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[Oct 25, 2020] Using covert actions, UK made Russia pay 'higher price than they had expected' for Salisbury poisoning ex Downing Street aide

So looks like Navalny poisoning was a join operation of Western intelligence agencies with MI6.
Oct 25, 2020 | www.rt.com

The explosive claim comes from Lord Mark Sedwill, who until last month served as the most senior adviser and head of the civil service in Johnson's cabinet. He held the same positions under former prime minister Theresa May, during whose term the Salisbury affair unfolded.

Speaking to Times Radio, Sedwill said Russia has "some vulnerabilities that we can exploit." So London's response to the incident included not only publicly accusing Russia of being behind the attack and expelling its diplomats, but also "a series of other discreet measures including tackling some of the illicit money flows out of Russia, and covert measures as well, which obviously I can't talk about," the former official said.

The Russians know that they had to pay a higher price than they had expected for that operation.

Sedwill would not explain how stopping illicit money flowing out of Russia would hurt the Russian government or why the UK didn't act sooner to crack down on those financial crimes. Presumably, in his view, President Vladimir Putin's power relies on allowing crooked officials and businessmen to siphon the Russian national wealth and the British government was content with it as long as the UK was on the receiving end.

A different view is taken in Moscow, where officials have repeatedly accused the British of harboring Russian criminals and welcoming illicitly gained cash.

The Times implied that the "covert measures" mentioned by Sedwill included the UK using its cyber offensive capabilities against Russia.

ALSO ON RT.COM US senators suggest going after Putin's 'personal money' in response to alleged poisoning of opposition figure Navalny

The Salisbury poisoning happened in March 2018. Former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter were injured by what the British government described as a uniquely Russian chemical weapon, but have since recovered. London identified two people from Russia as the culprits, calling them agents of the Russian military intelligence.

Moscow denied any involvement in the poisoning and said London had stonewalled all attempts to properly investigate what had happened.

[Oct 24, 2020] Who sells weapons to whom

Oct 24, 2020 | www.unz.com

antibeast , says: October 23, 2020 at 6:35 am GMT

@Menes losphere that came the closest to ruling the whole world. And China knows that Russia is a part of European civilization, that will switch sides as soon as geopolitics and geoeconomics change.

Au contraire , the fact that NATO exists is why Russia has to partner with China, to ensure its own national survival. If anything, it's NATO that has no feasible future because the USA is not even a European country, masquerading as the "protector" of Europe, against Russia! The Chinese saying "one mountain cannot contain two tigers" applies to the USA because it has no business being the dominant power in NATO to keep Russia out of Europe.

[Oct 24, 2020] Indonesia Refuses To Host American Spy Planes Amid Sino-US Cold War

Oct 24, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Hoyeru , Oct 22 2020 19:08 utc | 11

a bit of good news about USA trying to encircle China:

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/indonesia-refuses-host-american-spy-planes-amid-sino-us-cold-war

Indonesia Refuses To Host American Spy Planes Amid Sino-US Cold War


The US and China are smack dab in the middle of a new Cold War. The observation in itself should not be startling to readers - as President Trump's trade war metamorphosed into a technology war over the Chinese tech companies' global dominance. Rapidly deteriorating relations between both superpowers, especially since the virus pandemic, has resulted in increased military action in East Asia.

In the last couple of years, we've pointed out the US has constructed a Lockheed Martin F-35 stealth jet "friends circle" around China. More recently, there's been a significant uptick in US spy planes changing their transponder codes to disguise themselves during operations near China.

In the attempt to increase spy plane presence in East Asia, US officials made multiple "high-level" attempts in July and August to Indonesia's top defense and government officials to clear the way to allow Boeing P-8 Poseidon maritime surveillance planes to land and refuel on the Southeast Asia country.

Four senior Indonesian officials familiar with the matter told Reuters that defense officials rejected the US proposal because Indonesia has a well-established policy of foreign policy neutrality - and does not permit foreign militaries to operate across its archipelago.

Reuters notes the P-8 "plays a central role in keeping an eye on China's military activity in the South China Sea, most of which Beijing claims as its territory."

Indonesia rejected the US spy plane presence because it has developed increased economic and investment ties with China over the years.

"It does not want to take sides in the conflict and is alarmed by growing tensions between the two superpowers, and by the militarization of the South China Sea," Indonesia's Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi told Reuters.

"We don't want to get trapped by this rivalry," Retno said in an interview in early September. "Indonesia wants to show all that we are ready to be your partner."

Dino Patti Djalal, a former Indonesian ambassador to the US, said the "very aggressive anti-China policy" projected by the US has become troubling for Indonesia.

"It's seen as out-of-place," Djalal told Reuters. "We don't want to be duped into an anti-China campaign. Of course, we maintain our independence, but there is deeper economic engagement, and China is now the most impactful country in the world for Indonesia."

Greg Poling, a Southeast Asia analyst from the Washington, DC-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, said Washington's attempt to pressure Indonesia into giving up land rights so US spy planes can fly in and out of the country is an example of "clumsy overreach."

"It's an indication of how little folks in the US government understand Indonesia," Poling told Reuters. "There's a clear ceiling to what you can do, and when it comes to Indonesia, that ceiling is putting boots on the ground."

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Both China and the US have recently ramped up military exercises in the South China Sea. The US has increased naval freedom of navigation operations, submarine deployments, and spy plane flights, while China has increased naval missions in the region.

To sum up, the new cold war has pressured Southeast Asian countries to take sides; they must choose between the US and or China. As for Indonesia, they quickly decided to be neutral with a lean towards China. Does this mean China's gravity in terms of its size and its influence is overwhelming the US?

[Oct 24, 2020] Interesting pair of articles about Russia - from RT about the relationship with Germany

Oct 24, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

the pessimist , Oct 23 2020 6:05 utc | 79

Interesting pair of articles about Russia - from RT about the relationship with Germany:

https://www.rt.com/russia/504238-berlin-dominates-europe-moscow/

and from Strategic Culture on "Russophrenia":

https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2020/10/20/russophrenia-or-how-a-collapsing-country-runs-the-world/

and then Putin at Valdai:

https://thesaker.is/russian-president-putin-delivers-speech-at-valdai-discussion-club-2020/

[Oct 24, 2020] Open Thread 2020-84

Oct 24, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

karlof1 , Oct 22 2020 18:19 utc | 6

Putin's Valdai Club appearance video and beginnings of a transcript are now posted at the Kremlin's website. Here again is the paper Putin's responding to with his opening speech. What I'll call his introduction is as follows:

"From the onset of the pandemic in Russia, we have focused on preserving lives and ensuring safety of our people as our key values. This was an informed choice dictated by our culture and spiritual traditions, and our complex, sometimes dramatic, history. If we think back to the great demographic losses we suffered in the 20th century, we had no other choice but to fight for every person and the future of every Russian family.

"So, we did our best to preserve the health and the lives of our people, to help parents and children, as well as senior citizens and those who lost their jobs, to maintain employment as much as possible, to minimise damage to the economy, to support millions of entrepreneurs who run small or family businesses.

"Perhaps, like everyone else, you are closely following daily updates on the pandemic around the world. Unfortunately, the coronavirus has not retreated and still poses a major threat. Probably, this unsettling background intensifies the sense, like many people feel, that a whole new era is about to begin and that we are not just on the verge of dramatic changes, but an era of tectonic shifts in all areas of life.

"We see the rapidly, exponential development of the processes that we have repeatedly discussed at the Valdai Club before. Thus, six years ago, in 2014, we spoke about this issue when we discussed the theme The World Order: New Rules or a Game Without Rules. So, what is happening now? Regrettably, the game without rules is becoming increasingly horrifying and sometimes seems to be a fait accompli."

This is the 17th session of the Valdai Club, and I ask: Where is there an equivalent in the so-called democracies of the West which are allegedly the guardians of free speech and debate, where there supposedly exists a "marketplace of ideas"?

[Oct 24, 2020] The Q A portion of Putin's Valdai Club Speech transcript have been posted

Oct 24, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

karlof1 , Oct 23 2020 17:17 utc | 135

The Q & A portion of Putin's Valdai Club Speech transcript have been posted, and they run longer than his speech. In his first query, I completely agree with Putin that too many people have yet to learn the fundamental lesson the pandemic ought to have taught:

"However, the pandemic is playing into our hands when it comes to raising our awareness of the importance of joining forces against severe global crises. Unfortunately, it has not yet taught humanity to come together completely, as we must do in such situations."

But his answer wasn't directed at ignorant citizens. Putin's ire was directed at the Outlaw US Empire:

"I am not referring now to all these sanctions against Russia; forget about that, we will get over it. But many other countries that have suffered and are still suffering from the coronavirus do not even need any help that may come from outside, they just need the restrictions lifted, at least in the humanitarian sphere, I repeat, concerning the supply of medicines, equipment, credit resources, and the exchange of technologies. These are humanitarian things in their purest form. But no, they have not abolished any restrictions, citing some considerations that have nothing to do with the humanitarian component – but at the same time, everyone is talking about humanism .

"I would say we need to be more honest with each other and abandon double standards. I am sure that if people hear me now on the media, they are probably finding it difficult to disagree with what I have just said, difficult to deny it. Deep down in their hearts, in their minds, everyone is probably thinking, 'Yes, right, of course.' However, for political reasons, publicly, they will still say, 'No, we must keep restrictions on Iran, Venezuela, against Assad .' What does Assad even have to do with this when it is ordinary people who suffer? At least, give them medicines, give them technology, at least a small, targeted loan for medicine. No." [My Emphasis]

If I could speak to Putin, I'd tell him that they have no hearts, they are soulless, completely bereft of any sense of morality, and cannot be reasoned with whatsoever. They are ghouls, incapable of being shamed or made to feel guilt. You look at them and see a human, but they're not human at all; they are parasites cloaked in human form. They differ little from the Nazis of 75+ years ago and need to be eliminated once and for all. The pandemic has fully exposed them for what they are.

dh , Oct 23 2020 17:43 utc | 139

@134 Has anybody seen a comment yet from the Honorable Chrystia Freeland or the Lima Group regarding the election result in Bolivia? Maybe they are too busy strangling Venezuela.

[Oct 24, 2020] Russia and the EU- "Business as Usual" is over by Pepe Escobar

Russia is too weak to disengage with EU. Technologial superiority is still on the side of EU and the USA (EU mostly acts as a vassal of the USA.) They need to suffer this humiliation, and try to gain strength.
Oct 24, 2020 | www.unz.com

Sergey Lavrov, Russia's Foreign Minister, is the world's foremost diplomat. The son of an Armenian father and a Russian mother, he's just on another level altogether. Here, once again, we may be able to see why.

Let's start with the annual meeting of the Valdai Club , Russia's premier think tank. Here we may follow the must-watch presentation of the Valdai annual report on "The Utopia of a Diverse World", featuring, among others, Lavrov, John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago, Dominic Lieven of the University of Cambridge and Yuri Slezkine of UCLA/Berkeley.

It's a rarity to be able to share what amounts to a Himalayan peak in terms of serious political debate. We have, for instance, Lieven – who, half in jest, defined the Valdai report as "Tolstoyian, a little anarchical" – focusing on the current top two, great interlocking challenges: climate change and the fact that "350 years of Western and 250 years of Anglo-American predominance are coming to an end."

As we see the "present world order fading in front of our eyes", Lieven notes a sort of "revenge of the Third World". But then, alas, Western prejudice sets in all over again, as he defines China reductively as a "challenge".

Mearsheimer neatly remembers we have lived, successively, under a bipolar, unipolar and now multipolar world: with China, Russia and the US, "Great Power Politics is back on the table."

He correctly assesses that after the dire experience of the "century of humiliation, the Chinese will make sure they are really powerful." And that will set the stage for the US to deploy a "highly-aggressive containment policy", just like it did against the USSR, that "may well end up in a shooting match".

"I trust Arnold more than the EU"

Lavrov, in his introductory remarks, had explained that in realpolitik terms, the world "cannot be run from one center alone." He took time to stress the "meticulous, lengthy and sometimes ungrateful" work of diplomacy.

It was later, in one of his interventions, that he unleashed the real bombshell (starting at 1:15:55; in Russian, overdubbed in English): "When the European Union is speaking as a superior, Russia wants to know, can we do any business with Europe?"

He mischievously quotes Schwarzenegger, "who in his movies always said 'Trust me'. So I trust Arnold more than the European Union".

And that leads to the definitive punch line: "The people who are responsible for foreign policy in the West do not understand the necessity of mutual respect in dialogue. And then probably for some time we have to stop talking to them." After all, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen had stated, on the record, that for the EU, "there is no geopolitical partnership with modern Russia".

Lavrov went even further in a stunning, wide-ranging interview with Russian radio stations whose translation deserves to be carefully read in full.

Here is just one of the most crucial snippets:

Lavrov: "No matter what we do, the West will try to hobble and restrain us, and undermine our efforts in the economy, politics, and technology. These are all elements of one approach."

Question: "Their national security strategy states that they will do so."

Lavrov: "Of course it does, but it is articulated in a way that decent people can still let go unnoticed, but it is being implemented in a manner that is nothing short of outrageous."

Question: You, too, can articulate things in a way that is different from what you would really like to say, correct?"

Lavrov: "It's the other way round. I can use the language I'm not usually using to get the point across. However, they clearly want to throw us off balance, and not only by direct attacks on Russia in all possible and conceivable spheres by way of unscrupulous competition, illegitimate sanctions and the like, but also by unbalancing the situation near our borders, thus preventing us from focusing on creative activities. Nevertheless, regardless of the human instincts and the temptations to respond in the same vein, I'm convinced that we must abide by international law."

Moscow stands unconditionally by international law – in contrast with the proverbial "rules of the liberal international order" jargon parroted by NATO and its minions such as the Atlantic Council.

And here it is all over again , a report extolling NATO to "Ramp Up on Russia", blasting Moscow's "aggressive disinformation and propaganda campaigns against the West, and unchecked adventurism in the Middle East, Africa, and Afghanistan."

The Atlantic Council insists on how those pesky Russians have once again defied "the international community by using an illegal chemical weapon to poison opposition leader Alexei Navalny. NATO's failure to halt Russia's aggressive behavior puts the future of the liberal international order at risk."

Only fools falling for the blind leading the blind syndrome don't know that these liberal order "rules" are set by the Hegemon alone, and can be changed in a flash according to the Hegemon's whims.

So it's no wonder a running joke in Moscow is "if you don't listen to Lavrov, you will listen to Shoigu." Sergey Shoigu is Russia's Minister of Defense, supervising all those hypersonic weapons the US industrial-military complex can only dream about.

The crucial point is even with so much NATO-engendered hysteria, Moscow could not give a damn because of its de facto military supremacy. And that freaks Washington and Brussels out even more.

What's left is Hybrid War eruptions following the RAND corporation-prescribed non-stop harassment and "unbalancing" of Russia, in Belarus, the southern Caucasus and Kyrgyzstan – complete with sanctions on Lukashenko and on Kremlin officials for the Navalny "poisoning".

"You do not negotiate with monkeys"

What Lavrov just made it quite explicit was a long time in the making. "Modern Russia" and the EU were born almost at the same time. On a personal note, I experienced it in an extraordinary fashion. "Modern Russia" was born in December 1991 – when I was on the road in India, then Nepal and China. When I arrived in Moscow via the Trans-Siberian in February 1992, the USSR was no more. And then, flying back to Paris, I arrived at a European Union born in that same February.

One of Valdai's leaders correctly argues that the daring concept of a "Europe stretching from Lisbon to Vladivostok" coined by Gorbachev in 1989, right before the collapse of the USSR, unfortunately "had no document or agreement to back it up."

And yes, "Putin searched diligently for an opportunity to implement the partnership with the EU and to further rapprochement. This continued from 2001 until as late as 2006."

We all remember when Putin, in 2010, proposed exactly the same concept, a common house from Lisbon to Vladivostok , and was flatly rebuffed by the EU. It's very important to remember this was four years before the Chinese would finalize their own concept of the New Silk Roads.

Afterwards, the only way was down. The final Russia-EU summit took place in Brussels in January 2014 – an eternity in politics.

The fabulous intellectual firepower gathered at the Valdai is very much aware that the Iron Curtain 2.0 between Russia and the EU simply won't disappear.

And all this while the IMF, The Economist and even that Thucydides fallacy proponent admit that China is already, in fact, the world's top economy.

Russia and China share an enormously long border. They are engaged in a complex, multi-vector "comprehensive strategic partnership". That did not develop because the estrangement between Russia and the EU/NATO forced Moscow to pivot East, but mostly because the alliance between the world's neighboring top economy and top military power makes total Eurasian sense – geopolitically and geoeconomically.

And that totally corroborates Lieven's diagnosis of the end of "250 years of Anglo-American predominance."

It was up to inestimable military analyst Andrey Martyanov, whose latest book I reviewed as a must read , to come up with the utmost deliciously devastating assessment of Lavrov's "We had enough" moment:

"Any professional discussion between Lavrov and former gynecologist [actually epidemiologist] such as von der Leyen, including Germany's Foreign Minister Maas, who is a lawyer and a party worm of German politics is a waste of time. Western "elites" and "intellectuals" are simply on a different, much lower level, than said Lavrov. You do not negotiate with monkeys, you treat them nicely, you make sure that they are not abused, but you don't negotiate with them, same as you don't negotiate with toddlers.

They want to have their Navalny as their toy – let them. I call on Russia to start wrapping economic activity up with EU for a long time. They buy Russia's hydrocarbons and hi-tech, fine. Other than that, any other activity should be dramatically reduced and necessity of the Iron Curtain must not be doubted anymore."

As much as Washington is not "agreement-capable", in the words of President Putin, so is the EU, says Lavrov: "We should stop to orient ourselves toward European partners and care about their assessments."

Not only Russia knows it: the overwhelming majority of the Global South also knows it.

SteveK9 , says: October 21, 2020 at 6:26 pm GMT

Russia is a European Country with a European Culture they should leave the door open. Politics change, and it would be a terrible shame if the West lost Russia and vice versa.

The Alarmist , says: October 21, 2020 at 8:08 pm GMT
@SteveK9 "comment-text">

Russia is a European Country with a European Culture they should leave the door open. Politics change, and it would be a terrible shame if the West lost Russia and vice versa.

Most of the Europeans I know (and I know quite a few because I live in Europe) do not consider Russians to be European. It's not the Russians who have closed the door they are merely ensuring it doesn't hit them in the nose. That is indeed a shame, because, as Escobar suggests, the EU is setting itself to be colonised by the global south, as is the U.K. and the Hegemon. 1992 and beyond was indeed a great squandering of opportunity.

A123 , says: October 21, 2020 at 10:19 pm GMT

No One Can "Do Business" with the EU

Look at the EU's persistent irrationality trying to negotiate with the UK. How long have Brexit talks been blocked by EU Elite intransigence?

They cannot even cope internally. The Dark Heart of Europe keeps trying to kill freedom & individual rights. In response, the Christian Populist members of the EU have positioned themselves to veto Merkel's fascist budget trap. (1)

While all 27 EU heads of state and government approved the budget and recovery package at a summit in July, national parliaments must still ratify the budget and a so-called Own Resources Decision, which provides the EU with legal guarantees from its member countries regarding budget revenues.

Council President Charles Michel declared triumphantly that he had succeeded in ensuring there would be strong rule-of-law protections as part of the package. But Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki also claimed victory, saying the wording had been softened enough to give them the ability to veto any proposed regulation.

Everyone should abandon attempts to do business with the EU. The only solution is to end the flailing unworkable mess in an peaceful and orderly manner.

Of course, the SJW Sharia Globalist MegaCorporations hate that idea. It would derail their goal of undercutting infidel (Christian & Jewish) workers via faux-refugee migration.

PEACE

aleksander , says: October 22, 2020 at 1:23 am GMT

Europe has gone full ... Globo-Homo. Putin knows he can't trust homos. He CERTAINLY can't trust the Pope.

brabantian , says: October 22, 2020 at 5:59 am GMT

Culturally, the old Communist East that is within the EU, has more in common with Russia than with the Western Europeans

Tho it is taking time for the old anti-Russian instincts to fade away

And even within the West, there are regions and countries – the perhaps-soon-independent Flanders, and much of Italy as things proceed – for whom this also is in part true

Russia needs only to wait

Steven80 , says: October 22, 2020 at 12:03 pm GMT

Russia is NOT Europe. Anyone who considers this either has no clue of history and has never been there, or both, or has just been to Moscow for a while and has the wrong impression.

Contemporary Russia is a military descendand of the Golden Horde, (Altun Orda), absorbing the tartar, nogai and kalmyk nobility by resettling them to Moscow upon conquest. Their medieval rulers had tartar titles such as beylerbeg, used tartar outfits and arabic script on their coins. Russian state organised its existence based on military districts similar to those of the mongols (hence Belarus for example – white russia – white is the mongolian west wing of the army district in the mongol system, before that belarus was call Zhmutia).

Russia is also spiritual descendant of the Byzantine and Bulgarian states (bulgarians such as Saint Cyprian and Grigori Tsamblak actually delivered byzantine ortodoxy rites to russia due to similarity of languages, not greeks). Old church slavonic is actually old bulgarian, and this greek-slavonic culture has its peculiarities – in the eastern rites, the person closest to god is not the richest , but the one who has more faith. This in consequence makes those societies look for "saints" as rulers, and be never content with the people they rule them. Stability is achieved only with mild tyranny or the presence of extraordinary rulers, hence the economy is always behind the collective west. Anyway, the topic is too damn long, the short story is – don't ever beleive Russia is part of europe such as austria for example.

Russia is not part of Europe. It is something else – just like Malta, that speak semitic and the locals look like north africans, but some people say it is Europe.

The westernization of the muscovite tsardom only started in the 17-th century, and the process has been stopped several times (napoleon, one of the alexander kings, bolsheviks, now putin). the westerners still beleive Russia can be subdued because the slavs are savages and lack economy.
Eastern ortodoxy brings a peculiar mindset, that is hard to grasp by western politicians, and it is not materialistic – it brings things like being content with your position in the world without wanting more stuff, and the same time each one has to reach god by himself and no other authority is valid. Pepe doens't grasp this aspect – the overwhelming non-commercial, truth seeking part of the russians that westerners cannot see because of savage and poor looks and blunt directness. It will play us all a bad joke in the next war.

anon [225] Disclaimer , says: October 22, 2020 at 1:17 pm GMT

Mearsheimer did nice work popping the pus out of the Israel lobby so we could all go, Ew, so it's sad to see him fixate on discredited CIA realist doctrine when the civilized world has moved on:

http://www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/IntOrder/Pages/IEInternationalorderIndex.aspx

De Zayas should have been at Valdai instead of Mearsheimer because this is what the G-192 thinks, that is, what everybody thinks. If the SCO has to enforce this consensus at gunpoint, they're fine with that. We should be too. It's everybody in the world including us against the CIA regime, hostis humani generis.

Magro , says: October 22, 2020 at 2:12 pm GMT

Great Pepe Escobar. Excellent article. See '75 years after 'Stunde Null,' collapse in Russian-German relations is driven by Berlin's renewed desire to dominate Europe' by Glenn Diesen explaining Germany role on that.

Anonymous [120] Disclaimer , says: October 22, 2020 at 5:13 pm GMT

Some stupid (that is to say all of them) loud mouthed low browed EU bigwig only needs to get a bit too fresh and uppity with Turkey's Erdogan, (you know the kind of thing, some third rate tosser starts sounding off about 'human rights' to make himself look big and pompous), and therefore tick Erdogan off a bit too much, for Erdogan to retaliate by unleashing 3 million plus 'refugees' into the EU. Knowing the absolutely appalling lack of caliber and intelligence of EU bigwigs, this will inevitably happen in the near future. Just watch this space.

That day will certainly head the eventual and inevitable dissolution of the EU.

It's just all so fucking clear and obvious to anyone who's got a brain.

Anonymous [120] Disclaimer , says: October 22, 2020 at 6:37 pm GMT
@Menes

The trouble with this 'analysis' is very very simple:

Namely, that the brainless *SHIT* which runs the EU – who, by, the way are real deal undemocratic unelected unaccountable tyrants and dictators – *absolutely* could not give a fuck about *real* ethnic genetic Europeans.
All they care about are third worlders, of whom they wish to stuff as many into the EU as possible. Remember Merkel?

Most intelligent Europeans know this.
The Russian high command knows this.
The Chinese know this.

So your 'point' is pure garbage.

Hojer , says: October 22, 2020 at 8:05 pm GMT
@brabantian

Culturally, the old Communist East that is within the EU, has more in common with Russia than with the Western Europeans

From another point of view the old West has now more in common with communist-like totalitarian zeitgeist and rule of propaganda then old communist East, only colours changed from red to anti-white globo homo.
Not happy with that having experienced 17 years of vanishing red rule, now seeing it rebranded on the rise again in one of the EU bound countries affected (Czechia). Just saying.

syd.bgd , says: October 22, 2020 at 11:38 pm GMT
@Steven80 hat is the stuff that can be found in prayers ahead of meals yap, redneck and conservative assholes and meaning of them has nothing to do with availability of Mac Donald's or home deliveries.
For us death, hunger, desperation and bestial violence are fresh memories. They are in each and every family. We know where suffering came from and because of which of earthly reasons. ("Why" is a much deeper question and the answer is in reflection inside Orthodox Christian teachings.)

So, long story short. That's why S. Lavrov, since nobody there cares about warnings, now even more politely says: "F ** k off, you lawless hypocrites."

GeeBee , says: October 23, 2020 at 8:08 am GMT
@Steven80 commercial dominance.

We in the West therefore live under the unyielding yoke of Modernism, whereby we have become so used to its shallow, arid materialism, that has been carefully and artfully crafted for us over the past 150 years; its wall-to-wall advertising and huckstering; its population of zombified careerists and status-seekers, that we are now like the proverbial goldfish in its bowl, blissfully unaware that there is a wider, more varied and fulfilling world outside the narrow confines it inhabits.

One thinks of Hamlet: "I could be bound in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams".

Levtraro , says: October 23, 2020 at 8:10 am GMT
@The Alarmist

I know many Europeans too, and many Russians. Contrary to what you say, the Europeans I know consider Russians to be Europeans. The fact that nearly all Russians in Europe have white skin, blue eyes, blonde to light brown hair, come from the same Continent, and share European values, helps a lot!

Levtraro , says: October 23, 2020 at 8:18 am GMT
@Steven80

Eastern ortodoxy brings a peculiar mindset, that is hard to grasp by western politicians, and it is not materialistic – it brings things like being content with your position in the world without wanting more stuff, and the same time each one has to reach god by himself and no other authority is valid.

Bollocks. I know many Russians personally. They are indistinguishable from western Europeans, to me they are just like Finns and Swedes, even the accent.

GMC , says: October 23, 2020 at 9:32 am GMT

So Russia and Putin was willing to open up 8 time zones to the Europeans and they replied – No – we'd rather go to war with you and take it all.

WP , says: October 23, 2020 at 1:03 pm GMT
@SteveK9

...Hopefully, most Russians (except the Navalny types) are still proud of their unique civilization and culture, and will continue to resist...

Vojkan , says: October 23, 2020 at 2:55 pm GMT
@SteveK9

Every time the Russians leave the door open, it ends up with a Western attempt on Russia. The West represents roughly 10% of the world population, is declining rapidly and brings nothing to the table except promises of nuisance. If I were Russian, I would ditch relations with the globohomo West and seek partnerships among the 90%.

Vojkan , says: October 23, 2020 at 3:10 pm GMT
@coolhand850

If you speak of the capacity to project her troops on any point on Earth, you're right. The thing is, they don't need it and probably regard it as vanity of fools. If on the other hand you consider their capacity to incinerate you before you incinerate them, well, dream on.

A123 , says: October 23, 2020 at 3:35 pm GMT
@MLK this was a gift to Russia and Germany, but it's much worse than that. Why isn't anyone else curious as to who got what in return?

The blockage of Nordstream 2 is about The Dark Heart of Europe not Russia. Christian Europe is terrified of Mutti Mullah Merkel's highly authoritarian regime. Why would any of the V4 nations accept energy dependency on flows via Germany?

This is one of Putin's few serious errors. He would be much better off pushing gas projects that flowed through Christian European nations thus allowing them leverage against German anti-Christian SJW aggression.

PEACE

AnonFromTN , says: October 23, 2020 at 4:03 pm GMT
@coolhand850

Current US is a colossus with the feet of clay. Dems in their mad attempts to undermine Trump succeeded in undermining America. Just wait for November 3.

Putin's and Xi's policy towards the US follows the saying "when you see your enemy committing suicide, do not interfere". The same applies to the EU, as well as Brexited UK.

Times are a-changing. The West is destroying itself and behaving as if it's it is still hale and healthy. It was said that when God wishes to punish someone, He takes away that person's mind. This applies to countries, particularly to the Empires.

AnonFromTN , says: October 23, 2020 at 4:13 pm GMT
@Menes ckquote>

That's a deranged dream of neocons, and it won't come true. The policies of Russia and China are sane and pragmatic, whereas the policies of the Empire and its sidekicks are suicidal.

As far as civilizational divide goes, Russia is neither Europe nor Asia, it is a separate civilization. When the US and Europe succeed in destroying themselves, many Russians would miss them due to cultural ties with their predecessors, but that won't drive Russian policies. Not just Putin's (in fact, he appears to have a soft spot for Europe, characteristic of his generation), but policies of whoever runs Russia after him. There would be no gorbys or yeltsins any more.

AriusArmenian , says: October 23, 2020 at 4:47 pm GMT

Europe is a glove on the US hand and is easily led around by its nose by the CIA and MI6 that infest the MSM and run one false flag after another.

Politicians in the EU are mediocre creatures that crave the dollars stuffed into their pockets by the US. They are enjoying the ride while it lasts until they go down with the US.

Majority of One , says: October 23, 2020 at 5:05 pm GMT
@Steven80 es who make up modern Sweden–the Scanians, the Goths and the Svear. Both Kiev and Novgorod were founded by them and the original, etymological basis for Russia is "Rus". The royal line, beginning with Rurik and the nobility of the Rus , were of a Scandinavian-Slavic blend.

Though Muscovy may have later become dominated by the descendants of the Mongols and their allies, the northern, forested part of Russia features a native set of peoples who only rarely evince the features of their fully conquered brethren in the steppe lands of the south. In all truth, Putin, whom I believe was born in Tver, could easily pass for one of my Nordic cousins And that is the blue-eyed truth.

Flubber , says: October 23, 2020 at 10:04 pm GMT

I'm a British Brexit voter – primarily because the EU is run by arseholes with an absolutely loathing for any sort of democratic accountability.

So Russia's impression of the EU is totally realistic.

For four years I have had to watch the spectacle of the UK trying to form a fair deal, when the EU's explicit goal has been to punish the UK for leaving pour encourager les autres.

What a waste of time. The EU only understands blunt force and blunt actions.

[Oct 24, 2020] The buzz about Navalny is that he and some partners were running an anti-corruption blackmail racket getting compromising information on various enterprises and individuals

Oct 24, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

the pessimist , Oct 23 2020 7:32 utc | 90

m@84 the buzz about Navalny is that he and some partners were running an anti-corruption blackmail racket getting compromising information on various enterprises and individuals and Navalny decided to cash out without informing or consulting with his partners. Nothing to do with the Russian government.

the pessimist , Oct 23 2020 15:04 utc | 113

m@89 I got a rather detailed explanation from a Russian friend who just spent several weeks there. Navalny started out as an anti corruption reformer but got involved with partners that figured out how to monetize the dirt he was digging up. This is over a period of years, not something recent. There is no conspiracy between the Russian government and the Germans. Navalny was not a threat to governmental power in Russia - this was strictly a business matter. See the RT article I linked to:

https://www.rt.com/russia/504238-berlin-dominates-europe-moscow/

and the Russian government is not happy about how the case was used by the Germans for their own ends.

librul , Oct 23 2020 15:06 utc | 115

Which are the dumbest false flags of recent memory?

My selections are:

#1) Journalist Arkady Babchenko - he gets every prize!
He faked his death, complete with blood soaked pictures,
and then showed up the next day alive at a news conference.
They should name a drink after him, "Noah's Ark Ark Ark"- glacier water mixed
with glacier water, stirred not shaken.

#2) Saudi Intelligence Service - they air shipped printers
with incomplete bombs in them to the US and Britain from Yemen.
The Saudi agents revealed that they kept the tracking slips of the bombs!
I'll drink to that. And the Saudis played heroes by providing the tracking
numbers to the US and Britain in the nick of time. And I'll drink to that!

#3) Just this week CrowdStrike (yes, they still enjoy "credibility" in some circles)
let us know that Iranian hackers included a video with their email threats.
And that clever video:
"The video showed the hackers' computer screen as they typed in commands to purportedly hack a voter registration system.
Investigators noticed snippets of revealing computer code, including file paths, file names and an internet protocol (IP) address."
How does the Saudi Intelligence service say, "Skol!"?

[Oct 24, 2020] The blockage of Nordstream 2 is about The Dark Heart of Europe not Russia

Oct 24, 2020 | www.unz.com

A123 , says: October 23, 2020 at 3:35 pm GMT

@MLK

Take Nord Stream II. If Trump hadn't taken the oath, it would have been up and running years ago. Would that it were so that this was a gift to Russia and Germany, but it's much worse than that. Why isn't anyone else curious as to who got what in return?

The blockage of Nordstream 2 is about The Dark Heart of Europe not Russia...

This is one of Putin's few serious errors. He would be much better off pushing gas projects that flowed east...

PEACE

AriusArmenian , says: October 23, 2020 at 4:47 pm GMT

Europe is a glove on the US hand and is easily led around by its nose by the CIA and MI6 that infest the MSM and run one false flag after another.

Politicians in the EU are mediocre creatures that crave the dollars stuffed into their pockets by the US. They are enjoying the ride while it lasts until they go down with the US.

[Oct 23, 2020] Hating Russia is a full time and well paid job

Neocons do not want to fight Russia, they just want to profit from Russophobia while getting nice money from the US MIC.
Oct 23, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

Mister Delicious , 7 hours ago

  1. Introduction
  2. The euphemisms
  3. Hostility to Putin's Russia is largely a Jewish phenomenon
  4. The media
  5. A de facto violation of free speech
  6. Shutting down an honest examination of Russian history
  7. The best alt-media journalists are neutered
  8. Much of what is written about Russian relations and history becomes meaningless and deceptive
  9. A lesson in relevance from the Alt-Right
  10. Malice towards none
  11. The problem extends to all areas of public life
  12. We need serious scholarship and analysis
  13. Low expectations from the existing alt-media
  14. A call for articles and support
  15. https://www.unz.com/pgiraldi/hating-russia-is-a-full-time-job/
ebear , 6 hours ago

Has any nation on Earth suffered more destruction and loss of life in the 20th century? And yet, there they still are.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btff8DmOg1k

John Hansen , 7 hours ago

I'd have more hope for Russia if the Russian ruling class weren't so obsessed with the West and didn't send their children to Western (woke) schools, etc.

theallseeinggod , 7 hours ago

They're not doing that well, but they're not repeating many of the west's mistakes.

Normal , 5 hours ago

Now the West has rules only for poor people.

Helg Saracen , 6 hours ago

Advice to Americans (for the sake of experiment): prohibit lobbying in US and the right of citizens with dual citizenship to hold public office in US. I assure - you will be surprised how quickly Russians go from non-kosher to kosher for Americans and how American politicians, the media will convince Americans of this at every intersection. :) Ha ha ha

Nayel , 5 hours ago

If the [Vichy] Left in America weren't so determined to project their own Bolshevik leanings on to a possible great ally that their ideology now fears, Russia would be just that: a great ally that could help America shake the Bolsheviks that have infiltrated the American government and plan the same program their Soviet forefathers once held over Russia...

Arising 2.0 , 1 hour ago

Western zionist controlled propaganda reminds me of Mohamed Ali- he used to talk up the ******** so much before a fight that when the time came to fight the opponent was usually traumatised or confused. Until Ali met with Joe Frazier (Russia) who didn't fall for all the pre-fight BS.

ThePinkHole , 39 minutes ago

Time for a pop quiz! Name the two countries below:

Country A - competency, attention to first principles, planning based on reality, consistency of purpose, and unity of execution.

Country B - incompetency, interfering in everything everywhere, planning based on hubris and sloppy assumptions, confusion, and disunity.

(Source: Adapted from Patrick Armstrong)

foxenburg , 3 hours ago

This one is always good for a laugh....the Daily Telegraph's Con Coughlin explaining in 2015 how Putin will fail in Syria...

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/6990/russia-failure-syria

Money-Liberty , 6 hours ago

We have all this talk of the 'Ruskies' when in fact it is not the ordinary Russian people but rather a geopolitical power struggle. The ordinary US citizen or European just wants to maintain their liberty and be able to profit from their endeavours. The rich and powerful globalists who hide behind their military are the ones that play these games. I am no friend of Putin but equally I am no friend of our own political establishment that have been captured by Wall Street. I care about Main Street and as the US dollar loses its privilege there will be real pain to share amongst our economies. The last thing we need is for the elites of the Western alliance to profit with cold/hot wars on the backs of ourselves.

Having been behind the iron curtain as a young Merchant Navy Officer I found ordinary citizens fine and even organized football matches with the local communist parties. People have the same desires and aspirations and whether rich or poor we should respect each others cultures and territories. http://www.money-liberty.com/gallery/Predictions-2021.pdf

[Oct 23, 2020] Will it be a new Yeltsin after Putin ?

Oct 23, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com


play_arrow

shazzdan , 1 hour ago

Russia won't get interesting until Putin dies. It doesn't have the established institutions to survive a transfer of power.

Captain Nemo de Erehwon , 2 hours ago

https://imgflip.com/i/3eadzv

NOT EPS TYING , 2 hours ago

...How about Curveball and the 911 Hoax? How about Bibi Netanyahu and Oblock? They are all corrupt. They should all be in jail.

Sound of the Suburbs , 3 hours ago

How did Putin come to power anyway?

That was Jeffrey Sach's fault.

Everything looked very positive with Russia under Gorbachev, but the West thought his reforms were too slow.

A BBC documentary covers a young, naive Jeffrey "Joe 90" Sachs and other US free market fundamentalists as they headed into Russia to make a right mess of things and pave the way for Putin.

https://thoughtmaybe.com/the-trap/#top

Part 3 – We will Force You to be Free (36 – 44 mins)

The BBC is an official Western media outlet, so it must be the truth.

No arguing.

[Oct 23, 2020] Oil Production Cuts Could Be Extended- Putin -

Oct 23, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

Submitted by OilPrice.com

Russia does not rule out the possibility that OPEC+ could extend its current 7.7 million barrels per day of production cuts into next year, according to Russian President Vladimir Putin .

The comments could be merely jawboning to a market that is desperately seeking reassurances that oil production will not ramp up too quickly beyond demand. But Russia has in the past been reluctant to keep up its end of the oil production cuts, so any mention that it is even thinking about a slower tapering of the cuts is noteworthy.

In fact, Russia had failed to bring its own oil production down to the level it agreed to for most of the period of cuts in 2019 and early 2020.

Russia also was the spark that ignited the oil price war between it and Saudi Arabia-and by default the United States, when it refused to agree to additional cuts using the argument that as OPEC decreases its production, it opens the door for U.S. producers to increase theirs.

Vladimir Putin has had several discussions with Saudi Arabia and the United States on the state of the oil markets. "We believe there is no need to change anything in our agreements," Putin said. "We will watch how the market is recovery. The consumption is on the rise."

Putin added, however, that they did not "rule out" the possibility that OPEC+ could keep the current production cuts instead of removing them at the pace it had initially agreed upon.

But Putin didn't stop there. "If need be, maybe, we can take other decisions on further reductions. But we don't see such a necessity now," Putin said, intimating that more cuts were at least possible.

Russia's willingness to even consider additional cuts or waiting longer to ease the cuts than planned will be viewed positively by the markets, which has been struggling to break out of a rut where oil prices have traded in a relatively tight band for months.

[Oct 21, 2020] FORCING EUROPEANS TO ENGAGE IN MUTUALLY RESPECTFUL DIALOGUE WITH RUSSIA HAS BEGUN

Oct 21, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

MOSCOW EXILE October 18, 2020 at 10:56 pm

Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands Stef Blok:

https://platform.twitter.com/embed/index.html?dnt=true&embedId=twitter-widget-11&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1316743856558428160&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fthenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com%2F2020%2F09%2F18%2Fthe-near-global-collapse-of-critical-thinking%2F&siteScreenName=wordpressdotcom&theme=light&widgetsVersion=ed20a2b%3A1601588405575&width=550px

Negotiations over Russian responsibility for the downing of MH17????

When and where have such negotiations taken place?

FORCING EUROPEANS TO ENGAGE IN MUTUALLY RESPECTFUL DIALOGUE WITH RUSSIA HAS BEGUN
Stalker Zone
October 18, 2020

[Oct 21, 2020] Why the Struggle with China is not a replay of the Cold War by Chas Freeman

Oct 21, 2020 | responsiblestatecraft.org

Crucially, China is not the Soviet Union: China has no messianic ideology to export; China is not engaged in regime change operations to create an ideological sphere of influence; China's relationships with foreign nations are transactional rather than sentimental; China's economy dwarfs that of the USSR; China already possesses one-fourth of the world's scientific, technological, engineering, and mathematics workforce; China's "Belt and Road Initiative" is an order-setting geoeconomic strategy with no Soviet parallel; China spends two percent or less of it GDP on its military vs. the estimated 9 to 15 percent of the USSR -- and China has not built a nuclear arsenal to match that of either the United States or Russia.

Equally important, the United States of the 2020s is not the America of the early Cold War. As the Cold War began, the United States produced one-half or more of the world's manufactures. It now makes about one-sixth. During the Cold War, the United States was the uncontested leader of a bloc of dependent nations that it called "the free world." That bloc is now in an advanced state of decay. Further, legacy U.S. alliances formed to contain the USSR have little relevance to American contention with China: US-European alliances like NATO are withering and no Asian security partner of the United States wants to choose between America and China.

Since 1950, the Taiwan issue has been a casus belli between the United States and China. But U.S. allies see it as a fight among Chinese to be managed rather than joined. If the U.S. mismanages the Taiwan issue, as it now appears to be doing, it will have no overt allies in the resulting war. No claimant against China in the South China Sea is prepared to join the U.S. in naval conflict with China. In short, this time is different. Sino-American relations have a history and dynamic that do not conform to those of the US-Soviet contest. And the United States is not equipped to inspire and lead opposition to China. The US-China contention is far broader than that of the Cold War, in part because China, unlike the determinedly autarkic USSR, is part of the same global society as the United States. The battlefields include global governance, geoeconomics, trade, investment, finance, currency usage, supply chain management, technology standards and systems, and scientific collaboration, in addition to the geopolitical and military domains in which the Cold War played out.

The United States is isolated on a widening list of issues. It has withdrawn or excluded itself from a growing number of multilateral instruments of global and regional governance and is no longer able to lead the international community. Americans have repeatedly declined to recapitalize or cooperate in reforming international financial institutions to meet new global and regional investment requirements. This has led China, India, and other rising powers to create supplementary lenders like the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and the New Development Bank.

Four years ago, the U.S. unilaterally decided that geopolitics are inherently driven by great power military rivalry that precludes cooperation. The newly pugnacious U.S. stance legitimizes xenophobia and justifies bilateral approaches to foreign relations that ignore issues like global terrorism, pandemic diseases, climate change, migration, nuclear proliferation, or regional tensions, and cripple the global governance and international coordination needed to tackle them. The United States is going out of its way to demonstrate its indifference to the interests and sensibilities of its past and potential partners. It is withdrawing from international organizations it can no longer dominate. These actions amount to unilateral diplomatic disarmament and the creation of politico-economic vacuums for others -- not just China -- to fill.

Future historians will puzzle over why Americans have chosen to dismantle and discard the connections and capacities that long enabled the United States to direct the trend of events in most global and regional arenas. When they unravel this mystery, they will also need to explain the simultaneous collapse of the separation of powers structure on which the American republic was founded and on which its liberties were built. Fortunately for post-Constitutional America, China's political system, despite the stability and prosperity it has fostered, has even less appeal beyond China's borders. Both China and the United States are now repelling other nations rather than attracting them. If the U.S.-China contest were military and didn't go nuclear, the United States, with its battle-hardened and uniquely lethal military, would enjoy insuperable advantages. But armed conflict is not the central element in the Sino-American confrontation.

After World War II, the United States made the rules. American statesmen crafted a world order that expressed American ideals and served American interests. In the post-Cold War period Washington began to disengage from the global institutions and norms it had sponsored. The United States has failed to ratify international compacts that regulate a widening range of arenas of importance to it. These include conventions on the law of the sea, nuclear testing, the arms trade, human rights, and crimes against humanity. Washington has withdrawn from or suspended compliance with conventions on the laws of war and agreements on arms control, combating climate change, and trade and investment. It has ceased to participate in or sought to sabotage a growing list of United Nations specialized agencies and related institutions. Notwithstanding the current global pandemic, these include the World Health Organization.

America's withdrawal from its traditional role in global rule-setting and enforcement deprives it of the dominant influence it long exercised through the institutions it created. Other great powers remain wedded to the American-led order expressed in the United Nations Charter, but America's exemption of itself from the comity of nations and its spontaneous metamorphosis from world leader to global dropout have left it unable to aggregate the power of other nations to its own. Washington's resort to abusive language, threats and coercive measures has grown as its capacity to apply its power non-coercively has declined, further reducing the numbers of foreign allies, partners, and friends willing to bandwagon with America.

The decline in U.S. clout is made even more consequential by the fact that China has resources, including money, to offer its partners. The United States does not. The United States' budget is in chronic deficit. Even routine government operations must now be funded with debt. America has spent trillions of borrowed dollars on wars in the Islamic world that it can neither win nor end. Its "forever wars" siphoned off the funds needed to keep its human and physical infrastructure at levels competitive with those of China and other great economic powers. They also crippled U.S. statecraft by defunding non-military means to advance American interests abroad and curtailing U.S. contributions to the international institutions charged with assuring global peace and development.

Coercive approaches to statecraft are inherently alienating. Claims to superiority that are not empirically substantiable are unpersuasive. Asking countries to choose between China and the United States, when China is clearly rising and America is simultaneously stagnating and declining, guarantees the progressive eclipse of American prestige and power. Advocating democracy abroad while deviating from it at home destroys rather than enhances American credibility. America's addiction to debt risks eventual financial collapse even as it limits immediate policy options both at home and abroad.

Unless the United States cures its fiscal feebleness, rebuilds the capacities and competence of its government, upgrades its human and physical infrastructure, and reopens itself to trade, investment, and immigration, America's roles in global governance, trade, investment, finance, supply chain management, technology standards and systems, and scientific collaboration will continue to contract as those of China and others expand. The United States' capacity to innovate will decline, as will American well-being and self-confidence. This diminishment of the United States is not the consequence of Chinese predation but of American hubris, political ineptitude, and diplomatic decrepitude .

The essence of any s trategy is the efficient linkage of resources and capabilities to feasible objectives. Current U.S. China policy is strategy-free. With neither resources nor institutional capabilities to back it, it amounts to puerile fantasy. U.S. China policy at present is a classic example of demonizing a foreign foe to rally support at home and divert attention from festering political, economic, and social problems. This approach is highly unlikely to result in a Cold War-style victory for the United States or the Enlightenment values that gave birth to it. Quite the opposite. Written by
Chas Freeman Share Copy Print Related Posts China wins, India loses in Trump's gamble on crushing Iran by Fatemeh Aman

[Oct 21, 2020] Col. Brittany Stewart, Military Attach to the U.S. Embassy in Kiev and Donbass reconciliation

Such a diplomat.
Oct 21, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

MOSCOW EXILE October 20, 2020 at 11:16 pm

Did you not see this little gem from the US Embassy in Kiev last week?

https://platform.twitter.com/embed/index.html?dnt=true&embedId=twitter-widget-13&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1316258685916573697&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fthenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com%2F2020%2F09%2F18%2Fthe-near-global-collapse-of-critical-thinking%2F&siteScreenName=wordpressdotcom&theme=light&widgetsVersion=ed20a2b%3A1601588405575&width=550px

The woman speaking above is a certain Col. Brittany Stewart, Military Attaché to the U.S. Embassy in Kiev. Yet another American woman doing a man's job! The Russian Ministry of Defence was none too pleased with Colonel Stewart's little performance:

16.10.2020 (14:30)
Defence Attaché to the U.S. Embassy in Moscow has been informed about the position of the Russian Ministry of Defence

On October 16, the Defence Attaché to the U.S. Embassy in Moscow was invited to the Russian Federation Ministry of Defence Main Directorate for International Military Cooperation.

The US Department of Defence representative was informed about the position of the Russian Ministry of Defence with regards to a recent statement made by the Military Attaché to the U.S. Embassy in Kiev, Air Force Col. Brittany Stewart, on the joint efforts of the US and Ukrainian Armed Forces in countering so-called "Russian aggression".

The American side was briefed on the false claims of the statement and its provocative nature, which compels the Ukrainian side to a military resolution of the internal conflict in the Donbass.

The above mentioned statement is contradictory to previous declarations made by Pentagon officials on a settlement of the situation in the Ukraine by peaceful means only.

[Edited by Moscow Exile because of grammatical and punctuation errors in the above-linked Russian -English statement, although the Russian Ministry of Defence did spell "defence" correctly! :-)]

"We congratulate the defenders of the Ukraine. Thank them for their self-sacrifice and for taking risks every day", she says in an East Slav dialect, noting that during their visit to the Ukraine, US Deputy Secretary of State Stephen Bigan and US Secretary of State Michael Pompeo had visited memorials to fallen soldiers, "because it was these soldiers who had sacrificed themselves to help protect the democracy, sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Ukraine".

"The USA is and will be your indestructible partner", emphasized the Colonel Stewart.


Have a nice day, suckers!

[Oct 21, 2020] I think the whole thing was a carefully-concocted operation that Lyosha was fully briefed-in on

Notable quotes:
"... Perhaps the plot extended beyond those who directly participated but I don't think it was a high level operation. Navalny took a gamble that his sponsors would have no choice but to follow his lead. It now makes no practical difference as to whom planned it. ..."
Oct 21, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

PATIENT OBSERVER October 18, 2020 at 4:15 pm

Navalny on CBS 60 Minutes:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/alexey-navalny-poisoning-putin-russia-60-minutes-2020-10-18/

A skeptical 5-year old could see through the BS but the intrepid Leslie Stahl hangs on his every word.

MARK CHAPMAN October 18, 2020 at 5:55 pm

Alexey Navalny: It's a banned substance. I think for Putin– why– he's using this chemical weapon to do– do both, kill me and, you know, terrify others. It's something really scary, where the people just drop dead without– there are no gun. There are no shots and in a couple of hours, you– you'll be dead and without any traces on your body. It's something terrifying. And Putin is enjoying it.

So am I. It's very intriguing, the constant plot twists – Navalny is recorded live 'moaning in anguish' but he was not in any pain! Perhaps the very thought of such an amazing human being and exceptional leader – himself, naturally – struck down in his prime was just so sorrowful that he could not stifle his sadness.

It's 'something really scary', is it? Why? So far nearly everyone poisoned by it has survived with no apparent medium-to-long-term damage. The deadliest toxin in the world by a wide margin has so far managed to kill one barbag who was also a drug addict, and completely incidentally – she was not ever a target.

According to the Russian record of its use as a murder weapon, though, on the sole known occasion it was so used, it killed the target in just a few hours. It also killed his secretary, who used the same phone to call an ambulance, and the pathologist who did his autopsy.

So whoever is copying Novichok for its terror effects is not doing a very good job. Like Porsche, there is no substitute.

PATIENT OBSERVER October 19, 2020 at 5:03 am

The "moaning in anguish" was likely Navalny's theatrical assumption that Novichok creates intense pain. When he learned, after his performance, that Novichok does not create intense pain, he changed his story on the fly.

This, and a few other things, brings up an interesting conjecture. The Navalny stunt may have been a free-lance operation done without prior knowledge of Western intelligence agencies. He and his posse concocted the scheme betting that the the US and Germany would be backed into a corner and had to play along. They really had no choice as they could not abandon this asset without the entire "fearless opposition to the tyrant Putin" collapsing into the cesspool it was built upon.

If so, it was an audacious move that only a sociopath could do. However, it does suggest that Navalny is finished after the last bit of propaganda value is wrung out. His future could be either termination under a convenient pretext (i.e. Putin finally got him) or to become a professor of BS at some US University or the like. The main point is that he is too unreliable to conduct further operations.

MARK CHAPMAN October 19, 2020 at 9:42 am

I think the whole thing was a carefully-concocted operation that Lyosha was fully briefed-in on. His howls and screams would have been necessary in any case, with or without pain, because it was imperative that all on board be convinced that a terrible event was taking place and that emergency actions were absolutely called for. It's hard to imagine the same dramatic effect could have been achieved by Navalny flopping out of the toilet like a gaffed bass, and whispering to the flight attendant, "I just have this feeling that says body, we are done". Everyone including the flight attendant would assume he was drunk or something that was no particular cause for alarm, and maybe even for amusement. Until they learned that the flight was being diverted so this fuckwad could get off.

ET AL October 19, 2020 at 10:57 am

I don't know and I don't care who's cuning plan this was. It's got him all the publicity he needs and also those in the west with their standard 'no smoke without fire' level of foreign policy 'evidence.' I think he's actually looking to sell his life story for a Netflix series. Nothing else makes logical sense.

MOSCOW EXILE October 19, 2020 at 10:34 am

Yes, maybe -- apart from the fact that one of his posse is British agent who has been controlling FBK investigations into corruption for quite a while now and apparently was stuck to Navalny during his last foray into the provinces like shit to an army blanket.

PATIENT OBSERVER October 19, 2020 at 10:57 am

To Mark and ME;
The Navalny show still has an ad hoc feel to it. Perhaps the plot extended beyond those who directly participated but I don't think it was a high level operation. Navalny took a gamble that his sponsors would have no choice but to follow his lead. It now makes no practical difference as to whom planned it.

MOSCOW EXILE October 18, 2020 at 9:47 pm

More proof that Trump is a Kremlin Stooge?

Навальный пожаловался, что Трамп не осудил произошедший с ним инцидент
19.10.2020 | 07:59

Navalny has complained that Trump has not condemned what happened to him
19.10.2020 | 07:59

Blogger Aleksei Navalny has expressed the opinion that US President Donald Trump should have also condemned what happened to him, as did European politicians, TASS reports.

"I think it is especially important that everyone, including, and perhaps first and foremost, the US president, speak out against the use of chemical weapons in the 21st century", Navalny said.

["Я думаю, что особенно важно, чтобы все, включая и, возможно, в первую очередь президента США, выступили против применения химического оружия в XXI веке".]

On August 20, Navalny was taken to a hospital in Omsk after he had fallen ill on an aeroplane. Omsk doctors said that the main diagnosis was metabolic disorders. Then Navalny was transported to Germany. He was in a coma for two weeks. German doctors announced that he had been poisoned with substances from the Novichok group. Russia has asked Berlin for more detailed information on the test results, but has not yet received a response.

Currently, Navalny has been discharged from the hospital and is undergoing rehabilitation.

Big gobbed gobshite shouting his big gob off -- or did his US controllers really urge him to make that statement? Is the CIA really using him as part of the Democrats "Russiagate" arsenal?

MARK CHAPMAN October 19, 2020 at 8:48 am

Got it in one; I was going to say, until I read your last couple of lines, that this is further suggestion that Navalny is a Democratic project. The US State Department is full of Democratic appointees. They want to get all the mileage out of him they can before interest fades.

MARK CHAPMAN October 19, 2020 at 9:11 am

Miraculously, he recovered from the poison that is so dangerous people fear to mention its name, for fear that doing so might encourage tongue cancer, and is today fit as a flea; can't wait to return to Russia for Round Two. If they were wise, they'd kill Lyosha themselves for his stem cells. Then world leaders could be protected against Russian assassination attempts.

MARK CHAPMAN October 19, 2020 at 9:04 am

Certainly capitalizing on his new-found fame, isn't he? Now he feels comfortable telling the US president how he ought to behave, and chiding him for not appropriately recognizing Navalny's importance to the world. Dear God, what a swellheaded prat.

If the Chief Bullshitter really feels so concerned for the safety of his family, he will leave them all abroad and return to Russia alone – I mean, he's not a bit afraid for himself, he's said as much. Go on, Lyosha – go back home and rally the great restless throng of oppressed ordinary Russians who cry out for your leadership!!

Not on your life. He's got the sweetest gig ever going on right there, newspapers beating a path to his door to find out what he likes to eat for breakfast and whose shirts he wears, no worries about income or housing, hobnobbing with world leaders who listen respectfully to his opinions, and all he has to do is rant about Putin all day long. The Americans are finally getting their money's worth out of Lyosha. Whereas what would happen if he went home?

It would quickly become clear that his support still comes exclusively from the same group – a few disaffected intelligentsia such as Boris Akunin, the Atlanticist liberatsi who endlessly predict the collapse of Putin, and the angry kiddies who feel like they are part of some great Thunberg-like global freedom movement that will bring them a comfortable life but absolve them of responsibility for working for it – you know; the way they live in America!

[Oct 21, 2020] How Trump Got Played By The Military-Industrial Complex by Akbar Shahid Ahmed

Highly recommended!
Tramp was essentially the President from military industrial complex and Israel lobby. So he was not played. That's naive. He followed the instructions.
Oct 21, 2020 | www.huffpost.com

On March 20, 2018, President Donald Trump sat beside Saudi crown prince Muhammed bin Salman at the White House and lifted a giant map that said Saudi weapons purchases would support jobs in "key" states -- including Pennsylvania, Michigan, Florida and Ohio, all of which were crucial to Trump's 2016 election victory .

"Saudi Arabia has been a very great friend and a big purchaser of equipment but if you look, in terms of dollars, $3 billion, $533 million, $525 million -- that's peanuts for you. You should have increased it," Trump said to the prince, who was (and still is) overseeing a military campaign in Yemen that has deployed U.S. weaponry to commit scores of alleged war crimes.

Trump has used his job as commander-in-chief to be America's arms-dealer-in-chief in a way no other president has since Dwight Eisenhower, as he prepared to leave the presidency, warned in early 1961 of the military-industrial complex's political influence. Trump's posture makes sense personally ― this is a man who regularly fantasizes about violence, usually toward foreigners ― and he and his advisers see it as politically useful, too. The president has repeatedly appeared at weapons production facilities in swing states, promoted the head of Lockheed Martin using White House resources, appointed defense industry employees to top government jobs in an unprecedented way and expanded the Pentagon's budget to near-historic highs ― a guarantee of future income for companies like Lockheed and Boeing.

Trump is "on steroids in terms of promoting arms sales for his own political benefit," said William Hartung, a scholar at the Center for International Policy who has tracked the defense industry for decades. "It's a targeted strategy to get benefits from workers in key states."

In courting the billion-dollar industry, Trump has trampled on moral considerations about how buyers like the Saudis misuse American weapons, ethical concerns about conflicts of interest and even part of his own political message, the deceptive claim that he is a peace candidate. He justifies his policy by citing job growth, but data from Hartung , a prominent analyst, shows he exaggerates the impact. And Trump has made clear that a major motivation for his defense strategy is the possible electoral benefit it could have.

Next month's election will show if the bargain was worth it. As of now, it looks like Trump's bet didn't pay off ― for him, at least. Campaign contribution records, analysts in swing states and polls suggest arms dealers have given the president no significant political boost. The defense contractors, meanwhile, are expected to continue getting richer, as they have in a dramatic way under Trump.

Playing Corporate Favorites

Trump has thrice chosen the person who decides how the Defense Department spends its gigantic budget. Each time, he has tapped someone from a business that wants those Pentagon dollars. Mark Esper, the current defense secretary, worked for Raytheon; his predecessor, Pat Shanahan, for Boeing; and Trump's first appointee, Jim Mattis, for General Dynamics, which reappointed him to its board soon after he left the administration.

Of the senior officials serving under Esper, almost half have connections to military contractors, per the Project on Government Oversight. The administration is now rapidly trying to fill more Pentagon jobs under the guidance of a former Trump campaign worker, Foreign Policy magazine recently revealed ― prioritizing political reasons and loyalty to Trump in choosing people who could help craft policy even under a Joe Biden presidency.

Such personnel choices are hugely important for defense companies' profit margins and risk creating corruption or the impression of it. Watchdog groups argue Trump's handling of the hiring process is more evidence that lawmakers and future presidents must institute rules to limit the reach of military contractors and other special interests.

"Given the hundreds of conflicts of interest flouting the rule of law in the Trump administration , certainly these issues have gotten that much more attention and are that much more salient now than they were four years ago," said Aaron Scherb, the director of legislative affairs at Common Cause, a nonpartisan good-government group.

The theoretical dangers of Trump's approach became a reality last year, when a former employee for the weapons producer Raytheon used his job at the State Department to advocate for a rare emergency declaration allowing the Saudis and their partner the United Arab Emirates to buy $8 billion in arms ― including $2 billion in Raytheon products ― despite congressional objections. As other department employees warned that Saudi Arabia was defying U.S. pressure to behave less brutally in Yemen, former lobbyist Charles Faulkner led a unit that urged Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to give the kingdom more weapons. Pompeo pushed out Faulkner soon afterward, and earlier this year, the State Department's inspector general criticized the process behind the emergency declaration for the arms.

Red Crescent medics walk next to bags containing the bodies of victims of Saudi-linked airstrikes on a Houthi detention cente MOHAMED AL-SAYAGHI / REUTERS
Red Crescent medics walk next to bags containing the bodies of victims of Saudi-linked airstrikes on a Houthi detention center in Yemen on Sept. 1, 2019. The Saudis military campaign in Yemen has relied on U.S. weaponry to commit scores of alleged war crimes.

Even Trump administration officials not clearly connected to the defense industry have shown an interest in moves that benefit it. In 2017, White House economic advisor Peter Navarro pressured Republican lawmakers to permit exports to Saudi Arabia and Jared Kushner, the president's counselor and son-in-law, personally spoke with Lockheed Martin's chief to iron out a sale to the kingdom, The New York Times found.

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When Congress gave the Pentagon $1 billion to develop medical supplies as part of this year's coronavirus relief package, most of the money went to defense contractors for projects like jet engine parts instead, a Washington Post investigation showed .

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"It's a very close relationship and there's no kind of sense that they're supposed to be regulating these people," Hartung said. "It's more like they're allies, standing shoulder to shoulder."

Seeking Payback

In June 2019, Lockheed Martin announced that it would close a facility that manufactures helicopters in Coatesville, Pennsylvania, and employs more than 450 people. Days later, Trump tweeted that he had asked the company's then-chief executive, Marillyn Hewson, to keep the plant open. And by July 10, Lockheed said it would do so ― attributing the decision to Trump.

The president has frequently claimed credit for jobs in the defense industry, highlighting the impact on manufacturing in swing states rather than employees like Washington lobbyists, whose numbers have also grown as he has expanded the Pentagon's budget. Lockheed has helped him in his messaging: In one instance in Wisconsin, Hewson announced she was adding at least 45 new positions at a plant directly after Trump spoke there, saying his tax cuts for corporations made that possible.

Trump is pursuing a strategy that the arms industry uses to insulate itself from political criticism. "They've reached their tentacles into every state and many congressional districts," Scherb of Common Cause said. That makes it hard for elected officials to question their operations or Pentagon spending generally without looking like they are harming their local economy.

Rep. Chrissy Houlahan, a Democrat who represents Coatesville, welcomed Lockheed's change of course, though she warned, "This decision is a temporary reprieve. I am concerned that Lockheed Martin and [its subsidiary] Sikorsky are playing politics with the livelihoods of people in my community."

The political benefit for Trump, though, remains in question, given that as president he has a broad set of responsibilities and is judged in different ways.

"Do I think it's important to keep jobs? Absolutely," said Marcel Groen, a former Pennsylvania Democratic party chair. "And I think we need to thank the congresswoman and thank the president for it. But it doesn't change my views and I don't think it changes most people's in terms of the state of the nation."

With polls showing that Trump's disastrous response to the health pandemic dominates voters' thoughts and Biden sustaining a lead in surveys of most swing states , his argument on defense industry jobs seems like a minor factor in this election.

Hartung of the Center for International Policy drew a parallel to President George H.W. Bush, who during his 1992 reelection campaign promoted plans for Taiwan and Saudi Arabia to purchase fighter jets produced in Missouri and Texas. Bush announced the decisions at events at the General Dynamics facility in Fort Worth, Texas, and the McDonnell Douglas plant in St. Louis that made the planes. That November, as Bill Clinton defeated him, he lost Missouri by the highest margin of any Republican in almost 30 years and won Texas by a slimmer margin than had become the norm for a GOP presidential candidate.

President Donald Trump greets then-Lockheed Martin CEO Marillyn Hewson at the Derco Aerospace Inc. plant in Milwaukee on July MANDEL NGAN VIA GETTY IMAGES
President Donald Trump greets then-Lockheed Martin CEO Marillyn Hewson at the Derco Aerospace Inc. plant in Milwaukee on July 12, 2019. Trump does not appear to be winning his political bet that increased defense spending would help his political fortunes.

Checking The Receipts

The defense industry can't control whether voters buy Trump's arguments about his relationship with it. But it could, if it wanted to, try to help him politically in a more direct way: by donating to his reelection campaign and allied efforts.

Yet arms manufacturers aren't reciprocating Trump's affection. A HuffPost review of Federal Election Commission records showed that top figures and groups at major industry organizations like the National Defense Industrial Association and the Aerospace Industries Association and at Lockheed, Trump's favorite defense firm, are donating this cycle much as they normally do: giving to both sides of the political aisle, with a slight preference to the party currently wielding the most power, which for now is Republicans. (The few notable exceptions include the chairman of the NDIA's board, Arnold Punaro, who has given more than $58,000 to Trump and others in the GOP.)

Data from the Center for Responsive Politics shows that's the case for contributions from the next three biggest groups of defense industry donors after Lockheed's employees.

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One smaller defense company, AshBritt Environmental, did donate $500,000 to a political action committee supporting Trump ― prompting a complaint from the Campaign Legal Center, which noted that businesses that take federal dollars are not allowed to make campaign contributions. Its founder told ProPublica he meant to make a personal donation.

For weapons producers, backing both parties makes sense. The military budget will have increased 29% under Trump by the end of the current fiscal year, per the White House Office of Management and Budget. Biden has said he doesn't see cuts as "inevitable" if he is elected, and his circle of advisers includes many from the national security world who have worked closely with ― and in many cases worked for ― the defense industry.

And arms manufacturers are "busy pursuing their own interests" in other ways, like trying to get a piece of additional government stimulus legislation, Hartung said ― an effort that's underway as the Pentagon's inspector general investigates how defense contractors got so much of the first coronavirus relief package.

Meanwhile, defense contractors continue to have an outsize effect on the way policies are designed in Washington through less political means. A recent report from the Center for International Policy found that such companies have given at least $1 billion to the nation's most influential think tanks since 2014 ― potentially spending taxpayer money to influence public opinion. They have also found less obvious ways to maintain support from powerful people, like running the databases that many congressional offices use to connect with constituents, Scherb of Common Cause said.

"This goes into a much bigger systemic issue about big money in politics and the role of corporations versus the role of Americans," Scherb said.

Given its reach, the defense industry has little reason to appear overtly partisan. Instead, it's projecting confidence despite the generally dreary state of the global economy: Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun has said he expects similar approaches from either winner of the election, arguing even greater Democratic control and the rise of less conventional lawmakers isn't a huge concern.

In short, whoever is in the White House, arms dealers tend to do just fine.

[Oct 19, 2020] MI6 outgoing chief: the perceived threat posed by Russia and China against the UK is overstated and distract from addressing the UK's domestic problems

And that's by design. False flags like Scripal Novichok saga are just a smoke screen over UK problems, the ciursi of neoliberalism in the country, delegitimization of neoliberal elites and its subservience to the USA global neoliberal empire, which wants to devour Russia like it plundered the USSR in the past.
But why outgoing MI6 chief decided to tell us the truth? This is not in the traditions of the agency.
Oct 19, 2020 | www.rt.com

After years of focusing on combating terrorism, US Special Forces are preparing to turn their attention to the possibility of future conflict with adversaries Russia and China. The outgoing head of MI6, the UK's clandestine intelligence service, says that the perceived threat posed by Russia and China against the UK is overstated and distract from addressing the UK's domestic problems. Meanwhile, his replacement insists that the threat posed by Russia and China is real and is growing in complexity. Rick Sanchez explains. Then former US diplomat Jim Jatras and "Going Underground" host Afshin Rattansi share their insights.

The Senate Judiciary Committee is meeting for a for a final day of deliberations before the confirmation of Judge Amy Coney Barrett, President Trump's controversial pick for the US Supreme Court. RT America's Faran Fronczak reports. RT America's Trinity Chavez reports on the skyrocketing poverty across the US as coronavirus relief funds dry up and the White House stalls on additional stimulus. RT America's John Huddy reports on the backlash against Facebook and Twitter for their suppression of an incendiary new report about Democratic nominee Joe Biden's son Hunter Biden and his foreign entanglements.

[Oct 19, 2020] The Emails Are Russian- Will Be The Narrative, Regardless Of Facts Or Evidence by Caitlin Johnstone

Highly recommended!
Oct 19, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via CaitlinJohnstone.com,

Fight it all you want, but there's nothing you can do. "The emails are Russian" is going to be the official dominant narrative in mainstream political discourse, and there's nothing you can do to stop it. Resistance is futile.

Like the Russian hacking narrative, the Trump-Russia collusion narrative, the Russian bounties in Afghanistan narrative, and any other evidence-free framing of events that simultaneously advances pre-planned cold war agendas, is politically convenient for the Democratic party and generates clicks and ratings, the narrative that the New York Post publication of Hunter Biden's emails is a Russian operation is going to be hammered and hammered and hammered until it becomes the mainstream consensus. This will happen regardless of facts and evidence, up to and including rock solid evidence that Hunter Biden's emails were not published as a result of a Russian operation.

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This is happening. It's following the same formula all the other fact-free Russia hysteria narratives have followed. The same media tour by pundits and political operatives saying with no evidence but very assertive voices that Russia is most certainly behind this occurrence and we should all be very upset about it.

"To me, this is just classic textbook Soviet Russian tradecraft at work," Russiagate founder and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper is heard assuring CNN's audience .

"Joe Biden – and all of us – SHOULD be furious that media outlets are spreading what is very likely Russian propaganda," begins and eight-part thread by Democratic Senator Chris Murphy, who claims the emails are "Kremlin constructed anti-Biden propaganda."

"It's not really surprising at all, this was always the play, but still kind of head-spinning to watch all the players from 2016 run exactly the same hack-leak-smear op in 2020. Even with everyone knowing exactly what's happening this time," tweets MSNBC's Chris Hayes.

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"How are you all circling the wagons instead of being embarrassed for peddling Russian ops 18 days before the election. It's not enough that you all haven't learned from your atrocious handling of 2016 -- you are doubling down," Democratic Party think tanker Neera Tanden tweeted in admonishment of journalists who dare to report on or ask questions about the emails.

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Virtually the entirety of the Democratic Party-aligned political/media class has streamlined this narrative of Russian influence into the American consciousness with very little inertia, despite the fact that neither Joe nor Hunter Biden has disputed the authenticity of the emails and despite a complete absence of evidence for Russian involvement in their publication.

This is surely the first time, at least in recent memory, that we have ever seen such a broad consensus within the mass media that it is the civic duty of news reporters to try and influence the outcome of a presidential general election by withholding negative news coverage for one candidate. There was a lot of fascinated hatred for Trump in 2016, but people still reported on Hillary Clinton's various scandals and didn't attack one another for doing so. In 2020 that has changed, and mainstream news reporters have now largely coalesced along the doctrine that they must avoid any reporting which might be detrimental to the Biden campaign.

"Dem Party hacks (and many of their media allies) genuinely believe it's immoral to report on or even discuss stories that reflect poorly on Biden. In reality, it's the responsibility of journalists to ignore their vapid whining and ask about newsworthy stories, even about Biden," tweeted The Intercept 's Glenn Greenwald recently.

"You don't even have to think the Hunter Biden materials constitute some kind of earth-shattering story to be absolutely repulsed at the authoritarian propaganda offensive being waged to discredit them -- primarily by journalists who behave like compliant little trained robots ," tweeted journalist Michael Tracey.

Last month The Spectator 's Stephen L Miller described how the consensus formed among the mainstream press since Clinton's 2016 loss that it is their moral duty to be uncritical of Trump's opponent.

"For almost four years now, journalists have shamed their colleagues and themselves over what I will call the 'but her emails' dilemma," Miller writes. "Those who reported dutifully on the ill-timed federal investigation into Hillary Clinton's private server and spillage of classified information have been cast out and shunted away from the journalist cool kids' table. Focusing so much on what was, at the time, a considerable scandal, has been written off by many in the media as a blunder. They believe their friends and colleagues helped put Trump in the White House by focusing on a nothing-burger of a Clinton scandal when they should have been highlighting Trump's foibles. It's an error no journalist wants to repeat."

https://platform.twitter.com/embed/index.html?dnt=false&embedId=twitter-widget-2&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1316900508775280642&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com%2Fpolitical%2Femails-are-russian-will-be-narrative-regardless-facts-or-evidence&siteScreenName=zerohedge&theme=light&widgetsVersion=ed20a2b%3A1601588405575&width=550px

So "the emails are Russian" narrative serves the interests of political convenience, partisan media ratings, and the national security state's pre-planned agenda to continue escalating against Russia as part of its slow motion third world war against nations which refuse to bow to US dictates, and you've got essentially no critical mainstream news coverage putting the brakes on any of it. This means this narrative is going to become mainstream orthodoxy and treated as an established fact, despite the fact that there is no actual, tangible evidence for it.

Joe Biden could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and the mainstream press would crucify any journalist who so much as tweeted about it. Very little journalism is going into vetting and challenging him, and a great deal of the energy that would normally be doing so is going into ensuring that he slides right into the White House.

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If the mainstream news really existed to tell you the truth about what's going on, everyone would know about every questionable decision that Joe Biden has ever made, Russiagate would never have happened, we'd all be acutely aware of the fact that powerful forces are pushing us into increasingly aggressive confrontations with two nuclear-armed nations, and Trump would be grilled about Yemen in every press conference.

But the mainstream news does not exist to tell you the truth about the world. The mainstream news exists to advance the interests of its wealthy owners and the status quo upon which they have built their kingdoms. That's why it's so very, very important that we find ways to break away from it and share information with each other that isn't tainted by corrupt and powerful interests.

* * *

Thanks for reading! The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack , which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My work is entirely reader-supported , so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook , following my antics on Twitter , throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon or Paypal , purchasing some of my sweet merchandise , buying my books Rogue Nation: Psychonautical Adventures With Caitlin Johnstone and Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers . For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I'm trying to do with this platform, click here . Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I've written) in any way they like free of charge.

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[Oct 19, 2020] Could U.S bureaucrats be so short sighted where they cannot see the culture they are creating?

Oct 19, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

bren , Oct 18 2020 1:23 utc | 87

"As this is so obvious one must ask what the real reason for the anti-Russian pressure campaign is. What do those who argue for it foresee as its endpoint?"

I ask myself this question seemingly every day. Could U.S bureaucrats be so short sighted where they cannot see the culture they are creating? Any sane follower of international relations understands that poking a nuclear power with a stick is the work of fools. My nightmare, that I have feared since I was a child, is a nuclear confrontation that would result in the end of the human race.

Does rationality and common sense ever win out in Washington? I fear that our "endgame" will result in a mushroom cloud....

[Oct 19, 2020] Banking has an odd and opaque history of global control of money/finance and inciting wars

Oct 19, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

chu teh , Oct 17 2020 22:10 utc | 65

This in reply to your #131 yesterday re JP Morgan, oligarch power and method used to create Federal Reserve:

There is more. Banking has an odd and opaque history of global control of money/finance. It was clear by ca. 1900 that the global keystone was control of USA banking...but how?, because any USA legislation had to be signed-off by a President...the ONLY exception being overriding a pres. veto. It could not be done in USA by pres. decree.

So the riddle is how could this rip-off be done in a freak nation that was an open society of free public discourse full of very active politician? Even if Congress could be bribed and otherwise cajoled to pass such legislation, how could any President be "arranged" to sign it?

CLUE -- W. Wilson -- headmaster of Princeton University suddenly rose to Governor of New Jersey , then suddenly ran for Pres of US. A most weird election resulted in WW becoming Pres and in his first year signed the Fed Res Act. Boom! Done!

CLUE -- How did the bankers, Warburg et al, manage to put WW under their control? How did they select WW and get hooks so deeply into headmaster WW and get him elected Pres.? What was their secret?...and that could be kept secret? and never in writing.

The ANSWER might well be known only to surviving members of families of those involved in WW's mysterious medical maladies. Though WW's doctors never disclosed publicly all his medical data, related family members of consulted medical experts would likely have it as a family secret...that WW had an "unspeakable" malady whose diagnosis was quietly handed down to successive generations.

And IMO it is so.

[Oct 19, 2020] New report shows more than $1B from war industry and govt. going to top 50 think tanks

Highly recommended!
Oct 19, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Richard Steven Hack , Oct 17 2020 23:20 utc | 76

New report shows more than $1B from war industry and govt. going to top 50 think tanks
Esper's speech demonstrates a confluence of policies, ideas, and funds that permeate through the system, and are by no means unique to a single service, think tank, or contractor.

First, Esper consistently situated his future expansion plans in a need to adapt to "an era of great power competition." CNAS is one of the think tanks leading the charge in highlighting the threat from Beijing.

They also received at least $8,946,000 from 2014-2019 from the U.S. government and defense contractors, including over $7 million from defense contractors like Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, Huntington Ingalls, General Dynamics, and Boeing who would stand to make billions if the 500-ship fleet were enacted.

It's all about the money. Foreign and domestic policy is always all about the money, either directly or indirectly. Of course, the ultimate goal is power - or more precisely, the ultimate goal is relief of the fear of death, which drives every single human's every action, and only power can do that, and in this world only money can give you power (or so the chimpanzees believe.)

[Oct 19, 2020] A joke circulating Russia internets today

Oct 19, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

BG , Oct 17 2020 20:24 utc | 46

A joke circulating Russia internets today:

"German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas:

"North Stream 2 will be built 100%!"

A journalist asks:

"But what about Navalny?"

Maas replies:

"Well, unfortunately Navalny doesn't produce 55 billion cbm of natural gas per year..."

___

[Oct 19, 2020] The endpoint is to weaken Russia and sabotaging its economy. Less income through oil and gas exports means less money for weapons, which affects Russia's operations beyond its borders, less money for hospitals, education, welfare etc. increasing domestic instability etc.

Oct 19, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Et Tu , Oct 18 2020 10:48 utc | 111

"As this is so obvious one must ask what the real reason for the anti-Russian pressure campaign is. What do those who argue for it foresee as its endpoint?"

The endpoint is to weaken Russia and sabotaging its economy. Less income through oil and gas exports means less money for weapons, which affects Russia's operations beyond its borders, less money for hospitals, education, welfare etc. increasing domestic instability etc.
Diplomatically Russia is also weakened by having its reputation tarnished, regardless of whether it deserves it or not.

In order to get to the King, the pieces standing in front of it must be either taken out or moved out of the way. Sanctions, informational and economic warfare are the only available pieces on the chess board, short of direct military confrontation.

[Oct 19, 2020] To be fair, Russia was never given a time to grow. It was sanctioned, sanctioned and sanctioned.

Oct 19, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

steven t johnson , Oct 18 2020 10:52 utc | 112

Not sure who this Andrei Martyanov is, but underlying all the comments is the proposition that Putin-managed capitalism works great, will work great forever, will not have a crisis ever and will make Russia totally independent in all ways. Stated so forthrightly, no doubt it sounds too stupid to admit to. Nonetheless this is the claim. I say capitalist restoration did not improve the Russian economy in the way implied by Martyanov. Putin is still a Yeltsinite, even if he is sober enough to pass for competent.

Smith , Oct 18 2020 11:44 utc | 113

To be fair, Russia was never given a time to grow. It was sanctioned, sanctioned and sanctioned.

China did have a sweet time from the 80s to 10s where they serve as the world factory.

michael , Oct 18 2020 11:47 utc | 114
@vk | Oct 17 2020 17:32 utc | 12

I take the opposite view: Looking from today, Russia is lucky that the USSR collapsed in 1991. It shed its debt, its currency passed through hyperinflation, and their economy collapsed and rebuilt. The US and most Western countries still have that coming for them, and soon.

Plus beyond that the strict Communist/Marxist atheism over 70+ years lead to a rebirth of Christian values in Russia, their biggest advantage in this cultural war. And they practice science, not scientism.

Note: Russia and China are more capitalist than the US, for quite some time now. (12+ years)

Yeah, Right , Oct 18 2020 12:01 utc | 115
@110 Abe as far as I understand it, the economic argument goes like this: take the number of rubles generated/spent/whatever in Russian economic activity, then use the current conversion rate to convert that into an "equivalent" amount of US dollars.

Then see what you can buy with that many US dollars.

If you went shopping in the USA, the answer would be that this many US dollars doesn't buy you much, ergo, Russian economic activity is pathetically low.

An example: the Russian government might budget xxx (fill in the figure) rubles to buy new T-90 tanks. In Washington they would convert that into US dollars, and then declare that this is chicken-feed. Hardly enough to buy less than 10 Abrams tanks.

Only the Russians aren't buying Abrams tanks from the USA, and are not spending dollars. They are buying T-90 tanks, and for the amount of rubles spent they'll get 50 tanks.

Every metric the US analyst are using tells them that the USA is vastly, vastly outspending the Russians on military equipment, to the point where it is obvious that the Russian military must be destitute and decrepit.

But if they every took the time to look they'll see 50 brand-spanking new T-90 main battle tanks. Weapons that their assumptions say that the Russians can't afford, and would wonder "Huh? Where'd they come from?"

If they ever looked, which is doubtful.

vk , Oct 18 2020 14:56 utc | 116
@ Posted by: Andrei Martyanov | Oct 18 2020 4:11 utc | 96

I agree that comparing Russia's economy with the likes of Italy and Spain is ridiculous, but it's not that simple. Capitalism is not what is appears to be.

If a (capitalist) nation wants to get something from another (capitalist) nation, it needs to export something. There's no free lunch in international trade: if you want to import, you have to export or issue sovereign debt bonds (treasury bonds).

In this scenario, either Russia produces everything it needs in its own territory or it will have to export in order to import the technology it needs to do whatever it needs to do. Remember: the Russian Federation is a capitalist nation-state, it has to follow the laws of motion of capitalism, which take precedence over whatever Putin wants. To ignore that economic laws exist is to deny any kind of theory of collapse; nation-states would then be eternal, natural entities with no entropy.

Even if Russia produces everything it needs in its own territory, it is still capitalist. It would need, in order to "substitute imports", to super-exploit its own labor force (working class) in order to extract surpluses for its industrialization efforts. That's what the USSR did during Stalin.

If Russia is doing the imports substitution in the classical way (the way Latin America did during the liberal dictatorships of the 1950s-1980s), then it is trying to sell commodities to industrialized countries in order to import technology and machinery necessary to industrialize its own territory. That is probably the case here.

Assuming this more probable case, then I'm sorry to tell you it won't work. It may work in the short or even medium term, but it will ultimately fail in the long term. The thing is that, in a system of capitalist exchange between an agrarian and an industrial nation-state, the industrial nation-state will always have the advantage (i.e. have a trade surplus). That's because of Marx's labor theory of value: industrialized commodities ("manufactured goods") have more intrinsic value than agrarian/raw material commodities - just think about how many kilos of bananas Brazil would have to export to the USA in order to import one single unit of an iPhone 12, to use an contemporary example. As a social result, industrialized countries have a higher organic composition of capital (OCC) than agrarian countries, as they need more value to just keep themselves afloat (as a metaphor: it's more expensive to keep a big mansion than a little flat in a stationary state). Value (wealth) then tends to flow from lower OCC to the higher OCC, this is the material base that divides the First and Third World countries until today.

To make things even worse, raw materials/agricultural products have an inelastic demand, which means their prices fall when production rises, and their prices rise when production falls, relative to overall demand. You will pay whatever the water company will charge you for the cubic meter of water - but you won't consume more or less water because of its price, hence the term "inelastic": demand tends to be more or less constant on a macroeconomic level. The same problem suffers the commodity exporter nations: there will come a stage where their exports' overall value will collapse vis-a-vis the machinery and technology they need to import.

As a result, the commodity exporter nations will have to get more debt overseas, by issuing more T-bonds, just to keep the trade balance afloat. What was the quest for progress becomes a vicious battle for mere survival. A debt crisis is brewed.

And that's exactly what happened to the Latin American countries in the 1980s-1990s: their debt exploded and they were put to their knees by the USA (the country that issues the universal fiat currency). The USA then charged their debt, which triggered a wave of privatizations of everything those countries had built over decades. This is what will happen to Russia if it falls for the lure of imports substitution.

That's why I urge the Russians to review their concepts and try to get back to the Soviet times. It doesn't need to be exactly how it was before: you can make the due reforms and adopt a more or less Chinese model of socialism. That's the only way out, if the Russian people doesn't want to be enslaved by the liberals (capitalists).

pretzelattack , Oct 18 2020 15:11 utc | 117
looks like the fbi is still in bed with the cia on russiagate, they are now pivoting to investigating the laptop as a russian intelligence operation.
pretzelattack , Oct 18 2020 15:14 utc | 118
@vk from what i'm reading (stephen cohen: soviet fates and lost alternatives) the chinese adopted something like bukharin's nep policies, which stalin did his best to wipe out in the ussr. i've got some problems with cohen's last book, "war with russia?" but he has a lot of good information on the history of the ussr.
pretzelattack , Oct 18 2020 15:17 utc | 119
russia is not "lucky" that it went through a massive collapse following idiotic u.s. austerity policies in the 90's. it is still recovering from that.
vk , Oct 18 2020 15:42 utc | 120
@ Posted by: pretzelattack | Oct 18 2020 15:14 utc | 118

On the surface, yes: the comparison between Reform and Opening Up and NEP are irresistible. But it is not precise: the only merit it has is in the fact that it is fairer than simply classifying Deng Xiaoping's reforms as neoliberalism (Trotskysts, Austrian School) or capitalism (liberals).

The key here is the difference of the nature of the Chinese peasant class and the Russian peasant class. The Chinese peasant class, besides suffering a lot (millions of dead by famine) in the hands of a liberal government for decades (Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist Government) (while the Russian equivalent - the "February Revolution" - only lasted a few months, engulfed by their insistence on continuing with the meat-grinder of WWI), had a different historical subtract.

Chinese late feudalism was much more developed, much more manufactured-centered than Russian late feudalism. As a result, the Chinese peasant was much more proletarian-minded than the feudal Russian peasant. Also, the Chinese didn't have the kulak problem (peasant petite-bourgeoisie) - instead, they had regional warlords who self-destructed during the chaotic republican period (1911-1949). When the warlords were gone, what was left was a much more proletarian-minded, egalitarian-minded, small peasantry. This peasantry didn't bother to migrate to the cities to work in the industry or to start their own factories in the countryside itself. That's why Deng Xiaoping's Reform and Opening Up was successful - not because of his genius, but because he was backed up by a capable people.

The Chinese peasantry, for example, didn't hoard or directed their grain surplus to exports in order to starve the proletariat to death in the cities - they sold it to the Chinese market. The Chinese peasantry also trusted their central government (CCP) and saw itself as part of the project - in complete opposition to the feudal-minded Russian kulak, who saw his piece of land as essentially an independent and self-sufficient cell/ecosystem.

That's why the Reform and Opening Up was successful (it survives until the present times) and the NEP soon failed - following the good harvest of 1924, came the awful harvest of 1926, which triggered a shit show where the peasantry hoarded the grain and almost starved the USSR to extinction, and which led to Stalin's ascension and the dekulakization process (forced collectivization).

pretzelattack , Oct 18 2020 15:59 utc | 121
@vk thanks for your detailed and thorough response, i will keep it in mind as i read.
pretzelattack , Oct 18 2020 16:11 utc | 122
i should add that i know little about the actual history of communism, but capitalism is revealing itself as a monstrous failure, and not all the propaganda in the world is succeeding at covering that up.
Abe , Oct 18 2020 16:32 utc | 123
Yeah, Right @ 115

I know how economic reasoning comes to that conclusion, but IRL comparing such different countries only by GDP metric is insane and beyond stupid.

Eg. Russia has GDP similar to California!

Yes, in US centric GDP metrics that favors and cheats US itself (surprise!).

But. One of those countries sent man in space, produces everything, has vast resources and is self sufficient nuclear superpower.
Other one cant even feed and provider water to its population without outside help.

GDP means nothing when sh*t hits the fan. What will "richer" country do if it goes to war with "poorer"? Throw money at them while they launch nukes at it?

vk , Oct 18 2020 17:43 utc | 124
@ Posted by: pretzelattack | Oct 18 2020 16:11 utc | 122

There certainly are similarities between the NEP and the Reform and Opening Up. It's very possible Deng Xiaoping took Lenin as inspiration.

Forgot to mention the Scissors Crisis, which erupted in 1923, and triggered the NEP. That crisis is one more evidence that shows manufactured products are inherently more valuable than raw materials/agrarian products.

Andrei Martyanov , Oct 18 2020 19:57 utc | 125
@Eric.
The facts are that even in 2020 Russia does not have anything close to gas turbines that can replace Siemens

Before posting anything--learn your facts. You, obviously, have issues with accessing them.

https://www.interfax.ru/russia/694526

Again, for products of Western "education" basic logic and ability for a basic extrapolation seem beyond the grasp: there are no issues for Russia to produce anything, other than time and some money. Country which produces best hi-tech weapons in the world, dominates world's nuclear energy market (this is not your iPhone "hi tech") and has a full enclosed cycle for aerospace industry, among many other things, will have little trouble in substituting pretty much anything. I remember a bunch of morons, who pass for "analysts", from either WSJ or WaPo declaring 6 years ago that sanctions will deny Russia access to Western extraction technologies. Sure, for a country whose space program alone will crush whole economies of UK or Germany should they ever try to recreate it, will have "problems" producing compressor or drill equipment with the level of Russia's metallurgy and material science. Generally speaking, West's present pathetic state is a direct result of utter incompetence across the board in a number of key fields of human activity and your post, most likely based on some BS by Western media, is a good demonstration of this state of the affairs.

Andrei Martyanov , Oct 18 2020 20:00 utc | 126
@Jason

Per immigration policy, you can easily find a a truck load of resources, especially on the web-sites of Russian diplomatic missions (Embassies, Consulates etc.), easily available. Per cats--Russian love for cats is boundless and intense. You may say that Russia is a cat-obsessed country;)

steven t johnson , Oct 18 2020 20:05 utc | 127
vk@120 posits a mystical cultural difference in Russian and Chinese peasants, which unfortunately has pretty much the same content as the hypothesis of a racial difference. That the morally superior race is supposed to be Chinese doesn't really help. As often, some strange assertions of facts that aren't so accompany such bizarre thinking. The rich peasants in China (what would be kulaks in Russian history,) were notorious for moneylending. As ever, the inevitable arrears ended in the moneylender's family taking the land. Collectivization came early in China, well along the way by 1956. And a key aspect of it was the struggle against the Chinese equivalent of the kulak class. As for the insistence that private farming is superior, the growth of inequality in land drove millions, a hundred million or more, into the cities. Without residence permits this floating proletariat was effectively superexploited by the new capitalist elements, as Deng meant them to do. Nor did the warlords discredit themselves, not as a group. If anything the young warlord who forced Chiang to reject active war against the Communists, in order to fight the Japanese invaders, was the one who kept the GMD (KMT in Wade-Giles,) from discrediting itself. [Xian incident] And what warlords had to do with the Chinese rich peasantry *after* the Revolution is a complete mystery.

Socially, the deliberate uneven development promoted by Deng and his successors, is eroding the social fabric of the larger countryside. This, in addition to the neocolonial concessions, the growing links to the Chinese bourgeoisie of the diaspora suggest that as Dengists may go even back/forward to a new form of warlordism. The thing about comparing Bukharism/NEP to Dengism/the "Opening" is that Bukharin's program failed spectacularly. But modern China is not next door to Nazi Germany. Even more to the point, Stalin's victory over Hitler has provided a kind of moral shield for China, even under Deng, inspiring fear of losing a general war. If Bukharin had beaten Stalin, we can be as sure as any hypothetical can be, the USSR would have been defeated, not victorious. In modern China, the Bukharin won. There is an excellent chance the national government of today's China will be defeated.

Eric , Oct 18 2020 20:53 utc | 128
@125 Andrei Martyanov

That article describes a 110 MW turbine that has now finally been put into production (while Siemens, General Electric etc. produce utility-class gas turbines up to about 600 MW, with far higher efficiency and most likely reliability). The article further describes 40 GW of thermal electrical production to be "modernized" until 2031 (11 years from now), and apparently a microscopic 2 GW of new capacity from "domestic and localized" 65 MW turbines to be commissioned 2026-2028. (I don't understand Russian so I had to rely on Yandex's machine translation.) That's admittedly some kind of progress, but is simply not going to cut it. Nowhere close.

Imagine if China set the ambition to build its own semiconductors and its own turbofans for its stealth fighters sometime around 2040. Imagine if China was still producing a third of the amount of electricity of the United States instead of about double, etc., and considered this to be adequate. It would be akin to abandoning its ambitions for technological and industrial independence from the West, and that is exactly what Russia is doing in the realm of gas turbines. There is apparently no capability and no seriousness going into translating Russia's world-class research and science into actual large-scale, modern industrial production, and everything points to this continuing, while you can blather on all you want about people with "Western education" simply not getting anything.

Andrei Martyanov , Oct 18 2020 21:16 utc | 129
@Eric
That's admittedly some kind of progress, but is simply not going to cut it. Nowhere close.

That's admittedly you switching on "I am dense" mode and trying to up the ante with 600 MW, which are a unique product, while you somehow miss the point that 110 MWt MGT-110 of fully Russian production has completed a full cycle of industrial tests and operations (an equivalent of military IOC--Initial Operational Capability) and is in a serial production. But instead of studying the issue (even if through Yandex translate) with Siemens which when learning about MGT-110 offered Russia 100% localization with technology transfer, Russians declined, you go into generalizations without having even minimal set of facts and situational awareness. In fact 110 MWt turbines are most in demand product for a variety of applications. Get acquainted with this.

https://power-m.ru/en/customers/thermal-power/gas-turbines/

I am not going to waste my time explaining to you (you will play dense again) what IOC means and how it relates to serial production, I am sure you will find a bunch of unrealted "argumentation".

Imagine if China

I don't need to imagine anything, as well as draw irrelevant parallels with China.

There is apparently no capability and no seriousness going into translating Russia's world-class research and science into actual large-scale, modern industrial production, and everything points to this continuing, while you can blather on all you want about people with "Western education" simply not getting anything.

This is exactly what I am talking about. Hollow declarations by people who can not even develop basic factual base.

Grieved , Oct 18 2020 21:16 utc | 130
@125 Andrei Martyanov

It's great to see you here with your excellent facts and perspectives on Russia. I'm sorry you have to deal with people whose minds are too small to grasp the immense scale of Russia - scale in physical size, civilizational depth and importance to the balance of power in the world.

Russia alone stopped the creeping gray hegemony from the west that had looked like it would just ooze over the whole world and suffocate it in bullshit and tribute payments. And then China joined in the fun. The world has a future now, when a decade ago this didn't seem possible, at least from my view in the US. Geopolitically, Russia gave us this future, and China has come to show us how much fun it's going to be.

Many thanks to you and your people.

vk , Oct 18 2020 21:31 utc | 131
@ Posted by: steven t johnson | Oct 18 2020 20:05 utc | 127

There's no mysticism here because we know how the kulaks emerged in Russia: they were the result of the catastrophic capitalist reforms of the 1860s, which completely warped the old feudal relations of the Russian Empire.

The reforms of the 1860s were catastrophic for two reasons:

1) it freed the peasants slowly. The State serfs - the last who gained their freedom - were left with no land. A complex partition system of the land, based on each administrative region, created a distorted division of land, where very few peasants got huge chunks of land (the future kulaks) and most received almost nothing (as Lenin demonstrated, see his first book of his Complete Works, below the rate of subsistence);

2) it tried to preserve the old feudal privileges and powers of the absolutist monarchy.

As a result, the Russian Empire had a bizarre economic system, a mixed economy with the worst of the two words: the inequality and absolute misery of capitalism and the backwardness and lack of social mobility of feudalism.

But yes, you're right when you state Mao's era was not an economic failure. His early era really saw an attempt by the CCP to make an alliance with the "national bourgeoisie", and this alliance was indeed a failure. This certainly led to a more radical approach by the CCP, still in the Mao era (collectivization). Life quality in China greatly increased after 1949, until the recession of the Great Leap Forward (which was not a famine, but threw back some socioeconomic indicators temporarily back to the WWII era). When the Great Leap Forward was abandoned, China continued to improve afterwards.

All of this doesn't change the fact that China's "NEP" was a success, while the original NEP wasn't. Of course, there are many factors that explain this, but it is wrong to call late Qing China as even similar to the late Romanov Russia.

I'm not saying Stalin's reform were a failure. Without them, they wouldn't be able to quickly import the Fordist (Taylorist) method they needed to industrialize. The USSR became a superpower in just 19 years - a world record. The first Five-Year Plan was a huge morale boost and success for the Soviet people - specially because it happened at the same time as the capitalist meltdown of 1929.

--//--

@ Posted by: Eric | Oct 18 2020 20:53 utc | 128

The thing with semiconductors (and other very advanced technologies) is that it is an industry that only makes sense for a given nation to dominate if they're going to mass produce it. That usually means said production must be export oriented, which means competing against already well-established competitors.

China doesn't want to drain the State's coffers to fund an industry that won't at least pay for itself. It has to change the wheels with the car moving. That's why it is still negotiating the Huawei contracts in the West first, why it still is trying to keep the Taiwanese product flowing first, only to then gradually start the heavy investment needed to dominate the semiconductor technology and production process.

They learned with the Soviets in this sense. When computers became a thing in the West, the USSR immediately poured resources to build them. They were able to dominate the main frame technology, and they were successfully implemented in their economy. Then came the personal computers, and, this time, the Soviets weren't able to make it integrate in their economy. The problem wasn't that the Soviets didn't know how to build a personal computer (they did), but that every new technology is born for a reason, and only makes sense in a given social context. You can't just blindly copy your enemy's technology and hope for the best.

Andrei Martyanov , Oct 18 2020 23:03 utc | 132
@Grieved
The world has a future now, when a decade ago this didn't seem possible, at least from my view in the US. Geopolitically, Russia gave us this future, and China has come to show us how much fun it's going to be. Many thanks to you and your people.

Thank you for your kind words. As my personal experience (my third book is coming out soon)shows--explaining economic reality to people who have been "educated" (that is confused, ripped off for huge tuition and given worthless piece of paper with MBA or some "economics" Bachelor of "Science" on it) in Western pseudo-economic "theory" that this "global" "rules-based order" is over, is pretty much an exercise in futility. And if a catastrophe of Boeing is any indication (I will omit here NATO's military-industrial complex)--dividends, stocks and "capitalization" is a figment of imagination of people who never left their office and infantile state of development and swallowed BS economic narrative hook, line and sinker without even trying to look out of the window. They still buy this BS of US having "largest GDP in the world" (in reality it is much smaller than that of China), the de-industrialization of the United States is catastrophic (they never bothered to look at 2018 Inter-agency Report to POTUS specifically about that)and its industrial base is shrinking with a lighting speed, same goes to Germany which for now retains some residual industrial capability and competences but:

https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-germany-economy-manufacturing/german-manufacturing-output-to-shrink-4-this-year-bdi-says-idUKKBN1XT1D6

This is before COVID-19, after it Germany's economy shrank worst among Western nations, worse even than the US. It is a long story, but as Michael Hudson stated not for once in his books and interviews, what is "taught" as economics in the West is basically a pseudo-science. Well, it is. Or, as same Hudson stated earlier this year:"The gunboats don't appear in your economics textbooks. I bet your price theory didn't have gun boats in them, or the crime sector. And probably they didn't have debt in it either." And then they wonder in Germany (or EU)how come that EU structures are filled with pedophiles, "Green" fanatics and multiculturalists. Well, because Germany (and EU) are occupied territories who made their choice. And this is just the start. What many do not understand here is that overwhelming majority of Russians do not want to deal with Europe and calls for new Iron Curtain are louder and louder and the process has started. Of course, there is a lot of both contempt and schadenfreude on Russian part. As Napoleon stated, the nation which doesn't want to feed own army, will feed someone else's. Very true. Modern West worked hard for it, let it "enjoy" now.

karlof1 , Oct 18 2020 23:52 utc | 133
Andrei Martyanov @132 & elsewhere--

It's good to see you commenting here as barflies seem more inclined to listen to you than me. Did you watch Russian documentary on The Wall , which I learned about from Lavrov's meeting with those doing business within Russia on 5 Oct? I asked The Saker if his translation team would take on the task of providing English subtitles or a voice over but never got a reply one way or the other. IMO, for Russia to avoid the West's fate it must change its banking and financial system from the private to the public realm as Hudson advocates most recently in this podcast . As for Mr. Lavrov, he surprised the radio station interviewers by citing Semyon Slepakov's song "America Doesn't Like Us," of which barfly Paco thankfully provided a translation of the lyrics.С наилучшими пожеланиями крепкого здоровья и долгих лет жизни!

Smith , Oct 19 2020 0:01 utc | 134
So I don't get it, who won that engagement, Andrei or Eric?

Can Russia produce that turbo thingie or not?

Eric , Oct 19 2020 0:18 utc | 135
@132 Andrei Martyanov

I think you an Grieved misunderstand somewhat where I am coming from here. Michael Hudson would be (and has been) the first to describe how Russia's elites (and to a large extent it seems also the people) bought into a bogus neoliberal ideology teaching that somehow Russia needs to earn the money it needs to build its own economy in the form of foreign currency through export revenues. Apparently these economists and politicians in Russia never bothered to look how Western economies actually operate (as opposed to what they preach to countries they want to destroy), or for that matter how China has developed its economy (in all of these countries, the necessary credit is created on a keyboard.) The export revenues that Russia earns in the form of dollars and euros are sold to the central bank for the roubles that Russia's government needs to function. Bizarrely, this creates just as much inflation as it would if the central bank had just created the roubles without "backing" foreign currency. In fact, there is more inflation created, because in times of high oil prices, corresponding amounts of roubles are suddenly thrown into a domestic market that is underdeveloped, for example in its infrastructure and its food processing. There are reasons why China can expand its money supply by much greater proportions each year and still suffer far less inflation than Russia.

Unlike China, Russia had already attained much of the technological expertise for the equipment that it later decided it was unable to produce inside the country. A good example of this are the turboexpanders whose design was perfected (though the basic idea was a bit older) by Pyotr Kapisa in the 1930's in the USSR. This same technology went into the turbopumps of the rocket engines in the Energia boosters. These engines are still to this day, 30 years after the Soviet collapse, imported by the United States. As these rocket engines including the turbopumps are still produced in Russia, the know-how to manufacture was obviously not lost.

I read just the other day that as part of its import substitution program, Russia is considering to produce the turboexpanders for processing natural gas (separating methane from ethane) inside the country. Russia, with the world's largest natural gas reserves and production, and as I described already possessing the expertise to produce the turboexpanders needed for cryogenic separation, chose to hand over possibly billions of dollars to the West to import this machinery over the years, only to be helpless when the West introduced technological sanctions against its oil and gas sector. Very likely, in a couple of years we will receive the announcement that the drive to produce them domestically has been abandoned, after it was realized that their production will require new factories and new machinery, which do not fall out of the sky in Russia as they apparently do in the West and in China. Putin will announce that great business awaits whichever Western investor ready to provide the funds. (Spoiler: They won't! The West is not very interested in investing into building up Russia's industrial capabilities, preferring instead to loot its natural resources and to suck out its skilled worked and scientists.)

While Russia sits and waits for higher oil prices or foreign dollar credit on the one hand, and with unemployed skilled labor and rotting industrial infrastructure on the other hand, China spends the equivalent of trillions of dollars (in yuan, obviously) into fixed capital (not least infrastructure) each year. The funds for this are all created by keystrokes by the PBOC and provide employment for the domestic workforce. You don't have to ponder long on which model has been hugely successful, and which has been an unmitigated disaster.

I can't find the exact figures right now, but Russia produces something like 300,000 STEM graduates every year, more than the United States. (I may very well have read this originally on your blog, by the way.) Many of them will still be forced to emigrate to find gainful employment, even 20 years after the 1990's ended and Putin became President. These graduates remain even in post-Soviet times of a very high quality, and undergraduate students in Russia are trained at a higher level in mathematics and physics than in particular Americans are even as post-graduates. By refusing to invest in its own scientific infrastructure and industry the way China has done and does, Russia gives away all the education and training that were provided to these students, especially to the same Western countries that are seeking to destroy Russia. This is completely unforgivable.

I should add that I myself study physics in Germany. I have great appreciation for the Russian methods of teaching mathematics and physics, as many do here. I have learned, preferentially, mathematical analysis from Zorich, mechanics, electrodynamics etc. from Landau-Lifschitz, much about Fourier series from Tolstov, and so on, and have very often been awestruck and inspired in a mystical fashion by these works. I am not somehow unaware of the unparalleled quality (in particular after the destruction of Germany in WWII) of the USSR's and Russia's math/physics education or unfamiliar with the achievements of the USSR in science and engineering. It's precisely because I am familar with them that it frustrates me immensely how Russia's potential is needlessly wasted.

Digby , Oct 19 2020 0:28 utc | 136
What many do not understand here is that overwhelming majority of Russians do not want to deal with Europe and calls for new Iron Curtain are louder and louder and the process has started. Of course, there is a lot of both contempt and schadenfreude on Russian part.
Andrei (132), do you have a link to an opinion poll that supports this? Thanks in advance.
james , Oct 19 2020 1:01 utc | 137
@ Digby | Oct 19 2020 0:28 utc | 136.. if you haven't already listened to the lavrov interview that b linked to in his main post - it is a question and answer thing - you would benefit from doing so and it would help answer you question some too.. see b's post at this spot -"In a wide ranging interview with Russian radio stations" and hit that link
Digby , Oct 19 2020 2:17 utc | 138
@ james (137)
Well, I looked into the interview. While it is informative in its own right (at some point it briefly touches on Russo-Japanese relations), and some of the interviewers do show some concerns, I'm still not sure how it helps answer my question (maybe I missed something?). My initial impression was that Mr. Martyanov was referring to Russian civilians - not just radio interviewers.
Thanks anyway for the heads up.
james , Oct 19 2020 3:37 utc | 139
@ 138 digby... my impression was the radio interviewers questions were a reflection of the general sentiment of the public.. i could be wrong, but it seems to me they have completely given up on the west based on what they ask and say in their questions to lavrov...

on another note, you might enjoy engaging andrei more directly on his website which i will share here...

https://smoothiex12.blogspot.com/

cheers..

[Oct 19, 2020] The USA had more than doubled its oil imports from Russia last year and is now the world's second largest importer of Russian heavy oil

Notable quotes:
"... "Maas added that Germany takes decisions related to its energy policy and energy supply 'here in Europe', saying that Berlin accepts ' the fact that the US had more than doubled its oil imports from Russia last year and is now the world's second largest importer of Russian heavy oil .'" [My Emphasis] ..."
Oct 19, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

karlof1 , Oct 17 2020 17:50 utc | 14

Heavy oil is needed for the chemical industry (as opposed to transport). The three biggest producers of heavy oil are Iran, Venezuella and Russia.

The US produces mostly light oil, thus it needs to import the heavy oil. Since the US sanctioned Iran and Venezuella, the only significant option remaining is Russia. It would be ironic if they are buying iranian oil sold to Russia.

winston2 , Oct 17 2020 18:09 utc | 20

karlof1 , Oct 17 2020 17:50 utc | 14

It appears Lavrov's saying we'll just ignore the EU and its major components for awhile got quick results as Germany's FM just announced "Nord Stream 2 will be completed" ; but he also said this:

"Maas added that Germany takes decisions related to its energy policy and energy supply 'here in Europe', saying that Berlin accepts ' the fact that the US had more than doubled its oil imports from Russia last year and is now the world's second largest importer of Russian heavy oil .'" [My Emphasis]

Now isn't that the interesting bit of news!! The greatest fracking nation on the planet needs to import heavy oil (likely Iranian, unlikely Venezuelan) from its #1 adversary. As for the end game, I've written many times what I see as the goal and don't see any need to add more.

Passer by , Oct 17 2020 17:58 utc | 16

[Oct 18, 2020] More Pressure On Russia Will Have No Effect

Notable quotes:
"... Russia is militarily secure and the 'west' knows that. It is one reason for the anti-Russian frenzy. Russia does not need to bother with the unprecedented hostility coming from Brussels and Washington. It can ignore it while taking care of its interests. ..."
"... As this is so obvious one must ask what the real reason for the anti-Russian pressure campaign is. What do those who argue for it foresee as its endpoint? ..."
"... The nightmare scenario for the Anglo-Americans is a Germany-Russia-China triangle. If that happens it is game over! ..."
"... They don't want an actual war. They just ratchet up the tensions to keep Europe subdued and obedient and Russia off balance and thereby prevent any rapprochement between the two. ..."
"... The strong hatred and hostility coming from the US and the EU are due to the understanding that they don't have much time, and they must act now, or tomorrow it will be too late. ..."
"... Years ago Barack Obama gave speech to West Point graduates, proclaiming US moral and racial superiority (because they mix'n's*it) over whole world, Goebbels would be proud. Germany has long history of hating all those Slavs, and Israel... Lets not go there with how they threat those inferior brown people. ..."
"... Of course that end-point is money for military contractors and power for the FP elite in government and think-tanks which also means money. Yes, there are true-believers who see a mighty struggle between "good" (the USA) an "evil" (Russia/China) but they are incompetent. As for the American people they will believe whatever the NY Times says since they are militantly ignorant of history, geography, foreign affairs in general, and, above all, political science. ..."
"... The USA is lucky the USSR collapsed in 1991. If it managed to somehow survive for mere 17 years more, it would catch the 2008 capitalist meltdown ..."
"... It looks like the USA imported the Irish and imported their luck, too. ..."
"... This loathing was made blatantly manifest during WWII, of course, but it didn't die out because that generation and more likely their children remain with us. Ditto the generational Anglo-American hatred of Russians (yes, for the UK, and their haute bourgeoisie, it has deeper historical roots than the 20thC) and the USSR even more... ..."
"... "Maas added that Germany takes decisions related to its energy policy and energy supply 'here in Europe', saying that Berlin accepts ' the fact that the US had more than doubled its oil imports from Russia last year and is now the world's second largest importer of Russian heavy oil .'" [My Emphasis] ..."
"... The neocon/NATO aggressive expansionism has many purposes, but one is surely domestic repression: to gaslight and cause fear-the-foreign-bogeyman trauma among the American and British people as a whole and make most of them become docile and lose their critical thinking skills and their ability to analyze their own societies. ..."
"... One of the best ways to lobotomize the publics of the US and UK is to very gradually impose martial law in the name of protecting national security and ensuring peace and harmony at home. ..."
"... At the time, I thought it was just Trump and his followers freaking out, now I think it's the NatSec people, who have finally seen the truth of their situation. As one can see in the Atlantic Council piece B posted, they are still trying to keep the old narrative patched together too. ..."
"... As I've said numerous times -- Fuck the US Empire and it's minion bitches. Jesse Ventura commented this past week that EVERY US Incumbent politician should be voted out of office this election. 99% of them are scum. ..."
"... That was the whole point of the first Cold War. It is the whole point of creating a Cold War 2.0. Absolutely nothing has changed. ..."
"... If the Russian Federation really has an ongoing imports substitution program, then this explains everything. Germany is an exports-oriented economy. It wants to integrate with the Russian economy in the sense to keep it as an agrarian-extrativist economy to feed it with cheap commodities to feed their industry. Germany's ideal Russia is Brazil. ..."
"... A Russia that also exports high-value commodities (manufactured commodities) is a direct threat to Germany, as it competes with it directly in the international market. That's the reason Germany doesn't want the BRI to come to Europe, as Merkel once said: Europe must not become China's peninsula. China is Germany's main competitor, as it is also a big manufacturing exporter. ..."
"... Perhaps the US only has one script in the playbook: to balkanise, disrupt and foster 5th columns until their opponent becomes a dysfunctional or failed state. ..."
"... The US and EU attempts to break Russia's independent foreign policy are just stepping stones to the eventual goal of a breakup Russia itself, never forget Albright's comments in the 90s about how Siberia shouldn't belong to Russia alone. ..."
"... We may yet see a Cuban missile crisis scenario but it looks more likely to be caused by arms sales to Taiwan than conflict in the Caucasus. ..."
"... I also think its naive to see these as "fires burning at Russia's borders" instead of as deliberately set bear traps . Azerbaijan is in a strategic location between Russia and Iran and the conflict with Armenia comes just before Russia is about to sell advanced weapons to Iran. ..."
Oct 17, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Over the last years the U.S. and its EU puppies have ratcheted up their pressure on Russia. They seem to believe that they can compel Russia to follow their diktat. They can't. But the illusion that Russia will finally snap, if only a few more sanctions ar applied or a few more houses in Russia's neighborhood are set on fire, never goes away.

As Gilbert Doctorow describes the situation:

The fires burning at Russia's borders in the Caucasus are an add-on to the disorder and conflict on its Western border in neighboring Belarus, where fuel is poured on daily by pyromaniacs at the head of the European Union acting surely in concert with Washington.

Yesterday we learned of the decision of the European Council to impose sanctions on President Lukashenko, a nearly unprecedented action when directed against the head of state of a sovereign nation.
...
It is easy enough to see that the real intent of the sanctions is to put pressure on the Kremlin, which is Lukashenko's guarantor in power, to compound the several other measures being implemented simultaneously in the hope that Putin and his entourage will finally crack and submit to American global hegemony as Europe did long ago.
...
The anti-Russia full tilt ahead policy outlined above is going on against a background of the U.S. presidential electoral campaigns. The Democrats continue to try to depict Donald Trump as "Putin's puppy," as if the President has been kindly to his fellow autocrat while in office. Of course, under the dictates of the Democrat-controlled House and with the complicity of the anti-Russian staff in the State Department, in the Pentagon, American policy towards Russia over the entire period of Trump's presidency has been one of never ending ratcheting up of military, informational, economic and other pressures in the hope that Vladimir Putin or his entourage would crack. Were it not for the nerves of steel of Mr. Putin and his close advisers , the irresponsible pressure policies outlined above could result in aggressive behavior and risk taking by Russia that would make the Cuban missile crisis look like child's play.

The U.S. arms industry lobby, in form of the Atlantic Council, confirms the 'western' strategy Doctorow describes. It calls for 'ramping up on Russia' with even more sanctions:

Key to raising the costs to Russia is a more proactive transatlantic strategy for sanctions against the Russian economy and Putin's power base, together with other steps to reduce Russian energy leverage and export revenue. A new NATO Russia policy should be pursued in tandem with the European Union (EU), which sets European sanctions policy and faces the same threats from Russian cyberattacks and disinformation. At a minimum, EU sanctions resulting from hostilities in Ukraine should be extended, like the Crimea sanctions, for one year rather than every six months. Better yet, allies and EU members should tighten sanctions further and extend them on an indefinite basis until Russia ends its aggression and takes concrete steps toward de-escalation.

It also wants Europe to pay for weapons in the Ukraine and Georgia:

A more dynamic NATO strategy for Russia should go hand in hand with a more proactive policy toward Ukraine and Georgia in the framework of an enhanced Black Sea strategy. The goal should be to boost both partners' deterrence capacity and reduce Moscow's ability to undermine their sovereignty even as NATO membership remains on the back burner for the time being.

As part of this expanded effort, European allies should do more to bolster Ukraine and Georgia's ground, air, and naval capabilities, complementing the United States' and Canada's efforts that began in 2014.

The purpose of the whole campaign against Russia, explains the Atlantic Council author, is to subordinate it to U.S. demands:

Relations between the West and Moscow had begun to deteriorate even before Russia's watershed invasion of Ukraine, driven principally by Moscow's fear of the encroachment of Western values and their potential to undermine the Putin regime. With the possibility of a further sixteen years of Putin's rule, most experts believe relations are likely to remain confrontational for years to come. They argue that the best the United States and its allies can do is manage this competition and discourage aggressive actions from Moscow. However, by pushing back against Russia more forcefully in the near and medium term, allies are more likely to eventually convince Moscow to return to compliance with the rules of the liberal international order and to mutually beneficial cooperation as envisaged under the 1997 NATO-Russia Founding Act.

The 'rules of the liberal international order' are of course whatever the U.S. claims they are. They may change at any moment and without notice to whatever new rules are the most convenient for U.S. foreign policy.

But as Doctorow said above, Putin and his advisors stay calm and ignore such trash despite all the hostility expressed against them.

One of Putin's close advisors is of course Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. In a wide ranging interview with Russian radio stations he recently touched on many of the issues Doctorow also mentions. With regards to U.S. strategy towards Russia Lavrov diagnoses :

Sergey Lavrov : [...] You mentioned in one of your previous questions that no matter what we do, the West will try to hobble and restrain us, and undermine our efforts in the economy, politics, and technology. These are all elements of one approach.

Question : Their national security strategy states that they will do so.

Sergey Lavrov : Of course it does, but it is articulated in a way that decent people can still let go unnoticed, but it is being implemented in a manner that is nothing short of outrageous.

Question : You, too, can articulate things in a way that is different from what you would really like to say, correct?

Sergey Lavrov : It's the other way round. I can use the language I'm not usually using to get the point across. However, they clearly want to throw us off balance , and not only by direct attacks on Russia in all possible and conceivable spheres by way of unscrupulous competition, illegitimate sanctions and the like, but also by unbalancing the situation near our borders, thus preventing us from focusing on creative activities. Nevertheless, regardless of the human instincts and the temptations to respond in the same vein, I'm convinced that we must abide by international law.

Russia does not accept the fidgety 'rules of the liberal international order'. Russia sticks to the law which is, in my view, a much stronger position. Yes, international law often gets broken. But as Lavrov said elsewhere , one does not abandon traffic rules only because of road accidents.

Russia stays calm, no matter what outrageous nonsense the U.S. and EU come up with. It can do that because it knows that it not only has moral superiority by sticking to the law but it also has the capability to win a fight. At one point the interviewer even jokes about that :

Question : As we say, if you don't listen to Lavrov, you will listen to [Defense Minister] Shoigu.

Sergey Lavrov : I did see a T-shirt with that on it. Yes, it's about that.

Yes, it's about that. Russia is militarily secure and the 'west' knows that. It is one reason for the anti-Russian frenzy. Russia does not need to bother with the unprecedented hostility coming from Brussels and Washington. It can ignore it while taking care of its interests.

As this is so obvious one must ask what the real reason for the anti-Russian pressure campaign is. What do those who argue for it foresee as its endpoint?

Posted by b on October 17, 2020 at 16:31 UTC | Permalink

james , Oct 17 2020 16:45 utc | 1

thanks b.... that lavrov interview that karlof1 linked to previously is worth its weight in gold...

it gives a clear understanding of how russia sees what is happening here on the world stage... as you note cheap talk from the atlantic council 'rules of the liberal international order' is no substitute for 'international law' which is what russia stands on.... as for the usa campaign to tar russia and claim trump is putins puppet.. apparently this stupidity really sells in the usa.. in fact, i have a close friend here in canada from the usa with family in the usa has bought this hook, line and sinker as well.. and he is ordinarily a bright guy!

as for the endpoint - the usa and the people of the usa don't mind themselves about endpoints... it is all about being in the moment, living a hollywood fantasy off the ongoing party of wall st... the thought this circus will end, is not something many of them contemplate.. that is what it looks like to me.. maga, lol...

Michael Droy , Oct 17 2020 16:52 utc | 2
Belarus - this is happenstance, not long term planning. Like Venezuela - indeed neither original Presidential candidate nor his wife had a Wikipedia entry a week or so before being announced as candidate (much like Guaido 2 weeks before Trump "made" him President.

Yes the Western media make the most of it, and yes there are many in place in and besides the media whose job it is to maximise any noise. But little is happening in Belarus. Sanctioning is all anyone can do now. (Sanctions = punishment therefore proof of guilt without trial or evidence).

US pressure is based on the Dem vs Rep "I am tougher on Russia than you" game spurred on by the MIC.
European pressure is based on the Euro Defence force concept and a low key but real desire to rid itself of Nato. So again we have Nato saying "without US/us Europe would be soft on Russia" and Europe saying we are tough on Russia whatever.

Meanwhile China takes over the real world.

Down South , Oct 17 2020 16:56 utc | 3
What do those who argue for it foresee as its endpoint?

It is about driving a wedge between Europe and Russia. The nightmare scenario for the Anglo-Americans is a Germany-Russia-China triangle. If that happens it is game over!

They don't want an actual war. They just ratchet up the tensions to keep Europe subdued and obedient and Russia off balance and thereby prevent any rapprochement between the two.

Putin has repeatedly stated he wants a Lisbon to Vladivostok free trade area.

The Anglo-Americans will never permit that. That Europe is committed to a course that is against their own best interest shows just how subservient they are to the Anglo-Americans.

I think it was the first head of NATO that said the purpose of the organization is to "keep the Russians out, the Germans down and the US in"

Absolutely nothing has changed since then.

bjd , Oct 17 2020 17:01 utc | 4
There is no endpoint. Those who argue for it, the Western think-tank industry and security and intelligence industry, are recipients of huge sums of money. It is bread and butter for large numbers of people. And the acceptance of the conclusions and advice of the immense stacks of papers thus produced mean money towards the defense industry and the cyber warfare industry. In the end, all this is driven by elites' fear of their own populations. Sowing FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) makes these populations docile. Rinse and repeat.
Passer by , Oct 17 2020 17:05 utc | 5
>>As this is so obvious one must ask what the real reason for the anti-Russian pressure campaign is.

The reason was probably the new Russian Constitution, which is basically a declaration of independence from the West. This has caused serious triggerings in western elites, although their reaction took some time to crystalise due to the Covid Pandemic.

>>What do those who argue for it foresee as its endpoint?

The endpoint is - EU and NATO move into Ukraine, Moldova, Serbia, Georgia, Belarus, Armenia.

A puppet government of someone like Navalny is installed Russia. That government further gives up Crimea, Kaliningrad and Northen Caucasus. In the long run, a soft partition of Russia into 3 parts follows (as per the Grand Chessboard 1997).

The possibility for that happening is overall negative, as the West is on a long term decline, that is, it will be weaker in 2030, and even weaker in 2040 or 2050.

OECD economies were 66 % of the world economy in 2010 but that share is estimated to drop to 38 % of the world economy in 2050 (with further drops after that).

The strong hatred and hostility coming from the US and the EU are due to the understanding that they don't have much time, and they must act now, or tomorrow it will be too late.

Seeji , Oct 17 2020 17:15 utc | 6
Apt cover picture!
Abe , Oct 17 2020 17:18 utc | 7
Well, the hostility in "western" "elite" (rulers) towards Russia is on much more primal level than money and power IMO. It is pure racial hatred combined with Übermensch God complex. Main controllers in modern "west" are US, Israel and Germany.

Years ago Barack Obama gave speech to West Point graduates, proclaiming US moral and racial superiority (because they mix'n's*it) over whole world, Goebbels would be proud. Germany has long history of hating all those Slavs, and Israel... Lets not go there with how they threat those inferior brown people.

Seeji , Oct 17 2020 17:19 utc | 8
@ Down South #3

Yes. And it was so depressing that Germany played the Navalny Novichok hoax recently borrowed from the Perfidious Albion!

Bemildred , Oct 17 2020 17:24 utc | 9
They forsee not having to admit they are incompetent yet.
Chris Cosmos , Oct 17 2020 17:26 utc | 10
"What do those who argue for it foresee as its endpoint?"

Of course that end-point is money for military contractors and power for the FP elite in government and think-tanks which also means money. Yes, there are true-believers who see a mighty struggle between "good" (the USA) an "evil" (Russia/China) but they are incompetent. As for the American people they will believe whatever the NY Times says since they are militantly ignorant of history, geography, foreign affairs in general, and, above all, political science.

The problem as I see it is Europe generally, and Germany in particular. Why do they follow Washington diktats?

gottlieb , Oct 17 2020 17:31 utc | 11
Well let's see, the USA is $30 trillion in debt and counting, faces an upcoming economic depression to rival the 'great' one, with a citizenry on the brink of civil war and a political system that makes a 'banana republic' look like ancient Greece. Desperate is as desperate does.
vk , Oct 17 2020 17:32 utc | 12
As this is so obvious one must ask what the real reason for the anti-Russian pressure campaign is. What do those who argue for it foresee as its endpoint?

For a very simple reason: there's no other option. Capitalism can only work in one way. There's a limit to how much capitalism can reform within itself without self-destructing.

The West is also suffering from the "Whale in a Swimming Pool" dilemma: it has grown so hegemonic, so big and so gloated that its strategic options have narrowed sharply. It has not much more room for maneuver left, its bluffs become less and less effective. As a result, its strategies have become increasingly linear, extremely predictable. The "whale in a pool dilemma" is not a problem when your inner workings (domestic economy) is flourishing; but it becomes one when the economy begins to stagnate and, ultimately, decline (albeit slowly).

On a side note, it's incredible how History is non-linear, full of surprises. The Russian Federation is inferior to the Soviet Union in every aspect imaginable. Except for one factor: it now has an ascendant China on its side in a time where the West is declining. (Historical) context is everything.

The USA is lucky the USSR collapsed in 1991. If it managed to somehow survive for mere 17 years more, it would catch the 2008 capitalist meltdown and have an opportunity to gain the upper hand over capitalism (plus have a strong China on its side). Socialism/communism wouldn't have been demoralized the way it was in the 1990s, opening a huge flank for revolutions in the Western Hemisphere (specially Latin America). NATO would be much weaker. Since the USSR was closed to capitalism, the USA wouldn't be able to enforce as crippling economic sanctions on China and the USSR. The USSR would be able to "reform and open up" in a much safer environment (by copying China, instead of Yeltsin's neoliberalism), thus gaining the opportunity to make a Perestroika that could actually work.

But it didn't happen. Well, what can I say? It looks like the USA imported the Irish and imported their luck, too.

Anne , Oct 17 2020 17:37 utc | 13
Abe @7 - I would agree and have raised somewhere (old age?) that part of what we are seeing in this latest western-NATO cooked up charade re Navalny is, in part at least, a deep historical supremacist loathing of the Slavs an in general and the Russians in particular by the haute bourgeois Germans. This loathing was made blatantly manifest during WWII, of course, but it didn't die out because that generation and more likely their children remain with us. Ditto the generational Anglo-American hatred of Russians (yes, for the UK, and their haute bourgeoisie, it has deeper historical roots than the 20thC) and the USSR even more...

The pressure on Russia is enormous and I would enlarge on the economic sanctions aspect (siege warfare): Belarus, Armenia-Azerbaijan (Erdogan once again playing his role for the US/NATO - in this business, Iran is also a target), Kyrgyzstan - all on or very close to Russia's borders and thus dividing and draining (intention) Russia's focus and $$$$ (the Brzezinski game) in order to open it up to the western corporate-capitalist bloodsuckers. And I suspect that as the US (and UK) economies drain away, so these border country "revolts," "protests" etc. will grow...

Russia really needs to join with China in full comity. Bugger the west - they do not respect the rights of either country to their own culture, societal structures, mores, perspectives...nor apparently even those countries' rights to their own coastal waters, air space...

One wonders how the USA would react to Chinese and/or Russian warships in the Gulf or traversing (lengthwise) the Atlantic or Pacific????

karlof1 , Oct 17 2020 17:50 utc | 14
It appears Lavrov's saying we'll just ignore the EU and its major components for awhile got quick results as Germany's FM just announced "Nord Stream 2 will be completed" ; but he also said this:

"Maas added that Germany takes decisions related to its energy policy and energy supply 'here in Europe', saying that Berlin accepts ' the fact that the US had more than doubled its oil imports from Russia last year and is now the world's second largest importer of Russian heavy oil .'" [My Emphasis]

Now isn't that the interesting bit of news!! The greatest fracking nation on the planet needs to import heavy oil (likely Iranian, unlikely Venezuelan) from its #1 adversary. As for the end game, I've written many times what I see as the goal and don't see any need to add more.

winston2 , Oct 17 2020 18:02 utc | 17
"The Russians are coming' is a long standing fear built the American psyche almost from the very start. Russian colonization of the California Territory outnumbered the US population. The Monroe Doctrine was all about that,not S.America at all. The Brits ruled S.America by mercantile means until WWI cut the sea lanes, then and only then did it fall into the sphere of Yankee control.

Then there is Alaska. The Sewards Folly documents are almost certainly fakes, the verified Russian copy says a 100year LEASE,not a sale. The National Archives refuses examination by any but its own experts. Unless they are forgeries and they know it there can be no real reason for their stance. There is much more background to the antipathy than many are aware.

Rob , Oct 17 2020 18:02 utc | 18
@bjd (4) You nailed it, my friend. Cold wars are immensely profitable for certain sectors of the economy and the parasites who run them. The supreme imperative is always to have enemies--really big, bad, dangerous enemies--whether real or imagined. I will be voting for Biden, but I don't have much hope for positive change in American foreign policy. Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela, etc. will continue to be vilified as nations to be feared and hated.
Dao Gen , Oct 17 2020 18:05 utc | 19
The neocon/NATO aggressive expansionism has many purposes, but one is surely domestic repression: to gaslight and cause fear-the-foreign-bogeyman trauma among the American and British people as a whole and make most of them become docile and lose their critical thinking skills and their ability to analyze their own societies.

One of the best ways to lobotomize the publics of the US and UK is to very gradually impose martial law in the name of protecting national security and ensuring peace and harmony at home.

After several color revolutions succeeded, the Russiagate/Spygate op was carried out in the US, with British assistance. This op has been largely successful, though there has been limited resistance against its whole fake edifice as well as with the logic of Cold War2.0. Nevertheless, Spygate has shocked many tens of millions of Dems into a stupor, while millions more are dazed and manipulated by the Chinese bogeyman being manufactured by Trump. The most dangerous result of the martial law lite mentality caused by Spygate and its MSM purveyors is the growing support for censorship of free speech coming mostly from the Dems, such as Schiff and Warner. The danger inherent in this trend became very clear when FaceBook and Twitter engaged in massive and unprecedented arbitrary censorship of the New York Post and of various Trump-related accounts. This is the kind of thing you do during Stage 1 of a coup. Surely it was at least in part an experiment to see how various power points in the US would respond. Even though Twitter ended the censorship later, it was probably a successful experiment designed to gauge reactions and areas of resistance. In November, there could be further, more serious experiments/ops. If so, the current expansionist movements being made and planned by the US and NATO may well be integral parts of a new non-democratic model of "American-style democracy" -- not constitution-based but "rules-based."

Posted by: Dao Gen |

Ike , Oct 17 2020 18:13 utc | 21
"As this is so obvious one must ask what the real reason for the anti-Russian pressure campaign is. What do those who argue for it foresee as its endpoint?"

I think the answer is clear. The US economy is collapsing and likewise those wedded to the US dollar system. The USA spent 90% more than it received last year. They are desperate to have access to Russia's largely untapped resources and it doesn't want any competition for its position as world hegemon. Thus Russia and China are in the crosshairs.

Fortunately the corruption in the USA has resulted in a weaker military capability over time and they are reduced to behaving in clandestine and terroristic ways to try and achieve this. The turmoil enveloping the USA is scape goated on Trump and Covid19 but is ultimately due to their faltering economy and a big helping of financial corruption. Talk about your chickens coming home to roost

Bemildred , Oct 17 2020 18:27 utc | 22
Posted by: Ike | Oct 17 2020 18:13 utc | 21

Talk about your chickens coming home to roost."

Sounds like thunder, all those chickens. I appeared to me that whomever is in charge here, they started pulling all the levers they could lay a hand on a couple weeks back in terms of stirring up trouble. Throwing sand in the eyes of ones enemy.

At the time, I thought it was just Trump and his followers freaking out, now I think it's the NatSec people, who have finally seen the truth of their situation. As one can see in the Atlantic Council piece B posted, they are still trying to keep the old narrative patched together too.

Paco , Oct 17 2020 18:27 utc | 23
Posted by: vk | Oct 17 2020 17:32 utc | 12

Politfiction, or what could have happened if is an entertaining but futile exercise. Everybody agrees, there was no need for the USSR to dissolve, it was like a big jackpot for an amazed rival that rushed to declare himself the winner. The price has been high, on both sides of the fence but of course with a lot more victims and destruction on the other side of the fallen wall. Gorbachov a tragic figure and Yelstyn a sinister one, in spite of his being a clown, a tragic one at that, bombing his parliament and laughing at the world together with the degenerate Clinton, the 90's were somber indeed. The west paid its price, a self declared victory that did not bring any benefit, the peace dividend never was, to the contrary, military budgets never stopped growing year after year. The end of history was proclaimed, no need to match or better the rival ideology, there is none, so proles you better stop complaining, or else and that's where we are.

Laguerre , Oct 17 2020 18:34 utc | 25
Just to repeat the obvious, for the US actually to go to war is out of the question these days -- the US public would not tolerate the casualties. Therefore other methods have to be found to achieve the same objectives -- the maintenance of an eternal enemy in 1984 style, to keep up military budgets and world hegemony, neither of which are the elite ready to abandon. Economic sanctions have been the weapon of choice in the age of Trump, but there isn't really any other. Sometimes they are better aimed and sometimes not.

In any case I am not sure I agree that the EU is really submissive to the US in this respect. They don't want to offend the US, and some leaders have genuinely swallowed the Kool-Aid, but others haven't, and the continuation of Nordstream 2 is where they haven't.

steven t johnson , Oct 17 2020 18:38 utc | 26
Doctorow wrote "Of course, under the dictates of the Democrat-controlled House and with the complicity of the anti-Russian staff in the State Department, in the Pentagon, American policy towards Russia over the entire period of Trump's presidency..."

The Senate is more important for foreign affairs and has been Republican for Trump's entire term. The House was also Republican for half of Trump's term. Lastly the "staff" is not really able to run things in the presence of a minimally competent administrator, at the head of the State Department, acting under leadership of a competent, energetic president. There is no sign Doctorow is particularly intelligent or insightful.

I have long ago lost track of where the bar's consensus on Turkey is, whether the failing US means Erdogan must become the follower of the skilled, brave and indefatigable Putin...or whether his sultanship is suicidally persisting in thinking Russia cannot actually deliver anything his sultanship really needs and wants. At any rate it is entirely unclear what "international law" Lavrov thinks supports Russia.

As to the China Russia "alliance," the difficulty is that Putin has so very little to offer.

Steve , Oct 17 2020 18:39 utc | 27
I can hazard a guess to answer your final question. I think corruption is probably the main reason. Those involved in this are mostly interested in self-enrichment through the gullibility of their societies. I don't think the stenographers and the hot-heads neo liberals pushing for a show-down with Russia are intent on committing suicide by igniting a hot war with Russia, but they hope that Moscow could be intimidated and surrender eventually. As you rightly said, it is a pipe dream of course, but they get paid heavily for the hot air they emit.
Norwegian , Oct 17 2020 18:39 utc | 28
@James2 | Oct 17 2020 18:29 utc | 24
The west insulted the people's intelligence!!!
But unfortunately, the people didn't notice that.
dh-mtl , Oct 17 2020 18:46 utc | 29
'As this is so obvious one must ask what the real reason for the anti-Russian pressure campaign is. What do those who argue for it foresee as its endpoint?'

The endpoint is quite clear: 'Global Governance, by Global Institutions under control of the 'Globalists' (i.e. the Davos crowd).' For this, the 'Globalists' must subdue Russia.

Russia is not only blocking the 'Globalist's' plans in its own right, but, since 2013, it has been protecting other nations from falling prey to 'Globalist' colonization (Syria, Eastern Ukraine, Iran, Venezuela, Libya, Belarus, etc.). And Russia is the lynch-pin to enable the 'Globalists' to corner China.

In addition, together with China, Russia is offering the world an alternative to 'Globalism', a 'Multi-Polar World Order' that is much more attractive than becoming a 'Globalist' vassal.

For the 'Globalists' time has become critical. They are facing revolts in their home countries (Trump, Brexit, Gilets-Jaunes, etc.). The main source of their geo-political power, (since they can no longer challenge Russia and China militarily) the U.S. dollar, is on the verge of collapse as the World's reserve currency. And the economic growth of China means that China has become the most important trading partner for most of the World's nations.

The window of opportunity for the 'Globalists' to create their 'Global Governance' system may have already closed. But, as usual, the losers of any war are usually the last to know. The desperation with which the 'Globalists' are fighting their last battles, against Trump, against Russia, against Brexit, is testimony to the fact that for the 'Globalists' losing this war means their extinction as a ruling elite.

james | Oct 17 2020 18:55 utc | 30

@ steven t johnson | Oct 17 2020 18:38 utc | 26..

c'mon steve.... what is the usa offering turkey here?? they could give a rats ass about turkey, or any other country in the middle east, excluding their 24/7 darling israel... the usa presence on the world stage is meant to sabotage any and all who don't bow down to the exceptional nations philosophy of 'might makes right'... the obvious benefits of russia-china synergy are apparent to both countries and they continue to capitalize on this, in spite of what you read in the usa msm.. russia as a lot to offer china... the fact that the nation apparently masquerading as a gas station has so much to offer is also the reason that all the pillage of the 90's hasn't turned out the way the harvard boys had envisioned... that you can't see the vast wealth and value of russia has nothing to do with the reality on the ground... keep the blinders on, lol...

Laguerre , Oct 17 2020 19:09 utc | 31

The EU's attitude to the US is much like its attitude to Britain and Brexit. They don't want to split with the US, because, after all, there might be war, and NATO would be needed, but it's becoming increasingly less likely. In the same way, they would have preferred to stay in good relations with Britain, until Britain insisted on a hostile Brexit. Basic interests come first, and that will also be the case in the future with the US.
Abe , Oct 17 2020 19:11 utc | 32
Anne @ 13

Russia and China are already de-facto alliance. Militarily they cooperate at every level and will soon extend shared anti ballistic shield over China too. It is clear to any outside enemy (except for most retarded ones) that nuclear attack on one will be treated as attack on both of them. Not having formal alliance is somewhat an advantage (eg. limited attack on one of them by enemy that can be easily handled will not complicate situation) as it controls escalation. Lack of escalation control led to WW1 so...

Apart for military, Russia is one of rare fully self sufficient countries in the world. Having vast natural resources and territory, knowledge and industrial capacity to built EVERYTHING they need, they can afford to be sanctioned by whole world and close borders completely if needed. Having 100% secure land borders with China and already huge (and increasing) trade, including oil & gas, only make Russia's self sufficiency even more stable. It also strategically benefits China, as its main weakness is lack of those same resources Russia has in abundance and is willing to share.

So, if sh*t hits the fan, and Russia and China say f*ck it and close borders to rest of the world (even though China trade profits wouldn't be happy), both countries form self sufficient symbiosis that can carry on for centuries.

Which brings me to all those little fires US is starting in Russia's neighborhood. They don't matter. Unlike USSR, Russia's mission is self preservation only, not changing whole world into communist utopia (even though @VK here repeatedly fails to acknowledge it). And survive it will. All it needs is to wait few generations.

Unlike Russia, collective west is going down the drain. Soon enough, all those Slav hating in Bundestag, UK parlament and elsewhere will have more urgent problem of Islamic head choppers that became majority in their countries, while US will have problem to recruit enough men,women and "others" from pool of rainbow colored too-fat and unfit, godless faggot from broken family snowflakes.

joey_n , Oct 17 2020 19:36 utc | 34
@Down South (3)
At least someone still understands. For what it's worth, Lurk and I briefly discussed in the Brexit thread about England doing all it could to prevent comity between continental powers (e.g. Russia and Germany before the first world war).
https://www.moonofalabama.org/2020/10/its-a-hard-brexits-a-gonna-fall.html?cid=6a00d8341c640e53ef026be41afef7200d#comment-6a00d8341c640e53ef026be41afef7200d
Laguerre , Oct 17 2020 19:37 utc | 35
As China has been mentioned, I think it is worth saying that although I have full confidence that Putin will maintain his usual good sense in international conflicts, I have more doubts about the Chinese regime. I don't really understand their policy, which is becoming more nationalistic and edgy. I don't see why. They have great economic success; they should be more relaxed, but they aren't. The first signs came with their attitude towards the Muslims in China. One, the concentration camps in Xinjiang - in that case the Uyghur jihadists in Syria must have provoked anxiety in Beijing. But also increasing pressure on the Hui Muslims in central China (who are native Han) to become more "national". Some years ago they weren't bothered. Now they are.

This suggests that the question of Taiwan could blow up, apart from HongKong. They are less tolerant in Beijing.

Andrei Martyanov , Oct 17 2020 19:41 utc | 36
@Down South
It is about driving a wedge between Europe and Russia. The nightmare scenario for the Anglo-Americans is a Germany-Russia-China triangle. If that happens it is game over!

It is a tired and false concept. There cannot be a "triangle" which includes Germany, due to Germany's increasingly diminishing status. Moreover, Russians do not view Europe as a viable part of Russia's future--the cultural gap is gigantic and continues to grow--the only place of Europe in general, and Germany in particular, in Russian plans is that of a market for Russia's hydrocarbons and other exports. A rather successful program of export-substitution in Russia in the last 6 years dropped technological importance of Germany for Russia dramatically. In some fields, such as high-power turbines made Germany irrelevant, as Siemens learned the hard way recently.

Laguerre , Oct 17 2020 19:49 utc | 37

Andrei Martyanov | Oct 17 2020 19:41 utc | 36

due to Germany's increasingly diminishing status.

Difficult to believe.

CitizenX , Oct 17 2020 19:54 utc | 38

@b on October 17, 2020 at 16:31 UTC

"U.S. and its EU puppies have ratcheted up their pressure...

The 'rules of the liberal international order' are of course whatever the U.S. claims they are. They may change at any moment and without notice to whatever new rules are the most convenient for U.S. foreign policy."

Outstanding assessment and thank you for addressing it.

As I've said numerous times -- Fuck the US Empire and it's minion bitches. Jesse Ventura commented this past week that EVERY US Incumbent politician should be voted out of office this election. 99% of them are scum.

Every politician, corporate CEO Banker and Media whore, Judge, CIA filth should have a pitchfork held to their throat and be tried for treason and war crimes. MIC/Pentagon should be destroyed. Majority of Americans are propagandized dumbfucks. Sounds a bit like an American Cultural Revolution is exactly the medicine.

There will come a day for reckoning and true justice, hopefully it is sooner than later. There should be no mercy. For those committing their treasonous crimes, they know better but have chosen poorly, they should be broken.

Russia, Putin and Lavrov have remained the adults in the room while the Empire Brats tantrum themselves.
Anyone else notice that the Anti-Russia rhetoric increased after Snowden was trapped in Russia?

... ... ...

Stonebird , Oct 17 2020 20:01 utc | 40
"Alas, repent, the endpoint is near...."

I agree with Ike and others who think the US money situation is the problem. But I also think that the underlying endpoint is hyperinflation, not just the loss of the dollars' "reserve status." Hyperinflation is when so much "money" has been produced that it no longer has any value and the Central Bank cannot control what comes next.

There is a point at which people want to get rid of dollars and panic buy or "invest" in assets, or anything solid or simply anything (Gold, land etc. bread) At which time the money they want to get rid of looses value continuously, as others don't want it either. A Rush for the exits happens.

Who has the MOST money - the Rich and the sovereign Nations? (Althought the latter may also be in the same situation as the US.) Russia has more or less got rid of all it's US holdings. The Chinese must be alarmed by the thought of the Fed issuing ONLY new-digicoins, and then the US simply refusing to pay debts to the Chinese at some future point. They might want out now. Not so much dumping everything but a steady reduction of US denominated "assets" or reserves.

Most of this becomes self-sustaining panic, as happened in the Weimar Rep. What can be considered "assets" to grab? ie Russia, minerals and it's Gold, China and its Gold. Then the choice might be to invest in the US military and use it while there is a residue of belief in the Dollar.

The only thing about a panic exit is that it happens very quickly. About a month or two between when the first bright sparks try to get out and when everyone else tries to grab part of a rapidly restricted choice of things to buy with an unending pile of "empty" dollars.

Buy wheelbarrows.

David , Oct 17 2020 20:07 utc | 41
Germany should've been conquered by the Soviet Union entirely as it was won with Soviet, largely Russian, blood. Germany is increasingly irrelevant to Russia's needs now as Martyanov points out above. Germany's existence today should be that of a Russian oblast, same with Eastern Ukraine from Kharkiv to Mariupol and Belarus.

Ask yourself what Germany produces that Russia can't produce for itself with import substitution schemes or similar schemes within a 10 year period. Russia's GDP by PPP is the size of Germany's already and depending on how it deals with the impact of COVID, may continue an upward year-on-year growth trend (People's Republic of China is the only major economy forecast to expand in fiscal quarter this year). The fact of the matter is that Russia's population is much larger, its industrial base, at least in heavy industry, is nearly self sufficient (not much light industry to speak of) and Germany depends on Russian oil and gas to keep its lights on. Russia can carry on without Germany just fine. There may be a noticeable impact now if Russia were cornered into doing that, but it's nothing that can't be overcome in short order.

juliania , Oct 17 2020 20:08 utc | 42
Thank you, b, and before reading comments, I will give my take on your last question:
As this is so obvious one must ask what the real reason for the anti-Russian pressure campaign is. What do those who argue for it foresee as its endpoint?

The whole 'rules based order' became very clear when the Trans Pacific Partnership, TPP, was being debated,and what happened then is what many have noted, the 'rules' were all to advantage the US. So, you might say that was the beginning of the end for the oligarchy. And the partnership reformed after it had taken out that problem, to be fair to all participants. All the oligarchy can do is keep on keeping on until it can't. This is really about survival for that class of individuals who intend to keep on being in charge here in the US and wherever its tentacles have reached. The only endpoint they see is their continuance. And I suppose their fear is that it is simply not possible for that to be the case.

Hopefully there will just come a point where, as in Plato's Republic, the dialogue simply moves on. There, it begins in the home of the ancient one, Cephalus, with a polite discussion, and the old man says his piece, to which Socrates responds:

"What you say is very fine indeed, Cephalus...but as to this very thing, justice, shall we so simply assert that it is the truth and giving back what a man has taken from another, or is to do these very things sometimes just and sometimes unjust? Take this case as an example of what I mean: everyone would surely say that if a man takes weapons from a friend when the latter is of sound mind, and the friend demands them back when he is mad, one shouldn't give back such things, and the man who gives them back would not be just, and moreover, one should not be willing to tell someone in this state the whole truth."

"What you say is right," he said.

[Allan Bloom translation]

In the dialogue, the old man leaves to 'look after the sacrifices', handing down the argument to his heir, Polymarchus. To me, Socrates has adroitly caused this to come about in much the fashion that Lavrov answers his press questioners in the link b provides. That is, he has done so with diplomacy, and a lesson to his younger companions which perhaps Cephalus is no longer able to understand. Quod erat demonstrandum.

m , Oct 17 2020 20:15 utc | 43
Spent much of your money for weapons, brag with your military and wonder why you are perceived as a thread ...
Josh , Oct 17 2020 20:24 utc | 47
https://tass.com/world/1213379
Down South , Oct 17 2020 20:26 utc | 48
Andrei Martyanov @ 36

It is a tired and false concept

Yet in your disparaging comments of Europe and Germany in particular you proceed to show how successful the Anglo-Americans have been in creating a wedge between Europe and Russia actually validating my original point.

"Keep the Russians out, the Germans down and the US in"

That was the whole point of the first Cold War. It is the whole point of creating a Cold War 2.0. Absolutely nothing has changed.

Passer by , Oct 17 2020 20:30 utc | 50
Posted by: m | Oct 17 2020 20:15 utc | 43

By whom exactly? US & several euro puppets? Typical racist thinking that Europe and its former colonies are somehow "the world" or "the international community".

Meanwhile opinion of Russia is positive in India (1,3 billion people, more than the whole West combined) and China (1,4 billion, more than the whole West combined).

Those who don't spend for their own weapons, spend for their master's weapons (like europuppets).

Btw your master (US) spends on weapons too. What are you going to do about it?

norecovery , Oct 17 2020 20:45 utc | 51
@ laguerre -- This interview with Pepe Escobar by Moderate Rebels will answer some of your questions regarding China's treatment of Muslim minorities.
https://soundcloud.com/moderaterebels/the-coronavirus-pandemic-and-us-hybrid-war-on-china-with-pepe-escobar
Down South , Oct 17 2020 21:01 utc | 55
joey_n @ 34

As was rightly pointed out in that discussion, British foreign policy towards Europe was to ensure that no single power was to be allowed to achieve hegemony over Europe. The famous "balance of power"

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_balance_of_power

The Cold War with Russia is merely a British and US continuation of that exact same policy.

vk , Oct 17 2020 21:01 utc | 56
@ Posted by: Andrei Martyanov | Oct 17 2020 19:41 utc | 36

If the Russian Federation really has an ongoing imports substitution program, then this explains everything. Germany is an exports-oriented economy. It wants to integrate with the Russian economy in the sense to keep it as an agrarian-extrativist economy to feed it with cheap commodities to feed their industry. Germany's ideal Russia is Brazil.

A Russia that also exports high-value commodities (manufactured commodities) is a direct threat to Germany, as it competes with it directly in the international market. That's the reason Germany doesn't want the BRI to come to Europe, as Merkel once said: Europe must not become China's peninsula. China is Germany's main competitor, as it is also a big manufacturing exporter.

Down South , Oct 17 2020 21:19 utc | 57
https://youtu.be/ZVYqB0uTKlE

Watch in full. UK policy towards Europe in a nutshell

Digby , Oct 17 2020 21:24 utc | 58
@ David (41)
If I recall correctly, after WWII Stalin wanted a united, independent and Russia-friendly Germany, and even rejected the Morgenthau Plan.

https://thesaker.is/stalin-about-allies-idea-of-division-of-germany/

Eventually the Allied zones of occupation became West Germany, and the Soviet occupation zone became East Germany.

H.Schmatz , Oct 17 2020 21:40 utc | 60
@Posted by: vk | Oct 17 2020 21:01 utc | 56

But...it is not China currently main market for German exports...and Turkey second? In detriment of the EU....

Laguerre , Oct 17 2020 21:46 utc | 61
Posted by: Down South | Oct 17 2020 21:19 utc | 57

Old stuff. It's why Britain is losing today. They haven't kept up.

Smith , Oct 17 2020 22:04 utc | 63
Unlike China, Russia lacks the weight of population and reliance on the globalist capitalist system to throw around, China will not shut itself up for Russia when it can trade with EU & Turkey instead.

Russia is increasingly put into weak position, where Russian troops are sent to do the dying, while the Chinese business whoop in afterwards to get all the juicy business deals. In other words, Russia does the dying while China enriches itself.

Russia only hope is that it becomes friendly with the EU, otherwise, it is going to be crushed between two superpowers, the EU and China.

kemerd , Oct 17 2020 22:08 utc | 64
I think the point of the sanctions and all the pressure on Russia is an appeal to Russian elite, Just a reminder that they are isolated from the rest of the elite and hope that it would help them throw Russian nationalists from power. I think this might succeed as Putin did no really take on the new Russian capitalist class, and that will probably be his undoing.
Don Bacon , Oct 17 2020 22:12 utc | 66
@vk 36
That's the reason Germany doesn't want the BRI to come to Europe

BRI in Europe - 16 countries: Austria*, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Slovak Republic, Slovenia, Ukraine * shaky

SCMP - Aug 17, 2020: China's rail shipments to Europe set records as demand surges for Chinese goods amid coronavirus

> July saw 1,232 cargo trains travel from Chinese cities to European destinations – the most ever in a single month
> Once regarded as merely ornamental, freight service along belt and road trade routes has become increasingly important as exporters turn to railway transport. . . here

c1ue , Oct 17 2020 22:18 utc | 67
Lavrov, Shoigu and Putin are calm, but the domestic economic situation is not. While I have noted before that Russia is better positioned to survive low oil prices than Saudi Arabia - it doesn't mean this is fun.

Couple that with COVID-19 economic losses, and stresses on the domestic Russian economy are enormous.

Among other signs: after bouncing around in the 60s for some time, the ruble just hit 80 to the USD. Anecdotally, I am hearing a lot of direct personal accounts of businesses not being able to pay their people because their own customers aren't paying.

Russia has done relatively little extra to assist with COVID-19 related economic harms, so this isn't great either.

norecovery , Oct 17 2020 22:30 utc | 68
@ laguerre -- The interview with Pepe Escobar deals with the whole range of issues in the hybrid war against China, but the information you're looking for Regarding the suppression and re-education of Muslim terrorists starts just past the 1-hour point.

https://soundcloud.com/moderaterebels/the-coronavirus-pandemic-and-us-hybrid-war-on-china-with-pepe-escobar

H.Schmatz , Oct 17 2020 22:30 utc | 69
@Posted by: c1ue | Oct 17 2020 22:18 utc | 67

One would say you are describing the state of affairs in the US... Projecting?

norecovery , Oct 17 2020 22:34 utc | 70
@ laguerre -- Start at 1:09:40
Don Bacon , Oct 17 2020 22:36 utc | 71
@ Laguerre 35

the Chinese regime. I don't really understand their policy, which is becoming more nationalistic and edgy.

No, it's become more multi-national and sensible. Take the BRI: Launched in 2013, it was initially planned to revive ancient Silk Road trade routes between Eurasia and China, but the scope of the BRI (Belt & Road Initiative) has since extended to cover 138 countries, including 38 in sub-Saharan Africa and 18 in Latin America and the Caribbean.

they should be more relaxed
China has been an open target for the US, which doesn't even mention China any more (Pompeo) but dumps on the "CCP" (Chinese Communist Party). China (like Russia) has not responded in kind.

their attitude towards the Muslims in China
The US State Dept slash CIA has been fomenting terrorism in Xinjiang for years and China has had to contend with it.

the question of Taiwan could blow up
Taiwan like some other places in the world, including Hong Kong, has been another place where the US has fomented instability. This has increased recently with Taiwan "president" Tsai declaring that Taiwan (January this year, BBC interview) is a separate country, which it isn't. China is being pushed to do his Abe Lincoln thing and save the union.

They are less tolerant in Beijing
Chinese by nature are tolerant, and Beijing has been tolerant in the face of US naval fleets and bomber visits in their near seas, plus political attacks, sanctions and tariffs.

winston2 , Oct 17 2020 22:38 utc | 72
66 watch what they do and have done and not what they.
Construction started four years ago on enlarging and modernization of the railway marshaling yards in Duisburg.
The volume of Chinese freight trains arriving daily is already quite amazing and planned to increase to one every hour next month 24/7.They are not returning empty. The oil and gas pipeline corridors also had ten plus railway tracks built alongside .Germany is already at the center of the BRI expansion into Germany and it started four years ago.
vk , Oct 17 2020 22:42 utc | 73
@ Posted by: H.Schmatz | Oct 17 2020 21:40 utc | 60

That's why Germany is not full anti-China.

--//--

@ Posted by: Don Bacon | Oct 17 2020 22:12 utc | 66

Just because Germany doesn't want it, it doesn't mean it's not getting.

--//--

@ Posted by: c1ue | Oct 17 2020 22:18 utc | 67

I agree. Capitalism is a dead end for Russia. It's all about when Putin dies. After he dies, it will be a coin flip for Russia: it could continue its course or it could get another Yeltsin.

Smith , Oct 17 2020 22:48 utc | 74
@ vk

Germany being against BRI is news to me. Any proof? And it is very unlikely that China will be able to fool the europeans lile the american. The EU has regulations and aren't purely about profit.

And they still have strong domestic industry.

Patroklos , Oct 17 2020 22:54 utc | 75
Perhaps the US only has one script in the playbook: to balkanise, disrupt and foster 5th columns until their opponent becomes a dysfunctional or failed state. Then send in the acronyms (IMF etc), establish a provisional administration under trusted local elites but commandeer resource-rich areas under direct provincial command. That's US imperialism and it won't stop until they encounter opposition effective enough to resist it. That's why they'll never forgive Putin for Syria. In the end they want to finish doing to Russia (by other means...) what the Germans began in '41; and not just Russia, but anywhere their markets are prevented from calling the shots.
emersonreturn , Oct 17 2020 23:31 utc | 77
thank you, @72. the chinese learned much from their century of humiliation & clearly one of the important lessons was trade both ways, rather than take their silver, sell them tea, silks & porcelain & need nothing they offered.
Grieved , Oct 17 2020 23:40 utc | 78
@77 emersonreturn

That's an excellent observation, and a concept I had not encountered before. Thank you. How consciously China holds that narrative, if at all, I couldn't say.

But it's a great dynamic - kind of like keeping your enemies close. And if the German increase in reciprocal railroad trade with China is as it was stated up-thread, it would seem to be working.

emersonreturn , Oct 18 2020 0:02 utc | 79
@78, thank you, grieved...i've long admired you. in times such as these it can be a challenge to keep sight of the positive but as china prospers & wishes her trading partners to as well, & so long as russia continues to strive toward the high road rather than descend to the barroom floor perhaps we can also learn to rise...i'm reminded of a sufi saying: 'rise in love do not fall'. may we all.
Yeah, Right , Oct 18 2020 0:05 utc | 80
Do they even think about an endpoint? Is it really on their radar?

Or is this all being done because they are spoilt, and are throwing a tantrum because they aren't getting their way?

I assume that there are sober heads in the Pentagon that wargame possible "endpoints". If not sober at the beginning then sober when the results play out to their bitter end.

Or... maybe not. Post-retirement board seats are at stake, dammit! Full steam ahead and damn the torpedoes!

Grieved , Oct 18 2020 0:10 utc | 81
#35 Laguerre

I'm truly astonished that you don't know the truth of Xinjaing - in sum, that the concentration camps are a huge lie that can be revealed as such by any satellite, and that China has developed a progressive and worthy solution to the foreign-provoked terrorism within its border.

Fortunately, Qiao Collective, a great expert source on China, has recently compiled a treasure trove of links to know the truth:

Xinjiang: A Report and Resource Compilation - Sep 21 Written By Qiao Collective

Based on a handful of think tank reports and witness testimonies, Western governments have levied false allegations of genocide and slavery in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. A closer look makes clear that the politicization of China's anti-terrorism policies in Xinjiang is another front of the U.S.-led hybrid war on China.

This resource compilation provides a starting point for critical inquiry into the historical context and international response to China's policies in Xinjiang, providing a counter-perspective to misinformation that abounds in mainstream coverage of the autonomous region.

kooshy , Oct 18 2020 0:29 utc | 82
Posted by: Andrei Martyanov | Oct 17 2020 19:41 utc | 36

Andrei

A good justification on Russian German transitional relation, and we hope Russia is not fooled again, by hopes. Those of us who hope for containing and reducing western dominance over the world affairs, politics and economy, hope that Russians have learned from their experience of the 90's joining G7, seat at NATO, joining western sanctions on smaller powers, etc. all those efforts were the carrots thrown at Russia to tame the bear, one would think up to Georgian war, it worked, that war perhaps woke the bear. Russians felt they are part of Europe,part of western community of privileged nations (first world) but all that was a decoy to move the NATO to Russian borders. I hope Russians once for all have learned, as long as they have a big modern military and plenty of energy resources that is not under the western (you read US) control they will never be accepted as a "western" country, Ironically, Russia is the largest European country.

As a strategist you know better than most to circumvent western power and to bring back the rule of international law, it would be impossible without having the Russian defensive political and military power (as in Syria) on the side of resistance. We just hope you are right Russia, will not be bought out again. IMO as you say, is just impossible for Germany, or even France to decouple from the US grip on europe.

jared , Oct 18 2020 1:04 utc | 83
Seems to me its been terribly effective. Russian economy pretty weak heavily reliant on raw materials, fracturing at the periphery. China and Russia seem less than alies.

Seems US has Germany, France by the short hairs. US had to bail them out in 2009. Europe is having some problems with solvency and cohesion - whats a bureaucrat to do? Its not really about the sovereigns, that's only for appearances.

jared , Oct 18 2020 1:06 utc | 84
Also seems maybe Russians are growing tired of lack of progress.
Don Bacon , Oct 18 2020 1:17 utc | 85
@ 77
The Century of Humiliation from 1842 to 1949 and the contemporary discourse around it are a driving narrative of contemporary Chinese history, foreign policy, and militarization of its surrounding regions like the South China Sea. The expansion of the Chinese navy in numbers, mission, and aggression is directly fueled by China's previous weakness and exploitation at the hands of western nations. . . . here
c1ue , Oct 18 2020 1:19 utc | 86
@H.Schmatz #69

The US economy is definitely in trouble, but the US has spent roughly $2 trillion this year to help its economy = a bit under 10% of 2019 GDP.

The difference is structural. The US economy is a service one - and lockdowns are literally the best way to damage it.

The Russian economy is still heavily dependent on natural gas and oil sales. Despite the initial devaluation, ongoing low oil prices plus increasing competition in natural gas (for example, Azerbaijan is now selling natural gas to Italy) is hurting its economy.

Nor has Russia spent much to compensate for COVID-19 losses beyond its existing health and social safety nets - the Russian plan was $73B / 5 trillion rubles = 4.3% of 2019 GDP.

Circe , Oct 18 2020 2:00 utc | 88
I am anti-war and I am an anti-war crimes liberal (examples of war crimes: ethnic cleansing, proof of genocide, torture, collective punishment via deprivation and occupation of dispossessed land). Yet, I am also a non-interventionist except in extreme circumstances but I am against regime change for the sake of neutralizing competing powers or converting them religiously or politically.

All this implies exercising the highest integrity and blocking out all external influence and pressure if one is a true liberal, and relying solely on conscience and wisdom.

Therefore, I don't like the term liberal sullied and usurped by fake liberals, neoliberals and Zionist liberals, and I also take offense to the way liberal as a general term is denigrated in this article.

Andrei Martyanov , Oct 18 2020 2:24 utc | 90
@vk

Germany is an exports-oriented economy. It wants to integrate with the Russian economy in the sense to keep it as an agrarian-extrativist economy to feed it with cheap commodities to feed their industry. Germany's ideal Russia is Brazil.

True, it was about 10 years ago. Economic reality, of course, is such that Germany already beat the record by consecutive 20 months of real economy shrinkage. In general, Germany's energy policy is suicidal and Russia is increasingly independent from imports.

A lot to be done in the future yet, of course, but as the whole comedy with high-power turbines and Siemens demonstrated, Russia can do it on her own, plus General Electric is always there, sanctions or no sanctions. It is a complicated matter, but it is Germany which increasingly becomes irrelevant for Russia as an old image of technologically-advanced Germans getting their hands on Russia's resources and ruling the world--this image is utterly obsolete, completely false and doesn't correspond to the reality "on the ground".

It is really a simple thing which many Westerners cannot wrap their brains around, that the country which has a space program which operates ISS and second fully operational global satellite navigation constellation, or which produces hypersonic weapons and whose shipbuilding dwarfs that of Germany will have relatively little troubles in developing other crucial industries and removing Western interests from those. Simple as that.

Yeah, Right , Oct 18 2020 3:01 utc | 91
@90 Very true. Every time I read someone proclaiming that the Russian economy is no bigger than Italy's, or Spain's, or ..... (fill in the blanks) I simply think to myself: "This word, I do not think it means what you think it means".

Because it should be obvious to everyone that Italy can not produce all the things that Russia produces.
Equally, Spain can not produce all the things that Russia produces.

So if someone has measured "economy" in such a way that the numbers for Russia are the same as the number for Italy - or Spain - is simply admitting that their economic models are flawed.

Don Bacon , Oct 18 2020 3:13 utc | 92
Map of the World's Manufacturing Output 2018

here

BiloxiMarxKelly , Oct 18 2020 3:20 utc | 93
PLEASE SHARE, THANK YOU MOA
https://youtu.be/kr04gHbP5MQ
Kadath , Oct 18 2020 3:28 utc | 94
The US and EU attempts to break Russia's independent foreign policy are just stepping stones to the eventual goal of a breakup Russia itself, never forget Albright's comments in the 90s about how Siberia shouldn't belong to Russia alone.

Ultimately, though the US and EU nation states are nothing more than tools of the globalist elite whose dream of a fully economically integrated world where the power of labour is completely crushed by the power of capital to move instantly across the planet is already falling apart. The economic elite have already pillaged all of the minor nations in the world and the two grand prizes, Russia and China are too powerful to attack directly now. unable to control their unbridled greed they've begone the process of auto-self cannibalism, destroying their own states (or killing their hosts as Michael Huddson would say) in order to completely centralize all capital within the 0.1%.

This will make them very rich, however hundreds of millions of Americans, Australians, Canadians, Japanese and Europeans will be impoverished in order to do this. When this is eventually realized by the majority of the people in these states, the economic elite will be lucky if they "just" lose everything but their lives in mass nationalization campaigns. I see very little evidence that the Russian or Chinese states would be willing to offer safe harbour for the criminal oligarchs of the West, like London has offered to criminal Oligarchs fleeing justice in Russia

Yeah, Right , Oct 18 2020 4:09 utc | 95
@92 Don Bacon Would be very interesting to know how they define "manufacturing".

I suspect very much that it includes many things that aren't actually, you know, "manufactured".

Andrei Martyanov , Oct 18 2020 4:11 utc | 96
@Don Bacon.

Before posting here monetarist propaganda BS form Western "economic" sources learn to distinguish monetary expression of product and actual product in terms of quantity and quality.

Just to demonstrate to you: for $100,000 in a desirable place in the US you will be able to buy a roach-infested shack in a community known for meth-labs and high crime, for exactly the same money in Russia you will buy a superb brand-new house in a desirable location.

To demonstrate even more, for a price of a single Columbia-class SSBN ($8 billion+) which does not exist other than on paper yet, Russia financed and produced her 8-hulls state of the strategic missile submarines.

UK economy is dwarfed by Russia even in accordance by IMF and World Bank, in fact, it is, once one excludes still relevant RR and few other manufacturers, is down right third world economy. I am not going to post here all data from IMF, but even this can explain why you posted a BS. Anyone "counting" real economic sector in USD and Nominal GDP has to have head examined and is probably dumbed down through "economics" programs in Western madrasas, aka universities.

https://www.investopedia.com/insights/worlds-top-economies/

In related news, learn what Composite Index of National Capability (CINC) is and check energy consumption and production of Germany and Russia, just for shits and giggles.

https://yearbook.enerdata.net/total-energy/world-consumption-statistics.html

But, of course, feel free to remain reliant on economic BS produced by Western "economists".

Grieved , Oct 18 2020 4:16 utc | 97
@92 Don Bacon, @95 Yeah, Right

Yes, and also it should be said that obviously these metrics aren't the correct ones to judge the power of a country among its peers.

Perhaps a better metric is for any nation to ask: Of all these countries, which one do we NOT want to punch us in the face?

This, after all, is how geopolitical stature is measured.

It's not what you produce, it's how you deploy it that matters.

Grieved , Oct 18 2020 4:35 utc | 98
@97 more

And of course, Martyanov @96 is absolutely correct - the relative values of currencies are proved to be nothing more than the entries of bookkeepers and bankers, all "sound and fury, signifying nothing." What matters is what the home unit of currency will buy at home.

A better question is as Andrei suggests, what does it cost for Russia to produce something that works, as opposed to what it costs the US to produce something that doesn't work because of theft and cost inflation in the delivery chain?

The ultimate - MAD - question that the US should ask itself is this: How much does it cost Russia to destroy the US, compared with the cost involved for the US to destroy Russia?

~~

The cost of living is higher in the US. The cost of doing anything is higher. But none of that means the quality of the result is greater - I certainly don't hear anyone lately saying the living is good, compared to what people pay for it.

Jackrabbit , Oct 18 2020 4:41 utc | 99
b quotes Gilbert Doctorow:
Were it not for the nerves of steel of Mr. Putin and his close advisers, the irresponsible pressure policies outlined above could result in aggressive behavior and risk taking by Russia that would make the Cuban missile crisis look like child's play.
We may yet see a Cuban missile crisis scenario but it looks more likely to be caused by arms sales to Taiwan than conflict in the Caucasus.

I also think its naive to see these as "fires burning at Russia's borders" instead of as deliberately set bear traps . Azerbaijan is in a strategic location between Russia and Iran and the conflict with Armenia comes just before Russia is about to sell advanced weapons to Iran.

!!

[Oct 16, 2020] Jacques Chirac President of France told Jr Bush if the United States finds WMDs in Iraq you put them there.

Oct 16, 2020 | www.theamericanconservative.com


WilliamRD • 12 hours ago

Jacques Chirac President of France told Jr Bush if the United States finds WMDs in Iraq you put them there. The CIA and MI6 knew Iraq had no WMDs because Tariq Aziz Saddam's long time number 2 was a CIA asset. Back in the 1980s Aziz was a regular on the Washington cocktail party circuit and a frequent guest on CNNs Crossfire with Pat Buchanan, Robert Novak vs Tom Braden and Michael Kinsley. Finally Dick Armey Republican and House Majority leader was going to vote against authorizing the war in the fall of 2002. Cheney goes up to Capitol Hill pulls Armey into the Vice Presidents office in the Capitol and tells him that Iraq is close to having suitcase nukes and has very close ties to Osama bin Laden. Both lies of course.

On one occasion when Jr Bush was talking to Chirac he told him that the war on terror is Biblical prophecy. Needless to say Chirac was stunned. Yes the Republican establishment lied the country into one of the biggest foreign policy blunders in our history. Almost as bad as Woodrow Wilson taking us into World war 1 which led to the rise Bolshevik revolution and Nazi Germany

ekaneti WilliamRD • 2 hours ago • edited

Vietnam was a bigger lie and worse than Iraq

WilliamRD ekaneti • an hour ago

Vietnam was bad for sure and had a much larger death count, but the region or the domino theory never materialized. The Middle East has been in chaos ever since our invasion and occupation of Iraq

[Oct 16, 2020] WilliamRD WilliamRD

Oct 16, 2020 | disqus.com

• 12 hours ago

Jacques Chirac President of France told Jr Bush if the United States finds WMDs in Iraq you put them there. The CIA and MI6 knew Iraq had no WMDs because Tariq Aziz Saddam's long time number 2 was a CIA asset. Back in the 1980s Aziz was a regular on the Washington cocktail party circuit and a frequent guest on CNNs Crossfire with Pat Buchanan, Robert Novak vs Tom Braden and Michael Kinsley. Finally Dick Armey Republican and House Majority leader was going to vote against authorizing the war in the fall of 2002. Cheney goes up to Capitol Hill pulls Armey into the Vice Presidents office in the Capitol and tells him that Iraq is close to having suitcase nukes and has very close ties to Osama bin Laden. Both lies of course.

On one occasion when Jr Bush was talking to Chirac he told him that the war on terror is Biblical prophecy. Needless to say Chirac was stunned. Yes the Republican establishment lied the country into one of the biggest foreign policy blunders in our history. Almost as bad as Woodrow Wilson taking us into World war 1 which led to the rise Bolshevik revolution and Nazi Germany

[Oct 16, 2020] Why the West Fuels Conflict in Armenia -

Oct 16, 2020 | www.theamericanconservative.com

Fazal Majid • 15 hours ago • edited

Britain created Saudi Arabia? They supported the westernized Hashemites rivals of the Saud to the hilt. Just one of the many factual errors in a muddle-headed article that seems to draw its inspiration from the reflexive anti-Americanism of the European loony left.

The Caucasus, like the former Yugoslavia, or India before partition, is made up of many populations coexisting. When ethno- or religious nationalism rears its ugly head, violence and ethnic cleansing inevitably ensue. The Armenians prevailed militarily due to Azerbaijani incompetence, not because of any intrinsic moral righteousness, but the thing about military gains is they can be reversed when the other side gets its act together, specially if it enjoys an overwhelming advantage in population and resources.

Foreign powers like Russia, Turkey, Iran, France or Israel are pouring oil on the fires of revanchism for political or mercantile reasons, instead of pushing both sides to meaningful negotiations (let's not forget the Armenians are perfectly happy with the status quo and have not exactly been eager to negotiate it away). The last thing the US should be doing is taking sides, and since this is Russia's backyard there is not much we can do other than pressuring Turkey to stop making things worse, but we all know how little real sway we have with Erdögan.

S A Chaplin Fazal Majid • 12 hours ago

@Majid - Very insightful comment, thank you. (And better written than the article.) You also taught me a new word: revanchism.

Blood Alcohol Fazal Majid • 8 hours ago • edited

The article seems to me to be disjointed and I have feeling the damage was done during editing. There's no egregious mistake is saying the Brits created "Saudi" Arabia. That is a historical fact and which family/tribe they supported is irrelevant in historical terms. Your charge of "reflexive anti-Americanism of the European loony left." because of a few inaccuracies in the article is way off the wall. The article is badly written but it is informative.

Regarding your claim, "Foreign powers like Russia, Turkey, Iran, France or Israel are pouring oil on the fires...", I agree with you with the exception of Iran's role in this mess. The very first official announcement by the IRI, which I posted to another article on the site, warned Turkey is pouring fuel to the file. There's no disagreement there. Iran has no military personnel nor funding going to either country. Azerbaijan has about 700 Kilometers of common border with Iran, and Armenia shares about 32 Kilometers of borders with Iran. Iran has a substantial, vibrant and patriotic Azari population. Many are in top IRI leadership including Khamenei. Iran also has a very substantial and vibrant Armenian population. Iran does recognize the Turk's genocide of its Armenian population. Iran is connected to Armenia via oil and gas pipelines, as well as power grids. Iran is the most important of energy supplier for Armenia.

A bit of recent history will shed some light on Iran's behavior and attitude towards each country. While Armenia remained one of Iran's stalwart neighbors, Azerbaijan took the path of endearing itself to the US and Israel axis of war mongering and destabilizing policies. This put Azerbaijan on Iran's list of "unfriendly" governments, I'm not talking about Azerbaijan's Shia population in this context. There's nothing for Iran in this war. Therefore Iran's latest announcement is to end the war as soon as possible through diplomatic means. The shells and missiles have started landing on Iranian soil but no casualties fortunately.

Fazal Majid Blood Alcohol • 7 hours ago • edited

The British had literally nothing to do with the creation of Saudi Arabia. Abdulaziz Ibn Saud took back his family fief of Riyadh in 1901 from the rival al-Rashid of Ha'il, then waged war over the other tribes of Arabia, enlisting a fanatical proto-ISIS like militia called the Ikhwan to conquer in 1924 the British-supported Hejaz ruled by Sharif Hussein of the Hashemite dynasty. He did not extend his conquests to Yemen, Oman, Kuwait or Transjordan and Syria because that would have meant waging direct war on the British and French empires, and in fact had to quell a rebellion of the Ikhwan who wanted to do exactly that.

The Saudis draw great pride in being the one nation in the Middle East that was not colonized by Western powers (mostly because it was worthless until the discovery of oil). Just because William Shakespear or Gertrude Bell toured the region does not make the al-Saud British puppets like the Hashemites were, whatever their many faults. While Abdulaziz bided his time and tactically made treaties with the British like temporarily accepting a protectorate status or agreeing to fight the al-Rashid (like he would do otherwise, they being his family's hereditary enemies....), they never provided him with any significant assistance, and in fact tried ineffectually to contain his rise.

Blood Alcohol Fazal Majid • 4 hours ago • edited

I think if we remove "Saudi" from the discussion and just talk about "Arabia" our difference of opinion will evaporate. The country is mistakenly, in my opinion, was named "Saudi Arabia" for the Western colonizers' special interest. The rest of your argument about who did what to whom in Arabia is inside baseball to me.

By the way, stay tuned. We many start hearing about the al-Rashid as soon as the "king" passes and mBS tries be big cheese of Arabia.

redfish Blood Alcohol • 5 hours ago

Of course Iran would just like the conflict to go away; its leaving them with only bad choices, whether that to be appearing to support Azerbaijan and alienating Armenia, with whom they have an important relationship, or appearing to support Armenia and alienating much of its local Azeri population. I think Iran publicly is walking a fine line and trying to stress diplomacy to solve the conflict as much as possible, though its still hard for them to extricate themselves from the politics of the situation.

Though, in that regard, its a bit wrong to compare the Azeri population in Iran to the Armenian population; its completely different in scale and importance. Iran has some concern that the Armenian-Azerbaijan conflict, if handled wrongly, would become regional or spill over into their borders, and they're less concerned about Armenia in that part.

Also wrong to not point out that Israel formed ties with Azerbaijan and Iran formed ties with Armenia around the same time; these were complementary moves, and its just as possible to explain Israel's ties with Azerbaijan as being as a result of Iran's ties with Armenia, rather than just the reverse. Just as well, Israel at the time had friendly relations with Turkey, which have since deteriorated. Its also true that the relationships are based on reasons independent of those kind of geopolitical moves, and are largely based on self-interest on both sides. Azerbaijan is also Israel's top oil supplier. Simply blaming all this on the US and Israel, and making Iran's stance towards Azerbaijan as a result of them being the victim of these types of deals, is a bit much.

Blood Alcohol redfish • 2 hours ago

I doesn't seem Iran can or even thinks about extricate herself from "the situation". Iran is situated right there and whether things spill over to Iran or not will play a big role in Iran's perception of the regional security.

No sure where I inferred any comparison between the Azari and the Armenian population of Iran. They are BOTH Iranians. After the breakup of the USSR, the Azerbaijani dictator Heydar Aliyev established relation with Israel and later the US, while refusing to join any of the several post-Soviet economic arrangements. That was accompanied by Azerbaijan making noises about "unification" of Azerbaijan. That pushed Iran to throw all its support behind Armenia then. The situation has changed and IRI and Azerbaijan have normal relations.

Iran cannot simple afford to consider the Armenian Iranians less "important" than her Azeri Iranians, if that's where you are going.

Kindi • 14 hours ago

The author may have been a banker, but he clearly was neither an historian or diplomat. He knows neither the details of what he writes, nor does he have a framework.

The decision to assign Karabakh to Azerbaijan was taken in 1921, not 1923 and was taken by the Bolshevik Caucasus Bureau, not by Stalin. General clashes between Azerbaijanis and Armenians took place in 1905, and the fighting for Karabakh proper erupted in 1918 with the formation of independent Armenian and Azerbaijan republics. Both well before the Bolsheviks or Stalin could do anything about Karabakh (although the Bolsheviks did join with the Armenian Dashnaks in March 1918 to seize Baku and butcher Azerbaijanis in the process. Yes, Azerbaijanis retaliated in September, but the Armenians did start it and got their hands plenty bloody, outside Baku as well).

The author's contempt for Azerbaijanis comes through in his comment that the Azerbaijanis have lost every time against the Armenians. He never reflects that the possible reason might be that the Armenians have been both better organized and more aggressive than the Azerbaijanis. He deliberately leaves out that Armenian expelled 800,000 Azerbaijanis from the territories surrounding Karabakh. He is stunning in his disingenuousness and ignorance. As for his framework, he has none. Where does he get the idea that Kosovo and Karabakh are interlinked and that they can be resolved through tradeoffs? Does he imagine that Muslims are one people and constitute a single union? Apparently.

An Arab world moving toward Pan-Arabism and socialism in 1924?!

As to the "Armenian settlement area" – the author might reflect on the Kurds' claims to 90% of that same area, and the bloody history of Kurdish-Armenian relations. If turning over old borders what do you do about Abkhazia, Circassia, and multiple places in the Balkans from where Muslims were expelled. Bring Greeks back into Turkey, too, while we are it? This article was not analysis, but uninformed blathering laced with ethnic invective. The Armenians have suffered enough to deserve such shoddy argumentation. AmCon should be ashamed to have run this.

BluStateConservative • 12 hours ago • edited

Turkey regularly threatens Europe with opening the gates with their "refugees" as leverage in negotiations. Erdogan travels to the heart of Europe to encourage the Turkish diaspora to perpetuate their grudges on European soil and encourage them to flex their political muscle to further an Islamist agenda. They slaughtered Armenians, Greeks, and Syriac Christians- never acknowledging the crime or showing remorse. Now they seek to finish what they started with the Armenian Genocide- and the world sits on its hands claiming that both sides are equally responsible.

This is outrageous! Turkey has proved time and time again that it is the aggressor, using threats to get what it wants, and does not behave as an ally. Turkey has single-handily destabilized entire countries in its dream of Neo-Ottoman domination over the region. Time to heavily militarize the Greek- Turkish frontier, kick Turkey out of NATO, and put it on notice that it's adventurism in Libya, Syria, and Armenia will be met overwhelming force. Feeble responses made by the West will only encourage the mad-dog Erdogan.

M Orban BluStateConservative • 11 hours ago

I don't think our (US) interest is threatened in those parts. Russia can handle it,it is their back yard.

BluStateConservative M Orban • 3 hours ago

It calling for military action by any means, but we can apply pressure on Turkey.

former-vet • 10 hours ago • edited

Explains well why Biden spent the other day criticizing the President for not taking a more active role in the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict. Warmongers gonna warmonger. I assume that's one of the main attractions for Biden's supporters - more dead women and children in Asia. They spent eight years driving around with "Support America's Foreign Invasions" yellow ribbon stickers on their SUVs under the last administration Biden was part of.

With not a new war for nearly four years, I can understand why the establishment and Democrat voters are pissed. At least the fake "neoconservatives" are back in the party they belong in.

Blood Alcohol former-vet • 9 hours ago • edited

War mongering is like Herpes. You can suppress it, but it's virus never goes away. Biden has had it for years. He supported W's war of choice in Iraq, which led to the carnage of thousands of American 20-somethings, thousands of mental illness sufferers and MILLIONS of dead Iraqi people of ALL ages. He is an unrepentant old neo-con war criminal.

[Oct 14, 2020] Trump's latest arms sales to Taiwan aimed at winning votes by 'getting tough' on China but risks war -- RT Op-ed

Oct 14, 2020 | www.rt.com

Trump's latest arms sales to Taiwan aimed at winning votes by 'getting tough' on China but risks war Finian Cunningham Finian Cunningham is an award-winning journalist. For over 25 years, he worked as a sub-editor and writer for The Mirror, Irish Times, Irish Independent and Britain's Independent, among others. 14 Oct, 2020 14:56 / Updated 3 hours ago Get short URL Trump's latest arms sales to Taiwan aimed at winning votes by 'getting tough' on China but risks war Five US-made F16 jets fly over the Presidential Office during Taiwan's National Day. 10.10.2020 TAIPEI, TAIWAN © Getty Images / Walid Berrazeg / SOPA Images / LightRocket 17 Follow RT on RT In a reckless provocation to China, the Trump administration has given notice of three major arms deals with Taiwan. The rocket launcher and missiles on offer are advanced attack systems. Beijing is infuriated and vows to respond.

The timing of the weapons deals strongly suggests a calculated move by the Trump White House to deliberately antagonize China. After all, the Republican president and his Democrat rival have been sparring over which one is tougher towards Beijing. Riling up China would therefore play into President Donald Trump's hawkish posturing.

With recent opinion polls showing Trump losing ground to Joe Biden only three weeks from the ballot, it looks like the incumbent is throwing everything including the kitchen sink to boost his re-election chances. Announcing sped-up troop withdrawals from Afghanistan, as well as a touted nuclear arms agreement with Russia (dismissed by Moscow as overblown), seems to be part of a last-gasp effort by the Trump campaign to scrape up votes.

But offensive weapons sales to Taiwan is taking electioneering to recklessly dangerous levels. Trump may be betting that China will huff and puff and then a turn blind eye, thereby permitting him to make political gain without any real damage done – like starting a war.

READ MORE Trump's claim he'll 'make China pay' is more pre-election saber-rattling and he'll up the ante even further over next three weeks Trump's claim he'll 'make China pay' is more pre-election saber-rattling and he'll up the ante even further over next three weeks

It's more precarious than that. The Trump administration has been using Taiwan as a catspaw against China for too long. The latest weapons deals being proposed are just part of a slew of advanced armaments that the Trump White House has overseen in its determination to aggravate Beijing.

The moves by the Trump administration to increase supply of offensive weapons systems to Taiwan are unprecedented. Since Washington formally broke ties with Taiwan in 1979, as part of its One China policy to placate Beijing's territorial claims, previous administrations have limited arms sales to the breakaway island to "defensive" armaments.

Under Trump, however, Washington has signaled it is abandoning its One China policy by explicitly moving towards supporting Taiwan and its separatist position. Selling offensive missiles, torpedoes, anti-ship mines and F-16s to Taiwan over the past year alone is letting China know that the US is threatening to back the island in an armed confrontation with the mainland.

In recent months, the Trump administration has sent the most senior US officials on high-profile visits to Taiwan since 1979. Last month, Kelly Craft, the American ambassador to the UN, declared support for Taiwan to have official representation at the world body. Those high-level state acknowledgements have coincided with Washington sending high-powered military forces to the Taiwan Strait in the form of warships and nuclear-capable B-52 bombers.

ALSO ON RT.COM Zizek: Covid crisis sparked fear of communism & China's rise as superpower. But best way to prevent communism is to FOLLOW China

These provocative moves have been met by China escalating its military forces in a show of strength to underpin its self-declared right to retake Taiwan, which Beijing views as a renegade state since the 1949 civil war when the defeated nationalist faction exiled there.

The anti-China hostility generated in Washington is a bipartisan position adopted by Republicans and Democrats. That means the weapons sales lined up by Trump for Taiwan will likely be voted through, no matter who wins the presidential contest on November 3. There's also at least another four major arms packages reportedly in the works due at a later stage.

READ MORE The Vatican's calculated snub of Mike Pompeo exposes the limits of his evangelical, ideological, China-hating foreign policy The Vatican's calculated snub of Mike Pompeo exposes the limits of his evangelical, ideological, China-hating foreign policy

The US foreign policy establishment and the Pentagon – as seen in several planning documents over recent years – have targeted China as a great power rival. The antagonism that Trump has certainly lent his brash personality to is not going away even if he loses the election next month.

Piling on weapons sales to Taiwan is not merely a reprehensible electioneering ploy which Trump might cynically calculate benefits him. It is part of a growing dynamic of belligerence out of Washington towards Beijing. Whether it's Trump or Biden sitting in the White House, that doesn't alter the disastrous collision course that Washington is charting towards Beijing based on the former's presumed imperialist prerogatives.

It's a foreboding sign of the times when China's President Xi Jinping this week warned combat marines to be prepared for war in defense of the nation's sovereignty.

America's cowardly habit of beating up on other people for its own political ego trips sooner or later goes too far. Washington messing around with China's sovereignty and national security as seen with incorrigible and increasingly offensive weapons sales to Taiwan is playing with fire. A fire that could be just one spark away.

Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.

[Oct 14, 2020] European Oil Companies Will Not Tolerate Poland's Attempt To Cancel Nord Stream 2 -

Oct 14, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

European Oil Companies Will Not Tolerate Poland's Attempt To Cancel Nord Stream 2 by Tyler Durden Wed, 10/14/2020 - 06:10 Twitter Facebook Reddit Email Print

Authored by Paul Antonopoulos via InfoBrics.org,

By handing out a €6.5 billion fine against Gazprom, Warsaw has obviously and massively miscalculated because it did not only antagonize the Russian energy company as was intended, but also European partners of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline project , which the Polish government obviously had not considered.

Even leaders within the European Union were shocked at the huge fine that Poland is attempting to impose against Nord Stream 2.

It may very well be that the Polish Office of Competition and Consumer Protection (UOKiK) has lost itself when deciding on the price of the fine against Gazprom. But regardless of that, UOKiK has apparently also exceeded its jurisdiction . As the Düsseldorf-based energy supplier Uniper reports, the existing agreements on Nord Stream 2 have nothing to do with a joint venture, which is why the Polish laws on merger controls do not apply to them. The initial plans were to finance the construction of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline through the establishment of a joint venture. For this, however, the companies involved should have received a permit in all the countries in which they operate, as well as from Poland, the only EU state that blocked this decision. The decision for it not to be a joint venture was made without further ado so as not to waste time or money in a dispute with Polish authorities.

The pipeline partners designed an alternative financing model for Nord Stream 2 and instead of joining Nord Stream 2 AG (Company) as a co-partner, the European energy companies are participating in the project as lenders so that Polish antitrust laws do not apply to them. However, Gazprom, the majority shareholder of Nord Stream 2 AG, has given its European partners shares in the company as a mortgage for the financing provided. If the loans from the Russian side are not paid, the European corporations automatically become the owners of Nord Stream 2 AG. Referring to this fact, the Polish antitrust authorities have declared the European partner companies to be quasi-shareholders in the pipeline project.

With this UOKiK also justifies the exorbitant fine against Gazprom and the fines of around €55 million against Uniper (German), Wintershall (German), Engie (French), OMV (Austrian) and Shell (English-Dutch). Neither Gazprom nor Nord Stream 2 are financially at risk at the moment and the Russian group has already announced that it will take the fine to court.

Poland is of course now aware that their attempts to fine the Nord Stream 2 project will amount to nothing. The aim of the Polish government is not so much to force a large sum of money from Gazprom in the long term, but rather to bury the pipeline project entirely. And this is the part where Warsaw has grossly miscalculated, not only European reactions, but Russian determination.

The goal to cancel Nord Stream 2 also explains why Polish authorities published their decision last week. Relations between the EU and Russia are extra strained because of the Navalny case and the situation in Belarus. France and Germany are working on new sanctions against Russia for the Navalny case and continue to apply pressure against Belarus.

Another question is how effective these measures will be. Sanctions have long degenerated into ambiguity as it is the usual way the West deals with Moscow. Russia has learnt how to adjust their economy accordingly, meaning that sanctions have turned into a farce. The West is regularly expanding its blacklists of sanctioned companies and private individuals, but there has been no significant effect. Political forces with a keen interest in the failure of Nord Stream 2 are plentiful in the West and they are currently advancing the Navalny case in the hope that it will cut the EU from Russia more strongly or permanently. This will not occur as Europe desperately needs Russian energy, which is why Nord Stream 2 is such a critical project for all involved.

https://lockerdome.com/lad/13084989113709670?pubid=ld-dfp-ad-13084989113709670-0&pubo=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com&rid=www.zerohedge.com&width=890

Poland plays the main role in trying to cancel Nord Stream 2 and the decision by UOKiK is just another push to finally get Europe to abandon the pipeline project. According to a joint declaration by France and Germany, measures are currently being prepared for those alleged to be responsible in the Navalny case and their participation in the so-called Novichok program.

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Despite these measures, Western Europe is bringing its energy project which is important for its own future out of the danger zone, while Poland is attracting even more displeasure from EU giants through its own operation. A penalty against Gazprom may be a Russian problem, but fines against leading corporations from Germany, France, the Netherlands, Great Britain and Austria are guaranteed to leave many of Europe's biggest capitalist angered. The effort Warsaw is making to thwart Nord Stream 2 is visibly turning opposite to what they expected as there is little doubt the Nord Stream 2 project will come to fruition and completion.

me name=


[Oct 11, 2020] Putin on the US Presidential race and the myth that Trump, one of the most hostile to Russia presidents in history, is somehow a "Putin puppet"

Highly recommended!
The problem with American imperialism that like tiger it can't change its spots. In this sense Trump vs Biden is false dilemma. "Bothe aare worse" as Stalin quipped on the other occasion. Both still profess "Full Spectrum Dominance" doctrine at the expense of the standard of living of the USA people (outside of top 10 or 20%)
The problem with Putin statement is that both candidates are marionette of more powerful forces. Trump is a hostage of Izreal lobby, which in the USA are mostly consist of rabid Russophobes (look art Schiff, Schumer and other members of this gang). Biden is a classic neoliberal warmonger, much like Hillary was, who voted for Iraq war, contributed to color revolution in Ukraine, and was instrumental in the conversion of Dems into the second war party. So there is zero choice in the coming election unless you want to punish Trump for the betrayal of his electorate, which probably is the oonly valid reason to vote for Biden in key states; otherwise you san safely ignore the elections as youn; influence anythng. In a deep sense this is a simply legitimization procedure for the role of the "Deep State", not so much real elections as both cadidates were already vetted by neoliberal establishment
The key problem with voting for Bide is that this way you essentially legitimizing Obama administration RussiaGate false flag operation. But as Putin said, chances for extending the Start treaty might worse this self-betrayal.
Oct 11, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

Like much of the American public, the Russian public is no doubt weary of the prior couple years of non-stop 'Russiagate' headlines and wild accusations out of Western press, which all are now pretty much in complete agreement came to absolutely nothing. This is also why the whole issue has been conspicuously dropped by the Biden campaign and as a talking point among the Democrats, though in some corners there's been meek attempts to revive it, especially related to claims of "expected" Kremlin interference in the impending presidential election.

Apparently seeing in this an opportunity for some epic trolling, Russian President Vladimir Putin in an interview with Rossiya 1 TV days ago said it was actually the Democratic Party and the Communist Party which have most in common.

Putin was speaking in terms of historic Soviet communism in the recent interview (Wednesday) detailed in Newsweek. "The Democratic Party is traditionally closer to the so-called liberal values, closer to social democratic ideas," Putin began. "And it was from the social democratic environment that the Communist Party evolved."

"After all, I was a member of the Soviet Communist Party for nearly 20 years" Putin added. "I was a rank-and-file member, but it can be said that I believed in the party's ideas. I still like many of these left-wing values. Equality and fraternity. What is bad about them? In fact, they are akin to Christian values."

"Yes, they are difficult to implement, but they are very attractive, nevertheless. In other words, this can be seen as an ideological basis for developing contacts with the Democratic representative."

The Russian president also invoked that historically Russian communists in the Soviet era would have been fully on board the Black Lives Matter movement and other civil rights related causes. "So, this is something that can be seen, to a degree, as common values, if not a unifying agent for us," the Russian president said. "People of my generation remember a time when huge portraits of Angela Davis, a member of the U.S. Communist Party and an ardent fighter for the rights of African Americans, were on view around the Soviet Union."

So there it is: Putin is saying his own personal ideological past could be a basis of "shared values" with a Biden presidency, again, it what appears to be a sophisticated bit of trolling that he knows Biden won't welcome one bit. Or let's call it a 'Russian endorsement Putin style'. The Associated Press and others described it as Putin "hedging his bets", however.

Another interesting part of the interview is where the Russian TV presenter asked Putin the following question:

"The entire world is watching the final stage of the US presidential race. Much has happened there, including things we could never imagine happening before but the one constant in recent years is that your name is mentioned all the time," Zarubin said. "Moreover, during the latest debates, which have provoked a public outcry, presidential candidate Biden called candidate Trump 'Putin's puppy.'"

"Since they keep talking about you, I would like to ask a question which you probably will not want to answer," the interviewer continued. "Nevertheless, here it is: Whose position in this race, Trump's or Biden's, appeals to you more?"

And here's Putin's response:

"Everything that is happening in the United States is the result of the country's internal political processes and problems," Putin said. "By the way, when anyone tries to humiliate or insult the incumbent head of state, in this case in the context you have mentioned, this actually enhances our prestige, because they are talking about our incredible influence and power. In a way, it could be said that they are playing into our hands, as the saying goes."

But on a more serious note Putin pointed out that contrary to the notion some level of sympathy between the Trump administration and the Kremlin, much less the charge of "collusion", it remains that US-Russia relations have reached a low-point in recent history under Trump. The record bears this out.

Putin underscored that "the greatest number of various kinds of restrictions and sanctions were introduced [against Russia] during the Trump presidency."

"Decisions on imposing new sanctions or expanding previous ones were made 46 times. The incumbent's administration withdrew from the INF treaty. That was a very drastic step. After 2002, when the Bush administration withdrew from the ABM treaty, that was the second major step. And I believe it is a big danger to international stability and security," Putin explained.

"Now the US has announced the beginning of the procedure for withdrawing from the Open Skies Treaty. We have good reason to be concerned about that, too. A number of our joint projects, modest, but viable, have not been implemented – the business council project, expert council, and so on," he concluded.

But then on Biden specifically Putin said that despite "rather sharp anti-Russian rhetoric" from the Democratic nominee, it remains "Candidate Biden has said openly that he was ready to extend the New START or to sign a new strategic offensive reductions treaty."

"This is already a very significant element of our potential future cooperation," Putin added of a potential Biden presidency.

[Oct 11, 2020] About "The Insider":

Oct 11, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

MOSCOW EXILE October 10, 2020 at 12:18 am

About "The Insider":

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From Russian Wiki:

"The Insider" is a Russian online publication. Founded in November 2013 by a member of the movement "Solidarity" , a journalist and political activist of liberal-democratic orientation Roman Dobrokhotov , who is the editor-in-chief of the publication.


Dobrokhotov. As I live and breathe -- a "kreakl"!!!!

In September 2018, in collaboration with "Bellingcat" Eliot Higgins, "The Insider" conducted an investigation, allegedly publishing copies of official documents of the Russian Federal migration service for passport application in the name of Alexander Petrov, one of the suspects of the British authorities in the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal, which may indicate his connection with the Russian special services.

In February 2020, "The Insider", jointly with "Bellingcat"and "Der Spiegel", conducted an investigation and stated that the murder of Zelimkhan khangoshvili in Berlin in August 2019 was organized by the special unit of the FSB "Vimpel". They said that the FSB special assignment Centre was preparing a repeat killer, Vadim Krasikov, for this murder, and they also gave some details of Krasikov's movements around Europe.

On November 10, 2017, "The Insider" received from "The World Forum for Democracy" an award for innovation in democracy with the following wording:

"'The Insider' is an investigative publication that seeks to provide its readers with information about the current political, economic and social situation in Russia, while promoting democratic values and highlighting issues related to human rights and civil society. In addition, 'The Insider' carries out the project 'Antifake', the task of which is to systematically expose false news in the Russian media, which helps its audience to distinguish real information from false news and propaganda".

In 2019, "The Insider" and "Bellingcat" received the European Press Prize for establishing the identity of the two men allegedly responsible for the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal .

How drole! "The insider" likes to shout out "Fake!" yet seems to work closely with "Bellingcat".

[Oct 11, 2020] MARK CHAPMAN

Oct 11, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

October 10, 2020 at 3:30 am

Yes, I straightaway notified John Helmer to see if he is aware of these developments, and he says they are incorporated in this story, which I am just now reading myself (early morning on the MAYNE QUEEN for 'frontline workers' such as I).

http://johnhelmer.net/i-am-russia-navalny-story-collapses-in-self-contradiction/

Like Reply

JENNIFER HOR October 10, 2020 at 11:39 am

The French must be envious: while they have to tolerate Pavlensky with his arson stunts and sinister blackmailing of their politicians, the Germans only have to put up with Navalny who can't stop shooting his mouth off in a different direction every time he opens it. Although the day must be fast approaching when Berlin might wish Navalny silenced forever before he embarrasses his hosts even more. The irony would certainly be rich and furthermore, whatever transpires next against Navalny could parallel what happened to the Skripals in 2018. The difference is that Navalny may be walking into a trap with all eyes (and mouth) open. He will have only himself to blame if his hosts decide to get rid of him permanently.

ET AL October 10, 2020 at 11:17 am

Playing the devil's advocate, it could be that the bottle(s) were exfiltrated in another manner which in itself raises other questions.

But I would like to know the serial number of the bottle(s). That way they could be traced to whom the producers sold them to, so a) we can check whether in fact the hotel did purchase them whether directly or by an intermediary store, or not; b) whether they were bought elsewhere, i.e. the brand was noted at the hotel (during the recorded video 'discovery' performance) .

MARK CHAPMAN October 10, 2020 at 7:20 pm

I think you mean lot number.

MARK CHAPMAN October 10, 2020 at 2:48 pm

It kind of sounds like they are lawyering up, or getting legal advice about what Pevchikh's actions and movements prove. And so far, they're correct – a picture of her apparently buying a bottle of water or some other beverage from a machine proves nothing. She could have bought something entirely different, or just been standing in front of the machine. She also could have drunk the water on the plane and left the bottle there; that's quite true as well.

However, what do we have on their side? Video allegedly taken at the hotel in which they are seen bagging up empty water bottles. They must have been quote sure that was the piece of evidence they were looking for, since they took nothing else. And then what? There's no chain of custody, and nobody who was not there has any idea what happened to these bottles, or whether the ones allegedly delivered to the Bundeswehr or whoever are the same bottles allegedly taken from the hotel. There must have been no end of opportunities to open the bags – which are not proper custody envelopes, simply zip-loc bags which can be opened or closed any number of times without any indication that this has happened – and tamper with the contents. Nobody from Team Navalny other than The Bullshitter himself went into a coma or even showed any symptoms although they allegedly handled evidence which was liberally dusted with a weapons-grade nerve agent, and wore no personal protective equipment (PPE) other than rubber gloves. Detective Nick Bailey, who allegedly spent weeks in the hospital after touching a doorknob allegedly contaminated with the same nerve agent although he was wearing leather gloves, proved that gloves are no defense against Novichok.

Mind you, this latest iteration was apparently specially engineered to be slow-acting. So perhaps in a couple of weeks Pevchikh and/or Alburov will fall over jerking and drooling in the middle of a sentence. We'll just have to wait and see.


[Oct 11, 2020] The USA found new allies in gas war

Oct 11, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

MOSCOW EXILE October 10, 2020 at 6:28 am

RT
В МИД России назвали "Новичок" западным брендом
14:44

The Russian Foreign Ministry has called "Novichok" a Western brand
The chemical warfare agent called Novichok is a "purely Western brand" that has been synthesized and is present in Western countries in about 140 variants, Russia does not have it. This has been announced by the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

"We officially confirm that all chemical weapons in Russia were destroyed under the strictest international control. This time-consuming process was completed on September 27, 2017″, the foreign ministry has said in a statement.

They recalled that on October 11, 2017, the General Director of the OPCW's technical secretariat certified the final destruction of chemical weapons in the Russian Federation.

"As for the chemical warfare agent called "Novichok" in the West, its structure and mass spectrum were first presented in 1998 in the spectral database of the American Standards Institute (NIST 98). It is indicative that information on this substance came there from the research centre of the US Department of Defense", the ministry has stressed.

The ministry has added that subsequently, on the basis of this compound, a whole family of toxic chemicals had been formed that did not fall under the control of the CWC.

"They worked with it along with the Americans in no less than 20 Western countries". the statement says.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs has noted that the studies of Aleksei Navalny's biomaterials conducted in Omsk did not reveal the presence of traces of his poisoning with a chemical warfare agent.

"And the Charité doctors did not find them either. But the German military found them. Almost a week later", the department has said.

Earlier, the OPCW said that its experts had confirmed the presence of toxic substances in the samples of urine and blood taken from Navalny. According to the report, a substance had been found in his body, similar in characteristics to Novichok, but not on the list of prohibited chemicals.

The Russian diplomatic department has noted that this story has continued according to a pre-planned scenario, and promised to provide a chronology of "behind-the-scene manipulations of the main characters of this performance."

Note:

In 1997, the United States ratified the United Nations International Chemical Weapons Convention treaty. By participating in the treaty, the United States agreed to destroy its stockpile of aging chemical weapons -- principally mustard agent and nerve agents -- by April 29, 2007. However, the final destruction deadline was extended to April 29, 2012, at the Eleventh Session of the Conference of the States Parties to the Chemical Weapons Convention at The Hague on December 8, 2006 -- source .

The primary remaining chemical weapon storage facilities in the U.S. are Pueblo Chemical Depot in Colorado and Blue Grass Army Depot in Kentucky. These two facilities hold 10.25% of the U.S. 1997 declared stockpile and destruction operations are under the Program Executive Office, Assembled Chemical Weapons Alternatives. Other non-stockpile agents (usually test kits) or old buried munitions are occasionally found and are sometimes destroyed in place. Pueblo and Blue Grass are constructing pilot plans to test novel methods of disposal. The U.S. also uses mobile treatment systems to treat chemical test samples and individual shells without requiring transport from the artillery ranges and abandoned munitions depots where they are occasionally found. The destruction facility for Pueblo began disposal operations in March 2015. Completion at Pueblo is expected in 2019. Blue Grass is expected to complete operation by 2021 -- source .

MOSCOW EXILE October 10, 2020 at 6:42 am

Same story in Sputnik:

Moscow: Berlin Must Explain Situation With Navalny Under European Convention on Mutual Legal Aid
11:13 GMT 10.10.2020(updated 13:14 GMT 10.10.2020)

According to the ministry, the structure and mass spectrum of "Novichok," which is claimed to have been behind the poisoning of former double agent Sergei Skripal and opposition figure Alexey Navalny, were first revealed in the mass spectral database of the American Institute of Standards in 1998 (NIST 98).

And further:

The OPCW said on Tuesday that a substance similar to nerve agent Novichok, but not included on the lists of banned chemicals, had been found in Navalny's system. The German government believes the OPCW's statement actually confirmed the opposition activist's poisoning with a Novichok group substance but admits that the substance in question is not formally banned.

Russia has also said that the German Foreign Minister's address to lawmakers on the "Navalny case" shows that Moscow is still subject to propaganda attacks.

"As for Heiko Maas' thesis that Russia's claims against Germany and the OPCW are absurd, such remarks are outrageous and do not stand up to any criticism. All we want is to get legal, technical and organizational assistance both in the bilateral Russian-German format and via the OPCW in the interests of conducting a comprehensive, objective and unbiased investigation of all the circumstances of the incident that occurred with Alexey Navalny," the ministry said.

German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said earlier that Berlin will discuss with its OPCW and EU partners a general reaction to the incident with Navalny, adding that the EU may "very quickly" impose sanctions against those people who they believe are involved in the development of chemical weapons in Russia.

Russian Foreign Ministry's spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova, said earlier this week that the incident with Russian opposition figure Navalny was used just as a pretext for introducing sanctions against Russia that had long been in the works.

MARK CHAPMAN October 10, 2020 at 7:18 pm

But, as I probably need not mention again, the provocation has served its purpose already. The German Foreign Minister, who was once quite bellicose on the USA's bullying ways and, if not a friend of Russia, was at least telling America "You are not the boss of us" on the issue of energy projects with Russian partners, is now fighting with Russia and saying things that cannot be taken back. All thanks to that otherwise-useless grifter, the German-Russian relationship has suffered a serious blow. Merkel, the eternal pragmatist, will not be around forever and I would not be surprised at all to see her declining health take her out of politics altogether by the end of 2021, if she does not suffer a medical event which kills her. She is not a well woman. With her gone, the Atlanticists in the German government – who still constitute a significant influence – could well prevail, and dump Germany right back into Uncle Sam's lap. At the very best, in such an eventuality, Nord Stream II would be allowed to complete but the Germans would demand so much control over it that it would be just as if Washington was running it.

Time to complete it is not unlimited.


[Oct 10, 2020] Tell me again how Trump "doesn't want to start a new war": If Trump thinks that he can win re-election by panding to Zionist lonny, he might be mistaken

It time to make him accountable at the election box. Not that it matter much as Biden is yet another neocon and Zionist, but stil...
American people are tied of sliding standard of living, permanent wars and jingoism. Trump might share Hillary fate in 2020, because any illusion that he is for common fold, who voted for him in 2016 now disappeared. So he is not better then neocon Biden and Biden is new bastard. So why vote for the old bastard if we have new, who might be slightly better in the long run
This is a very expensive foreign policy, that doesn't benefit the USA. It has potential to raise the price of oil significantly.
Notable quotes:
"... Behind the move was pressure from the Zionist lobby. President Trump is in need of campaign funds and the lobby provides those. ..."
"... I can also see this green lighting Israeli or joint American-Israeli strikes on alleged Iranian nuclear weapons development sites and other military and petro-state assets. ..."
"... It's disgusting to watch the people of the US/UK/EU go along with this. Western elites are fat, lazy, vicious, and cruel. ..."
"... Paul wrote: "Perhaps a Biden administration would be just as much a Zionist captive as the Trump administration." Yes at least as much or more zionist. Nothing about Harris or Biden (or the DNC) says they won't be. ..."
"... I nominate president Eisenhower as slightly less zionist on one occasion: during the Anglo,French, Zionist Suez invasion of 1956 Eisenhower remarked after numerous UN resolutions condemning the bandit state's aggression ' Should a nation which attacks and occupies foreign territory in the face of United Nations disapproval be allowed to impose conditions on its withdrawal?' ..."
"... "The EU is trying to prop up the US Empire in response to its decline, instead of trying to free itself. " ..."
"... Donald Trump talked up his Iran policy in a profanity-laden tirade on Friday, telling conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh that Tehran knows the consequences of undermining the United States. ..."
"... "Iran knows that, and they've been put on notice: if you fuck around with us, if you do something bad to us, we are going to do things to you that have never been done before." ..."
Oct 10, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org
" Why U.S. Elections Do Not Change Its Foreign Policies | Main | The Ceasefire In Nagorno-Karabakh Is Unlikely To Hold " October 09, 2020 Europe And The New Sanctions On Iran

The U.S. has imposed new sanctions on Iran which will make ANY trade with the country very difficult:

[T]he Trump administration has decided to impose yet further sanctions on the country , this time targeting the entirety of the Iranian financial sector. These new measures carry biting secondary sanctions effects that cut off third parties' access to the U.S. financial sector if they engage with Iran's financial sector. Since the idea was first floated publicly , many have argued that sanctioning Iran's financial sector would eviscerate what humanitarian trade has survived the heavy hand of existing U.S. sanctions.

Behind the move was pressure from the Zionist lobby. President Trump is in need of campaign funds and the lobby provides those. The move is also designed to preempt any attempts by a potentially new administration to revive the nuclear agreement with Iran:

This idea appears to have first been introduced into public discourse in an Aug. 25, 2020, Wall Street Journal article by Mark Dubowitz and Richard Goldberg urging the Trump administration to "[b]uild an Iranian [s]anctions [w]all" to prevent any future Biden administration from returning to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the nuclear accord between Iran and the world's major powers on which President Donald Trump reneged in May 2018.

The new sanctions will stop all trade between the 'western' countries and Iran.

The Foreign Minister of Iran responded with defiance:

Javad Zarif @JZarif - 17:30 UTC · Oct 8, 2020

Amid Covid19 pandemic, U.S. regime wants to blow up our remaining channels to pay for food & medicine.

Iranians WILL survive this latest of cruelties.

But conspiring to starve a population is a crime against humanity. Culprits & enablers -- who block our money -- WILL face justice.

In response Iran will continue its turn to the east. Russia, China and probably India will keep payment channels with Iran open or will make barter deals.

The Europeans, who so far have not dared to counter U.S. sanctions on Iran, are likely to be again shown as the feckless U.S. ass kissers they have always been. They will thereby lose out in a market with 85 million people that has the resources to pay for their high value products. If they stop trade of humanitarian goods with Iran they will also show that their much vaunted 'values' mean nothing.

The European Union claims that it wants to be an independent actor on the world stage. If that is to be taken seriously this would be the moment to demonstrate it.

Posted by b on October 9, 2020 at 16:37 UTC | Permalink

Thomas Minnehan , Oct 9 2020 17:11 utc | 3
Unconscionable but what is new with pompass and his ghouls; treasury dept responsible for cranking up the sanctions program was formerly headed by a dual citizen woman who resigned suddenly after being exposed as an Israeli citizen-not hard to understand that sentiment in that dept has not changed.

The other aspect here is the FDD as key supporter of these severe sanctions; very virulent anti-Iranian vipers nest of ziocons with money bags from zionist oligarch funders.

karlof1 , Oct 9 2020 17:14 utc | 4
Ho-hum. As I wrote earlier, just the daily breaking of laws meaning business as usual. As noted, Russia has really upped the diplomatic heat on EU and France/Germany in particular, and that heat will be further merited if the response is as b predicts from their past, deplorable, behavior.

Much talk/writing recently about our current crisis being similar in many ways to those that led to WW1, but with the Outlaw US Empire taking Britain's role. I expect Iran's Iraqi proxies to escalate their attacks aimed at driving out the occupiers. IMO, we ought to contemplate the message within this Strategic Culture editorial when it comes to the hegemonic relationship between the Outlaw US Empire and the EU/NATO and the aims of both. The EU decided not to continue fighting against the completion of Nord Stream, but that IMO will be its last friendly act until it severs its relations with the Outlaw US Empire. With the Wall moved to Russia's Western borders, the Cold War will resume. That will also affect Iran.

james , Oct 9 2020 18:33 utc | 13
thanks b... it is interesting what a pivotal role israel plays in all of this... and why would there be concern that biden would be any different then trump in revoking the jcpoa? to my way of thinking, it is just pouring more cement and sealing the fate of the usa either way, as an empire in real decline and resorting to more of the same financial sanctions as a possible precursor to war.. frankly i can't see a war with iran, as the usa would have to contend with russia and china at this point... russia and china must surely know the game plan is exactly the same for them here as well.. as for europe, canada, australia and the other poodles - they are all hopeless on this front as i see it... lets all bow down to the great zionist plan, lol...
Daniel , Oct 9 2020 18:48 utc | 14
Yeah but at least Trump didn't start any new wars. /s

The Eurotools in Brussels are absolutely disgusting. A weaker bunch of feckless, milquetoast satraps is difficult to imagine. The EU perfectly embodies the 21st century liberal ethic: spout virtue signaling nonsense about peace, freedom, human rights and the "rules based international order" while licking the boots of Uncle Scam and the Ziofascists and going along with their war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Russia and China need to step up their game and boldly circumvent the collective punishment sanctions that are choking the life out of Iran, Syria and Venezuela. They still let the rogue states of the west get away with far too much.

augusto , Oct 9 2020 18:52 utc | 15
The Teheran men will not surrender to the yankee herds and hordes. And less so the telavivian.
It s easy to see that in the medium run this cruelly extended crime plays in chinese, russian and shia hands.
And they must start immediately a backlash handing hundreds of special forces and weapons opver to the Houthi hands.
Paco , Oct 9 2020 18:54 utc | 17
the Cold War will resume

The Cold War never ended.

Stonebird , Oct 9 2020 19:20 utc | 20
Of course there is a war on, and it has been gathering force for some time.

Iran is but one more skirmish or battle. However, Xi and Putin are using what I call the "Papou yes". You must always say "yes" as this way you avoid direct conflict, but then you go and do exactly what you were going to do in the first place . The person who does the demanding - having had his/her demands "met" has nothing further to add and will go away. (I have seen this effective technique in action).

At the moment it appears that the aim of the subversive (military/CIA/NGO) wings of the Empire are to start as many conflicts as possible. To isolate and overextend Russia, leading to it's collapse. (As they claim to have done before.)

The "Alternative axis" is just carrying on with it's own plan to overextend and eventually let the US dissolve into its own morasss. The opposition are trying to follow their own plan without giving an opening for the US/NATO to use its numerical military advantage, by not taking the bait.

The ultimate battle is for financial control of the worlds currency, or in the case of the US, to halt the loss of it's financial power. To avoid that The next step could be the introduction of a Fed. owned controlled and issued "digi-dollar", When all outstanding "dollar assets" are re-denominated into virtual misty-money which is created exclusively by the Fed. Banks become unnecessary as the Fed becomes the only "lender" available, Congress redundant, debts no longer matter and so on. Who cares about the reserves held by China and overseas "investors" if their use or even existence can be dictated by the Fed?
They have already published a "trial balloon" about introducing a digi-dollar.

Iran? the US is throwing ALL its cards into what looks like it's final battle to preserve the dollars supremacy. Why cut ALL the Iranian financial system out of their sphere of influence? Because it (thinks) it can and by doing so cower the wavering into obeying.

AtaBrit , Oct 9 2020 19:28 utc | 21
Thanks 'b', very well timed. I was actually heading to the open thread with this article until I saw your piece. This Asia Times article focuses on three key points:

- Iran has replaced the dollar with the Yuan as its main foreign currency
"This may become the east wind for the renminbi (yuan) and provide a new oil currency option for traders in oil-producing countries, including Iran," an editorial on qq.com said. "

- Several large banks in Iran are developing a gold encrypted digital currency called PayMon and had issued more than 1,000 crypto-currency mining licenses, which could promote the development of crude oil. Domestic traders use cryptocurrency to import goods and bypass American banks.

- The Iranian-Swiss Joint Chamber of Commerce
"Switzerland had received a special exemption from US supervisory authorities to allow the SHTA operations."

It remains to be seen how effective the Swiss Humanitarian Trade Agreement actually is. Some say it is nothing but a US propaganda stunt. Hopefully, that is not the case.

Richard Steven Hack , Oct 9 2020 20:37 utc | 31
Sure. Tell me again how Trump "doesn't want to start a new war." Morons.
William Gruff , Oct 9 2020 20:50 utc | 32
What does Iran need that they cannot get from China and Russia? The USA has cheap corn, and the EU has... what, cheese? Other than that I don't see why Iran needs to trade with the empire and its more servile vassals anyway.
Tollef Ås/秋涛乐 , Oct 9 2020 20:55 utc | 33
Strange, that ther is a jewish or Israeki ´ animosity agains Iran (or agains tthe Medtans -- as thy are all named in all Greek records(H, that theer is a jewish animosity against, that ther is a jewish anikisit agains Iran (or the Medtans -- as thy are old ptt in all Greek Strenge(Hellemistic) tales, Cyrur+s the Great is reported to have liberatet the Jews of Babilon end sent them back to Jerusalem . So, "PRIMO SON VENETANO, SECUNDO SON CHRISTANO" -- STILL A COMMONLY ACCEPTED SAYING INVENEZIA WHEB I VISITED ABD AKED IT IN THE THE YEAR OF 1´2917! Iran (or the Medtans -- as thy are old ptt in all Greek Strenge(Hellemistic) tales, Cyrur+s the Great is reorted to have liberatet te´he Jews of Babilon end sent them back to Jerusalem . So, "PRIMO SON VENETANO, SECUNDO SON CHRISTANO" -- STILL A COMMONLY ACCEPTED SAYING INVENEZIA WHEB I VISITED ABD AKED IT IN THE THE YEAR OF 1´2917! ellenistic) tales, Cyrur+s the Great is reorted to have liberatet te´he Jews of Babylon end sent them back to Jerusalem . So, "PRIMO SON VENETANO, SECUNDO SON CHRISTANO" -- STILL A COMMONLY ACCEPTED SAYING INVENEZIA WHEB I VISITED ABD AKED IT IN THE THE YEAR OF 2017
Paco , Oct 9 2020 21:05 utc | 34
Quite impressed with all the theories about Europe and its behavior. The answer is very simple, Europe is occupied by a foreign power, it is a colony. And all the qualifiers are quaint.
davenitup , Oct 9 2020 21:09 utc | 35
It's the world's loss that great cultures like the Persians have been suppressed for so long. The madness needs to end.
Passer by , Oct 9 2020 21:11 utc | 36
Posted by: Red Ryder | Oct 9 2020 20:06 utc | 23

I disagree. What did the EU did on Iran, compared to Russia and China? It stopped most trade with Iran, including the purchase of iranian oil, and it stopped all investment projects. INSTEX is a joke. Meanwhile Germany recently banned Hezbollah.

Yes, they did vote for the JCPOA in the UN. I look at actions rather than words though, and EU has imposed de facto sanctions on Iran.

Moreover, German FM Maas told Israel recently that efforts are underway to keep the Iran arms embargo. (He is also a big "Russia fan" - sarc off)

In other words, we "support" the JCPOA, but in practice with arms and trade embargoes on Iran continuing.

Yeah right.

Posted by: powerandpeople | Oct 9 2020 20:15 utc | 24

No, its not so simple, unless you claim that european russophobia started with the US and did not exist before it. Guy Mettan has a good book on it. It is a thousand years old issue, involving Catholicism, France, Germany, Sweden, Britain, and others.

Yes, the US wants to divide the EU and Russia. But the EU itself is rotten from within.

Politics are more important than the economy, German Chancellor Merkel said in relation to Russia.

"Drang nach Osten" - "Drive to the East".

Germany dreams of capturing Eastern Europe and using is as some sort of colonised labor pool similar to what Latin America is for the US.

And this is why the EU, without any prodding, eagerly took the lead in the attempt of colour revolution in Belarus, where it played far bigger role than the US.

m , Oct 9 2020 21:24 utc | 37
I have to disagree with your assessment.

Signing and adhearing to the JCPOA turned Europe and Iran from opponents into partners. This is a great diplomatic achievement. However, no part of the JCPOA made the two allies or obliged the European side to wage an economic war with the USA on behalf of Iran. On the contrary, the Iranians would be the first to say they are no friends of Europa. They have been complaining about "Western meddling" in their region for years. (Note that they don`t differentiate but always speak collectively of "the West").

So that`s their chance to show the world how much of a sovereign nation they are and that they can handle their problems without the "meddling" of the "despicable" Europeans. There is no obligation - neither legal nor moral - for Europe to take the side of Iran in the US-Iran conflict.

And actually it is both sides - both Iran and the USA - who are unhappy with the current European neutrality.

_K_C_ , Oct 9 2020 21:31 utc | 38
Thanks to MoA for being one of the only honest brokers of news on Iran in the English language. As an American citizen living abroad (in EU) I have a more jaded and at the same time worried feeling about this.

Along with all the other stuff, including the current threat to close the U.S. embassy in the Iraqi "Green Zone" and the accompanying military maneuvers, which would spark war in the region, I see this hardening and expansion of sanctions as yet the next clue that the U.S. and Donald Trump's regime are looking toward re-election and a hot war with/on Iran. Rattling the cage ever more and backing Iran into the corner with brutal, all-encompassing sanctions is already an act of war, usually the first prior to bombs falling. I can also see this green lighting Israeli or joint American-Israeli strikes on alleged Iranian nuclear weapons development sites and other military and petro-state assets.

I hope I'm wrong but we've all seen this before and it never ends well. If the EU shows a spine, or more likely Russia and/or China step in directly, perhaps the long desired neocon/neolib/Zionist hot war against Iran can be avoided.

Perimetr , Oct 9 2020 21:32 utc | 39
I think it is very important for the US to kill another 500,000 children via sanctions, in order to demonstrate the importance of freedom and democracy and observing international law.
AriusArmenian , Oct 9 2020 21:48 utc | 40
While reading this post I was thinking what MoA wrote in the last two paragraphs. And also that Iran will just continue to turn to China, Russia, and others in the East.

It's disgusting to watch the people of the US/UK/EU go along with this. Western elites are fat, lazy, vicious, and cruel.

claudio , Oct 9 2020 22:17 utc | 41
@17 passer by
(and others)
"Europeans can not be helped. Ironically, it is their own rejection of their WW2 past that causes them to reject the multipolar world and sovereignty as "primitive things from the past"

plus, as you point out elsewhere, there are longer histories at play: the Crusades against the Slavs, the Moors and the Turks (and the Arabs, in fact), the invention of "western civilization" in the 19th century (Arians vs Semites, Europe vs Asia, ecc) ...

plus, there is the persisting aspiration for world domination, partly frustrated by WW1 and the upheavals of the XXth century, which transformed the UK and the whole of Europe (with Japan, Australia, etc) in a junior partner of the new US Empire

(that's the other lesson learned from WW2: no single european power could dominate the continent and the world, but they could dominate as junior partners under the new young leader of the wolf pack, the US)

plus, there are is a class war that can be better fought, by national oligarchies, within globalist rethoric and rules

plus, there are the US deep state instruments of domination over european national states

but Europeans (and Usaians) do understand the language of force, and they have - at the moment - encountered a wall in their attempts at expansion, in Iran, China, Russia, Venezuela, ecc; an alternative multipolar alliance is taking shape

so they might attempt to win a nuclear war by 20 million deaths to 2 (or 200 to 20, who cares), but they might also decide to tune down their ambitions and return to reality; maybe

wj2 , Oct 9 2020 23:28 utc | 45
@m (#35)
EU promised to uphold JCPOA. They can't because of the US and they are doing next to nothing to change that. EU isn't neutral. They are stooges. Iran is right to complain about it, the US isn't.
Boss Tweet , Oct 9 2020 23:54 utc | 48
Trump is a man of peace, he hasn't started any new wars - whatever that means, lol.

As far as I know economic blocade is tantamount to war. If he wins reelection expect renewed kinetic attacks on venezuela and Iran. He's already lined up his zionist coalition with arabic satraps to launch his Iran quagmire. Trump is a deal maker, he understands the economy and will bring back manufacturing jobs to Murikkka, lol. I'm sure Boeing execs in deep trouble would love to sell plane to the Iranians but Mr. MIGA just made that impossible. Nothing to worry about, there's always the next socialist bailout for Boeing funded by taxpayers - suckers as Trump would call them. So much for winning, can't fix deplorable and stupid...

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/08/iran-deal-fallout-boeing-may-lose-20-billion-in-aircraft-deals.html

Btw b, Trump's opposition to the Iran deal has nothing to do with money or the zionist lobby. Stable genius opposed JCPOA in 2015 even before announcing his run for the presidency. It's not about the mula but all about the mollah's, lol: The Donald in his own words at a tea party event in 2015
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bIDNonMDSo8

kooshy , Oct 10 2020 0:00 utc | 49
Ever since the Iranian revolution of 1979 multiple US regimes in DC have been totally successful in making majority Iranian people everywhere in the world, understand that the US is their chronic strategic enemy for decades to come. At same time, these US regimes have equally been as successful in making American people believe Iran is their enemy.
The difference between this two side's belief is, that, Iranian people by experiencing US regime' conducts have come to their belief, but the American people' belief was made by their own regime' propaganda machinery. For this reason, just like the people to people relation between the US and Russian people, Before and after the fall of USSR the relation between US and Iran in next few generations will not come to or even develop to anything substantial or meaningful. One can see this same trajectory in US Chinese relations, or US Cuban. Noticeably all these countries relation with US become terminally irreparable after their revolutions, regardless of the maturity or termination of the revolution. As much as US loves color revolutions, US hates real revolutions. The animosity no longer is just strategic it has become people to people, and the reason and blame goes to Americans since they never were ready to accept the revolutions that made nations self-servient to their interests. The bottom line truth is the US / and her poodles in europe know, ever since the revolution Iran no longer will be subservient to US interests.
Hermius , Oct 10 2020 0:23 utc | 51
This is leverage to bargain away the oil pipeline to germany. That is what is behind it. You scratch my back, the US is saying to the EU, in particular, Germany....
karlof1 , Oct 10 2020 0:25 utc | 52
It's an Economy based on Plunder! , so that's why sanctions here, there and everywhere!! But the real problem is we aren't participating in the Plunder!! Sometimes you gotta use extreme sarcasm to explain the truth of a situation, and that's what Max and Stacey do in their show at the link. 13 minutes of honest reporting about the fraudulent world in which we live. As for Jerome Powell, current Fed Chair, he's complicit in the ongoing criminal activity just as much as the high ranking politicos. Bastiat laid it out 180 years ago, but we're living what he described now. And that's all part of what I wrote @40 above. The moral breakdown occurred long ago but took time to perfect.
joey_n , Oct 10 2020 0:34 utc | 54
Patrick Armstrong did a Sitrep article last month
https://patrickarmstrong.ca/2020/09/24/russian-federation-sitrep-24-september-2020/
where he cited an article on Sputnik titled "Macron: Europe 'Will Not Compromise' With Washington on Iran Sanctions"
https://sputniknews.com/world/202009221080541258-macron-europe-will-not-compromise-with-washington-on-iran-sanctions/
Make of it what you will.
Xingu , Oct 10 2020 0:46 utc | 55
I think it is crazy that EU allows US to manage SWIFT to the point they invent new entities to sidestep SWIFT and US sanctions (which are weak and ineffective, but that is the trajectory of their weak attempts at independence). Force SWIFT to equally service all legal transactions according to EU law, and let US cut itself off from all international financial transfers if it doesn't like using EU's SWIFT. US corps won't allow that to happen, it's just that EU refuses to call US bluff. Of course they are now praying for Biden presidency, but if they can't assert themselves it is all ultimately the same thing.
dh , Oct 10 2020 1:17 utc | 58
These 'foreign policy experts' think the trade war with China has been a mistake. But they think Trump is too soft on Russia and he hasn't been tough enough on NK, Iran and Venezuela.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/foreign-policy-experts-rebuke-trump-administration-for-policies-that-emboldened-rivals-alienated-allies-135205214.html

Paul , Oct 10 2020 1:34 utc | 59
It has become a standard trick for outgoing US administrations to saddle the incoming administration with set in stone policies and judicial appointments.

"Behind the move was pressure from the Zionist lobby. President Trump is in need of campaign funds and the lobby provides those. The move is also designed to preempt any attempts by a potentially new administration to revive the nuclear agreement with Iran."

Perhaps a Biden administration would be just as much a Zionist captive as the Trump administration.

The danger for the world is the Trump administration may go even further than additional sanctions. So I refer to the previous post, US policy remains the same whatever bunch are the frontmen.

Theodore Herzl even tried to drag Kaiser Wilhelm11 into the Zionist spider web: https://middleeastrealitycheck.blogspot.com/2008/07/theodor-herzl-first-photoshopper.html

When that attempt failed they worked on convincing the Sultan of Turkey to give them someone else's homeland. The Zionist Zealot Mr Kalvariski became the administrator of the Palestine Jewish Colonization Association with the aim of establishing a jewish suprematist ghetto. Following that flop the Zionists turned to the hapless British and were rewarded by Balfour with his notorious British government double cross of the Arabs. Now it's the turn of the US and assorted captive nations to uphold and support tyranny and Talmudic violence.

Crush Limbraw , Oct 10 2020 1:59 utc | 60

I am SLOWLY coming to the conclusion that DaTrumpster understands DaDeepState better than any of us armchair pundits. His patient - and yes, perhaps faulty strategy - he's still standing after ALL DaCrap that's been thrown at him.
All the 'EXPURTS' - including MoA - can only see part of DaPicture at best.

I've been as hard on DaTrumpster as anyone on DaConservative side - but I am SLOWLY coming to understand WTF just might be going on.

Point - don't be too sure of your immediate inclinations - we ALL see through DaGlass DARKLY!

Don Bacon , Oct 10 2020 2:27 utc | 61
SWIFT is only a messaging system – SWIFT does not hold any funds or securities, nor does it manage client accounts. Behind most international money and security transfers is the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications (SWIFT) system. SWIFT is a vast messaging network used by banks and other financial institutions to quickly, accurately, and securely send and receive information, such as money transfer instructions.
Sunny Runny Burger , Oct 10 2020 2:29 utc | 62
Paul wrote: "Perhaps a Biden administration would be just as much a Zionist captive as the Trump administration." Yes at least as much or more zionist. Nothing about Harris or Biden (or the DNC) says they won't be.

And hasn't it always been that way from one president to the the next? Was there ever one that was less zionist than the predecessor? (Maybe they're all so close this is an impossible question to answer, that too could be the case).

The sitting executive branch gives the favors right now and anyone incoming gives the favors after they win and thus each election becomes a double windfall for the lobby group?

A zionist double dip . Maybe most US voters could grasp it like that.

I can't back this up (much like my previous comment in this thread) but it's my impression. It would probably take a lot of work to make sure it's right; one would have to scrutinize so much over so many decades.

Paul , Oct 10 2020 3:29 utc | 63
@Sunny Runny Burger 60

I nominate president Eisenhower as slightly less zionist on one occasion: during the Anglo,French, Zionist Suez invasion of 1956 Eisenhower remarked after numerous UN resolutions condemning the bandit state's aggression ' Should a nation which attacks and occupies foreign territory in the face of United Nations disapproval be allowed to impose conditions on its withdrawal?'

This could be a useful quote for todays world.

Later, in 1964, Eisenhower approved his hand picked emissary's US $150 million so called Johnston Plan to steal the waters of the Jordan River and further marginalize the Palestine Arabs and surrounding Arab states.

ARI , Oct 10 2020 3:36 utc | 64
Sanctions aren't the story. Once all the players have left the JCPOA, either Israel or the US can claim Iranians are at the point of producing a nuclear weapon. Without the JCPOA and inspections of Iranian nuclear facilities it will be impossible to prove or deny the allegations. Thus giving either the US or Israel justification it wants to conduct military strikes against Iran. The only things stopping this from happening is if the EU stays in the JCPOA...
_K_C_ , Oct 10 2020 3:53 utc | 65
Fully agree with ARI | Oct 10 2020 3:36 utc | 62

Exactly the aim. I said so in an earlier post. This is all part of the program to create a false justification to conduct military strikes inside Iran. At this point, I'm really surprised that the U.S. even tries to construct these narratives after Obama's Syria and Libya operations didn't even really bother, save for a few probably fake "chemical weapons" attack they alleged Assad committed. Libya I don't remember hearing anything. The embassy maybe? After the Soleimani strike and the shootdown of the U.S. drone, not to mention the alleged Iranian attacks on ARAMCO's oil facilities, I'm really quite surprised something more serious (not to minimize the awful acts of war which the sanctions definitely are) hasn't already happened. It will soon, especially if Trump gets re-elected. Wonder what all of his "no new wars" supporters will say then?

Everybody reading knows what SWIFT is. That's a nice attempt to circumscribe the overall sanctions regime and paint it as "no big deal."

Crush Limpbro - Checked out your site. You've got a long way to go before you can criticize MoA. Hope that comment draws a few clicks to keep you going, but I would caution other barflies to use a proxy; could be a honey trap to collect IP addresses.

El Cid , Oct 10 2020 4:10 utc | 66
This United States imposed and Zionist inspired siege on Iran and its people will only further strengthen the political and economic bonds with Russia and China. Meanwhile, the US collapses from its internal social limitations and its abandonment of public healthcare responses to the Corvid 19 pandemic. Europe it close behind the US in this respect.
ARIES , Oct 10 2020 4:17 utc | 67
IRGC Commander-In-Chief: U.S. Is Incapable Of Waging War Against Iran, Its Weapons Are Outdated:

https://toranja-mecanica.blogspot.com/2020/10/irgc-commander-in-chief-us-is-incapable.html

Paul , Oct 10 2020 4:20 utc | 68
ARI @62

What exactly is this 'Justification'.. . 'to conduct military strikes against Iran' that you refer to hasbara boy? Failure to obey foreign imposed zionist diktats?

Would this 'justification' apply to the bandit state if it refused to abide by the NNPT for example?
No double standards pass the test here.

kiwiklown , Oct 10 2020 4:42 utc | 69
Yet another proof that "Western values" and their "rules based international order" mean exactly nothing.

In the past, the West at least kept up some pretense that it was wrong to target unarmed civilians (still, they flattened Driesden; Hiroshima; North Korea, Vietnam, Laos). Today, they do not care to be seen openly, cruelly, brutally, sadistically killing civvies. These American bastards say, "... it is not killing if the victims drop dead later, like, not right now. " Or, "... it became necessary to destroy Iran in order to save Iran."

Iran is perfectly correct to call this a crime against humanity for the West to starve a population of food and medicine. This will boomerang just as the opium-pushing in China will boomerang on the West.

Meanwhile, just as those drug-pushing English bastards earned themselves lordships and knighthoods; just as presidential bastards retire to their Martha Vineyard mansions; so the current crop of bastards in American leadership will retire to yet more mansions, leaving the next couple generations to meet Persian wrath. The American way is to "win" until they are tired of winning, no?

But in truth, in objective reality, only those who have lost their human-ness are capable of crimes against humanity.

michaelj72 , Oct 10 2020 4:50 utc | 71
The US is cruising for a bruising in the middle east fucking with Iran like this. Not that the US hasn't deserved a good knockout punch the past 19 years since invading and destroying Afghanistan and Iraq, etc, etc. Regardless of their rhetoric, how the European rogues and rascals (France, Germany and the UK) can sleep at night is beyond me.
snake , Oct 10 2020 7:00 utc | 75
Yes Psychochistorian @ 1, At the nation state level, EU support for blockade terror and sanction torture (BT&ST), against reluctant nation states and non compliant individuals within those nation states, logically suggests EU nation states are not independent sovereign countries <=EU nation states exist in name only? Maybe its just like in the USA, these private monopoly powered Oligarcks (PMPO), own everything (privately owned copyrights, patents, and property) made possible by rules nation states turn into law. The citizens of those privately owned EU nation states are victims <=in condition=exploitable. Maybe PMPOs use nation states <=as profit support weapons, to be directed against <=any and all <=competition, whereever and however <=competition appears.

The hidden suspects <=capital market linked crowds through out the world..

Media is 92% owned by six private individuals, of the seven typical nation state layers of authority and power: 5 are private and two are public. Additionally, few in the international organizations have allegiance to historic cultures of the nation state governed masses. It is as if, the named nation states are <=threatened by knee breaking thugs, but maybe its not threat, its actual PMPO ownership.

If one accepts PMPO <=to be in control of all of USA and all of allied nation state, one can explain <=current BT&ST events. But private Oligarch scenarios <=raise obvious questions, why have not the PMPO challenged East eliminated <=Israel, MSM propaganda repeatedly blames or points to Israel <=to excuse the USA leaders for their BT&ST policies. Seems the PMPO are <=using the nation states, they own <=to eliminate non complying competition.

What is holding the East back? Russia and China each have sufficient oil, gas and technology to keep things functional, so why has not the competition in the East taken Israel out, if Israel is directing the USA to apply BT&ST against its competitors? Why is the white House so sure, its BT&ST policies will not end up destroying Israel? Maybe because Israel has no real interest <=in the BT&ST policy <=Israel is deceptions:fall guy? The world needs to pin the tail on the party driving USA application of BT&ST because no visible net gain to Governed Americans seems possible from BT&ST policies?

I think Passer @ 17 has hit the nail on its head. "The EU is trying to prop up the US Empire in response to its decline, instead of trying to free itself. "

Norwegian , Oct 10 2020 7:11 utc | 76
@ARI | Oct 10 2020 3:36 utc | 62
Sanctions aren't the story. Once all the players have left the JCPOA, either Israel or the US can claim Iranians are at the point of producing a nuclear weapon.

So you put that forward as a justification for attacking Iran militarily, but that means according to your logic you also have justification for attacking Israel or the US militarily. The rules are the same for all, right?

robin , Oct 10 2020 8:12 utc | 77
Economic warfare is certainly effective. However, time is running out for these weapons as America's lock on the world economy grows weaker. With a rapidly approaching expiry date, the word out may be to use em or lose em.

In a zero-sum great game, it makes sense to deploy such weapons now insofar as an opponent's loss is always a gain for oneself.

jscott , Oct 10 2020 9:26 utc | 79
Donald Trump talked up his Iran policy in a profanity-laden tirade on Friday, telling conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh that Tehran knows the consequences of undermining the United States.

"Iran knows that, and they've been put on notice: if you fuck around with us, if you do something bad to us, we are going to do things to you that have never been done before."

Uncle Samuel is setting up a provocation for war.

uncle tungsten , Oct 10 2020 9:45 utc | 81
psychohistorian #1
What a shit show we are seeing. What is the next phase of this civilization war that is not a war because there are not enough dead bodies for some I guess?...but it sure looks like war to me.

Well for the first time in history Iran's symbolic "Red Flag" is still flying above the popular Jamkaran Mosque Holy dome. Perhaps the USA and its running dogs body count has risen in Iraq and Afghanistan? How would we know. These things are disguised from the fearless press in those countries ;)

Perhaps the dead and mangled are many but we do know that the US chief killer in Afghanistan was reduced to ashes immediately following General Shahid Qassem Suleimanis murder by the USA whilst on a diplomatic mission in Iraq.

In respect of b's observation above, the illegal occupier of Palestine is more likely tipping millions into the Harris Presidency as well as the possible Trump Presidency. I doubt either Harris or the biden bait and switch stooge would restore the JCPOA. Besides they would not be invited to sit at the table any time soon IMO. They would likely refuse to any conditions of reversing the sanctions and then carry on about all that 'unreasonable demands by a terrorist state' stuff etc etc.

No, Iran will be getting on with its future in a multilateral world where the United Nations has been reduced to pile of chicken dung by the USA while most other nations go along with global lunacy.


Circe , Oct 10 2020 12:56 utc | 87
You know what's telling about the bootlickers who hem and haw about U.S. policy with the T Administration, but never mention Trump as the real source of it even when profuse Zionist shit spills from his mouth on Limbaugh's show proving he's a Ziofascist pig?

What's telling is that these usual suspects jumped all over ARI @64 for zeroing in on Trump's precise intentions with Iran but they gave a pass to the real HASBARIST in the room, Crush Limbraw @60, exposing himself, putting his HARD-ON FOR TRUMP on full display.

@60 we ALL see through DaGlass DARKLY!
Speak for yourself- you Zionist MORON!

Ahhhhhh, you can always count on the DUPLICITY of MOA'S weathervane james and friends. Me, I ain't here to win a popularity contest like weathervane; I'm here to kick ass when I witness duplicity in action. My friend here is the truth that I'll defend to the grave.

********

Noooo, dum-dums Putin will not come to Iran's rescue when he's warm in bed with his Zionist Oligarchs and Russian squatters whom he pays homage to from time to time when he visits Ziolandia thanking them for choosing the stolen West Bank over Russia.

Iran knows that, and they've been put on notice. That's Trump blowhard driving the drumbeat.

Just rescue me from my self-destructive self for 4 more years, oh kings of Zion and Wall Street, and I'll give you WAR!!! all in CAPS with three exclamation points. The GREATEST war you've ever seen.

Linda Amick , Oct 10 2020 13:07 utc | 88
When I read the Great Reset article on the World Economic Forum website it seems to me that the western Globalists, in concert align the US and EU. That accounts for the basic vassal arrangements that predominate but allow for some nonalignments on certain issues.
Paco , Oct 10 2020 13:24 utc | 89
Posted by: vk | Oct 10 2020 0:58 utc | 56

That is precisely what the Belarusian authorities announced when Tikhanovskaya left Minsk, that she was helped in her way out, but we know how the MSM acts, they stick to their own script, just like a Hollywood movie.

The Belarusians must be watching with great attention what is happening in Kirguizia, riots and complete chaos, and thinking how lucky they were to avoid the color rev that was in the menu for them, which the same methods, discredit the oncoming election, claim fraud after it, use similar symbols like the clenched fist and the heart, new flag, start transliterating family and geographical names to a mythical and spoken by a very small minority language and then nobody knows if to spell Tikhanovskaya, Tsikhanouskaya or like the politically incorrect but street wise Luka called her, Guaidikha. And that is Kirguizia, how about a shooting war in Armenia and Azerbaijan, all those conflicts were unimaginable when the USSR existed, but the empire even on his way down is insatiable.

Circe , Oct 10 2020 13:25 utc | 90
@88 Linda Amick

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=RDPIAXG_QcQNU&feature=share&playnext=1

Paco , Oct 10 2020 13:35 utc | 91
Posted by: Circe | Oct 10 2020 12:56 utc | 87

There is over a million jews of Russian origin living in Israel, 20% of the population, with deep roots in Russia, language, culture and relatives. Do not let partisanship for the Dems blind you, a true successful leader is someone that defends his country's interests while at the same time tries to have good relations with everybody else, obviously that balance is not easy to achieve in a world full of conflicting interests, but so far Putin seems to be balancing his act while not loosing sight of the main thing, Russia.

Circe , Oct 10 2020 13:52 utc | 92
Paco, strange name for a Russiabot, oh well...

Nice way of putting: Putin belongs to the Zionist Club.

FYI, I'm not blind. I'm one of those special beings who was born with two extra eyes...in the back of my head.

Jackrabbit , Oct 10 2020 13:56 utc | 93
Circe @Oct10 12:56 #87
Putin will not come to Iran's rescue when he's warm in bed with his Zionist Oligarchs

If Putin is so close to Zionists, then why does Russia block the Zionist regime-change in Syria? Why has Russia denied Israel and USA entreaties to allow them to bomb Iran?

Russia Warns U.S. and Israel That Iran Is Its 'Ally' and Was Right About Drone Shoot Down

!!

Paco , Oct 10 2020 14:03 utc | 94
Posted by: Circe | Oct 10 2020 13:52 utc | 92

Not as strange as a mythological demigoddess that turned sailors into swain and that now enjoys to plunge into the mud with her creatures. A bot, what an easy label, it has lost any meaning.

Paco , Oct 10 2020 14:12 utc | 95
special beings who was born with two extra eyes...in the back of my head.

Alaska yellow fin sole, not bad, from Bristol Bay, but the Melva -a tunafish species with more oil in its meat- I cooked for lunch, just caught, has a lot more fish oil with its rich contents of vitamin D, add sunny Mediterranean weather and that is my pill for today, trying to keep the bug at bay.

expat , Oct 10 2020 14:39 utc | 96
Circe, why don't you do what your namesake would have done and whip yourself up some meds to calm down? You're starting to lapse into excessive use of upper case, italics, exclamation points, bolding, profanity, and of course, insults.

This may help. It looks like the orange man is in fact going down, so you will soon have Joe and Kamal empowered to dismantle the evil Putin-Netanyahu-Trump axis, and put the US back on the path to truth and justice.

Circe , Oct 10 2020 14:41 utc | 97
@93 Jackrabbit

It's called... lip service.

@94,95 Fransisco

A bot by any other name will smell as fishy. 🤭
Just messing with you!

ptb , Oct 10 2020 14:44 utc | 98
The unilateral and illegal-under-JCPOA sanctions mean it's time for EU to either confront the extraterritorial US policy it has clearly rejected in principle, or (more likely) acknowlege that it remains in practice just a collection of 'client states'. A sad moment for me, but useful for clarity.
Paco , Oct 10 2020 14:48 utc | 99
Posted by: Circe | Oct 10 2020 14:41 utc | 97

Hard to understand but you guys are incapable of spelling the name of a once great US city, San Francisco. I heard it has changed a lot, got to see long time ago, before the digital craze.

juliania , Oct 10 2020 15:51 utc | 100
This is a brief but subtle post by b, with quiet but telling headline. Perhaps, just guessing, a new take on the post he was having difficulty with earlier? The question of the EU is an interesting one - not to be considered as virulent as the former Soviet Union, but somehow as tugged at by the components thereof...

Sanctions on Iran? We do know what Iran is capable of; surely we have not forgotten? Indeed, by pressing these sanctions at this late date, the Trump administration surely has not forgotten either the effect sanctions had on Russia. They were postive to that country's independent survival, though the immediate effect was demonstrably harsh. So now, sanctions on Iran? One doesn't have to be a world leader to suppose similar cause, similar effect.

Ah, Paco has a wonderful meal of a beneficial fish called the Melva! Bravo, Paco; all is not lost! But you have hooked the sea-serpent as well -- take care! That one - carefully remove the hook and set it free ;)

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[Oct 10, 2020] Neocons are addicted to regime change like narcoaddicts to heroin

Oct 10, 2020 | www.theamericanconservative.com

Originally from: Another Opinion Columnist Pushing War With Iran Who Doesn't Actually Exist - The American Conservative

Tradcon • a month ago

Not very surprising to be honest, some people simply cannot go without regime change to the point where they have to parade people about who weren't even born in Iran and who have little to no support in the country as "dissidents" to try to guilt people into supporting intervention. Of course with that comes slander against those who warn against that, which unfortunately means TAC.

dragnet20 Tradcon • a month ago

Exactly--these folks are addicted to regime change like heroin. Ignoring them is one thing Trump absolutely got right during his first term.

Clyde Schechter dragnet20 • a month ago

Trump ignored them??? Hardly. He hired John Bolton as his national security advisor, and Rudy Giuliani is his personal attorney. Both of those guys are heavily tied to this organization and advocate its line. And while he did stop short of actually invading Iran, he was on the brink of doing so recently, talked out of it only at the last minute. I'll give him credit for not going all the way with them, but he's given them far too wide a berth and much too much influence in his foreign policy if you ask me.

Blood Alcohol Clyde Schechter • a month ago

He did not go all the way with them because he was told by the military and others, who take their jobs and missions to server the American people seriously, that his attacks on Iran - invasion was not "the table" at all - would face a humiliating defeat at the same level of what happened to his efforts to extend the weapons sanctions at the UNSC. Pompeo was sent home with his tail between his legs.

dragnet20 Blood Alcohol • a month ago

The idea that Trump would have invaded if allowed doesn't pass the smell test. He spent much of the 2016 railing against regime change and foreign wars. His recent instincts on this topic have been largely correct.

Carpenter E Clyde Schechter • a month ago

Trump did not want more war, and wanted to end the existing wars, that much is clear. At the same time as he believes the Israeli line about Iran. But he did not want war with Iran - he knows they would mine the Strait of Hormuz shut, and the U.S. economy would go into a depression along with the world economy. No president would survive that.

But, he has had to appease top donor *Sheldon Adelson, in order to prevent a GOP revolt in the Congress. The threat was always that they'd join the Democrats in impeaching him, that Mike Pence would call for the same, and people would leave his cabinet. So he caved by sanctioning Iran and destroying the lives of millions of people. And he had to appease Israel by taking Syria's oil fields via the Marxist Kurd mercenaries, and let them burn the wheat fields. But he did not start a war, and did not want a war.

J Villain Tradcon • a month ago

"The list of MEK disinformation tactics"

Lets be honest here. It isn't MEK disinformation tactics it is the tactics
of the US wrapped up and packaged as MEK. Just as Falon Gong is backed
by the CIA. MEK is a bunch of backwards ass hats with terrorist
tendencies. They are not some national level intelligence agency. This
is most likely crud made up by the US intelligence agencies sold as MEK
and pushed on the American people to convince them that Iran will be
dropping nuclear weapons on their house any minute now if they can stop
eating babies long enough, so they need to push their government to go
to WAR!!!!! with Iran and kill some Muslims. The gullibility of the
American people is why there will never be a time when they are not at
war.

Blood Alcohol J Villain • a month ago

Throw in "Saudi" Arabia and Israel, and France (the home of their leader) then you've got all of them in the same room.

Carpenter E J Villain • a month ago

Possibly, but the MEK does have an online presence and such. But of course, it is all with Washington's money, and Washington's assistance.

For those who don't know: The MEK is a Marxist-Islamist group that initially supported the Revolution, but turned against Ayatollah Khomeini as they didn't get to share power. Because no one liked them. And Marxists were not allowed in revolutionary Iran - the MEK was chased out along with the Soviet-installed communist party in northern Iran.

The MEK have been killing Iranian police, bureaucrats and local administrators. This is their "revolution". They kill people mainly with bombs. The present Ayatollah's left arm is withered after one of their bomb attacks.

The MEK have been killing Iranian physics professors and technicians. They kill them with car bombs in traffic - a motorbike with two killers drive up to a car by a traffic stop and attach a bomb with magnets. Of course, you can wonder where they got the bombs, and money and transport. This is classic Mossad strategy. Likewise, dozens of technicians and professors in Iraq have been murdered. Israel hopes for a counter-reaction which the U.S. can exploit.

Rest assured, the political opposition in Iran hates the Marxist-Islamist MEK as much as the government does. Which Washington and Israel don't acknowledge.

The MEK was housed by Saddam Hussein in an old military base. They had to leave Iraq eventually after the overthrow of Hussein. The U.S. then shipped them to a brand new training base in Albania. Crazy as it might seem. Albania's government is of course as eager to be a paid Washington agent as the Kurds are.

Absurdly, this explicitly terrorist group has been taken off the terror list by Washington. While Iran is called "terrorist" for helping Hezbollah, who formed to fight back when Israel invaded Lebanon and massacred Shia villagers in the south with artillery, because they lived close to the Palestinian refugee camps. And then kept fighting when Israel occupied part of southern Lebanon, Shia land, as a "buffer zone" for many years.

Carpenter E Carpenter E • a month ago

The MEK killed thousands of people, including Americans. But the Lobby always gets what it wants.

The MEK was founded in 1965 by three Islamic leftists with the goal of toppling the U.S.-supported regime of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.

In the 1970s it undertook a campaign of assassinating U.S. advisers and bombing U.S. corporations in Iran. It supported the 1979 Revolution in Iran, but in 1981 it turned its guns against the Tehran government and began a campaign of assassinations and terrorist operations that resulted in the death of thousands of Iranians, including the executions of its own supporters by government officials, soldiers, police officers, and ordinary people.

It then moved its headquarters to Iraq, made a pact with the regime of Saddam Hussein, which was fighting a ferocious war with Iran. The MEK spied on Iranian troops for Iraq, attacked Iran at the end of Iran-Iraq war with Hussein's support, and helped Hussein put down the uprisings by the Iraqi Kurds in the north and Shi'ites in the south after the Persian Gulf War of 1990-91.

The MEK is despised by the vast majority of Iranians for what they consider to be treason committed against their homeland.

disgustoo • a month ago

"As a matter of journalistic ethics any organization engaging in systematic dishonesty like this has provided a very good reason to blacklist them. ...This is not a matter of foreign policy differences: if you wish to see the U.S. pursue regime change in Iran, the MEK does not help make that case. Any publishers or think tanks who are aware of this dishonesty and still treat them like a legitimate opposition group should be considered part of a campaign not wholly different from the last time we were lied into a Mideast war."

If MEK does NOT help to make the case for regime change in Iran - & outside sponsored regime change is not ethical - then it would be unethical not to support them, in order to help prevent unethical regime change. Although that's probably not what horrible Hillary had in mind when, as Sec. of State in 2012, she de-listed them from the U.S. official list of terrorist organizations. But if anyone will lie "us" into a war with Iran, it will be AIPAC & innumerable other dishonest zionist organizations working on behalf of the Jewish terror state, & it's new Saudi terror state partner; both of whom look with favor on MEK as a bit partner in their joint effort to take out the government of Iran. MEK is pretty small potatoes compared to The Lobby, who are waging another campaign not wholly different from the last time they pushed us into a M.E. war to benefit lying israel.

Blood Alcohol Guest • a month ago

Why, do you "like" sock puppets"?!

Dodo • a month ago

Don't fall into this trap.

People tell you - You are a conservative, so do I. I support XYZ thus you should also support them.

Before the 2003 Iraqi War, Many then Bush administration officials and self-anointed "conservative opinion leaders" went on TV to lie to people to support their war. Today, we still suffer the consequence but they are preaching to us other wars.

Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.

Schopenhauer Dodo • a month ago • edited

In no way should the Bush administration's handling of the Iraq War be excused, nor should "conservative opinion leaders" be let off the hook, but the Congress was complicit, the Senate was complicit, the military was complicit, the intelligence community was complicit, and the majority of the electorate was complicit. Nobody cared whether the reason for the war was valid, people just wanted to vent their frustrations against terrorists on an unrelated Arab country that the US had already used as a whipping boy. What could happen?

Almost twenty years later and-- surprise! surprise!-- suddenly everyone recognizes the war for the folly it was. Some people, like Dreher, seem to have genuinely changed their stance based on what happened subsequently. But we'll all see what happens the next time the war mongers-- from both sides of the aisle and from all over the country-- start rattling their sabers.

IllinoisPatriot Schopenhauer • a month ago

Then there are the appeasers and anti-war peace-niks that would rather surrender than fight for liberty or that (if they are willing to fight) will on risk OTHER PEOPLE's (other American) lives, thus removing the need to ever put themselves at risk of learning what actually goes in in the countries they are so sympathetic to.

Charles IllinoisPatriot • a month ago • edited

"Then there are the appeasers and anti-war peace-niks that would rather surrender than fight for liberty"

Would you expound on that vis a vis current situations. Your sentence is straight out of the Vietnam era,

EliteCommInc. Charles • a month ago

The complete idiocy regarding Vietnam is the anti-war rhetoric surrounding. But has laid the framework for installing fear into anyone who doesn't tow the ridiculousness of what is argued by protesters -- which in every way has nearly every argument backwards.

Since the aggressors in Vietnam were the communists of four countries, it is very safe to say that those opposed to defending an independent S. Vietnam were in fact appeasing communist aggression and that is accurate.

The nation of Vietnam has rarely known peace and the lines during the conflict generally mark the region that separated the country's territorial history. The South Vietnamese sound reason to seek defend their territorial and political independence and we had sound reason to defend the same.

It was during that era that the liberal foundations showed their true colors. And if one doubt it --- just look at the anti-Vietnam advocates -- the managers of the Iraq and Afghanistan missteps and p[perhaps even worse their willingness to destroy the lives of anyone who challenged their rational based on the very case they made -- which was unsupportable.

There are some issues which simply are not really issues,

1. the lives of black people in the country and how they were/are socialized and the consequence

2.what the civil war was really about

3.Mexican invasion of US territory to retake territory they lost to band of squatters (lousy immigration enforcement) a war that is now taking place via our failure to enforce border protection.)

4.loss of the War of 1812
and

5. the colonial revolution and its justification

Blood Alcohol EliteCommInc. • a month ago • edited

"Since the aggressors in Vietnam were the communists of four countries, it is very safe to say that those opposed to defending an independent S. Vietnam were in fact appeasing communist aggression and that is accurate."
It's safe to say that BS like this is not hard to come by in the right wing nutjobs' circles. No Vietnamese had/has ever attempted to attack, invade, kill and spray Agent Orange anywhere in the US. So how come they became the aggressors?!
Viet Nam became truly independent AFTER expelling the American military.

Schopenhauer Blood Alcohol • a month ago

When it comes to discussing Vietnam with this guy-- it's Chinatown, there's nothing you can do.

Shiek Yerbooti Dodo • a month ago

If you're talking about Bush I think the quote is more like this:

"fool me once, shame on -- shame on you. Fool me -- you can't get fooled again."

Wallstreet Panic Dodo • a month ago

"There's an old saying in Tennessee -- I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee -- that says, fool me once, shame on -- shame on you. Fool me -- you can't get fooled again. You've got to understand the nature of the regime we're dealing with. This is a man who has delayed, denied, deceived the world." George W. Bush, September 17, 2002

chris chuba • a month ago

Bless you for writing this but you are spitting into the wind. There are too many people who want to believe this. The IRaq war analogy is apt. You have govt in exile types like MEK (remember Chalabi) who have a vested interest in lying to us. You have the hyper-pro Israel crowd and the newly accepted pro-Saudi crowd w/money to burn. I actually expect and don't begrudge foreigners for trying to get the U.S. into their fights. I resent the MSM that is simply in love with U.S. military conflicts who accuse people who oppose them of being anti-American, conspiracy theorists.

The most laughable example was CNN accepting the notion that Iran has a massive cyber presence in influencing our elections because our Intel Agencies told them so. Iran is detested by the U.S. public as we steal civilian cargo from them that would make the lives of people in other countries better. We sell the stolen goods for our benefit and call them terrorists for their trouble. To suggest that they have sway over us is laughable yet this passes for journalism.

Iran will be the next Iraq. If there is a God it will be the rock that breaks us. If not then a crime of shocking proportions.

Fletcher chris chuba • a month ago

I largely agree but I think there's room for optimism, the US military particular the army is largely a broken instrument, morale is not good except for the contractors, General maintenance is down in favor of expensive toys that largely do not work. For all of the bluster of this generation of sociopaths the military in general is a shadow of itself not to mention we live in times of a rising China and the reemergence Russia, neither of which would allow in on opposed attack on Iran.

Blood Alcohol Fletcher • a month ago

True, but the military has also been the biggest obstacle for tRump to make his Saudi/Israeli clients happy.

Fletcher Blood Alcohol • a month ago

How so? Our government seems to be providing the Saudi's with with as many bombs as they need, Air Force retirees to fly in the backseatair of Saudi planes, we have slowed down on the transfer of Thermo nuclear Technology as well as I assume the the delivery systems for them true but that was likely just a temporary Flash of Conscience it'll probably never happen again for that individual but if there something I'm missing please do tell.

Blood Alcohol Fletcher • a month ago • edited

Look at it this way. Either the Saudi/UAE themselves have to deal militarily with Iran, or the US. The US military-industrial complex is for selling weapons to these client states whole-heartedly for obvious reasons. The Saudi/UAE has always expected and often demanded the US is the one to "cut the snake's head" as "king" Abdullah of the "Saudi" Arabia demanded frequently. These states know very well neither the "version" of the weaponry they buy from the West is capable of performing in a real war with a powerful enemy like Iran, nor are their personnel capable of operating them effectively. So what they say to the US is, OK we'll buy your junk, but you need to do the job. In other words, they want to fight Iran to the last AMERICAN soldier. The Pentagon wants none of that. But happy to run the cash register. I hope I made my point clear.

Sorosh Nabi • a month ago

MEK have no support in Iran. If a MEK member would walk down the street there the people would tear them to shreds. When they started killing Iranians and cooperating with Saddam during the Iran-Iraq war they committed political suicide.

EliteCommInc. Sorosh Nabi • a month ago

You know, this really doesn't carry much weight. I am not going to dismiss the complaints of a group because the majority don't support them. That is not a case for regime change. I don't see a case for that as yet. But I don't buy this nonsense about Iran land of peace ----

They were instrumental in destabilizing any peace in Iraq and remain so. Their Islamic revolution has not passed and their ambitions are not as benign as as many including Iranians like to pretend.

Sorosh Nabi EliteCommInc. • a month ago

What does that have to do with anything that I said? If you want to come to power you need the support of the people MEK don't have that so they will never gain power. Also MEK are responsible for the revolution in the first place, they are the ones that carried out bombing and assassinations even of Americans in Iran. They are the ones that attacked the US embassy in Iran and held Americans hostage. There is a reason they were on the US terror list until 2012. As far as Iran being the land of peace not sure where you got that from, Iran has never claimed that and infact Iran will conduct foreign policy that benefits its goals, which is true of any nation. You should try to stay on topic when you reply to somebody though.

Blood Alcohol EliteCommInc. • a month ago • edited

Yes, as you know the Iranians attacked, invaded and looted Iraq's oil and cultural heritage. Had in not been for the US "rescue mission" Iranian would still be there. You must be tone deaf.

Feral Finster • a month ago

Same playbook as in the runup to the War on Iraq.

Gutbomb Feral Finster • a month ago

Mostly. They won't be bothering with the U.N. this time, though.

IllinoisPatriot Feral Finster • a month ago

... or Trump's run-up to the 2016 election.....

Thump the conspiracy theories and emphasize the hard-line approach with no idea or intent to actually go through with anything should he actually win. I see reference to Q-anon and I immediately think Trumpian conspieracy.

I'll pass.

john • a month ago

Conservatives are easy to target, they are prepared to believe all sorts of nonsense. Qanon aside they are prepared to believe that tax cuts pay for themselves and you can lose weight on a vinegar and ice cream diet.

CPT john • a month ago

As opposed to the people who believe that a man can become a "real woman" just by saying so, and nod approvingly when CNN shows the chyron "Mostly peaceful protests continue" over footage of burning buildings.

Fletcher john • a month ago

Really, that's pretty damn funny like you retards don't believe in a bunch of conspiracy nonsense and by the way don't put down Q is good fun to the geriatric Community on the other hand you clowns are playing footsie with actual Nazis in Ukraine while you accuse the right of being fascist that's beautiful congratulations it's going to be great in a couple years when this country has seceded from each other and all of you non-producers get to sort it out for yourselves, it's going to be magic.

hooly • a month ago

Fake dissident groups. Wow! Not even the Chinese are this duplicitous. And people whine and complain about Russian and Chinese 'infiltration' and 'meddling' ??

Iustitiae Semper Valet hooly • a month ago

Which fale dissident groups? I missed that. I am not being sarcastic. I see people who have been named as fake contributors all over the place. But I didn't see a reference to a fake dissident group.

IllinoisPatriot Iustitiae Semper Valet • a month ago

I'm still looking for the proof one way or the other of who the "good guys" are here.

Fake this, fake that I can get from Trump every time he opens his mouth about "fake news".

What I don't get from Trump (or from this article) is any references, documentation, or solid proof of any kind other than accusations and counter-accusations -- one side I'm supposed to believe because the author said so.

I'm not buying it without objective proof and trustworthy corroboration -- not just more sock-puppets.

PointyTailofSatan . • a month ago

I don't understand. The MEK hates the current Iranian government. Why the would the American Conservative be dissing them?

Blood Alcohol PointyTailofSatan . • a month ago • edited

They are being dissed by many smart conservatives and others, because they have become a tool of Saudi/Israel. They practically spearheaded killing Americans during the Shah, and now they are enjoying American political and financial support. In that vein the adage, my enemy's enemy is my friend, does not apply here. But if you are a money hungry Giuliani, Kennedy, Bolton or Howard Dean being a gang of killers, Saddam Husein mercenaries, and Saudi/Israeli agents don't matter.

Steve Blood Alcohol • a month ago

Bravo for this comment!! loved it!

Feral Finster PointyTailofSatan . • 19 days ago

Anyone remember Ahmad Chalabi's "Iraqi National Congress" or whatever it was called?

Same schtick, new players, same CIA..

Dyerville • a month ago

"We are especially on guard when it comes to unsolicited foreign policy commentary.""

So one would hope, but foreign meddling is rife. At least the Washington Examiner makes an effort, whereas the Washington Free Beacon functions almost openly as an Israeli organ inside the United States.

el disgustador • a month ago

Ehem...The Israelis have admitted they essentially founded, financed and thoroughly and continuously infiltrated the Palestinian revolutionary group, HAMAS to counter the PLO achieve the ongoing ethnic destruction of Palestinian land freedom and society...the MEK and their front group, the National Council of Resistance of Iran are comparable Israeli emanations whose ultimate goal is the land grab from the Nile to the Euphrates known as the Greater Israel project. This is Israeli history text book material, it is not conjecture...Read what former Israeli officials such as Brig. Gen. Yitzhak Segev, former Israeli military governor in Gaza in the early 1980s. had to say the New York Times in that he had helped finance the Palestinian Islamist movement as a "counterweight" to the secularists and leftists of the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Fatah party, led by Yasser Arafat (who himself referred to Hamas as "a creature of Israel.") "The Israeli government gave me a budget," the retired brigadier
general confessed, "and the military government gives to the mosques." Moreover, "Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel's creation," said Avner Cohen, a former Israeli religious affairs official who worked in Gaza for more than two decades to the Wall Street Journal in 2009. Deliberately planned, as far back as the mid-1980s, according to Cohen in an official report to his superiors playing the divide-and-rule in the Occupied Territories, by backing Palestinian Islamists against Palestinian secularists, HAMAS was built up to become an "existential threat" fake tool of nuclear mighty Israel. In his report Cohen wrote, "I suggest focusing our efforts on finding ways to break up this monster before this reality jumps in our face," he wrote. That was the point exactly, poor victimized Israel "endowed with the right to defend itself". With Palestine now Kushnerized into oblivion, Iran is next ...Go figure...

Go figure...

chris • a month ago

propaganda is unending when isn'treal wants more war isn't it?

Billo • a month ago

Let the Israel Jews fight and die in their own war. Iran is not our enemy, Israel is.

Ram2017 Billo • a month ago

Who is funding the MEK ?

ddearborn • a month ago • edited

Hmmm
Means, motive, opportunity and who benefits spells out in no uncertain terms that the entire create a justification and then go to war with Iran originates in Israel and is being sold by the Zionists and Israel's literal army of jewish/Zionist/pro-Israel agents masquerading as "lobbyists", "activists", "think tanks" "academics", the Media, Hollywood, Congress, most of the White House Staff, etc., etc., here in the US. In other words, by an Israeli controlled army in America made up of traitors, liars and criminals.... A group who collectively ALWAYS put Israel Uber Alles.

[Oct 10, 2020] The Man Who Knew Russia- A Tribute to Stephen F. Cohen - The National Interest

Oct 10, 2020 | nationalinterest.org

October 9, 2020 Topic: Politics Region: Americas Tags: Russia Mikhail Gorbachev NATO Ronald Reagan Soviet Union The Man Who Knew Russia: A Tribute to Stephen F. Cohen

As we disregarded Russian fears and ignored the chance for a true partnership, Steve worried about the resumption of hostile relations between our two countries and possibly a new Cold War.

by Bill Bradley ,

me title=

[Oct 07, 2020] Germany, France UK to propose sanctions on Russia over alleged poisoning of opposition figure Navalny -- RT Russia Former Soviet Union

Oct 07, 2020 | www.rt.com

Germany, France and the UK will push for EU sanctions on Russian individuals over the alleged poisoning of Kremlin critic Alexey Navalny, saying they see no other "credible explanation" for the incident than Moscow's involvement.

The proposals will target "individuals deemed responsible for this crime and breach of international norms" as well as "an entity involved in the Novichok program," the French and German foreign ministries said in a joint statement on Wednesday.

"No credible explanation has been provided by Russia so far. In this context, we consider that there is no other plausible explanation for Mr Navalny's poisoning than a Russian involvement and responsibility," the statement reads. Berlin and Paris said they will share their proposals for sanctions with their EU partners shortly.

ALSO ON RT.COM UK says 'we haven't yet attributed' Navalny's alleged poisoning to Kremlin, but Moscow must 'ANSWER'

Later, British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab added that the UK stands "side by side" with France and Germany, declaring that evidence against Moscow is "undeniable."

Navalny fell sick on a flight from the Siberian city of Tomsk to Moscow on August 20, forcing the plane to perform an emergency landing. The anti-corruption activist was put into an induced coma at a hospital in the city of Omsk and two days later was transferred to the prestigious Charité clinic in Berlin at the request of his family.

The German medics who treated Navalny said that their tests revealed that he had been poisoned with a substance from the Novichok group of nerve agents.

The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) has also studied the samples provided by Berlin, confirming the presence of a toxic substance from the Novichok group in Navalny's blood and urine.

This contradicts the statements made by the Russian medics from Omsk, who insisted that they had discovered no traces of any known poison in the activist's system at the time of his admission to hospital.

ALSO ON RT.COM OPCW says it found traces of Novichok-class substance in blood & urine samples of Russian opposition figure Alexey Navalny

Navalny, who has since emerged from coma and been discharged from hospital, said that he blames Vladimir Putin for making an attempt on his life.

Moscow has repeatedly denied any involvement in Navalny's alleged poisoning and has accused Berlin of failing to provide samples that would prove the use of the nerve agent.

'Novichok' became a household name after the chemical poisoning of double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter in the UK city of Salisbury in 2018. Western powers were also quick to blame Moscow in that instance, slapping sanctions on Russia, before offering any solid evidence of the country's involvement.

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[Oct 06, 2020] Kyrgyzstan Color Revolution in Central Asia - Global ResearchGlobal Research - Centre for Research on Globalization

Oct 06, 2020 | www.globalresearch.ca

Kyrgyzstan Color Revolution in Central Asia Crisis Intensifies the US' Hybrid War Containment of Russia By Andrew Korybko Global Research, October 06, 2020 Region: Asia , Russia and FSU , USA Theme: US NATO War Agenda

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The sudden outbreak of Color Revolution unrest in the historically unstable Central Asian country of Kyrgyzstan following recent parliamentary elections in this Russian CSTO mutual defense ally intensifies the US' Hybrid War "containment" of Russia when seen in the context of the ongoing regime change efforts in fellow ally Belarus as well as CSTO-member Armenia's dangerous efforts to provoke a Russian military intervention in support of its illegal occupation of universally recognized Azerbaijani territory.

Color Revolution In Central Asia

The historically unstable Central Asian country of Kyrgyzstan [former Soviet Republic] is once again in the midst of Color Revolution unrest after this Russian CSTO mutual defense ally's latest parliamentary elections were exploited as the pretext for members of the non-systemic opposition to torch their seat of government and free former President Atambayev who was arrested last year on charges of corruption. This sudden crisis is actually the third serious one in the former Soviet space in just as many months following the ongoing regime change efforts in Belarus since August and Armenia's dangerous efforts since the end of last month to provoke a Russian military intervention in support of its illegal occupation of universally recognized Azerbaijani territory. Crucially, all three of the aforementioned countries are Russia's CSTO allies, and their respective crises (provoked to varying extents by the US) intensify the American Hybrid War "containment" of Russia.

The US' Triple Hybrid War "Containment" Of Russia

The author has written extensively about the Belarusian Color Revolution campaign and Armenia's aggression in Nagorno-Karabakh , but those who aren't familiar with his analysis of those issues can refer to the two articles hyperlinked earlier in this sentence for a quick overview. The present piece aims to inform the audience about the complex dynamics of the Kyrgyz Color Revolution crisis and the impact that it could have on the US' recent Hybrid War "containment" offensive along the western, southern, and eastern peripheries of Russia's so-called "sphere of influence". The pattern at play is that the US is trying to provoke a Russian military intervention in one, some, or all three of these Hybrid War battlefronts through the CSTO, but the Kremlin has thus far avoided the trap of these potential quagmires. Lukashenko tried do this with his ridiculous claims about a speculated Polish annexation of Grodno while Pashinyan wants to provoke Azerbaijan into attacking Armenian cities to trigger a similar intervention scenario, hence Armenia's attack on its rival's Ganja in order to bring this about.

The Kyrgyz Powder Keg

Kyrgyzstan is an altogether different powder keg, however, since it has a recent history of close to uncontrollable inter-ethnic and political violence after its last two Color Revolutions of 2005 and 2010, especially the latter. The author explained all this in detail in his April 2016 analysis of the US' history of regime change attempts in the region, which comprises one of the chapters of his 2017 ebook on " The Law Of Hybrid Warfare: Eastern Hemisphere ". He expanded upon his research in this direction in August 2019 f ollowing President Jeenbekov's arrest of former President Atambayev, his former mentor, which almost plunged the country back into a state of de-facto civil war. It was explained that "Kyrgyzstan must 'cleanse' its 'deep state' (permanent bureaucracy) simultaneously with cracking down on organized crime (which is sometimes affiliated with some 'deep state' forces)." This is the only way to combat the destabilizing clan-based nature of the country (worsened by Western NGOs and diplomatic meddling ) that's responsible for its regular unrest.

Will The Crisis From 2010 Repeat Itself?

The present situation is so dangerous though because the last round of Color Revolution unrest in 2010 sparked accusations of ethnic cleansing against the local Uzbeks that inhabit Kyrgyzstan's portion of the divided Fergana Valley. That in turn almost provoked an international conflict between both landlocked states that was thankfully averted at the last minute by Tashkent's reluctance to worsen the security situation by launching a "humanitarian intervention" in Russia's CSTO ally (one which could have also been exploited to promote the concept of "Greater Uzbekistan" over the neighboring lands inhabited by its ethnic kin considering the country's closer coordination with American strategic goals at the time). Uzbekistan has since moved closer to Russia after the passing of former President Karimov, but its basic security interests remain the same, particularly as far as ensuring the safety of its ethnic kin in neighboring states. Any repeat of the 2010 scenario could therefore return Central Asia to the brink of war unless a Russian diplomatic intervention averts it.

The Threat To Russian Interests

From the Russian perspective, Kyrgyzstan's capture by Western-backed political forces could lead to long-term security implications. The state's potential internal collapse could turn it into a regional exporter of terrorism, especially throughout the volatile Fergana Valley but also across China's neighboring region of Xinjiang if a new government decides to host Uighur terrorists. The soft security consequences are that Kyrgyzstan's Color Revolution government could reduce its commitment to the CSTO and Eurasian Union up to and including the country's potential withdrawal from these organizations if the new power structure isn't co-opted by Russian-friendly forces first. It's possible, however, that Moscow might succeed in mitigating the blow to its geopolitical interests in the scenario of a regime change in Bishkek since it had previously worked real closely with Atambayev (who's the most likely candidate to seize power, either directly or by proxy), though only if it can prevent a civil war from breaking out first. That might necessitate a CSTO intervention, however, which is risky.

Concluding Thoughts

As it stands, the US' Hybrid War "containment" of Russia is making progress along the western, southern, and eastern periphery of the Eurasian Great Power's "sphere of influence". Belarus is no longer as stable as it has historically been known for being, Armenia is still trying to trick Russia into going to war against Azerbaijan (and by extension Turkey), and Kyrgyzstan is once again on the verge of a collapse that could take down the rest of Central Asia in the worst-case scenario. Having shrewdly avoided the first two traps, at least for the time being, Russia is now being challenged with the most serious crisis of the three after the latest events in Kyrgyzstan. The country's clan-based nature, proliferation of Western NGOs, and Western meddling in its admittedly imperfect democracy make it extremely unstable, thus heightening the risks that any well-intended Russian military stabilization intervention via the CSTO could entail, perhaps explaining why one never happened in 2010 during more dangerous times. The Kremlin will therefore have to carefully weigh its options in Kyrgyzstan.

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This article was originally published on OneWorld .

Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China's One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

[Oct 06, 2020] Max Boot is pro-Zionism and anti-White nationalism, forgetting that Zionism is a far right nationalist ideology

Oct 06, 2020 | www.unz.com

One morning a couple of years ago I received an urgent email from a moderately prominent libertarian figure strongly focused on antiwar issues. He warned me that our publication had been branded a "White Supremacist website" by the Washington Post , and urged me to immediately respond, perhaps by demanding a formal retraction or even taking legal action lest we be destroyed by that totally unfair accusation.

When I looked into the matter, my own perspective was rather different. Apparently Max Boot, one of the more agitated Jewish Neocons, had written a column fiercely denouncing some recent criticism of pro-Israel policies that Philip Giraldi had published in our webzine, and the "White Supremacist" slur was merely his crude means of demonizing the author's views for those of his readers who might be less than wholeheartedly enthusiastic about Benjamin Netanyahu and his policies.

After pointing this out to my correspondent, I also noted that a good 10% or more of our writers were probably "White Nationalists," and perhaps a few of them might even arguably be labeled "White Supremacists." So although Boot's description of our website was certainly wrong, it was probably less wrong than the vast majority of his other writing, which was typically focused on American military policy and the Middle East.

Our webzine is quite unusual in its willingness to feature a smattering of writers who provide a White Nationalist perspective. Such individuals are almost totally excluded from other online publications, except for those marginalized websites devoted to their ideas, which often tend to focus on such topics and related issues to the near exclusion of anything else. However, I believe that maintaining this sort of ideological quarantine or "ghettoization" greatly diminishes the ability to understand many important aspects of our world.

[Oct 06, 2020] What's at stake in the Armenia-Azerbaijan chessboard by Pepe Escobar

Oct 06, 2020 | www.unz.com

Yevardian , says: October 2, 2020 at 1:23 am GMT

And I suspect that Azerbaijan will do no harm to the Armenian civilians that stay. They'll be model liberators. And they'll take time to bring back Azerbaijani civilians (refugees/IDPs) to their homes, especially in areas that would become mixed as a result of return."

I never read such rubbish in my life.

AJ , says: October 2, 2020 at 3:02 am GMT
@Yevardian

Agreed, this is rubbish. "Mr. C" – assuming someone like this even exists, is either terribly misinformed or an outright liar. Basically, if we follow Escobar's logic, Armenian's are making a mistake by not agreeing to surrender their lives to the peace loving and rather humanistic dictatorship of Azerbaijan. While he touches on some relevant points, overall, Escobar has not done his homework and has come up with quite a bit of drivel.

Ann Nonny Mouse , says: Website October 2, 2020 at 3:39 am GMT

Pepe, you didn't mention the Armenian Genocide, the Greek Genocide, the Assyrian Genocide, all perpetrated by Turkey.

Why not? Would the Azeris, all Turks, be different? You say the Azeris if they won, Turks, would treat the Armenian population nicely. Huh?

I remember from Runciman's book on the First Crusade that the Turks had already taken over much of Anatolia but he seems to mention Armenians at every turn (from memory -- don't have the book handy).

My impression is that before the Genocide the Armenians were all over Anatolia. There was a narrow coastal strip at the western end that was historically part of Greece, and many different peoples of Asia Minor are mentioned in the NT, but they arguably were all Armenians, making the Armenians the indigenous people of Anatolia.

How is it that Turkey was allowed to keep part of Europe after WWI when they were losers? And did they keep faith? Is the current St Sophia turmoil the norm of Turkish good faith?

Time for all the Turks to get out of Anatolia, give it back to Armenia, and head for Azerbigan.

Aking , says: October 2, 2020 at 5:23 am GMT

Good article. What a web of " frenemies"

Anon [166] Disclaimer , says: October 2, 2020 at 6:00 am GMT
@Yevardian having been disciplined for some years now is, once again, at the throat of the west. Europe spent millions of lives and huge resources throwing the Moors out last time. If they don't take a stand and support Armenia they may very well have to do it again. As far as the mythical Mr C is concerned he comes across, to me, as yet another apologist for the Religion of Peace. Obviously cucked NATO will not help Armenia, they have neither the intestinal fortitude nor the will, so it will be left to Russia and the Visigrad nations, in the mean time Turkey is attempting to take Greek territory, Syrian territory, Libyan territory and anything else that it can get it's mitts on and the West does absolutely nothing. This will not end well.
true.enough , says: October 2, 2020 at 7:20 am GMT

I found this piece difficult to read: lots of data and suppositions scattered about.

Ankara, oh Ankara! Erdogan is overstretched, that's a fact.

Wielgus , says: October 2, 2020 at 7:26 am GMT
@Yevardian

I think few Armenian civilians will take the chance but I very much doubt Azerbaijanis will be "model liberators". The new Azerbaijani state was born from the Sumgait and Baku pogroms. I also don't think they will delay in moving Azeris into areas formerly inhabited by Armenians – their role model Erdoğan has been trying to change facts on the ground by moving ethnic Turks into Kurdish areas in his own country.

Tommy Thompson , says: October 2, 2020 at 10:15 am GMT
@Ann Nonny Mouse endeavor, even if they were the majority, though most accounts say they were 40%.

I would strongly urge the Armenians to get off their nationalist high horse and solve the problem diplomatically and learn to live with their neighbors. Super nationalism is a dangerous and fake mantra that usually leads to disaster. My understanding was that the Azeris and Armenians always got along before this debacle. They should try to work out things and get back to a their original multi-cultural paradigm, that is living side by side instead of fighting and dying over territory and national flags. Live is short and when we pass to the other side you dont carry your flag with you.

Rahan , says: October 2, 2020 at 11:48 am GMT

The Republic of Nagorno-Karabakh declared independence in 1991: but that was not recognized by the "international community"

Just to throw in quickly that if Kosovo is "recognized", then bleeding Karabakh should also long since have been recognized. Especially since the Armenians have an actual holocaust in their 20th century past.

reezy , says: October 2, 2020 at 2:43 pm GMT
@Anon

I believe that it was Winston Churchill who said that the Turk was either at your feet or at your throat

Actually he said that about the Germans. Though it sounds like one of those patronizing aphorisms that can easily apply to anyone.

Lin , says: October 2, 2020 at 3:29 pm GMT

Sabre dance–A famous piece of Armenian music composed by Khachaturian

https://www.youtube.com/embed/aH2Gpdr-WrA?feature=oembed

Aking , says: October 2, 2020 at 3:35 pm GMT
@Rahan

So, seems like the way to get sympathy to rob territory is to make full use of any "genocide" one had suffered as excuse . worked very well ( in fact, spectacularly well) so faR with the Chosen ones .

Showmethereal , says: October 2, 2020 at 5:19 pm GMT

Well i admittedly dont know enough about the situation to try to critique this piece as some of the other comments on here But i am skeptical about Armenia and their stated intent. If it is reallly about protecting an ethnic group – then why not offer them citizenship to move into your territory??? That would lead me to believe it is more about land and resources

Showmethereal , says: October 2, 2020 at 5:23 pm GMT
@true.enough

Yeah i dont know the nitty gritty in this conflict – but i do agree Edrogan seems to be biting off more than he can chew He has too many pots on the fire it seems. Kurds – Qatar/Saudis – Libya – Syria – Greece – Cyprus – and now this..?

Derer , says: October 2, 2020 at 5:33 pm GMT

Aside from refusing to participate against their Muslim cousins (Afghanistan, Libya), Turkey is using NATO doctrine quite effectively. It is a useful bullet prove vest for Erdogan. The Brussels morons will be sorry for not expelling Turkey from their military club long time ago.

SZ , says: October 2, 2020 at 5:37 pm GMT
@Ann Nonny Mouse driven to the Syrian desert AFTER some of them had aligned with the Russians who were about to invade eastern Anatolia in 1915. Similarly, most of Crimean Tatars were expelled from Crimea AFTER some of them had aligned with the invading Germans in 1941. As another comparison, American-Japanese living at the Pacific coast were banished to camps in the interior AFTER the Japanese army had attacked Pearl Harbor and not before.
When a group of people kill or drive out another group it's usually not for the fun of it but rather due to necessities of survival, whatever evil that might require at that particular time depending on the particular circumstances.
Surprised , says: October 2, 2020 at 5:50 pm GMT

It would be interesting to read a scholarly exposition on what the USSR and governments in Eastern Europe proper did or did not do to educate people away from their ancient hatreds, and why whatever they did do appears not to have been particularly successful. Or was it mostly successful and the hatreds were much more intense before 1917?

Tommy Thompson , says: October 2, 2020 at 8:04 pm GMT
@SZ

The ethnic cleansing of the Armenians was pretty bloody and barbaric and was meant as a public spectacle for reasons that are argued about till today.

It was well recorded by the inhabitants of Syria.

Uprising against your rulers does not give the rulers right to carry out genocide or ethnic cleansing in any case.

Anonymous [334] Disclaimer , says: October 3, 2020 at 2:52 am GMT

The entire Jewish American lobby and Israel are on Azerbaijan's side and anti-Armenian, just as when they were working with Turkey to deny the Armenian genocide.

Israel has also sold billions of dollars of weapons to Azerbaijan which the latter is using against Armenians. Israel gets oil from Azerbaijan

Of course, Azerbaijan and Turkey have imported jihadists from Syria and Libya to fight Christian Armenians now.

Apparently, Pepe, you and the Jewish lobby, Israel, Turkey, and the jihadists are on the same side.

Congratulations.

P.S. It would take a hundred pages to list all the factual errors you made. For example, Armenians were still the clear majority in Artsakh/Karabagh in 1988 and 1991. Armenians there had been grossly mistreated by Azerbaijan for decades.

The fighting occurred in the late 1980s only because Azerbaijan, backed by the Russian military, killed and harrassed Armenians. The Azeris also committed massacres of Armenians who were living in Baku and Sumgait in the late 1980s.

Stalin also placed Nakhichevan, an Armenian territory, inside Azerbaijan.
Azerbaijan kicked out every Armenian from Nakhichevan. Azerbaijan was doing that to Artsakh/Karabagh too.

No wonder Artsakh voted to be independent from Azerbaijan, something you don't want to understand.
Better luck next time trying to fool readers, Pepe.

Felix Keverich , says: October 3, 2020 at 6:46 am GMT

The key fact remains that as long as Armenia proper is not attacked by Azerbaijan, Russia will not apply the CSTO treaty and step in. Erdogan knows this is his red line. Moscow has all it takes to put him in serious trouble – as in shutting off gas supplies to Turkey.

Russia isn't going to shut off gas to Turkey. Russia never does that (shutting off gas). It's a Western canard.

Russia could, however, impose a no-fly-zone over Georgia, effectively blocking resupply and reinforcements to Azerbaijan. Azerbaijan is almost completely surrounded by Russian allies and bases. They rely on Georgia for military transit.

Druid , says: October 3, 2020 at 7:29 am GMT
@Ann Nonny Mouse

Ignorant post. Armenian nationalist were active in Russia prior to ww1, then supported Russian entrance into Turkish territory because they shared a religion. They stabbed the ottomans , of which they were a big part, in the back. The young Turks , who were actually donmeh jews, had them marched off to Syria and lebanon, etc, causing many deaths! The Armenian is still causing trouble for the Turks. They sided with the mongols in their battles against the Muslims, along wit the Georgians, repeatedly. More to a small story

anon [154] Disclaimer , says: October 3, 2020 at 11:51 pm GMT

What's going to happen to USA? The poverty and racial intolerance ,both seem to be undermining the stability and the ideological integrity of the country . I see many states emerging from the body of America.But the problems will not be resolved . It might just like like Caucasian territory or Balkan .

Anonymous [231] Disclaimer , says: October 4, 2020 at 3:25 am GMT
@Yevardian

Pepe appears to be on the side of Azerbaijan, and thus also on the side of Turkey, Israel, the Jewish lobby, and jihadists.

Nice company.

vot tak , says: October 4, 2020 at 11:58 pm GMT

Reading this, my suspicion is this "mr. c" is part of the western disinformation machine, probably operating for the israelis.

Semiogogue , says: October 5, 2020 at 12:47 am GMT

1. BTC is described as 'bypassing Iran'. One could easily argue it also bypasses *Russia* . Perhaps that's what made it necessary for Soros & others to peel Georgia off from Russian control back in the day? Look how Russia responded by recapturing the Georgian Military Highway (South Ossetia).

2. Look in general at how Russia is willing to give up huge areas of territory so long as she keeps key strategic points of control: South Ossetia, Crimea, Transnistria, Abkhazia and Armenia. Smell the coffee.

3. 2. 'Mr. C' is quick to mention Baku/Ankara joint exercises in August, but fails to mention Kavkas 2020 exercises led by Russia. Uh duh.

4. 'Mr. C' seems to ignore the fact that Armenia couldn't have taken that territory in first place, or kept it, w/out Russian assistance. And idea 'Russia can do nothing' is absurd. As is the idea that Russia can't supply Armenia because there's no land connection. Did the allies have any problem keeping West Berlin supplied by air? Of course not. All nonsense.

5. The idea that there is a 'Russia/Turkey' strategic partnership is also silly. Where is this partnership? Turkey buying S-400s? So what? Are they in partnership in Syria? In Libya? No. So why would they be in N-K?

6. Weird. No mention of China and it's growing relationship with Turkey. This probably tells you all you need to know about the author. Unless of course the author is just a fool, which is also possible.

Jivinski , says: October 5, 2020 at 4:04 am GMT

"Yet even before the collapse the Azerbaijani Army and Armenian independentists were already at war (1988-1994), which yielded a grim balance of 30,000 dead and roughly a million wounded."

This is a wounded-to-killed ratio of thirty-three to one. Doesn't make sense.

Majority of One , says: October 5, 2020 at 4:35 am GMT

Were Russia to be as devious and underhanded as the puppet regime in the Di$trict of Corruption, they would arrange for an overthrow of the present NATO/EU/U$ regime in Yerevan. With those bastards out of the way and Armenia no longer playing double jeopardy, it might be possible for a new Orthodox oriented Armenian government to come to some sort of arrangement with Baku.

At the same time, perhaps Syrian spetsnaz units could practice some infiltration tactics into Turkish semi-occupied "greater" Idlib and Ghurka style, behead a few Turkish officers running the show there.

"Sultan" Erdogan is playing loose and wild with his shattering economy and massive military. It is high time he was given a black-eye–one that would cause him to lose face among his own countrymen.

Mactoul , says: October 5, 2020 at 5:08 am GMT
@SZ

How many of the Japanese-American deportees died as consequence of deportation vs how many Armenians that died as consequence of their deportation.

It is not deportation that is alleged to be the Turkish crime but genocide. Please keep it mind.

Yukon Jack , says: October 5, 2020 at 5:16 am GMT

This is my educated guess, the Anglo-Zionists led by Rothschild and Netanayahu destablize the oil in the Middle East to keep their prices of oil in USD above 100 $/barrel

They have also blown up oil derricks in the North Sea, shut down Iranian and Iraq and Syria oil production. The game is clear, low oil prices are being met with wiping out the competition.

And causing hell in Iran and Venezueala. Back in 1954 Operation Ajax took out Mossadeq and installed the Shah – puppet of big oil. Before it was BP it was the Persian Gulf Oil Co. BP is owned mostly by the crown.

Trump's secretary of state was Rex Tillerson CEO Exxon just like GW Bush picked Condoleeza Rice CEO Chevron to be his national security advisor.

The Israel angle is to get Iran and to goad Russia into war with the USA, the eventually goal is that USA-Russia-China are reduced while Jews rule the world from Jerusalem.

How much you wanna bet Bibi Satanyahu has a hand in this war? And Evangelical Christians will support Israel even if this war kills lots of Armenian Christians just like in Syria.

Since this war in on Russia's doorstep Putin an Lavrov will try negotiations first then what will they do next. Putin has vowed the war will never come to Russia which means Russia will enter the theater on the anti-Zionist side.

Have you noticed every state within a few hundred miles of Israel is being torched and the natives driven out?

Ghali , says: October 5, 2020 at 6:17 am GMT

Back again to Pepe Escobar's distortions of reality. Nagorno-Karabakh is an Armenian-occupied Azerbaijani territory. In fact, no country in the world recognises it as an "Independent" as Escobar likes to mislead us. Armenia should do the right thing and withdraw its forces, including foreign militants from there. Like Israel, Armenia is playing the role of a victim of a "holocaust".

GMC , says: October 5, 2020 at 7:20 am GMT

Considering that the 2nd largest US/NWO Embassy in the World is in Armenia – a country of 2.9 million people, and that the new President was put in power by the West – the end game is to continue to surround Russia, screw up the New Silk Road, and be at Iran's back door too. As said before , the domestic USA can totally look like the USSR in the 90s, but the NWO Foreign policy money is 100% – guaranteed. What do all those thousands of workers in that huge Embassy compound do ?

GMC , says: October 5, 2020 at 7:30 am GMT
@Tommy Thompson

Actually, once the Armenians were genocided , the Jewish bankers were the big shots left in Turkey. H Morgenthau, our Turkish ambassador along with being jewish himself, wrote about it in his reports. The Game hasn't changed much – it stays the same. Thanks.

J , says: October 5, 2020 at 7:44 am GMT

About a third of Iran's population is Azeri. Should they develop interest in the conflict, Iran may become involved. That would align Turkey and Iran vs Russia. That would be something.

ARemo , says: October 5, 2020 at 8:48 am GMT
@Yevardian

Damn right. We already have experience what happens when Turks get control of Christian Armenians – systematic gang rapes and death marches are the rule of the day. Turks are animals and letting them control any portion of Armenia is basically turning that place into a concentration camp.

Ming Shih-tsung , says: October 5, 2020 at 10:58 am GMT
@Yevardian

"Mr. C" probably stands for Cemal, given how biased he is.

anon [229] Disclaimer , says: October 5, 2020 at 12:01 pm GMT
@Yukon Jack Pahlavi ruled post 1953.

Fact: 1979 was the year that "big oil" LEGAL contracts were to expire and the "puppet" Shah had threatened as early as 1973 (when he was instrumental in making OPEC a powerful entity) that in 1979 Iran "would sell Iranian Oil to any buyer, at market prices".

Fact: Iran, in 1978 produced 6 million barrels per day. It has never been permitted to reach those levels again.

Fact: Chinese, Indian, Syrian, Venezuelan, and God knows who else, all projects of the Global Cabal have been getting Iranian Oil (under their engineered boxing of Iranian nation) at levels that very likely are equal if not LOWER than the terms the Qajar idiots gave the insatiablely greedy and slimey English.

Alfred , says: October 5, 2020 at 12:05 pm GMT
@Ann Nonny Mouse Genocide, all perpetrated by Turkey.

And you did not mention that the only quarters of Smyrna/Izmir that were not torched in a fire in 1922 were the Jewish and Turkish quarters – what a surprise! An antecedent to 9/11. Here is the Jewpedia hiding the real story – as usual.

The Armenian and Greek quarters were destroyed and the Jews got a monopoly on the commerce. Done deal!

Great fire of Smyrna

Wielgus , says: October 5, 2020 at 12:09 pm GMT
@GMC

If the "colour revolution" assumptions were in force, there would be a host of denunciations of Azerbaijan and Turkey (the latter perhaps the real prime mover in this) by the USA and EU etc. There aren't. The USA and EU may even tacitly support the Azerbaijanis, perhaps they hope the Russians and Iranians will become entangled in this affair and so forth.

Ugetit , says: October 5, 2020 at 12:14 pm GMT
@vot tak

my suspicion is this "mr. c" is part of the western disinformation machine, probably operating for the israelis.

While I know nothing about the situation, after reading the article and the mostly excellent comments, I suspect your suspicion is correct.

Alfred , says: October 5, 2020 at 12:38 pm GMT

I have a suggestion.

How about swapping Nagorno-Karabakh for North Cyprus. I am sure the Greeks would be very happy to live with the Armenians. But the Sultan's dreams of owning the Eastern Mediterranean would come to naught.

anon [137] Disclaimer , says: October 5, 2020 at 12:45 pm GMT
@Lin

I've always associated that piece with the circus not knowing the title or its origin.

Stebbing Heuer , says: October 5, 2020 at 12:50 pm GMT
@Anonymous

Stalin did nasty things like that to keep the republics feuding with each other rather than pushing back against Moscow. The mixed-up borders of the 'stans, further east, are testament to this. Fergana Valley?

Divide and rule. Still costing lives in pointless wars almost 100 years later.

Дима Трамп , says: October 5, 2020 at 1:07 pm GMT

At stake is the very existence of the Armenian people. Turkey is trying to finish what remains of them after the genocide last century. Both Erdoghan and Aliev have stated, that they want a "final solution" to the "Armenian problem".

It's an existential battle for the Armenians.

Дима Трамп , says: October 5, 2020 at 1:09 pm GMT
@Yevardian

We all know what they did to the Armenians in 1915.

Дима Трамп , says: October 5, 2020 at 1:11 pm GMT
@Alfred

Exactly. The history of Turkey since 1880-s is full of ethnic cleansings and genocides of the non-muslim people such as Armenians, Greeks and Assyrians.

MLK , says: October 5, 2020 at 1:16 pm GMT

My thanks to Escobar for taking on a subject rather obviously not susceptible to 2,700 word essays, along with attention worthy links.

His biases are not my own but he's thoughtful and certainly doesn't hide them.

In this and so many other incidents we can see how thoroughly Trump has moved the American ship of state despite the relentless efforts of foreign and domestic resistance to neutralize America First and destroy him.

It's really quite something the way Obama's presidency in all its disastrous fullness has been memory-holed. The defense of it being that it merely extended Bush's world-historical incompetence and malefactions.

Could you have turned US unipolarity following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact into a "moment" if you tried? I couldn't.

You will be way ahead of most everyone if you get your mind around that and the geopolitical sad story that is CCP China winning the post-Cold War quarter-century hands down.

We inevitably come back to the point that the whole drama can be interpreted from the perspective of a NATO geopolitical hit against Russia – according to quite a few analyses circulating at the Duma.

Ukraine is an absolute black hole. There's the Belarus impasse. Covid-19. The Navalny circus. The "threat" to Nord Stream-2.

To pull Russia back into the Armenia-Azerbaijan drama means turning Moscow's attention towards the Caucasus . . .

I confess that I get no end of enjoyment over bellyaching on behalf of those powers the Obama administration was turning the world over to. Nord Stream II was merely the down payment on Russia's assistance/acquiescence in throwing the electron to Hillary, with the sky the limit for China, Russia and Iran once Democrats and their foreign allies had neutralized free and fair elections.

Now all of these powers must deal with a real POTUS who asks "What have you done for the US lately?"

The USG and Russia have cooperated where geopolitical interests align. More will follow once Trump takes the oath again. As I've explained previously, despite its high-risk position in the Resistance matrix, Russia/Putin have (unsurprisingly, to me) acted skillfully and with circumspection.

The same cannot be said for Iran. Nor China, particularly since the end of last year.

Ashino Wolf Sushanti , says: October 5, 2020 at 1:27 pm GMT

https://www.putin-today.ru/archives/109463
https://vz.ru
Михаил Мошкин

Why Russia needs Azerbaijan !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The aggravation of the situation in Nagorno-Karabakh has raised a number of questions. In particular, why Moscow is in no hurry to stand up for Armenia and why it does not sharply criticize
Azerbaijan. The answer is that Moscow and Baku have very close relations, and not only economic relations. So what is the value and irreplaceability of Azerbaijan for Russia?

[MORE]
Z-man , says: October 5, 2020 at 1:52 pm GMT

Border and population changes are in order. A quarter of N-K goes back to Azerbaijan and the rest closer to Armenia proper plus the capital city goes to Armenia with a 50 mile wide band connecting it with the rest of Armenia. The Azeris get the rest of their lands now occupied by the Armenians. Will it happen? Probably not, just look at Kosovo..

God's Fool , says: October 5, 2020 at 2:05 pm GMT

There is a province between Ngorno Karabakh and Armenia proper of roughly of the same size belonging to Azerbaijan, so why not just exchange it with each other to avoid further conflict and bloodshed?

Дима Трамп , says: October 5, 2020 at 2:57 pm GMT
@God's Fool

There is no guarantee that Turkey will not try to then eliminate whatever remains of Armenia.

Remember, Turkey genocided Armenians and wiped out close to 80% of them in 1915 through 1922. Armenian populated areas stretched from what is now Armenia until the shores of Eastern Mediterranean. The only thing that is left of it is Kessab in modern day Syria.

Majority of One , says: October 5, 2020 at 3:14 pm GMT
@Ghali nial borders are fake, false and fraudulent, whether in Asia or Africa. Over time, justice will prevail and borders will reflect the ethno-national composition of its long-term inhabitants.

That said, the current regime in Yerevan needs to be overthrown, as it was established in conjunction with the interests of the Cabal/Nato and their various puppet regimes. Armenia is the oldest Orthodox Christian nation in the world and was severely genocided by the Donmeh covert Jewish Masons who called themselves the "Young Turks" who were led by Enver Pasha.

By the way, who are you, Ghali? Do you have a dog in the fight? Are you connected with an intel agency?

anaccount , says: October 5, 2020 at 3:21 pm GMT

Excellent article, normally I pass over Pepe for the naughty articles on Unz but I might have to take another look.

My only critique is that the article feels pro-Azeri but that's balanced with an informative description how this started in July, including an accurate appraisal of Turkish behavior.

I'm not Azeri or Armenian so I didn't have a dog in this fight until I noticed Israel's support for Azerbaijan. It's nothing personal, I have only one hate.

Shaman911 , says: October 5, 2020 at 3:27 pm GMT

Jewish Bankers shifting profits to other Jewish bankers. Funding all sides and profiting from the mass graves again. 5000 years and nothing has changed.

GMC , says: October 5, 2020 at 3:36 pm GMT
@Wielgus

The Turks are the US Army in this – with their proxy armies sent to help the Azerbaijanis, just like the US Army /Israelis and their proxies Isis, al Nusra, al Qaeda etc. in Syria. The US and their 6000 employees at the Embassy, don't have to say anything – they back both sides – just like the Zionists do – in the US political parties. Things don't change , Tactics don't change. Thanks.

A.R. , says: October 5, 2020 at 4:30 pm GMT
@Majority of One

You are asking him if he has a dog in this fight? What about yourself? You very clearly have a dog in this fight yourself, haven`t you?
Try to cut down on the hypocrasy, why don`t you, and at the same time maybe moderate your "holier than thou" attitude.

[Oct 05, 2020] What's at stake in the Armenia-Azerbaijan chessboard

Notable quotes:
"... "the EU and Russia find common cause to limit Azerbaijani gains (in large part because Erdogan is no one's favorite guy, not just because of this but because of the Eastern Med, Syria, Libya)." ..."
"... "Iran favors Armenia, which is counter-intuitive at first sight. So the Iranians may help the Russians out (funneling supplies), but on the other hand they have a good relationship with Turkey, especially in the oil and gas smuggling business. And if they get too overt in their support, Trump has a casus belli to get involved and the Europeans may not like to end up on the same side as the Russians and the Iranians. It just looks bad. And the Europeans hate to look bad." ..."
Oct 05, 2020 | unz.com

It's important to remember that there was no "Azerbaijan" nation-state until the early 1920s. Historically, Azerbaijan is a territory in northern Iran. Azeris are very well integrated within the Islamic Republic. So the Republic of Azerbaijan actually borrowed its name from their Iranian neighbors. In ancient history, the territory of the new 20 th century republic was known as Atropatene, and Aturpakatan before the advent of Islam.

How the equation changed

Baku's main argument is that Armenia is blocking a contiguous Azerbaijani nation, as a look in the map shows us that southwest Azerbaijan is de facto split all the way to the Iranian border.

And that plunges us necessarily into deep background. To clarify matters, there could not be a more reliable guide than a top Caucasus think tank expert who shared his analysis with me by email, but is insistent on "no attribution". Let's call him Mr. C.

Mr. C notes that, "for decades, the equation remained the same and the variables in the equation remained the same, more or less. This was the case notwithstanding the fact that Armenia is an unstable democracy in transition and Azerbaijan had much more continuity at the top."

We should all be aware that "Azerbaijan lost territory right at the beginning of the restoration of its statehood, when it was basically a failed state run by armchair nationalist amateurs [before Heydar Aliyev, Ilham's father, came to power]. And Armenia was a mess, too but less so when you take into consideration that it had strong Russian support and Azerbaijan had no one. Back in the day, Turkey was still a secular state with a military that looked West and took its NATO membership seriously. Since then, Azerbaijan has built up its economy and increased its population. So it kept getting stronger. But its military was still underperforming."

That slowly started to change in 2020: "Basically, in the past few months you've seen incremental increases in the intensity of near daily ceasefire violations (the near-daily violations are nothing new: they've been going on for years). So this blew up in July and there was a shooting war for a few days. Then everyone calmed down again."

All this time, something important was developing in the background: Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, who came to power in May 2018, and Aliyev started to talk: "The Azerbaijani side thought this indicated Armenia was ready for compromise (this all started when Armenia had a sort of revolution, with the new PM coming in with a popular mandate to clean house domestically). For whatever reason, it ended up not happening."

What happened in fact was the July shooting war.

Don't forget Pipelineistan

Armenian PM Pashinyan could be described as a liberal globalist. The majority of his political team is pro-NATO. Pashinyan went all guns blazing against former Armenian President (1998- 2008) Robert Kocharian, who before that happened to be, crucially, the de facto President of Nagorno-Karabakh.

Kocharian, who spent years in Russia and is close to President Putin, was charged with a nebulous attempt at "overthrowing the constitutional order". Pashinyan tried to land him in jail. But even more crucial is the fact that Pashinyan refused to follow a plan elaborated by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov to finally settle the Artsakh/Nagorno-Karabakh mess.

In the current fog of war, things are even messier. Mr. C stresses two points: "First, Armenia asked for CSTO protection and got bitch slapped, hard and in public; second, Armenia threatened to bomb the oil and gas pipelines in Azerbaijan (there are several, they all run parallel, and they supply not just Georgia and Turkey but now the Balkans and Italy). With regards to the latter, Azerbaijan basically said: if you do that, we'll bomb your nuclear reactor."

The Pipelineistan angle is indeed crucial: for years I have followed on Asia Times these myriad, interlocking oil and gas soap operas, especially the BTC (Baku-Tblisi-Ceyhan), conceived by Zbigniew Brzezinski to bypass Iran. I was even "arrested" by a BP 4X4 when I was tracking the pipeline on a parallel side road out of the massive Sangachal terminal: that proved British Petroleum was in practice the real boss, not the Azerbaijani government.

In sum, now we have reached the point where, according to Mr. C,

"Armenia's saber rattling got more aggressive." Reasons, on the Armenian side, seem to be mostly domestic: terrible handling of Covid-19 (in contrast to Azerbaijan), and the dire state of the economy. So, says Mr. C, we came to a toxic concourse of circumstances: Armenia deflected from its problems by being tough on Azerbaijan, while Azerbaijan just had had enough.

It's always about Turkey

Anyway one looks at the Armenia-Azerbaijan drama, the key destabilizing factor is now Turkey.

Mr. C notes how, "throughout the summer, the quality of the Turkish-Azerbaijani military exercises increased (both prior to July events and subsequently). The Azerbaijani military got a lot better. Also, since the fourth quarter of 2019 the President of Azerbaijan has been getting rid of the (perceived) pro-Russian elements in positions of power." See, for instance, here .

There's no way to confirm it either with Moscow or Ankara, but Mr. C advances what President Erdogan may have told the Russians: "We'll go into Armenia directly if a) Azerbaijan starts to lose, b) Russia goes in or accepts CSTO to be invoked or something along those lines, or c) Armenia goes after the pipelines. All are reasonable red lines for the Turks, especially when you factor in the fact that they don't like the Armenians very much and that they consider the Azerbaijanis brothers."

It's crucial to remember that in August, Baku and Ankara held two weeks of joint air and land military exercises. Baku has bought advanced drones from both Turkey and Israel. There's no smokin' gun, at least not yet, but Ankara may have hired up to 4,000 Salafi-jihadis in Syria to fight -- wait for it -- in favor of Shi'ite-majority Azerbaijan, proving once again that "jihadism" is all about making a quick buck.

The United Armenian Information Center, as well as the Kurdish Afrin Post, have stated that Ankara opened two recruitment centers -- in Afrin schools -- for mercenaries. Apparently this has been a quite popular move because Ankara slashed salaries for Syrian mercenaries shipped to Libya.

There's an extra angle that is deeply worrying not only for Russia but also for Central Asia. According to the former Foreign Minister of Nagorno-Karabakh, Ambassador Extraordinary Arman Melikyan, mercenaries using Azeri IDs issued in Baku may be able to infiltrate Dagestan and Chechnya and, via the Caspian, reach Atyrau in Kazakhstan, from where they can easily reach Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan.

That's the ultimate nightmare of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) -- shared by Russia, China and the Central Asian "stans": a jihadi land -- and (Caspian) sea -- bridge from the Caucasus all the way to Central Asia, and even Xinjiang.

What's the point of this war?

So what happens next? A nearly insurmountable impasse, as Mr. C outlines it:

1. "The peace talks are going nowhere because Armenia is refusing to budge (to withdraw from occupying Nagorno-Karabakh plus 7 surrounding regions in phases or all at once, with the usual guarantees for civilians, even settlers -- note that when they went in in the early 1990s they cleansed those lands of literally all Azerbaijanis, something like between 700,000 and 1 million people)."

2. Aliyev was under the impression that Pashinyan "was willing to compromise and began preparing his people and then looked like someone with egg on his face when it didn't happen."

3. "Turkey has made it crystal clear it will support Azerbaijan unconditionally, and has matched those words with deeds."

4. "In such circumstances, Russia got outplayed -- in the sense that they had been able to play off Armenia against Azerbaijan and vice versa, quite successfully, helping to mediate talks that went nowhere, preserving the status quo that effectively favored Armenia."

And that brings us to the crucial question. What's the point of this war?

Mr. C: "It is either to conquer as much as possible before the "international community" [in this case, the UNSC] calls for / demands a ceasefire or to do so as an impetus for re-starting talks that actually lead to progress. In either scenario, Azerbaijan will end up with gains and Armenia with losses. How much and under what circumstances (the status and question of Nagorno-Karabakh is distinct from the status and question of the Armenian occupied territories around Nagorno-Karabakh) is unknown: i.e. on the field of battle or the negotiating table or a combo of both. However this turns out, at a minimum Azerbaijan will get to keep what it liberated in battle. This will be the new starting point. And I suspect that Azerbaijan will do no harm to the Armenian civilians that stay. They'll be model liberators. And they'll take time to bring back Azerbaijani civilians (refugees/IDPs) to their homes, especially in areas that would become mixed as a result of return."

So what can Moscow do under these circumstances? Not much,

"except to go into Azerbaijan proper, which they won't do (there's no land border between Russia and Armenia; so although Russia has a military base in Armenia with one or more thousand troops, they can't just supply Armenia with guns and troops at will, given the geography)."

Crucially, Moscow privileges the strategic partnership with Armenia -- which is a member of the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU) -- while meticulously monitoring each and every NATO-member Turkey's movement: after all, they are already in opposing sides in both Libya and Syria.

So, to put it mildly, Moscow is walking on a geopolitical razor's edge. Russia needs to exercise restraint and invest in a carefully calibrated balancing act between Armenia and Azerbaijan; must preserve the Russia-Turkey strategic partnership; and must be alert to all, possible US Divide and Rule tactics.

Inside Erdogan's war

So in the end this would be yet another Erdogan war?

The inescapable Follow the Money analysis would tells us, yes. The Turkish economy is an absolute mess, with high inflation and a depreciating currency. Baku has a wealth of oil-gas funds that could become readily available -- adding to Ankara's dream of turning Turkey also into an energy supplier.

Mr. C adds that anchoring Turkey in Azerbaijan would lead to "the creation of full-fledged Turkish military bases and the inclusion of Azerbaijan in the Turkish orbit of influence (the "two countries -- one nation" thesis, in which Turkey assumes supremacy) within the framework of neo-Ottomanism and Turkey's leadership in the Turkic-speaking world."

Add to it the all-important NATO angle. Mr. C essentially sees it as Erdogan, enabled by Washington, about to make a NATO push to the east while establishing that immensely dangerous jihadi channel into Russia: "This is no local adventure by Erdogan. I understand that Azerbaijan is largely Shi'ite Islam and that will complicate things but not render his adventure impossible."

This totally ties in with a notorious RAND report that explicitly details how "the United States could try to induce Armenia to break with Russia" and "encourage Armenia to move fully into the NATO orbit."

It's beyond obvious that Moscow is observing all these variables with extreme care. That is reflected, for instance, in how irrepressible Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova, earlier this week, has packaged a very serious diplomatic warning: "The downing of an Armenian SU-25 by a Turkish F-16, as claimed by the Ministry of Defense in Armenia, seems to complicate the situation, as Moscow, based on the Tashkent treaty, is obligated to offer military assistance to Armenia".

It's no wonder both Baku and Yerevan got the message and are firmly denying anything happened.

The key fact remains that as long as Armenia proper is not attacked by Azerbaijan, Russia will not apply the CSTO treaty and step in. Erdogan knows this is his red line. Moscow has all it takes to put him in serious trouble -- as in shutting off gas supplies to Turkey. Moscow, meanwhile, will keep helping Yerevan with intel and hardware -- flown in from Iran. Diplomacy rules -- and the ultimate target is yet another ceasefire.

Pulling Russia back in

Mr. C advances the strong possibility -- and I have heard echoes from Brussels -- that

"the EU and Russia find common cause to limit Azerbaijani gains (in large part because Erdogan is no one's favorite guy, not just because of this but because of the Eastern Med, Syria, Libya)."

That brings to the forefront the renewed importance of the UNSC in imposing a ceasefire. Washington's role at the moment is quite intriguing. Of course, Trump has more important things to do at the moment. Moreover, the Armenian diaspora in the US swings drastically pro-Democrat.

Then, to round it all up, there's the all-important Iran-Armenia relationship. Here is a forceful attempt to put it in perspective.

As Mr. C stresses, "Iran favors Armenia, which is counter-intuitive at first sight. So the Iranians may help the Russians out (funneling supplies), but on the other hand they have a good relationship with Turkey, especially in the oil and gas smuggling business. And if they get too overt in their support, Trump has a casus belli to get involved and the Europeans may not like to end up on the same side as the Russians and the Iranians. It just looks bad. And the Europeans hate to look bad."

We inevitably come back to the point that the whole drama can be interpreted from the perspective of a NATO geopolitical hit against Russia -- according to quite a few analyses circulating at the Duma.

Ukraine is an absolute black hole. There's the Belarus impasse. Covid-19. The Navalny circus. The "threat" to Nord Stream-2.

To pull Russia back into the Armenia-Azerbaijan drama means turning Moscow's attention towards the Caucasus so there's more Turkish freedom of action in other theaters -- in the Eastern Mediterranean versus Greece, in Syria, in Libya. Ankara -- foolishly -- is engaged in simultaneous wars on several fronts, and with virtually no allies.

What this means is that even more than NATO, monopolizing Russia's attention in the Caucasus most of all may be profitable for Erdogan himself. As Mr. C stresses, "in this situation, the Nagorno-Karabakh leverage/'trump card' in the hands of Turkey would be useful for negotiations with Russia."

No question: the neo-Ottoman sultan never sleeps.

Yevardian , says: October 2, 2020 at 1:23 am GMT

And I suspect that Azerbaijan will do no harm to the Armenian civilians that stay. They’ll be model liberators. And they’ll take time to bring back Azerbaijani civilians (refugees/IDPs) to their homes, especially in areas that would become mixed as a result of return.”

I never read such rubbish in my life.

AJ , says: October 2, 2020 at 3:02 am GMT
@Yevardian

Agreed, this is rubbish. “Mr. C” – assuming someone like this even exists, is either terribly misinformed or an outright liar. Basically, if we follow Escobar’s logic, Armenian’s are making a mistake by not agreeing to surrender their lives to the peace loving and rather humanistic dictatorship of Azerbaijan. While he touches on some relevant points, overall, Escobar has not done his homework and has come up with quite a bit of drivel.

Ann Nonny Mouse , says: • Website October 2, 2020 at 3:39 am GMT

Pepe, you didn’t mention the Armenian Genocide, the Greek Genocide, the Assyrian Genocide, all perpetrated by Turkey.

Why not? Would the Azeris, all Turks, be different? You say the Azeris if they won, Turks, would treat the Armenian population nicely. Huh?

I remember from Runciman’s book on the First Crusade that the Turks had already taken over much of Anatolia but he seems to mention Armenians at every turn (from memory—don’t have the book handy).

My impression is that before the Genocide the Armenians were all over Anatolia. There was a narrow coastal strip at the western end that was historically part of Greece, and many different peoples of Asia Minor are mentioned in the NT, but they arguably were all Armenians, making the Armenians the indigenous people of Anatolia.

How is it that Turkey was allowed to keep part of Europe after WWI when they were losers? And did they keep faith? Is the current St Sophia turmoil the norm of Turkish good faith?

Time for all the Turks to get out of Anatolia, give it back to Armenia, and head for Azerbigan.

Aking , says: October 2, 2020 at 5:23 am GMT

Good article. What a web of “ frenemies”…

Anon [166] • Disclaimer , says: October 2, 2020 at 6:00 am GMT
@Yevardian having been disciplined for some years now is, once again, at the throat of the west. Europe spent millions of lives and huge resources throwing the Moors out last time. If they don’t take a stand and support Armenia they may very well have to do it again. As far as the mythical Mr C is concerned he comes across, to me, as yet another apologist for the Religion of Peace. Obviously cucked NATO will not help Armenia, they have neither the intestinal fortitude nor the will, so it will be left to Russia and the Visigrad nations, in the mean time Turkey is attempting to take Greek territory, Syrian territory, Libyan territory and anything else that it can get it’s mitts on and the West does absolutely nothing. This will not end well.
true.enough , says: October 2, 2020 at 7:20 am GMT

I found this piece difficult to read: lots of data and suppositions scattered about.

Ankara, oh Ankara! Erdogan is overstretched, that’s a fact.

Wielgus , says: October 2, 2020 at 7:26 am GMT
@Yevardian

I think few Armenian civilians will take the chance but I very much doubt Azerbaijanis will be “model liberators”. The new Azerbaijani state was born from the Sumgait and Baku pogroms. I also don’t think they will delay in moving Azeris into areas formerly inhabited by Armenians – their role model Erdoğan has been trying to change facts on the ground by moving ethnic Turks into Kurdish areas in his own country.

Tommy Thompson , says: October 2, 2020 at 10:15 am GMT
@Ann Nonny Mouse deavor, even if they were the majority, though most accounts say they were 40%.

I would strongly urge the Armenians to get off their nationalist high horse and solve the problem diplomatically and learn to live with their neighbors. Super nationalism is a dangerous and fake mantra that usually leads to disaster. My understanding was that the Azeris and Armenians always got along before this debacle. They should try to work out things and get back to a their original multi-cultural paradigm, that is living side by side instead of fighting and dying over territory and national flags. Live is short and when we pass to the other side you dont carry your flag with you.

Rahan , says: October 2, 2020 at 11:48 am GMT

The Republic of Nagorno-Karabakh declared independence in 1991: but that was not recognized by the “international community”

Just to throw in quickly that if Kosovo is “recognized”, then bleeding Karabakh should also long since have been recognized. Especially since the Armenians have an actual holocaust in their 20th century past.

reezy , says: October 2, 2020 at 2:43 pm GMT
@Anon

I believe that it was Winston Churchill who said that the Turk was either at your feet or at your throat

Actually he said that about the Germans. Though it sounds like one of those patronizing aphorisms that can easily apply to anyone.

Lin , says: October 2, 2020 at 3:29 pm GMT

Sabre dance–A famous piece of Armenian music composed by Khachaturian

https://www.youtube.com/embed/aH2Gpdr-WrA?feature=oembed

Aking , says: October 2, 2020 at 3:35 pm GMT
@Rahan

So, seems like the way to get sympathy to rob territory is to make full use of any “genocide” one had suffered as excuse…. worked very well ( in fact, spectacularly well) so faR with the Chosen ones….

Showmethereal , says: October 2, 2020 at 5:19 pm GMT

Well i admittedly dont know enough about the situation to try to critique this piece as some of the other comments on here… But i am skeptical about Armenia and their stated intent. If it is reallly about protecting an ethnic group – then why not offer them citizenship to move into your territory??? That would lead me to believe it is more about land and resources…

Showmethereal , says: October 2, 2020 at 5:23 pm GMT
@true.enough

Yeah i dont know the nitty gritty in this conflict – but i do agree Edrogan seems to be biting off more than he can chew… He has too many pots on the fire it seems. Kurds – Qatar/Saudis – Libya – Syria – Greece – Cyprus – and now this..?

Derer , says: October 2, 2020 at 5:33 pm GMT

Aside from refusing to participate against their Muslim cousins (Afghanistan, Libya), Turkey is using NATO doctrine quite effectively. It is a useful bullet prove vest for Erdogan. The Brussels morons will be sorry for not expelling Turkey from their military club long time ago.

SZ , says: October 2, 2020 at 5:37 pm GMT
@Ann Nonny Mouse iven to the Syrian desert AFTER some of them had aligned with the Russians who were about to invade eastern Anatolia in 1915. Similarly, most of Crimean Tatars were expelled from Crimea AFTER some of them had aligned with the invading Germans in 1941. As another comparison, American-Japanese living at the Pacific coast were banished to camps in the interior AFTER the Japanese army had attacked Pearl Harbor and not before.
When a group of people kill or drive out another group it’s usually not for the fun of it but rather due to necessities of survival, whatever evil that might require at that particular time depending on the particular circumstances.
Surprised , says: October 2, 2020 at 5:50 pm GMT

It would be interesting to read a scholarly exposition on what the USSR and governments in Eastern Europe proper did or did not do to educate people away from their ancient hatreds, and why whatever they did do appears not to have been particularly successful. Or was it mostly successful and the hatreds were much more intense before 1917?

Tommy Thompson , says: October 2, 2020 at 8:04 pm GMT
@SZ

The ethnic cleansing of the Armenians was pretty bloody and barbaric and was meant as a public spectacle for reasons that are argued about till today.

It was well recorded by the inhabitants of Syria.

Uprising against your rulers does not give the rulers right to carry out genocide or ethnic cleansing in any case.

Anonymous [334] • Disclaimer , says: October 3, 2020 at 2:52 am GMT

The entire Jewish American lobby and Israel are on Azerbaijan’s side and anti-Armenian, just as when they were working with Turkey to deny the Armenian genocide.

Israel has also sold billions of dollars of weapons to Azerbaijan which the latter is using against Armenians. Israel gets oil from Azerbaijan

Of course, Azerbaijan and Turkey have imported jihadists from Syria and Libya to fight Christian Armenians now.

Apparently, Pepe, you and the Jewish lobby, Israel, Turkey, and the jihadists are on the same side.

Congratulations.

P.S. It would take a hundred pages to list all the factual errors you made. For example, Armenians were still the clear majority in Artsakh/Karabagh in 1988 and 1991. Armenians there had been grossly mistreated by Azerbaijan for decades.

The fighting occurred in the late 1980s only because Azerbaijan, backed by the Russian military, killed and harrassed Armenians. The Azeris also committed massacres of Armenians who were living in Baku and Sumgait in the late 1980s.

Stalin also placed Nakhichevan, an Armenian territory, inside Azerbaijan.
Azerbaijan kicked out every Armenian from Nakhichevan. Azerbaijan was doing that to Artsakh/Karabagh too.

No wonder Artsakh voted to be independent from Azerbaijan, something you don’t want to understand.
Better luck next time trying to fool readers, Pepe.

Felix Keverich , says: October 3, 2020 at 6:46 am GMT

The key fact remains that as long as Armenia proper is not attacked by Azerbaijan, Russia will not apply the CSTO treaty and step in. Erdogan knows this is his red line. Moscow has all it takes to put him in serious trouble – as in shutting off gas supplies to Turkey.

Russia isn’t going to shut off gas to Turkey. Russia never does that (shutting off gas). It’s a Western canard.

Russia could, however, impose a no-fly-zone over Georgia, effectively blocking resupply and reinforcements to Azerbaijan. Azerbaijan is almost completely surrounded by Russian allies and bases. They rely on Georgia for military transit.

Druid , says: October 3, 2020 at 7:29 am GMT
@Ann Nonny Mouse

Ignorant post. Armenian nationalist were active in Russia prior to ww1, then supported Russian entrance into Turkish territory because they shared a religion. They stabbed the ottomans , of which they were a big part, in the back. The young Turks , who were actually donmeh jews, had them marched off to Syria and lebanon, etc, causing many deaths! The Armenian is still causing trouble for the Turks. They sided with the mongols in their battles against the Muslims, along wit the Georgians, repeatedly. More to a small story

anon [154] • Disclaimer , says: October 3, 2020 at 11:51 pm GMT

What’s going to happen to USA? The poverty and racial intolerance ,both seem to be undermining the stability and the ideological integrity of the country . I see many states emerging from the body of America.But the problems will not be resolved . It might just like like Caucasian territory or Balkan .

Anonymous [231] • Disclaimer , says: October 4, 2020 at 3:25 am GMT
@Yevardian

Pepe appears to be on the side of Azerbaijan, and thus also on the side of Turkey, Israel, the Jewish lobby, and jihadists.

Nice company.

vot tak , says: October 4, 2020 at 11:58 pm GMT

Reading this, my suspicion is this “mr. c” is part of the western disinformation machine, probably operating for the israelis.

Semiogogue , says: October 5, 2020 at 12:47 am GMT

1. BTC is described as ‘bypassing Iran’. One could easily argue it also bypasses *Russia* . Perhaps that’s what made it necessary for Soros & others to peel Georgia off from Russian control back in the day? Look how Russia responded by recapturing the Georgian Military Highway (South Ossetia).

2. Look in general at how Russia is willing to give up huge areas of territory so long as she keeps key strategic points of control: South Ossetia, Crimea, Transnistria, Abkhazia and… Armenia. Smell the coffee.

3. 2. ‘Mr. C’ is quick to mention Baku/Ankara joint exercises in August, but fails to mention Kavkas 2020 exercises led by Russia. Uh duh.

4. ‘Mr. C’ seems to ignore the fact that Armenia couldn’t have taken that territory in first place, or kept it, w/out Russian assistance. And idea ‘Russia can do nothing’ is absurd. As is the idea that Russia can’t supply Armenia because there’s no land connection. Did the allies have any problem keeping West Berlin supplied by air? Of course not. All nonsense.

5. The idea that there is a ‘Russia/Turkey’ strategic partnership is also silly. Where is this partnership? Turkey buying S-400s? So what? Are they in partnership in Syria? In Libya? No. So why would they be in N-K?

6. Weird. No mention of China and it’s growing relationship with Turkey. This probably tells you all you need to know about the author. Unless of course the author is just a fool, which is also possible.

Jivinski , says: October 5, 2020 at 4:04 am GMT

“Yet even before the collapse the Azerbaijani Army and Armenian independentists were already at war (1988-1994), which yielded a grim balance of 30,000 dead and roughly a million wounded.”

This is a wounded-to-killed ratio of thirty-three to one. Doesn’t make sense.

Majority of One , says: October 5, 2020 at 4:35 am GMT

Were Russia to be as devious and underhanded as the puppet regime in the Di$trict of Corruption, they would arrange for an overthrow of the present NATO/EU/U$ regime in Yerevan. With those bastards out of the way and Armenia no longer playing double jeopardy, it might be possible for a new Orthodox oriented Armenian government to come to some sort of arrangement with Baku.

At the same time, perhaps Syrian spetsnaz units could practice some infiltration tactics into Turkish semi-occupied “greater” Idlib and Ghurka style, behead a few Turkish officers running the show there.

“Sultan” Erdogan is playing loose and wild with his shattering economy and massive military. It is high time he was given a black-eye–one that would cause him to lose face among his own countrymen.

Mactoul , says: October 5, 2020 at 5:08 am GMT
@SZ

How many of the Japanese-American deportees died as consequence of deportation vs how many Armenians that died as consequence of their deportation.

It is not deportation that is alleged to be the Turkish crime but genocide. Please keep it mind.

Yukon Jack , says: October 5, 2020 at 5:16 am GMT

This is my educated guess, the Anglo-Zionists led by Rothschild and Netanayahu destablize the oil in the Middle East to keep their prices of oil in USD above 100 $/barrel

They have also blown up oil derricks in the North Sea, shut down Iranian and Iraq and Syria oil production. The game is clear, low oil prices are being met with wiping out the competition.

And causing hell in Iran and Venezueala. Back in 1954 Operation Ajax took out Mossadeq and installed the Shah – puppet of big oil. Before it was BP it was the Persian Gulf Oil Co. BP is owned mostly by the crown.

Trump’s secretary of state was Rex Tillerson CEO Exxon just like GW Bush picked Condoleeza Rice CEO Chevron to be his national security advisor.

The Israel angle is to get Iran and to goad Russia into war with the USA, the eventually goal is that USA-Russia-China are reduced while Jews rule the world from Jerusalem.

How much you wanna bet Bibi Satanyahu has a hand in this war? And Evangelical Christians will support Israel even if this war kills lots of Armenian Christians just like in Syria.

Since this war in on Russia’s doorstep Putin an Lavrov will try negotiations first then what will they do next. Putin has vowed the war will never come to Russia which means Russia will enter the theater on the anti-Zionist side.

Have you noticed every state within a few hundred miles of Israel is being torched and the natives driven out?

Ghali , says: October 5, 2020 at 6:17 am GMT

Back again to Pepe Escobar’s distortions of reality. Nagorno-Karabakh is an Armenian-occupied Azerbaijani territory. In fact, no country in the world recognises it as an “Independent” as Escobar likes to mislead us. Armenia should do the right thing and withdraw its forces, including foreign militants from there. Like Israel, Armenia is playing the role of a victim of a “holocaust”.

GMC , says: October 5, 2020 at 7:20 am GMT

Considering that the 2nd largest US/NWO Embassy in the World is in Armenia – a country of 2.9 million people, and that the new President was put in power by the West – the end game is to continue to surround Russia, screw up the New Silk Road, and be at Iran’s back door too. As said before , the domestic USA can totally look like the USSR in the 90s, but the NWO Foreign policy money is 100% – guaranteed. What do all those thousands of workers in that huge Embassy compound do ?

GMC , says: October 5, 2020 at 7:30 am GMT
@Tommy Thompson

Actually, once the Armenians were genocided , the Jewish bankers were the big shots left in Turkey. H Morgenthau, our Turkish ambassador along with being jewish himself, wrote about it in his reports. The Game hasn’t changed much – it stays the same. Thanks.

J , says: October 5, 2020 at 7:44 am GMT

About a third of Iran’s population is Azeri. Should they develop interest in the conflict, Iran may become involved. That would align Turkey and Iran vs Russia. That would be something.

ARemo , says: October 5, 2020 at 8:48 am GMT
@Yevardian

Damn right. We already have experience what happens when Turks get control of Christian Armenians – systematic gang rapes and death marches are the rule of the day. Turks are animals and letting them control any portion of Armenia is basically turning that place into a concentration camp.

Ming Shih-tsung , says: October 5, 2020 at 10:58 am GMT
@Yevardian

“Mr. C” probably stands for Cemal, given how biased he is.

anon [229] • Disclaimer , says: October 5, 2020 at 12:01 pm GMT
@Yukon Jack p>

Fact: 1979 was the year that “big oil” LEGAL contracts were to expire and the “puppet” Shah had threatened as early as 1973 (when he was instrumental in making OPEC a powerful entity) that in 1979 Iran “would sell Iranian Oil to any buyer, at market prices”.

Fact: Iran, in 1978 produced 6 million barrels per day. It has never been permitted to reach those levels again.

Fact: Chinese, Indian, Syrian, Venezuelan, and God knows who else, all projects of the Global Cabal have been getting Iranian Oil (under their engineered boxing of Iranian nation) at levels that very likely are equal if not LOWER than the terms the Qajar idiots gave the insatiablely greedy and slimey English.

Alfred , says: October 5, 2020 at 12:05 pm GMT
@Ann Nonny Mouse perpetrated by Turkey.

And you did not mention that the only quarters of Smyrna/Izmir that were not torched in a fire in 1922 were the Jewish and Turkish quarters – what a surprise! An antecedent to 9/11. Here is the Jewpedia hiding the real story – as usual.

The Armenian and Greek quarters were destroyed and the Jews got a monopoly on the commerce. Done deal!

Great fire of Smyrna

Wielgus , says: October 5, 2020 at 12:09 pm GMT
@GMC

If the “colour revolution” assumptions were in force, there would be a host of denunciations of Azerbaijan and Turkey (the latter perhaps the real prime mover in this) by the USA and EU etc. There aren’t. The USA and EU may even tacitly support the Azerbaijanis, perhaps they hope the Russians and Iranians will become entangled in this affair and so forth.

Ugetit , says: October 5, 2020 at 12:14 pm GMT
@vot tak

…my suspicion is this “mr. c” is part of the western disinformation machine, probably operating for the israelis.

While I know nothing about the situation, after reading the article and the mostly excellent comments, I suspect your suspicion is correct.

Alfred , says: October 5, 2020 at 12:38 pm GMT

I have a suggestion.

How about swapping Nagorno-Karabakh for North Cyprus. I am sure the Greeks would be very happy to live with the Armenians. But the Sultan’s dreams of owning the Eastern Mediterranean would come to naught.

anon [137] • Disclaimer , says: October 5, 2020 at 12:45 pm GMT
@Lin

I’ve always associated that piece with the circus not knowing the title or its origin.

Stebbing Heuer , says: October 5, 2020 at 12:50 pm GMT
@Anonymous

Stalin did nasty things like that to keep the republics feuding with each other rather than pushing back against Moscow. The mixed-up borders of the ‘stans, further east, are testament to this. Fergana Valley?

Divide and rule. Still costing lives in pointless wars almost 100 years later.

Дима Трамп , says: October 5, 2020 at 1:07 pm GMT

At stake is the very existence of the Armenian people. Turkey is trying to finish what remains of them after the genocide last century. Both Erdoghan and Aliev have stated, that they want a “final solution” to the “Armenian problem”.

It’s an existential battle for the Armenians.

Дима Трамп , says: October 5, 2020 at 1:09 pm GMT
@Yevardian

We all know what they did to the Armenians in 1915.

Дима Трамп , says: October 5, 2020 at 1:11 pm GMT
@Alfred

Exactly. The history of Turkey since 1880-s is full of ethnic cleansings and genocides of the non-muslim people such as Armenians, Greeks and Assyrians.

MLK , says: October 5, 2020 at 1:16 pm GMT

My thanks to Escobar for taking on a subject rather obviously not susceptible to 2,700 word essays, along with attention worthy links.

His biases are not my own but he’s thoughtful and certainly doesn’t hide them.

In this and so many other incidents we can see how thoroughly Trump has moved the American ship of state despite the relentless efforts of foreign and domestic resistance to neutralize America First and destroy him.

It’s really quite something the way Obama’s presidency in all its disastrous fullness has been memory-holed. The defense of it being that it merely extended Bush’s world-historical incompetence and malefactions.

Could you have turned US unipolarity following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact into a “moment” if you tried? I couldn’t.

You will be way ahead of most everyone if you get your mind around that and the geopolitical sad story that is CCP China winning the post-Cold War quarter-century hands down.

We inevitably come back to the point that the whole drama can be interpreted from the perspective of a NATO geopolitical hit against Russia – according to quite a few analyses circulating at the Duma.

Ukraine is an absolute black hole. There’s the Belarus impasse. Covid-19. The Navalny circus. The “threat” to Nord Stream-2.

To pull Russia back into the Armenia-Azerbaijan drama means turning Moscow’s attention towards the Caucasus . . .

I confess that I get no end of enjoyment over bellyaching on behalf of those powers the Obama administration was turning the world over to. Nord Stream II was merely the down payment on Russia’s assistance/acquiescence in throwing the electron to Hillary, with the sky the limit for China, Russia and Iran once Democrats and their foreign allies had neutralized free and fair elections.

Now all of these powers must deal with a real POTUS who asks “What have you done for the US lately?”

The USG and Russia have cooperated where geopolitical interests align. More will follow once Trump takes the oath again. As I’ve explained previously, despite its high-risk position in the Resistance matrix, Russia/Putin have (unsurprisingly, to me) acted skillfully and with circumspection.

The same cannot be said for Iran. Nor China, particularly since the end of last year.

Ashino Wolf Sushanti , says: October 5, 2020 at 1:27 pm GMT

https://www.putin-today.ru/archives/109463
https://vz.ru
Михаил Мошкин

Why Russia needs Azerbaijan !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The aggravation of the situation in Nagorno-Karabakh has raised a number of questions. In particular, why Moscow is in no hurry to stand up for Armenia and why it does not sharply criticize
Azerbaijan. The answer is that Moscow and Baku have very close relations, and not only economic relations. So what is the value and irreplaceability of Azerbaijan for Russia?

[MORE]
Z-man , says: October 5, 2020 at 1:52 pm GMT

Border and population changes are in order. A quarter of N-K goes back to Azerbaijan and the rest closer to Armenia proper plus the capital city goes to Armenia with a 50 mile wide band connecting it with the rest of Armenia. The Azeris get the rest of their lands now occupied by the Armenians. Will it happen? Probably not, just look at Kosovo..

God's Fool , says: October 5, 2020 at 2:05 pm GMT

There is a province between Ngorno Karabakh and Armenia proper of roughly of the same size belonging to Azerbaijan, so why not just exchange it with each other to avoid further conflict and bloodshed?

Дима Трамп , says: October 5, 2020 at 2:57 pm GMT
@God's Fool

There is no guarantee that Turkey will not try to then eliminate whatever remains of Armenia.

Remember, Turkey genocided Armenians and wiped out close to 80% of them in 1915 through 1922. Armenian populated areas stretched from what is now Armenia until the shores of Eastern Mediterranean. The only thing that is left of it is Kessab in modern day Syria.

Majority of One , says: October 5, 2020 at 3:14 pm GMT
@Ghali e fake, false and fraudulent, whether in Asia or Africa. Over time, justice will prevail and borders will reflect the ethno-national composition of its long-term inhabitants.

That said, the current regime in Yerevan needs to be overthrown, as it was established in conjunction with the interests of the Cabal/Nato and their various puppet regimes. Armenia is the oldest Orthodox Christian nation in the world and was severely genocided by the Donmeh covert Jewish Masons who called themselves the “Young Turks” who were led by Enver Pasha.

By the way, who are you, Ghali? Do you have a dog in the fight? Are you connected with an intel agency?

anaccount , says: October 5, 2020 at 3:21 pm GMT

Excellent article, normally I pass over Pepe for the naughty articles on Unz but I might have to take another look.

My only critique is that the article feels pro-Azeri but that’s balanced with an informative description how this started in July, including an accurate appraisal of Turkish behavior.

I’m not Azeri or Armenian so I didn’t have a dog in this fight until I noticed Israel’s support for Azerbaijan. It’s nothing personal, I have only one hate.

Shaman911 , says: October 5, 2020 at 3:27 pm GMT

Jewish Bankers shifting profits to other Jewish bankers. Funding all sides and profiting from the mass graves again. 5000 years and nothing has changed.

GMC , says: October 5, 2020 at 3:36 pm GMT
@Wielgus

The Turks are the US Army in this – with their proxy armies sent to help the Azerbaijanis, just like the US Army /Israelis and their proxies Isis, al Nusra, al Qaeda etc. in Syria. The US and their 6000 employees at the Embassy, don’t have to say anything – they back both sides – just like the Zionists do – in the US political parties. Things don’t change , Tactics don’t change. Thanks.

A.R. , says: October 5, 2020 at 4:30 pm GMT
@Majority of One

You are asking him if he has a dog in this fight? What about yourself? You very clearly have a dog in this fight yourself, haven`t you?
Try to cut down on the hypocrasy, why don`t you, and at the same time maybe moderate your “holier than thou” attitude.

[Oct 05, 2020] As much as US loves color revolutions, US hates real revolutions.

Oct 05, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Kooshy , Oct 4 2020 19:01 utc | 26

US regime in this last forty years since the Iranian revolution has been totally successful making majority Iranian people anywhere in the world understand that the US is their chronic strategic enemy for decades to come, in mean time, US regime has been equally as successful in making American people believe Iran is their enemy.
The difference between the two sides belief is, Iranian people by experiencing US regime' conducts came to their belief, but the American people' belief was made by their own regime' propaganda machinery. For this reason just like the people to people relation between the US and Russian people Before and after the fall of USSR the relation between US and Iran in next few generations will not come or even develop to anything substantial or meaningful. One can see this same trajectory in US Chinese relations, or US Cuban. Noticeably all these countries relation with US become terminally irreparable after their revolutions, regardless of maturity or termination of their revolution.
As much as US loves color revolutions, US hates real revolutions.

[Oct 05, 2020] Russian subsides for Easter Europe are now much less then in the past

Oct 05, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Kooshy , Oct 4 2020 19:41 utc | 36

Before the fall of USSR most Eastern Europe USSR dependencies energy and security was subsidized by Russians /USSR. After the fall of USSR most so called independent Eastern European former Soviet allies are reviving their energy from Russia but subsidized by EU/US in form of loans and capital investments and their security is total subsidized by US/NATO. This was understood as such and cleverly corrected by the Russians

[Oct 04, 2020] Is The War Over Nagorno-Karabakh Already At A Stalemate-

Oct 04, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Moon of Alabama Brecht quote " U.S. President Trump Has Caught 'The Flu' | Main October 03, 2020 Is The War Over Nagorno-Karabakh Already At A Stalemate?

Seven days after Azerbaijan attacked the Armenian held Nagorno-Karabakh territory it has not made any territorial progress.

Overview map

Iran and Georgia have both large Azeri and Armenian minorities within their territories.
bigger

Detail map

bigger

The highlands of Nagorno-Karabakh are ethnically Armenian. The light blue districts were originally Azeri but have been ethically cleansed during the war in the early 1990s.

Turkey is supporting Azerbaijan by supplying it with Turkish drones and with 'moderate Syrian rebel' mercenaries from Syrian and Libya . All are flown in through Georgian air space. Other mercenaries seem to come from Afghanistan . Additional hardware comes by road also through Georgia. Another supporter of the attacker is Israel. During the last week Azerbaijani military transport aircraft have flown at least six times to Israel to then return with additional Israeli suicide drones on board. These Harop drones have been widely used in attacks on Armenian positions. An Israeli made LORA short range ballistic missile was used by Azerbaijan to attack a bridge that connects Nagorno-Karabakh with Armenia. Allegedly there are also Turkish flown F-16 fighter planes in Azerbaijan.

Turkey seems to direct the drones and fighter planes in Azerbaijan and Nagorno-Karabakh through AWACS type air control planes that fly circles at the Turkish-Armenian border.

The attack plan Azerbaijan had in mind when it launched the war foresaw to take several miles deep zones per day. It has not survived the first day of battle. Azerbaijan started the attack without significant artillery preparation. The ground attack was only supported by drone strikes on Armenian tanks, artillery and air defense positions. But the defensive lines held by Armenian infantry were not damaged by the drones. The dug in Armenian infantry could use its anti-tank and anti-infantry weapons to full extend. Azerbaijani tanks and infantry were slaughtered when they tried to break into the lines. Both sides had significant casualties but overall the frontlines did not move.

The war seems already to be at a stalemate. Neither Armenia nor Azerbaijan can afford to use air power and ballistic missiles purchased from Russia without Russian consent.

The drone attacks were for a while quite successful. A number of old air defense systems were destroyed before the Armenians became wiser with camouflaging them. The Azerbaijani's than used a trick to unveil hidden air defense positions. Radio controlled Antonov AN-2 airplanes, propeller driven relicts from the late 1940s, were sent over Armenian positions. When the air defense then launched a missile against them a loitering suicide drone was immediately dropped onto the firing position .

That seems to have worked for a day or two but by now such drone attacks have been become rare. Dozens of drones were shut down before they could hit a target and Azerbaijan seems to be running out of them. A bizarre music video the Azerbaijanis posted showed four trucks each carrying nine drones. It may have had several hundreds of those drones but likely less than one thousand. Israel is currently under a strict pandemic lockdown. Resupply of drones will be an issue. Azerbaijan has since brought up more heavy artillery but it seems to primarily use it to hit towns and cities, not the front lines where it would be more useful.

It is not clear who is commanding the Azerbaijani troops. There days ago the Chief of the General Staff of Azerbaijan was fired after he complained about too much Turkish influence on the war. That has not helped. Two larger ground attacks launched by Azerbaijan earlier today were also unsuccessful. The Armenians are currently counter attacking.

In our last piece on the war we pointed to U.S. plans to 'overextend Russia' by creating trouble in the Caucasus just as it is now happening. Fort Russ notes :

The current director of the CIA, Gina Haspel , was doing field assignments in Turkey in the early stages of her career, she reportedly speaks Turkish, and she has history of serving as a station chief in Baku, Azerbaijan , in the late 1990s. It is, therefore, presumable that she still has connections with the local government and business elites.

The current Chief of the MI6, Richard Moore , also has history of working in Turkey -- he was performing tasks for the British intelligence there in the late 1980s and the early 1990s. Moore is fluent in Turkish and he also served as the British Ambassador to Turkey from 2014 to 2017.

The intelligence chiefs of the two most powerful countries in the Anglosphere are turkologists with connections in Turkey and Azerbaijan. It would be reasonable to assume that a regional conflict of such magnitude happening now, on their watch, is far from being a mere coincidence.

Before President Trump stopped the program the CIA had used the Azerbaijani Silk Way Airlines in more than 350 flights to bring weapons from Bulgaria to Turkey to then hand them to 'Syrian rebels'. Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, is not only a CIA station but also a Mossad center for waging its silent war against Iran.

The former Indian ambassador to Turkey M.K. Bhadrakumar has written two interesting pieces on the current conflict. In the first one he reminds us on the 2018 color revolution in Armenia which he had thought meant trouble for Moscow .

I have never perceived it that way. While Armenia's current Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan tried to get into business with 'western' powers and NATO there was no way he could fundamentally change Armenia's foreign policy. A hundred years ago Turkey, with the second biggest NATO army, had genocided Armenians. They have never forgotten that. The relation to Azerbaijan were also certain to continue to be hostile. That will only change if the two countries again come under some larger empire. Armenia depends on Russian arms support just as much as Azerbaijan does. (Azerbaijan has more money and pays more for its Russian weapons which allows Russia to subsidize the ones it sells to Armenia.)

After Nikol Pashinyan was installed and tried to turn 'west' Russia did the same as it did in Belarus when President Lukashenko started to make deals with the 'west'. It set back and waited until the 'west' betrayed its new partners. That has happened in Belarus a few weeks ago. The U.S. launched a color revolution against Lukashenko and he had nowhere to turn to but to Russia . Now Armenia is under attack by NATO supported forces and can not hope for help from anywhere but Russia.

Iran likewise did not fear the new government in Yerevan. It was concerned over Pashinyan's recent diplomatic exchanges with Israel which were at the initiative of the White House. But that concern has now been lifted. To protest against Israel's recent sale of weapon to Azerbaijan Armenia has called back its ambassador from Israel just two weeks after it opened its embassy there.

Pashinyan will have to apologize in Moscow before Russia will come to his help. As Maxim Suchkov relays :

This is interesting: Evgeniy "Putin's chef" Prigozhin gives short interview to state his "personal opinion" on Nagorno-Karabakh. Some takeaways:

- Karabakh is Azerbaijan's territory
- Russia has no legal grounds to conduct military activity in Karabakh
- there are more American NGOs in Armenia than national military units
- PM Pashinyan is to blame
- until 2018 Russia was able to ensure ARM & AZ discuss conflict at the negotiation table, then US brought Pashinyan to power in Yerevan and he feels he's a king & can't talk to Aliyev

I wonder if Prigozhin's remarks suggest he'd be reluctant to deploy his Wagner guys to Armenia, if needed or if he is asked to do so, or he's just indeed stating his own views or it's a way to delicately allude to Pashinyan that Moscow not happy with him ... ?

Russia's (and Iran's) interest is to refreeze the conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh. But that requires compliant people on both sides. It therefore does not mind that Azerbaijan currently creates some pressure on Pashinyan. But it can not allow Azerbaijan to make a significant victory. One of its main concern will be to get Turkey out of the game and that will require support for Armenia. Iran has a quite similar strategy. The U.S. will probably try to escalate the situation and to make it more complicate for Russia. It is likely silently telling Turkey to increase its involvement in the war.

Russia will likely only intervene if either side makes some significant territorial gains. Unless that happens it will likely allow the war to continue in the hope that it will burn out :

The upcoming winter conditions, coupled with the harsh terrain, will limit large-scale military operations. Also, the crippled economies of both Azerbaijan and Armenia will not allow them to maintain a prolonged conventional military confrontation.

Posted by b on October 3, 2020 at 17:28 UTC | Permalink

james , Oct 3 2020 17:42 utc | 1

thanks b....informative... another proxy war is how this looks to me with all the usual suspects involved... they couldn't get what they wanted in syria, so now onto this...
dh , Oct 3 2020 18:04 utc | 2
Trump hasn't said much about this conflict yet. He probably has his eye on Armenian/American voters.
Kali , Oct 3 2020 18:05 utc | 3
The war started the day after negotiations between Russia and Turkey over Syria and maybe Libya also failed. Now the Azeri military complains about too much Turkish involvement which can only mean one thing--complaining about taking orders from Turks. So this looks like a Turkish aggression against Moscow? Meant to make a point about Syria? Libya?
Blue Dotterel , Oct 3 2020 18:17 utc | 4
In fact, most of your links are propaganda from both sides. We really have no idea what is going on on the ground.

In fact, most of your links are propaganda from both sides. We really have no idea what is going on on the ground.

Azerbaijan's position is justified, given that Armenia illegally occupies Azeri territory. The failure here is on the OSCE group for not being able or willing to resolve the conflict. Azerbaijan has a right to regain its territory by force, if necessary.

Russia may very well allow Azerbaijan to retake its territory, if it can, but draw a red line as to entering Armenia proper. The Current Armenian government is hardly a friend of Russia.

A good summary of the situation is Pepe Escobar's https://asiatimes.com/2020/10/explosive-stakes-on-the-armenia-azerbaijan-chessboard/


Blue Dotterel , Oct 3 2020 18:21 utc | 5
Posted by: Blue Dotterel | Oct 3 2020 18:17 utc | 4

Saker's link doesn't require a login
https://thesaker.is/whats-at-stake-in-the-armenia-azerbaijan-chessboard/

Josh , Oct 3 2020 18:27 utc | 6
Thanks B.
james , Oct 3 2020 18:29 utc | 7
@ Blue Dotterel | Oct 3 2020 18:17 utc | 4... do you feel the same way about crimea and ukraine taking it back? curious... you live in turkey if i am not mistaken.. are you turkish??
Bemildred , Oct 3 2020 18:31 utc | 8
Mountains are not good places to fight wars. Tends to be bloody, expensive, and useless.

I wonder what Haspel thinks she is doing too?

Maybe they could federate Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Armenia, form a union state, call it Caucasia, we can send all our white supremacists there.

Gary , Oct 3 2020 18:32 utc | 9
First Israeli attack on Armenia in 2017

In a rare move, the Defense Ministry suspended the export license of an Israeli drone manufacturer to Azerbaijan in light of claims that the company attempted to bomb the Armenian military on the Azeris behalf during a demonstration of one of its "suicide" unmanned aerial vehicles last month.
The two Israelis operating the two Orbiter 1K drones during the test refused to carry out the attack, Two higher ranking members of the Aeronautics Defense Systems delegation in Baku then attempted to carry out the Azerbaijani request , but, lacking the necessary experience, ended up missing their targets.
Last year, Azerbaijan used another Israeli suicide drone, an Israeli Aerospace Industries Harop-model, in an attack on a bus that killed seven Armenians.
Last year, the country's president, Ilham Aliyev, revealed Azerbaijan had purchased some $5 billion worth of weapons and defense systems from Israel.

Blue Dotterel , Oct 3 2020 18:44 utc | 10
Posted by: james | Oct 3 2020 18:29 utc | 7

My citizenship is the same as yours. No one recognizes Nagorno Karabagh independence, not even Armenia.

Bulent Ecevit, two time PM of Turkey, leftist and a poet, suggested the logical solution to the problem years ago. He suggested that Armenia cede land along the Armenian/Iran border of similar size so that Azerbaijan could unite with its southern territory Nakhchivan, thus Nagorno Karabagh could be exchanged for this territory. Both sides would be winners one assumes.

Apparently, no one liked the idea despite its fairness. I assume the Azeris in NK would have to be exchanged with the Armenians in the corridor in a population exchange for this to be realized.

arata , Oct 3 2020 18:55 utc | 11
@2 Kali
"The war started the day after negotiations between Russia and Turkey over Syria and maybe Libya also failed"

More than a week before start of the war, everyone involved in the region politics knew the war is imminent. Two days before the start of war Zarif rushed to Moscow.
Blue Dotterel , Oct 3 2020 18:57 utc | 12
Posted by: Bemildred | Oct 3 2020 18:31 utc | 8

You mean the Transcaucasian Democratic Federative Republic
https://wiki2.org/en/Transcaucasian_Democratic_Federative_Republic

Didn't last long.

Iñigo , Oct 3 2020 19:02 utc | 13
This bastard of Prigozhin goes where the money flows.
And the money flows from Baku.
Do not give much credit to this thug.
Or perhaps Crimea belongs to Ukraine?
R Rose , Oct 3 2020 19:03 utc | 14
@ Blue Dotterel

"Bulent Ecevit, two time PM of Turkey, leftist and a poet, suggested the logical solution to the problem years ago. He suggested that Armenia cede land along the Armenian/Iran border of similar size so that Azerbaijan could unite with its southern territory Nakhchivan, thus Nagorno Karabagh could be exchanged for this territory. Both sides would be winners one assumes.

Apparently, no one liked the idea despite its fairness. I assume the Azeris in NK would have to be exchanged with the Armenians in the corridor in a population exchange for this to be realized."

That reads like a reasonable solution. Too bad it wasn't embraced.


b "The highlands of Nagorno-Karabakh are ethnically Armenian."? Nagorno Kharbakh is internationally recognized Azerbaijan territory

Pashinyan's placement in Armenia was meant to give an advantage to those that 'brung him' Your claims to the otherwise are some kind of pretzel logic.
Georgia absolutely flat out denied any passage of 'rebels' through their territory. That claim is utter unsubstantiated rubbish.

"have never perceived it that way. While Armenia's current Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan tried to get into business with 'western' powers and NATO there was no way he could fundamentally change Armenia's foreign policy"

Why because you say he couldn't? The one constant is change.


AtaBrit , Oct 3 2020 19:04 utc | 15
While it is not a solution as such, I fully agree with b's last point about Russia and Iran preferring to 'refreeze' the game and remove Turkey from the board.

Since the kick off I have wondered to what extent this is an Azerbaijani initiative and to what extent a Turkish one.

Either way, as I posted on the open thread, Lavrov and Cavusoglu agreed a couple of days ago that a ceasefire was necessary and Russia reiterated its strong stance against the presence of foreign militias in the conflict. Let's hope sober heads prevail. As Rouhani stated very clearly, the region can not withstand another war.

ARIES , Oct 3 2020 19:10 utc | 16
The "invisible hand" of International Zionism is driving the conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh:

https://toranja-mecanica.blogspot.com/2020/10/a-mao-invisivel-do-sionismo.html

Blue Dotterel , Oct 3 2020 19:11 utc | 17
Posted by: james | Oct 3 2020 18:29 utc | 7

Sorry, didn't really answer your question. Kosovo, N. Cyprus, Crimea (annexation) and NK independence are all regarded as illegal accoding to international law, as far as, I know. None have had a proper UN sponsored referendum.
Although Turkish N. Cyprus did vote to reunite with Greek S. Cyrprus in a UN referendum, but the Greek Cypriots nixed it, and were immediately admitted to the EU as a prize for their pigheadedness.

Is it any wonder that Turks don't trust the Christian West or East? Neither the Grek Cypriots or the Armenians have any incentive nor desire to negotiate in good faith because the US, Europe and Russia are unwilling to compel them to, but reward them instead with territorial freezes that benefit them.

The ethnic Muslim Turks in both cases get screwed because of the racist propaganda directed at them through the ages.

Pat , Oct 3 2020 19:19 utc | 18
Wow, Blue Dotterel, the hatred for Armenians runs deep in you. Nakhichevan was handed over to Azerbaijan by the Soviets even before Karabakh/Artsakh was. Then the ethnic cleansing of its majority Armenian population and destruction of ancient Armenian monuments began so there would be little trace of its pedigree. Armenia has been chipped away at and betrayed by their so-called betters generation upon generation. They are not budging nor should they.
Galust , Oct 3 2020 19:30 utc | 19
You can buy as many weapons as you want, if your soldiers don't know how to fight it's not going to help. Whether you get 4000 Syrian rebels or 40,000 to Azerbaijan it still won't help them. If Azerbaijan could take those lands they wound have done it without asking Russia's permission. Even with advanced weapons they stand no chance. Armenians are using mostly antiquated and cheap air defense tech to shoot down the most advanced and expensive drones in the world. Thousands of their troops got slaughtered And hundreds of tanks destroyed so they could get one village that no one needs ? Wow great results. If they continue with these results for 2 more weeks they are going to need a brand new army. One thing Azeris have difficulty understanding is that in real life Might makes Right. Armenians learned this lesson back in 1914 when they got slaughtered and no one cared, not even the Christian west or orthodox Russia. Azeris just need to learn to leave with defeat and shame. And Azeris don't understand how bizarre and funny their army music videos look outside Azerbaijan. Same thing with Armenian videos. Not sure why both sides think there is a need to glorify war which creates grief and misery.
circumspect , Oct 3 2020 19:32 utc | 20
As always and interesting piece of work with some interesting comments and links for one to learn some angles on this situation.
Blue Dotterel , Oct 3 2020 19:33 utc | 21
Posted by: Pat | Oct 3 2020 19:19 utc | 18

What makes you think I hate Armenians? I grew up with many Armenian friends and acquaintences in my home country. Even in Turkey, I have worked with Armenians (Turkish citizens, of course) and even had and Armenian (from Armenia) cleaning women for my flat.

I certainly do think Armenians have had poor to incompetent, even racist leaders. Sort of like the US recently. Indeed, both countries have even had a similar Covid19 mismanagement.

No, I have no problem with Armenians, any more than I do with USAians or any other peoples.

Blue Dotterel , Oct 3 2020 19:55 utc | 22
Posted by: Pat | Oct 3 2020 19:19 utc | 18

You state "the ethnic cleansing of its majority Armenian population" with out any context, but you do realise that Armenians are quite capable of and certainly committted ethnic cleansing themselves. From the Pepe Escobar article:
https://thesaker.is/whats-at-stake-in-the-armenia-azerbaijan-chessboard/

"The peace talks are going nowhere because Armenia is refusing to budge (to withdraw from occupying Nagorno-Karabakh plus 7 surrounding regions in phases or all at once, with the usual guarantees for civilians, even settlers – note that when they went in in the early 1990s they cleansed those lands of literally all Azerbaijanis, something like between 700,000 and 1 million people)."

So, fact, the Armenians ethnically cleansed some 700,000 to 1 million Azeris from the Azeri lands they now occupy including NK.

Ethnic cleansing is a crime against humanity. Unfortunately, is commonplace in war time, and even in peace time.

Kooshy , Oct 3 2020 19:56 utc | 23
To make countries eligible to become part of the NATO the west first they would need to be cleansed going through a western inspired and planed color revolution. Russian resistance formula to prevent these countries joining NATO is to make these countries an economic, political and military basket case by making parts of these countries' territory contested, and out of control of western recognized seating governments. Once countries territorial integrity becomes challenged and out of control of western inspired governments, it becomes a challenge to be absorbed by any for any alliances. Such a country is a failed country dependent on western economic, political and military freebies. Likes of Ukraine, Georgia, Azerbaijan etc. We shall see when, US/west feel, this will not work and will go nowhere, and tries to climb down the unipolar peak. Both of these countries are dependent on Iran and Russia.
Jen , Oct 3 2020 20:30 utc | 24
Blue Dotterel @ 17:

Self-determination is considered a major principle of international law. This principle is included in the UN's Charter (Chapter 1). Even if a group of people goes ahead with declaring its independence and breaking away from a country it dislikes being part of, as in the case of Crimea, without consulting with the UN in any way, the UN cannot object to this act. What Crimea did, did not violate international law.

Had the Crimeans consulted with the UN, they very likely would have been advised to remain part of Ukraine.

Self-determination does not require any support or sponsorship from the UN.


AriusArmenian , Oct 3 2020 20:33 utc | 25
Good analysis by MOA, and I also hope the war burns out going nowhere.

As to those that say NK is Azeri territory: after the Armenians were genocided on the street of Baku in the 1990's and Azeri's destroyed 5,000 Armenian monumemts would you just 'walk away' and not protect the people of NK? And after getting out followed by the Azeri's butchering the Armenians of NG it will be ignored!

Why did the Turks bring all those jihadis to Azerbaijan to fight: they will run the massacres in NK.

Blue Dotterel , Oct 3 2020 20:47 utc | 26
Posted by: Jen | Oct 3 2020 20:30 utc | 24

I am not disagreeing with the Crimean's decision, and indeed sympathize with it, but still question whether it shouldn't be considered illegal. I mean, really, how does it differ from Kosovo separating from Serbia, or the Turkish Cypriots from the Greeks. The UN does not consider the Turkish Cypriots independent. Perhaps they need to be absorbed by Albania and Turkey respectively to be considered "legal", just as Russia absorbed Crimea, although it is not considered legal, either. So why hasn't Armenia annexed NK? Why hasn't the UN recognized NK as a separate state?

Anyway, we are not discussing our preferences here. The Greek Cypriots rejected uniting their country with the Turks under a UN referendum, but the Turks voted for a united country. Why are the Turkish Cypriots not recognized as a country by the UN or anyone, but Turkey. Why have they not been rewarded with EU membership as the Greeks were? Is it any surprise that the Greeks won't negotiate in good faith with the Turks? Why should they? They get the benefits. the Turks not.

Jackrabbit , Oct 3 2020 20:50 utc | 27
As I noted in the last thread on this topic: the war serves to make the Azeris more dependent on the West. 'Winning' the war is perhaps not the goal of those behind the conflict.

!!

Flo , Oct 3 2020 20:52 utc | 28
Amusing typo in "... but have been ethically cleansed during the war in the early 1990s."
Blue Dotterel , Oct 3 2020 20:54 utc | 29
Posted by: AriusArmenian | Oct 3 2020 20:33 utc | 25

So far the jihadis are hearsay, not fact nay more than the PKK are fact fighting with the Armenians. It would not be surprizing in either case, but neither has been confirmed as fact, but merely propaganda.

Again, it is not surprising that some people in the "Christian world attribute all the massacres and destructions on the Muslims but ignor the massacres and ethnic cleansing committed by the "Christian" side. This is is a tacit, perhaps subconscious racism that has existed for hundreds of years. It is so difficult to be objective when you have been brought up to dislike, perhaps even hate the other, isn't it?

Blue Dotterel , Oct 3 2020 20:56 utc | 30
Posted by: Flo | Oct 3 2020 20:52 utc | 28

Yeah, someone's got to learn to proof read.

james , Oct 3 2020 21:03 utc | 31
@ Blue Dotterel ... thanks for your comments... you never said, but i take it you are of turkish descent.. either way, i like the comments you make, even if i don't know enough to agree or disagree with them.. there are usually 2 sides to every story, but we often don't hear both sides stories..
Хау јес ноу , Oct 3 2020 21:13 utc | 32
"The Greek Cypriots rejected uniting their country"
As I understand it the war in Cyprus started when Greek Cypriots abolished the rules stipulated by British colonizers meant to subjugate majority Greek population. Those rules gave Turk Cypriots larger portion of the power then the Greek.
Voting for unification expecting to come back to the same discriminatory laws against Greek Cypriots is non-option for the Greek Cypriots.
The other thing regarding proposition to Armenians to trade its own historical land for the other part of its own land and call if fair is very biased by my opinion. It is almost the same as proposition to Serbia to trade part of its land with current Serbian majority in the Nato occupied part of the country (Kosovo and Metohia) for the other part of the Serbia proper where some of the land has Albanian majority.
Proposal to trade a corridor to the Azerbaijans Nakhchivan for the corridor to Armenians Nagorno Karabagh would be a fair proposal.
So in both cases/proposals (Cyprus and Armenia) on the surface seem fair but if someone scratch the surface the situation appear to be far from the fair.
And in the both cases the presentation is biased for the Turkish side ... by accident.
Et Tu , Oct 3 2020 21:16 utc | 33
MoA Rocks
sad canuck , Oct 3 2020 21:20 utc | 34
Stupid people fighting stupid wars for stupid reasons. The peoples of the Caucasus need to learn to live in peace with each other or the region will continue to be a backwater exploited for great power geopolitical games.

Russia and Iran are correct to stay out of this and let the idiots kill each other. If there was any significant security threat from the mob of unruly idiots running Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia; the Russian and Iranians would roll over them all in 48 hours and there is not a damn thing anyone outside the Caucasus could do about it.

Et Tu , Oct 3 2020 21:21 utc | 35
Posted by: Flo | Oct 3 2020 20:52 utc | 28

Yeah, someone's got to learn to proof read.

Agreed, sorry Mr B, no malice intended, but your blog's credibility with unfamiliar audiences could potentially be undermined with some occasionally 'liberal' use of the English language.

Respect for using your foreign language skills of course, but perhaps a friendly proof reader with native English skills could also be an idea..

Blue Dotterel , Oct 3 2020 21:23 utc | 36
Posted by: james | Oct 3 2020 21:03 utc | 31

No, I am of mixed European descent, both east and west. And yes, that is the problem; we seldom do seek out both sides. When one looks at the Assange case, one sees the the problem of our age (and many others) where the prosecution is allowed to present its case with all prejudice, but the defense is repeatedly hampered by the supposedly impartial judge. And the media, well what to the people get - propaganda, often through ommision in this case.

Similarly, peoples are judged by through the propaganda of a culture or society, usually to benefit those with power. So people are taught to demonize or denigrate the other assuming their own to have upstanding moral character or, if defeated in some way, victims needing redress.

After the bombing of the Turkish consulate in Ottawa in the early 80s by an Armenian terrorist group, ASALA, I made a point of educating myself on the so called genocide issue, but had a hard time finding the Turkish point of view in Canada. As fortune would have it, I found employment in Turkey, and eventually discovered what was difficult to find in Canada: an alternative point of view concerning the issue and many others. Examining the writers' treatment of facts and their academic backgrounds was certainly educational in many cases.

Suffice it to say that on being able to actually see the "defense", I came to different judgements from those I would be able to come to in my home country.

james , Oct 3 2020 21:33 utc | 37
i recommend a piano duel between an Azerbaijan and Armenian to work it out... forget the guns and killing people part...

one example of armenian musician (on youtube) Tigran Hamasyan

one example of azerbaijan musician (on youtube) Leila Figarova

james , Oct 3 2020 21:36 utc | 38
@ Blue Dotterel | Oct 3 2020 21:23 utc | 36.. thank you for this as well.. i hear what you are saying.. it is an ongoing battle to get all the information and nuances.. we probably don't ever get all the information necessary which is why i resort to believing war is not the answer.. easy for me to say this here on the westcoast of canada...
Clueless Joe , Oct 3 2020 21:49 utc | 39
Ah yes, the "other side's" point of view about Armenian genocide. Did you look for the Nazis' point of view about the Shoah, too?
Point is, Turkey has been genociding (directly or by proxies) non-Muslim people since the late 19th century, and keeps trying to do it everywhere it can. In a way, Kurds are lucky to be Muslim, they're just occupied and suppressed instead of being mass-murdered by the millions - unlike Cypriots, Greeks, Armenians, Yazidis, Assyrians and others.
S , Oct 3 2020 21:50 utc | 40
The seven surrounding regions should be returned to Azerbaijan, so that 600,000 refugees can return to their homes. NKAO should be allowed to join Armenia to avoid creating new refugees.

I understand that legally NKAO is part of Azerbaijan, but Armenians have been living in Artsakh for thousands of years, and it is unrealistic to expect them to give up and leave. On the other hand, it is morally wrong to preserve the status quo and thus accept the ethnic cleansing of the 90s. That's why a compromise is needed.

hopehely , Oct 3 2020 21:53 utc | 41
Posted by: Blue Dotterel | Oct 3 2020 19:55 utc | 22
Ethnic cleansing is a crime against humanity. Unfortunately, is commonplace in war time, and even in peace time.

Yeah, when was that when Bulgarians expelled Turks from Bulgaria, 1989? It was tragic, hard to watch.
Nationalism is evil. I blame French for that disease.

Somewhat unrelated question: so Karabakh is written in Turkish Karabağ, which is quite similar (to me) to Montenegro, Karadağ. Is the similarity accidental, or both words have related meaning / connotation?

foolisholdman , Oct 3 2020 21:54 utc | 42
Posted by: Blue Dotterel | Oct 3 2020 20:54 utc | 29
So far the jihadis are hearsay, not fact nay more than the PKK are fact fighting with the Armenians. It would not be surprizing in either case, but neither has been confirmed as fact, but merely propaganda.

https://uk.yahoo.com/news/syrian-recruit-describes-role-foreign-173138233.html

David G , Oct 3 2020 22:16 utc | 43
Blue Dotterel | Oct 3 2020 18:44 utc | 10:
Bulent Ecevit, two time PM of Turkey, leftist and a poet, suggested the logical solution to the problem years ago. He suggested that Armenia cede land along the Armenian/Iran border of similar size so that Azerbaijan could unite with its southern territory Nakhchivan, thus Nagorno Karabagh could be exchanged for this territory. Both sides would be winners one assumes.
I would not be one who so assumes. Armenia would be nuts to give up their border with the one neighbor supportive of them while creating contiguity between Turkey and Azerbaijan's main territory.
james , Oct 3 2020 22:20 utc | 44
i recommend the 2 articles b linked to up above by M.K. Bhadrakumar for greater historical context of what is at play here...
Josh , Oct 3 2020 22:25 utc | 45
An article with an interesting perspective from almayadeen.net
https://m.almayadeen.net/analysis/1426965/%D8%AA%D8%B1%D9%83%D9%8A%D8%A7-%D9%88-%D8%A5%D8%B3%D8%B1%D8%A7%D8%A6%D9%8A%D9%84----%D9%87%D9%84-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%AA%D9%82%D8%AA%D8%A7-%D9%81%D9%8A-%D8%A3%D8%B0%D8%B1%D8%A8%D9%8A%D8%AC%D8%A7%D9%86
Dr Wellington Yueh , Oct 3 2020 22:30 utc | 46
@james #37 re: piano duel

One of my all-time favorite recordings is Love, Devotion, Surrender (Santana, McLaughlin). The very first piece on the album, a cover of Coltrane's "A Love Supreme," has the two guitarists engage in a master-acolyte argument that frantically escalates, culminating in a crescendo of...agreement?

David G , Oct 3 2020 22:33 utc | 47
foolisholdman | Oct 3 2020 21:54 utc | 42:

Yeah, those Syrian "rebels" that Turkey shipped to Azerbaijan are more than hearsay and rumor. My heart really bleeds for them that when they got there they found they were facing a well-equipped and trained army, rather than having their pick of defenseless Christian villages where they could bring to bear their skills in robbing, raping, enslaving, and beheading.

Richard Steven Hack , Oct 3 2020 22:42 utc | 48
Posted by: sad canuck | Oct 3 2020 21:20 utc | 34

Correct. This is what you get when chimpanzees are allowed to form "states" to further their primate competition with each other.

ptb , Oct 3 2020 23:00 utc | 49
@b Thanks for the detailed analysis!

Even without conquering anything, with a large supply of drones and cheap yet robust comms (I feel the need to think of point to point IR, but I don't know enough about modern radio), the attacker can do a lot of damage without losing anything that expensive, i.e. potentially cheap spotter and relay drones, plus the munitions themselves. Air defense technology made to counter turn-of-the-century jets/helis/cruise-missiles, is not really appropriate. Handing out manpads in quantity creates other problems.

Patroklos , Oct 3 2020 23:32 utc | 50
This is what I come to MoA for. And it's nice to see b disclose his authorship with his trademark idiomatic slips ("full extend" for "to their full extent", 'unveil' for 'reveal' and 'relicts' for 'relics', etc).
arby , Oct 3 2020 23:48 utc | 51
right on Patroklas.
David G , Oct 3 2020 23:59 utc | 52
Patroklos | Oct 3 2020 23:32 utc | 50:

"Full extend" was a slight error, but "unveil" seems perfectly fine to me, and "relicts" was a better choice than "relics" in that context. (Though really the Antonov An-2 isn't either a relic or relict "from the late 1940s": they were produced in vast numbers for decades.)

Chevrus , Oct 4 2020 0:16 utc | 53
@ Dr Wellington 46: Also 'Visions of the Emerald Beyond' by The Mahavishnu Orchestra is a fantastic album that I think captures the Fusion era with a sense of refinement and less of the "slop".
Bemildred , Oct 4 2020 0:18 utc | 54
Posted by: David G | Oct 3 2020 23:59 utc | 52

Extend should be extent, I like discover better there than reveal or unveil, and relic has religious connotations, relict implies "remnant" which might work, derelict suggests inoperable, hmmm.

Maybe "remnant" or "survivor" would work.

But to be honest B's usage didn't bother me reading over it, the Internets is nothing if not slovenly about grammar and usage.

Sunny Runny Burger , Oct 4 2020 1:28 utc | 55
Some people here speak of yet more "exchanges" of territory as if it wouldn't involve 100% replacement of the people living there. and almost certainly by murder. They seem to think ethnic cleansing can be undone by more ethnic cleansing or at the very least loudly support one more round of it as a "final solution". They make it easy to understand why Erdogan references Hitler in positive terms.

The suggestion that Armenia and Artsakh losing their borders to Iran is fair is silly and anything but fair. It is an invitation to more war and genocide after such a "peace deal". The "peace plan" is nothing but siege warfare, it is a barely disguised war plan targeting Armenia and Artsakh.

North Cyprus being presented as some kind of Turkish benevolence belies the fact of the current ethnic Turkic dominance of the demographics of North Cyprus which did not happen by natural means, ie. it was/is over forty years of steadfast ethnic cleansing. Almost none of them were Cypriot when the Turkish invasion happened no matter how much they lie and pretend they were.

Hoyeru , Oct 4 2020 2:00 utc | 56
@hopehely how conveniently you forget that Bulgaria was under the Ottoman rule for 500 years and plenty of Bulgarian got murdered by the Turks during that time. WHEN the Bulgarians rebelled against the Turks in 1875–78, the Europeans didn't wept for ALL the Bulgarian women, children and men that were savagely slaughtered by the Turks, but instead sent one guy who claimed he never saw any atrociousness.
YEah, most of modern peoples' memory goes as far back as WII, everything else is forgotten. FUCK YOU, the Turks have always been savages.
Piotr Berman , Oct 4 2020 2:11 utc | 57
Before President Trump stopped the program the CIA had used the Azerbaijani Silk Way Airlines in more than 350 flights to bring weapons from Bulgaria to Turkey to then hand them to 'Syrian rebels'. Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, is not only a CIA station but also a Mossad center for waging its silent war against Iran.

This is dubious. Why use an Azeri airline to ferry weapons over the border that separates Bulgaria from Turkey, with a choice of three highways, an electrified railroad, or even by a ship (164 nautical miles between the main ports of the two countries).

Biswapriya Purkayast , Oct 4 2020 2:18 utc | 58
If Blitzkrieg failed the Azeris will use the attrition war tactic and that is absolutely certain to succeed. Murad Gazdiev tweeted selfies posted by Jihadi imports in Azeri uniforms in Azerbaijan here: https://mobile.twitter.com/MuradGazdiev/status/1312372865937932289
Jihadis will therefore be used as canon fodder by Azerbaijan while the Ottomans take over the air combat, directly or indirectly. Unless Azerbaijan is stupid enough to attack Armenia directly there is nothing Russia will ever do about it.

At some point approaching rapidly Armenian frontline positions will collapse and then there will be a panicked refugee flood into Armenia from Nagorno Karabakh and the surrounding occupied Azeri areas. At that point Nagorno Karabakh will become impossible to defend. Whether Azerbaijan permits Erdogan to seed the area with jihadis is an open question, but at the least Erdo will place Ottoman troops there to "guard against Armenia".

Without Nagorno Karabakh Armenia is actually worth very little to Russia. Even if it could be "taught a lesson" by Putinist restraint it would be strategically useless and a resource hole. A NATO Armenia, with or without a NATO Azerbaijan, would be a strategic disaster but that's the way things seem headed.

circumspect , Oct 4 2020 2:39 utc | 59
Watching the latest South Front videos it is easy to see how drone technology makes it difficult to move vehicles and set up fixed positions. It looks like a very high technology affair to counter drones.

Very expensive very costly training would equate to excellent results in second and third world areas for combat drones. Again the war party wins. It would be cheaper to build stable societies. What a toxic mess. It must be some weird parallel groups of death cults pushing this continued chaos.

Maybe is is just plain old human nature with high tech advantages over bronze and iron weapons. Even the bronze age brought a long period of peace and prosperity for a time.

Counter-Drone equipment


uncle tungsten , Oct 4 2020 2:44 utc | 60
Turkey resupplies weapons to Azerbaijan through the fake independent Georgia
Dr Wellington Yueh , Oct 4 2020 2:48 utc | 61
@circumspect #59 re: human nature (stoopid monkeys with guns)

Pride, stubbornness and stupidity - toxic, and tragic. A movie that quite well illustrates this is Lolly-Madonna XXX . It's such a brutally sad movie.

Piotr Berman , Oct 4 2020 3:58 utc | 62
If Blitzkrieg failed the Azeris will use the attrition war tactic and that is absolutely certain to succeed. Murad Gazdiev tweeted selfies posted by Jihadi imports in Azeri uniforms ...
Posted by: Biswapriya Purkayast | Oct 4 2020 2:18 utc | 58

I beg to differ. This is not Libya, both sides have relatively large armies, Armenians have weapons, high ground, prepared positions and people who believe that the choice is between standing the ground and exile (or worse). They will not be demoralized by few hundred casualties. Azerbaijan has low ground, attack uphill is not easy, and the motivation of soldiers is not as good. After bringing few hundred or even few thousands of second rate jihadists the equation will not change (inequality if you will).

Of course, if the war is protracted, both sides will need supplies. Except for Turkey, no one declared the will to supply either side, but unofficial traffic is bound to happen. Russia and Iran will surely neutralize any supplies from Turkey and Israel, they need to maintain the regional balance that so far is in their favor.

Then there is no potential for tipping the balance by direct intervention: it will trigger direct Russian response. Concerning the coming winter, one should read Wikipedia "Battle of Sarikamish". On New Year Eve of 1915, Turkish army advised by Germans attacked Russian positions after crossing high mountains. Because of even bloodier fighting in France, Russia was attacking in East Prussia to relieve the French and Caucasus Army was at half of full strength. The result was that 1/3 of Russian troops were lost, a lot of them to frostbite, and about the Turks there are debates: did 1/10 of them survive, a bit less, or a bit more.

p> " U.S. President Trump Has Caught 'The Flu' , Main

" U.S. President Trump Has Caught 'The Flu' | Main

[Oct 02, 2020] Army Chief of Staff General James McConville disingenious defence of MIC

Notable quotes:
"... As soon as many generals retire, they become the high-paid consultants and lobbyists for the major weapons manufacturers. There was a time when the Boston Globe and papers wrote about it. I wonder how many will now. It is time to recognize the problem and face up to the destructive influence it is having on our nation and our families in both our foreign and domestic policies. ..."
"... This is another consequence of allowing the people who own the media to own other things. Allowing the people who make bullets and bombs to own media is a sure recipe for perpetual war. ..."
"... It is quite normal for a top General to protect his cabal of corruption. He still has his slush fund money to protect. These military "Heroes" are in the habit of sending men to their deaths, just to advance themselves into top jobs with the Military Industrial Complex. ..."
"... They retire into prime Lobbying positions as well. This corruption has produced more broken Veterans than Covid-19 has produced deaths. ..."
"... “ I can assure the American people that the senior leaders would only recommend sending our troops to combat when it is required in national security and in the last resort, ” As invading Syria, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Grenada, Cambodia, Laos.... and many other countries was a last resort to secure the US national security. ..."
"... Trump says those things, and at the same time increases the Pentagon's budget & spending to over $1 Trillion (more than the next 15 Countries combined, and 13 of them are your allies).. ..."
"... Trump is picking up some that vote that supported Tulsi Gabbard, or so I speculate. Though he speaks with a bit of forked tongue -- stealing oil in Syria, won't pull out of Iraq when told by Iraqi government; still in Afghanistan long after the Pentagon lost the war there again another war lost against a fourth world country. ..."
"... An interviewer should test this man's integrity with a simple question, such as.. "When you retire, will promise to live off your generous pension....like Eisenhower in his rocking chair....and not go to work for an arms manufacturer or think tank or any other paid position?" ..."
"... Trump should spin the rest of the beans. Directly and indirectly, the Violence Industry is the biggest employer in the US. It's a gigantic social program. ..."
"... I think Trump is posturing for re election purposes . He is clearly in the hands of the deep state. ..."
"... Trump promised to end America’s “endless wars” . Just look at the people he appointed. They all love war. and trying to expand them. Russia showed the world, convoys of stolen Syrian oil. Than Russia bombed them. Now the US is stealing even more Syrian oil and nobody is bombing it. ..."
"... Biden was thinking about rebuilding contracts for his family and friends before the first bombs ever fell General.. ..."
Oct 02, 2020 | www.rt.com

Army Chief of Staff General James McConville has vehemently rejected Donald Trump's comments alleging that the military's top commanders wish to entangle the US in as many wars as possible in order to enrich weapon manufacturers.

" I can assure the American people that the senior leaders would only recommend sending our troops to combat when it is required in national security and in the last resort, " McConville, a Trump appointee, said during an online conference on Tuesday. " We take this very, very seriously in how we make our recommendations. "

The general added that many of the US commanders have sons and daughters that currently serve in the military and some of them " may be in combat right now. " The general declined to more directly respond to Trump's allegations, saying the military should remain out of politics.

Will someone tell him? Morning Joe brings up EISENHOWER to counter Trump's critique of Pentagon & military industrial complex

The Chief of Staff was referring to the highly publicized comments Trump made on Monday. The president said that " the top people in the Pentagon " might not be " in love " with him " because they want to do nothing but fight wars " to provide business for the US military-industrial complex.

During his 2016 campaign, Trump promised to end America's " endless wars " as he often calls them. However, the long-time military bureaucrats he appointed to command publicly opposed Trump's propositions to reduce US military presence in Afghanistan and Syria.

T. Agee Kaye 8 September, 2020 8 Sep, 2020 07:41 PM

Please. Who is he kidding. Rather than recognize the problem like an Al-Anon, he discredits himself and his institution even by suggesting there isn't one. As soon as many generals retire, they become the high-paid consultants and lobbyists for the major weapons manufacturers. There was a time when the Boston Globe and papers wrote about it. I wonder how many will now. It is time to recognize the problem and face up to the destructive influence it is having on our nation and our families in both our foreign and domestic policies.
whitey Interests T. Agee Kaye 10 September, 2020 10 Sep, 2020 02:09 PM
This is another consequence of allowing the people who own the media to own other things. Allowing the people who make bullets and bombs to own media is a sure recipe for perpetual war.

The media needs to be splintered into a thousand pieces with the new owners not allowed to own anything else. The Sherman anti trust act used to spell this out in law.

LonDubh 8 September, 2020 8 Sep, 2020 07:04 PM
It is quite normal for a top General to protect his cabal of corruption. He still has his slush fund money to protect. These military "Heroes" are in the habit of sending men to their deaths, just to advance themselves into top jobs with the Military Industrial Complex.

They retire into prime Lobbying positions as well. This corruption has produced more broken Veterans than Covid-19 has produced deaths. VFW (Victims of Futile Wars) have seen their ranks increase and their support mechanism decreased. Another generation of American youth destined for the scrapheap of "Heros"

IgyBundy LonDubh 9 September, 2020 9 Sep, 2020 04:25 AM
Have you noticed what great liars these so called honorable military brass have become? Better than most politicians..
Frank Cannon LonDubh 8 September, 2020 8 Sep, 2020 09:09 PM
1/3 less troops in germany, no new wars , troops in Syria brought home . all indicates that he is making progress. & is fighting against endless wars
Northern Light 8 September, 2020 8 Sep, 2020 07:52 PM
“ I can assure the American people that the senior leaders would only recommend sending our troops to combat when it is required in national security and in the last resort, ” As invading Syria, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Grenada, Cambodia, Laos.... and many other countries was a last resort to secure the US national security.
Kwok Shsee Northern Light 9 September, 2020 9 Sep, 2020 09:49 AM
You forgot Iraq, Libya, Korea, and Yugoslavia~
changyao 8 September, 2020 8 Sep, 2020 06:58 PM
Everyone knows that there is collusion between some serving and ex top guns with the MIC. Resulting in endless wars everywhere and many countries are forced by security tension to buy more expensive weapons which they can ill afford
Juan_More changyao 8 September, 2020 8 Sep, 2020 07:41 PM
It is not the generals but the politicians that started the endless wars. The politicians get campaign donations to their Super PACs or to an offshore numbered bank account.
Jewel Gyn 8 September, 2020 8 Sep, 2020 09:07 PM
What national security threat and last resort when all wars conducted are in foreign soils. Even if there are threats on the hundreds of military bases deployed around the world, the question is still 'what the *f are US troops there in the first place'.
Mark La Brooy 8 September, 2020 8 Sep, 2020 09:59 PM
Is it any surprise that the US spends $700 billion on defense. Next comes China with only $90 billion or thereabouts. Yes, Trump is right. It is all about the US military industry complex and continuous war.
JingsGeordie 8 September, 2020 8 Sep, 2020 07:23 PM
Apparently it's been the last resort continually since 1775.
Sinalco 8 September, 2020 8 Sep, 2020 07:05 PM
Trump says those things, and at the same time increases the Pentagon's budget & spending to over $1 Trillion (more than the next 15 Countries combined, and 13 of them are your allies).. As they say, action speaks louder than words - those are just cheap empty words to rally his base for the coming election.
whitey Interests Sinalco 10 September, 2020 10 Sep, 2020 02:13 PM
Unfortunately Trumps base likes war.
GottaBeMe Sinalco 8 September, 2020 8 Sep, 2020 09:28 PM
If you remember, it’s congress that approves of spending. And both the Dems and repubs authorize more and more money to the military.
PublicEnemy_1 8 September, 2020 8 Sep, 2020 08:32 PM
Trump not as much of a war monger as the establishment would like. Most Americans oppose war but that has never slowed the establishment. Probably the biggest reason the establishment is so opposed to Trump, among the other obvious reasons.
Kwok Shsee PublicEnemy_1 9 September, 2020 9 Sep, 2020 09:57 AM
Are you a kindergartener or just plainly naive?!!! Trump knows Americans love to hear this, so he is giving you the LIP SERVICE FCOL !!! He will pamper the MIC just as he has been doing in the last 4 years once the election in November is over! Exactly because americans are so incredibly foolish that Trump or Biden will be your next president, LOL!
donkeyoatee 9 September, 2020 9 Sep, 2020 01:52 AM
How was Vietnam or Iraq anything to do with US "national security" or the wars in Yemen or anywhere in the middle east and around the globe. The US isn't doing "National security" it's doing interference and domination.
Ekaterina 8 September, 2020 8 Sep, 2020 08:00 PM
I would laugh if this whole situation wasn’t so pitiful and sad. Eisenhower was right.
Shelbouy 9 September, 2020 9 Sep, 2020 10:34 AM
So many people say that Trump has not started any wars, which makes him ok. He didn't have to, there were enough already going on. What he did not do is stop any!
Juan_More 8 September, 2020 8 Sep, 2020 07:39 PM
When the Generals and Colonels end up with very cushy jobs in the MIC after they retire. It certainly does look like something is up. After all who authorised the F35, Ford class aircraft carriers and my favourite winner of the silly name for a boat the USS Zumwalt
NonDucorDuco 8 September, 2020 8 Sep, 2020 08:12 PM
The MIC stooges at the Pentagon don't need to say anything, as Trump's remark reflects what everybody already knows for decades.
Enki14 8 September, 2020 8 Sep, 2020 06:42 PM
LOL The facts speak for themselves and if one considers the endless war(s) since 911 were based on LIES...the towers were brought down by controlled demolition...in charge that day was dick cheney.
whitey Interests Enki14 10 September, 2020 10 Sep, 2020 02:25 PM
Wall St did 911.
Rocky_Fjord 8 September, 2020 8 Sep, 2020 11:39 PM
Trump is picking up some that vote that supported Tulsi Gabbard, or so I speculate. Though he speaks with a bit of forked tongue -- stealing oil in Syria, won't pull out of Iraq when told by Iraqi government; still in Afghanistan long after the Pentagon lost the war there again another war lost against a fourth world country. And he's flirted with an invasion of Venezuela, perhaps to keep the hawks and neolibs like Bolton and Bill Krystal on the edge of their seats. Sort of like Merkel getting exercised over Navalny to counter all the blather of war hawks and those who want to scuttle Nordstream 2. Throwing the ideological dog a bone. It's satisfying to finally hear a US president pick up the theme Eisenhower warned of. Now let him tell the truth of the filthy soul of the CIA, to take up where JFK left off. Trump could do far worse than to thank Pence for his... See more
Jim Christian Rocky_Fjord 8 September, 2020 8 Sep, 2020 11:43 PM
Nah, Gabbi is a Democrat. But she's a good kid. She, unlike 99% of them, got a taste of ugly military service and spoke out, only to be crushed. All you need to know of military/political corruption is to study THAT.
Karl194 9 September, 2020 9 Sep, 2020 07:51 AM
"In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist." Dwight Eisenhower (former USA President)
pykich Karl194 9 September, 2020 9 Sep, 2020 08:14 AM
says the man who signed the "Grenada Treaty"...
Jim Christian 8 September, 2020 8 Sep, 2020 11:37 PM
How many times has the 'good' general recycled himself between defense contractor jobs and board positions and then right back into the White House, sometimes to a University posting, then back to the Pentagon, rinsing and repeating several times after retirement? How do these Generals and Admirals become multi-millionaires otherwise? And there are hundreds of them. And they bring us the WORST, most corrupt procurement such as the Ford Class Carriers and the F-35, to name just TWO examples, albeit big ones Please. It's crooked as a 3-dollar bill. Look at the Pentagon opposition to Trump's every single overture toward peace in the Middle East (except Iran, which is a big mistake, our issues were resolved until they weren't under Trump). Any contest to the premise that the U.S. military is corrupt beyond repair is patently absurd. And this "General" is just the wrong representative to refute the truth. He is after all, part of the corruption.
Rocky_Fjord Jim Christian 8 September, 2020 8 Sep, 2020 11:46 PM
Two classes of US submarines were made with inferior steel from Australia. The steel was known by the contractor to be inferior, but the Pentagon did not run its own tests. So tens of billions wasted for subs that are unsafe at depths and of course in actual combat conditions. The generals and politicians float above it all like scu*m on a fe*tid pond.
shadowlady 8 September, 2020 8 Sep, 2020 09:24 PM
The Pentagon has to justify its enormous budget, they provoke conflict at every turn.
a325 8 September, 2020 8 Sep, 2020 09:06 PM
“I can assure the American people that the senior leaders would only recommend sending our troops to combat when it is required in national security and in the last resort" yada yada , of course you are going to say that. Admitting the truth would be instant career suicide
Raider Ssmc 8 September, 2020 8 Sep, 2020 11:47 PM
wasn't it Trump and many other presidents who were dishing out money left right and centre to the american war machine to build bigger and so called better weapons. Goes to show no matter what when push comes to shove the american government will always blame anyone else but themselves.
foxenburg 9 September, 2020 9 Sep, 2020 01:48 AM
An interviewer should test this man's integrity with a simple question, such as.. "When you retire, will promise to live off your generous pension....like Eisenhower in his rocking chair....and not go to work for an arms manufacturer or think tank or any other paid position?"
Dallas Snell Sr. 9 September, 2020 9 Sep, 2020 08:00 AM
Ever since Obama was elected we hear way to much out of these so called Generals. Jumping on a bandwagon is something active Generals should never do.
lectrodectus 10 September, 2020 10 Sep, 2020 02:06 AM
Frankiln Delanor Roosevelt: (During The Depression Created The WPA Works Progress Administration) "Instead Of Spending As Some Nations Do Half Their National Income In Piling Up Armaments And More Armaments For The Purposes Of War, We in America Are Wiser In Using Our Wealth On Projects Like This Which Will Us More Wealth And Greater Happiness For Our Children" (Fireside Chats) Similar To Dwight D Eisenhower.
RealWorld1 9 September, 2020 9 Sep, 2020 12:26 PM
Trump should spin the rest of the beans. Directly and indirectly, the Violence Industry is the biggest employer in the US. It's a gigantic social program.
Cabonnet 57 8 September, 2020 8 Sep, 2020 08:23 PM
I think Trump is posturing for re election purposes . He is clearly in the hands of the deep state.
Fred Dozer 9 September, 2020 9 Sep, 2020 12:17 AM
Trump promised to end America’s “endless wars” . Just look at the people he appointed. They all love war. and trying to expand them. Russia showed the world, convoys of stolen Syrian oil. Than Russia bombed them. Now the US is stealing even more Syrian oil and nobody is bombing it.
venze chern 8 September, 2020 8 Sep, 2020 11:18 PM
Is Trump really anti-war? Or he is just trying to exert his power over those hawkish generals in Pentagon to tell the world who is in charge of US? If he is truly against all kinds of war, that must be the only acceptable thing he has done so far.
pykich venze chern 9 September, 2020 9 Sep, 2020 08:13 AM
it would look like that he only engages in the conflicts that his son in law asks him to do, just a small subset of the larger set...
Anastasia Deko 9 September, 2020 9 Sep, 2020 03:42 PM
The war industry, the prison industry, the pharmaceutical industry, and many others, they all have their lobbyists and their plans for making more money. And manufacturing more wars, more prisoners, and more diseases is not beyond them. Freedom and democracy and high cholesterol are money making cons, and sometimes it takes a con like Trump to recognize it.
PurplePaw 9 September, 2020 9 Sep, 2020 02:59 PM
IF TRUMP WANTS TO END WARS ( KILLING) AND RIGHTLY SO THESE SO CALLED GENERALS NEED TO BE OUSTED FAST. THE MILITARY SHOULD BE IN MY VIEW INCLUDED IN POLITICS AND EXPOSED AS IN ANCIENT TIMES. A WARRIOR SHOULD BE ABLE TO BECOME CHIEF AS IN THE PAST. A PERSON LIKE ALEXANDER, JULIUS, BUT THEY MUST ALSO BE THE MOST GALLANT WITH HUMILITY AS IN ARTHUR'S DAYS. NONE OF THE HIGH MILITARY MEN HIDING BEHIND THE CLOAK IN THE DARK TO DECEIVE WHEN THE TIME IS RIGHT. TO MUCH OF THAT WHERE THEY ARE. TRUMP IS RIGHT ON HERE, STOP ABORTION.
pykich 9 September, 2020 9 Sep, 2020 08:10 AM
They should ask him what his plans after retiring are...
Ph7 9 September, 2020 9 Sep, 2020 06:06 AM
If he's so worried about national security "his" troops should be on the streets of US not in the bushes of Afghanistan and Iraq .
Orwellmatters 8 September, 2020 8 Sep, 2020 10:44 PM
off topic, but very important, Sen. Ben Sasse's op-ed regarding repeal of the 17th amendment. Haven't seen mention of it at RT. Whether you are red or blue, this is massive in returning power to the people.
DavidG992 9 September, 2020 9 Sep, 2020 06:08 PM
He could stage this 'ati-war' show only becasue democrats have ceded opposition to the military-industrial war machine to a belligerent fraud.
Anastasia Deko DavidG992 9 September, 2020 9 Sep, 2020 09:50 PM
The Dem big shots are pro-war, so they didn't cede anything. They just hope that the public doesn't realize what Biden is really about.
Dallas Snell Sr. 9 September, 2020 9 Sep, 2020 08:06 AM
Absolute truth really bothers these folks a lot. And Trump is not afraid to speak it.
Frank Cannon 8 September, 2020 8 Sep, 2020 08:58 PM
They leave the military for high paying indusrty jobs as a form of Briberty / reward for keeping the endless wrs going & business good..
Mark90168 9 September, 2020 9 Sep, 2020 04:24 AM
Every candidate before election become wise due to seeing sword over his heads but after winning the election they again become hate mongers and wars lovers. The US election candidates should never be trusted. It reminds me "The game of thrones."
Taoist Student 8 September, 2020 8 Sep, 2020 11:44 PM
This is easy. Trump has always done exactly as the pentagon wants. this is a stunt for Qanon votes that's all. Trump is smart he reads. He knows what Qanon thinks and wants to give them a bone.
Rocky_Fjord Taoist Student 8 September, 2020 8 Sep, 2020 11:47 PM
So the man can think and act -- well that's a start.
flakebuster 15 September, 2020 15 Sep, 2020 06:26 PM
General James McConville , even if you tell us that tomorrow the Sun will rise from the East we will not believe you, until we see it ourselves, general McCorrupt.
Karl194 9 September, 2020 9 Sep, 2020 07:55 AM
The DEEP STATE is build by the bosses in the FBI, CIA and the PENTAGON.
Winter7Mute 9 September, 2020 9 Sep, 2020 04:41 AM
Violence as a way of gaining power... is being camouflaged under the guise of tradition, national honor [and] national security. For almost 100yrs now.
Mark90168 9 September, 2020 9 Sep, 2020 05:04 AM
Every candidate before election become wise due to seeing sword over his heads but after winning the election they again become hate mongers and wars lovers. The US election candidates should never be trusted. It reminds me the game of thrones.
Dallas Snell Sr. 9 September, 2020 9 Sep, 2020 08:11 AM
Biden was thinking about rebuilding contracts for his family and friends before the first bombs ever fell General..
IgyBundy 9 September, 2020 9 Sep, 2020 04:22 AM
Army Chief of Staff General James McConville a man without honor a coward and a liar.. As most of the US military seems to be..
Arti Doane 9 September, 2020 9 Sep, 2020 12:11 PM
After Obama's purge of the military all that's left are the money making war mongers.
far_cough 9 September, 2020 9 Sep, 2020 04:08 AM
this 'national security' lie is getting really tired. but these general think american people are stupid enough to buy it.

[Oct 02, 2020] New world disorder- US demands that planet accept its damaged woke concepts while continuing to lecture on democracy by Robert Bridge

Sep 30, 2020 | www.rt.com

Robert Bridge is an American writer and journalist. He is the author of 'Midnight in the American Empire,' How Corporations and Their Political Servants are Destroying the American Dream. @Robert_Bridge Get short URL New world disorder: US demands that planet accept its damaged woke concepts while continuing to lecture on democracy FILE PHOTO: Participants of the LGBT parade in Kiev. © Sputnik / Stringer 73 Follow RT on RT As a democracy, the United States has the right to pick and choose the sort of social and cultural mores it wants to live by without any outside interference. So why does it not show the same courtesy to other nations?

When we hear discussions today about imperial 'conquests' and 'takeovers,' the natural assumption is that some form of military aggression is being alluded to. Yet that's not always the case. In fact, attacks on national traditions are occurring every single day on the social and cultural fronts, and it should come as no surprise that America is the driving force behind this juggernaut.

READ MORE California Gov. Newsom signs law allowing trans inmates to be locked up with men or women based on their gender identity California Gov. Newsom signs law allowing trans inmates to be locked up with men or women based on their gender identity

Presently, the US is undergoing a radical transformation the likes of which the world has never seen. Across the country, liberal progressives, captivated by the allure of 'wokeness' and extreme social justice, are overturning the 'natural order of things' by placing minorities and their controversial movements to the front of the serving line. This can be witnessed, for example, by the almost fanatical promotion of the LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer) community, which has its own flag, gratuitous corporate sponsorship, and even the entire month of June set aside in its honor.

Perhaps the most provocative part of this movement, however, involves the idea of transgender, which postulates that the sex of a biological male or female is not determined by its genitalia, but rather by what each individual person feels. Personally, I have no problem with any adult who accepts such beliefs, even if they wish to submit to a sex-change operation. The problem, however, is when the wants and desires of a miniscule segment of the population begin to adversely affect those of the majority. It seems we have reached that point.

Just this week, for example, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed a law requiring authorities to house transgender inmates based on their gender identity. The law forbids the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation from denying such requests solely based on the inmates' anatomy, sexual orientation or "a factor present" (i.e. female inmates) at the facility. This echoes legislation put forward by former president Barack Obama in 2016 that threatened to cut funding to any public school that refused to let transgender students use the bathrooms matching their chosen gender identity. Upon entering office in 2017, Donald Trump, taking a cue from the social warriors' playbook, ' canceled ' the legislation.

https://platform.twitter.com/embed/index.html?creatorScreenName=RT_com&dnt=false&embedId=twitter-widget-0&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=605407919820013568&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.rt.com%2Fop-ed%2F502160-us-woke-interference-democracy%2F&siteScreenName=RT_com&theme=light&widgetsVersion=ed20a2b%3A1601588405575&width=550px

The controversy surrounding this one US cultural issue, as well as numerous others, is meant to illustrate a point: if the American people themselves cannot agree on such radical concepts, why are Americans slowly but surely forcing them on the world?

ALSO ON RT.COM Wait, what? Eric Trump says he is 'part of the LGBT community,' sowing confusion online US-made woke exports – accept them or else

Thanks to America's undying belief in its 'exceptional' character, it has deemed itself the arbiter as to what values the world should hold dear, democracy be damned. Last year, for example, in a bid to curry favor with the radical leftists inside of the Democratic Party, Joe Biden, who could end up being the next US president, said he would "curtail foreign assistance to countries" who do not uphold the values of the LGBTQ community, and regardless if they clash with the traditions and beliefs of the country in question. The former vice president was also quoted as saying he would establish an office in the State Department with the job of promoting LGBTQ rights around the world .

This sort of sex-based foreign policy, however, is not solely the domain of the Democratic Party. In April, Richard Grenell, the former acting director of national intelligence in the Trump government, said the US would consider the possibility of not sharing intelligence with countries that discriminate against gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender lifestyles. Not only is that an obscene amount of meddling in the affairs of foreign states, which borders on blackmail, it could throw an potentially dangerous monkey wrench into the world of espionage.

READ MORE 'Unfortunate' views on homosexuality must DISQUALIFY Christians, Muslims & Orthodox Jews from SCOTUS, Biden campaign staffer says 'Unfortunate' views on homosexuality must DISQUALIFY Christians, Muslims & Orthodox Jews from SCOTUS, Biden campaign staffer says

Maybe if Uncle Sam would spend less time policing the world's bedrooms, it would discover that not every nation agrees with its homegrown cultural experiments.

Consider the issue of homosexuality and same-sex marriages, for example. A recent survey by Pew showed that the world continues to remain very much divided on the matter. While many countries in the western hemisphere show a high acceptance of such lifestyles, the more conservative countries in the East generally do not share those sentiments. For example, 72 percent of the US population said they accept homosexuality, whereas in distant Ukraine just 14 percent agreed.

Such polls, however, can be very misleading. In Russia, for example, which also shows 14 percent acceptance rates, there is no legislation on the books outlawing homosexuality, as has been recklessly reported in the Western media. Instead, Russia passed a law in 2013 ( "For the Purpose of Protecting Children from Information Advocating for a Denial of Traditional Family Values" ) that works to prevent the "propaganda of non-traditional sexual relationships" among minors. In other words, let's wait until children are 18 to begin such heavy conversations. All things considered, this seems to be a very reasonable idea, and one that conforms to Russian traditions. Yet the US establishment simply wrote it off as "anti-gay."

Meanwhile, back in the gold-paved streets of America, many children are learning about alternative sexual lifestyles in grade school, occasionally with the help of 'drag queen story time' at the local library. At the same time, an increasing number of adolescents, with the full support of the psychiatric community, are being allowed to start 'gender-transitioning' operations – which many of these youngsters live to regret later, and there is little chance of 'turning back.'

ALSO ON RT.COM When promoting Christian family values & querying LGBT lessons gets you fired, it's clear the Bible is woke militia's new target

The main point, however, is that although other countries may have severe reservations over such radical new practices, ultimately it comes down to the choice of the American people whether to continue with them or not. After all, that's what democracy is all about – respecting those ideas, however strange they may seem to outsiders, that a people hold dear. The US, however, does not seem ready to play by such rules as it continuously pushes its version of the 'new world order.'

Just like the American people, the emotion-fueled woke train is bearing down not only on the United States, but the entire world. And with the crackdown on open democratic debate, as witnessed at the most unlikely of places – from US college campuses to the increasingly totalitarian world of social media – many people will be powerless to stop the onslaught. After all, if the United States forbids its own people from questioning the wisdom of the brave new woke world, foreign countries should not expect any special favors either.

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The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.


[Oct 01, 2020] Steve's insistence on speaking the truth about Ukraine and US-Russia relations cost him -- but he never gave up by Lev Golinkin

Highly recommended!
I draw your attention to the irrefutable fact that Mr. Cohen said that the Buk missile, which brought down Malaysian Flight 370 over the skies of Donbas, was the Ukraine government "playing with its new toys and made a big mistake." -- and I draw your attention to the irrefutable fact that Mr. Cohen said that the Buk missile, which brought down Malaysian Flight 370 over the skies of Donbas, was the Ukraine government "playing with its new toys and made a big mistake."
He was a real giant in comparison with intellectual scum like Fiona Hill, Michael McFaul and other neocons.
Notable quotes:
"... I tried to explain to American friends what was happening, but quickly realized that ultimately, even friends believe what they read in the newspapers, and the newspapers were pushing the Washington line. Except for Steve Cohen. Steve was the only major figure in America who insisted on remembering the Russian-speaking Ukrainians who, like my family members, distrusted and hated the new Kiev government. He spoke of neo-Nazi paramilitiaries who fought for the US-backed government committing war crimes against civilians in eastern Ukraine. He spoke the truth, regardless of how unwieldy it was. ..."
"... There's a lot to say about Steve. He was extraordinarily kind, never forgetting that in geopolitics, the ones who have the most to lose aren't strategists but everyday individuals impacted by policy. He was a consummate teacher, insisting on giving mentees the skills to navigate the world, a real proponent of the Teach a man to fish philosophy. He had facets and stories and memories; he lived life with empathy and gusto. ..."
"... Steve's insistence on speaking the truth about Ukraine and US-Russia relations drew all sorts of attention. America was hurtling toward a new cold war with Russia, and Steve well, from the perspective of Washington's foreign policy establishment, Steve was fucking up the narrative. Steve talked about inconvenient things, things like US-backed war criminals and America's own meddling in Russian affairs; in the process, he himself had become inconvenient. ..."
"... After all, this wasn't some random blogger. This was one of America's foremost Russia experts, a tenured professor at Princeton and New York University, someone who didn't just write about history but had dinner with it, had briefed US presidents, and was friends with legends like Mikhail Gorbachev. Steve had clout earned from decades of brilliant work; by 2014, he was using that clout to throw a wrench in the think tank world. ..."
"... It was something far colder, more sustained, something that ironically the Soviets did to dissidents: a relentless crusade to render the target untouchable, a leper without a platform. The barrage of articles and diatribes hurled at Steve in the national press painted him as not just a dissenter but a supporter of dictators and murderers. It was a vicious, prolonged assault carried out by think tank toadies, the kind of people who win races by kneecapping the competition. ..."
"... I'd often talk with Steve after a new hatchet job or smear on national television. Of course, the attacks were hurtful -- the only way to not be affected was to not care, and Steve cared. But I also noticed he was remarkably free of bitterness. Every time I thought he'd snap, he'd return the next day to write, discuss, keep fighting. ..."
"... It took me a couple of years to understand that what kept Steve going was faith in his beloved institutions. He believed in academia, in scholarship, in discourse, debate, and civility. He believed in the capacity of everyday people to explore and engage with their world, he believed in Russia, and he always believed in America. He believed in these things far more than he believed in the power of today's warmongers. ..."
"... In 1967 Noam Chomsky wrote an article in the NY Review entitled "the Responsibility of Intellectuals" the first sentence ran like this: "IT IS THE RESPONSIBILITY of intellectuals to speak the truth and to expose lies.". Stephen Cohen did precisely that when all the parrots and pundits were lined up against him. ..."
"... Always I was skeptical of prevailing scholarly interpretive trends on the Soviet experience that were echoed by colleagues claiming expertise on the subject. Cohen provided the foundation for my skepticism and invigorated my lectures on American foreign policy. ..."
"... Once Cohen plied his knowledge against the hysterical narrative that culminated in 4 years of frothing neo-McCarthyism (by the freakin' "left," no less), we were no longer gonna see him on the PBS newshour any more likely than we would and will see chris hedges, chomsky, or margaret kimberly. ..."
"... His book War With Russia? was an oasis of counter-narrative when I picked it up. Losing voices like his is immeasurable as we hurtle toward total war with Russia and/or China, both of whom are finally, naturally, and perfectly predictably beginning to draw a line in the sand. ..."
Oct 01, 2020 | www.thenation.com

I first reached out to Stephen Cohen because I was losing my mind.

In the spring of 2014, a war broke out in my homeland of Ukraine. It was a horrific war in a bitterly divided nation, which turned eastern Ukraine into a bombed-out wasteland. But that's not how it was portrayed in America. Because millions of eastern Ukrainians were against the US-backed government, their opinions were inconvenient for the West. Washington needed a clean story about Ukraine fighting the Kremlin; as a result, US media avoided reporting about the "wrong" half of the country. Twenty-plus million people were written out of the narrative, as if they never existed.

I tried to explain to American friends what was happening, but quickly realized that ultimately, even friends believe what they read in the newspapers, and the newspapers were pushing the Washington line. Except for Steve Cohen. Steve was the only major figure in America who insisted on remembering the Russian-speaking Ukrainians who, like my family members, distrusted and hated the new Kiev government. He spoke of neo-Nazi paramilitiaries who fought for the US-backed government committing war crimes against civilians in eastern Ukraine. He spoke the truth, regardless of how unwieldy it was.

And so I e-mailed him, asking for guidance as I began my own writing career. Of course, there were many who clamored for Steve's time, but I had an advantage over others. Steve and I were both night owls, real night owls, the kind who have afternoon tea at three am. It was then, when the east coast was sleeping, that he became my mentor and friend.

There's a lot to say about Steve. He was extraordinarily kind, never forgetting that in geopolitics, the ones who have the most to lose aren't strategists but everyday individuals impacted by policy. He was a consummate teacher, insisting on giving mentees the skills to navigate the world, a real proponent of the Teach a man to fish philosophy. He had facets and stories and memories; he lived life with empathy and gusto.

But one thing Steve taught me is to stick to my strengths, and truth be told, there are others who can describe his life better than I. I'll stick to what I learned during our conversations at three in the morning, which is that, above all else, Stephen F. Cohen was a man of faith.

Steve's insistence on speaking the truth about Ukraine and US-Russia relations drew all sorts of attention. America was hurtling toward a new cold war with Russia, and Steve well, from the perspective of Washington's foreign policy establishment, Steve was fucking up the narrative. Steve talked about inconvenient things, things like US-backed war criminals and America's own meddling in Russian affairs; in the process, he himself had become inconvenient.

After all, this wasn't some random blogger. This was one of America's foremost Russia experts, a tenured professor at Princeton and New York University, someone who didn't just write about history but had dinner with it, had briefed US presidents, and was friends with legends like Mikhail Gorbachev. Steve had clout earned from decades of brilliant work; by 2014, he was using that clout to throw a wrench in the think tank world.

The DC apparatchiks couldn't discredit Steve's credentials or track record -- he'd predicted events in Ukraine and elsewhere years before they occurred. They couldn't intimidate him -- he'd faced far worse threats, like the KGB. Instead, they set out to turn him into an America-hating, Putin-loving pariah.

This went beyond an ad hominem campaign. It was something far colder, more sustained, something that ironically the Soviets did to dissidents: a relentless crusade to render the target untouchable, a leper without a platform. The barrage of articles and diatribes hurled at Steve in the national press painted him as not just a dissenter but a supporter of dictators and murderers. It was a vicious, prolonged assault carried out by think tank toadies, the kind of people who win races by kneecapping the competition.

I'd often talk with Steve after a new hatchet job or smear on national television. Of course, the attacks were hurtful -- the only way to not be affected was to not care, and Steve cared. But I also noticed he was remarkably free of bitterness. Every time I thought he'd snap, he'd return the next day to write, discuss, keep fighting.

It took me a couple of years to understand that what kept Steve going was faith in his beloved institutions. He believed in academia, in scholarship, in discourse, debate, and civility. He believed in the capacity of everyday people to explore and engage with their world, he believed in Russia, and he always believed in America. He believed in these things far more than he believed in the power of today's warmongers.

Steve liked movies and would often end a lecture with a movie reference to drive home the thesis. When I think of him, I think of the ending of The Shawshank Redemption , the line about Andy Dufresne crawling through filth and coming out clean on the other side. Steve didn't live in a movie; I can't claim he emerged unscathed. What he did was come through without bitterness or cynicism. He refused to turn away from the ugliness, but he didn't allow it to blind him to beauty. He walked with grace. And he lost neither his convictions nor his faith.

Lev Golinkin Lev Golinkin is the author of A Backpack, a Bear, and Eight Crates of Vodka, Amazon's Debut of the Month, a Barnes & Noble's Discover Great New Writers program selection, and winner of the Premio Salerno Libro d'Europa. Golinkin, a graduate of Boston College, came to the US as a child refugee from the eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkov (now called Kharkiv) in 1990. His writing on the Ukraine crisis, Russia, the far right, and immigrant and refugee identity has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, CNN, The Boston Globe, Politico Europe, and Time (online), among other venues; he has been interviewed by MSNBC, NPR, ABC Radio, WSJ Live and HuffPost Live.

Pierre Guerlain says: October 1, 2020 at 12:42 pm

In 1967 Noam Chomsky wrote an article in the NY Review entitled "the Responsibility of Intellectuals" the first sentence ran like this: "IT IS THE RESPONSIBILITY of intellectuals to speak the truth and to expose lies.". Stephen Cohen did precisely that when all the parrots and pundits were lined up against him. He was a Mensch. History will bear him the historian out.

Valera Bochkarev says to Lance Haley: October 1, 2020 at 11:09 am

Hmm, who's the apologist here ?

If the Ukraine is SO sovereign how is it I did not see any outrage in your diatribe against 'Toria, Pyatt and the rest orchestrating the Maidan putsch or the $5Billion US spent on softening up the ukraine for the regime change ?

I believe in numbers, as in the number of military bases any given country has surrounding the ones it wants to subvert, in the amount of money allocated to vilify and eventually bring down the "unwanted" regimes and the quantity and 'quality' of sanctions imposed against those regimes; and the sum of all of the above perpetrated against humanity in the past 75 or so years.

Your vapid drivel, Mr Haley, evaporates almost without a trace once seen with those parameters in mind.

Numbers don't lie.

Michael Batinski says: September 30, 2020 at 5:48 pm

Let me add from the perspective of an American historian who taught for forty years in a midwestern university. From the start I depended on William Appleman Williams to keep perspective and to counter prevailing interpretive trends.

Always I was skeptical of prevailing scholarly interpretive trends on the Soviet experience that were echoed by colleagues claiming expertise on the subject. Cohen provided the foundation for my skepticism and invigorated my lectures on American foreign policy.

I will always be thankful.

Michael Batinski

Tim Ashby says: September 30, 2020 at 2:37 pm

The smothering agitprop in America trumps even Goebbels and co. with its beautifully dressed overton window and first-amendment-free-press bullshit.

Once Cohen plied his knowledge against the hysterical narrative that culminated in 4 years of frothing neo-McCarthyism (by the freakin' "left," no less), we were no longer gonna see him on the PBS newshour any more likely than we would and will see chris hedges, chomsky, or margaret kimberly.

Let's face it, we were lucky to win the editorial fight to even give him space in the Nation.

His book War With Russia? was an oasis of counter-narrative when I picked it up. Losing voices like his is immeasurable as we hurtle toward total war with Russia and/or China, both of whom are finally, naturally, and perfectly predictably beginning to draw a line in the sand.

[Oct 01, 2020] US Department of Imperial Expansion: Deeper down the rabbit hole of US-backed color revolutions by Tony Cartalucci

Jun 28, 2015 | Land Destroyer

Deeper down the rabbit hole of US-backed color revolutions.

Believe it or not, the US State Department's mission statement actually says the following:

"Advance freedom for the benefit of the American people and the international community by helping to build and sustain a more democratic, secure, and prosperous world composed of well-governed states that respond to the needs of their people, reduce widespread poverty, and act responsibly within the international system."

A far and treasonous cry from the original purpose of the State Department - which was to maintain communications and formal relations with foreign countries - and a radical departure from historical norms that have defined foreign ministries throughout the world, it could just as well now be called the "Department of Imperial Expansion." Because indeed, that is its primary purpose now, the expansion of Anglo-American corporate hegemony worldwide under the guise of "democracy" and "human rights."

That a US government department should state its goal as to build a world of "well-governed states" within the "international system" betrays not only America's sovereignty but the sovereignty of all nations entangled by this offensive mission statement and its execution.

Image : While the US State Department's mission statement sounds benign or even progressive, when the term "international system" or "world order" is used, it is referring to a concept commonly referred to by the actual policy makers that hand politicians their talking points, that involves modern day empire. Kagan's quote came from a 1997 policy paper describing a policy to contain China with.

....

The illegitimacy of the current US State Department fits in well with the overall Constitution-circumventing empire that the American Republic has degenerated into. The current Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, gives a daily affirmation of this illegitimacy every time she bellies up to the podium to make a statement.

Recently she issued a dangerously irresponsible "warning" to Venezuela and Bolivia regarding their stately relations with Iran. While America has the right to mediate its own associations with foreign nations, one is confounded trying to understand what gives America the right to dictate such associations to other sovereign nations. Of course, the self-declared imperial mandate the US State Department bestowed upon itself brings such "warnings" into perspective with the realization that the globalists view no nation as sovereign and all nations beholden to their unipolar "international system."

It's hard to deny the US State Department is not behind the "color revolutions" sweeping the world when the Secretary of State herself phones in during the youth movement confabs her department sponsors on a yearly basis.

If only the US State Department's meddling was confined to hubris-filled statements given behind podiums attempting to fulfill outlandish mission statements, we could all rest easier. However, the US State Department actively bolsters its meddling rhetoric with very real measures. The centerpiece of this meddling is the vast and ever-expanding network being built to recruit, train, and support various "color revolutions" worldwide. While the corporate owned media attempts to portray the various revolutions consuming Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia, and now Northern Africa and the Middle East as indigenous, spontaneous, and organic, the reality is that these protesters represent what may be considered a "fifth-branch" of US power projection.

CANVAS : Freedom House, IRI, Soros funded Serbian color revolution college behind the Orange, Rose, Tunisian, Burmese, and Egyptian protests and has trained protesters from 50 other countries.

As with the army and CIA that fulfilled this role before, the US State Department's "fifth-branch" runs a recruiting and coordinating center known as the Alliance of Youth Movements (AYM). Hardly a secretive operation, its website, Movements.org proudly lists the details of its annual summits which began in 2008 and featured astro-turf cannon fodder from Venezuela to Iran, and even the April 6 Youth Movement from Egypt.

The summits, activities, and coordination AYM provides is but a nexus.

Other training arms include the US created and funded CANVAS of Serbia , which in turn trained color-coup leaders from the Ukraine and Georgia , to Tunisia and Egypt , including the previously mentioned April 6 Movement . There is also the Albert Einstein Institute which produced the very curriculum and techniques employed by CANVAS.

2008 New York City Summit (included Egypt's April 6 Youth Movement )
2009 Mexico City Summit
2010 London Summit

As previously noted , these organizations are now retroactively trying to obfuscate their connections to the State Department and the Fortune 500 corporations that use them to achieve their goals of expansion overseas. CANVAS has renamed and moved their list of supporters and partners while AYM has oafishly changed their "partnerships" to "past partnerships."

Before & After: Oafish attempts to downplay US State Department's extra-legal
meddling and subterfuge in foreign affairs. Other attempts are covered here .

Funding all of this is the tax payers' money funneled through the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the International Republican Institute (IRI), the National Democratic Institute (NDI), and Freedom House . George Soros' Open Society foundation also promotes various NGOs which in turn support the revolutionary rabble on the ground. In Egypt, after the State Department's youth brigades played their role, Soros and NED funded NGOs began work on drafting Egypt's new constitution.

It should be noted that while George Soros is portrayed as being "left," and the overall function of these pro-democracy, pro-human rights organizations appears to be "left-leaning," a vast number of notorious "Neo-Cons" also constitute the commanding ranks and determine the overall agenda of this color revolution army.

Then there are legislative acts of Congress that overtly fund the subversive objectives of the US State Department. In support of regime change in Iran, the Iran Freedom and Support Act was passed in 2006. More recently in 2011, to see the US-staged color revolution in Egypt through to the end, money was appropriated to "support" favored Egyptian opposition groups ahead of national elections.

Then of course there is the State Department's propaganda machines. While organizations like NED and Freedom House produce volumes of talking points in support for their various on-going operations, the specific outlets currently used by the State Department fall under the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG). They include Voice of America , Radio Free Europe , Radio Free Asia , Alhurra , and Radio Sawa . Interestingly enough, the current Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sits on the board of governors herself, along side a shameful collection of representatives from the Fortune 500, the corporate owned media, and various agencies within the US government.

Hillary Clinton: color revolutionary field marshal & propagandist,
two current roles that defy her duties as Secretary of State in any
rational sense or interpretation.

Judging from Radio Free Europe's latest headlines, such as " Lieberman: The West's Policy Toward Belarus Has 'Failed Miserably' " and " Azerbaijani Youth Activist 'Jailed For One Month,' " it appears that hope is still pinned on inciting color revolutions in Belarus and Azerbaijan to continue on with NATO's creep and the encirclement of Russia . Belarus in particular was recently one of the subjects covered at the Globsec 2011 conference , where it was considered a threat to both the EU and NATO, having turned down NATO in favor of closer ties with Moscow.

Getting back to Hillary Clinton's illegitimate threat regarding Venezuela's associations with Iran, no one should be surprised to find out an extensive effort to foment a color revolution to oust Hugo Chavez has been long underway by AYM, Freedom House, NED, and the rest of this "fifth-branch" of globalist power projection. In fact, Hugo Chavez had already weathered an attempted military coup overtly orchestrated by the United States under Bush in 2002.

http://www.youtube.com/embed/Id--ZFtjR5c

Upon digging into the characters behind Chavez' ousting in 2002, it
appears that this documentary sorely understates US involvement.

The same forces of corporatism, privatization, and free-trade that led the 2002 coup against Chavez are trying to gain ground once again. Under the leadership of Harvard trained globalist minion Leopoldo Lopez , witless youth are taking the place of 2002's generals and tank columns in an attempt to match globalist minion Mohamed ElBaradei's success in Egypt .

Unsurprisingly, the US State Department's AYM is pro-Venezuelan opposition, and describes in great detail their campaign to "educate" the youth and get them politically active. Dismayed by Chavez' moves to consolidate his power and strangely repulsed by his "rule by decree," -something that Washington itself has set the standard for- AYM laments over the difficulties their meddling "civil society" faces.

Chavez' government recognized the US State Department's meddling recently in regards to a student hunger strike and the US's insistence that the Inter-American Human Rights Commission be allowed to "inspect" alleged violations under the Chavez government. Venezuelan Foreign Minister Nicolás Maduro even went as far as saying, "It looks like they (U.S.) want to start a virtual Egypt."

The "Fifth-Branch" Invasion: Click for larger image.


Understanding this "fifth-branch" invasion of astro-turf cannon fodder and the role it is playing in overturning foreign governments and despoiling nation sovereignty on a global scale is an essential step in ceasing the Anglo-American imperial machine. And of course, as always, boycotting and replacing the corporations behind the creation and expansion of these color-revolutions hinders not only the spread of their empire overseas, but releases the stranglehold of dominion they possess at home in the United States. Perhaps then the US State Department can once again go back to representing the American Republic and its people to the rest of the world as a responsible nation that respects real human rights and sovereignty both at home and abroad.

Editor's Note: This article has been edited and updated October 26, 2012.

[Oct 01, 2020] Collapse of every pillar of an international order that served the USA so well over the most recent decades

Oct 01, 2020 | marknesop.wordpress.com

Al , , August 9, 2014 at 3:15 am

A hilarious article from the Daily Fail's warmonger in chief, Max Chicken Bastings

MAX HASTINGS: Barbarians, genocide and a terrifying lack of Western leadership

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2720403/MAX-HASTINGS-Barbarians-genocide-terrifying-lack-Western-leadership.html

###

" And I cannot forget that when David Cameron's government was so schoolboyishly eager to give support to the rebels attacking the tyranny of Syria's President Assad, a very senior British soldier friend said to me: 'This is the first time in my career that I think the Russians have a point. They keep waggling their fingers and saying to us "be careful what you wish for". They believe the anti-Assad jihadis represent a threat to us all, and they may be right' .

Professor Sir Michael Howard, Britain's most distinguished historian and strategist, now 92, lamented to me last month the tottering, if not collapse, of every pillar that has supported international order through his lifetime. By that he means the UN, Nato and a strong America . "

Don't these idiots ever learn?

marknesop, August 9, 2014 at 9:24 am

Actually, I am in perfect sympathy with Michael Howard, bless the old codger. I too lament the collapse of every pillar of an international order that served us well at least part of the time over the most recent decades.

The crisis in Ukraine marks the end of even the pretense that international law is anything other than a tool of the western powers – they made it, they staff it and they disobey it when they deem it is important enough.

Oh, they will cover themselves in sackcloth and ashes after their victory and say how sorry they are, blame it on Russia and try to recover and go back to the way things were, but the day when you could pull that off is gone because of instantaneous reporting around the world, and it's harder for a prefabricated cover story to hold up.

Most people who are paying attention at all know we now live under the law of the gun, and might makes right, and the western alliance will wipe its ass on every principle it espouses if it means that's what it must do to maintain its bankster corporate empire. Those who are content with the extension of this world order are lulled by the promise of the national dream.

Fern , , August 9, 2014 at 1:01 pm

What we are seeing In the Middle East, courtesy of ISIS or IS is an enacting of the Yinon Plan, originally published in the early 1980's. This proposed that Israel needed to 'reconfigure' its regional 'architecture' by breaking up neighbouring Arab countries into smaller statelets predicated upon ethnicity. US neocon thinking coincided with this in 'Clean Break' and 'Project for the New American Century'.

The destruction of existing states was key – mini ethnic statelets would find it much harder to defend their resources against predatory outsiders and, Israel, by virtue of their existence, would no longer be unique as a state predicated on ethnicity but as one such state amongst a number and, because of its overwhelming military force, would be the numero uno in the region.

Now we have some new Islamic kids on the block who're achieving exactly what Israel and a certain strand of US foreign policy has long held as a strategic goal for the Middle East. Which probably leads most thinking people – and I'd include Hastings here who must know the history – to realise that the ISIS/IS story is suspect. So I'd say his job is to direct attention elsewhere – 'we' need to ramp up the army, rally for a 'strong' and 'confident' America etc.

Jen , , August 9, 2014 at 3:22 pm

@ Fern: What makes you think ISIS or ISIL are the new Islamic kids on the block?

Try Googling Shimon+Elliot+ISIS and see what you get.

[Oct 01, 2020] Tucker Carlson pays tribute to Russia scholar Stephen F. Cohen - Fox News Video

Sep 29, 2020 | video.foxnews.com

The Nation contributing editor and frequent 'Tucker Carlson Tonight' guest died on Sept. 18 at age 81

[Sep 30, 2020] As the US pressures Russia to renegotiate the New START Treaty, it exposes its own unreliability as a negotiating partner by Scott Ritter

Sep 09, 2020 | www.rt.com

Scott Ritter

is a former US Marine Corps intelligence officer and author of ' SCORPION KING : America's Suicidal Embrace of Nuclear Weapons from FDR to Trump.' He served in the Soviet Union as an inspector implementing the INF Treaty, in General Schwarzkopf's staff during the Gulf War, and from 1991-1998 as a UN weapons inspector. Follow him on Twitter @RealScottRitter The US seeks to pressure Russia by threatening to reactivate nuclear capability mothballed under the New START treaty if Moscow refuses to renegotiate. All it will accomplish by this is prove it habitually cheats on arms control.

According to Politico, "The Trump administration has asked the military to assess how quickly it could pull nuclear weapons out of storage and load them onto bombers and submarines" when the New START treaty limiting the size of the US and Russian strategic nuclear arsenals expires in February. Politico sources its story "to three people familiar with the discussions." According to these sources, the request was made to the US Strategic Command as "part of a strategy to pressure Moscow into renegotiating the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty before the US presidential election."

What is curious about this report is that US Strategic Command already knows the answer to the request. To meet the level of warhead reductions mandated under the treaty, the US has decreased the number of warheads carried on the Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) from three to one, and on its Trident D-5 submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM) from up to 14 to around 5 or 6.

READ MORE US quitting ABM pact forced Moscow to turn to advanced hypersonic systems & now it has weapons no one else does - Putin US quitting ABM pact forced Moscow to turn to advanced hypersonic systems & now it has weapons no one else does - Putin

The deactivated warheads were reclassified as either active or inactive. Active warheads are kept fully assembled and subjected to the same level of maintenance and upgrades as their operational counterparts, and can be reactivated in accordance with guidelines already established by US Strategic Command. Inactive warheads have been partially disassembled, and their reactivation would take longer than for their active counterparts, but is similarly regulated by US Strategic Command directives. Moreover, the US regularly conducts tests where it reconverts the Minuteman III ICBM to a three-warhead configuration to practice for the very activities suggested in the Politico article. The timelines associated with this reconversion are well known to US Strategic Command. It is not publicly known whether the US Navy conducts similar re-conversion flight tests of its Trident D-5 SLBMs.

One aspect of this request that, if it were implemented, would fall outside the existing reactivation guidelines set by US Strategic Command is if the US were to reconvert its fleet of Trident ballistic missile submarines from its current configuration under New START to one where no restrictions applied. This possibility raises some interesting questions about US compliance with New START.

According to Section 1 , paragraph 3 in Part Three of the Protocol to the treaty,

"If an ICBM launcher, SLBM launcher, or heavy bomber is converted by rendering it incapable of employing ICBMs, SLBMs, or nuclear armaments, so that the other Party can confirm the results of the conversion, such a converted strategic offensive arm shall cease to be subject to the aggregate numbers provided for in Article II of the Treaty and may be used for purposes not inconsistent with the Treaty."

To meet its obligations under New START, the US converted four SLBM launchers on each of its 14 Trident ballistic missile submarines – a total of 56 – to remove them from the permitted number of launchers. This conversion was done by removing the gas generators of the ejecting mechanism from the launch tube and bolting the tube covers shut.

On February 27, 2018, the Russian Foreign Ministry protested the American actions, noting that, in regard to the Trident conversions, they were "converted in such a way that the Russian Federation cannot confirm that these strategic arms have been rendered incapable of employing SLBMs."

The Russians were concerned that the Trident SLBM conversions were not irreversible, as required under the terms of the treaty, and that the 56 launchers listed as having been "rendered incapable of employing SLBMs" should rather have been categorized as "non-deployed launchers" and not excluded from the total aggregate count. To put it bluntly, the Russians were accusing the United States of cheating on the New START Treaty.

ALSO ON RT.COM US envoy says Russia must agree to arms control deal with no NATO scaleback, or else it's 'happy to modernize nukes without START'

If true, the threat made by Marshall Billingslea in his interview with the Russian Kommersant paper on September 21 to "reconvert our weapons" , if applied to the Trident ballistic missile submarine launch tubes, would not only confirm the Russian suspicions, but certify the US as an untrustworthy negotiating partner in any future arms control negotiations, either with Russia or China.

Washington already has one strike against it in this regard: its contention that the Mk 41 launcher used on the Aegis Ashore anti-ballistic missile system could not be used as a cruise missile launcher, and, as such, did not constitute a violation of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. This was shown to be a lie when, less than a month after the US withdrew from the INF Treaty, it conducted a flight test of a cruise missile fired from the same Mk 41 launcher .

If the Politico reporting is accurate, the US military has been ordered to carry out an exercise that is redundant insofar as the data is already known, and which does nothing to further US strategic capabilities. Moreover, if the US plans on increasing its SLBM launch capability by reactivating the 56 SLBM launchers ostensibly rendered inoperable under New START, Marshall Billingslea would be undermining his own stated objective of trying to pressure Russia back to the negotiating table before the November 2020 presidential election. After all, who in their right mind would be willing to negotiate with a proven cheater?

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The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.

[Sep 29, 2020] How much safer has the world become for Armenia since the collapse of the USSR

Sep 29, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

MOSCOWEXILE September 27, 2020 at 2:17 am

Russian blogger:

Sep. 27th, 2020 | 02:57 pm

Ан-124 ВКС России прилетел в Армению.
Логистический ад, конечно.
Насколько для Армении мир стал безопаснее с развалом СССР, не правда ли?

An An-124 of the Russian Aerospace Forces has arrived in Armenia.

A logistical hell, of course.

How much safer has the world become for Armenia since the collapse of the USSR, isn't that so?

source

[Sep 29, 2020] Rostec announced the results of the Russian Be-200ES firefighting operations in Turkey

Sep 29, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

ET AL September 22, 2020 at 7:21 am

Russian Avaiation: Rostec announced the results of the Russian Be-200ES firefighting operations in Turkey
https://www.ruaviation.com/news/2020/9/21/15439/

Over the past three months, the Russian Be-200ES amphibious aircraft flew more than 200 times for suppressing wildland fires in Turkey. Aircraft with Russian crews onboard have been participating in the firefighting missions at difficult and strategically important places and locations since June 16. Total flight time exceeded 400 hours .
####

I don't know how I missed this.

So while Russia has been putting out fires in fancy parts of Turkey (Izmir), Turkey has been continuing its fires in Syria!

[Sep 29, 2020] Armenia claims Azerbaijani artillery attacks are intensifying as Nagorno-Karabakh officials allege they've downed Azeri warplane -- RT Russia Former Soviet Union

Sep 29, 2020 | www.rt.com

Fighting between Azerbaijani and Armenian forces over the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh intensified, on Monday, with heavy civilian and military casualties reported amid disputed claims of an Azeri warplane being shot down.

Azerbaijani troops and forces from Nagorno-Karabakh have been trading artillery and rocket fire, with the population of much of Karabakh told to seek shelter. Meanwhile, Armenia has declared a general mobilization and barred men between the ages of 18 and 55 from leaving the country, except with the approval of military authorities.

The most intense attacks took place in the Aras river valley, near the border with Iran, and the Matagis-Talish front in the northeast of the region, according to Armenian Defense Ministry spokesman Artsrun Hovhannisyan. He claimed that the Azeri side has lost 22 tanks and a dozen other vehicles, along with 370 dead and many wounded.

https://platform.twitter.com/embed/index.html?creatorScreenName=RT_com&dnt=false&embedId=twitter-widget-0&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1310588852793421824&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.rt.com%2Frussia%2F501974-karabakh-fighting-intensifies-plane-downed%2F&siteScreenName=RT_com&theme=light&widgetsVersion=219d021%3A1598982042171&width=550px

Artur Sargsyan, deputy commander of the Nagorno-Karabakh military, said their own losses so far have amounted to 84 dead and more than 200 wounded. Both figures should be understood in the context of an ongoing information war run by the belligerents.

Vagram Pogosyan, spokesman for the president of the self-declared Artsakh Republic – the ethnic Armenian de-facto government in the capital Stepanakert – said their forces shot down an Azeri An-2 airplane outside the town of Martuni on Monday. This is in addition to some three dozen drones, including ones provided by Turkey, that the Armenian forces claim to have shot down over the past 48 hours.

https://platform.twitter.com/embed/index.html?creatorScreenName=RT_com&dnt=false&embedId=twitter-widget-1&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1310642793065459712&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.rt.com%2Frussia%2F501974-karabakh-fighting-intensifies-plane-downed%2F&siteScreenName=RT_com&theme=light&widgetsVersion=219d021%3A1598982042171&width=550px

Baku has denied the reports, saying only that two civilians were killed on Monday, in addition to five on Sunday, and 30 were injured. There was no official information on military casualties. Reports concerning the downed airplane were rejected as "not corresponding to reality."

Azeri forces have taken several strategically important locations near the village of Talish in Nagorno-Karabakh, Colonel Anar Eyvazov, spokesman for the Defense Ministry in Baku, said in a statement. He was also quoted by the Interfax news agency as saying that Lernik Vardanyan, an Armenian airborne commander, was killed near Talish. Armenia has denied this and labelled it "disinformation."

ALSO ON RT.COM Armenia braced for LONG WAR in Nagorno-Karabakh, PM Pashinyan's adviser warns saying Turkey behaves like 'regional terminator'

In a video conference on Monday, Azeri President Ilham Aliyev told UN General Secretary Antonio Guterres that the question of Nagorno-Karabakh should be resolved in line with UN Security Council resolutions guaranteeing the territorial integrity of Azerbaijan, and called for the urgent withdrawal of Armenian troops from "occupied territories."

The current Azeri offensive is backed by Turkey, whose President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has called Armenia "the biggest threat" to peace in the region and called for it to end the "occupation" of Azeri land.

"Recent developments have given all influential regional countries an opportunity to put in place realistic and fair solutions," he said in Istanbul on Monday.

ALSO ON RT.COM Time to end 'occupation' of Nagorno-Karabakh, Turkish leader Erdogan tells Armenia as border clashes with Azerbaijan continue

Unconfirmed reports that Turkish-backed militants from northern Syria have been transported to Azerbaijan to fight the Armenians have been denied by Baku as "complete nonsense." They amount to "another provocation from the Armenian side," Khikmet Gadzhiev, an aide to President Aliyev, told Al Jazeera.

Meanwhile, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan vowed his people "won't retreat a single millimeter from defending our people and our Artsakh." All Armenians "must unite to defend our history, our homeland, identity, our future and our present, " Pashinyan tweeted on Sunday from Yerevan.

Nagorno-Karabakh is one of several border disputes left over from the collapse of the Soviet Union. An enclave predominantly populated by Armenians, it seceded from Azerbaijan in 1988 and declared itself the Republic of Artsakh following a bitter war in 1992-94.

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[Sep 29, 2020] Elena Evdokimova on Twitter -- War correspondent Alexander Kharchenko also believes that Turkey operates drones that attack Nagorny Kharabah

Sep 29, 2020 | twitter.com

by Alexander Kharchenko

yesterday at 8:42 pm

In Karabakh Turkish drones #Bayraktar started systematic destruction of enemy armored vehicles. Of course they are ruled by the Turks. Azerbaijani operators simply could not learn how to manage them in such a short time. The Armenian side opposes them with the outdated Osa-AKM complexes. They cannot cope with this task.

Most likely, the Coral electronic warfire system operate in conjusction with the drones. They create interference, operators are distracted by false targets, while drones enter the target and destroy it. If in the near future the Armenian side will not be able to quickly clear the airspace, then the Azerbaijanis will show many more shots with the destruction of armored vehicles.

What can be opposed to #Bayraktar ? Do not think that they are invulnerable. "BUKs" and "Pantsir" systems cope well with them. But we cannot say yet whether they are in the area of hostilities.

By their actions, the Ottomans make it clear that strike drones will be deployed anywhere in the world where there are Turkish interests. That's their brand. Similar to the Syrian mercenaries. Accordingly, their opponents first of all need to think about building an effective air defense system.

If you have a territorial dispute with Turkey, then it is better not to run to the UN with another note of protest. And he will directly turn to Russia with a request to urgently sell several "BUKs". Trust that there will be much more benefit from it. Indeed, while the world community calls on the parties to sit down at the negotiating table, dozens of your soldiers are dying on the battlefields. And "BUK" in seconds can prove to a presumptuous guest that he was not expected in this sky. And neither he nor his brothers should appear here.

[Sep 29, 2020] Azerbaijani Army And Syrian Jihadis Launch Attack On Armenian Lines

Sep 29, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Paco , Sep 28 2020 10:09 utc | 34

Posted by: uncle tungsten | Sep 28 2020 3:16 utc | 26

Interesting link Evdokimova, 79% Armenians and 84% Azerbaijanis want the USSR back, that goes to confirm the castotrophe of the USSR dissolution, of course there would be no wars in that inmense area, in exchange for McDonalds advertised by Gorby we have now conflicts galore, Moldavia, Ukraine, Belarus, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, Kirguizia, Abjazia, Osetia.... and who needs to eat that crap?

Jen , Sep 28 2020 11:06 utc | 35

An opportunity to hit several skittles with one ball was too much to leave alone for the Turks, especially if the skittles could be hit down in someone else's backyard and particularly if that someone else happens to be a client state of Turkey's.

It surely also suits the United States in some way, if that opportunity leads to Russia and Iran becoming bogged down fighting in the Caucasus, and they are forced to take their attention (and money, arms and fighters) away from Idlib province in NW Syria.

So presumably if the Azeris could beat the Armenians with imported "Syrian rebels", that then would encourage home-grown rebel wannabes in Daghestan, Chechnya and other Muslim areas in the northern Caucasus to "rise up" against Russian rule. At the same time, Azeris in NW Iran would be inspired (in the wildest dreams of both the American and Turkish governments) to rise up against Tehran and declare their part of Iran independent.

Unfortunately the Armenians, despite their government's pro-American tendencies, recovered from what must have been surprise attacks and were able to retaliate quickly and hard. Now Russia has taken the high road and offered itself as a mediator.

Let's see if the US and the EU can persuade the Armenians with their offers of loans worth billions (presumably contingent on Armenians deferring to Israel as to whose Holocaust deserves to be called a "Holocaust" and not a mere genocide - even though Winston Churchill about 100 years ago or so used the term to describe the Ottoman massacres of Armenians and other Christian groups in their empire) away from Russian mediation and negotiation. If the money fails to lure Armenia into the IMF / World Bank debt trap, there goes the opportunity to scatter all the skittles.

Chevrus , Sep 28 2020 18:20 utc | 46

I'm trying to get a better contextual setup to this conflict. I recall the USA directed coup attempt dubber "Electric Yerevan" when a company from said nation bought the power company, ran it into the ground and used it as a basis for sparking protests. Next I am hearing that the current president is a "Random Guido" who answer to the USA. If so how does this effect Armenias strategic partnership with Russia? From what little I know about the Armenian spirit they are fiercely devoted to their culture. Many Americans of Armenian would fly back to the old country in order to take up arms. It seems as though this conflict is going to escalate if only because the damage done so far. Armenia is fully mobilizing.
In regard to the Donbass situation, I gathered that the Ukrops army was heavily laden with conscripts many of whom fled to Russia. They succumbed to the cauldron tactic due in part to be order by "results driven" leaders in the rear. That and they stuck to the roads and were easily flanked by smaller NAF units operating "in the green" What I found interesting (and disturbing) about this conflict is that it resembles what could very well happen in the USA, minus the armor although....

Chevrus , Sep 28 2020 18:20 utc | 46

I'm trying to get a better contextual setup to this conflict. I recall the USA directed coup attempt dubber "Electric Yerevan" when a company from said nation bought the power company, ran it into the ground and used it as a basis for sparking protests. Next I am hearing that the current president is a "Random Guido" who answer to the USA. If so how does this effect Armenias strategic partnership with Russia? From what little I know about the Armenian spirit they are fiercely devoted to their culture. Many Americans of Armenian would fly back to the old country in order to take up arms. It seems as though this conflict is going to escalate if only because the damage done so far. Armenia is fully mobilizing.
In regard to the Donbass situation, I gathered that the Ukrops army was heavily laden with conscripts many of whom fled to Russia. They succumbed to the cauldron tactic due in part to be order by "results driven" leaders in the rear. That and they stuck to the roads and were easily flanked by smaller NAF units operating "in the green" What I found interesting (and disturbing) about this conflict is that it resembles what could very well happen in the USA, minus the armor although....

H.Schmatz , Sep 28 2020 20:13 utc | 47

Although it is, clearly I suppose, not my field, from known and new mostly military analysis sources recently found, I will try form a somehow readable post...( forgive thus if I do not write the weapons denomination correctly...I make the effort to keep you informed...and alos take into account, I am figuring out the events without thoroughly studying the maps, I have passed the day working/making food shopping/taking a nap... )

On the doubts about whether Russia would intervene on behalf of Armenia, that wouldv happen if Armenia request assistance under CIS agreements, but Republic of Nagorno-Karabakh ( currently Republic of Arsakh, the name of ancient Great Armenia, to eliminate the azeri denomination Karabakh.. ) is not Armenia, it is a region which apealed self-determination but not recognized by any nation so far...not even by Armenia, due the ceasfire signed in 1994 ( what implies that the war never ended, but was frozen for a while, to be reignited from time to time...) Thread ( you translate the Twitts on your own this time...otherwise would get too long post..)

https://twitter.com/descifraguerra/status/1310634361042145282

It is on the grounds of CIS agreements, I guess, that today some Russian MiG-29 overflow Yerevan...

https://twitter.com/Political_Room/status/1310604450424328192

Both countries are very mountainous terrain, this is Caucasus, what makes advancement quite difficult, thus, eventhough at first moments success was falling on the side of Azerbaijan ( which counts with the unestimable help of Turkish swarms of drones and intelligence from Turkish AWACSm it seems that Armenia, which has its borders mined, has inflicted heavy loses in armor to Azerbaijan today, destroyed and captured....( warning disturbing content of people flying in the air space..), also list of fallen in the Armenian side, most milennials...This is when most fallen could have originated...in Martakhert, in the North...

https://twitter.com/14Milimetros/status/1310173020082843655

https://twitter.com/Political_Room/status/1310635885738819584

#LATEST HOUR #URGENT #Azerbaiyan army claims to have destroyed #Armenia's air defense in Martakhert (north), with 12 OSA systems destroyed. The #Martakhert garrison would be surrounded and offered the option to surrender.

https://twitter.com/301_AD/status/1310574779733340160

#LATEST HOUR First list of fallen in combat by #Armenia. Note that most are kids born in 2000. The Armenian Defense Ministry also claims that during a successful counterattack they have captured 11 armor including an advanced BMP-3.

https://twitter.com/Political_Room/status/1310356974010339330

It seems that modern warfare through drones is rendering heavy armor a bit obsolete, well, like seating ducks slowly advancing in mountainous terrain of Caucasus..

https://twitter.com/SubBrief/status/1310359802615300097

The miniature air campaign being carried out by the #Azerbaijan drones against #Armenia seems to be very successful. Its main protagonist is being the MAM-L micromissiles from #Turkey.

https://twitter.com/Political_Room/status/1310604904042500105

#Azerbaiyan has already deployed the TOS-1 Buratino thermobaric rocket launchers. The #Azerbaiyan drone air campaign continues to wreak havoc on the Armenian ranks.

https://twitter.com/Political_Room/status/1310549583735459841

BTW, @flighradar24, where some people use to follow flights path is under attack...guys are saying this is Turkey/ Azrbaijan so that their drones can not be followed..

https://twitter.com/DragonLadyU2/status/1310662606261284869

Some additional points in this thread by another guy who works for @descifraguerra, with what is described by him as #cutremapa ( an outline made in the run without much precision so as to clarify his points.. ):

There are skirmishes throughout practically the entire front but the "serious" fighting is concentrated in the areas marked A (Murov Peak), B (Agdara - Heyvali axis) and C (Fuzuli region). Especially in the latter, I refer to the video.

The ultimate goal of the Azeris appears to be a south-north pincer on the capital of Artsakh, Stepanakert, with all the difficulties that this entails. Taking this into account, it seems that there are two previous objectives.

The first of these objectives is to cut the M11, the main logistics artery of Artsakh, for which they have two options: A) Take the peak of Murov and block the road taking advantage of the heights. But storming up the mountain is always tricky.
B) Take the Heyvali junction. To do so, they must first cross several towns, such as Aghdara, and it is in this area where it seems that more artillery fire is concentrating in the last hours.

The second ideal objective would be to cut the M12, the second most important road in the area and therefore the second most important supply route, but considering its position this is something very difficult to carry out in most of its tracing.

So it seems that they are opting for a second objective, a priori simpler: to capture the Fuzali region (remember, zone C on the map) and cut the M12 at the entrance to Stepanakert itself (just 1.37 km south From the capital).

For now, it seems that the Armenians are holding up well to the south, although it is the front in which the most intense fighting has taken place so far this day, but they have less and less anti-aircraft and that allows the Azeri drones to act.

On the growing military drone industry being built by Turkey ( guess where the command and control of those swarms of drones attacking one day after another Khmeimin and Syrian positions and warehousesd is placed ), in the hands of his son-in-law, it seems that Syrian oil smuggling resulted most profitting...

Turkey is laying the foundations of its geopolitics in the massive use of drones in places of conflict where it has great interests.

To achieve his goals, Erdogan managed to establish his own drone industry. He is currently in the hands of one of his sons-in-law.

https://twitter.com/14Milimetros/status/1310345958564204546

Some historical curiosities about the two "main" contenders...

Did you know...

-Armenia was the first country in the world to adopt Christianity as its official religion (301 AD)

-Azerbaijan was the first Muslim country in the world to adopt the secular parliamentary republic as a model state (1918).

https://twitter.com/14Milimetros/status/1310247759363088400


[Sep 29, 2020] Erdogan fancies Turkey to be Russia's equal on the world stage

Sep 29, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

MARK CHAPMAN September 29, 2020 at 3:45 pm

But Erdogan is so blatant in his challenges that it is plain he fancies Turkey to be Russia's equal on the world stage, and dares to poke it even as he takes actions that result in greater power and influence for Turkey. He needs a hard kick in the ass to remind him where his provocative actions are taking him. The west is unhappy with Turkey's cozying-up to Russsia, but is doubtless delighted when he behaves like this.

JAMES LAKE September 29, 2020 at 11:04 am

Karl,

Maybe Armenia could call it's new friends in NATO and in the EU

Please read the following it is a quote from an article over a Moon of Alabama.

" .. . Although a long-standing Russian partner, Armenia has also developed ties with the West: It provides troops to NATO-led operations in Afghanistan and is a member of NATO's Partnership for Peace, and it also recently agreed to strengthen its political ties with the EU. The United States might try to encourage Armenia to move fully into the NATO orbit. If the United States were to succeed in this policy, then Russia might be forced to withdraw from its army base at Gyumri and an army and air base near Yerevan (currently leased until 2044), and divert even more resources to its Southern Military District. "

Armenia after its colour revolution started to act in an anti -Russian way

Yet Russia is supposed to feel obliged to help Armenia?

What for? they have shown that they are going in another direction

And I think both Azerbaijan and Turkey looked at Armenia's behaviour to Russia and are taking full advantage of a weakened alliance.

KARL1HAUSHOFER September 29, 2020 at 1:10 pm

You make some good points. If Armenia has politically distanced itself from Russia and approached the West and the NATO then it makes no sense for Russia to offer help without strings attached. But Russia cannot let Turkey/Azerbaijan overrun Armenia either, or let Azerbaijan grab Nagarno-Karabakh, because it would strengthen Turkish position too much in the Caucasus region.

MARK CHAPMAN September 29, 2020 at 3:40 pm

Yes, you are plainly having the time of your life and yukking it up again like you do whenever something difficult happens to put Russia in a bad position – plainly, you are a real friend of Russia, and only motivated by concern. Keep on laughing and making jokes. Perhaps Russia should drop a bunker-buster on your house – would that be a martial enough reaction for you?

MARK CHAPMAN September 29, 2020 at 3:36 pm

They should – they should smack down a Turkish aircraft without warning and at the first available opportunity. Russia is trying to stabilize the situation and calm things down, while Turkey is openly backing Azerbaijan's military operation. A hard slap now could break the cycle, but it seems plain Erdogan will get away with whatever he is allowed to.

ET AL September 29, 2020 at 12:48 pm

It almost doesn't matter whether Turkey shot down the Armenian Su-25, rather that Armenia has publicly stated it. This is about crossing the Rubicon. For all the chest-beating and rah rah rah from In'Sultin' Erd O'Grand & Aliyev, both states have denied it happened. Here we clearly see the gulf between broadcast to self-and actual potential consequences of such an action.

Add to that Armenia has been open (not necessarily transparent) about its losses. Theres been nothing from Azerbaidjan except American Vietnam war style 'body counts' of Armenians.

It looks to me that Armenia are upping the ante to the max. and Azerbaidjan is left wanting by its response which makes no sense if its claims of victories/whatever are anywhere near true.

What I really want to know is what if any assistance, apart from words, the US is providing and comparatively Russia. One or them is clearly in a much better position than the other. There's really not much to go on as we know Russia does not broadcast and it certainly would not be in the current 'pro-EU' Armenian administrations interest either. Yet again, we are only left to ask what hasn't been said & done.

As far as I can see, Armenia is keeping most of its powder dry. The threat of 'other measures' is currently more useful (and doesn't entail the same risks) than actually enacting them. Maybe Putin will invite €µ to cover Aliyev's humilition as Sarkozy was for Sakaashiti's? Now that would be funny, but we must not get ahead of ourselves..

Strategically, each time In'Sultin' Erd O'Grand backs stunts like these, he exposes himself further to trouble at home. For Russia, not being fully NATO onside is evidently quite useful however distasteful his behavior is, but he may well be undoing himself and putting Turkey squarely back in to the western camp overall but retaining its nationalist Big Boy streak.

ET AL September 29, 2020 at 1:24 pm

BMPD: Директор Центра анализа стратегий и технологий о ситуации в Нагорном Карабахе
https://bmpd.livejournal.com/4151211.html

Осеннее военное обострение в Нагорном Карабахе для многих стало совершенной неожиданностью. Но специалисты, которые следят за военно-политической обстановкой в Закавказье, подобное развитие событий давно предсказывали. В частности, эксперты Центра анализа стратегий и технологий (ЦАСТ) еще два года назад спрогнозировали обострение ситуации в Карабахе. В их книге "В ожидании бури: Южный Кавказ" даны оценки, которые, судя по всему, подтверждаются сегодня, пишет Сергей Вальченко в материале для сайта MK.ru
####

More at the link.

This looks like a reasonable analysis. If you are lazy like I am, use and online translator.

I don't see how Armenia can accept the loss of critical territory even if the Azeri operations are 'limited.' According to the interview, Azerbiajan is repeating the tactics of 2018 which is a big NO NO according to Tsun Tzu. I would be surprises is Armenia hasn't already planned for this. The big fly in this ointment is Yerevan which may delay or limit a response and listen to its 'western partners.' That would cement Azeri successes and damage the 'Pro-EU' government. One reasonable strategy would be to actually encourage Azeri 'successes' as tehy would be tempted to go further than their limited goals and draw the forces in to a pre-prepared 'cauldron', aka kiling zone as occured previously in the Donbass and wrap up the Azeri army and gain ground. There's the risk that it wouldn't work either, yet again Tsun Tzu do not fight the next war as you fough the last

[Sep 29, 2020] Strategic Aims Behind The War On Armenia

Sep 29, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Strategic Aims Behind The War On Armenia

On Sunday Ilham Aliyev, the longtime dictator of Azerbaijan, launched a war on the Armenian held Nagorno-Karabakh area. That he dared to do this now, 27 years after a ceasefire ended a war over the area, is a sign that the larger strategic picture has changed.

When the Soviet Union fell apart the Nagorno-Karabakh area had a mixed population of Azerbaijani (also called Azeri) Shia Muslims and Armenian Christians. As in other former Soviet republics ethnic diversity became problematic when the new states evolved. The mixed areas were fought over and Armenia won the Nagorno-Karabakh area. There have since been several border skirmishes and small wars between the two opponents but the intensity of the fighting is now much higher than before.


Source: Joshua Kushera - bigger

In 2006 Yasha Levine wrote about his visit to Nagorno-Karabakh for The Exile. He described the uneven opponents:

In 1994 the Armenians won and forced Azerbaijan to a ceasefire. In the meantime Nagorno-Karabakh organized itself into a sovereign country [called Artsakh] with its own army, elected officials and parliament. But it still hasn't been recognized by any country other than Armenia and is still classified as one of the "frozen conflicts" in the region, along with the breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia in Georgia.

But this "frozen conflict" may soon heat up, if you believe what Azerbaijan's playboy/gambling addict/president, Ilham Aliyev, says. Not that Azerbaijanis should get too excited about another war: If Armenians are still the fighters they were ten years ago, then statistically, it's the Azeris who'll do most of the dying. While matched evenly in soldiers, the Azeris had double the amount of heavy artillery, armored vehicles, and tanks than the Armenians; but when it was over, the Azeri body count was three times higher then that of the Armenians. Azeri casualties stood at 17,000. The Armenians only lost 6,000. And that's not even counting the remaining Azeri civilians the Armenians ethnically cleansed.

Since the strategically-important Baku-Ceyhan oil pipeline opened up, pumping Caspian Sea oil to the West via Turkey, the Azeri president has been making open threats about reclaiming Nagorno-Karabakh by force. The $10 billion in oil revenues he expects to earn per year once the pipeline is fully operational is going to his head. $10 billion might not seem that much -- but for Azerbaijan it constitutes a 30% spike in GDP. In every single interview, Aliyev can't even mention the pipeline project without veering onto the subject of "resolving" the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.

Aliyev started spending the oil cash even before the oil started flowing and announced an immediate doubling of military spending. A little later he announced the doubling of all military salaries. Aliyev's generals aren't squeamish about bragging that by next year their military budget will be $1.2 billion, or about Armenia's entire federal budget.

Over the next 14 years the war that Yasha Levine foresaw in 2006 did not happen. That it was launched now points to an important change. In July another border skirmish broke out for still unknown reasons. Then Turkey stepped in :

Following the July conflict Turkey's involvement became much deeper than it had previously been, with unprecedentedly bellicose rhetoric coming from Ankara and repeated high-level visits between the two sides. Ankara appeared to see the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict as yet another arena in which to exercise its growing foreign policy ambitions, while appealing to a nationalist, anti-Armenian bloc in Turkey's domestic politics.

Turkey's tighter embrace, in turn, gave Baku the confidence to take a tougher line against Russia, Armenia's closest ally in the conflict but which maintains close ties with both countries. Azerbaijan heavily publicized (still unconfirmed) reports about large Russian weapons shipments to Armenia just following the fighting, and President Ilham Aliyev personally complained to his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin.

Turkey's President Erdogan intervened with more than rhetoric :

In August, Turkey and Azerbaijan completed two weeks of joint air and land military exercises, including in the Azerbaijani enclave of Naxcivan. Some observers have questioned whether Turkey left behind military equipment or even a contingent of troops.

The potential for robust Turkish involvement in the conflict is being watched closely by Russia, which is already on opposing sides with the NATO member in conflicts in Libya and Syria.

Russia sells weapons to both Azerbaijan and Armenia, but has a military base in Armenia and favors that strategic partnership.

Azerbaijan has bought drones from Turkey and Israel and there are rumors that they are flown by Turkish and Israeli personal. Turkey also hired 2,000 to 4,000 Sunni Jihadis from Syria to fight for the Shia Azerbaijan. A dozen of them were already killed on the first day of the war. One wonders how long they will be willing to be used as cannon fodder by the otherwise hated Shia.

There were additional rumors that there are Turkish fighter jets in Azerbaijan while Turkish spy planes look at the air-space over Armenia from its western border.


Source: IWN News - bigger

The immediate Azerbaijani war aim is to take the two districts Fizuli and Jabrayil in south-eastern corner of the Armenian held land:

While the core of the conflict between the two sides is the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, Fuzuli and Jabrayil are two of the seven districts surrounding Karabakh that Armenian forces occupy as well. Those districts, which were almost entirely populated by ethnic Azerbaijanis before the war, were home to the large majority of the more than 600,000 Azerbaijanis displaced in the conflict.

While there has been some modest settlement by Armenians into some of the occupied territories, Fuzuli and Jabrayil remain nearly entirely unpopulated.

The two districts have good farm land and Armenia, already poor, will want to keep them. It certainly is putting up a strong fight over them.

The war has not progressed well for Azerbaijan. It has already lost dozens of tanks (vid) and hundreds of soldiers. Internet access in the country has been completely blocked to hide the losses.

The losses do not hinder Erdogan's scribes to already write of victory :

Defending Azerbaijan is defending the homeland. This is our political identity and conscious. Our geopolitical mind and defense strategies are no different. Always remember, "homeland" is a very broad concept for us!

We are not making a simple exaggeration when we say "History has been reset." We are expecting a victory from the Caucasus as well!

Well ...

An hour ago the Armenian government said that Turkey shot down one of its planes:

Armenia says one of its fighter jets was shot down by a Turkish jet, in a major escalation in the conflict over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region.

The Armenian foreign ministry said the pilot of the Soviet-made SU-25 died after being hit by the Turkish F-16 in Armenian air space .

Turkey, which is backing Azerbaijan in the conflict, has denied the claim.
...
Azerbaijan has repeatedly stated that its air force does not have F-16 fighter jets. However, Turkey does.

A Turkish attack within Armenian borders would trigger the Collective Security Treaty which obligates Russia and others to defend Armenia.

A Russian entry into the war would give Erdogan a serious headache.

But that might not even be his worst problem. The Turkish economy is shrinking, the Central Bank has only little hard currency left, inflation is hight and the Turkish Lira continues to fall. Today it hit a new record low .


Source: Xe - bigger

Azerbaijan has quite a bit of oil money and may be able to help Erdogan. Money may indeed be a part of Erdogan's motivation to take part in this war.

Russia will certainly not jump head first into the conflict. It will be very careful to not over-extend itself and to thereby fall into a U.S. laid trap.

Last year the Pentagon financed RAND Corporation released a report that laid out plans against Russia :

Drawing on quantitative and qualitative data from Western and Russian sources, this report examines Russia's economic, political, and military vulnerabilities and anxieties. It then analyzes potential policy options to exploit them -- ideologically, economically, geopolitically, and militarily (including air and space, maritime, land, and multidomain options).

As one option the report discussed to over-extend Russia (pdf) in the Caucasus:

The United States could extend Russia in the Caucasus in two ways. First, the United States could push for a closer NATO relation-ship with Georgia and Azerbaijan, likely leading Russia to strengthen its military presence in South Ossetia, Abkhazia, Armenia, and southern Russia.

Alternatively, the United States could try to induce Armenia to break with Russia. Although a long-standing Russian partner, Armenia has also developed ties with the West: It provides troops to NATO-led operations in Afghanistan and is a member of NATO's Partnership for Peace, and it also recently agreed to strengthen its political ties with the EU. The United States might try to encourage Armenia to move fully into the NATO orbit. If the United States were to succeed in this policy, then Russia might be forced to withdraw from its army base at Gyumri and an army and air base near Yerevan (currently leased until 2044), and divert even more resources to its Southern Military District.

The RAND report gives those options only a poor chance to succeed. But that does not not mean that the U.S. would not try to create some additional problems in Russia's southern near abroad. It may have given its NATO ally Turkey a signal that it would not mind if Erdogan gives Aliyev a helping hand and jumps into anther war against Russia.

Unless Armenian core land is seriously attacked Russia will likely stay aside. It will help Armenia with intelligence and equipment flown in through Iran. It will continue to talk with both sides and will try to arrange a ceasefire.

Pressing Azerbaijan into one will first require some significant Armenian successes against the invading forces. Thirty years agon the Armenians proved to be far better soldiers than the Azeris. From what one can gain from social media material that seems to still be the case. It will be the decisive element for the outcome of this conflict.

Posted by b on September 29, 2020 at 18:04 UTC | Permalink

div> As much as I appreciate b's conflict sitreps, I sure hope this one does not become a recurring one..

Posted by: Lozion , Sep 29 2020 18:29 utc | 1

As much as I appreciate b's conflict sitreps, I sure hope this one does not become a recurring one..

Posted by: Lozion | Sep 29 2020 18:29 utc | 1

c , Sep 29 2020 18:32 utc | 2
Thanks. The best explanación I have seen so far of this complicated situación
Sakineh Bagoom , Sep 29 2020 18:32 utc | 3
Love the report b.
This is how you use to have it on Syria. Keep it up.
GeorgeSmiley , Sep 29 2020 18:37 utc | 4
Best article in quite some time B, bravo!
karlof1 , Sep 29 2020 18:53 utc | 5
As I reported last week, the Armenians were one of the international participants in recent military exercises held in the Caucus region, and they frequently train with Russian troops as CSTO members. Neither the Azeris or Armenians can really afford a conflict, although the former have the better economic basis and have done a better job dealing with COVID. Because of their history, Armenians are better and more tenacious in combat. Until Nagorno-Karabakh is resolved, it will be exploited by the Outlaw US Empire.
Jackrabbit , Sep 29 2020 18:53 utc | 6
The war will draw Azerbaijan closer to NATO/Turkey just as Trump is turning the screws on Iran via extended UN sanctions.

Much of the Russian-Iranian trade would likely be conducted via Volga River and Caspian Sea.

What are the chances that we see mysterious attacks on shipping in the Caspian Sea?

<> <> <> <> <> <>

PS Erdogan's adventurism (aka Ottoman fantasies) seem like a smokescreen for Imperial operations.

!!

ptb , Sep 29 2020 18:57 utc | 7
Agreed very much with @1.

The trouble with this kind of intimate geography, is that it is very tempting to operate longer-range weapons or drones from the 'uncontested' portion of each country's territory, since each home territory is theoretically out of bounds of the conflict.

The main meaningful response to a long-range or unmanned attack, targeting the source, could then be used to blame the other side for any escalation. It seems Azerbaijan is more comfortable with this at the moment. Assuming they end up occupying more of the contested territory, they will end up on the receiving end of the same pattern, but either way the result would be the same.

Besides the muddled geopolitics and heartbreaking history, it makes for a relevant study in the state of modern drone and anti-drone systems, which will only increase in significance going forward, as guidance systems, software integration, networked/relay-based-communications and hard-to-detect point-to-point radio or IR comms are all more accessible now. (for example, what would you do if you had the capacity to make ~10 million of the things a year)

Altai , Sep 29 2020 19:02 utc | 8
Meanwhile, the radical blue ticks need some way to seem like they are superior to plebs who might be inclined to take Armenia's side. It's all very complicated, both sides are just as wrong you see!

https://twitter.com/Tom_deWaal/status/1310559223441485826

"1 No side has a monopoly of justice. Both sides have historical claims to Karabakh. It was the site of a medieval Armenian kingdom in the 12th century and an Azerbaijani (Persian Turkic Shia) khanate in the 18th c. Both peoples have lived together here, mostly peacefully."

But the people never changed, they were Armenian before and after the very brief period of being a part of that Khanate (75 years, he left this out) against their will. It's all the more surreal since the guy making the argument that 75 years of being under somebody's rule 300 years ago makes you theirs forever.

It's all the more surreal given the writers own father is from Amsterdam given.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Netherlands

1556–1714

I don't see anyone suggesting Spain has legitimate claims on Flanders and the Netherlands.

It must be hard for bluechecks because their vaunted 'rules-based international order' such it might ever have been said to exist with constant violation without consequence by powerful countries is the source of the problem. Azerbaijan is only still after this territory based on the thin logic that despite being 85-90% Armenian at it's lowest point in the last 250 years and 100% Armenian today and being totally separated from Azerbaijan politically, the UN still considers it's de jure Azerbaijan. The map says it's Azerbaijan!

Yul , Sep 29 2020 19:29 utc | 9
It is surprising seeing Erdogan who is a Muslim Brotherhood fanatic supporting a mostly Shia Muslim country of Azerbaijan.
May be Persia should get involved to get back the land it lost during the Persian-Russo wars !
R.A. , Sep 29 2020 19:33 utc | 10
B, it is good to see you reporting on matters that are within your area of expertise. Your reporting on conflicts of this kind is invaluable, and I always follow your reports with great interest.

I wish I could say the same for your recent post about Covid19, but there are aspects of that post that are unfortunate. It is clear, for example, that you have not been following the latest work on cross-reactive immunity--that is, the evidence that people who have not yet been exposed to SARS-CoV-2 nevertheless have some immunity to it, due to exposure to other corona-viruses. Nor is your overall analysis of the actual lethality of the disease convincing--you seem to be unaware of the vast difference between young people and children, who almost never die of Covid19, versus the elderly, who are much at risk. This has great implications for what policies are best in dealing with the disease.

I recommend the following source, which allows investigation of the lethality of Covid19 more thoroughly: https://swprs.org/studies-on-covid-19-lethality/

ptb , Sep 29 2020 19:43 utc | 11
@Altai 8

Yes NK was historically Arm going back forever. Nevertheless, the geography made defending it impossible without occupying adjacent areas which as far as I know, were Azeri in modern times. There are few happy answers to be found here.

As far as biases are concerned, deWaal is giving the interview to Al Jazeera, and the network is (not surprisingly) somewhat more sympathetic to Turkish and therefore Azeri statements on the matter, though they typically do a better job keeping a professional facade than domestic (US) media at least. But that gives a hint.

AtaBrit , Sep 29 2020 19:45 utc | 12
Excellent couple of articles, 'b'. You are really on form. Thanks.

Think you are spot on regarding money and deflection. What we've seen recently from Erdogan is vast expenditure in construction - unnecessary pandemic hospitals with extortionate rental agreements to be met by the local authorities - and in technology - the latest TechnoFest headed by his other 'damat' advertised significant projects to be funded by the state, and of course oil and military: In these sectors nepotism and cronyism rule. it is those companies close to Erdogan that reap very significant benefits. So, any earnings that can be gleaned from Aliyev are very welcome I am sure.

The other aspect is deflection from a series of foreign policy failures, and several serious domestic failures, one being the management of Covid currently and its obvious manipulations and the abject failure of the online education system in which it is estimated between 35 and 50 percent of pupils are NOT participating. The others being the economy as 'b' alluded to and the failed Greek, Libyan and Syrian situations. Other than that, the political ground does not favour Erdogan at all and he is terrified of losing his 2023 deadline and therefore desperate to win back more of the electorate.

Turks talks about Turkey and Azerbaijan as One People, Two states - the Azeris do not say the same. But it is a sign of just how important this is to Turks. As 'b' has mentioned, the Turkish media is already in faitytale / victory mode - the last dreamt up report I saw claimed that PKK were moving from Syria to Iraq and into Armenia to fight against Azeris - and people are buying it, as they always do. Nationalism is very big in Turkey. There's a reason why criticising a military campaign is considered a crime!

I was tempted to think that this 'conflict' would go the way of every other contrived foreign policy foray this year, but Aliyev and Erdogan may be out to save each other's political lives here in which case we need to consider what they're fighting to defend - very wealthy authoritarian 'mafia states'. I do not think that Turkey would decide to push Russia too far unless it had NATO or US backing because Turkey's economy and regional influence are very dependent on Russia. So, I think this will be a limited show-piece that may score some territory. What is certain is that in both Turkey and Azerbaijan, victory is already guaranteed by the media! Does that imply a short 'conflict'?

Another aspect to remember is Iran. it has very good and important relations with both Azerbaijan and Armenia and would no doubt fully back any Russian intervention be it diplomatic or otherwise. It has also offered to mediate between the two. The Nagorno-Karabakh area is very important to Iran.

gottlieb , Sep 29 2020 19:47 utc | 13
So many fuses, so little time with desperate madmen on the march. As the good professor said, "I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones." WWIII ain't your grandfather's World War.
Orage , Sep 29 2020 20:05 utc | 14
R.A.
The swprs has been a constant source of Covid-19 scepticism from the outset. It is not balanced and is full of cherry picking about its sources and analysis. It is a very serious error to focus entirely on mortality in Covid 19 and its major effect on older people. It does mean premature death for many. But even more seriously Covid-19 causes serious morbidity and together with a high infectious rate leads to very sharp swamping of health systems, major loss of front line workers because of illness and serious health and economic effects independent of the mortality. Focussing on mortality of elderly only is a narrow view and ignores why Covid 19 is such a serious pandemic.
Et Tu , Sep 29 2020 20:08 utc | 15
Was lacking some of the details and depth of B's report but it was clear Erdogan is running point on another Nato led shit sandwich on Russia's doorstep and a blatant 'damned if you do, damned if you don't' trap laid out for Putin.

What's the bet if Russia supports Armenia the media will paint this as 'Russian aggression' on poor Azerbaijan and an invasion of their sovereign territory? The region is technically still part of Azerbaijan. Yet when all the first videos showed Azeri drones striking Armenian tanks in defensive dugouts, while Armenian footage showed ATGM's striking Azeri armour maneuvering in open fields, it doesn't take a genius to work out who the aggressor was... but facts should never get in the way of a good narrative when it comes to Nato..

Another frozen conflict would be just the ticket to drain more resources from Russia, not to mention, the potential for instability and refugees right on Iran's doorstep would be too much for the US not to want to invest in. Combine that with Erdogan's megalomania, and he'll be happy to add 15% on all munitions charged to Azerbaijan to help plug some of his budget holes, no doubt.

Luckily I'm no military strategist, but when i hear things like this i can't help wonder if some good old 'domestic terrorism' or missiles flying into Baku, Washington or Istanbul are just what is needed for these psychopaths to be brought to the negotiating table nice and early and avoid a lot of human misery... It is just crazy to think we have leaders who actually start wars in order to poke Russia in the eye... one wonders, since they know exactly who is doing what and why, what sort of payback that may bring one day.

Debsisdead , Sep 29 2020 20:16 utc | 16
There is no doubt that Nagorno-Karabakh is traditionally part of Azerbaijan and only got claimed by Armenia after a surfeit of Armenians invaded the territory since the end of WW1. All in all a very similar situation to that which developed in Serbia vis a vis the invasion of Kosovo by Albanians.
MOA has consistently stood against the internationally illegal Kosovo enclave, so why the contradiction with Nagorno-Karabakh?

Surely it cannot be because of ideological reasons i.e. Armenia is 'good guys' & Azerbaijan are bad guys? That is precisely the type of logical inconsistency which causes wars.
Azerbaijan is in a tough enough situation with Armenia block the creation of a contiguous nation with Armenia's takeover of the south of Azerbaijan up to the Iranian border. If you look at the first map provided you will see an unlabelled black blob up against the Iranian border a part of Azerbaijan which has been deliberately isolated by Armenia from the rest of Azerbaijan.

This report sounds like something out of the NYT or Guardian next you'll be claiming with zero evidence that there are Turkey funded terrorists brought in from Idlib just as the guardian has been claiming.

Jen , Sep 29 2020 20:28 utc | 17
Another motivation for Ottoman Sultan wannabe Erdogan may be the possibility of extending Turkish influence (and by implication his and his family's) through Azerbaijan and the Caspian Sea into Central Asia all the way to and into ... Xinjiang in NW China, with the potential for Uyghur terrorists, nurtured by Turkish propaganda, money and arms, to get a free ride through Central Asia and straight into any future conflict zones Turkey might want to open up in Iranian Azerbaijan and all Iran's northern and eastern border areas with Turkmenistan and Afghanistan.

Of course this will have US, UK, EU (possibly) and Israeli blessing if it means Turkey will have to do most of the heavy lifting of money transactions.

james , Sep 29 2020 20:33 utc | 18
thanks b.... seeing erdogan involved here makes sense.. at some point, someone is going to take him out to bring peace back to the area.... until then he is a useful tool..

@ debs....thanks for your comments.. perhaps b will respond to them?? i agree with et tu, the narrative the msm will spin here will tell us a lot..

AtaBrit , Sep 29 2020 20:38 utc | 19
@Jen
If I remember rightly, and I'll try to find the reports, it was claimed back in July that Erdogan had offered to send Syrian militias to help defend Azerbaijan.
What makes you think the claim is unfounded?
The jihadists left in N.Syria are a serious problem for Turkey, so it would nake perfect sense to try to 'liquidate' them in contrived 'conflicts'.
albagen , Sep 29 2020 20:38 utc | 20
@ Debsisdead 16

When did that "invasion of Kosovo by Albanians" did happen? You seem so pretty sure of it that it makes me wonder if you are the creator of history itself, so you just invented it, and believe it.

waiting...

Altai , Sep 29 2020 20:38 utc | 21
@ptb

The solution would be to give back the adjacent territories that border Azerbaijan to Azerbaijan and maybe pay some kind of nominal compensation to the displaced in return for normalisation. They are to my knowledge much like parts of the buffer zone in Cyprus, full of abandoned towns and villages. (Some of which you can see tanks using for cover in the videos)

But the Caucuses are the Caucuses are grudges are grudges. Can't turn back the clock so it's all or nothing, one side loses and one side wins.

Then you have all the exclaves and enclaves to deal with, which ironically, haven't become an issue yet at all, probably because it would involve attacks on Armenia proper. Though there has already been one strike in Armenia proper of a bus that was set to carry Armenian solders.

alaff , Sep 29 2020 20:46 utc | 22
1. It is obvious that the current aggravation was not accidental, but prepared in advance.

2. Possible goals for Turkey:

> Anchoring Turkey in Azerbaijan - the creation of full-fledged turkish military bases.

> Inclusion of Azerbaijan in the Turkish orbit of influence (thesis "two countries - one nation", in which Turkey assumes supremacy) within the framework of the concept of neo-Ottomanism and (pseudo-)leadership of Turkey in the Turkic world.

> Economic goals and energy projects (Azerbaijani oil, gas) as part of the Turkish plan to turn the country into an energy supplier.

> Given the circumstances (Ukrainian black hole, Belarusian problem, coronavirus, spectacle with Navalny, threat to Nord Stream-2 etc), involve Russia in the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict, thereby tying Russia's hands in the Caucasus direction in order to act more freely and boldly in other theaters (the Mediterranean conflict with Greece, Syria, Libya...), given the problematic position of Turkey (simultaneous war on several fronts and the almost complete absence of assistants/allies). In this situation, the Nagorno-Karabakh leverage/'trump card' in the hands of Turkey would be useful for negotiations with Russia.

The latter assumption is probably the main one.

@Debsisdead, #16


There is no doubt that Nagorno-Karabakh is traditionally part of Azerbaijan

Funny.
Actually, this territory - Nagorno-Karabakh, as well as Armenia and Azerbaijan - have been the territory (or "property", if you will) of Russia for the last 200-250 years.
Richard Steven Hack , Sep 29 2020 21:12 utc | 23
Haven't bothered to follow this conflict at all so far. Thanks to b for providing his usual excellent context overview.
Tom , Sep 29 2020 21:21 utc | 24
Interesting historic fact. As long as the centre (USSR) held, the facts on the ground held, much like the other areas of conflicts in Georgia, Ukraine and Transnistria. With the end of the USSR, everything changed. This is what Putin meant when he called the breakup of the USSR as disaster. And NATO will continue to poke a stick at these vulnerabilities. Are the people of Armenia really that stupid that they see anything positive from joining NATO? Like that will protect them against Turkey. They can see how Greece is treated. Hopefully this conflict will put to bed any thought of Armenia being pried away from Russia.

Stalin's Legacy: The Nagorno-Karabakh Conflict

Nagorno-Karabakh is a highly contested, landlocked region in the South Caucasus of the former Soviet Union. The present-day conflict has its roots in the decisions made by Joseph Stalin when he was the acting Commissar of Nationalities for the Soviet Union during the early 1920s. In April 1920, Azerbaijan was taken over by the Bolsheviks; Armenia and Georgia were taken over in 1921. To garner public support, the Bolsheviks promised Karabakh to Armenia. At the same time, in order to placate Turkey, the Soviet Union agreed to a division under which Karabakh would be under the control of Azerbaijan. With the Soviet Union firmly in control of the region, the conflict over the region died down for several decades.

https://adst.org/2013/08/stalins-legacy-the-nagorno-karabakh-conflict/

Vladimir , Sep 29 2020 21:27 utc | 25
As #12 seems to be implying as well, b is ignoring this region is the backyard of another regional powerhouse: Iran.

Any involvement from the US in Iran's backguard will be gladly countertargeted so that automatically means Turkey has very big ambitions to join this battle. This could very well end up in straight war if the diplomatic channels of mainly Russia are not effective enough..

Mackie , Sep 29 2020 22:15 utc | 26
@albagen

Kosovo Liberation Army ethnically cleansed the Serbs and others from Kosovo (with NATO help) and took over that territory. They are Albanians, no?

I see nothing wrong with what Debisdead's statement.

Jimmy , Sep 29 2020 22:56 utc | 27
Excellent insights on what is happening. Hang up the NWO scamdemic stuff.
conspiracy-theorist , Sep 29 2020 22:59 utc | 28
Posted by: Yul | Sep 29 2020 19:29 utc | 9

I've read somewhere that only English wankers call Iran "Persia". Iran lost those territories when the Turkic Qajar incompetents were ruling Iran (in a fashion).

It is informative to look into Qajar Iran. They somehow managed to take a Safavid (also Turkic) Iran from a fairly respectable state to the lowest state that Iran has likely been in its entire 3000+ year history. It is amazing what the Pahlavis managed to do to resurrect Iran in the short 50 turbulent years a Persian dynasty finally got to run Iran after centuries.

As to Sultan of Turkey making noises about Azar (Fire) PaadGaan (Guardians) being the homeland of the 'multi-faceted' spawn of the displaced Mongols of Turkistan, he can go and suck the Tsar of All Russians and Minions prick, again.

--

Interesting that "B" claims (without any proof whatsoever) that Russia intends to use Iran as a channel to transport arms to Armenia. Iran's media already has come out and has denied reports by "foreign media" to say such things. I guess that includes you, Moon Of Alabama.

--

Also interesting that the apparently very capable Turkish drone being used is not discussed here at Moon of Alabama. When did this place turn into the New York Times? What's next, B, a Pulitzer?

Since the bar keep is not sharing links to vidoes released by Azerbaijan's military showing multiple distinct drone hits on Armenian armour, then I won't either. But it is just a few clicks away.

--

Finally, this situation is a touchy one for Iran, aka as "Persia" amongst the wankers and related sorts. Will the "Muslim" revolutionaries, the children of Ayatollah cum Imam of "Persians" (lol) yet again choose infidels as waali, if they think this will permit them to warm the throne of Jamshid and the Hidden Imam and wisely rule and chart the destiny of "Persians"? The answer to that is answered by noting that no one has ever accused the Mullahs of "Persia" to be impractical men. Unholy, sure, some. But impractical, estaghforallah!

bevin , Sep 30 2020 0:17 utc | 29
"..Actually, this territory - Nagorno-Karabakh, as well as Armenia and Azerbaijan - have been the territory (or "property", if you will) of Russia for the last 200-250 years." alaff@22

A very good point. These countries have never been independent states. In 1918, under western influence, and led by mensheviks Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan formed the Trans-Caucasian Republic. My guess is that by the end of the Soviet era secularism dominated all three societies and religious disputes were largely forgotten.
One historical grudge very much alive is that of the Armenian genocide at the hands of the Turks, a century ago.

Debsisdead , Sep 30 2020 1:14 utc | 30
Sorry grump one, I just got back from my wednesday morning doctor's run where I pick up some locals from around the area & run them to the Drs in town.

I hope that this conflict won't get characterised as a religious conflict, because that isn't really what it is about.
Armenians fled east during WW1 in direct response to the genocidal attacks on Armenians by Turks, so that should be easy eh? Blame the Turks, but it isn't that easy because of the French & Englanders machinations when sequestering all the assets of the Ottoman empire.

Right the way through WW1 which was at heart a war over assets for empires, even the spark that lit the fuse was caused by the Austro-Hungarian Empire's lust for grabbing Serbia & including it in their repressive empire, all the politicians & bureaucrats to empire of the 'big' nations, spent a lot more time and energy divvying up their hoped for imperial gains, than they ever spent on concern about the generation of young men being forced through the meat grinders.

There were 3 big nations on the winning side France, England & Russia, yet Sykes Picot is a secret agreement between only two of the triumvirate. Many suppose this is because Russia pulled out of WW1 after the October revolution, that is not correct as this secret agreement was signed in May 1916, 18 months before the Bolshevik soviet uprising. England & France were doing the dirty on Russia even while the Tsar was the bossfella.

Perfidious Albion seems to be the one most responsible as it has always claimed that a similarly secret deal England made with Russia, unbeknownst to France had been completed. A deal whereby England would grab the oil rich Mesopotamia & all the rest of Arabian peninsular in return for Russia getting Constantinople and most of Anatolia.

That seems unlikely since England and France had already spilt the blood of 213,980 French, English Australian, New Zealand & Canadian troops on the Dardanelles in pursuit of an invasion and eventual takeover of Constantinople which england had begun planning since back in 1905! Long before WW1. Winston Churchill in particular had been advocating this for more than a decade because he wanted to deny Russia easy access to the mediterranean.
A lie was told to the fatally foolish Tsar - it was that the anglo-french invasion of southern Turkey was to be a distraction that would require Turkey & Germany/Austria to divert troops from the eastern front thereby relieving pressure on Imperial Russia's armies.

So what? How does that effect Nagorno-Karabakh? Well it does, because after england screwed up at the Dardanelles, they then encouraged Armenians to take up arms against the Ottomans, all the while knowing that despite promises to the contrary, if the Armenians came unstuck against the 'easybeat' Turks, there would be no way of helping the Armenians out.

That is what happened of course. Kemal Attaturk the bloke who had overseen Gallipoli & england's send off was sent to oversee the fight against Armenian guerillas and the Armenians got monstered, so fled eastwards some as far as into the mountains of Nagorno-Karabakh.

The situation is even more complicated by the fact that after WW1 ended and elites all over europe were crazed with anxiety about a 'red' takeover of Europe, 'the west' kicked up even more trouble. By financing a mob oops sorry, army, of so-called white russians to resist the USSR in the South Western Caucasus, it meant that the USSR was unable to exert full control of the region for nearly 5 years. This is why as Tom says at #24 it wasn't until 1921 that the Soviet Union could credibly promise Nagorno-Karabakh to Armenia, a blatant bribe to encourage the warring parties to talk not shoot, but really it was more like 1923 when the USSR got total control of the region.

I point out the mess that previous interference has caused because it is vital that history not repeat itself in that regard. If it does, then all that will result will be a conflict held in abeyance for a time until it flares up again.

There are two issues people & geography, maybe the boss of Azerbaijan is an arsehole who is trying to get back onside with Azerbaijanis by cranking up a conflict that is close to the hearts of most citizens because every time they look at a map they are confronted by the injustice of their nation cleaved in two. His alleged arseholery does not diminish the genuine injustice Azerbaijanis feel in their bones.

That is one group of people, the other group are the relatively small number of Armenians squatting illegally on Azerbaijani land.
The easiest way to fix the geography & people issue is for those Armenians to be relocated into decent accommodation within Armenia and return Nagorno-Karabakh plus a land corridor that rejoins Azerbaijan once again.
It will be complex to resolve as there will also be an issue with Armenians who have occupied the space between the two parts of Azerbaijan, but however much it costs, that is bound to be less than the cost of airplanes, rockets & artillery shells that will be expended keeping the conflict bubbling away.

[Sep 29, 2020] Tensions between Turkey and Russia rise in Idlib following failed talks

Sep 29, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

ET AL September 27, 2020 at 9:38 am

Middle East Eye via Antiwar.com : Tensions between Turkey and Russia rise in Idlib following failed talks
https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/syria-idlib-tensions-turkey-russia-talks-failed

Turkish officials are preparing for the worst case scenario as talks in Ankara made clear that Moscow doesn't want a new deal
####

This is a Turkey sympathetic piece but may be one reason for current events between Armenia and Azerbaidjan. As for Syria, Turkey has been claiming to keep the north/Idlib under control which is has until the last few weeks at it has used the previous time to reinforce its military presence ('observation posts') – vis Vinyard the Saker – and now claims it is not reponsible and its not fair that Russia reacts to attacks by its re-dressed (literally) jihadists. Turkey's preference is of course to do nothing despite the all the attacks, and that in itself explains a lot. Turkey is now publicly putting out its argument in advance that it is 'Russia wot broke the agreement' and thus 'we are not responsible for any of the consequences.' Erd O'Grand is due another significant spanking. Would he call NATO to his defense as he did before? Certainly. Will it happen? No. Not to mention his current intreagues around Cyprus and pissing of the French, Greeks and others. Trouble t'mill.

ET AL September 27, 2020 at 9:48 am

But here's a much better article again via Antiwar.com

AL Monitor: Turkey's military deterrence breaks down in Syria's last rebel stronghold
https://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2020/09/turkey-syria-russia-idlib-escalation-inevitable-m4-highway.html

Despite Turkey's efforts to maintain the status quo in Idlib, a Russian-backed Syrian assault seems increasingly likely.
####

In short, Turkey has not kept up its side of the deal of bringing the rebels under control and the supposed opening and joint patrols of the M4 & M5 highways has been suspended by Russia because of the attacks by rebadged jihadis. Turkey has clearly used the agreement to simply buy time for another 'cunning plan' and as no interest in fulfiling the agreement with Russia. The latter's patience is almost gone.

[Sep 29, 2020] Tomorrow's Arctic: Theatre of War or Cooperation? The Real Story Behind the Alaska Purchase

Sep 29, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

ET AL September 28, 2020 at 11:25 am

Strategic-Culture.org : Tomorrow's Arctic: Theatre of War or Cooperation? The Real Story Behind the Alaska Purchase
https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2020/05/19/tomorrows-arctic-theatre-of-war-or-cooperation-the-real-story-behind-the-alaska-purchase/

Matthew Ehret
May 19, 2020

Today, the Arctic has increasingly become identified as a domain of great prosperity and cooperation amongst world civilizations on the one side and a domain of confrontation and war on the other.

In 2007, the Russian government first voiced its support for the construction of the Bering Strait rail tunnel connecting the Americas with the Eurasian continent- a policy which has taken on new life in 2020 as Putin's Great Arctic Development strategy has wedded itself to the northern extension of the Belt and Road Initiative (dubbed the Polar Silk Road). In 2011, the Russian government re-stated its pledge to build the $64 billion project .
####

Plenty more at the link.

Full circle?

I found this via the more current Vinyard the Saker Piece by the same author: Trump's Surprising Alaska-Canada Rail Announcement: Might America Join the Polar Silk Road?
http://thesaker.is/trumps-surprising-alaska-canada-rail-announcement-might-america-join-the-polar-silk-road/

By Matthew Ehret for the Saker Blog

On September 26, President Trump announced that a long-overdue project would receive Federal support which involves connecting Alaska for the first time with Canada and the lower 48 states via a 2570 km railway.

In his Tweet announcing the project, Trump said:
####

I'd never read about the sale of Alaska to America by Russia in any detail before but just by looking at the map it was clear that it made sense. Indefensible against a rapidly growing country, so sell early for a good price or lose it and get nothing.

As for Ehret's hypothesis, we know that t-Rump sees things in a deal oriented way and not simply 'You must be destroyed (TM)' way, though his methods of reaching such deals 'Maximum Pressure (TM)' are none too bright and result in less than a normally negotiated deal. But, if we look at the ends rather than the means, improving trade links is surely to America's (and others) advantage.

One thing that does strike me from the maps of the proposed increased US-Asia links is that having those function normally is not compatible with the current strategic goal of trying to contain China. So, what is the point of the US Pacific Fleet? Just Free-Dumb of Navigation (FONOPS) cruises for pensioners?

[Sep 29, 2020] This nasty neocon Rachel MadCow

Notable quotes:
"... The DemoRats have never been a party dedicated to peace; the only ones thinking that are the walking bong-holes who assuage their cognitive dissonance by telling themselves that. Both the demorats and their willing accomplices 'across the aisle' have led us into constant war for nearly eight decades. Lilliputian Big enders and Little enders all. ..."
"... Screw the war mongers and the MIC. ..."
"... If you read the article, it's obvious that [neo]liberals/whores are the apogee of hypocrisy. ..."
"... Perpetual war is about $$$. It knows no party. Never has and never will. ..."
"... Yup. It's always about the money. ..."
Jan 13, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com
True Blue , 1 hour ago link

Feral, yes; rabid, absolutely; smart... not so much. Why is anyone surprised?

The DemoRats have never been a party dedicated to peace; the only ones thinking that are the walking bong-holes who assuage their cognitive dissonance by telling themselves that. Both the demorats and their willing accomplices 'across the aisle' have led us into constant war for nearly eight decades. Lilliputian Big enders and Little enders all.

AI Agent , 1 hour ago link

She's a good lying propagandist... but she's not brilliant. Smart? maybe. Brilliant? Cow flop has more shine than Madcow.

desertboy , 36 minutes ago link

Maybe he meant "brilliant manipulator" -- sometimes they have meant the same thing.

Throat-warbler Mangrove , 1 hour ago link

Get.Us (a). Out.Now

Screw the war mongers and the MIC.

BlackChicken , 1 hour ago link

If you read the article, it's obvious that [neo]liberals/whores are the apogee of hypocrisy.

richardsimmonsoftrout , 1 hour ago link

"they're likely to emerge from 2020 with not only smeared consciences, but four more years in the opposition."

"Smeared consciences"... that's rich, pretty sure the psychopaths don't have a conscience.

navy62802 , 1 hour ago link

Perpetual war is about $$$. It knows no party. Never has and never will.

holdbuysell , 1 hour ago link

Yup. It's always about the money. As Fitts would say, that screeching you hear is the cash flow drying up for the rentiers. The murdering of women and children be damned. Hillary's demonic cackle is but the grotesque cherry on top: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fgcd1ghag5Y

[Sep 29, 2020] Perhaps the Skripals 'disappeared' because the British government was unsure how to present them after a supposedly-deadly poisoning attempt which they plainly are said to have survived.

Sep 29, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

MARK CHAPMAN September 28, 2020 at 4:48 am

Yes, those are all good and sound arguments. The point I was trying to make, though, is that American toxicologists and field experts are astounded that anyone might survive exposure to VX; it is unaccountable not only that they could be alive, but that there is not a trail of death following the assassins as well until it kills them, too. But nobody seems surprised for Navalny to make a complete recovery and be sitting up in bed making demands and strolling around the stairwells, after exposure to a much more toxic agent that should have killed him, while nobody noticed anyone sneaking into his room dressed in a full hazmat suit with breathing apparatus and apparently others could come and go from the scene of the alleged exposure with no protection.

Perhaps the Skripals 'disappeared' because the British government was unsure how to present them after a supposedly-deadly poisoning attempt which they plainly are said to have survived. Perhaps also it is the judgment of similar authorities that the public will accept the dichotomy without demur; hence, the agent can still be nefarious beyond belief because it is so insidious and deadly, but Navalny can be alive and making noise after exposure to it.

MARK CHAPMAN September 27, 2020 at 6:26 pm

I'd like to look at the Navalny 'poisoning" from a slightly different angle, one which I think bears scrutiny. I've said several times that nobody – to the best of my knowledge – has ever survived poisoning by VX. But that's not quite accurate – the two women who thrust what was always believed to be VX in some form into the face of Kim Jong Nam (Kim Jong-Un's half-brother) at an airport in Kuala Lumpur killed him stone dead. But they themselves apparently survived with no ill effects except that one of them allegedly may have vomited.

The major difference in the way the stories are treated, then, is the incredulity with which the apparent survival of the alleged poisoners is regarded by the western press. Consider;

An amount of VX, we are told, that weighs as much as two pennies would kill 500 people. I assume that's what he meant, as he is strikingly un-eloquent for a scientist and the 'penny' is not a weight of measure. Is that a British penny, or an American one? Big difference in weight.

''The other chemical agents like sarin, tabun, those kinds of things, they're way below this. They're toxic, yes, but this is the king,'' said John Trestrail, a U.S. forensic toxicologist who has examined more than 1,000 poisoning crimes.

He said an amount of VX weighing two pennies could kill 500 people through skin exposure. It's also hard to acquire and would likely have come from a chemical weapons laboratory, making it more likely that the attack was executed by a government."

Yes, you read that right – VX is the King of vicious toxicological agents. Except for Novichok, which is ten times as deadly, and the would-be killers dusted Navalny's bottle with enough of it that the bottle was liberally covered with the dust, and his clothes apparently were as well, or so Team Navalny suspects. Say – that's a handy little timeline right there, innit? When did Navalny put those clothes on? Presumably he had a shower before going to bed; did he dress in fresh clothes before leaving for the airport, or wear the same stuff from the day before? Either way, the poisoner must have accessed Navalny's room between the time he got up and the time the plane took off – if he still had Novichok on his clothes from the day before, he'd be dead, plus would have contaminated God knows how many surfaces.

Anyway, remember – Novichok is ten times as deadly as the King of nerve agents, VX. But it has killed – according to western yarns – only one of six people exposed to it; Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Detective Nick Bailey, Navalny and Charles Rowley all survived and have apparently achieved full recovery, Navalny in only a week after emerging from an alleged coma.

Western incredulity? None. Nothing to see here, old chap.

Listen to the awful consequences of poisoning with VX, and remember the assassins only pushed some quantity of VX into Kim Jong-Nam's face; a second's contact, them they ran away, not wearing gloves or any protective gear at all.

"VX is an amber-colored, tasteless, odorless chemical weapon first produced in the 1950s. When inhaled or absorbed through the skin, it disrupts the nervous system and causes constriction and increased secretions in the throat, leading to difficulty breathing. Fluids pour from the body, including sweat, spontaneous urination and defecation, often followed by convulsions, paralysis and death. Kim Jong Nam sought help at the airport clinic and died en route to a hospital within two hours of being attacked, police said."

I don't think anyone has reported what Navalny was roaring and screaming, but perhaps it was"Get back!!! I'm shitting myself!! Jesus, I can't stop pissing!!! Help me!!" although you would think if his symptoms included spontaneous defecation and urination, someone would have said – it could be important. Different agent, I know, but the symptoms of nerve-agent poisoning are quite similar across the type. Navalny's symptoms were nothing like nerve-agent poisoning, no matter how energetically the defector Mirzayanov and his fan club try to backstop Navalny's story. The intense sweating and the obvious gross irritation of the mucous membranes would have been unmistakable to the doctors in Omsk, considering Navalny had already passed the onset of whatever symptoms he did have and was unconscious.

Kim Jong-Nam died within two hours of being attacked with a nerve agent ten times less toxic than Novichok. Navalny was definitely poisoned with a substance ten times more toxic than VX, according to the Germans and the French and whoever else swears to that ludicrous story, but was to all appearances normal at least an hour after having been poisoned, since he showed no symptoms until at least 40 minutes after the plane took off with no obvious GRU agents on board, and hung around the airport before the flight was called at least long enough to drink a cup of tea, plus however long it took for him to get from the hotel to the airport.

"The two women -- one Vietnamese, one Indonesian -- recorded on surveillance cameras thrusting a substance into Kim Jong Nam's face as he was about to check in for a flight home to Macau, apparently did not suffer serious health problems. Malaysian police have said they were not wearing gloves or protective gear and that they washed their hands afterward as they were trained to do. However, authorities said Friday that one of them vomited afterward.

Both have been arrested along with another man. Authorities are also seeking several others, including an employee of North Korea's state-owned airline, Air Koryo.

''If they used their bare hands, there's just no possible way that they would have exposed him to VX unless they took some sort of precaution,'' Goldberger said. ''The only precaution I know of would be administration of the antidote before this went down.''

Perhaps that's it; perhaps immediately after swigging from his water-bottle – which he left in the hotel room, obviously – Navalny rang room service for some Novichok antidote. Just in case. Can't be too careful, when you are the main opposition leader.

"No areas were cordoned off and protective measures were not taken. When asked about it a day after the attack, airport spokesman Shah Rahim said there was no risk to travelers and the airport was regularly and properly cleaned. But officials announced Friday that the facility would be decontaminated.

''It's as persistent as motor oil. It's going to stay there for a long time. A long time, which means anyone coming in contact with this could be intoxicated from it,'' Trestrail said. ''If this truly is VX, they ought to be calling in a hazmat team and looking at any place these women or the victim traveled after the exposure.''

A hazmat team, and looking at any place the assassin or anyone potentially exposed might have traveled. For an agent ten times less toxic than Novichok.

https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/world/2017/02/24/banned-chemical-weapon-potent-killer-that-lingers/5bTFjBz6tJVouk4tnyaERK/story.html

[Sep 29, 2020] Any rich Russian, Iranian, Chinese at this point who persists in keeping money abroad really are fools.

Sep 29, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

JAMES LAKE September 21, 2020 at 4:12 am

Any rich Russian, Iranian, Chinese at this point who persists in keeping money abroad – really are fools.

ET AL September 20, 2020 at 12:56 pm

FIGHT! Via MoonofAlabama.org :*

Matt Taibbi is a cancel culture hypocrite
https://yasha.substack.com/p/matt-taibbi-is-a-cancel-culture-hypocrite-b78

Here's what Matt hopes you don't remember: When the cancel mob came for him, he was the "upper class Twitter Robespierre" ratting on his colleagues.

Yasha Levine Sep 18

Between the pandemic, the economic collapse, the fires and the toxic fumes, and the fact that I'm currently fighting an eviction, I know there are much more pressing issues to get worked up about these days. But as someone who got his start in journalism at The eXile and who has been on the receiving end of our "cancel culture" so many times I lost count, I can't let it go.
####

Plenty more at the link.

There's very much 'don't put one's head above the parapet unnecessarily' about all this so no wonder Levine feels betrayed. Yes, people change and see things differently later in life and deal with it in their own ways. Maybe we all live too long .

The eXile also reflected closely what I myself saw and heard first hand while I was studying in Russia in the mid-1990s, that it bore no resemblance to what the western journalists were reporting. This on the back of all their lies and willful ignorance during the break up of Yugoslavia and the subsequent civil wars. It put me off being a journalist (which was a good thing)!

There's other interesting stuff including by Anatole Lieven in Prospect Magazine which is stuff familiar and oft discussed by us already.

* https://www.moonofalabama.org/2020/09/the-moa-week-in-review-open-thread-2020-75.html#more

MOSCOWEXILE September 20, 2020 at 10:40 pm

BBC

Huge banking scandal in London.

Squeaky clean, transparent, honest, true and trusted Western way of doing business -- European values and all that -- exposed as a crock of shite:

FinCEN Files: HSBC moved Ponzi scheme millions despite warning
By FinCEN Files reporting team
BBC Panorama
20 September 2020

HSBC allowed fraudsters to transfer millions of dollars around the world even after it had learned of their scam, leaked secret files show.

Britain's biggest bank moved the money through its US business to HSBC accounts in Hong Kong in 2013 and 2014.

Its role in the $80m (£62m) fraud is detailed in a leak of documents – banks' "suspicious activity reports" – that have been called the FinCEN Files.

HSBC says it has always met its legal duties on reporting such activity.

Why is it that the "Free World" has so many corrupt institutions, especially when it comes to dealing with loadsa lolly?

The West has so many internal financial traitors, who, essentially, are traitors and deceivers to whole populations of Western free society, and who make it too easy for enemies of the "Free World" to use the blatant dishonesty and hypocrisy of Western financial institutions as a glaring example of Western perfidy.

95% of Russians think that all Western financiers are thieves. Just walk around any hell hole of a Russian shitsville town out in the sticks and you will find that to be true!

And get this!

Clearly distraught about the enormity of this financial swindle perpetrated by HSBC, the BBC feels it duty bound to point out a Putin connection with this ginormous financial scam:

FinCEN Files: Sanctioned Putin associate 'laundered millions' through Barclays
By FinCEN Files reporting team
BBC Panorama
20 September 2020

Note the headline!

He definitely did it! Past tense: completed in the past -- "laundered"

However, in the first line of the body of the article, enter the modal auxiliary verb "may" in order to indicate probability, and slight probability at that:

One of Vladimir Putin's closest friends may have used Barclays Bank in London to launder money and dodge sanctions, leaked documents suggest.

And Putin has known this bloke since childhood!

I rest my case, m'lud!

MOSCOWEXILE September 21, 2020 at 4:43 am

And Deutsche Bank was well in on the money laundering scam as well:

FinCEN Files: Deutsche Bank tops list of suspicious transactions

Leaked documents shed a light on Deutsche Bank's central role in facilitating financial transactions deemed suspicious. Many of these could have enabled the circumvention of sanctions on Iran and Russia.

https://p.dw.com/p/3ilHd

European values.

MARK CHAPMAN September 21, 2020 at 8:44 am

He was probably saving up to buy his closest friend another palace. Now Putin will have him killed. Shame. Well, nothing lasts forever.

MOSCOWEXILE September 21, 2020 at 12:16 am

Why are there so many corrupt Russian businessmen and politicians?

Russia has so many corrupt public figures that it makes too easy for Russia's enemies to use them against Russia.

95% of Europeans think all Russians are corrupt!

RIA NOVOSTI

Опубликованы данные финразведки о счетах россиян в американских банках
08:46 21.09.2020 (обновлено: 09:04 21.09.2020)

Financial intelligence data about the accounts of Russians in American banks has been published
08:46 21.09.2020 (updated: 09:04 21.09.2020)

MOSCOW, September 21 – RIA Novosti. Cassandra, an international consortium of investigative journalists, has released classified data from the US Treasury Department for Combating Financial Crimes (FinCEN) regarding suspicious banking transactions.

According to media reports, the beneficiaries of some transactions are, amongst others, Russian politicians and businessmen.

The consortium declined to comment on how it got the secret documents. At the same time, the investigators themselves noted that suspicious transactions do not always indicate a violation of the law.

An "international consortium", eh?

No explanation of how the data was acquired, eh?

And in any case, big transfers of dough don't necessarily mean that such transfers are illegal.

So why make an issue out of it?

I wonder if this International Consortium has ever taken a peek at poroshenko's money transactions and offshore subterfuges?

Oh look!

The address of "Cassandra":

1710 Rhode Island Ave NW | 11th floor
Washington DC 20036 USA

See: International Consortium of Investigative Journalists

MOSCOWEXILE September 21, 2020 at 12:43 am

As regards Putin's pal since childhood who "may have used Barclays Bank in London to launder money and dodge sanctions", Vedomosti reports this morning:

14 минут назад
Ротенберг назвал бредом данные СМИ о транзакциях через лондонский банк

14 minutes ago
Rotenberg has called the media data on transactions through a London bank nonsense

Aha! A denial from a Russian -- and a Russian 4×2 to boot!

That can only mean he is guilty as accused.

The data on suspicious transactions carried out by Russian businessmen Arkady and Boris Rotenberg through the London bank Barclays is nothing more than nonsense, RBC reports with reference to a representative of Arkady Rotenberg.

"The data on suspicious transactions that Russian businessmen Arkady and Boris Rotenberg carried out through the London bank Barclays, published by the international investigative project Cassandra, is nothing more than delusion", the message says. Representatives of other members of the Rotenberg family said that they did not settle through British banks and did not directly or indirectly own Ayrton, which is mentioned in the Cassandra report, the newspaper reports.

Earlier, experts of the international investigation project "Cassandra" published a report on the results of a study of the documents of the US financial intelligence (FinCEN) that came at their disposal. Amongst the financial transactions that the banks reporting to FinCEN found suspicious, in particular, were those of Ayrton Development Limited. The company, according to the BBC, was deemed by Barclays to be owned by the sanctioned Arkady Rotenberg. According to the report, 26 transactions carried out in the interests of the Rotenbergs were classified as suspicious.

Leningrader Arkady Rotenberg was a sambo pal of Putin. He has clearly enjoyed considerable enrichment during the Putin tyranny.

In 2000, the Evil One created Rosspirtprom, a state-owned enterprise controlling 30% of Russia's vodka market, and put Rotenberg in control.

In 2001, Rotenberg and his brother founded the SMP bank, which operates in 40 Russian cities with over 100 branches, more than half of them in the Moscow area. SMP oversees the operation of more than 900 ATM-machines. SMP bank also became a leading large-diameter gas pipe supplier.

In 2007, Gazprom rejected an earlier plan to build a 350-mile pipeline and instead paid Rotenberg $45 billion to lay a 1,500 mile pipeline to the Arctic Circle.

O'Bummer signed an executive order instructing his government to impose sanctions on the Rotenberg brothers and other close friends of President Putin because of the Russian "annexation" of the Crimea.

For all his wealth, though, Arkady Rotenberg is not that smart at everything he does: In 2005, Rotenberg married his second wife Natalia Rotenberg, who is about 30 years his junior. Their two children, Varvara and Arkady, live in the United Kingdom with Natalia. They divorced in 2015 in the U.K. While the financial details of the divorce are private, the agreement includes division of the use of a £35 million Surrey mansion and a £8 million apartment in London. The couple's lawyers obtained a secrecy order preventing media in the U.K. from reporting on the divorce, but the order was overturned on appeal.

MARK CHAPMAN September 21, 2020 at 8:51 am

That time it was your fault. You used the same code to close your italics as you did to open them, with no slash.

MOSCOWEXILE September 21, 2020 at 1:38 am

Strange reaction indeed:

And only then, after having assured everyone and everything that the dose of the terrible poison Novichok was received precisely at home, Mr. Navalny, a dissenting person, was for some reason not at all afraid of this "irrefutable fact", and barely having opened his eyelids from a cloudy "comatose" slumber, was already prepared -- almost in his hospital robe -- to rush back.

To Moscow.

His home country.

Where allegedly, he was almost wiped off the face of the earth by "insidious poison murderers".

All part of the Bullshitter's repertoire.

source

MARK CHAPMAN September 21, 2020 at 8:54 am

Mercy, what a hero. Fair inspires me, he does.

[Sep 29, 2020] This is a threat? Washington is considering closing its embassy in Iraq

Sep 29, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

PATIENT OBSERVER September 28, 2020 at 4:33 am

This is a threat?

https://www.rt.com/usa/501883-iraq-embassy-baghdad-closure-attacks/

Washington is considering closing its embassy in Iraq, nine months after the US killing of an Iranian general on Iraqi soil led to protests over what Baghdad called a "violation" of its sovereignty, according to reports.

Multiple media outlets, including the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post and Sky News, reported on Sunday that US officials told their Iraqi counterparts that Washington will shut down its operations unless there is an end to rocket attacks on the embassy, which is located in the heavily-fortified Green Zone in Baghdad.

Sounds more like a possible victory for Iraq and its people. I suspect that there is much more to the story and the US is pre-emptively seeking a face-saving exit excuse if it were to come to that.

However, it would be extremely unlikely for the US to abandon the embassy given that it serves as the headquarters for numerous nefarious operations in Iraq and Iran

ET AL September 28, 2020 at 6:11 am

The claim that I have read is that this is in response to the USA's assassination of General Solemani in Lebanon. More precisely the i-Ranian strategy is not per se to cause American casualties but carry out sustained attacks via proxies on American interest in i-Rack, i.e. psychological pressure, cost etc. the ultimate goal being the USA leaving i-Rack as a suitable price for the assassination.I

I've also read (Vinyard the Saker?)that the USA has so far closed some of its smaller and less defensible outposts but concentrated what remains in fewer better defended bases. The USA does not want to leave i-Rack militarily and will hang on until it is out of options. The US embassy leaving i-Rack will not be good enough for i-Ran, but maybe this is the beginning of some kind of behind the scenes bargaining, though this is hard to believe considering the US is still pushing for a gulf coalition (WAR!) against i-Ran as well as polically neutralizing any potential spoiler countries. Also the embassay was built at quite a significant cost $750 billion.* So, you are right PO, this is bluff by the big puff Plumpeo.

i-Rack has also being trying to get rid of American military presence even though they have bought F-16IQs from Washington but the latter is using the same figleaf excuse as in Syria that they are 'fighting terrorists.'

* https://www.businessinsider.com/750-million-united-states-embassy-iraq-baghdad-2013-3

ET AL September 28, 2020 at 6:18 am

$750 million. Duh!

JRKRIDEAU September 28, 2020 at 6:47 am

$750 million. Duh
Given standard US contracting over-runs I was willg to believe "billions". The surprising thing is that it got built.

MARK CHAPMAN September 28, 2020 at 3:12 pm

The USA will never abandon its crown jewel in Iraq, and it would make little practical difference anyway, as it lies entirely within the American 'Green Zone', and they will surely not abandon that.

"But the location of the compound is well known in Baghdad anyway, where for several years it has been marked by large construction cranes and all-night work lights easily visible from the embattled neighborhoods across the river. It is reasonable to assume that insurgents will soon sit in the privacy of rooms overlooking the site, and use cell phones or radios to adjust the rocket and mortar fire of their companions. Meanwhile, however, they seem to have held off, lobbing most of their ordnance elsewhere into the Green Zone, as if reluctant to slow the completion of such an enticing target."

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2007/11/langewiesche200711

The Baghdad Embassy is the USA's most-expensive embassy in the world, and it costs far more to run it each year than the cost of building it, in excess of a Billion dollars a year. What America might do, and what Iraq does fear, is send its diplomats home for awhile, and use it as an excuse to open a military operation in Iraq against what it terms Iran-aligned militias.

[Sep 28, 2020] "Then there are the Chinese. OK, they really are communists, but who is it that has bought into the nonsense about them oppressing poor, innocent, religious head choppers?

Sep 28, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

One Too Many | Aug 9 2020 0:42 utc | 46

William Gruff , Aug 8 2020 23:50 utc | 40

"Then there are the Chinese. OK, they really are communists, but who is it that has bought into the nonsense about them oppressing poor, innocent, religious head choppers? Who cares even if those lies were true? Yep, that's millennial morons."

Actually it was the USG through funding of various think tanks and NGOs that started the whole fiasco with the MSM pushing the narrative. You know people with power in established organizations, who tend to be much older. I wouldn't blame the people at the bottom so much for the decisions made at the top.

[Sep 28, 2020] The great Orwellian hypocrisy of America's pants-wetting complaints that other countries are meddling in America's (fake) democracy is that the United States itself is guilty of regime changing, balkanizing, and colonizing scores of foreign nations dating back over a century to the USA's regime change and eventual colonization of the Hawaiian Kingdom.

Notable quotes:
"... We have no evidence, but don't forget, they are evil and wouldn't hesitate to do it! ..."
Sep 28, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

ak74 , Aug 10 2020 6:55 utc | 71

"The statement then claims:

Ahead of the 2020 U.S. elections, foreign states will continue to use covert and overt influence measures in their attempts to sway U.S. voters' preferences and perspectives, shift U.S. policies, increase discord in the United States, and undermine the American people's confidence in our democratic process."

What America is yet again conniving to do is to discredit any domestic political dissent against the fraud of "American Democracy" by connecting this dissent to those nations that are the latest targets of America's Two Minutes of Hate campaign.

This is a standard American tactic that the USA always resorts to when it fears its own citizens are starting to question the fairy tale of American "Democracy and Freedom." Thus, during the Cold War, the USA even to discredit some elements of the Civil Rights movement as being assets of the Soviet Union.

The great Orwellian hypocrisy of America's pants-wetting complaints that other countries are meddling in America's (fake) democracy is that the United States itself is guilty of regime changing, balkanizing, and colonizing scores of foreign nations dating back over a century to the USA's regime change and eventual colonization of the Hawaiian Kingdom.

Bottom Line: America needs to drink a big up of Shut the F*ck Up with its pathetic Pity Party whining about foreigners trying to influence its bogus democracy.

This tired psyops is pathetic.

Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq
https://books.google.com/books/about/Overthrow.html?id=Q3o2BaNiJksC

Killing Hope
U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II
https://williamblum.org/books/killing-hope

padre , Aug 10 2020 15:12 utc | 74

We have no evidence, but don't forget, they are evil and wouldn't hesitate to do it!

[Sep 28, 2020] From Conflict to Crisis- The Danger of U.S. Actions by Jeanne M. Haskin

Sep 28, 2020 | www.amazon.com

In the United States, a great deal of study and energy goes into promoting respect for democracy, not just to keep it alive here but also to spread it around the world. It embraces the will of the majority, whether or not its main beneficiaries have more resources than other citizens do, as shown by the election of President Obama, who promised hope and change for the suffering majority, but did not sit long in office before being subjected to an economic vote of no-confidence.

Those who claim we run a plutocracy (government for the rich by the rich) -- or that we're victims of a conspiracy contrived by a shadow government -- are right while being wrong.

Our government is beyond the reach of ordinary American citizens in terms of economic power. However, the creation of a system to keep the majority of the populace at the losing end of a structure which neither promised nor delivered a state of financial equality was a predictable extension of the economic system the U.S. government was formed to protect.

... .... ...

Forty years of Cold War and the ultimate realization that abuse of the communist system and a hierarchy of privilege proved that system to be vulnerable to selfishness -- in common with the triumphant capitalist countries.

Because any desired outcome can be written into an equation to exclude unwanted facts or inputs by holding some things constant while applying chosen variables that may not hold true under every historical circumstance, it's considered "falsifiable" and therefore "scientific." But only if it appeals to the right people and justifies a given political need will it become sacrosanct (until the next round of "progress").

.... .... ...

Abusive Self- Interest

In 1764, twenty- five years before the embrace of Madame Guillotine (when heads rolled literally to put the fear of the mob into politics), contempt for the filth and poverty in which the French commoners lived while the nobility gorged on luxury goods showed how arrogant they were, not just in confidence that their offices of entitlement were beyond reproach and unassailable, but that mockery and insult in the face of deliberate deprivation would be borne with obedience and humility.

It certainly affected Smith's outlook, since he wrote The Wealth of Nations with a focus on self- interest rather than moral sentiments. And while this may be purely pragmatic, based on what

he witnessed, he also wrote about the potential for self- interest to become abusive, both in collusion with individuals and when combined with the power of government. Business interests could form cabals (groups of conspirators, plotting public harm) or monopolies (organizations with exclusive market control) to fix prices at their highest levels. A true laissez- faire economy would provide every incentive to conspire against consumers and attempt to influence budgets and legislation.

Smith's assertion that self- interest leads producers to favor domestic industry must also be understood in the context of the period. While it's true that the Enlightenment was a movement of rational philosophy radically opposed to secrecy, it's important to understand that this had to be done respectfully , insofar as all arguments were intended to impress the monarchy under circumstances where the king believed himself God- appointed and infallible, no matter his past or present policies, and matters were handled with delicacy. Yet, Smith's arguments are clear enough (and certainly courageous enough) to be understood in laymen's terms.

In an era when the very industry he's observing has been fostered by tariffs, monopolies, labor controls, and materials extracted from colonies, he did his best to balance observation with what he thought was best for society. It's not his fault we pick and choose our recipes for what we do and don't believe or where we think Smith might have gone had he been alive today.


The New Double Standard

The only practical way to resolve the contradiction between the existing beneficiaries of state favoritism in this period and Smith's aversion to it is to observe that the means to prevent competition and interference with the transition from one mode of commerce to another that enhances the strength of the favored or provides a new means to grow their wealth is to close the door of government intervention behind them and burn any bridges to it.

In psychological terms, the practice of "negative attribution" is to assume that identical behavior is justifiable for oneself but not another. It may not be inconsistent with a system of economics founded on self- interest, but it naturally begs a justification as to why it rules out everyone else's self- interest. The beauty of this system is that it will always have the same answer.

You may have guessed it.

Progress.

Reallocation of Assets

It was always understood that capitalism produces winners and losers. The art of economizing is to gain maximum benefit for minimum expenditure, which generally translates to asset consolidation and does not necessarily mean there is minimum sacrifice. There's an opportunity cost for everything, whether it's human, financial, environmental, or material. But the most important tenet of free market capitalism is that asset redistribution requires the U. S. government to go to DEFCON 1, unless assets are being reallocated for "higher productivity," in which case the entire universe is saved from the indefensible sin of lost opportunity.

Private property is sacred -- up until an individual decides he can make more productive use of it and appeals to the courts for seizure under eminent domain or until the government decides it will increase national growth if owned by some other person or entity. In like manner, corporations can suffer hostile takeovers, just as deregulation facilitates predatory market behavior and cutthroat competition promotes an efficiency orientation that means fewer jobs and lower incomes, which result in private losses.

In the varying range of causes underlying the loss of assets, the common threat is progress -- the "civilized" justification for depriving some other person or entity of their right to own property, presumably earned by the sweat of their brow, except their sweat doesn't have the same champion as someone who can wring more profit from it. The official explanation is that the government manages the "scarcity" of resources to benefit the world. This is also how we justify war, aggression, and genocide, though we don't always admit to that unless we mean to avoid it.


Perfectly Rational Genocide

History cooperates with the definition of Enlightenment if we imagine that thoughtfulness has something to do with genocide. In the context of American heritage, it has meant that when someone stands in the way of progress, his or her resources are "reallocated" to serve the pursuit of maximum profit, with or without consent. The war against Native Americans was one in which Americans either sought and participated in annihilation efforts or believed this end was inevitable. In the age of rational thought, meditation on the issue could lead from gratitude for the help early settlers received from Native Americans to the observation they didn't enclose their land and had no concept of private property,

to the conviction they were unmotivated by profit and therefore irreconcilable savages. But it takes more than rational thought to mobilize one society to exterminate another.

The belief in manifest destiny -- that God put the settlers in America for preordained and glorious purposes which gave them a right to everything -- turned out to be just the ticket for a free people opposed to persecution and the tyranny of church and state.

Lest the irony elude you, economic freedom requires divorcing the state from religion, but God can be used to whip up the masses, distribute "It's Them or Us" cards, and send people out to die on behalf of intellectuals and investors who've rationalized their chosenness.

CHAPTER TWO: INSTILLING THE ILLUSION OF CHOICE

Selfishness may be exalted as the root and branch of capitalism, but it doesn't make you look good to the party on the receiving end or those whose sympathy he earns. For that, you need a government prepared to do four things, which each have separate dictums based on study, theorization, and experience.

Coercion: Force is illegitimate only if you can't sell it.
Persuasion: How do I market thee? Let me count the ways.
Bargaining: If you won't scratch my back, then how about a piece of the pie?
Indoctrination: Because I said so. (And paid for the semantics.)

Predatory capitalism is the control and expropriation of land, labor, and natural resources by a foreign government via coercion, persuasion, bargaining, and indoctrination.

At the coercive stage, we can expect military and/ or police intervention to repress the subject populace. The persuasive stage will be marked by clientelism, in which a small percentage of the populace will be rewarded for loyalty, often serving as the capitalists' administrators, tax collectors, and enforcers. At the bargaining stage, efforts will be made to include the populace, or a certain percentage of it, in the country's ruling system, and this is usually marked by steps toward democratic (or, more often, autocratic) governance.

At the fourth stage, the populace is educated by capitalists, such that they continue to maintain a relationship of dependency.


The Predatory Debt Link

In many cases, post- colonial states were forced to assume the debts of their colonizers. And where they did not, they were encouraged to become in debt to the West via loans that were issued through international institutions to ensure they did not fall prey to communism or pursue other economic policies that were inimical to the West. Debt is the tie that binds nation states to the geostrategic and economic interests of the West.

As such, the Cold War era was a time of easy credit, luring postcolonial states to undertake the construction of useless monoliths and monuments, and to even expropriate such loans through corruption and despotism, thereby making these independent rulers as predatory as colonizers. While some countries were wiser than others and did use the funds for infrastructural improvements, these were also things that benefited the West and particularly Western contractors. In his controversial work Confessions of an Economic Hit Man , John Perkins reveals that he was a consultant for an American firm (MAIN), whose job was to ensure that states became indebted beyond their means so they would remain loyal to their creditors, buying them votes within United Nations organizations, among other things.

Predatory capitalists demand export- orientations as the means to generate foreign currency with which to pay back debt. In the process, the state must privatize and drastically slash or eliminate any domestic subsidies which are aimed at helping native industry compete in the marketplace. Domestic consumption and imports must be radically contained, as shown by the exchange rate policies recommended by the IMF. The costs of obtaining domestic capital will be pushed beyond the reach of most native producers, while wages must be depressed to an absolute bare minimum. In short, the country's land, labor, and natural resources must be sold at bargain basement prices in order to make these goods competitive, in what one author has called "a spiraling race to the bottom," as countries producing predominantly the same goods engage in cutthroat competition whose benefactor is the West.

Under these circumstances, foreign investment is encouraged, but this, too, represents a loaded situation for countries that open their markets to financial liberalization. Since, in most cases, the

IMF does not allow restrictions on the conditions of capital inflows, it means that financial investors can literally dictate their terms. And since no country is invulnerable to attacks on its currency, which governments must try to keep at a favorable exchange rate, it means financial marauders can force any country to try to prop up its currency using vital reserves of foreign exchange which might have been used to pay their debt.

When such is the case, the IMF comes to the rescue with a socalled "bailout fund," that allows foreign investors to withdraw their funds intact, while the government reels from the effects of an IMF- imposed austerity plan, often resulting in severe recession the offshoot of which is bankruptcies by the thousands and plummeting employment.

In countries that experienced IMF bailouts due to attacks on their currencies, the effect was to reset the market so the only economic survivors were those who remained export- oriented and were strong enough to withstand the upheaval. This means they remained internationally competitive, which translates to low earnings of foreign exchange. At the same time that the country is being bled from the bottom up through mass unemployment, extremely low wages, and the "spiraling race to the bottom," it is in an even more unfavorable position concerning the payment of debt. The position is that debt slavery ensues, as much an engine of extraction as any colonial regime ever managed.


The Role of Indoctrination

The fact that it is sovereign governments overseeing the work of debt repression has much to do with education, which is the final phase of predatory capitalism, concluding in indoctrination. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the lesson to the world was that socialism can't work, nor were there any remaining options for countries that pursued "the third way" other than capitalism. This produced a virulent strain of neoliberalism in which most people were, and are, being educated. The most high- ranking of civil servants have either been educated in the West or directly influenced by its thinking. And this status of acceptance and adherence finally constitutes indoctrination. The system is now self- sustaining, upheld by domestic agents.

While predatory capitalism can proceed along a smooth continuum from coercion to persuasion to bargaining to formal indoctrination, the West can regress to any of these steps at any point in

time, given the perceived need to interfere with varying degrees of force in order to protect its interests.


Trojan Politics

Democracy is about having the power and flexibility to graft our system of government and predatory capitalism onto any target country, regardless of relative strength or conflicting ideologies. An entire productive industry has grown up using the tools of coercion, persuasion, bargaining, and formal indoctrination to maximize their impact in the arena of U. S. politics. Its actors know how to jerk the right strings, push the right buttons, and veer from a soft sell to a hard sell when resistance dictates war, whether it's with planes overhead and tanks on the ground or with massive capital flight that panics the whole world.

When the U. S. political economy goes into warp overdrive, its job proves far more valuable than anything ever made in the strict material sense because there's never been more at stake in terms of what it's trying to gain. It's the American idea machine made up of corporations, lobbyists, think tanks, foundations, universities, and consultants in every known discipline devoted to mass consumerism, and what they sell is illusory opportunity dressed in American principles. They embrace political candidates who'll play by elitist rules to preserve the fiction of choice, and, in this way, they maintain legitimacy, no matter what kind of "reallocation" is on the economic agenda.

The issue is not whether we'll question it, but who we'll applaud for administering it.

In the Information Age, perception management is king.


[Sep 28, 2020] The Empire still refuses to deal with Russia in any other way except insults, bullying, threats, accusations, sanctions, and constant sabre-rattling by The Saker

Sep 28, 2020 | www.unz.com

Oh, but it gets better.

NATO seems to be trying to frighten Russia with maneuvers in Poland and B-52 flights over the Ukraine and the Black Sea ( see here for a full analysis). As for the Poles and Ukronazis, they apparently believe that the Russian bear covered himself in poop and ran away at full speed.

What I am going to say next is not a secret, every military person who looked into this issue knows and understands this: NATO, and I mean the combined power of all NATO member states, simply does not have the hardware needed to wage a war against Russia in Europe. What NATO does have is only sufficient to trigger a serious incident which might result in a shooting war. But once this war starts, the chances of victory for NATO are exactly zero. Why?

Well, for one thing, while coalitions of countries might give a thin veneer of political legitimacy to a military action (in reality, only a UNSC resolution would), in purely military terms you are much better off having a single national military. Not only that, but coalitions are nothing but the expression of an often held delusion: the delusion that the little guy can hide behind the back of the big guy. Poland's entire history can be summarized in this simple principle: strike the weak and bootlick (or even worse !) the powerful. In contrast, real military powers don't count on some other guy doing the heavy lifting for them. They simply fight until they win.

Yes, the Europeans, being the cowards that they are, do believe that there is safety in numbers. But each time these midgets gang up on Russia and start barking (or, to use Putin's expression, start oinking ) all together, the Russians clearly see that the Europeans are afraid. Otherwise, they would not constantly seek somebody to protect them (even against a non-existing threat).

As a direct result of this delusion, NATO simply does not have the equivalent of the First Guard Tank Army in spite of the fact that NATO has a bigger population and much bigger budgets than Russia. Such a tank Army is what it would take to fight a real war in Europe, Russia has such an Army. NATO does not.

The other thing NATO does not have is a real integrated multi-layered air defense system. Russia does.

Lastly, NATO has no hypersonic weapons. Russia does.

(According to President Trump, the US does have super-dooper " hydrosonic " weapons, but nobody really knows what that is supposed to mean).

I would even argue that the comparatively smaller Belarusian military could make hamburger meat of the roughly three times larger Polish armed forces in a very short time (unlike the Poles, the Belarusian are excellent soldiers and they know that they are surrounded by hostile countries on three sides).

As for the "armed forces" of the Baltic statelets, they are just a sad joke.

One more example: the Empire is now sending ships into the Black Sea as some kind of "show of force". Yet, every military analyst out there knows that the Black Sea is a "Russian lake" and that no matter how many ships the US or NATO sends into the Black Sea, their life expectancy in case of a conflict would be measured in minutes.

There is a popular expression in Russia which, I submit, beautifully sums up the current US/NATO doctrine: пугать ежа голой задницей , which can be translated as " trying to scare a hedgehog with your naked bottom ".

The truth is that NATO military forces currently are all in very bad shape – all of them, including the US – and that their only advantage over Russia is in numbers. But as soon as you factor in training, command and control, the ability to operate with severely degraded C3I capabilities, the average age of military hardware or morale – the Russian armed forces are far ahead of the West.

Does anybody sincerely believe that a few B-52s and a few thousand soldiers from different countries playing war in Poland will really scare the Russian generals?

But if not – why the threats?

My explanation is simple: the rulers of the Empire simply hope that the people in the West will never find out how bad their current military posture really is, and they also know that Russia will never attack first – so they simply pretend like they are still big, mighty and relevant. This is made even easier by the fact that the Russians always downplay their real capabilities (in sharp contrast to the West which always brags about "the best XYZ in the world"). That, and the fact that nobody in the Western ruling classes wants to admit that the game is over and that the Empire has collapsed.

... the Empire still refuses to deal with Russia in any other way except insults, bullying, threats, accusations, sanctions, and constant sabre-rattling. This has never, and I mean never, worked in the past, and it won't work in the future. But, apparently, NATO generals simply cannot comprehend that insanity can be defined as " doing the same thing over and over again, while hoping to achieve different results ".

Finally, I will conclude with a short mention of US politicians.

First, Trump. He now declares that the Russians stole the secret of hypersonic weapons from Obama. This reminds me of how the Brits declared that Russia stole their vaccine against the sars-cov-2 virus. But, if the Russians stole all that, why is it that ONLY Russia has deployed hypersonic weapons (not the US) and ONLY Russia has both two vaccines and 2 actual treatments (and not the UK)? For a good laugh, check out Andrei Martyanov's great column " Russia Steal Everything ".

And then there is Nancy Pelosi who, apparently, is considering, yes, you guessed it – yet another impeachment attempt against Trump? The charge this time? Exercising this Presidential prerogative to nominate a successor to Ruth Ginsburg. Okay, Pelosi might be senile, but she also is in deep denial if she thinks impeaching Trump is still a viable project. Frankly? I think that she lost it.

In fact, I think that all the Dems have gone absolutely insane: they are now considering packing both the Supreme Court and the Senate. The fact that doing so will destroy the US political system does not seem to bother them in the least.

Conclusion: quos Deus vult perdere prius dementat !

We live in a world where facts or logic have simply become irrelevant and nobody cares about such clearly outdated categories. We have elevated " doubleplusgoodthinking " into an art form. We have also done away with the concepts of "proof" or "evidence" which we have replaced with variations on the "highly likely" theme. We have also, for all practical purpose, jettisoned the entire corpus of international law and replaced it with " rules-based international order ". In fact, I can only agree with Chris Hedges who, in his superb book the " Empire of illusions " and of the "triumph of spectacle". He is absolutely correct: not only is this a triumph of appearance over substance, and of ideology over reality, it is even the triumph of self-destruction over self-preservation.

There is not big "master plan", no complex international conspiracy, no 5D chess. All we have is yet another empire committing suicide and, like so many before this one, this suicide is executed by this empire's ruling classes.

Lawofkarma , says: September 26, 2020 at 1:34 am GMT

According to the updated Russian military doctrine, any missile fired at Russia would be considered tipped with Nuclear war head. If so, with available Hypersonic weapons, a significant portions of the Empire, including EU would be potentially turned to Radioactive ash within 20 minutes. Does this register at the highest levels of the Empire? I surely hope so.

[Sep 28, 2020] Russia itself did not sell out. It was the idiotic drunkard Yeltsin, who was surrounded by the Jewish Oligarchs who positioned themselves to take over state industrial assets in cahoots with financial assistance from abroad and who happened to despise the Narod, the Russian people.

Sep 28, 2020 | www.unz.com

Majority of One , says: September 26, 2020 at 5:37 pm GMT

@simonn

Russia itself did not sell out. It was the idiotic drunkard Yeltsin, who was surrounded by the Jewish Oligarchs who positioned themselves to take over state industrial assets in cahoots with financial assistance from abroad and who happened to despise the Narod, the Russian people. When Putin took over he made deals with some of these parasites, but threw out the worst ones and gradually was able to restore the nation and its pride.

JimDandy , says: September 26, 2020 at 3:51 pm GMT
@Zarathustra

The Neocons have a massive hardon for Russia because they are an impediment to absolute Israeli hegemony in the Middle East.

lavoisier , says: Website September 26, 2020 at 5:54 pm GMT
@JimDandy

Yes, but main reason Neocons hate Russia is that Putin imprisoned and or dispossessed many of the criminal Jewish oligarchs that had robbed Russia blind under Yeltsin.

Their ransacking of the country was stopped by Putin.

Hence, the hatred.

His support for the Russian Orthodox faith also does not sit well with the Neocons.

[Sep 28, 2020] Truth be told: political operatives own and run our MSM. This is why the press is called the 'Fourth Estate'

Highly recommended!
Aug 21, 2020 | www.unz.com
Ragno says: August 21, 2020 at 4:16 pm GMT 800 Words ⇑ @mark green

Truth be told: political operatives own and run our MSM. This is why the press is called the 'Fourth Estate'.

They are more correctly described as a Fifth Column , one far more open and sworn to destroy our country and its foundational citizens – and taxpayers – as any that ever operated during World War II. You would think this would be of vital interest to people who loudly declare themselves to be "Nazi-punchers", but who time and again show themselves to be merely low-level street terrorists informed and inspired by Mao's Red Guard and the irredeemable thugs of the African National Congress.

One wonders what's preventing them from mimicking the Red Terror waged by the leftists of Spain, when the battle for "freedom" involved the disinterment of the graves of Catholic clergy to better pose the corpses in blasphemous positions. Imagine how depraved those Mostly Peaceful protesters had to have been for even a leftist-supporting site such as Wikipedia to baldly state

The violence consisted of the killing of tens of thousands of people (including 6,832 Roman Catholic priests, the vast majority in the summer of 1936 in the wake of the military coup), attacks on the Spanish nobility, industrialists, and conservative politicians, as well as the desecration and burning of monasteries and churches.

Directly in the crosshairs this time are small and medium-sized owner-operated businesses – the true backbone of American freedom and prosperity – who have largely been sacrificed in exchange for the knock-kneed offerings of Danegeld from our giant conglomerates, all of whom have prospered immensely from the suffering and privation brought on by the Democratic lockdown of society – and the total shutdown of our economy.

Think! – have you read a single article charting how the government war on small business directly enriched Amazon.com and world's richest autocrat, Jeff Bezos? . who then funnels his windfall into a newspaper that blatantly pimps for the Democratic Party, which translates into a vast payday for the DNC, not least from its newly-approved partnership with the shadowy and many-tentacled Soros-surrogate group, BLM?

The result is what you'd expect when a fringe group operates with the full cooperation and partnership of major industry and both political parties (don't confuse Trump with a standard-issue Republican, please – he may have terrible flaws, but that isn't one of them) – 10% of the population holding the other 90% in a chokehold with only one set of rules: no arrest and prosecution for Bolshevik violence and terror ..but the zero-tolerance heavy hand of corrupt Leviathan coming down hard against any and all citizens who fight back or, eventually – inevitably – who even struggle against their restraints.

Short of the sudden arrival of celestial horsemen to punish the guilty and reward the set-upon, it has become clear that the only answer is the one that the Powers That Be claim to be dead set against: racial separatism. (Particularly when we consider that all that will be necessary to turn America into Hell on earth will be the adoption of Ibram Kendi's First Law, sometimes known as equality of outcome :

To fix the original sin of racism, Americans should pass an anti-racist amendment to the U.S. Constitution that enshrines two guiding anti-racist principals: Racial inequity is evidence of racist policy and the different racial groups are equals.

Could any "amendment" be more terrifyingly totalitarian than this?)

White and black separation would, instead, accomplish two goals, both more important than Kendi's quick fix: we would learn soon enough about actual equality of outcomes (which is why no Communist, black or white, wants anything to do with the creation of one more failed basket-case black state), and much more importantly, white families can sleep secure in their beds at night, without worrying about Apache raids at midnight, egged on and recorded for "posterity" by that Fourth Estate/Fifth Column referred to up top. Because the fact of the matter is that, even should some combination of government and law-enforcement halt the burning and looting of America – as things stand now, none of the worst malefactors will ever see the inside of a prison cell .which means any ceasefire will only be temporary, to be violently ripped asunder the moment they sense white Americans have at last lowered their guard once more. And living in perpetual paranoid readiness for violent uprisings and mindless destruction is no way to live at all.

Trump has it half right, a border wall is the answer: only it needs to run lengthwise , between the Southern and Northern borders. If we don't use the next four years to plan out such a separation, fretting over our children's children will be a fruitless exercise – those who aren't murdered will be captured and 'go native' .and in case you haven't looked at a globe lately, there's no place left to run.

Majority of One , says: August 21, 2020 at 4:33 pm GMT

@Miro23

As a recovering journalist, I can point out that even on a rinkydink rag in a small city, where I got fired for being a real journalist back in the early '70's; he who owns the presses and distribution networks calls the tune. It's a matter of working-class (no matter how middle-class your income or social-status) versus the ownership class. The latter wins every time.

[Sep 28, 2020] Washington's Hybrid War On Russian Energy Targets Germany, Belarus, And Bulgaria -

Sep 28, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

Washington's Hybrid War On Russian Energy Targets Germany, Belarus, And Bulgaria

by Tyler Durden Sun, 09/27/2020 - 08:10 Twitter Facebook Reddit Email Print

Authored by Andrew Korybko via OneWorld.press,

The US is ruthlessly waging an intense Hybrid War on Russian energy interests in Europe by targeting the Eurasian Great Power's relevant projects in Germany, Belarus, and Bulgaria, banking on the fact that even the partial success of this strategy would greatly advance the scenario of an externally provoked "decoupling" between Moscow and Washington's transatlantic allies.

The Newest Front In The New Cold War

The New Cold War is heating up in Europe after the US intensified its Hybrid War on Russian interests there over the past two months. This proxy conflict is being simultaneously waged in Germany, Belarus, and Bulgaria, all three of which are key transit states for Russian energy exports to the continent, which enable it to maintain at least some influence there even during the worst of times. The US, however, wants to greatly advance the scenario of an externally provoked "decoupling" between Moscow and Washington's transatlantic allies which would allow America to reassert its unipolar hegemony there even if this campaign is only partially successful. This article aims to explore the broad contours of the US' contemporary Hybrid War strategy on Russian energy in Europe, pointing out how recent events in those three previously mentioned transit states are all part of this larger plan.

Germany

From north to south, the first and largest of these targets is Germany, which is nowadays treating Russian anti-corruption blogger Navalny. The author accurately predicted in late August that "intense pressure might be put upon the authorities by domestic politicians and their American patrons to politicize the final leg of Nord Stream II's construction by potentially delaying it as 'punishment to Putin'", which is exactly what's happening after Berlin signaled that it might rethink its commitment to this energy project. America isn't all to blame, however, since Germany ultimately takes responsibility for its provocative statements to this effect. Dmitri Trenin, Director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, published a thought-provoking piece titled " Russian-German Relations: Back To The Future " about how bilateral relations will drastically change in the aftermath of this incident. It's concise and well worth the read for those who are interested in this topic.

Belarus

The next Hybrid War target is Belarus , which the author has been tracking for half a decade already. After failing to convince Lukashenko to break off ties with Russia after this summer's Wagner incident, a Color Revolution was then hatched to overthrow him so that his replacements can turn the country into another Ukraine insofar as it relates to holding Russian energy exports to Europe hostage. The end goal is to increase the costs of Russian resources so that the US' own become more competitive by comparison. Ultimately, it's planned that Russian pipelines will be phased out in the worst-case scenario, though this would happen gradually since Europe can't immediately replace such imports with American and other ones. "Losing" Belarus, whether on its own or together with Nord Stream II, would deal a heavy blow to Russia's geopolitical interests. Countries like Germany wouldn't have a need to maintain cordial relations with it, thus facilitating a possible "decoupling".

Bulgaria

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That's where Bulgaria could become the proverbial "icing on the cake". Turkish Stream is expected to transit through this Balkan country en route to Europe, but the latest anti-government protests there threaten to topple the government, leading to worries that its replacement might either politicize or suspend this project. Azerbaijan's TANAP and the Eastern Mediterranean's GRISCY pipelines might help Southeastern Europe compensate for the loss of Russian resources, though the latter has yet to be constructed and is only in the planning stages right now. Nevertheless, eliminating Turkish Stream from the energy equation (or at the very least hamstringing the project prior to replacing/scrapping it) would deal a death blow to Russia's already very limited Balkan influence. Russia would then be practically pushed out of the region, becoming nothing more than a distant cultural-historical memory with close to no remaining political influence to speak of.

Economic Warfare

The overarching goal connecting these three Hybrid War fronts isn't just to weaken Russia's energy interests, but to replace its current role with American and other industry competitors. The US-backed and Polish-led " Three Seas Initiative " is vying to become a serious player in the strategic Central & Eastern European space, and it can achieve a lot of its ambitions through the construction of new LNG and oil terminals for facilitating America's plans. In addition, artificially increasing the costs of Russian energy imports through political means related to these Hybrid Wars could also reduce Russia's revenue from these sources, which presently account for 40% of its budget . Considering that Russia's in the midst of a systemic economic transition away from its disproportionate budgetary dependence on energy, this could hit Moscow where it hurts at a sensitive time.

The Ball's In Berlin's Court

The linchpin of Russia's defensive strategy is Germany, without whose support all of Moscow's energy plans stand zero chance of succeeding. If Germany submits to the US on one, some, or all three of these Hybrid War fronts in contravention of its natural economic interests, then it'll be much easier for America to provoke a comprehensive "decoupling" between Russia and Europe. It's only energy geopolitics that allows for both sides to maintain some sense of cooperation despite the US-encouraged sanctions regime against Russia after its reunification with Crimea and thus provides an opportunity for improving their relations sometime in the future. Sabotaging Russia's energy interests there would thus doom any realistic prospects for a rapprochement between them, but the ball's in Berlin's court since it has the chance to say no to the US and ensure that the German-Russian Strategic Partnership upholds Europe's strategic autonomy across the present century.

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Concluding Thoughts

For as much as cautiously optimistic as many in the Alt-Media Community might be that the US' Hybrid War on Russian energy in Europe will fail, the facts paint a much more sobering picture which suggests that at least one of these plots will succeed. Should that happen, then the era of energy geopolitics laying the foundation for Russian-European relations will soon draw to a close, thereby facilitating the US' hoped-for "decoupling" between them, causing budgetary difficulties for Moscow at the moment when it can least afford to experience such, and pushing the Eurasian Great Power's strategic attention even further towards Asia. The last-mentioned consequence will put more pressure on Russia to perfect its "balancing" act between China and India , which could potentially be a double-edged sword that makes it more relevant in Asian geopolitical affairs but also means that one wrong move might seriously complicate its 21st-century grand strategy .

Vegetius , 4 hours ago

If you look at the three countries mentioned Belarus will likely be absorbed by Russia sooner rather than later. The push for this is underway looking at meetings taking place. For Bulgaria the US is far away and has no power to stop the Turks. It is the Turks the Bulgarians fear, with a lot of reasons, their surest way of keeping out of the Turks clutches is to look to Russia for support. Unfortunately the USA has an appalling track record of betraying countries, ask Libya.

The Germans have no choice but take the Russian gas, economically, socially and for strategic reasons. The truly big fear for the US is a German/Russian bloc. German and Russian technology with unrivaled resources. That is the future super power if they are pushed together, something that is very likely if we see a major economic contraction in the next few years.

Mustahattu , 4 hours ago

The US fear of an Eurasian alliance. The US fear Europe will create a Silicon Valley of the future. The US fear the Euro will replace the dollar as a reserve currency. The US fear Russia will become a superpower. The US fear China. There's a lot to fear yankee dear...cos it's all gonna happen.

Hope Copy , 1 hour ago

RUSSIA is content with 45 and 25nm as it can be hardened.. 14 and especially 7nm is so that the **** will wear out..

Ace006 , 2 hours ago

Instead of fretting about how this or that country or bloc will become a/an _________ superpower the US could focus on regaining its former pre-eminence.

It's a crazy thought, I know, but

  1. moving a massive amount of industrial capacity to China and fueling the rise of a communist country just might have been a bad idea and
  2. thrashing about in the international arena like a rutting rhinoceros at huge expense makes us look foolish and, in the case of Syria, petty and vindictive.

Repairing the damage from the former and stopping the hemorrhage of money and reputation respectively would be a far better objective than playing Frankenstein in Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Ukraine, Georgia, Serbia, Iran, Poland, N. Korea, and Venezuela, inter alia . Mexico is a failed state right on our border that contributes mightily to our immigration, cultural, and political problems. But, no, the puffed up, prancing morons who make US policy can summon the imagination to figure out how to help our very own neighbors deal with their hideous problems. No. Let's engage in regime change and "nation building" in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Ukraine, and Belarus.

The words of the great Marcus Aurelius are on point: "Within ten days thou wilt seem a god to those to whom thou art now a beast and an ape, if thou wilt return to thy principles and the worship of reason."

Herodotus , 1 hour ago

Bulgaria must return to the protection of the Ottoman Empire.

yerfej , 4 hours ago

Easy solution, end NATO. Just have all US forces told to leave the EU and let them determine their own destiny. Then do the same with US forces in the ME, Japan, Korea, etc. EVERYONE would be better off, including US taxpayers which get nothing out of the useless overseas deployment of resources which could be better spent at home.

yojimbo , 3 hours ago

5% budget deficit, 5% military spending. Leave the world, drop 4.5% of the spending and either save money, or build infrastructure. It's so simple, I am disappointed Trump doesn't at least state it. I get he is limited by the system, and can't be a Cincinnatus, even if he wanted to, but he has his First Amendment.. though I grant him a personal fear of being Kennedied!

Bac Si , 2 hours ago

Howdy Yerfej. It sounds like you are all for Isolationism.

But Isolationism means different things to different people. Pre WW2, Isolationism in the US meant selling our products to hostile countries. In the case of Japan, oil to help them kill Chinese people. In the case of Germany and Italy, food and vehicles to help them conquer all of Europe.

Considering the ridiculous education that the US gives its children, it's no wonder that most Americans don't know much about history (I say that in general terms, not to you specifically). Henry Ford senior not only received the 'Grand Cross of the German Eagle' from Adolf Hitler in 1938, he also received a 'Congressional Medal' from the US Congress shortly after WW2 – and for the same reason. Selling trucks to help the war effort.

Even after Pearl Harbor, there were politically powerful Isolationists that did not want the US to get involved in WW2. Why? Because a lot of money was at stake. It still is. These same people will continue to argue for Isolationism even after we are attacked.

Two months AFTER Pearl Harbor, FDR made a speech that included this:

"Those Americans who believed that we could live under the illusion of isolationism wanted the American eagle to imitate the tactics of the ostrich. Now, many of those same people, afraid that we may be sticking our necks out, want our national bird to be turned into a turtle. But we prefer to retain the eagle as it is – flying high and striking hard. I know that I speak for the mass of the American people when I say that we reject the turtle policy and will continue increasingly the policy of carrying the war to the enemy in distant lands and distant waters – as far away as possible from our own home grounds." – FDR

This radical change in our foreign policy has never been explained or even referred to in US history books. Powerful economic forces will always love the idea of "Open Trade Isolationism". But if Isolationism is ever suddenly defined by not doing business with any hostile government – those powerful forces will go ballistic. They will strongly lobby against 'Economic Warfare'. In other words, they will always want to make lots of money by selling their products to hostile governments, no matter how many people die.

Want a great example?

Right after Loral Corporation CEO Bernard L. Schwartz donated a million dollars to the DNC, President Clinton authorized the release of ballistic missile technology to China so Loral could get their satellites into space fast and at low cost. Those same missiles, and their nuclear warheads, are now pointed at the US.

The argument has always been that if we trade with hostile governments, they will grow to like us. Does anyone out there believe that if the UK and France gave pre WW2 Germany an extra $20 billion in trade, Germany wouldn't have started WW2? Anyone with a brain would tell you that Germany would have put those resources into their military (like China has been doing) and WW2 would have started earlier.

Yerfej, if we brought back the Cold War organization called the Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls (COCOM), I would be all for Isolationism. President Clinton got rid of it in his first year, and Western weapons technology has been threatening us ever since.

BaNNeD oN THe RuN , 5 hours ago

You have to love the dynamic duo of "lie, cheat and steal" Pompeo and his "mob boss" Trump. There is absolutely no subtlety in their obvious shakedown tactics.

PrivetHedge , 4 hours ago

The mob had far more honor, and better morals.

PrivetHedge , 4 hours ago

Washington's transatlantic allies...

Hahahah, occupied vassals.
Washington has cost Germany a massive slice of GDP.

you_do , 4 hours ago

Yankee has plenty of problems at home.

Rest of the world can decide their own energy policy.

They do not suffer from the 'Russia' propaganda.

geno-econ , 5 hours ago

Let Russia, the lowest cost energy producer win energy competition in Europe as China, the lowest cost manufacturing producer is winning in America. Only difference is retailers, shippers, assembly part importers such as auto, electronics and appliance makers are making a profit and consumer gets lower prices. We should let others decide for themselves and stop meddling----only result will be a bloody nose

you_do , 4 hours ago

Yankee has plenty of problems at home.

Rest of the world can decide their own energy policy.

They do not suffer from the 'Russia' propaganda.

geno-econ , 5 hours ago

Let Russia, the lowest cost energy producer win energy competition in Europe as China, the lowest cost manufacturing producer is winning in America. Only difference is retailers, shippers, assembly part importers such as auto, electronics and appliance makers are making a profit and consumer gets lower prices. We should let others decide for themselves and stop meddling----only result will be a bloody nose

free-energy , 4 hours ago

Notice how everything the US does around the world is a WAR. War on Energy, War on Drugs, War on Birth Control, War War War... America will fall after 2020 if nothing changes for the better. Every year the world grows more and more tired of the US bs and moves further away from it. Its so bad that they choose to deal with a communist country over us.

You reap what you've sowed.

Bobby Farrell Can Dance , 3 hours ago

The Anglo American parasite pirate gangsters keep barking on about Russia bad, China bad, but I look around and I see nothing but these trouble makers waging war on anything they cannot control. The US and UK are devil nations. They will deserve all the rot they have coming their way.

Unknown User , 5 hours ago

Trump wants a trade balance with all major economies like Germany and China. If they don't buy from us, he will have to raise tariffs. In case of Germany, they need nothing from us so he wants them to buy US LNG. Merkel's position is that "there is a cheap Russian gas", while Trump is telling her "no there isn't one".

Pumpinfe , 4 hours ago

So trump loves to deep throat Russia but give Germany a hard time to Nordstream 2? Wake up fanboys, your hero is a ******. I got so much money invested in gazprom. LNG is junk and gazprom (Russian owned) is gona crush LNG and trump and his idiot following can't do a damn thing. You trump idiots will believe anything. Let me enlighten you...gazprom is the lowest cost producer of natural gas in the world...go look at the difference between gazprom and LNG and then you will realize that orange dump is an idiot along with his army of empty heads. Oh and if you think China and Russia are not friendly, go look up the Power of Siberia pipeline. That will give you a good sense of the relationship between Russia and China. America is rotting from the inside and Russia and China are eating their popcorn watching it happen.

Dabooda , 3 hours ago

I don't see Trump deep-throating anyone but Netanyahu. Sans gratuitous insults, your comment about Gazprom is spot on

Lokiban , 5 hours ago

I doubt Merkel will give in. She would commit political suicide if she did that. She knows Navalny is a US effort to stop Nordstream 2.
What is the alternative? Buying gas from the US or US-controlled oilfields in Iraq and Syria? Putin might have a say in that.

Lokiban , 5 hours ago

I doubt Merkel will give in. She would commit political suicide if she did that. She knows Navalny is a US effort to stop Nordstream 2.
What is the alternative? Buying gas from the US or US-controlled oilfields in Iraq and Syria? Putin might have a say in that.

thurstjo63 , 3 hours ago

The main fault in Mr Korybko's thinking is that he believes that European countries will not just shoot themselves in the foot but in the head to appease the US. At a european and local level, those who wanted Nord Stream 2 to be suspended or killed have failed. The costs are way too high. For that we can thank, perversely, the agreements associated with protecting investments from political decisions pushed by the US itself!!! Given that there is no proof of Navalny being poisoned, Germany knows that there is no way that they could hope to win their case for stopping Nord Stream 2 in a tribunal with persons capable of rational thought. That is why they made the deal to buy some US liquified gas for a couple of billion dollars. Because that is the cheapest way of extricating themselves from this situation. Otherwise, they are looking at orders of magnitude more compensation to russian and european firms for stopping the pipeline.

As for Belarus, barring Lukashenko doing something profoundly stupid like reacting violently to protests, that ship has already sailed. Protests are smaller every week and mainly on the weekend as now the "opposition" has been publishing people's profiles accusing them of collaborating with the government without any proof, leading to innocent people and their families to be threatened. There will be a transition from Lukashenko over the next couple of years but you can be sure that the present "opposition" given their desire to break away from Russia will not be part of the group that comes to power in the future since their base of support diminishes every week.

Finally Bulgaria already shot themselves in the foot when they backed out of South Stream and had major problems securing energy resources to meet its needs during the intervening period. Radev as any politician wanting to stay in office knows, if he doesn't go through with connecting Turk Stream to the rest of Europe that he might as well resign. So unless the US has compromising information on him that can force him from office or the Radev's administration doesn't control the US attempts to create the conditions for a colour revolution in Bulgaria, it is definitely not going to happen.

I'm sorry but Mr. Korybko is wrong on all counts!

Savvy , 4 hours ago

When the US backed Georgia's violent incursion into S Ossetia it took Russia one day to send them back.

Russians are slow to saddle but ride fast.

Joiningupthedots , 2 hours ago

That was with the remnants of the old Soviet Army too.

The new Russian Army is an entirely different beast in both organisation, training, experience and equipment.

This guy has his finger on the pulse;

http://thesaker.is/the-world-has-gone-absolutely-insane/

JeanTrejean , 5 hours ago

Are the USA really at war with Russia...and EU?

Decoupling Russia from EU, is re-enforcing the Eurasia bloc...where is the future of the world.

Russia belongs to Europa...not the USA.

BaNNeD oN THe RuN , 4 hours ago

Geographically Europe and Asia are one continent. It was "European exceptionalism" (the precursor to American Exceptionalism) that divided it as an ethno-cultural construct.

researchfix , 5 hours ago

Cancelling NS2 will chase the German industry into Russia. Cheap energy, moderate wages, Eurasian market at the front steps.

The sheep and their ex working places and Mutti will stay in Germany.

Bobby Farrell Can Dance , 3 hours ago

Do Germans want to be slaves of these abject Brits and Americans? Pffffft....gas from Russia is a NO BRAINER.

Only British and Americans rats do not like that idea. How un-selfish then, it is for these jealous, insecure morons to dictate to Germany how she should trade. That's called outright meddling. These imperialists are like entitled Karens, they think the world owes them favours at the snap of a finger.

Sandmann , 4 hours ago

Nordstream 2 has an add-on leg to UK. Germany is largest gas importer on earth and cannot run its industry without gas imports from Russia. LNG is simply too expensive unless US taxpayers subsidise it.

If US wants to destabilise Europe it will reap the consequences. Southern Europe depends on gas from North Africa - Portugal generates electricity from Maghreb Pipeline to Spain from Algeria via Morocco. Erdogan hopes to put Turkey in position of supplying gas to Europe.

Germany will not abandon Nordstream 2 but might abandon USA first.

Max21c , 3 hours ago

The US is ruthlessly waging an intense Hybrid War on Russian energy interests in Europe by targeting the Eurasian Great Power's relevant projects in Germany, Belarus, and Bulgaria, banking on the fact that even the partial success of this strategy would greatly advance the scenario of an externally provoked "decoupling" between Moscow and Washington's transatlantic allies.

It's a petty game and when it fails then the Washingtonians credibility and legitimacy just further erodes. The EU needs the energy supplies and the Russian Federation has the supplies. It's all just short term & small gain silliness by a pack of freaks in Washington DC and their freaks in the CIA, Thunk Tank freaks and freaks in the foreign policy establishment. It's just more of the Carnival sideshow/freakshow put on by Washingtonians. As usual if it's a Washingtonian (post Cold War) policy then there's little or no substance behind it and you can be sure it hasn't be thought through thoroughly and it'll eventually turn and boomerang back on the circus people in Washington, Ivy League circus people, and JudeoWASP elite circus people, CIA circus clowns and circus clowns in the Thunk Tonks and elites Fareign Poolicy ***-tablishment.

John Hansen , 3 hours ago

If all it takes is a Navaly hoax to cause this Europe isn't really worth dealing with.

propaganda_reaper , 3 hours ago

Once upon a time, a revolution occurred in a country through which passed a gas pipeline. The bad guys were vanquished. And the very good foreign guys who helped the local good guys defeat the tyrant said: "We got the same stuff, but liquid."

Any similarity with fictitious events or characters was purely coincidental.

_ConanTheLibertarian_ , 4 hours ago

Germany needs the gaz.

https://www.politico.eu/article/why-germany-cant-say-no-to-nord-stream/

Obamanism666 , 49 minutes ago

Remember the Gas to Europe still flows through the Ukraine. Russia just needs to reduce the gas Pressure and blame the Ukraine and Europe goes cold and Dark.

German People will beg for Nordstream 2 to be switched on.

lucitanian , 31 minutes ago

That's not the way Russia works. But it's the kind of blackmail that the US uses. And that's why Russia is a more dependable partner for Europe for energy.

Hope Copy , 1 hour ago

This **** goes right back to the 'DeepState' pseudo-revolution that got the Nicky-the-weak killed ,because he financed his railroads and wanted to be rich as hell as he perceived the ENGLISH monarchy to be, with a parliamentary DUMA that he could over rule if need be. I have looked 'DeepState' right in the eyes when I was young and dumb and was told that I would never go to their masion.. Nicky had family enemies. and the Czech fighting force was never going to save him.. Stalin was also double-crossed, but was well informed.. it was in his sector if one reads and believes. Cunning fox Stalin was, always playing those under him to do his bidding.. and that lesson has been well learned by a couple of the world's leaders in this day-in-age...

Herodotus , 1 hour ago

German manufacturing costs must be driven higher to take the heat off of the UK as they emerge from the EU and attempt to become competitive.

novictim , 1 hour ago

When "War" is actually not war but trade policy and financial incentives then you know you are engaged in dangerous bloviations and hyperbole.

When the shooting starts, then you can talk of War.

SuperareDolo , 2 hours ago

Russia might not want to fight these attempts to isolate it from the western economy. The collateral damage will be that much less, once Babylon the great finally falls.

LoveTruth , 2 hours ago

And US claims to be a "Fair Player," caring for freedom and democracy, while twisting arms and supporting corrupted officials.

IronForge , 3 hours ago

PetroUSD, MIC, Colonial Control of Vassals. World Domination Play by the Hegemony.

Just like the Policies of NATO: Russians Out, Germans Down, Anglo-American-ZioMasons and Vatican_Vassals In.

Policies were like this - Sponsored by Anglo-ZioMasons from Pre-WWI, continued through WWII and the First Cold War, and onwards after the Collapse of the SUN and the ensuing NeoCon Wolfowitz Doctrine and PNAC7/Bush-Cheney PetroUSD Plans.

The Hegemony Control MENA Energy Producers. The IRQ-KWT War were mishandled; and KSA demanded for the USA to Smite IRQ. The Initial War and Occupation prompted Hussein to opt the EUR for Petroleum, which Brought about the End of Hussein through the 9-11/PNAC7 Long War.

LBY opted for the Au-Dinar for Petroleum; and were Fail-Stated. IRN and RUS remain the only Major Energy Producers not Controlled by the Hegemony.

IRN were Sanctioned since removing the Shackles of Hegemonic Occupancy via Shah Par Levi; and attempts for Energy Diversification via Nuclear means raised suspicions of Nuclear Weapons Development - prompting for heavier Sanctions and 5thColumn Regime Change Operations by the Hegemony. IRN circumvented Sanctions in part by selling their Petroleum via Major Currencies and Barter. Though many Countries have reduced or maintained their purchase of IRN Petroleum via Sanctions Protocols, CHN are involved in Purchasing IRN's Output.

RUS, another Target of Ruin, Plunder, and Occupational Exploitation by the Hegemony, were Too Large a Country with Standing Armed Forces for Direct Military Invasion by the Hegemony. After the Collapse of the SUN, The Harvard/Chicago led Economic Reforms ended in Plunder - which prompted the Selection and Rise of Putin, who drove out the Plunderers. The Hegemony continue their Geopolitical War of Influence Peddling around RUS while attempting Soft War NATO Membership Recruitment and Regime Change Coups within RUS, Ex-SUN Nation-States, and Trading Partners.

RUS have endured, became Militarily mightier, have become the Major Energy Producer for North/Western Europe and CHN. In addition to the Production, RUS now have begun Trading Petroleum+NatGas outside of the PetroUSD Exchange Mechanism, opting for Customer Currencies or RUB.

RUS and IRN are expected to be Key Providers of the PetroCNY-Au Exchange Mechanism.

The Hegemony and MENA Vassals can't Compete in Combined Petroleum+NatGas Volume and Price; and DEU - by Directly Importing from RUS - will most likely become more Independent from the Hegemon.

CHN, RUS, and DEU - Major Energy, Industrial, Natural Resource, and Military Powers Decoupling from the Influences of the Hegemony, with IND Slowly coming to their Own (IND are simply Too Large to remain Vassals to the Hegemon; and Vassal GBR did so much to Oppress them in the past).

Funny that the Anglo-American-ZioMasons and VAT have brought each of these 3 Powers to Ruin and Occupation in the Past 2 Centuries.

The Ironies being Played Out are that:

1) GBR Lost their Prime Colonies - America/USA, IND, and now Trade City Colony HKG - by their Oppressive and Exploitative Occupancy; and

2) USA, after Fighting Wars for Independence from such Occupations by GBR - Once Becoming a Major Military Power, Followed in the Anglo-ZioMason Tradition of Geopolitical Conquest and Control to the Scale of pursing not only in World Domination - but in Absolute Global Rule.

Maghreb2 , 2 hours ago

Problem is demographic shift . The previous modern system dominated by Zio-Masonry was GNP and GDP where currencies were measured against global output and floated against gold and each other. Now with high inflation and demographic decline knocking out the economy is easier leading to fights between zones of influence. Petro Ruble, Euro or dollar. Dangerous commodities like kilos of heroin, trafficked humans or weapons. Zio-Masonic system has fallen to gangsterism. Hybrid Warfare is the kind of thing we saw in Afghanistan or 80s Columbia . Militarized Russian mafia vs NATO backed militarized police forces.

Once the population reaches a certain age and consumption drops there isn't much to fight over besides social control systems of the young minority. Color revolutions in Central Europe are really only effecting the long term economy of the young . Hope would be Left wing Radicals stood up to the system and aligned with right wing groups to eliminate masonic and Zionist factions and take back the command and control systems before the continet is shut down permanently.

Precision strikes and hunting down their descendents . Easy to find because Hitler and Stalin had their ancestors massacred for loyalty to Rothschild. They won't bite the hands that feed.The Vatican vassal systems was built on knowing that a Zionist is Zionist and Masons is a Mason. They are cults simply teaching them the correct way to behave can avert these political problems.

In terms of Belarus and Russia they should consider the fact the birth rate rate rose after the Soviet collapse and exodus west means many of them shouldn't have even been born in Rothschilds plan. In their " system " economic planning starts at birth because color revolutions effect long term bond issuances they control.

Stalin and Hitler both knew this and used money linked to raw marterials and goods to beat the British gold standard system. If you knew what the Western Central banks were worth you would kill people for using their money.

[Sep 28, 2020] From Conflict to Crisis- The Danger of U.S. Actions by Jeanne M. Haskin

Sep 28, 2020 | www.amazon.com

In the United States, a great deal of study and energy goes into promoting respect for democracy, not just to keep it alive here but also to spread it around the world. It embraces the will of the majority, whether or not its main beneficiaries have more resources than other citizens do, as shown by the election of President Obama, who promised hope and change for the suffering majority, but did not sit long in office before being subjected to an economic vote of no-confidence.

Those who claim we run a plutocracy (government for the rich by the rich) -- or that we're victims of a conspiracy contrived by a shadow government -- are right while being wrong.

Our government is beyond the reach of ordinary American citizens in terms of economic power. However, the creation of a system to keep the majority of the populace at the losing end of a structure which neither promised nor delivered a state of financial equality was a predictable extension of the economic system the U.S. government was formed to protect.

... .... ...

Forty years of Cold War and the ultimate realization that abuse of the communist system and a hierarchy of privilege proved that system to be vulnerable to selfishness -- in common with the triumphant capitalist countries.

Because any desired outcome can be written into an equation to exclude unwanted facts or inputs by holding some things constant while applying chosen variables that may not hold true under every historical circumstance, it's considered "falsifiable" and therefore "scientific." But only if it appeals to the right people and justifies a given political need will it become sacrosanct (until the next round of "progress").

.... .... ...

Abusive Self- Interest

In 1764, twenty- five years before the embrace of Madame Guillotine (when heads rolled literally to put the fear of the mob into politics), contempt for the filth and poverty in which the French commoners lived while the nobility gorged on luxury goods showed how arrogant they were, not just in confidence that their offices of entitlement were beyond reproach and unassailable, but that mockery and insult in the face of deliberate deprivation would be borne with obedience and humility.

It certainly affected Smith's outlook, since he wrote The Wealth of Nations with a focus on self- interest rather than moral sentiments. And while this may be purely pragmatic, based on what

he witnessed, he also wrote about the potential for self- interest to become abusive, both in collusion with individuals and when combined with the power of government. Business interests could form cabals (groups of conspirators, plotting public harm) or monopolies (organizations with exclusive market control) to fix prices at their highest levels. A true laissez- faire economy would provide every incentive to conspire against consumers and attempt to influence budgets and legislation.

Smith's assertion that self- interest leads producers to favor domestic industry must also be understood in the context of the period. While it's true that the Enlightenment was a movement of rational philosophy radically opposed to secrecy, it's important to understand that this had to be done respectfully , insofar as all arguments were intended to impress the monarchy under circumstances where the king believed himself God- appointed and infallible, no matter his past or present policies, and matters were handled with delicacy. Yet, Smith's arguments are clear enough (and certainly courageous enough) to be understood in laymen's terms.

In an era when the very industry he's observing has been fostered by tariffs, monopolies, labor controls, and materials extracted from colonies, he did his best to balance observation with what he thought was best for society. It's not his fault we pick and choose our recipes for what we do and don't believe or where we think Smith might have gone had he been alive today.


The New Double Standard

The only practical way to resolve the contradiction between the existing beneficiaries of state favoritism in this period and Smith's aversion to it is to observe that the means to prevent competition and interference with the transition from one mode of commerce to another that enhances the strength of the favored or provides a new means to grow their wealth is to close the door of government intervention behind them and burn any bridges to it.

In psychological terms, the practice of "negative attribution" is to assume that identical behavior is justifiable for oneself but not another. It may not be inconsistent with a system of economics founded on self- interest, but it naturally begs a justification as to why it rules out everyone else's self- interest. The beauty of this system is that it will always have the same answer.

You may have guessed it.

Progress.

Reallocation of Assets

It was always understood that capitalism produces winners and losers. The art of economizing is to gain maximum benefit for minimum expenditure, which generally translates to asset consolidation and does not necessarily mean there is minimum sacrifice. There's an opportunity cost for everything, whether it's human, financial, environmental, or material. But the most important tenet of free market capitalism is that asset redistribution requires the U. S. government to go to DEFCON 1, unless assets are being reallocated for "higher productivity," in which case the entire universe is saved from the indefensible sin of lost opportunity.

Private property is sacred -- up until an individual decides he can make more productive use of it and appeals to the courts for seizure under eminent domain or until the government decides it will increase national growth if owned by some other person or entity. In like manner, corporations can suffer hostile takeovers, just as deregulation facilitates predatory market behavior and cutthroat competition promotes an efficiency orientation that means fewer jobs and lower incomes, which result in private losses.

In the varying range of causes underlying the loss of assets, the common threat is progress -- the "civilized" justification for depriving some other person or entity of their right to own property, presumably earned by the sweat of their brow, except their sweat doesn't have the same champion as someone who can wring more profit from it. The official explanation is that the government manages the "scarcity" of resources to benefit the world. This is also how we justify war, aggression, and genocide, though we don't always admit to that unless we mean to avoid it.


Perfectly Rational Genocide

History cooperates with the definition of Enlightenment if we imagine that thoughtfulness has something to do with genocide. In the context of American heritage, it has meant that when someone stands in the way of progress, his or her resources are "reallocated" to serve the pursuit of maximum profit, with or without consent. The war against Native Americans was one in which Americans either sought and participated in annihilation efforts or believed this end was inevitable. In the age of rational thought, meditation on the issue could lead from gratitude for the help early settlers received from Native Americans to the observation they didn't enclose their land and had no concept of private property,

to the conviction they were unmotivated by profit and therefore irreconcilable savages. But it takes more than rational thought to mobilize one society to exterminate another.

The belief in manifest destiny -- that God put the settlers in America for preordained and glorious purposes which gave them a right to everything -- turned out to be just the ticket for a free people opposed to persecution and the tyranny of church and state.

Lest the irony elude you, economic freedom requires divorcing the state from religion, but God can be used to whip up the masses, distribute "It's Them or Us" cards, and send people out to die on behalf of intellectuals and investors who've rationalized their chosenness.

CHAPTER TWO: INSTILLING THE ILLUSION OF CHOICE

Selfishness may be exalted as the root and branch of capitalism, but it doesn't make you look good to the party on the receiving end or those whose sympathy he earns. For that, you need a government prepared to do four things, which each have separate dictums based on study, theorization, and experience.

Coercion: Force is illegitimate only if you can't sell it.
Persuasion: How do I market thee? Let me count the ways.
Bargaining: If you won't scratch my back, then how about a piece of the pie?
Indoctrination: Because I said so. (And paid for the semantics.)

Predatory capitalism is the control and expropriation of land, labor, and natural resources by a foreign government via coercion, persuasion, bargaining, and indoctrination.

At the coercive stage, we can expect military and/ or police intervention to repress the subject populace. The persuasive stage will be marked by clientelism, in which a small percentage of the populace will be rewarded for loyalty, often serving as the capitalists' administrators, tax collectors, and enforcers. At the bargaining stage, efforts will be made to include the populace, or a certain percentage of it, in the country's ruling system, and this is usually marked by steps toward democratic (or, more often, autocratic) governance.

At the fourth stage, the populace is educated by capitalists, such that they continue to maintain a relationship of dependency.


The Predatory Debt Link

In many cases, post- colonial states were forced to assume the debts of their colonizers. And where they did not, they were encouraged to become in debt to the West via loans that were issued through international institutions to ensure they did not fall prey to communism or pursue other economic policies that were inimical to the West. Debt is the tie that binds nation states to the geostrategic and economic interests of the West.

As such, the Cold War era was a time of easy credit, luring postcolonial states to undertake the construction of useless monoliths and monuments, and to even expropriate such loans through corruption and despotism, thereby making these independent rulers as predatory as colonizers. While some countries were wiser than others and did use the funds for infrastructural improvements, these were also things that benefited the West and particularly Western contractors. In his controversial work Confessions of an Economic Hit Man , John Perkins reveals that he was a consultant for an American firm (MAIN), whose job was to ensure that states became indebted beyond their means so they would remain loyal to their creditors, buying them votes within United Nations organizations, among other things.

Predatory capitalists demand export- orientations as the means to generate foreign currency with which to pay back debt. In the process, the state must privatize and drastically slash or eliminate any domestic subsidies which are aimed at helping native industry compete in the marketplace. Domestic consumption and imports must be radically contained, as shown by the exchange rate policies recommended by the IMF. The costs of obtaining domestic capital will be pushed beyond the reach of most native producers, while wages must be depressed to an absolute bare minimum. In short, the country's land, labor, and natural resources must be sold at bargain basement prices in order to make these goods competitive, in what one author has called "a spiraling race to the bottom," as countries producing predominantly the same goods engage in cutthroat competition whose benefactor is the West.

Under these circumstances, foreign investment is encouraged, but this, too, represents a loaded situation for countries that open their markets to financial liberalization. Since, in most cases, the

IMF does not allow restrictions on the conditions of capital inflows, it means that financial investors can literally dictate their terms. And since no country is invulnerable to attacks on its currency, which governments must try to keep at a favorable exchange rate, it means financial marauders can force any country to try to prop up its currency using vital reserves of foreign exchange which might have been used to pay their debt.

When such is the case, the IMF comes to the rescue with a socalled "bailout fund," that allows foreign investors to withdraw their funds intact, while the government reels from the effects of an IMF- imposed austerity plan, often resulting in severe recession the offshoot of which is bankruptcies by the thousands and plummeting employment.

In countries that experienced IMF bailouts due to attacks on their currencies, the effect was to reset the market so the only economic survivors were those who remained export- oriented and were strong enough to withstand the upheaval. This means they remained internationally competitive, which translates to low earnings of foreign exchange. At the same time that the country is being bled from the bottom up through mass unemployment, extremely low wages, and the "spiraling race to the bottom," it is in an even more unfavorable position concerning the payment of debt. The position is that debt slavery ensues, as much an engine of extraction as any colonial regime ever managed.


The Role of Indoctrination

The fact that it is sovereign governments overseeing the work of debt repression has much to do with education, which is the final phase of predatory capitalism, concluding in indoctrination. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the lesson to the world was that socialism can't work, nor were there any remaining options for countries that pursued "the third way" other than capitalism. This produced a virulent strain of neoliberalism in which most people were, and are, being educated. The most high- ranking of civil servants have either been educated in the West or directly influenced by its thinking. And this status of acceptance and adherence finally constitutes indoctrination. The system is now self- sustaining, upheld by domestic agents.

While predatory capitalism can proceed along a smooth continuum from coercion to persuasion to bargaining to formal indoctrination, the West can regress to any of these steps at any point in

time, given the perceived need to interfere with varying degrees of force in order to protect its interests.


Trojan Politics

Democracy is about having the power and flexibility to graft our system of government and predatory capitalism onto any target country, regardless of relative strength or conflicting ideologies. An entire productive industry has grown up using the tools of coercion, persuasion, bargaining, and formal indoctrination to maximize their impact in the arena of U. S. politics. Its actors know how to jerk the right strings, push the right buttons, and veer from a soft sell to a hard sell when resistance dictates war, whether it's with planes overhead and tanks on the ground or with massive capital flight that panics the whole world.

When the U. S. political economy goes into warp overdrive, its job proves far more valuable than anything ever made in the strict material sense because there's never been more at stake in terms of what it's trying to gain. It's the American idea machine made up of corporations, lobbyists, think tanks, foundations, universities, and consultants in every known discipline devoted to mass consumerism, and what they sell is illusory opportunity dressed in American principles. They embrace political candidates who'll play by elitist rules to preserve the fiction of choice, and, in this way, they maintain legitimacy, no matter what kind of "reallocation" is on the economic agenda.

The issue is not whether we'll question it, but who we'll applaud for administering it.

In the Information Age, perception management is king.


[Sep 27, 2020] Azerbaijani Army And Syrian Jihadis Launch Attack On Armenian Lines

Sep 27, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Moon of Alabama Brecht quote " In Which We Debunk A Covidiot Pamphlet | Main | The MoA Week In Review - Open Thread 2020-77 " September 27, 2020 Azerbaijani Army And Syrian Jihadis Launch Attack On Armenian Lines

During the last weeks there was news that Turkey was hiring some 2,000 'Syrian rebels' to fight in Azerbaijan against Armenian forces which since 1993 occupy Nagorno- Karabakh . Earlier today the Azerbaijan forces and the mercenaries launched their attack on Armenian lines. It was a massacre. Two Azerbaijani helicopters were shot down. Some 10 tanks and armored troop transporters went up in flames . Azerbaijani artillery hit some civilian structures in Stepankert, the capital of Nagorno-Karabakh. Turkish(?) drones hit Armenia front positions .


bigger

The Azerbaijani tactic seems to be to bunch up a lot of their tanks in the open field and to wait for the Armenian artillery to destroy them. Russian troops are stationed in Armenia and additional heavy support from Russia was flown in today . But Russia is friendly with both countries and is already urging for an armistice. Armenia has mobilized its forces and reinforcements are moving towards the front.

This is now, after Syrian and Libya, the third country in which the wannabe Sultan of Turkey is trying to fight Russian supported forces. It ain't gonna work. But Erdogan has to keep on doing that as a domestic diversion because the Turkish economy has screeched to a halt. The recent central bank rate hike is unlikely to stop the loss of the Lira but will deepen the recession.

The situation might well escalated from here on. There will be a lot of disinformation coming from both sides.

Posted by b on September 27, 2020 at 12:55 UTC | Permalink

Josh , Sep 27 2020 13:19 utc | 1

Thanks B.
Biswapriya Purkayast , Sep 27 2020 14:03 utc | 2
Azerbaijan can't lift a finger without Ottoman backing. Armenia is traditionally a Russian ally, and even though the current regime is wooing Amerikastan, it can't survive without Russian protection. In any regular war Armenia will smash Azerbaijan flat but the Ottomans are guaranteed to get involved. Now Russia and the Ottomans are on different sides in Libya of course, Russia would back Greece in any conflict with Ankara, and increasingly Russia is getting fed up with Ottoman attempts to annex North Syria. I can only surmise that this is an Ottoman warning to Russia.
steven t johnson , Sep 27 2020 14:24 utc | 3
The claim the Azeri tanks were just sitting in a field waiting to be smashed by Russian artillery etc. actually sounds like the Russians attacking first. The aggressor usually has the initiative and thus usually has operational success in the opening round. It's theoretically possible that a Russian artillery offensive was on high alert, waiting to launch after a suitable "incident" which could be represented as an Azeri assault. Whatever the value of mercenaries from a losing war, a few weeks is very unlikely to permit meaningful incorporation into an actual fighting force. Therefore it is highly unlikely that their reinforcement was the enabling cause of an Azeri assault.

It is a strange and marvelous world, where wonders delightful and horrible abound. So it is barely possible the Azeris are terminally stupid, the underlying theory of the post. I would still say that it's *not* because non-Christians are stupid. More likely it's because the Azeris are getting their military advice from their friends the Russians.

R Rose , Sep 27 2020 14:30 utc | 4
@ # 2

"Armenia is traditionally a Russian ally"

Not so much anymore. It was the National Endowment for Democracy and George Soros Foundation that brought Armenia's most recent leader to power.


b "This is now, after Syrian and Libya, the third country in which the wannabe Sultan of Turkey is trying to fight Russian supported forces."

rubbish

H.Schmatz , Sep 27 2020 14:33 utc | 5
Thread on the reignitied conflict, IMO too coincidental with soon coming outcome of US elections..

https://twitter.com/descifraguerra/status/1310123197111689218

IMO this reigniting of an old conflict comes as response to recent Kavkas 2020 maneuvers organized by Russia which are taking place right now, with the participation of Armenia, and also as response of last meeting between Zarif and Lavrov, in whose presser Lavrov was quite explicit, at least more than before...

This comes, in the first place, as a new hot front ( apart from Belarus ) in the post-Soviet space to implicate Russia and make her choose amongst two neighbors she gets along with quite well, and at the same time, the transport of Syrian jihadi mercenary forces in a charter flight by Turkey imply that a new abcess the size and type of Idlib is planned to be inserted in the viccinity of both Russia and Iran, which will act as destablization force for future incursions after US elections...

As we talk Azerbaijan is announcing advances in the Southern front and the take over of some localities along Iranian border ...Why? What that has to do with Armenia? To implant there the jihadis for the coming "proxy war" on Iran, the same way they were implanted in Syria/Turkey northern East and West border and Syria/Lebanon Southern border...
Turkey here acting as US proxy PMC to position US managed and funded jihadi forces, as it has done in Syria and Lybia...

https://twitter.com/descifraguerra/status/1310165201073954816

https://twitter.com/descifraguerra/status/1310187962135609344

Also the conflict comes to shoot two, or three, birds with the same shot by starting another military conflict or destabilization process in the Silk & Road path...

This is the US MIC reasuring their rate of profit for the coming US presidency by extending the perpetual war...

Although may well be that they will not even wait for the elections results...

Is Steven Bannon Still Advising Trump? U.S. President Leads the Country Into Dangerous Waters With Latest Iran Move

H.Schmatz , Sep 27 2020 14:56 utc | 6
On the importance of this new conflict and its obvious connection with Iran...See map in thread linked above...Some more sources...Probable objective of past "color revolution" in Armenia...on the grounds of "alleged" US chaotic state...chaos in the US acts as veil for its own population ( so as thvey can not think of continuously started wars while they cop with the immeidate miserable oticome of the pandemic...) and for opponents... who may think of relaxing...Fortunately, Gerasimov, and IRGC, are always attentive...
THE SECOND WAR OF THE NAGORNO-KARABAJ HAS BREAKED In red the disputed region, in the center of which is Stefankert, the capital. In blue the areas supposedly conquered by #Azerbaiyan.

Everything indicates that the Azeri offensive began by surprise in the early hours of today, and has maintained a reasonable pace of advance

https://twitter.com/Political_Room/status/1310189589521403908

On the visible hand of Turkey in this reginition...no way Turkey is moving without NATO consent...and even support...recall "international coalition of the willing to fight ISIS in Syria"...which then turned into ISIS proxy war onto Syrian state and population...

I have been checking and Azerbaijan announced in June that they were interested in buying TB2 from Turkey. In no way have they been able to buy, receive and put the drones into operation in such a short time. It starts to get cloudy.

Twitter turco está diciendo abiertamente que son sus drones. Mientras Clash Report, que ya se ha comentado muchas veces que podría estar ligada a la inteligencia truca (por el acceso que tienen a cierto material informativo) habla de que los drones son Bayraktar TB2.

https://twitter.com/DragonLadyU2/status/1310186956475830272

Shooting is common in Upper Karabakh...but not in Down Karabakh...this conflict as part of war on Russian gas supply to Europe...

Although shooting is common in Upper Karabakh, a disputed area between Armenia and Azerbaijan, this is the fastest escalation in recent times. Just hours after the last incident, Armenia has declared martial law and total mobilization.

Let's not think that this is simply a local conflict between two countries: Azerbaijan is backed by Turkey, while Armenia is backed by Russia. And to this we can add the natural gas that comes to Europe from the Caspian.

https://twitter.com/elOrdenMundial/status/1310140310815731712

In case someone wants to follow, Youtube channel of Armenian TV which sometimes biradcast in Englisgh language...

In case anyone is interested in following him from the origin, YouTube channel with a live signal from an Armenian television (at times they speak in English)

https://twitter.com/carola1292/status/1310150136236998657


H.Schmatz , Sep 27 2020 15:07 utc | 7
@Posted by: H.Schmatz | Sep 27 2020 14:56 utc | 6

Well, sorry, posting too fast, as I must go now, and without time to check two times...
It seems that tweets by #DragonLadyU2 got middle trnaslated...Repost correctly and with blockquote, as it is not, as it could seem by the size of letter, info of mine, but of this account who is following the issue of Azerbaijani drones purchase...

I was introducing it as:

On the visible hand of Turkey in this reginition...no way Turkey is moving without NATO consent...and even support...recall "international coalition of the willing to fight ISIS in Syria"...which then turned into ISIS proxy war onto Syrian state and population...

I have been checking and Azerbaijan announced in June that they were interested in buying TB2 from Turkey. In no way have they been able to buy, receive and put the drones into operation in such a short time. It starts to get cloudy.

Turkish Twitter is openly saying that it is their drones. While Clash Report, which has already been commented many times that it could be linked to Turkish intelligence (due to the access they have to certain informative material), talks about the drones being Bayraktar TB2.

https://twitter.com/DragonLadyU2/status/1310186956475830272

H.Schmatz , Sep 27 2020 15:32 utc | 8
On preparations for this conflict, and who provoked whom...also reflected some intends of transforming this inot religious conflict...which then would reginite the whole Caucasus and Caspian region, and thus would end implying Iran and Russia...and probably palcing them in different sides...which could be one of the objectives, to put a breach into very good Russian/Iranian relations...Beware...
I'm reminded Israeli bizjet associated w secret flights was in Baku, Azerbaijan 3 days ago. Landed back in Israel along w Azeri ministry of defense cargo

https://twitter.com/avischarf/status/1310212966177009665

Now is when certain things start to make sense, airlift of Turkish military cargo planes bound for Azerbaijan on the 24th.

https://twitter.com/DragonLadyU2/status/1310201238403907584


Interesting thread on the preparations for the shipping of jihadis...on preparations time ago..( no idea baout this source I cathed over there...)

https://twitter.com/Elizrael/status/1310164366097027072

I have not been able to verify the arrival of Syrian fighters from the Turkish-backed factions (SNA) in Azerbaijan as of now. I can confirm that dozens of fighters from NW Syria (outside of regime control) left Syria via Turkey in an unknown direction about a week ago.

Families lost touch with these men since their departure. Rumored destinations include Azerbaijan, Qatar, Turkey and Libya. I am in touch with families & friends of men who left and will report once they manage to get in touch with their loved-ones.

About a month ago, rumors spread on WhatsApp among SNA fighters that they can register to go to Azerbaijan. Many registered over WhatsApp, others apparently thru offices in the Turkish-controlled areas.
The fighters registered due to the enticing rumored salaries of $2K-$2.5K

The SNA mercenaries who've gone to fight in Libya against Haftar were recruited with direct involvement by Turkish officers who met with commanders of the SNA factions to pressure them to send fighters. With the alleged Azerbaijan recruitment, there haven't been such meetings.

It seems likely that the recruitment is being carried out by a Turkish private security company that is also involved in shipping Syrians to fight in Libya. There is no need to apply pressure on Syrians to leave anymore. The number of men wanting to go far exceeds demand.

With time, the idea of being deployed oversees as a mercenary is becoming more socially acceptable in Syria, in both communities residing outside of regime control (men in Idlib have registered to go to Azerbaijan too) and in regime areas (where men are going to fight for Haftar)

Syrian lives are regarded as expendable, with Syria serving as an arena to settle geostrategic scores at Syrians' expense. Syrians resisted & still resist this logic, but the collapse of the economy is prompting many Syrians to be willing to sell themselves to the highest bidder.


div> I think that Jihadists have no nationality, therefore it is wrong to label them as "Syrian"!

Posted by: padre , Sep 27 2020 15:47 utc | 9

I think that Jihadists have no nationality, therefore it is wrong to label them as "Syrian"!

Posted by: padre | Sep 27 2020 15:47 utc | 9

H.Schmatz , Sep 27 2020 16:22 utc | 10
@Posted by: padre | Sep 27 2020 15:47 utc | 9

Indeed, that is a multinational proxy force, sometimes recruited in Gulf monarchies jails...

Attention also to the restarting of jihadi attacks in the land of Petit Napoleon...second from some days ago...

ptb , Sep 27 2020 16:40 utc | 11
some confused comments

(1) re: tanks bunched up - the linked Armenian MOD twitter-video with the cheesy music and 2 tank hits ( this one ) suggests it is not artillery? Recently dug cover beind them, but tanks mostly facing toward camera. Bulldozer still there. Direct hits. You can see from the reaction of the tanks what they think is the direction from which they were attacked. After the first hit, the next tank to be hit attempted (unsuccessfully) to hide behind the remains of the tank already destroyed. The others which were not already facing that way, turn their turrets toward the camera, which is the direction from which they think they were attacked. They start making smokescreen as the clip ends.

(2) We really don't need to see a war between Armenia and Azerbaijan.

(3) I don't really get the geopolitics of this. For Turkish strategic motivations, the relevant oil/gas pipeline does not pass thru the contested territory although is quite close. Not sure what to make of that. Map here , with Nagorno-Karabakh colored in under Azerbaijan. Turkey is in danger of being bypassed by Greece-Cyprus-Israel pipeline, how does this this help them in any way?

(4) For US-Iran conflict, just seems like general chaos. Perhaps there is a land route from Russia-Georgia-Iran, but it can't be as good as the caspian sea route.

(5) for Greece-Cyprus pipeline, there may be a commercial benefit, if the reliability of the Azerbaijan-Turkey route comes into question due to war or instability.

vk , Sep 27 2020 17:00 utc | 12
@ Posted by: ptb | Sep 27 2020 16:40 utc | 11

Looks like Turkey has gone rogue. Since the 2016 assassination attempt, Erdogan doesn't trust NATO anymore.

As for (3), it's very straightforward: Turkey probably wants some symmetrical leverage against Russia against the FUBARed situation in Idlib (which is draining Turkish coffers and soldiers). They are probably very desperate, and are looking for something on these lines: "look, Russia, you give us Idlib and we let Nagorno-Karabakh alone the next day. Deal?".

steven t johnson , Sep 27 2020 17:28 utc | 13
The Azeris making advances is to be expected if they had the aggressor's initiative. The post implies the Armenians are winning handily, which is not to be expected when a prepared Azeri offensive kicks off.
Ken Garoo , Sep 27 2020 17:30 utc | 14
Armenia has long been on the US Regime Change hitlist - June/July 2015, July 2017, April 2018 when the Random Guy Pashinyan was imposed as leader. He has the tricky task of balancing the demands of his owners versus the reality of Armenian interests.
p>

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[Sep 27, 2020] Should Trump be changed as a war criminal along with Obama, Bush, Clinton's, and Dick Cheney

Sep 27, 2020 | www.unz.com

Harold Smith , says: September 26, 2020 at 8:24 pm GMT

@Robert Dolan

"Trump doesn't even have the balls to go after the people who spied on him and tried to remove him from office. This is actually the greatest political scandal in American history, yet nothing will be done about it."

I don't think anyone was actually trying to remove him from office (they could've added his war crimes and violations of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations to the impeachment charges if they were serious about removing him). Most likely it's all political theater to fool the people who need and/or want to be fooled.

Biff , says: September 27, 2020 at 12:45 am GMT
@Harold Smith

I don't think anyone was actually trying to remove him from office ( they could've added his war crimes and violations of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations to the impeachment charges if they were serious about removing him). Most likely it's all political theater to fool the people who need and/or want to be fooled.

We are talking about thee most brazen pack of hypocrites, but charging Trump with war crimes with Obama, Bush, Clinton's, and Dick Cheney just standing around just might be a bridge too far.

Harold Smith , says: September 27, 2020 at 5:30 am GMT
@Biff

However, unlike other candidates for the presidency, war and aggression will not be my first instinct. You cannot have a foreign policy without diplomacy. A superpower understands that caution and restraint are really truly signs of strength."

And as we've seen all of it was a lie. Trump's whole campaign was a calculated bait-and-switch fraud. In order to win the election the con man had to steal votes from antiwar voters such as myself just the same as if he'd rigged voting machines.

Trump is a lying, mass-murdering, psychotic, psychopathic, traitorous, Israel-first, America-last hard core militant zionist extremist.

[Sep 27, 2020] The Real Russian Playbook Is Written in English by Patrick Armstrong

Jul 17, 2020 | www.strategic-culture.org

I hadn't given The Russian Playbook much attention until Susan Rice, Obama's quondam security advisor, opined a month ago on CNN that " I'm not reading the intelligence today, or these days -- but based on my experience, this is right out of the Russian playbook ". She was referring to the latest U.S. riots.

Once I'd seen this mention of The Russian Playbook (aka KGB, Kremlin or Putin's Playbook), I saw the expression all over the place. Here's an early – perhaps the earliest – use of the term. In October 2016, the Center for Strategic and International studies (" Ranked #1 ") informed us of the " Kremlin Playbook " with this ominous beginning

There was a deeply held assumption that, when the countries of Central and Eastern Europe joined NATO and the European Union in 2004, these countries would continue their positive democratic and economic transformation. Yet more than a decade later, the region has experienced a steady decline in democratic standards and governance practices at the same time that Russia's economic engagement with the region expanded significantly.

And asks

Are these developments coincidental, or has the Kremlin sought deliberately to erode the region's democratic institutions through its influence to 'break the internal coherence of the enemy system'?

Well, to these people, to ask the question is to answer it: can't possibly be disappointment at the gap between 2004's expectations and 2020's reality, can't be that they don't like the total Western values package that they have to accept, it must be those crafty Russians deceiving them. This was the earliest reference to The Playbook that I found, but it certainly wasn't the last.

Russia has a century-old playbook for 'disinformation' 'I believe in Russia they do have their own manual that essentially prescribes what to do,' said Clint Watts, a research fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and a former FBI agent. (Nov 2018)

The Russian playbook for spreading fake news and conspiracy theories is the subject of a new three-part video series on The New York Times website titled 'Operation Infektion: Russian Disinformation: From The Cold War To Kanye.' (Nov 2018)

I found headlines such as these: Former CIA Director Outlines Russian Playbook for Influencing Unsuspecting Targets (May 2017) ; Fmr. CIA op.: Don Jr. meeting part of Russian playbook (Jul 2017) ; Americans Use Russian Playbook to Spread Disinformation (Oct 2018) ; Factory of Lies: The Russian Playbook (Nov 2018) ; Shredding the Putin Playbook: Six crucial steps we must take on cyber-security -- before it's too late. (Winter 2018) ; Trump's spin is 'all out of the KGB playbook': Counterintelligence expert Malcolm Nance (May 2019) .

Of course, all these people are convinced Moscow interfered in the 2016 presidential election. Somehow. To some effect. Never really specified but the latest outburst of insanity is this video from the Lincoln Project . As Anatoly Karlin observes: "I think it's really cool how we Russians took over America just by shitposting online. How does it feel to be subhuman?" He has a point: the Lincoln Project, and the others shrieking about Russian interference, take it for granted that American democracy is so flimsy and Americans so gullible that a few Facebook ads can bring the whole facade down. A curious mental state indeed.

So let us consider The Russian Playbook. It stands at the very heart of Russian power. It is old: at least a century old . Why, did not Tolstoy's 1908 Letter to a Hindu inspire Gandhi to bring down the British Indian Empire and win the Great Game for Moscow? The Tolstoy-Putin link is undeniable as we are told in A Post-Soviet 'War and Peace': What Tolstoy's Masterwork Explains About Putin's Foreign Policy : "In the early decades of the nineteenth century, Napoleon (like Putin after him) wanted to construct his own international order ". Russian novelists: adepts of The Playbook every one . So there is much to consider about this remarkable Book which has had such an enormous – hidden to most – role in world history. Its instructions on how to swing Western elections are especially important: the 2016 U.S. election ; Brexit ; " 100 years of Russian electoral interference "; Canada ; France ; the European Union ; Germany and many more. The awed reader must ask whether any Western election since Tolstoy's day can be trusted. Not to forget the Great Hawaiian Pizza Debate the Russians could start at any moment.

What can we know about The Playbook? For a start it must be written in Russian, a language that those crafty Russians insist on speaking among themselves. Secondly such an important document would be protected the way that highly classified material is protected. There would be a very restricted need to know; underlings participating in one of the many plays would not know how their part fitted into The Playbook; few would ever see The Playbook itself. The Playbook would be brought to the desk of the few authorised to see it by a courier, signed for, the courier would watch the reader and take away the copy afterwards. The very few copies in existence would be securely locked away; each numbered and differing subtly from the others so that, should a leak occur, the authorities would know which copy read by whom had been leaked. Printed on paper that could not be photographed or duplicated. As much protection as human cunning could devise; right up there with the nuclear codes .

So, The Russian Playbook would be extraordinarily difficult to get hold of. And yet every talking head on U.S. TV has a copy at his elbow! English copies, one assumes. Rachel Maddow has comprehended the complicated chapter on how to control the U.S. power system . Others have read the impenetrably complex section on how to control U.S. voting machines or change vote counts . Many are familiar with the lists of divisions in American society and directions for exploiting them . Adam Schiff has mastered the section on how to get Trump to give Alaska back . Susan Rice well knows the chapter "How to create riots in peaceful communities".

And so on. It's all quite ridiculous: we're supposed to believe that Moscow easily controls far-away countries but can't keep its neighbours under control.

There is no Russian Playbook, that's just projection. But there is a "playbook" and it's written in English, it's freely available and it's inexpensive enough that every pundit can have a personal copy: it's named " From Dictatorship To Democracy: A Conceptual Framework for Liberation " and it's written by Gene Sharp (1928-2018) . Whatever Sharp may have thought he was doing, whatever good cause he thought he was assisting, his book has been used as a guide to create regime changes around the world. Billed as "democracy" and "freedom", their results are not so benign. Witness Ukraine today. Or Libya. Or Kosovo whose long-time leader has just been indicted for numerous crimes . Curiously enough, these efforts always take place in countries that resist Washington's line but never in countries that don't. Here we do see training, financing, propaganda, discord being sown, divisions exploited to effect regime change – all the things in the imaginary "Russian Playbook". So, whatever he may have thought he was helping, Sharp's advice has been used to produce what only the propagandists could call " model interventions "; to the "liberated" themselves, the reality is poverty , destruction , war and refugees .

The Albert Einstein Institution , which Sharp created in 1983, strongly denies collusion with Washington-sponsored overthrows but people from it have organised seminars or workshops in many targets of U.S. overthrows . The most recent annual report of 2014 , while rather opaque, shows 45% of its income from "grants" (as opposed to "individuals") and has logos of Euromaidan, SOSVenezuela, Umbrellamovement , Lwili , Sunflowersquare and others. In short, the logos of regime change operations in Ukraine, Venezuela, Hong Kong, Burkina Faso and Taiwan. (And, ironically for today's USA, Black Lives Matter). So, clearly, there is some connection between the AEI and Washington-sponsored regime change operations.

So there is a "handbook" but it's not Russian.

Reading Sharp's book, however, makes one wonder if he was just fooling himself. Has there ever been a "dictatorship" overthrown by "non-violent" resistance along the lines of what he is suggesting? He mentions Norwegians who resisted Hitler; but Norway was liberated, along with the rest of Occupied Europe, by extremely violent warfare. While some Jews escaped, most didn't and it was the conquest of Berlin that saved the rest: the nazi state was killed . The USSR went away, together with its satellite governments in Europe but that was a top-down event. He likes Gandhi but Gandhi wouldn't have lasted a minute under Stalin. Otpor was greatly aided by NATO's war on Serbia. And, they're only "non-violent" because the Western media doesn't talk much about the violence ; "non-violent" is not the first word that comes to mind in this video of Kiev 2014 . "Colour revolutions" are manufactured from existing grievances, to be sure, but with a great deal of outside assistance, direction and funding; upon inspection, there's much design behind their "spontaneity". And, not infrequently, with mysterious sniping at a expedient moment – see Katchanovski's research on the "Heavenly Hundred" of the Maidan showing pretty convincingly that the shootings were " a false flag operation" involving "an alliance of the far right organizations, specifically the Right Sector and Svoboda, and oligarchic parties, such as Fatherland". There is little in Sharp's book to suggest that non-violent resistance would have had much effect on a really brutal and determined government. He also has the naďve habit of using "democrat" and "dictator" as if these words were as precisely defined as coconuts and codfish. But any "dictatorship" – for example Stalin's is a very complex affair with many shades of opinion in it. So, in terms of what he was apparently trying to do, one can see it only succeeding against rather mild "dictators" presiding over extremely unpopular polities. With a great deal of outside effort and resources.

His "playbook" is useful to outside powers that want to overthrow governments they don't like. Especially those run by "dictators" not brutal enough to shoot the protesters down. It's not Russian diplomats that are caught choosing the leaders of ostensibly independent countries . It's not Russians who boast of spending money in poor countries to change their governments . It's not Russian diplomats who meet with foreign opposition leaders . Russia doesn't fabricate a leader of a foreign country . It's not Russia that invents a humanitarian crisis , bombs the country to bits , laughs at its leader's brutal death and walks away. It's not Russia that sanctions numerous countries . It's not Russia that gives fellowships to foreign oppositionists . Even the Washington Post (one of the principals in sustaining Putindunnit hysteria) covered " The long history of the U.S. interfering with elections elsewhere "; but piously insisted "the days of its worst behavior are long behind it". Whatever the pundits may claim about Russia, the USA actually has an organisation devoted to interfering in other countries' business ; one of whose leading lights proudly boasted: " A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA. "

The famous "Russian Playbook" is nothing but projection onto Moscow of what Washington actually does: projection is so common a feature of American propaganda that one may certain that when Washington accuses somebody else of doing something, it's a guarantee that Washington is doing it. Also by this author

Patrick Armstrong was an analyst in the Canadian Department of National Defence specialising in the USSR/Russia from 1984 and a Counsellor in the Canadian Embassy in Moscow in 1993-1996. He retired in 2008 and has been writing on Russia and related subjects on the Net ever since.

[Sep 27, 2020] PODCAST- Tribute to Andre Vltchek- "West's sadistic personality disorder" by Kevin Barrett

Sep 27, 2020 | www.unz.com

One of the most vibrantly alive people I met, André Vltchek, just died . Though he barely made it past his mid-fifties he got in a lot more living than a hundred average Americans who live to collect their pensions. Allah yarhamhu.

In honor of this great Truth Jihadi we're replaying this 2018 interview:

André Vltchek on West's sadistic personality disorder (originally broadcast May 2, 2018)

The West claims to be the "free world" -- the global leader in human rights, humanitarianism, and free expression. Globetrotting independent journalist André Vltchek , who joins us from Borneo, isn't buying it. His latest essay begins:

Western culture is clearly obsessed with rules, guilt, submissiveness and punishment.

By now it is clear that the West is the least free society on Earth. In North America and Europe, almost everyone is under constant scrutiny: people are spied on, observed, their personal information is being continually extracted, and the surveillance cameras are used indiscriminately.

Life is synchronized and managed. There are hardly any surprises.

One can sleep with whomever he or she wishes (as long as it is done within the 'allowed protocol'). Homosexuality and bisexuality are allowed. But that is about all; that is how far 'freedom' usually stretches.

Rebellion is not only discouraged, it is fought against, brutally. For the tiniest misdemeanors or errors, people end up behind bars. As a result, the U.S. has more prisoners per capita than any other country on Earth, except the Seychelles.

Andre Vltchek's latest book is : The Great October Socialist Revolution: Impact on the World and Birth of Internationalism

Information on his other books and films

Luther Blisst , says: September 23, 2020 at 11:21 pm GMT

Andre taunted rightwing elites and illness – with a passion. I guess one of them caught up.

Living hard seems like a death-wish, maybe it was. Staring at darkness messes people up and he traveled again and again into the hearts of darkness across the planet because he wanted to be a modern Wilfred Burchett. He was one of the greats. My condolences to his family and friends.

Peace to Stephen Cohen too. You both will be missed.

PetrOldSack , says: September 24, 2020 at 11:00 am GMT

André Vltchek was not an intellectual heavyweight. What is fascinating about his life-story is how and who financed. That should be easy for insiders to fish out, and insiders there be.

As to my humble opinion, Chomsky was neither. From all angles, his pre-fabricated prestige, his in-group attitudes, his encrusted prestance, pettiness, pedantry, always within convention, his factoid approach, the channels of communication, the lack of any systemic approach, his "good guys bad guys" copper´ approach, did not warrant the few hours listening in on his tune and omni-presence. His numb personality, contrary to the combative Vltchek is noted as a minor.

Some "intellectuals" have half a page of original content in them over the course of a life-time (not the same as career (n´est ce pas Pinker?)), most have none. "History repeat itself", through the bull-horns of public intellectuals. They both practiced a sort of journalism that is superficial (accent on the superficial) agenda driven.

They both are within the K. B. range.

No Friend Of The Devil , says: September 24, 2020 at 9:07 pm GMT

@Robert Konrad,

Ex-CIA John Kiriakou stated that the CIA was attempting to recruit just about anyone that they were able to starting in the sixties ranging from Hollywood actors/actresses, musicians, writers, journalists, artists, business people, just about anyone. Operation Mockingbird is still widely used even if it is no longer regerred to it as Operation Mockingbird.

brabantian , says: September 26, 2020 at 11:14 am GMT

André Vltchek (1962-2020) was the son of a Czech nuclear physicist father, and a Russian-Chinese artist-architect mother, born in Soviet-era St Petersburg (then Leningrad). He spent part of his childhood as well in the famous Czech beer city of Pilsen.

Here, an article where Vltchek talked about his roots, and his nostalgia for life under Communism in eastern Europe
https://www.chinadailyhk.com/article/134280#How-we-sold-Soviet-Union-and-Czechoslovakia-for-plastic-shopping-bags

Eulogy for André Vltchek by China expert Jeff J Brown

https://www.youtube.com/embed/EmCFRyDLDJU?feature=oembed

Adûnâi , says: Website September 26, 2020 at 2:12 pm GMT

Western culture is clearly obsessed with rules, guilt, submissiveness and punishment.

What culture is not? Every single population on Earth wants to survive, Westerners want non-Aryans to survive, but the mechanism is always the same. The Stasi, the Gestapo, the CIA, the KGB – they all breathed air, and they all tortured dissenters. Turkey was almost overthrown in 2016. The Shah of Iran was, as were Hosni Mubarak and Gaddafi in Egypt and Libya. Bashar is facing quite a lot of criticism for being free – that critique comes in the form of bombs and jihadi freedom fighters. The Saudi Prince is wise for strangling and beheading Khashoggi. The USSR disintegrated after they had shut down the GULAG.

As a result, the U.S. has more prisoners per capita than any other country on Earth, except the Seychelles.

In 2012, the U.S. Committee for Human Rights in [the DPR of Korea] estimated 150,000 to 200,000 are incarcerated, based on testimonies of defectors from the state police bureau, which roughly equals 600–800 people incarcerated per 100,000.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarceration_rate

The World Prison Brief puts the United States' incarceration rate at 655 per 100,000.

Anon [790] Disclaimer , says: September 26, 2020 at 5:27 pm GMT

Okay. If the West is the least free society on the planet, why the heck do all these third-world people keep trying to move there? It is plain that Vltchek's thinking flunks the real-world reality test.

The reality is, the rest of the world is worse off than the West, or people wouldn't keep trying to leave the third world for the West.

Robert Konrad , says: September 27, 2020 at 12:50 am GMT
@Anon ey want to have freedom of their stupid religious beliefs, not freedom from religion. They still don't know that freedom of religion is not worth anything if it also doesn't guarantee freedom from religion.

Thomas Jefferson tried very hard to explain this to them, but Yankee morons have never learned what Jefferson tried to teach them. (With some notable exceptions, though, who, however, have absolutely no political power.)

Vltchek is/was right: American/Western civilization [sic] (siphilization, rather) is bankrupt and inhuman. It can only offer an abundance of material goods and military weapons as if the only goals of human life were material things and warfare.

[Sep 27, 2020] Neoliberalisn means war: two neoliberal state clash in disputed Nagono-Karabakh: Armenia Orders 'Full Troop Mobilization' Against Azerbaijan As Tanks Clash, Martial Law Declared

So a NATO member -- Turkey is supporting Azerbaijan while Russia supports Armenia. Yet another proxy war?
Sep 27, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

Sunday saw huge clashes erupt between the armies of Armenia and Azerbaijan along the already militarized and disputed Nagorno-Karabakh border region. An official state of war in the region has been declared by Yerevan.

"Early in the morning, around 7 a.m. the Azerbaijani forces launched a large-scale aggression, including missile attacks..." Armenia's Defense Ministry stated Sunday. Armenia has since reportedly declared martial law and a "total military mobilization" in what looks to be the most serious escalation between the two countries in years.

Tank warfare unfolding Sunday. Armenian Defense Ministry produced footage (still frame) of attack on Azeri positions.

Air and artillery attacks from both sides ramped up, with each side blaming the other for the start of hostilities, while international powers urge calm. Crucially, civilians have already been killed on either side by indiscriminate shelling . At least a dozen soldiers on either side have also been reported killed.

Armenia's high command has ordered all troops throughout the country to muster and report to their bases : "I invite the soldiers appointed in the forces to appear before their military commissions in the regions," a statement said.

Armenia's military has released footage of significant tank warfare in progress. The below is said to be Armenian army forces destroying Azerbaijani tanks:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/-mJffVrtPLk

And here's more from Sunday's fighting:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/D2jd1bw0AXQ?start=9

The recent conflict hearkens back to 2016, but before that to post-Soviet times. Christian Armenia and Muslim Azerbaijan fought a war at that time in which at least 200 people were killed over Armenian ethnic breakaway Nagorno Karabakh, which declared independence in 1991, despite being internationally recognized as within Azerbaijan territory .

me title=

The first war for the territory finished in 1994, but the region has been militarized since, amid sporadic shelling.

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Dozens of civilians have already been injured Sunday in the major flare-up of fighting, as CNN reports :

While Armenia said it was responding to missile attacks launched by its neighbor Sunday, Azerbaijan blamed Armenia for the clashes.

In response to the alleged firing of projectiles by Azerbaijan, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan tweeted that his country had "shot down 2 helicopters & 3 UAVs, destroyed 3 tanks."

Multiple dramatic battlefield videos are circulating on social media confirming the large-scale deployment of tanks, artillery units, and airpower . Multiple Azerbaijani soldiers have been reported killed, but it's as yet unclear what casualty numbers could be.

Turkey's role in new fighting is attracting scrutiny. Its foreign ministry blamed Armenia and called for it to halt military operations, however, it hardly appears to be a mere outside or 'neutral' observer, given new widespread reports Turkey has transferred 'Syrian rebel' units to join the fighting on Azerbaijan's side .

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These reports of Turkish supplied Syrian mercenaries began days ago, in what regional analysts predicted would be a huge escalation in hostilities in the Caucuses.

Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan late in the day slammed Turkey's meddling in the conflict . Ankara had called Armenia "an obstacle" to peace after the fresh hostilities broke out. Yerevan has now formally confirmed Turkey is supplying fighters .

Via BBC

Given the number of vital oil and gas infrastructure facilities and pipelines in the region , impact on global markets could be seen as early as Monday.

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"At least 16 military and several civilians were killed on Sunday in the heaviest clashes between Armenia and Azerbaijan since 2016, reigniting concern about stability in the South Caucasus, a corridor for pipelines carrying oil and gas to world markets," Reuters reports.

Azerbaijan has also declared an official state of martial law while clashes between the armies are unfolding.

Meanwhile footage has emerged showing Armenia's nationwide mustering of its national and reserve forces :

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Unverified footage of frontline fighting into the night:

https://platform.twitter.com/embed/index.html?dnt=false&embedId=twitter-widget-4&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1310273042929590274&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com%2Fgeopolitical%2Farmenia-declares-war-martial-law-effect-tank-warfare-azerbaijan-erupts-disputed&siteScreenName=zerohedge&theme=light&widgetsVersion=219d021%3A1598982042171&width=550px

"Pipelines shipping Caspian oil and natural gas from Azerbaijan to the world pass close to Nagorno-Karabakh," Reuters reports. "Armenia also warned about security risks in the South Caucasus in July after Azerbaijan threatened to attack Armenia's nuclear power plant as possible retaliation ."

The fighting is expected to grow fiercer along front lines in the disputed region into the night as the prospect of a full 'state of war' is looming between the historic rivals.


[Sep 27, 2020] A note about neoliberal intelligencia

Sep 27, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

by Tyler Durden Sun, 09/27/2020 - 16:40 Twitter Facebook Reddit Email Print

Authored by Eric Zuesse via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

On September 11th, Gallup headlined "Bias in Others' News a Greater Concern Than Bias in Own News" , and reported (based upon polling a randomized sample of 20,046 American adults) that:

" 69% of Americans say they are more concerned about bias in the news other people consume than its presence in their own news (29%) ."

In other words: 69/29, or 2.38 times, as many Americans are closed-minded (prejudiced) regarding information-sources which don't fit their ideology, than are not. Overwhelmingly in America, only Democratic Party information-sources are trusted by Democrats, and only Republican information-sources are trusted by Republicans. Each side distrusts the other's information-sources. Gallup's news-report aptly noted the important fact that "This plays into the political polarization in the U.S. national discourse ."

The more prejudiced a population are, the more polarized it will be. Of course, one would expect this to be the case, but Gallup has now found striking new empirical evidence for it -- that the public's closed-mindedness is greatly increasing America's political polarization. Each side is craving propaganda instead of truth, but each side's voters want only the type of propaganda that is funded by the billionaires who also fund that side's politicians and control that side's 'news' media. Consequently, American politics is controlled by the conflict between liberal billionaires versus conservative billionaires -- totally controlled by billionaires (instead of by the public). There is the liberal herd, and the conservative herd, but they're both herds -- not by the public in an actual democracy. And each of these two herds is controlled by its shepherd, who are its billionaires. ( Here is how that's done. ) Billionaires control each Party and thereby control the Government. This is why the Government ignores the preferences of America's public . As will be shown here, the September 11th Gallup findings help to explain how and why that results.

Neither Democrats nor Republicans can become exposed to the other side's evidence and arguments unless they see those -- the other side's evidence and arguments, both for its own case and against the opposite side's case (i.e., against the case that oneself believes). Not to see the opposite side's viewpoint is to be blind to it, and thus to become locked into whatever oneself believes. This 69/29 is like a jury's rendering its verdict and nearly three quarters of the jurors having not listened to -- and thus not considered -- the opposite side's presentations. That's a frightening situation to exist in any court of law, and it is an equally frightening situation to exist in any nation's electorate.

As a consequence of Americans' strong tendency to be closed-minded, America's politics are, to a very large extent, driven more by prejudices than by the realities that the public are actually facing. Individuals are seeking for sources that will likeliest confirm what they already believe, and are seeking to avoid sources that are the likeliest to disconfirm their beliefs. This is consequently a population that's highly vulnerable to being manipulated, by playing up to, and amplifying, the given Party's propaganda, to which the given individual already subscribes. Republican Party billionaires (by their use of their conservative newsmedia and think tanks, etc., which they control) can easily manipulate Republican Party voters, and Democratic Party billionaires can, likewise, easily manipulate Democratic Party voters, by their liberal media, think tanks, etc. That's billionaires, on each of the two sides, guiding each of the two Parties' voters; and, therefore, the nation is an aristocracy -- a country which is controlled by its wealthiest few -- instead of an authentic democracy (which is controlled not by the numbers of dollars, but actually by the numbers of residents, each one of whom is independently and open-mindedly seeking for credibly documented facts). An aristocracy rules any such land.

The public are not the rulers in such a nation. It's not a democracy; it is a collective dictatorship, by its billionaires (its aristocracy).

Both of the two Parties' voters vote in accord with their billionaires' agenda, but especially in accord with whatever is on the agenda that's shared by both liberal and conservative billionaires -- billionaires fund both of the national Parties: Democrats and Republicans , and thereby control both Parties. Billionaires, in each Party, have their very golden, very heavy, thumbs, pressing down hard upon the scale of any such 'democracy', such that regardless of which group of billionaires ends up winning any ultimate election, the public inevitably will lose, because it's really just a contest between billionaires, who are stage-managing the nation's entire political proceedings. This is like two boxers fighting in a ring, in which the selection-process which placed them there was corrupt; and, so, even if the ultimate winner is not equally corruptly pre-determined, the final result has nonetheless already been rigged (during the primaries). When the contenders have been selected by a corrupt process, the ultimate outcome cannot be a democracy.

https://lockerdome.com/lad/13084989113709670?pubid=ld-dfp-ad-13084989113709670-0&pubo=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com&rid=www.zerohedge.com&width=890

This happens not only regarding elections, but regarding particular issues. For example, in 2002 and 2003, "regime-change in Iraq," and "Saddam's WMD," were just as much agendas of liberal billionaires' media and think tanks as they were of conservative billionaires' media and think tanks (and were thoroughly based on lies ); so, a closed-minded public were actually trapped, into the lies that were agreed-upon by both sides of the domestic American political spectrum -- the sides that are funded and controlled by the liberal billionaires, and by the conservative billionaires. The nearly $2 trillion cost of the invasion and military occupation of that country , and the consequent destruction of that country , were done for America's billionaires, and produced nothing for the American people except that enormous public debt and those injuries and deaths to America's soldiers and to Iraqis. And that's typical, nowadays, in this (just as in any) aristocracy: the aristocracy are served; the nation's public serve to them. (In the U.S., this has caused "U.S. Satisfaction at 13%, Lowest in Nine Years" , as Gallup headlined on 4 August 2020; and it has caused Americas' satisfaction with their Government to have ranged from its all-time low of only 7% in 2008, to its all-time high of only 45% at the very start of 2020 -- well below 50%, for as long as Gallup has surveyed this.)

What all of the billionaires want is what the American public get as their Government. It's bipartisanship amongst its billionaires. That's what produces this Government's policies. It's what determines the Government that Americans get. However, what is basic in making it a dictatorship of the aristocracy-type (such as this America is) is that the population is very prejudiced, not open-minded -- not each individual constantly seeking solid evidence to change one's mind about how society works (what the reality in the nation actually is), so as for one's view to become increasingly accurate over time. Instead, one's myths are constantly being fed. Such a public, as this, are not individuals, in a democracy, but more like mobs, very manipulable .

Often, America's bipartisan views are based upon lies that virtually all billionaires want the public to believe. In such cases -- and these instances are frequent -- the truth is being simply ignored, or else outright denied, by both sides (and by the media, for both sides). Individuals' prejudices are thus being increased, instead of reduced, by what the public see and hear in "the news." Everyone has prejudices, and truth can predominate only if people are constantly skeptical of the sources that they are relying upon -- constantly trying to root out and replace whatever false beliefs they have. This is the essence of scientific method. Democracy depends upon it. Aristocracy requires the opposite. America has the opposite.

Change away from this present situation, to a democracy, would be difficult. On both of America's political sides, there needs to be far less trust of the Establishment (including its politicians, its media, its think tanks, etc.), in order for any real democracy to become able to exist. It's not even able to exist now. And, therefore, it does not exist .

But what is even more depressing is that America's educational system, most especially its colleges and universities, are encouraging, instead of discouraging, this situation, this closed-mindedness. The more educated an American is, the more closed-minded that person becomes -- as is further shown in this same September 11th Gallup news-report :

" Whereas 52% of Americans with a high school education or less are more concerned about bias in others' news than in their own [and 45% of that minimally educated group think that the news which they are reading might be biased] , the figure is 64% among those with some college education and is even higher among college graduates (73%) and those with postgraduate education (77%) [and only 22% of that maximally educated group think that the news which they are reading might be biased]."

The most-educated Americans are the most-manipulable (the most closed-minded) Americans.

No finding in this Gallup report was as extreme as the finding that the more highly educated an American is, the less open that person is likely to be to changing his or her mind (outlook) about the situation. In other words: the more educated an American is, the more closed-minded that person tends to become . Higher education in America increases, instead of decreases, an individual's closed-mindedness. However, other contrasts which were almost as extreme are:

"Those who identify as liberal (80%) are more concerned than conservatives (68%) and moderates (65%) with other people's media bias. "

In other words: liberals are 80/65 or 1.23 times as closed-minded as are moderates, and are 80/68 or 1.18 times as closed-minded as conservatives are.

"While 58% of Black adults are more concerned about bias in others' news than in their own, fully 73% of Asian Americans and 72% of White adults say the same ."

Thus, African-Americans are 58/72.5 or 80% as closed-minded as are Euro-Americans and Asian-Americans.

This is the worst combination possible: it's a closed-minded population, which is especially closed-minded amongst its most educated segment. The leading segment is also the most closed-minded segment. These are crucial agents of the billionaires, and they crucially inculcate into the next generation of Americans the aristocracy's values.

This means that the leaders keep themselves, conceptually, inside a cocoon. They have minimal contact with the most vulnerable members of the society, which is the less-educated members. That enhances inequality of opportunity, throughout the society. Since the most-highly-educated Americans are the group that are the most-closed to opinions which are contrary to their own, it's easy for the most-highly-educated Americans to view individuals who disagree with those persons' views as being simply a "basket of deplorables." Their disagreement then becomes their contempt.

'Facts' about politics are -- for those persons, highly educated persons -- more derived from their values and priorities, than their values and priorities are derived from the political facts. Scientific epistemology is being turned upside-down, regarding political issues, in such a country. Overwhelmingly, some sort of faith, instead of any sort of science, determines what individuals in such a country believe about politics. In every aristocracy, this is the way that both conservative and liberal persons view any persons in the general public who oppose themselves: they're viewed as being a "basket of deplorables." It's the very essence of elitism -- on both sides. (For prominent examples of this: both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump had contempt for each-others' voters -- blotted them out.)

The leadership's minimal contact with the public makes exceedingly unlikely the leadership's compassion, concern about the sufferings that they, themselves, are causing down below. Actually, though every aristocracy claims to want to improve conditions for their public, the reality is that whenever doing that would entail their own losing power, that claim becomes exposed to be sheer hypocrisy -- a lie; often a self-deception, and not merely a deception against the public. Deceiving themselves about their own decency is easy, because they have minimal contact with the most vulnerable members of the society, the very people whom they claim to care the most about (and to be working in politics to help). Fakery is built into each and every aristocracy. Americans' strong tendency to be closed-minded causes the aristocratic con to be widely accepted as if it were instead truth. (Again: the "WMD in Iraq" con was a good example of this -- the aristocracy's media just blocked-out the reality .) Scientific studies have even demonstrated that the wealthier a person is, the less compassion the individual tends to have for people who are suffering.

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Furthermore, since the less-educated persons aspire to be more-educated, they are -- even without knowing it -- aspiring to become less open to contrary views, instead of to become more open to such views. One bad consequence of this is: it strangulates imaginativeness, openness, and creativity, in favor of being rote, rigid, and bureaucratic. Another bad consequence of it is that the authority-figures, in such a society, are, in some important ways, actually inferior to the rest of the population. Moreover, America's colleges and universities are not increasing their students' open-mindedness (as they should) but the exact opposite -- they are reducing their students' open-mindedness. Even if professors are teaching some truths, the professors are training their students to be authoritarian, instead of to be open to a more truthful, comprehensive, and deeper understanding, which encompasses those truths, but also many more -- which the majority of professors either ignore or else deny, because such deeper understanding violates the existing Scripture, or standard viewpoint (shaped by both sides' billionaires). At least in the United States, this is now the normal situation. That Gallup poll showed it not merely weakly, nor even only moderately, but extremely.

This is a perverse situation, which bodes ill for the future of the entire nation. Any country which is like this is not only an aristocracy instead of a democracy, but it is greatly disadvantaged, going forward. It will be disadvantaged both in the arts and in the sciences. Its future will be stultifying, instead of dynamic. Aristocracies tend to be this way. Also, because it will remain highly polarized, its internal ideological frictions will waste a large proportion of the nation's efforts. As a nation, its forward-motion, its progress , will thus largely be crippled, by its internal discord and distrust, between the two warring factions of its aristocracy -- and friction between the respective followers on each side.

This describes a declining culture -- a nation that is in decline.

That's what this poll-report, from Gallup, indicates, as clearly as any poll-findings can.

It indicates a nation in decline.

During the Presidential primaries in the Democratic Party, a major point of difference between the two major candidates, Joe Biden versus Bernie Sanders, was whether billionaires are bad for the country: Biden said no; Sanders said yes. (This was a major reason why the billionaires made sure that Sanders would lose .) In any country where wealth-inequality is so extreme, there can be no authentic democracy. America's extreme inequality of wealth makes democracy impossible in this country. America's other problems follow from that. In reality, it's a one-party state, and that party is controlled not actually by the counts of voters, but by the counts of dollars. It is an aristocracy; and its decline -- to what has been documented here -- follows from that fact. Whatever democracy America might once have had is gone now. It has become replaced by a land of mass-deceptions, which are bought and sold.

[Sep 27, 2020] Looks like Washington is simply playing for time

Sep 27, 2020 | www.unz.com

Beckow , says: September 27, 2020 at 12:39 am GMT

@vot tak – Russia could stop transit through Ukraine tomorrow and switch to LNG and existing underwater pipelines. The fact that they have not done it and signed a limited 5-year deal for 2020-2024 suggests that either Russia doesn't want to do it or it is a political concession to its customers (Germany)

You are right that NS2 theatre by Washington is simply playing for time – they know that they can't really prevail. But it is larger than that: their whole strategy is to delay and postpone. They are trying to delay the inevitable or are hoping for a miracle. But strategically they have lost. Water flows downstream, it is only a question of how fast.

TG , says: September 26, 2020 at 3:01 pm GMT

A very interesting post. I might quibble with some of the finer points, but yes, the world has gone stark raving bonkers.

The Russians are NOT ten feet tall, and the Americans – for all of the idiocy of the ruling elites – still have many strengths, and no matter how badly employed, these strengths will not disappear in a day. Russia might yet get pulled down, if they are unlucky or the elites are corrupted by money.

But there is one difference between the Americans and the Russians that, long term, may be the single biggest factor: more than hypersonic missiles or all of that. It's that, for now at least, the Russian elites can learn from experience, and the Americans, can not (or will not, but same thing).

Consider: after the Soviet Union fell, Russian forces got their tails whipped by the Chechens. The Russians rethought their approach, and in a rematch Russia scored not just a military victory, but an enduring strategic victory: they accomplished their policy goals! A goal that was not just spreading chaos and instability! When was the last time the United States did something like that? Maybe Korea in the 1950's.

Realist , says: September 26, 2020 at 3:09 pm GMT
@Ann Nonny Mouse

I'm waiting impatiently for the collapse of the US dollar, hope to live to see it.

Me too the price of gold will go through the roof.

The Spirit of Enoch Powell , says: September 26, 2020 at 3:13 pm GMT
@Mustapha Mond

The Taliban in Afghanistan and the 'rag-tag' North Vietnamese who successfully fought the Vietnam War might disagree with you .

You can't really use those examples as a way of finalising the inferiority of the Western armed forces vis-à-vis Russia as the latter also did not manage to defeat the Afghans and would likely have been made a mincemeat of by the VC as well.

Russia's performance in Chechnya was also not that great considering the power differential.

[Sep 26, 2020] The origin of Full Spectrum Dominance Doctrine

Sep 26, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Anatol Lieven's recent piece, How the west lost , describes this moral defeat of the 'west' after its dubious 'victory' in the cold war:

Accompanying this overwhelmingly dominant political and economic ideology was an American geopolitical vision equally grandiose in ambition and equally blind to the lessons of history. This was summed up in the memorandum on "Defence Planning Guidance 1994-1999," drawn up in April 1992 for the Bush Senior administration by Under-Secretary of Defence Paul Wolfowitz and Lewis "Scooter" Libby, and subsequently leaked to the media. Its central message was:
...
While that 1992 Washington paper spoke of the "legitimate interests" of other states, it clearly implied that it would be Washington that would define what interests were legitimate, and how they could be pursued. And once again, though never formally adopted, this "doctrine" became in effect the standard operating procedure of subsequent administrations. In the early 2000s, when its influence reached its most dangerous height, military and security elites would couch it in the terms of "full spectrum dominance." As the younger President Bush declared in his State of the Union address in January 2002, which put the US on the road to the invasion of Iraq: "By the grace of God, America won the Cold War A world once divided into two armed camps now recognises one sole and pre-eminent power, the United States of America."

But that power has since failed in the wars on Iraq and Afghanistan, during the 2008 financial crisis and now again in the pandemic.

[Sep 26, 2020] A deal may be possible if the United States is ready to coordinate a new document on the basis of the balance of interests, parity and without expecting Russia to make unilateral concessions

Sep 26, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

karlof1 , Sep 22 2020 22:55 utc | 37

An excellent look into the seemingly mundane but important business of negotiating arms control agreements is offered here: Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov's interview with the newspaper Kommersant, published on September 22, 2020 . Excerpt:

"For our part, we more than once described a balanced and mutually acceptable framework for future agreements in this sphere during our contacts with the American negotiators. Aware of the difficulties on the path forward in light of how widely different our approaches are, we proposed extending the New START as it was originally signed.

"We do not want any unilateral advantages, but we will not make any unilateral concessions either. A deal may be possible if the United States is ready to coordinate a new document on the basis of the balance of interests, parity and without expecting Russia to make unilateral concessions. But this will take time. We can have time to do this if the treaty is extended."

As predicted, the Outlaw US Empire makes an offer it knows will be refused so it can then blame Russia for being an unreliable negotiating partner--a trick we've all seen before.

Lavrov conducted a short interview with Sputnik mostly about Belarus and Ukraine and much of which is a rehash.

[Sep 26, 2020] What is predatory capitalism

Highly recommended!
Sep 26, 2020 | www.amazon.com

Extracted from: From Conflict to Crisis- The Danger of U.S. Actions by Jeanne M. Haskin

CHAPTER TWO: INSTILLING THE ILLUSION OF CHOICE

Selfishness may be exalted as the root and branch of capitalism, but it doesn't make you look good to the party on the receiving end or those whose sympathy he earns. For that, you need a government prepared to do four things, which each have separate dictums based on study, theorization, and experience. Coercion: Force is illegitimate only if you can't sell it. Persuasion: How do I market thee? Let me count the ways. Bargaining: If you won't scratch my back, then how about a piece of the pie? Indoctrination: Because I said so. (And paid for the semantics.)

Predatory capitalism is the control and expropriation of land, labor, and natural resources by a foreign government via coercion, persuasion, bargaining, and indoctrination.

At the coercive stage, we can expect military and/or police intervention to repress the subject populace. The persuasive stage will be marked by clientelism, in which a small percentage of the populace will be rewarded for loyalty, often serving as the capitalists' administrators, tax collectors, and enforcers. At the bargaining stage, efforts will be made to include the populace, or a certain percentage of it, in the country's ruling system, and this is usually marked by steps toward democratic (or, more often, autocratic) governance.

At the fourth stage, the populace is educated by capitalists, such that they continue to maintain a relationship of dependency.

The Predatory Debt Link

In many cases, post-colonial states were forced to assume the debts of their colonizers. And where they did not, they were encouraged to become in debt to the West via loans that were issued through international institutions to ensure they did not fall prey to communism or pursue other economic policies that were inimical to the West. Debt is the tie that binds nation states to the geostrategic and economic interests of the West.

As such, the Cold War era was a time of easy credit, luring postcolonial states to undertake the construction of useless monoliths and monuments, and to even expropriate such loans through corruption and despotism, thereby making these independent rulers as predatory as colonizers. While some countries were wiser than others and did use the funds for infrastructural improvements, these were also things that benefited the West and particularly Western contractors. In his controversial work Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, John Perkins reveals that he was a consultant for an American firm (MAIN), whose job was to ensure that states became indebted beyond their means so they would remain loyal to their creditors, buying them votes within United Nations organizations, among other things.

Predatory capitalists demand export-orientations as the means to generate foreign currency with which to pay back debt. In the process, the state must privatize and drastically slash or eliminate any domestic subsidies which are aimed at helping native industry compete in the marketplace. Domestic consumption and imports must be radically contained, as shown by the exchange rate policies recommended by the IMF. The costs of obtaining domestic capital will be pushed beyond the reach of most native producers, while wages must be depressed to an absolute bare minimum. In short, the country's land, labor, and natural resources must be sold at bargain basement prices in order to make these goods competitive, in what one author has called "a spiraling race to the bottom," as countries producing predominantly the same goods engage in cutthroat competition whose benefactor is the West.

Under these circumstances, foreign investment is encouraged, but this, too, represents a loaded situation for countries that open their markets to financial liberalization.

[Sep 26, 2020] Galloway- Lying industry may be the only sector of Western economies still in full production TAXPAYERS pay for it

Highly recommended!
Sep 26, 2020 | www.rt.com

If you have ever wondered why Syrian jihadists, or so-called 'moderate opposition', got support from the woke liberal West, a recent leak by Anonymous reveals it's because Western governments funded this propaganda.

In the end, it is the sheer childishness of the propaganda which amazes me most, not that our rulers lie about other countries – I have always known that. But somehow there was a kernel of truth around which the web of lies was spun, for example about life in the old Soviet Union.

I began to realise the scope of Western ability to literally invent the most baseless lies only in the run-up to the Iraq War in 2003, and only because I knew more about Iraq than any politician in Britain or America and ten times more than the average made-up telly-dolly chuntering through their auto-cued war propaganda. The women presenters weren't any better.

This all came flooding back to me when I received an email from Anonymous earlier this week and then read Ben Norton's excellent analysis of it all in The GrayZone.

If anyone ever wondered how the hordes of head-chopping throat-cutting heart-eating gay-murdering women-hating 'Jihadists' of the Syrian War ever managed to get a fair press in a 'woke' liberal West that gets hot under the lace collar about JK Rowling novels, the answers are all in the Anonymous leak . The principle answer is that you, the taxpayer, paid for it.

That's right. The blizzard of 'White Helmets' (who made it right up to the Oscars to thank everyone who'd helped them except those that had helped them the most), "chemical-weapons attacks" and all the paraphernalia of a newly "moderate opposition" in Syria – was all paid for by YOU. Millions of pounds of British taxpayers' money was revealed to have been spent secretly on UK support for the throat-cutting coalition of chaos, which for a decade massacred its way across Syria wearing a snow-white Western beard of respectability.

It would appear that while the US (or rather its milk-cows in the Gulf) was paying for the lethal-weapons, perfidious Albion was doing what it does best – lying through its teeth whilst making those being lied to, pay for the privilege. Now that – thanks to the leaks – we know this, it should put us on guard for the next one. Yet somehow it doesn't, at least not for the purveyors of the news.

The Lazarus-like resurrection (and photo-shoot) of Russia's opposition figure and Western darling Alexey Navalny after yet another alleged Novichok (believed to be 5-8 times more toxic than VX nerve agent) attack without so much as a tracheostomy to show for it is swallowed whole in yet another anti-Russian public relations offensive.

ALSO ON RT.COM Caitlin Johnstone: MSM smear merchants target critics of Establishment China narratives

Grown sane men call my television show to talk about 'concentration camps' in China in which, we are told, "a million Uighur Muslims" are being held and forcibly sterilised. This is despite the allegations being largely based on studies backed by the American government and statements by Western media favourite, German researcher Adrian Zenz. Zenz, who is part of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, a US-backed advocacy group, believes that he is "led by God" on his "mission" against China. Meanwhile, according to China's official statistics the Uighur population in Xinjiang province increased by over 25 percent between 2010 and 2018, while the Han Chinese rose by only two percent.

The lying industry may be the only sector of the Western economies still in full production. No need for furlough or bounce-back loans. The lie-machines never still. No smoke is usually detected from their chimneys, but inside, their pants are well and truly on fire.

Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.


[Sep 26, 2020] I see that the German Parliament has NOT TAKEN its red pills these days and is reluctant to swallow the BS.

Notable quotes:
"... On rules based disorder and the capitulation of Merkel and her BND lapdogs to the 'hate Russia' fulminations of the UKUSA morons. I see that the German Parliament has NOT TAKEN its red pills these days and is reluctant to swallow the BS. ..."
Sep 26, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

uncle tungsten , Sep 22 2020 22:53 utc | 36

On rules based disorder and the capitulation of Merkel and her BND lapdogs to the 'hate Russia' fulminations of the UKUSA morons. I see that the German Parliament has NOT TAKEN its red pills these days and is reluctant to swallow the BS. It would be satisfying to see the collective wisdom of the Parliament to exceed that of the BND. But then that is a low bar.

[Sep 25, 2020] The End Of The 'Rules Based International Order'

Notable quotes:
"... Accompanying this overwhelmingly dominant political and economic ideology was an American geopolitical vision equally grandiose in ambition and equally blind to the lessons of history. This was summed up in the memorandum on "Defence Planning Guidance 1994-1999," drawn up in April 1992 for the Bush Senior administration by Under-Secretary of Defence Paul Wolfowitz and Lewis "Scooter" Libby ..."
"... In the early 2000s, when its influence reached its most dangerous height, military and security elites would couch it in the terms of "full spectrum dominance." ..."
"... Bhadrakumar describes how the 'west', through its own behavior, created a mighty block that now opposes its dictates. He concludes ..."
"... Quintessentially, Russia and China contest a set of neoliberal practices that have evolved in the post-World War 2 international order validating selective use of human rights as a universal value to legitimise western intervention in the domestic affairs of sovereign states. On the other hand, they also accept and continuously affirm their commitment to a number of fundamental precepts of the international order -- in particular, the primacy of state sovereignty and territorial integrity, the importance of international law, and the centrality of the United Nations and the key role of the Security Council. ..."
"... The rules are follow the dictates of our western neo-colonial institutions like the World Bank, the IMF et all. ..."
"... Its a pretty simple concept backed by the attack dog of the US military. ..."
"... 'Rules based order' was always a euphemism for exceptionalism of one kind or another. The term was invented to avoid having to say 'rule of law', which invited criticism because even the most minimal amount of law (such as Geneva conventions, ICC etc) was rejected in practice and in policy by the leading members of the actually existing world order. ..."
"... Rumor says the "Wolfowitz Doctrine" also envisioned the balkanization of Russia (the document is still classified, but it leaked to a NYT journalist at the time, who published a report on it). ..."
"... It is not over in the sense that the West hasn't given up in its attempts to take over the world. But as the "exceptionalist" western countries decline, they will go even crazier and crazier and there will be full blown hysteria. ..."
"... In this sense, the rule based order will be over as there will be only disorder and animalistic, crazed western rage and bullying. The West is like a trapped animal. It will start pouncing, raging and snarling like a wild animal. This is the real nature of the West. A hungry wild animal that needs to feed. ..."
"... But behind the liberal mask, there are hateful eyes and gnashing teeth, and hunger and greed for other people's resources. ..."
"... Expressed in words, the West's face says "I'm the best and you are nothing! Give me your stuff! And this is how it will forever be!" ..."
"... As Putin has said, the US is no longer agreement capable. ..."
"... Instead of bringing Russia into the Western liberal democracies (with the threat of major nuclear war now drastically reduced) the now Anglo-Zionist Empire just looted it. ..."
"... Actually the Trump Administration has done far more against Russia than all US administrations from the last 30 years. Do not listen what they say, look at what they do. Right now the US in a full blown Cold War with Russia with ever increasing attacks ..."
"... Rules based international order .... the U.S. functions as the the Supreme Court for the U.N. , 'we have invoked snapback sanctions and extended the arms embargo on Iran indefinitely and are enforcing it'. UN, 'but your vote failed'. ..."
"... Rules based International Order is the dog whistle for global private finance controlled economies. It is sad that we are in a civilization war with China/Russia about who runs international finance going forward and yet there is no discussion of the subject but instead all sorts of proxy conflicts. ..."
"... The US is not just facing relative decline -- the fact that others are catching up in key ways. The US is also facing absolute decline -- the fact that it is suffering a degradation of capacities and is losing competitive battles in key areas. Examples of absolute decline include the Russian and Chinese military-technological revolutions based on anti-ship and hypersonic missiles and air defense systems; Chinese 5G; China's demonstrative success in suppressing COVID and its overall manufacturing power; the declining quality of life for most Americans; and the collapse of American institutional competence. ..."
"... Related to this, we can't separate these dynamics from the political economy of the states in question. China, in particular, is showing that an interventionist state, with high levels of public ownership, is essential to qualitative power, human security, and economic and social development. ..."
"... Psssst, learning Russian is easier than Chinese and we already know a few Russian words, such as novichok. ..."
"... Russia after the Cold War was a shambles and today it remains a weak economy with a limited role on the world stage, concerned mainly with retaining some of its traditional areas of influence. China is a vastly more formidable competitor. If the US (and the UK, if as usual we tag along) approach the relationship with Beijing with anything like the combination of arrogance, ignorance, greed, criminality, bigotry, hypocrisy and incompetence with which western elites managed the period after the Cold War, then we risk losing the competition and endangering the world. [my emphasis] ..."
"... It is not over in the sense that the West hasn't given up in its attempts to take over the world. ..."
"... The contest between the Empire and the upstarts is not over by a long shot. What the West HAS lost is the "inevitability" argument. But for the upstarts to actually prevail in their "multi-lateral" vision, they have to actually entice countries to join them despite threats and intimidation from the Empire. ..."
"... The Empire's power-elite KNOW that Russia, China, and allies of Russia-China don't want to be subject to their "rules-based order". The Empire is actively working to undermine, subvert, and divide the countries that oppose it. While also securing their own territories/population via intimidation and propaganda. ..."
"... On rules based disorder and the capitulation of Merkel and her BND lapdogs to the 'hate Russia' fulminations of the UKUSA morons. I see that the German Parliament has NOT TAKEN its red pills these days and is reluctant to swallow the BS. ..."
"... My late father as an army officer prosecuted Japanese war criminals for their atrocities now the Anglo-Zionists are the pre-eminent war criminals and their leaders loudly proclaim "our values" as a pathological and propagandistic form of projection. Is it possible they are unaware of their blatant hypocrisy ? ..."
"... There is no "international law" and no "international order." There is only relative power. And when those powers clash, as seems inevitable, the world is in for a major nuclear war, and probably preceded by several more regional wars. Meanwhile, the US internally is collapsing into economic disaster, social unrest, political and social oppression, infrastructure failure, and medical disasters. We'll probably be in martial law sometime between November 3 and January 21 if not beyond that period, just for starters. ..."
"... America's "Rules-Based International Order" is a Goebbelsian euphemism for a Lies-Based Imperial Order, led by the USA and its war criminal allies (aka the self-styled Free World). ..."
"... The true nature of this America-led order is exposed by the USA's war of aggression against Iraq (which violated international law and had no United Nations sanction) and its decades-long War on Terrorism, which have murdered hundreds of thousands of people and maimed, immiserated, or refugeed millions of more people. ..."
"... The Empire is very much alive and dangerous. Ask Iran, ask Syria, as the Palestinians, ask the Russians, ask the Chinese. Ask numerous African nations. Even Pangloss was not so stupidly naive. ..."
"... quite right. 'Rules based order' was always a euphemism for exceptionalism of one kind or another. ie US and its "allies" is basically asking the rest of the world to finance their (the US et al) version of a welfare state. ..."
"... China and rest of the worlds foreign central banks stopped growing their foreign exchange reserves (on net) in 2014 leaving the US in a sort of limbo. ..."
"... "Major powers maintaining cooperation, at least not engaging in Cold War-style antagonism, is the important foundation of world peace. China is committed to maintaining cooperation among major powers, as well as being flexible in the balance of interests acceptable to all parties. The problem is the Trump administration is hysterically shaping decoupling and confrontation between Beijing and Washington, and has been mobilizing more forces to its side at home and abroad. Those US policymakers are deliberately splitting the world like during the Cold War. ..."
"... The first 'Cold War' was entirely contrived. The US knew the Soviet Union was weak and had no agenda beyond maintaining security and its own reconstruction after WW2. There was no threat of a Western European invasion, or of the USSR spreading revolution globally. All that Cold War ideology is a lie. And the same lying is taking place about China today. No difference. ..."
"... It's good to see discussion here of the nefarious role of the American far-right neocon warmongers in the State Department, intelligence services and military leadership just before the turn of the new century. What I have never seen clearly explained, however, is the connection between these very dangerous forces and the equally cynical and reactionary Israeli politicians and the Mossad, as well as Saudi Arabian officials. ..."
Sep 25, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

The 'western' countries, i.e. the United States and its 'allies', love to speak of a 'rules based international order' which they say everyone should follow. That 'rules based order' is a way more vague concept than the actual rule of law:

The G7 is united by its shared values and commitment to a rules based international order. That order is being challenged by authoritarianism, serious violations of human rights, exclusion and discrimination, humanitarian and security crises, and the defiance of international law and standards.

As members of the G7, we are convinced that our societies and the world have reaped remarkable benefits from a global order based on rules and underscore that this system must have at its heart the notions of inclusion, democracy and respect for human rights, fundamental freedoms, diversity, and the rule of law.

That the 'rules based international order' is supposed to include vague concepts of 'democracy', 'human rights', 'fundamental freedoms', 'diversity' and more makes it easy to claim that this or that violation of the 'rules based international order' has occurred. Such violations can then be used to impose punishment in the form of sanctions or war.

That the above definition was given by a minority of a few rich nations makes it already clear that it can not be a global concept for a multilateral world. That would require a set of rules that everyone has agreed to. We already had and have such a system. It is called international law. But at the end of the cold war the 'west' began to ignore the actual international law and to replace it with its own rules which others were then supposed to follow. That hubris has come back to bite the 'west'.

Anatol Lieven's recent piece, How the west lost , describes this moral defeat of the 'west' after its dubious 'victory' in the cold war:

Accompanying this overwhelmingly dominant political and economic ideology was an American geopolitical vision equally grandiose in ambition and equally blind to the lessons of history. This was summed up in the memorandum on "Defence Planning Guidance 1994-1999," drawn up in April 1992 for the Bush Senior administration by Under-Secretary of Defence Paul Wolfowitz and Lewis "Scooter" Libby, and subsequently leaked to the media. Its central message was:
...
While that 1992 Washington paper spoke of the "legitimate interests" of other states, it clearly implied that it would be Washington that would define what interests were legitimate, and how they could be pursued. And once again, though never formally adopted, this "doctrine" became in effect the standard operating procedure of subsequent administrations. In the early 2000s, when its influence reached its most dangerous height, military and security elites would couch it in the terms of "full spectrum dominance." As the younger President Bush declared in his State of the Union address in January 2002, which put the US on the road to the invasion of Iraq: "By the grace of God, America won the Cold War A world once divided into two armed camps now recognizes one sole and pre-eminent power, the United States of America."

But that power has since failed in the wars on Iraq and Afghanistan, during the 2008 financial crisis and now again in the pandemic. It also created new competition to its role due to its own behavior:

On the one hand, American moves to extend Nato to the Baltics and then (abortively) on to Ukraine and Georgia, and to abolish Russian influence and destroy Russian allies in the Middle East, inevitably produced a fierce and largely successful Russian nationalist reaction. ...

On the other hand, the benign and neglectful way in which Washington regarded the rise of China in the generation after the Cold War (for example, the blithe decision to allow China to join the World Trade Organisation) was also rooted in ideological arrogance.

Western triumphalism meant that most of the US elites were convinced that as a result of economic growth, the Chinese Communist state would either democratise or be overthrown; and that China would eventually have to adopt the western version of economics or fail economically. This was coupled with the belief that good relations with China could be predicated on China accepting a so-called "rules-based" international order in which the US set the rules while also being free to break them whenever it wished; something that nobody with the slightest knowledge of Chinese history should have believed.

The retired Indian ambassador M.K. Bhadrakumar touches on the same points in an excellent series about the new Chinese-Russian alliance:

Bhadrakumar describes how the 'west', through its own behavior, created a mighty block that now opposes its dictates. He concludes:

Quintessentially, Russia and China contest a set of neoliberal practices that have evolved in the post-World War 2 international order validating selective use of human rights as a universal value to legitimise western intervention in the domestic affairs of sovereign states. On the other hand, they also accept and continuously affirm their commitment to a number of fundamental precepts of the international order -- in particular, the primacy of state sovereignty and territorial integrity, the importance of international law, and the centrality of the United Nations and the key role of the Security Council.

While the U.S. wants a vague 'rules based international order' China and Russia emphasize an international order that is based on the rule of law. Two recent comments by leaders from China and Russia underline this.

In a speech in honor of the UN's 75th anniversary China's President Xi Jinping emphasized law based multilateralism :

China firmly supports the United Nations' central role in global affairs and opposes any country acting like boss of the world, President Xi Jinping said on Monday.
...
"No country has the right to dominate global affairs, control the destiny of others or keep advantages in development all to itself," Xi said.

Noting that the UN must stand firm for justice, Xi said that mutual respect and equality among all countries, big or small, is the foremost principle of the UN Charter.

No country should be allowed to do whatever it likes and be the hegemon or bully, Xi said. "Unilateralism is a dead end," he said.
...
International laws should not be distorted or used as a pretext to undermine other countries' legitimate rights and interests or world peace and stability, he added.

The Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov went even further by outright rejecting the 'western rules' that the 'rules based international order' implies:

Ideas that Russia and China will play by sets of Western rules under any circumstances are deeply flawed , Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in an interview with New York-based international Russian-language RTVI channel.

"I was reading our political scientists who are well known in the West. The following idea is becoming louder and more pronounced: it is time to stop applying Western metrics to our actions and stop trying to be liked by the West at any cost . These are very reputable people and a rather serious statement. It is clear to me that the West is wittingly or unwittingly pushing us towards this analysis. It is likely to be done unwittingly," Lavrov noted. "However, it is a big mistake to think that Russia will play by Western rules in any case, just like thinking this in terms of China."

As an alliance China and Russia have all the raw materials, energy, engineering and industrial capabilities, agriculture and populations needed to be completely independent from the 'west'. They have no need nor any desire to follow dubious rules dictated by other powers. There is no way to make them do so. As M.K. Bhadrakumar concludes :

The US cannot overwhelm that alliance unless it defeats both China and Russia together, simultaneously. The alliance, meanwhile, also happens to be on the right side of history. Time works in its favour, as the decline of the US in relative comprehensive national power and global influence keeps advancing and the world gets used to the "post-American century."

---
P.S.
On a lighter note: RT , Russia's state sponsored international TV station, has recently hired Donald Trump (vid). He will soon host his own reality show on RT . The working title is reportedly: "Putin's Apprentice". The apprenticeship might give him a chance to learn how a nation that has failed can be resurrected to its former glory.

Posted by b on September 22, 2020 at 17:59 UTC | Permalink

Kali , Sep 22 2020 18:18 utc | 1

The Liberal International Order or Pax Americana are synonyms for The Rules Based Order. The plan that was followed for years was the outline given by Zbigniew Brzezinski and the Trilateral Commission in The Grand Chessboard to "contain" the ambition of Russia, China, and Iran over their interest to expand into Central Asia and the Middle East. Brzezinski changed in 2016, so did Kissinger, Brzezinski wrote that it was time to make peace and to integrate with Russia, China and Iran. But the elites had changed by then, newer people had taken over and no longer followed Brzezinski.
circumspect , Sep 22 2020 18:27 utc | 2
The rules are follow the dictates of our western neo-colonial institutions like the World Bank, the IMF et all. We will own you and you will do what we say and those are the rules. Any challenge to our authority will lead to war, economic ruin or both.

Its a pretty simple concept backed by the attack dog of the US military.

ptb , Sep 22 2020 18:37 utc | 3
'Rules based order' was always a euphemism for exceptionalism of one kind or another. The term was invented to avoid having to say 'rule of law', which invited criticism because even the most minimal amount of law (such as Geneva conventions, ICC etc) was rejected in practice and in policy by the leading members of the actually existing world order.
Patrick Armstrong , Sep 22 2020 18:52 utc | 4
Can't resist tooting my own horn.
https://patrickarmstrong.ca/2017/04/29/the-west-actually-lost-the-cold-war-it-turned-victory-into-defeat/
vk , Sep 22 2020 19:05 utc | 5
Rumor says the "Wolfowitz Doctrine" also envisioned the balkanization of Russia (the document is still classified, but it leaked to a NYT journalist at the time, who published a report on it).

.. .. ..

Passer by , Sep 22 2020 19:43 utc | 9
It is not over in the sense that the West hasn't given up in its attempts to take over the world. But as the "exceptionalist" western countries decline, they will go even crazier and crazier and there will be full blown hysteria.

In this sense, the rule based order will be over as there will be only disorder and animalistic, crazed western rage and bullying. The West is like a trapped animal. It will start pouncing, raging and snarling like a wild animal. This is the real nature of the West. A hungry wild animal that needs to feed.

All the liberalism is just self-congratulation about how exceptionalist it is. It is born out of narcisism and self-obsession during the "good times" of the West.

But behind the liberal mask, there are hateful eyes and gnashing teeth, and hunger and greed for other people's resources.

The real face of it is hateful and snarling. And it will be fully exposed during the next 10 years, as the West goes crazy and it becomes a hungry wild animal that desperately needs to feed.

Expressed in words, the West's face says "I'm the best and you are nothing! Give me your stuff! And this is how it will forever be!"

Countries need to stay out from the wild animal and carry a big stick just in case, until it succumbs from its internal hatreds and contradictions.

gepay , Sep 22 2020 19:44 utc | 11

As Putin has said, the US is no longer agreement capable. As b. outlines. the US elites no longer follow the rule of law. This is even true within the US. The US inherited the role formerly played by the British Empire after WW2.

The national security apparatus of both the US and the Soviet Union kept the Cold War going. Notice how soon after JFK was assassinated Khrushchev was deposed. Gorbachev rightly stopped the Soviets superpower regime. As Dmitri Orlov points out - Empire hollowed out the Soviet Union and he sees it doing the same to the US.

Instead of bringing Russia into the Western liberal democracies (with the threat of major nuclear war now drastically reduced) the now Anglo-Zionist Empire just looted it. The life expectancy of Russians fell 7 years in a decade until rescued by Putin.

It can now be seen that the Nixon-Kissinger opening up to China was not to gain access to its large market potential but to gain access to hundreds of millions of cheap, disciplined, and educated workers. The elites starting in the 70s became greedier. Jet travel,electronic communication, and computers allowed the outsourcing of manufacture.

The spread of air conditioning allowed even the too hot south to be a location. First in the US as the factories began their march through the non union southern states onto Mexico. Management from the north could now live in air conditioned houses, drive air conditioned cars and work in air conditioned offices.

The 70s oil inflation led to stagnation as the unionized labor were powerful enough to get cost of living raises. With the globalization of labor union power in the US has been destroyed. As Eric X Li points out China's one party rule actually changes policies easier than the Western democracies.

So China's government hasn't joined in with the West in just creating wealth for the top 1% and debt for the real economy.

As b. pointed out, the Anglo Zionist policies created the mutual benefit partnership of Russia and China. The Chinese belt and road initiative appears to be intent on creating a large trading zone that could benefit those involved. The US is just using sanctions and the military to turn sovereign functioning countries that don't go along with it into failed states and their infrastructure turned to rubble

Roy G , Sep 22 2020 20:11 utc | 13
Now, the US is forced into puppeteering the UN in order to maintain the illusion of the 'rules based order,' even as it slides further and further away from any meaningful international cooperation:

Fortunately for the world, the United States took responsible action to stop this from happening. In accordance with our rights under UNSCR 2231, we initiated the snapback process to restore virtually all previously terminated UN sanctions, including the arms embargo. The world will be safer as a result.

The United States expects all UN Member States to fully comply with their obligations to implement these measures. In addition to the arms embargo, this includes restrictions such as the ban on Iran engaging in enrichment and reprocessing-related activities, the prohibition on ballistic missile testing and development by Iran, and sanctions on the transfer of nuclear- and missile-related technologies to Iran, among others. If UN Member States fail to fulfill their obligations to implement these sanctions, the United States is prepared to use our domestic authorities to impose consequences for those failures and ensure that Iran does not reap the benefits of UN-prohibited activity.

https://www.state.gov/the-return-of-un-sanctions-on-the-islamic-republic-of-iran/

Passer by , Sep 22 2020 20:15 utc | 16
Any type of enmity btw the two countries under Trump is pure theater.

Posted by: NemesisCalling | Sep 22 2020 20:07 utc | 10

Actually the Trump Administration has done far more against Russia than all US administrations from the last 30 years. Do not listen what they say, look at what they do. Right now the US in a full blown Cold War with Russia with ever increasing attacks.

foolisholdman , Sep 22 2020 20:22 utc | 17
Pompeo talks more or less continually about "China's bullying behaviour". To me it is wonderful that he can say this with a straight face. (Perhaps it is a result of his lessons in the CIA on "how to lie better".)All the countries that have engaged with China have benefitted from it, whether as salesmen or as recipients of aid or loans at advantageous rates. The countries that have engaged with America have mostly (All?) lost. (The fifty+ countries invaded and wrecked since WW2 or the NATO "allies" or the countries attacked with sanctions.) Either their economies were destroyed or billions upon billions of dollars were paid to the US MIC. The NATO member countries have got what from their membership? Formerly, they had "Protection" from an imaginary Soviet threat, more recently "Protection" from an equally imaginary Russian threat! Some bargain, that!
Christian J. Chuba , Sep 22 2020 20:38 utc | 18
Rules based international order .... the U.S. functions as the the Supreme Court for the U.N. , 'we have invoked snapback sanctions and extended the arms embargo on Iran indefinitely and are enforcing it'. UN, 'but your vote failed'.

U.S, 'we have the right to seize cargo between any two countries transported in international waters based on U.S. federal appeals court decision even though the transaction in no way involves the U.S. We call this Freedom of Navigation and why we need to have aircraft carriers in the South China Sea and Arabian Gulf'

We are completely and totally insane.

psychohistorian , Sep 22 2020 20:41 utc | 19
Rules based International Order is the dog whistle for global private finance controlled economies. It is sad that we are in a civilization war with China/Russia about who runs international finance going forward and yet there is no discussion of the subject but instead all sorts of proxy conflicts.

Thanks for the posting b as it gets to the core myths around the global private finance jackboot on the neck of countries in the West.

profk , Sep 22 2020 20:59 utc | 22
The US is not just facing relative decline -- the fact that others are catching up in key ways. The US is also facing absolute decline -- the fact that it is suffering a degradation of capacities and is losing competitive battles in key areas. Examples of absolute decline include the Russian and Chinese military-technological revolutions based on anti-ship and hypersonic missiles and air defense systems; Chinese 5G; China's demonstrative success in suppressing COVID and its overall manufacturing power; the declining quality of life for most Americans; and the collapse of American institutional competence.

Related to this, we can't separate these dynamics from the political economy of the states in question. China, in particular, is showing that an interventionist state, with high levels of public ownership, is essential to qualitative power, human security, and economic and social development.

Capitalism might enrich a few, but it is the primary cause of America's relative and absolute decline.

jayc , Sep 22 2020 21:01 utc | 23
US and allied military analysts have been talking over the last year or so of the need to enter a single focus and total "wartime" posture throughout our societies, with all financial and industrial output directed to the "war". This has influenced the information/ propaganda efforts, but also the uptick in military manoeuvres around Taiwan and renewed NATO pressure directed at Russia (including the recent provocative B52 flights). Don't think Russia/China can be tricked into over-reacting, but some kind of loss-of-life military confrontation may be what the rules-based side is looking for as the population at large will probably not accept a "wartime sacrifice" regimen without such.
Kiza , Sep 22 2020 21:26 utc | 26
Very well written article.

Whilst Russia and China are creating a truly new, unique and creative alliance and a market of everything, in Australia the "authorities" are sicking their police dogs on poor grannies sitting on park benches. This image of five brainless armed state goons in a show of force over two quiet little grannies really puts things into perspective. It must be that New World Order that Soros and puppets always talked about.

Psssst, learning Russian is easier than Chinese and we already know a few Russian words, such as novichok.

Leser , Sep 22 2020 21:42 utc | 29
Great analysis b and connecting the dots.

The post scriptum stopped the clock for me. Has our host slipped into our drink there a profound prophecy, disguised as jesting?

Many agree something big will happen (break?) soon, possibly with the elections. The other thing is the Americans' ability to change course, drop all baggage, and run off in a new, even the opposite direction with unfettered enthusiasm (and ferocity). No people has a greater capacity for almost instant renewal, once it chooses to.

I also notice that the spoof takes good aim at The Donald's peculiarities, though in a fair and human way. The proverbial Russian warmth, or a humorous invitation?

Meanwhile, I enjoy my newfound optimism in these dark times. Thanks b!

uncle tungsten , Sep 22 2020 21:59 utc | 32
Thanks b and on Anatol Lieven in the Prospect story (fairy story?)...
Russia after the Cold War was a shambles and today it remains a weak economy with a limited role on the world stage, concerned mainly with retaining some of its traditional areas of influence. China is a vastly more formidable competitor. If the US (and the UK, if as usual we tag along) approach the relationship with Beijing with anything like the combination of arrogance, ignorance, greed, criminality, bigotry, hypocrisy and incompetence with which western elites managed the period after the Cold War, then we risk losing the competition and endangering the world. [my emphasis]

Lieven simply does not see it. Has it ever occurred to Lieven that colonialism just might be rejected by both Russia and China and that there might be no competition? Does Lieven watch too much football?

What is it that endangers the world in Lieven's petite cortex? This verbose Lieven tosh is littered with fancy sentences trawled from here and there but always presented to us from a narrow dimensional mind with limited analysis and seemingly zero interrogation.

again:- "then we risk losing the competition and endangering the world"...

So Lieven thinks the current behaviour of the US hegemon and its collaborator the UK is innocuous? These were the two nations that blithely squandered the "peace dividend" from the end of cold war as he describes and have led us to this time of perpetual war. A perpetual war that he does not mention, does not allude to, does not treat as an important driver behind the current global mistrust and disengagement from the USUK drive for global dominance.

Lieven is putting lipstick on his pig and screaming about losing the competition to the imagined wolf outside his prison.

Beneath contempt.

Jackrabbit , Sep 22 2020 22:09 utc | 33
Passer by @Sep22 19:43 #8
It is not over in the sense that the West hasn't given up in its attempts to take over the world.
I agree. The contest between the Empire and the upstarts is not over by a long shot. What the West HAS lost is the "inevitability" argument. But for the upstarts to actually prevail in their "multi-lateral" vision, they have to actually entice countries to join them despite threats and intimidation from the Empire.

_________________________________

Passer by @Sep22 20:15 #14

Right now the US in a full blown Cold War with Russia with ever increasing attacks.
Yes. We still see the narratives like of Trump as Putin-lover despite the debunking of Russiagate and the clear evidence of Cold War tensions. The incessant propaganda reeks of desperation.

<> <> <> <> <> <>

Some seem to think that the Empire is cornered.

Aha! We've got you now, you scoundrels!

LOL.

The Empire's power-elite KNOW that Russia, China, and allies of Russia-China don't want to be subject to their "rules-based order". The Empire is actively working to undermine, subvert, and divide the countries that oppose it. While also securing their own territories/population via intimidation and propaganda.

!!

uncle tungsten , Sep 22 2020 22:53 utc | 36
On rules based disorder and the capitulation of Merkel and her BND lapdogs to the 'hate Russia' fulminations of the UKUSA morons. I see that the German Parliament has NOT TAKEN its red pills these days and is reluctant to swallow the BS. It would be satisfying to see the collective wisdom of the Parliament to exceed that of the BND. But then that is a low bar.
karlof1 , Sep 22 2020 22:55 utc | 37
An excellent look into the seemingly mundane but important business of negotiating arms control agreements is offered here: Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov's interview with the newspaper Kommersant, published on September 22, 2020 . Excerpt:

"For our part, we more than once described a balanced and mutually acceptable framework for future agreements in this sphere during our contacts with the American negotiators. Aware of the difficulties on the path forward in light of how widely different our approaches are, we proposed extending the New START as it was originally signed.

"We do not want any unilateral advantages, but we will not make any unilateral concessions either. A deal may be possible if the United States is ready to coordinate a new document on the basis of the balance of interests, parity and without expecting Russia to make unilateral concessions. But this will take time. We can have time to do this if the treaty is extended."

As predicted, the Outlaw US Empire makes an offer it knows will be refused so it can then blame Russia for being an unreliable negotiating partner--a trick we've all seen before.

Lavrov conducted a short interview with Sputnik mostly about Belarus and Ukraine and much of which is a rehash.

Passer by , Sep 22 2020 23:07 utc | 39
@Jackrabbit | Sep 22 2020 22:09 utc | 31

I agree. The contest between the Empire and the upstarts is not over by a long shot. What the West HAS lost is the "inevitability" argument. But for the upstarts to actually prevail in their "multi-lateral" vision, they have to actually entice countries to join them despite threats and intimidation from the Empire.

Yes, the big question remaining is to predict what will happen and when. This is what the real deal is. And I'm sure they are working on that in the Intel agencies. It can certainly be predicted that the US and the EU will be significantly weaker in 2030 that today. Will this be enough is the question.

We now have some new information about US long term health as published by CBO. Very interesting numbers.

They predict lower population growth and lower GDP growth for the US than previously estimated, as well as higher debt rates. US federal debt is to reach 195 % of GDP by 2050 under best case scenario.

http://www.crfb.org/papers/analysis-cbos-2020-long-term-budget-outlook

Analysts also seem to agree that the Covid 19 crisis further weakened the US vis a vis China, as the Chinese economy significantly outperformed almost everyone else this year, more than expected before the crisis.

I will also mention two important recent numbers. This year:

1. China, for the first time, became the biggest trading partner for the EU, beating the US.

2. China's retail market overtook the one of the US.

kiwiklown , Sep 22 2020 23:41 utc | 41
Posted by: vk | Sep 22 2020 19:05 utc | 4 -- "....Eurasia is where most of human civilization lives, it's the "World Island" - the world island not in the military sense, but in the economic sense. Every path to human prosperity passes through Eurasia - that's why the USA can't "let it alone" in the first place, while the reverse is not true, that is, Eurasia can give to the luxury of letting the Americas alone."

Excellent observation, VK.

Even if the World Island (thanks for your formulation) trades with itself, within itself, there is sufficient mass to last a century, during which the arrogantly exceptional West might just wake up from their Century of Humiliation.

Meanwhile, inertia alone will ensure that the West forgets that their vaunted "civilisation" was fed, watered, enriched by the Silk Route that came from the East -- from the Middle Kingdom (China) and from the Middle East (which is "middle", as you pointed out above, because all wealth passes through that region).

Paul , Sep 23 2020 0:02 utc | 43
Yes there are rules which are observed more by their breach than their observance: The Geneva Conventions. Just ask Julian Assange.

I find it incredible that the Anglo-Zionist captive nations can sign, ratify, incorporate into domestic law and then sign the additional protocol, making themselves high contracting parties, which requires them to report all and any breaches to Geneva, then ignore all the above commitments. One of these commitments includes educating their citizens on the basic provisions of the conventions. Again they haven't bothered, that could expose their hypocrisy to the public.

Even the bandit statelet signed but I am yet to see just one example of its application in the seventy plus years of its barbaric and bloodthirsty occupation of Palestine.

Interestingly, the conventions prohibit the occupied from signing away one iota of their territory to the occupier. So much for what Claude Pictet's Commentary to the Fourth Geneva Convention calls "alleged annexations." This book is available from the ICRC.

My late father as an army officer prosecuted Japanese war criminals for their atrocities now the Anglo-Zionists are the pre-eminent war criminals and their leaders loudly proclaim "our values" as a pathological and propagandistic form of projection. Is it possible they are unaware of their blatant hypocrisy ?

It seems the New World Order has some familiar and unsurprising antecedents:

https://www.tehrantimes.com/news/452693/New-world-order-pledged-to-Jews-80-years-ago

Hold on tight, hubris is always fatal:

https://asiatimes.com/2020/09/pompeo-threatens-to-light-the-fuse-in-persian-gulf/

Jen , Sep 23 2020 0:09 utc | 44
Uncle Tungsten @ 30:

Anatol Lieven comes from an educated and cultured family in Britain's upper middle class layer. His older siblings - he is the youngest of five children - include a High Court judge (Dame Natalie Lieven), a Cambridge University professor / historian (Dominic Lieven) and a psychologist / linguistics researcher (Elena Lieven). They haven't done badly for a family from the old Baltic German aristocratic elite that used to serve the Russian empire as administrators for the Livonia governorate.

The British Lievens might see themselves as gatekeepers and interpreters of what the ruling classes desire (or appear to desire) and communicate that down to us. Hence their positions in intellectual and academic occupations - no engineers, technicians or academics in the physical or biological sciences among their number.

Anatol Lieven is right though about "competition", in the sense I believe he is using it: it is "competition" for supposed global leadership and influence as only the British and Americans understand it. Life as British and American elites understand it is the annual football competition writ large; there can only be one winner and the worst position to be in is second place and every other place below it. Never mind that what Russia and China have in mind is a vision of the world with multiple and overlapping leadership roles dispersed among nations according to various criteria: this ideal is simply too much for the Anglosphere elites to understand, let alone digest and accept.

Still, I wonder why Anatol Lieven is teaching in a university in Qatar of all places. Family influence and reputation must only go so far.

Richard Steven Hack , Sep 23 2020 0:54 utc | 47
Posted by: lizard | Sep 22 2020 21:59 utc | 29

if you aren't at least a little prepared for a disruption in critical supplies, and choose instead to waste time commenting on online forums, it won't matter how up to date you are on "rules based international order" vs. "international law". at that point the reality will be something like this: if you aren't holding it, you don't have it, and if you can't defend it, you won't be keeping it for long.

Got that absolutely right.

There is no "international law" and no "international order." There is only relative power. And when those powers clash, as seems inevitable, the world is in for a major nuclear war, and probably preceded by several more regional wars. Meanwhile, the US internally is collapsing into economic disaster, social unrest, political and social oppression, infrastructure failure, and medical disasters. We'll probably be in martial law sometime between November 3 and January 21 if not beyond that period, just for starters.

This month is National Preparedness Month. I recommend watching the following videos from well-known "preppers" who have been warning about this stuff for years.

78 Days Will Determine the Fate of America
5 Things You Need To Do Before the U.S. Election

A playlist of 23 videos for National Preparedness Month:
30 Days of Preparedness Collaboration - 2020

And this one from The Urban Prepper, an IT guy who is exceptionally well organized and logical in his videos. I recommend subscribing to his channel. He avoids most of the excessive "doom and gloom" hype that afflicts a lot of prepper channels and is oriented more about urban survival than "backwoods bushcraft" since most people live in cities.
Prepping 101: Prepping Architecture Diagram for Gear Organization

And if you don't watch anything else, watch this one from Canadian Prepper - he's absolutely right in this one and it specifically applies to the barflies here:
What is Really Going On? Its WORSE Than You Think

Jun , Sep 23 2020 1:06 utc | 48
Meanwhile, inertia alone will ensure that the West forgets that their vaunted "civilisation" was fed, watered, enriched by the Silk Route that came from the East -- from the Middle Kingdom (China) and from the Middle East (which is "middle", as you pointed out above, because all wealth passes through that region).
Posted by: kiwiklown | Sep 22 2020 23:41 utc | 39

============================================================================================

Thereby we have the answer to America's longest war:

https://twitter.com/danieldumbrill/status/1290456155286900737?lang=en

Richard Steven Hack , Sep 23 2020 1:19 utc | 50
Oh, and this one from Canadian Prepper in which he muses about whether and why we actually *want* the SHTF situation to occur. This one would resonate with a lot of the commentary here about the social malaise and the psychological reasons for it. Maybe nothing really new for some, but definitely relevant.

Society is Collapsing: Prepare for the Next Phase

uncle tungsten , Sep 23 2020 1:47 utc | 51
Jen #42
Still, I wonder why Anatol Lieven is teaching in a university in Qatar of all places. Family influence and reputation must only go so far.

Thank you that backgrounder explains a lot. Perhaps like Englanders before him he finds Qatar, safe and rewarding PLUS mounds of finest hashish and titillating company. From my understanding it is a grotesque abuser of human rights and everyone has a price.

ak74 , Sep 23 2020 2:15 utc | 52
America's "Rules-Based International Order" is a Goebbelsian euphemism for a Lies-Based Imperial Order, led by the USA and its war criminal allies (aka the self-styled Free World).

The true nature of this America-led order is exposed by the USA's war of aggression against Iraq (which violated international law and had no United Nations sanction) and its decades-long War on Terrorism, which have murdered hundreds of thousands of people and maimed, immiserated, or refugeed millions of more people. These crimes against humanity have been justified by Orwellian American lies about "Weapons of Mass Destruction," "fighting terrorism," or the curious events of Sept. 11th.

This America "Rules-Based" order is one drenched in the blood of millions of people--even as it sanctimoniously disguises itself behind endless propaganda about defending liberal democracy or the rule of law.

Truly, America and its allies can take their malignant Rules-Based Disorder back to Hell, where they all belong.

Two decades of US "war on terror" responsible for displacing at least 37 million people and killing up to 12 million
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/09/09/cost-s09.html?view=print

Erelis , Sep 23 2020 3:01 utc | 53
Posted by: karlof1 | Sep 23 2020 0:50 utc | 44

"Thus your "side note" has no "relevance" whatsoever."

You sound like some podunk UN official from a podunk country trying to impress a waitress in a NYC bar. The Empire is very much alive and dangerous. Ask Iran, ask Syria, as the Palestinians, ask the Russians, ask the Chinese. Ask numerous African nations. Even Pangloss was not so stupidly naive.

uncle tungsten , Sep 23 2020 3:02 utc | 54
Jun #46

Thank you - YES that is the answer and always has been PLUS there will be no pipeline from Iran through Afghanistan to Pakistan and on to China. There will be NO overland pipeline or rail route to sound the death knell to the maritime mafia.

milomilo , Sep 23 2020 3:33 utc | 55
Please vote for trump 2020. no president destroy America from inside like what trump did. The goal is to accelerate American empire destruction and grip in this world. What better way to put such clown along his circus in white house. he will make a mess of everything and will definitely bring America down

i hope he win 2020 and America explode into civil war and chaos. With America destroyed internally , they wont have time to invade Venezuela or Iran

milomilo , Sep 23 2020 3:37 utc | 56
Remember , if Biden win 2020 , American foreign policy will revert into normalcy that means seeking alliance with EU and 5 eyes in a more meaningful way , aka giving them preferential treatment on trade..

all that to box in china and russia , reenable TPP , initiate the delayed venezuela overt invasion other than covert

this is dangerous for the whole world , not that it will save US in the long run but it will increase real shooting conflict with china and russia.. So focus on trump victory in 2020 , the more controversial the win the better , lets push america into chaos

defaultcitizen , Sep 23 2020 3:41 utc | 57
I appreciate the time and thought that goes into a post like this; all without a popup ad trying to sell me ANOTHER item I just bought via Amazon, in spite of the fact that I am among the least likely to want another right now. Voice of reason crying in the wilderness and all that.

The rule The Capitalist Ogres promote as the heart of Civilization is simply the age-old Golden Rule. Those with the gold, make the rules.

j. casey , Sep 23 2020 12:28 utc | 75
In the very short-term (3 months?) what is the outcome of US/Nato seizure of ships and cargo in international water?
chris m , Sep 23 2020 13:42 utc | 79
@ptb
quite right. 'Rules based order' was always a euphemism for exceptionalism of one kind or another. ie US and its "allies" is basically asking the rest of the world to finance their (the US et al) version of a welfare state.

as US et al can no longer fund their own unaffordable welfare promises made to their own electorates, they have to call on the rest of the world to do so (China has been effectively funding the US budget deficit since they entered the WTO.
and the EU (mainly Germany) was doing the same before China's entry into WTO)

China and rest of the worlds foreign central banks stopped growing their foreign exchange reserves (on net) in 2014
leaving the US in a sort of limbo.

chris m , Sep 23 2020 13:47 utc | 80
PS addendum: if you've ever wondered who has been financing the GWOT since 2001; it was the Chinese.
karlof1 , Sep 23 2020 15:21 utc | 82
chris m @80--

Well, you're sorta correct; it was all those nations including China that bought Outlaw US Empire debt. China certainly knows better now and for almost a decade now it's purchases--and those of the rest of the world -- of said debt have declined to the point where a huge crisis related to the debt pyramid threatens all those aside from the 1% living within the Outlaw US Empire. The Judo involved was very instructive.

karlof1 , Sep 23 2020 16:21 utc | 85
"Trump's UN address censured" headlines Global Times article that reviews yesterday's UNGA. Domestic BigLie Media didn't like what it heard from Trump:

"Commenting on the US' performance, many Western media tended to view US as being 'isolated,' and its unilateral efforts 'widely derided....'

"Some US media outlets cannot stand Trump's accusations. A WSJ report said many Democrats blamed Trump for "isolating the US and diluting American influence in the WHO or other bodies."

It went on to say Trump's threat of withdrawal is often used as leverage to "influence partner countries, or get allies to pay more for shared defense."

"Some US media linked Trump's address to his widely blamed effort to re-impose sanctions on Iran, saying his address came as 'UN members push back against Washington,' AP reported.

"Wednesday's Washington Post article reported that the Trump administration walked on a 'lonely path' at the UN where the US attacked WHO, and embarked on the 'widely derided' effort to snap back Iran sanctions.

"A week before the UN General Assembly, US media NPR predicted that the US 'appeared to be isolated' at this year's General Assembly, saying that Trump's 'America First' agenda left him out of sync with America's traditional allies as it has a long record of pulling out of international agreements, including one meant to tackle the world's climate crisis."

So, Trump's attack on China's environmental record was beyond hypocritical and ought to be termed psychopathic prevarication. The best comment from the article well describes the Trumptroll @53:

"'Trump's smears and attacks against China were apparently aimed at campaigning for his reelection. Only his die-hard fans - those who do not care about truth but support him - will buy his words ,' Ding Yifan, a researcher at the Institute of World Development of the Development Research Center of the State Council, told the Global Times." [My Emphasis]

And isn't that really the basic issue--the truth? 75 years of lies by the Outlaw US Empire to cover it's continuous illegalities and subversion of its own fundamental law while killing and displacing tens of millions of people. Guardian of the Free World my ass! More like Guardian of the Gates of Hell.

vk , Sep 23 2020 16:40 utc | 86
More on the situation of the "rules based international order":

The Eurozone economy stopped recovering and stagnated in September (PMI)

And here's a more general picture on the state of global capitalism today:

The 90% world economy (UNCTAD report)

karlof1 , Sep 23 2020 16:45 utc | 87
Yes, I'm biased, but anyone seeking truth and invoking the Rule of Law would find themselves at odds with the Outlaw US Empire. Today's Global Times Editorial makes the following key observations:

"Major powers maintaining cooperation, at least not engaging in Cold War-style antagonism, is the important foundation of world peace. China is committed to maintaining cooperation among major powers, as well as being flexible in the balance of interests acceptable to all parties. The problem is the Trump administration is hysterically shaping decoupling and confrontation between Beijing and Washington, and has been mobilizing more forces to its side at home and abroad. Those US policymakers are deliberately splitting the world like during the Cold War.

"The impulse to promote a cold war is the ultimate version of unilateralism, and shows dangerous and mistaken arrogance that the US is almighty. Everyone knows that the US is declining in its competitiveness under the rules-based international system the US itself initiated and created. It wants to build a new system more beneficial to itself, and allow the US to maintain its advantage without making any effort. This is simply impossible."

My research is pointing me to conclude the First Cold War was contrived so the Outlaw US Empire could impose privately owned finance and corporations and the political-economies connected to them upon the world lest the collective forces that were the ones to actually defeat Fascism gain control of their national governments and shape their political-economies into the public/collectively owned realm where the benefits would flow to all people instead of just the already powerful. That's also the intent of imposing a Second Cold War. Some seem to think there's no ideological divide at play, but as I've ceaselessly explained there most certainly is, thus the intense demonization of both Russia and China--the Strategic Competition also is occurring in the realm of Ideas. And the only tools available for the Outlaw US Empire to use are lies, since the truths involved would encourage any neutral nation to join the Win-Win vision of China and Russia, not the Zero-sum bankruptcy pushed by the Parasites controlling the Empire.

psychohistorian , Sep 23 2020 17:07 utc | 88
@ karlof1 | Sep 23 2020 15:56 utc | 84 and forward with the links and quotes...thanks

I do like the confirmation Pepe quote, thanks

It is sad to understand that much of the US population does not have the mental clarity to see that Trump is no different than Biden when it comes to fealty to the God of Mammon. Way too many Americans think that replacing Trump with Biden will make things all better.

The end of the rules based international order/global private finance cannot end soon enough, IMO

Timothy Hagios , Sep 23 2020 17:19 utc | 90
farm ecologist @ 89

Patrick Armstrong publishes the sitreps (and other content) at https://patrickarmstrong.ca/

karlof1 , Sep 23 2020 18:07 utc | 92
psychohistorian @88--

Thanks for your reply! As I discussed with the Missus last night, IMO only the people regaining control over the federal government can rescue themselves from the multiple dilemmas they face--the most pressing being the Debt Bomb and control of the monetary and fiscal systems by private entities as exemplified by the Federal Reserve and Wall Street, both of which employ the Financial Parasites preying on the nation's body-politic. Undoing all the past wrongs requires both Congress and the Executive be captured by The People who can then write the laws to end the wrongs while arresting and prosecuting those responsible for the last 20+ years of massive fraud. The biggest components would be ending the Federal Reserve, Nationalizing all the fraudster banks, writing down the vast majority of debt, and disbanding NATO thus ending the overseas empire. Those are the most fundamental steps required for the USA to avoid the coming calamity brought about by the Neoliberals. I also have finally developed my thesis on where, why and how that philosophy was developed and put into motion.

profk , Sep 23 2020 18:16 utc | 94
karlof,

The first 'Cold War' was entirely contrived. The US knew the Soviet Union was weak and had no agenda beyond maintaining security and its own reconstruction after WW2. There was no threat of a Western European invasion, or of the USSR spreading revolution globally. All that Cold War ideology is a lie. And the same lying is taking place about China today. No difference.

The key issues for the US were:

1. it needed western european capitalist states to buy US manufactured exports. Those states had to remain capitalist and subordinate to the US, i.e. to avoid what Acheson called 'neutralism' in world politics.

2. the US wanted gradual decolonization of the British and French empires so that US firms could access markets and resources in those same territories. but the US feared revolutionary nationalism in the colonies and the potential loss of market access by the former colonial powers, which would need resources from the post-colonial world to rebuild after WW2.

The key event which cemented the 'Cold War' in Europe was the division of Germany, which Carolyn Eisenberg shows was entirely an American decision, in her important book, Drawing the Line.

The driving force of all this, though, was the economic imperatives of US capitalism. The US needed to restore and save capitalism in Western Europe and Japan, and the Cold War was the ideological framework for doing so. The Cold War ideology also allowed the US to frame its meddling in Korea, Guatemala, Iran, etc.

The late historian Gabriel Kolko wrote the best analyses of these issues. His work is much better than the New Left 'revisionist' US historians.

karlof1 , Sep 23 2020 20:01 utc | 96
profk @94--

I agree with your recap and second your appraisal of Gabriel Kolko. Eisenberg's work somehow escaped my view but will no longer thanks to your suggestion.

But I see more to it all as the First Cold War had to occur to promote the financialization of the USA's industrial Capitalism which began within the USA in 1913 and was abruptly interrupted by the various market crashes, the failure of the international payments system and subsequent massive deflation and Great Depression. A similar plan to outsource manufactures to its colonies and commonwealth and financialize its economy was began in the UK sometime after the end of the US Civil War. At the time in England, the school of Classical Political-Economists and their political allies (CPE) were attempting to rid the UK and the rest of Europe of the last vestiges of Feudalism that resided in the Rentier and Banking Classes, the former being mostly populated by Royalty and its retainers. Land Rent was the primary source of their income while it was the stated intent of the CPE to change the tax burden from individuals and businesses to that of Land Rent and other forms of Unearned Income. That movement came swiftly on the heels of the abolition of the Slave Trade which was a vast source of Royal income. Recognizing this threat to the basis of their wellbeing, the Royals needed to turn the tables but in such a manner where their manipulation was secret because of the vast popularity of the CPE's agenda. Thus began the movement to discredit the CPE and remove their ideas from discourse and later completely from the history of political-economy. And there was another problem--German Banks and their philosophy inspired by Bismarck to be totally supportive of German industry, which provided the impetus for its own colonial pursuits primarily in Africa.

Within that paragraph is my thesis for the rise of Neoliberalism, much of which Dr. Hudson documents but hasn't yet gotten to/revealed the root cause of the counter revolution against the CPE. IMO, that reactionary movement underlies far more, particularly the growing animosity between the UK and Germany from 1875 to 1914. As Eisenberg's research proves, there's much more past to be revealed that helps to resolve how we arrived at the times we now face.

karlof1 , Sep 23 2020 20:16 utc | 97
CitizenX @95--

Indeed, as Hudson and Max Keiser ask: Why pay taxes at all since the Fed can create all the credit required. I've written about the pros and cons of Secession here before which are quite similar to those existing in 1861. In Washington for example, how to deal with all the Federal property located there. Just as Ft. Sumter didn't belong to South Carolina, the many military bases there don't belong to Washington. Trying to seize it as the South Carolinians attempted in 1861 merely creates the casus belli sought by Trump. Now if you could get the vast majority of the military stationed in Washington to support your cause, your odds of resisting would greatly improve.

IMO, trying to regain public control over the Federal government would be much easier.

uncle tungsten , Sep 23 2020 21:21 utc | 98
karlof1 #85

Thank you brother karlof1, YES, the minotaur indeed but where is Theseus and Ariadne when we need them? Please don't tell me that Biden and Harris are the 'chosen ones' - that would mock the legend and prove that the gods are truly crazy :))

karlof1 , Sep 23 2020 22:48 utc | 101
ooops *elicit* uncle tungsten @98--

Well, they've clearly been chosen; they're just not THE CHOSEN and IMO would never qualify.

By contrast, here's Maduro's UNGA statement , a man clearly superior in all respects to either Biden or Trump or any of their vassals.

karlof1 , Sep 24 2020 0:31 utc | 103
It seems to me that a review is required, that we need to turn back the clock to an earlier analysis whose veracity has only been boosted by subsequent events. So here from 2011: "On November 3, 2011, Alan Minsky interviewed me on KPFK's program, 'Building a Powerful Movement in the United States' in preparation for an Occupy L.A. teach-in." Here's a brief excerpt to remind people what this is all about:

"Once people realize that they're being screwed, that's a pre-revolutionary situation. It's a situation where they can get a lot of sympathy and support, precisely by not doing what The New York Times and the other papers say they should do: come up with some neat solutions. They don't have to propose a solution because right now there isn't one – without changing the system with many, many changes. So many that it's like a new Constitution. Politics as well as the economy need to be restructured. What's developing now is how to think about the economic and political problems that are bothering people. It is not radical to realize that the economy isn't working. That is the first stage to realizing that a real alternative is needed. We've been under a radical right-wing attack – and need to respond in kind. The next half-year probably will be spent trying to spell out what the best structure would be."

Billosky , Sep 24 2020 6:19 utc | 104
It's good to see discussion here of the nefarious role of the American far-right neocon warmongers in the State Department, intelligence services and military leadership just before the turn of the new century. What I have never seen clearly explained, however, is the connection between these very dangerous forces and the equally cynical and reactionary Israeli politicians and the Mossad, as well as Saudi Arabian officials.

Like many others, I have been slowly won over to the position that the attacks of 9-11, and especially the totally unprecedented collapses of the three WTC towers, could only have been caused by the precisely timed explosion of previously installed demolition materials containing nanothermite. But if one accepts that position the immediately subsequent question is "Who planned and carried out the attacks?" Many people have claimed it was the Mossad, others that it was the Mossad in concert with the US neocons etc., -- many of whom were Israeli/US dual citizens -- but even now, so many years after the horrific events, I can find no coherent account of how such conspirators, or any others for that matter, might actually have carried out WTC building demotions. Do any of you know of sources on the matter that have made good progress on connecting the dots and explaining what precisely happened -- the easier part -- and how exactly it was carried out, by whom, and how they have managed to get away with it for all this time?

Piotr Berman , Sep 24 2020 14:04 utc | 106
Lieven: If the US (and the UK, if as usual we tag along) approach the relationship with Beijing with anything like the combination of arrogance, ignorance, greed, criminality, bigotry, hypocrisy and incompetence with which western elites managed the period after the Cold War, then we risk losing the competition and endangering the world.[my emphasis]

Uncle Tungsten: Lieven simply does not see it. Has it ever occurred to Lieven that colonialism just might be rejected by both Russia and China and that there might be no competition? Does Lieven watch too much football?

What is it that endangers the world in Lieven's petite cortex?
-------
It is clear to me that Tungsten does not understand Lieven because Lieven does not cross all t's and dot all i's. There can be two reasons for Lieven style: (1) a British style, leaving some conclusions to the reader, it is not elegant to belabor the obvious (2) Lieven works in a pro-Western feudal state and that particular piece appeared in a neo-liberal outfit where it is already a clear outlier toward (what I see as) common sense. Neo-liberals view themselves as liberals, "tolerating a wide spectrum of opinion", but with clear limits about the frequency and content for the outliers of their tolerance.

Back to "endangering the world", how "loosing competition to China" can result in huge mayhem? I guess that Tungsten is a little dense here. The sunset of Anglo-Saxon domination can seem like the end of the world for the "members" of that domination. But a longer historical perspective can offer a much darker vision of the future. First, there is a clash of two blocks, one with superior industrial production, domination of markets of assorted goods -- both as importer and exporter, etc, the other with still superior military technology and combative spirit.

Recall (or check) the situation in east Asia ca. 1240 AD. One of the major power was Song China, after a calamitous defeat roughly 300 years later, diminished Song China succeeded in developing all kinds of practical and beautiful goods and vibrant commerce while having quite inept military. The second major power was the Mongols. You can look up the rest.

USA stresses the military types of pressures, and seeing its position slipping too far, they may resort to a series of gigantic "provocations" -- from confiscation of property by fiat, like they did to Venezuela, to piracy on open seas, no cargoes can move without their approval and tribute, from there things can escalate toward nuclear war.

More generally, western decline leads to decrease of wealth affecting the lower classes first but gradually reaching higher, enmity toward competitors, then hatred, such processes can have dire consequences.

Importantly, these are speculations, so stopping short of spelling them out is reasonable. However, give some credit to Lieven for "the combination of arrogance, ignorance, greed, criminality, bigotry, hypocrisy and incompetence with which western elites managed the period after the Cold War".

Noirette , Sep 24 2020 16:24 utc | 108
On the rule-based world order. Scattered thoughts.

The article by Lieven was good in one aspect: it at least mentioned the crazy economic template aka imho 'religion' that lead to a part of this mess. For the rest, hmm. The 'rules based international order' was always pretty much a phoney scaffold, used for presentation to hide, cover up, legitimised many goings on (after WW2 I mean.)

Like a power-point extolling xyz product, with invented or 'massaged' charts and all., with tick boxes for what it positive or followed. (Fairness, Democracy, etc. etc. as 'Natural' 'Organic' etc. Total BS.)

In these kinds of discussions I am always reminded of the 'rights of the child' which in CH are taught in grade 3-5, with a boiled down text, logo type pix, etc. It is very tough on teachers, and they often only pretend to push the content. There are many immigrant children in CH and the natives know that the 'rights' are not respected and not just in 'jungles' (anarchist / animalistic hot spots) as they say. The kids go nuts - as they still more or less believe that they 'have a voice' as it called -- the parents follow the kids, lotsa troubles. OK, these are aspirations - but 'democracy' (purposely used as a calling card following advice from a well-know ad agency..) is so as well. And presenting aspirations that can't possibly be achieved in any way, when not a smiley joke about meeting God or flying to Mars, and is socially important, is not well received.

Anyway, since the invasion of Iraq (totally illegal according to any standards) leading to the biggest demos in the world ever, a loud indignant cry, which invasion the UN condoned, ppl (in my experience, in CH, F, It) no longer have a shred of belief in 'international rules'. Which of course makes them more 'nationalist' in the sense of acting in the community, close at hand, as the Intl order is a shit-scene.

Passer by , Sep 24 2020 20:06 utc | 109
Do you have sources for the last two facts, about China overtaking the US as main trading partner to Europe and as retail market?

Posted by: fx | Sep 24 2020 11:41 utc | 105

China becomes EU's top trading partner from Jan-July: Eurostat

https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202009/17/WS5f63070da31024ad0ba7a2fa.html

China retail market expected to overtake US this year

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/china-overtake-u-world-largest-135614391.html

https://www.asiatimesfinancial.com/we-will-be-top-economy-by-year-end-china-media-outlet-says

[Sep 25, 2020] Andre Vltchek was a great warrior, the world was kept informed by this wonderful spirit and passionate mind. I am very sad to hear of his passing.

Sep 25, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

uncle tungsten , Sep 22 2020 22:15 utc | 34

Colm O' Toole #26
Andre Vltchek whose done some great reporting on China, Russia, and the Middle East over the years was found dead today in Turkey.

Vale great warrior, the world was kept informed by this wonderful spirit and passionate mind. I am very sad to hear of his passing.

His works.

David G , Sep 22 2020 22:23 utc | 35
Colm O' Toole | Sep 22 2020 21:41 utc | 26:

I learned about places I've never been reading Vltchek. He will be missed by many.

Jen , Sep 22 2020 23:03 utc | 38
Colm O'Toole @ 26, Uncle Tungsten @ 32, David G @ 33:

I am also sad to hear of Andre Vltchek's passing. He used to be an occasional contributor to Off-Guardian.org.

His death is being treated as suspicious by Turkish police authorities. I myself am rather puzzled by the decision to travel overnight by car from Samsun to Istanbul, given his state of health (according to the report that Colm O'Toole linked to) and the length of the car journey (about nine hours) when he could have travelled by plane.

willie , Sep 23 2020 7:20 utc | 64
R.I.P DR.Stephen Cohen.

R.I.P. Andre Vitchek.

Maybe his latest outcry hindered some :

https://www.opednews.com/articles/Now-West-Should-Sit-On-Its-by-Andre-Vltchek-Brainwashing_China_Colonialism_Denial-200912-597.html

[Sep 24, 2020] Deceptive hope worked at Euromaidan in 2014 and now became major tool of fueling the protests by Leonid SAVIN

S o first neoliberal plunder the country dry and then they offer hope of "Eurointergation" as a carrot and organize a color revolution to overthouth the government. Is not this brilliant?
A nd as people want ot live "as in Europe" (often without understanding realities and seeing only tourist facade of the countries) this desire can become a door opener of the color revolution.
Another factor is that neoliberalism lifts the standard of living of top 10% or 5 % of the population and create powerful fifth column of compradors oriented on the West (a part of programmers and IT workers, large part of other well-paid professionals (such as corporate lawyers, medical professionals, etc), naive or crooked students, employees of joint ventures, etc) who can be relied on during the protest. Social network also simplify organization of frustrated underachievers and net hamsters for the protests.
Notable quotes:
"... From Ukraine's Euromaidan in 2014, we know that hope can be rather deceptive and elusive. It hovers within touching distance during protests and is an additional incentive, but it never becomes a reality. Disillusionment and frustration do not set in until it is already too late, by which time power has fallen into the hands of those who immediately tighten the screws and have no intention of discussing anything with the people. ..."
orientalreview.org

Colour revolutions and other forms of outside interference in state affairs are changing. This is both logical and natural, since government bodies adapt to change, find ways to counter threats, and retain the right to use legitimate force, which, according to Max Weber, is one of the features of the modern state. But no sooner do the world's leading centres for interference and destabilisation start feeling for new vulnerabilities in state systems than there is yet another attempted coup or an attack on a state system. This kind of instability is not desirable for any country, since it could gradually weaken the immunity of sovereignty. As a consequence, the transformation of protest movements should be of particular interest since, by understanding their development, it will be possible to predict protesters' and rioters' course of action. The protests in Belarus show that this is not what happened there, and the authorities were forced to respond quickly to the situation.

For an adequate understanding of anti-government strategies, it is necessary to turn, first of all, to the methods used by those organising the protests and coups.

In his article " Protests and Principles ", Srđa Popović, a well-known activist, organiser of colour revolutions and executive director of CANVAS, writes that the ideological and geopolitical factors focussed on by the media are insufficient to fully understand what's going on and evaluate the protests. He suggests paying attention to the structural conditions that differ in different countries, as well as the outcomes of movements. Popović concludes that the protests in recent years have shown a certain trend – "the traditional and institutional ways of creating change – elections, legal systems and dialogue with the elites – are insufficiently effective. So protesters have decided to utilize another form of power to force constructive change."

Executive director of CANVAS Srđa Popović

Further on, he asks: "If geography and ideology don't determine success, what does?" He outlines four key principles. One – a clear vision of the future. Two – a united opposition that should have a good understanding of who its allies are and who is neutral. Three – key pillars, which could be the media, business sectors, social institutions and government agencies (particularly security agencies that could be enticed over to the opposition). Four – attraction, which is a common element in many protest movements, since they position themselves as fighters of injustice.

At the same time, Popović admits that anger (and therefore also violence) is an effective tool for mobilisation, but it should be combined with hope, otherwise it will play a destructive role.

It is with a regretful sigh that Popović writes about the failed "revolutions" in Hong Kong and Venezuela, for which he partially blames the opposition. The problem with the former was the violence used against the police, and with the latter it was that Juan Guaidó put all his efforts into winning over the military and overthrowing Maduro with a coup.

In summary, Srđa Popović argues that initial conditions and context matter, but strategic skills matter even more. And it is difficult to disagree. After all, an initial flash of protest can be suppressed, activist cells can be liquidated, and crowds can be dispersed. And if there is no definite plan of action for how to act in a given situation, then any protest, whether peaceful or violent, will come to nothing.

Needless to say, the information in Popović's article is for naive readers and written with the utmost care so as to rule out any possible accusations of anti-state activities. All the advice is given from the standpoint of protecting democratic values. Therefore, one needs to be able to read between the lines and draw conclusions from past coups.

From Ukraine's Euromaidan in 2014, we know that hope can be rather deceptive and elusive. It hovers within touching distance during protests and is an additional incentive, but it never becomes a reality. Disillusionment and frustration do not set in until it is already too late, by which time power has fallen into the hands of those who immediately tighten the screws and have no intention of discussing anything with the people.

CANVAS, however, is an organisation that develops strategic action plans for particular countries. Judging by its recent online summer academy , CANVAS was actively involved in the overthrow of Bolivian President Evo Morales, supported protests in Sudan, Zimbabwe and Brazil, and has close ties with opposition groups in Malaysia, the Philippines and Georgia.

Peter Ackerman

Popović's views on the strategic planning of coups is shared by Peter Ackerman , former chair of the board of trustees of Freedom House, and board member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the NATO Atlantic Council. Ackerman believes that " the talented execution of even the simplest nonviolent tactics can alter the psychology of a population and the behavior of a regime ." He also believes that the consolidated efforts of hundreds of small organisations can have a cumulative effect and make it look like there is a unity of opinion and effort. This explains why, in Ukraine, the West actively supported both the radical nationalists and the liberals, which is basically like crossing a grass snake with a viper, given that these two groups have radically different ideologies. A similar situation can be seen in Belarus, where the muscle was provided by home-grown nationalists (symbolism associated with Nazi collaborators during the war was openly used at protests), while representatives of sexual minorities were included on various opposition councils.

The International Center on Nonviolent Conflict , which was founded by Ackerman and whose headquarters are in Washington, does similar work to CANVAS. In partnership with Rutgers University (New Jersey), the centre has been running online courses for activists since 2012. These not only cover the theory of protest movements and provide specific examples, but also adapt new techniques. It is noticeable that the course developers are seeking out new frontiers in resistance movements – how to exploit culture and religion, or how to target corporations (since corporations can be state-owned, by focusing on a problem related to the company's activities, attention can then be turned to the government itself).

George Soros's son Alexander Soros with Hashim Thachi

The activities of another institution, the United States Institute of Peace, cover 52 states , and, in a number of countries (such as China and Iran), they are carried out indirectly, using local agents and manipulating facts to its advantage. Thus, a recent report on Russia's interest in conflict zones states that " Russia's activities in conflict zones usually directly or indirectly run counter to Western interests ." The truth, however, is that it is the West's activities that run counter to the interests of Russia, which then has to respond in some way. Russia has no military bases in the Americas, whereas there are NATO bases and US troops on Russia's borders. Russian troops are in Syria legitimately, whereas US troops in the country are effectively occupiers.

The Tavistock Institute in London is doing some fairly serious work in the field of social engineering and manipulation. Its main activities are carried out under the ruse of supporting self-organisation and human relationships. Thus, the Tavistock Institute began developing the sociotechnical systems theory in the 1950s, started putting it into practice in the 1980s, and is still using it now. The proliferation of perverts around the world under the smokescreen of tolerance is largely due to this organisation (an agenda being carried out under the politically neutral guise of " Group Relations ").

It can be seen from these examples that the locale for protest headquarters and for the systematic destruction of the foundations of national identity is the same – the West, chiefly America.

Along with attempts to maintain tactical flexibility during protests, one can often see adjustments being made in response to the circumstances. Thus, the slogan "Flowers are better than bullets" on the placards of Belarusian opposition groups is just a reworking of the slogan "Food not Bombs" used in the decentralised anti-war campaign that originated in the US in the 1980s before spreading to Europe. A branch of this movement appeared in Belarus in 2005 with the help of local anarchists. A feature of the movement is the distribution of vegetarian food to the poor and the homeless. Depending on who is behind the campaign, local political nuances are superimposed in a number of countries.

Bernard-Henri Levy with former Belarus' presidential candidate Svetlana Tikhanovskaya

Many protest movements rely on creativity. So, on 14 April 2020, Polish feminists blocked the traffic on one of Warsaw's main streets. Although the police issued large fines (upwards of €6,000) to many of the activists, no one is going to pay them, and the blocking of traffic was explained by the guidelines of the authorities themselves to observe social distancing of two metres due to the pandemic. In the end, and with the help of lawyers, the draft bills were passed to parliament, and a special commission has been appointed to review them. Thus, the feminists killed two birds with one stone: they managed to troll the government's quarantine measures and also hold a protest that drew more attention to their activities (which are directed against conservatives, including for the legalisation of abortion and the support of sexual minorities).

One should also not forget the activities of individuals aimed at the destabilisation of various governments. Usually, they do it out of ideological beliefs, often using their own money and working with international contacts. One such individual is the French neoliberal philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, who actively supported coups in Yugoslavia and Ukraine, terrorists in Libya and Syria, and is currently helping Belarus opposition leader Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, who lost in the country's recent presidential election.

George Soros and his son Alexander Soros

George Soros's son, Alexander Soros , is diligently carrying on his father's work by serving as deputy chair of the Open Society Foundations. Recently, he has been making frequent visits to the Balkans, where he has been seen in the company of many senior politicians. In addition to Europe, Alexander Soros often visits Myanmar and is involved in projects in several African countries.

The activities of these people and organisations represent a multi-level international network with multiple dimensions of communication and hidden strategies prepared with an eye to the future.

Therefore, to establish an adequate response mechanism to current and future challenges, the activities of these groups, individuals and institutions must be monitored at the systemic level – constantly, thoroughly and comprehensively.

Reposts are welcomed with the reference to ORIENTAL REVIEW.
Leonid SAVIN

Geopolitical analyst, Chief editor of Geopolitica.ru, founder and chief editor of Journal of Eurasian Affairs; head of the administration of International Eurasian Movement.

[Sep 24, 2020] We have lost a real giant (Stephen F. Cohen has died)! by Saker

Notable quotes:
"... Cohen had the courage to take on the entire ruling elites of this country and their messianic supremacist ideology by himself, almost completely alone. ..."
"... He opposed the warmongering nutcases during the Cold War, and he opposed them again when they replaced their rabid hatred of the Soviet Union with an even more rabid hatred of everything Russian. ..."
Sep 24, 2020 | thesaker.is

First, he was a man of immense kindness and humility . Second, he was a man of total intellectual honesty . I can't say that Cohen and I had the same ideas or the same reading of history, though in many cases we did, but here is what I found so beautiful in this man: unlike most of his contemporaries, Cohen was not an ideologue , he did not expect everybody to agree with him, and he himself did not vet people for ideological purity before offering them his friendship.

Even though it is impossible to squeeze a man of such immense intellect and honesty into any one single ideological category, I would say that Stephen Cohen was a REAL liberal , in the original, and noble, meaning of this word.

I also have to mention Stephen Cohen's immense courage . Yes, I know, Cohen was not deported to GITMO for his ideas, he was not tortured in a CIA secret prison, and he was not rendered to some Third Word country to be tortured there on behalf of the USA. Stephen Cohen had a different kind of courage: the courage to remain true to himself and his ideals even when the world literally covered him in slanderous accusations, the courage to NOT follow his fellow liberals when they turned PSEUDO-liberals and betrayed everything true liberalism stands for. Professor Cohen also completely rejected any forms of tribalism or nationalism, which often made him the target of vicious hatred and slander, especially from his fellow US Jews (he was accused of being, what else, a Putin agent).

Cohen had the courage to take on the entire ruling elites of this country and their messianic supremacist ideology by himself, almost completely alone.

Last, but most certainly not least, Stephen Cohen was a true peacemaker , in the sense of the words of the Holy Gospel I quoted above. He opposed the warmongering nutcases during the Cold War, and he opposed them again when they replaced their rabid hatred of the Soviet Union with an even more rabid hatred of everything Russian.

I won't claim here that I always agreed with Cohen's ideas or his reading of history, and I am quite sure that he would not agree with much of what I wrote. But one thing Cohen and I definitely did agree on: the absolute, number one, priority of not allowing a war to happen between the USA and Russia. It would not be an exaggeration to say that Stephen Cohen dedicated his entire life towards this goal.

... ... ...

[Sep 24, 2020] Stephen F. Cohen, 1938–2020 - The Nation

Sep 24, 2020 | www.thenation.com

first "met" Steve through his 1977 essay "Bolshevism and Stalinism." His cogent, persuasive, revisionist argument that there are always alternatives in history and politics deeply influenced me. And his seminal biography, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution , challenging prevailing interpretations of Soviet history, was to me, and many, a model of how biography should be written: engaged and sympathetically critical.

At the time, I was too accepting of conventional wisdom. Steve's work -- and soon, Steve himself -- challenged me to be critical-minded, to seek alternatives to the status quo, to stay true to my beliefs (even if they weren't popular), and to ask unpopular questions of even the most powerful. These are values I carry with me to this day as editorial director of The Nation , which Steve introduced me to (and its editor, Victor Navasky) and for which he wrote a column ("Sovieticus") from 1982 to 1987, and many articles and essays beginning in 1979. His last book, War with Russia? was a collection of dispatches (almost all posted at thenation.com ) distilled from Steve's weekly radio broadcasts -- beginning in 2014–on The John Batchelor Show .

T he experiences we shared in Moscow beginning in 1980 are in many ways my life's most meaningful. Steve introduced me to realms of politics, history, and life I might never have experienced: to Bukharin's widow, the extraordinary Anna Mikhailovna Larina, matriarch of his second family, and to his eclectic and fascinating circle of friends -- survivors of the Gulag, (whom he later wrote about in The Victims Return ) dissidents, and freethinkers -- both outside and inside officialdom.

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From 1985 to 1991, when we lived frequently in Moscow, we shared the intellectual and political excitement, the hopes and the great achievements of those perestroika years. We later developed a close friendship with Mikhail Gorbachev, a man we both deeply admired as an individual and as a political leader who used his power so courageously to change his country and the world. Gorbachev also changed our lives in several ways.

Our marriage coincided with perestroika . In fact, Steve spent the very first day after our wedding, our so-called honeymoon, at the United Nations with Gorbachev and the news anchor Dan Rather (Steve was consulting for CBS News at the time). Then, on our first anniversary, in 1989, we were with President Bush (the first) and Gorbachev on Malta when they declared the end of the Cold War. And we think of our daughter, Nika, now 29 years old, as a perestroika baby because she was conceived in Russia during the Gorbachev years, made her first visit to Moscow in July 1991 and since then has been back some 40 times. In a moving moment, a year after Raisa Maksimovna died, Gorbachev remarked to Steve that our marriage and partnership reminded him of his with Raisa because we too seemed inseparable.

Steve has often regretted that many of the Russian friends he made after 1985 did not know about his earlier Moscow life. He first visited the Soviet Union in 1959. But it was those pre- perestroika years, 1975 to 1982, that gave Steve what he once told me was his "real education. Not only in Russian society but in Russian politics, because I began to understand the connection between trends in society, trends in the dissident movement, and trends in the nomenklatura." They were "utterly formative years for me."

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They also informed his writings, especially his pathbreaking book Rethinking the Soviet Experience , which was published at the very time Gorbachev came to power. "There was a lot of tragedy," Steve used to say, "but also a lot of humor and warmth when people had little more that personal friendships and ideas to keep them company." From 1980, when I first traveled to Moscow with Steve, to 1982 when neither of us could get a visa (until 1985 when Gorbachev became leader), we lived in that Russia, spending many nights in friends' apartments and kitchens drinking into the night, and listening to uncensored, often pessimistic, thinking about the present and future of Russia.

I later became Steve's collaborator in smuggling samizdat manuscripts out of Russia to the West, and bringing samizdat books back to Russia and distributing them. By the time I joined him, Steve had managed to send dozens of such books to Moscow, and satisfying friends with a selection ranging from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Varlam Shalamov, George Orwell, and Robert Conquest to the Kama Sutra and, of course, the samizdat version of Steve's own book on Bukharin. I learned from Steve that one had to keep forbidden documents and manuscripts on one's person at all times, knowing that the KGB frequently searched apartments and hotel rooms. At a certain point, Steve's shoulder bag became so heavy that he developed a hernia on his right side. After surgery, he started carrying his bag on his left side, but developed a second hernia there, as well. He liked to say that the worst the KGB ever did to him was to cause him two hernias!

In fact, it was samizdat manuscripts that first brought us together. In 1978, Steve heard that I had a diplomatic passport, which would have exempted me from a customs search, and was about to travel to Moscow. (At the time my father was the United States representative to the United Nations in Geneva.) Through a mutual friend, Steve asked if I would bring out samizdat documents being held for him in Moscow. I would have been happy to do so, but Steve had been misinformed. I didn't have a diplomatic passport.

S teve could sometimes seem like a tough guy, but those who won his trust knew he was a person of great generosity, loyalty, and kindness. He was known in our New York City neighborhood on the Upper West Side as an impresario/organizer and longtime supporter of basketball tournaments for local, often poor, kids. In the United States and Russia, Steve mentored and supported young scholars. In the last decade, he set up fellowships for young scholars of Russian history at the several universities where he'd he studied and taught: Indiana University, Princeton, New York University, and Columbia. He lent his support to the establishment of Moscow's State Museum of the History of the Gulag -- and to its young director and team.

Life with Steve was never boring. He was supremely independent, the true radical in our family, unfailingly going to the root of the problem. He spoke his mind. He had a CD with a dozen variations of "My Way" -- from Billy Bragg to Frank Sinatra. And as The Chronicle of Higher Education subtitled its 2017 profile of Steve, he "was the most controversial Russia expert in America."

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Through all our years together, Steve was my backbone, fortifying me for the battles Nation editors must wage (often with their own writers, sometimes including Steve!), and giving me the personal and political courage to do the right thing. But never more so than when we entered what might be called the "Russiagate era."

While Steve liked to say it's healthy to rethink, to have more questions than answers, there was a wise consistency to his political analysis. For example, as is clear from his many articles in The Nation in these last decades, he unwaveringly opposed American Cold War thinking both during the Cold War and since the end of the Soviet Union. He was consistent in his refusal to sermonize, lecture, or moralize about what Russia should do. He preferred to listen rather than preach, to analyze rather than demonize.

This stance was no recipe for popularity, which Steve professed to care little about. He was courageous and fearless in continuing to question the increasingly rigid orthodoxies about the Soviet Union and Russia. But in the last months, such criticism did take its toll on him. Along with others who sought to avert a new and more dangerous Cold War, Steve despaired that the public debate so desperately needed had become increasingly impossible in mainstream politics or media. Until his death he'd been working on a short article about what he saw as the "criminalization of détente." The organization he established, the American Committee on East-West Accord, tried mightily to argue for a more sane US policy toward Russia.

He fared better than I often did confronting the controversies surrounding him since 2014, in reaction to his views on Ukraine, Putin, election interference, and more. Positions he took often elicited slurs and scurrilous attacks. How many times could he be labeled "Putin's puppet"? "Putin's No.1 American apologist"? Endlessly, it seemed. But Steve chose not to respond directly to the attacks, believing -- as he told me many times when I urged him to respond -- that they offered no truly substantive criticism of his arguments, but were merely ad hominem attacks. What he did write about -- he was increasingly concerned about the fate of a younger generation of scholars -- was the danger of smearing those who thought differently about US policy toward Russia, thereby silencing skeptics and contributing to the absence of a needed debate in our politics, media, and academy.

M ikhail Gorbachev often told Steve how deeply influenced he was by his writings, especially his biography of Bukharin. Steve first met Gorbachev in 1987 at the Soviet Embassy in Washington. It was a reception for America's "progressive intelligentsia" -- which Steve found funny, because he considered himself a maverick and didn't like labels. But he was there that day, and within a few minutes a Kremlin aide told Steve that the general secretary wanted to talk to him. Minutes later, Mikhail Sergeevich approached and asked Steve, assuming the author of Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution must be eminent and of a "serious" age: " Deistvitelno [really] -- you wrote the book, or was it your father?"

Steve finally achieved that "serious" age Gorbachev spoke of! But his heart, spirit and mind remained youthful till the very end. Maybe it's because of his love of Jerry Lee Lewis's rock and roll, or New Orleans blues or Kentucky bluegrass, or his passion for basketball (shared with our daughter Nika and his 16-year-old grandson, Lucas), or his quest for a good anecdote (his annual anecdote lectures at Princeton and later NYU drew large crowds). Maybe it's because we continued our walks in nearby Riverside Park for as long as was possible -- walks full of loving and spirited argument and talk. Perhaps it's because, while Steve was a very serious person, he didn't take himself seriously.

O n Saturday, Mikhail Gorbachev sent these words about Steve:

Dear Katrina,
Please accept my sincere condolences on Steve's passing. He was one of the closest people to me in his views and understanding of the enormous events that occurred in the late 1980s in Russia and changed the world.
Steve was a brilliant historian and a man of democratic convictions. He loved Russia, the Russian intelligentsia, and believed in our country's future.
I always considered Steve and you my true friends. During perestroika and all the subsequent years, I felt your understanding and unwavering support. I thank you both.
Dear Katrina, I feel deep sympathy for your grief and I mourn together with you and Nika.
Blessed memory for Steve.
I embrace you,
Mikhail Gorbachev
19.09.20

F or 40 years, Steve was my partner, companion, co-conspirator, best friend, fellow traveler, mentor, husband (for 32 years), co-author. I will be forever grateful to him for introducing me to The Nation , to Russia, for a life that has been full of shared adventure, friendship and passion, and for our beloved daughter, Nika. MOST POPULAR 1

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Katrina vanden Heuvel TWITTER Katrina vanden Heuvel is editorial director and publisher of The Nation , America's leading source of progressive politics and culture. She served as editor of the magazine from 1995 to 2019.

Herbert Weiner says:

September 22, 2020 at 11:53 pm

My condolences for the passing of Stephen who fought the post Cold War policies against Russia with a balanced analysis--so contradictory to the intellectuals who gloat in our victory and are unrealistic to the "threat" posed by Russia which desperately needs peace and friendship with the West and, especially, us. He has shown that you can criticism and condemn Stalinism while also condemning our anti-Soviet policies. He walked that tightrope which I applaud. May his memory be a blessing.

Erwin Borda says: September 22, 2020 at 10:44 pm

Dear Katrina, at this time of America's political confusion, pain and intellectual despair, the lost of Steve is really big. He has been a source of inspiration to many, and the true defender of Russia in the middle of political adversity. Steve being an intellectual giant always exposed his ideas in a humble and honest way. What a lost for America and for the world!
Rest in Peace Steve! And for you Katrina and Nika my most sincere condolences!
God Bless you all!

Valera Bochkarev says: September 22, 2020 at 8:56 am

Boots, Applebaums, Kristols and Joffes of this world will come and go as specks of dirt clogging up our civilization while never measuring up to courageous moral and intellectual giants like Professor Cohen. His intellect, insight and humility will always be a shining beacon for those that have high hopes for humanity. Rest in peace, Steve Cohen. You've led a righteous and honorable life, Sir.

Pierre Guerlain says: September 22, 2020 at 2:43 am

I started reading Steve's articles in connection with the conspiracy theory that Russiagate is and then I watched many videos of him in interviews. I came to admire such a courageous man who was slandered by people who knew nothing, nothing about Russia, the country Steve knew so well but also nothing about geopolitics, international relations and the tricks of intel services. Always competent and with a gift for clear exposition, Steve warned about what is one of the gravest dangers: war with Russia. I too admired Gorbachev and saw how he was hoodwinked by people who unknowingly prepared Putin's rise. A great courageous thinker is gone and we miss him.

Ann Wright says: September 21, 2020 at 7:53 pm

I admired Steve's perspective from 1992 when I was in the second group that wasIn the US Embassy in Tashkent, Uzbekistan and two years later with the Us Embassy in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan for two years from 1994-1996. I've been back to Russia twice in the past three years and I agree totally with His view of the stupidity of another Cold War!!!

John Stewart says: September 21, 2020 at 5:12 pm

Katrina, thank you so much for sharing your thoughts. I took two courses with Professor Cohen at Princeton in 1973 and 1974, and he was without question the best lecturer I had in seven years of higher education. He became my intellectual mentor, although I was too shy to ever really talk with him. I graduated in Politics and Russian Studies in 1977, and he was an inspiration. I am especially saddened by his death because I have been thinking of picking up Russian studies soon when I retire and I wanted his advice on where I should do a Masters degree, with whom, and what topics needed someone to pick up. He was a great man, and a voice of sense about Russia. He will be greatly missed.

John Connolly says: September 21, 2020 at 3:10 pm

Dear Katrina: Thank You for this personal sharing of Your life with Stephen Cohen; and sincere condolences to You, Nika and Lucas.
I really appreciate Your clarity and candor about the unique position Steve occupied in the academic, intellectual and political firmament ... never completely clear to me until Your explication. Steve regularly engaged and sometimes enraged me with some of his positions -- some of them seeming to me ill-considered defenses of cloddish Stalinist bureaucrats or malevolent Russian authoritarians ... but I read everything he wrote in 'The Nation' and anywhere else I came across him. As a longtime Trotskyist/ Socialist I could find plenty to argue about with Brother Cohen, but also found great appreciation for the fact that almost no one else was currently thinking and writing about Russia or the Soviet experience with the rigor, insight, depth of experience and skill that Stephen owned and shared with us all. It goes without saying he will be missed by You his dearest and closest ones; but he will be sorely missed too by those of us in Your extended 'Nation' Family, and the Progressive millions he so widely taught and influenced to 'think different'.

[Sep 24, 2020] Putin And Trump vs The New World Order- The Final Battle

Sep 24, 2020 | orientalreview.org

When Vladimir Putin got charge of Russia, there was no sign that he would do better than the drunk he had replaced. An ex KGB officer seemed like a choice more driven by nostalgia rather than ideology, but Putin had many more assets going for him than first met the eyes: patriotism, humanism, a sense of justice, cunning ruse, a genius economist friend named Sergey Glazyev whom openly despised the New World Order, but above all, he embodied the reincarnation of the long lost Russian ideology of total political and economical independence. After a few years spent at draining the Russian swamp from the oligarchs and mafiosis that his stumbling predecessor had left in his trail of empty bottles, Vlad rolled his sleeves and got to work.

Because his opponents had been looting the planet for 250 years through colonization insured by a military dominance, Vlad knew that he had to start by building an invincible military machine. And he did. He came up with different types of hypersonic missiles that can't be stopped, the best defensive systems on the planet, the best electronic jamming systems, and the best planes. Then to make sure that a nuclear war wouldn't be an option, he came up with stuff which nightmares are made of, such as the Sarmat, the Poseidon and the Avangard, all unstoppable and able to destroy any country in a matter of a few hours.

Putin said that Russia is the only country in the world that has hypersonic weapons even though its military spending is a fraction of the U.S. military budget. Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, left, and Chief of General Staff of Russia Valery Gerasimov, right, attend the meeting.

With a new and unmatched arsenal, he could proceed to defeat any NATO force or any of its proxies, as he did starting in September 2015 in Syria. He proved to every country that independence from the NWO banking system was now a matter of choice. Putin not only won the Syrian war, but he won the support of many New World Order countries that suddenly switched sides upon realizing how invincible Russia had become. On a diplomatic level, it also got mighty China by its side, and then managed to protect independent oil producers such as Venezuela and Iran, while leaders like Erdogan of Turkey and Muhammad Ben Salman of Saudi Arabia decided to side with Russia, who isn't holding the best poker hand, but the whole deck of cards.

Ending in the conclusion that Putin now controls the all-mighty oil market, the unavoidable energy resource that lubricates economies and armies, while the banksters' NATO can only watch, without any means to get it back. With the unbelievable results that Putin has been getting in the last five years, the New World Order suddenly looks like a house of cards about to crumble. The Empire of Banks has been terminally ill for five years, but it's now on morphine, barely realizing what's going on.

Tragedy and hope

Since there is no hope in starting WW3 which is lost in advance, the last banzai came out of the bushes in the shape of a virus and the ensuing media creation of a fake pandemic. The main focus was to avoid a catastrophic hyperinflation of the humongous mass of US dollar that no one wants anymore, to have time to implement their virtual world crypto-currency, as if the chronically failing bankers still have any legitimacy to keep controlling our money supplies. It seemed at first that the plan could work. That's when Vlad took out his revolver to start the Russian roulette game and bankers blew their brains out upon the pressure on the trigger.

He called a meeting with OPEC and killed the price of oil by refusing to lower Russia's production, taking the barrel to under 30 dollars. Without any afterthought and certainly even less remorse, Vlad killed the costly Western oil production. All the dollars that had been taken out of the market had to be re-injected by the Fed and other central banks to avoid a downslide and the final disaster. By now, our dear bankers are out of solutions.

... ... ..

The New World Order is facing the two most powerful countries on the planet, and this fake pandemic changed everything. It showed how desperate the banksters are, and if we don't want to end up with nuclear warheads flying in both directions, Putin and Trump have to stop them now.

Terminate the BIS, the World Bank, the IMF, the European Central bank, the EU, NATO, now. Our world won't be perfect, but it might get much better soon.

Easter resurrection is coming. This might get biblical.

[Sep 24, 2020] What's With The Rich-Kid Revolutionaries- - Zero Hedge

Sep 24, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Zachary Yost via The Mises Institute,

By now, readers are no doubt familiar with the sight of angry mobs smashing windows, looting stores, and harassing pedestrians and street diners around the country , supposedly in the name of advocating for the rights of black Americans. Around the country, these mobs are diverse and have diverse motives, ranging from simply wanting to loot and get free stuff to being driven by deeply held ideological beliefs. However, one can't help but notice that in many places a significant number of those causing disturbances are not the subjects of the state oppression in question, but are often white and sometimes even affluent, and as a result are almost completely isolated from the consequences of their destructive sprees.

Portland, site of over a hundred straight days of protests and often violent rioting, seems like the poster child for this phenomenon. Portland is, in fact, the whitest big city in the US.

In New York City, the Daily Mail reported on the recent arrest of seven members of the New Afrikan Black Panther Party, a revolutionary Maoist group, after a rioting spree that caused at least $100,000 in damages. Every one of them appears to be white from their mugshots , and among them are an art director who has done work for Pepsi and Samsung, a model and actress, and the son of famous comic book writers. The New York Post profiled one rioter, twenty-year-old Clara Kraebber, and discovered that her mother runs her own architecture firm and her father is a psychiatrist who teaches at Columbia University. The family paid $1.8 million in 2016 for their New York City apartment and also own a home in Connecticut with four fireplaces.

Or consider Vicky Osterweil, the white author of the much-discussed book In Defense of Looting , who is also the daughter of a college professor. As Matt Taibbi reports in his review of the book, "there's little evidence the author of In Defense of Looting has ever been outside" and "she confesses to a 'personal aversion to violence,' lamenting a 'refusal to attack property' that 'does not lessen the degree to which I benefit from systems of domination.'" In Taibbi's words "this is a 288-page book written by a Very Online Person in support of the idea that other people should loot, riot, and burn things in the real world."

Rioting by the affluent is not limited to white people either. Consider the case of the two nonwhite attorneys, one of whom received his law degree at Princeton, whose arrest for throwing a molotov cocktail at a riot in New York City made the headlines precisely because of their high-status, well-paying jobs.

What all of these examples have in common is that the rioting and destruction, or advocacy for the same, is being perpetrated by people who have no skin in the game and will not be exposed to the long-term consequences for the people and communities that they are ostensibly trying to help. Neighborhoods that suffer through riots often end up economically depressed for decades to come, but people like Clara Kraebber will not have to worry about such things.

In the last century, there has been a great deal of scholarship attempting to discover the roots of these kinds of widespread revolutionary movements. In Liberalism , Mises discusses the idea of a Fourier complex, where antiliberal revolutionary ideas are adopted by people as a means of dealing with their own inadequacy in the face of reality. Political theorist Eric Voegelin (who attended Mises's Vienna seminars) also posits a similar, though more complex, explanation with his theory of gnosticism.

The classically liberal sociologist Helmut Schoeck also makes a similar argument in his book Envy . Envy, Schoeck argues, stems from an individual's reaction to a personal inadequacy and a desire to find a way to shift the blame to anyone or anything other than himself. Like Mises and Voegelin, Schoeck explores the ways in which this attitude is detrimental to society, but he also explores why some people engaged in revolutionary movements are themselves well off and not members of the toiling masses they seek to "liberate."

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In these cases Schoeck argues that such people are not afflicted with envy, but rather with a fear of envy or the guilt of being unequal. He argues that "the guilt-tinged fear of being thought unequal is very deeply ingrained in the human psyche," and that it can be observed everywhere from offices to schools in the way in which people who excel at something will consciously or unconsciously lower their performance. This phenomenon is unfortunate enough when it comes to the workplace, but when it comes to politics the consequences can be much more serious.

Schoeck argues that such guilt may lead a person to forgo their old life in order to serve the less fortunate but that many times such a person does not seek to extirpate their guilt by leaving their own comfortable station, but rather by insisting that the entire world must join them in eradicating inequality. In his words "I have no doubt that one of the most important motives for joining an egalitarian political movement is this anxious sense of guilt: 'Let us set up a society where no one is envious.'"

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No doubt even Schoeck would be impressed by the degree to which our current upheavals are driven by those wracked with the guilt of being unequal rather than those filled with envy itself. To be sure, there is no shortage of such envious people running around these days, but there can be no doubt about which group is the driving force.

Hopefully, as social life slowly returns to normal and as the weather gets colder, the guilt-ridden rich kids will tire out from playacting as revolutionaries and return home. But until then, it seems that the rest of us will be forced to suffer as they work out their psychological problems through some window-smashing therapy.

DEDA CVETKO , 2 hours ago

Just a friendly reminder to the author of the article:

Some of the most vicious and violent revolutionaries throughout human history were the scions of aristocracy or descendants of extremely rich and affluent families: Jean-Paul Marat, Girolamo Savonarola, Felix Dzerzhinsky, Simon Bolivar, Fidel Castro, Sun Yat-Sen, Che Guevara, Louis Auguste Blanqui, Oliver Cromwell, Friedrich Engels, etc, etc....all either came from the very rich family background or descended from the blue-bloods and nobility. Mao Zedong's father was one of the richest farmers in all of China, just as Trotsky's dad was one of the richest farmers in Russian Ukraine. Mohandas Gandhi was a brahmin. Count Mirabeau was a, well...count. Ataturk's father was one of the richest people in Salonica, Greece. Louis Philippe II - who sided with Robespierre - was of the royal blood, the first cousin of Louis XVI whose trial and execution he personally endorsed and supported. And, oh....lest I forget...Nelson Mandela was no slouch in the class pedigree department, either.

I could go on forever and ever.

In fact, impoverished and pauperized revolutionaries were always but a tiny subset of the revolutionary class. People like Stalin, Gramsci or Tito were always an aberrant group, an exception to the general rule.

One can probably write a very thick tome about the rich and aristocratic abandoning their social stratus in order to side with the dispossessed and disenfranchised. This is far from being a new and heretofore unknown phenomenon.

I am leaving it to the historians and political psychologists to explain why this is so. Personally, I think that the inherent cynicism and hypocrisy of their own families is a perfectly good reason to switch sides. Another possible reason is that the poor and hungry people are typically too busy surviving and feeding themselves to be organizing violent overthrow of the ruling class.

truth hound , 1 hour ago

They are knowingly in on the psyop. By DECEPTION, though shalt do war.

DEDA CVETKO , 1 hour ago

Possibly some but definitely not all. It would require a much more detailed psychological profile to figure out what went on in these people's heads. I myself am just visiting this cluster**** of galaxies, what the fvck do I know about how and why the humans behave?

Blue_Rock , 1 hour ago

A very good post. I will add anger and rebellion by the youths. The realization that they somehow don't measure up and that they might not be able to use that gender studies lesbian basket weaving diploma to get ahead. I have personally seen more than one inherited fortune lost and business run into the ground by spoiled entitled heirs.

DEDA CVETKO , 1 hour ago

I have personally seen more than one inherited fortune lost and business run into the ground by spoiled entitled heirs.

This is the Law of Entropy on display: each subsequent iteration is only a paler and paler version of the preceding one. This is why the caste and class-based societies can't endure forever: the forces and ideas that guide them simply aren't genetically suited to perpetuate themselves in their original, integral form. Sooner or later, the integrity of the founding father(s) dissipates into degeneration and devolution.

algol_dog , 2 hours ago

An interesting note to history. The initiators of these movements are the first to go once the new regime takes over. Once the new leaders get in charge they realize the danger of having them around and quickly dispense with them. Examples being the Stalin purges and Hitler's breaking of the SA.

Utopia Planitia , 2 hours ago

"What's With The Rich-Kid Revolutionaries?"

Safe spaces, exclusively female teachers, participation trophies, no siblings (nobody to kick you in the face growing up when you are being an asswipe), never a harsh word, no discipline, constantly being told you are "special", etc. etc. That's just a start.

not dead yet , 1 hour ago

Long before there were the things you mentioned there were rich kids doing rioting and looting. Back in the sixties it was rich kids made to feel guilty about being rich by their commie professors. Came from good families with a decent upbringing gone bad by propaganda. Same kids would go home during breaks and argue with their families how they made their money off the backs of the workers. Typical commie stuff. Unlike today back then they made bombs and blew stuff up killing people with many of the bomb makers rich kids. Robberies for the cause. The parents of the slimy San Francisco DA are serving life for killing a guard while robbing an armored car. Idiot was then raised by Bill Ayers after his parents were arrested.

motley331 , 3 hours ago

ALL of these people are useful idiots for the likes of Soros...

truthseeker47 , 1 hour ago

Leader of the violent Weather Underground and self-described communist revolutionary Bill Ayers came from a very upper class suburban Chicago family.

Ignant Bastad , 1 hour ago

neglected and unloved as a child, so he spends his life "getting back at" his parents? just a guess.

PGR88 , 2 hours ago

More importantly, those rich white kids out there burning 7-11s downtown are displaying yet more entitlement. They've never faced consequences their whole life. Imagine if some counter-protestor swung a bat at them, or small businessman defending his property shot them? It would be an quick education in consequences.

play_arrow
Arctic_Fox , 1 hour ago

When they don't get shot, it's another manifestation of their white-assed privilege.

Plus, Progressive mayors tell the cops not to play hardball with the rioters, and even if a few get busted the Soros-backed DA drops charges. Then if it does go to court, some faculty lounge kook is on the bench as judge, and there are OJ juries to nullify the prosecution... so they walk.

Privilege from start to finish...

Kind of makes you wonder why we even bother with this government-thing.

hoffstetter , 2 hours ago

People learn from their friends. I know tech millionaires that don't have a clue about what's going on outside their own circle jerk echo chamber of "friends" that repeat leftist talking points as if they were Catholics reciting the rosary. Occasionally, I get one to admit that the stuff they're spouting is completely unsupported after tossing them a few videos or transcripts that contradict what they thought was reality, but they just find something else to which they can redirect that is completely unsupported and irrefutable as it's nonexistent. These aren't kids. They've been around for decades but never left their cubicles or their monitors and were extremely competent in their jobs, so now they think they know everything because they knew one thing. It's extremely common.

hmmmm , 2 hours ago

Maslow's hierarchy of needs explains why a disproportionate amount of shallow thinking rich kids are involved in such causes. Regular folks are not focused on self actualization.

charlie_don't_surf , 2 hours ago

They are unaccomplished jealous little a-holes that can only tear down others to pretend to elevate themselves.

Why123 , 2 hours ago

Alexis De Tocqueville analyzed the United States in the early 19th century, before Germany was a country under the Kaisers. He predicted that the United States and Russia would be the world's superpowers in the 20th century. With respect to the United States, he predicted that we would be a preeminent superpower because 1) we didn't have permanent concentrations of wealth (for example, if a rich guy had six kids, his plantation would be evenly distributed in at least two generations) and 2) we focused exclusively on practical education, not the theoretical ******** that dominated European academia, and which could only benefit the aristocracy and absurdly intelligent proles (think Euclid or Gauss). With respect to both Russia and the United States, he saw that both populations had the capacity to sacrifice and overcome adversity (although different types of adversity). Those advantages have been eviscerated. We don't focus on practical education. We have permanent, feudal levels, of wealth, and the population has no will to sacrifice. The university system and institutionalization of the United States was fundamental towards achieving those aims.

It comes down to the needs of every human being, rich or poor, to feel achievement and the specific needs of the rich. These kids have real money because they own assets that replicate more money, without work. I won't get into tax, trade and immigration policies that take an already advantageous position enjoyed by these pricks to the next level of oligarchy. But that isn't enough. You have to impose your value system and "skills" as the objective value system. You see, these kids want the advantage of the wealth, but they want to demolish the path to achieving wealth by others. The university system has to be the ONLY functioning economic path. What would happen if kids knew from a young age that the name of the game is to save and acquire asserts, and all other pursuits are meaningless? Do you think we would have a student loan problem? Do you think we would have an inequality problem? The answer is a resounding "no." The education system is designed to destroy. It blinds you to this indisputable truth. There are people who see through the BS though (more on this later). As long as there is some freedom, these problem will rise up the dominance hierarchy. These rich kids don't like that. These rich kids and their academic professors deeply resent that. This is why they have to tear down the system. Their privilege will be preserved, but the rest of the population will be enslaved. If they have their way, every single young person in the United Stares will have the "benefit" of attending university and having a "fulfilling career." Well have people in school until their thirties, learning useless crap, and in permanent debt bondage. This cements the rich kids' status,

Anecdotally, I was speaking to friends from high school. Most of us are professionals. Some work in law enforcement, some work as engineers, some as lawyers, a few unionized tradespeople and one doctor. The unionized trades people blow all of us out of the water, but that's not the startling thing. One of our friends went straight to work at 16. He's not even a real "tradesman." His father, mother, three sister and himself worked three jobs and saved aggressively. They bought a first multifamily in 2005. They now have 70 buildings. The first building, as my one friend put it, "caused a snowballs effect." That's the American way. That's the American dream. The American dream is not going to school until you are in your fu**** late twenties or mid thirties to go churn and burn on a W-2. For the prick with an inheritance, that may be useful because he or she has wealth, and he or she can, especially in light of Boomer cultural norms, pretend that the source of wealth is the education, but deep inside they know the truth, and they resent the system because it still allows it and a small number of people manage to rise as a result. These people are at the top of the food chain. This offends these rich university assholes.

I chuckled when my friend who works for Homeland Security (Democrat) and my friend who works as an engineer for the Defense Industry (Republican) both stated "why didn't they teach us that in school?" Rofl. The point of the schools is that so you don't know the source of success. The point of school is to cement the rich kids advantage and destroy you. This causes a dual resentment: the poor kids feel resentment because they see they were sold a bag of goods and the rich kid feels resentment because he or she can't pretend the success is self induced.

I'll leave everyone with this: Donald Trump was called a racist, rapist, crook, liar, etc by Clinton in the 2016 campaign. That didn't bother him. The only thing that got him angry, ever, was when Clinton said he inherited money, which was the only thing that was true.

Dying-Of-The-Light , 2 hours ago

Kind of ironic that you have the thick-as-shxt, criminal end of blacks who want lots of bling without working for it, marching with middle class whites who have all the toys these blacks want. A real match made in hell. The sooner these black and white retards are given long prison sentences the better.

createnewaccount , 2 hours ago

Ironic? Maybe for the moment but watch this space, I expect the old Minsky quote also applies to the body politic.

" stability breeds instability "

-Hyman Minsky

Eastern Whale , 2 hours ago

The US government especially Trump, Pompeo and Nancy Pelosi seem to like the "peaceful" violence in Hong Kong. Nancy Pelosi even coined it a ""a beautiful sight to behold".

What goes around comes around, beware of what you are promoting overseas. Violence and War all in the name of WMD, Democracy and National Security.

Herodotus , 3 hours ago

Same thing was going on in 1968.

Also, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were rich kid revolutionaries.

fackbankz , 3 hours ago

George Washington was not from a particularly rich family. Jefferson was though.

Jack's Raging Bile Duct , 1 hour ago

It's pretty simple. Rich kids are idle, don't understand the value of anything, and commonly lazy. This is fertile ground for half-baked ideologies that run h

awesomepic4u , 3 hours ago

Revolutionary leftism is contemporary Western society's operating definition of nobility and heroism. Social elites have always justified themselves as being the people who fully live up to the ideal, and their young men in particular are supposed to earn their aristocratic honors by being the ones who run towards both good and evil rather than shrinking from them. Violence gets justified as being the ultimate test of personal commitment to an ideal, and it's a short road from there to arguing that violence must therefore be virtuous in itself.

If these kids feel guilty of anything, they feel guilty of sitting in classrooms and offices rather than exercising their powers to the fullest. A moral crusade with lots of opportunities for adrenaline-soaked adventure is an irresistible temptation.

Cheap Chinese Crap , 1 hour ago

I forget the exact context but I remember the story about an American couple who wondered if they should send their kids to an American or British university.

"That depends," their British friend replied,"on whether you want them back as radicals or homosexuals."

Now you get both.

sbin , 2 hours ago

Would be fun to move those BLM white tards to the real black neighborhoods.

Would produce a lot of racists.

My black friends do not want to live in a black majority neighborhood.

y_arrow
stinkypinky , 3 hours ago

Abused and angry children, lashing out at "the system" around them, being used by true revolutionaries (Marxists). The abuse angle is key - they want all vestiges of "the power structure" around them to be torn down, to get back at it all. Racism doesn't matter, sexism doesn't matter, none of these causes are actually cared about one iota. They would riot because it's Tuesday and 60 degrees outside as long as someone had a bullhorn, an umbrella and a brick. It certainly helps that racism is a thought crime you can accuse ANYONE OF, and it's been so loaded with meaning that it's a devastating attack of character which can't be defended against.

Bottom line: to understand why these rich kids are rioting look to how they've been abused.

4Y_LURKER , 2 hours ago

Yeah they are in reality human shields for the corporate apparently communist coup which is ongoing.

1Y4NixfGQ4MbMO4f , 3 hours ago

I think they are called "Useful idiots" or more descriptive would be "Disposable Idiots"

GRDguy , 29 seconds ago

Another generation of sociopaths, born to and indoctrined by sociopathic parents.

"Behind every great fortune lies a great crime," and a great number of victims.

smacker , 9 minutes ago

I believe there's a long history of rich kids being involved in revolutionary conduct.

They are invariably brought up in the shadow of dominating strict rich white parents and get to
an age where they want to cut out their own slice of life to establish themselves as independent
individuals, not clones. Adopting political extremes and crime is an easy way to do that.

Angular Momentum , 48 minutes ago

The industrial revolution has made life safe bland and comfortable for the middle class. It's easy to be moral when life is easy. In rough dangerous times and places living a life of integrity was a challenge and those who did it earned respect. But how can you be a hero in Suburbia? By heroically challenging common sense. The stupider the cause the harder it is to accept its ideas and thus the more heroic.

fcd443 , 58 minutes ago

Because these dipsh!ts didn't create their own wealth and they feel bad for all of their parents/generational wealth. They don't know the first thing when it comes to creating something and coming from nothing.

They want to feel as relevant as their priors so they do what they know best, throw a tantrum. In this case, it's called a peaceful protest aka black lives matter.

LeftandRightareWrong , 1 hour ago

Many people just want to be relevant. Why do sites like Facebook work?

Psychological, psychiatric pandemic in full force.

darkstar7646 , 2 hours ago

Couple of ideas:

  1. They know the game is over and that they will "fail" to live up to the legacy of their parents, costing their families everything in the process (which see the scam college-admissions scandals).
  2. They are trying to provoke a reaction among the White Right Militias ( agent provocateurs ).
  3. They feel they can get away with anything and are actually acti
Linda Hand , 3 hours ago

The education system is infested with communists.

DancingDragon , 3 hours ago

You mean the democrat party and their MSM sycophants

[Sep 24, 2020] Washington using Navalny situation as excuse to block Russian-German Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, Russian intelligence chief says by Jonny Tickle

Notable quotes:
"... Discussion about ending Nord Stream 2 resumed last month, when EU politicians debated further sanctions, following the suspected poisoning of Navalny. Naryshkin believes that the US is using the accusations of poisoning as a pretext to sell more LNG to Europe. On Thursday, MEPs demanded that Germany cancel construction of the pipeline. ..."
Sep 22, 2020 | www.rt.com

The US is working hard to keep the spotlight on the case of Alexey Navalny as a way to help block construction of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, according to Sergey Naryshkin, head of Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service (the SVR).

Naryshkin believes that Washington wants to block Nord Stream 2 so it can prevent Moscow from efficiently providing gas to the continent, thereby increasing demand for American liquefied natural gas (LNG) in other European states. As things stand, Russia delivers a large percentage of the continent's gas, and the pipeline would connect the country's gas supply directly to Germany, under the Baltic Sea. The project is more than 90 percent complete.

READ MORE: German FM links Nord Stream 2 to Navalny, threatens sanctions as Moscow accuses Berlin of dragging feet on alleged poisoning probe

"It is extremely important for Washington to end this project," Naryshkin said, explaining that the alleged poisoning of opposition figure Navalny has become an excuse to stop Nord Stream 2's construction.

The United States has long been opposed to the project, somewhat incredibly claiming that it would "undermine Europe's overall energy security and stability," but many believe that Washington's true motivations are economic.

Discussion about ending Nord Stream 2 resumed last month, when EU politicians debated further sanctions, following the suspected poisoning of Navalny. Naryshkin believes that the US is using the accusations of poisoning as a pretext to sell more LNG to Europe. On Thursday, MEPs demanded that Germany cancel construction of the pipeline.

Despite US pressure, Naryshkin has expressed hope that the EU will rely on common sense before the "cold winter" and likened the proposed halting of Nord Stream 2 to "cutting off the nose to spite the face."

Late last month, Russian anti-corruption activist Navalny was hospitalized in the Siberian city of Omsk after he became ill on a flight from Tomsk to Moscow. Two days later, after a request from his family and associates, he was flown to Berlin for treatment at that city's Charité clinic. Following tests, German authorities announced that Navalny was poisoned with a substance from the Novichok group of nerve agents. After the diagnosis, Heiko Maas, the German Foreign Minister, told Berlin tabloid Bild that he hopes "the Russians don't force [the Germans] to change [their] stance on Nord Stream 2."

US aims for gas domination in Europe, Ukrainian MP says. Nord Stream 2 is 1st target, then existing European pipeline system

Like this story? Share it with a friend!

[Sep 23, 2020] Mattis Told Intel Chief They May 'Have to Take Collective Action' Against 'Unfit' Trump -- Woodward

Notable quotes:
"... Former defense secretary Jim Mattis appears to have been plotting a coup with then-Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats after growing furious with President Trump for banning transgenders from the military and moving to pull out of Afghanistan and Syria. ..."
"... Mattis quietly went to Washington National Cathedral [in May 2019] to pray about his concern for the nation's fate under Trump's command and, according to Woodward, told Coats, "There may come a time when we have to take collective action" since Trump is "dangerous. He's unfit." ..."
"... Translation: we may have to stage a coup to get him out of power. Plenty of Democrats and former and current intelligence officials are working on a Color Revolution come November as we speak . ..."
Sep 10, 2020 | www.blacklistednews.com

SOURCE: CHRIS MENAHAN, INFORMATION LIBERATION

Former defense secretary Jim Mattis appears to have been plotting a coup with then-Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats after growing furious with President Trump for banning transgenders from the military and moving to pull out of Afghanistan and Syria.

From The Washington Post :

Mattis quietly went to Washington National Cathedral [in May 2019] to pray about his concern for the nation's fate under Trump's command and, according to Woodward, told Coats, "There may come a time when we have to take collective action" since Trump is "dangerous. He's unfit."

Translation: we may have to stage a coup to get him out of power. Plenty of Democrats and former and current intelligence officials are working on a Color Revolution come November as we speak .

In a separate conversation recounted by Woodward, Mattis told Coats, "The president has no moral compass," to which the director of national intelligence replied: "True. To him, a lie is not a lie. It's just what he thinks. He doesn't know the difference between the truth and a lie."

Mattis doesn't know the difference between a male and a female. Trump reportedly accurately said his generals were a "bunch of pussies."

"Not to mention my f**king generals are a bunch of pussies. They care more about their alliances than they do about trade deals," Trump told White House trade adviser Peter Navarro at one point, according to Woodward.

No lie detected!

Ann Coulter, who has repeatedly tried to tell Trump today's generals have nothing in common with those of the past like Trump-favorite Gen. George Patton, responded to the news on Wednesday by saying Trump has won her back!

And he wins me back! https://t.co/7nhtSuC4k9

-- Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter) September 10, 2020

[Sep 23, 2020] MH17 looks like a flashback to KAL007 to me, the evil is always Russian and every where!

Sep 23, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Wolle , Aug 8 2020 1:20 utc | 32

MH17 looks like a flashback to KAL007 to me, the evil is always Russian and every where! KAL007 was shot down by Russians, after some thousand kilometres in high sensitive Russian air space partially shadowed by RC-135 spy plane. Extremely devilish!

MH17 was IMHO shot down by drunken Ukraine forces: https://youtu.be/Q3MomxNHnUA (video from July 16th, 2014)

Of course there are NO operational BUK systems and NO fascists in the ATO zone in east Ukraine! And a SU-24 can't fly higher then 6km! Believe me, it's in Wikipedia!

[Sep 23, 2020] How fake media actually works: reporter are given the narrative and they should rehash their stories to fit it

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... The blogger Caitlin Johnstone accurately states that these most of these mainstream corporate journalists are really *narrative managers* in that their primary role is to peddle the official narrative of the US corporate/political establishment for any given topic. ..."
"... I would add that the managing editors of these "journalists"/narrative managers would be more honestly described as "handlers," to use the parlance of spooks. ..."
"... Waste of time. They control the media. The Internet may have lots of influence, but it still does not set "consensus reality" - that remains with the MSM. The MSM issues one coordinated narrative. The Internet is all over the place. Without one coordinated narrative, you can't set "reality". ..."
"... In addition, those who issue the narrative and control the MSM have the power. People want to believe those in power, due to cognitive dissonance - otherwise they'd have to accept that everyone ruling their lives is a corrupt liar. The electorate may *say* they understand that their rulers are corrupt - but they can't act* on that realization without compromising their own internal belief systems. So again, waste of time to try ..."
Sep 23, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

snake , Sep 22 2020 0:59 utc | 22 can we not invent a method that can counter this tactic of using propaganda to control the narrative?

1) Hack them. Release their planning documents, emails, phone calls, etc. showing how the scam was set up.

2) Waste of time. They control the media. The Internet may have lots of influence, but it still does not set "consensus reality" - that remains with the MSM. The MSM issues one coordinated narrative. The Internet is all over the place. Without one coordinated narrative, you can't set "reality".

3) In addition, those who issue the narrative and control the MSM have the power. People want to believe those in power, due to cognitive dissonance - otherwise they'd have to accept that everyone ruling their lives is a corrupt liar. The electorate may *say* they understand that their rulers are corrupt - but they can't act* on that realization without compromising their own internal belief systems. So again, waste of time to try.

snake , Sep 22 2020 10:19 utc | 36

time2wakeupnow , Sep 21 2020 23:36 utc | 20

Well....as always, and especially if it involves anything even remotely relating to 'Russia', or Iran, or whatever adversarial operational target of the day might be -- one can reliably count on our very own "Izvestia on the Hudson" to faithfully execute their officially sanctioned nation security state propaganda mission by dutifully steno-graphing as much dis/mis-information as their NSA/CIA/Pentagon handlers request (require) from them.

Petri Krohn , Sep 21 2020 22:50 utc | 18

A former editor and correspondent of the The New York Times , Michael Cieply describes how the newspaper works:
Stunned By Trump, The New York Times Finds Time For Some Soul-Searching

It was a shock on arriving at the New York Times in 2004, as the paper's movie editor, to realize that its editorial dynamic was essentially the reverse. By and large, talented reporters scrambled to match stories with what internally was often called "the narrative." We were occasionally asked to map a narrative for our various beats a year in advance, square the plan with editors, then generate stories that fit the pre-designated line.

Reality usually had a way of intervening. But I knew one senior reporter who would play solitaire on his computer in the mornings, waiting for his editors to come through with marching orders. Once, in the Los Angeles bureau, I listened to a visiting National staff reporter tell a contact, more or less: "My editor needs someone to say such-and-such, could you say that?"

The bigger shock came on being told, at least twice, by Times editors who were describing the paper's daily Page One meeting: "We set the agenda for the country in that room.

ak74 , Sep 22 2020 0:14 utc | 22
The blogger Caitlin Johnstone accurately states that these most of these mainstream corporate journalists are really *narrative managers* in that their primary role is to peddle the official narrative of the US corporate/political establishment for any given topic.

I would add that the managing editors of these "journalists"/narrative managers would be more honestly described as "handlers," to use the parlance of spooks.

In fact, it would be apt to described venerable institution of journalism itself as an intelligence operation.

THE CIA AND THE MEDIA

http://www.carlbernstein.com/magazine_cia_and_media.php

Richard Steven Heck , Sep 22 2020 4:01 utc | 28

@snake | Sep 22 2020 0:59 utc | 22 can we not invent a method that can counter this tactic of using propaganda to control the narrative?

1) Hack them. Release their planning documents, emails, phone calls, etc. showing how the scam was set up.

2) Waste of time. They control the media. The Internet may have lots of influence, but it still does not set "consensus reality" - that remains with the MSM. The MSM issues one coordinated narrative. The Internet is all over the place. Without one coordinated narrative, you can't set "reality".

3) In addition, those who issue the narrative and control the MSM have the power. People want to believe those in power, due to cognitive dissonance - otherwise they'd have to accept that everyone ruling their lives is a corrupt liar. The electorate may *say* they understand that their rulers are corrupt - but they can't act* on that realization without compromising their own internal belief systems. So again, waste of time to try.

[Sep 23, 2020] Never Forget- Smoking Gun Intel Memo From 1990s Warned Of Frankenstein The CIA Created

Notable quotes:
"... knew and bluntly acknowledged ..."
"... War on The Rocks ..."
"... The U.S. State Dept.'s own numbers at the height of the war in Syria: access the full report at STATE.GOV ..."
Sep 23, 2020 | www.blacklistednews.com
SOURCE: ZEROHEDGE

As Americans pause to remember the tragic events of September 11, 2001 which saw almost 3,000 innocents killed in the worst terror attack in United States history, it might also be worth contemplating the horrific wars and foreign quagmires unleashed during the subsequent 'war on terror'.

Bush's so-called Global War on Terror targeted 'rogue states' like Saddam's Iraq, but also consistently had a focus on uprooting and destroying al-Qaeda and other armed Islamist terror organizations (this led to the falsehood that Baathist Saddam and AQ were in cahoots). But the idea that Washington from the start saw al-Qaeda and its affiliates as some kind of eternal enemy is largely a myth.

Recall that the US covertly supported the Afghan mujahideen and other international jihadists throughout the 1980's Afghan-Soviet War, the very campaign in which hardened al-Qaeda terrorists got their start. In 1999 The Guardian in a rare moment of honest mainstream journalism warned of the Frankenstein the CIA created -- among their ranks a terror mastermind named Osama bin Laden .

But it was all the way back in 1993 that a then classified intelligence memo warned that the very fighters the CIA previously trained would soon turn their weapons on the US and its allies. The 'secret' document was declassified in 2009, but has remained largely obscure in mainstream media reporting, despite being the first to contain a bombshell admission.

A terrorism analyst at the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research named Gina Bennett wrote in the 1993 memo "The Wandering Mujahidin: Armed and Dangerous," that --

"support network that funneled money, supplies, and manpower to supplement the Afghan mujahidin" in the war against the Soviets, "is now contributing experienced fighters to militant Islamic groups worldwide."

The concluding section contains the most revelatory statements, again remembering these words were written nearly a decade before the 9/11 attacks :

US support of the mujahidin during the Afghan war will not necessarily protect US interests from attack.

...Americans will become the targets of radical Muslims' wrath. Afghan war veterans, scattered throughout the world, could surprise the US with violence in unexpected locales.

There it is in black and white print: the United States government knew and bluntly acknowledged that the very militants it armed and trained to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars would eventually turn that very training and those very weapons back on the American people .

And this was not at all a "small" or insignificant group, instead as The Guardian wrote a mere two years before 9/11 :

American officials estimate that, from 1985 to 1992, 12,500 foreigners were trained in bomb-making, sabotage and urban guerrilla warfare in Afghan camps the CIA helped to set up .

But don't think for a moment that there was ever a "lesson learned" by Washington.

Instead the CIA and other US agencies repeated the 1980s policy of arming jihadists to overthrow US enemy regimes in places like Libya and Syria even long after the "lesson" of 9/11. As War on The Rocks recounted :

Despite the passage of time, the issues Ms. Bennett raised in her 1993 work continue to be relevant today. This fact is a sign of the persistence of the problem of Sunni jihadism and the "wandering mujahidin." Today, of course, the problem isn't Afghanistan but Syria. While the war there is far from over, there is already widespread nervousness, particularly in Europe, about what will happen when the foreign fighters return from that conflict.

https://platform.twitter.com/embed/index.html?dnt=false&embedId=twitter-widget-0&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1304385396692914177&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.blacklistednews.com%2Farticle%2F77999%2Fnever-forget-smoking-gun-intel-memo-from-1990s-warned-of-frankenstein-the-cia.html&theme=light&widgetsVersion=219d021%3A1598982042171&width=550px

On 9/11 we should never forget the innocent lives lost, but we should also never forget the Frankenstein of jihad the CIA created .

* * *

The U.S. State Dept.'s own numbers at the height of the war in Syria: access the full report at STATE.GOV

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[Sep 22, 2020] Stephen F. Cohen -- In Memoriam by Gilbert Doctorow

Unfortunately in his brilliant analysis of USA-Russia relations Stephen Cohen never pointed out that the USA policy toward Russia is dictated by the interests of maintaining global neoliberal empire and the concept of "Full Spectrum Dominance" which was adopted by the USA neoliberal elite after the collapse of the USSR.
Like British empire the USA neoliberal empire is now overextended, metropolia is in secular stagnation with deterioration standard of living of the bottom 80% of population, so the USA under Trump became more aggressive and dangerous on the international arena. Trump administration behaves behaves like a cornered rat on international arena.
Notable quotes:
"... On Friday, 18 September, professor Steve Cohen passed away in New York City and we, the "dissident" community of Americans standing for peace with Russia – and for peace with the world at large – lost a towering intellectual and skillful defender of our cause who enjoyed an audience of millions by his weekly broadcasts on the John Batchelor Show, WABC Radio. ..."
"... from the start of the Information Wars against Russia during the George W. Bush administration following Putin's speech at the Munich Security Conference in February 2007, no voice questioning the official propaganda line in America was tolerated. Steve Cohen, who in the 1990s had been a welcome guest on U.S. national television and a widely cited expert in print media suddenly found himself blacklisted and subjected to the worst of McCarthyite style, ad hominem attacks. ..."
"... the opposition to Steve was led by experts in the Ukrainian and other minority peoples sub-categories of the profession who were militantly opposed not just to him personally but to any purely objective, not to mention sympathetic treatment of Russian leadership in the territorial expanse of Eurasia. ..."
"... Almost no one outside our 'dissident' community is concerned about the possibility of Armageddon in say two years' time due to miscalculations and bad luck in our pursuing economic, informational and military confrontation with Russia and China. ..."
"... My point in this discussion is that in the last decade of his life Stephen Cohen became one of the nation's most fearless and persistent defenders of the right to Free Speech. ..."
"... It was forced upon him by The New York Times, The Washington Post and other major media who pilloried him or blacklisted him over his unorthodox, unsanctioned, nonconformist views on the "Putin regime." It was forced upon him by university colleagues who sought to deny his right to establish graduate school fellowships in Russian affairs bearing his name and that of his mentor at Indiana University, Professor Tucker. ..."
"... In the face of vicious personal attacks from these McCarthyite forces, in the face of hate mail and even threats to his life, Steve decided to set up The American Committee and to recruit to its governing board famous, patriotic Americans and the descendants of the most revered families in the country. In this he succeeded, and it is to his credit that a moral counter force to the stampeding bulls of repression was erected and has survived to this day. ..."
Sep 22, 2020 | gilbertdoctorow.com

On Friday, 18 September, professor Steve Cohen passed away in New York City and we, the "dissident" community of Americans standing for peace with Russia – and for peace with the world at large – lost a towering intellectual and skillful defender of our cause who enjoyed an audience of millions by his weekly broadcasts on the John Batchelor Show, WABC Radio.

A year ago, I reviewed his latest book, War With Russia? which drew upon the material of those programs and took this scholar turned journalist into a new and highly accessible genre of oral readings in print. The narrative style may have been more relaxed, with simplified syntax, but the reasoning remained razor sharp. I urge those who are today paying tribute to Steve, to buy and read the book, which is his best legacy.

From start to finish, Stephen F. Cohen was among America's best historians of his generation, putting aside the specific subject matter that he treated: Nikolai Bukharin, his dissertation topic and the material of his first and best known book; or, to put it more broadly, the history of Russia (USSR) in the 20 th century. He was one of the very rare cases of an historian deeply attentive to historiography, to causality and to logic. I understood this when I read a book of his from the mid-1980s in which he explained why Russian (Soviet) history was no longer attracting young students of quality: because there were no unanswered questions, because we smugly assumed that we knew about that country all that there was to know. That was when our expert community told us with one voice that the USSR was entrapped in totalitarianism without any prospect for the overthrow of its oppressive regime.

But my recollections of Steve also have a personal dimension going back six years or so when a casual email correspondence between us flowered into a joint project that became the launch of the American Committee for East West Accord (ACEWA). This was a revival of a pro-détente association of academics and business people that existed from the mid-1970s to the early 1990s, when, following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the removal of the Communist Party from power, the future of Russia in the family of nations we call the 'international community' seemed assured and there appeared to be no further need for such an association as ACEWA.

I hasten to add that in the original ACEWA Steve and I were two ships that passed in the night. With his base in Princeton, he was a protégé of the dean of diplomats then in residence there, George Kennan, who was the leading light on the academic side of the ACEWA. I was on the business side of the association, which was led by Don Kendall, chairman of Pepsico and also for much of the 1970s chairman of the US-USSR Trade and Economic Council of which I was also a member. I published pro-détente articles in their newsletter and published a lengthy piece on cooperation with the Soviet Union in agricultural and food processing domains, my specialty at that time, in their collection of essays by leaders in the U.S. business community entitled Common Sense in U.S.-Soviet Trade .

The academic contingent had, as one might assume, a 'progressive' coloration, while the business contingent had a Nixon Republican coloration. Indeed, in the mid-1980s these two sides split in their approach to the growing peace movement in the U.S. that was fed by opposition in the 'thinking community' on university campuses to Ronald Reagan's Star Wars agenda. Kendall shut the door at ACEWA to rabble rousing and the association did not rise to the occasion, so that its disbanding in the early '90s went unnoticed.

In the re-incorporated American Committee, I helped out by assuming the formal obligations of Treasurer and Secretary, and also became the group's European Coordinator from my base in Brussels. At this point my communications with Steve were almost daily and emotionally quite intense. This was a time when America's expert community on Russian affairs once again felt certain that it knew everything there was to know about the country, and most particularly about the nefarious "Putin regime." But whereas in the 1970s and 1980s, polite debate about the USSR/Russia was entirely possible both behind closed doors and in public space, from the start of the Information Wars against Russia during the George W. Bush administration following Putin's speech at the Munich Security Conference in February 2007, no voice questioning the official propaganda line in America was tolerated. Steve Cohen, who in the 1990s had been a welcome guest on U.S. national television and a widely cited expert in print media suddenly found himself blacklisted and subjected to the worst of McCarthyite style, ad hominem attacks.

From my correspondence and several meetings with Steve at this time both in his New York apartment and here in Brussels, when he and Katrina van der Heuvel came to participate in a Round Table dedicated to relations with Russia at the Brussels Press Club that I arranged, I knew that Steve was deeply hurt by these vitriolic attacks. He was at the time waging a difficult campaign to establish a fellowship in support of graduate studies in Russian affairs. It was touch and go, because of vicious opposition from some stalwarts of the profession to any fellowship that bore Steve's name. Allow me to put the 'i' on this dispute: the opposition to Steve was led by experts in the Ukrainian and other minority peoples sub-categories of the profession who were militantly opposed not just to him personally but to any purely objective, not to mention sympathetic treatment of Russian leadership in the territorial expanse of Eurasia. In the end, Steve and Katrina prevailed. The fellowships exist and, hopefully, will provide sustenance to future studies when American attitudes towards Russia become less politicized.

At all times and on all occasions, Steve Cohen was a voice of reason above all. The problem of our age is that we are now not only living in a post-factual world, but in a post-logic world. The public reads day after day the most outrageous and illogical assertions about alleged Russian misdeeds posted by our most respected mainstream media including The New York Times and The Washington Post . Almost no one dares to raise a hand and suggest that this reporting is propaganda and that the public is being brainwashed. Steve did exactly that in War With Russia? in a brilliant and restrained text.

Regrettably today we have no peace movement to speak of. Youth and our 'progressive' elites are totally concerned over the fate of humanity in 30 or 40 years' time as a consequence of Global Warming and rising seas. That is the essence of the Green Movement. Almost no one outside our 'dissident' community is concerned about the possibility of Armageddon in say two years' time due to miscalculations and bad luck in our pursuing economic, informational and military confrontation with Russia and China.

I fear it will take only some force majeure development such as we had in 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis to awaken the broad public to the risks to our very survival that we are incurring by ignoring the issues that Stephen F. Cohen, professor emeritus of Princeton and New York University was bringing to the airwaves week after week on his radio program.

Postscript

In terms of action, the new ACEWA was even less effective than its predecessor, which had avoided linking up with the peace movement of the 1980s and sought to exert influence on policy through armchair talks with Senators and other statesmen in Washington behind closed doors of (essentially) men's clubs.

However, the importance of the new ACEWA, and the national importance of Stephen Cohen lay elsewhere.

This question of appraising Stephen Cohen's national importance is all the more timely given that on the day of his death, 18 September, the nation also lost Supreme Justice Ruth Ginsburg, about whose national importance no Americans, whether her fans or her opponents, had any doubt.

My point in this discussion is that in the last decade of his life Stephen Cohen became one of the nation's most fearless and persistent defenders of the right to Free Speech. It was not a role that he sought. It was thrust upon him by the expert community of international affairs, including the Council on Foreign Relations, from which he reluctantly resigned over this matter.

It was forced upon him by The New York Times, The Washington Post and other major media who pilloried him or blacklisted him over his unorthodox, unsanctioned, nonconformist views on the "Putin regime." It was forced upon him by university colleagues who sought to deny his right to establish graduate school fellowships in Russian affairs bearing his name and that of his mentor at Indiana University, Professor Tucker.

In the face of vicious personal attacks from these McCarthyite forces, in the face of hate mail and even threats to his life, Steve decided to set up The American Committee and to recruit to its governing board famous, patriotic Americans and the descendants of the most revered families in the country. In this he succeeded, and it is to his credit that a moral counter force to the stampeding bulls of repression was erected and has survived to this day.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2020

[If you found value in this article, you should be interested to read my latest collection of essays entitled A Belgian Perspective on International Affairs, published in November 2019 and available in e-book, paperback and hardbound formats from amazon, barnes & noble, bol.com, fnac, Waterstones and other online retailers. Use the "View Inside" tab on the book's webpages to browse.]

[Sep 22, 2020] The hypocrisy of Western democracy promotion

Sep 22, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Jackrabbit , Sep 20 2020 16:45 utc | 8

How the west lost

What I liked most about this article was the highlighting of impossible-to-counter narratives, the hypocrisy of Western democracy promotion (even as Western governments fellate domestic and foreign economic elites), and the denigration of nationalism from 1990-2016.

Sadly, the author does a disservice in suggesting that such manipulations are past. Instead, the Western power-elite has done what it does best: co-opt a 'winning' narrative (nationalism) and double-down.

Other deficiencies:

  1. Ignores the fact that the US Deep State, caretakers of the Empire, hasn't accepted defeat. Since 2014 they have been actively trying to reverse what they see as a major set-back (not defeat).

    Via economic sanctions, trade wars, propaganda, and military tensions the Empire is waging a hybrid war against what it calls the "revisionist" efforts of Russia and China.

  2. Plays into the propaganda narrative of Trump as populist.
  3. Fails to see the 1990's 'economic shock therapy' as a deliberate attempt to push Russia into total capitulation. This, darker view, was confirmed obliquely by Kissinger in his interview with ft in which he stated that no one could foresee the ability of Russia to absorb pain.
!!

[Sep 22, 2020] The New US-Russian Cold War -- Who is to Blame

It was all about Full Spectrum Domination. McFaul is not intellectual, he is a propagandist. Actually mediocre, obnoxious propagandist. In like Professor Cohen, intellectually he is nothing with academic credentials.
The level and primitivism lies about Ukraine would name any serious academic flash. It was about encircling Russia.
McFaul was behind Magnitsky which in best conspiracy tradition raises questions whether he works for MI6? We now know who Browder was and suspicious that he was Magnitsky killer or facilitator/financer (by hiring the jail doctor who traded Magnitsky) are very strong in view of "cui bono" question.
Notable quotes:
"... He is definitely not at the same level as Stephen F.Cohen. This is very alarming for the US, that people like him could have any power decision on Foreign Policy, and could explain the slow decline of the USA. ..."
"... McFaul is intellectually incoherent and disingenuous. Cohen wasted him ..."
"... We all know the truth... US economy heavily dependent on producing weapons and ammunition ..."
"... Mc Faul is clearly not supposed to have been in the positions of power, where he was. Something is fundamentally wrong with America. I think there is a crisis of personnel. Where are all these incredibly smart, high IQ people Harvard, Princeton, and the Ivy Leagues are supposedly pumping out? ..."
Sep 22, 2020 | www.youtube.com

TheInstallations , 2 years ago

McFaul is definitely not an academic, but much more a mediocre high civil servant. He is also very post modern in his approach. He is here to sell his book, not to argue ideas. He is incapable of building a rhetorical argument, and of having any political vision or strong analytical intelligence.

He is definitely not at the same level as Stephen F.Cohen. This is very alarming for the US, that people like him could have any power decision on Foreign Policy, and could explain the slow decline of the USA.

Confronted to people like Putin who is obviously an Old fashion politician like de Gaulles or Churchill, the Cold War can only lead us to catastrophe.

Yevgeny Goncharov , 2 years ago

Great facts from Prof. Cohen. Faulty logic from McFaul ("you cannot use those variables..."). McFaul will not get far in understanding Russia with this twisted approach, ie pretending like nothing (NATO, missile treaty, regime changes) happens.

The Maverick Historian , 2 years ago

Very informative debate! I think McFaul has only contributed to the new cold war with the treaties he helped write and the ill-informed advice he provided to the neoconservative Obama administration. Mr. Stephen Cohen is brilliant and I only wish he was more influential in shaping today's foreign policy. Though thankfully, McFaul is also no longer influential in shaping U.S. foreign policy.

Yevgeny Goncharov , 2 years ago

Very low from McFaul. Bringing personal attacks on him from social media as "facts" and "arguments" ("McFaul is a pedophile") . This not a level of academic argument from McFaul. He is no match to Cohen.

Aleksandar Mali , 1 year ago

It's so easy to understand! Russia is doing same thing usa will do when china starts to open military bases in latin America. Its not hard to imagine and in decade or to you will not have to imagine you will have that reality. Many Latin America countries will be interconnected with china with economic and military agreements than one day they will try to brig Mexico in China's sphere of influence if they refuse china can let's say "help" opposition to come in power and sign everything China wants.

I would like to see what American "experts" will say. How many of them will think that Mexico as a sovereign natio have right to sign any agreement it wants maybe even Russia can open military base and bring nuclear weapons to border of USA. So what it's their democratic right, isn't it?

Peace and Love , 2 years ago

McFaul is intellectually incoherent and disingenuous. Cohen wasted him

Salam Ahmed , 10 months ago

1:13:33 - 1:13:58 I swear by the all-powerful Albert Einistine that you are lying AND YOU KNOW IT. Russians said A BILLION times that U.S.A slowly but SURELY preparing for what they called "a calamitous war" by moving its lethal weapons nearer and nearer to the Russian territories.

We all know the truth... US economy heavily dependent on producing weapons and ammunition but the very very very main reason [for harassing Russia and the rest of world] is because the Rothschild family wants GLOBAL DOMINATION. SOLD FACT (ask ANY Russian intelligence officer about it and you will see what i mean).

SvendBosanvovski , 1 year ago (edited)

I have read Professor Cohen's last two works ("Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives" and "War with Russia?") and found them very informative and persuasive, but seeing him here expanding upon his key arguments is even more rewarding.

He shouldn't have to be brave to hold to his position, given his reputation as a scholar, but regrettably he is made to appear out of step with the critical mass of opinion makers who see more value promoting conflict with Russia than working towards a sensible accommodation.

rd264 , 2 years ago

I'm not an "expert" from Stanford, but as I recall the USSR imploded and the US [CIA etc] was totally surprised -so called pundits and experts in the US did not see it coming, then the next thing we get is US mainstream media claimed victory in the cold war, just blanket assertions that US won the cold war because the US is virtuous and clean and good, and we did it by the clear superiority of US way of life or some such crap.

Charles Krauthammer, for example. Now so called media and historians try to convince us that Reagan lead disarmament, but as I recall he blocked it at most points, for example, it was Gorbachev not Reagan who was out front and did all the leading at Reykjavik, and Reagan threw away Gorbachev's historic offer to totally disarm on the grounds that Star Wars was a more important priority, on Richard Perle's advice.

Now we are seeing something similar under Trump in which the US is again uninterested in peace and far more interested in wars by proxies and drones and global hegemony and control running the 7 seas and space to boot.

Dmitriy A , 1 year ago

Michael Foley is a liar of course US was involved I was me in US Army force and my friends used to travel to Georgia way before 2008 and of course everybody knows 2008 Russia and Georgia went to war with each other but our soldiers US government soldiers were teaching Georgians fighting with the NATO forces and all orange resolutions and Geo like him involved in Overturning government was famous Victoria Nuland

a 19 , 9 months ago

Mcfaul should have stayed in Montana

Larry Galearis , 2 years ago

Interesting debate and I hope Cohen is right, and is not the first of its kind. But still the FIRST EVER free debate about the New Cold War in the United States is (so far) still on Youtube. While listening to the two professors I found myself noting the difference in the presentation of facts from a career oriented politician/academic who is influenced by a forced narrative (McFaul) and one (Cohen) who is an academic historian who is in dissent and can speak freely (he is retired).

Keep in mind that Prof. McFaul has a career to worry about. It shows a LOT! Here we can see how political pressure can influence a debate. McFaul is still quite deserving of accolades for his courage to even say what he did in this debate.

And note how much free speech is missing in American society in the fact that this sort of thing is very difficult to achieve in a collapsed democracy. Note also that McFaul also stuck to "the Narrative" big lies like the so-called Crimea "annexation" when he would have known the truth of it....There are other examples. Americans are denied the fact that the public vote taken in Crimea was over 90% IN FAVOUR of joining Russia (again). This fact is simply too large for McFaul to be unaware of and yet most Americans are wallowing in this fake news. Or censored omissions. FWIW, Galearis

blackjackpinoko , 1 year ago

McFaul sounded like Pompeo

Steven Bishop , 2 months ago

The Monroe Doctrine. Has McFly read it?

Davide Sinigoi , 1 year ago

Prof. McFaul is a partisan. He bases his opinion of detailed facts, so detailed that he misses the bigger picture. The bigger picture is that he claims to be a sovereigns, but only when it comes to the US sovereignty. How about Russia's sovereignty?

Or Ukraine's whose government has been toppled by a (among others) US sponsored coup? How about Syria sovereignty? He furthers the view that the US had a fair posture towards Russia, which is not. This is also demonstrated by his personal deep dislike of Putin, which is something that both a real statesman or a real scholar should not influence opinions and actions.

McFaul's perspective is also flawed by the conflation of his (and Obama's) wishes and reality: that is that they don't like Putin and think to deal with Russia as if Putin was not there, but he is. You deal with the reality, not with your wishes. Putin is legitimate and strong Russia's president, whether McFaul likes him or not. A real respect for sovereignty demands respect for the head of the state you deal with. You don't question his legitimacy, as well as they don't questioned Clinton's, Bush's, Obama or Trump legitimacy. His point of view is that everything goes on in the world should have the US sanction, otherwise is not good.

This is imperial hubris, this is arrogance. This flaws his opinion in so far everything is measured upon american likes and dislikes. THis is not statesmanship, this is not scholarship, this is partisanship. He is also intellectually dishonest because he confuses a debate on right and wrong, which should be based on certain assumptions, with a debate on party interests, which has nothing to do with right and wrong, and is based on different assumptions. Indeed he is the less fit person in a debate on responsibility for the New Cold War because he was involved in its development and acquisition.

Partisanship is admitted, but shouldn't be disguised as neutrality or given any relevance just because of knowledge of technical details he knows - much of them are, frankly, irrelevant. His points are weak and inconsistent with geopolitical and a realist view of the international relations, they are biased by universal-liberal ideology, they are US-centric, he forgets too many essential points about the whole story. For instance he talks about the missed chance for Russian democracy (here a debate about what democracy is: his assumption is that the US democracy is .... please, don't make me laugh), but he doesn't mention that Soviet people voted in referenda and overwhelmingly wanted the USSR to keep on existing, but he forgets this "detail".

He forgets how the so much beloved Elcin sent the tanks against the parliament, many people were killed, how he allowed the pillaging of Russian people and resources by criminal oligarchs (many of them happily hosted by the UK and presented as political dissidents), and how the Russian 1996 were HEAVILY rigged and meddled by the US in order to reconfirm Elcin as a president. He complains about Putin being appointed by Elcin out of nothing. Well I can't recall any American complaints at that time, maybe because they thought he could be an alcoholic puppet like Elcin and that was clearly something the US liked and supported. So what about Obama (fake) words about wishing a strong Russia?

Obama spoke derogatory words about Russia. The only American interests about Russia is that is a militarily and strategically weak provider of cheap natural resources and that is not in tne position of competing for anything. I will stop here, although I could write pages and pages about McFlaws .... ooops! McFaul's inconsistency both as a scholar and even more as a statesman's advisor, but the debate was among a great intellectual with a clear vision of the world, and a small professor taken with insignificant details and too much love for Obama and blind believe in liberal universal ideology.

Alex P. , 9 months ago

Mc Faul is clearly not supposed to have been in the positions of power, where he was. Something is fundamentally wrong with America. I think there is a crisis of personnel. Where are all these incredibly smart, high IQ people Harvard, Princeton, and the Ivy Leagues are supposedly pumping out?

Bob Trajkoski , 1 year ago

McFaul believes in his own propaganda, irrational person and dangerous at that

Adam Rihak , 3 months ago

Prof. Cohen astonishing realpolitik ingenuity when asked "what the security interests of Ukraine and Georgia are" ( 1:16:21 ) unveils to me his understanding of politics as kind of imperialistic chess game where the US stands against the USSR (or RF for that matter). I have experienced the same feelings from his other debates (I remember one memorable at Munk Debates in 2015) - as if the historic fears, desires and dreams (of NATO or EU membership as the only effective shield against Russian military power) of so many ex-soviet countries means absolutely nothing - as if they were mere puppets of US "regime". As though the legitimate wishes of these sovereign countries means nothing at all. He is so surprised by that question he suddenly can't retrieve even the definition of what security interests of a country actually means - a rather strange quality in a historian. Ultimately he comes up with "they should make peace with their neighbors" - say this to countries that were along their history subjects of Soviet violent repression, military invasions, ethnic genocides and such. "I don't think Russian is a threat to them". Absolutely ridiculous.


Jean-Pierre Delorraine , 8 months ago (edited)

This Michael McFaul individual is such severe laughing-stock completely out of touch with reality. Stephen Cohen's version of the "new cold war" is much closer to reality and we should not forget the nefarious entities that pull the strings in D.C. U.S. covert involvement throughout eastern Europe and especially the Ukraine is more than evident. Putin and Russia in general is not stupid and see right through U.S. covert meddling on Russia's border. And those "peaceful demonstrators" in Syria that MacFaul dearly praises are mere agents of the CIA/Mossad complex. Where are they now?


Nikhilesh Surve , 4 months ago

Monroe doctrine doesn't care about the democratic rights of countries in the western hemisphere to enter into any alliance or partnership with USA's rival. Also, there's still no evidence of Russian hacking which is basis of their religion of RUSSIA RUSSIA RUSSIA !

Pink Question , 3 months ago

Sure, since in Ukraine you guys didn't push money in mysterious organisations that would support the "democratic" narrative. I don't like NATO in my country and I see nato presence as an existential threat for Russia! Look back at the Cuba crisis it's exactly the SAME! You no good morally and ethically corrupt poor excuses of mouth pieces

Ser Korz , 2 years ago

Interesting how USA wants democracy for (all) others , but USA wants capitalist aristocracy for it self ( Jimmy Carter Tells Oprah America Is No Longer a Democracy, Now an Oligarchy https://mic.com/articles/125813/jimmy-carter-tells-oprah-america-is-no-longer-a-democracy-now-an-oligarchy#.AFxvdOCIa ).


Preben Soe , 9 months ago

Either that Faul person is delusional or he is outright lying - Did Turkey not get threatened with sanctions when they decided to trade with Russia on anti missile weapons.

Eamonn Wright555 , 1 year ago

You know Obama is a straight faced liar . Furthermore , we genocided innocent Christians and Muslims in three countries and created a diaspora of migrants to Europe. So , we are supposed to believe that all those PhDs did not foresee that , most people think that it was your intentional outcome all along . So it goes now in Venezuela. Mcfaul is one of many who just carry the water and carry out orders . It's almost as if , the powers that be want the USA to fall . Because they can not be this stupid .

Paul Srochenski , 1 year ago

Call Cohen tells the truth the other guy just lying a United States started that whole thing in Syria they backed up Isis they backed up all the terrorists and because they want to split the country up and give Israel that major part of it cuz they want the natural resources the oil out of there and everything else because that's what they do everywhere they go they want a natural Resorts and they don't care how many people they kill

Eamonn Wright555 , 1 year ago

You know Obama is a straight faced liar . Furthermore , we genocided innocent Christians and Muslims in three countries and created a diaspora of migrants to Europe. So , we are supposed to believe that all those PhDs did not foresee that , most people think that it was your intentional outcome all along . So it goes now in Venezuela. Mcfaul is one of many who just carry the water and carry out orders . It's almost as if , the powers that be want the USA to fall . Because they can not be this stupid .

Davide Sinigoi , 1 year ago

Prof. McFaul is a partisan. He bases his opinion of detailed facts, so detailed that he misses the bigger picture. The bigger picture is that he claims to be a sovereignist, but only when it comes to the US sovereignty. How about Russia's sovereignity? Or Ukraine's whose government has been toppled by a (among others) US sponsored coup? How about Syria sovereignty? He furthers the view that the US had a fair posture towards Russia, which is not. This is also demonstrated by his personal deep dislike of Putin, which is something that both a real statesman or a real scholar should not influence opinions and actions. McFaul's perspective is also flawed by the conflation of his (and Obama's) wishes and reality: that is that they donì't like Putin and think to deal with Russia as if Putin was not there, but he is. You deal with the reality, not with your wishes. Putin is legitimate and strong Russia's president, whether McFaul likes him or not. A real respect for sovereignty demands respect for the head of the state you deal with. You don't question his legitimacy, as well as they don't questioned Clinton's, Bush's, Obama or Trump legitimacy. His point of view is that everything goes on in the world should have the US sanction, otherwise is not good. This is imperial hubris, this is arrogance. This flaws his opinion in so far everything is measured upon american likes and dislikes. THis is not statesmanship, this is not scholarship, this is partisanship. He is also intellectually dishonest because he confuses a debate on right and wrong, which should be based on certain assumptions, with a debate on party interests, which has nothing to do with right and wrong, and is based on different assumptions. Indeed he is the less fit person in a debate on responsibility for the New Cold War because he was involved in its development and acutisation. Partisanship is admitted, but shouldn't be disguised as neutrality or given any relevance just because of knowledge of technical details he knows - much of them are, frankly, irrelevant. His points are weak and inconsistent with geopolitical and a realist view of the international relations, they are biased by universal-liberal ideology, they are US-centric, he forgets too many essential points about the whole story. For instance he talks about the missed chance for Russian democracy (here a debate about what democracy is: his assumption is that the US democracy is .... please, don't make me laugh), but he doesn't mention that Soviet people voted in referenda and overwhelmingly wanted the USSR to keep on existing, but he forgets this "detail". He forgets how the so much beloved Elcin sent the tanks against the parliament, many people were killed, how he allowed the pillaging of Russian people and resources by criminal oligarchs (many of them happily hosted by the UK and presented as political dissidents), and how the Russian 1996 were HEAVILY rigged and meddled by the US in order to reconfirm Elcin as a president. He complains about Putin being appointed by Elcin out of nothing. Well I can't recall any American complaints at that time, maybe because they thought he could be an alcoholic puppet like Elcin and that was clearly something the US liked and supported. So what about Obama (fake) words about wishing a strong Russia? Obama spoke derogatory words about Russia. The only American interests about Russia is that is a militarly and strategically weak provider of cheap natural resources and that is not in tne position of competing for anything. I will stop here, although I could write pages and pages about McFlaws .... ooops! McFaul's inconsistency both as a scholar and even more as a statesman's advisor, but the debate was among a great intellectual with a clear vision of the world, and a small professor taken with insignificant details and too much love for Obama and blind believe in liberal universal ideology.

Alex P. , 9 months ago

Mc Faul is clearly not supposed to have been in the positions of power, where he was. Something is fundamentally wrong with America. I think there is a crisis of personnel. Where are all these incredibly smart, high IQ people Harvard, Princeton, and the Ivy Leagues are supposedly pumping out?

Rufus Leaking , 1 week ago

I won't, for a second, try to justify the expansion of N.A.T.O. up to the borders of Russia. But I simply cannot get past the belief that the N.A.T.O. expansion was fueled by a (not implausible) fear that a non-Soviet Russia would eventually try to surround its borders with Moscow-friendly governments, just as Stalin did before, during, and after WWII. Russia has been invaded from the west so many times that the lingering fear of it is almost in the Russian people's genetic code. What the rest of the world sees as Soviet & post-Soviet Russian paranoia and expansionism could plausibly be seen by the Russians as a prudent precaution against further western aggression. I don't AGREE with this, but I can imagine how the Russian psyche might be so inclined. I don't agree with the N.A.T.O. expansion, but I can also see how western paranoia about Russian expansionism would fuel the resulting western "encroachment". Ask people in Latvia, Lithuania & Estonia (and, for that matter, Finland) who were alive in WWII if their fear of Russian expansion is based in reality, or is merely paranoia. Be prepared for "VERY STRONG" answers.

Virgocygni56 , 9 months ago

What is the date of this debate Anyone can suggest?

Bob Trajkoski , 1 year ago

McFaul believes in his own propaganda, irrational person and dangerous at that

Alyson Mc Vitty , 1 year ago

2nd speaker - mcfaul - is and idiot sort of manic.

Jsmes Oercy , 1 year ago

Wow the second guy is such a schmuck ,,z,,trying to be funny and failing

Charles DuBois , 6 months ago

Why does 'our' US/Euro left leave me a pronounced impression that they have some special axe grinding on Russia? Is my take on this wrong? And try as I may to ignore it, my gut reaction to our younger author is highly unfavorable. I shall re-watch tomorrow hoping to listen more obectively.

James Registe , 4 months ago

Who ELSE is to blame, Russia has been making overtures since Kruschev

popiedo , 1 year ago

Mcfaul just rambles and tries to crack jokes.

Colonel Chuck , 1 year ago

McFaul sure runs his mouth about nothing.

Adam Rihak , 3 months ago

Prof. Cohen astonishing realpolitik ingenuity when asked "what the security interests of Ukraine and Georgia are" ( 1:16:21 ) unveils to me his understanding of politics as kind of imperialistic chess game where the US stands against the USSR (or RF for that matter). I have experienced the same feelings from his other debates (I remember one memorable at Munk Debates in 2015) - as if the historic fears, desires and dreams (of NATO or EU membership as the only effective shield against Russian military power) of so many ex-soviet countries means absolutely nothing - as if they were mere puppets of US "regime". As though the legitimate wishes of these sovereign countries means nothing at all. He is so surprised by that question he suddenly can't retrieve even the definition of what security interests of a country actually means - a rather strange quality in a historian. Ultimately he comes up with "they should make peace with their neighbors" - say this to countries that were along their history subjects of Soviet violent repression, military invasions, ethnic genocides and such. "I don't think Russian is a threat to them". Absolutely ridiculous.

Jean-Pierre Delorraine , 8 months ago (edited)

This Michael McFaul individual is such severe laughing-stock completely out of touch with reality. Stephen Cohen's version of the "new cold war" is much closer to reality and we should not forget the nefarious entities that pull the strings in D.C. U.S. covert involvement throughout eastern Europe and especially the Ukraine is more than evident. Putin and Russia in general is not stupid and see right through U.S. covert meddling on Russia's border. And those "peaceful demonstrators" in Syria that MacFaul dearly praises are mere agents of the CIA/Mossad complex. Where are they now?

varro We , 2 years ago (edited)

I think it's fair to say that the US won the cold war, the eastern block was broke, there soviet union was a nightmare for humanity, the west was seen as a bright light and it was. So let's put aside propaganda, ask anyone from the eastern block and they will tell you that what Russia created was a genocide. Just look how fast all of those counties jumped to enter NATO. Soviet union collapsed. It's a very nice discussion and I learn a lot from this, there are a lot of things that US and Russia could have done to prevent another cold war, I think what we are with is with a belief in human wisdom, if there is any left.

[Sep 21, 2020] How the west lost by Anatol Lieven

Highly recommended!
A very good article. A better title would be "How neoliberalism collapsed" Any religious doctrine sonner or later collased under the weight of corruption of its prisets and unrealistic assumptions about the society. Neoliberalism in no expection as in heart it is secular religion based on deification of markets.
He does not discuss the role of Harvard Mafiosi in destruction of Russian (and other xUSSR republics) economy in 1990th, mass looting, empowerment of people (with pensioners experiencing WWII level of starvation) and creation of mafia capitalism on post Soviet state. But the point he made about the process are right. Yeltsin mafia, like Yeltsin himself, were the product of USA and GB machinations
Notable quotes:
"... If the US (and the UK, if as usual we tag along) approach the relationship with Beijing with anything like the combination of arrogance, ignorance, greed, criminality, bigotry, hypocrisy and incompetence with which western elites managed the period after the Cold War, then we risk losing the competition and endangering the world. ..."
"... One of the most malign effects of western victory in 1989-91 was to drown out or marginalise criticism of what was already a deeply flawed western social and economic model. In the competition with the USSR, it was above all the visible superiority of the western model that eventually destroyed Soviet communism from within. ..."
"... These beliefs interacted to produce a dominant atmosphere of "there is no alternative," which made it impossible and often in effect forbidden to conduct a proper public debate on the merits of the big western presumptions, policies or plans of the era ..."
"... This was a sentiment I encountered again and again (if not often so frankly expressed) in western establishment institutions in that era: in economic journals if it was suggested that rapid privatisation in the former USSR would lead to massive corruption, social resentment and political reaction; in security circles, if anyone dared to question the logic of Nato expansion ..."
"... Accompanying this overwhelmingly dominant political and economic ideology was an American geopolitical vision equally grandiose in ambition and equally blind to the lessons of history. This was summed up in the memorandum on "Defence Planning Guidance 1994-1999," drawn up in April 1992 for the Bush Senior administration by Under-Secretary of Defence Paul Wolfowitz and Lewis "Scooter" Libby, and subsequently leaked to the media ..."
"... By claiming for the US the right of unilateral intervention anywhere in the world and denying other major powers a greater role in their regions, this strategy essentially extended the Monroe Doctrine (which effectively defined the "western hemisphere" as the US sphere of influence) to the entire planet: an ambition greater than that of any previous power. The British Empire at its height knew that it could never intervene unilaterally on the continent of Europe or in Central America. The most megalomaniac of European rulers understood that other great powers with influence in their own areas of the world would always exist. ..."
"... "A stable and healthy polity and economy must be based on some minimal moral values" ..."
"... Many liberals gave the impression of complete indifference to the resulting immiseration of the Russian population in these years. At a meeting of the Carnegie Endowment in Washington that I attended later, former Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar boasted to an applauding US audience of how he had destroyed the Russian military industrial complex. The fact that this also destroyed the livelihoods of tens of millions of Russians and Ukrainians was not mentioned. ..."
"... This attitude was fed by contempt on the part of the educated classes of Moscow and St Petersburg for ordinary Russians, who were dubbed Homo Sovieticus and treated as an inferior species whose loathsome culture was preventing the liberal elites from taking their rightful place among the "civilised" nations of the west. This frame of mind was reminiscent of the traditional attitude of white elites in Latin America towards the Indio and Mestizo majorities in their countries. ..."
"... I vividly remember one Russian liberal journalist state his desire to fire machine guns into crowds of elderly Russians who joined Communist demonstrations to protest about the collapse of their pensions. The response of the western journalists present was that this was perhaps a little bit excessive, but to be excused since the basic sentiment was correct. ..."
"... If the post-Cold War world order was a form of US imperialism, it now looks like an empire in which rot in the over-extended periphery has spread to the core. The economic and social patterns of 1990s Russia and Ukraine have come back to haunt the west, though so far thank God in milder form. The massive looting of Russian state property and the systematic evasion of taxes by Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs was only possible with the help of western banks, which transferred the proceeds to the west and the Caribbean. This crime was euphemised in the western discourse (naturally including the Economist ) as "capital flight." ..."
"... The indifference of Russian elites to the suffering of the Russian population has found a milder echo in the neglect of former industrial regions across Britain, Western Europe and the US that did so much to produce the votes for Brexit, for Trump and for populist nationalist parties in Europe. The catastrophic plunge in Russian male life expectancy in the 1990s has found its echo in the unprecedented decline in white working-class male life expectancy in the US. ..."
"... Perhaps the greatest lesson of the period after the last Cold War is that in the end, a stable and healthy polity and economy must be based on some minimal moral values. ..."
"... Those analysing the connection between Russia and Trump's administration have looked in the wrong place. The explanation of Trump's success is not that Putin somehow mesmerised American voters in 2016. It is that populations abandoned by their elites are liable to extreme political responses; and that societies whose economic elites have turned ethics into a joke should not be surprised if their political leaders too become scoundrels. ..."
Sep 21, 2020 | prospectmagazine.co.uk

A s the US prepares to plunge into a new cold war with China in which its chances do not look good, it's an appropriate time to examine how we went so badly wrong after "victory" in the last Cold War. Looking back 30 years from the grim perspective of 2020, it is a challenge even for those who were adults at the time to remember just how triumphant the west appeared in the wake of the collapse of Soviet communism and the break-up of the USSR itself.

Today, of the rich fruits promised by that great victory, only wretched fragments remain. The much-vaunted "peace dividend," savings from military spending, was squandered. The opportunity to use the resources freed up to spread prosperity and deal with urgent social problems was wasted, and -- even worse -- the US military budget is today higher than ever. Attempts to mitigate the apocalyptic threat of climate change have fallen far short of what the scientific consensus deems to be urgently necessary. The chance to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and stabilise the Middle East was thrown away even before 9/11 and the disastrous US response. The lauded "new world order" of international harmony and co-operation -- heralded by the elder George Bush after the first Gulf War -- is a tragic joke. Britain's European dream has been destroyed, and geopolitical stability on the European continent has been lost due chiefly to new and mostly unnecessary tension with Moscow. The one previously solid-seeming achievement, the democratisation of Eastern Europe, is looking questionable, as Poland and Hungary (see Samira Shackle, p20) sink into semi-authoritarian nationalism.

Russia after the Cold War was a shambles and today it remains a weak economy with a limited role on the world stage, concerned mainly with retaining some of its traditional areas of influence. China is a vastly more formidable competitor. If the US (and the UK, if as usual we tag along) approach the relationship with Beijing with anything like the combination of arrogance, ignorance, greed, criminality, bigotry, hypocrisy and incompetence with which western elites managed the period after the Cold War, then we risk losing the competition and endangering the world.

One of the most malign effects of western victory in 1989-91 was to drown out or marginalise criticism of what was already a deeply flawed western social and economic model. In the competition with the USSR, it was above all the visible superiority of the western model that eventually destroyed Soviet communism from within. Today, the superiority of the western model to the Chinese model is not nearly so evident to most of the world's population; and it is on successful western domestic reform that victory in the competition with China will depend.

Hubris

Western triumph and western failure were deeply intertwined. The very completeness of the western victory both obscured its nature and legitimised all the western policies of the day, including ones that had nothing to do with the victory over the USSR, and some that proved utterly disastrous.

As Alexander Zevin has written of the house journal of Anglo-American elites, the revolutions in Eastern Europe "turbocharged the neoliberal dynamic at the Economist , and seemed to stamp it with an almost providential seal." In retrospect, the magazine's 1990s covers have a tragicomic appearance, reflecting a degree of faith in the rightness and righteousness of neoliberal capitalism more appropriate to a religious cult.

These beliefs interacted to produce a dominant atmosphere of "there is no alternative," which made it impossible and often in effect forbidden to conduct a proper public debate on the merits of the big western presumptions, policies or plans of the era. As a German official told me when I expressed some doubt about the wisdom of rapid EU enlargement, "In my ministry we are not even allowed to think about that."

This was a sentiment I encountered again and again (if not often so frankly expressed) in western establishment institutions in that era: in economic journals if it was suggested that rapid privatisation in the former USSR would lead to massive corruption, social resentment and political reaction; in security circles, if anyone dared to question the logic of Nato expansion; and almost anywhere if it was pointed out that the looting of former Soviet republics was being assiduously encouraged and profited from by western banks, and regarded with benign indifference by western governments.

The atmosphere of the time is (nowadays notoriously) summed up in Francis Fukuyama's The End of History , which essentially predicted that western liberal capitalist democracy would now be the only valid and successful economic and political model for all time. In fact, what victory in the Cold War ended was not history but the study of history by western elites.

"The US claiming the right of unilateral intervention anywhere in the world was an ambition greater than that of any previous power"

A curious feature of 1990s capitalist utopian thought was that it misunderstood the essential nature of capitalism, as revealed by its real (as opposed to faith-based) history. One is tempted to say that Fukuyama should have paid more attention to Karl Marx and a famous passage in The Communist Manifesto :

"The bourgeoisie [ie capitalism] cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society All fixed, fast-frozen relations with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away; all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify the bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed "

Then again, Marx himself made exactly the same mistake in his portrayal of a permanent socialist utopia after the overthrow of capitalism. The point is that utopias, being perfect, are unchanging, whereas continuous and radical change, driven by technological development, is at the heart of capitalism -- and, according to Marx, of the whole course of human history. Of course, those who believed in a permanently successful US "Goldilocks economy" -- not too hot, and not too cold -- also managed to forget 300 years of periodic capitalist economic crises.

Though much mocked at the time, Fukuyama's vision came to dominate western thinking. This was summed up in the universally employed but absurd phrases "Getting to Denmark" (as if Russia and China were ever going to resemble Denmark) and "The path to democracy and the free market" (my italics), which became the mantra of the new and lucrative academic-bureaucratic field of "transitionology." Absurd, because the merest glance at modern history reveals multiple different "paths" to -- and away from -- democracy and capitalism, not to mention myriad routes that have veered towards one at the same time as swerving away from the other.

Accompanying this overwhelmingly dominant political and economic ideology was an American geopolitical vision equally grandiose in ambition and equally blind to the lessons of history. This was summed up in the memorandum on "Defence Planning Guidance 1994-1999," drawn up in April 1992 for the Bush Senior administration by Under-Secretary of Defence Paul Wolfowitz and Lewis "Scooter" Libby, and subsequently leaked to the media. Its central message was:

"The US must show the leadership necessary to establish and protect a new order that holds the promise of convincing potential competitors that they need not aspire to a greater role or pursue a more aggressive posture to protect their legitimate interests We must maintain the mechanism for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role "

By claiming for the US the right of unilateral intervention anywhere in the world and denying other major powers a greater role in their regions, this strategy essentially extended the Monroe Doctrine (which effectively defined the "western hemisphere" as the US sphere of influence) to the entire planet: an ambition greater than that of any previous power. The British Empire at its height knew that it could never intervene unilaterally on the continent of Europe or in Central America. The most megalomaniac of European rulers understood that other great powers with influence in their own areas of the world would always exist.

While that 1992 Washington paper spoke of the "legitimate interests" of other states, it clearly implied that it would be Washington that would define what interests were legitimate, and how they could be pursued. And once again, though never formally adopted, this "doctrine" became in effect the standard operating procedure of subsequent administrations. In the early 2000s, when its influence reached its most dangerous height, military and security elites would couch it in the terms of "full spectrum dominance." As the younger President Bush declared in his State of the Union address in January 2002, which put the US on the road to the invasion of Iraq: "By the grace of God, America won the Cold War A world once divided into two armed camps now recognises one sole and pre-eminent power, the United States of America."

Nemesis

Triumphalism led US policymakers, and their transatlantic followers, to forget one cardinal truth about geopolitical and military power: that in the end it is not global and absolute, but local and relative. It is the amount of force or influence a state wants to bring to bear in a particular place and on a -particular issue, relative to the power that a rival state is willing and able to bring to bear. The truth of this has been shown repeatedly over the past generation. For all America's overwhelming superiority on paper, it has turned out that many countries have greater strength than the US in particular places: Russia in Georgia and Ukraine, Russia and Iran in Syria, China in the South China Sea, and even Pakistan in southern Afghanistan.

American over-confidence, accepted by many Europeans and many Britons especially, left the US in a severely weakened condition to conduct what should have been clear as far back as the 1990s to be the great competition of the future -- that between Washington and Beijing.

On the one hand, American moves to extend Nato to the Baltics and then (abortively) on to Ukraine and Georgia, and to abolish Russian influence and destroy Russian allies in the Middle East, inevitably produced a fierce and largely successful Russian nationalist reaction. Within Russia, the US threat to its national interests helped to consolidate and legitimise Putin's control. Internationally, it ensured that Russia would swallow its deep-seated fears of China and become a valuable partner of Beijing.

On the other hand, the benign and neglectful way in which Washington regarded the rise of China in the generation after the Cold War (for example, the blithe decision to allow China to join the World Trade Organisation) was also rooted in ideological arrogance. Western triumphalism meant that most of the US elites were convinced that as a result of economic growth, the Chinese Communist state would either democratise or be overthrown; and that China would eventually have to adopt the western version of economics or fail economically. This was coupled with the belief that good relations with China could be predicated on China accepting a so-called "rules-based" international order in which the US set the rules while also being free to break them whenever it wished; something that nobody with the slightest knowledge of Chinese history should
have believed.

Throughout, the US establishment discourse (Democrat as much as Republican) has sought to legitimise American global hegemony by invoking the promotion of liberal democracy. At the same time, the supposedly intrinsic connection between economic change, democracy and peace was rationalised by cheerleaders such as the New York Times 's indefatigable Thomas Friedman, who advanced the (always absurd, and now flatly and repeatedly falsified) "Golden Arches theory of Conflict Prevention." This vulgarised version of Democratic Peace Theory pointed out that two countries with McDonald's franchises had never been to war. The humble and greasy American burger was turned into a world-historical symbol of the buoyant modern middle classes with too much to lose to countenance war.

Various equally hollow theories postulated cast-iron connections between free markets and guaranteed property rights on the one hand, and universal political rights and freedoms on the other, despite the fact that even within the west, much of political history can be characterised as the fraught and complex brokering of accommodations between these two sets of things.

And indeed, since the 1990s democracy has not advanced in the world as a whole, and belief in the US promotion of democracy has been discredited by US patronage of the authoritarian and semi-authoritarian regimes in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, India and elsewhere. Of the predominantly Middle Eastern and South Asian students whom I teach at Georgetown University in Qatar, not one -- even among the liberals -- believes that the US is sincerely committed to spreading democracy; and, given their own regions' recent history, there is absolutely no reason why they should believe this.

The one great triumph of democratisation coupled with free market reform was -- or appeared to be -- in the former communist states of Central and Eastern Europe, and this success was endlessly cited as the model for political and economic reform across the globe.

But the portrayal of East European reform in the west failed to recognise the central role of local nationalism. Once again, to talk of this at the time was to find oneself in effect excluded from polite society, because to do so called into question the self-evident superiority and universal appeal of liberal reform. The overwhelming belief of western establishments was that nationalism was a superstition that was fast losing its hold on people who, given the choice, could everywhere be relied on to act like rational consumers, rather than citizens rooted in one particular land.

The more excitable technocrats imagined that nation state itself (except the US of course) was destined to wither away. This was also the picture reflected back to western observers and analysts by liberal reformers across the region, who whether or not they were genuinely convinced of this, knew what their western sponsors wanted to hear. Western economic and cultural hegemony produced a sort of mirror game, a copulation of illusions in which local informants provided false images to the west, which then reflected them back to the east, and so on.

Always the nation

Yet one did not have to travel far outside the centres of Eastern European cities to find large parts of populations outraged by the moral and cultural changes ordained by the EU, the collapse of social services, and the (western-indulged) seizure of public property by former communist elites. So why did Eastern Europeans swallow the whole western liberal package of the time? They did so precisely because of their nationalism, which persuaded them that if they did not pay the cultural and economic price of entry into the EU and Nato, they would sooner or later fall back under the dreaded hegemony of Moscow. For them, unwanted reform was the price that the nation had to pay for US protection. Not surprisingly, once membership of these institutions was secured, a powerful populist and nationalist backlash set in.

Western blindness to the power of nationalism has had several bad consequences for western policy, and the cohesion of "the west." In Eastern Europe, it would in time lead to the politically almost insane decision of the EU to try to order the local peoples, with their deeply-rooted ethnic nationalism and bitter memories of outside dictation, to accept large numbers of Muslim refugees. The backlash then became conjoined with the populist reactions in Western Europe, which led to Brexit and the sharp decline of centrist parties across the EU.

More widely, this blindness to the power of nationalism led the US grossly to underestimate the power of nationalist sentiment in Russia, China and Iran, and contributed to the US attempt to use "democratisation" as a means to overthrow their regimes. All that this has succeeded in doing is to help the regimes concerned turn nationalist sentiment against local liberals, by accusing them of being US stooges.

"A stable and healthy polity and economy must be based on some minimal moral values"

Russian liberals in the 1990s were mostly not really US agents as such, but the collapse of Communism led some to a blind adulation of everything western and to identify unconditionally with US policies. In terms of public image, this made them look like western lackeys; in terms of policy, it led to the adoption of the economic "shock therapy" policies advocated by the west. Combined with monstrous corruption and the horribly disruptive collapse of the Soviet single market, this had a shattering effect on Russian industry and the living standards of ordinary Russians.

Many liberals gave the impression of complete indifference to the resulting immiseration of the Russian population in these years. At a meeting of the Carnegie Endowment in Washington that I attended later, former Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar boasted to an applauding US audience of how he had destroyed the Russian military industrial complex. The fact that this also destroyed the livelihoods of tens of millions of Russians and Ukrainians was not mentioned.

This attitude was fed by contempt on the part of the educated classes of Moscow and St Petersburg for ordinary Russians, who were dubbed Homo Sovieticus and treated as an inferior species whose loathsome culture was preventing the liberal elites from taking their rightful place among the "civilised" nations of the west. This frame of mind was reminiscent of the traditional attitude of white elites in Latin America towards the Indio and Mestizo majorities in their countries.

I vividly remember one Russian liberal journalist state his desire to fire machine guns into crowds of elderly Russians who joined Communist demonstrations to protest about the collapse of their pensions. The response of the western journalists present was that this was perhaps a little bit excessive, but to be excused since the basic sentiment was correct.

The Russian liberals of the 1990s were crazy to reveal this contempt to the people whose votes they needed to win. So too was Hillary Clinton, with her disdain for the "basket of deplorables" in the 2016 election, much of the Remain camp in the years leading up to Brexit, and indeed the European elites in the way they rammed through the Maastricht Treaty and the euro in the 1990s.

If the post-Cold War world order was a form of US imperialism, it now looks like an empire in which rot in the over-extended periphery has spread to the core. The economic and social patterns of 1990s Russia and Ukraine have come back to haunt the west, though so far thank God in milder form. The massive looting of Russian state property and the systematic evasion of taxes by Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs was only possible with the help of western banks, which transferred the proceeds to the west and the Caribbean. This crime was euphemised in the western discourse (naturally including the Economist ) as "capital flight."

Peter Mandelson qualified his famous remark that the Blair government was "intensely relaxed about people becoming filthy rich" with the words "as long as they pay their taxes." The whole point, however, about the filthy Russian, Ukrainian, Nigerian, Pakistani and other money that flowed to and through London was not just that so much of it was stolen, but that it was escaping taxation, thereby harming the populations at home twice over. The infamous euphemism "light-touch regulation" was in effect a charter
for this.

In a bitter form of poetic justice, however, "light-touch regulation" paved the way for the 2008 economic crisis in the west itself, and western economic elites too (especially in the US) would also seize this opportunity to move their money into tax havens. This has done serious damage to state revenues, and to the fundamental faith of ordinary people in the west that the rich are truly subject to the same laws as them.

The indifference of Russian elites to the suffering of the Russian population has found a milder echo in the neglect of former industrial regions across Britain, Western Europe and the US that did so much to produce the votes for Brexit, for Trump and for populist nationalist parties in Europe. The catastrophic plunge in Russian male life expectancy in the 1990s has found its echo in the unprecedented decline in white working-class male life expectancy in the US.

Perhaps the greatest lesson of the period after the last Cold War is that in the end, a stable and healthy polity and economy must be based on some minimal moral values. To say this to western economists, businessmen and financial journalists in the 1990s was to receive the kindly contempt usually accorded to religious cranks. The only value recognised was shareholder value, a currency in which the crimes of the Russian oligarchs could be excused because their stolen companies had "added value." Any concern about duty to the Russian people as a whole, or the fact that tolerance of these crimes would make it grotesque to demand honesty of policemen or civil servants, were dismissed as irrelevant sentimentality.

Bringing it all back home

We in the west are living with the consequences of a generation of such attitudes. Western financial elites have mostly not engaged in outright illegality; but then again, they usually haven't needed to, since governments have made it easy for them to abide by the letter of the law while tearing its spirit to pieces. We are belatedly recognising that, as Franklin Foer wrote in the Atlantic last year: "New York, Los Angeles and Miami have joined London as the world's most desired destinations for laundered money. This boom has enriched the American elites who have enabled it -- and it has degraded the nation's political and social mores in the process. While everyone else was heralding an emergent globalist world that would take on the best values of America, [Richard] Palmer [a former CIA station chief in Moscow] had glimpsed the dire risk of the opposite: that the values of the kleptocrats would become America's own. This grim vision is now nearing fruition."

Those analysing the connection between Russia and Trump's administration have looked in the wrong place. The explanation of Trump's success is not that Putin somehow mesmerised American voters in 2016. It is that populations abandoned by their elites are liable to extreme political responses; and that societies whose economic elites have turned ethics into a joke should not be surprised if their political leaders too become scoundrels.

About this author Anatol Lieven Anatol Lieven is a professor at Georgetown University in Qatar and the author among other books of America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism and (with John Hulsman), Ethical Realism: A Vision for America's Role in the World More by this author More by Anatol Lieven Will Qatar be reduced to a Saudi client state? July 18, 2017 Why the left needs nationalism January 3, 2017 Pakistan has survived -- now can it prosper?

[Sep 21, 2020] Stephen F. Cohen- The Ukrainian Crisis - It s not All Putin s Fault

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... There is no chance of mending relations and even less of achieving some security partnership between US and Russia. The rift will only keep on widening as US political and financial elites are growing increasingly desperate (and thus even more aggressive) while Russia abandons its attempts to please the haters and moves its focus on to its future prospective partners who have genuine interest in cooperating with Russia and achieving common goals.... including opposing the common enemy if you like! Well at least I hope so: the only reason why US wish to get closer to Russia would be to stab it in the back... one more time! ..."
Sep 21, 2020 | www.youtube.com

Gerry Cooney , 3 years ago (edited)

Speaking as an Independent, I say that our country, the USA, has engineered past confilcts and wars in order to feed the military industrial complex. Not so much that it results in a nuke-shooting war, but in a regular non-nuke shooting war. The solution? Send the sons and daughters of the politicians into direct combat, every time they approve another war. That should keep things a bit more peaceful.

Playthell Benjamin , 3 years ago

Professor Cohen is this nation's most objective and therefore most valuable thinker on Russia! The charge that his views are "not patriotic" is a compliment rather than the insult they intended. A scholar's views are only valuable to the public and, more importantly, policy makers, if they are OBJECTIVE!!! Which is to say that he follows the FACTS wherever they lead!

Stratus Blue , 4 years ago

Any "discussion" with no mention of the supranational central bank cartel is intentional deceptive omission. The "brass ring" is forced use of petro-dollars. The central bank stock holders and bankers loaning all dollars into existence as national debt, do not care who owns land. They care who pays off national debts and interest on debt. Civil war is their racket. There are no sovereign nations. No genuine nations that create their medium of exchange publicly. No national people. Just participants in an extortion or its victims. The "Elite" collect on money they created as loans in their central banking accounts. All others are only human numbers assigned billing addresses.

Maria Schick , 4 years ago

Welcome to the New World Order ....where Multinational corporations rule & their profits are what are most important..... NOT nation states it's the 99.9% against the .01% and they use MSM propaganda & fear to control the DUMB masses thinking

Madaleine , 9 months ago

Global mafia in the background! Shut down funding cia ET Al

keepinitreal , 2 years ago

So infuriating that videos that carry the truth have 57k views, while nasty lying propaganda has millions!

SJ R , 4 years ago

I just discovered John Batchelor Show on which Cohen has a guest spot- I just was drawn to this man's thinking, probably because I had made up my mind about Russia during the Ukraine crises. Seeing the US has ruin every country we have gone into- I'm on Russia's side, especially where Russia and Ukraine has a history, on that side of the world.

Santos D , 4 years ago (edited)

38:49 - Apologies for the somewhat Utopian question here. I agree with everything Cohen has said, but regarding cause of jihadist terrorism ( ie implosion of the economies in the region), does it make sense to discuss primarily this game of terrorist whack a mole (bombing, invading and crushing Jihadist insurgencies)? Is there any point in talking about a pro active policy of recreating sustainable, stable economies in the region? What would that even look like?

Cezanne Monet , 11 hours ago

Brilliant scholar. RIP Prof Cohen. Watch if you want to understand today's geopolitical situation. The whole situation.

No Names , 4 years ago (edited)

Not very many average Americans would be able to easily access and watch this. Average Americans still consume mainly mainstream media. Too bad, because this lecture would have opened their eyes and have blown up their brain-contaminated minds by the CNN, the New York Times and alike.

Chris Bowers , 4 years ago

I agree wholeheartedly Loane. Have always been extremely impressed with and appreciative of Cohen's carefully & thoughtfully considered contribution. We in the US have gone a bit off the deep end when it comes to this deeply embedded belief in exceptionalism and superiority, and have been extremely rude to much of the rest of the world in the process. It amazes me how patient Russia has been with us, waiting for us to come around to a more sober understanding of the world we live in today. I have to conclude that what we are experiencing here in the US is a perennial phenomenon that comes with the end of all empires throughout history, the mission creep of over-extending resources and the big one, seemingly blind hubris.

M Ch , 4 years ago

There is no chance of mending relations and even less of achieving some security partnership between US and Russia. The rift will only keep on widening as US political and financial elites are growing increasingly desperate (and thus even more aggressive) while Russia abandons its attempts to please the haters and moves its focus on to its future prospective partners who have genuine interest in cooperating with Russia and achieving common goals.... including opposing the common enemy if you like! Well at least I hope so: the only reason why US wish to get closer to Russia would be to stab it in the back... one more time!

Raf Zam , 3 years ago (edited)

NATO'S reason to exist ended when the Warsaw Pact was demolished. It was created to confront the socialist Warsaw Pact but today ALL of the members of the pact are part of NATO, except Russia. So why is it still operating? Who are they confronting? They are a bunch of bureaucrats looking for a reason to stay employed in an organization that lost its excuse to be. However, their behavior has gone from increasing security to actually becoming a menace to trigger a nuclear war to destroy life on earth.

Donald Watts , 4 years ago

It will take a Republican President to turn our relationships with hostile nations around. For some irrational reasoning, the current administration refuses negotiation with it's enemies. Somehow this is going to create understanding. and a less dangerous world. I don't see a continuation of this Administrations policy anything but reckless . I am assuming this policy has been one determined through Clinton, and will remain so. Clinton has said on a number of occasions, it is the Obama Administration's policies that will be hers as well. As an ex cold warrior, who has spent a lot of time chasing Soviet boomers in the North Atlantic, I am not willing to gamble my children and grand children's lives . It is a dangerous and ego driven pissing match. Let us start talking , This administration and families can climb into their luxury nuclear bomb proof bunkers...... My family and most Americans don't have that luxury.

William Carr , 3 years ago

Dr. Cohen, so Putin gave the Northern Alliance to the USA after 911 to bludgeon Afghanistan for hiding Bin Laden? Paul Craig Robert, David Ray Griffin and a growing list of Americans believe 911 was a total bamboozle. If that is true which it looks increasingly like it was, does that mean Putin was playing along with the our Reichstag fire? What does that make Putin? NATO should have been totally remade after 1986, but it wasn't and we simply missed a huge opportunity not for worldwide U.S. hegemony, but for a new umbrella of security by super powers in alliance. Obviously, the proliferation of ethno-religious groups was in Putin's mind when he welcomed us into Afghanistan, but damn it man, tell people EXACTLY why we and the Russians want to be in the Golden Crescent besides the extraction of minerals.

[Sep 21, 2020] Stephen Cohen at the AJC 2017 Forum, about Russia and Terrorism

Highly recommended!
This was a really bright mind
Julia Ioffe is a joke -- she is essentially a typical "national security parasite" and of the level that surprisingly, is lower that Max Boor, although previously I thought this is impossible. Julia Ioffe is very typical of the anti-Russian thinking in the West.
Jun 23, 2017 | www.youtube.com

Stephen Cohen at the American Jewish Committee Forum 2017, about Russia and Terrorism. Full debate

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0rtr...

alo1, 3 years ago

And again, Cohen smashed these government employers singlehandedly.

Drew Hunkins, 3 years ago

This incessant Russophobia constantly being trumpeted by the Washington militarist imperialists must stop. It's putting the world on the brink of nuclear war.

Stephen Cohen's a godsend along with a handful of the other intellectuals out there speaking and writing the truth that penetrates the miasma of disinformation, half-truths and exaggerations emanating from the state-corporate nexus in the American mass media.

Cohen, along with John Pilger, James Petras, Robert Parry, Michael Parenti, John Pilger, Eva Bartlett, Diana Johnstone and Paul Craig Roberts must be read widely in order for folks to get a grasp of where the Washington imperialist ruling class is driving the world.

mitrovdan, 3 years ago

at 25:40 he just destroys her totally. what a point he made, amazing!! "thank you professor" the guy on the left wants to end Cohen's carnage of the so called experts. Cohen made minced meat out of em. Fact after fact...stonewalled em both. Listen to her, ISIS doesn't have nuke's, she obviously doesn't have a clue.

MrWebster, 3 years ago

Cohen is always cogent and convincing. One area I wish some historian would look into is how "Russia-gate" is not echoing Cold War themes, but echoing themes from the German Nazis in particular their belief about a great Jewish conspiracy against Europe.

Even Putin recently remarked on all these accusations: "It reminds me of anti-Semitism, A dumb man who can't do anything would blame the Jews for everything." Look at how Putin is drawn and pictured on major outlets. The NYTimes blamed resistance to TPP on Putin.

The Russians like the Jews are behind every social problem. Popular culture shows and speaks of Russia in the same way Nazi propagandists wrote about Russia.

Undermining Western liberal democracies, Jews were compared to spiders catching people in the webs. Same with Putin. Pick up Hitler's speech after the invasion of the Soviet Union justifying it., Echos? Accidental rhetoric of conspiracies ?

DSCdaP, 3 years ago

"to look past a long list of transgressions and abuses..." this is what I absolutely hate about America, they are all so stupid and ignorant to their own countries misdeeds it is unbelievable, infuriating beyond belief. The US is currently fighting 7 wars simultaneously, which it all started itself under false pretences and hid the real reason beneath a thick layer of BS propaganda and misinformation.

The secession of Crimea is the least egregious event of the entire conflicts history. The EU and US have pumped billions of dollars into the coup which took place weeks before the Crimean referendum, on the 20th of February 2014, 2 weeks prior to that, an intercepted phone conversation between Victoria Nuland (Assistant Secretary of State of the United States to Europe) and Geoffrey Pyatt (US Ambassador to the Ukraine) was leaked on February 4th, 2014. In this phone conversation, they describe key positions within the Ukrainian government being filled by Klitshko and Yatz... fast forward a few weeks, who do we see? Klitsh and Yatz! It was the most obvious sponsored coup in history.

Putin snatched the Crimean peninsula from NATO, who wanted to seize Russias military harbour in Sevastopol (which the Russians have used to supply Syria, this was one and a half years before they entered the conflict directly, apart from being a very important strategic harbour in general), by suggesting a referendum to the local government and they accepted.

Why? Because they were ethnic Russians and knew who gained power in Kiev, the neo-Nazi, Bandera-worshipping OUN, which the US has nourished, supported and developed for the last 100 years within the Ukrainian territory. These Nazis hate Russians, they have a deep seeded hatred of all things Russian which has been indoctrinated and drilled into them by the CIA for decades, the first thing they did after seizing power was to demote the Russian language from the official list of languages of the Ukraine.

They have since honoured Ukrainian Nazi-collaborators from WWII by erecting statues, renaming streets, creating new holidays etc. This is just one example of US misinformation and propaganda, nothing they say accurately describes the truth, nothing, not one thing has it's bases in reality. Be it about Libya, Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, and what have you, it's all lies and propaganda to mask their intentions.

North Korea is another example. North Korea is a hornets nest they kick once in a while to scare the Japanese and South Koreans into tolerating US occupation longer. Everything North Korea does is a direct response to threats and intimidations by the US. They staged a drill off the coast of North Korea which they called "Decapitation" for F's sake.

They have ratcheted up the tension again these past few months to sneak in their THAAD weapons stations, before the new President was chosen. And these THAAD systems have absolutely nothing to do with North Korea, it's against China and Russia, North Korea is a pretext.

The still active war, which has merely been under a seize fire for decades, against North Korea, could have been ended before there was colour television, but the US needs North Korea to exist in order to justify their occupation of S.Korea and Japan.

MrRondonmon , 1 day ago

And by the way, the CrowdStrike guy testified in 2017 that there was ZERO PROOF that the Russians hacked the DNC, but Schiff hid that for 2 years until John Ratcliff threatened to declassify it, then Schiff's sorry ass released the interviews. So, this man was 100 percent right, there is ZERO PROOF the Russians or anyone hacked the DNC. Its a damned lie, and it was always a lie.

Patty Rogers , 3 years ago

As usual, the journalists and leftist have nothing to offer- no facts, no forensic evidence, no truth. Only speculation hyperbole and hysteria. I don't believe Russia are the good guys but give me a break in all this crap!

beija flor , 2 years ago (edited)

why did cohen tell everyone even potential 'terrorists' that there is too much of exactly what 'terrorists' wish to get their hands on in the former soviet states?!!? if he is 'so afraid' of 'terrorism...' WHY did he say THAT?!!? not very bright... or perhaps he is FOS. idk?! wth?! SMH. maybe e is trying to inform people who r not 'terrorists,' so that people know n can figure out how to address the issues...?

Yet, for any terrorists who wanted to know how to get materials he spoke of, now they may know a region where they could potentially go to attain the materials... maybe in 'terrorists' circles they all know this already? it just seems concerning, is all...

Beth Lemmon, 2 years ago (edited)

Love Stephen Cohen, he is spot on and right about most if not all points, he's fair, wicked smart and sober minded. However he isn't right about POTUS Trump. If anyone has been watching this type of discourse about world geopolitics it looks like the NWO wants wars to depopulate the earth, set up a OWG and a utopia. It's so blatantly obvious to those who are honest and not ideologically possessed.

They recruit their stupid Antifa army and zombie possessed minions to do their dirty work in the streets. They want send our amazing military to do the fighting wars that are just to feed the MIC, and does nothing for America's good.

[Sep 21, 2020] Stephen Cohen Has Died. Remember His Urgent Warnings Against The New Cold War by Caitlin Johnstone

Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God
"... In a world that is increasingly confusing and awash with propaganda, Cohen's death is a blow to humanity's desperate quest for clarity and understanding. ..."
Sep 19, 2020 | www.strategic-culture.org

Stephen F Cohen, the renowned American scholar on Russia and leading authority on US-Russian relations, has died of lung cancer at the age of 81.

As one of the precious few western voices of sanity on the subject of Russia while everyone else has been frantically flushing their brains down the toilet, this is a real loss. I myself have cited Cohen's expert analysis many times in my own work, and his perspective has played a formative role in my understanding of what's really going on with the monolithic cross-partisan manufacturing of consent for increased western aggressions against Moscow.

In a world that is increasingly confusing and awash with propaganda, Cohen's death is a blow to humanity's desperate quest for clarity and understanding.

I don't know how long Cohen had cancer. I don't know how long he was aware that he might not have much time left on this earth. What I do know is he spent much of his energy in his final years urgently trying to warn the world about the rapidly escalating danger of nuclear war, which in our strange new reality he saw as in many ways completely unprecedented.

The last of the many books Cohen authored was 2019's War with Russia? , detailing his ideas on how the complex multi-front nature of the post-2016 cold war escalations against Moscow combines with Russiagate and other factors to make it in some ways more dangerous even than the most dangerous point of the previous cold war.

"You know it's easy to joke about this, except that we're at maybe the most dangerous moment in US-Russian relations in my lifetime, and maybe ever," Cohen told The Young Turks in 2017. "And the reason is that we're in a new cold war, by whatever name. We have three cold war fronts that are fraught with the possibility of hot war, in the Baltic region where NATO is carrying out an unprecedented military buildup on Russia's border, in Ukraine where there is a civil and proxy war between Russia and the west, and of course in Syria, where Russian aircraft and American warplanes are flying in the same territory. Anything could happen."

Cohen repeatedly points to the most likely cause of a future nuclear war: not one that is planned but one which erupts in tense, complex situations where "anything could happen" in the chaos and confusion as a result of misfire, miscommunication or technical malfunction, as nearly happened many times during the last cold war.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/kqQbK_6meM8?feature=oembed

"I think this is the most dangerous moment in American-Russian relations, at least since the Cuban missile crisis," Cohen told Democracy Now in 2017. "And arguably, it's more dangerous, because it's more complex. Therefore, we -- and then, meanwhile, we have in Washington these -- and, in my judgment, factless accusations that Trump has somehow been compromised by the Kremlin. So, at this worst moment in American-Russian relations, we have an American president who's being politically crippled by the worst imaginable -- it's unprecedented. Let's stop and think. No American president has ever been accused, essentially, of treason. This is what we're talking about here, or that his associates have committed treason."

"Imagine, for example, John Kennedy during the Cuban missile crisis," Cohen added. "Imagine if Kennedy had been accused of being a secret Soviet Kremlin agent. He would have been crippled. And the only way he could have proved he wasn't was to have launched a war against the Soviet Union. And at that time, the option was nuclear war."

"A recurring theme of my recently published book War with Russia? is that the new Cold War is more dangerous, more fraught with hot war, than the one we survived," Cohen wrote last year . "Histories of the 40-year US-Soviet Cold War tell us that both sides came to understand their mutual responsibility for the conflict, a recognition that created political space for the constant peace-keeping negotiations, including nuclear arms control agreements, often known as détente. But as I also chronicle in the book, today's American Cold Warriors blame only Russia, specifically 'Putin's Russia,' leaving no room or incentive for rethinking any US policy toward post-Soviet Russia since 1991."

"Finally, there continues to be no effective, organized American opposition to the new Cold War," Cohen added. "This too is a major theme of my book and another reason why this Cold War is more dangerous than was its predecessor. In the 1970s and 1980s, advocates of détente were well-organized, well-funded, and well-represented, from grassroots politics and universities to think tanks, mainstream media, Congress, the State Department, and even the White House. Today there is no such opposition anywhere."

"A major factor is, of course, 'Russiagate'," Cohen continued. "As evidenced in the sources I cite above, much of the extreme American Cold War advocacy we witness today is a mindless response to President Trump's pledge to find ways to 'cooperate with Russia' and to the still-unproven allegations generated by it. Certainly, the Democratic Party is not an opposition party in regard to the new Cold War."

"Détente with Russia has always been a fiercely opposed, crisis-ridden policy pursuit, but one manifestly in the interests of the United States and the world," Cohen wrote in another essay last year. "No American president can achieve it without substantial bipartisan support at home, which Trump manifestly lacks. What kind of catastrophe will it take -- in Ukraine, the Baltic region, Syria, or somewhere on Russia's electric grid -- to shock US Democrats and others out of what has been called, not unreasonably, their Trump Derangement Syndrome, particularly in the realm of American national security? Meanwhile, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has recently reset its Doomsday Clock to two minutes before midnight."

https://www.youtube.com/embed/owbMRxC382A?feature=oembed

And now Stephen Cohen is dead, and that clock is inching ever closer to midnight. The Russiagate psyop that he predicted would pressure Trump to advance dangerous cold war escalations with no opposition from the supposed opposition party has indeed done exactly that with nary a peep of criticism from either partisan faction of the political/media class. Cohen has for years been correctly predicting this chilling scenario which now threatens the life of every organism on earth, even while his own life was nearing its end.

And now the complex cold war escalations he kept urgently warning us about have become even more complex with the addition of nuclear-armed China to the multiple fronts the US-centralized empire has been plate-spinning its brinkmanship upon, and it is clear from the ramping up of anti-China propaganda since last year that we are being prepped for those aggressions to continue to increase.

We should heed the dire warnings that Cohen spent his last breaths issuing. We should demand a walk-back of these insane imperialist aggressions which benefit nobody and call for détente with Russia and China. We should begin creating an opposition to this world-threatening flirtation with armageddon before it is too late. Every life on this planet may well depend on our doing so.

Stephen Cohen is dead, and we are marching toward the death of everything. God help us all.

medium.com

lay_arrow

novictim , 55 minutes ago

People are just now starting to realize that possible alternate path. But the Demoncrats in the USA must first be put down, politically euthanized, along with their neocon never-Trump Republican partners. And that cleaning up is on the way. Trump's second term will be the advancement of the USA-Russia initiative that is so long overdue.

PerilouseTimes , 48 minutes ago

Putin won't let western billionaires rape Russia's enormous natural resources and on top of that Putin is against child molesters, that is what this Russia bashing is all about.

awesomepic4u , 1 hour ago

Sad to hear this.

What a good man. It is a real shame that we dont have others to stand up to this crazy pr that is going on right now. Making peace with the world at this point is important. We dont need or want another war and i am sure that both Europe and Russia dont want it on their turf but it seems we keep sticking our finger in their eye. If there is another war it will be the last war. As Einstein said, after the 3rd World War we will be using sticks and stones to fight it.

Clint Liquor , 44 minutes ago

Cohen truly was an island of reason in a sea of insanity. Ironic that those panicked over climate change are unconcerned about the increasing threat of Nuclear War.

thunderchief , 41 minutes ago

One of the very few level headed people on Russia.

All thats left are anti Russia-phobic nut jobs.

Send in the clowns.

Stephen Cohen isn't around to call them what they are anymore.

Eastern Whale , 55 minutes ago

cooperate with Russia

Has the US ever cooperated with anyone?

fucking truth , 3 minutes ago

That is the crux. All or nothing.

Mustafa Kemal , 49 minutes ago

Ive read several of his books. They are essential, imo, if you want to understand modern russian history.

Normal , 1 hour ago

The bankers created the new CCP cold war.

evoila , 19 minutes ago

Max Boot is an effing idiot. Tucker wiped him clean too. It was an insult to Stephen to even put them on the same panel.

RIP Stephen.

Gary Sick is the equivalent to Stephen, except for Iran. He too is of an era of competence which is and will be missed as their voices are drowned out by neocon warmongers

thebigunit , 17 minutes ago

I heard Stephen Cohen a number of time in John Bachelor's podcasts.

He seemed very lucid and made a lot of sense.

He made it very clear that he thought the Democrat's "Trump - Russia collusion schtick" was a bunch of crap.

He didn't sound like a leftie, but I'm sure he never told me the stuff he discussed with his wife who was editor of the left wing "The Nation" magazine.

Boogity , 9 minutes ago

Cohen was a traditional old school anti-war Liberal. They're essentially extinct now with the exception of a few such as Tulsi Gabbard and Dennis Kucinich who have both been ostracized from the Democrat Party and the political system.

[Sep 20, 2020] "I'd Rather Have This Book Than The Atomic Bomb"

Sep 20, 2020 | www.theburningplatform.com

Ominous stuff indeed. For readers who wish to read further, please consult the full Politico piece from which we have excerpted the above highlighted passages. There is also a fascinating documentary on Sharp instructively titled " How to Start a Revolution ."

This is all interesting and disturbing, to say the least. In its own right it would suggest a compelling nexus point between the operations run against Trump and the Color Revolution playbook. But what does this have to do with our subject Norm Eisen? It just so happens that Eisen explicitly places himself in the tradition of Gene Sharp, acknowledging his book "The Playbook" as a kind of update to Sharp's seminal "Dictatorship to Democracy."

https://www.youtube.com/embed/bb8mGNWwv-Y

And there we have it, folks -- Norm Eisen, former Obama Ethics Czar, Ambassador to Czechoslovakia during the "Velvet Revolution," key counsel in impeachment effort against Trump, and participant in the ostensibly bi-partisan election war games predicting a contested election scenario unfavorable to Trump -- just happens to be a Color Revolution expert who literally wrote the modern "Playbook" in the explicitly acknowledged tradition of Color Revolution Godfather Gene Sharp's "From Dictatorship to Democracy."

Before we turn to the contents of Norm Eisen's Color Revolution manual, full title "The Democracy Playbook: Preventing and Reversing Democratic Backsliding," it will be useful to make a brief point regarding the term "democracy" itself, which happens to appear in the title of Gene Sharp's book "From Dictatorship to Democracy" as well.

Just like the term "peaceful protestor," which, as we pointed out in our George Kent essay is used as a term of craft in the Color Revolution context, so is the term "democracy" itself. The US Government launches Color Revolutions against foreign targets irrespective of whether they actually enjoy the support of the people or were elected democratically. In the case of Trump, whatever one says about him, he is perhaps the most "democratically" elected President in America's history. Indeed, in 2016 Trump ran against the coordinated opposition of the establishments of both parties, the military industrial complex, the corporate media, Hollywood, and really every single powerful institution in the country. He won, however, because he was able to garner sufficient support of the people -- his true and decisive power base as a "populist." Precisely because of the ultra democratic "populist" character of Trump's victory, the operatives attempting to undermine him have focused specifically on attacking the democratic legitimacy of his victory.

In this vein we ought to note that the term "democratic backsliding," as seen in the subtitle of Norm Eisen's book, and its opposite "democratic breakthrough" are also terms of art in the Color Revolution lexicon. We leave the full exploration of how the term "democratic" is used deceptively in the Color Revolution context (and in names of decidedly anti-democratic/populist institutions) as an exercise to the interested reader. Michael McFaul, another Color Revolution expert and key anti-Trump operative somewhat gives the game away in the following tweet in which the term "democratic breakthrough" makes an appearance as a better sounding alternative to "Color Revolution:"

Most likely as a response to Revolver News' first Color Revolution article on State Department official George Kent, former Ambassador McFaul issued the following tweet as a matter of damage control:

https://platform.twitter.com/embed/index.html?dnt=false&embedId=twitter-widget-1&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1297593718363394048&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theburningplatform.com%2F2020%2F09%2F20%2Fid-rather-have-this-book-than-the-atomic-bomb%2F&partner=tfwp&siteScreenName=burningplat&theme=light&widgetsVersion=219d021%3A1598982042171&width=550px

What on earth then might Color Revolution expert and Obama's former ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul, who has been a key player agitating for President Trump's impeachment, mean by "democratic breakthrough?"

Being a rather simple man from a simple background, McFaul perhaps gave too much of this answer away in the following explanation (now deleted).

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With this now-deleted tweet we get a clearer picture of the power bases that must be satisfied for a "democratic breakthrough" to occur -- and conveniently enough, not one of them is subject to direct democratic control. McFaul, Like Eisen, George Kent, and so many others, perfectly embodies Revolver's thesis regarding the Color Revolution being the same people running the same playbook. Indeed, like most of the star never-Trump impeachment witnesses, McFaul is or has been an ambassador to an Eastern European country. He has supported operations against Trump, including impeachment. And, like Norm Eisen, he has actually written a book on Color Revolutions (more on that later).

Norm Eisen's The Democracy Playbook: A Brief Overview:

A deep dive into Eisen's book would exceed the scope of this relatively brief exposé. It is nonetheless important for us to draw attention to key passages of Eisen's book to underscore how closely the "Playbook" corresponds to events unfolding right here at home. Indeed, it would not be an exaggeration to say that regime change professionals such as Eisen simply decided to run the same playbook against Trump that they have done countless times when foreign leaders are elected overseas that they don't like and want to remove via extra-democratic means -- "peaceful protests," "democratic breakthroughs" and such.

First, consider the following passage from Eisen's Playbook:

If you study this passage closely, you will find direct confirmation of our earlier point that "democracy" in the Color Revolution context is a term of art -- it refers to anything they like that keeps the national security bureaucrats in power. Anything they don't like, even if elected democratically, is considered "anti-democratic," or, put another way, "democratic backsliding." Eisen even acknowledges that this scourge of populism he's so worried about actually was ushered in with "popular support," under "relatively democratic and electoral processes." The problem is precisely that the people have had enough of the corrupt ruling class ignoring their needs. Accordingly, the people voted first for Brexit and then for Donald Trump -- terrifying expressions of populism which the broader Western power structure did everything in its capacity to prevent. Once they failed, they viewed these twin populist victories as a kind of political 9/11 to be prevented by any means necessary from recurring. Make no mistake, the Color Revolution has nothing to do with democracy in any meaningful sense and everything to do with the ruling class ensuring that the people will never have the power to meddle in their own elections again.

The passage above can be insightfully compared to the passage in Gene Sharp's book noting ripe applications to the domestic situation.

It is instructive to compare the passage in Eisen's Color Revolution book to the passage in Michael McFaul's Color Revolution book:

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First off, it is absolutely imperative to look at every single one of the conditions for a Color Revolution that McFaul identifies. It is simply impossible not to be overcome with the ominous parallels to our current situation. Specifically, however, note condition 1 which refers to having a target leader who is not fully authoritarian, but semi-autocratic. This coincides perfectly well with Eisen's concession that the populist leaders he's so concerned about might be "illiberal" but enjoy "popular support" and have come to power via "relatively democratic electoral processes."

Consulting the above passage from McFaul's book, we note that McFaul has been perhaps the most explicit about the conditions which facilitate a Color Revolution. We invite the reader to supply the contemporary analogue to each point as a kind of exercise.

    1. A semi-autocratic regime rather than fully autocratic
    2. An unpopular incumbent (note blanket negative coverage of Trump, fake polls)
    3. A united and organized opposition (media, intel community, Hollywood, community groups, etc)
    4. An ability to quickly drive home the point that voting results were falsified -- See our piece on the Transition Integrity Project
    5. Enough independent media to inform citizens of falsified vote (see full court press in media pushing contested election narrative, social media censorship)
    6. A political opposition capable of mobilizing tens of thousands or more demonstrators to protest electoral fraud ( SEE BLACK LIVES MATTER AND ANTIFA )

On point number four , which is especially relevant to our present situation, Eisen has an interesting thing to say about the role of a contested election scenario in the Orange Revolution, arguably the most important Color Revolution of them all.

Finally, let's look at one last passage from Norm Eisen's Color Revolution "Democracy Playbook" and cross-reference it with McFaul's conditions for a Color Revolution as well as the situation playing out right now before our very eyes:

A few things immediately jump out at us. First, the ominous instruction: "prepare to use electoral abuse evidence as the basis for reform advocacy." Secondly, we note the passage suggesting that opposition to a target leader might avail itself of "extreme institutional measures" including impeachment processes, votes of no confidence, and, of course, the good old-fashioned "protests, strikes, and boycotts" (all more or less peaceful no doubt).

By now the Color Revolution agenda against Trump should be as plain as day. Regime change professionals like McFaul, Eisen, George Kent, and others, who have refined their craft conducting color revolutions overseas, have taken it upon themselves to use the same tools, the same tactics -- quite literally, the same playbook -- to overthrow President Trump. Yet again, same people, same playbook.

We conclude this study of key Color Revolution figure Norm Eisen by exploring his particularly proactive -- indeed central role -- in effecting one of the Color Revolution's components mentioned in the Eisen Playbook -- impeachment.

__________

The Ghost of Democracy's Future

We mentioned at the outset of this piece that Norm Eisen is many things -- a former Obama Ethics Czar (but of course), Ambassador to Czechoslovakia, participant in the now notorious Transition Integrity Project, et cetera. But he earned his title as "legal hatchet man" of the Color Revolution for his tireless efforts in promoting the impeachment of President Trump.

The litany of Norm Eisen's legal activity cited at the beginning of this piece bears repeating.

As the man who implemented the David Brock blueprint for suing the President into paralysis and his allies into bankruptcy , who helped mainstream and amplify the Russia Hoax, who drafted 10 articles of impeachment for the Democrats a full month before President Trump ever called the Ukraine President in 2018 , who personally served as DNC co-counsel for litigating the Ukraine impeachment

If that resume doesn't warrant the title "legal hatchet man" we wonder what does? We encourage interested readers or journalists to explore those links for themselves. By way of conclusion, it simply suffices to note that much of Eisen's impeachment activity he conducted before there was any discussion or knowledge of President Trump's call to the Ukrainian President in 2018 -- indeed before the call even happened. Impeachment was very clearly a foregone conclusion -- a quite literal part of Norm Eisen's Color Revolution playbook -- and it was up to people like Eisen to find the pretext, any pretext.

Despite their constant invocation of "democracy" we ought to note that transferring the question of electoral outcomes to adversarial legal processes is in fact anti-Democratic -- in keeping with our observation that the Color Revolution playbook uses "democracy" as a term of art, often meaning the precise opposite of the usual meaning suggesting popular support.

Perhaps the most important entry in Eisen's entry is the first, that is, Eisen's participation in the infamous David Brock blueprint on how to undermine and overthrow the Trump presidency.

The Washington Free Beacon attended the retreat and obtained David Brock's private and confidential memorandum from the meeting. The memo, " Democracy Matters: Strategic Plan for Action ," outlines Brock's four-year agenda to attack Trump and Republicans using Media Matters, American Bridge, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) , and Shareblue.

The memo contains plans for defeating Trump through impeachment , expanding Media Matters' mission to combat " government misinformation ," ensuring Democratic control of the Senate in the 2018 midterm elections , filing lawsuits against the Trump administration, monetizing political advocacy , using a "digital attacker" to delegitimize Trump's presidency and damage Republicans, and partnering with Facebook to combat "fake news." [Washington Free Beacon]

This leaked memo was written before President Trump took office, further suggesting that all of the efforts to undermine Trump have not been good faith responses to his behavior, but a pre-ordained attack strategy designed to overturn the 2016 election by any means necessary. The Color Revolution expert who suggests impeachment as a tactic in his Color Revolution "playbook" was already in charge of impeachment before Trump even took office -- -Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) is run by none other than Norm Eisen.

But the attempt to overturn the 2016 election using Color Revolution tactics failed. And so now the plan is to overthrow Trump in 2020, hence Norm Eisen's noted participation in the Transition Integrity Project. Looking around us, one is forced to ask the deeply uncomfortable question, "transition into what?"

To conclude, we would like to call back to a point we raised in the first piece in our color revolution series. In this piece, we noted that star Never Trump impeachment witness George Kent just happens to be running the Belarus desk at the State Department. Belarus, we argued, with its mass demonstrations egged on by US Government backed NGOS, its supposed "peaceful protests" and of course its contested election results all fit the Color Revolution mold curiously enough.

One NGO called the Transatlantic Democracy Working Group (TDWG) was bold or reckless enough to draw the parallels between the Color Revolution in Belarus and the events playing out against Trump explicitly. In response to a remark by a twitter user that the TDWG's remarks about Belarus suggested parallels to the United States, the TDWG ominously replied:

https://platform.twitter.com/embed/index.html?dnt=false&embedId=twitter-widget-2&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1292956044252131329&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theburningplatform.com%2F2020%2F09%2F20%2Fid-rather-have-this-book-than-the-atomic-bomb%2F&partner=tfwp&siteScreenName=burningplat&theme=light&widgetsVersion=219d021%3A1598982042171&width=550px

Now, would the reader care to take a guess as to who runs the Transatlantic Democracy Working Group? If you guessed Norm Eisen, you would be correct.

Stay tuned for more in Revolver.news' groundbreaking coverage of the Color Revolution against Trump. Be sure to check out the previous installments in this series:

REVOLVER EXCLUSIVE -- The Curious Case of George Kent: State Department's Belarus "Color Revolution" Expert And "Never Trump" Impeachment Witness

REVOLVER EXCLUSIVE: Transition Integrity Project: Is this Soros Linked Group Plotting a "Color Revolution" Against President Trump?

*****************

The QT has referenced "the playbook" (uncapitalized) several times. Don't know if they are pointing to Eisen's book, or the "Nazi" playbook. Whichever one it is, probably both, the legitimate question can be asked:

3596
Q !!mG7VJxZNCI 11/15/2019 13:38:28 ID: 0a9027
Archive Bread/Post Links: 7354957 / 7355985
Direct Link: 7355985

What advantages might exist when you know the other sides playbook ?
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/trap
Enjoy the show!
Q

* Note what word is being defined in the dictionary link.

If interested in seeing what QT is referencing in regards to "the playbook" you can click this link , type " playbook " into the 'Search' and all mentions of 'playbook' in the drops will come up.

Examples:

Part of #4655

Part of #4650

Part of #4476


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[Sep 20, 2020] NGOs - Information Resource Center

Sep 20, 2020 | ircsofia.wordpress.com

Information Resource Center U.S. Embassy – Sofia, Bulgaria The Democracy Playbook: Preventing and Reversing Democratic Backsliding Posted on January 22, 2020

The Democracy Playbook: Preventing and Reversing Democratic Backsliding. Brookings Institution. Norman Eisen et al. November 2019

The Democracy Playbook sets forth strategies and actions that supporters of liberal democracy can implement to halt and reverse democratic backsliding and make democratic institutions work more effectively for citizens. The strategies are deeply rooted in the evidence: what the scholarship and practice of democracy teach us about what does and does not work. We hope that diverse groups and individuals will find the syntheses herein useful as they design catered, context-specific strategies for contesting and resisting the illiberal toolkit. This playbook is organized into two principal sections: one dealing with actions that domestic actors can take within democracies, including retrenching ones, and the second section addressing the role of international actors in supporting and empowering pro-democracy actors on the ground. [ Note: contains copyrighted material ].

[PDF format, 100 pages].

[Sep 20, 2020] Democratic-Defense-Against-Disinformation-2.0.pdf by Alina Polyakova and Daniel Fried

Counter disinformation network can't revive the dead chicken of neoliberal ideology.
Neoliberal elite lost legitimacy and as such has difficulties controlling the narrative. That's why all this frantic efforts were launched to rectify the situation.
Anti-Russian angle of Atlantic council revealed here quite clearly
Sep 20, 2020 | www.brookings.edu

The paper's biggest single recommendation was that the United States and EU establish a Counter-Disinformation Coalition, a public/private group bringing together, on a regular basis, government and non-government stakeholders, including social media companies, traditional media, Internet service providers (ISPs), and civil society groups. The Counter-Disinformation Coalition would develop best practices for confronting disinformation from nondemocratic countries, consistent with democratic norms. It also recommended that this coalition start with a voluntary code of conduct outlining principles and agreed procedures for dealing with disinformation, drawing from the recommendations as summarized above.

In drawing up these recommendations, we were aware that disinformation most often comes from domestic, not foreign, sources. 8 While Russian and other disinformation players are known to work in coordination with domestic purveyors of disinformation, both overtly and covertly, the recommendations are limited to foreign disinformation, which falls within the scope of "political warfare." Nevertheless, it may be that these policy recommendations, particularly those focused on transparency and social resilience, may be applicable to combatting other forms of disinformation.

[Sep 19, 2020] The Kremlin Plans to Modernize Russia, Again - The Nation

Sep 19, 2020 | www.thenation.com

Putin's quest for a transformed nation and his own legacy. By Stephen F. Cohen FEBRUARY 21, 2020 fb tw mail Print Flag of Russian Federation with gilded coat of arms waving on the dome of Senate Palace of Moscow Kremlin

(Vladimir Zhupanenko / Shutterstock)

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T he US media's three-year obsession with the mostly fictitious allegations of "Russiagate" has all but obscured, even deleted, important, potentially historic, developments inside that nation itself, still the world's largest territorial country. One of the most important is the Putin government's decision to invest $300-to-$400 billion of "rainy day" funds in the nation's infrastructure, especially in its vast, underdeveloped provinces, and on "national projects" ranging from education to health care and family services to transportation and other technology. If successfully implemented, Russia would be substantially transformed and the lives of its people significantly improved.

Not surprisingly, however, the plan has aroused considerable controversy and public debate in Russia's policy elite, primarily for two reasons. The funds were accumulated largely due to high world prices for Russia's energy exports and the state's budgetary austerity during the decade after Putin came to power in 2000, and they have been hoarded as a safeguard against Western economic sanctions and/or a global economic depression. (Russia's economic collapse in the Yeltsin 1990s, perhaps the worst modern-day depression in peacetime, remains a vivid memory for policy-makers and ordinary citizens alike.)

There is also the nation's long, sometimes traumatic, history of "modernization from above," as it is termed. In the late 19th century, the czarist regime's program to industrialize the country, "to catch up" with other world powers, had unintended consequences that led, in the accounts of many historians, to the end of czarism in the 1917 revolution. And Stalin's "revolution from above" of the 1930s, based on the forced collectivization of the peasantry, which at the time accounted for more than 80 percent of the population, along with very rapid industrialization, resulted in millions of deaths and economic distortions that burdened Soviet and post-Soviet Russia for decades.

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Nor are Russia's alternative experiences of modernization from below inspiring or at least instructive. In the 1920s, during the years known as the New Economic Policy, or NEP, the victorious Bolsheviks pursued evolutionary economic development through a semi-regulated market economy. It had mixed -- and still disputed -- results, and it was brutally abolished by Stalin in 1929. Decades later, Yeltsin's "free-market reforms" were widely blamed for the ruination and widespread misery of the 1990s, which featured many aspects of actual de-modernization.

With all this "living history" in mind, Putin's plan for such large-scale (and rapid) investment has generated the controversy in Moscow and resulted in three positions within the policy class. One fully supports the decision on the essentially Keynesian grounds that it will spur Russia's annual economic growth, which has lagged below the global average for several years. Another opposes such massive expenditures, arguing that the funds must remain in state hands as a safeguard against the US-led "sanctions war" (and perhaps worse) against Russia. And, as usual in politics, there is a compromise position that less should be invested in civilian infrastructure and less quickly.

Running through the discussion is also Russia's long history of thwarted implementation of good intentions. To paraphrase a prime minister during the 1990s, Viktor Chernomyrdin , "We wanted things to turn out for the best, but they turned out as usual." In particular, it is often asked, what will be the consequences of putting so much money into the hands of regional and other local officials in provinces where corruption is endemic? How much will be stolen or otherwise misdirected?

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Nonetheless, Putin seems to be resolute. He is also insistent that his ambitious plan to transform Russia requires a long period of international peace and stability. Here again is plain evidence that those in Washington who insist Putin's primary goal is "to sow discord, divisions, and instability" in the world, especially in the West, where he hopes to find "modernizing partnerships," do not care about or understand what is actually unfolding inside Russia -- or Putin's vision of his own historical role and legacy.

Listen to the podcast here .

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Stephen F. Cohen Stephen F. Cohen is a professor emeritus of Russian studies and politics at New York University and Princeton University. A Nation contributing editor, his most recent book, War With Russia? From Putin & Ukraine to Trump & Russiagate , is available in paperback and in an ebook edition. His weekly conversations with the host of The John Batchelor Show , now in their seventh year, are available at www.thenation.com .

[Sep 19, 2020] Stephen F. Cohen, Influential Historian of Russia, Dies at 81 - The New York Times

Sep 19, 2020 | www.nytimes.com

By Robert D. McFadden

Stephen F. Cohen, an eminent historian whose books and commentaries on Russia examined the rise and fall of Communism, Kremlin dictatorships and the emergence of a post-Soviet nation still struggling for identity in the 21st century, died on Friday at his home in Manhattan. He was 81.

His wife, Katrina vanden Heuvel, the publisher and part owner of The Nation, said the cause was lung cancer.

From the sprawling conflicts of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution and the tyrannies of Stalin to the collapse of the Soviet Union and Vladimir V. Putin's intrigues to retain power, Professor Cohen chronicled a Russia of sweeping social upheavals and the passions and poetry of peoples that endured a century of wars, political repression and economic hardships.

A professor emeritus of Russian studies at Princeton University and New York University, he was fluent in Russian, visited Russia frequently and developed contacts among intellectual dissidents and government and Communist Party officials. He wrote or edited 10 books and many articles for The Nation, The New York Times and other publications, was a CBS-TV commentator and counted President George Bush and many American and Soviet officials among his sources.

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In Moscow he was befriended by the last Soviet leader, Mikhail S. Gorbachev, who invited him to the May Day celebration at Red Square in 1989. There, at the Lenin Mausoleum, Professor Cohen stood with his wife and son one tier below Mr. Gorbachev and the Soviet leadership to view a three-hour military parade. He later spoke briefly on Russian television to a vast audience about alternative paths that Russian history could have taken.

Loosely identified with a revisionist historical view of the Soviet Union, Professor Cohen held views that made him a controversial public intellectual. He believed that early Bolshevism had held great promise, that it had been democratic and genuinely socialist, and that it had been corrupted only later by civil war, foreign hostility, Stalin's malignancy and a fatalism in Russian history.

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A traditionalist school of thought, by contrast, held that the Soviet experiment had been flawed from the outset, that Lenin's political vision was totalitarian, and that any attempt to create a society based on his coercive utopianism had always been likely to lead, logically, to Stalin's state terrorism and to the Soviet Union's eventual collapse.

Professor Cohen was an enthusiastic supporter of Mr. Gorbachev, who after coming to power in 1985 undertook ambitious changes to liberate the nation's 15 republics from state controls that had originally been imposed by Stalin. Mr. Gorbachev gave up power as the Soviet state imploded at the end of 1991 and moved toward beliefs in democracy and a market economy.

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Mr. Cohen first came to international attention in 1973 with his biography of Lenin's protégé Nikolai Bukharin.

A prolific writer who mined Soviet archives, Professor Cohen first came to international attention in 1973 with "Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution," a biography of Lenin's protégé Nikolai Bukharin, who envisioned Communism as a blend of state-run industries and free-market agriculture. Critics generally applauded the work, which was a finalist for a National Book Award. Editors' Picks Who Gets Hurt When the World Stops Using Cash Films Hit Festivals Trying to Create Buzz Without a Crowd A Timely Collection of Vital Writing by Audre Lorde Continue reading the main story

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"Stephen Cohen's full-scale study of Bukharin is the first major study of this remarkable associate of Lenin," Harrison Salisbury's wrote in a review in The Times. "As such it constitutes a milestone in Soviet studies, the byproduct both of increased academic sophistication in the use of Soviet materials and also of the very substantial increase in basic information which has become available in the 20 years since Stalin's death."

After Lenin's death, Mr. Bukharin became a victim of Stalin's Moscow show trials in 1938; he was accused of plotting against Stalin and executed. His widow, Anna Mikhailovna Larina, spent 20 years in exile and in prison camps and campaigned for Mr. Bukharin's rehabilitation, which was endorsed by Mr. Gorbachev in 1988.

Ms. Larina and Professor Cohen became friends. Given access to Bukharin archives, he found and returned to her the last love letter that Mr. Bukharin wrote her from prison.

In "Rethinking the Soviet Experience" (1985), Professor Cohen offered a new interpretation of the nation's traumatic history and modern political realities. In his view, Stalin's despotism and Mr. Bukharin's fate were not necessarily inevitable outgrowths of the party dictatorship founded by Lenin.

Richard Lowenthal, in a review for The Times, called Professor Cohen's interpretation implausible. "While I do not believe that all the horrors of Stalinism were 'logically inevitable' consequences of the seizure of power by Lenin and his Bolshevik Party," Mr. Lowenthal wrote, "I do believe that Stalin's victory over Bukharin was inherent in the structure of the party's system."

As Professor Cohen and other scholars pondered Russia's past, Mr. Gorbachev's rise to power and his efforts toward glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring) cast the future of the Soviet Union in a new light, potentially reversing 70 years of Cold War dogma.

[Sep 19, 2020] Stephen F. Cohen, pre-eminent contemporary American scholar of Russia USSR, friend of Gorbachev advisor to Bush, dies at 81 -- RT Russia Former Soviet Union

Sep 19, 2020 | www.rt.com

19 Sep, 2020 11:44 / Updated 4 hours ago Get short URL Stephen F. Cohen, pre-eminent contemporary American scholar of Russia & USSR, friend of Gorbachev & advisor to Bush, dies at 81 Prof. Stephen F. Cohen © Getty Images via AFP / Eugene Gologursky 118 Follow RT on RT Stephen F. Cohen, the leading American Russia expert of his generation and a celebrated historian of Russia and the Soviet Union, who became a vocal critic of Washington's "new Cold War" with Moscow, has died at the age of 81.

Cohen succumbed to lung cancer at his home in Manhattan, on Friday, according to his wife Katrina vanden Heuvel, who is also the part-owner and publisher of The Nation magazine, where he worked as a contributing editor.

A native of Kentucky, he was a prolific and prominent scholar in his field, serving as a professor emeritus of Russian studies at Princeton University and New York University. As a frequent visitor to Russia, Cohen became well-connected among leading Soviet dissidents, politicians and thinkers in the 1980s, even befriending Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev.

Cohen also advised former US President George Bush, senior, in the late 1980s, and assisted Anna Larina, the widow of Nikolai Bukharin, to rehabilitate her husband's name during the Soviet era. He had earlier written a biography of the journalist and politician, which argued that had Bukharin succeeded Vladimir Lenin as Bolshevik leader, rather than Joseph Stalin, the Soviet Union would have enjoyed greater openness, and perhaps even democracy.

//www.youtube.com/embed/-wc94DRFCik

Breaking with many American academics and political commentators, Cohen was highly critical of Washington's approach to Russia following the collapse of the Soviet Union. He warned of the dangers of NATO expansion and argued that much of the economic devastation seen in Russia during the 1990s could be traced to bad-faith policies and advice from the United States.

His principled, and patriotic stand, led to smears from members of the think tank racket and both liberal and neoconservative interventionists, keen to stoke tensions with Moscow. Cohen was labelled a Putin apologist. He responded by saying that he saw him as being "in the Russian tradition of leadership, getting Russia back on its feet."

READ MORE Will the Mueller report make the New Cold War even worse? (by Stephen Cohen) Will the Mueller report make the New Cold War even worse? (by Stephen Cohen)

After the election of Donald Trump, Cohen found himself in the crosshairs of the mainstream media for challenging the now-debunked Russiagate narrative, which he said was being used to sabotage bilateral relations and trigger a "new Cold War" with Moscow.

The unsubstantiated claim that Trump's presidential campaign "colluded" with the Kremlin would likely make a US-Russia detente "impossible" and could even help fuel an actual war between the two nations, Cohen argued. He lamented that Special Counsel Robert Mueller's probe into the conspiracy theory, which found no evidence of collusion, would do little to tone down the fiery rhetoric and anonymously sourced media hysteria concerning Russia and its alleged influence over the US political system.

The author of numerous books and countless articles, Cohen was a frequent guest on RT, where he often used his air time to sound the alarm over the dangerous state of US-Russia relations, lamenting that the hostility was both unnecessary and potentially calamitous.

//www.youtube.com/embed/pQK7M7_GMDc

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[Sep 19, 2020] The Twilight of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization - CounterPunch.org

Sep 19, 2020 | www.counterpunch.org

SEPTEMBER 2, 2020 The Twilight of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization by MELVIN GOODMAN Facebook Twitter Reddit Email

Photograph Source: Bundesarchiv, B 145 Bild-P098967 – CC BY-SA 3.0 de

It is time for the United States to debate the downsizing, if not the dissolution, of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). U.S. national security would be strengthened by the demise of NATO because Washington would no longer have to guarantee the security of 14 Central and East European nations, including the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. European defense coordination and integration would be more manageable without the participation of authoritarian governments in Poland and Hungary. Key West European nations presumably would favor getting out from under the use of U.S. military power in the Balkans, the Middle East, and Southwest Asia, which has made them feel as if they were "tins of shoe polish for American boots."

Russia would obviously be a geopolitical winner in any weakening -- let alone the demise -- of NATO, but the fears of Russian military intervention outside of the Slavic community are exaggerated. The East European and Baltic states would protest any weakening of NATO, but it would be an incentive for them to increase their own security cooperation.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was created seven decades ago as a political and military alliance to "keep the United States in Europe; the Soviet Union out of Europe; and Germany down in Europe." The collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989; the Warsaw Pact and the East European communist governments in 1990; and the Soviet Union in 1991 marked the high water mark for the alliance.

For the past three decades, however, the United States has weakened NATO by forcing a hurried and awkward expansion on the alliance. Most recently in 2020, North Macedonia was admitted as its 30th member, further weakening the integrity of the alliance. Did President Donald Trump actually believe that the presence of North Macedonia as well as 13 other Central European states would strengthen U.S. security?

The enlargement of NATO demonstrated the strategic mishandling of Russia, which now finds the United States and Russia in a rivalry reminiscent of the Cold War. President Bill Clinton was responsible for bringing former members of the Warsaw Pact into NATO, starting in the late-1990s; President George W. Bush introduced former republics of the Soviet Union in his first term. German Chancellor Angela Merkel deserves credit for dissuading Bush from seeking membership for Ukraine and Georgia.

The United States justified the expansion of NATO as a way to create more liberal, democratic members, but this has not been the case for the East European members. Russia, moreover, views the expansion as a return to containment and a threat to its national security. Russia was angered by the expansion from the outset, particularly since President George H.W. Bush and Secretary of State James Baker assured Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze that the United States wouldn't "leap frog" over Germany if the Soviets pulled their 380,000 troops out of East Germany.

NATO's success from 1949 to 1991 was marked by a common perception of the Soviet threat, which is the key to solidarity in any alliance framework. In 2020, however, the 30 members of NATO no longer share a common perception of the Russian threat in Europe. The United States has one view of Russia; the key nations of West Europe have a more benign view; and the East Europeans perceive a dire threat that the others do not share. The United States has always expressed some dissatisfaction with the asymmetric burden sharing and risk sharing within the alliance, and the Trump administration has threatened to withdraw from NATO over the burden sharing issue.

Turkey has rapidly become the outlier within NATO, and there have been a series of confrontations in the eastern Mediterranean that threaten the integrity of the alliance. Greek and Turkish warships collided in August, creating the first such confrontation between the two navies since 1996, when the Clinton administration mediated the problem. The United States no longer acts in such diplomatic capacities, so French President Emmanuel Macron has stepped into the breach by sending jet aircraft to the Greek island of Crete as well as warships to exercise with the antiquated Greek navy. Greece and Turkey, which joined NATO together in 1952, are rivals over economic zones in the Mediterranean where there are important deposits of oil and natural gas. Greece and Turkey have squabbled since 1974 over the divided island of Cyprus.

Turkey and France have additional differences over Turkey's violations of the UN arms embargo on Libya. The two NATO allies had a confrontation in the Mediterranean when a French warship tried to inspect a Turkish vessel. Last week, France joined military exercises with Greece and Italy in the eastern Mediterranean following a Turkish maritime violation of contested waters. Paris backs Athens in the conflicting claims with Ankara over rights to potential hydrocarbon resources on the continental shelf in the Mediterranean.

President Macron took a particularly tough line in stating that he was setting "red lines" in the Mediterranean because the "Turks only consider and respect a red-line policy," adding that he "did it in Syria" as well. Macron's tough stance is somewhat surprising in view of the concern of France and other European NATO countries regarding Turkey's ability to turn on the refugee spigot, which would cause economic problems in southern Europe. Turkey has been using the refugee issue as leverage since 2015, when huge numbers of refugees in West Europe led to a rightward shift in European politics.

There is also the problem of Turkey's purchase of the most sophisticated Russian air defense system, the S-400, which was developed to counter the world's most sophisticated jet fighter, the U.S. F-35. As a result of the purchase of the S-400 system, the United States reneged on the sale of eight F-35s to Turkey at a loss of $862 million, creating additional problems between Trump and Turkish President Recip Tayyip Erdogan. Turkey had planned to buy 100 F-35s over the next several years, and had begun pilot training in the United States.

Trump's constant harangues about burden sharing have created more friction within NATO. Trump falsely takes credit for increased European defense spending, but it was the Obama administration that successfully arranged greater Canadian and European defense spending in 2014 in the wake of Russia's seizure of Crimea. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg panders regularly to Trump on the issue of increased defense spending, ignoring Trump's false claims that NATO spending will increase by $400 billion annually. The $400 billion is in fact the increased spending over an eight-year period.

With Trump's drift toward isolationism and unilateralism ("America First"), there is incentive for the European Community to take control of its own "autonomous" defense policy. The Europeans have reason to believe that a second presidential term for Trump could lead to a sudden U.S. withdrawal from NATO. The unilateralist character of U.S. foreign and defense policy strengthens the case for building European defense cooperation along side of an undetermined transatlantic relationship with the United States.

Melvin A. Goodman is a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and a professor of government at Johns Hopkins University. A former CIA analyst, Goodman is the author of Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA and National Insecurity: The Cost of American Militarism . and A Whistleblower at the CIA . His most recent book is "American Carnage: The Wars of Donald Trump" (Opus Publishing), and he is the author of the forthcoming "The Dangerous National Security State" (2020)." Goodman is the national security columnist for counterpunch.org .

[Sep 19, 2020] The Russian Embassy has demanded clarification from the United States about an NBC report

Sep 19, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

MOSCOW EXILE September 17, 2020 at 9:46 pm

18 сентября 2020 07:55
Посольство РФ потребовало от США разъяснений по поводу репортажа NBC

18 September 2020 07:55
The Russian Embassy has demanded clarification from the United States about an NBC report

The Russian Embassy in Washington has demanded an explanation from the US authorities about an NBC TV report, which mentions US support for "Ukrainian units" in the Crimea.

This has been reported in social networks on the official page of the diplomatic mission.

In American journalists' material, it was said that the United States was arming certain groups that were acting against Russian forces in the Crimea.

The point that the embassy is emphasizing is that Washington is supporting the activities of terrorists in Russia. Diplomats admit that the channel may be wrong, but demand that the United States clarify whether they are involved in organizing terrorist attacks against the residents of Crimea.

Ukrainian units fighting Russian occupying forces in the Crimea?

For the liberation of Crimeans living under the yoke of post-Soviet Russian imperialism?

Where?

When?

ET AL September 18, 2020 at 12:12 am

Liberation and subsequent return as a khanate where it can pick up where it left off, carrying out slave raids in to Russia for profit.* Good times!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimean_Khanate#Slave_trade

[Sep 19, 2020] Who organized this provocation? Is this a part of gas war?

Were Khodorkovsky or Browder among people involved? To what extent Trump administration and MI6 were involved? Looks more and more line a bad replay of Skripals poisoning
Notable quotes:
"... Germans and "the whole world", to quote Pompeo, know the truth: Russians simply deny the truth, and the more they deny, the more truthful the accusations appear. And the elephant in the room: Why isn't the poisoned by "Novichok" bullshitting bastard of a US agent dead? And the answer given by the Germans, that is ironic in the extreme: because Russian doctors saved his life in Omsk. ..."
"... There are undeniable advantages to accusations for which no substantiation is offered – as we saw with the Skripals, you can await public comment, identify where you went wrong from scornful rejections of the narrative, and then modify it so that it makes more sense. ..."
"... I hope Germany offers residency to the Navalnys, and that they accept. Russia can't really refuse to let him back in, he's a citizen. But as long as he is there he will cause trouble, and he'll be recharged with all the PR he has received from this latest caper. ..."
"... But it is suggested that Russia is bargaining for his return; the story also expands on Lavrov's recent statements, and introduces a villain in the woodpile I would not have personally suspected: Poland. ..."
"... I recall Lavrov querying the other day Pevchikh's presence in Germany, her refusal to be interviewed by investigators in Omsk and how come she managed to fly to Germany with Navalny? He also said that other supporters of Navalny had also turned up in Germany. ..."
"... I lay a pound to a pinch of shit that Pevchikh is a British agent. ..."
"... Looking good for almost a corpse. COVID-19, a flu virus, is a deadly killer, and Novichok, a deadly nerve agent, is not a killer. ..."
"... Dances with Bears: THE PEVCHIKH PLOT – NAVALNY BOTTLE, LONDON WITNESS FLEE THE SCENE OF THE CRIME, BERLIN TOO http://johnhelmer.net/the-pevchikh-plot-navalny-bottle-london-witness-flee-the-scene-of-the-crime-berlin-too/ ..."
"... I reckon Khordokovsky has a hand in this. He has the same moral compass as dead Berezovsky. None. And he has refused to stick to agreements (keep out of politics). If the British or someone else get fingered for this cunning plan , would they serve him up on a silver platter? Almost certainly so. ..."
"... We certainly did well to focus on Maria Pevchikh as soon as we discovered that in addition to being the one who evaded questioning by Russian authorities by flying out to Germany, she also had British residency. She certainly has become a "person of interest" and could well be the major individual in the plot to incapacitate Navalny and use him to pressure Germany over NSII and Russia over the Belarus unrest. ..."
"... It is still unknown whether Pevchikh is a British citizen. I think she is and probably must be, in fact, for if she is only a visa holder or an applicant for UK citizenship, she could be told by the Home Office to go take a hike if it is proven that she was instrumental in the poisoning plot. ..."
"... Ask Pevchikh! Only she is now probably undergoing debriefing in London at UK Secret Intelligence Services HQ, 85 Albert Embankment. ..."
"... There was considerable risk involved in the deception. I doubt that Navalny went into the deception willingly. There was a very real risk that he could have suffered some brain damage going into the first coma and that's sure to compromise his health in the long term in other ways. ..."
"... More likely it seems a lot of the deception was planned behind Navalny's back and people were waiting for an opportunity to carry it out. It may have been planned years ago for someone else and then switched to Navalny once he was in the Omsk hospital. Julia Navalnaya may have been pushed into demanding that Navalny be transferred to Berlin and while the Omsk hospital doctors were stabilising him for the transfer, the deception then started going into action in Germany. ..."
"... Lavrov smelt a rat several days ago -- last week, I'm sure -- when he stated that suspicions had been aroused by one of Navalny's gang refusing to answer investigators' questions in Omsk and then scarpering off to Germany. ..."
"... I'm quite sure the FSB already knew of Pevchikh's comings and goings between London and Moscow (over 60 flights there and back I read somewhere) and her activities with the Navalny organization. ..."
"... if Washington thinks it can actually halt Nord Stream II – with the understanding that the Russians would probably give up after such a stinging second rebuke – then the sky is the limit, and they will scornfully reject any other solution. The one who stands to get hurt the most is Europe. But I don't think they realize it. ..."
Sep 19, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

MOSCOWEXILE September 14, 2020 at 11:07 pm

Russian librag Vedomosti reports NYT:

NYT сообщила о планах Навального вернуться в Россию
15 сентября 2020

NYT has announced Navalney's to return to Russia
15 September 2020

Founder of the Anti-Corruption Foundation, Alexei Navalny, who is undergoing treatment in Germany, has discussed his poisoning with the German prosecutor and announced that he plans to return to Russia, The New York Times has reported, citing a source in the German security forces.

According to the source, Navalny is fully aware of his condition, of what happened and where he is. In a conversation with the prosecutor, he refused that his case be jointly investigated by Germany and Russia. Navalny said he planned to return to Russia immediately after his recovery and continue his mission, the newspaper notes.

https://vedomosti-ru.turbopages.org/vedomosti.ru/s/society/news/2020/09/15/839918-o-planah-navalnogo?utm_source=yxnews&utm_medium=mobile

Mission accomplished.

I notice that the Navalny fake story has gone off the radar in the Western MSM.

Now there just remain the lies and innuendos fixed in the minds of the sheeple.

Only an investigation by the Germans.

No investigation by the Russians.

Germans and "the whole world", to quote Pompeo, know the truth: Russians simply deny the truth, and the more they deny, the more truthful the accusations appear. And the elephant in the room: Why isn't the poisoned by "Novichok" bullshitting bastard of a US agent dead? And the answer given by the Germans, that is ironic in the extreme: because Russian doctors saved his life in Omsk.

Other elephants lurking in the shadows:

Why hadn't everyone who had been in contact with the piece of shit, including fellow passengers on the Tomsk-Moscow flight died?

Where were the hazmat-suit-wearing specialists that should have detoxified the aeroplane on board of which the Bullshitter threw a wobbler?

So many elephants, all ignored.

Total fabrication.

When the liar returns here, how about arresting him for breach of his bail conditions?

Not technically but absolutely legally he was not allowed to leave the country.

How about arresting him for perverting the course of justice? You can get life for doing that in the UK!

He refuses to allow the Russian state to investigate his case but he and his controllers and supporters maintain that the Russian state attempted to murder him with the most deadly nerve agent known to man -- but it didn't work.

ET AL September 15, 2020 at 1:32 am

Jesus has Risen!

And on the plus side he can sell expensive 'blessed' trinkets to his hamsters help subsidize his interesting lifestyle. Think holy relics, think Medjigorje, Lourdes etc.

MARK CHAPMAN September 15, 2020 at 8:58 am

Having survived Novichok poisoning, is he now immune?

MOSCOWEXILE September 15, 2020 at 4:16 am

A long read:

VESTI RU

Навальный, "Новичок" и "белая коробка"
13 сентября 2020

Navalny, "Novichok" and the "White Box"
13 September 2020

Why is not a single Berlin doctor ready to personally confirm the announced poisoning of Navalny?

A Russian patient is recovering in the "White Box" of the Charité hospital. During the three weeks of Navalny's stay within these walls, no one shouted at the doctors that they were murderers, no one demanded from them hourly reports on the patient's state of health. At the beginning of the week, the hospital's press service informs the press that the personal guest of the Federal Chancellor has been withdrawn from an artificial coma and is reacting to other people. A couple of days later, "Spiegel" magazine publishes encouraging information: "More progress has been made. If his health continues to improve, Navalny will begin to receive more visitors". According to "Bellingcat" and "Der Spiegel", Navalny can already speak and can probably recall the events that happened before he lost consciousness on an aeroplane flying from Tomsk to Moscow.

In general, the latest Charité press releases are in clear contradiction to the horror that the German press had been gathering all week. The already poisoned underpants have been forgotten, the newspaper "Die Zeit" returns the reader to a famous photograph: morning in a café at the Tomsk airport, a passenger for the flight to Moscow flight peers into a cup that he has raised in order to drink out of it. In it,, according to a "Die " source, is not just a chemical warfare agent from the "Novichok" group: in there is a "Novichok" on steroids.

"Before this assassination attempt, the world did not know about this poison, which is said to be even more deadly and dangerous than all known substances from the Novichok group. Scientists found corresponding traces on the Navalny's hands and on the neck of a bottle from which he had drunk. This "modified Novichok" allegedly acts more slowly than previous versions. The Germans assume that one of the FSB agents monitoring Navalny, or an undercover agent, added drops of poison to his tea or applied a substance to the surface of a cup. Navalny was supposed to die on board the aircraft", writes "Die Zeit".

Everything is just fine and dandy here: for example, about agents who had to perform the necessary manipulations with a super-poison in a crowded place. A remarkable and suddenly appeared bottle -- no bottle was seen in Omsk at all. The story goes on about the fact that, apart from tea, Navalny did not drink anything. It turns out that those accompanying the blogger took the bottle out of the plane, hid it, and then transported it to Germany and handed it to Bundeswehr chemists Concealing evidence is pure criminality. But the most interesting thing is the super-"Novichok".

After the poisoning of the Skripals in Salisbury (let us recount the usual version of events that happened there), about 50 more people sought medical help. Houses were taken apart, pets were destroyed. But here no one except Navalny was hurt: neither the people at Tomsk airport, nor the fellow travellers with whom he, having the terrible poison in his hands, took a selfie on a bus, nor the passengers on board the aircraft, and he also touched things there. Symptoms of poisoning should have appeared amongst the passengers, but they did not. This should raise questions from the authors of the serious newspaper "Die Zeit", but it does not. A weapon of mass destruction by any reasoning, but the longer the German press examines the Navalny case, the more mediaeval and grotesque it becomes. And it works -- you can see it even from the reaction of quite moderate politicians.

Already a week and a half ago, Merkel announced the results of a toxicological examination, allegedly carried out in a secret laboratory of the Bundeswehr (yes, Navalny was poisoned), opponents of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline have intensified their onslaught against the federal government in order to stop the construction, they say, this is the only way to punish Russia. At the head of the column are the party leaders of the Greens and those associates of Merkel who are friendly with Washington and have plans for higher party or administrative posts after the Chancellor leaves.

These voices were at least heard. In an evening talk show on ZDF, German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas made it clear that the shutdown of Nord Stream 2 could be one response.

"We cannot say that since the sanctions do not work, then there is no need to introduce any. Sometimes we have to put up with the risk of the consequences, thereby saying that we do not want to live in a world without rules", Maas said.

Now Herr Maas, along with many members of the government and administration and the Chancellor, lives in a world of very strange rules. Merkel's press secretary Seibert reiterated that Germany will interact with Russia exclusively at the site of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), where all the documents allegedly have already been sent.

The OPCW Technical Secretariat informed our permanent representative, Alexander Shulgin, that Berlin had only sent a notification about Navalny's poisoning, a sheet of A4 paper, but there is still nothing that the experts could work on. But the Germans had to formulate a response to the proposal of the Russian Prosecutor General's Office on exchange of information: any information about the state of Navalny can be transferred to Russia only with his permission.

This was the case in 2004. The Charité clinic then diagnosed the presidential candidate of the Ukraine Viktor Yushchenko with dioxin poisoning -- no one ever saw documentary evidence. Yushchenko then for 4 years, while he was of interest he was to the public, promised to show everything, but he never did.

This trick can be repeated again, the main thing is to find the answer to an urgent task: to inflate the level of confrontation between Russia and Germany, and therefore the entire West, in order to force the Russian authorities to be as cautious as possible in their domestic and foreign policy, for example, in the Belarusian direction.

However, the fact that Nord Stream 2, for which the German federal government was ready to support unto death, suddenly became an instrument of blackmail -- admit the poisoning, otherwise we can close it down -- openly outraged German business and regional elites.

"It seems that the verdict has already been given -- there are demands that construction of the pipeline be stopped. I strongly oppose such measures", said Michael Kretschmer, Prime Minister of Saxony.

"We have had absolutely trusting cooperation with Russia in the energy sector for 50 years. And even in the most difficult political times, which were probably even more difficult during the Cold War, we managed to maintain this trust", emphasized Michael Harms, executive director of Eastern Committee of the German economy.

Even a true transatlantist, the president of the Munich Security Conference Wolfgang Ischinger, stood up for Nord Stream 2 (and Denmark had joined the renewed US incitement against it the day before).

Political games will not pass themselves of as force majeure. Investors will go to the German government for their money. Here you need to think ten times, because along with the demands of multibillion-dollar compensation, there will definitely be asked unpleasant questions about the reasons that made the German authorities abandon a project that was profitable to all sides. So you can go to Navalny's analyses. In a normal court, bureaucratic excuses will not work. And, by the way, in Germany there are politician-lawyers who can professionally draw up a claim and conduct a case.

"I want to investigate this. One of the developers of Novichok is in the US. It is known that many special services have this poison. Of course, the Russian have it as well, but if Putin did it, then why give Navalny to Germany? So that we can establish all this here? A crime must have some logic", says Bundestag deputy Gregor Gizi.

The logic that we now see is somehow not German. One gets the impression that the compassion and humanism of the German politician, brought up on the lessons of the past, are now being tried out by smart and cynical people who know how to competently fabricate, substitute and cover their tracks. And not too far away, we already had Britain.

At the end of May 2003, the BBC released material that Prime Minister Blair and his cabinet had made a decision to enter the war in Iraq based on falsified intelligence. The person who passed on this information to reporters was David Kelly, a leading chemical weapons specialist at the British Department of Defence. His speech at the parliamentary hearings threatened the prime minister, the military and the secret services with big problems, Hiwever, on July 18, 2003, Kelly was found dead in the woods near his home. Suicide, the investigation stated, but in 2007, a group of parliamentarians conducted an unofficial investigation -- there were no legal consequences, but now all British people know that Kelly was murdered in cold blood.

In 2015, Blair was forced to admit that he lied to citizens about Iraq, and escaped trial only because no one wanted to get involved with it. Nevertheless, Blair has gone down in history with this lie. And history is important to remember in order to do it right. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov calls on the Germans to leave emotions and turn on their brains.

"I hope that these absurd actions will be stopped and Germany, at least for the sake of the reputation of German punctuality, will fulfill its obligations under the agreement with the Russian Federation. Moreover, they are demanding an investigation from us, but it turns out that all those who accompanied Navalny are slowly moving to Germany too. this is very unpleasant and leads to serious thoughts. Therefore, it is in the interests of our German colleagues to protect their reputation and provide all the necessary information that would somehow shed light on their so far absolutely unfounded accusations", Lavrov said.

Another proposal has gone from Moscow to Berlin: to send a Russian investigation team to Germany in order to jointly study the circumstances of the case, the victim of which is a Russian citizen. So far, there is no reason to believe that Berlin will respond with consent.

Some German politicians and almost all the SMS likes to moralize against Russia, periodically recalling the Stalinist repressions and the GULAG. But now Germany itself behaves like an investigator during interrogation in the dungeons of the NKVD. Confession is the queen of proof.*

https://yandex.ru/turbo/vesti.ru/s/article/2457559?promo=navbar&utm_referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fzen.yandex.com%2F%3Ffrom%3Dspecial&utm_source=YandexZenSpecial

Yeah, we got a confession in the end!

That's all the bastards demand of Russia: Confess and then we'll be pals.

*Признание -- царица доказательств

"Confession is the Queen of proof."

From Latin: Сonfessio regina probationum est)

Roman legal principle of criminal procedural law.

Слава России!

MARK CHAPMAN September 15, 2020 at 10:04 am

There are undeniable advantages to accusations for which no substantiation is offered – as we saw with the Skripals, you can await public comment, identify where you went wrong from scornful rejections of the narrative, and then modify it so that it makes more sense.

In this case, people wonder why such a potent nerve agent did not fell Navalny instantly like a poleaxed ox, before he ever left the terminal, instead of 40 minutes or so into the flight. Ahhh but this, we later learn, was a specially-modified Novichok, engineered to be slow-acting. Just what you want in a nerve agent. Hint – no, it isn't. Just like you don't want it specially engineered to be 'persistent', like that chemical-warfare expert tit for Bellingcat claimed was the reason the poison daubed on Skripal's doorknob did not wash away in the rain and was still deadly weeks afterward. You want a nerve agent to quickly and efficiently kill enemy troops caught in the open and unprotected, and then as quickly degrade and disperse so your own forces can move in and occupy the objective. The last thing you want is it hanging about for weeks, or being 'slow-acting' so those troops can come in and wax your ass and then later fall down dead. One of the first casualties of these silly stories must be that the agent is 'military grade'. The military would say, if you want to use that useless shite, spread it yourself – we want nothing to do with it.

MOSCOWEXILE September 15, 2020 at 4:46 am

Just appeared, posted from Charité -- Bullshitter with statuesque wife and kiddie acolytes:

https://www.instagram.com/p/CFJwV0Dly0Z/embed/captioned/?cr=1&v=12&wp=822&rd=https%3A%2F%2Fthenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com&rp=%2F2020%2F07%2F31%2Fthe-ceaseless-lies-of-eva-bartlett-or-the-partisan-scrubbing-of-western-consciousness%2F#%7B%22ci%22%3A0%2C%22os%22%3A3146.465000000717%7D

Another bungled FSB wet job!

MOSCOWEXILE September 15, 2020 at 4:56 am

It reads:

navalny Hi, this is Navalny. I miss you all 😍. I still can hardly do anything, but yesterday I was able to breathe on my own all day. Generally myself. I did not use any outside help, not even the simplest valve in my throat. I liked it very much. An amazing, underestimated by many thing. Would totally recommend.

What, no tracheotomy scar?

Why aren't you dead, you wanker?

Thinking about thanking the Omsk doctors who "saved your life" after you had taken a dose of salts in the aircraft shithouse?

MARK CHAPMAN September 15, 2020 at 10:07 am

"I still can hardly do anything "

I'm still waiting for the difference to become evident. Navalny does perhaps less than any man in Russia who enjoys such a leisurely lifestyle.

MOSCOWEXILE September 15, 2020 at 10:05 am

I take it that the kiddie Navalnyites in the above Instagram are all Russian citizens and part of the Bullshitter's entourage that turned up in Berlin, hot on the heels of their comatose hero.

So how did they get the documentation that enabled them to leave the Mafia State and enter Germany, the coronavirus shamdemic notwithstanding?

Are they all guests of Frau Kanzelerin Merkel?

MARK CHAPMAN September 15, 2020 at 10:34 am

I thought they were the Bullshitter's kids.

MOSCOWEXILE September 15, 2020 at 10:49 am

Yes, they are his children. Navalnaya clearly got permission for their son to travel to Germany. His daughter has flown in from the USA.

However, the question still remains as regards those Navalnyites who rolled up in Germany following their leader's private flight there: how did they get the appropriate documentation to do so at such short notice, not to mention Pevchikh, who flew with the comatose Navalny to Berlin -- and then vanished?.

Seibert was asked about this and said he knew nothing about her.

MARK CHAPMAN September 15, 2020 at 11:22 am

Ah, yes; that's a good point. I just assumed the hamsters were blathering from a distance, as in Russia. I did not realize some of them had turned up in Germany, except for the mysterious Masha.

I hope Germany offers residency to the Navalnys, and that they accept. Russia can't really refuse to let him back in, he's a citizen. But as long as he is there he will cause trouble, and he'll be recharged with all the PR he has received from this latest caper.

But it is suggested that Russia is bargaining for his return; the story also expands on Lavrov's recent statements, and introduces a villain in the woodpile I would not have personally suspected: Poland.

https://www.stalkerzone.org/lavrov-offered-merkel-a-choice-between-russia-navalny/

MOSCOWEXILE September 15, 2020 at 11:54 am

And get this:

Does he want to end his political ambitions? Top Eurocrat Borrell calls for Navalny's name to be attached to EU 'Magnitsky List'

https://www.rt.com/russia/500766-borrell-navalny-sanctions-russia/

MOSCOWEXILE September 15, 2020 at 12:03 pm

I recall Lavrov querying the other day Pevchikh's presence in Germany, her refusal to be interviewed by investigators in Omsk and how come she managed to fly to Germany with Navalny? He also said that other supporters of Navalny had also turned up in Germany.

I lay a pound to a pinch of shit that Pevchikh is a British agent.

MOSCOWEXILE September 16, 2020 at 11:35 am

Note how the monitor in the Navalny Instagram above has been censored.

It's because, they say, it displays personal data about Putin's intended Novichok victim, such as body temperature, pulse, blood pressure etc.

Wouldn't like the world to know that there is nothing wrong with him, would they?

Source:

Эксперт объяснил ретушь прикроватного экрана на фото Навального
15 сентября 2020

An expert has explained the retouching of the bedside monitor in the Navalny photo
15 September 2020

https://vz-ru.turbopages.org/vz.ru/s/news/2020/9/15/1060574.html?promo=navbar&utm_referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fzen.yandex.com

MARK CHAPMAN September 16, 2020 at 12:26 pm

Too late to get smart now.

MOSCOWEXILE September 16, 2020 at 10:51 pm

NAVALNY: HIDDEN AND OVERT SIGNALS
Stalker Zone
September 16, 2020

Staged???

Why on earth should one think that?

MOSCOWEXILE September 16, 2020 at 10:54 pm

Comment to the above C/Z article:

anymouse • 8 hours ago

Looking good for almost a corpse. COVID-19, a flu virus, is a deadly killer, and Novichok, a deadly nerve agent, is not a killer.

ET AL September 15, 2020 at 11:36 am

Dances with Bears: THE PEVCHIKH PLOT – NAVALNY BOTTLE, LONDON WITNESS FLEE THE SCENE OF THE CRIME, BERLIN TOO
http://johnhelmer.net/the-pevchikh-plot-navalny-bottle-london-witness-flee-the-scene-of-the-crime-berlin-too/

British and other international toxicological experts say that without technical reporting by the laboratory of the spectrometric composition of the chemical, and without identifying the compound by the international naming protocol there is no evidence at all;..

the US Army had recently manufactured its own Novichok types: "A230, A232 and A234 A232 has a CAS number of 2308498-31-7. A230 and A234 have no known CAS numbers."
####

A lot more at the link.

ET AL September 15, 2020 at 11:40 am

I reckon Khordokovsky has a hand in this. He has the same moral compass as dead Berezovsky. None. And he has refused to stick to agreements (keep out of politics). If the British or someone else get fingered for this cunning plan , would they serve him up on a silver platter? Almost certainly so.

MARK CHAPMAN September 15, 2020 at 3:29 pm

Helmer always delivers. It looks very much as if the Germans have stepped in the shit.

JEN September 15, 2020 at 7:10 pm

We certainly did well to focus on Maria Pevchikh as soon as we discovered that in addition to being the one who evaded questioning by Russian authorities by flying out to Germany, she also had British residency. She certainly has become a "person of interest" and could well be the major individual in the plot to incapacitate Navalny and use him to pressure Germany over NSII and Russia over the Belarus unrest.

MARK CHAPMAN September 15, 2020 at 7:17 pm

Agreed; she does indeed look to have played a far bigger part in the operation than she lets on.

MOSCOWEXILE September 15, 2020 at 9:44 pm

It is still unknown whether Pevchikh is a British citizen. I think she is and probably must be, in fact, for if she is only a visa holder or an applicant for UK citizenship, she could be told by the Home Office to go take a hike if it is proven that she was instrumental in the poisoning plot.

When Berezovsky got cocky in the UK after a judge there had prevented his being forced to leave Misty Albion because Berzovsky had persuaded him that were he to return to Mordor, he would face an unfair trial and his life would be in danger -- the erstwhile "Godfather of the Kremlin" had arrived in the with a 6-month visitor's visa -- he started bragging to the "Guardian" that he was organizing with his chums still in the Evil Empire the overthrow of the tyrant Putin.

The Home Secretary at the time was none other than "Jack" Straw -- another odious pile of ordure -- who promptly summonsed Berezovsky to the Home Office for an official bollocking. He was told that if, while resident in the UK, he continued to engage himself with the overthrow of a foreign head of state, he was out.

Be that as it may, I am quite sure he was working with British state security, as was his once favoured acolyte Litvinenko.

Litvinenko was poisoned. Berezovsky committed suicide -- they say.

Like

MOSCOWEXILE September 15, 2020 at 1:32 pm

Россия задала ЕС девять вопросов об обвинениях в ситуации с Навальным

Постоянное представительство России при Евросоюзе указало на ключевые нестыковки в версии об отравлении Алексея Навального
15 сентября 2020

Russia has asked the EU nine questions about accusations in the situation with Navalny

The Permanent Representative of Russia to the European Union has pointed out the key inconsistencies in the version about the poisoning of Alexei Navalny
15 September 2020

https://yandex.ru/turbo/tass.ru/s/politika/9466401?sign=80f97b564d197b55161b94400f4ff187026d184af0581f365926a5271a89189a%3A1600204510&utm_source=yxnews&utm_medium=mobile&trbsrc=neo-news

In the eighth question, Russian diplomats drew attention to a bottle of water, on which, according to Germany, traces of poison had been found: "Not a single surveillance camera recorded how Navalny drank from a similar bottle at the Tomsk airport [before departure]. from this bottle earlier or on board the plane, how did this bottle get to Berlin? "

Ask Pevchikh! Only she is now probably undergoing debriefing in London at UK Secret Intelligence Services HQ, 85 Albert Embankment.

PATIENT OBSERVER September 15, 2020 at 4:41 pm

Navalny, if indeed he was close to death, must now realize he was set up by one of his own benefactors. What would be his next move? Going back to Russia would make the most sense as the Russians may actually protect him from another show-assassination and he would have freedom to prance around to his heart's content.

MARK CHAPMAN September 15, 2020 at 6:54 pm

I don't believe he was ever 'close to death', rather that he was an active part of the deception. He is a grifting idiot who puffs up like a toad upon being flattered. He could never win power in Russia legitimately, as he is mostly a figure of contempt in Russia save for the perennially-discontented children of the liberal elite and the few Americaphiles who don't know enough to keep their heads down. I believe he played his role by taking something that would nauseate him but not seriously hurt him, rolling about and screaming, and that the introduction of the phony 'poison bottle' was with his full knowledge. I wish Russia would just disown him and tell the Germans they can have him.

However, I could be wrong. We will know from the tone of his remarks when he feels he is strong enough to once again assume his president-in-waiting role, and starts spouting off about what happened to him. He is the most likely candidate to be selected to get the water-bottle narrative back on track, so if he comes out with an explanation for how he drank from the bottle somewhere there were no surveillance cameras, and noticed a sketchy-looking guy in a leather jacket and a "Vote For Putin!" T-shirt standing nearby just before he drank, it will be a pretty good indication that he is as full of shit as ever.

JEN September 15, 2020 at 10:53 pm

There was considerable risk involved in the deception. I doubt that Navalny went into the deception willingly. There was a very real risk that he could have suffered some brain damage going into the first coma and that's sure to compromise his health in the long term in other ways.

More likely it seems a lot of the deception was planned behind Navalny's back and people were waiting for an opportunity to carry it out. It may have been planned years ago for someone else and then switched to Navalny once he was in the Omsk hospital. Julia Navalnaya may have been pushed into demanding that Navalny be transferred to Berlin and while the Omsk hospital doctors were stabilising him for the transfer, the deception then started going into action in Germany.

MOSCOWEXILE September 15, 2020 at 11:18 pm

Lavrov smelt a rat several days ago -- last week, I'm sure -- when he stated that suspicions had been aroused by one of Navalny's gang refusing to answer investigators' questions in Omsk and then scarpering off to Germany.

I'm quite sure the FSB already knew of Pevchikh's comings and goings between London and Moscow (over 60 flights there and back I read somewhere) and her activities with the Navalny organization.

Perhaps they allowed Navalny to leave for Germany -- with Pevchikh flying out with him, I may add -- because they knew what was afoot and would later expose the Germans for liars, or if not that, then for their falling to a sucker punch off the British secret service.

They certainly allowed Pevchikh to leave Russia: she didn't sneak on board Navalny's private flight.

Just Pevchikh, note, not Navalnaya, who is not a British agent, I'm sure.

MARK CHAPMAN September 16, 2020 at 8:49 am

Certainly possible – as I say, we will know more from his blabber once he starts giving interviews, which he lives to do. His tone will have changed considerably if he believes his erstwhile chums in politics intended to martyr him. Otherwise I read his expressed desire to return at once to Russia as simply remaining in character – the selfless hero risking all for freedom and democracy.

I wonder how he will thank the doctors in Omsk for saving his life, as it is generally acknowledged they did. He cannot go into transports of admiration for their professional skills, because they claimed to have found no trace of poisoning in his samples. He faces the choice, then, of simply passing over it without mention, or accusing the people who saved his life of 'being part of the machine'. Doing either will certainly not increase his popularity in Russia. And it makes no difference at all how popular he is in the west – something the west seemingly cannot be taught.

Like

MOSCOWEXILE September 16, 2020 at 4:41 am

Die Zeit сообщила о предложении США от ФРГ по "Северному потоку -- 2"
RT на русском, 16 сентября 2020

Die Zeit announced the proposal of the USA from Germany for the "Nord Stream – 2
RT in Russian, September 16, 2020

The German government has offered the United States a deal in exchange for Washington's waiver of sanctions against Nord Stream 2.

This is reported by the newspaper Die Zeit, citing sources

It is noted that Berlin has expressed its readiness to invest up to € 1 billion in the construction of two terminals in Germany for receiving liquefied natural gas from the United States.

"In response, the United States will allow the unhindered completion and operation of Nord Stream 2", TASS quotes the text of a letter from German Finance Minister Olaf Scholz, which was sent on August 7 to the head of the US Treasury, Stephen Mnuchin.

In early August, US senators sent a letter to the operator of the German port of Sassnitz calling for an end to work to support the construction of Nord Stream 2.

https://russian-rt-com.turbopages.org/russian.rt.com/s/business/news/783868-predlozhenie-frg-ssha?utm_source=yxnews&utm_medium=mobile

PAULR September 16, 2020 at 5:07 am

This would suggest that the Germans are not planning to cancel North Stream 2 themselves in response to the Navalny case.

MOSCOWEXILE September 16, 2020 at 5:57 am

The USA won't like the offer. Zero-Win for them -- always.

Americans have to be winners -- expect to be winners: it's their birthright and what made America great. To be a loser is un-American.

In my experience, the worst thing ever for many US citizens is to be accused of being a "loser".

PATIENT OBSERVER September 16, 2020 at 9:05 am

Very true about the term "loser" being a harsh insult for Americans. The "loser" tag starts to be applied to kids in early grade school and only intensifies from that point. The glorification of success (defined by the level of conspicuous consumption) further sharpens the divide between losers and winners. Our "feel-good" stories are often about individuals who were able to transform themselves from "losers" to "winners". American culture is one-dimensional in that way.

PATIENT OBSERVER September 16, 2020 at 5:12 pm

Building an LNG terminal is one thing, buying US LNG is another thing. In addition, I believe that Russia could provide LNG to Germany as well and likely at a substantially lower price.

The US may settle for this gesture as it does hold the door open, however slightly, for future developments to be leveraged by the US to force Germany to reduce or stop gas purchases from Russia. Having the terminal in place could make a future change in suppliers more feasible and faster but nevertheless representing an economic disaster for Germany. Lets call it step 1 in Plan B.

MARK CHAPMAN September 16, 2020 at 10:49 pm

I'm pretty sure the Americans will not take this offer, but will instead – correctly – interpret it as weakness and increase their pressure.

ET AL September 16, 2020 at 11:56 pm

On the other hand any diplomatic/economic success plays well in this presidential erection year. So a) is it worth it?; b) can they reverse the decision the day after? I assume they can have their cake and eat it as Brussels is mostly spineless. Borrell can squeal about Russia, but that's because he can do f/k all about the USA's behavior, being spokeshole and all

MARK CHAPMAN September 17, 2020 at 8:51 am

That's what people seem not to get – the decision would not ever be 'reversible' once Nord Stream II is complete. That pipeline quad alone can carry all of Europe's gas supply that it receives from Russia. None through Ukraine, not a whiff, if that is Moscow's will, although the Russians have agreed to transit token amounts, which the Ukrainians say are not enough to make the system's continued operation viable – without the large volumes they are accustomed to handling, they will have to progressively begin shutting down, bypassing and dismantling sections they can no longer afford to maintain.

So long as the pipeline's future remains in doubt, Uncle Sam can sell the philosophical possibility of supplying Europe with large volumes of cheap LNG via tankers, made desirable – although it will cost a little more, no getting around that – for political reasons. Once Nord Stream II is complete, the reality of a reliable supply of cheap pipeline gas would have to be countered with a concrete offer from the USA; this many cubic meters times this many Euros. Any housewife can do a cost-benefit analysis at that level. Do you want to pay more for American gas just because it comes from America? Well, let me think about it – what are the benefits? Well, it comes from America! What, you mean, that's it? There would be no possibility the Americans would use their status as a major energy supplier as leverage to bring about economic or political changes in Europe that they desired, would there? Well I can't guarantee that.

You know what? I'm okay with Russian gas, thanks just the same. Maybe I'll use the money I save to buy a Ford – how's that?

MARK CHAPMAN September 16, 2020 at 9:20 am

Pathetic. After declaring forcefully that American extraterritorial sanctions are illegal – which, technically, they are, only America has a right to threaten to limit European trade in America if it wishes; although that, too is illegal under WTO rules – Germany is now cowering and trying to 'make a deal'. With Trump, in case anyone missed that, whose 'Art of the Deal' consists of destroying the opponent until he is happy to have escaped with his life, and will never publicly complain about a 'deal' which came out very much to his disadvantage. Put another way, offering America a 'deal' only highlights that you believe you are in a weak position, are looking for mercy, and are ripe for the plucking. Germany was already planning to build the heaviest concentration of LNG terminals in Europe; a far better strategy would have been to threaten to cancel them all if Uncle Sam did not back off. The Americans are certainly smart enough to figure out – in about 2.5 seconds – that more LNG terminals means diddly when Russia can also supply LNG far cheaper than the USA because it has teensy transport costs by comparison, being much closer. Two more LNG terminals buys America precisely zero advantage, but the willingness to 'deal' reveals vulnerability. The only American response to rolling on your back to expose your belly is to step on your head.

I swear, it is hard to recognize Germany as the country which once frightened the world.

A Trump counter-offer might be a commitment from Germany to buy X amount of American LNG at a locked-in price, said amount to be sufficient that extra Nord Stream capacity would not be utilized. It depends on whether the Americans really think they can actually stop Nord Stream II, because even that would ultimately be a loser strategy. Unless a term far into the future were specified, the Americans know that once the pipeline is finished, their product is no longer competitive and cannot ever be unless it is unprofitable to themselves. They could satisfy themselves with gutting the Germans for a year or two (if they accepted), but it would be short-term satisfaction at best. Might be enough to win Trump the election, though.

But if Washington thinks it can actually halt Nord Stream II – with the understanding that the Russians would probably give up after such a stinging second rebuke – then the sky is the limit, and they will scornfully reject any other solution. The one who stands to get hurt the most is Europe. But I don't think they realize it.

MOSCOWEXILE September 16, 2020 at 8:31 am

WHY IS IT SO DIFFICULT TO KILL THE "OPPOSITION" TORCH-BEARER NAVALNY?
Stalker Zone
September 15, 2020

CORTES September 17, 2020 at 12:41 am

The Borgias are history. Well, obviously, they ARE history. But now they have been relegated to the Second Division/Championship (football joke) of Poisoners by Sergei Lavrov and his chef de cuisine:

Voici le mindfuck (pardon my French):

https://thesaker.is/us-deputy-secretary-of-state-was-afraid-to-eat-russian-soup-navalny-and-swift-ruslan-ostashko/

Contains a smidgeon of addled Navalny. Delish!

https://c0.pubmine.com/sf/0.0.3/html/safeframe.html REPORT THIS AD

MOSCOWEXILE September 17, 2020 at 12:53 am

Oh look! The Navalnyites have shown a video, shot in Tomsk, of Navalny drinking from the allegedly poisoned water bottle that earlier nobody had seen or made mention of before it turned up in Berlin and was sent to the Bundeswehr lab.

Recall that his loud-mouth spokeswoman had from the very start insisted that Navalny had been poisoned by laced-with-poison tea that he had drunk at Tomsk airport.

Change of story line -- as persistently happened in the Skripal fake.

Video Showing Water Bottle That 'Poisoned' Alexei Navalny Shared by His Team
17 September, 2020: 10:17

https://sputniknews.com/russia/202009171080484058-navalny-was-poisoned-by-water-bottle-in-his-hotel-room-his-team-claims/

MOSCOWEXILE September 17, 2020 at 12:56 am

That Sputnik headline should read, I think, "shared with his team".

And if that is the case, why didn't his team also start howling and screaming and rolling around on the deck some time later on board the Tomsk-Moscow flight?

MOSCOW EXILE September 17, 2020 at 3:15 am

gazeta.ru

Соратники Навального сообщили, что забрали бутылки из номера в Томске
17.09.2020 | 10:57

Navalny's companions have reported that they took bottles from a hotel room in Tomsk

Alexei Navalny's companions have said that a bottle of mineral water, on which German experts had allegedly found traces of poison from the Novichok group, had been brought from a hotel room in Tomsk.

On an Instagram, they have posted a video in which, according to them, an hour after news of Navalny's deteriorating condition, they examine the room and seize all the items which he had been able to touch.

On August 20, the aeroplane in which Navalny was flying urgently landed in Omsk, from where the blogger was taken to hospital. On August 21, doctors announced that the main diagnosis was metabolic disorders.

At the moment, Navalny is in Germany, where he has been taken out of an artificial coma. German doctors announced that he had been poisoned with substances from the Novichok group, but did not provide any relevant evidence.

So why didn't the Navalny hamsters, who dutifully sought out the poison bottle and most certainly handled it, throw wobblers as did Navalny when performing what he thought were the effects of nerve agent poisoning?

And whom did the hamsters hand the bottle to -- Navalnaya or Pevchikh? And who handled the bottle after its arrival in Berlin and before the obliging Bundeswehr said it had been dosed with the most lethal nerve agent (weapons grade) known to man?

Why isn't there a trail of stiffs from Tomsk to Berlin and beyond?

Who's going to believe this shite?

"Why, the whole world knows it's true!" will Imperial Plenipotentiary Pompeus Fattus Arsus surely say.

MOSCOW EXILE September 17, 2020 at 3:36 am

One of the developers of Novichok, Leonid Rink, commented on reports that a bottle in the Tomsk hotel where Alexei Navalny had stayed could [have been] Novichok [contaminated] .

"This is a situation where no one would have been allowed to touch the bottle -- you would have died if you had done so. If this had really been the case, then there would have basically been a deceased person, and everyone who had carried this bottle without gloves and protection would also have died", he told RIA Novosti.

Ah, but . . . Rink is forgetting that it was a special, delayed action Novichok made to take effect on "Putin's Fiercest Critic" when he was on board the Tomsk-Moscow flight.

Rink's an old Soviet has-been and knows nothing about the latest developments in diabolical weaponry that issues forth from secret Orc laboratories.

Эксперт прокомментировал сообщения о бутылке с "Новичком"
12:27

Expert comments on statements about the bottle with "Novichok"
12:27

CORTES September 17, 2020 at 6:20 am

Maybe the cunning developers have produced a Novichok variant safe to those who have sinned but fatal (or liable, at least, to provoke a severe tummy upset, occasionally) to the purest of heart?

JENNIFER HOR September 17, 2020 at 12:43 pm

I like this idea of the special edition of Novichok with the delayed kick. Maybe we could call it Brawndo and speculate that the poison only goes into action when it does because the added electrolytes take time to work to release the poison.

MOSCOWEXILE September 17, 2020 at 7:56 am

kp.ru

Alexei Navalny's team immediately after his departure from Tomsk airport, went to the hotel room in that city where he had spent the night, and packed all the items (including water bottles) so as to deliver them for analysis (of course, not in Russia). A video about this was posted on the oppositionist's Instagram.

Everything in this story is beautiful. Navalny's supporters were collecting "evidence" on a case that had not yet happened -- but it was already supposed to have happened? Together with them, there went a lawyer to the hotel -- he was also at the ready. But why were none of the "trackers" hurt if on the "evidence", as is said, they found traces of the "Novichok" military poison? And how did the "people of Navalny" end up in a room where cleaning up should have been done after the guest's departure? There are other questions as well. Some of them "KP" asked FSB reserve general Alexander Mikhailov .

MARK CHAPMAN September 17, 2020 at 9:06 am

And the person shown handling the bottle is wearing gloves – they made sure to show that. But as others have pointed out, this was well before anyone knew 'an attempt had been made on the Opposition Leader's life'. What, all Lyosha's shit was still in his hotel room, towels on the floor, the next day, after he checked out? Pretty crappy service in those Russian hotels. He didn't even leave Russia for several days, and the first suggestions he had been poisoned came from his 'press agent', who claimed he had been poisoned with tea at the airport.

Skripals II.

Like

MOSCOWEXILE September 17, 2020 at 7:26 am

Навального выдвинули на Нобелевскую премию мира

Navalny nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize

Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Sergei Yerofeyev, a professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey, USA, has spoken about this.

According to Yerofeyev, Navalny has been nominated for the prize by "a number of professors from recognized universities who deal with Russia". He did not give specific names, but noted that there are "great people" amongst the scientists who have nominated Navalny.

A professor of any university in the world can nominate a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize: there are no specific requirements for a candidate. In addition, members of national governments and parliaments, heads of state and some other categories of persons can nominate candidates.

The oppositionist will have to fight for the main prize of the planet with venerable rivals.

This is, first of all, US President Donald Trump, who was nominated by Christian Tubring-Jedde, a member of the Norwegian parliament from the far-right Libertarian Progress Party. As the MP said in an interview with Fox News, Donald Trump should be awarded for his role in concluding an agreement on the full normalization of relations between Israel and the UAE.

And why not? O'Bummer was awarded the peace prize, wasn't he?

Same story in Yukie news:

Navalny nominated for Nobel Peace Prize

Navalny nominated for Nobel Peace Prize – Kyiv Post

MOSCOWEXILE September 17, 2020 at 7:42 am

I wonder how the Kiev Post evaluates Navalny's position on the Crimea?

The status of the Crimea is a problem that a new democratic Russia will inherit from its former government. The Russian position on this problem will be determined by the recognition of the right of the citizens of the Crimea to determine their own destiny -- Navalny 20!8

TIMOTHY HAGIOS September 17, 2020 at 8:26 am

I say give it to him. Let him join the prestigious ranks of Obama, the OPCW, the EU.

I also propose starting a Nobel War Prize, to be awarded to whatever individual or organization is responsible for the highest body count in a given year. Although that may be redundant, considering that it would probably be given to the same people as the Peace Prize.

MARK CHAPMAN September 17, 2020 at 9:13 am

Ha, ha!! And it all descends into farce, again. Navalny has arrived – he has gone global, beyond his wildest dreams. The nothing from Wherever He Is From who could not even break 5% in presidential election polling is now a major star, glittering in the western firmament. As Saint Lily Tomlin once remarked, no matter how cynical you get, you can never keep up.

All the west is going to be able to get out of this is the satisfaction of showing its ass to the neo-Soviets, the way it does when it re-names the street the Russian Embassy is – or was – located on after some prominent Russian dissident. Beavis and Butthead level, at best.

MOSCOWEXILE September 18, 2020 at 9:17 am

On Navalny, a Russian blogger writes:

That's it! This is a farewell article. A real goodbye to the topic. More precisely, parting with Navalny as a topic. His political role has been played to the end. And even lethal doses of Novichok have not caused a mass movement. Furgal's arrest caused an explosion of civil consciousness in Khabarovsk. The poisoning of Navalny, sending him abroad, the discovery of Novichok, official accusations from Germany did not cause any rally, no procession, no movement. No excitement in civic consciousness has occurred and will never happen.

[Sep 18, 2020] New Documents Reveal Secret British Efforts To Arm, Assist And Propagandize 'Moderate Rebels' In Syria

Notable quotes:
"... Integrity Initiative ..."
"... Integrity Initiative ..."
"... Moon of Alabama ..."
"... Integrity Initiative ..."
"... Integrity Initiative ..."
"... Moon of Alabama ..."
Sep 18, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

New Documents Reveal Secret British Efforts To Arm, Assist And Propagandize 'Moderate Rebels' In Syria

In November 2018 some anonymous people published a number of documents that had been liberated from a clandestine British propaganda organization, the Integrity Initiative .

The same group or person who revealed the Integrity Initiative papers has now released several dozens of documents about another 'Strategic Communication' campaign run by the British Foreign Office. The current release reveals a number of train and assist missions for 'Syrian rebels' as well as propaganda operations run in Syria and globally on behalf of the British government.

Moon of Alabama , as well as other sites , had published a series of pieces about the Integrity Initiative . There were also connections between the Integrity Initiative and the Skripal 'novichok poisoning' affair.

They newly released documents about British operations in Syria are accessible under:

All the now published documents archived in one file are available for download under:

Most of the documents are detailed company responses to several solicitations from the Foreign Office for global and local campaigns in support of the 'moderate rebels' who are fighting against the Syrian government and people.

The documents lay out large scale campaigns which have on-the-ground elements in Syria, training and arming efforts in neighboring countries, command and control elements in Jordan, Turkey and Iraq, as well as global propaganda efforts. These operations were wide spread.


bigger

Most of the documents are from 2016 to 2019. They detail the organization of such operations and also portrait persons involved in these projects. They often refer back to previous campaigns that have been run from 2011/2012 onward. This is where the documents are probably the most interesting. They reveal what an immense effort was and is waged to fill the information space with pro-rebel/pro-Islamist propaganda.

The documents are not about the 'White Helmets' which were a separate British run Strategic Communication campaign financed by various governments. While the operations described in the new documents were coordinated with U.S. efforts they do not reference the CIA run campaigns in Syria which included similar efforts at a cost of $1 billion per year.

The various projects and the detailed commercial offers to implement them from various notorious companies are roughly described in the above two links. I will therefore refrain from repeating that here. Some of the documents' content will surely be used in future Moon of Alabama posts. But for now I will let you rummage through the stash.

Please let us know in the comments of the surprising bits that you might find.

Posted by b on September 18, 2020 at 15:51 UTC | Permalink

james , Sep 18 2020 16:22 utc | 1

thanks b... i will look at them and get back on this..
Red Ryder , Sep 18 2020 16:32 utc | 2
Documents the "war crimes industry" of the UK, and others, as expressed in Libya and Syria.

Assad has indicated he will pursue reparations from the nations that have killed 400,000 citizens, destroyed or stolen his industrial infrastructure (whole factories broken down and trucked into Turkey).

One reason why the US and UK and France want Assad dead is the tens of billions of dollars they will have to pay the Syrian people for the genocidal war waged for a decade in order to kill Assad and break Syria into pieces.

vk , Sep 18 2020 16:53 utc | 3
This confirms the UK has essentially kept the same military doctrine it adopted by necessity in 1945, which is: attach itself to the USA, focus on intelligence, punch above your weight. Ideologically, they rationalize that by attributing themselves the role of the cultured province of the USA; "Greece to the USA's Rome".

The British were always fascinated with intelligence/paramilitary forces. In their vision, it gives you (a nation) an air of sophistication, a civilizing aspect to the nation that wages this kind of warfare.

After the Suez fiasco of 1956, the UK gave up direct interventions in the Middle East. It now only intervenes there under the skirt of the USA. Of course, whenever they can, they do that with their weapon of choice, which is intelligence. So, yeah, these documents don't surprise me.

[Sep 18, 2020] Middle East Peace and Trump's New Art of the Deal by Larry Johnson - Sic Semper Tyrannis

Notable quotes:
"... He thinks the Palestinians will accept permanent helot status? Maybe so... But is that something we should relish? ..."
"... And what of Syria? What of Syria? Evidently Trump considered murdering President Assad two years ago. Is he going to abandon regime change now? is he going to abandon the policy of Pompeo and Jeffries? ..."
"... My guess is that the acceptability for Helot status of Palestinians will depend on how much worse it is compared to the status of Palestinian equivalents elsewhere. Syria and Lebanon certainly look far less attractive. ..."
"... Also, from my admittedly limited experience, Palestinians aren't exactly homogenous, Gaza =! West Bank. ..."
"... If the Israelis are smart (and I think they are), they will continue to exploit Palestinian disunity by not having one helot status but several, with privileges to repress and boss around the lesser helots (perhaps even some less desirable Israelis) awarded to the higher helots. ..."
"... The neocons have been firmly ensconced in ME policy since Reagan. At least Trump made a little bit of lemonade. Nothing earth shattering IMO but moved the ball forward 10 yds and away from own goals under the so-called experts & strategists of the past decades. ..."
"... Support for Israel and its maximalist dreams has always been bipartisan. ..."
"... The colonel has a much more realistic take on this: the intention is to co-opt the Arab states into forcing the Palestinians to accept permanent helot status. Not quite slaves but closes to it. ..."
"... There would be many ways to describe that, but I suspect "peace plan" would rank amongst the less accurate ones. ..."
"... I also remember when the Trump admin killed the Gen. Suleimani late last year the same people also touted it a national security success. This is shameful pattern. ..."
"... Just because Jared Kushner, Berkowitz (Kushner's mini-me), David Friedman and the Zionist anti-American paid shills of Christians United For Israel et.al put Israel's interest first does not make it a success for American interests abroad. Trump does not know two things about the ME. He just obeys orders from this outside 'advisors' when it comes to ME policy. ..."
"... When I read that " If you look at relatively successful integration/assimilations in history, jointly overcoming something that was threatening to both typically ranked pretty highly as a cause." I think that The Islamic Republic of Iran is what is being offered or used as that cause. ..."
"... But if the present and future Israelis believe this means that the total advantage is totally theirs to press, then present and future Palestinians will continue searching for ways to make their unhappiness felt. But that outcome would not be Trump's fault. That outcome would be the majority-likudnic Israelis' choice. ..."
"... the problem with "outside in" strategy is that implies that if conditions are bad enough for the Palestinians, they will agree to any deal Trump can force down their throats. Instead, Palestinians have been offered terrible deals since 2000 (ie., a state that is never going to be a real state with permanent Israeli control over its borders, air space, and water tables ..."
"... The smarter plan is to acknowledge that the Zionists killed the Two-State Solution, and Palestinians might as well push this into an anti-Apartheid struggle. ..."
Sep 18, 2020 | turcopolier.typepad.com

turcopolier , 16 September 2020 at 08:52 AM

All

It is clear that the heat has gone away in the fabled "Arab Street" over the issue of Israel. If that were not so, the rulers would not have dared to do this. That being so ... It will be very interesting to see how many people from these two countries go to Israel to visit holy sites like the al-Aqsa Mosque. There have not been many religious tourists from Egypt and Jordan. This is what the Israelis call pilgrims. Trump thinks that he can bring Saudi Arabia into such a deal? Good! Let's see it. He thinks that Iran can be brought into such a deal? Wonderful! Let's see it.

He thinks the Palestinians will accept permanent helot status? Maybe so... But is that something we should relish?

And what of Syria? What of Syria? Evidently Trump considered murdering President Assad two years ago. Is he going to abandon regime change now? is he going to abandon the policy of Pompeo and Jeffries?

I suggest that security should be very tight on airline flights from Bahrein and the UAE.

eakens , 16 September 2020 at 10:03 AM

I suspect this has less to do with peace and more to do with lining up a coalition against Iran. He's signing peace deals at the white house the same day he not only threatens Iran for a make believe assassination plot against our South African Ambassador, but admits he wanted to assassinate Assad.

He's making a big mistake though if he thinks Iranians will behave and respond similarly to the Arabs, and they are certainly not North Koreans.

He's being frog marched into a war with Iran while his ego is being stroked under the guise of a Nobel peace prize.

nbsp; tjfxh , 16 September 2020 at 11:17 AM

What say about Alastair Crooke's "Maintaining Pretence Over Reality: 'Simply Put, the Iranians Outfoxed the U.S. Defence Systems'" at Strategic Culture Foundation?

https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2020/09/14/maintaining-pretence-over-reality-simply-put-iranians-outfoxed-us-defence-systems/

A.I.S. , 16 September 2020 at 11:49 AM

@ turcopolier:

Excellent questions.

My guess is that the acceptability for Helot status of Palestinians will depend on how much worse it is compared to the status of Palestinian equivalents elsewhere. Syria and Lebanon certainly look far less attractive. The other issue is the degree with which Arab elites can "reroute" Anti Israeli into Anti Iranian sentiments on the Arab street.

Also, from my admittedly limited experience, Palestinians aren't exactly homogenous, Gaza =! West Bank.

If the Israelis are smart (and I think they are), they will continue to exploit Palestinian disunity by not having one helot status but several, with privileges to repress and boss around the lesser helots (perhaps even some less desirable Israelis) awarded to the higher helots.

I think this will be fairly hard though. Various Historical, religion and cultural issues specific to the situation make it quite hard for Arabs to actually assimilate into Israeli society. There is also a lack of a unifying foe to unite against. If you look at relatively successful integration/assimilations in history, jointly overcoming something that was threatening to both typically ranked pretty highly as a cause.

Leith , 16 September 2020 at 12:01 PM

"I suggest that security should be very tight on airline flights from Bahrein and the UAE."

Bingo! I won't be flying on Gulf Air or FlyDubai.

Jack , 16 September 2020 at 02:12 PM

The neocons have been firmly ensconced in ME policy since Reagan. At least Trump made a little bit of lemonade. Nothing earth shattering IMO but moved the ball forward 10 yds and away from own goals under the so-called experts & strategists of the past decades.

The TDS afflicted media couldn't bear that some lemonade was made. Wolf Blitzer interviewing Jared Kushner was all about pandemic nothing about the implications or process to having couple gulf sheikhs recognize Israel. The fact is that these gulf sheikhs only paid lip service to the plight of the Palestinians in any case. This formalizes what was reality. The "Arab Street" have always been a manifestation of whatever were powerful manipulations. The manipulators have been coopted in the current lemonade making. In any case Bibi must be very pleased. He didn't have to give up anything in his difficult domestic political predicament.

Jack , 16 September 2020 at 02:44 PM

https://twitter.com/partynxs/status/1306015487273377792?s=21

Support for Israel and its maximalist dreams has always been bipartisan.

Serge , 16 September 2020 at 05:18 PM

The arabs simply do not care anymore, from Morocco to Oman. Their spirit totally broken by the "Arab spring", youth disillusioned and jobless. The only dream left for most is to ape the western lifestyle. The others are fighting in wars.

I can see one of two futures, a Clean Break: Securing the Realm-style one in which all of the arabs live life as helots under the thumb of a Greater Israel. This would bring relative economic prosperity to most of the helots.

Yeah, Right , 16 September 2020 at 06:03 PM

I think I see the flaw in this article: ..."If that turns out to be the case and this maneuver succeeds in ultimately bringing about a two state solution for Israel and the Palestinians,"...

Surely you don't believe that these maneuvers are intended to bring about a Palestinian state?

The colonel has a much more realistic take on this: the intention is to co-opt the Arab states into forcing the Palestinians to accept permanent helot status. Not quite slaves but closes to it.

There would be many ways to describe that, but I suspect "peace plan" would rank amongst the less accurate ones.

Polish Janitor , 16 September 2020 at 06:14 PM

One running theme that I have been seeing from the former so-called neocon critics and ME wars opponents (Michael Scheuer comes to mind) is their uncontrollable exhilaration for any terrible so-called F.P. 'success' that the Trump admin achieves in the ME.

I also remember when the Trump admin killed the Gen. Suleimani late last year the same people also touted it a national security success. This is shameful pattern.

Just because Jared Kushner, Berkowitz (Kushner's mini-me), David Friedman and the Zionist anti-American paid shills of Christians United For Israel et.al put Israel's interest first does not make it a success for American interests abroad. Trump does not know two things about the ME. He just obeys orders from this outside 'advisors' when it comes to ME policy.

It it exactly what it is. Israel normalized relations with the most notorious dictatorships and wants to implement Pegasus spying program and wide-scale surveillance (among other nefarious things) in UAE and Bahrain. How is that a success for America? America should stay out of these Israeli-first trouble making schemes and stay neutral or out of there.

Let me tell you what a F.P. success is, OK? It would have been a huge success if America was able to lure Iran into its orbit to fend of the Chinese communists out of the region and out of our lives and have a stronger alliance with regards to its upcoming Cold War with China.

It would have been successful for America to balance China out with Iran, India, Turkey and Afghanistan, and not let China to invest billions in Haifa port (close to U.S. military forces there) a major hub of its Belt and Road initiative and a huge blow to U.S. new Cold war effort against China.

Think about it.

Allow me to raise a few points: first of all , every single one of these brutal backward Arab dictatorships has had low key but crucial relations with Israel since the Cold War and they just made it open, Big deal! Second, this joyfulness for a hostile anti-american country is quite sad for two reasons:

1. that Larry touts it as a success for America, which is anything but a success for America. It is a success for Bibi and Trump's evangelical/zionist sugar daddies to cough up some Benjamins for Trump's campaign and his GOP/Likudniks. I guess nowadays our judgement is so clouded and inverted that MAGA and MIGA are considered inseparable.

2. The delusion that dems are bitterly angry and anti-Israel (because they are anti-Trump) and therefore it automatically becomes an issue of partisan support for Trump and whatever he does. This idea is so absurd that I won't get into it. Dems were the first to congratulate Israel.

I would like Larry to tell me what he thinks of H.R. 1697 Israel Anti-Boycot Act which punishes American citizens for practicing their god-given 2nd Amendment rights. or the 3.8 billion of aid, or the the gifting of Golan heights to Bibi? Are these big foreign policy success too?

What the Arab-Israeli normalization means:

*The U.S. wants out of the ME to focus on China, a wet dream that Israel favors especially post Cold War. It does not want secular, (semi) democratic sovereign states around it, and if anyone pays attention close enough they do whatever they can to prevent any kind of political reform and change of government to occur among Arab nations. Israelis are staunch supporters of Saudi, Bahraini, UAE, Jordanian, and Egyptian dictatorships in the MENA region.

Israel will now be better positioned to roll-back any kind of grassroots reform in the ME with the help of their now openly pro-Israeli Arab rulers by directing policies to these backward rulers to divest from human development and political reform and instead invest more in security, tech, surveillance.

This trend also explains Israeli constant opposition to the Iran Deal, which would have had further ramifications for political reform and accelerated weakening of Hardliners in Tehran and a better position for America to pivot to China with the help of a moderated Iran. Israel does not want a powerful democratic nation near its borders, and especially not in Iran. Just take a look at Israel's neighbors and tell me how many of them are democratic and friendly with Israel and how does Israel behave when there are secular Arab democratic states around it?

John Merryman , 16 September 2020 at 10:17 PM

In the end, it's all just tribal superstition. Logically a spiritual absolute would be the essence of sentience, from which we rise, not an ideal of wisdom and judgement, from which we fell. The fact we are aware, than the myriad details of which we are aware.

One of the reasons we can't have a live and let live world is because everyone thinks their own vision should be universal, rather than unique. So the fundamentalists rule.

The reason nature is so diverse and dense is because it isn't a monoculture. Irrespective of our technology, we are still fairly primitive, in the grand scheme of things.

different clue , 17 September 2020 at 02:42 AM

A.I.S.,

When I read that " If you look at relatively successful integration/assimilations in history, jointly overcoming something that was threatening to both typically ranked pretty highly as a cause." I think that The Islamic Republic of Iran is what is being offered or used as that cause.

If this all ends up in the longest run leading to today's and tomorrow's Israelis accepting the lesser Israel that Rabin ended up deciding would be necessary for a lesser-but-still-real Palestine to emerge as a real country resigned with both resigned enough to that outcome that they would tolerate eachother's separate independence over the long term, then this will go somewhere good.

But if the present and future Israelis believe this means that the total advantage is totally theirs to press, then present and future Palestinians will continue searching for ways to make their unhappiness felt. But that outcome would not be Trump's fault. That outcome would be the majority-likudnic Israelis' choice.

Mathias Alexander , 17 September 2020 at 04:53 AM

To have a two state solution Israel will have to leave enough of Palestine without Jewish settlement for there to be room for another state. Their actions show that they have no intention of doing that.

Matthew , 17 September 2020 at 09:26 AM

Larry: the problem with "outside in" strategy is that implies that if conditions are bad enough for the Palestinians, they will agree to any deal Trump can force down their throats. Instead, Palestinians have been offered terrible deals since 2000 (ie., a state that is never going to be a real state with permanent Israeli control over its borders, air space, and water tables)

The smarter plan is to acknowledge that the Zionists killed the Two-State Solution, and Palestinians might as well push this into an anti-Apartheid struggle. The gerontocracy that rules the PA will soon pass away. The younger generation of Palestinians are much more sophisticated.

As a trial lawyer, I see this type of behavior all the time. If you offer someone essentially nothing, they lose nothing by rejecting it. The Arab dictators will not be around forever. And before Camp David, the Palestinians have suffered far worse than they are suffering now.

BABAK MAKKINEJAD , 17 September 2020 at 09:55 AM

Matthew:

For any kind of Peace in Palestine, Jerusalem must revert back to Muslim Sovereignty.

It is all about who calls the shots there; just as it was 800 years ago.

Artemesia , 17 September 2020 at 10:35 AM

Matthew: Your description of Trump's strategy is no different from Vladimir Jabotinsky's 1923 Iron Wall doctrine
http://www.marxists.de/middleast/ironwall/ironwall.htm
and
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/quot-the-iron-wall-quot

In short: "We Jews know that Arabs (Palestinians) will never, ever voluntarily give up hope of resisting Jewish demands, and Jews will never stop with Jewish demands: that all of Palestine become Jewish.
Since 'voluntary' will not work, only force -- an Iron Wall -- will suffice.
Jabotinsky defines "Iron Wall" as the enforcement capacity of an outside power:

"we cannot promise anything to the Arabs of the Land of Israel or the Arab countries. Their voluntary agreement is out of the question. Hence those who hold that an agreement with the natives is an essential condition for Zionism can now say "no" and depart from Zionism. Zionist colonization, even the most restricted, must either be terminated or carried out in defiance of the will of the native population. This colonization can, therefore, continue and develop only under the protection of a force independent of the local population – an iron wall which the native population cannot break through. This is, in toto, our policy towards the Arabs. To formulate it any other way would only be hypocrisy.

Not only must this be so, it is so whether we admit it or not. What does the Balfour Declaration and the Mandate mean for us? It is the fact that a disinterested power committed itself to create such security conditions that the local population would be deterred from interfering with our efforts."

Be aware that Benjamin Netanyahu's father, Benzion, was Jabotinsky's administrative assistant, then replacement, in New York; that Bibi is very much heir to the ideological fervor of Jabotinsky & of Benzion; and that Benzion and Benjamin laid out the blueprint for the GWOT at the Jerusalem Conference July 4, 1979
https://www.amazon.com/International-Terrorism-Challenge-Benjamin-Netanyahu/dp/0878558942

Trump plays only a walk-on role in this carefully scripted 150 year old zionist drama.

turcopolier , 17 September 2020 at 10:58 AM

Babak

To "Muslim Sovereignty?" No. It should be an international city.

turcopolier , 17 September 2020 at 11:30 AM

james

"there isn't a lot of difference between KSA and these fiefdoms of uae and bahrain.." A total crock. you obviously have never been to either of these places.

BABAK MAKKINEJAD , 17 September 2020 at 11:46 AM

Col. Lang:

Who or what Legitimate Authority would administer such an International City?

None has ever existed.

Artemesia , 17 September 2020 at 12:00 PM

Jews can have Jerusalem if they return Washington, DC to full USA sovereignty.

[Sep 18, 2020] Exposing war crimes should always be legal. Committing and hiding them should not by Caitlin Johnstone

Sep 18, 2020 | www.rt.com

By Caitlin Johnstone , an independent journalist based in Melbourne, Australia. Her website is here and you can follow her on Twitter @caitoz ...Amid all the pedantic squabbling over when it is and is not legal under US law for a journalist to expose evidence of US war crimes, we must never lose sight of the fact that (A) it should always be legal to expose war crimes, (B) it should always be illegal for governments to hide evidence of their war crimes, (C) war crimes should always be punished, (D) people who start criminal wars should always be punished, (E) governments should not be permitted to have a level of secrecy that allows them to start criminal wars, and (F) power and secrecy should always have an inverse relationship to one another.

The Assange case needs to be fought tooth and claw, but we must keep in mind that it is so very, very many clicks back from where we need to be as a civilization. In an ideal situation, governments should be too afraid of the public to keep secrets from them; instead, here we are begging the most powerful government in the world to please not imprison a journalist because he arguably did not break the rules that that government made for itself.

Do you see how far that point is from where we need to be?

It's important to remember this. It's important to remember that the amount of evil deeds power structures will commit is directly proportional to the amount of information they are permitted to hide from the public. We will not have a healthy world until power and secrecy have an inverse relationship to each other: privacy for rank-and-file individuals, and transparency for governments and their officials.

"But what about military secrets?" one might object. Yes, what about military secrets? What about the fact that virtually all military violence perpetrated by the world's largest power structures is initiated based on lies ? What about the utterly indisputable fact that the more secrecy we allow the war machine, the more wars it deceives the public into allowing it to initiate?

https://platform.twitter.com/embed/index.html?creatorScreenName=RT_com&dnt=false&embedId=twitter-widget-0&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1028347374765318144&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.rt.com%2Fop-ed%2F501031-caitlin-johnstone-exposing-war-crimes%2F&siteScreenName=RT_com&theme=light&widgetsVersion=219d021%3A1598982042171&width=550px

In a healthy world, the most powerful government on Earth wouldn't be trying to squint at its own laws in such a way that permits the prosecution of a journalist for telling the truth.

In a healthy world, the most powerful government on Earth wouldn't prosecute anyone for telling the truth at all.

In a healthy world, governments would prosecute their own war crimes, instead of those who expose them.

In a healthy world, governments wouldn't commit war crimes at all.

In a healthy world, governments wouldn't start wars at all.

In a healthy world, governments would see truth as something to be desired and actively sought, not something to be repressed and punished.

In a healthy world, governments wouldn't keep secrets from the public, and wouldn't have any cause to want to.

In a healthy world, if governments existed at all, they would exist solely as tools for the people to serve themselves, with full transparency and accountability to those people.

We are obviously a very, very far cry from the kind of healthy world we would all like to one day find ourselves in. But we should always keep in mind what a healthy world will look like, and hold it as our true north for the direction that we are pushing in.

Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!

By Caitlin Johnstone , an independent journalist based in Melbourne, Australia. Her website is here and you can follow her on Twitter @caitoz

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.

Reality007 3 hours ago 18 Sep, 2020 10:07 AM

Unfortunately, no criminals that have committed or covered up war crimes, decades ago to present, will ever be indicted. They are all above the law while all innocents that revealed the truths must pay highly. We can only pray and hope for the best for Julian Assange.
Fred Dozer Reality007 1 hour ago 18 Sep, 2020 12:16 PM
I see nothing wrong with robbing banks in criminal controlled countries. These governments, murder, cheat, lie, & steal.
T. Agee Kaye 2 hours ago 18 Sep, 2020 11:10 AM
The right of a people to know what their government is doing, and the potential consequences of those actions on the people, nation, and society, is inalienable. The exposure of war crimes and any corruption is not illegal and cannot be made illegal. The trial of Assange is not about the legality of Assange's actions. It is a display of the influence that criminal interests have over the government and judiciary. It is an attempt to create legitimacy by creating precedent. Murder has plenty of precedent. It will never be legitimate.
Jewel Gyn 3 hours ago 18 Sep, 2020 10:21 AM
Agreed but having said that, we are not living in a perfect world. Bully with big fists exist and the lesser countries just stood by frustrated and sucking their thumbs, silent lest they be targeted for voicing out. And you can see clearly why US is walking away from any form of organised voice eg UN.
Odinsson 2 hours ago 18 Sep, 2020 10:51 AM
What we need in the case of Julian Assange is factual reporting. While the motivation to prosecute Assange is most likely political, there would be no ability to prosecute him were it not for his active support of PFC Manning's hacking of a DOD information system. It is not unlawful to publish classified information which was provided to you, so long as you are not involved in the criminal acts leading to the exfiltration of the data. Had Assange not aided PFC Manning by looking up hash codes in spreadsheets of known password to hash code translations then the grand jury would not have indicted him. FWIW, it is my opinion that the statute of limitations expired long ago and this should be grounds for dismissal of all charges against him.
jholf 1 hour ago 18 Sep, 2020 12:04 PM
These world leaders, claim to be Christians, ... their God 'commands', "Thou shalt not kill." Yet, for more than 6 decades, that is exactly what each of these Christian Commanders in Chief, have done for no reason, other than to fill the pockets of the elite. A man is known by his deeds, Assange gave us truth, while these world leaders gave us war and destructi

[Sep 18, 2020] Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov's interview with RTVI television, Moscow, September 17, 2020 - The Vineyard of the Saker

Sep 18, 2020 | thesaker.is

Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov's interview with RTVI television, Moscow, September 17, 2020 839 Views September 18, 2020 1 Comment

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation

Question: I'll start with the hottest topic, Belarus. President of the Republic of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko visited Bocharov Ruchei. Both sides have officially recognised that change within the Union State is underway. This begs the question: What is this about? A common currency, common army and common market? What will it be like?

Sergey Lavrov: It will be the way our countries decide. Work is underway. It relies on the 1999 Union Treaty. We understand that over 20 years have passed since then. That is why, a couple of years ago, upon the decision of the two presidents, the governments of the Russian Federation and the Republic of Belarus began to work on identifying the agreed-upon steps that would make our integration fit current circumstances. Recently, at a meeting with Russian journalists, President Lukashenko said that the situation had, of course, changed and we must agree on ways to deepen integration from today's perspective.

The presidential election has taken place in Belarus. The situation there is tense, because the opposition, backed by some of our Western colleagues, is trying to challenge the election outcome, but I'm convinced that the situation will soon get back to normal, and the work to promote integration processes will resume.

Everything that is written in the Union Treaty is now being analysed. Both sides have to come to a common opinion about whether a particular provision of the Union Treaty is still relevant, or needs to be revised. There are 31 roadmaps, and each one focuses on a specific section of the Union Treaty. So, there's clearly a commitment to continue the reform, a fact that was confirmed by the presidents during a recent telephone conversation. This is further corroborated by the presidents' meeting in Sochi.

I would not want that country's neighbours, and our neighbours for that matter, including Lithuania, for example, to try to impose their will on the Belarusian people and, in fact, to manage the processes in which the opposition is unwittingly doing what's expected of it. I have talked several times about Svetlana Tikhanovskaya's situation. Clearly, someone is putting words in her mouth. She is now in the capital of Lithuania, which, like our Polish colleagues, is strongly demanding a change of power in Belarus. You are aware that Lithuania declared Ms Tikhanovskaya the leader of the Republic of Belarus, and Alexander Lukashenko was declared an illegitimate president.

Ms Tikhanovskaya has made statements that give rise to many questions. She said she was concerned that Russia and Belarus have close relations. The other day, she called on the security and law-enforcement forces to side with the law. In her mind, this is a direct invitation to breach the oath of office and, by and large, to commit high treason. This is probably a criminal offense. So, those who provide her with a framework for her activities and tell her what to say and what issues to raise should, of course, realise that they may be held accountable for that.

Question: Commenting on the upcoming meeting of the presidents of Russia and Belarus in Sochi, Tikhanovskaya said: "Whatever they agree on, these agreements will be illegitimate, because the new state and the new leader will revise them." How can one work under such circumstances?

Sergey Lavrov: She was also saying something like that when Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin went to Belarus to meet with President Lukashenko and Prime Minister Golovchenko. She was saying it then. Back then, the opposition was concerned about any more or less close ties between our countries. This is despite the fact that early on during the crisis they claimed that they in no way engaged in anti-Russia activities and wanted to be friends with the Russian people. However, everyone could have seen the policy paper posted on Tikhanovskaya's website during the few hours it was there. The opposition leaders removed it after realising they had made a mistake sharing their goals and objectives with the public. These goals and objectives included withdrawal from the CSTO, the EAEU and other integration associations that include Russia, and drifting towards the EU and NATO, as well as the consistent banning of the Russian language and the Belarusianisation of all aspects of life.

We are not against the Belarusian language, but when they take a cue from Ukraine, and when the state language is used to ban a language spoken by the overwhelming majority of the population, this already constitutes a hostile act and, in the case of Ukraine, an act that violates its constitution. If a similar proposal is introduced into the Belarusian legal field, it will violate the Constitution of Belarus, not to mention numerous conventions on the rights of ethnic and language minorities, and much more.

I would like those who are rabidly turning the Belarusian opposition against Russia to realise their share of responsibility, and the opposition themselves, including Svetlana Tikhanovskaya and others – to find the courage to resist such rude and blatant manipulation.

Question: If we are talking about manipulation, we certainly understand that it has many faces and reflects on the international attitude towards Russia. Internationally, what are the risks for us of supporting Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko? Don't you think 26 years is enough? Maybe he has really served for too long?

Sergey Lavrov: The President of the Republic of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko, did say it might have been "too long." I believe he has proposed a very productive idea – constitutional reform. He talked about this even before the election, and has reiterated the proposal more than once since then. President of Russia Vladimir Putin supports this attitude. As the Belarusian leader said, after constitutional reform, he will be ready to announce early parliamentary and presidential elections. This proposal provides a framework where a national dialogue will be entirely possible. But it is important that representatives of all groups of Belarusian society to be involved in a constitutional reform process. This would ensure that any reform is completely legitimate and understandable for all citizens. Now a few specific proposals are needed concerning when, where and in what form this process can begin. I hope that this will be done, because President Alexander Lukashenko has repeatedly reaffirmed carrying out this initiative.

Question: Since we started talking about the international attitude towards Russia, let's go over to our other partner – the United States. The elections in the US will take place very soon. We are actively discussing this in Russia. When asked whether Russia was getting ready for the elections in the US at the Paris forum last year, you replied: "Don't worry, we'll resolve this problem." Now that the US elections are around the corner, I would like to ask you whether you've resolved it.

Sergey Lavrov: Speaking seriously, of course we, like any other normal country that is concerned about its interests and international security, are closely following the progress of the election campaign in the US. There are many surprising things in it. Naturally, we see how important the Russian issue is in this electoral process. The Democrats are doing all they can to prove that Russia will exploit its hacker potential and play up to Donald Trump. We are already being accused of promoting the idea that the Democrats will abuse the mail-in voting option thereby prejudicing the unbiased nature of voting. I would like to note at this point that mail-in voting has become a target of consistent attacks on behalf of President Trump himself. Russia has nothing to do with this at all.

A week-long mail-in voting is an interesting subject in comparing election systems in different countries. We have introduced three-day voting for governors and legislative assembly deputies in some regions. You can see the strong criticism it is subjected to, inside Russia as well. When the early voting in the US lasts for weeks, if not months, it is considered a model of democracy. I don't see any criticism in this respect. In principle, we have long proposed analysing election systems in the OSCE with a view to comparing best practices and reviewing obviously obsolete arrangements. There have been instances in the US when, due to its cumbersome and discriminatory election system, a nominee who received the majority of votes could lose because in a national presidential election the voting is done through the Electoral College process rather than directly by the people. There have been quite a few cases like that. I once told former US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in reply to her grievances about our electoral system: "But look at your problem. Maybe you should try to correct this discriminatory voting system?" She replied that it is discriminatory but they are used to it and this is their problem, so I shouldn't bother.

When the United States accuses us of interference in some area of its public, political or government life, we suggest discussing it to establish who is actually doing what. Since they don't present any facts, we simply recite their Congressional acts. In 2014, they adopted an act on supporting Ukraine, which directly instructed the Department of State to spend $20 million a year on support for Russian NGOs. We asked whether this didn't amount to interference. We were told by the US National Security Council that in reality they support democracy because we are wreaking chaos and pursuing authoritative and dictatorial trends abroad when we interfere in domestic affairs whereas they bring democracy and prosperity. This idea is deeply rooted in American mentality. The American elite has always considered its country and nation exceptional and has not been shy to admit it.

I won't comment on the US election. This is US law and the US election system. Any comments I make will be again interpreted as an attempt to interfere in their domestic affairs. I will only say one thing that President Vladimir Putin has expressed many times, notably, that we will respect any outcome of these elections and the will of the American people.

We realise that there will be no major changes in our relations either with the Democrats or with the Republicans, as representatives of both parties loudly declare. However, there is hope that common sense will prevail and no matter who becomes President, the new US Government and administration will realise the need to cooperate with us in resolving very serious global problems on which the international situation depends.

Question: You mentioned an example where voters can choose one president and the Electoral College process, another. I even have that cover of Time magazine with Hillary Clinton and congratulations, released during the election. It is a fairly well-known story, when they ran this edition and then had to cancel it.

Sergey Lavrov: Even the President of France sent a telegramme, but then they immediately recalled it.

And these people are now claiming that Alexander Lukashenko is an illegitimate president.

Question: You mentioned NGOs. These people believe that NGOs in the Russian Federation support democratic institutions, although it is no secret to anyone who has at least a basic understanding of foreign and domestic policy that those NGOs act exclusively as institutions that destabilise the situation in the country.

Sergey Lavrov: Not all of them.

Question: Can you tell us more about this?

Sergey Lavrov: We have adopted a series of laws – on public associations, on non-profit organisations, on measures to protect people from human rights violations. There is a set of laws that regulate the activities of non-government organisations on our territory, both Russian and foreign ones.

Concepts have been introduced like "foreign agent," a practice we borrowed from "the world's most successful democracy" – the United States. They argue that we borrowed a practice from 1938 when the United States introduced the foreign agent concept to prevent Nazi ideology from infiltrating from Germany. But whatever the reason they had to create the concept – "foreign agent" – the Americans are still effectively using it, including in relation to our organisations and citizens, to Chinese citizens, to the media.

In our law, foreign agent status, whatever they say about it, does not prevent an organisation from operating on the territory of the Russian Federation. It just needs to disclose its funding sources and be transparent about the resources it receives. And even that, only if it is engaged in political activities. Initially, we introduced a requirement for these organisations that receive funding from abroad and are involved in political projects to initiate the disclosure process. But most of them didn't want to comply with the law, so it was modified. Now this is done by the Russian Ministry of Justice.

Question: Do you think that NGOs are still soft power?

Sergey Lavrov: Of course. In Russia we have about 220,000 NGOs, out of which 180 have the status of a foreign agent. It's a drop in the ocean. These are probably the organisations, funded from abroad, that are more active than others in promoting in our public space ideas that far from always correspond to Russian legislation.

There is also the notion of undesirable organisations. They are banned from working in the Russian Federation. But there are only about 30 of them, no more.

Question: Speaking about our soft power, what is our concept? What do we offer the world? What do you think the world should love us for? What is Russia's soft power policy all about?

Sergey Lavrov: We want everything that has been created by nations and civilisations to be respected. We believe nobody should impose any orders on anyone, so that nothing like what has now happened in Hollywood takes place on a global scale. We think nobody should encroach on the right of each nation to have its historical traditions and moral roots. And we see attempts to encroach upon them.

If soft power is supposed to promote one's own culture, language and traditions, in exchange for knowledge about the life of other nations and civilisations, then this is the approach that the Russian Federation supports in every way.

The Americans define the term "soft power" as an attempt to influence the hearts and minds of others politically. Their goal is not to promote their culture and language, but to change the mood of the political class with a view to subsequent regime change. They are doing this on a daily basis and don't even conceal it. They say everywhere that their mission is to bring peace and democracy to all other countries.

Question: Almost any TV series out there shows the US president sitting in the Oval Office saying he's the leader of the free world.

Sergey Lavrov: Not just TV series. Barack Obama has repeatedly stated that America is an exceptional nation and should be seen as an example by the rest of the world. My colleague Mike Pompeo recently said in the Czech Republic that they shouldn't let the Russians into the nuclear power industry and should take the Russians off the list of companies that bid for these projects. It was about the same in Hungary. He then went to Africa and was quite vocal when he told the African countries not to do business with the Russians or the Chinese, because they are trading with the African countries for selfish reasons, whereas the US is establishing economic cooperation with them so they can prosper. This is a quote. It is articulated in a very straightforward manner, much the same way they run their propaganda on television in an unsophisticated broken language that the man in the street can relate to. So, brainwashing is what America's soft power is known for.

Question: Not a single former Soviet republic has so far benefited from American soft power.

Sergey Lavrov: Not only former Soviet republics. Take a look at any other region where the Americans have effected a regime change.

Question: Libya, Syria. We stood for Syria.

Sergey Lavrov: Iraq, Libya. They tried in Syria, but failed. I hope things will be different there. There's not a single country where the Americans changed the regime and declared victory for democracy, like George W. Bush did on the deck of an aircraft carrier in Iraq in May 2003, which is prosperous now. He said democracy had won in Iraq. It would be interesting to know what the former US President thinks about the situation in Iraq today. But no one will, probably, go back to this, because the days when presidents honestly admitted their mistakes are gone.

Question: Here I am listening to you and wondering how many people care about this? Why is it that no one understands this? Is this politics that is too far away from ordinary people who are nevertheless behind it? Take Georgia or Ukraine. People are worse off now than before, and despite this, this policy continues.

Will the Minsk agreements ever be implemented? Will the situation in southeastern Ukraine ever be settled?

Returning to what we talked about. How independent is Ukraine in its foreign policy?

Sergey Lavrov: I don't think that under the current Ukrainian government, just like under the previous president, we will see any progress in the implementation of the Minsk agreements, if only because President Zelensky himself is saying so publicly, as does Deputy Prime Minister Reznikov who is in charge of the Ukrainian settlement in the Contact Group. Foreign Minister of Ukraine Kuleba is also saying this. They say there's a need for the Minsk agreements and they cannot be broken, because these agreements (and accusing Russia of non-compliance) are the foundation of the EU and the US policy in seeking to maintain the sanctions on Russia. Nevertheless, such a distorted interpretation of the essence of the Minsk agreements, or rather an attempt to blame everything on Russia, although Russia is never mentioned there, has stuck in the minds of our European colleagues, including France and Germany, who, being co-sponsors of the Minsk agreements along with us, the Ukrainians and Donbass, cannot but realise that the Ukrainians are simply distorting their responsibilities, trying to distance themselves from them and impose a different interpretation of the Minsk agreements. But even in this scenario, the above individuals and former Ukrainian President Kravchuk, who now heads the Ukrainian delegation to the Contact Group as part of the Minsk process, claim that the Minsk agreements in their present form are impracticable and must be revised, turned upside down. Also, Donbass must submit to the Ukrainian government and army before even thinking about conducting reforms in this part of Ukraine.

This fully contradicts the sequence of events outlined in the Minsk agreements whereby restoring Ukrainian armed forces' control on the border with Russia is possible only after an amnesty, agreeing on the special status of these territories, making this status part of the Ukrainian Constitution and holding elections there. Now they propose giving back the part of Donbass that "rebelled" against the anti-constitutional coup to those who declared these people terrorists and launched an "anti-terrorist operation" against them, which they later renamed a Joint Forces Operation (but this does not change the idea behind it), and whom they still consider terrorists. Although everyone remembers perfectly well that in 2014 no one from Donbass or other parts of Ukraine that rejected the anti-constitutional coup attacked the putschists and the areas that immediately fell under the control of the politicians behind the coup. On the contrary, Alexander Turchinov, Arseniy Yatsenyuk and others like them attacked these areas. The guilt of the people living there was solely in them saying, "You committed a crime against the state, we do not want to follow your rules, let us figure out our own future and see what you will do next." There's not a single example that would corroborate the fact that they engaged in terrorism. It was the Ukrainian state that engaged in terrorism on their territory, in particular, when they killed [Head of the Donetsk People's Republic] Alexander Zakharchenko and a number of field commanders in Donbass. So, I am not optimistic about this.

Question: So, we are looking at a dead end?

Sergey Lavrov: You know, we still have an undeniable argument which is the text of the Minsk Agreements approved by the UN Security Council.

Question: But they tried to revise it?

Sergey Lavrov: No, they are just making statements to that effect. When they gather for a Contact Group meeting in Minsk, they do their best to look constructive. The most recent meeting ran into the Ukrainian delegation's attempts to pretend that nothing had happened. They recently passed a law on local elections which will be held in a couple of months. It says that elections in what are now called the Donetsk and Lugansk people's republics will be held only after the Ukrainian army takes control of the entire border and those who "committed criminal offenses" are arrested and brought to justice even though the Minsk agreements provide for amnesty without exemptions.

Question: When I'm asked about Crimea I recall the referendum. I was there at a closed meeting in Davos that was attended by fairly well respected analysts from the US. They claimed with absolute confidence that Crimea was being occupied. I reminded them about the referendum. I was under the impression that these people either didn't want to see or didn't know how people lived there, that they have made their choice. Returning to the previous question, I think that nobody is interested in the opinion of the people.

Sergey Lavrov: No, honest politicians still exist. Many politicians, including European ones, were in Crimea during the referendum. They were there not under the umbrella of some international organisation but on their own because the OSCE and other international agencies were controlled by our Western colleagues. Even if we had addressed them, the procedure for coordinating the monitoring would have never ended.

Question: Just as in Belarus. As I see it, they were also invited but nobody came.

Sergey Lavrov: The OSCE refused to send representatives there. Now that the OSCE is offering its services as a mediator, I completely understand Mr Lukashenko who says the OSCE lost its chance. It could have sent observers and gained a first-hand impression of what was happening there, and how the election was held. They arrogantly disregarded the invitation. We know that the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) is practically wholly controlled by NATO. We have repeatedly proposed that our nominees work there but they have not been approved. This contradicts the principles of the OSCE. We will continue to seek a fairer approach to the admission of members to the organisation, but I don't have much hope for this. Former OSCE Secretary General Thomas Greminger made an effort with this for the past three years but not everything depended on him – there is a large bloc of EU and NATO countries that enjoy a mathematical majority and try to dictate their own rules. But this is a separate issue.

Returning to Crimea, I have read a lot about this; let me give you two examples. One concerns my relations with former US Secretary of State John Kerry. In April 2014, we met in Geneva: me, John Kerry, EU High Representative Catherine Ashton and then Acting Foreign Minister of Ukraine Andrey Deshchitsa. We compiled a one page document that was approved unanimously. It read that we, the representatives of Russia, the US and the EU welcomed the commitments of the Ukrainian authorities to carry out decentralisation of the country with the participation of all the regions of Ukraine. This took place after the Crimean referendum. Later, the Americans, the EU and of course Ukraine "forgot" about this document. John Kerry told me at this meeting that everyone understood that Crimea was Russian, that the people wanted to return, but that we held the referendum so quickly that it didn't fit into the accepted standards of such events. He asked me to talk to President Vladimir Putin, organise one more referendum, announce it in advance and invite international observers. He said he would support their visit there, that the result would be the same but that we would be keeping up appearances. I asked him why put on such shows if they understand that this was the expression of the will of the people.

The second example concerns the recent statements by the EU and the European Parliament to the effect that "the occupation" of Crimea is a crude violation of the world arrangement established after the victory in World War II. But if this criterion is used to determine where Crimea belongs, when the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic joined the UN after WWII in 1945, Crimea did not belong to it. Crimea was part of the USSR. Later, Nikita Khrushchev took an illegal action, which contradicted Soviet law, and this led to them having it. But we all understood that this was a domestic political game as regards a Soviet republic that was the home to Khrushchev and many of his associates.

Question: You have been Foreign Minister for 16 years now. This century's major foreign policy challenges fell on your term in office. We faced sanctions, and we adapted to them and coped with them. Germany said it obtained Alexey Navalny's test results. France and Sweden have confirmed the presence of Novichok in them. Reportedly, we are now in for more sanctions. Do you think the Navalny case can trigger new sanctions against Russia?

Sergey Lavrov: I agree with our political analysts who are convinced that if it were not for Navalny, they would have come up with something else in order to impose more sanctions.

With regard to this situation, I think our Western partners have simply gone beyond decency and reason. In essence, they are now demanding that we "confess." They are asking us: Don't you believe what the German specialists from the Bundeswehr are saying? How is that possible? Their findings have been confirmed by the French and the Swedes. You don't believe them, either?

It's a puzzling situation given that our Prosecutor General's Office filed an inquiry about legal assistance on August 27 and hasn't received an answer yet. Nobody knows where the inquiry has been for more than a week now. We were told it was at the German Foreign Ministry. The German Foreign Ministry did not forward the request to the Ministry of Justice, which was our Prosecutor General Office's ultimate addressee. Then, they said that it had been transferred to the Berlin Prosecutor's Office, but they would not tell us anything without the consent of the family. They are urging us to launch a criminal investigation.

We have our own laws, and we cannot take someone's word for it to open a criminal case. Certain procedures must be followed. A pre-investigation probe initiated immediately after this incident to consider the circumstances of the case is part of this procedure.

Some of our Western colleagues wrote that, as the German doctors discovered, it was "a sheer miracle" that Mr Navalny survived. Allegedly, it was the notorious Novichok, but he survived thanks to "lucky circumstances." What kind of lucky circumstances are we talking about? First, the pilot immediately landed the plane; second, an ambulance was already waiting on the airfield; and third, the doctors immediately started to provide help. This absolutely impeccable behaviour of the pilots, doctors and ambulance crew is presented as "lucky circumstances." That is, they even deny the possibility that we are acting as we should. This sits deep in the minds of those who make up such stories.

Returning to the pre-investigation probe, everyone is fixated on a criminal case. If we had opened a criminal case right away (we do not have legal grounds to do so yet, and that is why the Prosecutor General's Office requested legal assistance from Germany on August 27), what would have been done when it happened? They would have interviewed the pilot, the passengers and the doctors. They would have found out what the doctors discovered when Navalny was taken to the Omsk hospital, and what medications were used. They would have interviewed the people who communicated with him. All of that was done. They interviewed the five individuals who accompanied him and participated in the events preceding Navalny boarding the plane; they interviewed the passengers who were waiting for a flight to Moscow in Tomsk and sat at the same bar; they found out what they ordered and what he drank. The sixth person, a woman who accompanied him, has fled, as you know. They say she was the one who gave the bottle to the German lab. All this has been done. Even if all of that was referred to as a "criminal case," we couldn't have done more.

Our Western partners are looking down on us as if we have no right to question what they are saying or their professionalism. If this is the case, it means that they dare to question the professionalism of our doctors and investigators. Unfortunately, this position is reminiscent of other times. Arrogance and a sense of infallibility have already been observed in Europe, and that led to very regrettable consequences.

Question: How would you describe this policy of confrontation? When did it start (I mean during your term of office)? It's simply so stable at the moment that there seems no chance that something might change in the future.

Sergey Lavrov: President of Russia Vladimir Putin has repeatedly spoken on this topic. I think that the onset of this policy, this era of constant pressure on Russia began with the end of a period that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, a time when the West believed it had Russia there in its pocket – it ended, full stop. Unfortunately, the West does not seem to be able to wrap its head around this, to accept that there is no alternative to Russia's independent actions, both domestically and on the international arena. This is why, unfortunately, this agony continues by inertia.

Having bad ties with any country have never given us any pleasure. We do not like making such statements in which we sharply criticise the position of the West. We always try to find compromises, but there are situations where it is hard not to come face to face with one another directly or to avoid frank assessments of what our Western friends are up to.

I have read what our respected political scientists write who are well known in the West. And I can say this idea is starting to surface ever stronger and more often – it is time we stop measuring our actions with the yardsticks that the West offers us and to stop trying to please the West at all costs. These are very serious people and they are making a serious point. The fact that the West is prodding us to this way of thinking, willingly or unwillingly, is obvious to me. Most likely, this is being done involuntarily. But it is a big mistake to think that Russia will play by Western rules in any case – as big a mistake as like approaching China with the same yardstick.

Question: Then I really have to ask you. We are going through digitalisation. I think when you started your diplomatic career, you could not even have imagined that some post on Twitter could affect the political situation in a country. Yet – I can see your smile – we are living in a completely different world. Film stars can become presidents; Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook can become drivers of political campaigns – that happened more than once – and those campaigns can be successful. We are going through digitalisation, and because of this, many unexpected people appear in international politics – unexpected for you, at least. How do you think Russia's foreign policy will change in this context? Are we ready for social media to be impacting our internal affairs? Is the Chinese scenario possible in Russia, with most Western social media blocked to avoid their influence on the internal affairs in that country?

Sergey Lavrov: Social media are already exerting great influence on our affairs. This is the reality in the entire post-Soviet space and developing countries. The West, primarily the United States, is vigorously using social media to promote their preferred agenda in just about any state. This necessitates a new approach to ensuring the national security. We have been doing this for a long time already.

As for regulating social media, everyone does it. You know that the digital giants in the United States have been repeatedly caught introducing censorship, primarily against us, China or other countries they dislike, shutting off information that comes from these places.

The internet is regulated by companies based in the United States, everyone knows that. In fact, this situation has long made the overwhelming majority of countries want to do something about it, considering the global nature of the internet and social media, to make sure that the management processes are approved at a global level, become transparent and understandable. The International Telecommunication Union, a specialised UN agency, has been out there for years. Russia and a group of other co-sponsoring countries are promoting the need to regulate the internet in such a way that everyone understands how it works and what principles govern it, in this International Union. Now we can see how Mark Zuckerberg and other heads of large IT companies are invited to the Congress and lectured there and asked to explain what they are going to do. We can see this. But a situation where it will be understandable for everyone else and, most importantly, where everyone is happy with it, still seems far away.

For many years, we have been promoting at the UN General Assembly an initiative to agree on the rules of responsible behaviour of states in the sphere of international information security. This initiative has already led to set up several working groups, which have completed their mandate with reports. The last such report was reviewed last year and another resolution was adopted. This time, it was not a narrow group of government experts, but a group that includes all UN member states. It was planning to meet, but things slowed down due to the coronavirus. The rules for responsible conduct in cyberspace are pending review by this group. These rules were approved by the SCO, meaning they already reflect a fairly large part of the world's population.

Our other initiative is not about the use of cyberspace for undermining someone's security; it is about fighting crimes (pedophilia, pornography, theft) in cyberspace. This topic is being considered by another UNGA committee. We are preparing a draft convention that will oblige all states to suppress criminal activities in cyberspace.

Question: Do you think that the Foreign Ministry is active on this front? Would you like to be more proactive in the digital dialogue? After all, we are still bound by ethics, and have yet to understand whether we can cross the line or not. Elon Musk feels free to make any statements no matter how ironic and makes headlines around the world, even though anything he says has a direct bearing on his market cap. This is a shift in the ethics of behaviour. Do you think that this is normal? Is this how it should be? Or maybe people still need to behave professionally?

Sergey Lavrov: A diplomat can always use irony and a healthy dose of cynicism. In this sense, there is no contradiction here. However, this does not mean that while making ironic remarks on the surrounding developments or comments every once in a while (witty or not so witty), you do not have to work on resolving legal matters related to internet governance. This is what we are doing.

The Foreign Ministry has been at the source of these processes. We have been closely coordinating our efforts on this front with the Security Council Office, and the Ministry of Digital Development, Communications and Mass Media and other organisations. Russian delegations taking part in talks include representatives from various agencies. Apart from multilateral platforms such as the International Telecommunication Union, the UN General Assembly and the OSCE, we are working on this subject in bilateral relations with our key partners.

We are most interested in working with our Western partners, since we have an understanding on these issues with countries that share similar views. The Americans and Europeans evade these talks under various pretexts. There seemed to be an opening in 2012 and 2013, but after the government coup in Ukraine, they used it as a pretext to freeze this process. Today, there are some signs that the United States and France are beginning to revive these contacts, but our partners have been insufficiently active. What we want is professional dialogue so that they can raise all their concerns and accusations and back them with specific facts. We stand ready to answer all the concerns our partners may have, and will not fail to voice the concerns we have. We have many of them.

During the recent visit by German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas to Russia, I handed him a list containing dozens of incidents we have identified: attacks against our resources, with 70 percent of them targeting state resources of the Russian Federation, and originating on German territory. He promised to provide an answer, but more than a month after our meeting we have not seen it so far.

Question: Let me ask you about another important initiative by the Foreign Ministry. You decided to amend regulations enabling people to be repatriated from abroad for free, and you proposed subjecting the repatriation guarantee to the reimbursement of its cost to the budget. Could you tell us, please, is this so expensive for the state to foot this bill?

Sergey Lavrov: Of course, these a substantial expenses. The resolution that provided for offering free assistance was adopted back in 2010, and was intended for citizens who find themselves in situations when their life is at risk. Imagine a Russian ambassador. Most of the people ask for help because they have lost money, their passport and so on. There are very few cases when an ambassador can actually say that a person is in a life-threatening situation and his or her life is in danger. How can an ambassador take a decision of this kind? As long as I remember, these cases can be counted on the fingers of my two hands since 2010, when an ambassador had to take responsibility and there were grounds for offering this assistance. We wanted to ensure that people can get help not only when facing an imminent danger (a dozen cases in ten years do not cost all that much). There were many more cases when our nationals found themselves in a difficult situation after losing money or passports. We decided to follow the practices used abroad. Specifically, this means that we provide fee-based assistance. In most cases, people travelling abroad can afford to reimburse the cost of a return ticket.

This practice is designed to prevent fraud, which remains an issue. We had cases when people bought one-way tickets knowing that they will have to be repatriated.

Question: And with no return ticket, they go to the embassy?

Sergey Lavrov: Yes, after that they come to the embassy. For this reason, I believe that the system we developed is much more convenient and comprehensive for dealing with the situations Russians get into when travelling abroad, and when we have to step in to help them through our foreign missions.

Question: Mr Lavrov, thank you for your time. As a Georgian, I really have to ask this. Isn't it time to simplify the visa regime with Georgia? A second generation of Georgians has now grown up that has never seen Russia. What do you think?

Sergey Lavrov: Georgians can travel to Russia – they just need to apply for a visa. The list of grounds for obtaining a visa has been expanded. There are practically no restrictions on visiting Russia, after obtaining a visa in the Interests Section for the Russian Federation in Tbilisi or another Russian overseas agency.

As for visa-free travel, as you know, we were ready for this a year ago. We were actually a few steps away from being ready to announce it when that incident happened with the Russian Federal Assembly delegation to the International Interparliamentary Assembly on Orthodoxy, where they were invited in the first place, seated in their chairs, and then violence was almost used against them.

I am confident that our relations with Georgia will recover and improve. We can see new Georgian politicians who are interested in this. For now, there are just small parties in the ruling elites. But I believe our traditional historical closeness, and the mutual affinity between our peoples will ultimately triumph. Provocateurs who are trying to prevent Georgia from resuming normal relations with Russia will be put to shame.

They are trying to use Georgia the same way as Ukraine. In Ukraine, the IMF plays a huge role. And the IMF recently decided that each tranche allocated to Ukraine would be short-term.

Question: Microcredits.

Sergey Lavrov: Microcredits and a short leash that can always be pulled a little.

They are trying to use Georgia the same way. We have no interest in seeing this situation continue. We did not start it and have never acted against the Georgian people. Everyone remembers the 2008 events, how American instructors arrived there and trained the Georgian army. The Americans were well aware of Mikheil Saakashvili's lack of restraint. He trampled on all agreements and issued a criminal order.

We are talking about taking their word for it. There were many cases when we took their word for it, but then it all boiled down to zilch. In 2003, Colin Powell, a test tube – that was an academic version. An attack on Iraq followed. Many years later, Tony Blair admitted that there had been no nuclear weapons in Iraq. There were many such stories. In 1999, the aggression against Yugoslavia was triggered by the OSCE representative in the Balkans, US diplomat William Walker, who visited the village of Racak, where they found thirty corpses, and declared it genocide of the Albanian population. A special investigation by the International Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia found they were military dressed in civilian clothes. But Mr Walker loudly declared it was genocide. Washington immediately seized on the idea, and so did London and other capitals. NATO launched an aggression against Yugoslavia.

After the end of the five-day military operation to enforce peace, the European Union ordered a special report from a group of invited experts, including Swiss diplomat Heidi Tagliavini. She was later involved in the Minsk process, and then she was asked to lead a group of experts who investigated the outbreak of the military conflict in August 2008. The conclusion was unambiguous. All this happened on the orders of Mikheil Saakashvili, and as for his excuses that someone had provoked him, or someone had been waiting for him on the other side of the tunnel, this was just raving.

Georgians are a wise nation. They love life, perhaps the same way and the same facets that the peoples in the Russian Federation do. We will overcome the current abnormal situation and restore normal relations between our states and people.

In addition, if you follow the Minister, follow up on this interview with Sputnik

Exclusive: Sergei Lavrov Talks About West's Historical Revisionism, US Election and Navalny Case

https://sputniknews.com/interviews/202009181080493098-sputniks-exclusive-sergei-lavrov-talks-about-wests-historical-revisionism-belarus–navalny-case/

[Sep 18, 2020] West wanted Moscow to open up to international media 30 years ago, now it's discriminating against Russian outlets - FM Lavrov -- RT Russia Former Soviet Union

Sep 18, 2020 | www.rt.com

West wanted Moscow to open up to international media 30 years ago, now it's discriminating against Russian outlets - FM Lavrov 18 Sep, 2020 15:35 Get short URL West wanted Moscow to open up to international media 30 years ago, now it's discriminating against Russian outlets - FM Lavrov FILE PHOTO © REUTERS/Philippe Wojazer 10 Follow RT on RT The West encouraged Russia to launch a new era of transparency during 'perestroika,' yet the very same democracy lecturers are today stigmatizing RT and Sputnik for "state funding" – which its own foreign media outlets rely on.

That's according to Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov who pointed out that US broadcaster RFE/RL, which is openly state-run, and British outlet BBC are also financed from public funds.

Two of Russia's broadcasters are facing open discrimination across their countries of accreditation, Lavrov told Sputnik.

RT has been forced to register with the US Justice Department under the 1938 Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). Its correspondents have also been barred from attending events hosted by the French president; likewise, RT and Sputnik have faced enormous difficulties while reporting from Baltic nations.

ALSO ON RT.COM Twitter labels RT & Sputnik but NOT BBC, NPR & VOA as it launches blitz on state media staff & govt officials

"We are being presented with the argument that there is state funding [for RT and Sputnik]," Lavrov commented. Nevertheless, there are is media in the West – the BBC and Radio Liberty being prime examples – that also receive government donations and "are considered beacons of democracy."

They also rely on state funding, but for some reason no restrictive measures are being taken against them, including through the internet, where censorship is now openly introduced.

This comes as audiences of both broadcasters are growing and their popularity is on the rise. "I saw the statistics; I can only assume that this is another sign of the fear of competition on the side of those who dominated the global information market until recently," the foreign minister said.

The pressure Western nations pile on Russian media is one reason to wonder if they actually practice what they preach. Lavrov recalled that the West demanded Russia "open up to the world" during the period of perestroika – including by allowing full access "to any kind of information, whether it was based on domestic sources or came from abroad."

Thirty years later, the West is "already even embarrassed" to stick to the same principles when Russia asks "that access to information be respected, including in France with respect to Sputnik and RT," Lavrov stated. France has its own state-funded outlets, such as AFP, Radio France International and France 24.

Double standards, hypocrisy – unfortunately, these are the words to describe their position.

Russia will take these matters to the upcoming ministerial summit of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) this December. "These questions will not disappear anywhere from the agenda, our Western colleagues will have a lot to answer," Lavrov vowed.

Speaking about the pressure put on Russia in general – and often initiated by the media and not among political circles – Lavrov described the current times as "the age of social media, disinformation and fake news." It is fairly easy "to throw any invention into the media domain" and get away with it, he said, adding, "and then no one will read the rebuttal."

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[Sep 18, 2020] Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov's on Minsk agreements in his September 17, 2020 interview

Notable quotes:
"... This fully contradicts the sequence of events outlined in the Minsk agreements whereby restoring Ukrainian armed forces' control on the border with Russia is possible only after an amnesty, agreeing on the special status of these territories, making this status part of the Ukrainian Constitution and holding elections there. Now they propose giving back the part of Donbass that "rebelled" against the anti-constitutional coup to those who declared these people terrorists and launched an "anti-terrorist operation" against them, ..."
"... On the contrary, Alexander Turchinov, Arseniy Yatsenyuk and others like them attacked these areas. The guilt of the people living there was solely in them saying, "You committed a crime against the state, we do not want to follow your rules, let us figure out our own future and see what you will do next." There's not a single example that would corroborate the fact that they engaged in terrorism. It was the Ukrainian state that engaged in terrorism on their territory, in particular, when they killed [Head of the Donetsk People's Republic] Alexander Zakharchenko and a number of field commanders in Donbass. So, I am not optimistic about this. ..."
Sep 18, 2020 | thesaker.is

Question: Here I am listening to you and wondering how many people care about this? Why is it that no one understands this? Is this politics that is too far away from ordinary people who are nevertheless behind it? Take Georgia or Ukraine. People are worse off now than before, and despite this, this policy continues.

Will the Minsk agreements ever be implemented? Will the situation in southeastern Ukraine ever be settled?

Returning to what we talked about. How independent is Ukraine in its foreign policy?

Sergey Lavrov: I don't think that under the current Ukrainian government, just like under the previous president, we will see any progress in the implementation of the Minsk agreements, if only because President Zelensky himself is saying so publicly, as does Deputy Prime Minister Reznikov who is in charge of the Ukrainian settlement in the Contact Group. Foreign Minister of Ukraine Kuleba is also saying this. They say there's a need for the Minsk agreements and they cannot be broken, because these agreements (and accusing Russia of non-compliance) are the foundation of the EU and the US policy in seeking to maintain the sanctions on Russia. Nevertheless, such a distorted interpretation of the essence of the Minsk agreements, or rather an attempt to blame everything on Russia, although Russia is never mentioned there, has stuck in the minds of our European colleagues, including France and Germany, who, being co-sponsors of the Minsk agreements along with us, the Ukrainians and Donbass, cannot but realise that the Ukrainians are simply distorting their responsibilities, trying to distance themselves from them and impose a different interpretation of the Minsk agreements. But even in this scenario, the above individuals and former Ukrainian President Kravchuk, who now heads the Ukrainian delegation to the Contact Group as part of the Minsk process, claim that the Minsk agreements in their present form are impracticable and must be revised, turned upside down. Also, Donbass must submit to the Ukrainian government and army before even thinking about conducting reforms in this part of Ukraine.

This fully contradicts the sequence of events outlined in the Minsk agreements whereby restoring Ukrainian armed forces' control on the border with Russia is possible only after an amnesty, agreeing on the special status of these territories, making this status part of the Ukrainian Constitution and holding elections there. Now they propose giving back the part of Donbass that "rebelled" against the anti-constitutional coup to those who declared these people terrorists and launched an "anti-terrorist operation" against them, which they later renamed a Joint Forces Operation (but this does not change the idea behind it), and whom they still consider terrorists. Although everyone remembers perfectly well that in 2014 no one from Donbass or other parts of Ukraine that rejected the anti-constitutional coup attacked the putschists and the areas that immediately fell under the control of the politicians behind the coup. On the contrary, Alexander Turchinov, Arseniy Yatsenyuk and others like them attacked these areas. The guilt of the people living there was solely in them saying, "You committed a crime against the state, we do not want to follow your rules, let us figure out our own future and see what you will do next." There's not a single example that would corroborate the fact that they engaged in terrorism. It was the Ukrainian state that engaged in terrorism on their territory, in particular, when they killed [Head of the Donetsk People's Republic] Alexander Zakharchenko and a number of field commanders in Donbass. So, I am not optimistic about this.

Question: So, we are looking at a dead end?

Sergey Lavrov: You know, we still have an undeniable argument which is the text of the Minsk Agreements approved by the UN Security Council.

Question: But they tried to revise it?

Sergey Lavrov: No, they are just making statements to that effect. When they gather for a Contact Group meeting in Minsk, they do their best to look constructive. The most recent meeting ran into the Ukrainian delegation's attempts to pretend that nothing had happened. They recently passed a law on local elections which will be held in a couple of months. It says that elections in what are now called the Donetsk and Lugansk people's republics will be held only after the Ukrainian army takes control of the entire border and those who "committed criminal offenses" are arrested and brought to justice even though the Minsk agreements provide for amnesty without exemptions.

Question: When I'm asked about Crimea I recall the referendum. I was there at a closed meeting in Davos that was attended by fairly well respected analysts from the US. They claimed with absolute confidence that Crimea was being occupied. I reminded them about the referendum. I was under the impression that these people either didn't want to see or didn't know how people lived there, that they have made their choice. Returning to the previous question, I think that nobody is interested in the opinion of the people.

Sergey Lavrov: No, honest politicians still exist. Many politicians, including European ones, were in Crimea during the referendum. They were there not under the umbrella of some international organisation but on their own because the OSCE and other international agencies were controlled by our Western colleagues. Even if we had addressed them, the procedure for coordinating the monitoring would have never ended.

[Sep 18, 2020] Continued German Support for Nord Stream 2 Completion -- Towards a Shift in Russia-Germany Relations by Stephen Lendman

Sep 17, 2020 | www.globalresearch.ca

https://apis.google.com/u/0/se/0/_/+1/fastbutton?usegapi=1&size=medium&count=true&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.globalresearch.ca&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.globalresearch.ca%2Fcontinued-german-support-nord-stream-2-completion%2F5724195&gsrc=3p&jsh=m%3B%2F_%2Fscs%2Fapps-static%2F_%2Fjs%2Fk%3Doz.gapi.en.myOGgYJo9ys.O%2Fam%3DwQE%2Fd%3D1%2Fct%3Dzgms%2Frs%3DAGLTcCMR2Cg_3Iqxcgmos-E9G6cjWQG_Kw%2Fm%3D__features__#_methods=onPlusOne%2C_ready%2C_close%2C_open%2C_resizeMe%2C_renderstart%2Concircled%2Cdrefresh%2Cerefresh&id=I0_1600401164093&_gfid=I0_1600401164093&parent=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.globalresearch.ca&pfname=&rpctoken=21838589 1

Construction of Russia's Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline to Germany is about 94% completed.

The project is all about supplying Germany and other European countries with readily available low-cost Russian natural gas -- around 30% cheaper than US liquified natural gas (LNG).

Both right wings of the US one-party state want the pipeline halted to benefit US producers at Russia's expense.

US sanctions on the project breach international law, Germany's Angela Merkel earlier saying "(w)e oppose extraterritorial sanctions (W)e don't accept" them.

"We haven't backed down (on wanting Nord Stream 2 completed) nor do we intend to back down."

Last December, German Foreign Minister Heiko Mass said "European energy policy is decided in Europe, not the United States. We reject any outside interventions and extraterritorial sanctions."

Did the novichok poisoning of Putin critic Alexey Navalny hoax change things?

During a September 24 – 25 summit of EU leaders, the future of Nord Stream 2 will be discussed. Ahead of the summit, Merkel's government offered to invest around one billion euros (about $1.2 billion) in construction of two terminals in Germany for US LNG.

According to the German broadsheet Die Zeit, by letter to Trump regime Treasury Secretary Mnunchin in August, German Vice Chancellor and Finance Minister Olaf Scholz said the following:

"In exchange (for Berlin's proposed LNG investment), the US will allow unobstructed finalization and use of Nord Stream 2," adding:

"(E)xisting legal options for (challenging US) sanctions (on firms involved in the project) have not been exhausted yet."

The broadsheet added that Scholz first expressed Berlin's proposal verbally, confirming it by letter. Proposed German LNG terminals would be built in Brunsbuttel and Wilhelmshaven. Berlin's proposal also included a gas transit contract for Ukraine and financing of a terminal for Poland's use of US LNG.

Following the Navalny false flag, opinion on completing Nord Stream 2 in Germany is divided. Merkel still supports the project as evidenced by her government's offer to build two terminals for US LNG in exchange for dropping sanctions on the pipeline by the US.

Orchestrated Events Responsible for Alexey Navalny's Illness?

Last June, US Senate hardliners proposed legislation to expand Nord Stream 2 related sanctions.

It targets all nations and enterprises involved in the project, including underwriting, insurance and reinsurance companies.

At the time, Gazprom CEO Alexey Miller said Russia will complete construction of the project on its own -- expected to be operational in January or shortly thereafter. Last month, German Foreign Minister Heiko Mass expressed "displeasure" to Pompeo about US sanctions on the project. Last week, Polish government spokesman Piotr Muller was quoted saying the following:

"Poland has from the very beginning emphasized that European solidarity (on Nord Stream 2) should be unambiguous."

"Therefore, if such a need is expressed by the German side, Poland is open to the idea of using the infrastructure which it is building for its own energy security."

His remark followed German media reports that Merkel said a decision by her government on Nord Stream 2 has not been made in light of the Navalny incident. German officials supporting the project stressed that the country will be the main beneficiary of its completion economically, environmentally and strategically. Construction on the proposed 800 – 950 km Baltic Pipe gas pipeline from Norwegian North Sea waters to Poland hasn't begun.

If completed in October 2022 as proposed, it'll be able to deliver about 10 billion cubic meters of natural gas annually -- less than 20% of Nord Stream 2's 55 billion annual cubic meter capacity.

Berlin earlier was skeptical about the project because of environmental concerns. Days earlier, Polish energy expert Jakub Wiech called it "pointless" to compare Baltic Pipe to Nord Stream 2, given the latter project's far greater capacity and ability to provide gas to other Western European countries. A day after the Navalny incident last month, Merkel said Nord Stream 2 will be completed regardless of threatened new US sanctions on firms involved in the project.

Separately on Wednesday, Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Nord Stream 2's completion should not be raised in discussing the Navalny incident.

"It should stop being mentioned in the context of any politicization."

"This is a commercial project that is absolutely in line with the interests of both Russia and European Union countries, and primarily Germany."

No evidence links Russia to Navalny's illness. Whatever caused it wasn't from a novichok nerve agent, the deadliest know substance able to kill exposed individuals in minutes. Over three weeks after falling ill, Navalny is very much alive, recuperating in a Berlin hospital, and able to be ambulatory for short periods.

A Final Comment

On September 14, CNBC reported the following:

"Experts say Berlin is unlikely to (abandon Nord Stream 2 that's) over 94% completed after almost a decade's construction, involv(ing) major German and European companies, and is necessary for the region's current and future energy needs," adding:

"In this case, economic and commercial interests could trump political pressure" against Russia.

Chief eurozone economist Carsten Brzeski said he doesn't see "Germany pulling out of the project Many (in the country) are still in favor of it."

CNBC noted that

"Germany has been reluctant to link the fate of its involvement with Nord Stream 2 to the Navalny incident so far, and (FM Heiko) Maas conceded that stopping the building of the pipeline would hurt not only Russia but German and European firms."

"(O)ver 100 companies from 12 European countries" are involved in the project about half of them from Germany."

*

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Award-winning author Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected] . He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)

His new book as editor and contributor is titled "Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III."

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com .

Featured image is from Asia Times

The original source of this article is Global Research Copyright © Stephen Lendman , Global Research, 2020

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[Sep 17, 2020] Military desperados and Mattis "military messiah syndrome" by Scott Ritter

Highly recommended!
I always assumed that Trump was the candidate of MIC in 2016 elections, while Hillary was the candidate of "Intelligence community." But it looks like US military is infected with desperados like Mattis and Trump was unable fully please them despite all his efforts.
But it looks like US military is infected with desperados like Mattis and Trump was unable fully please them despite all his efforts. Military desperados are not interested in how many American they deprived of decent standard of living due to outside military expenses. All they want is to dominate the word and maintain the "Full Spectrum Dominance" whatever it costs.
Sep 16, 2020 | www.rt.com

... ... ...

It is Trump's tortured relationship with the military that stands out the most, especially as told through the eyes of former Secretary of Defense Jim 'Mad Dog' Mattis, a retired marine general. It is clear that Bob Woodward spent hours speaking with Mattis -- the insights, emotions and internal voice captured in the book show a level of intimacy that could only be reached through in-depth interviews, and Woodward has a well-earned reputation for getting people to speak to him.

The book makes it clear that Mattis viewed Trump as a threat to the US' standing as the defender of a rules-based order -- built on the back of decades-old alliances -- that had been in place since the end of the Second World War.

It also makes it clear that Mattis and the military officers he oversaw placed defending this order above implementing the will of the American people, as expressed through the free and fair election that elevated Donald Trump to the position of commander-in-chief. In short, Mattis and his coterie of generals knew best, and when the president dared issue an order or instruction that conflicted with their vision of how the world should work, they would do their best to undermine this order, all the while confirming to the president that it was being followed.

This trend was on display in Woodward's telling of Trump's efforts to forge better relations with North Korea. At every turn, Mattis and his military commanders sought to isolate the president from the reality on the ground, briefing him only on what they thought he needed to know, and keeping him in the dark about what was really going on.

In a telling passage, Woodward takes us into the mind of Jim Mattis as he contemplates the horrors of a nuclear war with North Korea, and the responsibility he believed he shouldered when it came to making the hard decision as to whether nuclear weapons should be used or not. Constitutionally, the decision was the president's alone to make, something Mattis begrudgingly acknowledges. But in Mattis' world, he, as secretary of defense, would be the one who influenced that decision.

Mattis, along with the other general officers described by Woodward, is clearly gripped with what can only be described as the 'Military Messiah Syndrome'.

What defines this 'syndrome' is perhaps best captured in the words of Emma Sky, the female peace activist-turned adviser to General Ray Odierno, the one-time commander of US forces in Iraq. In a frank give-and-take captured by Ms. Sky in her book 'The Unravelling', Odierno spoke of the value he placed on the military's willingness to defend "freedom" anywhere in the world. " There is, " he said, " no one who understands more the importance of liberty and freedom in all its forms than those who travel the world to defend it ."

Ms. Sky responded in typically direct fashion: " One day, I will have you admit that the [Iraq] war was a bad idea, that the administration was led by a radical neocon program, that the US's standing in the world has gone down greatly, and that we are far less safe than we were before 9/11. "

Odierno would have nothing of it. " It will never happen while I'm the commander of soldiers in Iraq ."

" To lead soldiers in battle ," Ms. Sky noted, " a commander had to believe in the cause. " Left unsaid was the obvious: even if the cause was morally and intellectually unsound.

his, more than anything, is the most dangerous thing about the 'Military Messiah Syndrome' as captured by Bob Woodward -- the fact that the military is trapped in an inherited reality divorced from the present, driven by precepts which have nothing to with what is, but rather by what the military commanders believe should be. The unyielding notion that the US military is a force for good becomes little more than meaningless drivel when juxtaposed with the reality that the mission being executed is inherently wrong.

The 'Military Messiah Syndrome' lends itself to dishonesty and, worse, to self-delusion. It is one thing to lie; it is another altogether to believe the lie as truth.

No single general had the courage to tell Trump allegations against Syria were a hoax

The cruise missile attack on Syria in early April 2017 stands out as a case in point. The attack was ordered in response to allegations that Syria had dropped a bomb containing the sarin nerve agent on a town -- Khan Shaykhun -- that was controlled by Al-Qaeda-affiliated Islamic militants.

Trump was led to believe that the 59 cruise missiles launched against Shayrat Airbase -- where the Su-22 aircraft alleged to have dropped the bombs were based -- destroyed Syria's capability to carry out a similar attack in the future. When shown post-strike imagery in which the runways were clearly untouched, Trump was outraged, lashing out at Secretary of Defense Mattis in a conference call. " I can't believe you didn't destroy the runway !", Woodward reports the president shouting.

" Mr. President ," Mattis responds in the text, " they would rebuild the runway in 24 hours, and it would have little effect on their ability to deploy weapons. We destroyed the capability to deploy weapons " for months, Mattis said.

" That was the mission the president had approved, " Woodward writes, clearly channeling Mattis, " and they had succeeded ."

The problem with this passage is that it is a lie. There is no doubt that Bob Woodward has the audio tape of Jim Mattis saying these things. But none of it is true. Mattis knew it when he spoke to Woodward, and Woodward knew it when he wrote the book.

There was no confirmed use of chemical weapons by Syria at Khan Shaykhun. Indeed, the forensic evidence available about the attack points to the incident being a false flag effort -- a successful one, it turns out -- on the part of the Al-Qaeda-affiliated Islamists to provoke a US military strike against Syria. No targets related to either the production, storage or handling of chemical weapons were hit by the US cruise missiles, if for no other reason than no such targets could exist if Syria did not possess and/or use a chemical weapon against Khan Shaykhun.

Moreover, the US failed to produce a narrative of causality which provided some underlying logic to the targets that were struck at Khan Shaykhun -- "Here is where the chemical weapons were stored, here is where the chemical weapons were filled, here is where the chemical weapons were loaded onto the aircraft." Instead, 59 cruise missiles struck empty aircraft hangars, destroying derelict aircraft, and killing at least four Syrian soldiers and up to nine civilians.

The next morning, the same Su-22 aircraft that were alleged to have bombed Khan Shaykhun were once again taking off from Shayrat Air Base -- less than 24 hours after the US cruise missiles struck that facility. President Trump had every reason to be outraged by the results.

But the President should have been outraged by the processes behind the attack, where military commanders, fully afflicted by 'Military Messiah Syndrome', offered up solutions that solved nothing for problems that did not exist. Not a single general (or admiral) had the courage to tell the president that the allegations against Syria were a hoax, and that a military response was not only not needed, but would be singularly counterproductive.

But that's not how generals and admirals -- or colonels and lieutenant colonels -- are wired. That kind of introspective honesty cannot happen while they are in command.

Bob Woodward knows this truth, but he chose not to give it a voice in his book, because to do so would disrupt the pre-scripted narrative that he had constructed, around which he bent and twisted the words of those he interviewed -- including the president and Jim Mattis. As such, 'Rage' is, in effect, a lie built on a lie. It is one thing for politicians and those in power to manipulate the truth to their advantage. It's something altogether different for journalists to report something as true that they know to be a lie.

On the back cover of 'Rage', the Pulitzer prize-winning historian Robert Caro is quoted from a speech he gave about Bob Woodward. " Bob Woodward ," Caro notes, " a great reporter. What is a great reporter? Someone who never stops trying to get as close to the truth as possible ."

After reading 'Rage', one cannot help but conclude the opposite -- that Bob Woodward has written a volume which pointedly ignores the truth. Instead, he gives voice to a lie of his own construct, predicated on the flawed accounts of sources inflicted with 'Military Messiah Syndrome', whose words embrace a fantasy world populated by military members fulfilling missions far removed from the common good of their fellow citizens -- and often at conflict with the stated intent and instruction of the civilian leadership they ostensibly serve. In doing so, Woodward is as complicit as the generals and former generals he quotes in misleading the American public about issues of fundamental importance.

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Scott Ritter

is a former US Marine Corps intelligence officer and author of ' SCORPION KING : America's Suicidal Embrace of Nuclear Weapons from FDR to Trump.' He served in the Soviet Union as an inspector implementing the INF Treaty, in General Schwarzkopf’s staff during the Gulf War, and from 1991-1998 as a UN weapons inspector. Follow him on Twitter @RealScottRitter

See also:

Whose side are generals on? As Joint Chiefs chairman APOLOGIZES for standing by Trump, Biden confident of military support The military is trapped in an inherited reality divorced from the present

Caitlin Johnstone: Tens of millions of people displaced by the 'War On Terror', the greatest scam ever invented Misleading the American public

Jewel Gyn 21 hours ago 17 Sep, 2020 12:23 AM

Whichever construct you want to believe, the fact remains that US has continued to sow instability around the world in the name of defending the liberty and freedom. Which brings to the question how the world can continue to allow a superpower to dictate what's good or bad for a sovereign country.
Johan le Roux Jewel Gyn 18 hours ago 17 Sep, 2020 03:42 AM
The answer you seek is not in the US's proclaimed vision of 'democracy' ot 'rescuing populations from the clutches of vile dictators.' They just say that to validate their actions which in reality is using their military as a mercenary force to secure and steal the resources of countries.
Joaquin Montano 1 day ago 16 Sep, 2020 04:57 PM
Bob Woodward was enshrined as a great, heroic like journalist by the Hollywood propaganda machine, but reality is he is a US Security agent pretending to be a well informed/connected journalist. And indeed, he is well informed/connected, since he was a Naval intelligence man, part responsible of the demise of the Nixon administration when it fell out of grace with the powerful elites, and the Washington Post being well connected with the CIA, the rest is history. And as they say, once a CIA man, always a CIA man.
DukeLeo Joaquin Montano 22 hours ago 16 Sep, 2020 11:36 PM
That is correct. Woodward is a Naval intelligence man. The elite in the US was not happy about Nixon's foreign policy and his detante with the Soviet Union. Watergate was invented, and Nixon had nothing to do with it. However, it brought him down, thank's to Woodward.
NoJustice Joaquin Montano 1 day ago 16 Sep, 2020 06:48 PM
But he also exposed Trump's lies about Covid-19.
lectrodectus 17 hours ago 17 Sep, 2020 04:45 AM
Another first class article by ....Scott .. The book makes it clear that Mattis viewed Trump as a threat to the Us' standing as the defender of a " rules -based order -built on the back of decades -old alliances-that had been in place since the end of the second World War". It also makes it clear that " Mattis and the Military officials he oversaw placed defending this order above the implementing the will of the American People " These old Military Dinosaurs simply can't let go of the past, unfortunately for the American people / the World I can't see anything ever changing, it will be business as usual ie, war after War after War.
Jonny247364 lectrodectus 5 minutes ago 17 Sep, 2020 09:53 PM
Just because donny signs a dictact it does not equate to the will of the americian people. The americian people did not ask donny to murder Assad.
neeon9 1 day ago 16 Sep, 2020 06:56 PM
"a threat to the US’ standing as the defender of a rules-based order –" Who made that a thing? who voted for the US to be the policeman of the planet? and who said their "rules" are right? I sure didn't, nor did anyone I know, even my american friends don't know whose idea it was!
fezzie035fezzm 1 day ago 16 Sep, 2020 06:29 PM
It's interesting to note that every president since J.F.K. has got America into a military conflict, or has turned a minor conflict into a major one. Trump is the exception. Trump inherited conflicts (Afghanistan, Syria etc) but has not started a new one, and he has spent his three years ending or winding down the conflicts he had inherited.
NoJustice fezzie035fezzm 1 day ago 16 Sep, 2020 06:34 PM
Trump increased military deployment to the Middle East. He increased military spending. He had a foreign general assassinated. He had missiles fired into Syria. He vetoed a bill that would limit his authority to wage war. Trump is not an exception.
T. Agee Kaye 1 day ago 16 Sep, 2020 05:59 PM
Good op ed. 'Rage is built on a lie' applies to many things.
E_Kaos T. Agee Kaye 7 hours ago 17 Sep, 2020 02:46 PM
True, the beginning of a new narrative and the continuation of an old narrative.
PYCb988 1 day ago 16 Sep, 2020 07:25 PM
Something's amiss here. Mattis was openly telling the press that there was no evidence against Assad. Just Google: Mattis Newsweek Assad.
erniedouglas 12 hours ago 17 Sep, 2020 09:14 AM
What was Watergate? Even bet says there were tapes of a private relationship between Nixon and BB Rebozo.
allan Kaplan 1 day ago 16 Sep, 2020 06:03 PM
Continuation of a highly organized and tightly controlled disinformation campaign to do one singularly the most significant and historically one of the most illegal act of American betrayal... overthrow American elections at any and all costs to install one of the most deranged, demoralized sold out brain dead Biden and his equally brown nosing Harris only to unseat a legally and democratically elected US president according to our Constitution! Will their evil acts against America work? I doubt it! But at a price that America has never before seen. Let's sit back and watch this Rose Bowl parade of America's dirtiest of the dirty politics!
E_Kaos allan Kaplan 7 hours ago 17 Sep, 2020 02:49 PM
"brown nosing harris", how apropos with the play on words.
Bill Spence allan Kaplan 1 day ago 16 Sep, 2020 06:29 PM
Both parties and their politicians are totally corrupt. Why would anyone support one side over the other? Is that because you believe the promises and lies?
custos125 17 hours ago 17 Sep, 2020 04:35 AM
Is there any evidence that both Mattis and Woodward knew that the allegations of a Syrian use of chemical weapons by plane were not true, a false flag? On the assumption of this use, the capacity to fly such attack and deploy such weapons was destroyed for some time. I recommend reading of Rage, it is quite interesting, even if some people will not like it and try to keep people away from the book.
E_Kaos custos125 7 hours ago 17 Sep, 2020 02:58 PM
My observations were: 1 - where were the bomb fragments 2 - why use rusted gas cylinders 3 - how do you attach a rusted gas cylinder to a plane 4 - were the rusted gas cylinders tossed out of a plane 5 - how did the rusted gas cylinders land so close to each other My conclusion - False Flag Incident
neeon9 1 day ago 16 Sep, 2020 06:58 PM
The is only one threat to peace in the world, and it's the US/Israeli M.I.C.. War mongering children, who actually believe, against all reason, that they are the most worthy and entitled race on earth! they are not. The US has been responsible for more misery in the world than any other state, which isn't surprising given how many Nazi's were resettled there by the Jews. They are also the only Ppl on the planet who think a nuclear war is winnable! How strange is that!
NoJustice 1 day ago 16 Sep, 2020 06:22 PM
So everything is a lie because Woodward didn't mention that there was no evidence found that linked the Syrian government to the chemical attack?
Strongbo50 6 minutes ago 17 Sep, 2020 09:58 PM
The left is firing up the Russian Interference narrative again, how Russia is trying to take the election. The real truth is in plain sight, The main stream media is trying to deliver Biden a win, along with google yahoo msn facebook and twitter. I say, come on Russia, if you can help stem that tide of lies please Mr Putin help. That's a joke but the media is real. And Woodward in his old age wants one more trophy on his mantle.
CuttySark 1 day ago 16 Sep, 2020 05:41 PM
Trump has become the great white whale. Seems like there are Ahab's everywhere willing to shoot their hearts upon the beast to bring it down whatever the cost. I think it was this kind of rage and attitude that got Adolf off to a good start.
NoJustice CuttySark 1 day ago 16 Sep, 2020 05:44 PM
He's an easy target because he keeps screwing up.
Gryphon_ 1 day ago 16 Sep, 2020 06:59 PM
The Washington Post is owned by Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon. Never in my life have I seen a newspaper that lies as much as the post. Bob Woodward works for the post.

[Sep 17, 2020] Why the Blob Needs an Enemy by ARTA MOEINI

Highly recommended!
Crisis of neoliberal undermines the USA supremacy and the US elite hangs by the stras to the Full Specturm Domionanc edoctrine, whih it now can't enforce and which is financially unsustainable for the USA.
Collapse of neoliberalism means the end of the USA supremacy and the whole political existence on the USA was banked on this single card.
Notable quotes:
"... In America, this unfortunate status quo in support of primacy persists even in the Trumpian Age and within debates around the eccentric and unconventional presidency of Donald Trump. In fact, despite all the talk of political polarization in the United States, it appears that when it comes to naming new threats and enemies to "contain," "deter," and deem "existential," bipartisan consensus is found swiftly and quite readily. ..."
"... In a recent speech delivered in Europe, the U.S. defense secretary and former corporate lobbyist for Raytheon, Mark Esper, unified these two faces of the Janus that embodies the North Atlantic foreign policy establishment. Esper referred to both China and Russia as disruptive forces working to unravel the international order, which "we have created together," and called on the international community to preserve that order by countering both powers. As it stands, we are on the path to a series of cold wars throughout this century, if not a hot conflict between rival great powers that could spiral into World War III. Despite increased calls for realism and restraint in foreign policy, primacy is alive and well. ..."
"... There is, however, a more significant psychosociological reason for the blob's remarkable persistence. When it comes to foreign policy, Western policymakers today suffer from a Manichean worldview, a caustic mindset crystalized during a decades-running Cold War with the Soviet Union. ..."
"... Frozen in this Cold War mindset, the Atlanticist blob has internalized the bipolar moment that followed the Second World War, treating it as a permanent fixture and the normal state of the international system. In fact, the bipolar and unipolar periods we have undergone over the past 75 years are nothing but aberrations and historical anomalies. In truth, the reality of the international system tends toward multi-polarity -- and at long last it appears that the system is self-correcting. The North Atlantic establishment came of age during that time of exception, forming its (liberal) identity through the process of "alterity" and in a nemetic opposition to communism. ..."
"... Not surprisingly then, the North Atlantic elites continue to seek adversaries to demonize and "monsters to destroy" in order to justify their moral universalism and presumed ideological superiority, doing so under the garb of a totalizing and absolutist idea of exceptionalism. ..."
Sep 09, 2020 | www.theamericanconservative.com

The international order is no longer bipolar, despite the elites' insistence otherwise. Fortunately there is hope for change.

Despite its many failings and high human, social, and economic costs, American foreign policy since the end of the Second World War has shown a remarkable degree of continuity and inflexibility. This rather curious phenomenon is not limited to America alone. The North Atlantic foreign policy establishment from Washington D.C. to London, which some have aptly dubbed the "blob," has doggedly championed the grand strategic framework of "primacy" and armed hegemony, often coated with more docile language such as "global leadership," "American indispensability," and "strengthening the Western alliance."

In America, this unfortunate status quo in support of primacy persists even in the Trumpian Age and within debates around the eccentric and unconventional presidency of Donald Trump. In fact, despite all the talk of political polarization in the United States, it appears that when it comes to naming new threats and enemies to "contain," "deter," and deem "existential," bipartisan consensus is found swiftly and quite readily.

On the Left, and in the wake of President Trump's election, the Democratic establishment began fixating its wrath on Russia–adopting a confrontational stance toward Moscow and fueling fears of a renewed Cold War. On the Right, the realigning GOP has increasingly, if at times inconsistently, singled out China as the greatest threat to U.S. national security, a hostile attitude further exacerbated in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Alarmingly, Joe Biden, the Democratic presidential nominee, has recently joined the hawkish bandwagon toward China, even attempting to outflank Trump on this issue and attacking the president's China policy as too weak and accommodating of China's rise.

In a recent speech delivered in Europe, the U.S. defense secretary and former corporate lobbyist for Raytheon, Mark Esper, unified these two faces of the Janus that embodies the North Atlantic foreign policy establishment. Esper referred to both China and Russia as disruptive forces working to unravel the international order, which "we have created together," and called on the international community to preserve that order by countering both powers. As it stands, we are on the path to a series of cold wars throughout this century, if not a hot conflict between rival great powers that could spiral into World War III. Despite increased calls for realism and restraint in foreign policy, primacy is alive and well.

Indeed, the dominant tendency among many foreign policy observers is to overprivilege the threat of rising superpowers and to insist on strong containment measures to limit the spheres of influence of the so-called revisionist powers. Such an approach, coupled with the prospect of ascendant powers actively resisting and confronting the United States as the ruling global hegemon, has one eminent International Relations scholar warning of the Thucydides Trap.

There are others, however, who insist that the structural shifts undermining the liberal international order mark the end of U.S. hegemony and its "unipolar moment." In realist terms, what Secretary Esper really means to protect, they would argue, is a conception of "rules-based" global order that was a structural by-product of the Second World War and the ensuing Cold War and whose very rules and institutions were underwritten by U.S. hegemony. This would be an exercise in folly -- not corresponding to the reality of systemic change and the return of great power competition and civilizational contestation.

What's more, the sanctimony of this "liberal" hegemonic order and the logic of democratic peace were both presumably vindicated by the collapse of the Soviet Union and its totalitarian system, a black swan event that for many had heralded the "end of history" and promised the advent of the American century. A great deal of lives, capital, resources, and goodwill were sacrificed by America and her allies toward that crusade for liberty and universality, which was only the most recent iteration of a radically utopian element in American political thought going back to Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine. Alas, as it had eluded earlier generations of idealists, that century never truly arrived, and neither did the empire of liberty and prosperity that it loftily aimed to establish.

Today, the emerging reality of a multipolar world and alternate worldviews championed by the different cultural blocs led by China and Russia appears to have finally burst the bubble of American Triumphalism, proving that the ideas behind it are "not simply obsolete but absurd." This failure should have been expected since the very project the idealists had espoused was built on a pathological "savior complex" and a false truism that reflected the West's own absolutist and distorted sense of ideological and moral superiority. Samuel Huntington might have been right all along to cast doubt on the long-term salience of using ideology and doctrinal universalism as the dividing principle for international relations. His call to focus, instead, on civilizational distinction, the permanent power of culture on human action, and the need to find common ground rings especially true today. Indeed, fostering a spirit of coexistence and open dialogue among the world's great civilizational complexes is a fundamental tenet of a cultural realism.

And yet, despite such permanent shifts in the global order away from universalist dichotomies and global hegemony and toward culturalism and multi-polarity, there exists a profound disjunction between the structural realities of the international system and the often business-as-usual attitude of the North Atlantic foreign policy elites. How could one explain the astonishing levels of rigidity and continuity on the part of the "blob" and the military-industrial-congressional complex regularly pushing for more adventurism and interventionism abroad? Why would the bipartisan primacist establishment, which their allies in the mainstream media endeavor still to mask, justify such illiberal acts of aggression and attempts at empire by weaponizing the moralistic language of human rights, individual liberty, and democracy in a world increasingly awakened to arbitrary ideological framing?

There are, of course, systemic reasons behind the power and perpetuation of the blob and the endurance of primacy. The vast economic incentives of war and its instruments, institutional routinization and intransigence, stupefaction and groupthink of government bureaucracy, and the significant influence of lobbying efforts by foreign governments and other vested interest groups could each partly explain the remarkable continuity of the North Atlantic foreign policy establishment. The endless stream of funding from the defense industry, neoliberal and neoconservative foundations, as well as the government itself keeps the "blob" alive, while the general penchant for bipartisanship around preserving the status quo allows it to thrive. What is more, elite schools produce highly analytic yet narrowly focused and conventional minds that are tamed to be agreeable so as to not undermine elite consensus. This conveyor belt feeds the "blob," supplying it with the army of specialists, experts, and wonks it requires to function as a mind melding hive, while in practice safeguarding employment for the career bureaucrats for decades to come.

There is, however, a more significant psychosociological reason for the blob's remarkable persistence. When it comes to foreign policy, Western policymakers today suffer from a Manichean worldview, a caustic mindset crystalized during a decades-running Cold War with the Soviet Union. The world might have changed fundamentally with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the bipolar structure of the international system might have ended irreversibly, but the personnel -- the Baby Boomer Generation elites conducting foreign policy in the North Atlantic -- did not leave office or retire with the collapse of the USSR. They largely remain in power to this day.

Every generation is forged through a formative crisis, its experiences seen through the prism that all-encompassing ordeal. For the incumbent elites, that generational crisis was the Cold War and the omnipresent threat of nuclear annihilation. The dualistic paradigm of the international system during the U.S.-Soviet rivalry bred an entire generation to see the world through a black-and-white binary. It should come as no surprise that this era elevated the idealist strain of thought and the crusading, neo-Jacobin impulse of U.S. foreign policy (personified by Thomas Jefferson and Woodrow Wilson) to new, ever-expanding heights. Idealism prizes a nemesis and thus revels in a bipolar order.

Frozen in this Cold War mindset, the Atlanticist blob has internalized the bipolar moment that followed the Second World War, treating it as a permanent fixture and the normal state of the international system. In fact, the bipolar and unipolar periods we have undergone over the past 75 years are nothing but aberrations and historical anomalies. In truth, the reality of the international system tends toward multi-polarity -- and at long last it appears that the system is self-correcting. The North Atlantic establishment came of age during that time of exception, forming its (liberal) identity through the process of "alterity" and in a nemetic opposition to communism.

Not surprisingly then, the North Atlantic elites continue to seek adversaries to demonize and "monsters to destroy" in order to justify their moral universalism and presumed ideological superiority, doing so under the garb of a totalizing and absolutist idea of exceptionalism. After all, a nemetic zeitgeist during which ideology reigned supreme and realism was routinely discounted was tailor-made for dogmatic absolutism and moral universalism. In such a zero-sum strategic environment, it was only natural to demand totality and frame the ongoing geopolitical struggle in terms of an existential opposition over Good and Evil that would quite literally split the world in two.

Today, that same kind of Manichean thinking continues to handicap paradigmatic change in foreign policy. A false consciousness, it underpins and promotes belief in the double myths of indispensability and absolute exceptionality, suggesting that the North Atlantic bloc holds a certain monopoly on all that is good and true. It is not by chance that such pathological renderings of "exceptionalism" and "leadership" have been wielded as convenient rationale and intellectual placeholders for the ideology of empire across the North Atlantic. This sense of ingrained moral self-righteousness, coupled with an attitude that celebrates activism, utopianism, and interventionism in foreign policy, has created and reinforced a culture of strategic overextension and imperial overreach.

It is this very culture -- personified and dominated by the Baby Boomers and the blob they birthed -- that has made hawkishness ubiquitous, avoids any real reckoning as to the limits of power, and habitually belittles calls for restraint and moderation as isolationism. In truth, however, what has been the exceptional part in the delusion of absolute exceptionalism is Pax Americana, liberal hegemony, and the hubris that animates them having gone uncontested and unchecked for so long. That confrontation could begin in earnest by directly challenging the Boomer blob itself -- and by propagating a counter-elite offering a starkly different worldview.

Achieving such a genuine paradigm shift demands a generational sea-change, to retire the old blob and make a better one in its place. It is about time for the old establishment to forgo its reign, allowing a new younger cohort from among the Millennial and post-Millennial generations to advance into leadership roles. The Millennials, especially, are now the largest generation of eligible voters (overtaking the Baby Boomers) as well as the first generation not habituated by the Cold War; in fact, many of them grew up during the "unipolar moment" of American hegemony. Hence, their generational identity is not built around a dualistic alterity. Free from obsessive fixation on ideological supremacy, most among them reject total global dominance as both unattainable and undesirable.

Instead, their worldview is shaped by an entirely different set of experiences and disappointments. Their generational crisis was brought on by a series of catastrophic interventions and endless wars around the world -- chief among them the debacles in Afghanistan and Iraq and the toppling of Libya's Gaddafi -- punctuated by repeated onslaughts of financial recessions and domestic strife. The atmosphere of uncertainty, instability, and general chaos has bred discontent, turning many Millennials into pragmatic realists who are disenchanted with the system, critical of the pontificating establishment, and naturally skeptical of lofty ideals and utopian doctrines.

In short, this is not an absolutist and complacent generation of idealists, but one steeped in realism and a certain perspectivism that has internalized the inherent relativity of both power and truth. Most witnessed the dangers of overreach, hubris, and a moralized foreign policy, so they are actively self-reflective, circumspect, and restrained. As a generation, they appear to be less the moralist and the global activist and more prudent, level-headed, and temperamentally conservative -- developing a keen appreciation for realpolitik, sovereignty, and national interest. Their preference for a non-ideological approach in foreign policy suggests that once in power, they will be less antagonistic and more tolerant of rival powers and accepting of pluralism in the international system. That openness to civilizational distinction and global cultural pluralism also implies that future Millennial statesmen will subscribe to a more humble, less grandiose, and narrower definition of interest that focuses on securing core objectives -- i.e., preserving national security and recognizing spheres of influence.

Reforming and rehabilitating the U.S. foreign policy establishment will require more than policy prescriptions and comprehensive reports: it needs generational change. To transform and finally "rein in" North Atlantic foreign policy, our task today must be to facilitate and expedite this shift. Once that occurs, the incoming Millennials should be better positioned to discard the deep-seated and routinized ideology of empire, supplanting it with a greater emphasis on partnership that is driven by mutual interests and a general commitment to sharing the globe with the world's other great cultures.

This new approach calls for America to lead by the power of its example, exhibiting the benefits of liberty and a constitutional republic at home, without forcibly imposing those values abroad. Such an outlook means abandoning the coercive regime change agendas and the corrosive projects of nation-building and democracy promotion. In this new multipolar world, America would be an able, dynamic, and equal participant in ensuring sustainable peace side-by-side the world's other great powers, acting as "a normal country in a normal time." Reflecting the spirit of republican governance authentically is far more pertinent now and salutary for the future of the North Atlantic peoples than is promulgating the utopian image of a shining city on a hill.

Arta Moeini is research director at the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy and a postdoc fellow at the Center for the Study of Statesmanship. Dr. Moeini's latest project advances a theory of cultural realism as a cornerstone to a new understanding of foreign policy.

The Institute for Peace and Diplomacy will be co-sponsoring "The Future of Grand Strategy in the Post-COVID World," with TAC, tonight at 6 p.m. ET. Register for free here .

[Sep 17, 2020] A General of the Ukrainian Armed Forces Admitted That Poroshenko Executes America's Orders

Notable quotes:
"... The former Deputy Chief of the General Staff of the UAF Yury Dumansky stated on the air of the " NewsOne " TV channel that Kiev is guided by the decisions of the US concerning the question of resolving the conflict in Donbass ..."
Apr 11, 2018 | www.stalkerzone.org
Translated by Ollie Richardson & Angelina Siard 21:40:32 11/04/2018 ria.ru

The former Deputy Chief of the General Staff of the UAF Yury Dumansky stated on the air of the " NewsOne " TV channel that Kiev is guided by the decisions of the US concerning the question of resolving the conflict in Donbass.

The demands of the President Petro Poroshenko concerning the deployment of UN peacekeepers in the east of the country will directly be agreed with the special representative of the US State Department for Ukraine Kurt Volker , stressed Dumansky.

"We are in the conditions of the negotiation process. Not we, Ukraine, but a third external player who presents America – Volker – decides for us. And he solves the problem with the Russian Federation at the level of negotiations," noted the Lieutenant-General.

And it is only after, according to the military, that Poroshenko undertakes measures coordinated with the US for the solving of the conflict in Donbass.

"And then the corresponding processes are launched -- what we observe directly -- the president's trips to Turkey, Germany where one of the questions concerning solving this conflict are being raised," noted Dumansky.

Kiev in April, 2014, started a military operation against the self-proclaimed LPR and the DPR, which declared their independence after a coup d'etat in Ukraine.

The issue of solving the situation in Donbass is discussed also during contact group meetings in Minsk, which since September, 2014, adopted already three documents regulating steps to de-escalate the conflict. However, firefights between the parties of the conflict still continue.

Now the Ukrainian authorities try to obtain the introduction of UN peacekeepers in the East of Ukraine. According to Kiev, "blue helmets" should be deployed on all the territory of Donbass up to the border with Russia.

Vladimir Putin supported the idea of sending a peacekeeping mission to the East of Ukraine. However, according to him, their task includes only ensuring the security of OSCE staff, and they have to be based on the contact line.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/w_3ntz01TDc?version=3&rel=1&fs=1&autohide=2&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&wmode=transparent

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[Sep 17, 2020] FBI director rehashes 2016 claims but provides no evidence

Notable quotes:
"... The CIA was founded by the same fascists who tried to enlist Smedley Butler to overthrow FDR. During the post-war period, they smuggled their ideological brethren out of Germany with operation Paperclip. Their founding fathers included Prescott Bush, a Nazi, whose son and grandson went on to become US Presidents. ..."
Sep 17, 2020 | www.rt.com

apothqowejh 4 hours ago 17 Sep, 2020 04:31 PM

The CIA was founded by the same fascists who tried to enlist Smedley Butler to overthrow FDR. During the post-war period, they smuggled their ideological brethren out of Germany with operation Paperclip. Their founding fathers included Prescott Bush, a Nazi, whose son and grandson went on to become US Presidents.

They have never stopped hating Russia, nor have they ever stopped lying to the American Public.

[Sep 17, 2020] Lies in the Navalny case

Was it BZ toxin again: Lavrov- Swiss lab says 'BZ toxin' used in Salisbury, not produced in Russia, was in US & UK service
Notable quotes:
"... German Chancellor Angela Merkel personally announced at a press conference last week that a chemical weapons laboratory of the Bundeswehr (Armed Forces) had proved "beyond doubt" that Navalny was the victim of an attack using the Novichok nerve agent. She called on the Russian government to answer "very serious questions." ..."
"... At a special session of the Parliamentary Control Committee, which meets in secret, representatives of the German government and the secret services left no doubt, according to media reports, that the poisoning of Navalny had been carried out by Russian state authorities, with the approval of the Russian leadership. The poison was said to be a variant of the warfare agent -- one even more dangerous than that used in the Skripal case in Britain. It purportedly could enter the body simply through inhalation, and its production and use required skills possessed only by a state actor. ..."
"... Excerpt of an article by Peter Schwarz published by wsws.org ..."
Sep 10, 2020 | www.defenddemocracy.press

The relationship between Germany and Russia has reached its lowest point since Berlin supported the pro-Western coup in Ukraine six years ago and Russia subsequently annexed the Crimean Peninsula.

The German government is openly accusing the Russian state of poisoning opposition politician Alexei Navalny, who is currently in Berlin's Charité Clinic. He reportedly awoke from a coma on Monday.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel personally announced at a press conference last week that a chemical weapons laboratory of the Bundeswehr (Armed Forces) had proved "beyond doubt" that Navalny was the victim of an attack using the Novichok nerve agent. She called on the Russian government to answer "very serious questions."

At a special session of the Parliamentary Control Committee, which meets in secret, representatives of the German government and the secret services left no doubt, according to media reports, that the poisoning of Navalny had been carried out by Russian state authorities, with the approval of the Russian leadership. The poison was said to be a variant of the warfare agent -- one even more dangerous than that used in the Skripal case in Britain. It purportedly could enter the body simply through inhalation, and its production and use required skills possessed only by a state actor.

Germany and the European Union are threatening Russia with sanctions. The German government has even questioned the completion of the almost finished Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline, which it had categorically defended against pressure from the US and several Eastern European states.

The German media has gone into propaganda mode, repeating the accusations against Russian President Vladimir Putin with a thousand variations. Seventy-nine years after Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union, which claimed more than 25 million lives, German journalists and politicians, in editorials, commentaries and on talk shows, speak with the arrogance of people who are already planning the next military campaign against Moscow.

Anyone who expresses doubts or contradicts the official narrative is branded a "conspiracy theorist." This is what happened to Left Party parliamentarian Sevim Dagdelen, among others, on Sunday evening's "Anne Will" talk show. The Christian Democratic Union (CDU) foreign policy expert Norbert Röttgen, the head of the Munich Security Conference Wolfang Ischinger and former Green Party Environment Minister Jürgen Trittin sought to outstrip one another in their accusations against the Russian government. When Dagdelen gently pointed out that, so far, no evidence whatsoever has been presented identifying the perpetrators, she was accused of "playing games of confusion" and "encouraging unspeakable conspiracy theories."

Read also: Russian Defense Minister held talks with Iran's Chief of Staff

The Russian government denies any responsibility in the Navalny case. It questions whether Navalny was poisoned at all and has called on the German government to "show its cards" and present evidence. Berlin, according to Moscow, is bluffing for dirty political reasons.

Contradictory and implausible

Evidence of the involvement of the Russian state is as contradictory as it is implausible.

For example, the German authorities have so far published no information or handed evidence to Russian investigators identifying the chemical with which Navalny was poisoned. Novichok is merely a generic term for several families of warfare agents.

No explanation has been given as to why no one else showed signs of poisoning from a nerve agent that is fatal even in the tiniest amounts, if touched or inhaled. Navalny had had contact with numerous people between the time he boarded the airplane on which he fainted, his entering the clinic in Omsk where he was first treated, and his transfer to the Charité hospital in Berlin.

This is only one of many unexplained anomalies in the German government's official story. Career diplomat Frank Elbe, who headed the office of German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher for five years and negotiated the Convention on the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons as head of the German delegation in Geneva from 1983 to 1986, wrote on Facebook on Friday: "I am surprised that the Federal Ministry of Defence concludes that the nerve agent Novichok was used against Navalny."

Novichok, he wrote, belongs "to the group of super-toxic lethal substances that cause immediate death." It made no sense, he argued, to modify a nerve poison that was supposed to kill instantly in such a way that it did not kill, but left traces behind allowing its identification as a nerve agent.

There was something strange about this case, Elbe said. "Either the perpetrators -- whoever they might be -- had a political interest in pointing to the use of nerve gas, or foreign laboratories were jumping to conclusions that are in line with the current general negative attitude towards Russia."

The assertion that only state actors can handle Novichok is also demonstrably false. The poison was sold in the 1990s for small sums of money to Western secret services and economic criminals, and the latter made use of it. For example, in 1995, the Russian banker Ivan Kiwelidi and his secretary were poisoned with it. The chemist Leonid Rink confessed at the time in court that he had sold quantities to criminals sufficient to kill hundreds of people. Since the binary poisons are very stable, they can last for decades.

Read also: UK psyops bigwig pushed plan to 'mine Sevastopol Bay' during 2014 Crimea crisis – leaked documents

The Navalny case is not the reason, but the pretext for a new stage in the escalation of German great power politics and militarism. The media hysteria over Navalny is reminiscent of the Ukrainian crisis of 2014, when the German press glorified a coup d'état carried out by armed fascist militias as a "democratic revolution."

Social Democrat Frank-Walter Steinmeier, then foreign minister and now German president, personally travelled to Kiev to persuade the pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych, to resign.

He also met with the fascist politician Oleh Tyahnybok, whose Swoboda Party glorifies Nazi collaborators from World War II. Yanukovych's successor, Petro Poroshenko, one of the country's richest oligarchs, was even more corrupt than his predecessor. He terrorised his opponents with fascist militias, such as the infamous Azov regiment. But he brought Ukraine into NATO's sphere of influence, which was the real purpose of the coup.

In the weeks before the Ukrainian coup, leading German politicians (including then-President Joachim Gauck and Steinmeier) had announced a far-reaching reorientation of German foreign policy. The country was too big "to comment on world politics from the sidelines," they declared. Germany had to defend its global interests, including by military means.

NATO marched steadily eastward into Eastern Europe, breaking the agreements made at the time of German reunification in 1990. For the first time since 1945, German soldiers today patrol the border with Russia. With Ukraine's shift into the Western camp, Belarus is the only remaining buffer country between Russia and NATO.

Berlin now sees the protests against the Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko as an opportunity to remove this hurdle as well. Unlike in Ukraine, where anti-Russian nationalists exerted considerable influence, especially in the west of the country, such forces are weaker in Belarus, where the majority speaks Russian. The working class is playing a greater role in the resistance to the Lukashenko regime than it did in Ukraine. But Berlin is making targeted efforts to steer the movement in a pro-Western direction. Forces that appeal for Western support, such as the presidential candidate Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, are being promoted.

Read also: Europe - "Green" Alliance with Russia or experimental field for genetic Monsters? Dispute over Nord Stream 2

The dispute over the construction of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, whose discontinuation is being demanded by more and more German politicians, must also be seen in this context. It was a strategic project from the very beginning.

The natural gas pipeline, which will double the capacity of Nord Stream 1, which began operations in 2011, will make Germany independent of the pipelines that run through Ukraine, Poland and Belarus. These countries not only earn transit fees from the pipelines but have also used then as a political lever.

With a total capacity of 110 billion cubic metres per year, Nord Stream 1 and 2 together would carry almost all of Germany's annual gas imports. However, the gas is also to be transported from the German Baltic Sea coast to other countries.

In addition to Russia's Gazprom, German, Austrian, French and Dutch energy companies are participating in the financing of the project, which will cost almost €10 billion. The chairman of the board of directors is former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder (Social Democratic Party), who is a friend of President Putin.

Nord Stream 2 is meeting with fierce opposition in Eastern Europe and the US. These countries fear a strategic alliance between Berlin and Moscow. In December of last year, the US Congress passed a law imposing severe sanctions on companies involved in the construction of the pipeline -- an unprecedented move against nominal allies. The nearly completed construction came to a standstill because the company operating the special ship for laying the pipes withdrew. Berlin and Moscow protested vehemently against the US sanctions and agreed to continue construction with Russian ships, which, however, will not be available until next year at the earliest.

Excerpt of an article by Peter Schwarz published by wsws.org

[Sep 17, 2020] 'No evidence'- EU Parliament using Navalny's alleged poisoning to push for sanctions halt Nord Stream project German MEP

Germany in the past played important role is promoting Yushchenko's Poisoning false flag. Nothing new here.
If we ask "que bono?". it clearly looks like the USA ears protrude from the whole German part of Navalny poisoning saga.
Sep 17, 2020 | www.rt.com

That's according to Maximilian Krah, a member of the European Parliament from the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party. The "obscure" case involving the alleged poisoning of Navalny has been used by the EU establishment to launch another round of Moscow-bashing, he says.

The lawmaker explained that his fellow MEPs had not, in fact, seen a single piece of evidence suggesting the Russian government might have had a hand in what happened to Navalny.

We don't have the evidence... none of the members of parliament who today voted in favor of sanctions has seen any evidence.

Krah said it was "unrealistic" to expect that Navalny's case would not be politicized, arguing that it was "absolutely clear" it was being used to push an anti-Moscow agenda.

On Thursday morning, the EU Parliament passed a resolution calling on member states to "isolate Russia in international forums," to "halt the Nord Stream 2 project" and to prioritize the approval of another round of sanctions against Moscow.

The MEP also expressed skepticism about the prospects of the broader public ever getting to see any evidence linking the opposition figure's sudden illness to Russian foul play.

"Evidence will only get published and provided to Russia if there is public pressure," he said, adding that he does not see any such pressure building anywhere in the EU. Until that changes, Berlin is likely to continue demanding "answers" from Moscow while holding off on requests by Russian for cooperation, Krah believes.

ALSO ON RT.COM European Parliament calls for international probe into alleged Navalny poisoning & suspension of Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline

The German MEP also weighed in on the fate of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, suggesting that the alleged poisoning could work to Washington's benefit, given that the White House has been seeking to undermine the project, liking Russian gas to Germany, for months. Krah said it was "clear from the beginning" that the US would try to use the situation to scupper the project, which he says would make Germany "more independent from American influence."

The EU resolution, which is not legally binding but acts as an advisory for the bloc's leaders, was supported by 532 MEPs and opposed by 84, while 72 abstained. Fresh sanctions against Russia have been mulled by both the EU and US since news about Navalny's alleged poisoning was made public.

ALSO ON RT.COM Berlin struggles to answer RT's question on fate of mysterious Navalny aide who left Russia for Germany without being questioned

Moscow has repeatedly expressed its readiness to cooperate with Germany in the probe into the incident, while stressing that the Russian medics who first treated Navalny when he fell ill found no traces of any poison in his body. The Kremlin has also repeatedly approached Berlin for data possessed by the German side, but has so far received none.

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Dachaguy 8 hours ago 17 Sep, 2020 02:02 PM

Of course, the investigation is incomplete, but that doesn't stop the EU from levying "justice." We've seen this before in the Downing Street Memos, where the facts were, "being fixed around the policy. " Millions of innocent people died as a result. When will people learn?
Jeff_P 4 hours ago 17 Sep, 2020 06:01 PM
There should be an international commission to look into this false flag. It should be comprised of Russia and Germany, of course, but no other NATO or European countries and no US vassal states other than Germany. Other members could be Cuba, China, Venezuela, and maybe India. And, of course, the US playbook of assignment of guilt without the benefit of evidence and the exacting of penalties without proving guilt won't fly. Russia might just tell Europe to go FO and leave PACE and the other organizations that it supports but which insist on abusing it.
perikleous 6 hours ago 17 Sep, 2020 04:09 PM
If Russia was determined they would say you cannot delay NSII or we cut the Ukraine pipeline as well, its all or none! Tick Tock Tick Tok, winter is coming soon! Hopefully the Covid 19 won't delay the fuel ships your relying on or the workers who procure the fuel, you know a 2nd wave... is "Highly Likely" and its taking over in the rural areas where the fuel comes from! Present evidence to a poisoning directed by either the fuel company or the gov't and we will continue, or just tell your "handlers" go ***, because I do not recall the US severing weapons sales to Saudi Arabia after Admission to them Severing the head off of (J. Koshoggei) because the US profits/jobs are bigger than one WaPo Journalists life! Hypocracy in action!
Shelbouy 6 hours ago 17 Sep, 2020 03:46 PM
Germany has offered to help pay for the construction of two LNG terminals in Germany to the tune of 1 billion plus to the US. to receive US LNG. The US in turn has said then they would not interfere with the completion of Nord Stream 2 if this were to take place. I am suggesting that Germany then would have 30% cheaper Russian gas than US LNG, blend these two prices, hi cost US LNG and low cost Russian gas of Nord Stream 2, and sell to the EU consumers at a price which would likely be higher than the current rate today, and who would be the wiser, and who would consumers blame when the price of gas goes up instead of down. This may, at least temporarily, appease the US while at the same time ensure the completion of the cheaper Russian supply line, and prevent the diversion of Russian gas to other customer nations like China, and Germany laughs all the way to the bank. This is only speculation on my part because I do not know if it would work that way or not. If it did then Germany would have their cake and eat it. The offer of Germany to the US is however, a fact. The reasons behind this offer are speculative. After all, it's really all about money anyway.
perikleous Shelbouy 5 hours ago 17 Sep, 2020 04:16 PM
The US would demand a contract/commitment for the fuel based on your yearly usage currently, if you re neg, they still bill you for it! Then its handled in court while your bank accounts are frozen and none of the US debt to you is paid until this is resolved. You may win the hearing/court but the losses from not having access to that money will cost way more!
HimandI 4 hours ago 17 Sep, 2020 05:47 PM
Just more proof that the EU rulers are bought and paid prostitutes.
Jayeshkumar 6 minutes ago 17 Sep, 2020 10:03 PM
May be EU is indirectly suggesting to use the 2nd Pipeline to be used Exclusively for Transporting the Hydrogen, in the Future!
Congozebilu 2 hours ago 17 Sep, 2020 08:06 PM
From the first minute this Navalny story broke I knew it was aimed at Nordstream. Everyone who understands geopolitics and also US desperation to sell "freedom gas" knows that Nordstream was the intended target this Navalny clown show.
ivoivo 1 hour ago 17 Sep, 2020 09:00 PM
apparently there are evidence found in a trash can in his hotel room in omsk, they poisoned him with novichock in a water they gave it to him and discard a paper cup in a trash can, standard kremlins procedure, isn't it, what is happening to world intelligence, russians can't kill some dude that is actually not even important and americans can't stop russian hackers in meddling in us election

[Sep 16, 2020] The Interface between Propaganda and War

Sep 16, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

snake , Sep 15 2020 22:09 utc | 54

Karlof 1 @ 32 attacks vk @4-- Your attempt to credit Karl Popper with the concept of public opinion is just as false as the stories b wrote about. Click here for a history of that concept. by: karlof1 | Sep 15 2020 17:04 utc | 32


What I like about what vk@ 4 said is that he has given this list a beginning to not only understand our plight as members of the governed classes, but also to analyze our experience with this stuff and to develop a set of rules that can allow us to defend our minds against being controlled by invisible hands of mind control.

can we on this list develop a defensive strategy and use it to teach the governed masses?

Around the globe and throughout history it can be observed that the oligarchs invent a collection of values and stuff them into structures they call nation states, culture, institutions and journalist are all designed to, and rewarded for supporting the values, while media is charged to keep the propaganda circulating.

The H&C propaganda model pulls together from across the political communications literature the variety of factors which essentially constrain journalist and means that they don't actually play the independent autonomous and watchdog role that we expect them to in a democracy ae Herman Chromsky talk about the importance oe size concentration ownership oe mainstream media the way in w/e ownership of most oe media outlets w/people go to for their information is essentially associated w/very large conglomerates w/h overlapping interests and overlapping interests with government and this produces a large structural constraint oe way the media operates.

The Interface between Propaganda and War: Prof.
The Propaganda Model: The filters (Herman & Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent, the political economy of the mass media).

[Sep 16, 2020] Concerns about viability of democracy

Sep 16, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

xrxs , 38 minutes ago

Sen. Chris Murphy said this the other day: "I have a real belief that democracy is unnatural. We don't run anything important in our lives by democratic vote other than our government. Democracy is so unnatural that it's illogical to think it would be permanent. It will fall apart at some point, and maybe that point isn't now, but maybe it is."

[Sep 16, 2020] So You Want To Overthrow The State: Ten Questions For Aspiring Color Revolutionaries

Sep 16, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

1. Do I have the facts straight?

Karl Marx said that " Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it ." I doubt very much that you will know which changes you need to make if you don't have a very good idea about your starting point. In his book Factfulness and in his many excellent online presentations, the late Swedish Professor of International Health Hans Rosling identifies a lot of the ways things have gotten better , especially for the world's poorest.

Suppose, for example, that you encounter the name " Milton Friedman ," perhaps in connection with lamented "neoliberalism" and maybe in connection with human rights abuses perpetrated by the brutal Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. Friedman has been denounced as the "father of global misery," and his reputation has taken another beating in the wake of the fiftieth anniversary of his 1970 New York Times Magazine essay " The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits ," which I suspect most people haven't read past its title. But what happened during "The Age of Milton Friedman," as the economist Andrei Shleifer asked in a 2009 article ? Shleifer points out that "Between 1980 and 2005, as the world embraced free market policies, living standards rose sharply, while life expectancy, educational attainment, and democracy improved and absolute poverty declined." Things have never been so good, and they are getting better , especially for the world's poor.

In 2008, there was a bit of controversy over the establishment of the Milton Friedman Institute at the University of Chicago, which operates today as the Becker Friedman Institute (it is also named for Friedman's fellow Chicago economist Gary Becker ). In a blistering reply to a protest letter signed by a group of faculty members at the University of Chicago, the economist John Cochrane wrote, "If you start with the premise that the last 40 or so years, including the fall of communism, and the opening of China and India are 'negative for much of the world's population,' you just don't have any business being a social scientist. You don't stand a chance of contributing something serious to the problems that we actually do face." Nor, might I add, do you stand much of a chance of concocting a revolutionary program that will actually help the people you're trying to lead.

2. What makes me so sure I won't replace the existing regime with something far worse?

I might hesitate to push the aforementioned button because while the world we actually inhabit is far from perfect, it's not at all clear that deleting the state overnight wouldn't mean civilization's wholesale and maybe even perpetual collapse. At the very least, I would want to think long and hard about it. The explicit mention of Frantz Fanon and Che Guevara in the course description suggest that students will be approaching revolutionary ideas from the left. They should look at the results of populist revolutions in 20th century Latin America, Africa, and Asia. The blood of many millions starved and slaughtered in efforts to "forge a better society" cries out against socialism and communism, and macroeconomic populism in Latin America has been disastrous . As people have pointed out when told that "democratic socialists" aren't trying to turn their countries into Venezuela, Venezuelans weren't trying to turn their country into Venezuela when they embraced Hugo Chavez. I wonder why we should expect WLU's aspiring revolutionaries to succeed where so many others have failed.

3. Is my revolutionary program just a bunch of platitudes with which no decent person would disagree?

In 2019, Kristian Niemietz of London's Institute of Economic Affairs published a useful volume titled Socialism: The Failed Idea That Never Dies , which you can download for $0 from IEA . He notes a tendency for socialists and neo-socialists to pitch their programs almost exclusively in terms of their hoped-for results rather than in terms of the operation of concrete social processes they hope to set in motion (on this I paraphrase my intellectual hero Thomas Sowell ).

Apply a test proposed a long time ago by the economist William Easterly: can you imagine anyone seriously objecting to what you're saying? If not, then you probably aren't saying anything substantive. Can you imagine someone saying "I hate the idea of the world's poor having better food, clothing, shelter, and medical care" or "It would be a very bad thing if more people were literate?" If not, then it's likely that your revolutionary program is a tissue of platitudes and empty promises. That's not to say it won't work politically–God knows, nothing sells better on election day than platitudes and empty promises–but you shouldn't think you're saying anything profound if all you're saying is something obvious like "It would be nice if more people had access to clean, drinkable water."

... ... ...

7. How has it worked the other times it has been tried?

Are you considering "land reform," whether land expropriation and redistribution, or straight up collectivization? Satellite images of the effects of land reform in Zimbabwe should make you think twice.

Years before the Russian Revolution, Eugene Richter predicted with eerie prescience what would happen in a socialist society in his short book Pictures of the Socialistic Future ( which you can download for $0 here ). Bryan Caplan, who wrote the foreword for that edition of Pictures and who put together the online " Museum of Communism ," points out the distressing regularity with which communists go from "bleeding heart" to "mailed fist." It doesn't take long for communist regimes to go from establishing a workers' paradise to shooting people who try to leave. Consider whether or not the brutality and mass murder of communist regimes is a feature of the system rather than a bug. Hugo Chavez and Che Guevara both expressed bleeding hearts with their words but used a mailed fist in practice (I've written before that "irony" is denouncing Milton Friedman for the crimes of Augusto Pinochet while wearing a Che Guevara t-shirt. Pinochet was a murderous thug. Guevara was, too). Caplan points to pages 105 and 106 of Four Men: Living the Revolution: An Oral History of Contemporary Cuba . On page 105, Lazaro Benedi Rodriguez's heart is bleeding for the illiterate. On page 106, he's "advis(ing) Fidel to have an incinerator dug about 40 or 50 meters deep, and every time one of these obstinate cases came up, to drop the culprit in the incinerator, douse him with gasoline, and set him on fire."

... ... ...

9. What will I do with people who aren't willing to go along with my revolution?

Walter Williams once said that he doesn't mind if communists want to be communists. He minds that they want him to be a communist, too. Would you allow people to try capitalist experiments in your socialist paradise? Or socialist experiments in your capitalist paradise (Families, incidentally, are socialist enterprises that run by the principle "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.")? Am I willing to allow dissenters to advocate my overthrow, or do I need to crush dissent and control the minds of the masses in order for my revolution to work? Am I willing to allow people to leave, or will I need to build a wall to keep people in?

10. Am I letting myself off the hook for questions 1-9 and giving myself too much credit for passion and sincerity?

The philosopher David Schmidtz has said that if your best argument is that your heart is in the right place, then your heart is most definitely not in the right place. Consider this quote from Edmund Burke and ask whether or not it leads you to revise your revolutionary plans:

"A conscientious man would be cautious how he dealt in blood. He would feel some apprehension at being called to a tremendous account for engaging in so deep a play, without any sort of knowledge of the game. It is no excuse for presumptuous ignorance, that it is directed by insolent passion. The poorest being that crawls on earth, contending to save itself from injustice and oppression is an object respectable in the eyes of God and man. But I cannot conceive any existence under heaven (which, in the depths of its wisdom, tolerates all sorts of things) that is more truly odious and disgusting, than an impotent helpless creature, without civil wisdom or military skill, without a consciousness of any other qualification for power but his servility to it, bloated with pride and arrogance, calling for battles which he is not to fight, contending for a violent dominion which he can never exercise, and satisfied to be himself mean and miserable, in order to render others contemptible and wretched." (Emphasis added).

[Sep 14, 2020] While We're at It by R. R. Reno

Notable quotes:
"... On the strength of Adrian Vermeule's review last month (" Liturgy of Liberalism ," January 2017), I picked up Ryszard Legutko's The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies . Legutko sees many parallels between the communism that dominated the Poland of his youth and the political-social outlook now treated as obligatory by Eurocrats and dominant in America, which he calls "[neo]liberal democracy." ..."
"... One parallel struck me as especially important: "Communism and [neo]liberal democracy are related by a similarly paradoxical approach to politics: both promised to reduce the role of politics in human life, yet induced politicization on a scale unknown in previous history." We're aware of the totalitarian dimension of communism. But liberalism? Isn't it supposed to be neutral with respect to substantive outlooks, endorsing only the constitutional and legal frameworks for free and fair political debate? Actually, no. Liberals always assert that liberalism is the view of politics, society, and morality "most adequate of and for modern times." ..."
"... [Neo]Liberalism, Legutko points out, is committed to dualism, not pluralism. He gives the example of Isaiah Berlin, who made a great deal out of the importance of the pluralism of the liberal spirit. Yet "Berlin himself, a superbly educated man, knew very well and admitted quite frankly that the most important and most valuable fruits of Western philosophy were monistic in nature." This means that liberalism, as Berlin defines it, must classify nearly the entire history of Western thought (and that of other cultures as well) as "nonliberal." Thus, "the effect of this supposed liberal pluralism" is not a welcoming, open society in which a wide range of substantive thought flourishes, but "a gigantic purge of Western philosophy, bringing an inevitable degradation of the human mind." ..."
"... The purge mentality has a political dimension. Since 1989, European politics has shifted away from a left vs. right framework toward "mainstream" vs. "extremist." This is a telling feature of [neo]liberal democracy as an ideology. "The tricky side of 'mainstream' politics is that it does not tolerate any political 'tributaries' and denies that they should have any legitimate existence. Those outside the mainstream are believed to be either mavericks and as such not deserving to be treated seriously, or fascists who should be politically eliminated." ..."
"... Lumpenproletariat ..."
"... Legutko speaks of "lumpenintellectuals." These are the professors and journalists who buttress the status quo by rehearsing ideological catechisms and exposing heretics. We certainly have a lumpenintelligentsia ..."
"... I regularly read two lumpenintellectuals in order to understand the orthodoxies of our political mainstream: Tom Friedman over at the New York Times and Bret Stephens at the Wall Street Journal . The former is a cheerleader for today's globalist orthodoxies, complete with ritual expressions of misgivings. The latter eagerly plays the role of Leninist enforcer of those orthodoxies ..."
"... Weekly Standard ..."
"... The Weekly Standard ..."
Sep 14, 2020 | www.firstthings.com

♦ Boys and girls are different. There, I've said it, a heresy of our time. We're not supposed to suggest that a woman shouldn't fight in combat, or that an athletic girl doesn't have a right to play on the boys' football team -- or that a young woman doesn't run a greater risk than a young man when binge drinking. We are not supposed to reject the conceit that the sexes are interchangeable, and therefore a man can become a "woman" and use the ladies' bathroom.

Male and female God created us. I commend this heresy to readers. Remind people that boys in girls' bathrooms put girls at risk, and that Obergefell is a grotesque distortion of the Constitution. True -- and don't miss the opportunity to say, in public, that men and women are different. This is the deepest reason why gender ideology is perverse. As Peter Hitchens observes in this issue (" The Fantasy of Addiction "), there's a great liberation that comes when, against the spirit of the age, one blurts out what one knows to be true.

♦ Great Britain recently announced regulatory approval for scientists to introduce third-party DNA into the reproductive process. The technological innovation that allows for interventions into the most fundamental dimensions of reproduction and human identity is sure to accelerate. Which is a good reason for incoming President Trump to revive the President's Council on Bioethics. (It existed under President Obama, but was told to do and say nothing.) We need sober reflection on the coming revolution in reproductive technology. Trump should appoint Princeton professor Robert P. George to head the Bioethics Commission. He has the expertise in legal and moral philosophy, and he knows what's at stake. (See " Gnostic Liberalism ," December 2016.)

♦ On the strength of Adrian Vermeule's review last month (" Liturgy of Liberalism ," January 2017), I picked up Ryszard Legutko's The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies . Legutko sees many parallels between the communism that dominated the Poland of his youth and the political-social outlook now treated as obligatory by Eurocrats and dominant in America, which he calls "[neo]liberal democracy."

One parallel struck me as especially important: "Communism and [neo]liberal democracy are related by a similarly paradoxical approach to politics: both promised to reduce the role of politics in human life, yet induced politicization on a scale unknown in previous history." We're aware of the totalitarian dimension of communism. But liberalism? Isn't it supposed to be neutral with respect to substantive outlooks, endorsing only the constitutional and legal frameworks for free and fair political debate? Actually, no. Liberals always assert that liberalism is the view of politics, society, and morality "most adequate of and for modern times."

This gives [neo]liberalism a partisan spirit all the more powerful because it is denied.

Although such words as "dialogue" and "pluralism" appear among its favorite motifs, as do "tolerance" and other similarly hospitable notions, this overtly generous rhetorical orchestration covers up something entirely different. In its essence, liberalism is unabashedly aggressive because it is determined to hunt down all nonliberal agents and ideas, which it treats as a threat to itself and to humanity.

[Neo]Liberalism, Legutko points out, is committed to dualism, not pluralism. He gives the example of Isaiah Berlin, who made a great deal out of the importance of the pluralism of the liberal spirit. Yet "Berlin himself, a superbly educated man, knew very well and admitted quite frankly that the most important and most valuable fruits of Western philosophy were monistic in nature." This means that liberalism, as Berlin defines it, must classify nearly the entire history of Western thought (and that of other cultures as well) as "nonliberal." Thus, "the effect of this supposed liberal pluralism" is not a welcoming, open society in which a wide range of substantive thought flourishes, but "a gigantic purge of Western philosophy, bringing an inevitable degradation of the human mind."

♦ The purge mentality has a political dimension. Since 1989, European politics has shifted away from a left vs. right framework toward "mainstream" vs. "extremist." This is a telling feature of [neo]liberal democracy as an ideology. "The tricky side of 'mainstream' politics is that it does not tolerate any political 'tributaries' and denies that they should have any legitimate existence. Those outside the mainstream are believed to be either mavericks and as such not deserving to be treated seriously, or fascists who should be politically eliminated."

♦ Karl Marx coined the term Lumpenproletariat . Lumpen means "rag" in German, and its colloquial meanings include someone who is down-and-out. According to Marx, this underclass has counter-revolutionary tendencies. These people can be riled up by demagogues and deployed in street gangs to stymie the efforts of the true proletariat to topple the dominant class.

Legutko speaks of "lumpenintellectuals." These are the professors and journalists who buttress the status quo by rehearsing ideological catechisms and exposing heretics. We certainly have a lumpenintelligentsia , left and right: tenured professors, columnists, think tank apparatchiks, and human resources directors.

♦ I regularly read two lumpenintellectuals in order to understand the orthodoxies of our political mainstream: Tom Friedman over at the New York Times and Bret Stephens at the Wall Street Journal . The former is a cheerleader for today's globalist orthodoxies, complete with ritual expressions of misgivings. The latter eagerly plays the role of Leninist enforcer of those orthodoxies.

♦ Bill Kristol recently stepped down as day-to-day editor at the Weekly Standard . .... As he put it with characteristic humor, "Here at The Weekly Standard , we've always been for regime change."...

[Sep 14, 2020] Russia -- The Revolt of "Net Hamsters" by by Alexey Sidorenko

Notable quotes:
"... This post is part of our special coverage Russia Elections 2011 . ..."
"... This post is part of our special coverage Russia Elections 2011 . ..."
Dec 05, 2011 | globalvoices.org

This post is part of our special coverage Russia Elections 2011 .

The day after the elections , Russians got together to rally against election fraud. Even though the United Russia party, according to preliminary results, is to lose some 77 seats compared to the previous Duma, most of the protesters considered the election to be neither fair, nor free (see our previous reports on the web crackdown and massive violation reports).

After the polls closed on Dec. 4, Solidarnost movement invited protesters to Chistye Prudy metro station in Moscow, while the Communists, also unhappy with the election results, organized their rally at Pushkinskaya square. Solidarnost movement represenatives, most of whom have no political arena except street actions and the blogosphere, managed to bring thousands of people together (while crowd estimates vary significantly, the most balanced assessment seems to be from 8,000 to 10,000 people).

Chistye Prudy

People began gathering for the Solidarnost event at around 19:00 MSK. Georgiy Alburov posted a picture of the line to the site of the rally:

Line to the Chistye Prudy rally. Photo by Georgiy Alburov

Line to the Chistye Prudy rally. Photo by Georgiy Alburov

British journalist Shaun Walker tweeted [ru]:

Thousands out in cold/rain baying for free elections, Putin to be sent to prison. Never seen anything on this scale. Definite change of mood

The overall coverage was chaotic as the mobile Internet stopped working in the area and people couldn't upload videos and pictures. LiveJournal kept the chronology of the events here [ru].

Only later in the evening people were able to upload videos [ru] from the rally and particularly the speech [ru] by Alexey Navalny, who was among the most popular politicians of the event. His speech probably best describes the essence of the current events:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/Cd_yYhqU_SA?feature=oembed

Alexey Navalny shouted:

"We have our voices. We exist. Do we exist?"

The crowd replied: "Yes!"

And then: "They can call us microbloggers or net hamsters. I am a net hamster! And I'll bite [these bastards' heads off.] We'll all do it together! Because we do exist! [ ] We will not forget, we will not forgive"

The reference to 'net hamsters' (a pejorative term for politically-engaged Internet commenters) and their political will to change the country has destroyed the myth of the slacktivist nature of political engagement online. Navalny has specifically emphasized 'forgetting/forgiving' to show that netizens do not necessarily have a short attention span often ascribed to them.

On to Lubyanka

After several speeches made by the opposition politicians, the crowd moved on towards Lubyanka Square, where the head office of the Federal Security Service is located. The video [ru] uploaded by user bigvane depicts Muscovites moving to Lubyanka and chanting "Free elections":

https://www.youtube.com/embed/1_NMbJTGCk8?feature=oembed

Most of the activists, however, were soon stopped on their way. Ilya Barabanov tweeted a picture of the blocked road:

Blocked road. Photo by Ilya Barabanov

Blocked road. Photo by Ilya Barabanov

Twenty minutes after the aforementioned photo was made, Alexey Navalny was detained by the police. Ilya Barabanov was detained three minutes after Navalny. (See this great photo report made by ridus.ru correspondents here [ru].)

But even the detention didn't break the rebellious and quite positive spirit of the protesters. Navalny, while sitting in a police bus together with other activists, shared an instagram photo of the cheerful detained protesters:

'I'm sitting in a police bus with all the guys. They all say hi.' Photo by Alexey Navalny

'I'm sitting in a police bus with all the guys. They all say hi.' Photo by Alexey Navalny

Another video , also shot inside a police bus, showed protesters discussing the salaries of police officers, laughing a lot.

The Hamster Revolution

The most interesting part of the post-election rebellion is not its peaceful manner (also an important feature compared to violent nationalist riots), but its new demographics. Tvrain.ru field reporter said that the crowd consisted mainly of the "intelligentsia, hipsters, and young people." "It is a fashionable rally," said the reporter. Later, these observations were added: the age of the protesters was between 16 and 33 and for many of those who were detained this was the first street action experience. As Vera Kichanova tweeted :

Lyosha Nikitin writes that he is the only one of the 16 people in the police bus who had been detained before. Others were taking part in a rally for the first time!

***

Meanwhile, levada.ru, the site of Levada Center polling and sociological research organization, has been DDoSed [ru] and the contents of epic-hero.ru were removed [ru] by the hosting provider.

This post is part of our special coverage Russia Elections 2011 .

[Sep 14, 2020] Is Biden an old-school right-wing Democrat war criminal.

Sep 14, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

booboo , 6 hours ago

"The Past is Prologue

It is September 2020. Americans are focused on an election between an Orange Fascist criminal and an old-school right-wing Democrat war criminal. Where Donald Trump projects chaos and disorder, Biden projects stability, order, and a return to normalcy. If Trump is the virus, then surely Biden is the cure"

so this *** clown spends 5000 words on the criminal operation in Libya under Obama/Biden/Clinton which leave the country in utter chaos and this is his money shot? Orange man bad fascist, old school democrat War Criminal normal.

what a load of tripe

Ace006 , 5 hours ago

A+. He provides much needed clarity and perspective on the Libyan tragedy and then crashes into the usual delusional, leftist landfill of fascism, murder of black youth, BLM (all hail), and Biden as, so help me, some kind of a cure for anything.

... ... ...

[Sep 14, 2020] The Plot Against Libya- An Obama-Biden-Clinton Criminal Conspiracy -

Sep 14, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

The Plot Against Libya: An Obama-Biden-Clinton Criminal Conspiracy

by Tyler Durden Fri, 09/11/2020 - 23:40 Twitter Facebook Reddit Email Print

Authored by Eric Draitser via Counterpunch.org,

The scorching desert sun streams through narrow slats in the tiny window. A mouse scurries across the cracked concrete floor, the scuttling of its tiny feet drowned out by the sound of distant voices speaking in Arabic. Their chatter is in a western Libyan dialect distinctive from the eastern dialect favored in Benghazi. Somewhere off in the distance, beyond the shimmering desert horizon, is Tripoli, the jewel of Africa now reduced to perpetual war.

But here, in this cell in a dank old warehouse in Bani Walid, there are no smugglers, no rapists, no thieves or murderers. There are simply Africans captured by traffickers as they made their way from Nigeria, Cameroon, Chad, Eritrea, or other disparate parts of the continent seeking a life free of war and poverty, the rotten fruit of Anglo-American and European colonialism. The cattle brands on their faces tell a story more tragic than anything produced by Hollywood.

These are slaves: human beings bought and sold for their labor. Some are bound for construction sites while others for the fields. All face the certainty of forced servitude, a waking nightmare that has become their daily reality.

This is Libya, the real Libya. The Libya that has been constructed from the ashes of the US-NATO war that deposed Muammar Gaddafi and the government of the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya. The Libya now fractured into warring factions, each backed by a variety of international actors whose interest in the country is anything but humanitarian.

But this Libya was built not by Donald Trump and his gang of degenerate fascist ghouls. No, it was the great humanitarian Barack Obama, along with Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Susan Rice, Samantha Power and their harmonious peace circle of liberal interventionists who wrought this devastation. With bright-eyed speeches about freedom and self-determination, the First Black President, along with his NATO comrades in France and Britain, unleashed the dogs of war on an African nation seen by much of the world as a paragon of economic and social development.

But this is no mere journalistic exercise to document just one of the innumerable crimes carried out in the name of the American people. No, this is us, the antiwar left in the United States, peering through the cracks in the imperial artifice – crumbling as it is from internal rot and political decay – to shine a light through the gloom named Trump and directly into the heart of darkness.

There are truths that must be made plain lest they be buried like so many bodies in the desert sand.

The War on Libya: A Criminal Conspiracy

me title=

To understand the depth of criminality involved in the US-NATO war on Libya, we must unravel a complex story involving actors from both the US and Europe who quite literally conspired to bring about this war, while simultaneously exposing the unconstitutional, imperial presidency as embodied by Mr. Hope and Change himself.

In doing so, a picture emerges that is strikingly at odds with the dominant narrative about good intentions and bad dictators. For although Gaddafi was presented as the villain par excellence in this story told by the Empire's scribes in corporate media, it is in fact Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, former French President Nicholas Sarkozy, French philosopher-cum-neocolonial adventurist Bernard Henri-Levy, and former UK Prime Minister David Cameron, who are the real malevolent forces. It was they, not Gaddafi, who waged a blatantly illegal war on false pretenses and for their own aggrandizement. It was they, not Gaddafi, who conspired to plunge Libya into chaos and civil war from which it is yet to emerge. It was they who beat the war drums while proclaiming peace on earth and good will to men.

The US-NATO war on Libya represents perhaps one of the most egregious examples of US military aggression and lawlessness in recent memory. Of course, the US didn't act alone as a wide cast of characters played a role as the French and British were keen to involve themselves in the reassertion of control over a once lucrative African asset torn from European control by the evil Gaddafi. And this, only a few years after former UK Prime Minister and Iraq war criminal Tony Blair met with Gaddafi to usher in a new era of openness and partnership.

The story begins with Bernard Henri-Lévy, the French philosopher, journalist, and amateur foreign service officer who fancied himself an international spy. Having failed to arrive in Egypt in time to buttress his ego by capitalizing on the uprising against former dictator Hosni Mubarak, he quickly shifted his attention to Libya, where an uprising in the anti-Gaddafi hotbed of Benghazi was underway. As Le Figaro chronicled , Henri-Levy managed to talk his way into a meeting with then head of the National Transition Council (TNC) Mustapha Abdeljalil, a former Gaddafi official who became head of the anti-Gaddafi TNC. But Henri-Levy wasn't there just for an interview to be published in his French paper, he was there to help overthrow Gaddafi and, in so doing, make himself into an international star.

Henri-Levy quickly pressed his contacts and got on the phone with French President Nicholas Sarkozy to ask him, rather bluntly, if he'd agree to meet with Abdeljalil and the leadership of the TNC. Just a few days later, Henri-Levy and his colleagues arrived at the Élysée Palace with TNC leadership at their side. To the utter shock of the Libyans present, Sarkozy tells them that he plans to recognize the TNC as the legitimate government of Libya. Henri-Levy and Sarkozy have now, at least in theory, deposed the Gaddafi government.

But the little problem of Gaddafi's military victories and the very real possibility that he might emerge victorious from the conflict complicated matters as the French public had become aware of the scheme and was rightly lambasting Sarkozy. Henri-Levy, ever the opportunist, stoked the patriotic fervor by announcing that without French intervention, the tricolor flag flying over five-star hotels in Benghazi would be stained with blood. The PR campaign worked as Sarkozy quickly came around to the idea of military intervention.

However, Henri-Levy had a still more critical role to play: bringing the US military juggernaut into the plot. Henri-Levy organized the first of what would be several high-level talks between US officials from the Obama Administration and the Libyans of the TNC. Most importantly, Henri-Levy set up the meeting between Abdeljalil and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. While Clinton was skeptical at the time of the meeting, it would be a matter of months before she and Joe Biden, along with the likes of Susan Rice, Samantha Power, and others would be planning the political, diplomatic, and military route to regime change in Libya.

The Americans Enter the Fray

There would have been no war in Libya were it not for the US political, diplomatic, and military machine. In this sense, despite the relatively meager US military involvement, the war in Libya was an American war. That is to say, it was a war that could not have happened were it not for the active collaboration of the Obama Administration with its French and British counterparts.

As Jo Becker of the NY Times explained in 2016, Hillary Clinton met with Mahmoud Jibril, a prominent Libyan politician who would go on to become the new Prime Minister of post-Gaddafi Libya, and his associates, in order to assess the faction now garnering US support . Clinton's job, according to Becker, was "to take measure of the rebels we supported" – a fancy way of saying that Clinton attended the meeting to determine whether this group of politicians speaking on behalf of a diverse group of anti-Gaddafi voices (ranging from pro-democracy activists to outright terrorists affiliated with global terror networks) should be supported with US money and covert arms.

The answer, ultimately, was a resounding yes.

But of course, as with all America's warmongering misadventures, there was no consensus on military intervention. As Becker reported, some in the Obama Administration were skeptical of the easy victory and post-conflict political calculus. One prominent voice of dissent, at least according to Becker, was former Defense Secretary Robert Gates. Himself no dove, Gates was concerned that Clinton and Biden's hawkish attitude toward Libya would ultimately lead to an Iraq-style political nightmare that would undoubtedly end with the US having created and then abandoned a failed state – exactly what happened.

It is important to note that Clinton and Biden were two of the principal voices for aggression and war. Both were supportive of the No-Fly Zone from early on, and both advocated for military intervention. Indeed, the two have been simpatico in nearly every war crime committed by the US in the last 30 years, including perhaps most egregiously in support of Bush's crime against humanity that we call the second Iraq War.

As former Clinton lackey (Deputy Director of Secretary of State Clinton's Policy Planning staff) Derek Chollet explained, "[Libya] seemed like an easy case." Chollet, a principal participant in the American conspiracy to make war on Libya who later went on to serve directly under Obama and at the National Security Council, inadvertently illustrates in stark relief the imperial arrogance of the Obama-Clinton-Biden liberal interventionist camp. In calling Libya an "easy case" he of course means that Libya was a perfect candidate for a regime change operation whose primary benefit would be to boost politically those who supported it.

Chollet, like many strategic planners at the time, saw Libya as a slam dunk opportunity to turn the demonstrations and uprisings of 2010-2011, which quickly became known as the Arab Spring, into political capital from the Democratic camp of the US ruling class. This rapidly became Clinton's position. And soon, the consensus of the entire Obama Administration.

Obama's War Off the Books

One of the more pernicious myths of the US war on Libya was the notion – propagated dutifully by the defense lobbyists-cum-journalists at major corporate media outlets – that the war was a cheap little war that cost the US almost nothing. There were no American lives lost in the war itself (Benghazi is another mythology to be unraveled later), and very little cost in terms of "treasure", to use that despicable imperialist phrase.

But while the total cost of the war paled in comparison to the monumental-scale crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, the means by which it was funded has cost the US far more than dollars; the war on Libya was a criminal and unconstitutional endeavor that has further laid the groundwork for the imperial presidency and unconstrained executive power. As the Washington Post reported at the time:

Noting that Obama had said the mission could be paid for with money already appropriated to the Pentagon, [former House Speaker] Boehner pressed the president on whether supplemental funding would be requested from Congress.

Unforeseen military operations that require expenditures such as those being made for the Libyan effort normally require supplemental appropriations since they are outside the core Pentagon budget. That is why funds for Afghanistan and Iraq are separate from the regular Defense Department budget. The added costs for some of the operations in Libya are minimal But the expenditures for weapons, fuel and lost equipment are something else.

Because the Obama Administration did not seek congressional appropriations to fund the war, there is very little in the way of paper trail to do a proper accounting of the costs of the war. As the cost of each bomb, fighter jet, and logistical support vehicle disappeared into the abyss of Pentagon accounting oblivion, so too did any semblance of constitutional legality. In essence, Obama helped establish a lawless presidency that not only has little respect for constitutionally mandated checks and balances, but completely ignores the rule of law. Indeed, some of the crimes that Trump and Attorney General Bill Barr are guilty of have their direct corollary in the Obama Administration's prosecution of the Libya war.

So where did the money come from and where did it go? It's anybody's guess really, unless you're one of those rubes who likes taking the Pentagon's word for it. As a Pentagon spokesperson told CNN in 2011, "The price tag for U.S. Defense Department operations in Libya as of September 30 [was] $1.1 billion. This included daily military operations, munitions, the drawdown of supplies and humanitarian assistance." However, to illustrate the downright Orwellian impossibility of discerning the truth, Vice President Joe Biden doubled that number when speaking on CNN, suggesting that "NATO alliance worked like it was designed to do, burden-sharing. In total, it cost us $2 billion, no American lives lost."

As is painfully evident, there is no clear way to know how much was spent other than to take the word of those who prosecuted the war. With no congressional oversight, and no clear documentary record, the war on Libya disappears down the memory hole, and with it the idea that there is a separation of powers, Congressional authority to make war, or a functioning Constitution.

America's Dirty War in Libya

While the enduring memory of Libya for most Americans is the political theater that resulted from the attack on the US facility in Benghazi that killed several Americans, including US Ambassador Stevens, it is not nearly the most consequential. Rather, America's use of terrorist groups (and the insurgents who emerged from them) as military proxies may perhaps be the real legacy from a strategic perspective. For while the corporate media presented the narrative of spontaneous protests and uprisings to overthrow Gaddafi, it was in fact a loose network of terror groups that did the dirty work.

While much of this recent history has been buried by bad reporting, establishment mythmaking, and conspiracist muddying of the truth, it was surprisingly well reported at the time. For example, as the New York Times wrote of one of the primary US-backed forces on the ground during the war in 2011:

"The Libyan Islamic Fighting Group was formed in 1995 with the goal of ousting Colonel Qaddafi. Driven into the mountains or exile by Libyan security forces, the group's members were among the first to join the fight against Qaddafi security forces Officially the fighting group does not exist any longer, but the former members are fighting largely under the leadership of Abu Abdullah Sadik [aka Abdelhakim Belhadj]."

Even at the time, there was considerable unease among Washington's strategic planners that the Obama Adminstration's embrace of a terror group with known links to al-Qaeda could prove to be a major blunder. "American, European and Arab intelligence services acknowledge that they are worried about the influence that the former group's members might exert over Libya after Colonel Qaddafi is gone, and they are trying to assess their influence and any lingering links to Al Qaeda," the Times noted.

Of course, those in the know at the various US intelligence agencies already had a pretty good sense of who they were backing, or at least the elements likely to be involved in any US operation. Specifically, the US knew that the areas from which it was drawing anti-Gaddafi opposition forces was a hotbed of criminal and terrorist activity.

In a 2007 study entitled "Al-Qa'ida's Foreign Fighters in Iraq: A First Look at the Sinjar Records" which examined the origins of various criminal and terrorist groups active in Iraq, the Combating Terrorism Center at the US Military Academy at West Point concluded that:

"Almost 19 percent of the fighters in the Sinjar Records came from Libya alone. Furthermore, Libya contributed far more fighters per capita than any other nationality in the Sinjar Records, including Saudi Arabia The apparent surge in Libyan recruits traveling to Iraq may be linked with the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group's (LIFG) increasingly cooperative relationship with al-Qa'ida which culminated in the LIFG officially joining al-Qa'ida on November 3, 2007 The most common cities that the fighters called home were Darnah [Derna], Libya and Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, with 52 and 51 fighters respectively. Darnah [Derna] with a population just over 80,000 compared to Riyadh's 4.3 million, has far and away the largest per capita number of fighters in the Sinjar records."

It was known at the time that the majority of the anti-Gaddafi forces hailed from the region including Derna, Benghazi, and Tobruk – the "Eastern Libya" so often referred to as anti-Gaddafi – and that the likelihood that al-Qaeda and other terror groups were among the ranks of the US recruits was very high. Nevertheless, they persisted.

Take the case of the February 17 Martyrs Brigade, charged by the US with guarding the CIA facility in Benghazi at which Ambassador Stevens was murdered. As the Los Angeles Times reported in 2012:

"Over the last year, while assigned by their militia to help protect the U.S. mission in Benghazi, the pair had been drilled by American security personnel in using their weapons, securing entrances, climbing walls and waging hand-to-hand combat The militiamen flatly deny supporting the assailants but acknowledge that their large, government-allied force, known as the Feb. 17 Martyrs Brigade, could include anti-American elements The Feb. 17 brigade is regarded as one of the more capable militias in eastern Libya."

But it wasn't just LIFG and al-Qaeda affiliated criminal groups entering the fray thanks to Washington rolling out the blood-stained red carpet.

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A longtime asset of the US, General Khalifa Hifter and his so-called Libyan National Army have been on the ground in Libya since 2011, and have emerged as one of the primary forces vying for power in post-war Libya. Hifter has a long and sordid history working for the CIA in its attempts to overthrow Gaddafi in the 1980s before being resettled conveniently near Langley, Virginia. As the New York Times reported in 1991:

The secret paramilitary operation, set in motion in the final months of the Reagan Administration, provided military aid and training to about 600 Libyan soldiers who were among those captured during border fighting between Libya and Chad in 1988 They were trained by American intelligence officials in sabotage and other guerrilla skills, officials said, at a base near Ndjamena, the Chadian capital. The plan to use the exiles fit neatly into the Reagan Administration's eagerness to topple Colonel Qaddafi.

Hifter, leader of these failed efforts, became known as the CIA's "Libya point man," having taken part in numerous regime change efforts, including the aborted attempt to overthrow Gaddafi in 1996. So, his arrival in 2011 at the height of the uprising signaled an escalation of the conflict from an armed uprising to an international operation. Whether Hifter was directly working with US intelligence or simply complimenting US efforts by continuing his decades-long personal war against Gaddafi is somewhat irrelevant. What matters is that Hifter and the Libyan National Army, like LIFG and other groups, became part of the broader destabilization effort which successfully toppled Gaddafi and created the chaotic hellscape that is modern Libya.

Such is the legacy of the US dirty war on Libya.

The Past is Prologue

It is September 2020. Americans are focused on an election between an Orange Fascist criminal and an old-school right-wing Democrat war criminal. Where Donald Trump projects chaos and disorder, Biden projects stability, order, and a return to normalcy. If Trump is the virus, then surely Biden is the cure.

It is September 2020. Libya prepares to enter its eighth year of civil war. Slave markets like the one in Bani Walid are as common as youth literacy centers were in Gaddafi's Libya. Armed gangs and militias wield power even in areas nominally under government control. A warlord regroups in the East as he looks to Russia, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates for support.

It is September 2020 and the US-NATO war on Libya has faded to a distant memory as other issues like Black Lives Matter and police murder of Black youth have captured the public imagination and discourse.

But these issues are, in fact, united by the bond of white supremacy and anti-Blackness. The Libya once known as the "Jewel of Africa," a country that provided refuge for many sub-Saharan African migrant workers while maintaining independence from the US and the former colonial powers of Europe, is no more. In its place is a failed state that now reflects the kind of vicious anti-Black racism forcefully suppressed by the Gaddafi government.

Libya as the global exemplar of the exploitation and disposability of the black body.

Squint a little and you can see President Joe Biden getting the old band back together. Hillary Clinton welcomed into the Oval Office as an influential voice, someone to give words to the demented thoughts of the living corpse serving as Commander-in-Chief. Derek Chollet and Ben Rhodes laughing together as they buy another round at their favorite DC hangout, toasting to the re-establishment of order in Washington. Barack Obama as the éminence grise behind the political resurgence of the liberal-conservative dominant structure.

But in Libya, there is no going back, no fixing the past to escape the present.

Perhaps the same might be true of the United States.

AVmaster , 13 hours ago

Number of wars the boy king and his minions started: 6, that we know of: Ukraine, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan.

(Not withstanding the proxy wars during the "muslim spring" like in egypt)

Number of wars Trump has started: 0

This is NOT including the ongoing wars that trump inherited but has dialed back somewhat, like reduced troop presence in iraq/afghan.

fucking truth , 12 hours ago

Trump hasn't started any but he still feeds the beast, hopefully his next four will see a correction to this behaviour,one can only hope.

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GreatUncle , 3 hours ago

Has no choice.

The economic reality is the MIC is a big part of the US domestic economy.

Shut that down and you would go into a full blown depression.

If you build bullets, missile, bombs, F35's etc. they have to be used or you have to start scrapping them.

The issue though is not the MIC as such but the lack of any moral integrity and disregard for human life by those mentioned in the article. Once the country was put into this position by them it is much more difficult to extract.

Now I think those in the article should be prosecuted for not going to Congress to declare a war and fund it correctly as this is supposed to be the check and balance of a rogue president.

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Bollixed , 2 hours ago

Regarding the MIC, many of those companies consist of manufacturing entities comprised of engineers, factory infrastructure and logistics infrastructure funded by government spending that could realistically be 'retooled' to produce things that could benefit society instead of piss money away on the tools of destruction. America is in need of a massive infrastructure overhaul from our electric grid to our transportation modes to name just two. Nothing is preventing those MIC giants from refocusing their efforts toward a better America versus the current focus they are paid to undertake. It's a matter of priorities and right now I find their priorities misplaced and vulgar.

The money is available at their current funding rates, the manpower and brain power is there, what is lacking is the will to turn the ship around and start putting humans before profits. There is no need to go into a full blown depression as with the shut down of that capacity if those entities are given a mandate to redirect their output for the good of society and create things of lasting value. In other words, take the retooling mindset that turned refrigerator factories into weapons factories like they did in WW2 and take the weapons factories and turn them into entities for the betterment of society. And then wean them off of the government teat.

DeepStateThrombosis , 3 hours ago

Unused funds from the Pentagon can be redirected to the Wall and other Defense protections not known to the public at this time.

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DaiRR , 1 hour ago

DemoRats and NeoCons will try every way possible to keep the wars going.

The USA is incredibly blessed to have Donald J. Trump in the White House.

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muggeridge , 11 hours ago

To think Americans demonstrated in the millions to stop the Vietnam war exposed as a fraud by Daniel Ellsberg in the PENTAGON PAPERS. Obama did admit that the removal of Ghadaffy was his biggest foreign policy mistake. Clinton also in trouble over Tunisia while Secretary of State with US ambassador killed in 2012. She took responsibility but was found not to have acted improperly by US Congress. However her part in this tragedy remains an open question. Today the only Middle Eastern country still standing IRAN supported by China. Syria supported by Russia. Cold Wars never go away?


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GreatUncle , 3 hours ago

Cold war is an inevitable consequence of a MIC that must continually produce and expend munitions to keep its part of the economy going.
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scaleindependent , 10 hours ago

Final Jeopardy, genius!

What is Syria and Iran?


HIS acts against those countries ARE acts of war.

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muggeridge , 10 hours ago

Regime Change as our modus operandi to serve the cause of military superiority as if pre-set by computer.

How everything became war and the military became everything by Rosa Brooks Tales of the Pentagon.

Something funny happened on the way to the forum; Broadway musical. Hail Caesar?

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CheapBastard , 7 hours ago

Hey, military contractors have to put food on the table also, even if it means murdering millions of innocent people in Yugoslavia (like Clinton did) or in the middle east (like Bush and Obama did).

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GreatUncle , 3 hours ago

Yep some people don't get it.

With all the military contractors now moved into peaceful protests maybe we actually need more war to keep them gainfully employed.

Get the picture?


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SoilMyselfRotten , 3 hours ago

HIS acts against those countries ARE acts of war

Don't forget also blockading Venezuela


No1uNo , 9 hours ago

No Libya story is complete without mentioning David Shayler- the MI6 agent turned whistleblower who was tasked with blowing up Gaddafi in his car - but refused to do so when he was accompanied by his wife and children. (under the Tony Blair govt). -yep.
Shayler later went into a bizarre series of personas -which is understood by many as self preservation tactic - (testimony of mentally unstable is not recognised in court - so no threat).

Then there's the covert ratlines of gathering the ex-Libyan army weapons & shipping them to ISIS Syria via Turkey and White Helmets (see James Corbett) organised by HRC via Benghazi -so no rescue for US Ambassador & team (RIP) HRC prefer'd keep op covert. Carrier 50 miles off coast -HRC killed US Diplomats & support team. -Biden knew.

Also check out the courageous Dilyana Gaytandzhieva who runs armswatch .com and some SM in her name. for laypersons overview of extent of games-within-games & wheels-within-wheels in arms trade/ chem weapons "research". She's currently researching the Beirut bombings - which will be another revelation when it hits.

sauldaddy , 11 hours ago

That awkward moment when you find out the first Black President brought slavery BACK to Africa .....Q- That awkward moment when you find out the first Black President brought slavery BACK to Africa

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. . . _ _ _ . . . , 13 hours ago

Qaddafi kept African migrants out of the Mediterranean and away from Europe's shores.
Sarkozy couldn't allow that knowing what was in store for Europe.
He predicted what would happen to Europe were he to be deposed. He was right. Macron's (and Merkel's) policies are proof.
That and the gold dinar was his undoing.
.
P.S. Don't tell the leftists, but Libya was the only case of a successful socialist state. On second thought, it might be funny to see them publicly defending Qaddafi.

Ms No , 13 hours ago

That may work for a while when you pull black gold out of the ground, for a while. Oil declines and free **** armies breed faster. Then you are Saudi Arabia and we are about to see how that ends up.

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not dead yet , 12 hours ago

Libyan youth unemployment was over 30% because these spoiled kids with their families getting oil checks in the mail every month refused to do menial jobs. Qaddafi kept the black Africans out of the boats by letting them do the work the kids and other Libyans thought was beneath them. A lot of the money the Africans made they sent home which was spent in the local economies which increased jobs there. Libya also invested heavily in Africa which created lots of jobs. These actions kept the number of Africans headed to Europe a trickle. Once Qaddafi was gone so were all the jobs in Libya and the money that flowed into Africa dried up and jobs were lost. A lot of businesses the Libyans created in Africa were confiscated by the local governments and no doubt given to cronies who ran them into the ground.

No1uNo , 9 hours ago

Gaddafi thought wrongly that job description would save him. Also suggested trading oil for €uro's over dollar$, which blew the lid on powder keg. In the end they say it was the oil, though my thinking was DC think tanks didn't want a monied "Mexico" on south coast of Euroland - could make Europe too financially powerful & too difficult to control.

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. . . _ _ _ . . . , 6 hours ago

I had heard about selling oil for Euros in relation to Saddam, but not to Qaddafi. Qaddafi was about the gold Dinar.
??

No1uNo , 6 hours ago

Yep, it's what can happen if I'm not careful when I post and try to watch a documentary at the same time.
Thanks for your vigilance.

In case anyone's interested: ex-mossad agent - 57mins
https://archive.org/details/victor-ostrovsky-1995

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Steverino , 13 hours ago

Find the Libyan gold that dissapeard.... and one likely finds the source of the overthrow....

quanttech , 13 hours ago

try the french treasury...

Bill300 , 12 hours ago

Look no further than Hillary's brother. General Gage, a former Special Forces Colonel, had been hired by Hillary, et al, to assemble a merc army to secure Qaddafi's gold amidst the fog of war and transport it to Haiti to be laundered thru Hugh Rodham's little gold mine. Does anyone really think Obama sold enough books to buy a $12M seaside mansion in Massachusetts and the Washington DC home?

These people are so evil.

Justapleb , 12 hours ago

That's certainly titillating. Do you have a source that puts these things together?

I tried some Google searches, but I already know those searches are censored so it is not an easy thing to find

dark pools of soros , 4 hours ago

you gotta get your hands dirty if you want to know whats in the soil

DaCrustyDad , 13 hours ago

Imagine if some country invaded us and slaughtered about 23.5 million (apples for apples based on the 500k civilians killed out of 7,000,000)? Obama and the Clinton's should be playing basketball at Pelican Bay the rest of their lives at best.

quanttech , 12 hours ago

It's mind boggling.

Trump dropped 7400 bombs on Afghanistan in 2019. That would be like 60,000 bombs dropping on the US one year.

Arch_Stanton , 9 hours ago

Libya was a modern, secular Arab state. A model for the rest of Islam. Who the f@@k decided it was appropriate to reduce Libya to a 19th century sh1thole?

Shifter_X , 9 hours ago

Hillary ******* Clinton

Constitution101 , 6 hours ago

on instruction from the cabalist banksters who never permit a rival currency system.

Qaddafi's gold-backed dinar throughout Nth Africa would have exposed and displace their petrodollar scam in which they infinitely print their cronies untold trillion$.

end the fed, and all central banks.

Best Satan in Town , 6 hours ago

That's the story in a nutsh-ell

desertboy , 10 hours ago

The petrodollar centrality gets monotonously overplayed. For anyone who cares to look, the geopolitics of the West/NATO are the geopolitics of all its central bank owners as an interlinked group, who are keeping all their options open.

Destroying Libya went beyond the petrodollar to the fight for influence in Africa's future, where France's history in Africa has made it the designated hitter. Note the new CFR-type buzz on a "resurgent France" due to this role.

No1uNo , 8 hours ago

I maintained elsewhere on this thread, was advice of DC think tanks he was taken out. Because a well funded, well educated, low cost, labor factory resource state on south coast of eurozone makes europe too competitive to DC tank's interests. (and open Africa's growing economy to cheap - outside eurozone - euro profiting business interests).

Gaddafi was never a threat to Europe, but europe buying his oil and building his economy......different story.

No1uNo , 9 hours ago

B-I-N-G-O !
get your case of beer for that one!

not dead yet , 11 hours ago

Qaddafi would have not met with death if he only wanted to sell oil in the Gold Dinar. Instead he wanted the Gold Dinar as the currency for all of Africa. The system was being set up along with 4 central banks to manage African economic and monetary affairs when Libya was attacked. Libya also invested heavily in Africa creating lots of jobs and enhancing communications. Unlike the IMF and World Bank with their draconian edicts attached to their loans, like no loans for fossil fueled power plants and other eco garbage, almost guaranteeing default the Libyan Development Fund attached no such garbage to their loans making success possible. Europe was charging Africa $500 million a year for use of their satellites. Qaddafi ponied up $300 million of the $400 million needed to put up Africa's first satellite screwing Europe out of $500 million a year. Qaddafi was also the driving force for Africa for Africans and which kept US African command and it's troops out of Africa. Now the US has troops all over Africa. Qaddafi really was bad. Bad for Western exploitation of Africa.

At the time of Qaddafi's demise the Libyan Development Fund had $32 billion in banks around the world. Western governments and media tried to claim it was money stolen by Qaddafi. Last I knew the Libyan's, the rightful owners of that money, haven't seen a penny.

Constitution101 , 6 hours ago

great info.

got a good concise source?

dark pools of soros , 4 hours ago

you have to dig deep to get little nuggets of truth about Libya since so many sides want to tarnish and twist to push their agenda and greed on its riches

SmokeyBlonde , 12 hours ago

America, as a country, deserves whatever happens just for electing and re-electing Obama.

Far too many grifters, Bolsheviks, pedocrats, and sub-moron IQ feral ghetto rats oh-so-pleased with themselves for being so enlightened and bringing chaos to the whole F'n world.

ReflectoMatic , 11 hours ago

The Democrats are working with the globalist at the United Nations & World Economic Forum. The program being run is the destruction of the United States and elimination of humans, per instructions from "The Cult of Rasur", which is located in the jungle at Mount Rasur in Costa Rica but now renamed as the United Nations University For Peace. The university teaches occult and meditation and only graduates 20 students per year, those students then take positions of influence within the UN. The cult was founded by Maurice Strong & Dr Muller, Strong also created the Agenda 21 & World Economic Forum, plus in 1982, the more exclusive secret group of 300 called just "World Forum" which met in Vail Colorado near his hippie commune at the Baca Grande in the San Luis Valley.

The GAIA Theory which was converted into GAIA Religion at the Maurice Strong Hippie Commune in Colorado. David Perkins was there, apparently one of the first hippies to arrive at the commune around 1978. In this podcast we get a rare look into the mindset of the globalist and the creation of Agenda 21.

http://radiomisterioso.com/audio/David_Perkins_6_21_18.mp3

It's not clear if David Perkins & his partner, Chris O'Brian, are aware of Maurice Strong & Klaus Schwab conducting the special and secret World Forum of 300 at Vail in 1982. At that 1982 event the concepts David Perkins describes, combined with concepts gotten by paranormal activities at Mount Rasur in Costa Rica, were passed down to the 300 and thus began the creation that has brought the world to a standstill.

Chris O'Brian has an interesting podcast also, describing the Maurice Strong hippie commune, in this he describes meeting Lawrence Rockefeller at the commune.

https://slvoices.com/2019/12/21/the-mysterious-san-luis-valley-part-1/

I saw it posted here that Amschel Rothschild Said Rothschilds Have Met with Satan met the Devil in Colorado , now we know where in Colorado.

And finally, who the heck is this guy, the one in the middle? MJ-12 captured this photo of him in Hollywood in 1972, he was then usually seen in company of Curtis LeMay, grandson of the General who founded JPL NASA MJ-12, then in 1982 he was at that World Forum in Vail and in charge of covertly poisoning them all with LSD. He was born in Berkley or Alameda in 1951 while his mother was at theater watching "Day The Earth Stood Still". Seems there is a message which needs to be understood.

https://vault.myvzw.com/webcs/7V1ewnG0Xl

David Champaign, night manager at the Christie Lodge in Avon Colorado, can give further description and verification that the ultra-secret World Forum did occur.

If you listened to that podcast, there was mention of the "group of psychics" at the Baca hippie commune. The guy in the photo, the link just above, the photo was taken in the presence of Allen J Funk MJ-12, Funk's only friend took the photo, Bob Custer. Bob shared hotel rooms with the Stones & Monkeys while on concert tour as official photographer. The guy in the photo and Bob were taken one night, in Allen's white Cadillac convertible, to a house in the hills east of JPL Pasadena. There he met Bob's ex, Val, and Val's work associates, the work Val and associates did was some secret psychic project in Central America and perhaps in Colorado, usually Val just came over to Bob's house to visit when Val was not off at those remote locations. Secret about it they were.

Shifter_X , 8 hours ago

These are self-loathing humans. Imagine wanting to destroy the human race.

SMH

bobroonie , 13 hours ago

Obama bombed Libya in defense of Islamic terrorists he sold weapons to. 600 requests for more security from Ambassador Stevens unanswered.. But when defense contractor Osprey Global's Sidney Blumenthal called Clinton gave him special treatment. Lots of money to be made for a defense contractor and the Secretary of State that starts the war.

not dead yet , 12 hours ago

At the time Stevens died, he was not murdered he died of smoke inhalation as the invaders set the place on fire and the safe room wasn't air tight, Benghazi was the most dangerous place on earth for diplomats. Attempted murders and kidnappings of diplomats were so rife that most governments closed their missions and evacuated their people. Stevens was well aware of this and he went to Benghazi, the US Embassy is in Tripoli, anyway with his last meeting running guns with the Turks. By doing so he signed his death warrant. According to many at the time Stevens was begging for more security shortly before he left for Benghazi he was offered a military security detachment that was already in Tripoli and Stevens refused. Seems Stevens and Hillary didn't want the military to know what they were up to.

quanttech , 12 hours ago

the ambassador got what was coming to him. he was a terrorist, plain and simple.

the rest of the Americans were rescued ... by Qadaffi loyalists. the Americans are shy to admit this.

David2923 , 5 hours ago

Facts you probably do not know about Libya under Muammar Gaddafi:

• There are no electricity bills in Libya; electricity is free for all its citizens.

• There is no interest on loans, banks in Libya are state-owned and loans given to all its citizens at 0% interest by law.

• If a Libyan is unable to find employment after graduation, the state pays the average salary of the profession as if he or she is employed until employment is found.

• Should Libyans want to take up a farming career, they receive farm land, a house, equipment, seed and livestock to kick start their farms – all for free.

• Gaddafi carried out the world's largest irrigation project, known as the Great Man-Made River project, to make water readily available throughout the desert country.

• A home considered a human right in Libya. (In Qaddafi's Green Book it states: "The house is a basic need of both the individual and the family, therefore it should not be owned by others.")

• All newlyweds in Libya receive 60,000 Dinar (US$ 50,000 ) by the government to buy their first apartment so to help start a family.

• A portion of Libyan oil sales is credited directly to the bank accounts of all Libyan citizens.

• A mother who gives birth to a child receives US $5,000.

• When a Libyan buys a car, the government subsidizes 50% of the price.

• The price of petrol in Libya is $0.14 per liter.

• For $ 0.15, a Libyan local can purchase 40 loaves of bread.

• Education and medical treatments are free in Libya. Libya can boast one of the finest health care systems in the Arab and African World. All people have access to doctors, hospitals, clinics and medicines, completely free of charge.

• If Libyans cannot find the education or medical facilities they need in Libya, the government funds them to go abroad for it – not only free but they get US $2,300/month accommodation and car allowance.

• 25% of Libyans have a university degree. Before Gaddafi only 25% of Libyans were literate. Today the figure is 87%.

• Libya has no external debt and its reserves amount to $150 billion – though much of this is now frozen globally.

Here is photo of the man who helped kill the Col shaking hands with the Col. https://news.antiwar.com/2011/03/03/un-postpones-praising-gadhafis-human-rights-record/

Vivekwhu , 5 hours ago

You have explained why Libya was perfectly ripe for looting by the US Evil Empire and its slave states.

dark pools of soros , 5 hours ago

Yes I've been shining a light on this for years. The true history of Libya should red pill EVERYONE that can still think for themselves.

We are destroying George Washington statues while worshiping a black african american president who destroyed the one rare prosperous socialist African nation.. which now has slave trading!!!! all because it didn't share it's water to french/italian bottlers. And of course the Gold Dinar becoming the African currency.

Lokiban , 11 hours ago

Gadhaffi's two mistakes leading to this war.
Threaten to sell his sweet oil in gold dinars

Threaten French president Sarkozy to pull out all of his money out of France and reveal to the public the donations he made to the French presidential campaign of Sarkozy, which we know is illegal because foreigners can't donate money.

That sealed his fate. America needed to stop this gold for oil scheme just like it did in Iraq and French president Sarkozy's presidency was ont he line.

NuYawkFrankie , 12 hours ago

Slick Willy --> War Criminal

Chimp --> War Criminal

Obongo --> War Criminal

Hillarity --> War Criminal

Groper Joe --> War Criminal

Etc... etc... etc...

Are you at least BEGINNING to see a pattern here???

If not, you soon will do as 'the chickens come home to roost' and ZOG focusses it's attention on YOUR a$$!

Apeon , 11 hours ago

Apparently you are not old enough to remember Johnson

NuYawkFrankie , 8 hours ago

I'm holding "Johnson" as we speak... and the most I can accuse him of is being a naughty - sometimes a VERY naughty- boy. Looks like he's due for another spanking!

NAV , 2 hours ago

But in Libya, there is no going back, no fixing the past to escape the present.

Perhaps the same might be true of the United States.

Obama left this country and Libya in rags, what else is there to say.

Yet Obama lives, while Gaddafi is dead, a man who had the good of his people in mind and already was using primary water from which eventually all of Africa could be watered and developed into a paradise for his people, a people who live on a continent rich with more natural resources than any other.

But this could not be allowed by the Devil's Globalists who want to own all the world's resources in order to make beggars of all mankind. Obama was their man. He not only betrayed Africa but all men for a $40,000,000 pot of silver proffered by the world enemy of liberty - the DEEPSTATE.

NAV , 2 hours ago

But in Libya, there is no going back, no fixing the past to escape the present.

Perhaps the same might be true of the United States.

Obama left this country and Libya in rags, what else is there to say.

Yet Obama lives, while Gaddafi is dead, a man who had the good of his people in mind and already was using primary water from which eventually all of Africa could be watered and developed into a paradise for his people, a people who live on a continent rich with more natural resources than any other.

But this could not be allowed by the Devil's Globalists who want to own all the world's resources in order to make beggars of all mankind. Obama was their man. He not only betrayed Africa but all men for a $40,000,000 pot of silver proffered by the world enemy of liberty - the DEEPSTATE.

you know it makes sense , 5 hours ago

Who writes this crap and who believes a word of it ?.

No mention that Gaddafi planned to set up a new gold backed African money to sell his oil rather than the euro or the dollar. 143+ tons of gold and 140 tons of silver went missing.

www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2016/01/06/new-hillary-emails-reveal-true-motive-for-libya-intervention/

truepublica.org.uk/global/hillary-emails-reveal-nato-killed-gaddafi-stop-libyan-creation-gold-backed-currency/

It was because of this lie and NATO's involvement in the destruction of Libya that both Russia and China vowed never again to allow this to happen to another country

taglady , 7 hours ago

Trump: "lock her up" became "she's been through enough." What has she been through exactly? "Make America great again" became we need to bail out Boeing and the rest because of an "invisible enemy." It's invisible alright, because it doesn't exist. The only invisible enemy are the parasites shoveling our money into their own very deep pockets in every conceivable way. Like Biden and his entire family and the Clintons and the Obamas and many others have been doing for many years. Like Bush and Cheney made out so well after 911. That's how Gates and the pharmaceutical industry became so bloated while real Americans have struggled to make ends meet.

taglady , 7 hours ago

Interesting coalition between finance, government and media. Like when Bush announced the necessary, unconstitutional war and changes to our society after 911. We didn't get to vote on these changes. No referendum ever happened. Just an announcement in the media and media spin on public opinion, then preplanned actions by corrupt officials. This alliance was never more obvious than during the cv response. We are censored and silenced while liars and thieves are given the bully pulpit to beat us over the head with their idiocracy to enrich very few parasites, again. Then the public is blamed for the rogue actions of government/ business/media. America is bad. We just keep voting for these dummies. Except our voting system is run by the same corrupt dummies who keep getting re-elected. Hmmm. Just like they did to Kadafi and many others. Suddenly Libya is poor. What happened to all of Kadafi's gold? Probably the same thing that happened to the Pentagon trillions and SS "surplus" and public pensions across America. Taxation without representation leaves us broke, without a voice and broken. What are we going to do about it?

Iconoclast27 , 1 hour ago

The problem is you believe imperialism and colonialism has ended in the African continent when that clearly isn't the case, this Libyan regime change op being the latest example of interference you are claiming no longer exists.

John C Durham , 1 hour ago

Actually the end of colonialism that FDR ("Winston, Colonialism is the Cause of this War. This war is going to end all Colonialism".) wished for is hardly over. We got Democratic Party's Truman, not the great Henry Wallace, remember?

Libya only proves this true.

LEEPERMAX , 5 hours ago

America's "BOTCHED CIA OPERATION OF THE CENTURY" as they funneled GADDAFI WEAPONS from the PORT OF BENGHAZI into SYRIA as OBAMA & CO. completed their agenda to DESTABILIZE THE MIDDLE EAST and eventually ALL OF EUROPE.

NO MORE . . . NO LESS

QABubba , 5 hours ago

This is the very reason I sat out the 2016 election. They say citizens don't vote foreign policy but I did. The "We came, we saw, he died" statement illustrated that our leaders didn't have a clue as to the geopolitical damage we had done. The US supported a "no fly zone" in the UN Security Council. Russia supported it. Gaddafi declared his own, stating that none of his air force would fly. The US and their allies quickly "redefined" it to mean they could destroy his air force on the ground, and once destroyed, any of his antiaircraft guns, and once destroyed, any of his tanks and artillery (which don't fly), and his troop convoys.

Gaddafi's, Russia's, perhaps North Korea's big mistake was believing the US would stand by their agreement in the UN Security Council. This and the Eastward creep of Nato may very well be the deciding factor's in Putin's view that he has no responsible actors in the West to deal with. North Korea was watching. Any dream of getting a denuclearized North Korea just receded by about 50 years.

And of course, our presstitute media had a starring role as always. The average American thinks this was a just war, and knows nothing of the slave markets, and nothing about the flood of African immigrants, who are majority muslim, and have no plans whatsoever to assimilate, into Europe. The leaders of France and supposedly Great Britain have stabbed their citizens in the back, as they will now have to watch European culture destroyed.

Vivekwhu , 6 hours ago

Many thanks are due to Draitser for this excellent report on the vile activities of the US Evil Empire in Libya. The power motives have been laid bare, but the massive greed of the US/EU imperial elites have not been detailed. The greed for Libyan oil by France and Italy is well known but the US also looted Libyan gold, just as they looted Ukrainian gold after the 2014 Maidan coup.

By removing Gaddaffi (and who can forget Clinton's evil words "We came, we saw, he died") and looting the gold they scuppered the plans to create a gold-backed dinar for all of Africa, that would have challenged the use of USD, French-controlled "Franc" and other fiat currencies.

That would have been shocking for the US/EU imperial elite that regards Africa as their private fiefdom to loot at will.

Combined with a lust for power, the US/EU imperial elites have an insatiable greed. After all, what use is an empire if the elites can't gorge themselves at will?

lastugro , 10 hours ago

... and Medvedev led Russia abstained (did not veto the vote) at the UNSC session where the intervention was approved. Russia bears a tacit responsibility.

Michael Norton , 11 hours ago

Obama supplied ISIS with leftover weapons from the Libya operation to take out Bashar Assad in Syria. That didn't work out for him too well, did it? Got an ambassador and some CIA spooks killed in Benghazi.

dogfish , 9 hours ago

And Trump steals the oil, the oil that is desperately needed by the suffering Syrians. Trump is a real humanitarian.

Maghreb2 , 5 hours ago

Obama believed every word he was fed about the R2P Right to Protect fantasy concocted at the U.N. At the same time if you knew how dangerous the man was with his Green Revolution and Desert sorcery you would have had him killed.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/apr/12/barack-obama-says-libya-was-worst-mistake-of-his-presidency

The first step of his plan was the Libyan African Gold Dinar which would have been a commodity backed gold cuerrency. This would have broken Rothschild and most of the colonial banking systems. On its own it was a just move but not even the Chinese could have an African Bloc form that fast with that much growth. Imploding the CFA system would have destroyed France as we know it and made it poorer than Poland.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/mandrake/3520920/Now-Nat-Rothschild-hobnobs-with-Gaddafi-jnr.html

https://panamapapers.sueddeutsche.de/articles/573aeac75632a39742ed39a0/

Second factor was his ruthless plans to deal with his Islamic Nationalist and Monarchist "Brothers". Gaddafis Green revolution could have spread across the desert wastes and easily overthrown the Al Sauds and trapped Arab natioanlists in their citites. Not a powerful fighter but understood desert warfare. It was the cost of Soviet equipment and the French adapted technicals that made him weaker. The Wars of the Sahara desert like those of Polisario Front and Libyan Chad War were decided by mobility.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sand_War

Finally there were reports amongst the occultists that the man was obsessed with the Occult and the Djinn. Giving a warlord his own banking system and access to African black Magic was enough even for the Jesuits to view the man as a threat to global peace. Rumours the djinns warned him of advance of air strikes and gave strength to his soldiers in the deserts made him a force to be reckoned with in his borders. The association with Abu Nidal is rumoured to have revealed things about the nature of these desert beings. If he had the innate gift for it his tribe probably would have joined us at some point. Reports he had fallen out with the real Green a man a sage and advisor to the Islamic leaders point to a major rupture with the Islamic creed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khidr

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senusiyya

https://eng-archive.aawsat.com/theaawsat/news-middle-east/colonel-gaddafi-using-african-magic-to-prolong-his-reign-libyan-rebel-officer

Only God can really judge whether his plan to emancipate Africa was his own power grab to free the continent or another mad man trying to join the global elite by enslaving them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hwiCkU73NA

Maghreb2 , 5 hours ago

The Moroccans learnt a lot from that mess. Islamic world lacks something like the Jesuits to keep these things under wraps.

https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-goldman-sachs-libya/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USJCcZGbb7w

SmokeyBlonde , 4 hours ago

It would appear, at this point in time, that regardless of motive of his plan, the US-backed alternative has turned out far worse. The only positive result is more money in the pockets of the MIC and the opportunity to play war games in the desert.

Maghreb2 , 2 hours ago

Like I said he was a dangerous man. It takes one to rock the boat like he did. End of the day the system could have been put in place for the African Gold Standard to start to expand into areas that were tired of the Central African Franc system but it would have destroyed Rothschild and led to hundreds of million of Black Muslims having resources to throw at Israel.

https://www.investigaction.net/fr/macron-libye-la-rothschild-connection/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_African_CFA_franc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjyRchz8PFY

Making Chad, Senegal and Mali into something like Yugoslavia with Chinese and Russian Weaponry was beyond the imaginings of Africom. Would have lowered the birth rates with the development and solved the migration and economic crisis. Having these countries like Sweden would have also created living space for white liberals who were highly educated. Instead all the money vanished with the Kleptokrats. Its only insane Facists who want dead Africans on their doorsteps in Berlin and on the television that agree with this madness.

Euafrica, Eurabia could be avoided by making sure the Africans slow their birth rates through development and saving wealth rather than following it to Europe when the big men run with gold and dollars.

At the same time he was known as a devil to the Arabs and the dissidents. Sort of like Rockefeller with the company towns and corporate face. You ask the bastards to resign and why all these people has vanished and gives you statistics on how many electrical appliances have been handed out and says he was never in charge and you don't know how the system works.

https://www.countercurrents.org/janson170812.htm

Hard to say but he played the game. Robbed Bunker Hunt which was enough for us. Bunker C%nt as we called him when he tried to bring down the Morgue in Texas. Stuff like that is why the Illuminati are feared. Its hard for anyone to gauge what is going on and what the domino effects are. He was trained by the Americans and British and supplied with Socialist apparatus. Gianni Agnelli the suavest yid since Joseph kept NATO off his back. He had ties to the U.S deep State as well but that goes back to Wheelus.

https://www.nytimes.com/1986/09/24/business/libya-s-fiat-stake-sold-for-3-billion.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheelus_Air_Base

https://www.nytimes.com/1973/08/09/archives/bp-and-bunker-hunt-sue-coastal-states-on-libya-oil-alternative.html

Like we said about the Occult everyone has a backer but that man had demons watching over him. According to some. Thin line between a Djinn and Shaytan when politics and murder get involved.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/gaddafis-son-had-fingers-cut-off/news-story/ca6d3416e46441842ac8aca3edb11cb7

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcgNqHnjLK8

freedommusic , 5 hours ago

Failed nation states make a perfect platform for a profitable global criminal enterprise.

voting machine , 6 hours ago

Allen Dulles couldn't have scripted this operation any better.

This is right out of the CIA hand book. Regime change 101

Jackprong , 7 hours ago

As is painfully evident, there is no clear way to know how much was spent other than to take the word of those who prosecuted the war. With no congressional oversight, and no clear documentary record, the war on Libya disappears down the memory hole, and with it the idea that there is a separation of powers, Congressional authority to make war, or a functioning Constitution.

Got an answer for this: CUTBACKS!

bshirley1968 , 3 hours ago

" The story begins with Bernard Henri-Lévy, the French philosopher, journalist, and amateur foreign service officer who fancied himself an international spy. "

"Lévy was born in 1948 in Béni Saf , French Algeria , to an affluent Algerian Jewish family. "

you_do , 6 hours ago

The war against Libya is a crime .

The arguments for it are mostly fake .

The real reason is the threat against the `dollar`.

JeanTrejean , 6 hours ago

It's the Frenchmen Sarkozy and B.H. Levy who are responsible for this agression.

The USA and NATO (outside Europe) were just "dumb followers".

Vivekwhu , 6 hours ago

Nothing dumb about Obomber: why did he loot and murder in Libya (or Yemen, Ukraine, Syria etc)? Because he CAN!!!

Joiningupthedots , 21 minutes ago

Everything The West touches turns to rat ****.

Mercifully Russia recognised its mistake with Libya and stepped in to save Syria from the same fate.

Every country, its military bandits politicians involved in the unprovoked attack and subsequent destruction of Libya can be considered........WAR CRIMINALS.

Hopefully one day they will be stupid enough to attack Russia or China and be completely destroyed for their stupidity.

OTBorder@CA , 1 hour ago

First of all, Gadhafi gave an unconditional surrender that was brokered by international diplomatic channels over a month before our invasion. Obama & his minions ignored it. We knew many pilots that flew "missions" over Libya during this war & were involved in a massive bombing campaign. Don't forget the Wikileaks where France signed onto the war on the condition they got a % of Libya's gold. My wish is that someday history will tell the truth about the bastard Obama. Read the Lost Arab Spring by, Walid Phares to see all of the other Countries Obama tried to overthrow & have radical Islamic Terrorists replace the peaceful governments.

csc61 , 1 hour ago

The author gives these idiots far too much credit. People must come to the understanding that presidents and politicians (on all sides) simply do as they're told. It is the hidden hand, the international financiers, who are ruining the world. Politicians are mere pawns ... minions willing to sell their souls for a few short years of presumed power, only to scurry off afterward to play the role of elder statesmen. Politicians are nothing more than privileged degenerates who proved early in their political lives they could be easily corrupted and compromised. It is not them who do the damage directly - these things would happen no matter who's in charge. No, they're simply the ones pushed out front to sign documents and take blame for the world's ruination ... a small price they are willing to pay to feed their narcissistic appetites.

Mentaliusanything , 7 hours ago

I would caption that image as "Who is going first to the platform and rope... Biden thinks he has won a Prize and is excited , The Kenyan says you first Bro (loser) and the white Privileged woman is laughing as she says , You have nothing on Me... Bitches, I bury mine deep and dead, I do not swing

Scipio Africanuz , 8 hours ago

Fair enough..

Now that we've completed stage 1 of the harvest, perhaps we ought boost the Republic of Liberty, and hopefully, temper the anxious wrath of folks..

Libya was a catastrophic mistake, borne of hubris, vanity, intellectual rigidity, vainglory, and confusion. Hubris on the part of some, Sarkozy comes to mind, vanity on the part of some, Hillary Clinton comes to mind, confusion on the part of some, Obama comes to mind, and Ideological rigidity on the part of some, Biden comes to mind, and vainglorious pride on the part of some, the security establishment and their directors come to mind..

Having cleared that, it's no use crying over spilt milk, what's necessary, if the humility to acknowledge errors is available, is contributing rationally, and pernitently, to fixing the errors, and not by the same thinking that led to the errors, but fresh thinking that ought now understand that..

What's sown, is what's reaped, but MERCY it is, mitigates the harvests of depravity, via the provision of energy to restitute, and make amends..

The caveat however, is that mercy is NEVER deployed without REPENTANCE and RECALIBRATION,
which are the foundational pillars that make MERCY provide the energy to effect RESTITUTION..

Having clarified that, it's pertinent to inform, that Providence is NOT interested, in any way, shape, or form, in the damnation of anyone and why?

Well, which loving father is interested in the damnation of his children, no matter how depraved?

Still, patience ought not be mistaken for coddling and why?

With one, patience, the intent is to provide time for change..

With the other, coddling, the gambit is the turning of blind eyes to depravity..

But seeing as God, the Almighty Father is CONSISTENTLY Just, we can conclude then, that patience is the prerequisite for either Mercy or Damnation and how so?

Because if patience is deployed, and the depraved utilize it to change, then their salvation is self directed..

And if not, utilized that is, then their damnation as well, is self obtained..

And thus is the Justice and Honor of Divine Providence satisfied..

It's that simple..

And on that note VP Biden, we'll no longer refer to you as that, but as Joseph..

That ought awaken in you the grave responsibility on your shoulders, like that of the Biblical Joseph, whose father made for him, a "Coat of MANY colors.."

And if you be perceptive Joseph, you're now about to wear E Pluribus Unum (Coat of many colors..), created as a singular garment (ONE NATION..), for a reason (the glorification of Provident Divinity..
)

And the glorification?

That E Pluribus Unum (coat of many colors created as a singular garment..), ought demonstrate to all who see it worn, the goodness, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, and LOVE of the Provider of the Coat..

And considering Joseph, that in service of the Republic, you've not withheld the fruit of your loins, it's appropriate then, that you ought now demonstrate that love for the Republic, by putting it first, just as you'd put the fruits of your loins first, except above Divine Providence, known to you, as God Almighty..

So then Joseph, as we begin the next stage of the harvest, remember your oath that "you keep your promises..", you'll be judged by that oath..

And Joseph, "a promise is a debt..", it MUST be paid..

And to boost you energetically, here's Parton the Sweet Voiced Nightingale..

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=h7I_9MMcWvk

Good luck and God speed...

[Sep 12, 2020] Never Forget- Smoking Gun Intel Memo From 1990s Warned Of 'Frankenstein The CIA Created' - Zero Hedge

Sep 12, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

As Americans pause to remember the tragic events of September 11, 2001 which saw almost 3,000 innocents killed in the worst terror attack in United States history, it might also be worth contemplating the horrific wars and foreign quagmires unleashed during the subsequent 'war on terror'.

Bush's so-called Global War on Terror targeted 'rogue states' like Saddam's Iraq, but also consistently had a focus on uprooting and destroying al-Qaeda and other armed Islamist terror organizations (this led to the falsehood that Baathist Saddam and AQ were in cahoots). But the idea that Washington from the start saw al-Qaeda and its affiliates as some kind of eternal enemy is largely a myth.

Recall that the US covertly supported the Afghan mujahideen and other international jihadists throughout the 1980's Afghan-Soviet War, the very campaign in which hardened al-Qaeda terrorists got their start. In 1999 The Guardian in a rare moment of honest mainstream journalism warned of the Frankenstein the CIA created -- among their ranks a terror mastermind named Osama bin Laden .

1998 CNN still of Osama bin Laden, right, along with Egyptian jihadist Ayman al-Zawahiri in Afghanistan, CNN/Getty Images

But it was all the way back in 1993 that a then classified intelligence memo warned that the very fighters the CIA previously trained would soon turn their weapons on the US and its allies. The 'secret' document was declassified in 2009, but has remained largely obscure in mainstream media reporting, despite being the first to contain a bombshell admission.

A terrorism analyst at the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research named Gina Bennett wrote in the 1993 memo "The Wandering Mujahidin: Armed and Dangerous," that --

"support network that funneled money, supplies, and manpower to supplement the Afghan mujahidin" in the war against the Soviets, "is now contributing experienced fighters to militant Islamic groups worldwide."

UNCLASSIFIED

SECRET/NOFORWNOCONTRACT/ORCON

RELEASED IN FULL

United States Department of State
Bureau of Intelligence and Research

WEEKEND EDITION

21-22 August 1993

UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF STATE
REVIEW AUTHORITY: FRANK II PEREZ
DATEj'CASK ID: 23 NOV 2007 200605437

The Wandering Mujahidin: Armed and Dangerous

During the war in Afghanistan, eager Arab
youths volunteered en masse to fight a historic "jihad"
against the Soviet •'infidel." The support network
that funneled money, supplies, and manpower to sup-
plement the Afghan mujahidin is now contributing
experienced fighters to militant Islamic groups world-
wide. Veterans of the Afghan jihad are being inte-

... ... ...

dump hundreds more devout fighters into the net-
work. exacerbating the problems of governments that
are accepting the wandering mujahidin.

* * *

When the Boys Come Home

The concluding section contains the most revelatory statements, again remembering these words were written nearly a decade before the 9/11 attacks :

US support of the mujahidin during the Afghan war will not necessarily protect US interests from attack.

...Americans will become the targets of radical Muslims' wrath. Afghan war veterans, scattered throughout the world, could surprise the US with violence in unexpected locales.

https://lockerdome.com/lad/13084989113709670?pubid=ld-dfp-ad-13084989113709670-0&pubo=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com&rid=www.zerohedge.com&width=890

ue until wc throw India out," apparently is well armed
and operating about 80 miles southeast of Srinagar.

Mujahidin in Every Corner

Beyond the Middle East and South Asia, small
numbers of Afghan war veterans are taking up causes
from Somalia to the Philippines. Mujahidin connections
to the larger network heighten the chances that even
an ad hoc group could carry out destructive insurgent
attacks. Veterans joining small opposition groups can
contribute significantly to their capabilities; therefore,
some militant groups are actively recruiting returning
veterans, as in the Philippines where the radical Mus-
lim Abu Sayyaf Group (ASG) reportedly is using muja-
hidin members' connections to the network to bolster
funding and broker arms deals. The ASG is believed
to have carried out the May bombings of Manila's
light rail system.

Focus on the United States

The alleged involvement of veterans of the Af-
ghan war in the World Trade Center bombing and the
plots against New York targets arc a bold example of
what tactics some fop^r mujahidin are willing in use
in their ongoing jihad (see box, p. 3). US support of
the mujahidin during the Afghan war will not neces-
sarily protect US interests from attack.

The growing perception by Muslims that the US
follows a double standard with regard to Islamic issues --
particularly in Iraq, Bosnia, Algeria, and the Isracli-
occupicd territories -- heightens the possibility that
Americans will become the targets of radical Muslims'
wrath. Afghan war veterans, scattered throughout the
world, could surprise the US with violence in unex-
pected locales.

(Gina BennoB. INfVTNA)

There it is in black and white print: the United States government knew and bluntly acknowledged that the very militants it armed and trained to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars would eventually turn that very training and those very weapons back on the American people .

And this was not at all a "small" or insignificant group, instead as The Guardian wrote a mere two years before 9/11 :

American officials estimate that, from 1985 to 1992, 12,500 foreigners were trained in bomb-making, sabotage and urban guerrilla warfare in Afghan camps the CIA helped to set up .

But don't think for a moment that there was ever a "lesson learned" by Washington.

Frankenstein the CIA created

So he found a different theatre for his holy war and achieved a different sort
of martyrdom. Three years ago, he was convicted of planning a series of
massive explosions in Manhattan and sentenced to 35 years in prison.

Hampton-el was described by prosecutors as a skilled bomb-maker. It was
hardly surprising. In Afghanistan he fought with the Hezb-i-Islami group of
mujahideen, whose training and weaponry were mainly supplied by the CIA.

He was not alone. American officials estimate that, from 1985 to 1992,12,500

foreigners were trained in bomb-making, sabotage and urban guerrilla

warfare in Afghan camps the CIA helped to set up.

Instead the CIA and other US agencies repeated the 1980s policy of arming jihadists to overthrow US enemy regimes in places like Libya and Syria even long after the "lesson" of 9/11. As War on The Rocks recounted :

Despite the passage of time, the issues Ms. Bennett raised in her 1993 work continue to be relevant today. This fact is a sign of the persistence of the problem of Sunni jihadism and the "wandering mujahidin." Today, of course, the problem isn't Afghanistan but Syria. While the war there is far from over, there is already widespread nervousness, particularly in Europe, about what will happen when the foreign fighters return from that conflict.

https://platform.twitter.com/embed/index.html?dnt=false&embedId=twitter-widget-0&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1304385396692914177&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com%2Fgeopolitical%2Fnever-forget-1993-smoking-gun-intel-memo-warned-frankenstein-cia-created&siteScreenName=zerohedge&theme=light&widgetsVersion=219d021%3A1598982042171&width=550px NEVER MISS THE NEWS THAT MATTERS MOST

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Receive a daily recap featuring a curated list of must-read stories.

On 9/11 we should never forget the innocent lives lost, but we should also never forget the Frankenstein of jihad the CIA created .

* * *

The U.S. State Dept.'s own numbers at the height of the war in Syria: access the full report at STATE.GOV

19 June 2015, From US Department of
State, Country Report on Terrorism 2014:
"The rate of foreign terrorist fighter travel to Syria
[during 2014]- totaling more than 16,000 foreign
terrorist ficjhters from more than 90 countries as
of late December - exceeded the rate of foreign
terrorist fighters who traveled to Afghanistan and
Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen, or Somalia at any point in
the last 20 years"

me name=

[Sep 12, 2020] World War II Plaque to Red Army Soldiers Who Died in Leningrad Siege Unveiled in Manchester Photos

Sep 12, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

MOSCOWEXILE September 3, 2020 at 7:52 pm

World War II Plaque to Red Army Soldiers Who Died in Leningrad Siege Unveiled in Manchester – Photos

https://sputniknews.com/uk/202009031080358099-world-war-ii-plaque-to-red-army-soldiers-who-died-in-leningrad-siege-unveiled-in-manchester–/

Well done, Manchester!

How long before the plaque is vandalized, I wonder?

There's a sizable Ukrainian and Polish community in Manchester -- mostly 3rd generation now. I used to work with some of their grandfathers. Strangely, some of the Ukrainians whom I worked with had ended up in the UK as prisoners of war. Chose the wrong side!

To be fair though, some had little or no choice in doing so. One of them used to tell me he had served in 3 armies during WWII: the Red Army, the Wehrmacht as a "Hilfswilliger", and in the British army. He told me that he only drove trucks and never fired a shot in anger in any army.

I reckoned he must have been barely 18 years old when he ended up in King George VI's army.

[Sep 12, 2020] Clearly abother case of Novichok poisoning

Sep 12, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

MOSCOWEXILE September 3, 2020 at 7:02 pm

BBC

Alexei Navalny: Two hours that saved Russian opposition leader's life

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-54012278

An open and shut case! Clearly Novichok poisoning, a deadly poison made only in Russia, and the Russians have already used it at least once. The most deadly nerve agent known to man and part of the brutal armament that Putin's thugs use on their murderous missions.

I rest my case, m'lud.

MOSCOWEXILE September 3, 2020 at 8:15 pm

Germany has denied allegation of falsification of the Navalny case
3 September 2020

MOSCOW, September 3 – RIA Novosti. The statement made by the President of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko, about the falsification of data on the "poisoning" of Navalny is not true, the press service of the German Cabinet told RIA Novosti.
Earlier, at a meeting with Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin, Lukashenko said that Minsk had intercepted a conversation between Warsaw and Berlin, which denied allegations of the blogger's poisoning. He promised that he would give the Russian side a transcript of this "interesting dialogue, which clearly indicates that this is falsification".

"Of course, Mr. Lukashenko's statement does not correspond to reality. Yesterday the Federal Chancellor, the Foreign Minister and the Defence Minister expressed their views on the new circumstances in the Navalny poisoning case There is nothing to add", the cabinet told the agency.

In Moscow, they noted that they had not yet received this evidence.

"Lukashenko hast just announced this. He said that the material would be transferred to the FSB. There is no other information yet", Peskov told RIA Novosti.

What a duplicitous creep Lukashenko is!

Always jumping to one side of the fence to the other and thinking he is so smart in doing so.

Then again, perhaps he has such damning evidence, but even if he had, nobody would believe it, because Germany, being a vassal state of the USA, is on the side of freedom and democracy.

"Einigkeit und Recht und Freiheit für das deutsche Vaterland" as one sings there to a well known tune.


[Sep 12, 2020] Russia had jumped onboard the hydrogen train with a plan to use nuclear created hydrogen

Sep 12, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

ET AL September 3, 2020 at 10:27 am

A week or so ago it was reported that the EU's carbon tax would also apply to energy imports (Russian gas etc.) and in the Tass Press Review (?) 'shock' was apparently expressed, which is weird as de-carbonization (plus more recently a setting in place the necssary infrastcture for a hydrogen based economy) has been an open and long stated plan by Brussels. Norway has already invested significant resources in de-carbonizing its gas and is ready to go.

And in the last couple of days there was a report (RT?) that Russia had jumped onboard the hydrogen train with a plan to use nuclear created hydrogen (heat, innit?) and Norway style de-carbonization tech. Will post the links if I can re-find them. Still, interesting stuff.

[Sep 12, 2020] Novichok, Navalny, Nordstream, Nonsense

Sep 12, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

JAMES LAKE September 3, 2020 at 9:08 pm

Good article by ex Ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray. Novichok, Navalny, Nordstream, Nonsense

" Once Navalny was in Berlin it was only a matter of time before it was declared that he was poisoned with Novichok. The Russophobes are delighted. This of course eliminates all vestiges of doubt about what happened to the Skripals, and proves that Russia must be isolated and sanctioned to death and we must spend untold billions on weapons and security services. We must also increase domestic surveillance, crack down on dissenting online opinion. It also proves that Donald Trump is a Russian puppet and Brexit is a Russian plot.

I am going to prove beyond all doubt that I am a Russian troll by asking the question Cui Bono?, brilliantly identified by the Integrity Initiative's Ben Nimmo as a sure sign of Russian influence.

I should state that I have no difficulty at all with the notion that a powerful oligarch or an organ of the Russian state may have tried to assassinate Navalny. He is a minor irritant, rather more famous here than in Russia, but not being a major threat does not protect you against political assassination in Russia.

What I do have difficulty with is the notion that if Putin, or other very powerful Russian actors, wanted Navalny dead, and had attacked him while he was in Siberia, he would not be alive in Germany today. If Putin wanted him dead, he would be dead.

Let us first take the weapon of attack. One thing we know about a "Novichok" for sure is that it appears not to be very good at assassination. Poor Dawn Sturgess is the only person ever to have allegedly died from "Novichok", accidentally according to the official narrative. "Novichok" did not kill the Skripals, the actual target. If Putin wanted Navalny dead, he would try something that works. Like a bullet to the head, or an actually deadly poison.

"Novichok" is not a specific chemical. It is a class of chemical weapon designed to be improvised in the field from common domestic or industrial precursors. It makes some sense to use on foreign soil as you are not carrying around the actual nerve agent, and may be able to buy the ingredients locally. But it makes no sense at all in your own country, where the FSB or GRU can swan around with any deadly weapon they wish, to be making homemade nerve agents in the sink. Why would you do that?

Further we are expected to believe that, the Russian state having poisoned Navalny, the Russian state then allowed the airplane he was traveling in, on a domestic flight, to divert to another airport, and make an emergency landing, so he could be rushed to hospital. If the Russian secret services had poisoned Navalny at the airport before takeoff as alleged, why would they not insist the plane stick to its original flight plan and let him die on the plane? They would have foreseen what would happen to the plane he was on.

Next, we are supposed to believe that the Russian state, having poisoned Navalny, was not able to contrive his death in the intensive care unit of a Russian state hospital. We are supposed to believe that the evil Russian state was able to falsify all his toxicology tests and prevent doctors telling the truth about his poisoning, but the evil Russian state lacked the power to switch off the ventilator for a few minutes or slip something into his drip. In a Russian state hospital.

Next we are supposed to believe that Putin, having poisoned Navalny with novichok, allowed him to be flown to Germany to be saved, making it certain the novichok would be discovered. And that Putin did this because he was worried Merkel was angry, not realising she might be still more angry when she discovered Putin had poisoned him with novichok

There are a whole stream of utterly unbelievable points there, every single one of which you have to believe to go along with the western narrative. Personally I do not buy a single one of them, but then I am a notorious Russophile traitor.

The United States is very keen indeed to stop Germany completing the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which will supply Russian gas to Germany on a massive scale, sufficient for about 40% of its electricity generation. Personally I am opposed to Nord Stream 2 myself, on both environmental and strategic grounds. I would much rather Germany put its formidable industrial might into renewables and self-sufficiency. But my reasons are very different from those of the USA, which is concerned about the market for liquefied gas to Europe for US produces and for the Gulf allies of the US. Key decisions on the completion of Nord Stream 2 are now in train in Germany.

The US and Saudi Arabia have every reason to instigate a split between Germany and Russia at this time. Navalny is certainly a victim of international politics. That he is a victim of Putin I tend to doubt.

MOSCOWEXILE September 3, 2020 at 9:50 pm

I do hope that Murray was writing cynically when he penned the following words above about Navalny:

He is a minor irritant, rather more famous here than in Russia

His popularity here is minimal and his political base statistically zilch, the incessant swamping of the Russian blogosphere with his praise by his hamsters notwithstanding.

I saw one of such hamster's nonsense only the other week in which the retard wrote that Navalny is the most well-known person in Russia and another post of yet another hamster who presented a list of policies that the bullshitter would follow "when he becomes president".

MOSCOWEXILE September 3, 2020 at 10:13 pm

The whole crock of Navalny -- Novichok shite neatly summed up by a comment to Murray's article linked above:

Goose
September 4, 2020 at 00:28
We're being asked to believe by people calling themselves serious journalists, that the Kremlin's thought process was thus :

Let's poison this guy with Novichok. Nobody will know it was us and there'll be no diplomatic fallout.

Completely illogical.

Logic has no part in this machination, dear chap: the people to whom these lies are directed are fucking stupid: uneducated, brain-dead, browser surfing, soap opera and "Celebrity Come Dancing" and "Reality TV" and porn watching morons.

Oh yes! And in the UK they're daily fed pap about "The Royals": every day without fail the UK media presents page after page of "stories" concerning "Kate and Wills" and "Harry and Megan".

And much of the rest of the UK media is full of shite about "football" and its prima donnas -- that's "Associated Football" or "soccer" as they prefer to say in North America, and not "Rugby Football" -- better said: not "Rugby League Football".

MOSCOWEXILE September 4, 2020 at 9:28 pm

BBC

It gets worse and worse:

Alexei Navalny: Nato says Russia must disclose its Novichok programme
Published 13 hours ago

Nato has called for Russia to disclose its Novichok nerve agent programme to international monitors, following the poisoning of activist Alexei Navalny.

Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said members were united in condemning the "horrific" attack.
He added there was "proof beyond doubt" that a Novichok nerve agent was used against Mr Navalny.

Where is the proof????????

You just say so or some "guy" at Porton Down or some Bundeswehr Scheißkerl laboratories?

Get fucked Stoltenberg!

And Peskov, a word of advice: Shut the fuck up and say nothing.

Don't believe that silence from you will be taken as proof of guilt!

You and the Russian state are guilty of everything as charged by the very nature of the fact that you are Russian, "the other"!

Sound familiar?

It's what the Nazis said about every Jew: guilty of all accusations because of their ethnicity -- not their religion, note: Christianized Jews were still "Jews". They were guilty of all charges from the moment of each and every one's birth as a "Jew".

And the sickening thing is that "woke" arseholes the world over condemn racism, but racism directed against Russians is fair game.

The West stinks!

It is a vile sump of festering shite.

Thank Woden I live in Russia!

MOSCOWEXILE September 4, 2020 at 9:38 pm

Trump the moron:

Trump says he's seen NO PROOF of Russian opposition activist Navalny's poisoning – but has no reason to doubt Germany's conclusion
5 Sep, 2020 00:30 / Updated 26 minutes ago

Trump the believer!

It's called blind faith.

MOSCOWEXILE September 4, 2020 at 9:41 pm

From the above linked RT article:

The US president has received heavy criticism for his reluctance to immediately join NATO allies in pressing Russia over the Navalny incident, which CNN called "the latest instance of Trump failing to speak out and call for answers from the Kremlin on issues ranging from election interference to possible bounties on US troops in Afghanistan."

I presume that the concept of "burden of proof" is now a dead letter in the Free West.

MARK CHAPMAN September 4, 2020 at 11:16 pm

I thought that whole Russia-offered-bounties-for-dead-US-troops thing had been 'debunked' for good. Several western sources which are sometimes not snapping-turtle crazy said there was nothing to it. So why are they still citing it?

MOSCOWEXILE September 4, 2020 at 10:17 pm

Editorial Independent [wall]:

Alexei Navalny is one of the most important leaders of what passes for political opposition in President Putin's Russia. Some say he is, in effect, "the" leader of the opposition in Russia. He has just been the subject of an assassination attempt, and lies in an induced coma in a German hospital. It's worth repeating: the leader of the opposition to Vladimir Putin has been poisoned, perhaps fatally, using novichok, a chemical weapon banned by international treaty. There is little doubt that, in one form or another, formal or informal agents of the Russian state would have been part of the plot, especially given the evidence of novichok, and that the highest circles of the Russian establishment would either have knowledge of the attack, or made it apparent to any shady blah, blah. blah ..

Now don't you folks go and forget, BoJo recently made Evgeny Lebedev, the owner of that rag and who penned the above shite, a Baronet.

Lebedev has dual Russian/British citizen and has lived in the UK since he arrived there as an 8-year-old with his KGB papa, who had landed a cushy number at the Soviet Embassy.

Papa Lebedev went back to Russia, where in the immediate post-Soviet years of Russia he made a mint and became an "oligarch", namely an extremely successful thief who had pillaged Russia. His son became a UK citizen in 2010.

Evgeny Lebedev is now a life peer and may now plonk his arse (and get paid for doing so!) in one of the chambers of the British legislature, the one whose members are unelected: they are there either through their aristocratic "birthright" or are appointees, such as is Lebedev.

When BoJo appointed Lebedev as a life peer, the moronic Russophobes in the UK accused that fool of a British PM of being under the Evil One's control.

Just shows you how they know shag all about Russia and Russians.

That's because they are all tossers.

MOSCOWEXILE September 4, 2020 at 10:33 pm

Опубликована запись разговора Берлина и Варшавы по делу Навального
20:40 04.09.2020 (обновлено: 05:19 05.09.2020)

Recording of conversation between Berlin and Warsaw on Navalny case published
20:40 09/04/2020 (updated: 05:19 09/05/2020)

MOSCOW, September 4 – RIA Novosti. The state Belarusian media has published a recording of the negotiations between Berlin and Warsaw on the situation with Alexei Navalny, intercepted by Minsk .
RIA Novosti is publishing a transcript of this dialogue.

– Hello, good afternoon, Nick. How are we getting on?

– Everything seems to be going according to plan. The materials about Navalny are ready. They'll be transferred to the Chancellor's office. We'll be waiting for her statement.

– Has the poisoning been definitely confirmed?

– Look, Mike, it's not that important in this case. There is a war going on. And during a war, all sorts of methods are good.

– I agree. It is necessary to discourage Putin from sticking his nose into the affairs of Belarus. The most effective way is to drown him with the problems in Russia, and there are many of them. Moreover, in the near future they will have elections, voting day in the Russian regions.

– This is what we are doing. How are you doing in Belarus?

– To be honest, not that well, really. President Lukashenko has turned out to be a tough nut to crack. They are professional and organized. It is clear that Russia supports them. The officials and the military are loyal to the president. We are working on it. The rest [of this conversation] we'll have when we meet and not on the 'phone.

– Yes, I understand. See you then, bye.

MARK CHAPMAN September 4, 2020 at 11:21 pm

I find it hard to believe this is real. Lukashenko is 'a tough nut to crack'? The Belarusian government is 'professional and organized'? Well, you never know with the Poles. But it seems so perfectly to confirm western perfidy that it must be made up. Who would be stupid enough to say things like that on the phone?

MOSCOWEXILE September 5, 2020 at 12:17 am

Who would be stupid enough to say things like that on the phone?

"Fuck the EU!" said on the 'phone by Noodles to Ambassador Pietwat.

JEN September 5, 2020 at 4:13 am

And "Yats is our man!" Victory Noodles crowed to Pie-whacked.

Don't forget also that Jens Stoltenberg was dumb enough to think he could drive a taxi around Oslo and pick up paying passengers without their recognising him and commenting on his poor driving skills and knowledge of Oslo streets.

MOSCOWEXILE September 5, 2020 at 5:43 am

And on hearing off a Latvian (?) politician, who had been observing the "Revolution of Dignity" and was involved in an investigation into the deaths of the "Heavenly Hundred", that there were good grounds to believe that those martyrs for Ukrainian freedom had been martyred by being shot in the back by their fellow countrymen who were of a fascist bent, Lady Ashton said: "Gosh!""

Now that really was a dumb utterance to make on the phone, considering the circumstances.

MOSCOWEXILE September 5, 2020 at 7:32 am

Dejevsky in today's Independent [wall]:

It is also worth underlining that the Russian pilot who decided to make an emergency landing in Omsk, rather than proceed to Moscow, may have saved Navalny's life, as may the doctors in Omsk who – despite their professed doubts about poison – administered atropine, the closest treatment there is to a novichok antidote, early on. The claim, made by some, that this was a brazen attack, with the Kremlin's fingerprints all over it, designed to be found out and interpreted as a "two fingers up" to the west, does not stack up.

But the German findings that probably the most influential Russian opposition leader was poisoned and that the substance used was the same as the one identified in the Skripal case – a military-grade nerve agent, moreover, that is associated with Russia, even though it was developed in the Soviet-era and can be found outside Russia – means that the Kremlin has a case to answer. Yes, everyone is innocent until proven guilty, and the Kremlin is all denials, but the onus is now squarely on Putin to make his case in the court of international opinion.

" the doctors in Omsk who – despite their professed doubts about poison – administered atropine, the closest treatment there is to a novichok antidote, early on."

That a fact, Doctor Dejevsky?

" everyone is innocent until proven guilty, and the Kremlin is all denials, but the onus is now squarely on Putin to make his case in the court of international opinion"

Burden of proof?

Russia has been accused! Russia is not obliged to prove its innocence, FFS!!!!

Where is the evidence to back up the accusation????

MOSCOWEXILE September 5, 2020 at 7:33 am

Link to above:

https://www.independent.co.uk/independentpremium/voices/novichok-alexei-navalny-poison-russia-putin-germany-a9703756.html?r=10355

JENNIFER HOR September 5, 2020 at 1:19 pm

Of course the Omsk hospital doctors had to apply atropine because Navalny's groupies were squealing that he had been poisoned. They would have squealed again and accused the hospital of malpractice if the hospital had not used the drug.

MOSCOWEXILE September 5, 2020 at 9:42 am

Sputnik:

Russian Doctors Suggest Setting up Joint Group With German Colleagues on Navalny Case
5 September 2020
18:56

https://sputniknews.com/world/202009051080376439-russian-doctors-suggest-setting-up-joint-group-with-german-colleagues-on-navalny-case/

Russian doctors have proposed to their German colleagues that they establish a joint group on the case of Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny, the president of Russia's National Medical Chamber, noted paediatrician Leonid Roshal, told reporters on Saturday.

Will the Germans agree?

I shouldn't imagine so. They and the rest of the West have crossed the Rubicon:

Alea iacta est!


[Sep 11, 2020] MSM's attempts to spin Trump's attacks on senseless wars as disrespect for military at large are a dismal distortion of reality -- RT Op-ed

Notable quotes:
"... By Tony Cox , a US journalist who has written or edited for Bloomberg and several major daily newspapers. ..."
"... "Trump has lost the right and authority to be commander in chief," ..."
"... "despicable comments" ..."
"... "Killing generals could get to be a habit with me." ..."
"... "right and authority" ..."
"... "when it's required for national security and a last resort." ..."
"... "pattern of public statements ..."
"... Like this story? Share it with a friend! ..."
Sep 11, 2020 | www.rt.com

MSM's attempts to spin Trump's attacks on senseless wars as disrespect for military at large are a dismal distortion of reality 11 Sep, 2020 12:06 Get short URL © Getty Images / David Dee Delgado 29 Follow RT on RT

By Tony Cox , a US journalist who has written or edited for Bloomberg and several major daily newspapers. The New York Times and CNN are desperate to paint Donald Trump as an enemy of the military, due to his desire not to get involved in pointless wars. But this is simply not true, and Trump has the backing of many soldiers.

Someone should tell the New York Times, CNN and other mainstream media outlets that soldiers don't actually like getting killed or maimed for no good reason. Nor do they like generals and presidents who spill their blood in vain.

Alas, ignorance of these obvious truths probably isn't the issue. This is likely just another case of the biggest names in news pretending to not get the point so they can take the rest of us along for a ride in their confidence game of alternative reality.

The latest example is the New York Times spinning President Donald Trump's critique this week of Pentagon leadership and the military industrial complex as disrespect for the military at large. "Trump has lost the right and authority to be commander in chief," the Times quoted retired US Marines General Anthony Zinni as saying. Zinni cited Trump's alleged "despicable comments" about the nation's war dead – reported last week by The Atlantic , citing anonymous sources – as one of the reasons Trump "must go."

ALSO ON RT.COM After Trump helps crush ISIS, end Korea nuke tests and avoid new wars, Republican haters warn he 'imperiled America's security'

Never mind that Trump and all on-the-record administration sources denied The Atlantic's report. The Times couldn't resist when the pieces seemed to fit so well together for the military's latest propaganda campaign against Trump. First the president disses the troops, calling them "losers" and "suckers," then he has the temerity to say Pentagon leaders want to fight wars to keep defense contractors happy.

Except the pieces don't fit. The many people who occupy so-called boots on the ground don't have the same interests as the few people who send them to war. In fact, combat troops are given reason to hate the generals who send them to die when there's not a legitimate national security reason for the war they're fighting. And the US has fought a long line of wars that didn't serve the nation's national security interests. Even when a war is justified, the interests of top brass and front-line soldiers often clash.

Remember that great 1967 war movie, ' The Dirty Dozen' ? A group of 12 soldiers who were condemned to long prison sentences or execution in military prison for their crimes were sent on a 1944 suicide mission to kill high-ranking German officers at a heavily defended chateau far behind enemy lines. After succeeding in the mission and escaping the Germans, the lone surviving convict, played by tough-guy actor Charles Bronson, told the mission leader, "Killing generals could get to be a habit with me."

ALSO ON RT.COM NATO cannot survive a second Trump term

So no, New York Times, speaking out against ill-advised wars does not equal bashing the military. And sorry, General Zinni, but generals, defense contractors and their media mouthpieces don't get to decide who has the "right and authority" to be commander in chief. The voters decided that already, and they expressed clearly that they don't want senseless and endless wars and foreign interventions.

The Times cited General James McConville, the Army's chief of staff, as saying Pentagon leaders would only recommend sending troops to combat "when it's required for national security and a last resort." And no, it wasn't a comedy skit. What's the last US war or combat intervention that measured up to that standard? Let's just say the late Bronson, who died in 2003 at the age of 81, was a young man the last time that happened.

CNN tried a similar ploy on Sunday, while trying to sell the "losers" and "suckers" story in an interview with US Veterans Affairs Secretary Robert Wilkie. Host Dana Bash said the allegations fit a "pattern of public statements " by the president because Trump called US Senator John McCain a "loser" in 2015 and said McCain shouldn't be considered a hero for being captured in the Vietnam War. She repeatedly suggested to Wilkie, who didn't take the bait, that Trump's attacks on McCain, who died in 2018, showed disrespect for the troops.

https://platform.twitter.com/embed/index.html?creatorScreenName=RT_com&dnt=false&embedId=twitter-widget-0&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1302611067995074561&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.rt.com%2Fop-ed%2F500455-trump-military-media-lies%2F&siteScreenName=RT_com&theme=light&widgetsVersion=219d021%3A1598982042171&width=550px

Apparently, this follows the same line of propagandist thought which told us that saying there are rapists among the illegal aliens entering the US from Mexico – which is undeniably true – equals saying all Mexicans are rapists. In CNN land, a bad word about McCain is a bad word about all soldiers.

McCain was a warmonger who didn't mind getting US troops killed or backing terrorist groups in Syria. If he had his way , many more GIs would be dead or disabled, because the intervention in Syria would have been escalated and the US might be at war with Iran. Soldiers wouldn't want their lives wasted in such conflicts.

https://platform.twitter.com/embed/index.html?creatorScreenName=RT_com&dnt=false&embedId=twitter-widget-1&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=339455679800700928&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.rt.com%2Fop-ed%2F500455-trump-military-media-lies%2F&siteScreenName=RT_com&theme=light&widgetsVersion=219d021%3A1598982042171&width=550px

All wars are hard on the people who have to fight them, but senseless wars are spirit-crushing. An average of about 17 veterans commit suicide each day in the US, according to Veterans Administration data . Veterans account for 11 percent of the US adult population but more than 18 percent of suicides.

The media's deceiving technique of trying to pretend that ruling-class chieftains and front-line grunts are in the same boat reflects a broader campaign of top-down revolution against populism. The military is just one of several pro-Trump segments of the population that must be turned against the president. Other pro-Trump segments, such as police , are demonized and attacked.

Trump has managed to keep the US out of new wars and has drawn down deployments to Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan – despite Pentagon opposition. His rival, Democrat presidential nominee Joe Biden, can be expected to rev up the war machine if he takes charge. His foreign policy adviser, Antony Blinken, lamented in a May interview with CBS News that Trump had given up US "leverage" in Syria.

Trump also has turned around the VA hospital system, ending decades of neglect that left many veterans to die on waiting lists.

Like past campaigns to oust Trump, the notion that he's not sufficiently devoted to the troops might be a tough sell. No matter how good their words may sound, the people who promote endless wars without clear objectives aren't true supporters of the rank and file.

Like this story? Share it with a friend!

[Sep 11, 2020] Peak of Sinophobia- Boom Bust looks at US crackdown on Chinese students -- RT Business News

Sep 11, 2020 | www.rt.com

More than 1,000 Chinese students have had their visas revoked by the United States since June, after being accused of espionage for the Chinese military. azn_okay 1 hour ago There really hasn't been a time when the US wasn't sinophobic to some degree. It's one of those things that is normalised because China is supposedly the enemy and because of this, the Chinese are dehumanised. The fact that Trump has seen little backlash speaks volumes of the anti-China sentiment in the US. Enriquecost 8 minutes ago Every year more than 200,000 Chinese students go to the US. That is too much

[Sep 11, 2020] 'Legitimate response to the erroneous US moves'- China imposes tit-for-tat restrictions on American diplomats -- RT World News

Sep 11, 2020 | www.rt.com

Beijing has introduced reciprocal restrictions on American diplomats and other staff at the US embassy and consulates in China, including Hong Kong, the Chinese Foreign Ministry announced.

A diplomatic note announcing tit-for-tat restrictions had been recently sent to Washington, the ministry said on its website.

These measures are China's legitimate and necessary response to the erroneous US moves.

The limitations on the actions of "senior diplomats and all other personnel" were introduced to persuade Washington to lift restrictions it earlier placed on Chinese diplomats in America which "disrupted China-US relations," it added.

Last week, the Trump administration said that Chinese diplomats would from now on have to get approval from the US State Department before visiting American university campuses or staging cultural events with more than 50 people attending outside embassy grounds.

ALSO ON RT.COM Beijing slams Washington's new restrictions on Chinese diplomats as 'delusional', promises 'legitimate response'

The announcement followed the closure of the Chinese consulate in Houston in July, which the US has accused of spying. Earlier, Chinese diplomats were also ordered to inform US authorities of any meetings with state and local officials as well as communications with educational and research institutions.

Washington and Beijing have been trading jabs for months now as tensions keep mounting between the two countries over a whole range of issues.

They include a US crackdown on Chinese telecom giant Huawei and popular video sharing app TikTok over spying claims, as well as the backing of independence movements in Hong Kong and Taiwan by the White House.

[Sep 11, 2020] Evangelists of Democracy - The National Interest

Sep 11, 2020 | nationalinterest.org

Evangelists of Democracy

Mini Teaser: Radicals of the democracy-promotion movement embody the very thing they are fighting against -- a closed-minded conviction that they represent the one true path for all societies and thus possess a monopoly on social, ethical and political truth.

by Author(s): David Rieff

https://7891318a7d7e3d7b445a1b67cd7d0911.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-37/html/container.html

[Sep 11, 2020] DoD Confirms $10-$20 Billion COVID Bailout For Contractors After Trump Blasted Military-Industrial Complex -

Sep 11, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

DoD Confirms $10-$20 Billion COVID Bailout For Contractors After Trump Blasted Military-Industrial Complex by Tyler Durden Fri, 09/11/2020 - 09:45 Twitter Facebook Reddit Email Print

This is surely the last thing the American people want to hear, but it does confirm President Trump's recent statements saying that top Pentagon brass essentially seeks out constant wars to keep defense contractors "happy": the Department of Defense plans to cut major military contractors a $10 billion to $20 billion COVID bailout check .

Defense One reports : "With lawmakers and the White House unable to come to an agreement on a new coronavirus stimulus package, it's unlikely that money requested to reimburse defense contractors for pandemic-related expenses will reach these companies until at least the second quarter of 2021, according to the Pentagon's top weapons buyer."

Defense undersecretary for acquisition and sustainment, Ellen Lord, in recent statements has indicated the private defense firm stimulus would cover the period from March 15 to Sept. 15 and is estimated at "between $10 and $20 billion."

President Trump at Andrews Air Force Base, via AP.

"Then we want to look at all of the proposals at once," Lord said at a press briefing Wednesday. "It isn't going to be a first in, first out, and we have to rationalize using the rules we've put in place what would be reimbursable and what's not."

And strongly suggesting that it won't be the last of such stimulus for defense firms who have already profited immensely off post 9/11 'wars of choice' launched under Bush and Obama, Lord said , "I would contend that most of the effects of COVID haven't yet been seen."

To recall, here's what Trump said at the start of this week :

"I'm not saying the military's in love with me," Trump added , as he advocated for the removal of U.S. troops from "endless wars" and lambasted NATO allies that he says rip off the U.S. "The soldiers are."

"The top people in the Pentagon probably aren't because they want to do nothing but fight wars so all of those wonderful companies that make the bombs and make the planes and make everything else stay happy," he added.

"Some people don't like to come home, some people like to continue to spend money," the president said. "One cold-hearted globalist betrayal after another, that's what it was."

The "outrage" that followed included reporters claiming that Trump's words were "unprecedented".

https://lockerdome.com/lad/13084989113709670?pubid=ld-dfp-ad-13084989113709670-0&pubo=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com&rid=www.zerohedge.com&width=890

But that's far from the truth, as Glen Greenwald reminded his fellow journalists:

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Well over a half-century ago, Eisenhower warned, "In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex . The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist."

And further: "We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together."

[Sep 11, 2020] Sic Semper Tyrannis

Sep 11, 2020 | turcopolier.typepad.com

RUSSIAN FEDERATION SITREP 10 SEPTEMBER 2020 by Patrick Armstrong - Sic Semper Tyrannis

RUSSIAN FEDERATION SITREP 10 SEPTEMBER 2020 by Patrick Armstrong


RUSSIA AND COVID. Latest numbers : total cases 1046K; total deaths 18,263; tests per 1 million 270K . Russia has done 39.5 million tests (fourth after China, USA and India); among countries with populations over 10M it's done the most tests per million. Lancet paper on Russian vaccine . Photographs of the vaccine production line . Claims that Surfactant drugs are effective treatment . A machine capable of detecting numerous pathogens including COVID-19 unveiled.

CAR CRASH. The famous actor Efremov was given an 8-year sentence for causing fatal car crash .

TREASON. A military historian and reservist has been imprisoned on charges of high treason ; no details given and the trial was in camera. There have been several recent trials. I wonder what's going on. Renewed attacks on Russia, or a decision to clean things up?

NAVALNIY. Notice Novichok doesn't need people in hazmat suits this time? Noticed the mysterious bottle? ( Helmer and Cunningham have). Hard to keep the lies straight – another hole in Skripalmania .

CONTEMPT. Now they come right out and tell us they think we're stupider than pond scum: " a variant that the world did not know until this attack, but which is said to be more malicious and deadly than all known offshoots of the Novichok family ... The fact that he is still alive... is only due to a chain of happy circumstances. "

IN THE COUNTRY THAT MAKES NOTHING. " The President drove an Aurus limousine along a newly-built section of the Taurida motorway ."

UBI. Medvedev, leader of the majority party, floats the idea of universal basic income . Something to watch.

VODKA. Continues its decline as Russia's booze of choice . Another change to the Russia of clichés.

AGRICULTURE. Short piece on how effectively Russia has used sanctions and counter sanctions to make its agricultural sector an important international player . It's been a stunning achievement in fact and unimaginable in the 1990s – I remember an agricultural guy then just shaking his head. I reiterate – Russia, far from being the feeble and failing entity described by Western propaganda, is the closest thing to an autarky on the planet today. Twenty years of peace and you won't recognise Russia.

THE HUMBLE SOYBEAN. China imports a lot from the USA . But, given the way things are going, it's probably reconsidering: Commerce Minister Zhong calls for a " soybean industry alliance" with Russia .

DOOM AVERTED. AGAIN. Russia's military, formerly "hamstrung" by lack of parts from Ukraine , has replaced the lack . COVID-19 didn't finish Russia and Putin off . Relying on Western coverage of Russia makes you more ignorant. Continuing to, failure after failure, makes you stupid.

RATINGS. New Levada poll puts Putin back in the high 60s .

ANOTHER ONE. The Admiral Nakhimov (remember seeing it in the distance in the 1990s) put in water after years of reconstruction . Prestigious-looking ships packed with weapons.

COOLEST PLANE EVER. Is back . Did you know it's actually younger than the American B-52?

PROBABLY NOT A COINCIDENCE. Film of biggest nuclear weapon ever declassified.

WESTERN VALUES™. Navalniy. Assange. MH17 trial. Meng. Sacoolas. Sterling examples all.

AMERICA-HYSTERICA I. " Vote because Russian lessons are expensive ". But suppose Putin doesn't care whether you speak Russia as long as you obey? But see below – Farsi is probably a better choice.

AMERICA-HYSTERICA II. China Russia and Iran are " are seeking to disrupt our election ". Has there ever been such a fearful superpower ? I still bet that Tehran will make the choice because the other two will cancel each other out.

PROBLEMS WITH THE NARRATIVE. Remember when we said Russia was dangerously fast tracking its vaccine ? Forget we said that .

EUROPEANS ARE REVOLTING. Pompeo says the European Allies " chose to side with the Ayatollahs ". Time to sanction them all I guess.

BELARUS. The shape of the settlement is appearing: a referendum on constitutional changes; Lukashenka steps down; new election; solid alliance with Russia.

UKRAINE. A poll shows 49% distrust and 44% trust President Zelensky . Not so surprising: he hasn't delivered on anything. Not that anybody would let him. Ukraine continues its misery.

exiled off mainstreet , 10 September 2020 at 02:24 PM

This is a very informative summary with the ring of truth as always and is a corrective to the avalanche of propaganda which generally overwhelms the truth here. It is excellent that these are articles published by an easily accessible outlet which has an audience which it is useful to expose them to.

Babak makkinejad , 10 September 2020 at 03:01 PM

Patrick Armstrong

"Persian" please, and not "Farsi" or "Dari" (a recent Afghan fabrication); you would not be using "Italiano" when describing the mother tongue of Claudia Cardinale (Viva Italia!).

Pompeo's hatred for Shia Muslims is quite evident when an honorific - "Sign of God" - is used by him as a swear word.

Russian, ancient Greek, and Sankrit are indeed the most difficult languages among the Indo-European ones. Specifically about Russian: it does not have a clear question around noun-construction for things; "How does it look?", e.g. electric broom - "How does it work?, e.g. vacuum cleaner - "What does it do?", e.g. dusk sucker - corresponding to the word for "vacuum cleaner" in French, English, and German.

Also, in learning Russian, the fog of confusion never lifts, one is forever lost in the morass of that language. Even the native speakers make mistakes all the time - just like native Arabic speakers.

Pollychrome , 10 September 2020 at 04:46 PM

THANKS for vital facts with inspiring wit, Patrick A.

Flavius , 10 September 2020 at 05:10 PM

Thanks.
When I read the phrase "disrupt our elections" I actually start to laugh. I get almost. as much enjoyment imagining the election kops scrambling after foreign squirrels with Biden votes in their mouths as I do from 3 fingers of Midleton Irish.
It is sadistic, I know, but it can also be enjoyable to muse, when one of Hilary's rants on what cost her her destiny manages to get through the defenses, on whether she actually believes the rubbish she puts out in her pathetic attempts to write history as a loser, but really a winner.

JohnH , 10 September 2020 at 06:02 PM

Simplest refutation of Russian poisoning of Navalny: the poisoned him and then turned him over to Germany so that the forensic evidence could be found? Right!!! If the Russians did it, they certainly would NOT have delivered the evidence on a silver platter.

Just as Assad conveniently used CW just as the inspectors were about to arrive. Right!

The gullibility of the official media and its readers is simply mind boggling.

JohninMK , 10 September 2020 at 06:12 PM

Great stuff again Patrick.

The Tu-95/142 must be among the noisiest aircraft ever as well as faster than a P-51 Mustang as well as a B-52 at some altitudes. A very underrated aircraft.

Escarlata , 10 September 2020 at 07:50 PM

@Babak Makkinejad,

Are you learning Russian then? How so?

Yeah, Right , 11 September 2020 at 05:31 AM

Pompeo: [The E3]..."all told me privately"....

You know, in a world of normal diplomacy that sound-bite should have made Pompeo the lamest of lame ducks in the corridors of power in Berlin, London and Paris.

I mean, what a boorish man.

[Sep 11, 2020] Will the alleged Alexey Navalny poisoning sink the Nord Stream 2 pipeline- It might, but it shouldn t -- RT Op-ed

Sep 11, 2020 | www.rt.com

Will the alleged Alexey Navalny poisoning sink the Nord Stream 2 pipeline? It might, but it shouldn't 11 Sep, 2020 17:39 / Updated 4 hours ago Get short URL © REUTERS/Stine Jacobsen/File Photo; © AFP/Vasily MAXIMOV 11 Follow RT on RT

By Dr. Karin Kneissl , who works as an energy analyst and book author. She served as the Austrian minister of foreign affairs from 2017-2019. In June, she published her book on diplomacy 'Diplomatie Macht Geschichte' in Germany through Olms, and in early September her book 'Die Mobilitätswende', or 'Mobility in Transition', was released in Vienna by Braumüller. The cacophony of noise generated in the wake of the attack on the Russian opposition figure is drowning out the reality. As Angela Merkel has always maintained, the German-Russian gas deal is purely a commercial project.

Nord Stream has always had the ingredients to drive sober-minded Germans emotional. I remember energy conferences in Germany back in 2006 when already the idea of such a gas pipeline as a direct connection from Russia to Germany provoked deep political rows, not just in Berlin but across the EU.

Conservatives disliked it for the simple reason that it was a "Schröder thing," the legacy of social democrat Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, who lost the election of September 2005 to Angela Merkel. Schröder had negotiated the project with his good friend, President Vladimir Putin, and then chaired the company in charge of implementing it.

READ MORE Nord Stream 2 must be completed: Don't politicize Russian energy project over Navalny situation – Merkel Party politics and pipelines

Around that time, I was invited to an energy conference in Munich by the conservative think tank, the Hanns Seidel Foundation, managed by the Bavarian party CSU, the traditional junior partner of the ruling CDU in the government. The bottom-line of the debate on Nord Stream was negative, with the consensus being that the German-Russian pipeline would lead to the implosion of a European common foreign policy and damage the EU's energy ambitions.

I attended many other such events across Germany, from parliament to universities, and listened carefully to all the arguments. The feelings towards Nord Stream were much more benign at meetings held under the auspices of the SPD.

But over the years, the rift between different political parties evaporated, and a consensus emerged which supported enhanced energy cooperation between Berlin and Moscow. Politicians of all shades defended the first pipeline, Nord Stream 1, after it went operational in 2011, bringing Russian gas directly to Germany under the Baltic Sea.

They also enthusiastically supported the creation of the second, Nord Stream 2, better known by its acronym NS2. This $11bn (Ł8.4bn) 1,200km pipeline is almost finished and was due to go online next year.

But now, in the very final stage of construction, everything has been thrown in limbo thanks to the alleged poisoning of Russian opposition figure Alexey Navalny.

NS2 has always been controversial. Critics, such as the US and Poland, have argued that it makes Germany too reliant on energy from a politically unreliable partner. President Trump last year signed a law imposing sanctions on any firm that helps Russia's state-owned gas company, Gazprom, finish it. The White House fears NS2 will tighten Russia's grip over Europe's energy supply and reduce its own share of the lucrative European market for American liquefied natural gas.

These sanctions have caused delays to the project. A special ship owned by a Swiss company menaced with sanctions had to be replaced. And prior to that, various legal provisions were brought up by the European Commission that had to be fulfilled by the companies in retrospect.

Now the case of Navalny, currently being treated at a Berlin clinic after being awoken from a medically induced coma, has thrown everything up in the air again. It has triggered a political cacophony that threatens relations between Germany, the EU, Russia, and Washington. And at the center is the pipeline.

READ MORE 'Fraught with consequences for Russian-German relations': Moscow furious with Berlin over lack of cooperation on Navalny

Various German sources, among them laboratories of the armed forces, have alleged that Navalny had been poisoned with the nerve agent Novichok. Foreign Minister Heiko Maas (SPD) stated in an interview published on Sunday by Bild: " I hope the Russians don't force us to change our stance on Nord Stream 2 – we have high expectations of the Russian government that it will solve this serious crime ." He claimed to have seen " a lot of evidence " that the Russian state was behind the attack. " The deadly chemical weapon with which Navalny was poisoned was in the past in the possession of Russian authorities ," he insisted.

He conceded that stopping the almost-completed pipeline would harm German and broader European business interests, pointing out that the gas pipeline's construction involves "over 100 companies from 12 European countries, and about half of them come from Germany." Maas also threatened the Kremlin with broader EU sanctions if it did not help clarify what happened "in the coming days." Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov responded by labeling the accusations "groundless" and Moscow has staunchly denied any involvement in the affair.

The whole matter is complicated by domestic political considerations in Germany. CDU politician Norbert Röttgen, who heads up foreign affairs within the ruling party and has demanded that the pipeline should be stopped, is among those conservatives vying to lead the CDU in the run-up to Chancellor Angela Merkel's retirement next year. Meanwhile, Merkel is still trying to strike a balance between the country's legal commitments, her well-known mantra that NS2 is a " purely commercial project, " and what is now a major foreign policy crisis.

The chancellor had always focused on the business dimension. But most large energy projects also have a geopolitical dimension, and that certainly holds true with Nord Stream.

When I was Austria's foreign minister, I saw first-hand the recurring and very harsh criticism of the project by US politicians and officials. I remember the US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, in a speech at the margins of the UN General Assembly in September 2018 that focused solely on NS2. I replied by pointing out to him that pipelines are not built to annoy others, but because there is demand. One thing was certain – the US opposition to Nord Stream would not wane and now the Navalny case has given it new impetus. What we are witnessing is a tremendous politicization of the pipeline with a wide range of people all shouting very loudly.

ALSO ON RT.COM Craig Murray: Opposition figure Navalny may possibly have been targeted by Russian state, but Western narrative doesn't add up Diplomatic confrontation instead of solution

So here we are, in a very poisoned atmosphere where it might be difficult to revise positions without losing face. The social democrat Maas, just like the conservative Röttgen and many others, have taken to the media for different reasons. In my observation, it might have to do with their respective desires to take a strong position in order to also mark their upcoming emancipation from the political giant Merkel (she is due to step down next year).

Due to her professional and empathetic handling of the pandemic, she is today much more popular than before the crisis. That makes it difficult for a junior partner, represented by Foreign Minister Maas, and for all those who wish to challenge her inside the party.

What is needed is to get the topic out of the media and out of the to-and-fro of daily petty politics. Noisy statements might serve some, but not the overall interests involved. And there are many at stake. It is not only about energy security in times of transition, namely moving away from nuclear, but much wider matters.

As a legal scholar, I deem the loss of trust in contracts. Vertragstreue, as we call it in German – loyalty to the contract – will be the biggest collateral damage if the pipeline is abandoned for political reasons. This fundamental principle of every civilization was coined as pacta sunt servanda by the Romans – agreements must be kept. Our legal system is based on this. Who would still conclude contracts of such volumes with German companies if politics can change the terms of trade overnight?

ALSO ON RT.COM German FM links Nord Stream 2 to Navalny, threatens sanctions as Moscow accuses Berlin of dragging feet on alleged poisoning probe Remember South Stream

In June 2014, construction sites on the coasts of the Black sea, both in Russia and Bulgaria, were ready for starting the gas pipeline South Stream. After pressure from the European Commission, the work never started. The political reason was the dispute on Ukraine – in particular, the annexation of the Crimea. However, the legal argument was that the tenders for the contracts were in contradiction with EU regulations on competition. Tens of thousands of work permits, which had been issued from Bulgaria to Serbia etc., were withdrawn. The economic consequence was the rise of China's influence in the region. South Stream was redirected to Turkey.

So here we are in the midst of a diplomatic standoff. It is a genuine dilemma, but it could also turn into a watershed. Will contracts be respected or will we move into a further cycle of uncertainty on all levels? Germany is built on contracts, norms (probably much too many) and not on arbitrariness.

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The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.

silvermoon 5 hours ago

All these weeks have passed and Germany has still not shown shared actual evidence of their Navalny tests with Russia though. That is the same as saying we found the gun with your finger prints on it but never showing it.

Count_Cash silvermoon 3 hours ago

Correct, Germany has only since 10th September (if confirmed) shared any 'evidence'. That is sufficient intervening time to concoct any test result and associated materials that they want - another Diesel scandal. Indeed people will ask why when you had the patient on 22nd of august, it took you so long to send samples to the OPCW, despite almost immediately yelling Poison!

gainwmn silvermoon 5 hours ago

U stupid sheep: Germany did show it to the OPCW, i.e. the organization RF is the member of, and therefore the latter gets the full access to all the data provided by Germany, as well as any other of 192 members. Kremlin lies and demands in this regard is more than ridiculous, they completely destroy any shred of trust left to all RF governmental structures and regime itself.

Teodor Nitu gainwmn 3 hours ago

Riiight!...Those Russians...not only their chemical weapons are no longer working, but they are no longer capable to choose the proper time to use them, or so the story goes. Think about it; they 'used' novichok to kill the Skripals and they are still alive and well (supposedly), now they (Russians) 'used' novichok again to kill Navalny and he is alive and getting better.

Besides, they chose the absolutely wrong time to do it. With Skripals it was just before the opening of the World Cup in Russia and now, just before the finishing of the North Stream 2 pipeline.

It sounds that they are sabotaging their own interests, aren't they? Are they (Russians) that stup!d? Some 'smart' posters here seem to believe it. But lets get real, one has to be able to see beyond the length of his nose, in order to understand what is really going on.

silvermoon Teodor Nitu 2 hours ago

Russia had all their chemical weapons legally destroyed. Along with hundreds of countries. The US, UK and Israel never did. Navalny the innocent anti Putin. Can't win one way try another.

Pro_RussiaPole gainwmn 2 hours ago

So why is Russia still asking for it? Clearly, something is being withheld. As for the OPCW, their credibility has been shot for years with all their fake Syrian chem weapon attack reports.

seawolf 6 hours ago

Even if there was not Navalny's story, they could invent another to stop the project.

Abraxas79 seawolf 4 hours ago

Exactly. I hope Russia is the one that abandons it. Let Germany be the one that decides to cancel it and go along with it. Concentrate on supplying China and other Asian nations and internal consumption. Forget about Europe. You don't have to turn off the current supply, just charge more for it when the market allows. Looks like the next German leader according to this article is quite the Russophobe, which means relations will only get worse.

Pro_RussiaPole Abraxas79 2 hours ago

If this navalny farce does end up cancelling the NS2 project, Russia should stop all gas transit to western Europe through Poland and Ukraine by spring of next year. Tell those countries that will be cut off that Russia can either sell them LNG, or that they will have to connect to other sources of gas. Because if certain countries are so against Russian gas, then why are they not doing anything against Russian gas going through Poland and Ukraine, and why isn't Trump threatening sanctions on these countries for doing so?

Blue8ball713 RTjackanory 3 hours ago

Its a far longer list and it have the fingerprints of GB secret services all over it.

Reply Gabriel Delpino seawolf 46 seconds ago It is not in the interest of Germany to stop de project. Reply

magicmirror 6 hours ago

Europe should have nothing to do with the USA ....... proved time and time again they cannot be trusted. All they want is markets, resources and consumers. They lie, they cheat, they steal...... (quoting mr Pompeo, I think). A big opportunity to win Europe's independence.

SmellLaRata 5 hours ago

All due respect for Mr. Navalny but since when does an individual fate of one person dictates the fate for millions ? And c' mon Germany. Your hypocrisy is so utterly laughable. You ignore the Assange and Snowden cases, the slaughter of Kashoggi, the brutal beating of yellow vests, the brutal actions against the Catalans ... but Navalni. Not even a hint of a proof of government involvemen. But it fits the agenda, does it? The agenda which is dictated by the deep state agitators who so much flourished under Obama.

gainwmn SmellLaRata 4 hours ago

Even being not a fan (to say the least) of the US foreign and some of the domestic policy, I have to point out that tried by U analogy is largely out of balance: first, the issue in Navalny (as well as in Scripals' and others cases acted on with poisons) case is not so much the assassination attempt on a person's life, as the banned use of chemical weapons, the ban RF's signature has been under since 1993. And that conclusion (Russia's guilt) has not been made by the UK or Germany or any other country alone, but the OPCW - the organization not only RF is the member of, but also 191(!) other countries, out of which not a single country (except RF) rejected that conclusion!; second, the US did not made attempt on either Snowden's or Assange's life, with any kind of weapon, not already mentioning the weapons banned by the international agreements American government(s) signed. This is a large - I would say - decisive difference! As far as Kashoggi's case or other cases sited by U, RF did not react with sanctions against the respective perpetrators either, thus demonstrating the same disregard for the law and order as the US did... therefore making all lies about innocent RF and evil US, foolish, at the least.

Pro_RussiaPole gainwmn 2 hours ago

The US and its lackeys are killing Assange. They are doing it slowly. And many voices going along with a lie does not make the lie true. Because these poisoning allegations are lies. The accused were never allowed to see the evidence or challenge it. And there is the whole issue of politicized reports coming out of the OPCW that contradicted evidence and reality.

Nathi Sibbs 4 hours ago

After completing the pipe and it start running Russia must turn off all Ukraine pipes. No more gas for free from Russia, Ukraine must start importing LNG from thier reliable partner USA. I think imports from USA will be good for Ukrainian Nazi people

Abraxas79 Nathi Sibbs 4 hours ago

How are they going to pay for it? Ukraine's only exports these days are its women to various brothels across Europe and North America.

Hilarous 5 hours ago

The German leaders know very well that the case of Navalny will never be resolved and exists for no other reason than to seize a pretext to demonize Russia and to end Nord Stream 2 in exchange for US freedom gas

magicmirror Hilarous 4 hours ago

freedom gas and handsome presents .....

SandythePole 3 hours ago

This is an excellent account by Dr Karin Kneissl. It is a genuine dilemma for 'occupied' Europe. Its occupying master does NOT want NS2 and will do anything to stop it. Russia suffers sanctions upon sanctions, but still gallantly tries to maintain friendly and honourable business relations with its implacable neighbours. For how much longer is this to continue? Surely there must be some limit to the endless provocations of occupied Europe and its Western master. Perhaps it is time to shut off the oil and gas and leave Germany to sail under its own wind.

dunkie56 3 hours ago

Perhaps Russia should disengage with Germany/EU totally and forge ahead in partnership with China and India and whoever wants to do business. let the EU tie it's ship to the sinking US ship and drown along with it's protection racket partner! Then Russia should build a new iron curtain between itself and all countries who want to align with the EU..in the long run Russia has tried to forge a partnership with the West but it just has not born any fruit and even as pragmatic as Russia is they must be coming to the conclusion they are flogging a dead horse!

Blue8ball713 dunkie56 2 hours ago With 146 million citizen Russia is too small to be a real partner to anyone like China or India. Best fit is the EU, but the EU is controlled or better said occupied by the USA. Its part of their hegemonial system. So Russia is left out in the rain..

micktaketo 5 hours ago

I am not sure if it is the right thing to do but I think Russia should sue the German authorities if this deal is withdrawn and if it is have nothing to do with Germany again along with other corrupt countries that cannot prove or at the least bring forth their evidence to be seen, to be transparent to all even Russia the first, because Russia is the one being accused. These countries must think we the people are all completely stupid and Russia more so. This corruption stinks to high heaven and is obvious to all sane people who love fairness. You cannot trust an entity that believes in getting what they want by hook or by crook. Russia learn your lesson ! So you countries that love whats good for you and your people do not cheat them for they voted for you to help them. Germany do not kick yourself, it will hurt your people. Saying, There is more than one way to skin a cat, they say.

Mutlu Ozer 3 hours ago

There is a simple concept to investigate a crime to find the criminals: Just look at whose benefit the crime is? EU politicians are certainly smart people to know this basic concept of criminal investigation. However, now they are playing a new strategy about how to domesticate(!) not only Russia China as well... Germans are the main actors in the stage of the WW-I and WW-II. I surely claim that Germans would be the main architect of the last war, WW-III.

[Sep 11, 2020] From 9-11 to the Great Reset by Pepe Escobar

Sep 11, 2020 | www.unz.com

9/11 was the foundation stone of the new millennium – ever as much indecipherable as the Mysteries of Eleusis. A year ago, on Asia Times, once again I raised a number of questions that still find no answer.

A lightning speed breakdown of the slings and arrows of outrageous (mis)fortune trespassing these two decades will certainly include the following. The end of history. The short unipolar moment. The Pentagon's Long War. Homeland Security. The Patriot Act. Shock and Awe. The tragedy/debacle in Iraq. The 2008 financial crisis. The Arab Spring. Color revolutions. "Leading from behind". Humanitarian imperialism. Syria as the ultimate proxy war. The ISIS/Daesh farce. The JCPOA. Maidan. The Age of Psyops. The Age of the Algorithm. The Age of the 0.0001%.

Once again, we're deep in Yeats territory: "the best lack all conviction/ while the worst are full of passionate intensity."

All along, the "War on Terror" – the actual decantation of the Long War – proceeded unabated, killing Muslim multitudes and displacing at least 37 million people.

WWII-derived geopolitics is over. Cold War 2.0 is in effect. It started as US against Russia, morphed into US against China and now, fully spelled out in the US National Security Strategy, and with bipartisan support, it's the US against both. The ultimate Mackinder-Brzezinski nightmare is at hand: the much dread "peer competitor" in Eurasia slouched towards the Beltway to be born in the form of the Russia-China strategic partnership.

Something's gotta give. And then, out of the blue, it did.

A drive by design towards ironclad concentration of power and geoconomic diktats was first conceptualized – under the deceptive cover of "sustainable development" – already in 2015 at the UN ( here it is , in detail).

Now, this new operating system – or technocratic digital dystopia – is finally being codified, packaged and "sold" since mid summer via a lavish, concerted propaganda campaign.

Watch your mindspace

The whole Planet Lockdown hysteria that elevated Covid-19 to post-modern Black Plague proportions has been consistently debunked, for instance here and here , drawing from the highly respected, original Cambridge source.

The de facto controlled demolition of large swathes of the global economy allowed corporate and vulture capitalism, world wide, to rake untold profits out of the destruction of collapsed businesses.

And all that proceeded with widespread public acceptance – an astonishing process of voluntary servitude.

None of it is accidental. As an example, over then years ago, even before setting up a – privatized – Behavioral Insights Team, the British government was very much interested in "influencing" behavior, in collaboration with the London School of Economics and Imperial College.

The end result was the MINDSPACE report. That was all about behavioral science influencing policymaking and most of all, imposing neo-Orwellian population control.

MINDSPACE, crucially, featured close collaboration between Imperial College and the Santa Monica-based RAND corporation. Translation: the authors of the absurdly flawed computer models that fed the Planet Lockdown paranoia working in conjunction with the top Pentagon-linked think tank.

In MINDSPACE, we find that, "behavioral approaches embody a line of thinking that moves from the idea of an autonomous individual, making rational decisions, to a 'situated' decision-maker, much of whose behavior is automatic and influenced by their 'choice environment'".

So the key question is who decides what is the "choice environment'. As it stands, our whole environment is conditioned by Covid-19. Let's call it "the disease". And that is more than enough to beautifully set up "the cure": The Great Reset .

The beating heart

The Great Reset was officially launched in early June by the World Economic Forum (WEF) – the natural habitat of Davos Man. Its conceptual base is something the WEF describes as Strategic Intelligence Platform : "a dynamic system of contextual intelligence that enables users to trace relationships and interdependencies between issues, supporting more informed decision-making".

It's this platform that promotes the complex crossover and interpenetration of Covid-19 and the Fourth Industrial Revolution – conceptualized back in December 2015 and the WEF's choice futuristic scenario. One cannot exist without the other. That is meant to imprint in the collective unconscious – at least in the West – that only the WEF-sanctioned "stakeholder" approach is capable of solving the Covid-19 challenge.

The Great Reset is immensely ambitious , spanning over 50 fields of knowledge and practice. It interconnects everything from economy recovery recommendations to "sustainable business models", from restoration of the environment to the redesign of social contracts.

The beating heart of this matrix is – what else – the Strategic Intelligence Platform, encompassing, literally, everything: "sustainable development", "global governance", capital markets, climate change, biodiversity, human rights, gender parity, LGBTI, systemic racism, international trade and investment, the – wobbly – future of the travel and tourism industries, food, air pollution, digital identity, blockchain, 5G, robotics, artificial intelligence (AI).

In the end, only an all-in-one Plan A applies for making these systems interact seamlessly: the Great Reset – shorthand for a New World Order that has always been glowingly evoked, but never implemented. There is no Plan B.

The Covid-19 "legacy"

The two main actors behind the Great Reset are Klaus Schwab, the WEF's founder and executive chairman, and IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva. Georgieva is adamant that "the digital economy is the big winner of this crisis". She believes the Great Reset must imperatively start in 2021.

The House of Windsor and the UN are prime executive co-producers. Top sponsors include BP, Mastercard and Microsoft. It goes without saying that everyone who knows how complex geopolitical and geoeconomic decisions are taken is aware that these two main actors are just reciting a script. Call the authors "the globalist elite". Or, in praise of Tom Wolfe, the Masters of the Universe.

Schwab, predictably, wrote the Great Reset's mini-manifesto. Over a month later, he expanded on the absolutely key connection: the "legacy" of Covid-19.

All this has been fully fleshed in a book , co-written with Thierry Malleret, who directs the WEF's Global Risk Network. Covid-19 is described as having "created a great disruptive reset of our global, social, economic and political systems". Schwab spins Covid-19 not only as a fabulous "opportunity", but actually as the creator (italics mine) of the – now inevitable – Reset.

All that happens to dovetail beautifully with Schwab's own baby: Covid-19 "accelerated our transition into the age of the Fourth Industrial Revolution". The revolution has been extensively discussed at Davos since 2016.

The book's central thesis is that our most pressing challenges concern the environment – considered only in terms of climate change – and technological developments, which will allow the expansion of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

In a nutshell, the WEF is stating that corporate globalization, the hegemonic modus operandi since the 1990s, is dead. Now it's time for "sustainable development" – with "sustainable" defined by a select group of "stakeholders", ideally integrated into a "community of common interest, purpose and action."

Sharp Global South observers will not fail to compare the WEF's rhetoric of "community of common interest" with the Chinese "community of shared interests" as applied to the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which is a de facto continental trade/development project.

The Great Reset presupposes that all stakeholders – as in the whole planet – must toe the line. Otherwise, as Schwab stresses, we will have "more polarization, nationalism, racism, increased social unrest and conflicts".

So this is – once again – a "you're with us or against us" ultimatum, eerily reminiscent of our old 9/11 world. Either the Great Reset is peacefully established, with whole nations dutifully obeying the new guidelines designed by a bunch of self-appointed neo-Platonic Republic sages, or it's chaos.

Whether Covid-19's ultimate "window of opportunity" presented itself as a mere coincidence or by design, will always remain a very juicy question.

Digital Neo-Feudalism

The actual, face-to-face Davos meeting next year has been postponed to the summer of 2021. But virtual Davos will proceed in January, focused on the Great Reset.

Already three months ago, Schwab's book hinted that the more everyone is mired in the global paralysis, the more it's clear that things will never be allowed (italics mine) to return to what we considered normal.

Five years ago, the UN's Agenda 2030 – the Godfather of the Great Reset – was already insisting on vaccines for all, under the patronage of the WHO and CEPI – co-founded in 2016 by India, Norway and the Bill and Belinda Gates foundation.

Timing could not be more convenient for the notorious Event 201 "pandemic exercise" in October last year in New York, with the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security partnering with – who else – the WEF and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. No in-depth criticism of Gates's motives is allowed by media gatekeepers because, after all, he finances them.

What has been imposed as an ironclad consensus is that without a Covid-19 vaccine there's no possibility of anything resembling normality.

And yet a recent, astonishing paper published in Virology Journal – which also publishes Dr. Fauci's musings – unmistakably demonstrates that "chloroquine is a potent inhibitor of SARS coronavirus infection and spread". This is a "relatively safe, effective and cheap drug" whose "significant inhibitory antiviral effect when the susceptible cells were treated either prior to or after infection suggests a possible prophylactic and therapeutic use."

Even Schwab's book admits that Covid-19 is "one of the least deadly pandemics in the last 2000 years" and its consequences "will be mild compared to previous pandemics".

It doesn't matter. What matters above all is the "window of opportunity" offered by Covid-19, boosting, among other issues, the expansion of what I previously described as Digital Neo-Feudalism –

or Algorithm gobbling up Politics. No wonder politico-economic institutions from the WTO to the EU as well as the Trilateral Commission are already investing in "rejuvenation" processes, code for even more concentration of power.

Survey the imponderables

Very few thinkers, such as German philosopher Hartmut Rosa, see our current plight as a rare opportunity to "decelerate" life under turbo-capitalism.

As it stands, the point is not that we're facing an "attack of the civilization-state" . The point is assertive civilization-states – such as China, Russia, Iran – not submitted to the Hegemon, are bent on charting a quite different course.

The Great Reset, for all its universalist ambitions, remains an insular, Western-centric model benefitting the proverbial 1%. Ancient Greece did not see itself as "Western". The Great Reset is essentially an Enlightenment-derived project.

Surveying the road ahead, it will certainly be crammed with imponderables. From the Fed wiring digital money directly into smartphone financial apps in the US to China advancing an Eurasia-wide trade/economic system side-by side with the implementation of the digital yuan.

The Global South will be paying a lot of attention to the sharp contrast between the proposed wholesale deconstruction of the industrial economic order and the BRI project – which focuses on a new financing system outside of Western monopoly and emphasizes agro-industrial growth and long-term sustainable development.

The Great Reset would point to losers, in terms of nations, aggregating all the ones that benefit from production and processing of energy and agriculture, from Russia, China and Canada to Brazil, Indonesia and large swathes of Africa.

As it stands, there's only one thing we do know: the establishment at the core of the Hegemon and the drooling orcs of Empire will only adopt a Great Reset if that helps to postpone a decline accelerated on a fateful morning 19 years ago.

[Sep 06, 2020] Oh, look, no masks! And you thought that Obama official dirty tricks will be unmasked up by the investigation done by the Mueller team?

Sep 06, 2020 | turcopolier.typepad.com

... ... ...

And in the nation's capital - Play it again, Sam.

Oh, look, no masks! And you thought that got covered up by the investigation done by the Mueller team? Let's go over this one more time:

The document declassified by DNI Grenell shows that there were 14 unique days when the NSA received requests to "unmask"--the first was on 30 November 2016 by UN Ambassador Samantha Power and the last came on 12 January from Joe Biden. There were two separate requests on the 14th of December by Samantha Power, which indicates two separate NSA reports. Samantha Power would not have to submit two requests for the same document.

[Sep 01, 2020] Are We Deliberately Trying to Provoke a Military Crisis With Russia by Ted Galen Carpenter

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... There has been a long string of U.S. provocations toward Russia. The first one came in the late 1990s and the initial years of the twenty-first century when Washington violated tacit promises given to Mikhail Gorbachev and other Soviet leaders that if Moscow accepted a united Germany within NATO, the Alliance would not seek to move farther east. Instead of abiding by that bargain, the Clinton and Bush administrations successfully pushed NATO to admit multiple new members from Central and Eastern Europe, bringing that powerful military association directly to Russia's western border. In addition, the United States initiated "rotational" deployments of its forces to the new members so that the U.S. military presence in those countries became permanent in all but name. Even Robert M. Gates, who served as secretary of defense under both George W. Bush and Barack Obama, was uneasy about those deployments and conceded that he should have warned Bush in 2007 that they might be unnecessarily provocative. ..."
"... Such provocative political steps, though, are now overshadowed by worrisome U.S. and NATO military moves. Weeks before the formal announcement on July 29, the Trump administration touted its plan to relocate some U.S. forces stationed in Germany. When Secretary of Defense Mike Esper finally made the announcement, the media's focus was largely on the point that 11,900 troops would leave that country. ..."
"... Among other developments, there already has been a surge of alarming incidents between U.S. and Russian military aircraft in that region. Most of the cases involve U.S. spy planes flying near the Russian coast -- supposedly in international airspace. On July 30, a Russian Su-27 jet fighter intercepted two American surveillance aircraft; according to Russian officials, it was the fourth time in the final week of July that they caught U.S. planes in that sector approaching the Russian coast. Yet another interception occurred on August 5, again involving two U.S. spy planes. Still others have taken place throughout mid-August. It is a reckless practice that easily could escalate into a broader, very dangerous confrontation. ..."
"... The growing number of such incidents is a manifestation of the surging U.S. military presence along Russia's border, especially in the Black Sea . They are taking place on Russia's doorstep, thousands of miles away from the American homeland. Americans should consider how the United States would react if Russia decided to establish a major naval and air presence in the Gulf of Mexico, operating out of bases in such allied countries as Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua. ..."
"... I think this has been bipartisan policy since at least 1947. Unlikely to change anytime soon, even with realists gaining ground. Perhaps expanding NATO east, sending support to Ukraine, and intervening in Syria (despite attempts to leave, the best we can get at this point are small troop reductions that most likely are redeployed to neighboring countries) aren't the best idea after all? ..."
"... they think Russia is a weak state and can do nothing therefore they are free to do as they please. ..."
"... the US leadership wants ether country to take a shot at some thing US. Then then can scream and stomp their feet that no one on earth is allowed to trade with ether country and the US can block all trade with ether country. ..."
"... The other thing at play is Americans love it when their leaders act like gangsters. That's why leaders do it. Nothing will get you votes faster in the US than saying your going to kill people. I see US citizens try that non-sense about it's all Washington we don't want that. But you keep voting for people that are going to give you the next war fix. When you stop they will stop. ..."
"... if people are convinced that Russia is a weak state -- then it is easier to approve adventures abroad -- including ringing Russia. ..."
"... Please explain to me, a Russian person, what kind of anti-American policy Russia is spreading in countries? If we exclude acts of counteraction against American expansion and aggression against Russia? ..."
"... The only people that are destroying Americans are within our borders, wielding power to fulfill their mission -- enrich themselves, keep the borders open, and our military all over the globe. ..."
"... I think there is a third option besides escalation and deescalation - exhaustion. Projecting power across the globe is expensive, it is a slow but steady drain on US resources, which are needed elsewhere (for example to quell the riots in major US cities). ..."
"... I see it as exhaustion by corruption. The US military is increasingly bureaucratic, political and ineffectual. Our weapons are gold-plated, hyper-tech focused and require highly-skilled people to maintain them, which means we can't quickly train new people up. The weapons themselves are so complex and expensive that there is no way to manufacture them at scale quickly. ..."
"... Read Jean Lartegy's "The Centurions." That is the direction where the tactically brilliant, but strategically incompetent US military leadership is headed. ..."
"... Stop focusing on what Trump says and look at what his administration does. Troops in Poland and Eastern Europe, Nord Stream 2, intrusive US reconnaissance flights along Russia's borders, support of Ukraine, interference with Russian patrols in Syria, the continuing attempt to destabilize Assad in Syria, the destruction of JCPOA, global sanctions campaign on Russia among others, withdrawal from arms control treaties, accusation that Russia was cheating on INF treaty, hiring dozens of anti-Russia hardliners, etc, etc. ..."
"... I don't think US-Russian cooperation is doable at this point--or any time soon. Given how erratic US policy is--yawing violently from one direction to another--Russia has no reason to accept the damage to its relationship with China that shifting to a strategic arrangement with the US would entail. The risk is too high and the potential rewards too uncertain. ..."
"... We have pretty much alienated the Russian state under Putin, and now we're trying to wait him out, with the expectation that there is no one of his capabilities to maintain the strategic autonomy of the Russian state in the longer term and that once he exits the scene, some Yeltsin-like stooge will present himself. ..."
"... Everyone is focusing on Russia because of the Russia hoax. Dems started a new cold war based on an irrational fear that Russia was threatening our democracy. ..."
"... The foreign policy elite dislikes Russia, always has, and will do anything to keep this "adversary" front and center because their prospects for prestige, power and position depend upon the presence of an enemy. As an example see Strobe Talbot and Michael McFaul. ..."
Aug 28, 2020 | www.theamericanconservative.com

Tensions are becoming dangerous in Syria and on Russia's back doorstep. US soldiers stand near US and Russian military vehicles in the northeastern Syrian town of al-Malikiyah (Derik) at the border with Turkey, on June 3, 2020. (Photo by DELIL SOULEIMAN/AFP via Getty Images)

A dangerous vehicle collision between U.S and Russian soldiers in Northeastern Syria on Aug. 24 highlights the fragility of the relationship and the broader test of wills between the two major powers.

According to White House reports and a Russian video that went viral this week, it appeared that as the two sides were racing down a highway in armored vehicles, the Russians sideswiped the Americans, leaving four U.S. soldiers injured. It is but the latest clash as both sides continue their patrols in the volatile area. But it speaks of bigger problems with U.S. provocations on Russia's backdoor in Eastern Europe.

A sober examination of U.S. policy toward Russia since the disintegration of the Soviet Union leads to two possible conclusions. One is that U.S. leaders, in both Republican and Democratic administrations, have been utterly tone-deaf to how Washington's actions are perceived in Moscow. The other possibility is that those leaders adopted a policy of maximum jingoistic swagger intended to intimidate Russia, even if it meant obliterating a constructive bilateral relationship and eventually risking a dangerous showdown. Washington's latest military moves, especially in Eastern Europe and the Black Sea, are stoking alarming tensions.

There has been a long string of U.S. provocations toward Russia. The first one came in the late 1990s and the initial years of the twenty-first century when Washington violated tacit promises given to Mikhail Gorbachev and other Soviet leaders that if Moscow accepted a united Germany within NATO, the Alliance would not seek to move farther east. Instead of abiding by that bargain, the Clinton and Bush administrations successfully pushed NATO to admit multiple new members from Central and Eastern Europe, bringing that powerful military association directly to Russia's western border. In addition, the United States initiated "rotational" deployments of its forces to the new members so that the U.S. military presence in those countries became permanent in all but name. Even Robert M. Gates, who served as secretary of defense under both George W. Bush and Barack Obama, was uneasy about those deployments and conceded that he should have warned Bush in 2007 that they might be unnecessarily provocative.

As if such steps were not antagonistic enough, both Bush and Obama sought to bring Georgia and Ukraine into NATO. The latter country is not only within what Russia regards as its legitimate sphere of influence, but within its core security zone. Even key European members of NATO, especially France and Germany, believed that such a move was unwise and blocked Washington's ambitions. That resistance, however, did not inhibit a Western effort to meddle in Ukraine's internal affairs to help demonstrators unseat Ukraine's elected, pro-Russia president and install a new, pro-NATO government in 2014.

Such provocative political steps, though, are now overshadowed by worrisome U.S. and NATO military moves. Weeks before the formal announcement on July 29, the Trump administration touted its plan to relocate some U.S. forces stationed in Germany. When Secretary of Defense Mike Esper finally made the announcement, the media's focus was largely on the point that 11,900 troops would leave that country.

However, Esper made it clear that only 6,400 would return to the United States; the other nearly 5,600 would be redeployed to other NATO members in Europe. Indeed, of the 6,400 coming back to the United States, "many of these or similar units will begin conducting rotational deployments back to Europe." Worse, of the 5,600 staying in Europe, it turns out that at least 1,000 are going to Poland's eastern border with Russia.

Another result of the redeployment will be to boost U.S. military power in the Black Sea. Esper confirmed that various units would "begin continuous rotations farther east in the Black Sea region, giving us a more enduring presence to enhance deterrence and reassure allies along NATO's southeastern flank." Moscow is certain to regard that measure as another on a growing list of Black Sea provocations by the United States.

Among other developments, there already has been a surge of alarming incidents between U.S. and Russian military aircraft in that region. Most of the cases involve U.S. spy planes flying near the Russian coast -- supposedly in international airspace. On July 30, a Russian Su-27 jet fighter intercepted two American surveillance aircraft; according to Russian officials, it was the fourth time in the final week of July that they caught U.S. planes in that sector approaching the Russian coast. Yet another interception occurred on August 5, again involving two U.S. spy planes. Still others have taken place throughout mid-August. It is a reckless practice that easily could escalate into a broader, very dangerous confrontation.

The growing number of such incidents is a manifestation of the surging U.S. military presence along Russia's border, especially in the Black Sea . They are taking place on Russia's doorstep, thousands of miles away from the American homeland. Americans should consider how the United States would react if Russia decided to establish a major naval and air presence in the Gulf of Mexico, operating out of bases in such allied countries as Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua.

The undeniable reality is that the United States and its NATO allies are crowding Russia; Russia is not crowding the United States. Washington's bumptious policies already have wrecked a once-promising bilateral relationship and created a needless new cold war with Moscow. If more prudent U.S. policies are not adopted soon, that cold war might well turn hot.

Ted Galen Carpenter, a senior fellow in security studies at the Cato Institute and a contributing editor at The American Conservative, is the author of 12 books and more than 850 articles on international affairs. His latest book is NATO: The Dangerous Dinosaur (2019).

Tradcon • 5 days ago • edited

I mean, I think this has been bipartisan policy since at least 1947. Unlikely to change anytime soon, even with realists gaining ground. Perhaps expanding NATO east, sending support to Ukraine, and intervening in Syria (despite attempts to leave, the best we can get at this point are small troop reductions that most likely are redeployed to neighboring countries) aren't the best idea after all?

Mike P Tradcon • 4 days ago

This is a very anti American article! Patriots know that where the U.S. gives political or economic ground Russia and other adversaries will fill the vacum with policies intended to destroy American peoeple. So no, it is not a bad idea to be involved in Syria and Ukraine in fact it is a very good idea.

northernobserver Mike P • 4 days ago

The entire framing of Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the Muslim Brotherhood as "pro American" and those who oppose them as "anti American" is delusional.
Russia is a weak state trying to maintain its natural spheres of influence along the Curzon line. Why has the State Department/ Pentagon decided to try and roll this back? How the F to they expect Russia to react. How would America react if a foreign power tried to turn Mexico into a strategic asset. So why is it ok to make Ukraine into a Nato member? It's reckless and ultimately it is pointless. Weakening Russia further serves little strategic purpose and potentially threatens to destabilize the Balkans and mid east with Turkish adventurism. What will America do if the Turks seize Rhodes under some pretext?

Syria is another case of State Department midwits not understanding the results of their regime change. What purpose does it serve to put a Sunni extremist government in Damascus. How hateful do you have to be to subject Syria's minorities to genocide at the hands of an ISIS sympathetic government? How do you delude yourself that such a regime will serve America's interests in the long run? So you can own Iran before the election? You are trading victory today for permanent loss tomorrow. It's insane.

Aen Elle northernobserver • 4 days ago
How the F to they expect Russia to react.

Just like you, they think Russia is a weak state and can do nothing therefore they are free to do as they please. Also, since Turkey is a NATO member and as such an ally to the U.S. shouldn't you be cheering in good faith for Turkey and against Russia?

Bianca Aen Elle • a day ago

You got that one. Because Turkey is a thorn in NATO side. It has massive economic interests in Russia, China and the rest of Asia. The "adventure" in Syria is coordinated with Russia to the last detail, while playacting tensions. US problem in Syria is not Russia or Turkey, but Russia AND Turkey.

As US is frowning at Egypt Al-Sisi , or Saudi MBS -- it is because they frown at Egypt AND Russia, as well as Saudi Arabia AND Russia.
Basically, countries nominally counted in OUR camp are frowned upon when collaborating with the ENEMY countries.
Our foreign policy is stuck in Middle East -- and cannot get unstuck. Cannot be better illustrated then Pompeo addressing Republican convention from Jerusalem.

The only way Russia can challenge encirclement is by challenging US in its home away from home -- Middle East. And creating new realities in the ground by collaborating with the countries in the region -- undermining monopoly.

And as the entire world is hurting from epidemic related economic setbacks, Russia and China are economies that are moving forward. And nobody in the Middle East can afford to ignore it.

J Villain northernobserver • 4 days ago

I agree with you with the exception of Russia being weak. One day the US which has never seen any thing in advance will push Russia one time to many and find the Russian Army in Poland and Romania. That is if China doesn't take out some thing precious to the US in the mean time like a U2, aircraft carrier etc.

There are two things at play here. The first is the US leadership wants ether country to take a shot at some thing US. Then then can scream and stomp their feet that no one on earth is allowed to trade with ether country and the US can block all trade with ether country.

The other thing at play is Americans love it when their leaders act like gangsters. That's why leaders do it. Nothing will get you votes faster in the US than saying your going to kill people. I see US citizens try that non-sense about it's all Washington we don't want that. But you keep voting for people that are going to give you the next war fix. When you stop they will stop.

PJ London J Villain • a day ago

I agree with your assessment except Russia will not put troops into any country without the express request from the legitimate government. They are not going into Poland and especially not Romania (Transnistria maybe) why would they? The countries do not have any resources that Russia wants. The only reason to put troops into Belarus is to maintain a distance between Poland and the borders.

Russia needs nothing from the rest of the world except trade. Un-coerced, free trade. This drives the US corporations crazy as no one will trade with the US anymore without coercion.

PS the same goes for China with the proviso that Taiwan is part of China and needs to be reabsorbed into the mainstream. It will take +20 years but China just keeps the pressure on until there will be no viable alternative.

Bianca northernobserver • a day ago

It has never meant to serve American interests. Ever. Once you put it in perspective, it makes sense.

But if people are convinced that Russia is a weak state -- then it is easier to approve adventures abroad -- including ringing Russia.

The problem for never satiated Zealots is the following -- regional powers in the Middle East are hitching their wagons to Eurasian economic engine. That is definitely true of Turkey, Egypt and even Saudi Arabia. The tales of Moslem Brotherhood are here to interpret something today from the iconography from the past. And to explain today what an entirely different set of leaders did -- be that few years ago or one hundred years ago. Same goes for iconography of Al-Qaeda, ISIS, Communism, Socialism, authoritarianism, and other ISMS.

Those icons serve the same purpose as icons in religion or in cyber-space. You look at them, or you click -- and the story and explanation is ready made for your consumption. Time to watch actions -- not media iconography to tell us what is going on.

Tradcon Mike P • 4 days ago

If we're being purely ideological here those with an overtly internationalist disposition (barring leftists) are those who want to be involved overseas, hardly ones to go on about national interest or pride. Its been a common stance associated with American Nationalism and Paleoconservatives to be anti-intervention, these people (of which I consider myself a part) can hardly be bashed for holding unpatriotic views.)

Russia has a declining population, and an economy smaller than that of Spain. Its hardly a threat and our involvement in Eastern Europe was relatively limited pre-2014 and even so the overall international balance of power hasn't shifted after Russian annexation of Crimea, and the Ukrainians proved quite capable of defending their nation (though not so capable as to end retake separatist strongholds.

Alexandr Kosenkov Mike P • 3 days ago

Please explain to me, a Russian person, what kind of anti-American policy Russia is spreading in countries? If we exclude acts of counteraction against American expansion and aggression against Russia? What ideological foundations does Russia have after 1991? Isn't Russia's actions a guerrilla war on the communications of the self-proclaimed "Empire of Good", which is pursuing a tough offensive policy? And is it not because the Russians support a significant part of Putin's initiatives (despite a number of Putin's obvious shortcomings) precisely because they have experience of cooperation with the "Empire of Good" in the 90s: give loans, corrupt officials and deputies, put Russian firms under control big American companies, and then just give orders from the White House.
PS. I beg your pardon my google english

Bianca Mike P • a day ago

Another Zealot in Patriot garb. The only people that are destroying Americans are within our borders, wielding power to fulfill their mission -- enrich themselves, keep the borders open, and our military all over the globe.

kouroi • 4 days ago • edited

It would be interesting to read the minds of the US pilots engaged in these activities. My guess is that the cognitive dissonance energy in those heads is equivalent to the biggest nuclear bomb ever exploded...

Vhailor • 4 days ago

Hmmm... I think there is a third option besides escalation and deescalation - exhaustion. Projecting power across the globe is expensive, it is a slow but steady drain on US resources, which are needed elsewhere (for example to quell the riots in major US cities).

In a major crisis this could lead to a breaking point. What if some US adversary decides to double down and attack (directly or by proxy) US troops and the US will not be able to respond? A humiliating defeat combined with an exhausted public decidedly set against military adventures abroad could cause a rapid retrenchment and global withdrawal.

Kent Vhailor • 4 days ago

I see it as exhaustion by corruption. The US military is increasingly bureaucratic, political and ineffectual. Our weapons are gold-plated, hyper-tech focused and require highly-skilled people to maintain them, which means we can't quickly train new people up. The weapons themselves are so complex and expensive that there is no way to manufacture them at scale quickly.

The DOD today is only about personal political position, and grubbing tax-payer dollars for self-aggrandizement. In any real war with a real adversary, we wouldn't stand a chance.

Vhailor Kent • 4 days ago

I wouldn't be so pessimistic regarding US military capabilities and I'm neither a US citizen or a fan of US global hegemony.

The US armed forces are made up of professionals. There are some universal advantages and disadvantages of such forces. A professional army is good at fighting wars but bad at controlling territory because of its limited size and higher costs-per-soldier. In order to control territory you need "boots on the ground" in great numbers, standing at checkpoints and patrolling the countryside. They didn't have to be trained to the level of Navy SEALS, for them it is enough if they can shoot straight and won't be scared from some fireworks and the US lacks such forces.

kouroi Vhailor • 4 days ago

So how is one going to get the millions of manpower to fulfill these tasks? Pauperize the masses so that joining the army becomes the only viable solution? Introduce the Draft? Provide a pathway for US citizenship for any foreigner that joins, establishing a US Foreign Legion?

And then, how you'll have enough boots on the ground to pacify Russia or China. It took more than a month to establish and secure the beach heads in Bretagne in France in 1944. How do you think you can even get those boots to land in Russia or China, when you know that the ICBMs are going to start flying towards the continental US if something like this will ever happen?

Vhailor kouroi • 4 days ago

So how is one going to get the millions of manpower to fulfill these tasks? Pauperize the masses so that joining the army becomes the only viable solution? Introduce the Draft?

It is no longer possible to introduce the draft in the US - even mentioning it would lead to social unrests.

Baruch Dreamstalker Vhailor • 4 days ago

The idea of a soft-mandatory year of service with a military option has been floated. It generates neither unrest nor interest.

alan Vhailor • 21 hours ago

Read Jean Lartegy's "The Centurions." That is the direction where the tactically brilliant, but strategically incompetent US military leadership is headed.

Scaathor Kent • 4 days ago

In addition, those gold-plated weapon systems often do not work as advertised. Look how the multi-billion IADS of the Saudis couldn't protect their refinery complex from a cruise missile attack from Yemen. Look at the embarrassing failures of the LCS and Zumwalt ship classes, and the endless problems with the Ford CVN. The F35 is proving a ginormous boondoggle that will massively enrich LM shareholders but will do squat for US military capabilities.

kouroi Vhailor • 4 days ago

It will go on as long as the US is able to benefit of its present ability to print money and have the world use that money...

Baruch Dreamstalker William Toffan • 15 hours ago

The alternative is an incumbent who runs against the condition of his own country as an outsider. It take an idiot to support that.

PJ London Feral Finster • a day ago

He already did and the Military ignored him.
He backtracked with endless excuses and conditionals.
https://www.nbcnews.com/new...
**
Bill Clinton once reportedly told senior White House reporter Sarah McClendon, "Sarah, there's a government inside the government, and I don't control it."
**
Since I entered politics, I have chiefly had men's views confided to me privately. Some of the biggest men in the United States, in the field of commerce and manufacture, are afraid of something. They know that there is a power somewhere so organised, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, that they better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it.
– Woodrow Wilson, 28th President of the United States (1856-1924)
**
Do you really think that the adults with so much to lose would allow an idiot like Trump (or Clinton or Obama or Bush) to actually run things?

Feral Finster PJ London • a day ago

And then, like the cuck he is, Trump knuckled under. "I like oil!"

Dan Greene bumbershoot • 3 days ago

Stop focusing on what Trump says and look at what his administration does. Troops in Poland and Eastern Europe, Nord Stream 2, intrusive US reconnaissance flights along Russia's borders, support of Ukraine, interference with Russian patrols in Syria, the continuing attempt to destabilize Assad in Syria, the destruction of JCPOA, global sanctions campaign on Russia among others, withdrawal from arms control treaties, accusation that Russia was cheating on INF treaty, hiring dozens of anti-Russia hardliners, etc, etc.

I'll repeat: Focus on what Trump does, not what he says, and then total up the pro-Russia and anti-Russia actions of this administration and see what that reveals.

peter mcloughlin • 4 days ago

A danger with this "new Cold War" is the assumption it will end like the first one – peacefully. If this is the thinking among policy-makers we are in a very perilous situation. History shows that fatal miscalculations contributed to the First World War, and as a consequence the second. Today there is no room for miscalculation, which will set off unstoppable escalation into a third.
https://www.ghostsofhistory...

I Don't Matter • 4 days ago

Russians deliberately repeatedly ram an American vehicle, but I'm sure it's all our fault. Shouldn't have worn that skirt I guess.
Before y'all armchair Putin experts say all your loving things: you have nothing to contribute unless you speak fluent Russian. I watched the video taken and published by the Russians and it was pretty clear what they were doing.

Feral Finster I Don't Matter • 4 days ago

The United States is not invited in Syria or wanted. Russian troops are in Syria at the invitation of the legitimate and recognized government.

Whatever happens to American troops there is deserved.

dba12123 . I Don't Matter • 3 days ago • edited

Something critical is being missed entirely. The United States has invaded Syria without a mandate from the UN. Its' president has explicitly stated that it is the intention of the US to take Syria's oil. Both are violations of international law. Any hostile action taken against the illegal US presence in Syria is justifiable as self defense. While the US presence in Syria is illegal, Russia's presence is not. Russia was invited into Syria by the UN recognized Syrian government to assist it in defending against the US regime change by Al Qaeda proxy operation..

hooly • 4 days ago

establish a major naval and air presence in the Gulf of Mexico, operating out of bases in such allied countries as Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua.

What would happen if China or Russia established bases in the Caribbean and Latin America? Trump joked about selling Puerto Rico, what if the Chinese bought it?

L RNY • 4 days ago

If the Israeli's have a problem with Russia being in Syria then Israel should deal with it. Its not our problem and Russia is not our enemy. Infact India is bringing closer relations between Russia and Japan. Which do you want? Russian antagonism because Israel doesn't want Russians in Syria or Russian partnership with India, Japan, Australia and the US dealing with China? Remember....you could spend 1000 years in the middle east and not make a dent in the animosities between peoples there...so one is a futile endeaver...while the other has great benefit.

Carlton Meyer • 4 days ago

Note that Russian soldiers are in Syria at the request of its government to help fend off foreign invaders. The American troops are there illegally, with no UN or even Congressional authorization.

Also note the USA risks another Cuban missile crisis by withdrawing from the INF treaty after illegally building missile launch complexes in Romania and Poland that can hit Russia with nuclear cruise missiles.

The USA did much more than "meddle" in Ukraine. The Obama/Biden team openly organized a coup to overthrow its elected President because he didn't want to join NATO and the EU.

https://cdn.embedly.com/widgets/media.html?src=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fembed%2FnW7lNABfDVk%3Ffeature%3Doembed&display_name=YouTube&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DnW7lNABfDVk&image=https%3A%2F%2Fi.ytimg.com%2Fvi%2FnW7lNABfDVk%2Fhqdefault.jpg&key=21d07d84db7f4d66a55297735025d6d1&type=text%2Fhtml&schema=youtube

Hrant Carlton Meyer • 4 days ago

Is that guy in the middle of the left seated Vlad Klitschko? I great boxer no doubt, but also known for his stunning stupidity. Is he part of the new Ukrainian political elite? Poor Ukraine.

Aen Elle Hrant • 4 days ago

Klichko has been the mayor of Ukrainian capital city Kiev since the victory of Euromaidan in 2014 until present day.

longlance • 4 days ago

Russia has been threatened & attacked by military powers to its West, East & South for 1000 years. Russia is now lean & mean, but still standing.

Baruch Dreamstalker • 4 days ago • edited

A Russian vehicle sideswipes an American vehicle, injuring two US soldiers, and that's an American provocation? An American spy plane claims to be in international waters, and you tack in a "supposedly" in that sentence? "Violating" a tacit promise, really? Russia aggression against Georgia and Crimea is OK because Sphere of Influence? This article is loaded with Blame America First crap usually associated with the Left (much to this liberal's disgust). Never expected to find it here.

Yes, the expansion of NATO east must have looked to Russia like something coming at their borders entirely too fast. I thought it was a terrible idea at the time, and wrote it off to the wheels of a fifty-year-old bureaucracy not knowing how to slow down. Your eye-straining gaze at the tea-leaves for Deeper State motives is unpersuasive, even without your odious prejudices.

kouroi Baruch Dreamstalker • 4 days ago

Maybe some play of Rashomon would be in order here. That is your perspective.

Now your honor, what I have seen is that Georgia attacked first and hoped to occupy a certain area that Russian Federation was protecting, As a side comment, I have to point to an Orwellian use of the word "aggressive" and "attack". It seems that anything that the US cannot wantonly control or bomb is inherently aggressive and attacking either directly or indirectly the "rules based order".

Crimea had Russian assets that became endangered. Crimea was part of Russia until 1954, when was donated in an unsanctioned manner to Ukraine. The majority Russian population in Crimea has been persecuted by the Ukrainian state since at least 1994. The Euromaidan would have exacerbated that. A referendum was carried on and just considering ethnic lines, Russians won in their desire to re-unite with the Russian Federation. There aren't many legal arguments against that referendum and that process, if one looks for them...

So the above perspectives have nothing to do with just "sphere of influence" but with direct core interests of the Russian state and its core security...

The deep state is a tool that is trying to fulfill one objective: integration of Russian economy under the control of US and its Oligarchy. Otherwise it will always be a threat. A Nationalist, democratic (but not oligarchic) and sovereign Russia will always be considered an enemy of the world hegemon...

And the provocation is the actual presence in Syria of US troops. Ramming the US military vehicle is not a provocation from Russians, it is a simple eviction notification. End of story!

Hannibal Jubal • 4 days ago

Isn't it just amazing how this writer gets to turn an incident of provocation by Russian soldiers into a story of persistent provocation by America. That is remarkable dexterity even for this paper. I am used to them suggesting that we should leave the people of Eastern Europe to the tender mercies of the whims and wishes of a dictator in Moscow - because they are in his backyard. But to be able to switch from that incident to their regular theme is an achievement one can recognize, though not respect. The people of those countries should have a choice about who they associate, and they certainly have a right not to align with people they fear. Calling us for not respecting he rights of other people to decide their fates is right and proper. I enthusiastically support this paper when they do. But when they turn right around and castigate us for not respecting Russia's right to do it - I am flabbergasted.

Dan Greene Hannibal Jubal • 3 days ago

"Isn't it just amazing how this writer gets to turn an incident of provocation by Russian soldiers into a story of persistent provocation by America."

How do you know it's an incident of provocation by Russian soldiers? It almost certainly is almost the exact opposite.

Dan Greene • 3 days ago • edited

This piece spends too much time re-hashing everything Russia-US since 1990 and fails to focus on the key current issues.

The vehicle incidents in Syria are distinct from the European issue -- see below in this post -- that is generating some of the other tensions the author lists. Syria is really part of the larger Middle East issue.

His brief summary of the latest Syria mishap is inadequate to convey what actually happened.

If you actually look at the video, it does NOT appear to be the case that a Russian vehicle simply "sideswiped" a US vehicle. It appears that the US was maintaining a checkpoint on a road that in effect blocked Russian passage. Given the terrain, the Russians could of course bypass such a checkpoint, which is what they appear to have done. Then, however, other US vehicles left the checkpoint and attempted to block and turn back the Russian bypass movement, and this led to the collision. So the incident is part of a larger US policy to impede Russian operations in NE Syria.

Almost two years ago, Trump ordered US forces out of Syria, and Russia, in agreement with that plan, sent patrols to the NE to ensure that provisions of an stability agreement with Turkey and the Kurds were maintained. But then Trump was almost immediately convinced--by whom is not clear, but ultimately Israel in all probability--to do a 180 and keep US forces in NE Syria, the superficial rationale being to take control of oil, the kind of pirate operation that Trump likes. In fact, the goal of those who influence Trump is to keep Syria weak and unable to rebuild with the expectation that Assad can still be overthrown at some future point. This is the desire of Israel and its operatives in the US.

Trump's zag after the zig of planned withdrawal left the US-Russian understanding in chaos. Now both the US AND the Russians were operating in NE Syria. And over time the US has become more and more aggressive about impeding Russian operations. The Russians claim--credibly--that we are demanding that they, in moving their patrols up to the area of the Syria-Turkey border area not use the M4 highway, the main and direct route and instead follow a secondary route that circuitously follows the border. The Russians don't accept that demand. And the vehicle incidents that we are seeing are the outcome of that disagreement. The Russians are driving up Highway 4 and when they get to the US checkpoint are bypassing and then continuing up the highway. We are aggressively trying to deter them from that route choice.

Not sure why this article does not go into detail on this issue in order to clarify it.

Much of the other stuff the author is talking about here--intrusive air ops in the Black Sea, etc--is really a separate, European issue. The US is highly concerned about the economic interactions between Russia and Europe--especially the big economies of Western Europe and most especially Germany. We are worried that over time Russian-European economic integration will erode our strategic control and dominance over Europe in general.

Hence, we are making common cause with the anti-Russian elements in "the New Europe," i.e., Eastern Europe to try, in essence, to place a barrier between Russia and Western Europe, playing off Poland, the Baltics and Romania, among others, against Russia, Germany, France et al. Moving more US forces into Poland and the so-called "Black Sea Region"; impeding Nord Stream 2 and other Russian pipeline initiatives; indulging in recurrent anti-German propaganda for not maintaining a more robust anti-Russian military posture; fomenting (behind the scenes) the recent disturbances in Belarus; and promotion of the so-called "Three Seas Initiative" intended to weld Eastern and Central Europe together into a reliable tool of US policy are all part of this plan to retain US strategic control of Europe over the long term.

That's what the heightened tensions in Europe are about.

As I said, the Syria issue, part of the larger Middle East struggle, is separate from the parallel struggle for mastery in Europe.

It's all an important topic, but this article doesn't really capture the salient points.

Dan Greene Hannibal Jubal • 3 days ago • edited

You're living in a dreamland.

And you're playing word games. Syria's oil is effectively under US control. Yes, we are deriving strategic benefit from it in that we are denying it to the Syrian government in order to further destabilize it. It's not a good policy, but the policy does benefit from denying Syria its oil.

The problem is that most of the oil is on Arab land, not Kurdish land, and the Arabs of the Northeast are now realigning themselves with Assad, so holding on to the oil is likely to get more difficult in the future.

I have no idea what you mean by "slander." Guess that means truths you find inconvenient. Sorry--not in the business of coddling the faint of heart. Trump likes the idea of taking resources which he imagines to be payment for services we have rendered--like leaving the country in a state of ruin. He talked about Iraqi oil that way too, but taking that would be much harder.

Time for you to stop dismissing every reality you don't like as unpatriotic.

dba12123 . Hannibal Jubal • 3 days ago

The "Assad regime" is the UN recognized government of Syria. That is the only entity entitled to the country's resources. How is it "the property of the Syrian nation" if the Syrian government and its people no longer have access to it? To whom is the oil being sold? Who is receiving the proceeds of the oil sales?

Here are some of Trump's own words with respect to Syria's oil. "I like oil. We are keeping the oil." 4/11/2019. "The US is in Syria solely for the oil." "We are keeping the oil. We have the oil. The oil is secure. We left troops behind only for oil." "The US military is in Syria only for oil." What part of Trump's public assertion that "We are keeping the oil" are you having difficulty in understanding? How can you say the US "did not take possession of the oil" when Trump could not have been more explicit in saying precisely the opposite? Do you not comprehend that the US presence in Syria has no mandate either from the UN or from the US Congress. Do you not understand that the US presence in Syria is illegal under international law? Do you not understand that "Keeping the oil" is a violation of international law? Your post is one of the most ridiculous I have even read.

Dan Greene Hannibal Jubal • 2 days ago • edited

1. It's quite clear from the video that the US had set up a checkpoint on the road at left in the video. (Indeed, we are open about the fact that we are doing so in general in NE Syria.) And it's equally clear that Russian vehicles are seen bypassing those checkpoints. The encounter between US and Russian vehicles takes place off the road. There is only one logical interpretation of what happened. What is your alternative explanation?

2. "No one reading this can believe that Eastern Europeans have genuine cause to fear Russia, or that these countries continually request more military and political involvement than we are willing to provide or that we are not inducing them to do anything or manipulating them."

First of all, there are no current indications of any Russian intent to do anything in regard to Eastern Europe. Yes, one can understand the history, which is why there is anti-Russian sentiment in Eastern Europe, but aside perhaps from the Baltic states in their unique geographic position, there is no country that has any basis in reality to worry about Russian aggression in the present.

Of course, this does not stop the Poles from doing exactly that. And perhaps the Romanians to a much lesser extent. So yes, there is fear in a few key countries based on past history, Poland being the keystone of the whole thing, and yes, we are indeed manipulating that fear in an attempt to block/undermine any economic integration between Germany and Russia. We are also trying to use the "Three Seas Initiative" to block Chinese commercial and tech penetration of Eastern Europe--5G and their plan to rebuild the port of Trieste to service Central and NE Europe.

Do you actually believe Russia, which has lately been cutting its defense budget, is actually going to invade Europe? That really is a fantasy. The only military operations they will take are to prevent further expansion of NATO into Ukraine and Belarus. The real game today is commercial and tech competition. Putin knows it would be disastrous for Russia to start a war with NATO. Not sure why that's hard for you to see.

Your notion of the Russian threat--as it exists today--is wildly exaggerated.

Dr.Diprospan • 3 days ago

Once President Putin remarked that there are forces in the United States trying to use Russia for internal political struggle. He added that we will nevertheless try not to be drawn into these confrontations.

A scene from a Hollywood action movie rises before my eyes, when two heroes of the film are fighting and a circular saw is spinning nearby, and each of the heroes is trying to shove a part of the enemy's body under this saw.

The relationship between Russian and American servicemen, I would compare with two hockey teams, when the tough behavior of the players on the ice does not mean that the players of one team would be happy with the death of the entire opposing team, say in some kind of plane crash, since the presence of a strong opponent is a necessary condition for getting a good salary.

Still, I would not completely deny the possibility of a "hot war".

Since the times of the Roman Empire, the West of Europe has been trying to take control of the territory of Europe, Eurasia, and Eurasia, in turn, dreams of mastering the technologies of the West.

The defeat of the 3rd Reich provided the Soviet Union with a breakthrough in the nuclear industry and space...

It's hard to imagine that Russia is capable of defeating NATO, but I can imagine that in the current situation, President Putin can offer China to build military bases in western Russia for a million Chinese servicemen, for 100 thousand on the Chukchi Peninsula, for 500 thousand on Sakhalin...

The extra money for renting military bases in a coronavirus crisis will not hurt anyone.

stevek9 • 3 days ago • edited

Of all the things about Hillary Clinton to despise, her selfish attempt to explain her loss, and to attack the President (to whom she never conceded the election!) by blaming Russia, is at the top of the list. To generate a completely unnecessary conflict with a nuclear super-power that could burn this country to ashes in minutes, out of personal vindictiveness, ... is lower than it can get.

Denmark002 • 3 days ago

We are totally messing with fire... we will need Europe but Russia as well to defeat the Chinese.

Dan Greene LostForWords • 2 days ago • edited

I don't think US-Russian cooperation is doable at this point--or any time soon. Given how erratic US policy is--yawing violently from one direction to another--Russia has no reason to accept the damage to its relationship with China that shifting to a strategic arrangement with the US would entail. The risk is too high and the potential rewards too uncertain.

We have pretty much alienated the Russian state under Putin, and now we're trying to wait him out, with the expectation that there is no one of his capabilities to maintain the strategic autonomy of the Russian state in the longer term and that once he exits the scene, some Yeltsin-like stooge will present himself.

We thought we were dealing with the main threats to our global hegemony sequentially--Russia "defeated" in the Cold War, and then on to a defeat of "militant Islam" in the Greater Middle East and finally to a showdown with China. But now, the sequencing has fallen apart, and we're trying to prosecute all three simultaneously.

We're in serious trouble.

Ram2017 LostForWords • a day ago

Hizbollah arose as a defensive militia because of an Israeli invasion of Lebanon. It is not a terrorist group even though labelled so by the US.

William H Warrick III MD • a day ago

You have inverted the facts. The video evidence shows the Americans side-swiped the Russian vehicle and claimed "American soldiers had 'concussions'". A concussion requires loss of consciousness or significant changes in mental function. In football, you have your "Bell rung". You can't add 2+2 correctly. There is no evidence to support that.

Mark Thomason • a day ago

No, we are just trying to outdo each other with "Putin-under-the-bed" and all-powerful-Putin causing all the world's evils.

Jamie • a day ago

Everyone is focusing on Russia because of the Russia hoax. Dems started a new cold war based on an irrational fear that Russia was threatening our democracy.

Along with Dems, I also blame Putin; he bribed Hillary millions for uranium -- that doesn't lend to good relations.

alan • a day ago

The foreign policy elite dislikes Russia, always has, and will do anything to keep this "adversary" front and center because their prospects for prestige, power and position depend upon the presence of an enemy. As an example see Strobe Talbot and Michael McFaul.

[Sep 01, 2020] How Democrats and Republicans made deals to pass Magnitsky Act by Lucy Komisar

Highly recommended!
The foreign policy elite dislikes Russia, always has, and will do anything to keep this "adversary" front and center because their prospects for prestige, power and position depend upon the presence of an enemy. As an example see Strobe Talbot and Michael McFaul.
Notable quotes:
"... Ben Cardin agreed to be the cosponsor of a Magnitsky Act in the Senate. He sought a Republican cosponsor, John McCain, a Russophobic senator who never met a war he didn't like. ..."
"... It wasn't the first time McCain helped a fraudster. McCain was one of the corrupt "Keating Five" senators who improperly intervened in 1987 on behalf of Charles H. Keating, Jr., corrupt chairman of the Lincoln Savings and Loan Association, which collapsed in 1989 at a cost of $3.4 billion to the federal government (and thus taxpayers). Many investors lost their life savings. ..."
"... To get to McCain and others, Browder hired lobbyist Juleanna Glover, who had been Vice President Dick Cheney's press secretary and then Attorney General John Ashcroft's senior policy adviser. She went with Ashcroft when he left government to run the Washington office of his law firm, the Ashcroft Group. ..."
"... She got Browder a meeting with McCain who agreed to sponsor the Magnitsky Act. It fit with his Russophobia and friendship with fraudsters. ..."
"... On September 29, 2010, Senators Ben Cardin, John McCain, Roger Wicker (Republican of Mississippi) and Joe Lieberman (Democrat of Connecticut) introduced the bill in the Senate. Anyone involved in the false arrest, torture or death of Sergei Magnitsky, or the crimes he uncovered, would be publicly named, banned from entering the United States, and have their U.S. assets frozen. ..."
"... Remember again that a few months later Browder would tell the San Diego law school he didn't know how Magnitsky died. ..."
"... How the Browder-Magnitsky hoax law got passed in a trade deal ..."
"... Browder got Senator Joe Lieberman, conservative Democrat from Connecticut, to agree to block Jackson-Vanik repeal unless the administration stopped blocking his Magnitsky Act. ..."
"... Lieberman and the other cosponsors of the Magnitsky Act sent a letter to Montana Democratic Senator Max Baucus, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. The letter said, "In the absence of the passage of the Magnitsky leg­islation, we will strongly oppose the lifting of Jackson-Vanik." ..."
"... The final count December 6, 2012 was 92-4. Levin and three other Democrats – Bernie Sanders as well as Jack Reed and Sheldon Whitehouse, both of Rhode Island – were the only Senators to vote against it. Elizabeth Warren was not yet in the Senate. ..."
"... It was signed by Obama a week later. Read Title IV of the law to see how it is based on the fake claims the chief sponsors would not, could not prove. Including "he was beaten by 8 guards with rubber batons on the last day of his life" based on zero evidence, just Browder's lies. (I also wrote to Cardin's office and got no reply.) ..."
Aug 19, 2020 | www.thekomisarscoop.com

As the Democratic Convention is in progress, it is fitting to look at how Democrats in Congress and the White House, with Republican collaboration, were responsible for the Magnitsky Act , the law that protects tax fraudster William Browder and his henchman Mikhail Khodorkovsky by erecting a wall against their having to face justice for their financial crimes. And ramps up hostility against Russia.

The fraudster William Browder .

This is a half-hour interview about this I did today on this subject for Fault Lines . And a 15-minute interview for The Critical Hour . Here is an expanded version of what I said.

William Browder in the mid-1990s became manager of the Hermitage Fund, set up with $25 million from Lebanese-Brazilian banker Edmond Safra and Israeli mining investor Beny Steinmez to buy shares in Russian companies.

He says he started the fund, but that is a lie. He was brought in to manage other people's money. But after some years, when the two investors either died or confronted major financial problems, Browder gained control.

Browder doesn't like paying taxes.

Browder was an American who traded his citizenship for a UK passport in 1998 so he could avoid paying U.S. taxes on his stock profits. ( CBS called him a tax expatriate.)

He didn't like paying Russian taxes either. In an early rip-off, he and his partners billionaire Kenneth Dart of Dart cups and New York investor Francis Baker bought a majority of Avisma, a titanium company, that produces material used in airplanes. They cheated minority investors and the Russian tax collector of profits by using transfer pricing.

Corrupt Russian "oligarch" Mikhail Khodorkovsky, photo Lucy Komisar.

You sell your production to a fake company at a low price, then your fake company sells it at the world price. You book lower dividends to cheat minority shareholders, report lower taxes to cheat the Russian people.

Browder and partners bought Avisma from infamous oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky on the basis of continuing his transfer pricing scam. It was revealed by documents in a lawsuit when Browder and partners sued another infamous guy, Peter Bond, the Isle of man crook handling the rake-offs for not passing on the full amount of the skim. (No honor among thieves!) The legal documents where Browder admits to the scam are linked in this story .

Browder cheats bigtime on Russia taxes

Browder's next corruption was to cheat the Russians of taxes from his stock buys in Russia, to the tune of about $100million. That included claiming as deductions disabled workers who didn't work for him, local investments he never made, profits from stock buys of Gazprom the Russian energy conglomerate that non-Russians were not allowed to buy in Russia.

Investigations started in the early 2000s for $40 mil in evaded takes and led to legal judgments in 2004. When he refused to pay, in November 2005 he was denied a Russian visa and in 2006 he moved all his assets out of Russia. But the Russian tax evasion investigations continued.

Browder's accountant Sergei Magnitsky was arrested for investigation of the tax evasion in 2008, and the European Commission on Human Rights ruled last year that was correct because of the evidence and because he was a flight risk. Browder's fake narrative was that Magnitsky, who he lied was his lawyer , had been arrested because he blew the whistle on a scheme by Russian officials to embezzle money from the Russian Treasury. In his own U.S. federal court deposition , Browder admits Magnitsky didn't go to law school or have a law license. See his brief video on that.

Browder gives speeches that he didn't know how Magnitsky died

Then Magnitsky died of heart failure exacerbated by stomach disease which forensic reports say was not properly treated. Browder first said (in talks at the British foreign policy association Chatham House , London, a month after he died, and San Diego Law School -- video at minute 6:20 -- a year later) he didn't know how Magnitsky died, but after a few years he invented a story that he had been beaten to death.

Jonathan Winer, who helped Browder with his scam.

That story was developed by Jonathan Winer, a former assistant to Senator John Kerry and then a State Department official. Winer was working for APCO, an international public relations company one of whose major clients was the same Mikhail Khodorkovsky. They correctly assumed the western media would do no research. Or at least would not be allowed to report it. And the mainstream media never did, except much later Der Spiegel in Germany, which the rest of the western press ignored.

The plan was to get a U.S. law that would in effect block the Russians from going after certain Americans who had cheated on taxes. They would be Browder and Khodorkovsky, who is actually named in the law.

Khodorkovsky would spend several hundred thousand dollars to buy Congressional support for the Magnitsky Act, clearly money well spent. He duly reported it as lobbying expenses.

Here is how the Democrats and Republicans colluded in the Browder Magnitsky hoax. Much of this comes from Browder's own writings in his mostly fake book "Red Notice." Note the corruption of both parties.

Magnitsky died in November 2009. Only four months later in March 2010, Browder was plotting his Magnitsky hoax, attacking Russians he would claim were responsible for Magnitsky's death. But the bizarre part of the story is that he continued throughout 2010 to say he didn't know how Magnitsky died, including in a videoed Dec 2010 San Diego law school talk. He obviously assumed U.S. media and politicians would not notice or care about the contradictions.

Ben Cardin, senator who signed on to Browder hoax.

Browder got Maryland Democratic Senator Ben Cardin to send a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in March 2010 urging her to ban visas for 60 people Browder had listed (without evidence) as complicit in Magnitsky's death. (Remember 9 months later in a videoed talk at San Diego Law School Browder says he didn't know how Magnitsky died.)

The letter to Hillary Clinton, written (Browder says in his book) by Browder acolyte Kyle Parker, a staffer at the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said, I "urge you to immediately cancel and permanently withdraw the U.S. visa privileges of all those involved in this crime, along with their dependents and family members." Immediately? No due process, not even for children and grandparents? Cousins?

Attached to the letter was the list of the sixty officials Browder accused, without evidence, of involvement in Magnitsky's death and a tax fraud against the Treasury.

Browder's fake tax refund fraud

The tax refund fraud was a scheme in which shell companies were set up to sue Browder's Hermitage companies claiming contract violations and damages of $1billion. The Hermitage companies immediately agreed to pay (no evidence of actual bank transfers), then demanded the Treasury pay a tax refund of $230million because they now had zero profits.

Viktor Markelov, tried and jailed for the scam, said he worked with a Sergei Leonidovich, which is Magnitsky's name and patronymic. Other evidence, including an inexplicable delay of months between Browder learning about the his companies being re-registered in other names and him reporting that as "theft," indicates he was part of the scam too.

Note this: Hermitage trustee HSBC filed a financial document in July 2007 saying it was putting aside $7 million for legal costs that might be required to get back the companies. This was five months before the tax refund fraud occurred. Albert Dabbah, chief financial controller for HSBC, confirmed the document's authenticity in U.S. federal court. But Browder and Magnitsky (in his testimony ) said they didn't learn about the "theft" till October 2007.

Theft of his companies? The best defense is a good offense. Accuse others of the crime you committed.

Senator Cardin was requesting that all sixty of Browder's accused have their U.S. travel privileges permanently revoked.

But Hillary didn't buy it. Then House staffer Parker arranged for Browder to testify about the Magnitsky case May 6 th at the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission, not an official House body but a pressure group set up in the name of a Russophobic former congressman from Hungary.

Congressman Jim McGovern would not send the evidence he promised, because he couldn't. There wasn't any.

The commission chairman was Massachusetts Democratic congressman Jim McGovern, who runs liberal but is a Russophobe who pretends to be a human rights advocate.

Now what is really interesting is that seven months after this May 6 testimony, on December 6, 2010, Browder was telling the San Diego law school (video 6:20 in) that "they put him in a straight jacket, put him in an isolation room and waited outside the door until he died." Nothing about torture or killing. Had Browder forgotten his dramatic beating story?

McGovern at the Lantos Commission hearing asked for no evidence. He said he would introduce legislation, put the 60 names Browder cited in it, move it to the committee and make a formal recommendation from Congress, then pass it on the floor.

McGovern lies about sending evidence

Kimberly Stanton, who runs a propaganda operation and refused to provide evidence.

In July 2019, almost a decade later, I saw McGovern when he spoke at the Council on Foreign Relations. I asked if he would send me evidence backing the claim that Magnitsky was tortured and killed. He agreed and introduced me to an aide. The aide referred me to Kimberly Stanton, director of the Lantos Commission, who refused in an email to provide any information. And said evidence against targeted people is not required!

I also wrote McGovern's press secretary Matt Bonaccorsi and legislative director Cindy Buhl. They ignored repeated requests, never sent me anything. I conclude that Jim McGovern, who pretends to be a liberal civil rights promoter, is a fake and a fraud.

McGovern introduces a Magnitsky bill in the House.

John McCain, he loved fraudsters and wars.

Ben Cardin agreed to be the cosponsor of a Magnitsky Act in the Senate. He sought a Republican cosponsor, John McCain, a Russophobic senator who never met a war he didn't like.

It wasn't the first time McCain helped a fraudster. McCain was one of the corrupt "Keating Five" senators who improperly intervened in 1987 on behalf of Charles H. Keating, Jr., corrupt chairman of the Lincoln Savings and Loan Association, which collapsed in 1989 at a cost of $3.4 billion to the federal government (and thus taxpayers). Many investors lost their life savings.

Keating was the target of a regulatory investigation. With powerful senators like McCain advocating his cause, the regulator backed off taking action against Lincoln. Though Keating went to jail. McCain was cited only for exercising "poor judgment." Helping a crook doesn't get you thrown out of the Senate.

To get to McCain and others, Browder hired lobbyist Juleanna Glover, who had been Vice President Dick Cheney's press secretary and then Attorney General John Ashcroft's senior policy adviser. She went with Ashcroft when he left government to run the Washington office of his law firm, the Ashcroft Group.

Juleanna Glover, former aide to Dick Cheney. She can buy you a bill .

She got Browder a meeting with McCain who agreed to sponsor the Magnitsky Act. It fit with his Russophobia and friendship with fraudsters.

On September 29, 2010, Senators Ben Cardin, John McCain, Roger Wicker (Republican of Mississippi) and Joe Lieberman (Democrat of Connecticut) introduced the bill in the Senate. Anyone involved in the false arrest, torture or death of Sergei Magnitsky, or the crimes he uncovered, would be publicly named, banned from entering the United States, and have their U.S. assets frozen.

Remember again that a few months later Browder would tell the San Diego law school he didn't know how Magnitsky died.

Now here is how the law got passed. The Jackson-Vanick amendment put in place in the mid-1970s imposed trade sanctions on the Soviet Union to punish it for not allowing Soviet Jews to emigrate. Well, nobody could emigrate. Eventually 1.5 million Jews were allowed to leave the country.

How the Browder-Magnitsky hoax law got passed in a trade deal

Thirty-seven years later the Soviet Union no longer existed, and everybody could emigrate, but Jackson-Vanik was still on the books. It blocked American corporations from enjoying the same trade benefits with Russia as the world's other WTO members.

So, the U.S. business community said Jackson-Vanik had to go, and the Obama administration agreed. So did John Kerry, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. They needed an act of Congress.

Meanwhile, Kerry opposed the Magnitsky Act which he considered untoward interference in Russia (is that like saying meddling?) and had been delaying bringing it to vote in committee.

Browder got Senator Joe Lieberman, conservative Democrat from Connecticut, to agree to block Jackson-Vanik repeal unless the administration stopped blocking his Magnitsky Act.

Lieberman and the other cosponsors of the Magnitsky Act sent a letter to Montana Democratic Senator Max Baucus, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. The letter said, "In the absence of the passage of the Magnitsky leg­islation, we will strongly oppose the lifting of Jackson-Vanik."

John Kerry had good instincts, forced to make bad compromise.

So, Kerry stopped his opposition to the Magnitsky Act.

The two bills were combined. First the bill would be brought up at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to pass Magnitsky, then it would go before the Finance Committee to repeal Jackson-Vanik, and then, it would go before the full Senate for a vote.

Kerry called for a meeting of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in June 2012, with the purpose of approving the Magnitsky Act.

At the hearing, Kerry said that America was not a perfect country, and that the people in that room should be "very mindful of the need for the United States not to always be pointing fingers and lecturing and to be somewhat introspective as we think about these things." (Such nuance would obviously not be allowed today.)

He was "worried about the unintended consequences of requiring that kind of detailed reporting that implicates a broader range of intelligence." He didn't have to worry. Reporting? Intelligence? Actual evidence would never be required! The U.S. was setting up a kangaroo court and calling it a human rights tribunal!

The bill passed the House 365 to 43 on November 16, 2012. Voting "No" were 37 Democrats and 6 Republicans. Among them Maxine Waters and Ron Paul. And surprisingly New York Democrat Jerrold Nadler who since then became a Russophobe. Tulsi Gabbard had not yet been elected.

Kyle Parker told Browder, "There are a number of senators who are insisting on keeping Magnitsky global instead of Russia-only." One was Cardin, but also Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan – a political giant who spent many years fighting, holding hearings, about offshore tax evasion and must have known very well how Browder was a poster child for offshore tax-evading crooks. Also Jon Kyl, Republican from Arizona. Of course, Browder wanted "Russia only," because the purpose of the law was to attack Russia, not to promote global human rights. Cardin withdrew his objection, and the bill was "Russia only."

The Senate vote

The final count December 6, 2012 was 92-4. Levin and three other Democrats – Bernie Sanders as well as Jack Reed and Sheldon Whitehouse, both of Rhode Island – were the only Senators to vote against it. Elizabeth Warren was not yet in the Senate.

It was signed by Obama a week later. Read Title IV of the law to see how it is based on the fake claims the chief sponsors would not, could not prove. Including "he was beaten by 8 guards with rubber batons on the last day of his life" based on zero evidence, just Browder's lies. (I also wrote to Cardin's office and got no reply.)

It was the first pillar of Russiagate, where Cold Warrior Democrats joined forces with Cold Warrior Republicans. The result would be to build a wall against Russia bringing Browder to justice, including getting Interpol to refuse to issue a red notice that would require other countries to arrest him. He would name his book Red Notice as a jab at the Russians.

And the crooks Browder and Khodorkovsky, protected from the rule of law, laughed all the way to their offshore banks. Here's the link to Browder's Mossack Fonseca (on Panama Papers fame) bank.

(Speaking of the rule of law, it doesn't apply to offshore banks, with secret owners of companies and accounts. They are largely run by western banks that make big profits from laundering the money of the world's crooks. Note on any SEC filing where banks have their subsidiaries: Caymans, Isle of Man, Guernsey, BVI, etc. No local clients, just financial fakery: letterbox companies, tax evasion. It's okay. When there's corruption, only the little people go to jail. In the offshore system, the corrupt financial oligarchy rules.)

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One Response to " How Democrats and Republicans made deals to pass Magnitsky Act "

  1. Pingback: How Democrats and Republicans made deals to pass Magnitsky Act – The Chaos Cat

[Aug 27, 2020] Rand Paul Delivers Blistering Foreign Policy Attack- -Biden Will Choose War Again- -

Aug 27, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

Among the most notable highlights at last night's Republican National Convention, Senator Rand Paul delivered a blistering take down of Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden's foreign policy, which Paul linked to multiple wars under Democrat administrations spanning decades (going back to Clinton's bombing of Serbia).

"I fear Biden will choose war again," Paul asserted . "He supported war in Serbia, Syria, Libya. Joe Biden will continue to spill our blood and treasure. President Trump will bring our heroes home."

"If you hate war like I hate war, if you want us to quit sending $50 billion every year to Afghanistan to build their roads and bridges instead of building them here at home , you need to support President Trump for another term," said Paul, who has long been a fierce critic of former President Obama's foreign policy, including overt intervention in Libya, and covert action toward destabilizing Syria.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1298426809290285057

He slammed Biden as a hawk who has "consistently called for more war" and with no signs anything would be different.

Interestingly, Sen. Paul has also in the recent past led foreign policy push back against President Trump - especially over the two times Trump has bombed Syria following alleged Assad chemical attacks, which Paul along with other anti-interventionists across the aisle like Tulsi Gabbard questioned to begin with.

But it appears Paul is firmly supportive of Trump's newly released 50-point agenda for his second term outlining the Commander-in-Chief will "stop endless war" and ultimately bring US troops "home." The plan still emphasized, however, the administration will "maintain" US military strength abroad while 'wiping' out global terrorism.

"President Trump is the first president in a generation to seek to end war rather than start one. He intends to end the war in Afghanistan. He is bringing our men and women home. Compare President Trump with the disastrous record of Joe Biden, who has consistently called for more war ," Paul said further.

Back during the primaries in 2016, Paul and Trump sparred intensely over national security questions:

https://twitter.com/i/status/1298422787120361472

He also highlighted Biden's unrepentant yes vote to go to war in Iraq .

"I'm supporting President Trump because he believes as I do that a strong America cannot fight endless wars. We must not continue to leave our blood and treasure in Middle East quagmires," Paul concluded.

Elsewhere in the approximately four-minute speech, Paul said Trump will fight "socialists poisoning our schools and burning our cities."

Cluster_Frak , 7 hours ago

Obama was a warmonger and so is Biden. They love war and doing everything possible for the next war to be on the home ground.

Davidduke2000 , 7 hours ago

Obama had skeletons in his closet, he did what the neocons want, Trump gave them the embassy and other shenanigans.

Izzy Dunne , 2 hours ago

And so is Trump. They are all warmongers, because war is what the US does...

Weihan , 7 hours ago

Paul is right.

Biden knows who butters his bread. At least candidate Trump - in principle - stood for opposition to the deep state's monstrous agenda.

Biden, Clinton, Bush, Obama are despicable warmongers. Their administrations were responsible for the slaughter of tens of thousands in Libya, Syria, Ukraine, and the list would have gone on and on had it not been for Trump.


Remember Biden's 1992 Wall Street Journal article titled:

"How I Learned to Love the New World Order."

JUICE E SMALL IT EMPIRE , 7 hours ago

Rand was the only guy I watched last night and he was on point. I did not disagree with anything he said.

kulkarniravi , 8/26/2020, 2:33:07 PM

You can diss Obama all you want, but he signed a peace accord with Iran and Trump reneged on it. Iran is not the villain, at least not when compared to the likes of Saudi Arabia. And what's the deal with Cuba?

d_7878 , 6 hours ago

Rand on Trump:

"Are we going to fix the country through bombast and empty blather?

"Unless someone points out the emperor has no clothes, they will continue to strut about, and then we'll end up with a reality TV star as our nominee."

"Donald Trump is a delusional narcissist and an orange-faced windbag"

"Have you ever had a speck of dirt fly into your eye?""[It is] annoying, irritating and might even make you cry.

"If the dirt doesn't go away, it will keep scratching your cornea until eventually it blinds you with all its filth. A speck of dirt is way more qualified to be president."

Trump is a "fake conservative."

mike_1010 , 7 hours ago

Trump might be talking peace, but he has increased US military spending significantly more than previous presidents. He also tore up the US peace agreement with Iran and nearly triggered a US war with Iran by assassinating one of their top generals.

If any president is going to start a war with Iran, then it's Trump. And such a war would dwarf any recent wars USA has fought. Because Iran is three times bigger than Iraq in terms of their population, and they've been preparing for a possible US attack for decades.

Perhaps Biden might start a small war here or there. But Trump goes big on anything he does. If he starts a war, then it's going to be either with China or Iran.

So, neither Biden nor Trump is to be trusted, when it comes to war. But I'd say that Trump is the bigger danger compared to Biden. Because if Trump starts a war, then it might end up being a nuclear war.

Airstrip1 , 6 hours ago

Rand Paul needs to ask himself if the pot is blacker than the kettle.

How can he expect people to believe this disingenuous claptrap ?

The USA is an Empire-building Crime Cartel.

Dims or Reps are just frontmen managers for the Mob.

chopsuey , 7 hours ago

Ron and Rand. The dog and pony show. The alternative. They say what you want to hear.

I say

Phuck OFF Ron and Rand. You had many many years to do something (anything) about the endless "wars" and in reality, they are not really wars. They are ruthless invasions of vulnerable countries whereupon natural resources are contained, the culture and its symbolic treasures are destroyed/stolen and thousands to millions are killed in the name of USA. These unwarranted invasions are justified with lies and fraud and deceit.

Washington DC is the military capital of the world doing the dirty work of the elite. And its soldier are your kids and grandkids.

Wake the Phuck UP people. It will not end until they have achieved their objectives. You are fodder for their cannon.

Dragonlord , 7 hours ago

Biden voted for war in Iraq and supported Obama aggression in Libya, Syria, etc and he is disappointed that Trump did not help Kurd to wage war against Turks for their independence.

ConanTheContrarian1 , 7 hours ago

Not sure. Trump has to play ball with established Deep State interests while he tries (I hope) to set things right. So, yes, questions will abound for some time.

takefive , 7 hours ago

whatever the reason, he is now part of the swamp. and that's why he's in a tough re-election battle with a stiff.

Ex-Oligarch , 3 hours ago

You have it exactly wrong. If Trump were really part of the swamp, they wouldn't be fighting so desperately to prevent his re-election. They wouldn't have spent three years on the Russiagate failed coup, they wouldn't have gone through the ridiculous partisan impeachment exercise, they wouldn't have torpedoed the economy over coronavirus, and we wouldn't have organized race riots in all the democrat strongholds.

LaugherNYC , 3 hours ago

Rand Paul is just about the only grown-up in American politics.

How much bettter off would the USA be with a Paul/Gabbard ticket?

But ANYTHING is better than Joe Biden. Literally ANYTHING.

Well...assuming Hillary were dead or incapacitated,

DaVinciCode , 7 hours ago

It's happening. Yugoslavian girl give dire warning to Americans.

This all happened in her country the same way.

PLEASE LISTEN - it is coming to the USA and the West

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-DSjSEl_CM

(copied from a fellow :-) thanks)

captain noob , 7 hours ago

No

synthetically derived , 5 hours ago

I agree with the Yugoslav girl's premise that the powers that be have been deceptively employing a divide-and-conquer strategy to get the American people to fight among themselves rather than confront their own corrupt government, but I do not buy into the conclusion drawn that the solution lies in trusting the head of the government (in this case Trump) to do right by the people.

As George Carlin famously said, "it's a big club, and you ain't in it!" The American people are not going to be able to fix the problems now confronting them by voting for one uniparty politician over another any more than the Yugoslav people were

wick7 , 7 hours ago

The Democrats will get their regime change war no matter what. If Biden is elected they'll continue the Syrian war that has cost 800,000 innocent lives so far. If Trump is elected they'll try to have one here to take him down.

yojimbo , 7 hours ago

Afghani GDP - $20bn. US military spending - $50bn.

They must have the best services in the world!

yesnomaybe , 7 hours ago

That video clip from the 2016 GOP debate is classic... as Paul questions Trump attacking personal appearances, Trump flat out denies it, and then proceeds to do just that in his next breath.

In all seriousness, Rand is a stand up guy and would make a great president.

Maghreb2 , 7 hours ago

Ru Paul has as much chance of stopping this war as Rand Paul. If he was a threat to the people starting it he would be getting the **** bashed out of him or shot dead by a mad man. Don't see many people talking about auditing the Fed outside of Texas anymore.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Congressional_baseball_shooting

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/15/us/politics/rand-paul-attack.html

He's got a point. Biden's son is in Ukraine milking it high on crack cocaine like a senators son should in the new Roman Emperor. Ukrainian color revolution and CIA long war strategy means he has set up shop there permanently like a little princeling. Same as princess Kushners wonderful tour of the Middle Eastern courts to meet his boyfriends. Old days they would both have be poisoned to death or strangled as children for disrespecting the senate.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/07/08/will-hunter-biden-jeopardize-his-fathers-campaign

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/08/20/politics/kushner-uae-israel-f-35-fighter-jet/index.html

Real rules of Eastern European politics are Nationalist winding up dead in dust bins behind the American Embassy and Russians threatening to switch of the gas and freeze everyone to death every winter. Footage of hard man dictator Lukashenko showing up at opposition protests with an assault rifle is broadcast to school children. I'd like to see Hunter Biden and Jared Kushner show up to something like that.

https://edition.cnn.com/videos/world/2020/08/24/belarus-protests-lukashenko-rifle-fred-pleitgen-live-nr-intl-ldn-vpx.cnn

Truth is Trump is a ******* liar. the Moment they started to shut down Rammenstein airbase they moved forces close to the Belarus border to pull another color revolution right in front of Putin. Trump and the Republicans are just stooges for the Zionist mafia. They are playing war scare but its too piss take for anyone now. Polish and Baltic States are NATO and have their own prerogative. They just push people closer to war.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFKyYOZjFzc

Rand Paul should worry about the Civil War that should come after the election.

Aint no senators sons for that game....

DEDA CVETKO , 5 hours ago

Thank you, Rand, for remembering the little Serbia -- twice (in both World Wars) America's fiercest and most loyal ally, and now a roadkill of the Clinton Foundation and Madeleine Albright, the new owner of Kosovo.

The nations that sadistically massacre and dismember their friends and allies do not have a future, nor the right to claim any.

Scipio Africanuz , 5 hours ago

Again Senator Paul, we don't do self deception..

In almost four years, how many legions have been repatriated home, or how many of the existing wars have been ended?

All we've observed, is an escalation of hybrid wars, reducing in some, kinetism, and increasing death tolls via other means, and in some, increased covert kinetism..

Your candidate brazenly murdered a top general of a nation not at war with the US..

Imagine Senator Paul, if Iran had murdered Petraeus, would the US not have declared war?

That the Iranians didn't significantly escalate, was NOT due to fear, but back channel advocacy and energetic remonstrations by adult folks..

If you believe Biden is worse than your candidate who's done worse, in terms of brazen law abrogation, then why aren't you a candidate, or is it that you'd prefer partisanship to patriotism?

Look within your party for corollary and accomplice warmongers, and leave Biden alone after all, you do have a rabid warmongering Lindsey Graham and Tom Cotton as party colleagues, no?

Senator Paul, there's principle, character, and integrity and then there's opportunism, partisanship, and betrayal..

Of nobility..

Anyhow, you're sovereign and thus, fully entitled to your choices, we simply point out inconsistencies between what you espouse, and what you support..

Character, Senator Paul, is destiny..

Cheers...

Anthraxed , 4 hours ago

Trump has dropped more bombs than Obama at the same time in his term.

You're in complete denial if you think Trump has stopped any of the wars. And yes, he is expanding the wars to a much larger country.

Trump's first veto was a bill that would have stopped the Yemen war.

Reality is like Cryptonite for Trumptards.

quanttech , 4 hours ago

lol, 10 minutes ago I was being accused of being Antifa, and now I'm a Trumptard. Definitely doing something right.

Yes, Trump is a war criminal extraordinaire. He dropped a MOAB. He removed controls on civilian casualties. He dropped 7400+ bombs on Afghanistan in 2019.... 60% of the casualties were civilians, mostly children.

He also stupidly listened to his generals when they told him to kill Sulemani. BUT... when the Iranians retaliated (and they DID retaliate, injuring dozens of US soldiers) Trump de-escalated. Similarly, when the Iranians downed a drone, the generals wanted to retaliate - Trump asked how many Iranians would die. The generals said 150. Trump said it didn't make sense to kill 150 people for downing a drone.

Trump is a moron who is completely out of it most of the time. But when he pays attention for a moment, he's against a a war with Iran.

Now, if I'm a Trumptard, then you're a Hillaryhead. My question to you is... where would we be if Hillary was president? Answer: at war with Iran. Another question: where will we be if Biden is president?

Dull Care , 3 hours ago

How much authority do you think Trump has over the foreign policy? Not a rhetorical question but I have yet to see an American president run for office advocating a more interventionist foreign policy yet it doesn't change greatly no matter who is in office. Trump often carries a big stick but he's nowhere near as reckless as his predecessors.

The one thing we know is Trump is hostile to the Chinese government and hasn't turned around relations with Russia.

quanttech , 1 hour ago

"... I have this feeling that whoever's elected president when you win, you go into this smoky room with the twelve industrialists capitalists scum-***** who got you in there. And a big guy with a cigar goes: 'Roll the film.' And it's a shot of the Kennedy Assassination from an angle you've never seen before - It looks suspiciously off the grassy knoll. Then the screen comes up, and they go to the new president: 'Any questions?'"
- Bill Hicks, Rant in E-Minor (1993)

Observer 2020 , 5 hours ago

The spiritual, moral, ethical, philosophical, intellectual and cultural bankruptcy of Biden and his fellow death cult reprobates is depthless. One need know nothing more about them that they have become so detached from reality as to regard abortion, partial birth abortion, infanticide, euthanasia, generational genocide, genocide, of the white race, unremitting sociocultural warfare and the balkanization of this nation as being virtues.

Anyone who would even begin to contemplate supporting Biden or any of his fellow Fifth Columnists should be regarded as being too demented or otherwise Bidenesque to be competent to vote.

12Doberman , 5 hours ago

Biden has a record showing him to be a Neocon...and that's why we see the neverTrumpers supporting him.

Musum , 5 hours ago

And Pompeous is 10X worse than Biden. And he serves as Trump's Sec. of State.

chinoslims , 5 hours ago

Hey Trump is self professed king of Israel

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/08/donald-trump-king-of-israel

Musum , 5 hours ago

Of course, he's just a viceroy serving on behalf of the kosher people.

ted41776 , 8 hours ago

it's not what the president chooses

it's what chooses the president

conraddobler , 8 hours ago

This has lost all it's entertainment value.

Hollywood and the Postman was a more realistic view, in that movie I believe the warlord was a former copier either salesman or technician, can't remember but it's more likely a guy like that would have leadership capabilities than these clowns would.

invention13 , 1 hour ago

It saddens me that people can just go about their business in this country without giving a thought about the men and women who are getting injured and coming home stressed out and addicted to painkillers. Also that the real motive for continued military involvement in the ME is that some people are making tons of money off it. We need our own version of Smedley Butler these days.

It is all decadent beyond belief.

mrjinx007 , 1 hour ago

That MF no good SOB war mongering no good neocon SOB Shawn did everything he could to get RP to agree with him that we need to continue with the policy of regime change.

Rand just basically told him to shut the f up and stop blowing the Neo-cons' erections. It was precious. You know how people like this ******* Hannity get their funding from. Deep state, MIC, and all the f'king Rino's like Tommy Cotton.

gm_general , 2 hours ago

Thanks to Hillary and Obama, Libya is a complete mess and black people are being sold as slaves there. Let that sink in.

[Aug 27, 2020] Only a neolibral moron like Obama could bring slavery back to Libya.

Aug 27, 2020 | www.unz.com

niteranger , says:

[Aug 27, 2020] A couple of lessons for Belarus, if it has a government capable of learning from the mistakes of others rather than insisting upon making them itself before learning

Aug 27, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

MARK CHAPMAN August 25, 2020 at 5:27 pm

A couple of lessons for Belarus, if it has a government capable of learning from the mistakes of others rather than insisting upon making them itself before learning; the first – Ukraine.

The Biggest Little Country In Yurrup has just voted, in an extraordinary meeting of the Verkhovna Rada, to beg the EU for a further loan of $1.2 Billion. For that mess of pottage, it will accept enhanced external governance.

"With this memorandum, Ukraine undertakes to increase the role of international structures in the judicial system, law enforcement agencies, and state-owned enterprises' executive boards (with the restoration of their cosmic salaries)."

Of course, that's the selfish Russian perspective; it comes from Stalker Zone. The 'reality' as Ukrainians see it might be a lot more lighthearted, like going on an adventure with some foreign friends! And it might not even happen, considering the Ukrainian plan to get half the money up front, without having to satisfy any of the conditions, although even the full $1.2 Billion seems to me a bargain price to gain control of Ukrainian state institutions. If I had $1.2 Billion lying around doing nothing, I might buy them myself.

https://www.stalkerzone.org/the-verkhovna-rada-sold-the-remnants-of-ukraines-sovereignty/

The second is the collapse of Latvian industry under capitalism and foreign investment. There but for the grace of God go you, Belarus.

https://www.stalkerzone.org/the-same-awaits-maz-and-belaz-how-latvias-no-1-plant-was-killed/

When you think about it, it is amazing how willing eastern Europeans are to believe the siren song of western capital investment, since as soon as they control the company, they break it up and sell it, and the locals are left with nothing but western newspapers to keep their bums from freezing. But it happens over and over.

PATIENT OBSERVER August 25, 2020 at 5:48 pm

It's the lottery mentality, most of the poor saps will only get poorer but the chance of winning big (especially if you have a few connections) overwhelms logic and common sense. It what makes capitalism so attractive – dreams of big wealth and leaving your poor slum behind make the most miserable life somehow tolerable.

And it what makes socialism so boring – you may be, on average, better off but little prospect for that life-changing jackpot.

There is more to it than that but the dreams of a big payday explains much of why so many Eastern Europeans put up with, if not embrace, capitalism BS.

PATIENT OBSERVER August 26, 2020 at 5:41 pm

The carrot always seemingly just out of reach works for most until the day you die. And if you do reach the carrot, you will soon realize that it is rotten.

Trying to make ends meet, you're a slave to the money then you die.
– Bittersweet Symphony

[Aug 23, 2020] Western celebs politicians are falling over themselves to condemn racism, yet, Russophobia Sinophobia remain acceptable -- RT Op-ed

Notable quotes:
"... "Moscow-Jewish mafia" ..."
"... "Corbyn was thoroughly delegitimised as a political actor from the moment he became a prominent candidate and even more so after he was elected as party leader, with a strong mandate." ..."
"... "chose not to" ..."
"... Think your friends would be interested? Share this story! ..."
Aug 23, 2020 | www.rt.com

Western celebs & politicians are falling over themselves to condemn racism, yet, Russophobia & Sinophobia remain acceptable Tomasz Pierscionek Tomasz Pierscionek is a medical doctor and social commentator on medicine, science, and technology. He was previously on the board of the charity Medact and is editor of the London Progressive Journal. 23 Aug, 2020 06:51 Get short URL Counter protesters wave signs during a far-right rally on August 15, 2020 near the downtown of Stone Mountain, Georgia © Getty Images / Lynsey Weatherspoon 162 Follow RT on RT Censorship is democracy, fake news is truth, submission is freedom. Western propaganda requires acceptance of contradictory dogmas alongside an impressive array of mental gymnastics to reconcile logical fallacies.

George Orwell's novel '1984' depicts life within Oceania, a totalitarian society strictly controlled by an omnipresent Party whose three simple yet contradictory slogans are: war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength. Citizens of Oceania were forced to accept that two plus two may equal five if the Party deemed it so.

Akin to the Snake game found on old Nokia mobile phones, woke movements become increasingly illogical and harder to control before eventually tying themselves in knots or crashing into the walls of logic, sowing the seeds of their own destruction. Modern feminist movements are having the wind taken out of their sails by other woke factions who argue that children should be taught boys can have periods , so as not to distress transgender students, or that terms like mother and father should be replaced with parent 1 and parent 2. Even the main UK doctors' union sent an internal memo advising its staff to use the term 'pregnant people' rather than 'expectant mothers' to avoid causing offense.

One could argue that campaigns designed to remove the concept of male and female is a threat to women and their historical struggles. By eliminating the 'existence' of women, it not only airbrushes out women's vast contribution to history but also removes the whole notion of feminism – if womanhood does not exist, then the whole idea of misogyny becomes irrelevant. Perhaps one day someone will decide that race is simply a construct and can be changed at will, thus making all debates about racism and oppression irrelevant. Thus future woke cultists might argue themselves into a corner in which racism and thus 'white privilege' does not exist.

READ MORE Russia wants neither 'rethink' nor 'reset' if it means restoring American supremacy & returning to Cold War diplomacy

In the West you are free to choose any gender or sexuality, transition between these at whim, or perhaps create your own, but you are not supposed to question the foundations of capitalism or liberalism. Likewise, the much lauded concept of human rights and democracy – one of the key pillars on which Western 'cultural superiority' rests and from which it sneers at 'undemocratic' and 'uncivilised' countries – is used to justify the destruction, occupation and economic enslavement of other peoples.

Whether it is Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen or Palestine we see that non-white lives do not matter when there are no political points to score. Indeed, condemning the slaughter of Palestinians could be enough to get you labeled an anti-Semite by those who remain suspiciously silent when real anti-Semitism rears its ugly head.

For example, far right and neo-nazi militias in Ukraine, some of whom take their symbols and ideology from the 1930-1940s , have operated with relative impunity and perpetuated human rights abuses upon the people of the Donbass region. These groups were part of the Maidan movement, visited by Western politicians and praised by liberals, that violently overthrew elected Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych. Some of the leaders of this movement included far right elements who had no qualms being amidst white power logos and neo-nazi flags, or had in the past claimed that a "Moscow-Jewish mafia" controls Ukraine. Neither Western nor Israeli politicians seemed too interested in such developments, despite Israeli newspaper Haaretz reporting that weapons sent by Israel to Ukraine were ending up in the hands of far right militias, such as the Azov battalion. Paradoxically, copious effort and resources were allocated to make people believe that the UK Labour Party, led by left wing leader Jeremy Corbyn, had a serious problem with anti-Semitism.

As soon as a party leader like Jeremy Corbyn began to offer something outside the narrowly defined political bandwidth and stood up for the rights of Palestinians, he was demonized by politicians as well as their media allies and big business handlers. A study conducted by the London School of Economics and Political Science examined UK newspaper coverage of Corbyn in the months following his election as Labour Party leader and found evidence of media bias such that "Corbyn was thoroughly delegitimised as a political actor from the moment he became a prominent candidate and even more so after he was elected as party leader, with a strong mandate."

It is welcome that recent events in the US have highlighted racism faced by African Americans. Yet frequent murders of African Americans by a militarized police force did not suddenly appear when Trump came to power. Many Democratic Party politicians who nowadays make sure everyone knows they unquestioningly support the Black Lives Matter movement had few issues with the status quo before the killing of George Floyd, and will probably regain their apathy if Biden wins the election.

Furthermore, little is said about the role the Obama administration played only a few years ago in the destruction of Libya, formerly one of Africa's richest and most stable nations, and its relinquishment to warlords and Al-Qaeda affiliated groups. Some of these groups were quick to imprison and murder citizens from sub-Saharan Africa who had migrated to Libya in search of a better life. Slave markets selling sub-Saharan Africans now exist in the new post-Gaddafi Libya.

ALSO ON RT.COM Caitlin Johnstone: MSM smear merchants target critics of Establishment China narratives

The UK Conservative Party, traditionally not fans of refugees or migrants, were responsible for the Windrush scandal which saw Caribbean immigrants who had arrived in the UK decades earlier being threatened with deportation despite having lived, worked, and paid taxes in this country for many years. The same party is now thinking of allowing nearly three million Hong Kong citizens the opportunity to reside in the UK and later apply for citizenship . When it comes to sticking two fingers up to China, we hear no talk about how the NHS and welfare system cannot afford to absorb refugees and migrants.

These days many people, especially celebrities, politicians and media figures, are falling over themselves to condemn racism and make sure everyone is aware of their anti-racist credentials. The only remaining forms of racism deemed acceptable in the West include Russophobia and Sinophobia. The media devotes endless hours hyping up the threat from Russia and China and in doing so surreptitiously promotes animosity toward these nations and their peoples. The shadowy hand of the Russian government is deemed to be behind every calamity or undesired election result. We are frequently reminded that a vague and poorly defined threat from Russia and China looms large, though hard evidence is often sketchy, open to interpretation or questionable. At the same time NATO troops encroach upon Russia's borders, yet the latter is deemed the aggressor, whilst the US sails warships through contested seas near China's borders . Whereas the UK seeks to provoke Russia for no logical reason, the US is determined to pick a fight with China and claims it "chose not to" stop coronavirus from spreading beyond its borders.

The waning US empire and its allies within the disintegrating EU prefer to attack their rivals Russia and China to deflect their own populations' attention away from domestic problems with some good old-fashioned xenophobia. The UK, in particular, would do well to try and improve its relationships with Russia and China as it is on track to have a lonely time post Brexit.

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The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.


[Aug 21, 2020] The deep state "beef" with Trump is that he's rocking the boat

Aug 21, 2020 | www.unz.com

He [Bezos] and people like him are more concerned with maintaining the Dollar as reserve currency in order to facilitate the continued sell-out of Americans for cheap foreign manufactured goods, technology sells to China, and their own personal enrichment.

"The theory that refuses to die is that the US, as the country with "the" global reserve currency, "must have" a large trade deficit with the rest of the world."
https://www.sgtreport.com/2019/07/and-the-us-dollars-status-as-global-reserve-currency/

In both cases, the "beef" with Trump is that he's rocking the boat -- both in terms of his criticism of the Bush-Clinton-Bush-Obama wars for Israel and the Petrodollar, and in terms of the America First noises he's made. While he's proven to be a fairly reliable Zionist stooge (although he hasn't started any new wars in the Mideast, and been more of a placeholder), he's edging a little too close to America First (with his domestic rhetoric and some of his policies) for comfort.

[Aug 21, 2020] On Bombs And Bombings by Caitlin Johnstone

Notable quotes:
"... The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House. ..."
"... "The US-centralized empire is held together by endless violence, and the plutocrats who run it have built their kingdoms upon the status quo of that empire." That statement is a synopsis of the past 500+ years of European expansion/ imperialism ..."
Aug 19, 2020 | www.informationclearinghouse.info

For a full week now the Israeli army has been bombing Gaza, a population that is about to run out of fuel for its only power plant due to a years-long Israeli program of deliberate siege warfare .

Yesterday the US ordered an airstrike on Syrian forces, killing one, when they refused to let the illegal occupying force past a checkpoint in northern Syria.

In both cases an arm of the US-centralized empire used wildly disproportionate force against people who stood against a hostile occupation of their own country. In both cases the more powerful and violent occupiers claimed they were acting in "self-defense". In both cases dropping explosives from the sky upon human beings barely made the news.

https://platform.twitter.com/embed/index.html?dnt=false&embedId=twitter-widget-0&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1295478503694114816&lang=en&origin=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.informationclearinghouse.info%2F55476.htm&theme=light&widgetsVersion=223fc1c4%3A1596143124634&width=550px

Bombs should not exist. Explosives designed to blow fire and shrapnel through human bodies should not be a thing. In a sane world, there wouldn't be bombs, and if some mentally unbalanced person ever made and used one it would be a major international news story.

Instead, bombs are cranked out like iPhones at enormous profit , and nearly all bombings are ignored. Many bombs are being dropped per day by the US and its allies, with a massive civilian death toll , and almost none of those bombings receive any international attention. The only time they do is generally when a bombing occurs that was not authorized by the US-centralized empire.

This is one of those absolutely freakish things about our society that has become normalized through careful narrative management, and we really shouldn't allow it to be. The fact that explosives designed to rip apart human anatomy are dropped from the sky many times per day for no other reason than to exert control over foreign countries should horrify us all.

An interesting social experiment when you talk to someone might be to tell them solemnly, "There's been a bombing." Then when they say "What?? Where??", tell them "The Middle East mostly. Our government and its allies drop many bombs there per day in order to keep a resource-rich geostrategic region balkanized and controllable."

Then watch their reaction.

You will probably notice a marked change in demeanor as the person learns that what you meant is different from what they thought you meant. They will likely act as though you'd tricked them in some way. But you didn't. You just called a thing the thing that it is, and let their assumptions do the rest.

When someone gravely tells you "There's been a bombing," what they almost always mean is that there has been a suspected terrorist attack in a western, majority-white nation. They don't mean the kind of bombing that kills exponentially more people and does exponentially more damage than terrorism in western nations. They don't mean the kind of terrorism that our government enacts and approves of.

There's a lot of pushback nowadays against the racism and prejudices that are woven throughout the fabric of our society, and rightly so . But what doesn't get nearly enough attention in this discourse is the fact that while some manifestations of bigotry may have been successfully scaled back somewhat in our own countries, it was in a sense merely exported overseas.

The violence that is being inflicted overseas in our name by the US-centralized empire is more horrific than any manifestation of racism we're ever likely to encounter at home. It is more horrific than the pre-integration American South. It is more horrific than even slavery itself. Yet even the more conscious among us fail to give this relentless onslaught of violence a proportionate degree of recognition and condemnation, even while the consent for it is largely born of the unexamined bigoted notion that violence against people in developing and non-western countries does not matter.

Like many other forms of bigotry, this one has been engineered and promulgated by powerful people who benefit from it. If the mainstream news media were what it purports to be, namely an institution dedicated to creating an informed populace about what's truthfully going on in the world, we would see the bombings in foreign nations given the same type of coverage that a bombing in Paris or London receives.

This would immediately bring consciousness to the unconscious bigotry that those in the US-centralized empire hold against people in low and middle income countries, which is exactly why the plutocrat-owned media do not report on it in this way. The US-centralized empire is held together by endless violence, and the plutocrats who run it have built their kingdoms upon the status quo of that empire.

When people set out to learn what's really going on in their world they often start cramming their heads with history and geopolitics facts and figures, which is of course fine and good. But a bigger part of getting a clear image of what's happening in the world is simply turning your gaze upon things you already kind of knew were happening, but couldn't quite bring yourself to look at.

Caitlin's articles are entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking her on Facebook , following her antics on Twitter , checking out her podcast , throwing some money into her hat on Patreon or Paypal , or buying her book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers . https://caitlinjohnstone.com

The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House.

From the Ramparts, 17 hours ago

"The US-centralized empire is held together by endless violence, and the plutocrats who run it have built their kingdoms upon the status quo of that empire." That statement is a synopsis of the past 500+ years of European expansion/ imperialism.

The AmeriKKKan Empire is the reigning heir to that legacy of Western thuggery, plunder and pillage.

[Aug 19, 2020] Some Shocking Facts on the Concentration of Ownership of the US Economy

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the world has not seen these levels of concentration of ownership. The Soviet Union did not die because of apparent ideological reasons but due to economic bankruptcy caused by its uncompetitive monopolistic economy. Our verdict is that the US is heading in the same direction. ..."
"... In a future instalment of this report, we will show that the oligarchization of America – the placing it under the rule of the One Percent (or perhaps more accurately the 0.1%, if not 0.01%) - has been a deliberate ideologically driven long-term project to establish absolute economic power over the US and its political system and further extend that to involve an absolute global hegemony (the latter project thankfully thwarted by China and Russia). ..."
"... In present-day United States a few major investors – equity funds or private capital - are as a rule cross-owned by each other, forming investor oligopolies, which in turn own the business oligopolies. ..."
"... A study has shown that among a sample of the 1,500 largest US firms (S&P 1500), the probability of one major shareholder holding significant shares in two competing firms had jumped to 90% in 2014, while having been just 16% in 1999. (*2). ..."
"... Institutional investors like BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street, Fidelity, and JP Morgan, now own 80% of all stock in S&P 500 listed companies. The Big Three investors - BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street – alone constitute the largest shareholder in 88% of S&P 500 firms, which roughly correspond to America's 500 largest corporations. (*3). Both BlackRock and Vanguard are among the top five shareholders of almost 70% of America's largest 2,000 publicly traded corporations. (*4). ..."
May 19, 2019 | russia-insider.com

A close-knit oligarchy controls all major corporations. Monopolization of ownership in US economy fast approaching Soviet levels

Starting with Ronald Reagan's presidency, the US government willingly decided to ignore the anti-trust laws so that corporations would have free rein to set up monopolies. With each successive president the monopolistic concentration of business and shareholding in America has grown precipitously eventually to reach the monstrous levels of the present day.

Today's level of monopolistic concentration is of such unprecedented levels that we may without hesitation designate the US economy as a giant oligopoly. From economic power follows political power, therefore the economic oligopoly translates into a political oligarchy. (It seems, though, that the transformation has rather gone the other way around, a ferocious set of oligarchs have consolidated their economic and political power beginning from the turn of the twentieth century). The conclusion that the US is an oligarchy finds support in a 2014 by a Princeton University study.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the world has not seen these levels of concentration of ownership. The Soviet Union did not die because of apparent ideological reasons but due to economic bankruptcy caused by its uncompetitive monopolistic economy. Our verdict is that the US is heading in the same direction.

In a later report, we will demonstrate how all sectors of the US economy have fallen prey to monopolization and how the corporate oligopoly has been set up across the country. This post essentially serves as an appendix to that future report by providing the shocking details of the concentration of corporate ownership.

Apart from illustrating the monopolization at the level of shareholding of the major investors and corporations, we will in a follow-up post take a somewhat closer look at one particularly fatal aspect of this phenomenon, namely the consolidation of media (posted simultaneously with the present one) in the hands of absurdly few oligarch corporations. In there, we will discuss the monopolies of the tech giants and their ownership concentration together with the traditional media because they rightfully belong to the same category directly restricting speech and the distribution of opinions in society.

In a future instalment of this report, we will show that the oligarchization of America – the placing it under the rule of the One Percent (or perhaps more accurately the 0.1%, if not 0.01%) - has been a deliberate ideologically driven long-term project to establish absolute economic power over the US and its political system and further extend that to involve an absolute global hegemony (the latter project thankfully thwarted by China and Russia). To achieve these goals, it has been crucial for the oligarchs to control and direct the narrative on economy and war, on all public discourse on social affairs. By seizing the media, the oligarchs have created a monstrous propaganda machine, which controls the opinions of the majority of the US population.

We use the words 'monopoly,' 'monopolies,' and 'monopolization' in a broad sense and subsume under these concepts all kinds of market dominance be it by one company or two or a small number of companies, that is, oligopolies. At the end of the analysis, it is not of great importance how many corporations share in the market dominance, rather what counts is the death of competition and the position enabling market abuse, either through absolute dominance, collusion, or by a de facto extinction of normal market competition. Therefore we use the term 'monopolization' to describe the process of reaching a critical level of non-competition on a market. Correspondingly, we may denote 'monopoly companies' two corporations of a duopoly or several of an oligopoly.

Horizontal shareholding – the cementation of the oligarchy

One especially perfidious aspect of this concentration of ownership is that the same few institutional investors have acquired undisputable control of the leading corporations in practically all the most important sectors of industry. The situation when one or several investors own controlling or significant shares of the top corporations in a given industry (business sector) is referred to as horizontal shareholding . (*1). In present-day United States a few major investors – equity funds or private capital - are as a rule cross-owned by each other, forming investor oligopolies, which in turn own the business oligopolies.

A study has shown that among a sample of the 1,500 largest US firms (S&P 1500), the probability of one major shareholder holding significant shares in two competing firms had jumped to 90% in 2014, while having been just 16% in 1999. (*2).

Institutional investors like BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street, Fidelity, and JP Morgan, now own 80% of all stock in S&P 500 listed companies. The Big Three investors - BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street – alone constitute the largest shareholder in 88% of S&P 500 firms, which roughly correspond to America's 500 largest corporations. (*3). Both BlackRock and Vanguard are among the top five shareholders of almost 70% of America's largest 2,000 publicly traded corporations. (*4).

Blackrock had as of 2016 $6.2 trillion worth of assets under management, Vanguard $5.1 trillion, whereas State Street has dropped to a distant third with only $1 trillion in assets. This compares with a total market capitalization of US stocks according to Russell 3000 of $30 trillion at end of 2017 (From 2016 to 2017, the Big Three has of course also put on assets).Blackrock and Vanguard would then alone own more than one-third of all US publicly listed shares.

From an expanded sample that includes the 3,000 largest publicly listed corporations (Russell 3000 index), institutions owned (2016) about 78% of the equity .

The speed of concentration the US economy in the hands of institutions has been incredible. Still back in 1950s, their share of the equity was 10%, by 1980 it was 30% after which the concentration has rapidly grown to the present day approximately 80%. (*5). Another study puts the present (2016) stock market capitalization held by institutional investors at 70%. (*6). (The slight difference can possibly be explained by variations in the samples of companies included).

As a result of taking into account the common ownership at investor level, it emerges that the US economy is yet much more monopolized than it was previously thought when the focus had been on the operational business corporation alone detached from their owners. (*7).

The Oligarch owners assert their control

Apologists for monopolies have argued that the institutional investors who manage passive capital are passive in their own conduct as shareholders as well. (*8). Even if that would be true it would come with vastly detrimental consequences for the economy as that would mean that in effect there would be no shareholder control at all and the corporate executives would manage the companies exclusively with their own short-term benefits in mind, inevitably leading to corruption and the loss of the common benefits businesses on a normally functioning competitive market would bring.

In fact, there seems to have been a period in the US economy – before the rapid monopolization of the last decade -when such passive investors had relinquished control to the executives. (*9). But with the emergence of the Big Three investors and the astonishing concentration of ownership that does not seem to hold water any longer. (*10). In fact, there need not be any speculation about the matter as the monopolist owners are quite candid about their ways. For example, BlackRock's CEO Larry Fink sends out an annual guiding letter to his subject, practically to all the largest firms of the US and increasingly also Europe and the rest of the West. In his pastoral, the CEO shares his view of the global conditions affecting business prospects and calls for companies to adjust their strategies accordingly.

The investor will eventually review the management's strategic plans for compliance with the guidelines. Effectively, the BlackRock CEO has in this way assumed the role of a giant central planner, rather like the Gosplan, the central planning agency of the Soviet command economy.

The 2019 letter (referenced above) contains this striking passage, which should quell all doubts about the extent to which BlackRock exercises its powers:

"As we seek to build long-term value for our clients through engagement, our aim is not to micromanage a company's operations. Instead, our primary focus is to ensure board accountability for creating long-term value. However, a long-term approach should not be confused with an infinitely patient one. When BlackRock does not see progress despite ongoing engagement, or companies are insufficiently responsive to our efforts to protect our clients' long-term economic interests, we do not hesitate to exercise our right to vote against incumbent directors or misaligned executive compensation."

Considering the striking facts rendered above, we should bear in mind that the establishment of this virtually absolute oligarch ownership over all the largest corporations of the United States is a relatively new phenomenon. We should therefore expect that the centralized control and centralized planning will rapidly grow in extent as the power is asserted and methods are refined.

Most of the capital of those institutional investors consists of so-called passive capital, that is, such cases of investments where the investor has no intention of trying to achieve any kind of control of the companies it invests in, the only motivation being to achieve as high as possible a yield. In the overwhelming majority of the cases the funds flow into the major institutional investors, which invest the money at their will in any corporations. The original investors do not retain any control of the institutional investors, and do not expect it either. Technically the institutional investors like BlackRock and Vanguard act as fiduciary asset managers. But here's the rub, while the people who commit their assets to the funds may be considered as passive investors, the institutional investors who employ those funds are most certainly not.

Cross-ownership of oligarch corporations

To make matters yet worse, it must be kept in mind that the oligopolistic investors in turn are frequently cross-owned by each other. (*11). In fact, there is no transparent way of discovering who in fact controls the major institutional investors.

One of the major institutional investors, Vanguard is ghost owned insofar as it does not have any owners at all in the traditional sense of the concept. The company claims that it is owned by the multiple funds that it has itself set up and which it manages. This is how the company puts it on their home page : "At Vanguard, there are no outside owners, and therefore, no conflicting loyalties. The company is owned by its funds, which in turn are owned by their shareholders -- including you, if you're a Vanguard fund investor." At the end of the analysis, it would then seem that Vanguard is owned by Vanguard itself, certainly nobody should swallow the charade that those funds stuffed with passive investor money would exercise any ownership control over the superstructure Vanguard. We therefore assume that there is some group of people (other than the company directors) that have retained the actual control of Vanguard behind the scenes (perhaps through one or a few of the funds). In fact, we believe that all three (BlackRock, State Street and Vanguard) are tightly controlled by a group of US oligarchs (or more widely transatlantic oligarchs), who prefer not to brandish their power. It is beyond the scope of this study and our means to investigate this hypothesis, but whatever, it is bad enough that as a proven fact these three investor corporations wield this control over most of the American economy. We also know that the three act in concert wherever they hold shares. (*12).

Now, let's see who are the formal owners of these institutional investors

In considering these ownership charts, please, bear in mind that we have not consistently examined to what degree the real control of one or another company has been arranged through a scheme of issuing different classes of shares, where a special class of shares give vastly more voting rights than the ordinary shares. One source asserts that 355 of the companies in the Russell index consisting of the 3000 largest corporations employ such a dual voting-class structure, or 11.8% of all major corporations.

We have mostly relied on www.stockzoa.com for the shareholder data. However, this and other sources tend to list only the so-called institutional investors while omitting corporate insiders and other individuals. (We have no idea why such strange practice is employed

[Aug 19, 2020] Washington's Supposed Gift to President Putin

Aug 19, 2020 | ronpaulinstitute.org

< Older Washington's Supposed Gift to President Putin written by brian cloughley tuesday august 18, 2020
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One of the comments made following Trump's decision to relocate some 12,000 troops from Germany was made by retired Admiral James ('Zorba') Stavridis, who in 2009-2013 was US Supreme Allied Commander Europe (the military commander of Nato). He declared that the action, among other things, "hurts NATO solidarity and is a gift to Putin." This was a most serious pronouncement, which was echoed by Republican Senator Mitt Romney, a rich Republican and Mormon cleric, who said the redeployment was a "gift to Russia." These sentiments were well-reported and endorsed by US media outlets which continue to be relentlessly anti-Russia.

Stavridis is the man who wrote that the seven-month bombing and rocketing of Libya by the US-Nato military grouping in 2011 "has rightly been hailed as a model intervention. The alliance responded rapidly to a deteriorating situation that threatened hundreds of thousands of civilians rebelling against an oppressive regime. It succeeded in protecting those civilians and, ultimately, in providing the time and space necessary for local forces to overthrow Muammar al-Gaddafi."

On June 22 Human Rights Watch noted that "over the past years" in Libya their investigators have "documented systematic and gross human rights and humanitarian law violations by armed groups on all sides, including torture and ill-treatment, rape and other acts of sexual violence, arbitrary arrests and detention, forced displacement, unlawful killings and enforced disappearances ." Amnesty International's current Report also details the chaos in the shattered country where Nato conducted its "model intervention."

The Libya catastrophe illustrates the desperation of Nato in its continuing search for international situations in which it might be able to intervene, to try to provide some sort of justification for its existence. And the calibre of its leadership can be judged from the pronouncements of such as Stavridis, who was unsurprisingly considered a possibility for the post of Secretary of State by Donald Trump.

It is not explained how relocation of US troops from Germany could hurt Nato's "solidarity" but Defence Secretary Esper was more revealing about the situation as he sees it, when interviewed by balanced and objective Fox News on August 9. He declared "we basically are moving troops further east, closer to Russia's border to deter them. Most of the allies I've either spoken to, heard from or my staff has spoken to, see this as a good move. It will accomplish all of those objectives that have been laid out. And frankly, look, we still have 24,000 plus troops in Germany, so it will still be the largest recipient of US troops. The bottom line is the border has shifted as the alliance has grown." (It is intriguing that this important policy statement was not covered by US mainstream media and cannot be found on the Pentagon's Newsroom website -- the "one-stop shop for Defense Department news and information.")

No matter the spin from the Pentagon and what is now appearing in the US media, Trump's July 29 decision to move troops from Germany had no basis in strategy. It was not the result of a reappraisal of the regional or wider international situation. And it was not discussed with any of Washington's allies, causing Nato Secretary General Stoltenberg to say plaintively that it was "not yet decided how and when this decision will be implemented."

The BBC reported that "President Donald Trump said the move was a response to Germany failing to meet Nato targets on defence spending." Trump was quoted as telling reporters that "We don't want to be the suckers anymore. We're reducing the force because they're not paying their bills; it's very simple." It could not have been made clearer than that. The whole charade is the result of Trumpian petulance and has nothing to do with military strategy, no matter what is belatedly claimed by the Pentagon's Esper.

The German government was not consulted before Trump's contemptuous announcement, and defence minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer criticised Washington, saying "Nato is not a trade organisation, and security is not a commodity." But so far as Trump is concerned, security is indeed a commodity that can be traded as he sees fit, irrespective of relevance to national policy or anything other than his ego.

In trying to pick up the pieces following Trump's candid explanation of his orders to "reduce the force" in Germany, the Pentagon has conjured up a jumbled but confrontational plan intended to convince those who are interested (who do not include the German public), that it is all part of a grand scheme to extend the power of the US-Nato alliance. To this end, Esper announced he is "confident that the alliance will be all the better and stronger for it," because the redeployment involves reinforcement of the US military in Poland. He is moving 200 staff of the army's 5 corps to Krakow where, as reported by Military.com on August 5, "In a ceremony Army Chief of Staff General James McConville promoted John Kolasheski, the Army's V Corps commander, to the rank of lieutenant general and officially unfurled the headquarters' flag for the first time on Polish soil."

In addition to Washington's move of the advance HQ of V Corps to Krakow, there is a agreement that Poland will engage in what the Military Times reports as "a host of construction projects designed to support more US troops in that country" and Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. Tom Campbell said that the Warsaw government "has agreed to fund infrastructure and logistical support to US forces," which should please the White House.

These initiatives are part of the US-Poland Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement completed on August 3, which Esper stated "will enhance deterrence against Russia, strengthen NATO, reassure our Allies, and our forward presence in Poland on NATO's eastern flank will improve our strategic and operational flexibility." Then on August 15 Secretary of State Pompeo visited Poland to formally ink the accord which was warmly welcomed by Polish President Duda who recently visited Trump in Washington.

Duda's declaration that "our soldiers are going to stand arm-in-arm" is consistent with the existing situation in Poland, where the Pentagon has other elements already deployed, including in Redzikowo, where a base is being built for Aegis Ballistic Missile Defence systems, and the Air Force's 52nd Fighter Wing detachments at Polish Air Force bases at Lask and Miroslawiec, where there is a unit operating MQ-9 attack drones.

Defence Secretary Esper has emphasised that "the border has shifted as the alliance has grown" -- and the border to which he refers is that of US-Nato as it moves more menacingly eastwards. That's the gift that Trump has given Russia.

Reprinted with permission from Strategic Culture Foundation .

[Aug 19, 2020] UAE is committed to contain #Turkey amp; turn its presence in Libya into a quagmire that bleeds it. by Jalel Harchaou

Aug 19, 2020 | twitter.com

More than anybody, #UAE is committed to making sure #Ankara having won the #Tripoli battle in Jun never helps it win the #Libya war. Idea is to contain #Turkey & turn its presence into a quagmire that bleeds it. By promising to help #Greece , the #French navy joins that endeavor


Jalel Harchaoui @JMJalel_H Aug 12

France to bolster Mediterranean military presence. With Macron determined to assert French leadership in the the Mediterranean, he will have to team up w RU to take on Turkey. This means France will work w RU in Lebanon too. At cross purposes w the US. https:// reut.rs/31O3fjY Show this thread
Nabil Ferhat @FerhatNabil Aug 13
Replying to
@JMJalel_H Aug 13
@JMJalel_H and
@joshua_landis Aug 13
@joshua_landis Will FR have the necessary resources and supports in the long run to succeed?

[Aug 19, 2020] American imperialism vs. EU imperialism: Pushed into the Ukrainian adventure by the US? Rubbish. The EU and its constituent members were attempting to play their own hand and were not merely following the US lead submissively.

Highly recommended!
Aug 19, 2020 | turcopolier.typepad.com

likbez , 17 August 2020 at 11:05 AM

IMO NATO should have ended with the fall of the USSR. It now "confronts" a largely imaginary threat, concocted for the purpose of maintaining the status quo in US government expenditures for defense and supporting the imperial dreams of the neocons.

Does anyone really think Russia is going to invade the Baltics? Really?


Hear! Hear!
blue peacock , 17 August 2020 at 11:20 AM

Col. Lang,

Isn't the western alliance for all intents & purposes already dead?

It is a shame as it could work together to counter the totalitarian CCP. But Mama Merkel it seems would rather get a few yuan from the communists and turn a blind eye to CCP authoritarianism until it becomes obvious that the CCP are ruthless and will be competing with Germany around the world for machine tools and autos by undercutting them on price and heavily subsidizing their companies until German industry is destroyed.

Barbara Ann , 17 August 2020 at 11:57 AM

I have heard of these elusive creatures called "Europeans", but have yet to meet one, so am not able to comment on their alleged "smug superiority". How many divisions do they have?

JohnH , 17 August 2020 at 01:13 PM

If anything drives the US and Europe apart, it will be trade, not security. Germany is clearly chafing under the US bit, which sacrifices European industry to US interests -- sanctions on Nordstream 2, trade with Russia, trade with Iran, and China and Huawei. The US clearly prioritizes it's own LNG , finance, technology and arms industries over European prosperity. It amazes me that it has taken Europe so long to wake up.

Biden will do nothing to change that dynamic, since he is beholden to the same interests as Trump.

james , 17 August 2020 at 01:36 PM

nato is an anachronism much like a lot of western type institutions today..

i am predicting a trump win via the astro...

srw , 17 August 2020 at 01:58 PM

Does anyone really think Russia is going to invade the Baltics? The Baltics and most likely the Poles do with past history in mind. I would like to see them and the Ukrainians transition into something like the Finns who acknowledge Russian power but maintain their independence. Right now they are looking at NATO as their guarantee of independence in the future. Who can blame them when looking at history.

Polish Janitor , 17 August 2020 at 03:28 PM

Col. Lang,

The Trump admin's (and for that matter, Trump's own instincts) are and have continuously been quite correct with regards to EU's defense expenditures agenda. The European 'humanists' take advantage of the American defense umbrella inside their own countries so they can afford to NOT spend on defense and instead spend more on domestic and economic development. So while America continues to pay for the EU's defense it cannot afford to invest in its own domestic programs (infrastructure, etc.) adequately. These Europeans then with the collaboration of their Atlanticist fellows on the other side of the pond do nation-building and democratization projects (call it endless wars) abroad, such as in Afghanistan. Just don't ask them about their track record in this department.

However, the thing is when their immediate interests are in danger they forget about America in a heartbeat. Examples, Germany's Nordstream pipeline with Russia, 5G infrastructure and development, trade with China, Paris climate accord, etc.

I tend to believe that EU knows best how to make an existential threat out of Russia. Anyone still remembers the novichok incident back in 2018? The thing with Russia is that from the POV of EU, they view their Eastern neighbor as a solid and stable illiberal system that is not within the ideological orbit of the western liberal democracy and thus they feel threatened by that ideologically, NOT a scenario in which from Tallinn to Toulouse is invaded and captured by Putin. In this endeavor they also have found willing partners in 'anti-authoritarian' hawks such as Bob Kagan, Hilary, Sam Power et.al that tow the same line and advocate for NATO expansion and other similar projects.

The EU in definitely terrified of a scenario in which the U.S. (under a nationalist conservative administration) starts de-funding NATO or withdraws its troops from Europe. In this case they need to cut public spending and allocate more on defense which has a clear impact on the 'democratic spirit' of EU's over-hyped social democracy.

In the past few years we have seen the rise of right-wing populsit nationalist parties in pretty much every single major EU country. I believe there are strong tendencies in the Trump admin-if DJT manages to stay in power for another 4 years- to do a little *something something* about EU's decades-long nefarious free-riding of U.S. defense umbrella and I don't think the effeminate EU leaders will gonna like it very much.

English Outsider , 17 August 2020 at 04:31 PM


Barbara Ann - You say "I have heard of these elusive creatures called "Europeans", but have yet to meet one, so am not able to comment on their alleged "smug superiority". How many divisions do they have?"

The term "European" has become disputed territory. As an Englishman I regard myself fully as "European" as any German or Frenchman but for many the term now seems to mean exclusively "Member of the European Union". Tricky, that one.

Me, I prefer the term "Westerner". It takes in the so-called "Anglosphere" as well and therefore covers all the ground without going into the fact that some parts have become considerably less powerful over the last century and others considerably more. Also accommodates without fuss the fact that the cultural centre of gravity, at some indeterminate time in that last century, moved across from Paris, Vienna and Berlin to New York and parts west.

Not always to your advantage, to you as an American that is, because a fair chunk of the Frankfurt mob moved over your way with it. You caught from Old Europe the destructive and vacuous tenets of "Progressivism" and are now sharing the disease in its full vigour with us.

I mention that last because the violent TDS you see across the Atlantic isn't specifically European. It's merely that it's natural for progressives to detest Trump or rather, not the man himself but the "populist" forces he is taken to represent. It's garlic to the vampire for the progressive, the Little House on the Prairie or its various European equivalents, and the allergic reaction will become stronger yet. That "smug superiority" you will therefore find in the States as readily as you will find it here. America or here we live on sufferance in occupied territory, if we are not progressives ourselves, and should not the occupiers always be superior and smug?

I went hunting for the Telegraph article the Colonel discusses above. I didn't like that article at all. It gets the "freeloading" part right but in the context of a Russophobia that's seemingly set in stone. And the Telegraph is not so much a progressive newspaper as one that, while throwing a few token bones to its mainly Conservative readership, buys the progressive Weltanschauung just as much as the Guardian or New York Times.

"How many divisions do they have?" A few more than the pope but maybe that's not the point. I recently tried to follow the twists and turns of Mrs May's negotiations with the EU as they related to defence. I got the impression that in the matter of defence the supply of divisions could safely be left to the Americans. It was the allocation of defence contracts that they were all concerned about.

Deap , 17 August 2020 at 04:46 PM

Residing in Europe in the late 1960's at a US joint NATO military attachment in Northern Italy, we mused were we there to keep our eye on the Russians, or in fact keep our eyes on the Germans. One still saw in the back rooms, AXIS memorabilia.

As an aside: the only reason Michelle Obama chose as one of her FLOTUS projects - support of military families -- was so she could get Uncle Sam to jet her around to all those US military bases still in Europe for tea with the commander's wife and then on to her real purpose - shopping and having fun with friends and families she was able to drag along. On our dime.

Deap , 17 August 2020 at 04:53 PM

My last visit to Europe found there are now more Turks, than former "Europeans; except in France where they were more Algerians, than native French. And of course UK has long been little more than the entrenched polyglot of their vast far flung Empire.

Indeed, who is a "European" today. Birth rate demographics from the former colonies, boat people or import of cheap labor has now taken over anything we used to call "European". Can a resident Turk really serve up a perfect plate of raclette in Switzerland? One word answer: no. And that is a sad loss. One must instead shift their tastes to shwarma, if one wants European food today.

Diana Croissant , 17 August 2020 at 06:19 PM

In regard to Europeans--and perhaps some Australians whom I've met--I have often felt that they in some ways did feel a bit superior to Americans.

Their sense of superiority, however, seemed more rooted in a sense of cultural superiority. Those on the blog who viewed the comic rendition of the Three Little Pigs that was recently posted here might think of that and its wonderful ending about the house that was "American made." it was a wonderful ending for that well-known tale and a great defense of our culture's current limited and plain vocabulary in some groups.

As an English major and English teacher, so much of the great literature that we taught did come from England. I took three Comps when I earned my Masters: English literature from Beowulf (which I read in Old English) to Chaucer's Catterbury Tales (which I read in Middle English) and then to Virginia Woolf.

For my comp in American literature, I read from Washington Irving to the modern American writers at the time I was in college.

My third comp was in Modern Linguistic Theory.

Of course we taught Shakespeare and Dickens---English writers--to our junior high and high school classes. We studied mostly American writers in regard to short stories, as short stories are considered the American genre. Our teaching of poetry covered both English and American poets. As far as novels go, we taught both English and American novels.

Russian and German novelists were also on our list of reading for our comps. (We read them in English translation.)

In summary, American culture was often overshadowed by the many longer centureies of European culture in much of my college career.

What the Europeans can't deny, though they may want to, is that the tehcology and innovation in things like automobile production, electricity, telephones, and into space expoloration ---many things like that--is where we can indeed be quite proud.

They can continue to feel culturally superior to us if it makes them feel better. I defy them, however, to minimize our importance in World War II.

Babak makkinejad , 17 August 2020 at 11:24 PM

Deap

A European was understood, in Iran, to be a Christian. A Turk in Germany or and Algerian in France is just that, a Turk, an Algerian, i.e. another Muslim.

There are professional and managerial middle class French Muslims in Paris and elsewhere, but are they French? I do not know how assimilated they are.

Mathias Alexander , 18 August 2020 at 03:01 AM

" he will follow some Trump-era objectives, because that is what American interests demand, thus showing that Trump was no extremist on China."
So if Biden and Trump both want something, that shows that it isn't extreme. How does that work again?
The drive for confrontation with Russia contradicts Europe's desire to do buisness with her. Hence the end of the Western Alliance.

Mathias Alexander , 18 August 2020 at 04:18 AM

"The US faces a rapidly escalating political crisis. The losing party in November will undoubtedly go to the federal courts to claim that their opponents cheated in the process."
They all went along with electronic voting and postal ballots. Now they're all going to complain about the consequences.

Paco , 18 August 2020 at 04:43 AM

Of course NATO should have disappeared together with the Berlin Wall, but it is alive, kicking and ever looking for trouble, Belarus comes to mind.
The problem with propaganda is that the emitter ends up believing it, Europe does not need any protection, we have the means to protect ourselves.
The US is an occupation force, and on top of it demands payment for it. Pick up your gear and go home, and by the way, Europe should worry about countries armed to their teeth by the US, I'm thinking about Morocco for instance, since I live in Spain. The beautiful line of the Sierra that I contemplate every morning while stretching has been contaminated with a radar station of the Aegis system, and that means we in our quite and beautiful Andalusian town are a target for the biggies. Stop believing your propaganda, pick up your gear and let everybody take care of themselves, the benefits will be for the US population in the first place, and the world will rejoice.

A.I.S. , 18 August 2020 at 06:20 AM

The reason German military contribution to the "western alliance" is what it is is very simple.
It is according to the incentives that threats that German leadership perceives.

First: Objective strategic things:
Essentially, noone is going to invade Germany. This removes one major reason to have a large army. Secondly, Germany is not going to productively (in terms of return of investment) invade anyone else. This removes the second major reason to have a large army. There is something to be said to have a cadre army that can be surged into a real army if conditions change.

Second: Incentives of German political leaders.
While the degree of German vassal stateness concerning the USA is up to a degree of debate, that the USA has a lot of influence over Germany is in my view not. Schröder got elite regime changed over his Iraq war opposition (it was amazing that literally all the newspaper were against him, had a big impact on me growing up during this time).
Essentially, if you are in Nato, at some point, Uncle Sam will invite you to some adventure. If you say yes to this adventure you commit your armed forces to some confrontation in the middle east if you are lucky, or against Russia in Eastern Europe if you are unlucky. Your population is not going to like this, and you may face losing elections over this. It is also expensive in terms of life and material (although not very expensive compared to actual wars against competent enemies).
If you say no, Uncle Sam will be displeased with you and will make this known for example by sicking the entire "Transatlantic leadership networks" on you, which can also make you lose the next election.

Essentially, if Uncle Sam comes asking, you lose the next election if you say yes, and you also lose if you say no. Saying no is on balance cheaper, because you dont incurr the financial and human costs of joing a random US adventure on top of the risk of losing the next election.
The winning play is to get your army in such a state that Uncle Sam will not even ask.

Germany basically did create condition that enabled this.
Its a reasonably happy state for Germany to be in.

We are basically doing Brave Soldier Schweijk on the national level.

Solutions from a US pov:

1: Do less military adventures. If you do less adventures, people will fear being shanghaied along less. This will decrease the drawbacks associated with having a reasonable military as a Nato state.

2: Dont soft regime change governments that say no to your foreign adventures. Instead, maybe listen to them. Had the US listend to French and German criticism regarding the wisdom of going to war with Iraq, the US and also a lot of others would have been much better off.

3: Make it clear that particpation in foreign adventures is actually voluntary instead of "voluntary", make also clear that participation in defensive operations is not voluntary and is what Nato was created for and that you expect a considerable contribution towards this. Also, do some actual exercises. For example, if Germany claims that its military expenditure is sufficient, stress test this premise by having a realistic exercise in which a German divisions goes up against an American one. Yes, do some division size exercizes pretty please. Heck, after ensuring that this exercize wont be a failfest, have some Indian be the referee.

Barbara Ann , 18 August 2020 at 08:03 AM

Territoriality European Outsider

Now we are getting to the heart of the matter. My jest about never having met a European was of course designed to illustrate that "Europe" is a secondary construct. Never has a person, upon meeting me, introduced themselves as a "European".

Europe is a moveable feast and even territorial definitions are slippery. "Europeans" I think, must be characterized by short memories, for was it not less than 25 years ago that European NATO planes bombed their fellow Europeans in Bosnia? It can't have been an accident either, as I understand the op. was called "Operation Deliberate Force".

If Europe is synonymous with the EU it has precisely zero divisions and though you yourself may remain "Western", you are as a consequence of Brexit no longer "European". No, I think you and Polish Janitor are close by identifying "European" as a progressive/liberal, democratic (read "globalist") value system. An insufficiency of "European-ness" can thus be used to justify NATO involvement across various geographies - from Bosnia to Afghanistan (& shortly Belarus?).

But of course the "European" members of NATO are hardly on the same page. It looks not at all unlikely that two of its members may go to war in the Eastern Mediterranean.

I agree with you re the Telegraph article btw. "European" smugness is well represented in that organ.

nbsp; turcopolier , 18 August 2020 at 08:21 AM

Mathias Alexander

No. They did NOT all go along with "electronic voting and postal ballots." The 50 states each run federal elections in any way they please. The US Constitution requires that. There are a wide variety of voting machines in use and only a few states use mailed in ballots. the Republican Party particularly opposes mail in voting.

Barbara Ann , 18 August 2020 at 09:28 AM

Darn spellchecker "Territorially" of course EO.

I should also have added that "European" by the above definition is pretty much synonymous with "Atlanticist".

Jack , 18 August 2020 at 12:54 PM

Paco,

You should be complaining to the politicians you elect. They're the ones requesting US military protection. Prior to Trump, our governments were quite happy to provide that protection. He's now asking for some cost sharing.

Be careful though, before you know it Spain could become a vassal of the Chinese communists as many countries in Africa are finding out now. Hopefully you can continue to extract euros from the Germans and Dutch while battling the separatists in Catalonia. There's a thin veneer between stability & strife.

Deap , 18 August 2020 at 01:01 PM

Paco, with a huge cost of lives and treasure the US was twice asked to clean up Europe's self-inflicted messes in the past century. Promise you won't call on us again, and we can talk. I know, past is not necessarily prologue but do at least meet us half way. It is only good manners.

English Outsider , 18 August 2020 at 01:17 PM


Barbara Ann - Lots of Europes of course. "My" Europe may no longer be on the active list. Traces here and there. Few green shoots that are visible to me. Many rank growths overlaying it.

Also many "European Unions". They exist all right, in uneasy company.

So many "EU's". A ramshackle Northern European trading empire - I think that's too unstable to be long for this world but I could be wrong. A nascent superpower, that denied by many but for some their central aim.

A bureaucratic growth. A handy market place for all. A Holocaust memorial centre; when the EU politicians find themselves in a tight spot they can always call on Auschwitz and all fall back in line. I saw Mrs Merkel pull that trick at the last but one Munich Security Conference and all there, because Mrs Merkel was at that time in a very tight spot, applauded with relief.

A Progressive Shangri-La, all the more enticing for never being defined. Those adherents of that "EU" do actually call themselves "EU citizens" and I see the term is becoming more common usage. Maybe those are the self proclaimed "European citizens" you have not met.

And the producer of reams of lifeless prescription that seek to force all into the same mould and tough on the poor devils who can't fit the model. And on their families.

Lots of "EU's". I like none of them. While we wait for that edifice of delusion to collapse I hope the damage it does to "My" Europe is not irreparable.

Artemesia , 18 August 2020 at 02:26 PM

@ Diana Croissant: "They can continue to feel culturally superior to us if it makes them feel better. I defy them, however, to minimize our importance in World War II."

What an unfortunate conclusion to your essay.


Paco , 18 August 2020 at 05:47 PM

Jack, with all due respect, the politician who committed treason and gave away Spanish territory for a foreign power to install bases died in 1975, nobody voted for him, general Franco, an ally of Hitler, someone who sent over 50k troops to the siege of Leningrad, one of the greatest crimes in the history of mankind, a million casualties, mainly civilians, dead by hunger and disease, that fascist ally of Hitler we had to endure for 40 years, the price to close your eyes and your nose not to smell the stench were bases, an occupying force watching one of the strategic straights in Rota, close to Gibraltar, plus other bases inland. I could go on, and remind you of 4H bombs dropped over Palomares after a broken arrow incident, one of them broke and plutonium is still poisoning an area that your government is not willing to clean. So that is what foreign occupation looks like, if something goes wrong, well, we are protecting you . they say. History should be taught with a bit more detail in the USA.

English Outsider , 18 August 2020 at 06:35 PM

A.I.S

I'm afraid you're reading the dynamics of the European/US relationship quite incorrectly. Bluntly, you have the facts wrong.

This site, and particularly the Colonel's committee of correspondence, is packed with experts who have lived in this field and know their way around it. So I don't venture a comprehensive rebuttal myself - my knowledge is partial and I do not have the background to be sure of getting it dead right. But here -

"Essentially, if you are in Nato, at some point, Uncle Sam will invite you to some adventure. If you say yes to this adventure you commit your armed forces to some confrontation in the middle east if you are lucky, or against Russia in Eastern Europe if you are unlucky."

That is transparent nonsense.

Obama has stated that it was the Europeans, including the UK, who pushed him into some middle East interventions. I don't think he was shooting a line. The leaked Blumenthal emails confirm that and we merely have to look at the thrust of French military actions to understand that the French in particular push continually for intervention in the ME.

They are still doing so, and not for R2P purposes. They would see the ME and parts of Africa as part of the EU sphere of influence and their initial reaction to Trump's abortive attempt to withdraw from Syria shows they would be more than prepared to go it alone there if they could.

A squalid bunch, and here I must include my own country in that verdict. Reliant on US logistics and military strength they seek to pursue their own interests and could they but do so they would do so unassisted. Don't pretend that it's the Americans who force them into these genocidal adventures.


As for the Ukraine, we see from Sakwa's unflattering study of the EU adventure there that that was building up well before 2014. The dramatic rejection of the EU deal was the prelude to the coup. The Ashton tape shows an astonishing degree of EU intervention in Ukrainian internal affairs before that coup. And from the Nuland tape we get a glimpse of the EU regime change project that shows it was deeply implicated.

Pushed into the Ukrainian adventure by the US? Rubbish. The EU and its constituent members were attempting to play their own hand and were not merely following the US lead submissively.

We hear little of European neocon ventures. But what little has surfaced about them shows that your picture of peace loving Europeans dragged into these conflicts by an overbearing "Uncle Sam" is dishonest and misleading.

So I tell my German friends and relatives when they push the same line. They look at me with disbelief and go off and hunt around the internet themselves. And then come back and do not disagree. I suggest you do the same. The facts are all there, even for those of us without inside knowledge or who lack the requisite background.

[Aug 18, 2020] Biden's election will show that the Western alliance is no more - Telegraph

Notable quotes:
"... IMO NATO should have ended with the fall of the USSR. It now "confronts" a largely imaginary threat, concocted for the purpose of maintaining the status quo in US government expenditures for defense and supporting the imperial dreams of the neocons. ..."
"... Does anyone really think Russia is going to invade the Baltics? Really? ..."
"... The kind of symmetrical disinterest described in Timothy's article will encourage the end of Atlanticism ..."
Aug 17, 2020 | turcopolier.typepad.com
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/08/16/bidens-election-will-show-western-alliance-no/

"There are, then, two ways in which a Biden presidency will remove the Europeans' veil of smug superiority. First, he will follow some Trump-era objectives, because that is what American interests demand, thus showing that Trump was no extremist on China . And second, where he does change approach, he will expose European indifference to the Western Alliance as driven, not by distaste for Trump's policies, but by Europe's own cynicism, short-termism and willingness to freeload off US military budgets.

In both respects, Biden's election will reveal Europe's dirty secret. It was never Donald Trump who stopped the Europeans being their better selves, taking responsibility for the security of their own citizens, and protecting long-term Western interests. It was always Europe itself." Nick Timothy in The Telegraph.

------------

I was struck earlier today by English Outsider's admonition (on SST) directed to ConfusedPonderer (archetype of the Teutons) in which EO said that it was vainglorious and vacuous to bitterly claim that the US "occupies" Germany as it did in 1945 while at the same time relying on US funding of Germany's defense through the USA's enormous military expenditures.

IMO NATO should have ended with the fall of the USSR. It now "confronts" a largely imaginary threat, concocted for the purpose of maintaining the status quo in US government expenditures for defense and supporting the imperial dreams of the neocons.

Does anyone really think Russia is going to invade the Baltics? Really?

The US faces a rapidly escalating political crisis. The losing party in November will undoubtedly go to the federal courts to claim that their opponents cheated in the process. These charges will eventually reach SCOTUS. In this environment US interest in European affairs will decline radically.

The kind of symmetrical disinterest described in Timothy's article will encourage the end of Atlanticism. pl

[Aug 13, 2020] The Trump Administration's Economic War on the World: Hitting Adversaries, Punishing Innocents, Angering Allies by Doug Bandow

Aug 12, 2020 | original.antiwar.com
As if viewing gambling at Rick's Café Americain in Casablanca, Washington policymakers are shocked, shocked to discover that China, too, can apply economic pressure. Complained the Heritage Foundation's James Carafano: "the Chinese Communist government slapped sanctions on members of Congress as well as a U.S. ambassador. This action is intended to send the world a message: Fear us."

Of course, the penalties Carafano complained of were retaliation for Washington's imposition of similar sanctions on Chinese officials over the crackdown in Hong Kong. The bilateral pissing match will have no impact on Beijing's policies.

Carafano is not the first person to complain about China's economic sanctions. Mathew Ha of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies was upset by South Korea's refusal to follow Washington's criticism of the People's Republic of China, which he blamed on fear of PRC economic retaliation. Washington Examiner columnist Tom Rogan voiced similar irritation with Beijing's threatened economic retaliation after Canberra moved to counteract increased Chinese repression in Hong Kong.

Imagine. China is acting like the US!

It's almost charming to see such anger over Beijing's behavior when America continues to be the global leader in using its economic power to penalize governments which refuse to heed its commands. In January the president said he would punish Iraq if it acted like a sovereign state and insisted on the withdrawal of American troops.

In June the Trump administration threatened to impose sanctions on everyone, including family members , associated with the International Criminal Court if it proceeded with plans to investigate US military personnel. Washington would treat a United Nations body created by a multilateral treaty like Iran. And borrow enforcement tactics from North Korea, which punishes multiple generations for offenses against the regime.

Last month the Trump administration added new sanctions in an attempt to block construction of the Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline between Germany, a supposed ally, and Russia, essentially demanding that Berlin submit its energy policy to America for approval. (It is widely suspected in Europe that Washington's ultimate objective is to force US natural gas exports into the German market.)

However, what continues to most set America apart from ever other country, including China, is the former's insistence on conscripting the rest of the world to follow US policy. Originally American officials punished American companies and individuals trading with disfavored states. However, in the 1980s the US began expanding penalties for commerce with the Soviet Union and later Cuba to foreign, especially European, subsidiaries of American firms.

The next step, applied to Sudan in 1997, was financial sanctions, punishing any company or individual doing business with anyone in Sudan if they had the slightest connection to any US banking institution. Which prevented normal commerce, irrespective of where a firm was located. As a result, even Khartoum's embassies had to operate on a cash basis. After the 9/11 attacks Washington extended this form of penalty. Today the US uses America's dominant economic role to insist that every resident of earth follow Washington's directives.

The Trump administration sanctions everyone everywhere for everything even if there is no likelihood that doing so will have any practical impact. That is most evident in the administration's high-profile "maximum pressure" campaigns against Iran, North Korea, and Venezuela. So far none of America's targets have yielded.

Washington nevertheless has attempted to spin these failures as victories, since sanctions obviously hurt the countries involved. However, the original objective in every case was to change the target regime's policies. President Donald Trump promised a new regime in power in Caracas, a nuclear agreement with Pyongyang, and an improved nuclear deal with Tehran. In every case he failed to deliver. Indeed, his conduct toward Iran, which refused to even talk with him after he tossed the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, degenerated into shameless begging when he promised the reigning clerics a better deal if they settled before the election. The administration's ongoing economic campaigns against Cuba, Russia, and Syria have been no more successful.

Now the president is using economic war against the PRC for domestic political purposes. Hoping to win reelection with a "tough on China" campaign, he likely does not care about sanctions' actual impact. His primary objective is to appear strong and determined to protect America. No matter how ineffective, most any economic penalty will fulfill that role.

History demonstrates that sanctions most often work when they receive wide international backing and are tied to something short of regime change or its policy equivalent. Moreover, commercial pressure needs to be part of a larger diplomatic process. And the conditions to end sanctions must be clear. When unrealistic terms are set, the policy is guaranteed to fail. Even impoverished regimes steadfastly resist demands to surrender political control and other vital interests. Hence the failure of the administration's promiscuous use of "maximum pressure." The result in every case has been maximum resistance. Cuba's communists have been defiant for six decades.

Unfortunately, economic sanctions usually hurt the wrong people. When I visited Cuba in 2018 the strongest critics of the Trump administration's reinvigorated sanctions were private businesspeople. Trump effectively wiped out investments made by multiple entrepreneurs hoping to welcome more American visitors. The private sector's growing success had undermined the communist regime by providing some 40 percent of jobs in Cuba, draining power and revenue away from the state. Trump reversed the process.

The impact of economic warfare often falls hardest on the most vulnerable members of societies already ravaged by authoritarian politics and socialist economics. In the worst case the impact of sanctions is akin to that of military conflict. And many US policymakers don't care. When UN Ambassador Madeleine Albright was asked about the death of a half million Iraqi babies as a result of US sanctions, she famously replied: "I think this is a very hard choice, but the price – we think the price is worth it." No doubt she did, since the high human cost did not affect her. Today economists Mark Weisbrot and Jeffrey Sachs warn that U.S. sanctions on Iran, North Korea, and Venezuela also are killing civilians, perhaps resulting in tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths.

In contrast, ruling elites are much better positioned to work commercial restrictions to their advantage. For instance, authoritarian regimes can use foreign threats to rally public support. The Trump administration's policies showed Iran's relative moderates, most importantly President Hassan Rouhani, to be fools to trust the U.S. Hardline factions strengthened their hold over the parliament in February's election and are expected to retake the presidency in next year's contest. Dissidents with whom I met on an earlier trip to Cuba complained that Washington's painful economic assault supported Fidel Castro's criticism of "Yanqui imperialism." The regime blamed its self-inflicted economic failures on the American embargo.

Almost 30 years ago I visited Belgrade and interviewed opposition leader Zoran Djindzic – who after Slobodan Milosevic's defeat became prime minister (and was later assassinated). Djindzic criticized US sanctions which, he complained, left his supporters without enough money even for gasoline to travel to his rallies while Milosevic's allies profited from illicit smuggling.

In part in reaction to such perverse impacts, the US enthusiastically added "smart" or individual sanctions to its repertoire. So Washington punishes specific individuals – often foreign officials in highly politicized cases. For instance, the US recently targeted the hardline party boss for Xinjiang, Chen Quanguo, and the local puppet chief executive for Hong Kong, Carrie Lam. Both are accomplices to great crimes who ultimately will find themselves looking for their proper level of hell. However, neither is likely to barge into Chinese President Xi Jinping's office to demand that he end the central government's oppression in territories that they oversee. If they did so they probably would end up in one of the prisons their opponents are assigned to.

The number of individual sanctions imposed is extraordinary. The Treasury Department's "Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons List" runs 1421 pages and covers people, companies, organizations, ships, airplanes, and more. Most individual penalties, though they might make US policymakers feel good, do little more than inconvenience regime elites, who are denied the pleasure of purchasing a second home or hiding ill-gotten assets in America. In January the law firm Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher published its annual report on US sanctions, explaining:

" Between claims of 'financial carpet bombing' and dire warnings regarding the 'weaponization' of the US dollar, it was difficult to avoid hyperbole when describing the use of economic sanctions in 2019. Sanctions promulgated by the US Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control ('OFAC') have become an increasingly prominent part of US foreign policy under the Trump administration. For the third year in a row, OFAC blacklisted more entities than it had under any previous administration, adding an average of 1,000 names to the Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons ('SDN') List each year – more than twice the annual average increase seen under either President Barack Obama or President George W. Bush. Targets included major state-owned oil companies such as Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A. ('PdVSA'), ostensible US allies such as Turkey (and – almost – Iraq), major shipping lines, foreign officials implicated in allegations of corruption and abuse, drug traffickers, sanctions evaders, and more. As if one blacklisting was not enough, some entities had the misfortune of being designated multiple times under different regulatory authorities – each new announcement resulting in widespread media coverage if little practical impact. At last count, Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps ('IRGC') has been sanctioned under seven separate sanctions authorities. Eager to exert its own authorities in what has traditionally been a solely presidential prerogative, in 2019 the US Congress proposed dozens of bills to increase the use of sanctions. Compounding the impact of expansive new sanctions, OFAC's enforcement penalties hit a record of more than US $1.2 billion."

Other than collecting some cash – last year a bit more than a tenth of a percent of the deficit – Washington's economic warfare usually achieves little of note. Instead, the administration's sanctions have been the occasion for endless hypocrisy, which seems inevitable for American foreign policy, and sanctimony, which Secretary of State Mike Pompeo supplies in abundance. He is notable for shamelessly lauding brutal, dangerous, and vile regimes, such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt, while sanctioning awful but actually lesser oppressors like Iran and Cuba. The more closely one studies administration policy, the more political and less serious it is revealed to be.

The Trump administration's ever-increasing use of the dollar to coerce its friends as well as adversaries also is creating resentment even among those who share many of America's interests. So far Europe, which helped negotiate the nuclear pact with Iran, has repeatedly chosen Tehran's Islamist regime over Washington's Trump administration. Most recently European governments rejected the latter's preposterous claim that it remained a participant in the JCPOA which it ostentatiously abandoned and thus could trigger reimposition of UN sanctions.

There also is growing incentive for China, Russia, Europe, and other nations to cooperate in looking for alternative mediums of exchange and payment systems. Commerce involving barter trade, gold, crypto/digital currencies, local currency/non-dollar transactions, and special facilities, such as Europe's INSTEX, which shuffles payments both ways without transfer through a US connected bank, is expanding. Nascent Chinese and Russian payment systems have begun to operate, though an alternative to the US dominated SWIFT system remains far off.

Predictably, Washington reacted to such developments by threatening to sanction anyone attempting to work around US sanctions, most notably the creators of INSTEX. The danger to American financial dominance is real. Even Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin acknowledged the long-term risk to the US dollar's status as the world's reserve currency. Peter Harrell of the Center for a New American Security observed: "US financial dominance is not immutable in a world where the United States constitutes a slowly but steadily shrinking share of global GDP. The Trump administration needs to weigh the near-term benefits of its aggressive use of sanctions against the potential longer-term risks of a global backlash." Obama administration Treasury Secretary Jack Lew warned that "While there is no immediate alternative to the centrality of the US economy and dollar, there are troubling signs that the current approach may accelerate efforts to create new options."

Long-time advocates of US economic aggression are horrified to find that Beijing now views commercial coercion as a legitimate tactic. After all, in their view the only country that has the mandate of heaven to rule the globe is America. Do as we say, not as we do, long has been Uncle Sam's mantra.

The good news is that the PRC's economic clout remains limited. Despite its malign intentions, it is far less able than the US to compel others to comply with its dictates. Financial penalties can be a useful international tool, but not as America's "go-to" response to every foreign challenge, especially given the human cost that so often results. Washington needs to relearn the concepts of humility, restraint, and proportionality before it sparks a global revolt that harms more innocent parties and further undermines America's economic clout.

Doug Bandow is a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute. A former Special Assistant to President Ronald Reagan, he is author of Foreign Follies: America's New Global Empire .

[Aug 13, 2020] Today, Washington is saturated with China hawks. Unfortunately, andy voices that champion keeping America strong by avoiding conflict with China are reflexively smeared as "appeasement."

Aug 13, 2020 | nationalinterest.org

America's actions have already caused Beijing and Moscow to put aside historic enmity and increase its partnership on economic issues and increasingly frequent joint military drills . China and Iran recently completed the basics of an energy and military cooperation agreement. Moreover, President Xi Jinping has become increasingly effective at deepening ties with European, African, and Latin American states.

Today, Washington is saturated with China hawks. Unfortunately, andy voices that champion keeping America strong by avoiding conflict with China are reflexively smeared as "appeasement." I fear America may one day find out to its harm that rejecting sober diplomatic engagement, which could have extended its security and prosperity well into the future, was dismissed in favor of an unnecessary military-first tactic of coercing China.

Daniel L. Davis is a Senior Fellow for Defense Priorities and a former lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army who retired in 2015 after twenty-one years, including four combat deployments. Follow him @DanielLDavis1.

[Aug 12, 2020] Interview with Hassan Nasrallah providing insight into his tactical and strategic thinking processes w.r.t the conflict with Israel

Aug 12, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Arch Bungle , Aug 11 2020 15:52 utc | 88

Incredible interview with Hassan Nasrallah ("The Old Man of The Mountain" as I think of him) providing insight into his tactical and strategic thinking processes w.r.t the conflict with Israel:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_xJ1jb3r74

Probably excellent material for textbooks on asymmetric warfare ...

[Aug 12, 2020] The ongoing inquest into the cause of Dawn Sturgess's death remain at risk of exposure; to reduce that risk and move on to a new policy towards Russia and other enemies, Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings have now forced Sedwill and Younger into retirement, concealing the purge and their purpose

Aug 12, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Australian lady , Aug 11 2020 2:53 utc | 59

"The Sedwill/Younger narrative of what happened on the day, the British prosecution case against two GRU agents for the novichok attack, and the ongoing inquest into the cause of Dawn Sturgess's death remain at risk of exposure; to reduce that risk and move on to a new policy towards Russia and other enemies, Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings have now forced Sedwill and Younger into retirement, concealing the purge and their purpose": John Helmer."Dances with Bears" website.
Thanks to Mark2 for the YouTube link on the 77th brigade. You may find Helmer's investigations as fascinating as I do.
And as an adjunct to uncle tungsten's comments re. the round table and Rhodes scholarship recipients. Susan Rice is a Rhodes scholar. This is portentous.

Paracletus , Aug 11 2020 3:24 utc | 61

"The long read [...] does not account for who or what instigated the British spies into launching their campaign against Trump. My hunch is that then CIA director John Brennan was the central person behind it."

You're starting from the assumption that our British "cousins" are junior partners in the American hegemon's globalist designs, but in fact American imperialism is a departure from its founding principles, in which willing Anglophiles (Aaron Burr, J.P. Morgan, the Dulles Bros., to name a few -- you get the picture) have always subverted efforts by US leaders to break from British geopolitics as formulated by Halford Mackinder, etc., for whom the survival of Atlanticist world power still depends on preventing US-Russia collaboration to bring about a world anti-colonialist order. This oligarchy, whose species memory far surpasses that of the clueless masses for whom they rewrite history, can still feel the burn of Catherine the Great's support for the American Revolution when she refused George III Russia's help suppressing rebellion in the American colonies, or when Alexander II deployed two whole fleets of the Russian Navy to prevent the British from bailing out the failing Confederacy. More recently, Franklin Roosevelt sent Churchill into apoplectic rage when he categorically rejected that racist pig's demand to return her colonies back to Britain at the end of the war.

Since at least the assassination of Lincoln (or earlier, when British soldiers came down from Canada to burn down Washington in 1814) the British Empire and its surviving heirs have always been at the core of efforts to denature America, replacing win-win Hamiltonian economics with a phony "free-trade" ideology increasingly adopted as gospel by "western" economic authorities, and sabotaging every effort by Americans to play a productive, cooperative role with other nations in world affairs. Just like Hillary Clinton and her crazed minions refuse to acknowledge the election of Donald Trump, the Brits never accepted the loss of their former colonies, and have never missed an opportunity to subvert the uniquely American System by which we became a world power -- no thanks to any kind of "special relationship" with Britain, which quickly sank its hooks into our finances by establishing Wall Street as an outpost of the City of London, and infiltrating all of our political and economic as well as cultural and academic institutions (Harvard, e.g.) with devotees of that financial empire. True American interests have always been betrayed by Anglophile fifth-columnists aligned with the Brits -- more broadly defined as a true oligarchy that goes back to Venice and its alliance with the Ottoman Empire to bring down Constantinople, the gateway to a Eurasian powerhouse which then and now threatens to weaken these globalists' hold over world affairs.

So "Rule Britannia" is still the battle cry of the Five Eyes "intelligence community" as it spins out wild, implausible narratives to demonize every alternative to the necrotic vulture capitalism behind globalist hegemony, which most mistakenly see as an American enterprise but in reality is the essence of the "Deep State" that so-called patriots believe they oppose. Such is these psy-warriors' control of collective awareness, through mainstream media and well-placed mouthpieces, as well as, increasingly, "independent" social media and education itself, that red-blooded Americans who instinctively deplore this usurpation of their sovereignty blame Russia, or China, or whomever, and mindlessly parrot absurd "intelligence community" slanders against any country standing up to the status quo Perfidious Albion has been craftily building since... well, since the day after Yorktown. Any initial skepticism at this historical perspective, protestations that such claims are preposterous and the British Empire died long ago, will quickly fall away as the origin of every fake news item used against the Trump administration is examined, whether paid for by the Democratic Party, the FBI, etc. Consider this a mere primer in a much-needed re-framing of strategic analyses at this time. As Leviathan lashes out in increasing pain at an encroaching multi-polar paradigm of development and growth, its DNA will become increasingly apparent.

My hunch is that the "long read," by omitting this piece of the puzzle, is a bit of a cover-up... or, as they say, "limited hangout."

Jackrabbit , Aug 11 2020 3:44 utc | 62

Paracletus @Aug11 3:24 #61

a bit of a cover-up... or, as they say, "limited hangout."

I concur with that.

I believe that the operation was approved by bigwigs in both the US and UK establishment.

Gina Haspel's presence in London is not likely to be an accident. If the operation was supposed to elect Hillary instead of Trump, I suspect she wouldn't be CIA Director today.

We should not underestimate the angst in 2013 and 2014 at Russia's interventions in Syria and Ukraine. Russian assertiveness showed that their alliance with China was serious.

See my comment @Aug10 21:03 #38 for more.

!!

uncle tungsten , Aug 11 2020 10:37 utc | 75

Australian lady #71

The poms have a way of getting away with this kind of stuff - have been doing it for their entire history. Lots of conspiring, lots of coverupping. But when the Americans are actively involved I guess things can get complicated.


Thank you for that post. re Skripals - it is also possible that the two 'Russian chaps' picked up what they were after (left at a drop by Sergei) and returned to London as planned and then on to Russia that night. When the MI6 imagined rendezvous between the Russian chaps and Skripals failed to materialise and then things went pear shape at the pub, MI6 decided to fix the Skripals. Perhaps they left the 'Russian chaps' alone as it was all too late or too dangerous for MI6 to grab them as well. Perhaps Sergei gave them material that was promptly uploaded and sent home as the two rode the train to London. They caught the 1300 train afaik and the Skripals were 'hit' at 1700 more or less.

But something critical seems to have gone down at the pub and MI6 was not in that loop. Mayhem ensued as the Skripals then walked away to their doom.

Pure speculation on my part as I seek logic in a black ops world.

Thank you for the advice on Susan Rice. Rhodes Scholar data base here for barflies to ponder . See Alumni and Volunteers for a roadmap etc.

[Aug 08, 2020] Takes one to know one- New 'Russian disinformation' scare-sheet by State Department's propaganda arm is full of projection -- RT Op-ed

Aug 08, 2020 | www.rt.com

Takes one to know one? New 'Russian disinformation' scare-sheet by State Department's propaganda arm is full of projection Helen Buyniski Helen Buyniski

is an American journalist and political commentator at RT. Follow her on Twitter @velocirapture23 6 Aug, 2020 12:42 Get short URL FILE PHOTO. The State Department Building is pictured in Washington, U.S., January 26, 2017. © REUTERS/Joshua Roberts 16 1 Follow RT on RT The State Department has released a report purporting to unmask "Russia's disinformation and propaganda ecosystem," highlighting supposed Russian proxies in an effort to cast all opposition to US policy as Kremlin-linked.

Behind every narrative unfriendly to US geopolitical aims is a Russian proxy typing madly away, according to the Global Engagement Center (GEC), the State Department's "counter-propaganda" vehicle, which released a report to that effect on Wednesday titled "Pillars of Russia's Disinformation and Propaganda Ecosystem."

More than half of the 76-page paper consists of "proxy site profiles" – writeups of websites deemed to be secretly (or not-so-secretly) operated by the Kremlin. While some are openly connected to the Russian government (New Eastern Outlook, an official publication of the Russian Academy of Sciences), others – like Montreal-based Global Research – are not.

READ MORE 'We must deal with Russia as it is, not as we wish it to be': US ex-diplomats, academics call for engagement with Moscow

In the eyes of the GEC, however, all "serve no other purpose but to push pro-Kremlin content" (which might be news to the websites' operators). Most have previously appeared on lists of "Russian propaganda websites" such as the sprawling blacklist published by PropOrNot – a shady outfit linked to pro-war think tank, the Atlantic Council – in November 2016.

While the report is supposedly dedicated to "exposing Russia's tactics so that partner and allied governments, civil society organizations, academia, the press, and the international public" can arm themselves against evil Kremlin propaganda, its focus on specific websites, their social media follower counts, and the amount of traffic they get seems tailor-made for legitimizing government censorship. Any ideas which resemble the content of these particular websites are to be squashed, sidelined, and suppressed, as are any other sites who publish writers associated with the "proxy sites."

The "ecosystem" metaphor is deployed to explain why some alleged Russian proxies occasionally come out with material opposing the Russian government line – they're just "muddying the waters of the information environment in order to confuse those trying to discern the truth."

As for "truth," the report has an interesting interpretation of the concept. The claims that it deems to constitute "disinformation" include the assertion that "financial circles and governments are using the coronavirus to achieve [their] own financial and political goals" (are there any that aren't?).

They also include claims that "EU bureaucrats and affiliated propaganda bodies are blaming Russia for the crisis over the outbreak of coronavirus" (who knew the Financial Times was a Kremlin disinfo outlet too?)

READ MORE Credibility of European Court of Human Rights lies in ruins after judges' links to Soros revealed

Also included are claims that "George Soros' tentacles entangle politics and generate chaos around the world" (if the shoe fits ).

The GEC report wouldn't be a Russia scare-sheet if it didn't include a heavy dose of projection, and this one does not disappoint. The Kremlin's "weaponization of social media" and "cyber-enabled disinformation" are deemed "part of its approach to using information as a weapon," while Moscow is accused of "invest[ing] massively in its propaganda channels, its intelligence services and its proxies to conduct malicious cyber activity to support their disinformation efforts."

But the CIA and US military intelligence have been engaging in pre-emptive cyber-warfare for two years with the full knowledge and consent of the executive branch – a legitimization of covert activities that previously ran on a don't-ask-don't-tell basis dating at least back to the development of the Stuxnet virus that devastated Iran's nuclear sites over a decade ago.

US weaponization of social media is so pervasive the US Army was recently booted off streaming platform Twitch for relentlessly propagandizing teenage users. The Pentagon has been spreading pro-US propaganda using hordes of "sock puppets" – fake social media accounts purporting to be real people – for upwards of a decade. Indeed, the report hints at these very operations, praising the "thriving counter-disinformation community" that is "pushing back" against those naughty Russians.

With social media platforms jittery over the looming US election in November, the report appears designed to serve as a handy cheat-sheet as to which opinions to censor to avoid a repeat of President Donald Trump's upset victory in 2016 – even though none of the listed "proxies" could be considered pro-Trump by any stretch of the imagination. It also provides a portable reference for Americans worried about committing thought-crime, though the complete lack of fanfare accompanying its publication – Secretary of State Mike Pompeo mentioned it in passing during a press conference on Wednesday – would seem to suggest it is not meant for the hoi polloi.

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.


[Aug 08, 2020] Russia-China -Dedollarization- Reaches -Breakthrough Moment- As Countries Ditch Greenback For Bilateral Trade -

Aug 08, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

Russia-China "Dedollarization" Reaches "Breakthrough Moment" As Countries Ditch Greenback For Bilateral Trade by Tyler Durden Thu, 08/06/2020 - 21:55 Twitter Facebook Reddit Email Print

Late last year, data released by the PBOC and the Russian Central Bank shone a light on a disturbing - at least, for the US - trend: As the Trump Administration ratcheted up sanctions pressure on Russia and China, both countries and their central banks have substantially "diversified" their foreign-currency reserves, dumping dollars and buying up gold and each other's currencies.

Back in September, we wrote about the PBOC and RCB building their reserves of gold bullion to levels not seen in years. The Russian Central Bank became one of the world's largest buyers of bullion last year (at least among the world's central banks). At the time, we also introduced this chart.

We've been writing about the impending demise of the greenback for years now, and of course we're not alone. Some well-regarded economists have theorized that the fall of the greenback could be a good thing for humanity - it could open the door to a multi-currency basket, or better yet, a global current (bitcoin perhaps?) - by allowing us to transition to a global monetary system with with less endemic instability.

Though, to be sure, the greenback is hardly the first "global currency".

Falling confidence in the greenback has been masked by the Fed's aggressive buying, as central bankers in the Eccles Building now fear that the asset bubbles they've blown are big enough to harm the real economy, so we must wait for exactly the right time to let the air out of these bubbles so they don't ruin people's lives and upset the global economic apple cart. As the coronavirus outbreak has taught us, that time may never come.

But all the while, Russia and China have been quietly weening off of the dollar, and instead using rubles and yuan to settle transnational trade.

Since we live in a world where commerce is directed by the whims of the free market (at least, in theory), the Kremlin can just make Russian and Chinese companies substitute yuan and rubles for dollars with the flip of a switch: as Russian President Vladimir Putin once exclaimed , the US's aggressive sanctions policy risks destroying the dollar's reserve status by forcing more companies from Russia and China to search for alternatives to transacting in dollars, if for no other reason than to keep costs down (international economic sanctions can make moving money abroad difficult).

In 2019, Putin gleefully revealed that Russia had reduced the dollar holdings of its central bank by $101 billion, cutting the total in half.

https://lockerdome.com/lad/13084989113709670?pubid=ld-dfp-ad-13084989113709670-0&pubo=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com&rid=www.zerohedge.com&width=890

And according to new data from the Russian Central Bank and Federal Customs Service, the dollar's share of bilateral trade between Russia and China fell below 50% for the first time in modern history.

Businesses only used the greenback for roughly 46% of settlements between the two countries. Over the same period, the euro constituted an all-time high of 30%. While other national currencies accounted for 24%, also a new high.

As one 'expert' told the Nikkei Asian Review, it's just the latest sign that Russia and China are forming a "de-dollarization alliance" to diminish the economic heft of Washington's sanctions powers, and its de facto control of SWIFT, the primary inter-bank messaging service via which banks move money from country to country.

The shift is happening much more quickly than the US probably expected. As recently as 2015, more than 90% of bilateral trade between China and Russia was conducted in dollars.

Alexey Maslov, director of the Institute of Far Eastern Studies at the Russian Academy of Sciences, told the Nikkei Asian Review that the Russia-China "dedollarization" was approaching a "breakthrough moment" that could elevate their relationship to a de facto alliance.

"The collaboration between Russia and China in the financial sphere tells us that they are finally finding the parameters for a new alliance with each other," he said. "Many expected that this would be a military alliance or a trading alliance, but now the alliance is moving more in the banking and financial direction, and that is what can guarantee independence for both countries."

Dedollarization has been a priority for Russia and China since 2014, when they began expanding economic cooperation following Moscow's estrangement from the West over its annexation of Crimea. Replacing the dollar in trade settlements became a necessity to sidestep U.S. sanctions against Russia.

"Any wire transaction that takes place in the world involving U.S. dollars is at some point cleared through a U.S. bank," explained Dmitry Dolgin, ING Bank's chief economist for Russia. "That means that the U.S. government can tell that bank to freeze certain transactions."
The process gained further momentum after the Donald Trump administration imposed tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars worth of Chinese goods. Whereas previously Moscow had taken the initiative on dedollarization, Beijing came to view it as critical, too.

"Only very recently did the Chinese state and major economic entities begin to feel that they might end up in a similar situation as our Russian counterparts: being the target of the sanctions and potentially even getting shut out of the SWIFT system," said Zhang Xin, a research fellow at the Center for Russian Studies at Shanghai's East China Normal University.

[Aug 07, 2020] RUSSIAN FEDERATION SITREP 6 AUGUST 2020 By Patrick Armstrong

Aug 07, 2020 | turcopolier.typepad.com

RUSSIAN FEDERATION SITREP 6 AUGUST 2020 By Patrick Armstrong


RUSSIA AND COVID. Latest numbers : total cases 870K; total deaths 14,606; tests per 1 million 203K . Russia has done 29.7 million tests (third after China and USA); among countries with populations over 10M it's second in tests per million and of those over 100M first. The Health Minister says mass vaccinations will begin by October . Has Russia really won the vaccine race? this researcher believes so and gives his explanation .

KHABAROVSK. Protests continue ( video of Sunday's ). A lot of things going on: Furgal was popular , his replacement, while from the LDPR, is unknown in the area, Khabarovsk feels ignored (Moscow is only 700kms closer than Vancouver), outside activists coming in , corruption . Moscow has handled it badly.

RUSSIA INC. Despite the usual predictions from the usual sources , Russia Inc is healthy: big FOREX kitty; low debts. And, furthermore, it's about the closest thing to an autarky that exists today. Entertaining argument that it can only get better in the rest of the year . It's just been suggested that there may be even more money available in a couple of oil and gas companies.

PUTINOLOGY. Sarkozy and Bill Clinton agree: he always keeps his word. I agree after years of observation: he says what he means and means what he says.

CHURCH. Some of the Church's officials live very well indeed. An Abbess was requested to sell her Mercedes . This is drawing some attention . The Patriarch says such speculations "are designed to prevent the spread of God's word". Which is not an entirely satisfactory response. In the Yeltsin days the ROC was given a piece of the action of certain imports (tobacco for one) so as to fund itself. That seems to have stopped and revenue today comes from the state, sale of articles for church use and some business entities . Scandals come up from time to time and are forgotten as this one probably will be too. The wealth of religious organisations is not, of course, just an issue with the ROC.

FOREIGN CONNECTIONS. A Constitutional amendment prohibits certain officials from having foreign

citizenship or residency permits. A KPRF Deputy says 39 Deputies from the pedestal party have ; the Speaker has promised to look into it. Some one else has published a list of officials with a second passport . Quite a few; something to watch: presumably they formally renounce these things or are fired.

MOON. The Roscosmos head says that Russia and China are likely to build a Moon research base . Another sign neither sees Washington as reliable. I note Beijing is becoming blunter: a " bully" " undermining international law and order" "reckless provocation" "conspiracy theories ".

MILITARY. Airborne exercise video and a reminder that they're the only one that routinely drops AFVs. Eastern Military District . Mediterranean . Sea of Japan . Black Sea . Baltic . Practice and messages.

BEIRUT DISASTER. First Russian aid arrived yesterday, more coming today .

AMERICA-HYSTERICA. Source of The Dossier finally revealed – unimpressive, to put it mildly . Interesting link with Fiona Hill and Brookings . Even the CIA thought it was junk but the FBI insisted . Comey "went rogue" . (Are we ever going to get to the arrest and handcuff phase of this so that even WaPo and NYT readers can learn what happened?)

DOUMA. The Douma fake CW attack, the FUKUS attack, leaks from the OPCW and its cover-up finally hit the MSM thanks to Aaron Mat é and The Nation . Neither fake attack nor coverup news to my readers.

BELARUS. Pretty mystifying. The Russians-sent-to-destabilise story is absurd ( vide .) I know that Lukashenka has been playing Russia and the West , I see signs of a "colour revolution" ( colours. Slogans ). I've heard that the arrested Russians were on their way to be security guards for a facility in Libya . Now Lukashenka says US citizens have been arrested and that Putin's his " elder brother ". It's smelling to me like a Western regime change operation that hasn't been very well prepared. I would expect Lukashenka to prevail and suggest he check his immediate entourage.

GERMANY-USA. Little by little the split grows. Some recent German polls show good support for American troop reduction . And good support for reducing dependence on the USA and improving relations with Russia .

FREUDIAN SLIP. " So we can all deter Russia and avoid peace in Europe ".

NORDSTREAM. Washington huffs and puffs , last opposition from Copenhagen over .

PROBLEMS WITH THE NARRATIVE. Sloppy, sloppy: the latest UK Russian hacker story debunks itself: documents reported in UK media two days before "Russian hackers" "hacked" them !

fanto , 06 August 2020 at 02:23 PM

The book "Russia im Zangengriff" by Peter Scholl-Latour, came out in 2006. He describes the Far East of Russia, in detail, the cities of Magadan, Wladiovostok,Chabarovsk and he is prescient in the development of separatist tendencies. PSL has been prescient in many other situations, - he predicted (also in 2006) that the war in Afghanistan is not winnable by USA. Good observers are rare and not well tolerated by political and media "elites" .
Thanks Mr Armstrong for good informations.

Jim , 06 August 2020 at 04:14 PM

Secretary of Defense Mark Esper: "So we can all deter Russia and avoid peace in Europe".
Priceless!

Thank you Patrick Armstrong.

Barbara Ann , 06 August 2020 at 04:19 PM

Patrick

The Russians-sent-to-destabilize Belarus story is clearly BS. But there seems to be real support for Lukashenko's opposition; led by the "reluctant", but rather photogenic Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya. Tonight her supporters have apparently crashed a Lukashenko rally (their own having been banned) and effectively taken it over.

Sunday's election result is a foregone conclusion, of course, but one has to wonder what might follow. Whatever happens I don't expect Russia to be caught napping again.

https://twitter.com/franakviacorka/status/1291422076432252928

nbsp; Patrick Armstrong , 06 August 2020 at 04:49 PM

Barbara Ann. My gut reaction, having seen so many of these things, is to assume fake from the start.
But Luka has been around for a long time which is never a good idea. Although, truth to be told, he hasn't done so badly, has he? But all these guys have to think about succession.
My guess is that Nazarbayev's precedent will be common (off the front stage, but still in the back). Ukraine has been a terrible example and the Baltics are no great shakes either.

Deap , 06 August 2020 at 05:56 PM

Not sure if I can get excited about a Russian corona "vaccine" showing 38 people from ages 18-60 got "milder symptoms". Since that is what they do already under most situations. Trust, but verify.

nbsp; Fred , 06 August 2020 at 06:41 PM

Patrick,

Interesting that the ROC accounts for 10% of the cigarette imports into Russia. The other scandals brought back memories of Banco Ambrosiano from early 80s.

NATO: Perhaps we should invite Russia to join, that way they'll be pledging "to safeguard the freedom, common heritage and civilisation of their peoples, founded on the principles of democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law." and that bit in article 4 about territorial integrity.

Yeah, Right , 06 August 2020 at 07:49 PM

Here in Australia we have a similar prohibition on dual citizens sitting in our Federal Parliament. One idiot politician sought to discredit an opposition figure by pointing out that their renunciation of their previous citizenship was procedurally null and void.

I forget the details, but the argument was pretty arcane.

What the idiot politician didn't do was to run that same yardstick over fellow members of his own party, because if he had then he would have realized they'd fall like nine-pins.

Hilarity ensured, much to the disgust of a thoroughly unimpressed public. The entire exercise simply convinced everyone that politics in Australia was a Clown Car.


nbsp; turcopolier , 06 August 2020 at 08:21 PM

Yeah, right

No prohibition on multi-citizenship for congressional seats here. do you think Ilhan Omar is not still a Somali citizen?

Señorita Escarlata , 06 August 2020 at 08:35 PM

Cayetana Alvarez de Toledo, a double national Argentinian/French, had to nationalize Spanish to be able to hold a Congressional seat...You see...

The Borbons are also foreigners...

Señorita Escarlata , 06 August 2020 at 08:38 PM

The last news from the Belarus affair...it seems that everything was plotted by the SBU in Kiev to add more people to the kill list of Mirotvorets , and also to put to rot relations amongst Lukashenko and Putin...

https://www.stalkerzone.org/the-arrest-of-33-russians-in-minsk-turned-out-to-be-a-provocation-of-the-ukrainian-security-services/

Yeah, Right , 06 August 2020 at 08:47 PM

Am I right in thinking that there was a time when nobody in the USA could be a dual-citizen? Office-holder or private citizen alike?

[Aug 07, 2020] more than one answer

Aug 07, 2020 | blog.nuclearsecrecy.com

. The decision involved various persons with differing motives. Some of those people, especially in the military, were against using the bomb. Japan was ready to surrender even before the nuclear bombs were dropped. It did not surrender because the bombs destroyed two of its cities.

A major reason to use the new bombs was to demonstrate to the Soviet Union - already selected as the next enemy - that the U.S. had superior weapons. But it did not take long for the scientist in the Soviet Union to catch up and to test their own nuclear device.

It then daunted to some in Washington that a world with nuclear weapons is less secure than one without them. For 75 years they tried to stop the race for more nuclear weapons and to create a path to their total abolishment. But the hawks were more numerous - they still are - and they won out each and every time.

A history of that process is well caught in Scott Ritter's opus "Scorpion King - America's suicidal embrace of nuclear weapons from FDR to Trump".


bigger

Scott Ritter has studied the Soviet Union, worked in military intelligence and as a United Nations weapon inspector in Iraq. He is extraordinary qualified to write about nuclear weapon policies.

The book is an updated version of the 2010 edition. It is comprehensive and covers the decision processes of every U.S. administration with regards to nuclear weapons, nuclear arms control, non proliferation and nuclear disarmament.

Over the first decades many new nuclear arms and delivery systems were introduced. There was always a demand for even more. The nuclear capabilities of the Soviet Union were widely exaggerated. The U.S. assessments of Soviet power were often fake. One commission after the other was setup to make nuclear war plans, to decide which cities should be obliterated, how many million people should be killed and to calculate how many additional weapons were needed to achieve that.

Over time the insanity of the nuclear arms race became more obvious. But when presidents tried to negotiate arms control agreements, and to lower the number of nuclear weapons, there were always people who worked to hinder them. Some successes were made. Nuclear tests were banned. A number of strategic weapons were restricted. Anti-ballistic missiles, introduced to prevent an enemy's response to an offensive first strike, were limited. Certain categories of intermediate nuclear weapons were abolished.

But then came the breakup of the Soviet Union. The U.S. felt no longer a need to restrict itself. Its 'unilateral moment' had begun. Since the 1990s it is again trying to gain an absolute nuclear supremacy. It encroached on Russia's borders and it reintroduced anti-ballistic missile capabilities to make a nuclear first strike against Russia possible.

The attempt failed when Russia in 2018, a decade after warning the U.S. to back off, introduced new weapons which can evade any attempt to counter them. The Obama administrations had failed to draw the right consequences from Russia's warning. Under Trump more nuclear treaties were abolished and soon there will be none left. The world is today more in danger of a nuclear war than it ever was.

As Ritter diagnoses:

The United States is a nation addicted to nuclear weapons and the power and prestige, both real and illusory, that these weapons bring. Breaking this addiction will prove extremely difficult. This is especially true given the lack of having any real nuclear disarmament policy in place since the dawn of the nuclear age. The failure of the United States to formulate or to implement effective nuclear disarmament policy has placed America and the world on very dangerous ground. The longer America and the world continue to possess nuclear weapons, the greater the likelihood of nuclear weapons being used. The only way to prevent such a dire outcome is through abolition, and not the reduction of control, of all nuclear weapons.

The book gives a detailed history of the nuclear decision processes of every U.S. administration since the dawn of the nuclear age. It digs into the motives of many of the involved persons. It documents how - throughout many administrations - the general nuclear policies were kept unchanged. The differences were only gradual.

With 501 pages, including end notes, the Scorpion King takes more than one evening to fully comprehend.

But I for one am grateful to have had the chance to read it page for page. Scott Ritter's opus will now be THE work of reference to consult when I write about nuclear policies.

The book is available as paperback for $29.95 or electronically for $19.00.

Posted by b on August 6, 2020 at 18:38 UTC | Permalink

Comments Thx b.
Matter of proliferation and hypocrisy in foreign policy ...

Permitting Pakistan to develop the Islamic nuclear weapon !

https://www.eurotrib.com/story/2020/7/7/13426/56228

Posted by: Oui | Aug 6 2020 19:14 utc | 1 "The president has made clear that we have a tried and true practice here. We know how to win these races and we know how to spend the adversary into oblivion. If we have to, we will, but we sure would like to avoid it," Special Presidential Envoy Marshall Billingslea said in an online presentation to a Washington think tank. [Reuters, May 21, 2020]

One problem with this thinking is that Putin is a maniacal tightwad, believer in balanced budget and rainy day funds, and he seems to have some control over military costs. Russian experts and most of all, their bosses, take home many times less that their "American partners", projects are selected more carefully, old technologies are maximally reused. American MIC is a horde of hungry pigs that are world's top expert at inflating costs, plying fanciful technologies that sometimes work, but often do not (after spending many billions) etc. Repeating the past glories of "spending into oblivion" will not work again.

Second problem is horribly illustrated in Beirut (and in few places before, Tianjin comes to mind). We have a huge pile of highly explosive substances, but they are stored and handled properly, so nothing will happen, right? Or we have best possible software to automatically launch nuclear missiles when an attack is detected, but it is 110% reliable, and the international tensions will always be handled with care to prevent "hair trigger" status, right?

Posted by: Piotr Berman | Aug 6 2020 19:25 utc | 2 Nukes are a self-licking ice-cream cone for the protection racket.

USA power-elite are not addicted to nukes, they're addicted to power.

This is easily seen via the supremacist ideologies that they subscribe to:


Together, these distill the worst impulses of Western civilization and form a mindset of might makes right that is better known today as the "rules-based order".

!!

Posted by: Jackrabbit | Aug 6 2020 19:32 utc | 3 @Jackrabbit

You're in fine form today. Succinct and to the point.

Posted by: Red Ryder | Aug 6 2020 19:39 utc | 4 @ Jackrabbit # 3

I would only offer a point of clarification to your comment. That clarification would be that its the global power-elite, not USA, and they are addicted to owning the tools of Western private finance which is the source of their power.

Posted by: psychohistorian | Aug 6 2020 19:46 utc | 5 It's fear. Many Americans (not just the power elite) see themselves living in a hostile world. Probably goes back to the Mayflower. And Hollywood. If it's not natives and Russians it's sharks and spiders. They think having lots of nukes will protect them.

Posted by: dh | Aug 6 2020 19:49 utc | 6 Thank you for supporting Scott Ritter. I saw him speak at a small book store in Schenectady NY before the Bush II genocide on Iraq and Afghanistan. Myself and my wife will never forget his words and strengthened our resolve to try and stop the war by protesting in NYC,Boston and our small town of Saratoga NY. I hope that Mr Ritter continues his work to awaken others to the truth of what a sad pathetic country the USA is. I wish him well.

Posted by: So | Aug 6 2020 20:08 utc | 7 Just had to get 'Trump's' name on that headline. He probably wouldn't have used that line of it was Hilary in the Whitehouse.

Posted by: Arne S | Aug 6 2020 20:22 utc | 8 @ Posted by: Arne S | Aug 6 2020 20:22 utc | 8

He had to put Trump's name because, otherwise, he would overshadow the important year of 2018 (when Putin announced Russia's new weapons).

Posted by: vk | Aug 6 2020 20:33 utc | 9 Another reason things don't change is because of the media. The media keeps the people placated, or at least tries, and in fact succeeds to a great extent. See this new article Palace Eunuchs or: Why Mainstream Media Fears the Truth to see how this has happened. It wasn't always like today. But over time the media has been bought out. And they work with and for the MIC.

Posted by: Kali | Aug 6 2020 21:22 utc | 10 thanks b... i agree with jackrabbit - it is all about being addicted to power and trying to hold onto it ( as it slips away )..

this hate on for russia is mystifying.. i think - is this a bunch of war on commies relics from the past driving usa foreign policy? or is it a bunch of sore losers like browder and friends from the 90's? or is it just a case of your usual garden variety insanity on display pretty frequently, from the usa establishment?? i still don't get this hate on for russia... it makes no sense, other then the money it generates for the military complex..

Posted by: james | Aug 6 2020 21:39 utc | 11 Good Evening! A discussion about nuclear weapons should take into consideration the scientific and technical progress since 1945 - though the latter may be hidden from broader public. Yesterday @Schmatz referred to arcticles of Meyssan regarding the explosion in Beirut. Today some more information was published on https://www.voltairenet.org/article210672.html. The German tests of 1944 and 1945 were of the same type (hybrid, lithium, fusion). Israel is not the only gang to have this type of mini-nukes. Big nuclear bombs are out of date. War today has another face. BE AWARE! Nations and states are out of date, too. The war now is against mankind itself. The only remedy against this destruction is mentioned in my preceding comment. Kind Regards, Gerhard

Posted by: Gerhard | Aug 6 2020 21:42 utc | 12 Nuclear War and the Ultimate Game of Hardball


The assassination was a continuation of the Cuban Missle Crisis.
US planes were launched towards Cuba immediately after the assassination, but recalled in time.

It wasn't until 1995 that people had the book "The Spy That Saved The World" - Oleg Penkovsky.

The voluminous technical missile details this spy revealed allowed the US to determine the state of readiness,
or rather unreadiness, of the missiles being deployed in Cuba. Thus, Kennedy knew he had a window of time to
take the path of diplomacy, and without this key information his decision making process would have been quite different.

But there was another critical window that the spy Penkovsky revealed.
Khrushchev famously threatened that his factories were producing like "sausages" ICBM capable of reaching the US;
Khrushchev could make it rain ICBM. The spy Penkovsky revealed that this was simply a bluff.
Khrushchev might be able to launch ONE experimental ICBM towards the US but that was it.
The window however, Penkovsky revealed, was only reliable for three years. Penkovsky believed that within as
little as three years the Soviets could be producing ICBM in large numbers.

The Joint Chiefs Of Staff, as history records, contained men with the right stuff, right enough to inspire "Doctor Strangelove".
They wanted to take out the Soviet Union while we could. Kennedy, however, did not want to go down in history
as the greatest mass murderer of all time.

It was a game of Super Hardball Poker. The ICBM Window was closing down like a guillotine,
Kennedy had his bellicose generals and Khrushchev had his own hardline generals to contend with.
What move in this game could Kennedy make?

The US generals had WANTED the Soviets to run the blockade of Cuba and "cross the line" to war
and Khrushchev didn't know that his ICBM bluff cards were exposed.

Kennedy's move: he could let Khrushchev know of his slim poker hand.
Kennedy was also proving to the Soviet generals that here was a US President that wanted to deal,
which would be useful later when seeking treaties. Did Kennedy also blunt the US general's urge for war
by closing a key vulnerability in the Soviet defenses? Penkovsky had also revealed to us key Soviet
defense vulnerabilities.

Did Kennedy, in this game of Super Hardball Poker give up the spy, codenamed HERO, to the Soviets?
Did Kennedy reveal the depth of knowledge HERO had given us about the Soviets?

Oleg Penkovsky was arrested by the Soviets on the seventh day of the Cuban Missle Crisis.

One year later the assassination created a different stalemate.

The plotter's plan was to blame Cuba for the assassination of our President thus bringing a retaliatory strike
against Cuba. This would escalate to full out war with the USSR. Robert Kennedy immediately wanted to thwart
the plans of his brother's killers. Before that bloody day was done, instead of blaming Cuba Robert Kennedy supported
a safer alternate theory, the lone gunman theory.

Vice President Johnson was heading for a fall before the assassination, his criminal past was going to catch up with him.
The Kennedys were going to drop Johnson from the ticket during the second presidential term.
The Joint Chiefs Of Staff brought Johnson into the plot late in the game; but, he double-crossed them after
the assassination and didn't give them the war against the Soviets (by first attacking Cuba) they had wanted.

As an insider Johnson had the goods on the Joint Chiefs of Staff and they in turn had the goods on him. Stalemate.
Robert Kennedy had knowledge of Johnson's criminal past, but the Kennedys acting as tipsters to the Soviets
in the Oleg Penkovsky affair put a sword over Robert's head. Just as importantly Robert Kennedy would make
an already dangerous world more dangerous if he made it known publicly that the Joint Chiefs of Staff had tried
to launch a war that day and were willing to assassinate presidents in order to carry this out.

Robert Kennedy supported the hoax that was the Warren Commission to protect his brother's reputation and his own,
but more importantly to deter nuclear war. Johnson was high in the saddle as President and thus supported the Commission,
and he retired key members of The Joint Chiefs of Staff. With his reputation intact Robert Kennedy planned to
later become President and once he had power he would bring justice against his brother's killers.

Posted by: librul | Aug 6 2020 21:55 utc | 13 @ Kali | Aug 6 2020 21:22 utc | 10

"It wasn't always like today. But over time the media has been bought out."

Sorry, but that is incorrect. The "news" media in the US has always been the knowing tool of the oligarchy. Should anyone doubt that, just read Jack London's 1908 novel "The Iron Heel." In addition to describing to a "T" the devices the oligarchy uses to keep down and punish the proletariat, he describes the use of the press to silence, punish and do away with troublemakers such as socialists.

The fictional revelations in the novel will be immediately recognizable to MOA members as present-day techniques of repressing the proletariat and corrupting the media.

Posted by: AntiSpin | Aug 6 2020 22:14 utc | 14 p.s.

"The Iron Heel" is available online.

Posted by: AntiSpin | Aug 6 2020 22:15 utc | 15 The historian b links at the beginning of his piece makes the point that the building of the bombs was taking place well before Truman came to office and basically had no knowledge of what had been going on. The timeline for that circumstance is horribly short, and here is how Peter Kuznick describes it in the interview I linked to at 25 on the open thread:

"...65% of potential voters [in a Gallup poll] said they wanted Wallace back as vice president, 2% said they wanted Harry Truman. But Truman gets in there, is vice president for 82 days, Roosevelt dies, Truman becomes president on April 12th, 1945, the day that shall live in infamy. And so Truman on April 13th, his first day in office, Secretary of the Navy, Forrestal sends his private plane down to Spartanburg, South Carolina, to bring James Byrnes back to Washington. Truman was desperate. He sits down with Byrnes and he says, I don't know anything, Roosevelt didn't talk to me about what was going on, or the agreements at Yalta, I don't know anything, fill me in on everything and Byrnes then starts to lay it out. That the Soviets can't be trusted, that you know, that they're breaking their agreements. So that's a Truman who was inclined to think that way anyway, starts hearing it from Byrnes.

And even though that was the opposite of what Roosevelt believed and Roosevelt said right up to his dying day, Roosevelt was sure that the US and the Soviets would get along after the war..."

I wouldn't want to make any other observation than that as b's historian suggests, there were many influences behind the scenes of the fateful decision. Just to point out the similarity in the apparent railroading out of Wallace at such a critical time. It does remind one of politics today.

Posted by: juliania | Aug 6 2020 22:20 utc | 16 I distinctly remember reading somewhere that at the height of the insanity the USA had so many nuclear warheads that it had difficulty finding worthwhile targets for them. So much so that the ended up designating one nuke to destroy a post office in Siberia. A Freaking Post Office.

For all I know they pointed two some poor postmistress. You know: one to obliterate the mailboxes, and the other to make the rubble bounce around a bit....

Mad as Hatters, the lot of 'em.

Posted by: Yeah, Right | Aug 6 2020 22:32 utc | 17 Fascinating book review and important commentary. Thanks b.

(PS on English usage. In paragraph 4 I think you meant "It then dawned on some in Washington...". If I am 'daunted' by something I am hesitating out of fear or scale [e.g. I was daunted by the huge task that lay ahead...]). Sorry if that sounds pedantic, but I like your posts a lot and am impressed by your grasp of idiom in a second language.

Posted by: Patroklos | Aug 6 2020 22:40 utc | 18 sounds like an excellent book, i'll order as soon as i finish "the deficit myth".

Posted by: pretzelattack | Aug 6 2020 22:58 utc | 19 james @ 11,in the Paul Jay interview, Peter Kuznick makes the point that early on, when the weapons were first used on Japan, there wasn't a formidable military industrial complex, so Truman seems to have made the decision solely on the advice that the Russians were not to be trusted. Still, behind the scenes, that complex had to be in its infancy, as Eisenhower warned before he left office.

And psychohistorian is correct, it morphed into the entity that now is the main driver of world finance, not just in the US. So it is not the people of the US who are addicted to horrible weapons; it is that huge military/industrial/banking complex feeding off hapless Americans as it also feeds off the rest of the world, under the umbrella of neoliberalism: 'austerity for you but not for me.'

Grim stuff, and hopefully its days are numbered.

Posted by: juliania | Aug 6 2020 23:03 utc | 20 kennedy was a long time warmonger prior to the cuban missle crisis. he ran to the right of nixon, claiming nixon and eisenhower had left american vulnerable to a mythical "missle gap" which was not close to being true. both sides had ample weapons to destroy each other; what difference did the u.s.s.r. having a few more in cuba to match the u.s. placing some missles in turkey. this is often portrayed as j.f.k.'s shining moment, instead of a astoundingly reckless course of action that took the world close to a nuclear war. the russia missles in cuba would not have given them any sort of nuclear advantage, it would have taken them to the parity of being able to destroy american cities as many times as the americans could destroy russian cities, a meaningless equality. indeed the us withdrew the turkish missles, from what i remember, after the crisis.
it was the worst single example of american military overreach since needlessly blowing up hiroshima and nagasaki, an incredibly ill judged attempt to maintain u.s. superiority at all potential costs, and this time it was against an adversary that could destroy the united states. sound familiar? it should, it's been the strategy of the u.s. empire at least since 1945.

Posted by: pretzelattack | Aug 6 2020 23:09 utc | 21 Nukes exist to be paid for. Corporate welfare. The Russians and everyone else got them because the US had them. Peiod. End of story. 'Nuff said.

Posted by: Richard Steven Hack | Aug 6 2020 23:36 utc | 22 It is very costly trying to live up to your ego. Many within the US government have big big egos, but who will pay the cost?

Posted by: Dick | Aug 6 2020 23:44 utc | 23 Lots of good discussion and links to excellent essays on the subject. Here are four, John Pilger's essay , "Another Hiroshima is Coming Unless We Stop It Now;" Dave Lindorff's essay , "Unsung Heroes of Los Alamos: Rethinking Manhattan Project Spies and the Cold War;" H. Bruce Frankiln's essay , "How the Fascists Won World War II;" and Robert Jacobs and Ran Zwigenberg's essay , "The American Narrative of Hiroshima is a Statue that Must be Toppled." Of course, there are dozens more written over the years at each anniversary of Hiroshima Day. As a former teacher, I found the last essay to be perhaps the most important as it details the great effort expended to keep that Narrative as THE ONLY OFFICIAL NARRATIVE to be allowed. But also as AntiSpin said, the fixing of the facts around the policy has gone on for 100+ years.

We humans face an EVIL GANG that's worse in its goals than Hitler was. Most are situated within the Outlaw US Empire, with the remainder sprinkled within its satrapies. They are mostly members of the Rentier Class psychohistorian rails about constantly for good reason, but others are traditional imperialists and fascists. All constitute what is known as the Donor Class--the controllers of the Duopoly within the Outlaw US Empire and of the satrapies abroad. But in a great many ways that do matter, they are outed now as more people globally become aware of their existence and designs. Much discussion here revolves around the issue of how to deprive them of the power they wield. Other discussions are subsets, such as the attempt to launch a new Cold War aimed at China. IMO, the key involves dragging ALL the skeletons from the closet and having them dance for all the world to see. Part of that is condemning the Outlaw US Empire for its genocide of the Japanese people in the nuclear fires and those that preceded them.

Posted by: karlof1 | Aug 6 2020 23:48 utc | 24 juliania shared a link in the open thread which fits here as well.. thanks juliania...

Why Did Americans Accept Barbaric Slaughter of Japanese Civilians?

Posted by: james | Aug 7 2020 1:21 utc | 25 @ 20 juliania.. thanks.. i agree with pyschohistorians view @5 - global power elite are behind this.. however, they need the assistance and help of the american military and political leaders too... do you think pompeo would act any different here?? he has proven beyond doubt that the usa on most levels, is not to be trusted.. let me quote from your link from the other thread, which i have linked to above @ 25..

"In fact, Major General Haywood Hansell, the head of the 21st bomber command that was doing the bombing in Japan, resisted orders to abandon precision bombing at the end of'44. He didn't want to bomb urban areas. So Hap Arnold sacked him and installed General Curtis LeMay as commander of the 21st Bomber Command and LeMay had no such compunction. The large-scale bombing on the night of March 9th through 10th when 324 aircraft attacked Tokyo and killed probably one hundred thousand people, destroyed 16 square miles, injured a million, at least 41,000 seriously injured, more than a million homeless. The air reached eighteen hundred degrees Fahrenheit. LeMay says that the victims were scorched and boiled and baked to death. He referred to this as his masterpiece."

it takes more then the global power elite to enact these types of horrific acts as i see it.. if ordinary people like general haywood hansell can say no to this, so can others... but as we see general curtis lemay had no compunction murdering 100,000 innocent people.. someone might be pulling the levers, but it has to be followed thru by more ordinary people who need to resist it..

Posted by: james | Aug 7 2020 1:30 utc | 26 I did not know that today it was the anniversary of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima, after all I was not even born then...

But, knowing now, it makes even more sense that the governor of Beirut compared ( I imagine that as ignorant of the date as i am...) the port blast with a destruction equaling that of Hiroshima...Who I fear that do not ignore this are other people...

I do not go to the heights of other people looking for signals everywhere, but after some years of reading info I do not think any more some events are coincidences...

Look at this other oddity...

In the afternoon of this Thursday a fire was reported in the World Trade Center tower located in the city of Brussels, in Belgium

The fire occurred at 4:00 p.m. (local time) and would not have left victims so far

https://twitter.com/teleSURtv/status/1291446525659422721

What I find odd enough is not only that the building is named World Trade Center....but, also that it has a banner in its fachade which reads "The future is here"...

What kind of future?

Then just saw this front page of The Economist at Daniel Estulin Twitter account...

https://twitter.com/EstulinDaniel/status/1291496244548902912

Intriguing to say the least....

Posted by: H.Schmatz | Aug 7 2020 1:31 utc | 27 Truman's statement following the destruction of Hiroshima is interesting to read. He starts off by describing Hiroshima as "an important Japanese Army base" rather than a city filled with civilians.

He later says "We are now prepared to obliterate more rapidly and completely every productive enterprise the Japanese have above ground in any city. We shall destroy their docks, their factories, and their communications. Let there be no mistake; we shall completely destroy Japan's power to make war".

Nothing there about wholesale slaughter of the population or destroying their food supply or drinking water, just attacks on military-related targets.

Interesting.

Posted by: BillB | Aug 7 2020 1:52 utc | 28 Gordon Duff, even a broken clock is correct ... well you know the rest https://www.veteranstoday.com/2020/08/06/breathtaking-case-closed-infrared-video-reveals-details-of-israeli-nuclear-missile/

I do NOT believe this was a nuclear attack on Beirut but it does look like a missile strike.
Yes, the Lebanese govt is corrupt, negligent, and awful but that doesn't exclude the possibility that a foreign actor took advantage of the situation. I am wondering if Israel just had to use their new toy, that cargo ship, container missile and I still think it's possible that if they did attack Lebanon that they only meant to hit the fireworks warehouse. In any case, I think this vid is worth looking at.

Posted by: Christian J. Chuba | Aug 7 2020 2:02 utc | 29 @28 Yes very interesting. You may find the Potsdam Declaration interesting too. The Japanese were given an opportunity to surrender. They turned it down.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potsdam_Declaration

Posted by: dh | Aug 7 2020 2:07 utc | 30 @29

Heavy

Posted by: librul | Aug 7 2020 2:28 utc | 31 @31 Wars are heavy. They are fought to some kind of conclusion. Not sure why Hiroshima was the target. I imagine other targets were considered but the basic idea was to create a major impression.

Posted by: dh | Aug 7 2020 2:41 utc | 32 @31 Sorry librul. I guess you weren't talking about Hiroshima.

Posted by: dh | Aug 7 2020 2:53 utc | 33 I have become comfortably numb. This happened some time ago coinciding with the release of Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon. 80,000 people died immediately in Hiroshima on this day in 1945. With Nagasaki, the total was over 220,000 in two single incidents. Do shape-shifting lizards from another dimension control our world behind the scenes? Most likely. Global policies lack humanity. They also lack intelligence, being born of a lizard brain. This is the end game. This is the Kaliyuga. Billions will die while we remain comfortably numb, armchair pundits. March on Scott Ritter, stalwart Marine!

Posted by: jadan | Aug 7 2020 3:27 utc | 34 dh 33

I read the two Japanese cities were selected because of their geography. Surrounded by hills to contain and concentrate the blast for better effects.

Posted by: Peter AU1 | Aug 7 2020 3:31 utc | 35 Christian J. Chuba 29

Why do you post the duff shit here? Should be plenty of UFO and other nutcase forums it can be posted on.

Posted by: Peter AU1 | Aug 7 2020 3:36 utc | 36 @35 Possibly. I think it was the psychological effect they were going for,

https://www.npr.org/2015/08/06/429433621/why-did-the-u-s-choose-hiroshima

Posted by: dh | Aug 7 2020 3:41 utc | 37 Peter AU1

Surrounded by hills

dh

psychological effect

My understanding is that they chose it because it was had experienced very little previous bombing. And they had deliberately withheld bombing there for some months before dropping the bomb.

They were as interested in learning about the effects of a nuke on a city as they were in sending a 'message' to the Japanese Govt.

!!

Posted by: Jackrabbit | Aug 7 2020 3:55 utc | 38 @38 "They were as interested in learning about the effects of a nuke on a city as they were in sending a 'message' to the Japanese Govt."

I'm sure that was a factor. They probably wanted to send a message to the rest of the world as well.

Posted by: dh | Aug 7 2020 4:12 utc | 39 DH and others,

One reason the US dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was to send a message to the Soviets that it had nuclear weapons - and was prepared to use them.

Japan had petitioned the US to surrender on the condition that it be allowed to retain its monarchy. The US insisted on unconditional surrender.

Hibiki Yamaguchi: "Can the Atomic Bombings on Japan Be Justified? A Conversation with Dr. Tsuyoshi Hasegawa"

"... [A dilemma] Truman faced was the so-called unconditional-surrender demand. Under Roosevelt, the United States had been demanding unconditional surrender by Japan, and Truman followed this policy faithfully. This was because Japan had engaged in military aggression causing the war (unjust war) and had committed all kinds of atrocities against American and Allied soldiers (violations on justice in warfare). In order to defeat Japanese militarism so that Japan could never rise up again as a military power, the United States and its allies should impose on Japan unconditional surrender.

But, as the war developed, there were certain people, very influential people within the government – such as Secretary of War Henry Stimson, Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal, and Deputy Secretary of State and former Ambassador to Japan Joseph Grew – who thought it necessary to define what "unconditional surrender" exactly meant. Particularly important was the status of the emperor. If the United States were to insist on unconditional surrender, particularly if it were to insist on, for instance, trying or punishing the emperor, as some within the administration insisted, the Japanese would fight on to the very last man. Therefore, in order to terminate the war, the US government would have to define the terms in such a way that it could allow the Japanese to preserve the monarchical system, even under the current dynasty.

In fact, before the Potsdam Conference began, Stimson presented the president with the draft proposal for the Potsdam on July 2. This draft included two important items. First, it anticipated the Soviet entry into the war. In fact, the Operation Division of the Army General Staff, which had worked on the proclamation draft, thought the most effective means of forcing Japan's surrender was to time the issuance of the ultimatum to Japan so that it coincided with the initiation of Soviet entry into the war. The second provision was that the Allied powers would allow Japan to preserve the monarchical system under the current dynasty.

What happened with these provisions? When the actual Potsdam proclamation was issued, it stated nothing about the Soviet Union and nothing about unconditional surrender. Those two conditions were rejected because of political considerations.

So the first assumption – that the atomic bomb was the only alternative for the United States to end the war – turned out to be false, a myth. The fact is not only that Truman did not choose those alternatives, but also that he just rejected them out of political consideration ..."

In the end, Japan surrendered once the Soviets declared war on that country, and eventually the US allowed Japan to retain its monarchy and to keep Hirohito on the throne.

Incidentally Nagasaki was selected for bombing because it was on a list of potential targets on which Kokura was first , but on the morning of 9 August 1945, the weather over the town was cloudy and the crew of the B-29 bomber could not see the target city clearly. Nagasaki was second on the list. The bomb hit a Roman Catholic cathedral during a celebration of Sunday Mass.

Posted by: Jen | Aug 7 2020 5:11 utc | 40

[Aug 06, 2020] Is War With China Inevitable by J

Notable quotes:
"... "When I analyze the current situation, I understand that this is a rehearsal for biological warfare," ..."
"... "I am not saying that this virus was created by humans... but this is a test of the health system's strength, including the country's biological defense." ..."
"... More sinophobic drivel and propaganda. Is it coming from Bannon, Navarro,Fox News, and the other similar warmongering outfits ? This type of propaganda is irrational but certainly purposeful to whip declining exceptionals into war frenzy. They are correct in one aspect - China is outpacing the US and will eventually in 10-20 years surpass it as #1 in Economic power (already the case) and Technology ..."
"... China is a missile-based military deploying hypersonics. This means the US Navy has to standoff 1000 km from the Chinese naval forces or missiles from mainland will decimate the carrier task forces within that range. ..."
"... More sinophobic drivel and propaganda. Is it coming from Bannon, Navarro,Fox News, and the other similar warmongering outfits ? This type of propaganda is irrational but certainly purposeful to whip declining exceptionals into war frenzy. They are correct in one aspect - China is outpacing the US and will eventually in 10-20 years surpass it as #1 in Economic power (already the case) and Technology ..."
"... China is a missile-based military deploying hypersonics. This means the US Navy has to standoff 1000 km from the Chinese naval forces or missiles from mainland will decimate the carrier task forces within that range. ..."
"... Of course having moved much of our manufacturing base into China and then allowing their students to take up most of the hard engineering class space and lab assistantships while diverting our students to 'studies' programs has been a resounding success. ..."
"... "There are few viable military options for warmongering chickenhawks advising..." Bush, Obama, Biden, a Triumverate of peacemakers. Remind me who is ordering troops out of Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria. ..."
"... Of course having moved much of our manufacturing base into China and then allowing their students to take up most of the hard engineering class space and lab assistantships while diverting our students to 'studies' programs has been a resounding success. ..."
"... "There are few viable military options for warmongering chickenhawks advising..." Bush, Obama, Biden, a Triumverate of peacemakers. Remind me who is ordering troops out of Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria. ..."
Aug 06, 2020 | turcopolier.typepad.com

The rattling of sabres between the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the U.S. is becoming louder, and causing many to ponder if World War III is not far off. There are those in the international community increasingly alarmed given the COVID situation, the South China Sea imbroglio, and China's growing threat that they intend to invade and absorb Taiwan into Communist China within a year. These items have led to the belief that World War III is on the horizon.

Just recently, Dr.Leonid Roshal, a noted Moscow physician, hostage negotiator, and advisor to the WHO remarked that the COVID pandemic is a dry run for World War III, and that COVID-19 is practice for future biological warfare. Covid-19 pandemic has functioned as a "rehearsal for biological warfare," Dr. Roshal also believes that the rapidly-spreading virus was a test for the world's healthcare systems.

In an interview with Forbes, Professor Roshal, President of the Research Institute of Emergency Pediatric Surgery and Traumatology, explained that not all nations were ready for a mass influx of patients, and their lack of preparation has been exposed by the pandemic.

"When I analyze the current situation, I understand that this is a rehearsal for biological warfare," he explained. "I am not saying that this virus was created by humans... but this is a test of the health system's strength, including the country's biological defense."

In addition, Hong Kong-based virologist Yan Li-Meng, currently in hiding at an undisclosed location, claims that the COVID-19 coronavirus came from a People's Liberation Army lab, and not from a Wuhan wet market as Beijing has claimed. Speaking on a live stream interview on Taiwan's News Agency Lude Press, she said, "At that time, I clearly assessed that the virus came from a Chinese Communist Party military lab. The Wuhan wet market was just used as a decoy." Yan has been in hiding in the U.S. after fleeing Hong Kong in April.

Chinese PLA Senior Colonel Ren Guoqiang stated recently that TAIWAN WILL be reunified with the rest of China - and any attempt by the United States to interfere is futile and dangerous. Senior Colonel Guoqiang is Deputy Director of the Ministry of Defense's Information Office, and Chinese Defense Ministry Spokesman. J

entrybody comment-odd comment-has-avatar">

Well, this is certainly a depressing and frightening post. I can't say, however, that I have been thinking along the same lines. However, since I am basically a nobody, I have tried to assure myself that I am being paranoid. So, it's not helping that some people who are much more knowledgeable have expressed in print some of the fears I have been feeling over these months dealing with the pandemic.

All I can do is pray and hold fast to my faith in God. Perhaps He will lift up the people who can deter us from the predictions of this post. (But are we worthy of being saved?)

Posted by: Diana Croissant , 05 August 2020 at 03:44 PM

Well, this is certainly a depressing and frightening post. I can't say, however, that I have been thinking along the same lines. However, since I am basically a nobody, I have tried to assure myself that I am being paranoid. So, it's not helping that some people who are much more knowledgeable have expressed in print some of the fears I have been feeling over these months dealing with the pandemic.

All I can do is pray and hold fast to my faith in God. Perhaps He will lift up the people who can deter us from the predictions of this post. (But are we worthy of being saved?)

Posted by: Diana Croissant 05 August 2020 at 03:44 PM

entrybody comment-even comment-has-avatar">

J

I don't believe there will be any direct military conflict. However, we can expect some saber rattling from both sides.

Sec.Azhar is leading a US delegation to Taiwan. On another note Taiwan ain't HK. They have an independent government. While they will eventually be overwhelmed in any military conflict with China if no other country intervenes on Taiwan's side, they definitely have the capability to inflict a black eye.

The CCP has been emboldened precisely because the US government has actively abetted their rapaciousness for many decades under both parties. From Clinton's MFN designation to Bush & Obama administrations actively supporting the shuttering of US manufacturing.

Trump is making the first course correction albeit in a limited manner with tariffs. He has however changed the tone in an important manner by no longer just kowtowing to whatever the CCP wants.

This story of ARM China exemplifies CCP long-term policy of requiring JVs to access the Chinese market and once technology and know-how have been successfully transferred, then expropriating it. The west in general and the US in particular have turned a blind eye. Huawei got going by stealing cisco source code and design.
https://www.businessinsider.com/arm-conflict-china-complicates-acquisition-prospects-2020-8

It is high time for the US to make the totalitarian Chinese communists pay a price and directly take the fight to them economically and financially. The CCP must be doing their best to insure a Biden win to return to the status quo or wait another Trump term and hope an establishment Democrat or Republican wins after. They have bought and paid the establishment politicians, entire think-tanks, many in academia and the media.

Posted by: Jack , 05 August 2020 at 03:58 PM

J

I don't believe there will be any direct military conflict. However, we can expect some saber rattling from both sides.

Sec.Azhar is leading a US delegation to Taiwan. On another note Taiwan ain't HK. They have an independent government. While they will eventually be overwhelmed in any military conflict with China if no other country intervenes on Taiwan's side, they definitely have the capability to inflict a black eye.

The CCP has been emboldened precisely because the US government has actively abetted their rapaciousness for many decades under both parties. From Clinton's MFN designation to Bush & Obama administrations actively supporting the shuttering of US manufacturing.

Trump is making the first course correction albeit in a limited manner with tariffs. He has however changed the tone in an important manner by no longer just kowtowing to whatever the CCP wants.

This story of ARM China exemplifies CCP long-term policy of requiring JVs to access the Chinese market and once technology and know-how have been successfully transferred, then expropriating it. The west in general and the US in particular have turned a blind eye. Huawei got going by stealing cisco source code and design.
https://www.businessinsider.com/arm-conflict-china-complicates-acquisition-prospects-2020-8

It is high time for the US to make the totalitarian Chinese communists pay a price and directly take the fight to them economically and financially. The CCP must be doing their best to insure a Biden win to return to the status quo or wait another Trump term and hope an establishment Democrat or Republican wins after. They have bought and paid the establishment politicians, entire think-tanks, many in academia and the media.

Posted by: Jack 05 August 2020 at 03:58 PM

entrybody comment-even comment-has-avatar">

More sinophobic drivel and propaganda. Is it coming from Bannon, Navarro,Fox News, and the other similar warmongering outfits ? This type of propaganda is irrational but certainly purposeful to whip declining exceptionals into war frenzy. They are correct in one aspect - China is outpacing the US and will eventually in 10-20 years surpass it as #1 in Economic power (already the case) and Technology .

There are few viable military options for warmongering chickenhawks advising Trump. Certainly, US Naval Intel and PACCOM (now INDOPACCOM) brass who would love a grand Coral Sea 2.0 battle to destroy PLAN vessel on the seas. However, no one, except few Marine 4 stars want any land war. The Marines think they can defeat the PLA on some islands. That kind of warfare is for hollywood movies. China is a missile-based military deploying hypersonics. This means the US Navy has to standoff 1000 km from the Chinese naval forces or missiles from mainland will decimate the carrier task forces within that range.

There won't be any war in SE Asia or East Asia. This area now has a circuit breaker, Russia. Russia is building a naval presence, expanding it's aerospace arm, has basing rights in the zone in Vietnam and has long range radars that cover a lot of the zones, and submarines the US is having issues tracking.

The signals from China and Russia to the US military is very clear. You can walk and talk like the Hegemon but the days of regional hegemony are over. ASEAN nations will not accepting accept a return to gunboat diplomacy and colonization. All these nations want prosperity and progress, not western hegemony and military destruction.

This is why the hybrid war of sanctions, trade war, Infowars, cyberwar, proxies in Central Asia (ISIS and AQ), color revolution attempts in Hong Kong, hysterics about Tibet and Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia (Bannon front) are on the front burner. Military action is a losing proposition for the US. They simply cannot win anything anywhere in the Asia Pacific, western Asia or even against near peer powers proxies like Venezuela.

China simply has to do what Russia does and tell the US to pound sand.

Posted by: Horatio , 05 August 2020 at 04:51 PM

More sinophobic drivel and propaganda. Is it coming from Bannon, Navarro,Fox News, and the other similar warmongering outfits ? This type of propaganda is irrational but certainly purposeful to whip declining exceptionals into war frenzy. They are correct in one aspect - China is outpacing the US and will eventually in 10-20 years surpass it as #1 in Economic power (already the case) and Technology .

There are few viable military options for warmongering chickenhawks advising Trump. Certainly, US Naval Intel and PACCOM (now INDOPACCOM) brass who would love a grand Coral Sea 2.0 battle to destroy PLAN vessel on the seas. However, no one, except few Marine 4 stars want any land war. The Marines think they can defeat the PLA on some islands. That kind of warfare is for hollywood movies. China is a missile-based military deploying hypersonics. This means the US Navy has to standoff 1000 km from the Chinese naval forces or missiles from mainland will decimate the carrier task forces within that range.

There won't be any war in SE Asia or East Asia. This area now has a circuit breaker, Russia. Russia is building a naval presence, expanding it's aerospace arm, has basing rights in the zone in Vietnam and has long range radars that cover a lot of the zones, and submarines the US is having issues tracking.

The signals from China and Russia to the US military is very clear. You can walk and talk like the Hegemon but the days of regional hegemony are over. ASEAN nations will not accepting accept a return to gunboat diplomacy and colonization. All these nations want prosperity and progress, not western hegemony and military destruction.

This is why the hybrid war of sanctions, trade war, Infowars, cyberwar, proxies in Central Asia (ISIS and AQ), color revolution attempts in Hong Kong, hysterics about Tibet and Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia (Bannon front) are on the front burner. Military action is a losing proposition for the US. They simply cannot win anything anywhere in the Asia Pacific, western Asia or even against near peer powers proxies like Venezuela.

China simply has to do what Russia does and tell the US to pound sand.

Posted by: Horatio 05 August 2020 at 04:51 PM

entrybody comment-odd comment-has-avatar">

Bjorn H

... BTW, "J" is a farmer in Oklahoma who served a long time in USAF.

Posted by: turcopolier , 05 August 2020 at 05:04 PM

Bjorn H

... BTW, "J" is a farmer in Oklahoma who served a long time in USAF.

Posted by: turcopolier 05 August 2020 at 05:04 PM

entrybody comment-even comment-has-avatar">

We've been in a war with China for a few decades now, and losing. Of course having moved much of our manufacturing base into China and then allowing their students to take up most of the hard engineering class space and lab assistantships while diverting our students to 'studies' programs has been a resounding success.

Horatio,

"There are few viable military options for warmongering chickenhawks advising..." Bush, Obama, Biden, a Triumverate of peacemakers. Remind me who is ordering troops out of Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria.

Posted by: Fred , 05 August 2020 at 05:05 PM

We've been in a war with China for a few decades now, and losing. Of course having moved much of our manufacturing base into China and then allowing their students to take up most of the hard engineering class space and lab assistantships while diverting our students to 'studies' programs has been a resounding success.

Horatio,

"There are few viable military options for warmongering chickenhawks advising..." Bush, Obama, Biden, a Triumverate of peacemakers. Remind me who is ordering troops out of Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria.

Posted by: Fred 05 August 2020 at 05:05 PM

entrybody comment-odd comment-has-avatar">

The rattling. of sabres between the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the U.S.

That line as introduction gives away the article as plain and unsofisticated propaganda. Nobody refers to the USA as the Republican Party, the red scare is a momified bogey..

Posted by: Paco , 05 August 2020 at 05:28 PM

The rattling. of sabres between the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the U.S.

That line as introduction gives away the article as plain and unsofisticated propaganda. Nobody refers to the USA as the Republican Party, the red scare is a momified bogey..

Posted by: Paco 05 August 2020 at 05:28 PM

[Aug 05, 2020] Democratic Party Boosters Have Little to Offer by Philip Giraldi

Aug 05, 2020 | www.unz.com

Hillary is a co-founder of Onward Together , a Democratic Party front group that is affiliated to other activist organizations. In a recent e-mail she played the race card in a bid to solidify the black vote behind the Democratic Party, writing "Friend, George Floyd's life mattered. Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor's lives mattered. Black lives matter. Against a backdrop of a pandemic that has disproportionately ravaged communities of color, we are being painfully reminded right now that we are long overdue for honest reckoning and meaningful action to dismantle systemic racism."

It is, of course, a not-so-subtle bid to buy votes using the currently popular code words "systemic racism" as a pledge that the Democrats will take steps to materially benefit blacks if the party wins the White House and a majority in the Senate. She ends her e-mail with an odd commitment, "I promise to keep fighting alongside all of you to make the United States a place where all men and all women are treated as equals, just as we are and just as we deserve to be." The comment is odd because she is on one hand promising to promote the interests of one group based on skin color while also stating that everyone should be "treated as equals." Someone should tip her off to the fact that employment and educational racial preferences and reparations are not the hallmarks of a government that treats everyone the same.

But if one really wants to dig into the depths of the Democratic Party soul, or lack thereof, there is no one who is better than former U.N. Ambassador and Secretary of State under Bill Clinton, the estimable Madeleine Albright. She too has written an e-mail that recently went out to Democratic Party supporters, saying:

"I'm deeply concerned. Donald Trump poses an existential threat to our standing in the world and continues to threaten the decades of diplomatic progress we had made. It is easy to forget from the comfort of our homes that for many people, America is a beacon of hope and opportunity. We're known as a country that keeps our promises and upholds justice and democracy, and that didn't just happen overnight. We've spent decades building our nation's reputation on the world stage through careful, strategic diplomacy -- but in just under four years, Trump has done unspeakable damage to those relationships and has insulted even our closest allies."

Albright, who is perhaps most famous for having stated that she thought that the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children due to U.S. imposed sanctions was "worth it," is living in a fantasy bubble that many politicians and high government officials seem to inhabit. She embraces the America the "Essential Nation" concept because it makes her and her former boss Bill Clinton look like great statesmen. She once enthused nonsensically that "If we have to use force, it is because we are America; we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future, and we see the danger here to all of us."

Madeleine Albright's view that "America is a beacon of hope and opportunity known as a country that keeps our promises and upholds justice and democracy" is also, of course, completely delusional, as opinion polls regularly indicate that nearly the entire world considers the U.S. to be extremely dangerous and virtually a rogue state in its blind pursuit of narrow self-interest combined with an unwillingness to uphold international law. And that has been true under both Democratic and Republican recent presidents, including Clinton. It is not just Trump.

Albright is clearly on a roll and has also submitted to a New York Times interview , further enlightening that paper's readership on why the Trump administration is failing in its job of protecting the American people. The questions and answers are singularly, perhaps deliberately, unexciting and are largely focused on coronavirus and the new world order that it is shaping. Albright faults Trump for not promoting an international effort to defeat the virus, which is perhaps a bridge too far for most Americans who are not even very receptive to a nationally mandated pandemic response, let alone one requiring cooperation with "foreigners."

Albright's persistence as a go-to media "expert" on international relations is befuddling given her own history as an integral part of the inept foreign policy promoted by the Clinton Administration. She and Bill Clinton became cheerleaders for an unnecessary Balkan war that still resonates and were responsible for what was possibly the greatest foreign policy blunder (with the possible exception of the Iraq War) since the Second World War. That consisted of ignoring the commitment to post-Soviet Russia to not take advantage of the 1991 end of Communism by expanding U.S. or NATO military presence into Eastern Europe. Clinton/Albright reneged on that understanding and opened the door for many of the former Soviet allied states to enter NATO, thereby introducing a hostile military presence right up to Russia's border.

Simultaneously, the U.S. enabled the election as Russian president of the hapless drunk Boris Yeltsin, who, guided by advisers sent by the White House, oversaw the western looting of his country's natural resources. The bad decision-making under the Clintons led inevitably to the rise of Vladimir Putin as a corrective, which, exacerbated by Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State and a maladroit Donald Trump, has in turn produced the poisoned bilateral relationship between Washington and Moscow that currently prevails.

So, one might reasonably suggest to Joe Biden that if he really wants to get elected in November it would be a good idea to keep the Clintons, Albright and maybe even Obama carefully hidden away somewhere. Albright's interview characteristically concludes with her plan for an "Avengers style dream team" to "fix the world right now." She said that "Well, it certainly would be a female team. Without naming names, I would really try to look for women who are in office, both in the executive and legislative branch. I would try to have a female C.E.O., but also somebody who heads up a nongovernmental organization. You don't want everybody that's exactly the same. Oh, and I'm about to do a program for the National Democratic Institute with Angelina Jolie, and she made the most amazing movie about what was going on in Bosnia, so I would want her on my team."

No men allowed and a Hollywood actress who is regarded as somewhat odd? Right.

Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is <a://councilforthenationalinterest.org%2C/" title="https://councilforthenationalinterest.org%2C/" href="https://councilforthenationalinterest.org%2C/">https://councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is <a:[email protected]" title="mailto:[email protected]" href="mailto:[email protected]">[email protected].

Priss Factor , says: Website August 4, 2020 at 4:05 am GMT

Elites are afraid that vulgar Trump will give THE GAME away.

Elites like to speak softly and use a big stick.

Be imperialist with 'liberal democratic' face.

Trump shows the obnoxious face of US power.

Carlton Meyer , says: Website August 4, 2020 at 4:14 am GMT

Hillary and Barack were also complicit in unnecessary wars against Libya and Syria that have devastated both countries.

Most Americans remain unaware of their destruction of Libya, Africa's most prosperous nation, which claimed 40,000 black lives. Thousands more were killed as they destroyed Somalia and Sudan as part of the neocon plan from the Bush era to destroy "seven countries in five years" as General Wesley Clark told the world. Thousands more died as they attempted to destroy Syria. Here is a short summary of their destruction of Libya:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/n5Lh4HUyudk?feature=oembed

Majority of One , says: August 4, 2020 at 4:33 am GMT

Take a close look at the visage of Mad Albright. What do you see beyond the simple ravages of the aging process on a life misspent? Check out those eyes, unmasked by the rouge. Take a close look. What do you see? Can you discern the sociopathic evidence, the haunting by the scores of thousands of Iraqi children who starved to death under the tender mercies of United $tates of America Corporation's foreign policy on behalf of the agenda of the elite crime clans of highest international finance.

Maddie is a minion, a minion for genocide and for a total lack of elementary human empathy. She is an ambulatory exemplar of Kali Yuga, the age of devolution, which in polar opposition to the Celestial Kingdom which reigned in China as recently as the Ming Dynasty. During that era where administrative positions were based as much as possible on merit, the contrast is vivid versus the current reality in our ruptured republic where instead of the cream, the scum rises to the top.

Derer , says: August 4, 2020 at 4:55 am GMT

Remove that pic of know nothing old owl from this site – some children might see it!

We need updates on Biden's mega corruption in Ukraine investigation. Trump was impeached for talking to Ukraine president about Biden's corruption and that lifetime taxpayers leech is Democrats front runner for the highest office – pathetic.

Ahoy , says: August 4, 2020 at 5:22 am GMT

During the days of her power and glory (Yeltsin years) Albright had made nine maps of the countries that would be created by the dissolution of Russia. Somebody walked in the poker game room and said "Let's play a different game". Enter the Putin era.

The democrats are just snake skins laying on the asphalt. The new sheriff in town (Syria, Libya) is laying out a different plan. Good by NWO , halo multipolar world.

Joe Levantine , says: August 4, 2020 at 5:54 am GMT

Trump declared on many occasions " we are there because we want the oil"; crude? Yes but honest at least. For those who prefer smooth talkers like the Clintons and the Obamas, I state that the legacy of those two administrations has done more harm to the foreign perception of US power In the Middle East and Eastern Europe than any vulgar language pronounced by Trump who, so far, can be credited with not having started any foreign wars.

At least Trump tried to withdraw American troops from Syria only to be kept in check by the reality of the American Deep state power structure. Had he succeeded in his endeavour, US Russia relations would have better than they are today.

Yukon Jack , says: August 4, 2020 at 6:06 am GMT

Three months to the election and what is on the main menu? Two old white men, neither fit to serve the office of the Presidency. The nation is a tired old whore, spent from all those wars for Zion, and it seems to me the crazy cat lady from the Simpsons is better than Trump or Biden. Both candidates are loony tune, both are completely unacceptable. We are looking at Weimar in the mirror. The nation has run it's course, the Republic is dead.

(Weimar Germany, of course, collapsed. Weimar is also the prelude democratic state before the rise of the authoritarian state. All those who thought Trump was a new Hitler are fools, Trump is the slavish whore of the Jews, not the opposing force, not the charismatic leader who restores sanity to the nation wrecked by Jews. What Trump is, is the final wrecking ball, not the savior.)

Gone are the glory days of imperial dreams, Amerika is not longer fit to wage another big war in the Middle East for Israel. So what is Bibi to do, Israel is in corona crazy lockdown, and his influence on Amerikan politics seems to me slipping badly. How much longer will AIPAC be allowed to influence our politicians if we go into a hyper deflationary crash? It seems to me the Greater Israel project is about to get the rug pulled out, because if the USA crashes and burns no one will tolerate one more cent going to that god forsaken shithole.

Franz , says: August 4, 2020 at 7:08 am GMT

Albright is clearly on a roll

Most people thought she was dead. I sure did.

"If we have to use force, it is because we are America; we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future, and we see the danger here to all of us."

Whom the gods would destroy they first make Madeleine.

vot tak , says: August 4, 2020 at 8:59 am GMT

The main difference between the reps and dems is their party names. Both represent the same oligarch interests. Most of the dem objections to trump are psywar manipulations for public consumption, not serious policy differences. Pretty much all fluff. The reps also do the same about influencial dems, they endlessly talk nonsense about inconsequential things about them.

The drama queenery is to manipulate the public into thinking their votes for either party actually matter in some way. As of late, that psywar has been failing since most people don't see much difference between the two and believe both parties don't represent them and are lying scum. Trying to neutralize this view by the people is part of the reason the psywar critters have ramped up the hysterics.

Really No Shit , says: August 4, 2020 at 11:32 am GMT

Barack's mother, Madeleine's father and Chelsea's husband all have one thing in common and that something is without which sleepy Joe can't be elected so the author's advice to keep Obamas, Clintons and Albright at bay is moot at best!

chuckywiz , says: August 4, 2020 at 12:06 pm GMT

Her statement about Iraqi children should not come as a surprise to any. She was is from that part of Europe which is famous for being racist.

I came across with an interesting story during Balkan "peace" negotiations in a Paris in 90s. The Bosnian and Serbian delegates were negotiating in Paris hotel where American delegate was staying. One time, at 4 O'clock in the morning out curiosity sMadeline went and knocked on the negotiators door. One of them opened the door and failed to recognize her and thought her to be the cleaning lady. Told her to come back later.
That role suits her perfectly.

ThreeCranes , says: August 4, 2020 at 12:13 pm GMT

I would rather live in a State headed up by Vladimir Putin and his cronies than in one led by Albright and hers.

Albright puts us, we gentiles, in the same basket as those 500,000 Iraqi children; contemptible nothings, dismissed with a backwards wave of the hand.

Putin, at least, would recognize and honor our common European ancestry and heritage .

BL , says: August 4, 2020 at 1:08 pm GMT

Set everything else aside and consider the relationship of each POTUS to the sovereign.

The terminology I use is that they fall somewhere on the spectrum from figurehead to real POTUS.

Obama and Trump are opposites in this respect. Obama took office having gifted the national security state a globally appealing front-man. While he had campaigned and started his presidency looking like he wanted to use his power to move the needle in the right direction, he was quickly snapped like a butter bean, retreating into the presidential safe space offered, at least up until that point, to a POTUS that accepted the constrained role to which the American presidency had been consigned in the modern era.

There were signs almost immediately with Obama. After decisively winning election and becoming our first black president, he was house-trained early on over a single comment defending his Harvard professor friend after a silly arrest.

Does anyone other than me even remember this incident? Or how it completely emasculated the new POTUS, with him retreating behind a teleprompter for everything other than occasional unscripted remarks that, if unwittingly notable or problematic, were quickly corrected by some handler.

Now consider Trump. Both as candidate and POTUS he's Obama's opposite. Where Obama had the establishment wind at his back, writ large those same forces tried to destroy Trump's candidacy and presidency.

Rather than belabor any particulars I'll just note that the psychological driver for the ruling and governing classes, regardless of their ideological and programmatic preferences, is boundless resentment toward him.

After all, it isn't an overstatement to note that more than any other president, Trump got there on his own, with a near complete array of establishment forces, domestic and foreign, against him, including his own party.

Who would have thought such a thing possible before Trump did it?

Little has changed since 2016. We're in our current moment because destroying Trump remains as close to a dues ex machina as any of us have or will see in our lifetimes. There are real, monumental interests at stake but when you get right down to it most personalities in the ruling and governing classes -- who to a one grew up with mama telling them they should be POTUS someday, need him gone so they can go back to feeling better about themselves.

A123 , says: August 4, 2020 at 1:31 pm GMT
@RoatanBill pointees he has to placate some truly awful people, such as Mitt Romney. Some personnel selections that appear to be made by the President are actually part of package deals where key Senators get to pick their names. That is why certain parts of the administration are out of touch with Trump's agenda.

Trump has been 100% successful preventing NeoConDemocrats from starting new wars. Unwinding the messes he inherited from prior administrations is much more complicated.

Hopefully Trump's now inevitable second term will include a friendlier Senate. That will help him get more done than his first term which was impeded by the ObamaGate deception.

RoatanBill , says: August 4, 2020 at 1:59 pm GMT
@A123 Is that true or isn't it? Yes or no?

I don't care about all the political backstabbing and massaging. If he had any balls he'd use the same New York English I grew up with and tell the entire Congress, the Supreme Court and the intel agencies to go F themselves and do so on national TV. The silent majority in the country would back up his play.

But he doesn't do that because he's a bought and paid for politico just like the rest of them. The deep state probably has dirt on him like everyone else in the District of Criminals and they tell him how to behave. He backs off and allows more deaths to occur to save his sorry ass from some exposure.

A123 , says: August 4, 2020 at 2:34 pm GMT
@RoatanBill asking the wrong question . Let me Fix That For You.

As Impeachment Jury, the Senate has final say on whether Trump stays in office.

Is that true or isn't it? Yes or no?

Are you leading a movement to:
-- Jettison the Constitution
-- Dissolve Congress and the Supreme Court
-- Proclaim Trump as God Emperor of the Golden Throne
When you finish this task, I will back your position that Trump can act unilaterally with regard to foreign troop deployments.

Until then, I strongly recommend a more realistic and nuanced view on what a President can accomplish.

anonymous [400] Disclaimer , says: August 4, 2020 at 2:41 pm GMT

complicit in unnecessary wars against Libya and Syria

That's putting it in polite terms. In reality it's massive war criminality, wars of aggression that killed, maimed and uprooted millions of people in other countries. Not that it caused as much of a stir domestically as the death of Floyd but there you have it, the order of priorities of the American people and their supposed leaders. During the Vietnam war a common chant was "Hey hey, LBJ, how many kids you kill today?". This is true for the Clintons, Obama, Albright and all the rest of them yet somehow they still have their fans. They're past their expiration dates yet are still kicking around since the Dem party is sclerotic with no new blood, no new ideas, just the same old parasites. Their presidential candidate is way past retirement age and has been obviously faltering in public. This is their champion, a lifelong mediocrity who is entering senility? US no longer has any wind in its sails.

EliteCommInc. , says: August 4, 2020 at 2:47 pm GMT

O think out move in the Balkans was essentially correct. Even Russia scolded their allies for their behavior as over the top in brutality. If Russia your closest ally says you are over the top -- then there's a good chance the genocide claim has merit.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- –

But I see no reason for Dr. Giraldo to be tepid here. somalia is the a complete embarssment. The admin took a feed and water operation and turned into a "warloard" hunt without any clue began interfering into the internal affairs of a complex former colonized region left bankrupt to reconfigure itself and began a failed bid to set aright -- ohhh that should sound familiar.

1. They turned a mess into a "warlord" victory for the leader they thought most dangerous(and I hate that word and its connotations -- a civil conflict) and then to top it off

2. ran away with their tail between their legs -- it was in my mind the second sign of US vulnerability to asymmetric warefare

counter balance that against not intervening in the genocide in Africa's Rwanda. The deep level hypocrisy here or complete bankrupt moral efficacy -- intervening in Bosnia-Herzegovina but completely ignoring the a worse case in Africa.

All of which occurred under the foreign policy headship of Mrs Albright. Ahhh they are women hear them roar . . . Let's get it straight.

Women wanted us in

Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Syria, Ukraine, Libya, they want to intervene . . . in the name of humanity for any host of issues, in a bid to appear tough they will on occasion say the incedulous -- but the bottom lie

female leadership has demonstrated to be no more effective, astute, or beneficial than that of the men.

And allow me to get this out of the way before it starts though start it will,

In fact, it appears that not even white skin is not road to effective political leadership or governance as all of the key players have been predominately and by that I mean near all white. But here the test cases about femininity alone being a key qualifier just does not pan out. And no personal offense Dr. Giraldi neither is an elite education.

RoatanBill , says: August 4, 2020 at 2:52 pm GMT
@A123 ght as the dollar keeps declining in importance and the whole world is sick of the sanctions and bullying.

So, Yes, I'm in favor of ending the Constitution as it has shown to be a useless piece of paper except to deceive those that think it's worth something. Yes, I'm in favor of getting rid of the criminals in DC including the asshat president, all of congress and the absolutely useless supreme court. I'm in favor of 50 new countries once the empire expires offering 50 experiments on how to govern and let the best idea win.

Your more nuanced approach is exactly what Trump is doing – exactly nothing. He's the most do nothing president in decades.

W. Baker , says: August 4, 2020 at 2:56 pm GMT
@Franz

"Whom the gods would destroy they first make Madeleine." Is it okay, if I steal that derivative quotation of Longfellow?

Brilliant!

Jus' Sayin'... , says: August 4, 2020 at 3:03 pm GMT
@Carlton Meyer

If a primary principle, supposedly justifying the Nuremburg Trials, that initiating wars of aggression is a criminal act against humanity, then the Clintons, Bush II, Albright, essentially all the USA's senior foreign policy and military bureaucrats over the last thirty years, and all the Zionist/neocons urging them on and aiding and abetting their criminal acts, would end their lives in Spandau Prison or dangling at the end of a rope.

Jus' Sayin'... , says: August 4, 2020 at 3:32 pm GMT
@A123 ons">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Government_Policy_and_Supporting_Positions

In the following years I've been shocked again and again to observe Trump's ignorance of government and politics and, even more disturbing, his apparent unwillingness to recover and learn from his mistakes. I'm not sure whether this is due to stupidity, laziness, or sociopathic levels of grandiosity. Whatever the cause, the result has been an inability on the part of Trump to fill many campaign promises. (A less sympathetic interpretation of events might be that Trump's campaign promises were deliberate lies.)

Taras77 , says: August 4, 2020 at 4:26 pm GMT
@Majority of One

The woman is a psychopathic monster!

RoatanBill , says: August 4, 2020 at 4:29 pm GMT
@A123 ng out of the country. The Chinese were eager to comply to get access to the processes involved. The Chinese didn't have to steal anything, as the US corporations voluntarily gave them the tech as part of the deal to be in China. The reason to move out of the US is due to the high labor rate and regulations costs. Those costs are high because the Fed Gov that you apparently like is sucking the life out of the population with high taxes, an oversize and out of control military and intelligence services, a financial sector that repeatedly rapes the country and gets away with it, etc, etc, etc.

Keep voting. It shows you're well programmed.

BL , says: August 4, 2020 at 4:30 pm GMT
@A123 a rel="nofollow" href="https://energyeducation.ca/encyclopedia/Law_of_conservation_of_energy"> https://energyeducation.ca/encyclopedia/Law_of_conservation_of_energy

In other words, the Democrats and their Allied Media's malefactions against Trump forestalled them suffering what Republicans did post-Watergate in the House and Senate midterms in 1974, but all of that negative energy didn't go away.

Either they will get their comeuppance in 2020, or it will remain and grow, biting them in ass soon enough.

We Americans are kinda attached to our constitutional republic thingie, including our right to choose the POTUS.

Taras77 , says: August 4, 2020 at 4:38 pm GMT

It really is stunning that the dimo crats have learned nothing from their decades of disaster after disaster after disaster!

From regime change to financial debacles to the looting of the break up of the Soviet Union: the cretins are now once again being trotted out as part of the biden farcial "campaign."

A case in point is the odious Larry Summers: This article goes far in summarizing this pending disaster with the prominent placement of summers:

https://wallstreetonparade.com/2020/08/memo-to-biden-cut-your-ties-to-larry-summers/

Majority of One , says: August 4, 2020 at 4:52 pm GMT
@Joe Levantine could be behind the lines calling the shots) and the other, representing the Marianas Trench of the Deep $tate (CIA) and also the Rushdoony loonies of the Dispensationalist "Great Rupture" Christian-Zionist ambulatory oxymorons are THEIR reeking heinies.

Trump is merely a girlie-lusting ram compared with those two prowling lobos, sporting images of blood in their eyes and hatred in their hearts. Suburban soccer-moms detest the Dumpster, mainly because he exacerbates their emotional radar-screens. They totally overlook the deep danger lurking beneath the surface in the likes of Bolton and Pomposity, because they are adroit at masking their totally psychopathic sociopathy.

Curmudgeon , says: August 4, 2020 at 5:09 pm GMT

No men allowed and a Hollywood actress who is regarded as somewhat odd? Right.

Almost 40 years ago my late aunt (in her mid 70s) opined that more women leaders were needed to stop all of the wars. I asked her if she thought Golda Meir, Sirimavo Bandaranaike, and Margaret Thatcher were really women, and if so, how were they any different than the men?

ChuckOrloski , says: August 4, 2020 at 5:13 pm GMT

Dear Friends,

In a Foreword to Christopher Bollyn's book, "The War on Terror; The Plot to Rule the Middle East," USMC vet, Alan Sabrosky wrote:
"The book provides a way for even informed readers to better appreciate the origins, evolution, and extent to which Israel has driven a process by which the United States and other countries have systematically destroyed Israel's enemies, at no cost to itself. As we have torn up or assailed a long list of countries -- only Iran has not yet been openly attacked."

A less known fact is how the US is undergoing systematic Israel attack, and I suggest that the best outcome is our being "Balkanized," as described by vagabond, Linh Dinh, who now describes the resilient life in Serbia.

The Process continues even if Trumpstein does or does not consent to leave the Blue & White House.
Thank you, Friends.

Franz , says: August 4, 2020 at 5:15 pm GMT
@W. Baker 90s.

The Cato article in May on her "new book" gives her the right treatment. Even if you are a long way from libertarian, well worth a read. The first paragraph:

"Madeleine Albright is back with a new book to sell. Interviewed in by the New York Times magazine, she reminds us how she continues to live in the past. Unfortunately, that's what made her advice as UN ambassador and secretary of state so uniformly bad."

https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/madeleine-albright-back-she-still-living-past

Majority of One , says: August 4, 2020 at 5:25 pm GMT
@BL culate faceman which the shotcallers running the Deep $tate tend to prefer as their podium images.

The failure of the Wicked Witch of the West to achieve her 2017 coronation was a total shock to the system for the DNC, FBI, CIA, Chew Pork Slymes and other major institutional minions for the ruling plutocratic oligarchy. Even before Trump's Inauguration, they set out to destroy his presidency. After all, it had been decreed from on high that our ruptured republic would be blessed by our first female (more or less) chief executive and that she would be totally on-message and not some small (d) Democrat the likes of Tulsi Gabbard–an irrepressible anti-imperialist.

Alden , says: August 4, 2020 at 5:42 pm GMT
@A123

Great post, absolutely right.

President issues executive order at 4 PM. Liberals electronically file for a court order at 5 PM. 8AM next day some judge, county, state or federal, issues an injunction forbidding carrying out the executive order. The executive order is tied up in the courts for months.

Last President to successfully defy the courts was Lincoln. The judiciary overturns laws passed by legislators and referendums. The judiciary's orders create new laws.

That's the system

Rurik , says: August 4, 2020 at 6:28 pm GMT
@Ray Caruso who looks cross eyed at terrorist states Israel or Saudi Arabia , it takes some pretty rancid balls to call those defending their nations from an illegal aggressor, 'terrorists'.

What, if not massive and collective terror, is the murder by drone of villagers and leaders? When their children look at the sky, they don't see wonder and beauty, but terror of an arbitrary death.

The only thing we Americans should be feeling these days, is an excruciating shame for the mass-murder and nation destructions our government has perpetrated in our name.

'The exceptional people'. If only we understood just how true that is.

anon [216] Disclaimer , says: August 4, 2020 at 8:26 pm GMT

Dr. Phil is sound on this issue. Democrat nomenklatura must impute some cultic authority to the quivering rhytides of their living-dead mummies.

A gerontocracy is the appropriate government for this degenerate state. The interview excerpt is priceless with Albright's senile brain fart: "let's hire Angelina Jolie, she made an amazing movie!" about how those crispies fucked the Balkans up for shits & grins. You can just see her masticating bon-bons in her slow-motion catapult chair, watching the genocide she caused like it's Star Wars, feeling transient stirrings in her crepey loins at the more romantic rape scenes. Just give that rank old downer cow the bolt gun.

One cavil on the rhetorical devices of the piece: even in jest it makes no sense to suggest ideas to Vegetable-in-Chief Joe Biden. CIA is going to hook him up to a teleprompter or some brain electrodes or whatever and make him talk and nod and gesture like audio-animatronic Lincoln at Disneyland. He's gonna say we have to blow shit up. And MBNA needs privatized debtors' prisons. It's pointless to offer friendly advice to the captive parties of this failed state. It's like telling NAMBLA they should fuck adults. Wipe out this roach motel of a party. The Greens have signed on to BAP's demilitarization pledge. Or write in your Grammy's moldering corpse. Or that big wet floater dump you took this morning. Fuck the USA and its fake democracy.

turtle , says: August 4, 2020 at 8:33 pm GMT
@A123

Trump's now inevitable second term

Dream about a world so fine,
Sweet as apple-berry wine.
Dream on .

Timur The Lame , says: August 4, 2020 at 8:34 pm GMT

OK, now to be serious. This article and most of the responses to it thus far, however erudite and with good intention seem to have fallen into a trap before they realized it was a trap namely that everything depends on the result of Dems vs Repubs version 2020. Will Mr. Giraldi write an article to show how it makes even in the slightest way a difference who is the President at this late stage ( or any stage) of decay in the US? I know he knows better to especially on this site. So has he really shed his roots?

I have recently entered into cash bets with almost all of my friends of all dispositions and mental acuity on the prospect of Trump being re-elected. They think that I am crazy. I may be but not on this topic. They are all infected with a mental disease called "normiesm". It is immensely frustrating for me to put any kind of 'out of the box' thinking into conversations regarding Trump because they react like women going through hormonal flushes. All verbal reactions seemingly in lockstep.

So with the monetary challenges shoved in their faces they all seemed to pause briefly to wonder if it was decent to take money from a fool such as I. After a few profanities and insults as to their inter-cranial pressure from me they gladly accepted to a one and some doubled down.

Taking their money, as I will, is the only way that they can be brought to bear to hear me out about my logic. Funny, but it always seems to come down to money.

Now lookie here. What have we had since the Trump inauguration? Four years of 24/7/365 vilification, right versus left, grabbing P ***** , Putin, Stormy Daniels, impeachment (a 24 hour respite when he sent 77 missiles into Syria) and then back to 24/7 of Trump foibles.

Do you see what is/was happening? TDS was the precursor of Covid. And like a charm it worked and still works. Divide and conquer, bread and circuses rolled onto one tasty bagel. Look around you. Would you recognize main-street 4 months ago? I would not. Why would the PTB want to remove Trump? He is a major cog in their satanic wheel whether he knows it or not.

So with the powerful combination of TDS, COVID, BLM and antifa backed by MSM effectively scaring the normies from even uttering a peep , I would say that things are going swimmingly in some power's interests.

Mr Giraldi, "New Dummies, Same Ventriloquist" should be your next article for the sake of your own credibility not digging up another corpse (living or not) like that of of Madeleine Halfbright.

Cheers-

A123 , says: August 4, 2020 at 8:35 pm GMT
@RoatanBill

You're a hopium addict,

Your use of the ad hominem 'hopium addict' slur shows your frustration. You can't come up with an actual retort, so you lash out.

I notice that you intentionally came out against me personally, because you are unable to defeat my ideas. Your sad & pathetic attempt to paint you submission to Biden as a virtue has failed. And, your personal attacks are simply shameless.

PEACE

turtle , says: August 4, 2020 at 8:43 pm GMT
@Anonymous

starving and incinerating 500,000 or so Iraqi children.

No word on what she might have thought had she heard of the demise of 5000 (1% of 500,000) Jewish children.
But I'll bet I can guess

Majority of One , says: August 4, 2020 at 10:03 pm GMT
@Alden ferson's administration. But as Leo the Lip Durocher insisted, "nice guys finish last."

Jefferson should have had his fellow Virginian arrested and imprisoned for overstepping his constitutional powers. Didn't happen. Marshall (the darling of the Kavanaugh-cloned Federalist Society of statist lawyers) had set a bad precedent, much to the dismay of the president and all freedom-loving elements of WE THE PEOPLE. The very root concept of small (r) republicanism, that of popular sovereignty ,was promptly derailed by that closet monarchist.

Well, at least his fellow Federalist (and London bankster tool) Alexander Hamilton got his just desserts.

Hegar , says: August 4, 2020 at 10:52 pm GMT

Simultaneously, the U.S. enabled the election as Russian president of the hapless drunk Boris Yeltsin, who, guided by advisers sent by the White House, oversaw the western looting of his country's natural resources.

False. But Giraldi knows most readers won't know the truth. It wasn't "western looting," it was looting by a group inside Russia, "the oligarchs". Eight out of the twelve were Jews, among them the top oligarch, Berezovsky.

Philip Giraldi also doesn't mention that Madeleine Albright is a Jew. It's as if her lust for war springs from being pro-American to a fault. Right? Except it's all about destroying Israel's targets, the few Middle Eastern and Central Asian nations that support the Palestinians. And Russia, for giving some support to pro-Palestinian Iran and Syria. The Israeli Lobby always gets what it wants.

Both in Russia and in the Middle East it's about race, not "the West". Of course, ask a communist like "Eric Striker" who writes for Unz Review, and he'll do everything he can to make you believe it's "the Right," "capitalists," "the West" who are behind it all, while conveniently forgetting the Left's domination of media, universities and politics. The lies flow freely.

snag , says: August 5, 2020 at 2:40 am GMT

Bi*ch had the audacity to visit that place and show her face to these people.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/uDfsAxvIMyc?feature=oembed

anon [161] Disclaimer , says: August 5, 2020 at 2:40 am GMT
@ChuckOrloski

'Steal of the Century' (Part 2), filmed in occupied #Palestine is now out! (The first part is being censored on Youtube.) Find out what Donald Trump's plan has paved the way for and what's happening right now in Palestine. •Premiered Aug 2, 2020

'Steal Of The Century': Trump's Palestine-Israel Catastrophe (Documentary) | Episode 2/2

https://www.youtube.com/embed/o3OqReiTpXI?feature=oembed

[Aug 04, 2020] Russia never saw Trump as a potential ally or friend by The Saker

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Furthermore, it is pretty obvious to the Russians that while Crimea and MH17 were the pretexts for western sanctions against Russia, they were not the real cause. The real cause of the West's hatred for Russia is as simple as it is old: Russia cannot be conquered, subdued, subverted or destroyed. They've been at it for close to 1,000 years and they still are at it. In fact, each time they fail to crush Russia, their russophobia increases to even higher levels (phobia both in the sense of "fear" and in the sense of "hatred"). ..."
"... I would argue that since at least Russia and the AngloZionist Empire have been at war since at least 2013, when Russia foiled the US plan to attack Syria under the pretext that it was "highly likely" that the Syrian government had used chemical weapons against civilians (in reality, a textbook case of a false flag organized by the Brits), This means that Russia and the Empire have been at [Cold] war since at least 2013, for no less than seven years (something which Russian 6th columnists and Neo-Marxists try very hard to ignore). ..."
"... True, at least until now, this was has been 80% informational, 15% economic and only 5% kinetic, but this is a real existential war of survival for both sides: only one side will walk away from this struggle. The other one will simply disappear (not as a nation or a people, but as a polity; a regime). The Kremlin fully understood that and it embarked on a huge reform and modernization of the Russian armed forces in three distinct ways: ..."
"... While some US politicians understood what was going on (I think of Ron Paul, see here ), most did not. They were so brainwashed by the US propaganda that they were sure that no matter what, "USA! USA! USA!". Alas for them, the reality was quite different. ..."
Aug 04, 2020 | www.unz.com

Truth be told, most Russian politicians (with the notable exception of the official Kremlin court jester, Zhirinovskii) and analysts never saw Trump as a potential ally or friend. The Kremlin was especially cautious, which leads me to believe that the Russian intelligence analysts did a very good job evaluating Trump's psyche and they quickly figured out that he was no better than any other US politician.

Right now, I know of no Russian analyst who would predict that relations between the US and Russia will improve in the foreseeable future. If anything, most are clearly saying that "guys, we better get used to this" (accusations, sanctions, accusations, sanctions, etc. etc. etc.).

Furthermore, it is pretty obvious to the Russians that while Crimea and MH17 were the pretexts for western sanctions against Russia, they were not the real cause. The real cause of the West's hatred for Russia is as simple as it is old: Russia cannot be conquered, subdued, subverted or destroyed. They've been at it for close to 1,000 years and they still are at it. In fact, each time they fail to crush Russia, their russophobia increases to even higher levels (phobia both in the sense of "fear" and in the sense of "hatred").

Simply put -- there is nothing which Russia can expect from the upcoming election. Nothing at all. Still, that does not mean that things are not better than 4 or 8 years ago. Let's look at what changed.

I would argue that since at least Russia and the AngloZionist Empire have been at war since at least 2013, when Russia foiled the US plan to attack Syria under the pretext that it was "highly likely" that the Syrian government had used chemical weapons against civilians (in reality, a textbook case of a false flag organized by the Brits), This means that Russia and the Empire have been at [Cold] war since at least 2013, for no less than seven years (something which Russian 6th columnists and Neo-Marxists try very hard to ignore).

True, at least until now, this was has been 80% informational, 15% economic and only 5% kinetic, but this is a real existential war of survival for both sides: only one side will walk away from this struggle. The other one will simply disappear (not as a nation or a people, but as a polity; a regime). The Kremlin fully understood that and it embarked on a huge reform and modernization of the Russian armed forces in three distinct ways:

A "general" reform of the Russian armed forces which had to be modernized by about 80%. This part of the reform is now practically complete. A specific reform to prepare the western and southern military districts for a major conventional war against the united West (as always in Russian history) which would involve the First Guards Tank Army and the Russian Airborne Forces. The development of bleeding-edge weapons systems with no equivalent in the West and which cannot be countered or defeated; these weapons have had an especially dramatic impact upon First Strike Stability and upon naval operations.

While some US politicians understood what was going on (I think of Ron Paul, see here ), most did not. They were so brainwashed by the US propaganda that they were sure that no matter what, "USA! USA! USA!". Alas for them, the reality was quite different.

Russian officials, by the way, have confirmed that Russia was preparing for war . Heck, the reforms were so profound and far reaching, that it would have been impossible for the Russians to hide what they were doing (see here for details; also please see Andrei Martyanov's excellent primer on the new Russian Navy here ).

While no country is ever truly prepared for war, I would argue that by 2020 the Russians had reached their goals and that now Russia is fully prepared to handle any conflict the West might throw at her, ranging from a small border incident somewhere in Central Asia to a full-scaled war against the US/NATO in Europe .

Folks in the West are now slowly waking up to this new reality (I mentioned some of that here ), but it is too late. In purely military terms, Russia has now created such a qualitative gap with the West that the still existing quantitative gap is not sufficient to guarantee a US/NATO victory. Now some western politicians are starting to seriously freak out (see this lady , for example), but most Europeans are coming to terms with two truly horrible realities:

Russia is much stronger than Europe and, even much worse, Russia will never attack first (which is a major cause of frustration for western russophobes)

As for the obvious solution to this problem, having friendly relations with Russia is simply unthinkable for those who made their entire careers peddling the Soviet (and now Russian) threat to the world.

But Russia is changing, albeit maybe too slowly (at least for my taste). As I mentioned last week, a number of Polish, Ukrainian and Baltic politicians have declared that the Zapad2020 military maneuvers which are supposed to take place in southern Russia and the Caucasus could be used to prepare an attack on the West (see here for a rather typical example of this nonsense). In the past, the Kremlin would only have made a public statement ridiculing this nonsense, but this time around Putin did something different. Right after he saw the reaction of these politicians, Putin ordered a major and UNSCHEDULED military readiness exercise which involved no less than 150,000 troops, 400 aircraft & 100 ships ! The message here was clear:

Yes, we are much more powerful than you are and No, we are not apologizing for our strength anymore

And, just to make sure that the message is clear, the Russians also tested the readiness of the Russian Airborne Forces units near the city of Riazan, see for yourself:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/2s2V8iPofFs?feature=oembed

This response is, I think, the correct one. Frankly, nobody in the West is listening to what the Kremlin has to say, so what is the point of making more statements which in the future will be ignored equally as they have been in the past.

If anything, the slow realization that Russia is more powerful than NATO would be most helpful in gently prodding EU politicians to change their tune and return back to reality. Check out this recent video of Sarah Wagenknecht, a leading politician of the German Left and see for yourself:

https://www.dailymotion.com/embed/video/x7uu5fk

The example of Sahra Wagenknecht is interesting, because she is from Germany, one of the countries of northern Europe; traditionally, northern European powers have been much more anti-Russian than southern Europeans, so it is encouraging to see that the anti-Putin and anti-Russia hysteria is not always being endorsed by everybody.

But if things are very slowly getting better in the EU, in the bad old US of A things are only getting worse. Even the Republicans are now fully on board the Russia-hating float (right behind a "gay pride" one I suppose) and they are now contributing their own insanity to the cause, as this article entitled " Congressional Republicans: Russia should be designated state sponsor of terror " shows (designating Russia as a terrorist state is an old idea of the Dems, by the way).

Russian options for the Fall

In truth, Russia does not have any particularly good options towards the US. Both parties are now fully united in their rabid hatred of Russia (and China too, of course). Furthermore, while there are many well-funded and virulently anti-Russian organizations in the US (Neo-cons, Papists, Poles, Masons, Ukrainians, Balts, Ashkenazi Jews, etc.), Russian organizations in the US like this one , have very little influence or even relevance.

Banderites marching in the US

However, as the chaos continues to worsen inside the US and as US politicians continue to alienate pretty much the entire planet, Russia does have a perfect opportunity to weaken the US grip on Europe. The beauty in the current dynamic is that Russia does not have to do anything at all (nevermind anything covert or illegal) to help the anti-EU and anti-US forces in Europe: All she needs to do is to continuously hammer in the following simple message: "the US is sinking -- do you really want to go down with it?".

There are many opportunities to deliver that message. The current US/Polish efforts to prevent the EU from enjoying cheap Russian gas might well be the best example of what we could call "European suicide politics", but there are many, many more.

Truth be told, neither the US nor the EU are a top priority for Russia, at least not in economic terms. The moral credibility of the West in general can certainly be described as dead and long gone. As for the West military might, it is only a concern to the degree that western politicians might be tempted to believe their own propaganda about their military forces being the best in the history of the galaxy. This is why Russia regularly engages in large surprise exercises: to prove to the West that the Russian military is fully ready for anything the West might try. As for the constant move of more and more US/NATO forces closer to the borders of Russia, they are offensive in political terms, but in military terms, getting closer to Russia only means that Russia will have more options to destroy you. "Forward deployment" is really a thing of the past, at least against Russia.

With time, however, and as the US federal center loses even more of its control of the country, the Kremlin might be well-advised to try to open some venues for "popular diplomacy", especially with less hostile US states. The weakening of the Executive Branch has already resulted in US governors playing an increasingly important international role and while this is not, strictly speaking, legal (only the federal government has the right to engage in foreign policy), the fact is that this has been going on for years already. Another possible partner inside the US for Russian firms would be US corporations (especially now that they are hurting badly). Finally, I think that the Kremlin ought to try to open channels of communication with the various small political forces in the US which are clearly not buying into the official propaganda: libertarians, (true) liberals and progressives, paleo-conservatives.

What we are witnessing before our eyes is the collapse of the US federal center. This is a dangerous and highly unstable moment in our history. But from this crisis opportunities will arise. The best thing Russia can do now is to simply remain very careful and vigilant and wait for new forces to appear on the US political scene.

Twilight Patriot , says: • Website July 29, 2020 at 12:26 am GMT

I really agree with you that the “blame Russia” and “blame China” thing has gotten out of hand in US politics. Whether it will turn into a shooting war seems doubtful to me, as the government is still full of people who are looking out for their own interests and know that a full-sized war with Russia, China, Iran or whoever will not advance their interests.

But who would have guessed, a few years ago, that “Russian asset” would become the all-purpose insult for Democrats to use, not just against Republicans, but against other Democrats?

With Republicans I think that “blame China” is stronger. China makes a good scapegoat for the economic situation in the United States. But convincing the working class that China is the source of their problems (and that Mr. MAGA is going to solve those problems by standing up to China) requires ignorance of the crucial facts about the trade relationship between those two countries.

Namely, that the trade deficit exists only because the Federal Reserve chooses to create huge amounts of new dollars each year for export to other countries, and it’s only possible for US exports to fall behind imports so badly (and thus put so many American laborers out of work) because the Fed is making up the difference by exporting dollars. Granted, it isn’t a policy that the US can change without harming the interests of its own upper classes; at the same time, it isn’t a policy that China could force on the US without the people in charge of the United States wanting it.

This is a topic I’ve dealt with a few times on my own blog.

Why I Don’t Fear Chinese Hegemony: https://www.twilightpatriot.com/2020/05/why-i-dont-fear-chinese-hegemony.html

Nobody Will Win The Trade War: https://www.twilightpatriot.com/2019/09/nobody-will-win-trade-war.html

[Aug 03, 2020] Nationalism and the collapse of the USSR

Nearly all these erstwhile Marxists turned neo-liberal after the fall of the wall of Berlin
Aug 03, 2020 | www.unz.com

Curmudgeon , says: August 1, 2020 at 7:15 pm GMT

@onebornfree w.britannica.com/topic/commonwealth-political-science">https://www.britannica.com/topic/commonwealth-political-science
What is labelled socialism today is nowhere near what the original socialists would consider socialism, which is closer to the co-operative movement and anarchy than communism.

On the other hand, Marxism (communism) is about complete state control and was international in scope. One (of many) reason for the breakdown of the USSR, was that it was, in fact, becoming socialistic in many countries, starting with Hungary in 1956 then Czechoslovakia in 1968 becoming nationalist. Even Russia was becoming more nationalistic.

Miro23 , says: August 2, 2020 at 2:30 am GMT
@Druid unknown in Russia 1917. It wasn't really understood. In contrast Neo-Bolshevism USA 2020 has the prior example of Bolshevism Russia 1917 to learn from and check the mechanism.

– The Russian population 1917 held some arms (which were immediately made illegal – retention carrying the death penalty). But nothing at all like the vast armoury presently held by the US public.

– The Bolsheviks successful subverted the demoralized and badly organized Russian Imperial Army (at least in Petrograd where it mattered). The US military is in a much better state, and is maybe not so attracted by SJW/BLM/Antifa (middle and lower ranks).

[Aug 03, 2020] Austria Confirms OPCW Report On Skripal Faking by the British Vienna Exposes Financial Times Lies and Cover-Up

Aug 03, 2020 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

Maritimer , August 1, 2020 at 4:39 am

" have covered up British government lying on the Skripal blood testing and the Novichok evidence."

From Fool Me Once, Twice University:

"Sir Reginald, how is the Covid 19 vaccine propaganda campaign shaping up?"

Plague Species , August 1, 2020 at 10:24 am

I have a comment that was moderated in the vaccine thread that speaks to this. Some yahoo claimed that those engaged in the vaccine hype are on the up and up and have the same motivation all of us unwashed have for an effective and affordable vaccine.

These are the people in charge and we're to believe they are on the up and up and have our best interests at heart -- that they are magnanimous people with the utmost integrity? Yeah, no, I don't think so.

The irony is, a vaccine gone wrong, because caveat emptor is now the rule of the day, will be the REAL Novichok writ large on the world at large.

Steven Tooge , August 1, 2020 at 5:02 am

Okay, so what killed Dawn Sturgess?

John A , August 1, 2020 at 7:34 am

Drug overdose most probably. She was hastily cremated, just to make sure there were no subsequent autopsies.

Susan the other , August 1, 2020 at 11:13 am

So the story about the "perfume bottle" was as fictitious as it sounded? I wonder about the rumors that the Skripals were knocked out with fentanyl might be true.

Olga , August 1, 2020 at 11:47 am

It always seemed to me that Dawn S was just an afterthought. A woman, who was known to use drugs, died (unclear how) – and wouldn't it just help our case if we linked it to Skripals' troubles? The story of a sealed perfume bottle – which seemed to have no effect on her partner – was always something out of an Alice-in- Wonderland narrative.
And to think that there is a whole department, somewhere in the bowels of MI6 – that is paid to come up with such nonsense.
Lies, upon lies, upon more lies. My first reaction on seeing Helmer's report last week was 'et tu, FT-us?' There simply is not a single western media outlet that can be trusted not to lie.
And if anyone is still confused – just think about this: where are the Skripals? We've not seen or heard of them in about two years. Julia is a Russian citizen – who seems to have been kidnapped by another govt (UK). Imagine if Russians had done something like that.

cirsium , August 1, 2020 at 5:58 pm

contaminated batch of drugs – the local police were issuing warnings to drug addicts. See John Helmer's post
http://johnhelmer.net/british-coroner-hides-british-police-evidence-in-the-novichok-case-as-bbc-prepares-to-broadcast-new-lies/

John A , August 1, 2020 at 5:31 am

Funnily enough, this is not a big enough bombshell to alert British msm to report it.

Acacia , August 1, 2020 at 5:53 am

So, they lied, then lied about lying, then lost track of their own lies, and then lied about that too.

And now the story is "who are the 'moles' that exposed the lies about the lies?".

Susan the other , August 1, 2020 at 11:15 am

And as usual we will only have to wait for some appropriate amount of time to pass before we get the next British rendition of the story. It'll be a good one because it's possible the British could be dragged into the Hague for this, isn't it?

Ramon , August 2, 2020 at 7:57 am

Delay and delay until people say "who are the Skripals?" Already people are saying "what's the Steele dossier?" (Just googled Steele, comes at 16th place, page two)

David , August 1, 2020 at 7:32 am

"Austria officially confirmed this week that the British Government's allegation that Novichok, a Russian chemical warfare agent, was used in England by GRU, the Russian military intelligence service, in March 2018, was a British invention."
Er, OK, could we perhaps have a link to this official confirmation, or at least a summary of what the Austrian government is supposed to have said? Otherwise it's just an assertion without any evidence.

Helmer seems a bit confused. All the article says is that it's been established by the bar-code that the ultimate source of the copy of the OPCW report used by the FT was the Austrians , who as a state party would routinely have received a copy of the report. Since the FT presumably wanted to protect their sources they obscured the origins. And since it's highly unlikely the whoever leaked a copy of the report would have handed it directly to the FT (why would they?) it's likely that it came through intermediaries. He doesn't claim to have seen the report himself, and in the long and complicated story of his to which he links simply quotes an anonymous "expert" who hasn't seen the report either. Bricks wthout straw
It was obvious at the time, and still is, that there was something weird about the Skripal affair, but this doesn't get us any further forward, I'm afraid.

Zamfir , August 1, 2020 at 9:49 am

I am confused as well. The oe24 website doesn't say anything about the contents of the report, and does not say that Austria wrote the report, or that Austria did their own research.

All it says is that Marsalek had the Austrian copy of the document.

Light Rue , August 1, 2020 at 9:55 am

John Helmer seems to spend a lot of words dancing around so that he can selectively quote the the following two paragraphs:

The OPCW's findings confirm the United Kingdom's analysis of the identity of the toxic chemical. It supports our finding that a military grade nerve agent of a type known as Novichok was used in Salisbury. DSTL, our laboratories at Porton Down, established the highest concentrations of the agent were found on the handle of Mr Skripal's front door.

But of course, while the identification of the nerve agent used is an essential piece of technical evidence in our investigation, neither DSTL's analysis, nor the OPCW's report, identifies the country or laboratory of origin of the agent used in this attack.So let me also set out the wider picture, which leads the United Kingdom to assess that there is no plausible alternative explanation for what happened in Salisbury than Russian State responsibility. We believe that only the Russian Federation had the technical means, operational experience, and the motive to target the Skripals.

I.e. Everyone involved is confident Novichok was used, but they were unable to track it to a specific Russian lab. Given all the other evidence, this is hardly exculpatory, nor is it contradictory, unless there have previously been high-profile claims that the specific source of the Novichok was identified. Checking Wikipedia and sources back in 2018 finds multiple statements, including from the UK government, that they had not be able to track down the exact source of the nerve agent.

Harry , August 1, 2020 at 11:12 am

My reading of Mr Helmer's piece is that he is claiming the Lab report did not confirm the presence of a Novichuk type chemical.

From memory, I recall the Russian MFA claiming the Lab report actually specified BZ, another chemical from a different family of chemicals.

It would be good if the ambiguity were removed.

Susan the other , August 1, 2020 at 11:23 am

That's how I read it as well. The Austrians reported that they found no traces of Novichok or other nerve agent in the Skripals' blood samples. At that point, you'd think, they would have run further tests to determine what agent was involved. The smartest poison would have been one that left no trace. So that lets out the "technical means" of the Russian state – it clearly was never needed.

Zamfir , August 1, 2020 at 11:46 am

But that's the weird thing. Helmer says:
"Austria officially confirmed this week that the British Government's allegation that Novichok, a Russian chemical warfare agent, was used in England by GRU, the Russian military intelligence service, in March 2018, was a British invention."

But his only link is the Oe24 website, and it does not say anything like that. It only says that the Austrian government had a copy of the OPCW report, and this particular copy was leaked to Marsalek.

The Oe24 website does not say anything about the content of that report, and it does not say that the Austria government did any research of their own.

Perhaps Helmer has other sources, but I can't find them. In particular, I would have expected a link to the official confirmation by the Austrian government, if there is such a thing

David , August 1, 2020 at 12:17 pm

I don't think "the Austrians" have played any role in this at all, in spite of Helmer's confusing suggestions. As OPCW state parties they would have received a copy of the report. That's it. The OE24 story is just that their own copy leaked in some way, which is embarrassing for the Austrian government since these reports are confidential. But there's no suggestion that the Austrians played any other role, or even that they could have if they wanted to. (Why would they?).
To answer your question properly, you'd need an organic chemist who was a specialist in nerve agents. Remember that "Novichok" is not a nerve agent: it just means something like "new one", and is the generic name for at least five known nerve agents developed by the Soviet Union before the end of the Cold War. Each presumably has common characteristics but also differences, and you'd need an expert to tell you what traces they leave, how fast these traces decay, and so on. It may simply have been that, whilst the symptoms of the Skripals were consistent with the use of one or more of the agents, it couldn't be shown clearly exactly what the agent was. Certainly the careful statements of the UK government at the time would support that interpretation.
Don't forget by the way that the Russians, as OPCW state parties, would have a copy of the report, and may have decided that it would suit their interests if it became public in some roundabout manner.

Harry , August 1, 2020 at 10:14 am

I asked Helmer on his own website for the same. There is one step missing from the argument – the content of the OPCW memo. Apparently Helmer in another piece quotes a chemist who appears to have seen the document and says the FT could not have had material which confirmed the British government story. But we are not in a position to judge for ourselves.

The way the other piece reads, the memo may be on the Austrian newspapers website. But when I clicked on the link I could not find it. Quite often, sensitive links like this are moved to prevent a snowjob falling apart. So its possible Helmer might have linked to it and the link was moved. But I cannot say.

However I have to disagree regarding whether this adds information. The FT presented their story to make it appear the document had been leaked by the Russians. They didnt obscure the source, they misrepresented it. Curiouser still is the involvement of the FT Russian correspondent.

But I suspect this is just one installment in the story. I await Mr. Helmer's clarification.

Harry , August 1, 2020 at 10:26 am

This is the key phrase

"The Austrian copy of the OPCW file now confirms this was a misrepresentation of the chemical formula and other evidence the OPCW had gathered."

Is it possible to show us this?

Kurt Sperry , August 1, 2020 at 1:47 pm

It was obvious at the time, and still is, that there was something weird about the Skripal affair, but this doesn't get us any further forward, I'm afraid.

Quite, my reaction as well.

johnson , August 1, 2020 at 7:40 pm

Agreed. The level of reporting here fails to even clear the bar of "anonymous people close to the matter" sourcing that we would be excoriating mainstream media for: he doesn't offer us the contents of the report, or claim to have seen it, or even provide testimony of someone who does claim to have seen it. Helmer comes off, at best, as a crank, and at worst intentionally obfuscatory. Is this typical of his work?

shtove , August 1, 2020 at 7:38 am

Strange report, dancing around the substance underlying its allegation – that the report showed no evidence of novichok.

Mr. House , August 1, 2020 at 7:46 am

Yes yes we lied about that, and that, and yes that, oh and also that, but this time we are telling the TRUTH!

a different chris , August 1, 2020 at 10:08 am

This is my favorite along those lines:

>The leak had been an "explosive secret betrayal"

Letting the unwashed get the truth is a "betrayal" to them. Ok, got it.

jefemt , August 1, 2020 at 9:59 am

Another Paywalled Rag .. WSJ and NYT come to mind

Integrity in the 4th Estate. Clutch yer pearls and ponder the misinformation EVERYWHERE

Hubert Horan , August 1, 2020 at 10:12 am

FYI Dan McCrum, the FT reporter Helmer says was part of the cover up, is also the reporter who broke the recent Wirecard story

Harry , August 1, 2020 at 10:16 am

Absolutely Mr. Horan. Which makes perfect sense given the hedge fund analyst who alerted the FT to the docs was a Wirecard short.

The Rev Kev , August 1, 2020 at 10:48 am

What's the bet that in a coupla years, that there will be a showcase trial of some Russians like they are doing in the Netherlands at the moment over the MH17 shoot down. You would think that being in the same country that they could do it through the International Criminal Court at the Hague. Only problem here is that they cannot stop the accused giving evidence in defence but they can through these show trials. To think that the OPCW had such a great reputation just a few years ago but now they have been corrupted.

Meanwhile in Oz, I see advertised on TV a three-part series coming here called "The Salisbury Poisoning." I can hardly wait-

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekoW6g_wg7A

Alex Cox , August 1, 2020 at 12:05 pm

The series is produced by the BBC and The Guardian. Craig Murray has done a thorough takedown of all three episodes on his site.

KMD , August 1, 2020 at 12:16 pm

Perhaps it's this one?

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2020/06/putins-gonna-get-me/

Craig Murray has been on this from the beginning. The official explanation(s) never made any sense.

stan6565 , August 1, 2020 at 4:01 pm

I have seen these two strange looking persons here in Esher, south west London. I don't know if they are he's or she's or them's but sure as fek they are evil russkies with their backpacks full of nasty substances.

Save for somewhat lighter facial and bodily complexion they are same as the beach vendors i encountered in Jamaica many years ago, who were not only offering ackee and fish but also a whole array of chemical mind altering substances as well as privileged access to all and any members of their supposed family, especially those of self declared female persuasion.

Synoia , August 1, 2020 at 6:59 pm

If you want to see many strange people I suggest Public Viewing in the House of Commons. Especially at question time.

km , August 1, 2020 at 10:57 am

But but but Bellingcat, which is a totally independent organization interested only in exposing the truth said that it was proven that Russia did it it with the super duper evil novichoks!

And if the official story doesn't quite hang together and the Skripals don't need to be "kept safe", then that begs the question of where are they?

stan6565 , August 1, 2020 at 3:53 pm

Madame Tussaud's is opening next week. The two Skripal drones are already there.

TimH , August 1, 2020 at 10:57 am

Aren't there treaties to not develop nerve agents? So not just the question of who supplied and administered the agent, but being caught at breaking the treaty?

JTMcPhee , August 1, 2020 at 11:45 am

Rules are for little people, not "state actors." "A fig for your treaty." Remember, of course, the sell substantiated comment that the US (and its imperial minions and lackeys" is/are not "agreement-capable."

Interesting, the rigorous and gimlet-eyed analysis being applied to Helmer's article. Too bad people who are doing that did not also apply the same rigor and skepticism to the "government" fish story

"We'll know our disinformation campaign is complete when everything the American public believes is false." Evil CIA Director William Casey, Feb. 1981. https://amallulla.org/casey/

Parker Dooley , August 1, 2020 at 12:49 pm

"Innocent pesticide and anesthesiology research. How unfortunate that one of our candidate formulas turned out to be so toxic to humans."

David , August 1, 2020 at 2:07 pm

These agents were developed before the entry into force of the CWC, and it appears that they were deliberately designed to circumvent its likely provisions. According to various published sources, some of the agents were "binaries", ie they were agents which would be created in the field from precursors which would not themselves be subject to the Treaty. It has been suggested that they were developed hidden within a much larger agricultural pesticide programme. The old Soviet regime always drew a distinction between signing a Treaty (which was a political act) and implementing it, which was another matter. I doubt if much has changed in Moscow since then.

Stephen , August 1, 2020 at 1:10 pm

just to add to what appears to be the majority of posts on this matter -- I find the article from Helmer entirely unconvincing, and certainly doesn't supply any evidence, or reasoning, that would justify the view that the Brits claim of Russian use of a Novichock type agent on the Skripals "looks to have fallen apart"
Helmer's article was either very badly written, or very cleverly composed to give it the "look and feel" of a well researched and well footnoted article despite an underlying disconnect between evidence provided and verdict announced.
It's almost impossible to refute such an article, beyond returning it to the author for a rewrite.
I wouldn't go to the wall defending the Brits version of events, but at this point it hangs together WAY better than Mr. Helmer's article does

CanChemist , August 1, 2020 at 1:11 pm

For those interested in better understanding the agents in question, here's a link to a discussion at the time on a well known chemistry blog with chemistry commenters, In the Pipeline:

"A Poisoning in England: But Which Poison?"
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2018/03/08/a-poisoning-in-england-but-which-poison

Like other commenters I'm not exactly sure what is being asserted by whom here. But I would say generally, given the context of who the Skripals were and the timing with Russian signaling, not to mention the Russians having excellent chemistry capabilities, nobody I know in the chemistry community doubted it was the Russians. I'd struggle to believe they were set up. And if it were traced back conclusively to a Russian fingerprint, that would be a feature not a bug, to keep the expats in line.

harry , August 1, 2020 at 2:09 pm

1) The Uk has fairly good chemistry capabilities too. And so conveniently located

2) The timing was terrible for Russia. But excellent for the UK. Cui bono?

3) This article suggests that the chemical in question was not what was reported in the media. Its interesting that this material is not public domain. The Russians announced the confidential Lab analysis result was BZ. They were ignored. Naturally

4) The Skripals fed ducks by hand after leaving home. They gave bread to local children to feed the ducks. Neither the kids nor the ducks suffered any ill effects.

5) UK government timeline makes no sense

6) Dawn Sturgess' partner is adamant that the "perfume" he gave her was still in its cellophane wrap. There is no explanation for how it was there given the charity bin he took it from had been emptied several times.

7) A doctor at the local hospital wrote a letter to the Times disputing the notion of any poisoning in the area.

This list of inconsistencies is not complete. There are many others. Which is not to say i know what happened. Just that the story the UK told approximates impossible.

CanChemist , August 1, 2020 at 2:48 pm

I'll throw out a few points ;)

1. The UK is certainly capable. However these aren't synthetically difficult, the hard part is not killing yourself in the process.

2. I think it fits with Putin's messaging, and maybe they expected to pull this off like a heart attack or drug OD and the agent screwed up. Historically some of their foreign assassinations were designed to be written off as accidents or suicides.

3. Chemistry reporting is generally terrible so yes. And there are tons of things, not just chemical warfare but even mundane things like cosmetic formulations, that are not in the public domain. As a chemist I wouldn't believe what Russia said unless I'd heard it confirmed through the gravevine. In any case we certainly know it's a nerve agent, and therefore deliberate.

4. Agree that the delivery method isn't clear, but I don't find it hard to believe they came into contact with a sophisticated poison and that once that happened, we saw the result. There are a lot of ways to deliver a poison e.g. remember the ricin umbrella incident. I don't think the UK correctly figured it out.

5,6. I agree, and it's related to 4.

7. Honestly doctors are so generally underinformed that when chemists manage to poison themselves at work, someone else from the lab has to go with them to help the hospital understand how to treat. So I don't put any weight on this.

I think it's possible to agree that the UK story has issues, probably due to not having proper investigation by actual experts, without that eliminating the possibility of the Russian angle. The Russians have a long and storied history of poisoning dissidents in pretty dramatic ways in foreign countries this matches their pattern. Remember the polonium incident? That was messy and they didn't care. And if the UK was doing it 'in house' there would be a lot more pressure not to have collateral damage on a setup like this. Given that history, I think that invoking a setup takes a lot more evidence, when it's already credible that the Russians did it again given who Skripal was.

urblintz , August 1, 2020 at 5:07 pm

see comment below

btw, is your last name Clapper? Maybe Murray?

"If you put that in context with everything else we knew the Russians were doing to interfere with the election," he said. "And just the historical practices of the Russians, who typically, are almost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor, whatever, which is a typical Russian technique. So, we were concerned." https://observer.com/2017/05/james-clapper-russia-xenophobia/

urblintz , August 1, 2020 at 5:10 pm

comment below should be here

is your last name Clapper? Maybe Murray?

https://observer.com/2017/05/james-clapper-russia-xenophobia

CanChemist , August 1, 2020 at 5:33 pm

I'll clarify my statements and say that they are specific to the Russian government. I have personally had long working relationships with Russian scientists, and they are excellent scientists and people who are deservedly part of the international scientific community. Russian chemistry and physics are first rate.

And now here's two links I quickly pulled,

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2018/03/06/the-long-terrifying-history-of-russian-dissidents-being-poisoned-abroad/

https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/03/09/a-brief-history-of-attempted-russian-assassinations-by-poison/

If you don't like these links, a Google search will show you there are a lot more than just a few people. The Russian government certainly has a track record with this, and I think it's fair to state this criticism publicly.

urblintz , August 1, 2020 at 4:58 pm

"The Russians have a long and storied history of poisoning dissidents in pretty dramatic ways in foreign countries"

links please and I'll need more than one about Litvinenko or the familiar Russo-phobic screed from a deranged British anti-communist still living in the '50's.

Alex , August 1, 2020 at 6:04 pm

No one has explained how the Scripals could have pure novichok on their hands for appox. 4hours feeling fine drinking in the Mill pub and then going for a meal in a Zizzi restaurant and then both very suddenly, a man twice the weight and age of his
daughter, together become. very ill at exactly the same moment

Oh and hey those professional Russian assasins stroll out of Salisbury station undesguised at about 11.30am knowing full well that CCT will catch them out and walk up to the Scripal M16 funded house on a Sunday lunchtime with the Scripals in at the time!

mauisurfer , August 1, 2020 at 9:30 pm

How likely is it that the first person to come to the aid of the Skripals just happened to be
Colonel Alison McCourt, chief nursing officer in the British Army. This fact was kept secret for months afterwards, and only came to be known through happenstance.
McCourt joined the Army in 1988 and became Chief Nursing Officer for the Army on February 1, 2018, just a month before the Skriprals' poisoning. She received the OBE (Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire) honour from the Queen in 2015. The biography, which includes a posed photo of McCourt outside the prime minister's residence 10 Downing Street, notes, "Alison has deployed to Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq and Sierra Leone." Subsequent assignments include Officer Instructor at the Defence Medical Services Training Centre and a deployment to Kosovo as the Senior Nursing Officer for 33 Field Hospital in 2001. During that operational tour she was the in-theatre lead for the establishment of the joint UK/US hospital facility at Camp Bondsteel."

Sound of the Suburbs , August 2, 2020 at 3:43 am

I read the FT.
It's a neoliberal joke.
I enjoy making comments, giving an alternative explanation of events.

The funniest bit.
The curse of FT.
They always promote neoliberals and are convinced neoliberal leaders will bring success to a country.
It always turns into a disaster.

Sound of the Suburbs , August 2, 2020 at 3:57 am

Another amusing aspect is when they give the game away accidently.
The FT had graphs of growth over the years.
A quick glance revealed that growth was much higher in the Keynesian era, even in the 1970s.

The FT did a timeline of financial crises with each one marked by a vertical bar.
There were lots before the Keynesian era, and lots after the Keynesian era, but hardly any during the Keynesian era.
Surprisingly the FT journalist missed the obvious.
If they had realised they wouldn't have put the timeline in.

John A , August 2, 2020 at 6:31 am

Anybody coming new to the Skripal story could do worse than read this blog, which covers all the absurdities and improbabilities and impossibilities of the official British government story:

https://www.theblogmire.com/the-salisbury-poisonings-two-years-on-a-riddle-wrapped-in-a-cover-up-inside-a-hoax/

David , August 2, 2020 at 6:55 am

Well, we seem to have arrived at a consensus that Helmer has published a story with a click-bait title and introduction making accusations which he doesn't even try to substantiate. Either he's completely confused, or he's just publishing propaganda. Whichever, I won't take him seriously as a journalist any more: a pity, because some of the things he's written in the past have been quite informative.

mauisurfer , August 2, 2020 at 9:28 am

disagree strongly

John A , August 2, 2020 at 10:36 am

I also disagree strongly.
'We seem to have arrived at a consensus..' 'We' is doing an awful lot of heavy lifting in your claim.

[Aug 02, 2020] Russiagate, Nazis, and the CIA by ROB URIE

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... The U.S. has spent a century or more trying to install a U.S.-friendly government in Moscow. Following the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, the U.S. sent neoliberal economists to loot the country as the Clinton administration, and later the Obama administration, placed NATO troops and armaments on the Russian border after a negotiated agreement not to do so . Subsequent claims of realpolitik are cover for a reckless disregard for geopolitical consequences. ..."
"... The paradox of American liberalism, articulated when feminist icon and CIA asset Gloria Steinem described the CIA as ' liberal, nonviolent and honorable ,' is that educated, well-dressed, bourgeois functionaries have used the (largely manufactured) threat of foreign subversion to install right-wing nationalists subservient to American business interests at every opportunity. ..."
"... To the point made by Christopher Simpson , the CIA could have achieved better results had it not employed former Nazi officers, begging the question of why it chose to do so? ..."
"... Russiagate is the nationalist party line in the American fight against communism, without the communism. Charges of treason have been lodged every time that military budgets have come under attack since 1945. In 1958 the senior leadership of the Air Force was charging the other branches of the military with treason for doubting its utterly fantastical (and later disproven) estimate of Soviet ICBMs. Treason is good for business. ..."
"... Shortly after WWII ended, the CIA employed hundreds of former Nazi military officers, including former Gestapo and SS officers responsible for murdering tens and hundreds of thousands of human beings , to run a spy operation known as the Gehlen Organization from Berlin, Germany. Given its central role in assessing the military intentions and capabilities of the Soviet Union, the Gehlen Organization was more likely than not responsible for the CIA's overstatement of Soviet nuclear capabilities in the 1950s used to support the U.S. nuclear weapons program. Former Nazis were also integrated into CIA efforts to install right wing governments around the world. ..."
"... Under the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act passed by Congress in 1998, the CIA was made to partially disclose its affiliation with, and employment of, former Nazis. In contrast to the ' Operation Paperclip ' thesis that it was Nazi scientists who were brought to the U.S. to labor as scientists, the Gehlen Organization and CIC employed known war criminals in political roles. Klaus Barbie, the 'Butcher of Lyon,' was employed by the CIC, and claims to have played a role in the murder of Che Guevara . Wernher von Braun, one of the Operation Paperclip 'scientists,' worked in a Nazi concentration camp as tens of thousands of human beings were murdered. ..."
"... To understand the political space that military production came to occupy, from 1948 onward the U.S. military became a well-funded bureaucracy where charges of treason were regularly traded between the branches. Internecine battles for funding and strategic dominance were (and are) regularly fought. The tactic that this bureaucracy -- the 'military industrial complex,' adopted was to exaggerate foreign threats in a contest for bureaucratic dominance. The nuclear arms race was made a self-fulfilling prophecy. As the U.S. produced world-ending weapons non-stop for decades on end, the Soviets responded in kind. ..."
"... Long story short, the CIA employed hundreds of former Nazi officers who had the ideological predisposition and economic incentive to mis-perceive Soviet intentions and misstate Soviet capabilities to fuel the Cold War. ..."
"... the U.S. had indicated its intention to use nuclear weapons in a first strike -- and had demonstrated the intention by placing Jupiter missiles in Italy, nothing that the U.S. offered during the Missile Crisis could be taken in good faith. ..."
"... Following the election of Bill Clinton in 1992, the Cold War entered a new phase. Cold War logic was repurposed to support the oxymoronic 'humanitarian wars' -- liberating people by bombing them. In 1995 'Russian meddling' meant the Clinton administration rigging the election of Boris Yeltsin in the Russian presidential election. Mr. Clinton then unilaterally reneged on the American agreement to keep NATO from Russia's border when former Baltic states were brought under NATO's control . ..."
"... The Obama administration's 2014 incitement in Ukraine , by way of fostering and supporting the Maidan uprising and the ousting of Ukraine's democratically elected President, Viktor Yanukovych, ties to the U.S. strategy of containing and overthrowing the Soviet (Russian) government that was first codified by the National Security Council (NSC) in 1945. The NSC's directives can be found here and here . The economic and military annexation of Ukraine by the U.S. (NATO didn't exist in 1945) comes under NSC10/2 . The alliance between the CIA and Ukrainian fascists ties to directive NSC20 , the plan to sponsor Ukrainian-affiliated former Nazis in order to install them in the Kremlin to replace the Soviet government. This was part of the CIA's rationale for putting Ukrainian-affiliated former Nazis on its payroll in 1948. ..."
"... That Russiagate is the continuation of a scheme launched in 1945 by the National Security Council, to be engineered by the CIA with help from former Nazi officers in its employ, speaks volumes about the Cold War frame from which it emerges ..."
"... Its near instantaneous adoption by bourgeois liberals demonstrates the class basis of the right-wing nationalism it supports. That liberals appear to perceive themselves as defenders 'democracy' within a trajectory laid out by unelected military leaders more than seven decades earlier is testament to the power of historical ignorance tied to nationalist fervor. Were the former Gestapo and SS officers employed by the CIA 'our Nazis?' ..."
"... Furthermore, are liberals really comfortable bringing fascists with direct historical ties to the Third Reich to power in Ukraine? And while there are no good choices in the upcoming U.S. election, the guy who liberals want to bring to power is lead architect of this move. ..."
Jul 31, 2020 | www.counterpunch.org
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The political success of Russiagate lies in the vanishing of American history in favor of a façade of liberal virtue. Posed as a response to the election of Donald Trump, a straight line can be drawn from efforts to undermine the decommissioning of the American war economy in 1946 to the CIA's alliance with Ukrainian fascists in 2014. In 1945 the NSC (National Security Council) issued a series of directives that gave logic and direction to the CIA's actions during the Cold War. That these persist despite the 'fall of communism' suggests that it was always just a placeholder in the pursuit of other objectives.

The first Cold War was an imperial business enterprise to keep the Generals, bureaucrats, and war materiel suppliers in power and their bank accounts flush after WWII. Likewise, the American side of the nuclear arms race left former Gestapo and SS officers employed by the CIA to put their paranoid fantasies forward as assessments of Russian military capabilities. Why, of all people, would former Nazi officers be put in charge military intelligence if accurate assessments were the goal? The Nazis hated the Soviets more than the Americans did.

The ideological binaries of Russiagate -- for or against Donald Trump, for or against neoliberal, petrostate Russia, define the boundaries of acceptable discourse to the benefit of deeply nefarious interests. The U.S. has spent a century or more trying to install a U.S.-friendly government in Moscow. Following the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, the U.S. sent neoliberal economists to loot the country as the Clinton administration, and later the Obama administration, placed NATO troops and armaments on the Russian border after a negotiated agreement not to do so . Subsequent claims of realpolitik are cover for a reckless disregard for geopolitical consequences.

The paradox of American liberalism, articulated when feminist icon and CIA asset Gloria Steinem described the CIA as ' liberal, nonviolent and honorable ,' is that educated, well-dressed, bourgeois functionaries have used the (largely manufactured) threat of foreign subversion to install right-wing nationalists subservient to American business interests at every opportunity. Furthermore, Steinem's aggressive ignorance of the actual history of the CIA illustrates the liberal propensity to conflate bourgeois dress and attitude with an imagined gentility . To the point made by Christopher Simpson , the CIA could have achieved better results had it not employed former Nazi officers, begging the question of why it chose to do so?

On the American left, Russiagate is treated as a case of bad reporting, of official outlets for government propaganda serially reporting facts and events that were subsequently disproved. However, some fair portion of the American bourgeois, the PMC that acts in supporting roles for capital, believes every word of it. Russiagate is the nationalist party line in the American fight against communism, without the communism. Charges of treason have been lodged every time that military budgets have come under attack since 1945. In 1958 the senior leadership of the Air Force was charging the other branches of the military with treason for doubting its utterly fantastical (and later disproven) estimate of Soviet ICBMs. Treason is good for business.

Shortly after WWII ended, the CIA employed hundreds of former Nazi military officers, including former Gestapo and SS officers responsible for murdering tens and hundreds of thousands of human beings , to run a spy operation known as the Gehlen Organization from Berlin, Germany. Given its central role in assessing the military intentions and capabilities of the Soviet Union, the Gehlen Organization was more likely than not responsible for the CIA's overstatement of Soviet nuclear capabilities in the 1950s used to support the U.S. nuclear weapons program. Former Nazis were also integrated into CIA efforts to install right wing governments around the world.

By the time that (Senator) John F. Kennedy claimed a U.S. 'missile gap' with the Soviets in 1958, the CIA was providing estimates of Soviet ICBMs (Inter-continental Ballistic Missiles), that were wildly inflated -- most likely provided to it by the Gehlen Organization. Once satellite and U2 reconnaissance estimates became available, the CIA lowered its own to 120 Soviet ICBMs when the actual number was four . On the one hand, the Soviets really did have a nuclear weapons program. On the other, it was a tiny fraction of what was being claimed. Bad reporting, unerringly on the side of larger military budgets, appears to be the constant.

Under the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act passed by Congress in 1998, the CIA was made to partially disclose its affiliation with, and employment of, former Nazis. In contrast to the ' Operation Paperclip ' thesis that it was Nazi scientists who were brought to the U.S. to labor as scientists, the Gehlen Organization and CIC employed known war criminals in political roles. Klaus Barbie, the 'Butcher of Lyon,' was employed by the CIC, and claims to have played a role in the murder of Che Guevara . Wernher von Braun, one of the Operation Paperclip 'scientists,' worked in a Nazi concentration camp as tens of thousands of human beings were murdered.

The historical sequence in the U.S. was WWI, the Great Depression, WWII, to an economy that was heavily dependent on war production. The threatened decommissioning of the war economy in 1946 was first met with an honest assessment of Soviet intentions -- the Soviets were moving infrastructure back into Soviet territory as quickly as was practicable, then to the military budget-friendly claim that they were putting resources in place to invade Europe. The result of the shift was that the American Generals kept their power and the war industry kept producing materiel and weapons. By 1948 these weapons had come to include atomic bombs.

To understand the political space that military production came to occupy, from 1948 onward the U.S. military became a well-funded bureaucracy where charges of treason were regularly traded between the branches. Internecine battles for funding and strategic dominance were (and are) regularly fought. The tactic that this bureaucracy -- the 'military industrial complex,' adopted was to exaggerate foreign threats in a contest for bureaucratic dominance. The nuclear arms race was made a self-fulfilling prophecy. As the U.S. produced world-ending weapons non-stop for decades on end, the Soviets responded in kind.

What ties the Gehlen Organization to CIA estimates of Soviet nuclear weapons from 1948 – 1958 is 1) the Gehlen Organization was central to the CIA's intelligence operations vis-à-vis the Soviets, 2) the CIA had limited alternatives to gather information on the Soviets outside of the Gehlen Organization and 3) the senior leadership of the U.S. military had long demonstrated that it approved of exaggerating foreign threats when doing so enhanced their power and added to their budgets. Long story short, the CIA employed hundreds of former Nazi officers who had the ideological predisposition and economic incentive to mis-perceive Soviet intentions and misstate Soviet capabilities to fuel the Cold War.

Where this gets interesting is that American whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg was working for the Rand Corporation in the late 1950s and early 1960s when estimates of Soviet ICBMs were being put forward. JFK had run (in 1960) on a platform that included closing the Soviet – U.S. ' missile gap .' The USAF (U.S. Air Force), charged with delivering nuclear missiles to their targets, was estimating that the Soviets had 1,000 ICBMs. Mr. Ellsberg, who had limited security clearance through his employment at Rand, was leaked the known number of Soviet ICBMs. The Air Force was saying 1,000 Soviet ICBMs when the number confirmed by reconnaissance satellites was four.

By 1962, the year of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the CIA had shifted nominal control of the Gehlen Organization to the BND, for whom Gehlen continued to work. Based on ongoing satellite reconnaissance data, the CIA was busy lowering its estimates of Soviet nuclear capabilities. Benjamin Schwarz, writing for The Atlantic in 2013, provided an account, apparently informed by the CIA's lowered estimates, where he placed the whole of the Soviet nuclear weapons program (in 1962) at roughly one-ninth the size of the U.S. effort. However, given Ellsberg's known count of four Soviet ICBMs at the time of the missile crisis, even Schwarz's ratio of 1:9 seems to overstate Soviet capabilities.

Further per Schwarz's reporting, the Jupiter nuclear missiles that the U.S. had placed in Italy prior to the Cuban Missile Crisis only made sense as first-strike weapons. This interpretation is corroborated by Daniel Ellsberg , who argues that the American plan was always to initiate the use of nuclear weapons (first strike). This made JFK's posture of equally matched contestants in a geopolitical game of nuclear chicken utterly unhinged. Should this be less than clear, because the U.S. had indicated its intention to use nuclear weapons in a first strike -- and had demonstrated the intention by placing Jupiter missiles in Italy, nothing that the U.S. offered during the Missile Crisis could be taken in good faith.

The dissolution of the USSR in 1991 was met with a promised reduction in U.S. military spending and an end to the Cold War, neither of which ultimately materialized. Following the election of Bill Clinton in 1992, the Cold War entered a new phase. Cold War logic was repurposed to support the oxymoronic 'humanitarian wars' -- liberating people by bombing them. In 1995 'Russian meddling' meant the Clinton administration rigging the election of Boris Yeltsin in the Russian presidential election. Mr. Clinton then unilaterally reneged on the American agreement to keep NATO from Russia's border when former Baltic states were brought under NATO's control .

The Obama administration's 2014 incitement in Ukraine , by way of fostering and supporting the Maidan uprising and the ousting of Ukraine's democratically elected President, Viktor Yanukovych, ties to the U.S. strategy of containing and overthrowing the Soviet (Russian) government that was first codified by the National Security Council (NSC) in 1945. The NSC's directives can be found here and here . The economic and military annexation of Ukraine by the U.S. (NATO didn't exist in 1945) comes under NSC10/2 . The alliance between the CIA and Ukrainian fascists ties to directive NSC20 , the plan to sponsor Ukrainian-affiliated former Nazis in order to install them in the Kremlin to replace the Soviet government. This was part of the CIA's rationale for putting Ukrainian-affiliated former Nazis on its payroll in 1948.

That Russiagate is the continuation of a scheme launched in 1945 by the National Security Council, to be engineered by the CIA with help from former Nazi officers in its employ, speaks volumes about the Cold War frame from which it emerges.

Its near instantaneous adoption by bourgeois liberals demonstrates the class basis of the right-wing nationalism it supports. That liberals appear to perceive themselves as defenders 'democracy' within a trajectory laid out by unelected military leaders more than seven decades earlier is testament to the power of historical ignorance tied to nationalist fervor. Were the former Gestapo and SS officers employed by the CIA 'our Nazis?'

The Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act came about in part because Nazi hunters kept coming across Nazi war criminals living in the U.S. who told them they had been brought here and given employment by the CIA, CIC, or some other division of the Federal government. If the people in these agencies thought that doing so was justified, why the secrecy? And if it wasn't justified, why was it done? Furthermore, are liberals really comfortable bringing fascists with direct historical ties to the Third Reich to power in Ukraine? And while there are no good choices in the upcoming U.S. election, the guy who liberals want to bring to power is lead architect of this move. Cue the Sex Pistols .

[Aug 02, 2020] Balkans Ahead! by Linh Dinh

Aug 02, 2020 | www.unz.com

Belgrade has been razed 44 times. In the 20th century, it was bombed thrice. In World War II, hundreds of thousands of Serbs were mass murdered by Croats, an undisputed fact still little known.

From the taxi into town, I was reintroduced to the concrete housing blocks that are typical of the former Eastern Bloc. Belgrade's few high-rises are left over the 1970's, perhaps the worst decade for architecture ever. Its gorgeous buildings from the late 19th and early 20th centuries have been crumbling for decades.

I passed a monstrously huge banner of Serbian soldiers, with the lead one a stern female saluting, with accusation in her eyes. This draped the former Yugoslav Defense Ministry . Bombed by NATO in 1999, its mauled remains are left as is .

At a nearby park days later, I'd chance upon a bronze statue of a small girl holding a rag doll. Framed by a black marble slab resembling butterfly wings, she stood on a grave-like marker that's partly inscribed, "DEDICATED TO THE CHILDREN KILLED BY NATO AGGRESSION 1999."

Most of the world, though, don't see Serbians as victims so much as perpetrators of genocide, as recently evidenced by the Siege of Sarajevo and, even more so, Srebrenica.

On July 13th, 2012, Eric Margolis wrote :

During the mid 1990's, the world turned its back on the massacres of Muslims in Bosnia. The UN would not call it genocide because that would have demanded military intervention. Most shamefully, the Muslim world also closed its eyes as up to 160,000 Bosnian Muslims were slaughtered, starved and tortured in Serb-run concentration camps. At least 10,000 Muslim girls and women were gang raped, some in special rape camps.

A hundred-and-sixty-thousand is an atrociously high number of victims, but how many were actually slaughtered, as opposed to tortured or starved? Surely, Margolis didn't mean they were all starved, tortured then slaughtered? It's an oddly ambiguous passage for a seasoned author.

In any case, Margolis had seen it coming:

In 1988, I wrote warning that Milosevic would create disaster in Bosnia and Kosova, the Albanian-majority region of southern Serbia. I was denounced in Belgrade and declared an enemy of the Serbs. In truth, I had always been an admirer of Serbs as courageous, intelligent people. But the Serbs that Milosevic rallied were the scum of the gutter, criminals, racists, brutal pig farmers, fanatical priests.

On December 8th, 2017, The Saker presented an entirely different take :

Truly, that war had it all, every dirty trick was used against the Serbs: numerous false flags attacks, pseudo-genocides, illegal covert operations to arm terrorists groups, the covert delivery of weapons to officially embargoed entities, deliberate attacks against civilians, the use of illegal weapons, the use of officially "demilitarized zones" to hide (fully armed) entire army corps – you name it: if it is disgusting it was used against the Serbian people. Even deliberate attacks on the otherwise sacrosanct journalistic profession was considered totally normal as long as the journalists were Serbs. As for the Serbs, they were, of course, demonized. Milosevic became the "New Hitler" (along with Saddam Hussein) and those Serbs who took up arms to defend their land and families became genocidal Chetniks.

On January 3rd, 2019, The Saker added :

Brigadier-General Pierre Marie Gallois of the French Army has condemned the NATO destruction of Yugoslavia, and has gone on record stating that the endless stories of Serb atrocities, such as mass rapes and the siege of Sarajevo were fabricated. Gallois also argues that the German elite sought revenge for the fierce Serb resistance during the two world wars, especially with regard to the Serb partisans that held up German divisions that were headed towards Leningrad and Moscow during Operation Barbarossa. While relentlessly demonized, the Serbs were in many ways the greatest victims of the NATO-orchestrated Balkan wars, as hundreds of thousands of Serbs were forcibly expelled from both Croatia and Kosovo while Serbia was turned into a free-fire zone by NATO for over seventy days. Washington took advantage of the conflict to solidify control over its European vassals.

The Saker's parents fled to Belgrade as Russian refugees, and he even had a Serbian godmother, so there is a strong emotional attachment here, which The Saker freely admits.

Still, The Saker at his website has rebutted the inflated hooey of Srebrenica with some hard facts .

It's entirely unclear, even approximately, how many were intentionally executed, instead of being killed in battle, whether by Serbs or other Muslims, or who died because of starvation, suicide or illness.

The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia's star witness, and the only one convicted of direct participation in the Srebrenica "genocide," was not a Serb, but a Bosnian Croat, Drazen Erdemovic.

On June 27th, 1996, the ICTY itself declared Erdemovic mentally impaired, yet, on July 5th, 1996, it put him on the witness stand anyway.

Even more incredibly, Erdemovic admitted he had fought for all three sides during that conflict, Serbs, Croats and Bosnian Muslims. Dude couldn't decide whom he was trying to kill or defend.

In exchange for his testimonies against Serbs, Erdemovic was jailed for just five years, then given a new identity and whisked to a new country, so who knows, he might be living next to you as John Smith.

3

It's just a neighborhood squabble, you might be thinking. Who cares about Montenegroes? I've got my own black asses to kiss. I'm already kneeling, massa.

As always, though, there are lessons aplenty from the Balkans.

Serbs didn't have a country for five centuries, and Croats went stateless for eight, yet neither lost their fierce sense of nationhood, that is, their nationalism. It's not a debatable concept, but a deeply felt necessity, for how can any population with a unique history, heritage and identity not have its own homeland?

In the 21st century, such tribal thinking is not just deemed barbaric, but evil, Nazism, in short, except in Israel, of course. Gas chambers, remember?

When nations are contorted, tortured or simply enticed into any supranational entity, a correction, often violent, is inevitable, and that's exactly what has happened, repeatedly, in the Balkans. Wholesome pig farmers convulsed against the Ottomans, Austro-Hungarian Empire and Communists, etc. There is no progress beyond this.

This innate nationalism can only be purged when a population has been thoroughly cowed and/or brainwashed into renouncing itself, but the Serbs, for all for their defeats and humiliations down the centuries, never did. There's a magnificent lesson there.

Rebecca West, "So in the first battle of Kossovo the Serbs learned the meaning of defeat, not such defeat as forms a necessary proportion of all effort, for in that they had often been instructed during the course of their history, but of total defeat, annihilation of their corporate will and all their individual wills. The second battle of Kossovo taught them that one may live on such a low level of existence that even defeat cannot be achieved. The third taught them that even that level is not the lowest, and that there is a limbo for subject peoples where there is neither victory nor defeat but abortions which, had they come to birth, would have become such states."

Repeatedly butchered, suffocated and written off, Serbs have rebirthed themselves, thanks to their nationalism.

4

When the Turks were in Belgrade, they embellished this city with 273 beautiful mosques, so where the hell are they?! Only one is left, unfortunately, and the Bajrakli Mosque almost joined all the rest when it was torched in 2004, in retaliation for the burning of Serbian churches in Kosovo.

Built in 1575, it is elegant, intimate and handsomely proportioned, with the only false note the jivey, concrete minaret, clearly a recent replacement. Inside , I admired its minbar , octagonal wooden tablets etched with calligraphy and, especially, the stone, baroque frame around some verse, a nice East meets West touch. Light angled in from high windows . The darkened dome soothed.

It's an active mosque. Half a dozen suited Muslims milled outside, until they all left, so that I could have cleared out their mosque had I wanted to, and started World War III. Outside the gate, there was an old beggar , but she too disappeared, because I had already given her sixty cents.

Leaving the Bajrakli Mosque, I walked by Dukat, a Turkish restaurant, then Zein, a Lebanese one. The Arabic Zuwar was also nearby. Though not nearly as cosmopolitan as, say, Busan, contemporary Belgrade is no xenophobic backwater. Chinese takeouts dot the city, and there's even a Chinese shopping center at Blok 70, in New Belgrade.

I'm writing this in a bar, Dzidzi Midzi , where American pop music is played nonstop. On its walls are mostly photos of American icons, such as Hitchcock, Dylan, Hendrix, Buffalo Bill, Jack Nicholson, John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, Louis Armstrong and Bruce Lee (who was born in San Francisco, graduated from the University of Washington, married an American and is buried in Seattle). Though imploding, America still mesmerizes. Tellingly, there's just one Serb, Nicolas Tesla, and one Russian, Yuri Gagarin, who's depicted as a generic, faceless astronaut, with a quotation in English, "I see no god up here "

This is no touristy brewpub, but a Janko Janković joint in Hadžipopovac, a neighborhood of drab buildings, frankly. I'm paying $1.90 for a pint of Staropramen, and a flatbread sandwich with prosciutto and gouda is just $2.50.

Although Vietnam doesn't have an embassy here, there's a Vietnamese at the University of Belgrade. Here nine years and working on his second degree, this young man's so in love with Serbia, he's changed his name to Hoan Zlatanovic. Odder still was the Japanese who fought alongside Serbs and Russians in Bosnia. A self-declared "Japanese cheknik," he risked his life while forgoing a salary and his monthly cigar.

Oddest, perhaps, is Serbia's yearning to join the European Union, though not NATO, which already includes Croatia, Slovenia, Albania, North Macedonia and Montenegro. They're all leaning West. Last to board, they'll get to enjoy some choppy sailing with the big boys.

Bombing Serbia, America gave Russia and China a wakeup call, and forced them towards a new understanding. Everything changed after 1999. Again, this tiny nation played an outsized role in remaking our world.

Balkanizing, Americans can look here for warnings and inspiration. Five hundred years from now, a Serbian nation will still exist.

Linh Dinh's latest book is Postcards from the End of America . He maintains a regularly updated photo blog .

Erik Sieven , says: August 1, 2020 at 8:43 pm GMT

"Gallois also argues that the German elite sought revenge for the fierce Serb resistance during the two world wars, especially with regard to the Serb partisans that held up German divisions that were headed towards Leningrad and Moscow during Operation Barbarossa"
I wonder whether this french general has talked to some actual Germans. Everybody who knows just a little bit about german elites in the nineties knows that this an abstruse idea.

Franz , says: August 1, 2020 at 10:03 pm GMT

Balkanizing, Americans can look here for warnings and inspiration. Five hundred years from now, a Serbian nation will still exist.

Beautiful tail on a beautiful essay. Thanks, Linh.

As also, the Serbs had no choice in any Balkanization, but their American counterparts look on sheepishly as their plutocrat masters are inflicting it on the USA. Our end won't be justice: The same scum who used 1999 as practice are just using what they learned in California, etc. They won't be happy till the whole world is stateless and landless. Except them.

"Balkanization" is a curiously old subject. As a true wet-behind-the-ears nipper the first public speech I ever heard was during the one (and only) week I ever spent in New England. Ayn Rand gave her speech, entitled Global Balkanization at Boston's Ford Hall Forum in 1977. Just as a curiosity I wanted to see if it has any of it held up. She might have been on everyone's brown list by then, but her energy levels were still high:

https://ari.aynrand.org/issues/culture-and-society/education-and-multiculturalism/global-balkanization/

[Aug 02, 2020] The Kurdish-led Autonomous Administration of Northeast Syria signed a deal to market oil to US-based Delta Crescent Energy LLC "with the knowledge and encouragement of the White House."

Aug 02, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Peter AU1 , Aug 2 2020 14:35 utc | 2

I put these comments on the open thread about the same time b started this one

https://twitter.com/MaxBlumenthal/status/1289724554982629377
The Kurdish-led Autonomous Administration of Northeast Syria signed a deal to market oil to US-based Delta Crescent Energy LLC "with the knowledge and encouragement of the White House."

Trump a few months back "We've kept the oil". Well, he hasn't had a problem hanging onto it and getting an American company involved.

Delta Crescent Energy. Formed beginning of 2019 and nothing else on it. I guess Trump and a few mates divvying up the spoils.
https://www.bizapedia.com/de/delta-crescent-energy-llc.html

Laguerre , Aug 2 2020 15:00 utc | 6

The Kurdish-led Autonomous Administration of Northeast Syria signed a deal to market oil to US-based Delta Crescent Energy LLC "with the knowledge and encouragement of the White House."

Posted by: Peter AU1 | Aug 2 2020 14:35 utc | 2

Very likely the Kurds were under pressure from Trump, and the act wasn't voluntary. It's not even the Kurds' oil to sign a deal on (except one well). We'll see whether the operation actually succeeds. At the moment, everybody is waiting to see whether Trump is re-elected in November. Signing a piece of paper now is of no significance.

[Aug 02, 2020] The USA military establishment are the masters of the deception game: the right to combat the internal enemy it is the right to instll puppet regime which will exterminate social workers, trade unionists, men and women who are not supportive of the establishment, and who are assumed to be communist extremists

Aug 02, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Maracatu , Aug 2 2020 15:01 utc | 7

How a US military doctrine became Colombia's 'origin of evil' | Part 1: "Popeye" :
What is known in Latin America as the National Security Doctrine [is] not defense against an external enemy, but a way to make the military establishment the masters of the game [with] the right to combat the internal enemy : it is the right to fight and to exterminate social workers, trade unionists, men and women who are not supportive of the establishment, and who are assumed to be communist extremists. And this could mean anyone, including human rights activists such as myself.

Colombia's former Foreign Minister Alfredo Vasquez

[Aug 02, 2020] Nationalism and the collpase of the USSR

Aug 02, 2020 | www.unz.com

Curmudgeon , says: August 1, 2020 at 7:15 pm GMT

@onebornfree w.britannica.com/topic/commonwealth-political-science">https://www.britannica.com/topic/commonwealth-political-science
What is labelled socialism today is nowhere near what the original socialists would consider socialism, which is closer to the co-operative movement and anarchy than communism.

On the other hand, Marxism (communism) is about complete state control and was international in scope. One (of many) reason for the breakdown of the USSR, was that it was, in fact, becoming socialistic in many countries, starting with Hungary in 1956 then Czechoslovakia in 1968 becoming nationalist. Even Russia was becoming more nationalistic.

Miro23 , says: August 2, 2020 at 2:30 am GMT
@Druid unknown in Russia 1917. It wasn't really understood. In contrast Neo-Bolshevism USA 2020 has the prior example of Bolshevism Russia 1917 to learn from and check the mechanism.

– The Russian population 1917 held some arms (which were immediately made illegal – retention carrying the death penalty). But nothing at all like the vast armoury presently held by the US public.

– The Bolsheviks successful subverted the demoralized and badly organized Russian Imperial Army (at least in Petrograd where it mattered). The US military is in a much better state, and is maybe not so attracted by SJW/BLM/Antifa (middle and lower ranks).

[Aug 02, 2020] Austria Confirms OPCW Report On Skripal-Faking By The British, Exposes FT Lies Cover-Up -

Aug 02, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

Austria Confirms OPCW Report On Skripal-Faking By The British, Exposes FT Lies & Cover-Up by Tyler Durden Sun, 08/02/2020 - 08:10 Twitter Facebook Reddit Email Print

Authored by John Helmer via Dances With Bears blog,

Austria officially confirmed this week that the British Government's allegation that Novichok, a Russian chemical warfare agent, was used in England by GRU, the Russian military intelligence service, in March 2018, was a British invention.

Investigations in Vienna by four Austrian government ministries, the BVT intelligence agency, and by Austrian prosecutors have revealed that secret OPCW reports on the blood testing of Sergei and Yulia Skripal, copies of which were transferred to the Austrian government, did not reveal a Russian-made nerve agent.

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Two reports, published in Vienna this week by the OE media group and reporter Isabelle Daniel, reveal that the Financial Times publication of the cover-page of one of the OPCW reports exposed a barcode identifying the source of the leaked documents was the Austrian government. The Austrian Foreign Ministry and the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz und Terrorismusbekämpfung (BVT), the domestic intelligence agency equivalent to MI5 or FBI, have corroborated the authenticity of the documents.

The Austrian disclosures also reveal that in London the Financial Times editor, Roula Khalaf, four of the newspaper's reporters, and the management of the Japanese-owned company have fabricated a false and misleading version of the OPCW evidence and have covered up British government lying on the Skripal blood testing and the Novichok evidence.

On Wednesday afternoon this week, OE24, a news portal of the OE media group in Vienna, broke the first story (lead image, right) that the barcode found on the OPCW document photograph published in London had been traced to several Austrian state ministries . The next day, OE political editor Isabelle Daniel reported the Austrian Foreign, Defence and Economics Ministries had received copies of the barcoded OPCW dossier, and that the Justice Ministry and prosecutors were investigating "potential moles".

Daniel also quoted a Foreign Ministry source as saying its copy of the documents had been securely stored in its disarmament department safe, and that there were "no tips" the leak had come from there. Daniel also quoted a BVT spokesman as confirming the authenticity of the OPCW file had been verified. "We have checked it recently. Officially it has not come to us."

Left: Isabelle Daniel of OE, Vienna. Right, Roula Khalaf Razzouk, editor of the Financial Times since her recent appointment by the Nikkei group, the newspaper's owner. Her full name and concealment of her Lebanese political and business interests can be followed here . The names of the four Financial Times reporters who have participated in the misrepresentation and cover-up are Paul Murphy, investigations editor; Dan McCrum, a reporter; Helen Warrell, NATO correspondent; and Max Seddon of the Moscow bureau.

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The leak had been an "explosive secret betrayal" and a criminal investigation was under way, OE24 reported. OE is a privately owned Austrian media group, based in Vienna. It publishes a newspaper, the news portal OE.at, radio and television.

The Financial Times report first exposing the OPCW documents appeared on July 9. Details of how the newspaper fabricated the interpretation the OPCW had corroborated Russian involvement in the Novichok attack can be read here . For the full Skripal story, read the book .

At an OPCW Executive Council meeting on April 14, 2018, five weeks after the Skripal attack, the British Government confirmed that a few days earlier "all States parties" had received copies of the OPCW dossier. This included Austria, as the Viennese sources now acknowledge.

Source: https://www.opcw.org/

"The OPCW responded promptly to our request to send their experts to the United Kingdom," declared Peter Wilson, the British representative to the OPCW on April 14, 2018.

"They conducted a highly professional mission. The OPCW's designated laboratories have also responded professionally and promptly. What the Director-General said was really important on this, and the Technical Secretariat's presentation shows how professional that work was. The report the Technical Secretariat presented to us on 11 April was thorough and methodical. The Technical Secretariat responded quickly to our request to share that report with all States Parties. All have had the chance to see the quality of that work."

Wilson went on to say:

"As you know, on 4 March Yulia and Sergei Skripal were poisoned in Salisbury, the United Kingdom, with a chemical weapon, which United Kingdom experts established to be a Novichok. OPCW has now clearly verified those findings."

The Austrian copy of the OPCW file now confirms this was a misrepresentation of the chemical formula and other evidence the OPCW had gathered.

Wilson went on to conclude:

"the identification of the nerve agent used is an essential piece of technical evidence in our investigation, neither DSTL's [Defence Science and Technology Laboratory at Porton Down] analysis, nor the OPCW's report, identifies the country or laboratory of origin of the agent used in this attack. So let me also set out the wider picture, which leads the United Kingdom to assess that there is no plausible alternative explanation for what happened in Salisbury than Russian State responsibility. We believe that only the Russian Federation had the technical means, operational experience, and the motive to target the Skripals."

The first qualifying sentence was the British truth; the conclusion was the British lie. The Austrian evidence now verifies there was no evidence of a Russian source in the blood and other test samples; no evidence of Novichok; and no evidence to corroborate the British allegations of a Russian chemical warfare attack.

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In its report, the Financial Times displayed a partial photograph of the cover-page of one of the OPCW documents in its possession (lead image, left). A classification stamp appears to be showing through the title page, but no barcode is visible. The London newspaper appears to have cropped the published picture so as to hide the barcode . That concealment -- proof of the Austrian source – allowed the newspaper reporters to claim the source of the document was unknown, probably Russian, as the headline implied: "Wirecard executive Jan Marsalek touted Russian nerve gas documents."

A British military source was reported as claiming "the documents were 'unlikely' to have come from OPCW member states in western Europe or the US." Khalaf and her reporters added: "The OPCW, which is based in The Hague, said this week that it was investigating the matter, but declined further comment. The Kremlin did not immediately respond to a request for comment." With the barcode in their possession but hidden, they knew they were publishing a combination of disinformation and lies.

The disclosure of the barcode to the Austrians appears to have followed after they had requested it from Khalaf. She checked with her superiors in the newspaper management before handing it over. They believed they were doing so in secret.

It is not known if Motohiro Matsumoto , the Nikkei executive responsible for the London publishing company, was alerted and gave his authorization; he refuses to answer questions. Matsumoto, one of the five directors of Financial Times Ltd., is the general manager of Nikkei's global business division. He takes his running orders from Nikkei's chairman and a long-time media executive, Tsuneo Kita. Matsumoto replaced Hirotomo Nomura at the head of the Financial Times on March 25, 2020. When Nikkei bought the newspaper from Pearson Plc in 2015, Nikkei became its sole proprietor.

The Austrian press has yet to report how the barcode was obtained from the newspaper. Because the BVT and state prosecutors in Vienna are involved in their search for the "moles", it is likely they contacted their counterparts at MI5 and the Home Office, and that the newspaper agreed to hand over its copy of the OPCW file to the latter. The collaboration of the journalists with the secret services to falsify evidence against Moscow in the Novichok story remains a sensitive secret.

Source: https://m.oe24.at/

Khalaf has refused repeated requests for comment. Max Seddon, the newspaper's Moscow reporter, was also asked for additional information about the photograph of the cover-page. He will not answer.

[Aug 02, 2020] Modern jihadism was co-invented in 1979 by Saudi Prince

Aug 02, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

LuBa , Aug 1 2020 7:13 utc | 77

"Modern jihadism was co-invented in 1979 by Saudi Prince"

Yes after the Mecca siege they found the potential of wahabi islam(redefined by Qutb teachings in the previous years) to be used against the enemy of zionism.Without 20 November 1979 (not in Teheran but in Mecca) there wouldn't have been any suicide bomber in the years after.Those men with long beards and strong motivations were a great threat to the saudi family..they had no fear to die for their struggle because the struggle was all their life...They had a genuine hatred for usa and saudi corrupted state.It was only a matter of annihilating them internally and at the same time promoting their birth everywhere in the Sunni Islamic world...to serve the zionist scum.

[Aug 02, 2020] Libya invasion was pure neocolonialism

Aug 02, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

H.Schmatz , Aug 1 2020 13:41 utc | 100

The "no-fly zone" issue is covered in a second video suggested when this one almost ends...It is also told that Obama opposed at first the destruction of Lybia, along with the important participation of some NATO superpowers on basis of geopolitical interests and, of course, looting of always...It was a coalition of the willing with assorted goals...althoughm ainly benefitted the US in its cursade on the ME...

All these wars have happened to destroy kinda powerful nations ( competing economic/military powers...), like Lybia in Africa and Yugoslavia in Europe on behalf of others´hegemony...

[Aug 02, 2020] The seal story about Benghazi has appeared in a short video. Hillary and Stevens caught in a massive gun running scheme.

Aug 02, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Bob Dvorak , Aug 1 2020 2:11 utc | 53

The seal story about Benghazi has appeared in a short video. Hillary and Stevens caught in a massive gun running scheme.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fc4wrSIOUxc

Jackrabbit , Aug 1 2020 2:58 utc | 59

Bob Dvorak @Aug1 2:11 #53

Great video that everyone should see (especially clueless Americans) but it should've included Obama's illegally turning a "no fly" Zone into a bombing campaign.

The UN had only authorized a "no fly" zone and Obama never sought authorization from Congress for war.

!!

juliania , Aug 1 2020 4:03 utc | 64

Okay, I'll bite, Jackrabbit - sorry if I haven't followed your line of thinking on CIA and Hillary ...wanting to elect Trump??? That really doesn't make sense to me. That would mean everything about the really outrageous campaign against Trump's presidency has been orchestrated so we chumps wouldn't guess they really were secretly rejoicing?

Sorry, I just don't buy it. But of course, I could be wrong. Who knows what dark deeds are being secretly devised behind all these curtains of lies? (A good reason to suppose there is a God who sees and who will someday reveal to us mortals what has really been going on. I can't wait to find out.)

[Aug 02, 2020] Iran launching very clever non-silo dug down ballistic missiles. Anyone can copy the idea in earth or sand, it looks relatively simple and perhaps genius.

Aug 02, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Sunny Runny Burger , Aug 1 2020 0:42 utc | 41

News I noticed:

...Iran launching very clever non-silo dug down ballistic missiles. Anyone can copy the idea in earth or sand, it looks relatively simple and perhaps genius. It should only require minimal additions similar to when missiles are "containerized"/vertical on ships.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dytSOhfg1UM for the video.

· "W93/MK7 Navy Warhead -- Developing Modern Capabilities to Address Current and Future Threats" - Pentagon, Energy Department's National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), unclassified 5-page white paper, May 2020 is still not "leaked". Seems a dud: reading between the lines not written no one was convinced and instead complained about anyone saying there's any problems (how "exceptional").

Grieved , Aug 1 2020 0:54 utc | 43

@41 Sunny Runny Burger

That's a great little video clip. Missiles erupting out of the ground. Trying to guess where the next one's coming from. I'll call it genius.

Peter AU1 , Aug 1 2020 1:54 utc | 49

Millenium Challenge 2002

"Red, commanded by retired Marine Corps Lieutenant General Paul K. Van Riper, adopted an asymmetric strategy, in particular, using old methods to evade Blue's sophisticated electronic surveillance network. Van Riper used motorcycle messengers to transmit orders to front-line troops and World-War-II-style light signals to launch airplanes without radio communications.

Red received an ultimatum from Blue, essentially a surrender document, demanding a response within 24 hours. Thus warned of Blue's approach, Red used a fleet of small boats to determine the position of Blue's fleet by the second day of the exercise. In a preemptive strike, Red launched a massive salvo of cruise missiles that overwhelmed the Blue forces' electronic sensors and destroyed sixteen warships. The losses were as follows: one aircraft carrier, ten cruisers and five of six amphibious ships. An equivalent success in a real conflict would have resulted in the deaths of over 20,000 service personnel. Soon after the cruise missile offensive, another significant portion of Blue's navy was "sunk" by an armada of small Red boats, which carried out both conventional and suicide attacks that capitalized on Blue's inability to detect them as well as expected."

Iranians are not part of the rules based order it seems - not that the bad guys in the war game was played by Iranians.

Grieved , Aug 1 2020 4:29 utc | 69

@50 Peter AU1 & #55 Bemildred

In the 2002 war game, the US was defeated in 2 days - lost a massive part of its fleet or some such. So they stopped the game and changed the rules. I think that's when Van Riper quit the game in disgust, and of course ultimately went public. But even with the rules changed, the US still lost.

The point about these exercises is that they are real endeavors to create a playbook that will result in victory. Millennium cost about $200 million to stage, and even for the Pentagon that was war-fighting money spent to try to get somewhere. The next point even more crucial is that in EVERY exercise the Pentagon has undertaken since this game, the US is ALWAYS beaten by Iran.

This is the point I frequently try to hammer home here - the Pentagon has no map whatsoever that leads to victory in warfare against Iran. Any warfare will always result in defeat for the US - and we know how unpalatable a public defeat would be for the whole MIC stream of income. The fundamentals are stacked against the US. It's very similar to Israel's position right now against Hezbollah. For both the US and Israel, neither one can move forward along the path it wants to go because its foe simply cannot be beaten by any stratagem it can devise.

Sharmine Narwani talked about this extensively in her interview with Ross Ashcroft last year on Renegade, Inc. It's an excellent interview. She's expert on the geopolitics of the ME and laid out many of the fundamentals that create and support Iran's unwavering position in this theater and in the great game:

What's the real plan with Iran?

I keep this episode bookmarked largely to share it here from time to time. You will both enjoy the interview. The takeaway is that the US can bluster all it wants, but it dare not cross a red line with Iran - such as it already has, for example, with Soleimani's murder, and for which it has not yet suffered its full punishment, which is complete banishment from the ME (and which I am convinced Iran will ultimately achieve).

~~

When your generals tell you constantly, daily, that you can't go into battle in a certain theater, you are free to bluster all you want. In fact, it's all you have left, and you pour all your feeble energy into it. Thus, the US.

Sakineh Bagoom , Aug 1 2020 6:44 utc | 75

Peter AU1 50 & 55 Bemildred & Grieved 70
RE: Millenium Challenge 2002
And yet, I keep pointing out that, that was 18 long years ago, when Iran did NOT have the following:

Terminal guidance for it's ballistics
Armed drone technology
Satellite to map out the battlefield
Proximity to Israel (two countries sat between Iran and Israel)
Electronic surveillance and response, like spoofing a drone to land in Iran.
S300 and home built variations
Cyber
Experience watching coalition forces fighting in ME
Etc, etc,

Peter AU1 , Aug 1 2020 9:03 utc | 84

Re Iran

US could not attack Iran conventionally but with Trump's earlier fixation on nuclear weapons I think he was going to give that a try. Putin must have thought so to as he very publicly laid Russia's nuclear umbrella over Iran and maintained the status quo.

It was after this meeting the Russian envoy made the point plain and public in the presser that Iran was an ally of Russia.
https://www.newsweek.com/russia-iran-us-israel-drone-ally-1445802

Richard Steven Hack , Aug 1 2020 9:55 utc | 86

Posted by: Peter AU1 | Aug 1 2020 9:03 utc | 88 US could not attack Iran conventionally

The US is perfectly capable of *attacking* Iran conventionally. The only thing to question is whether the US can *defeat* Iran in the sense that Iran "surrenders" officially to the US. *That* is in my view impossible short of the US actually killing thirty million Iranians by nuking Iran.

Which in turn I believe even Trump would not do. He really would get Pentagon pushback on that, as well as from every US ally and the UNSC, because no one wants to get the geopolitical hear from being the first country to use nuclear weapons against a non-nuclear country (this isn't WWII any more, before anyone brings up Hiroshima.)

As for Putin declaring Iran an ally, that does *not* mean that Putin would risk a nuclear confrontation with the US over Iran. Not going to happen - even if the US nuked Tehran. Putin's charge is to take care of Russian interests - and having Iran as an "ally and partner" does qualify as an "interest". But it is *not* an *overriding* interest. Putin would not be authorized by the Russian people to risk their country being nuked over a bunch of Persians and if he did, they'd kick his butt out at the next election - and rightly so.

Current Russian military doctrine (discussed here specifies the following:


The section on use begins by repeating the formulation in the last two Russian military doctrines (translation from the Russian Embassy in the U.K.): "The Russian Federation shall reserve the right to use nuclear weapons in response to the use of nuclear and other types of weapons of mass destruction against it and/or its allies, as well as in the event of aggression against the Russian Federation with the use of conventional weapons when the very existence of the state is in jeopardy." Like the doctrines, Foundations underlines that the president of the Russian Federation makes any decision to use nuclear weapons. However, unlike the doctrines, it then, in paragraph 19, outlines four conditions that could allow for (not require) nuclear use:

credible information that Russia is under ballistic missile attack (the missiles don't have to be nuclear -- this isn't specified -- but in many cases, it's hard to tell before they land);
the use of nuclear or other WMD by an adversary against Russian territory or that of its allies;
adversary actions against Russian critical government or military infrastructure that could undermine Russia's capacity for nuclear retaliation (so, for example, a cyber attack on Russia's command and control -- or perhaps one that targets Russian leadership could also qualify); and, finally,
conventional aggression against Russia that threatens the very existence of the state.

The primary requirement is the use of nukes or "WMDs" against Russia, or conventional weapons where their use is an "existential threat", i.e., Russia is about to be defeated on a conventional battlefield.

the phrase "and/or its allies" almost certainly does *not* include Iran. There are two "alliances" to which Russia is a party, according to Wikipedia:
1) Collective Security Treaty Organization: Military alliance with 6 former Soviet republics: Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia and Tajikistan.
2) Union State: an alliance between Russia and Belarus (also already covered by 1).

Russia and Iran do not have any formal military or mutual-defense alliance agreements. Russia and Iran are "allied" only with regard to Syria and Islamic terrorism in general. Russia is willing to sell Iran arms, obviously. Equally obviously, that does not indicate a willingness to risk nuclear war.

Putin made the following statement in June of 2019:

After talks Friday with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani at the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit in the Kyrgyz capital of Bishkek, Putin said that "relations between Russia and Iran are multifaceted, multilateral" and that "this concerns the economy, this concerns the issues of stability in the region, our joint efforts to combat terrorism, including in Syria."

Nothing in that statement indicates a willingness to use Russia's nuclear arsenal to threaten the US to prevent a US attack on Iran.

It is of course *possible* that some in the Pentagon, the Deep State, and/or Congress, may interpret that to be the case. But I think the primary restraint on any President would be the heat for a first use of nukes on a non-nuclear country - even if the alleged "reason" was that Iran was developing nukes.
Even severe damage to US Navy assets in the region would not be sufficient to justify the use of nukes against Iran, in particular because the only viable target for nukes would Tehran or some other major Iranian city.

It is just possible that a tactical nuke would be used against a heavily buried facility involved in nuclear weapons development (or more precisely, alleged to be so - because Iran won't be developing nukes regardless of any US attack.) But even that would likely produce more heat than the US would want - and if it was done, it would be done as covertly as possible and then denied by the US. And even in that case, Russia would not threaten a nuclear response over that.

Of course, if the US leadership were to become even more unhinged than Trump, or say, the Russian leadership after Putin were to become more hawkish, then all bets are off. But under current conditions, it's not going to happen.

Peter AU1 , Aug 1 2020 10:52 utc | 90

Putin's speech March 1 2018

http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/56957
"In this connection, I would like to note the following. We are greatly concerned by certain provisions of the revised nuclear posture review, which expand the opportunities for reducing and reduce the threshold for the use of nuclear arms. Behind closed doors, one may say anything to calm down anyone, but we read what is written. And what is written is that this strategy can be put into action in response to conventional arms attacks and even to a cyber-threat.

I should note that our military doctrine says Russia reserves the right to use nuclear weapons solely in response to a nuclear attack, or an attack with other weapons of mass destruction against the country or its allies, or an act of aggression against us with the use of conventional weapons that threaten the very existence of the state. This all is very clear and specific.

As such, I see it is my duty to announce the following. Any use of nuclear weapons against Russia or its allies, weapons of short, medium or any range at all, will be considered as a nuclear attack on this country. Retaliation will be immediate, with all the attendant consequences."

Patrushev from my link above.
"In the context of the statements made by our partners with regard to a major regional power, namely Iran, I would like to say the following: Iran has always been and remains our ally and partner, with which we are consistently developing relations both on bilateral basis and within multilateral formats"


Patrushev went to the meeting as a presidential envoy. After Putin's 2018 speech, I wondered who Russia considered an ally as I had not seen Russia name any. I tend to think Patrushev had reason to publicly name Iran as an ally at that presser. My guess is Israel and US were trying to get Russia to stand aside while they attacked Iran.

Richard Steven Hack , Aug 1 2020 13:20 utc | 96

Posted by: Peter AU1 | Aug 1 2020 10:52 utc | 95 I tend to think Patrushev had reason to publicly name Iran as an ally at that presser. My guess is Israel and US were trying to get Russia to stand aside while they attacked Iran.

Nonetheless, the two statements do not constitute an official declaration that Iran is an ally in the sense of being under the Russian nuclear umbrella, as the countries in the list I quoted from Wikipedia are. The Collective Security Treaty Organization "charter reaffirmed the desire of all participating states to abstain from the use or threat of force. Signatories would not be able to join other military alliances or other groups of states,[3] while aggression against one signatory would be perceived as an aggression against all."

That's a military alliance which specifically declares those countries as "allies" in the military sense and specifically states that an attack on any of them is an attack on all of them.

Putin nor anyone else in Russia has specifically stated that Iran is an ally in those same terms. Putin's reference to Iran as an ally applied to economic matters and the security of Syria.

There is an article at Stratfor which I cannot access, but the tagline says: "Nikolai Bordyuzha, secretary-general of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), said Feb. 25 [2020] that Moscow's nuclear umbrella has been extended to other CSTO member countries..." In other words, the nuclear umbrella didn't even cover the former Soviet Union countries until this year, apparently. From another article I found, Russia extended the umbrella to Belarus in 2000. Another article I found says this:


Finally, Russia has created its own military alliance through the Collective Security Treaty (1992) or "Tashkent treaty". In 2002, the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) was created, with a view to parallel NATO. As of June 2009, the organization included Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kirghizia, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan, which are implicitly covered by a Russian nuclear guarantee. Even though Russian officials refer sometimes to all Commonwealth of
Independent States (CIS) countries being protected by Moscow's nuclear forces, it is reasonable to assume that only CSTO countries are effectively under the Russian nuclear umbrella.

So I simply don't see any reference anywhere to Russia explicitly extending its nuclear umbrella outside of the former Soviet Bloc countries. Again, all of the references made by Russians - Putin or otherwise - to Iran as an "ally" do not reference a military dimension. Of course, it's always *possible* that Putin or some future Russian leader *would* extend that umbrella to Iran, depending on future circumstances. But it seems highly unlikely.

I repeat: There is no chance that Russia will go to nuclear war over Iran. Or even conventional war against US military assets engaged in an attack on Iran because that would risk escalation to a nuclear level. The most Russia will do is supply arms and intelligence to Iran.

[Aug 02, 2020] Skripal might be the true "primary sub-source" for Steele's "dirty dossier"

Aug 02, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Jackrabbit , Aug 1 2020 2:36 utc | 55

juliania @Aug1 1:58 #51

the Skripals being triple spies

Well, I actually disagree with this part.

John Helmer thinks Skripal was going to bring back to Russia info related to Porton Down and military secrets.

But I suspect that Skripal was actually the true "primary sub-source" for Steele's "dirty dossier" (I've voiced this suspicion several times now at moa). I think Skripal knew that that material in the dossier was false and that it was MEANT to be false. Because it was intended to throw shade on Russia without actually tarnishing Trump.

Why would Hillary and the Democrats want a dossier that wasn't true? Trick question! CIA wanted to elect Trump as a nationalist President that would counter Russia and China. Hillary was almost certainly in on it - along with other top US officials (each of whom feel it was the patriotic thing to do).

IMO Skripal was probably trying to run back to Russia. Not necessary to bring British secrets but because he didn't feel safe because he knew too much about the operation to elect Trump.

That's my conspiracy theory -story and I'm stickin' to it! LOL. Until/unless there's info that disproves it.

!!

[Aug 01, 2020] Executed Turkish general exposed misuse of Qatari funds for Syria extremists- Report - Al Arabiya English

Highly recommended!
Aug 01, 2020 | english.alarabiya.net

Executed Turkish general exposed misuse of Qatari funds for Syria extremists: Report Semih Terzi, a general within the Turkish army, was executed on the night of the 2016 Turkish coup attempt against Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. (Photo via the stockholmcf) Ismaeel Naar, Al Arabiya English Friday 31 July 2020 Text size A A A

me title=

The Turkish army executed a senior general within its ranks after he had discovered the embezzlement of illicit Qatari funding for extremists in Syria by public officials, according to a 2019 court testimony unveiled in a report by the Nordic Monitor.

Semih Terzi, a general within the Turkish army, was executed on the night of the 2016 Turkish coup attempt against Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

For all the latest headlines follow our Google News channel online or via the app.

The new allegations unveiled in court testimonies from a hearing March 20, 2019at Ankara 17th High Criminal Court were made by Col. Fırat Alakuş, an army officer working within Turkey's Special Forces Command's intelligence section.

According to the Nordic Monitor, Terzi is said to have been executed after discovering that Lt. Gen. Zekai Aksakallı, in charge of the Special Forces Command at the time, was working covertly with Turkey's National Intelligence Organization (MIT) "in running illegal and clandestine operations in Syria for personal gain while dragging Turkey deeper into the Syrian civil war."

Read more:

Qatar, Turkey, Muslim Brotherhood leading campaign to 'vilify' UAE: Gargash

Turkey leans on Qatar for $15 billion deal as economy stutters amid coronavirus

Syrian refugees file law suit against Qatar's Doha Bank for terror funding

"[Terzi] knew how much of the funding delivered [to Turkey] by Qatar for the purpose of purchasing weapons and ammunition for the opposition was actually used for that and how much of it was actually used by public officials, how much was embezzled," Col. Alakuş was quoted as saying by the Nordic Monitor via his court testimony.

The Nordic Monitor said in its report published on Friday that Alakuş testified that Aksakallı had run a gang outside of the chain of command within the Turkish intelligence that was involved in illicit activities.

The report further alleged that Terzi was aware of public officials involved in oil-smuggling operations with ISIS from Syria.

"[Terzi] was aware of who in the government was involved in an oil-smuggling operation from Syria, how the profits were shared, and what activities they were involved in," Alakuş said in his testimony.

[Aug 01, 2020] This withdrawal of American troops and personnel from Germany points to the direction of European long-term decline in importance, as it seems the USA is opting for a more aggressive model against the Russian Federation. Either it believes the Russian Federation will fall soon (after Putin's death) or it is giving up Europe altogether

Aug 01, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

vk , Jul 31 2020 18:08 utc | 16

AFRICOM confirms HQ is leaving Stuttgart, German defense minister says US withdrawal is 'regrettable'

USA's shift to the Western Pacific (Australia) is taking shape. This withdrawal of American troops and personnel from Germany points to the direction of European long-term decline in importance, as it seems the USA is opting for a more aggressive, less in-depth model against the Russian Federation. Either it believes the Russian Federation will fall soon (after Putin's death) or it is giving up Europe altogether. Both scenarios imply in Germany's (the EU) decline.

[Jul 31, 2020] John Helmer continues his superb reporting and commentary on Skripals false flag

Jul 31, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Jackrabbit , Jul 31 2020 14:39 utc | 3

John Helmer continues his superb reporting and commentary. He is truly amazing.


!!

[Jul 30, 2020] It s Official: Pompeo Has Declared Cold War With China It s Official- Pompeo Has Declared Cold War With China - The American Conservative

Notable quotes:
"... Pompeo is a disgusting man. The US Oligarchic Regime is projecting a lot. It is this Regime that does not recognize any other order than its own, and always puts a messianic spin on its discourse. ..."
"... Mike Pompous can be counted upon to do everything possible to torpedo legitimate US interests below the waterline, and then nuke any survivors. ..."
Jul 29, 2020 | www.theamericanconservative.com

Mike Pompeo declared the start of a new Cold War with China last week.

...Pompeo's speech was an expression of this unreasonable and unrealistic view, and it is likely to leave most U.S. allies in East Asia and elsewhere cold. Our allies do not wish for deepening antagonism and strife between the U.S. and China, and if push comes to shove Washington may find itself without much support in the region. Calling for a "new alliance" to oppose China when Trump and Pompeo have done such an abysmal job of managing existing alliances in the region just drives home how divorced from reality the speech was.

... ... ...

The Secretary also relied on a familiar mix of simplistic analysis and threat inflation that he has used so often when talking about Iran: "It's this ideology, it's this ideology that informs his decades-long desire for global hegemony of Chinese communism." Pompeo is falling back on two of the stalest talking points from the Cold War. He interprets the behavior of another state primarily in terms of its official ideology rather than its concrete interests, and he attributes to them a goal of "global hegemony" that they are not pursuing to make them seem more dangerous and powerful than they are. China does seek to be the leading state in its own part of the world, but there is no evidence that they aspire to the global domination that Pompeo claims. A hard-line ideologue and hegemonist himself, Pompeo wrongly assumes that the things that motivate him must also drive the actions of others.

... ... ...

Most of the people on the receiving end of this "engagement" and "empowerment" will likely resent the condescension and interference from a foreign government in their country's affairs. Even if we assume that the vast majority of people in China might wish for a radically different government, they are liable to reject U.S. meddling in what they naturally consider to be their business. But, of course, Pompeo isn't serious about "empowering" the Chinese people, just as he isn't serious about supporting the people of Iran or Venezuela or any of the other countries on Washington's list of official foes. We can see from the economic wars that the U.S. has waged on Iran and Venezuela that the administration is only too happy to impoverish and strangle the people they claim to help. Hard-liners feign concern for the people that they then set out to harm in order to make their aggressive and destructive policies look better to a Western audience, but they aren't fooling anyone these days.

Pompeo's bombastic, caustic style and his personal lack of credibility make him an unusually poor messenger, and the Trump administration is uniquely ill-suited to rally a group of states in common cause. But the main problem with the policy Pompeo promotes is that an intensifying rivalry with China is not in the American interest. The U.S. has found that it is virtually impossible to change the behavior of adversaries when that behavior concerns what they believe to be their core security interests. ...

Fred Bowman • a day ago • edited

I was reading the words that Nixon wrote about China that Pompeo quoted and it occurred to me that if you took out the word "China" and replaced it with the "United States" then that statement would be completely accurate in describing how America acts in the world. In OTW, it's "the Pot calling the Kettle black".

daveyl123 Fred Bowman • a day ago

I wouldn't enjoin the American people with our out-of-touch, out-of-control and (In the cases of Hillary, Waters, Biden and Pelosi..) out of their minds government.

We're so conditioned to global conflicts now, it's merely a matter of the U.S. population learning how to spell the names of foreign leaders and their capitals marked for "Regime Changes", while crossing our fingers in hopes that our buildings will not again be subjected to airliner collisions and collapses in the wake of this aggression.

It would behoove Americans to start pulling on the reins of our bellicose administrations to confine their authority and actions to benefit our citizens.

KennesawJack • a day ago • edited

Your comment that we have coexisted with China for 70 years is not quite accurate. There was this little dust-up called the Korean Conflict as I recall...

kouroi BobPM • a day ago

The main purpose of TPP was to force the Chinese to privatize the State Owned Enterprises, likely via Wall Street.

L RNY • a day ago

The communist Chinese can control our movie, sports, news and entertainment industries by denying them access to China if they don't show China in a positive light or if they show China in a negative life...

daveyl123 John Achterhof • 2 hours ago

You define with accuracy the core tenets of Socialists. Once a government expands to the proportions needed to implement that form of socioeconomic leadership, the character of those leaders becomes tyrannical, while they target segments of their populations for reeducation or elimination. (Abortions would fit that scenario nicely..) Obama was just such a leader, and had he somehow been able to ignore term limits, his administration would have resembled those of any Socialist State.

rayray L RNY • a day ago

All of the policies you mention above would achieve absolutely nothing while inflaming conflict - thus increasingly the problems you outline. These hawkish responses prove the point...the issue isn't that there are or aren't issues, but that the US has lost the ability to have real discussions of these issues with world players and allies.

Much of that is because Trump patently hasn't the temperament, sophistication, or intelligence for discussion and diplomacy - this was proven again and again in the zero sum ineptitude of his private ventures.

The rot of that malignant ineptitude flows down from the head and into every aspect of government, both domestic and foreign. Thus we see his response to every domestic crisis is to inflame division. And the same in the foreign theater. He cannot be gotten rid of soon enough.

daveyl123 L RNY • a day ago • edited

I don't believe our government is so foolish as to contemplate a shooting war with the Chinese. They have nuclear warheads. Their populations are fanatics when it comes to conflicts against them...

L RNY daveyl123 • 21 hours ago

Men will not fight another war nor will women leave their jobs when the men return from war as they did with WWII. There will be no war in Europe simply because Europe (including Russia) is depopulating at such a rapid rate they cant afford a losing more of their population through conflict. I dont see a shooting war with China either. I think that is the purpose of the tariffs and detachment of economies. US intelligence says that China does not want war with the US either. I don't think there is any country that would jump to a pre-emptive nuclear attack in case of a hot war. They dont have the air force superiority or the Navy or superiority in space yet.

Its not the Chinese way. The Chinese wait until they have superiority then they act otherwise they like to fly below the radar and get away with as much espionage and intimidation as possible. The opium wars came about because of the Chinese culture of trade exporting much but importing little thus creating a trade imbalance and indebting their trading partners.

Chinese culture has many forms of achieving superiority without restoring to conflict. The think tanks and experts are predicting that Xi may be pushed out of power by his competitors in the politburo which could defuse the situation. I don't think it will change detaching the economies. After COVID, countries are shifting focus from lowest cost possible to lowest cost and lowest risk possible.

That's why medical instruments, pharmaceuticals, etc are either moving out of China or moving part of their production to the US or they can win against a declining, an indebted power, an over stretched power, etc. Take a lesson with Russia and the US. Russia did not confront the US directly. It used proxies elsewhere around the world. Russia did not want a war with NATO or with the US. That balance kept the peace. If you want peace with China then there is going to have to be some sort of parity or superiority of China's neighbors via an alliance and/or superiority in trade/technology/economy. If you want war then you pacify and try to avoid war leaving a strategic space where your competitor thinks they can win. To avoid war, you need parity or superiority.

kouroi • a day ago

Pompeo is a disgusting man. The US Oligarchic Regime is projecting a lot. It is this Regime that does not recognize any other order than its own, and always puts a messianic spin on its discourse.

The US itself is not a democracy, but as B. Franklin put it from the beginning, is a Republic, which from the birth was design to promote and preserve the haves, the existing Oligarchy. While they looked for a balance of power in order to prevent the rise of an autocrat (the other bugbear of Oligarchy), the main fear of the framers was democracy and the threat of the mob voting for re-distribution...

The success of the socialist state of China is an indication of what might have happened if the socialist block in ensemble wouldn't have suffered the containment enforced by the US. Given the ability to engage in normal economic intercourse with the world, China developed and lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty. Vietnam is another example. But look what is happening with Cuba or North Korea or Venezuela. It is not the socialist system per se, but the blockade of those countries and the crushing economic war that ruins them.

Fortunately, Russia has learned from the mistakes of the past.

It is good that the cards are on the table to see that US Oligarchy wants to rule everything, because it is a corrupting way of life and mind. Because of this, the march for more open societies, with more, no less democracy, and people representation and input is halted.

And of course, in this new Cold War, a lot of civil liberties and freedom of speech will be curtailed. In my neck of the woods we have already experienced individuals assaulting people of Chinese ethnicity. Way to go America!

Jeff Dickey kouroi • 2 hours ago

Mike Pompous can be counted upon to do everything possible to torpedo legitimate US interests below the waterline, and then nuke any survivors. He, along with Barr, Graham, and the rest of the Trump circus, are a cautionary tale for what happens to governments that let ideologues deliberately divorced from reality run a country. They've turned what was once the United States from a superpower to a failed state in an absurdly short period of time. History will be far less kind to these political Bernie Madoffs than to the original financial exemplar.

daveyl123 • a day ago

Wars ain't nothing to bandy about among administration subordinates. Pompeo is not supposed to be declaring wars--hot or cold. Wars cost big money, lives and property. Only the most grave threats against our country should prompt our leaders to even consider conflicts, much less initiate them. The American people cannot just sit back and absorb such profound adjustments to our national security posture and defense expenditures being unilaterally decided by Washington. It is also a condition of conflicts that our civil rights will be under increased constraints. I chuckled a little when China was listed as our 'new' foe. We won't fight the Chinese because we'll have another Vietnam War on our hands. Our troops aren't used to our enemies fighting back. They've been deployed into banana wars against poorly trained and ill equipped armies of Middle East camel holes. The U.S. Armed Forces' new culture, consisting of socially-engineered, politically-corrected soldiers-of-tolerance have yet to confront true fanatics. These facts were known waaaaay back during our Korean War Adventure.

I've always said that if the Chinese are good at anything, it's making more Chinese.

Adriana Pena • a day ago

Because we did not have enough problems already.

"Eramos pocos y pario la abuela"

hooly • a day ago

New Cold War? Bring it on. Competition is good. A strong rival is desired. Instead of a struggle over Ideology, this will be a Civilizational struggle, Western Civilization VS Central Civilization, liberal democracy VS Confucian/Legalist authoritarianism, Euro-America VS the Han Chinese. But this time, is America up to the tast?

During the Cold War we were led by 'Greatest Generation' who lived through the Great Depression and fought in World War II, is today's America of Facebook, Twitter, conspiracy theories, selfies, BLM, safe spaces, Diversity, mass immigration and Woke political correctness run amok up to the task?

While China is a predator, homogeneous, nationalist, revanchist and bent on returning to the glory it thinks it deserves. All I can say is, thank god for nuclear weapons and the Chinese Communist Party for keeping a short leash on the patriotic passions of the Han Chinese.

Myron Hudson • a day ago

We had "an alliance of democracies" in the TPP which was developed to counter China. Of course, it handed much of our domestic sovereignty over to multinational corporations, but that's what you can expect from a corporatist like Obama. Still, might have been better than this.

Anton • 20 hours ago

On point analysis.

Ho Hum • 14 hours ago

I wonder if the Nixon family knew in advance that Pompeo was going to trash Richard Nixon's greatest legacy?

A war between China and the U.S. would not simply be costly for the US - it could end in the destruction of the world as we know it if it turns nuclear. Trump and Pompeo are sociopathic madman. I would not put it past Trump to use Nukes against China. He is just that stupid and evil.

peter mcloughlin • an hour ago

President Nixon's détente with China had an important geopolitical consideration, leverage on Russia. "We're using the China thaw to get the Russians shook", he is quoted to have said. There is much talk among hawks these days of a "new Cold War", with that the confidence it will end like the first one: victory for the west and no nuclear annihilation. But this is a danger illusion: today America is in a hegemonic struggle with China for global dominance. It seems neither side can back down. The present crisis is like the Cold War in one crucial sense – world war must be avoided at all costs. The powers are not heeding the warning of history.
https://www.ghostsofhistory...

[Jul 30, 2020] Donald Trump is 'willing to accept more risk' to counter Beijing aggression, says US official - South China Morning Post

Notable quotes:
"... Join the Singapore Property Festival - a virtual exhibition organised by the South China Morning Post on August 1 to explore a wide range of affordable luxury residential and commercial real estate assets in Singapore, perfect as relocation and investment options. Get property project highlights and market insights from Info Session webinars and LIVE 1-on-1 chats with property taxation, immigration and investment experts. Register for your FREE PASS now. ..."
Jul 30, 2020 | www.scmp.com

Curtis also stuck close to the main theme of US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's high-profile China policy speech last week by arguing that the India border clash and sovereign debt financing used for Belt and Road Initiative projects "fits with a larger pattern of PRC aggression in other parts of the world". Pompeo called for "a new grouping of like-minded nations" to counter China.

Accusing Beijing of "selling cheap armaments and building a base for the 1970s-era submarines that it sold to the Bangladesh Navy in 2016", Curtis also committed to stronger relations with Dhaka.

"We're committed to Bangladesh's long-term success because US interests in the Indo-Pacific depends on a Bangladesh that is peaceful, secure, prosperous healthy and democratic," Curtis said. "We continue to encourage the Bangladeshi government to renew its commitment to democratic values as it prepares to celebrate its 50th anniversary of independence, next year." Big Tech tangles with US lawmakers in antitrust showdown 30 Jul 2020

While the India-China border clash, pressing of maritime claims in the South China Sea, and increasing military and economic pressure on Taiwan may have helped to push countries in the region to cooperate more, Washington will not necessarily benefit, said Ali Wyne, a non-resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and a non-resident fellow at the Modern War Institute.

"China's actions in recent months have compelled many of its neighbours to try and bolster their military capabilities on an accelerated timeline and to intensify their security cooperation with one another," Wyne said.

"For at least two reasons, though, it is unclear that those neighbours would be full participants in a US-led effort to counterbalance China.

"First, geographical proximity and economic dependence constrain the extent to which they can push back against Beijing's assertiveness without undercutting their own national interests," he said. "Second, many of them are reluctant to make common cause with the United States in view of the transactional diplomacy that it has pursued in recent years." China's foreign minister calls on other nations to resist US and stop a new cold war 29 Jul 2020

China's embassy in Washington did not respond to a request for comment.

However, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi on Tuesday called Washington's increasingly hard line against the Chinese government "naked power politics". In a phone call with his French counterpart Jean-Yves Le Drian on Tuesday, Wang said the Trump administration's strategy was to "constantly provoke China's core interests, attack the social system chosen by the Chinese people and slander the ruling party that is closely connected with the Chinese people," according to state news agency Xinhua.

"These actions have lost the most basic etiquette for state-to-state exchanges and have broken through the most basic bottom line of international norms," he said, warning that "the world will fall into a crisis of division, and the future and destiny of mankind will also be in danger".

https://www.youtube.com/embed/c3uzkXgW4yY?rel=0&mute=1&playsinline=1&frameborder=0&autoplay=0&embed_config=%7B%22relatedChannels%22%3A%5B%22UC4SUWizzKc1tptprBkWjX2Q%22%5D%2C%22adsConfig%22%3A%7B%22adTagParameters%22%3A%7B%22iu%22%3A%22%2F8134%2Fscmp%2Fweb%2Fchina_policiespolitics%2Farticle%2Finstream1%22%2C%22cust_params%22%3A%7B%22paid%22%3A1%2C%22scnid%22%3A%223095250%22%2C%22sctid%22%3A%22326745%22%2C%22scsid%22%3A%5B%2291%22%2C%224%22%2C%22318198%22%5D%2C%22articletype%22%3A%22DEFAULT%22%7D%7D%2C%22nonPersonalizedAd%22%3Atrue%7D%7D&enablejsapi=1&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.scmp.com&widgetid=2 US House of Representatives sends Uygur Human Rights Policy Act to Trump's desk for approval

US House of Representatives sends Uygur Human Rights Policy Act to Trump's desk for approval

Curtis was less sanguine about how much Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and other Central Asian republics were resisting China's influence, citing an emphasis by governments in the region on the economic consequences of strained ties with Beijing by protesting the treatment of Muslim minorities in China's far northwest.

China's internment of Muslim Uygurs in the Xinjiang region has drawn international condemnation. The UN has estimated that more than a million Muslims have been detained in camps there for political re-education, but Beijing claims they are vocational training centres aimed at countering religious extremism.

"With regard to the Central Asian countries, I think they're concerned about China's economic influence in their countries, and therefore they very much hedge their comments about the repression of Muslims in Xinjiang province," Curtis said, but added that she expected public condemnation of China in Pakistan and Bangladesh to mount over the issue.

"There has been reticence, which has been disheartening, but I think as these countries see China trying to trying to increase disinformation campaigns you'll start to see pushback from the South Central Asian countries and more speaking out about the treatment of Muslims in Xinjiang," she said. Join the Singapore Property Festival - a virtual exhibition organised by the South China Morning Post on August 1 to explore a wide range of affordable luxury residential and commercial real estate assets in Singapore, perfect as relocation and investment options. Get property project highlights and market insights from Info Session webinars and LIVE 1-on-1 chats with property taxation, immigration and investment experts. Register for your FREE PASS now.

[Jul 30, 2020] Presumptuous Pompeo Pushes Preposterous 'Peking' Policy - Antiwar.com Original

Jul 30, 2020 | original.antiwar.com

Presumptuous Pompeo Pushes Preposterous 'Peking' Policy

by Ray McGovern Posted on July 30, 2020

Quick. Somebody tell Mike Pompeo. The secretary of state is not supposed to play the role of court jester – the laughing stock to the world. There was no sign that any of those listening to his "major China policy statement" last Thursday at the Nixon Library turned to their neighbor and said, "He's kidding, right? Richard Nixon meant well but failed miserably to change China's behavior? And now Pompeo is going to put them in their place?"

Yes, that was Pompeo's message. The torch has now fallen to him and the free world. Here's a sample of his rhetoric:

"Changing the behavior of the CCP [Chinese Communist Party] cannot be the mission of the Chinese people alone. Free nations have to work to defend freedom.

"Beijing is more dependent on us than we are on them (sic). Look, I reject the notion that CCP supremacy is the future the free world is still winning. It's time for free nations to act Every nation must protect its ideals from the tentacles of the Chinese Communist Party. If we bend the knee now, our children's children may be at the mercy of the Chinese Communist Party, whose actions are the primary challenge today in the free world.

"We have the tools. I know we can do it. Now we need the will. To quote scripture, I ask is 'our spirit willing but our flesh weak?' Securing our freedoms from the Chinese Communist Party is the mission of our time, and America is perfectly positioned to lead it because our nation was founded on the premise that all human beings possess certain rights that are unalienable. And it's our government's job to secure those rights. It's a simple and powerful truth. It's made us a beacon of freedom for people all around the world, including people inside of China.

"Indeed, Richard Nixon was right when he wrote in 1967 that "the world cannot be safe until China changes." Now it's up to us to heed his words. Today the free world must respond. "

Trying to Make Sense of It

Over the weekend an informal colloquium-by-email took pace, spurred initially by an op-ed article by Richard Haass critiquing Pompeo's speech. Haass has the dubious distinction of having been director of policy planning for the State Department from 2001 to 2003, during the lead-up to the attack on Iraq. Four months after the invasion he became president of the Council on Foreign Relations, a position he still holds. Despite that pedigree, the points Haass makes in "What Mike Pompeo doesn't understand about China, Richard Nixon and U.S. foreign policy" are, for the most part, well taken.

Haass's views served as a springboard over the weekend to an unusual discussion of Sino-Soviet and Sino-Russian relations I had with Ambassador Chas Freeman, the main interpreter for Nixon during his 1972 visit to China and who then served as US ambassador to Saudi Arabia from 1989 to 1992.

As a first-hand witness to much of this history, Freeman provided highly interesting and not so well-known detail mostly from the Chinese side. I chipped in with observations from my experience as CIA's principal analyst for Sino-Soviet and broader Soviet foreign policy issues during the 1960s and early 1970s.

Ambassador Freeman:

As a participant in that venture: Nixon responded to an apparently serious threat to China by the USSR that followed the Sino-Soviet split. He recognized the damage a Soviet attack or humiliation of China would do to the geopolitical balance and determined to prevent the instability this would produce. He offered China the status of ( what I call ) a "protected state" -- a country whose independent existence is so important strategically that it is something we would risk war over.

Mao was sufficiently concerned about the prospect of a Soviet attack that he held his nose and welcomed this change in Sino-American relations, thereby accepting this American abandonment of the sort of hostility we are again establishing as outlined in Pompeo's psychotic rant of last Thursday. Nixon had absolutely zero interest in changing anything but China's external orientation and consolidating its opposition to the USSR in return for the US propping it up. He also wanted to get out of Vietnam, which he inherited from LBJ, in a way that was minimally destabilizing and thought a relationship with China might help accomplish that. It didn't.

Overall, the maneuver was brilliant. It bolstered the global balance and helped keep the peace. Seven years later, when the Soviets invaded and occupied Afghanistan, the Sino-American relationship immediately became an entente -- a limited partnership for limited purposes.

In addition to its own assistance to the mujahideen , China supplied the United States with the weapons we transferred to anti-Soviet forces ($630 million worth in 1987), supplied us with hundreds or millions of dollars worth of made-to-order Chinese-produced Soviet-designed equipment (e.g. MiG21s) and training on how to use this equipment so that we could learn how best to defeat it, and established joint listening posts on its soil to more than replace the intelligence on Soviet military R&D and deployments that we had just lost to the Islamic revolution in Iran. Sino-American cooperation played a major role in bringing the Soviet Union down.

Apparently, Americans who don't see this are so nostalgic for the Cold War that they want to replicate it, this time with China, a very much more formidable adversary than the USSR ever was.

Those who don't understand what that engagement achieved argue that it failed to change the Chinese political system, something it was never intended to do. They insist that we would be better off returning to 1950s-style enmity with China. Engagement was also not intended to change China's economic system either but it did.

China is now an integral and irreplaceable part of global capitalism. We apparently find this so unsatisfactory that, rather than addressing our own competitive weaknesses, we are attempting to knock China back into government-managed trade and underdevelopment, imagining that "decoupling" will somehow restore the economic strengths our own ill-conceived policies have enfeebled.

A final note. Nixon finessed the unfinished Chinese civil war, taking advantage of Beijing's inability to overwhelm Taipei militarily. Now that Beijing can do that, we are unaccountably un-finessing the Taiwan issue and risking war with China -- a nuclear power -- over what remains a struggle among Chinese -- some delightfully democratic and most not. Go figure.

Ray McGovern:

This seems a useful discussion – perhaps especially for folks with decades-less experience in the day-to-day rough and tumble of Sino-Soviet relations. During the 1960s, I was CIA's principal Soviet analyst on Sino-Soviet relations and in the early 1970s, as chief of the Soviet Foreign Policy Branch and Presidential Daily Brief writer for Nixon, I had a catbird seat watching the constant buildup of hostility between Russia and China, and how, eventually, Nixon and Henry Kissinger saw it clearly and were able to exploit it to Washington's advantage.

I am what we used to be called an "old Russian hand" (like over 50 years worth if you include academe). So, my not being an "old China hand" except for the important Sino-Soviet issue, it should come as no surprise that my vantage point will color my views – especially given my responsibilities for intelligence support for the SALT delegation and ultimately Kissinger and Nixon – during the early 1970s.

I had been searching for a word to apply to Pompeo's speech on China. Preposterous came to mind, assuming it still means "contrary to reason or common sense; utterly absurd or ridiculous." Chas's "psychotic rant" may be a better way to describe it. And it is particularly good that Chas includes several not widely known facts about the very real benefits that accrued to the US in the late 70's and 80's from the Sino-U.S. limited partnership.

Having closely watched the Sino-Soviet hostility rise to the point where, in 1969, the two started fighting along the border on the Ussuri River, we were able to convince top policy makers that this struggle was very real – and, by implication, exploitable.

Moscow's unenthusiastic behavior on the Vietnam War showed that, while it felt obliged to give rhetorical support, and an occasional surface-to-air missile battery, to a fraternal communist country under attack, it had decided to give highest priority to not letting Moscow's involvement put relations with the US into a state of complete disrepair. And, specifically, not letting China, or North Vietnam, mousetrap or goad the Soviets into doing lasting harm to the relationship with the US

At the same time, the bizarre notion prevailing in Averell Harriman's mind at the time as head of the US delegation to the Paris peace talks, was that the Soviets could be persuaded to "use their influence in Hanoi" to pull US chestnuts out of the fire. It was not only risible but also mischievous.

Believe it or not, that notion prevailed among the very smart people in the Office of National Estimates as well as other players downtown. Frustrated, I went public, publishing an article , "Moscow and Hanoi," in Problems of Communism in May 1967.

After Kissinger went to Beijing (July 1971) – followed in February 1972 by Nixon – we Soviet analysts began to see very tangible signs that Moscow's priority was to prevent the Chinese from creating a closer relationship with Washington than the Soviets could achieve.

In short, we saw new Soviet flexibility in the SALT negotiations (and, in the end, I was privileged to be there in Moscow in May 1972 for the signing of the Antiballistic Missile Treaty and the Interim Agreement on Offensive Arms). Even earlier, we saw some new flexibility in Moscow's position on Berlin. To some of us who had almost given up that a Quadripartite Agreement could ever be reached, well, we saw it happen in September 1971. I believe the opening to China was a factor.

So, in sum, in my experience, Chas is quite right in saying, "Overall, the maneuver was brilliant." Again, the Soviets were not about to let the Chinese steal a march in developing better ties with the US And I was able to watch Soviet behavior very closely in the immediate aftermath of the US opening to China.

As for the future of Sino-Soviet relations, we were pretty much convinced that, to paraphrase that "great" student of Russian history, James Clapper, the Russians and Chinese were "almost genetically driven" to hate each other forever. In the 1980s, though, we detected signs of a thaw in ties between Moscow and Beijing.

To his credit, Secretary of State George Shultz was very interested in being kept up to date on this, which I was able to do, even after my tour briefing him on the PDB ran out in 1985. (I was acting chief of the Analysis Group at the Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) for two years (an outstanding outfit later banned by Robert Gates.)

Some Observations

1 – Unless Pompeo had someone else take the exams for him at West Point, he has to be a pretty smart fellow. In other words, I don't think he can claim "Invincible ignorance", (a frame of mind that can let us Catholics off the hook for serious transgressions or ineptitude). The only thing that makes sense to me is that he is a MICIMATTer. MICIMATT for the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-MEDIA-Academia-Think-Tank complex (MEDIA is all caps because it is the sine quo non, the linchpin) For example: Item: "Officials cite 'keeping up with China' as they award a $22.2 billion contract to General Dynamics to build Virginia-class submarines." December 4, 2019

2 – I sometimes wonder what China, or Russia, or anyone thinks of a would-be statesman with the puerile attitude of a US secretary of state who brags: "I was the CIA director. We lied, we cheated, we stole. We had entire training courses. It reminds you of the glory of the American experiment."

3 – If memory serves, annual bilateral trade between China and Russia was between $200 and 400 MILLION during the 1960's. It was $107 BILLION in 2018.

4 – The Chinese no longer wear Mao suits; and they no longer issue 178 "SERIOUS WARNINGS" a year. I can visualize, though, just one authentically serious warning about US naval operations in the South China Sea or the Taiwan Strait. Despite the fact that there is no formal military alliance with Russia, I suspect the Russians might decide to do something troublesome – perhaps even provocative -- in Syria, in Ukraine, or even in some faraway place like the Caribbean – if only to show a modicum of solidarity with their Chinese friends who at that point would be in direct confrontation with US ships far from home. That, I think, is how far we have come in Pompeo's benighted attempt to throw his weight around at both countries.

Three years ago, I published here an article titled "Russia-China Tandem Shifts Global Power." Here are some excerpts:

"Gone are the days when Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger skillfully took advantage of the Sino-Soviet rivalry and played the two countries off against each other, extracting concessions from each. Slowly but surely, the strategic equation has markedly changed – and the Sino-Russian rapprochement signals a tectonic shift to Washington's distinct detriment, a change largely due to US actions that have pushed the two countries closer together.

But there is little sign that today's US policymakers have enough experience and intelligence to recognize this new reality and understand the important implications for US freedom of action. Still less are they likely to appreciate how this new nexus may play out on the ground, on the sea or in the air.

Instead, the Trump administration – following along the same lines as the Bush-43 and Obama administrations – is behaving with arrogance and a sense of entitlement, firing missiles into Syria and shooting down Syrian planes, blustering over Ukraine, and dispatching naval forces to the waters near China.

But consider this: it may soon be possible to foresee a Chinese challenge to "US interests" in the South China Sea or even the Taiwan Strait in tandem with a U.S.-Russian clash in the skies over Syria or a showdown in Ukraine.

A lack of experience or intelligence, though, may be too generous an interpretation. More likely, Washington's behavior stems from a mix of the customary, naïve exceptionalism and the enduring power of the US arms lobby, the Pentagon, and the other deep-state actors – all determined to thwart any lessening of tensions with either Russia or China. After all, stirring up fear of Russia and China is a tried-and-true method for ensuring that the next aircraft carrier or other pricey weapons system gets built.

Like subterranean geological plates shifting slowly below the surface, changes with immense political repercussions can occur so gradually as to be imperceptible until the earthquake. As CIA's principal Soviet analyst on Sino-Soviet relations in the 1960s and early 1970s, I had a catbird seat watching sign after sign of intense hostility between Russia and China, and how, eventually, Nixon and Kissinger were able to exploit it to Washington's advantage.

The grievances between the two Asian neighbors included irredentism: China claimed 1.5 million square kilometers of Siberia taken from China under what it called "unequal treaties" [they were unequal] dating back to 1689. This had led to armed clashes during the 1960s and 1970s along the long riverine border where islands were claimed by both sides.

In the late 1960s, Russia reinforced its ground forces near China from 13 to 21 divisions. By 1971, the number had grown to 44 divisions, and Chinese leaders began to see Russia as a more immediate threat to them than the US

Enter Henry Kissinger, who visited Beijing in July 1971 to arrange the precedent-breaking visit by President Richard Nixon the following February. What followed was some highly imaginative diplomacy orchestrated by Kissinger and Nixon to exploit the mutual fear China and the USSR held for each other and the imperative each saw to compete for improved ties with Washington.

Triangular Diplomacy

Washington's adroit exploitation of its relatively strong position in the triangular relationship helped facilitate major, verifiable arms control agreements between the US and USSR and the Four Power Agreement on Berlin. The USSR even went so far as to blame China for impeding a peaceful solution in Vietnam.

It was one of those felicitous junctures at which CIA analysts could jettison the skunk-at-the-picnic attitude we were often forced to adopt. Rather, we could in good conscience chronicle the effects of the US approach and conclude that it was having the desired effect. Because it was.

Hostility between Beijing and Moscow was abundantly clear. In early 1972, between President Nixon's first summits in Beijing and Moscow, our analytic reports underscored the reality that Sino-Soviet rivalry was, to both sides, a highly debilitating phenomenon.

Not only had the two countries forfeited the benefits of cooperation, but each felt compelled to devote huge effort to negate the policies of the other. A significant dimension had been added to this rivalry as the US moved to cultivate better relations simultaneously with both. The two saw themselves in a crucial race to cultivate good relations with the US

The Soviet and Chinese leaders could not fail to notice how all this had increased the US bargaining position. But we CIA analysts saw them as cemented into an intractable adversarial relationship by a deeply felt set of emotional beliefs, in which national, ideological, and racial factors reinforced one another. Although the two countries recognized the price they were paying, neither seemed able to see a way out. The only prospect for improvement, we suggested, was the hope that more sensible leaders would emerge in each country. But this seemed an illusory expectation at the time.

We were wrong about that. Mao Zedong's and Nikita Khrushchev's successors proved to have cooler heads. The US, under President Jimmy Carter, finally recognized the communist government of China in 1979 and the dynamics of the triangular relationships among the US, China and the Soviet Union gradually shifted with tensions between Beijing and Moscow lessening.

Yes, it took years to chip away at the heavily encrusted mistrust between the two countries, but by the mid-1980s, we analysts were warning policymakers that "normalization" of relations between Moscow and Beijing had already occurred slowly but surely, despite continued Chinese protestations that such would be impossible unless the Russians capitulated to all China's conditions. For their part, the Soviet leaders had become more comfortable operating in the triangular environment and were no longer suffering the debilitating effects of a headlong race with China to develop better relations with Washington.

A New Reality

Still, little did we dream back then that as early as October 2004 Russian President Putin would visit Beijing to finalize an agreement on border issues and brag that relations had reached "unparalleled heights." He also signed an agreement to jointly develop Russian energy reserves.

A revitalized Russia and a modernizing China began to represent a potential counterweight to US hegemony as the world's unilateral superpower, a reaction that Washington accelerated with its strategic maneuvers to surround both Russia and China with military bases and adversarial alliances by pressing NATO up to Russia's borders and President Obama's "pivot to Asia."

The U.S.-backed coup in Ukraine on Feb. 22, 2014, marked a historical breaking point as Russia finally pushed back by approving Crimea's request for reunification and by giving assistance to ethnic Russian rebels in eastern Ukraine who resisted the coup regime in Kiev. [Surprisingly, China decided not to criticize the annexation of Crimea.]

On the global stage, Putin fleshed out the earlier energy deal with China, including a massive 30-year natural gas contract valued at $400 billion. The move helped Putin demonstrate that the West's post-Ukraine economic sanctions posed little threat to Russia's financial survival.

As the Russia-China relationship grew closer, the two countries also adopted remarkably congruent positions on international hot spots, including Ukraine and Syria. Military cooperation also increased steadily. Yet, a hubris-tinged consensus in the US government and academe continues to hold that, despite the marked improvement in ties between China and Russia, each retains greater interest in developing good relations with the US than with each other. "

Good luck with that Secretary Pompeo.

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. His 27-year career as a CIA analyst includes serving as Chief of the Soviet Foreign Policy Branch and preparer/briefer of the President's Daily Brief. He is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS). This originally appeared at Consortium News .

[Jul 30, 2020] USA threatens German Nord Stream 2 contractors

Jul 30, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

MOSCOWEXILE July 27, 2020 at 2:17 am

USA drohen deutschen Auftragnehmern von Nord Stream 2
Stand: 08:32 Uhr

USA threatens German Nord Stream 2 contractors
Status: 08:32 a.m.

https://www.welt.de/wirtschaft/plus212234259/Nord-Stream-2-USA-drohen-deutschen-Auftragnehmern.html?cid=onsite.onsitesearch

Die Welt: США угрожают европейским подрядчикам "Северного потока -- 2"
26 июля 2020

https://yandex.ru/turbo/s/ria.ru/20200726/1574926306.html?promo=navbar&utm_referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fzen.yandex.com

MOSCOW, July 26 – RIA Novosti. The US authorities are increasing pressure on German and European companies involved in the construction of Nord Stream 2, Die Welt newspaper writes, citing sources.

The newspaper notes that the American side has held two videoconferences with gas pipeline contractors from Germany and other European countries to "indicate the far-reaching consequences of their further participation in the project". The conferences were attended by representatives of the US Department of State, Treasury and Department of Energy.

Sources told the newspaper that American officials "have made it very clear that they want to prevent the completion of Nord Stream 2".

The Empire hath spoken!

MARK CHAPMAN July 27, 2020 at 1:35 pm

I suppose the Germans could crumble like cheese, but I personally think it is very unlikely, since doing so would mean total dependence on the United States, with its whims and its 'loyalty tests'. Not necessarily in energy, because Europe would still have to rely heavily on Russia; the United States would be satisfied – for the moment – with Russia continuing to supply its present amounts, provided they went through Ukraine as they do now, so that Russia has to help finance Ukraine's slow development as a US project dedicated to Russia's undoing. But America knows it cannot ever replace Russian supply, although it would ideally like to take more and more market share as its own production (theoretically) continues to increase. It just adamantly does not want Ukraine taken out of the equation, because Ukraine is like a rheostat that Washington can turn up or down as necessary.

No, the USA cannot replace Russian gas, but if Germany gives in now, Washington will run it as a wholly-owned subsidiary for as far as the eye can see. And I believe Germany knows it.

MOSCOWEXILE July 27, 2020 at 11:46 pm

The German foreign minister was making suitable noises for the USA yesterday, saying that in order to rejoin G7, Russia must firstly clean up its relations with Banderastan -- read: stop its "aggression" towards the Ukraine and return the Crimea to its rightful "owner".

The Kremlin responded that it has no intention of rejoining G7.

No mention off the German minister about the Ukraine not complying with the Minsk agreement, about the Ukraine government waging war against its citizens, its stopping the water supply to the Crimea etc., etc. just Big Bad Russia the "Aggressor State" that must learn how to behave itself according "International Law".

MOSCOWEXILE July 27, 2020 at 3:34 am

RT

Russia beating United States in battle for China's huge energy market
July 27, 2020, 11:12 GMT

https://www.rt.com/business/495949-russia-outpaces-us-lng-china/

MOSCOWEXILE July 27, 2020 at 3:36 am

Unbelievable!

They're turning down "Freedom Molecules"?

MARK CHAPMAN July 27, 2020 at 3:37 pm

So it would appear. But it should not be at all surprising – except maybe to Washington – that you cannot shit on China day and night and call it all sorts of unpleasant names, and then expect the sun to come up on happy business partners China and the USA next day. China shares with Russia an imperative that it be respected; you don't have to like it, but you must speak respectfully and politely about it, and limit your accusations to what you can prove.

Washington likes to unload the mockery by the truckload, and then, when it's time to do business, say "Aw, shucks – I were just funnin'", and have business go forward as if the insults had never been voiced. Or, worse yet, insist that it is sticking to its positions, but you must do business with it anyway because it is the world leader and there is nowhere else to turn.

Natural Gas in the USA is at what is referred to as a 'messy bottom', and both production and sales are below year-over-year average. Yet it is plain – they say so, in so many words – that America expects sales growth to come from China and India.

"The International Energy Agency expects LNG, the main driver of international gas trade, to expand by 21% in 2019-2025, reaching 585 billion cubic meters annually. The growth will come from China and India, the IEA said in its Gas 2020 report published Wednesday. Trade will increase at a slower pace than liquefaction capacity additions, limiting the prospects of a tighter market, it said in the report."

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/shell-ceo-says-lng-market-will-recover-to-pre-virus-levels/ar-BB15imQu

I think he's probably right that the natural gas market will expand by a significant number. I'm just not sure the USA will play much of a part in it. And China is on solid ground, no matter how much America screams and roars; Russian gas is cheaper, and the logistics chain is short and reliable.

WARREN July 28, 2020 at 5:31 pm

https://platform.twitter.com/embed/index.html?dnt=true&embedId=twitter-widget-1&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1288112640493928449&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fthenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com%2F2020%2F07%2F05%2Fhow-to-make-a-brick-from-straw-and-bullshit%2F&siteScreenName=wordpressdotcom&theme=light&widgetsVersion=9066bb2%3A1593540614199&width=550px


MARK CHAPMAN July 28, 2020 at 6:06 pm

Obviously, for this group, 'bridging the gap' in 'threat perception' does NOT mean coaxing Poland and Lithuania to realize that Nord Stream II is just a commercial venture. It means coaxing France and Germany to accept and amplify Poland and Lithuania's paranoia and loathing of Russia. Equally obviously, America's determination to be Europe's Daddy with the LNG is just a commercial venture. Nothing political about it, and if the USA ever found itself in the position where it could leverage its energy sales to Europe to make Europe do things it otherwise would not do willingly, why, it would never use that power. Only the Russians weaponize energy.

The 'panel' is simply a parade of Atlanticists, a neoconservative wet dream. There are no realists there. Fortunately, US approval of the project is not required.


[Jul 30, 2020] Financial capitalism is bloodthirstily by definition as it needs new markets. It fuels wars.

Jul 29, 2020 | crookedtimber.org

steven t johnson 07.29.20 at 3:14 pm (50 )

PS likbez@46 reminded me of a line from the movie Reds. Warren Beatty's John Reed spoke of people who "though Karl Marx wrote a good antitrust law." This was not a favorable comment. The confusion of socialism and what might be called populism is quite, quite old. Jack London's The Iron Heel has its hero pointing out even before the Great (Class) War that the normal operations of capitalism, concentration and centralization, destroyed the middle class paradise of equal competition. It wasn't conspiracies.

likbez 07.29.20 at 3:30 pm

@steven t johnson 07.29.20 at 3:14 pm (51)

Jack London's The Iron Heel has its hero pointing out even before the Great (Class) War that the normal operations of capitalism, concentration and centralization, destroyed the middle class paradise of equal competition.

I think the size of the USA military budget by itself means the doom for the middle class, even without referring to famous Jack London book (The Iron Heel is cited by George Orwell 's biographer Michael Shelden as having influenced Orwell's most famous novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.).

Wall Street and MIC (especially intelligence agencies ; Allen Dulles was a Wall Street lawyer) are joined at the hip. And they both fully control MSM. As Jack London aptly said:

"The press of the United States? It is a parasitic growth that battens on the capitalist class. Its function is to serve the established by moulding public opinion, and right well it serves it."
― Jack London, The Iron Heel

Financial capitalism is bloodthirstily by definition as it needs new markets. It fuels wars. In a sense, Bolton is the symbol of financial capitalism foreign policy.

It is important to understand that finance capitalism creates positive feedback loop in the economy increasing instability of the system. So bubbles are immanent feature of finance capitalism, not some exception or the result of excessive greed.

[Jul 29, 2020] The UK government didn't find evidence because it didn't look for it, and backs increased powers for intelligence agencies and media censorship as a result

Jul 29, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

WARREN July 27, 2020 at 10:07 am

https://www.youtube.com/embed/NG17cgS2-sU?version=3&rel=1&fs=1&autohide=2&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&wmode=transparent

UK 'Russia report' fear-mongers about meddling yet finds no evidence
10,974 views•25 Jul 2020

The Grayzone
111K subscribers
Pushback with Aaron Maté

A long-awaited UK government report finds no evidence of Russian meddling in British domestic politics, including the 2016 Brexit vote. But that hasn't stopped the fear-mongering: the report claims the UK government didn't find evidence because it didn't look for it, and backs increased powers for intelligence agencies and media censorship as a result. Afshin Rattansi, a British journalist and host of RT's "Going Underground", responds.

Guest: Afshin Rattansi, British journalist and host of RT's "Going Underground."

[Jul 29, 2020] How Modern Jihadism Became Co-Invented by the U.S. and Saudi Governments -- Strategic Culture

Jul 29, 2020 | www.strategic-culture.org

Modern jihadism was co-invented in 1979 by Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan al Saud, and U.S. National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, working together, and here is the background for it, and the way -- and the reasons -- that it was done:

Back in the later Middle Ages, the Roman Catholic Church and its aristocracies had used religious fervor in order to motivate very conservative and devout people to invade foreign countries so as to spread their empire and to not need to rely only on taxes in order to fund these invasions, but also to highly motivate them by their faith in a heavenly reward. It was far cheaper this way, because these invading forces wouldn't need to be paid so much; the reason why they'd be far cheaper is that their pay would chiefly come to them in their afterlife (if at all). That's why people of strong faith were used. (Aristocracies always rule by deceiving the public, and faith is the way.) Those invaders were Roman Catholic Crusaders, and they went out on Crusades to spread their faith and so 'converted' and slaughtered millions of Muslims and Jews, so as to expand actually the aristocracies' and preachers' empire, which is the reason why they had been sent out on those missions (to win 'converts'). This was charity, after all. (Today's large tax-exempt non-profits are no different -- consistently promoting their aristocracy's invasions, out of 'humanitarian' concern for the 'welfare', or else 'souls', of the people they are invading -- and, if need be, to kill 'bad people'. This has been the reality. And it still is. It's the way to sell imperialism to individuals who won't benefit from imperialism -- make mental slaves of them.)

The original Islamic version of the Christian Crusades, Islamic Holy War or "jihad," started on 14 November 1914 in Constantinople (today's Istanbul) when the Sheikh Hayri Bey, the supreme religious authority in the Ottoman Empire , along with the Ottoman Emperor, Mehmed V , declared a Holy War for their Muslim followers to take up arms against Britain, France, Russia, Serbia and Montenegro in World War I. They were on Germany's side, and lost. (That's the reason why the Ottoman Empire ended.) Both the Sheikh and the Emperor had actually been selected -- and then forced -- by Turkey's aristocracy, for them to declare Islamic Holy War at that time. In fact, the sitting Sheikh, Mehmet Cemaleddin Efendi , in 1913, was actually an opponent of the pro-German and war-oriented policy of the Union and Progress Party, which represented Turkey's aristocrats, and so that Sheikh was replaced by them, in order to enable a declaration of Islamic Holy War. Jihad actually had its origin in Turkey's aristocracy -- not in the Muslim masses, and not even in the Muslim clergy. It resulted from an overly ambitious Turkish aristocracy, hoping to extend their empire. It did not result from the public. And, at that time, relatively few Muslims followed this 'Holy' command, which is one reason why the Ottoman Empire soon thereafter ended.

Incidentally, so as to clarify how Turkey's aristocracy ran the show, at that time, Taner Akçam's September 2006 "The Ottoman Documents and the Genocidal Policies of the Committee for Union and Progress toward the Armenians in 1915" reported that:

The fact that the decision about the Armenians was made after a great deal of thought, based on extensive debate and discussion by the Central Committee of the CUP [Committee for Union and Progress] , can be understood by looking at other sources of information as well. The indictment of the Main Trial states as follows: ''The murder and annihilation of the Armenians was a decision taken by the Central Committee of the Union and Progress Party.'' These decisions were the result of ''long and extensive discussions.'' In the indictment are the statements of Dr. Nazım to the effect that ''it was a matter taken by the Central Committee after thinking through all sides of the issue'' and that it was ''an attempt to reach a final solution to the Eastern Question .'' 54 In his memoirs, which were published in the newspaper Vakit, Celal, the governor of Aleppo, describes the same words being spoken to him by a deputy of the Ottoman Parliament from Konya, coming as a ''greeting of a member of the Central Committee .'' This deputy told Celal that if he had ''expressed an opinion that opposed the point of view of the others, [he would] have been expelled .'' 55

(And, consequently, when Hitler allegedly -- on 22 August 1939 , right before his invasion of Poland which started WW II, and it is on page 2 here , but the sincerity and even the authenticity of that alleged private 'speech' by him should be questioned and not accepted outright by historians -- cited Turkey's genocide against Armenian Christians as being proof that genocide is acceptable, Hitler would actually have been citing there not only a Muslim proponent of genocide, but an ally of Germany who had actually done it, because the Ottoman Empire's aristocracy had been both Muslim and German-allied. Hitler would, in that 'speech', if he actually said it, have been citing that earlier ally of Germany, which had actually genocided Christians. The genocide happened, even if that speech mentioning it was concocted by some propagandist during WW II.)

The new jihad, or Islamic version of the Crusades, is, however, very different from the one that had started on 14 November 1914. It wasn't Turkish, it instead came straight from Turkey's top competitor to lead the world's Muslims, the royal family who owned Saudi Arabia, the Sauds. But they partnered with America's aristocracy, in creating it.

Today's jihadism started in 1979, when U.S. President Jimmy Carter's national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski (a born Polish nobleman), and his colleague Prince Bandar bin Sultan al Saud, re-created jihad or Islamic Holy War, in order to produce a dirt-cheap army of Pakistani fundamentalist Sunni students or "mujahideen," soon to be renamed Taliban ( Pashto & Persian ṭālibān, plural of ṭālib student, seeker, from Arabic ) so as to invade and conquer next door to the Soviet Union the newly Soviet-allied Afghanistan, and to turn it 'pro-Western', now meaning both anti-Soviet, and anti-Shiite. (The Saud family hate Shiites , and so do America's aristocrats, whose CIA had conquered Shiite Iran in 1953, and who became outraged when Shiites retook Iran in 1979. And, from then on, America's aristocracy, too, have hated Shiites and have craved to re-conquer Iran. By contrast, the Sauds had started in 1744 to hate Shiites.) So, modern Islamic Holy War started amongst fundamentalist Sunnis in Pakistan in 1979, against both the Soviets and the Iranians (and now against both Russia and Iran ). Here is a video of Brzezinski actually doing that -- starting the "mujahideen" (subsequently to become the Taliban) onto this 'Holy War':

https://www.youtube.com/embed/A9RCFZnWGE0?feature=oembed

Brzezinski , incidentally, had been born a Roman Catholic Polish aristocrat whose parents hated and despised Russians, and this hostility went back to the ancient conflicts between the Roman Catholic and the Russian Orthodox Churches.

So: whereas on the American end this was mainly a Roman Catholic versus Orthodox operation, it was mainly a Sunni versus Shiite operation on the Saudi end.

Here's more of the personal background regarding the co-creation, by the aristocracies of America and of Saudi Arabia, of today's jihadism, or "radical Islamic terrorism":

Whereas Nelson Rockefeller in the Republican Party sponsored Harvard's Henry Kissinger as the geostrategist and National Security Advisor, David Rockefeller in the Democratic Party sponsored Harvard's and then Columbia's Zbigniew Brzezinski as the geostrategist and National Security Advisor. The Rockefeller family was centrally involved in controlling the U.S. Government.

According to pages 41-44 of David B. Ottaway's 2008 The King's Messenger: Prince Bandar , U.S. President Jimmy Carter, whose National Security Advisor was Brzezinski, personally requested and received advice from a certain graduate student at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan al Saud, regarding geostrategy. At the time, Brzezinski commented favorably on Bandar's graduate thesis. But that's not all. "Secretly, Carter had already turned to the kingdom for help, calling in Bandar and asking him to deliver a message to [King] Fahd pleading for an increase in Saudi [oil] production. Fahd's reply, according to Bandar, was 'Tell my friend, the president of the United States of America, when they need our help, they will not be disappointed.'13 The king was true to his world." However, Bandar's advice went beyond oil. And the re-creation, of the fundamentalist-Sunni movement (amongst only fundamentalist Sunni Muslims, both in 1914 and in 1979), that now is called "jihadism," was a joint idea, from both Brzezinski and Bandar.

On 2 July 2014, Akbar Ganji headlined at Huffington Post, "U.S.-Jihadist Relations (Part 1): Creating the Mujahedin in Afghanistan" , and he noted that :

It was the United States that, together with Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Pakistan, dispatched the jihadists to Afghanistan. Prince Bandar bin Sultan of Saudi Arabia played a key role in those operations, with Saudi Arabia providing the key financial, military and human support for them. The kingdom encouraged its citizens to go to Afghanistan to fight the Soviet army. One such citizen was Osama bin Laden. Saudi Arabia agreed to match, dollar for dollar, any funds that the CIA could raise for the operations. The U.S. provided Pakistan with $3.2 billion , and Saudi Arabia bought weapons from everywhere, including international black markets, and sent them to Afghanistan through Pakistan's ISI.

That was then, and this is now, but it is merely an extension of that same operation, even after the Soviet Union and its communism and its Warsaw Pact military alliance all ended in 1991, and Russia ended its side of the Cold War but the United States secretly continued its side , as is shown here, by an example. This example, of America's continuing its Cold War, is America's longstanding effort, after the death of FDR in 1945, to overthrow and replace Syria's pro-Russian Government and install instead a Syrian Government that will be controlled by the Sauds:

U.S. President Barack Obama was warned in 2012 by U.S. DOD intelligence that if he would try to overthrow and replace Syria's secular, non-sectarian (and predominantly Shiite) Government (as the Sauds had been urging every U.S. President ever since Truman to do -- to replace those secular Shiites by fundamentalist Sunnis ), he would be able to do it only with the support of Syria's minority of fanatically Sunni fundamentalists , who were especially concentrated in Syria's northwestern province of Idlib, bordering Turkey. Obama went for the idea , and promoted it as being his attempt to 'liberate' Syria, from being led by the "barbaric" secular, non-sectarian, Shiite, Bashar al-Assad. As far back as 2009, Obama had been informed that an intense drought was ripening Syria for overthrow (regime-change), but Obama wanted to wait for his second term before he'd go all-out for this conquest. Obama didn't want his re-election chances to be clouded by possible accusations that he would be arming Al Qaeda. But, anyway, he needed to do it that way because only as late as December 2012 did Syria's domestic jihadists make clear to him that they'd go along with his plan to wage war against Assad only if they would be led by Syria's Al Qaeda, called "Al Nusra." So, this invasion began only in his second term, starting in January 2013. But the planning for the 'rebellion' -- the "Arab Spring" in Syria -- actually began in 2009 , and the U.S. State Department, under Hillary Clinton, was centrally involved . Turkey "began operations in April-May 2011" to overthrow Assad, but Obama had actually started it, Erdogan didn't. Turkey merely cooperated with it. Altogether, throughout the U.S.-initiated war in Syria, something on the order of around a hundred thousand jihadists have come into Syria from around the world so as to overthrow Bashar al-Assad. Virtually all of them entered through Turkey, to its north. The influx was a trickle as late as 2013, escalated in 2014, approximately doubled in 2015, and continued escalating , but no reliable count of the incoming jihadists exists. Though Turkey was the pathway, this invasion started actually in Washington.

So, in this new 'Islamic holy war', to overthrow Syria's non-sectarian Government, the fighters entered Syria through Turkey, and they were welcomed mainly in Syria's province of Idlib, which adjoins Turkey.

On 13 March 2012, the Al Jazeera TV station, of the pro-jihad Thani royal family of Qatar, headlined "Inside Idlib: Saving Syria" , and opened

The Syrian government crackdown on the dissenting northern city of Idlib has continued for a third day, with casualties from random shelling and sniper fire mounting, and growing concerns for many citizens detained by government forces. "I can't tell you what an unequal contest this is . The phrase that we felt yesterday applied to it was 'Shooting fish in a barrel' – these people can't escape, they can't help themselves, they have very little weaponry, what can they do but sit there and take it?"

The UK Government had given Qatar to the Thanis in 1868. On 12 September 1868 , Mohammed Bin Thani signed "an agreement with the British Political Resident Col. Lewis Pelly, which was considered as the first international recognition of the sovereignty of Qatar"; so, on that precise day, Britain's Queen Victoria gave Qatar to his family, which owns it, to the present day. The Thanis are the leading financial backers of the Muslim Brotherhood, which spreads Thani influence to foreign countries. (At least up till 9/11, the Saud family have been the main financial backers of Al Qaeda .) The Thanis have been, along with the Sauds, the main financial backers of replacing the non-sectarian Syrian Government by a fundamentalist-Sunni Syrian Government. Whereas the Sauds want to control that new government, also the Thanis do, and this is one reason for the recent falling-out between those two families. America's aristocracy prefers that Syria's rulers will be selected by the Saud family, because they buy more weapons from the U.S. than does any other country. However, everything is transactional between aristocracies, and, so, international alliances can change. It's always a jostling, everyone grabbing for whatever they can get: aristocracies operate no differently than crime-families do, because FDR's dream of an anti-imperialistic U.N., which would set and enforce international laws, died when he did; we live instead in an internationally lawless world -- he died far too soon. In a sense (at least ideologically), Hitler won, but, actually, Churchill did (he was as much an imperialist as Hitler and Mussolini were).

Anyway, uncounted tens of thousands of jihadists from all over the world descended upon Syria, funded by the Sauds and the Thanis, and armed and trained by the United States, to conquer Syria. At the Syrian Government's request, Russia started bombing the jihadists on 30 September 2015 . That air-support for the Syrian Army turned the war around. By the time of 4 May 2018, Britain's Financial Times headlined "Idlib offers uncertain sanctuary to Syria's defeated rebels" ("rebels" being the U.S. and UK Governments' term for jihadists who were serving as the U.S., Saud and Thani, proxy-forces or mercenaries to conquer Syria) and reported (stenographically transmitting what the CIA and MI6 told them to say) that, "more than 70,000 rebels and civilians" -- meaning jihadists and their families -- who were "fleeing the last rebel holdout near the capital," had been given a choice, and this "choice was die in Ghouta, or leave for Idlib," and chose to get onto the Government-supplied buses taking them to Idlib. So, perhaps unnumbered hundreds of thousands of jihadists did that, from all over Syria, and collecting them in Idlib.

As I reported on 10 May 2018:

On May 8th, Syria's Government bannered, "6th batch of terrorists leave southern Damascus for northern Syria" and reported that "During the past five days, 218 buses carrying terrorists with their families exited from the three towns to Jarablos and Idleb under the supervision of the Syrian Arab Red Crescent." Jarablos (or " Jarabulus ") is a town or "District" in the Aleppo Governate; and Idleb (or " Idlib ") is the capital District in the adjoining Governate of Idlib, which Governate is immediately to the west of Aleppo Governate; and both Jarabulus and Idlib border on Turkey to the north. Those two towns in Syria's far northwest are where captured jihadists are now being sent.

The Government is doing that because at this final stage in the 7-year-long war, it wants civilian deaths and additional destruction of buildings to be kept to a minimum, and so is offering jihadists the option of surviving instead of being forced to fight to the death (which would then require Syria's Government to destroy the entire area that's occupied by the terrorists); this way, these final clean-up operations against the terrorists won't necessarily require bombing whole neighborhoods -- surrenders thus become likelier, so as to end the war as soon as possible, and to keep destruction and civilian casualties at a minimum.

The Syrian and Russian Governments had planned to finish them off there in Idlib, so that none of them could escape back into their home countries to continue their jihad. However, the U.S. and its allies raised 'humanitarian' screams at the U.N. and other international organizations, in order to protect the 'rebels' against the 'barbarous dictator' of Syria, its President, Bashar al-Assad -- just in order to create more anti-Assad (and anti-Russian, and anti-Iranian) propaganda. And, so, on 9 and 10 September 2018, Putin and Erdogan and Rouhani met in Rouhani's Tehran to decide what to do. By that time, Erdogan was riding the fence between Washington and Moscow. On 17 September 2018, I headlined "Putin and Erdogan Plan Syria-Idlib DMZ as I Recommended" and reported that Putin and Rouhani entrusted Idlib to Erdogan, with the expectation that Erdogan would keep the jihadists penned-up there, so that Putin and Assad would be able to bomb them to hell after the 'humanitarian crisis' in Idlib would be no longer on front pages.

As things turned out, Erdogan double-crossed Putin and Rouhani, and just grabbed the territory .

The role of the United Nations in this has been to stand aside and pretend that it's a 'humanitarian crisis' (as the U.S. regime wanted it to be called) instead of a U.S.-and-allied invasion, aggressive war, and consequently a vast war-crime such as Hitler's top leaders were prosecuted and executed for at Nuremberg. As Miri Wood wrote, at Syria News, on 28 February 2018 :

Members of the General Assembly must be in good financial standing to vote. Dues are on a sliding scale but do not factor in draconian sanctions against targeted members, nor crimes of war involved in their destruction. As such, CAR, Libya, Venezuela and Yemen have been stripped of their voting rights. The non-permanent SC members function as obedient House Servants to the P3 bullies, ever mindful of placing self-preservation above moral integrity .

So Truman's U.N. turns out to be on the side of the new Nazism, against its victims.

Erdogan wants to be with the winners. He evidently believes that whatever empire he'll be able to have will be just a vassal nation within the U.S. Empire. He had been extremely reluctant to accept this viewpoint , but, apparently, he now does. And so, now, Erdogan has become so confident that he has the backing of Christian-majority America and of Christian-majority Europe, so that Turkey's Hagia Sophia , which had been "the world's largest cathedral for nearly a thousand years, until Seville Cathedral was completed in 1520," has finally become officially declared by the Turkish Government to be, instead, a mosque. He feels safe enough to insult the publics in the other NATO countries so as to be able now to assert publicly his support for Islam against Christianity, because he knows that NATO's other aristocracies -- all of them majority-Christian, and all of these aristocrats ruling their respective Christian-majority countries -- don't really give a damn about that. Amongst themselves, the concern for 'heaven' is all just for show, because they are far more interested to buy Paradise in the here-and-now, for themselves and for their families. As for any possible 'afterlife', it will be reflected in the big buildings and charities that will bear their names, after they're gone. Erdogan feels safe, knowing that they're all psychopaths. And, as for the publics anywhere -- Syria, Libya, even in Turkey itself -- they don't matter, to him, any more than they do to the leaders of those other NATO countries.

Consequently, too, on July 18th, the American Herald Tribune headlined "As It Did in Libya, Turkey Recruits Syrian Militants to Fight in Azerbaijan" , and Khaled Iskef, a journalist for Beirut's Almaydeen TV, reported, based on unnamed "private sources in the northern countryside of Aleppo," that

Turkish forces started recruiting numbers of its armed fighters to send them to Azerbaijan in order to assist the Azerbaijani forces in confronting the Armenian army.

According to sources, Turkey opened special promotion offices in different parts of Afrin northern Aleppo, to attract the militants and encourage them to sign contracts by which they would move to fight in Azerbaijan for a period of six months, renewable in case they wanted to.

According to the contract, the militants receive a monthly salary of $2500, while the advantage of granting Turkish citizenship to the families of the militants in case they died is absent, contrary to the contracts that Turkey had signed with the armed men who wanted to move to Libya.

The sources said that Turkey has designated centers for registering militants wishing to fight in Azerbaijan within the towns of Genderes and Raju, along with Afrin city, and these centers have already started receiving requests by the militants.

Armenia is virtually 100% Christian, and, according to Wikipedia :

The Armenian Genocide [c] (also known as the Armenian Holocaust ) [13] was the systematic mass murder and expulsion of 1.5 million [b] ethnic Armenians carried out in Turkey and adjoining regions by the Ottoman government between 1914 and 1923. [14] [15] The starting date is conventionally held to be 24 April 1915, the day that Ottoman authorities rounded up, arrested, and deported from Constantinople (now Istanbul) to the region of Angora ( Ankara ), 235 to 270 Armenian intellectuals and community leaders , the majority of whom were eventually murdered.

So, the recruitment of fundamentalist-Sunni mercenaries in the areas of Syria that Turkey has captured, and sending those men "to assist the Azerbaijani forces in confronting the Armenian army," is likewise consistent with the NATO member-country Turkey's restoration of its former Ottoman Empire. Using these jihadist proxy-soldiers, NATO is now invading Christian Armenia.

However, Iskef was reporting without paying any attention to the aristocratic interests which were actually very much involved in what Erdogan was doing here. On July 19th, Cyril Widdershoven at the "Oil Price" site bannered "The Forgotten Conflict That Is Threatening Energy Markets" and he reported the economic geostrategic factors which were at stake in this now-emerging likely hot war, which is yet another "pipeline war," and which pits Turkey against Russia. In this particular matter, Turkey has an authentic economic reason to become engaged in a possible hot war allied with Muslim Azerbaijan against Christian Armenia. Russia, yet again, would be backing Christian soldiers. Of course, NATO, also yet again, would be on the Muslim side, against the Christians. But, this time, NATO would be backing Azerbaijan, which is 85% Shiite. Consequently, in such a conflict, the U.S. could end up on the same side as Iran, and against Russia.

If history is any guide, aristocratic interests will take precedence over theocratic interests, but democratic interests -- the interests of the publics that are involved -- will be entirely ignored. The sheer hypocrisy of the U.S. regime exceeds anything in human history.

How can anybody not loathe the U.S. regime and its allies? Only by getting one's 'news' from its 'news'-media -- especially (but not only) its mainstream ones.

[Jul 29, 2020] Russia and the next Presidential election in the US by The Saker

Jul 29, 2020 | www.unz.com

A quick look at Russia

Before looking into Russian options in relation to the US, we need to take a quick look at how Russia has been faring this year. The short of it would be: not too well. The Russian economy has shrunk by about 10% and the small businesses have been devastated by the combined effects of 1) the economic policies of the Russian government and Central Bank, and 2) the devastating economic impact of the COVID19 pandemic, and 3) the full-spectrum efforts of the West, mostly by the Anglosphere, to strangle Russia economically. Politically, the "Putin regime" is still popular, but there is a sense that it is getting stale and that most Russians would prefer to see more dynamic and proactive policies aimed, not only to help the Russian mega-corporations, but also to help the regular people. Many Russians definitely have a sense that the "little guy" is being completely ignored by fat cats in power and this resentment will probably grow until and unless Putin decides to finally get rid of all the Atlantic Integrationists aka the "Washington consensus" types which are still well represented in the Russian ruling circles, including the government. So far, Putin has remained faithful to his policy of compromises and small steps, but this might change in the future as the level of frustration in the general population is likely to only grow with time.

That is not to say that the Kremlin is not trying. Several of the recent constitutional amendments adopted in a national vote had a strongly expressed "social" and "patriotic" character and they absolutely horrified the "liberal" 5th columnists who tried their best two 1) call for a boycott, and 2) denounce thousands of (almost entirely) imaginary violations of the proper voting procedures, and to 3) de-legitimize the outcome by declaring the election a "fraud". None of that worked: the participation was high, very few actual violations were established (and those that were, had no impact on the outcome anyway) and most Russians accepted that this outcome was the result of the will of the people. Furthermore, Putin has made public the Russian strategic goals for 2030 ,which are heavily focused on improving the living and life conditions of average Russians (for details, see here ). It is impossible to predict what will happen next, but the most likely scenario is that Russia has several, shall we say, "bumpy" years ahead, both on the domestic and on the international front.

JasonT , says: July 28, 2020 at 10:53 pm GMT

Good analysis.

I would add that Russia should also start opening channels of communication with various organizations in Canada, especially those in the far north. While Canada is small politically, it is vastly bigger than the U.S. in natural resources, very strategically located and right next door to Russia.

Twilight Patriot , says: Website July 29, 2020 at 12:26 am GMT

I really agree with you that the "blame Russia" and "blame China" thing has gotten out of hand in US politics. Whether it will turn into a shooting war seems doubtful to me, as the government is still full of people who are looking out for their own interests and know that a full-sized war with Russia, China, Iran or whoever will not advance their interests.

But who would have guessed, a few years ago, that "Russian asset" would become the all-purpose insult for Democrats to use, not just against Republicans, but against other Democrats?

... ... ...

aandrews , says: July 29, 2020 at 3:22 am GMT

" at worst, the crisis will move to a new stage . "

Highly likely.

I think Trump can win, though, if he successfully hangs the escalating Antifa/BLM mayhem around the Democrat's necks. Normal, salt-of-the-earth-type Americans won't vote for the party of Maoist mayhem. I just hope their numbers are still sufficient. So, really, the mayhem needs to worsen and get ultra-bad, and Trump needs to carefully respond with just enough law enforcement to bait the Democrats into defending the insurrectionists and their tactics and loudly condemning Trump's "fascist" response. Normal people will see the true story and in the privacy of the voting booth, not vote Democrat. And if you think the other side lost their minds after the 2016 election .

GMC , says: July 29, 2020 at 7:54 am GMT

Thanks Saker – I would have loved it, had Alaska been able to hang on to the 90s relationship with Russia. It was a perfect match, except that Russian economy { as we were told} was just tanking, and they had no money to throw into the tourist trade. Not that us Alaskans, expected much more than what our bush villages had to offer. lol But , I'm afraid this will never happen again, with the Zio freaks in charge of the US. I recall when I was flying and living in McGrath in the 90s, that a womens Russian helicopter team dropped down to refuel and I was workin on my cessna about 50 yrds away. I saw about 6+ really good looking Russian chicks come out of those choppers, and us guys were floored ! We started to communicate with them, they told us that they were re -tracing the WW II lend lease route and were headed to the lower 48. Just about the time we started getting close tho, an old Lady colonel jumped out and put the girls in place – lol . I also remember the Magadan hockey team came over to play against our University teams Anchorage and Fairbanks. My neighbor here in Kryme, was on that Russian team – small world. Ya, Russia and Alaska would be a great match today – just gotta get rid of Washington. Thanks for the memories.

Fiendly Neighbourhood Terrorist , says: Website July 29, 2020 at 12:22 pm GMT

" until and unless Putin decides to finally get rid of all the Atlantic Integrationists aka the "Washington consensus" types which are still well represented in the Russian ruling circles, including the government."

Putin's regime is merely a less unbearable version of the Yeltsin regime, with open loot by oligarchs replaced by less overt loot by smaller scale actors. Putin is exactly as beholden to the neoliberal capitalist system as Yeltsin. To expect Putin to change sides as this point is ludicrous.

" Russia and the Empire have been at war since at least 2013, for no less than seven years (something which Russian 6th columnists and Neo-Marxists try very hard to ignore)."

I have no idea what a "neo" Marxist is (apart from a blatant made up term to taint us by association with the neo-Nazis), but as a Marxist, which the Saker obviously is not, it's obvious to me that the Imperialist States of America has been at war with Russia since the Yeltsinite attack on the Moscow parliament in 1993, and probably from the failed patriotic coup of 1991. If we ignore the Saker's idea of a war since 2013 it's only because we know it's twenty years out of date.

Things will never improve between Amerikastan and Russia and don't need to. Amerikastan is sinking and will sink; Putin will, if he continues on the neoliberal capitalist track, sink Russia as well in the end.

RoatanBill , says: July 29, 2020 at 12:32 pm GMT

The video link to Sahra Wagenknecht's report was the best part of this article although the article itself was spot on if one has any respect for reality.

I keep waiting for Germany to tell NATO and the US to get the hell out, but their political establishment is just as corrupt as the US's.

The amount of money the US Fed Gov steals from the population in taxes and regulation or causes loss of purchasing power by increasing debt could be much better put to use than shoveling it into the military to murder people around the globe. The entire Fed Gov will, I hope, disappear like fart gas as a result of the economic collapse in the making.

mark tapley , says: July 29, 2020 at 4:54 pm GMT
@Emily at was just a brutal form of monopoly capitalism that is the essence of the Zionist syndicate we all are up against. Today piratized not privatized Russia is suffering a less severe form but it is estimated that half Jew Putin and his oligarch cronies control ap. 30% of the Russian economy. all of this insider theft was "codified and Legalized" by Larry Summers and the Harvard Jews. Same thing is happening in Jewmerica and moving lots faster now with the theft under cover of the fake virus. Don't forget in 08-09 the bailout for billionaires cost the regular economy trillions then too. No problem, the Jews at Black Rock picked up some great bargains as they will this time.
Stanley Dundee , says: Website July 29, 2020 at 5:27 pm GMT

Per the Saker:

The real cause of the West's hatred for Russia is as simple as it is old: Russia cannot be conquered, subdued, subverted or destroyed.

I would add that Putin (a masterful statesman) tamed Russia's oligarchs. The greatest fear of America's oligarchs might well be a similar taming by a masterful American statesman. Hence the refusal to allow anyone other than corrupted mediocrities anywhere near nominal power in the US. And hence the entirely genuine hatred for Putin. He embodies their worst nightmare.

Harold Smith , says: July 29, 2020 at 5:50 pm GMT

"Russia will never attack first (which is a major cause of frustration for western russophobes)"

Now that team orange clown (with the full support of congress) has done away with the doctrine of mutually assured destruction, apparently replacing it with the concept of a "winnable" nuclear war (impliedly by way of a devastating first strike), the time may come when Russia may have to either strike first or be struck first.

Also, what about the case where the empire is finally successful in starting a war against Iran, for example, and the war goes badly for the empire (i.e. Iran is inflicting some serious damage), whereupon the empire resorts to nukes. Would Russia just sit back and watch, or would Russia then realize that the monster has to be put down?

"The real cause of the West's hatred for Russia is as simple as it is old: Russia cannot be conquered, subdued, subverted or destroyed."

In a sense that's true as far as it goes, but it really doesn't explain very much. Lots of countries are unable to subdue, subvert or conquer other countries but that in itself doesn't generally lead to "hatred." The simpler and more profound explanation is that the empire does what it does because it's evil. And the evil empire is analogous to an aggressive cancer: either the cancer wins and the patient dies, or the cancer is completely eradicated and the patient survives. There is no peaceful coexistence with the evil empire just like there is no peaceful coexistence with glioblastoma. You cannot negotiate with it to find some kind of a reasonable compromise.

AnonFromTN , says: July 29, 2020 at 6:53 pm GMT
@JVC

The US government and FRS seem to be hell-bent on destroying the value of the US $: when someone issues debt obligations (treasuries) and then buys them himself because there are no other takers, you cannot help smelling a rat.

The crash of the $ will hurt everyone, but some will recover faster than others. Euro and yen would be buried with the US $, but assets in less US-dependent countries that have real economies producing things other than hot air will likely fare better. Which leaves Russia, big China, South Korea, and some SE Asia countries.

Harold Smith , says: July 29, 2020 at 7:14 pm GMT
@Stanley Dundee

"And hence the entirely genuine hatred for Putin. He embodies their worst nightmare."

Evil hates a good example.

cassandra , says: July 29, 2020 at 7:27 pm GMT
@Jake t statistic for China is surprisingly better than I would have guessed. According to the CBO chart at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_inequality_in_the_United_States ,

the US was at about the same level in 2013: "The top 10% of families held 76% of the wealth in 2013, while the bottom 50% of families held 1%. Inequality worsened from 1989 to 2013"

Indications are that the worsening has only continued since then, and with all the money being poured into the stock market by the Fed this year, 2020 is on track to be exceptionally iniquitously inequitable.

Xaxa , says: July 29, 2020 at 7:47 pm GMT

Trump 're-election' is certain. All roads are paved toward it. In fact and so far Trump is the best Neocon/Deep State's man they found. Stop pretending Saker!

Agent76 , says: July 29, 2020 at 7:50 pm GMT

June 17, 2020 America: An Empire Eating Itself

Empire has one trick – divide and conquer. When it runs out of territory, nations, and people abroad to consume, it turns inward on itself.

https://landdestroyer.blogspot.com/2020/06/america-empire-eating-itself.html

Jul 3, 2020 Independence Day Under Dictatorship

The US is under rule by decree, not by rule of law. Looking at the original list of grievances the Colonists had against King George, it looks like most of them are met – and then some – by our current system of government. Can we regain our independence?


Wally , says: July 29, 2020 at 7:53 pm GMT
@Herald

said:
"A Trump re-election will virtually guarantee civil war, but that is still a better option than a Biden hot war against Russia. Either way though, the country is totally fucked."

– We already have a civil war.

– Either way there will be no "hot war against Russia". That's just silly.

– And there is no "Biden" there.

– The US is much, much better off with Trump, it's not even close. Especially if you value free speech, fighting violence, and at least some semblance of a market economy devoid of the 'Green New Deal' scam.

Alfred , says: July 29, 2020 at 8:35 pm GMT
@Anon

after Vietnam war, Vietnam, ally of China , keep their regime in their own hand.

The ally of North Vietnam was Russia.

China blocked the transit of Russian weapons to North Vietnam. After North Vietnam defeated the Americans, with Russian help, China invaded North Vietnam and was defeated.

marryne , says: July 29, 2020 at 8:47 pm GMT

For Saker it is always about Russia, Russia, Russia Sure, Russia is a big world power, it used to be and it is now. It is so mostly because of its military, which draws its strength and know-how from the USSR (meaning it is not strictly Russian). However, Russia will never again be a superpower as the USSR had been. It was possible then only because of the (historically) unparalleled appeal of the communist ideology. Firstly and objectively, Russia does not have an economy necessary to support such a status. Secondly, Russia has no sufficient population which, again, is a limiting factor to its economy. Putin probably realized that although he did not realize that the Putin-inspired immigration from the former Muslim republic of the USSR will not alleviate the problem. But again, who would even want to go to today's Russia if not Asiatic muslims. It will slowly but surely make Russia not much different from the West. Muscovites, just like New Yorkers are already leaving the city, those who can afford.
And, subjectively, Russia or the Russians don't have the most important ingredient fort the superpower status – the MENTALITY. The recent (1990-2020) Russian history clearly displays that. It shows that in order to realize the centuries old dreams of the few (so called "elites") Russia as a nation and as country had put itself to the downward trajectory: As an empire it sold Alaska; as a civilization – it destroyed itself by dismantling the rest of the empire, the USSR. As an ally it abandoned and handed over the most Russophile german friend and ally E. Honecker and others to the "partners" in the west. And, as an orthodox and Slavic "brother" it betrayed and abandoned the only people that have always loved Russia – the Serbs. As an ally it behaved recklessly and treacherously. Russia will do the same again. So, hate Russia.

Ko , says: July 29, 2020 at 8:59 pm GMT

Since 2016 I've always believed Trump will be legally elected in 2020 but the DNC/Deep State will reject the result much more forcefully and violently than they've been doing since 2016. The DNC/Deep State will establish a shadow government minus the shadow. It will not be Joe Biden leading it but someone much younger, possibly Biden's VP choice – who was (will be) selected to replace Biden should Biden actually win. Hell, it may even be Hussein since he's such a treasonous pussy and easy to manipulate. The communists behind the scenes (aren't they always such cowards) currently coordinating BLM and Antifa riots all over America will again use rioting but with firearms and bombings. This must be met with a military response and the violence will be nationwide. At some point either Trump declares martial law and outright civil war ensues, or a military coup takes over with or without Trump as a figurehead and they crush the communists and leftists while right wing militias join in the hunt. The only wild-card is if race driven factionalism within lower ranks cause wide divisions and some officers break away – then the whole show is over and there will be no place safe from people with guns and bad intentions. We will be fighting over food and gasoline. At least, like in China, there will be plenty of dogs to satisfy hunger.

mark tapley , says: July 29, 2020 at 9:01 pm GMT
@Wally

To Wally and Herald: How many Presidential election circuses have you guys seen. Probably a lot of them like me...

cassandra , says: July 29, 2020 at 9:16 pm GMT

Putin's difficulty is that Russia is really too important for the West to ignore.

Western elites, and not just in the US, but in the EU and the western-hemisphere in general, are facing a problem: people are beginning to notice that human values are not universal. This had been one of the main pillars for the existence and credibility of a technocratic elite, specifically for the people to trust the elites to implement some unspecified but benevolent neo-enlightenment.

Putin became truly anathema first when he rejected western neoliberal criminality because

[Hide MORE] it was destroying his country, secondly, when he thwarted amputation of Crimea by color revolution, and thirdly, when he kept calling out NATO/EU expansionism for what it was. This made conversion of Russia to the neoliberal finance and 'universal value" system even less likely than the conversion to Roman Catholicism prophesied at Fatima. Putin decided that Russia would live by its own values, thank you very much. Russia could still have been an arms-length ally, but Anglo-Zionist geopolitical extremism forced him to make cause with a clearly adversarial China, and encouraged him to circumvent the western currency system as well.

But peoples within the west were also developing this NGTOW (Nations Going Their Own Way) attitude. Hungary and Poland were already becoming thorns in the side of the EU over the "human value" immigration, and the elections of Trump and Brexit were further assertions of populist preferences. Other politicians like Wagenknecht, LePen and Salvini are nurturing this movement elsewhere. It remains to be seen whether the neoliberal oligarchy, by dialing up propaganda and censorship, and by using Orwellian cancel terrorism, can quell this awakening rebellion.

alwayswrite , says: July 29, 2020 at 9:18 pm GMT
@marryne elves out

Capital flight is enormous,especially through London

Ask yourself why????

Because British intelligence knows absolutely the places all this money goes to

British intelligence aren't stupid, they've played this game for centuries

Which gives them enormous leverages over the Russians,who are trapped by this age old system

Putin knows this as do all Russian oligarchs

Money rules,not silly hypersonic weapons !!!!

Which doesn't come into the sakers evaluation

Basically,the saker doesn't understand power,money power!!!

AnonFromTN , says: July 29, 2020 at 9:59 pm GMT
@Wally licies.
6. Dramatically improve US education, from elementary school up.
7. Reform US healthcare, with a view of making it healthcare, rather than extortion racket it is today.

There are many other things, but anyone attempting to do even half of those listed would be promptly JFK'ed by the Deep State. That is why there is no one in the US politics decent enough to even talk about real problems, not to mention attempting to do what needs to be done to save the country. Hence, I can name no names.

As things stand, even Trump is better than senile and corrupt Biden. But being better than that piece of shit is not a big achievement.

hu_anon , says: July 29, 2020 at 10:07 pm GMT
@Alfred

China allowed Soviet arms through to North Vietnam and was herself giving weapons to them. The Soviets didn't trust the Chinese though, so they preferred to transport more advanced weapons on ships rather than by train through China, to prevent the Chinese from getting a close look on these.

China attacked Vietnam for invading Cambodia, but this war exposed the weakness of the Chinese Army. Deng Xiaoping was able to push through military reforms after the debacle.

mark tapley , says: July 29, 2020 at 10:30 pm GMT
@Ko e and destabilize western nations. These paid activists, opportunists and useful idiots could be taken care of by the local law enforcement as the constitution mandates if allowed to do so. The goal of the Zionist criminals is to create enough chaos and breakdown that people will demand that the national gov. step in with martial law. This is exactly what the Zionists want so they can get rid of the locally controlled police and implement a gestapo of thugs that are accountable only to the elite at the top.

The zionist politicians and their operatives from the mayors to the Governors on up need to be thrown out of office. That is the first step in restoring the Republic.

annamaria , says: July 29, 2020 at 10:49 pm GMT
@alwayswrite ernative media has excellent analysts) instead of immersing in the stinky products of presstituting MSM controlled by 6 zio-corporations.

Your hysterics about Russia's alleged attempts at destabilizing the EU are particularly entertaining. For starter, 1. learn about US bases in Europe and beyond, and 2. read about the consequences of the wars of aggression (also known as Wars for Israel) in the Middle East for the EU.

If you are in search of neonazi, turn your attentions to a great project run by ziocons and neonazi in Ukraine. See Grossman, Kolomojsky, Zelinsky, Nuland-Kagan, Pyatt, Carl Gershman (NED), and the whole Kagans' clan united with Banderites What can go wrong?

[Jul 28, 2020] Turkey On The Warpath

Putin decision to save Erdogan from the coup in retrospect looks like a blunder...
Jul 28, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Uzay Bulut via The Gatestone Institute,

Turkey is currently involved in quite a few international military conflicts -- both against its own neighbors such as Greece, Armenia, Iraq, Syria and Cyprus, and against other nations such as Libya and Yemen. These actions by Turkey suggest that Turkey's foreign policy is increasingly destabilizing not only several nations, but the region as well.

In addition, the Erdogan regime has been militarily targeting Syria and Iraq, sending its Syrian mercenaries to Libya to seize Libyan oil and continuing, as usual, to bully Greece. Turkey's regime is also now provoking ongoing violence between Armenia and Azerbaijan.

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Erdogan leads first Muslim prayer after Hagia Sophia mosque reconversion

Istanbul's Hagia Sophia reconversion to a mosque, 'provocation to civilised world', Greece says

Turkish top court revokes Hagia Sophia's museum status, 'tourists should still be allowed in'

Erdogan: Interference over Hagia Sophia 'direct attack on our sovereignty'

Libya's GNA says Egypt's warning on Sirte offensive a 'declaration of war'

Erdogan says 'agreements' reached with Trump on Libya

What Turkish Election Results Mean for the Lira

Erdogan Sparks Democracy Concerns in Push for Istanbul Vote Rerun

Since July 12, Azerbaijan has launched a series of cross-border attacks against Armenia's northern Tavush region in skirmishes that have resulted in the deaths of at least four Armenian soldiers and 12 Azerbaijani ones. After Azerbaijan threatened to launch missile attacks on Armenia's Metsamor nuclear plant on July 16, Turkey offered military assistance to Azerbaijan.

"Our armed unmanned aerial vehicles, ammunition and missiles with our experience, technology and capabilities are at Azerbaijan's service," said İsmail Demir, the head of Presidency of Defense Industries, an affiliate of the Turkish Presidency.

One of Turkey's main targets also seems to be Greece. The Turkish military is targeting Greek territorial waters yet again. The Greek newspaper Kathimerini reported :

"There have been concerns over a possible Turkish intervention in the East Med in a bid to prevent an agreement on the delineation of an exclusive economic zone (EEZ) between Greece and Egypt which is currently being discussed between officials of the two countries."

Turkey's choice of names for its gas exploration ships are also a giveaway. The name of the main ship that Turkey is using for seismic "surveys" of the Greek continental shelf is Oruç Reis , (1474-1518), an admiral of the Ottoman Empire who often raided the coasts of Italy and the islands of the Mediterranean that were still controlled by Christian powers. Other exploration and drilling vessels Turkey uses or is planning to use in Greece's territorial waters are named after Ottoman sultans who targeted Cyprus and Greece in bloody military invasions. These include the drilling ship Fatih "the conqueror" or Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II, who invaded Constantinople in 1453; the drilling ship Yavuz , "the resolute", or Sultan Selim I, who headed the Ottoman Empire during the invasion of Cyprus in 1571; and Kanuni , "the lawgiver" or Sultan Suleiman, who invaded parts of eastern Europe as well as the Greek island of Rhodes.

Turkey's move in the Eastern Mediterranean came in early July, shortly after the country had turned Hagia Sophia, once the world's greatest Greek Cathedral, into a mosque. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan then linked Hagia Sophia's conversion to a pledge to "liberate the Al-Aqsa Mosque" in Jerusalem.

https://lockerdome.com/lad/13084989113709670?pubid=ld-dfp-ad-13084989113709670-0&pubo=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com&rid=www.zerohedge.com&width=890

On July 21, the tensions arose again following Turkey's announcement that it plans to conduct seismic research in parts of the Greek continental shelf in an area of sea between Cyprus and Crete in the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean.

"Turkey's plan is seen in Athens as a dangerous escalation in the Eastern Mediterranean, prompting Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis to warn that European Union sanctions could follow if Ankara continues to challenge Greek sovereignty," Kathimerini reported on July 21.

Here is a short list of other countries where Turkey is also militarily involved:

In Libya , Turkey has been increasingly involved in the country's civil war. Associated Press reported on July 18:

"Turkey sent between 3,500 and 3,800 paid Syrian fighters to Libya over the first three months of the year, the U.S. Defense Department's inspector general concluded in a new report, its first to detail Turkish deployments that helped change the course of Libya's war.

"The report comes as the conflict in oil-rich Libya has escalated into a regional proxy war fueled by foreign powers pouring weapons and mercenaries into the country."

Libya has been in turmoil since 2011, when an armed revolt during the "Arab Spring" led to the ouster and murder of dictator Muammar Gaddafi. Political power in the country, the current population of which is around 6.5 million, has been split between two rival governments. The UN-backed Government of National Accord (GNA), has been led by Prime Minister Fayez al Sarraj. Its rival, the Libyan National Army (LNA), has been led by Libyan military officer, Khalifa Haftar.

Backed by Turkey, the GNA said on July 18 that it would recapture Sirte, a gateway to Libya's main oil terminals, as well as an LNA airbase at Jufra.

Egypt, which backs the LNA, announced , however, that if the GNA and Turkish forces tried to seize Sirte, it would send troops into Libya. On July 20, the Egyptian parliament gave approval to a possible deployment of troops beyond its borders "to defend Egyptian national security against criminal armed militias and foreign terrorist elements."

Yemen is another country on which Turkey has apparently set its sights. In a recent video , Turkey-backed Syrian mercenaries fighting on behalf of the GNA in Libya, and aided by local Islamist groups, are seen saying, "We are just getting started. The target is going to be Gaza." They also state that they want to take on Egyptian President Sisi and to go to Yemen.

"Turkey's growing presence in Yemen," The Arab Weekly reported on May 9, "especially in the restive southern region, is fuelling concern across the region over security in the Gulf of Aden and the Bab al-Mandeb.

"These concerns are further heightened by reports indicating that Turkey's agenda in Yemen is being financed and supported by Qatar via some Yemeni political and tribal figures affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood."

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In Syria , Turkey-backed jihadists continue occupying the northern parts of the country. On July 21, Erdogan announced that Turkey's military presence in Syria would continue. "Nowadays they are holding an election, a so-called election," Erdogan said of a parliamentary election on July 19 in Syria's government-controlled regions, after nearly a decade of civil war. "Until the Syrian people are free, peaceful and safe, we will remain in this country."

Additionally, Turkey's incursion into the Syrian city of Afrin, created a particularly grim situation for the local Yazidi population:

"As a result of the Turkish incursion to Afrin," the Yazda organization reported on May 29, "thousands of Yazidis have fled from 22 villages they inhabited prior to the conflict into other parts of Syria, or have migrated to Lebanon, Europe, or the Kurdistan Region of Iraq... "

"Due to their religious identity, Yazidis in Afrin are suffering from targeted harassment and persecution by Turkish-backed militant groups. Crimes committed against Yazidis include forced conversion to Islam, rape of women and girls, humiliation and torture, arbitrary incarceration, and forced displacement. The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) in its 2020 annual report confirmed that Yazidis and Christians face persecution and marginalization in Afrin.

"Additionally, nearly 80 percent of Yazidi religious sites in Syria have been looted, desecrated, or destroyed, and Yazidi cemeteries have been defiled and bulldozed."

In Iraq , Turkey has been carrying out military operations for years. The last one was started in mid-June. Turkey's Defense Ministry announced on June 17 that the country had "launched a military operation against the PKK" (Kurdistan Workers' Party) in northern Iraq after carrying out a series of airstrikes. Turkey has named its assaults "Operation Claw-Eagle" and "Operation Claw-Tiger".

The Yazidi, Assyrian Christian and Kurdish civilians have been terrorized by the bombings. At least five civilians have been killed in the air raids, according to media reports . Human Rights Watch has also issued a report , noting that a Turkish airstrike in Iraq "disregards civilian loss."

Given Turkey's military aggression in Syria, Iraq, Libya, and Armenia, among others, and its continued occupation of northern Cyprus, further aggression, especially against Greece, would not be unrealistic. Turkey's desire to invade Greece is not exactly a secret. Since at least 2018, both the Turkish government and opposition parties have openly been calling for capturing the Greek islands in the Aegean, which they falsely claim belong to Turkey.

If such an attack took place, would the West abandon Greece?

Gaius Konstantine , 10 hours ago

If such an attack took place, it will get real messy, real fast. The Turkish military is only partially adept at fighting irregular forces that lack heavy weaponry while Turkey has absolute control of the sky. Even then, the recent performance of Turkish forces has been lacklustre for "the 2nd largest Army in NATO".

Turkey should understand that a fight with Greece will mean that the advantages she enjoyed in her recent adventures will not be there. Nor should Turkey look to the past and expect an easy victory, the Greek Army will not be marching deep into Anatolia this time, (which was the wrong type of war for Greece).

So what happens if they actually take it to war?

The larger Greek islands are well defended, they won't be taken, but defending the smaller ones is hard and Turkey will probably grab some of those. The Greeks, who have absolute control and dominance in the Aegean will do several things. Turkish naval and air bases along the Aegean coastline will be attacked as will the bosphorus bridges, (those bridges WILL go down). The Greek army, which is positioned well, will blitz into eastern Thrace and stop outside Istanbul where they will dig in and shell the city, thereby causing the civilians to flee and clogging up the tunnels to restrict military re-enforcement.

That's Greece acting alone, a position will be achieved where any captured islands will be traded for eastern Thrace. Should the French intervene, (even if it's just air and naval forces), it gets a lot more interesting.

The mighty Turkish fleet was just met by the entire Greek navy in the latest stand-off, it was enough to cause Turkey to reconsider her options. There will be no Ottoman empire 2.0

OliverAnd , 9 hours ago

The Greeks need their navy for surgically precise attacks against Turkey's navy. Every island, especially the large ones are unsinkable aircraft carriers. No one has mentioned in any article that Turkey's navy is functioning with less than minimum required personnel. No one has mentioned that their air force is flying with Pakistani pilots. The only way Turks will land on Greek uninhabited islands is only if they are ship wrecked and that for a very very short period of time. Turkey's population is composed of 25% Kurds... that will also be very interesting to see once they awaken from their hibernation and realize their great and holy goal of Kurdistan. Egypt will not waste the opportunity to join in to devastate whatever Turkish navy remains. Serbian patriots will not allow the opportunity to go to waste and will attack Kosovo and indirectly Albania composed primarily of Turkish descendants... realize the coverage lately of how the US did wrong for supporting these degenerate Muslim Albanians.

I have no doubt Greeks will make it to Aghia Sophia but will not pass Bosporus. The result will be a Treaty that is a hybrid of the Treaty of Lausanne and the Treaty of Sevron. If the Albanians decide to support the Turks by attacking Greeks in the North and in Northern Epeirus they should expect annexation of Northern Epeirus to Greece. Erdogan bases his bullying on Trump's incompetences and false friendship. This is why America is non existent in any of these regions. If Trump wins the election it will be a long war and very destabilized for the region. If Trump loses the war will be much much quicker. The outcome will remain the same. The Russians will not allow Turkey to dictate in the area. Israel will not allow Turkey to dictate in the area. Egypt will not allow Turkey to dictate in the area. Not even European Union. UK is the questionable.

bobcatz , 2 hours ago

And the US in the Middle East is not????????

ALL MidEast terrorism, shenanigans, and warmongering are for APARTHEID Israhell.

Joy Division , 7 hours ago

The West has Turkey's back otherwise the Turkish currency the Turkish Lira would have collapsed by now under attacks from the City of London Freemasonic Talmudic bankers.

Remember what happened to the Russian Rouble when Russia annexed Crimea?

The Fed and the ECB in cahoots with the usual Talmudic interests, are supporting the Turkish Lira and propping up the Erdogan regime.

There is NO OTHER explanation.

The Turks have NO foreign currency reserves, no net positive euro nor dollar reserves. Their tourism industry and main hard currency generator has COLLAPSED (hotels are 95 percent empty). The Turkish central bank has resorted to STEALING Turkish citizens' dollar-denominated bank accounts via raising Turkish Banks' foreign currency reserve requirements which the Turkish central bank SPENDS upon receipt to buy TLs and prop up the Turkish Lira.

This is utter MADNESS and FRAUD and LARCENY.

London-based currency traders would be all over the Turkish Lira and/or Turkish bonds and stocks by now UNLESS they had been instructed by the Fed and the ECB or the Talmudic bankers that own and control both, to lay off the Turkish Lira.

Despite the noise on TV or the press,

BY DEFINITION,

Erdogan and the Turks are only doing the bidding of the TRIBE hence Erdogan has the blessing and the protection of the people ZH censors the name.

BUT

You know how those parasites treat their host and what the inevitable outcome is, right?

Indeed,

Erdogan and the Turks are being set up to be thrown under the proverbial bus at the appropriate time.

The Neo-Ottoman Sultan has inadvertently set up his (ill begotten) country for eventual destruction and partition. The Kurds will get a piece of it. Who knows, maybe even the Armenians will be able to recover some bits of their ancient homeland.

Greeks in Constantinople? Nothing is impossible thanks to the hubris and chutzpah of Erdogan who is purported to have "Amish" blood himself.

Know thyself , 5 hours ago

Good for the UK that they have left the EU.

Apart from the Greeks, who would be fighting for their lives and homeland, the only EU forces capable of acting are the French. German does not have an operative army or navy; Italy, Spain and Portugal have neglected their armed forces for many years, and the Baltic and Eastern Nations are unlikely to want to get involved. The Netherlands have very good forces but not many of them.

MPJones , 7 hours ago

We can live in hope. Erdogan certainly seems to need external enemies to hold the country together. Let us also hope that Erdogan's adventurism finally wakes up Europe to the reality of the ongoing Muslim invasion so that the necessary Muslim repatriation can get going without the bloodshed which Islam's current strategy in Europe will otherwise inevitably lead to.

Know thyself , 5 hours ago

The Turkish army is a conscript army. They will need to be whipped up with religious fervour to perform. Otherwise they will look after their own skins.

But remember that the Turks put up a good defence in the Dardanelles in the First World War.

HorseBuggy , 9 hours ago

What do you expect? He killed Russian fighter pilots and he survived, this empowers terrorists like him. Those pilots were the only ones at that time fighting ISIS. May they RIP.

Max.Power , 9 hours ago

Turkey is in a "proud" group of failed empires surrounded by nations they severely abused less than 100 years ago.

Other two are Germany and Japan. Any military aggression from their side will be met with rage by a coalition of nations.

US position will be irrelevant at this point, because local historical grievances will overweight anything else.

monty42 , 10 hours ago

"Libya has been in turmoil since 2011, when an armed revolt during the "Arab Spring" led to the ouster and murder of dictator Muammar Gaddafi. Political power in the country..."

Kinda gave yourself away there. The coordinated assault on Libya by the US, Britain, France, and their Al-CiA-da allies on the ground resulted in the torture, sodomizing, and murder of Gaddafi, as well as his son and grandchildren killed in bombings by the US.

Also, let's not forget that Turkey is still in NATO, and their actions in Syria were alongside the US regime and terrorist proxies labeled "moderate rebels". The same terrorists originally used in Libya, then shipped to destroy Syria, now flown back to Libya. The attempt to paint all of those things as Turkey's actions alone is not honest.

When Turkey isn't in NATO anymore, let me know.

TheZeitgeist , 10 hours ago

Don't forget that Hiftar guy Turks are fighting in Libya was a CIA toadie living in Virginia for a decade before they gave him his "chance" to among other things become a client of the Russians apparently. Flustercluck of the 1st order everywhere one looks.

monty42 , 10 hours ago

Then they put on this whole production where it's the CIA guy or the terrorist puppet regime they installed, so that the rulers win regardless of the outcome. The victims are those caught up in their sick game.

GalustGulbenkyan , 9 hours ago

Turkish population has been recently getting ****** due to the economic contractions and devaluation of the Lira. Once Turkey starts fighting against a real army the Turks will realize that they are going to be ****** by larger dildos. In 1990's they sent thousands of volunteers to Nagorno Karabagh to fight against irregular Armenian forces and we know how that ended for them. Greeks and Egyptians are not the Kurds. Erdogan is a lot of hot air and empty threats. You can't win wars with Modern drones which even Armenians have learned how to jam and shoot down with old 1970's soviet tech.

Guentzburgh , 5 hours ago

Greece should be aligned with Russia, EU and USA are a bad choice that Greece will regret.

Greece needs to pivot towards Russia which will open huge opportunities for both countries

KoalaWalla , 6 hours ago

Greeks are bitter and prideful - they would not only defend themselves if attacked but would counter attack to reclaim land they've lost. But, I don't know that Erdogan is clever enough to realize this.

60s Man , 9 hours ago

Turkey is America's Mini Me.

currency , 3 hours ago

Erdogan is in Trouble at home declining economy and his radical conservative/Thug type policies. Turks are moving away from him except the hard core radicals and conservatives. He and his family are Corrupt - they rule with threats and use of THUGS. Sense his constant wars may be over stretched Time for a Turkish Spring.

Time for US, Nato and etc. to say goodbye to this THUG

OrazioGentile , 7 hours ago

Turkey seems to be on a warpath to imploding from within. Erdogan looks like a desperate despot with a failing economy, failing political clout, and failing modernization of his Country. Like any despot, he has to rally the troops or he will literally be a dead man walking.

HorseBuggy , 9 hours ago

The world fears loud obnoxious tyrants and Erdogan is the loudest tyrant since Hitler. Remember how countries pandered to Hitler early on? Same thing is happening with Erdogan.

This terrorist will do a lot more damage than he has already before the world wakes up.

By the time Hitler was done, 70 million people were dead, what will Erdogan cause?

OliverAnd , 9 hours ago

Turkey is not Germany. Not by far. Erdogan may be a bigger lunatic than Hitler, but Turkey is not Germany of the 30's. Without military equipment/parts from Germany, Italy, Spain, France, USA, and UK he cannot even build a nail. Economies are very integrated; he will be disposed of very very quickly. He has been warned. He is running out of lives.

NewNeo , 9 hours ago

You should research a lot more. Turkey is a lot more power thank Nazi Germany of the 1930's. Turkey currently have brand new US made equipment. It even houses the nuclear arsenal of NATO.

You should probably look at information from stratfor and George Friedman to give you a better understanding.

The failed coupe a few years ago was because the lunatic had gone off the reservation and was seen as a threat to the region. Obviously the bankers thought it in their benefit to keep him going and tipped him off.

OliverAnd , 8 hours ago

Clearly the lockdown has hindered your already illiteracy. Turkey has modern US equipment. Germany did not need US equipment. They made their own equipment; in fact both the US and USSR used Grrman old tech to develop future tech.

The coup was designed by Erdogan to bring himself to full power. When this is all done he will be responsible for millions of Turkish lives; after all he is not a Turk but a Muslim Pontian.

[Jul 27, 2020] Germany Rejects Trump Bid To Let Russia Back Into G7- 'No Chance Due To Ukraine'

So Merkel and Obama staged the coup and Russia is guilty of consequences.
Jul 27, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

For much of the past year Trump has caused angst among allies by maintaining a consistent position that Russia should be invited back into the Group of Seven (G7), making it as it was prior to 2014, the G-8.

Russia had been essentially booted from the summit as relations with the Obama White House broke down over the Ukraine crisis and the Crimea issue. Trump said in August 2019 that Obama had been "outsmarted" by Putin.

But as recently as May when Germany followed by other countries rebuffed Trump's plans to host the G7 at Camp David, Trump blasted the "very outdated group of countries" and expressed that he planned to invite four additional non-member nations, mostly notably Russia .

... per Reuters :

Germany has rejected a proposal by U.S. President Donald Trump to invite Russian President Vladimir Putin back into the Group of Seven (G7) most advanced economies , German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said in a newspaper interview published on Monday.

Interestingly enough the Ukraine and Crimea issues were raised in the interview: "But Maas told Rheinische Post that he did not see any chance for allowing Russia back into the G7 as long as there was no meaningful progress in solving the conflict in Crimea as well as in eastern Ukraine," according to the report.

[Jul 27, 2020] France-Turkey naval clash- Proxy war in Libya enters a new stage -- RT Op-ed

Notable quotes:
"... By Dr. Karin Kneissl , who works as an energy analyst and book author. She served as the Austrian minister of foreign affairs between 2017-2019. She is currently writing her book 'Die Mobilitätswende' (Mobility in transition), to be published this summer. ..."
"... "humanitarian corridor" ..."
"... "good opposition" ..."
"... "humanitarian war," ..."
"... "worst mistake." ..."
"... "geopolitical commission." ..."
"... "community of the good ones" ..."
"... "Friends of Libya," ..."
"... "good opposition" ..."
"... "exclusive economic zone" ..."
"... "other actors" ..."
"... "mare nostrum" ..."
"... Think your friends would be interested? Share this story! ..."
Jul 27, 2020 | www.rt.com

By Dr. Karin Kneissl , who works as an energy analyst and book author. She served as the Austrian minister of foreign affairs between 2017-2019. She is currently writing her book 'Die Mobilitätswende' (Mobility in transition), to be published this summer. A confrontation between the two NATO states France and Turkey continues to trouble the Mediterranean region; Egyptian forces are mobilizing. And many other military players are continuing operations there.

In March 2011, during a hectic weekend, the French delegation to the UN Security Council managed to convince all other member States of the Council to support Resolution 1973. It was all about a "humanitarian corridor" for Benghazi, which was considered the "good opposition" by the government of Nicolas Sarkozy. One of his whisperers was the controversial philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy, who supported a French intervention. Levy, fond of the "humanitarian war," found a congenial partner in Sarkozy.

France was at root of crisis

Muammar Gaddafi had been received generously with all his tents in the park of the Elysée, but suddenly he was coined the bad guy. The same had happened to Saddam Hussein in Iraq. It was not the Arab dictator who had changed; it was his usefulness to his allies. The Libyans had been distributing huge amounts of money in Europe, in particular in Rome and Paris at various levels. In certain cases they knew too much. Plus, the Libyans had been protecting the southern border of the Mediterranean for the European Union.

READ MORE Turkish media claims Egyptian military used fake photo to report on joint naval drills with France

So, the French started the war in 2011, took the British on board, which made the entire adventure look a bit like a replay of the Suez intervention of 1956, the official end of European colonial interventions. A humanitarian intervention changed into regime change on day two, which was March 20, 2011. Various UN Security Council members felt trapped by the French.

The US was asked to help, with then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and many other advisers in favor of joining that war. President Obama, however, was reluctant but, in the end, he gave in. In one of his last interviews while still in the White House, Obama stated that the aftermath of the war in Libya was his "worst mistake."

Libya ever since has mostly remained a dossier in the hands of administrative officials in Washington, but not on the top presidential agenda anymore. This practice has been slightly shifting in the past weeks. US President Donald Trump and France's Emmanuel Macron had a phone conversation on how to deescalate the situation there. Trump also spoke on that very topic with Turkish President Recep T. Erdogan. Paris supports General Haftar in his war against the Turkish-backed Government of National Accord, which is also supported by the European Union, in theory

The triggering momentum for the current rise in tensions was a naval clash between French- and Turkish-supported vessels. Both nations are NATO members, and an internal alliance investigation is underway. But France decided to pull out of the NATO naval operation that enforces the Libya arms embargo, set up during the high-level Berlin conference on Libya in mid-January 2020. Without the French vessels it will be even more toothless than its critics already deem it. This very initiative on Libya was the first test for the new European commission headed by Ursula von der Leyen and claiming to be a "geopolitical commission." The EU strives to speak the language of power but keeps failing in Libya, where two members, namely Italy and France, are pursuing very different goals. Rome is anxious about migration while Paris cares more about the terrorist threat. But both have an interest in commodities.

ALSO ON RT.COM France, Germany & Italy threaten 'sanctions' against countries that interfere in Libya It's about oil and gas

When Gaddafi was reintegrated in the "community of the good ones" in early 2004 after a curious British legal twisting on the Lockerbie attack of December 1988, a bonanza for oil and gas concessions started. The Italian energy company ENI and BP were among the first to have a big foot in the door. I studied some of those contracts and asked myself why companies were ready to accept such terms. The answer was maybe in the then rise in the oil price of oil and the proximity of Libya to the European market.

Interestingly, in September 2011, the very day of the opening ceremony of the Paris conference dubbed "Friends of Libya," a secret oil deal for the French company Total was published by the French daily Libération. The "good opposition" had promised the French an interesting range of oil concessions. Oil production continuously fell with the rise of the war, attracting sponsors, militias and smugglers from all horizons. The situation in Libya has since been called 'somalization,' but it would become even worse, since many more regional powers got involved in Libya than ever was the case in hunger-ridden Somalia.

READ MORE Turkey will be the death of NATO – its recent clash with fellow member France off the coast of Libya is an early symptom

In exchange for its military assistance, Turkey recently gained access to exploration fields off Libya's shores. Ankara had identified an "exclusive economic zone" with the government in Tripoli, which disregards the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. Actually, Israel made the same bilateral demarcation with Cyprus about ten years ago, when Noble Energy started its delineation of blocs in the Levant Basin. So Turkey is infringing on Greek and Cypriot territorial waters, while President Macron keeps reminding his EU colleagues of the "other actors" in the Mediterranean Sea. Alas, it is nobody's "mare nostrum" as it was 2,000 years ago in the Roman era. In principle, all states which have ratified the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea should simply comply with their legal obligations.

The crucial question remains: who has which leverage to de-escalate? Is it the US President, who seemingly has acted more wisely on certain issues in recent times? Or will Russian and Turkish diplomacy be able to negotiate and implement a truce? The tightrope-walk diplomacy between these last two countries is a most interesting example of classical diplomacy: interest-based and focused; able to conduct hard-core relations even in times of direct military confrontation and assassinations (remember the Russian Ambassador Karlov, shot by his Turkish bodyguard in Ankara in December 2016?).

Meanwhile, yet another actor could move in to complicate everything even more. On July 20, the Egyptian parliament voted unanimously for the deployment of the national army outside its borders, thereby taking the risk of direct confrontation with Turkey in Libya. Egyptian troops would be mobilized in support of the eastern forces of General Khalifa Haftar. Furthermore, Cairo would thereby compete even more obviously with Algeria, spending a fortune on military control of its border with Libya. Algeria in the past could rely on US support in the region, but with the gradual decline in US engagement in that part of the world, the country faces a fairly existential crisis.

There are currently two powers, among those involved in Libya, that can still contain the next stage of a decade of proxy wars started by a French philosopher and various EU oil interests: Russia and the USA.

Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.

Quizblorg 48 minutes ago Does anything here make sense? No, because France this, Italy that is not how the world is run. The parties involved here go far beyond countries. Also no mention of Saudi-Arabia/Israel. Who engineered the "Arab Spring"?

[Jul 27, 2020] 25 YEARS OF CN- 'Iraq the Nuremberg Precedent' -- March 16, 2006 by Peter Dye

Notable quotes:
"... International law is simply a weapon for the empire when it is invoked by it, and it is a useless farce for those the empire opposes. ..."
"... Interesting, but how is it possible to prosecute the US when it already dominates the world? If Hitler and the Germans had won the war there wouldn't have been a Nuremberg Trial. ..."
Mar 16, 2006 | consortiumnews.com

Editor's Note: As the United States approaches the third anniversary of the Iraq invasion, much of the commentary is focusing on the Bush administration's "incompetence" in prosecuting the war -- the failure to coimnit enough troops, the decision to disband the old Iraqi army without adequate plans for training a new one, the highhandedness of the U.S. occupation.

But what about the legal and moral questions aiising from the unprovoked invasion of Iraq? Should George W. Bush and his top aides be held accountable for violating the laws against aggressive war that the United States and other Western nations promulgated in punishing senior Nazis after World War II? Do the Nuremberg precedents that prohibit one nation from invading another apply to Bush and American officials -- or are they somehow immune? Put bluntly, should Bush and his inner circle face a war-crimes tiibunal for the tens of thousands of deaths in Iraq?

Despite the present-day conventional wisdom in Washington that these are frivolous questions, they actually go to the heart of the American commitment to the rule of law and the concept that the law applies to everyone. In this guest essay, Peter Dyer looks at this larger issue:

Just over six decades ago, the first Nuremberg Trial began. On Nov. 21, 1945, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson opened the prosecution of 21 Germans for initiating a war of aggression and for the crimes which flowed from this act. Now is a good time to reconsider some of the history and issues involved in this momentous trial in the light of the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

The trial lasted for over a year, culminating in verdicts of guilty of one, some, or all of these crimes for 18 of the defendants. Eleven were sentenced to death.

While the Nuremberg trial is, these days, seldom invoked or discussed, it was, and still is, in the words of Tribunal President Sir Geoffrey Lawrence, "unique in the history of the jurisprudence of the world." Among the most groundbreaking aspects were the drive to formally criminalize the three categories of crimes, and to establish responsibility by individuals for these crimes.

These days, the Nuremberg Trial is chiefly remembered for the prosecution and punishment of individuals for genocide. Equally important at the time, however, was the focus on wars of aggression. Thus, the first sentence of Justice Jackson's opening statement: "The privilege of opening the first trial in history for crimes against the peace of the world imposes a grave responsibility."

Crimes against peace and the responsibility tor them were detined in Article 6, the heart of the Charter of the IMT: "The tribunal.. .shall have the power to try and punish persons who.. .whether as individuals or as members of organizations, committed any of the following crimes...(a) Crimes Against Peace, namely, planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances..

The desire was not only to punish individuals for crimes but to set an international moral and legal precedent for the future. Indeed, before the end of 1946, the United Nations General Assembly unanimously adopted Resolution 95 (1), affirming '4he principles of International Law recognized by the Charter of the Nuremberg Tribunal and the judgment of the Tribunal." And, of course, the United Nations Charter forbids armed aggression and violations of the sovereignty of any state by any other state, except in immediate self defense (Article 2, Sec. 4 and Articles 39 and 51).

Invoking the precedent set by the United States and its allies at the Nuremberg trial in 1946, there can be no doubt that the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 was a war of aggression. There was no imminent threat to U.S. security nor to the security of the world. The invasion violated the U.N. Charter as well as U.N. Security Council Resolution #1441.

The Nuremberg precedent calls for no less than the arrest and prosecution of those individuals responsible for the invasion of Iraq, beginning with President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, former Secretary of State Colin Powell and former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz.

Those who still justify the invasion of Iraq would do well to remember the words of Justice Jackson: "Our position is that whatever grievances a nation may have, however objectionable it finds the status quo, aggressive warfare is an illegal means for settling these grievances or for altering these conditions."

And, for those who have difficulty visualizing American leaders as defendants in such a trial, Justice Jackson's words again: "...(L)et me make clear that while this law is first applied against German aggressors, the law includes, and if it is to serve a useful purpose it must condemn, aggression by any other nations, including those which sit here now in judgment...This trial represents mankind's desperate effort to apply the discipline of the law to statesmen who have used their powers of state to attack the foundations of the world's peace and to commit aggression against the rights of their neighbors."

Peter Dyer is a machinist who moved with his wife from California to New Zealand in 2004.

Aaron , July 26, 2020 at 20:17

Well, it would have been up to one person to call for an investigation and prosecute any illegal actions pertaining to the invasion – Barack Obama. Nobody in the Bush administration would have done it, and it was something that Obama talked about alot in his speeches in his campaign to be president.

Ana Márcia Vainsencher , July 25, 2020 at 17:47

Law is only applied to the USA "enemies", are they real, or no. Historically, the USA loves to create enemies. It's the king of wars.

frank scott , July 26, 2020 at 00:30

Sadly, we still entertain notions of war crimes, meaning that mass murders can be conducted in legal ways that's the disease right there: all we have to do is make rules for how to slaughter human beings according to a scholarly and civilized rule book written by our most gifted and trained in the humanities experts and then wipe out as many humans as we need to in a completely legal way hello?

How about a Geneva convention to write up rules of child rape, wife beating, or maybe the only thing to get "civilized" people upset: pet murdering?

Germany was only doing the politcal economic business of capital, as were its enemies, except for Russia which played the greater role in the defeat of "evil" nazi capitalism..anti-democratic capitalism is in the business of war and it will take democratic communism to bring about peace and global sanity before it destroys humanity.

Andrew Thomas , July 25, 2020 at 13:25

It has been clear for several decades that Nuremberg was not a precedent. It was -- and this is very difficult to actually write out -- victor's justice, which is exactly what the Nazis and their sympathizers said it was then. The US has been "projecting power" around the world ever since in violation of the spirit of the legal terms of the international order it was instrumental in creating post World War II; and its clear provisions at least since Reagan told the World Court to drop dead re: Nicaragua vs. US.

Other more informed readers may have much earlier examples. International law is simply a weapon for the empire when it is invoked by it, and it is a useless farce for those the empire opposes.

Robert Sinuhe , July 25, 2020 at 10:34

Interesting, but how is it possible to prosecute the US when it already dominates the world? If Hitler and the Germans had won the war there wouldn't have been a Nuremberg Trial. Principles are morals and just but power trumps all.

[Jul 26, 2020] Former Poroshenko Ally Admits Euromaidan In 2014 Was Entirely Funded By "Organized Criminal Group" - Defend Democracy Press

Highly recommended!
Jul 26, 2020 | www.defenddemocracy.press

Former Poroshenko Ally Admits Euromaidan In 2014 Was Entirely Funded By "Organized Criminal Group" 25/07/2020

24.07.2020

On July 21 st , Ukrainian businessman and politician David Zhvania revealed some open secrets of the Ukrainian politics, including crimes that former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko had carried out. The irony of the situation is that Zhvania was, at one point, the leader of Poroshenko's campaign headquarters.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/JChtKpaulOs

He said that Euromaidan was ruled by criminal groups led by the people who were leading the parties that came into power following the coup – the BPP (Bloc of Petro Poroshenko) and the National Front.

He also said that he had participated in giving multimillion-dollar bribes to European officials in exchange for their support to Poroshenko's election as president.

The former member of Ukrainian parliament, in his video message, said that Ukraine is threatened with a new coming to power of Poroshenko.

"A creeping revenge is taking place in the country – Zelensky's rating falls, and Poroshenko and his entourage are again striving for power. I cannot look at it calmly, so I decided to give this press conference. Warn the citizens of Ukraine not to make a mistake. Tell everyone. who is Poroshenko and his entourage.

This is a criminal group that from the very beginning participated in the Maidan solely for the sake of seizing power and personal enrichment," Zhvania said.

He said that following the 2014 Maidan, an organized criminal group took power in Ukraine, and he admitted that he was part of it.

According to Zhvania, it was this criminal group that financed the protests and thwarted any options for agreements with the authorities (the Yanukovich government), which were designed to avoid escalation.

Read also: Les gilets jaunes lancent un ultimatum au Président

"I was also a member of the organized criminal group, which seized power in 2014 on the wave of popular protests. We financed the Maidan, we fueled protest moods in the media, thwarted the government's peace initiatives, conducted separate negotiations with deputies of the Party of Regions, and negotiated with foreign embassies.

The organized criminal group included Martynenko, Poroshenko, Turchynov, Yatsenyuk, Klitschko. Each of whom has attached its own group. Turchinov, for example, brought Pashinsky and Parubiy," Zhvania said and added that he was ready to testify on this matter.

After the coup victory, Zhvania's group engaged in political corruption to secure the presidency for Poroshenko.

"I and Klimkin (note: Klimkin later became the foreign minister) directly participated in the transfer of 5 million euros through the Ukrainian Embassy in Germany for one high-ranking European official at that time in order to ensure support for Poroshenko as a candidate for the presidency of Ukraine from the EU. I am ready to provide the circumstances of this to the investigating authorities," Zhvania claimed.

In his opinion, Poroshenko became president as a result of the consensus of the oligarchs. And he took on certain obligations to them, which in most cases he carried out.

According to Zhvania, during his tenure as president, Poroshenko acquired approximately $3.4 billion in bribes.

The former politician hoped that President Zelensky "will have enough political will to bring the case of Poroshenko and his entourage to an end."

"Poroshenko today, on the eve of local elections, may try to run for mayor. Before Maidan, it was his dream – he humiliatingly begged Yanukovych for the right to run for mayor of Kiev, was ready to give a bribe for this. Yanukovych did not allow, and Poroshenko did not dare to disobey," Zhvania said and promised to reveal more in the following weeks.

Read also: Brazil's Neo-Liberal Fascist Road to Power | By James Petras

In brief, he said:

  1. The Euromaidan in 2014 was not a spontaneous protest, but was financed by political circles to overthrow Yanukovych.
  2. Any peace initiatives were thwarted by a group that included Martynenko, Poroshenko, Turchynov, Yatsenyuk and Klitschko.
  3. Zhvania and Klimkin gave 5 million euros in bribes to a European official to lobby for Poroshenko's interests as a presidential candidate in 2014.

David Zhvania is a well-known Ukrainian businessman from Georgia. Long-term business partner of the deputy of several iterations of Parliament Nikolay Martynenko.

Zhvania was also a member in four different Ukrainian parliament configurations. In 2004, he was an ally of Yushchenko, was a member of the Our Ukraine bloc, and took part in the Orange Revolution. In 2005, he served as Minister of Emergency Situations in the government of Yulia Tymoshenko.

In 2006 he went to the Verkhovna Rada from "Our Ukraine" and Yushchenko, but he had a falling out with him.

In 2010, he became friends with the Yanukovych team.

In the 2012 elections, he entered parliament as a self-nominated and non-partisan candidate in 140 constituencies. He was a member of the Party of Regions faction, but left it in 2013 when the Revolution of Dignity began.

In the 2014 elections, he was one of the heads of the electoral headquarters of the Petro Poroshenko Bloc. People's Deputy Aleksandr Onishchenko stated that he transferred money to Zhvania for a seat in the parliament of the 8th convocation.

[Jul 26, 2020] Russian hatefest was over the top. It was a classic case of accusing Russia of what we do. Russia (aka United States) nihilistically creates trouble and by amplifying discord in other countries in order to deflect from their own domestic problems and foreign adventurism in places like Syria and Ukraine.

Jul 26, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Christian J. Chuba , Jul 26 2020 15:54 utc | 7

Made the mistake of watching Fareed Zakaria show

The good , a 5 minute segment where a guest picked winner / loser countries post covid19 world.
Winners: Germany, Taiwan, and Russia, Loser: United States.
It was amusing to watch Zakaria's face contort at the mention of Russia being named a winner, 'wha-whaaaaaaat?' The guest had to reassure Zakaria that Russia is a crap country and only benefits because of Putin's Fortress Russia campaign and low debt making it capable of weathering storms. Zakaria's face still frozen in a mask of horror.

The bad a rather long segment on Russia, China, and Iran's meddling campaign for our next election. This was more painful to me then when I had appendicitis and had to wait several hours before anyone could drive me to the emergency room.
1. Two experts, a China hater and a Russia hater from different 'Institutes'

2. The gratuitous adding of Iran to the list without explanation. Pro-Iranian views are invisible.

3. Russian hatefest was over the top. It was a classic case of accusing Russia of what we do. Russia (aka United States) nihilistically creates trouble and by amplifying discord in other countries in order to deflect from their own domestic problems and foreign adventurism in places like Syria and Ukraine.

Nihilistic spoilers? We the U.S. lost in Syria but are now trying to create a quagmire for Russia and are pulling out all of the stops to make Syrians brutally suffer with a full scale trade embargo and partition of their country.

[Jul 26, 2020] If the US led west want to strengthen their 'Democratic' factions on the Russian federation they need to start playing nice so at least those poor sob have something to work on.

Jul 26, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Lucci , Jul 26 2020 15:36 utc | 4

@ Albertde | Jul 26 2020 15:15 utc | 1

The reasoning and arguments being?

Posted by: Lurk | Jul 26 2020 15:19 utc | 2

US led west doesn't leave room for atlanticist fifth column of Russian federation to gain political traction. Keeping their course in demonizing Russia and subjecting it with unfair standard of conduct wherever possible is sure way to boost nationalist faction political gain.

If the US led west want to strengthen their 'Democratic' factions on the Russian federation they need to start playing nice so at least those poor sob have something to work on. This however no longer possible for the US who rapidly left behind in development in every aspect.

[Jul 26, 2020] Patriotic Dissent- How A Working-Class Soldier Turned Against -Forever Wars- -

Jul 26, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

Patriotic Dissent: How A Working-Class Soldier Turned Against "Forever Wars"

by Tyler Durden Sat, 07/25/2020 - 00:05 Twitter Facebook Reddit Email Print

Authored by Steve Early and Suzanne Gordon via Counterpunch.org,

When it comes to debate about US military policy, the 2020 presidential election campaign is so far looking very similar to that of 2016. Joe Biden has pledged to ensure that "we have the strongest military in the world," promising to "make the investments necessary to equip our troops for the challenges of the next century, not the last one."

In the White House, President Trump is repeating the kind of anti-interventionist head feints that won him votes four years ago against a hawkish Hillary Clinton. In his recent graduation address at West Point, Trump re-cycled applause lines from 2016 about "ending an era of endless wars" as well as America's role as "policeman of the world."

In reality, since Trump took office, there's been no reduction in the US military presence abroad, which last year required a Pentagon budget of nearly $740 billion. As military historian and retired career officer Andrew Bacevich notes , "endless wars persist (and in some cases have even intensified ); the nation's various alliances and its empire of overseas bases remain intact; US troops are still present in something like 140 countries ; Pentagon and national security state spending continues to increase astronomically ."

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When the National Defense Authorization Act for the next fiscal year came before Congress this summer, Senator Bernie Sanders proposed a modest 10 percent reduction in military spending so $70 billion could be re-directed to domestic programs. Representative Barbara Lee introduced a House resolution calling for $350 billion worth of DOD cuts. Neither proposal has gained much traction, even among Democrats on Capitol Hill. Instead, the House Armed Services Committee just voted 56 to 0 to spend $740. 5 billion on the Pentagon in the coming year, prefiguring the outcome of upcoming votes by the full House and Senate.

An Appeal to Conscience

Even if Biden beats Trump in November, efforts to curb US military spending will face continuing bi-partisan resistance. In the never-ending work of building a stronger anti-war movement, Pentagon critics, with military credentials, are invaluable allies. Daniel Sjursen, a 37-year old veteran of combat in Iraq and Afghanistan is one such a critic. Inspired in part by the much-published Bacevich, Sjursen has just written a new book called Patriotic Dissent: America in the Age of Endless War (Heyday Books)

Patriotic Dissent is a short volume, just 141 pages, but it packs the same kind of punch as Howard Zinn's classic 1967 polemic, Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal . Like Zinn, who became a popular historian after his service in World War II, Sjursen skillfully debunks the conventional wisdom of the foreign policy establishment, and the military's own current generation of "yes men for another war power hungry president." His appeal to the conscience of fellow soldiers, veterans, and civilians is rooted in the unusual arc of an eighteen-year military career. His powerful voice, political insights, and painful personal reflections offer a timely reminder of how costly, wasteful, and disastrous our post 9/11 wars have been.

Sjursen has the distinction of being a graduate of West Point, an institution that produces few political dissenters. He grew up in a fire-fighter family on working class Staten Island. Even before enrolling at the Academy at age 17, he was no stranger to what he calls "deep-seated toxically masculine patriotism." As a newly commissioned officer in 2005, he was still a "burgeoning neo-conservative and George W. Bush admirer" and definitely not, he reports, any kind of "defeatist liberal, pacifist, or dissenter."

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Sjursen's initial experience in combat -- vividly described in his first book, Ghost Riders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of The Surge (University Press of New England) -- "occurred at the statistical height of sectarian strife" in Iraq.

"The horror, the futility, the farce of that war was the turning point in my life," Sjursen writes in Patriotic Dissent .

When he returned, at age 24, from his "brutal, ghastly deployment" as a platoon leader, he "knew that the war was built on lies, ill-advised, illegal, and immoral." This "unexpected, undesired realization generated profound doubts about the course and nature of the entire American enterprise in the Greater Middle East -- what was then unapologetically labeled the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT)."

A Professional Soldier

By the time Sjursen landed in Kandahar Province, Afghanistan, in early 2011, he had been promoted to captain but "no longer believed in anything we were doing."

He was, he confesses, "simply a professional soldier -- a mercenary, really -- on a mandatory mission I couldn't avoid. Three more of my soldiers died, thirty-plus were wounded, including a triple amputee, and another over-dosed on pain meds after our return."

Despite his disillusionment, Sjursen had long dreamed of returning to West Point to teach history. He applied for and won that highly competitive assignment, which meant the Army had to send him to grad school first. He ended up getting credentialed, while living out of uniform, in the "People's Republic of Lawrence, Kansas, a progressive oasis in an intolerant, militarist sea of Republican red." During his studies at the state university, Sjursen found an intellectual framework for his "own doubts about and opposition to US foreign policy." He completed his first book, Ghost Riders , which combines personal memoir with counter-insurgency critique. Amazingly enough, it was published in 2015, while he was still on active duty, but with "almost no blowback" from superior officers.

Before retiring as a major four years later, Sjursen pushed the envelope further, by writing more than 100 critical articles for TomDispatch and other civilian publications. He was no longer at West Point so that body of work triggered "a grueling, stressful, and scary four-month investigation"by the brass at Fort Leavenworth, during which the author was subjected to "a non-publication order." At risk were his career, military pension, and benefits. He ended up receiving only a verbal admonishment for violating a Pentagon rule against publishing words "contemptuous of the President of the United States." His "PTSD and co-occurring diagnoses" helped him qualify for a medical retirement last year.

Sjursen has now traded his "identity as a soldier -- the only identity I've known in my adult life -- for that of an anti-war, anti-imperialist, social justice crusader," albeit one who did not attend his first protest rally until he was thirty-two years old. With several left-leaning comrades, he started Fortress on A Hill, a lively podcast about military affairs and veterans' issues. He's a frequent, funny, and always well-informed guest on progressive radio and cable-TV shows, as well as a contributing editor at Antiwar.com , and a contributor to a host of mainstream liberal publications. This year, the Lannan Foundation made him a cultural freedom fellow.

In Patriotic Dissent , Sjursen not only recounts his own personal trajectory from military service to peace activism. He shows how that intellectual journey has been informed by reading and thinking about US history, the relationship between civil society and military culture, the meaning of patriotism, and the price of dissent.

One historical figure he admires is Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler, the recipient of two Medals of Honor for service between 1898 and 1931. Following his retirement, Butler sided with the poor and working-class veterans who marched on Washington to demand World War I bonus payments. And he wrote a best-selling Depression-era memoir, which famously declared that "war is just a racket" and lamented his own past role as "a high-class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street, and for the Bankers."

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Sjursen contrasts Butler's anti-interventionist whistle-blowing, nearly a century ago, with the silence of high-ranking veterans today after "nineteen years of ill-advised, remarkably unsuccessful American wars." Among friends and former West Point classmates, he knows many still serving who "obediently resign themselves to continued combat deployments" because they long ago "stopped asking questions about their own role in perpetuating and enabling a counter-productive, inertia-driven warfare state."

Sjursen looks instead to small left-leaning groups like Veterans for Peace and About Face: Veterans Against the War (formerly Iraq Veterans Against the War), and Bring Our Troops Home. US, a network of veterans influenced by the libertarian right. Each in, its own way, seeks to "reframe dissent, against empire and endless war, as the truest form of patriotism." But actually taming the military-industrial complex will require "big-tent, intersectional action from civilian and soldier alike," on a much larger scale. One obstacle to that, he believes, is the societal divide between the "vast majority of citizens who have chosen not to serve" in the military and the "one percent of their fellow citizens on active duty," who then become part of "an increasingly insular, disconnected, and sometimes sententious post-9/11 veteran community."

Not many on the left favor a return to conscription.

But Sjursen makes it clear there's been a downside to the U.S. replacing "citizen soldiering" with "a tiny professional warrior caste," created in response to draft-driven dissent against the Vietnam War, inside and outside the military. As he observes:

"Nothing so motivates a young adult to follow foreign policy, to weigh the advisability or morality of an ongoing war as the possibility of having to put 'skin in the game.' Without at least the potential requirement to serve in the military and in one of America's now countless wars, an entire generation -- or really two, since President Nixon ended the draft in 1973–has had the luxury of ignoring the ills of U.S. foreign policy, to distance themselves from its reality ."

At a time when the U.S. "desperately needs a massive, public, empowered anti-war and anti-imperial wave" sweeping over the country, we have instead a "civil-military" gap that, Sjursen believes, has "stifled antiwar and anti-imperial dissent and seemingly will continue to do so." That's why his own mission is to find more "socially conscious veterans of these endless, fruitless wars" who are willing to "step up and form a vanguard of sorts for revitalized patriotic dissent." Readers of Sjursen's book, whether new recruits to that vanguard or longtime peace activists, will find Patriotic Dissent to be an invaluable educational tool. It should be required reading in progressive study groups, high school and college history classes, and book clubs across the country . Let's hope that the author's willingness to take personal risks, re-think his view of the world, and then work to change it will inspire many others, in uniform and out.

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Justus_Americans , 59 minutes ago

Do we need to be in 160 countries with our military and can we afford it?

Cat Daddy , 1 hour ago

I am all for bringing the troops home except for this one unnerving truth; nature abhors a vacuum, specifically, when we pull out, China moves in. A world dominated by the CCP will be a dangerous place to be. When we leave, we will need to make sure our bases are safely in the hands of our friends.

dogbert8 , 1 hour ago

War is effectively the way the U.S. has done business since the Spanish American War, our first imperial conquests. War is how we ensure big business has the materials and markets they demand in return for their support of political parties and candidates. War is the only area left with opportunities for growth and profit. Don't think for a minute that TPTB will ever let us stop waging war to get what we (they) want.

TheLastMan , 2 hours ago

If you are new to zh all you need to do is study PNAC and the related nature of all parties to understand the criminality of USA militarization and for whose benefit it serves

Anonymous IX , 2 hours ago

I have written many times on this platform the exact same sentiments.

I am most disheartened by the COVID + Antifa/BLM Riots because of the facts this author presents.

We are distracted with emotional and highly volatile MASSIVELY PROPAGANDIZED stories by MSM (I don't watch) while the real problem in the world is as the author describes above.

We are war-mongering nation who needs to bring our troops home and disband over half of our overseas installations and bases.

We have no right to levy economic sanctions to impoverish, sicken, and weaken the citizens of Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, or anywhere else.

Yet, we run around arguing about masks and who can go into a restaurant or toppling statutes and throwing mortar-type fireworks at federal officers. This is what we do instead of facing a real problem which is that we are war-mongering nation with no moral/ethical conscience. These scraggily bearded white Antifas need to WTFU and realize who their true enemy.

Oh, wait. They work for the true enemy! Get it?

Max21c , 1 hour ago

We have no right to levy economic sanctions to impoverish, sicken, and weaken the citizens of Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, or anywhere else.

I don't agree with the economic sanctions nonsense thing as they seem to be more of a crutch for people that are not any good at planning, strategy, analytical thinking, critical thinking, strategic thinking, and lack much in the way of talent or creativity or intellectual acumen or intellectual skills...I believe there's around just shy of 10k economic sanctions by Washington...

But the USA does have the right to receive or refuse to receive foreign Ambassadors and Consuls and to recognize or not recognize other nations governments thus it does have some degrees of the right to not trade or engage in commerce with other nations to a certain extent... per imports and exports... et cetera... though it's not necessarily an absolute right or power

IronForge , 2 hours ago

Sjursen may admire General Butler; but he doesn't seem to know that several of the General's Descendants Served in the US Military.

Sjursen isn't Butler. The General Prevented a Coup in his Time.

The USA are a Hegemony whose KleptOchlarchs overtook the Original Constitutional Republic.

PetroUSD, MIC, Corporate Expansion-Conquest, AgriGMO, and Pharma Interests Span the Globe.

Wars are Rackets; and Societies to Nation-States have waged them over Real Estate, Natural Resources, Trade Routes, Industrial Capacity, Slavery, Suppresive Spite, Religious/Ideological Zeal, Economic Preservation, and Profiteering Greed.

YET, Militaries are still formed by Nation-States to Survive and for Some - Thrive above such Competitive Existenstential Threats.

*****

The Hegemony are running up against New Shifts in Global Power, Systems, and Influences; and are about to Lose their Unilateral Advantages. The Hegemon themselves may suffer Societal Collapses Within.

Sjursen should read up on Chalmers Johnson. Instead of trying to Coordinate Ineffective Peace Demonstrations, the Entire Voting/Political Contribution/Candidacy Schemes should be Separated from the Oligarchy of Plutocrats and Corporate/Political KleptOchlarchs.

Without Bringing the Votes back to the Collective Hands of Citizenry Interests First and Foremost, the Republic are Forever Conquered; and the Ethical may have to resort to Emigration and/or Secession.

Ink Pusher , 2 hours ago

Nobody rides for free,there's always a cost and those who can't pay in bullion will often pay in bodily fluids of one form or another.

Profiteers that create warfare for profit are simply parasitical criminals and should not be considered a "special breed" when weighed upon the Scales of Justice.

gzorp , 2 hours ago

Read 'Starship Troopers' by Robert A Heinlein (1959) pay especial attention to the "History and Moral Philosophy" courses... that's where his predictions for the future course of 'America's' future appear.... rather accurately. Heinlein was a 1930's graduate of Annapolis (Navy for you dindus and nohabs).....

A DUDE , 2 hours ago

t's not just the war machine but the entire system, the corporatocracy, of which the MIC is a part. And there is no way to change the system from within the system because whatever is anti-establishment becomes absorbed and neutered and part of the system.

So why would anyone vote is my question? 11. Trump and Biden Are Far Right of Center and Running to Offenbach Nearly Every Day

sbin , 2 hours ago

Tulsi Gabbard ran on anti interventionism foreign policy.

Look how fast the DNC disappeared her.

Of course destroying Kamala Harris in a debate and going after the ancient evil Hitlery sealed her fate.

BarkingWolf , 2 hours ago

In reality, since Trump took office, there's been no reduction in the US military presence abroad, which last year required a Pentagon budget of nearly $740 billion. As military historian and retired career officer Andrew Bacevich notes , "endless wars persist (and in some cases have even intensified ); the nation's various alliances and its empire of overseas bases remain intact; US troops are still present in something like 140 countries ; Pentagon and national security state spending continues to increase astronomically ."

Now wait just a minute there mister, that sounds like criticism of the Donald John PBUH PBUH PBUH ... you can't do that ... the cult followers will call you a leftist and a commie if you point out stuff like that even if it is objectively true! That's strike one, punk.

An Appeal to Conscience

Even if Biden beats Trump in November, efforts to curb US military spending will face continuing bi-partisan resistance.

November doesn't have anything to do with anything really. The appeal to conscience is wasted. The appeal would be better spent on removing the political class that is on the AIPAC dole and have dual citizenship in a foreign country in the ME while pretending to serve America while they are members of Congress. That's only the tip of the spear ... and that is a nonstarter from the get go.

Sjursen skillfully debunks the conventional wisdom of the foreign policy establishment, and the military's own current generation of "yes men for another war power hungry president."


I don't think Trump is necessarily a war power hungry president. While it is true that we have not withdrawn from Syria and basically stole their oil as Trump has repeated promised he would do, it is also true that Trump has yet to deliver Israels war with Iran and in fact had called back an invasion of Iran ten minutes before a flotilla of US warships was about to set sail to ignite such an invasion leaving Tel Aviv not only aggrieved, but angry as well.

Sjursen has now traded his "identity as a soldier -- the only identity I've known in my adult life -- for that of an anti-war, anti-imperialist, social justice crusader," albeit one who did not attend his first protest rally until he was thirty-two years old. With several left-leaning comrades ...

Okay, this is where you are starting to lose me .... i't like listening to a concert and suddenly the music is hitting sour notes that are off key, off tempo, and don't seem to fit somehow.

Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler, the recipient of two Medals of Honor for service between 1898 and 1931. Following his retirement, Butler sided with the poor and working-class veterans who marched on Washington to demand World War I bonus payments. And he wrote a best-selling Depression-era memoir, which famously declared that "war is just a racket" and lamented his own past role as "a high-class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street, and for the Bankers."

"On July 28, 1932, at the command of Gen. Douglas MacArthur, they marched down Pennsylvania Avenue toward the Capitol to launch an attack on World War I veterans. " https://www.stripes.com/news/us/the-veterans-were-desperate-gen-macarthur-ordered-us-troops-to-attack-them-1.480665

Butler was correct, war especially nowadays, is a racket that makes rich people who never seem to get their hands dirty, even richer. As one grunt put it long ago, "it's a dirty job, but somebody has to do it."

That "somebody" is going to be the kids of the little people (the real high-class muscle-men ) who are hated by their political class overlords even as the political class are worshipped as gods.

Sjursen looks instead to small left-leaning groups like Veterans for Peace and About Face: Veterans Against the War (formerly Iraq Veterans Against the War), and Bring Our Troops Home. US, a network of veterans influenced by the libertarian right.

The problem here is that the so-called "left" brand has always been about war and the capitalism of death.

The Democrat party is really the group that started the American civil war for instance, they are the ones behind legacy of Eugenists like Margaret Sanger who was a card carrying Socialist who founded the child murder mill known today as Planned Parenthood that sadly still exists under Trump but has turned into the industrialized slaughter of children ...even after birth so that their organs can be "harvested" for profit.

Sjursen's affinity for "the left" as saintly purveyors of peace, goodness, love, and life strikes me as rather disingenuous. Then he seems to argue if I read the analysis correctly that conscription will somehow be the panacea for the insatiable appetite for war?

One false flag such as The Gulf of Tonkin or 911 or even Perl Harbor or the Sinking of the Lusitania or the assassination of an Arch Duke ... is all that is really needed to arouse the unbridled hoards to march off to battle with almost erotic enthusiasm -the political class KNOWS IT!

Amendment X , 2 hours ago

And don't forget President Wilson (D) who was re-elected on the platform "He kept us out of the war" only to drag U.S. into the hopeless European Monarchary driven WWI.

11b40 , 1 hour ago

Yo! Low class muscle man here, and I have to agree with bringing back the draft. It should never have been eliminated, and is the root of the golbalists abiity to keep us in Afghanistan, and other parts of the ME, for going on 20 years.

Skin in the game. It means literally everything. As noted we now have 2 generations of men who never had to give much thought at all to what's happening around the world, and how America is involved....and look at the results. It would be a much different situation today if all those 18 year olds had to face the draft board with an unforgiving lottery.

Yes, one false falg can whip up the country to a war time fever pitch, but unless there is a real, serious threat, the fever cannot be maintained. The 1969 draft lottery caught me when I stayed out the first semester of my senior year. Didn't want to go, but accepted my fate and did the best job I could to stay alive and keep those around me as safe as possible. In 1966, I was in favor of the war, and was about to go Green Beret on the buddy system. We were going to grease gooks with all the enthusiasm of John Wayne. My old man, an artillery 1st Sgt at the time in Germany, talked me out of it. More like get your *** on a plane back to the States and into college, befroe i kick it up around your shouders. A WW2 & Korea vet, he told me then it was the wrong war, in the wrong place, at the wrong time.

The point is, when kids are getting drafted, Mom's, Dad's, and everyone else concerned with the safety of their friends & relatives, start paying attention and asking hard questions of politicians. Using Afghanistan as an example, we would have been on the way out by the 2004 election cycle, or at max before the next one in 2008. That was 12 years ago, and we are still there.

I addition, the reason we went would have been more closely examined, and there may have been a real investigtion into 9/11. Plus, I am convinced that serving your country makes for a better all around citizen, and God knows, we need better citizens.

Cassandra.Hermes , 2 hours ago

Trump and Pompeo started new cold war with China, but have no way to back up their threats and win it!! When i was in Kosovo peace corps i heard so many stories from Albanian who were blamed to be Russian or American spy because of double cold war against Albania. Trump and Pompeo just gave excuse to Xi to blame anyone who protest as American spy. BBC were showing China's broadcast of the protests in Oregon to Hong Kong with subtitle "Do you really want American democracy?", LMFAO

Max21c , 2 hours ago

Joe Biden has pledged to ensure that "we have the strongest military in the world," promising to "make the investments necessary to equip our troops for the challenges of the next century, not the last one."

The United States shall continue to have a weak military until it starts to fix its foreign policy and diplomacy. You cannot have the strongest military in the world if you lack a good foreign policy and good diplomacy. Brains are a lot more important than battleships, battalions, bullets, barrels, or bombs. Get a frickin' clue you friggin' Washington morons.

Washington is weak because they are dumb. Blind, deaf, and dumb.

Heroic Couplet , 2 hours ago

Too little, too late. Great ad for a book that will be forgotten in a week. Read Bolton's book. The minute Trump tries to reduce troops, Bolton is right there, saying "No, we can't move troops to the perimeter. No, we can't move troops from barracks to tents at the perimeter." Who needs AI?

Erik Prince wrote 3.5 years ago that 4th gen warfare consists of cyberwarfare and bio-weapons. The US military is fooked. There's probably an interesting book to be researched: How do Republicans feel about contracting COVID-19 after listening to Trump fumble?

ChecksandBalances , 3 hours ago

Blame the voters. Run on a platform to reduce military and police spending. See how many of those lose. Probably all of them. You have to stop feeding the beast. This is a slogan Trump correctly said but as usual didn't actually mean. We should cut all military and police spending by 1/2 and then take the remaining money and build a smarter, more efficient military and police force.

Max21c , 3 hours ago

It's not just the "Deep State." It's Washingtonians overall. It's Deep Crazy. They're all Deep Crazy! They're nuts. And the rare exceptions that may know better and have enough common sense to know its wrong to sick the secret police on innocent American civilians aren't going to say anything or do anything to stop it. The few that know better in foreign policy aren't going to say anything or do anything against the new Cold Wars on the Eastern Front against China or on the Western Front against Russia since they're not willing to go up against the Regime. So the Regimists know they have carte blanche to persecute or terrorize or go after any that stand in their way. This is how tyrannies and police states operate. It's the nature of the beast. At a minimum they brow beat people into submission. People don't want to stick their neck out and risk going up against the Regime and risk losing to the Regime, its secret police, and the powers that be. They shy away from anything that would bring the Regime and its secret police and its radicals, extremists, fanatics, and zealots their way.

nonkjo , 4 hours ago

It's okay to be against "forever war" and still not have to be a progressive douchbag.

Sjursen is an unprincipled ******** artist. He leaves Iraq disillusioned as a lieutenant but sticks around long enough for them to pay for his grad school and give him some sweet "resume building" experiences that he can stand on to sell books? FYI, from commissioning time as a second lieutenant to promotion to captain is 3 years...that means Sjusen was so disillusioned that he decided to stick around for 12 more years which is about 9 years longer than he actually needed to as an Academy grad (he only had to serve 6 unless he elected to go to grad school).

The bottom line is Sjusen capitalizes on people not knowing how the military works. That is, that his own self-interest far outweighs his the principles he espouses. Typical leftist hypoctite.

Max21c , 4 hours ago

...the U.S. "desperately needs a massive, public, empowered anti-war and anti-imperial wave ..."

Perhaps the USA just needs a better foreign policy. Though we all know that's not going to happen with the flaky screwballs of Washington and the flaky screwballs in the Pentagon, CIA, State Department, foreign policy establishment, think tanks et cetera.

Minor technical point: the time for the "anti-imperial wave" was before Washingtonians destroyed much of the world and created their strategic blunders and disastrous foreign policy. You folks all went along with this nonsense and now you have your quagmires, forever wars, and numerous trouble spots that have popped up here and there along the way to boot.

Pottery barn rule: you broke it and you own it and it's yours...Ma'am please pay at the register on the way out...Sorry Ma'am there's no more free gluing...though the gluing specialist may be in on the third Thursday this month though it's usually the second Tuesday each month...

Contemporaneously, in the same vein the American public has been brainwashed into going along with the new Cold Wars on the Western Front against Moscow and the even newer Cold War on the Eastern Front against Beijing. It's like P.T. Barnum said "There's a sucker born every minute," and you fools in the American public just keep buying right in to the brainwashing. They're now successfully indoctrinating you into buying into their new Cold Wars with Russia and China. The Cold War on the Eastern Front versus Peking is more getting more fanciful attentions at the moment and the Cold War on the Western Front has temporarily been relegated to the back burner but they'll move the Western Front Cold War from simmer to boil over whenever it suits their needs. It's just a rendition of the Oceania has always been at war with East Asia and Eurasia is our friend are just gameplays right out of George Orwell's 1984.

Most of the quagmires can be fixed to a certain extent by applying some cement and engineering to the quicksand and many of the trouble spots can become more settled and less unstable if not stable in some instances. Even some of the more serious strategic problems like the South China Sea, North Korean nuclear weapons development, and potential Iranian nuclear weapons development can still be resolved through peaceful strategies and solutions.

In re sum, while I won't disparage a peace movement I do not believe it is either necessary nor proper simply because you will not solve anything through a peace movement. The sine qua non or quintessential element is simply to end one of these wars successfully through a peaceful diplomatic solution or solve one of these serious foreign policy problems through diplomacy which is something that hasn't been the norm since the downfall of the Berlin Wall, is no longer in favor, and which is the necessary element to prove that peace can be achieved through strategy and diplomacy and thereby change the course of the country's future.

In foreign affairs the foreign policy establishment has its pattern of behavior and it is that pattern of behavior that has to be changed. It's the mindset of the Washingtonians & elites that has to be changed. Just taking to the streets won't really change their ways or their beliefs for any significant part of the duration. They may pay lip service to peace & diplomacy but it won't win out in their minds in the long run. They are so warped in their views and beliefs that it'll have little or no effect over the long haul. As soon as the protests dissipate they'll be right back at it, back to their bad ways and bad behavior.

Son of Captain Nemo , 4 hours ago

For the past 19 years... And as Anti-War as you will ever get!...

https://action.ae911truth.org/p/salsa/web/common/public/signup?signup_page_KEY=11418&killorg=True&loggedOut=True

https://www.ae911truth.org/grandjury

P.S.

Remind 0range $hit $tain ( https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2016/11/14/trump-im-reopening-911-investigation/ ) that if he makes this a campaign pledge and an issue for debate he maybe can avoid a war crimes tribunal given how much has already been spent on the war machine ( https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/944-trillion-reasons-why-fed-quietly-bailing-out-hedge-funds )!

Hatterasjohn , 4 hours ago

Was it George Carlin that said " if voting made a difference they wouldn't let us do it " ? The only way to stop these forever wars is for people to stop joining the military. Parents should teach their children that joining the military and trotting off to some country to fight a war for the elite is not being patriotic . I was in the military from 1964 -1968. When Lyndon Johnson became president he drug out the Vietnam war as long as he could. Oh ! Lady Byrd Johnson bought Decon Company [ rat poison ] when most people never heard of it. Johnson bought this rat poison , government paid for ,at an inflated price . Sent ship loads of it to Vietnam .Never mind all the Americans and so called enemy killed.. Jane Fonda , Hanoi Jane , was really a hero who helped save countless lives by helping to end the war. Tommy and **** Smothers , Smother Brothers , spoke out against the war . Our government had them black balled from TV. Our government is probably as corrupt as any other country.

No-Go zone , 5 hours ago

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-03-19/top-us-general-says-american-troops-should-be-ready-die-israel

cowboyted , 7 hours ago

A piece of irony, one of our greatest generals was Dwight Eisenhower, the Allied Supreme Commander in WWII and two term president. He kept the peace for almost 10 years and warned Americans to beware of the "military-industrial complex." Most military men never want war, they just make sure they are ready if it comes. We have had the military industrial complex for way too long, it needs to be reduced and we need more generals to run for president, Gen. Flynn maybe? I'll also take Schwartzkoff.

cowboyted , 7 hours ago

The U.S. should only use our military if we are attacked, period. Otherwise, as Jefferson astutely stated, a standing army is a threat to democracy.

captain noob , 7 hours ago

Capitalism has no morals

Profit is the driving force of every single thing

cowboyted , 7 hours ago

The U.S. should only use our military if we are attacked, period. Otherwise, as Jefferson astutely stated, a standing army is a threat to democracy.

Chief Joesph , 7 hours ago

After what General Smedley Butler had to say and warned us about, here we are, 90 years later, doing the very same thing. Goes to show how utterly dumb, unprogressive, sheepish, and Medieval Americans really are. And you thought this is what makes America Great????

cowboyted , 8 hours ago

The U.S. Constitution provides for a "national defense." Yet, the last time we were attacked by a foreign nation was on Dec. 7, 1941 in which, the Congress declared war on Japan. Yet, in the past 100 years our country's leaders have convinced Americans that we can wage war if the issue concerns our "national INTEREST." This is wrong and needs to be deleted and replaced with our Constitution's language. Also, Congress is the ONLY Constitutional authority to declare war, not the executive branch. Too many countries, including the U.S., spend too much money preparing for war on levels of destruction that are unnecessary. We must attain a new paradigm with leading countries to achieve a mutual understanding that the people of the world are better off with jobs, food, families, peace, and a chance at a better life, filled with hope, faith, and flourishing communities. Things have to change.

transcendent_wannabe , 8 hours ago

I have to agree in sentiment with the author, but the reality of humans on earth almost demands constant war, it is the price we pay for the modern city lifestyle. There are various reasons.

1. Ever since WW1, the country has become citified, and the old peaceful country farm life was replaced with the rat race of industrial production. Without war, there is no need for the level of industrial production required to give full employment to the overpopulated cities. People will scream for war and jingoism when they have no city jobs. How do you deal with that? Sure, War is a Racket, but so far a necessary racket.

2. Every 20 years the military needs a real shooting war to battle test its upcoming soldiers and new equipment. Now the battles are against insurgencies... door-to-door in cities and ghettos, and new tactics need to be field tested. If the military goes more than 20 years without a real shooting war, they lose the real men, the sargeant majors, who just become fat pot bellied desk personel without the adrenaline of a real fight.

3. Humans inately like to fight. Even children, boys wrestle, girls taunt one another. There is no way discovered yet to keep people from turning violent in their attempts to steal what others have, or to gain dominance thru physical intimidation. Without war, gangs will form and fight over territorial boundaries. There is no escaping it.

4. Earth is where the battle field is, Battlefield Earth. There is no fighting allowed in heaven, so Earth is where souls come to fight. Nobody on earth likes it, but fighting and war is here to stay, and you should really use this life to find out how to transcend earth and get to a place where war is not needed or allowed, like heaven or Valhalla.

Tortuga , 8 hours ago

So. He thinks the crooked, grifting, regressive hate US murdering dim pustules aren't the warmongering, globalist, hate US, crooked, grifting, murdering republicrats. What a mo ron.

HenryJonesJr , 8 hours ago

Real conservatives were always against foreign intervention. It was the Left that embraced foreign wars (Wilson / Roosevelt / Truman / Johnson).

messystateofaffairs , 8 hours ago

From my perspective being a professional goon to serve the greater glory of international criminals, is, aside from having to avoid the mirror, way too much hard and dangerous work for the money. As a civilian of a society run by criminals on criminal imperialist principles, I have no literal PTSD type of skin in that filthy game, but like most citizens, knowing and unknowing, I do swim in that sewer everyday, doing my best to avoid bumping into the larger turds. My "patriotism" lies where the turds are fewest, anywhere in the world that might be.

bh2 , 8 hours ago

The threat to US interests is not in the ME (apart from Israel). It's in the Pacific.

NATO was never intended to be a defense arrangement perpetually funded by the US. Once stood up and post-war economies in Europe were restored, it was supposed to be a European defense shield with the US as ultimate backup. Not as a sugar-daddy for wealthy nations. Now that Russia is no longer situated to attack through the Fulda Gap, NATO is a grotesque expression of Parkinson's Law writ large.

China is a real threat to US interests. That's obvious simply by consulting a map. Military assets committed to engagement in theaters that no longer seriously matter is feckless and spendthrift. Particularly when Americans are put in harm's way with no prospect of either winning or leaving.

Worse yet is the accelerating prospect of being drawn into conflict in the South China Sea because fewer than decisive US and allied assets are deployed there.

While nations are now responding to that threat (including Japan, who are re-arming), China must realize a successful Taiwan invasion faces steadily diminishing prospects. They must act soon or give up the opportunity. Moreover, the CCP are loosing face with their own people because of multiple calamities wreaking havoc. The danger of a desperate CCP turning to a hot war to save face is an ever-rising threat. (If Three Gorges Dam fails, that could be the final straw.)

FDR deliberately suckered Japan into attacking the US (but apparently never guessed it would be on Pearl Harbor). It appears modern neo warmongers of all stripes would be delighted if China were tempted into yet another senseless war in the Pacific. And more lives lost on all sides.

While the size of US military and (ineptly named) "intelligence" budgets are vastly out of scale, the short-term cost in money is secondary to risk of long-term cost in blood. Surging the budget may make good sense when guns are all pointing in the wrong direction and political donors don't care as long as it pays well.

Defeating that outrageously wasteful spending is the first battle to be won. Disengaging from stupid, distracting, unwinnable conflicts is an imperative to achieve that goal.

The Judge , 8 hours ago

US. is the real threat to US interests.

DeptOfPsyOps-14527776 , 8 hours ago

An important part of this statue quo is propaganda and in particular neo-con propaganda.

Once it was clear that agitating against the Russian federation had failed, they started agitating against the PRC.

FDR administration wasn't that clever, they just had (((support))). They wanted Imperial Japan unable to strengthen itself against the United Kingdom as it was waging a war against the European Axis, did not realize that the Japanese fleet could reach as far as Hawaii and after Pearl Harbor, believed the West Coast could have been attacked as well.

Hovewer, they likely expected the Japanese to intercept their fleet on the way to the Phillipines after a war between Imperial Japan and the Commonwealth had started.

Salzburg1756 , 8 hours ago

"FDR deliberately suckered Japan into attacking the US (but apparently never guessed it would be on Pearl Harbor)." No, we knew the japs were going to attack Pearl Harbor. We had broken their code. That's why we sent our best battle ships away from Hawaii just before the attack. Most of the ships they sank were old and worthless; our good ships were out at sea.

TheLastMan , 4 hours ago

What constitutes "America's interests"?

the us military is the world community welcome wagon for global multi national Corp chamber of commerce

Do us citizens serve corporations or do corporations serve us citizens?

next ?, who owns / controls corporations?

Alice-the-dog , 8 hours ago

There is a reason why suicide is the leading cause of death among active duty military. They come to realize that what they are doing is perfect male bovine fecal matter. That they are guilty of participating in completely unwarranted death and destruction.

847328_3527 , 9 hours ago

Liberals and "progressives" are traditionally against wars. This new "woke" group of Demorats shows they are NOT liberals or progressives since they support the Establishment War Criminals like Obama and his side kick, demented Biden, and Bloodthirsty Clinton.

[Jul 26, 2020] 'Very serious threats'- US reportedly ramps up pressure on Nord Stream 2 contractors -- RT Business News

Jul 26, 2020 | www.rt.com

'Very serious threats': US reportedly ramps up pressure on Nord Stream 2 contractors 26 Jul, 2020 08:12 Get short URL © Nord Stream 2 / Axel Schmidt 123 Follow RT on RT The US government has made further attempts to force European firms to ditch the Russian-led Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline project, Welt am Sonntag reported, citing people familiar with talks on the issue.

According to the newspaper, officials from US Department of State, the Treasury Department, as well as the Department of Energy approached European contractors to make sure they fully understand the consequences of staying in the project. Up to a dozen officials reportedly held at least two online conferences with representatives of the firms in recent days.

ALSO ON RT.COM Russia's Nord Stream 2 pipeline will significantly cut gas prices in Europe, energy consultancy says

Speaking in a "friendly" manner, the US side stressed that it wanted to prevent completion of Nord Stream 2, observers of the online talks said. "I believe the threat is very, very serious," one of them revealed to the German outlet.

Those threats are consistent with comments by US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo last week, in which he warned that companies involved in the project had better "get out now" or risk facing penalties under Section 232 of the notorious Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA).

READ MORE 'Attempted extortion': Germany reaffirms commitment to Russian gas project despite US threats

Apart from Russia's energy major Gazprom, which is developing the project, five European companies have joined. Those are France's Engie, Austria's OMV, the UK-Dutch company Royal Dutch Shell, as well as Wintershall and Germany's Uniper.

Speaking to Welt am Sonntag, the latter called US attempts to undermine the "important infrastructure project" a clear intervention into European sovereignty.

Earlier this week, the US House of Representatives approved an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act, meant to expand US sanctions on companies involved in installing Russia's Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline. According to one of the sponsors of the bill, the measures can target companies facilitating or providing vessels, insurance, port facilities, or tethering services for those vessels, as well as to those providing certification for Nord Stream 2.

Both European businesses and government officials have repeatedly decried US attempts to meddle in European energy policy by sanctioning Nord Stream 2, with some even calling on Brussels to work on countermeasures.

Moscow has also lambasted Washington's move, calling it unfair competition. Earlier this week, presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that Russia will develop a new strategy for completion of the project if Washington proceeds with new punitive measures.

[Jul 25, 2020] Propaganda for kids- UK govt-backed 'news' site teaches children about 'ruthless' Putin 'shameless' Russia -- RT UK News

Jul 25, 2020 | www.rt.com

Propaganda for kids: UK govt-backed 'news' site teaches children about 'ruthless' Putin & 'shameless' Russia 24 Jul, 2020 19:09 / Updated 1 day ago Get short URL © Getty Images / Robert Daly 98 32 Follow RT on RT Is Vladimir Putin "the most dangerous man in the world?" If you trust the same news sources that some British schoolchildren's teachers do, then yes. Perhaps it's a good thing that the kids aren't listening.

When schools in Britain eventually reopen in September, children filling into the classrooms won't just be learning their reading, writing and arithmetic. On top of these fundamentals, their teachers will spoon-feed them blatant propaganda that would make Herr Goebbels blush.

The propaganda source in question is The Day, a news site founded by a team of established journalists and directed at teens. Designed for use in the classroom, each of The Day's stories is presented alongside a range of thought-provoking questions and exercises to help young people learn to "think for themselves and engage with the world."

Though UK-focused, The Day is used in classrooms around the world as a teaching aid.

ALSO ON RT.COM Madonna LIES about getting fined A MILLION DOLLARS in Russia for speaking up about gay rights – what else is new?

A recent article describes Russian President Vladimir Putin as "the most dangerous man in the world" and suggests "nothing can be done to bring this rogue state [Russia] to heel." Moscow's entire foreign policy is "shameless" and Putin is described as a man who delights in stoking unrest in the West. The widely-debunked accusations of Russian interference into the 2016 US election are treated as fact, as are the rumors that Putin meddled in the UK's Brexit referendum and in last year's general election.

The children are also offered Bill Browder's opinion that Russia is a "mafia state running a mafia operation." Browder, the site omits, is a magnate and fraudster who made billions of dollars in Russia during the privatization rush of the 1990s and reinvented himself as an anti-Putin activist once his revenue stream was cut off.

Below the article, kids are asked to answer a number of questions, such as "Should Russia be expelled from the United Nations?" and even to write a creative story about what it would be like to meet Putin during his KGB days. For good measure, the New York Times' recent evidence-free and widely criticized story claiming Russia paid bounties to the Taliban to kill US troops in Afghanistan is suggested as further reading to help kids become an "expert" on all things Putin.

ALSO ON RT.COM The Russians are coming, again! Poorly understood cybercrimes play perfectly into political agendas

The Day does not bill itself as an anti-Russia think tank for kids. Quite the opposite. Ironically, its founder, Richard Addis, wanted to set up the site to fight deceptive journalism, hoaxes, "slanted reporting" and "stories where the truth is contentious" -- fake news in other words.

He was supported in this quest by the British government's Commission on Fake News and the Teaching of Critical Literacy Skills in Schools, which partnered with The Day to compile a damning report in 2018, revealing that only two percent of British youngsters have the critical thinking skills to spot phony news.

"It is clear that our schools are absolutely vital in encouraging children to burrow through the rubbish and rootle out the truth," Addis said at the time. Stories on the site with titles like 'Putin the terrible' and 'Toxic Putin on mission to poison the West' are clearly what Addis considers balanced journalism.

ALSO ON RT.COM George Galloway: Labour's demand for Ofcom review of RT licence is apostasy against democratic principles

Balance, however, is not a common trait among British Russia-watchers. Parliament's long-awaited 'Russia report' relies almost wholesale on "allegations" to back up its claim that Moscow "poses a significant threat to the UK." The report even relies on articles by BuzzFeed to substantiate its shaky claims.

As slanted as its coverage is, The Day's message may fall on deaf ears. According to the same government report, only a quarter of older children actually trust the news they read online. As such, The Day's propagandizing might all be in vain.

[Jul 25, 2020] Yeah, you mention Brzezinski. He convinced Carter to put the screws to the Soviet Union by arming and financing the extremists in Afghanistan. How'd that work out?

Jul 25, 2020 | caucus99percent.com

The Wizard on Wed, 07/22/2020 - 1:06pm

The Deep State is in fact extra-constitutional

The CIA, NSA, and all the other XYZs in the War Department believe strongly that they set policy. In effect, that they are in charge and know best. How does that fit in with the Constitution. Where are these powers specified?

The Treaty Clause is part of Article II, Section 2, Clause 2 of the United States Constitution that empowers the President of the United States to propose and chiefly negotiate agreements between the United States and other countries, which, upon receiving the advice and consent of a two-thirds supermajority vote of the United States Senate, become binding with the force of federal law .

(My Bold)

Since we ratified the UN Charter that makes all of our wars of aggression unconstitutional and war crimes. Our use of phosphorus and napalm are war crimes.

If you read the Constitution carefully, especially the Bill of Rights then you know that what we got bears little resemblance. So we have two levels of bad. The Constitution, written by the slave owning aristocracy, is a piece of shit by modern, or any, standards. It was intended that the elite run the government, and the people in only one case get to elect these elite representatives. Electoral college for the Presidency? really. With nothing specified as to how the States are to select these electors. There is little commitment to democracy and, given our corruption on top of that, it's clear that we have a very defective democracy. And the second level, of course, is that we ignore the Constitution when it's too inconvenient.

The thing is, we desperately need a new constitution and the will to follow it. This will never happen.

Yeah, you mention Brzezinski. He convinced Carter to put the screws to the Soviet Union by arming and financing the extremists in Afghanistan. How'd that work out? Looking for a pair of Trade Towers in NYC? He had stated publicly that he was the first Pole in 300 years to put the screws to Russia. He ruined Carter's presidency. Carter had good options to make the world a safer place, instead he listened to Brzezinski. Same thing with Reagan and Richard Pearle. We might not be sitting in a world under a hair trigger of thermonuclear armageddon if it were not for Pearle. Reagan came within one item of agreement on a plan to eliminate nuclear weapons. That was SDI, or star wars. Gorbachev insisted that the project remain in the laboratory and that Space was not to be militarized. Pearle convinced Reagan to keep SDI and not sign the agreement. These asshole Neocons from the deep state have screwed us and civilization over and over again. Wait till Biden is in office. He will fill the War department with neocons, starting with Susan Rice.

Pluto's Republic on Wed, 07/22/2020 - 8:20pm
Electing senile dementia to the Presidency

@The Wizard

Makes Biden the true Manchurian candidate.

It's a coup d'etat, where Susan Rice inherits the throne.

No matter who wins, you get an Israel-firster in the White House.

wendy davis on Wed, 07/22/2020 - 9:10pm
i'll add:

@The Wizard

' Due Process; Lamenting the death of the rule of law in a country where it might have always been missing ', Lewis H. Lapham, laphamsquarterly.org

True law is right reason in agreement with nature.
-- Cicero

Law is a flag, and gold is the wind that makes it wave.
-- Russian proverb

To pick up on almost any story in the news these days -- political, financial, sexual, or environmental -- is to be informed in the opening monologue that the rule of law is vanished from the face of the American earth. So sayeth President Donald J. Trump, eight or nine times a day to his 47 million followers on Twitter. So sayeth also the plurality of expert witnesses in the court of principled opinion (media pundit, Never Trumper, think-tank sage, hashtag inspector of souls) testifying to the sad loss of America's democracy, a once upon a time "government of laws and not of men."

The funeral orations make a woeful noise unto the Lord, but it's not clear the orators know what their words mean or how reliable are their powers of observation. The American earth groans under the weight of legal bureaucracy, the body politic so judiciously enwrapped and embalmed in rules, regulations, requirements, codes, and commandments that it bears comparison to the glorified mummy of a once upon a time great king in Egypt.

Senior statesmen and tenured Harvard professors say the rule of law has been missing for three generations, ever since President Richard Nixon's bagmen removed it from a safe at the Watergate. If so, who can be expected to know what it looks like if and when it shows up with the ambulance at the scene of a crime? Does it come dressed as a man or a woman? Blue eyes and sweet smile riding a white horse? Black uniform, steel helmet, armed with assault rifle? Or maybe the rule of law isn't lost but misplaced. Left under a chair on Capitol Hill, in a display case at the Smithsonian, scouting locations for Clint Eastwood's next movie.

The confusion is in keeping with the trend of the times that elected Trump to the White House. In hope of clarification, this issue of Lapham's Quarterly looks to the lessons of history. They are more hopeful than those available to the best of my own knowledge and recollection, which tend to recognize the rule of law as the politically correct term of art for the divine right of money.'

[long snip]

'The framers of the Constitution were of the same opinion. The prosperous and well-educated gentlemen assembled in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787 shared with John Adams the suspicion that "democracy will infallibly destroy all civilization," agreed with James Madison that the turbulent passions of the common man lead to reckless agitation for the abolition of debts and "other wicked projects." With Plato the framers shared the assumption that the best government, under no matter what name or flag, incorporates the means by which a privileged few arrange the distribution of property and law for the less fortunate many. They envisioned a wise and just oligarchy -- to which they gave the name of a republic -- managed by men like themselves, to whom Madison attributed "most wisdom to discern, and most virtue to pursue the common good of the society." Adams thought the great functions of state should be reserved for "the rich, the wellborn, and the able"; John Jay, chief justice for the Supreme Court, observed that "those who own the country ought to govern it."

ovals49 on Wed, 07/22/2020 - 1:16pm
Oops.....no comment

But a big thumbs up in any event!

Crazytimes on Wed, 07/22/2020 - 1:38pm
Not the only one

This was spot on rooster. I couldn't agree more! I'm so sick of the red vs blue shit. For chrissakes neither side is worth a shit. The government hasn't done anything to help the average citizen in a very long time. Wake up and smell the roses people!

[Jul 24, 2020] Cold Wars Profit by Craig Murray

Jul 24, 2020 | consortiumnews.com

Consortiumnews Volume 26, Number 206 – Friday, July 24, 2020

AFGHANISTAN , COMMENTARY , FOREIGN POLICY , HISTORY , HUMAN RIGHTS , MEDIA , PROPAGANDA , RUSSIA , RUSSIAGATE , UKRAINE , UNITED KINGDON , UNTIL THIS DAY--HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES ON THE NEWS Cold Wars & Profit July 21, 2020 Save

Craig Murray lambasts a Russophobic media that celebrates a supposed cyber attack on UK vaccine research, ignores collapse of key evidence of a "hack" and dabbles in dubious memorabilia.

The Guardian's headquarters in London. (Bryantbob, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

By Craig Murray
CraigMurray.org.uk

... ... ...

Attack on UK Vaccine Research

Andrew Marr, center, in 2014. ( Financial Times , Flickr)

A whole slew of these were rehearsed by Andrew Marr on his flagship BBC1 morning show. The latest is the accusation that Russia is responsible for a cyber attack on Covid-19 vaccination research. This is another totally evidence-free accusation. But it misses the point anyway.

The alleged cyber attack, if it happened, was a hack not an attack -- the allegation is that there was an effort to obtain the results of research, not to disrupt research. It is appalling that the U.K. is trying to keep its research results secret rather than share them freely with the world scientific community.

As I have reported before , the U.K. and the USA have been preventing the WHO from implementing a common research and common vaccine solution for Covid-19, insisting instead on a profit driven approach to benefit the big pharmaceutical companies (and disadvantage the global poor).

What makes the accusation that Russia tried to hack the research even more dubious is the fact that Russia had just bought the very research specified. You don't steal things you already own.

Evidence of CIA Hacks

If anybody had indeed hacked the research, we all know it is impossible to trace with certainty the whereabouts of hackers. My VPNs [virtual private networks] are habitually set to India, Australia or South Africa depending on where I am trying to watch the cricket, dodging broadcasting restrictions.

More pertinently, WikiLeaks' Vault 7 release of CIA material showed the specific programs for the CIA in how to leave clues to make a leak look like it came from Russia. This irrefutable evidence that the CIA do computer hacks with apparent Russian "fingerprints" deliberately left, like little bits of Cyrillic script, is an absolutely classic example of a fact that everybody working in the mainstream media knows to be true, but which they all contrive never to mention.

Thus when last week's "Russian hacking" story was briefed by the security services -- that former Labour Party Leader Jeremy Corbyn deployed secret documents on U.K./U.S. trade talks which had been posted on Reddit, after being stolen by an evil Russian who left his name of Grigor in his Reddit handle -- there was no questioning in the media of this narrative. Instead, we had another round of McCarthyite witch-hunt aimed at the rather tired looking Corbyn.

Personally, if the Russians had been responsible for revealing that the Tories are prepared to open up the NHS "market" to big American companies, including ending or raising caps on pharmaceutical prices, I should be very grateful to the Russians for telling us. Just as the world would owe the Russians a favor if it were indeed them who leaked evidence of just how systematically the DNC rigged the 2016 primaries against Bernie Sanders.

But as it happens, it was not the Russians. The latter case was a leak by a disgusted insider, and I very much suspect the NHS U.S. trade deal link was also from a disgusted insider.

When governments do appalling things, very often somebody manages to blow the whistle.

Crowdstrike's Quiet Admission

Crowdstrike's Shawn Henry presenting at the International Security Forum in Vancouver, 2009.
(Hubert K, Flickr)

If you can delay even the most startling truth for several years, it loses much of its political bite. If you can announce it during a health crisis, it loses still more. The world therefore did not shudder to a halt when the CEO of Crowdstrike admitted there had never been any evidence of a Russian hack of the DNC servers.

You will recall the near incredible fact that, even through the Mueller investigation, the FBI never inspected the DNC servers themselves but simply relied on a technical report from Crowdstrike, the Hillary Clinton-related IT security consultant for the DNC.

It is now known for sure that Crowdstrike had been peddling fake news for Hillary. In fact, Crowdstrike had no record of any internet hack at all. There was no evidence of the email material being exported over the internet. What they claimed did exist was evidence that the files had been organized preparatory to export.

Remember the entire "Russian hacking" story was based ONLY on Crowdstrike's say so. There is literally no other evidence of Russian involvement in the DNC emails, which is unsurprising as I have been telling you for four years from my own direct sources that Russia was not involved. Yet finally declassified congressional testimony revealed that Shawn Henry stated on oath that "we did not have concrete evidence" and "There's circumstantial evidence , but no evidence they were actually exfiltrated."

This testimony fits with what I was told by Bill Binney, a former technical director of the National Security Agency (NSA), who told me that it was impossible that any large amount of data should be moved across the internet from the USA, without the NSA both seeing it happen in real time and recording it. If there really had been a Russian hack, the NSA would have been able to give the time of it to a millisecond.

That the NSA did not have that information was proof the transfer had never happened, according to Binney. What had happened, Binney deduced, was that the files had been downloaded locally, probably to a thumb drive.

Bill Binney. (Miquel Taverna / CCCB via Flickr)

So arguably the biggest news story of the past four years -- the claim that Putin effectively interfered to have Donald Trump elected U.S. president -- turns out indeed to be utterly baseless. Has the mainstream media, acting on security service behest, done anything to row back from the false impression it created? No it has doubled down.

Anti-Russia Theme

The "Russian hacking" theme keeps being brought back related to whatever is the big story of the day.

Brexit? Russian hacking.
U.K. general election 2019? Russian hacking
Covid-19 vaccine? Russian hacking.

Then we have those continual security service briefings. Two weeks ago we had unnamed security service sources telling The New York Times that Russia had offered the Taliban a bounty for killing American soldiers. This information had allegedly come from interrogation of captured Taliban in Afghanistan, which would almost certainly mean it was obtained under torture.

It is a wildly improbable tale. The Afghans have never needed that kind of incentivization to kill foreign invaders on their soil. It is also a fascinating throwback of an accusation – the British did indeed offer Afghans money for, quite literally, the heads of Afghan resistance leaders during the first Afghan War in 1841, as I detail in my book "Sikunder Burnes."

Taliban in Herat, Afghanistan, 2001. (Wikipedia)

You do not have to look back that far to realize the gross hypocrisy of the accusation. In the 1980s the West was quite openly paying, arming and training the Taliban -- including Osama bin Laden – to kill Russian and other Soviet conscripts in their thousands. That is just one example of the hypocrisy.

The U.S. and U.K. security services both cultivate and bribe senior political and other figures abroad in order to influence policy all of the time. We work to manipulate the result of elections -- I have done it personally in my former role as a U.K. diplomat. A great deal of the behavior over which Western governments and media are creating this new McCarthyite anti-Russian witch hunt, is standard diplomatic practice.

My own view is that there are malign Russian forces attempting to act on government in the U.K. and the USA, but they are not nearly as powerful as the malign British and American forces acting on their own governments.

The truth is that the world is under the increasing control of a global elite of billionaires, to whom nationality is irrelevant and national governments are tools to be manipulated. Russia is not attempting to buy corrupt political influence on behalf of the Russian people, who are decent folk every bit as exploited by the ultra-wealthy as you or I. Russian billionaires are, just like billionaires everywhere, attempting to game global political, commercial and social structures in their personal interest.

The other extreme point of hypocrisy lies in human rights. So many Western media commentators are suddenly interested in China and the Uighurs or in restrictions on the LBGT community in Russia, yet turn a completely blind eye to the abuse committed by Western "allies" such as Saudi Arabia and Bahrain.

As somebody who was campaigning about the human rights of both the Uighurs and of gay people in Russia a good decade before it became fashionable, I am disgusted by how the term "human rights" has become weaponized for deployment only against those countries designated as enemy by the Western elite.

Finally, do not forget that there is a massive armaments industry and a massive security industry all dependent on having an "enemy." Powerful people make money from this Russophobia. Expect much more of it. There is money in a Cold War.

Craig Murray is an author, broadcaster and human rights activist. He was British ambassador to Uzbekistan from August 2002 to October 2004 and rector of the University of Dundee from 2007 to 2010.

This article is from CraigMurray.org.uk .

The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.

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Tags: Cold War Craig Murray Russophobia Ukrainian Insurgent Army Ukrainian Resistance

Post navigation ← COVID-19: The Pentagon Confronts the Pandemic State Dept-Funded Transparency International Silent on Jailed Transparency Activist Julian Assange → 12 comments for " Cold Wars & Profit "

DH Fabian , July 22, 2020 at 19:54

On the core subject here: By necessity, a pandemic requires a cooperative international response. Only one country has refused to do so: The US. In their supreme arrogance, our ruling class lost track the fact that the US needs the rest of the world, not the other way way around.

Zalamander , July 22, 2020 at 19:12

One by one the so-called Russiagate "evidence" have collapsed. The fake Steele Dossier, "Russian spy" Joseph Mifsud who is actually a self-admitted member of the Clinton Foundation, Roger Stone's non-existant Wikileaks contacts, Russian Afgan bounties, etc. But the neoliberal mainstream media still presents these as "facts" with no retractions. This is not journalism, its disinformation designed to distract the American public from the failures of capitalism.

Piotr Berman , July 22, 2020 at 18:03

Peter Janney
July 22, 2020 at 06:55
Craig Murray succinctly (and very beautifully) gives us a REAL glimpse of what great journalism really looks like.
-- --
Perhaps it is great writing, but is it journalism?

Some people in National Union of Journalists (a trade union in UK) ponder that question for many months, unable to decide if Craig should be allowed to join or not. If he is neither a flack nor a hack, who kind of journalist is he? (More details at Craig Murray's web site).

Peter Janney , July 23, 2020 at 06:06

Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed.
Everything else is public relations.
-- George Orwell

rosemerry , July 22, 2020 at 16:42

All of the Russophobia and lies serve the rulers of the USA?UK and their poodles well. The whole year of Skripal mania started by Theresa May and joined in by Trump, with the media such as the Guardian's scurrilous Luke Harding providing fantasy "evidence" and the whole story conveniently disappearing, like the Skripals, when other "news" arrived, has no benefit to seekers of even the minimum of truth.

DH Fabian , July 22, 2020 at 19:46

Certainly, and this is key to understanding the current situation. What we're seeing now is the final stages of the long-sinking West -- those once-mighty partners of empire, the UK/US. This descent appears to have begun with the Reagan/Thatcher years, and is now in the final stages. We've seen a rather dramatic growth of psychosis in the political-media-public discussion over the past 3-4 years, driven by an irrational obsession with China/Russia. (Russia and China both quietly observe, prepared to respond if attacked.) There really isn't anything we can do about it, beyond acknowledging it as what it is.

Jerome J Donnelly , July 22, 2020 at 12:12

Very good, but needs to be supplemented by reference to the interview with NIH Director Franaic Collins on last Sunday's Meet the Press. When host Chuck Todd asked Collins about Russian hacking of US vaccine research Collins smiled and answered by pointing out that the research wasn't intended to be secret and that it was all to be published for "transparency." Todd looked disappointed, mumbled, "OK," and changed the subject. No media have reported this exchange, which is retrievable on the internet.

JOHN CHUCKMAN , July 22, 2020 at 10:58

Brilliant, but that's what one expects of Craig Murray.

Ray McGovern , July 22, 2020 at 10:13

Brilliant article, Craig. You do have a way of saying things. Thanks.

Question: "Team Mueller" forgot to interview you. Have any of the new investigators taken the trouble to talk to you?

Ray

Bob Van Noy , July 22, 2020 at 09:18

Can't thank you enough Craig Murray for your professional life of honesty!

Please read: hXXp://off-guardian.org/2020/07/21/globocap-uber-alles/

Peter Janney , July 22, 2020 at 06:55

Craig Murray succinctly (and very beautifully) gives us a REAL glimpse of what great journalism really looks like. I commend his courage for never bending in the face of all the bullshit we have had to tolerate from the mainstream media. Thank you, thank you dear Craig . . .

geeyp , July 22, 2020 at 00:10

Regarding Craig's last summing up paragraph, all one need do to confirm that is read the previous article of Michael T. Klare.

[Jul 24, 2020] Blowback from the destruction of Libya, the attempted destruction of Syria, and the ugly face of European neo-imperialism:

Jul 24, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

vk , Jul 23 2020 18:32 utc | 21

Blowback from the destruction of Libya, the attempted destruction of Syria, and the ugly face of European neo-imperialism:

Pernicious life and death policies in the Mediterranean

There is circumstantial evidence the European Union is systematically sinking boats loaded with refugees coming from the Libyan route. The MS editorial is correct in calling the Mediterranean "the graveyard of many people from the Middle East and Africa."

It looks like a continental-wide operation of genocide and silence: the Italian and Greek Coast Guards do the dirty job with secret blessing from their governments, and their governments count with the tacit blessing (and silence) from the other EU governments and their respective MSMs. The Russian and Chinese MSMs do nothing because they can't prove it (as they don't have access to the local) and are more honest than the Western MSM (they don't report what they can't know).

I wouldn't be surprised if we were talking, after all of this is done, of about some 100,000 dead drowned in the Mediterranean. After that dead boy in a Turkish beach fiasco, they took care of perfecting the scheme, so that the Italian and Greek coast guards can operate deeper into the sea, where the drowned corpses cannot be beached. If true, this would be the most well covered genocide in modern history, and the first one will full and direct complying from the "free press".

[Jul 24, 2020] The UPA was, without any shadow of a doubt, responsible for the slaughter of at least 200,000 Polish civilians

Jul 24, 2020 | consortiumnews.com

Consortiumnews Volume 26, Number 206 – Friday, July 24, 2020

The Guardian's headquarters in London. (Bryantbob, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

By Craig Murray
CraigMurray.org.uk

The Guardian a few days ago carried a very strange piece [which has since been removed] under the heading "Stamps celebrating Ukrainian resistance in pictures." The first image displayed a stamp bearing the name of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA).

The UPA was, without any shadow of a doubt, responsible for the slaughter of at least 200,000 Polish civilians; they liquidated whole Polish communities in Volhynia and Galicia, including the women and children. The current Polish government, which is as anti-Russian and pro-NATO as they come, nevertheless has declared this a genocide.

It certainly was an extremely brutal ethnic cleansing. There is no doubt either that at times between 1942 and 1944 the UPA collaborated with the Nazis and collaborated in the destruction of Jews and Gypsies. It is simplistic to describe the UPA as fascist or an extension of the Nazi regime; at times they fought the Nazis, though they collaborated more often.

There is a real sense in which they operated at the level of medieval peasants, simply seizing local opportunities to exterminate rural populations and seize their land and assets, be they Polish, Jew or Gypsy. But on balance any reasonable person would have to conclude that the UPA was an utterly deplorable phenomenon. To publish a celebration of it, disguised as a graphic art piece, without any of this context, is no more defensible than a display of Nazi art with no context.

In fact, The Guardian's very brief text was still worse than no context.

"Ukrainian photographer Oleksandr Kosmach collects 20th-century stamps issued by Ukrainian groups in exile during the Soviet era.

Artists and exiles around the world would use stamps to communicate the horrors of Soviet oppression. "These stamps show us the ideas and values of these people, who they really were and what they were fighting for," Kosmach says."

That is so misleadingly partial as a description of the art glorifying the UPA movement as to be deeply reprehensible. It does however fit with the anything -- goes stoking of Russophobia, which is the mainstay of government and media discourse at the moment.

[Jul 23, 2020] This is a biggie: Egypt's parliament approves troop deployment to Libya

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... I suspect In'Sultin Erd O'Grand is a mole of the garden kind. He goes about digging one hole for himself after another. ..."
Jul 23, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

ET AL July 21, 2020 at 6:01 am

This is a biggie:

Al's Jizz Error: Egypt's parliament approves troop deployment to Libya
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/07/egypt-legislators-vote-deploying-troops-libya-200720141515828.html

Move comes as Libya gov't and Turkey demand an end of foreign intervention in support of commander Khalifa Haftar.
####

I suspect In'Sultin Erd O'Grand is a mole of the garden kind. He goes about digging one hole for himself after another. If he keeps this up, all the holes will merge in to one and he will disappear! It would give the West a chance to have someone running Turkey with a more reliably western perspective though I think it is clear that whatever comes next, Turkey will not allow itself to be treated as a western annex and pawn.

[Jul 23, 2020] RUSSIAN FEDERATION SITREP 23 JULY 2020 by Patrick Armstrong - Sic Semper Tyrannis

Jul 23, 2020 | turcopolier.typepad.com

RUSSIAN FEDERATION SITREP 23 JULY 2020 by Patrick Armstrong


RUSSIA AND COVID. Latest numbers : total cases 795K; total deaths 12,892; tests per 1 million 178K . Russia has done 26 million tests (third after China and USA); among countries with populations over 10M it's second in tests per million and of those over 100M first. Russia claims to have a working vaccine that is safe and reliable and that produced antibodies in all who were tested . Mishustin expressed confidence to the Duma . In an amazing development Newsweek actually published this " What Russia Got Right About the Coronavirus -- and What It Can Share With The World ".

KHABAROVSK. Two weeks ago the FSB arrested Sergey Furgal , governor of Khabarovsk Region, on suspicion of organizing murders in 2004 and 2005. He was one of the few governors not from the pedestal party but from the LDPR . Furgal was quite popular and there have been significant protests. Doctorow discusses the background: one of his conclusions is that there are misgivings in the Russian Far East about Moscow's closeness with Beijing . Protest numbers have probably been exaggerated, but are still significant . Perhaps the appointment of another LDPR member as acting governor will calm things down. We will see. A terrorist plot in Khabarovsk was just prevented: would it be too cynical to wonder whether Moscow is telling the good citizens of Khabarovsk how valuable it is to them ?

RUSSIA INC. Despite everything, Russia's FOREX and gold kitty keeps growing – now worth 569 billion USD . Of course, quite a bit is the increase in the price of its gold holdings (about 2300 tonnes ).

RUSSIA- EXERCISE. Snap combat readiness test of Southern Military District . Kinzhal launch . Video . Not aimed at anybody or anything, just routine, blah blah blah , but, should anyone be watching...

CHINA. Another conversation between the two presidents about their "comprehensive strategic partnership". China FM Wang told Lavrov the USA had "lost its mind, morals and credibility".

NYT BIAS. Historian David Foglesong has written a piece about the long-time Russophobia of the NYT: "propaganda is not necessarily untrue. It is a method of emphasis calling attention to that which it is desired to have known". It is desired to have known . Free media indeed.

WESTERN VALUES™. Today's bloviation: "America is fundamentally good... America, uniquely among nations, has the capacity to champion human rights and the dignity of every human being made in the image of God, no matter their nation... And to the world, America is the star that shines brightest when the night is the darkest...". And so on . Does any other country said this sort of thing routinely?

MEDDLING. The CIA has been authorised to make cyberattacks on other countries including Russia . You only do this if you think you're better at it than your targets; otherwise you've just stuck a kick me sign on your back. Are the Americans better at this? Doubt it .

NORDSTREAM 2. Washington is going all out in sanctions; Bonn is determined to finish it . Well, Washington is going to lose this one; then what?

AMERICA-HYSTERICA. All lies. "The statements by Mr. Strzok question the entire premise of the FBI's investigation of the Trump Campaign and make it even more outrageous that the Mueller team continued this investigation for almost two and a half years. Moreover, the statements by Strzok raise troubling questions as to whether the FBI was impermissibly unmasking and analyzing intelligence gathered on U.S. persons."

STEELE. Troubles are catching up to him. He just lost a court case in the UK against two Russian bankers over claims he made in the infamous Dossier. The fines plus court costs may bankrupt his company . And more revelations about the worthlessness of the sources of the junk in the famous Dossier. Bit late for this to come out – anybody with a bit of nous knew it was garbage from the start .

BUT THEY'RE STILL AT IT. The UK report is the s ame old crap from the same old sources (Steele too!) – don't pay it any attention. GIGO . Flying vampire bats with smart phones. (And Soviet stars – natch. )

NUGGETS FROM THE STUPIDITY MINE. Today's story is that Russian big wheels were getting the vaccine months ago , I guess we're supposed to forget last week's story that Russia was trying to steal our vaccine .

THE EMPTINESS OF FORMER FLAPS. Why do Russia's enemies fall from balconies ? Oops! Can we re-write that ?

HISTORY. " Canada's Nazi Monuments ". And don't think there aren't policy implications today.

[Jul 23, 2020] 'Putin Hacked Our Vaccine' the excessive use of words like ridiculous and stupid; calim is both stupid and evil

Notable quotes:
"... CaitlinJohnstone.com ..."
"... The New York Times ..."
"... The Washington Post ..."
"... This article was re-published with permission. ..."
"... The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News. ..."
Jul 23, 2020 | consortiumnews.com

COVID-19: 'Putin Hacked Our Vaccine' Is Dumbest Story Yet July 17, 2020 Save

Caitlin Johnstone tackles the latest "Russiavape" story.

By Caitlin Johnstone
CaitlinJohnstone.com

O MG you guys Putin hacked our coronavirus vaccine secrets!

Today mainstream media is reporting what is arguably the single dumbest Russiavape story of all time, against some very stiff competition.

"Russian hackers are targeting health care organizations in the West in an attempt to steal coronavirus vaccine research, the U.S. and Britain said," reports The New York Times .

"Hackers backed by the Russian state are trying to steal COVID-19 vaccine and treatment research from academic and pharmaceutical institutions around the world, Britain's National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) said on Thursday," Reuters reports .

"Russian news agency RIA cited spokesman Dmitry Peskov as saying the Kremlin rejected London's allegations, which he said were not backed by proper evidence," adds Reuters.

https://platform.twitter.com/embed/index.html?dnt=true&embedId=twitter-widget-0&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1283787832549691395&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fconsortiumnews.com%2F2020%2F07%2F17%2Fcovid-19-putin-hacked-our-vaccine-is-dumbest-story-yet%2F&theme=light&widgetsVersion=9066bb2%3A1593540614199&width=550px

I mean, there are just so many layers of stupid.

First of all, how many more completely unsubstantiated government agency allegations about Russian nefariousness are we the public going to accept from the corporate mass media? Since 2016 it's been wall-to-wall narrative about evil things Russia is doing to the empire-like cluster of allies loosely centralized around the United States, and they all just happen to be things for which nobody can actually provide hard verifiable evidence.

Ever since the shady cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike admitted that it never actually saw hard proof of Russia hacking the DNC servers, the already shaky and always unsubstantiated narrative that Russian hackers interfered in the U.S. presidential election in 2016 has been on thinner ice than ever. Yet because the mass media converged on this narrative and repeated it as fact over and over they've been able to get the mainstream headline-skimming public to accept it as an established truth, priming them for an increasingly idiotic litany of completely unsubstantiated Russia scandals, culminating most recently in the entirely debunked claim that Russia paid Taliban-linked fighters to kill coalition forces in Afghanistan.

Secondly, the news story doesn't even claim that these supposed Russian hackers even succeeded in doing whatever they were supposed to have been doing in this supposed cyberattack.

"Officials have not commented on whether the attacks were successful but also have not ruled out that this is the case," Wired reports .

Thirdly, this is a "vaccine" which does not even exist at this point in time, and the research which was supposedly hacked may never lead to one. Meanwhile, Sechenov First Moscow State Medical University reports that it has "successfully completed tests on volunteers of the world's first vaccine against coronavirus," in Russia.

Fourthly, and perhaps most importantly, how obnoxious and idiotic is it that coronavirus vaccine "secrets" are even a thing?? This is a global pandemic which is hurting all of us; scientists should be free to collaborate with other scientists anywhere in the world to find a solution to this problem. Nobody has any business keeping "secrets" from the world about this virus or any possible vaccine or treatment. If they do, anyone in the world is well within their rights to pry those secrets away from them.

https://platform.twitter.com/embed/index.html?dnt=true&embedId=twitter-widget-1&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1283875929152909312&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fconsortiumnews.com%2F2020%2F07%2F17%2Fcovid-19-putin-hacked-our-vaccine-is-dumbest-story-yet%2F&theme=light&widgetsVersion=9066bb2%3A1593540614199&width=550px

This intensely stupid story comes out at the same time British media are blaring stories about Russian interference in the 2019 election, which if you actually listen carefully to the claims being advanced amounts to literally nothing more than the assertion that Russians talked about already leaked documents pertaining to the U.K.'s healthcare system on the internet.

"Russian actors 'sought to interfere' in last winter's general election by amplifying an illicitly acquired NHS dossier that was seized upon by Labour during the campaign, the foreign secretary has said," reports The Guardian .

"Amplifying." That's literally all there is to this story. As we learned with the ridiculous U.S. Russiagate narrative , with such allegations, Russia "amplifying" something can mean anything from RT reporting on a major news story to a Twitter account from St. Petersburg sharing an article from The Washington Post . Even the foreign secretary's claim itself explicitly admits that "there is no evidence of a broad spectrum Russian campaign against the General Election."

"The statement is so foggy and contradictory that it is almost impossible to understand it," responded Russia's foreign ministry to the allegations. "If it's inappropriate to say something then don't say it. If you say it, produce the facts."

https://platform.twitter.com/embed/index.html?dnt=true&embedId=twitter-widget-2&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1283786417206956034&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fconsortiumnews.com%2F2020%2F07%2F17%2Fcovid-19-putin-hacked-our-vaccine-is-dumbest-story-yet%2F&theme=light&widgetsVersion=9066bb2%3A1593540614199&width=550px

Instead of producing facts you've got the Murdoch press pestering Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour Party candidate, on his doorstep over this ridiculous non-story, and popular right-wing outlets like Guido Fawkes running the blatantly false headline "Government Confirms Corbyn Used Russian-Hacked Documents in 2019 Election." The completely bogus allegation that the NHS documents came to Jeremy Corbyn by way of Russian hackers is not made anywhere in the article itself, but for the headline-skimming majority this makes no difference. And headline skimmers get as many votes as people who read and think critically.

All this new Cold War Russia hysteria is turning people's brains into guacamole. We've got to find a way to snap out of the propaganda trance so we can start creating a world that is based on truth and a desire for peace.

Caitlin Johnstone is a rogue journalist, poet, and utopia prepper who publishes regularly at Medium . Her work is entirely reader-supported , so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking her on Facebook , following her antics on Twitter , checking out her podcast on either Youtube , soundcloud , Apple podcasts or Spotify , following her on Steemit , throwing some money into her tip jar on Patreon or Paypal , purchasing some of her sweet merchandise , buying her books " Rogue Nation: Psychonautical Adventures With Caitlin Johnstone " and " Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers ."

This article was re-published with permission.

The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.

Putin Apologist , July 19, 2020 at 17:50

"How many more completely unsubstantiated government agency allegations about Russian nefariousness are we the public going to accept from the corporate mass media?"

The Answer is none. Nobody (well, nobody with a brain) believes anything the "corporate mass media" says about Russia, or China, Iran or Venezuela or anything else for that matter.

James Keye , July 19, 2020 at 10:26

Guy , July 18, 2020 at 15:32

But,but, but we never heard the words "highly likely" ,they must be slipping.LOL


DH Fabian , July 18, 2020 at 13:41

The Democrat right wing are robotically persistent, and count on the ignorance of their base. By late last year, we saw them begin setting the stage to blame-away an expected 2020 defeat on Russia. Once again, proving that today's Democrats are just too dangerous to vote for. Donald Trump owes a great deal to his "friends across the aisle."

[Jul 23, 2020] Am I in an IMAX theater? Because there is so much projection going on here.

Jul 23, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

jayc , Jul 22 2020 18:40 utc | 21

There's no way the trillion in T-bills will be seized/defaulted/whatever. The damage to US credibility will be unrecoverable.

It is certainly crazy time. AG Barr threatened major US corporations Disney & Apple with having to register as "foreign agents" due to their Chinese investments. Earlier in the year, the FBI and Congress decided to destroy the career of one of America's top scientists over failure to submit relatively inconsequential paperwork. These are the types of things which should result in a determined pushback against an intrusive national security state, but the balance of power in USA may have flipped.

J W , Jul 22 2020 17:01 utc | 4

Am I in an IMAX theater? Because there is so much projection going on here.

[Jul 23, 2020] Wartime Without End, War Powers Without Check -

Jul 23, 2020 | www.theamericanconservative.com

kouroi • 13 days ago

The Congress is serving the interests of the US Oligarchy, at home and abroad. The strategy is simple: keep allies/vassals in obeisance and non-competitive and destroy polities that do not subject themselves to a similar system (which ends up to become subservient to the US interests anyways, in the long run). Thus, all enemies are polities were Oligarchy doesn't run the roster, and are semi-socialist / socialist countries: Russia, China, Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba, North Korea, in the past Iraq.

Fully fledged democracies, that truly enact the will of the people, would not do something like this.

Carlton Meyer • 13 days ago

For those too young to remember the horrible American war on Yugoslavia in 1999, or those who have forgot, or were misled with lies about Kosovo, here is a quick summary:

https://cdn.embedly.com/widgets/media.html?src=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fembed%2FUsRkqnFn8DA%3Ffeature%3Doembed&display_name=YouTube&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DUsRkqnFn8DA&image=https%3A%2F%2Fi.ytimg.com%2Fvi%2FUsRkqnFn8DA%2Fhqdefault.jpg&key=21d07d84db7f4d66a55297735025d6d1&type=text%2Fhtml&schema=youtube

ericsiverson Carlton Meyer • 11 days ago

This is a very accurate and honest report what { NATO } the North American Terrorist Organization did to Yugoslavia . If you Americans wish to know what kind of global government you are promoting . You only have to find the actual transcripts of Milosevic's trail . Don't read or listen to any fake news of the trail . You must read the trail transcripts and judge for yourself The butcher of Balkans has kind of been exonerated after his death . The world court is something to be very afraid of not at all a instrument of justice .But the trail transcripts are about 5000 pages so you will have to work to find out the truth .

Ram2017 • 11 days ago

WW2 and it's depiction in various films and TV programs has had an unexpected effect on the military psyche. The US believes it won the war on it's own and the troops came home as heroes. This is the expectation of the US military even today, unable to accept that it can be defeated. "Thank you for your service" is a given whatever crimes had been committed abroad on the innocent who had done them no harm whatsoever. The ICC is opposed on the theory that US troops cannot commit torture or massacres.

Adriaan de Leeuw Ram2017 • 11 days ago

The Joke is that the US has not one a war since WWII, except maybe Granada. As for War Crimes, the Current President himself committed a War Crime, He gave a Pardon to a Convicted War Criminal, that is actually breach of the Geneva Conventions, which is US Treaty Law and as such equal to the Constitution itself in importance. Schedule 4 Article 146

The High Contracting Parties undertake to enact any legislation necessary to provide effective penal sanctions for persons committing, or ordering to be committed, any of the grave breaches of the present Convention defined in the following Article.

Each High Contracting Party shall be under the obligation to search for persons alleged to have committed, or to have ordered to be committed, such grave breaches, and shall bring such persons, regardless of their nationality, before its own courts. It may also, if it prefers, and in accordance with the provisions of its own legislation, hand such persons over for trial to another High Contracting Party concerned, provided such High Contracting Party has made out a prima facie case.

Each High Contracting Party shall take measures necessary for the suppression of all acts contrary to the provisions of the present Convention other than the grave breaches defined in the following Article.

In all circumstances, the accused persons shall benefit by safeguards of proper trial and defense, which shall not be less favorable than those provided by Article 105 and those following of the Geneva Convention relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War of August 12, 1949.

Article 147

Grave breaches to which the preceding Article relates shall be those involving any of the following acts, if committed against persons or property protected by the present Convention: willful killing, torture or inhuman treatment, including biological experiments, willfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health, unlawful deportation or transfer or unlawful confinement of a protected person, compelling a protected person to serve in the forces of a hostile Power, or willfully depriving a protected person of the rights of fair and regular trial prescribed in the present Convention, taking of hostages and extensive destruction and appropriation of property, not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly.

Article 148

No High Contracting Party shall be allowed to absolve itself or any other High Contracting Party of any liability incurred by itself or by another High Contracting Party in respect of breaches referred to in the preceding Article.

The President has by absolving the Navy Seal of the Liability, Absolved the United States of the War Crime also, Now I understand that we will hear arguments here of the Presidents ability to Pardon, but take this as a given, there is no way that During the Nuremberg Trials the Prosecution of those War Crimes would have accepted the argument that the Head of State of Germany (Hitler) had the blanket Authority to Pardon German War Criminals. as such and this is why this was placed in the Geneva Conventions the very act of Absolving a War Crime is itself a War Crime!

bootin buddin Ram2017 • 10 days ago

We could care less what the ICC is opposed to. We are not subject to the ICC or international law. We can enforce it if needed but do not have to abide by it.

rayray bootin buddin • 10 days ago

The micrograins of ICC jurisdiction and validity require a sharper legal mind than mine to sift through. But the debate is revelatory of something else -

In general, the current domestic ICC debate reveals part of the true nature of the US (helped in no small part by the hamfisted and transparent vulgarity of President Trump): that we are in fact the rogue state that we accuse everyone else in the world of being.

If we are who we say we are we should be straight up supporting the ICC, helping to fund it and increase its reach and investigative power. Far better than any military intervention to deal with the truly bad actors in the world would be a legal intervention. The idea that vicious and violent despots should run scared when they travel or otherwise face arrest and extradition is exactly right.

But we're not. Why? The answer is obvious at this point - because we have powerful players in our midst that would face that arrest. And should face that arrest.

[Jul 23, 2020] Egypt approves Libya deployment, risking clash with Turkey - HoustonChronicle.com

Jul 23, 2020 | www.houstonchronicle.com

CAIRO (AP) -- Egypt's parliament on Monday authorized the deployment of troops outside the country, a move that could escalate the spiraling war in Libya after the president threatened military action against Turkish-backed forces in the oil-rich country.

A troop deployment in Libya could bring Egypt and Turkey, close U.S. allies that support rival sides in the conflict, into direct confrontation.

[Jul 22, 2020] The west is so fixed on 'getting' Russia that it must simply make things up when it cannot find real reasons for its hatred. Here hired gunds like Browder comes handy

Notable quotes:
"... I seem to recall William "Bill" Browder, AKA "Putin's Number-One Enemy" was briefly detained in Spain on an Interpol warrant or something. ..."
"... And courtesy of today's Independent, the words of that most noble and trustworthy lying cnut Browder as regards "Russian Meddling" in the affairs of my pathetic Motherland: ..."
"... Spoken by a person who changed his citizenship so as to dodge paying tax. What a slimy toad Browder is! ..."
"... Of course, though, Browder is not an oligarch himself. He's an 'investment firm boss'. And naturally he does not himself engage 'basically in intelligence and influence work'. He only single-handedly managed to get the Magnitsky Act on the books, where it will stay forever although the German press is belatedly owning up that Magnitsky was not the pink-faced legal cherub Browder portrayed. If that's not influence, I don't know what is. ..."
"... The west is so fixed on 'getting' Russia that it must simply make things up when it cannot find real reasons for its hatred. You could say that the USA with its marble-this-and-that secret algorithms is making up online traffic and attributing it to Russia, but I'm pretty sure other western countries are not complete oafs themselves in the computer world, and if you know what you're looking for I'm sure that their analysts can separate fantasy-land gifts like 'Kremlin Assassination Plan for American Soldiers' from actual Russian plans. ..."
Jul 22, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

ET AL July 21, 2020 at 4:38 am

I think the only Spanish connection it is a convenient location for whatever they were up to off-shore. We are expected to trust the intelligence services word that Litvinenko/Skripal/whomever were investigating the 'Russian Mafia' in Spain, so in reality it could be anything.

What we do know is that Spain signed an updated SOFA (Status Of Forces Agreement) with the United States in 2012 (Second Amendment) and 2015 (Third Amendment). Why should this be linked to UK Russian assets like Litvinenko & Skripal? Because we know that when the United States wants to do something off the books , i.e. that is techincally illegal for their citizens to do on their soil, the UK more than happy to oblige (sic. the choice of Steele's Orbis company in the UK to peddle lies for the Democrats to say that they only lost the US election because of someone else. Everybody else's fault but not theirs.

MARK CHAPMAN July 21, 2020 at 11:54 am

Also, I seem to recall William "Bill" Browder, AKA "Putin's Number-One Enemy" was briefly detained in Spain on an Interpol warrant or something.

Why, yes; yes, he was, 'way back in the mists of 2018. According to the screeching British press, he was let go because the warrant was expired.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5786099/British-financier-Putin-critic-William-Browder-arrested-Spain-Russias-request.html

I daresay these international japes add spice to his life and put a spring in his step.

MOSCOWEXILE July 20, 2020 at 11:32 pm

And guess who arrives in London today to have discussions with Johnson and Raab?

None other than fat twat bully boy Pompeo!

TROND July 21, 2020 at 9:28 am

Next he is going to Denmark .

To bully them about NS2 .? An inform them that Greenland belongs to Uncle Sam.

MOSCOWEXILE July 21, 2020 at 1:34 am

And courtesy of today's Independent, the words of that most noble and trustworthy lying cnut Browder as regards "Russian Meddling" in the affairs of my pathetic Motherland:

Will the Russia report 'follow the money'?

Russia is operating in the UK through "oligarchs" who "spend their money on highly placed people", according to British investment firm boss Bill Browder.

Browder, the CEO of Hermitage Capital, who gave evidence for the report, told the BBC said these figures "would basically do intelligence and influence work".

How far will the report delve into the influence of Russian money in British politics? Although this morning's Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) 50-page document is expected to cover political donations from wealthy Russians, reports suggest it won't actually name any names.

Spoken by a person who changed his citizenship so as to dodge paying tax. What a slimy toad Browder is!

I shouldn't have said that: toads are very useful creatures.

See -- or better: do not, see unless you have a vomit bag near at hand:

UK politics news live: Latest updates as long-awaited Russia report to be released today | The Independent

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/uk-politics-news-live-russia-china-hong-kong-dominic-cummings-a9629521.html

MARK CHAPMAN July 21, 2020 at 8:20 am

Of course, though, Browder is not an oligarch himself. He's an 'investment firm boss'. And naturally he does not himself engage 'basically in intelligence and influence work'. He only single-handedly managed to get the Magnitsky Act on the books, where it will stay forever although the German press is belatedly owning up that Magnitsky was not the pink-faced legal cherub Browder portrayed. If that's not influence, I don't know what is.

The west is so fixed on 'getting' Russia that it must simply make things up when it cannot find real reasons for its hatred. You could say that the USA with its marble-this-and-that secret algorithms is making up online traffic and attributing it to Russia, but I'm pretty sure other western countries are not complete oafs themselves in the computer world, and if you know what you're looking for I'm sure that their analysts can separate fantasy-land gifts like 'Kremlin Assassination Plan for American Soldiers' from actual Russian plans.

But they pretend to be fooled. And the best they can come up with is that Russia is behind upsets like the Black Lives Matter movement which are tearing the USA apart. If Russia always had such a mysterious weapon, why did it wait so long to use it when the USA and UK spit in its face every day?

[Jul 21, 2020] This Skripal thing smelled to high heaven from day 1. My opinion is that Sergei Skripal was involved (to what degree is open to speculation) with the Steele dossier.

Highly recommended!
Apr 20, 2019 | theduran.com
Marcus April 20, 2019

There is something rotten in the state .. of England.

This Skripal thing smelled to high heaven from day 1. My opinion is that Sergei Skripal was involved (to what degree is open to speculation) with the Steele dossier. He was getting homesick (perhaps his mother getting older is part of this) for Russia and he thought that to get back to Russia he needed something big to get back in Putin's good graces. He would have needed something really big because Putin really has no use for traitors. Skripal put out some feelers (perhaps through his daughter though that may be dicey). The two couriers were sent to seal or move the deal forward. The Brits (and perhaps the CIA) found out about this and decided to make an example of Sergei. Perhaps because they found out about this late, the deep state/intelligence people had to move very quickly. The deep state story was was extremely shaky (to put it mildly) as a result. Or they were just incompetent and full of hubris.

Then they were stuck with the story and bullshit coverup was layered on bullshit coverup. 7 Reply FlorianGeyer Reply to Marcus April 20, 2019

@ Marcus.

To hope to get away with lies, one must have perfect memory and a superior intellect that can create a lie with some semblance of reality in real life, as opposed to the digital 'reality' in a Video game. And a rather corny video game at that.

MI5/6 failed on all parts of Lie creation 2 Reply Mistaron April 21, 2019

If Trump was so furious about being conned by Haspel, how come he then went on to promote her to becoming the head of the CIA? It's quite perplexing.

[Jul 20, 2020] The Real 'Russian Playbook' Is Written in English -- Strategic Culture

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... There was a deeply held assumption that, when the countries of Central and Eastern Europe joined NATO and the European Union in 2004, these countries would continue their positive democratic and economic transformation. Yet more than a decade later, the region has experienced a steady decline in democratic standards and governance practices at the same time that Russia's economic engagement with the region expanded significantly. ..."
"... Are these developments coincidental, or has the Kremlin sought deliberately to erode the region's democratic institutions through its influence to 'break the internal coherence of the enemy system'? ..."
"... a false flag operation" involving "an alliance of the far right organizations, specifically the Right Sector and Svoboda, and oligarchic parties, such as Fatherland". There is little in Sharp's book to suggest that non-violent resistance would have had much effect on a really brutal and determined government. He also has the naïve habit of using "democrat" and "dictator" as if these words were as precisely defined as coconuts and codfish. But any "dictatorship" – for example Stalin's is a very complex affair with many shades of opinion in it. So, in terms of what he was apparently trying to do, one can see it only succeeding against rather mild "dictators" presiding over extremely unpopular polities. With a great deal of outside effort and resources. ..."
"... His "playbook" is useful to outside powers that want to overthrow governments they don't like. Especially those run by "dictators" not brutal enough to shoot the protesters down. ..."
Jul 17, 2020 | www.strategic-culture.org

I hadn't given The Russian Playbook much attention until Susan Rice, Obama's quondam security advisor, opined a month ago on CNN that " I'm not reading the intelligence today, or these days -- but based on my experience, this is right out of the Russian playbook ". She was referring to the latest U.S. riots.

Once I'd seen this mention of The Russian Playbook (aka KGB, Kremlin or Putin's Playbook), I saw the expression all over the place. Here's an early – perhaps the earliest – use of the term. In October 2016, the Center for Strategic and International studies (" Ranked #1 ") informed us of the " Kremlin Playbook " with this ominous beginning

There was a deeply held assumption that, when the countries of Central and Eastern Europe joined NATO and the European Union in 2004, these countries would continue their positive democratic and economic transformation. Yet more than a decade later, the region has experienced a steady decline in democratic standards and governance practices at the same time that Russia's economic engagement with the region expanded significantly.

And asks

Are these developments coincidental, or has the Kremlin sought deliberately to erode the region's democratic institutions through its influence to 'break the internal coherence of the enemy system'?

Well, to these people, to ask the question is to answer it: can't possibly be disappointment at the gap between 2004's expectations and 2020's reality, can't be that they don't like the total Western values package that they have to accept, it must be those crafty Russians deceiving them. This was the earliest reference to The Playbook that I found, but it certainly wasn't the last.

Russia has a century-old playbook for 'disinformation' 'I believe in Russia they do have their own manual that essentially prescribes what to do,' said Clint Watts, a research fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and a former FBI agent. (Nov 2018)

The Russian playbook for spreading fake news and conspiracy theories is the subject of a new three-part video series on The New York Times website titled 'Operation Infektion: Russian Disinformation: From The Cold War To Kanye.' (Nov 2018)

I found headlines such as these: Former CIA Director Outlines Russian Playbook for Influencing Unsuspecting Targets (May 2017) ; Fmr. CIA op.: Don Jr. meeting part of Russian playbook (Jul 2017) ; Americans Use Russian Playbook to Spread Disinformation (Oct 2018) ; Factory of Lies: The Russian Playbook (Nov 2018) ; Shredding the Putin Playbook: Six crucial steps we must take on cyber-security -- before it's too late. (Winter 2018) ; Trump's spin is 'all out of the KGB playbook': Counterintelligence expert Malcolm Nance (May 2019) .

Of course, all these people are convinced Moscow interfered in the 2016 presidential election. Somehow. To some effect. Never really specified but the latest outburst of insanity is this video from the Lincoln Project . As Anatoly Karlin observes: "I think it's really cool how we Russians took over America just by shitposting online. How does it feel to be subhuman?" He has a point: the Lincoln Project, and the others shrieking about Russian interference, take it for granted that American democracy is so flimsy and Americans so gullible that a few Facebook ads can bring the whole facade down. A curious mental state indeed.

So let us consider The Russian Playbook. It stands at the very heart of Russian power. It is old: at least a century old . Why, did not Tolstoy's 1908 Letter to a Hindu inspire Gandhi to bring down the British Indian Empire and win the Great Game for Moscow? The Tolstoy-Putin link is undeniable as we are told in A Post-Soviet 'War and Peace': What Tolstoy's Masterwork Explains About Putin's Foreign Policy : "In the early decades of the nineteenth century, Napoleon (like Putin after him) wanted to construct his own international order ". Russian novelists: adepts of The Playbook every one . So there is much to consider about this remarkable Book which has had such an enormous – hidden to most – role in world history. Its instructions on how to swing Western elections are especially important: the 2016 U.S. election ; Brexit ; " 100 years of Russian electoral interference "; Canada ; France ; the European Union ; Germany and many more. The awed reader must ask whether any Western election since Tolstoy's day can be trusted. Not to forget the Great Hawaiian Pizza Debate the Russians could start at any moment.

What can we know about The Playbook? For a start it must be written in Russian, a language that those crafty Russians insist on speaking among themselves. Secondly such an important document would be protected the way that highly classified material is protected. There would be a very restricted need to know; underlings participating in one of the many plays would not know how their part fitted into The Playbook; few would ever see The Playbook itself. The Playbook would be brought to the desk of the few authorised to see it by a courier, signed for, the courier would watch the reader and take away the copy afterwards. The very few copies in existence would be securely locked away; each numbered and differing subtly from the others so that, should a leak occur, the authorities would know which copy read by whom had been leaked. Printed on paper that could not be photographed or duplicated. As much protection as human cunning could devise; right up there with the nuclear codes .

So, The Russian Playbook would be extraordinarily difficult to get hold of. And yet every talking head on U.S. TV has a copy at his elbow! English copies, one assumes. Rachel Maddow has comprehended the complicated chapter on how to control the U.S. power system . Others have read the impenetrably complex section on how to control U.S. voting machines or change vote counts . Many are familiar with the lists of divisions in American society and directions for exploiting them . Adam Schiff has mastered the section on how to get Trump to give Alaska back . Susan Rice well knows the chapter "How to create riots in peaceful communities".

And so on. It's all quite ridiculous: we're supposed to believe that Moscow easily controls far-away countries but can't keep its neighbours under control.

There is no Russian Playbook, that's just projection. But there is a "playbook" and it's written in English, it's freely available and it's inexpensive enough that every pundit can have a personal copy: it's named " From Dictatorship To Democracy: A Conceptual Framework for Liberation " and it's written by Gene Sharp (1928-2018) . Whatever Sharp may have thought he was doing, whatever good cause he thought he was assisting, his book has been used as a guide to create regime changes around the world. Billed as "democracy" and "freedom", their results are not so benign. Witness Ukraine today. Or Libya. Or Kosovo whose long-time leader has just been indicted for numerous crimes . Curiously enough, these efforts always take place in countries that resist Washington's line but never in countries that don't. Here we do see training, financing, propaganda, discord being sown, divisions exploited to effect regime change – all the things in the imaginary "Russian Playbook". So, whatever he may have thought he was helping, Sharp's advice has been used to produce what only the propagandists could call " model interventions "; to the "liberated" themselves, the reality is poverty , destruction , war and refugees .

The Albert Einstein Institution , which Sharp created in 1983, strongly denies collusion with Washington-sponsored overthrows but people from it have organised seminars or workshops in many targets of U.S. overthrows . The most recent annual report of 2014 , while rather opaque, shows 45% of its income from "grants" (as opposed to "individuals") and has logos of Euromaidan, SOSVenezuela, Umbrellamovement , Lwili , Sunflowersquare and others. In short, the logos of regime change operations in Ukraine, Venezuela, Hong Kong, Burkina Faso and Taiwan. (And, ironically for today's USA, Black Lives Matter). So, clearly, there is some connection between the AEI and Washington-sponsored regime change operations.

So there is a "handbook" but it's not Russian.

Reading Sharp's book, however, makes one wonder if he was just fooling himself. Has there ever been a "dictatorship" overthrown by "non-violent" resistance along the lines of what he is suggesting? He mentions Norwegians who resisted Hitler; but Norway was liberated, along with the rest of Occupied Europe, by extremely violent warfare. While some Jews escaped, most didn't and it was the conquest of Berlin that saved the rest: the nazi state was killed . The USSR went away, together with its satellite governments in Europe but that was a top-down event. He likes Gandhi but Gandhi wouldn't have lasted a minute under Stalin. Otpor was greatly aided by NATO's war on Serbia. And, they're only "non-violent" because the Western media doesn't talk much about the violence ; "non-violent" is not the first word that comes to mind in this video of Kiev 2014 . "Colour revolutions" are manufactured from existing grievances, to be sure, but with a great deal of outside assistance, direction and funding; upon inspection, there's much design behind their "spontaneity". And, not infrequently, with mysterious sniping at a expedient moment – see Katchanovski's research on the "Heavenly Hundred" of the Maidan showing pretty convincingly that the shootings were " a false flag operation" involving "an alliance of the far right organizations, specifically the Right Sector and Svoboda, and oligarchic parties, such as Fatherland". There is little in Sharp's book to suggest that non-violent resistance would have had much effect on a really brutal and determined government. He also has the naïve habit of using "democrat" and "dictator" as if these words were as precisely defined as coconuts and codfish. But any "dictatorship" – for example Stalin's is a very complex affair with many shades of opinion in it. So, in terms of what he was apparently trying to do, one can see it only succeeding against rather mild "dictators" presiding over extremely unpopular polities. With a great deal of outside effort and resources.

His "playbook" is useful to outside powers that want to overthrow governments they don't like. Especially those run by "dictators" not brutal enough to shoot the protesters down. It's not Russian diplomats that are caught choosing the leaders of ostensibly independent countries . It's not Russians who boast of spending money in poor countries to change their governments . It's not Russian diplomats who meet with foreign opposition leaders . Russia doesn't fabricate a leader of a foreign country . It's not Russia that invents a humanitarian crisis , bombs the country to bits , laughs at its leader's brutal death and walks away. It's not Russia that sanctions numerous countries . It's not Russia that gives fellowships to foreign oppositionists . Even the Washington Post (one of the principals in sustaining Putindunnit hysteria) covered " The long history of the U.S. interfering with elections elsewhere "; but piously insisted "the days of its worst behavior are long behind it". Whatever the pundits may claim about Russia, the USA actually has an organisation devoted to interfering in other countries' business ; one of whose leading lights proudly boasted: " A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA. "

The famous "Russian Playbook" is nothing but projection onto Moscow of what Washington actually does: projection is so common a feature of American propaganda that one may certain that when Washington accuses somebody else of doing something, it's a guarantee that Washington is doing it.

[Jul 20, 2020] Gavin "Stupid Boy" Williamson was Minister of Defence when he said that Russia should "go away and shut up"

The game now turned against Johnson and Co and it is British government who now probably should follow his immortal advice "go away and shut up".
Jul 20, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

MOSCOWEXILE July 19, 2020 at 10:37 am

Not foreign minister: Gavin "Stupid Boy" Williamson was Minister of Defence when he said that Russia should "go away and shut up".

[Jul 20, 2020] The text of the OPCW document is "enhanced" in FT reports

Jul 20, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

CORTES July 19, 2020 at 1:37 pm

To paraphrase the famous line from "Jaws":

"You're gonna need a bigger rewrite" as another wheel falls off the Skripals Saga Wagon:

http://johnhelmer.net/financial-times-editor-khalaf-fakes-opcw-reports-on-skripal-sturgess-cases-hides-original-documents/

The text of the OPCW document is "enhanced" in FT reports. "Sexed up" was the term used about the UN Weapons Inspectors' report on Iraq's WMD programme way back when.

A Dr. David Kelly was involved. I wonder what became of him?

MOSCOWEXILE July 19, 2020 at 7:47 pm

That term "sexed up" really made me cringe when it suddenly came in vogue amongst UK commenters and "journalists" .

I was already in exile when the the shit hit the fan in the UK as regards criminal Blair's warmongering and was at a loss to understand what "sexed up" meant in the British newspaper articles that I read at the time -- no Internet then, so once a week I used to buy a copy of the "Sunday Times" (Woden forgive me!) in the foyer of of the five-star Hotel National, Moscow. Used to cost me an arm and a leg an' all! Robbing bastards!

[Jul 20, 2020] Harding's latest shtick the Guardian can't be arsed having him interviewed for another piece of self promotion by one of their hacks

Jul 20, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

MOSCOWEXILE July 17, 2020 at 9:06 pm

Love this comment below to this offGuardian article:

The "Russian vaccine hack" is a 3-for-1 deal on propaganda – OffGuardian

https://off-guardian.org/2020/07/16/the-russian-vaccine-hack-is-a-3-for-1-deal-on-propaganda/

Tutisicecream
Jul 17, 2020 8:44 AM
Yikes! The Ruskies are hacking again! Let's not forget that the British Superb plan for Brexit was born out of Vova's cunning mind.

From the people who brought you polonium in a teacup, Basha's bouncing Barrel Bombs, Salisbury Plain Pizza and the Covid- Horrid. Now want you to know Vova is back!

Last weekend they launched their counter move with Luke Harding interviewing himself about his new book

https://www.theguardian.com/membership/2020/jul/12/covering-russia-and-the-west-putins-goal-is-to-make-the-truth-unknowable

The decline of the Guardian is legend and one of their supposed ace gumshoes, Luke Harding, who has been the chief protagonist of the "Stupid Russia/ Cunning Russia" Guardian editorial line gets this time to interview himself. Displacement in psychology, as I'm sure Luke must have learnt from his handlers, is where we see in others that which we can't or fail to recognise in ourselves.

Those CIFers long in the tooth will recall how he moderated his own BTL comments on Russia until it all got too much for him. At which point they were cancelled. Now it seems it's all gone to a new level as Harding apparently interviews himself about his new book! In the Guardian's new post apocalyptic normal, where self censorship plus self promotion is the norm for their self congratulatory hacks and hackets Harding never fails to amaze at this genre.

As expected the reader is taken into the usual spy vs spy world of allusion and narrative plus fake intrigue and facts, so much the hallmark of Harding's work. None of which stands up to serious analysis as we recall:

https://youtu.be/9Ikf1uZli4g

where we have Arron Maté, a real journalist doing a superb job of exposing Harding as the crude propagandist he truly is.

This interview is about Harding's last book "Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win the 2016 US election".

Now we have a new cash cow where clearly with Harding's latest shtick the Guardian can't be arsed having him interviewed for another piece of self promotion by one of their hacks. So they go for the off the shelf fake interview where they allow Harding to talk to himself.

Clearly as they point out Harding is working for home, with more than one foot in the grave it must be time to furlough him.

You couldn't make this stuff up Luke could you?

[Jul 20, 2020] Dominic Raab grandstanding

Jul 20, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

Reply

MOSCOWEXILE July 19, 2020 at 8:55 am

Dominic Raab @DominicRaab · Jul 17 Today, we remember that 6 years ago flight #MH17 was shot down & 298 people tragically lost their lives, including 10 🇬🇧 citizens. We support the ongoing trial in the Netherlands to deliver justice for those who died & for their loved ones, and call on Russia to cooperate fully

And Russia does not try to cooperate fully?

Is Russia even allowed to cooperate?

The Ukraine is allowed to cooperate, of course, and not only cooperate: the Ukraine is part of the "Joint Investigative Team"!

The Ukraine even provides "evidence" of Russian culpability!

What duplicitous twat Raab is!

MOSCOWEXILE July 19, 2020 at 9:35 am

And of course, according to the mendacious Raab, the purpose of the "trial" is to deliver "justice for those who died and their loved ones" and certainly not to apportion blame on Russia and the so-called terrorists in eastern Ukraine, whom Russia supports by, amongst other things, having dispatched a Buk ground-to-air anti-aircraft missile launching complex from Russia to the Ukraine, which weaponry was part of the Russian armed forces and manned by Russian servicemen, then ferreted said system out of the Ukraine back to Russia, mission having been accomplished, namely the downing of a civilian airliner that, for some reason or other, had been diverted by Ukraine air-traffic control over a war zone in the Ukraine and on a day when all Ukraine air-traffic radars were, for some inexplicable reason, out of action.

Raab, to partly quote one of your fellow British cabinet ministers and erstwhile foreign minister: "You should go away and shut up!"

[Jul 20, 2020] The US military is defending US global hegemony, and is priced accordingly. What you think of US military spending depends on what you think of the US as a hegemon.

Jul 20, 2020 | crookedtimber.org

Ebenezer Scrooge 07.19.20 at 1:13 pm

US military spending is certainly much higher than it needs to be for US defense needs. But the US military is not primarily defending the US. It is defending Asia from China, NATO from Russia, and a number of countries from Iran, not to speak of Norkland.

IOW, the US military is defending US global hegemony, and is priced accordingly. What you think of US military spending depends on what you think of the US as a hegemon.

Alan White 07.19.20 at 2:15 pm ( 21 )

Thanks John that's very helpful -- I thought those two figures would be much closer together. Reading CT is always instructive in one way or another.

James Wimberley 07.19.20 at 5:02 pm ( 22 )

Long comment on the cross-post, on the cost of the energy transition part of the GND:
https://johnquiggin.com/2020/07/18/a-trillion-here-a-trillion-there-pretty-soon-youre-talking-real-money-creation/#comment-226012

Tom 07.20.20 at 1:37 pm ( 23 )

As a share of GDP, military spending today is half of what it was in 1986. Data here:

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/MS.MIL.XPND.GD.ZS?locations=US

I am not a fan of military spending – following an excellent post by John about Eisenhower's famous speech (more tanks or more hospitals), I often use it as an example opportunity cost when teaching. One can certainly claim that the budget should be lower but, as a share of overall economic resources, the budget has been cut substantially in the last 30 years.

[Jul 20, 2020] The Truth About -Massive Protests- in Khabarovsk • Stalker Zone

Jul 20, 2020 | www.stalkerzone.org

The Truth About "Massive Protests" in Khabarovsk July 19, 2020 Stalker Zone

Guys, a quick note.

I didn't want to write any more about this, but after the stages of irony, sarcasm, and grins, the stage of endless weariness came.

A rally was held in Khabarovsk again. Our "oppositionists" again claim that "filthy Rashka" [a pejorative way of referring to "Russia" used by the fifth-column – ed] and that there is a "Beautiful Russia" [a slogan used by Navalny – ed] of the future, in Khabarovsk and right now.

"It seems that due to its geographical location in Khabarovsk, not only does the New Year arrive earlier than it does in Moscow, but also the Beautiful Russia of the future."

More tantrums, moaning, and calls for a Far Eastern People's Republic (when will they start putting people in prison for separatism?). Especially amusing are theses like "the government is falling under the pressure of the crowd" and "Putin's fate is being decided in Khabarovsk today" . Yes, I've even seen that.

You there, in Khabarovsk, no longer want to decide anyone's fate? The Dalai Lama, our agent Donnie, maybe you can take care of the whole State Department there? Although, in fact, these questions are not for Khabarovsk residents, because Moscow and St. Petersburg hamsters [liberals – ed] masturbate loudest over the protests.

They say that about 50,000 people came to the rally. After the end of the rally, reports started to arrive about as many as 80,000 – comparable to Bolotnaya , Yes. The "opposition" is happy and shout that every 5th person has come out to Khabarovsk, the people are against the government, Baba Yaga is against everything and anything in general.

READ: The Ukrainian Trace Was Discovered in the Khabarovsk Protests

No, well, the footage is really impressive.

And, like, it starts to seem that this is really serious and guys like this moose on salt aren't overreacting.

"It is reported that now just in Khabarovsk at a rally against the government – 82,000 people – every 5th resident!

Moscow, St. Petersburg, Russia! Can you stop sleeping?

'ARISE, great country! Get up to fight TO THE DEATH!'"

Although, for the desecration of sacred lines [Stalin's famous WW2 quote: "Arise, great country!" – ed], it is simply not enough to hit his ugly mug.

So: let me show you what and how it really was in Khabarovsk, and then remember that there are many filming techniques to create the effect of the crowd being massive.

This is what the center of Khabarovsk looked like at 12:22 local time, 22 minutes after the start of the campaign, when messages about endless tens of thousands of people began to pop up.

And this is how the main square of Khabarovsk looked at 13:16, a little more than an hour after the start of the rally. When the "opposition" introduced reports of thousands on the square, and the mayor's office declared a maximum of 300 – well, about 300 people are visible. At most.

According to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, there were no more than 10,000 people at the rally. Photos taken by a quadrocopter make even these figures overly optimistic, I would estimate about 5,000 people.

Everything else was faked in order to put pressure on the investigation and convince the authorities that the protest is growing and spreading. Moreover, the mayor of Khabarovsk himself started to complain about the sent kosachoks and idiots, jumping for money every day with the same speeches and posters.

READ: Do You Know Who Organised a Terrorist Attack in Khabarovsk?

There will not be any "revolution of dignity" [maidan – ed]. All that is happening is an attempt by Khabarovsk bandits from the 90s to protect their crook, and I hope the central authorities will deal with this effectively.

No mass participation, no "every fifth resident" , no country will arise for a fight to the death. Bummer, that's that, let's move on, the revolution has been cancelled.

Finally, there is concrete evidence and witness statements against Furgal . Do you know why they are so implacably trying to push the authorities into an open trial in his case?

Do you even know why it was closed?

To protect witnesses who have been threatened and silenced for years. Witnesses and a mother, who were bullied and whose lives might be in danger.

And Furgal is a huckster who, using his deputy's mandate and immunity, for years evaded the investigation, did not turn up for questioning, and protected his ass as best he could.

Furgal is a killer.

And everyone who yells "I/We are Furgal" stands in solidarity with this killer. Voluntarily.

Anyone who insists on an open process insists on disclosing the privacy of people who would be put at risk. Real danger, unlike all these fat-faced hamsters who are completely raging with impudence and don't see further than the end of their nose. For them the best case scenario is a trip in a police van, selfies, and hopes for payments that they will be awarded by the ECHR.

That's about it.

Enfer (Zen Yandex)

[Jul 20, 2020] Who was Steele's primary Subsource and who belong his circle of heavily drinking buddies who brainstormed the set of myth which Steele put in the dossier

Did Skripal played any role in this mess. In this case his poisoning looks more logical as an attempt to hide him from Russians, who might well suspect him in playing a role in creating Steele dossier by some myths that were present in it.
Notable quotes:
"... Even Beria would laugh at this kind of "evidence". ..."
Jul 20, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Eric Felten via RealClearInvestigations.com,

Much of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation into Donald Trump was built on the premise that Christopher Steele and his dossier were to be believed. This even though, early on, Steele's claims failed to bear scrutiny. Just how far off the claims were became clear when the FBI interviewed Steele's "Primary Subsource" over three days beginning on Feb. 9, 2017. Notes taken by FBI agents of those interviews were released by the Senate Judiciary Committee Friday afternoon.

The Primary Subsource was in reality Steele's sole source, a long-time Russian-speaking contractor for the former British spy's company, Orbis Business Intelligence. In turn, the Primary Subsource had a group of friends in Russia. All of their names remain redacted. From the FBI interviews it becomes clear that the Primary Subsource and his friends peddled warmed-over rumors and laughable gossip that Steele dressed up as formal intelligence memos.

Paul Manafort: The Steele dossier's "Primary Subsource" admitted to the FBI "that he was 'clueless' about who Manafort was, and that this was a 'strange task' to have been given." AP Photo/Seth Wenig, File

Steele's operation didn't rely on great expertise, to judge from the Primary Subsource's account. He described to the FBI the instructions Steele had given him sometime in the spring of 2016 regarding Paul Manafort: "Do you know [about] Manafort? Find out about Manafort's dealings with Ukraine, his dealings with other countries, and any corrupt schemes." The Primary Subsource admitted to the FBI "that he was 'clueless' about who Manafort was, and that this was a 'strange task' to have been given."

The Primary Subsource said at first that maybe he had asked some of his friends in Russia – he didn't have a network of sources, according to his lawyer, but instead just a "social circle." And a boozy one at that: When the Primary Subsource would get together with his old friend Source 4, the two would drink heavily. But his social circle was no help with the Manafort question and so the Primary Subsource scrounged up a few old news clippings about Manafort and fed them back to Steele.

Also in his "social circle" was Primary Subsource's friend "Source 2," a character who was always on the make. "He often tries to monetize his relationship with [the Primary Subsource], suggesting that the two of them should try and do projects together for money," the Primary Subsource told the FBI (a caution that the Primary Subsource would repeat again and again.) It was Source 2 who "told [the Primary Subsource] that there was compromising material on Trump."

And then there was Source 3, a very special friend. Over a redacted number of years, the Primary Subsource has "helped out [Source 3] financially." She stayed with him when visiting the United States. The Primary Subsource told the FBI that in the midst of their conversations about Trump, they would also talk about "a private subject." (The FBI agents, for all their hardnosed reputation, were too delicate to intrude by asking what that "private subject" was).

Michael Cohen: The bogus story of the Trump fixer's trip to Prague seems to have originated with "Source 3," a woman friend of the Primary Subsource, who was "not sure if Source 3 was brainstorming here." AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File

One day Steele told his lead contractor to get dirt on five individuals. By the time he got around to it, the Primary Subsource had forgotten two of the names, but seemed to recall Carter Page, Paul Manafort and Trump lawyer Michael Cohen. The Primary Subsource said he asked his special friend Source 3 if she knew any of them. At first she didn't. But within minutes she seemed to recall having heard of Cohen, according to the FBI notes. Indeed, before long it came back to her that she had heard Cohen and three henchmen had gone to Prague to meet with Russians.

Source 3 kept spinning yarns about Michael Cohen in Prague. For example, she claimed Cohen was delivering "deniable cash payments" to hackers. But come to think of it, the Primary Subsource was "not sure if Source 3 was brainstorming here," the FBI notes say.

The Steele Dossier would end up having authoritative-sounding reports of hackers who had been "recruited under duress by the FSB" -- the Russian security service -- and how they "had been using botnets and porn traffic to transmit viruses, plant bugs, steal data and conduct 'altering operations' against the the Democratic Party." What exactly, the FBI asked the subject, were "altering operations?" The Primary Subsource wouldn't be much help there, as he told the FBI "that his understanding of this topic (i.e. cyber) was 'zero.'" But what about his girlfriend whom he had known since they were in eighth grade together? The Primary Subsource admitted to the FBI that Source 3 "is not an IT specialist herself."

And then there was Source 6. Or at least the Primary Subsource thinks it was Source 6.

Ritz-Carlton Moscow: The Primary Subsource admitted to the FBI "he had not been able to confirm the story" about Trump and prostitutes at the hotel. But he did check with someone who supposedly asked a hotel manager, who said that with celebrities, "one never knows what they're doing." Moscowjob.net/Wikimedia

While he was doing his research on Manafort, the Primary Subsource met a U.S. journalist "at a Thai restaurant." The Primary Subsource didn't want to ask "revealing questions" but managed to go so far as to ask, "Do you [redacted] know anyone who can talk about all of this Trump/Manafort stuff, or Trump and Russia?" According to the FBI notes, the journalist told Primary Subsource "that he was skeptical and nothing substantive had turned up." But the journalist put the Primary Subsource in touch with a "colleague" who in turn gave him an email of "this guy" journalist 2 had interviewed and "that he should talk to."

With the email address of "this guy" in hand, the Primary Subsource sent him a message "in either June or July 2016." Some weeks later the Primary Subsource "received a telephone call from an unidentified Russia guy." He "thought" but had no evidence that the mystery "Russian guy" was " that guy." The mystery caller "never identified himself." The Primary Subsource labeled the anonymous caller "Source 6." The Primary Subsource and Source 6 talked for a total of "about 10 minutes." During that brief conversation they spoke about the Primary Subsource traveling to meet the anonymous caller, but the hook-up never happened.

Nonetheless, the Primary Subsource labeled the unknown Russian voice "Source 6" and gave Christopher Steele the rundown on their brief conversation – how they had "a general discussion about Trump and the Kremlin" and "that it was an ongoing relationship." For use in the dossier, Steele named the voice Source E.

When Steele was done putting this utterly unsourced claim into the style of the dossier, here's how the mystery call from the unknown guy was presented: "Speaking in confidence to a compatriot in late July 2016, Source E, an ethnic Russian close associate of Republican US presidential candidate Donald TRUMP, admitted that there was a well-developed conspiracy of co-operation between them and the Russian leadership." Steele writes "Inter alia," – yes, he really does deploy the Latin formulation for "among other things" – "Source E acknowledged that the Russian regime had been behind the recent leak of embarrassing e-mail messages, emanating from the Democratic National Committee [DNC], to the WikiLeaks platform."

All that and more is presented as the testimony of a "close associate" of Trump, when it was just the disembodied voice of an unknown guy.

Perhaps even more perplexing is that the FBI interviewers, knowing that Source E was just an anonymous caller, didn't compare that admission to the fantastical Steele bluster and declare the dossier a fabrication on the spot.

But perhaps it might be argued that Christopher Steele was bringing crack investigative skills of his own to bear. For something as rich in detail and powerful in effect as the dossier, Steele must have been researching these questions himself as well, using his hard-earned spy savvy to pry closely held secrets away from the Russians. Or at the very least he must have relied on a team of intelligence operatives who could have gone far beyond the obvious limitations the Primary Subsource and his group of drinking buddies.

But no. As we learned in December from Inspector General Michael Horowitz, Steele "was not the originating source of any of the factual information in his reporting." Steele, the IG reported "relied on a primary sub-source (Primary Sub-source) for information, and this Primary Sub-source used a network of [further] sub-sources to gather the information that was relayed to Steele." The inspector general's report noted that "neither Steele nor the Primary Sub-source had direct access to the information being reported."

One might, by now, harbor some skepticism about the dossier. One might even be inclined to doubt the story that Trump was "into water sports" as the Primary Subsource so delicately described the tale of Trump and Moscow prostitutes. But, in this account, there was an effort, however feeble, to nail down the "rumor and speculation" that Trump engaged in "unorthodox sexual activity at the Ritz."

While the Primary Subsource admitted to the FBI "he had not been able to confirm the story," Source 2 (who will be remembered as the hustler always looking for a lucrative score) supposedly asked a hotel manager about Trump and the manager said that with celebrities, "one never knows what they're doing." One never knows – not exactly a robust proof of something that smacks of urban myth. But the Primary Subsource makes the best of it, declaring that at least "it wasn't a denial."

If there was any denial going on it was the FBI's, an agency in denial that its extraordinary investigation was crumbling.

bh2, 23 minutes ago

Even Beria would laugh at this kind of "evidence".


[Jul 20, 2020] Was Skripal one of the subsources of Steele?

So Russia started to suspect him and British staged this fun show with Novichok ?
Heavily drinking individuals are probably common in London Russian emigrant circles.
‘Duckgate’, as it is now being dubbed, was used to trick US President Trump into expelling 60 Russian Diplomats over false photographic evidence presented to him by Haspel, as it was provided to her by UK authorities. The manipulation of Trump, courtesy of CIA Director Haspel, the UK government (and accidentally documented on by the NYT), had blown first serious holes into the entire narrative that Sergei and Yulia Skripal were poisoned by Russian agents with the deadly Novichok nerve agent.
"Ms. Haspel showed pictures the British government had supplied her of young children hospitalized after being sickened by the Novichok nerve agent that poisoned the Skripals. She then showed a photograph of ducks that British officials said were inadvertently killed by the sloppy work of the Russian operatives "
Notable quotes:
"... The Primary Subsource was in reality Steele’s sole source, a long-time Russian-speaking contractor for the former British spy’s company, Orbis Business Intelligence. In turn, the Primary Subsource had a group of friends in Russia. All of their names remain redacted. From the FBI interviews it becomes clear that the Primary Subsource and his friends peddled warmed-over rumors and laughable gossip that Steele dressed up as formal intelligence memos. ..."
Jul 20, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

The Primary Subsource was in reality Steele’s sole source, a long-time Russian-speaking contractor for the former British spy’s company, Orbis Business Intelligence. In turn, the Primary Subsource had a group of friends in Russia. All of their names remain redacted. From the FBI interviews it becomes clear that the Primary Subsource and his friends peddled warmed-over rumors and laughable gossip that Steele dressed up as formal intelligence memos.

...Steele’s operation didn’t rely on great expertise, to judge from the Primary Subsource’s account. He described to the FBI the instructions Steele had given him sometime in the spring of 2016 regarding Paul Manafort: “Do you know [about] Manafort? Find out about Manafort’s dealings with Ukraine, his dealings with other countries, and any corrupt schemes.” The Primary Subsource admitted to the FBI “that he was ‘clueless’ about who Manafort was, and that this was a ‘strange task’ to have been given.”

The Primary Subsource said at first that maybe he had asked some of his friends in Russia – he didn’t have a network of sources, according to his lawyer, but instead just a “social circle.” And a boozy one at that: When the Primary Subsource would get together with his old friend Source 4, the two would drink heavily. But his social circle was no help with the Manafort question and so the Primary Subsource scrounged up a few old news clippings about Manafort and fed them back to Steele.

bh2 , 23 minutes ago

Even Beria would laugh at this kind of "evidence".

Versengetorix, 1 hour ago remove

The Durham investigation has been covered over with asphalt.

ze_vodka , 1 hour ago

After all that has happened, if anyone actually still thinks the Trump = Putin story has any shred of truth... well... there are no words left to write about that.

jeff montanye , 1 hour ago

chris wray needs to go pronto.

https://thespectator.info/2020/07/20/chris-wray-hires-jason-jones-a-partner-at-rod-rosensteins-law-firm-and-associate-of-sally-yates-as-fbi-general-counsel/

[Jul 19, 2020] This sacred cow of illusion of American democracy is being threatened from all directions it seems. Democracy is great for whoever owns it, and whoever owns the media owns democracy. A cow well worth milking

Democracy is incompatible with the global neoliberal empire ruled from Washington. And the USA is empire now.
Notable quotes:
"... cancel culture is just fine, as long as it's your side doing the cancelling...or if it's Israel or the national security state doing the cancelling ..."
Jul 19, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org
Peter AU1 , Jul 18 2020 20:21 utc | 36

"The forces of illiberalism are gaining strength throughout the world and have a powerful ally in Donald Trump, who represents a real threat to democracy."

This sacred cow of illusion is being threatened from all directions it seems. Democracy is great for whoever owns it, and whoever owns the media owns democracy. A cow well worth milking.

JohnH , Jul 18 2020 21:18 utc | 48

Norman Finkelstein must be laughing out loud at the sight of so many hypocritical liberals opposing cancel. Did anyone in this crowd get 150 people to sign a letter of protest when Finkelstein got cancelled? Or when Phil Donahue got fired for opposing the Iraq war?

IOW, cancel culture is just fine, as long as it's your side doing the cancelling...or if it's Israel or the national security state doing the cancelling . CountrPunch, a victim of blacklisting themselves, has a major takedown of the screaming hypocrisy of some of the signers: https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/07/10/harpers-and-the-great-cancel-culture-panic/

[Jul 19, 2020] A trillion here, a trillion there, pretty soon you're talking real money

Jul 19, 2020 | crookedtimber.org

Alan White 07.19.20 at 1:21 am

John, what say you about US/global military spending, which if cut and reallocated in the low double digits could transform society? Do you think it's just politically untouchable? If the US cut its military budget by say 25% it would still be formidable, especially given its nuclear deterrent. For the life of me I can never understand why military budgets are sacrosanct. Is it just WW2 and Cold War hangover? Couldn't the obvious effects of climate change and the fragility of the economy subject to natural threats like the pandemic change attitudes about overfunding the military (like the debacle of the F-35 program)?

John Quiggin 07.19.20 at 3:50 am ( 15 )

Alan White @13 Military spending is about 3.4 per cent of US GDP, compared to 2 per cent or less most places. So that's a significant and unproductive use of resources that could be redirected to better effect. But the income of the top 1 per cent is around 20 per cent of total income. If that was cut in half, there would be little or no reduction in the productive services supplied by this group. If you want big change, that's where you need to look.

eg 07.19.20 at 4:08 am ( 16 )

@Alan White #13

I think some of the reluctance to cut military spending in the US is the extent to which it acts as a politically unassailable source of fiscal stimulus and "welfare" in a country where such things are otherwise anathema. Well, that and all of the grift it represents for the donor class.

likbez 07.19.20 at 10:18 am ( 17 )

@John Quiggin 07.19.20 at 3:50 am *15)

Alan White @13 Military spending is about 3.4 per cent of US GDP, compared to 2 per cent or less most places.

GDP is a fake metric in general (due to the size of FIRE sector in the US economy) and especially when we are discussing military spending.

Military spending is 53% of discretionary spending which put the USA in the category of the most militarized countries. https://www.nationalpriorities.org/analysis/2020/militarized-budget-2020/

[Jul 19, 2020] The Chinese and Russian Foreign Ministers just jointly agreed in a rare published account of their phone conversation that the Outlaw US Empire " has lost its sense of reason, morality and credibility .

Jul 19, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

karlof1 , Jul 18 2020 22:54 utc | 6 4

Does Cancel Culture intersect with Woke? The former's not mentioned in this fascinating essay , but the latter is and appears to deserve some unpacking beyond what Crooke provides.

As for the letter, it's way overdue by 40+ years. I recall reading Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind and Christopher Lasch's Culture of Narcissism where they say much the same.

What's most irksome are the lies that now substitute for discourse--Trump or someone from his admin lies, then the WaPost, NY Times, MSNBC, Fox, and others fire back with their lies. And to top everything off--There's ZERO accountability: people who merit "canceling" continue to lie and commit massive fraud.

The Chinese and Russian Foreign Ministers just jointly agreed in a rare published account of their phone conversation that the Outlaw US Empire " has lost its sense of reason, morality and credibility .

Yes, they were specifically referring to the government, but I'd include the Empire's institutions as well. In the face of that reality, the letter is worse than a joke.

[Jul 18, 2020] SCOTT RITTER- Powell Iraq -- Regime Change, Not Disarmament- The Fundamental Lie Consortiumnews

Notable quotes:
"... Special to Consortium News ..."
"... Powell was part of the policy team that crafted the post-Gulf War response to the fact that Iraq's president, Saddam Hussein, survived a conflict he was not meant to. After being labeled the Middle East equivalent of Adolf Hitler whose crimes required Nuremburg-like retribution in a speech delivered by President Bush in October 1990, the Iraqi President's post-conflict hold on power had become a political problem for Bush 41. ..."
"... Powell was aware of the CIA's post-war assessment on the vulnerability of Saddam's rule to continued economic sanctions, and helped craft the policy that led to the passage of Security Council resolution 687 in April 1991. That linked Iraq's obligation to be disarmed of its WMD prior to any lifting of sanctions and the reality that it was U.S. policy not to lift these sanctions, regardless of Iraq's disarmament status, until which time Saddam was removed from power. ..."
"... Regime change, not disarmament, was always the driving factor behind U.S. policy towards Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Powell knew this because he helped craft the original policy. ..."
"... The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of ..."
"... Consortium News. ..."
"... 25th Anniversary ..."
Jul 18, 2020 | consortiumnews.com

SCOTT RITTER: Powell & Iraq -- Regime Change, Not Disarmament: The Fundamental Lie July 18, 2020 Save

Regime change, not disarmament, was always the driving factor behind U.S. policy towards Saddam Hussein. Powell knew this because he helped craft the original policy.

By Scott Ritter
Special to Consortium News

T he New York Times Magazine has published a puff piece soft-peddling former Secretary of State Colin Powell's role in selling a war on Iraq to the UN Security Council using what turned out to be bad intelligence. "Colin Powell Still Wants Answers" is the title of the article, written by Robert Draper. "The analysts who provided the intelligence," a sub-header to the article declares, "now say it was doubted inside the CIA at the time."

Draper's article is an extract from a book, To Start a War: How the Bush Administration Took America into Iraq , scheduled for publication later this month. In the interest of full disclosure, I was approached by Draper in 2018 about his interest in writing this book, and I agreed to be interviewed as part of his research. I have not yet read the book, but can note that, based upon the tone and content of his New York Times Magazine article, my words apparently carried little weight.

Regime Change, Not WMD

I spent some time articulating to Draper my contention that the issue with Saddam Hussein's Iraq was never about weapons of mass destruction (WMD), but rather regime change, and that everything had to be viewed in the light of this reality -- including Powell's Feb. 5, 2003 presentation before the UN Security Council. Based upon the content of his article, I might as well have been talking to a brick wall.

Powell's 2003 presentation before the council did not take place in a policy vacuum. In many ways, the March 2003 U.S.-led invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq was a continuation of the 1991 Gulf War, which Powell helped orchestrate. Its fumbled aftermath was again, something that transpired on Powell's watch as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the administration of George H. W. Bush.

Powell at UN Security Council. (UN Photo)

Powell was part of the policy team that crafted the post-Gulf War response to the fact that Iraq's president, Saddam Hussein, survived a conflict he was not meant to. After being labeled the Middle East equivalent of Adolf Hitler whose crimes required Nuremburg-like retribution in a speech delivered by President Bush in October 1990, the Iraqi President's post-conflict hold on power had become a political problem for Bush 41.

Powell was aware of the CIA's post-war assessment on the vulnerability of Saddam's rule to continued economic sanctions, and helped craft the policy that led to the passage of Security Council resolution 687 in April 1991. That linked Iraq's obligation to be disarmed of its WMD prior to any lifting of sanctions and the reality that it was U.S. policy not to lift these sanctions, regardless of Iraq's disarmament status, until which time Saddam was removed from power.

Regime change, not disarmament, was always the driving factor behind U.S. policy towards Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Powell knew this because he helped craft the original policy.

I bore witness to the reality of this policy as a weapons inspector working for the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM), created under the mandate of resolution 687 to oversee the disarming of Iraq's WMD. Brought in to create an intelligence capability for the inspection team, my remit soon expanded to operations and, more specifically, how Iraq was hiding retained weapons and capability from the inspectors.

SCUDS

UN weapons inspectors in central Iraq, June 1, 1991. (UN Photo)

One of my first tasks was addressing discrepancies in Iraq's accounting of its modified SCUD missile arsenal; in December 1991 I wrote an assessment that Iraq was likely retaining approximately 100 missiles. By March 1992 Iraq, under pressure, admitted it had retained a force of 89 missiles (that number later grew to 97).

After extensive investigations, I was able to corroborate the Iraqi declarations, and in November 1992 issued an assessment that UNSCOM could account for the totality of Iraq's SCUD missile force. This, of course, was an unacceptable conclusion, given that a compliant Iraq meant sanctions would need to be lifted and Saddam would survive.

The U.S. intelligence community rejected my findings without providing any fact-based evidence to refute it, and the CIA later briefed the Senate that it assessed Iraq to be retaining a force of some 200 covert SCUD missiles. This all took place under Powell's watch as chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

I challenged the CIA's assessment, and organized the largest, most complex inspection in UNSCOM's history to investigate the intelligence behind the 200-missile assessment. In the end, the intelligence was shown to be wrong, and in November 1993 I briefed the CIA Director's senior staff on UNSCOM's conclusion that all SCUD missiles were accounted for.

Moving the Goalposts

The CIA's response was to assert that Iraq had a force of 12-20 covert SCUD missiles, and that this number would never change, regardless of what UNSCOM did. This same assessment was in play at the time of Powell's Security Council presentation, a blatant lie born of the willful manufacture of lies by an entity -- the CIA -- whose task was regime change, not disarmament.

Powell knew all of this, and yet he still delivered his speech to the UN Security Council.

In October 2002, in a briefing designed to undermine the credibility of UN inspectors preparing to return to Iraq, the Defense Intelligence Agency trotted out Dr. John Yurechko, the defense intelligence officer for information operations and denial and deception, to provide a briefing detailing U.S. claims that Iraq was engaged in a systematic process of concealment regarding its WMD programs.

John Yurechko, of the Defense Intelligence Agency, briefs reporters at the Pentagon on Oct. 8, 2002 (U.S. Defense Dept.)

According to Yurechko, the briefing was compiled from several sources, including "inspector memoirs" and Iraqi defectors. The briefing was farcical, a deliberate effort to propagate misinformation by the administration of Bush 43. I know -- starting in 1994, I led a concerted UNSCOM effort involving the intelligence services of eight nations to get to the bottom of Iraq's so-called "concealment mechanism."

Using innovative imagery intelligence techniques, defector debriefs, agent networks and communications intercepts, combined with extremely aggressive on-site inspections, I was able, by March 1998, to conclude that Iraqi concealment efforts were largely centered on protecting Saddam Hussein from assassination, and had nothing to do with hiding WMD. This, too, was an inconvenient finding, and led to the U.S. dismantling the apparatus of investigation I had so carefully assembled over the course of four years.

It was never about the WMD -- Powell knew this. It was always about regime change.

Using UN as Cover for Coup Attempt

In 1991, Powell signed off on the incorporation of elite U.S. military commandos into the CIA's Special Activities Staff for the purpose of using UNSCOM as a front to collect intelligence that could facilitate the removal of Saddam Hussein. I worked with this special cell from 1991 until 1996, on the mistaken opinion that the unique intelligence, logistics and communications capability they provided were useful to planning and executing the complex inspections I was helping lead in Iraq.

This program resulted in the failed coup attempt in June 1996 that used UNSCOM as its operational cover -- the coup failed, the Special Activities Staff ceased all cooperation with UNSCOM, and we inspectors were left holding the bag. The Iraqis had every right to be concerned that UNSCOM inspections were being used to target their president because, the truth be told, they were.

Nowhere in Powell's presentation to the Security Council, or in any of his efforts to recast that presentation as a good intention led astray by bad intelligence, does the reality of regime change factor in. Regime change was the only policy objective of three successive U.S. presidential administrations -- Bush 41, Clinton, and Bush 43.

Powell was a key player in two of these. He knew. He knew about the existence of the CIA's Iraq Operations Group. He knew of the successive string of covert "findings" issued by U.S. presidents authorizing the CIA to remove Saddam Hussein from power using lethal force. He knew that the die had been cast for war long before Bush 43 decided to engage the United Nations in the fall of 2002.

Powell Knew

Powell knew all of this, and yet he still allowed himself to be used as a front to sell this conflict to the international community, and by extension the American people, using intelligence that was demonstrably false. If, simply by drawing on my experience as an UNSCOM inspector, I knew every word he uttered before the Security Council was a lie the moment he spoke, Powell should have as well, because every aspect of my work as an UNSCOM inspector was known to, and documented by, the CIA.

It is not that I was unknown to Powell in the context of the WMD narrative. Indeed, my name came up during an interview Powell gave to Fox News on Sept. 8, 2002, when he was asked to comment on a quote from my speech to the Iraqi Parliament earlier that month in which I stated:

"The rhetoric of fear that is disseminated by my government and others has not to date been backed up by hard facts that substantiate any allegations that Iraq is today in possession of weapons of mass destruction or has links to terror groups responsible for attacking the United States. Void of such facts, all we have is speculation."

Powell responded by declaring,

"We have facts, not speculation. Scott is certainly entitled to his opinion but I'm afraid that I would not place the security of my nation and the security of our friends in the region on that kind of an assertion by somebody who's not in the intelligence chain any longer If Scott is right, then why are they keeping the inspectors out? If Scott is right, why don't they say, 'Anytime, any place, anywhere, bring 'em in, everybody come in -- we are clean?' The reason is they are not clean. And we have to find out what they have and what we're going to do about it. And that's why it's been the policy of this government to insist that Iraq be disarmed in accordance with the terms of the relevant UN resolutions."

UN inspectors in Iraq. (UN Photo)

Of course, in November 2002, Iraq did just what Powell said they would never do -- they let the UN inspectors return without preconditions. The inspectors quickly exposed the fact that the "high quality" U.S. intelligence they had been tasked with investigating was pure bunk. Left to their own devices, the new round of UN weapons inspections would soon be able to give Iraq a clean bill of health, paving the way for the lifting of sanctions and the continued survival of Saddam Hussein.

Powell knew this was not an option. And thus he allowed himself to be used as a vehicle for disseminating more lies -- lies that would take the U.S. to war, cost thousands of U.S. service members their lives, along with hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, all in the name of regime change.

Back to Robert Draper. I spent a considerable amount of time impressing upon him the reality of regime change as a policy, and the fact that the WMD disarmament issue existed for the sole purpose of facilitating regime change. Apparently, my words had little impact, as all Draper has done in his article is continue the false narrative that America went to war on the weight of false and misleading intelligence.

Draper is wrong -- America went to war because it was our policy as a nation, sustained over three successive presidential administrations, to remove Saddam Hussein from power. By 2002 the WMD narrative that had been used to support and sustain this regime change policy was weakening.

Powell's speech was a last-gasp effort to use the story of Iraqi WMD for the purpose it was always intended -- to facilitate the removal of Saddam Hussein from power. In this light, Colin Powell's speech was one of the greatest successes in CIA history. That is not the story, however, Draper chose to tell, and the world is worse off for that failed opportunity.

Scott Ritter is a former Marine Corps intelligence officer who served in the former Soviet Union implementing arms control treaties, in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm, and in Iraq overseeing the disarmament of WMD.

The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.

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News on its 25th Anniversary


[Jul 17, 2020] Dutch Foreign Ministry Says Probe Started Into Why Ukraine Did Not Close Skies Over warzone

Jul 17, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

MOSCOWEXILE July 17, 2020 at 7:30 am

Dutch Foreign Ministry Says Probe Started Into Why Ukraine Did Not Close Skies Over MH17 Crash Site
Updated 18:20, 17th July

https://sputniknews.com/world/202007171079916084-dutch-foreign-ministry-says-probe-into-why-ukraine-did-not-close-skies-over-mh17-crash-site/

The Flight Safety Foundation has begun an investigation into why Kiev did not close the airspace over the warzone in eastern Ukraine where MH17 was destroyed in July 2014, a Dutch foreign ministry spokesperson has confirmed to Sputnik.

[Jul 17, 2020] 100 years since formation of Soviet Extraordinary Commission for the Liquidation of Illiteracy by Patrick O'Connor

Jul 08, 2020 | www.wsws.org

On June 19, 1920 the Soviet government led by Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky established the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for the Liquidation of Illiteracy (Cheka Likbez).

The organisation played an important role in leading the campaign to wipe out illiteracy within the Soviet Union, eliminating one of the most damaging legacies of Tsarist backwardness and poverty. The Soviet literacy campaign remains the largest and most successful in world history. Historian Ben Eklof noted: "There is good reason to conclude that in 22 years (1917-39), the Soviet Union had accomplished what it took Britain, France, and Germany at least a hundred years to do."[1]

The Soviet literacy campaign serves as an enduring demonstration of the extraordinary possibilities for reorganising society in the interests of the working class on a planned, socialist basis.

"An illiterate person is like one who is blind. Accidents and misfortune await him everywhere"

The campaign's achievements stand in stark contrast to the global illiteracy that continues to plague humanity under capitalism in the 21st century. According to UNESCO statistics, at least 750 million people are illiterate, with 100 million of these people aged between 5-24. Most are in the former colonial regions of sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. In addition, however, within the advanced capitalist countries, access to proper literacy education opportunities is under threat as austerity and privatisation measures restrict access to adequately funded public education. In the United States, multiple law suits have sought to establish the as yet unrecognised constitutional right to literacy.

In 1917, when the Bolshevik Party overthrew the bourgeois provisional government and established the world's first workers state, the revolutionary government confronted mass illiteracy across the former Tsarist empire. An 1897 census reported that just 21 percent of adults could read, though that was almost certainly an exaggerated figure given that anyone who could sign their name and who claimed to be able to read was counted as literate.[2] In the last two decades of the Tsarist regime the literacy rate increased somewhat, in parallel with the rising urban population, but by 1917 a large majority of the country's 150 million people remained unable to read.

Tsarist authorities regarded the growth of literacy with suspicion and fear. In the early 19th century, Tsar Alexander I's minister of instruction declared: "Knowledge is only useful, when like salt, it is used and offered in small measures according to the people's circumstances and their needs. To teach the mass of people, or even the majority of them, how to read will bring more harm than good."[3]

Exactly the opposite conception was advanced by the revolutionary government led by the Bolshevik Party.

Vladimir Lenin

The elimination of illiteracy was understood to be the essential prerequisite for the assimilation of culture and knowledge that was required by the working class to begin to construct a socialist society. Lenin, in his classic work written on the eve of the October insurrection, State and Revolution , explained that the great majority of state administrative functions could be performed by "any literate person" (emphasis added), with universal literacy therefore a basic prerequisite for a workers state in which "the door will be thrown wide open for the transition from the first phase of communist society to its higher phase, and with it to the complete withering away of the state."[4]

After the October Revolution, Lenin emphasised: "The illiterate person stands outside politics. First it is necessary to teach him the alphabet. Without it there are only rumours, fairy tales and prejudices -- but not politics."

The rapid acquisition of universal literacy was an immediate educational priority for the Soviet government. Just three days after the completion of the Bolshevik-led insurrection, on October 29, 1917 (November 11 on the new calendar), the newly appointed commissar for education, Anatoly Lunacharsky, issued "An Address to the Citizens of Russia" that explained:

Any truly democratic authority in the educational sphere of a country where illiteracy and ignorance are rife must make its first task that of combatting this atmosphere of gloom. It must, in the shortest period of time, try to achieve universal literacy by organising a network of schools that satisfy the requirements of contemporary education and by introducing universal, compulsory, free education. The fight against illiteracy and ignorance cannot be confined merely to organising proper school teaching for children, adolescents and young persons. Adults too will want to be rescued from the humiliation of being unable to read or write. Schools for adults must occupy a prominent place in the general plan of education.[5]

In December 1919, Lenin signed a nine-point decree titled "The Elimination of Illiteracy among the Population of the Russian Soviet Republic."

Hundreds of thousands of copies of the decree were distributed across the country. It explained that, "for the purpose of giving the entire population of the Republic the opportunity for conscious participation in the country's political life," the Soviet government was making it obligatory for everyone between 8 and 50 years of age to learn to read and write in Russian or their native language, according to their choice.

The Commissariat of Education was given the power "to recruit, for teaching the illiterate, the country's entire literate population which has not been called to war, as a labour responsibility." It became a criminal offence for a literate person not to teach at least one illiterate how to read (though no-one was ever prosecuted for this). Illiterate workers were given two hours a day off work, on full wages, to study.

The June 1920 formation of the Extraordinary Commission for the Liquidation of Illiteracy aimed at advancing the practical implementation of the 1919 decree.

One historian summed up its role as follows:

This was an organisational mechanism to handle co-ordination and collaboration with all other organs of the government and the [Communist] Party, as well as public organisations and voluntary associations. The Commission included representatives of various state and public organisations and had extensive powers and functions; these included motivational work among the masses, registration of illiterates, elaboration of methods of instruction and production of primers and other textbooks, and recruitment of teachers and supervisors to implement the programme.[6]

The organisation's decisions were binding for all government institutions and public employees. It was known in abbreviated form as the Cheka Likbez, underscoring its importance to the revolution through the echo of the name of the Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage, or Cheka, the security agency organised to defeat counterrevolutionary efforts to overthrow the Soviet government.

The Extraordinary Commission for the Liquidation of Illiteracy was organised under the Commissariat of Education's Main Administration for Political Education (Glavpolitprosvet), led by Nadezhda Krupskaya. Sometimes dismissed by bourgeois historians as nothing other than Lenin's wife, Krupskaya was in fact an important revolutionist in her own right. Before the revolution, she had spent time working as a teacher and had made an extensive study of educational theorists. Her educational writings comprise multiple volumes, only a small fraction of which has been translated into English.

Collaborating closely with Lenin and Lunacharsky, Krupskaya in the 1920s developed many of the extraordinary initiatives in schooling and adult education that became renowned among educators internationally.

Red Army literacy campaigns

The Extraordinary Commission for the Liquidation of Illiteracy did not begin its work from scratch in 1920. Early Bolshevik efforts to eradicate illiteracy developed amid conditions of civil war, after counterrevolutionary forces, backed by European and American imperialist states, attacked the Soviet government. The campaign centred on the Red Army, which under Trotsky's leadership mobilised millions of workers and peasants between 1918 and 1921 in defence of the revolution.

Leon Trotsky

"Literacy is far from being everything, literacy is only a clean window onto the world, the possibility of seeing, understanding, knowing," Trotsky explained in a 1922 speech at the Moscow Soviet. "This possibility we must give them [Red Army soldiers], and before everything else."

He continued:

Our preparation is, above all, preparation, in the soldier, of the revolutionary citizen. We have to raise our young men in the army to a higher level, and, first and foremost, to rid them decisively and finally of the shameful stain of illiteracy. ... You, the Moscow Soviet, you, the district brigades and schools -- the Red Army asks you, the Red Army expects of you, that you will not let anyone remain illiterate among your "s ons " in the great family you have adopted. You will give them teachers, you will help them master the elementary technical means whereby a man can become a conscious citizen.[7]

Few details of the literacy campaign within the Red Army escaped Trotsky's scrutiny. In early 1919, for example, amid some of the fiercest campaigns of the civil war, he took the time to write a scathing review of a compilation of literature and political material. "The general-education section attached to the military department of the Central Executive Committee has issued a First Reading-Book for use by the soldiers," he wrote. "I do not know who compiled this book, but I can clearly see that it was someone who, in the first place, did not know the people for whom he was compiling it; who, secondly, had a poor understanding of the matters he was writing about; and who, thirdly, was not well acquainted with the Russian language. And these qualities are not sufficient for the compilation of a First Reading-Book for our soldiers."[8]

Compulsory teaching was introduced for all ranks in April 1918.[9] Teachers who volunteered for the literacy campaign on the front quickly discovered that they had to abandon pre-revolutionary teaching methods. Krupskaya wrote about the experience of one teacher, Dora El'kina, a former Socialist Revolutionary who joined the Bolsheviks after the revolution: "El'kina began to teach them, as was the custom, from textbooks written on the basis of the analytical-synthetic [phonics] method: 'Masha ate kasha. Masha washed the window.' 'How are you teaching us?' protested Red Army men. 'What's all this about kasha? Who's this Masha? We don't want to read that.'"[10]

El'kina initially attempted to continue by discussing why the soldiers could not be with their Mashas and why there was a shortage of kasha. But she then wrote a new sentence of her own, which was subsequently published as the opening line of a new literacy book, becoming famous in Soviet Russia as the first words read by millions of newly literate workers and peasants -- "We are not slaves; slaves we are not."

El'kina and the co-authors of her book, titled Down with Illiteracy , explained in their preface the connection between acquiring the ability to read and the development of socialist consciousness: "We know that political work is not limited to clarifying slogans, just as teaching is not limited to instruction in reading and writing. But this book allows us to introduce the student to both. We regard the acquisition of political literacy and learning how to read to be interwoven goals. Students should not only be taught educational skills, but we should also pique their interest in public life. Students should not only assume their place in society as educated people, but they also should join the ranks of the fighters and builders of Soviet Russia."[11]

Other early literacy initiatives included the recruitment of artists and writers, including Vladimir Mayakovsky, to develop simple and appealing first readers and alphabet books.

Aiming to develop the new found literacy abilities of millions of Red Army fighters, the Soviet government devoted substantial resources, including precious foreign currency reserves, to the provision of reading materials, despite chronic difficulties in sourcing paper, ink, and means of publishing texts. According to one survey of the Red Army's work, in 1920 soldiers had been supplied with 20 million pamphlets, leaflets and posters, 5.6 million books, and 300,000 to 400,000 copies of newspapers a day.[12]

Eliminating illiteracy in the working class and peasantry

The Extraordinary Commission for the Liquidation of Illiteracy developed a series of initiatives in the factories and workplaces to ensure that all workers, including those who had just arrived from the countryside, could read.

Literacy centres or schools ( likpunkty , "liquidation points") were established across the Soviet Union in the 1920s. Larger factories and workplaces had their own literacy centres and libraries. As early as November 1920, the Extraordinary Commission had established 12,067 literacy centres, teaching 278,637 students.[13] Between 1920 and 1928, a total of 8.2 million people attended literacy schools.[14]

In line with the directive of Lenin's 1919 decree, workers unable to read and write were given reduced shifts on full pay for daily study. Workers were also encouraged to attend classes taught by volunteers on Sunday. Literacy courses often culminated in public celebrations timed to coincide with revolutionary anniversaries -- some workers' courses first semester concluded on January 21 (the date of Lenin's death in 1924) and second semester on May 1 (May Day).[15]

"Books (Please)! In All Branches of Knowledge," Poster for state publishers (Alexander Rodchenko, 1924)

Literacy courses had high expectations of the enrolled workers. Far from the old Tsarist standard of a literate person being one who could sign their name, the Extraordinary Commission for the Liquidation of Illiteracy explained that a 3-4 month literacy centre course provided only a "key" to literacy, with a worker who participated in such a course for two hours each working day to be regarded as only "semi-literate." A longer, 6-8 month course involving at least 6-8 hours of study each week was necessary as a precondition for genuine literacy.[16]

In 1923, the Extraordinary Commission's work was expanded through the formation of the Down with Illiteracy society, a mass organisation led by the Communist Party. By October 1924, 1.6 million Soviet citizens had joined.[17] The society organised volunteer literacy teachers, distributed anti-illiteracy campaign posters, and raised money for the publication and distribution of pamphlets and books. It also organised regular literacy festivals and campaigns. One three-day campaign, beginning on May Day, 1925, involved the organisation of public plays, films and other public art, mass graduations from literacy centre courses, and the organisation of "agitational streetcars," distributing brochures and popularising slogans from Lenin ("We have three tasks: first, to study, second, to study, and third, to study") and Trotsky ("We will create a thick network of schools everywhere in the Russian land. There should be no illiterates. There should be no ignorant workers.").[18]

Results varied in different industries throughout the 1920s. Illiteracy persisted in workplaces that absorbed former peasants who moved to the cities, especially women, such as the textile industry. In other sectors it was wiped out, including among metal, print and rail workers. By the end of 1924, literacy rates among rail workers were reportedly as high as 99 percent, with all of the remaining illiterates enrolled in literacy centre courses. In 1928, the rail workers union developed plans to eliminate illiteracy among the estimated 93,000 spouses and family members of their worker members.[19]

Within the peasantry, the campaign for universal literacy was more protracted and difficult. Serfdom had been abolished in Russia only 56 years before the October Revolution and religious superstition and different kinds of backwardness still afflicted the peasantry. Women were especially affected, and they were substantially more illiterate than men throughout the former Tsarist Empire. In the villages, boys were typically educated before girls. "We have full equality of men and women here," Trotsky noted in 1924. "But for a woman to have the real opportunities that a man has, even now in our poverty, women must equal men in literacy. The 'woman problem' here, then, means first of all the struggle with female illiteracy."[20]

An initial boost to the campaign came with the demobilisation of the Red Army at the end of the civil war, as the number of troops reduced from 5.5 million to 800,000. Millions of newly literate peasants returned to their villages and taught their family members how to read.[21]

"May darkness disappear, long live the sun!"

Across the vast Russian countryside in the 1920s, the Soviet government established a network of village reading rooms ( izba-chital'nia , literally "reading hut"). During the civil war, more than 20,000 reading rooms were established, approximately one for every five villages. The number initially declined when the New Economic Policy forced cuts in government expenditure. Limited resources affected every aspect of the fight against illiteracy. One reading room established in Tambov county in 1923, for example, had reading materials consisting only of the regional newspaper, a pamphlet on political economy and Nikolai Bukharin and Yevgeni Preobrazhensky's ABC of Communism .[22] There were also protracted difficulties in securing sufficiently educated workers to run the reading rooms.

"The goal of the reading rooms is to make the reading of the newspaper a keenly felt need for each poor and middle peasant," Krupskaya explained. "They must be drawn to the newspaper as the drunk is to wine. If the reading room can accomplish this, it will have done a great thing."[23]

The rooms did more, however, than merely make newspapers available. They developed as vehicles of literacy and culture, breaking down the isolation and backwardness of traditional peasant life. A December 1925 survey reported 6,392 "socio-political circles" convening in reading rooms, with 123,000 members. Larger still were "agro-economic circles" (7,000 circles with 136,000 members) and "drama/theatre circles" (9,400 circles with 185,000 members).[24]

New technologies were utilised to promote the value of learning to read and write. Where radios could be purchased for the village reading room, attendance increased sharply and in some regions had to be restricted to different groups of people on different days.[25] In addition, by April 1926, 976 travelling film groups were each visiting 20 villages a month. One historian explained: "Literate peasants introduced the films and used them as stimuli to create a demand for further information through books."[26]

Children's literacy education

The Soviet literacy campaign was always affected by limited financial resources. The Bolsheviks had established a workers' government in October 1917 with the perspective that this would be the first shot in the world revolution. The spread of the revolution to the advanced capitalist countries, beginning with Germany and other European centres, was eagerly anticipated, not least because of the prospect of alleviating Russia's economic backwardness through the sharing of financial resources and industrial technique. In Germany, however, in 1918–1919 and again in 1923, revolutionary upheavals ended in bourgeois counterrevolution, as did working-class uprisings in other European countries.

The immense economic backwardness of Russia was compounded by the impact of the civil war and imperialist onslaught. In 1921, the Extraordinary Commission for the Liquidation of Illiteracy issued a pamphlet outlining short-term literacy courses, which featured one chapter titled, "How to get by without paper, pencils, or pens."[27]

Anatoly Lunacharsky

Poverty and shortages especially affected the development of the Soviet school system in this period. One American educator who visited the USSR in 1925 described the situation:

It would be hard to find poorer equipment than that in many of the Soviet institutions. Buildings are old. Benches are worn out. Blackboards and books are lacking. Teachers and other educational workers are badly paid -- sometimes, for months, unpaid. Only about half the children of school age in the Soviet Union can be accommodated in the schools. Lunacharsky, People's Commissar for Education, estimates that the Union is now short of 25,000 teachers. Even if they had these teachers, they would have no rooms in which to put them. Probably there is no large country in Europe where educational conditions are physically worse than they are in the Soviet Union.[28]

Despite these immense challenges, the early Soviet Union developed the world's most innovative and progressive approaches to teaching and learning.

The Educational Act of October 1918 abolished the old, Church-dominated education administrative system that was geared towards the Tsarist elite and advanced the principle of freely accessible, secular education from primary to tertiary levels, developed as a "United Labour School." A historian has explained that this Act reflected a consensus within the Commissariat of Education for "a school system with the following features: a single type of school, the United Labour School, providing nine years of polytechnical education as well as shoes, clothing, hot breakfasts, medical care, and academic materials free of charge to all children regardless of gender or social origin; little or no homework; no standard textbooks, promotion, or graduation examinations or grades (marks); socially useful exercises as part of the standard curriculum (care of public parks, campaigns against assorted evils from illiteracy to religion and alcohol); the study and practice of labour from modelling in the earlier grades to work in a school shop or plot in later grades, perhaps even a practicum in a factory for senior pupils; and self-government to teach school in which the public, parents, and pupils would play a vital role."[29]

While not all of these commitments were immediately met, given the material shortages, the Soviet Union nevertheless became a laboratory of pedagogical experimentation.

"Our socialist country is striving for the reconciliation of physical and mental labour, which is the only thing that can lead to the harmonious development of man," Trotsky explained in a 1924 speech, "A Few Words on How to Raise a Human Being." He continued: "Such is our program. The program gives only general directions for this: it points a finger, saying 'Here is the general direction of your path!' But the program does not say how to attain this union in practice. In this field, as in many others, we shall go and are going already by way of experience, research, and experiments, knowing only the general direction of the road to the goal: as correct as possible a combination of physical and mental labour."[30]

Children's literacy learning changed substantially in many schools after the revolution. The Tsarist system, for the minority of children able to access it at all, had featured authoritarian, rote-learning methods, with grammar and other aspects of the reading and writing processes taught without any connections to other aspects of the curriculum, let alone to the child's environment and interests.

Soviet schools, on the other hand, were encouraged to adopt an integrated curriculum and teach reading and writing through engagement with, and exploration of, society and the natural world. Krupskaya incorporated the approaches developed by progressive American educators in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, developing them on the basis of a Marxist understanding of human society and the productive process. This became known as the "complex method," with teachers planning children's literacy and numeracy learning within the framework of three "complexes" -- nature, labour and society. The closest connections were encouraged between schools and their communities, with frequent excursions and research projects on neighbouring factories or farms.

Krupskaya explained: "The first stage [of school] aims to give children the most necessary skills and knowledge for work activity and cultural life and to awaken their interest in their surroundings. It should not be forgotten that language and mathematics must play a purely functional role in the first stage. Their study as separate branches of knowledge in the first stage is premature. Study of their mother tongue and mathematics must, therefore, have a modern character, which is closely tied to a child's observations and activities."[31]

Nadezhda Krupskaya (Tsarist police images, 1896)

Writing on the development of Soviet education in the 1920s, American journalist William Henry Chamberlin reported:

The most striking and novel educational experiments are to be found in the lower and middle Soviet schools. Old-fashioned teaching methods, with every subject placed in a water-tight compartment and taught separately, have been completely discarded. I witnessed a practical application of this [complex] method in a Moscow school, named after President Kalinin. The given theme was 'The City of Moscow.' The history lesson was based on past events in the life of the city. Some geographical ideas were imparted by taking the children to the Moscow River and showing them what are islands, shores, and peninsulas, etc. Arithmetic had its turn when the children turned out in a body to measure the block nearest the school and make various calculations regarding its relation to the city as a whole. From time to time they visited factories, museums, and historical monuments. The purely scholastic method is anathema in Soviet pedagogy. Every effort is made to give the pupils some concrete and visible representation of the things which they are studying.[32]

The 1930s and the impact of Stalinism

The isolation of the Soviet state, a consequence of the defeats suffered by the working class in western and central Europe in the years after World War I, together with the country's enormous poverty and social inequality, gave rise to a new bureaucratic caste. In the early 1920s, this privileged social layer became increasingly self-satisfied and conservative and lined up behind Joseph Stalin after he unveiled in 1924 the nationalist perspective of "socialism in one country."

This was directly aimed against the theory of permanent revolution, which Trotsky developed amid the 1905 revolutionary upheavals in Russia and which was the basis on which the Bolshevik Party seized power in 1917. Trotsky analysed that the tasks of the democratic revolution in Russia -- including the elimination of Tsarism and all remnants of feudal backwardness -- could only be advanced through the taking forward of the socialist revolution, led by the working class. The workers would lead the revolution and, once in power, Trotsky correctly anticipated, would be compelled to take into public ownership the commanding heights of the economy and institute socialist measures, including state planning. However, given Russia's immense economic backwardness, the victory of the revolution ultimately depended on its development internationally, above all in the advanced capitalist countries.

The bureaucracy came to identify the theory of permanent revolution and the fight for world socialist revolution as a threat to its interests. Trotsky recalled in his autobiography: "The sentiment of 'Not all for the revolution, but something for oneself as well,' was translated as 'Down with the permanent revolution.' The revolt against the exacting theoretical demands of Marxism and the exacting political demands of the revolution gradually assumed, in the eyes of the people, the form of a struggle against 'Trotskyism'."[33]

Trotsky and the Left Opposition fought a determined and principled campaign in defence of the revolution and its internationalist perspective. The Stalinist bureaucracy responded with a ferocious campaign of slander, historical falsifications, factional manoeuvres and violent state repression. Krupskaya, who briefly joined the Opposition before capitulating to Stalin, noted in 1926 that if Lenin had then been alive he would have been jailed by the new regime. After the Left Opposition organised demonstrations within the official rallies in 1927 for the 10th anniversary of the October revolution in Moscow and Leningrad, unfurling banners in defence of soviet democracy and internationalism, the Stalinists expelled Trotsky and other oppositionists from the Communist Party and sent them into internal exile. Trotsky was expelled from the USSR in 1929, and assassinated while in exile in Mexico in 1940, two years after he founded the Fourth International.

The Stalinist counterrevolution had a devastating impact on education and pedagogy, as it did in every other area of culture.

Lunacharsky was forced out of the Commissariat of Education in 1929. The Marx-Engels Institute of Marxist Pedagogy was disbanded in 1932. Also that year, Stanislav Shatsky was removed from his position as head of the "First Experimental Station," a network of progressive child and adult educational centres that had also served as a teacher training hub. Shatsky had collaborated closely with Krupskaya in the 1920s, and his school network had been visited by numerous appreciative Western educators, including the American philosopher and pedagogue John Dewey. The Stalinist regime in the 1930s elevated as national-educator-in-chief Anton Makarenko, a previously obscure administrator of GPU secret police-operated "colonies" for orphaned and homeless children. These were run as military-style boot camps, with students spending as much time working on assembly lines producing drills and cameras as they did learning in classrooms.

In the early 1930s, a series of Central Committee resolutions and government edicts condemned educational "experimentation," prohibited the complex method, effectively junked any commitment to polytechnism, abolished student democracy in favour of principal and teacher authority, imposed mandatory school uniforms, and wound back school autonomy in favour of centralised state control.[34] Teachers were rewarded for increasing their students' individual test scores, while exams were introduced for students entering each year level. Authoritarianism saturated every aspect of the education system. A "Rules for Conduct" was issued for every primary and secondary school -- they included commands for students to "obey the instructions of the school manager and the teachers without question," to "rise when the teacher or director enters or leaves the room," and to "stand to attention when answering the teacher; to sit down only with the teacher's permission; to raise his hand if he wishes to answer a question."

In his masterpiece analysis, The Revolution Betrayed , Trotsky in 1937 noted that the new generation in the Soviet Union was emerging "under intolerable and constantly increasing oppression." He added: "In the factory, the collective farm, the barracks, the university, the schoolroom, even in the kindergarten, if not in the creche, the chief glory of man is declared to be: personal loyalty to the leader and unconditional obedience. Many pedagogical aphorisms and maxims of recent times might seem to have been copied from Goebbels, if he himself had not copied them in good part from the collaborators of Stalin."[35]

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The campaign for universal literacy was, inevitably, adversely affected by the Stalinist counterrevolution.

At the same moment that the Soviet Union was on the verge of wiping out illiteracy, the Stalin regime relentlessly propagated lies and historical falsification. The "big lie" of Stalinism -- that Stalin represented the continuity of Lenin's leadership of the Bolshevik Party, and that Trotsky and the theory of permanent revolution were enemies of the working class -- assumed monstrous proportions during the 1936-1938 purges and show trials. Virtually every one of Lenin and Trotsky's comrades other than Stalin was accused of being a spy, a fascist or a provocateur. Historical falsification was institutionalised in the schools, universities and party education institutions, and any teacher or student who objected to the regime's crude lies was subject to imprisonment or execution.

In such conditions, the development of genuine literacy -- understood as more than the simple ability to read words on a page, instead involving critical-minded engagement with texts -- was all but impossible.

A historian noted that the 1930s campaigns "produced a sharp rise in the national literacy rate, but at the expense of true education as Lenin had understood it. The chief aim was an economic and not a cultural one -- to provide a barely literate mass labour force as fast as possible for employment in the Five-Year Plans."[36]

Krupskaya, despite her accommodation to the Stalinist regime, acknowledged that the literacy campaign work in the late 1920s and early 1930s had "helped millions of people to read and write, but the knowledge gained was of the most elementary kind."[37] One survey indicated a significant decrease in the time that workers spent reading in the 1930s. Between 1923 and 1939, the average time that city workers devoted to reading newspapers each week declined from 2.3 to 1.8 hours, and the time spent reading books and periodicals from 2.1 to 1.0 hours.[38]

Stalinism also affected the literacy campaign work among the non-Russian nationalities, which comprised around half the population of the Soviet Union. Some of the nationalities were pre-literate societies at the time of the October Revolution, and in others literacy rates were very low. In the 1920s, in order to allow people to become literate in their native language, Soviet linguists, as one account describes, "diagrammed and codified alphabets, grammars and vocabularies for the whole range of Northern Caucasus, Turkic and Finno-Ugric peoples." In addition: "Narkompros [the Commissariat of Education] retooled dozens of academic institutes and created new ones (the Central Institute of Living Eastern Languages, the Institute of Orientology, the All-Union Association of Orientology, the Communist University of the Workers of the East) in order to prepare linguistic studies, alphabets, dictionaries, school texts, and native language cadres for work in the east."[39]

Stalin's promotion of great-Russian chauvinism hindered these initiatives -- in the 1930s Cyrillic scripts were imposed on those nationalities that had previously developed use of the Latin alphabet. Some newly literate workers and peasants had to relearn how to read their own language in Cyrillic. In addition, learning Russian was made mandatory in school from 1938.

Despite these Stalinist hindrances on the literacy campaign, the number of people who could read and write significantly increased in the 1930s. As Trotsky analysed, the bureaucratic caste usurped political power from the working class in Soviet Union, but it retained the state monopoly of foreign trade and public ownership of the means of production. The USSR remained a workers state, although a severely degenerated one. As such, the state was capable of planning and distributing vast resources as part of the literacy campaign.

Ensuring that many more workers and peasants could read and write was an essential requirement of the industrialisation drive. Stalin's industrialisation and forced collectivisation of the peasantry -- sharply condemned by Trotsky and the Left Opposition for its needlessly violent and reckless character -- saw a sharp increase in the Soviet Union's urban population. Forced collectivisation, while having a devastating economic impact, allowed literacy teaching within a now more concentrated peasant population. The Komsomol, Communist youth organisation, was mobilised to assist the literacy campaign in the countryside. Between 1931 and 1933, 50,000 Komsomol members taught in schools, although most of these and other young teachers lacked any formal qualifications.[40]

Worker enrolment in literacy centre courses increased. Significant resources were devoted in the 1930s to ensure universal schooling for children. Between 1927 and 1932, the number of school teachers doubled, increasing by 230,000. Student numbers for grades 1-7 increased from 11 million in 1927-1928 to 21 million in 1932-1933, with 8 million of this increased enrolment being in rural schools' early grade levels. One historian has noted that this "increase of 8 million in rural schools exceeded the entire primary school enrolment in the Russian Empire in 1914."[41]

Conclusion

A 1939 USSR census demonstrated that illiteracy was then in the process of being entirely wiped out, just 22 years after the October revolution. For those aged between 9 and 49 years, 87.4 percent were literate. The literacy rate remained higher in the cities than in the countryside, and higher among men than women. The urban male literacy rate was 97.1 percent, and the urban female rate 90.7 percent.[42] Some of the most extraordinary gains in literacy were recorded in the non-Russian Soviet republics. In the Central Asian region of Turkmenia, for example, literacy rates increased from less than 8 percent, recorded in the 1897 census, to 78 percent in 1939.[43]

"If You Don't Read Books, You'll Soon Forget How to Read and Write"

The literacy campaign laid the basis for the deeply cultured character of Soviet society. Notwithstanding the Stalinist regime's censorship and repression, the Soviet population revered literature, poetry and the arts. More immediately, the literacy campaign also undoubtedly played a role in the military campaign against Nazi Germany between 1941-1945, in which an estimated 27 million Soviet citizens lost their lives. The tens of millions of Soviet men drafted into the army between 1941 and 1945, and men and women who staffed the armaments factories, were capable of following and issuing written instructions. The mass mobilisation of the entire population for the fight against fascism would likely have been made even more costly had there not been near-universal literacy.

From today's perspective, the Soviet literacy campaign remains an extraordinary achievement. The world crisis of capitalism brings with it a stepped-up assault on public education and the ability of the working class to access culture. In the United States and other countries, the coronavirus pandemic is being used as a pretext to slash spending on public education. Chronic shortages of resources in public schools across the world, including in the advanced capitalist countries -- together with appalling working conditions for teachers and mandated regressive pedagogical methods -- threaten to deny the younger generation their right of acquiring a genuine, critical literacy. No doubt among the financial oligarchs and their political hirelings there is a similar mindset to that expressed by the 19th century Tsarist minister of instruction, with literacy and knowledge for working class youth believed to be a dangerous thing, best restricted.

The defence of universal, high quality literacy, as with the defence of every other aspect of human culture, again falls to the socialist movement.

References:

[1] Ben Eklof, "Russian Literacy Campaigns 1861-1939," in R.F. Arnove and H.J. Graff (eds.) National Literacy Campaigns: Historical and Comparative Perspectives (p. 141). Springer, 1987.

[2] Roger Pethybridge, The Social Prelude to Stalinism . Palgrave Macmillan, 1974, p. 134.

[3] Cited in Theresa Bach, Educational Changes in Russia . US Government Printing Office, 1919, p. 4.

[4] Vladimir Lenin, The State and Revolution: the Marxist Theory of the State and the Tasks of the Proletariat in the Revolution (p. 479), in Collected Works (vol. 25). Progress Publishers, 1974.

[5] Cited in K. Nozhko et al., Educational Planning in the USSR . UNESCO, 1968, p. 26.

[6] H.S. Bhola, Campaigning for Literacy: Eight National Experiences of the Twentieth Century. UNESCO , 1984, pp. 44-45.

[7] Leon Trotsky, "Listen and Get Ready, Red Army!," in How the Revolution Armed: The Military Writings and Speeches of Leon Trotsky (vol. 5) . New Park Publishers, 1979.

[8] Leon Trotsky, "First Reading Book -- Is it Worth Reading?," in How the Revolution Armed: The Military Writings and Speeches of Leon Trotsky (vol. 2) . New Park Publishers, 1979.

[9] Pethybridge, The Social Prelude to Stalinism , op. cit., p. 110.

[10] Cited in V. Protsenko, "Lenin's Decrees on Public Education." Soviet Education , vol. 3 no. 3, 1961, p. 59.

[11] Cited in I.V. Glushchenko, "The Soviet Educational Project: The Eradication of Adult Illiteracy in the 1920s–1930s." Russian Social Science Review , vol. 57 no. 5, September–October 2016, p. 389.

[12] Jeffrey Brooks, "Studies of the Reader in the 1920s." Russian History , vol. 9 nos. 2/3, 1982, p. 189.

[13] Peter Kenez, The Birth of the Propaganda State: Soviet Methods of Mass Mobilisation , 1917-1929. Cambridge University Press, 1985, p. 82.

[14] Ibid., p. 157.

[15] Charles E. Clark, "Literacy and Labour: The Russian Literacy Campaign within the Trade Unions, 1923-27." Europe-Asia Studies , vol. 47 no. 8, December 1995, p. 1,332.

[16] Ibid., p. 1,328.

[17] Kenez, T he Birth of the Propaganda State , op. cit., p. 154.

[18] Ibid., p. 161.

[19] Clark, "Literacy and Labour," op. cit., p. 1,330.

[20] Leon Trotsky, "Leninism and Library Work," in Problems of Everyday Life . Pathfinder Press, 1973, p.153

[21] Eklof, "Russian Literacy Campaigns 1861-1939," op. cit., p. 133.

[22] Alexandre Sumpf, "Confronting the Countryside: The Training of Political Educators in 1920s Russia." History of Education , vol. 35 nos. 4-5, p. 479.

[23] Cited in Bradley Owen Jordan, Subject(s) to Change: Revolution as Pedagogy, or Representations of Education and the Formation of the Russian Revolutionary . PhD thesis, University of Pennsylvania, 1993, p. 211.

[24] Charles E. Clark, "Uprooting Otherness -- Bolshevik Attempts to Refashion Rural Russia via the Reading Rooms of the 1920s." Canadian Slavonic Papers , vol. 38 nos. 3/4, September-December 1996, p. 328.

[25] Ibid., p. 324.

[26] Pethybridge, The Social Prelude to Stalinism , op. cit., p. 159.

[27] Eklof, "Russian Literacy Campaigns 1861-1939," op. cit., p. 133.

[28] Scott Nearing, Education in Soviet Russia . International Publishers, 1926, p. 13.

[29] Larry E. Holmes, "Soviet Schools: Policy Pursues Practice, 1921-1928." Slavic Review , vol. 48 no. 2, Summer 1989, p. 235.

[30] Leon Trotsky, "A Few Words on How to Raise a Human Being," in Problems of Everyday Life . Pathfinder Press, 1973, pp. 136-137.

[31] Cited in John T. Zepper, "N. K. Krupskaya on Complex Themes in Soviet Education." Comparative Education Review , vol. 9 no. 1, February 1965, p. 34.

[32] William Henry Chamberlin, Soviet Russia: A Living Record and a History . 1930, available here: https://www.marxists.org/archive/chamberlin-william/1929/soviet-russia/ch12.htm

[33] Leon Trotsky, My Life: An Attempt at an Autobiography . Charles Scribner's Sons, 1931, p. 505.

[34] Jon Lauglo, "Soviet Education Policy 1917-1935: From Ideology to Bureaucratic Control." Oxford Review of Education , vol. 14 no. 3, 1988, pp. 294-295.

[35] Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed: What is the Soviet Union and Where is it Going . Labor Publications, 1991, p. 137.

[36] Cited in Pethybridge, The Social Prelude to Stalinism , op. cit., p. 176.

[37] Ibid.

[38] Eklof, "Russian Literacy Campaigns 1861-1939," op. cit., p. 143.

[39] Michael G. Smith, Language and Power in the Creation of the USSR , 1917-1953. Mouton de Gruyter, 1998, p. 71.

[40] Sheila Fitzpatrick, Education and Social Mobility in the Soviet Union 1921-1934 . Cambridge University Press, 1979, p. 174.

[41] Eklof, "Russian Literacy Campaigns 1861-1939," op. cit., p. 142.

[42] Ibid.

[43] John Dunstan, Soviet Schooling in the Second World War . Macmillan Press, 1997, p. 19.

The author also recommends:

Leon Trotsky - Culture and Socialism - 1927
[23 October 2008]

What the Russian Revolution meant for modern art and culture
[28 February 2018]

One Hundred and Fifty Years Since the Birth of Lenin

[Jul 16, 2020] The UK says Magnitsky was a crackerjack tax lawyer and whistleblower who exposed a gigantic tax fraud by the Russian government. The Russian government says Magnitsky was a crooked accountant who masterminded a tax-cheat scheme to help a western crook set up tax shelters and buy Gazprom stock at the price accorded to nationals only.

Jul 16, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

ET AL July 6, 2020 at 2:20 am

And here to make it even more farcical.

al-Beeb s'Allah: UK sanctions regime to target human rights abuser
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-53303100

The UK will later impose sanctions independently for the first time on dozens of individuals accused of human rights abuses around the world.

Dominic Raab will name the first violators to have their assets frozen as part of a new post-Brexit regime.

These are expected to include Russian officials thought to be implicated in the death of Sergei Magnitsky in 2009.

The whistleblower's maltreatment while in custody has been condemned by the European Court of Human Rights.

In the past, the UK has almost always imposed sanctions collectively as a member of the United Nations or European Union but, after its departure from the EU in January, a new framework is being put in place in UK law .
####

MARK CHAPMAN July 6, 2020 at 8:16 am

The UK is sanctimonious to a fault. The UK says Magnitsky was a crackerjack tax lawyer and whistleblower who exposed a gigantic tax fraud by the Russian government. The Russian government says Magnitsky was a crooked accountant who masterminded a tax-cheat scheme to help a western crook set up tax shelters and buy Gazprom stock at the price accorded to nationals only. The UK has been caught in lie after lie after lie, and the scenarios it has constructed for wrongdoing by Russia on its own soil will barely withstand critical thinking by alcoholics and farmyard animals. Who's got form here?

[Jul 16, 2020] Putin makes it easier to obtain Russian passport. Moscow tries new approach to tackle demographic challenges

Jul 16, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

MOSCOWEXILE July 14, 2020 at 7:25 pm

Putin makes it easier to obtain Russian passport. Moscow tries new approach to tackle demographic challenges

https://www.rt.com/russia/494715-russian-citizenship-quick-way/

Russian President Vladimir Putin has signed a long-awaited law streamlining the process for foreigners to obtain Russian citizenship.

Foreign citizens who have a Russian parent, are married to a Russian, or have a child with a Russian citizen, can now quickly obtain a passport themselves. The acquisition of Russian nationality has also been streamlined for foreigners who reside permanently in the country.

In April, the Russian parliament passed a law allowing foreigners to become Russian citizens without giving up existing passports. Along with the simplified process, Moscow hopes that the updated process for obtaining citizenship will help attract millions of new Russians.

Time to bite the bullet, I think.

It's the decision that I need not forfeit my British passport is the one that has made me decide to apply for citizenship, albeit I have the full rights of a Russian citizen already, apart from the right to participate in political activities. But my children all have two passports so I want two as well!!!

And there's another thing that annoys me about RT, by the way -- at the very top: who's this "Putin"?

The man has a full name and is head of state. Why ape the Western arsewipe media with "Putin-Does-This" and "Putin-Does-That" headlines?

Disrespectful, to say the least.

[Jul 16, 2020] We support the environment as long as it benefits our trade partners and is poitically balanced in our favor.

Jul 16, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

ET AL July 14, 2020 at 9:14 am

Politico.eu : EU's new green label for fertilizer is set to benefit Russia
https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-new-green-label-fertilizer-benefits-russia-cadmium-phosphate/

That scientific debate soon turned into a geopolitical one, however. EU farmers are overwhelmingly dependent on North and West Africa for phosphate where, because of the natural conditions, there is usually a cadmium level far higher than 20mg/kg. At the same time, phosphate coming from Russia has far lower natural levels of the metal.

Southern European countries feared that switching phosphate supplies away from Africa to Russia could severely undermine volatile North African economies and trigger social problems

One of the countries that has strongly opposed the new labeling rules is Poland -- a country that historically wants to avoid commercial dependence on Russia but also has its own national fertilizer business and has invested in a Senegalese phosphate mine
####

Plenty more at the link.

We support the environment as long as it benefits our trade partners and is poitically balanced in our favor.

This looks like the european industry is waving the 'Russia Bad' flag because it cannot counter the technical aspects and more environmental policies coming out of the EU.

They are also arguing in favor of less transparency and less information for farmers which is suspect because their fear is that low cadmium fertilizer (from Russia/wherever) may get tax-breaks to promote its use.

Rather than figure out a way to adapt and help their partners, their first reaction is to throw poo at the walls.

[Jul 16, 2020] The Russian 5th column is composed of rabid russophobes who hate their own nation and who are nothing but willing prostitutes to the AngloZionist Empire

Jul 16, 2020 | www.unz.com

Russia

One would think that following the massive victory the Kremlin has achieved with the vote on the changes to the Russian Constitution, the political situation in Russia would be idyllic, at least compared to the sinking Titanic of the "collective West". Alas, this is far from being the case. Here are some of the factors which contribute to a potentially dangerous situation inside Russia.

As I have mentioned in the past, besides the "official" (pretend) opposition in the Duma, there are now two very distinct "non-system" oppositions to Putin: the bad old "liberals" (which I sometimes call the 5th column) and the (relatively new) "pink-nationalist" Putin-haters which I christened, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, I admit – as a 6th column (Ruslan Ostashko calls them " emo-Marxists ", and that is a very accurate description too). What is so striking is that while Russian 5th and 6th columnists hate each other, they clearly hate Putin even more. Many of them also hate the Russian people because they don't "get it" (at least in their opinion) and because time and again the people vote with and for Putin. Needless to say, these "5th and 6th columnists" (let's call them "5&6c" from now on) declare that the election was stolen, that millions of votes were not counted at all, while others were counted many times. According to these 5&6c types, it is literally unthinkable that Putin would get such a high support therefore the only explanation is that the elections were rigged.

While the sum total of these 5&6c types is probably not enough to truly threaten Putin or the Russian society, the Kremlin has to be very careful in how it handles these groups, especially since the condition of the Russian society is clearly deteriorating:
Russia has objective, real, problems which cannot simply be dismissed. Most Russians clearly would prefer a much more social and economically active state. The reality is that the current political system in Russia cares little for the "little man".

The way the Kremlin and the Russian "big business" are enmeshed is distressing to a lot of Russians, and I agree with them. Furthermore, while the western sanctions did a great job preparing Russia for the current crisis, it still remains true that Russia does not operate in such a favorable environment, revenues are down in many sectors, and the COVID19 pandemic has also had a devastating effect on Russian small businesses.

And while the issue of the COVID19 virus has not been so hopelessly politicized in Russia has it has in the West, a lot of my contacts report to me that many people feel that the Kremlin and the Moscow authorities have mismanaged the crisis.

So while the non-systemic opposition of the 5&6c cannot truly threaten Russia, there are enough of what I would call "toxic and potentially dangerous trends" inside the Russian society which could turn into a much bigger threat should a crisis suddenly erupt (including a crisis triggered by an always possible Ukrainian provocation).
More and more Russians, including Putin-supporters, are getting frustrated with what they perceive as being a lame and frankly flaccid Russian foreign policy. This does not necessarily mean that they disagree with the way Putin deals with the big issues (say Crimea, or Syria or the West's sabre-rattling), but they get especially frustrated by what they perceive as lame Russian responses against petty provocations.

For example, the US Congress and the Trump Administration have continued to produce sanctions and stupid accusations against Russia on a quasi-daily basis, yet Russia is really doing nothing much about that, in spite of the fact that there are many options in her political "toolkit" to really make the US pay for that attitude. Another thing which irritates the Russians is that arrogant, condescending and outright rude manner in which western politicians (and their paid for journalists in Russia) constantly intervene in internal Russian matters without ever being seriously called out for this. Sure, some particularly nasty characters (and organization) have been kicked out of Russia, but not nearly enough to really send a clear message Russia's enemies.
And, just to make things worse, there are some serious problems between Russia and her supposed allies, specifically Belarus and Kazakhstan. Nothing truly critical has happened yet, but the political situation in Belarus is growing worse by the day (courtesy of, on one hand, the inept policies of Lukashenko and, on the other, a resurgence of Kazakh nationalism, apparently with the approval of the central government).

Not only is the destabilization of two major Russian allies a bad thing in itself, it also begs the question of how Putin can deal with, say, Turkey or Poland, when Russia can't even stabilize the situation in Belarus and Kazakhstan.

To a large degree, I share many of these frustrations too and I agree that it is time for Putin and Russia to show a much more proactive posture towards the (eternally hostile) West.

My problem with the 5th column is that it is composed of rabid russophobes who hate their own nation and who are nothing but willing prostitutes to the AngloZionist Empire. They want Russia to become a kind of "another Poland only further East" or something equally insipid and uninspiring.

My problem with the 6th column is that it hates Putin much more than it loves Russia, which is regularly shows by predicting either a coup, or a revolution, or a popular uprising or any other bloody event which Russia simply cannot afford for two main reasons:

Russia almost destroyed herself twice in just the past century: in 1917 and 1991. Each time, the price paid by the Russian people was absolutely horrendous and the Russian nation simply cannot afford another major internal conflict. Russia is at war against the Empire, and while this war remains roughly an 80% informational/ideological one, about 15% an economic one and only about 5% a kinetic war, it remains that this is a total, existential, war for survival: either the Empire disappears or Russia will. This is therefore a situation where any action which weakens your state, your country and its leader always comes dangerously close to treason.

Right now the biggest blessing for Russia is that neither the 5th nor the 6th column has managed to produce even a halfway credible political figure who at least appears as marginally capable of offering realistic solutions. A number of 5th columnists have decided to emigrate and leave what they see as "Putin's Mordor". Alas, I don't see any stream of 6th columnists leaving Russia, which objectively makes them a much more useful tool for outfits like the CIA who will not hesitate to infiltrate even a putatively anti-US political movement if this can weaken Russia in general, or Putin personally.

Right now the Russian security services are doing a superb job countering all these threats (including the still very real Wahabi terrorist threat) all at the same time. However, considering the rather unstable and even dangerous international political situation, this could change if all the forces who hate Putin and what they call "Putinism" either join forces or simply strike at the same time.

[Jul 16, 2020] The Danes have set August 3rd as the restart date

Jul 16, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

MOSCOWEXILE July 6, 2020 at 3:38 am

Дания разрешила использовать новые суда для прокладки "Северного потока – 2"

STOCKHOLM, July 6. / TASS /. At the request of Nord Stream 2 AG, the Danish Energy Agency (DEA) has given permission that vessels with anchor positioning be used on an unfinished section of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline southeast of Bornholm Island. This was announced on Monday in a departmental press release.

https://tass.ru/ekonomika/8893439
https://yandex.ru/turbo/s/tass.ru/ekonomika/8893439?promo=navbar&utm_referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fzen.yandex.c

MARK CHAPMAN July 6, 2020 at 8:41 am

Ha, ha! I expect the Danes had their wetted finger to the wind, and were reasonably quick to observe Merkel's kiss-off of the United States when it did the inadvisable, and went ahead with more sanctions to try to prevent completion of the pipeline. Might be too late to start construction this summer, though – we're into the cod-spawning season now. Maybe they could do part of it at the other end, or something.

MOSCOWEXILE July 6, 2020 at 11:58 am

The Danes have set August 3rd as the restart date because that's when the Baltic cod stop doing their thing.

MOSCOWEXILE July 6, 2020 at 12:10 pm

No, not after the spawning season has stopped -- I think that must have just been a load of bollocks of an excuse for blocking further work -- but when the time allowed for an appeal against the Danish govt decision has elapsed:

К достройке газопровода приступят после истечения срока обжалования обновленного разрешения Дании -- 3 августа.

The completion of the gas pipeline will begin after the expiration of the appeal period for the renewed Denmark permit -- August 3./

https://m.gazeta.ru/business/2020/07/06/13142635.shtml

MOSCOWEXILE July 6, 2020 at 3:41 am

Send in the a United States Navy!!!

Europe must be saved from Russian gas weaponization!

Let the US freedom gas molecules ring!

[Jul 16, 2020] If Pompeo has a functioning brain, he should realize that all these blatant efforts to reserve markets for America by sanctioning all its competitors out of the picture is having the opposite effect, and frightening customers away from becoming dependent on American products

Jul 16, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

MOSCOWEXILE July 15, 2020 at 7:58 am

Fat bully boy speaks for Bully Boy state:

"Today the Department of State is updating the public guidance for CAATSA authorities to include Nord Stream 2 and the second line of TurkStream 2. This action puts investments or other activities that are related to these Russian energy export pipelines at risk of US sanctions. It's a clear warning to companies aiding and abetting Russia's malign influence projects and will not be tolerated. Get out now or risk the consequences".

Pompeo speaking at a press conference today.

CAATSA -- Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act

So Russia and Turkey are "adversaries" of the USA?

In what way?

Do these states wish to wage war against the USA?

Is it adversarial to United States interest to compete economically with the hegemon?

MOSCOWEXILE July 15, 2020 at 7:59 am

Link to above:

https://sputniknews.com/world/202007151079893067-us-plans-to-add-nord-stream-2-turkstream-to-list-of-projects-to-be-sanctioned/

MARK CHAPMAN July 15, 2020 at 3:51 pm

Who cares? Really, is Pompeo still scary? If he has a functioning brain, he should realize that all these blatant efforts to reserve markets for America by sanctioning all its competitors out of the picture is having the opposite effect, and frightening customers away from becoming dependent on American products which might be withheld on a whim when America wants political concessions. 'Will not be tolerated' – what a pompous ass. Sanction away. The consequence is well-known to be seizure of assets held in the United States or an inability to do business in the United States. That will frighten some into submission – like the UK, which was threatened with the cessation of intelligence-sharing with the USA (sure you can spare it?) if it did not drop Huawei from its 5G networks. But others will take prudent steps to limit their exposure to such threats, in the certain knowledge that if they work, they will encourage the USA to use the technique again.

[Jul 15, 2020] Rutte and his foreign minister, Stephanus Blok, want to submit MH17 case to European Court of Human Rights. The ECHR has yet to record their lawsuit

Jul 15, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

ET AL July 14, 2020 at 3:19 am

Dances with Bears: RUTTE'S RUT -- DUTCH PRIME MINISTER LOSES CONFIDENCE IN MH17 TRIAL, FILES CLAIM TO EUROPEAN COURT OF HUMAN RIGHTS DESPITE COURT DECISION DELAYING ALL UKRAINE-RUSSIA CASES
http://johnhelmer.net/ruttes-rut-dutch-prime-minister-loses-confidence-in-mh17-trial-files-claim-to-european-court-of-human-rights-despite-court-decision-delaying-all-ukraine-russia-cases/

"This isn't just parallel litigation, which the ECHR has already refused to allow," commented a London legal expert. "It's a vote of no confidence in the Dutch prosecutors to secure convictions in the murder case they are trying to make."

Rutte and his foreign minister, Stephanus Blok, made their move on July 10 with press releases and tweets; there has been no release of the legal papers. The ECHR has yet to record their lawsuit

####

Well we're not surprised! Rutte seems quite adept at autof/kery.

[Jul 15, 2020] The real Bill Browder story (part one)- What US-UK media won t tell you about billionaire lobbyist s dubious narrative by John Ryan

Bill is the primary suspect for killing Magnitsky. He has incentive, methods and means.
Jul 15, 2020 | www.rt.com

By John Ryan, Ph.D . – Retired Professor of Geography and Senior Scholar, University of Winnipeg, Canada

If anyone has proven the adage that "a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on it shoes," it's Bill Browder. The mega-rich vulture capitalist has been spinning a yarn for years.

Intriguingly, after Germany's leading news magazine kiboshed his fake narrative, Anglo-American media ignored the revelations.

Browder's narrative suits the US/UK establishment as it provides a convenient excuse to sanction Russia, but the story has more holes than Swiss cheese.

The billionaire vulture capitalist has been a figure of some prominence on the world scene for the past decade. A few months back, Der Spiegel published a major exposé on him and the case of Sergei Magnitsky, but the US/UK mainstream media failed to follow it up and so, aside from Germany, few people are aware of Browder's background.

Browder had gone to Moscow in 1996 to take advantage of the privatization of state companies by then-Russian President Boris Yeltsin. Browder founded Hermitage Capital Management, a Moscow investment firm registered in offshore Guernsey in the Channel Islands. For a time, it was the largest foreign investor in Russian securities. Hermitage Capital Management was rated as extremely successful after earning almost 3,000 percent in its operations between 1996 and December 2007.

During the corrupt Boris Yeltsin years, with his business partner's US$25 million, Browder amassed a fortune. Profiting from the large-scale privatizations in Russia from 1996 to 2006, his Hermitage firm eventually grew to $4.5 billion.

When Browder encountered financial difficulties with Russian authorities, he portrayed himself as an anti-corruption activist and became the driving force behind the Magnitsky Act, which resulted in economic sanctions aimed at Russian officials. However, an examination of Browder's record in Russia and his testimony in court cases reveal contradictions with his statements to the public and Congress, and raises questions about his motives in attacking corruption in Russia.

ALSO ON RT.COM Russia to impose reciprocal sanctions on UK following publication of 'Magnitsky List'

Although he has claimed that he was an 'activist shareholder' and campaigned for Russian companies to adopt Western-style governance, it has been reported that he cleverly destabilized companies he was targeting for takeover. Canadian blogger Mark Chapman has revealed that after Browder would buy a minority share in a company, he would resort to lawsuits against this company through shell companies he controlled. This would destabilize the company with charges of corruption and insolvency. To prevent its collapse, the Russian government would intervene by injecting capital into it, causing its stock to rise -- with the result that Browder's profits would rise exponentially.

Later, through Browder's Russian-registered subsidiaries, his accountant Magnitsky acquired extra shares in Russian gas companies such as Surgutneftegaz, Rosneft and Gazprom. This procedure enabled Browder's companies to pay the residential tax rate of 5.5 percent instead of the 35 percent that foreigners would have to pay.

However, the procedure to bypass the Russian presidential decree that banned foreign companies and citizens from purchasing equities in Gazprom was an illegal act. Because of this and other suspected transgressions, Magnitsky was interrogated in 2006 and later in 2008. Initially he was interviewed as a suspect and then as an accused. He was then arrested and charged by Russian prosecutors with two counts of aggravated tax evasion committed in conspiracy with Bill Browder in respect of Dalnyaya Step and Saturn, two of Browder's shell companies to hold shares that he bought. Unfortunately, in 2009, Magnitsky died in pre-trial detention because of a failure by prison officials to provide prompt medical assistance.

Browder has challenged this account and for years he has maintained that Magnitsky's arrest and death were a targeted act of revenge by Russian authorities against a heroic anti-corruption activist.

It's only recently that Browder's position was challenged by the European Court of Human Rights, which in its ruling on August 27, 2019 concluded that Magnitsky's "arrest was not arbitrary, and that it was based on reasonable suspicion of his having committed a criminal offence." And as such, "The Russians had good reason to arrest Sergei Magnitsky for Hermitage tax evasion."

"The Court observes that the inquiry into alleged tax evasion, resulting in the criminal proceedings against Mr Magnitskiy, started in 2004, long before he complained that prosecuting officials had been involved in fraudulent acts."

Prior to Magnitsky's arrest, because of what Russia considered to be questionable activities, Browder had been refused entry to Russia in 2005. However, he did not take lightly his rebuff by the post-Yeltsin Russian government under Vladimir Putin. As succinctly expressed by Professor Halyna Mokrushyna at the University of Ottawa:

[Browder] began to engage in a worldwide campaign against the Russian authorities, accusing them of corruption and violation of human rights. The death of his accountant and auditor Sergei Magnitsky while in prison became the occasion for Browder to launch an international campaign presenting the death as a ruthless silencing of an anti-corruption whistleblower. But the case of Magnitsky is anything but.

Despite Browder's claims that Magnitsky died as a result of torture and beatings, authentic documents and testimonies show that Magnitsky died because of medical neglect – he was not provided adequate treatment for a gallstone condition. It was negligence typical at that time of prison bureaucracy, not a premeditated killing. Because of the resulting investigation, many high-level functionaries in the prison system were fired or demoted.

For the past 10 years, Browder has maintained that Magnitsky was tortured and murdered by prison guards. Without any verifiable evidence he has asserted that Magnitsky was beaten to death by eight riot guards over 1 hour and 18 minutes. This was never corroborated by anybody, including by autopsy reports. It was even denied by Magnitsky's mother in a video interview.

Nevertheless, on the basis of his questionable beliefs, he has carried on a campaign to discredit and vilify Russia and its government and leaders.

In addition to the ruling of the European Court of Human Rights, Browder's basic underlying beliefs and assumptions are being seriously challenged. Very recently, on May 5, 2020, an American investigative journalist, Lucy Komisar, published an article with the heading Forensic photos of Magnitsky show no marks on torso :

On Fault Lines today I revealed that I have obtained never published forensic photos of the body of Sergei Magnitsky, William Browder's accountant, that show not a mark on his torso. Browder claims he was beaten to death by prison guards. Magnitsky died at 9:30pm Nov 16, 2009, and the photos were taken the next day.

READ MORE UK sanctions head of Russian investigative committee, following US lead

Later in her report she states:

I noted on the broadcast that though the photos and documents are solid, several dozen U.S. media – both allegedly progressive and mainstream -- have refused to publish this information. And if that McCarthyite censorship continues, the result of rampant fear-inducing Russophobia, I will publish it and the evidence on this website.

Despite evidence such as this, till this day Browder maintains that Sergei Magnitsky was beaten to death with rubber batons. It's this narrative that has attracted the attention of the US Congress, members of parliament, diplomats and human rights activists. To further refute his account, a 2011 analysis by the Physicians for Human Rights International Forensics Program of documents provided by Browder found no evidence he was beaten to death.

In his writings, as supposed evidence, Browder provides links to two untranslated Russian documents. They were compiled immediately after Magnitsky died on November 16, 2009. Recent investigative research has revealed that one of these appears to be a forgery. The first document, D309, states that shortly before Magnitsky's death: "Handcuffs were used in connection with the threat of committing an act of self-mutilation and suicide, and that the handcuffs were removed after thirty minutes." To further support this, a forensic review states that while in the prison hospital, "Magnitsky exhibited behavior diagnosed as 'acute psychosis' by Dr. A. V. Gaus at which point the doctor ordered Mr. Magnitsky to be restrained with handcuffs."

The second document, D310, is identically worded to D309 except for a change in part of the preceding sentence. The sentence in D309 has the phrase "special means were" is changed in D310 to "a rubber baton was."

As such, while D309 is perfectly coherent, in D310 the reference to a rubber baton makes no sense whatsoever, given the title and text it shares with D309. This and other inconsistencies, including signatures on these documents, make it apparent that D310 was copied from D309 and that D310 is a forgery. Furthermore, there is no logical reason for two almost identical reports to have been created, with only a slight difference in one sentence. There is no way of knowing who forged it and when, but this forged document forms a major basis for Browder's claim that Magnitsky was clubbed to death.

The fact that there is no credible evidence to indicate that Magnitsky was subjected to a baton attack, combined with forensic photos of Magnitsky's body shortly after death that show no marks on it, provides evidence that appears to repudiate Browder's decade-long assertions that Magnitsky was viciously murdered while in jail.

With evidence such as this, it repeatedly becomes clear that Browder's narrative contains mistakes and inconsistencies that distort the overall view of the events leading to Magnitsky's death.

Despite Magnitsky's death, the case against him continued in Russia and he was found guilty of corruption in a posthumous trial. Actually, the trial's main purpose was to investigate alleged fraud by Bill Browder, but to proceed with this they had to include the accountant Magnitsky as well. The Russian court found both of them guilty of fraud. Afterwards, the case against Magnitsky was closed because of his death.

After Browder was refused entry to Russia in November of 2005, he launched a campaign insisting that his departure from Russia resulted from his anti-corruption activities. However, the real reason for the cancellation of his visa that he never mentions is that in 2003, a Russian provincial court had convicted Browder of evading $40 million in taxes. In addition, his illegal purchases of shares in Gazprom through the use of offshore shell companies were reportedly valued at another $30 million, bringing the total figure of tax evasion to $70 million.

ALSO ON RT.COM Bill Browder points finger at Bernie Sanders on Magnitsky Act vote, but the real story is his own corruption

It's after this that the Russian federal government next took up the case and initially went after Magnitsky, the accountant who carried out Browder's schemes.

But back in the US, Browder portrayed himself as the ultimate truth-teller, and embellished his tale by asserting that Sergei Magnitsky was a whistleblowing "tax lawyer," rather than one of Browder's accountants implicated in tax fraud. As his case got more involved, he presented a convoluted explanation that he was not responsible for bogus claims made by his companies. This is indeed an extremely complicated matter and as such only a summary of some of this will be presented.

The essence of the case is that in 2007, three shell companies that had once been owned by Browder were used to claim a $232 million tax refund based on trumped-up financial loses. Browder has stated that the companies were stolen from him, and that in a murky operation organized by a convicted fraudster, they were re-registered in the names of others. There is evidence, however, that Magnitsky and Browder may have been part of this convoluted scheme.

Browder's main company in Russia was Hermitage Capital Management, and associated with this firm were a large number of shell companies, some in the Russian republic of Kalmykia and some in the British Virgin Islands. A law firm in Moscow, Firestone Duncan, owned by Americans, did the legal work for Browder's Hermitage. Sergei Magnitsky was one of the accountants for Firestone Duncan and was assigned to work for Hermitage.

An accountant colleague of Magnitsky's at Firestone Duncan, Konstantin Ponomarev, was interviewed in 2017 by Komisar, who said:

According to Ponomarev, the firm – and Magnitsky -- set up an offshore structure that Russian investigators would later say was used for tax evasion and illegal share purchases by Hermitage the structure helped Browder execute tax-evasion and illegal share purchase schemes.

He said the holdings were layered to conceal ownership: The companies were 'owned' by Cyprus shells Glendora and Kone, which, in turn, were 'owned' by an HSBC Private Bank Guernsey Ltd trust. Ponomarev said the real owner was Browder's Hermitage Fund. He said the structure allowed money to move through Cyprus to Guernsey with little or no taxes paid along the way. Profits could get cashed out in Guernsey by investors of the Hermitage Fund and HSBC.

Ponomarev said that in 1996, the firm developed for Browder 'a strategy of how to buy Gazprom shares in the local market, which was restricted for foreign investors.'

READ MORE Anti-Russian sanctions based on fraudster's tales? Spiegel finds Magnitsky narrative fed to West by Browder is riddled with lies

In the course of their investigation, on June 2, 2007, Russian tax investigators raided the offices of Hermitage and Firestone Duncan. They seized Hermitage company documents, computers and corporate stamps and seals. They were looking for evidence to support Russian charges of tax evasion and illegal purchase of shares of Gazprom.

In a statement to US senators on July 27, 2017, Browder stated that Russian Interior Ministry officials "seized all the corporate documents connected to the investment holding companies of the funds that I advised. I didn't know the purpose of these raids so I hired the smartest Russian lawyer I knew, a 35-year-old named Sergei Magnitsky. I asked Sergei to investigate the purpose of the raids and try to stop whatever illegal plans these officials had."

Contrary to what Browder claims, Magnitsky had been his accountant for a decade. He had never acted as a lawyer, nor did he have the qualifications to do so. In fact, in 2006, when questioned by Russian investigators, Magnitsky said he was an auditor on contract with Firestone Duncan. In Browder's testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2017, he claimed Magnitsky was his lawyer, but in 2015, in his testimony under oath in the US government's Prevezon case, Browder told a different story, as will now be related.

On Browder's initiative, in December 2012, he presented documents to the New York District Attorney alleging that a Russian company, Prevezon, had "benefitted from part of the $230 million dollar theft uncovered by Magnitsky and used those funds to buy a number of luxury apartments in Manhattan." In September 2013, the New York District Attorney's office filed money-laundering charges against Prevezon. The company hired high-profile New York-based lawyers to defend themselves against the accusations.

https://platform.twitter.com/embed/index.html?creatorScreenName=RT_com&dnt=false&embedId=twitter-widget-0&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=true&id=1018928646755581952&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.rt.com%2Frussia%2F494802-browder-story-what-uk-wont-tell%2F&siteScreenName=RT_com&theme=light&widgetsVersion=9066bb2%3A1593540614199&width=550px

As reported by Der Spiegel, Browder would not voluntarily agree to testify in court, so Prevezon's lawyers sent process servers to present him with a subpoena, which he refused to accept and was caught on video literally running away. In March 2015, the judge in the Prevezon case ruled that Browder would have to give testimony as part of pre-trial discovery. Later, while in court and under oath and confronted with numerous documents, Browder was totally evasive. Lawyer Mark Cymrot spent six hours examining him, beginning with the following exchange:

ALSO ON RT.COM Russian court orders arrest of UK investor Bill Browder over organization of criminal network

Cymrot asked: Was Magnitsky a lawyer or a tax expert?

He was "acting in court representing me," Browder replied.

And he had a law degree in Russia?

"I'm not aware he did."

Did he go to law school?

"No."

How many times have you said Mr. Magnitsky is a lawyer? Fifty? A hundred? Two hundred?

"I don't know."

Have you ever told anybody that he didn't go to law school and didn't have a law degree?

"No."

Critically important, during the court case, the responsible US investigator admitted during questioning that his findings were based exclusively on statements and documents from Browder and his team. Under oath, Browder was unable to explain how he and his people managed to track the flow of money and make the accusation against Prevezon. In his 2012 letter that launched the court case, Browder referred to "corrupt schemes" used by Prevezon, but when questioned under oath, he admitted he didn't know of any. In fact, to almost every question put forth by Mark Cymrot, Browder replied that he didn't know or didn't remember.

(Read the next part of The Real Bill Browder story on Thursday, here on RT)

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[Jul 15, 2020] I think Putin, a long time ago , decided to spare his people from the same fate of the Western populace or at least , make it as comfortable, as can be expected in these times.

Jul 15, 2020 | www.unz.com

GMC , says: July 15, 2020 at 7:59 am GMT

Good article, yes I remember 2016 and the power grid that was taken out by the Ukies. A lot of generators were sold that summer /year. lol I see Putin and Russia – just sitting /waiting it out – patiently as usual. Time is on their side and bad things are happening fast in the domestic west.

Of course Russia is part of the NWO because they have to be. They sell oil, gaz and natural resources internationally and have Corporations that have a big sayso in the Government. I think Putin, a long time ago , decided to spare his people from the same fate of the Western populace or at least , make it as comfortable, as can be expected – in these times. It helps by not having the Ghettos, Gangs, Dysfunctional Melting Pot, POlice state, and a slew of Wars to deal with -- for starters. Like the Saker said – Russian problems are – all the BS directed at them from ther West .

[Jul 15, 2020] Russians no longer want to be Europeans

Jul 15, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

ET AL July 14, 2020 at 11:06 am

Russia Observer: RUSSIANS DON'T WANT TO BE EUROPEANS
https://patrickarmstrong.ca/2020/07/13/russians-dont-want-to-be-europeans/

On July 13, 2020 By Patrick Armstrong

Pravda lied to us about the USSR, but it told the truth about the West.

– Contemporary Russian joke

For fifty years, secretly and openly, we wanted to live like you, but not any longer.

Margarita Simonyan, editor-in-chief of RT

First published Strategic Culture Foundation
####

A lot more at the link.

I can't really think of much to add. Maybe the word 'disappointment.' It initially sounds (and feels) rather passive and benign, but as we have all experienced at some point in our personal lives at the point where reality crashes in dreams and sends them down in flames. It's that hollow, sick feeling that starts in the pit of your stomach and works its way up to join your brain in trying to cope with the shock. Then it becomes a weight you carry around until you are ready to cast it off with a f/k it! and move on.

[Jul 14, 2020] Angloshere propaganda mostly projects onto target countries what they themselves are doing

Jul 14, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Peter AU1 , Jul 13 2020 4:56 utc | 150

JC 143

Plenty of decent people have headed to five eyes thinking they would find a better life, but we also take in the scum of the world that can be used against their own countries. These generally rise to high places.
Imperial France seems of the same mindset and Chechen freedom fighters are now fighting for their freedom in France. Yankistans freedom fighter Osama Bin Larden was just fighting for freedom apparently. Like the AQ media wing 'White Helmets' that UK and Canada took in, not to mention the nazi's that participated in the genocides in their own countries in WWII.

When peasants living conditions are constantly improving, there will be no revolt and no civil war. Yankistan propaganda can't even come up with an opposition in China.

Angloshere propaganda mostly projects onto target countries what they themselves are doing.

[Jul 14, 2020] There is a recent book which analyses how the US policy of preventive mass murder and torture in Indonesia has inspired policies, structures and knowhow in many of US client states

Jul 14, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

JC , Jul 12 2020 20:08 utc | 100

Posted by: uncle tungsten | Jul 12 2020 1:38 utc | 48 & 64
Posted by: Lucci | Jul 12 2020 15:59 utc | 87

To clear the air, I recalled the "Non-Aligned Movement a forum of developing states not formally aligned with or against any major power bloc or nations." It consist of - Nehru India, Tito Yugoslavia, Bung Karno, Bapa Sukarno Indonesia, Zhou Enlai China, Habib Bourguiba Tunisian, Norodom Sihanouk Cambodian, U Nu Burma, Kwame Nkrumah, Gamal Abdel Nasser Egypt, Fidel Castro Cuba, at the Bandung conference in 1955, the Non-Aligned Movement was born. Later many nationalism leaders were disposed. How about Sukarno, did he "slaughter" the Chinese? Nope that's from what I was told from BBC and it remains in my mind until uncle tungstan and Lucci points out my mistakes, it was Suharto with CIA and Brit Foreign Office that brought down Sukarno and Suharto was disposed his wife was known as Ten Percent.

How we destroyed Sukarno

https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/how-we-destroyed-sukarno-1188448.html

I was growing up and aligned with Americans exceptionlism. It was after ww2 and nationalism on the rise (almost) everywhere changed of government. In school each morning assembled to raised the union jack and sing god save the freaking queen. That's when I was indoctrinated from BBC the evils of communism and socialism. Western imperialist was the way to go man. Much of my lunch hours in the library mainly reading, one book, my librarian recommended The Jungle is Neutral by Spencer F, Chapman . The book still available and probably my view has changed am no longer accepting the stupid Brit and Yank.

Tuyzentfloot , Jul 12 2020 21:07 utc | 103

@ JC there is a recent book which analyses how the US policy of preventive mass murder and torture in Indonesia has inspired policies, structures and knowhow in many of US client states : https://vincentbevins.com/book/

uncle tungsten , Jul 12 2020 21:19 utc | 104
JC #100

Thank you for clearing the air on Sukarno. The Indonesian coup that destroyed the democratic socialis government he led was a tragic loss to the people of Indonesia. The coup leader Suharto fully backed by the CIA murdered many hundreds of thousands of civilians and their elected officials and educators and medical staff. It was a ruthless murderous purge. The Dulles brothers at the top.

Suharto then ruled for decades and Indonesia became the evil corruption ridden prison it is today. This sad country is our planets exemplar failed state ruled by criminal oligarchs and their owned courts and religion.

Indonesian people are great in their spirit and humility, they deserve better.

Jen , Jul 12 2020 23:50 utc | 114

JC and others who have been conversing with him on the issue of the Indonesian military's persecution and slaughter of Chinese Indonesians and others perceived to be Communist or sympathetic to Communism or socialism might be interested in watching Joshua Oppenheimer's "The Act of Killing" to see how small-time thugs and young people (especially those in the Pancasila Youth movement) alike were caught up in the anti-Communist brainwashing frenzy in Indonesia during the 1960s and participated in the mass persecution and slaughter themselves.

Oppenheimer tracked down some of these former killers in North Sumatra and got them to re-enact their crimes in whatever from they desired. For various reasons, some of them psychological, they were quite enthusiastic about this idea. Significantly they chose to re-enact their crimes as a Hollywood Western / Godfather-style pastiche film, even getting their relatives and friends to play extras.

The mass murderers interviewed did well for themselves with some of them even becoming politicians and rising to the level of Cabinet Minister in the Indonesian government. The film also shows something of how deeply corruption is embedded in everyday life with one prospective political candidate going around bribing villagers and demanding money from small-time ethnic Chinese shopkeepers in his electorate and threatening them with violence if they do not cough up.

The major issue I have with the film is that by focusing on these mass murderers in North Sumatra, it misses the overall national and international political and social context that still supports and applauds what these killers did. As long as this continues, the likelihood that similar persecutions and genocidal purges of outsider groups and individuals, be they Chinese, Christian, Shi'a and other heterodox Muslim, academics, trade unionists, separatists in Maluku, West Papua or other parts of Indoneisa, and all these purges supported by the West in some way, will occur in the future is strong.

Antonym , Jul 13 2020 1:44 utc | 132

@ Jen 114
"As long as this continues, the likelihood that similar persecutions and genocidal purges of outsider groups and individuals, be they Chinese, Christian, Shi'a and other heterodox Muslim, academics, trade unionists, separatists in Maluku, West Papua or other parts of Indoneisa, and all these purges supported by the West in some way, will occur in the future is strong."

Yeah, "we" Anglos" are the only bad guys on this planet - not.
The CIA & co are not yet into slaughtering of Christians. Extremist Indonesian Sunni Muslims were guilty in the above atrocities, continuing as harassments till today. Hard to swallow: bad brown people do exist!

[Jul 14, 2020] Simonyan loses her cool

Jul 14, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

MOSCOWEXILE July 10, 2020 at 5:59 am

Simonyan loses her cool:

Margarita Simonyan, editor-in-chief of RT, asked a diplomat at the American embassy in Moscow to shut her mouth after she had tried to shame the Russian Federation about arrested journalists. U.S. embassy spokeswoman Rebecca Ross said Washington was keeping an eye on successive arrests in Russia.

Simonyan said in response that allegations of an attempt against the "freedom of the press" are especially cynical in the light of the numerous arrests of journalists in the United States. During the riots in the United States alone, 58 journalists have been arrested and more than 470 injured at the hands of the police.

But Simonyan did not say "mouth", as it says in the lead of the Russian article linked below:

Just shut your gobs, right! And do not open them until you have rewritten your methodology manuals so that your couriers are able to work, observing at least a minimal illusion of connection with reality. Otherwise, this [what you say] is completely ridiculous , writes the editor-in-chief of RT in Telegram.

https://yandex.ru/turbo/s/tsargrad.tv/news/simonjan-obratilas-k-posolstvu-ssha-zakrojte-uzhe-past-pravda_265494?utm_source=yxnews&utm_medium=mobile

MOSCOWEXILE July 10, 2020 at 6:11 am

"Just shut your gob, right?" that should have been above

Simonyan was addressing Ross.

рот is "mouth"; пасть is "nuzzle", "snout", "gob".

I think "gob" is the best translation in this context.

It's rude. And пасть is rude and vulgar in Russian too.

That's why Simonyan said it.

At least she didn't say: "Shut your fucking gob!"

MOSCOWEXILE July 10, 2020 at 9:24 pm

Hey, Ross of the US embassy, Moscow!

Waddya think those Limey SOBs are up to?
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/journalist-arrested-andrew-buncombe-boris-johnson-donald-trump-seattle-a9613281.html

Limey concerns over freedom of the press on the other side of the pond???

Tea drinking faggots! They should take a look at the Soviet Union Russia!!!!

JULIUS SKOOLAFISH July 10, 2020 at 6:15 am

and it is not the first time

https://fort-russ.com/2018/08/german-press-let-simonyan-speak-and-got-an-earful/?utm_medium=ppc&utm_source=wp&utm_campaign=push&utm_content=new-article

"And now you've made sure we do not respect you any more – with your short – sighted sanctions, the heartless humiliation of our athletes (including the disabled), your Skripals, with that demonstrative indifference to basic liberal values like presumption of innocence your attacks of mass hysteria, which can only bring relief to any sane person living in Russia rather than in Hollywood; with your confusion after the elections – be it in the US or in Germany or in the Brexit zone – with your incitements against RT (formerly Russia Today, ed.), whom you can not forgive for taking advantage of your freedom of speech and demonstrating to the whole world that one had better not use it, and that it was not invented for use but for ornamentation ( ) -- the injustice, wickedness, hypocrisies, and lies have led to the point that we do not respect you anymore. You and your so-called values.
[ ]
We have no more respect for you
[ ]
Our people can forgive many things, but just like anyone else, we do not forgive arrogance."

I like her

PATIENT OBSERVER July 10, 2020 at 10:37 am

Tell it! Marvelously said.

MARK CHAPMAN July 10, 2020 at 11:08 am

Sometimes nothing gets the job done like plain talk. However, the official version would reflect that Simonyan got spitting mad when people of integrity called her on Russia's repressions or some such shit. There is a basic truth in there, though – America sacrificed the respect of a lot of its allies as well, and even those who did not particularly like it used to respect it.

I imagine Simonyan hates them with a passion.

[Jul 14, 2020] I'd bet a dollar to a doughnut Skripal was the source of the Russian 'intelligence', and that he was bumped off afterward to make sure he stayed quiet about Steele dossier.

Notable quotes:
"... If Skripal is involved with all the Clinton stuff, then he would want an insurance policy for example on an USB drive that he could leave for someone to pick up, and leak if something foreshortened his life ..."
Jul 14, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

MARK CHAPMAN July 8, 2020 at 8:08 pm

"The judge also concluded that Steele's notes of his first interaction with the FBI about the dossier on July 5, 2016 made clear that his ultimate client for his research project was Hillary Clinton's campaign as directed by her campaign law firm Perkins Coie. The FBI did not disclose that information to the court."

Finally we are getting down to where the cheese binds. Hillary Clinton's campaign, with Mrs. Clinton's knowledge, commissioned the Steele dossier to try to torpedo Trump's election prospects. She never thought he could win, but the Dems wanted to make sure.

I'd bet a dollar to a doughnut Skripal was the source of the Russian 'intelligence', and that he was bumped off afterward to make sure he stayed quiet.

The whole Russiagate scandal was just Democrat bullshit, and they kept up with it long after they all knew they were lying. And Biden thinks he's going to get elected, after that revelation? The Democrats deserve to be expelled from politics en masse. Leading with that wretched prick Schiff.

JEN July 8, 2020 at 9:42 pm

It would seem likely that had the Klintonator won the 2016 Presidential election, Sergei Skripal might have been left alone mouldering with his guinea pigs and cats in his Salsibury home. Perhaps he had to take the fall for HRC's loss in the election, for whatever reason (not shovelling enough shit into the dossier to bring down Trump perhaps); someone had to take the blame and of course HRC will never admit responsibility for her own failure.

MARK CHAPMAN July 9, 2020 at 8:43 am

Well, you never know – Russians are kind of an endangered species in the UK. They turn up dead whenever a public accusation of another Putin 'state hit' would be a useful feature in the papers.

ET AL July 9, 2020 at 12:34 am

What I want to know is if the paths of the Skripals passed with those of the supposed Russian assassins (which I assume to be possible decoys) or anyone else in space, but not necessarily time. If Skripal is involved with all the Clinton stuff, then he would want an insurance policy for example on an USB drive that he could leave for someone to pick up, and leak if something foreshortened his life

It could well have been a simple dead-drop and when alerted by their phones being turned off and batteries removed, the priority was to immobilize/incapacitate them. A bit tricky in public, but not at all impossible by a near/passer by to their bench with an aerosol, say a cyclist walking with his bike After all, they did also have the Chief nurse of the BA on hand just in case it went wrong as things sometimes do. Which leads to the question, was it just the Brits alone, together with the Americans, or watching the Americans and then cleaning up their mess? 2 or more likely 3 seem most likely if we look at sheer brazeness.

That concludes my speculation for the day! Maybe I should be a journalist. I could be paid for this!

MARK CHAPMAN July 9, 2020 at 9:01 am

Yes, you never know, but it's certainly hard to believe Occam was English. It seems pretty clear the simplest explanation is "MI6 bumped him off and blamed it on Russia". When you are trying to arrange a death which is bound to be suspicious, you want to do it in a way that when it becomes public knowledge, the first people the public thinks of is not you. means, motive and opportunity all strongly favour the English side. It seems to be be fairly common knowledge that Skripal wanted to return to Russia; we have no way of knowing if he planned to live there or just visit, more likely the latter. But Putin decides to send an assassination team to England to rub him out. Instead of welcoming him home to Russia, where he could prevent the British from investigating, and then killing him. Presumably in a much more prosaic fashion – say, running him down with a car – rather than employing some exotic poison or isotope which will scream 'Russia!!' How long would the British have been investigating the Skripals' deaths (if they had died) had they been run down with a 7.5 ton lorry which was subsequently found burned to a shell several counties away? Would the British papers have been shrieking "Putin's Truck!!!" next morning? But no – Russian assassins always have to 'send a message', which must inspire Britain to 'send a message' of its own by punishing the entire country. Maybe it's just me, but flash-cooking Skripal in the High Street with a flamethrower in broad daylight would send a message. And then say to the police, "Keep your hands where I can see 'em, unless you want a couple of shashliks, comrade", before speeding away in an Aurus Senat limousine. That would send a message, too.


[Jul 13, 2020] George Washington Tried To Warn Americans About Foreign Policy Today by Doug Bandow

Highly recommended!
This is all about maintaining the US-centered global neoliberal empire. After empires is created the the USA became the salve of imperial interests and in a way stopped existing as an independent country. Everything is thrown on the altar of "full spectrum Dominance". The result is as close to a real political and economic disaster as we can get. Like USSR leadership the US elite realized now that neoliberalism is not sustainable, but can't do anything as all bets were made for the final victory of neoliberalism all over the world, much like Soviets hoped for the victory of communism. That did not happened and although the USA now is in much better position then the USSR in 60th (but with the similar level of deterioration of cognitive abilities of the politicians as the USSR). In this sense COVID-19 was a powerful catalyst of the crush of the US-centered neoliberal empire
Notable quotes:
"... On the other side are the targets of "inveterate antipathies." This also characterizes US Middle East policy. So hated are Iran and Syria that Washington, DC is making every effort to destroy their economies, ruin their people's livelihoods, wreck their hospitals, and starve their population. The respective governments are bad, to be sure, but do not threaten the US Yet, as the nation's first president explained to Americans, "Antipathy in one nation against another disposes each more readily to offer insult and injury, to lay hold of slight causes of umbrage, and to be haughty and intractable, when accidental or trifling occasions of dispute occur. Hence, frequent collisions, obstinate, envenomed, and bloody contests. The nation, prompted by ill-will and resentment, sometimes impels to war the government, contrary to the best calculations of policy." ..."
"... Consider how close the US has come to foolish, unnecessary wars against both nations. There were manifold demands that the US enter the Syrian civil war, in which Americans have no stake. Short of combat the Obama administration indirectly aided the local affiliate of al-Qaeda, the terrorist group which staged 9/11 and supposedly was America's enemy. Moreover, there was constant pressure on America to attack Iran, targeted by the US since 1953, when the CIA helped replace Tehran's democracy with a brutal tyrant, whose rule was highlighted by corruption, torture, and a nuclear program – which then was taken over by Iran's Islamic revolutionaries, to America's horror. ..."
"... The US now is pushing toward a Cold War redux with Russia, after successive administrations treated Moscow as if it was of no account, lying about plans to expand NATO and acting in other ways that the US would never tolerate. Imagine the Soviet Union helping to overthrow an elected, pro-American government in Mexico City, seeking to redirect all commerce to Soviet allies in South America, and proposing that Mexico join the Warsaw Pact. US policymakers would be threatening war. ..."
"... In different ways many US policies illustrate the problem caused by "passionate attachments" – the almost routine and sometimes substantial sacrifice of US economic and security interests to benefit other governments. For instance, hysteria swept Washington at the president's recent proposal to simply reduce troop levels in Germany, which along with so many other European nations sees little reason to do much to defend itself. There are even those who demand American subservience to the Philippines, a semi-failed state of no significant security importance to the US Saudi Arabia is a rare case where the attachment is mostly cash and lobbyists. In most instances cultural, ethnic, religious, and historical ties provide a firmer foundation for foreign political influence and manipulation. ..."
Jul 13, 2020 | original.antiwar.com

Ben Rhodes, Barack Obama's deputy national security adviser, unkindly characterized the foreign policy establishment in Washington, D.C., as "the Blob." Although policymakers sometimes disagree on peripheral subjects, membership requires an absolute commitment to U.S. "leadership," which means a determination to micro-manage the world.

Reliance on persuasion is not enough. Vital is the willingness to bomb, invade, and, if necessary, occupy other nations to impose the Blob's dictates on other peoples. If foreigners die, as they often do, remember the saying about eggs and omelets oft repeated by communism's apologists. "Stuff happens" with the best-intentioned policies.

One might be inclined to forgive Blob members if their misguided activism actually benefited the American people. However, all too often the Blob's policies instead aid other governments and interests. Washington is overrun by the representatives of and lobbyists for other nations, which constantly seek to take control of US policy for their own advantage. The result are foreign interventions in which Americans do the paying and, all too often, the dying for others.

The problem is primarily one of power. Other governments don't spend a lot of time attempting to take over Montenegro's foreign policy because, well, who cares? Exactly what would you do after taking over Fiji's foreign ministry other than enjoy a permanent vacation? Seize control of international relations in Barbados and you might gain a great tax shelter.

Subvert American democracy and manipulate US foreign policy, and you can loot America's treasury, turn the US military into your personal bodyguard, and gain Washington's support for reckless war-mongering. And given the natural inclination of key American policymakers to intervene promiscuously abroad for the most frivolous reasons, it's surprisingly easy for foreign interests to convince Uncle Sam that their causes are somehow "vital" and therefore require America's attention. Indeed, it is usually easier to persuade Americans than foreign peoples in their home countries to back one or another international misadventure.

The culprits are not just autocratic regimes. Friendly democratic governments are equally ready to conspiratorially whisper in Uncle Sam's ear. Even nominally classical liberal officials, who believe in limiting their own governments, argue that Americans are obligated to sacrifice wealth and life for everyone else. The mantra seems to be liberty, prosperity, and peace for all – except those living in the superpower tasked by heaven with protecting everyone else's liberty, prosperity, and peace.

Although the problem has burgeoned in modern times, it is not new. Two centuries ago fans of Greek independence wanted Americans to challenge the Ottoman Empire, a fantastic bit of foolishness. Exactly how to effect an international Balkans rescue was not clear, since the president then commanded no aircraft carriers, air wings, or nuclear-tipped missiles. Still, the issue divided Americans and influenced John Quincy Adams' famous 1821 Independence Day address.

Warned Adams:

"Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will commend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example. She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom."

"The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force . She might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit . [America's] glory is not dominion, but liberty. Her march is the march of the mind. She has a spear and a shield: but the motto upon her shield is, Freedom, Independence, Peace. This has been her Declaration: this has been, as far as her necessary intercourse with the rest of mankind would permit, her practice."

Powerful words, yet Adams was merely following in the footsteps of another great American, George Washington. Obviously, the latter was flawed as a person, general, and president. Nevertheless, his willingness to set a critical precedent by walking away from power left an extraordinary legacy. As did his insistence that the Constitution tasked Congress with deciding when America would go to war. And his warning against turning US policy over to foreign influences.

Concern over obsequious subservience to other governments and interests pervaded his famous 1796 Farewell Address. Applied today, his message indicts most of the policy currently made in the city ironically named after him. He would be appalled by what presidents and Congresses today do, supposedly for America.

Obviously, the US was very different 224 years ago. The new country was fragile, sharing the Western hemisphere with its old colonial master, which still ruled Canada and much of the Caribbean, as well as Spain and France. When later dragged into the maritime fringes of the Napoleonic wars the US could huff and puff but do no more than inconvenience France and Britain. The vastness of the American continent, not overweening national power, again frustrated London when it sought to subjugate its former colonists.

Indeed, when George Washington spoke the disparate states were not yet firmly knit into a nation. Only after the Civil War, when the national government waged four years of brutal combat, which ravaged much of the country and killed upwards of 750,000 people in the name of "union," did people uniformly say the United States "is" rather than "are." However, the transformation was much more than rhetorical. The federal system that originally emerged in the name of individual liberty spawned a high tax centralized government that employed one of the world's largest militaries to kill on a mass scale to enforce the regime's dictates. The modern American "republic" was born. It acted overseas only inconsistently until World War II, after which imperial America was a constant, adding resonance to George Washington's message.

Today Washington, D.C.'s elites have almost uniformly decided that Russia is an enemy, irrespective of American behavior that contributed to Moscow's hostility. And that Ukraine, a country never important for American security, is a de facto military ally, appropriately armed by the US for combat against a nuclear-armed rival. A reelection-minded president seems determined to turn China into a new Cold War adversary, an enemy for all things perhaps for all time. America remains ever entangled in the Middle East, with successive administrations in permanent thrall of Israel and Saudi Arabia, allowing foreign leaders to set US Mideast policy. Indeed, both states have avidly pressed the administration to make their enemy, Iran, America' enemy. The resulting fixation caused the Trump administration to launch economic war against the rest of the world to essentially prevent everyone on earth from having any commercial dealing of any kind with anyone in Tehran.

Under Democrats and Republicans alike the federal government views nations that resist its dictates as adversaries at best, appropriate targets of criticism, always, sanctions, often, and even bombs and invasions, occasionally. No wonder foreign governments lobby hard to be designated as allies, partners, and special relationships. Many of these ties have become essentially permanent, unshakeable even when supposed friends act like enemies and supposed enemies are incapable of hurting America. US foreign policy increasingly has been captured and manipulated for the benefit of other governments and interests.

George Washington recognized the problem even in his day, after revolutionary France sought to win America's support against Great Britain. He warned: "nothing is more essential than that permanent, inveterate antipathies against particular nations, and passionate attachments for others, should be excluded; and that, in place of them, just and amicable feelings towards all should be cultivated. The nation which indulges towards another a habitual hatred or a habitual fondness is in some degree a slave. It is a slave to its animosity or to its affection, either of which is sufficient to lead it astray from its duty and its interest."

Is there a better description of US foreign policy today? Even when a favored nation is clearly, ostentatiously, murderously on the wrong side – consider Saudi Arabia's unprovoked aggression against Yemen – many American policymakers refuse to allow a single word of criticism to escape their lips. The US has indeed become "a slave," as George Washington warned.

The consequences for the US and the world are highly negative. He observed that "likewise, a passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate inducement or justification."

This is an almost perfect description of the current US approach. American colonists revolted against what they believed had become ever more "foreign" control, yet the US backs Israel's occupation and mistreatment of millions of Palestinians. American policymakers parade the globe spouting the rhetoric of freedom yet subsidize Egypt as it imprisons tens of thousands and oppresses millions of people. Washington decries Chinese aggressiveness, yet provides planes, munitions, and intelligence to aid Riyadh in the slaughter of Yemeni civilians and destruction of Yemeni homes, businesses, and hospitals. In such cases, policymakers have betrayed America "into a participation in the quarrels and wars without adequate inducement or justification."

On the other side are the targets of "inveterate antipathies." This also characterizes US Middle East policy. So hated are Iran and Syria that Washington, DC is making every effort to destroy their economies, ruin their people's livelihoods, wreck their hospitals, and starve their population. The respective governments are bad, to be sure, but do not threaten the US Yet, as the nation's first president explained to Americans, "Antipathy in one nation against another disposes each more readily to offer insult and injury, to lay hold of slight causes of umbrage, and to be haughty and intractable, when accidental or trifling occasions of dispute occur. Hence, frequent collisions, obstinate, envenomed, and bloody contests. The nation, prompted by ill-will and resentment, sometimes impels to war the government, contrary to the best calculations of policy."

Consider how close the US has come to foolish, unnecessary wars against both nations. There were manifold demands that the US enter the Syrian civil war, in which Americans have no stake. Short of combat the Obama administration indirectly aided the local affiliate of al-Qaeda, the terrorist group which staged 9/11 and supposedly was America's enemy. Moreover, there was constant pressure on America to attack Iran, targeted by the US since 1953, when the CIA helped replace Tehran's democracy with a brutal tyrant, whose rule was highlighted by corruption, torture, and a nuclear program – which then was taken over by Iran's Islamic revolutionaries, to America's horror.

Read George Washington and you would think he had gained a supernatural glimpse into today's policy debates. He worried about the result when the national government "adopts through passion what reason would reject; at other times it makes the animosity of the nation subservient to projects of hostility instigated by pride, ambition, and other sinister and pernicious motives. The peace often, sometimes perhaps the liberty, of nations has been the victim."

What better describes US policy toward China and Russia? To be sure, these are nasty regimes. Yet that has rarely bothered Uncle Sam's relations with other states. Saudi Arabia, a corrupt and totalitarian theocracy, has been sheltered, protected, and reassured by the US even after invading its poor neighbor. Among Washington's other best friends: Bahrain, Turkey, Egypt, and United Arab Emirates, tyrannies all.

The US now is pushing toward a Cold War redux with Russia, after successive administrations treated Moscow as if it was of no account, lying about plans to expand NATO and acting in other ways that the US would never tolerate. Imagine the Soviet Union helping to overthrow an elected, pro-American government in Mexico City, seeking to redirect all commerce to Soviet allies in South America, and proposing that Mexico join the Warsaw Pact. US policymakers would be threatening war.

Washington, DC also is treating China as a near-enemy, claiming the right to control China along its own borders – essentially attempting to apply America's Monroe Doctrine to Asia. This is something Americans would never allow another nation, especially China, to do to the US Imagine the response if Beijing sent its navy up the East Coast, told the US how to treat Cuba, and constantly talked of the possibility of war. America's consistently hostile, aggressive policy is the result of "projects of pride, ambition, and other sinister and pernicious motives."

This kind of foreign policy also corrupts the American political system. It encourages officials and people to put foreign interests before that of America. As George Washington observed, this mindset: "gives to ambitious, corrupted, or deluded citizens (who devote themselves to the favorite nation), facility to betray or sacrifice the interests of their own country, without odium, sometimes even with popularity; guiding, with the appearances of a virtuous sense of obligation, a commendable deference for public opinion, or a laudable zeal for public good, the base or foolish compliances of ambition, corruption, or infatuation."

For instance, Woodrow Wilson and America's Anglophile establishment backed Great Britain over the interests of the American people, dragging the US into World War I, a mindless imperial slugfest that this nation should have avoided. After the Cold War's end Americans with ties to Central and Eastern Europe pushed to expand NATO to their ancestral homes, which created new defense obligations for America while inflaming Russian hostility. Ethnic Greeks and Turks constantly battle over policy toward their ethnic homelands. Taiwan has developed enduring ties with congressional Republicans, especially, ensuring US government support against Beijing. Many evangelical Christians, especially those who hold a particularly bizarre eschatology (basically, Jews must gather together in their national homeland to be slaughtered before Jesus can return), back Israel in whatever it does to assist the apparently helpless God of creation finish his job. The policies that result from such campaigns inevitably are shaped to benefit foreign interests, not Americans.

Regarding the impact of such a system on the political system George Washington also was prescient: "As avenues to foreign influence in innumerable ways, such attachments are particularly alarming to the truly enlightened and independent patriot. How many opportunities do they afford to tamper with domestic factions, to practice the arts of seduction, to mislead public opinion, to influence or awe the public council. Such an attachment of a small or weak towards a great and powerful nation dooms the former to be the satellite of the latter."

In different ways many US policies illustrate the problem caused by "passionate attachments" – the almost routine and sometimes substantial sacrifice of US economic and security interests to benefit other governments. For instance, hysteria swept Washington at the president's recent proposal to simply reduce troop levels in Germany, which along with so many other European nations sees little reason to do much to defend itself. There are even those who demand American subservience to the Philippines, a semi-failed state of no significant security importance to the US Saudi Arabia is a rare case where the attachment is mostly cash and lobbyists. In most instances cultural, ethnic, religious, and historical ties provide a firmer foundation for foreign political influence and manipulation.

What to do about such a long-standing problem? George Washington was neither naïf nor isolationist. He believed in what passed for globalism in those days: a commercial republic should trade widely. He didn't oppose alliances, for limited purposes and durations. After all, support from France was necessary for the colonies to win independence.

He proposed a practical policy tied to ongoing realities. The authorities should "steer clear of permanent alliances," have with other states "as little political connection as possible," and not "entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils" of other nations' "ambition, rivalship, interest, humor or caprice." Most important, the object of US foreign policy was to serve the interests of the American people. In practice it was a matter of prudence, to be adapted to circumstance and interest. He would not necessarily foreclose defense of Israel, Saudi Arabia, or Germany, but would insist that such proposals reflect a serious analysis of current realities and be decided based on what is best for Americans. He would recognize that what might have been true a few decades ago likely isn't true today. In reality, little of current US foreign policy would have survived his critical review.

George Washington was an eminently practical man who managed to speak through the ages. America's recently disastrous experience of playing officious, obnoxious hegemon highlights his good judgment. The US, he argued, should "observe good faith and justice towards all nations; cultivate peace and harmony with all."

America may still formally be a republic, but its foreign policy long ago became imperial. As John Quincy Adams warned, the US is "no longer the ruler of her own spirit." Americans have learned at great cost that international affairs are too important to be left to the Blob and foreign policy professionals, handed off to international relations scholars, or, worst of all, subcontracted to other nations and their lobbyists. The American people should insist on their nation's return to a true republican foreign policy.

Doug Bandow is a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute . A former Special Assistant to President Ronald Reagan, he is author of Foreign Follies: America's New Global Empire .

[Jul 13, 2020] Daily Fail: EDWARD LUCAS: At last! The end of the age of appeasing Beijing bullies

Jul 13, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

ET AL July 7, 2020 at 2:53 am

Ever wondered what happened to our mouth foaming favorite russophobe, Ed Lucas?

Daily Fail: EDWARD LUCAS: At last! The end of the age of appeasing Beijing bullies
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-8495983/EDWARD-LUCAS-end-age-appeasing-Beijing-bullies.html

####

Remember, Sir John Sawers is the former chief of MI6 and is in no way linked to the UK government. He is a private individual. This is not Hybrid Warfare.

Which is good, because it allows Ed to earnestly parrot his talking points and add plenty of filler in that well known balanced, independent and journalistically shining star of an outlet, the Daily Fail.

The lesson I think we can take from this is that UK gov has finally been caught in its own bitch 'n' slap China trap and also a victim of t-Rump's bash China campaign. Time has run out on this strategy. It was more than happy to sign on to loud anti-China slogans, as long as it didn't cost UK plc serious cash or future investme nt. The problem is that China has had enough of mostly ignoring those slings and arrows for years.

The new so-called 'Wolf-warrior' China response that the west is publicly bemoaning as 'threatening' comes after so much sinophobia. Thus, UK gov has got the message much more forcefully in the last few days and the opposition like 'ex' directors of British intelligence and others are all hands to the wheel because they do not hold official power and have no other way of influencing the government. 2020 really is a momentous year.

MARK CHAPMAN July 7, 2020 at 8:28 am

I didn't really have time to read it because I have to leave for work, but the headline alone is enough to showcase classic Lucas behavior – enthusiastically cheer the government 'taking a stand', and leaving the accountants to sort out the damage and try to salvage something from the rubble. You know, it is a miracle Britain has survived as long as it has with the eejits who are let to run it.

[Jul 13, 2020] Washington has essentially forgotten how to negotiate on mutually-respectful terms, and favours maneuvering its 'partners' into relationships in which the USA has an overwhelmingly dominant position, and then announcing it is 'leveling the playing field'. Which means putting its thumb on the scale.

Jul 13, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

MARK CHAPMAN July 7, 2020 at 8:12 am

Again, probably not an urgent problem unless some existing Chinese aircraft in service are on their last legs and urgently must be replaced. In which case they could go with Airbus if the situation could not wait. China has options. Boeing does not.

The west loves to portray the Chinese as totally without ethics, and if you have a product they can't make for themselves, they will buy it from you only until they have figured out how to make it themselves, and then fuck you, Jack. I don't see any reason to believe the Chinese value alliances less than the west does, or are any more incapable of grasping the value of a give-and-take trade policy. The west – especially the United States – favours establishing a monopoly on markets and then using your inability to get the product anywhere else as leverage to force concessions you don't want to make; is that ethical? China must surely see the advantages of a mutually-respectful relationship with Russia, considering that country not only safeguards a significant length of its border from western probing, but supplies most of its energy. There remain many unexplored avenues for technical, engineering and technological cooperation. At the same time, Russia is not in a subordinate position where it has to endure being taken advantage of.

Trade is hard work, and any partner will maneuver for advantage, because everyone in commerce likes market share and money. But Washington has essentially forgotten how to negotiate on mutually-respectful terms, and favours maneuvering its 'partners' into relationships in which the USA has an overwhelmingly dominant position, and then announcing it is 'leveling the playing field'. Which means putting its thumb on the scale.


[Jul 13, 2020] Those weapons aren't going to sell themselves!

Jul 13, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

ET AL July 6, 2020 at 9:47 am

Sky Nudes:

https://news.sky.com/story/suspected-killers-of-jamal-khashoggi-and-sergei-magnitsky-included-on-new-uk-sanctions-list-12022458

.They include:

20 Saudi nationals involved in the death of journalist Jamal Khashoggi;

25 Russian nationals involved in the mistreatment and death of lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, who uncovered widespread corruption;

two high-ranking Myanmar generals involved in violence against Rohingya people and other ethnic minorities

Two organisations involved in forced labour, torture and murder in North Korea's gulags have also been listed

The new autonomous regime will allow the UK to work independently with allies such as the US, Canada, Australia and the EU

####

But not Mohammed Bin Salman, obvs. Those weapons aren't going to sell themselves!

Can the UK government put itself on the list for arbitary detention and expulsion of Brits born in Jamaica but resident in the UK for decades and asked to come to the UK due to the shortage of national labor, aka the Windrush scandal? The latest news on that is there is no automatic redress for those screwed over by Theresa May+. They have to prove they that they had been unfairly targeted!

Anger As Windrush Victims Told To Prove Case 'Beyond Reasonable Doubt' To Get Compensation
https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/windrush-compensation-beyond-reasonable-doubt_uk_5efcaf12c5b612083c55c7cf

MARK CHAPMAN July 6, 2020 at 12:53 pm

'Suspected' killers. That's good enough for sanctions these days. Hopefully the rest of the EU will take Brexit as an opportunity to break with the Russophobic policies of the loony UK and its crackpot big brother, and re-orient its economy on a separate trajectory from theirs. We're already going to end up with two distinct trading blocs who operate largely outside one another, to the detriment of both but much more so to the United States. We don't need three. I'm watching in appalled fascination to see what happens to the American airliner market when it doesn't get any more Chinese orders. Once I would have said it was impossible that Boeing would go under, but now I'm not so sure.

Speaking of Boeing, no more 747's will be built after the current order backlog is completed, about 13 more planes. That'll be it for four-engine airliners – too expensive to run. Twin-engine planes can achieve almost the same range for less outlay. And economy is going to have to be the watchword of the aviation industry for awhile if it is to survive: air travel in the USA is down about 80% in the past week. Of course Boeing stock rose, though, because the investor class lives in a different reality.

I can't help noting that this will mean Boeing will rely even more heavily on the 737.

https://www.barrons.com/articles/us-regulators-complete-test-flights-on-boeing-737-max-01593642305

[Jul 13, 2020] How to Make a Brick from Straw and Bullshit

After neocons in Washinton adopted Magnitsky act all bets for US-Russia cooperation are off. And that in a long run will hurt the USA too.
Notable quotes:
"... Every time you "impose costs" on another country, you make more enemies and inspire more end-around plays which take you as an economic player out of that loop. And by and by what you do is of no great consequence, and your ability – your LEGAL ability, I should interject – to 'impose costs' is gone. ..."
Jul 13, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

MARK CHAPMAN July 13, 2020 at 10:49 am

Every time you "impose costs" on another country, you make more enemies and inspire more end-around plays which take you as an economic player out of that loop. And by and by what you do is of no great consequence, and your ability – your LEGAL ability, I should interject – to 'impose costs' is gone. Sooner or later America's allies are going to refuse to recognize its extraterritorial sanctions, which it has no legal right to impose; it gets away with it by threatening costs in trade with the USA, which is a huge economy and is something under its control. But that practice causes other countries to gradually insulate themselves against exposure, and one day the cost of obeying will be greater than the cost of saying "Go fuck yourself".

The New York Times goes a little further, stressing that the agreement would entail an economic and military partnership: "It calls for joint training and exercises, joint research and weapons development and intelligence sharing -- all to fight "the lopsided battle with terrorism, drug and human trafficking and cross-border crimes." This would give Iran access to some fairly high-tech systems, perhaps fighter aircraft and training and tech support, but of that part of the package, I would rate intelligence sharing the highest. It would potentially give Iran a heads-up on what the USA is planning in the region before it even is briefed to Congress – Washington leaks like a sieve, and while it is often intentional, it happens when it is not desired as well.

https://www.nytimes.com/svc/oembed/html/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2020%2F07%2F11%2Fworld%2Fasia%2Fchina-iran-trade-military-deal.html

Washington's policy now consists of little more than frantically papering over cracks as they appear; its ability to direct the world is gone and its ability to influence it is deteriorating by the day as it becomes more and more intensely disliked, and everyone's enemy. Perversely, this brings war closer as a possibility, as threats of it are no longer an effective deterrent to partnerships and exchanges the USA does not like. More and more of those threatened are taking the attitude of "Put up or shut up". Trade deals outside Washington's influence increase those countries' insulation against US sanctions, and perhaps it is beginning to dawn on the western banking cartel that it is in imminent danger of being isolated itself, like a fleck of grit that irritates an oyster and finds itself encased in nacre.

ET AL July 13, 2020 at 9:22 am

SCMP: China hits back, sanctioning US officials and Congress members in response to Xinjiang ban
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3092945/china-hits-back-sanctioning-us-officials-response-uygur-ban

Beijing follows through on its promised retaliation for Washington's move to hold individuals to account

Senators Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio among those facing sanctions in latest tit-for-tat move
####

More at the link.

What springs to mind is that Groucho Marx quote: "I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member."

That the US sanctions China with an act named after a dodgy Russian book-keeper working for a thief is all kinds of wrong, but as we all know, the ends justify the means. Hamsters are happy.

[Jul 13, 2020] Evidence Casts New Doubts on Russian Doping Whistleblower

F irst Magnitsky then Roschenkov . What happened with Spiegel?
Jul 13, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

ET AL July 6, 2020 at 8:55 am

Via MoonofAlabma.org .

The Beagle: Evidence Casts New Doubts on Russian Doping Whistleblower
https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/evidence-casts-new-doubts-on-russian-doping-whistleblower-a-4bba2ee9-4ead-42fd-85d0-56bd87092c93

For five years, the sporting world has been gripped by Russian manipulation of the anti-doping system. Now new evidence suggests the whistleblower who went into a witness protection program during the scandal may not have been entirely truthful.

#####

What's the bet that the beagle will win prizes for 'reporting' like this and the previous 'discovery' that Bill Browder makes pork sandwiches in a pork shop made of pork? More importantly, wtf is up with this coming out now? Has the free, democratic and inquisitive German press suddenly grown a pair or have the authorities told them that they could 'go ahead.' Nothing that they have published is new and has been known about for a long time. Again, wtfof?

NICOLAAVERY July 6, 2020 at 11:23 am

There's currently several differences of opinion between US and WADA regarding what the US wants WADA to do in thr future and what their funding contribution will be: https://www.sportsintegrityinitiative.com/us-may-withhold-wada-funding-due-to-failure-to-reform/
Der Spiegel stuck its neck out re Browder in recent months too https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/spiegel-responds-to-browder-criticisms-of-magnitsky-story-a-1301716.html

ET AL July 6, 2020 at 11:52 am

Don't forget the Danes at Finans.dk !

https://www.thekomisarscoop.com/2020/01/danish-press-board-says-report-on-browder-lies-tax-evasion-is-true/

MARK CHAPMAN July 6, 2020 at 1:11 pm

Hi, Nicola! Great to see you again! It would be fairly easy to guess what the US wants WADA to do in future – mind your business where US athletes are concerned, or at a minimum accept American explanations for any irregularities you might find, and come down like a ton of bricks on the Russians and the Chinese, excluding them from pro sports to the degree that is possible.

NICOLAAVERY July 7, 2020 at 11:08 am

Shame isn't it, am not against WADA in principle but a biased WADA helps no one. Perhaps they want to privatise it

MARK CHAPMAN July 7, 2020 at 8:17 pm

I wish they would get it out of Canada. I find it embarrassing.

MARK CHAPMAN July 6, 2020 at 12:37 pm

Well, once again, it was the Germans who started it all. WADA went to German station ARD with its suspicions – which it got from the Stepanovs, Rodchenkov was still defending the Moscow lab and calling the WADA panel 'fools' at that point – and then WADA used the ARD 'documentary' as an excuse to open a major investigation. At some juncture someone probably pointed out how lucrative it could be fr Roschenkov if he rolled, and he did.

Yes, I'm sure the Germans will reap rewards from playing both ends. But who cares, as long as it gets out? Maybe it will teach people to not be so trusting of the mess media next time it breaks a Russia-the-Evil story. Probably not, though.


[Jul 13, 2020] How to Make a Brick from Straw and Bullshit. The New Kremlin Stooge

Jul 13, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

I have to confess, I'm having a hard time getting past the headline. There's so MOSCOW BLOG: Kremlin ready to roll out the red carpet for Bojo's flying circus much about it that screams of a policy flak who knows how to present things as facts when they are anything but, and lead you into the piece already believing that (a) Britain has been the victim of more than one attack by Russia, (b) that a country supposedly friendless, without allies and with its economy reeling and staggering from punishing sanctions still somehow has sufficient power to not only grip Europe, but to squeeze it until it squeaks, and (c) Britain can do something about it.

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Well, let's look; if Mr. Straw is totally unconcerned about potential embarrassment. there's nothing holding us back, is there? As we have often done before, let's look at each of the 'attacks' Russia is supposed to have visited upon Britain. Ready? Litvinenko.

Litvinenko is supposed to have ingested Polonium 210 – a uniquely Russian isotope, although the United States buys enough Polonium from Russia nearly every month to have killed Litvinenko about 8,000 times – which was slipped to him by two Russian agents in the Pine Bar in London. Polonium traces were subsequently found all over London, including on documents Litvinenko had touched, a Fax machine at fellow collaborator Boris Berzovsky's house, and in a cab in which Litvinenko had ridden, which was so toxic thereafter that it had to be withdrawn from service. The problem with that is that neither of Litvinenko's accused murderers was with him in the cab, or touched the documents he handled but Litvinenko never touched Polonium with his hands. He swallowed it, in tea, and once inside him it could not contaminate anything else unless Litvinenko licked it, because Polonium – despite its toxicity – is a low-alpha isotope which cannot penetrate skin. Litvinenko was, remarkably, covered from head to toe in skin.

Litvinenko produced a passionately and eloquently-written deathbed accusation which tabbed Vladimir Putin as his murderer, because he – Litvinenko – 'knew too much', including Putin's secret pedophilia, evidence of which was the subject of KGB videotapes made while Putin was a student, although the first personal video recorder (the Sony Betamax) was not introduced until the year Putin graduated. Litvinenko himself could barely order a cup of coffee in English, but that puzzle was solved when Alexander Goldfarb – a former nuclear scientist in Russia and a close confidante of Boris Berezovsky – stepped up to say that Litvinenko had 'dictated it to him'. Just as an interesting aside, Litvinenko had bragged to his brother how he had lied to British authorities before in the case of a supposed murder attempt against Boris Berezovsky by the Russian state, using a poisoned pen. This fake murder plot was successfully used by Berzovsky to argue against deportation from Great Britain.

Anyway, we don't want to go on and on about Litvinenko – how believable is the British tale of his assassination by the Russian state? Polonium traces all over London in places the alleged assassins had never visited could not have been left by Litvinenko, because he never touched Polonium with his hands, and it cannot penetrate skin. Polonium was not discovered in his urine until after he was dead. We will never know if radiation poisoning made his hair fall out, because his head was shaved by one of Berezovsky's dissident Chechen sidekicks. Berezovsky himself also turned up dead in England, after losing a major legal case, having supposedly hung himself with his tie inside a locked bathroom at his home. Coincidentally, Polonium as a murder weapon led straight back to Russia (if we assume we did not know about the American purchases of Polonium, which had the added cachet of bearing the telltale signature of having been made in a Russian nuclear reactor), and would have been a breathtakingly stupid choice for a Russian assassin. Still, they almost got away with it – British doctors were totally on the wrong track, and the alleged assassins had already left the country, when an 'anonymous tipster' (*cough* Goldfarb *cough*) suggested they check for Polonium 210.

The Skripals – yes, 'pon my word, old chap; what a nefarious example of Russian ruthlessness. Probably ordered straight from the top, by Vladimir Putin himself – "Will no one rid me of this troublesome has-been KGB agent who has been out of Russia since 2010: would that I had snuffed him then, instead of trading him to the UK in a spy swap!" Yes, I know, already stupid, but it gets so much more unbelievable . Once again, a distinctively Russian murder weapon; Novichok, a nerve agent manufactured from commercially-available fertilizers and organophosphates. The helpful BBC miniseries Mr. Straw speaks of was an exercise in retconning – retroactive connectivity, an after-the-fact fix which explains what was unexplainable in previous versions. For instance, the co-poisoning of Detective Nick Bailey, so ill he was nigh unto death. Originally the story was that he was contaminated because he was one of the first responders, when the Skripals were jerking and drooling on a public bench near the restaurant where they had just eaten, in Salisbury. But the first passer-by, who helpfully attended them, just happened to be none other than the senior medical officer in the British Army, and she was in no way affected although she wore no protection than perhaps rubber gloves. Nick Bailey also wore gloves, because it was cold. The next version had him entering the Skripal home – where he was contaminated – via the back door. But the assassins had unhelpfully smeared the poison on the front doorknob. Shit! So, unable to bring the assassins and the Skripals and Nick Bailey all together at the same doorknob within the same period of lethality, the story was changed again. Bailey had actually nipped next door, borrowed the spare key – the existence of which was completely unknown to anyone prior to the television broadcast – from a neighbour, and entered by the front door, where he became contaminated. It was touch and go there for awhile, but he went home 18 days later, none the worse for his brush with one of the deadliest nerve agents known to man. A nerve agent which, incidentally, was not known to the elimination of other possibilities to have killed anyone. Dawn Sturgess died later, in Amesbury, after spraying pure Novichok on her wrists from a fake perfume bottle, we are told. But Dawn Sturgess was a known drug addict, Novichok as an aerosol spray would have taken effect within seconds but she was not stricken for hours, and the medium of infection was not discovered until three days after her death, sitting conspicuously on Charles Rowley's kitchen counter, although the house had already been searched. Perfectly intact and waiting to be discovered, although Charles Rowley's brother reported that the bottle had broken in his brother's hands as Sturgess handed it back to him, which was how he became contaminated. Another insultingly full-of-bullshit story that would not survive press scrutiny for an hour if it had been Russia reporting a poisoning by British agents in Russia.

Well, I spent a lot longer on that than I meant to; let's move on. Suffice it to say that while there indeed is 'overwhelming evidence' in both cases as Mr. Straw avers, it argues strongly that Britain made up both scenarios, and not very competently, while there is actually zero evidence that Russia had anything to do with either except for the screaming 'made in Russia' agents used, which Russian assassins would be beyond foolish to have chosen for that very reason. Would it make sense for a British assassin in Moscow to bump off a former double agent by caving in his skull with a King Dick claw hammer , and then leave it at the scene? Do international test scores suggest an otherworldly degree of reasoning ability on the part of Britons, while Russians are abysmally stupid by comparison? Not that I have ever seen.

Straw claims an 'ever-present threat of Russia's efforts to destabilise the UK and European Union.' Is there anything more destabilizing between the two than Brexit ? Whose idea was that – Putin's?

Mr. Straw claims Russia's alleged belligerence results from insecurity, a feeling of weakness and is a function of how many more times Russia's defense budget other countries and alliances spend. How do you figure? The best fighter aircraft the USA can come up with, for more than $80 Million a copy , is the F-35. The F-35 was unable to defeat previous-generation aircraft from its own armed forces. The Sukhoi S-35 costs less than half as much, and while western sites which match the two grant all sorts of 'excitement points' to the F-35 for its technology and Beyond-Visual-Range (BVR) performance, the SU-35 is more maneuverable, has a higher rate of climb, more thrust, has double the speed, and while the F-35's BVR performance is rated much better, its engagement range with its embarked missile is only a bit better than half the SU-35's.

"However, despite high spending on its military, it is no match for the US, which spends 12 times as much, nor China, which spends four times its budget. Russia's population is declining, and its GDP per head is just 50th in the world. It feels isolated, surrounded by potentially hostile forces, and weak."

JENNIFER HOR July 6, 2020 at 2:26 am

I was led to believe by some other online sites (the names of which I've now forgotten) that Sergei Skripal's neighbour, from whom Detective Nick Bailey must have borrowed the spare key 'coz who else could have held it, was none other than Pablo Miller. I'd have thought the D-notice imposed on British media compelling them never to refer to him back in March 2018 was still current. How would the BBC or those Guardian journos who wrote the script for the recent TV series have avoided referring to him when the detective was trying to locate a spare key? I admit I haven't seen the TV series yet and from what I've seen and heard about it so far, it's not worth a look.

Thanks for the new post, Mark, and for making it as detailed and riveting as ever.

ET AL July 6, 2020 at 3:04 am

The D-Notice system (DSMA?) technically only requires voluntary compliance but curiously all the British media consistently go along with it Ho! Ho! Ho!

..Any D-Notices or DA-notices are only advisory requests and are not legally enforceable; hence, news editors can choose not to abide by them. However, they are generally complied with by the media

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DSMA-Notice

MARK CHAPMAN July 6, 2020 at 8:38 am

Thanks, Jennifer; I didn't really have to do much – Moscow Exile was kind and psychic enough to print out Straw's whole editorial, else I might have had to subscribe to The Independent to even see it. *Shudder*. And Straw just opened his head and let the bullshit flow – I only had to redirect the stream a little here and there.

I don't think Miller was the neighbour, I seem to remember a different name nope, that was Ross Cassidy, who was cited by John Helmer as perhaps the only person Skripal trusted enough to have left a key with him, but he didn't live next door. Pablo Miller does indeed also live in Salisbury, but I have seen no mention of where,

https://www.theblogmire.com/joining-some-dots-on-the-skripal-case-part-2-four-invisible-clues/

Pablo Miller, Mark Urban and Hamish de Bretton-Gordon all served in the same tank regiment in the British Army. I have seen one other source – can't remember where now – that claimed Christopher Steele also served in the same regiment, but that's not true – he was recruited straight out of Cambridge at graduation, by MI6, and worked for them for 22 years. That's not to say there were not connections, though – Steele was also Case Officer for Litvinenko, and was allegedly the first to assess that Litvinenko's death was 'a Russian state hit'.

"Over a career that spanned more than 20 years, Steele performed a series of roles, but always appeared to be drawn back to Russia; he was, sources say, head of MI6's Russia desk. When the agency was plunged into panic over the poisoning of its agent Alexander Litvinenko in 2006, the then chief, Sir John Scarlett, needed a trusted senior officer to plot a way through the minefield ahead – so he turned to Steele. It was Steele, sources say, who correctly and quickly realised that Litvinenko's death was a Russian state "hit"."

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jan/12/intelligence-sources-vouch-credibility-donald-trump-russia-dossier-author

You'll enjoy that piece by The Grauniad – it goes on and on about how first-rate credible Steele was, and how the quality of his work is above reproach. His legendary 'dossier', obviously, has since fallen apart and been dismissed as fanciful disinformation.

CORTES July 6, 2020 at 12:20 pm

The spare key was found in the usual place: inside the cane rod of the little angling garden gnome modelled on His Imperial Majesty Tsar Nicholas II, stood by that awkward entrance to the back porch. No need for nosy neighbours. (I added this detail for inclusion in Version 4 of The Skripals, due out in January 2021.)

Thanks again, Mark.

[Jul 13, 2020] The Danish Energy Agency (DEA) has announced a deadline after which it will be possible to begin work on completing the Russian Nord Stream-2 gas export pipeline

Jul 13, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

MOSCOWEXILE July 6, 2020 at 8:05 am

The Danish Energy Agency (DEA) has announced a deadline after which it will be possible to begin work on completing the Russian Nord Stream-2 gas export pipeline, RIA Novosti reported with reference to the regulator's statement.

https://yandex.ru/turbo/s/lenta.ru/news/2020/07/06/restart/?promo=navbar&utm_referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fzen.yandex.c

Over to you Uncle Sam!

MOSCOWEXILE July 6, 2020 at 10:52 pm

Apart from this below, I have found nothing in the UK and German media about Denmark's giving the go-ahead for the final stage of NS2 construction:

NATURAL GAS 06 Jul 2020 | 09:44 UTC London
Denmark approves use of ships with anchors to lay Nord Stream 2 gas link

https://www.spglobal.com/platts/en/market-insights/latest-news/natural-gas/070620-denmark-approves-use-of-ships-with-anchors-to-lay-nord-stream-2-gas-link

I wonder why?

If you search through the web, you find reports in the Western media about Denmark giving its approval in 2019. It reneged on that decision. . But nothing on the Danish decision the other day.

Because the USA must never appear as a "loser".?

[Jul 13, 2020] Here's a great must-see 36-minute piece by Abby Martin about the US perpetual occupation of Afghanistan.

Jul 13, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Canadian Cents , Jul 13 2020 0:04 utc | 115

Here's a great must-see 36-minute piece by Abby Martin about the US perpetual occupation of Afghanistan.

It was posted on YouTube on June 26, but I only came across it last night thanks to a Paul Craig Roberts article, and I don't think it's been mentioned here at MoA yet by anyone yet (at least I wasn't able to find any mentions using the MoA search.)

I'm sure many of us have come across many of the points over the years, but she does a great job of reviewing and bringing it all together.

Afghanistan War Exposed: An Imperial Conspiracy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3LFbOSPfrE

Google/Youtube has of course made the video "age-restricted", though I don't really see why, requiring sign-in and probably greatly reducing its viewership as a result.

This alternate link to the same video doesn't seem to require sign-in:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/C3LFbOSPfrE

[Jul 13, 2020] Then the Englanders bombed the great porcelain treasure house in Dresden in 1945 and the world heritage was vaporised. Read Edmund de Waal The White Road

Jul 13, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Cyril , Jul 13 2020 3:01 utc | 142

@uncle tungsten | Jul 12 2020 23:16 utc | 112

Then the Englanders bombed the great porcelain treasure house in Dresden in 1945 and the world heritage was vaporised. Read Edmund de Waal The White Road

I didn't know about the porcelain repository in Dresden. Thanks.


@uncle tungsten | Jul 12 2020 23:24 utc | 113

And then some oriental gave [the Europeans] the fork and saved them to colonise the world. So it goes.

I guess it's really true that no good deed goes unpunished.

[Jul 11, 2020] UPRISING- Trump, Tulsa the Rise of Military Dissent by Danny Sjursen

Jul 11, 2020 | consortiumnews.com

Danny Sjursen goes undercover in Trumplandia and comes back with this reflection on the U.S. president's loss of loyalty among soldiers and veterans.

...As both the Covid-19 crisis and the militarization of the police in the streets of American cities have made clear, the imperial power that we veterans fought for abroad is the same one some of us are now struggling against at home and the two couldn't be more intimately linked. Our struggle is, at least in part, over who gets to define patriotism.

Should the sudden wave of military and veteran dissent keep rising, it will invariably crash against the pageantry patriots of Chickenhawk America who attended that Tulsa rally and we'll all face a new and critical theater in this nation's culture wars. I don't pretend to know whether such protests will last or military dissent will augur real change of any sort. What I do know is what my favorite rock star, Bruce Springsteen, used to repeat before live renditions of his song "Born to Run":

William H Warrick MD , July 10, 2020 at 13:21

oBOMBa destroyed the Anti-War Movement. When he got in the White House all of them began going to Brunch instead of Peace/Anti-War marches.

[Jul 11, 2020] Pablo Miller, Mark Urban and Hamish de Bretton-Gordon all served in the same tank regiment in the British Army

Jul 11, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

MARK CHAPMAN July 6, 2020 at 8:38 am

Thanks, Jennifer; I didn't really have to do much – Moscow Exile was kind and psychic enough to print out Straw's whole editorial, else I might have had to subscribe to The Independent to even see it. *Shudder*. And Straw just opened his head and let the bullshit flow – I only had to redirect the stream a little here and there.

I don't think Miller was the neighbour, I seem to remember a different name nope, that was Ross Cassidy, who was cited by John Helmer as perhaps the only person Skripal trusted enough to have left a key with him, but he didn't live next door. Pablo Miller does indeed also live in Salisbury, but I have seen no mention of where,

https://www.theblogmire.com/joining-some-dots-on-the-skripal-case-part-2-four-invisible-clues/

Pablo Miller, Mark Urban and Hamish de Bretton-Gordon all served in the same tank regiment in the British Army. I have seen one other source – can't remember where now – that claimed Christopher Steele also served in the same regiment, but that's not true – he was recruited straight out of Cambridge at graduation, by MI6, and worked for them for 22 years. That's not to say there were not connections, though – Steele was also Case Officer for Litvinenko, and was allegedly the first to assess that Litvinenko's death was 'a Russian state hit'.

"Over a career that spanned more than 20 years, Steele performed a series of roles, but always appeared to be drawn back to Russia; he was, sources say, head of MI6's Russia desk. When the agency was plunged into panic over the poisoning of its agent Alexander Litvinenko in 2006, the then chief, Sir John Scarlett, needed a trusted senior officer to plot a way through the minefield ahead – so he turned to Steele. It was Steele, sources say, who correctly and quickly realised that Litvinenko's death was a Russian state "hit"."

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jan/12/intelligence-sources-vouch-credibility-donald-trump-russia-dossier-author

You'll enjoy that piece by The Grauniad – it goes on and on about how first-rate credible Steele was, and how the quality of his work is above reproach. His legendary 'dossier', obviously, has since fallen apart and been dismissed as fanciful disinformation.

[Jul 11, 2020] Mutiny on the Bounties by Ray McGovern

Jul 03, 2020 | consortiumnews.com

Has there been another mutiny in Trump's White House, as Obama's former ambassador to Russia piles on the nonsense about Trump being in Putin's pocket?


Special to Consortium News

C orporate media are binging on leaked Kool Aid not unlike the WMD concoction they offered 18 years ago to "justify" the U.S.-UK war of aggression on Iraq.

Now Michael McFaul, ambassador to Russia under President Obama, has been enlisted by The Washington Post 's editorial page honcho, Fred Hiatt, to draw on his expertise (read, incurable Russophobia) to help stick President Donald Trump back into "Putin's pocket." (This has become increasingly urgent as the canard of "Russiagate" -- including the linchpin claim that Russia hacked the DNC -- lies gasping for air.)

In an oped on Thursday McFaul presented a long list of Vladimir Putin's alleged crimes, offering a more ostensibly sophisticated version of amateur Russian specialist, Rep. Jason Crow's (D-CO) claim that: "Vladimir Putin wakes up every morning and goes to bed every night trying to figure out how to destroy American democracy."

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry with McFaul meeting Vladimir Putin and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in Moscow, Russia, on May 7, 2013. (State Department)

McFaul had -- well, let's call it an undistinguished career in Moscow. He arrived with a huge chip on his shoulder and proceeded to alienate just about all his hosts, save for the rabidly anti-Putin folks he openly and proudly cultivated. In a sense, McFaul became the epitome of what Henry Wooton described as the role of ambassador -- "an honest man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country." What should not be so readily accepted is an ambassador who comes back home and just can't stop misleading.

Not to doubt McFaul's ulterior motives; one must assume him to be an "honest man" -- however misguided, in my opinion. He seems to be a disciple of the James Clapper-Curtis LeMay-Joe McCarthy School of Russian Analysis.

Clapper, a graduate summa cum laude , certainly had the Russians pegged! Clapper was allowed to stay as Barack Obama's director of national intelligence for three and a half years after perjuring himself in formal Senate testimony (on NSA's illegal eavesdropping). On May 28, 2017 Clapper told NBC's Chuck Todd about "the historical practices of the Russians, who typically, are almost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor, whatever, which is a typical Russian technique."

https://www.youtube.com/embed/tcN_tWk089w?feature=oembed

As a finale, in full knowledge of Clapper's proclivities regarding Russia, Obama appointed him to prepare the evidence-impoverished, misnomered "Intelligence Community Assessment" claiming that Putin did all he could, including hacking the DNC, to help Trump get elected -- the most embarrassing such "intelligence assessment" I have seen in half a century .

Obama and the National Security State

I have asked myself if Obama also had earned some kind of degree from the Clapper/LeMay/McCarthy School, or whether he simply lacked the courage to challenge the pitiably self-serving "analysis" of the National Security State. Then I re-read "Obama Misses the Afghan Exit-Ramp" of June 24, 2010 and was reminded of how deferential Obama was to the generals and the intelligence gurus, and how unconscionable the generals were -- like their predecessors in Vietnam -- in lying about always seeing light at the end of the proverbial tunnel.

Thankfully, now ten years later, this is all documented in Craig Whitlock's, "The Afghanistan Papers: At War With the Truth." Corporate media, who played an essential role in that "war with the truth", have not given Whitlock's damning story the attention it should command (surprise, surprise!). In any case, it strains credulity to think that Obama was unaware he was being lied to on Afghanistan.

Some Questions

Clark Gable (l.) with Charles Laughton (r.) in Mutiny on the Bounty, 1935.

Does no one see the irony today in the Democrats' bashing Trump on Afghanistan, with the full support of the Establishment media? The inevitable defeat there is one of the few demonstrable disasters not attributable directly to Trump, but you would not know that from the media. Are the uncorroborated reports of Russian bounties to kill U.S. troops aimed at making it appear that Trump, unable to stand up to Putin, let the Russians drive the rest of U.S. troops out of Afghanistan?

Does the current flap bespeak some kind of "Mutiny on the Bounties," so to speak, by a leaker aping Eric Chiaramella? Recall that the Democrats lionized the CIA official seconded to Trump's national security council as a "whistleblower" and proceeded to impeach Trump after Chiaramella leaked information on Trump's telephone call with the president of Ukraine. Far from being held to account, Chiaramella is probably expecting an influential job if his patron, Joe Biden, is elected president. Has there been another mutiny in Trump's White House?

And what does one make of the spectacle of Crow teaming up with Rep. Liz Cheney (R, WY) to restrict Trump's planned pull-out of troops from Afghanistan, which The Los Angeles Times reports has now been blocked until after the election?

Hiatt & McFaul: Caveat Editor

And who published McFaul's oped? Fred Hiatt, Washington Post editorial page editor for the past 20 years, who has a long record of listening to the whispers of anonymous intelligence sources and submerging/drowning the subjunctive mood with flat fact. This was the case with the (non-existent) weapons of mass destruction in Iraq before the U.S.-UK attack. Readers of the Post were sure there were tons of WMD in Iraq. That Hiatt has invited McFaul on stage should come as no surprise.

To be fair, Hiatt belatedly acknowledged that the Post should have been more circumspect in its confident claims about the WMD. "If you look at the editorials we write running up [to the war], we state as flat fact that he [Saddam Hussein] has weapons of mass destruction," Hiatt said in an interview with the Columbia Journalism Review . "If that's not true, it would have been better not to say it." [CJR, March/April 2004]

At this word of wisdom, Consortium News founder, the late Robert Parry, offered this comment: "Yes, that is a common principle of journalism, that if something isn't real, we're not supposed to confidently declare that it is." That Hiatt is still in that job speaks volumes.

'Uncorroborated, Contradicted, or Even Non-Existent'

It is sad to have to remind folks 18 years later that the "intelligence" on WMD in Iraq was not "mistaken;" it was fraudulent from the get-go. The culprits were finally exposed but never held to account.

Announcing on June 5, 2008, the bipartisan conclusions from a five-year study by the Senate Intelligence Committee, Sen. Jay Rockefeller ( D-WV) said the attack on Iraq was launched "under false pretenses." He described the intelligence conjured up to "justify" war on Iraq as "uncorroborated, contradicted, or even non-existent."

Homework

Yogi Berra in 1956. (Wikipedia)

Here's an assignment due on Monday. Read McFaul's oped carefully. It appears under the title: "Trump would do anything for Putin. No wonder he's ignoring the Russian bounties: Russia's pattern of hostility matches Trump's pattern of accommodation."

And to give you a further taste, here is the first paragraph:

"Russian President Vladimir Putin appears to have paid Taliban rebels in Afghanistan to kill U.S. soldiers. Having resulted in at least one American death, and maybe more, these Russian bounties reportedly produced the desired outcome. While deeply disturbing, this effort by Putin is not surprising: It follows a clear pattern of ignoring international norms, rules and laws -- and daring the United States to do anything about it."

Full assignment for Monday: Read carefully through each paragraph of McFaul's text and select which of his claims you would put into one or more of the three categories adduced by Sen. Rockefeller 12 years ago about WMD on Iraq. With particular attention to the evidence behind McFaul's claims, determine which of the claims is (a) "uncorroborated"; which (b) "contradicted"; and which (c) "non-existent;" or (d) all of the above. For extra credit, find one that is supported by plausible evidence.

Yogi Berra might be surprised to hear us keep quoting him with "Deja vu, all over again." Sorry, Yogi, that's what it is; you coined it.

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. During his 27-year career as a CIA analyst, he prepared and briefed The President's Daily Brief for Presidents Nixon, Ford, and Reagan. He is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.

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Tags: Clark Gabel Curtis LeMay Donald Trump Eric Chiaramella Henry Wooton James Clapper Joe Biden Joe McCarthy Michael McFaul Ray McGovern Vladimir Putin Yogi Berra

Tarus77 , July 6, 2020 at 14:25

Gad, one wonders if it can ever get much lower in the press and the answer is yes, it can and will go lower, i.e. the mcfaul/hiatt tag team. They are still plumbing for the lows.

The question becomes just how stupid these two are or how stupid do they believe the readership is to read and believe this garbage.

Voice from Europe , July 6, 2020 at 11:58

By now the Russia did it ! is in effect a joke in Russia. Economically, politically, geo strategically China and Asia and Africa have become more important and reliable partners of Russia than the USA. And Europe is also dropping fast on the trustworthy partners list…..

John , July 5, 2020 at 12:55

Michael McFaul and Fred Hiatt are both long-time members of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), flagship of the globalist “liberal world order”. The CFR and its many interlocking affiliates, along with their media assets and frontmen in government, have dominated US policy since WW2. Most of the Fed chairmen and secretaries of State, Treasury, Defense and CIA have been CFR members, including Jerome Powell and Mark Esper.

The major finance, energy, defense and media corporations are CFR sponsors, and several of their execs are members. David Rubenstein, billionaire founder of the notorious Carlyle Group, is the current CFR chairman. Laurence Fink, billionaire chairman of BlackRock, is a CFR director. See lists at the CFR website.

Anna , July 6, 2020 at 09:38

Michael McFaul and Fred Hiatt are both very active promoters of hate crimes. Neither has any decency hence decency is allergic to war profiteers and opportunistic liars.
The poor USA; to descend to such a deep moral hole that both Michael McFaul and Fred Hiatt are still alive and prospering. Shamelessness and presstituting are paid well in the US.

Juan M Escobedo , July 5, 2020 at 11:35

Dems and Reps are already mad.You cannot destroy what does not exist;like Democracy in these United States.Nor God or Putin could.This has always being a fallacy.This is not a democracy;same thing with”comunist China or the USSR.Those two were never socialist.There has never being a real Socialist or Communist country.

Guy , July 4, 2020 at 12:26

“It is sad to have to remind folks 18 years later that the “intelligence” on WMD in Iraq was not “mistaken;” it was fraudulent from the get-go. The culprits were finally exposed but never held to account.”
That statement goes to the crux of the matter .Why should journalists care about what is true or a lie in their reports ,they know they will never be held to account .They should be held to account through the court system . A lie by any journalist should be actionable by any court of law . The fear of jail time would sort out the scam journalists we presently have to endure . As it is they have perverted the profession of journalism and it is the law of the jungle .No true democracy should put up with this. We are surrounded with lies that are generated by the very establishment that should protect it’s citizens from same .

Skip Scott , July 4, 2020 at 15:36

They are spoon fed those lies by our “intelligence” agencies. As CNN’s Jeff Zucker said, “We’re not investigators, we’re journalists”.
Replace “journalists” with “toadies” or “shills” for our “intelligence” community and you’ve gotten to the truth of the matter.

Anna , July 6, 2020 at 09:50

The ‘journalists’ observe how things have been going on for Cheney the Traitor and Bush the lesser — nothing happened to the mega criminals. The hate-bursting and war-profiteering Cheney’s daughter has even squeezed into US Congress.
In a healthy society where human dignity is cherished, the Cheney family will be ostracized and the family name became a synonym for the word ‘traitor.’ In the unhealthy scoiety of Clintons, Obamas, Epstein, Mueller, Adelsons, Clapper, and Krystols, human dignity is a sin.

Ricard Coleman , July 6, 2020 at 11:42

Our institutions including journalism are not merely corrupt, they are degenerate. That is, the corruption is not occasional or the exception is is by design, desired and entirely normal.

Stan W. , July 4, 2020 at 12:10

I’m still confident that Durham’s investigation will expose and successfully prosecute the maggots that infest our government.

Skip Scott , July 4, 2020 at 15:29

What is the basis for this confidence?

John Puma , July 4, 2020 at 12:03

Re: whether Obumma “had earned some kind of degree from the Clapper/LeMay/McCarthy School” of Russia Analytics.

It would be a worthy addition to his degree collection featuring that earned from the Neville Chamberlain Night School of Critical Political Negotiation.

Jeff Harrison , July 4, 2020 at 11:16

Hmmm. Lessee. The US attacks Afghanistan with about the same legitimacy that we had when we attacked Iraq and the Taliban are in charge. We oust the Taliban from power and put our own puppets in place. What idiot thinks that the Taliban are going to need a bounty to kill Americans?

Wendy LaRiviere , July 4, 2020 at 18:29

Jeff Harrison, I like your logic. Plus, I understand that far fewer Americans are being killed in Afghanistan than were under Obama’s administration.

AnneR , July 4, 2020 at 10:27

Frankly, I am sick to death of the unwarranted, indeed bestial Russophobia that is megaphoned minute by minute on NPR and the BBC World Service (only radio here since my husband died). If it isn’t this latest trumped up (ho ho) charge, there are repeated mentions, in passing, of course, of the Russiagate, hacking, Kremlin control of the Strumpet to back up the latest bunch of lies. Doesn’t matter at *all* that Russiagate was debunked, that even Mueller couldn’t actually demonstrably pull the DNC/ruling elites rabbit out of the hat, that the impeachment of the Strumpet went nowhere. And it clearly – by its total absence on the above radio broadcasts – doesn’t matter one iota that the Pentagonal hasn’t gone along, that gaping holes in the confabulation are (and were) obvious to those who cared to think with half a mind awake and reflecting on past US ruling elite lies, untruths, obfuscations. Nope. Just repeat, repeat, repeat. Orwell would clap his hands (not because he agreed with the atrocious politics but the lesson is learnt).

Added to the whipped up anti-Russia, decidedly anti-Putin crapola – is of course the Russian peoples’ vote, decision making on their own country’s changes to the Basic Law (a form of Constitution). When the radio broadcasts the usual sickening anti-Russian/Putin propaganda regarding this vote immediately prior they would state that the changes would install Putin for many more years: no mention that he would have to be elected, i.e. voted by the populace into the presidency. (This was repeated ad infinitum without any elaboration.) No other proposed changes were mentioned – certainly not that the Duma would gain greater control over the governance of the country and over the president’s cabinet. I.e. that the popularly elected (ain’t that what we call democracy??) representatives in the Duma (parliament) would essentially have more power than the president.

But most significantly, to my mind, no one has (well of course not – this is Russia) raised the issue of the fact that it was the Russian people, the vox populi/hoi polloi, who have had some say in how they are to be governed, how their government will work for them. HOW much say have we had/do we have in how our government functions, works – let alone for us, the hoi polloi? When did we the citizenry last have a voting say on ANY sentence in the Constitution that governs us??? Ummm I do believe it was the creation of the wealthy British descended slave holding, real estate ethnic-cleansing lot who wrote and ratified the original document and the hardly dissimilar Congressional and state types who have over the years written and voted on various amendments. And it is the members of the upper classes in the Supreme Court who adjudicate on its application to various problems.

BUT We the hoi polloi have never, ever had a direct opportunity to individually vote for or against any single part of the Constitution which is supposed to be the “democratic” superstructure which governs us. Unlike the Russians a couple of days ago.

Richard Coleman , July 6, 2020 at 15:48

“HOW much say have we had/do we have in how our government functions, works…” See, that’s your mistake right there. WE don’t have a government. We need one, but we ain’t got one. THEY have a government which they let us go through the motions of electing. ‘Member back when Bernie was talking about a Political Revolution?

Here’s a little fact for you. The five most populous states have a total of 123,000,000 people. That’s 10 Senators. The five least populated states have a total of 3.5 million. That’s also 10 Senators. Democracy anyone?

vinnieoh , July 4, 2020 at 09:37

There have been three coup d’état within the US within the lifetimes of most that read these pages. The first was explained to us by Eisenhower only as he was exiting his time from the national stage; the MIC had co-opted our government. The second happened in 2000, with the putsch in Florida and then the adoption by the neocon cabal of Bush /Chaney of the PNAC blueprint “Strategies for Rebuilding America’s Defenses” (Defenses – hahahaha – shit!). The third happened late last year and early this year when the bottom-up grass-roots movement of progressivism was crushed by the DNC and the cold-warrior hack Biden was inserted as the champion of “the opposition party.”

And, make no mistake that Kamala Harris WILL be his running mate. It was always going to be Harris. It was to be Harris at the TOP of the ticket as the primaries began, but she wasn’t even placing in the top tier in any of the contests. However, the poohbahs and strategists of the DNC are nothing if not determined and consistent. If Biden should win, we should all start practicing now saying “President Harris” because that is what the future holds. For the DNC, she looks the part, she sounds the part, but more importantly she is the very definition of the status quo, corporate ass-kisser, MIC tool.

The professional political class have fully colluded to fatally cripple this democratic republic. “Democracy” is just a word they say like, “Where’s my kickback?” (excuse me – my “motivation”.) This bounty scam and the rehabilitation of GW Bush are nothing but a full blitzkrieg flanking of Trump on the right. And Trump of course is so far out of his depth that he actually believes that Israel is his friend. (A hint Donny: Israel is NO-ONE’S friend.)

What is most infuriating? hope-crushing? plain f$%&*#g scary? is that the majority of Americans from all quarters do not want any of what the professional political class keeps dumping on us. The very attempt at performing this upcoming election will finally and forever lay completely bare the collapse of a functioning government. It’s going to be very ugly, and it may very well be the end. Dog help us all.

Richard Coleman , July 6, 2020 at 15:51

Don’t you think that the assassination of JFK counts as a coup d’etat?

Zhu , July 7, 2020 at 02:10

Apres moi, le Deluge.

John Drake , July 7, 2020 at 11:25

Oh gosh how can you forget the Kennedy Assassination. Most people don’t realize he was had ordered the removal of a thousand advisors from Vietnam starting the process of completely cutting bait there, as he had in Laos and Cambodia. All of which made the generals apoplectic. The great secret about Vietnam-which Ellsberg discovered much latter, and mentioned in his book Secrets, another good read- was that every president had been warned it was likely futile. Kennedy was the only one who took that intelligence seriously-like it was actually intelligent intelligence.

Enter stage right Allen Dulles(fired CIA chief), the anti Castro Cubans, the Mafia and most important the MIC; exit Jack Kennedy.

Douglas, JFK why he died and why it matters is the best work on the subject. And no Oswald did not do it; it was a sniper team from different angles, but read the book it gets complicated.

Roger , July 4, 2020 at 09:11

from Counterpunch.org : “Around 15,000 Soviet troops perished in the Afghan War between 1979 and 1989. The US funneled more than $20 billion to the Mujahideen and other anti-Soviet fighters over that same period. This works out to a “bounty” of $1.33 million for each Soviet soldier killed.”

Skip Scott , July 4, 2020 at 08:35

I am wondering how Cheney and Crow can block Trump from withdrawing the troops from Afghanistan. Is Trump Commander in Chief, or not? How can two senators stop the Commander in Chief from commanding troop movements? I realize they control the budget, but aren’t they crossing into illegality by restricting Trump’s ability to “command”?

Toad Sprocket , July 4, 2020 at 16:49

Yeah, I imagine it’s illegal. Didn’t Lindsay Graham threaten the same thing when Trump was thinking of pulling troops/”advisers” from Syria? And other congress warmongers joined in though I don’t think any legislation was passed. They can’t be bothered to authorize the starts of wars but want to step in when someone tries to end them.

Oh, and Schumer on South Korea troops, I think that one did pass. Almost certainly illegal if it came down to it, but our government is of course lawless. And our courts full of judges who are bought off or moronic or both.

dean 1000 , July 4, 2020 at 06:52

The soft coup attempt continues Ray. More lies and bullshit. It may continue until election day. Will the media fess-up to its lies after the fact again?

Francis Lee , July 4, 2020 at 04:49

“Vladimir Putin wakes up every morning and goes to bed every night trying to figure out how to destroy American democracy.”

Yes, of course it is a well-known ‘fact’ that Putin has nothing better to do than destory American democracy, and I bet he has dreams about it too! But I am minded to think that if anybody has a penchant for destroying American democracy it is the powers that be in the US deep state, intelligence agencies, and zionist cliques controlling the President and Congress.

”Those whom the gods would destroy they first make mad.”

The American establishment seems to be suffering from a bad case of ‘projection’ as psychiatrists call it. That is to say accusing others of what they are themselves actually doing.

The whole idiotic circus would be hilarious if it were not so serious.

Antonia Young , July 4, 2020 at 12:20

Putin’s (and by extension the Russian Federation’s) primary objective is international stability. “Destroying America, dividing Americans is the last thing he wants.) Putin learned many lessons during the break-up of the U.S.S.R. observing the carpet baggers/oligarchs/vultures who descended on the weak nation, absconding with it’s wealth and resources at mere fractions of their real value. The deep state’s worst fear is the co-operation btwn Putin and President Trump to make the world more peaceful, stable, co-operative and prosperous.

rosemerry , July 4, 2020 at 16:10

The whole conceited and arrogant “belief” that
1. the USA has any resemblance to a democracy and
2 Pres. Putin has nothing else to do but think how he could do a better job of showing the destructive and irresponsible behavior of the USA than its own leaders” and media can do with no help
has no basis in reality.

If anything, Putin is such a stickler for international law, negotiations, avoidance of conflict that he is regarded by many as too Christian for this modern, individualistic, LBGTQ,”nobody matters but me” worldview of the USA!

Steve Naidamast , July 5, 2020 at 19:54

“If the enemy is self destructing, let them continue to do so…”

Napoleon

Zhu , July 7, 2020 at 02:17

“zionist cliques”: Christian Zionist fighting Fundies, eager for the End of the World, the Second Coming of Jesus.

delia ruhe , July 4, 2020 at 01:09

Yup, we got a Bountygate. Since my early morning visit to the Foreign Policy site, the place has exploded with breathless articles on the dastardly Putin and the cowardly Trump, who has so far failed to hold Putin to account. Reminded me of a similar explosion there when Russiagate finally got the attention the Dems thought it deserved.

(Anyone think that the intel community pays a fee to each of the FP columnists whenever one of their a propaganda narratives needs a push to get it off the ground?)

JOHN CHUCKMAN , July 4, 2020 at 08:52

Udo Ulfkotte was a German journalist.

He wrote a sensational book about the practices he experienced of the CIA paying German journalists to publish certain stories.

The book was a big best seller in Germany.

Its English translation was suppressed for years, but I believe is now available.

Susan Siens , July 5, 2020 at 16:30

Reply to John Chuckman: I’d love to read this book but it wasn’t available a few years ago when I looked. I’ll look again!

Voice from Europe , July 6, 2020 at 11:52

Gekaufte journalisten.
Ulfkotte admitted he signed off on numerous articles that were prepared for him during his career. The last year’s of his life he changed his mores and advocated “better die in truth than live with lies”.

Richard A. , July 4, 2020 at 00:59

I remember the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour from decades ago. Real experts on Russia like Dimitri Simes and Stephen Cohen were the ones to appear on that NewsHour. The NewsHour of today rarely has experts on Russia, just experts on Russia bashing–like Michael McFaul. Oh how the mighty have fallen.

Antonia Young , July 3, 2020 at 23:35

Thank you, Ray for your clarion voice in the midst of WMD-seventeen-point-oh. Will the American people have the wisdom to notice how many times we’re being fooled? And finally wake up and stop supporting these questionable news outlets? With appreciation for your excellent analysis, as usual. ~Tonia Young (Formerly with the Topanga Peace Alliance)

Blessthebeasts , July 4, 2020 at 11:55

The majority of Americans have a lot more to worry about than the latest nonsense about Russia. I think most people just tune it out.
The ones being fooled are the fools who have been lapping this crap up from the get go. The supposed educated class who think themselves superior and well informed because they read and listen to the propaganda of PBS, NPR, NYT etc.
They don’t seem to realize the ship is sinking while they’re playing these ridiculous games.

Susan Siens , July 5, 2020 at 16:34

The supposedly educated class, yes! It can be stunning how people believe anything they hear on PBS or NPR, and then they make fun of people who believe anything they hear on Fox News. What’s the difference? Both are propaganda tools.

And, yes, watch us go down in flames while so-called progressives boo-hoo about Trump thinking he’s above the law (like every other president before him). Our local “peace and justice” group sent me an email asking me to sign a petition supporting Robert Mueller. I was gobsmacked, and then I realized our local “peace and justice” group had been taken over by Democratic Party “resisters.” Jeezums, why is every word hijacked?

[Jul 09, 2020] U.S. UK intensify campaign against Russia; UK harks back to first pillar of new Cold War, the Magnitsky hoax – The Komisar Scoop

Notable quotes:
"... Browder testimony to Senate Judiciary Committee ..."
"... claimed that Magnitsky was beaten to death by 8 riot guards ..."
"... Browder's Hermitage Fund in 2009 put out press release noting Starova's complaint to police. See last graph. Browder deleted it when his narrative changed, but the Wayback Machine preserved it. ..."
"... She says there has been a violation of Article 165 of the criminal code. ..."
"... Browder translates that into Starova accusing his companies of the theft of state funds. She talks about involvement of Viktor Markelov, who organized the fraud. In his testimony , Markelov said he got documents from a "Sergei Leonidovich." Magnitsky's full name was Sergei Leonidovich Magnitsky. ..."
"... Magnitsky's body on a cot in the hospital ward. ..."
"... Script: The position of the corpse of Mr. S. L. Magnitsky. ..."
"... Script: The situation in the [hospital] ward, viewed towards the door. ..."
"... Magnitsky face shoulders on hospital-bed ..."
"... Script: Chest image of Mr. S. L. Magnitsky. ..."
"... Browder doctored report claims a section illegible, third line. ..."
"... Russian document shows nothing is illegible. ..."
"... Dr. Robert Bux ..."
"... They do exist, but Browder did not give them to PHR. ..."
"... Forensic photos of bruises on Magnitsky's hands and knee ..."
"... Forensic schematic drawings showing marks of injuries show no injuries. ..."
"... closed craniocerebral injury ..."
"... No signs of a violent death detected." ..."
"... Magnitsky death certificate – no signs of a violent death detected ..."
Jul 09, 2020 | www.thekomisarscoop.com

U.S. & UK intensify campaign against Russia; UK harks back to first pillar of new Cold War, the Magnitsky hoax

By Lucy Komisar
July 6, 2020, Committee for an East-West Accord .

Browder testimony to Senate Judiciary Committee
claimed that Magnitsky was beaten to death by 8 riot guards .

The U.S. and UK are intensifying their collaborative Cold War against Russia. In Washington, calls for sanctions are based on the fake "bountygate," and the UK has sanctioned selected Russians based on William Browder's Magnitsky hoax.

The "bountygate" charge that Russia paid militants to kill American soldiers in Afghanistan is unproved by U.S. intelligence agencies and even discounted by the international wire-tapping National Security Agency (NSA). The UK sanctions against 25 Russians, judges and court officials, tax investigators, and prison doctors, are based on disproved claims by billionaire investor William Browder that they were responsible for the death of his accountant Sergei Magnitsky.

Browder's Magnitsky story is a pillar of America's Russiagate, which has five. Before bountygate, there was the 2019 Mueller Report which found no evidence that President Trump had colluded with the Russians, the Jan 2017 intelligence agencies' charge of Russian interference in the U.S. 2016 election which concludes with the admission that they had no proof; and the 2016 accusation that Russians had stolen Democratic National Committee emails, made by the private security group CrowdStrike, later walked back by CrowdStrike's president Shawn Henry at a secret House hearing in Dec 2017, but not revealed till this May.

With the UK, we return to the first pillar of the U.S. Russiagate story, the 2012 Magnitsky Act, which targeted many on the U.S. list. The Magnitsky Act is recognized as the beginning of the deterioration of U.S.-Russian relations. It is based on a hoax invented by Browder and easily disproved by documentary evidence, if governments cared about that.

The European Court of Human Rights on Magnitsky's arrest

First, a few of the obvious fake charges. Three judges are accused of detaining Magnitsky, which the UK says "facilitated" his mistreatment and denial of medical care. However, the European Court of Human Rights ruled in August 2019, "The Russians had good reason to arrest Sergei Magnitsky for Hermitage tax evasion." The Court said: "The accusations were based on documentary evidence relating to the payment of taxes by those companies and statements by several disabled persons who had confessed to sham work for the two companies."

The decision to arrest him was made after "investigating authorities noted that during a tax inquiry which had preceded the criminal investigation, Mr Magnitskiy had influenced witnesses, and that he had been preparing to flee abroad. In particular, he had applied for an entry visa to the United Kingdom and had booked a flight to Kyiv." He was a flight risk.

Several of the UK targets were said to have "facilitated" mistreatment of Magnitsky because they had been involved in a fraud he exposed. The reference is to a $230-million tax refund scam against the Russian Treasury.

Back to the ECHR: "The Court observe[d] that the inquiry into alleged tax evasion, resulting in the criminal proceedings against Mr Magnitskiy, started in 2004, long before he complained that prosecuting officials had been involved in fraudulent acts." The taxes were the real story; the fraud narrative was a cover-up.

The fake fraud story

Magnitsky did not uncover a massive fraud. That was the tax refund fraud in which companies engaged in collusive lawsuits, "lost" the suits, and "agreed" to pay damages equal to their entire year's profits. They then requested a full refund of taxes paid on the now zero gains. The fake lawsuits and payouts were first revealed to police by Russian shell company director Rimma Starova April 9 and July 10, 2008. (Russian originals April and July .)

With investigators on the trail, Browder's Hermitage Fund director Paul Wrench filed a complaint about the fraud, and Browder gave the story to The NYTimes and the Russian paper Vedomosti , which published it July 24, 2008, long before Magnitsky mentioned it in October 2008. His testimony did not accuse any officials.

Browder's Hermitage Fund in 2009 put out press release noting Starova's complaint to police. See last graph. Browder deleted it when his narrative changed, but the Wayback Machine preserved it. She says there has been a violation of Article 165 of the criminal code. Browder translates that into Starova accusing his companies of the theft of state funds. She talks about involvement of Viktor Markelov, who organized the fraud. In his testimony , Markelov said he got documents from a "Sergei Leonidovich." Magnitsky's full name was Sergei Leonidovich Magnitsky.

The main story at the center of the Magnitsky Acts in the U.S. and UK are not that he was mistreated or failed to get good medical care, which is what is mostly alleged here. That would put dozens of U.S. prison officials in the crosshairs, including recently those running state prison systems in Alabama and Mississippi . It is that he was murdered. In the only reference to beating, the head of the Matrosskaya detention center is accused of "ordering the handcuffing and beating" of Magnitsky before he died.

The U.S. Act, on which the British version is modeled, says that in detention Magnitsky "was beaten by 8 guards with rubber batons on the last day of his life." But the alleged assailants' names are not on the list. A key argument made by sponsors Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md) and Rep. James McGovern (D-Mass) was that the people targeted – tax investigators, court officials, hospital workers -- played a role in this claimed murder of Magnitsky. (Cardin and McGovern haven't responded to my requests to comment on contradictory evidence.)

UK Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab takes the same line, declaring, "You cannot set foot in this country, and we will seize your blood-drenched ill-gotten gains if you try," as he announced the new sanctions. Blood-drenched? No evidence supplied for the sanctioned Russians.

For Browder, the purpose of the Magnitsky Acts he promotes in the West is as a political tool to build a wall against Russia's attempt to have him answer for documented financial frauds totaling at least $100 million, and with new evidence as much as $400 million.

The death hoax: Forensic photos tell the truth

Here is the story of Magnitsky death hoax, with links to evidence, including how Browder forged and falsified documents.

Browder had the Russian forensic reports and photos that were made after Magnitsky's death but suppressed what did not support his arguments. The photos in this forensic report show that Magnitsky, allegedly beaten to death, didn't have a life-threatening mark on his body.

Magnitsky's body on a cot in the hospital ward. Script: The position of the corpse of Mr. S. L. Magnitsky.

Script: The situation in the [hospital] ward, viewed towards the door.

Magnitsky face shoulders on hospital-bed . Script: Chest image of Mr. S. L. Magnitsky.

Browder doctored part of another forensic report provided in translation to the Physicians for Human Rights, Cambridge, Mass., for its analysis of Magnitsky's death. It notes as "illegible" words that show there were no beating marks on Magnitsky's body and that there was no scalp damage. The deleted parts of the true translation are underlined.

"The cadaverous spots are abundant, bluish-violet, diffuse, located on the back surface of the neck, trunk, upper and lower extremities, with pressure on them with a finger disappear and restore their original color after 8 minutes. Damage not found on the scalp."

The doctored line reads, "The cadaverous spots are abundant, bluish-violet, diffuse, located on the back surface of the neck, trunk, upper and lower extremities, (illegible) not found on the scalp."

Here in the report that Browder gave PHR:

Browder doctored report claims a section illegible, third line.

The paragraph in the Russian document shows nothing is illegible.

Russian document shows nothing is illegible.

The Russian words omitted in the doctored English document are "при надавливании на них пальцем исчезают и восстанавливают свою первоначальную окраску через 8 минут. Повреждений на волосистой части головы не обнаружено."

The full Russian text can be translated online: Трупные пятна обильные, синюшно-фиолетовые, разлитые, располагающиеся на задней поверхности шеи, туловища, верхних и нижних конечностей, при надавливании на них пальцем исчезают и восстанавливают свою первоначальную окраску через 8 минут. Повреждений на волосистой части головы не обнаружено. Кости лицевого скелета, хрящи носа на ощупь целы. Глаза закрыты.

What the American pathologist who analyzed Browder's documents said

Dr. Robert Bux

Dr. Robert C. Bux, then coroner/chief medical examiner for the El Paso County Coroner's Office in Colorado Springs, was the forensic expert on the team that wrote the PHR report . Bux told me, "I do not think that these spots are contusions. Contusions will not go away and can be demonstrated by incising or cutting into the tissues under the skin. These are reportedly all on the posterior aspect of the neck, body and limbs and may represent postmortem lividity when the body was viewed by the prosecutor of the autopsy."

Dr. Bux said, "If this is lividity (red purple coloration of the skin) it is not yet fixed and will blanch to a pale skin color and red purple coloration will disappear. If the body is then placed face up i.e. supine then after a few minutes then it will appear again. This is simply due to blood settling in the small blood vessels and a function of gravity."

It's not what a layman reading Browder's forged "illegible" might think.

Dr. Bux added, "Having said all of this, I have never seen any autopsy photographs demonstrating this, and while photographs should have been taken to document all skin abnormalities as well as all surfaces of the body to document the presence or absence of trauma, I do not know if photographs were taken and withheld or never taken ."

PHR said, "A full and independent review of the cause of death of S.L. Magnitsky is not possible given the documentation presented and available to PHR." The document list is at its report pages 2-3 .

The PHR autopsy protocol claims that there are "photo tables on 2 sheets" and "schematic representation of injuries on 1 sheet. However, if they exist, they were not available for the present review."

They do exist, but Browder did not give them to PHR.

Browder posted and widely distributed this composite of photos of bruises on Magnitsky's hand and knee taken November 17 th , 2009, the day after the accountant's death.

Forensic photos of bruises on Magnitsky's hands and knee

He got them from Russian forensic Report 2052. Katie Fisher , doing public relations for Hermitage, posted them, but not the text, to Google Cloud.

The report cited "circular abrasions in the wrist area," a "bluish-violet bruise" and "multiple strip-like horizontally located abrasions."

It said, "A bruise located on the inner surface of the right lower limb in the projection of the ankle joint appeared 3-6 days before the time death."

It concluded, "[T]hese injuries in living persons do not entail a temporary disability or a significant permanent loss of general disability and are not regarded as harm to health, they are not in a cause and effect relationship with death."

The forensic reports attribute bruises to Magnitsky wearing handcuffs and kicking and hitting against cell doors. Magnitsky's lawyer Dmitri Kharitonov told filmmaker Andrei Nekrasov, "I think he was simply banging on the door with all his force trying to make them let him out and none paid attention."

No other injuries found

The same report includes schematic drawings of Magnitsky's body on which to note other relevant marks or injuries.

The report said, "There were no marks or injuries noted on his head or torso No other injuries were found on the corpse " Browder didn't send PHR these drawings or make them public.

Forensic schematic drawings showing marks of injuries show no injuries.

Asked if there was evidence that Magnitsky was "beaten to death by riot guards," Dr. Bux told me, "I have no evidence to suggest that this occurred." For the record, PHR said Magnitsky's death was from untreated serious illness. Even without the body photos, its experts didn't claim a beating. Forensic analysts never have.

Manipulating the death certificate

To promote his fabrication, Browder posted a deceptive PowerPoint of the death certificate that indicated a " closed craniocerebral injury ?" circled in red, with the other text too small to read.

The true document told a different story: " No signs of a violent death detected." That url is at the bottom of Browder's own PowerPoint.

Magnitsky death certificate – no signs of a violent death detected

"Closed" meant "past." Several forensic documents include an interview with Magnitsky's mother Natalya Magnitskaya. She told investigators, "In 1993 – I can't say a more accurate date, S.L Magnitsky had a craniocerebral injury. He slipped on the street and as a result hit his head, after which he had headaches for some time."

Investigators obtained full medical records including this on page 29 of Report 555-10 in English, which Browder gave PHR: " On February 4, 1993, at about 08:40 a.m.., in his house entrance he slipped and fell down hitting his head, lost consciousness for a short time, vomited, attended for emergency help by an ambulance which took him to the City Clinic Hospital (GKB). Was examined by the neurosurgeon in the reception ward, craniogram without pathema. Diagnosis: brain concussion, recommended treatment to be taken on an out-patient clinic basis."

Browder's assertion that the "closed craniocerebral injury" came from a beating was a lie.

Browder's changing stories on the death of Magnitsky

Browder did not initially claim Magnitsky had been murdered. He said Magnitsky, left alone uncared for in a room, had simply died. After a few years, pushing the Magnitsky Act, he declared Magnitsky had been tied up and beaten by rubber baton-wielding thugs until dead.

Graphic by Michael Thau.

Browder December 2009 tells Chatham House , London, "I don't know what they were thinking. I don't know whether they killed him deliberately on the night of the 16th, or if he died of neglect."

"They put him in a straight-jacket, put him in an isolation room and waited 1 hour and 18 minutes until he died." December 2010, San Diego Law School .

Then, promoting the Magnitsky Act, "They put him in an isolation cell, tied him to a bed, then allowed eight guards guards beat him with rubber batons for 118 min until he was dead." December 2011, University of Cambridge Judge Business School.

" .they put him in an isolation cell, chained him to a bed, and eight riot guards came in and beat him with rubber batons. That night he was found dead on the cell floor." July 2017, U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee .

What the Moscow Public Oversight Commission says really happened

The Public Oversight Commission , an independent Russian NGO, reports Magnitsky's final day differently. November 16, 2009:

7:00pm. The patient behaves inadequately. Talks to a "voice," looks disorientated, and shouts that someone wants to kill him. His condition is diagnosed as psychosis. The emergency doctor was called. There are no body damages apart from traces of handcuffs on the wrists.

7:30pm. He was left unattended without medical support.

8:48pm. Emergency team arrived. When emergency doctors entered the special cell, Sergei was sitting on the cot, with his eyes unfocused.

9:15pm. The patient was surveyed again as his condition deteriorated. He lost consciousness. The reanimation procedure was started (indirect heart massage and ventilation of lungs using the Ambu pillow). The patient was transferred to the special room where he received an artificial ventilation of lungs and a hormones injection.

9:50pm. The patient died."

The commission reported no evidence of beating. The Russian forensic and medical experts' conclusion was that Magnitsky had heart disease (arteriosclerosis), diabetes, hepatitis, and pancreatitis, some illnesses predating arrest. They wrote detailed criticism of the doctors' treatment, saying that it wasn't timely or adequate and that "the shortcomings in the provision of the medical assistance to S.L. Magnitsky" caused his death.

But it's not the riot squad beating Browder, with no evidence, sold to the U.S. Congress, the State Department, the UK Parliament, the Foreign Office and the media. Or that U.S. or UK authorities or media ever attempted to prove. Because like the Tonkin Gulf "incident" and Iraq's WMD, the weaponized Russiagate stories have a foreign/military policy goal. Truth is quite irrelevant.

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7 Responses to " U.S. & UK intensify campaign against Russia; UK harks back to first pillar of new Cold War, the Magnitsky hoax "

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[Jul 09, 2020] The racket of national security

Jul 09, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Grieved , Jul 9 2020 15:59 utc | 8

Back in the CHOICES thread, we had discussion on the US bullying Iran, and the semantics of whether the US was engaging in "war" against Iran. I hope not to get caught up in those semantics again, but here are a couple of good pieces to show the situation.

The latest Renegade Inc episode interviews Gareth Porter, who draws from Smedley Butler and talks about the "racket" of the security state of the US, which acts only to perpetuate and extend itself, and to increase its funding by all means.

The racket of national security

The episode answers several questions about the US posture towards Iran. Porter supplies the history and background to illustrate the US anger for Iran. Sharmine Narwani makes an appearance also, and together they show why the Pentagon will never conduct acts of war against Iran that will provoke the kind of overt retaliation that Iran delivered by targeting the US bases this year.

The US will only conduct acts that Iran will not overtly respond to. It will escalate its theater right up to that red line, but if it crosses the line - as it did with killing Soleimani - it will be by miscalculation. The only purpose of the US security state is to escalate the threat level to keep the funding coming, and to leave no possible margin for de-funding by Congress. It's a racket, and the racket has swallowed all statecraft.

Once I suggested seriously that Ukraine could not be understood in terms of statecraft, but only in terms of thievery. It becomes increasingly clear that the tenets of organized crime are now the only way to parse US action.

~~

Iran meanwhile, lives by statecraft. It will always respond when that red line is crossed - always and without hesitation. My view is that Iran is continuously working for the total departure of the US from West Asia, as it said that it would in retribution for Soleimani. Much of what it does we don't see, but I note the "resistance" axis goes from strength to strength in solidarity. It was ready to erupt when Iran attacked the US base, but the US disengaged and this unified axis of several nations and forces stood down.

So the school of thought presented for example by Richard Steven Hack here, that the US will war on Iran for decades if it can, simply to feed the MIC, is correct. What's not correct is that the US can perform much in the way of military action against Iran.

We stumbled over the word "war" so perhaps we can talk about minor activities of warfare, which are not enough to bring the theater to full battle. All the nations in the region have tolerated US incursions because to fight them head on would provoke escalation that serves less purpose than living with them - there is a time for everything.

But we have to understand the red lines. And we have to understand that because we see nothing moving, it doesn't mean nothing is moving. Narwani makes some good points about that - and see her full interview on Renegade from last year for a good understanding of what Iran is as a nation and an adversary. It's clear that the Pentagon agrees with her.

As to the Resistance axis, this interview with Lebanese analyst Anees Naqqash is worth a quick read. It tells us much about Lebanon.

US should know 'Resistance' now controls all of West Asia: Naqqash

It is not the case that Iran is doing nothing in response to US warfare against it and its regional allies. The red flag is still flying, and the Iranians take it seriously.

[Jul 07, 2020] Mutiny on the Bounties by RAY McGOVERN

Highly recommended!
So they dusted of McFaul to provide the support for bounty provocation. I wonder whether McFaul one one of Epstein guests, or what ?
So who was the clone of Ciaramella this time? People want to know the hero
Notable quotes:
"... Not to doubt McFaul's ulterior motives; one must assume him to be an "honest man" -- however misguided, in my opinion. He seems to be a disciple of the James Clapper-Curtis LeMay-Joe McCarthy School of Russian Analysis. ..."
"... Clapper, a graduate summa cum laude , certainly had the Russians pegged! Clapper was allowed to stay as Barack Obama's director of national intelligence for three and a half years after perjuring himself in formal Senate testimony (on NSA's illegal eavesdropping). On May 28, 2017 Clapper told NBC's Chuck Todd about "the historical practices of the Russians, who typically, are almost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor, whatever, which is a typical Russian technique." ..."
"... As a finale, in full knowledge of Clapper's proclivities regarding Russia, Obama appointed him to prepare the evidence-impoverished, misnomered "Intelligence Community Assessment" claiming that Putin did all he could, including hacking the DNC, to help Trump get elected -- the most embarrassing such "intelligence assessment" I have seen in half a century . ..."
"... Does no one see the irony today in the Democrats' bashing Trump on Afghanistan, with the full support of the Establishment media? The inevitable defeat there is one of the few demonstrable disasters not attributable directly to Trump, but you would not know that from the media. Are the uncorroborated reports of Russian bounties to kill U.S. troops aimed at making it appear that Trump, unable to stand up to Putin, let the Russians drive the rest of U.S. troops out of Afghanistan? ..."
"... Does the current flap bespeak some kind of "Mutiny on the Bounties," so to speak, by a leaker aping Eric Chiaramella? Recall that the Democrats lionized the CIA official seconded to Trump's national security council as a "whistleblower" and proceeded to impeach Trump after Chiaramella leaked information on Trump's telephone call with the president of Ukraine. Far from being held to account, Chiaramella is probably expecting an influential job if his patron, Joe Biden, is elected president. Has there been another mutiny in Trump's White House? ..."
"... It is sad to have to remind folks 18 years later that the "intelligence" on WMD in Iraq was not "mistaken;" it was fraudulent from the get-go. The culprits were finally exposed but never held to account. ..."
"... Here's an assignment due on Monday. Read McFaul's oped carefully. It appears under the title: "Trump would do anything for Putin. No wonder he's ignoring the Russian bounties: Russia's pattern of hostility matches Trump's pattern of accommodation." ..."
"... Full assignment for Monday: Read carefully through each paragraph of McFaul's text and select which of his claims you would put into one or more of the three categories adduced by Sen. Rockefeller 12 years ago about WMD on Iraq. With particular attention to the evidence behind McFaul's claims, determine which of the claims is (a) "uncorroborated"; which (b) "contradicted"; and which (c) "non-existent;" or (d) all of the above. For extra credit, find one that is supported by plausible evidence. ..."
"... Michael McFaul and Fred Hiatt are both long-time members of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), flagship of the globalist “liberal world order”. The CFR and its many interlocking affiliates, along with their media assets and frontmen in government, have dominated US policy since WW2. Most of the Fed chairmen and secretaries of State, Treasury, Defense and CIA have been CFR members, including Jerome Powell and Mark Esper. ..."
"... The major finance, energy, defense and media corporations are CFR sponsors, and several of their execs are members. David Rubenstein, billionaire founder of the notorious Carlyle Group, is the current CFR chairman. Laurence Fink, billionaire chairman of BlackRock, is a CFR director. See lists at the CFR website. ..."
"... “It is sad to have to remind folks 18 years later that the “intelligence” on WMD in Iraq was not “mistaken;” it was fraudulent from the get-go. The culprits were finally exposed but never held to account.” ..."
"... They are spoon fed those lies by our “intelligence” agencies. As CNN’s Jeff Zucker said, “We’re not investigators, we’re journalists”. Replace “journalists” with “toadies” or “shills” for our “intelligence” community and you’ve gotten to the truth of the matter. ..."
"... In the unhealthy society of Clintons, Obamas, Epstein, Mueller, Adelsons, Clapper, and Krystols, human dignity is a sin. ..."
"... Our institutions including journalism are not merely corrupt, they are degenerate. That is, the corruption is not occasional or the exception is is by design, desired and entirely normal. ..."
"... from Counterpunch.org : “Around 15,000 Soviet troops perished in the Afghan War between 1979 and 1989. The US funneled more than $20 billion to the Mujahideen and other anti-Soviet fighters over that same period. This works out to a “bounty” of $1.33 million for each Soviet soldier killed.” ..."
"... Yes, of course it is a well-known ‘fact’ that Putin has nothing better to do than destory American democracy, and I bet he has dreams about it too! But I am minded to think that if anybody has a penchant for destroying American democracy it is the powers that be in the US deep state, intelligence agencies, and zionist cliques controlling the President and Congress. ..."
"... Udo Ulfkotte was a German journalist. He wrote a sensational book about the practices he experienced of the CIA paying German journalists to publish certain stories. The book was a big best seller in Germany. Its English translation was suppressed for years, but I believe is now available. ..."
"... Gekaufte journalisten. Ulfkotte admitted he signed off on numerous articles that were prepared for him during his career. The last year’s of his life he changed his mores and advocated “better die in truth than live with lies”. ..."
Jul 03, 2020 | consortiumnews.com

RAY McGOVERN: Mutiny on the Bounties

Has there been another mutiny in Trump's White House, as Obama's former ambassador to Russia piles on the nonsense about Trump being in Putin's pocket?

By Ray McGovern
Special to Consortium News

C orporate media are binging on leaked Kool Aid not unlike the WMD concoction they offered 18 years ago to "justify" the U.S.-UK war of aggression on Iraq.

Now Michael McFaul, ambassador to Russia under President Obama, has been enlisted by The Washington Post 's editorial page honcho, Fred Hiatt, to draw on his expertise (read, incurable Russophobia) to help stick President Donald Trump back into "Putin's pocket." (This has become increasingly urgent as the canard of "Russiagate" -- including the linchpin claim that Russia hacked the DNC -- lies gasping for air.)

In an oped on Thursday McFaul presented a long list of Vladimir Putin's alleged crimes, offering a more ostensibly sophisticated version of amateur Russian specialist, Rep. Jason Crow's (D-CO) claim that: "Vladimir Putin wakes up every morning and goes to bed every night trying to figure out how to destroy American democracy."

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry with McFaul meeting Vladimir Putin and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in Moscow, Russia, on May 7, 2013. (State Department)

McFaul had -- well, let's call it an undistinguished career in Moscow. He arrived with a huge chip on his shoulder and proceeded to alienate just about all his hosts, save for the rabidly anti-Putin folks he openly and proudly cultivated. In a sense, McFaul became the epitome of what Henry Wooton described as the role of ambassador -- "an honest man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country." What should not be so readily accepted is an ambassador who comes back home and just can't stop misleading.

Not to doubt McFaul's ulterior motives; one must assume him to be an "honest man" -- however misguided, in my opinion. He seems to be a disciple of the James Clapper-Curtis LeMay-Joe McCarthy School of Russian Analysis.

Clapper, a graduate summa cum laude , certainly had the Russians pegged! Clapper was allowed to stay as Barack Obama's director of national intelligence for three and a half years after perjuring himself in formal Senate testimony (on NSA's illegal eavesdropping). On May 28, 2017 Clapper told NBC's Chuck Todd about "the historical practices of the Russians, who typically, are almost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor, whatever, which is a typical Russian technique."

https://www.youtube.com/embed/tcN_tWk089w?feature=oembed

As a finale, in full knowledge of Clapper's proclivities regarding Russia, Obama appointed him to prepare the evidence-impoverished, misnomered "Intelligence Community Assessment" claiming that Putin did all he could, including hacking the DNC, to help Trump get elected -- the most embarrassing such "intelligence assessment" I have seen in half a century .

Obama and the National Security State

I have asked myself if Obama also had earned some kind of degree from the Clapper/LeMay/McCarthy School, or whether he simply lacked the courage to challenge the pitiably self-serving "analysis" of the National Security State. Then I re-read "Obama Misses the Afghan Exit-Ramp" of June 24, 2010 and was reminded of how deferential Obama was to the generals and the intelligence gurus, and how unconscionable the generals were -- like their predecessors in Vietnam -- in lying about always seeing light at the end of the proverbial tunnel.

Thankfully, now ten years later, this is all documented in Craig Whitlock's, "The Afghanistan Papers: At War With the Truth." Corporate media, who played an essential role in that "war with the truth", have not given Whitlock's damning story the attention it should command (surprise, surprise!). In any case, it strains credulity to think that Obama was unaware he was being lied to on Afghanistan.

Some Questions

Clark Gable (l.) with Charles Laughton (r.) in Mutiny on the Bounty, 1935.

Does no one see the irony today in the Democrats' bashing Trump on Afghanistan, with the full support of the Establishment media? The inevitable defeat there is one of the few demonstrable disasters not attributable directly to Trump, but you would not know that from the media. Are the uncorroborated reports of Russian bounties to kill U.S. troops aimed at making it appear that Trump, unable to stand up to Putin, let the Russians drive the rest of U.S. troops out of Afghanistan?

Does the current flap bespeak some kind of "Mutiny on the Bounties," so to speak, by a leaker aping Eric Chiaramella? Recall that the Democrats lionized the CIA official seconded to Trump's national security council as a "whistleblower" and proceeded to impeach Trump after Chiaramella leaked information on Trump's telephone call with the president of Ukraine. Far from being held to account, Chiaramella is probably expecting an influential job if his patron, Joe Biden, is elected president. Has there been another mutiny in Trump's White House?

And what does one make of the spectacle of Crow teaming up with Rep. Liz Cheney (R, WY) to restrict Trump's planned pull-out of troops from Afghanistan, which The Los Angeles Times reports has now been blocked until after the election?

Hiatt & McFaul: Caveat Editor

And who published McFaul's oped? Fred Hiatt, Washington Post editorial page editor for the past 20 years, who has a long record of listening to the whispers of anonymous intelligence sources and submerging/drowning the subjunctive mood with flat fact. This was the case with the (non-existent) weapons of mass destruction in Iraq before the U.S.-UK attack. Readers of the Post were sure there were tons of WMD in Iraq. That Hiatt has invited McFaul on stage should come as no surprise.

To be fair, Hiatt belatedly acknowledged that the Post should have been more circumspect in its confident claims about the WMD. "If you look at the editorials we write running up [to the war], we state as flat fact that he [Saddam Hussein] has weapons of mass destruction," Hiatt said in an interview with the Columbia Journalism Review . "If that's not true, it would have been better not to say it." [CJR, March/April 2004]

At this word of wisdom, Consortium News founder, the late Robert Parry, offered this comment: "Yes, that is a common principle of journalism, that if something isn't real, we're not supposed to confidently declare that it is." That Hiatt is still in that job speaks volumes.

'Uncorroborated, Contradicted, or Even Non-Existent'

It is sad to have to remind folks 18 years later that the "intelligence" on WMD in Iraq was not "mistaken;" it was fraudulent from the get-go. The culprits were finally exposed but never held to account.

Announcing on June 5, 2008, the bipartisan conclusions from a five-year study by the Senate Intelligence Committee, Sen. Jay Rockefeller ( D-WV) said the attack on Iraq was launched "under false pretenses." He described the intelligence conjured up to "justify" war on Iraq as "uncorroborated, contradicted, or even non-existent."

Homework

Yogi Berra in 1956. (Wikipedia)

Here's an assignment due on Monday. Read McFaul's oped carefully. It appears under the title: "Trump would do anything for Putin. No wonder he's ignoring the Russian bounties: Russia's pattern of hostility matches Trump's pattern of accommodation."

And to give you a further taste, here is the first paragraph:

"Russian President Vladimir Putin appears to have paid Taliban rebels in Afghanistan to kill U.S. soldiers. Having resulted in at least one American death, and maybe more, these Russian bounties reportedly produced the desired outcome. While deeply disturbing, this effort by Putin is not surprising: It follows a clear pattern of ignoring international norms, rules and laws -- and daring the United States to do anything about it."

Full assignment for Monday: Read carefully through each paragraph of McFaul's text and select which of his claims you would put into one or more of the three categories adduced by Sen. Rockefeller 12 years ago about WMD on Iraq. With particular attention to the evidence behind McFaul's claims, determine which of the claims is (a) "uncorroborated"; which (b) "contradicted"; and which (c) "non-existent;" or (d) all of the above. For extra credit, find one that is supported by plausible evidence.

Yogi Berra might be surprised to hear us keep quoting him with "Deja vu, all over again." Sorry, Yogi, that's what it is; you coined it.

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. During his 27-year career as a CIA analyst, he prepared and briefed The President's Daily Brief for Presidents Nixon, Ford, and Reagan. He is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.

Tarus77 , July 6, 2020 at 14:25

Gad, one wonders if it can ever get much lower in the press and the answer is yes, it can and will go lower, i.e. the mcfaul/hiatt tag team. They are still plumbing for the lows.

The question becomes just how stupid these two are or how stupid do they believe the readership is to read and believe this garbage.

Voice from Europe , July 6, 2020 at 11:58

By now the Russia did it ! is in effect a joke in Russia. Economically, politically, geo strategically China and Asia and Africa have become more important and reliable partners of Russia than the USA. And Europe is also dropping fast on the trustworthy partners list…..

John , July 5, 2020 at 12:55

Michael McFaul and Fred Hiatt are both long-time members of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), flagship of the globalist “liberal world order”. The CFR and its many interlocking affiliates, along with their media assets and frontmen in government, have dominated US policy since WW2. Most of the Fed chairmen and secretaries of State, Treasury, Defense and CIA have been CFR members, including Jerome Powell and Mark Esper.

The major finance, energy, defense and media corporations are CFR sponsors, and several of their execs are members. David Rubenstein, billionaire founder of the notorious Carlyle Group, is the current CFR chairman. Laurence Fink, billionaire chairman of BlackRock, is a CFR director. See lists at the CFR website.

Anna , July 6, 2020 at 09:38

Michael McFaul and Fred Hiatt are both very active promoters of hate crimes. Neither has any decency hence decency is allergic to war profiteers and opportunistic liars.

The poor USA; to descend to such a deep moral hole that both Michael McFaul and Fred Hiatt are still alive and prospering. Shamelessness and presstituting are paid well in the US.

Juan M Escobedo , July 5, 2020 at 11:35

Dems and Reps are already mad. You cannot destroy what does not exist; like Democracy in these United States. Nor God or Putin could. This has always being a fallacy. This is not a democracy; same thing with ”communist" China or the USSR .Those two were never socialist. There has never being a real Socialist or Communist country.

Guy , July 4, 2020 at 12:26

“It is sad to have to remind folks 18 years later that the “intelligence” on WMD in Iraq was not “mistaken;” it was fraudulent from the get-go. The culprits were finally exposed but never held to account.”

That statement goes to the crux of the matter.Why should journalists care about what is true or a lie in their reports ,they know they will never be held to account .They should be held to account through the court system . A lie by any journalist should be actionable by any court of law . The fear of jail time would sort out the scam journalists we presently have to endure .

As it is they have perverted the profession of journalism and it is the law of the jungle .No true democracy should put up with this. We are surrounded with lies that are generated by the very establishment that should protect it’s citizens from same .

Skip Scott , July 4, 2020 at 15:36

They are spoon fed those lies by our “intelligence” agencies. As CNN’s Jeff Zucker said, “We’re not investigators, we’re journalists”. Replace “journalists” with “toadies” or “shills” for our “intelligence” community and you’ve gotten to the truth of the matter.

Anna , July 6, 2020 at 09:50

The ‘journalists’ observe how things have been going on for Cheney the Traitor and Bush the lesser — nothing happened to the mega criminals. The hate-bursting and war-profiteering Cheney’s daughter has even squeezed into US Congress.

In a healthy society where human dignity is cherished, the Cheney family will be ostracized and the family name became a synonym for the word ‘traitor.’ In the unhealthy society of Clintons, Obamas, Epstein, Mueller, Adelsons, Clapper, and Krystols, human dignity is a sin.

Ricard Coleman , July 6, 2020 at 11:42

Our institutions including journalism are not merely corrupt, they are degenerate. That is, the corruption is not occasional or the exception is is by design, desired and entirely normal.

Stan W. , July 4, 2020 at 12:10

I’m still confident that Durham’s investigation will expose and successfully prosecute the maggots that infest our government.

Skip Scott , July 4, 2020 at 15:29

What is the basis for this confidence?

John Puma , July 4, 2020 at 12:03

Re: whether Obumma “had earned some kind of degree from the Clapper/LeMay/McCarthy School” of Russia Analytics.

It would be a worthy addition to his degree collection featuring that earned from the Neville Chamberlain Night School of Critical Political Negotiation.

Jeff Harrison , July 4, 2020 at 11:16

Hmmm. Lessee. The US attacks Afghanistan with about the same legitimacy that we had when we attacked Iraq and the Taliban are in charge. We oust the Taliban from power and put our own puppets in place. What idiot thinks that the Taliban are going to need a bounty to kill Americans?

Wendy LaRiviere , July 4, 2020 at 18:29

Jeff Harrison, I like your logic. Plus, I understand that far fewer Americans are being killed in Afghanistan than were under Obama’s administration.

AnneR , July 4, 2020 at 10:27

Frankly, I am sick to death of the unwarranted, indeed bestial Russophobia that is megaphoned minute by minute on NPR and the BBC World Service (only radio here since my husband died). If it isn’t this latest trumped up (ho ho) charge, there are repeated mentions, in passing, of course, of the Russiagate, hacking, Kremlin control of the Strumpet to back up the latest bunch of lies.

Doesn’t matter at *all* that Russiagate was debunked, that even Mueller couldn’t actually demonstrably pull the DNC/ruling elites rabbit out of the hat, that the impeachment of the Strumpet went nowhere. And it clearly – by its total absence on the above radio broadcasts – doesn’t matter one iota that the Pentagonal hasn’t gone along, that gaping holes in the confabulation are (and were) obvious to those who cared to think with half a mind awake and reflecting on past US ruling elite lies, untruths, obfuscations. Nope. Just repeat, repeat, repeat. Orwell would clap his hands (not because he agreed with the atrocious politics but the lesson is learnt).

Added to the whipped up anti-Russia, decidedly anti-Putin crapola – is of course the Russian peoples’ vote, decision making on their own country’s changes to the Basic Law (a form of Constitution). When the radio broadcasts the usual sickening anti-Russian/Putin propaganda regarding this vote immediately prior they would state that the changes would install Putin for many more years: no mention that he would have to be elected, i.e. voted by the populace into the presidency. (This was repeated ad infinitum without any elaboration.) No other proposed changes were mentioned – certainly not that the Duma would gain greater control over the governance of the country and over the president’s cabinet. I.e. that the popularly elected (ain’t that what we call democracy??) representatives in the Duma (parliament) would essentially have more power than the president.

But most significantly, to my mind, no one has (well of course not – this is Russia) raised the issue of the fact that it was the Russian people, the vox populi/hoi polloi, who have had some say in how they are to be governed, how their government will work for them. HOW much say have we had/do we have in how our government functions, works – let alone for us, the hoi polloi? When did we the citizenry last have a voting say on ANY sentence in the Constitution that governs us??? Ummm I do believe it was the creation of the wealthy British descended slave holding, real estate ethnic-cleansing lot who wrote and ratified the original document and the hardly dissimilar Congressional and state types who have over the years written and voted on various amendments. And it is the members of the upper classes in the Supreme Court who adjudicate on its application to various problems.

BUT We the hoi polloi have never, ever had a direct opportunity to individually vote for or against any single part of the Constitution which is supposed to be the “democratic” superstructure which governs us. Unlike the Russians a couple of days ago.

Richard Coleman , July 6, 2020 at 15:48

“HOW much say have we had/do we have in how our government functions, works…” See, that’s your mistake right there. WE don’t have a government. We need one, but we ain’t got one. THEY have a government which they let us go through the motions of electing. ‘Member back when Bernie was talking about a Political Revolution?

Here’s a little fact for you. The five most populous states have a total of 123,000,000 people. That’s 10 Senators. The five least populated states have a total of 3.5 million. That’s also 10 Senators. Democracy anyone?

vinnieoh , July 4, 2020 at 09:37

There have been three coup d’état within the US within the lifetimes of most that read these pages. The first was explained to us by Eisenhower only as he was exiting his time from the national stage; the MIC had co-opted our government. The second happened in 2000, with the putsch in Florida and then the adoption by the neocon cabal of Bush /Chaney of the PNAC blueprint “Strategies for Rebuilding America’s Defenses” (Defenses – hahahaha – shit!). The third happened late last year and early this year when the bottom-up grass-roots movement of progressivism was crushed by the DNC and the cold-warrior hack Biden was inserted as the champion of “the opposition party.”

And, make no mistake that Kamala Harris WILL be his running mate. It was always going to be Harris. It was to be Harris at the TOP of the ticket as the primaries began, but she wasn’t even placing in the top tier in any of the contests. However, the poohbahs and strategists of the DNC are nothing if not determined and consistent. If Biden should win, we should all start practicing now saying “President Harris” because that is what the future holds. For the DNC, she looks the part, she sounds the part, but more importantly she is the very definition of the status quo, corporate ass-kisser, MIC tool.

The professional political class have fully colluded to fatally cripple this democratic republic. “Democracy” is just a word they say like, “Where’s my kickback?” (excuse me – my “motivation”.) This bounty scam and the rehabilitation of GW Bush are nothing but a full blitzkrieg flanking of Trump on the right. And Trump of course is so far out of his depth that he actually believes that Israel is his friend. (A hint Donny: Israel is NO-ONE’S friend.)

What is most infuriating? hope-crushing? plain f$%&*#g scary? is that the majority of Americans from all quarters do not want any of what the professional political class keeps dumping on us. The very attempt at performing this upcoming election will finally and forever lay completely bare the collapse of a functioning government. It’s going to be very ugly, and it may very well be the end. Dog help us all.

Richard Coleman , July 6, 2020 at 15:51

Don’t you think that the assassination of JFK counts as a coup d’etat?

Zhu , July 7, 2020 at 02:10

Apres moi, le Deluge.

John Drake , July 7, 2020 at 11:25

Oh gosh how can you forget the Kennedy Assassination. Most people don’t realize he was had ordered the removal of a thousand advisors from Vietnam starting the process of completely cutting bait there, as he had in Laos and Cambodia. All of which made the generals apoplectic. The great secret about Vietnam-which Ellsberg discovered much latter, and mentioned in his book Secrets, another good read- was that every president had been warned it was likely futile. Kennedy was the only one who took that intelligence seriously-like it was actually intelligent intelligence.

Enter stage right Allen Dulles (fired CIA chief), the anti Castro Cubans, the Mafia and most important the MIC; exit Jack Kennedy.

Douglas, JFK why he died and why it matters is the best work on the subject. And no Oswald did not do it; it was a sniper team from different angles, but read the book it gets complicated.

Roger , July 4, 2020 at 09:11

from Counterpunch.org : “Around 15,000 Soviet troops perished in the Afghan War between 1979 and 1989. The US funneled more than $20 billion to the Mujahideen and other anti-Soviet fighters over that same period. This works out to a “bounty” of $1.33 million for each Soviet soldier killed.”

Skip Scott , July 4, 2020 at 08:35

I am wondering how Cheney and Crow can block Trump from withdrawing the troops from Afghanistan. Is Trump Commander in Chief, or not? How can two senators stop the Commander in Chief from commanding troop movements? I realize they control the budget, but aren’t they crossing into illegality by restricting Trump’s ability to “command”?

Toad Sprocket , July 4, 2020 at 16:49

Yeah, I imagine it’s illegal. Didn’t Lindsay Graham threaten the same thing when Trump was thinking of pulling troops/”advisers” from Syria? And other congress warmongers joined in though I don’t think any legislation was passed. They can’t be bothered to authorize the starts of wars but want to step in when someone tries to end them.

Oh, and Schumer on South Korea troops, I think that one did pass. Almost certainly illegal if it came down to it, but our government is of course lawless. And our courts full of judges who are bought off or moronic or both.

dean 1000 , July 4, 2020 at 06:52

The soft coup attempt continues Ray. More lies and bullshit. It may continue until election day. Will the media fess-up to its lies after the fact again?

Francis Lee , July 4, 2020 at 04:49

“Vladimir Putin wakes up every morning and goes to bed every night trying to figure out how to destroy American democracy.”

Yes, of course it is a well-known ‘fact’ that Putin has nothing better to do than destory American democracy, and I bet he has dreams about it too! But I am minded to think that if anybody has a penchant for destroying American democracy it is the powers that be in the US deep state, intelligence agencies, and zionist cliques controlling the President and Congress.

”Those whom the gods would destroy they first make mad.”

The American establishment seems to be suffering from a bad case of ‘projection’ as psychiatrists call it. That is to say accusing others of what they are themselves actually doing.

The whole idiotic circus would be hilarious if it were not so serious.

Antonia Young , July 4, 2020 at 12:20

Putin’s (and by extension the Russian Federation’s) primary objective is international stability. “Destroying America, dividing Americans is the last thing he wants.) Putin learned many lessons during the break-up of the U.S.S.R. observing the carpet baggers/oligarchs/vultures who descended on the weak nation, absconding with it’s wealth and resources at mere fractions of their real value. The deep state’s worst fear is the co-operation btwn Putin and President Trump to make the world more peaceful, stable, co-operative and prosperous.

rosemerry , July 4, 2020 at 16:10

The whole conceited and arrogant “belief” that

  1. The USA has any resemblance to a democracy and
  2. Pres. Putin has nothing else to do but think how he could do a better job of showing the destructive and irresponsible behavior of the USA than its own leaders” and media can do with no help has no basis in reality.

If anything, Putin is such a stickler for international law, negotiations, avoidance of conflict that he is regarded by many as too Christian for this modern, individualistic, LBGTQ, ”nobody matters but me” worldview of the USA!

Steve Naidamast , July 5, 2020 at 19:54

“If the enemy is self destructing, let them continue to do so…”

Napoleon

Zhu , July 7, 2020 at 02:17

“zionist cliques”: Christian Zionist fighting Fundies, eager for the End of the World, the Second Coming of Jesus.

delia ruhe , July 4, 2020 at 01:09

Yup, we got a Bountygate. Since my early morning visit to the Foreign Policy site, the place has exploded with breathless articles on the dastardly Putin and the cowardly Trump, who has so far failed to hold Putin to account. Reminded me of a similar explosion there when Russiagate finally got the attention the Dems thought it deserved.

(Anyone think that the intel community pays a fee to each of the FP columnists whenever one of their a propaganda narratives needs a push to get it off the ground?)

JOHN CHUCKMAN , July 4, 2020 at 08:52

Udo Ulfkotte was a German journalist. He wrote a sensational book about the practices he experienced of the CIA paying German journalists to publish certain stories. The book was a big best seller in Germany. Its English translation was suppressed for years, but I believe is now available.

Susan Siens , July 5, 2020 at 16:30

Reply to John Chuckman: I’d love to read this book but it wasn’t available a few years ago when I looked. I’ll look again!

Voice from Europe , July 6, 2020 at 11:52

Gekaufte journalisten. Ulfkotte admitted he signed off on numerous articles that were prepared for him during his career. The last year’s of his life he changed his mores and advocated “better die in truth than live with lies”.

Richard A. , July 4, 2020 at 00:59

I remember the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour from decades ago. Real experts on Russia like Dimitri Simes and Stephen Cohen were the ones to appear on that NewsHour. The NewsHour of today rarely has experts on Russia, just experts on Russia bashing–like Michael McFaul. Oh how the mighty have fallen.

Antonia Young , July 3, 2020 at 23:35

Thank you, Ray for your clarion voice in the midst of WMD-seventeen-point-oh. Will the American people have the wisdom to notice how many times we’re being fooled? And finally wake up and stop supporting these questionable news outlets? With appreciation for your excellent analysis, as usual. ~Tonia Young (Formerly with the Topanga Peace Alliance)

Blessthebeasts , July 4, 2020 at 11:55

The majority of Americans have a lot more to worry about than the latest nonsense about Russia. I think most people just tune it out.

The ones being fooled are the fools who have been lapping this crap up from the get go. The supposed educated class who think themselves superior and well informed because they read and listen to the propaganda of PBS, NPR, NYT etc.

They don’t seem to realize the ship is sinking while they’re playing these ridiculous games.

Susan Siens , July 5, 2020 at 16:34

The supposedly educated class, yes! It can be stunning how people believe anything they hear on PBS or NPR, and then they make fun of people who believe anything they hear on Fox News. What’s the difference? Both are propaganda tools.

And, yes, watch us go down in flames while so-called progressives boo-hoo about Trump thinking he’s above the law (like every other president before him). Our local “peace and justice” group sent me an email asking me to sign a petition supporting Robert Mueller. I was gobsmacked, and then I realized our local “peace and justice” group had been taken over by Democratic Party “resisters.” Jeezums, why is every word hijacked?

[Jul 07, 2020] War is no longer about winning. Endless conflict is the name of the game. Military defense contractors are the most influential of all lobbyists

Jul 07, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

450.org , Jul 7 2020 2:06 utc | 99

@96

War is no longer about winning. Endless conflict is the name of the game. Military defense contractors are the most influential of all lobbyists and so intertwined in government that it's truly & effectively fascist. Profit is the end, war is the means.

Jackrabbit , Jul 7 2020 2:28 utc | 102

Wait ... what?
<> <> <> <> <>

IMO Trump has started wars but the countries and peoples he picks on know that it's best not to respond too forcibly or they invite greater damage.

I'm surprised that moa commenters give any credence to the claims that portray Trump as peaceful/peace-loving. In addition to his belligerence, Empire front-man Trump has initiated a huge military build-up, ended long-standing peace treaties, and militarized space.

!!

Edward , Jul 7 2020 2:56 utc | 106

This is the standard Washington rhetoric that accompanies their coup attempts. It is a companion to the "moderate democracy" rhetoric about U.S. satellite governments like Saudi Arabia. The rhetoric tells you that these people have zero interest in democracy, honesty, or avoiding hypocrisy. Some of Bush's neocons are Biden Supporters; what a surprise.

Don Bacon , Jul 7 2020 3:13 utc | 108

@ Jackrabbit 102
re: Isn't USA effectively at war with Venezuela?. . .etc
Obviously you don't know jack about actual war, do you.
Or give us your creds?

Grieved , Jul 7 2020 4:28 utc | 109
I dropped back in to see what follows...imagine my deflation to find that people don't know what war is.

@108 Don Bacon

Precisely. No one who has ever experienced the tragedy of war will ever mistake the playground games of make-believe war with the real thing.

~~

That's the problem with the US administration, and its satraps and the many camp followers and court jesters who follow it. They don't know the difference between posturing war and waging war.

The difference is so profound that it calls for not only a new language but a new departure point of reference within one's soul even to begin to speak of such things.

The US will pursue the make-believe war it postures through in order to score points within its small group circle. But real war, should it ever come to touch it - and it will if it pursues its childishness too far - will shock it into total frozen fear the moment that it strikes.

Iran knew this, and had the human strength to test it and to prove it. Everything else, up to this point, was an accommodation by the world's nations to the posturing of the US for its own internal coherence. It was a matter of supporting the US ego rather than of being close to the event when that ego falls apart, with potentially explosive consequences.

But Iran had the strength of character to stand on its principles, and to proclaim its truth. And by the way, that stand is by no means done, despite what the trolls may suggest. Iran has barely begun its action to remove the US from Southwest Asia, and we will only see the footprints of its actions as we realize that the US has departed. And this will happen, regardless of the US narrative and its many parrots.

~~

I don't blame the US or any of its supporters for threatening war when all it really does is act as a nuisance and a spoiler in those few platforms left to it. Those it oppresses have so far mostly chosen to bear the insult rather than to make a fuss. But Iran has shown the way, and one should not expect many more of those oppressed to put up with the abuse from the US many more times.

What is clearly known is that the very last thing the US can do is go to war, in the real meaning of that term. The very last thing the US is capable of, is war. And the generals of all the nations of the world know this because they have seen the proof of it. Anyone who doesn't see the proof of it is behind the curve, and may well have license to comment here and elsewhere, but fortunately does not sit in the security councils of the nations of the world.

~~

If anyone wants to think that the US is "effectively" at war with another nation, then consider that Iran is absolutely "effectively" at war with the US, just as Hezbollah is beyond any doubt at war with Israel. And so what? When positions are "effectively" this or that, then they had better produce "effective" results. And it is only from these effective results that we can count the coup of the engagement. Hezbollah and Iran don't need to be told the difference between real attacks and propaganda attacks.

What they count is the real force.

Everything else is bluster. And I was 16 years old myself once, so in all humility I don't condemn this braggadocio, which I understand all too humanly.

But neither do I take it as real in the real world.

Don Bacon , Jul 7 2020 4:47 utc | 110
@ Grieved 109
Thanks for helping to deliver us from all that illusory make-believe on war from the deep thinkers who apparently man this place. And yes, Iran has shown the way, which includes its ability to put a serious hurt on US forces if attacked. We're talking about the possibility of lots of US dead bodies, military and dependents, men women and children, also sunken ships, and not just some supporting proxies and aerial bombing with the attendant publicity that suggests to some that genuine war exists, when it doesn't.
People need to get real.
Jackrabbit , Jul 7 2020 5:26 utc | 112

Trump is really no different than Clinton, GWBush, and Obama. Each a front-man for the Deep State/Empire. Each portrayed as well-meaning, peace-loving men that were FORCED! to war for all the right reasons. In that context, these Jedi mind-tricks fall flat:


!!
Mao , Jul 7 2020 5:52 utc | 113

With only four months left to the U.S. presidential elections, and the increasing likelihood of Donald Trump, the most pro-Israel President in history, losing, Israel has been trying to provoke Iran to start a war, so that it can drag the United State into it. This is not anything new. For over a decade Benjamin Netanyahu has been trying to force the United States to go to war with Iran, and Israel itself almost attacked Iran three times between 2010 and 2011. But the with events of the last several months darkening the prospects of a second Trump term, Israel feels a new urgency for a war with Iran.

For over two years Israel tried to provoke Iran by attacking Iranian-backed Shiite forces in Syria, but Iran has opted not to retaliate. Since the attacks did not provoke Iran to retaliate, and also failed to dislodge Iran's military advisers and the Shiite forces that it trained, armed, and dispatched to Syria, Israel has seemingly turned to attacking Iran directly within its borders.

The events of past two months in Iran are indicative of Israel's new push for war. These events include large-scale infernos, explosions, and cyberattacks, all believed to have been carried out by Israel and its Iranian proxies, the "fake opposition" which is the part of the opposition that supports economic sanctions and military attacks against Iran, and has even allied itself with small secessionist groups that carry out terrorist attacks inside Iran.

https://original.antiwar.com/sahimi/2020/07/05/israel-is-trying-to-provoke-iran-to-start-a-war/

Mao , Jul 7 2020 6:23 utc | 114

In this video, Prof. Wolff talks about the breakdown of the capitalist system and outlines 4 major problems that the US has been faced with without for quite some time with no solution in sight: climate change, capitalism's intrinsic instability, systemic racism inherited from slavery, and lastly the lack of mechanisms to manage viruses.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9HRWWRFyEc8

In this video, Prof. Wolff compares and contrasts the preparation for and management of COVID-19 with how the US has managed military preparedness and the handling of military confrontations and activities. It has succeeded at one and completely failed at the other. He explains why.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAo_QJAsOGg

AskProfWolff: How the Fed Serves Capitalism
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=reHa7VVnhT8

Richard Steven Hack , Jul 7 2020 6:36 utc | 115
Posted by: Grieved | Jul 7 2020 1:09 utc | 96 Prediction: The US may start a war but the US will not finish that war. Its opponent will end that war, by causing unacceptable losses to the US - something quite easily achieved, and already proved to the world by Iran in this very year of 2020.

I agree. The US can not defeat Iran, short of nuking Tehran, which is not in the cards for geopolitical reasons. However, the US can devastate much of Iran's civilian infrastructure, which, like most such infrastructures, can't run and hide. The US can also kill a million or two milllion Iranians, as it proved in Iraq.

All that will do, however, is merely guarantee that Iran will never surrender. Nor would Iran ever surrender in the first place. Which is why I tend to reference the upcoming war as the "New Thirty Years War". The clear example is the near twenty years we've spent in Afghanistan - which is vastly weaker than Iran. Each war - Vietnam, Afghanistan, and arguably Iraq - has lasted longer than the last and with failure as an outcome.

The US can keep attacking Iran from the air and sea for thirty years - but without ever defeating Iran. It will do so because the military-industrial complex will make profits every year from that war - and in the end, that's all that matters to the US (along with the

Only if the US tries a land invasion will the US lose a massive number of troops. But even that will come over time, albeit at a *much* higher rate than the US saw in either Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan. US annual casualties would probably be in the low to medium 5 digits per year, as opposed to the low 4 digits in most of those wars. In other words, four or five times the rate in Iraq. That's as compared with a hot war in North Korea which would see 50,000 US casualties in the first ninety days, or any war with China or Russia. See "United States military casualties of war" on Wikipedia. It's possible that casualties could rise to the level of WWI, if the war lasts five or ten years, or even WWII if it lasts twenty - or even higher if it lasts thirty.

Most people think the US will not try a land invasion. I've argued, however, that the *only* way to even attempt to prevent Iran from closing the Straits for the duration of the war will be for the US to put several score thousand Marines and US troops on Iran's shores to attempt to prevent launching of mines and anti-ship missiles. This would be difficult since Iran has a long Persian Gulf shoreline, Iran has fortified that shoreline, there are many places to launch weapons from that shoreline - and any such US troops would be subject to both conventional and guerrilla war by the Iranian military and perhaps a million or more Iranian Basij militia. Nonetheless, the US is likely to be dumb enough to try.

In any event, the US will eventually be forced to withdraw either because the US electorate would eventually tire of the war - although as Afghanistan proves, that could take a *very* long time, mostly depending on the casualty rate, however, as I indicateed - or because another "threat" takes precedence, which would likely mean either Russia or China.

"And the US will strain its mighty Wurlitzer to the utmost to declare victory as it retreats."

Yup. And the sad part is that the US electorate will probably believe that, then forget about the reality and be willing to commit to a new war within another ten years.

Jackrabbit , Jul 7 2020 6:36 utc | 116
Mao @Jul7 5:52 #113

increasing likelihood of Donald Trump, the most pro-Israel President in history, losing

1) The USA establishment are all pro-Israel.

2) Biden has proclaimed himself a Zionist.

3) In 2016 all the polls had Clinton ahead.

Fake populist outsiders (like Trump) have to be shown to defeat the establishment. That helps to sell them as being on the side of the people.

!!

Richard Steven Hack , Jul 7 2020 7:00 utc | 119
In addition to the above, the idea that because there's a difference between "war" and "conflicts before war" there is *no chance* of war is absurd.

Every war started with this sort of enmity between nations historically. As I've said before, with this level of enmity between the US and Iran, and arguably between the US and Russia, and the US and China, war is inevitable. With the latter two countries, such a war is likely to be nuclear - which is why it hasn't happened yet - that risk is *way* too high (although it can still happen if a miscalculation causes a conventional war, which then escalates into nuclear.)

A war with Iran doesn't have that risk. No nuclear power that I am aware of is going to enter the war on Iran's side and thus risk a nuclear war over Iran. Iran itself will not develop or use nuclear weapons. Israel *might* consider using nuclear weapons against Iran - that would be a*huge* mistake geopolitically and probably result in Israel's destruction by geopolitical means if not by military means. But neither Russia nor China are going to directly engage the US military to defend Iran. That would be stupid and putting their own national survival at risk for the benefit of another nation. As Percival Rose would say, "That ain't gonna happen."

The real problem for some people is cognitive dissonance. They can't emotionally accept the possibility of these wars occurring - so they don't. They are reduced to saying, "well, it hasn't happened...yet."

The "yet" is the operative term. There is no logical extension of that term to mean "never".

Jackrabbit , Jul 7 2020 7:03 utc | 120
Richard Steven Hack @Jul7 6:36 115

There are many other mistaken assumptions, such as:


!!
arby , Jul 7 2020 11:59 utc | 123

IMO, the word "WAR" means two sides are fighting.

What is plain to see is all of these "wars" are not wars but provocations, aggression from one side and bullying. In every case the other side does not want a war.

Interesting how the US has way upped its aggression on Venezuela without a peep from the people. This started off with some nonsense about an idiot named Guaido and is now full blown nastiness.

Digital Spartacus , Jul 7 2020 12:59 utc | 125

@120

Sadly they are not the only stooges. It beggars belief that people everywhere believe that they can elect someone to change the system in the country in which they reside. Political stripes have very little meaning as the differences are incremental at best. The bureaucracies necessary to keep the modern systems of governance afloat are staggeringly monolithic. Electing one individual, or party, or parties and presuming that the system will somehow be improved upon is a laughable fantasy. It leads to a continuous cycle of four years of initiatives to tear down the previous four years initiatives unless you're a second term government. But actual change is still the sole purview of the entrenched bureaucracy or "deep state" or whatever other label you prefer. To Jackrabbit's point, most decisions hinge on whether or not the bureaucracies in charge believe a war, a social change etc. can be implemented and a desired result achieved. It takes a finely developed sense of myopia to think that the only stooges are those of the political class. Says volumes about the people that put them there, and continues to suggest that they are electing "change".
As an aside, the Frank Zappa quote that "government is the entertainment division of the military industrial complex" remains potently poignant.

arby , Jul 7 2020 15:52 utc | 134

Calling what the US is doing to these countries "war" is like saying that Floyd was in a fight with the cop's knee.
Yes,there has been some very measured retaliation from some of the victims, but it amounts to Floyd saying he can't breathe.

PleaseBeleafMe , Jul 7 2020 16:11 utc | 135

@450 132
The provocations and responses of the formation of a war with Iran have been very interesting and I think that if Iran hadn't of shot down the Ukrainian airliner after their attack against the American base we may have already or continue to witness that war. As I see it there was a real hard on to go after Iran but word of the shoot down allowed the Don to pull back and let Iran suffer the black mark without escalation.
There are way too many itchy trigger fingers and pretexts for this and that can be easily engineered and sold to the masses. Helps Biden or whomever if he can blame the future cluster fuck on cleaning up donnies mess. I expect something expectedly unexpected in the coming months.

450.org , Jul 7 2020 16:59 utc | 139

@134

War is not a static proposition and its meaning and definition can and should change over time to fit the prevailing military strategies and economic paradigm of the day. We don't live and operate in an unassailable lexicon vacuum. War is not defined tautologically, meaning, war is not war. War is many things and can be fought on many dimensional fronts, meaning not just militarily.

Jackrabbit , Jul 7 2020 17:25 utc | 144

arby @Jul7 17:12 @141

I think war is a state of mind. That's why we talk about "the war on poverty" or a "propaganda war".

You might say that there is a "Cold War" but the number of acts of war is too numerous for that and targeted at multiple countries/peoples. It's more like a 'hybrid war' on everyone that opposes the New World Order that the AZ Empire seeks to impose on the planet.

Importantly, you can't prevent war if you only start thinking of it as 'war' when the shooting starts.

!!

[Jul 07, 2020] Vladimir Putin wakes up every morning and goes to bed every night trying to figure out how to destroy American democracy

Jul 07, 2020 | consortiumnews.com

In an oped on Thursday McFaul presented a long list of Vladimir Putin's alleged crimes, offering a more ostensibly sophisticated version of amateur Russian specialist, Rep. Jason Crow's (D-CO) claim that: "Vladimir Putin wakes up every morning and goes to bed every night trying to figure out how to destroy American democracy."

Francis Lee , July 4, 2020 at 04:49

“Vladimir Putin wakes up every morning and goes to bed every night trying to figure out how to destroy American democracy.”

Yes, of course it is a well-known ‘fact’ that Putin has nothing better to do than destory American democracy, and I bet he has dreams about it too! But I am minded to think that if anybody has a penchant for destroying American democracy it is the powers that be in the US deep state, intelligence agencies, and zionist cliques controlling the President and Congress.

”Those whom the gods would destroy they first make mad.”

The American establishment seems to be suffering from a bad case of ‘projection’ as psychiatrists call it. That is to say accusing others of what they are themselves actually doing.

The whole idiotic circus would be hilarious if it were not so serious.

[Jul 07, 2020] Saddam statue toppling vs toppling of statues in the USA

Jul 07, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

CitizenX , Jul 6 2020 18:49 utc | 114

..
"Three weeks into the war, Marine Sgt. Ed Chin got the order: Help the Iraqis celebrating in Baghdad's Firdos Square topple the statue of Saddam Hussein.

"My captain comes over and he's got like this package. He hands it to me and he's like, he tells me there's an American flag in there and when I get up there, you know, he's like, show the boys the colors," said Chin.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/a-decade-after-saddam-husseins-statue-falls-a-tale-of-two-memories/

I'll speak very slowly and simply just for you.

Are you seriously incapable of making a connection regarding the hypocrisy of the US Govt/US military wrapping an American Flag on the Saddam Statue and destroying it for a media photo op while cheering about it? And the condemnation of the US Govt declaring statues should not be destroyed?

Do you see no insanity regarding the US Regime illegally invading and destroying another Nation and its statues (war crime w/millions dead)? The very same Nation celebrating a "bad" Iraqi statue being destroyed is suddenly disgusted when its own statues are being destroyed by its own people?

My point is obvious if you can step back from your myopic view. The US is a mentally ill Nation ridden with hypocrisy. I personally do not put much merit into statues, cultural idolatry comes to mind, just as foolish as religious idolatry.

So what are your thoughts on the destruction of the Saddam statue sanctioned by the US govt and military?

dh , Jul 6 2020 21:40 utc | 125

@114 I expect V will be along at some point but here are my thoughts on the Saddam statue.....

The US is ridden with hypocrisy as you say ....no surprise there. The statue was actually pulled down by a rentamob of Iraqi Saddam haters while American troops high-fived each other.

They wouldn't see anything wrong with pulling the statue down because Saddam was a 'bad guy' and an American enemy.

Those same troops would probably not feel the same way about Confederate generals.....who just happened to be Americans who kept slaves and picked the losing side. They would be seen as major figures in American history.

That is how a lot of Americans would justify it. Of course it is rank hypocrisy..

[Jul 06, 2020] The "anti-antiwar left" is of course an oxymoron. In reality, they are neo-McCarthyites, neocons, and Israel-firsters

There is not much "real" left in the the USA. Usually what we see is just different flavors of far right and right.
Money quote: "Ah, for the good old days when lefties could be treated as a deluded minority rather than a vanguard party of globalist imperialists. pl"
Notable quotes:
"... As Johnstone recounts, after the Cold War liberals became bewitched by the prospect of waging wars for humanitarian ends. A generation of journalists and foreign policy experts including Samantha Power, Christiane Amanpour, Jamie Rubin, and Christopher Hitchens, would make the Balkans a proving ground for their liberal theories of preventative war, in the process throwing the ancient and venerable tradition of St. Augustine’s Just War theory on the trash heap and paving the way for what was to follow in the coming decades, including Iraq II, Libya, Syria and a global drone war and a “targeted” assassination program." ..."
"... In other words we are seeing the tight squeezing of the New Democrats (Wall-Street, Tech, humanitarian intervention) by the radical left (Green New Deal, UBI) and by the angry Trumpists. ..."
"... Samantha Power is Irish bred and London born. She was schooled in Dublin till her mother emigrated to the US. Christiane Amanpour is British-Iranian. As far as I can determine she never has had US citizenship. ..."
"... WTF were they smoking when they decided to promote war to secure human rights??? So why did we let these halfwits in the country? ..."
"... Kerry seems is the perfect example of Democrats’ hypocritical ‘opposition’ to pointless and futile wars. Not that anybody remembers, but it was the liberal Bill Clinton who went to war in Yugoslavia and defanged the anti-war wing of the party. After Clinton Democrats only raised their voices against Republican wars and now have taken to criticizing Trump for not being belligerent enough!!! ..."
"... The same white men who stood three years ago Charlottesville to prevent the toppling of statues could be the backbone of a new anti-war movement ..."
"... The New York Times is not revolutionary, not by a very long shot. Neither are all the big corporations and foundations who've donated generously to the cause of BLM. ..."
"... America is not in the middle of a revolution — it is a reactionary putsch. About four years ago, the sort of people who had acquired position and influence as a result of globalisation were turfed out of power for the first time in decades. They watched in horror as voters across the world chose Brexit, Donald Trump and other populist and conservative-nationalist options. ..."
"... The essential idea is that neither the non Trump wing of the American establishment (more properly Global establishment still anchored tenuously in DC) nor the Trump wing want the voters to discuss the economy - it's too hot a subject. ..."
"... Way too hot since the financial crisis of 2007-08 followed the working class jobs overseas and south of the border in the 90s and inequality exceeded that of the gilded age. No. But they will discuss racism (and gender). It divides the country further than ever, deflects focus on wealth disparity (the establishment has no intention of ever equalizing wealth even a bit) and presto - gives corporate America and media a new policing tool in the form of mandatory workshops and summary job dismissals even more unsubstantiated than many of those with #MeToo. It enhances the academic totalitarians of political correctness with corporate / employer totalitarianism of "learn your inclusivity lessons reeducation camp" or else. Unions disappeared long ago and now this. ..."
"... Yes the stupidity is ominous. They act as though there is no potential for repurcussion. It's very peculiar. ..."
Jul 05, 2020 | turcopolier.typepad.com

As Johnstone recounts, after the Cold War liberals became bewitched by the prospect of waging wars for humanitarian ends. A generation of journalists and foreign policy experts including Samantha Power, Christiane Amanpour, Jamie Rubin, and Christopher Hitchens, would make the Balkans a proving ground for their liberal theories of preventative war, in the process throwing the ancient and venerable tradition of St. Augustine’s Just War theory on the trash heap and paving the way for what was to follow in the coming decades, including Iraq II, Libya, Syria and a global drone war and a “targeted” assassination program."

Carden, https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/07/01/the-return-of-the-anti-antiwar-left

exiled off mainstreet , 04 July 2020 at 03:36 PM

This is a serious article addressing a serious problem. If the "left" sells out on war issues as they have done the last 20 years or so, there is no pushback against the permanent war system. Those one-time leftists who have sold out are no longer really leftists, especially once they are relying on the corrupt permanent spy state for their information and support.

Polish Janitor , 04 July 2020 at 04:05 PM

Col Lang,

Interesting and correct observation. Allow me to throw in my own two cents with regards to the rise of what is defined as the "anti-Anti War left". I should note that there are eerily similar parallels between the rise of the New Left in the 60s that was the mix of socialist democrats, sexual revolutionaries, flower-power hippies, anti-imperialist/anti-war activists, and identitarianists (Huey Netwon, Cesar Chavez, MLK) etc. and today's BLM, Antifa, 'woke' types, third-gen feminists, broke millennials.

While the former's rise in the Democratic Party led to the exodus of Neoconservatives (former Trotskyists, Socialist and Marxists) to the Conservative movement, the latter is also moving the New Democrats to the Right, but the problem is that the current Political Right is mostly controlled by the Trumpists so these New Democrat types (Pelosi, Schumer, Schiff, Menendez, Biden etc.) are stuck between a hard place and a rock.

In other words we are seeing the tight squeezing of the New Democrats (Wall-Street, Tech, humanitarian intervention) by the radical left (Green New Deal, UBI) and by the angry Trumpists.

Just to give you one example, last week a prototype New Democrat and long time congressman (since 89) Elliot Engel of NY who fits well into this definition was defeated handily in the NY-16 primaries by the Democratic Socialists of America endorsed candidate, Jamal Bowman. Mr. Bowman, an African American is ideologically very similar to AOC, Tlaib, and Omar.

He won on a platform of foreign policy endorsed by the left-zionists (ex-labor zionists) against the likudnik right-wing zionist of Engles' which is very interesting since, Engel has been known for his hawkish views on foreign policy and extremely pro-Israel and chaired the House Foreign Affairs Committee recently.

Recently Sanders and the Democratic Socialists expressed their opposition to Bibi's planned annexation of West-bank and adjacent Palestinian enclaves and threatened to to cut-off the military aid to Israel if Bibi moved on with his plan.

Domestically, there are several seats up for re-election and especially two in Georgia and Arizona Senate whose ppointed Republican candidates are in very shaky grounds versus their democratic challengers. What is clear is that the New Democrat platforms are no longer popular by the Democratic base and given recent events, it can be safely said that either the most law and order and Trumpian candidates will win or the Democratic socialists endorsed ones. So another problem for the New Dems.

Judging by my observation, the current trend is the alliance between the NeverTrumpers (The Lincoln project, The Right Pac) like Bill Kristol and the Reagan-to-Bush-43-neoconservatives (most of whom were Reagan Democrats in the late 70s and 80s themselves so nothing new for them) to push Trump out of office in their view before the RNC in Aug and to make room for the New Democrats and also to restore their previous 20+ years of reigning over the Republican Party. If their plan becomes successful, in the post 2020 election we will see a political configuration resembling the 90s and early 2000s with one major difference which is the introduction of several, in my opinion less that 10 seats in the House reserved for the far-Left socialist Democrats.

And in terms of Foreign policy, everyone will get happy and the Blob/Borg think tank class in D.C. will see business as usual as the Democratic Socialists will be "persuaded" to team up with the New Democrats with regards to sending Troops to conduct humanitarian intervention abroad (i.e. the Powell Doctrine) in exchange for domestic welfare programs, the NeverTrumpers and the Republican hawks (Cotton, Graham, Rubio, Cruz, etc.) will have war plans already written for them at AEI, Hudson and Heritage that focuses on China with the help of the New Democrats and probably the Far-left.

Leith , 04 July 2020 at 05:28 PM

Samantha Power is Irish bred and London born. She was schooled in Dublin till her mother emigrated to the US. Christiane Amanpour is British-Iranian. As far as I can determine she never has had US citizenship. Christopher Hitchens is English born, never visited America unti he was 32. And even then kept his British citizenship for another 26 years, only becoming a US citizen in 2007. Probably to take advantage of favorable US income tax on his book earnings.

WTF were they smoking when they decided to promote war to secure human rights??? So why did we let these halfwits in the country?

Seems to me we are better off by letting in a few more Sikh farmers from India or more wannabee restaurant owners from Ethiopia. Or maybe even more wannabee bodega empresarios from south of our border.

JohnH , 04 July 2020 at 06:32 PM

Anyone remember John Kerry, who criticized the anti-war movement and enlisted and served in Vietnam, only to opportunistically turn against the war. As long as the winds blew anti-war, he continued to posture that way. Then he reversed course, maybe sensing an SOS opportunity, and voted for the War in Iraq, meanwhile posturing against it on the grounds that it wasn’t being fought right!

Kerry seems is the perfect example of Democrats’ hypocritical ‘opposition’ to pointless and futile wars. Not that anybody remembers, but it was the liberal Bill Clinton who went to war in Yugoslavia and defanged the anti-war wing of the party. After Clinton Democrats only raised their voices against Republican wars and now have taken to criticizing Trump for not being belligerent enough!!!

Outrage Beyond , 04 July 2020 at 08:16 PM

The "anti-antiwar left" is of course an oxymoron. In reality, they are neo-McCarthyites, neocons, and Israel-firsters. Nothing new. They were never leftists to begin with and certainly never will be.

To add onto the comments by Polish Janitor regarding Jamaal Bowman, I have this to say. Just like AOC, he'll cuck out to Israel. He'll take the money and he'll probably take that "educational" trip to Israel as well. While he's there, would anyone be surprised if he had a hot time with some honey pie and they got him on Kodak? They'll only drop hints about the stick, in the meantime, they'll be stuffing his face with carrots as he comes around to the Zionist agenda.

Vegetius , 05 July 2020 at 12:40 AM

@exiled off mainstreet

The same white men who stood three years ago Charlottesville to prevent the toppling of statues could be the backbone of a new anti-war movement, if only conservatives weren't afraid of being called 'racist' by people who hate them anyway.

Fourth and Long , 05 July 2020 at 04:56 PM

To better get one's bearings regarding what's going on I highly recommend this Spectator article to the committee. Although BLM and other nefarious types referred to as Antifa certainly do pass the anarchist test and Marxist test it's critical the committee understand that the whole thing is being managed by a wing of the establishment.

The New York Times is not revolutionary, not by a very long shot. Neither are all the big corporations and foundations who've donated generously to the cause of BLM.

Editorial talents at NYT instigated the wholesale rewriting of American history over a year ago with their fraudulent 1619 project which says American history began in that year with the importation of African slaves.

But it's real thesis is that the revolution of 1776 (an inspiration to people everywhere), was not undertaken to free the thirteen colonies from the tyranny of King George - no - it was done for the sole reason of perpetuation of slavery because Washington and other colonial land owners feared that the institution of slavery would be made illegal by their then British overlords. I kid you not.

The NY Times. Pure revisionism of the worst sort. But the ends which this revisionism serve, as do the subsequent BLM riots and mindless iconoclasms, are revealed in this piece:

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/this-revolution-isnt-what-it-looks-like

(This Revolution isn't What it Looks Like). Here's a brief excerpt - it's a management device. Matt Taibbi has a treatment nearly as good but too diffuse and witty for these purposes, under the title "Year Zero" on his blog, but it is behind a paywall. Many illustrative exames though.

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/year-zero/

Spectator first few paragraphs.. Bear with this. What they're doing is designed to infuriate and disable critical understanding as they proceed to carry the day in real time.

QUOTE:

America is not in the middle of a revolution — it is a reactionary putsch. About four years ago, the sort of people who had acquired position and influence as a result of globalisation were turfed out of power for the first time in decades. They watched in horror as voters across the world chose Brexit, Donald Trump and other populist and conservative-nationalist options.

This deposition explains the storm of unrest battering American cities from coast to coast and making waves in Europe as well. The storm’s ferocity — the looting, the mobs, the mass lawlessness, the zealous iconoclasm, the deranged slogans like #DefundPolice — terrifies ordinary Americans. Many conservatives, especially, believe they are facing a revolution targeting the very foundations of American order.

But when national institutions bow (or kneel) to the street fighters’ demands, it should tell us that something else is going on. We aren’t dealing with a Maoist or Marxist revolt, even if some protagonists spout hard-leftish rhetoric. Rather, what’s playing out is a counter-revolution of the neoliberal class — academe, media, large corporations, ‘experts’, Big Tech — against the nationalist revolution launched in 2016. The supposed insurgents and the elites are marching in the streets together, taking the knee together.

They do not seek a radically new arrangement, but a return to the pre-Trump, pre-Brexit status quo ante which was working out very well for them. It was, of course, working out less well for the working class of all races, who bore the brunt of their preferred policy mix: open borders, free trade without limits, an aggressive cultural liberalism that corroded tradition and community, technocratic ‘global governance’ that neutered democracy and politics as such.

When national institutions bow to the street fighters’ demands, it tells us something else is going on

UNQUOTE

jerseycityjoan , 05 July 2020 at 05:32 PM

...Did you realize that the Black Lives Matter group only has 14 local chapters in America and 3 in Canada? I don't think there are many actual Antifa members out there either. Now of course a few determined troublemakers can cause a lot of problems but still I can't see how the country is in real danger.

Probably the real danger here is that these groups get moral support from nonradical people for radical actions and policies. Right now there are a lot more people against getting rid of the police than are for it. Now if that changed I would get worried. I have to admit that I don't like the fact that we do not know who's funding the radicals and that many are anonymous but I am not afraid of them. I can't imagine a situation in which they would win and we would lose over time.

Fourth and Long , 05 July 2020 at 06:23 PM

Colonel Lang,

No it doesn't, not that I know of. It was the brainchild of Nikole Hannah-Jones working since 2015 for the times, who received a 2020 Pulitzer prize for the project which initially was presented in the Times magazine for the 400th anniversary of 1619 when it is claimed that enslaved Africans first arrived to the American colonies. However it mushroomed into something much larger and won the award. It was to investigate the legacy of slavery but with its claim that the true founding of the United States was in 1619 rather than 1776, it drew criticism from several historians. The controversy was conducted in Politico and on the pages of the World Socialist Web Site. See here:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_1619_Project

You will find links to several of the articles of the project, including: "America Wasn't a Democracy Until Black Americans Made It One", essay by Nikole Hannah-Jones and "American Capitalism Is Brutal. You Can Trace That to the Plantation", essay by Matthew Desmond.

I prefaced the intro to the Spectator article with mention of the Times award winning project because it is vital cultural- historical background to what's transpired since George Floyd incident of May 25.

My purpose was not to focus on that revisionist project though one may investigate it at leisure, but the reactionary establishment counter coup to the 2016 election of which the events of May 25 et seq are the most recent chapter - chapters one and two being Russiagate and impeachment.

Taibbi, in his latest which parallels the Spectator piece, does think to mention it. The essential idea is that neither the non Trump wing of the American establishment (more properly Global establishment still anchored tenuously in DC) nor the Trump wing want the voters to discuss the economy - it's too hot a subject.

Way too hot since the financial crisis of 2007-08 followed the working class jobs overseas and south of the border in the 90s and inequality exceeded that of the gilded age. No. But they will discuss racism (and gender). It divides the country further than ever, deflects focus on wealth disparity (the establishment has no intention of ever equalizing wealth even a bit) and presto - gives corporate America and media a new policing tool in the form of mandatory workshops and summary job dismissals even more unsubstantiated than many of those with #MeToo. It enhances the academic totalitarians of political correctness with corporate / employer totalitarianism of "learn your inclusivity lessons reeducation camp" or else. Unions disappeared long ago and now this.

From Taibbi:

It’s the Fourth of July, and revolution is in the air. Only in America would it look like this: an elite-sponsored Maoist revolt, couched as a Black liberation movement whose canonical texts are a corporate consultant’s white guilt self-help manual, and a New York Times series rewriting history to explain an election they called wrong.

Much of America has watched in quizzical silence in recent weeks as crowds declared war on an increasingly incoherent succession of historical symbols. Maybe you nodded as Confederate general Albert Pike was toppled or even when Christopher Columbus was beheaded, but it got a little weird when George Washington was emblazoned with “Fuck Cops” and set on fire, or when they went after Ulysses S. Grant, abolitionist Colonel Hans Christian Heg, “Forward,” (a seven-foot-tall female figure meant to symbolize progress), the Portland, Oregon “Elk statue,” or my personal favorite, the former slave Miguel de Cervantes, whose cheerful creations Don Quixote and Sancho Panza were apparently mistaken for reals and had their eyes lashed red in San Francisco.

Was a What the Fuck? too much to ask? It was! In the space of a few weeks the level of discourse in the news media dropped so low, the fear of being shamed as a deviationist so high, that most of the weirder incidents went uncovered. Leading press organs engaged in real-time Soviet-style airbrushing. Here’s how the Washington Post described a movement that targeted Spanish missionary Junipero Serra, Abraham Lincoln (a “single-handed symbol of white supremacy,” according to UW-Madison students), an apple cider press sculpture, abolitionist Mathias Baldwin, and the first all-Black volunteer regiment in the Civil War, among others:

Across the country, protesters have toppled statues of figures from America’s sordid past — including Confederate generals — as part of demonstrations against racism and police violence.

The New York Times, once the dictionary definition of “unprovocative,” suddenly reads like Pol Pot’s Sayings of Angkar. Heading into the Fourth of July weekend, the morning read for upscale white Manhattanites was denouncing Mount Rushmore, urging Black America to arm itself, and re-positioning America alongside more deserving historical parallels in a feature about caste systems:

turcopolier , 05 July 2020 at 06:57 PM

fourth and long

For 150 years the US treated its defeated internal enemy with respect in the interest of re-unification and reconciliation. Now that is gone destroyed by Marxist vanguard conspiratorial parties like antifa and BLM and the the power hungry Democrat Party pols who have made a deal with their soul mate extremists. Well, laissez les bon temps roulez!

Fourth and Long , 05 July 2020 at 07:55 PM

Colonel,

Yes the stupidity is ominous. They act as though there is no potential for repurcussion. It's very peculiar. Maybe they think oh well, there's been plenty of riots over the years. What ever happened? Didn't we get OJ freed? Didn't they pass civil rights legislation back in the day? And as for right now - aren't all the big people taking the knee - aren't corporations endorsing us? Isn't Twitter censoring in our favor? The mayor of New York City - wasn't he all set to paint a black lives matter mural onto 5th avenue opposite Trump tower before postponing it to paint one in Harlem instead?

Yes, all true. I don't think they've detected how furious people are getting with their behavior though. The tide is turning - CHAZ is gone, the conventions loom.

Long term I see nothing to be optimistic about. If Trump wins the counter coups will continue. If Biden, with a female minority VP who may become President -- good luck. Remember the Tea Party reaction ensuing on the heels of the first African American President? Reaction will be quite as bad at least with Trump, his family and his base still very much on the scene and infuriated.

But the oligarchs have seen their assets rise by hundreds of billions of dollars in a few short months. The surviving owners consolidate. People will be forced to work for peanuts. Evictions and repossessions are coming soon.

[Jul 06, 2020] Why is turkey even in Libya?

Jul 06, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Mina , Jul 5 2020 16:55 utc | 14

Libya:

Last week Turkey brought two MIM-23 Hawk air defense systems to the al-Watiyah Airbase. Last night they were bombed by either French, UAE, Egyptian or Russian mercenary airplanes. Officially the LNA (Hafter) has taken responsibility for the bombing. Whoever did this had a message to Turkey: Stop trying to break our red lines.

James, "why is turkey even in libya?"
Because they had to get out and quick, upon order of NATO/EU, back in 2011 (+ get a tip for evacuating the other foreigners). They ve lost a lot in this:
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-libya-protests-turkey/turkish-businesses-looted-in-libya-turks-evacuated-idUSTRE71K2HJ20110221

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2011-02-23/turkey-mounts-biggest-evacuation-in-its-history-to-rescue-5-000-from-libya
(I remember reading much more than 25,000 workers, mainly well-paid engineers whose money back home was most welcome)
And there is that
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turks_in_Libya

Egypt lost just as much or even more, they have ca 2-3 million workers there, mainly not higher scale jobs though

Hoarsewhisperer , Jul 5 2020 17:14 utc | 16

Thanks for the link to the Egypt/Libya article, b. It's a rare insight into the often-hidden complexities behind armed conflict. Thanks too for Caitlin J's opinion of AmeriKKKa's two Right-wing Crank parties. She makes it easier to laugh about their un-funny antics.

Slightly off topic, but I think Caitlin could be onto something worthwhile with her Utopia Prepper meme (whether she invented it or not). The way things are going, Hell could freeze over before sanity emerges in Western Political circles. Prompted by her optimism, I intend to devote an hour every Sunday afternoon to Utopia Prepping and contemplate the many potential delights which a mildly more Utopian world would facilitate. There's way too much negative thinking at present and it's NOT accidental. We'll never get to Utopia if we don't plan what we'll do when we arrive...

[Jul 06, 2020] Last week Turkey brought two MIM-23 Hawk air defense systems to the al-Watiyah Airbase. Last night they were bombed by either French, UAE, Egyptian or Russian mercenary airplanes

Jul 06, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Libya:

Last week Turkey brought two MIM-23 Hawk air defense systems to the al-Watiyah Airbase. Last night they were bombed by either French, UAE, Egyptian or Russian mercenary airplanes. Officially the LNA (Hafter) has taken responsibility for the bombing. Whoever did this had a message to Turkey: Stop trying to break our red lines.

[Jul 06, 2020] Trump's two Russias confound coherent US policy

This is a neocon written article. Reader beware.
Trump as wolf in sheep's clothing in his policy toward Russia. Any person who can appoint Bolton as his national security advisor should be criminally prosecuted for criminal incompetence. To say nothing about Pompeo, Haley and many others. Such a peacenik, my ***
The USA foreign policy is not controlled by the President. It is controlled by the "Deep state"
Notable quotes:
"... The dizzying, often contradictory, paths followed by Trump on the one hand and his hawkish but constantly changing cast of national security aides on the other have created confusion in Congress and among allies and enemies alike. To an observer, Russia is at once a mortal enemy and a misunderstood friend in U.S. eyes. ..."
"... But Trump has defended his perspective on Russia, viewing it as a misunderstood potential friend, a valued World War II ally led by a wily, benevolent authoritarian who actually may share American values, like the importance of patriotism, family and religion. ..."
"... despite Trump's rhetoric, his administration has plowed ahead with some of the most significant actions against Russia by any recent administration. ..."
"... Dozens of Russian diplomats have been expelled, diplomatic missions closed, arms control treaties the Russians sought to preserve have been abandoned, weapons have been sold to Ukraine despite the impeachment allegations and the administration is engaged in a furious battle to prevent Russia from constructing a new gas pipeline that U.S. lawmakers from both parties believe will increase Europe's already unhealthy dependence on Russian energy. ..."
Jul 06, 2020 | apnews.com

When it comes to Russia, the Trump administration just can't seem to make up its mind.

For the past three years, the administration has careered between President Donald Trump's attempts to curry favor and friendship with Vladimir Putin and longstanding deep-seated concerns about Putin's intentions. As Trump has repeatedly and openly cozied up to Putin, his administration has imposed harsh and meaningful sanctions and penalties on Russia.

The dizzying, often contradictory, paths followed by Trump on the one hand and his hawkish but constantly changing cast of national security aides on the other have created confusion in Congress and among allies and enemies alike. To an observer, Russia is at once a mortal enemy and a misunderstood friend in U.S. eyes.

Even before Trump took office questions about Russia abounded. Now, nearing the end of his first term with a difficult reelection ahead , those questions have resurfaced with a vengeance. Intelligence suggesting Russia was encouraging attacks on U.S. and allied forces in Afghanistan by putting bounties on their heads has thrust the matter into the heart of the 2020 campaign.

The White House says the intelligence wasn't confirmed or brought to Trump's attention, but his vast chorus of critics are skeptical and maintain the president should have been aware.

The reports have alarmed even pro-Trump Republicans who see Russia as a hostile global foe meddling with nefarious intent in Afghanistan, the Middle East, Ukraine and Georgia, a waning former superpower trying to regain its Soviet-era influence by subverting democracy in Europe and the United States with disinformation and election interference .

Trump's overtures to Putin have unsettled longstanding U.S. allies in Europe, including Britain, France and Germany, which have expressed concern about the U.S. commitment to the NATO alliance, which was forged to counter the Soviet threat, and robust democracy on the continent.

But Trump has defended his perspective on Russia, viewing it as a misunderstood potential friend, a valued World War II ally led by a wily, benevolent authoritarian who actually may share American values, like the importance of patriotism, family and religion.

Trump's approach to Russia was at center stage in the impeachment proceedings, when U.S. officials testified that the president demanded political favors from Ukraine in return for military assistance it needed to combat Russian aggression. But the issue ended up as a largely partisan exercise, with House Democrats voting to impeach Trump and Senate Republicans voting to acquit .

Within the Trump administration, the national security establishment appears torn between pursuing an arguably tough approach to Russia and pleasing the president. Insiders who have raised concern about Trump's approach to Russia -- including at least one of his national security advisers, defense secretaries and secretaries of state, but especially lower-level officials who spoke out during impeachment -- have nearly all been ousted from their positions.

Suspicions about Trump and Russia go back to his 2016 campaign. His appeal to Moscow to dig up his opponent's emails , his plaintive suggestions that Russia and the United States should be friends and a series of contacts between his advisers and Russians raised questions of impropriety that led to special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation . The investigation ultimately did not allege that anyone associated with the campaign illegally conspired with Russia.

Mueller, along with the U.S. intelligence community, did find that Russia interfered with the election, to sow chaos and also help Trump's campaign. But Trump has cast doubt on those findings, most memorably in a 2018 appearance on stage with Putin in Helsinki .

Yet despite Trump's rhetoric, his administration has plowed ahead with some of the most significant actions against Russia by any recent administration.

Dozens of Russian diplomats have been expelled, diplomatic missions closed, arms control treaties the Russians sought to preserve have been abandoned, weapons have been sold to Ukraine despite the impeachment allegations and the administration is engaged in a furious battle to prevent Russia from constructing a new gas pipeline that U.S. lawmakers from both parties believe will increase Europe's already unhealthy dependence on Russian energy.

At the same time, Trump has compounded the uncertainty by calling for the withdrawal or redeployment of U.S. troops from Germany, angrily deriding NATO allies for not meeting alliance defense spending commitments, and now apparently ignoring dire intelligence warnings that Russia was paying or wanted to pay elements of the Taliban to kill American forces in Afghanistan.

On top of that, even after the intelligence reports on the Afghanistan bounties circulated, he's expressed interest in inviting Putin back into the G-7 group of nations over the objections of the other members.

White House officials and die-hard Trump supporters have shrugged off the obvious inconsistencies, but they have been unable to staunch the swell of criticism and pointed demands for explanations as Russia, which has vexed American leaders for decades, delights in its ability to create chaos.

[Jul 06, 2020] The attack on Russian athletes is just another instance of the American and Western petty hatred of Russia

Jul 06, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Erelis , Jul 5 2020 20:59 utc | 46

I tell people: "Russia dopes their Olympians. America rapes them." The attack on Russian athletes is just another instance of the American and Western petty hatred of Russia. When the athletes got independent tests certifying they are clean, they were still not allowed to participate in many international events. As Russian hackers revealed some of the biggest names in sports are legally allowed meds because of existing conditions. Sure.Right. Who knew that the Norwegian team and country have the highest rates of asthma around and required performance enhancing drugs. Russia was a way to distract away from other country's doping.

[Jul 05, 2020] The Russian Foreign Ministry welcomed the formation in Malaysia of its own position on the collapse of MH17

Jul 05, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

MOSCOWEXILE July 2, 2020 at 9:39 am

The Russian Foreign Ministry welcomed the formation in Malaysia of its own position on the collapse of MH17
The department noted that in the West this tragedy has been portrayed one-sidedly and biased.
July 2, 2020
<bMOSCOW, July 2. / TASS /. The publication of a book written by Mahajir Ibrahim on the causes of the downing of flight MH17 indicates the formation of a position in Malaysian society on this tragedy. This was announced on Thursday at a briefing by the official representative of the Russian Foreign Ministry, Maria Zakharova.

"The appearance of the book testifies to the increasing desire of the Malaysians to form their own opinion about what happened. We believe that the latter is especially important, given how the tragedy has been covered in a one-sided and biased manner in the West", she said.

As noted by Zakharova, in the book, the author pays special attention to various versions of the airliner crash as well as to motives, "including not always obvious ones which concern one or another country involved in the crash investigation. For example, the United States, as the author claims, has used tragedy to justify the need for new sanctions against Russia", the diplomat said.

https://tass.ru/politika/8872199

[Jul 05, 2020] A Dutch court has denied MH17 crash lawyers a second request for satellite data from NATO

Jul 05, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

MOSCOWEXILE July 3, 2020 at 10:41 pm

Суд одобрил повторный запрос у США снимков с места крушения MH17
RT на русском, 3 июля 2020

Court has given approval for a re-request to the United States for images of the MH17 crash site
RT in Russian, July 3, 2020

The Netherlands court has called the proposal to re-appeal to the United States about satellite images from the crash site of a Malaysian Boeing in eastern Ukraine in 2014 justified.

This was reported by RIA Novosti with reference to the presiding judge Hendrick Steenheys.

According to him, interest in viewing satellite images and introducing them to the case is obvious.

"The court notes that since the autumn of 2016, the prosecutor's office has not made any attempts to verify whether these images can be made public as part of the criminal process. A second request would be reasonable", said the judge.

It is noted that at past hearings, lawyers asked to make a second request to the United States about satellite data that allegedly recorded the launch of a missile on Boeing flight MH17.

Earlier, the Dutch prosecutor Theis Berger, said that the Ukraine had not provided primary data from radars for the case concerning the downing of the Malaysian Boeing.

The Boeing 777, flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, crashed on July 17, 2014 in the Donetsk region of the Ukraine, killing 283 passengers and 15 crew members.

https://yandex.ru/turbo/s/russian.rt.com/ussr/news/761133-sud-ssha-snimki-mh17?promo=navbar&utm_referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fzen.yandex.com&utm_source=stick_link_button

MOSCOWEXILE July 4, 2020 at 2:05 am

However, in RBK, 3rd July, 18:48:

A Dutch court has denied MH17 crash lawyers a second request for satellite data from NATO. This was announced by the presiding judge Hendrick Steenhuis reports RIA Novosti.

Earlier, on June 29, Dutch lawyer for the accused Oleg Pulatov, Baudewein van Eyck, stated that NATO has not provided satellite data from the crash site. In this regard, he asked the court to find out whether the North Atlantic Alliance has relevant records for the eastern Ukraine zone on July 17, 2014. The court, in turn, recalled that it had already made such a request and the response said that no data was recorded from the crash site of flight MH17.

"We conclude that NATO does not have such data So the second request was rejected," the judge explained at the July 3 hearing.

https://www.rbc.ru/rbcfreenews/5eff3dc59a79473c9ff53474?utm_referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fzen.yandex.com

A stitch-up or what?

MOSCOWEXILE July 4, 2020 at 8:17 am

But on the other hand:

A Dutch court investigating the downing of MH17 has agreed to hear from Almaz-Antey, a Russian arms manufacturer, which argues that the prevailing Western narrative – that rebels in eastern Ukraine shot down the plane – is false.

The hearing in Badhoevedorp, Netherlands says it will explore alternative scenarios in the high-profile trial, in which four anti-Kiev fighters stand accused of using a Russian anti-aircraft missile to destroy the civilian plane, killing 283 passengers – mostly Dutch – and 15 crew on board.

https://www.rt.com/russia/493798-mh17-trial-manufacturer-witness/

MARK CHAPMAN July 4, 2020 at 11:59 am

Crash site, crash site, crash site. We don't give a flip about the crash site; it has been done to death. What Kerry claimed, and never, ever substantiated in any way whatsoever other than non-stop allusion to having the information amongst its mountains of evidence, was that the USA had remotely observed the taking of the shot, and had seen the where and the when of its origin, and seen the very moment the airliner disappeared from radar. NOBODY CARES ABOUT THE CRASH SITE. The dispute does not revolve around whether or not the aircraft crashed, or where, but who shot it down and from where the shot originated. The USA claimed to know – and be able to prove conclusively – both those things. It manifestly is not going to do so no matter how many requests are floated, because if the Dutch thought there was any hope of proving the case to that level of certainty, the prosecution would never have embarked on its ridiculous strategy of 'conditional intent'.

I think it is at least possible if not probable that the USA did record something, or bought it from Digital Globe and now is sitting on it. I personally think the USA knows full well that Ukraine was probably or even definitely responsible, and is deliberately blocking that discovery. It is at least possible that this trial is all about a verdict of 'Guess we'll never know', so people will stop digging. But I'm sure they would still like a conviction of some Russians if it looked like they could pull it off.

MARK CHAPMAN July 4, 2020 at 11:15 am

The entire trial, and indeed the investigation which preceded it, has been an attempt to push a narrative in which first the investigators and then the officers of the court have stated 'facts' which are not in evidence. On occasion persons have claimed to have seen the evidence themselves, and satisfied themselves that it invites the conclusion they have arrived upon, and have asked to be believed on the strength of their reputations because the evidence cannot be made publicly available. Sometimes this has been difficult to grant because no such reputation for veracity is present, and sometimes because the scenario the missing evidence purports to tie together is so plainly ludicrous and/or biased toward or away from certain conclusions that it is broadly unacceptable. Anyway, I think it is fair to say that there is little we can claim we 'know'.

One think I believe we do 'know' is that if the United States had some slam-dunk evidence which would prove east-Ukrainian militias shot down MH17, regardless by design or by mistake, the United States would find a way to make that evidence available, and would have done so long since. It is so clearly in its own interests to make this case, simultaneously removing all doubt that its loyal ally – Ukraine – was not responsible, and so many examples exist of the United States flinging aside its own rules when doing so served its interests, that it is impossible to believe conclusive satellite evidence exists which proves what they say it does, but modesty and concerns for national security prohibit showing it. Similarly, if actual US government satellite data showed the movement of a single Buk TELAR from Kursk to eastern Ukraine and back again at the time of the disaster, it would be in every newspaper. Instead, we get limited hangouts and photoshops from Bellingcat, which has turned out to be a nice little earner for Higgins and like-minded computer nerds.

I believe, but cannot prove yet, that an ATC is not allowed to assume control of an aircraft in his/her airspace if no primary radar is available – something which has long bothered me is Ukraine's cheeky assurance that it cannot supply any electronic data because no primary radars were available, and the west's no-problem acceptance of this excuse. If no primary radar is available, the ATC actually has no video contact with the aircraft; Automatic Dependent Surveillance- Broadcast (ADS-B) consists of the aircraft determining its own position relative to everything else, and broadcasting it to the ground. The ATC must, armed with this information, provide guidance on altitude and course which will not take the aircraft he/she is controlling too close to other aircraft operating in the same airspace. There are rules on acceptable separation with/without primary radar, and obviously when the ATC cannot see the aircraft on his/her own radar, greater separation is necessary for safety. Other aircraft were operating in proximity, and there was speculation at the time that one or more of them might have seen the flare from the explosion, but I forget now how far away each was and am too lazy to look it up. Anyway, separation between aircraft in the best conditions, when you have primary radar contact and can see raw video on your scope, and secondary broadcast (because primary radar does not give identification or altitude) is five miles ahead on the aircraft's course and three miles to each side.

ICAO PANS-ATM ( Doc.4444 , Chapter 8) details radar separation minima of five (5) and three (3) nautical miles. These minima allow for a considerable increase in airspace utilisation compared to procedural control. Changes to ICAO documents are about to be published (2007) recognising ADS-B use to support 5 nautical mile separation standards. ICAO's Separation & Airspace Safety Panel (SASP) is working on proposals to allow 3 nautical mile separation standards using ADS-B and also on the use of multilateration to support both 3 and 5 nautical mile separation standards.

Early in the investigation of the incident, within a day or two, alert observers claimed Ukraine had given MH17 an ordered course correction which took it directly over the DNR. There was some talk about a altitude reduction as well, but I can't find any reference to that now. There was immediate pushback from Ukraine's defenders, so,me saying the course correction was just an urban legend and had never happened, some that MH17 had itself requested a course change due to weather, etc Whatever the case, the information was expunged from FlightRadar and other sites which provide it in the public domain, although there are many screen captures of it as it appeared at the time – people have learned that sensitive information has a way of vanishing from the internet as if it had never been.

Perhaps you can give course corrections to aircraft that you cannot see on radar, but it would be an act of faith that their broadcast data is accurate, and you must observe proper flight separation; the five-and-three rule applies to separation of aircraft that you can see on radar. So what I am saying is that if MH17's separation from other flights did not exceed five miles to the front and rear and three miles to either side, either the Ukrainian controller had primary radar available and could see MH17, or else he/she was controlling in violation of ICAO rules.

So, as to the satellite data which would reveal who shot down MH17, there are two alternatives I can see; one, the USA has no such data, and John Kerry was full of shit as usual, just grandstanding. Two, they do have such information, but it reveals a scenario drastically different to the one in the official narrative. Whatever the case, if the USA could prove beyond a doubt that Eastern-Ukrainian militia using a single Buk TELAR provided by Russia shot down the aircraft from the vicinity of Schnizne, and then booked it back to Russia with all reasonable dispatch, all the while firing off frantic radio messages to one another, there is nothing which would stop them from providing it. People already have a pretty good idea what is possible through satellite photography and analysis, what resolution is achievable and how easy it is to interpret what is revealed, and it's pretty hard to believe America is playing coy because it has unearthly technological capabilities which must remain secret even if it means murderers go free.

I'm afraid I still think the Dutch have their minds made up, and have done from the first, who is going to be awarded responsibility, and are now just going through the motions of being scrupulously fair; they would not accept Russia's primary radar data or insisted it shows nothing useful, supported the Ukrainian view that data held by Russia which shows the missile the Ukies are exhibiting as the murder weapon was transferred to Ukraine many years ago and never returned to Russia is forged or faked, ignored the impossibility of parts from such a missile being found 'at the crash scene' or 'in the wreckage' because the missile responsible would have exploded by proximity fuse without ever touching the airliner, except for the shrapnel from the warhead – the missile parts would have fallen to earth miles away, where the aircraft was hit and not where it landed. The premise of now exploring 'alternative scenarios' just looks like window-dressing to me, and I think it should be regarded with the greatest suspicion.

The title of the linked article implies the Dutch will seek 'images of the crash site' from the Americans. We have seen images of the crash site up the yingyang. What we need to see is imagery of the missile shot being taken, and from where it originated plus any detail visible of the system which fired it.

ET AL July 4, 2020 at 12:02 pm

I seem to recall that it was reported that the ATC audio tapes were taken by 'armed men' shortly after the event but no mention of radar tapes:

https://21stcenturywire.com/2014/07/25/mh17-verdict-real-evidence-points-to-us-kiev-cover-up-of-failed-false-flag-attack/

The BBC reported on July 17th:

"Ukraine's SBU security service has confiscated recordings of conversations between Ukrainian air traffic control officers and the crew of the doomed airliner, a source in Kiev has told Interfax news agency."
####

The link above of course doesn't work but this one from the 16:38.18 snapshot does (so take a screenshot!):

https://web.archive.org/web/20140718163618/https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-28360784

15:29: Ukraine's SBU security service has confiscated recordings of conversations between Ukrainian air traffic control officers and the crew of the doomed airliner, a source in Kiev has told Interfax news agency.

MARK CHAPMAN July 4, 2020 at 1:27 pm

Ummm how does that square with reports that examination of the Cockpit Voice Recorder on the downed flight revealed 'nothing useful'. and there being nothing on it – no audio – for some four minutes (just guessing, I would have to look it up again, somewhere on Helmer's site) following a routine positional update? What would be the point of confiscating voice records of communications between the ATC and the aircraft from one end if they had a recording in full from the other, the receiving end?

Unless, of course, there was something on it you felt you could safely remove, considering no other record of it remained.

I believe the report of armed men seizing the ATC recordings was first offered by 'Carlos', the mystery ATC whose every appearance is greeted with yodels of joy by Matt, our former Venezuela correspondent, who claims that Carlos was conclusively and irrefutably proven not to exist, being a complete fabrication by Russia. So it's kind of complicated. The only thing I could say about it at this point would be that if it actually was done by Ukraine and was not a planned provocation but an accident, the speed and efficiency with which the global PR apparatus swung into action was awe-inspiring. If it was planned and executed by Ukraine, it was such a cold-blooded act that they would never live it down if it were exposed. But how likely is it that either Ukraine or Russia accidentally shot it down, and in only minutes, goons broke into the control tower and seized the recordings? If that ever actually happened, it would be a critical piece of evidence arguing that the shooting-down of MH17 was a carefully-planned provocation by Ukraine. They certainly would not seize recordings required by law to be retained as part of an investigation in order to protect Russia. The sole explanation for such behavior, if it could ever be proven to have happened, would be to prevent one's own implication in the crime. And it could never have happened so quickly by happenstance – it would have to be part of a plan.

MARK CHAPMAN July 4, 2020 at 2:09 pm

A couple of interesting things from the Malaysian statement: one, it affirms that Ukraine ordered a descent in altitude from 35,000 ft to 33,000 ft. Two, it affirms the aircraft was at all times within airspace which had been cleared by the ICAO. If true, not only Ukraine is to blame for not closing the airspace over a war zone.

https://web.archive.org/web/20140718151313/http://www.malaysiaairlines.com/my/en/site/mh17.html

I don't see anything between 16:37 and 16:41. Are you talking about the live feed record?

When the US State Department was not yet even sure if any Americans had been aboard, Sammy Power was already saying it was a surface-to-air missile that brought down the plane, and there was already language being used which said "a Russian missile system or supplied by Russia". In retrospect, it kind of looks like a plan, doesn't it? Similarly, all early statements said that if the plane had been shot down, it was 'an unspeakable crime'. There was never any question of it being an accident.

At 03:13 the narrative says "Data on MH17's flight route by flightradar24 suggests the plane had deviated slightly from its usual route and flew across the length of Ukraine." "Flightradar24" is a hotlink, but if you click it you learn that Googlemaps has disabled the feed and the data is not recoverable.

Wow; spooky; at 04:05 the feed says "Aviation website Flightradar24.com says in a Facebook post that MH17's plane crashed exactly 17 years after its first flight." First time I'd ever heard that.

All through the narrative are regular intercessions by the Americans, the British and the Australians to reiterate that it was a horrible murder and that Russia is responsible.

Mmmm interesting – in reference to my earlier statement that if you had the tapes you would know what could safely be removed from the CVR once it was located, this report reflects that several news sites including the BBC mentioned the ATC tapes being seized by the SBU. At one point, Ukraine's Ambassador to Malaysia Ihor Humennyi said "it is just the same as the flight data and cockpit voice recorders".

https://www.liveleak.com/view?i=29d_1407645168

Oh, okay – now I see it. 15:28. I was looking at 16:38. "Ukraine's SBU security service has confiscated recordings of conversations between Ukrainian air traffic control officers and the crew of the doomed airliner, a source in Kiev has told Interfax news agency." But Matt has told us several times that is all bullshit concocted by the now-proven-to-have-never-existed 'Carlos'.

ET AL July 5, 2020 at 3:17 am

It think 'Carlos' claimed to be ATC at Kiev Borisopol and I also doubt he was what he said he was:

https://www.globalresearch.ca/spanish-air-controller-kiev-borispol-airport-ukraine-military-shot-down-boeing-mh17/5391888
####

It happens to all of us, no? But, being right once doesn't verify all the other opinions of that person. Remember he frequently refused to admit he was wrong and would accuse others of deliberately misinterpreting what he wrote, which was very odd as his english was quite good. He was quite the Princess because that is how he behaved, petulant, childish, priviliged, and never, ever wrong. Or in short, a troll, which is why I never engaged with him(?).


[Jul 05, 2020] In the 1993 vote for the "Yeltsin Constitution", the turnout was 54%. Turnout for the 2020 vote on the constitution -- 68%.

Jul 05, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

MOSCOWEXILE July 2, 2020 at 11:54 pm

KP:

A summary of what the constitutional changes entail:

Русские, Бог и пенсии: что дадут принятые поправки в Конституцию

Russians, God and pensions: what the adopted amendments to the Constitution will give

https://www.kp.ru/daily/27150/4246245/

After processing 100% of the ballots, the Central Electoral Commission has summed up the results: for – 77.92%, against – 21.27%. Turnout – 65%. Amendments to the Constitution have been approved, and therefore, in fact, adopted. Total changes – 206. Now let's see how the most important parts of the updated Basic Law of the country will change our lives.

In a graphic within the article, the following is pointed out:

Compare:

In the 1993 vote for the "Yeltsin Constitution", the turnout was 54%.

For the Yeltsin constitution -- 58%.

[This constitution was drawn up under US guidance after the "democrat" Yeltsin had ordered that the Russian White House be bombarded. It was occupied by protesters against that Washington puppet's regime. The Yeltsin Constitution gave the president great powers. This is when that drunken bastard's government was selling off Russian state assets for a kopeck in the ruble and the whole country had been plunged into abject misery; when that cnut Chubais had said "tough shit" to those who could not adapt to market conditions and that they would soon die off and be replaced by a generation that could.]

Turnout for the 2020 vote on the constitution -- 68%.

For the constitution -- 78%.

Harding doesn't like this.

Navalny doesn't like this.

No fucker likes this -- apart from a majority of Russians, that is!

And the following are the amendments that Western critics a Russian liberal shits and "oppositionists" are squawking about

13. One person cannot hold a post of the president more than 2 terms. Clarification "in a row" was removed.

14. A reservation has been added that the rule of no more than two terms applies to the current head of state, but without taking into account the number of terms during which he held this position before. Which allows Putin to be elected in 2024.

Vladimir Putin is now 67 years old.

I hope he is fit and well in 4 years' time and I hope he stands for re-election then.

MARK CHAPMAN July 3, 2020 at 8:58 am

I might add, since it appears to not be generally well-known, that when the revolutionary government which preceded Yeltsin took power – which it held only a few days – the KGB commenced 157 investigations into financial misdeeds; 'economic crimes', at least two-thirds of which involved joint ventures with foreign firms. Yeltsin's triumph put a block on them all before they could get much beyond identifying some suspects.

https://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1991/09/23/75512/index.htm

"Gorbachev was cautious about the plan when Yavlinsky first presented it last spring, while Yeltsin backed it. His biggest task will be to restore some value to the discredited Soviet currency. Says Robert Hormats, former U.S. assistant secretary of state and now vice chairman of Goldman Sachs International: "The reformers must use the next month or two to lay out the fundamental pieces of a price and currency reform program." So far, Yavlinsky has kept quiet about what he will do. Western diplomats expect that he will move quickly to slash government spending, legalize private property, and abandon price controls. The goal would be to restore value to the wounded ruble so that it can be made convertible with the dollar and other hard currencies. Says one diplomat: "There are no more ideological hang-ups. Now they can at least get the laws in place and start working on the hard part -- implementation." Under the Harvard plan, all of these Soviet steps would be accompanied by heavy U.S. and European aid."

Privatize, abolish price controls, borrow huge amounts from the IMF and World Bank. Certainly sounds a recipe for success but I have this nagging sense that I have heard the formula before

JOHN KANE July 4, 2020 at 2:59 am

I have to say the one provision in the new constitution I dislike, and where i agree with your wife -- clearly a wise woman -- is the citizenship provision.

I am not sure how many PMs we might have lost but we would have lost Michaëlle Jean & Adrienne Clarkson as GG's. I am a bit neutral on Jean but Clarkson seems to have done some good work. Showing up in Afghanistan while we had troops there was a plus for me.
I thought that having Cdn Forces there was a horrible idea, but recognising their service was appropriate for the CinC.

[Jul 05, 2020] western chapter of looking the other way for their 'son of a bitches.'

Jul 05, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

ET AL July 3, 2020 at 12:40 pm

Euractiv: MEPs alarmed by 'politically motivated persecution' in Ukraine
https://www.euractiv.com/section/europe-s-east/news/meps-alarmed-by-politically-motivated-persecution-in-ukraine/

"We are alarmed by continuous attempts to misuse the Ukrainian justice system for politically motivated persecution of political opponents," said lawmakers from the informal Friends of European Ukraine group in a statement on Friday (3 July).

After the peaceful power transition of 2019 election in the post-Soviet country, "current attempts to prosecute political opponents pose a risk of democratic backsliding," the group of MEPs added.

Ukraine's former president, Petro Poroshenko, is suspected of abuse of office by illegally pressuring the then-chief of Ukraine's Foreign Intelligence Service, Yehor Bozhok, into appointing Serhiy Semоchko as his deputy.

Poroshenko is involved in 24 investigations, with three others recently closed, and denies any wrongdoing, calling the probes selective justice 'at the orders of [Volodymyr] Zelensky', the current president .

The 50-member group, which does not have formal standing, was created in September last year with the goal of providing political support and to promote Ukraine's economic integration with the EU
####

Unfortunately there is more at the link except the names of MEPs.

A Ukrainian oligarch has his own MEP lobby group! Why should we be surprised? I can't find a list of members (this is not the old 2014-19 group and this European Parliament page has not been updated with the new group of the same name) but Auštrevičius is the chaiman. There's also the Friends of Ukraine with the like of Fogh Rasmussen, Versbow, Rifkind, Cox, Bildt etc. on the Rasmussen site.

No matter how corrupt, murderous or just plain nasty, it is more important to keep the u-Kraine close to the EU, close to NATO etc. for strategic purposes. It's just another western chapter of looking the other way for their 'son of a bitches.'

[Jul 05, 2020] Support for the Ukrainian SOB from usual cicles : BBC casts a sympathetic eye on Porky's alleged persecution:

Jul 05, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

MOSCOWEXILE July 4, 2020 at 5:54 pm

Poor old Poroshenko!

BBC casts a sympathetic eye on Porky's alleged persecution:

Ukraine's Zelensky accused by ex-leader of hosting Russian 'fifth column'
55 minutes ago

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-53281086 .

Accompanied by "several thousand of supporters" was Porky, according to the BBC

That a fact?

[Jul 05, 2020] Afghanistan and the Endless War Caucus by DANIEL LARISON

Looks like Liz Cheney words for Russians. Her action suggest growing alliance between Bush repoblicans and neolibral interventionaistsof the Democratic Party. The alliance directed against Trump.
Notable quotes:
"... As Boland explains, the amendment passed by the committee yesterday sets so many conditions on withdrawal that it makes it all but impossible to satisfy them: ..."
"... The longer that the U.S. stays at war in Afghanistan, the more incentives other states will have to make that continued presence more costly for the U.S. When the knee-jerk reaction in Washington to news of these bounties is to throw up obstacles to withdrawal, that gives other states another incentive to do more of this. ..."
"... Prolonging our involvement in the war amounts to playing into Moscow's hands. For all of their posturing about security and strength, hard-liners routinely support destructive and irrational policies that redound to the advantage of other states. This is still happening with the war in Afghanistan, and if these hard-liners get their way it will continue happening for many years to come. ..."
Jul 03, 2020 | www.theamericanconservative.com

The immediate response to a story that U.S. forces were being targeted is to keep fighting a losing conflict.

Barbara Boland reported yesterday on the House Armed Services Committee's vote to impede withdrawal of U.S. from Afghanistan:

The House Armed Services Committee voted Wednesday night to put roadblocks on President Donald Trump's vow to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan, apparently in response to bombshell report published by The New York Times Friday that alleges Russia paid dollar bounties to the Taliban in Afghanistan to kill U.S troops.

It speaks volumes about Congress' abdication of its responsibilities that one of the few times that most members want to challenge the president over a war is when they think he might bring it to an end. Many of the members that want to block withdrawals from other countries have no problem when the president wants to use U.S. forces illegally and to keep them in other countries without authorization for years at a time. The role of hard-liner Liz Cheney in pushing the measure passed yesterday is a good example of what I mean. The hawkish outrage in Congress is only triggered when the president entertains the possibility of taking troops out of harm's way. When he takes reckless and illegal action that puts them at risk, as he did when he ordered the illegal assassination of Soleimani, the same members that are crying foul today applauded the action. As Boland explains, the amendment passed by the committee yesterday sets so many conditions on withdrawal that it makes it all but impossible to satisfy them:

Crow's amendment adds several layers of policy goals to the U.S. mission in Afghanistan, which has already stretched on for 19 years and cost over a trillion dollars. As made clear in the Afghanistan Papers, most of these policy goals were never the original intention of the mission in Afghanistan, and were haphazardly added after the defeat of al Qaeda. With no clear vision for what achieving these fuzzy goals would look like, the mission stretches on indefinitely, an unarticulated victory unachievable.

The immediate Congressional response to a story that U.S. forces were being targeted is to make it much more difficult to pull them out of a war that cannot be won. Congressional hawks bemoan "micromanaging" presidential decisions and mock the idea of having "535 commanders-in-chief," but when it comes to prolonging pointless wars they are only too happy to meddle and tie the president's hands. When it comes to defending Congress' proper role in matters of war, these members are typically on the other side of the argument. They are content to let the president get us into as many wars as he might want, but they are horrified at the thought that any of those wars might one day be concluded. Yesterday's vote confirmed that there is an endless war caucus in the House, and it is bipartisan.

The original reporting of the bounty story is questionable for the reasons that Boland has pointed out before, but for the sake of argument let's assume that Russia has been offering bounties on U.S. troops in Afghanistan. When the U.S. keeps its troops at war in a country for almost twenty years, it is setting them up as targets for other governments. Just as the U.S. has armed and supported forces hostile to Russia and its clients in Syria, it should not come as a shock when they do to the same elsewhere. If Russia has been doing this, refusing to withdraw U.S. forces ensures that they will continue to have someone that they can target.

The longer that the U.S. stays at war in Afghanistan, the more incentives other states will have to make that continued presence more costly for the U.S. When the knee-jerk reaction in Washington to news of these bounties is to throw up obstacles to withdrawal, that gives other states another incentive to do more of this.

Because the current state of debate about Russia is so toxic and irrational, our political leaders seem incapable of responding carefully to Russian actions. It doesn't seem to occur to the war hawks that Russia might prefer that the U.S. remains preoccupied and tied down in Afghanistan indefinitely.

Prolonging our involvement in the war amounts to playing into Moscow's hands. For all of their posturing about security and strength, hard-liners routinely support destructive and irrational policies that redound to the advantage of other states. This is still happening with the war in Afghanistan, and if these hard-liners get their way it will continue happening for many years to come.

Daniel Larison is a senior editor at TAC , where he also keeps a solo blog . He has been published in the New York Times Book Review , Dallas Morning News , World Politics Review , Politico Magazine , Orthodox Life , Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week . He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter .

email

kouroi • a day ago

One needs to mention the democratic deficit in the US. All the members voting yes are representatives, they represent the people in their constituencies, and presumably vote for what the majority in those constituencies would want, or past promises.

Any poll shows that Americans would rather have the troops brought back home, thank you very much. But this is not what their representatives are voting for. Talk about democracy!

Fran Macadam • a day ago

For elite war profiteers and the politicians they own, the only war that is lost is one that ends. No lives matter.

chris chuba • a day ago

And what's the logic, if you make an accusation against someone you don't like it must be true. Okay well then let's drone strike Putin. If you are going to be Exceptional and consistent, Putin did everything Soleimani did so how can Liz Cotton argue for a different punishment?
1. Killed U.S. troops in a war zone, 2. planning attacks on U.S. troops.

The entire Russian military plans for attacks all the time just like ours does but the Neocons have declared that we are the only ones allowed to do that. Verdict, death penalty for Putin.

kouroi chris chuba • a day ago

If you have watched Oliver Stone's interview with Putin, it comes through that in fact there were at least three or four attempts to Putin's life...

William Toffan chris chuba • 21 hours ago

Death penalty for Putin = Death Penalty for continental USA.

RBH • 15 hours ago

So you can get into a war without Congressional approval, but you can't get out of one without Congressional approval. Gotcha.

Lavinia • 10 hours ago • edited

Interesting, well reasoned article as usual from Mr. Larison. However, I have to say that I don't see why Russia would want the US in Afghanistan indefinitely. In primis, they have a strategic partnership with China (even though we've got to see how Russia will behave now when there is the India-China rift), and China has been championing the idea of rebuilding the Silk Road (brilliant idea if you ask me) so in this sense it's more reasonable to assume that they might be aiming to get stability in the region rather than keep it in a state of unrest (as to be strategic partners you need to have some kind of common strategy, or at least not a completely different strategy). In 2018 they (Russia) actually were trying to organise a mediation process which would have the Afghan Gvt. and the Talibans discuss before the US would retire the troops, and it was very significative as they managed to get all the parties sitting around a table for the very first time (even the US participated as an observer).

Secondly, Russia also has pretty decent relations with Iran (at least according to Iranian press, which seems to be realistic as Russia is compliant to the JCPOA, is not aggressive towards them, and they're cooperating in the Astana process for a political solution for Syria, for example), and it wouldn't be so if Russia would pursue a policy which would aim to keep the US in the Middle East indefinitely, as Iran's WHOLE point is that they want the US out of the region, so if Russia would be trying to keep the US in the Middle East indefinitely, that would seriously upset Iran.

Thirdly, Russia is one of the founders of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, which now includes most of the states in Central Asia, China, India and Pakistan. The association never made overt statements about their stance on the US's presence in the region; yet they've been hinting that they don't approve of it, which is reasonable, as it is very likely that those countries would all have different plans for the region, which might include some consideration for human and economic development rather than constant and never-ending militarisation (of course Pakistan would be problematic here, as the funds for the Afghan warlords get channeled through Pakistan, which receives a lot of US money, so I don't know how they're managing this issue).

Last but not least, I cannot logically believe that the Talibans, who've been coherent in their message since the late 70's ("we will fight to the death until the invaders are defeated and out of our national soil") would now need to be "convinced" by the Russians to defeat and chase out the invader. This is just NOT believable at all. Afghanistan is called the Graveyard of Empires for a reason, I would argue.

In any case I am pleased to see that at TAC you have been starting debunking the Russia-narrative, as it is very problematic - most media just systematically misrepresents Russia in order to justify aggressive military action (Europe, specifically Northern Europe, is doing this literally CONSTANTLY, I'm so over it, really). The misrepresentation of Russia as an aggressive wannabe-empire is a cornerstone of the pro-war narrative, so it is imperative to get some actual realism into that.

wynn • an hour ago • edited

As if the Afghan freedom fighters need additional incentive to eliminate the invaders? In case Amerikans don't know, Afghans, except those on the US payroll, intensely despise Amerika and its 'godless' ways. Amerikans forces have been sadistic, bombing Afghan weddings, funerals, etc.

Even if the Russians are providing bounties to the Afghans, to take out the invaders, don't the Amerikans remember the 80s when Washington (rightfully) supported the mujahedin with funds, arms, Stinger missiles, etc.? Again, the US is on shaky ground because of the neocons.

Afghanistan is known through the ages to be the graveyard of empires. They have done it on their own shedding blood, sweat, and tears. Also, the Afghan resistance have been principled about Amerikans getting out before making deals.

Blood Alcohol wynn • an hour ago

Same argument goes for the Iraqi people.

[Jul 03, 2020] Every American Should Watch Abby Martin's Afghanistan War Exposed- An Imperial Conspiracy

Jun 29, 2020 | www.mintpressnews.com

By MintPress News Desk

T he perpetual occupation of Afghanistan has become so normalized that it mostly serves as background noise to most Americans. It's even jokingly referred to as the "Forever War," accepted as just another constant reality. A soldier dies now and again, a couple of dozen civilians get killed in another bombing. It's never enough to stir the population to pressure Washington enough to stop it. And the endless war drags on.

From George W. Bush to Barack Obama, to Donald Trump, every U.S. president has promised to end the war. But their plans to bring the troops home inevitably require first sending more troops to the country. You can't look at all this rhetoric and reality and not conclude that the United States wants to stay in Afghanistan forever. And there is a reason, despite an unresolvable military quagmire, that the Empire won't let go of Afghanistan.

In this latest "Empire Files" documentary, journalist Abby Martin covers reveals the reality of America's Wars in Afghanistan, from the CIA construct of the 1980s through today's senseless stalemate. MintPress brings you documentary in its entirety, published with permission from filmmaker Abby Martin.

[Jul 03, 2020] Russians to the USA embassy: 1993. It was yours; 2020. It will be ours!

Jul 03, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Ashino , Jul 3 2020 11:20 utc | 129

The Russian Constitution Was Projected Onto the US Embassy Building in Moscow

https://www.youtube.com/watchtime_continue=1&v=J1Bk11INPNI&feature=emb_logo

The organisers projected an image of the cover of the Russian Constitution against the background of Bill Clinton, Boris Yeltsin, and the inscription "1993. It was yours " Then there is an image of the Russian people and the message "2020. It will be ours!", followed by a call to come to vote, was projected on the building of the US Embassy. The light projection was organised by the art group "Re:Venge".
https://www.stalkerzone.org/the-russian-constitution-was-projected-onto-the-us-embassy-building-in-moscow/

Ha, I really like this one ! Would have loved to watch 'das dumme Gesicht' (something like >>stupid face<< but stronger. like the Germans say) of the latest Trump's edition of silly ambassadors, lol !!!

[Jul 03, 2020] Russia's Constitution now provides a guarantee that the minimum wage will not be lower than the basic cost of living

Jul 03, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

karlof1 , Jul 2 2020 16:33 utc | 10

Just a note about Russia's vote. This falls under the heading of "Pragmatic": Russia's Constitution now provides a guarantee that the minimum wage will not be lower than the basic cost of living. I know millions within the Outlaw US Empire would greatly desire such an Act to "promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity;" but such an Act would be 100% against the ethos of Neoliberalism and thus unthinkable. Now we know why Moose and Squirrel are constantly barraged with "Bad Russia" bologna. So yes, today's Barbarians are most certainly Neculturny and speak English.

vk , Jul 2 2020 17:37 utc | 23

Russia faced unprecedented opposition [cyber attacks] to constitutional amendment vote, says speaker

[Jul 03, 2020] Hitler price for winning the battel fo Stalingrad was getting Turkey into axis

Jul 03, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

vk , Jul 3 2020 16:01 utc | 158

@ Posted by: bevin | Jul 3 2020 15:36 utc | 154

A curiosity about Turkey during WWII was its decisive, albeit indirect, role in the Battle of Stalingrad.

Turkey was neutral in WWII, but made it clear its allegiance was for sale. During the early exploits by the Afrikakorps in North Africa, the Islamic nations of the region quickly sided with the Nazis. By Stalingrad, Turkey was on the verge of being a Nazi ally, as it was more or less clear they would be soon the lords of the Caucasus. Either way, unconditional Turkish support for Germany was directly conditioned to a German absolute victory in Southwestern USSR, in which Stalingrad was the biggest and most strategic metropolis.

It is suspected that Hitler's anxiety with taking Stalingrad had very much to do with striking an alliance with Turkey, which was waiting to see to side with the winning side (which is very typical of neutral sides). That may have been the main factor that impelled Hitler to decide to keep the 6th Army inside the city - not Göring's alleged blunder, as many Anglo-Saxon historians like to tell us.

The necessity of Turkey to destroy the USSR is very obvious, as it was needed to cut it off from the Black Sea and consolidate the Caucasus.

--//--

@ snake

Yes, oil was one of the major factors in WWII (not WWI). But only in drawing the sides, not in causing the war itself. At the end of the day, the USA calculated that it was better to ally with the USSR to give a more comfortable victory against two oil starved empires (Germany and Japan) than risk a proto-MAD, endless war of self-destruction by allying with the Nazis and the Japanese against the USSR.

The bet paid off, as the USSR lost 35% of its GDP and one seventh of its population either way, so it always had the upper hand in the Cold War, which it also won comfortably due to that initial advantage.

[Jul 03, 2020] FUCKUS banned Russia from the Olympics on a bogus state sponsored steroid scam, no reinstatement on horizon. FUCKUS kicked Russia out of the now G7 and imposed a trade embargo that destroyed a large commercial relationship w/Germany.

Notable quotes:
"... Some countries like Italy (maybe Germany) are warming to Russia a little bit but Russia has a long way to go just to get back to their pre-2014 status with Europe. That is 'tightening their grip?'. I know, this is how propagandists speak. ..."
Jul 03, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Christian J. Chuba , Jul 3 2020 16:13 utc | 162

VK, re: Russia's grip on Europe is gradually tightening from the U.K.'s INDEPENDENT

It's behind a paywall but I read just enough to be curious as to how someone could possibly justify a clickbait title like that.

I suspect that the rest of the article is just going to recap Russia's alleged sins in order to fan hatred but how can someone objectively say that Russia is tightening its grip on Europe?

  1. FUCKUS banned Russia from the Olympics on a bogus state sponsored steroid scam, no reinstatement on horizon.
  2. FUCKUS kicked Russia out of the now G7 and imposed a trade embargo that destroyed a large commercial relationship w/Germany.

What is the 'overwhelming' evidence that the Russians poisoned the Skripal's, Novichok can be made by just about anyone.

Some countries like Italy (maybe Germany) are warming to Russia a little bit but Russia has a long way to go just to get back to their pre-2014 status with Europe. That is 'tightening their grip?'. I know, this is how propagandists speak.

[Jul 03, 2020] Dangerous Game - How the Wreckage of Russiagate Ignited a New Cold War by Kyle Anzalone and Will Porter

Jul 02, 2020 | libertarianinstitute.org

It's been nearly four years since the myth of Trump-Russia collusion made its debut in American politics, generating an endless stream of stories in the corporate press and hundreds of allegations of conspiracy from pundits and officials. But despite netting scores of embarrassing admissions, corrections, editor's notes and retractions in that time, the theory refuses to die.

Over the years, the highly elaborate "Russiagate" narrative has fallen away piece-by-piece. Claims about Donald Trump's various back channels to Moscow -- Carter Page , George Papadopoulos , Michael Flynn , Paul Manafort , Alfa Bank -- have each been thoroughly discredited. House Intelligence Committee transcripts released in May have revealed that nobody who asserted a Russian hack on Democratic computers, including the DNC's own cyber security firm , is able to produce evidence that it happened. In fact, it is now clear the entire investigation into the Trump campaign was without basis .

It was alleged that Moscow manipulated the president with " kompromat " and black mail, sold to the public in a " dossier " compiled by a former British intelligence officer, Christopher Steele. Working through a DC consulting firm , Steele was hired by Democrats to dig up dirt on Trump, gathering a litany of accusations that Steele's own primary source would later dismiss as "hearsay" and "rumor." Though the FBI was aware the dossier was little more than sloppy opposition research, the bureau nonetheless used it to obtain warrants to spy on the Trump campaign.

Even the claim that Russia helped Trump from afar, without direct coordination, has fallen flat on its face. The " troll farm " allegedly tapped by the Kremlin to wage a pro-Trump meme war -- the Internet Research Agency -- spent only $46,000 on Facebook ads, or around 0.05 percent of the $81 million budget of the Trump and Clinton campaigns. The vast majority of the IRA's ads had nothing to do with U.S. politics, and more than half of those that did were published after the election, having no impact on voters. The Department of Justice, moreover, has dropped its charges against the IRA's parent company, abandoning a major case resulting from Robert Mueller's special counsel probe.

Though few of its most diehard proponents would ever admit it, after four long years, the foundation of the Trump-Russia narrative has finally given way and its edifice has crumbled. The wreckage left behind will remain for some time to come, however, kicking off a new era of mainstream McCarthyism and setting the stage for the next Cold War.

It Didn't Start With Trump

The importance of Russiagate to U.S. foreign policy cannot be understated, but the road to hostilities with Moscow stretches far beyond the current administration. For thirty years, the United States has exploited its de facto victory in the first Cold War, interfering in Russian elections in the 1990s, aiding oligarchs as they looted the country into poverty, and orchestrating Color Revolutions in former Soviet states. NATO, meanwhile, has been enlarged up to Russia's border, despite American assurances the alliance wouldn't expand " one inch " eastward after the collapse of the USSR.

Unquestionably, from the fall of the Berlin Wall until the day Trump took office, the United States maintained an aggressive policy toward Moscow. But with the USSR wiped off the map and communism defeated for good, a sufficient pretext to rally the American public into another Cold War has been missing in the post-Soviet era. In the same 30-year period, moreover, Washington has pursued one disastrous diversion after another in the Middle East, leaving little space or interest for another round of brinkmanship with the Russians, who were relegated to little more than a talking point. That, however, has changed.

The Crisis They Needed

The Washington foreign policy establishment -- memorably dubbed " the Blob " by one Obama adviser -- was thrown into disarray by Trump's election win in the fall of 2016. In some ways, Trump stood out as the dove during the race, deeming "endless wars" in the Middle East a scam, calling for closer ties with Russia, and even questioning the usefulness of NATO. Sincere or not, Trump's campaign vows shocked the Beltway think tankers, journalists, and politicos whose worldviews (and salaries) rely on the maintenance of empire. Something had to be done.

In the summer of 2016, WikiLeaks published thousands of emails belonging to then-Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, her campaign manager, and the Democratic National Committee. Though damaging to Clinton, the leak became fodder for a powerful new attack on the president-to-be. Trump had worked in league with Moscow to throw the election, the story went, and the embarrassing email trove was stolen in a Russian hack, then passed to WikiLeaks to propel Trump's campaign.

By the time Trump took office, the narrative was in full swing. Pundits and politicians rushed to outdo one another in hysterically denouncing the supposed election-meddling, which was deemed the "political equivalent" of the 9/11 attacks , tantamount to Pearl Harbor , and akin to the Nazis' 1938 Kristallnacht pogrom. In lock-step with the U.S. intelligence community -- which soon issued a pair of reports endorsing the Russian hacking story -- the Blob quickly joined the cause, hoping to short-circuit any tinkering with NATO or rapprochement with Moscow under Trump.

The allegations soon broadened well beyond hacking. Russia had now waged war on American democracy itself, and "sowed discord" with misinformation online, all in direct collusion with the Trump campaign. Talking heads on cable news and former intelligence officials -- some of them playing both roles at once -- weaved a dramatic plot of conspiracy out of countless news reports, clinging to many of the "bombshell" stories long after their key claims were blown up .

A large segment of American society eagerly bought the fiction, refusing to believe that Trump, the game show host, could have defeated Clinton without assistance from a foreign power. For the first time since the fall of the USSR, rank-and-file Democrats and moderate progressives were aligned with some of the most vocal Russia hawks across the aisle, creating space for what many have called a " new Cold War. "

Stress Fractures

Under immense pressure and nonstop allegations, the candidate who shouted "America First" and slammed NATO as " obsolete " quickly adapted himself to the foreign policy consensus on the alliance, one of the first signs the Trump-Russia story was bearing fruit.

Demonstrating the Blob in action, during debate on the Senate floor over Montenegro's bid to join NATO in March 2017, the hawkish John McCain castigated Rand Paul for daring to oppose the measure, riding on anti-Russian sentiments stoked during the election to accuse him of "working for Vladimir Putin." With most lawmakers agreeing the expansion of NATO was needed to "push back" against Russia, the Senate approved the request nearly unanimously and Trump signed it without batting an eye -- perhaps seeing the attacks a veto would bring, even from his own party.

Allowing Montenegro -- a country that illustrates everything wrong with NATO -- to join the alliance may suggest Trump's criticisms were always empty talk, but the establishment's drive to constrain his foreign policy was undoubtedly having an effect. Just a few months later, the administration would put out its National Security Strategy , stressing the need to refocus U.S. military engagements from counter-terrorism in the Middle East to "great power competition" with Russia and China.

On another aspiring NATO member, Ukraine, the president was also hectored into reversing course under pressure from the Blob. During the 2016 race, the corporate press savaged the Trump campaign for working behind the scenes to " water down " the Republican Party platform after it opposed a pledge to arm Ukraine's post-coup government. That stance did not last long.

Though even Obama decided against arming the new government -- which his administration helped to install -- Trump reversed that move in late 2017, handing Kiev hundreds of Javelin anti-tank missiles. In an irony noticed by few , some of the arms went to open neo-Nazis in the Ukrainian military, who were integrated into the country's National Guard after leading street battles with security forces in the Obama-backed coup of 2014. Some of the very same Beltway critics slamming the president as a racist demanded he pass weapons to out-and-out white supremacists.

Ukraine's bid to join NATO has all but stalled under President Volodymyr Zelensky, but the country has nonetheless played an outsized role in American politics both before and after Trump took office. In the wake of Ukraine's 2014 U.S.-sponsored coup, "Russian aggression" became a favorite slogan in the American press, laying the ground for future allegations of election-meddling.

Weaponizing Ukraine

The drive for renewed hostilities with Moscow got underway well before Trump took the Oval Office, nurtured in its early stages under the Obama administration. Using Ukraine's revolution as a springboard, Obama launched a major rhetorical and policy offensive against Russia, casting it in the role of an aggressive , expansionist power.

Protests erupted in Ukraine in late 2013, following President Viktor Yanukovych's refusal to sign an association agreement with the European Union, preferring to keep closer ties with Russia. Demanding a deal with the EU and an end to government corruption, demonstrators -- including the above-mentioned neo-Nazis -- were soon in the streets clashing with security forces. Yanukovych was chased out of the country, and eventually out of power.

Through cut-out organizations like the National Endowment for Democracy, the Obama administration poured millions of dollars into the Ukrainian opposition prior to the coup, training, organizing and funding activists. Dubbed the "Euromaidan Revolution," Yanukovych's ouster mirrored similar US-backed color coups before and since, with Uncle Sam riding on the back of legitimate grievances while positioning the most U.S.-friendly figures to take power afterward.

The coup set off serious unrest in Ukraine's Russian-speaking enclaves, the eastern Donbass region and the Crimean Peninsula to the south. In the Donbass, secessionist forces attempted their own revolution, prompting the new government in Kiev to launch a bloody "war on terror" that continues to this day. Though the separatists received some level of support from Moscow, Washington placed sole blame on the Russians for Ukraine's unrest, while the press breathlessly predicted an all-out invasion that never materialized.

In Crimea -- where Moscow has kept its Black Sea Fleet since the late 1700s -- Russia took a more forceful stance, seizing the territory to keep control of its long term naval base. The annexation was accomplished without bloodshed, and a referendum was held weeks later affirming that a large majority of Crimeans supported rejoining Russia, a sentiment western polling firms have since corroborated . Regardless, as in the Donbass, the move was labeled an invasion, eventually triggering a raft of sanctions from the U.S. and the EU (and more recently, from Trump himself ).

The media made no effort to see Russia's perspective on Crimea in the wake of the revolution -- imagining the U.S. response if the roles were reversed, for example -- and all but ignored the preferences of Crimeans. Instead, it spun a black-and-white story of "Russian aggression" in Ukraine. For the Blob, Moscow's actions there put Vladimir Putin on par with Adolf Hitler, driving a flood of frenzied press coverage not seen again until the 2016 election.

Succumbing to Hysteria

While Trump had already begun to cave to the onslaught of Russiagate in the early months of his presidency, a July 2018 meeting with Putin in Helsinki presented an opportunity to reverse course, offering a venue to hash out differences and plan for future cooperation. Trump's previous sit-downs with his Russian counterpart were largely uneventful, but widely portrayed as a meeting between master and puppet. At the Helsinki Summit, however, a meager gesture toward improved relations was met with a new level of hysterics.

Trump's refusal to interrogate Putin on his supposed election-hacking during a summit press conference was taken as irrefutable proof that the two were conspiring together. Former CIA Director John Brennan declared it an act of treason , while CNN gravely contemplated whether Putin's gift to Trump during the meetings -- a World Cup soccer ball -- was really a secret spying transmitter. By this point, Robert Mueller's special counsel probe was in full effect, lending official credibility to the collusion story and further emboldening the claims of conspiracy.

Though the summit did little to strengthen U.S.-Russia ties and Trump made no real effort to do so -- beyond resisting the calls to directly confront Putin -- it brought on some of the most extreme attacks yet, further ratcheting up the cost of rapprochement. The window of opportunity presented in Helsinki, while only cracked to begin with, was now firmly shut, with Trump as reluctant as ever to make good on his original policy platform.

Sanctions!

After taking a beating in Helsinki, the administration allowed tensions with Moscow to soar to new heights, more or less embracing the Blob's favored policies and often even outdoing the Obama government's hawkishness toward Russia in both rhetoric and action.

In March 2018, the poisoning of a former Russian spy living in the United Kingdom was blamed on Moscow in a highly elaborate storyline that ultimately fell apart (sound familiar?), but nonetheless triggered a wave of retaliation from western governments. In the largest diplomatic purge in US history, the Trump administration expelled 60 Russian officials in a period of two days, surpassing Obama's ejection of 35 diplomats in response to the election-meddling allegations.

Along with the purge, starting in spring 2018 and continuing to this day, Washington has unleashed round after round of new sanctions on Russia, including in response to " worldwide malign activity ," to penalize alleged election-meddling , for " destabilizing cyber activities ," retaliation for the UK spy poisoning , more cyber activity , more election-meddling -- the list keeps growing.

Though Trump had called to lift rather than impose penalties on Russia before taking office, worn down by endless negative press coverage and surrounded by a coterie of hawkish advisers, he was brought around on the merits of sanctions before long, and has used them liberally ever since.

Goodbye INF, RIP OST

By October 2018, Trump had largely abandoned any idea of improving the relationship with Russia and, in addition to the barrage of sanctions, began shredding a series of major treaties and arms control agreements. He started with the Cold War-era Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF), which had eliminated an entire class of nuclear weapons -- medium-range missiles -- and removed Europe as a theater for nuclear war.

At this point in Trump's tenure, super-hawk John Bolton had assumed the position of national security advisor, encouraging the president's worst instincts and using his newfound influence to convince Trump to ditch the INF treaty. Bolton -- who helped to detonate a number of arms control pacts in previous administrations -- argued that Russia's new short-range missile had violated the treaty. While there remains some dispute over the missile's true range and whether it actually breached the agreement, Washington failed to pursue available dispute mechanisms and ignored Russian offers for talks to resolve the spat.

After the U.S. officially scrapped the agreement, it quickly began testing formerly-banned munitions. Unlike the Russian missiles, which were only said to have a range overstepping the treaty by a few miles, the U.S. began testing nuclear-capable land-based cruise missiles expressly banned under the INF.

Next came the Open Skies Treaty (OST), an idea originally floated by President Eisenhower, but which wouldn't take shape until 1992, when an agreement was struck between NATO and former Warsaw Pact nations. The agreement now has over 30 members and allows each to arrange surveillance flights over other members' territory, an important confidence-building measure in the post-Soviet world.

Trump saw matters differently, however, and turned a minor dispute over Russia's implementation of the pact into a reason to discard it altogether, again egged on by militant advisers. In late May 2020, the president declared his intent to withdraw from the nearly 30-year-old agreement, proposing nothing to replace it.

Quid Pro Quo

With the DOJ's special counsel probe into Trump-Russia collusion coming up short on both smoking-gun evidence and relevant indictments, the president's enemies began searching for new angles of attack. Following a July 2019 phone call between Trump and his newly elected Ukrainian counterpart, they soon found one.

During the call , Trump urged Zelensky to investigate a computer server he believed to be linked to Russiagate, and to look into potential corruption and nepotism on the part of former Vice President Joe Biden, who played an active role in Ukraine following the Obama-backed coup.

Less than two months later, a " whistleblower " -- a CIA officer detailed to the White House, Eric Ciaramella -- came forward with an "urgent concern" that the president had abused his office on the July call. According to his complaint , Trump threatened to withhold U.S. military aid, as well as a face-to-face meeting with Zelensky, should Kiev fail to deliver the goods on Biden, who by that point was a major contender in the 2020 race.

The same players who peddled Russiagate seized on Ciaramella's account to manufacture a whole new scandal: "Ukrainegate." Failing to squeeze an impeachment out of the Mueller probe, the Democrats did just that with the Ukraine call, insisting Trump had committed grave offenses, again conspiring with a foreign leader to meddle in a U.S. election.

At a high point during the impeachment trial, an expert called to testify by the Democrats revived George W. Bush's "fight them over there" maxim to argue for U.S. arms transfers to Ukraine, citing the Russian menace. The effort was doomed from the start, however, with a GOP-controlled Senate never likely to convict and the evidence weak for a "quid pro quo" with Zelensky. Ukrainegate, like Russiagate before it, was a failure in its stated goal, yet both served to mark the administration with claims of foreign collusion and press for more hawkish policies toward Moscow.

The End of New START?

The Obama administration scored a rare diplomatic achievement with Russia in 2010, signing the New START Treaty, a continuation of the original Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty inked in the waning days of the Soviet Union. Like its first iteration, the agreement places a cap on the number of nuclear weapons and warheads deployed by each side. It featured a ten-year sunset clause, but included provisions to continue beyond its initial end date.

With the treaty set to expire in early 2021, it has become an increasingly hot topic throughout Trump's presidency. While Trump sold himself as an expert dealmaker on the campaign trail -- an artist , even -- his negotiation skills have shown lacking when it comes to working out a new deal with the Russians.

The administration has demanded that China be incorporated into any extended version of the treaty, calling on Russia to compel Beijing to the negotiating table and vastly complicating any prospect for a deal. With a nuclear arsenal around one-tenth the size of that of Russia or the U.S., China has refused to join the pact. Washington's intransigence on the issue has put the future of the treaty in limbo and largely left Russia without a negotiating partner.

A second Trump term would spell serious trouble for New START, having already shown willingness to shred the INF and Open Skies agreements. And with the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM) already killed under the Bush administration, New START is one of the few remaining constraints on the planet's two largest nuclear arsenals.

Despite pursuing massive escalation with Moscow from 2018 onward, Trump-Russia conspiracy allegations never stopped pouring from newspapers and TV screens. For the Blob -- heavily invested in a narrative as fruitful as it was false -- Trump would forever be "Putin's puppet," regardless of the sanctions imposed, the landmark treaties incinerated or the deluge of warlike rhetoric.

Running for an Arms Race

As the Trump administration leads the country into the next Cold War, a renewed arms race is also in the making. The destruction of key arms control pacts by previous administrations has fed a proliferation powder keg, and the demise of New START could be the spark to set it off.

Following Bush Jr.'s termination of the ABM deal in 2002 -- wrecking a pact which placed limits on Russian and American missile defense systems to maintain the balance of mutually assured destruction -- Russia soon resumed funding for a number of strategic weapons projects, including its hypersonic missile. In his announcement of the new technology in 2018, Putin deemed the move a response to Washington's unilateral withdrawal from ABM, which also saw the U.S. develop new weapons .

Though he inked New START and campaigned on vows to pursue an end to the bomb, President Obama also helped to advance the arms build-up, embarking on a 30-year nuclear modernization project set to cost taxpayers $1.5 trillion. The Trump administration has embraced the initiative with open arms, even adding to it , as Moscow follows suit with upgrades to its own arsenal.

Moreover, Trump has opened a whole new battlefield with the creation of the US Space Force , escalated military deployments, ramped up war games targeting Russia and China and looked to reopen and expand Cold War-era bases.

In May, Trump's top arms control envoy promised to spend Russia and China into oblivion in the event of any future arms race, but one was already well underway. After withdrawing from INF, the administration began churning out previously banned nuclear-capable cruise missiles, while fielding an entire new class of low-yield nuclear weapons. Known as "tactical nukes," the smaller warheads lower the threshold for use, making nuclear conflict more likely. Meanwhile, the White House has also mulled a live bomb test -- America's first since 1992 -- though has apparently shelved the idea for now.

A Runaway Freight Train

As Trump approaches the end of his first term, the two major U.S. political parties have become locked in a permanent cycle of escalation, eternally compelled to prove who's the bigger hawk. The president put up mild resistance during his first months in office, but the relentless drumbeat of Russiagate successfully crushed any chances for improved ties with Moscow.

The Democrats refuse to give up on "Russian aggression" and see virtually no pushback from hawks across the aisle, while intelligence "leaks" continue to flow into the imperial press, fueling a whole new round of election-meddling allegations .

Likewise, Trump's campaign vows to revamp U.S.-Russian relations are long dead. His presidency counts among its accomplishments a pile of new sanctions, dozens of expelled diplomats and the demise of two major arms control treaties. For all his talk of getting along with Putin, Trump has failed to ink a single deal, de-escalate any of the ongoing strife over Syria, Ukraine or Libya, and been unable to arrange one state visit in Moscow or DC.

Nonetheless, Trump's every action is still interpreted through the lens of Russian collusion. After announcing a troop drawdown in Germany on June 5, reducing the U.S. presence by just one-third, the president was met with the now-typical swarm of baseless charges. MSNBC regular and retired general Barry McCaffrey dubbed the move "a gift to Russia," while GOP Rep. Liz Cheney said the meager troop movement placed the "cause of freedom in peril." Top Democrats in the House and Senate introduced bills to stop the withdrawal dead in its tracks, attributing the policy to Trump's "absurd affection for Vladimir Putin, a murderous dictator."

Starting as a dirty campaign trick to explain away the Democrats' election loss and jam up the new president, Russiagate is now a key driving force in the U.S. political establishment that will long outlive the age of Trump. After nearly four years, the bipartisan consensus on the need for Cold War is stronger than ever, and will endure regardless of who takes the Oval Office next.

[Jul 02, 2020] Browder connections timeline

Jul 02, 2020 | www.unz.com

Pft , says: Show Comment July 3, 2020 at 12:02 am GMT

Browder connection timeline

Interesting history Browder has. I suspect he has a history with Putin before Putin became President , but its hard to find anything on a connection. Anyways lots of interesting connections, meaningful or not, I cant say.

[Hide MORE]
1985 - bugged version of PROMIS was sold for Soviet government use, with the media mogul Robert Maxwell as a conduit.

1990 - just after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Browder found himself on assignment in Poland for Boston Consulting Group. The government had begun privatizing state-owned companies and selling their shares at ridiculously low valuations.

1991 - Anatoly Sobchak, a former law professor of Putin's at Leningrad State, became mayor of Leningrad.* Sobchak hired Vladimir Putin, whom he had known when Putin worked at Leningrad State. Putin was still on active reserve with the KGB.

Putin's tenure in Sobchak's office was so rife with scandal that it led to a host of investigations into illegal assignment of licenses and contracts . Putin was head of the Committee for Foreign Liaison; collaborated with criminal gangs in regulating gambling; a money-laundering operation by the St. Petersburg Real Estate Holding Company, where Kumarin was involved and Putin served on the advisory board; Putin's role in providing a monopoly for the Petersburg Fuel Company, then controlled by the Tambov criminal organization; and much, much more -- virtually all of which was whitewashed. While he was in St. Petersburg in the nineties, Putin signed many hundreds of contracts doling out funds to his cronies.

1991 - November 5, Robert Maxwell, allegedly drowned after falling off his yacht in the Canary Islands near the northwest coast of Africa. Billions were missing from his pension funds

Maxwell's investment bankers included Salomon Brothers. Eventually, the pension funds were replenished with monies from investment banks Shearson Lehman and Goldman Sachs, as well as the British government.

It was March 1991 when William Browder went to work for British billionaire Robert Maxwell as his "investment manager". Just how deep into the investment decisions of Maxwell did Browder participate as an investment manager?

1991 November 10, Maxwell's funeral took place on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem, the resting place for the nation's most revered heroes. Prime Minister Shamir eulogized: "He has done more Israel than can today be said."

1992 - Interestingly, after Maxwell died, Bill Browder went to work for the Salomon Brothers in the middle of their own scandal. Browder was put in charge of the Russian proprietary investments desk at Salomon Brothers. He was given 25 million to invest and used it by paying cash for vouchers in Russian companies the government had issued to citizens , and used them to buy shared at public auction. In a short period he turned that into 125 million

The scandal at Salomon Brothers was the manipulation of the US Treasury auctions back then.After that scandal where the government was threatening to shut down Salomon Brothers who was the biggest bond dealer in the USA for manipulating markets, all of a sudden, people from Goldman Sachs started taking posts in government.

1996-Browder left Salomon Brothers and with Edmond Safra founded Hermitage Capital Management for the purpose of investing initial seed capital of $25 million in Russia during the period of the mass privatization after the fall of the Soviet Union. Beny Steinmetz was another of the original investors in Hermitage, the Israeli diamond billionaire.

Cyprus is a favorite place for Russian to launder money. Thats probably why Browder and his accounting advisor Jamison Firestone chose it to launder Browder's Russian profits.

Browder from about 1997 to the mid-2000s used Cyprus shell companies to move money out of Russia to cheat the country of multi-millions of dollars in taxes. He used the Russian shells to invest in shares, including Gazprom shares that were illegal for foreigners to buy in Russia, then moved the shares to Cyprus shells

1996 article entitled, "The Money Plane," published by New York Magazine detailed how the "Russian mob gets a shipment of up to a billion dollars in fresh $100 bills," Edmond Safra's bank, Republic National, was directly implicated.

Guess we know where Browder got the cash money to pay for the vouchers

1998 - If Salomon had not been merged with Travelers Group in 1997 (which owned retail brokerage, Smith Barney), no doubt Salomon Brothers would have collapsed in the 1998 Long-Term Capital Management debacle created by one of their own – Salomons John Meriwether.

Safra lost $1 billion in Russia during the 1998 Long-Term Capital Management crisis over Russian bonds and investments which was why he put his bank, Republic National Bank, up for sale to HSBC in 1999.

1999 - Following the Russian financial crisis of 1998, despite significant outflows from the fund, Hermitage became a prominent shareholder in the Russian oil and gas. It was in 1999 when VSMPO-AVISMA Corporation (Russian: ВСМПО-АВИСМА) – the world's largest titanium producer - filed a RICO lawsuit against Browder and other Avisma investors including Kenneth Dart, alleging they illegally siphoned company assets into offshore accounts and then transferred the funds to U.S. accounts at Barclays.

Browder and his co-defendants settled with Avisma in 2000; they sold their Avisma shares as part of the confidential settlement agreement.

1999 - Republican National Bank was owned by Safra . On May 11, HSBC, announced a $10.3 billion deal to purchase Edmond Safra's holdings including the Republic National Bank of New York and Safra's shares in Bill Browder's firm, Hermitage Capital. The announcement came only nine months after Russia's economy collapsed and Browder's clients, lost over $900 million. It was also nine months after $4.8 billion in IMF funds was deposited in an undisclosed account at Safra's bank and well before the public became aware that that same money was dispersed and stolen through the Bank of New York, off-shore companies, and foreign financial institutions.

HSBC then became Browders partner of the Heritage Fund . Browder's shell companies were registered in Cyprus but owned by HSBC (Guernsey) as the trustee for his Hermitage Capital Management.

Cypriot shells Glendora and Kone were part of his offshore network "owned" by an HSBC Private Bank Guernsey Ltd trust. The real owner was Browder's Hermitage Fund. Assets (stocks and money) went from Russia to Cyprus and then to parts unknown.

Republic International Trust, registered by Mossack Fonseca of Panama Papers fame and listed on the Glendora document, was in the offshore network of Republic National Bank owner Edmond Safra, an early investor who then held 51% of Hermitage Fund shares.

1999 December 3 - Safra was killed in suspicious fire that broke out in his Monte Carlo home. Although some believe that Safra was killed by the Russian mafia, Lurie reported that a Swiss prosecutor investigating the missing IMF money believed that Safra was killed "because of his revelations to the FBI and the Swiss Prosecutor's Office investigating the disappearance and laundering of $4.8 billion of the IMF stablilization loan." One of the more interesting things to note here is that the prosecutor implied that Safra not only spoke with the FBI about the missing IMF funds but with Swiss authorities as well.

Funny how Browders bosses/partners get killed

1999 - the bombings that killed nearly three hundred innocent Russians were likely the product of a "false flag" operation that enabled Putin to consolidate power.

Putin promised to stop the plundering of the Russian state by rich oligarchs. But very few Russians knew that Putin had been a primary actor in the same kind of activity in St. Petersburg. And as for cleaning up corruption, one of Putin's first acts as president was to pardon Boris Yeltsin, thereby guaranteeing immunity from prosecution to the outgoing president.-

Putin recruited two oligarchs who were among his closest confidants, Roman Abramovich and Lev Leviev, to undertake the highly unlikely mission of creating a new religious organization called the Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia under the leadership of Rabbi Berel Lazar, a leader in the Hasidic movement called Chabad-Lubavitch.

Founded in the late eighteenth century, the tiny, Brooklyn-based Chabad-Lubavitcher movement is a fundamentalist Hasidic sect centered on the teaching of the late Rabbi Menachem Schneerson, who is sometimes referred to as a messiah -- moshiach -- a savior and liberator of the Jewish people. It is antiabortion, views homosexuality as a perversion, and often aligns itself politically with other fundamentalist groups on the right.

Its biggest donors included Leviev, an Israeli billionaire who was an Uzbek native and was known as the "King of Diamonds" thanks to his success in the diamond trade, and Charles Kushner, an American real estate developer who was later jailed for illegal campaign contributions, tax evasion, and witness tampering. Kushner is also the father of Jared Kushner, who married Donald Trump's daughter, Ivanka, and later became a senior adviser to President Trump. Leviev's friendship with Lazar dates back to 1992 and, according to Haaretz, made Leviev "the most influential, most active and most connected person in the Jewish community of Russia and made Lazar the country's chief rabbi."

Roman Abramovich, controlled the trading arm of one of Russia's largest oil companies through an Isle of Man company that had figured in the Bank of New York affair. Mr. Abramovich ran the Siberian oil giant Sibneft, which sold its oil through a company called Runicom.

His name emerged after speculation that Swiss investigators were looking into the role of Runicom as part of the widening investigation into the laundering of up to $15 billion of Russian money through American banks. Runicom is owned by at least two offshore companies set up by the Valmet Group, a financial services concern partly owned by Menatep, a failed Russian bank that used the Bank of New York."

2001- Salomon Brothers Building (WTC 7) collapses. Tenants include the Department of Defense, the Secret Service, the IRS, and the Securities and Exchange Commission

2005 - Steinmetz of Browders Heritage Fund teamed up with another diamond magnate, Putins buddy Lev Leviev, to purchase the top ten floors of Israel's Diamond Tower which also houses the Israeli Diamond Exchange. Haaretz.com reported that "the buyers intend to build a connector from the 10 floors – the top 10 floors of the building – to the diamond exchange itself in order to benefit from the security regime of the other offices within the exchange." And benefit they did.

According to one website reporting on a Channel 10 (Israel) news story, from 2005 – 2011, an "underground" bank was set up to provide "loans to firms using money taken from other companies while pretending it was legally buying and selling diamonds." The bank apparently washed over $100 million in illicit funds over the course of six years and both Steinmetz and Leviev were directly implicated as "customers" of the bank but Neither of them were charged in the case.

Then there's HSBC's involvement in the diamond industry and Leviev's ties not only to arms dealer Arcadi Gaydamak via Africa-Israeli Investments but Roman Abramovich and Kushner

2007 - Browders Hermitage Capital Management, was raided by Russian interior ministry officers, who confiscated stamps and documents. These were then used to file bogus tax returns to the Russian Treasury, which were paid out to bank accounts controlled by Klyuev and his associates, according to the U.S. government.

Browder claimed Organized crime carried out the tax refund fraud against the Russian Treasury under which criminals used collusive lawsuits to fake damages and get refunds of company taxes. The tax refund fraud using Browder's companies netted $230 million.

2008 - HSBC (Guersey) director Paul Wrench filed a complaint about the tax refund fraud in July on behalf of Hermitage (after Starova's complaints) .

Maginitsky was arrested for being the accountant (not a lawyer) of Browder's tax evasion schemes.

2008 - A lawsuit alleged Bayrock's projected profits were "to be laundered, untaxed through a sham Delaware entity" to the FL Group, Iceland's largest private investment fund, the first major firm to collapse in 2008 when Iceland's financial bubble burst, and a favored financial instrument for loans to Russia-connected oligarchs who were, court papers claim, in favor with Vladimir Putin. According to Bloomberg, Eva Joly, who assisted Iceland's special prosecutor in the investigation of the financial collapse, said, "There was a huge amount of money that came into these banks that wasn't entirely explained by central bank lending. Only Mafia-like groups fill a gap like that."

Another significant Bayrock partner, the Sapir Organization, had, through its principal, Tamir Sapir, a long business relationship with Semyon Kislin, the commodities trader who was tied to the Chernoy brothers and, according to the FBI, to Vyacheslav Ivankov's gang in Brighton Beach.

In addition to being wired into the Kremlin, Sapir's son-in-law, Rotem Rosen, was a supporter of Chabad along with Sater, Sapir, and others at Bayrock, and, as a result, was part of an extraordinarily powerful channel between Trump and Putin. After all, the ascent of Chabad in Russia had been part of Putin's plan to replace older Jewish institutions in Russia with corresponding organizations that were loyal to him.

The biggest contributor to Chabad in the world was Leviev, the billionaire "King of Diamonds" who had a direct line to Rabbi Berel Lazar, aka "Putin's rabbi," to Donald Trump, and to Putin himself dating back to the Russian leader's early days in St. Petersburg.

Indeed, one of the biggest contributors to Chabad of Port Washington, Long Island, was Bayrock founder Tevfik Arif, a Kazakh-born Turk with a Muslim name who was not Jewish, but nonetheless won entry into its Chai Circle as a top donor.

2013-The Hermitage Fund, an HSBC-backed vehicle that invested in Russia and became embroiled in a diplomatic war with the Kremlin over the death of one of its accountants, closes down..

2014, Vekselberg's Renova Group became a partner with Wilbur Ross in the takeover of the Bank of Cyprus, which had held billions in deposits from wealthy Russians.

Back in early 90's Trump found himself in financial trouble when his three casinos in Atlantic City were under foreclosure threat from lenders. He was bailed-out by senior managing director of N.M. Rothschild & Sons, Wilbur Ross, who Trump would later appoint as Secretary of Commerce. Ross, who is known as the "King of Bankruptcy," specializes in leveraged buyouts of distressed businesses.

Along with Blackstones Carl Icahn, Ross convinced bondholders to strike a deal with Trump that allowed Trump to keep control of the casinos.

By the mid-1990s, Ross was a prominent figure in New York Democratic Party politics and had caught the attention President Bill Clinton who appointed him to lead the U.S.-Russia Investment Fund.

2015 - Donald Trump, after emerging from a decade of litigation, multiple bankruptcies, and $ 4 billion in debt, had risen from the near-dead with the help of Bayrock and its alleged ties to Russian intelligence and the Russian Mafia. "They saved his bacon," said Kenneth McCallion, a former federal prosecutor

2015 - Kushner paid $295 million for some of the floors in the old New York Times building, purchased in 2015 from the US branch of Israeli-Russian oligarch Leviev's company, Africa Israel Investments (AFI), and partner, Five Mile Capital.

Kushner later borrowed $285 million from the German financial company Deutsche Bank, which has also been linked to Russian money laundering,

Jared and Ivanka were also close to another of Putins oligarchs, Roman Abramovich and his wife, Dasha Zhukova.

2015-While Wilbur Ross served as vice-chairman of the Bank of Cyprus, the bank's Russia-based businesses were sold to a Russian banker and consultant, Artem Avetisyan, who had ties to both the Russian president and Russia's largest bank, Sberbank. At the time, Sberbank was under US and EU sanctions following Russia's annexation of Crimea.

Avetisyan had earlier been selected by Putin to head a new business branch of the Russian president's strategic initiative agency, which was tasked with improving business and government ties.

Avetisyan's business partner, Oleg Gref, is the son of Herman Gref, Sberbank's chief executive officer, and their consultancy has served as a "partner" to Sberbank, according to their website. Ross had described the Russian businesses – including 120 bank branches in Russia – as being worth "hundreds of millions of euros" in 2014 but they were sold with other assets to Avetisyan for €7m (£6m).

Ross resigned from the Bank of Cyprus board after he was confirmed as commerce secretary in 2017

2018 - Cyprus suspended cooperation with Russia, which had been seeking assistance from the government in Moscow's alleged case of tax evasion against Hermitage Capital Founder Bill Browder.

[Jul 02, 2020] Bill Browder, a Billionaire accused of being a Fraud and Liar by John Ryan

Jul 02, 2020 | www.unz.com

William "Bill" Browder has been a figure of some prominence on the world scene for the past decade. A few months back, Der Spiegel published a major exposé on him and the case of Sergei Magnitsky but the mainstream media completely ignored this report and so aside from Germany few people are aware of Browder's background and the Magnitsky issue which resulted in sanctions on Russia.

Browder had gone to Moscow in 1996 to take advantage of the privatization of state companies by Russian President Boris Yeltsin. Browder founded Hermitage Capital Management, a Moscow investment firm registered in offshore Guernsey in the Channel Islands. For a time, it was the largest foreign investor in Russian securities. Hermitage Capital Management was rated as extremely successful after earning almost 3,000 percent in its operations between 1996 and December 2007.

During the corrupt Yeltsin years, with his business partner's US $25 million, Browder amassed a fortune . Profiting from the large-scale privatizations in Russia from 1996 to 2006 his Hermitage firm eventually grew to $4.5 billion .

When Browder encountered financial difficulties with Russian authorities he portrayed himself as an anti-corruption activist and became the driving force behind the Magnitsky Act, which resulted in economic sanctions aimed at Russian officials. However, an examination of Browder's record in Russia and his testimony in court cases reveals contradictions with his statements to the public and Congress, and raises questions about his motives in attacking corruption in Russia.

Although he has claimed that he was an 'activist shareholder' and campaigned for Russian companies to adopt Western-style governance, it has been reported that he cleverly destabilized companies he was targeting for takeover. Canadian blogger Mark Chapman has revealed that after Browder would buy a minority share in a company he would resort to lawsuits against this company through shell companies he controlled. This would destabilize the company with charges of corruption and insolvency. To prevent its collapse the Russian government would intervene by injecting capital into it, causing its stock market to rise -- with the result that Browder's profits would rise exponentially.

Later, through Browder's Russian-registered subsidiaries, his accountant Magnitsky acquired extra shares in Russian gas companies such as Surgutneftegaz, Rosneft and Gazprom. This procedure enabled Browder's companies to pay the residential tax rate of 5.5% instead of the 35% that foreigners would have to pay.

However, the procedure to bypass the Russian presidential decree that banned foreign companies and citizens from purchasing equities in Gazprom was an illegal act. Because of this and other suspected transgressions, Magnitsky was interrogated in 2006 and later in 2008. Initially he was interviewed as a suspect and then as an accused. He was then arrested and charged by Russian prosecutors with two counts of aggravated tax evasion committed in conspiracy with Bill Browder in respect of Dalnyaya Step and Saturn, two of Browder's shell companies to hold shares that he bought. Unfortunately, in 2009 Magnitsky died in pre-trial detention because of a failure by prison officials to provide prompt medical assistance.

Browder has challenged this account and for years he has maintained that Magnitsky's arrest and death were a targeted act of revenge by Russian authorities against a heroic anti-corruption activist.

It's only recently that Browder's position was challenged by the European Court of Human Rights who in its ruling on August 27, 2019 concluded that Magnitsky's "arrest was not arbitrary, and that it was based on reasonable suspicion of his having committed a criminal offence." And as such "The Russians had good reason to arrest Sergei Magnitsky for Hermitage tax evasion."

"The Court observes that the inquiry into alleged tax evasion, resulting in the criminal proceedings against Mr Magnitskiy, started in 2004, long before he complained that prosecuting officials had been involved in fraudulent acts."

Prior to Magnitsky's arrest, because of what Russia considered to be questionable activities, Browder had been refused entry to Russia in 2005. However, he did not take lightly his rebuff by the post-Yeltsin Russian government under Vladimir Putin. As succinctly expressed by Professor Halyna Mokrushyna at the University of Ottawa:

[Browder] began to engage in a worldwide campaign against the Russian authorities, accusing them of corruption and violation of human rights. The death of his accountant and auditor Sergei Magnitsky while in prison became the occasion for Browder to launch an international campaign presenting the death as a ruthless silencing of an anti-corruption whistleblower. But the case of Magnitsky is anything but.

Despite Brower's claims that Magnitsky died as a result of torture and beatings, authentic documents and testimonies show that Magnitsky died because of medical neglect – he was not provided adequate treatment for a gallstone condition. It was negligence typical at that time of prison bureaucracy, not a premeditated killing. Because of the resulting investigation, many high level functionaries in the prison system were fired or demoted.

For the past ten years Browder has maintained that Magnitsky was tortured and murdered by prison guards. Without any verifiable evidence he has asserted that Magnitsky was beaten to death by eight riot guards over 1 hour and 18 minutes. This was never corroborated by anybody, including by autopsy reports. It was even denied by Magnitsky's mother in a video interview.

Nevertheless, on the basis of his questionable beliefs, he has carried on a campaign to discredit and vilify Russia and its government and leaders.

In addition to the ruling of the European Court of Human Rights, Browder's basic underlying beliefs and assumptions are being seriously challenged. Very recently, on May 5, 2020, an American investigative journalist, Lucy Komisar, published an article with the heading Forensic photos of Magnitsky show no marks on torso :

On Fault Lines today I revealed that I have obtained never published forensic photos of the body of Sergei Magnitsky, William Browder's accountant, that show not a mark on his torso. Browder claims he was beaten to death by prison guards. Magnitsky died at 9:30pm Nov 16, 2009, and the photos were taken the next day.

Later in her report she states:

I noted on the broadcast that though the photos and documents are solid, several dozen U.S. media – both allegedly progressive and mainstream -- have refused to publish this information. And if that McCarthyite censorship continues, the result of rampant fear-inducing Russophobia, I will publish it and the evidence on this website.

Despite evidence such as this, till this day Browder maintains that Sergei Magnitsky was beaten to death with rubber batons. It's this narrative that has attracted the attention of the US Congress, members of parliament, diplomats and human rights activists. To further refute his account, a 2011 analysis by the Physicians for Human Rights International Forensics Program of documents provided by Browder found no evidence he was beaten to death.

In his writings, as supposed evidence, Browder provides links to two untranslated Russian documents. They were compiled immediately after Magnitsky died on November 16, 2009. Recent investigative research has revealed that one of these appears to be a forgery. The first document D309 states that shortly before Magnitsky's death: "Handcuffs were used in connection with the threat of committing an act of self-mutilation and suicide, and that the handcuffs were removed after thirty minutes." To further support this, a forensic review states that while in the prison hospital "Magnitsky exhibited behavior diagnosed as "acute psychosis" by Dr. A. V. Gaus at which point the doctor ordered Mr. Magnitsky to be restrained with handcuffs."

The second document D310 is identically worded to D309 except for a change in part of the preceding sentence. The sentence in D309 has the phrase " special means were" is changed in D310 to " a rubber baton was."

As such, while D309 is perfectly coherent, in D310 the reference to a rubber baton makes no sense whatsoever, given the title and text it shares with D309. This and other inconsistences, including signatures on these documents, make it apparent that D310 was copied from D309 and that D310 is a forgery. Furthermore, there is no logical reason for two almost identical reports to have been created, with only a slight difference in one sentence. There is no way of knowing who forged it and when, but this forged document forms a major basis for Browder's claim that Magnitsky was clubbed to death.

The fact that there is no credible evidence to indicate that Magnitsky was subjected to a baton attack, combined with forensic photos of Magnitsky's body shortly after death that show no marks on it, provides evidence that appears to repudiate Browder's decade-long assertions that Magnitsky was viciously murdered while in jail.

With evidence such as this, it repeatedly becomes clear that Browder's narrative contains mistakes and inconsistencies that distort the overall view of the events leading to Magnitsky's death.

Despite Magnitsky's death the case against him continued in Russia and he was found guilty of corruption in a posthumous trial. Actually, the trial's main purpose was to investigate alleged fraud by Bill Browder, but to proceed with this they had to include the accountant Magnitsky as well. The Russian court found both of them guilty of fraud. Afterwards, the case against Magnitsky was closed because of his death.

After Browder was refused entry to Russia in November of 2005, he launched a campaign insisting that his departure from Russia resulted from his anti-corruption activities. However, the real reason for the cancellation of his visa that he never mentions is that in 2003 a Russian provincial court had convicted Browder of evading $40 million in taxes. In addition, his illegal purchases of shares in Gazprom through the use of offshore shell companies were reportedly valued at another $30 million, bringing the total figure of tax evasion to $70 million.

It's after this that the Russian federal government next took up the case and initially went after Magnitsky, the accountant who carried out Browder's schemes.

But back in the USA Browder portrayed himself as the ultimate truth-teller, and embellished his tale by asserting that Sergei Magnitsky was a whistleblowing "tax lawyer," rather than one of Browder's accountants implicated in tax fraud. As his case got more involved, he presented a convoluted explanation that he was not responsible for bogus claims made by his companies. This is indeed an extremely complicated matter and as such only a summary of some of this will be presented.

The essence of the case is that in 2007 three shell companies that had once been owned by Browder were used to claim a $232 million tax refund based on trumped-up financial loses. Browder has stated that the companies were stolen from him, and that in a murky operation organized by a convicted fraudster, they were re-registered in the names of others. There is evidence however that Magnitsky and Browder may have been part of this convoluted scheme.

Browder's main company in Russia was Hermitage Capital Management, and associated with this firm were a large number of shell companies, some in the Russian republic of Kalmykia and some in the British Virgin Islands. A law firm in Moscow, Firestone Duncan, owned by Americans, did the legal work for Browder's Hermitage. Sergei Magnitsky was one of the accountants for Firestone Duncan and was assigned to work for Hermitage.

An accountant colleague of Magnitsky's at Firestone Duncan, Konstantin Ponomarev, was interviewed in 2017 by Lucy Komisar, an investigative journalist, who was doing research on Browder's operations in Russia. In the ensuing report on this , Komisar states:

"According to Ponomarev, the firm – and Magnitsky -- set up an offshore structure that Russian investigators would later say was used for tax evasion and illegal share purchases by Hermitage. . .

the structure helped Browder execute tax-evasion and illegal share purchase schemes.

"He said the holdings were layered to conceal ownership: The companies were "owned" by Cyprus shells Glendora and Kone, which, in turn, were "owned" by an HSBC Private Bank Guernsey Ltd trust. Ponomarev said the real owner was Browder's Hermitage Fund. He said the structure allowed money to move through Cyprus to Guernsey with little or no taxes paid along the way. Profits could get cashed out in Guernsey by investors of the Hermitage Fund and HSBC.

"Ponomarev said that in 1996, the firm developed for Browder 'a strategy of how to buy Gazprom shares in the local market, which was restricted for foreign investors.'"

In the course of their investigation, on June 2, 2007, Russian tax investigators raided the offices of Hermitage and Firestone Duncan. They seized Hermitage company documents, computers and corporate stamps and seals. They were looking for evidence to support Russian charges of tax evasion and illegal purchase of shares of Gazprom.

In a statement to US senators on July 27, 2017, Browder stated that Russian interior ministry officials "seized all the corporate documents connected to the investment holding companies of the funds that I advised. I didn't know the purpose of these raids so I hired the smartest Russian lawyer I knew, a 35-year-old named Sergei Magnitsky. I asked Sergei to investigate the purpose of the raids and try to stop whatever illegal plans these officials had."

Contrary to what Browder claims, Magnitsky had been his accountant for a decade. He had never acted as a lawyer, nor did he have the qualifications to do so. In fact in 2006 when questioned by Russian investigators, Magnitsky said he was an auditor on contract with Firestone Duncan. In Browder's testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2017 he claimed Magnitsky was his lawyer, but in 2015 in his testimony under oath in the US government's Prevezon case, Browder told a different story, as will now be related.

On Browder's initiative , in December 2012 he presented documents to the New York District Attorney alleging that a Russian company Prevezon had "benefitted from part of the $230 million dollar theft uncovered by Magnitsky and used those funds to buy a number of luxury apartments in Manhattan." In September 2013, the New York District Attorney's office filed money-laundering charges against Prevezon. The company hired high-profile New York-based lawyers to defend themselves against the accusations.

As reported by Der Spiegel , Browder would not voluntarily agree to testify in court so Prevezon's lawyers sent process servers to present him with a subpoena, which he refused to accept and was caught on video literally running away. In March 2015, the judge in the Prevezon case ruled that Browder would have to give testimony as part of pre-trial discovery. Later while in court and under oath and confronted with numerous documents, Browder was totally evasive. Lawyer Mark Cymrot spent six hours examining him, beginning with the following exchange:

Cymrot asked: Was Magnitsky a lawyer or a tax expert?

He was "acting in court representing me," Browder replied.

And he had a law degree in Russia?

"I'm not aware he did."

Did he go to law school?

"No."

How many times have you said Mr. Magnitsky is a lawyer? Fifty? A hundred? Two hundred?

"I don't know."

Have you ever told anybody that he didn't go to law school and didn't have a law degree?

"No."

Critically important, during the court case, the responsible U.S. investigator admitted during questioning that his findings were based exclusively on statements and documents from Browder and his team. Under oath, Browder was unable to explain how he and his people managed to track the flow of money and make the accusation against Prevezon. In his 2012 letter that launched the court case, Browder referred to "corrupt schemes" used by Prevezon, but when questioned under oath he admitted he didn't know of any. In fact, to almost every question put forth by Mark Cymrot, Browder replied that he didn't know or didn't remember.

The case finally ended in May 2017 when the two sides reached a settlement. Denis Katsyv, the company's sole shareholder, on a related matter agreed to pay nearly six million dollars to the US government, but would not have to admit any wrongdoing. Also the settlement contained an explicit mention that neither Katsyv nor his company Prevezon had anything to do with the Magnitsky case. Afterwards, one of Katsyv's, lawyers, Natalia Veselnitskaya, exclaimed: "For the first time, the U.S. recognized that the Russians were in the right!"

A major exposé of the Browder-Russia story is presented in a film that came out in June 2016 The Magnitsky Act: Behind the Scenes by the well-known independent filmmaker Andrei Nekrasov . Reference to this film will be made later but to provide a summary of the Browder tax evasion case some critical information can be obtained from a report by Eric Zuesse , an investigative historian, who managed to get a private viewing of the film by the film's Production Manager.

In the film Nekrasov proceeds to unravel Browder's story, which was designed to conceal his own corporate responsibility for the criminal theft of the money. As Browder's widely accepted story collapses, Magnitsky is revealed not to be a whistleblower but a likely abettor to the fraud who died in prison not from an official assassination but from banal neglect of his medical condition. The film cleverly allows William Browder to self-destruct under the weight of his own lies and the contradictions in his story-telling at various times.

Following the raid by tax officials on the Moscow Hermitage office on June 2, 2007, nothing further on these matters was reported until April 9, 2008 when Ms Rimma Starlova, the figurehead director of the three supposedly stolen Browder shell companies, filed a criminal complaint with the Russian Interior Ministry in Kazan accusing representatives of Browder companies of the theft of state funds, i.e., $232 million in a tax-rebate fraud. Although Hermitage was aware of this report they kept quiet about it because they claimed it as a false accusation against themselves.

On September 23, 2008, there was a news report about a theft of USD 232 million from the Russian state treasury, and the police probe into it. On October 7, 2008, Magnitsky was questioned by tax investigators about the $232 million fraud because he was the accountant for Browder's companies.

The central issue was that during September of 2007 three of Browder's shell companies had changed owners and that afterwards fraud against Russian treasury had been conducted by the new owners of these companies.

According to Magnitsky the way that ownership changed was through powers of attorney. This is a matter that Browder never mentioned. The Nekrasov film shows a document: "Purchase agreement based on this power of attorney, Gasanov represents Glendora Holdings Ltd." Glendora Holdings is another shell company owned by Browder. This shows that Gasanov, the middleman, had the power of attorney connecting the new nominees to the real beneficiaries. However, Gasanov could not be questioned on whose orders he was doing this because shortly afterwards, he mysteriously died. No one proved that it was murder, but if that death was a coincidence, it wasn't the only one.

During September 2007 the three Hermitage shell companies, Rilend, Parfenion and Mahaon, were re-registered by Gasanov to a company called Pluton that was registered in Kazan, and owned by Viktor Markelov, a Russian citizen with a criminal record. Markelov through a series of sham arbitration judgments conducted fake lawsuits that demanded damages for alleged contract violations. Once the damages were paid, in December 2007 the companies filed for tax refunds that came to $232 million. These were taxes that had been paid by these companies in 2006.

On February 5, 2008 the Investigative Committee of the Russian General Prosecutor's Office opened a criminal case to investigate the fraud committed by Markelov and other individuals.

Markelov had hired a Moscow lawyer, Andrey Pavlov, to conduct these complex operations. Afterwards Pavlov was questioned by Russian authorities and revealed what had happened. Markelov was convicted and sentenced to five years for the scam . At his trial Markelov testified that he was not in possession of the $232 million tax refund and that he did not know the identity of the client who would benefit from the refund scheme. And till this day no one knows! However, Russian tax authorities suspect it is William Browder.

At his trial, Markelov testified that one of the people he worked with to secure the fraudulent tax refund was Sergei Leonidovich. Magnitsky's full name was Sergei Leonidovich Magnitsky. Also when questioned by the police, Markelov named Browder's associates Khairetdinov and Kleiner as people involved in the company's re-registration.

So this provides evidence that Magnitsky and Browder's other officials were involved in the re-registration scheme – which Browder later called theft. In his film Nekrasov states that Browder's team had set things up to look as if outsiders -- not Browder's team -- had transferred the assets.

According to Nekrasov's film documentation, Russian courts have established that it was the representatives of the Hermitage investment fund who had themselves voluntarily re-registered the Makhaon, Parfenion and Rilend companies in the name of other individuals, a fact that Mr Browder is seeking to conceal by shifting the blame, without any foundation, onto the law enforcement agencies of the Russian Federation.

Indeed there is cause to be skeptical of the Browder narrative, and that the fraud was in fact concocted by Browder and his accountant Magnitsky. A Russian court has supported that alternative narrative, ruling in late December 2013 that Browder had deliberately bankrupted his company and engaged in tax evasion. On the basis of this he was sentenced to nine years prison in absentia.

In the meantime, over all these years, Browder has maintained and convinced the public at large that the $232 million fraud against the Russian treasury had been perpetrated by Magnitsky's interrogators and Russian police. With respect to the "theft" of his three companies (or "vehicles as he refers to them) on September 16, 2008 he stated on his Hermitage website : "The theft of the vehicles was only possible using the vehicles' original corporate documents seized by the Moscow Interior Ministry in its raid on Hermitage's law firm in Moscow on 4 June 2007."

As such, Browder is accusing Russian tax authorities and police for conducting this entire fraudulent operation.

In his film Nekrasov says that the Browder version is: "Yes, the crime took place [$232 million fraud against the public treasury but, according to Browder, actually against Browder's firm], but somebody else did it -- the police did it."

In this convoluted tale, it should be recalled that the fraud against the Russian treasury had first been reported to the police by Rimma Starlova on April 9, 2008. This had been recorded on the Hermitage website. In preparing the material for his film, Nekrasov noted that

"In March 2009, Starlova's report disappeared from Hermitage's website. . . . This is the same time that Magnitsky started to be treated as an analyst . . . who discovered the $232 million fraud. Thus the Magnitsky-the-whistleblower story was born, almost a year after the matter had been reported to the police."

Nekrasov's film also undermines the basis of Browder's case that Magnitsky had been killed by the police because he had accused two police officials, Karpov and Kuznetsov, but this is questionable since documents show Magnitsky had not accused anyone. As Nekrasov states in the film: "The problem is, he [Magnitsky] made no accusations. In that testimony, its record contains no accusations. Mr. Magnitsky did not actually testify against the two officers [Karpov and Kuznetsov]." So this factual evidence should destroy Browder's accusations.

It should be noted Magnitsky's original interview with authorities was as a suspect, not a whistleblower. Also contradicting Browder's claims, Nekrasov notes that Magnitsky does not even mention the names of the police officers in a key statement to authorities.

In his film Nekrasov includes an interview that he had with Browder regarding the issues about Magnitsky. Nekrasov confronts Browder with the core contradictions of his story. Incensed, Browder rises up and threatens the filmmaker:

" Anybody who says that Sergei Magnitsky didn't expose the crime before he was arrested is just trying to whitewash the Russian Government. Are you trying to say that Pavel Karpov is innocent? I'd really be careful about your going out and saying that Magnitsky wasn't a whistleblower. That's not going to do well for your credibility." Browder then walks off in a huff.

Nekrasov claims to be especially struck that the basis of Browder's case -- that Magnitsky had been killed by the police because he had accused two police officials, Karpov and Kuznetsov -- is a lie because there is documentary evidence that Magnitsky had not accused anyone.

Because of Browder's accusations, Nekrasov interviewed Pavel Karpov, the police officer who Browder accused of being involved in Magnitsky's alleged murder, despite the fact that Karpov was not on duty the day Magnitsky died.

Karpov presents Nekrasov with documents that Browder's case was built on. These original documents are actually fundamentally different from the way Browder had described them. This documentary evidence further exposes Browder's story for what it is.

Nekrasov asks Karpov why Browder wants to demonize him. Karpov explains that he had pursued Browder in 2004 for tax evasion, so that seems to be the reason why Browder smears him. And then Karpov says, "Having made billions here, Browder forgot to tell how he did it. So it suits him to pose as a victim. He is wanted here, but Interpol is not looking for him."

Afterwards in 2013, Karpov had tried to sue Browder for libel in a London court, but was not able to on the basis of procedural grounds since he was a resident of Russia and not the UK. However at the conclusion of the case, set out in his Judgment the presiding judge, Justice Simon, made some interesting comments.

"The causal link which one would expect from such a serious charge is wholly lacking; and nothing is said about torture or murder. In my view these are inadequate particulars to justify the charge that the Claimant was a primary or secondary party to Sergei Magnitsky's torture and murder, and that he would continue to commit or 'cause' murder, as pleaded in §60 of the Defence.

The Defendants have not come close to pleading facts which, if proved, would justify the sting of the libel."

In other words – in plain English – in the judge's view, Karpov was not in any sense party to Magnitsky's death, and Browder's claim that he was is not valid.

On the basis of the evidence that has been presented, it is undeniable that Browder's case appears to be a total misrepresentation, not only of Magnitsky's statements, but of just about everything else that's important in the case .

On a separate matter, on April 15, 2015 in a New York court case involving the US government and a Russian company, Previzon Holdings, Bill Browder had been ordered by a judge to give a deposition to Prevezon's lawyers.

Throughout this deposition, Browder (now under oath) contradicted virtually every aspect of his Magnitsky narrative and stated "I don't recall" when pressed about key portions of his narrative that he had previously repeated unabashedly in his testimonies to Congress and interviews with Western media. Browder "remembered nothing" and could not even deny asking Magnitsky to take responsibility for his (Browder's) crimes.

As a further example of Browder's dishonesty, in one of his publications, he shows a photo of an alleged employee of Browder's law firm, Firestone Duncan, named "Victor Poryugin" with vicious facial wounds from allegedly being tortured and beaten by police. However, the person shown was never with Browder's firm. Instead, this is a photo of "an American human rights campaigner beaten up during a street protest in 1961." It was Jim Zwerg, civil-rights demonstrator, during the 1960s, in the American South. Nekrasov was appalled and found it almost unimaginable that Browder would switch photos like that to demonize Russia and its police.

Browder was arrested by the Spanish police in June 2018. Even though Russia has on six occasions requested Browder's arrest through Interpol for tax fraud, the Spanish national police determined that Browder had been detained in error because the international warrant was no longer valid and released him.

A further matter that reflects on his character, William Browder, the American-born co-founder of Hermitage Capital Management is now a British citizen. The US taxes offshore earnings, but the UK does not. Highly likely because of this, in 1998 he gave up his American citizenship and became a British citizen and thereby has avoided paying US taxes on foreign investments. Nevertheless, he still has his family home in Princeton, NJ and also owns a $11 million dollar vacation home in Aspen, Colorado.

To put this in political context, Browder's narrative served a strong geopolitical purpose to demonize Russia at the dawn of the New Cold War. As such, Browder played a major role in this. In fact, the late celebrated American journalist Robert Parry thought that Browder single-handedly deserves much of the credit for the new Cold War.

Browder's campaign was so effective that in December 2012 he exploited Congressional willingness to demonize Russia, and as a result the US Congress passed a bipartisan bill, the Magnitsky Act, which was then signed by President Obama. U.S. Senators Ben Cardin and John McCain were instrumental in pushing through the Magnitsky Act, based on Browder's presentations.

However, key parts of the argument that passed into law in this act have been shown to be based on fraud and fabrication of 'evidence.' This bill blacklisted Russian officials who were accused of being involved in human-rights abuses.

In her analysis of the Magnitsky Act, Lucy Komisar, an investigative journalist, reveals a little known fact :

"A problem with the Magnitsky Act is that there is no due process. The targets are not told the evidence against them, they cannot challenge accusations or evidence in a court of law in order to get off the list. This "human rights law" violates the rule of law. There is an International Court with judges and lawyers to deal with human rights violators, but the US has not ratified its jurisdiction. Because it does not want to be subject to the rules it applies to others."

In 2017, Congress passed the Global Magnitsky Act, which enables the U.S. to impose sanctions against Russia for human rights violations worldwide.

In a move that history will show to be ill-advised, on October 18, 2017 Canada's Parliament and Senate unanimously approved Bill 226, a 'Magnitsky Act.' It mimics the US counterpart and targets Russia for further economic sanctions. Russia immediately denounced Canada's actions as being counter-productive, pointless and reprehensible. Actually an act of this type had been opposed by Stéphane Dion while he was Canada's minister of foreign affairs because he viewed it as a needless provocation against Russia. Dion also stated that adoption of a 'Magnitsky Act' would hurt the interests of Canadian businesses dealing with Russia and would thwart Canada's attempt's to normalize relations with Russia. However, Dion was replaced by Chrystia Freeland who immediately pushed this through. This is not surprising considering her well-documented Nazi family background and who is persona non grata in Russia.

A version of the Magnitsky Act was enacted in the UK and the Baltic republics in 1917.

In early 2020 a proposal to enact a version of the Magnitsky Act was presented to the Australian parliament and it is still under consideration. There has been considerable opposition to it including a detailed report by their Citizens Party, which exposes the full extent of Browder's fraud and chicanery.

The investigation into Browder's business activities in Russia is still an ongoing endeavour. On October 24, 2017 the

Russian Prosecutor General , Yuri Chaika, requested the US Attorney General Jeff Sessions to launch a probe into alleged tax evasion by Bill Browder, who in 2013 had already been sentenced in absentia to 9 years in prison in Russia for a similar crime.

Browder at that time was still being tried in Russia for suspected large-scale money laundering, also in absentia. Chaika added that Russian law enforcement possesses information that over $1 billion was illegally transferred from the country into structures connected with Bill Browder.

The Prosecutor General also asked Sessions to reconsider the Magnitsky Act. As he put it,

" from our standpoint, the act was adopted for no actual reason, while it was lobbied by people who had committed crimes in Russia. In our view, there are grounds to claim that this law lacks real foundation and that its passing was prompted by criminals' actions."

It's not known if Sessions ever responded to the Russian Prosecutor General. In any event, President Trump fired Attorney General Jeff Sessions on November 7, 2018. As such it's evident that Russia's concerns about Browder's dishonest activities are stymied.

Extensive reference has already been made to the film that came out in June 2016 The Magnitsky Act: Behind the Scenes by the independent filmmaker Andrei Nekrasov . When Nekrasov started the film he had fully believed Browder's story but as he delved into what really happened, to his surprise, he discovered that the case documents and other incontrovertible facts revealed Browder to be a fraud and a liar. The ensuing film presents a powerful deconstruction of the Magnitsky myth, but because of Browder's political connections and threats of lawsuits, the film has been blacklisted in the entire "free world." So much for the "free world's" freedom of the press and media. This film is not available on YouTube.

https://www.bitchute.com/embed/oJsWUlkjN6Gf/

The documentary was set for a premiere at the European Parliament in Brussels in April 2016, but at the last moment – faced with Browder's legal threats – the parliamentarians cancelled the showing.

There were hopes to show the documentary to members of Congress but the offer was rebuffed. Despite the frantic attempts by Browder's lawyers to block this documentary film from being shown anywhere, Washington's Newseum, to its credit, had a one-time showing on June 13, 2016, including a question-and-answer session with Andrei Nekrasov, moderated by journalist Seymour Hersh. Except for that audience, the public of the United States and Europe has been essentially shielded from the documentary's discoveries, all the better for the Magnitsky myth to retain its power as a seminal propaganda moment of the New Cold War.

Nekrasov's powerful deconstruction of the Magnitsky myth – and the film's subsequent blacklisting throughout the "free world" – recall other instances in which the West's propaganda lines don't stand up to scrutiny, so censorship and ad hominem attacks become the weapons of choice to defend " perception management ."

Other than the New York Times that had a lukewarm review , the mainstream media condemned the film and its showing. As such, with the exception of that one audience, the public in the USA, Canada and Europe has been shielded from the documentary's discoveries. The censorship of this film has made it a good example of how political and legal pressure can effectively black out what we used to call "the other side of the story."

Andrei Nekrasov is still prepared to go to court to defend the findings of his film, but Bill Browder has refused to do this and simply keeps maligning the film and Mr. Nekrasov.

Recent Developments

Although for almost the past ten years Browder's self-serving story had been accepted almost worldwide and served to help vilify Russia, in the past few months there has been an awakening to the true state of affairs about Browder.

The first such article "The Case of Sergei Magnitsky: Questions Cloud Story Behind U.S. Sanctions" written by Benjamin Bidder, a German journalist, appeared on November 26, 2019 in Der Spiegel. At the outset Bidder states:

"Ten years after his death, inconsistencies in Magnitsky's story suggest he may not have been the hero many people -- and Western governments -- believed him to be. Did the perfidious conspiracy to murder Magnitsky ever really take place? Or is Browder a charlatan whose story the West was too eager to believe? The certainty surrounding the Magnitsky affair becomes muddled in the documents, particularly the clear division between good and evil. The Russian authorities' take is questionable, but so is everyone else's -- including Bill Browder's.

But with the Magnitsky sanctions, it could be that the activist Browder used a noble cause to manipulate Western governments."

In summation, the article raises serious questions about many aspects of Browder's account. It concluded that his narrative was riddled with lies and said Western nations have fallen for a "convenient" story made up by a "fraudster. "

The report provoked Browder's fury, and he swiftly filed a complaint against Der Spiegel with the German Press Council as well as a complaint to the editor of Der Spiegel .

On December 17, 2019 Der Spiegel responded : " Why DER SPIEGEL Stands Behind Its Magnitsky Reporting." In a lengthy detailed response the journal rejects all aspects of Browder's complaint. They point out the inconsistencies in Browder's version of events and demonstrate that he is unable to present sufficient proof for his claims. They state: We believe his complaint has no basis and would like to review why we have considerable doubts about Browder's story and why we felt it necessary to present those doubts publicly."

Their report is highly enlightening and will have long-term consequences. It is one of the best refutations of Browder's falsified accounts that led to the Magnitsky Act. It exposes Browder as a fraud and his Magnitsky story as a fake. Despite all this, this exposé was ignored in the mainstream media so most people are unaware of these revelations. A good review of it is presented by Lucy Komisar in her article The Der Spiegel exposé of Bill Browder, December 6, 2019.

The German Press Council rejected Browder's complaint against Der Spiegel in January 2020 but Browder did not disclose this so it became known only in early May. Lucy Komisar reported this on May 12 and the main points of the Council's rejection are presented in her account. Browder had complained that the article had serious factual errors. The Press Council stated that Browder's position lacks proof and there could be no objection to Der Spiegel's examination of events leading to Magnitsky's death. All other Browder objections were rejected as well. In summation the Council stated: "Overall, we could not find a violation of journalistic principles."

But the action of the press council has not been reported in the Canadian, U.S. or UK media. Nor was the November Der Spiegel report.

The German Press Council ruling follows a December 2019 Danish Press Board ruling against another Browder complaint over an article by a Danish financial news outlet, Finans.dk, on his tax evasion and invented Magnitsky story. Significantly, both the Danish and German cases involve mainstream media, which usually toe the US-UK-NATO strategic line against Russia, which Browder's story serves. And these press complaint rulings follow a September 2019 European Court of Human Rights ruling that there was credible evidence that Magnitsky and Browder were engaged in a conspiracy to commit tax fraud and that Magnitsky was rightfully charged.

In summation, for ten years or more, no one in the West ever seriously challenged Bill Browder's account of what happened to his "lawyer" Sergei Magnitsky and his stories of corruption and malfeasance in Russia. This is what allowed him to get such influence that the Magnitsky Act was passed, despite Russia's attempts to clarify matters.

But when pressure was exerted on Germany to install a Magnitsky Act, one of their most influential journals Der Spiegel published an investigative bombshell picking apart Browder's story about his auditor Sergei Magnitsky's death. Browder immediately lashed out at Der Spiegel , accusing it of "misrepresenting the facts." However, his outraged objections backfired and resulted in a further even more damaging Der Spiegel article and a rebuke from the German Press Council.

At long last, thanks to Der Spiegel , its investigative reports have effectively rejected and discredited Browder's claim that Magnitsky was a courageous whistleblower who exposed corruption in Russia and was mercilessly killed by authorities out of revenge.

Despite this important and significant course of events, because of its imbedded Russophobia, the mainstream media have completely ignored the Der Spiegel exposé and almost nowhere has this been reported. To some extent this is because Browder has used his fortune to threaten lawsuits for anyone who challenges his version of events, effectively silencing many critics. Hence aside from people in Germany, this has been a non-event and the Browder hoax still prevails. Given this, it is important for us to publicize this revelation as best we can.

John Ryan, Ph.D. is a Retired Professor of Geography and Senior Scholar, University of Winnipeg The Untouchable Mr. Browder? The Browder affair is a heady upper-class Jewish cocktail of money, spies, politicians and international crime. Israel Shamir Is Bill Browder the Most Dangerous Man in the World? The darling of the war party needs to answer some questions Philip Giraldi

Vuki , says: Show Comment July 1, 2020 at 10:44 pm GMT

John, great article but we know that what you call "large-scale privatizations in Russia " was a large scale robbery. Even Magnitsky's mother stated that Browder is a fraud. Mr. Nekrasov whose film has been banned in many countries due to Browder's legal challenges has a reputation as a Putin critic -- After interviewing Mr. Browder in 2010 Nekrasov says he set out to make a "Magnitsky the hero" film. But as filming proceeded he "began to have doubts". More accurate would be that he smelled a rat. John, I have read many of your articles you never disappoint with your research and evidence.
Neo-Socratic , says: Show Comment July 2, 2020 at 5:26 am GMT
Outstanding article sir. I remember when Browder popped up in the news a couple of years ago and made TV appearances on all three big networks in the same day. I was astonished that this lowlife wielded such influence in America.

Total and absolute corruption just like Weimer.

TheTrumanShow , says: Show Comment July 2, 2020 at 5:49 am GMT
" smelled a rat "

Indeed – and very likely more than one! It should be obvious that the ease with which Browder (a complete nonentity) was able to get away with what he got away with in Russia and remain a virtually untouchable, protected free man to this day, in spite of the very significant evidence against him, would very much seem to indicate that he, much like Paul Bremer later in Iraq, was a tool of higher powers.

No Friend Of The Devil , says: Show Comment July 2, 2020 at 6:53 am GMT
Excellent article. There is a misperception that these pathological liars are believed, since their critics are silenced. It has been my experience that that is not the case. The pathological liars are not believed. They just keep lying, sabotaging, fining, legal system stalking, shouting down their oppenents, black listing those who doubt or know that they are lying as conspiracy theorists. I've been witnessing this for far to long. It is obviously not limited to the Magnitsky Act. This country is really nothing more than a sick joke at this point. These individuals do not behave like people. They behave like mercury poisoned monsters. Maybe they are. There is no logical excuse for this insanity. However, if they were mercury poisoned monsters, they would not all always have the same insane delusions. They are extremely corrupt sadistic terrorist criminal psychopaths that have destroyed America and the rest of the world too.

They are not The Resistance, they are The Persistence! Something has to be done about them. Freedom of the press does not give people the freedom to deliberately lie. You may doubt that, however, slander, libel, and defamation of charcter suits will prove you to be wrong, in addition to providing false information that endangers human life and national security, in the case of a non person like covid that is being used to deprive people of every liberty and rights that exists, including life. They are terrorists. They cannot claim to be news journalists or investigative reporters if they simply say whatever their advertisers or the government tells them to say. If they are unable to get to the bottom of the story, when so many in the alternative media are, then they are either unqualified to do their jobs, or are simply full of shit.

I really believe that the primary intention of covid and the response to it is to get people to voluntarily give up cell phones, particularly since 5-G is so hazardous. That way, the industries will never have to admit any wrong doing about the health hazards related to cell phones and Wi-Fi.That
is what I believe. Also, you can be damn sure that the government and corporations do not like the fact that they can be embarrassed by people that they cannot prevent from embarrassing them without being accused of human rights abuses like vault7 technology.

"Did they expect us to treat them with any respect?!" – Pink Floyd Fletcher Memorial Home For Incurable Tyants

Knowing them, they probably did!

Anon [268] Disclaimer , says: Show Comment July 2, 2020 at 7:23 am GMT
@Vuki I had at one time a copy of a book titled "The murder of Bill Browder" by an Eastern European journalist which I have, unfortunately, misplaced. As well as being an exposè of the nefarious Mr Browder it also exposes far more serious wrongdoing against him. This book has vanished from the Google search engine (I wonder why?) so if anyone can tell me where to get a copy i would really value it
FlintWheel4 , says: Show Comment July 2, 2020 at 7:41 am GMT
An aptly titled must read:

https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/harvard-boys-do-russia/

While most American's were distracted by the emerging World Wide Web, our elite were raping Russia. I'll say it again, America's "elite" raped Russia. In internet time twenty five years past puts you in prehistoric times. This is critical history that most of us missed, or more accurately wasn't available -- to the majority of us.

This was the Clinton era -- with just that you know this story can't be good. With Slick Willie's taste for skanks in a period where there is a story of beautiful impoverished young Russian women (teens likely) forming a line for one of our "elite" who was peeling off Benjamins for blowjobs in a club frequented by their foreign "advisors." Yep, I'm sure this was of no interest to William Jefferson Blythe III.

Harvard University was given a significant role in this "helping" of Russia (pardon the pun), due to the prestige of this institution, long-gone and unbeknownst to Russian elite, but hey they weren't "connected" yet. Geez, sorry about your luck. The Harvard you got was the Harvard we've been getting also, a race privileged hot bed for educating global "rapists" (or was that Brandeis University I'm thinking of?). Six of one

William Browder is a highly educated Jew (not certain about either) who's grandfather was Earl Browder, the former General Secretary of the CPUSA (that's the "Communist Party of the United States of America" for those of you who didn't know we had one). Bill Browder crowed about the irony in his grandfather being an activist for communism here in the U.S., while HE was an activist for capitalism in Russia! No, he was doing to Russia what Jews did to Russia when they hijacked the real Russian's revolution -- fucking them.

Billy Browder's book, "Red Notice," seems at first heartfelt story from a genuine American do-gooder. Oops! I missed the "A true story " tip-off. It's a self engrandizing fairy tale of a rapist's plea of innocence because "she didn't say NO."

There is MUCH more to this most interesting, world impacting historical event, that I believe is the most understated and least understood of the twentieth century, but that said, who fucked up? Certainly Yeltsin with his alcohol addled brain (likely rooted for by Russian Jews, who are the MOST notorious criminals world-wide) in trusting and believing America would help Russia! More significantly I feel America did, big-time, for acting so damn un-American. Unfortunately the America I'm dreaming of is as long-gone as Harvard and now, like Harvard has a Zionist occupied governance (if you didn't know what "ZOG" stood for). Come to think of it, we're acting much like Israel. God save America!

I can tell you one person who did not, Vladimir Ilyich Putin. Yeltsin threw Russia's doors open to the west and Putin slammed them shut. You can quibble about how he got and keeps his office, or how he enriched himself through the process, but he had a job to do and he did it well -- he saved Russia from what the west was going to continue doing to it. You may not agree with his ideology, but he is the most formidable leader the world has. I pray he leaves Russia and Russians in a better place than we're headed.

So, here we are today, where Trump is currently in the position to decide whether Russia should be invited to the next G-whatever summit:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/30/us/politics/trump-g7-russia.html

I say we're damn lucky it isn't Putin deciding whether to include Trump and the U.S., as some day it very well may be.

P.S. This is a rant of mine burning a long time for a window. Thank you John Ryan. Thank you Billy Browder. Most of all, Thank YOU Mr. Unz!

UNZ has provided a platform for authors, journalists and "knowers" from all over the world. All converging on the same theme -- there is a "they" and there is a plan. This seeming runaway train has awakened plain folks with uncommon sense and giants of intellect alike. Kudos, Ron Unz.

GMC , says: Show Comment July 2, 2020 at 8:48 am GMT
" The western Governments are easily moved or manipulated" and have been Gang Banged – time and time again by the corrupt mafia corporations, Zionists inc., and a dozen other international gangs that are in charge of things – today. Not to mention the corrupt, treasonist nationals that work for the Western Governments. Browder's Hermitage scam just shows how easily the US Gov and others are bought and paid for – that's why the true Magnitsky lie , has to be covered up , from the public. PS – notice all the tax money Browder skimmed off the US – very visible to anyone that can smell a Rat.
jsigur , says: Show Comment July 2, 2020 at 9:24 am GMT
I became aware of the Browder case when known controlled asset, Brandon Martinez, used his claims as a refutation of Putin which he seemed unbelievably obsessed about.
As I perused you-tube for videos on Browder, I saw that he was welcomed into all approved western media to make his case with the questioners rarely going into the material to dispute his claims. I determined at that time that Browder was part of a deep state campaign to demonize Russia under Putin leadership.
It surprises me not to hear no MSM News organization will print these latest findings since in 2012 I realized the free world and press are anything but free and lie as much or more than the most demonized communist outlets.
Not mentioned in the article that I recall is the fact that Browder's dad was the head of the Communist party in the USA before and during WWII which should be enough by itself for a legitimate news outlet to scrutinize with great vigor any claims made by the man but then we know WWII was really a war against any country willing to exercise goyim rule independent of Jewish advisors and that the US was on the side of Jewish power in that war as much as all the other wars it has engaged in.
(Its interesting that my spell check keeps telling me that there is no such word as "goyem")
Parsnipitous , says: Show Comment July 2, 2020 at 10:09 am GMT
"But when pressure was exerted on Germany to install a Magnitsky Act, one of their most influential journals "

Der Spiegel is known as a craven Atlanticist rag. Somebody high up – possibly as a snub to the Trump admin – must have provided ass cover for it to be upheld.

Chet Roman , says: Show Comment July 2, 2020 at 11:40 am GMT
@Anon https://dxczjjuegupb.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/TheKillingOfWilliamBrowder_PrintLayout_6x9-1.pdf
Saggy , says: Website Show Comment July 2, 2020 at 12:27 pm GMT
@Vuki You can see the film here


https://www.bitchute.com/embed/oJsWUlkjN6Gf/

That Browder is a crook is not surprising, the revelation is the extent to which he is supported by the establishment.

annamaria , says: Show Comment July 2, 2020 at 12:52 pm GMT
Bill Browder has been heavily supported by Ben Cardin, a prominent zionist in the US Congress.

Browder is a mega thief (he was also involved in several deaths-on-order) who owes everything to Cardin and other zionists from the Mega Group like Lex Wexner and similar criminals:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Cardin
https://www.mintpressnews.com/mega-group-maxwells-mossad-spy-story-jeffrey-epstein-scandal/261172/
https://www.globalresearch.ca/bill-browder-escapes-again/5642767

It is the same old story of subversion of the state by the moneyed and powerful Israel-firsters.

vot tak , says: Show Comment July 2, 2020 at 2:39 pm GMT
Useful summary of browder's scam. The man managered to wield a great amount of influence in american/uk media and government, yet is only a minor player by western oligarch standards. For that he must have substantial backing. By whom?

Well he definitely is closely defended by these sources:

British Jewish businessman who challenged Putin is put on Interpol wanted list

https://www.thejc.com/news/uk-news/british-jewish-businessman-who-challenged-putin-is-put-on-interpol-wanted-list-1.446467

Be careful of Putin, he is a true enemy of Jews

https://www.thejc.com/culture/books/be-careful-of-putin-he-is-a-true-enemy-of-jews-1.61745

Who has the power to control media and western governments to such a tight degree?

AnonFromTN , says: Show Comment July 2, 2020 at 3:18 pm GMT
Bill Browder is a thief, a typical representative of a flock of Western vultures that landed in 1990s Russia to steal state assets. When his thievery was curbed by Putin, he got angry and vengeful, like a scorned lover. He manufactured and spread lies to whip up an anti-Putin campaign in the West. His "narrative" was eagerly supported by the neocons and other scum, as it was in line with their "narrative". Naturally, the first things about Browder any honest investigator or journalist would unearth were lies and fraud. Just as naturally, the scum and scum-controlled Western MSM keep spreading lies supporting their "narrative", and ignoring numerous facts that contradict it.
Alfred , says: Show Comment July 2, 2020 at 3:31 pm GMT
There is an interesting connection between Bill Bowder, Robert Maxwell, Bill Clinton, Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell and others. They are all members of "CLUB"

There are many more revealing articles on Martin Armstrong's blog. Browder is one of the biggest scumbags to ever walk on this earth. He is trying to start a war against Russia – because they took away some of the things he had stolen. An absolute arsehole.

Ghislaine Maxwell Arrested – Clinton's & Epstein's Lover | Armstrong Economics

Really No Shit , says: Show Comment July 2, 2020 at 3:55 pm GMT
Ben Cardin must feel like a schmuck given Ben Bidder's exposé in the Der Spiegel but having suborned the late drama queen Johnny McCain in supporting him in his efforts to protect a fellow tribesman, the noodge won't make any effort to rescind the illicit bill now that's the power of corruption!

[Jul 02, 2020] There is an interesting connection between Bill Bowder, Robert Maxwell, Bill Clinton, Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell and others. They are all members of "CLUB"

Jul 02, 2020 | www.unz.com

Alfred , says: Show Comment July 2, 2020 at 3:31 pm GMT

There is an interesting connection between Bill Bowder, Robert Maxwell, Bill Clinton, Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell and others. They are all members of "CLUB"

There are many more revealing articles on Martin Armstrong's blog. Browder is one of the biggest scumbags to ever walk on this earth. He is trying to start a war against Russia – because they took away some of the things he had stolen. An absolute arsehole.

Ghislaine Maxwell Arrested – Clinton's & Epstein's Lover | Armstrong Economics

Really No Shit , says: Show Comment July 2, 2020 at 3:55 pm GMT
Ben Cardin must feel like a schmuck given Ben Bidder's exposé in the Der Spiegel but having suborned the late drama queen Johnny McCain in supporting him in his efforts to protect a fellow tribesman, the noodge won't make any effort to rescind the illicit bill now that's the power of corruption!
Bombercommand , says: Show Comment July 2, 2020 at 4:54 pm GMT
@Saggy Many thanks for posting this. Halfway through the film I began to suspect that Browder had Magnitsky killed: "Dead Men Tell No Tales", and an accountant can tell very important tales for the procecution. I had no idea that several guys connected with Browder shell companies convienently turned up dead. Looks like the "cleanup" scenes in Scorcese's "Casino".
Craig Nelsen , says: Show Comment July 2, 2020 at 5:34 pm GMT
The Nekrasov film is absolutely devastating. Bowder comes off looking like the rat-faced vermin he is.
geokat62 , says: Show Comment July 2, 2020 at 9:32 pm GMT
Here's a link to all 6 parts of Browder's deposition in the Previzon case

https://www.youtube.com/embed/videoseries?list=PLNR-zS4HKxC3_GPQM39JKcsDWk7PiAbnh

[Jul 01, 2020] Putin s economic and social policies have a neoliberal bent but Putin is far from a classic neoliberal

Highly recommended!
Putin has to stay within neoliberal framework because this is a the dominant social framework in existence. But he is determine to "tame the markets" when necessary which is definitely anathema to neoliberals. So he is kind of mixture of neoliberal and traditional New Deal style statist. At the same time he definitely deviates from neoliberalism in some major areas, such as labor market and monopolies.
Jul 01, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org
likbez , July 02, 2020 at 03:51
@Prof K | Jul 1 2020 20:50 utc | 18
In fact, much of his economic and social policies have a decidedly neoliberal bent. As Tony Wood argues, Putin has reformed and consolidated the Yeltsin system. There is not as much of a break with Yeltsin as liberals -- or apparently leftists looking for any hope -- want to believe.
You have no clue. This is a typical left-wing "Infantile Disorder" point of view based on zero understanding of Russia and neoliberalism as a social system. Not that I am a big specialist, but your level of ignorance and arrogance is really stunning.

Neoliberalism as a social system means internal colonization of population by financial oligarchy and resulting decline of the standard of living for lower 80% due to the redistribution of wealth up. It also means subservience to international financial capital and debt slavery for vassal countries (the group to which Russia in views of Washington belongs) .

The classic example is Ukraine where 80% of population are now live on the edge of abject poverty. Russia, although with great difficulties, follows a different path. This is indisputable.

The neoliberal resolution which happened under alcoholic Yeltsin was stopped or at least drastically slowed down by Putin. Some issues were even reversed. For example, the USA interference via NGO ended. Direct interference of the USA into internal affairs of Russia ( Russia was a USA colony under Yeltsin ) also diminished, although was not completely eliminated (and this is impossible in view of the USA position in the the hegemon of the neoliberal "International" and owner of the world reserve currency.)

Those attempts to restore the sovereignty of Russia were clearly anti-neoliberal acts of Putin. After all the slogan of neoliberalism is "financial oligarchy of all countries unite" -- kind of perversion of Trotskyism (or. more correctly, "Trotskyism for the rich.")

In general, Yeltsin's model of neoliberalism in Russia ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semibankirschina ) experienced serious setbacks under Putin's rule, although some of his measures were distinctly neoliberal.

Recent "Medvedev's" pension reform is one (which was partially a necessity due to the state of Russian finances at the time; although the form that was chosen -- in your face, without some type of carrot -- was really mediocre, like almost anything coming from Medvedev ); some botched attempt in privatization of electrical networks with Chubais at the helm is another -- later stopped, etc.

But in reality, considerable if not dominant political power now belongs to corporations, whether you want it or not. And that creates strong neoliberal fifth column within the country. That's a huge problem for Putin. The alternative is dictatorship which usually does not end well. So there is not much space for maneuvering anyway. You need to play the anti-neoliberal game very skillfully as you always have weak cards in hands, the point which people like VK never understand.

BTW, unlike classic neoliberals, Putin is a consistent proponent of indexation of income of lower strata of the population to inflation, which he even put in the constitution. Unlike Putin, classic neoliberals preach false narrative that "the rising tide lifts all boats."

All-in-all whenever possible, Putin often behaves more like a New Deal Capitalism adherent, than like a neoliberal. He sincerely is trying to provide a decent standard of living for lower 80% of the population. He preserves a large share of state capital in strategically important companies. Some of them are still state-owned (anathema for any neoliberal.)

But he operates in conditions where neoliberalism is the dominant system and when Russia is under constant, unrelenting pressure, and he needs to play by the rules.

Like any talented politician, he found some issues were he can safely deviate from neoliberal consensus without too hard sanctions. In other matters, he needs to give up to survive.

[Jul 01, 2020] Madcap Militarism- H.R. McMaster's Dishonest Attack on Restraint -

Notable quotes:
"... The purpose of McMaster's essay is to discredit "retrenchers" -- that's his term for anyone advocating restraint as an alternative to the madcap militarism that has characterized U.S. policy in recent decades. Substituting retrenchment for restraint is a bit like referring to conservatives as fascists or liberals as pinks : It reveals a preference for labeling rather than serious engagement. In short, it's a not very subtle smear, as indeed is the phrase madcap militarism. But, hey, I'm only playing by his rules. ..."
"... The militarization of American statecraft that followed the end of the Cold War produced results that were bad for the United States and bad for the world. If McMaster can't figure that out, then he's the one who is behind the times. ..."
"... While Hillary was very clear on her drive against Russia, Trump promised the opposite, so many people had hopes for something on that. Nevertheless, he also promised to go against China and JPCOA, which many people forgot or thought not likely. But lo and behold, with Trump we ended up having the worst of both worlds ..."
"... just because of Trump's rhetoric against military adventurism, I would have voted for him. I would have been wrong, so now I am now extremely weary of any promises on this direction, but still hoped for Tulsi... ..."
Jul 01, 2020 | www.theamericanconservative.com

Home / Articles / Realism & Restraint / Madcap Militarism: H.R. McMaster's Dishonest Attack On Restraint REALISM & RESTRAINT Madcap Militarism: H.R. McMaster's Dishonest Attack On Restraint

Anyone looking for new grand strategy won't find it in the retired general's latest 'think piece.' Gen. H.R. McMaster in 2013. By CSIS/Flickr

JUNE 29, 2020

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12:01 AM

ANDREW J. BACEVICH

H.R. McMaster looks to be one of those old soldiers with an aversion to following Douglas MacArthur's advice to "just fade away."

The retired army three-star general who served an abbreviated term as national security adviser has a memoir due out in September. Perhaps in anticipation of its publication, he has now contributed a big think-piece to the new issue of Foreign Affairs. The essay is unlikely to help sell the book.

The purpose of McMaster's essay is to discredit "retrenchers" -- that's his term for anyone advocating restraint as an alternative to the madcap militarism that has characterized U.S. policy in recent decades. Substituting retrenchment for restraint is a bit like referring to conservatives as fascists or liberals as pinks : It reveals a preference for labeling rather than serious engagement. In short, it's a not very subtle smear, as indeed is the phrase madcap militarism. But, hey, I'm only playing by his rules.

Yet if not madcap militarism, what term or phrase accurately describes post-9/11 U.S. policy? McMaster never says. It's among the many matters that he passes over in silence. As a result, his essay amounts to little more than a dodge, carefully designed to ignore the void between what assertive "American global leadership" was supposed to accomplish back when we fancied ourselves the sole superpower and what actually ensued.

Here's what McMaster dislikes about restraint: It is based on "emotions" and a "romantic view" of the world rather than reason and analysis. It is synonymous with "disengagement" -- McMaster uses the terms interchangeably. "Retrenchers ignore the fact that the risks and costs of inaction are sometimes higher than those of engagement," which, of course, is not a fact, but an assertion dear to the hearts of interventionists. Retrenchers assume that the "vast oceans" separating the United States "from the rest of the world" will suffice to "keep Americans safe." They also believe that "an overly powerful United States is the principal cause of the world's problems." Perhaps worst of all, "retrenchers are out of step with history and way behind the times."

Forgive me for saying so, but there is a Trumpian quality to this line of argument: broad claims supported by virtually no substantiating evidence. Just as President Trump is adamant in refusing to fess up to mistakes in responding to Covid-19 -- "We've made every decision correctly" -- so too McMaster avoids reckoning with what actually happened when the never-retrench crowd was calling the shots in Washington and set out after 9/11 to transform the Greater Middle East.

What gives the game away is McMaster's apparent aversion to numbers. This is an essay devoid of stats. McMaster acknowledges the "visceral feelings of war weariness" felt by more than a few Americans. Yet he refrains from exploring the source of such feelings. So he does not mention casualties -- the number of Americans killed or wounded in our post-9/11 misadventures. He does not discuss how much those wars have cost , which, of course, spares him from considering how the trillions expended in Afghanistan and Iraq might have been better invested at home. He does not even reflect on the duration of those wars, which by itself suffices to reveal the epic failure of recent U.S. military policy. Instead, McMaster mocks what he calls the "new mantra" of "ending endless wars."

Well, if not endless, our recent wars have certainly dragged on for far longer than the proponents of those wars expected. Given the hundreds of billions funneled to the Pentagon each year -- another data point that McMaster chooses to overlook -- shouldn't Americans expect more positive outcomes? And, of course, we are still looking for the general who will make good on the oft-repeated promise of victory.

What is McMaster's alternative to restraint? Anyone looking for the outlines of a new grand strategy in step with history and keeping up with the times won't find it here. The best McMaster can come up with is to suggest that policymakers embrace "strategic empathy: an understanding of the ideology, emotions, and aspirations that drive and constrain other actors" -- a bit of advice likely to find favor with just about anyone apart from President Trump himself.

But strategic empathy is not a strategy; it's an attitude. By contrast, a policy of principled restraint does provide the basis for an alternative strategy, one that implies neither retrenchment nor disengagement. Indeed, restraint emphasizes engagement, albeit through other than military means.

Unless I missed it, McMaster's essay contains not a single reference to diplomacy, a revealing oversight. Let me amend that: A disregard for diplomacy may not be surprising in someone with decades of schooling in the arts of madcap militarism.

The militarization of American statecraft that followed the end of the Cold War produced results that were bad for the United States and bad for the world. If McMaster can't figure that out, then he's the one who is behind the times. Here's the truth: Those who support the principle of restraint believe in vigorous engagement, emphasizing diplomacy, trade, cultural exchange, and the promotion of global norms, with war as a last resort. Whether such an approach to policy is in or out of step with history, I leave for others to divine.

Andrew Bacevich, TAC's writer-at-large, is president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.

kouroi • 2 days ago

Surveys show over and over that the Americans overwhelmingly share Dr. Bacevich's views. There was even hope that Trump will reign on the US military adventurism.

The fact that all this continues unabated and that the general is given space in the Foreign Affairs is in our face evidence of the glaring democratic deficit existent in the US, and that in fact democracy is nonexistent being long ago fully replaced by a de facto Oligarchy.

Doesn't matter what Dr. Bachevich writes or says or does. Unless and until the internal political issues in the US are not addressed, the world will suffer.

libertarianlwyr kouroi • 2 days ago

only idiots and fools were under any delusion that Trump would "reign in US military adventurism".

kouroi libertarianlwyr • 2 days ago

While Hillary was very clear on her drive against Russia, Trump promised the opposite, so many people had hopes for something on that. Nevertheless, he also promised to go against China and JPCOA, which many people forgot or thought not likely. But lo and behold, with Trump we ended up having the worst of both worlds...

and the tragedy is that even if Biden is elected, that direction will not be reversed, or not likely. While I cannot vote, just because of Trump's rhetoric against military adventurism, I would have voted for him. I would have been wrong, so now I am now extremely weary of any promises on this direction, but still hoped for Tulsi...

[Jul 01, 2020] Chagnon theorized that war, far from being the product of capitalist exploitation and colonization was in fact the true "state of nature."

Jul 01, 2020 | www.unz.com

Sean , says: June 30, 2020 at 12:58 pm GMT

There is no reason for US elite act as is being suggested, because the cake they get the lion's share of is growing and so even though inequality is growing, the economy is too and the common people are getting slightly better off.

If a country were in the hands of a tiny minority and they were to act in such a way and try steal all the wealth for themselves, then they would be overthrown by domestic enemies like Somoza was.

Chagnon theorized that war, far from being the product of capitalist exploitation and colonization was in fact the true "state of nature." He concluded that 1) "maximizing political and personal security was the overwhelming driving force in human social and cultural evolution," and 2) "warfare has been the most important single force shaping the evolution of political society in our species."

Everything in the last five years is a symptom of the US reacting to being bested by China.

I happen to think states that are even slightly nation-states have emergent qualities, like a nest of social insects that react as though there is central direction though none exists, and no state is closer to being alive than a democracy.

[Jul 01, 2020] Angry Bear " Differences

Jul 01, 2020 | angrybearblog.com

Differences

Dan Crawford | June 29, 2020 8:29 am

HISTORY JOURNALISM POLITICS

Differences

by Ken Melvin

He said I have no opinion about this

And I have no opinion about that

Asked an Honors History Class what they thought was the most important issue facing America. In an earlier period, Patrick, a kid from Africa, responded, "our differences." In a later period, a black female, in a plaintive voice, responded, "we are different."

Indeed. We are a world of people with many differences: different politics, different religions, different cultures. Not just here; worldwide, humans are wrestling with this question: How to live with our differences? Can we humans, after all our centuries, change enough? Change enough to accept our differences?

The importance of these questions came to the fore with the recent onslaught of immigration into Europe and has since played out in referenda/elections throughout Europe and the United States. The pending further, and of greater scale, dislocations caused by global warming/climate change and globalization, makes their answering imperative. Plus: What will resulting cultures look like? At what point does an existing culture become more like that of the immigrant? What is the tipping point? Can the center hold?

Over the past 20 years, really quite late, much of our nation has come to believe that someone else's sexuality is really none of our business. We, as a nation, now accept lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender, LGBT, people as they are. Not ignore them, not tolerate them, not demand that they change; but accept them as they are. Yet, there are still regions of America, sectors of the population, where a majority of the people think that they know how people should act, should think, that they have the right to demand that others change.

Really? Does anyone really have the right to tell anyone else that they must change? Be like the rest of 'us'. That they must assimilate?

Time was, when most would have said that assimilation was the time-proven solution; that a minority should adopt the culture of the majority -- with the culture of majority minimally affected. The mechanism for this change went along the lines we have often seen narrated in literature where: the immigrant parents clustered, were suspicious of others, and were subject suspicion. They may have squabbled with those within the cluster of different ethnicity, culture; even called each other names. But, their children played together, went to school together, and along the way took on many of the ways of the majority. Their children might marry someone of their own cultural group, or maybe someone from another; and some married someone from the established majority. Voila, in a couple generations, the immigrant families had assimilated; and the dominant culture had gained a few new dishes to enjoy, added a few new words and phrases to their vocabulary. An immigrant minority assimilated.

What if a cultural minority doesn't want to assimilate? Feels that assimilation would mean the loss of their culture? What if aspects of a minority's cultural beliefs are in direct conflict with those of the majority? For example: Does a minority cultural group that believes in female genital mutilation, FGM, have an inherent right to practice FGM in a society where the majority strongly oppose the practice?

Even in an accepting society, there will be norms, limits, bounds. All well-functioning societies have norms, limits, bounds, ; have common cultural norms that are the 'laws of the land'; that supersede any and all other cultural customs. No cultural belief can ever supersede the law of the land. Though both laws and beliefs are subjective, and both are derivative of culture; they are not equal. Laws have precedence over beliefs. Everyone of a cultural minority chooses whether to believe or not to believe; they do not get to choose which laws to obey. In a multicultural society, some, maybe all, cultures will have to forego certain of their practices. The cultural majority will have to accept certain practices and behaviors of the cultural minority that are different from their own. Minorities cultures can maintain most of their cultural identity and still fit into a larger multicultural society. The cultural majority accepts most of a minority's behavior. In exchange for this acceptance, the minority cultural group must agree to, at all times abide by, accept, the 'laws of the land'.

If any minority cultural group were to be granted immunity to the laws of the land, others will petition for the same; society would soon descend into chaos and failure.

Doesn't the first amendment give us the right to not have religious beliefs imposed on us? It does. But when homegrown religious groups try to impose their religious beliefs upon us, they often try to base their legal arguments on that they disdain most, science.

[Jul 01, 2020] The Long Roots of Our Russophobia by JEREMY KUZMAROV

Mar 06, 2020 | www.counterpunch.org
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For the last five years, the American media has been filled with scurrilous articles demonizing Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Putin has been accused of every crime imaginable, from shooting down airplanes, to assassinating opponents, to invading neighboring countries, to stealing money to manipulating the U.S. president and helping to rig the 2016 election.

Few of the accusations directed against Putin have ever been substantiated and the quality of journalism has been at the level of "yellow journalism."

In a desperate attempt to sustain their political careers, centrist Democrats like Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton accused their adversaries of being Russian agents – again without proof.

And even the progressive hero Bernie Sanders – himself a victim of red-baiting – has engaged in Russia bashing and unsubstantiated accusations for which he offers no proof.

Guy Mettan's book, Creating Russophobia: From the Great Religious Schism to Anti-Putin Hysteria (Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2017) provides needed historical context for our current political moment, showing how anti-Russian hysteria has long proliferated as a means of justifying Western imperialism.

Mettan is a Swiss journalist and member of parliament who learned about the corruption of the media business when his reporting on the world anticommunist league rankled his newspapers' shareholders, and when he realized that he was serving as a paid stenographer for the Bosnian Islamist leader Alija Izetbegovic in the early 1990s.

Mettan defines Russophobia as the promotion of negative stereotypes about Russia that associate the country with despotism, treachery, expansion, oppression and other negative character traits. In his view, it is "not linked to specific historical events" but "exists first in the head of the one who looks, not in the victim's alleged behavior or characteristics."

Like anti-semitism, Mettan writes, "Russophobia is a way of turning specific pseudo-facts into essential one-dimensional values, barbarity, despotism, and expansionism in the Russian case in order to justify stigmatization and ostracism."

The origins of Russophobic discourse date back to a schism in the Church during the Middle Ages when Charlemagne was crowned emperor of the Roman empire and modified the Christian liturgy to introduce reforms execrated by the Eastern Orthodox Churches of the Byzantine empire.

Mettan writes that "the Europe of Charlemagne and of the year 1000 was in need of a foil in the East to rebuild herself, just as the Europe of the 2000s needs Russia to consolidate her union."

Before the schism, European rulers had no negative opinions of Russia. When Capetian King Henri I found himself a widower, he turned towards the prestigious Kiev kingdom two thousand miles away and married Vladimir's granddaughter, Princess Ann.

A main goal of the new liturgy adopted by Charlemagne was to undermine any Byzantine influence in Italy and Western Europe.

Over the next century, the schism evolved from a religious into a political one.

The Pope and the top Roman administration made documents disappear and truncated others in order to blame the Easterners.

Byzantium and Russia were in turn rebuked for their "caesaropapism," or "Oriental style despotism," which could be contrasted which the supposedly enlightened, democratic governing system in the West.

Russia was particularly hated because it had defied efforts of Western European countries to submit to their authority and impose Catholicism.

In the 1760s, French diplomats working with a variety of Ukrainian, Hungarian and Polish political figures produced a forged testament of Peter 1 ["The Great"] purporting to reveal Russia's 'grand design' to conquer most of Europe.

This document was still taken seriously by governments during the Napoleanic wars; and as late as the Cold War, President Harry Truman found it helpful in explaining Stalin.

In Britain, the Whigs, who represented the liberal bourgeois opposition to the Tory government and its program of free-trade imperialism, were the most virulent Russophobes, much like today's Democrats in the United States.

The British media also enflamed public opinion by taking hysterical positions against Russia – often on the eve of major military expeditions.

The London Times during the 1820s Greek Independence war editorialized that no "sane person" could "look with satisfaction at the immense and rapid overgrowth of Russian power." The same thing was being written in The New York Times in the 2010s.

A great example of the Orientalist stereotype was Bram Stoker's novel Dracula , whose main character was modeled after Russian ruler, Ivan the Terrible. As if no English ruler in history was cruel either.

The Nazis took Russo-phobic discourse to new heights during the 1930s and 1940s, combining it with a virulent anti-bolshevism and anti-semitism.

A survey of German high school texts in the 1960s found little change in the image of Russia. The Russians were still depicted as "primitive, simple, very violent, cruel, mean, inhuman, cupid and very stubborn."

The same stereotypes were displayed in many Hollywood films during the Cold War, where KGB figures were particularly maligned.

No wonder that when a former KGB agent, Vladimir Putin, took power, people went insane.

Russophobia in the United States has been advanced most insidiously by the nation's foreign policy elite who have envisioned themselves as grand chess-masters seeking to checkmate their Russian adversary in order to control the Eurasian heartland.

This view is little different than European colonial strategists who had learned of the importance of molding public opinion through disinformation campaigns that depicted the Russian bear as a menace to Western civilization.

Guy Mettan has written a thought-provoking book that provides badly needed historical context for the anti-Russian delirium gripping our society.

Breaking the taboo on Russophobia is of vital importance in laying the groundwork for a more peaceful world order and genuinely progressive movement in the United States. Unfortunately, recent developments don't inspire much confidence that history will be transcended. Join the debate on Facebook More articles by: JEREMY KUZMAROV

Jeremy Kuzmarov is the author of The Russians are Coming, Again: The First Cold War as Tragedy, the Second as Farce (Monthly Review Press, 2018) and Obama's Unending Wars: Fronting for the Foreign Policy of the Permanent Warfare State (Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2019).

[Jul 01, 2020] Operation Cyclone - Wikipedia

Jul 01, 2020 | en.wikipedia.org

Operation Cyclone was the code name for the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) program to arm and finance the mujahideen (jihadists) in Afghanistan from 1979 to 1989, prior to and during the military intervention by the USSR in support of its client, the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. The mujahideen were also supported by Britain's MI6, who conducted separate covert actions. The program leaned heavily towards supporting militant Islamic groups that were favored by the regime of Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq in neighboring Pakistan, rather than other, less ideological Afghan resistance groups that had also been fighting the Marxist-oriented Democratic Republic of Afghanistan regime since before the Soviet intervention.[1]

Operation Cyclone was one of the longest and most expensive covert CIA operations ever undertaken.[2] Funding officially began with $695,000 in 1979,[3][4] was increased dramatically to $20–$30 million per year in 1980, and rose to $630 million per year in 1987,[1][5][6] described as the "biggest bequest to any Third World insurgency."[7] Funding continued (albeit reduced) after the 1989 Soviet withdrawal as the mujahideen continued to battle the forces of President Mohammad Najibullah's army during the Afghan Civil War (1989–1992).[8]

[Jul 01, 2020] Not only British, but American, intelligence/foreign policy/law enforcement agencies got into bed with the members of the semibankirshchina of the Nineties who refused to accept the terms Putin offered.

Notable quotes:
"... What Catan established is that, at the time his helicopter was blown out of the sky, Curtis, lawyer both to the Menatep oligarchs and Berezovsky, had started 'singing sweetly' to what was the the National Criminal Intelligence Service. ..."
"... And what he was telling them about the activities of Khodorkovsky and his associates would have been 'music to the ears' of Putin and his associates. ..."
"... Ironically, she inadvertently demonstrates a crucial element in this story – the extent to which not only British, but American, intelligence/foreign policy/law enforcement agencies 'got into bed' with the members of the 'semibankirshchina' of the 'Nineties who refused to accept the terms Putin offered. ..."
"... A prescient early analysis of Putin, which brings out that the notion that his KGB background meant that he wanted conflict with the West is BS, is the 2002 paper 'Vladimir Putin & Russia's Special Services.' ..."
"... It was published by the 'Conflict Studies Research Centre', which was what the old 'Soviet Studies Research Centre', which did 'open source' analysis for the British military at Sandhurst became, after the collapse of the Soviet Union. ..."
Jul 01, 2020 | turcopolier.typepad.com

xxx:

TTG:

From the description of the evolution the thinking of Christopher Steele by his co-conspirators Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch:

'When the Soviet Union finally collapsed, the suffocating surveillance of Western diplomats and suspected intelligence officers suddenly ceased – which for a brief moment seemed like a possible harbinger of a new, less authoritarian future for Russia. But the surveillance started again within days. The intrusive tails and petty harassment were indistinguishable from Soviet practices and have continued to this day. To Steele, that told him all he needed to know about the new Russia: The new boss was the same as the old boss.'

This was, apparently, the figure who MI6 judged fit to head their Russia Desk, and whose analyses were regarded as serious among people in the State Department, CIA, FBI, DOJ etc. LOL.

As to Simpson and Fritsch, they were supposed to be serious journalists. LOL again.

A curious thing is that Tom Catan once was.

He wrote a good long investigative piece in the 'Financial Times', back in 2004, about the death of Stephen Curtis, one of the fourteen mysterious incidents in the U.K., which according to Heidi Blake of 'BuzzFeed', American intelligence agencies have evidence establishing that they were the work of the Russian 'special services.'

(As, according to the 'Sky' report you and Colonel Lang discussed, the supposed attempt to assassinate Sergei and Yulia Skripal is supposed to be.)

What Catan established is that, at the time his helicopter was blown out of the sky, Curtis, lawyer both to the Menatep oligarchs and Berezovsky, had started 'singing sweetly' to what was the the National Criminal Intelligence Service.

And what he was telling them about the activities of Khodorkovsky and his associates would have been 'music to the ears' of Putin and his associates.

As with the deaths of Berezovsky and Patarkatsishvili, which also feature in Ms. Blake's farragos, at the precise time they died, it was precisely Putin and his associates who had the strongest possible interest in keeping them alive.

Ironically, she inadvertently demonstrates a crucial element in this story – the extent to which not only British, but American, intelligence/foreign policy/law enforcement agencies 'got into bed' with the members of the 'semibankirshchina' of the 'Nineties who refused to accept the terms Putin offered.

(See https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/heidiblake/putin-global-assassination-campaign-berezovsky-london . Note, in the link, 'putin-global-assassination-campaign-berezovsky-london.')

Unfortunately, I cannot provide a link to the Catan article, as it is no longer available on the web, and when I put my old link into the 'Wayback Machine' version, I was told it was infected with a Trojan.

But I can send you a copy, if you are interested.

Leith,

Of course, no ancestry – be it Lithuanian, or Polish, or Ukrainian, or whatever – 'automatically' produces bias.

A prescient early analysis of Putin, which brings out that the notion that his KGB background meant that he wanted conflict with the West is BS, is the 2002 paper 'Vladimir Putin & Russia's Special Services.'

It was published by the 'Conflict Studies Research Centre', which was what the old 'Soviet Studies Research Centre', which did 'open source' analysis for the British military at Sandhurst became, after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The actual name of 'Gordon Bennett', who wrote it, is Henry Plater-Zyberk. They were a great, and very distinguished, Polish-Lithuanian noble family.

(See https://www.files.ethz.ch/isn/96481/02_Aug_4.pdf .)

In quite a long experience of refugees to these islands from the disasters of twentieth-century European history, and their descendants, I have found that sometimes the history is taken as a subject of reflection and becomes a source of insight and understanding not granted to those with more fortunate backgrounds.

At other times, however, people become locked in a trauma, out of which they cannot escape.

[Jul 01, 2020] Enormity of problems within Russia exclude any possibilities of trying to emulate the imperial behavior of the USA. Also Russia does not have the printing press for the world reserve currency, which the USA still has

Jul 01, 2020 | turcopolier.typepad.com

@The Twisted Genius


Many here seem to think Russia is a nation totally separate from the now defunct Soviet Union, that Russia is incapable or unwilling to engage in the seamier aspects of realpolitik like all other nations. Funny, Putin doesn't ascribe to this view. A short time ago, someone posted a link to a lecture by the KGB defector, Yuri Bezmenov

Bezmenov was trying to please new owners. Russia does not have resources to engage like USA in Full Spectrum Dominance games. Like Obama correctly said it is regional power.

Also why bother, in internal fight between two factions of neoliberal elite is really bitter and dirty fight. You can't do better that neoliberal Dems in dividing the country. Why spend money if you can just wait.

Enormity of problems within Russia exclude any possibilities of trying to emulate the imperial behavior of the USA. Also Russia does not have the printing press for the world reserve currency, which the USA still has.

And Putin is the first who understands this precarious situation, mentioning this limitation several times in his speeches. As well as the danger of being pushed into senseless arm race with the USA again by Russian MIC, which probably would lead to similar to the USSR results -- further dissolution of Russia into smaller statelets. Which is a dream of both the USA and the EU, for which they do not spare money.

Russia is a very fragile country -- yet another neoliberal country with its own severe problems related to "identity politics" (or more correctly "identity wedge") which both EU and the USA is actively trying to play. Sometimes very successfully.

Ukraine coup detat was almost a knockdown for Putin, at least a very strong kick in the chin; it happened so quick and was essentially prepared by Yanukovish himself with his por-EU and pro-nationalist stance. Being a sleazy crook, he dug the grave for his government mostly by himself.

Now the same game can be repeated in Belarussia as Lukachenko by-and-large outlived his usefulness and like most autocratic figures created vacuum around himself -- he has neither viable successor, not the orderly, well defined process of succession; but economic problems mounts and mounts. Which gives EU+USA a chance to repeat Ukrainian scenario, as by definition years of independence strengthens far right nationalist forces in the country (which were present during WWII probably is no less severe form than in Ukraine and Baltic countries). Which like all xUUSR nationalists are adamantly anti-Russian.

Currently the personality of Putin is kind of most effective guarantee of political stability in Russia, but like any cult of personality this can't last forever and it might deprive Russia of finding qualified successor.

Putin was already burned twice with his overtures to Colonel Qaddafi (who after Medvedev's blunder in UN was completely unable to defend himself), and Yanukovich, who in addition to stupidly pandering to nationalists and trying to be the best friend of Biden proved to be a despicable coward.

[Jul 01, 2020] Kosovo Indictment Proves Bill Clinton s Serbian War Atrocities - Defend Democracy Press by Jim Bovard

Notable quotes:
"... Clinton remains a hero in Kosovo where a statue of him was erected in the capital, Pristina. The Guardian newspaper noted that the statue showed Clinton "with a left hand raised, a typical gesture of a leader greeting the masses. In his right hand he is holding documents engraved with the date when NATO started the bombardment of Serbia, 24 March 1999." It would have been a more accurate representation to depict Clinton standing on a pile of corpses of the women, children, and others killed in the U.S. bombing campaign. ..."
"... Bill Clinton's 1999 bombing of Serbia was as big a fraud as George W. Bush's conning this nation into attacking Iraq. The fact that Clinton and other top U.S. government officials continued to glorify Hashim Thaci despite accusations of mass murder, torture, and body trafficking is another reminder of the venality of much of America's political elite. Will Americans again be gullible the next time that Washington policymakers and their media allies concoct bullshit pretexts to blow the hell out of some hapless foreign land? ..."
Jun 25, 2020 | www.defenddemocracy.press

President Bill Clinton's favorite freedom fighter just got indicted for mass murder, torture, kidnapping, and other crimes against humanity. In 1999, the Clinton administration launched a 78-day bombing campaign that killed up to 1500 civilians in Serbia and Kosovo in what the American media proudly portrayed as a crusade against ethnic bias. That war, like most of the pretenses of U.S. foreign policy, was always a sham.

Kosovo President Hashim Thaci was charged with ten counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity by an international tribunal in The Hague in the Netherlands. It charged Thaci and nine other men with "war crimes, including murder, enforced disappearance of persons, persecution, and torture." Thaci and the other charged suspects were accused of being "criminally responsible for nearly 100 murders" and the indictment involved "hundreds of known victims of Kosovo Albanian, Serb, Roma, and other ethnicities and include political opponents."

Hashim Thaci's tawdry career illustrates how anti-terrorism is a flag of convenience for Washington policymakers. Prior to becoming Kosovo's president, Thaci was the head of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), fighting to force Serbs out of Kosovo. In 1999, the Clinton administration designated the KLA as "freedom fighters" despite their horrific past and gave them massive aid. The previous year, the State Department condemned "terrorist action by the so-called Kosovo Liberation Army." The KLA was heavily involved in drug trafficking and had close to ties to Osama bin Laden.

But arming the KLA and bombing Serbia helped Clinton portray himself as a crusader against injustice and shift public attention after his impeachment trial. Clinton was aided by many shameless members of Congress anxious to sanctify U.S. killing. Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-CN) whooped that the United States and the KLA "stand for the same values and principles. Fighting for the KLA is fighting for human rights and American values." And since Clinton administration officials publicly compared Serb leader Slobodan Milošević to Hitler, every decent person was obliged to applaud the bombing campaign.

Both the Serbs and ethnic Albanians committed atrocities in the bitter strife in Kosovo. But to sanctify its bombing campaign, the Clinton administration waved a magic wand and made the KLA's atrocities disappear. British professor Philip Hammond noted that the 78-day bombing campaign "was not a purely military operation: NATO also destroyed what it called 'dual-use' targets, such as factories, city bridges, and even the main television building in downtown Belgrade, in an attempt to terrorize the country into surrender."

Read also: From the very beginning: Α conscious plan to destroy Greece!

NATO repeatedly dropped cluster bombs into marketplaces, hospitals, and other civilian areas. Cluster bombs are anti-personnel devices designed to be scattered across enemy troop formations. NATO dropped more than 1,300 cluster bombs on Serbia and Kosovo and each bomb contained 208 separate bomblets that floated to earth by parachute. Bomb experts estimated that more than 10,000 unexploded bomblets were scattered around the landscape when the bombing ended and maimed children long after the ceasefire.

In the final days of the bombing campaign, the Washington Post reported that "some presidential aides and friends are describing Kosovo in Churchillian tones, as Clinton's 'finest hour.'" The Post also reported that according to one Clinton friend "what Clinton believes were the unambiguously moral motives for NATO's intervention represented a chance to soothe regrets harbored in Clinton's own conscience The friend said Clinton has at times lamented that the generation before him was able to serve in a war with a plainly noble purpose, and he feels 'almost cheated' that 'when it was his turn he didn't have the chance to be part of a moral cause.'" By Clinton's standard, slaughtering Serbs was "close enough for government work" to a "moral cause."

Shortly after the end of the 1999 bombing campaign, Clinton enunciated what his aides labeled the Clinton doctrine: "Whether within or beyond the borders of a country, if the world community has the power to stop it, we ought to stop genocide and ethnic cleansing." In reality, the Clinton doctrine was that presidents are entitled to commence bombing foreign lands based on any brazen lie that the American media will regurgitate. In reality, the lesson from bombing Serbia is that American politicians merely need to publicly recite the word "genocide" to get a license to kill.

Read also: Derrière l'affaire Benalla, la banalisation de la violence policière

After the bombing ended, Clinton assured the Serbian people that the United States and NATO agreed to be peacekeepers only "with the understanding that they would protect Serbs as well as ethnic Albanians and that they would leave when peace took hold." In the subsequent months and years, American and NATO forces stood by as the KLA resumed its ethnic cleansing, slaughtering Serb civilians, bombing Serbian churches and oppressing any non-Muslims. Almost a quarter-million Serbs, Gypsies, Jews, and other minorities fled Kosovo after Mr. Clinton promised to protect them. By 2003, almost 70 percent of the Serbs living in Kosovo in 1999 had fled, and Kosovo was 95 percent ethnic Albanian.

But Thaci remained useful for U.S. policymakers. Even though he was widely condemned for oppression and corruption after taking power in Kosovo, Vice President Joe Biden hailed Thaci in 2010 as the "George Washington of Kosovo." A few months later, a Council of Europe report accused Thaci and KLA operatives of human organ trafficking. The Guardian noted that the report alleged that Thaci's inner circle "took captives across the border into Albania after the war, where a number of Serbs are said to have been murdered for their kidneys, which were sold on the black market." The report stated that when "transplant surgeons" were "ready to operate, the [Serbian] captives were brought out of the 'safe house' individually, summarily executed by a KLA gunman, and their corpses transported swiftly to the operating clinic."

Despite the body trafficking charge, Thaci was a star attendee at the annual Global Initiative conference by the Clinton Foundation in 2011, 2012, and 2013, where he posed for photos with Bill Clinton. Maybe that was a perk from the $50,000 a month lobbying contract that Thaci's regime signed with The Podesta Group, co-managed by future Hillary Clinton campaign manager John Podesta, as the Daily Caller reported.

Clinton remains a hero in Kosovo where a statue of him was erected in the capital, Pristina. The Guardian newspaper noted that the statue showed Clinton "with a left hand raised, a typical gesture of a leader greeting the masses. In his right hand he is holding documents engraved with the date when NATO started the bombardment of Serbia, 24 March 1999." It would have been a more accurate representation to depict Clinton standing on a pile of corpses of the women, children, and others killed in the U.S. bombing campaign.

In 2019, Bill Clinton and his fanatically pro-bombing former Secretary of State, Madeline Albright, visited Pristina, where they were "treated like rock stars" as they posed for photos with Thaci. Clinton declared, "I love this country and it will always be one of the greatest honors of my life to have stood with you against ethnic cleansing (by Serbian forces) and for freedom." Thaci awarded Clinton and Albright medals of freedom "for the liberty he brought to us and the peace to entire region." Albright has reinvented herself as a visionary warning against fascism in the Trump era. Actually, the only honorific that Albright deserves is "Butcher of Belgrade."

Clinton's war on Serbia was a Pandora's box from which the world still suffers. Because politicians and most of the media portrayed the war against Serbia as a moral triumph, it was easier for the Bush administration to justify attacking Iraq, for the Obama administration to bomb Libya, and for the Trump administration to repeatedly bomb Syria. All of those interventions sowed chaos that continues cursing the purported beneficiaries.

Bill Clinton's 1999 bombing of Serbia was as big a fraud as George W. Bush's conning this nation into attacking Iraq. The fact that Clinton and other top U.S. government officials continued to glorify Hashim Thaci despite accusations of mass murder, torture, and body trafficking is another reminder of the venality of much of America's political elite. Will Americans again be gullible the next time that Washington policymakers and their media allies concoct bullshit pretexts to blow the hell out of some hapless foreign land?

[Jun 30, 2020] Russophobia- Anti-Russian Lobby and American Foreign Policy- Tsygankov, A.- 9781349378418- Amazon.com- Books

Highly recommended!
Jun 30, 2020 | www.amazon.com

by A. Tsygankov (Author)

"The author painstakingly reconstructs and analyzes most visible expressions of Russophobia in various segments of American political class. . . [and] convincingly shows that Russia-hostile elites hold images of Moscow s eternal authoritarianism at home and permanent imperialism abroad." - Mirovaya Ekonomika i Mezhdunarodnyye Otnosheniya (World Economy and International Relations), No. 4, 2001, pp. 113-116

"The book s chapters deal with, among other topics, the Chechen wars, democracy promotion and energy policies. It is also important that this interpretation comes from a Russian-born political scientist who lives in the US and knows American discourse and politics well. Tsygankov s deep knowledge of both Russian affairs and camps and trends in US politics adds considerable value to this analysis. . . . this dense description of, and spirited attack on, Western rhetoric and policies regarding Russia will be a valuable addition and original contribution to seminars in such fields as international security, post-Soviet affairs and US foreign policy." - Europe-Asia Studies

"Although many works about anti-Americanism in Russia existed already, until now there was a lack of an approach that focused on Russophobia from an American perspective. . . Tsygankov s [book] provides the missing piece. . . This type of analysis opens the door for more comparative analysis of different "phobias" in international relations - Sinophobia, Islamophobia, Europhobia, etc. - and the tone of this book certainly inspires the further research of them that we would all benefit from." - Critique internationale

"In this stimulating and insightful book, Andrei Tsygankov shows how fear and loathing of Russia s political system as fundamentally incompatible with the interests and values of the West have distorted American popular perceptions of Russia and misguided U.S. policies toward the former Soviet Union. Arguing for a reorientation of U.S. attitudes and policies, Tsygankov calls for engagement, reciprocity, and patience as the keys to improving relations with an enormous, resource-rich, and strategically important country." - David S. Foglesong, Associate Professor of History at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, and author of The American Mission and the "Evil Empire"

"Andrei Tsygankov is one of the most profound analysts of both the rational and the irrational aspects of the US-Russian relationship. His searching, provocative book is an indispensable contribution to scholarship and to the debate on US policy towards Russia." - Professor Anatol Lieven, King's College London

About the Author ANDREI P. TSYGANKOV is Professor at the Departments of Political Science and International Relations, San Francisco State University, USA.

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Andreas Umland

Stretching "Russophobia"

3.0 out of 5 stars Stretching "Russophobia" Reviewed in the United States on June 11, 2010

An analysis like Andrei P. Tsygankov's book was sorely needed. However, I am not sure that Tsygankov will fully reach with this text what he seemingly wanted to attain - namely, an effective, noted and, above all, consequential critique of US attitudes towards Russia during the last decade. Tsygankov has, to be sure, done a great deal of investigative work. He details many episodes that illustrate well where US policy or opinion makers have gone wrong. The book's chapters deal with, among other topics, the Chechen wars, democracy promotion, and energy policies. It is also important that this interpretation comes from a Russia-born political scientist who lives in the US and knows American discourse and politics well. Tsygankov's deep knowledge of both, Russian affairs as well as camps and trends in US politics, adds considerable value to this analysis.

Yet, already the title of the book indicates where Tsygankov may be defeating his purpose. By way of classifying most of US-American critique of Russia as "Russophobia", Tsygankov goes, at least in terms of the concepts and words that he uses to interpret these phenomena, a bit too far. Tsygankov asserts that Russophobia is a major intellectual and political trend in US international thought and behaviour. He also tries to make the reader believe that there exists a broad coalition of political commentators and actors that form an anti-Russian lobby in Washington.

It is true that there is a lot to be criticised and improved in Western approaches towards post-Soviet Russia - and towards the non-Western world, in general. US behaviour vis-ŕ-vis, and American comments on, Russia, for the last 20 years, have all too often been characterized by incompetence and insensitivity regarding the daunting challenges and far-reaching consequences of the peculiarly post-Soviet political, cultural and economic transformation. Often, Russian-American relations have been hampered by plain inattention among US decision and opinion makers - a stunning phenomenon in view of the fact that Russia has kept being and will remain a nuclear superpower, for decades to come. The hundreds of stupidities that have been uttered on, and dozens of mistakes in US policies towards, Russia needed to be chronicled and deconstructed. Partly, Tsygankov has done that here with due effort, interesting results and some interpretative success. Yet, Tsygankov does not only talk about failures and omissions regarding Russia. He also speaks of enemies of the Russian state in the US, and their supposed alliances as well various dealings.

Certainly, there is the occasional Russophobe in Washington and elsewhere, in the Western world. Among such personage, there are even some who are indeed engaged in an anti-Russian political lobbying of sorts. However, the circle of activists who truly deserve to be called "Russophobes" largely contains immigrants from the inner or outer Soviet/Russian empire. These are people who have their own reasons to be distrustful of, or even hostile towards, Russia. After the rise of Vladimir Putin and the Russian-Georgian War, many of them, I suspect, feel that they have always been right, in their anti-Russian prejudices. In any way, this is a relatively small group of people who are more interested in the past and worried about the future of their newly independent nation-states than they are concerned about the actual fate of Russia herself.

Among those who are interested in Russia there are many, as Tsygankov aptly documents, who have recently been criticizing the Russian leadership harshly. Some of them have, in doing so, exerted influence on Western governments and public opinion. And partly such critique was, indeed, unjustified, unbalanced or/and counterproductive. But is that enough to assert that there is an "anti-Russian lobby"? What would such a lobby gain from spoiling US-Russian relationships? Who pays these lobbyists, and for what? Who, apart from a few backward-looking East European émigrés, is sufficiently interested in a new fundamental Russian-Western confrontation so as to conduct the allegedly concerted anti-Russian campaigns that Tsygankov appears to be discovering, in his book? Dalton C. Rocha 9 years ago Report abuse Less than one hundred years ago, there was more than ten Russians for each Brazilian. In 1991, there was more Brazilians than Russians. Russia is in decadency since 1917. Please, keep Russia in peace, fighting against Islamics. Leave a reply

Roobit 9 years ago (Edited) Report abuse I have no idea what is abstract West (though I can say there is a pedophile when I see one) but the point Tsygankov was trying to make is not existence of some paid lobby but widespread cultural and racial hatred of Russia that motivates Americans and American policies, and not abstract Western (I have no idea what that is, French, Portuguese, Brazilian, Slovak, Norwegian, Italian, City of Vatican?) attitudes and policies toward Russia. The author of the comment, a known and rather Russophobe himself, should know what I mean. Leave a reply Oliver L. 9 years ago Report abuse I appreciate your review (and I haven't read the book) but I think perhaps you are taking the existence of a Russophobic lobby too literally...as an American who reads and follows international politics and American foreign policy I think there is an overdeveloped reflex among many Americans to use Russia (regardless of the formal organization of its government i.e. czarist, communist or "democratic") as a political foil to everything "good" about American politics i.e. democracy, openness, empowerment of citizens, etc., that will not go away or even amerliorate until every last American politician, political scientist, etc. who grew up with personal memories of the Cold War is no longer professionally active.

It is similar to what exists in the Anglosphere at a cultural level vis-á-vis France/the French, and perhaps what Professors Mearsheimer and Walt were trying to describe about the "Israeli lobby"-not so much a formal organization but rather a pandemic mentality among a certain group which inevitably finds a multiplicity of ways to express itself (and thereby give the impression to some outside observers of being centrally organized).

[Jun 30, 2020] Vladimir Putin on the 75th Anniversary of the Soviet victory

Jun 30, 2020 | www.veteranstoday.com

VT: The real story of betrayal and how fake history, invented for the West by globalist elites from the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations. The result has been an America and Britain with generations raised in ignorance, leading to the global catastrophe we see today.

Key in this paper are the background issues tied to the runup between the start of the war in September 1939 and the German invasion of Russia in June 1941.

Some information here is damning to Stalin, however, much if not most is very needed historical clarification and insight into Soviet thinking.

Only when we understand how the precursor of Trump's Kosher Nostra friends started World War II will we recognize how we are walking the same path, led by fake historians and the ignorant.

Everything Putin writes is there for Western historians to see, were they allowed to tell that story without persecution, which they aren't.

Simply put, the Americans and British who fought and died in World War II did so because the elites of their nation in concert with a centuries old cabal of financial criminals, failed to control history out of hubris, arrogance and ignorance.

But then none of them died and they made trillions

By Vladimir Putin, President of the Russian Federation

Seventy-five years have passed since the end of the Great Patriotic War. Several generations have grown up over the years. The political map of the planet has changed. The Soviet Union that claimed an epic, crushing victory over Nazism and saved the entire world is gone. Besides, the events of that war have long become a distant memory, even for its participants. So why does Russia celebrate the ninth of May as the biggest holiday? Why does life almost come to a halt on June 22? And why does one feel a lump rise in their throat?

They usually say that the war has left a deep imprint on every family's history. Behind these words, there are fates of millions of people, their sufferings and the pain of loss. Behind these words, there is also the pride, the truth and the memory.

For my parents, the war meant the terrible ordeals of the Siege of Leningrad where my two-year-old brother Vitya died. It was the place where my mother miraculously managed to survive. My father, despite being exempt from active duty, volunteered to defend his hometown. He made the same decision as millions of Soviet citizens. He fought at the Nevsky Pyatachok bridgehead and was severely wounded. And the more years pass, the more I feel the need to talk to my parents and learn more about the war period of their lives. However, I no longer have the opportunity to do so. This is the reason why I treasure in my heart those conversations I had with my father and mother on this subject, as well as the little emotion they showed.

People of my age and I believe it is important that our children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren understand the torment and hardships their ancestors had to endure. They need to understand how their ancestors managed to persevere and win. Where did their sheer, unbending willpower that amazed and fascinated the whole world come from? Sure, they were defending their home, their children, loved ones and families. However, what they shared was the love for their homeland, their Motherland. That deep-seated, intimate feeling is fully reflected in the very essence of our nation and became one of the decisive factors in its heroic, sacrificial fight against the Nazis.

I often wonder: What would today's generation do? How will it act when faced with a crisis situation? I see young doctors, nurses, sometimes fresh graduates that go to the "red zone" to save lives. I see our servicemen that fight international terrorism in the Northern Caucasus and fought to the bitter end in Syria. They are so young. Many servicemen who were part of the legendary, immortal 6th Paratroop Company were 19-20 years old. But all of them proved that they deserved to inherit the feat of the warriors of our homeland that defended it during the Great Patriotic War.

This is why I am confident that one of the characteristic features of the peoples of Russia is to fulfill their duty without feeling sorry for themselves when the circumstances so demand. Such values as selflessness, patriotism, love for their home, their family and Motherland remain fundamental and integral to the Russian society to this day. These values are, to a large extent, the backbone of our country's sovereignty.

Nowadays, we have new traditions created by the people, such as the Immortal Regiment. This is the memory march that symbolizes our gratitude, as well as the living connection and the blood ties between generations. Millions of people come out to the streets carrying the photographs of their relatives that defended their Motherland and defeated the Nazis. This means that their lives, their ordeals and sacrifices, as well as the Victory that they left to us will never be forgotten.

We have a responsibility to our past and our future to do our utmost to prevent those horrible tragedies from happening ever again. Hence, I was compelled to come out with an article about World War II and the Great Patriotic War. I have discussed this idea on several occasions with world leaders, and they have showed their support. At the summit of CIS leaders held at the end of last year, we all agreed on one thing: it is essential to pass on to future generations the memory of the fact that the Nazis were defeated first and foremost by the Soviet people and that representatives of all republics of the Soviet Union fought side by side together in that heroic battle, both on the frontlines and in the rear. During that summit, I also talked with my counterparts about the challenging pre-war period.
That conversation caused a stir in Europe and the world. It means that it is indeed high time that we revisited the lessons of the past. At the same time, there were many emotional outbursts, poorly disguised insecurities and loud accusations that followed.

Acting out of habit, certain politicians rushed to claim that Russia was trying to rewrite history. However, they failed to rebut a single fact or refute a single argument. It is indeed difficult, if not impossible, to argue with the original documents that, by the way, can be found not only in the Russian, but also in the foreign archives.

Thus, there is a need to further examine the reasons that caused the world war and reflect on its complicated events, tragedies and victories, as well as its lessons, both for our country and the entire world. And like I said, it is crucial to rely exclusively on archive documents and contemporary evidence while avoiding any ideological or politicized speculations.

I would like to once again recall the obvious fact. The root causes of World War II mainly stem from the decisions made after World War I. The Treaty of Versailles became a symbol of grave injustice for Germany. It basically implied that the country was to be robbed, being forced to pay enormous reparations to the Western allies that drained its economy. French marshal Ferdinand Foch who served as the Supreme Allied Commander gave a prophetic description of that Treaty: "This is not peace. It is an armistice for twenty years."

It was the national humiliation that became a fertile ground for radical sentiments of revenge in Germany. The Nazis skillfully played on people's emotions and built their propaganda promising to deliver Germany from the "legacy of Versailles" and restore the country to its former power while essentially pushing German people into war. Paradoxically, the Western states, particularly the United Kingdom and the United States, directly or indirectly contributed to this. Their financial and industrial enterprises actively invested in German factories and plants manufacturing military products. Besides, many people in the aristocracy and political establishment supported radical, far-right and nationalist movements that were on the rise both in Germany and in Europe.

The "Versailles world order" caused numerous implicit controversies and apparent conflicts. They revolved around the borders of new European states randomly set by the victors in World War I. That boundary delimitation was almost immediately followed by territorial disputes and mutual claims that turned into "time bombs".

One of the major outcomes of World War I was the establishment of the League of Nations. There were high expectations for that international organization to ensure lasting peace and collective security. It was a progressive idea that, if followed through consistently, could actually prevent the horrors of a global war from happening again.

However, the League of Nations dominated by the victorious powers of France and the United Kingdom proved ineffective and just got swamped by pointless discussions. The League of Nations and the European continent in general turned a deaf ear to the repeated calls of the Soviet Union to establish an equitable collective security system, and sign an Eastern European pact and a Pacific pact to prevent aggression. These proposals were disregarded.

The League of Nations also failed to prevent conflicts in various parts of the world, such as the attack of Italy on Ethiopia, the civil war in Spain, the Japanese aggression against China and the Anschluss of Austria. Furthermore, in case of the Munich Betrayal that, in addition to Hitler and Mussolini, involved British and French leaders, Czechoslovakia was taken apart with the full approval of the League of Nations. I would like to point out in this regard that, unlike many other European leaders of that time, Stalin did not disgrace himself by meeting with Hitler who was known among the Western nations as quite a reputable politician and was a welcome guest in the European capitals.

Poland was also engaged in the partition of Czechoslovakia along with Germany. They decided together in advance who would get what Czechoslovak territories. On September 20, 1938, Polish Ambassador to Germany Józef Lipski reported to Minister of Foreign Affairs of Poland Józef Beck on the following assurances made by Hitler: " in case of a conflict between Poland and Czechoslovakia over our interests in Teschen, the Reich would stand by Poland." The Nazi leader even prompted and advised that Poland started to act "only after the Germans occupy the Sudetes."

Poland was aware that without Hitler's support, its annexationist plans were doomed to fail. I would like to quote in this regard a record of the conversation between German Ambassador to Warsaw Hans-Adolf von Moltke and Józef Beck that took place on October 1, 1938, and was focused on the Polish-Czech relations and the position of the Soviet Union in this matter. It says: "Mr. Beck expressed real gratitude for the loyal treatment accorded [to] Polish interests at the Munich conference, as well as the sincerity of relations during the Czech conflict. The attitude of the Führer and Chancellor was fully appreciated by the Government and the public [of Poland]."

The partition of Czechoslovakia was brutal and cynical. Munich destroyed even the formal, fragile guarantees that remained on the continent. It showed that mutual agreements were worthless. It was the Munich Betrayal that served as a "trigger" and made the great war in Europe inevitable.

Today, European politicians, and Polish leaders in particular, wish to sweep the Munich Betrayal under the carpet. Why? The fact that their countries once broke their commitments and supported the Munich Betrayal, with some of them even participating in divvying up the take, is not the only reason. Another is that it is kind of embarrassing to recall that during those dramatic days of 1938, the Soviet Union was the only one to stand up for Czechoslovakia.

The Soviet Union, in accordance with its international obligations, including agreements with France and Czechoslovakia, tried to prevent the tragedy from happening. Meanwhile, Poland, in pursuit of its interests, was doing its utmost to hamper the establishment of a collective security system in Europe. Polish Minister of Foreign Affairs Józef Beck wrote about it directly in his letter of September 19, 1938 to the aforementioned Ambassador Józef Lipski before his meeting with Hitler: " in the past year, the Polish government rejected four times the proposal to join the international interfering in defense of Czechoslovakia."

Britain, as well as France, which was at the time the main ally of the Czechs and Slovaks, chose to withdraw their guarantees and abandon this Eastern European country to its fate. In so doing, they sought to direct the attention of the Nazis eastward so that Germany and the Soviet Union would inevitably clash and bleed each other white.

That is the essence of the western policy of appeasement, which was pursued not only towards the Third Reich but also towards other participants of the so-called Anti-Comintern Pact – the fascist Italy and militarist Japan . In the Far East, this policy culminated in the conclusion of the Anglo-Japanese agreement in the summer of 1939, which gave Tokyo a free hand in China. The leading European powers were unwilling to recognize the mortal danger posed by Germany and its allies to the whole world. They were hoping that they themselves would be left untouched by the war.

The Munich Betrayal showed to the Soviet Union that the Western countries would deal with security issues without taking its interests into account. In fact, they could even create an anti-Soviet front, if needed.

Nevertheless, the Soviet Union did its utmost to use every chance of creating an anti-Hitler coalition. Despite – I will say it again – the double‑dealing on the part of the Western countries . For instance, the intelligence services reported to the Soviet leadership detailed information on the behind-the-scenes contacts between Britain and Germany in the summer of 1939 . The important thing is that those contacts were quite active and practically coincided with the tripartite negotiations between France, Great Britain and the USSR, which were, on the contrary, deliberately protracted by the Western partners. In this connection, I will cite a document from the British archives. It contains instructions to the British military mission that came to Moscow in August 1939. It directly states that the delegation was to proceed with negotiations very slowly, and that the Government of the United Kingdom was not ready to assume any obligations spelled out in detail and limiting their freedom of action under any circumstances. I will also note that, unlike the British and French delegations, the Soviet delegation was headed by top commanders of the Red Army, who had the necessary authority to "sign a military convention on the organization of military defense of England, France and the USSR against aggression in Europe."

Poland played its role in the failure of those negotiations as it did not want to have any obligations to the Soviet side. Even under pressure from their Western allies, the Polish leadership rejected the idea of joint action with the Red Army to fight against the Wehrmacht. It was only when they learned of the arrival of Ribbentrop to Moscow that J. Beck reluctantly and not directly, through French diplomats, notified the Soviet side: " in the event of joint action against the German aggression, cooperation between Poland and the Soviet Union is not out of the question, in technical circumstances which remain to be agreed." At the same time, he explained to his colleagues: " I agreed to this wording only for the sake of the tactics, and our core position in relation to the Soviet Union is final and remains unchanged."

In these circumstances, the Soviet Union signed the Non-Aggression Pact with Germany. It was practically the last among the European countries to do so . Besides, it was done in the face of a real threat of war on two fronts – with Germany in the west and with Japan in the east, where intense fighting on the Khalkhin Gol River was already underway.

Stalin and his entourage, indeed, deserve many legitimate accusations. We remember the crimes committed by the regime against its own people and the horror of mass repressions. In other words, there are many things the Soviet leaders can be reproached for, but poor understanding of the nature of external threats is not one of them. They saw how attempts were made to leave the Soviet Union alone to deal with Germany and its allies. Bearing in mind this real threat, they sought to buy precious time needed to strengthen the country's defenses.

Nowadays, we hear lots of speculations and accusations against modern Russia in connection with the Non-Aggression Pact signed back then. Yes, Russia is the legal successor state to the USSR, and the Soviet period – with all its triumphs and tragedies – is an inalienable part of our thousand-year-long history. However, let us recall that the Soviet Union gave a legal and moral assessment of the so-called Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. The Supreme Soviet in its resolution of 24 December 1989 officially denounced the secret protocols as "an act of personal power" which in no way reflected "the will of the Soviet people who bear no responsibility for this collusion."

Yet other states have preferred to forget the agreements carrying signatures of the Nazis and Western politicians, not to mention giving legal or political assessments of such cooperation, including the silent acquiescence – or even direct abetment – of some European politicians in the barbarous plans of the Nazis. It will suffice to remember the cynical phrase said by Polish Ambassador to Germany J. Lipski during his conversation with Hitler on 20 September 1938: " for solving the Jewish problem, we [the Poles] will build in his honor a splendid monument in Warsaw."

Besides, we do not know if there were any secret "protocols" or annexes to agreements of a number of countries with the Nazis. The only thing that is left to do is to take their word for it. In particular, materials pertaining to the secret Anglo-German talks still have not been declassified. Therefore, we urge all states to step up the process of making their archives public and publishing previously unknown documents of the war and pre-war periods – the way Russia has done it in recent years. In this context, we are ready for broad cooperation and joint research projects engaging historians.

But let us go back to the events immediately preceding the Second World War. It was naïve to believe that Hitler, once done with Czechoslovakia, would not make new territorial claims. This time the claims involved its recent accomplice in the partition of Czechoslovakia – Poland. Here, the legacy of Versailles, particularly the fate of the so-called Danzig Corridor, was yet again used as the pretext. The blame for the tragedy that Poland then suffered lies entirely with the Polish leadership, which had impeded the formation of a military alliance between Britain, France and the Soviet Union and relied on the help from its Western partners, throwing its own people under the steamroller of Hitler's machine of destruction.

The German offensive was mounted in full accordance with the blitzkrieg doctrine. Despite the fierce, heroic resistance of the Polish army, on 8 September 1939 – only a week after the war broke out – the German troops were on the approaches to Warsaw. By 17 September, the military and political leaders of Poland had fled to Romania, abandoning its people, who continued to fight against the invaders.

Poland's hope for help from its Western allies was in vain. After the war against Germany was declared, the French troops advanced only a few tens of kilometers deep into the German territory. All of it looked like a mere demonstration of vigorous action. Moreover, the Anglo-French Supreme War Council, holding its first meeting on 12 September 1939 in the French city of Abbeville, decided to call off the offensive altogether in view of the rapid developments in Poland. That was when the infamous Phony War started. What Britain and France did was a blatant betrayal of their obligations to Poland.

Later, during the Nuremberg trials, German generals explained their quick success in the East. The former chief of the operations staff of the German armed forces high command, General Alfred Jodl admitted: " we did not suffer defeat as early as 1939 only because about 110 French and British divisions stationed in the west against 23 German divisions during our war with Poland remained absolutely idle."

I asked for retrieval from the archives of the whole body of materials pertaining to the contacts between the USSR and Germany in the dramatic days of August and September 1939. According to the documents, paragraph 2 of the Secret Protocol to the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact of 23 August 1939 stated that, in the event of territorial-political reorganization of the districts making up the Polish state, the border of the spheres of interest of the two countries would run "approximately along the Narew, Vistula and San rivers". In other words, the Soviet sphere of influence included not only the territories that were mostly home to Ukrainian and Belarusian population but also the historically Polish lands in the Vistula and Bug interfluve. This fact is known to very few these days.

Similarly, very few know that, immediately following the attack on Poland, in the early days of September 1939 Berlin strongly and repeatedly called on Moscow to join the military action. However, the Soviet leadership ignored those calls and planned to avoid engaging in the dramatic developments as long as possible.

It was only when it became absolutely clear that Great Britain and France were not going to help their ally and the Wehrmacht could swiftly occupy entire Poland and thus appear on the approaches to Minsk that the Soviet Union decided to send in, on the morning of 17 September, Red Army units into the so-called Eastern Borderlines, which nowadays form part of the territories of Belarus, Ukraine and Lithuania.

Obviously, there was no alternative. Otherwise, the USSR would face seriously increased risks because – I will say this again – the old Soviet-Polish border ran only within a few tens of kilometers of Minsk. The country would have to enter the inevitable war with the Nazis from very disadvantageous strategic positions, while millions of people of different nationalities, including the Jews living near Brest and Grodno, Przemyśl, Lvov and Wilno, would be left to die at the hands of the Nazis and their local accomplices – anti-Semites and radical nationalists.

The fact that the Soviet Union sought to avoid engaging in the growing conflict for as long as possible and was unwilling to fight side by side with Germany was the reason why the real contact between the Soviet and the German troops occurred much farther east than the borders agreed in the secret protocol. It was not on the Vistula River but closer to the so-called Curzon Line, which back in 1919 was recommended by the Triple Entente as the eastern border of Poland.

As is known, there is hardly any point in using the subjunctive mood when we speak of the past events. I will only say that, in September 1939, the Soviet leadership had an opportunity to move the western borders of the USSR even farther west, all the way to Warsaw, but decided against it

The Germans suggested formalizing the new status quo. On September 28, 1939 Joachim von Ribbentrop and V.Molotov signed in Moscow the Boundary and Friendship Treaty between Germany and the Soviet Union, as well as the secret protocol on changing the state border, according to which the border was recognized at the demarcation line where the two armies de-facto stood.

In autumn 1939, the Soviet Union, pursuing its strategic military and defensive goals, started the process of the incorporation of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. Their accession to the USSR was implemented on a contractual basis, with the consent of the elected authorities. This was in line with international and state law of that time. Besides, in October 1939, the city of Vilna and the surrounding area, which had previously been part of Poland, were returned to Lithuania. The Baltic republics within the USSR preserved their government bodies, language, and had representation in the higher state structures of the Soviet Union.

During all these months there was an ongoing invisible diplomatic and politico-military struggle and intelligence work. Moscow understood that it was facing a fierce and cruel enemy, and that a covert war against Nazism was already going on. And there is no reason to take official statements and formal protocol notes of that time as a proof of 'friendship' between the USSR and Germany. The Soviet Union had active trade and technical contacts not only with Germany, but with other countries as well. Whereas Hitler tried again and again to draw the Soviet Union into Germany's confrontation with the UK. But the Soviet government stood firm.

The last attempt to persuade the USSR to act together was made by Hitler during the visit of Molotov to Berlin in November 1940. But Molotov accurately followed Stalin's instructions and limited himself to a general discussion of the German idea of the Soviet Union joining the Tripartite Pact signed by Germany, Italy and Japan in September 1940 and directed against the UK and the USA. No wonder that already on November 17 Molotov gave the following instructions to Soviet plenipotentiary representative in London Ivan Maisky: "For your information No agreement was signed or was intended to be signed in Berlin. We just exchanged our views in Berlin and that was all Apparently, the Germans and the Japanese seem anxious to push us towards the Gulf and India. We declined the discussion of this matter as we consider such advice on the part of Germany to be inappropriate ." And on November 25 the Soviet leadership called it a day altogether by officially putting forward to Berlin the conditions that were unacceptable to the Nazis, including the withdrawal of German troops from Finland, mutual assistance treaty between Bulgaria and the USSR, and a number of others. Thus it deliberately excluded any possibility of joining the Pact. Such position definitely shaped the Fuehrer's intention to unleash a war against the USSR. And already in December, putting aside the warnings of his strategists about the disastrous danger of having a two-front war, Hitler approved the Barbarossa Plan. He did this with the knowledge that the Soviet Union was the major force that opposed him in Europe and that the upcoming battle in the East would decide the outcome of the world war. And he had no doubts as to the swiftness and success of the Moscow campaign.

And here I would like to highlight the following: Western countries, as a matter of fact, agreed at that time with the Soviet actions and recognized the Soviet Union's intention to ensure its national security. Indeed, back on October 1, 1939 Winston Churchill, the First Lord of the Admiralty back then, in his speech on the radio said, "Russia has pursued a cold policy of self-interest But that the Russian armies should stand on this line [the new Western border is meant] was clearly necessary for the safety of Russia against the Nazi menace." On October 4, 1939 speaking in the House of Lords British Foreign Secretary Halifax said, " it should be recalled that the Soviet government's actions were to move the border essentially to the line recommended at the Versailles Conference by Lord Curzon I only cite historical facts and believe they are indisputable." Prominent British politician and statesman D. Lloyd George emphasized, "The Russian armies occupied the territories that are not Polish and that were forcibly seized by Poland after the First World War It would be an act of criminal insanity to put the Russian advancement on a par with the German one."

In informal communications with Soviet plenipotentiary representative Maisky, British diplomats and high-level politicians spoke even more openly . On October 17, 1939 Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs R. A. Butler confided him that the British government circles believed there could be no question of returning Western Ukraine and Belarus to Poland. According to him, if it had been possible to create an ethnographic Poland of a modest size with a guarantee not only of the USSR and Germany, but also of Britain and France, the British government would have considered itself quite satisfied. On October 27, 1939, Chamberlain's senior advisor H.Wilson said that Poland had to be restored as an independent state on its ethnographic basis, but without Western Ukraine and Belarus.

It is worth noting that in the course of these conversations the possibilities for improving British-Soviet relations were also being explored. These contacts to a large extent laid the foundation for future alliance and anti-Hitler coalition. Churchill stood out among other responsible and far-sighted politicians and, despite his infamous dislike for the USSR, had been in favour of cooperating with the Soviets even before. Back in May 1939, he said in the House of Commons, "We shall be in mortal danger if we fail to create a grand alliance against aggression. The worst folly would be to drive away any natural cooperation with Soviet Russia." And after the start of hostilities in Europe, at his meeting with Maisky on October 6, 1939 he confided that there were no serious contradictions between the UK and the USSR and, therefore, there was no reason for strained or unsatisfactory relations. He also mentioned that the British government was eager to develop trade relations and willing to discuss any other measures that might improve the relationships.

The Second World War did not happen overnight, nor did it start unexpectedly or all of a sudden. And German aggression against Poland was not out of nowhere. It was the result of a number of tendencies and factors of the world policy of that time. All pre-war events fell into place to form one fatal chain. But, undoubtedly, the main factors that predetermined the greatest tragedy in the history of mankind were state egoism, cowardice, appeasement of the aggressor who was gaining strength, and unwillingness of political elites to search for a compromise.

Therefore, it is unfair to claim that the two-day visit to Moscow of Nazi Foreign Minister Ribbentrop was the main reason for the start of the Second World War. All the leading countries are to a certain extent responsible for its outbreak. Each of them made fatal mistakes, arrogantly believing that they could outsmart others, secure unilateral advantages for themselves or stay away from the impending world catastrophe. And this short-sightedness, the refusal to create a collective security system cost millions of lives and tremendous losses.

Saying this, I by no means intend to take on the role of a judge, to accuse or acquit anyone, let alone initiate a new round of international information confrontation in the historical field that could set countries and peoples at loggerheads. I believe that it is academics with a wide representation of respected scientists from different countries of the world who should search for a balanced assessment of what happened. We all need the truth and objectivity. On my part, I have always encouraged my colleagues to build a calm, open and trust-based dialogue, to look at the common past in a self-critical and unbiased manner. Such an approach will make it possible not to repeat the errors committed back then and to ensure peaceful and successful development for years to come.

However, many of our partners are not yet ready for joint work. On the contrary, pursuing their goals, they increase the number and the scope of information attacks against our country, trying to make us provide excuses and feel guilty, and adopt thoroughly hypocritical and politically motivated declarations. Thus, for example, the resolution on the Importance of European Remembrance for the Future of Europe approved by the European Parliament on 19 September 2019 directly accused the USSR together with the Nazi Germany of unleashing the Second World War. Needless to say, there is no mention of Munich in it whatsoever.

I believe that such 'paperwork' – for I cannot call this resolution a document – which is clearly intended to provoke a scandal, is fraught with real and dangerous threats. Indeed, it was adopted by a highly respectable institution. And what does that show? Regrettably, this reveals a deliberate policy aimed at destroying the post-war world order whose creation was a matter of honour and responsibility for States a number of representatives of which voted today in favour of this deceitful resolution. Thus, they challenged the conclusions of the Nuremberg Tribunal and the efforts of the international community to create after the victorious 1945 universal international institutions. Let me remind you in this regard that the process of European integration itself leading to the establishment of relevant structures, including the European Parliament, became possible only due to the lessons learnt form the past and its accurate legal and political assessment. And those who deliberately put this consensus into question undermine the foundations of the entire post-war Europe.

Apart from posing a threat to the fundamental principles of the world order, this also raises certain moral and ethical issues. Desecrating and insulting the memory is mean. Meanness can be deliberate, hypocritical and pretty much intentional as in the situation when declarations commemorating the 75th anniversary of the end of the Second World War mention all participants in the anti-Hitler coalition except for the Soviet Union. Meanness can be cowardly as in the situation when monuments erected in honour of those who fought against Nazism are demolished and these shameful acts are justified by the false slogans of the fight against an unwelcome ideology and alleged occupation. Meanness can also be bloody as in the situation when those who come out against neo-Nazis and Bandera's successors are killed and burned. Once again, meanness can have different manifestations, but this does not make it less disgusting.

Neglecting the lessons of history inevitably leads to a harsh payback. We will firmly uphold the truth based on documented historical facts. We will continue to be honest and impartial about the events of World War II. This includes a large-scale project to establish Russia's largest collection of archival records, film and photo materials about the history of World War II and the pre‑war period.

Such work is already underway. Many new, recently discovered or declassified materials were also used in the preparation of this article . In this regard, I can state with all responsibility that there are no archive documents that would confirm the assumption that the USSR intended to start a preventive war against Germany. The Soviet military leadership indeed followed a doctrine according to which, in the event of aggression, the Red Army would promptly confront the enemy, go on the offensive and wage war on enemy territory. However, such strategic plans did not imply any intention to attack Germany first.

Of course, military planning documents, letters of instruction of Soviet and German headquarters are now available to historians. Finally, we know the true course of events. From the perspective of this knowledge, many argue about the actions, mistakes and misjudgment of the country's military and political leadership. In this regard, I will say one thing: along with a huge flow of misinformation of various kinds, Soviet leaders also received true information about the upcoming Nazi aggression. And in the pre-war months, they took steps to improve the combat readiness of the country, including the secret recruitment of a part of those liable for military duty for military training and the redeployment of units and reserves from internal military districts to western borders.

The war did not come as a surprise, people were expecting it, preparing for it. But the Nazi attack was truly unprecedented in terms of its destructive power. On June 22, 1941, the Soviet Union faced the strongest, most mobilized and skilled army in the world with the industrial, economic and military potential of almost all Europe working for it. Not only the Wehrmacht, but also German satellites, military contingents of many other states of the European continent, took part in this deadly invasion.

The most serious military defeats in 1941 brought the country to the brink of catastrophe. Combat power and control had to be restored by extreme means, nation-wide mobilization and intensification of all efforts of the state and the people. In summer 1941, millions of citizens, hundreds of factories and industries began to be evacuated under enemy fire to the east of the country. The manufacture of weapons and munition, that had started to be supplied to the front already in the first military winter, was launched in the shortest possible time, and by 1943, the rates of military production of Germany and its allies were exceeded. Within six months, the Soviet people did something that seemed impossible. Both on the front lines and the home front. It is still hard to realize, understand and imagine what incredible efforts, courage, dedication these greatest achievements were worth.

The tremendous power of Soviet society, united by the desire to protect their native land, rose against the powerful, armed to the teeth, cold-blooded Nazi invading machine. It stood up to take revenge on the enemy, who had broken, trampled peaceful life, people's plans and hopes.

Of course, fear, confusion and desperation were taking over some people during this terrible and bloody war. There were betrayal and desertion. The harsh split caused by the revolution and the Civil War, nihilism, mockery of national history, traditions and faith that the Bolsheviks tried to impose, especially in the first years after coming to power – all of this had its impact. But the general attitude of the absolute majority of Soviet citizens and our compatriots who found themselves abroad was different – to save and protect the Motherland. It was a real and irrepressible impulse. People were looking for support in true patriotic values.

The Nazi "strategists" were convinced that a huge multinational state could easily be brought to heel. They thought that the sudden outbreak of the war, its mercilessness and unbearable hardships would inevitably exacerbate inter-ethnic relations. And that the country could be split into pieces. Hitler clearly stated: "Our policy towards the peoples living in the vastness of Russia should be to promote any form of disagreement and division".

But from the very first days, it was clear that the Nazi plan had failed. The Brest Fortress was protected to the last drop of blood by its defenders of more than 30 ethnicities. Throughout the war, the feat of the Soviet people knew no national boundaries – both in large-scale decisive battles and in the protection of every foothold, every meter of native land.

The Volga region and the Urals, Siberia and the Far East, the republics of Central Asia and Transcaucasia became home to millions of evacuees. Their residents shared everything they had and provided all the support they could. Friendship of peoples and mutual help became a real indestructible fortress for the enemy.

The Soviet Union and the Red Army, no matter what anyone is trying to prove today, made the main and crucial contribution to the defeat of Nazism. These were heroes who fought to the end surrounded by the enemy at Bialystok and Mogilev, Uman and Kiev, Vyazma and Kharkov. They launched attacks near Moscow and Stalingrad, Sevastopol and Odessa, Kursk and Smolensk. They liberated Warsaw, Belgrade, Vienna and Prague. They stormed Koenigsberg and Berlin.

We contend for genuine, unvarnished, or whitewashed truth about war. This national, human truth, which is hard, bitter and merciless, has been handed down to us by writers and poets who walked through fire and hell of front trials. For my generation, as well as for others, their honest and deep stories, novels, piercing trench prose and poems have left their mark in my soul forever. Honoring veterans who did everything they could for the Victory and remembering those who died on the battlefield has become our moral duty.

And today, the simple and great in its essence lines of Alexander Tvardovsky's poem "I was killed near Rzhev " dedicated to the participants of the bloody and brutal battle of the Great Patriotic War in the center of the Soviet-German front line are astonishing. Only in the battles for Rzhev and the Rzhevsky Salient from October 1941 to March 1943, the Red Army lost 1,154, 698 people, including wounded and missing. For the first time, I call out these terrible, tragic and far from complete figures collected from archive sources. I do it to honor the memory of the feat of known and nameless heroes, who for various reasons were undeservingly, and unfairly little talked about or not mentioned at all in the post-war years.

Let me cite you another document. This is a report of February 1954 on reparation from Germany by the Allied Commission on Reparations headed by Ivan Maisky. The Commission's task was to define a formula according to which defeated Germany would have to pay for the damages sustained by the victor powers. The Commission concluded that "the number of soldier-days spent by Germany on the Soviet front is at least 10 times higher than on all other allied fronts. The Soviet front also had to handle four-fifths of German tanks and about two-thirds of German aircraft." On the whole, the USSR accounted for about 75 percent of all military efforts undertaken by the anti-Hitler coalition. During the war period, the Red Army "ground up" 626 divisions of the Axis states, of which 508 were German.

On April 28, 1942, Franklin D. Roosevelt said in his address to the American nation: "These Russian forces have destroyed and are destroying more armed power of our enemies – troops, planes, tanks, and guns – than all the other United Nations put together". Winston Churchill in his message to Joseph Stalin of September 27, 1944, wrote "that it is the Russian army that tore the guts out of the German military machine ".

Such an assessment has resonated throughout the world. Because these words are the great truth, which no one doubted then. Almost 27 million Soviet citizens lost their lives on the fronts, in German prisons, starved to death and were bombed, died in ghettos and furnaces of the Nazi death camps. The USSR lost one in seven of its citizens, the UK lost one in 127, and the USA lost one in 320. Unfortunately, this figure of the Soviet Union's hardest and grievous losses is not exhaustive. The painstaking work should be continued to restore the names and fates of all who have perished – Red Army soldiers, partisans, underground fighters, prisoners of war and concentration camps, and civilians killed by the death squads. It is our duty. And here, members of the search movement, military‑patriotic and volunteer associations, such projects as the electronic database "Pamyat Naroda", which contains archival documents, play a special role. And, surely, close international cooperation is needed in such a common humanitarian task.

The efforts of all countries and peoples who fought against a common enemy resulted in victory. The British army protected its homeland from invasion, fought the Nazis and their satellites in the Mediterranean and North Africa. American and British troops liberated Italy and opened the Second Front. The US dealt powerful and crushing strikes against the aggressor in the Pacific Ocean. We remember the tremendous sacrifices made by the Chinese people and their great role in defeating Japanese militarists. Let us not forget the fighters of Fighting France, who did not fall for the shameful capitulation and continued to fight against the Nazis.

We will also always be grateful for the assistance rendered by the Allies in providing the Red Army with ammunition, raw materials, food and equipment. And that help was significant – about 7 percent of the total military production of the Soviet Union.

The core of the anti-Hitler coalition began to take shape immediately after the attack on the Soviet Union where the United States and Britain unconditionally supported it in the fight against Hitler's Germany. At the Tehran conference in 1943, Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill formed an alliance of great powers, agreed to elaborate coalition diplomacy and a joint strategy in the fight against a common deadly threat. The leaders of the Big Three had a clear understanding that the unification of industrial, resource and military capabilities of the USSR, the United States and the UK will give unchallenged supremacy over the enemy.

The Soviet Union fully fulfilled its obligations to its allies and always offered a helping hand. Thus, the Red Army supported the landing of the Anglo-American troops in Normandy by carrying out a large-scale Operation Bagration in Belarus. In January 1945, having broken through to the Oder River, it put an end to the last powerful offensive of the Wehrmacht on the Western Front in the Ardennes.

Three months after the victory over Germany, the USSR, in full accordance with the Yalta agreements, declared war on Japan and defeated the million-strong Kwantung Army.

Back in July 1941, the Soviet leadership declared that the purpose of the War against fascist oppressors was not only the elimination of the threat looming over our country, but also help for all the peoples of Europe suffering under the yoke of German fascism. By the middle of 1944, the enemy was expelled from virtually all of the Soviet territory. However, the enemy had to be finished off in its lair. And so the Red Army started its liberation mission in Europe. It saved entire nations from destruction and enslavement, and from the horror of the Holocaust. They were saved at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives of Soviet soldiers.

It is also important not to forget about the enormous material assistance that the USSR provided to the liberated countries in eliminating the threat of hunger and in rebuilding their economies and infrastructure. That was being done at the time when ashes stretched for thousands of miles all the way from Brest to Moscow and the Volga. For instance, in May 1945, the Austrian government asked the USSR to provide assistance with food, as it "had no idea how to feed its population in the next seven weeks before the new harvest." The state chancellor of the provisional government of the Austrian Republic Karl Renner described the consent of the Soviet leadership to send food as a saving act that the Austrians would never forget.

The Allies jointly established the International Military Tribunal to punish Nazi political and war criminals. Its decisions contained a clear legal qualification of crimes against humanity, such as genocide, ethnic and religious cleansing, anti-Semitism and xenophobia. Directly and unambiguously, the Nuremberg Tribunal also condemned the accomplices of the Nazis, collaborators of various kinds.

This shameful phenomenon manifested itself in all European countries. Such figures as Pétain, Quisling, Vlasov, Bandera, their henchmen and followers – though they were disguised as fighters for national independence or freedom from communism – are traitors and slaughterers. In inhumanity, they often exceeded their masters. In their desire to serve, as part of special punitive groups they willingly executed the most inhuman orders. They were responsible for such bloody events as the shootings of Babi Yar, the Volhynia massacre, burnt Khatyn, acts of destruction of Jews in Lithuania and Latvia.

Today as well, our position remains unchanged – there can be no excuse for the criminal acts of Nazi collaborators, there is no statute of limitations for them. It is therefore bewildering that in certain countries those who are smirched with cooperation with the Nazis are suddenly equated with the Second World War veterans. I believe that it is unacceptable to equate liberators with occupants. And I can only regard the glorification of Nazi collaborators as a betrayal of the memory of our fathers and grandfathers. A betrayal of the ideals that united peoples in the fight against Nazism.

At that time, the leaders of the USSR, the United States, and the UK faced, without exaggeration, a historic task. Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill represented the countries with different ideologies, state aspirations, interests, cultures, but demonstrated great political will, rose above the contradictions and preferences and put the true interests of peace at the forefront. As a result, they were able to come to an agreement and achieve a solution from which all of humanity has benefited.

The victorious powers left us a system that has become the quintessence of the intellectual and political quest of several centuries. A series of conferences – Tehran, Yalta, San Francisco and Potsdam – laid the foundation of a world that for 75 years had no global war, despite the sharpest contradictions.

Historical revisionism, the manifestations of which we now observe in the West, and primarily with regard to the subject of the Second World War and its outcome, is dangerous because it grossly and cynically distorts the understanding of the principles of peaceful development, laid down at the Yalta and San Francisco conferences in 1945 . The major historic achievement of Yalta and other decisions of that time is the agreement to create a mechanism that would allow the leading powers to remain within the framework of diplomacy in resolving their differences.

The twentieth century brought large-scale and comprehensive global conflicts, and in 1945 the nuclear weapons capable of physically destroying the Earth also entered the scene. In other words, the settlement of disputes by force has become prohibitively dangerous. And the victors in the Second World War understood that. They understood and were aware of their own responsibility towards humanity.

The cautionary tale of the League of Nations was taken into account in 1945. The structure of the UN Security Council was developed in a way to make peace guarantees as concrete and effective as possible. That is how the institution of the permanent members of the Security Council and the right of the veto as their privilege and responsibility came into being.

What is veto power in the UN Security Council? To put it bluntly, it is the only reasonable alternative to a direct confrontation between major countries. It is a statement by one of the five powers that a decision is unacceptable to it and is contrary to its interests and its ideas about the right approach. And other countries, even if they do not agree, take this position for granted, abandoning any attempts to realize their unilateral efforts. So, in one way or another, it is necessary to seek compromises.

A new global confrontation started almost immediately after the end of the Second World War and was at times very fierce. And the fact that the Cold War did not grow into the Third World War has become a clear testimony of the effectiveness of the agreements concluded by the Big Three. The rules of conduct agreed upon during the creation of the United Nations made it possible to further minimize risks and keep confrontation under control.

Of course, we can see that the UN system currently experiences certain tension in its work and is not as effective as it could be. But the UN still performs its primary function. The principles of the UN Security Council are a unique mechanism for preventing a major war or global conflict.

The calls that have been made quite often in recent years to abolish the veto power, to deny special opportunities to permanent members of the Security Council are actually irresponsible. After all, if that happens, the United Nations would in essence become the League of Nations – a meeting for empty talk without any leverage on the world processes. How it ended is well known. That is why the victorious powers approached the formation of the new system of the world order with utmost seriousness seeking to avoid repetition of the mistakes of their predecessors.

The creation of the modern system of international relations is one of the major outcomes of the Second World War. Even the most insurmountable contradictions – geopolitical, ideological, economic – do not prevent us from finding forms of peaceful coexistence and interaction, if there is the desire and will to do so. Today the world is going through quite a turbulent time. Everything is changing, from the global balance of power and influence to the social, economic and technological foundations of societies, nations and even continents. In the past epochs, shifts of such magnitude have almost never happened without major military conflicts. Without a power struggle to build a new global hierarchy. Thanks to the wisdom and farsightedness of the political figures of the Allied Powers, it was possible to create a system that has restrained from extreme manifestations of such objective competition, historically inherent in the world development.

It is a duty of ours – all those who take political responsibility and primarily representatives of the victorious powers in the Second World War – to guarantee that this system is maintained and improved. Today, as in 1945, it is important to demonstrate political will and discuss the future together. Our colleagues – Mr. Xi Jinping, Mr. Macron, Mr. Trump and Mr. Johnson – supported the Russian initiative to hold a meeting of the leaders of the five nuclear-weapon States, permanent members of the Security Council. We thank them for this and hope that such a face-to-face meeting could take place as soon as possible.

What is our vision of the agenda for the upcoming summit? First of all, in our opinion, it would be useful to discuss steps to develop collective principles in world affairs. To speak frankly about the issues of preserving peace, strengthening global and regional security, strategic arms control, as well as joint efforts in countering terrorism, extremism and other major challenges and threats.

A special item on the agenda of the meeting is the situation in the global economy. And above all, overcoming the economic crisis caused by the coronavirus pandemic. Our countries are taking unprecedented measures to protect the health and lives of people and to support citizens who have found themselves in difficult living situations. Our ability to work together and in concert, as real partners, will show how severe the impact of the pandemic will be, and how quickly the global economy will emerge from the recession. Moreover, it is unacceptable to turn the economy into an instrument of pressure and confrontation. Popular issues include environmental protection and combating climate change, as well as ensuring the security of the global information space.

The agenda proposed by Russia for the upcoming summit of the Five is extremely important and relevant both for our countries and for the entire world. And we have specific ideas and initiatives on all the items.

There can be no doubt that the summit of Russia, China, France, the United States, and the UK can play an important role in finding common answers to modern challenges and threats, and will demonstrate a common commitment to the spirit of alliance, to those high humanist ideals and values for which our fathers and grandfathers were fighting shoulder to shoulder.

Drawing on a shared historical memory, we can trust each other and must do so. That will serve as a solid basis for successful negotiations and concerted action for the sake of enhancing the stability and security on the planet and for the sake of prosperity and well-being of all States. Without exaggeration, it is our common duty and responsibility towards the entire world, towards the present and future generations.

Vladimir Putin serves as President of the Russian Federation.

[Jun 30, 2020] Some Italian Thinkers are Resisting the Lies About the Soviet Union and WWII Veterans Today - Military Foreign Affairs Policy Journal for Clandestine Services

Jun 30, 2020 | www.veteranstoday.com

By Andre Vltchek for VT

Lying about world history is one of the main weapons of the Western imperialists, through which they are managing to maintain their control of the world.

European and North American countries are inventing and spreading a twisted narrative about almost all essential historic events, be they colonialism, crusades, or genocides committed by the Western expansionism in all corners of the globe.

One of the vilest fabrications has been those which were unleashed against the young Soviet Union, a country that emerged from the ruins of the civil war fueled by the European, North American, and Japanese imperialist interests. Foreign armies and local violent gangs were destroying countless cities and villages, robbing, raping, and murdering local people. But determined acts to restore order and elevate the Soviet Union from its knees, dramatically improving lives of tens of millions, was termed in a derogatory way as "Stalinism". The label of brutality was soon skillfully attached to it.

Next came the Great Patriotic War (for the Soviets), or what is also known as the Second World War.

The West miscalculated, hoping that Nazi Germany would easily destroy the Soviet Union, and with it, the most determined Communist revolution on earth.

But Germany had, obviously, much bigger goals. While brutalizing Soviet lands, it also began committing crimes against humanity all over Europe, doing precisely what it used to do in its African colonies, decades earlier, which was, basically, exterminating entire nations and races.

While the United States first hesitated to intervene (some of its most powerful individuals like Henry Ford were openly cooperating with the German Nazis), the European nations basically collapsed like the houses of cards.

Then, unthinkable took place: indignant, injured but powerful, enormous the Soviet Union stood up, raised, literally from ashes. Kursk and Stalingrad fought as no cities ever fought before, and neither did Leningrad, withstanding 900 years of blockade. There, surrender was not an option: people preferred to eat glue and plywood, fighting hunger, as long as fascist boots were not allowed to step on the pavement of their stunningly beautiful city.

In Leningrad, almost all men were dead before the siege was lifted. Women went to the front, including my grandmother, and they, almost with bare hands repelled the mightiest army on earth.

They did it for their city. And for the entire world. They fought for humanity, as Russia did so many times in the past, and they won, at a tremendous cost of more than 25 million soldiers, civilians, men, women, and children.

Then, Soviet divisions rolled Eastwards, liberating Auschwitz, Prague, planting the red Soviet flag on top of Reichstag in Berlin.

The world was saved, liberated. By Soviet people and Soviet steel.

The end of a monstrous war! Entire Soviet cities in ruins. Villages burned to ashes.

But new war, a Cold War, a true war against colonialism, for the liberation of Africa and Asia was already beginning! And the internationalist war against racism and slavery.

No, such narrative could never be allowed to circulate in the West, in its colonies and client states! Stalin, Soviet Union, anti-colonialist struggle – all had to be smeared, dragged through the dirt!

*

That smearing campaign first against the Soviet Union and then against Russia was conducted all over Europe, and it gained tremendous proportions.

Mass media has been spreading lies, and so were schools and universities.

The foulest manipulations were those belittling decisive role of the USSR in the victory against Nazi Germany. But Western propaganda outlets also skillfully and harmfully re-wrote the entire history of the Soviet Union, portraying it in the most nihilist and depressing ways, totally omitting tremendous successes of the first Communist country, as well as its heroic role in the fight against the global Western colonialism and imperialism.

*

Since the end of WWII, Italy has been in the center of the ideological battle, at least when it comes to Europe.

With its powerful Communist Party, almost all great Italian thinkers and artists were either members or at least closely affiliated with the Left. Partisans who used to fight fascism were clearly part of the Left.

Would it not be for the brutal interference in Italy's domestic politics by the U.S. and U.K., the Italian Communist Party would have easily won the elections, democratically, right during the post-war period.

Relations between the Italian and Soviet/Russian people were always excellent: both nations inspired and influenced each other, greatly, particularly when it comes to arts and ideology.

However, like in the rest of Europe, the mainstream media, the propaganda injected by the Anglo-Saxon polemicists and their local counterparts, had a huge impact and eventually damaged great ties and understanding between two nations.

Especially after destruction of the Soviet Union, Italian Left began experiencing a long period of profound crises and confusion.

Anti-Soviet and anti-Russian propaganda started finding fertile ground even in such historical bastions of the Italian Left like Bologna.

*

With the arrival of the 5 Star Movement and the radical, traditional Left-wing fractions concealed inside it, the millions of Italian citizens began waking up from their ideological lethargy.

I witnessed it when speaking at the legendary Sapienza University in Rome, shoulder to shoulder with professor Luciano Vasapollo, a great thinker and former political prisoner.

I was impressed by young Italian filmmakers, returning to Rome from Donbas, arranging countless political happenings in support of Russia.

Rome was boiling. People forgotten by history were resurfacing, while the young generation was joining them. My friend Alessandro Bianchi and his increasingly powerful magazine, L'Antidiplomatico, were bravely standing by Venezuela and Cuba, but also by Russia and China.

Still, Mr. Bianchi kept repeating:

"These days, very few Italians understand what happened during WWII. It is a tragedy, real tragedy "

And then, recently, L'Antidiplomatico informed me that it will be publishing, in order to celebrate the April 25 and May 9 anniversaries, an essential book put together by the Soviet Information Bureau, by the academics, with notes and inside information by Joseph Stalin. It was fired right after the end of WWII: "Falsifiers of History. Historic Information." (In Russian: " Fal'sifikatory istorii. Istoriceskaja spravka .")

Now in Italian, the book will be called " Contro la falsificazione della storia ieri e oggi " ( Fabrizio Poggi: "Against the Falsification of History Yesterday and Today").

The powerful editorial work of Mr. Poggi is unveiling the truth, and counter-attacking the Western Anti-Soviet propaganda.
Throughout this work, "The Anglo-American claims about the alleged Berlin-Moscow union against the 'western democracies' and a "secret pact between the USSR and Hitler to divide all of Eastern Europe" were clearly dismantled. The falsity of the rhetoric which is repeatedly used today in virtually all Western countries is exposed here, step by step.

Ale Bianchi, the publisher, explains:
"The translation presented here is preceded by an introduction, edited by Poggi himself, which mentions the main issues of the period before the Second World War: Polish-German relations, the role of France and Great Britain and their relations with the USSR, Munich Conference, etc., all used by Western propagandists to advance the theory of "equal responsibility" of Nazi Germany and the USSR for the outbreak of the Second World War."

I asked Mr. Bianchi about the main purpose of launching the book in Italy, and he answered without hesitation:

"To defeat the anti-Soviet propaganda and also propaganda related to the Second World War."

*

In many ways, Fabrizio Poggi's " Against the Falsification of History Yesterday and Toda y"), is not just a book. It is a movement, which will consist of discussions, lectures, interviews.

Top Italian intellectuals will, no doubt, participate. Many essential topics will be revisited. The truth will be revealed.

This could be a new chapter in cooperation between the Italian and Russian thinkers and progressive leaders, in their common struggle for a better world!

*

[First published by NEO – New Eastern Outlook – a journal of the Russian Academy of Sciences]

Andre Vltchek is a philosopher, novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He has covered wars and conflicts in dozens of countries. Six of his latest books are " New Capital of Indonesia ", " China Belt and Road Initiative", " China and Ecological Civilization" with John B. Cobb, Jr., " Revolutionary Optimism, Western Nihilism", a revolutionary novel "Aurora" and a bestselling work of political non-fiction: " Exposing Lies Of The Empire ". View his other books here . Watch Rwanda Gambit , his groundbreaking documentary about Rwanda and DRCongo and his film/dialogue with Noam Chomsky "On Western Terrorism" . Vltchek presently resides in East Asia and Latin America, and continues to work around the world. He can be reached through his website , his Twitter and his Patreon .


[Jun 30, 2020] The attitude of ignorance and self-righteousness toward Russia tells us volumes about the United States' lack of preparation for the twenty-first century's central challenges that include political instability, weapons proliferation, and energy insecurity.

Jun 30, 2020 | www.amazon.com

Although a critical analysis of Russia and its political system is entirely legitimate, the issue is the balance of such analysis. Russia's role in the world is growing, yet many U.S. politicians feel that Russia doesn't matter in the global arena. Preoccupied with international issues, such as Iraq and Afghanistan, they find it difficult to accept that they now have to negotiate and coordinate their international policies with a nation that only yesterday seemed so weak, introspective, and dependent on the West. To these individuals, Russophobia is merely a means to pressure the Kremlin into submitting to the United States in the execution of its grand plans to control the world's most precious resources and geostrategic sites. In the meantime, Russia has grown increasingly resentful, and the war in the Caucasus in August 2008 has demonstrated that Russia is prepared to act unilaterally to stop what it views as U.S. unilateralism in the former Soviet region.

And some in Moscow are tempted to provoke a much greater confrontation with Western states. The attitude of ignorance and self-righteousness toward Russia tells us volumes about the United States' lack of preparation for the twenty-first century's central challenges that include political instability, weapons proliferation, and energy insecurity.

Despite the dislike of Russia by a considerable number of American elites, this attitude is far from universally shared. Many Americans understand that Russia has gone a long way from communism and that the overwhelming support for Putin's policies at home cannot be adequately explained by high oil prices and the Kremlin's manipulation of the public -- despite the frequent assertions of Russophobic observers. Balanced analysts are also aware that many Russian problems are typical difficulties that nations encounter with state-building, and should not be presented as indicative of Russia's "inherent drive" to autocracy or empire. As the United States and Russia move further to the twenty-first century, it will be increasingly important to redefine the relationship between the two nations in a mutually enriching way.

Political and cultural phobias are, of course, not limited to those of an anti-Russian nature For instance, Russia has its share of America-phobia -- a phenomenon that I have partly researched in my book Whose World Order (Notre Dame, 2004) and in several articles. Anti-American attitudes are strongly present in Russian media and cultural products, as a response to the U.S. policies of nuclear, energy, and military supremacy in the world.

Extreme hegemonic policies tend to provoke an extreme response, and Russian nationalist movements and often commentators react harshly to what they view as unilateral encroachment on Russia's political system and foreign policy interests. Russia's reactions to these policies by the United States are highly negative and frequently inadequate, but hardly more extreme than the American hegemonic and imperial discourse.

The Anti-Russian Lobby

When the facile optimism was disappointed. Western euphoria faded, and Russophobia returned ... The new Russophobia was expressed not by the governments, but in the statements of out-of-office politicians, the publications of academic experts, the sensational writings of jour- nalists, and the products of the entertainment industry. (Rodric Bmithwaite, Across the Moscow River, 2002)1

Russophobia is not a myth, not an invention of the Red-Browns, but a real phenomenon of political thought in the main political think tanks in the West . . . |T]he Yeltsin-Kozyrev's pro-U.S. "giveaway game" was approved across the ocean. There is reason to say that the period in ques- tion left the West with the illusion that Russia's role was to serve Washington's interests and that it would remain such in the future. (Sergei Mikoyan, International Affairs [October 20061)2

This chapter formulates a theory of Russophobia and the anti-Russian lobby's influence on the U.S. Russia policy. I discuss the Lobby's objec- tives, its tactics to achieve them, the history of its formation and rise to prominence, and the conditions that preserved its influence in the after- math of 9/11.1 argue that Russophobia has been important to American hegemonic elites in pressuring Russia for economic and political conces- sions in the post-Cold War era.

The central objective of the Lobby has been to preserve and strengthen America's power in the post-Cold War world through imperial or hege- monic policies. The Lobby has viewed Russia with its formidable nucleai power, energy reserves, and important geostrategic location as a major obstacle in achieving this objective.

Even during the 1990s, when Russia looked more like a failing state3 than one capable of projecting power, some members of the American political class were worried about the future revival of the Eurasian giant as a revisionist power. In their percep- tion, it was essential to keep Russia in a state of military and economic weakness -- not so much out of emotional hatred for the Russian people and their culture, but to preserve American security and promote its values across the world. To many within the Lobby, Russophobia became a useful device for exerting pressures on Russia and controlling its policies. Although to some the idea of undermining and, possibly, dismembering Russia was personal, to others it was a necessity of power dictated by the realities of international politics.

According to this dominant vision, there was simply no place in this "New American Century" for power competitors, and America was destined eventually to assume control over potentially threatening military capabilities and energy reserves of others. As the two founders of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), William Kristol and Robert Kagan, asserted when referring to the large military forces of Russia and China, "American statesmen today ought to recognize that their charge is not to await the arrival of the next great threat, but rather to shape the international environment to prevent such a threat from arising in the first place."4 Russia was either to agree to assist the United States in preserving its world-power status or be forced to agree. It had to either follow the U.S. interpretation of world affairs and develop a political and economic system sufficiently open to American influences or live as a pariah state, smeared by accusations of pernicious behavior, and in constant fear for its survival in the America-centered world. As far as the U.S. hegemonic elites were concerned, no other choice was available.

This hegemonic mood was largely consistent with mainstream ideas within the American establishment immediately following the end of the Cold War. For example, 1989 saw the unification of Germany and the further meltdown of the Soviet Union, which some characterized as "the best period of U.S. foreign policy ever."5 President Jimmy Carter's former national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski envisioned the upcoming victory of the West by celebrating the Soviet Union's "grand failure."6 In his view, the Soviet "totalitarian" state was incapable of reform.

Communism's decline was therefore irreversible and inevitable. It would have made the system's "practice and its dogma largely irrelevant to the human conditions," and communism would be remembered as the twentieth century's "political and intellectual aberration."7 Other com- mentators argued the case for a global spread of Western values. In 1990 Francis Fukuyama first formulated his triumphalist "end of history" thesis, arguing a global ascendancy of the Western-style market democracy.

Policy factors

The impact of structural and institutional factors is further reinforced by policy factors, such as the divide within the policy community and the lack of presidential leadership. Not infrequently, politicians tend to defend their personal and corporate interests, and lobbying makes a difference in the absence of firm policy commitments.

Experts recognize that the community of Russia watchers is split and that the split, which goes all the way to the White House, has been responsible for the absence of a coherent policy toward the country. During the period of 2003-2008, Vice President Richard Dick Cheney formed a cohesive and bipartisan group of Russia critics, who pushed for a more confrontational approach with the Kremlin. The brain behind the invasion of Iraq, Cheney could not tolerate opposition to what he saw as a critical step in establishing worldwide U.S. hegemony. He was also harboring the idea of controlling Russia's energy reserves.91 Since November 2004, when the administration launched a review of its policy on Russia,92

Cheney became a critically important voice in whom the Lobby found its advocate. Secretaries of State Condoleezza Rice and, until November 2004, Colin Powell opposed the vice president's approach, arguing for a softer and more accommodating style in relations with Moscow.

President Bush generally sided with Rice and Powell, but he proved unable to form a consistent Russia policy. Because of America's involvement in the Middle East, Bush failed to provide the leadership committed to devising mutually acceptable rules in relations with Russia that could have prevented the deterioration in their relationship. Since the end of 2003, he also became doubtful about the direction of Russia's domestic transformation.93 As a result, the promising post-9/11 cooperation never materialized.

... ... ...

The "New Cold War" and the American Sense of History

It's time we start thinking of Vladimir Putin's Russia as an enemy of the United States.

(Brer Stephens, "Russia: Vie Enemy," The Wall Street Journal, November 28,2006)

If todays reality of Russian politics continues ... then there is the real risk that Russia's leadership will be seen, externally and internally, as illegitimate. (John Edwards and Jack Kemp, "We Need to Be Tough with Russia," International Herald Tribune, July 12, 2006)

On Iran, Kosovo, U.S. missile defense, Iraq, the Caucasus and Caspian basin, Ukraine -- the list goes on -- Russia puts itself in conflict with the U.S. and its allies . . . here are worse models than the united Western stand that won the Cold War the first time around. ("Putin Institutionalized," Vie Wall Street Journal, November 19,2007)

In order to derail the U.S.-Russia partnership, the Lobby has sought to revive the image of Russias as an enemy of the United States. The Russophobic groups have exploited important differences between the two countries' historical self-perceptions, presenting those differences as incompatible.

1. Contested History Two versions of history

The story of the Cold War as told from the U.S. perspective is about American ideas of Western-style democracy as rescued from the Soviet threat of totalitarian communism. Although scholars and politicians disagreed over the methods of responding to the Soviet threat, they rarely questioned their underlying assumptions about history and freedom.1 It therefore should not come as surprise that many in the United States have interpreted the end of the Cold War as a victory of the Western freedom narrative. Celebrating the Soviet Union's "grand failure" -- as Zbigniew Brzezinski put it2 -- the American discourse assumed that from now on there would be little resistance to freedom's worldwide progression. When Francis Fukuyama offered his bold summary of these optimistic feelings and asserted in a famous passage that "what we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War ... but the end of history as such,"3 he meant to convey the disappearance of an alternative to the familiar idea of freedom, or "the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government."4

In Russia, however, the Cold War story has been mainly about sovereignty and independence, rather than Western-style liberalism. To many Russians it is a story of freedom from colonization by the West and of pre- serving important attributes of sovereign statehood. In a world where neocolonialism and cultural imperialism are potent forces, the idea of freedom as independence continues to have strong international appeal and remains a powerful alternative to the notion of liberal democracy. Russians formulated the narrative of independence centuries ago, as they successfully withstood external invasions from Napoleon to Hitler. The defeat of the Nazi regime was important to the Soviets because it legit- imized their claims to continue with the tradition of freedom as independence. The West's unwillingness to recognize the importance of this legitimizing myth in the role of communist ideology has served as a key reason for the Cold War.

Like their Western counterparts, the Soviets were debating over methods but not the larger assumptions that defined their struggle.

This helps to understand why Russians could never agree with the Western interpretation of the end of the Cold War. What they find missing from the U.S. narrative is the tribute to Russia's ability to defend its freedom from expansionist ambitions of larger powers. The Cold War too is viewed by many Russians as a necessarily defensive response to the West's policies, and it is important that even while occupying Eastern Europe, the Soviets never celebrated the occupation, emphasizing instead the war victory.6

The Russians officially admitted "moral responsibility" and apologized for the Soviet invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia.7

They may be prepared to fully recognize the postwar occupation of Eastern Europe, but only in the context of the two sides' responsibility for the Cold War.

Russians also find it offensive that Western VE Day celebrations ignore the crucial contribution of Soviet troops, even though none of the Allies, as one historian put it, "paid dearer than the Soviet Union for the victory. Forty Private Ivans fell in battle to every Private Ryan."8 Victory over Nazi Germany constitutes, as another Russian wrote, "the only undisputable foundation of the national myth."9

Toward an agreeable history

If the two sides are to build foundations for a future partnership, the two historical narratives must be bridged. First, it is important to recognize the difficulty of negotiating a common meaning of freedom and accept that the idea of freedom may vary greatly across nations. The urge for freedom may be universal, but its social content is a specific product of national his- tories and local circumstances. For instance, the American vision of democracy initially downplayed the role of elections and emphasized selection by merit or meritocracy. Under the influence of the Great Depression, the notion of democracy incorporated a strong egalitarian and poverty-fighting component, and it was not until the Cold War -- and not without its influence -- that democracy has become associated with elections and pluralistic institutions.10

Second, it is essential to acknowledge the two nations' mutual responsibility for the misunderstanding that has resulted in the Cold War. A his- torically sensitive account will recognize that both sides were thinking in terms of expanding a territorial space to protect their visions of security. While the Soviets wanted to create a buffer zone to prevent a future attack from Germany, the Americans believed in reconstructing the European continent in accordance with their ideas of security and democracy. A mutual mistrust of the two countries' leaders exacerbated the situation, making it ever more difficult to prevent a full-fledged political confrontation.

Western leaders had reason to be suspicious of Stalin, who, in his turn, was driven by the perception of the West's greed and by betrayals from the dubious Treaty of Versailles to the appeasement of Hitler in Munich. Arrangements for the post-World War II world made by Britain, the USSR, and the United States proved insufficient to address these deep-seated suspicions. In addition, most Eastern European states created as a result of the Versailles Treaty were neither free nor democratic and collaborated with Nazi Germany in its racist and expansionist policies. The European post-World War I security system was not working properly, and it was only a matter of time before it would have to be transformed.

Third, if an agreeable historical account is to emerge, it would have to accept that the end of the Cold War was a product of mutually beneficial...

... ... ..

..."it also does not want the reversal of the U.S. geopolitical gains that it made in the decade or so after the end of the Cold War."112 Another expert asked, "What possible explanation is there for the fact that today -- at a moment when both the U.S. and Russia face the common enemy of Islamist terrorism -- hard-liners within the Bush administration, and especially in the office of Vice President Dick Cheney, are arguing for a new tough line against Moscow along the lines of a scaled-down Cold War?""3

Yet another analyst wrote "at the Cold War's end, the United States was given one of the great opportunities of history: to embrace Russia, the largest nation on earth, as partner, friend, ally. Our mutual interests meshed almost perfectly. There was no ideological, territorial, his- toric or economic quarrel between us, once communist ideology was interred. We blew it. We moved NATO onto Russia's front porch, ignored her valid interests and concerns, and, with our 'indispensablenation' arrogance, treated her as a defeated power, as France treated Weimar Germany after Versailles."114

The Chechnya "Oppressor" and U.S. Objectives in the Caucasus

[Russians] fight brutally because that is part of the Russian military
ethos, a tradition of total war fought with every means and without
moral restraints. (Los Angeles Times, Editorial, 1999)

The Chechen issue is delaying the post-imperial transformation of Russia. It is not only delaying it, it is helping to reverse it. And this is why one should care. (Zbigniew Brzezinski, "Catastrophe in Chechnya: Escaping the Quagmire, n 2004)

In Chechnya, our basic morality is at stake. ... [T]he Russian government is suppressing the liberties gained when the Soviet empire col-
lapsed? The Chechen war both masks and motivates the reestablishment of a central power in Russia. (Andri Glucksmann et ai, "End the Silence Over Chechnya, n 2006)

1. Decolonization or State-Building?

The decolonization narrative

One way to make sense of Russia's problems in the Caucasus is to view them as a continuation of the imperial disintegration set in motion by Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms. Western advocates of this perspective often believe that not only the Soviet Union but Russia too is responsible for oppressing non-Russian nationalities and religions, including Islam.

Russia is perceived as not principally different from the British, French, or Portuguese colonial empires, and Chechnya as indicative of a larger trend toward the breakup of the Russian empire. This narrative is popular in Western media and academia, partly because it brings to mind the heroic Chechen resistance to Russia in the nineteenth century. 1 To many left-leaning observers, even violence is justified when it is directed against Anglo-Saxon and European oppressors, and when it aims to advance the self-determination denied to their colonial subjects. To Americans, this argument carries additional weight, in part because the United States was not directly involved in the West's colonial practices.

A recent example of the decolonization narrative is the book by Tony Wood, the deputy editor of the New Left Review, in which he makes a case for Chechnya's independence. 2 Wood documents the history of Chechen resistance beginning with the nineteenth century and argues that, as with the case of Algeria under the French, ethnic Russians held prominent jobs and controlled key political positions in the northern Caucasus. 3 He further asserts that, although Chechens had not developed their own institutions of elites under Soviet rule, the situation there in the 1990s was hardly more corrupt or chaotic than in other parts of the former USSR, and therefore the threat of Islamic terrorism in the northern Caucasus is an overstatement. 4 What Chechens lacked from Russia was humane treatment, a willingness to negotiate an international recognition of their independence claims, rather than a war waged against them. Wood maintains that if the West had provided such recognition early enough, the disastrous military intervention by Moscow, as well as attempts to isolate Chechnya economically, might have been prevented.

The conservative version of the decolonization argument is similar, but it places a greater emphasis on the Russian people and their "oppressive and imperialist" political culture, viewing colonial institutions as a direct extension of this imperial mindset. For instance, Richard Pipes, who also compared Chechnya to Algeria, insisted on independence as the only way to prevent Russia's further territorial disintegration. 5 Zbigniew Brzezinski was even more blunt in holding "die Russians" responsible for depriving Chechens of their own political institutions, 6 as well as assuming that Russian attitudes and behavior since Stalin's deportation of Chechens and other nationalities
had not changed.

In Anatol Lieven's words, "The condemnation of Stalinism by Nikita Khrushchev, the reforms of Mikhail Gorbachev, the peaceful Soviet withdrawal from Poland, the Russian recognition of the independence of the other Soviet republics -- all this is ignored." 7 What Western geopoliticians seem to be especially concerned about is a possible revival of a Russian statehood, which they view as equivalent to an empire. 8

Upon a closer scrutiny, the decolonization argument is difficult to sustain. The zero-sum approach -- either empire or hill independence -- fails to recognize the most important challenge faced by the modern state, which is how to accommodate minorities and guarantee their rights without undermining the political viability and territorial integrity of the state itself.

As scholars have argued, international law recognizes the right to secession, but it also abhors the unilateral redrawing of borders. 9 Self-determination is not viable if it comes at the cost of political instability, state disintegration, and violation of human rights, which are all too evident in Chechnya. Even more problematic is the assumption that Russians and Chechens are culturally incompatible or, as one scholar puts it, "it is hard to think of a more likely pair of candidates for historical enmity than the Russian government and the Chechens." 10

The Imperatives of state-building and Russia as a weak state

A more productive way to understand Russia is to see it as a nation that has relinquished the Soviet state model and is now struggling to establish new political and economic foundations of statehood. The post-Soviet Russia is a new state because it acts under new international conditions that no longer accept traditional patterns of imperial domination. However, Russia's long history as an empire and its complex relations with non-Russian nationalities make creating a new power-sharing mechanism in the region a challenge.

Russia's historical relations with Chechnya include a long nineteenth-century war to subjugate Chechnya's warriors to the tsar's imperial rule, as well as Stalin's mass deportation of Chechens to Central Asia in 1944. Still, it is misleading to present these relations exclusively as a historical confrontation." For instance, despite the Stalinist perception, most Chechens did not collaborate with Hitler during World War II, and in fact fought bravely on the Soviet side.

The tsar of Russia trusted Chechens enough to hire them as his bodyguards, and Chechens served in some of the most selective Soviet battalions. Many Chechen intellectuals also shared Mikhail Gorbachev's vision of democratic reform and the peaceful coexistence of diverse nationalities within the framework of a single Soviet state. The overall story of the two peoples' relationship is far too complex to be described as a "conflict of civilizations" or, to quote former Chechen president Aslan Maskhadov, a "war [that] has been continuing for more than 400 years." 12

During the Perestroika years -- as viewed by some Chechens themselves 13 -- the democratic idea was hijacked by criminal elites and ethno-nationalists who saw a secessionist opportunity in the decline of the Soviet state, and who prevailed in imposing their own political agenda.

[Jun 30, 2020] 29 June 2020 at 11:00 PM

Jun 30, 2020 | turcopolier.typepad.com
div One of distinctive features, the hallmark of neocons who dominate the USA foreign policy establishment is rabid, often paranoid Russophobia which includes active, unapologetic support of separatist movements within Russia.
And what is your evidence for claiming that the EU and USA want to break up Russia into 'smaller statelets'? That smells a bit fishy. It would make the world a more dangerous place.
One of distinctive features, the hallmark of neocons who dominate the USA foreign policy establishment is rabid, often paranoid Russophobia which includes active, unapologetic support of separatist movements within Russia.

The same is true about GB.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/03/06/the-long-roots-of-our-russophobia/

I think the evidence of the USA and EU (especially GB, but also Poland, Sweden, and Germany) multi-level (PR, MSM, financial, diplomatic and sometimes military) support of Islamic separatists in Russia is well known: support of separatist movements in Russia is just a continuation of the support of separatist movement within the USSR, which actually helped to blow up the USSR from within (along the key role of KGB changing sides along with a part of Politburo who deciding to privatize Russia's economy)

See

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-32487081

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissolution_of_Russia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_active_separatist_movements_in_Europe#Russia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_active_separatist_movements_in_Asia#Russia

Here is old but still relevant list of "who is who" in the USA foreign policy establishment in promoting separatism in Russia. You will see many prominent neocons in the list.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Committee_for_Peace_in_Chechnya#ACPC_members

The foreign policy of the USA toward Russia to a considerable extent is driven by emigres from Eastern Europe and people who were accepted to the USA before and, especially, after WWII from filtration camps. This "diaspora lobby" includes older generation of emigrants such as late Brzezinski, Madeline Allbright, as well as more recent such as Farkas, Chalupa, Appelebaum, etc. The same is true for Canada (Freeland). All of them are rabid, sometimes paranoid (Brzezinski) Russophobs. They consistently use the USA as a leverage to settle the "ancient hatred".

https://www.wilsoncenter.org/event/diaspora-communities-influencing-us-foreign-policy

[Jun 30, 2020] 29 June 2020 at 05:26 PM

Jun 30, 2020 | turcopolier.typepad.com
div Russia problems


@The Twisted Genius | 29 June 2020 at 03:55 PM


Many here seem to think Russia is a nation totally separate from the now-defunct Soviet Union, that Russia is incapable or unwilling to engage in the seamier aspects of realpolitik like all other nations. Funny, Putin does not ascribe to this view. A short time ago, someone posted a link to a lecture by the KGB defector, Yuri Bezmenov

Bezmenov was trying to please the new owners. Russia does not have resources to engage like USA in Full Spectrum Dominance games. Like Obama correctly said, Russia now is a regional power.

Also, why bother to do petty dirty tricks in Afghanistan, if an internal fight between two factions of the neoliberal elite, is a really bitter and dirty fight. You cannot do better than neoliberal Dems in weakening and dividing the country. Why spend money, if you can just wait.

The enormity of problems within Russia itself also excludes any possibilities of trying to emulate the imperial behavior of the USA and CIA dirty tricks. Russia does not have the printing press for the world reserve currency, which the USA still has.

And Putin is the first who understands this precarious situation, mentioning this limitation several times in his speeches. As well as the danger of being pushed into senseless arms race with the USA again by the alliance of the USA neocons and Russian MIC, which probably would lead to similar to the USSR results -- the further dissolution of Russia into smaller statelets. Which is a dream of both the USA and the EU, for which they do not spare money.

Russia is a very fragile country -- yet another neoliberal country with a huge level of inequality and a set of very severe problems related to the economy and "identity politics" (or more correctly "identity wedge"), which both EU and the USA is actively trying to play. Sometimes very successfully.

Ukraine coup d'etat was almost a knockdown for Putin, at least a powerful kick in the chin; it happened so quick and was essentially prepared by Yanukovich himself with his pro-EU and pro-nationalist stance. Being a sleazy crook, he dug the grave for his government mostly by himself.

Now the same game can be repeated in Belorussia as Lukachenko by-and-large outlived his usefulness, and like most autocratic figures created vacuum around himself -- he has neither viable successor, not the orderly, well defined process of succession; but economic problems mounts and mounts. This gives EU+USA a chance to repeat Ukrainian scenario, as like in Ukraine, years of independence greatly strengthened far-right nationalist forces (which BTW were present during WWII ; probably in less severe form than in Ukraine and Baltic countries but still were as difficult to suppress after the war). Who, like all xUUSR nationalists are adamantly, pathologically anti-Russian. That's where Russia need to spend any spare money, not Afghanistan.

Currently, the personality of Putin is kind of most effective guarantee of political stability in Russia, but like any cult of personality, this cannot last forever, and it might deprive Russia of finding qualified successor.

But even Putin was already burned twice with his overtures to Colonel Qaddafi(who after Medvedev's blunder in the UN was completely unable to defend himself against unleashed by the West color revolution), and Yanukovich, who in addition to stupidly pandering to nationalists and trying to be the best friend of Biden proved to be a despicable coward, making a color revolution a nobrainer.

After those lessons, Putin probably will not swallow a bait in a form of invitation to be a "decider" in Afghanistan.

So your insinuations that Russian would do such stupid, dirty and risky tricks are not only naive, they are completely detached from the reality.

The proper way to look at it is as a kind of PR or even false flag operation which was suggested by David Habakkuk:


...we are dealing with yet another of the collusive 'information operations' practised by incompetent and corrupt elements in the 'deep state' in the U.S., U.K. and Western Europe.

[Jun 28, 2020] Russian position for Start talks: "We don't believe the US in its current shape is a counterpart that is reliable, so we have no confidence, no trust whatsoever".

Highly recommended!
Jun 28, 2020 | turcopolier.typepad.com

START. Talks began in Vienna with a childish stunt by the American side . I wouldn't expect any results: the Americans are fatally deluded . As for the Russians: " We don't believe the U.S. in its current shape is a counterpart that is reliable, so we have no confidence, no trust whatsoever ".Russian has a word for that: недоговороспособны and it's characterised US behaviour since at least this event (in Obama's time). Can't make an agreement with them and, even if you do, they won't keep it.

[Jun 28, 2020] How Fake is Roman Antiquity by The First Millennium Revisionist

Jun 28, 2020 | www.unz.com

Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter Display All Comments

Biff , says: Show Comment June 28, 2020 at 7:41 am GMT

History-writing is a political act,

And a lucrative act.

[Jun 28, 2020] The MH17 trial is turning into an interesting indictment on Dutch justice

Notable quotes:
"... There is no beyond reasonable doubt evidence (No US satellite pictures as claimed by Biden, even within NATO to Dutch Intel) and the defence is not pushing that hard but have asked for the Russian General to be called to describe the BUK missile's documented life i. e. it came from Ukraine's stock. ..."
Jun 28, 2020 | turcopolier.typepad.com

JohninMK , 25 June 2020 at 03:57 PM

Enjoy your updates. The MH17 trial is turning into an interesting indictment on Dutch justice. There is no beyond reasonable doubt evidence (No US satellite pictures as claimed by Biden, even within NATO to Dutch Intel) and the defence is not pushing that hard but have asked for the Russian General to be called to describe the BUK missile's documented life i. e. it came from Ukraine's stock.

So, on July 3rd the Judges have to decide whether to allow that evidence, which definitely puts the evidence less than reasonable double, or not allow it and convict the four defendants on insufficient evidence to meet Dutch Law, or allow them to go free.

Looks like they have a bit of a problem meeting the expectations of the US.

[Jun 28, 2020] Ukraine's Maidan Snipers were U.S Assets from Georgia by Ronald Thomas West

Notable quotes:
"... Italian investigative journalist Gian Micalessin interviews three snipers who shot the people in Maidan square. They were Georgians sent to Ukraine by security services people aligned with American allied-educated Mikhail Saakashvili. American mercenary Brian Christopher Boyenger ran the sniper operation on location. Expanded translation of the Italian (the video subtitles are abridged) below the video ..."
"... "They explained to us to shoot to create chaos and confusion. We did not have to stop. It did not matter if we fired at a tree, a barricade, or a molotov. The important thing was to sow chaos. " ..."
"... Alexander, admitting he was involved in the shootout from the Conservatory building, claims to have understood very little. "Everyone started shooting two or three shots at a time. We did not have much choice. We were ordered to shoot both the Berkut, the police, and the demonstrators, no matter what. I was totally outraged. It went on for fifteen minutes maybe twenty. I was out of my mind, agitated, under stress, I did not understand anything. Then suddenly, after 15, 20 minutes the shooting ceased and everyone has put down the weapons. " ..."
"... As wounded and dead arrived in the Ukrainian Hotel's reception, the snipers fled from the rooms. And so the victims found themselves next to their assassins. ..."
"... Alexander says he left in a hurry. "Someone was shouting that there were snipers, I knew what they were talking about," he said, "my only thought was to disappear before they knew about me. Otherwise, they had me. At that time, however, I did not realize, but now I understand. I do understand. We've been used. Used and discarded." ..."
Oct 30, 2019 | www.fort-russ.com

Referencing the piece run here at Fort Russ on 27 October " Confessions of Maidan Snipers " by Darrol, here is the original confessions given to Italian journalist Gian Micalessin which transcript should closely match the testimony provided in the Belarus' courtroom, noted in the 27 October piece:

(With English subtitles) Italian investigative journalist Gian Micalessin interviews three snipers who shot the people in Maidan square. They were Georgians sent to Ukraine by security services people aligned with American allied-educated Mikhail Saakashvili. American mercenary Brian Christopher Boyenger ran the sniper operation on location. Expanded translation of the Italian (the video subtitles are abridged) below the video

transcript of parts one and two:

What the hell? Who is shooting? Somebody got shot! I can't believe it happened right here! A man standing right next to me just got shot!

It was at dawn, I heard sounds of gunshots as bullets were flying. Somebody got shot in the head by a sniper.

We were ordered to shoot at the police and protestors randomly.

Which location were the shots fired [from]? From the Ukraine Hotel?

The shooting was from the Ukraine Hotel.

Kyiv, February 2014. It is three months the Maidan square, in the heart of the capital, has been filled with protestors; who've been demanding the government and president, Victor Yanukovych, to sign an association agreement with the European Union.

On February 18th the clashes have become bloody, with about 30 casualties. The worst moment will be in the morning of February 20th. A group of unknown snipers began firing at protestors and police. In a short period of time up to 80 dead were counted.

The next day [February 21st, president] Yanukovych leaves the country. On February 22nd the opposition seizes power.

But who was shooting at the crowd and opposition?

To this very day, the official version from Kiev is the slaughter was conducted by the order of the Kremlin-backed [Yanukovych] government. This version seemed suspicious to many. The Foreign Minister of Estonia, Ermas Paet, was the first one to dispute this.

Returning from a trip to Kiev only 5 days after the massacre, [Paet] reported in a phone call to EU Commissioner for Foreign Affairs Catherine Ashton, revelations from a Ukrainian doctor who examined the cadavers of Maidan square. The intercepted phone call, published widely by the Russian media, is disconcerting.

"The most disturbing thing [Paet explains] is that all of the evidence points to the people killed by snipers, both police and people in the street, were killed by the same snipers."

Speaking with a clearly embarrassed Ashton, the foreign minister cites the testimony of the Ukrainian doctor:

"She speaks as a doctor, and says it is the same signature, the same kind of bullets. It is really disturbing that now the new coalition [Paet reaffirms] refuses to investigate what is really going on. There is a very strong conviction that they're are behind the snipers That it is not Yanukovych, but some of the new coalition "

After four years from the beginning at November 2013 of Maidan demonstrations, we are able to tell another truth, completely different from the official story. Our story begins towards the end of summer 2017, in Skopye, the capital of Macedonia. There, after long and complex negotiations, we met with Koba Nergadze and Kvarateskelia Zalogy, two Georgian participants and witnesses in the tragic shootings and massacre.

Both Nergadze and Zalogy are linked to former Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili , who started, in August 2008, a short but bloody war with Russia's Vladimir Putin. Nergadze, as proved by an identification card he holds, was a member of a security service at President Saakashvili's order. Zalogy is a former Saakashvili party activist.

"I decided to come to Skopije to tell you everything we know, about what happened and I and my friend have decided together, we need to shed some light on those facts," Nergadze says.

Nargadze also says Alexander Revazishvilli, [we met] a few months later, a former sniper of the Georgian army, participated in the Maidan shootout. [We] met in another Eastern European country.

All three of our participants say that they were recruited at the end of 2013 by Mamuka Mamulashvili, a Saakashvili military advisor who, after the Maidan action, will move to the Donbass, to lead the so-called Georgian Legion in clashes with ethnic Russian insurgents.

"The first meeting was with Mamulashvili [was] at the office of the National Movement," Zalogy said. "The Ukrainian uprising in 2013 was similar to the" Pink Revolution "that took place in Georgia years before. We had to direct and guide it using the same pattern used for the "Pink Revolution"

Alexander's version is no different. "Mamuka first asked me if I was really a trained sniper, Alexander recalls, [then] he immediately told me he needed me in Kiev to pick some places."

Our informants integrated to various groups of volunteers between November 2013 and January 2014, [after] receiving passports with false names, and money advances.

"We left on January 15, and on the plane, Zalogy remembers, I received my passport and another [passport] with my photo but with different name and surname. Then they gave us each a thousand dollars to begin, promising to give another five thousand more"

Once in Kiev, our three participants begin to understand better why they were recruited. "Our task, Alexander explains, was to arrange provocations to push the police to charge the crowd. Until the middle of February, however, there were not many weapons around. The Molotovs, the shields and the sticks were used to the maximum."

But in mid-February, clashes around Maidan begin to get worse. "About 15 and 16 February," Nergadze remembers, "the situation has begun to become more serious every day. It was out of control now. And in the meantime, the first shoots were heard. "With the rising of tensions, new players [would] come into play"

"One day around February 15, remembers Alexander, Mamualashvili personally visited our tent. There was another guy in his uniform with him. He introduced him and told us he was an instructor, an American soldier." The US military veteran Brian Christopher Boyenger, is a former officer and sniper for the 101st Airborne Division. After Maidan, [Boyenger] moves on to the Donbass front, where he will fight in the ranks of the Georgian Legion alongside Mamulashvili.

"We were always in touch with this Bryan, Nergadze explains, he was a Mamulashvili man. It was he who gave us the orders. I had to follow all his instructions"

The first suspects in the possession of firearms among the ranks of demonstrators, involve Serghey Pashinsky, a leader of Maidan Square, who became, after the fall of Yanukovych, chairman of the Kiev parliament.

On February 18, in a video made that day, a rifle locked in a car was recorded with video taken by a demonstrator, showing an automatic rifle. A few seconds after, Pashinsky approaches and orders the car be allowed to go. The next day, weapons were distributed to groups of Georgian and Lithuanian mercenaries residing in Hotel Ukraine, the hotel overlooking the square used as a headquarters by opposition.

"In those days, Pashinsky and three other people, including Parasyuk, had taken the weapons handbags to the hotel. They were going to get them into my room," Nergadze says.

Volodymyr Parasyuk is one of the leaders of the Maidan Square protest. After the massacre of demonstrators, he will become famous for an ultimatum in which he will threaten to use weapons to hunt President Viktor Yanukovych.

"On February 18, recalls Zalogy, someone took some weapons to my room. In the room with me there were two Lithuanians, the weapons were unpacked by them."

"In each bag, recalls Nergadze, there were Makarov's pistols, Akm automatics, carbines. And there were packages of cartridges. When I first saw them I did not understand . When Mamulashvili arrived, I also asked him. "What's going on," I told him, "what are these weapons? Is everything all right?

"Koba, things are getting complicated, we have to start shooting," he replied, "we can not go to the pre-election presidential elections " "But who should we shoot? And where? "I asked him." He replied that where he did not care, we had to shoot somewhere to sow some chaos."

"While Nergadze and Zalogy assisted in arms distribution at the hotel, Alexander Revazishvilli and other volunteers went to the Conservatory, another building overlooking the square. "It was February 16th Pashinsky ordered us to collect our belongings and bring them in Other people arrived, they were almost all masked.

"From their cases I understood they carried weapons . They pulled them out and handed them over to the various groups. Only Pashinsky was talking "He was giving orders. He asked me where we were supposed to shoot. " "In the meantime, explained Nergadze, even at the Ukraine hotel, the leaders of the revolt underlined the purpose of using the weapons.

"They explained to us to shoot to create chaos and confusion. We did not have to stop. It did not matter if we fired at a tree, a barricade, or a molotov. The important thing was to sow chaos. "

On the 20th, in the morning, the plan came into action. "It was supposed to be dawn," Zalogy remembers, "when I heard the sound of the shots they were not bursts, they were single strokes came from the next room. At that same time, the Lithuanians opened the window. One of them fired one shot while the other closed the window. They have fired three or four times everywhere."

Alexander, admitting he was involved in the shootout from the Conservatory building, claims to have understood very little. "Everyone started shooting two or three shots at a time. We did not have much choice. We were ordered to shoot both the Berkut, the police, and the demonstrators, no matter what. I was totally outraged. It went on for fifteen minutes maybe twenty. I was out of my mind, agitated, under stress, I did not understand anything. Then suddenly, after 15, 20 minutes the shooting ceased and everyone has put down the weapons. "

As wounded and dead arrived in the Ukrainian Hotel's reception, the snipers fled from the rooms. And so the victims found themselves next to their assassins.

"Inside, recalls Nergadze, "there was chaos, you did not understand who was who. People ran back and forth. Someone was hurt someone was armed. Outside was even worse. There were so many injured in the streets. And the many dead."

Alexander says he left in a hurry. "Someone was shouting that there were snipers, I knew what they were talking about," he said, "my only thought was to disappear before they knew about me. Otherwise, they had me. At that time, however, I did not realize, but now I understand. I do understand. We've been used. Used and discarded."

color revolution Coup Georgia Maidan Saakashivili Snipers ukraine

[Jun 26, 2020] How The Dutch Rigged The Outcome Of The MH17 Trial (On A Charge That Requires No Proof) by by John Helmer

Jun 26, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by John Helmer via Dances With Breas blog,

The Dutch Government has devised an evidence-proof scheme for ensuring the trial of the Russian government for the destruction of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 will end in a conviction .

This scheme will work without evidence to prove that the four men accused of the crime of shooting down the aircraft, killing the 298 passengers and crew on board on July 17, 2014, intended to kill; or even intended to fire the missile which allegedly brought MH17 down.

The Dutch scheme is evidence-proof because no evidence will be needed, not from US satellite photographs which are missing; nor NATO airborne tracking which shows no missile; nor Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) evidence which has proved to have been fabricated, and in the case of Ukrainian witnesses for the prosecution, threatened, tortured or bribed.

The scheme is also evidence-proof because the Dutch Prime Minister has told the Dutch Minister of Justice to order the state prosecutors to tell the state-appointed judge that he must convict the Russians if he finds as proven that MH17 crashed to the ground in eastern Ukraine; that everyone on board was killed; and that the four soldiers accused – three Russians and one Ukrainian – were on the ground fighting.

International war crimes lawyers are calling this a legal travesty. It was presented in court near Amsterdam by Dutch state prosecutor Thijs Berger on June 10. It has gone unnoticed in the mainstream western media. Russian reporters following the trial have missed it. The scheme was first reported in English and Russian by a NATO propaganda unit on June 12.

As a prosecutor of the Dutch War Crimes Unit, a state entity, Berger has been employed in the past to prosecute the targets of wars fought by the Dutch, alongside NATO and the US, in Yugoslavia and Afghanistan. In Europe his group prosecuted war crimes alleged by the NATO alliance in its war on Serbia from March to June of 1999. A recent report [2]to which Berger contributed, entitled Universal Jurisdiction Annual Review 2019, identifies a case which Berger pursued of war crimes in Afghanistan; those alleged crimes were not of the US and allied forces in Afghanistan, but of the local Afghans defending themselves.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/YKJcJuT_5jc

Prosecutor Thijs Berger announces the evidence-proof scheme of Article 168. The legal loophole is spelled out over six minutes – Min 3:31:00 to 3:37:00.

For his presentation to presiding judge Hendrik Steenhuis, Berger read from a multi-page script authorized by his superiors in the Dutch Ministry of Justice and Security. They and he repeatedly made the mistake of calling the charges in the prosecution's indictment – Articles 168, 287 and 298 – provisions of the Dutch Code of Criminal Procedure. This is the procedure code; its provisions are called articles in the original Dutch, but sections in the English version.

The charges of the indictment are from the Dutch Criminal Code. They are called articles in court; they are called articles in the Dutch statute but sections in the official English translation.

Source: The Dutch Criminal Code

For analysis of how the prosecution has manipulated both the Criminal Code and the Code of Criminal Procedure in the MH17 trial preliminaries, read this .

"The scope of the indictment," Berger began his legal argument, is that together, the four defendants -- Igor Girkin (Strelkov), Sergei Dubinsky, Oleg Pulatov, who are Russians, and Leonid Kharchenko, a Ukrainian – played "a steering, organizing, and supporting role in deploying the BUK-Telar [missile and radar unit]" to shoot down MH 17 (Min 3:25:22). They were members of an "armed group" engaged in "armed struggle, the purpose being to shoot down an aircraft" (Min 3:27:20-21).

Note the indefinite article – an aircraft. The prosecution is charging the four with capital crimes for defending themselves from attack by the Ukrainian Air Force. This, however, is not mentioned by the prosecution.

"They are not being prosecuted," Berger went on, "as the persons who actually carried out the firing process" (Min 3:38:22). "We do not need evidence as to the exact cause of events in order to be able to judge the accused" (Min 3:28:27). Homicide or murder, Berger conceded, is in Dutch law "death caused intentionally" (Min 3:29:15). But the crimes which must be judged by Steenhuis and his panel of The Hague District Court, he claims aren't homicide in the usual legal sense. "The exact course of events need not be established" (Min 3:30:43), Berger told Steenhuis. So the prosecution does not need to prove what happened. "That the missile which hit the MH17 could possibly have been meant and intended for a military aircraft doesn't change these facts" (Min 3:31:17).

" None of the charges in the indictment requires intention concerning the civilian nature of the aircraft or the occupants. The crimes in the indictment forbid the downing of any aircraft; this is Article 168 of the Code of Criminal Procedure [sic]; and also forbid causing the deaths of others under Articles 287 and 289 irrespective of whether the aircraft has a military or civilian status, and an error in the target doesn't really make a difference for the evidence that these crimes have been committed. So no evidence is required that the accused should have had the intention to shoot down a civilian aircraft" (Min 3:32:00).

"It was their intention to down a military aircraft of the Ukrainian Air Force" (Min 3:32:28), Berger claims his evidence of the SBU telephone tapes and witnesses proves.

"Those who intend to shoot down a military aircraft and subsequently, accidentally, hit a civilian aircraft are guilty of causing an aircraft to crash according to Article 168 of the Code of Criminal Procedure [sic]; but also guilty of murder of the occupants according to Article 289 of the Code of Criminal Procedure [sic]" (Min 3:33:04).

In a regular court of law in England, Australia, Canada or the US, a prosecutor's legal argument is always presented with explicit references to the case law. That's the accumulation of judgements by courts going back as far as the history of the crime and of the statute can be traced. These are the precedents which, in international law and in Dutch law too, must be followed by judges hearing cases to which these precedents apply. This reflects the accepted notion that law is cumulative, and that judges administer and interpret that law; they don't issue personal opinions or preferences.

Berger didn't identify any Dutch case law or provide the court with precedents in previous cases decided by the Dutch courts.

The reason is that there are none , explains a veteran Dutch judge who was asked this week to identify the case law on Article 168. The judge replied: "It's sufficient to establish that the defendant had the intention to take down some aircraft and that he should have seriously taken into consideration the chance that he would hit an aircraft such as the MH-17. That's called conditional intent -- voorwaardelijk opzet in Dutch Answering this question [of precedents] took a bit more time. I couldn't find any case law that would be relevant to the issue. Article 168 is not used very often."

Conditional intent doesn't exist in Anglo-American law. But in Dutch law, the concept has not (repeat never) been applied to cases of warfare, or in situations of military engagement where men are attacking and defending themselves. For a Dutch review of the court precedents for application of voorwaardelijk opzet to deaths caused by a drunk driver and a poisoning, read this [8]– Sect. 3.3.1. Fatal traffic offences committed by drunken drivers are the typical homicides in which Dutch prosecutors apply the doctrine of conditional intent; the case law and precedents are reviewed here [9]. No Dutch lawyer, judge or court has ever applied this to warfare.

Berger knows this; so does Steenhuis. They also know there is voluminous case law in the international courts dealing with similar facts to those of the MH17 case and of the combat in which the four defendants were engaged; for a sample Dutch law review, read this .

Again, Berger ignored what no prosecutor outside The Netherlands would attempt in front of a judge. "We are aware," Berger told Steenhuis, "of academic comments that imply that Article 168 would require intention in killing civilians [Min 3:33:04]. But this is incorrect. Article 168 does not require any intention for the death of the occupants" (Min 3:33:34).

The NATO propaganda unit Bellingcat repeated this claim in a publication two days after Berger's presentation. The Article 168 argument, repeated from Berger's script, will prove to be a "boomerang" for the Russian government, NATO officials are now claiming. "It is only a question of time, therefore, that the Dutch prosecution brings murder charges against Russian top military commanders. Unlike the case with the 4 defendants, they would easily have obtained combatant immunity, if only they – and their supreme commander – had admitted to being part of the war. But they – and he – continuously denied, and this alone makes immunity impossible. Also unlike the 4 defendants, the political price that Russia will pay such indictments will be much higher. It is one thing for 3 Russian 'volunteers', forgotten by most, to spend the rest of their life holed up at home and afraid to take any trip abroad. It's an altogether different story when top Mod [Ministry of Defence] and FSB officials – and maybe even a minister – are charged with murder of 298 civilians and end up on the Interpol red-notice list."

International lawyers already before the European Court of Human Rights are arguing that the "boomerang" strikes the government in Kiev first, because it was ordering combat in eastern Ukraine, including orders for bombing and strafing by the Ukrainian Air Force, and at the same time refusing to close the airspace to civilian aircraft. The case of Denise Kenke, on behalf of her father, MH17 victim Willem Grootscholten, explains .

Canadian war crimes attorney Christopher Black (right) says the Dutch prosecution is deliberately ignoring Dutch law, as well as international law.

"What Berger is stating is a case of criminal negligence, not murder. The general principles of criminal law apply to this case as much as to any case. As for the burden of proof, the court has to be convinced on the basis of the lawful evidence presented that the accused has committed the crime he is accused of."

Black is pointing out that the prosecution's evidence from the Ukrainian SBU is unlawful. For analysis of evidence tampering by the SBU, read more .

"'Any person who intentionally and unlawfully' -- that's the key phrase in the wording of Article 168. Its use there means specific intent. Specific intent . A general intent to use missiles on something is not good enough in this case. It is telling that [Berger] does not make the distinction between specific intent versus general intent. That indicates the prosecutors don't think they can prove the necessary specific intent. And if the plane had been shot down by the accused thinking it was engaged in an attack on them or masking [a Ukrainian Air Force] attack on them, then the court cannot convict. That's because the facts would show an accident or a justifiable act of self-defence."

In Dutch courts, there are several of what are called "full defences" to indictments for murder. One is insanity; another [14] is duress. Self-defence is the third full defence; it is spelled out in Article 41 of the Criminal Code:

Source: http://www.ejtn.eu/

European lawyers observing the MH17 trial have noted that Berger failed to mention that. They interpret this as an indication the prosecution already believes Judge Steenhuis has decided on conviction.

"The term 'unlawfully' is used in Article 168", Black continues, "because there may be situations where at sea, for example, a vessel has to be grounded or sunk because it is a danger to other shipping or to the crew -- or to save the crew. It's harder to think of a plane that must be crashed for a comparable reason. But one can anticipate the scenario – for example, when men on the ground believe on reasonable grounds that an aircraft was about to bomb them – when attacking the plane would not be considered unlawful because it is self-defence."

" So the Dutch prosecutors are trying to prove there was an intent [to fire at an aircraft] and therefore they did it, even if there is no evidence they did. I didn't realise courts dealt in smoking guns. They ought to be dealing in hard evidence. The fact that someone fantasizes about a woman and she ends up getting pregnant and then she has a miscarriage can't be turned into the accusation against the man of intent to make her pregnant, and then of causing her miscarriage, and so guilty of bodily harm."

[Jun 24, 2020] Russia heavily subsidised Ukrainian energy imports for decades gas and oil; the USA converted Ukraine into a debt slave, sells Ukraine expensive weapons and cornered their energy industry; The level of fleecing Ukraine by the USA after Euromaidan can be compared only with fleecing of Libya.

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Russia heavily subsidised Ukrainian energy imports for decades – gas and oil. In a similar fashion, Russia is doing this with Belarus until the present time. Russia is the only possible consumer of what Ukraine used to manufacture – a market that has disappeared. Gas turbines used to be made in Ukraine. Now, this has moved to Russia. Of course, the skilled Ukrainians went to Russia with their know-how. ..."
"... To the best of my knowledge the USSR was the only empire that actually subsidized its colonies – Poland, East Germany, Ukraine etc. Russia is far better off without them. ..."
"... Ukrainian supermarkets are overflowing with French/German/Italian products. European supermarkets are devoid of Ukrainian products. ..."
Jun 24, 2020 | www.unz.com

Likbez, June 24, 2020 at 4:02 am GMT

@Mr. Hack

Only a complete and utter incompetent (or a rabid Ukrainian nationalist) can call Ukraine an independent state. It is de-facto a colony of the West. A debt slave.

I applaud the US response of supporting Ukraine's aspirations for a freer, more Western-oriented country and that it continues to support Ukraine's territorial interests over those of Russia's.

This was not about supporting Ukrainian aspirations for a freer, more Western-oriented country. It is about kicking out Russia from Ukrainian markets and plundering Ukraine all by themselves. Mainly by Germany and the USA -- to major players of Euromaydan color revolution. For Germans this is return to "Drang nach Osten" on a new level, on the level of neoliberal neocolonialism.

They used Western nationalists as their fifth column, but Western Ukrainian suffered from the results no less then people in Eastern Ukraine. Many now try to move to Kiev, Kiev region and further East in order to escape poverty and unemployment. Seasonal labor to Russia (mainly builders) diminished rapidly. Train communication now is blocked, and for Western Ukraine only Poland now represents a chance to earn money for the family to survive the winter.

For the USA this is first of all about selling Ukraine expensive weaponry, wasting precious Ukrainian resources on permanent hostility with Russia (with Donbas conflict as a real win to further the USA geopolitical ambitions -- in line with the "Full spectrum dominance" doctrine) , cornering Ukrainian energy market (uranium supplies for power stations, etc.), destruction, or buy-out of a few competing industries other than extracting industries and maquiladoras, getting better conditions for the EU exports and multinationals operating in Ukraine (and initially with plans for re-export products to Russia tax free) and increasing the country debt to "debt slave" level.

In other words this is a powerful kick in a chin by Obama to Putin. Not a knockdown, but very close.

For Ukraine first of all that means rapid accumulation of a huge external debt -- conditions of economic slavery, out of which there is no escape. Ukrainian people paid a very dear price for their Euromaydan illusions. They became mass slave labor in Poland. Prostitutes in Germany. Seasonal picker of fruits in some other EU countries (GB, France). A new European blacks, so to speak.

The level of fleecing Ukraine by the USA after Euromaidan can be compared only with fleecing of Libya. The currency dropped 300%, and 80% Ukrainians now live in abysmal poverty, while neoliberal oligarchs allied with the West continue to plunder the country. Gold reserves were moved to the USA.

If I had to choose between two colonizers, I probably would prefer Russians. They are still colonizers, but they are less ruthless and brutal colonizers.

Alfred , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 24, 2020 at 7:45 am GMT

@likbez If I had to choose between two colonizers, I probably would prefer Russians. They are still colonizers, but they are less ruthless and brutal colonizers.

I agree with 90% of what you wrote, but I would like to correct the above.

Russia heavily subsidised Ukrainian energy imports for decades – gas and oil. In a similar fashion, Russia is doing this with Belarus until the present time. Russia is the only possible consumer of what Ukraine used to manufacture – a market that has disappeared. Gas turbines used to be made in Ukraine. Now, this has moved to Russia. Of course, the skilled Ukrainians went to Russia with their know-how.

To the best of my knowledge the USSR was the only empire that actually subsidized its colonies – Poland, East Germany, Ukraine etc. Russia is far better off without them.

Ukrainian supermarkets are overflowing with French/German/Italian products. European supermarkets are devoid of Ukrainian products.

[Jun 24, 2020] No Security Council resolution authorized aggression against Yugoslavia. NATO's Operation Allied Force lasted 78 days.

Jun 24, 2020 | www.unz.com

Robjil , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 10:21 pm GMT

@Druid55 That is the western MSM sugared up version of what happened in Yugoslavia. Western MSM learned their lesson about being truthful about war when US and friends were in Vietnam.

Lies and lies only come from western MSM these days so wars and regime change games can go on with anyone noticing or caring.

Western MSM notifies their puppet readers that all the US and friends does is "humanitarian" stuff these days. Most puppet readers lap up this junk.

https://www.globalresearch.ca/natos-rape-of-yugoslavia/5375189

March 24, 1999 will go down in history as a day of infamy. US-led NATO raped Yugoslavia. Doing so was its second major combat operation.

It was lawless aggression. No Security Council resolution authorized it. NATO's Operation Allied Force lasted 78 days.

Washington called it Operation Noble Anvil. Evil best describes it. On June 10, operations ended.

From March 1991 through mid-June 1999, Balkan wars raged. Yugoslavia "balkanized" into seven countries. They include Serbia, Kosovo, Montenegro, Macedonia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia and Slovenia.

Enormous human suffering was inflicted. Washington bears most responsibility.

[Jun 24, 2020] War is the health of the state" is true only to a certain limit. After that the bankruptcy is looming

Jun 24, 2020 | www.unz.com

onebornfree , says: Website Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 2:21 pm GMT

"So the difference between neocons and liberal interventionists is one of style rather than substance. And, by either yardstick all-in-all, Trump looks pretty good, but there has nevertheless been a resurgence of neocon-think in his administration. "

This "just" in: "War is the health of the state" Randolph Bourne https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randolph_Bourne

Agent76 , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 2:22 pm GMT
Apr 27, 2017 This Is Already Putting an End to the Age of Globalization and Bankrupting the United States (2004)

For a major power, prosecution of any war that is not a defense of the homeland usually requires overseas military bases for strategic reasons. After the war is over, it is tempting for the victor to retain such bases and easy to find reasons to do so. February 26, 2015 The Neoconservative Threat To World Order

Scholars from Russia and from around the world, Russian government officials, and the Russian people seek an answer as to why Washington destroyed during the past year the friendly relations between America and Russia that President Reagan and President Gorbachev succeeded in establishing.

http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2015/02/26/neoconservative-threat-world-order-paul-craig-roberts/

[Jun 24, 2020] Only a complete and utter incompetent (or a rabid Ukrainian nationalist) can call Ukraine an independent state. It is de-facto a colony of the West. A debt slave

Jun 24, 2020 | www.unz.com

likbez , says: Show Comment June 24, 2020 at 4:02 am GMT

@Mr. Hack Only a complete and utter incompetent (or a rabid Ukrainian nationalist) can call Ukraine an independent state. It is de-facto a colony of the West. A debt slave.

I applaud the US response of supporting Ukraine's aspirations for a freer, more Western-oriented country and that it continues to support Ukraine's territorial interests over those of Russia's.

This was not about supporting Ukrainian aspirations for a freer, more Western-oriented country. It is about kicking out Russia from Ukrainian markets and plundering Ukraine all by themselves. Mainly by Germany and the USA -- to major players of Euromaydan color revolution. For Germans this is return to "Drang nach Osten" on a new level, on the level of neoliberal neocolonialism.

They used Western nationalists as their fifth column, but Western Ukrainian suffered from the results no less then people in Eastern Ukraine. Many now try to move to Kiev, Kiev region and further East in order to escape poverty and unemployment. Seasonal labor to Russia (mainly builders) diminished rapidly. Train communication now is blocked, and for Western Ukraine only Poland now represents a chance to earn money for the family to survive the winter.

For the USA this is first of all about selling Ukraine expensive weaponry, wasting precious Ukrainian resources on permanent hostility with Russia (with Donbas conflict as a real win to further the USA geopolitical ambitions -- in line with the "Full spectrum dominance" doctrine) , cornering Ukrainian energy market (uranium supplies for power stations, etc.), destruction, or buy-out of a few competing industries other than extracting industries and maquiladoras, getting better conditions for the EU exports and multinationals operating in Ukraine (and initially with plans for re-export products to Russia tax free) and increasing the country debt to "debt slave" level.

In other words this is a powerful kick in a chin by Obama to Putin. Not a knockdown, but very close.

For Ukraine first of all that means rapid accumulation of a huge external debt -- conditions of economic slavery, out of which there is no escape. Ukrainian people paid a very dear price for their Euromaydan illusions. They became mass slave labor in Poland. Prostitutes in Germany. Seasonal picker of fruits in some other EU countries (GB, France). A new European blacks, so to speak.

The level of fleecing Ukraine by the USA after Euromaidan can be compared only with fleecing of Libya. The currency dropped 300%, and 80% Ukrainians now live in abysmal poverty, while neoliberal oligarchs allied with the West continue to plunder the country. Gold reserves were moved to the USA.

If I had to choose between two colonizers, I probably would prefer Russians. They are still colonizers, but they are less ruthless and brutal colonizers.

[Jun 24, 2020] Why do our 'foreign interventionists,' our 'permanent war for globalist perpetual peace' crusaders, our Neocons, hate Russia so thoroughly and so centrally to their very beings?

Notable quotes:
"... First, our imperialists are the direct descendants intellectually, spiritually, and morally of the first WASP Empire, the first Anglo-Zionist Empire: the British Empire. And they have used their high IQs that are focused on grasping the One Ring to Rule Them All to locate where the Brit WASP Empire failed to achieve its goals, which allowed the collapse starting with World War 1. They are obsessed with that because they believe that if they can achieve what the Brit WASPs failed to achieve, then they can make the Anglo-Zionist Empire 2.0 as permanent as the Roman Empire – a Thousand Year Reich. ..."
"... And that is spiritually what all WASP imperialism, all Anglo-Zionist imperialism back to at least the Anglo-Saxon Puritans, is about: replacing the Roman Empire, which means replacing that which culturally led to, and was absolutely indispensable to, Christendom. ..."
"... Our 'foreign interventionists' have seen Russia under Putin rise from the ashes, and they intend to destroy Russia once and for all, so they then can reduce China and win The Great Game. And thus make Anglo-Zionist Empire greater than Roman Empire. ..."
"... The "foreign interventionists" want two things: Russia's mineral riches and its good gene pool (how do you think Middle Eastern Semites became blonde hair-blue eyed people who can easily blend into the West to undermine it from within in the first place to begin with?) ..."
Jun 24, 2020 | www.unz.com

Jake , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 12:18 pm GMT

Why do our 'foreign interventionists,' our 'permanent war for globalist perpetual peace' crusaders, our Neocons, hate Russia so thoroughly and so centrally to their very beings?

First, our imperialists are the direct descendants intellectually, spiritually, and morally of the first WASP Empire, the first Anglo-Zionist Empire: the British Empire. And they have used their high IQs that are focused on grasping the One Ring to Rule Them All to locate where the Brit WASP Empire failed to achieve its goals, which allowed the collapse starting with World War 1. They are obsessed with that because they believe that if they can achieve what the Brit WASPs failed to achieve, then they can make the Anglo-Zionist Empire 2.0 as permanent as the Roman Empire – a Thousand Year Reich.

And that is spiritually what all WASP imperialism, all Anglo-Zionist imperialism back to at least the Anglo-Saxon Puritans, is about: replacing the Roman Empire, which means replacing that which culturally led to, and was absolutely indispensable to, Christendom.

What they wish to redo and achieve that the Brit WASPs failed in is winning The Great Game: becoming total master of Eur-Asia. And that requires taking out Russia and China. In the 19th century, China was sicker than even the Ottoman Turkish Empire. To play the long game to destroy Russia, the Brit WASPs allied with the Turks to prevent Russia acting to push the Ottomans out of Europe. Brit WASP secret service in eastern Europe was focused on reducing Russia significantly right through the Bolshevik Revolution, even with Russia naively, stupidly allied with the British Empire in World War 1.

Our 'foreign interventionists' have seen Russia under Putin rise from the ashes, and they intend to destroy Russia once and for all, so they then can reduce China and win The Great Game. And thus make Anglo-Zionist Empire greater than Roman Empire.

Second, our Neocons are the spiritual and intellectual descendants not just of Trotskyites, but of all Russia-hating Jews with ties to Central and/or Eastern Europe. For them, Russia always is the evil that must be destroyed for the good of Jews.

Everything at its bedrock is about theology, is about the choice between Christ and Christendom or the Chaos of anti-Christendom.

Really No Shit , says: Show Comment Next New Comment June 23, 2020 at 1:13 pm GMT
The "foreign interventionists" want two things: Russia's mineral riches and its good gene pool (how do you think Middle Eastern Semites became blonde hair-blue eyed people who can easily blend into the West to undermine it from within in the first place to begin with?)

And they won't stop until they get what they want, by hook or crook!

[Jun 23, 2020] Surely 'legitimacy' goes to the victor. Once you've won you can build a sort of legitimacy that the majority will agree with (whether its real or not)

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Of course ultimately you reach a point where no one truly understands what is real and what isn't any more. ..."
"... Boris Johnson PM of the UK? Surely not, Theresa May? I can barely wipe the smirk from my face. 4th and 5th rate politicians relying on SPADs to run the country. ..."
"... Reading his recent essay on the truths of WWII ( http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/63527 ) yet again sees him posting uncomfortable realities to a West knee deep in vassalage to a crumbling US. ..."
"... Change is coming whether we like it or not, with or without Putin, we'd best tend our own garden and stop worrying about an opposition that simply doesn't exist. ..."
Jun 23, 2020 | irrussianality.wordpress.com
    1. Gerald says: June 20, 2020 at 5:34 pm surely 'legitimacy' goes to the victor. Once you've won you can build a sort of legitimacy that the majority will agree with (whether its real or not) of course if you are a kind of despotic dictatorship (as appears to be happening in terms of western neoliberal capitalism) then you will merely do as you wish regardless until confronted with overwhelming opposition at which point you will infiltrate and co-opt said opposition, pay lip service to their vague claim for 'rights' and continue on your merry way.

      I always thought that the greatest thing that the capitalists did in the 20th century was to get the slaves to love their slavery, its all advertising, hollywood, TV that's all that politics has become, certainly in the West. Edward Bernays has a lot to answer for.

      Of course ultimately you reach a point where no one truly understands what is real and what isn't any more.

      Boris Johnson PM of the UK? Surely not, Theresa May? I can barely wipe the smirk from my face. 4th and 5th rate politicians relying on SPADs to run the country.

      There is no wonder that Putin looks like the greatest 21st century leader, the last of a dying breed. Reading his recent essay on the truths of WWII ( http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/63527 ) yet again sees him posting uncomfortable realities to a West knee deep in vassalage to a crumbling US.

      Change is coming whether we like it or not, with or without Putin, we'd best tend our own garden and stop worrying about an opposition that simply doesn't exist.

[Jun 23, 2020] Putin Tries To Set Record Straight by

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... "Why does life almost come to a halt on June 22? And why does one feel a lump in the throat?" ..."
"... no matter what anyone is trying to prove today ..."
"... War Against Civilians ..."
Jun 22, 2020 | www.antiwar.com
"Why does life almost come to a halt on June 22? And why does one feel a lump in the throat?"

This how Russian President Vladimir Putin chose to address the fateful day in 1941, when Germany invaded Russia, with an extraordinarily detailed article on June 19: "75th Anniversary of the Great Victory: Shared Responsibility to History and our Future."

Citing archival data, Putin homes in on both world wars, adding important information not widely known, and taking no liberties with facts well known to serious historians. As for the "lump in the throat", the Russian president steps somewhat out of character by weaving in some seemingly formative personal experiences of family loss during that deadly time and postwar years. First, the history:

"On June 22, 1941, the Soviet Union faced the strongest, most mobilized and skilled army in the world with the industrial, economic, and military potential of almost all Europe working for it. Not only the Wehrmacht, but also Germany's satellites, military contingents of many other states of the European continent, took part in this deadly invasion.

"The most serious military defeats in 1941 brought the country to the brink of catastrophe. By 1943 the manufacture of weapons and munitions behind the lines exceeded the rates of military production of Germany and its allies. The Soviet people did something that seemed impossible. the Red Army. no matter what anyone is trying to prove today , made the main and crucial contribution to the defeat of Nazism Almost 27 million Soviet citizens lost their lives, one in seven of the population the USA lost one in 320." [ Emphasis added .]

Somber factual recollections. Significant, too, is Putin's explicit criticism of "crimes committed by the [Stalin] regime against its own people and the horror of mass repressions." Nor does he spare criticism of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, denouncing its "secret protocols as "an act of personal power" which in no way reflected "the will of the Soviet people."

Putin notes that he asked for "the whole body of materials pertaining to contacts between the USSR and Germany in the dramatic days of August and September 1939," and found facts "known to very few these days" regarding Moscow's reaction to German demands on carving up Poland (yet again). On this key issue, he cites, "paragraph 2 of the Secret Protocol to the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact of August 23, 1939", indicating that it throws new light on Moscow's initial foot-dragging and its eventual decision to join in a more limited (for Russia) partition.

Look it up. And while you're at it, GOOGLE Khalkhin Gol River and refresh your memory about what Putin describes as "intense fighting" with Japan at the time.

The Russian president points out, correctly, that "the Red Army supported the Allied landing in Normandy by carrying out the large-scale Operation Bagration in Belorussia", which is actually an understatement. ( See: " Who Defeated the Nazis: a Colloquy and " Once We Were Allies; Then Came MICIMATT ."

"No matter what anyone is trying to prove today," writes Putin, who may have had in mind the latest indignity from Washington; namely, the White House tweet on V-E day this year, saying "On May 8, 1945, America and Great Britain had victory over the Nazis."

Lump in Throat

And why does one feel a lump rise in the throat? Putin asks rhetorically.

"The war has left a deep imprint on every family's history. Behind these words, there are the fates of millions of people Behind these words, there is also the pride, the truth and the memory.

"For my parents, the war meant the terrible ordeals of the Siege of Leningrad where my two-year old brother Vitya died. It was the place where my mother miraculously managed to survive. My father, despite being exempt from active duty, volunteered to defend his hometown. He fought at the Nevsky Pyatachok bridgehead and was severely wounded. And the more years pass, the more I treasure in my heart the conversations I had with my father and mother on this subject, as well as the little emotion they showed.

"People of my age and I believe it is important that our children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren understand the torment and hardships their ancestors had to endure how their ancestors managed to persevere and win. We have a responsibility to our past and our future to do our utmost to prevent those horrible tragedies from happening ever again. Hence, I was compelled to come out with an article about World War II and the Great Patriotic War."

Putin was born in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) eight years after the vicious siege by the German army ended. Michael Walzer, in his War Against Civilians , notes, "More people died in the 900-day siege of Leningrad than in the infernos of Hamburg, Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki taken together."

Putin notes that the "human truth" of war, "which is bitter and merciless, has been handed down to us by writers and poets who walked through hell at the front. For my generation, as well as for many others, their piercing trench prose and poems have left their mark on the soul forever." He calls particular attention to a poem by Alexander Tvardovsky , "I was killed near Rzhev," dedicated to those who fought the formidable German Army Group Center.

Putin explains, "In the battles for Rzhev from October 1941 to March 1943, the Red Army lost 1,342,888 people, including wounded and missing in action. For the first time, I call out these terrible, tragic and far from complete figures collected from archive sources. I do it to honor the memory of the feat of known and nameless heroes", who were largely ignored in the postwar years.

The Germans were hardly the first to invade Russia. It was occupied for more than two centuries beginning in 1240 by Mongols from the east, after which its western neighbor was Europe, the most powerful and expansionist region in world history into the 20th century. After the Mongols were finally driven out, in came invaders from Lithuania, Sweden, the Hanseatic League, Napoleon and, 79 years ago today, Hitler.

"The Poet of Russian Grief"

Out of this history (and before the Nazi attack on June 22, 1941) came the deeply compassionate 19th century poet Nikolay Nekrasov, who, after Pushkin, became my favorite Russian poet. His poem, "Giving Attention to the Horrors of War") moved me deeply; I have carried it with me from my college days when I committed it to memory.

I visited Moscow in April 2015 to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the meeting of American and Russian troops on the Elbe at the end of WWII. It was a heartwarming observance of the victory of our wartime Grand Alliance and a reminder of what might be possible seven decades later. I was asked to speak at the ceremony celebrating the meeting on the Elbe, and was happy to be able to feature Nekrasov's poem to compensate for my out-of-practice Russian.

On June 22, 2016, the 75th anniversary of the Nazi attack on Russia, I was in Yalta, Crimea, with an American citizens' delegation and was again asked to speak. It was an even more appropriate occasion to recite Nekrasov's "Giving Attention to the Horrors of War," and I shall never forget the poignant experience of personally witnessing, and feeling, just why Nekrasov is called "the poet of Russian grief." There were several people in the audience old enough to remember.

Finally, I recited Nekrasov again, in Brussels, at the annual EU Parliament Members' Forum on Russia in early December 2015. My talk came on the second day of the Forum; until then, almost all of the talks were pretty much head-speeches. So I tried a little heart therapy and called my presentation "Stay Human." The late Giulietto Chiesa, one of the Forum moderators recorded my speech and posted it on his website.

The poem can be heard from minute 11:00 to 17:00 . There is some voice-over in Italian, but I spoke mostly in English and some of that is intelligible – audible, I mean. There is no voice-over for the Nekrasov poem. I shall provide a translation into English below:

Heeding the horrors of war,
At every new victim of battle
I feel sorry not for his friend, nor for his wife,
I feel sorry not even for the hero himself.

Alas, the wife will be comforted,
And best friends forget their friend;
But somewhere there is one soul –
Who will remember unto the grave!

Amidst the hypocrisy of our affairs
And all the banality and triviality
Unique among what I have observed in the world
Sacred, sincere tears –
The tears of poor mothers!

They do not forget their own children,
Who have perished on the bloody battlefield,
Just as the weeping willow never lifts
Its dangling branches

Suffice it to add that I confess to being what the Germans call a "Putin Versteher" – literally, one who understands Putin. (Sadly, most Germans mean no compliment with this appellation; quite the contrary.) As one who has studied Russia for half a century, though, I believe I have some sense for where Russian leaders "are coming from."

That said, like almost all Americans, I cannot begin to know, in any adequate sense, what it is actually like to be part of a society with a history of being repeatedly invaded and/or occupied – whether from East or West. In my view, U.S. policy makers need to make some effort to become, in some degree, Putin Verstehers, or the risk of completely unnecessary armed confrontation will increase still more.

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. His 27-year career as a CIA analyst includes serving as Chief of the Soviet Foreign Policy Branch and preparer/briefer of the President's Daily Brief. He is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS). This originally appeared at Consortium News .

[Jun 23, 2020] John Bolton Tells How Iran Hawks Set Up Trump's Syrian Kurdish Disaster

Notable quotes:
"... Bolton's account sheds light on how it happened: hawks in the administration, including Bolton himself, wanted U.S. forces in Syria fighting Russia and Iran. They saw the U.S.-Kurdish alliance against ISIS as a distraction -- and let the Turkish-Kurdish conflict fester until it spiralled out of control. ..."
Jun 23, 2020 | nationalinterest.org

The drama eventually ended with President Donald Trump pulling U.S. peacekeepers out of Syria -- and then sending them back in . One hundred thousand Syrian civilians were displaced by an advancing Turkish army, and the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces turned to Russia for help. But U.S. forces never fully withdrew -- they are still stuck in Syria defending oil wells .

Bolton's account sheds light on how it happened: hawks in the administration, including Bolton himself, wanted U.S. forces in Syria fighting Russia and Iran. They saw the U.S.-Kurdish alliance against ISIS as a distraction -- and let the Turkish-Kurdish conflict fester until it spiralled out of control.

Pompeo issued a statement on Thursday night denouncing Bolton's entire book as "a number of lies, fully-spun half-truths, and outright falsehoods."

[Jun 22, 2020] Vladimir Putin The Real Lessons of the 75th Anniversary of World War II

Jun 18, 2020 | nationalinterest.org

The Russian president offers a comprehensive assessment of the legacy of World War II, arguing that "Today, European politicians, and Polish leaders in particular, wish to sweep the Munich Betrayal under the carpet. The Munich Betrayal showed to the Soviet Union that the Western countries would deal with security issues without taking its interests into account."

by Vladimir Putin ,

[Jun 21, 2020] Paul R. Pillar who pointed out that U.S. sanctions are frequently peddled as a peaceful alternative to war fit the definition of 'crimes against peace'.

Highly recommended!
Jun 21, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Christian J. Chuba , Jun 21 2020 14:18 utc | 78

Re: the Nuremberg trials , I became fascinated by the writings of Paul R. Pillar who pointed out that U.S. sanctions are frequently peddled as a peaceful alternative to war fit the definition of 'crimes against peace' . This is when one country sets up an environment for war against another country. I'll grant you that this is vague but if this is applicable at all how is this not an accurate description of what we are doing against Iran and Venezuela?

In both cases, we are imposing a full trade embargo (not sanctions) on basic civilian necessities and infrastructures and threatening the use of military force. As for Iran, the sustained and unfair demonization of Iranians is preparing the U.S. public to accept a ruthless bombing campaign against them as long overdue. We are already attacking the civilian population of their allies in Syria, Yemen, and Lebanon.

How Ironic that the country that boasts that it won WW2 is now guilty of the very crimes that it condemned publicly in court.

[Jun 21, 2020] Katyn in Reverse in Ukraine: Nazi-led Massacres turned into Soviet Massacres. By Ivan Katchanovski

Jun 21, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

H.Schmatz , Jun 21 2020 12:09 utc | 76

From Furr´s research:

Debunked the "official" version of the Katyn massacre?

Furthermore, a large part of the bodies in the graves were those of children. The Soviets did not execute children. This is compelling evidence that it was the work of the Germans and not of the Soviets. Such a conclusion is confirmed by recent research by other Ukrainian scholars. Based on the evidence from the trials of German war criminals, testimonies of Jewish survivors, and investigations by Polish historians Ivan Katchanovski and Volodymyr Musychenko into mass executions of Poles by Ukrainian nationalists, they concluded that the buried bodies correspond mainly to Jews, but also Poles and "Soviet activists". Katchanovski concludes that the Ukrainian authorities sought to blame the Soviet NKVD in order to hide the guilt of some Ukrainian nationalists considered heroes in present-day Ukraine, including Volodimir-Volynski itself.

Source mentioned:

Katyn in Reverse in Ukraine: Nazi-led Massacres turned into Soviet Massacres. By Ivan Katchanovski

[Jun 21, 2020] The Western powers behind the destruction of the USSR paid all these anti-Soviet, anti-Russian, agents. That affects Katin investigation

Jun 21, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

H.Schmatz , Jun 21 2020 11:40 utc | 75

@Posted by: Jen | Jun 21 2020 9:52 utc | 73

There were no real documents which could anytime prove the NKVD, or any Soviet official or citizen fighting in the Red Army for that matter, executed the people whose corpses were found in Katyn.

Amongst the multiple contradictions and contradictory evidence found by several researchers´groups, there is the fact that the corpses were placed in the pit in the known nazi preferred way so called "sardine cans", plus that fact that children were also found in the pit, when the Soviets never executed a child.

The fake documents, known in Furr´s investigation as "Closed Package No. 1″, where "closed" refers to the highest level of confidentiality, were provided by Yeltsyn, amid his permanent intoxication, who claimed to have found secret folders in the files of the presidency, and directly blamed Stalin for the massacre. The folders were shown to contain false, undated, contradictory, visibly fabricated documents. The Prosecutor General of the Russian Federation in 2004 closed the investigation. He found no evidence to blame the USSR, Stalin, or even the "sinister" head of the NKVD, Lavrenti Beria.

That Gorbachov, Yeltsyn, or some people currently in the Russian Duma agree with the doctored report by the Yale University to underpine the narrative against Stalin, the USSR and communism in general is not to be surprised since to this very day there are enemies of Russia holding a deputy post in the Russian Duma, and we all know how generously the Western powers behind the destruction of the USSR paid all these anti-Soviet, anti-Russian, agents.

The thing is that the "Katyn Hoax" contitutes, along the "Holodomor Hoax", the cornerstone of the Polish and Ukrainian far-right´s and Russian fifth column´s ( far-right too )narrative to throw shit over Stalin´s and the heroic Sovier peoples´ victory in WWII. Both hoaxes currently debunked by serious researchers.

[Jun 21, 2020] Note of partitioning of Chechoslvakia

Jun 21, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Jozwa , Jun 21 2020 15:56 utc | 80

@ Posted by: Dirk / Jun 20 2020 17:37 utc | 7

A certain explanation for this unfortunate Polish whim, you will find it at the address below. You should know that the route of the Czech-Polish border, although it originated from the Spa Conference of 1920, was clarified according to the wishes of the French consortium Schneider, which had taken control of the Czech industry after World War I. It is the French historian Annie Lacroix-Riz who specifies it in "The choice of the defeat".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_minority_in_the_Czech_Republic

"There was a very tense climate in 1918–1920, a time of decision. It was decided that a plebiscite would be held in Cieszyn Silesia asking people which country the territory should join. Plebiscite commissioners arrived at the end of January 1920 and after analyzing the situation declared a state of emergency in the territory on 19 May 1920. The situation in the territory remained very tense. Mutual intimidation, acts of terror, beatings, and even killings affected the area.[17] A plebiscite could not be held in this atmosphere. On 10 July both sides renounced the idea of a plebiscite and entrusted the Conference of Ambassadors with the decision.[18] Eventually 58.1% of the area of Cieszyn Silesia and 67.9% of the population was incorporated into Czechoslovakia on 28 July 1920 by a decision of the Spa Conference.[18] This division was in practice what gave birth to the concept of the Zaolzie -- which literally means "the land beyond the Olza River" (looking from Poland)."

You will find the map of the 1910 Polish speakers of this region there:
https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polacy_w_Czechach

[Jun 21, 2020] The Western allies still expected the USSR would destroy itself alongside the Third Reich so they could simply march forwards over the wasteland and occupy the whole thing. Until Stalingrad, Roosevelt explicitly conditioned the existence of the Lend Lease to the non-existence of a second front against Germany

Jun 21, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

vk , Jun 21 2020 17:08 utc | 89

@ Posted by: Dave the Wade | Jun 21 2020 16:03 utc | 83

At the beginning/before the war, the Trotskyists made a resolution declaring that the USSR, albeit "degenerated", was still a proletarian republic. Hence, vis-a-vis the Third Reich, it should be defended. The document was released publicly, and it is available on the internet; I don't remember the exact year and the name of the document. It's important to highlight that the Nazi build up was evident already even before Hitler took power in 1932.

When it became clear the USSR would win the war, they "pushed" for the Soviets to liberate the whole European peninsula, not just until Germany.

@ Posted by: Vince | Jun 21 2020 15:58 utc | 82

The Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact had a secret protocol that envisaged the partition of Poland. But that's immaterial as to "who's to blame for the start of the WWII" because Poland had imperial ambitions at the time, therefore it was "a player in the game". If you "play the game", you're putting yourself in a position to lose said game.

The reason the USSR saw Eastern Poland, Finland and the Baltics as part of its "natural borders" is very simple: those were the borders of the old Russian Empire. The USSR was smaller in territorial terms than the Russian Empire.

Everybody was building up before 1941 (even the USA). WWII wasn't a bolt from the blue. The only doubt at the eve of 1939 was how each side would take shape, as it wasn't obvious the Western colonial powers would ally with the USSR.

The allies were actually divided in half: the USSR on one side, the UK-France-USA on the other side. The Western allies still expected the USSR would destroy itself alongside the Third Reich so they could simply march forwards over the wasteland and occupy the whole thing. Until Stalingrad, Roosevelt explicitly conditioned the existence of the Lend Lease to the non-existence of a second front against Germany. It was only when it became clear the Soviets would achieve a total victory over Germany that the Americans sobered up and lifted this condition (i.e. they would keep the Lend Lease and they would get their second front). That's why D-Day happened in 1944, and not in, say, 1942.

[Jun 21, 2020] I believe Stalin and the Central Commity decision to occupy those countries on its periphery and absolutely crush the likely fascist resurgence was the correct decision. I gather they recognized the oligarchic forces who financed and supported Hitler. Those same forces are at it again today.

Notable quotes:
"... It is disturbing that no Western leaders are attending the 75th anniversary celebrations of the end of WWII in Moscow. ..."
"... The US began arming Afghan warlords and mujaheddin as early as August 1979, as part of the then US State Secretary Zbigniew Brzezinski's plan to push the USSR into an Afghan version of the Vietnam War. The plan passed muster with the Carter government. The funding and arming of the mujaheddin by the CIA was what led Kabul to request help from Moscow. The Soviets arrived in December 1979. ..."
"... The Russians suffered and endured horrific sacrifices during WWII while simultaneously turning the tide against the Third Reich. An heroic tale much unappreciated by many in the West. The Russians did participate in the Lend-Lease program although the benefits are debated especially for the early and decisive years. ..."
"... https://www.historynet.com/did-russia-really-go-it-alone-how-lend-lease-helped-the-soviets-defeat-the-germans.htm ..."
Jun 21, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

vk , Jun 20 2020 21:25 utc | 25

@ Posted by: Ike | Jun 20 2020 20:17 utc | 20

For the events of the 1930s, I recommend reading Micheal Jabara Carley's The Alliance that Never Was and the Coming of World War II.

This book is essential to understand the intricate politics that ultimately triggered WWII because it focus on the people that really had the power to stop it: the Nation-States themselves (through their diplomats).

The politics of the 1930s were very complex, but can be based on one main contradiction: during the 1930s, there was the widespread belief in France and the UK that a new world war would result in a worldwide communist revolution. The equation was war=communism in Europe, according to the conservative governments of those two nations.

Another important reason WWII happened the way it happened was very simple, but is denied by the Western nations until modern times: fascism was very popular in Western Europe and the USA during the 1930s. In France in particular, the local MSM was waging a vicious propaganda war against the USSR, and we could guess the country was essentially polarized. The British MSM was also waging it in their home country.

Poland was 100% against the USSR. Their preference would be to preserve their alliance with the UK-France, but they (i.e. their chief of staff of the Armed Forces) also explicitly stated to Litvinov that, if it came to choose between Germany and the USSR, they would choose Germany. It was because of Poland that the USSR wasn't able to fly around Germany in order to form an alliance with the West (Romania, however, agreed to extraofficially allow Soviet planes to cross their airspace).

Chamberlain used Poland to officially legitimize his non-alliance with the USSR, but we now know from his personal letters (many of them to his sister) that the real reason he didn't do it was his fear of the equation war=communism (in Western Europe). He was literally "taking one for the team" of capitalism and was very aware of that. His position was unsustainable, because we now know that it never crossed Hitler's mind to not wage war against France and the UK, even though his main goal was the USSR. The thing is the Nazis rose to power with the promise of revenging the Army for WWI.

Churchill was a capitalist and a staunch anti-communist, and, in another universe, he certainly would do an alliance with the Nazis to crush the USSR. The problem is that the UK's military doctrine already was completely directed towards Germany, and the British people already was brainwashed for decades that Germany was the UK's main enemy. You can't call a total war against an enemy your own people doesn't want to fight against. Changing a military doctrine of a country takes decades - it simply wasn't possible for Churchill to shift the British people's minds from an anti-German mode to an anti-Soviet mode in such a short time. It would only be during the Cold War that it was made possible (as they had the time to do so), and, nowadays, we can comfortably say most of the British people is germanophile (at least, the British left) and russophobe. Plus, Churchill could see Hitler right into his soul, and knew he would wage war from the beginning.

The Americans were completely out of the picture in the 1930s. They were divided among the isolationists and the interventionists. Exception to the rule were the American industrialists, who helped mainly Nazi Germany, but also the USSR, in rebuilding themselves. They did so not because of ideology, but because they were desperate for new markets after the collapse of 1929. American loyalty was on the cheap in the 1930s.

Innocent Civilian , Jun 20 2020 21:27 utc | 26

The humanity owes a big debt to USSR for defeating Nazi Germany and saving the earth from their unholy empire. While Angela Merkel, instead of Putin, makes the rounds and poses in photos in the 75th anniversary D-Day in London, the history is being rewritten in front of our eyes and we have ended up with a majority that fails to question why it took more than two years to plan and execute the Normandy invasion. As for capitalists funding the build-up of the Wehrmacht, the saying goes "The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them."
uncle tungsten , Jun 20 2020 21:37 utc | 27
bystander 04 #23

I am inclined that way right now.

I believe Stalin and the Central Committees decision to occupy those countries on its periphery and absolutely crush the likely fascist resurgence was the correct decision. I gather they recognized the oligarchic forces who financed and supported Hitler. Those same forces are at it again today.

The foresight and analysis of those Russian thinkers was correct then and remains relevant now.

karlof1 , Jun 20 2020 21:41 utc | 28
I guess I need to again remind people that all history is revisioned --it is seen or read about, then processed through the historian's mind-- revisioned --then written. Even an event that's 100% written about as it genuinely occurred is revisioned in the above manner because that's how the human mind works. Before it was discovered how to doctor them, photographs and film were deemed to be superior recorders of events than descriptive words because there was no revisioning to alter the content, but that ceased to be the case 100+ years ago. In today's world, the live broadcast is the closest thing that avoids the revisioning dilemma--that's why live streams sent via cell phones and webcams are powerful and hated by those seeking control--they're deprived of the opportunity to shape the narrative or manipulate the evidence.

In his essay, I expected Putin to write more about International Law and why adherence to it is so important in the maintenance of peace. Instead, he sent a backhanded message to those managing the Outlaw US Empire about the fate they'll face if they continue on their path and exit the UN.

Tom , Jun 20 2020 21:43 utc | 29
#14 Steve

USSR was invited, and didn't invaded Afghanistan. Ronnie Ray gun's freedom fighters, the mujahidin were already there.

Jen , Jun 20 2020 21:50 utc | 30
That so many people in the West believe that the US did the most to defeat Nazi Germany is understandable due to decades of repeated Hollywood propaganda starring the likes of John Wayne (who never actually went near anything resembling a tank or a nav asl ship) and others. But what explains the 50% of British people who believe the British did the most to beat the Nazis?

Is it all that constant blagging about the Battle of Britain (which incidentally was won for Britain by pilots representing something like 25 different nationalities with the most significant hits being made by Polish pilots) or the ceaseless propaganda about what a great warmonger and mass murderer ... er, "hero" Winston Churchill was, in crap media like The Daily Mail and the BBC?

H.Schmatz , Jun 20 2020 21:51 utc | 31
It is disturbing that no Western leaders are attending the 75th anniversary celebrations of the end of WWII in Moscow.

@Posted by: Ike | Jun 20 2020 20:17 utc | 20

Indeed, it is disturbing... May be the Russians should turn to the Western people and invite them to represent their countries?

I am currently available for traveling...I would feel most grateful of having the opportunity, still have not visited Lenin Mausoleum.... although for being in Moscow for June 24th, I should be carried by a "Moscow Express" flight...

Anonymous , Jun 20 2020 21:56 utc | 32

"At the end of his essay Putin defends the veto power of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council. In his view it has prevented that another clash on a global scale has happened since World War II ended. Putin rejects attempts to abolish that system."

b, what is your opinion about Germany becoming a permanent member of the UNSC since it is now, arguably, the most powerful nation in Europe?
Do you think it threatens security/stability by excluding it from the UNSC, while the UK and France are included? (I think it does, but I'm Canadian, what do I know? :-)

Jen , Jun 20 2020 22:08 utc | 34
Victor @ 17:

If you are referring to the massacre of Polish POWs and Polish intellectuals, musicians and artists whose bodies were found in the forests of Katyn by Nazi German soldiers, bear in mind that Nazi Germany stood to benefit from blaming the massacre directly on the Soviets. While Russia under President Yeltsin did accept responsibility for the Katyn massacre - after all, the Soviets did hold the victims as prisoners and should have evacuated them - one still has to be wary of a narrative shaped and dictated by an enemy nation who milked the propaganda value of the massacre against the Soviets. That in itself might tell you who the real murderers were.

Jen , Jun 20 2020 22:18 utc | 35
Steve @ 14, Tom @ 29:

The US began arming Afghan warlords and mujaheddin as early as August 1979, as part of the then US State Secretary Zbigniew Brzezinski's plan to push the USSR into an Afghan version of the Vietnam War. The plan passed muster with the Carter government. The funding and arming of the mujaheddin by the CIA was what led Kabul to request help from Moscow. The Soviets arrived in December 1979.

snow_watcher , Jun 20 2020 22:18 utc | 36
Thanks, I'll read Putin's essay.

I'm almost done reading "Life And Fate" by Vasily Grossman, translated by Robert Chandler. The defense of Stalingrad and the eventual defeat of Field Marshal Paulus, commander of the 6th army, is instructive.

The Russians suffered and endured horrific sacrifices during WWII while simultaneously turning the tide against the Third Reich. An heroic tale much unappreciated by many in the West. The Russians did participate in the Lend-Lease program although the benefits are debated especially for the early and decisive years.

https://www.historynet.com/did-russia-really-go-it-alone-how-lend-lease-helped-the-soviets-defeat-the-germans.htm

Ghost Ship , Jun 20 2020 22:41 utc | 37
Vk @ 3
even though it has the victory against Japan
Nah, sorry mate, doesn't even have that. The Soviet Union scared the Japanese high command into surrendering after the US dropped its demand for unconditional surrender because it was scared that the Soviet Union would invade the main islands of Japan before it could.
BraveNewWorld , Jun 20 2020 22:43 utc | 38
I have been following the latest shit show between POTUS, DOJ & SDNY. Are Americans really sure they are ready to go to war with China because I have to be honest. I'm not entirely convinced you guys have your act together.
Senalis , Jun 20 2020 22:45 utc | 39
Stalin foresaw attempts to belittle the USSR's role in WWII. For example, during the Battle of Stalingrad there was a team of cinephotographers that filmed different aspects of the battle, from the siege to the envelopment of the beseigers.

When the battle ended a documentary was compiled, many copies were made, some of which were shown to enthusiastic audiences in North America. I saw that film in, I believe, March 1943 when I was a 12 year old living in Toronto.

You have to know that 1942 had been a terribly demoralizing year for the Allied side. Japan was unstoppable running over SE Asia; U-boats were sinking lots of supply ships headed to the UK in the North Atlantic; there was the fiasco of Dieppe which hit Canadian pride hard; Rommel and assorted British generals were playing tag back & forth across North Africa; but the biggest disaster was unfolding across the USSR from Leningrad down to the lower Volga. So when that documentary opened with a shot of Reichsmarschall von Paulus trudging through knee-deep snow leading a seemingly endless column of bedraggled German soldiers to an imprisonment camp, it was a most uplifting moment, unmatched until May 1945.

The ferocity of the Soviet counterattack was awesome: Katyusha rockets; great swarms of troops under air cover, including women, in white camouflage on skis, heading to the front.

I and hundreds of thousands of others who saw that film in 1943 know damn well who really won the war and how. Putin has had enough of insults directed against Russia's record during WWII from UKUS, but especially from Poland, and has responded forcefully.

I found most interesting his reference to still-locked archives outside of Russia dealing with the shenanigans that led to WWI. We can only hope that historians will get to them before the mice!

Real History , Jun 20 2020 22:54 utc | 40
Why is it there is no mentions that Churchill tasked his Chiefs of Staff to come up with a plan to attack the Soviet Union and start WW Three in April 1945, a month before the end of World War Two.

The plan his Chiefs developed was called Operation Unthinkable. It called for the Great Britain and the allies to attack the Soviet Union on July 1, 1945. This plan went nowhere.

Then Truman came up with a plan in August 1945 called Operation Totality which called for dropping atomic bombs on Moscow and 20 of the most important cities in the USSR. This plan too didn't go anywhere but this marked the end of the Great Britain, America alliance with Stalin and from this point on, in a 180 degree turn, Stalin and the Communists became the West's mortal enemies and the Cold War was born.

Why does this development and the reasons for this 180 degree about turn not get any mention and analysis? Why did the allies turn on a dime and go from being best of buddies with the Marxist Communists to being worst of enemies with the West desiring to annihilate the Soviet Union? Why?

Real History

H.Schmatz , Jun 20 2020 22:55 utc | 41
May be Mr. Putin aimed at trying a last intend on appeasement, his own Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact ....May be, even knowing this time it will not work either...
"The great criminal who has ordered the murder, transforms his joy for the crime committed into currency, giving a reward worthy of a prince. Now that he has ordered the looting and murder of the two thousand richest men in Italy, Antonio can finally be generous. For the bloody sack containing Cicero's hands and head, pay the centurion a brilliant million sesterces. But with it his revenge has not yet cooled, so that the stupid hatred of this bloodthirsty man still creates a special ignominy for the dead, without realizing that with himself he will be debased for all time. Antonio orders that the head and the hands are nailed in the tribune from where Cicero incited the city against him to defend the freedom of Rome.

The next day a disgraceful spectacle awaits the Roman people. In the speakers' gallery, the same from which Cicero delivered his immortal speeches, the severed head of the last defender of liberty hangs discolored. An imposing rusty nail pierces the forehead, the thousands of thoughts. Livid and with a rictus of bitterness, the lips that formulated the metallic words of the Latin language more beautifully than those of any other. Closed, the blue eyelids cover the eyes that for sixty years watched over the republic. Powerless, they open his hands that wrote the most splendid letters of the time.

But all in all, no accusation made by the great orator from that rostrum against brutality, against the delirium of power, against illegality, speaks as eloquently against the eternal injustice of violence as that silent head of a murdered man .

Suspicious the people gather around the desecrated rostra . Dejected, ashamed, it turns away again. No one dares - it is a dictatorship! - to express a single reply, but a spasm oppresses their hearts. And dismayed, they lower their heads at this allegory of the crucified republic...."

Sternstunden der Menschheit , by Stefan Zweig....

https://twitter.com/shanevanderhart/status/1274372422859448324

bystander 04 , Jun 20 2020 23:15 utc | 42
Thanks, „b" for this article and the links - I read Putin´s essay and am impressed with the depth , insight, humanity in his words. I would like to share my views, gained from living for many years under soviets and their Jewish helpers (like Jakub Berman, Zambrowski, Fejgin, to name a few). Here my amplifications and few other important details, omitted by Putin:

1). regarding his description of decisions by different governments - he does not mention that the Polish government had good reasons not to trust Stalin - because Soviet Union cooperated with Germany for many years before - in form of having Germans (disguised as some kind of para military, in order to circumvent the prohibitions following Versailles treaty) training in the Soviet Union.

2). Another detail is that the British, French and Americans were trying to gain time before confrontation with Nazis, just the same reasoning Putin allows to Soviet Union.

3).It also can be interpreted that Stalin decided to join the partition of Poland only after Germany was victorious, similar tactic Stalin used in starting war against Japan after USA won the war in Pacific and occupied the Kurile Islands.

4). Putin is disguising the aggressive action of USSR vis-a-vis Baltic states by saying „In autumn 1939, the Soviet Union pursuing its strategic military and defensive goals, started the process of incorporation of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia." If Hitler would have stopped at that and not march on Moscow like Napoleon - this action would have mutate into pure aggression. „incorporation" - my foot!

5). Putin does not mention any Polish names along Petain, Quisling, Vlasov and Bandera -- because there were none, and this is significant, showing that not a single Pole was found to work - in a quasi government - with Nazis.

6). The spirit of independence he claims for Russian people (earlier in the essay), he is not giving the People of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania or Poland.

7). Putin mentions „burnt Khatyn" in one breath with Babi Yar - I wonder, is there a different Kathyn from „the" Katyn, where over 22 Tsd. Polish officers and officials were butchered on orders of Stalin, Beria, Kaganovich (and one or two more whose names escape me now).

8). Putin is knowingly or otherwise pushing the antisemitic mantra on Polish nation - mentioning the ´splendid monument´ for Hitler to be erected in Warsaw, quoting ambassador Lipski in 1938 this is a blow below the waist line and I did not expect it to be repeated in this essay, as he used it already on a previous occasion. It is in jarring contrast with the otherwise solid and even-handed exposition.

In my humble opinion Putin´s essay is a big wink to Poland to stay away from Ukraine and Belarus and not be a stooge of others (oligarchs, as uncle tungsten says in #27) to try undermine Russia!

The insinuations about polish antisemitism (as if Poles had monopoly in this subject!!!) is in line with the possible use of Jewish „forces" in dealing with Polish nationalism, and unpredictability of events in Eastern Europe, if the color revolutions continue, say in Belarus..

The possible role of Israeli political calculus should also be kept in mind, as their ´plan B´, when Islam will get too dangerous for many Jews and who will suddenly discover love to the land of their polish antisemites That is why Poland is mentioned that many times.

Victor , Jun 20 2020 23:31 utc | 43
Jen @ 34

Putin and the Russian Duma have previously accepted that the Katyn massacre occurred under orders of Stalin and Beria. It's not Western of Polish propaganda.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-11845315

Putin also condemned the Molotov/Ribbentrop Pact.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8230387.stm?fbclid=IwAR3bH6muxpRxGYqjUDgiDP9hVY2W143HYLWrsyBmi4E_pW5AgWOsUq2s-V4

While I understand that a lot has changed in the last 10 years with regards to the level of anti-Russia hysteria, and I also understand that this essay is meant to bring forward the Russian point of view on WW2 as opposed to the propaganda of the West, I stand by my earlier statement that glossing over the bad things that happened under the orders of Stalin and simply giving a generic "Stalin was a bad man" statement only leaves an otherwise excellent historical essay open to be dismissed as propaganda.

Clueless Joe , Jun 20 2020 23:40 utc | 44
Bystander 04

There was a deal between US and Stalin that the Red Army would attack Japan 3 months after the end of the war in Europe, which actually happened on time - the Manchurian campaign which utterly destroyed the Japanese army in N. China/Manchukuo/Korea began on the 9th of August. Japan wasn't prepared for this and still assumed the non-aggression agreement with USSR that had been made in 1939 was still valid.

This wasn't Stalin trying to take advantage, the US were so far from invading the Main Islands that everyone assumed the war would last another year. This was Stalin doing exactly what Roosevelt had begged him to do at Yalta. And opening a 2nd front against Japan worked far better than expected - and far better than when the Western Allies opened a 2nd front in Europe against the Reich.

H.Schmatz , Jun 21 2020 0:03 utc | 45
Debunking the Polish trolls here...

What really happened at Katyn? (I)

Historians, political scientists, Western "experts" and anti-communist "liberals" in Russia have always attributed the Katyn massacre to the NKVD, the secret police of the Soviet Union, providing alleged evidence and documents that would prove such authorship. However, all indications suggest that the Katyn massacre is another historical falsification similar to the Ukrainian Holodomor or to the figures given on the "millions of deaths" of Soviet communism. The responsibility for what happened in Katyn, in light of the evidence and testimonies provided, was the work of the Nazis.

80 years after the events of Katyn (supposedly happened in April 1940) near the city of Smolensk (border with Belarus), where more than 20 thousand Polish soldiers were executed in a nearby forest, the propaganda of the cold war returns with force, and the renewed counterfeits of the West against Russia and the former USSR.

Definitely, there is not a single consistent proof of Soviet authorship in the Katyn massacre.

Interestingly, on June 18, 2012, the European Communities Court of Justice for Human Rights, following a claim by Polish relatives of the soldiers executed in Katyn, made a surprising decision: the "documents" provided by Gorbachev and Yeltsin, after the fall of the USSR (which we will talk about in the second part of this entry), indicating that Stalin and the Soviets were guilty of the execution of tens of thousands of Polish officers near Katyn, were false. A historical slap to the propagandists of the "Russian Katyn".

The alleged documents on the mass execution of Katyn, which appeared in the late 1980s, were gutted by one of the members of the Politburo of the CPSU Central Committee, Alexander Yakovlev (a more than likely US agent who trained in North American Columbia University in the late 1950s), turned out to be false. The European court did not even accept them for consideration.

The European Court was also unable to clearly decide who was responsible for the massacre since the judges did not have enough documentary evidence, although they spent more than a year studying all kinds of historical documents and archival evidence. Until around 1990, everyone was convinced that the Poles had been killed by the Germans. This decision of the EECC Court of Justice has been completely ignored by the propagandists of the Katyn myth.(...)

In the early 19th century, fueling the illusory hope of restoring Greater Poland, the Poles sided with Napoleon in the war of 1812. The Polish army, created with the help of the French, became part of the "Great Army "Of Bonaparte as the most reliable foreign contingent. This was the third Polish invasion of Russia.

The Polish uprising of 1830 began with the widespread extermination of the Russians. In all the churches they called for the indiscriminate murder of the Russians. In Warsaw, on Easter night, an entire battalion of the Russian army was taken by surprise in a church. 2,265 Russian soldiers and officers died.

The Polish state, born in November 1918, immediately showed its hostility towards Soviet Russia. With the help of the Entente, Poland begins preparations for a war against Russia. Polish politicians had the possibility that a forceful blow from the Polish army would be dealt to the Russian army.

Poland accompanied its aggressive intentions with a set of propaganda stereotypes about the aggressiveness of the Bolsheviks. Numerous proposals from the young Soviet state to conclude a peace treaty and establish diplomatic relations were rejected. Polish military operations against Russia in the spring of 1920 were undertaken by Poland, not Soviet Russia.

After tripling numerical superiority, Polish troops, along with the army of the Ukrainian nationalist military man Simon Petliura, launched a full-scale offensive along the entire Western Front from Pripyat to Dniester. This was the fourth Polish invasion of Russian lands. In early May 1920, Polish and Petliura fighters captured Kiev. The invasion of the allied forces of Poland and Petlyura was accompanied by brutal and inhuman retaliation against the civilian civilian population.

In the occupied regions of Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania, Polish invaders established bloody local governments, insulted and robbed civilians, or burned innocent people. Orthodox churches became Polish Christian churches, national schools closed.(...)

The total number of prisoners of war who died in those concentration camps is not known with certainty. However, there are various estimates based on the number of Soviet prisoners of war who returned from Polish captivity - there were 75,699 people. Russian historian Mikhail Meltiukhov estimates the number of prisoners killed at 60,000 people. Mortality among prisoners of war reached 50 people per day and as of mid-November 1920 it was 70 people per day. In the Tukholsky concentration camp alone, during the entire time of its existence, 22 thousand Red Army prisoners of war died.

In other words, the Poles established in their concentration camps a systematic policy of extermination with the Russians that reached the character of genocide, something that has been systematically silenced or hidden by the West in favor of Polish propaganda. For these crimes, the Poles today neither feel guilty nor have any remorse and disparagingly call it "Russian propaganda".

In the period between the two world wars, Poland repeatedly threatened to destroy Bolshevism and Russia as a state. Instead, as General Vladyslaw Anders, an active participant in Pan-Poland's intervention against Soviet Russia in 1919-1920, admitted, "There was never a real threat from the USSR to Poland."

Poland was never reluctant to attack Russia to hold, alongside Nazi Germany and Japan, a parade of victorious Polish-German troops on Moscow's Red Square. Marshal and national hero of Poland, the dictator Jozéf Pilsudsky, responsible for the mass extermination of Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusians and Jews, dreamed of coming to Moscow and writing "It is forbidden to speak Russian on the Kremlin wall!"

In January 1934, Poland was the first, five years before the USSR, to conclude a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany. In late 1936, the Anti-Komintern Pact was concluded with the signing of Germany and Japan, which were later joined by Italy, Spain, Romania, Hungary, Denmark, Finland, Croatia, Slovakia, Bulgaria, and the Republic of China (a state puppet formed by the Japanese empire in occupied territory).

The Poles, at that time, flatly refused to sign any agreement with the USSR, a country that despite having been throughout the history of countless Polish aggressions reached out to Poland. As early as mid-August 1939, the Polish Foreign Minister Józef Beck, in whose office there was a portrait of Hitler, declared that "we have no military agreement with the USSR, nor do we want to have one."

In developing the plan of attack against Poland in early 1939, Hitler did not take into account the overtly anti-Soviet policies of the Polish government before the war. He and his entire circle despised and hated the Poles as a nation (even though they had been his allies in the 1930s), which was natural since his supremacist ideology did not take into account other nations than the German one.

In August 1939, before the attack on Poland, Hitler ordered that all Polish women, men, and children be ruthlessly exterminated. During the years of occupation, the Nazis murdered more than 6 million Poles, representing 22 percent of the Polish population. 95% of genetically defective Poles were planned to be evicted from their homeland.

Soviet troops, by contrast, did not allow the Nazis to wipe Poland off the face of the earth. No other force in the world could do this. "Poles must be very stupid, Winston Churchill wrote in January 1944, if they don't understand who saved them and who for the second time in the first half of the 20th century gives them the possibility of true freedom and independence." These surprising statements by Churchill, a confessed anti-communist, had nothing to do with the Cold War preparations that the British premier against the USSR and the socialist countries subsequently devised and that was reflected in his famous speech by Fulton (USA).

More than 600,000 Soviet soldiers gave their lives, saving the cities and towns of Poland in battles with the Nazis. On the contrary, during the three weeks of the Polish-German war of 1939, there were attacks by Polish troops against units of the Red Army. As a consequence of these attacks, the Soviet army lost more than a thousand of its men.

The Polish troops, who were in the midst of the Second World War in the territory of the Soviet Union, refused to fight together with the Red Army against which it should be a common Nazi enemy and left for Iran in the summer of 1942 While in the USSR, Polish troops engaged in robbery in cities and towns and committed atrocities in them.

During World War II, up to half a million Polish volunteers fought on the eastern front against the USSR, as part of the Nazi Wehrmacht (the regular army). In fact, the Germans did not carry out a forced mobilization of Polish fighters to fight alongside Nazi Germany. In the SS, the Poles acted voluntarily and in the Wehrmacht, they posed as "Germans" or "semi-Germans".

During the four years of the war, the Red Army captured 4 million Wehrmacht soldiers and volunteers from 24 European nationalities. The Poles on that list were in seventh place (over 60,000 mercenaries), ahead of the Italians (about 49,000).

It should be noted that the mortality of German refugees in Polish camps in 1945-1946. reached 50%. In the Potulice camp in 1947-1949 half of the prisoners died of starvation, cold and harassment by the Polish guards. At the end of the war, four million Germans lived in Poland. According to estimates by the Union of German Exiles, the loss of the German population during the expulsion from Poland amounted to some 3 million people.

After the unmitigated defeat of the Wehrmacht in Stalingrad, it became clear that if nothing extraordinary happened in favor of the Hitler regime, nothing would change the course of events and the Third Reich would eventually implode in the very near future.

So the Nazis "discovered" in 1943, in the Katyn forest near Smolensk, a mass grave with Polish officers. The Germans immediately declared that, as a result of the opening of the graves, all those buried there had been executed by members of the Soviet Union's secret police, the NKVD (People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs), in the spring of 1940. .

The official statement on the Katyn massacre was made by the Nazi government and released by its Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, on April 13, 1943, in a statement speaking about the "terrible discovery of the crimes of the Jewish commissioners of the NKVD "in the Katyn Forest. With this propaganda device, Nazi Germany sought to divide the anti-Hitler coalition and win the war.

The significance of such a declaration by the Goebbels Department had a cunning undercurrent: the Polish government-in-exile would strongly oppose Moscow and thereby pressure the British who sheltered them in London to stop supporting the Kremlin. According to Berlin's calculations, the Poles would push the British and Americans to fight Stalin, which could imply a completely different development from the events in World War II.

But Goebbels' calculation was not justified: Britain at the time did not consider it profitable to believe in the "crime of the Bolsheviks". At the same time, the head of London's "Polish government", General Wladyslaw Sikorski, took a relentless position and began to truly become an obstacle to the great international policy of alliances between the United States, the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union.

The Vladislav Sikorsky government in London supported Goebbels's version and began to distribute it diligently, hoping that this would help regain power in Warsaw and spark a war between the USSR and its anti-Hitler coalition allies. Sikorsky supported the Germans' proposal to send to the Katyn region an "International Medical Commission" created by them under the auspices of the International Red Cross (IRC) with doctors selected by Germany, as well as experts from 13 allied countries and the German-occupied countries.

When his CRI commission reached Katyn, Goebbels demanded that his subordinates prepare everything, including a medical report tailored to the Nazis. Under pressure from the Nazis and so that events such as the terrible fate of Polish officers would not be repeated in the future, the agreement was signed by the majority of the members of the international commission.

Members of the commission, such as the doctor from the Department of Forensic Medicine at Sofia University, Marko Markov, and the Czech professor of forensic medicine, Frantisek Gajek, did not support Goebbels's version. The representatives of Vichy, France, Professor Castedo, and Spain, Professor Antonio Piga and Pascual, did not put their signature on the final document. After the war, all members of the international commission of forensic experts abandoned their conclusions in the spring of 1943.

The Polish Red Cross Technical Commission, which worked in Katyn in specially "prepared" places and under the control of the Germans, was unable to reach unequivocal conclusions about the causes of death of the Polish officers, although they discovered German cartridges used in the shooting of victims in the Katyn forest. Joseph Goebbels demanded to keep this a secret so that the Katyn case would not collapse.

A few weeks later, on July 4, 1943, General Sikorsky, his daughter Zofya, and the head of his cabinet, Brigadier General Tadeusz Klimecki, were killed in a plane crash near Gibraltar. Only the Czech pilot, Eduard Prchal, survived, who was unable to clearly explain why he put on a life jacket during this flight, when he generally did not.

The position of the "Western Allies" of the USSR in World War II on the Katyn issue began to change along with the deterioration of relations between Washington-London and Moscow, once the "cold war" began by the United States and its allies. The accusations against the USSR were continued by the American Madden commission in 1951-1952.

juliania , Jun 21 2020 0:08 utc | 46
Again, Victor@43, you make your point well, but perhaps we need to pay attention to what karlof1 is saying at the end of his post at 29:

"Instead, he sent a backhanded message to those managing the Outlaw US Empire about the fate they'll face if they continue on their path and exit the UN."

I'm not sure I understand the meaning of this (perhaps Karlof will elucidate when he has time) but I do note that the essay has a slightly different focus than b's first link as its title begins "The Real Lessons..."

So, what, we may ask, are those real lessons? Apparently the instances of Stalin's bad behavior are not such, or are not what we need to learn.

And further, what is the importance of the final paragraphs of the essay, which call for the Security Council leaders,(having agreed to do so) representing the nations which were allied successfully during WWII, to meet as soon as possible? Putin has given in his essay the example of the League of Nations, the failure of that body to prevent the second great war. I saw his final statement more as an urgent call for unity in present crisis than as a threat, but then I'm always a polyanna.

Patroklos , Jun 21 2020 0:39 utc | 47
And here I thought it was Tom Hanks and Brad Pitt who beat the Nazis on D-Day playing Call of Duty.
Kay Fabe , Jun 21 2020 1:13 utc | 48
Putin glosses over Stalins aggressions against Finland and his annexations of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and parts of Romania (Bessarabia, northern Bukovina and the Hertza region), the latter in violation of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact , are overlooked

He justifies Russia taking back land in Poland because he claimed that was theirs was but Hitler doing the same was not , and justified as a defensive measure against Germany while ignoring Poland was a threat to Germany , as they sought alliance with UK/US

Stalin had a very large and well equipped military and was resource rich unlike Germany.

Stalin began his buildup long before the war, perhaps anticipating Germanys military expansion, or perhaps he had designs on Europe himself. Remember one of FDR's first moves as President was recognizing Stalin and providing loans for trade in 1933

From Icebreaker (Suvorov)

In the early 1930s, American engineers traveled to the Soviet Union and built the Uralvagonzavod (the Ural Railroad Car Factory). Uralvagonzavod was built in such a manner that it could at any moment switch from producing railroad cars to producing tanks.

The most powerful aviation factory in the world was built in the Russian Far East. The city Komsomolsk-na-Amure was built in order to service this factory. Both the factory and the city were built according to American designs and furnished with the most modern American equipment.

Western technology was the main key to success. The Soviet Union became the world's biggest importer of machinery and equipment in the early 1930s, at a time when millions were starving due to his bloody war against peasants, which was called collectivization. The Soviet collectivization of 1932-1933 is estimated to have resulted in 3.5 to 5 million deaths from starvation, and another three to 4 million deaths as a result of intolerable conditions at the places of exile.

Cargo warplanes are used to deliver assault forces with parachutists to the enemy's rear. Soviet war-transport aviation used the American Douglas DC-3, which was considered to be the best cargo plane in the world at the start of World War II, as its primary cargo plane. In 1938, the U.S. government sold to Stalin the production license and the necessary amount of the most complex equipment for the DC-3's production. The Soviet Union also bought 20 DC-3s from the United States before the war.

In 1939, the Soviet Union produced six identical DC-3 aircraft; in 1940, it produced 51 DC-3 aircraft; and in 1941, it produced 237 DC-3 aircraft. During the entire war 2,419 DC-3s or equivalent planes were produced in Soviet factories.

In the years 1937-1941, the Soviet Army grew five-fold, from 1.1 million to 5.5 million. An additional 5.3 million people joined the ranks of the Red Army within one week of the beginning of the war. A minimum of 34.5 million people were used by the Red Army during the war. This huge increase in the size of the Soviet Army was accomplished primarily by ratification of the universal military draft in the Soviet Union on Sept. 1, 1939.

According to the new law, the draft age was reduced from 21 to 19, and in some categories to 18. This new law also allowed for the preparation of 18 million reservists, so that the Soviet Union continued to fill the ranks of the Red Army with many millions of soldiers as the war progressed.

The 9th Army appeared on the Romanian border on June 14, 1941, in the exact place where a year ago it had "liberated" Bessarabia. If the Soviet 9th Army had been allowed to attack Romania, Germany's main source of oil would have been lost and Germany would have been defeated. Hitler's attack of the Soviet Union prevented this from happening. The concentration of Soviet troops on Romanian borders presented a clear danger to Germany, and was a major reason for the German invasion of the Soviet Union.

Looking for blame one must not forget to look home. US finance and industrialists built up the Stalin and Hitler both with money, tech transfers, cartel agreements.

FDR pushed both the British and Poland into decisions which would lead to War.

When Germany tried to negotiate for Free Danzig , which was mostly German , Poland succumbed to US and British pressure/promises of aid, so they took a hardline and took measures to assume control over Free Danzig from the League of Nations. As a result Poles began to persecute ethnic Germans of which there were many , forcing some to flee Poland into Germany while those who wanted to protect their property stayed and faced the violence.

Yeah, Right , Jun 21 2020 1:43 utc | 49
Everyone in the West knows about the D-Day landings in Normandy on 6 June 1944.
150,000 men on the first day, building up to 2 million men during the peak of Operation Overlord.

Nobody in the West knows about Operation Bagration in the Eastern front, launched two weeks after the D-Day landings.
Vastly bigger in every way, and it ended in the complete annihilation of Army Group Centre and the severe mauling of Army Group North and Army Group South.

Operation Bagration was much more important to the defeat of Germany than Operation Overlord.

Indeed, the Red Army would have succeeded even if the Normandy landings had not taken place, whereas it is very, very unlikely that Operation Overlord would have succeeded if it were not for the Germans being hamstrung by the carnage that was taking place in the East.

Antonym , Jun 21 2020 1:51 utc | 50
Putin's own words in the center article of B: Stalin and his entourage, indeed, deserve many legitimate accusations. We remember the crimes committed by the regime against its own people and the horror of mass repressions. Lets keep that in mind and praise the USSR for defeating the Nazi regime, never Stalin.
As for Churchill; he was a typical upper class imperialist most of his life but did save GB in the critical early years of the Battle for Britain with his moral boosters.

Hitler showed how powerful a force nationalism can be to unite a people but simultaneously demonstrated that by focusing on a country's Ego and not its Soul how wrong it can end up. His "National Sozialismus" fouled both notions in the West and lead many to embrace globalism and uncontrolled capitalism, of which we see the results today. He had Germany under his black magic speeches for just one decade, but these after effects had Europe twisted for many.

Antonym , Jun 21 2020 2:11 utc | 51
Putin holds on to the existing choice of the 5 permanent UNSC veto holders, probably not to complicate matters now. The PRC was added in 1972 and the ROC (Taiwan) removed.

The next change should be the UK out, India in.

Victor , Jun 21 2020 2:14 utc | 52
H.Schmatz @ 45

There is a lot of cherry picking of history going on when it comes to who did what to whom in the lead up to WW2. All countries are a lot less innocent than they claim to be.

But I'm not sure why you are posting revisionist history about Katyn since the Russians already admitted that the Soviets were responsible for the crime.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/released-at-last-the-katyn-execution-order-signed-by-stalin-1957315.html

james , Jun 21 2020 2:19 utc | 53
@ victor... a lot of posters here are suspect of wikipedia, and any number of media outlets offering up their take on russia...

unfortunately if i was to believe the independent.co.uk - i would believe all the lies and bulshit around skripal and for the record - i don't... a better source to back up your viewpoint is needed.. thanks..

bystander 04 , Jun 21 2020 4:05 utc | 54
Schmatz@45 - as Victor at 52 says, there is no need to suspect anyone else for massacre in Katyn (and other places btw), Russians admitted it. If you wish to see the signatures, a book by Pavel Sudoplatov "Special Tasks" (available on Amazon) has a facsimile copy of the order signed by Beria, Stalin and 2 or 3 more - to liquidate the Polish POW´s...
Oscar Peterson , Jun 21 2020 4:09 utc | 55
@17 Victor

"No real errors in Putin's excellent essay, but some glossing over of certain major incidents, including the arrests, deportations and executions of thousands of Poles committed by the Soviets when they invaded Poland, the absorption of the Baltic countries, and the war with Finland. Unfortunately, omitting important details just gives ammunition to the many Putin haters to claim that this is just more Russian historical revisionism and propaganda."

I agree on the Baltic states. I think it's the one part of Putin's essay I'd take issue with.

He should have made the strategic case for why the USSR felt compelled to take control of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. The Baltic coastline and approach to Leningrad were both very significant. Of course it's true that Russia lost control of all three for most of the war, but that doesn't change the strategic validity of Soviet policy in 1940.

The same thing goes for Soviet demands to control some coastal area and islands in Finland which led to the Soviet-Finnish War of 1939-40.

Instead of making a strategic case, Putin tries to whitewash the Russian takeover by claiming "consent." That is a weak argument and the only real point of weakness I see in his essay.

Mariátegui , Jun 21 2020 4:34 utc | 56
Victor @ 52

There is certainly enough amount of evidence to be suspicious of the Katyn events

Here is some

[Jun 21, 2020] The Miracle of Salisbury. The Skripals Affair - Global ResearchGlobal Research - Centre for Research on Globalization

Jun 21, 2020 | www.globalresearch.ca

The Miracle of Salisbury. The Skripals Affair By Craig Murray Global Research, June 17, 2020 Craig Murray 16 June 2020 Region: Europe Theme: Intelligence , Law and Justice , Media Disinformation

It turns out that the BBC really does believe that God is an Englishman. When the simple impossibility of the official story on the Skripals finally overwhelmed the dramatists, they resorted to Divine Intervention for an explanation – as propagandists have done for millennia.

This particular piece of script from Episode 2 of The Salisbury Poisonings deserves an induction in the Propaganda Hall of Fame:

Porton Down Man: I've got the reports from the Bailey house

Public Health Woman: Tell me, how many hits?

Porton Down Man: It was found in almost every room of the house. Kitchen, bathroom, living room, bedrooms. It was even on the light switches. We found it in the family car too. But his wife and children haven't been affected. I like to think of myself as a man of science, but the only word for that is a miracle.

Well, it certainly would be a miracle that the family lived for a week in the house without touching a light switch. But miracle is not really the "only word for that". Nonsense is a good word. Bullshit is a ruder version. Lie is entirely appropriate in these circumstances.

Because that was not the only miracle on display. We were told specifically that the Skripals had trailed novichok all over Zizzis and the Bishops Mill pub, leaving multiple deadly deposits, dozens of them in total, which miraculously nobody had touched. We were told that Detective Bailey was found to have left multiple deadly deposits of novichok on everything he touched in a busy police station, but over several days before it was closed down nobody had touched any of them, which must be an even bigger miracle than the Baileys' home.

Perhaps even more amazingly, as the Skripals spread novichok all over the restaurant and the pub, nobody who served them had been harmed, nobody who took their payment. The man who went through Sergei's wallet to learn his identity from his credit cards was not poisoned. The people giving first aid were not poisoned. The ducks Sergei fed were not poisoned. The little boy he fed the ducks with was not poisoned. So many miracles. If God were not an Englishman, Salisbury would have been in real trouble, evidently.

The conclusion of episode two showed Charlie Rowley fishing out the perfume bottle from the charity bin at least two months in the timeline before this really happened, thus neatly sidestepping one of the most glaring impossibilities in the entire official story. I think we can forgive the BBC that lie – there are only so many instances of divine intervention in the story the public can be expected to buy in one episode.

It is fascinating to see that the construction of this edifice of lies was a joint venture between the BBC and the security services' house journal, the Guardian. Not only is all round pro-war propagandist "Colonel" Hamish De Bretton Gordon credited as Military Advisor, but Guardian journalists Caroline Bannock and Steven Morris are credited as Script Consultants, which I presume means they fed in the raw lies for the scriptwriters to shape into miracles.

Now here is an interesting ethical point for readers of the Guardian. The Guardian published in the last fortnight two articles by Morris and Bannock that purported to be reporting on the production of the drama and its authenticity, without revealing to the readers that these full time Guardian journalists were in fact a part of the BBC project. That is unethical and unprofessional in a number of quite startling ways. But then it is the Guardian.

[Full disclosure. I shared a flat with Caroline at university. She was an honest person in those days.]

Again, rather than pepper this article with links, I urge you to read this comprehensive article , which contains plenty of links and remains entirely unanswered.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

The original source of this article is Craig Murray

[Jun 20, 2020] Fatal mistake of the USSR in the WWII

Highly recommended!
Jun 20, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

RussianSoul , Jun 20 2020 19:48 utc | 18

Where Soviet Union or Russia were wrong was that after kicking out the Nazis from Soviet Union they should have stopped right there and not marched all the way to Berlin.

They should have left Poland and other occupied states to deal with it themselves :-).

[Jun 20, 2020] Putin On World War II

Jun 20, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Putin On World War II james , Jun 20 2020 17:16 utc | 1

Due to decades of Hollywood propaganda many people in "western" countries believe that the U.S. did the most to defeat the Nazis during World War II.

bigger

Nothing could be further from the truth.

The President of Russia Vladimir Putin has taken the opportunity of the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II to describe the build-up to the war, the diplomatic and military considerations Russia took into account during that time, and the results of the allies' victory.

His essay was published in multiple languages on the Website of the Kremlin:

75th Anniversary of the Great Victory: Shared Responsibility to History and our Future .

The English version is also published in the National Interest magazine:

Vladimir Putin: The Real Lessons of the 75th Anniversary of World War II .

The part with the Russian view of the behavior of various nation in the late 1930s is most interesting. But this passage, related to the graphic above, is also very relevant:

The Soviet Union and the Red Army, no matter what anyone is trying to prove today, made the main and crucial contribution to the defeat of Nazism.
...
This is a report of February 1945 on reparation from Germany by the Allied Commission on Reparations headed by Ivan Maisky. The Commission's task was to define a formula according to which defeated Germany would have to pay for the damages sustained by the victor powers. The Commission concluded that "the number of soldier-days spent by Germany on the Soviet front is at least 10 times higher than on all other allied fronts. The Soviet front also had to handle four-fifths of German tanks and about two-thirds of German aircraft." On the whole, the USSR accounted for about 75 percent of all military efforts undertaken by the Anti-Hitler Coalition. During the war period, the Red Army "ground up" 626 divisions of the Axis states, of which 508 were German.

On April 28, 1942, Franklin D. Roosevelt said in his address to the American nation: "These Russian forces have destroyed and are destroying more armed power of our enemies – troops, planes, tanks, and guns – than all the other United Nations put together." Winston Churchill in his message to Joseph Stalin of September 27, 1944, wrote that "it is the Russian army that tore the guts out of the German military machine "

Such an assessment has resonated throughout the world. Because these words are the great truth, which no one doubted then. Almost 27 million Soviet citizens lost their lives on the fronts, in German prisons, starved to death and were bombed, died in ghettos and furnaces of the Nazi death camps. The USSR lost one in seven of its citizens, the UK lost one in 127, and the USA lost one in 320.

As a German and former officer who has read quite a bit about the war I agree with the Russian view. It was the little acknowledged industrial power of the Soviet Union and the remarkable dedication of the Red Army soldiers that defeated the German Wehrmacht.

At the end of his essay Putin defends the veto power of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council. In his view it has prevented that another clash on a global scale has happened since World War II ended. Putin rejects attempts to abolish that system.

I have found no major flaw with the historic facts in the essay and recommend to read it in full.

Posted by b at 17:07 UTC | Comments (22) thanks for highlighting this b.... the graph at the top is very telling of how many people remain fairly ignorant of the reality on the ground.. putins speech and text are well worth the read... s and karlof1 posted a link on the open thread and some of us were talking about it their.... i found putins comments on the UN especially interesting...

I wonder if the brainwashing going on in the usa about how bad the UN is, is another example of americans being dumbed right down into believing the UN is useless? that is what it looks like to me... some of us aren't buying that and i am glad to see putin make some comments on that as well... thanks for highlighting this.. revisionist history seems to be a speciality of some..

james , Jun 20 2020 17:16 utc | 1

Babyl-on , Jun 20 2020 17:25 utc | 2
When I read here and in the article the quotes from Churchill and the "west" praising Russia's conduct of the war against fascism I can't help but translate them into praise for Hitler should he have won. British and US oligarchs were funding and supporting Hitler all along, which is well documented. For the oligarchy it made little difference who won.

The strategy of the imperial oligarchy was to let all its potential competitors deplete their resources then move in with its full power when the outcome had already been determined and pray on their weakness. It worked as we see in the global imperial power of the Western oligarchy as engineered by Roosevelt after the war which has ruled now for 75 years.

vk , Jun 20 2020 17:27 utc | 3
What Putin wrote already was common sense among historians, but it is good to see it becoming more mainstream.

My theory about the USA trying to get the credit for defeating the Third Reich - even though it has the victory against Japan (an empire that made the Third Reich look like Human Rights lovers) - comes from the fact that the European Peninsula became the major theater of the Cold War. The USA had then to create a narrative that could justify its supremacy over Western Europe, and its attempts to "liberate" Eastern Europe.

Yes, the Korean War happened in the early 1950s, but Japan was secured, Soviet access to warm water port in Asia was thus blocked and, after the Mao-Nixon pact of 1972, China (and thus North Korea) was out of the Soviet sphere. That made the European Peninsula even more important. Indeed, the threat of invading and occupying West Berlin was one of the greatest leverages the Soviets had and used against the USA during the whole Cold War. This leverage became even more pronounced after the Soviets successfully crushed the Hungarian counter-revolution of 1956, which sobered up the CIA and the hampered the USG's ambitions on absorbing Eastern Europe by propaganda and subversion warfare.

Prof K , Jun 20 2020 17:29 utc | 4
Putin's main arguments are fully in accord with British historian, Richard Overy's very important book, Russia's War.
Dirk , Jun 20 2020 17:37 utc | 6
The most baffling news to me recently was when I found out that Poland invaded the CSSR together with Hitler and occupied a part of the Czech Republic in March 1939 - and I went through several decades of WW2 "education" just as everyone. Not even Wikipedia mentions the Polish contribution to the invasion and occupation of the CSSR, which is very telling.

It sheds an entirely new light on the entire development right before WW2, in which Hitler went all-in to give Poland something for the future return of Danzig. Poland took it, but didn't realize that it was part of a deal, so Hitler activated Plan B. The process was certainly aggressive and kicked the Czechs interests as a people/nation, but the overall plan (I guess developed by Ribbentrop) makes a lot of sense. It is by far not irrational as it is usually portrayed.

I guess, I am now a "revisionist".

Joshua , Jun 20 2020 17:40 utc | 7
I read the article when it was posted (in full) on Southfront.
It is excellent. Detailed, accurate, insightful, as well as well composed and written.
I recommend that everyone who is able to do so read this article in its entirety.
I also fully agree with the position of Mr. Putin, as stated in his writing.
bevin , Jun 20 2020 17:41 utc | 8
You are quite correct. All historians know that the role of the Soviet Union in the war was decisive. When I was a child, growing up in British military circles, nobody troubled to deny it, while the role of the United States was generally regarded as very minor.
I recall, passing through the Suez Canal on a troopship bound for Malaya, the immense enthusiasm and loud cheering of the British troops for the crew of a Soviet destroyer, parading on deck while at anchor in the sweetwater lake. It drove the senior officers mad but the troops, mostly young working class conscripts, understood that the Red Army had saved millions of British lives.
As b says, however, by far the most interesting part of Putin's summary is that outlining the facts of the gyrating foreign policies of the United Kingdom in the 1930s.
Again most of what Putin relates is well known to honest historians. It used to be well known-thanks largely to the work of the Left- that the well understood strategy of the Tories, and most of the US business class, was to support a German invasion of the Soviet Union. Which is why the Nazi economy rested so heavily on US capital- it was expected to pay political as well as financial dividends by erasing the Communist threat (and, by implication that of socialism too).
I saw not a single error in Putin's history. It coincides precisely with the analysis I learned, as a young socialist, from German emigres. One of them, Hans Hess, who was a long time director of an Art Gallery in the north of England, told us that he, at the time in Paris, had greeted the news of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact with relief. He understood that it meant that the policy of appeasement had failed, and that the Soviet Union would survive and prevail.
It needs to be understood that, before the US Cold War, based on the support it got from the isolationist, ultra right wing Republicans who had never really warmed to the World War, the view that Putin gives was widely shared by all 'patriotic' (anti collaborationist) political currents in western Europe. The contempt with which Baldwin, Chamberlain and their ilk were regarded in the UK used to be enormous- they were held to be little short of traitors. Seventy years later they and their US equivalents, the Vichy supporters in France and Nazi collaborators from all over Europe (including Mussolini's political heirs) dominate European politics.
It is a badge of honour for Russians to be hated by these scum.
vk , Jun 20 2020 17:48 utc | 9
@ Posted by: Dirk | Jun 20 2020 17:37 utc | 6

Yeah, Wikipedia is close to useless for WWII. Too much propaganda.

JCC , Jun 20 2020 17:57 utc | 10
The Soviet Union put together a 20 part documentary, The Unknown War, with the assistance of the U.S in 1978 to tell their part of the story. Mandatory watching for any history buffs, or those who want to expand their horizons. An incredible 30 hours of footage from the Soviet perspective. Narrated by Burt Lancaster.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wI3rqO42lVc

oldhippie , Jun 20 2020 18:39 utc | 11
When I was a history student, undergrad and grad, at University of Illinois in 1970s, students of European history were taught exactly Putin's view. Students of American history were taught the Hollywood view. The American side of the History department viewed the entire faculty and student body on the European side as a pack of disloyal Communists. The European side saw the American side as exactly what they were - schoolteachers and future schoolteachers. Most of my old profs were glad to get out. Any profs known since retired early as precisely this issue made the job impossible. Of course at U of I there was and remains a large contingent of Eastern European descendants of Nazi collaborators who are very vocal and completely immune to criticism. A protected class. Open display of Nazi regalia, memorabilia, salutes, songs were always 100% approved because these are after all the victims of Soviet oppression.
Constantine , Jun 20 2020 19:50 utc | 19
Posted by: Babyl-on | Jun 20 2020 17:25 utc | 2

While it is true that numerous folks among the Anglo-American elites would be okay with a German victory (particularly if it didn't involve the trashing of their own imperial regimes), Churchill wasn't one of them. For all his odious aspects, this was a defining characteristic of his as a British nationalist: he wouldn't countenance any compromise with the Axis. In fact, it is safe to say that he played a very important role in keeping Britain in the war and not making any sort of peace with Germany after the fall of France.

On the other hand, it is an absolute truth that Hitler and Mussolini were highly respected among western capitalists who supported the military reinvigoration of the Third Reich. Mussolini was treated with more favour, but Hitler was also seen positively, not least for his racialist and racist views which coincided with those of the official Anglo-sphere.

Ike , Jun 20 2020 20:17 utc | 20
It is interesting to see in Putin's essay confirmation that the roots of WW11 were the greedy and inhumane attitudes of France and The UK to German reparations for WWI. Today we have The UK France and the USA losing the war in Syria and now imposing sanctions on the Syrian people. In Libya they have created chaos and the same bunch of war criminals do f--- all to assist the country. I have read elsewhere that Churchill could have stopped WWII much earlier and saved many lives' including the thousands killed in the Dresden firebombing, but wanted a complete surrender from Germany rather than a conditional one and that the Japanese were ready to surrender before the atomic bombs were dropped as the Soviet Army was poised to invade Japan after cleaning up China. The USA needed a quick resolution and an extravagant display of power to establish its global supremacy however so dropped the bombs anyway killing hundreds of thousands of civilians.
All facts that are glossed over by most western publications.
It is disturbing that no Western leaders are attending the 75th anniversary celebrations of the end of WWII in Moscow.
I am very grateful that at least one of the current super-powers is led by the humane, diplomatic, non-empire building Vladimir Putin.
juliania , Jun 20 2020 20:18 utc | 21
Victor@17, you cannot be blamed for wanting to add to the essay important details, but I don't think the charge of revisionism is warranted. In the essay, Putin says this:
"...Stalin and his entourage, indeed, deserve many legitimate accusations. We remember the crimes committed by the regime against its own people and the horror of mass repressions. In other words, there are many things the Soviet leaders can be reproached for, but poor understanding of the nature of external threats is not one of them..."

That's a pretty strong statement. Putin is making clear his essay focuses on misrepresented aspects of Russia's involvement in the war. This is not a blanket endorsement of all that took place, but a template for careful study of events and increased understanding as documents pertaining to them become available.

Thanks for your input.

lgfocus , Jun 20 2020 20:51 utc | 22
As an American student with a class in "Soviet History" in the 1960's during the Cold War, what President Putin said about the War is what I was taught at the time.

I don't know when things changed. Probably just Americans lack of knowledge of history and belief in their exceptionalism.

[Jun 19, 2020] The USG' s definition of Dictator

Highly recommended!
Jun 19, 2020 | www.theamericanconservative.com

Cyndy Tyler L RNY • 8 hours ago

The USG' s definition of Dictator.

DICTATOR, Noun: Someone who does not let American CEOs dictate how their country is run

[Jun 16, 2020] It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future (incorrectly attributed to Yogi Berra)

Jun 16, 2020 | carnegieendowment.org

... There are no signs that the [USA-Russia] relationship will improve in the near future.

[Jun 16, 2020] It would be hard to have a FEMEN in the USSR of the 80s.

Jun 16, 2020 | www.unz.com

Malla , says: June 16, 2020 at 2:18 pm GMT

Ironically, if any of the right-wing figures of whom Soros is a favorite target were aware of his instrumental role in the fall of communism staging the various CIA-backed protest movements in Eastern Europe that toppled socialist governments, he would likely not be such a subject of their derision.

Yeah, those Warsaw Pact regimes had to fall so that the populations of Eastern Europe (and maybe Mongolia & Central Asia) could be exposed to the much more poisonous Cultural Marxist "culture" from the West. It would be hard to have a FEMEN in the USSR of the 80s.

[Jun 16, 2020] Progressive pseudo-democracy vs liberal democracy

Jun 16, 2020 | www.unz.com

Stogumber , says: Show Comment June 13, 2020 at 12:40 pm GMT

Cook here represents a tradition of progressive pseudo-democracy which contradicts liberal democracy.
In progressive pseudo-democracy, men "at the side of history" have a privilege in destroying other people's values.
In liberal democracy, the defenders of the old system are recognized as a legitimate opposition with the possibility of becoming the government again. so there are no privileges for "men at the side of history". Of course there can be changes who are, in hindsight, consensually accepted by both sides. Nearly nobody sees a reason to reestablish slavery – but the acceptance of a gollywog or the acceptance of a statue is not slavery, not even similar to it. The "pain" of people who conflate these matters is self-inflicted.

[Jun 16, 2020] No form of the word 'democracy' is found in the US Declaration of Independence or Constitution. To the contrary, democracy is forbidden by Constitution Article IV Section 4.

Jun 16, 2020 | www.unz.com

schnellandine , says: Show Comment June 13, 2020 at 3:16 am GMT

Any article discussing 'democracy' without defining it is the work of a hack.

Oh yes, it's supposed that everyone knows 'democracy'. He doesn't. It's a bullshit word meant to gloss around the writer's refusal to reason by way of first principles. It's cowardice.

We are all supposed to accept as the major premise that democracy's good, and thus desirable. Ergo, if the writer can somehow tie his conclusion to 'democratic' roots, he's carried the day.

Shameless fraud. Thousands of words of spittle.

Interesting truth: No form of the word 'democracy' is found in the US Declaration of Independence or Constitution. To the contrary, democracy is forbidden by Constitution Article IV Section 4.

Beavertales , says: Show Comment June 12, 2020 at 9:12 pm GMT
The Holocaust memorial museum in Washington should be stormed by Americans outraged by Israel's theft of US resources and its corruption of US politics, and for Israel's attack on the USS Liberty.

This may or may not include the defenestration of the directors, the casting of exhibits into the street, and the bulldozing of the entire structure into a landfill.

Yes, more democratic tradition, please, until justice is done and seen to be done.

[Jun 16, 2020] Intellectual trends which may affect Putin

Jun 16, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

vk , Jun 15 2020 23:35 utc | 66

Very interesting article by Vladimir Odintsov:

Vestiges of the American Dream

It brings this very curious information that I wasn't aware of:

On May 15, the US Department of the Treasury released Treasury International Capital (TIC) data for March 2020. It showed that total foreign ownership of Treasuries dropped by $256.6 billion to $6.81 trillion.

I already knew there was a race to the Renminbi since China recovered from the first wave of the pandemic (it is mentioned in at least two op-pieces in the Asia Times), but I didn't know there was a correspondent race from the USD. Let's remember: in 2008, there was a race to the USD; the USD became stronger than ever with that crisis, and America's dominance in the financial sector strengthened, not weakened.

Now it may be different. The USD is getting weaker, not stronger. Faith in the USA is weaning.

Also there's this nice little piece, very poetic, whose only value is in the fact that it was written by an American who loves his country and served in the Army:

America Without the Sugar Coating: Wishing Ill Will On Our World

--//--

@ Posted by: juliania | Jun 15 2020 22:55 utc | 61

What will become of "Putin's Russia" is a very interesting topic.

Pepe Escobar's interview with Karaganov made it look like Russia's plan is to serve as some kind of leader of the "non-aligned" countries in a future China-USA bipolar world order. I found it too vague, could mean anything.

However, there's another, much more interesting, phenomenon: the rise of some right-wing intellectuals from Russia and the USA who are trying to revive what we call nowadays as "paleoconservatism". They are the Martyanovs, Dugins, Korybkos the guys who write for Unz and The Saker, the Russia Insider team around there.

Those "new paleoconservatives" differentiate themselves in the sense that they really try very hard to be intellectuals -- that is, they do not adopt the irrational methodology of the typical far-right/neofacism, they abhor the neocons/neoliberals, they abhor the so-called "woke left/cultural marxists/pluralists/SJWs" (which they frequently associate, if not equate, to the neoliberals), they believe in some kind of a concept of race or racially determined culture based on geography and climate, they certainly abhor scientific socialism (some of them even, under absurd and extremely dumbed down arguments, directly stating Marx's theory was wrong) but they also abhor Nazism - albeit for reasons that are not, let's say, "orthodox". They are also against imperialism as the USA is practicing right now, but not against "self-defense" imperialism, that is, the line is blurry.

But the most important factor that unites this group is their blind faith in Christianism. They somehow believe that if you fuse capitalism (which, for many of them is not even a system, but human nature itself) with Christian values (it doesn't need to be Christian religion per se, you don't need to be a practicing Christian), you somehow get the perfect mix between man's animal side (capitalism) and spiritual side (Christianism). It's like your traditional post-war social-democracy, with the difference that they put Christianism in socialism's place. As a result, you go back to the good ol' times, more or less in the 1950s, where everything was, allegedly, "in their place".

This obsession with Christianism makes me, jokingly, to call this coterie as the "Neobyzantines" - a bizarre postmodern chimera born from the degeneration of late stage capitalism.

But this is the boring part. The cool part about the Neobyzantines is the fact that they have a geopolitical policy. What's this policy? You guessed it right: they want a Christian confederation composed of the entire Northern Atlantic (NATO countries)... plus Russia. This, the Neobyzantines say, will save Christianism (and the correspondent white race) from subjugation and hegemony of the socialist Yellows (some of them also have a racial-based theory about why socialism/communism naturally occurs in East Asia; for some of them, South Korea and Japan are even communist themselves already).

We know Putin was raised as a Neobyzantine. He's an Ocidentalist that believed in the concept of an European civilization. That's why, in my opinion, he plays such a good sport with the Orthodox Church, as it is a living fossil of the times of Peter the Great etc. etc. However, as time passed, he became increasingly disillusioned with the USA and the EU, and the ties were definitely broken with the invasion and partition of the Ukraine in 2014. His policies, therefore, clearly became more Eurasianist, but that certainly was the result of necessity, not free will.

Is Putin may be converting himself to "Neobyzantism"? Will Neobyzantism really become a thing, or will it just be thrown to the dustbin of History, as was many other ideologies of the past of which only a Historian knows nowadays?

ptb , Jun 16 2020 1:28 utc | 78

@vk 66

re: neo-Byzanyines. Clever. And there may be something to that idea. Certainly the general flavor of Christian conservatism you describe holds some real currency among the national security types. However, despite ideological commonality across borders, I think it is clearly nationalist and not internationalist.

The more theatrical "paleo" versions stand out, if only for being one of the few cohesive alternatives to neoliberalism (socialism and socdem being sadly moribund). But if you dial down the drama and take away the contrarian personalities, then pan-nationalist Christian conservatism (and for that matter, the Islamic or Hindu analogs) can be integrated into neoliberalism too. I don't see why not.

Considering the post-millennial generations may well end up in a Byzantium of some kind in some decades, this is worth following up on.

Richard Steven Hack , Jun 16 2020 1:53 utc | 80
Posted by: vk | Jun 15 2020 23:35 utc | 66 Will Neobyzantism really become a thing, or will it just be thrown to the dustbin of History, as was many other ideologies of the past of which only a Historian knows nowadays?

I've noticed that trend as well - the rise of the Russian Orthodox Church and the rise of conservatism in Russia. I see it reflected in the attitudes on the Crosstalk show that I used to watch regularly.

I agree that trying to resurrect Christianity is a major error. It will just lead to even greater anti-intellectualism and irrational belief systems, and possibly even eventually into a "theocracy" - hardly conducive to freedom. As a rabid atheist myself, I despise all of this.

vk , Jun 16 2020 2:26 utc | 83
@ Posted by: ptb | Jun 16 2020 1:28 utc | 78

I think that, if we take it from your approach, the problem with the neobyzantines is more related to the fact that they can't accept being juniors to the "yellows" (i.e. a non-white, non-Christian people) than with Chinese-style socialism. They are like the reverse Chicoms in this sense (and, if that's indeed the case, they are very different than the American Bannonist far-right).

The Bannonists (I think Bannon himself coin his ideology as "Neopopulism" or something like that) believe in the reverse case: it is good that the Chinese are to hegemonize the world in the 21st Century - as long as they do so in a capitalist form, not in a socialist one, that is, without the CCP at the helm.

Indeed, neoliberalism is very malleable, and for one very simple reason: it is not an ideology per se, but a doctrine. Doctrines are not as much incisive as ideologies, but they have the advantage of being very adaptable and quickly digestible. For example: who, at the beginning of the 1970s, would think that - of all places - neoliberalism would find its most fertile ground in Latin America? Theoretically, Latin America should be the anti-neoliberalism area of the world par excellence, as it was the subcontinent that suffered the most (except, maybe, Africa - but Africa was razed to the ground, there's no material there to any doctrine or ideology to sprout) under the hands of American neocolonialism. But here we are: the lack of a strong revolutionary movement in Latin America gave birth to a strong inferiority complex, which created a political vacuum in which neoliberalism fitted perfectly (Mexico, then Ménem's "Peripheral Realism", then FHC's "we must be the last of the top" in Brazil).

Neoliberalism's success story in Latin America is a warning example for historians to never stick to a sociological formula either for trying to explain History or to try to predict History. There's always the human factor, that "x" factor that only good old method of studying History can decipher.

--//--

@ Posted by: Richard Steven Hack | Jun 16 2020 1:53 utc | 80

I use the term "Neobyzantine" as some kind of pejorative joke (my humor is very dark). I don't think those who I would classify as "neobyzantine" feed any illusions about the real Byzantine Empire - which, as a Christian Empire, was an absolute farce: it was plagued with schisms after schism inside Christianism that castigated them with endless drama, exiles, executions, dead emperors and civil wars. No Byzantine citizen ever believed Christianity would rise someday to become a world religion: it was under the hands of the Western European medieval lords and their descendants that it became so (conquests of America, Africa, Oceania and SE Asia).

It is a myth Christianism ever brought unity to the Roman Empire, but it may be true that the early Christian emperors (from Constantine the Great onward) thought it would. If Constantine and his successors really thought that, then they were to be proven completely wrong - as today's schism between Catholics, Protestants and Orthodox are to serve as living evidence.

ptb , Jun 16 2020 3:15 utc | 86
@vk 83

I think that, if we take it from your approach, the problem with the neobyzantines is more related to the fact that they can't accept being juniors to the "yellows"

Well, not sure how that fits into the byzantine analogy, but I do think it is a central unifying theme of conservatives in the west who are taking an anti-neoliberal position.

I think the position toward capitalism is something between nuanced and contradictory, or at least very heterogenous. There is plenty of awareness of its ills of a state captive to private $ and corps. Yet the ideal of free enterprise is celebrated without reservation, with a real hope for markets that could in theory become non dysfunctional. So no, IMO anti-neoliberal conservatives in the US are not socialist in the slightest (except the military has universal health and education). Basically very sympathetic to the "libertarian" side of it. But that may be unique to the US vs the rest of the "west". I mean this is all stereotyping very much, everyone has their own emphasis. Also the economic idea are maybe not so important to the byzantium / historical analogy, we might happen to prioritize them higher ourselves.

Where does the Chinese socialism fit in? That is contradictory too. One has to make a judgment of capitalism with Chinese characteristics, and also Socialism with Chinese characteristics. Neither of those is a direct translation of the European versions of them. You also have a strong and intimate state power, which the nationalists might actually be jealous of but I find off-putting. I do think the commonality there, for the would-be neobyzantines is, again, simple national power.

Kindof like Bannonites, except he represents just one version of this. Specifically, his version of a conservative anti-neoliberal position is especially uninteresting IMO. And I dont take most of what he says at face value anyhow. Just a particularly unattractive nationalist IMO... Finally, I don't think he would make a good byzantine, but maybe I am romanticizing the idea in my head a little.

vk , Jun 16 2020 4:02 utc | 90
@ Posted by: ptb | Jun 16 2020 3:15 utc | 86

Yes, I agree: the Bannonites are certainly not Neobyzantines. They are more like the traditional fascists: radical in form, conservative in essence. They are like agents of chaos - a domesticated chaos, of course.

The unifying factor of the Neobyzantines, in my opinion, is the fact that they believe a universalized (forced upon the masses) Christian moral code can save capitalism. In their opinion, it is greed by the rich and the depravity of the leftists that is the problem.

They believe that the end of the USSR and the slow rise of China (plus, I guess, the failure of the West in Christianizing the Middle East and Asia) put an end or proved wrong the existence of economic systems. In this sense, they lowkey agree with Fukuyama in essence, albeit kot in form. This would also make the Neobyzantines part of the Postmodern constellation of ideologies, which preach absolute relativism.

--//--

@ Posted by: A User | Jun 16 2020 3:36 utc | 87

Yes, if you think about it, the American Revolution was a petite-bourgoeis revolution: it was just a bunch of small planters not wanting to pay taxes.

Thomas Jefferson certainly didn't imagine he was building the world's future sole superpower. None of the founding fathers imagined that.

However, the American Revolution was important in the sense it was the first European colony to achieve independency without consent of it metropolis. It showed the other colonies it was possible. We know the American case would never be replicated, but it inspired the colonised a world without metropoleis was possible, and opened way for the end of the old colonial system in 1945.

King Lear , Jun 16 2020 4:08 utc | 91
Vk #66
I don't understand your ridiculous concern that their will be some grand alliance of the "White Christian" world (the U$, Russia, and the NATO/EU puppets) along with some assorted Non-White, Non-Christian, countries (India, Japan, South Korea, etc.), against "Yellow Socialist China". In reality the only "Prominent" person who has entertained this anachronistic lunacy is the wannabe fascist Drunkard known as Steve Bannon, who has no real impact on anything beyond grifting illiterate Trump supporters (The last I heard of him, he was drunkenly proclaiming the creation of a "New Federal State of China's" with some former Chinese "Communist" billionaire on a dingy boat in New York Harbor, LMAO". In reality most of the "Neobyzantine" fools you mentioned in both the U$ and Russia, are big advocates of the phony idea that China is a "rising", "Socialist", superpower that is an alternative to the Unipolar, U$-led, world order, as evidenced that the "Unz Review" and "The Saker" are filled with articles by Pro-China hacks such as Pepe Escobar. Personally, I view the "Neobyzantines" as a bunch of hacks and grifters who in Russia seek to brainwash the population into believing that the USSR was an evil "Judeo-Bolshevik" abomination while Putin's Russia is an "Orthodox Christian" paradise and rising Superpower, that is In alliance with the "good Socialist" China, in a "New Cold War" with the U$, all while covering up the fact that Putin's Russia is a utter joke compared to the USSR, due to its population wallowing in poverty and degeneracy (so much for those Orthodox values,
LOL), and it losing half its territory and all its Geopolitical alliances and ideological support (due to its rejection of Marxism-Leninism). In the U$, these quacks appeal to a very narrow group of disenfranchised U$ right-wingers who seem to believe that Russia and China represent some Conservative utopia, LOL. In conclusion, these people are much less significant then you make them out to be and just serve as mere propagandists for the phony New Cold War" of the U$ vs. Russia and China which like I said in my previous post is Fake wrestling to confuse and distract the populations of all three countries as they are oppressed by the same Neoliberal policies that all three governments implement.

[Jun 15, 2020] Opinion Are Neocons Getting Ready to Ally With Hillary Clinton by Jacob Heilbrunn

Jul 05, 2014 | www.nytimes.com
Neocons like the historian Robert Kagan may be connecting with Hillary Clinton to try to regain influence in foreign policy. Credit... Left, Stephanie Sinclair/VII via Corbis; right, Colin McPherson/Corbis

WASHINGTON -- AFTER nearly a decade in the political wilderness, the neoconservative movement is back, using the turmoil in Iraq and Ukraine to claim that it is President Obama, not the movement's interventionist foreign policy that dominated early George W. Bush-era Washington, that bears responsibility for the current round of global crises.

Even as they castigate Mr. Obama, the neocons may be preparing a more brazen feat: aligning themselves with Hillary Rodham Clinton and her nascent presidential campaign, in a bid to return to the driver's seat of American foreign policy.

To be sure, the careers and reputations of the older generation of neocons -- Paul D. Wolfowitz, L. Paul Bremer III, Douglas J. Feith, Richard N. Perle -- are permanently buried in the sands of Iraq. And not all of them are eager to switch parties: In April, William Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard, said that as president Mrs. Clinton would "be a dutiful chaperone of further American decline."

But others appear to envisage a different direction -- one that might allow them to restore the neocon brand, at a time when their erstwhile home in the Republican Party is turning away from its traditional interventionist foreign policy.

It's not as outlandish as it may sound. Consider the historian Robert Kagan, the author of a recent, roundly praised article in The New Republic that amounted to a neo-neocon manifesto. He has not only avoided the vitriolic tone that has afflicted some of his intellectual brethren but also co-founded an influential bipartisan advisory group during Mrs. Clinton's time at the State Department.

Mr. Kagan has also been careful to avoid landing at standard-issue neocon think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute; instead, he's a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, that citadel of liberalism headed by Strobe Talbott, who was deputy secretary of state under President Bill Clinton and is considered a strong candidate to become secretary of state in a new Democratic administration. (Mr. Talbott called the Kagan article "magisterial," in what amounts to a public baptism into the liberal establishment.)

Perhaps most significantly, Mr. Kagan and others have insisted on maintaining the link between modern neoconservatism and its roots in muscular Cold War liberalism. Among other things, he has frequently praised Harry S. Truman's secretary of state, Dean Acheson, drawing a line from him straight to the neocons' favorite president: "It was not Eisenhower or Kennedy or Nixon but Reagan whose policies most resembled those of Acheson and Truman."

Other neocons have followed Mr. Kagan's careful centrism and respect for Mrs. Clinton. Max Boot, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, noted in The New Republic this year that "it is clear that in administration councils she was a principled voice for a strong stand on controversial issues, whether supporting the Afghan surge or the intervention in Libya."

And the thing is, these neocons have a point. Mrs. Clinton voted for the Iraq war; supported sending arms to Syrian rebels; likened Russia's president, Vladimir V. Putin, to Adolf Hitler; wholeheartedly backs Israel; and stresses the importance of promoting democracy.

It's easy to imagine Mrs. Clinton's making room for the neocons in her administration. No one could charge her with being weak on national security with the likes of Robert Kagan on board.

Of course, the neocons' latest change in tack is not just about intellectual affinity. Their longtime home, the Republican Party, where presidents and candidates from Reagan to Senator John McCain of Arizona supported large militaries and aggressive foreign policies, may well nominate for president Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, who has been beating an ever louder drum against American involvement abroad.

In response, Mark Salter, a former chief of staff to Senator McCain and a neocon fellow traveler, said that in the event of a Paul nomination, "Republican voters seriously concerned with national security would have no responsible recourse" but to support Mrs. Clinton for the presidency.

Still, Democratic liberal hawks, let alone the left, would have to swallow hard to accept any neocon conversion. Mrs. Clinton herself is already under fire for her foreign-policy views -- the journalist Glenn Greenwald, among others, has condemned her as "like a neocon, practically." And humanitarian interventionists like Samantha Power, the ambassador to the United Nations, who opposed the second Iraq war, recoil at the militaristic unilateralism of the neocons and their inveterate hostility to international institutions like the World Court.

But others in Mrs. Clinton's orbit, like Michael A. McFaul, the former ambassador to Russia and now a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, a neocon haven at Stanford, are much more in line with thinkers like Mr. Kagan and Mr. Boot, especially when it comes to issues like promoting democracy and opposing Iran.

Far from ending, then, the neocon odyssey is about to continue. In 1972, Robert L. Bartley, the editorial page editor of The Wall Street Journal and a man who championed the early neocon stalwarts, shrewdly diagnosed the movement as representing "something of a swing group between the two major parties." Despite the partisan battles of the early 2000s, it is remarkable how very little has changed.

[Jun 14, 2020] Jeane J. Kirkpatrick 30 Years Unheeded

Highly recommended!
The national security establishment does represent the actual government of dual "double government". And it is not unaccountable to, and unsupervised by, the elected branches of government. Instead it controls them and is able to stage palace coups to remove "unacceptable" Presidents like was the case with JFK, Nixon and Trump.
For them is are occupied country and then behave like real occuplers.
Notable quotes:
"... In Trumpian fashion, Kirkpatrick then goes on to warn Americans about the danger of an unaccountable "deep state" in foreign policy that is immune to popular pressures. ..."
"... She says that, no, "it has become more important than ever that the experts who conduct foreign policy on our behalf be subject to the direction of and control of the people." ..."
"... She points out that because America had for much of the twentieth century assumed global responsibilities, our foreign policy elites had developed "distinctive views" that are different from those of the electorate. ..."
"... foreign policy elites "grew accustomed to thinking of the United States as having boundless resources and purposes . . . which transcended the preferences of voters and apparent American interests . . . and eventually developed a globalist attitude." ..."
"... In support of Kirkpatrick's concern, Tufts professor Michael Glennon has more recently argued that the national security establishment has now become so "distinctive" in their separation from our constitutional processes that they represent one wing of a now "double government" that is not unaccountable to, and unsupervised by, the popular branches of government. The Russiagate investigations and the attempt to disable the Trump presidency, aided by many in the establishment, would appear to confirm Kirkpatrick's warning that foreign policy elites want no part of the electoral preferences of voting Americans. ..."
"... Kirkpatrick died in 2006 and had, like many neoconservatives, evolved from a Humphrey Democrat into a member of the GOP establishment. With William Bennett and Jack Kemp, in 1993 she cofounded a neoconservative group, Empower America, which took a very aggressive stance against militant Islam after the 9/11 attacks. However, she was quite ambivalent about the invasion of Iraq and was quoted in The Economist ..."
Jun 14, 2020 | nationalinterest.org

Kirkpatrick's essay begins by insisting that, because of world events since 1939, America has given to foreign affairs "an unnatural focus." Now in 1990, she says, the nation can turn its attention to domestic concerns that are more important because "a good society is defined not by its foreign policy but its internal qualities . . . by the relations among its citizens, the kind of character nurtured, and the quality of life lived." She says unabashedly that "there is no mystical American 'mission' or purposes to be 'found' independently of the U.S. Constitution and government."

One cannot fail to notice that this perspective is precisely the opposite of George W. Bush's in his second inauguration. According to Bush, America's post –Cold War purpose was to follow our "deepest beliefs" by acting to "support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture." For three decades neoconservative foreign policy has revolved around "mystical" beliefs about America's mission in the world that are unmoored from the actual Constitution.

In Trumpian fashion, Kirkpatrick then goes on to warn Americans about the danger of an unaccountable "deep state" in foreign policy that is immune to popular pressures. She rejects emphatically the views of some elitists who argue that foreign policy is a uniquely esoteric and specialized discipline and must be cushioned from populism. She says that, no, "it has become more important than ever that the experts who conduct foreign policy on our behalf be subject to the direction of and control of the people."

She points out that because America had for much of the twentieth century assumed global responsibilities, our foreign policy elites had developed "distinctive views" that are different from those of the electorate. Again, in Trumpian fashion, she argued that foreign policy elites "grew accustomed to thinking of the United States as having boundless resources and purposes . . . which transcended the preferences of voters and apparent American interests . . . and eventually developed a globalist attitude."

In support of Kirkpatrick's concern, Tufts professor Michael Glennon has more recently argued that the national security establishment has now become so "distinctive" in their separation from our constitutional processes that they represent one wing of a now "double government" that is not unaccountable to, and unsupervised by, the popular branches of government. The Russiagate investigations and the attempt to disable the Trump presidency, aided by many in the establishment, would appear to confirm Kirkpatrick's warning that foreign policy elites want no part of the electoral preferences of voting Americans.

Kirkpatrick concludes her essay with thoughts on "What should we do?" and "What we should not do." Remarkably, her first recommendation is to negotiate better trade deals. These deals should give the U.S. "fair access" to foreign markets while offering "foreign businesses no better than fair access to U.S. markets." Next, she considered the promotion of democracy around the world and, on this subject, she took the John Quincy Adams position : that "Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be." However, she insisted: "it is not within the United States' power to democratize the world."

When Kirkpatrick goes on to discuss America's post –Cold War alliances, she makes clear that she is advocating, quite simply, an America First foreign policy. Regarding the future of the NATO alliance, a sacrosanct pillar of the American foreign policy establishment, she argued that "the United States should not try to manage the balance of power in Europe." Likewise, we should be humble about what we can accomplish in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union: "Any notion that the United States can manage the changes in that huge, multinational, developing society is grandiose." Finally, with regard to Asia: "Our concern with Japan should above all be with its trading practices vis-à-vis the United States. We should not spend money protecting an affluent Japan, though a continuing alliance is entirely appropriate."

She famously concludes her essay by making the plea for the United States to become "a normal country in a normal time" and "to give up the dubious benefits of superpower status and become again an unusually successful, open American republic."

Kirkpatrick became Ronald Reagan's United Nations ambassador because her 1979 article in Commentary , "Dictatorships and Double Standards," caught the eye of the future president. In that article, she sensibly points out that authoritarian governments that are allies of the United States should not be kicked to the curb because they are not free and open democracies. The path to democracy is a long and perilous one, and nations without republican traditions cannot be expected to make the transition overnight. Regarding the world's oldest democracy, she remarked: "In Britain, the road from the Magna Carta to the Act of Settlement, to the great Reform Bills of 1832, 1867, and 1885, took seven centuries to traverse."

While at the time neoconservatives opportunistically embraced her for this position as a tactic to fight the Cold War, the current foreign policy establishment would consider Kirkpatrick's argument to be beyond the bounds of decent conversation, as it would lend itself to an accommodation with authoritarian Russia as a counterweight to totalitarian China.

Kirkpatrick died in 2006 and had, like many neoconservatives, evolved from a Humphrey Democrat into a member of the GOP establishment. With William Bennett and Jack Kemp, in 1993 she cofounded a neoconservative group, Empower America, which took a very aggressive stance against militant Islam after the 9/11 attacks. However, she was quite ambivalent about the invasion of Iraq and was quoted in The Economist as saying that George W. Bush was "a bit too interventionist for my taste" and that Bush's brand of moral imperialism is not "taken seriously anywhere outside a few places in Washington, DC."

The fact that Kirkpatrick's recommendations in her 1990 essay coincide with some of Donald Trump's positions in the 2016 campaign (if not with many of his actual actions as president) make her views, ipso facto, not serious. The foreign policy establishment gives something like pariah status to arguments that we should negotiate better trade deals, reconsider our Cold War alliances and, most especially, subject American foreign policy to popular preferences. If she were alive today and were making the arguments she made in 1990, then she would be an outcast. That a formidable intellectual like Kirkpatrick would be dismissed in such a fashion is a sign of how obtuse our foreign policy debate has become.

William S. Smith is Senior Research Fellow and Managing Director of the Center for the Study of Statesmanship at The Catholic University of America. His recent book, Democracy and Imperialism , is from the University of Michigan Press. He studied political philosophy under Professor Jeane Kirkpatrick as an undergraduate at Georgetown University.

[Jun 14, 2020] Putin's World: Russia against the West and with the Rest

The author is neoliberal apologists, who use idiotic cliché about democratization to cover neoliberal wolfs teens and appetite. Neoliberalism means impoverishment of countries like Russia. so Putin actions are logical: he defends interests of Russian people against international financial oligarchy. Experience of countries like Ukraine and Libya are vivid examples of what financial oligarchy can do to the countries which do not resists conversion into debt slaves.
McFaul of course was a color revolution specialist, who tried to unleash White color revolution in 2011-2012. But he was actually a gift to Russians, as he proved to be a complete and utter idiot, not a skillful diplomat. After EuroMaydan in 2014 neoliberal fifth column in Russia was decimated and seized to exist as a political force.
Jun 14, 2020 | networks.h-net.org

"Russians," says Stent, "have at best been reluctant Europeans" (45). They need and admire Western technology but managed to miss the Reformation, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment, and never developed a middle class and a democracy. Putin himself is a "wary European," who fails "to understand that Europe's successful modernization was a product of both a free market economy and a democratic political system based on the rule of law." More appealing to him is China's model of "authoritarian modernization" (52).

Moreover, he is suspicious of the expansion of the European Union, its Eastern Partnership Initiative (EPI, 2009), and its overtures for former Soviet states to join the EPI or EU. Disputes over the signing of such an Association Agreement with Ukraine in 2013 exploded into the Maidan movement, the annexation of Crimea by Russia, the war in eastern Ukraine, and economic sanctions against Russia. China soon replaced Europe as Russia's largest trading partner. Instead of President Mikhail Gorbachev's dream of a 'common European home,' Russia has become the major opponent of European unity, a promoter of Brexit, and an ally of the anti-liberal axis of 'take-our-country-back' right-wing populist and neo-authoritarian European parties and governments. Putin is indiscriminate about cultivating allies and has established friendly relations with a rogues' gallery of strongmen and authoritarian politicians that includes among others Marine Le Pen, Victor Orban, Silvio Berlusconi, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Bashar al-Assad, Benjamin Netanyahu, Mohammad bin Salman, Narendra Modi, and Donald J. Trump. But at the same time he has worked to establish ties with moderate and centrist leaders like Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel.

As scholar and practitioner, Angela Stent is at her best when elaborating the specificities of Russian dealings with friends and foes. Her chapter on NATO expansion -- "The 'Main Opponent'" (Putin's words) -- is a judicious and critical review of policies that redivided Europe and propelled Russia through the logic of a security dilemma to re-engage in offensive strategies from rearmament to hybrid warfare. Yet while acknowledging that Russia has genuine security concerns about NATO's moves eastward, she reverts to the notion that Russian ideological constants are key to the conflict between East and West.

Russia has not, over the past quarter century, been willing to accept the rules of the international order that the West hoped it would. Those included acknowledging the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the post-Soviet states and supporting a liberal world order that respects the right to self-determination. Russia continues to view the drivers of international politics largely through a nineteenth-century prism. Spheres of influence are more important than the individual rights and sovereignty of smaller countries. It is virtually impossible to reconcile the Western and Russian understanding of sovereignty. For Putin, what counts is power and scale, not rules (137-138).

Stent does not share the default view of some of her fellow Putinologists, among them Masha Gessen and Michael McFaul, who see almost every malevolent deed of Russian policy as stemming from one grim personality. She argues instead that Putin and more generally Kremlin policies are the effusion of something deeply Russian. Like the work of many other analysts of Soviet and Russian foreign policy behavior, however, the book often neglects or underplays the intersubjective effects on Kremlin actions, the ways in which initiatives by the more powerful West precipitate reactions by the East -- NATO expansion and European and American recognition of Kosovo independence being among the clearest examples.

Losing the West, much of East Central Europe, the Baltic countries, Georgia, and Ukraine, Russia turned eastward toward Eurasia, to the former South of the USSR, a region that Stent argues "has been an essential component of [Putin's] main goal restoring Russia as a great power" (142). He wants, as did Yeltsin, the West to recognize Russia's "sphere of privileged interests" in the so-called "Near Abroad," where it has "civilizational commonalities" with former Soviet states (144-145). To the Kremlin the Near Abroad is contested with the West, and losing it would severely jeopardize Russia's security. Military arrangements, like the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), and economic collaboration in the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU) have bound several republics, notably Belarus, Armenia, and Kazakhstan, to Russia. In recent years several states, notably Moldova, have gravitated closer to Moscow, while others, like Turkestan, maintain a guarded distance.

Substantive chapters review Russian relations with Ukraine, China, Japan, the Middle East, and the United States. Putin's greatest success came in Syria, where he took advantage of the Obama and Trump administrations' ambivalence about their role in the civil war. Putin sided with Assad and, along with Iran and its proxies, propelled the brutal dictator to victory over myriad rebels. For a time he solidified relations with Erdoğan's Turkey, but by 2019 the two potential allies were at loggerheads both in Syria and Libya. Playing a relatively weak hand vis-à-vis Europe, China, and the United States, Putin managed to deploy limited resources to become the principal extra-regional player in the conflict-riven Near East. Given Trump's reluctance to go to war or remain on the front line, Putin deftly filled the vacuum left by American confusion and incompetence.

Reading Putin's World , one can see how Putin, successful in some places, bogged down in others, and threatened in still others, has both increased Russian prestige and extended his influence while deepening Russia's economic and diplomatic isolation and elevating global suspicions as to its nefarious actions, from poisonings to election interference. Benefiting from the gullibility and ignorance of the occupant of the White House, he can sit back and observe the chaos launched by the Trump administration. But unpredictability should not calm a realist's mind, and Putin is forced to deal with the contradictory cascade of attitudes and activities emanating from Washington: friendly personal relations between the two leaders, the series of sanctions placed on the Russians, the bizarre actions of Trump and his cronies in Ukraine, unilateral abrogation of arms controls, withdrawal from the Paris Accords on climate control and the Iranian nuclear agreement, the precipitate withdrawal from Syria, and the impulsive assassination of high Iranian and Iraqi officials.

Stent ends the book with an assessment of how Russia's strongman has reasserted his country's role on the world stage while at the same time worsening relations with the West and facing a renewed arms race and the resurrection of harsh Cold War-like representations of his country. "Putin has achieved his major objectives . The world can no longer ignore [Russia]. It is respected -- and feared" (346). In much of the world he is a more attractive figure than his "partner" Trump. Stent is confident that the West can work with Putin, but "the West has to recognize what Russia is -- and not what it would like Russia to be" (356). Russia's views of the world and of its interests have to be taken seriously, even when the West is unwilling to accede to or compromise with them; "Engagement must be realistic and flexible" (361). Expect the unexpected. After all, you are dealing with a wiry, wily judo master.

[Jun 14, 2020] Putin Says US Social Unrest Show Deep-Seated Internal Crises

Jun 14, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

Putin Says US Social Unrest Show "Deep-Seated Internal Crises" by Tyler Durden Sun, 06/14/2020 - 11:51 The Rubin Report's Pavel Zarubin interviewed Russian President Vladimir Putin on Sunday, where he said social unrest across the US reveals the deep internal crisis in the country, reported TASS News .

"What has happened [in the US] is the manifestation of some deep domestic crises," Putin said, noting that this crisis was festering well before President Trump took office. "When he won, and his victory was absolutely obvious and democratic, the defeated party invented all sorts of bogus stories just to call into question his legitimacy," he added.

Putin pointed out the biggest problem of the US political system is the parties and their special interest of people behind the scenes.

"It seems to me that the problem is that group party interests, in this case, are placed above the interests of the entire society and the interests of people," Putin said.

While commenting on domestic issues, Putin said his government has been combating the virus with minimal losses. He said that was not the case in the US, adding the failures of the US' "management system" led to poor response and widespread destruction. He said the best strategy has been Moscow's top-down approach as all parts of government operated as a single team.

Putin further expanded on the US social unrest by linking it to the pandemic: "It shows there are problems. Things connected to the fight with the coronavirus have shone a spotlight on general problems."

He criticized the lack of strong leadership of virus response efforts, saying that "the president says we need to do such-and-such, but the governor somewhere tells him where to go."

In Russia, "I doubt anyone in the government or the regions would say 'we're not going to do what the government says, what the president says, we think it's wrong,'" Putin said.

Putin believes American democracy will work to end the twin crisis: public health and social unrest, which have engulfed the country lately.

"I expect that the fundamental basis of US democracy will still allow and help this country to end this crisis period where it certainly finds itself," he said.

Watch Full Interview

[Jun 13, 2020] Korea is just another distraction: false conflicts with China, North Korea, Russia and Iran are needed to keep support for MIC and Security State which cost 1.2 trillion a year

Highly recommended!
The saying "War is racket" means not only that conquered nations are loots, but the the USA taxpayers will be looted as well
Jun 13, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org
Kay Fabe , Jun 13 2020 0:10 utc | 35
Just another distraction.

Heck US aircraft carriers used to visit HK quite often until recently, even after the hand over. They anchored in the harbor while thousands of sailors headed to the Wanchai bars, although after the hand over they anchored in a less visible part of the harbor. China didn't have a problem.

I doubt China sweats a couple of aircraft carriers when we have large bases in Japan and South Korea, not to mention Guam.

False conflicts with China, North Korea, Russia and Iran are needed to keep support for MIC and Security State which cost 1.2 trillion a year.

If the US were serious about confronting China there would be sanctions and not tariffs. China and US are partners. We sell them chips that they put in our electronics and sell to us, so we can spy on our people, and they test out our social control technology on their own people. They clothe us, sell cheap API's for drugs and they invest in treasuries and other US assets and we educate their young talent and give them access to our research and technology and fund some of their own research and share numerous patents

[Jun 13, 2020] Surprise, surprise. The Trump/Kim Jong-un love affair was about as long as one of Elizabeth Taylor's romances.

This "chest-thumping" is what passes for US "diplomacy" those days
Jun 13, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org
450.org , Jun 12 2020 18:31 utc | 9
Surprise, surprise. The Trump/Kim Jong-un love affair was about as long as one of Elizabeth Taylor's romances. Kim Jong-un wrote him beautiful letters and they fell in love, yet just as quickly they fell out of love. That's the way it is with Trump. He's a male version of Elizabeth Taylor. Melania was smart to renegotiate her prenup. It appears Kim Jong-un neglected to insist on a prenup.

They Were A Match Made In Heaven But Heaven Can Wait I Guess

[Jun 13, 2020] Note on Trump/Pompeo diplomacy of insults: Iran proved to be quite good at swapping insults with the USA and Iran's insults are usually funnier

Jun 13, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Hoarsewhisperer , Jun 12 2020 23:08 utc | 27

Since this nothing-burger appears to have kicked off with an article in the NYT, it looks to me as though someone reminded The Swamp that Iran hasn't been disarmed and is thus not the kind of soft target that can be pushed around with impunity by AmeriKKKa. Imo, Iran is a lot closer to the top of the Military Genius pecking order than AmeriKKKa. i.e. Iran has made it quite clear that "Israel" will cop the blowback if Iran is attacked, and has also demonstrated its ability to conduct high-precision strikes on US bases & bunkers in the region. Iran is also quite good at swapping insults with AmeriKKKa and Iran's insults are usually funnier than AmeriKKKa's...

Threatening North Korea probably seemed like a better/safer idea than threatening Iran but only until China's diplomatic comedians start ripping into AmeriKKKa's loud-mouthed dorks and daydreamers.

[Jun 13, 2020] Note on Trump/Pompeo diplomacy of insults: Iran proved to be quite good at swapping insults with the USA and Iran's insults are usually funnier

Jun 13, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Hoarsewhisperer , Jun 12 2020 23:08 utc | 27

Since this nothing-burger appears to have kicked off with an article in the NYT, it looks to me as though someone reminded The Swamp that Iran hasn't been disarmed and is thus not the kind of soft target that can be pushed around with impunity by AmeriKKKa. Imo, Iran is a lot closer to the top of the Military Genius pecking order than AmeriKKKa. i.e. Iran has made it quite clear that "Israel" will cop the blowback if Iran is attacked, and has also demonstrated its ability to conduct high-precision strikes on US bases & bunkers in the region. Iran is also quite good at swapping insults with AmeriKKKa and Iran's insults are usually funnier than AmeriKKKa's...

Threatening North Korea probably seemed like a better/safer idea than threatening Iran but only until China's diplomatic comedians start ripping into AmeriKKKa's loud-mouthed dorks and daydreamers.

[Jun 13, 2020] Surprise, surprise. The Trump/Kim Jong-un love affair was about as long as one of Elizabeth Taylor's romances.

This "chest-thumping" is what passes for US "diplomacy" those days
Jun 13, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org
450.org , Jun 12 2020 18:31 utc | 9
Surprise, surprise. The Trump/Kim Jong-un love affair was about as long as one of Elizabeth Taylor's romances. Kim Jong-un wrote him beautiful letters and they fell in love, yet just as quickly they fell out of love. That's the way it is with Trump. He's a male version of Elizabeth Taylor. Melania was smart to renegotiate her prenup. It appears Kim Jong-un neglected to insist on a prenup.

They Were A Match Made In Heaven But Heaven Can Wait I Guess

[Jun 12, 2020] China and Russia as the civilisational states

This guy does not understand the term "neoliberalism" and process of rejection of neoliberal ideology and the collapse of neoliberal globalization. As such his analysis is by-and-large junk. Still some quotes are interesting enough to the readers. Undeniably Russia and China are poses both features of the nationa-states and distinct civilizations, but that changes nothing in their fight against American Imperialism and global neoliberalism.
The weakness of both Russia and China is that they are neoliberal states themselves, so while fighting American neoliberal imperialism (to a certain extent) externally, they promote neoliberalism internally. China implements something like NEP (New economic Policy) installed in Russia after revolution. It leads to tremendous level of corruption. Putin promotes something like a New Deal Capitalism, but that contradicts the logic of neoliberalism and the fact of existince of Russian oligarchs. Political balance relies just of the power of Putin personality. That might lead to the collapse of state when current leaders are gone, as this is a very fine balance which requires exceptional political agility. Putin does possessed it, but that does not mean that Russia can find another Putin. Then what? A new Yeltsin?
Notable quotes:
"... today we are witnessing the end of the liberal world order and the rise of the civilisational state, which claims to represent not merely a nation or territory but an exceptional civilisation ..."
"... Western civilisation is much less able to confront both internal problems such as economic injustice, social dislocation and resurgent nationalism, ..."
Jun 12, 2020 | www.newstatesman.com

Such states define themselves not as nations but civilisations – in opposition to the liberalism and global market ideology of the West. By Adrian Pabst The 20th century marked the downfall of empire and the triumph of the nation state. National self-determination became the prime test of state legitimacy, rather than dynastic inheritance or imperial rule.

After the Cold War, the dominant elites in the West assumed that the nation-state model had defeated all rival forms of political organisation. The worldwide spread of liberal values would create an era of Western hegemony. It would be a new global order based on sovereign states enforced by Western-dominated international organisations such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the World Trade Organisation.

But today we are witnessing the end of the liberal world order and the rise of the civilisational state, which claims to represent not merely a nation or territory but an exceptional civilisation. In China and Russia the ruling classes reject Western liberalism and the expansion of a global market society. They define their countries as distinctive civilisations with their own unique cultural values and political institutions. The ascent of civilisational states is not just changing the global balance of power. It is also transforming post-Cold War geopolitics away from liberal universalism towards cultural exceptionalism.

****

Thirty years after the collapse of totalitarian state communism, liberal market democracy is in question. Both the West and "the rest" are sliding into forms of soft totalitarianism as market fundamentalism or state capitalism creates oligarchic concentrations of power and wealth. Oligarchies occur in both democratic and authoritarian systems, which are led by demagogic leaders who can either be more liberal, as with France's president Emmanuel Macron, or more populist, such as Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán. In both the older democracies of western Europe and in the post-1989 democracies of the former Soviet Union, fundamental freedoms are in retreat and the separation of powers is under threat.

The resurgence of great power rivalry, especially with the rise of Russia and China, is weakening Western attempts to impose a unified set of standards and rules in international relations. The leaders of these powers, including the US under Donald Trump, reject universal human rights, the rule of law, respect for facts and a free press in the name of cultural difference. The days of spreading universal values of Western enlightenment have long since passed.

Globalisation is partly in reverse. Free trade is curtailed by protectionist tariff wars between the US and China. The promotion of Western democracy has been replaced by an accommodation with autocrats such as North Korea's Kim Jong-un. But more fundamentally, geopolitics is no longer simply about the economy or security – Christopher Coker describes it in The Rise of the Civilizational State (2019) as largely sociocultural and civilisational. The non-Western world, led by Beijing and Moscow, is pushing back against the Western claim to embody universal values.

Chinese leader Xi Jinping champions a model of "socialism with Chinese characteristics" fusing a Leninist state with neo-Confucian culture. Vladimir Putin defines Russia as a "civilisational state", which is neither Western nor Asian but uniquely Eurasian. Trump rails against the European multicultural dilution of Western civilisation – which he equates with a white supremacist creed. Common to these leaders is a hybrid doctrine of nationalism at home and the defence of civilisation abroad.

It reconciles their promotion of great-power status with their ideological aversion to liberal universalism. States based on civilisational identities are bound to collide with the institutions of the liberal world order, and so it is happening.

Civilisations themselves might not clash, but contemporary geopolitics has turned into a contest between alternative versions of civilised norms. Within the West, there is a growing gap between a cosmopolitan EU and a nativist US. And a global "culture war" is pitting the West's liberal establishment against the illiberal powers of Russia and China. Cultural exceptionalism is once again challenging, and arguably replacing, liberalism's claim to universal validity. The powers redefining themselves as state civilisations are gaining strength.

****

A new narrative has taken hold among the ruling classes in the West: that the aggressive axis of Russia and China is the main threat to the Western-dominated international system. But the liberal world order is also under unprecedented strain from within. The Iraq invasion of 2003, the 2008 global financial crash, austerity and the refugee crisis in Europe, which began in earnest in 2015 and was partly the result of Western destabilisation in Libya and Syria, have all eroded public confidence in the liberal establishment and the institutions it controls. Brexit, Donald Trump and the populist insurgency sweeping continental Europe mark a revolt against the economic and social liberalism that has dominated domestic politics and neoliberal globalisation. The ascent of authoritarian "strongmen" such as Putin, Xi Jinping, India's prime minister Narendra Modi, Turkey's President Erdogan and Brazil's new leader Jair Bolsonaro are a major menace to liberal dominance over international affairs. But the principal danger to the West is internal – namely the erosion of Western civilisation by ultra-liberalism.

The dominant idea of the last four decades is the belief that the West is a political civilisation that represents the forward march of history towards a single normative order. But experience has shown that this force, with its tendency towards cartel capitalism, bureaucratic overreach, and rampant individualism, is devastating the West's cultural civilisation. Part of the legacy of this civilisation is the postwar model of socially embedded markets, decentralised states, a balance of open economies with protection of domestic industry and a commitment to the dignity of the person, enshrined in human rights.

It is a legacy that rests on a common cultural heritage of Greco-Roman philosophy and law, as well as Judeo-Christian religion and ethics. Each, in different ways, stress the unique value of the person and free human association independent of the state. Western countries share traditions of music, architecture, philosophy, literature, poetry and religious belief that make them members of a common civilisation rather than a collection of separate cultures.

This civilisational heritage and its principles are under threat from the forces of liberalism. In the name of supposedly universal liberal values, the Clinton administration adopted as its civilising mission the worldwide spread of market states and humanitarian intervention. After the 9/11 attacks, left-liberal governments such as Tony Blair's New Labour waged foreign wars and curtailed civil rights in the name of security.

Emmanuel Macron, the latest cheerleader for Western progressives, has led a crackdown of the gilets jaunes protesters in France that threatens fundamental freedoms of speech, association and public demonstration. As Patrick Deneen, the Catholic legal scholar and author of Why Liberalism Failed (2018), and others have shown, liberalism is undermining the principles of liberality on which Western civilisation depends, such as free inquiry, free speech, tolerance for dissent and respect for political opponents.

At the heart of the West is a paradox. It is the only community of nations founded upon the political values of self-determination of the people, democracy and free trade. These principles were codified in the 1941 Atlantic Charter signed by Winston Churchill and Franklin D Roosevelt, and enshrined in the post-1945 international system. Yet liberalism is eroding these cultural foundations, and we are now living with the consequences. Western civilisation is much less able to confront both internal problems such as economic injustice, social dislocation and resurgent nationalism, and the external threats of ecological devastation, Islamist terrorism and hostile foreign powers.

After the fall of communism, the liberal West sought to recast reality in its progressive self-image. As Tony Blair put it, only liberal culture is on the "right side of history". The US and western Europe viewed themselves as carriers of universal values for the rest of humanity. Liberal leaders mutated into what Robespierre called "armed missionaries". They exported Western cultural norms of personal self-expression and individual emancipation from family, religion and nationality. Nations were seen by Western liberals as egos writ large that desire nothing but to adapt to the imperatives of globalisation and a world without borders or national identities.

The shallow culture of contemporary liberalism weakens civilisation in the West and elsewhere. Liberal capitalism promotes cultural standards that glorify greed, sex and violence. Too many liberals in politics, the media and the academy are characterised by a "closing of the mind" that ignores the intellectual, literary and artistic achievements that make the West a recognisable civilisation.

Some cosmopolitan liberals even repudiate the very existence of the West as a civilisation. In one of his BBC Reith Lectures in 2016, the British-born Ghanaian-American academic Kwame Anthony Appiah, the grandson of the former Labour chancellor Stafford Cripps, maintained that we should give up on the idea of Western civilisation. "I believe," Appiah said, "that Western civilisation is not at all a good idea, and Western culture is no improvement."

****

The rejection of Western universalism by the elites in Russia and China challenges the idea of the nation state as the international norm for political organisation. The Chinese and the Russian ruling classes view themselves as bearers of unique cultural norms, and define themselves as civilisational states rather than nation states because the latter are associated with Western imperialism – and in the case of China a century of humiliation following the 19th-century Opium Wars. Martin Jacques, author of When China Rules the World (2009), argues that, "The most fundamental defining features of China today, and which give the Chinese their sense of identity, emanate not from the last century when China has called itself a nation state but from the previous two millennia when it can be best described as a civilisation state."

... ... ...

Adrian Pabst is a New Statesman contributing writer and the author of "Liberal World Order and Its Critics" and "The Demons of Liberal Democracy"

[Jun 12, 2020] Expect legal contortions in The Hague

Jun 12, 2020 | turcopolier.typepad.com

JohninMK , 11 June 2020 at 06:56 PM

On MH17, the Dutch court is now in a bit of a bind. The State Prosecutor has to submit evidence beyond reasonable doubt and he has had to admit this week in court that he does not have that as primarily there are no US satellite photos, not even behind multiple levels of security, that they or the Dutch military have been able to get hold of. He has no real evidence just, as you say Patrick, the fair and honest not obtained under duress evidence from Kiev and the definitely undoctored photo analysis of Bellingcat. Logically the case should now collapse.

Given that that satellite image, as boasted about by Kerry at the time, would have had the Russians bang to rights in a proper court in a major PR coup for the US, I suspect that its non production means that it doesn't exist.

Expect legal contortions in The Hague.

Patrick Armstrong , 11 June 2020 at 07:06 PM
JohninMK. Never believed the official story for a moment. Somebody in Ukraine did it. Who why and how not determined.

https://patrickarmstrong.ca/2015/10/18/mh17-final-report-is-not-a-final-report-its-just-a-limited-hangout-it-tells-as-much-of-the-truth-as-it-has-to-but-no-more/

[Jun 12, 2020] RUSSIAN FEDERATION SITREP 11 JUNE 2020 by Patrick Armstrong

Jun 11, 2020 | turcopolier.typepad.com

RUSSIAN FEDERATION SITREP 11 JUNE 2020 by Patrick Armstrong

RUSSIA AND COVID. Latest numbers: total cases 502K; total deaths 6532; tests per 1 million 95K. Russia has done 13.8 million tests (second after USA); among countries with populations over 10M it's second in tests per million and of those over 100M first. Moscow city lockdown and ID pass system ended on Tuesday . Russian developers register a drug that may help alleviate the worst symptoms .

COVID COUNTING. The usual suspects are convinced that Russia's lying (the accusation is a pitiful attempt to cover up the failure of the " two best-prepared countries ") but I don't believe anything Western outlets say about Russia. But Moscow city has published numbers that may explain things . 15,713 deaths in Moscow in May; three-year average is 9914; therefore excess of 5799. They calculate 2757 had COVID as the main cause of death but it was present in 5260 deaths. Therefore, as I suspected , it's a counting issue: died of versus died with . In any case, even at the larger number, the deaths are far fewer than elsewhere. A new theory to add to the others is that there are fewer old people, thanks to high mortality rates in the Soviet days, and Russians don't generally put them in nursing homes (the source of large proportion of deaths in Western countries.)

CONSTITUTIONAL REFERENDUM. Now set for 1 July . Wikipedia has a summary article and tells us that the vote will be a yes or no on the whole package. Some advertising billboards . Polls suggest the package will pass but not by big numbers.

GENETICS. Putin has told the government to ensure creation of Russian-made laboratory and scientific equipment for research in genetics . Remember the report that the USAF was collecting genetic material of Russians ? I think COVID has made Moscow and Beijing rather thoughtful. Teheran too.

OIL WARS. Oil futures are creeping up . OPEC+ has agreed to extend the production cuts to the end of July . So, I guess if there was some attempt by Riyadh to crush US shale and Russian oil, it failed. Who won? Russia did: prices are back in Russia's comfort zone . The Power of Siberia pipeline has sent 1.58 billion M3 of natural gas to China in the last 6 months. The icebreaker LNG ship is on its way to China via the Northern Sea Route .

MONOPOLY. With Dragon's successful docking , Russia has lost its monopoly on taxi service to the ISS.

PERSONALLY I think Moscow is commenting with considerable restraint as the USA learns about colour revolutions first hand. Read this from the Atlantic : "The Trump Regime Is Beginning to Topple". "Regime". Wow, eh?

START. Russia-US talks will begin in Vienna on the 22nd. Beijing says it won't be there. The US side is so deluded that I doubt much will happen. (BTW the US " super duper missile " just failed .)

THE DEATH OF IRONY. Russia Sends More Troops West, Challenging U.S.-NATO Presence Near Borders.

NUGGETS FROM THE STUPIDITY MINE. "Before Donald Trump, Russia Needed 60 Hours To Beat NATO -- Now Moscow Could Win Much Faster" Forbes tells us. The assumption is that Russia would grab the Baltics and stop there. I know the author is just shilling for the weapons makers but, if you assume your audience is really stupid, you become stupider – a race to the bottom of the mine.

MH17. It looks as if all the prosecution has is stuff from Kiev and Bellingcat . So much for Kerry's "we observed it" . So will the court find the defendants not guilty or continue with the farce? Speaking of "our values and way of life".

CHINA IS THE NEW RUSSIA. You'd think NATO would be busy enough but it's time to add China to the enemy list: the threat posed by China to "our values and way of life" .

AMERICA-HYSTERICA. A Republican caucus group from the legislature of " the greatest force for good the world has ever known" has decided that Russia should be named a "state sponsor of terrorism" and hit with "the toughest sanctions ever imposed ". But it doesn't accuse Moscow of fiddling elections; I guess that particular sector of the delusion is reserved for the other side of the aisle.

PUTIN DERANGEMENT SYNDROME. Sure, we don't need evidence – there's the "playbook" .

EUROPEANS ARE REVOLTING. Germany rejects US extraterritorial sanctions against Nord Stream 2 ; a German politician suggests Berlin may respond with counter-sanctions . Trump orders a troop pull-out (would be about a quarter of the US troops in Germany).

[Jun 10, 2020] What is a Vassal State?

Jun 10, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Christian J Chuba , Jun 10 2020 18:35 utc | 13

What is a Vassal State? ... visited a Neocon website putting on the warpaint against China and posters accused China of oppressing their vassal states and it got me thinking, what is a fair definition of a vassal state. This is what I came up with.

A Vassal state: Needs are subordinate to the wants of the master, not allowed to make their own choices, not allowed to leave the relationship on their own, they are expendable.

N. Korea, are they a vassal state of China? I don't see any of these attributes. N. Korea depends on China many times but the master state needs the vassal more than the vassal needs the master.

Iraq is a vassal state of the U.S. (I had many choices, too many) Recently, they needed a waiver from Pompeo to buy electricity from Iran, talk about humiliating. We ignored multiple requests to leave and threatened to impose a trade embargo and freeze their bank accounts if they pushed the issue but told they 'could' bring up the issue later. We them more than they need us for as long as we must have military bases close to Iran and the ability to kill Iraqis we don't like. If we leave, we will leave Iraq in ruins rather than allow them to have unfettered trade with Iran.

[Jun 10, 2020] A very interesting overview of what is happening in Libya

Jun 10, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

dh-mtl , Jun 10 2020 18:13 utc | 6

A very interesting overview of what is happening in Libya.

https://madamasr.com/en/2020/06/08/feature/politics/what-comes-after-the-collapse-of-haftars-western-campaign/

b might want to comment on the situation.

chet380 , Jun 10 2020 18:30 utc | 12

In Libya, as in Idlib, Turkish drones have caused very significant damage to tanks and artillery positions ... what is the defence?
Daniel , Jun 10 2020 19:22 utc | 20
@6 dh-mtl

Thanks for that link, a very interesting and detailed article. It seems Haftar is an erratic and unreliable character and the LNA's major foreign allies/sponsors, including Russia, make no secret of the fact that they basically consider him a temporary "necessary evil" until a more solid and reliable leader can be found.

[Jun 10, 2020] The nationalist right should embrace police defunding. Let communities police themselves.

Jun 10, 2020 | www.unz.com

Old Curmudgeon , says: Show Comment June 10, 2020 at 11:35 am GMT

The nationalist right should embrace police defunding. Let communities police themselves.
Peter Turchin's studies show that our polarization has reached catastrophic levels. The immiseration of the working and middle classes is 5 decades old and shows no sign of abating.
Plus we hate each other. De-platforming and firing for tiny, frivolous reasons will continue. The (second) American experiment is crashing, and the decline looks irremediable. Look at the streets.
The Great Society experiment is a failure. 80% of black Americans believe that race relations are worse today than in 1960.
If self-policing doesn't work (it probably won't), at least it will pave the way for peaceful separations based on "irreconcilable differences." Communities will develop a sense of sovereignty. A key aspect of state power is the exercise of legitimate coercion.
In any event, we do not have to kneel. "Is life so sweet and peace so dear "

[Jun 10, 2020] Justice vs revenge.

Jun 10, 2020 | www.unz.com

The Alarmist , says: Show Comment June 10, 2020 at 11:07 am GMT

That's what people really want, justice. They want to see Floyd's killer prosecuted, convicted and put behind bars.

That's not justice, that is revenge. Justice would be a thorough examination of the facts of the matter and any mitigating factors that would lead a jury of the accused cops' peers to an appropriate verdict, which might also be acquittal.

As for the economy, the current fantasy-land painted by our leaders reminds me of the StayCations and FunEmployment of 2009-2010, including madam Pelosi's quip that we should all be free to be artists on someone else's dime. Instead, over time, we got more barristas and wait-staff jobs, more despair, and more opioid deaths.

C'est la vie.

[Jun 10, 2020] It's the globalist war of control to defeat the nationalists

Jun 10, 2020 | www.unz.com

jsinton , says: Show Comment June 10, 2020 at 10:38 am GMT

Russiagate. Impeachment scam. Planned demic. Obamagate. And now white lives don't matter. All these things are really the same thing.

It's the globalist war of control to defeat the nationalists.

In America, it means war on God, family, and love of America. We've been bombarded with this war for decades, but now Trump has brought the war out into the open. The good news is that the left is now at peak irrationality, and the tide is turning. They've used up all the kitchen sinks to throw at Trump, and now he's stronger than ever. No love lost for Trump on my part, but who in their right minds can vote for Biden now? It's Nixon '68 all over again.

[Jun 09, 2020] How Interventionists Hijack the Rhetoric of Morality

Jun 09, 2020 | www.theamericanconservative.com

ori Schake objects to Biden's foreign policy record on the grounds that he is not hawkish enough and too skeptical of military intervention. She restates a bankrupt hawkish view of U.S. military action:

This half-in-half-out approach to military intervention also strips U.S. foreign policy of its moral element of making the world a better place. It is inadequate to the cause of advancing democracy and human rights [bold mine-DL].

The belief that military intervention is an expression of the "moral element" of U.S. foreign policy is deeply wrong, but it is unfortunately just as deeply-ingrained among many foreign policy professionals. Military intervention has typically been disastrous for the cause of advancing democracy and human rights. First, by linking this cause with armed aggression, regime change, and chaos, it tends to bring discredit on that cause in the eyes of the people that suffer during the war. Military interventions have usually worsened conditions in the targeted countries, and in the upheaval and violence that result there have been many hundreds of thousands of deaths and countless other violations of human rights.

Destabilizing other countries, displacing millions of people, and wrecking their infrastructure and economy obviously do not make anything better. As a rule, our wars of choice have not been moral or just, and they have inflicted tremendous death and destruction on other nations. When we look at the wreckage created by just the last twenty years of U.S. foreign policy, we have to reject the fantasy that military action has something to do with moral leadership. Each time that the U.S. has gone to war unnecessarily, that is a moral failure. Each time that the U.S. has attacked another country when it was not threatened, that is a moral abomination.

Schake continues:

Biden claims that the U.S. has a moral obligation to respond with military force to genocide or chemical-weapons use, but was skeptical of intervention in Syria. The former vice president's rhetoric doesn't match his policies on American values.

If Biden's rhetoric doesn't match his policies here, we should be glad that the presumptive Democratic nominee for president isn't such an ideological zealot that he would insist on waging wars that have nothing to do with the security of the United States. If there is a mismatch, the problem lies with the expansive rhetoric and not with the skepticism about intervention. That is particularly true in the Syria debate, where interventionists kept demanding more aggressive policies without even bothering to show how escalation wouldn't make things worse. Biden's skepticism about intervention in Syria of all places is supposed to be held against him as proof of his poor judgment? That criticism speaks volumes about the discredited hawkish crowd in Washington that wanted to sink the U.S. even more deeply into that morass of conflict.

One of the chief problems with U.S. foreign policy for the last several decades is that it has been far too militarized. To justify the constant resort to the threat and use of force, supporters have insisted on portraying military action as if it were beneficent. They have managed to trick a lot of Americans into thinking that "doing something" to another country is the same thing as doing good. Interventionists emphasize the goodness of their intentions while ignoring or minimizing the horrors that result from the policies they advocate, and they have been able to co-opt the rhetoric of morality to mislead the public into thinking that attacking other countries is legitimate and even obligatory. This has had the effect of degrading and distorting our foreign policy debates by framing every argument over war in terms of righteous "action" vs. squalid "inaction." This turns everything on its head. It treats aggression as virtue and violence as salutary. Even a bog-standard hawk like Biden gets criticized for lacking moral conviction if he isn't gung-ho for every unnecessary war.

Feral Finster • a day ago

That America's wars of aggression advance the cause of human rights is a hoot.
Rkramden66 Feral Finster • a day ago
"Ya gotta laugh to keep from cryin.'"
kouroi • 17 hours ago
Very strong words Mr. Larison, kudos for them.

As for Mr. Biden's "but was skeptical of intervention in Syria", maybe he was aware of the actual perpetrators of the gas attacks (as several OPCW whistle-blowers testified) and was maybe uncomfortable being again the spearhead for another war, like he was with Iraq as the Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee.

Feral Finster kouroi • 6 hours ago
Biden has been out of office for four years now. If I recall correctly, he didn't say jack to support Trump's two failed attempts to pull out from Syria.

TL;DR Don't get your hopes up.

Carpenter E • 7 hours ago • edited
Kori Schake writes for the British neocon IISS, which has been secretly funded by the Sunni dictator in Bahrain, who holds down the Shia majority with imported Pakistanis as soldiers and police. Ordinary Bahrainis are like occupied prisoners in their own country. Everything is for the small Sunni elite. Though there are also ordinary Sunnis who oppose them.

Kori Schake is simply paid to promote neocon interests, which the Bahraini dictator is closely aligned with. The Sunni king dissolved parliament and took all the power, aided by Saudi tanks crushing protesters, who were tortured and had their lives destroyed. The dictator even destroyed Bahrain's famous Pearl Monument, near which the protesters had camped out, so it wouldn't be a symbol of resistance. (Forever making it a symbol of resistance.) The tower was on all the postcards from Bahrain and it appeared on the coins. It's like destroying the Eiffel Tower. Kori's Sunni paymasters want Shia Iran destroyed as it speaks up for the oppressed Shias in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, Yemen and the UAE.

Mark Thomason • 3 hours ago
Biden is and for over four decades always was an example of all that is worst in militarized US foreign policy. The idea that he isn't hawkish enough is itself crazy.

[Jun 09, 2020] The CIA called Dr. Zhivago "strategic (long-range) propaganda,"

Jun 09, 2020 | www.theamericanconservative.com

During the cold war, the CIA called Dr. Zhivago "strategic (long-range) propaganda," which may seem simplistic, but they had a point , Randy Boyagoda writes in his review of Cold Warriors: Writers Who Waged the Literary Cold War : "Pasternak emerges as one of the book's most impressive, if tragic, figures. He wrote his novel knowing it would anger Soviet authorities, but he did not anticipate how Western powers would wield it against his country. The CIA, Dutch intelligence, and the Vatican conspired to provide Russian-language editions of the novel to Russians visiting the 1958 World's Fair in Brussels. The CIA regarded it and similar titles as 'strategic (long-range) propaganda.' The irony, of course, is that Doctor Zhivago appealed precisely because it wasn't written as propaganda. As White observes, 'The lead character, Zhivago, a doctor and a poet, refuses to engage with politics, and it was this, [the CIA] argued, that was "fundamental"' to its meaning. The CIA, whose earliest analysts included people with serious literary training and interests, saw Zhivago as a challenge to the idea that ­politics is the first and last context for ­meaningful ­experience. In this sense, they believed, the book was efficaciously opposed to the first principles of Marxist and Stalinist thought and practice."

[Jun 08, 2020] Trump is completely right when he says Powell is an complete hack and fraud who helped scam the US people into the Iraq war

Jun 08, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Mao , Jun 7 2020 21:28 utc | 34

Powell on Sunday aimed a broad critique at Trump's approach to the military, a foreign policy he said was causing "disdain" abroad, and a president he portrayed as trying to amass excessive power.

"We have a Constitution and we have to follow the Constitution, and the president has drifted away from it," Powell said. Trump also, he said, "lies about things."

Trump responded swiftly on Twitter, mocking Powell and calling the retired four-star general "a real stiff" who got the U.S. into wars after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the U.S.

Colin Powell, a real stiff who was very responsible for getting us into the disastrous Middle East Wars, just announced he will be voting for another stiff, Sleepy Joe Biden. Didn't Powell say that Iraq had "weapons of mass destruction?" They didn't, but off we went to WAR!

-- Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 7, 2020

Kadath , Jun 7 2020 22:08 utc | 37

Credit when credit is due, Trump is completely right when he says Powell is an complete hack and fraud who helped scam the US people into the Iraq war. Years after his UN appearance Powell's own chief of staff Lawrence Wilkerson, admitted that he and Powell knew that the fix was in to attack Iraq and the information they were presenting to the UN was falsified, i.e. they knowingly lied to the UN to start a war, a war crime (was of aggression)! Rather than do the honourable thing and resign in protest and go public with the truth they stayed quite and obey their illegal orders, presumably reasoning that a competently managed crime would be less damaging then an incompetently managed crime. As it turns out though, Powell was an utterly incompetent Secretary of State who was outmaneuvered at every stage of the conflict by the mad dog crazies in the administration that he thought he was controlling. in the end, all Powell's shameful behaviour accomplished was to destroy his honour and leave him forever known as a war criminal (even if the UN is too cowardly to charge him as such). So, seeing Powell and the lamestream media try to croon about him as some sort of moral authority is laughable and Trump is right to rub all of Powell's crimes right in his face.

Trisha , Jun 8 2020 0:16 utc | 46
Not to forget (as a Vietnam Vet, I can't) that Maj. Colin Powell - after a cursory investigation into the massacre at My Lai - drafted a response on Dec. 13, 1968 stating - among other lies - that "[it] is the fact that relations between Americal soldiers and the Vietnamese people are excellent" while denying any pattern of wrong-doing.

Powell was simply protecting other murderous gang members (especially his bosses) from justice, thus becoming another un-indicted accessory to murder. The gods are not interested in justice, though, and he roams free.

Sunny Runny Burger , Jun 8 2020 2:09 utc | 47
Wow I wish I had know that little tidbit back then when I watched the full uninterrupted UN broadcasts from the Security Council before the war. He pretty much managed to get the US a free pass with his testimony of lies. I believed him and so did a lot of other people. Now his whitewash of My Lai is even on his Wikipedia page. Thank you Trisha.

Several years earlier I got to know about My Lai during relatively brief military education (non-US but NATO) on the rules of the Geneva Convention, it was used as the prime example of when to resist and disobey unlawful orders (I have to wonder if it still is).

If there had been a free press they should have shouted this little fact at the top of their lungs while mocking the US, maybe someone somewhere did but I never heard any mention of it, not even from any of all the people I knew that were opposing the war and who never seemed to have anything substantive to say (a bit like BLM: who isn't against murder and particularly murder committed by "cops"? There's a serious communication problem going on).

I find this so strange that I'm starting to wonder if I have an extremely selective memory. Did anyone here learn about this at the time? Not counting anyone who already knew it well before that time.

[Jun 08, 2020] Strange coinsidences

Jun 08, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

jef , Jun 7 2020 14:09 utc | 1

So we had two major pandemic exercises last year projecting almost exactly what did happen with the corona virus. First was Crimson Contagion Jan thru Aug 2019

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimson_Contagion

Then Event 201 the international war gaming of a global pandemic almost exactly like what happened which took place only months before the real pandemic on October 2019

https://www.centerforhealthsecurity.org/event201/

So why is it ok for TPTB to act like it wasn't happening or it was a complete supprise "no one could have known" and were completely unprepared?

Mark2 , Jun 7 2020 14:20 utc | 2

Jef @ 1
A week before the Skripal poisoning at Salisbury U.K. 'they had a chemical warfare exercise a few miles up the road on Salisbury Plain.

[Jun 08, 2020] No wonder the bottle of Novichok wasn't discovered during the first search of Rowley's flat. MI6 hadn't planted it there until some time later

Jun 08, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

uncle tungsten , Jun 7 2020 21:05 utc | 30

Dave #21
So depressing that nobody in the UK has the guts to ask questions about the Skripal affair.

Parliamentarians and msm are silent but there is always Rob Slane A HREF="https://www.theblogmire.com/">here for one of the more exacting research efforts by himself and his commenters. Its worth a detailed examination as he never bought the Govt fairytale from day one and has the most forensic analysis available given the erasing of all public data and cctv in Salisbury on the day and days that followed. Rob Slane lives in Salisbury and was swept up in the Skripal story from his quiet little social/christian blog. He is a legend.

Or Craig Murray of course but he would prefer to be known as a Scotland man not an englander.

Tom , Jun 7 2020 22:26 utc | 41

#30 Uncle Tungsten

John Helmer at Dancing with Bears has also written some fine pieces on the Skripal's. His latest piece brings light to the Wiltshire Police report that states

"On July 4 – that is four days after Sturgess and Rowley had been admitted to hospital – the Wiltshire police published the conclusion from their investigation, their roundup of witnesses, and from the hospital evidence that the drugs Sturgess and Rowley had taken were Class A criminal and contaminated. Detective Sergeant Eirin Martin was explicit. "We believe the two patients have fallen ill after using from a contaminated batch of drugs, possibly heroin or crack cocaine." The evidence was so strong, Martin acknowledged that publishing details of the crime was an "unusual step we are also asking anyone who may have information about this batch of drugs we just need to know how these people came to fall ill and where the drugs may have been bought from and who they may have been sold to."

No wonder the bottle of Novichok wasn't discovered during the first search of Rowley's flat. MI6 hadn't planted it there until some time later.

http://johnhelmer.net/british-coroner-hides-british-police-evidence-in-the-novichok-case-as-bbc-prepares-to-broadcast-new-lies/

uncle tungsten , Jun 7 2020 22:35 utc | 42
Tom #41

Thank you and I forgot John Helmer. He is a legend on this and other matters of our times. The Sturgess/Rowley story was pure D grade vaudeville. If there is one event that confirms the ignorance of the englander power elite and its running dog media, it was the Sturgess/Rowley fubar. LMAO at that one PLUS the utter BS about the 'novichok contaminated' hotel room that the two 'Russian Lads' stayed in.

[Jun 06, 2020] Spare Us Your 'Mad Dog' Mattis Worship by Andy Kroll

Jun 06, 2020 | www.rollingstone.com

James Mattis and other generals have sent the political class into delirium with their Trump criticism, but there are better voices for this moment than the authors of America's forever wars

Andy Kroll

Rolling Stone Washington bureau chief

@AndyKroll Follow ,

Here come the generals.

A procession of decorated former U.S. military leaders has spoken out in recent days to gravely denounce President Trump and his unmistakably authoritarian response to the demonstrations against police violence and racial injustice sparked by the death of George Floyd.

James Mattis, a retired Marine Corps four-star general, accused Trump of shredding the Constitution with the violent removal of protesters outside the White House so that Trump could stage a photo op. Mattis, who was Trump's first secretary of defense, said Americans were "witnessing the consequences of three years without mature leadership."

John Allen, a retired Marine Corps four-star general and former commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, warned that the "slide of the United States into illiberalism may well have begun on June 1, 2020," the day of Trump's crackdown and photo op. "Remember the date. It may well signal the beginning of the end of the American experiment."

Mike Mullen, a retired Navy admiral and a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the highest ranking military position in the country, penned an essay titled "I Cannot Remain Silent" in which he wrote that Trump's conduct "laid bare his disdain for the rights of peaceful protest in this country, gave succor to the leaders of other countries who take comfort in our domestic strife, and risked further politicizing the men and women of our armed forces."

[Jun 03, 2020] The first rule of political hypocrisy: Justify your actions by the need to protect the weak and vulnerable

Highly recommended!
Jun 26, 2019 | www.unz.com

...If you bomb Syria, do not admit you did it to install your puppet regime or to lay a pipeline. Say you did it to save the Aleppo kids gassed by Assad the Butcher. If you occupy Afghanistan, do not admit you make a handsome profit smuggling heroin; say you came to protect the women. If you want to put your people under total surveillance, say you did it to prevent hate groups target the powerless and diverse.

Remember: you do not need to ask children, women or immigrants whether they want your protection. If pushed, you can always find a few suitable profiles to look at the cameras and repeat a short text. With all my dislike for R2P (Responsibility to Protect) hypocrisy, I can't possibly blame the allegedly protected for the disaster caused by the unwanted protectors.

[Jun 02, 2020] According to the standards set by the Trump administration when the Guaido coup first launched, the video footage of these protests is full justification for a foreign nation to directly intervene and remove Trump from office by force right now.

Trump's threat to deploy the military here is an excessive and dangerous one. Mark Perry reports on the reaction from military officers to the president's threat:
Jun 02, 2020 | www.theamericanconservative.com

Senior military officer on Trump statement: "So we're going to tell our soldiers that we're redeploying them from the Middle East to the midwest? What do we think they're going to say, 'yeah, sure, no problem?' Guess again."

-- Mark Perry (@markperrydc) June 2, 2020

Feral Finster • 35 minutes ago • edited

According to the standards set by the Trump administration when the Guaido coup first launched, the video footage of these protests is full justification for a foreign nation to directly intervene and remove Trump from office by force right now.

[Jun 02, 2020] According to the standards set by the Trump administration when the Guaido coup first launched, the video footage of these protests is full justification for a foreign nation to directly intervene and remove Trump from office by force right now.

Trump's threat to deploy the military here is an excessive and dangerous one. Mark Perry reports on the reaction from military officers to the president's threat:
Jun 02, 2020 | www.theamericanconservative.com

Senior military officer on Trump statement: "So we're going to tell our soldiers that we're redeploying them from the Middle East to the midwest? What do we think they're going to say, 'yeah, sure, no problem?' Guess again."

-- Mark Perry (@markperrydc) June 2, 2020

Feral Finster • 35 minutes ago • edited

According to the standards set by the Trump administration when the Guaido coup first launched, the video footage of these protests is full justification for a foreign nation to directly intervene and remove Trump from office by force right now.

[Jun 02, 2020] So we're going to tell our soldiers that we're redeploying them from the Middle East to the midwest? What do we think they're going to say, 'yeah, sure, no problem?' Guess again."

Trump's threat to deploy the military here is an excessive and dangerous one. Mark Perry reports on the reaction from military officers to the president's threat:
Jun 02, 2020 | www.theamericanconservative.com

Senior military officer on Trump statement: "So we're going to tell our soldiers that we're redeploying them from the Middle East to the midwest? What do we think they're going to say, 'yeah, sure, no problem?' Guess again."

-- Mark Perry (@markperrydc) June 2, 2020

Earlier in the day yesterday, audio has leaked in which the Secretary of Defense referred to U.S. cities as the "battlespace." Separately, Sen. Tom Cotton was making vile remarks about using the military to give "no quarter" to looters. This is the language of militarism.

It is a consequence of decades of endless war and the government's tendency to rely on militarized options as their answer for every problem. Endless war has had a deeply corrosive effect on this country's political system: presidential overreach, the normalization of illegal uses of force, a lack of legal accountability for crimes committed in the wars, and a lack of political accountability for the leaders that continue to wage pointless and illegal wars. Now we see new abuses committed and encouraged by a lawless president, but this time it is Americans that are on the receiving end. Trump hasn't ended any of the foreign wars he inherited, and now it seems that he will use the military in an llegal mission here at home.

Megan S • an hour ago

The military is the only American institution that young people still have any real degree of faith in, it will be interesting to see the polls when this is all over with.

[May 31, 2020] On the meaning of the term Russiagate

May 31, 2020 | angrybearblog.com

  1. likbez , May 31, 2020 2:03 am

    Anybody who uses the term "Russiagate" seriously and not to recognize the actual and serious Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election in support of Trump is not to be taken remotely seriously.

    Russiagate is a valid and IMHO very useful political discourse term which has two intersecting meanings:

    1. Obamagate : Attempt of a certain political forces around Clintons and Obama with the support of intelligence agencies to stage a "color revolution" against Trump, using there full control of MSM as air superiority factor. With the main goal is the return to "classic neoliberalism" (neoliberal globalization uber alles) mode

    Which Trump rejected during his election campaign painting him as a threat to certain powerful neoliberal forces which include but not limited to Silicon Valley moguls (note bad relations of Trump and Bezos), some part of Wall street financial oligarchy, and most MSMs honchos.

    2. Neo-McCarthyism campaign unleashed by Obama administration with the goal to whitewash Hillary fiasco and to preserve the current leadership of the Democratic Party.

    That led to complete deterioration of relations between the USA and Russia and increase of chances of military conflict between two. Add to this consistent attempts of Trump to make China an enemy and politicize the process of economic disengagement between the two countries and you understand the level of danger. .

    When a senior Russian official implicitly calls the USA a rogue state and Trump administration -- gangsters on international arena, that a very bad sign. See

    https://nationalinterest.org/feature/russian-deputy-foreign-minister-sergei-ryabkov-%E2%80%9Cwe-have-no-trust-no-confidence-whatsoever%E2%80%9D

    But then again, it may well be so that the current Republican administration will in effect become a line in history in which a considerable number of useful international instruments were abrogated and that America exited them in the anticipation that this approach would serve U.S. interests better. Having said that, I will never say or never suggest that it was for us -- at least in the mid-2010s -- better with the previous administration.

    It was under the previous Obama administration that endless rounds of sanctions were imposed upon Russia. That was continued under Trump. The pretext for that policy is totally rejected by Russia as an invalid and illegal one. The previous administration, weeks before it departed, stole Russian property that was protected by diplomatic immunity, and we are still deprived of this property by the Trump administration. We have sent 350 diplomatic notes to both the Obama and the Trump administrations demanding the return of this property, only to see an endless series of rejections. It is one of the most vivid and obvious examples of where we are in our relationship.

    There is no such thing as "which administration is better for Russia in the U.S.?" Both are bad, and this is our conclusion after more than a decade of talking to Washington on different topics.

    Heilbrunn: Given the dire situation you portray, do you believe that America has become a rogue state?

    Ryabkov: I wouldn't say so, that's not our conclusion. But the U.S. is clearly an entity that stands for itself, one that creates uncertainty for the world. America is a source of trouble for many international actors. They are trying to find ways to protect and defend themselves from this malign and malicious policy of America that many of the people around the world believe should come to an end, hopefully in the near future.

    What I can't understand is this stupid jingoism, kind of "cult of death" among the US neocons, who personally are utter chickenhawks, but still from their comfortable offices write dangerous warmongering nonsense. Without understanding possible longer term consequences.

    Of course, MIC money does not smell, but some enthusiasts in blogs do it even without proper remuneration

[May 30, 2020] Cutting our excessive defense budget post-COVID-19 will be difficult. Here's how to do it by Gordon Adams

Sound like wishful thinking. Looks like cutting US military budget is impossible as "Full spectrum Dominance" doctrine is still in place and neocons are at the helm of the USA foreign policy. COVID-19 or not COVID-19.
May 29, 2020 | responsiblestatecraft.org

The other day an aerospace industry analyst asked me whether I thought the defense budget would start to go down, courtesy of the huge cost of dealing with the pandemic and the massive deficits the nation faces. I said it was unlikely and he agreed.

This is not the conventional wisdom in DC. Some national security analysts and advocates for higher defense budgets have warned that the defense budget is now under siege . Critics of the Pentagon and its spending are equally convinced that the pandemic opens the door to necessary, deep, sensible cuts in defense in order to fund the mountain of debt and take care of pressing needs for income, employment, health care, global warming, and other major threats to the well-being of Americans.

Whatever the nation's strategy, critics argue, the pandemic has changed the face of the threat to America. COVID-19 is an invisible, lethal threat to human security, a viral neutron bomb that spares buildings but kills their occupants.

Congress has appropriated more than 20 percent of the nation's gross domestic product, so far, to cope with this threat. Additional funds for the military, ironically, have become a "rounding error" in this spending -- little more than $10 billion of the more than $4 trillion appropriated to date. Secretary of Defense Mark Esper warned about the likelihood of defense cuts and wanted more funds for the Pentagon, but Rep. Adam Smith, Chair of the House Armed Services Committee said there was no way defense would get more funds through the pandemic bills.

So it looks bad for defense, and good for the advocates of cuts. But not so fast. Yes, it is true; history shows that defense budgets do decline. It happens, predictably, when we get out of a war – World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the Cold War. Even when we left Iraq in 2011, the budget went down.

There is a secret ingredient in defense budget reductions: they seem to happen, as well, when the politics of deficit reduction appear. Defense also declined after Korea because a fiscal conservative, Eisenhower, was in office, with five virtual stars on his shoulders, making it possible to put a lid on the budgetary appetites of the services.

In fact, in 1985, well before the end of the Cold War, Congress, focused on the deficit, passed the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Act, which was then was reinforced in the 1990 Budget Enforcement Act that set hard spending limits on domestic and defense spending. It had to cover both parts of discretionary spending or Congress could not agree. It was 17 years before the defense budget began to rise .

Put the end of war together with a dollop of deficit reduction and defense budgets will go down. They become the caboose, rather than the engine, of the budgetary train. But beware of what you ask for. The price of constraints on defense has been constraints on domestic spending, as the nation has learned over the past three decades. In fact, the Budget Control Act of 2011 constrained domestic spending, while allowing defense to escape almost unscathed, thanks to war supplementals.

When attention shifts to debates over priorities and deficits, it opens the door to a real discussion about defense. But they do not ensure cuts. While the military services may not see their appetite for real growth of 3-5 percent fulfilled, it is unlikely to decline very much.

There is a floor under the defense budget. But you need to change the level of analysis to see it and look at who actually makes defense budget decisions and why they make the decisions they do. It's about something I called the "Iron Triangle."

We all like to think that strategy drives defense budgets. For the most part, however, defense decisions are made inside a political system involving constant, relatively closed interaction between the military services, the Congress, and the community and industry beneficiaries of defense spending.

In outline, budget planners in the military services start with last year's budget and graft on new funds, rarely giving up a program, a mission, or part of the force. This dynamic points the budgets upwards over time. Secretaries and under-secretaries work to add preferences and projects, like national missile defense, to the services' budget plans. On top of that, presidents have made promises, adding such things as bomber funds (Reagan) and space forces (Trump) the services do not want.

Then there is the second leg of the triangle: Congress. For all their efforts to cut Pentagon waste, progressive members do not drive defense decisions in the Congress. The defense authorizers and appropriators do. The associated committees are dominated by defense spending advocates, deeply interested in the outcomes, encouraged by industry campaign contributions and community lobbying. These outside interests are the third leg of the triangle. Contracts and community-based impacts give them a deep stake in the outcomes.

This system is not a conspiracy; it is a visible part of American politics, similar in shape to the players in farm price supports or health care policy. But it is a system that operates somewhat separately from and parallel to the politics of deficit reduction and has a major impact on the content and levels of the defense budget. And its work bakes a kind of sclerosis into efforts to have a broader debate over spending priorities.

The politics of the Iron Triangle will set limits on the defense budget debate making deep cuts unlikely. So what might be the options to end-run this system? Politics, of course. If the advocates of deeper defense reductions want to change America's spending and budgeting priorities, they will need to join forces with advocates of a "new, new deal" in America -- one that would put priority on the national health system, infrastructure investment, climate change, immigration, and educational reform. Only a very large, very deep coalition has a chance of overcoming the inertia imposed by the Iron Triangle.

And that coalition will need to focus on Joe Biden. The president is the key actor here, particularly at the start of an administration. As Bill Clinton learned, the first months are critical to changing overall budget priorities, before the departments, including Defense, can begin the Iron Triangle dance.

Even then, major cuts in defense budgets are an uphill fight. The opening for a broader priorities debate has been provided by the COVID-19 pandemic. The outcome depends significantly on bringing this kind of focus to actions over the next seven months.

[May 30, 2020] Imperialism undercuts democracy by furthering inequalities among its citizens: Corruption becomes endemic, not only abroad but at home.

May 30, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Norogene , May 29 2020 23:02 utc | 115

lysias @ 109
... Here is a fine quote from Wolin's book (page 264) which illustrates the point (please excuse the length of this quote):

A twofold moral might be drawn from the experience of Athens: that it is self-subverting for democracy to subordinate its egalitarian convictions to the pursuit of expansive politics with its corollaries of conquest and domination and the power relationships they introduce. Few care to argue that, in political terms, democracy at home is advanced or improved by conquest abroad.

As Athens showed and the United States of the twenty-first century confirmed, imperialism undercuts democracy by furthering inequalities among its citizens. Resources that might be used to improve health care, education, and environmental protection are instead directed to defense spending, which, by far, con- sumes the largest percentage of the nation's annual budget. Moreover, the sheer size and complexity of imperial power and the expanded role of the military make it difficult to impose fiscal discipline and accountability. Corruption becomes endemic, not only abroad but at home. The most dangerous type of corruption for a democracy is measured not in monetary terms alone but in the kind of ruthless power relations it fosters in domestic politics. As many observers have noted, politics has become a blood sport with partisanship and ideological fidelity as the hallmarks. A partisan judiciary is openly declared to be a major priority of a political party; the efforts to consolidate executive power and to relegate Congress to a supporting role are to some important degree the retrojection inwards of the imperial thrust.

Second, if Athens was the first historical instance of a confrontation between democracy and elitism, that experience suggests that there is no simple recipe for resolving the tensions between them. Political elites were a persistent, if uneasy and contested, feature of Athenian democracy and a significant factor in both its expansion and its demise. In the eyes of contemporary observers, such as Thucydides, as well as later historians, the advancement of Athenian hegemony de- pended upon a public-spirited, able elite at the helm and a demos will- ing to accept leadership. Conversely, the downfall of Athens was attributed to the wiles and vainglory of leaders who managed to whip up popular support for ill-conceived adventures. As the war dragged on and frustration grew, domestic politics became more embittered and fractious: members of the elite competed to outbid each other by pro\posing ever wilder schemes of conquest.

In two attempts (411–410 and 404–403) elites, abetted by the Spartans, succeeded in temporarily abolishing democracy and installing rule by the Few.

...and while I am at it: lysias @ 106

Let's deconstruct what you've said. Even if he resisted arrest (by what degree was he resisting?) that is not cause for applying deadly force on someone. Clearly he was restrained and was going no where. Furthermore, the application of restraint should be one that ought not induce death in someone with a previous health condition. By your rationale, you have no business of walking the streets if you are not an able-bodied person and that death by restraint by a police officer is excusable if you happen to be in bad health.

Although you don't explicitly say it, somehow it feels like you are saying that he had it coming to him when you write "Floyd had a lengthy criminal record." Does that mean just because he had a lengthy record he deserved to be roughed up like that? This sounds like victim blaming, which is something commonly done in this country to continue to oppress people who have no power.

[May 30, 2020] The arseholes arguing for getting into conflicts do so only for the opportunities for personal benefit conflicts create

May 30, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

A User , May 30 2020 3:47 utc | 160

re Norogene | May 30 2020 3:09 utc | 155
"But, of course, you need to protect your country which means maintaining a defense force. " Yet I cannot think of a single instance of a conflict amerika has gotten into that wasn't a case of amerika kicking off the action with some particularly egregious act.

eg On the instances I have raised this with amerikans, many have told me they consider Pearl Harbour to be an instance of amerika being the innocent party, they had no idea that FDR had instigated a blockade of Japan long before which was starving Japanese people or that Pearl Harbour wasn't amerikan soil, it was an illegally occupied nation and the Japanese attack had been careful to only bomb and strafe the occupying force.

No nation needs a defense force if the true will of the citizens of a country was what steered that nation, since as you said, most humans the world over prefer to live and let live.

When I worked as a public servant it took me about 5 seconds to suss that those bureaucrats promoting change didn't have a real interest in change apart from the opportunity for promotion change can promote.

This is equally true of war, the arseholes arguing for getting into conflicts do so only for the opportunities for personal benefit conflicts create. Since no war has ever advantaged the masses it is safe to say left up to the people, no wars would always be their first preference.

[May 29, 2020] The USA effectively controls world semiconductor industry and this fact will hurt Huaway at least in a short run

May 29, 2020 | www.theamericanconservative.com

The administration also took off the gloves with China over U.S. listings by mainland companies that fail to follow U.S. securities laws. This came after the Commerce Department finally moved to limit access by Huawei Technologies to high-end silicon chips made with U.S. lithography machines. The trade war with China is heating up, but a conflict was inevitable and particularly when it comes to technology.

At the bleeding edge of 7 and 5 nanometer feature size, American tech still rules the world of semiconductors. In 2018, Qualcomm confirmed its next-generation Snapdragon SoC would be built at 7 nm. Huawei has already officially announced its first 7nm chip -- the Kirin 980. But now Huawei is effectively shut out of the best in class of custom-made chips, giving Samsung and Apple a built-in advantage in handsets and network equipment.

It was no secret that Washington allowed Huawei to use loopholes in last year's blacklist rules to continue to buy U.S. sourced chips. Now the door is closed, however, as the major Taiwan foundries led by TSMC will be forced to stop custom production for Huawei, which is basically out of business in about 90 days when its inventory of chips runs out. But even as Huawei spirals down, the White House is declaring financial war on dozens of other listed Chinese firms.

President Donald Trump said in an interview with Fox Business News that forcing Chinese companies to follow U.S. accounting norms would likely push them to list in non-U.S. exchanges. Chinese companies that list their shares in the U.S. have long refused to allow American regulators to inspect their accounting audits, citing direction from their government -- a practice that market authorities here have been unwilling or unable to stop.

The attack by the Trump Administration on shoddy financial disclosure at Chinese firms is long overdue, but comes at a time when the political evolution in China is turning decidedly authoritarian in nature and against any pretense of market-oriented development. The rising power of state companies in China parallels the accumulation of power in the hands of Xi Jinping, who is increasingly seen as a threat to western-oriented business leaders. The trade tensions with Washington provide a perfect foil to crack down on popular unrest in Hong Kong and discipline wayward oligarchs.

The latest moves by Beijing to take full control in Hong Kong are part of the more general retrenchment visible in China. "[P]rivate entrepreneurs are increasingly nervous about their future," writes Henny Sender in the Financial Times . "In many cases, these entrepreneurs have U.S. passports or green cards and both children and property in America. To be paid in U.S. dollars outside China for their companies must look more tempting by the day." A torrent of western oriented Chinese business leaders is exiting before the door is shut completely.

The fact is that China's position in U.S. trade has retreated as nations like Mexico and Vietnam have gained. Mexico is now America's largest trading partner and Vietnam has risen to 11th, reports Qian Wang of Bloomberg News . Meanwhile, China has dropped from 21 percent of U.S. trade in 2018 to just 18 percent last year. A big part of the shift is due to the U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade pact, which is expected to accelerate a return of production to North America. Sourcing for everything from autos to semiconductors is expected to rotate away from China in coming years.

China abandoned its decades-old practice of setting a target for annual economic growth , claiming that it was prioritizing goals such as stabilizing employment, alleviating poverty and preventing risks in 2020. Many observers accept the official communist party line that the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic made it almost impossible to fix an expansion rate this year, but in fact the lasting effects of the 2008 financial crisis and the aggressive policies of President Trump have rocked China back on its heels.

As China becomes increasingly focused inward and with an eye on public security, the economic situation is likely to deteriorate further. While many observers viewed China's "Belt & Road" initiative as a sign of confidence and strength, in fact it was Beijing's attempt to deal with an economic realignment that followed the 2008 crisis. The arrival of President Trump on the scene further weakened China's already unstable mercantilist economic model, where non-existent internal demand was supposed to make up for falling global trade flows. Or at least this was the plan until COVID-19.

"Before the Covid-19 outbreak, many economists were expecting China to set a GDP growth target of 6% to 6.5% to reflect the gradual slowdown in the pace of expansion over the past few years," reports Caixin Global . "Growth slid to 6.1% in 2019 from 6.7% in 2018. But the devastation caused by the coronavirus epidemic -- which saw the economy contract 6.8% year-on-year in the first quarter -- has thrown those forecasts out of the window."

Out of the window indeed. Instead of presiding over a glorious expansion of the Chinese sphere of influence in Asia, Xi Jinping is instead left to fight a defensive action economically and financially. The prospective end of the special status of Hong Kong is unlikely to have any economic benefits and may actually cause China's problems with massive internal debt and economic malaise to intensify. Beijing's proposed security law would reduce Hong Kong's separate legal status and likely bring an end to the separate currency and business environment.

M Orban • 20 hours ago

I honestly don't know if this article is or is not correct... But I wonder...
AmConMag publishes a major anti-China article on most days now. What is happening? What is the mechanics of this... "phenomenon"?
chris chuba M Orban • 12 hours ago
For any of their flaws AmConMag was a sweet spot.

A place where where Americans opposed to U.S. hegemony because it's harm on everyone without being overwhelmed by the Neocon acolytes where can we go, anyone ever try to get a word in on foxnews ?

If you try to reach out to twitter on Tom Cotton or Mike Waltz dismisses you as a 'Chinese govt / Iranian / Russian bot'

You know what, God will judge us and we will all be equal in he eyes of Him
Why should I be afraid. Why should I be silent. And thank you TAC for the opportunity to post.

M Orban chris chuba • 6 hours ago
I too came here for interesting commentary, - and even better comments... five years ago or so?
I found the original articles mostly okay, often too verbose, meandering for my taste but the different point of view made them worthwhile. The readers' comments, now that is priceless. That brings the real value. That's where we learn. That's where I learn, anyway. :)
It never occurred to me to message to any politician, I think my voice would be lost in the cacophony.
The target of my curiosity is that when all these articles start to point in one direction (like belligerence toward China) how does it happen? Is there a chain of command? It seems coordinated.
MPC M Orban • 2 hours ago • edited
It's possible to be anti-neocon, for their being too ideological, and not pacifist. That is basically my position.

I agree with most here on Russia and Iran. They are not threats, and in specific cases should be partners instead. Agree on American imperialism being foolish and often evil. I believe in a multipolar world as a practical matter. I don't take a soft view of China however. I believe they do intend to replace nefarious American hegemony with their own relevant, but equally nefarious, flavor of hegemony. There are few countries in the world with such a pathological distrust of their own people. I truly believe that country is a threat that needs to be checked at least for a couple of decades by the rest of the world.

As to the editorial direction, I think it is merely capitalism. China's perception in the world is extremely bad lately. I would fully expect the always somewhat Russophile environment here to seize the moment to say 'see! Russia is not a true threat! It's China!' RT itself soon after Trump's election I recall posted an article complaining about total disregard for Chinese election meddling.

Barry_II M Orban • 7 hours ago
You can see when the people holding the leash give a tug on the collar. And it's clear that the GOP is feeling the need for a warlike political environment.

The most blatant presstitution example, of course, was the National Review, going from 'Never Trump' to full time servicing.

M Orban Barry_II • 6 hours ago
In case of AmConMag, who is holding the leash?

[May 29, 2020] Putin: Once again, preserving the jobs and incomes of Russian families has been one of our top priorities since day one of our efforts to counter the epidemic. This, of course, is a fair approach and a fair principle, because people should always be our priority.

May 29, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

karlof1 , May 28 2020 16:31 utc | 94

I haven't written anything about Putin in awhile, and his teleconference about Russia's "labour market situation" provides an excellent opportunity. What you'll read illustrates the acutely dramatic difference in policy between Russia and the Outlaw US Empire when it comes to supporting its populous:

"Once again, preserving the jobs and incomes of Russian families has been one of our top priorities since day one of our efforts to counter the epidemic. This, of course, is a fair approach and a fair principle, because people should always be our priority ." [My Emphasis]

To be fair, Trump and Congress do favor some of the people--those at and associated with Wall Street--and what we've seen is those people are certainly Trump and Congress's priority, but not so much anyone else. Contrast that with Russia's policy:

"We have established a key, basic criterion for supporting businesses. From the outset, we have organised our work exactly this way: preserving the workforce and salaries is a priority . We offered incentives whereby companies and entrepreneurs who take care of their employees and strive to retain them, can count on greater support from the state. By that, I also mean direct subsidies to pay salaries at small- and medium-sized businesses in the affected industries in an amount equivalent to one minimum wage per employee in April and May, as well as easy-term loans with a 2 percent interest rate. These loans will be repaid by the state, as agreed, if staffing at a given company remains at the current level." [My Emphasis]

The above isn't the total policy, of course. Also note the tone of Putin's remarks, which have actually remained very consistent over his tenure as Russia's leader:

"We need to analyse and look deep into the problems of every person that asks for help , especially elderly people and pre-pensioners. This also applies to graduates of universities, colleges and academies that are finishing their studies and starting to work.

"It is necessary to look for suitable jobs in cooperation with companies, organisations and employers. These things must not be left to luck. It is necessary to offer snap courses, as well as education and retraining programmes for those who have lost their jobs." [My Emphasis]

By comparison, what do we see from UK, EU and Outlaw US Empire? Pretty much the opposite--unless you're in the top 10% who won't risk losing one cent--it's a Free Market where you're free to sink to your doom. Putin in contrast agreed to extend unemployment to October 1 and prior to that time will reexamine the state of the labour market to determine if that deadline needs to be extended again--policy that's the polar opposite of that within the Outlaw US Empire. What's somewhat astonishing is the Outlaw US Empire has about 130 million of its people unemployed while Russia's entire population is about 145 million but doesn't have a parasite that demands being continually fed massive amounts of money--about $8 Trillion for the first third of 2020.


[May 28, 2020] The US-based Center For Public Integrity seems to be the parent of the UK government's Integrity Initiative boondoggle

May 28, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

guidoamm , May 28 2020 7:05 utc | 60

Center For Public Integrity

Funding
The Center for Public Integrity has received contributions from a number of left-leaning foundation funders including the Ford Foundation, Omidyar Network Fund, Foundation to Promote Open Society, Knight Foundation, and MacArthur Foundation.[3] The foundation has stated that it no longer accepts corporate gifts, but it takes money from the private foundations of many of the richest Americans including actor Leonardo DiCaprio.

Seems to be the parent of the UK government's Integrity Initiative boondoggle

[May 28, 2020] Trump: I Can and Will Start Wars Whenever I Please

May 28, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Richard Steven Hack , May 27 2020 23:54 utc | 38

Trump: I Can and Will Start Wars Whenever I Please
https://tinyurl.com/yc6j4sqy
Trump claims that the resolution was "based on misunderstandings of facts and law." The only allegedly incorrect fact he mentions is the existence of open hostilities between the United States and Iran, but that's merely a reflection of the time when the measure was drafted. Besides, the two countries are still not exactly at peace with each other, thanks in part to the president.

Trump is the one who is clearly mistaken regarding the law. He insists, as he did in January, that the 2002 Authorization for the Use of Military Force against Saddam Hussein's Iraq was sufficient justification for killing Soleimani, but as the American Conservative's Daniel Larison opined, "There is no honest reading of that resolution that supports this interpretation." In addition, he claims that he derives his war-making power from Article II of the Constitution, yet that article specifically states that "the president shall be commander in chief of the [armed forces] when called into the actual service of the United States." (Emphasis added.) And who gets to call them into service? According to Article I, Congress does, by declaring war.

Trump doubles down on this unsupportable assertion in his next paragraph:

The resolution implies that the President's constitutional authority to use military force is limited to defense of the United States and its forces against imminent attack. That is incorrect. We live in a hostile world of evolving threats, and the Constitution recognizes that the President must be able to anticipate our adversaries' next moves and take swift and decisive action in response. That's what I did!

This is on a par with Trump's declaration over the states re-opening: he declared: "When somebody is the president of the United States, the authority is total. And that's the way it's got to be."

This lunatic thinks he's Caesar!

Anyone who thinks he won't start a new war - somewhere - is delusional. He may not start one *before* the election, but if he wins, what about *after*? And i wouldn't even be sure about "before". He's dumb enough to think - or be convinced by his neocon advisers - that he could get a "war President" boost in the polls if he starts one before the election. After all, the one time he got a boost in the polls was when he attacked Syria over the bogus "chemical weapons" incidents. So I wouldn't rule anything out.

[May 26, 2020] Afghanistan's insurgency is clearly supported from Pakistan and are reportedly aided by some elements of Pakistan's ISI

May 26, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

karlof1 , May 26 2020 17:41 utc | 1

The New York Times has a 4,000 words long piece about the war on Afghanistan. It tries to explain why the Taliban won the war.

How the Taliban Outlasted a Superpower: Tenacity and Carnage

It is also a remarkable attempt to ignore the factual history:

[The Taliban] have outlasted a superpower through nearly 19 years of grinding war. And dozens of interviews with Taliban officials and fighters in three countries, as well as with Afghan and Western officials, illuminated the melding of old and new approaches and generations that helped them do it.

After 2001, the Taliban reorganized as a decentralized network of fighters and low-level commanders empowered to recruit and find resources locally while the senior leadership remained sheltered in neighboring Pakistan.

That is simply wrong. Between the end of 2001 and 2007 there were no Taliban. The movement had dissolved.

The author later acknowledges that there were no Taliban activity throughout those years. But the narrative is again skewed:

Many Taliban commanders interviewed for this article said that in the initial months after the invasion, they could scarcely even dream of a day they might be able to fight off the U.S. military. But that changed once their leadership regrouped in safe havens provided by Pakistan's military -- even as the Pakistanis were receiving hundreds of millions of dollars in American aid.

From that safety, the Taliban planned a longer war of attrition against U.S. and NATO troops. Starting with more serious territorial assaults in 2007, the insurgents revived and refined an old blueprint the United States had funded against the Soviets in the same mountains and terrain -- but now it was deployed against the American military.

Even before the U.S. invaded Afghanistan the Taliban had recognized that they lacked the capability to run a country. They had managed to make Afghanistan somewhat secure. The warlords who had fought each other after the Soviet draw down were suppressed and the streets were again safe. But there was no development, no real education or health system and no money to create them.

When the U.S. invaded the Taliban dispersed. On December 5 2001 Taliban leader Mullah Omar resigned and went into hiding within Afghanistan. For one day the Taliban defense minister Mullah Obaidullah became the new leader. From the The Secret Life of Mullah Omar by Bette Dam:

The next day, Mullah Obaidullah drove up north to Kandahar's Shah Wali Kot district to meet with Karzai and his supporters. In what has become known as the "Shah Wali Kot Agreement", Mullah Obaidullah and the Taliban agreed to lay down their arms and retire to their homes or join the government. The movement effectively disbanded itself. Karzai agreed, and in a media appearance the next day, he announced that while al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden were the enemies of Afghanistan, the Taliban were sons of the soil and would effectively receive amnesty. For the moment, the war was over.

The Taliban fighters went back to their home villages and families. Most stayed in Afghanistan. Some of the leaders and elder members went back to the tribal regions of Pakistan where their families had been living as refugees since the Soviet invasion in 1979.

The Taliban did not plan a longer war of attrition - at least not between 2001 and 2006. The movement had simply ended to exist.

The big question is then why it came back but the New York Times has little to say about that:

From the start, the insurgents seized on the corruption and abuses of the Afghan government put in place by the United States, and cast themselves as arbiters of justice and Afghan tradition -- a powerful part of their continued appeal with many rural Afghans in particular. With the United States mostly distracted with the war in Iraq, the insurgency widened its ambitions and territory.

No, the 'corruption and abuses of the Afghan government' were not the reason the Taliban were reestablished. It were the abuses of the U.S. occupation that recreated them. The publicly announced amnesty Karzai and Mullah Obaidullah had agreed upon, was ignored by the U.S. commanders and politicians.

The CIA captured random Afghans as 'Taliban' and brutally tortured them - some to death. U.S. Special Forces randomly raided private homes and bombed whole villages to rubble. The brutal warlords, which the Taliban had suppressed, were put back into power. When they wanted to grab a piece of land they told their U.S. handlers that the owner was a 'Taliban'. The U.S. troops would then removed that person one way or the other. The behavior of the occupiers was an affront to every Afghan.

By 2007 Mullah Omar and his helper Jabbar Omari were hiding in Siuray, a district around twenty miles southeast of Qalat. A large U.S. base was nearby. Bette Dam writes of the people's mood:

As the population turned against the government due to its corruption and American atrocities, they began to offer food and clothing to the house-hold for Jabbar Omari and his mysterious friend.

It was the absurd stupidity and brutality with which the U.S. occupied the country that gave Afghans the motive to again fight against an occupier or at least to support such a fight.

At the same time the Pakistani military had come to fear a permanent U.S. presence in its backyard. It connected the retired Taliban elders with its sponsors in the Gulf region and organized the logistics for a new insurgency. The Taliban movement was reestablished with new leadership but under the old name.

The old tribal command networks where again activates and the ranks were filled with newly disgruntled Afghans. From that point on it was only a question of time until the U.S. would have to leave just like the Soviets and Brits had to do before them.

By December 2001 the war against the Taliban had ended. During the following five years the U.S. fought against an imaginary enemy that no longer existed. It was this war on the wider population that by 2007 created a new insurgency that adopted the old name.

A piece that claims to explain why the Taliban have won the war but ignores the crucial period between 2001 and 2007 misses the most important point that made the Taliban victory possible.

The will of the Afghan people to liberate their country from a foreign occupation. Thanks b for doing a good job in restating the record. IMO, the Outlaw US Empire followed the same MO as it did in Korea, Vietnam, and the Philippines well before them all, all of which were based on the White Supremacist Settler credo underlying the culture of the US military that was just called out--again-- in this very powerful NY Times Editorial , and Iraq was no different either. The contrast between the Editorial Board and its Newsroom writers is quite stark when their products are compared--one lies about recent history while the other attempts to educate more fully about the very sordid past of the most revered federal government institution.

Don Bacon , May 26 2020 18:03 utc | 3

Bombing civilians is recruiting more enemies. Also, in this mistaken adventure the US has been stupidly allied with and funding the neighboring country (Pakistan) which is supporting the people (Taliban) who are killing Americans.

General McChrystal's Report to President Obama, Aug 30, 2009:

'Afghanistan's insurgency is clearly supported from Pakistan. . .and are reportedly aided by some elements of Pakistan's ISI [Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence ]. . . .Indian political and economic influence is increasing in Afghanistan, including significant efforts and financial investment. In addition, the current Afghan government is perceived by Islamabad to be pro-Indian. While Indian activities largely benefit the Afghan people, increasing Indian influence in Afghanistan is likely to exacerbate regional tensions and encourage Pakistani countermeasures in Afghanistan or India." . . .Simply put, Pakistan didn't want to be in an Indian sandwich with its mortal enemy on two sides.

President Obama was then in the process of more than tripling the US military strength in Afghanistan, sending 70,000 more troops to that graveyard of empires (UK, Russia). Three months later, December 1, 2009 at West Point, Obama gave a rah-rah speech to cadets including: . . ."Third, we will act with the full recognition that our success in Afghanistan is inextricably linked to our partnership with Pakistan."

LuBa , May 26 2020 19:56 utc | 6
This article wants on purpose link taliban to Pakistan..there is no connection between Talibans and yanks backed Pakistani militias..and there is no pakistani talibans..they want to hide the truth confusing the people but the truth is that the violent and illegal occupation of Afghanistan created a strong resistance in an already strong population.The puppet-method didn't work there and this article is the last (I hope) attempt to give a false narrative of the events.18 years of war for nothing..what the empire has gained from this war?nothing.
arby , May 26 2020 20:03 utc | 7
LuBa--
"what the empire has gained from this war?nothing"

Hmmm, not sure about that. First of all it has kept Russia out of Afghanistan, and somewhere I read that Afghanistan is very central to controlling Eurasia.

I'm pretty sure that attacking Afghanistan was planned before 911 as well, so there must be some reason for that.

Jen , May 26 2020 20:18 utc | 8
The writer of that NYT piece, Mujib Mashal, studied history (presumably the history of Afghanistan and western and southern Asia) at Columbia University - O'Bomber's alma mater, I believe - and in-between working as an NYT intern in Kabul and his current senior correspondent role, worked for a time with Al Jazeera in Doha. One wonders how much effort Mashal and other NYT writers with similar backgrounds put into reordering reality to fit whatever fairy-tale narratives they were taught at Columbia University.

The underlying aim in MM's hit-piece must surely be to set up Pakistan as a target for criticism. Some sort of narrative arc leading to removing Imran Khan as Prime Minister there can't be too far away.

uncle tungsten , May 26 2020 21:02 utc | 10
Michael Hastings was a real journalist. His demolition of McChrystal the goof US war criminal should be read again and again. Vale brave journalist.
vato , May 26 2020 21:44 utc | 13
Soviet invasion? The Soviet-Afghan Friendship Treaty signed in December 1978 permitted - inter alia - military assistance and advice to the Afghani government if requested. Saying the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan is like saying Russia invaded Syria.
Sakineh Bagoom , May 26 2020 21:46 utc | 14
Opium production is now seven-fold since the arrival of the empire. It is afflicting Afghanistan and neighboring countries with addiction all the while paying for CIA operations.
Mission Accomplished.

Let's not forget the MOAB, we are told was detonated over -- caves?

cirsium , May 26 2020 22:01 utc | 15
@LuBa, May 26
what the empire has gained from this war?nothing.

Millions of dollars earned off-the-books from drug trafficking plus enough product to carry out narco-aggression against Iran, Russia, China and the 'stans is nothing?

bevin , May 26 2020 22:03 utc | 16
Superb.
The relationship with Pakistan has two aspects : the borders between the countries, imposed by the British, make no sense, dividing the Pashtun people artificially. The second is that the US has long used Pakistan as a pawn in the region. This goes back to the foundation of the country in 1948 and malign US influence in Pakistan has been the major factor in the country's problems. It is a reminder that there are no known limits to the hypocrisy of the people running the USA that the links between the Taliban, nurtured under US sponsorship in Pakistan which was used as a secure base beyond Kabul's writ, and Pakistan are attributed to Pakistan's initiative.
Another matter which one supposes that the New York Times neglected to mention is that under US sponsorship since 2001 the Heroin industry, reduced almost to nothing by the Taliban government has ballooned into the proportions we have grown to expect where US influence is established. Besides the corpses of those bombed, tortured and shot to death by the imperialist armies there are millions of victims of the drug trades, ranging from those killed by death squads in the producing countries, and those in, for example Colombia and Honduras, victimised by narco governments to the millions of addicts around the world.
Part of the truth of Afghanistan is that the US and its allies have been protecting the criminal narcotics trade in order to employ its profits for their own evil purposes.
Gerhard , May 26 2020 22:12 utc | 17
Hello!

Please allow to add to b 's very good overview another subject: drug planting, producing and dealing in Afghanistan. The Taliban first were against drugs (religious reasons), but when they saw that the people were exhausted by the Americans and their corrupt Afghan friends, and had no more income, they allowed the farmers to plant opium poppy for the EXPORT. Soon they also realized the profits for themselves (to change into weapons). And so it happened that Afghanistan became a major producer for the world market. It's an open question (at least for me) how much international networks with connections to US-people and US-institutions (like CIA) are involved in this drug dealing business originating in Afghanistan.

arby | 7 wrote:

I'm pretty sure that attacking Afghanistan was planned before 911 as well, so there must be some reason for that.

Interesting question (more see below)! A few days ago I made some research to a parallel problem: was "homeland security" also in the development before 9/11? Parallel to the war against Afghanistan another war was started: against the American people. Under the roof of 'Homeland Security' in the interior; parallel zu 'National Security' as a topic in foreign politics. Bush jun. appointed Tom Ridge within 28 days, did they have some plans before? I found some remarks in Edward LIPTON's book, Homeland Security Office (2002), indicating plannings as early as Dec. 2000 and Jan. 2001. Please also remember that there were anthrax mailings parallel to 9/11. Please remember that Homeland Security Act has some paragraphs about defense against bioweapon attacks and has some paragraphs about vaccine, too. Please remember that early plannings of homeland security had also controlling american people with the help of lockdowns. That trail was followed during the next years in 'hidden' further plannings as You may find them here:

https://www.voltairenet.org/article209776.html

https://www.voltairenet.org/article209808.html

And that all now will be further developed into future as outlined here:

https://www.voltairenet.org/article210000.html

Next interesting question: when did THEY begin to focus on the twin towers? WTC area was public property and administration. Very profitable. Then SIVLERSTEIN bought the WTC7 ground and started to built and rented it, among others, to CIA. And then THEY were looking just out of the window to see the twin towers. And then these very pofitable buildings were privatized - why? And they were insured. That privatization was a very dramatic poker which was won by SILVERSTEIN, too. Why? Some 'renovation' had to be done of course when SILVERSTEIN took over the property. I remember that companies included were overseen by one of the Bush sons (Jebb?), and so on ...

Back to the questions about planning of War against Afghanistan. There should be documents available (foreign policy planning & military planning) because the background primarily was (according to my estimation) geopolitical. But there is a greater framework within which the war against terrorism has to be seen. On the day after 9/11 a document was published for the first time which had been collected under Bush Sen. in the 1980s: 'Report of the Vice President's Task Force on Combatting Terrorism'. It says that terrorism follows overpopulation in undeveloped countries. So we are here within the idea of depopulation, and realizing that we can look on the Bill & Melinda Gates' Charitable Works as a far more human version. For further reading three LINKs are given below.

Concluding, I would like to say: unterstanding and commenting the past doesn't help much. THEY are acting and THEY are planning, day by day. Things only will change if 'we' are planning and acting, too. And if 'we' want a better world our instruments must be better than THEIRs.

Kind regards, Gerhard (Germany)


Regarding DEPOPULATION:

https://www.population-security.org (look also into INTRO)

https://www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/books/book-review-empty-planet-explores-the-world-s-next-biggest-population-threat-1.848236 (opposite perspective but the same thinking; pure academic stuff)
~~~~~~~
The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies (hrsg. von Donald Bloxham, A. Dirk Moses)

karlof1 , May 26 2020 22:26 utc | 18
Et Tu @12--

The New York Times occasionally publishes something worthy of reading. One such item I linked to @ 1 above.

DeQuincey , May 27 2020 0:57 utc | 21
vato 13 wrote
Soviet invasion? The Soviet-Afghan Friendship Treaty signed in December 1978 permitted - inter alia - military assistance and advice to the Afghani government if requested. Saying the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan is like saying Russia invaded Syria.

Treaty of friendship, good-neighbourliness and co operation. Signed at Moscow on 5 December 1978

b fix the error in your report please.

Richard Steven Hack , May 27 2020 1:34 utc | 22
Posted by: arby | May 26 2020 20:03 utc | 7 I'm pretty sure that attacking Afghanistan was planned before 911 as well, so there must be some reason for that.

It's called 1) oil pipeline, and 2) heroin for the CIA to finance their "black black" operations. That's not a typo: there are "black budget" operations not identified in the Federal budget - and "black black" operations that are financed outside the Federal budget. No one knows how much that is.

The "official" Black Budget operations are described in a Harvard University document as:


On March 18, 2019 the Office the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), announced its request for the largest sum ever, $62.8 billion, for funding U.S. intelligence operations in Fiscal Year (FY) 2020.1This request spans the classified funding from more than a dozen agencies that make up the National Intelligence Program (NIP).2 The U.S. Government spends these funds on data collection, counterintelligence, and covert action.3 The DNI also requested $21.2 billion for FY 2019 for the Military Intelligence Program (MIP) devoted to intelligence activity in support of U.S. military operations.4 For FY2020, it is likely to request a similar figure, for a total estimated request of approximately $85 billion for the "Black Budget," t he U.S. Government's secret military and intelligence expenditures.

Interesting article here that shows how some of this has been done in Asia, Saudi Arabia, Central America, etc.

CIA Funding: Never Constrained by its Congressional Budget
https://whowhatwhy.org/2014/12/12/cia-funding-never-constrained-congressional-budget/

And from The Intercept - another clear example:

The U.S. Quietly Released Afghanistan's "Biggest Drug Kingpin" From Prison. Did He Cut a Deal?
https://theintercept.com/2018/05/01/haji-juma-khan-afghanistan-drug-trafficking-cia-dea/


Before his arrest, the alleged drug trafficker worked with the CIA and the DEA, received payments from the government, and, at one point, visited Washington and New York on the DEA's dime. ,/BLOCKQUOTE

From the Federation of American Scientists:

A Tangled Web: A History of CIA Complicity in Drug International Trafficking
https://fas.org/irp/congress/1998_cr/980507-l.htm

[May 26, 2020] Between Two Worlds: American in Small Town Russia

May 26, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Ashino , May 25 2020 13:59 utc | 81

https://halfreeman.wordpress.com/2020/05/19/four-years-back-in-russia/

Between Two Worlds: American in Small Town Russia
Luga: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luga,_Leningrad_Oblast
IMAGES: https://yandex.com/images/search?from=tabbar&text=Luga%2C%20Leningrad%
20Oblast

FOUR YEARS BACK IN RUSSIA

Excerpts...
Our arrival here went pretty smooth. I read my early blog on our arrival the other day and remembered how shocked I was at the nice roads and homes we saw on the way from the airport to Luga....

'Russian Hoax' has been exposed.... but still, the Russia narrative continues. The U.S. media do not retract stories about Russia that are later found to be inaccurate. The Russian Embassy pointed out recently that the NY Times won three Pulitzer prizes for reports on Russian meddling and trolling that later proved to be wrong. There was never a retraction.
https://www.rt.com/usa/487842-new-york-times-russia-pulitzer/
American media can accuse Russia of anything from election collusion to cheating on COVID-19 figures. They don't need evidence to charge Russians with anything. And they know they won't be held accountable when it turns out the info is not factual !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I admit all this Russia hoax has impacted me. There are so many misrepresentations in the American news of life here and what Russia is like. I still see these articles and interviews by those who know nothing about life here. Oksana and I have lost a few of our American friends ("acquaintances" might be a better word). The suggestion that in some ways life is better in
Russia offends some Americans. Politics becomes more important than friendships.

It is not just the misrepresentations of life in Russia. I have gotten to meet ex-pats or folks who have spent a lot of time in other countries.
I've learned the American government has lied about those countries as well.
They share the same sense of frustration that we feel here. Right now, China is a possibility for taking from Russia the top-spot in the list of countries America hates. Someone asked me what I thought of how China handled the COVID crisis. I have no idea.

I don't know anyone in China. I read things in the American press that paints them as deceptive, but these are the same !!!! media sources that I am absolutely sure lied about Russia.
I did hear one Russian medical person who went there to study the situation in China when it first broke.
He said the portrayal in the Western press was completely wrong.
After what I've seen here, I don't doubt it.

[May 25, 2020] The extent of the incompetence involved in the USA accessment of the USSR just befor the collapse

May 25, 2020 | irrussianality.wordpress.com
  1. davidhabakkuk says: May 25, 2020 at 12:22 pm The kind of view of the end of the Cold War which underpins Billingslea's notion that the United States can spend Russia and China into 'oblivion' is that championed by people who totally failed to anticipate what happened in the Soviet Union in the 'Eighties, and have not seen this fact as reason for rethinking the assumptions that caused them to get things so radically wrong.

    The extent of the incompetence involved is vividly apparent in the collection of documents from the American and Soviet sides published by the 'National Security Archive' in January 2017, under the title 'The Last Superpower Summits.'

    (See https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/russia-programs/2017-01-23/last-superpower-summits

    Particularly revealing, to my mind, is Document 12, the transcript of the closed-door testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee by the top three CIA analysts of the Soviet Union, Doug MacEachin, Robert Blackwell, and Paul Ericson, at the precise moment, in December 1988, when Gorbachev announced his 500,000 troop cut at the U.N.

    The editors comment:

    'And MacEachin offers a true confession in an extraordinary passage that demonstrates how prior assumptions about Soviet behavior, rather than actual intelligence data points, actually drove intelligence findings: "Now, we spend megadollars studying political instability in various places around the world, but we never really looked at the Soviet Union as a political entity in which there were factors building which could lead to the kind of – at least the initiation of political transformation that we seem to see. It does not exist to my knowledge. Moreover, had it existed inside the government, we never would have been able to publish it anyway, quite frankly. And had we done so, people would have been calling for my head. And I wouldn't have published it. In all honesty, had we said a week ago that Gorbachev might come to the UN and offer a unilateral cut of 500,000 in the military, we would have been told we were crazy. We had a difficult enough time getting air space for the prospect of some unilateral cuts of 50 to 60,000."

    Actually, it was quite possible to do much better, without spending 'megadollars', if one simply went to the Chatham House Library and/or the London Library and looked at what competent analysts, like those working for the Foreign Policy Studies Program then run by the late, great John Steinbruner at Brookings – a very different place then from now.

    Among those he employed were two of the best former intelligence analysts of Soviet military strategy: Ambassador Raymond Garthoff and Commander Michael MccGwire, R.N., to give them their titles when in government service.

    These has devoted a great deal of effort to explaining that Professor Richard Pipes of Harvard, a key influence in creating the 'groupthink' MacEachin described, had missed a crucial transition away from nuclear war planning to conventional 'deep operations' in the late 'Sixties and 'Seventies.

    Inturn, this led Garthoff and MccGwire to grasp that the Gorbachev-era 'new thinkers' had decided that the conventional 'deep operations' posture in turn needed to be abandoned. For a summary of the latter's arguments, see article entitled 'Rethinking War: The Soviets and European Security', published in the Spring 1988 edition of the 'Brookings Review', available on the 'Unz Review' site.

    (See https://www.unz.com/print/BrookingsRev-1988q2-00003/ .)

    Also associated with Brookings at the time was the Duke University Sovietologist Jerry Hough, who had read his way through the writings of academics in the institutes associated with the Academy of Sciences on development economics, and talked extensively to many of their authors.

    In the 'Conclusion' to his 1986 study, 'The Struggle for the Third World: Soviet Debates and American Options', Hough wrote:

    'Or what is one to say about the argument – now very widely accepted – among Soviet economists – that countries with "capitalist-oriented" economies in the third world have a natural tendency to grow more rapidly than countries with a "socialist orientation" because well-rounded development seems to be dependent on foreign investment and integration into the world market? A quarter of a century ago, let alone in the Stalin period, it was just as widely accepted that integration into the capitalist world economy doomed a third world country to slow, deformed growth and that foreign investment exploited a local economy.'

    One thing one could say is that this recognition that fundamental premises of the Marxist-Leninist view of the world had turned out wrong was simple an acknowledgement of the ways that the world had changed. And that view of the world had defined the political framework in which Soviet contingency planning for war had developed.

    Central to this had been the premise of a 'natural' teleology of history towards socialism, with the risk of war in the international system arising from the attempts of the 'imperialist' powers to resist this.

    So there were profound pressures, which really were not simply created by the Reagan military build-up and SDI, for radical changes in the Soviet security posture. Questions were obviously raised, however, as to whether these – together with radical domestic reform – would defuse Western hostility.

    Fascinating here is Document 11, a memo to Gorbachev from a key advisor, Georgy Arbatov, the director of the 'Institute for U.S.A. and Canada' from the previous June. This sets the plan for the 500,000 troop reduction in the context both of the wider conception of liquidating the capability for large-scale offensive operations described MccGwire, and also of the perceived importance of breaking the 'image of the enemy' in the West.

    While both Gorbachev, and Arbatov, were widely perceived in the West as engaged in a particularly dangerous 'active measures' campaign, it is striking how closely the thinking set out in the memo echoes that the latter had articulated the previous December in a letter to the 'New York Times', in response to a column by William Safire.

    (See https://www.nytimes.com/1987/12/08/opinion/l-it-takes-two-to-make-a-cold-war-963287.html .)

    Headlined 'It Takes Two to Make a Cold War', it expresses key assumptions underlying the 'new thinking.' Two crucial paragraphs:

    'If the Soviet Union should accept the proposed rules of the game and devotedly continue the cold war, then, of course, sooner or later, the whole thing would end in a calamity. But at least Mr. Safire's plan would work. The only problem I see here is that the Soviet Union will not pick up the challenge and accept the proposed rules of the game. And then Americans would find themselves in exactly the same position Mr. Safire and his ilk, as he himself writes, are finding themselves in now: history would pass them by, and years from now they would be "regarded as foot-draggers and sourpusses," because almost no one in the world is willing to play the games of the American right. Least of all, the Soviet Union.

    'And here we have a "secret weapon" that will work almost regardless of the American response e would deprive America of The Enemy. And how would you justify without it the military expenditures that bleed the American economy white, a policy that draws America into dangerous adventures overseas and drives wedges between the United States and its allies, not to mention the loss of American influence on neutral countries? Wouldn't such a policy in the absence of The Enemy put America in the position of an outcast in the international community?'

    There was however another question which was raised by the patent bankrupcy of Marxism-Leninism, which bore very directly upon what Arbatov, in his memorandum to Gorbachev.

    If one accepted that Soviet-style economics had led to a dead end, and that integration into the U.S. dominated global economic order was the road to successful development, questions obviously arose about not simply about how far, and how rapidly, one should attempt to dismantle not simply the command economy.

    But they also arose about whether it was prudent to dismantle the authoritarian political system with which it was associated, at the same time.

    In a lecture given in 2010, entitled 'The Cold War: A View from Russia', the historian Vladimir O. Pechatnov, himself a product of Arbatov's institute, would provide a vivid picture of the disillusion felt by 'liberalising' intellectuals within the Soviet apparatus, like himself.

    (See http://jhss-khazar.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/01.pdf .)

    However, he also made the – rather interesting – suggestion that, had logic of central arguments by George F. Kennan, the figure generally, if in my own view somewhat misleadingly, regarded as the principal architect of post-war American strategy, actually pointed rather decisively away from the assumption that a rapid dismantling of the authoritarian system was wise.

    And Pechatnov pointed to the very ambivalent implications of the view of the latent instability of Soviet society expressed in Kennan's famous July 1947 'X-article':

    'So, if Communist Party is incapacitated, the Soviet Russia, I quote, "would almost overnight turn from one of the mightiest into one of the weakest and miserable nations of the world "). Had Gorbachev read Kennan and realized this causal connection (as Deng and his colleagues most definitely had), he might have thought twice before abruptly terminating the Communist monopoly on power.'

    What is involved here is a rather fundamental fact – that in their more optimistic assumptions, people like Arbatov and Gorbachev turned out to be simply wrong.

    Crucially, rather than marginalising people like Pipes, and Safire, and Billingslea, an effect of the retreat and collapse of Soviet power was to convince a very substantial part of what had been the 'Peace Movement' coalition that their erstwhile opponents had been vindicated.

    However, the enthusiasm of people like Billingslea for a retry of the supposed successful 'Reagan recipe' brings another irony.

    As to SDI, it was well-known at the time that it could easily be countered, at relatively low cost, with 'asymetric' measures.

    This is well brought out in Garthoff's discussion in his 2001 Memoir 'A Journey through the Cold War: A Memoir of Containment and Coexistence' (see p. 356.) For a more recent discussion, in the light of declassified materials, which reaches the same conclusion, see a piece in the 'Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists' by Pavel Podvig from April 2013, entitled 'Shooting down the Star Wars myth' at

    https://thebulletin.org/2013/04/shooting-down-the-star-wars-myth-2/

    And if one bothers to follow the way that arguments have been developing outside the 'bubble' in which most inhabitants of Washington D.C., and London exist, it is evident that people in Moscow, and Beijing, have thought about the lessons of this history. Those who think that they are going to be suckered into an arms race that the United States can win are quite patently delusional.

[May 24, 2020] About Pompeo threat to cut Australia from the fives eyes intelligence flows

From MoA comment 57: "Warmongering shit bags endlessly flatulent about their moral superiority while threatening to nuke nations on the other side of the globe daily. ... the greatness of the US consists of how gullible its hyper-exploited populace has been to a long series of Donald Trumps who use the resources of the land and people for competitive violence against other nations. the world heaves a collective hallelujah that this bullshit is about to end. "
Notable quotes:
"... Lets reverse that point, shall we. There is a US spy base in Australia at a place called Pine Gap. Without it being operational the USA would lose its 3 dimensional vision across the planet. ..."
"... This Bannon/Trump bluster is weak as p!ss as 'sharing intelligence' is the cornerstone of the five eyes perversion that gives the USA some superiority in intelligence matters. So if sharing intelligence were withdrawn by the USA with Australia it would have meaningless consequences. ..."
"... Pompeo is blathering bullsh!t and he knows it and we all know it ..."
May 24, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

uncle tungsten , May 25 2020 0:44 utc | 56

vk #4
Pompeo Warns US May Stop Sharing Intelligence With Australia Over Victoria Inking Deal With China's BRI

The battle for Australia's soul has begun.

Lets reverse that point, shall we. There is a US spy base in Australia at a place called Pine Gap. Without it being operational the USA would lose its 3 dimensional vision across the planet.

This Bannon/Trump bluster is weak as p!ss as 'sharing intelligence' is the cornerstone of the five eyes perversion that gives the USA some superiority in intelligence matters. So if sharing intelligence were withdrawn by the USA with Australia it would have meaningless consequences.

On the other hand if Australia ceased its intelligence sharing and shut down all the data traffic out of Australia - the USA would go ballistic. Not that the Oz government would ever do such a thing being a craven water carrier for the new world order etc...

Pompeo is blathering bullsh!t and he knows it and we all know it. Odd that you would reiterate his brainless threat vk.

[May 24, 2020] Unable to communicate in Arabic and with no relevant experience or appropriate educational training

Highly recommended!
I wouldn't hold my breath for the slightest change in that status quo any time soon.
May 24, 2020 | www.unz.com

anonymous [400] Disclaimer , says: Show Comment May 23, 2020 at 12:34 pm GMT

Unable to communicate in Arabic and with no relevant experience or appropriate educational training

Seems rather typical of those making policy, not knowing much about the area they're assigned to. If a person did know Arabic and had an understanding of the culture they wouldn't get hired as they'd be viewed with suspicion, suspected of being sympathetic to Middle Easterners. How and why these neocons can come back into government is puzzling and one wonders who within the establishment is backing them. Judging by the quotes her father certainly seems deranged and not someone to be allowed anywhere near any policy making positions.
Flynn also seems to be a dolt what with his 'worldwide war against radical Islam'. Someone should clue him in that much of this radical Islam has been created and stoked by the US who hyped up radical Islam, recruiting and arming them to fight the Russians in Afghanistan. Bin Laden was there, remember? Flynn, a general, is unaware of this? Islamic jihadists are America's Foreign Legion and have been used all over the Muslim world, most recently in Syria. Does this portend war with Iran? Possibly, but perhaps Trump wouldn't want to go it alone but would want the financial support of other countries. They've probably war-gamed it to death and found it to be a loser.

[May 24, 2020] About Pompeo threat to cut Australia from the fives eyes intelligence flows

From MoA comment 57: "Warmongering shit bags endlessly flatulent about their moral superiority while threatening to nuke nations on the other side of the globe daily. ... the greatness of the US consists of how gullible its hyper-exploited populace has been to a long series of Donald Trumps who use the resources of the land and people for competitive violence against other nations. the world heaves a collective hallelujah that this bullshit is about to end. "
Notable quotes:
"... Lets reverse that point, shall we. There is a US spy base in Australia at a place called Pine Gap. Without it being operational the USA would lose its 3 dimensional vision across the planet. ..."
"... This Bannon/Trump bluster is weak as p!ss as 'sharing intelligence' is the cornerstone of the five eyes perversion that gives the USA some superiority in intelligence matters. So if sharing intelligence were withdrawn by the USA with Australia it would have meaningless consequences. ..."
"... Pompeo is blathering bullsh!t and he knows it and we all know it ..."
May 24, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

uncle tungsten , May 25 2020 0:44 utc | 56

vk #4
Pompeo Warns US May Stop Sharing Intelligence With Australia Over Victoria Inking Deal With China's BRI

The battle for Australia's soul has begun.

Lets reverse that point, shall we. There is a US spy base in Australia at a place called Pine Gap. Without it being operational the USA would lose its 3 dimensional vision across the planet.

This Bannon/Trump bluster is weak as p!ss as 'sharing intelligence' is the cornerstone of the five eyes perversion that gives the USA some superiority in intelligence matters. So if sharing intelligence were withdrawn by the USA with Australia it would have meaningless consequences.

On the other hand if Australia ceased its intelligence sharing and shut down all the data traffic out of Australia - the USA would go ballistic. Not that the Oz government would ever do such a thing being a craven water carrier for the new world order etc...

Pompeo is blathering bullsh!t and he knows it and we all know it. Odd that you would reiterate his brainless threat vk.

[May 24, 2020] Trial by Blockhead by Mark Chapman

Notable quotes:
"... Enter the Buk system, with the 9K37 SA-11 missile. It's got the range, it's got the altitude, the Russians have it in active service. Oooo problem. It's got the range, but only if it was fired from inside Ukraine. ..."
"... Anyway, back to the Buk system. And not a moment before time, either – I just re-read that sanctimonious stab above, again; " having armed the militants without due thought as to the consequences " What, exactly, is the ridiculous nature of the accusation being presented here? That the Russians gave an anti-aircraft system to the 'militants' without considering they might use it to shoot down an aircraft? How did they not see that coming? The Ukrainian Army shot down a civilian airliner in October of 2001 , and lied about it for as long as it could – interestingly, it took place during joint Ukrainian-Russian air defense exercises on the Crimean peninsula, and Russia tried hard to avoid assigning blame to Ukraine, while at least one Israeli television station claimed the Russians had shot down their own aircraft. This disaster and subsequent lying did not prevent the USA from giving the Javelin missile to Ukraine – did it not occur to them that they might use it to shoot tanks? No due thought to the consequences, obviously. ..."
"... The Buk air-defense system normally consists of at least 4 TELAR launchers , each with 4 missiles on the launch rails, a self-propelled acquisition radar designated by NATO nomenclature as Snow Drift (the radar on the nose of the TELAR unit itself is designated Fire Dome), and a self-propelled command post, for a minimum of 6 vehicles. Also usually part of the system is a mobile crane, to reload the launchers. If you were going to supply an air-defense system to militant rebels, why wouldn't you give them the whole system? In a pinch, you might be able to get away without the command post vehicle, although it is the station that collates all the input from the sensors and makes the decision to assign targets for acquisition, tracking and engagement. If you didn't give them the crane vehicle, and perhaps a logistics truck with some reloads, they would be limited to the missiles that came already mounted – once those were fired, they'd have to abandon the system, because they couldn't reload it. Seems a little wasteful, don't you think? ..."
"... I'm going a little further with my inexpert opinion, to say that the Buk system was selected as the 'murder weapon', because it provides a limited autonomous capability. To be clear, the Fire Dome radar on the nose of the TELAR does have a limited search capability, and once the radar is locked on to a target, the TELAR vehicle is completely autonomous. The purpose of the surveillance radar is to detect the target from far beyond the Fire Dome's range, assign it to a TELAR and thereby direct it to the elevation and bearing of the target so that the TELAR's radar knows exactly where to look, and continue to update its position until the TELAR to which it was assigned has locked on to the target. ..."
"... The Fire Dome radar mounted on the TELAR can search a 120-degree sector in 4 seconds, at an elevation of 6 to 7 degrees. Its search function is maximized for defense against ground attack aircraft, and a single launcher is not looking at 240 degrees of potential air threat axis during each sweep. It is not looking high enough to see an airliner at 30,000 ft+. More importantly for a system which was not designed to shoot down helpless airliners, it leaves two-thirds of a circle unobserved all the time it is searching for a target. And the Russians provided this to the 'militants' for air defense? They should be shot. ..."
"... There is no telling what kind of ordnance might be found in the wreckage itself, as the Ukrainian Army continued to shell the site for days after the crash; doubtless various artillery shells could be found at the crash site, as well, but it would be quite a leap of faith to suggest a Boeing 777 was shot down by artillery. What you would not find is pieces of the SAM that shot it down. ..."
"... Nor is that by any means all. The Dutch investigation which concluded with the preliminary report implied that nothing of any investigative value was found on the Cockpit Voice Recorder (CVR) or the Flight Data Recorder (FDR). Nothing to indicate what might have happened to the aircraft – just that it was flying along, and suddenly it wasn't. How likely is that? No transcript was provided, and I guess that would be expected if there was no information at all. Funny how often that happens with Malaysian airliners; they really need to look at their quality control. Oh; except they don't build the aircraft. Boeing does. I could see there not being any information after the plane began to break up, because both the CVR and the FDR are in the tail , and that broke off before the fuselage hit. But the microphones are in the ceiling of the cockpit and in the microphone and earpiece of the pilots' headsets, which they wear at all times while in flight. The last audio claimed to have been recorded was a course alteration sent by Ukrainian ATC. ..."
"... According to the Malaysian government, there was an early plan by NATO for a military operation involving some 9000 troops to 'secure the crash site', which was forestalled by a covert Malaysian operation which recovered the 'black boxes' and blocked the plan. I have to say that given the many, many other unorthodox and bizarre happenings in the conduct of what was supposed to be a transparent and impartial international investigation, it's getting so nothing much is unbelievable. The Malaysian Prime Minister went on record as believing that the western powers had already concluded that Russia was responsible, and were mostly just going through the motions of investigating. ..."
"... The telephone recordings presented by the SBU as demonstrating Russian culpability were analyzed by OG IT Forensic Services, a Malaysian firm specializing in forensic analysis of audio, video and digital materials for court proceedings, which concluded the recordings were cut, edited and fabricated . Yet they are relied upon as important evidence of guilt by the Dutch and the JIT. ..."
May 24, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

>Uncle Volodya says, "We become slaves the moment we hand the keys to the definition of reality entirely over to someone else, whether it is a business, an economic theory, a political party, the White House, Newsworld or CNN."

"The receptivity of the masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous. In consequence of these facts, all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans until the last member of the public understands what you want him to understand by your slogan."

– Adolf Hitler

We're going to do something just a bit different today; the event I want to talk about is current – in the future, actually – but the reference which is the subject of the discussion is almost a year old. and the event it discusses is coming up to its sixth anniversary. The past event was the downing of Malaysia Airlines flight MH-17 over Ukraine, the future event is the trial in absentia of persons accused by the west of having perpetrated that disaster, and the reference is this piece, by Mark Galeotti, for the Moscow Times: "Russia's Roadmap Out of the MH17 Crisis" .

You all know Mr. Galeotti, I'm sure. Here's his bio, for Amazon:

"Professor Mark Galeotti is a senior researcher at UMV, the Institute of International Relations Prague, and coordinator of its Centre for European Security. Formerly, he was Professor of Global Affairs at New York University and head of History at Keele University. Educated at Cambridge University and the LSE, he is a specialist in modern Russian politics and security and transnational organized crime. And he writes other things for fun, too "

Yes, yes, he certainly does, as you will see. But this bio is extremely modest, albeit he most likely wrote it himself. Mr. Galeotti also authored an excellent blog, In Moscow's Shadows , which was once a go-to reference for crime and legal issues in Russia, a subject in which he seems very well-informed. The blog is still active, although he seems mostly to use it now to advertise podcasts and sell books. That's understandable – it's evident from the blur of titles appended to his name that he's a very busy man. Always has been, really; either as a student or an educator. He also speaks with confidence on the details of military affairs and equipment despite never having been in the military or studied engineering; his education has pretty much all been in history, law or political science.

I know what you will say – many of the greatest reference works on pivotal battles, overall military campaigns and affairs were written by those who had no personal military experience themselves. Mr. Galeotti studied under Dominic Lieven, whose "Russia Against Napoleon" was perhaps the greatest work of military history, rich with detail and insight, that I have ever read. It won him the Wolfson prize for History for 2010, a well-deserved honour. Yet so far as I could make out, Mr. Lieven never served a day in uniform, and if you handed him an AK-47 and said "Here; field-strip this", your likely response would be a blank look. He most certainly was not a witness to the subject military campaign. No; his epic work on Napoleon's invasion of Russia was informed by research, reading the accounts of others who were there at the time, poring over reams of old documents and matching references to get the best picture we have been afforded to date of Napoleon's ignominious defeat through a combination of imperial overreach, a poor grasp of logistics and, most of all, resistance by an adversary who refused to be drawn into playing to Napoleon's strength – the decisive, crushing battle in which the enemy could not retreat, and in which Napoleon would commit all the reserves and crush his enemy to dust.

So it is perfectly possible for an inquisitive mind with no military experience to put together an excellent reference on military happenings which already took place, even if the owner of that mind was not present for the actual event. Given human nature and the capabilities afforded by modern military equipment, it is even possible to forecast future military events with a fair degree of accuracy, going merely by political ambitions and enabling factors, without any personal military experience. After all, the decision-makers who give the orders that send their military forces into battle are often not military men themselves.

Returning for a moment to Mr. Galeotti, it is quite believable that an author with no military background could compose such works as "Armies of the Russian-Ukrainian War" , although there is no serious evidence that Russia is a part of such a conflict in any real military strength. You could write such a book entirely from media references and documentation, which in this case would come almost entirely from the side which claims it is under constant attack by the other – Ukraine. Likewise "Kulikovo 1380; the Battle that Made Russia" . None of us were around in 1380, so we all have to go by historical references, and whoever collects them all into a book first is likely to be regarded as an expert.

No, it's more when we get into how stuff works that I have an issue with it. Like " Spetsnaz: Russia's Special Forces ". Or " The Modern Russian Army ". I'm kind of skeptical about how someone could claim to know the actual internal workings of either organization simply from reading about them in popular references, considering that more than half the material on Russia written in English in western references is rubbish heavily influenced by politics and policy. We would not have to look very far to find examples in which ridiculous overconfidence by one side that it had the other side's number resulted in a horrible surprise. In fact, we would not have to look very far to find an example of this particular author confidently averring to know something inside-out, only to find that version of reality could not be sustained . And I would no more turn to a Senior Non-Resident Fellow at the Institute of International Relations Prague for expert analysis of the "Combat Vehicles of Russia's Special Forces" than I would ask a house painter to cut my hair. Unless I see some recollections of a college-age Galeotti tinkering with drivetrains and differentials until the sun went down from a pure love of mechanics, I am going to go ahead and assume that he knows what the vast majority of us knows about military vehicles – he could pick one out of a lineup which included a melon, a goat and an Armored Personnel Carrier, and if it had a flat tire he could probably fix it given time and the essential equipment.

Just before we move on, the future event: the MH-17 'trial' has been postponed until June 8th , to give defense attorneys more time to prepare after the amazingly fortuitous capture of a 'key witness' in Eastern Ukraine. I'm not going to elaborate here on what a kicking-the-can-down-the-road crock this is; we'll pick that up later. The whole MH-17 'investigation' has been such a ridiculous exercise in funneling the pursuit to a single inescapable conclusion – that Russia shot it down – irrespective of how many points have to be bent to fit the curve that no matter how it comes out, it will stand as perhaps the greatest example of absurd western self-justification ever recorded.

There are a couple of ways of solving a mystery crime. One is to collect evidence, and follow where it takes you. Another is to decide who you want to have been responsible, and then construct a sequence of events in which they might have done it. To do that, especially in this case, we will have to throw out a few assumptions, such as all that stuff about means, motive and opportunity. In the absence of a believable scenario, that is. Let's look at what we have, and what we need, and see how we get from there to here.

First, we need for Ukraine not to have been responsible. That's going to be awkward, because it looks as if the aircraft was shot down by a missile, but the missile had to have come from inside Ukraine, because the aircraft was too far from the nearest point in Russia at the moment it was stricken for the missile to have come from there. But we need Russia to have been responsible, and not Ukraine. Therefore we need a sequence of events in which a Russian missile launcher capable of shooting down an airliner at cruising altitude was inside Ukraine, in a position from which it could have taken the shot.

You know what? We are going to have to look at means, motive and opportunity, just for a second. My purpose in doing so is to illustrate just how improbable the western narrative is, starting from square one. The coup in Ukraine – and anyone who believes it was a 'grass-roots revolution' might as well stop reading right here, because we are going to just get further apart in our impressions of events – followed by the triumphant promise from the revolutionaries to repeal Yanukovych's language laws and make Ukrainian the law of the land touched off the return of Crimea to its ancestral home in the Russian Federation. Crimea was about 65% ethnic Russian by population at the time, and only about 15% Ukrainian, and Crimea had made several attempts to break free of Ukraine before that yet for some reason the west refused steadfastly to accept the results of a referendum which voted in favour of Crimea becoming a part of the Russian Federation, as if it were more believable that a huge ethnic-Russian majority preferred to learn Ukrainian and be governed by Kiev.

Be that as it may, Washington reacted very angrily; much more so than Europe, considering the distance between the United States and Ukraine versus its proximity to Europe. Perhaps that is owed simply to Washington's assumption that every corner of the world looks to it for leadership, and that it must have a position ready on any given situation, regardless how distant. So Washington insisted there must be sanctions against Russia, for stealing Crimea from its rightful owner, Ukraine. We're not really going to get into struggles for freedom and the right to self-determination right now, except to state that the USA considers nothing more important in some cases, while in others it is completely irrelevant. Washington demanded sanctions but much of Europe was reluctant .

"It is notoriously difficult to secure EU agreement on sanctions anywhere because they require unanimity from the 28 member states. There were wide differences over the numbers of Russians and Crimeans to be punished, with countries such as Greece, Cyprus, Bulgaria and Spain reluctant to penalise Moscow for fear of closing down channels of dialogue. The 21 named were on an original list that ran to about 120 people Expanding the numbers on the sanctions list is almost certain to be discussed at the EU summit on Thursday and Friday. Some EU states are torn about taking punitive measures against Russia for fear of undoing years of patient attempts to establish closer ties with Moscow as well as increase trade. The EU has already suspended talks with Russia on an economic pact and a visa agreement The German foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, said any measure must leave "ways and possibilities open to prevent a further escalation that could lead to the division of Europe" .

The original list of those to be sanctioned was 120 people. The haggling reduced that to 21. Only 7 of those were Russians. Putin was not included. That was pretty plainly not the United Front That Speaks With One Voice that Washington had envisioned, and the notion that Europe would buy into sanctions that might really do some damage to Russia, albeit there would be economic costs to Europe as well, was a dim prospect.

Gosh – you know what we need? An atrocity which can be quickly tied to Russia, and which will so appall the EU member states that resistance to far-reaching sanctions will collapse. That's called 'motive'. It's just not a motive for Russia. Having just gone far out on a limb and taken back Crimea, to the obvious and vocal fury of the United States, it is a bit of a stretch that Russia was looking for what else it could do that would stir up the world against it.

Means, now. That presents its own dilemma. Because Russia could have shot down an airliner from its own territory. Just not with the weapon chosen. The S-400 could have done it; it has the range, easily. But if you were setting up a scenario in which something happened that you wanted to blame on Russia, but they didn't really do it, you must have the weapon to do it yourself, or access to it. By any reasonable construct, Ukraine must be a suspect as well – there was a hot war going on in Ukraine, Ukraine controlled both the airspace and the aircraft that was lost, and the aircraft was lost over Ukrainian territory. But Ukraine doesn't have the S-400. You could use a variety of western systems, but it would quickly be established that the plane was shot down with a weapon that Russia does not have. In order for the narrative to be believable, Russia must have the weapon – but if it wasn't Russia, then whoever did it must have the weapon, too.

Enter the Buk system, with the 9K37 SA-11 missile. It's got the range, it's got the altitude, the Russians have it in active service. Oooo problem. It's got the range, but only if it was fired from inside Ukraine.

Which brings us back to Mr. Galeotti, an expert in Russian combat systems; enough of an expert to write books on them, anyway. And he plainly believes it was an SA-11 missile fired from a single Buk TELAR (Transporter/Erector/Launcher and Radar) which brought down the Boeing; he says that's what the evidence demonstrates, although by this time (2019) most of the world has backed away from saying Putin showed up with no shirt on to close the firing switch personally (cue the instant British-press screaming headlines before the dust had even settled, "PUTIN'S MISSILE!!!" "PUTIN KILLED MY SON!!!"). Now the story is that the disgraceful deed was done by 'Ukrainian anti-government militants', using a weapon supplied by Russia.

"In this context, a full reversal of policy seems near-enough impossible. The evidence suggests that while the fateful missile was fired by Ukrainian anti-government militants, it was supplied by the Russian 53rd Air Defense Brigade under orders from Moscow and in a process managed by Russian military intelligence.

To admit this would not only be to acknowledge a share in the unlawful killing of 298 innocents, but also an unpicking of the whole Kremlin narrative over the Donbass. It would mean admitting to having been an active participant in this bloody compound of civil war and foreign intervention, to having armed the militants without due thought as to the consequences, and to having lied to the world and the Russian people for half a decade."

We don't really have the scope in this piece to broaden the discussion to Russia's probable actual involvement. Suffice it to say that despite non-stop allegations by Poroshenko throughout his presidency of entire battalions of active-service Russian Army soldiers inside Ukraine, zero evidence has ever been provided of any such presence, although there have been some clumsy attempts to fabricate it . To argue that the Russian Army has been trying to overrun Ukraine for six years now, but has been unable to do so because of the combat prowess of the Ukrainian Army is to imply a belief in leprechauns. This is only my own inexpert opinion, but it seems likely to me the complete extent of Russia's involvement, militarily, is the minimum which prevents Eastern Ukraine from being overrun by the Ukrainian military, and including the rebel areas' own far-from-inconsequential military forces. I'm always ready to entertain competing theories, though; be sure to bring your evidence. Meanwhile, the Ukrainian Constitution prohibits using the country's military forces against its own citizens. The logic of 'Have cake, and eat it" cannot apply here – either the Ukrainian state is in direct and obvious violation of its own constitution or the people of the breakaway regions are not Ukrainian citizens.

Anyway, back to the Buk system. And not a moment before time, either – I just re-read that sanctimonious stab above, again; " having armed the militants without due thought as to the consequences " What, exactly, is the ridiculous nature of the accusation being presented here? That the Russians gave an anti-aircraft system to the 'militants' without considering they might use it to shoot down an aircraft? How did they not see that coming? The Ukrainian Army shot down a civilian airliner in October of 2001 , and lied about it for as long as it could – interestingly, it took place during joint Ukrainian-Russian air defense exercises on the Crimean peninsula, and Russia tried hard to avoid assigning blame to Ukraine, while at least one Israeli television station claimed the Russians had shot down their own aircraft. This disaster and subsequent lying did not prevent the USA from giving the Javelin missile to Ukraine – did it not occur to them that they might use it to shoot tanks? No due thought to the consequences, obviously.

The Buk air-defense system normally consists of at least 4 TELAR launchers , each with 4 missiles on the launch rails, a self-propelled acquisition radar designated by NATO nomenclature as Snow Drift (the radar on the nose of the TELAR unit itself is designated Fire Dome), and a self-propelled command post, for a minimum of 6 vehicles. Also usually part of the system is a mobile crane, to reload the launchers. If you were going to supply an air-defense system to militant rebels, why wouldn't you give them the whole system? In a pinch, you might be able to get away without the command post vehicle, although it is the station that collates all the input from the sensors and makes the decision to assign targets for acquisition, tracking and engagement. If you didn't give them the crane vehicle, and perhaps a logistics truck with some reloads, they would be limited to the missiles that came already mounted – once those were fired, they'd have to abandon the system, because they couldn't reload it. Seems a little wasteful, don't you think?

What about the acquisition radar? Because acquiring targets is all about scanning capability and situational awareness. We're going to assume for a moment that you don't use an air defense system exclusively to hunt for airliners, but that you want to defend yourself against ground-attack aircraft like the Sukhoi SU-25. Because, when you think about it, who is more likely to be trying to kill you ? A Malaysian Airlines Boeing 777, or an SU-25? The latter is not quite as fast as an airliner at its cruising height of 30,000 ft+, but it is very agile and will be nearly down in the treetops if it is attacking you. You need to be able to search all around, all the time.

That's where the acquisition radar comes in. A centimetric waveband search radar, the Snow Drift (called the 9S18M1 by its designer) has 360-degree coverage and from 0 to 40 degrees of height in a 6-second sweep in anti-aircraft mode, with a 160 km detection range, obviously dependent on target altitude. An airliner, being a large target not attempting to evade detection, and at a high altitude, would quite possibly be detected at the maximum range of which the system is capable. But then the operators would certainly know it was an airliner. And the narrative says whoever shot it down probably did so by accident.

Maybe if it was his first day on the job. Let's talk for a minute about air-defense deconfliction. It would be nice if your Command parked you somewhere that there was nothing around you but enemies. Well, not as nice as parking you across the street from a pulled-pork barbecue joint with strippers and cold beer, but from a defense standpoint, it'd be nice to know that anything you detected, you could shoot. Know something? It's never like that. Your own aircraft are flying around as if they didn't even know you are dangerous, and as everyone now knows, civilian airliners continue their transport enterprises irrespective of war except in rare instances in which high-flying aircraft have been shot down by long-range missiles. That rarely happens. Why? Because an aircraft flying a steady course, at 30,000 ft+ and not descending, is no threat to you on the ground. From that altitude it can't even see you in the ground clutter, and it'd be quite a bombardier that could hit a target the size of a two-car garage with a bomb dropped from 30,000 ft while flying at 400 knots.

And unless you are an idiot, you know it is an airliner. When you are deployed into the field in an air-defense role, you know where the commercial airlanes are that are going to be active. You know what a commercial-aviation profile looks like – aircraft at 30,000 ft+ altitude, flying at ≥400 knots on a steady course, squawking Mode 3 and Charlie = airliner. Might as well take a moment here to talk about IFF ; Identification Friend or Foe. This is a coded pulse signal transmitted by all commercial aircraft whenever they are in flight unless their equipment is non-functional, and you are not allowed to take off with it in that state. Mode C provides the aircraft's altitude, taken automatically from its barometric altimeter. All modern air search radars have IFF capability, and a dashed line just below the raw video of the air track can be interrogated with a light-pen to provide the readout. You already know how high the plane is if you have a solid radar track, but Mode C provides a confirmation.

Military aircraft have IFF transponders, too; in fact, most of the modes are reserved for military use. But military aircraft often turn off their IFF equipment, because it provides a giveaway who and where they are. In Ukraine, which uses mostly Soviet military aircraft, both sides are capable of reading each other's IFF, so all the more reason not to transmit. Foreign nations typically cannot read each other's IFF except for the modes which are for both military and civilian use, other than those nations who are allies. Anyway, the point I wanted to make is that the Snow Drift acquisition radar has IFF, and if it detected an airliner-like target at 160 km., the operator would have that much more time to interrogate it and determine it was an airliner. Just to reiterate, the western narrative holds that the destruction of the airliner was a mistake.

I'm going a little further with my inexpert opinion, to say that the Buk system was selected as the 'murder weapon', because it provides a limited autonomous capability. To be clear, the Fire Dome radar on the nose of the TELAR does have a limited search capability, and once the radar is locked on to a target, the TELAR vehicle is completely autonomous. The purpose of the surveillance radar is to detect the target from far beyond the Fire Dome's range, assign it to a TELAR and thereby direct it to the elevation and bearing of the target so that the TELAR's radar knows exactly where to look, and continue to update its position until the TELAR to which it was assigned has locked on to the target.

That autonomous capability is probably what made it attractive to those building the scenario; consider. A complete Buk system of 6, maybe 7 vehicles could hardly get all the way inside Ukraine to the firing position without being noticed and perhaps recorded. But perhaps a single TELAR could do it. The aircraft could be shot down by an SA-11 missile and blamed on Russia – Ukraine has access to plenty of SA-11's. But it is a weapon in the Russian active-service inventory. Further, Galeotti's commitment to the allegation that the single TELAR was provided by Russia's 53rd Air Defense Brigade tells us he supports the crackpot narrative offered by Bellingcat, the loopy citizen-journalist website headed by failed financial clerk Eliot Higgins. Bellingcat claims the Buk TELAR was trucked into Ukraine on the back of a flatbed, took the shot that slew MH-17, and was immediately withdrawn back to Russia.

Ummm .how was that an accident? The Russians gave the Ukrainian militants a single launcher with no crane or reload missiles, so it was limited to a maximum of four shots. Its ability to defend itself from ground attack was almost nil, since the design purpose of mounting a Fire Dome radar on each TELAR is not to make the launcher units autonomous; it is to permit concurrent engagements by several launchers, all coordinated by the acquisition radar and command post. Without a radar of its own on the launcher, the firing unit would have to wait until each engagement was completed before it could switch to a new target, but with a fire-control guidance radar on each TELAR, multiple targets can be assigned to multiple launchers, while the search radar limits itself to acquisition and target assignment.

The Fire Dome radar mounted on the TELAR can search a 120-degree sector in 4 seconds, at an elevation of 6 to 7 degrees. Its search function is maximized for defense against ground attack aircraft, and a single launcher is not looking at 240 degrees of potential air threat axis during each sweep. It is not looking high enough to see an airliner at 30,000 ft+. More importantly for a system which was not designed to shoot down helpless airliners, it leaves two-thirds of a circle unobserved all the time it is searching for a target. And the Russians provided this to the 'militants' for air defense? They should be shot.

A single TELAR with no reloads and no acquisition radar would have to be looking directly at the target when it was activated in order to even see it; it takes 15 seconds for the launcher to swing into line and elevation even when that information is transmitted to it from the acquisition radar. It takes 4 seconds for a scan to be completed when there is a whole two-thirds of a circle that it is not even looking at, and you have to manually force it to search above 7 degrees because it is not designed to shoot down airliners. All this time, the target is crossing the acquisition scope at 400 knots+. Fire Dome has integrated IFF, so if it did by some miracle pick up an airliner in its search, the operator would know from transmitted IFF that he was looking at an airliner. A single TELAR with no reload capability sent on an air-defense mission would have its ass ripped in half by ground-attack aircraft that it never saw – if the autonomous capability is so good, why don't the Ukrainians use them as a single unit? Think of how much air-defense coverage they could provide! Do you see the Ukrainian air-defense units employing the Buk that way? Never. Not once. Four TELARS, acquisition radar vehicle, command vehicle, just the way the system was designed to operate.

Just because it has a limited capability to function in a given capacity should not suggest you would employ it that way. You can use a hockey stick to turn off the bedroom light, and you won't even have to get out of bed. Would you do that? I hope not.

A one-third effective capacity in the air defense role together with the covert delivery and immediate withdrawal suggests that the Russians provided the 'militants' with a single TELAR for the express purpose of shooting down a defenseless airliner. Except nobody is saying that. It was a mistake. Well, except for Head of the Security Service of Ukraine Valentyn Nalyvaichenko, who claimed "Terrorists and militants have planned a cynical terrorist attack on a civilian aircraft Aeroflot AFL-2074 Moscow-Larnaka that was flying at that time above the territory of Ukraine." He further claimed that this was motivated by a desire to 'justify an invasion'. I'm pretty sure if any western authority could prove anything even close to that, we would not have had to wait 6 years for a trial.

Which brings us to the covert delivery and extraction. As part of his personal investigation, Max van der Werff drove the route Bellingcat claimed was the extraction route by which the single TELAR, on its flatbed, was returned to Russia. He verified that there is a highway overpass on the route which is too low for a load that tall to pass underneath. When he pointed this out to Higgins, he was told there is a bypass spur which goes around it, which would allow the flatbed to regain the road beyond without having gone through the overpass. Max drew his attention to the concrete barriers which blocked that road at the top of the hill, and which locals claimed had been in place long before the destruction of MH-17. And that was the end of that conversation. I cannot say enough about the quality of Max's work and his diligent, patient dissection of the evidence . His diagrams of the entry and egress routes as provided by Bellingcat illustrate how little sense they make. It was imperative the guilty Russians get the fuck out of Dodge with the greatest possible dispatch so they drove 100 kilometers out of their way? Don't even terrorist murderers have GPS now?

Similarly, the simpleminded flailing of the Ukrainian investigators suggests they do not even have much of a grasp of how Surface-To-Air missiles work. In excited posts like this one , the BBC discloses that an exhaust vent from the tail section of a 'Buk missile' (the missile is actually the SA-11, while Buk is the entire system) was found in the wreckage of the crashed plane, while this one even shows terminally-stunned head prosecutor Fred Westerbeke standing next to what is allegedly part of the rocket body of an SA-11, including legible inventory markings, also 'found at the crash scene'.

Do tell.

Let me review for you how an SA-11 missile shoots down an aircraft. Does it pierce it like a harpoon, blow up in a thunderous explosion, and ride the doomed aircraft down to the crash site? It certainly does not. The missile blasts out of the launcher and flies to the target via semiactive homing, which means it has an onboard seeker that updates the missile trajectory, while the radar on the launcher also communicates with it and the missile and the target are brought together in intercept. When the proximity fuse of the missile – this is the important part – senses that the missile's warhead is close to the target, the internal explosive detonates, and a shower of prefragmented shrapnel pierces the area of the plane near where the missile detonated, usually the front, because the missile is constantly adjusting to make sure it stays with the target until intercept.

MH-17 traveled on, mostly intact, for miles before it crashed into the ground; the crash site was some 13 miles from where the plane was hit. The missile self-destructed miles away from the crash site, and the only parts of it which accompanied the plane to its impact point were the shrapnel bits of the exploded warhead. The body of the missile, together with the exhaust vent, fell back to the ground somewhere quite close to where the plane was hit, not where it fell. Once the missile's fuel is exhausted, either because it ran out or because it was consumed in the explosion triggered by the proximity fuse, the missile parts do not fly around in formation, seeking out the wreckage and coming gently to rest in it where they can later be found by investigators. I don't know how many times I have to say this, because this is certainly not the first, but there would not be any missile parts in the wreckage of MH-17 because the missile would have blown up in front of the plane without ever touching it. The missile does not hit the plane. The pieces of the warhead do. But reality has to take a back seat to making out an airtight case.

There is no telling what kind of ordnance might be found in the wreckage itself, as the Ukrainian Army continued to shell the site for days after the crash; doubtless various artillery shells could be found at the crash site, as well, but it would be quite a leap of faith to suggest a Boeing 777 was shot down by artillery. What you would not find is pieces of the SAM that shot it down.

Several witnesses claimed to have seen an SU-25 near the plane before it exploded. They quite possibly did – the Ukrainian Air Force was observed to be using civilian airliners as cover to allow them to get close to Eastern-Ukrainian villages which might be protected by hand-held launchers known as MANPADS (for Man-Portable Air Defense System), reasoning the defenders would not shoot if they were afraid they might hit a civil aircraft. Once they were close enough to the village or other target to make an attack run, they would then return to the vicinity of the airliner for protection while withdrawing; the rebel side complained about this illegal and immoral practice a month before the destruction of MH-17. But there is no evidence I am aware of linking the destruction of MH-17 to an attack by aircraft.

It may no longer be possible to look at the shooting-down of the Malaysian Boeing objectively; the event has become a partisan rush to judgment which was rendered immediately, after which an investigation began which plainly had as its goal proving the accusations already made. Means and motive clearly favour the accusers rather than the accused, and opportunity is mostly irrelevant as a consideration. Ukraine obviously had to be a suspect – the destruction of the aircraft occurred over Ukraine while Ukraine was in control of it and the airspace in which it traveled. Yet Ukraine was allowed to lead the investigation, and to gather and safeguard evidence, while the owner of the aircraft – Malaysia – was excluded until the investigation had been in progress for four months. Russia was not allowed any part in it save to yield whatever evidence the investigators demanded, while all its theories were widely mocked. Demonstrations set up by Almaz-Antey, the designers and builders of the SA-11, were unattended by any investigating nation – small wonder they do not have Clue One how the missile works, and believe they are going to find big chunks of it in the wreckage, perhaps with Putin's passport stuck to one of them. If any of these conditions prevailed in an investigation which favoured Russia, NATO would scream as if it were being run over with spiked wheels – if the Boeing had been shot down over Russia, who thinks Russia would have been heading the investigation, and custodian of the evidence?

Nor is that by any means all. The Dutch investigation which concluded with the preliminary report implied that nothing of any investigative value was found on the Cockpit Voice Recorder (CVR) or the Flight Data Recorder (FDR). Nothing to indicate what might have happened to the aircraft – just that it was flying along, and suddenly it wasn't. How likely is that? No transcript was provided, and I guess that would be expected if there was no information at all. Funny how often that happens with Malaysian airliners; they really need to look at their quality control. Oh; except they don't build the aircraft. Boeing does. I could see there not being any information after the plane began to break up, because both the CVR and the FDR are in the tail , and that broke off before the fuselage hit. But the microphones are in the ceiling of the cockpit and in the microphone and earpiece of the pilots' headsets, which they wear at all times while in flight. The last audio claimed to have been recorded was a course alteration sent by Ukrainian ATC.

According to the Malaysian government, there was an early plan by NATO for a military operation involving some 9000 troops to 'secure the crash site', which was forestalled by a covert Malaysian operation which recovered the 'black boxes' and blocked the plan. I have to say that given the many, many other unorthodox and bizarre happenings in the conduct of what was supposed to be a transparent and impartial international investigation, it's getting so nothing much is unbelievable. The Malaysian Prime Minister went on record as believing that the western powers had already concluded that Russia was responsible, and were mostly just going through the motions of investigating.

The telephone recordings presented by the SBU as demonstrating Russian culpability were analyzed by OG IT Forensic Services, a Malaysian firm specializing in forensic analysis of audio, video and digital materials for court proceedings, which concluded the recordings were cut, edited and fabricated . Yet they are relied upon as important evidence of guilt by the Dutch and the JIT.

The conduct of the investigation has been all the way across town from transparent, and in fact seems to represent a clique of cronies getting their heads together to attempt nailing down a consistent narrative, which is in the judgment of forensic professionals based upon clumsy fabrications. The investigators plainly have no understanding of how the weapons systems involved perform, or they would not claim confidently to have discovered pieces of the very missile that destroyed the plane in the wreckage of it. But rather than take an objective look at how this flailing is perceived, they continue to rely on momentum and the appearance of getting things done while being scrupulously impartial, all the while that more mountains of evidence are collected, which they cannot disclose to the public, although it is all right to let the prime suspect keep it safe under wraps.

Make of that what you will.

" Bullshit is unavoidable whenever circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about. Thus the production of bullshit is stimulated whenever a person's obligations or opportunities to speak about some topic exceed his knowledge of the facts that are relevant to that topic. "

-Harry G. Frankfurt

[May 24, 2020] Bellingcrap's bread-and-butter is to use satellite photos and make them say whatever Bellingcrap had been tasked to say they were

Notable quotes:
"... This was Bellingcrap's bread-and-butter function, to use satellite photos and make them say whatever Bellingcrap had been tasked to say they were, relying on the fact that mainstream media organisations rarely employ people expert in interpreting satellite imagery, before people outside the MSM environment started voicing suspicions about how the "evidence" for the official MH17 narrative was being worked and whipped into shape to fit that narrative. ..."
May 24, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

Jen May 24, 2020 at 4:35 pm

" The point is that we often tend to believe satellite photography shows what its presenters say it shows because we do not have the skill to interpret it ourselves "

This was Bellingcrap's bread-and-butter function, to use satellite photos and make them say whatever Bellingcrap had been tasked to say they were, relying on the fact that mainstream media organisations rarely employ people expert in interpreting satellite imagery, before people outside the MSM environment started voicing suspicions about how the "evidence" for the official MH17 narrative was being worked and whipped into shape to fit that narrative.

It's my understanding that there is a company in Colorado, called Digital something or other, that supplies a huge amount of satellite imagery to the US government and other big clients.

Aha, just found the company: Digital Globe .

[May 24, 2020] Australia should stop fabricating evidence of Russian involvement in the shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17, and withdraw from the Dutch show trial which is scheduled to resume hearings in Amsterdam next month

May 24, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

Jen May 24, 2020 at 4:24 am

Incidentally not long after China slapped anti-dumping tariffs on Australian barley (and switched to buying barley from the US) and suspended beef imports from four Australian abattoirs, Australia's foreign minister Maryse Payne phoned her Russian counterpart apparently to request that Russia send more tourists to Australia and buy more Australian products. Imagine Sergei Lavrov's initial reaction before he went straight into his diplomatic persona. As John Helmer bluntly puts it :

" Lavrov replied that Australia should stop fabricating evidence of Russian involvement in the shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17, and withdraw from the Dutch show trial which is scheduled to resume hearings in Amsterdam next month "

Another source is rather more circumspect:

" Russian Foreign Minister [Lavrov] informed [Payne] that Russia will disseminate in the UN a comprehensive document with the facts revealing the serious problems in the operation of the Netherlands-established Joint Investigative Team (JIT).

Mr Sergey Lavrov criticised the JIT and said their activities fail to conform to the high standards set by UN Security Council Resolution 2166.

"Russian experts are ready to hold consultations with their Australian and Netherlands colleagues to clear up answers to the numerous questions put during their cooperation with the JIT", he maintained "

Looks like Australia is now between a rock and a hard place. Payne must be really thick to think that she could play Russia off China.

Mark Chapman May 24, 2020 at 9:23 am
Nobody seems to catch on that it's always Washington, manipulating and meddling and getting its poodles to yap for it, and it is the poodles who bear the consequences, while nothing much accrues to the manipulator. It will be the same with the Huawei affair, mentioned elsewhere here; it is looking more like Washington will get its way and all its allies will cave and reject all Huawei gear, whereupon they will all end up with a less-capable and more-expensive 5G network which meets with American approval, and the allies will pay the cost in trade reprisals by China.

[May 24, 2020] China diplomancy in action: Foreign Minister Wang Yi Meets the Press conference

China diplomacy is trying to thread very carefully to avoid the fallout. The answer of RIA Novosti is good example here. Counterattacks are few (see the answer to CC question with the following money quote: "I respect your right to ask the question, but I'm afraid you're not framing the question in the right way. One has to have a sense of right and wrong. Without it, a person cannot be trusted, and a country cannot hold its own in the family of nations. " This is implicit slap in the face for the USA.
May 24, 2020 | fmprc.gov.cn

RIA Novosti: How do you assess China-Russia relations in the context of COVID-19? Do you agree with some people's characterization that China and Russia may join force to challenge US predominance?

Wang Yi: While closely following the COVID-19 response in Russia, we have done and will continue to do everything we can to support it. I believe under the leadership of President Vladimir Putin, the indomitable Russian people will defeat the virus and the great Russian nation will emerge from the challenge with renewed vigor and vitality.

Since the start of COVID-19, President Xi Jinping and President Putin have had several phone calls and kept the closest contact between two world leaders. Russia is the first country to have sent medical experts to China, and China has provided the most anti-epidemic assistance to Russia. Two-way trade has gone up despite COVID-19. Chinese imports from Russia have grown faster than imports from China's other major trading partners. The two countries have supported and defended each other against slanders and attacks coming from certain countries. Together, China and Russia have forged an impregnable fortress against the "political virus" and demonstrated the strength of China-Russia strategic coordination.

I have no doubt that the two countries' joint response to the virus will give a strong boost to China-Russia relations after COVID-19. China is working with Russia to turn the crisis into an opportunity. We will do so by maintaining stable cooperation in energy and other traditional fields, holding a China-Russia year of scientific and technological innovation, and accelerating collaboration in e-commerce, bio-medicine and the cloud economy to make them new engines of growth in our post-COVID-19 economic recovery. China and Russia will also enhance strategic coordination. By marking the 75th anniversary of the UN, we stand ready to firmly protect our victory in WWII, uphold the UN Charter and basic norms of international relations, and oppose any form of unilateralism and bullying. We will enhance cooperation and coordination in the UN, SCO, BRICS and G20 to prepare ourselves for a new round of the once-in-a-century change shaping today's world.

I believe that with China and Russia standing shoulder-to-shoulder and working back-to-back, the world will be a safer and more stable place where justice and fairness are truly upheld.

Cable News Network: We've seen an increasingly heated "war of words" between China and the US. Is "wolf warrior" diplomacy the new norm of China's diplomacy?

Wang Yi: I respect your right to ask the question, but I'm afraid you're not framing the question in the right way. One has to have a sense of right and wrong. Without it, a person cannot be trusted, and a country cannot hold its own in the family of nations.

There may be all kinds of interpretations and commentary about Chinese diplomacy. As China's Foreign Minister, let me state for the record that China always follows an independent foreign policy of peace. No matter how the international situation may change, we will always stand for peace, development and mutually beneficial cooperation, stay committed to upholding world peace and promoting common development, and seek friendship and cooperation with all countries. We see it as our mission to make new and greater contributions to humanity.

China's foreign policy tradition is rooted in its 5,000-year civilization. Since ancient times, China has been widely recognized as a nation of moderation. We Chinese value peace, harmony, sincerity and integrity. We never pick a fight or bully others, but we have principles and guts. We will push back against any deliberate insult to resolutely defend our national honor and dignity. And we will refute all groundless slander with facts to resolutely uphold fairness, justice and human conscience.

The future of China's diplomacy is premised on our commitment to working with all countries to build a community with a shared future for mankind. Since we live in the same global village, countries should get along peacefully and treat each other as equals. Decisions on global affairs should be made through consultation, not because one or two countries say so. That's why China advocates for a multi-polar world and greater democracy in international relations. This position is fully aligned with the direction of human progress and the shared aspiration of most countries. No matter what stage of development it reaches, China will never seek hegemony. We will always stand with the common interests of all countries. And we will always stand on the right side of history. Those who go out of their way to label China as a hegemon are precisely the ones who refuse to let go of their hegemonic status.

The world is undergoing changes of a kind unseen in a century and full of instability and turbulence. Confronted by a growing set of global challenges, we hope all countries will realize that humanity is a community with a shared future. We must render each other more support and cooperation, and there should be less finger-pointing and confrontation. We call on all nations to come together and build a better world for all.

[May 24, 2020] The Spin War: US Military Planners Advise Expanded Online Psychological Warfare Against China by Alan Macleod

Notable quotes:
"... The recently published Pentagon budget request for 2021 makes clear that the United States is retooling for a potential intercontinental war with China and/or Russia. It asks for $705 billion to "shift focus from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and a greater emphasis on the types of weapons that could be used to confront nuclear giants like Russia and China," noting that it requires "more advanced high-end weapon systems, which provide increased standoff, enhanced lethality and autonomous targeting for employment against near-peer threats in a more contested environment." The military has recently received the first batch of low-yield nuclear warheads that experts agree blurs the line between conventional and nuclear conflict, making an all out example of the latter far more likely. ..."
"... "Our governments spend over 1.75 trillion dollars every year on wars, on weapons, on conflict If we could deploy that sort of resource to address the coronavirus crisis that we're currently living through, imagine what else we could be doing. Imagine how we could be fighting the climate crisis, how we could be addressing global poverty, inequality. Our priority should never be war; our priorities need to be public health, the environment, and human well being." ..."
May 24, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Alan Macleod via MintPressNews.com,

Just three years ago, Americans had a neutral view of China (and nine years ago it was strongly favorable). Today, the same polls show that 66 percent of Americans dislike the country. As the U.S. military turns its attention from the Middle East to conflict with Russia and China, American war planners are advising that the United States greatly expand its own online "psychological operations" against Beijing.

A new report from the Financial Times details how top brass in Washington are strategizing a new Cold War with China, describing it less as World War III and more as "kicking each other under the table." Last week, General Richard Clarke, head of Special Operations Command, said that the "kill-capture missions" the military conducted in Afghanistan were inappropriate for this new conflict, and Special Operations must move towards cyber influence campaigns instead.

Military analyst David Maxwell, a former Special Ops soldier himself, advocated for a widespread culture war, which would include the Pentagon commissioning what he called "Taiwanese Tom Clancy" novels, intended to demonize China and demoralize its citizens, arguing that Washington should "weaponize" China's one-child policy by bombarding Chinese people with stories of the wartime deaths of their only children, and therefore, their bloodline.

A not dissimilar tactic was used during the first Cold War against the Soviet Union, where the CIA sponsored a huge network of artists, writers and thinkers to promote liberal and social-democratic critiques of the U.S.S.R., unbeknownst to the public, and, sometimes, even the artists themselves.

Manufacturing consent

In the space of only a few months, the Trump administration has gone from praising China's response to the COVID-19 pandemic to blaming them for the outbreak, even suggesting they pay reparations for their alleged negligence. Just three years ago, Americans had a neutral view of China (and nine years ago it was strongly favorable). Today, the same polls show that 66 percent of Americans dislike China, with only 26 percent holding a positive opinion of the country. Over four-in-five people essentially support a full-scale economic war with Beijing, something the president threatened to enact last week.

The corporate press is certainly doing their part as well, constantly framing China as an authoritarian threat to the United States, rather than a neutral force or even a potential ally, leading to a surge in anti-Chinese racist attacks at home.

Retooling for an intercontinental war

Although analysts have long warned that the United States gets its "ass handed to it" in hot war simulations with China or even Russia, it is not clear whether this is a sober assessment or a self-serving attempt to increase military spending. In 2002, the U.S. conducted a war game trial invasion of Iraq, where it was catastrophically defeated by Lt. Gen. Paul Van Riper, commanding Iraqi forces, leading to the whole experiment being nixed halfway through. Yet the subsequent invasion was carried out without massive loss of American lives.

The recently published Pentagon budget request for 2021 makes clear that the United States is retooling for a potential intercontinental war with China and/or Russia. It asks for $705 billion to "shift focus from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and a greater emphasis on the types of weapons that could be used to confront nuclear giants like Russia and China," noting that it requires "more advanced high-end weapon systems, which provide increased standoff, enhanced lethality and autonomous targeting for employment against near-peer threats in a more contested environment." The military has recently received the first batch of low-yield nuclear warheads that experts agree blurs the line between conventional and nuclear conflict, making an all out example of the latter far more likely.

There has been no meaningful pushback from the Democrats. Indeed, Joe Biden's team has suggested that the United States' entire industrial policy should revolve around "competing with China" and that their "top priority" is dealing with the supposed threat Beijing poses. The former vice-president has also attacked Trump from the right on China, trying to present him as a tool of Beijing, bringing to mind how Clinton portrayed him in 2016 as a Kremlin asset. (Green Party presidential frontrunner Howie Hawkins has promised to cut the military budget by 75 percent and to unilaterally disarm).

Nevertheless, voices raising concern about a new arms race are few and far between. Veteran deproliferation activist Andrew Feinstein is one exception, saying :

"Our governments spend over 1.75 trillion dollars every year on wars, on weapons, on conflict If we could deploy that sort of resource to address the coronavirus crisis that we're currently living through, imagine what else we could be doing. Imagine how we could be fighting the climate crisis, how we could be addressing global poverty, inequality. Our priority should never be war; our priorities need to be public health, the environment, and human well being."

However, if the government is going to launch a new psychological war against China, it is unlikely antiwar voices like Feinstein's will feature much in the mainstream press.

[May 24, 2020] William Kristol, the Flaming Neocon, Is Looking To Reinvent Himself as a Dissenter by Bill Hughes

This is all noise. Kristol is a MIC prostitute and as such he can't attack Trump who gave MIC and Israel all what they want
Notable quotes:
"... "A 'Neocon' is neither new or conservative, but old as Babylon and evil as Hell." – Edward Abbey ..."
"... Being an unrepentant Neocon, such as William (Bill) Kristol, means never having to say you're sorry. To qualify, you need to be an ideologue, who also has paid no price for recklessly cheerleading 4,488 U.S. troops to their deaths in the illegal and immoral Iraq War, plus another 32,223 who were seriously wounded (2003-2011). ..."
"... For years, we've heard Kristol on the TV/Cable/Network shows making outrageous statements, like this one: "The war in Iraq could have terrifically good effects throughout the Middle East." (09/18/2001). ..."
"... There was also no mention by the reporter of the possible real reasons that Kristol was dumping on Trump. One could be that during the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump had trashed Kristol's and the Neocons' support of the Iraq War. ..."
"... And, also Trump has indicated he doesn't have any plans to reignite another of Kristol's favorites schemes – "a Cold War with Russia." These are just two of the reasons the "Neocons, like Kristol, can't stomach Trump," according to the commentator, JP Sottile, of Consortium News. ..."
"... During last year's Democratic presidential primary, Kristol took a swipe at the candidate, Sen. Bernie Sanders, and posted a tweet that said: "#Never Sanders." The popular antiwar candidate responded to Kristol: "Have you apologized to the nation for your foolish advocacy of the Iraq War? I make no apologies for opposing it." Sanders then added this zinger: "I will do everything in my power to prevent a war with Iran." ..."
"... The Neocon replied: "I will defend my views on Iraq as you defend yours." Sen. Sanders underscored how Kristol had called for regime change in Iraq as early at 1998; and that Kristol also predicted the conflict would last "only two months;" and that he had repeatedly argued for the Bush-Cheney Gang to send in more troops. As early at 2006, Kristol was urging the US to bomb Iran's nuclear facilities, asking, "Why wait?" ..."
"... In a way, Kristol reminded me, in a physical sense, of the late actor Peter Lorre. Whether Kristol has a "Little Man (Napoleon) Complex," or not, I will leave to the experts in the field. All I know for sure is that he's a relentlessly angry, pusher of costly and unnecessary wars. ..."
"... Here is another gem from Kristol: "The first two battles of this new era are now over. The battles of Afghanistan and Iraq have been won decisively and honorably." (April 28, 2003) And, then there is this whopper from the slippery Neocon: "The Iraqi elections of Jan. 30, 2005 could be a key moment perhaps the key moment so far in vindicating the 'Bush/Cheney Doctrine' as the right response to 9/11." (March 7, 2005) ..."
May 24, 2020 | original.antiwar.com
"A 'Neocon' is neither new or conservative, but old as Babylon and evil as Hell." – Edward Abbey

Being an unrepentant Neocon, such as William (Bill) Kristol, means never having to say you're sorry. To qualify, you need to be an ideologue, who also has paid no price for recklessly cheerleading 4,488 U.S. troops to their deaths in the illegal and immoral Iraq War, plus another 32,223 who were seriously wounded (2003-2011).

It also helps to have a significant media platform and not to give a good hoot about how many innocent Iraqis died via the U.S.-led invasion and/or the occupation of that country. (Try an estimated 655,000.)

By the way, false prophet, Kristol: Our troops found "No" Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq.

Let me formally introduce – William Kristol, age 67, out of New York City, now Northern Virginia, warmonger extraordinaire, ultra-conservative, and currently editor at large of Bulwark magazine.

For years, we've heard Kristol on the TV/Cable/Network shows making outrageous statements, like this one: "The war in Iraq could have terrifically good effects throughout the Middle East." (09/18/2001).

The other day, May 20, 2020, Kristol was the subject of a puff piece profile in the Washington Post , by reporter KK Ottesen. The article made no mention of Kristol's disgusting role in promoting the Iraq War. Instead, he was given the opportunity to rip President Donald Trump on how he has been mismanaging the coronavirus crisis. (Well, heck, everybody knows that.)

There was also no mention by the reporter of the possible real reasons that Kristol was dumping on Trump. One could be that during the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump had trashed Kristol's and the Neocons' support of the Iraq War.

And, also Trump has indicated he doesn't have any plans to reignite another of Kristol's favorites schemes – "a Cold War with Russia." These are just two of the reasons the "Neocons, like Kristol, can't stomach Trump," according to the commentator, JP Sottile, of Consortium News.

The idea that Kristol is some kind of genuine dissenter and is opposing Trump because he's concerned about the quality of his leadership is pure nonsense. The Washington Post allowed Kristol to use the paper for this dubious exercise and it has no one to blame but itself.

During last year's Democratic presidential primary, Kristol took a swipe at the candidate, Sen. Bernie Sanders, and posted a tweet that said: "#Never Sanders." The popular antiwar candidate responded to Kristol: "Have you apologized to the nation for your foolish advocacy of the Iraq War? I make no apologies for opposing it." Sanders then added this zinger: "I will do everything in my power to prevent a war with Iran."

The Neocon replied: "I will defend my views on Iraq as you defend yours." Sen. Sanders underscored how Kristol had called for regime change in Iraq as early at 1998; and that Kristol also predicted the conflict would last "only two months;" and that he had repeatedly argued for the Bush-Cheney Gang to send in more troops. As early at 2006, Kristol was urging the US to bomb Iran's nuclear facilities, asking, "Why wait?"

Flashback: The first time I laid eyes on the cunning Neocon, Kristol was at a pro-Iraq War rally held on the National Mall, on April 12, 2003, in Washington, D.C., G. Gordon Liddy and the late, ex-U.S. Sen. Fred Thompson (R-TN) were there, along with some other Right Wing types.

What was really weird about the whole affair was the appearance of that so-called comedian, Ben Stein. He showed up on a huge video screen endorsing the war. It should have had "a warning label" on it!

I recall a lady in the modest crowd of about fifty at that event saying of Kristol: "Oh, look how small he is!" She was right. Kristol is, indeed, on the very short side. I'd say that he comes in at about 5 ft. 4 or 5 inches. It seems that, as a result of his tiny body frame, his head appears more massive than it really is. The rally was boring. I didn't stay long.

In a way, Kristol reminded me, in a physical sense, of the late actor Peter Lorre. Whether Kristol has a "Little Man (Napoleon) Complex," or not, I will leave to the experts in the field. All I know for sure is that he's a relentlessly angry, pusher of costly and unnecessary wars.

(During the Iraq War, there were countless protest actions mounted by ten of thousands of splendid antiwar activists across the country. Many of them were held on the National Mall, and other sites in our nation's capital.)

Here is another gem from Kristol: "The first two battles of this new era are now over. The battles of Afghanistan and Iraq have been won decisively and honorably." (April 28, 2003) And, then there is this whopper from the slippery Neocon: "The Iraqi elections of Jan. 30, 2005 could be a key moment perhaps the key moment so far in vindicating the 'Bush/Cheney Doctrine' as the right response to 9/11." (March 7, 2005)

Of course, it wouldn't be fair to leave out this one from Kristol: "It is much more likely that the situation in Iraq will stay more or less the same, or improve, in either case, Republicans will benefit from being the party of victory." (Nov. 30, 2005)

As a result of an onslaught of Kristol's articles and media appearances in support of the Iraq invasion, the Washington Post 's Richard Cohen dubbed the conflict: "Kristol's War!" Right on, Mr. Cohen.

The estimated cost of the Iraq War to the U.S. taxpayers runs to a high of around $1.7 trillion!

If Kristol has any regrets with respect to his amoral advocacy for the Iraq War (which was launched by the Bush-Cheney Gang based on a pack of rotten lies) and/or about the staggering US casualties in Iraq, I have never heard him express them.

If Kristol has any empathy for the innocent Iraqi dead and wounded, the Iraqi women and children who have suffered and are continuing to suffer from that conflict, along with the tens of thousands of Iraqi homes that have been destroyed, and also for those 3.8 million Iraqis made into refugees, then he's kept those kinds of feelings to himself.

(The other amazing thing about Kristol is how he's repeatedly able to get his distorted views on our televisions and in our newspapers. It's like he has to only press a button and there he is. It is all so – Orwellian!)

In any event, when the name of William Kristol, the Neocon, is mentioned, I think callous indifference to human life and suffering.

The next time the Neocon Kristol visits the Arlington National Cemetery, over in Virginia, to honor our Iraqi War dead, will be his FIRST! Despite all of the above, he continues to argue for a U.S.-led attack on Iran. Kristol insists: "Invading Iran is not a bad idea!"

If warmongering isn't a Hate Crime and/or a Hate Speech, then maybe it should be. (Peace Movement, please copy.) That would give the heartless Kristol something to think about when he advocates for the launching of yet another monstrosity, like the Iraq War.

Bill Hughes is an attorney, author, actor and photographer. His latest book is Byline Baltimore . Contact the author. Reprinted from the Baltimore Post-Examiner with the author's permission.

[May 24, 2020] US anti-china crusade started

May 24, 2020 | www.theamericanconservative.com

After the Soviet collapse thirty years ago, that order expanded its jurisdiction. Proponents sought to subsume the old Eastern Bloc, including perhaps Russia itself, into the American sphere. And they wanted to do so firmly on Washington's terms. Even as the country began to deindustrialize and growth slowed, American leadership developed a taste for fresh crusades in the Middle East; exotic savagery, went the subtext, had to be brought finally to heel. China was a rising force, but its regime would inevitably crater or democratize. Besides, Beijing was a peaceful trading partner of the United States.

2008, 2016 and 2020 -- the financial crisis, Trump's election and now the Coronavirus and its reaction -- have been successive gut punches to this project, a hat trick which may seal its demise. Ask anyone attempting to board an international flight, or open a new factory in China, or get anything done at the United Nations: the world is de-globalizing at a speed almost as astonishing as it integrated. Post-Covid, U.S.-China confrontation is not a choice. It's a reality. The liberal international order is not lamentable. It's already dead.

This was the argument made by Bannon. It had other backers, of course, within both the academy and an emerging foreign policy counter-establishment loathe to repeat the mistakes of the past thirty years. But coming from the former top political advisor to the sitting president of the United States, it was provocative stuff. Bannon articulated a perspective which seemed to be on the tip of the foreign policy world's tongue. And it riled people up. The most fulsome rebuttal to the zeitgeist was perhaps The Jungle Grows Back , tellingly written by Robert Kagan, an Iraq War architect. The peripheral world was dangerous brush; the United States was the machete.

Trumpian nationalism has chugged along for nearly three years since -- stripped, some might say, of its Bannonite flair and intelligence. The most hysterical prophecies of what the president might do -- that he might withdraw from the geriatric North Atlantic Treaty Organization, for instance -- have not come to pass. Trump has howled and roared, true: but so far, his most disruptive foreign policy maneuver has been escalation against Iran.

MPC • 3 days ago

It's very good to hear the right getting a little humility in them now and talking less empire, more multilateralism. Trump has been way too concerned with his MAGA personality cult to understand the value of humility.

The world's a big place. The reality is, America first will more and more mean working together with other nations for mutual benefit, and often their gain will indirectly be to our own also.

kouroi MPC • 3 days ago
Working more and more, yes. This is why US is undercutting Germany's competitiveness, by blocking a cheap source of energy via NS2...

As Bush said, you are either with us or against us. Nothing has changed and nothing will change, but it will become uglier. If it were to desire multi-polarity, the US would tolerate not only states, like KSA, where the Royals own everything, but also states, like Iran, or Cuba, where the people (through the government/state) owns assets (land and productive facilities). But the US does not tolerate such type of multi-polarity, not open to US "investment" and ownership (bought with fiat money).

Cold War II started in 2007, with Putin. Popcorn & beer lads!

MPC kouroi • 3 days ago
It does seem like there's a creeping idea, not just on dissident internet sites now like before, that the Russian rivalry is a luxury of the past. Even the liberals are going to have to reconcile with liberal hegemony not being workable and settle for something less. Owing to distance and mutual interest (common rivals Britain and Germany) Russia and America had a long history of friendship before the Cold war.

I sadly agree about the predatory nature of much of America does. I think it really is a reflection of partially, imperial arrogance, but even moreso a matter of who runs the country. Oligarchy is poorly checked in modern America. Maybe we can hope for a humbled oligarchy, at least.

DUNK Buhari2 • 2 days ago
Trump is indeed an empty suit and a demagogue, but he ran on a decent nationalist platform (probably thanks to Bannon, who is almost certainly a closeted gay. No joke... a deep-in-the-closet, self-hating gay. The navy can change a man, and he's a fraud in other ways: see Eric Striker's article "International Finance's Anti-China Crusade"). Trump does have an absurd ego, and he probably figured becoming president would impress Ivanka too.

Also, the Uyghurs are not totally innocent victims... Some of them are US-financed revolutionaries and some of them have committed terrorism: see Godfree Roberts at Unz Review: "China and the Uyghurs" (January 10, 2019) and Ajit Singh at The Grayzone: "Inside the World Uyghur Congress: The US-backed right-wing regime change network seeking the 'fall of China'" (March 5, 2020). Some of our pathetic propagandists make it seem like they're in concentration camps, but there is objective reporting that suggests it's more like job training programs and anti-jihad classes. Absurd lies have certainly been told about North Korea and many other countries, so be skeptical.

kirthigdon • 3 days ago
Yeah, let's get that hate on for China - why they're as bad as Russia, Iran and Venezuela put together and there are so many more of them. Especially a lot are available right here in the US and have lots of restaurants that can be boycotted. Not that many Venezuelan restaurants around. Seriously, can Americans get over this childishness? When the US closes down its 800+ overseas bases and withdraws its fleet to its own shores instead of Iran's and China's, then maybe Americans will be entitled to complain about someone else's imperialism.
Collin Reid • 3 days ago
Most of anti-China stuff Hawley, much like Trump, claims always feels empty populism for WWC voters.

1) It is reasonable to be against our Middle East endeavors and not be so anti-China.
2) I still don't understand how it is China fault for stealing manufacturing jobs when it is the US private sector that does it. (And Vietnam exist, etc.) So without Charles Koch and Tim Cook behind this trade stuff, it feels like empty populism.
3) The most obvious point on China to me is how little they do use military measures for their 'imperialism.'

One problem with all this populism emptiness, is there is a lot issues with China to work on:
1) This virus could have impact economies in Africa and South America a lot where the nations have to renegotiate their loans to China. I have no idea how this goes but there will be tensions here. Imperialism is tough in the long run.
2) There are nations banding together on China's reaction to the virus and it seems reasonable that US joining them would be more effective than Trump's taunting.
3) To prove Trump administration incompetence, I have no idea how he is not turning this crisis into more medical equipment and drugs manufacturing. (My guess is this both takes a lot of work and frankly a lot of manufacturing plants have risks of spreads so noone wants to invest.)

Feral Finster Collin Reid • 3 days ago
Apparently it is now a form of aggression, imperialism, even, to work for lower wages than a comparable American worker.

I can understand some protectionist measures. But acting as if these measures were a response to an unprovoked attack is hyperventilating.

DUNK Collin Reid • 2 days ago
Hawley is a "fake populist" according to Eric Striker's article "International Finance's Anti-China Crusade" and I just saw fake-patriot airhead Pete Hegseth claim China wants to destroy our civilization, on fake populist Tucker Carlson's show. It's well-established that Fox News and the GOP are still neocons and fake patriots... after all, the Trump administration is run by Jared Kushner, a protégé of Rupert Murdoch and Bibi Netanyahu.
dbjm • 3 days ago
Hawley's speech on the Senate floor yesterday deserves much more criticism than it gets here. This article from Reason does a good job breaking down the speech and pointing out what's right AND wrong about it:

https://reason.com/2020/05/...

Collin Reid Kessler • 2 days ago
What if there is reduced wars and civil wars n the world today than ever. (So say anytime before 1991?) I get all the Middle East & African Wars but look at the rest of the world. When in history have the major West Europe powers not had a major war in 75 years. After issues of post Cold War East Europe is probably more peaceful than ever. Look at South America. In the 1970s the Civil Wars raged in all those nations. Or the Pacific Rim? Japan, China, and other nations are fighting with Military right now.

This is certainly less than perfect but the number of people (per million) dieing in wars and civil wars are at historic lows.

kouroi Collin Reid • 2 days ago
The fall of Soviet Union and weakening of Russia allowed US and Western Europe to attack Serbia in 1990s. A stronger Russia wouldn't have allowed that to happen (who's trying to get Crimea from Russia's control now?). But with US aggressiveness and bellicosity (including nuclear posture) at Russia's borders do not bode well.

But it is true, less important people are dying now...

chris chuba • 3 days ago
Chinese imperialism? Uh ... other than shaking trees and drumming up fear can I get like one example of that.

Taiwan, part of China since the 1500's and they are have not issued any new threats since 1949.

Hong Kong - stolen from China and now reluctantly given back with lots of conditions. If they deserve the right of independence through referendum I'm all for it as long as we apply this standard uniformly including parts of Texas, San Diego, New Mexico, Arizona, any place that has a large foreign population will do.

DUNK chris chuba • 2 days ago
Yeah, "Chinese imperialism" is complete nonsense, just like the claim that they definitely originated the coronavirus, caused Americans to be under house arrest, and caused a depression. In fact, the origin of the virus is far from clear, and it wasn't China who hyped up and exaggerated the danger and wrecked the economy. It was our superficial corporate media and government that did that (perhaps deliberately)... the same people who are desperately trying to deflect blame onto the CCP. The same people who have been mismanaging and ruining America for decades in order to enrich themselves.
Gregtown • 3 days ago
Should we all start reading Chomsky books again?

"Neoliberal democracy. Instead of citizens, it produces consumers. Instead of communities, it produces shopping malls. The net result is an atomized society of disengaged individuals who feel demoralized and socially powerless."

Sidney Caesar Gregtown • 3 days ago • edited
Most people would be well served to read Chomsky a first time.
However, it should be noted, Chomsky's critiques of neoliberalism aren't grounded in nationalism, xenophobia, and racism. So a lot of TAC readers (and especially writers) may be disappointed.
Gregtown Sidney Caesar • 3 days ago
Ha...sadly true.

I just pulled On Anarchism off my bookshelf. Time to revisit my early 20's.

Tradcon • 3 days ago
Hawley seems like the natural choice for the potential future of the GOP, that is a post-fusionist or post-liberal GOP. However the one thing that worries me is his foreign policy. He talks the talk, but I'm having trouble to see if he walks the walk. As Mills noted he didn't vote to end support for the genocidal war in Yemen, a war that serves purely the interests of Saudi Arabia and not our own. He has criticized David Petraeus before, but its important not to be fooled by just rhetoric. While accepting he'll be better than any Tom Cotton or (god forbid) Nikki Haley in 2024, his foreign policy needs to be examined more until then.
stevek9 • 3 days ago
Our response to the epidemic was 100% 'made in China'. The entire 'Western World' decided to copy Beijing. If that doesn't establish a new level of leadership for China, I don't know what would. I'm surprised this is not more widely recognized. You can run down the many parallels, including the pathetic photo-op attempt by the West to build those emergency hospitals (Nightingale in the UK, Javits Center, etc. all across the US), which were just to show 'hey we can build hospitals in a few weeks also' ... never mind they could never, and were never used for anything at all.
Kiyoshi01 • 3 days ago
At this point, Hawley is all talk. Further, much of his talking amounts to little more than expressing resentment. I agree that the US needs to follow a more nationalist pathway, which involved making itself less dependent on its chief geopolitical rival. But accomplishing this is going to require more than bashing China and asserting that cosmopolitan Americans are traitors. At this point, Hawley has no positive program to offer. Giving paid speeches that vilify coastal elites and China is not a political plan.

Further, I agree that we're probably moving away from the universalist order that's guided much of our thinking since the 1990s. But isolationism is not the answer. We need to begin building a multilateral order that takes full account of China's rise as a worthy rival. This means that we need to develop a series of smaller-scale agreements with strategic partners. The TPP is a good example of such an agreement. But where is the call to revive it?

Lastly, I find the article's reference to China's treatment of gays and lesbians to be curious. I'd first note that using the term "homosexual" in reference to people is generally viewed as an offensive slur. Further, China's treatment of gay people isn't so bad, and tends to be better than what Hawley's evangelical supporters would afford. Moreover, China is a multi-ethnic country. It's program in Xinjiang has more to do with maintaining political order than a desire to repress non-Han people.

MPC Kiyoshi01 • 2 days ago
The general chest puffing nature of the American right makes it hard for them to understand that America might need to work with other countries at a deep level, and not as vassals either.
DUNK MPC • 2 days ago
It doesn't seem like they're able to understand anything, or learn anything.
Barry_II Kiyoshi01 • 11 hours ago
". We need to begin building a multilateral order that takes full account
of China's rise as a worthy rival. This means that we need to develop a
series of smaller-scale agreements with strategic partners. The TPP is a
good example of such an agreement. But where is the call to revive it?"

The thing is that the post-WWII liberal international order was good for things like that.
Trump and the GOP quite deliberately destroyed it. Before that, the US would have the trust of many other governments; now they don't trust the US - even if Biden is elected, the next Trump is on the way.

KevinS • 3 days ago • edited
"We benefit if countries that share our opposition to Chinese imperialism -- countries like India and Japan, Vietnam, Australia and Taiwan -- are economically independent of China, and standing shoulder to shoulder with us,"

OK....then can someone explain why Hawley opposed the TPP, which was designed to accomplish just this. The TPP was supposed to create trading relationships between these countries and the United States in the context of an agreement that excluded China. In this instance people like Hawley were advancing China's position and interests (I suspect simply because it was a treaty negotiated under Obama, which apparently was enough to make it bad).

Kiyoshi01 KevinS • 3 days ago
Probably because Hawley seems more interested in demagoguery than accomplishing anything productive. Never mind that 95% of the people who voted for him probably couldn't find Japan or Vietnam on a map.
kouroi KevinS • 2 days ago
TPP was not geared against China as a blanket thing, as an entire exclusion of China. The perfidy of TPP was that it was against any economic interactions with State Owned Enterprises (didn't mention the origin, didn't have to). The ultimate goal wasn't to isolate China but to force privatization of said SOEs, preferably run from Wall Street.

Private property good and = Democracy; State property bad = Authoritarianism, dictatorship, etc. It is a fallacy here somewhere, cannot really put my finger on it...

calidus • 3 days ago
Except this is all lies. On each chance to actually do something Hawley has sided with international corporations, as a good conservative will always do. Fixing globalism will never come form the right, this is all smoke and mirrors for the religious right, aka the rubes. And they are perpetual suckers and will keep buying into this crap as our nation is hollowed out and raided by the rich. And that, is TRUE conservatism.
TheSnark • 3 days ago
"Now we must recognize that the economic system designed by Western policy makers at the end of the Cold War does not serve our purposes in this new era," proclaimed Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Missouri. "And it does not meet our needs for this new day." He continued, perhaps too politely: "And we should admit that multiple of its founding premises were in error."

The "error" in the founding premises of the post-WWII economic system was that it assumed that the US would act in a responsible manner. Instead we have run huge budget deficits and borrowed the difference from foreigners, randomly invading other countries, undermined the institutions we set up, bullied smaller countries rather than working with them, and abused our control of the financial system.

No, that old economic system served our interests very well, as long as we respected the institutions we set up and kept our own house in order. We haven't been doing any of that for at least 20 years.

Kiyoshi01 Amicus Brevis • 2 days ago
Let's bear in mind that the Republican leader of the Senate married into a wealthy Chinese family that makes its money from hauling Chinese exports to our shores and the shores of other developed nations.

This is all just hollow bravado meant to appeal to the right's nativist base.

Amicus Brevis Kiyoshi01 • 2 days ago • edited
I am not into the thinking that everyone whose politics I don't support is acting in bad faith. We are talking about the actions of literally millions of people. Accusing this or that person of acting in bad faith because of personal interest is just dirty politics dressed up as perceptiveness. I am not accusing any specific person of acting in bad faith, although some of the people who pushed opening up to China because more business in China would create a class of people who would eventually push for Democracy there, were indeed acting in bad faith. They wanted access to cheap labor with no rights.

Yet, no doubt many of them actually believed the propaganda, because it supposedly happened in South Korea, Taiwan and other places. And especially the ones who switched the line to "globalism" when it was clear that the supposed indigenous pressures for Democracy did not materialize also acted in bad faith. I only assume that some of were because once I understood the rationale of the CCCP it was clear to me that China was radically different, and there is no way that so many of those guys who are smarter and more knowledgeable about political systems than me, did not figure it out. But I am not going to behave as if it the Republicans alone who were pushing either of these two false messages.

phreethink • 2 days ago
Criticizing China for "imperialism" is the height of hypocrisy on multiple levels. First, the United States has engaged in economic imperialism, sometimes enforced with military intervention, for a hundred years. Read Smedley Butler's "War is a Racket" if you doubt that. Second, this is the same guy who voted against our proxy war in Yemen. Third, one could very reasonably argue that China is simply applying the lessons it learned at the hands of Western imperialists since 1800s..

It's good that SOME Republicans are at least giving lip service to the idea of bringing back manufacturing in this country. But you have to thank Trump for that, not the GOP establishment. The offshoring of American manufacturing as part of "free trade" was strongly supported (if not led) by the GOP going back to the 1980s.

DUNK phreethink • 2 days ago
And check out John Perkins's books ("Confessions of an Economic Hit Man", etc.) for up-to-date information. It's obviously true that criticizing China for "imperialism" is ridiculously hypocritical but people like Senator Hawley know they can get away with it because they understand how propaganda works on the dumbed-down masses.

They understand doublethink, repetition, appeal to patriotism, appeal to racism, appeal to fear, etc. People like Rupert Murdoch do this every day... poorly, but well enough to be effective on a lot of people.

Incidentally, the Republicans may talk about bringing manufacturing back to the US but they're actually planning on shifting it to India (see Eric Striker's article "International Finance's Anti-China Crusade").

[May 24, 2020] As its own infrastructure has been laid waste by the COLLASSAL MONEY PIT that is the Pentagon, its flagrant use of the most valuable energy commodity, oil, to maintain some 4000 bases worldwide, this rickety over-extended upside down version of old Anglo-Dutch trading empires, will finally collapse

Kissinger laid out the transition plan in 2014 in his WSJ Op-Ed: Henry Kissinger on the Assembly of a New World Order . USA Deep State are not the complete idiots that some want to make them seem.
China is still very vulnerable and the USA has multiple levers to force it to suffer.
May 24, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org
Kurt Zumdieck , May 22 2020 18:24 utc | 4
If Washington lured the Soviet Union into it's demise in Afghanistan, which left that minor empire in shambles - socially, militarily, economically - it was the nuclear conflagration at Chernobyl that put the corpse in the ground.....

(Watch the GREAT HBO five-part tragedy on it and you will see that the brutally heroic response of the Soviets, that saved the Western World at least temporarily, but is the portrait of self-sacrifice)

What was lost in the Soviets fumbling immediate post-explosion cover-up was the trust of their Eastern European satellite countries. That doomed that empire. So much military might was given up in Afghanistan, then on Chernobyl, it was not clear if the Soviets had the wherewithal to put down the rebellions that spread from Czechoslovakia to East Germany and beyond.

Covid-19 will do the same to the American Empire.

As its own infrastructure has been laid waste by the COLLASSAL MONEY PIT that is the Pentagon, its flagrant use of the most valuable energy commodity, oil, to maintain some 4000 bases worldwide, this rickety over-extended upside down version of old Anglo-Dutch trading empires, will finally collapse.

Loss of trust by the many craven satellites, in America's fractured response, to Covid-19 will put the final nail in its coffin.

A hot-shooting War may come next, but the empire cannot win it.

William Gruff , May 23 2020 14:25 utc | 79

"I will believe my eyes." --oldhippie @76

It would be nice if that were so, but it is very unlikely.

"So tired of reading propaganda."

Is that why you regurgitate it onto forums? Kinda like purging the system, eh?

If you are going to be judging China's economic health by their pollution levels then in the future you will find yourself convinced that they have never recovered, even when it becomes inescapably obvious that they have. The fact is that China's pollution levels are never going back to 2019 levels, but that has nothing to do with their economic health.

It really never ceases to amaze me how deeply rooted and pervasive the delusions and sense of exceptionality is in America. It is woven into the thinking, from the lowest levels to the very top of their thoughts, of even the very most intelligent Americans. It is apparently a phenomenon that operates at an even deeper level than mass media brainwashing, as it seems it was just as much a problem in every empire in history. That is, I am sure citizens of the Roman Empire had the same blinding biases embedded deep below their consciousness. I guess Marx was entirely correct to say that consciousness arises from material conditions, and being citizen of an empire must be one of those material conditions that gives rise to this all-pervasive and unconscious sense of exceptionality.

oldhippie , May 23 2020 11:47 utc | 71
Go over to EOSDIS Worldview and take a look at satellite photos of China. Simple toggle in lower left hand corner will take you to photos of same day, earlier years. Or any day in satellite record.

The skies over China are clear. Chinese industry is not back at work. It may be that China at 50% or even at 20% is a manufacturing powerhouse compared to a crumbling US. But until China is back at work the thread so far is about the historical situation six months ago.

Xi used to do elaborately staged state appearances with well planned camera angles, fabulous lighting, pomp and circumstance. He enjoyed the trappings of power and knew how to use the trappings of power. Hasn't done that kind of state appearance since January.

Paul , May 23 2020 12:47 utc | 72
The Empire has no respect for international agreements, laws or anything that interferes with maintaining US global hegemony.
lizzie dw , May 23 2020 12:55 utc | 73
China and the US are so different. The citizens of China cannot vote. The population's movements are micromanaged by the government. This is not the case here (yet). And I hope it is never the case. I agree with the premise that there are those in our government who are living in a dream of the past and that is over, unless we want to destroy the world. But China's government is so repressive. The rules must be obeyed. We seem to be compliant so far of some of our government officials stepping over the bounds allowed by our Constitution, due to the fear of C-19 engendered by the deep state (aka the bsmsm). But we will not do that forever and our government cannot just start shooting big crowds of us as they can and have done in China. Theirs is all top down rule, which is not the case here. Also, although it is probably heretical to say this I am glad that the US has many cases of C-19. We will eventually get herd immunity. IMO, China can lock down as many millions of citizens as they wish; they cannot stop this virus and as time goes by they will have as many deaths and as many cases as everybody else. Well, that is off the topic of the article. In the end I agree that we are fighting weird battles we can never win and we citizens need to keep informing our government employees that we just want to trade and make money, not threaten companies and countries and lose money.

[May 23, 2020] China is still in great danger. Of the existing 30 or so high-tech productive chains, China only enjoys superiority at 2 or 3

Highly recommended!
May 23, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

vk , May 22 2020 21:02 utc | 28

China is still in great danger. Of the existing 30 or so high-tech productive chains, China only enjoys superiority at 2 or 3 (see 6:48).

It is still greatly dependent on the West to development and still is a developing country.

So, yes, the West still has a realistic chance of destroying China and inaugurating a new cycle of capitalist prosperity.

What happens with the "decoupling"/"Pivot to Asia" is that, in the West, there's a scatological theory [go to 10th paragraph] - of Keynesian origin - that socialism can only play "catch up" with capitalism, but never surpass it when a "toyotist phase" of technological innovation comes (this is obviously based on the USSR's case). This theory states that, if there's innovation in socialism, it is residual and by accident, and that only in capitalism is significant technological advancement possible. From this, they posit that, if China is blocked out of Western IP, it will soon "go back to its place" - which is probably to Brazil or India level.

If China will be able to get out of the "Toyotist Trap" that destroyed the USSR, only time will tell. Regardless, decoupling is clearly not working, and China is not showing any signs so far of slowing down. Hence Trump is now embracing a more direct approach.

As for the USA, I've put my big picture opinion about it some days ago, so I won't repeat myself. Here, it suffices to say that, yes, I believe the USA can continue to survive as an empire - even if, worst case scenario, in a "byzantine" form. To its favor, it has: 1) the third largest world population 2) huge territory, with excellent proportion of high-quality arable land (35%), that basically guarantees food security indefinitely (for comparison, the USSR only had 10% of arable land, and of worse quality) 3) two coasts, to the two main Oceans (Pacific and Atlantic), plus a direct exit to the Arctic (Alaska and, de facto, Greenland and Canada) 4) excellent, very defensive territory, protected by both oceans (sea-to-sea), bordered only by two very feeble neighbors (Mexico and Canada) that can be easily absorbed if the situation asks to 4) still the financial superpower 5) still a robust "real" economy - specially if compared to the micro-nations of Western Europe and East-Asia 6) a big fucking Navy, which gives it thalassocratic power.

I don't see the USA losing its territorial integrity anytime soon. There are separatist movements in places like Texas and, more recently, the Western Coast. Most of them exist only for fiscal reasons and are not taken seriously by anyone else. The Star-and-Stripes is still a very strong ideal to the average American, and nobody takes the idea of territory loss for real. If that happens, though, it would change my equation on the survival of the American Empire completely.

As for Hong Kong. I watched a video by the chief of the PLA last year (unfortunately, I watched it on Twitter and don't have the link with me anymore). He was very clear: Hong Kong does not present an existential threat to China. The greatest existential threat to China are, by far, Xinjiang and Tibet, followed by Taiwan and the South China Sea. Hong Kong is a distant fourth place.

Those liberal clowns were never close.

[May 23, 2020] Regarding Madeleine Albright: "She also said that the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children through U.S. imposed sanctions was " a very hard choice, but the price -- we think the price is worth it." That is the basic credo of the liberal interventionists."

May 23, 2020 | www.unz.com

Mustapha Mond , says: Show Comment May 21, 2020 at 7:30 pm GMT

Regarding Madeleine Albright: "She also said that the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children through U.S. imposed sanctions was " a very hard choice, but the price -- we think the price is worth it." That is the basic credo of the liberal interventionists."

I think 'liberal interventionist' is a bit too weak for the 'lovely' Ms Albright and her (in)famous quote.

Instead, let's try, "That is the basic credo of psychopathically sadistic zionist monsters who exquisitely enjoy the thought of Arab children dying agonizingly slow deaths of preventable diseases and starvation."

Ah, yes. That's a much more accurate assessment of the situation ..

Emily , says: Show Comment May 23, 2020 at 11:47 am GMT
@04398436986 Video of Madeleine Albright confirming that the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children was a price worth paying .

https://www.youtube.com/embed/bntsfiAXMEE?feature=oembed

[May 22, 2020] No US president who can withdraw the USA from the Forever Wars

Highly recommended!
But may be coronavirus can. Although Perfumed Princes of Pentagon and MIC with it neocon fifth column will fiercely resist.
May 22, 2020 | www.unz.com

Nikolai Vladivostok , says: Website Show Comment May 22, 2020 at 6:21 am GMT

I've long since concluded, there is no president who can withdraw the US from the Forever Wars. Obama couldn't. Trump can't. Biden/Harris/Oprah/Gabbard/Pence won't.

There are a half-dozen permanent US policies that Americans don't get to vote on, and the Permawar is one of them.

Anon [151] Disclaimer , says: Show Comment May 22, 2020 at 6:36 am GMT
My God, Buchanan, I am staggered by the arrogance of this column. Where in the name of all that's holy did you ever get the idea that America has the right to impose on anyone, from Afghans through to Venezuelans, your (perceived) systems of thought, values and democracy? How many American soldiers in Iraq or Afghanistan can even speak the local language? Understand the local customs? None!!! They swan around in their sunglasses and battle gear thinking that they are they return of the Terminator and wander why the locals absolutely hate their collective guts! It's time that you collectively learned that America is NOT the world's sheriff and that, as Benjamin Franklin said "A man convinced against his will, is of the same opinion still".
animalogic , says: Show Comment May 22, 2020 at 7:00 am GMT
Pat is not entirely wrong -- he hints at the explanation for failure:
"As imperialists, we Americans are conspicuous failures.

Moreover, with us, the national interest inevitably asserts itself."
As Imperialists there has never been anything but the (Elite) "national interest".
In short, these so called "losing" wars have been wars of aggression -- ie "bad" wars. All Pat's talk of conversion, democracy etc is just so much nonsense.

swamped , says: Show Comment May 22, 2020 at 8:14 am GMT
"While we can defeat our enemies in the air and on the seas and in cyberspace, we cannot persuade them to embrace secular democracy and its values any more than we can convert them to Christianity" although they might be better persuaded to convert to Christianity – traditional Christianity – than to embrace secular democracy and its "values".

Why would anyone want to embrace homosexuality, transgenderism, rad-feminism, opioids, prozac, inequality, broken homes, mass shootings, mountainous debt, corrupt media, puppet politicians & the rest of the filth & perversion that passes for "values" in secular democracies like America or Western Europe?

Indeed, why would anyone in these decadent countries even want to defend these venal "values", let alone try to spread them around the world like the Chinese plague?
No, "they are not trying to change us" but maybe they should.

Donald Duck , says: Show Comment May 22, 2020 at 10:07 am GMT
As the British and French ultimately found out it costs more to run an empire than to loot it. So the long retreat ensues. One would have thought that the Americans might have learned this from history, but no! After all they were "the exceptional people, they stood taller than the others and saw further." Errrm, no they didn't. Like their forbears they got bogged down as well getting into debt which was only bailed out by their insistence that they would not convert the dollar into gold.

Human nature and stupidity has got a long track-record and it isn't going to end anytime soon.

paranoid goy , says: Website Show Comment May 22, 2020 at 12:30 pm GMT
The writer, and most commenters' are still under the erroneous belief that AMerica goes to war in places then AMerica wins or loses or wastes lives or kill children. This is the saddest part of the Yankee war machine: Americans joining the Army because they think theya re joining the fight to defend the American Dream.

You-all are corporate gunmonkeys, fighting and killing and burning and bombing, not in the name of freedom or apple pie, but in the name of Gulf Oil, Goldman Sachs, Citicorp, JPMorgan, Monsanto, PHBBillington, whatever Devil Rumsfeld calls his sack of shit these days .

America has not won any war anywhere, even their civil war was mostly just clearing the land for the banks. That is because it is not America at war, she just supplies the cannon fodder. And cannons. And radiactive scrapmetal to make bullets to mow down women and children in the name of Investor Confidence.
But then, that is what your Zionist bible tells you to do, isn't it?

Realist , says: Show Comment May 22, 2020 at 1:26 pm GMT

What Does Winning Mean in a Forever War?

Winning a war is not in the interest of the Deep State. Being at war makes the Deep State more wealthy and powerful not winning at war.

Realist , says: Show Comment May 22, 2020 at 1:30 pm GMT
@Anon

I just don't think the US has the immoral fortitude to engage in genocide, so it's hopeless trying to "win."

If by the US you mean most of the people you may be right. But the people in the US have no say in the actions of the US government which is controlled by psychopaths.

anonymous [400] Disclaimer , says: Show Comment May 22, 2020 at 1:49 pm GMT
Afghanistan is hardly even a country as the average American might define one. There's really nothing to "win"; we only occupy. The infrastructure is primitive so it's not cost effective to try to take whatever natural resources they may have, if any, so there's nothing they have that we want. The Taliban were not "ousted". In the face of massive firepower they split up and scattered; they're still there. After all, the US has been negotiating with them for a peace deal of some sort hasn't it? "Democracy crusades" is just a propaganda fig leaf to bamboozle stupid Americans. It's amazing that there's people who actually believe stuff like that but PT Barnum had it right. "Eventually, we give up and go home". That's because they live there and we don't. "They apparently have an inexhaustible supply of volunteers" willing to fight and die. They don't want foreign robo-soldiers pointing guns at them in their own country. We have our own version, it's called "Remember the Alamo", men who stood their ground against the odds.
Amerimutt Golems , says: Show Comment May 22, 2020 at 2:03 pm GMT
@Anon

If a country is not willing to do that, and I would hope the United States is not willing to do that, then they (we) should go home and leave the Afghans to murder each other without our assistance. If they return to supporting terrorism or go whole hog in producing opium, perhaps the US should decapitate their entire government and let the next batch of losers give governing a try. I just don't think the US has the immoral fortitude to engage in genocide, so it's hopeless trying to "win."

The growth in opium cultivation correlates with CIA activities in the area and the $3 billion from American taxpayers which financed Mujahideen 'terrorism' against the Russians and their local proxies just to avenge the fall of Saigon.

In 1980 Afghanistan accounted for about only 5% of total world heroin production. This was mainly for the local market and neighbor Iran.

That is how you get forever wars.

Rurik , says: Show Comment May 22, 2020 at 3:04 pm GMT

They refuse to surrender and submit because it is their beliefs, their values, their faith, their traditions, their tribe, their God, their culture, their civilization, their honor that they believe they are fighting for in what is, after all, their land, not ours.

If I may..

another way of looking at this, and I feel a profound respect for the Afghans, and only wish we were made of the same mettle. If only ((they)) could say of us..

They refuse to surrender and submit because it is their beliefs, their values, their faith, their traditions, their tribe, their God, their culture, their civilization, their honor that they believe they are fighting for in what is, after all, their land, not (((ours)))).

They are not trying to change ((((us. We))) are trying to change them. And they wish to remain who they are.

IOW, we white Westerners, have proved willing to surrender and submit to all of it. Without nary a peep of protest. Even as ((they)) send us around the globe to kill people like these Afghans, for being slightly inconvenient to their agenda. [And so the CIA can reconstitute its global heroin trafficking operation$.]

If only history would look back on this epic moment, at the last Death throes of the West, and say of whitey, that he refused to surrender his values and faith and traditions and tribe and God, and culture and civilization and honor.. to ((those)) who would pervert his values, and mock his faith, and trash his traditions, and exterminate his tribe, while mocking his God, and poisoning his culture, and destroying his civilization and all because at the end of the day, he had no honor.

These men may be backwater, illiterate villagers,

but at least they have enough mettle and honor, to tell the Beast that they would rather die killing as many of the Beast's stupid goons as they're able, than ever sacrifice their sacred honor- or lands or sovereignty, or the destinies of their children – over to the fiend, which is more than I can say for Western "man".

They are not trying to change us. We are trying to change them. And they wish to remain who they are.

Would that the Swedish people had a Nano-shred of the blood-honor of an Afghan, Barbara Spectre would be pounding sand.

Historically, the Afghans are fundamentalist, tribal and impervious to foreign intervention.

Obviously, there is a great deal we need to learn from them.

What will the Taliban do when we leave?

They will not give up their dream of again ruling the Afghan nation and people. And they will fight until they have achieved that goal and their idea of victory: dominance.

Um.. Pat. Whose land is it anyways? Is it such a horror that Afghans should be dominant in Afghanistan ?

The Taliban was welcomed into most of the regions it governed, because they drove out local war lords who often treated the villager's children as their sex toys, and the foreign (CIA) opioid growers and traffickers. And it was the Taliban that put an end to all of that. They're harsh, but they're effective, and that is their land, not ours.

Also, the Taliban offered to turn over Osama Bin Laden, if the West could provide a shred of proof that he had anything whatsoever to do with 9/11. (he didn't ; ) But the West had zero proof, (as the FBI admits to this day), that they have zero proof that ties Bin Laden to 9/11.

And n0w that we all know 9/11 was an Israeli false flag, intended to use the American military as their bitch, to burn down 'seven nations in five years' .. that the Jewish supremacists wanted destroyed, our whole pretext for being over there has been a sham from day one. Duh.
.
.
.
.
I remember long ago when I had a subscription to National Geographic and this photo came out, I cut the picture out, and stuck it somewhere to look at- it was so visceral and haunting.

Leave them alone. I don't care how many Jews at the WSJ demand whitey has to stay and die for Israel. (Afghanistan is on Iran's border, and that's why we have to stay, to menace all those anti-Semites over there, trying to gas all the Jews and make soap).

Good on Trump for calling out the ((WSJ)).

follyofwar , says: Show Comment May 22, 2020 at 3:42 pm GMT
@paranoid goy I very much doubt if many are joining the military to "defend the American Dream." Most are more practical and are joining to escape poverty, even if it might cost them their lives. Recruiters will now be inundated with volunteers since there are no jobs in the covid depression.
Exile , says: Show Comment May 22, 2020 at 4:15 pm GMT
If the neo-con clown car Trump has permitted to run foreign policy since his election gets us into a war with Iran and/or Venezuela before November, will Pat still be stumping for him, or will we see the return of non-election-year Pat?
VinnyVette , says: Show Comment May 22, 2020 at 4:46 pm GMT
Excellent question Pat! Unfortunately there is no answer, we've been at "forever war" seemingly forever, and the whole point as Eisenhower so preciently warned us is THE objective.
Priss Factor , says: Website Show Comment May 22, 2020 at 5:36 pm GMT
It's not 'forever war'. It is Empire. Empire exists to continue and expand. War is about win or lose. Empire is about keep and dominate.

US wars are not to win and then depart. It is to keep occupying and controlling.

And US is rich enough to buy off the local elites as collaborators forever.

Marshal Marlow , says: Show Comment May 23, 2020 at 1:56 am GMT
@Anon

If they return to supporting terrorism

The thing is that the Afghan government wasn't supporting terrorism. Rather, it had no on-going control anywhere except the cities, which made the tribal areas useful hideouts / bases for a raft of groups.

I well remember the prelude to the invasion where the US was demanding that its government (which merely happened to be Taliban that year) hand over OBL in 72hrs. The truth was that the US knew Afghanistan didn't have the capability to do that and it merely wanted to use OBL as an excuse to invade and continue the encirclement of the old soviet states.

[May 22, 2020] Having a sense of history, de Gaulle saw that colonialism had been a moment in history that was past. His policy was to foster friendly relations on equal terms with all parts of the world, regardless of ideological differences. I think that Putin's concept of a multipolar world is similar. It is clearly a concept that horrifies the exceptionalists

Notable quotes:
"... Mr. de Gaulle like other "leaders" of colonial powers did understand that the moment of overt coercive relations of colonialism had passed and that colonialism to remain qualitatively the same, required covert coercive relations facilitated by the complicity of local "elites" on the basis of perceived self-interest. ..."
May 22, 2020 | consortiumnews.com

Herman , May 17, 2020 at 09:00

Interesting comparison between the aspirations of De Gaulle and Putin.

"Having a sense of history, de Gaulle saw that colonialism had been a moment in history that was past. His policy was to foster friendly relations on equal terms with all parts of the world, regardless of ideological differences. I think that Putin's concept of a multipolar world is similar. It is clearly a concept that horrifies the exceptionalists."

Agree with Johnstone.

OlyaPola , May 19, 2020 at 11:55

"Having a sense of history, de Gaulle saw that colonialism had been a moment in history that was past. "

Mr. de Gaulle like other "leaders" of colonial powers did understand that the moment of overt coercive relations of colonialism had passed and that colonialism to remain qualitatively the same, required covert coercive relations facilitated by the complicity of local "elites" on the basis of perceived self-interest.

The exceptions to such strategies lay within constructs of settler colonialism which were addressed primarily through warfare – "The United States of America", Vietnam/Laos/Cambodia, Indonesia, Algeria, Kenya, Rhodesia, Mozambique, Angola refer – to facilitate such future strategies.

"I think that Putin's concept of a multipolar world is similar."

As outlined elsewhere the concept of a multi-polar world is not synonymous with the concept of colonialism except for the colonialists who consistently seek to encourage such conflation through myths of we-are-all-in-this-togetherness.

[May 21, 2020] The 'Clean Break' Doctrine OffGuardian

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm ..."
"... "the right to plunder anything one can get their hands on" ..."
"... "the UK and France in March 2011 which led the international community to support an intervention in Libya to protect civilians from forces loyal to Muammar Gaddafi" ..."
May 21, 2020 | off-guardian.org

n 1996 a task force, led by Richard Perle, produced a policy document titled A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm for Benjamin Netanyahu, who was then in his first term as Prime Minister of Israel, as a how-to manual on approaching regime change in the Middle East and for the destruction of the Oslo Accords.

The "Clean Break" policy document outlined these goals:

Ending Yasser Arafat's and the Palestinian Authority's political influence, by blaming them for acts of Palestinian terrorism Inducing the United States to overthrow Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq. Launching war against Syria after Saddam's regime is disposed of. Followed by military action against Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt.

"Clean Break" was also in direct opposition to the Oslo Accords, to which Netanyahu was very much itching to obliterate. The Oslo II Accord was signed just the year before, on September 28th 1995, in Taba, Egypt.

During the Oslo Accord peace process, Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu accused Rabin's government of being "removed from Jewish tradition and Jewish values." Rallies organised by the Likud and other right-wing fundamentalist groups featured depictions of Rabin in a Nazi SS uniform or in the crosshairs of a gun.

In July 1995, Netanyahu went so far as to lead a mock funeral procession for Rabin, featuring a coffin and hangman's noose.

The Oslo Accords was the initiation of a process which was to lead to a peace treaty based on the United Nations Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338, and at fulfilling the "right of the Palestinian people to self-determination." If such a peace treaty were to occur, with the United States backing, it would have prevented much of the mayhem that has occurred since.

However, the central person to ensuring this process, Yitzak Rabin, was assassinated just a month and a half after the signing of the Oslo II Accord, on November 4th, 1995. Netanyahu became prime minister of Israel seven months later. "Clean Break" was produced the following year.

On November 6th, 2000 in the Israeli daily Ha'aretz, Israeli Justice Minister Yossi Beilin, who was the chief negotiator of the Oslo peace accords, warned those Israelis who argued that it was impossible to make peace with the Palestinians:

Zionism was founded in order to save Jews from persecution and anti-Semitism, and not in order to offer them a Jewish Sparta or – God forbid – a new Massada."

On Oct. 5, 2003, for the first time in 30 years, Israel launched bombing raids against Syria, targeting a purported "Palestinian terrorist camp" inside Syrian territory. Washington stood by and did nothing to prevent further escalation.

"Clean Break" was officially launched in March 2003 with the war against Iraq, under the pretence of "The War on Terror". The real agenda was a western-backed list of regime changes in the Middle East to fit the plans of the United Kingdom, the U.S. and Israel.

However, the affair is much more complicated than that with each player holding their own "idea" of what the "plan" is. Before we can fully appreciate such a scope, we must first understand what was Sykes-Picot and how did it shape today's world mayhem.

Arabian Nights

WWI was to officially start July 28th 1914, almost immediately following the Balkan wars (1912-1913) which had greatly weakened the Ottoman Empire.

Never one to miss an opportunity when smelling fresh blood, the British were very keen on acquiring what they saw as strategic territories for the taking under the justification of being in war-time, which in the language of geopolitics translates to "the right to plunder anything one can get their hands on" .

The brilliance of Britain's plan to garner these new territories was not to fight the Ottoman Empire directly but rather, to invoke an internal rebellion from within. These Arab territories would be encouraged by Britain to rebel for their independence from the Ottoman Empire and that Britain would support them in this cause.

These Arab territories were thus led to believe that they were fighting for their own freedom when, in fact, they were fighting for British and secondarily French colonial interests.

In order for all Arab leaders to sign on to the idea of rebelling against the Ottoman Sultan, there needed to be a viable leader that was Arab, for they certainly would not agree to rebel at the behest of Britain.

Lord Kitchener, the butcher of Sudan, was to be at the helm of this operation as Britain's Minister of War. Kitchener's choice for Arab leadership was the scion of the Hashemite dynasty, Hussein ibn Ali, known as the Sherif of Mecca who ruled the region of Hejaz under the Ottoman Sultan.

Hardinge of the British India Office disagreed with this choice and wanted Wahhabite Abdul-Aziz ibn Saud instead, however, Lord Kitchener overruled this stating that their intelligence revealed that more Arabs would follow Hussein.

Since the Young Turk Revolution which seized power of the Ottoman government in 1908, Hussein was very aware that his dynasty was in no way guaranteed and thus he was open to Britain's invitation to crown him King of the Arab kingdom.

Kitchener wrote to one of Hussein's sons, Abdallah, as reassurance of Britain's support:

If the Arab nation assist England in this war that has been forced upon us by Turkey, England will guarantee that no internal intervention take place in Arabia, and will give Arabs every assistance against foreign aggression."

Sir Henry McMahon who was the British High Commissioner to Egypt, would have several correspondences with Sherif Hussein between July 1915 to March 1916 to convince Hussein to lead the rebellion for the "independence" of the Arab states.

However, in a private letter to India's Viceroy Charles Hardinge sent on December 4th, 1915, McMahon expressed a rather different view of what the future of Arabia would be, contrary to what he had led Sherif Hussein to believe:

[I do not take] the idea of a future strong united independent Arab State too seriously the conditions of Arabia do not and will not for a very long time to come, lend themselves to such a thing."

Such a view meant that Arabia would be subject to Britain's heavy-handed "advising" in all its affairs, whether it sought it or not.

In the meantime, Sherif Hussein was receiving dispatches issued by the British Cairo office to the effect that the Arabs of Palestine, Syria, and Mesopotamia (Iraq) would be given independence guaranteed by Britain, if they rose up against the Ottoman Empire.

The French were understandably suspicious of Britain's plans for these Arab territories. The French viewed Palestine, Lebanon and Syria as intrinsically belonging to France, based on French conquests during the Crusades and their "protection" of the Catholic populations in the region.

Hussein was adamant that Beirut and Aleppo were to be given independence and completely rejected French presence in Arabia. Britain was also not content to give the French all the concessions they demanded as their "intrinsic" colonial rights.

Enter Sykes and Picot.

... ... ...

Throughout the 1920s and 1930s violent confrontations between Jews and Arabs took place in Palestine costing hundreds of lives. In 1936 a major Arab revolt occurred over 7 months, until diplomatic efforts involving other Arab countries led to a ceasefire.

In 1937, a British Royal Commission of Inquiry headed by William Peel concluded that Palestine had two distinct societies with irreconcilable political demands, thus making it necessary to partition the land.

The Arab Higher Committee refused Peel's "prescription" and the revolt broke out again. This time, Britain responded with a devastatingly heavy hand. Roughly 5,000 Arabs were killed by the British armed forces and police. Following the riots, the British mandate government dissolved the Arab Higher Committee and declared it an illegal body.

In response to the revolt, the British government issued the White Paper of 1939, which stated that Palestine should be a bi-national state, inhabited by both Arabs and Jews.

Due to the international unpopularity of the mandate including within Britain itself, it was organised such that the United Nations would take responsibility for the British initiative and adopted the resolution to partition Palestine on November 29th, 1947.

Britain would announce its termination of its Mandate for Palestine on May 15th, 1948 after the State of Israel declared its independence on May 14th, 1948.

A New Strategy for Securing Whose Realm?

Despite what its title would have you believe, "Clean Break" is neither a "new strategy" nor meant for "securing" anything. It is also not the brainchild of fanatical neo-conservatives: Dick Cheney and Richard Perle, nor even that of crazed end-of-days fundamentalist Benjamin Netanyahu, but rather has the very distinct and lingering odour of the British Empire.

"Clean Break" is a continuation of Britain's geopolitical game, and just as it used France during the Sykes-Picot days it is using the United States and Israel.

The role Israel has found itself playing in the Middle East could not exist if it were not for over 30 years of direct British occupation in Palestine and its direct responsibility for the construction of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which set a course for destruction and endless war in this region long before Israel ever existed.

It was also Britain who officially launched operation "Clean Break" by directly and fraudulently instigating an illegal war against Iraq to which the Chilcot Inquiry, aka Iraq Inquiry , released 7 years later, attests to.

This was done by the dubious reporting by British Intelligence setting the pretext for the U.S.' ultimate invasion into Iraq based off of fraudulent and forged evidence provided by GCHQ, unleashing the "War on Terror", aka "Clean Break" outline for regime change in the Middle East.

In addition, the Libyan invasion in 2011 was also found to be unlawfully instigated by Britain.

In a report published by the British Foreign Affairs Committee in September 2016, it was concluded that it was "the UK and France in March 2011 which led the international community to support an intervention in Libya to protect civilians from forces loyal to Muammar Gaddafi" .

The report concluded that the Libyan intervention was based on false pretence provided by British Intelligence and recklessly promoted by the British government.

If this were not enough, British Intelligence has also been caught behind the orchestrations of Russia-Gate and the Skripal affair .

Therefore, though the U.S. and Israeli military have done a good job at stealing the show, and though they certainly believe themselves to be the head of the show, the reality is that this age of empire is distinctly British and anyone who plays into this game will ultimately be playing for said interests, whether they are aware of it or not.

Originally published by Strategic Culture

Almondson ,

Yossi B said:

Zionism was founded in order to save Jews from persecution and anti-Semitism

Ever heard of Dumbo? He's a flying elephant.

The crusade in the ME will continue, with Israel the top dog until America's military support is no longer there. Even without the Israeli eastern european invaders, the area is primed for perpetual tribal warfare because the masses are driven by tribalist doctrines and warped metaphysics dictated by insane and inhumane parasites (priests). It is the epicenter of a spiritual plague that has infected most of the planet.

paul ,

There is complete continuity between the activities of Zionist controlled western countries and those of the present day.

In the 1930s, there were about 300,000 adult Palestinian males. Over 10% were killed, imprisoned and tortured or driven into exile. 100,000 British troops were sent to Palestine to destroy completely Palestinian political and military organisations. Wingate set up the Jew terror gangs who were given free rein to murder, rape and burn, in preparation for the complete ethnic cleansing of the country.

We see the same ruthless, genocidal brutality on an even greater scale in the present day, serving exactly the same interests. Nothing has ever come of trying to negotiate with the Zionists and their western stooges – just further disasters. It is only resolute and uncompromising resistance that has ever achieved anything. Hezbollah kicking their Zionist arses out of Lebanon in 2000 and keeping them out in 2006. Had they not done so, Lebanon would still be under Zionist occupation and covered with their filthy illegal settlements.

They have never stopped and they never will. The objective is to create a vast Zionist empire comprising the whole of Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria, and parts of Egypt, Turkey, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia. This plan has never changed and it never will. The Zionist thieves will shortly steal what little is left of Palestine. But the thieving will not end there. It will just move on to neighbouring countries.

The prime reason they have been able to get away with this is not their control of British and US golems. It is by playing the old, dirty colonial games of divide and rule, with the Quisling stooge dictators serving their interests. They have always been able to set Sunni against Shia, and different factions against others. The dumb Arabs fall for it every time. Their latest intrigues are directed at the destruction of Iran, the next victim on their target list after Iraq, Libya and Syria. And the Quisling dictators of Saudi Arabia are openly agitating for this and offering to pay for all of it. Syria sent troops to join the US invasion of Iraq in 1991, though Iraqi troops fought and died in Syria in 1973 against Israel. Egypt allows Israel to use its airspace to carry out the genocidal terror bombing of Gaza.

All this is contemptible enough and fits into racist stereotypes of Arabs as stupid, irrational, corrupt, easily bought, violent and treacherous. This of course does not apply to the populations of those countries, but it is a legitimate assessment of their Quisling dictators, with a (very) few honourable exceptions.

Seamus Padraig ,

Of course, Arab rulers who don't tow the Zionist line generally get overthrown, don't they? And that usually requires the efforts/intervention of FUKUS, doesn't it? So you can't really pretend that 'Arab stupidity' is the main factor.

Richard Le Sarc ,

The fact that, as the Yesha Council of Rabbis and Torah Sages declared in 2006, as Israel was bombing Lebanon 'back to the Stone Age', under Talmudic Judaism, killing civilians is not just permissible, but a mitzvah, or good deed, explains Zionist behaviour. Other doctrines allow an entire 'city' eg Gaza, to be devastated for the 'crimes' of a few, and children, even babies, to be killed if they would grow up to 'oppose the Jews'. Dare mention these FACTS, seen everyday in Israeli barbarity, and the 'antisemitism' slurs flow, as ever.

Julia ,

" is that this age of empire is distinctly British"

.it takes some balls to make such an absurd statement and still expect to be taken seriously. The US of course with its 800 military bases around the world and gifts of 40 billion a year to Israel has no opinion on the future of the Middle East. You would have us believe that they are just humble onlookers, as a small bankrupt country tells them what to do. We are being told that the CIA, the most formidable spy agency and manipulator of countries in history, sits quietly by as the British and Israel tells the US what to do.
Absurd isn't it., Clearly the truth is that Israel is just another military base for the US in the Middle East, easily the most important geopolitical region in the world. They fund it, arm it, and protect it from all attacks, Israel does as it is told by the US for the most part despite the pantomime on the surface.
Many on the far right like to hide US interests behind a wall of antisemitism that likes to paint 'the jews' as an all powerful enemy but this is just cover for Israel's real geopolitical roll as a US puppet.
Time and time again all we are seeing is attempt to write the US, the largest empire in the history out of the news and out of the history books, like it is some invisible benign force that has not interests, no control and does noting to forward it's interests and it's empire.

''To find out who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticise."

I don't know about you, but I'm not 10 years old and I know I am looking at Empire and it's power being flexed every day in every part do the world, especial in the parts of the world that it funds with trillions of dollars.

Julia ,

" is that this age of empire is distinctly British"

.it takes some balls to make such an absurd statement and still expect to be taken seriously. The US of course with its 800 military bases around the world and gifts of 40 billion a year to Israel has no opinion on the future of the Middle East. You would have us believe that they are just humble onlookers, as a small bankrupt country tells them what to do. We are being told that the CIA, the most formidable spy agency and manipulator of countries in history, sits quietly by as the British and Israel tells the US what to do.
Absurd isn't it., Clearly the truth is that Israel is just another military base for the US in the Middle East, easily the most important geopolitical region in the world. They fund it, arm it, and protect it from all attacks, Israel does as it is told by the US for the most part despite the pantomime on the surface.
Many on the far right like to hide US interests behind a wall of antisemitism that likes to paint 'the jews' as an all powerful enemy but this is just cover for Israel's real geopolitical roll as a US puppet.
Time and time again all we are seeing is attempt to write the US, the largest empire in the history out of the news and out of the history books, like it is some invisible benign force that has not interests, no control and does noting to forward it's interests and it's empire.

''To find out who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticise."

I don't know about you, but I'm not 10 years old and I know I am looking at Empire and it's power being flexed every day in every part do the world, especial in the parts of the world that it funds with trillions of dollars.

Richard Le Sarc ,

The antithesis of the truth. It is US politicians who flock to AIPAC's meeting every year to pledge UNDYING fealty to Israel, not Israeli politicians pledging loyalty to the USA. It is Israeli and dual loyalty Jewish oligarchs funding BOTH US parties, it is US politicians throwing themselves to the ground in adulation when Bibi the war criminal addresses the Congress with undisguised contempt, not Israeli politicians groveling to the USA. The master-servant relationship is undisguised.

Pyewacket ,

In Daniel Yergin's The Prize, a history of the Oil industry, he provides another interesting angle to explain British interest in the region. He states that at that time, Churchill realised that a fighting Navy powered by Coal, was not nearly as good or efficient as one using Oil as a fuel, and that securing supplies of the stuff was the best way forward to protect the Empire.

BigB ,

Yergin would be right. The precursor of the First World War was a technological arms race and accelerated 'scientific' perfection of arsenals – particularly naval – in the service of imperialism. British and German imperialism. The full story involves the Berlin to Cairo railway and the resource grab that went with it. I'm a bit sketchy on the details now: but Churchill had a prominent role, rising to First Lord of the Admiralty.

Docherty and Macgregor have exposed the hidden history. F W Engdahl has written about WW1 being the first oil war.

Andreas Schlüter ,

And don´t forget which of the US Military command regions into which the US Military divided the WHOLE World is named "US CENTCOM"!
„One Thing Must be Clear to the World: The US Power Elite Regards the Whole Globe as Their Colony!": https://wipokuli.wordpress.com/2016/10/26/one-thing-must-be-clear-to-the-world-the-us-power-elite-regards-the-whole-globe-as-their-colony/

Antonym ,

In 1996 a task force, led by Richard Perle, produced a policy document titled A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm for Benjamin Netanyahu

No source link for this!

By the way 1996 was during the Clinton administration. Warren Christopher was secretary of state and John Deutch was the Director of Central Intelligence . George Tenet was appointed the Deputy Director of Central Intelligence in July 1995. After John Deutch's abrupt resignation in December 1996, Tenet served as acting director.

Reg ,

Here you go, sonny boy

http://www.dougfeith.com/docs/Clean_Break.pdf

Richard Le Sarc ,

Antsie, what are you going to deny next? The USS Liberty? Deir Yassin? The Lavon Affair? Sabra, Shatilla? Qana (twice)? The Five Celebrating Israelis on 9/11?Does not impress.

[May 21, 2020] The neoliberal globalization myth fostered the delusion of labour in which Western societies could prosper from the ideas and computer startups, while the dirty work of actually making things is left to low-wage countries. One result: a drastic shortage of face masks

Notable quotes:
"... In France, confinement has been generally well accepted as necessary, but that does not mean people are content with the government -- on the contrary. Every evening at eight, people go to their windows to cheer for health workers and others doing essential tasks, but the applause is not for President Macron. ..."
"... What we have witnessed is the failure of what used to be one of the very best public health services in the world. It has been degraded by years of cost-cutting. In recent years, the number of hospital beds per capita has declined steadily. Many hospitals have been shut down and those that remain are drastically understaffed. Public hospital facilities have been reduced to a state of perpetual saturation, so that when a new epidemic comes along, on top of all the other usual illnesses, there is simply not the capacity to deal with it all at once. ..."
"... The neoliberal globalization myth fostered the delusion that advanced Western societies could prosper from their superior brains, thanks to ideas and computer startups, while the dirty work of actually making things is left to low-wage countries. One result: a drastic shortage of face masks. The government let a factory that produced masks and other surgical equipment be sold off and shut down. Having outsourced its textile industry, France had no immediate way to produce the masks it needed. ..."
"... In late March, French media reported that a large stock of masks ordered and paid for by the southeastern region of France was virtually hijacked on the tarmac of a Chinese airport by Americans, who tripled the price and had the cargo flown to the United States. There are also reports of Polish and Czech airport authorities intercepting Chinese or Russian shipments of masks intended for hard-hit Italy and keeping them for their own use. ..."
"... The Covid–19 crisis makes it just that much clearer that the European Union is no more than a complex economic arrangement, with neither the sentiment nor the popular leaders that hold together a nation. For a generation, schools, media, politicians have instilled the belief that the "nation" is an obsolete entity. But in a crisis, people find that they are in France, or Germany, or Italy, or Belgium -- but not in "Europe." The European Union is structured to care about trade, investment, competition, debt, economic growth. Public health is merely an economic indicator. For decades, the European Commission has put irresistible pressure on nations to reduce the costs of their public health facilities in order to open competition for contracts to the private sector -- which is international by nature. ..."
"... Scapegoating China may seem the way to try to hold the declining Western world together, even as Europeans' long-standing admiration for America turns to dismay. ..."
"... The countries that have suffered most from the epidemic are among the most indebted of the EU member states, starting with Italy. The economic damage from the lockdown obliges them to borrow further. As their debt increases, so do interest rates charged by commercial banks. They turned to the EU for help, for instance by issuing eurobonds that would share the debt at lower interest rates. This has increased tension between debtor countries in the south and creditor countries in the north, which said nein . Countries in the eurozone cannot borrow from the European Central Bank as the U.S. Treasury borrows from the Fed. And their own national central banks take orders from the ECB, which controls the euro. ..."
"... The great irony is that "a common currency" was conceived by its sponsors as the key to European unity. On the contrary, the euro has a polarizing effect -- with Greece at the bottom and Germany at the top. And Italy sinking. But Italy is much bigger than Greece and won't go quietly. ..."
"... A major paradox is that the left and the Yellow Vests call for economic and social policies that are impossible under EU rules, and yet many on the left shy away from even thinking of leaving the EU. For over a generation, the French left has made an imaginary "social Europe" the center of its utopian ambitions. ..."
"... Russia is a living part of European history and culture. Its exclusion is totally unnatural and artificial. Brzezinski [the late Zbigniew Brzezinski, the Carter administration's national security adviser] spelled it out in The Great Chessboard : The U.S. maintains world hegemony by keeping the Eurasian landmass divided. ..."
"... But this policy can be seen to be inherited from the British. It was Churchill who proclaimed -- in fact welcomed -- the Iron Curtain that kept continental Europe divided. In retrospect, the Cold War was basically part of the divide-and-rule strategy, since it persists with greater intensity than ever after its ostensible cause -- the Communist threat -- is long gone. ..."
"... The whole Ukrainian operation of 2014 [the U.S.–cultivated coup in Kyiv, February 2014] was lavishly financed and stimulated by the United States in order to create a new conflict with Russia. Joe Biden has been the Deep State's main front man in turning Ukraine into an American satellite, used as a battering ram to weaken Russia and destroy its natural trade and cultural relations with Western Europe. ..."
"... I think France is likelier than Germany to break with the U.S.–imposed Russophobia simply because, thanks to de Gaulle, France is not quite as thoroughly under U.S. occupation. Moreover, friendship with Russia is a traditional French balance against German domination -- which is currently being felt and resented. ..."
"... "Decades of indoctrination in the ideology of "Europe" has instilled the belief that the nation-state is a bad thing of the past. The result is that people raised in the European Union faith tend to regard any suggestion of return to national sovereignty as a fatal step toward fascism. This fear of contagion from "the right" is an obstacle to clear analysis which weakens the left and favors the right, which dares be patriotic." ..."
"... Since WWII the US has itself been occupied by tyrants, using Russophobia to demand power as fake defenders. ..."
"... " French philosophy .By constantly attacking, deconstructing, and denouncing every remnant of human "power" they could spot, the intellectual rebels left the power of "the markets" unimpeded, and did nothing to stand in the way of the expansion of U.S. military power all around the world " ..."
"... From her groundbreaking work on the NATO empire's sickening war on sovereign Serbia, the dead end of identity politics and trans bathroom debates, to her critique of unfettered immigration and open borders, and her dismissal of the absurd Russsiagate baloney, better than anyone else, Johnstone has kept her intellect carefully honed to the real genuine kitchen table bread and butter issues that truly matter. She recognized before most of the world's scholars the perils of rampant inequality and saw the writing on the wall as to where this grotesque economic system is taking us all: down a dystopian slope into penury and police-state heavy-handedness, with millions unable to come up with $500 for an emergency car repair or dental bill. ..."
"... The mask competition and fiasco shows the importance of a country simply making things in their own country, not on the other side of the world, it's not nationalism it's just a better way to logistically deliver reliable products to the citizens. ..."
"... Some hold that they never departed, but mutated tools including CFA zones and "intelligence" relations in furtherance of "changing" to remain qualitatively the same. Just as "The United States of America" is a system of coercive relations not synonymous with the political geographical area designated "The United States of America", the colonialism of former and present "colonial powers" continues to exist, since the "independence" of the colonised was always, and continues to be, framed within linear systems of coercive relations, facilitated by the complicity of "local elites" on the basis of perceived self-interest, and the acquiescence of "local others" for myriad reasons. ..."
"... After reading Circle in the Darkness, I have ordered and am now reading her books on Hillary Clinton (Queen of Chaos) and the Yugoslav wars (Fool's Crusade), which are very worthwhile and important. I would recommend that her many articles over the years, appearing in such publications such as In These Times, Counterpunch and Consortium News, be reprinted and published together as an anthology. Through Circle in the Darkness, we have Diana Johnstone's "Life", but it would be good also to have her "Letters". ..."
"... Mr. de Gaulle like other "leaders" of colonial powers did understand that the moment of overt coercive relations of colonialism had passed and that colonialism to remain qualitatively the same, required covert coercive relations facilitated by the complicity of local "elites" on the basis of perceived self-interest. ..."
May 21, 2020 | consortiumnews.com

In France, confinement has been generally well accepted as necessary, but that does not mean people are content with the government -- on the contrary. Every evening at eight, people go to their windows to cheer for health workers and others doing essential tasks, but the applause is not for President Macron.

Macron and his government are criticized for hesitating too long to confine the population, for vacillating about the need for masks and tests, or about when or how much to end the confinement. Their confusion and indecision at least defend them from the wild accusation of having staged the whole thing in order to lock up the population.

What we have witnessed is the failure of what used to be one of the very best public health services in the world. It has been degraded by years of cost-cutting. In recent years, the number of hospital beds per capita has declined steadily. Many hospitals have been shut down and those that remain are drastically understaffed. Public hospital facilities have been reduced to a state of perpetual saturation, so that when a new epidemic comes along, on top of all the other usual illnesses, there is simply not the capacity to deal with it all at once.

The neoliberal globalization myth fostered the delusion that advanced Western societies could prosper from their superior brains, thanks to ideas and computer startups, while the dirty work of actually making things is left to low-wage countries. One result: a drastic shortage of face masks. The government let a factory that produced masks and other surgical equipment be sold off and shut down. Having outsourced its textile industry, France had no immediate way to produce the masks it needed.

Meanwhile, in early April, Vietnam donated hundreds of thousands of antimicrobial face masks to European countries and is producing them by the million. Employing tests and selective isolation, Vietnam has fought off the epidemic with only a few hundred cases and no deaths.

You must have thoughts as to the question of Western unity in response to Covid–19.

In late March, French media reported that a large stock of masks ordered and paid for by the southeastern region of France was virtually hijacked on the tarmac of a Chinese airport by Americans, who tripled the price and had the cargo flown to the United States. There are also reports of Polish and Czech airport authorities intercepting Chinese or Russian shipments of masks intended for hard-hit Italy and keeping them for their own use.

The absence of European solidarity has been shockingly clear. Better-equipped Germany banned exports of masks to Italy. In the depth of its crisis, Italy found that the German and Dutch governments were mainly concerned with making sure Italy pays its debts. Meanwhile, a team of Chinese experts arrived in Rome to help Italy with its Covid–19 crisis, displaying a banner reading "We are waves of the same sea, leaves of the same tree, flowers of the same garden." The European institutions lack such humanistic poetry. Their founding value is not solidarity but the neoliberal principle of "free unimpeded competition."

How do you think this reflects on the European Union?

The Covid–19 crisis makes it just that much clearer that the European Union is no more than a complex economic arrangement, with neither the sentiment nor the popular leaders that hold together a nation. For a generation, schools, media, politicians have instilled the belief that the "nation" is an obsolete entity. But in a crisis, people find that they are in France, or Germany, or Italy, or Belgium -- but not in "Europe." The European Union is structured to care about trade, investment, competition, debt, economic growth. Public health is merely an economic indicator. For decades, the European Commission has put irresistible pressure on nations to reduce the costs of their public health facilities in order to open competition for contracts to the private sector -- which is international by nature.

Globalization has hastened the spread of the pandemic, but it has not strengthened internationalist solidarity. Initial gratitude for Chinese aid is being brutally opposed by European Atlanticists. In early May, Mathias Döpfner, CEO of the Springer publishing giant, bluntly called on Germany to ally with the U.S. -- against China. Scapegoating China may seem the way to try to hold the declining Western world together, even as Europeans' long-standing admiration for America turns to dismay.

Meanwhile, relations between EU member states have never been worse. In Italy and to a greater extent in France, the coronavirus crisis has enforced growing disillusion with the European Union and an ill-defined desire to restore national sovereignty.

Corollary question: What are the prospects that Europe will produce leaders capable of seizing that right moment, that assertion of independence? What do you reckon such leaders would be like?

The EU is likely to be a central issue in the near future, but this issue can be exploited in very different ways, depending on which leaders get hold of it. The coronavirus crisis has intensified the centrifugal forces already undermining the European Union. The countries that have suffered most from the epidemic are among the most indebted of the EU member states, starting with Italy. The economic damage from the lockdown obliges them to borrow further. As their debt increases, so do interest rates charged by commercial banks. They turned to the EU for help, for instance by issuing eurobonds that would share the debt at lower interest rates. This has increased tension between debtor countries in the south and creditor countries in the north, which said nein . Countries in the eurozone cannot borrow from the European Central Bank as the U.S. Treasury borrows from the Fed. And their own national central banks take orders from the ECB, which controls the euro.

What does the crisis mean for the euro? I confess I've lost faith in this project, given how disadvantaged it leaves the nations on the Continent's southern rim.

The great irony is that "a common currency" was conceived by its sponsors as the key to European unity. On the contrary, the euro has a polarizing effect -- with Greece at the bottom and Germany at the top. And Italy sinking. But Italy is much bigger than Greece and won't go quietly.

The German constitutional court in Karlsruhe recently issued a long judgment making it clear who is boss. It recalled and insisted that Germany agreed to the euro only on the grounds that the main mission of the European Central Bank was to fight inflation, and that it could not directly finance member states. If these rules were not followed, the Bundesbank, the German central bank, would be obliged to pull out of the ECB. And since the Bundesbank is the ECB's main creditor, that is that. There can be no generous financial help to troubled governments within the eurozone. Period.

Is there a possibility of disintegration here?

The idea of leaving the EU is most developed in France. The Union Populaire Républicaine, founded in 2007 by former senior functionary François Asselineau, calls for France to leave the euro, the European Union, and NATO.

The party has been a didactic success, spreading its ideas and attracting around 20,000 active militants without scoring any electoral success. A main argument for leaving the EU is to escape from the constraints of EU competition rules in order to protect its vital industry, agriculture, and above all its public services.

A major paradox is that the left and the Yellow Vests call for economic and social policies that are impossible under EU rules, and yet many on the left shy away from even thinking of leaving the EU. For over a generation, the French left has made an imaginary "social Europe" the center of its utopian ambitions.

" Europe" as an idea or an ideal, you mean.

Decades of indoctrination in the ideology of "Europe" has instilled the belief that the nation-state is a bad thing of the past. The result is that people raised in the European Union faith tend to regard any suggestion of return to national sovereignty as a fatal step toward fascism. This fear of contagion from "the right" is an obstacle to clear analysis which weakens the left and favors the right, which dares be patriotic.

Two and a half months of coronavirus crisis have brought to light a factor that makes any predictions about future leaders even more problematic. That factor is a widespread distrust and rejection of all established authority. This makes rational political programs extremely difficult, because rejection of one authority implies acceptance of another. For instance, the way to liberate public services and pharmaceuticals from the distortions of the profit motive is nationalization. If you distrust the power of one as much as the other, there is nowhere to go.

Such radical distrust can be explained by two main factors -- the inevitable feeling of helplessness in our technologically advanced world, combined with the deliberate and even transparent lies on the part of mainstream politicians and media. But it sets the stage for the emergence of manipulated saviors or opportunistic charlatans every bit as deceptive as the leaders we already have, or even more so. I hope these irrational tendencies are less pronounced in France than in some other countries.

I'm eager to talk about Russia. There are signs that relations with Russia are another source of European dissatisfaction as "junior partners" within the U.S.–led Atlantic alliance. Macron is outspoken on this point, "junior partners" being his phrase. The Germans -- business people, some senior officials in government -- are quite plainly restive.

Russia is a living part of European history and culture. Its exclusion is totally unnatural and artificial. Brzezinski [the late Zbigniew Brzezinski, the Carter administration's national security adviser] spelled it out in The Great Chessboard : The U.S. maintains world hegemony by keeping the Eurasian landmass divided.

But this policy can be seen to be inherited from the British. It was Churchill who proclaimed -- in fact welcomed -- the Iron Curtain that kept continental Europe divided. In retrospect, the Cold War was basically part of the divide-and-rule strategy, since it persists with greater intensity than ever after its ostensible cause -- the Communist threat -- is long gone.

I hadn't put our current circumstance in this context. US-backed, violent coup in Ukraine, 2014.

The whole Ukrainian operation of 2014 [the U.S.–cultivated coup in Kyiv, February 2014] was lavishly financed and stimulated by the United States in order to create a new conflict with Russia. Joe Biden has been the Deep State's main front man in turning Ukraine into an American satellite, used as a battering ram to weaken Russia and destroy its natural trade and cultural relations with Western Europe.

U.S. sanctions are particularly contrary to German business interests, and NATO's aggressive gestures put Germany on the front lines of an eventual war.

But Germany has been an occupied country -- militarily and politically -- for 75 years, and I suspect that many German political leaders (usually vetted by Washington) have learned to fit their projects into U.S. policies. I think that under the cover of Atlantic loyalty, there are some frustrated imperialists lurking in the German establishment, who think they can use Washington's Russophobia as an instrument to make a comeback as a world military power.

But I also think that the political debate in Germany is overwhelmingly hypocritical, with concrete aims veiled by fake issues such as human rights and, of course, devotion to Israel.

We should remember that the U.S. does not merely use its allies -- its allies, or rather their leaders, figure they are using the U.S. for some purposes of their own.

What about what the French have been saying since the G–7 session in Biarritz two years ago, that Europe should forge its own relations with Russia according to Europe's interests, not America's?

At G7 Summit in Biarritz, France, Aug. 26, 2019. (White House)

I think France is likelier than Germany to break with the U.S.–imposed Russophobia simply because, thanks to de Gaulle, France is not quite as thoroughly under U.S. occupation. Moreover, friendship with Russia is a traditional French balance against German domination -- which is currently being felt and resented.

Stepping back for a broader look, do you think Europe's position on the western flank of the Eurasian landmass will inevitably shape its position with regard not only to Russia but also China? To put this another way, is Europe destined to become an independent pole of power in the course of this century, standing between West and East?

At present, what we have standing between West and East is not Europe but Russia, and what matters is which way Russia leans. Including Russia, Europe might become an independent pole of power. The U.S. is currently doing everything to prevent this. But there is a school of strategic thought in Washington which considers this a mistake, because it pushes Russia into the arms of China. This school is in the ascendant with the campaign to denounce China as responsible for the pandemic. As mentioned, the Atlanticists in Europe are leaping into the anti–China propaganda battle. But they are not displaying any particular affection for Russia, which shows no sign of sacrificing its partnership with China for the unreliable Europeans.

If Russia were allowed to become a friendly bridge between China and Europe, the U.S. would be obliged to abandon its pretensions of world hegemony. But we are far from that peaceful prospect.

Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune , is a columnist, essayist, author and lecturer. His most recent book is "Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century" (Yale). Follow him on Twitter @thefloutist . His web site is Patrick Lawrence . Support his work via his Patreon site .

Josep , May 19, 2020 at 02:04

It recalled and insisted that Germany agreed to the euro only on the grounds that the main mission of the European Central Bank was to fight inflation, and that it could not directly finance member states.

I once read a comment elsewhere saying that, back in 1989, both Britain (under Margaret Thatcher) and the US objected to German reunification. Since they could not stop the reunification, they insisted that Germany accept the incoming euro. A heap of German university professors jumped up and protested, knowing fully well what the game was: namely the creation of a banker's empire in Europe controlled by private bankers.

Thorben Sunkimat , May 20, 2020 at 13:45

France and Britain rejected the german reunification. The americans were supportive, even though they had their demands. Mainly privatisation of german public utilities. After agreeing to those demands the americans persuaded the british and pressured the french who agreed to german reunification after germany agreed to the euro.

So why did france want the euro?

The German central bank crashed the European economy after reunification with high interest rates. This was because of above average growth rates mainly in Eastern Germany. Main function of the Bundesbank is to keep inflation low, which is more important to them than anything else. Since Germany's D Mark was the leading currency in Europe the rest of Europe had to heighten their interest rates too, witch lead to great economic problems within Europe. Including France.

OlyaPola , May 21, 2020 at 05:30

"namely the creation of a banker's empire in Europe controlled by private bankers."

Resort to binaries (controlled/not controlled) is a practice of self-imposed blindness. In any interactive system no absolutes exist only analogues of varying assays since "control" is limited and variable. In respect of what became the German Empire this relationship predated and facilitated the German Empire through financing the war with Denmark in 1864 courtesy of the arrangements between Mr. von Bismark and Mr. Bleichroder. The assay of "control of bankers" has varied/increased subsequently but never attained the absolute.

It is true that finance capital perceived and continues to perceive the European Union as an opportunity to increase their assay of "control" – the Austrian banks in conjunction with German bank assigning a level of priority to resurrecting spheres of influence existing prior to 1918 and until 1945.

One of the joint projects at a level of planning in the early 1990's was development of the Danube and its hinterland from Regensburg to Cerna Voda/Constanta in Romania but this was delayed in the hope of curtailment by some when NATO bombed Serbia in 1999 (Serbia not being the only target – so much for honesty-amongst-theives.)

This project was resurrected in a limited form primarily downstream from Vidin/Calafat from 2015 onwards given that some states of the former Yugoslavia were not members of the European Union and some were within spheres of influence of "The United States of America".

As to France, "Vichy" and Europa also facilitated the resurrection of finance capital and increase in its assay of control after the 1930's, some of the practices of the 1940's still being subject to dispute in France.

mkb29 , May 18, 2020 at 16:33

I've always admired Diana Johnstone's clear headed analyses of world/European/U.S./ China/Israel-Palestine/Russia/ interactions and the motivation of its "players". She has given some credence to what as been known as French rationalism and enlightenment. (Albeit as an American expat) Think Descartes, Diderot, Sartre , and She loves France in her own rationalist-humanist way.

Linda J , May 18, 2020 at 13:21

I have admired Ms. Johnstone's work for quite awhile. This enlightening interview spurs me to get a copy of the book and to contribute to Consortium News.

Others may be interested in the two-part video discovered yesterday featuring Douglas Valentine's analysis of the CIA's corporate backers and their global choke-hold on governments and their influencers in every region of the world.

Part 1
see:youtu(dot)be/cP15Ehx1yvI

Part 2
see:youtu(dot)be/IYvvEn_N1sE

worldblee , May 18, 2020 at 12:26

Not many have the long distance perspective on the world, let alone Europe, that Diana Johnstone has. Great interview!

Drew Hunkins , May 18, 2020 at 11:03

"Decades of indoctrination in the ideology of "Europe" has instilled the belief that the nation-state is a bad thing of the past. The result is that people raised in the European Union faith tend to regard any suggestion of return to national sovereignty as a fatal step toward fascism. This fear of contagion from "the right" is an obstacle to clear analysis which weakens the left and favors the right, which dares be patriotic."

Bingo! A marvelous point indeed! Quick little example -- Bernard Sanders should have worn an American flag pin on his suit during the 2020 Dem primary campaign.

chris , May 18, 2020 at 04:46

A very good analysis. As an American who has relocated to Spain several years ago, I am always disappointed that discussions of European politics always assume that Europe ends at the Pyrenees. Admittedly, Spanish politics is very complicated and confusing. Forty years of an unreconstructed dictatorship have left their mark, but the country´s socialist, communist and anarchic currents never went away. I like to say that the country is very conservative, but at least the population is aware of what is going on.

Perhaps what Ms. Johnston says about the French being just worn out, with no stomach for more violent conflict also applies to the Spanish since their great ideological struggle is more recent. The American influence during the Transition (which changed little – as the expression goes: The same dog but with a different collar) was very strong, and remains so. Even so, there is popular support for foreign and domestic policies independent of American and neoliberal control, but by and large the political and economic powers are not on board. I do not think Spain is willing to make a break alone, but would align itself with an European shift away from American control.

As Ms. Johnston says, Europe currently lacks leaders willing to take the plunge, but we will see what the coming year brings.

Sam F , May 17, 2020 at 17:45

Thank you Diana, these are valuable insights. Since WWII the US has itself been occupied by tyrants, using Russophobia to demand power as fake defenders.

1. Waving the flag and praising the lord on mass media, claiming concern with human rights and "Israel"; while
2. Subverting the Constitution with large scale bribery, surveillance, and genocides, all business as usual nowadays.
In the US, the form of government has become bribery and marketing lies; it truly knows no other way.

It may be better that Russia and China keep their distance from the US and maybe even the EU:
1. The US and EU would have to produce what they consume, eventually empowering workers;
2. Neither the US nor EU are a political or economic model for anyone, and should be ignored;
3. Neither the US nor EU produces much that Russia and China cannot, by investing more in cars and soybeans.

It will be best for the EU if it also rejects the US and its "neolib" economic and political tyranny mechanisms:
1. Alliance with Russia and China will cause substantial gains in stability and economic strength;
2. Forcing the US to abandon its "pretensions of world hegemony" will soon yield more peaceful prospects; and
3. Isolating the US will force it to improve its utterly corrupt government and society, maybe 40 to 60 years hence.

Drew Hunkins , May 17, 2020 at 15:40

" French philosophy .By constantly attacking, deconstructing, and denouncing every remnant of human "power" they could spot, the intellectual rebels left the power of "the markets" unimpeded, and did nothing to stand in the way of the expansion of U.S. military power all around the world "

Brilliant. Exactly right. This was the progenitor to our contemporary I.D. politics which seems to be solely obsessed with vocabulary, semantics and non-economic cultural issues while rarely having a critique of corporate capitalism, militarism, massive inequality and Zionism. And it almost never advocates for robust economic populist proposals like Med4All, U.B.I., debt jubilee, and the fight for $15.

Drew Hunkins , May 17, 2020 at 15:10

The book is phenomenal. I posted a customer review over on Amazon for this stupendous work. Below is a copy of my review:

(5 stars) One of the most important intellects pens her magisterial lasting legacy
Reviewed in the United States on March 31, 2020

Johnstone's been an idol of mine ever since I started reading her in the 1990s. She's clearly proved her worthiness over the decades by bucking the mainstream trend of apologetics for corporate capitalism, neoliberalism, globalism and imperialistic militarism her entire career and this astonishing memoir details it all in what will likely be the finest book of 2020 and perhaps the entire decade.

Her writing style is beyond superb, her grasp of the overarching politico-socio-economic issues that have rocked the world over the past 60 years is as astute and spot-on as you will find from any global thinker. She's right up there with Michael Parenti, James Petras, John Pilger and Noam Chomsky as seminal figures who have documented and brought light to tens of thousands (millions?) of people across the globe via their writings, interviews and speaking engagements.

Johnstone has never been one to shy away from controversial topics and issues. Why? Simple, she has the facts and truth on her side, she always has. Circle in the Darkness proves all this and more, she marshals the documentation and lays it out as an exquisite gift for struggling working people around the world.

From her groundbreaking work on the NATO empire's sickening war on sovereign Serbia, the dead end of identity politics and trans bathroom debates, to her critique of unfettered immigration and open borders, and her dismissal of the absurd Russsiagate baloney, better than anyone else, Johnstone has kept her intellect carefully honed to the real genuine kitchen table bread and butter issues that truly matter. She recognized before most of the world's scholars the perils of rampant inequality and saw the writing on the wall as to where this grotesque economic system is taking us all: down a dystopian slope into penury and police-state heavy-handedness, with millions unable to come up with $500 for an emergency car repair or dental bill.

Whenever she comes out with a new article or essay I immediately drop everything and devour it, often reading it twice to let her wisdom really soak in. So too Circle of Darkness is an extremely well written beautiful work that will scream out to be re-read every few years by those with a hunger to know exactly what was going on since the Korean War era through today regarding liberal thought, neocon and neoliberal dominance with its capitalist global hegemony and the take over of Western governments by the parasitic financial elite.

There will never be another Diana Johnstone. Circle in the Darkness will stand as her lasting legacy to all of us.

Bob Van Noy , May 17, 2020 at 14:43

"As our circle of knowledge expands, so does the circumference of darkness surrounding it" ~Albert Einstein

Many Thanks CN, Patrick Lawrence, and Joe Lauria. Once again I must commend CN for picking just the appropriate response to our contemporary dilemma.

The quote above leads Diana Johnstone's new book and succinctly describes both the universe and our contemporary experience with our digital age. President Kennedy and Charles de Gaulle of France would agree that colonialism was past and that a new world (geopolitical) approach would become necessary, but that philosophy would put them against some great local and world powers. Each of them necessarily had different approaches as to how this might be accomplished. They were never allowed to present their specific proposals on a world stage. Let's hope a wiser population will once again "see" this possibility and find a way to resolve it

Aaron , May 17, 2020 at 14:18

Well over the span of all of those decades, the consistent, inexorable theme seems to be a trend of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer, a small number of individuals, not really states, gaining wealth and power, so everybody else fights over the crumbs, blaming this or that party, alliance, event or whatever, but behind it all there are two flower gardens, indeed the rich are all flowers of their golden garden, and the poor are all flowers of their garden.

It's like the Europeans and the 99 percent in America have all fallen for the myth of the American dream, that if we are just allowed more free, unfettered economic opportunity, it's just up to us to pick ourselves up by the bootstraps and become a billionaire.

The mask competition and fiasco shows the importance of a country simply making things in their own country, not on the other side of the world, it's not nationalism it's just a better way to logistically deliver reliable products to the citizens.

AnneR , May 17, 2020 at 13:42

Regarding French colonialism – as I recall the French were especially brutal in their forced withdrawal from Algeria, both toward Algerians in their homeland and to Algerians within France itself.

And the French were hardly willing, non-violent colonialists when being fought by the Vietnamese who wanted to be free of them (quite rightly so).

As for the French in Sub-Saharan Africa – they have yet to truly give up on their presumed right to have troops within these countries. They did not depart any of their colonies happily, willingly – like every other colonial power, including the UK.

And, as for WWII – she seems, in her reminiscences, to have mislaid Vichy France, the Velodrome roundups of French Jews, and so on ..

Ms Johnstone clearly has been looking backwards with rose-tinted specs on when it comes to France.

Randal Marlin , May 18, 2020 at 13:00

There may be some truth to AnneR's claim that Ms Johnstone has been looking with rose-tinted specs when it comes to France, but it is highly misleading for her to talk about "the French" regarding Algeria. I spent 1963-64 in Aix-en-Provence teaching at the Institute for American Universities and talked with some of the "pieds-noirs," (French born in Algeria).

After French President Charles de Gaulle decided to relinquish French control over Algeria, having previously reassured the colonial population that "Je vous ai compris" ("I have understood you"), there followed death threats to many French colonizers who had to flee Algeria immediately within 24 hours or get their throats slit – "La valise ou le cercueil" (the suitcase or the coffin).

In the fall of 1961, I saw Parisian police stations with machine-gun armed men behind concrete barriers, as an invasion by the colonial French paratroopers against mainland France was expected. The "Organisation Armée Secrète," OAS, (Secret Armed Organization) of the colonial powers, threatened at the time to invade Paris.

As an aside, giving a sense of the anger and passion involved, when the death of John F.Kennedy in November 1963 was announced in the historic, right-wing café in Aix, Les Deux Garçons, a huge cheer went up when the media announcer proclaimed "Le Président est assassinée. Only, that was because they thought de Gaulle was the president in question. A huge disappointment when they heard it was President Kennedy. To get a sense of the whole situation regarding France and Algeria I recommend Alistair Horne's "A Savage War of Peace."

OlyaPola , May 19, 2020 at 11:23

"They did not depart any of their colonies happily"

Some hold that they never departed, but mutated tools including CFA zones and "intelligence" relations in furtherance of "changing" to remain qualitatively the same. Just as "The United States of America" is a system of coercive relations not synonymous with the political geographical area designated "The United States of America", the colonialism of former and present "colonial powers" continues to exist, since the "independence" of the colonised was always, and continues to be, framed within linear systems of coercive relations, facilitated by the complicity of "local elites" on the basis of perceived self-interest, and the acquiescence of "local others" for myriad reasons.

Despite the "best" efforts of the opponents and partly in consequence of the opponents' complicity, the PRC and the Russian Federation like "The United States of America" are not synonymous with the political geographical areas designated as "The People's Republic of China and The Russian Federation", are in lateral process of transcending linear systems of coercive relations and hence pose existential threats to "The United States of America".

The opponents are not complete fools but the drowning tend to act precipitously including flailing out whilst drowning; encouraging some to dispense with rose- tinted glasses, despite such accessories being quite fashionable and fetching.

OlyaPola , May 20, 2020 at 04:32

" .. their colonies "

Perception of and practice of social relations are not wholly synonymous. A construct whose founding myths included liberty, egality and fraternity – property being discarded at the last moment since it was judged too provocative – experienced/experiences ideological/perceptual oxymorons in regard to its colonial relations, which were addressed in part by rendering their "colonies" department of France thereby facilitating increased perceptual dissonance.

Like many, Randal Marlin draws attention below to the perceptions and practices of the pied-noir, but omits to address the perceptions and practices of the harkis whom were also immersed in the proselytised notion of departmental France, and to some degree continue to be.

This understanding continues to inform the practices and problems of the French state.

Lolita , May 17, 2020 at 12:05

The analysis is very much inspired from "Comprendre l'Empire" by Alain Soral.

Dave , May 17, 2020 at 11:27

Do not fail to read this interview in its entirety. Ms Johnstone analyzes and describes many issues of national and global importance from the perspective of an USA expat who has spent most of her career in the pursuit of what may be termed disinterested journalism. Whether one agrees or disagrees in whole or in part the perspectives she presents, particularly those which pertain to the demise (hopefully) of the American Empire are worthy of perusal.

Remember that this is not a polemic; it's a memoir of a lifetime devoted to reporting and analyzing and discussion of most of the significant issues confronting global and national politics and their social ramifications. And a big thanks to Patrick Lawrence and Consortium News for posting the interview.

PEG , May 17, 2020 at 09:11

Diana Johnstone is one of the most intelligent, clear-minded and honest observers of international politics today, and her book "Circle in the Darkness" – which expands on the topics and insights touched on in this interview – is certainly among the best and most compelling books I have ever read, putting the events of the last 75 years into objective context and focus (normally something which only historians can do, if at all, generations after the fact).

After reading Circle in the Darkness, I have ordered and am now reading her books on Hillary Clinton (Queen of Chaos) and the Yugoslav wars (Fool's Crusade), which are very worthwhile and important. I would recommend that her many articles over the years, appearing in such publications such as In These Times, Counterpunch and Consortium News, be reprinted and published together as an anthology. Through Circle in the Darkness, we have Diana Johnstone's "Life", but it would be good also to have her "Letters".

Herman , May 17, 2020 at 09:00

Interesting comparison between the aspirations of De Gaulle and Putin.

"Having a sense of history, de Gaulle saw that colonialism had been a moment in history that was past. His policy was to foster friendly relations on equal terms with all parts of the world, regardless of ideological differences. I think that Putin's concept of a multipolar world is similar. It is clearly a concept that horrifies the exceptionalists."

Agree with Johnstone.

OlyaPola , May 19, 2020 at 11:55

"Having a sense of history, de Gaulle saw that colonialism had been a moment in history that was past. "

Mr. de Gaulle like other "leaders" of colonial powers did understand that the moment of overt coercive relations of colonialism had passed and that colonialism to remain qualitatively the same, required covert coercive relations facilitated by the complicity of local "elites" on the basis of perceived self-interest.

The exceptions to such strategies lay within constructs of settler colonialism which were addressed primarily through warfare – "The United States of America", Vietnam/Laos/Cambodia, Indonesia, Algeria, Kenya, Rhodesia, Mozambique, Angola refer – to facilitate such future strategies.

"I think that Putin's concept of a multipolar world is similar."

As outlined elsewhere the concept of a multi-polar world is not synonymous with the concept of colonialism except for the colonialists who consistently seek to encourage such conflation through myths of we-are-all-in-this-togetherness.

[May 20, 2020] The American Mission and the Evil Empire The Crusade for a Free Russia Since 1881 by Foglesong

Highly recommended!
Paperback: 364 pages Publisher: Cambridge University Press; 1 edition (October 15, 2007)
"Foglesong's book provides a panoramic view of American popular attitudes toward Russia, one that is illustrated with many arresting cartoons and magazine covers. It should provoke a wider debate about the rationality of evaluating Russia with reference to an idealized view of the United States, as well as the deeper sources of this tendency." -Deborah Welch Larson, H-Diplo
"In the 21st century, the American debate on the prospects of modernizing Russia and on the Americans' role in this process is still going strong even though it began more than a century ago. This is why David Foglesong's book aimed at elucidating the mechanisms of misrepresentations which threaten both Russian-American relations and the world security as a whole is of equal importance for the academic community and for the policy makers in both Russia and the United States."
-Victoria Zhuravleva, H-Diplo
"Foglesong demonstrates that powerful Americans have again and again seen the possibility, even necessity, of spreading the word to Russia, and then, when Russia fails to transform itself into something resembling the US, have recoiled and condemned Russia's perfidious national character or its leaders-most recently Putin. The author's singular achievement is to show that well before the cold war, Russia served as America's dark double, an object of wishful thinking, condescension and self-righteousness in a quest for American purpose-without much to show for such efforts inside Russia. The author thereby places in context the cold war, when pamphleteers like William F Buckley Jr and politicians like Ronald Reagan pushed a crusade to revitalise the American spirit. Russia then was a threat but also a means to America's end (some fixed on a rollback of the alleged Soviet "spawn" inside the US-the welfare state-while others, after the Vietnam debacle, wanted to restore "faith in the United States as a virtuous nation with a unique historical mission"). Foglesong's exposé of Americans' "heady sense of their country's unique blessings" helps make sense of the giddiness, followed by rank disillusionment, vis-...-vis the post-Soviet Russia of the 1990s and 2000s." -Stephen Kotkin, Prospect Magazine -Stephen Kotkin, Prospect Magazine
Notable quotes:
"... For example, Foglesong argued that "a vital factor in the revival of the crusade in the 1970s was the need to expunge doubts about American virtue instilled by the Vietnam War, revelations about CIA covert actions, and the Watergate scandal." ..."
"... By tracing American representations of Russia over the last 130 years, Foglesong illuminated three of the strongest notions that have informed American attitudes toward Russia: (1) a messianic faith that America could inspire sweeping overnight transformation from autocracy to democracy; (2) a notion that despite historic differences, Russia and America are very much akin, so that Russia, more than any other country, is America's "dark double;" (3) an extreme antipathy to "evil" leaders who Americans blame for thwarting what they believe to be the natural triumph of the American mission. These expectations and emotions continue to effect how American journalists and politicians write and talk about Russia. "My hope," Foglesong concluded, "is that by seeing how these attitudes have distorted American views of Russia for more than a century, we may begin to be able to escape their grip." ..."
"... The usefulness of Russia as bogeyman for all that is wrong in the world - a contrasting foil to the virtues of "us" - has defined this relationship ever since the first democratic stirrings in Russia following the Emancipation of '61. In this it followed Britain, who'd long demonized Russia since imperial rivalries over the Crimea. ..."
"... This trope was also successful for reactionaries in blocking progressive legislation at home. Ronald Reagan was perhaps the most successful in this linkmanship: "socialized medicine" was the first step to the gulags. ..."
"... T he flak over Pus*y Riot following this book's publication - while ignoring the crucifixion of the Dixie Chicks - demonstrates the double standard is too convenient to be allowed to wither. The empire must always be evil, precisely because it reflects our own image like a Buddhist truth mirror. ..."
May 20, 2020 | www.amazon.com

"By 1905," Foglesong stated, "this fundamental reorientation of American views of Russia had set up a historical pattern in which missionary zeal and messianic euphoria would be followed by disenchantment and embittered denunciation of Russia's evil and oppressive rulers." The first cycle, according to Foglesong, culminated in 1905, when the October Manifesto, perceived initially by Americans as a transformation to democracy, gave way to a violent socialist revolt. Foglesong observed similar cycles of euphoria to despair during the collapse of the tsarist government in 1917, during the partial religious revival of World War II, and during the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s

Crucial to Foglesong's analysis was how these cycles coincided with a contemporaneous need to deflect attention away from America's own blemishes and enhance America's claim to its global mission.

For example, Foglesong argued that "a vital factor in the revival of the crusade in the 1970s was the need to expunge doubts about American virtue instilled by the Vietnam War, revelations about CIA covert actions, and the Watergate scandal."

By tracing American representations of Russia over the last 130 years, Foglesong illuminated three of the strongest notions that have informed American attitudes toward Russia: (1) a messianic faith that America could inspire sweeping overnight transformation from autocracy to democracy; (2) a notion that despite historic differences, Russia and America are very much akin, so that Russia, more than any other country, is America's "dark double;" (3) an extreme antipathy to "evil" leaders who Americans blame for thwarting what they believe to be the natural triumph of the American mission. These expectations and emotions continue to effect how American journalists and politicians write and talk about Russia. "My hope," Foglesong concluded, "is that by seeing how these attitudes have distorted American views of Russia for more than a century, we may begin to be able to escape their grip."

The Adventures of Straw Man Reviewed in the United States on September 27, 2013 This has been the essential function of US Russia policy, as David Foglesong shows in his century-long tour.

The usefulness of Russia as bogeyman for all that is wrong in the world - a contrasting foil to the virtues of "us" - has defined this relationship ever since the first democratic stirrings in Russia following the Emancipation of '61. In this it followed Britain, who'd long demonized Russia since imperial rivalries over the Crimea.

This trope was also successful for reactionaries in blocking progressive legislation at home. Ronald Reagan was perhaps the most successful in this linkmanship: "socialized medicine" was the first step to the gulags.

The crusade against US civil rights - of which Reagan was also a part in his early career - as Communist-inspired tinkering with the Constitution was much less successful. His support for free trade unions in the Soviet Bloc while crushing them at home underscored the irony.

But Foglesong is much too generous in evaluating Reagan's human decency as a policy motive. Reagan pursued his grand rollback strategy by any means necessary, mixing hard tactics (contras, death-squad funding, mujahadin, Star Wars) with soft (democracy-enhancement, human rights, meeting with Gorbachev). Solidarity activists in Poland might remember his crusading fondly; survivors of the Salvadoran civil war will not.

The "crisis" with the Putin regime currently empowered shows the missionary impulse yet alive: projecting one's reforming instincts upon others rather than at home. T he flak over Pus*y Riot following this book's publication - while ignoring the crucifixion of the Dixie Chicks - demonstrates the double standard is too convenient to be allowed to wither. The empire must always be evil, precisely because it reflects our own image like a Buddhist truth mirror.

I do find it puzzling that Foglesong made no mention of Maurice Hindus, the prolific popular "explainer" of Russia in over a dozen mid-century books; and the notorious defector Victor Kravchenko and his best-selling memoir of the 1940s (ghost-written by Eugene Lyons, another popular anti-Soviet scribe). Both were much more influential in the public and political mind than many of the more obscure missionary authors Foglesong does cite. Nevertheless, Foglesong has offered a generous helping of cultural/political history that shows no signs of growing stale.

>

indah nuritasari , Reviewed in the United States on October 24, 2012

A Good Book About America and The Cold War

This book tells a fascinating story of American efforts to liberate and remake Russia since the 1880s. It starts with the story of Tsar Alexander II's asasination on March 1, 1881 and how James William Buel, a Missoury Journalist wrote it in his book "Russian Nihilism and Exile Life in Siberia."

The story continues until The Reagan era and "the Evil Empire," 1981-1989.

This book is very interesting and useful for history lovers, students, journalists, or general public. Here you can find all the "dark and exciting stuff" about the cold war, including the involvement of the journalists, political activists, diplomats, and even engineers.

It is really helpful for me as a new immigrant in the US to help me understand the US position and role in the Cold War Era. The language used in this book, though, is " kind of dry". A little editing for the next edition could be really helpful!!

[May 20, 2020] McGovern Turn Out The Lights, Russiagate Is Over by Ray McGovern

Highly recommended!
It is not. Forces behind Russiagate are intact and still have the same agenda. CrowdStrike was just a tool. As long as Full Spectrum Dominance dourine is alive, Russiagate will flourish in one form or another
Notable quotes:
"... The need for a scapegoat to blame for Hillary Clinton's snatching defeat out of the jaws victory also played a role; as did the need for the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-Media-Academia-Think-Tank complex (MICIMATT) to keep front and center in the minds of Americans the alleged multifaceted threat coming from an "aggressive" Russia. (Recall that John McCain called the, now disproven , "Russian hacking" of the DNC emails an "act of war.") ..."
"... Though the corporate media is trying to bury it, the Russiagate narrative has in the past few weeks finally collapsed with the revelation that CrowdStrike had no evidence Russia took anything from the DNC servers and that the FBI set a perjury trap for Gen. Michael Flynn. There was already the previous government finding that there was no collusion between Trump and Russia and the indictment of a Russian troll farm that supposedly was destroying American democracy with $100,000 in Facebook ads was dropped after the St. Petersburg defendants sought discovery. ..."
"... Given the diffident attitude the Security State plotters adopted regarding hiding their tracks, Durham's challenge, with subpoena power, is not as formidable as were he, for example, investigating a Mafia family. ..."
"... Meanwhile, the corporate media have all been singing from the same sheet since Trump had the audacity a week ago to coin yet another "-gate" -- this time "Obamagate." Leading the apoplectic reaction in corporate media, Saturday's Washington Post offered a pot-calling-the-kettle-black pronouncement by its editorial board entitled "The absurd cynicism of 'Obamagate"? ..."
"... So if we dug in and found large payments from George Soros or Mrs Clinton to these 'journalists', what crime could they be accused of? No crimes, I don't think. ..."
"... There never was anything to Russiagate. It was always just politics. I knew that from the beginning. There was, however, a lot of something to the torture scandal. Obama said "We are not going to look back." And now Gina Haspel, one of the chief torturers, partly responsible for destroying the torture tapes, despite a court order to preserve them, is now head of the CIA. ..."
"... Drain the Swamp my ***. He's started by firing all the IG's? Trump "looking back," not forward. He could start by investigating Gina Haspel. ..."
"... For example, Foglesong argued that "a vital factor in the revival of the crusade in the 1970s was the need to expunge doubts about American virtue instilled by the Vietnam War, revelations about CIA covert actions, and the Watergate scandal." ..."
"... By tracing American representations of Russia over the last 130 years, Foglesong illuminated three of the strongest notions that have informed American attitudes toward Russia: (1) a messianic faith that America could inspire sweeping overnight transformation from autocracy to democracy; (2) a notion that despite historic differences, Russia and America are very much akin, so that Russia, more than any other country, is America's "dark double;" (3) an extreme antipathy to "evil" leaders who Americans blame for thwarting what they believe to be the natural triumph of the American mission. These expectations and emotions continue to effect how American journalists and politicians write and talk about Russia. "My hope," Foglesong concluded, "is that by seeing how these attitudes have distorted American views of Russia for more than a century, we may begin to be able to escape their grip." ..."
May 19, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com
Authored by Ray McGovern via ConsortiumNews.com,

Seldom mentioned among the motives behind the persistent drumming on alleged Russian interference was an over-arching need to help the Security State hide their tracks.

The need for a scapegoat to blame for Hillary Clinton's snatching defeat out of the jaws victory also played a role; as did the need for the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-Media-Academia-Think-Tank complex (MICIMATT) to keep front and center in the minds of Americans the alleged multifaceted threat coming from an "aggressive" Russia. (Recall that John McCain called the, now disproven , "Russian hacking" of the DNC emails an "act of war.")

But that was then. This is now.

Though the corporate media is trying to bury it, the Russiagate narrative has in the past few weeks finally collapsed with the revelation that CrowdStrike had no evidence Russia took anything from the DNC servers and that the FBI set a perjury trap for Gen. Michael Flynn. There was already the previous government finding that there was no collusion between Trump and Russia and the indictment of a Russian troll farm that supposedly was destroying American democracy with $100,000 in Facebook ads was dropped after the St. Petersburg defendants sought discovery.

All that's left is to discover how this all happened.

Attorney General William Barr, and U.S. Attorney John Durham, whom Barr commissioned to investigate this whole sordid mess seem intent on getting to the bottom of it. The possibility that Trump will not chicken out this time, and rather will challenge the Security State looms large since he felt personally under attack.

Writing on the Wall

Given the diffident attitude the Security State plotters adopted regarding hiding their tracks, Durham's challenge, with subpoena power, is not as formidable as were he, for example, investigating a Mafia family.

Plus, former NSA Director Adm. Michael S. Rogers reportedly is cooperating. The handwriting is on the wall. It remains to be seen what kind of role in the scandal Barack Obama may have played.

But former directors James Comey, James Clapper, and John Brennan, captains of Obama's Security State, can take little solace from Barr's remarks Monday to a reporter who asked about Trump's recent claims that top officials of the Obama administration, including the former president had committed crimes. Barr replied:

"As to President Obama and Vice President Biden, whatever their level of involvement, based on the information I have today, I don't expect Mr. Durham's work will lead to a criminal investigation of either man. Our concerns over potential criminality is focused on others."

In a more ominous vein, Barr gratuitously added that law enforcement and intelligence officials were involved in "a false and utterly baseless Russian collusion narrative against the president. It was a grave injustice, and it was unprecedented in American history."

Meanwhile, the corporate media have all been singing from the same sheet since Trump had the audacity a week ago to coin yet another "-gate" -- this time "Obamagate." Leading the apoplectic reaction in corporate media, Saturday's Washington Post offered a pot-calling-the-kettle-black pronouncement by its editorial board entitled "The absurd cynicism of 'Obamagate"?

The outrage voiced by the Post called to mind disgraced FBI agent Peter Strzok's indignant response to criticism of the FBI by candidate Trump, in a Oct. 20, 2016 text exchange with FBI attorney Lisa Page:

Strzok: I am riled up. Trump is a f***ing idiot, is unable to provide a coherent answer.

Strzok -- I CAN'T PULL AWAY, WHAT THE F**K HAPPENED TO OUR COUNTRY

Page -- I don't know. But we'll get it back. We're America. We rock.

Strzok -- Donald just said "bad hombres"

Strzok -- Trump just said what the FBI did is disgraceful.

Less vitriolic, but incisive commentary came from widely respected author and lawyer Glenn Greenwald on May 14, four days after Trump coined "Obamagate": ( See "System Update with Glenn Greenwald -- The Sham Prosecution of Michael Flynn").

For a shorter, equally instructive video of Greenwald on the broader issue of Russia-gate, see this clip from a March 2019 Democracy Now! -sponsored debate he had with David Cay Johnston titled, "As Mueller Finds No Collusion, Did Press Overhype Russiagate? Glenn Greenwald vs. David Cay Johnston":

https://www.youtube.com/embed/qdYw6jk3TTA

(The entire debate is worth listening to). I found one of the comments below the Democracy Now! video as big as a bummer as the commentator did:

"I think this is one of the most depressing parts about the whole situation. In their dogmatic pushing for this false narrative, the Russiagaters might have guaranteed Trump a second term. They have done more damage to our democracy than Russia ever has done and will do ." (From "Clamity2007")

In any case, Johnston, undaunted by his embarrassment at the hands of Greenwald, is still at it, and so is the avuncular Frank Rich -- both of them some 20 years older than Greenwald and set in their evidence-impoverished, media-indoctrinated ways.

... ... ...

Uncle Frank, 40 seconds ago

So if we dug in and found large payments from George Soros or Mrs Clinton to these 'journalists', what crime could they be accused of? No crimes, I don't think.

But when journalists are revealed to be issuing paid-for propaganda/lies mixed with their own internal opinions, and their publisher allows it to be presented as if it were reporting rather than opinion, said writers, editors, and publishers are relegated to obscurity and derision.

Their work will never be taken seriously again by anyone who wasn't already brain-washed.

They don't get that, I guess.

QABubba, 47 minutes ago (Edited)

There never was anything to Russiagate. It was always just politics. I knew that from the beginning. There was, however, a lot of something to the torture scandal. Obama said "We are not going to look back." And now Gina Haspel, one of the chief torturers, partly responsible for destroying the torture tapes, despite a court order to preserve them, is now head of the CIA.

General Flynn was so involved with Turkey he should have been registered as a foreign agent.

And as I have said before, the real crime was laundering Russian Mafia/Heroin money through Deutsche Bank into New York real estate. It is curious that Turkey is also a huge transport spot for heroin into the EU. And France and other EU nations have a migrant population that lives off the drug trade.

Drain the Swamp my ***. He's started by firing all the IG's? Trump "looking back," not forward. He could start by investigating Gina Haspel.

1911A1, 55 minutes ago

Operation Mockingbird

The MSM disinformation campaign with consistent common talking points is not difficult to see with a little discernment. The bigger question is has this happened organically or is there a larger agency manipulating the public discourse?

Question_Mark, 43 minutes ago

4AM secure drop from Senior Executive Services ( SES ) is a threat to our democracy.

Our greatest responsibility is to serve our [insert name of community here] community.

1surrounded2, 1 hour ago

" It remains to be seen what kind of role in the scandal Barack Obama may have played. "

Come on, Ray, I know you are not that stupid, but you ARE that libtarded.

Obama's very obvious role in all of this: KINGPIN .

Moribundus, 3 hours ago

Amazon.com The American Mission and the 'Evil Empire' The Crusade for a Free Russia Since 1881 (8580000721935) Foglesong,

"By 1905," Foglesong stated, "this fundamental reorientation of American views of Russia had set up a historical pattern in which missionary zeal and messianic euphoria would be followed by disenchantment and embittered denunciation of Russia's evil and oppressive rulers." The first cycle, according to Foglesong, culminated in 1905, when the October Manifesto, perceived initially by Americans as a transformation to democracy, gave way to a violent socialist revolt. Foglesong observed similar cycles of euphoria to despair during the collapse of the tsarist government in 1917, during the partial religious revival of World War II, and during the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s

Crucial to Foglesong's analysis was how these cycles coincided with a contemporaneous need to deflect attention away from America's own blemishes and enhance America's claim to its global mission.

For example, Foglesong argued that "a vital factor in the revival of the crusade in the 1970s was the need to expunge doubts about American virtue instilled by the Vietnam War, revelations about CIA covert actions, and the Watergate scandal."

By tracing American representations of Russia over the last 130 years, Foglesong illuminated three of the strongest notions that have informed American attitudes toward Russia: (1) a messianic faith that America could inspire sweeping overnight transformation from autocracy to democracy; (2) a notion that despite historic differences, Russia and America are very much akin, so that Russia, more than any other country, is America's "dark double;" (3) an extreme antipathy to "evil" leaders who Americans blame for thwarting what they believe to be the natural triumph of the American mission. These expectations and emotions continue to effect how American journalists and politicians write and talk about Russia. "My hope," Foglesong concluded, "is that by seeing how these attitudes have distorted American views of Russia for more than a century, we may begin to be able to escape their grip."

Moribundus, 3 hours ago

America's imperialism rules: Never to admit a fault or wrong; never to accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time; blame that enemy for everything that goes wrong; take advantage of every opportunity to raise a political whirlwind.

Kidbuck, 5 hours ago

Trump hasn't engaged in a fight in his life. He's a sissy at heart wants to negotiate. He can't even do that right. He's caved on nearly every campaign promise he made. The only thing his administration fights for is their salary and their retirement. Hillary still waddles free and farts in his general direction.

ChaoKrungThep, 4 hours ago

Trump the Mafia punk, like his dad, and draft dodger like his German grand dad. Barr, old CIA asset from the Clinton-Mena coke smuggling op. This crappy crew is running their masters' game in front of the redneck rabble who are dumber than their mutts.

Save_America1st, 9 hours ago

Geez...how far behind can most of these assholes be after all these years????

For one...there was no "Russia-gate". It was all a hoax from the beginning, and anyone with a few functioning brain cells knew that from the start.

And as of about 3 years ago we have all known this as "Obamagate" for the most part...we all knew the corruption of the hoax totally led up to O-Scumbag.

And now as of the recent disclosures it is a total fact.

Haven't most of you been watching Dan Bongino for over 2 years now and haven't you read his books? Haven't you been reading Sarah Carter and John Soloman among others for nearly 3 years now???

Surely, you haven't been just sitting around sucking leftist media **** for over 3 years, right???????? I'm sure you haven't.

So why is this article even necessary on ZeroHedge?????

We already knew and have known the truth since before even the 2016 election. Drop it.

Posa, 9 hours ago

So funny. The 85 Year old "American century' is palpably disintegrating before our very eyes. In particular the Deep State permanent bureaucracy is completely untethered and facing what seems to be a Great Reckoning in the form of Barr- Durham. Cognitve Derangement prevails in the press and spills overto the body politic. The country teeters a slo-mo Civil War. Meanwhile, The dollar is disintegrating and we seem to face an economic abyss, the Terminal Depression. Real "last Days of Rome" stuff.

BaNNeD oN THe RuN, 5 hours ago (Edited)

The Israeli dual citizens like Adelson and Mercer bought the Presidency.

Mossad was the organization handling the mole Seth Rich.

Blaming Russia also worked for those 2 groups because it deflected attention away from (((them))).

Ray McGovern, being ex-intel, must know this to be true.

LetThemEatRand, 11 hours ago

Russiagate. The supposed target of said coup d'etat just Presided over the largest bailout of banks ever by a factor of five or more. Trump supporters are asleep for the bailout, Trump haters are asleep for the bailout. Let's fight about transgender bathrooms and Russiagate, shall we?

yojimbo, 8 hours ago

I glance at the MSM, so here is a Guardian article along strongly TDS lines https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/may/19/will-donald-trump-end-up-in-prison-arwa-mahdawi

It's projection again, implying Obama gate is fake, like Russiagate actually was.. Tough to even want to get through!

[May 19, 2020] Russophobia in the Age of Donald Trump

Highly recommended!
Russiaphobia as a pathological reaction on the deep crisis of neoliberalism
Notable quotes:
"... The described lack of confidence was reflected in the exaggerated fear that Russia was capable of destroying the West's values. However, Russia and Putin were neither omnipresent nor threatening to destroy the United States' political system. ..."
"... Russia's basic motives remain defensive even when the Kremlin relies on assertive tactics. Russia's assertiveness, even in cyberspace, is of a reactive nature and is a response to US policies. ..."
"... Rather than fighting a full-scale information war with the West, Russia seeks to increase its status and strengthen its bargaining position in relations with the United States. 68 The Kremlin has been proposing to negotiate rules of cooperation in the cyber area since early in the twenty-first century. Motivated by an insistence on "cyber-sovereignty," Russia regularly proposes resolutions at the United Nations to prohibit "information aggression," In a 2011 letter to the United Nations General Assembly, Russia proposed an "International Code of Conduct for Information Security," stipulating that states subscribing to the code would pledge to "not use information and communications technologies and other information and communications networks to interfere with the internal affairs of other states or with the aim of undermining their political, economic and social stability." 69 ..."
"... Overall, what the Kremlin challenges is the United States' post–Cold War behavior that undermines Russia's status as a great power. Although Russia is not in a position to directly challenge the United States and the US-centered international order, the Kremlin hopes to gain external recognition as a great power by relying on low-cost methods and revealing the vulnerability of Western nations. Russia's capabilities and presence in global cyber and media space are limited, and the Kremlin is motivated by asymmetric deployment of its media, information, and cyber power. ..."
May 19, 2020 | www.oxfordscholarship.com
Chapter:
(p.81) 5 Russophobia in the Age of Donald Trump
Source:
The Dark Double
Author(s):
Andrei P. Tsygankov
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
DOI:10.1093/oso/9780190919337.003.0005

Abstract and Keywords

The chapter extends the argument about media and value conflict between Russia and the United States to the age of Donald Trump. The new value conflict is assessed as especially acute and exacerbated by the US partisan divide. The Russia issue became central because it reflected both political partisanship and the growing value division between Trump voters and the liberal establishment. In addition to explaining the new wave of American Russophobia, the chapter analyzes Russia's own role and motives. The media are likely to continue the ideological and largely negative coverage of Russia, especially if Washington and Moscow fail to develop a pragmatic form of cooperation.

Keywords: Russia, Trump, US elections, narrative of collusion, partisan divide

This chapter addresses the new development in the US media perception of the Russian threat following the election of Donald Trump as the United States' president. The election revealed that US national values could no longer be viewed as predominantly liberal and favoring the global promotion of democracy, as supported by Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama. During and after the election, the liberal media sought to present Moscow as not only favoring Trump but being responsible for his election and even ruling on behalf of the Kremlin. Those committed to a liberal worldview led the way in criticizing Russia and Putin for assaulting liberal democratic values globally and inside the United States. This chapter argues that the Russia issue became so central in the new internal divide because it reflects both political partisanship and the growing division between the values of Trump voters and those of the liberal establishment. The domestic political struggle has exacerbated the divide. Russia's otherness, again, has highlighted values of "freedom," seeking to preserve the confidence of the liberal self. (p.82)

The Narrative of Trump's "Collusion" with Russia

During the US presidential election campaign, American media developed yet another perception of Russia as reflected in the narrative of Trump's collusion with the Kremlin. 1 Having originated in liberal media and building on the previous perceptions of neo-Soviet autocracy and foreign threat, the new perception of Russia was that of the enemy that won the war against the United States. By electing the Kremlin's favored candidate, America was defeated by Russia. As a CNN columnist wrote, "The Russians really are here, infiltrating every corner of the country, with the single goal of disrupting the American way of life." 2 The two assumptions behind the new media narrative were that Putin was an enemy and that Trump was compromised by Putin. The inevitable conclusion was that Trump could not be a patriot and potentially was a traitor prepared to act against US interests.

The new narrative was assisted by the fact that Trump presented a radically different perspective on Russia than Clinton and the US establishment. The American political class had been in agreement that Russia displayed an aggressive foreign policy seeking to destroy the US-centered international order. Influential politicians, both Republicans and Democrats, commonly referred to Russian president Putin as an extremely dangerous KGB spy with no soul. Instead, Trump saw Russia's international interests as not fundamentally different from America's. He advocated that the United States to find a way to align its policies and priorities in defeating terrorism in the Middle East -- a goal that Russia shared -- with the Kremlin's. Trump promised to form new alliances to "unite the civilized world against Radical Islamic Terrorism" and to eradicate it "completely from the face of the Earth." 3 He hinted that he was prepared to revisit the thorny issues of Western sanctions against (p.83) the Russian economy and the recognition of Crimea as a part of Russia. Trump never commented on Russia's political system but expressed his admiration for Putin's leadership and high level of domestic support. 4

Capitalizing on the difference between Trump's views and those of the Democratic Party nominee, Hillary Clinton, the liberal media referred to Trump as the Kremlin-compromised candidate. Commentators and columnists with the New York Times , such as Paul Krugman, referred to Trump as the "Siberian" candidate. 5 Commentators and pundits, including those with academic and political credentials, developed the theory that the United States was under attack. The former ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul, wrote in the Washington Post that Russia had attacked "our sovereignty" and continued to "watch us do nothing" because of the partisan divide. He compared the Kremlin's actions with Pearl Harbor or 9/11 and warned that Russia was likely to perform repeat assaults in 2018 and 2020. 6 The historian Timothy Snyder went further, comparing the election of Trump to a loss of war, which Snyder said was the basic aim of the enemy. Writing in the New York Daily News , he asserted, "We no longer need to wonder what it would be like to lose a war on our own territory. We just lost one to Russia, and the consequence was the election of Donald Trump." 7

The election of Trump prompted the liberal media to discuss Russia-related fears. The leading theory was that Trump would now compromise America's interests and rule the country on behalf of Putin. Thomas Friedman of the New York Times called for actions against Russia and praised "patriotic" Republican senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham for being tough on Trump. 8 MSNBC host Rachel Maddow asked whether Trump was actually under Putin's control. Citing Trump's views and his associates' travel to Moscow, she told viewers, "We are also starting to see (p.84) what may be signs of continuing [Russian] influence in our country, not just during the campaign but during the administration -- basically, signs of what could be a continuing operation." 9 Another New York Times columnist, Nicholas Kristof, published a column titled "There's a Smell of Treason in the Air," arguing that the FBI's investigation of the Trump presidential campaign's collusion "with a foreign power so as to win an election" was an investigation of whether such collusion "would amount to treason." 10 Responding to Trump's statement that his phone was tapped during the election campaign, the Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum tweeted that "Trump's insane 'GCHQ tapped my phone' theory came from . . . Moscow." McFaul and many others then endorsed and retweeted the message. 11

To many within the US media, Trump's lack of interest in promoting global institutions and his publicly expressed doubts that the Kremlin was behind cyberattacks on the Democratic National Committee (DNC) served to exacerbate the problem. Several intelligence leaks to the press and investigations by Congress and the FBI contributed to the image of a president who was not motivated by US interests. The US intelligence report on Russia's alleged hacking of the US electoral system released on January 8, 2017, served to consolidate the image of Russia as an enemy. Leaks to the press have continued throughout Trump's presidency. Someone in the administration informed the press that Trump called Putin to congratulate him on his victory in elections on March 18, 2018, despite Trump's advisers' warning against making such a call. 12

In the meantime, investigations of Trump's alleged "collusion" with Russia were failing to produce substantive evidence. Facts that some associates of Trump sought to meet or met with members of Russia's government did not lead to evidence of sustained contacts or collaboration. It was not proven that the Kremlin's "black dossier" on Trump compiled by British intelligence officer (p.85) Christopher Steele and leaked to CNN was truthful. Russian activity on American social networks such as Facebook and Twitter was not found to be conclusive in determining outcomes of the elections. 13 In February 2018, a year after launching investigation, Special Counsel Robert Mueller indicted thirteen Russian nationals for allegedly interfering in the US 2016 presidential elections, yet their connection to Putin or Trump was not established. On March 12, 2018, Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Richard Burr stated that he had not yet seen any evidence of collusion. 14 Representative Mike Conaway, the Republican leading the Russia investigation, announced the end of the committee's probe of Russian meddling in the election. 15

Trump was also not acting toward Russia in the way the US media expected. His views largely reflected those of the military and national security establishment and disappointed some of his supporters. 16 The US National Security Strategy and new Defense Strategy presented Russia as a leading security threat, alongside China, Iran, and North Korea. The president made it clear that he wanted to engage in tough bargaining with Russia by insisting on American terms. 17 Instead of improving ties with Russia, let alone acting on behalf of the Kremlin, Trump contributed to new crises in bilateral relations that had to do with the two sides' principally different perceptions. While the Kremlin expected Washington to normalize relations, the United States assumed Russia's weakness and expected it to comply with Washington's priorities regarding the Middle East, Ukraine, and Afghanistan and nuclear and cyber issues. 18 Trump also authorized the largest expulsion of Russian diplomats in US history and ordered several missile strikes against Assad's Russia-supported positions in Syria, each time provoking a crisis in relations with Moscow. Even Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, whom Rachel Maddow suspected of being appointed on Putin's advice to "weaken" the State Department and "bleed out" (p.86) the FBI, 19 was replaced by John Bolton. The latter's foreign policy reputation was that of a hawk, including on Russia. 20

Responding to these developments, the media focused on fears of being attacked by the Kremlin and on Trump not doing enough to protect the country. These fears went beyond the alleged cyber interference in the US presidential elections and included infiltration of American media and social networks and attacks on congressional elections and the country's most sensitive infrastructure, such as electric grids, water-processing plants, banking networks, and transportation facilities. In order to prevent such developments, media commentators and editorial writers recommended additional pressures on the Kremlin and counteroffensive operations. 21 One commentator recommended, as the best defense from Russia's plans to interfere with another election in the United States, launching a cyberattack on Russia's own presidential elections in March 2018, to "disrupt the stability of Vladimir Putin's regime." 22 A New York Times editorial summarized the mood by challenging President Trump to confront Russia further: "If Mr. Trump isn't Mr. Putin's lackey, it's past time for him to prove it." 23 The burden of proof was now on Trump's shoulders.

Opposition to the "Collusion" Narrative

In contrast to highly critical views of Russia in the dominant media, conservative, libertarian, and progressive sources offered different assessments. Initially, opposition to the collusion narrative came from the alternative media, yet gradually -- in response to scant evidence of Trump's collusion -- it incorporated voices within the mainstream.

The conservative media did not support the view that Russia "stole" elections and presented Trump as a patriot who wanted to make America great rather than develop "cozy" relationships with (p.87) the Kremlin. Writing in the American Interest , Walter Russell Mead argued that Trump aimed to demonstrate the United States' superiority by capitalizing on its military and technological advantages. He did not sound like a Russian mole. Challenging the liberal media, the author called for "an intellectually solvent and emotionally stable press" and wrote that "if President Trump really is a Putin pawn, his foreign policy will start looking much more like Barack Obama's." 24 Instead of viewing Trump as compromised by the Kremlin, sources such Breitbart and Fox News attributed the blame to the deep state, "the complex of bureaucrats, technocrats, and plutocrats," including the intelligence agencies, that seeks to "derail, or at least to de-legitimize, the Trump presidency" by engaging in accusations and smear campaigns. 25

Echoing Trump's own views, some conservatives expressed their admiration for Putin as a dynamic leader superior to Obama. In particular, they praised Putin for his ability to defend Russia's "traditional values" and great-power status. 26 Neoconservative and paleoconservative publications like the National Review , the Weekly Standard, Human Events Online , and others critiqued Obama's "feckless foreign policy," characterized by "fruitless accommodationism," contrasting it with Putin's skilled and calculative geopolitical "game of chess." 27 A Washington Post / ABC News poll revealed that among Republicans, 75% approved of Trump's approach on Russia relative; 40% of all respondents approved. 28 This did not mean that conservatives and Republicans were "infiltrated" by the Kremlin. Mutual Russian and American conservative influences were limited and nonstructured. 29 The approval of Putin as a leader by American conservatives meant that they shared a certain commonality of ideas and were equally critical of liberal media and globalization. 30

Progressive and libertarian media also did not support the narrative of collusion. Gary Leupp at CounterPunch found the (p.88) narrative to be serving the purpose of reviving and even intensifying "Cold War-era Russophobia," with Russia being an "adversary" "only in that it opposes the expansion of NATO, especially to include Ukraine and Georgia." 31 Justin Raimondo at Antiwar.com questioned the narrative by pointing to Russia's bellicose rhetoric in response to Trump's actions. 32 Glenn Greenwald and Zaid Jilani at Intercept reminded readers that, overall, Trump proved to be far more confrontational toward Russia than Obama, thereby endangering America. 33 In particular Trump severed diplomatic ties with Russia, armed Ukraine, appointed anti-Russia hawks, such as ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley, National Security Advisor John Bolton, and Secretary of State Michal Pompeo to key foreign policy positions, antagonized Russia's Iranian allies, and imposed tough sanctions against Russian business with ties to the Kremlin. 34

The dominant liberal media ignored opposing perspectives or presented them as compromised by Russia. For instance, in amplifying the view that Putin "stole" the elections, the Washington Post sought to discredit alternative sources of news and commentaries as infiltrated by the Kremlin's propaganda. On November 24, 2016, the newspaper published an interview with the executive director of a new website, PropOrNot, who preferred to remain anonymous, and claimed that the Russian government circulated pro-Trump articles before the election. Without providing evidence on explaining its methodology, the group identified more than two hundred websites that published or echoed Russian propaganda, including WikiLeaks and the Drudge Report , left-wing websites such as CounterPunch, Truthout, Black Agenda Report, Truthdig , and Naked Capitalism , as well as libertarian venues such as Antiwar.com and the Ron Paul Institute. 35 Another mainstream liberal outlet, CNN, warned the American people to be vigilant against the Kremlin's alleged efforts to spread propaganda: "Enormous numbers of (p.89) Americans are not only failing to fight back, they are also unwitting collaborators -- reading, retweeting, sharing and reacting to Russian propaganda and provocations every day." 36

However, voices of dissent were now heard even in the mainstream media. Masha Gessen of the New Yorker said that Trump's tweet about Robert Mueller's indictments and Moscow's "laughing its ass off" was "unusually (perhaps accidentally) accurate." 37 She pointed out that Russians of all ideological convictions "are remarkably united in finding the American obsession with Russian meddling to be ridiculous." 38 The editor of the influential Politico , Blake Hounshell, confessed that he was a Russiagate skeptic because even though "Trump was all too happy to collude with Putin," Mueller's team never found a "smoking gun." 39 In reviewing the book on Russia's role in the 2016 election Russian Roulette , veteran New York Times reporter Steven Lee Myers noted that the Kremlin's meddling "simply exploited the vulgarity already plaguing American political campaigns" and that the veracity of many accusations remained unclear. 40

Explaining Russophobia

The high-intensity Russophobia within the American media, overblown even by the standards of previous threat narratives, could no longer be explained by differences in national values or by bilateral tensions. The new fear of Russia also reflected domestic political polarization and growing national unease over America's identity and future direction.

The narrative of collusion in the media was symptomatic of America's declining confidence in its own values. Until the intervention in Iraq in 2004, optimism and a sense of confidence prevailed in American social attitudes, having survived even the terrorist attack on the United States on September 11, 2001. The (p.90) country's economy was growing and its position in the world was not challenged. However, the disastrous war in Iraq, the global financial crisis of 2008, and Russia's intervention in Georgia in August 2008 changed that. US leadership could no longer inspire the same respect, and a growing number of countries viewed it as a threat to world peace. 41 Internally, the United States was increasingly divided. Following presidential elections in November 2016, 77% of Americans perceived their country as "greatly divided on the most important values." 42 The value divide had been expressed in partisanship and political polarization long before the 2016 presidential elections. 43 The Russia issue deepened this divide. According to a poll taken in October 2017, 63% of Democrats, but just 38% of Republicans, viewed "Russia's power and influence" as a major threat to the well-being of the United States. 44

During the US 2016 presidential elections, Russia emerged as a convenient way to accentuate differences between Democratic and Republican candidates, which in previous elections were never as pronounced or defining. The new elections deepened the partisan divide because of extreme differences between the two main candidates, particularly on Russia. Donald Trump positioned himself as a radical populist promising to transform US foreign policy and "drain the swamp" in Washington. His position on Russia seemed unusual because, by election time, the Kremlin had challenged the United States' position in the world by annexing Crimea, supporting Ukrainian separatism, and possibly hacking the DNC site.

The Russian issue assisted Clinton in stressing her differences from Trump. Soon after it became known that DNC servers were hacked, she embraced the view that Russia was behind the cyberattacks. She accused Russia of "trying to wreak havoc" in the United States and threatened retaliation. 45 In his turn, Trump used Russia to challenge Clinton's commitment to national security (p.91) and ability to serve as commander in chief. In particular, he drew public attention to the FBI investigation into Clinton's use of a private server for professional correspondence, and even noted sarcastically that the Russians should find thirty thousand missing emails belonging to her. The latter was interpreted by many in liberal media and political circles as a sign of Trump's being unpatriotic. 46 Clinton capitalized on this interpretation. She referred to the issue of hacking as the most important one throughout the campaign and challenged Trump to agree with assessments of intelligence agencies that cyberattacks were ordered by the Kremlin. She questioned Trump's commitments to US national security and accused him of being a "puppet" for President Putin. 47 Following Trump's victory, Clinton told donors that her loss should be partly attributed to Putin and the election hacks directed by him. 48

Clinton's arguments fitted with the overall narrative embraced by the mainstream media since roughly 2005 characterizing Russia as abusive and aggressive. Clinton viewed Russia as an oppressive autocratic power that was aggressive abroad to compensate for domestic weaknesses. Previously, in her book Hard Choices , then-secretary of state Clinton described Putin as "thin-skinned and autocratic, resenting criticism and eventually cracking down on dissent and debate." 49 This view was shared by President Obama, who publicly referred to Russia as a "regional power that is threatening some of its immediate neighbors not out of strength but out of weakness." 50 During the election's campaign, Clinton argued that the United States should challenge Russia by imposing a no-fly zone in Syria with the objective of removing Assad from power, strengthening sanctions against the Russian economy, and providing lethal weapons to Ukraine in order to contain the potential threat of Russia's military invasion.

Following the elections, the partisan divide deepened, with liberal establishment attacking the "unpatriotic" Trump. Having (p.92) lost the election, Clinton partly attributed Trump's victory to the role of Russia and advocated an investigation into Trump's ties to Russia. In February 2017 the Clinton-influenced Center for American Progress brought on a former State Department official to run a new Moscow Project. 51 As acknowledged by the New Yorker , members of the Clinton inner circle believed that the Obama administration deliberately downplayed DNC hacking by the Kremlin. "We understand the bind they were in," one of Clinton's senior advisers said. "But what if Barack Obama had gone to the Oval Office, or the East Room of the White House, and said, 'I'm speaking to you tonight to inform you that the United States is under attack . . .' A large majority of Americans would have sat up and taken notice . . . it is bewildering -- it is baffling -- it is hard to make sense of why this was not a five-alarm fire in the White House." 52

In addition to Clinton, many other members of the Washington establishment, including some Republicans, spread the narrative of Russia "attacking" America. Republican politicians who viewed Clinton's defeat and the hacking attacks in military terms included those of chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee John McCain, who stated, "When you attack a country, it's an act of war," 53 and former vice president Dick Cheney, who called Russia's alleged interference in the US election "a very serious effort made by Mr. Putin" that "in some quarters that would be considered an act of war." 54 A number of Democrats also engaged in the rhetoric of war, likening the Russian "attack," as Senator Ben Cardin did, to a "political Pearl Harbor." 55

Rumors and leaks, possibly by members of US intelligence agencies, 56 and activities of liberal groups that sought to discredit Trump contributed to the Russophobia. In addition to the DNC hacking accusations, many fears of Russia in the media were based on the assumption that contacts, let alone cooperation with the (p.93) Kremlin, was unpatriotic and implied potentially "compromising" behavior: praise of Putin as a leader, possible business dealings with Russian "oligarchs," and meetings with Russian officials such Ambassador Sergei Kislyak. 57

There were therefore two sides to the Russia story in the US liberal media -- rational and emotional. The rational side had to do with calculations by Clinton-affiliated circles and anti-Russian groups pooling their resources to undermine Trump and his plans to improve relations with Russia. Among others, these resources included dominance within the liberal media and leaks by the intelligence community. The emotional side was revealed by the liberal elites' values and ability to promote fears of Russia within the US political class and the general public. Popular emotions of fear and frustration with Russia already existed in the public space due to the old Cold War memories, as well as disturbing post–Cold War developments that included wars in Chechnya, Georgia, and Ukraine. In part because of these memories, factions such as those associated with Clinton were successful in evoking in the public liberal mind what historian Richard Hofstadter called the "paranoid style" or "the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy." 58 Mobilized by liberal media to pressure Trump, these emotions became an independent factor in the political struggle inside Washington. The public display of fear and frustration with Russia and Trump could only be sustained by a constant supply of new "suspicious" developments and intense discussion by the media.

Russia's Role and Motives

Russia's "attacking" America and Trump's "colluding" with the Kremlin remained poorly substantiated. Taken together, the DNC hacking, Trump's and Putin's mutual praise, and Trump associates' (p.94) contacts with Russian officials implied Kremlin infiltration of the United States' internal politics. Yet viewed separately, each was questionable and unproven. Some of these points could have also been made about Hillary Clinton, who had ties to Russian -- not to mention Saudi Arabian -- business circles and Ukrainian politicians. 59 Political views cannot be counted as evidence. Contacts with Russian officials could have been legitimate exchanges of views about two countries' interests and potential cooperation. Even the CIA- and the FBI-endorsed conclusion that Russia attacked the DNC servers was questioned by some observers on the grounds that forensic evidence was lacking and that it relied too much on findings by one cybersecurity company. 60 In general, discussion of Russia in the US media lacked nuances and a sense of proportion. As Jesse Walker, an editor at Reason magazine and author of The United States of Paranoia , pointed out,

There's a difference between thinking that Moscow may have hacked the Democratic National Committee and thinking that Moscow actually hacked the election, between thinking the president may have Russian conflicts of interest and thinking he's a Russian puppet . . . when someone like the New York Times columnist Paul Krugman declares that Putin "installed" Donald Trump as president, he's moving out of the realm of plausible plots and into the world of fantasy. Similarly, Clinton's warning that Trump could be Putin's "puppet" leaped from an imaginable idea, that Putin wanted to help her rival, to the much more dubious notion that Putin thought he could control the impulsive Trump. (Trump barely seems capable of controlling himself.) 61

The loose and politically tendentious nature of discussions, circulation of questionable leaks and dossiers complied by unidentified (p.95) individuals, and lack of serious evidence led a number of observers to conclude that the Russia story was more about stopping Trump than about Russia. The Russian scandal was symptomatic of the poisonous state of bilateral relations that Democrats exploited for the purpose of derailing Trump. US-Russia relations became a hostage of partisan domestic politics. As one liberal and tough critic of Putin wrote, Democratic lawmakers' rhetoric of war in connection with the 2016 elections "places Republicans -- who often characterize themselves as more hawkish on Russia and defense -- in a bind as they try to defend to the new administration's strategy towards Moscow." 62 Another observer noted that Russiagate performed "a critical function for Trump's political foes," allowing "them to oppose Trump while obscuring key areas where they either share his priorities or have no viable alternative." 63

The described lack of confidence was reflected in the exaggerated fear that Russia was capable of destroying the West's values. However, Russia and Putin were neither omnipresent nor threatening to destroy the United States' political system. A number of analysts, such as Mark Schrad, identified fears of Russia as "increasingly hysterical fantasies" and argued that Russia was not a global menace. 64 If the Kremlin was indeed behind the cyberattacks, it was not for the reasons commonly broached. Rather than trying to subvert the US system, it sought to defend its own system against what it perceived as a US policy of changing regimes and meddling in Russia's internal affairs. The United States has a long history of covert activities in foreign countries. 65 Washington's establishment has never followed the advice given by prominent American statesmen such as George Kennan to let Russians "be Russians" and "work out their internal problems in their own manner." 66 Instead, the United States assumes that America defines the rules and boundaries of proper behavior in international politics, while others must simply follow the rules.

(p.96) Russia's basic motives remain defensive even when the Kremlin relies on assertive tactics. Russia's assertiveness, even in cyberspace, is of a reactive nature and is a response to US policies. Experts observe that Russia's conception of cyber and other informational power serves the overall purpose of protecting national sovereignty from encroachments by the United States. 67 Rather than fighting a full-scale information war with the West, Russia seeks to increase its status and strengthen its bargaining position in relations with the United States. 68 The Kremlin has been proposing to negotiate rules of cooperation in the cyber area since early in the twenty-first century. Motivated by an insistence on "cyber-sovereignty," Russia regularly proposes resolutions at the United Nations to prohibit "information aggression," In a 2011 letter to the United Nations General Assembly, Russia proposed an "International Code of Conduct for Information Security," stipulating that states subscribing to the code would pledge to "not use information and communications technologies and other information and communications networks to interfere with the internal affairs of other states or with the aim of undermining their political, economic and social stability." 69

Overall, what the Kremlin challenges is the United States' post–Cold War behavior that undermines Russia's status as a great power. Although Russia is not in a position to directly challenge the United States and the US-centered international order, the Kremlin hopes to gain external recognition as a great power by relying on low-cost methods and revealing the vulnerability of Western nations. Russia's capabilities and presence in global cyber and media space are limited, and the Kremlin is motivated by asymmetric deployment of its media, information, and cyber power.

[May 18, 2020] Madeleine Albright Is Back, but She Is Still Living in the Past

This neocons is definitely past her shelf live. But MIC still controls the US foreign policy, and this is that's why she is able to publish yet another second rate book.
May 18, 2020 | nationalinterest.org

One of the disasters that she endorsed was the Iraq war. Although not as enthusiastic about launching an illegal, aggressive war as Sen. Hillary Clinton, Albright said at the time: "I personally felt the war was justified on the basis of Saddam's decade-long refusal to comply with UN Security Council resolutions on WMD." When pressed on America's alleged indispensability, she allowed: "Vietnam clearly was a terrible disaster. The war in Iraq was a terrible disaster. I do think that we have misunderstood the Middle East." Yet such admissions don't appear to have tempered her enthusiasm for Washington's meddling around the globe.

She does run away from her flip answer to journalist Lesley Stahl's question about the death of a half million Iraqi children due to sanctions: "we think the price is worth it." Albright even claims that the Clinton administration came to recognize the human cost of sanctions and moved to better targeted "smart" penalties. Yet there is nothing smart about America's current economic war on Venezuela, Iran, and North Korea.

Moreover, she did not retreat from the assumption that U.S. policymakers are entitled to decide on the life and death of foreigners. She might doubt in retrospect that the price was worth it. But she still believes that decision was for her and other Clinton administration officials to make.

This mindset has made the U.S. government anathema to many around the globe. Why do "they" hate us? Because of officials like Albright. These days even the Europeans loath Washington. No doubt, she would be horrified to be lumped with President Donald Trump and some of his aides, such as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, but they all are swimming in hubris. Albright is simply more polite when dealing with representatives of wealthy industrialized countries. In contrast, Trump and Pompeo are ever ready to insult them as well.

Nor does she appear to retreat from the hubris she constantly expressed in other forms. For instance, while declaring the U.S. to be "the indispensable nation," she also claimed: "We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future, and we see the danger here to all of us." That assertion was bad enough when she made it in 1998. After Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Syria, and more it is positively ludicrous. Overweening arrogance among foreign policy elites has cost America thousands of lives and trillions of dollars, while killing hundreds of thousands of foreigners and ravaging foreign nations.

On This Day 3 seconds Do You Know What Happened Today In History? May 18 2015

At least 78 people die in a landslide caused by heavy rains in the Colombian town of Salgar.

Shawn Nelson, 35, steals a tank from a National Guard Armory, destroying cars and other property and is shot to death by police after immobilizing the tank. sponsored Advertisement

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However, it is not just those overseas for whom Albright has contempt. In 1992 she famously queried Colin Powell: "What's the use of having this superb military you're always talking about if we can't use it?" Never mind the lives of those who volunteered to defend America. For her, they were just gambit pawns to be sacrificed in whatever global chess game she was playing at the time. Powell, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, observed: "I thought I would have an aneurysm." Having served in Vietnam, he knew what it was like to lose soldiers in combat. Anyone who has family in the military, as I do, cannot help but react similarly.

A decade later she was asked about her comment. She responded: "what I thought was that we had -- we were in a kind of a mode of thinking that we were never going to be able to use our military effectively again." A strange claim, since shortly before George H. W. Bush had sent American military personnel into a limited war against Iraq, while avoiding an interminable guerrilla war and attempt at nation-building. She well represented the sofa samurai who dominate Washington policy-making.

Even worse, however, in 1997 she said to Gen. Hugh Shelton, also JCS chairman: "I know I shouldn't even be asking you this, but what we really need in order to go in and take out Saddam is a precipitous event -- something that would make us look good in the eyes of the world. Could you have one of our U-2s fly low enough -- and slow enough -- so as to guarantee that Saddam could shoot it down?" He appeared to react rather like Powell, indicating that it could be done as soon as she was ready to fly.

Albright is intelligent and has a fascinating family background. But she should be kept far away from American foreign policy.

https://lockerdome.com/lad/11037927505607526?pubid=ld-11037927505607526-823&pubo=https%3A%2F%2Fnationalinterest.org&rid=eastwestaccord.com&width=550

Doug Bandow is a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute. A former Special Assistant to President Ronald Reagan, he is author of Foreign Follies: America's New Global Empire.

[May 17, 2020] About rewritting of history and US way of twisting WWII events

May 17, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

H.Schmatz , May 17 2020 18:19 utc | 18

About rewritting of history and US way of proceeding, a recommendation on books...

"The Myth of the Good War.The US in WWII" by Jacques R. Pauwels

Review:

This book is not exactly a novelty, but we already warned that we were going to undertake this trip without consulting schedules. Our imaginary about the Second World War is essentially nourished by images and scenes from the great Hollywood film productions. How much or how little we know about those years that devastated the world is always mediated - interfered, perhaps - by the narratives projected on the big screen. Hollywood has imposed the story of World War II.

The Normandy landing, on D-Day, is represented as the turning point of a war that Americans have resorted to to save Europe from Nazism. The American soldier, who misses his family, whom he feels very far, steps on the floor of the Old Continent with the gesture of a hero, when he intervenes in a war that is not his own, but that due to a moral imperative, motivated by his altruism, he is forced to participate. And to win. In the final scene, the US raises the flag of victory, like the army that has liberated Europe. This is the story that the US has built about World War II and that the Hollywood film industry, as a good propaganda apparatus, has been in charge of popularizing.

Of course, there remain dark places on which the historian Jacques R. Pauwels sheds light in "The Myth of the Good War". The presence of the United States in World War II differs from myth. First of all, their participation is late, since at first it was not even clear who their enemy would be. The US would choose its enemy from whomever it was most debilitating from the clashes between the Nazis and the Soviets. He never ruled out an alliance with Hitler. In fact, when it finally allied itself with the USSR, the North American oligarchy, openly philophascist and with important business going on with Nazi Germany, believes that their country has made the wrong enemy.

The truth is that neither the entry of the United States into the war was decisive nor the landing of Normandy marked a before and after in the victory of the allies. When the United States enters as a belligerent force in the conflict, it does so because it sees as very likely the worst scenario ever imagined: that the USSR emerged from the Second World War as the sole winner of Nazism. A scenario that would leave the Americans in an unfavorable geopolitical position. Similarly, Pauwels points out that "the purpose of the landing in Normandy was to allow Western allies to reach Berlin before the Red Army". And he adds that the triumph of that battle did not depend exclusively on the American military potential, but on a Soviet offensive that prevented the Germans from transferring troops from the eastern front to France. No heroics or altruism. This is only one of the episodes referred to, and clarified, by Jacques Pauwels in "The Myth of the Good War". An essential book to dispute the relate of History. For historians and for those who do not want their past stolen. For those who do not want others continue telling them movies.


[May 17, 2020] Why U.S. Must Be Prosecuted for Its War Crimes Against Iraq by Eric Zuesse

May 16, 2020 | astutenews.com
The reason why the U.S. Government must be prosecuted for its war-crimes against Iraq is that they are so horrific and there are so many of them, and international law crumbles until they become prosecuted and severely punished for what they did. We therefore now have internationally a lawless world (or "World Order") in which "Might makes right," and in which there is really no effective international law, at all. This is merely gangster "law," ruling on an international level. It is what Hitler and his Axis of fascist imperialists had imposed upon the world until the Allies -- U.S. under FDR, UK under Churchill, and U.S.S.R. under Stalin -- defeated it, and established the United Nations. Furthermore, America's leaders deceived the American public into perpetrating this invasion and occupation, of a foreign country (Iraq) that had never threatened the United States; and, so, this invasion and subsequent military occupation constitutes the very epitome of "aggressive war" -- unwarranted and illegal international aggression. (Hitler, similarly to George W. Bush, would never have been able to obtain the support of his people to invade if he had not lied, or "deceived," them, into invading and militarily occupying foreign countries that had never threatened Germany, such as Belgium, Poland and Czechoslovakia. This -- Hitler's lie-based aggressions -- was the core of what the Nazis were hung for, and yet America now does it.)

As Peter Dyer wrote in 2006, about "Iraq & the Nuremberg Precedent" :

Invoking the precedent set by the United States and its allies at the Nuremberg trial in 1946, there can be no doubt that the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 was a war of aggression. There was no imminent threat to U.S. security nor to the security of the world. The invasion violated the U.N. Charter as well as U.N. Security Council Resolution #1441.

The Nuremberg precedent calls for no less than the arrest and prosecution of those individuals responsible for the invasion of Iraq, beginning with President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Condoleez[z]a Rice, former Secretary of State Colin Powell and former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz.

Take, for example, Condoleezza Rice, who famously warned "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud." (That warning was one of the most effective lies in order to deceive the American public into invading Iraq, because President Bush had had no real evidence, at all, that there still remained any WMD in Iraq after the U.N. had destroyed them all, and left Iraq in 1998 -- and he knew this; he was informed of this; he knew that he had no real evidence, at all: he offered none; it was all mere lies .)

So, the Nuremberg precedent definitely does apply against George W, Bush and his partners-in-crime, just as it did against Hitler and his henchmen and allies.

The seriousness of this international war crime is not as severe as those of the Nazis were, but nonetheless is comparable to it .

On 15 March 2018, Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies headlined at Alternet "The Staggering Death Toll in Iraq" and wrote that "our calculations, using the best information available, show a catastrophic estimate of 2.4 million Iraqi deaths since the 2003 invasion," and linked to solid evidence, backing up their estimate.

On 6 February 2020, BusinessInsider bannered "US taxpayers have reportedly paid an average of $8,000 each and over $2 trillion total for the Iraq war alone" , and linked to the academic analysis that supported this estimate. The U.S. regime's invasive war, which the Bush gang perpetrated against Iraq, was also a crime against the American people (though Iraqis suffered far more from it than we did).

On 29 September 2015, I headlined "GALLUP: 'Iraqis Are the Saddest & One of the Angriest Populations in the World'," and linked to Gallup's survey of 1,000 individuals in each of 148 countries around the world, which found that Iraq had the highest "Negative Experience Score." That score includes "sadness," "physical pain," "anger," and other types of misery -- and Iraq, after America's invasion, has scored the highest in the entire world, on it, and in the following years has likewise scored at or near the highest on "Negative Experience Score." For example: in the latest, the 2019, Gallup "Global Emotions Report" , Iraq scores fourth from the top on "Negative Experience Score," after (in order from the worst) Chad, Niger, and Sierra Leone. (Gallup has been doing these surveys ever since 2005, but the first one that was published under that title was the 2015 report, which summarized the 2014 surveys' findings.) Of course, prior to America's invasion, there had been America's 1990 war against Iraq and the U.S. regime's leadership and imposition of U.N. sanctions (which likewise were based largely on U.S.-regime-backed lies , though not totally on lies like the 2003 invasion was), which caused massive misery in that country; and, therefore, not all of the misery in Iraq which showed up in the 2015 Global Emotions Report was due to only the 2003 invasion and subsequent military occupation of that country. But almost all of it was, and is. And all of it was based on America's rulers lying to the public in order to win the public's acceptance of their evil plans and invasions against a country that had never posed any threat whatsoever to Americans -- people residing in America . Furthermore, it is also perhaps relevant that the 2012 "World Happiness Report" shows Iraq at the very bottom of the list of countries (on page 55 of that report) regarding "Average Net Affect by Country," meaning that Iraqis were the most zombified of all 156 nationalities surveyed. Other traumatized countries were immediately above Iraq on that list. On "Average Negative Affect," only "Palestinian Territories" scored higher than Iraq (page 52). After America's invasion based entirely on lies, Iraq is a wrecked country, which still remains under the U.S. regime's boot, as the following will document:

Bush's successors, Obama and Trump, failed to press for Bush's trial on these vast crimes, even though the American people had ourselves become enormously victimized by them, though far less so than Iraqis were. Instead, Bush's successors have become accessories after the fact, by this failure to press for prosecution of him and his henchmen regarding this grave matter. In fact, the "Defense One" site bannered on 26 September 2018, "US Official: We May Cut Support for Iraq If New Government Seats Pro-Iran Politicians" , and opened with "The Trump administration may decrease U.S. military support or other assistance to Iraq if its new government puts Iranian-aligned politicians in any 'significant positions of responsibility,' a senior administration official told reporters late last week." The way that the U.S. regime has brought 'democracy' to Iraq is by threatening to withdraw its protection of the stooge-rulers that it had helped to place into power there, unless those stooges do the U.S. dictators' bidding, against Iraq's neighbor Iran. This specific American dictator, Trump, is demanding that majority-Shiite Iraq be run by stooges who favor, instead, America's fundamentalist-Sunni allies, such as the Saud family who own Saudi Arabia and who hate and loathe Shiites and Iran. The U.S. dictatorship insists that Iraq, which the U.S. conquered, serve America's anti-Shiite and anti-Iranian policy-objectives. "The U.S. threat, to withhold aid if Iran-aligned politicians occupy any ministerial position, is an escalation of Washington's demands on Baghdad." The article went on to quote a "senior administration official" as asserting that, "if Iran exerts a tremendous amount of influence, or a significant amount of influence over the Iraqi government, it's going to be difficult for us to continue to invest." Get the euphemisms there! This article said that "the Trump administration has made constraining Iran's influence in the region a cornerstone of their foreign policy." So, this hostility toward Iran must be reflected in Iraq's policies, too. It's not enough that Trump wants to destroy Iran like Bush has destroyed Iraq; Trump demands that Iraq participate in that crime, against Iraq's own neighbor. This article said that, "There have also been protests against 'U.S. meddling' in the formation of a new Iraqi government, singling out Special Presidential Envoy Brett McGurk for working to prevent parties close to Iran from obtaining power." McGurk is the rabidly neconservative former high G.W. Bush Administration official, and higher Obama Administration official, who remained as Trump's top official on his policy to force Iraq to cooperate with America's efforts to conquer Iran. Trump's evil is Obama's evil, and is Bush's evil. It is bipartisan evil, no matter which Party is in power. Though Trump doesn't like either the Bushes or Obamas, all of them are in the same evil policy-boat. America's Deep State remains the same, no matter whom it places into the position of nominal power. The regime remains the same, regardless.

On April 29th, the whistleblowing former UK Ambassador Craig Murray wrote :

Nobody knows how many people died as a result of the UK/US Coalition of Death led destruction of Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and, by proxy, Syria and Yemen. Nobody even knows how many people western forces themselves killed directly. That is a huge number, but still under 10% of the total. To add to that you have to add those who died in subsequent conflict engendered by the forced dismantling of the state the West disapproved of. Some were killed by western proxies, some by anti-western forces, and some just by those reverting to ancient tribal hostility and battle for resources into which the country had been regressed by bombing.

You then have to add all those who died directly as a result of the destruction of national infrastructure. Iraq lost in the destruction 60% of its potable drinking water, 75% of its medical facilities and 80% of its electricity. This caused millions of deaths, as did displacement. We are only of course talking about deaths, not maiming.

UK's Prime Minister Tony Blair should hang with the U.S. gang, but who is calling for this? How much longer will the necessary prosecutions wait? Till after these international war-criminals have all gone honored to their graves?

Although the International Criminal Court considered and dismissed possible criminal charges against Tony Blair's UK Government regarding the invasion and military occupation of Iraq, the actual crime, of invading and militarily occupying a country which had posed no threat to the national security of the invader, was ignored, and the conclusion was that "the situation did not appear to meet the required threshold of the Statute" (which was only "Willful killing or inhuman treatment of civilians" and which ignored the real crime, which was "aggressive war" or "the crime of aggression" -- the crime for which Nazis had been hanged at Nuremberg). Furthermore, no charges whatsoever against the U.S. Government (the world's most frequent and most heinous violator of international law) were considered. In other words: the International Criminal Court is subordinate to, instead of applicable to, the U.S. regime. Just like Adolf Hitler had repeatedly made clear that, to him, all nations except Germany were dispensable and only Germany wasn't, Barack Obama repeatedly said that "The United States is and remains the one indispensable nation" , which likewise means that every other nation is "dispensable." The criminal International Criminal Court accepts this, and yet expects to be respected.

The U.S. regime did "regime change" to Iraq in 2003, and to Ukraine in 2014 , and tried to do it to Syria since 2009 , and to Yemen since 2015, and to Venezuela since 2012, and to Iran since 2017 -- just to mention some of the examples. And, though the Nuremberg precedent certainly applies, it's not enforced. In principle, then, Hitler has posthumously won WW II.

Hitler must be smiling, now. FDR must be rolling in his grave.

The only way to address this problem, if there won't be prosecutions against the 'duly elected' (Deep-State-approved and enabled) national leaders and appointees, would be governmental seizure and nationalization of the assets that are outright owned or else controlled by America's Deep State. Ultimately, the Government-officials who are s'elected' and appointed to run the American Government have been and are representing not the American people but instead represent the billionaires who fund those officials' and former officials' careers . In a democracy, those individuals -- the financial enablers of those politicians' s'electoral' success -- would be dispossessed of all their assets, and then prosecuted for the crimes that were perpetrated by the public officials whom they had participated in (significantly funded and propagandized for) placing into power. (For example, both Parties' Presidential nominees are unqualified to serve in any public office in a democracy.)

Democracy cannot function with a systematically lied-to public . Nor can it function if the responsible governmental officials are effectively immune from prosecution for their 'legal' crimes, or if the financial string-pullers behind the scenes can safely pull those strings. In America right now, both of those conditions pertain, and, as a result, democracy is impossible . There are only two ways to address this problem, and one of them would start by prosecuting George W. Bush.

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They're Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST'S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity .

[May 16, 2020] Putin's Call For A New System and the 1944 Battle Of Bretton Woods

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Our Job in the Pacific ..."
"... "supposed the President was more literate, economically speaking." ..."
"... General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money ..."
"... "contemplates the dismantling of the British and Dutch empires." ..."
May 16, 2020 | off-guardian.org

On the one side, figures allied to American President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's vision for an anti-Imperial world order lined up behind FDR's champion Harry Dexter White while those powerful forces committed to maintaining the structures of a bankers' dictatorship (Britain was always primarily a banker's empire) lined up behind the figure of John Maynard Keynes[ 1 ].

John Maynard Keynes was a leading Fabian Society controller and treasurer of the British Eugenics Association (which served as a model for Hitler's Eugenics protocols before and during the war). During the Bretton Woods Conference, Keynes pushed hard for the new system to be premised upon a one world currency controlled entirely by the Bank of England known as the Bancor. He proposed a global bank called the Clearing Union to be controlled by the Bank of England which would use the Bancor (exchangeable with national currencies) and serve as unit of account to measure trade surpluses or deficits under the mathematical mandate of maintaining "equilibrium" of the system.

Harry Dexter White, on the other hand, fought relentlessly to keep the City of London out of the drivers' seat of global finance and instead defended the institution of national sovereignty and sovereign currencies based on long term scientific and technological growth.

Although White and FDR demanded that US dollars become the reserve currency in the new world system of fixed exchange rates, it was not done to create a "new American Empire" as most modern analysts have assumed, but rather was designed to use America's status as the strongest productive global power to ensure an anti-speculative stability among international currencies which entirely lacked stability in the wake of WWII.

Their fight for fixed exchange rates and principles of "parity pricing" were designed by FDR and White strictly around the need to abolish the forms of chaotic flux of the un-regulated markets which made speculation rampant under British Free Trade and destroyed the capacity to think and plan for the sort of long term development needed to modernize nation states. Theirs was not a drive for "mathematical equilibrium" but rather a drive to "end poverty" through REAL physical economic growth of colonies who would thereby win real economic independence.

As figures like Henry Wallace (FDR's loyal Vice President and 1948 3rd party candidate), Representative Wendell Wilkie (FDR's republican lieutenant and New Dealer), and Dexter White all advocated repeatedly, the mechanisms of the World Bank, IMF, and United Nations were meant to become drivers of an internationalization of the New Deal which transformed America from a backwater cesspool in 1932 to becoming a modern advanced manufacturing powerhouse 12 years later. All of these Interntional New Dealers were loud advocates of US-Russia –China leadership in the post war world which is a forgotten fact of paramount importance.

In his 1944 book Our Job in the Pacific , Wallace said:

It is vital to the United States, it is vital to China and it is vital to Russia that there be peaceful and friendly relations between China and Russia, China and America and Russia and America. China and Russia Complement and supplement each other on the continent of Asia and the two together complement and supplement America's position in the Pacific.

Contradicting the mythos that FDR was a Keynesian, FDR's assistant Francis Perkins recorded the 1934 interaction between the two men when Roosevelt told her:

"I saw your friend Keynes. He left a whole rigmarole of figures. He must be a mathematician rather than a political economist."

In response Keynes, who was then trying to coopt the intellectual narrative of the New Deal stated he had "supposed the President was more literate, economically speaking."

In his 1936 German edition of his General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money , Keynes wrote:

For I confess that much of the following book is illustrated and expounded mainly with reference to the conditions existing in the Anglo Saxon countries. Nevertheless, the theory of output as a whole, which is what the following book purports to provide, is much more easily adapted to the conditions of a totalitarian state.

While Keynes represented the "soft imperialism" for the "left" of Britain's intelligentsia, Churchill represented the hard unapologetic imperialism of the Old, less sophisticated empire that preferred the heavy fisted use of brute force to subdue the savages. Both however were unapologetic racists and fascists (Churchill even wrote admiringly of Mussolini's black shirts) and both represented the most vile practices of British Imperialism.

FDR's Forgotten Anti-Colonial Vision Revited

FDR's battle with Churchill on the matter of empire is better known than his differences with Keynes whom he only met on a few occasions. This well documented clash was best illustrated in his son/assistant Elliot Roosevelt's book As He Saw It (1946) who quoted his father:

I've tried to make it clear that while we're [Britain's] allies and in it to victory by their side, they must never get the idea that we're in it just to help them hang on to their archaic, medieval empire ideas I hope they realize they're not senior partner; that we are not going to sit by and watch their system stultify the growth of every country in Asia and half the countries in Europe to boot.

[ ]

The colonial system means war. Exploit the resources of an India, a Burma, a Java; take all the wealth out of these countries, but never put anything back into them, things like education, decent standards of living, minimum health requirements – all you're doing is storing up the kind of trouble that leads to war. All you're doing is negating the value of any kind of organizational structure for peace before it begins.

Writing from Washington in a hysteria to Churchill, Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden said that Roosevelt "contemplates the dismantling of the British and Dutch empires."

Unfortunately for the world, FDR died on April 12, 1945. A coup within the Democratic establishment, then replete with Fabians and Rhodes Scholars, had already ensured that Henry Wallace would lose the 1944 Vice Presidency in favor of Anglophile Wall Street Stooge Harry Truman.

Truman was quick to reverse all of FDR's intentions, cleansing American intelligence of all remaining patriots with the shutdown of the OSS and creation of the CIA, the launching of un-necessary nuclear bombs on Japan and establishment of the Anglo-American special relationship.

Truman's embrace of Churchill's New World Order destroyed the positive relationship with Russia and China which FDR, White and Wallace sought and soon America had become Britain's dumb giant.

The Post 1945 Takeover of the Modern Deep State

FDR warned his son before his death of his understanding of the British takeover of American foreign policy, but still could not reverse this agenda. His son recounted his father's ominous insight:

You know, any number of times the men in the State Department have tried to conceal messages to me, delay them, hold them up somehow, just because some of those career diplomats over there aren't in accord with what they know I think. They should be working for Winston.

As a matter of fact, a lot of the time, they are [working for Churchill]. Stop to think of 'em: any number of 'em are convinced that the way for America to conduct its foreign policy is to find out what the British are doing and then copy that!" I was told six years ago, to clean out that State Department. It's like the British Foreign Office

Before being fired from Truman's cabinet for his advocacy of US-Russia friendship during the Cold War, Wallace stated:

American fascism" which has come to be known in recent years as the Deep State [ ] Fascism in the postwar inevitably will push steadily for Anglo-Saxon imperialism and eventually for war with Russia. Already American fascists are talking and writing about this conflict and using it as an excuse for their internal hatreds and intolerances toward certain races, creeds and classes.

In his 1946 Soviet Asia Mission, Wallace said:

Before the blood of our boys is scarcely dry on the field of battle, these enemies of peace try to lay the foundation for World War III. These people must not succeed in their foul enterprise. We must offset their poison by following the policies of Roosevelt in cultivating the friendship of Russia in peace as well as in war.

Indeed this is exactly what occurred. Dexter White's three year run as head of the International Monetary Fund was clouded by his constant attacks as being a Soviet stooge which haunted him until the day he died in 1948 after a grueling inquisition session at the House of Un-American Activities.

White had previously been supporting the election of his friend Wallace for the presidency alongside fellow patriots Paul Robeson and Albert Einstein.

Today the world has captured a second chance to revive the FDR's dream of an anti-colonial world . In the 21st century, this great dream has taken the form of the New Silk Road, led by Russia and China (and joined by a growing chorus of nations yearning to exit the invisible cage of colonialism).

If western nations wish to survive the oncoming collapse, then they would do well to heed Putin's call for a New International system, join the BRI, and reject the Keynesian technocrats advocating a false "New Bretton Woods" and "Green New Deal" .

Originally published on The Saker

[1] You may be thinking "wait! Wasn't FDR and his New Deal premised on Keynes' theories??" How could Keynes have represented an opposing force to FDR's system if this is the case? This paradox only exists in the minds of many people today due to the success of the Fabian Society's and Round Table Movement's armada of revisionist historians who have consistently created a lying narrative of history to make it appear to future generations trying to learn from past mistakes that those figures like FDR who opposed empire were themselves following imperial principles.

Another example of this sleight of hand can be seen by the sheer number of people who sincerely think themselves informed and yet believe that America's 1776 revolution was driven by British Imperial philosophical thought stemming from Adam Smith, Bentham and John Locke.

Matthew Ehret is the Editor-in-Chief of the Canadian Patriot Review , a BRI Expert on Tactical talk , regular author with Strategic Culture, the Duran and Fort Russ and has authored 3 volumes of 'Untold History of Canada' book series. In 2019 he co-founded the Montreal-based Rising Tide Foundation and can be reached at [email protected]

[May 16, 2020] Turkey is currently 9th from top in terms of case numbers with 146,457 cases, yet it has only 48 deaths per million, 36th on the list. Russia by comparison has only 17 deaths per million, 65th on the list, but has far higher quality medical care and abundant financial resources

May 16, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

BM , May 16 2020 15:44 utc | 106

... symptoms such as fever, store throat and coughing to take antipyretics and stay at home, but invite them to hospital and immediately start treatment by administering chloroquine to the people in suspicious cases without waiting for the results from the test results.
Posted by: Blue Dotterel | May 16 2020 14:17 utc | 94

That would make Turkey a very interesting case to watch. Looking on worldometers.info, Turkey is currently 9th from top in terms of case numbers with 146,457 cases, yet it has only 48 deaths per million, 36th on the list. Russia by comparison has only 17 deaths per million, 65th on the list, but has far higher quality medical care and abundant financial resources. Turkey is not especially developed, has a large population with many poor, an extremely serious economic crisis even before Covid, and many political crises. I can remember suggestions a month or more ago that it could be a serious disaster zone for Covid. How come it is doing so well? Maybe its treatment policies are worth looking at closely.

Compare USA, home to several key Big Pharma players, top of the charts with 1,487,076 cases, 83,603 deaths (more than the total number of cases that China ever had, most of whom recovered), 268 deaths per million (currently 13th from top but rising fast). Is it any wonder that the US death rate is higher?

[May 16, 2020] Cultural domination of English in Brazil

May 16, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

vk , May 16 2020 18:05 utc | 129

@ Posted by: hopehely | May 16 2020 17:27 utc | 126

Not the proletariat, but the Brazilian elite is entirely bilingual nowadays (Portuguese and English). Contrary to the myth, there are more English speakers in Brazil than Spanish speakers, that is, English is Brazil's de fact second language, not Spanish (as you would expect for a country circles by Spanish speakers).

In place of Spanish, Brazilians speak the so-called "Portunhol", which is essentially Portuguese with Spanish lexicon. The Brazilian elite - unless he/she "works" for something specifically Spanish (i.e. Santander Bank, or a Latin American subsidiary of an American giant HQd in Brazil) - is not educated in Spanish. Many of them are educated with English as their first language, Portuguese being the second, in specially prepared Anglophone schools which are only available to these same elite members. Those schools adopt the American national curriculum system, so when they graduate from high school, they can go directly to an American college without those genius-hunter mega-tests organized annually by the likes of the MIT: they enroll as normal, typical American citizens. Almost all of them have second homes in Miami or in some other city in Florida (e.g. Sarasota), where they usually (but not only) spend the Brazilian winter (June-August).

Most of the Brazilian elite share the same disgust the American elite has for the "Hispanics", and they abhor being confused with one by their American counterparts, so they avoid any connection with Spanish they can - including giving their children English or Anglicized names (e.g. Anthony instead of Antonio; Henry instead of Henrique; Mary instead of Maria - all of which are exactly the same in Spanish and Portuguese).

And those are just the "rich". The real Brazilian elite (the "billionaires") do not even live in Brazilian territory, and educate their children directly in the USA educational system. A concrete example of this is Eduardo Saverin, one of the founders of Facebook. He was spent the first years of his life in Rio de Janeiro to a billionaire Brazilian family, but quickly moved to the USA when he was just a kid because the Brazilian Intelligence (Abin) warned his parents he was on the list of the most likely to be kidnapped in Brazil. He was then raised as an American, and went to Harvard as a normal American (billionaire) citizen.

More extravagant examples exist, though. Lily Safra, widow of the banker who founded Safra Bank, chose to have her main home in London, as it probably fits her lifestyle better (she has a more "sophisticated" taste, preferring the likes of jewel collections and European architecture). Others (generally the ones who still have a strong cultural connection with their European ancestors) do the same, sending their children to be educated in Switzerland instead of the USA. But those are the exception that proves the rule, not the rule itself.

[May 15, 2020] Why so few young Russians show support for "'classical' civil and political liberties". My guess is that 20 years of observation of Western practice of these noble ideals has soured them.

May 15, 2020 | turcopolier.typepad.com

RUSSIAN YOUTH. It's a widespread delusion, strengthened by the narrow circle Western reporters talk to in Russia, that " the government's anti-Western agenda and reports of widespread corruption are turning young Russians against the leader ."

Levada has done a survey of Russian youth and that's pretty hard to find; in general they're not far off their parents: a bit more liberal but also a bit more nationalist. Perhaps the most interesting result was that a solid majority thought Russia was not European.

Robinson discusses. He wonders why so few show much support for "'classical' civil and political liberties".

My guess is that 20 years of observation of Western practice of these noble ideals has soured them.

[May 15, 2020] Why so few young Russians show support for "'classical' civil and political liberties". My guess is that 20 years of observation of Western practice of these noble ideals has soured them.

May 15, 2020 | turcopolier.typepad.com

RUSSIAN YOUTH. It's a widespread delusion, strengthened by the narrow circle Western reporters talk to in Russia, that " the government's anti-Western agenda and reports of widespread corruption are turning young Russians against the leader ."

Levada has done a survey of Russian youth and that's pretty hard to find; in general they're not far off their parents: a bit more liberal but also a bit more nationalist. Perhaps the most interesting result was that a solid majority thought Russia was not European.

Robinson discusses. He wonders why so few show much support for "'classical' civil and political liberties".

My guess is that 20 years of observation of Western practice of these noble ideals has soured them.

[May 15, 2020] Can the istuation with coronavirus in Russia be called 'bad'?

May 15, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

alaff , May 15 2020 23:36 utc | 38

#13
2. Situation in Russia and Belarus is bad.

So the situation in Russia is 'bad'.
Hmm, tens of thousands of deaths in European countries ('Western' countries, on the whole), doctors who have to wear "protective suits" from garbage bags, mass graves, calls to allow the population to get sick in order to develop "collective immunity" (in fact, voluntary consent to screening (=death) of a part of the population with such natural selection)... but it is Russia where the situation is 'bad', and, as you said, "Europe looks to be moving behind the epidemic". That's funny.

The situation in Russia is 'bad'... You are talking about a country where one of the lowest mortality rates (thanks to well-thought-out, previously taken measures, as well as reliable coordinated work of the medical system - a legacy of the Soviet system), where one of the highest rates of population testing is carried out (the more infected people are identified, the better), where dozens of spare modern medical centers have been built at the moment (thanks to the excellent work of the Ministry of Defense). Where the authorities offered the population one of the most impressive measures of social support (one-time payments, payments for children, moratorium on penalties for housing and communal services, zero bank credit for business, payments to medical workers, tax holidays, etc.). The country, which is the world leader in providing ventilation devices - Russia has 26.6 (or 27.3 according to some estimates) devices per 100 thousand people (for comparison, in the USA this indicator is 18.8 devices per 100 thousand people, and in Italy it is 8.3), and produces/supplies them to dozens of other countries. And by the way, in Russia, a vaccine for the COVID-19 may appear already in September (I recall that thanks to the Russian vaccine it was possible to stop and defeat the Ebola epidemic in Africa).

Of course, the situation may change, including in Russia. Anything can happen. But I only recall that at the moment Russia is not a country where it was necessary to withdraw the military with weapons to the streets, or introduce a curfew. Do not forget this when you write that this is Russia, where the situation is 'bad'.

[May 15, 2020] NATO v. Nord Stream 2 caucus99percent

May 15, 2020 | caucus99percent.com

NATO v. Nord Stream 2

gjohnsit on Thu, 05/14/2020 - 3:54pm After a five month delay, Russia is ready to complete the Nord Stream 2 pipeline .

The Nord Stream 2 pipeline, built to increase the flow of Russian gas into Europe's biggest economy, was thwarted five months ago after U.S. President Donald Trump imposed sanctions that forced workers to retreat. Now, after a three-month voyage circumnavigating the globe, the Akademik Cherskiy, the Russian pipe-laying vessel that's a prime candidate to finish the project, has anchored off the German port where the remaining pipeline sections are waiting to be installed...
Satellite images captured by Planet Labs inc. on May 10 show that sections of pipeline have been moved to a jetty equipped with a crane for loading. Ship-tracking data shows that a dredging vessel operated by a Nord Stream 2 contractor, as well as a Russian pipe-laying-crane ship are also in the vicinity and that the Akademik Cherskiy had moved as of Wednesday next to the jetty loaded with pipes.

In order to complete the final 100-mile stretch of Nord Stream 2, Russia effectively needs to use its own vessels due to U.S. sanctions.
The U.S. still thinks that it can stop Gazprom from finishing the pipeline, but that's insane.

Tens of billions of dollars, along with Putin's reputation as a savvy geopolitical chess master, have been invested in the pipeline project. However, Moscow is now running out of viable options. The only move left is to proceed in defiance of sanctions that will adversely affect many in the higher echelons of the Russian establishment.

This is checkmate.

Yes, this is checkmate...for Putin.
After investing billions of dollars, Gazprom would go bust if they don't finish this pipeline. So do you really think that more U.S. sanctions will give them even a moment's pause?
Sanctions are pointless now.

The question here is, why was this pipeline such a big deal?
To give you an idea, consider the recently completed Turkstream pipeline .
The Turkstream pipeline network isn't even fully integrated yet, and it's already having an impact. Who it's impacting is the key.

Although Ukraine has not been importing any Russian gas for its domestic needs since November 2015, it has signed a five-year transit contract with Gazprom for a minimum 65bcm in 2020 and 40bcm/year from 2021.

However, transit volumes have fallen 47% year on year in the first four months of 2020, amounting to 15.5bcm. The steep drop has been linked to European oversupply and low demand, but also to the lack of transit to the Balkan region after Russian exports to Turkey, Bulgaria and Greece were diverted to the new TurkStream pipeline from January 2020.

"Our transmission system can transit 110bcm of gas [annually] but this year we expect only 50-55bcm of transit," Makogon added, pointing out that volumes would drop even lower if Russia commissions Nord Stream 2 , a 55bcm/year subsea pipeline designed to link Russia directly to Germany via the Baltic Sea.

Ukraine stands to lose $3 Billion a year in transit fees from Russia once Nord Stream 2 is completed this year. This will devastate Ukraine's budget and economy.
Before you feel any sympathy for Ukraine, consider the situation that Ukraine put Russia in.

Ukraine's NATO membership ambitions were written into the Ukrainian Constitution in February 2019 via an amendment that also confirmed the goal of eventually joining the European Union.

NATO integration has remained official Ukrainian policy following the April 2019 election of President Zelenskyy. In early 2020, the country was said to be on track to secure NATO Enhanced Opportunity Partner status later in the year if the pace of reforms was maintained.

NATO's mission continues to be "destroy Russia". So you can see why Russia would feel the need to, at the very least, not help fund an enemy nation.
Plus the potential consequences of Ukraine entering NATO are terrible.

There are ongoing concerns that membership would allow Ukraine to immediately invoke Article 5 of the NATO treaty, the stipulation that an armed attack against one member state is an attack against them all.

Fortunately, the new Ukraine government of President Zelensky doesn't appear nearly so eager for a military confrontation with Russia. Plus public support for joining NATO is dropping.

If I was to make a prediction, I would say that NATO was about to experience a political setback.

[May 15, 2020] Correlation between the number of test and the number of infected

May 15, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

Patrick Armstrong May 10, 2020 at 10:04 am

As to Russia and COVID I offer this: As of today Russia was #5 in tests/million among countries with 10M+ populations and #1 in countries with 100M+ populations. Therefore, the number of cases is probably not a very good indicator other than showing how many got it without much of an effect.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

[May 15, 2020] Browder story takes another hit

May 15, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

BROWDER. His story takes another hit – as it always does when someone takes a real look at it. The German press council rejected his complaint against Der Spiegel saying his narrative lacked proof.

et Al May 12, 2020 at 4:24 am

RT.com: German media watchdog rejects Browder's complaint against Spiegel over Magnitsky story report, says his own narrative lacks proof
https://www.rt.com/news/488395-german-media-watchdog-browder-spiegel/

Bill Browder's complaint against Der Spiegel for questioning the story he used to push for anti-Russian sanctions has backfired, with Germany's Press Council concluding his own position is far from being an "indisputable fact."

"We cannot agree with your analysis, in which you criticize the allegations made by the author," the German Press Council – a monitoring organization formed by major German publishers and journalistic associations – said in its response to Browder's team, as it rejected the complaint against one of Germany's major news media outlets

What's the world come to when the world's most influential ex-American-vulture-capitalist-turned-British-human-rights-crusader can't crush free speech in every NATO country, only some NATO countries? A blow to all the London-DC human rights apparatchiks on Browder's payroll. https://t.co/774OihXK8T

-- Mark Ames (@MarkAmesExiled) May 11, 2020

[May 14, 2020] Comparador Navilny about WWII

May 14, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

Moscow Exile May 10, 2020 at 10:28 am

The Bullshitter's going to be out of a job if he doesn't watch it!

Hey guys, not that this is a contest, but you have missed one tiny detail. The contribution of my country to this great victory: the sacrifice of 27m Russians in some of the bloodiest battles of the war. https://t.co/WYxKyhySvN

-- Alexey Navalny (@navalny) May 9, 2020

Then the closet Russian nationalist had to correct himself:

I am going to correct myself. 27m Soviet people of course. All nationalities included.

-- Alexey Navalny (@navalny) May 9, 2020

Алексей говорил он не иностранный шпион, а почему тогда всё на английском ? Может я дура?

-- Инга Майер (@Inga__Mayer) May 9, 2020

Alexey said he was not a foreign spy, but why then is everything in English? Maybe I'm a fool?

[May 14, 2020] In a wide-ranging interview, Russian Ambassador to the EU, Vladimir Chizhov, discussed Victory Day, Russia's relations with its wartime allies, conspiracy theories about COVID-19, sanctions, disinformation and more

May 14, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

et Al May 10, 2020 at 2:15 am

Euractiv: Chizhov: Coronavirus cannot diminish the significance of Victory Day

https://www.euractiv.com/section/global-europe/interview/chizhov-coronavirus-cannot-diminish-the-significance-of-victory-day/

In a wide-ranging interview, Russian Ambassador to the EU, Vladimir Chizhov, discussed Victory Day, Russia's relations with its wartime allies, conspiracy theories about COVID-19, sanctions, disinformation and more.
####

All at the link.

Again, what is the point of 'main stream journalism'? Chizov is a slick diplomat who more than ably bats away Gotev's lazy and repetitive accusations. Just keep on asking the same questions in the hope that the answers (and reality) might magically change? It's just a another wasted opportunity, avenues not taken, questions not asked. Clichés and stereotypes.

Sanctions have failed and are going nowhere. Containment doesn't work in a globalized world except somewhat arguable for small countries like Venezuela or i-Ran, but the amount of political time and economic energy spent for such little return delivers is nothing much more than pointless punishment, and creating even more enemies.

In macro, I guess Russian (and China) are just having to wait for the west to sort out its own identity issues without deliberately inflaming relations, save for when pushback is necessary. Is this century the west's existential crisis of identity & bellybutton wiggling why me!? It's all very freudian.

[May 14, 2020] Very impressive in design and execution

May 14, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

moscowexile May 9, 2020 at 6:24 pm

https://www.youtube.com/embed/x_lDNvwTx6Q

This is the correct link, I hope.

moscowexile May 9, 2020 at 6:26 pm
Yes!

Strange to say, completed during this pandemic that threatens civilization, as Dimka said a few weeks ago. I hope the construction workers all wore masks and regularly washed their hands.

Mark Chapman May 9, 2020 at 7:17 pm
Speaking of that, as I am slowly rebuilding my blogroll, I came across this in Tony Cartalucci's 'Land Destroyer'.

https://landdestroyer.blogspot.com/2020/04/the-massive-covid-19-hoax.html

We were right from the beginning. The international health officials will struggle for awhile yet, but someday somebody will have some 'splainin' to do. Unless they're going to try that horseshit that social distancing and clapping for frontline workers stopped it dead. And that's unlikely, because the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is the development of a vaccine, which all nations will buy and stockpile.

Patient Observer May 11, 2020 at 4:55 am
Jesus H Christ. That is impressive in design and execution. The Western equivalent of a spiritual center is Wall Street where greed and narcissism are idolized.

[May 13, 2020] Dramatic change of direction for Syrian envoy

Highly recommended!
This is MIGA in action...
Notable quotes:
"... former CIA Deputy Director Mike Morell admitted in a TV interview he views that the US should be in the business of "killing Russians and Iranians covertly" ). ..."
"... Ironically, Jeffrey's official title has been Special Envoy for the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIL, but apparently the mission is now to essentially "give the Russians hell". His comments were made Tuesday during a video conference hosted by the neocon Hudson Institute : ..."
"... He also emphasized that the Syrian state would continue to be squeezed into submission as part of long-term US efforts (going back to at least 2011) to legitimize a Syria government in exile of sorts. This after the Trump administration recently piled new sanctions on Damascus. As University of Oklahoma professor and expert on the region Joshua Landis summarized of Jeffrey's remarks: "He pledged that the United States will continue to deny Syria - international funding, reconstruction, oil, banking, agriculture & recognition of government." ..."
May 13, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

Washington now says it's all about defeating the Russians . While it's not the first time this has been thrown around in policy circles (recall that a year after Russia's 2015 entry into Syria at Assad's invitation, former CIA Deputy Director Mike Morell admitted in a TV interview he views that the US should be in the business of "killing Russians and Iranians covertly" ).

And now the top US special envoy to region, James Jeffrey, has this to say on US troops in Syria :

"My job is to make it a quagmire for the Russians."

Ironically, Jeffrey's official title has been Special Envoy for the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIL, but apparently the mission is now to essentially "give the Russians hell". His comments were made Tuesday during a video conference hosted by the neocon Hudson Institute :

Asked why the American public should tolerate US involvement in Syria, Special Envoy James Jeffrey points out the small US footprint in the fight against ISIS. "This isn't Afghanistan. This isn't Vietnam. This isn't a quagmire. My job is to make it a quagmire for the Russians."

He also emphasized that the Syrian state would continue to be squeezed into submission as part of long-term US efforts (going back to at least 2011) to legitimize a Syria government in exile of sorts. This after the Trump administration recently piled new sanctions on Damascus. As University of Oklahoma professor and expert on the region Joshua Landis summarized of Jeffrey's remarks: "He pledged that the United States will continue to deny Syria - international funding, reconstruction, oil, banking, agriculture & recognition of government."

"My job is to make it a quagmire for the Russians."

Special US envoy to Syria - James Jeffery

He pledged that the United States will continue to deny Syria - international funding, reconstruction, oil, banking, agriculture & recognition of government. https://t.co/MSAkQqAmdh

-- Joshua Landis (@joshua_landis) May 12, 2020

But no doubt both Putin and Assad have understood Washington's real proxy war interests all along, which is why last year Russia delivered it's lethal S-300 into the hands of Assad (and amid constant Israeli attacks). But no doubt both Putin and Assad have understood Washington's real proxy war interests all along, which is why last year Russia delivered it's lethal S-300 into the hands of Assad (and amid constant Israeli attacks).

As for oil, currently Damascus is well supplied by the Iranians, eager to dump their stock in fuel-starved Syria amid the global glut. Trump has previously voiced that part of US troops "securing the oil fields" is to keep them out of the hands of Russia and Iran.

* * *

Recall the CIA's 2016 admission of what's really going on in terms of US action in Syria:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/OJ3fTFHQ0KA

[May 12, 2020] The end of illusions about who is the real Donald Trump

May 12, 2020 | www.defenddemocracy.press

... ... ... 'Deep-seated ignorance' or 'calculated snub'?

The apparent oversight or blunder does not appear surprising if one takes a closer look at the modern American approach to history, argues Peter Kuznick, professor of History and Director of the Nuclear Studies Institute at American University.

Read also: 75 years since Operation Barbarossa - Revisions...

"The problem is that it is what most Americans are taught in the schools and by the media. If you ask Americans who won WWII, most will say it was the US," Kuznick told RT. He added that many people in the US have a "deep-seated ignorance about all things historical."

But Jim Jatras, a former US diplomat, believes that the wording of the message was intentional.

"It is a calculated insult, a snub" directed against modern-day Russia, he said. Jatras says that such an approach stems from Washington's desire to portray itself as the only world leader – and the world's policeman, who dictates to others what to do.

The US is projecting the modern view of American dominance as the leader of the "progressive world" on history, including that of WWII. The complexities of the war are terra incognita, as far as most Americans are concerned.

"They have a reckless attitude towards insulting other countries," Jatras adds. The fact that many Americans are enthralled by "fundamental" historical myths perpetuated by the media only makes things worse, Kuznick says.

He adds that these myths particularly include the idea that it was the US that won the war in Europe (American soldiers set foot on the ground in Normandy almost five years after the war began and well after the tide had changed against Germany on the eastern front), and that the American nuclear bombs dropped on Japan helped "save lives" by ending the war (historians still disagree whether the bombings had any military meaning, and they coincided with the Soviet Union's massive advance on Japan-occupied China, as per an agreement with the US).

Read also: Stalingrad author Anthony Beevor speaks out over Ukraine book ban

Kuznick says the historical myths also put the blame for the ensuing Cold War solely on the Soviet Union. However, rather than being isolated in history textbooks, these misconceptions actually shape modern-day attitudes.

"They are all very dangerous because the way people understand history is going to shape the way they act in the world now and the way they will behave in the future Perpetuating these kinds of myths is just so irresponsible."

[May 12, 2020] Geoffrey Roberts 75 years on let's hope the Covid-19 crisis re-energises global efforts to avoid war

May 12, 2020 | www.irishexaminer.com

When Putin came to power 20 years ago, he was a pro-western leader who, in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the US, sought to recreate a contemporary version of the wartime grand alliance.

Putin's vision of renewed great power collaboration has been undermined but not yet obliterated by a succession of Russian-Western crises and disputes over Serbia, Iraq, Libya, Georgia, Ukraine and Syria, as well as NATO expansionism, the Skripal poisoning affair and Donald Trump's election as American president.

Critics often accuse Putin of being opposed to a rules-based world order. Rather, it is that he rejects the self-serving rules some western states are seeking to impose on Russia under the guise of improving global security.

As recently as January this year, Putin called for a five-power summit of the UN Security Council's permanent members - Russia, China, the US, France and Britain - to discuss common economic, security and environmental issues.

Maybe we can hope the current emergency will re-energise efforts to achieve a multi-lateral approach to global challenges without the necessity for war.

Geoffrey Roberts is Emeritus Professor of History at University College Cork.

His latest book (with Martin Folly and Oleg Rzheshevsky) is Churchill and Stalin: Comrades-in-Arms during the Second World War.

[May 11, 2020] the pro-NATO propagandists often exploit the so-called 'Russian threat' concept; however, this merely provides a cover for their aggressive actions to silence and discredit opposing opinions and sources of information they deem to be counter to their own interests.

May 11, 2020 | www.unz.com

Anonymous [208] Disclaimer , says: Show Comment May 11, 2020 at 10:43 am GMT

To achieve their goals, the pro-NATO propagandists often exploit the so-called 'Russian threat' concept; however, this merely provides a cover for their aggressive actions to silence and discredit opposing opinions and sources of information they deem to be counter to their own interests.

The reason behind their activity is simple – they must justify their existence in reports to their sponsors. They are constantly and fiercely working to engineer 'successful actions' regardless of their validity. In order to continue securing funding to expose and defeat an imaginary enemy, they must create imaginary victories, irrespective of reality.

Uh, the author obviously knows better so why promote this narrative? These operatives are not going after "wrong", or "invalid" targets to justify their funding. They're specifically hired to do what they're doing now.

[May 11, 2020] I got sent to the UK at age 9 by west leaning liberal parents. They now regret that decision because of the risk of foreigners, especially Russians and Chinese, being interned like the Japanese in WWII.

May 11, 2020 | www.unz.com

Ilya G Poimandres , says: Show Comment May 10, 2020 at 7:11 am GMT

@Cowboy A society that goes for an economy of divided labour reduces the individual away from the natural equality of aggrarian, or artisan production. A worker who screws in one bolt for a car in a production line is a slave – they are dependent on the system of manufactoring, and a level of technology, for their security.

Division of labour brings its own systemic inequality, which can only be dealt with by adjusting the system to provide each individual security from destitution – same as the city demanded the birth of the state for the provision of security from violence. This provision costs 30% of GDP now, if done universally, without all this capitalistic means testing and progressive taxation, which engorges the state monopoly. And leave that 70% of GDP to a free market regulated away from monopoly and deceit. Or even caveat emptor – so long as the people have what they need when they enter such a cold economy.

A collective responsibility for needs won't produce golems, unless you believe the psychology of 'unlimited wants' is incorrect, and people just want daily bread and shelter, to live out their pointless lives and die.

Stealing tech – so you agree with knowledge monopolies then. It's not theft – technology just filters through. What if nation A develops a touchscreen, sells it to the world. You demand no one get curious and finds out how it works by themselves? Curiosity is a key driver of human progress, denying that to people is denying them an aspect of their human nature.. How communist! Look at Edison, he stole. Einstein, he plagiarised. Israel, they got their nuclear program how? And the space programs got seeded how for the US and USSR?

You think the Chinese steal because they spend billions in US unis learning, then working for US companies, then later take know how to China? You want to lobotomised them so they can't or something? You should have treated them better. Same as the Russians. I got sent to the UK at age 9, by west leaning liberal parents (who like Putin, but didn't like where Russia was heading in the late 90s). They now regret that decision because of how the west has acted on other nations. They would say the west betrayed its advertising, and that those that leave for their birth lands do so out of disappointment at these nations. Sure some spies, but that's a thing in itself. Most are leaving with their acquired knowledge because of the risk of being interned like the Japanese in WWII.

[May 09, 2020] American neocons are literally getting everything they want from Trump administration

May 09, 2020 | www.unz.com

Tor597 , says: Show Comment April 21, 2020 at 4:13 am GMT

If I had told you a year ago that Iran would have its top General assassinated and then its country decimated by a viral infection, that China would be a world pariah with calls for trillion in reparations, that Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela would have a bounty on his head for lol being involved in the cocaine trade, and that Kim Jong Un would be dead who do you think would be the architect of this future?

Chinese elites or American ones?

American neocons are literally getting everything they want.

You can look at all of the damage to the American economy relative to China, but who is really being hurt in America? Regular Americans are being hurt. But the elites are getting bailed out and will buy US assets for pennies on the dollar.

[May 08, 2020] Avaaz and We came, we saw, he died (cackle)... Assad must go... Promoting chaos....Cui bono?

Notable quotes:
"... Avaaz supported the establishment of a no-fly zone over Libya, which led to the military intervention in the country in 2011. It was criticized for its pro-intervention stance in the media and blogs. [17] ..."
"... Avaaz supported the civil uprising preceding the Syrian Civil War . This included sending $1.5 million of Internet communications equipment to protesters, and training activists. Later it used smuggling routes to send over $2 million of medical equipment into rebel-held areas of Syria. It also smuggled 34 international journalists into Syria. [10] [18] ..."
"... Yes, pilgrims, my professional deformation leads me to find pattern where there may be none. ..."
"... It would be logical for there to exist connective tissue that relates the Sorosistas, The Clintonistas, the media freaks, Tom Perez' DNC, ..."
"... And then, there is Neil Ferguson the British epidemiologist who sold #10 on the idea of a national lock-down that looks to destroy the UK economy and political system. Antonia Staats his married mistress is a major figure in AVAAZ. He broke curfew twice to get a little bit of that. Coincidence? ..."
"... Even a small amount of google searching suggests that Avaaz is simply another Zionist-funded pro-Israel controlled opposition cutout type of organization. Funded by Zionist George Soros. Main honcho Ricken Patel is associated with Zionist lobby group J Street. ..."
"... Per the commentary above, supported the regime change operation in Syria (a longstanding Zionist goal, refer to the Clean Break plan.) ..."
"... What pillow talk went on between AVAAZ agent Antonia Staats and her Imperial College of London paramour Neil Ferguson right before he briefed Trump/Pence on their corona "we are all gonna die" projections. ..."
May 08, 2020 | turcopolier.typepad.com

"Avaaz claims to unite practical idealists from around the world. [8] Director Ricken Patel said in 2011, "We have no ideology per se. Our mission is to close the gap between the world we have and the world most people everywhere want. Idealists of the world unite!" [12] In practice , Avaaz often supports causes considered progressive, such as calling for global action on climate change , challenging Monsanto, and building greater global support for refugees. [13] [14] [15]

During the 2009 Iranian presidential election protests , Avaaz set up Internet proxy servers to allow protesters to upload videos onto public websites. [16]

Avaaz supported the establishment of a no-fly zone over Libya, which led to the military intervention in the country in 2011. It was criticized for its pro-intervention stance in the media and blogs. [17]

Avaaz supported the civil uprising preceding the Syrian Civil War . This included sending $1.5 million of Internet communications equipment to protesters, and training activists. Later it used smuggling routes to send over $2 million of medical equipment into rebel-held areas of Syria. It also smuggled 34 international journalists into Syria. [10] [18] Avaaz coordinated the evacuation of wounded British photographer Paul Conroy from Homs . Thirteen Syrian activists died during the evacuation operation. [10] [19] Some senior members of other non-governmental organizations working in the Middle East have criticized Avaaz for taking sides in a civil war. [16] As of November 2016, Avaaz continues campaigning for no-fly zones over Syria in general and specifically Aleppo . (Gen. Dunford, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the United States, has said that establishing a no-fly zone means going to war against Syria and Russia. [20] ) It has received criticism from parts of the political blogosphere and has a single digit percentage of its users opposing the petitions, with a number of users ultimately leaving the network. The Avaaz team responded to this criticism by issuing two statements defending their decision to campaign. wiki

----------------

Yes, pilgrims, my professional deformation leads me to find pattern where there may be none. BUT, OTOH, there may BE a pattern. It would be logical for there to exist connective tissue that relates the Sorosistas, The Clintonistas, the media freaks, Tom Perez' DNC, etc., etc., ad nauseam. ...

And then, there is Neil Ferguson the British epidemiologist who sold #10 on the idea of a national lock-down that looks to destroy the UK economy and political system. Antonia Staats his married mistress is a major figure in AVAAZ. He broke curfew twice to get a little bit of that. Coincidence? pl

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avaaz

Outrage Beyond , 07 May 2020 at 06:41 PM

Even a small amount of google searching suggests that Avaaz is simply another Zionist-funded pro-Israel controlled opposition cutout type of organization. Funded by Zionist George Soros. Main honcho Ricken Patel is associated with Zionist lobby group J Street.

Per the commentary above, supported the regime change operation in Syria (a longstanding Zionist goal, refer to the Clean Break plan.)

Bottom line: not a leftist organization. Faux leftist, controlled opposition, Zionist. Neocons are probably delighted with Avaaz.

Deap , 07 May 2020 at 06:46 PM
It was a ground hog day nightmare when I read the AVAAZ website and found all the "progressive" chestnuts, alive, well and kicking into high gear. This AVAAZ agenda fuels the politics in my state, California, so I know each element well plus how each of of them has failed us so badly. They all teeter on OPM, which the state wide corona shut down has decimated.

What pillow talk went on between AVAAZ agent Antonia Staats and her Imperial College of London paramour Neil Ferguson right before he briefed Trump/Pence on their corona "we are all gonna die" projections.

It all happened so fast - from runs on toilet paper in Australia reported on March 2 to global shutdown on March 16 due to this Imperial College model in just two weeks. Who and what communication network was behind this radical global shift that generated virtually no push back? The message quickly became one case of corona and we are all gonna die. How did that find such a willing audience?

I keep hearing that same echo in my nightmares, never let a crisis go to waste - now with this very distinct German accent on the face of a red-lipped blonde. Too weird to see this AVAAZ "global" network is so darn interested in over-turning a US Supreme Court Citizens United ruling - the old Hilary Clinton rallying cry. What is with that - they care in Malaysia?

Thank you for sunshining this very curious operation and its all too familiar cast of known characters lurking in its history, shadows, funding and leadership circle. Injecting them with Lysol is the better plan.

It is one thing to sic Barr-Durham on US government operations, but who can even explore let alone touch the world of global NGO's.

It does explain where a lot of the Bernie Sanders fervor comes from and how it sustains this energy despite defeat in the US election polls. The AVAAZ agenda winning the hearts and minds of many young people around the world. It will be their world to inherit, if they go down this path; not ours. God speed to all of them. Namaste. Dahl and naan for everyone.

Deap , 07 May 2020 at 07:04 PM
A little internet search also questions if AVAAZ is an intelligence community funded operation, linking key Obama administration players.

Good indoor fun during our national lockdowns - track AVAAZ in all its permutations and recurrent players. Samantha Powers and her hundreds of FISA unmasking requests comes to mind as well as her role in the AVAAZ games played in Syria.

Some AVAAZ fodder from a random internet search: Tinfoil hat fun times - keep digging.

......."Curiously, however, the absence of routine information on the Avaaz website -- board of directors, contact information, etc. -- raises the possibility that the organization is one of innumerable such groups created around the world by intelligence organizations with secret funding to advance hidden agendas.

This was the gist of a 2012 column by Global Research columnist Susanne Posel, headlined Avaaz: The Lobbyist that Masquerades as Online Activism. She alleged that Avaaz purports to be a global avenue for dissent, but channels reform energies on the most sensitive issues into such pro-U.S. positions as support for Israel and the Free Syrian Army......."

turcopolier , 07 May 2020 at 07:11 PM
AVAAZ

It is interesting that AVAAZ stopped accepting foundation and corporate money years ago. So, where do they get their money?

Harlan Easley , 07 May 2020 at 08:06 PM
Looking at him and her. She is out of his league. He is beta soy boy material.

You're probably right.

Fred , 07 May 2020 at 08:16 PM
Deap,

"Who and what communication network ..." ... " but who can even explore let alone touch the world of global NGO's."

Have you noticed how fast Project Veritas gets shut down, how Twitter, FB, etc silence any effective opposition to the message of the left?

"It is one thing to sic Barr-Durham on US government operations,..."
Perhaps now that FlynnFlu is evaporating in the disinfecting sunlight some sunshine should be applied to the H1B visa holders at the aformentioned social media companies and add in Google, Bing, Oath etc. and see how many Communist operatives are there, in addition to "essential employee" non-citizen lefty's pushing the anti-American propaganda. A dinner invitation to Jeff Bezos and his paramore might provide some interesting conversation on just who at Amazon might be involved in the same type of anti-western operations; compare their corporate response to distribution operations in the US vs. France as an example.
https://twitter.com/JamesOKeefeIII/status/1143127502895898625
Furthermore, observe the Google leadership team discussion of the 2016 elections.
https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2018/09/12/leaked-video-google-leaderships-dismayed-reaction-to-trump-election/
Minute 12:30 CFO Ruth Porat
Minute 27:00 Q&A Sergey Brin response on matching donations to employee causes.
Make sure to watch minute 52 on H1B visa holders. With 30,000,000 unemployed Americans just how many of those visas does Google need now? (I don't recall any organization telling China they need open borders immigration since thier hispanic/african/caucasian population percentages are effectively zero, so we might wonder who has been behind that message for the past few decades and why it is only directed at Western democracies).
And the inevitable campaign against "low information" voters and "fake news". I wonder what their take on Russian election interference is now? (Russia cyber trolling! minute 54:44.)

56:20 The inevitable arc of "progress". Make sure you join the fight for Hilary's values. That's the actual corporate leadership message. See the final round of applause at 1:01. Our new overlords know best. Too bad they don't own a mirror, or an ability to reflect on why someone can see the same data and come to a different conclusion of than these experts.

That's just a scratch on the surface. How much money flowed through the Clinton Global Initiative, which NGOs got some cleansed proceeds, which elections were influenced, professors and research sponsored, local communities "organzied". There's plenty to look at and "Isreal, Soros, Zionists" are the least of it.

J , 07 May 2020 at 09:48 PM
State sponsorship?
james , 07 May 2020 at 11:04 PM
avaaz always struck me like some intel agency psyc op... maybe israel like the poster outrage beyond implies.. either way - one could read stay away based on everything about them..
eakens , 08 May 2020 at 01:26 AM
Avaaz means change in Farsi. Interesting.
LondonBob , 08 May 2020 at 03:31 AM
A friend of a friend is a research scientist at Imperial in biology, he is as lefty as they get and I think would be happy to falsify his research to serve his political goals. Besides Imperial is a hard science uni, UCL is top in the University of London for medicine.

Soros and his organisations should be made persona non grata, as the Russians and Hungarians have. Extraordinary his influence in the EU, he has picked up where the Soviet Union left off, funding every organisation that demoralises society, from gay rights to immigration promotion to ethnic lobbies, even in Eastern European countries where there are no minorities.

CK , 08 May 2020 at 08:34 AM
An unusual thing happens once; it could be happenstance.
The thing happens again; it is Reconnaissance.
The thing happens yet again; it is war.
turcopolier , 08 May 2020 at 08:59 AM
J

That is for us to learn.

A. Pols , 08 May 2020 at 09:17 AM
We came, we saw, he died (cackle)... Assad must go...
Promoting chaos....Cui bono?
BABAK MAKKINEJAD , 08 May 2020 at 09:33 AM
eaken

Avaaz means "song" in Persian.

Diana Croissant , 08 May 2020 at 09:35 AM
The one woman standing up to a pompous judge who has called her "selfish" for wanting to earn the money it takes to feed her child is the heroine of this week's news.

Hers is the story of our Democratic Republic, born in the Age of Reason. Voltaire's Candide comes to the best conclusion for the way our elected representatives should make decisions: what works best to help INDIVIDUALS tend their own gardens is the form of government we should pursue.

It's true that young people have hearts and good intentions, but older people in most cases have brains and understand human nature better.

This older person--even when she was young--always distrusted a popular uprising or growing movement.

And if Obama and Hillary are for it, I know I am against it. (That's a more specific life lesson I've learned.)

[May 07, 2020] Angry Bear " "cannot remember a single International Crisis in which the United States had no global presence at all"

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Anne Applebaum is a bitter neocon. She is furious that people no longer read the Washington Post as the authoritative voice of US foreign policy. She has apparently made a tidy fortune warning us that the Russians are coming, but she wants even more. The Washington Post still views her as an expert, but the American people, as she herself complains, are no longer interested in her worn-out fantasies. She is buried in defense industry funded think tanks and she does the bidding of her masters. Every intelligent American reader should ridicule her as the propagandist she is. ..."
"... "McMaster's dangerous China hawkishness calls to mind something that Jim Mattis said about him regarding a different issue when they served together in the Trump administration: "Oh my God, that moron is going to get us all killed." His aggressiveness towards China is not driven by an assessment of the threat from China, but comes from his tendency to advocate for aggressive measures everywhere." ..."
"... The country which spends over trillion dollars on "defense" is by definition an imperial country and its foreign policy priorities are not that difficult to discern. ..."
"... And due to well fed MIC which maintains an army of lobbyists and along with FIRE sector controls Capitol Hill this is a Catch 22 situation (we can't abandon neocon Full Spectrum Dominance doctrine and can't continue as it will bankrupt the country) which might not end well for the country. ..."
"... Note how unprepared the country was to COVID-19 epidemic. Zero strategic thinking as if the next epidemic was not in the cards at least since swine fly ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_swine_flu_pandemic_in_the_United_States ). ..."
"... Some experts now claim that this is criminal incompetence on the part of Trump administration. "So, what does it mean to let thousands die by negligence, omission, failure to act, in a legal sense under international law?" asked Gonsalves, an assistant professor of epidemiology of microbial diseases at the Yale School of Public Health, in a tweet Wednesday morning. https://twitter.com/gregggonsalves/status/1257988303443431425 ..."
"... Please note that Trump campaigned in 2016 on the idea of disengagement from foreign wars and abandoning the global neoliberal empire built by his predecessors as well as halting neoliberal globalization. ..."
"... And what we got? We got this warmonger McMaster, bombing Syria on false flag chemical attack pretext, conflict with Russia over North Stream II and Ukraine, and the assassination of Soleimani. Such a bait and switch. ..."
May 07, 2020 | angrybearblog.com

likbez , May 6, 2020 11:53 pm

Hi run75441,

I do not share your enthusiasm about those two authors.

Anne Applebaum is married to "Full spectrum Dominance doctrine". Like any neocon she a regular well-paid MIC prostitute

http://ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/neocon-watch/2017/may/08/neocon-anne-applebaum-give-me-money-to-fight-russian-disinformation/

Neocon Anne Applebaum has never seen a bed she did not expect to find an evil Russian lurking beneath. More than a quarter of a century after the end of the Cold War, she cannot let go of that hysterical feeling that, "The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming!" In screeching screed after screeching screech, Applebaum is, like most neocons, a one trick pony: the US government needs to spend more money to counter the threat of the month. Usually it's Russia or Putin. But it can also be China, Iran, Assad, Gaddafi, Saddam, etc.

Nothing new, nothing interesting.

Anne Applebaum is a bitter neocon. She is furious that people no longer read the Washington Post as the authoritative voice of US foreign policy. She has apparently made a tidy fortune warning us that the Russians are coming, but she wants even more. The Washington Post still views her as an expert, but the American people, as she herself complains, are no longer interested in her worn-out fantasies. She is buried in defense industry funded think tanks and she does the bidding of her masters. Every intelligent American reader should ridicule her as the propagandist she is.

As for McMaster paper see Daniel Larison take on the subject in his brilliant post "McMaster and the Myths of Empire" https://www.theamericanconservative.com/larison/mcmaster-and-the-myths-of-empire/

Here is what he said:

"McMaster's dangerous China hawkishness calls to mind something that Jim Mattis said about him regarding a different issue when they served together in the Trump administration: "Oh my God, that moron is going to get us all killed." His aggressiveness towards China is not driven by an assessment of the threat from China, but comes from his tendency to advocate for aggressive measures everywhere."

And as a China scholar McMaster is not the best choice either:

McMaster uses the same "paper tiger image" to portray China as an unstoppable aggressor that can nonetheless be stopped at minimal risk.

I have heard from other colleagues that several CN scholars met w/ McMaster before he wrote this (while working on his book) and corrected him on many issues. He apparently ignored all of their views. This is what we face people: a simple, deceptive narrative is more seductive.

-- Michael

likbez, May 7, 2020 6:22 pm

The main thrust here is the US abandoning the world to China and a much weaker Russia. I am calling for the US to play a much broader role in the world as it has economic and strategic value

The road to hell is paved with good intentions. This is definitely above my pay grade, but the problem that I see here is that it is very unclear where "a much broader role in the world" ends and where "imperial overstretch" starts.

The country which spends over trillion dollars on "defense" is by definition an imperial country and its foreign policy priorities are not that difficult to discern.

And due to well fed MIC which maintains an army of lobbyists and along with FIRE sector controls Capitol Hill this is a Catch 22 situation (we can't abandon neocon Full Spectrum Dominance doctrine and can't continue as it will bankrupt the country) which might not end well for the country.

Note how unprepared the country was to COVID-19 epidemic. Zero strategic thinking as if the next epidemic was not in the cards at least since swine fly ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_swine_flu_pandemic_in_the_United_States ).

Some experts now claim that this is criminal incompetence on the part of Trump administration. "So, what does it mean to let thousands die by negligence, omission, failure to act, in a legal sense under international law?" asked Gonsalves, an assistant professor of epidemiology of microbial diseases at the Yale School of Public Health, in a tweet Wednesday morning. https://twitter.com/gregggonsalves/status/1257988303443431425

Please note that Trump campaigned in 2016 on the idea of disengagement from foreign wars and abandoning the global neoliberal empire built by his predecessors as well as halting neoliberal globalization. That's how he got anti-war independents to vote for him.

And what we got? We got this warmonger McMaster, bombing Syria on false flag chemical attack pretext, conflict with Russia over North Stream II and Ukraine, and the assassination of Soleimani. Such a bait and switch.

[May 05, 2020] Is there a "6th column" trying to subvert Russia, by The Saker

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... What is often forgotten is that at the same time, the Soviet society was oppressive, the corrupt and geriatric CPSU ran everything and was mostly hated, the Russian people were afraid of the KGB and could not enjoy the freedoms folks in the US or Europe had. In truth, it was a mixed bag, but it is easy to remember only the good stuff. ..."
"... The core of this opposition is formed of Communists and Communist sympathizers who absolutely hate Putin for his (quite outspoken) anti-Communism. Let's call them "new Communists" or "Neo-Communists". And here is what makes them much more dangerous than the "liberal" opposition: the Neo-Communists are often absolutely right. ..."
"... Under Putin the Russian foreign policy has been such a success that even the Russian liberals, very reluctantly, admit that he did a pretty good job. However, the internal, many financial, policies of Russia have been a disaster. Just one example, the fact that the major Russian banks are bloated with their immense revenues, did not prevent millions of Russians from living in poverty and many hundreds of thousands of Russian small/family businesses of going under due to the very high interest rates. ..."
"... First, Russia has been in a state of war against the US+EU+NATO since at least 2015. Yes, this war is 80% informational, 15% economic and only 5% kinetic. But it is a very real war nonetheless. ..."
"... The Neo-Communist Russian opposition steadfastly pretends like there is no war, like all the losses (economic and human) are only the result of corruption and incompetence. They forget that during the last war between Russia and the "United West" German tanks were at the outskirts of Moscow. ..."
"... if Putin decided to follow the advice of, say, Glaziev and his supporters, the Russian bankers would react with a "total war" against Putin. ..."
"... If you study Russian history, you will soon realize that Russia did superbly with military enemies, did very averagely with diplomatic efforts (which often negated military victories) and did terribly with what we could call the "internal opposition". ..."
"... I have always, and still do, consider that the real danger for Putin and those who share his views is the internal, often "insider", opposition in Russia. They were always the ones to present the biggest threat to any Russian ruler, from the Czars to Stalin. ..."
"... This new Neo-Communist 6th column is, however, a much more dangerous threat to the future of Russia than the pro-western 5th columnists. Some of their tactics are extremely devious. For example, one of the things you hear most often from these folks is this: "unless Putin does X, Y or Z, there is a risk of a bloody revolution". ..."
"... "Too often in our history we have seen that instead of an opposition to the government we are confronted with an opposition to Russia herself. And we know how this ends: with the destruction of the state as such". ..."
"... Now, if you think as a true patriot of Russia, you have to realize that Russia suffered from not one, but two, truly horrible revolutions: in 1917 and 1991. In each case the consequences of these revolutions (irrespective of how justified they might have appeared at the time) were absolutely horrible: both in 1917 and in 1991 Russia almost completely vanished as a country, and millions suffered terribly. I now hold is as axiomatic that nothing would be worse for Russia than *any* revolution, no matter what ideology feeds it or how bad the "regime in power" might appear to be. ..."
"... These Neo-Communists would very much disagree with me. They "warn" about a revolution, while in reality trying to create the conditions for one. ..."
"... There is a very vocal internal opposition to Putin in Russia which is most unlikely to ever get real popular support, but which could possibly unite enough of the nostalgics of the Soviet era to create a real crisis. This internal opposition clearly and objectively weakens the authority/reputation of Putin, which has been main goal of the western "alphabet soup" ever since Putin came to power. ..."
"... This internal opposition, being mostly nostalgics of the Soviet era, will get no official support from the West, but it will enjoy a maximal covert support from the western "alphabet soup". ..."
"... Finally, this Neo-Communist opposition will never seize power, but it might create a very real internal political crisis which will very much weaken Putin and the Eurasian Sovereignists. ..."
"... The bottom line is this: Putin represents something very unique and very precious: he is a true Russian patriot, but he is not one nostalgic for the days of the Soviet Union. Right now, he is the only (or one of very few) Russian politician which can claim this quality. He needs to preempt the crisis which the Neo-Communists could trigger not by silencing them, but by realizing that on some issues the Russian people do, in fact, agree with them (even if they are not willing to call for a revolution). ..."
"... That poll showing Putin on top of everybody else, tells me that he is the Single-Point-Failure. If he croaks, so does Russia. Very much like Jesus, or Nicholas the II, or Gorbachov, before him -- all obrazovanshchiki, educated past the point of their intelligence level ..."
May 05, 2020 | www.unz.com

For those of us who followed the Russian Internet there is a highly visible phenomenon taking place which is quite startling: there are a lot of anti-Putin videos posted on YouTube or its Russian equivalents. Not only that, but a flurry of channels has recently appeared which seem to have made bashing Putin or Mishustin their full-time job. Of course, there have always been anti-Putin and anti-Medvedev videos in the past, but what makes this new wave so different from the old one is that they attack Putin and Mishustin not from pro-Western positions, but from putatively Russian patriotic positions. Even the supposed (not true) "personal advisor" to Putin and national-Bolshevik (true), Alexander Dugin has joined that movement (see here if you understand Russian).

This is a new, interesting and complex phenomenon, and I will try to unpack it here.

First, we have to remember that Putin was extremely successful at destroying the pro-Western opposition which, while shown on a daily basis on Russian TV, represents something in the 3-5% of the people at most. You might ask why they are so frequent on TV, and the reason is simple: the more they talk, the more they are hated.

So far from silencing the opposition, the Kremlin not only gives it air time, it even pays opposition figures top dollars to participate in the most popular talk shows. See here and here for more details

Truly, the reputation of the pro-Western "liberal" (in the Russian sense) opposition is now roadkill in Russia. Yes, there is a core of Russophobic Russians who hate Russia with a passion (they refer to it as "Rashka") and their hatred for everything Russian is so obvious that they are universally despised all over the country (the one big exception being Moscow where there is a much stronger "liberal" opposition which gets the support of all those who had a great time pillaging Russia in the 1990s and who now hate Putin for putting an end to their malfeasance).

As for the Duma opposition, it is an opposition only in name. They make noises, they bitch here and there, they condemn this or that, but at the end of the day, they will not represent a credible opposition at all.

Why?

Well, look at this screenshot I took from a Russian polling site :

The chart is in Russian, but it is also extremely simple to understand. On the Y axis, you see the percentage of people who "totally trust" and "mostly trust" the six politicians, in order: Putin, Mishustin, Zhirinovskii, Ziuganov, Mironov and Medvedev. The the X axis you see the time frame going from July 2019 to April 2020.

The only thing which really matters is this: in spite all the objective and subjective problems of Russia, in spite of a widely unpopular pension reform, in spite of all the western sanctions and in spite of the pandemic, Putin still sits alone in a rock-solid position: he has the overwhelming support of the Russian people. This single cause pretty much explains everything else I will be talking about today.

As most of you probably remember, there were already several waves of anti-Putin PSYOPS in the past, but they all failed for very simple reasons:

Most Russians remember the horrors of the 1990s when the pro-Western "liberals" were in power. Second, the Russian people could observe how the West put bona fide rabidly russophobic Nazis in power in Kiev. The liberals expressed a great deal of sympathy for the Ukronazi regime. Few Russians doubt that if the pro-western "liberals" got to power, they would turn Russia into something very similar to today's Ukraine. Next, the Russians could follow, day after day, how the Ukraine imploded, went through a bloody civil war, underwent a almost total de-industrialization and ended up with a real buffoon as President (Zelenskii just appointed, I kid you not, Saakashvili as Vice Prime Minister of the Ukraine, that is all you need to know to get the full measure of what kind of clueless imbecile Zelenskii is!). Not only do the liberals blame Russia for what happened to this poor country, they openly support Zelenskii. Most (all?) of the pro-western "NGO" (I put that in quotation marks, because these putatively non-governmental organization were entirely financed by western governments, mostly US and UK) were legally forced to reveal their sources of financing and most of them got listed as "foreign agents". Others were simply kicked out of Russia. Thus, it became impossible for the AngloZionists to trigger what appeared to be "mass protests" under these condition. There is a solid "anti-Maidan" movement in Russia (including in Moscow!) which is ready to "pounce" (politically) in case of any Maidan-like movement in Russia. I strongly suspect that the FSB has a warm if unofficial collaboration with them. The Russian internal security services (FSB, FSO, National Guard, etc.) saw a major revival under Putin and they are now not only more powerful than in the past, but also much better organized to deal with subversion. As for the armed forces are solidly behind Putin and Shoigu. While in the 1990s Russia was basically defenseless, Russia today is a very tough nut to crack for western subversion/PSYOP operations. Last, but not least, the Russian liberals are so obviously from the class Alexander Solzhenitsyn referred to as " obrazovanshchina ", a word hard to translate but which roughly means "pretend [to be] educated": these folks have always considered themselves very superior to the vast majority of the Russian people and they simply cannot hide their contempt for the "common man" (very similar to Hillary's "deporables"). The common man fully realizes that and, quite logically, profoundly distrusts and even hates "liberals".

There came a moment when the western curators of the Russian 5th column realized that calling Putin names in the western press, or publicly accusing him of being a "bloody despot" and a "KGB killer" might work with the gullible and brainwashed western audience, but it got absolutely no traction whatsoever in Russia.

And then, somebody, somewhere (I don't know who, or where) came up with an truly brilliant idea: accusing Putin of not being a patriot and declare that he is a puppet in the hands of the AngloZionist Empire. This was nothing short of brilliant, I have to admit that.

First, they tried to sell the idea that Putin was about to "sell out" (or "trade") Novorussia. One theory was that Russia would stand by and let the Ukronazis invade Novorussia. Another one was that the US and Russia would make a secret deal and "give" Syria to Putin, if he "gave" Novorussia to the Empire. Alternatively, there was the version that Russia would "give" Syria to Trump and he would "give" Novorussia to Putin. The actual narrative does not matter. What matters, A LOT, is that Putin was not presented as the "new Hitler" who would invade Poland and the Baltics, who would poison the Skripals, who would hack DNC servers and "put Trump into power". These plain stupid fairy tales had not credibility in Russia. But Putin "selling out" Novorussia was much more credible, especially after it was clear that Russia did not allow the DNR/LNR forces to seize Mariupol.

I remain convinced that this was the correct decision. Why? Because had the DNR/LNR forces entered Mariupol their critical supply lines would have been cut off by an envelopment maneuver by the Ukrainian forces. Yes, the DNR/LNR forces did have the power needed to take Mariupol, but then they would end up surrounded by Ukronazi forces in a "cauldron/siege" kind of situation which would then have forced Russia to openly intervene to either support these forces. That was a no brainer in military terms, but in political terms this would have been a disaster for Russia and a dream come true to the AngloZionists who could (finally!) "prove" that Russia was involved all along. The folks in the Russian General Staff are clearly much smarter than the couch-generals which were accusing Russia of treason for now letting Mariupol be liberated.

Eventually, both the "sellout Syria" and the "sellout Novorussia" narratives lost their traction and the PSYOPS specialists in the West tried another good one: Putin became the obedient servant of Israel and, personally, Netanyahu. The arguments were very similar: Putin did not allow Syrians (or Russians) to shoot down Israeli aircraft over the Mediterranean or Lebanon, Putin did not use the famous S-400 to protect Syrian targets from Israeli strikes, and Putin did not land an airborne division in Syria to deal with the Takfiris. And nevermind here the fact that the officially declared Russian objectives in Syria were only to " stabilize the legitimate authority and create conditions for a political compromise " (see here for details). The simple truth is that Putin never said that he would liberate each square meter of Syrian land from the Takfiris nor did he promise to defend Syria against Israel!

Still, for a while the Internet was inundated with articles claiming that Putin and Netanyahu were closely coordinating their every step and that Putin was Israel's chum.

Eventually, this canard also lost a lot of credibility. After all, most folks are smart enough to realize that if Putin wanted to help Israel, all he had to do is well exactly *nothing*: the Takfiris would take Damascus and it would be "game over" for a civilized Syria and the Israelis would have a perfect pretext to intervene.

As I have already mentioned in a past article , these were the original Israeli goals for Syria:

Bring down a strong secular Arab state along with its political structure, armed forces and security services. Create total chaos and horror in Syria justifying the creation of a "security zone" by Israel not only in the Golan, but further north. Trigger a civil war in Lebanon by unleashing the Takfiri crazies against Hezbollah. Let the Takfiris and Hezbollah bleed each other to death, then create a "security zone", but this time in Lebanon. Prevent the creation of a Shia axis Iran-Iraq-Syria-Lebanon. Breakup Syria along ethnic and religious lines. Create a Kurdistan which could then be used against Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran. Make it possible for Israel to become the uncontested power broker in the Middle-East and forces the KSA, Qatar, Oman, Kuwait and all others to have to go to Israel for any gas or oil pipeline project. Gradually isolate, threaten, subvert and eventually attack Iran with a wide regional coalition of forces. Eliminate all center of Shia power in the Middle-East.

It is quite easy nowadays to prove the two following theses: 1) Israel dismally failed to achieve ANY of the above set goals and 2) the Russian intervention is the one single most important factor which prevented Israel from achieving these goals (the 2nd most important one was the heroic support given by Iran and Hezbollah who, quite literally, "saved the day", especially during the early phases of the Russian intervention. Only an ignorant or dishonest person could seriously claim that Russia and Israel are working together when Russia, in reality, completely defeated Israel in Syria.

Still, while the first PSYOP (Putin the new Hitler) failed, and while the second PSYOP (Putin the sellout) also failed, the PSYOP specialists in the West came up with a much more potentially dangerous and effective PSYOP operation.

But first, they did something truly brilliant: they realized that their best allies in Russia would not be the (frankly, clueless) "liberals" but that they would find a much more powerful "ally" in those nostalgic of the Soviet Union. This I have to explain in some detail.

First, there is one thing human psychology which I have observed all my life: we tend to remember the good and forget the bad. Today, most of what I remember from boot-camp (and even "survival week") sounds like fun times. The truth is that while in boot camp I hated almost every day. In a similar way, a lot of Russian have developed a kind of nostalgia for the Soviet era. I can understand that. After all, during the 50s the USSR achieved a truly miraculous rebirth, then in the 60s and 70s there were a lot of true triumphs. Finally, even in the hated 80s the USSR did achieve absolutely spectacular things (in science, technology, etc.). This is all true. What is often forgotten is that at the same time, the Soviet society was oppressive, the corrupt and geriatric CPSU ran everything and was mostly hated, the Russian people were afraid of the KGB and could not enjoy the freedoms folks in the US or Europe had. In truth, it was a mixed bag, but it is easy to remember only the good stuff.

Furthermore, a lot of folks who had high positions during the Soviet era did lose it all. And now that Russia is objectively undergoing various difficult trials, these folks have "smelled blood" and they clearly hope that by some miracle Putin will be overthrown. He won't, if only for the following very basic reasons:

The kind of state apparatus which protects Putin today can easily deal with this new, pseudo (I will explain below why I say "pseudo") patriotic opposition. In the ranks of this opposition there is absolutely no credible leader (remember the chart above!) This opposition mostly complains, but offers no real solutions.

The core of this opposition is formed of Communists and Communist sympathizers who absolutely hate Putin for his (quite outspoken) anti-Communism. Let's call them "new Communists" or "Neo-Communists". And here is what makes them much more dangerous than the "liberal" opposition: the Neo-Communists are often absolutely right.

The (in my opinion) sad reality is that, for all his immense qualities, Putin is indeed a liberal, at least an economic sense. This manifests itself in two very different ways:

Putin has still not removed all of the 5th columnists (aka "Atlantic Integrationists" aka "Washington consensus" types) from power. Yes, he did ditch Medvedev, but others (Nabiulina, Siluanov, etc.) are still there. Putin inherited a very bad system where almost all they key actors were 5th columnists. Not just a few (in)famous individuals, but an entire CLASS (in a Marxist sense of the term) of people who hate anything "social" and who support "liberal" ideas just so they can fill their pockets.

Here is the paradox: the USSR died in 1991-1993, Putin is an anti-Communist, but there STILL is a (Soviet-style) Nomenklatura in Russia, except for now they are often referred to as "oligarchs" (which is incorrect because, say, the Ukrainian oligarch truly decide the fate of the nation whereas this new Russian Nomenklatura does not decide the fate of Russia as a whole, but they have a major influence in the financial sector, which is what they care mostly about).

So we have something of a, maybe not quite "perfect", but still very dangerous storm looming over Russia. How? Consider this:

Under Putin the Russian foreign policy has been such a success that even the Russian liberals, very reluctantly, admit that he did a pretty good job. However, the internal, many financial, policies of Russia have been a disaster. Just one example, the fact that the major Russian banks are bloated with their immense revenues, did not prevent millions of Russians from living in poverty and many hundreds of thousands of Russian small/family businesses of going under due to the very high interest rates.

One key problem in Russia is that both the Central Bank and the major commercial banks only care about their profits. What Russia truly needs is a state-owed DEVELOPMENT bank whose goal would not be millions and billions for the few, but making it possible for the creativity of the Russian people to truly blossom. Today, we see the exact opposite in Russia.

So what is my beef with this social ( if not quite "Socialist") opposition?

They are so focused on their narrow complaints that they completely miss the big picture. Let me explain.

First, Russia has been in a state of war against the US+EU+NATO since at least 2015. Yes, this war is 80% informational, 15% economic and only 5% kinetic. But it is a very real war nonetheless. The key characteristic of a real war is that victory is only achieved by one side, the other is fully defeated. Which means that the war between the AngloZionist Empire is an existential one: one party will win and survive, the other one will disappear and will be replaced with a qualitatively new polity/society. The Neo-Communist Russian opposition steadfastly pretends like there is no war, like all the losses (economic and human) are only the result of corruption and incompetence. They forget that during the last war between Russia and the "United West" German tanks were at the outskirts of Moscow.

Well, of course they know that. But they pretend not to. And this is why I think of them as the 6th column (as opposed to the 5th, openly "liberal" and pro-Western one).

Second, while this opposition is, in my opinion, absolutely correct in deploring Putin's apparent belief that following the advice of what I would call "IMF types" is safer than following recommendations of what could be loosely called "opposition economists" (here I think of Glaziev, whose views I personally fully support), they fail to realize the risks involved in crushing the "IMF types". The sad truth is that Russian banks are very powerful and that in many ways, the state cannot afford totally alienating them. Right now the banks support Putin only because he supports them. But if Putin decided to follow the advice of, say, Glaziev and his supporters, the Russian bankers would react with a "total war" against Putin.

If you study Russian history, you will soon realize that Russia did superbly with military enemies, did very averagely with diplomatic efforts (which often negated military victories) and did terribly with what we could call the "internal opposition".

So let me repeat it here: I do not consider NATO or the US as credible military threats to Russia, unless they decide to use nuclear weapons, at which point both Russia and the West would suffer terribly. But even in this scenario, Russia would prevail (Russia has a 10-15 year advantage against the US in both civilian and military nuclear technologies and the Russian society is far more survivable one -- if this topic is of interest to you, just read Dmitry Orlov's books who explains it all better than I ever could). I have always, and still do, consider that the real danger for Putin and those who share his views is the internal, often "insider", opposition in Russia. They were always the ones to present the biggest threat to any Russian ruler, from the Czars to Stalin.

This new Neo-Communist 6th column is, however, a much more dangerous threat to the future of Russia than the pro-western 5th columnists. Some of their tactics are extremely devious. For example, one of the things you hear most often from these folks is this: "unless Putin does X, Y or Z, there is a risk of a bloody revolution". Having listened to many tens of their videos, I can tell you with total security that far from fearing a bloody revolution, these folks in reality dream of such a revolution.

"Too often in our history we have seen that instead of an opposition to the government we are confronted with an opposition to Russia herself. And we know how this ends: with the destruction of the state as such".

Now, if you think as a true patriot of Russia, you have to realize that Russia suffered from not one, but two, truly horrible revolutions: in 1917 and 1991. In each case the consequences of these revolutions (irrespective of how justified they might have appeared at the time) were absolutely horrible: both in 1917 and in 1991 Russia almost completely vanished as a country, and millions suffered terribly. I now hold is as axiomatic that nothing would be worse for Russia than *any* revolution, no matter what ideology feeds it or how bad the "regime in power" might appear to be.

Putin is acutely aware of that (see image).

These Neo-Communists would very much disagree with me. They "warn" about a revolution, while in reality trying to create the conditions for one.

Now let me be clear: I am absolutely convinced that NO revolution (Neo-Communist or other) is possible in Russia. More accurately, while I do believe that an attempt for a revolution could happen, I believe that any coup/revolution against Putin is bound to fail. Why? The graphic above.

Even if by some (horrible) miracle, it was possible to defeat/neutralize the combined power of the FSB+FSO+National Guard+Armed forces (which I find impossible), this "success" would be limited to Moscow or, at most, the Moscow Oblast. Beyond that it is all "Putin territory". In terms of firepower, the Moscow Oblast has a lot of first-rate units, but it does not even come close to what the "rest of Russia" could engage (just the 58th Army in the south would be unstoppable). But even that is not truly crucial. The truly crucial thing following any coup/revolution would be the 70%+ of Russian people who, for the first time in centuries, truly believe that Putin stands for their interest and that he is "their man". These people will never accept any illegal attempt to remove Putin from power. That is the key reason why no successful revolution is currently possible in Russia.

But while any revolution/coup would be bound to fail, it could very much result in a bloodbath way bigger than what happened in 1993 (where the military was mostly not engaged in the events).

Now lets add it all up.

There is a very vocal internal opposition to Putin in Russia which is most unlikely to ever get real popular support, but which could possibly unite enough of the nostalgics of the Soviet era to create a real crisis. This internal opposition clearly and objectively weakens the authority/reputation of Putin, which has been main goal of the western "alphabet soup" ever since Putin came to power.

This internal opposition, being mostly nostalgics of the Soviet era, will get no official support from the West, but it will enjoy a maximal covert support from the western "alphabet soup".

Finally, this Neo-Communist opposition will never seize power, but it might create a very real internal political crisis which will very much weaken Putin and the Eurasian Sovereignists.

So what is the solution?

Putin needs to preempt any civil unrest. Removing Medvedev and replacing him by Mishustin was the correct move, but it was also too little too late. Frankly, I believe that it is high time for Putin to finally openly break with the "Washington consensus types" and listen to Glaziev who, at least, is no Communist.

Russia has always been a collectivistic society, and she needs to stop apologizing (even just mentally) for this. Instead, she should openly and fully embrace her collectivistic culture and traditions and show the "Washington consensus" types to the door.

Yes, the Moscow elites will be furious, but it is also high time to tell these folks that they don't own Russia, and that while they could make a killing prostituting themselves to the Empire, most Russian don't want to do that.

The bottom line is this: Putin represents something very unique and very precious: he is a true Russian patriot, but he is not one nostalgic for the days of the Soviet Union. Right now, he is the only (or one of very few) Russian politician which can claim this quality. He needs to preempt the crisis which the Neo-Communists could trigger not by silencing them, but by realizing that on some issues the Russian people do, in fact, agree with them (even if they are not willing to call for a revolution).

Does that sound complicated or even convoluted? If it does, it is because it is. But for all the nuances we can discern a bottom line: it is not worth prevailing (or even failing) if that weakens/threatens Russia. Right now, the Neo-Communist opposition is, objectively, a threat to the stability and prosperity of Russia. That does NOT, however, mean that these folks are always wrong. They often are spot on, 100% correct.

Putin needs to prove them wrong by listening to them and do the right thing.

Difficult? Yes. Doable? Yes. Therefore he has to do it.

anno nimus , says: Show Comment April 30, 2020 at 9:44 pm GMT

Russia needs to be strong for the sake of global civilization, human decency, religious freedom, etc, not only for her own good. going back to communism and Godlessness should be unthinkable. nor should we sell our souls for 30 kopeks of silver to become the dumping ground for western filth and surplus.
Russia has the unique position, the space and resources, an intelligent population, Orthodox tradition to show mankind that a decent, safe, compassionate, sound existence is possible.
although great leaders are a gift from Above, the state also should make every effort to identify and prepare Putin's successor while strengthening the institutions so that the people will perceive them as their own and will not be tempted to support revolutionary radicals again.
Derer , says: Show Comment April 30, 2020 at 10:49 pm GMT
First of all, Russian electorate have much better sources and the grasp of the international political scene than the American media's self-centered pseudo-trues.

Putin's obvious pros:

-Reclaimed Russian crucial energy industry from the pillaging by Yeltsin oligarchs. Now babysat by the UK and Israel. -Russian voters' motto: "We vote for a leader that is most criticized and slandered by our enemies and adversaries. Vote almost never for their selected puppet a la Kasparov." -Putin's brilliant move to reclaimed Crimea -- administratively attached to Ukraine in 1954 by a communist dictate after being centuries part of Russia -- by a democratic mean. -Western sanctions are viewed by the Russian electorate as a declaration of the "enemy status". Furthermore, they are also viewed as a sinister attempt to slow down the Russian economic progress. -NATO backstabbing expansion to Russian border. Continuation of Western military encircling Russia -- US military in Poland. -Opposing Western clumsy interference in Ukraine or in Georgia. Liberating S. Ossetia from the Georgia's lunatic who is now Ukraine deputy prime minister.
Fiendly Neighbourhood Terrorist , says: Website Show Comment May 1, 2020 at 1:17 am GMT
I have always seen Putin as a late, reluctant, and often only partially effective reacter to a crisis, never someone who proactively acts to defuse one before it gets bad. I will repeat what I've said many, many times: in 2014 Putin could have sent two battalions of Spetsnaz into Kiev, routed the Ukranazi coup regime, reinstated Yanukovych, and withdrawn with the warning that if there was ever again any attempt to stage another Maidan Russian troops would be back and this time to stay. Instead he got Russia blamed for an invasion he should have but did not carry out, and consequently sanctions that are still in effect to this day, not to speak of a NATO proxy thrust against the Russian heartland. (That Russia needed the sanctions and that they were good for Russia is another thing entirely; it isn't as though Putin planned them to turn out like that.)

In Syria in 2015 Putin waited until the government was in desperate straits -- similar to the final stages of the Libyan government forces' collapse in 2011 as Obama's terrorists advanced on Tripoli -- before sending in small commando detachments and the air force. And even then the failure to defend Syria, an ally of Russia, which has given Russia bases, against zionazi bombing is inexcusable. For one thing it cost Russia a valuable reconnaissance plane with priceless trained crew, after which Putin first rushed to absolve Nazinyahu of blame before even calling the crew's families. For another the refusal to use the S 400 merely gives the Amerikastanis an excuse to portray the S 400s as hyped, ineffective weapons Russia does not dare to actually use. How is showing Putin's obvious affinity to the zionazi pseudostate "anti Russian" in any way? It's the absolute and obvious truth, from Putin's own record.

This is also why Putin will do nothing about the capitalist leeches still sucking Russia dry (many of whom are zionazi citizens); he will have to be forced into it and then will try to get away with cosmetic measures, leaving as much undone as he possibly can. That he has not already eliminated the oligarchy is proof enough of that. No amount of Saker excuses is enough to hide the fact; what could the banks do to harm Putin, given the popularity the Saker keeps touting? You'll see that the Saker is very careful not to say anything about what they could, he just says that they could. You'd almost think he just made it up.

I agree about the Moscow "liberals"; I met a few of them and they're always smartly dressed, fluent in English -- with an inevitable American accent -- and they hate Russia more than anything. I recall meeting a couple in this town in late 2014 or early 2015. I remember saying that I support Russia's help to the Donbass freedom fighters. The woman's eyes went round. "But why? This is a great burden for Russia, none of our business, we should never have got involved " There is an excellent argument for shifting the capital from Moscow back to St Petersburg, or, if that's too strategically vulnerable, to Volgograd or some other city in the Russian interior.

By the way, as one of the "neo communists", as the Saker dismissively calls us -- in an obvious effort to conflate us with the neo-nazis -- let me ask a question: let's suppose everything the Saker says is correct. Well, then, is Putin immortal? No? So what happens when he dies or retires? Who will take over? Will the "pro-Putin population" switch its loyalty to a replacement from Putin's party, given that most of them are so despised that United Russia keeps losing local elections from Moscow to Vladivostok? If not, what happens but either a total change of course or .a bloody revolution?

What happens then?

Passer by , says: Show Comment May 1, 2020 at 3:21 am GMT
I can certainly say that there are people in United Russia who quite openly work for the West and push for western liberal projects in Russia, as well as attack patriotic forces.

What kind of joke is that to have people like this in the so called ruling party and in various Duma comitees? Why is this even allowed? Why are they still there?

Art , says: Show Comment May 1, 2020 at 6:02 am GMT
Russia needs a depositor credit union type local banking system. Only the local depositors would own the bank. The bank's functioning management would be controlled by the owners/depositors. One depositor -- one vote.

These banks would make loans only to local businesses and homeowners. They would have nothing to do with Moscow. They would build honesty and stability.

MarylinM , says: Show Comment May 1, 2020 at 6:28 am GMT
That poll showing Putin on top of everybody else, tells me that he is the Single-Point-Failure. If he croaks, so does Russia. Very much like Jesus, or Nicholas the II, or Gorbachov, before him -- all obrazovanshchiki, educated past the point of their intelligence level . The jerk already swallowed the virus-thing, hook and sinker. He's gonna be reeled-in in no time.
Art , says: Show Comment May 1, 2020 at 6:51 am GMT
As a citizen of one of the top ten nations on our Earth (US) -- I believe that Putin is the savviest, most stable conscientious foreign policy leader of the lot.

He handled both the Ukraine and Syria without getting into all out wars. Both a considerable achievement, considering Jews played major antagonistic roles in both confrontations.

Derer , says: Show Comment May 1, 2020 at 6:53 am GMT
@Fiendly Neighbourhood Terrorist He should have annexed East Ukraine with 12 mil Russians and its historical Russian cities. When McCain and Biden's puppets were installed in Kiev they banned the Russian language -- that was the right time to act and killings would have been avoided.
Astuteobservor II , says: Show Comment May 1, 2020 at 9:43 am GMT
1000% there is.

I am sure they are salivating at the idea of another Yeltsin or Gorbachev coming into power after Putin.

Putin's number 1 priority right now should be grooming a competent successor, or Russia could get rape again after he is gone.

John Thurloe , says: Show Comment May 1, 2020 at 10:25 am GMT
Russia and China deeply underestimate the extent and determination of the US and toadies to have in place well funded campaigns to blacken those countries names, reputations and standing. It's awful listening to Chinese or Russian officials making ritual formal protests. And then doing nothing. Letting their country be undermined and infiltrated, allowing the minds of the public elsewhere be poisoned. This is how the Colour Revolutions get their traction.

It's the continual, weak, feeble and inept lack of action by Russia and China against the western engines of smear. And this state of affairs seriously disheartens their allies and supporters. Please stop being too reasonable, find your backbone and righteousness and FIGHT! For Pete's sake.

animalogic , says: Show Comment May 1, 2020 at 10:54 am GMT
@Passer by Sad to say that Putin should have done more internally.
Saker 's point about a national bank is telling. Russia's Central Bank should have it's neoliberals attrited. Russia's Anglo-zionists should have also been quietly & invisibly defanged & sent into "outer-space". More actions against NGO's need to also be taken.
A nation in Russia's precarious position re: the West, can afford only so much internal treachery .
This is not to suggest any of this would be easy. However, Putin has had & still has considerable popular support -- political Capital capable of being used to take risky but "right" reforms.
ComradePuff , says: Show Comment May 1, 2020 at 11:13 am GMT
I'm an American living in Moscow for the last 5 years. I've also had the special privilege to earn a masters degree in politics and economics at the Ministry of Foreign Affair's university, MGIMO. I can say, as someone who has viewed this situation here from virtually every angle possible as a foreigner; "Putin" has done nothing good for Russia domestically that has not been an unplanned side effect of sanctions. And don't get me wrong, the sanctions were the best thing that could have happened here. But all the official pro-Russia grandstanding on the international stage aside, there are endless news stories of Russia lobbying for readmission to the club, pleading with the US to cooperate and a return to the status-quo. The people who make the policy here and run the institutions are all holdovers from the 90's. Their overarching concern is that Russia -- ie the elites themselves -- are "treated with respect" by the Western plutocracy.

But what has changed here since 2014? An explosion in traffic cameras and fines, more restrictions (prescriptions and bans) on medicines, inflation, reforms (attacks) in pensions and healthcare, skyrocketing housing costs and an simmering education crisis from preschool to university where money increasingly buys limited space over need or merit. Now like a rotten cherry on top, there is this quarantine which seems arbitrary except when you realize the whole police force has been turned against the citizens to check QR code passes. Who is deemed essential is also arbitrary and favors the government while bankrupting everyone else. Gasterbyters, the backbone of the economy, are literally destitute. Russians also dislike seeing the government luxuriously spend resources in the form of political-point scoring coronavirus aid to the US and Italy, and then abruptly flip-flopping on the severity of the pandemic at home. On tv its is Corona Vision 24/7 here, while families with small children are forced out of work and cramped into tiny apartments in ugly neighborhoods, forbidden to walk more than 10 meters from their door, their money and sanity running out. Russians who are able, flout the quarantine at every opportunity, more concerned about being harassed by police than getting sick.

There is a lot more I could say, but I will leave it at on this note; This new wave of disillusionment is not coming from the West. The West has virtually no direct influence here anymore. This is all homegrown.

obabajko , says: Show Comment May 1, 2020 at 12:27 pm GMT
Although I have admired President Putin for many years now, I have never agreed with his economic policies. It was sad to read that he fired S. Glazyev as an adviser. When will President Putin see that following western style economic policies is a tragedy waiting to happen for Russia. As is happening now to most of the western countries, especially the US and EU.
Old and Grumpy , says: Show Comment May 1, 2020 at 12:27 pm GMT
@Fiendly Neighbourhood Terrorist Its a great mystery to me why Putin released Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Maybe there was a good reason. No clue, it just seems odd especially when you realize this freed oligarch was the power behind Browder's Magnitzky Act.
Jake , says: Show Comment May 1, 2020 at 2:30 pm GMT
'Remembering only the good and forgetting the bad' is what every bad ruler, every bad culture, demands of those it misleads.

The Anglo-Zionist Empire has been the master of that con game for its entire existence, back to the start of English Reformation. Bolsheviks were clumsy brutes compared to Anglo-Zionists even in their early days when they lacked sophistication and finesse.

Agent76 , says: Show Comment May 1, 2020 at 4:32 pm GMT
Apr 19, 2020 US corporate takeover -- Biden 2020 Today, the U.S is living through a power grab by lobbyists and moneyed interests in government -- the way Russia did after the Soviet collapse of the 1990s.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/gnfnApc6XIA?feature=oembed

Apr 2, 2020 Putin reveals KEY to political success: the poor man

Which is the bigger political influence on President Putin? Multinational corporations, filthy rich oligarchs or financial institutions? He asserts -- it is the sentiment of 'the common man' that is responsible for his popularity and long-standing political career.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/BaZCTz2id-c?feature=oembed

Mar 12, 2020 Putin: The US Made A Colony Out Of Ukraine But They Want It Sustained By Russian Money!

The 20 Questions with Vladimir Putin project is an interview with the President of Russia on the most topical subjects of social and political life in Russia and the world.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/civa7sI9TGM?feature=oembed

Cyrano , says: Show Comment May 1, 2020 at 4:34 pm GMT
@ComradePuff If it's so bad in Russia, why don't you f ** k off back to your home country were everything works perfectly?
Cyrano , says: Show Comment May 1, 2020 at 5:29 pm GMT
I am afraid I'm going to have to disagree with you Saker on this issue. I just can't see how a communist can be a traitor to their country. Some of the biggest patriots ever produced in history have been communists. Not just in Russia, but in other countries like North Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, China. They are willing to do anything for their country. Same thing with modern communists, I don't see them betraying their country for personal gain.

My theory is like this: Patriotism is different in Capitalist countries (or as they like to call themselves democracies) than in Communist countries. First of all, Capitalism has 2 types of elites -- real ones and political elites -- who are nothing more than domestic servants, in other words nobodies. Communism usually has only one type of elites -- political. They are the only game in town.

I know that they ascribed terms such as cult of personalities to Communist leaders, but the real megalomaniacs and narcissists can really be found among the 2 types of capitalist elites. Those are the one that are really in love with themselves.

So how does patriotism work in communism vs. capitalism? Well, for one thing, patriotism means love for one's country. As we all know, a country is a collection of dead rocks, (hopefully) some arable land, few mountains and so on. Basically a country usually needs a spokesperson. That's where the elites come in. They are the spokespersons for the needs of the country.

I believe that communist elites are more honest spokespersons than capitalist ones. Why? Well for one thing all communist elites were usually 1st generation elites, meaning they were new on the job and they didn't have the span of few generations time to degenerate like the capitalist elites. Communist elites for the most could still remember the time when they were not elites but very ordinary people -- except maybe now the Kim dynasty in North Korea which is in its 3rd generation of dynastic cycle.

But still, the flow of patriotism is very similar in both "communist" and capitalist countries. Patriotism flows from the poor dumbos to the rich and powerful elites -- whether they are political or economic elites. Patriotism whose intended recipient is the fatherland always gets intercepted by the elites and then processed.

Basically, what that means is that when an ordinary person expresses love and affection for their country -- it's usually ends up being manifested as love and affection for their elites.

Remember, a country is just a pile of rocks and some other geological features, -- doesn't know how to process affection from patriots. But the elites do, and they are the usual beneficiaries of patriotism.

If love for your country is always a love for the elites, why do the stupid always fall for the same trick? Well, I guess there are not too many options left, one of them being a traitor. Still, I believe that communist elites were more honest brokers and managers of patriotic love, because the managed to pass more of the patriotism to its intended target -- the homeland, than it was ever case with capitalist elites.

Sure, Stalin had few dachas and property that he would have been hard-pressed to explain how he earned, but it was nothing compared to the spoils from patriotism that elites in capitalism receive as a payout for being spokespersons for the needs of their countries.

I just don't see a communist doing something with personal benefit in mind first, and putting the well-being of their country as a second consideration. It usually doesn't happen, and hopefully the new generation of communists in Russia will keep up with that tradition.

The Grim Joker , says: Show Comment May 1, 2020 at 7:02 pm GMT
@Cyrano Because he is one of those chronic complainers. We dont want him here because he will change the words "Russia" and "Moscow" in his comment to "USA and Washington" and just reprint the comment again. That comrade is all puffed up, no pun intended, with his dialogue.
Ilya G Poimandres , says: Show Comment May 1, 2020 at 7:42 pm GMT
@jbwilson24 I know what you mean, but you are splitting hairs -- a supremacist is a supremacist is a supremacist. German supremacist, Anglo-Saxon supremacist, Jewish supremacist -- it all leads to the same result.

Ukraine is dominated by supremacists. That all of Jewish supremacy, Nationalist Socialist supremacy (the rank parts of the ideology mind you), ISIS, find themselves working and cooperating in a historically alien land, shows that supremacists really don't mind working with each other, before whatever the greater enemy they attack is destroyed.. Kinda like the prelude to Highlander!

Agent76 , says: Show Comment May 1, 2020 at 7:49 pm GMT
25.12. 2015 NATO: Seeking Russia's Destruction Since 1949

Baker told Gorbachev: "Look, if you remove your [300,000] troops [from east Germany] and allow unification of Germany in NATO, NATO will not expand one inch to the east."

http://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2015/12/25/nato-seeking-russia-destruction-since-1949.html

Nov 29, 2016 The Map That Shows Why Russia Fears War With US

https://www.youtube.com/embed/L6hIlfHWaGU?feature=oembed

Mustapha Mond , says: Show Comment May 1, 2020 at 7:51 pm GMT
Saker's blind love for all things Putin, a faith in the man against all facts and logic, has continually amazed me for years.

Putin is using Syria for Russia's advantage: 1.) a Mediterranean port at Tartus and airfield at Kheimem; 2.) as a 'live fire' weapons testing and demonstration area, much as Israel uses Gaza for same. Sales of Russian armaments have soared since entering Syria.

As I recall, Putin has allowed at least two Dunkirk moments, when he had ISIS on the ropes and then agreed to a cease fire when his generals were furious at not being permitted to finish the Takfiris off, once and for all. I, too, was furious at the time, predicting they would simply re-trench, re-arm and continue to terrorize the hapless Syrians, which they did for years, and may even make a comeback from Iraq (with America and Israel's help, of course).

Same idiocy was applied, and is still being applied regarding Turkey's open and obvious arming and supporting the terrorist scum of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) in Idlib, as innocent Syrians continue to suffer therefrom, and we daily read of the brave Syrian fighters' being killed and maimed by these Al-Qaeda butchers .

He has let Syria's eastern oil fields fall into the hands of the US, and allowed the Turds, excuse me, the Kurds far too much leeway in the north.

He even allows Israel to bomb Syrian territory with absolute impunity, killing countless Syrian, Hezbollah and Iranian soldiers in the process, when a few freely operated S-300 batteries would allow the Syrians to smoke the Israeli's missiles with ease, and protect their homeland from hundreds of brazen attacks by the Jews. Yet he denies the Syrians such freedom, allowing the Israelis to continue their onslaught unabated.

Why? Why does he ignore the advice of his top generals to wipe out ISIS when the opportunities arose years ago, and allow Israel to continually attack with high-precision missiles Syrian/Hezbollah/Iranian fighters, just short of allowing the Jews to directly bomb Assad and Damascus into the stone age, again, with complete impunity? Certainly, the existing partition of Syria could have been easily avoided long ago, if he simply followed his general's advice.

And why did he come out and endorse Netanyahu for PM last year, despite continually saying Russia does not stick its nose into other countries' political affairs?

I suggest that an incident from 2006 may hold a clue, and that we may simply be seeing another "Epstein" job that Mossad and friends are so good at arranging. Read this article about the incident with Putin and that young male child, Nikita Konkin, and decide for yourself: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/nikita-konkin-boy-who-vladimir-putin-kissed-on-the-stomach-speaks-about-the-spontaneous-gesture-a6829786.html

But to my mind, any world 'leader' who simply cannot control himself publicly and feels compelled to forcibly lift a small child's t-shirt and slather the tot's bare stomach with kisses, right in front of countless on-lookers and the international press, in Russia's most famous public square, and then declare to the BBC thereafter that, "I wanted to cuddle him like a kitten ", possibly reveals a great deal about why Putin seems to so frequently kiss another offensive body part publicly, that being Israel's obnoxious, murderous butt ..

vot tak , says: Show Comment May 1, 2020 at 9:07 pm GMT
Well despite all the "well wishers" here and against saker's expert advice about what she should be doing, Russia is still somehow alive and kicking and generally getting to be a better place to live. Imagine that. While the countries the "well wishers" hail from are not becoming better places to live and rather than alive and kicking are much better described as zombiefied and twitching.
Johan , says: Show Comment May 1, 2020 at 9:16 pm GMT
"Russia today is a very tough nut to crack for western subversion/PSYOP operations."

Correction, democratic Russia is still a tough nut to crack. But Putin cannot rule forever, and so long as Russia is a democracy, and when there is no longer a strong and charismatic leader, it is in considerable danger of subversion by the 'AngloZionists'. You bet that they are waiting for this, the current situation being a preparation, to keep the fire burning, but when and if Putin is gone, the Western trojan horses already inside will unleash their puppets of disruption, and the AngloZionists and their Western puppets outside will attack it vehemently, like a pack of wolves.

AnonFromTN , says: Show Comment May 1, 2020 at 11:59 pm GMT
As one Russian joke puts it, lets' have cutlets separately and flies separately.

One thing is Youtube, FB, Wiki, and the rest of globohomo-controlled media. They would host anything anti-Putin, because Putin is continuously stepping on the most sensitive part of their anatomy: the wallet. If globohomo hates you, you must have done at least something good.

The other thing is the feelings of Russians who actually live in the country. They rightfully feel that oligarchs and the state that often acts as their cover are robbing them. They clearly see that education is going down from Soviet levels (although it still has a long way to go to become as dismal as the US education). They see that the best part of healthcare is the holdover from Soviet times, whereas "progressive" paid medicine is fraud and extortion. But that's exactly what "healthcare" is in the US, as current epidemic demonstrated in no uncertain terms. They also see that recent pension "reform" was designed to rob them yet again. What's more, they are at least 90% right.

So, maybe it's not the "6th column", after all? Maybe Russia is actually acquiring an opposition worth the name? Patriotic opposition, in contrast to "liberal opposition" consisting exclusively of traitors? If so, it's good, not bad, for the country. Nobody is infallible, Putin included.

Robjil , says: Show Comment May 2, 2020 at 12:07 am GMT
@Quartermaster The US invaded Ukraine with Nuland's thugs during the Sochi Olympics

Crimea went back home. It did not want be part of Nulandistan.

Donbass does not want to be a US/Israel colony. This is the reason it revolted.

Notice the recent Ukrainegate nonsense. Why would USIsrael care so much about Ukraine if Ukraine was really an independent nation? It is not, it is a USIsrael colony -- Nulandistan.

FB , says: Website Show Comment May 2, 2020 at 2:11 am GMT
@ComradePuff First I see you just parachuted into this website with this, your very first post

We usually have a welcoming ceremony for new trolls

We look at the cartoonish drivel they post and quickly point out glaring giveaways

Like 'Gasterbyters' which is not actually a word in any language

Your instructions from your troll room supervisor may have referred to the German word 'gastarbeiter' which means 'guest worker'

This expression is not a proper noun and does not get capitalized

And you're trying to tell us you have earned a master's degree from one of Moscow's most prestigious universities..?

Yeah no, I don't think so cheeseball

Guest workers are 'crucial' to Russia..?

Again total bunk the only countries where guest workers might be 'essential' is in the Gulf oil monarchies, where they often outnumber the natives

The US is not going to collapse if the Mexican workers take a beating neither will Germany nor any industrial country with foreign workers why should Russia..?

And then your main whopper NOBODY in the Putin administration is 'begging' the west for anything much less to be accepted back in some 'club'

Russia has moved on a long time ago they never cared about being in some sort of 'club' to begin with international relations isn't junior high, which one would expect a 'graduate' of international relations to know

All Russia ever cared about was having normal relations friendly if possible, but on equal footing the entire tone of your fantasy is straight out of the '90s only deluded Washington hacks still dream that we are living in the '90s

In case you haven't noticed Russia has much bigger fish to fry than to obsess over a tottering empire

The partnership with China for instance the country with the most money, plus the country with the most advanced military technology

I'd say it's not actually looking good for Exceptionalistan

Alfred , says: Show Comment May 2, 2020 at 6:00 am GMT
@Derer Georgia's lunatic who is now Ukraine deputy prime minister

I think Saakashvili has not made it yet. He is being opposed by a lot of the Jews who control this "country". Last week, the guy investigating "corruption" was sacked. His replacement was a Jew. It is just so funny. Like a theater.

Almost all the oligarchs are Jewish -- courtesy of the World Bank and (((Western))) banks. It is amazing that in a country of allegedly 42 million they cannot find an ethnic Slav to get the job. I do not use the term Ukrainian as it is not really one country.

Forget the bluster. I suspect they want to bring in Saakashvili because he can bring in more loans from the IMF. His backers are in the USA.

BTW, the new American ambassador to Ukraine is a retired US Army general. That should give you some idea as to their line of thinking. However, I suspect that he is too knowledgeable to want to start a war with Russia.

The departing ambassador is a female from the Ukrainian diaspora in Canada. A Ukrainian "Nationalist" by descent. Incapable of thinking of the interests of this unfortunate country.

[May 05, 2020] UK government experince with the White Helmets and the Skripal affair definitly halps in anti-china propaganda.

Highly recommended!
May 05, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

begob , May 5 2020 2:08 utc | 114

In the UK, looks like Tom Tugendhat, chair of the foreign affairs committee, is spreading the China-did-it propaganda, after his comments on the BBC last week. He can file it alongside his promotion of the White Helmets and the Skripal affair.

[May 05, 2020] German Regulator Plans to Deny Nord Stream 2 Waiver from New Gas Directive

May 05, 2020 | sputniknews.com

javascript:void(0)

Handelsblatt newspaper reported, citing the draft decision of the Federal Network Agency of Germany (BNA), that the BNA intends to reject an application filed by Nord Stream 2 for an exemption of the pipeline project from the requirements of the updated EU gas directive.

The agency announced in mid-January that it had accepted applications from the Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 operators to exempt the gas pipelines from the requirements of the EU gas directive. According to Handelsblatt, the agency earlier on Friday sent a draft decision to the parties involved in the process. The newspaper added that the BNA will accept replies from them until 8 May, after which it will "promptly" make a final decision .

The reason for the rejection of the Nord Stream 2 application was the fact that in order to exempt the gas pipeline from the updated directive, the pipeline must have been completed before May 2019. Nord Stream 2 insisted that it was necessary to not proceed from the "construction" point of this requirement, but to take into account the fact that "billions of investments had already been made in accordance with the previous legal regime by the time the new directives of the domestic gas market came into force".

The spokesman for Nord Stream 2, Jens Mueller, said in January that the project meets all the requirements for its exemption from the rules of the updated EU gas directive in Germany and that this also applies to the completion date of the project.

[May 05, 2020] Five eyes, the anglosphere intel and propaganda warriors are the best in the world

Notable quotes:
"... When the people who made fake claims about Iraq's WMD, about Russiagate, about Iran's danger, are claiming that the thing isn't manmade, then either it's not manmade or it's US-made and the claim is a lie (what we expect from US intelligence agencies) and a cover-up. ..."
May 05, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

karlof1 , May 4 2020 20:57 utc | 35

In many Ways, Trump reminds me of a Hitler/Stalin admirer. He demands certain results; if you don't supply them, at least Trump will just fire you instead of having you shot or sent to the Gulag -- Evidence of the many IG firings as this article notes .

The daily lies and bald-faced propaganda is at the point where many are aware but still all too many remain oblivious or are Brown Shirts in all but outward appearance. Pompeo would be a perfect example of a clone if Hitler had a PR spokesperson spewing lies daily for the press & public to digest without any thinking. Imagine Hitler with Twitter.

None of the above is meant to denigrate; rather, it's to put them into proper perspective. I invite barflies to click here and just look at the headlines of the posted news items--that site's biggest failing was to omit similar criticism of Obama, Clinton, and D-Party pukes in general, although that doesn't render today's headlines false.

Will the coming Great Depression 2.0 be global or confined to NATO nations? As with the first Great Depression, it will be restricted to being Trans-Atlantic for that's where the dollar zone and Neoliberalism overlap. The emerging dollar-free Eurasian trade zone

Peter AU1 , May 4 2020 21:32 utc | 42

karlof1

Many of Goering's quotes are very accurate as to human nature. US took in Nazi and Japanese scientists. It wouldn't have left the propaganda behind. Goering's quote about taking people to war - nazi's were obviously very good at it as the Germans fought until the very end. US peasants will likely do the same.

Peter AU1 , May 4 2020 21:51 utc | 47
The anti China crap filling the MSM is anglosphere in origin. Five eyes, the anglosphere intel and propaganda warriors will be in it up to their eyeballs.
Clueless Joe , May 4 2020 21:52 utc | 48
When the people who made fake claims about Iraq's WMD, about Russiagate, about Iran's danger, are claiming that the thing isn't manmade, then either it's not manmade or it's US-made and the claim is a lie (what we expect from US intelligence agencies) and a cover-up. That said, odds are on the former, as far as I'm concerned. The absolutely sure thing is that it's not the Chinese who crafted it.
H.Schmatz , May 4 2020 22:05 utc | 49
@Posted by: Clueless Joe | May 4 2020 21:52 utc | 48

Indeed, this is the pattern, as happened with Skripals and Litvinenko, must be an anglo thing.

"The best defesne is a good attack"

[May 05, 2020] Is War With China Inevitable

Dec 13, 2013 | www.zerohedge.com
Submitted by Brandon Smith of Alt-Market blog ,

As a general rule, extreme economic decline is almost always followed by extreme international conflict. Sometimes, these disasters can be attributed to the human survival imperative and the desire to accumulate resources during crisis. But most often, war amid fiscal distress is usually a means for the political and financial elite to distract the masses away from their empty wallets and empty stomachs.

War galvanizes societies, usually under false pretenses . I'm not talking about superficial "police actions" or absurd crusades to "spread democracy" to Third World enclaves that don't want it. No, I'm talking about REAL war: war that threatens the fabric of a culture, war that tumbles violently across people's doorsteps. The reality of near-total annihilation is what oligarchs use to avoid blame for economic distress while molding nations and populations.

Because of the very predictable correlation between financial catastrophe and military conflagration, it makes quite a bit of sense for Americans today to be concerned. Never before in history has our country been so close to full-spectrum economic collapse, the kind that kills currencies and simultaneously plunges hundreds of millions of people into poverty. It is a collapse that has progressed thanks to the deliberate efforts of international financiers and central banks. It only follows that the mind-boggling scale of the situation would "require" a grand distraction to match.

It is difficult to predict what form this distraction will take and where it will begin, primarily because the elites have so many options. The Mideast is certainly an ever-looming possibility. Iran is a viable catalyst. Syria is not entirely off the table. Saudi Arabia and Israel are now essentially working together, forming a strange alliance that could promise considerable turmoil -- even without the aid of the United States. Plenty of Americans still fear the Al Qaeda bogeyman, and a terrorist attack is not hard to fabricate. However, when I look at the shift of economic power and military deployment, the potential danger areas appear to be growing not only in the dry deserts of Syria and Iran, but also in the politically volatile waters of the East China Sea.

China is THE key to any outright implosion of the U.S. monetary system. Other countries, like Saudi Arabia, may play a part; but ultimately it will be China that deals the decisive blow against the dollar's world reserve status. China's dollar and Treasury bond holdings could be used as a weapon to trigger a global sell-off of dollar-denominated assets. China has stopped future increases of dollar forex holdings, and has cut the use of the dollar in bilateral trade agreements with multiple countries. Oil-producing nations are shifting alliances to China because it is now the world's largest consumer of petroleum. And, China has clearly been preparing for this eventuality for years. So, given these circumstances, how can the U.S. government conceive of confrontation with the East? Challenging one's creditors to a duel does not usually end well. At the very least, it would be economic suicide. But perhaps that is the point. Perhaps America is meant to make this seemingly idiotic leap.

Here are just some of the signs of a buildup to conflict...

Currency Wars And Shooting Wars

In March 2009, U.S. military and intelligence officials gathered to participate in a simulated war game , a hypothetical economic struggle between the United States and China.

The conclusions of the war game were ominous. The participants determined that there was no way for the United States to win in an economic battle with China. The Chinese had a counterstrategy to every U.S. effort and an ace up their sleeve – namely, their U.S. dollar reserves, which they could use as a monetary neutron bomb, a chain reaction that would result in the abandonment of the dollar by exporters around the world . They also found that China has been quietly accumulating hard assets (including land and gold) across globe, using sovereign wealth funds, government-controlled front companies, and private equity funds to make the purchases. China could use these tangible assets as a hedge to protect against the eventual devaluation of its U.S. dollar and Treasury holdings, meaning the losses on its remaining U.S. financial investments was acceptable should it decide to crush the dollar.

The natural response of those skeptical of the war game and its findings is to claim that the American military would be the ultimate trump card and probable response to a Chinese economic threat. Of course, China's relationship with Russia suggests a possible alliance against such an action and would definitely negate the use of nuclear weapons (unless the elites plan nuclear Armageddon). That said, it is highly likely that the U.S. government would respond with military action to a Chinese dollar dump, not unlike Germany's rise to militarization and totalitarianism after the hyperinflationary implosion of the mark. The idea that anyone except the internationalists could "win" such a venture, though, is foolish.

I would suggest that this may actually be the plan of globalists in the United States and their counterparts in Asia and Europe. China's rise to financial prominence is not due to its economic prowess. In fact, China is ripe with poor fiscal judgment calls and infrastructure projects that have gone nowhere. But what China does have on its side are massive capital inflows from global banks and corporations, mainly based in the United States and the European Union. And, it has help in the spread of its currency (the Yuan) from entities like JPMorgan Chase and Co. The International Monetary Fund is seeking to include China in its global basket currency, the SDR, which would give China even more leverage to use in breaking the dollar's reserve status. Corporate financiers and central bankers have made it more than possible for China to kill the dollar , which they openly suggest is a "good thing."

Is it possible that the war game scenarios carried out by the Pentagon and elitist think-tanks like the RAND Corporation were not meant to prevent a war with China, but to ensure one takes place?

The Senkaku Islands

Every terrible war has a trigger point, an event that history books later claim "started it all." For the Spanish-American War, it was the bombing of the USS Maine. For World War I it was the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria. For U.S. involvement in World War I, it was the sinking of the Lusitania by a German U-Boat. For U.S. involvement in World War II, it was the attack on Pearl Harbor. For Vietnam, it was the Gulf of Tonkin Incident (I recommend readers look into the hidden history behind all of these events). While the initial outbreak of war always appears to be spontaneous, the reality is that most wars are planned far in advance.

As evidence indicates, China has been deliberately positioned to levy an economic blow against the United States. Our government is fully aware what the results of that attack will be, considering they have gamed the scenario multiple times. And, by RAND Corporation's own admission, China and the United States have been preparing for physical confrontation for some time, centered on the concept of pre-emptive strikes . Meaning, the response both sides have exclusively trained for in the event of confrontation is to attack the other first!

The seemingly simple and petty dispute over the Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea actually provides a perfect environment for the pre-emptive powder keg to explode.

China has recently declared an "air defense zone" that extends over the islands, which Japan has already claimed as its own. China, South Korea and the United States have all moved to defy this defense zone. South Korea has even extended its own air defense zone to overlap China's .

China has responded with warnings that its military aircraft will now monitor the region and demands that other nations provide it with civilian airline flight paths. China has also stated that it plans to create MORE arbitrary defense zones in the near future.

The U.S. government under Barack Obama has long planned a military shift into the Pacific, which is meant specifically to counter China's increased presence. It's almost as if the White House knew a confrontation was coming .

The shift is now accelerating due to the Senkaku situation, as the U.S. transfers submarine-hunting jets to Japan while pledging full support for Japan should war ignite.

And most recently, the Japanese press has suggested that war between the two countries could erupt as early as January .

China, with its limited navy, has focused more of its energy and funding into advanced missile technologies -- including "ship killers," which fly too low and fast to be detected with current radar. This is the same strategy of cheap compact precision warfare being adopted by countries like Syria and Iran, and it is designed specifically to disrupt tradition American military tactics.

Currently, very little diplomatic headway has been made or attempted in regards to the Senkaku Islands. The culmination of various ingredients so far makes for a sour stew.

All that is required now is that one trigger event -- that one ironic "twist of fate" that mainstream historians love so much, the spark that lights the fuse. China could suddenly sell a mass quantity of U.S. Treasuries, perhaps in response to the renewed debt debate next spring. The United States could use pre-emption to take down a Chinese military plane or submarine. A random missile could destroy a passenger airliner traveling through the defense zone, and both sides could blame each other. The point is nothing good could come from the escalation over Senkaku.

Why Is War Useful?

What could possibly be gained by fomenting a war between the United States and China? What could possibly be gained by throwing America's economy, the supposed "goose that lays the golden eggs", to the fiscal wolves? As stated earlier, distraction is paramount, and fear is valuable political and social capital.

Global financiers created the circumstances that have led to America's probable economic demise, but they don't want to be blamed for it. War provides the perfect cover for monetary collapse, and a war with China might become the cover to end all covers. The resulting fiscal damage and the terror Americans would face could be overwhelming. Activists who question the legitimacy of the U.S. government and its actions, once considered champions of free speech, could easily be labeled "treasonous" during wartime by authorities and the frightened masses. (If the government is willing to use the Internal Revenue Service against us today, just think about who it will send after us during the chaos of a losing war tomorrow.) A lockdown of civil liberties could be instituted behind the fog of this national panic.

Primarily, war tends to influence the masses to agree to more centralization, to relinquish their rights in the name of the "greater good", and to accept less transparency in government and more power in the hands of fewer people. Most important, though, is war's usefulness as a philosophical manipulation after the dust has settled.

After nearly every war of the 20 th and 21 st century, the subsequent propaganda implies one message in particular: National sovereignty, or nationalism, is the cause of all our problems. The establishment then claims that there is only one solution that will solve these problems: globalization. This article by Andrew Hunter , the chairman of the Australian Fabian Society, is exactly the kind of narrative I expect to hear if conflict arises between the United States and China.

National identity and sovereignty are the scapegoats, and the Fabians (globalist propagandists) are quick to point a finger. Their assertion is that nation states should no longer exist, borders should be erased and a one-world economic system and government should be founded. Only then will war and financial strife end. Who will be in charge of this interdependent one world utopia? I'll give you three guesses...

The Fabians, of course, make no mention of global bankers and their instigation of nearly every war and depression for the past 100 years; and these are invariably the same people that will end up in positions of authority if globalization comes to fruition. What the majority of people do not yet understand is that globalists have no loyalties to any particular country, and they are perfectly willing to sacrifice governments, economies, even entire cultures, in the pursuit of their "ideal society". "Order out of chaos" is their motto, after all. The bottom line is that a war between China and the United States will not be caused by national sovereignty. Rather, it will be caused by elitists looking for a way to END national sovereignty. That's why such a hypothetical conflict, a conflict that has been gamed by think tanks for years, is likely to be forced into reality.

[May 05, 2020] For Russian elites, it is the fact that the game is rigged against them which is the problem, not the game itself.

May 05, 2020 | www.unz.com

ComradePuff , says: Show Comment May 3, 2020 at 10:27 am GMT

@FB Soooo your proof that I am a troll is that I didn't spell a German to Russian to English borrow word correctly and capitalized it on a website comment board? And your follow-up slam dunk is that I am new to the site. To really take it to the next level of critical thinking, you throw in some ad hominim attacks and deny my education? Move over Sherlock Holmes, we got a real sleuth here.

My diploma number is 107732 0012900, awarded on June 5th, 2019 and signed by Шестопал Е. Б. and Байков А. А.. My thesis was titled: "Russia in sub-Saharan Africa: Approaches, Interests and a New Frontier for Cooperation with China" so yeah actually I know quite a bit about Russia's relationship with China. You're welcome to read it. You'd find my recommendations in the conclusion would not go over well at the CIA. That I took intelligence analysis courses from the likes of Andrey Bezrukov would not make me a shoo-in either. Anyway, I assumed this crowd didn't require a lengthy numbering of America's crimes as a preface to holding an opinion about Russia.

hey never cared about being in some sort of 'club' to begin with international relations isn't junior high, which one would expect a 'graduate' of international relations to know

That is funny that you say that because that is *exactly* the impression that I got from my diplomacy classes. It was like 24/7 LARP set to The Emperor's New Clothes. I am not talking about the attitude toward the Putin or the Russian government – that was surprisingly neutral and refreshingly open to discussion – just about how politics are conducted in general. It was astonishingly – by my admittedly cynical standards – juvenile. I cannot even imagine how asinine diplomacy and political wheeling and dealing in the West must be, as they take it all deadly serious in Russia.

All Russia ever cared about was having normal relations friendly if possible, but on equal footing the entire tone of your fantasy is straight out of the '90s only deluded Washington hacks still dream that we are living in the '90s

That is true. I don't think Russia is still the 90's. I wasn't here in the 90's anyway, so I cannot even make that comparison. What I said is that, from my observation and experience, the people who are still in charge are the same who forged their careers in the 90's and that their thinking has evolved only in response to betrayals by the US, not due to any fundamental problem with how the US operates. Russia is fine to play by the rules set out be Washington, but they are eternally bewildered that those rules only apply to them because otherwise they would be forced to swallow the truths of Lenin and Marx. For professors arriving in late model black Mercedes driven by chauffeurs, that would be awkward. For Russian elites, it is the fact that the game is rigged against them which is the problem, not the game itself.

[May 05, 2020] Russia needs a depositor credit union type local banking system.

May 05, 2020 | www.unz.com

Mefobills , says: Show Comment May 2, 2020 at 5:35 pm GMT

@Art

Russia needs a depositor credit union type local banking system.

These types of banks are called "gyro or giro" banking. When you take out a loan, you are borrowing existing money. The bank does not hypothecate new money into existence.

The movie "It's a wonderful life" is a battle between two types of banking, the Gyro Bank, vs Hypothecation Bank.

Gyro banking has been subsumed by the more dishonest Hypothecation methods that usurers prefer. Gyro banks like U.S. Savings and Loans, and their equivalents around the world, have slowly disappeared. In U.S. it was the (((usual suspects))) that were responsible for S&L's disappearing.

Gryo banking has another nemesis, and that is money origination. If a national-state creates new money debt free, then laboring savers will eventually have a "pile o money" to loan out. Without debt free from Treasury, then laboring savers will be storing money that at-source originated as a hypothecation event elsewhere in the banking system.

In other words, it is not enough to have a Gyro saving bank, the "credit" origination problem elsewhere hasn't been dealt with.

One of Saker's points is that Putin did not listen to Stolypin Group's Sergei Glaziev and instead is listening to economic liberals like Elvira Sakhipzadovna Nabiullina . The Stolypin group is on-point, and yet they have been marginalized. Why?

Liberalism's swan song is seductive, and one of its tenets is that you need to borrow "credit" on international markets to then buy "international goods." Another tenet is that you can get rich and become an Oligarch too, and live a life of blowing snow up your nose, and having hooker's galore living the life on another's labor is usury magic that works.

A national state does not need to borrow credit, when it can make its own. The only time a national state needs to borrow another countries money type, or international banker money like Federal Reserve Notes, is to acquire something your nation doesn't have . say petroleum.

In Russia's case, its economy can be almost completely autarkial, and hence liberalism's swan song is BS, and Putin hasn't gotten the memo. Putin doesn't understand economy, or has purposefully ignored Glazyev for some reason.

Saker is correct, Russia would be doing much better if Putin had listened to Glazyev Much better means an economy probably two or three times what it is now, and the six'th column would be nowhere to be found.

The money power is never trivial, and it informs just about everything else in a civilization. I feel the same as Saker, I like Putin but Putin has failed spectacularly by not understanding how money works, and falling for economic Liberalism's swan song.

Hitler had somebody like Glazyev. His name was Reinhardt, and because Reinhardt was nationalist and illiberal, Germany's economy was able to take off and had a large measure of autarky.

Germany spent debt free "labor certificates" into the economy per Reinhardt (and later Schact's) method.

[May 03, 2020] Obama's Muslim Brotherhood Strategy, the 'War' Against Jihadism, and Russia's Syria Intervention Parts 1 and 2 Russian Eu

May 03, 2020 | gordonhahn.com

by Gordon M. Hahn

Part 1: The Obama Administration and the Muslim Brotherhood at Home

Introduction

Under a misguided illusion that Islamists can be regarded as moderates worthy of partnership with democracies and other civilized states in the war against jihadism, the Barack Obama administration has undertaken a series high-stakes, ideologically-driven and naive policy gambits driven by the U.S. president's dangerous sympathy for Islam. In and of itself such a sympathy is not necessarily a problem if it is moderate and indirectly influences a few, non-strategic policies. However, when it becomes the ideological foundation for U.S. foreign policy and strategy across the Muslim world, it is downright dangerous and a potentially catastrophic miscalculation. The upshot of Obama's miscalculation has been the simultaneous destabilization of whole regions of the world, the weakening of key allies, the alienation of potential ones, and the possibility that for the first time since World War Two the West and Eurasia will be riven by violence, terrorism and war.

The catastrophic failure of Obama's pro-Islamic foreign policy is shaping the perceptions and calculus of friends, enemies, foes, and 'frenemies' alike. For great powers, his policies offer risks and opportunities but, more importantly, they demand a complete re-thinking of what U.S. foreign policy goals are and a rapid policy response to the picture that comes out of such re-thinking. This has become especially true when it comes to the single great power the expanse of which stretches along the most of the Muslim world's northern periphery – Russia. Therefore, Moscow is in the grips of a major revamping and reinvigoration of its foreign policy activity along its southern periphery. In each case the need to do so can be reasonably argue to have been necessitated by American mistakes and failures–from South and Central Asia in the east to North Africa in the west.

Here I will focus on the most recent cases of the Arab Spring and demonstrate that the Obama administration has attempted to make alliances with Islamists as a buffer against global jihadism and a battering ram for destroying secular authoritarian regimes in the Muslim world despised by many liberals and the left, despite their use as a bulwark against radical political Islam. In three key cases of the so-called Arab Spring–Egypt, Libya, and Syria–the Obama administration has supported the radical global Islamist organization, the Muslim Brotherhood (MB). The Egyptian case is well-known and will not be discussed here.

The pro-MB policy has been a fundamental miscalculation for several reasons. First, it assumed that democratic, moderately Islamic states led by the MB would follow secular authoritarian regimes. Instead, as the short-lived MB regime in Egypt demonstrated, an Islamist MB regime is no better and likely much worse than secular, even military-led regimes. The rise of Islamist authoritarianism after the fall of secular regimes is even better demonstrated by the upper hand that jihadist totalitarian groups have in the chaos of post-secular regimes across those parts of the Muslim world thrown into chaos with the help of U.S. policy.

Second, it assumed an impermeable line between the global Islamist revolutionary movement, led by groups such as the MB and Hizb ut-Tahrir Islami (HTI), and the global jihadi revolutionary movement, led by the Islamic State or IS (ISIS, ISIL, Daesh) and Al Qa`ida (AQ). The former type of group is often a half-way house for radicalized Muslims heading towards the path of jihad. Like their jihadi counterparts, the MB and other radical Islamist revolutionary groups favor a global caliphate based on the rule of Shariah law. The difference lies in the strategies and tactics for getting there. By backing the MB, the U.S. facilitated jihadi agitation and propaganda, recruiting, and arms acquisition fueling the global jihadi revolutionary movement.

Part 1: The Obama Administration and the Muslim Brotherhood at Home

There is a logic President Obama's policy bias in favor of the MB. President Obama's biographical and radical leftist background lends him a great pro-Muslim feeling that often attains absurd proportions. After all, he spent many of his most formative childhood years in Indonesia, went to a madrassah school there, and stated in his autobiography that the most beautiful sound he ever heard is the Islamic azan or call to prayer. The president apparently believes that Islam and Muslims have been an instrumental part of America since its founding. In his 2009 Cairo speech, which the administration claimed sparked the MB-led Egyptian revolution that overthrew Hosni Mubarak in September 2012, President Obama claimed to "know" that "Islam has always been a part of America's story" (www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/remarks-president-cairo-university-6-04-09). In a 2010 speech marking the end of Ramadan, Obama asserted: "Islam has always been part of America" (www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2010/08/11/statement-president-occasion-ramadan). In February 2015 he stated: "Islam has been woven into the fabric of our country since its founding" ( http://cnsnews.com/news/article/susan-jones/obama-islam-has-been-woven-fabric-our-country-its-founding ). In short, President Obama has a bias in favor of Islam–indeed, a hyper-empathy that goes over the line into fantasy. Given these realities, it might be expected that this sentiment would be reflected in the American President's foreign policy. In fact, it is.

There is now a boat load of evidence that the Obama administration has brought in officials and advisors from radical Muslim circles–in particular those from groups fronting for, or tied to the MB–who espouse Islamist, anti-semitic, and anti-American points of view similar to those MB proposes. Until Hillary Clinton's resignation as US Secretary of State, MB links connected two high-ranking Obama administration officials: Clinton's chief of staff Huma Abedin and current special assistant to the National Security Council Chief of Staff for the military's Islamic chaplain program Mehdi K. Alhassani. The specific link is the Muslim World League (MWL), indicted for financing Al Qa`ida (AQ) front groups. MWL successor groups have been officially designated terrorist organizations by both the State Department and the United Nations (Aaron Klein, "White House aide linked to al-Qaida funder," Counter Jihad Report , 9 May 2014, http://counterjihadreport.com/tag/mehdi-k-alhassani/ ).

A link between these two and MB is the Muslim Student Association (MSA) with branches in hundreds of universities across America. The nationwide umbrella organization MSA has extensive proven ties to the MB ("The Muslim Students Association and and the Jihadi Network," Terrorism Awareness Project, 2008 http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/Articles/MSA%20and%20Jihad%20Network%20v5b-1.pdf ). The MSA's official anthem restates MB's credo:

Allah is our objective

The Prophet is our leader

The Quran is our law

Jihad is our way

Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.

Abedin served on the board of the MSA at George Washington University in 1997 ( http://shoebat.com/2014/05/03/distribution-list-smoking-gun-benghazi-email-included-muslim-brotherhood-agent/ ). The GWU MSA was founded by Muslim Brotherhood activists with start-up funding provided by the Saudi Arabian charity the Muslim World League or MWL founded in Mecca in 1962. From 2005 to 2006 Alhassani was the GWU MSA's president (Aaron Klein, "White House aide linked to al-Qaida funder," Counter Jihad Report , 9 May 2014, http://counterjihadreport.com/tag/mehdi-k-alhassani/ ). In 2001 AQ in the Arabian Peninsula's American leader Anwar al-Awlaki, who inspired Fort Hood jihadist Nidal Malik Hasan, became the chaplain for the GWU MSA chapter ( http://shoebat.com/2014/05/03/distribution-list-smoking-gun-benghazi-email-included-muslim-brotherhood-agent/ ).

Huma worked with Abdullah Omar Naseef on the editorial board of her father's Saudi-financed think tank, the Institute for Muslim Minority Affairs (IMMA). Huma was there from 2002-2008, and Naseef was there from December 2002 – December 2003. Naseef left the JMMA editorial board at a time when various charities led by Naseef's MWL were declared illegal terrorism fronts worldwide, including by the U.S. and U.N. Naseef is still the MWL's secretary-general. Huma's mother, Saleha, is the editor of the IMMA's Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs (JMMA), the publication of Syed's institute ( http://shoebat.com/2014/05/03/distribution-list-smoking-gun-benghazi-email-included-muslim-brotherhood-agent/ ). Its latest issue (Vol. 35, Issue 4, 2015) features the lead article "Muslims in Western Media: New Zealand Newspapers' Construction of 2006 Terror Plot at Heathrow Airport and Beyond," a study of alleged Islamophobia, in which the institute specializes ( www.tandfonline.com/toc/cjmm20/current ). Saleha Abedin is also a MWL representative.

The MWL and its various offshoots, including the International Islamic Relief Organization (IIRO) and Al Haramain, have been accused of having terrorist ties. Al Haramain was declared a terror-financing front organization by the U.S. and U.N. with direct ties to Osama bin Laden and banned both in the U.S. and worldwide. The Anti-Defamation League accuses the MWL of proselytizing a "fundamentalist interpretation of Islam around the world through a large network of charities and affiliated organizations" and notes that "several of its affiliated groups and individuals have been linked to terror-related activity." In 2003, U.S. News and World Report documented "a blizzard of Wahhabist literature" accompanied MWL's donations ( http://shoebat.com/2014/05/03/distribution-list-smoking-gun-benghazi-email-included-muslim-brotherhood-agent/ ).

Both Abedin and Alhassani were links in the Obama's administration's strategic communications (propaganda) operation to pin the 11 September 2012 Bengazi attack that killed the US ambassador to Libya and three CIA operatives on an Internet film instead of an AQ affiliate's attack. In an email obtained under a Judicial Watch lawsuit sent to Alhassani and other officials from Ben Rhodes, Obama's deputy national security adviser for strategic communication sent an email to Alhassani and several other administration officials three days after the three days after the Benghazi attack indicating the need to "underscore that these protests are rooted in an Internet video, and not a broader failure of policy." Another email indicates that US Ambassador to the UN Susana Rice was prepped on the Saturday before her Sunday tour of talk shows where she repeated the video story and other elements cantained in the email's talking points (See p. 14 of the PDF of several documents at, http://www.judicialwatch.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/1919_production-4-17-14.pdf#page=14 ).

An Egyptian newspaper claimed in December 2012 that six Muslims in particular have direct ties to the MB or are even MB members. Four are adiminstration officials or semi-officials, and three of these deserve scrutiny: assistant secretary for policy development at the Homeland Security Department (HSD) Arif Alikhan; HSD Advisory Council member Mohammed Elibiary; and U.S. special envoy to the Organization of the Islamic Conference Rashad Hussain ( www.investigativeproject.org/3608/dawud-walid-the-quran-and-jews and Ahmed Shawki, "A man and 6 of the Brotherhood in the White House!," Rose El-Youssef, 22 December 2012, www.rosa-magazine.com/News/3444/%D8%B1%D8%AC%D9%84%D9%886-%D8%A5%D8%AE%D9%88%D8%A7%D9%86-%D9%81%D9%89-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%A8%D9%8A%D8%AA-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%A3%D8%A8%D9%8A%D8%B6 ). To be sure, the Egyptian article appears to be overstated in claiming these persons' MB membership. The piece was likely part of a strategic communications operation carried out by opponents of the MB regime that overthrew Mubarak and backed the post-MB Egyptian government of General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi counter-revolution. Nevertheless, the Obama administration's appointment of these officials or plenipotentiaries as well as several other Muslim-American leaders -- in particular, Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) president Imam Mohamed Magid and and Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) co-founder Salam al-Marayati -- is disturbing given their indirect MB associations and MB-like Islamist political and theological views.

The biggest knock against DHS assistant secretary for policy development Arif Alikhan has been the endorsement by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) of his appointment. CAIR has defended terrorist organizations such as Hamas and Hezbollah as liberation movements. It also was an unindicted co-conspirator in the Hamas terrorism funding case, and several of its former officials have been convicted of terrorism-related charges. A lesser rap is that Alikhan attended a fundraiser for the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) just days before his appointment. MPAC has a similar history of defending Hamas ( http://www.jihadwatch.org/2009/07/new-dhs-official-linked-to-muslim-public-affairs-council-which-calls-hizballah-a-liberation-movement ). The Egyptian publication claimed that Alikhan is a founder of the World Islamic Organization (WIO), which it characterizes as a Brotherhood "subsidiary" ( www.investigativeproject.org/3869/egyptian-magazine-muslim-brotherhood-infiltrates# ). These indictments of Alikhan seem less than convincing as evidence of MB ties.

Much more disturbing was the appointment in 2010 to the DHS Advisory Council (HSAC) member of Mohammed Elibiary, released from his position in September 2014 amidst reports of a coverup involving his misuse of secret documents ( http://freebeacon.com/issues/controversial-dhs-adviser-let-go-amid-allegations-of-cover-up/ ). Before his HSAC appointment Elibiary was known to have publicly praised the MB's leading philosopher Sayyid Qutb, the leader of Iran's Islamist revolution Ayatollah Khomeini, and a radical New York imam Siraj Wahhaj, who was an unindicted co-conspiratr in the World Trade bombing case and was a defense character witness for the jihadist 'Blind Sheikh' Omar Abdel Rahman ( www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/mohamed-elibiary-homeland-security/ and www.investigativeproject.org/documents/misc/712.pdf ).

While on the HSAC Elibiary was caught having tweeted that it is "onevitable that the caliphate returns" ( http://freebeacon.com/national-security/senior-dhs-adviser-brags-inevitable-that-caliphate-returns/ ). His tweets were later used by ISIL for propaganda and recruitment purposes ( http://freebeacon.com/national-security/isil-celebrates-dhs-advisers-anti-american-tweets-on-return-of-caliphate/ ). Echoing his appointer, Pressident Obama, Elibiary claimed in November 2013 that America is "an Islamic country with an Islamically compliant constitution" and that the Muslim Brotherhood poses no threat to the U.S. ( http://freebeacon.com/national-security/dhs-adviser-tweets-america-an-islamic-country/ ).

The funding for Elibiary's own community organizing activity has been shrouded in secrecy. He is co-founder, president and CEO of the Freedom and Justice Foundation (FJF), founded in November 2002 "to promote government relations and "interfaith community relations for the organized Texas Muslim community." The IRS revoked the FJF's nonprofit status in May 2010 for failure to file the requisite forms that would have revealed its source of funding. Moreover, his FJF has never filed a Texas Franchise Tax Public Information Report. He also has ties to CAIR. The North Texas Islamic Council (NTIC) or Texas Islamic Council (TIC) is a FJF affiliate, and Elibiary is a registered NTIV agent for the NTIC. One of the NTIC's directors is H. Mustafaa Carroll, who is the executive director of CAIR's Houston chapter. Elibiary has described the writings of Qutb, the chief ideologist of the MB and a major source for global Islamist and jihadist revolutionaries alike, as having ""the potential for a strong spiritual rebirth that's truly ecumenical allowing all faiths practiced in America to enrich us and motivate us to serve God better by serving our fellow man more" ( www.investigativeproject.org/documents/misc/712.pdf ).

According to an investigation by the Washington Free Beacon, Elibiary was at the center of a scandal involving the "inappropriate disclosure of sensitive law enforcement documents" resulting from his access to DHS's secure HS-SLIC system, according to a DHS letter. The case has been "shrouded in mystery, with various officials providing unclear and at times contradictory answers about whether DHS ever properly investigated." The allegation was that Elibiary "inappropriately accessed classified documents from a secure site and may have attempted to pass them to reporters." As part of his role on the HSAC, Elibiary "was provided access to a network containing sensitive but unclassified information," according to the July 2014 DHS letter U.S. congressman Louis Gohmert (Republican from Texas). DHS claimed that its 2011 investigation "found no credible information" that Elibiary "disclosed or sought to disclose 'For Official Use Only' information to members of the media." Nor did DHS "find any indication that he sought to disclose any other internal OHS [Office of Homeland Security] information to anyone apart from official use of information within the scope of his role for the Homeland Security Advisory Council," according to the letter states.

However, DHS's denials are contradicted by documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by Judicial Watch, which indicate that there was never a proper investigation into Elibiary's actions. In a September 2013 letter DHS informed Judicial Watch in fact that it could not find investigation records connected to the matter. This conflicting information suggests a cover up of the fact that there was no investigation, as congressman Gohmert notes, and that Elibiary was let go from the HSAC to lock in the cover up. Terrorism expert Patrick Poole concluded that any DHS investigation that might have occurred was "phony," since it failed to contact him and his source, which led to the first public allegations of Elibiary's misuse of documents. "(W)hen DHS couldn't provide a single email or document in response to the Judicial Watch FOIA to prove this investigation ever took place, the jig was up," Poole noted ( http://freebeacon.com/issues/controversial-dhs-adviser-let-go-amid-allegations-of-cover-up/ ; see also www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/mohamed-elibiary-homeland-security/ ).

President Obama's originally appointed Rashad Hussain as his special envoy to the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC). In February 2015 Hussain was promoted to the position of director of the U.S. State Department's Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications (www.jewsnews.co.il/2015/02/26/obama-appoints-muslim-brotherhood-linked-muslim-to-head-center-for-strategic-counterterrorism-communications/). Hussain previously served on Critical Islamic Reflections program organizing committee with the founder of Zaytuna College, Imam Zaid Shakir ( http://www.yale.edu/cir/2004/about.html ). Shakir's co-founder is Hamza Yusuf, who has said that jihadist Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, convicted in the Al Qa`ida conspiracy to bomb New York landmarks in the 1990s, was tried unjustly ( www.investigativeproject.org/2778/ipt-profiles-hamza-yusuf ).

Speaking at a MSA conference in 2004 Hussain condemned the U.S. Justice Department for "politically motivated persecutions" in prosecuting the soon-to-be convicted terrorism supporter Sami Al-Arian, a University of South Florida computer engineering professor. He also called the legal process "sad commentary on our legal system," "a travesty of justice," and "atrocious" (www.politico.com/story/2010/02/islam-envoy-retreats-on-terror-talk-033210#ixzz0g5R9A5gl). One wonders what legal system Hussain would prefer to the American system of justice. In 2006 the good professor pleaded guilty to one count of "(c)onspiracy to make or receive contributions of funds, goods or services to or for the benefit of the Palestinian jihadist organization, Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), a U.S. State Department 'Specially Designated Terrorist organization'" and was sentenced to 57 months in prison (www.investigativeproject.org/profile/100/sami-al-arian). The judge in the case said there was evidence that Al-Arian served on PIJ's governing board. Al-Arian successfully had lied about his ties to the terrorist group for ten years. For his part, Hussain lied in 2006 about the fact that he made the noted 2004 remarks condemning the Justice Department for 'persecutions', only to be forced to admit he had lied after being subjected to media scrutiny in the wake of his appointment. (www.investigativeproject.org/1809/how-are-these-not-considered-lies). According to the watchdog group Global Mulsim Brotherhood Watch, Hussain has a long record of attending MB-tied conferences, including a May 2009 conference organized by MB-tied groups like the MSA (www.globalmbwatch.com/2010/02/20/breaking-news-rashad-hussain-admits-making-controversial-comments-and-asking-for-deletion/).

In addition such to appointments, Obama administration grant-giving has rewarded radical Muslims, including open anti-Semites. Director of the Michigan branch of MB front group CAIR, Dawud Walid, has traveled abroad at least twice on U.S State Department funds, using a 2010 trip to Mali to criticize America's treatment of Muslims after 9/11. But it gets worse. In a 25 May 2012 sermon at the Islamic Organization of North America mosque in Warren, Michigan, Walid asked rhetorically: "Who are those who incurred the wrath of Allah?" Walid answered: "They are the Jews, they are the Jews." He also has stated: "One of the greatest social ills facing American today is Islamophobia, and anti-Muslim bigotry. And if you trace the organizations and the main advocates and activists in Islamophobia in America, you will see that all those organizations are pro-Israeli occupation organizations and activists." Walid's anti-American bias is reflected in his view that the 2009 shooting death of a Detroit imam was unjust, despite the imam's refusal of police orders to lay down his weapon and surrender and his fire at police first ( www.investigativeproject.org/3608/dawud-walid-the-quran-and-jews ).

Obama's ties to Muslims with anti-American and radical leanings predate his election to the presidency. The Obama campaign's Muslim outreach adviser Mazen Asbahi was forced to resign in August 2008 after Wall Street Journal article unmasked his indirect radical and MB ties. In 2000, Asbahi served on the board of the Islamic investment fund Allied Assets Advisors Fund (AAAF), a Delaware-registered trust. Asbahi also has been a frequent speaker before several U.S.-based groups that scholars associate with the MB. AAAF is a subsidiary of the North American Islamic Trust (NAIT), which receives funding from the government of Saudi Arabia and holds the title to many U.S. mosques in the U.S. NAIT promotes fundamentalist Islam compatible with both the ideology of MB and Saudi Arabian Wahhabism. Other AAAF board members at the time included one Jamal Sayid, the imam at a fundamentalist mosque in Illinois the Bridgeview Mosque in Bridgeview, Ill., outside Chicago. Sayid served on the AAAF board until 2005. The Justice Department designated the imam an unindicted co-conspirator in a 2007 racketeering trial of several alleged Hamas fund-raisers, which ended in a mistrial. Sayid has been identified as a leading Hamas member in numerous news reports since 1993. (www.wsj.com/articles/SB121797906741214995 and http://www.globalmbwatch.com/2008/08/06/breaking-news-obama-advisor-resigns-after-wall-street-journal-report/ ). Asbahi reportedly has connections to two other MB-linked organizations, the Institute For Social Policy And Understanding and SA Consulting. One of the latter's three managers is Omer Totonji, the apparent son of Iraqi-born U.S. Muslim Brotherhood founder Ahmed Totonji (www.globalmbwatch.com/2008/08/01/breaking-news-obama-top-muslim-adviser-part-of-two-more-organizations-tied-to-us-muslim-brotherhood/).

The White House's 'go to' imam is Mahomed Magid, president of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), to which Asbahi also has ties (www.globalmbwatch.com/2008/08/01/breaking-news-obama-top-muslim-adviser-part-of-two-more-organizations-tied-to-us-muslim-brotherhood/). Although Magid has been involved in outreach to Jews at the US Holocaust Museum and the gay community, he has also awarded an American Muslim who has verbally attacked Jews on an Islamist ideo-theological basis. Magid is often invited to attend administration speeches on US Middle East policy at the State Department, has advised the FBI and the Justice Department to criminalize defamation of Islam, and is a member of the Department of Homeland Security's Countering Violent Extremism Working Group. He also advises other federal agencies. In 2012 Magid's ISNA organized a "Diversity Forum" at which Magid gave a diversity award to CAIR Michigan branch director Dawud Walid, just weeks after Walid's sermon at the Islamic Organization of America (IOA) mosque in Warren, Michigan, in which he claimed Jews had incurred the wrath of Allah (www.investigativeproject.org/3608/dawud-walid-the-quran-and-jews and https://pjmedia.com/blog/obamas-shariah-czar-mohamed-magid-hands-diversity-award-to-jew-hater-dawud-walid ).

Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) co-founder and director Salam al-Marayati is a frequent White House visitor and administration consultant (www.mpac.org/programs/government-relations.php). Marayati has said that Israel should have been added to the "suspect list" for the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks ( http://theblacksphere.net/2013/04/devout-muslims-in-key-positions-in-the-white-house/ ). MPAC has stated Muslims should be "confronting a nation of cowards," speaking of the United States in the words of former U.S. Attorney General ( www.mpac.org/programs/government-relations/ferguson-confronting-a-nation-of-cowards.php ). Marayati's MPAC spokeswoman in 2007, one Edina Lekovic, was editor of Al-Talib: The Muslim News Magazine at UCLA , for its July 1999 issue which praised Osama bin Laden as a "glorious mujahed" and in 2007 lied on national television about it, for which she was later fully exposed by Investigative Project director Stephen Emerson (www.investigativeproject.org/293/ms-lekovica-dozen-printing-mistakes). By the early 2000s, if not much during Ms Lekovic's years at UCLA, the UCLA MSA was engaged in Islamist and anti-Semitic propaganda and agitation, including support for the publication (www.discoverthenetworks.org/Articles/MSA%20and%20Jihad%20Network%20v5b-1.pdf). CAIR was affiliated with the university paper, with its southern California chapter's director sitting on Al-Talib 's editorial board (www.investigativeproject.org/271/mpac-cair-and-praising-osama-bin-laden). The UCLA MSA was also intimately involved with the newspaper's publishing and protest activity attacking Jews (www.discoverthenetworks.org/Articles/MSA%20and%20Jihad%20Network%20v5b-1.pdf and www.danielpipes.org/blog/2003/06/cairs-legal-tribulations ).

Given all of the above, it is certainly not unreasonable to suspect that President Obama's Cairo speech was intended to lend support to the world's most powerful MB branch -- that in Egypt. The Obama administration's warm support for Egypt's MB-led revolution and short-lived regime and cold shoulder to Gen. Sisi's government is well-known and speaks for itself.

Part 2: The Obama Administration and the MB Abroad

Abroad, President Obama's sympathy for semi-Islamist, MB-like elements at home was soon reflected in his foreign policy. In 2011 Obama issued a secret directive called Presidential Study Directive-11, or PSD-11, which, according to the Washington Times, outlined a strategy for backing the Muslim Brotherhood across the Middle East as a strategy for supporting reform and blocking jihadism's advances in the region ( https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/jun/3/inside-the-ring-muslim-brotherhood-has-obamas-secr/ ).

It appears to have been the foundation of the Obama administration's overall strategy in the Middle East and North Africa and the war against jihadism. It would be evident in the administration's policy failures in Egypt, Libya, Iraq, and Syria. Those failures would influence U.S. relations with allies and competitors, especially the other major powers in the region – Russia and Turkey – putting them on a collision course as they attempted a region in free-fall collapse as a result, for the most part, of American policies.

Egypt

The Obama administration first encouraged the MB-led overthrow of Hosni Mubarak's secular Arab nationalist regime in Egypt, and then openly supported the new MB 'democracy.' Thus, the U.S. was backing the overthrow of the leader who had repressed the MB in the wake of the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in October 1981, in which the some MB members were involved but not the main actors. Thus, President Obama invited MB leader and new Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi to the White House, a strong endorsement from any U.S. president. After President Obama's November 2012 meeting with the MB's now Egyptian President Morsi, Obama told his aides that he "sensed an engineer's precision with surprisingly little ideology" (www.nytimes.com/2012/11/22/world/middleeast/egypt-leader-and-obama-forge-link-in-gaza-deal.html?pagewanted=1&_r=4&src=un&feedurl=http:/json8.nytimes.com/pages/world/middleeast/index.jsonp&pagewanted=all&). This was at a time when the Israeli incursion in Gaza was at its peak and Egyptian MB officials were issuing the most harsh and sometimes jihadist and racist statements in relation to Israel and Jews. Just days before Obama met with Morsi, the latter declared in Cairo's Al-Azhar mosque: "The leaders of Egypt are enraged and are moving to prevent the aggression on the people of Palestine in Gaza. We in Egypt stand with Gaza," he said. "[W]e are with them in one trench, that he who hits them, hits us; that this blood which flows from their children, it, it is like the blood flowing from the bodies of our children and our sons, may this never happen." At the same time, the chairman of Morsi's Freedom and Justice Party, Saad Katatni was making threats of jihad against Israel: "We are with you (Gaza) in your jihad. We have come here to send a message from here to the Zionist entity, to the Zionist enemy. And we say to them, Egypt is no longer. Egypt is no longer after the revolution a strategic treasure for you. Egypt was and still is a strategic treasury for our brothers in Palestine; a strategic treasure for Gaza; a strategic treasure for all the oppressed" (www.investigativeproject.org/3827/obama-administration-oversells-morsi).

MB officials and its official website in fact issued a series of anti-Semitic and jihadi calls. During one MB-organized protest at the time, preacher Muhammad Ragab called on Muslims "to raise the banner of jihad against the tyrannical, invading and wicked sons of apes and pigs [i.e., the Jews], and to unite against the enemies of Allah." MB website articles described "Zionists" as "apes and pigs," "scum of the earth," "prophet murderers," or "infidels." For example, MB General Guide Dr. Muhammad Badi issued various jihidist and anti-Semitic calls and motifs, including a quote of the hadith of "the rocks and the trees" – a well-known Islamic antisemitic motif–also found in Hamas's founding charter–according to which the Muslims will fight and kill the Jews before the Day of Judgment. The MB also repeatedly thanked God for the deaths of Israeli civilians during the killed by rockets (www.memri.org/report/en/0/0/0/0/0/0/6836.htm).

The Obama administration has never criticized the Egyptian MB or any other MB branch for pro-Hamas and pro-jihad rhetoric whether from Morsi, Katatni, or their 'ikhwan' associates. In addition, he nor any U.S. official ever threatened sanctions as the new MB regime allowed Islamist elements to attack Coptic Christians, and he was reluctant to support the overthrow of the MB regime and the return to power of the now military-backed Arab nationalist rule under Gen. Sisi.

Indeed, when confronted by a journalist on the issue, then State Department spokeswoman and architect of State's remarkably similarly failed Ukraine policy, Victoria Nuland responded: "Well, I'm obviously not, from this podium, going to characterize the Egyptian view, nor am I going to speak for them and characterize our private diplomatic conversations. We all agree on the need to de-escalate this conflict, and the question is for everybody to use their influence that they have to try to get there" (www.investigativeproject.org/3827/obama-administration-oversells-morsi). This pro-MB policy orientation was mirrored in the events in Libya and elsewhere that soon followed.

Libya

The administration then directly intervened to overthrow Muammar Qaddafi regime in Libya–another country with a considerable MB presence–in violation of a UN resolution limiting NATO action to establishing a no-fly zone backed by Russia by its abstention in the UN Security Council vote. The overthrow of Qaddafi first led to minimal change after elections and eventually anarchy and a civil war, which rages to this day. The parliamentary elections of July 2012 saw National Transition Council president Mustafa Abdul Jalil's party take the most votes, but Jalil represented limited change having been the economic advisor of Qaddafi's son. The elections also provided an opening for the MB, which finished in second place. But these elections failed in strengthening regime or consolidating democracy, and the country soon melted down into civil war, with jihadi elements supplementing the Islamist trend represented by the MB.

The Obama administration pattern of supporting MB and, unwittingly through it, jihadi elements such as AQ first emerged in Libya in 2011. In the words of the Citizens' Commission on Benghazi (CCB) -- founded in September 2013 and including among its members former US Congressman Peter Hoekstra and numerous former CIA and military officers -- the Obama administration "switched sides in the war on terrorism" ( www.aim.org/benghazi/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/CCB-Interim-Report-4-22-2014.pdf ). CCB member and former CIA officer Clare Lopez concludes that "the Qaddafi opposition was led by the Muslim Brotherhood and the fighting militia was dominated by al-Qaida. That's who we helped" ( http://counterjihadreport.com/tag/mustafa-abdul-jalil/ ).

A December 2015 FOIA release of emails of then U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton show that from the outset of protests in Libya the Obama administration was aware of AQ's presence in the U.S. backed opposition and anti-Qaddafi rebels' war crimes and had sent special ops trainers inside Libya from nearly the start of the protests, and concerned regarding oil access for Western firms, Qaddafi's gold and silver reserves and his plans for a gold-backed currency that might weaken Western currencies. Thus, Clinton's unofficial advisor and envoy to the region, Sidney Blumenthal refers in one email to "an extremely sensitive source" who confirmed that British, French, and Egyptian special ops forces were training the Libyan rebels along the Egyptian-Libyan border and in Benghazi's suburbs within a month of the first ant-Qaddafi protests which began in Benghazi in mid-February 2011. By March 27 what was repeatedly being referred to as a popular revolt involved foreign agents "overseeing the transfer of weapons and supplies to the rebels" of the National Libyan Council (NLC) opposition front, including "a seemingly endless supply of AK47 assault rifles and ammunition." Blumenthal then notes that "radical/terrorist groups such as the Libyan Fighting Groups and Al Qa'ida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) are infiltrating the NLC and its military command." Moreover, Blumenthal reported to her that "one rebel commander stated that his troops continue to summarily execute all foreign mercenaries captured in the fighting." The commander was using a label–'foreign mercenaries'–used by opposition forces for the black Libyans favored under his regime and apparently was not referring to the Western special forces training and backing the rebels, whose atrocities of Libyan blacks were well-documented at the time by human rights groups the U.S. government often cites. Furthermore, Blumenthal states that the stories of Qaddafi's forces engaging in mass rape and his distributing Viagra to encourage them were only rumors, and yet these rumors became a charge leveled officially by Clinton in a State Department statement, US Ambassador to the UN Susan Rice at the UN itself, and numerous Western officials and media. The claims were shown in July 2011 by Amnesty International to have been very likely false and initiated by the rebels ( www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2016/01/06/new-hillary-emails-reveal-true-motive-for-libya-intervention/ with links to original sources). The above-mentioned CCB investigation, based on interviews with sources in U.S. intelligence agencies and the military, concludes that the U.S. facilitated delivery of weapons and military support to Libyan rebels from the MB who were linked to AQ, including the AQ cell that undertook the Bengazi consulate attack that killed U.S. ambassador Christopher Stevens and three CIA operatives.( www.aim.org/benghazi/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/CCB-Interim-Report-4-22-2014.pdf ).

A New York Times investigation confirms the interpretation supported by the recently disclosed documents and CCB investigation. Secretary of State Clinton, whose ear Huma Abedin had, provided the pivotal support convincing the president first to back a UN resolution on a no-fly zone and disabling Qaddafi's command and control. Clinton also led the push inside the administration to upgrade from that policy to one of pursuing a rebel victory and a strategy of letting its allies supply weapons to the rebels and knowingly and willfully exceed the UN resolution's legal writ. Almost immediately after the UN resolution's adoption and well before Qadaffi was killed, the U.S. was providing assistance that went far beyond that necessary to secure a no-fly zone. According to former CIA Director, General David Petraeus, the United States was then already providing "a continuing supply of precision munitions, combat search and, and surveillance." Throughout spring 2011, the Obama administration looked the other way as Qatar and the United Arab Emirates supplied the rebels with lethal weapons, according to the Defense Secretary Robert Gates and others, and Clinton knew and was ostensibly "concerned that Qatar, in particular, was sending arms only to militias from the city of Misurata and select Islamist brigades." The State Department's Libya policy adviser Daniel Shapiro acknowledged to the NYT that the goal no longer was enforcing a no-fly zone but "winning" and "winning quickly enough," the latter goal perhaps connected with U.S. domestic politics and the presidential election little more than a year away. US State Department's Policy Planning Director Anne-Marie Slaughter confirmed in the NYT article that the U.S. "did not try to protect civilians on Qaddafi's side" (Jo Becker and Scott Shane, "The Libya Gamble, Part 1: Hillary Clinton's 'Soft Power' and a Dictator's Fall," New York Times , 27 February 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/us/politics/hillary-clinton-libya.html?emc=edit_th_20160228&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=59962778&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=New%20Campaign&utm_term=%2ASituation%20Report&_r=0).

Clinton was unusually interested–on "the activist side"–in having the U.S. take part, if a clandestine part in the supply of weapons to "secular" Libyan rebels "to counter Qatar" and the threat of lost influence. However, senior military officials, such as NATO's supreme allied commander, Adm. James G. Stavridis and Obama's national security adviser Tom Donilon warned that there were signs, "flickers." of Al Qaeda within the opposition and the administration would not be able to ensure that weapons would not fall into Islamist extremists's hands. This was a 'flicker' of the tragedies in Benghazi and Syria yet to come(Becker and Scott Shane, "The Libya Gamble, Part 1: Hillary Clinton's 'Soft Power' and a Dictator's Fall").

The CCB and the NYT also concluded that Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi had communicated to the U.S. his willingness to resign and depart from Libya and that the U.S. facilitated the delivery of arms to Libyan MB rebels tied to AQ in the person of its North African affiliate, AQ in Maghreb or AQIM. Moreover, the investigation found that the U.S. ignored Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi's called for a truce and expressed a readiness to abdicate shortly after the 2011 Libyan revolt began but was ignored or rebuffed by U.S. officials leading to "extensive loss of life (including four Americans), chaos, and detrimental outcomes for U.S. national security objectives across the region" ( www.aim.org/benghazi/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/CCB-Interim-Report-4-22-2014.pdf ). There was another plan supported by State Department policy planning director Slaughter to have Qaddafi step down in favor of one his sons, but this was also rejected by Clinton in favor of supporting the rebels to victory and violating international law established by the UN resolution (Becker and Scott Shane, "The Libya Gamble, Part 1: Hillary Clinton's 'Soft Power' and a Dictator's Fall").

The CCB's broader conclusions about the Islamist revolution in U.S. counter-jihadism policy is backed up by revelations from other newly disclosed documents regarding the debacle in Syria. The Obama administration's MB policy in Libya–which was already getting out of control and would turn Libya into a failed state, a jihadi and in particular IS stronghold, and a main source of Europe's refugee deluge–would be applied to Syria as well with even more disastrous results. Documents show that the U.S. administration was well aware that no later than October 2012 weapons of the formerly Qaddafi-led Lybian army were being sent from Libyan MB and AQ rebels to the increasingly jhadist-dominated Syrian opposition.

Obama, the MB, and Jihadists in Syria

When the Syrian revolt began in Daraa on March 18, 2011, the Syrian MB only existed abroad, having been exiled by Hafez al-Assad, Bashar's father and predecessor. However, its support abroad translated into strength in the original opposition alliance, the Syrian National Council (Oct. 2, 2011-Nov. 11, 2012) or SNC, backed and 'weaponized,' literally speaking, by the West, Turkey, and the Arabs. Turkey and Qatar sponsored the Syrian MB's strong representation on the SNC, though traditionally different Syrian MB factions have had ties in Saudi Arabia and Iraq as well and more radical Salafists were stronger at home in 2011-2013 in contrast to the MB's dominance in Syria from 1979-1982 (www.al-monitor.com/pulse/politics/2014/01/syria-muslim-brotherhood-past-present.html#). At a conference hosted by Turkey in Istanbul in October 2011, the Syrian MB became a co-founder of the SNC, which it came to dominate politically if not numerically ( http://carnegieendowment.org/syriaincrisis/?fa=48370 ). Exiled Syrian MB members comprise a quarter of the SNC's 310 members, and the MB constitutes the most cohesive, well-organized and influential bloc within the SNC. Moreover, another Islamist group within the SNC, the 'Group of 74' consists of former MB members ( http://carnegieendowment.org/syriaincrisis/?fa=48370 ; http://carnegie-mec.org/publications/?fa=48334 ; and www.stratfor.com/sample/analysis/more-divisions-among-syrian-opposition ).

The MB is far more clever and deceptive than some other Islamist and all jihadist groups. It attempts to portray a moderate face and join alliances that function as fronts for its activity and vehicles for its rise to power. Thus, the SNC platform professed the goal of creating a full-fledged democracy, with full individual and groups rights and freedoms, elections, and the separation of powers ( http://carnegieendowment.org/syriaincrisis/?fa=48370 ). It also allowed more moderate SNC leaders to assume the mantle of leadership to present a moderate face to foreign sponsors. This is openly acknowledged by MB leaders in the SNC. Former Muslim Brotherhood leader Ali Sadr el-Din Bayanouni, the SNC's fourth most powerful leader, stated that SNC Chairman Burhan Ghalioun was chosen because he "is accepted in the West and at home and, to prevent the regime from capitalizing on the presence of an Islamist at the top of the SNC" ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tk6KTU1zoTE ). In 2012 liberal members began resigning from the council precisely because they saw it functioning as a liberal front for the MB ( http://english.alarabiya.net/articles/2012/03/14/200546.html ). One of the SNC's few secular members claimed in February 2012 that more than half of the council consisted of Islamists ( http://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-syria-opposition-idUKTRE81G0VM20120217 ).

The SNC joined the National Coalition for Syrian Revolution and Opposition Forces when the coalition was founded in November 2012 but withdrew from it in January 2014 when the latter agreed to enter into talks on a ceasefire and peaceful transition sponsored by the West and Russia in Geneva. By then both the council and the coalition had been long overtaken by the Al-Qa`ida-tied Jabhat al-Nusrah and other such groups as well as by the Islamic State (IS). The National Council is also heavily influenced by the MB. Its first president (November 2012-April 2103), Moaz al-Khatib, was the former imam of the historical Sunni Umayyad Mosque, a converted Christian church which houses the remains of St. John the Baptist and is situated in the heart of old Damascus. One of his two vice presidents was Suheir Atassi, ostensibly a secularist, and Khatib has at times promised equal rights for Sunnis, Shiites, Alawites, Christians and Kurds alike, prompting optimism in the West at the time that he could be a strong counter to the growing jihadization of the Free Syria Army (FSA). However, Katib is a MB sympathizer if not clandestine operative, a declared follower of the MB's chief theologian Yusuf al-Qardawi, whom he calls "our great imam." In accordance with Islamist taqqiya -- the right to lie to non-Muslims in order to further the Islamic cause -- when communicating in Arabic, Katib's statements become more radical. He has supported the establishment of a Shariah-law based stated and his Darbuna.net website has included articles, including some of his own, which express anti-Semitic, anti-Western, and anti-Shia views ( http://foreignpolicy.com/2012/11/14/islamist-in-chief/ ). Moreover, Katib has demonstrated just how much the differences between Islamist groups such as the MB and jihadists groups like AQ and IS are differences over strategy and tactics, not the goal of restoring the caliphate and globalizing radical Islamic influence if not rule. He has also called on the U.S. to reconsider its 2012 decision to declare the AQ-allied Jabhat al-Nusrah as a terrorist organization, refusing to denounce JN and emphasizing its value as an ally in the struggle against the Assad regime (www.csmonitor.com/USA/Foreign-Policy/2012/1212/For-newly-recognized-Syrian-rebel-coalition-a-first-dispute-with-US-video and http://www.sharnoffsglobalviews.com/assad-opposition-094/ ).

It is important to remember that the dividing lines between secular and Islamist groups such as the MB and even moreso those between Islamist groups like the MB and jihadi groups like AQ and IS on the ground in Syria are fluid and porous. The events in Libya demonstrated the dangers of these intersections, and now failed results would be repeated inside the Syria opposition with support for 'moderates' and Islamists leading to support for jihadists.

Recently disclosed U.S. government documents reveal the extent to which -- already by at least mid-2012 -- the Obama administration along with its European and Sunni allies were supplying financial, weapons, and training support to the SNC in its efforts to overthrow the Baathist and Alawite-led regime of Bashar al-Assad. Moreover, the documents show that the weapons were not only going to the MB-dominated SNC but also to the Al Qa`ida (AQ) Iraqi affiliate, the forerunner to ISIS. In fact, an August 2012 Defense Department/Defense Information Agency (DIA) document, which would have been based on data from the preceding months up to a year before mid-2012, emphasized that Salafists, in particular MB and AQ's affiliate in Iraq 'Al Qaida in Iraq' or AQI already dominated the Syrian opposition forces. The same document undermines the neo-con argument that if the U.S. had intervened in Syria early on– say, in 2011 -- there would have been little opportunity for jihadi groups like AQI and IS to dominate the forces fighting the Assad regime. But already in early 2012 if not sooner, elements from AQ's group in the region, AQI, immediately moved from Iraq to back the opposition in Syria, AQI already had been present in Syria for years as part of its operations in Iraq. Moreover, its strongholds were in the eastern regions of Iraq, and the religious and tribal leaders there came out strongly in support for the opposition to Syria's secular regime ( www.judicialwatch.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Pg.-291-Pgs.-287-293-JW-v-DOD-and-State-14-812-DOD-Release-2015-04-10-final-version11.pdf ). Therefore, AQI would have had no trouble recruiting for the fight against Assad regardless of Western actions. One needs only recall the already existing AQI presence and the open desert terrain and porous border between western Iraq and eastern Syria.

One DoD/DIA document states that weapons were being sent from the port of Bengazi, Libya to the ports of Banias and Borj Islam in Syria beginning from October 2011–that is, before the SNC was even founded, meaning Western support actually began quite early on (www.judicialwatch.org/document-archive/pgs-1-3-2-3-from-jw-v-dod-and-state-14-812/). The document is heavily redacted (blacked out) and does not indicate who organized the weapons shipments. However, the detailed knowledge of the reasons why specific ports were selected and specific ships used suggests that U.S. intelligence, likely the CIA, organized the shipments. The document states: " The Syrian ports were chosen due to the small amount of cargo traffic transiting these two ports. The ships used to transport the weapons were medium-sized and able to hold 10 or less shipping containers of cargo " ( www.judicialwatch.org/document-archive/pgs-1-3-2-3-from-jw-v-dod-and-state-14-812/ ). This shows that U.S. intelligence was already on the ground before October 2011. Moreover, this demonstrates that early Western actions in the form of supplying weapons especially, only strengthened AQI's recruitment and development potential both in Iraq and Syria, helping to produce the Islamic State. I include extended excerpts from the most relevant newly released documents at the end of this article. One document warned of "dire consequences," most of which are blacked out, but one potential consequence is not redacted: the "renewing facilitation of terrorist elements from all over the Arab world entering into Iraqi Arena" ( www.judicialwatch.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Pg.-291-Pgs.-287-293-JW-v-DOD-and-State-14-812-DOD-Release-2015-04-10-final-version11.pdf ).

The interpretation that the Obama administration intentionally or unintentionally aided and abetted AQ and the rise of its successor organization ISIS (IS) is supported by the U.S. administration's second-ranking official. On 2 October 2015 U.S. Vice President Joseph Biden let the cat out of the big when he was asked the question–"In retrospect do you believe the United States should have acted earlier in Syria, and if not why is now the right moment?"– at the John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Biden answered:

The answer is 'no' for 2 reasons. One, the idea of identifying a moderate middle has been a chase America has been engaged in for a long time. We Americans think in every country in transition there is a Thomas Jefferson hiding beside some rock – or a James Madison beyond one sand dune. The fact of the matter is the ability to identify a moderate middle in Syria was – there was no moderate middle because the moderate middle are made up of shopkeepers, not soldiers – they are made up of people who in fact have ordinary elements of the middle class of that country. And what happened was – and history will record this because I'm finding that former administration officials, as soon as they leave write books which I think is inappropriate, but anyway, (laughs) no I'm serious – I do think it's inappropriate at least , you know, give the guy a chance to get out of office. And what my constant cry was that our biggest problem is our allies – our allies in the region were our largest problem in Syria. The Turks were great friends – and I have the greatest relationship with Erdogan, which I just spent a lot of time with – the Saudis, the Emiratis, etc. What were they doing? They were so determined to take down Assad and essentially have a proxy Sunni-Shia war, what did they do? They poured hundreds of millions of dollars and tens, thousands of tons of weapons into anyone who would fight against Assad except that the people who were being supplied were Al Nusra and Al Qaeda and the extremist elements of jihadis coming from other parts of the world . Now you think I'm exaggerating – take a look. Where did all of this go? So now what's happening? All of a sudden everybody's awakened because this outfit called ISIL which was Al Qaeda in Iraq, which when they were essentially thrown out of Iraq, found open space in territory in eastern Syria, work with Al Nusra who we declared a terrorist group early on and we could not convince our colleagues to stop supplying them. So what happened? Now all of a sudden – I don't want to be too facetious – but they had seen the Lord. Now we have – the President's been able to put together a coalition of our Sunni neighbors ( www.youtube.com/watch?v=UrXkm4FImvc&feature=youtu.be&t=1h31m57s ).

This illegal activity is at least one if not the main reason behind the Obama administration's deception of the American people regarding the murder of US ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens and three CIA agents in September 2012 in Benghazi. Indeed, the above-mentioned document and other recently released DoD documents confirm that within hours of the attack, the entire US government, including those who were at the forefront in claiming the incident was a political demonstration that took place in reaction to a film denigrating Islam–President Barack Obama, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and US National Security advisor (then US rep to the UN) Susan Rice–was in fact a carefully planned terrorist attack carried out by an AQ affiliate in Libya and facilitated by the U.S. president's favorite Islamist organization, the Muslim Brotherhood, which was also dominant within the 'moderate' wing of the Syrian opposition and Free Syrian Army. Indeed, the recent congressional hearings into the Benghazi terrorist attack demonstrated that within a day of the attack Clinton told her daughter and the Egyptian ambassador to the US that it was a terrorist attack carried out by a AQ affiliate as described in the document not by a 'demonstration' protesting film as she told the American people and the relatives of the the CIA agents killed in the attack.

At the same time, the military and intelligence communities are in virtual mutiny over the Obama administration's failure to recognize the growing IS and overall jihadi threat and the risk of growing that threat by continuing the failed MB and other policies the administration pursues in the MENA region. The military's policy revolt underscores the fact and gravity of the policy to supply weapons to Syria's MB- and eventually jihadist-infested 'moderate' opposition to the Assad regime. In a January 2016 London Review of Books article, investigative journalist Seymour M. Hersh uncovered major dissent and opposition within the Pentagon's Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) over Obama's policy of supplying weapons to MB elements in Syria. Hersh found: "Barack Obama's repeated insistence that Bashar al-Assad must leave office – and that there are 'moderate' rebel groups in Syria capable of defeating him" – has in recent years provoked quiet dissent, and even overt opposition, among some of the most senior officers on the Pentagon's Joint Staff. Moreover, the Pentagon critics' opposition centered on the administration's unwarranted "fixation on Assad's primary ally, Vladimir Putin." Another less likely accurate aspect of their critique holds that "Obama is captive to Cold War thinking about Russia and China, and hasn't adjusted his stance on Syria to the fact both countries share Washington's anxiety about the spread of terrorism in and beyond Syria; like Washington, they believe that Islamic State must be stopped" ( www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n01/seymour-m-hersh/military-to-military ).

In my view, Obama is captive to anything but 'Cold War thinking.' Rather, he is willing prisoner of his excessive sympathy for Islam, to his MB strategy, and to his perhaps/perhaps not unconscious association of Putin with the dreaded Republican and conservative white male so detested by the Democratic Party and American left from which the president hails. That association has been unintentionally reinforced by Putin's attempt to wear the mantle of defender of traditional values, Christianity and, as strange as it may seem to come, Western civilization. However, Hersh's other findings are well-taken.

According to Hersh, the top brass's resistance began in summer of 2013–more than a year since the CIA, the UK, Saudi Arabia and Qatar began to ship guns and goods from Libya via Turkey and sea to Syria for Assad's toppling. A joint JCS-DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency) "highly classified," "all-source" intelligence estimate foresaw that the Assad regime's fall would bring chaos and very possibly Syria's takeover by jihadists was occurring in much of Libya. Hersh's source, a former JCS senior adviser, said the report "took a dim view of the Obama administration's insistence on continuing to finance and arm the so-called moderate rebel groups." The assessment designated Turkey a "major impediment" to the policy since Ankara had "co-opted" the "covert US programme to arm and support the moderate rebels fighting Assad," which "had morphed into an across-the-board technical, arms and logistical programme for all of the opposition, including Jabhat al-Nusra and Islamic State." Moderates had "evaporated" and the Free Syrian Army was "a rump group stationed at an airbase in Turkey." The estimate concluded, according to Hersh and his source, that "there was no viable 'moderate' opposition to Assad, and the US was arming extremists" ( www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n01/seymour-m-hersh/military-to-military ).

DIA Director (2012-14) Lieutenant General Michael Flynn confirmed that his agency had sent a steady stream of warnings to the "civilian leadership" about the "dire consequences of toppling Assad" and the jihadists' control of the opposition. Turkey was not working hard enough to stem the flow of foreign fighters and weapons across its border and "was looking the other way when it came to the growth of the Islamic State inside Syria," Flynn says. "If the American public saw the intelligence we were producing daily, at the most sensitive level, they would go ballistic" Flynn told Hersh. But the DIA's analysis, he says, "got enormous pushback" from the Obama administration: "I felt that they did not want to hear the truth." Hersh's former JCS adviser concurred, saying: "Our policy of arming the opposition to Assad was unsuccessful and actually having a negative impact." "The Joint Chiefs believed that Assad should not be replaced by fundamentalists. The administration's policy was contradictory. They wanted Assad to go but the opposition was dominated by extremists. So who was going to replace him? To say Assad's got to go is fine, but if you follow that through – therefore anyone is better. It's the 'anybody else is better' issue that the JCS had with Obama's policy" ( www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n01/seymour-m-hersh/military-to-military ).

In September 2015 more than 50 intelligence analysts at the U.S. military's Central Command lodged a formal complaint that their reports on IS and AQ affiliate 'Jabhat al-Nusrah' or JN–some of which were briefed to the president–were being altered inappropriately by senior Pentagon officials. In some cases, "key elements of intelligence reports were removed" in order to alter their thrust. The CENTCOMM analysts' complaint was sent in July to the Defense Department and sparked a DoD inspector general's investigation (www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/09/09/exclusive-50-spies-say-isis-intelligence-was-cooked.html). This was likely done in response to explicit requests or at least implicit signaling coming from White House officials on what and what is not politically correct in the president's mind. Thus, the analysts' complaint alleges that the reports were altered to depict the jihadi groups as weaker than analysts had assessed in an attempt by CENTCOM officials to adhere to the Obama administration's line that the U.S. is winning the battle against ISIS and JN (www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/09/09/exclusive-50-spies-say-isis-intelligence-was-cooked.html). This would correlate with the motive behind the Bengazi coverup as well, as the terrorist attack occurred at the peak of the 2012 presidential campaign when the president was stumping on slogans that he had destroyed AQ.

Perhaps in response to the growing tensions, President Obama threw the intelligence agencies under the bus in September 2014 days after the US authorized itself to begin bombing Syria. He claimed that it was the intelligence agencies who "underestimated what was taking place in Syria" – a euphemism for the growing power of IS. He did this in August (www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2014/08/09/statement-president-iraq) and again in September ( http://thehill.com/policy/defense/219123-obama-intel-underestimated-isis and http://time.com/3442254/obama-u-s-intelligence-isis/ ). In turn, the Republican-controlled U.S. House of Representatives has begun an investigation and hearings on the intel redactions (www.nationalreview.com/article/424000/house-investigates-alleged-doctoring-isis-intel-joel-gehrke), and Obama's former DIA chief, General Michael Flynn, has urged that the investigation begin "at the top" ( http://hotair.com/archives/2015/11/24/former-obama-dia-chief-intel-probe-should-focus-on-white-house/ and http://thehill.com/policy/defense/219123-obama-intel-underestimated-isis ).

But matters in the Obama administration are even worse. After illegally running guns to AQ and then IS and thereby strengthening history's greatest terrorist threat emanating from a non-state actor, the administration facilitated IS's financing by failing to bomb both the IS-controlled oil wells and the hundred-long truck convoys that transported the oil to market across the open desert in open daylight. Although in October 2014 a U.S. State Department, deputy assistant secretary for European and Eurasian Affairs Julieta Valls Noyes, claimed the sale of IS fuel was one of the US's "principal concerns" and air strikes against them were "a viable option", nothing was ever done (www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/war-on-isis-us-planning-to-bomb-oil-pipelines-to-halt-jihadists-funding-9813980.html). According to former Obama administration CIA director Mike Morell's statement on November 24th, the administration refused to bomb oil wells which IS took control of because of the potential environmental damage ( www.theblaze.com/stories/2015/11/25/obamas-former-cia-director-reveals-real-reason-admin-declined-to-hit-islamic-state-oil-wells/ ).

One reason claimed for not attacking the truck convoys was that the drivers of the trucks ferrying oil from Mosul, Iraq to the Turkish border for sale–more about NATO member Turkey's role below–were not IS members but rather civilians. Only after Russia's military intervention and bombing of the IS oil convoys, along with France's doing the same after the November 13th Paris attacks, did the U.S. carry out its first sorties against the IS oil convoys on 17 November 2015. In advance of the first U.S. attack on the convoys, U.S. forces dropped leaflets warning the truck drivers (and any mujahedin accompanying them) of the impending raid ( www.wsj.com/articles/french-airstrikes-in-syria-may-have-missed-islamic-state-1447685772 ). It remains unclear how the U.S. knew the drivers were not IS members, whether this is in fact true, whether this necessarily exonerates them, and whether it is possible to defeat an extremist insurgency under such legal structures.

However, the perfidy of Obama's MB policy was far greater than simply the usual political correctness and naivete`of the president and his milieu or the resulting policy failures in Egypt, Libya Syria and Iraq. By looking the other way and even facilitating the flow of weapons to rebels, the Obama administration was flirting with violating U.S. anti-terrorism laws. The administration persisted in funneling arms to MB and other 'moderate' elements, when it was obvious to any moderately informed analyst that it would be impossible to control the flow of weapons in the murky circles and dark networks essence of frequently intersecting Islamist and jihadist organizations.

The administration's main partner in this gambit–NATO member Turkey–would raise similar and even more troubling issues.

Part 3: Obama's America, Erdogan's Turkey and the 'War Against' Jihadism in Syria and Iraq is forthcoming later in March .

[May 03, 2020] Never in my country: COVID-19 and American exceptionalism by Jeanne Morefield

Notable quotes:
"... Because behind today's coronavirus-inspired astonishment at conditions in developing or lower income countries, and Trump's authoritarian-like thuggery, lies an actual military and political hegemon with an actual impact on the world; particularly on what was once called the "Third World." ..."
"... In physical terms, the U.S.'s military hegemony is comprised of 800 bases in over 70 nations – more bases than any other nation or empire in history. The U.S. maintains drone bases, listening posts, "black sites," aircraft carriers, a massive nuclear stockpile, and military personnel working in approximately 160 countries. This is a globe-spanning military and security apparatus organized into regional commands that resemble the "proconsuls of the Roman empire and the governors-general of the British." In other words, this apparatus is built not for deterrence, but for primacy. ..."
"... The U.S.'s global primacy emerged from the wreckage of World War II when the United States stepped into the shoes vacated by European empires. Throughout the Cold War, and in the name of supporting "free peoples," the sprawling American security apparatus helped ensure that 300 years of imperial resource extraction and wealth distribution – from what was then called the Third World to the First – remained undisturbed, despite decolonization. ..."
"... In fiscal terms, maintaining American hegemony requires spending more on "defense" than the next seven largest countries combined. Our nearly $1 trillion security budget now amounts to about 15 percent of the federal budget and over half of all discretionary spending. Moreover, the U.S. security budget continues to increase despite the Pentagon's inability to pass a fiscal audit. ..."
"... Foreign policy is routinely the last issue Americans consider when they vote for presidents even though the president has more discretionary power over foreign policy than any other area of American politics. Thus, despite its size, impact, and expense, the world's military hegemon exists somewhere on the periphery of most Americans' self-understanding, as though, like the sun, it can't be looked upon directly for fear of blindness. ..."
"... The shock of discovering that our healthcare system is so quickly overwhelmed should automatically trigger broader conversations about spending priorities that entail deep and sustained cuts in an engorged security budget whose sole purpose is the maintenance of primacy. And yet, not only has this not happened, $10.5 billion of the coronavirus aid package has been earmarked for the Pentagon, with $2.4 billion of that channeled to the "defense industrial base." Of the $500 billion aimed at corporate America, $17.5 billion is set aside "for businesses critical to maintaining national security" such as aerospace. ..."
"... To make matters worse, our blindness to this bloated security complex makes it frighteningly easy for champions of American primacy to sound the alarm when they even suspect a dip in funding might be forthcoming. Indeed, before most of us had even glanced at the details of the coronavirus bill, foreign policy hawks were already issuing dark prediction s about the impact of still-imaginary cuts in the security budget on the U.S.'s "ability to strike any target on the planet in response to hostile actions by any actor" – as if that ability already did not exist many times over. ..."
Apr 07, 2020 | responsiblestatecraft.org

This March, as COVID-19's capacity to overwhelm the American healthcare system was becoming obvious, experts marveled at the scenario unfolding before their eyes. "We have Third World countries who are better equipped than we are now in Seattle," noted one healthcare professional, her words echoed just a few days later by a shocked doctor in New York who described "a third-world country type of scenario." Donald Trump could similarly only grasp what was happening through the same comparison. "I have seen things that I've never seen before," he said . "I mean I've seen them, but I've seen them on television and faraway lands, never in my country."

At the same time, regardless of the fact that "Third World" terminology is outdated and confusing, Trump's inept handling of the pandemic has itself elicited more than one "banana republic" analogy, reflecting already well-worn, bipartisan comparisons of Trump to a " third world dictator " (never mind that dictators and authoritarians have never been confined solely to lower income countries).

And yet, while such comparisons provoke predictably nativist outrage from the right, what is absent from any of these responses to the situation is a sense of reflection or humility about the "Third World" comparison itself. The doctor in New York who finds himself caught in a "third world" scenario and the political commentators outraged when Trump behaves "like a third world dictator" uniformly express themselves in terms of incredulous wonderment. One never hears the potential second half of this comparison: "I am now experiencing what it is like to live in a country that resembles the kind of nation upon whom the United States regularly imposes broken economies and corrupt leaders."

Because behind today's coronavirus-inspired astonishment at conditions in developing or lower income countries, and Trump's authoritarian-like thuggery, lies an actual military and political hegemon with an actual impact on the world; particularly on what was once called the "Third World."

In physical terms, the U.S.'s military hegemony is comprised of 800 bases in over 70 nations – more bases than any other nation or empire in history. The U.S. maintains drone bases, listening posts, "black sites," aircraft carriers, a massive nuclear stockpile, and military personnel working in approximately 160 countries. This is a globe-spanning military and security apparatus organized into regional commands that resemble the "proconsuls of the Roman empire and the governors-general of the British." In other words, this apparatus is built not for deterrence, but for primacy.

The U.S.'s global primacy emerged from the wreckage of World War II when the United States stepped into the shoes vacated by European empires. Throughout the Cold War, and in the name of supporting "free peoples," the sprawling American security apparatus helped ensure that 300 years of imperial resource extraction and wealth distribution – from what was then called the Third World to the First – remained undisturbed, despite decolonization.

Since then, the United States has overthrown or attempted to overthrow the governments of approximately 50 countries, many of which (e.g. Iran, Guatemala, the Congo, and Chile) had elected leaders willing to nationalize their natural resources and industries. Often these interventions took the form of covert operations. Less frequently, the United States went to war to achieve these same ends (e.g. Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq).

In fiscal terms, maintaining American hegemony requires spending more on "defense" than the next seven largest countries combined. Our nearly $1 trillion security budget now amounts to about 15 percent of the federal budget and over half of all discretionary spending. Moreover, the U.S. security budget continues to increase despite the Pentagon's inability to pass a fiscal audit.

Trump's claim that Obama had "hollowed out" defense spending was not only grossly untrue, it masked the consistency of the security budget's metastasizing growth since the Vietnam War, regardless of who sits in the White House. At $738 billion dollars, Trump's security budget was passed in December with the overwhelming support of House Democrats.

And yet, from the perspective of public discourse in this country, our globe-spanning, resource-draining military and security apparatus exists in an entirely parallel universe to the one most Americans experience on a daily level. Occasionally, we wake up to the idea of this parallel universe but only when the United States is involved in visible military actions. The rest of the time, Americans leave thinking about international politics – and the deaths, for instance, of 2.5 million Iraqis since 2003 – to the legions of policy analysts and Pentagon employees who largely accept American military primacy as an "article of faith," as Professor of International Security and Strategy at the University of Birmingham Patrick Porter has said .

Foreign policy is routinely the last issue Americans consider when they vote for presidents even though the president has more discretionary power over foreign policy than any other area of American politics. Thus, despite its size, impact, and expense, the world's military hegemon exists somewhere on the periphery of most Americans' self-understanding, as though, like the sun, it can't be looked upon directly for fear of blindness.

Why is our avoidance of the U.S.'s weighty impact on the world a problem in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic? Most obviously, the fact that our massive security budget has gone so long without being widely questioned means that one of the soundest courses of action for the U.S. during this crisis remains resolutely out of sight.

The shock of discovering that our healthcare system is so quickly overwhelmed should automatically trigger broader conversations about spending priorities that entail deep and sustained cuts in an engorged security budget whose sole purpose is the maintenance of primacy. And yet, not only has this not happened, $10.5 billion of the coronavirus aid package has been earmarked for the Pentagon, with $2.4 billion of that channeled to the "defense industrial base." Of the $500 billion aimed at corporate America, $17.5 billion is set aside "for businesses critical to maintaining national security" such as aerospace.

To make matters worse, our blindness to this bloated security complex makes it frighteningly easy for champions of American primacy to sound the alarm when they even suspect a dip in funding might be forthcoming. Indeed, before most of us had even glanced at the details of the coronavirus bill, foreign policy hawks were already issuing dark prediction s about the impact of still-imaginary cuts in the security budget on the U.S.'s "ability to strike any target on the planet in response to hostile actions by any actor" – as if that ability already did not exist many times over.

On a more existential level, a country that is collectively engaged in unseeing its own global power cannot help but fail to make connections between that power and domestic politics, particularly when a little of the outside world seeps in. For instance, because most Americans are unaware of their government's sponsorship of fundamentalist Islamic groups in the Middle East throughout the Cold War, 9/11 can only ever appear to have come from nowhere, or because Muslims hate our way of life.

This "how did we get here?" attitude replicates itself at every level of political life making it profoundly difficult for Americans to see the impact of their nation on the rest of the world, and the blowback from that impact on the United States itself. Right now, the outsized influence of American foreign policy is already encouraging the spread of coronavirus itself as U.S. imposed sanctions on Iran severely hamper that country's ability to respond to the virus at home and virtually guarantee its spread throughout the region.

Closer to home, our shock at the healthcare system's inept response to the pandemic masks the relationship between the U.S.'s imposition of free-market totalitarianism on countries throughout the Global South and the impact of free-market totalitarianism on our own welfare state .

Likewise, it is more than karmic comeuppance that the President of the United States now resembles the self-serving authoritarians the U.S. forced on so many formerly colonized nations. The modes of militarized policing American security experts exported to those authoritarian regimes also contributed , on a policy level, to both the rise of militarized policing in American cities and the rise of mass incarceration in the 1980s and 90s. Both of these phenomena played a significant role in radicalizing Trump's white nationalist base and decreasing their tolerance for democracy.

Most importantly, because the U.S. is blind to its power abroad, it cannot help but turn that blindness on itself. This means that even during a pandemic when America's exceptionalism – our lack of national healthcare – has profoundly negative consequences on the population, the idea of looking to the rest of the world for solutions remains unthinkable.

Senator Bernie Sanders' reasonable suggestion that the U.S., like Denmark, should nationalize its healthcare system is dismissed as the fanciful pipe dream of an aging socialist rather than an obvious solution to a human problem embraced by nearly every other nation in the world. The Seattle healthcare professional who expressed shock that even "Third World countries" are "better equipped" than we are to confront COVID-19 betrays a stunning ignorance of the diversity of healthcare systems within developing countries. Cuba, for instance, has responded to this crisis with an efficiency and humanity that puts the U.S. to shame.

Indeed, the U.S. is only beginning to feel the full impact of COVID-19's explosive confrontation with our exceptionalism: if the unemployment rate really does reach 32 percent, as has been predicted, millions of people will not only lose their jobs but their health insurance as well. In the middle of a pandemic.

Over 150 years apart, political commentators Edmund Burke and Aimé Césaire referred to this blindness as the byproduct of imperialism. Both used the exact same language to describe it; as a "gangrene" that "poisons" the colonizing body politic. From their different historical perspectives, Burke and Césaire observed how colonization boomerangs back on colonial society itself, causing irreversible damage to nations that consider themselves humane and enlightened, drawing them deeper into denial and self-delusion.

Perhaps right now there is a chance that COVID-19 – an actual, not metaphorical contagion – can have the opposite effect on the U.S. by opening our eyes to the things that go unseen. Perhaps the shock of recognizing the U.S. itself is less developed than our imagined "Third World" might prompt Americans to tear our eyes away from ourselves and look toward the actual world outside our borders for examples of the kinds of political, economic, and social solidarity necessary to fight the spread of Coronavirus. And perhaps moving beyond shock and incredulity to genuine recognition and empathy with people whose economies and democracies have been decimated by American hegemony might begin the process of reckoning with the costs of that hegemony, not just in "faraway lands" but at home. In our country.

[May 03, 2020] REPORT The Real Ukrainian "Snipers' Massacre", 20 February 2014 by Gordon M. Hahn

Mar 09, 2016 | gordonhahn.com

Introduction

On February 18-20 th 2014 there was a major escalation of the violence on Kiev's Maidan, ending in a massacre on the 20 th and ultimately in the overthrow of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanuykovych. In the center of a European capitol over one hundred police and demonstrators had been shot to death and hundreds more wounded. Despite the heavy casualties suffered by police, Western governments, the opposition-turned government and Western and Maidan media were the very next day unanimous in reporting that the massacre had been ordered by President Yanukovych and that the shooting was initiated and carried out exclusively or nearly so by snipers from the Ukrainian state's police and security organs using professional sniper rifles. To this day, many in Kiev believe it was more likely that Russian special forces organized and perhaps even carried out the slaughter. As discussed further below, the Maidan government's chief of the Security Service of Ukraine, Kiev's equivalent of the KGB or FSB, falsely declared in March 2015 that Russian President Vladimir Putin's advisor, Vladislav Surkov, organized and commanded the snipers. The three days of killing peaked on the 20 th and ultimately scuttled an agreement to end the crisis signed on February 21 st by Yanukovich and three opposition party leaders and brokered by Russia and the foreign ministers of Germany, France and Poland.

Less than two weeks after the massacre and Yanukovich's ensuing removal from power there emerged an audiotape – likely a Russian or Ukrainian government intercept – of a telephone conversation between Estonian Foreign Minister Urmas Paet and the EU's Catherine Ashton in which the former states that his feeling and the sense in Kiev generally was growing that someone from the new Maidan regime was behind the shooting. Although when pressed by Paet that there needed to be an investigation Ashton faint-heratedly agreed, neither party made any effort to push the issue again, no less demand an investigation. [1] The legitimacy of the new coalition government and subsequent new Maidan regime depended on the myth surrounding the snipers' massacre that Yanukovich's alleged deployment of snipers sparked his overthrow and prompted Western governments to ignore the opposition's violation of an agreement between the regime and opposition that provided a way out of the crisis. The martyrs of the Maidan revolution know as the 'heavenly hundred', who were allegedly killed by Yanukovych's forces, became the heroes and symbol of the revolution. Thus, from the Paet-Ashton phone call forward, not only did Paet and Ashton stop discussing the shooting, but not a single Western official discussed this issue so pivotal for the fate of Europe, no less called for an investigation. Quite disturbingly, Ashton and Paet remained silent until the audiotape was leaked. Nor would any foreign government, with the exception of Russia, or any international governmental organization demand an investigation or threaten repercussions for Kiev's failure to do so.

Mounting evidence now shows that not police, as the Ukrainian opposition and Western governments and media assume, but rather RS and SP fighters were shooting both police and pro-Maidan demonstrators on those fateful days. Contrary to Western and Kiev's claims, the gunfire was initiated by Maidan supporters in the early morning hours, and police initially showed restraint and sought to convince Maidan leaders to find and stop the shooters so they would not have to respond. The escalation from Molotov cocktails, chains, and massive bricks was not a distant leap.

Detailed and comprehensive analysis of publicly available evidence conducted by Ottawa University professor and Ukrainian scholar Ivan Katchanovski demonstrates that the armed fighting on both February 18 th and 20 th was initated by the neofascist-dominated Euromaidan 'self-defense' units and that the RS and SP fighters shot, killed, and wounded both police and EuroMaidan demonstrators. After the first version of Professor Katchanovski's research was published, his house in Vinnitsa, Ukraine was seized by the RS- and NSA-led Azov Battalion's fighters on behalf of the Maidan regime. [2] Independent investigations by numerous organizations and a plethora of video and audio evidence support Katchanovski's findings: Germany's Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, a BBC documentary film, a documentary film by Beck-Hoffman, among several others. The following account is based on their findings and others. These include interviews with several Maidan shooters, who testify about their involvement in the killing of police. [3]

Those killed and wounded on 18-20 February 2014 in Kiev were not shot by trained police 'snipers'. For the most part, both police and demonstrators were shot by hunting rifles, Makarov pistols, and occasionally modified Kalashnikovs. To be sure, some videos show police aiming but rarely firing rifles with scopes. However, they were doing so long after the RS and SP fighters began the shooting and are not positioned on building roofs in order to carry out a clandestine sniping operation. The police are openly deployed on the streets during a retreat before a violent and advancing crowd, some of whom were deploying firearms as well.

February 18 th , black Tuesday, saw 17 deaths in Kiev. Most were killed in fighting around the Supreme Rada and Trade Union buildings. The Maidan's 'Self Defense' (MSD) 'self-defense' units or 'hundreds' ( sotniki ) led by the neo-fascist RS attempted to storm the building of the Verkhovna Rada (for the seond time – the first on January 21 st ) and set the Party of Regions headquarters in Kiev on fire blocking the exits, killing one worker and seven Berkut and MVD police. In response, the Yanukovich government authorized plans 'Boomerang' and 'Khvylia' for the the seizure of the Maidan and its headquarters. An Alfa officer, who led one of the SBU groups that stormed the Trade Union Building, stated that their main task was to seize the building's 5th floor. The RS occupied the entire floor, which served as headquarters for both the EuroMaidan, the Maidan Self-Defense (MSD), which organized and supervised the EuroMaidan's 'sotniki', and RS and housed a cache of weapons. The fire set by RS fighters in the Trade Union House was allegedly intended to block the advance of 'spetsnaz' troops and killed at least two Maidan protestors. The Trade Union House, the Music Conservatory and especially the Hotel Ukraine would wherefrom much of the gunfire targeting police and demonstrators would come in the next days. [4]

Katchanovski's groundbreaking research on the February 18 – 20 th violence uncovered two radio intercepts of Internal Troops units and Alfa commanders and snipers, confirming that the MSD and RS blocked their attempts to seize the Maidan headquarters and Trade Union building on February 18 by setting the building on fire and using live ammunition. Also, a radio intercept of Alfa commanders contains their report about deploying SBU snipers to counter two Maidan "snipers" or spotters located on a Maidan-controlled building. [5] The majority of February 18's deaths were reported to be the result of gunfire wounds, [6] and several policemen were wounded by gunfire on that day, at least one seriously, according to a police account. [7] This confirms Omega commander Strelchenko's testimony, which claims that groups of Maidan protesters used live ammunition as early as February 18 th during the so-called "peaceful march" and shot several of his policeman in two incidents near 22/7 Institute Street across the street from the Kiev Music Conservatory with hunting rifles and Makarov pistols. [8]

Protester Ivan Uduzhov claims someone gave him a Kalashnikov, and he shot at police from behind protesters during the police attack just prior to police retreat. Uduzhov's description coincides with events on February 18 th and 20 th and specific 5.45mm AK-74 and 7.62mm caliber AKM weapons. [9] An Italian journalist's photograph shows a protester using the cover of demonstrators' shields to fire a Kalashnikov AK-74 assault rifle at advancing police during the evening of February 18. [10] On February 19 th there was a relative lull, but one police report states that police spotted demonstrators wearing RS symbols in the Music Conservatory that day. [11]

Shortly after midnight on February 20 th RS leader Dmitro Yarosh announced on his Facebook page that RS would reject any agreement with the Yanukovych regime and that "the offensive of the people in revolt will continue." [12] On that day at least 49 Maidan demonstrators and 3 policemen would be killed by gunfire, and more than a hundred more demonstrator and police would be wounded. Not only was the shooting on the 20 th initiated by RS and PS fighters of the MDS, but many of the casualties among the protesters appear to have been shot from areas controlled by the EuroMaidan and MDS, in particular neo-fascist RS and SP elements. By 9:00am, before any civilians were hit by gunfire, three policeman were killed and another 13 wounded. Only a few police appear to have fired at the perpetrators on the 20 th and did so in self-defence and retreat after the massacre had reached its peak. The February 20 th shooting of civilians and police centered on Institutskaya (Institute) Street in the Kiev city center, in particular from the Music Conservatory and Hotel Ukraine, and began with the shooting of Internal Troops (VV) of the Internal Affairs Ministry (MVD) and 'Berkut' riot police in the early morning hours. [13]

Different sources contain evidence of pro-Maidan shooters or spotters in at least 12 buildings occupied by the Euromaidan opposition or located within the general territory held by them during the massacre on February 20. This includes the Hotel Ukraine, Zhovtnevyi Palace, Kinopalats, Bank "Arkada," other buildings on both sides of Instytutska Street, and several buildings on the Maidan (Independence Square) itself, such as the Music Conservatory, the Trade Union Hose, and the Main Post Office. The evidence also indicates that in addition to more than 60 Euromaidan protesters, 17 members of special police units were killed and 196 wounded from the Maidan-controlled buildings by similar types of ammunition and weapons on February 18-20. [14]

On February 20 th the police had been informed that neo-fascist elements among the demonstrators had acquired firearms. Nevertheless, for the first hour or so the VV troops and Berkut used standard crowd control techniques, including three new riot-control vehicles with water cannons just acquired from Russia, to force the crowd back to the Maidan and off of Institutka Street. From Institutska the neo-fascists in the crowd had hoped to make it to Bankovaya (Bank) Street and storm the main government buildings of the president, government and Supreme Rada as they would succeed in doing the next day. But in the early morning of the 20 th the police had gained their first foothold on Maidan in weeks. Prepared to clear the square, the VV and Berkut suddenly were forced to retreat when they came under significant fire from armed protesters. All sources report that around 6:00am and as early as 5:30am gunfire coming from the demonstrators' side, specifically the Conservatory Building and the Ukraine Hotel's sixth floor, began to hit both demonstrators and police. The Ukraine Hotel, the Conservatory, and the Trade Union House were all under the Maidan's control. Right Sector fighters were located in all three buildings and controlled specifically the sixth floor of the Trade Union House. [15] One of the EuroMaidan shooters claimed he was firing at police for as long as 20 minutes and saw 10 other Maidan shooters doing the same. [16] The pro-Maidan Fatherland Party's Rada deputy and former journalist Andriy Shevchenko told the BBC and other investigators that a police chief in charge of officers on Institutska– phoned him in desperation saying that his men were under fire from the Conservatory, casualties were mounting, with 11 initially and within the hour as many as 21 wounded and three already dead, and that soon he would need to return fire if the shooting did not cease. [17] This commander was Ukrainian MVD's National Guard 'anti-terrorist' unit Omega commander Anatoliy Strelchenko, who reported to MSD commander Parubiy at 8:21am that casualties within his unit had grown to 21 wounded and three killed within a half an hour. [18] On the same day, pro-Maidan Rada deputy Inna Bogoslovskaya announced from the Rada's rostrum that there is a video of someone dressed in a Berkut uniform – but not of the Berkut – shooting from a window in the Ukraine Hotel at both civilians and police in the early morning. [19] Other reports, such as the BBC report, also show that the first casualties occurred in the early morning and were policeman. [20]

The first casualty among the Maidan protesters came at 9:00am, which was several minutes before the Berkut arrived on the scene, while the Maidan protesters were firing at water cannons deployed to disperse the crown from Institutka nonviolently. [21] Tens of other casualties among the protesters came from shots fired from territory and buildings under the direct control of EuroMaidan's MSD or 'heavenly hundred' units consisting of shooters from Right Sector, Svoboda, SNA, and the latter's military unit, the Patriots of Ukraine throughout the day. Buildings under Maidan's comtrol included: the Hotel Ukraina, the Zhovtnevyi Palace, the Kinopalats, Muzeinyi Lane, the Arkada Building, and Horodetskoho Street. The data supporting this include eyewitness accounts, videotapes, exit wound analyses, and markings on trees and building in the areas where civilians were shot. Eyewitnesses report seeing snipers shooting from buildings such as the Ukraina Hotel at both police/security forces and protesters. [22] One video shows journalists and Maidan supporters, including rank-and-file protesters as well as leaders on the stage, stating they see sniper "coordinator" or spotter on top of the Trade Union House during the massacre. [23]

A comparable number of casualties came from police, Berkut, and Omega units' fire from the streets, but these came after the initial early morning massacre of police and Berkut and during the period when snipers were shooting at both sides. No evidence of police, Berkut or Omega firing from buildings has been produced. Thus, the day of mass casualties from gunfire was initiated in the early morning by the neo-fascist elements of the Maidan, and the same elements fired on both police and protesters later in the morning and the early afternoon. Police fired on Maidan shooters and some unarmed protesters, but in the latter case the shooting seemed to target the ground in front of demonstrators in order to drive them back as they advanced on retreating police up Institutka. [24]

Who Were the Shooters?

By mid-day on the 20 th both sides were firing, but the government forces seemed to demonstrated some restraint. Thus, there be admissions by the official post-revolutionary investigation that Maida protesters were killed by firearms not used by the Berkut, MVD Internal Troops or regular police. The head of the post-Maidan Rada's special parliamentary commission, Gennadii Moskal, reported that of the 76 protesters killed on February 18-20, at least 25 were shot with 7.62mm caliber bullets and at least 17 with pellets, while another was shot with a 9mm bullet from a Makarov pistol. [25] Precisely who initiated fire on the morning of the 20 th also is clear, and it was not the government forces. Small groups of RS and SP members and fellow travelers from the MSD's heavenly hundreds were the first snipers of February 20 th .

As noted above, the buildings from which the gunfire emanated – the Trade Union House, the Music Conservatory, and the Ukraina Hotel – were under the control of Right Sector and Svoboda groups. Numerous testimony, reports and analyses show that Maidan shooters opened fire on police as early as 5:30am, wounded at least 14 Berkut police and killed at least 3 before 9:00am and before police returned fire. They were fired on mainly from three buildings: the Conservatory, Ukraina Hotel, and Trade Union Hall. [26] Despite RS, SNA and Svoboda fighters being identified in various sources as initiating and ultimately perpetrating much of the sniper massacre, at the time a group identifiying itself as the "Ukrainian Insurgent Army" or UPA – apparently named after the World War Two Nazi-allied Ukrainian organization responsible for mass murders of Jews and Poles – claimed responsibility for the February 20 th massacre. [27] This could have been a RS and/or SP subunit.

BBC investigators found a Ukrainian photographer who photographed armed men in the Kiev Conservatory during the shooting. They also interviewed an ultra-nationalist, called Sergei, who claims he was part of an armed Maidan unit deployed in the Conservatory and was equipped with a high-velocity hunting rifle. The Conservatory directly overlooks that part of the Maidan where the police's water cannon-mounted vehicles had taken up positions. Sergei states that his unit fired on police in the early morning of February 20 at approximately 7:00am but that they did not shoot to kill, merely firing at their feet. [28] According to the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , the Conservatory riflemen were under the command of 27-year-old Volodymyr Parasyuk, who was the leader of one of the MSD sotniki units. [29]

Although Andriy Parubiy was commander MSD hundreds, Parasyuk claims his group did not coordinate its joining the MSD with Parubiy but rather with the Right Sector, speaking with representatives of opposition UDAR party leader Klichko. [30] However, as Katchanovski correctly notes, it is highly unlikely that such a large unit of armed men could have been moving around on the Maidan without permission from someone in the EuroMaidan leadership – perhaps Klichko. [31] Parasyuk, a native of nationalistic Lviv in western Ukraine, states that over the years he received paramilitary training with a range of nationalist groups there and was a member of the Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists, one of the many Ukrainian organizations modeled like RS and SP on the World War II era Nazi-allied OUN. [32] Parasyuk admitted in a Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung interview that many in his soten or hundred of some 50 men were armed with hunting rifles and fired on the police from the Music Conservatory, but supposedly only in response to initial police fire. [33] After playing this key role in the Maidan revolt, Parasyuk would serve as a company commander in the Donbass battalion organized with the direct involvement of the Right Sector. In 2015 he would be elected to the Ukraine's Verkhovna Rada, where he would be involved in several physical attacks on his fellow parliamentarians. One of Parasyuk's Maidan shooters also joined this battalion, [34] the commander of which, Semyon Semenchenko, was by February 2016 under investigation for illegally holding people, using falsified documents, and other unidentified crimes. [35]

Parasyuk's role in initiating the shooting on February 20 th is corroborated by other sources, including RS EuroMaidan members. The aforementioned RS commander Igor Mazur, once a leader of the OUN successor organization, the Ukrainian Nationalist Army (UNA-UNSO), which was one of RS's three founding groups of RS, stated that he saw some 50 armed protesters in Maidan's underground area and shooting at police on the Maidan on that morning. [36] Another source staying in the Ukraine Hotel overlooking the Maidan and Institutska told Business News Europe IntelliNews that a Maidan rifleman demanded entry to the hotel's guest rooms and then fired from the window at about that time. [37] Katchanovski and Beck-Hoffman cite and include, respectively, video showing RS and/or SP riflemen firing from the Hotel Ukraina at the same time. [38]

In an interview given a year after the events, commander of Ukrainian MVD's National Guard 'anti-terrorist' unit 'Omega' Anatoliy Strelchenko confirmed that police and security possessed prior information that some MSD hundreds were armed. He caims to have witnessed both Maidan protesters and the police being killed and wounded by shots emanating from the Hotel Ukraina on February 20 th . Additionally, he stated that shooters and spotters were positioned in other nearby buildings under the Maidan's control, including but not limited to the Music Conservatory, the Trade Union House, Zhovtnevyi Palace, Kinopalats, and Muzeiny Lane. At these and other places Strelchenko and Omega troops came under fire from Maidan protesters with both hunting rifles and Kalashnikovs. [39] Strelchenko also testifies that his men were fired on twice on February 21 st – just after midnight and just before noon. [40] Hours later, they and all other police, MVD, and special forces pulled out of the city center in accordance with the February 20 th agreement, leaving the government buildings unprotected to be stormed by the very same RS, SP and other Maidan activists who had been involved in the shootings.

One Maidan shooter was apparently a member of either the neo-fascist Right Sector or one of its founding neo-fascist parties, the Social-National Assembly (SNA), and later served in the notorious Azov Battalion fighting near Mariupol and led by SNA chairman Biletskiy. This shooter said he was recruited in January for this operation and that on February 19 th at around 6:00pm he and some 20 others who came forward after someone from the Maidan protest's podium requested people with shooting skills. They were offered a choice of weapons, including shotguns and Kalashnikov-based Saiga rifles and told to take up convenient positions. The same shooter claims he saw about 10 other protesters shooting at police from the Music Conservatory building in the morning of February 20. Other Maidan protesters who witnessed these events said that organized groups from western Ukraine's Lviv and Ivano-Frankivsk regions, some with rifles, came to the Maidan and then moved to the conservatory hours after midnight on February 20 th . [41] Using medical emergency service reports, a Rada special commission confirmed the time line, concluding that shooting from Maidan and neighboring streets targeting Berkut and Internal Troops on February 20 th started at 6:10am. [42] The BBC investigation includes photos showing Maidan shooters with hunting rifles and a Kalashnikov rifle inside the Music Conservatory shortly after 8:00am. [43] Two separate '112 Ukraina' television broadcasts reported that between 8:00am and 9:00am several policeman were shot by Maidan shooters from the Music Conservatory. At the same time, a video shows a Maidan stage speaker warning demonstrators of shooting coming from behind the stage, demonstrators pointing to a shooter on a hotel rooftop, and sounds of gunfire. [44] Numerous other reports cited by Katchanovskii, including an interview with a Swedish neo-Nazi pro-Maidan protester, report Maidan shooters firing on, killing, and wounding police before 9am. [45]

Euromaidan tweeted at 8:21am -- minutes after Omega commander Strelchenko informed Euromaidan self-defense chief Parubiy about the first Berkut report of Maidan shooters firing at police -- that a "sniper" was caught at the Music Conservatory, which is consistent with both BBC and Vesti interviews of the same shooter, who said that he was "captured" by the Parubiy's personal security unit and driven out of Kiev. [46] This 'capture' may have been an early attempt to cover up the hundreds' falso flag 'sniper's' massacre, since later, as Katchanovski reports, Parubiy denied his forces ever captured a sniper. [47] It is likely that the ultra-nationalist Parubiy was behind the false flag operation and nationalist revolutionary seizure of power. He would be rewarded under the new Maidan regime with the post of Chairman of the Defense and Security Council of Ukraine.

Video evidence compiled by Professor Katchanovski leaves no doubt that Parasyuk and at least one of his groups of RS and SP snipers were firing from the 14 th floor of the Hotel Ukraina. One video shows, beginning at 2 minute and 37 seconds into the video, the arrival of a Parasyuk-led group with Parasyuk and Koshulynsky, who is carrying a Glock handgun. At the 2:47 mark, as the armed demonstrators are still entering, journalists attempt to photograph or film them at which point they are confronted by people who appear to be in charge with screams, "Don't photograph (them), don't photograph (them)!" [48] Koshulynsky would chair the Verkhovna Rada emergency session in the late afternoon and evening of that same day during which the parliament condemned the Yanukovych government for the massacre and issued a resolution ordering government forces to withdraw from downtown Kiev. A video from Germany's ZDF television Parasyuk can be seen removing armed comrades from a 14 th floor room of the Hotel Ukraina at 10:22am commanded the shooters to stop firing and move because "the press should not be drawn into it." The SP figure and then Verkhovna Rada deputy speaker Ruslan Koshulynsky is also seen in this video with the same group of armed shooters. The video was removed in early March 2015 from the German ZDF website but is available on Professor Katchanovski's Facebook page. [49] Another video shows the men inside the Hotel Ukraine room shooting out the window. [50] A Ruptly video shows another group of Maidan protesters with at least one gun and an axe breaking into the same 14 th floor hotel room, which had been occupied by journalists. Just prior to this a Ruptly reporter showed at 10:12am that he was shot in his bullet-proof vest about half an hour before, and the ZDF correspondent says in the video: "They captured our room on the 14th floor of the hotel. They fired out of our window." [51] All of this, as Katchanovski points out, has been covered up or denied by the Ukrainian government investigation, avoided in both Maidan Ukrainian and Western media reporting, and ignored by Western governments.

Around the time of the second anniversary of the February massacre, yet another pro-Maidan sniper, Ivan Bubenchik, emerged to acknowledge that he shot and killed Berkut before any protesters were shot that day. In a print interview Bubenchik previews his admission in Vladimir Tikhii's documentary film 'Brantsy' that he shot and killed two Berkut commanders in the early morning hours of February 20 th on the Maidan. Bubenchik hails from Lviv, having learned how to shoot in the Soviet army and undergone training at a military intelligence academy for operations planned for Afghanistan and "other hot points." Claiming that he was on the Maidan from the "first day," he soon joined the MSD's "Ninth" soten tasked with guarding the subway exits onto the Maidan, so the SBU could not use them to infiltrate the square. At some point, the MVD blocked their acces to the government quarters on Hrushevskii Strret. The Ninth soten delivered a written ultimatum that if by the next day Ninth's fighters were not allowed to move freely between the Maidan and the Metro, they would attack the Internal Troops, which they did with Molotov cocktails and stones. [52]

On February 20 th , Bubenchik claims that the Yanukovich regime started the fire in the Trade Union House -- where his and many other EuroMaidan fighters lived during the revolt -- prompting the Maidan's next reaction. As noted above, however, pro-Maidan neo-fascists have revealed that Right Sector started that fires there. Relocating to the infamous Conservatory where, Bubenchik confirms other testimony that there were pro-Maidan fighters "with hunting rifles" shooting at the units of special troops seventy meters away." He moved them away from windows through which they were firing at the secial forces when the latter allegedly began throwing Molotov cocktails at the building in order to burn down their "last refuge." Claiming he had been praying for 40, then 20 Kalashnikovs to appear, on the morning of the February 20 th an unidentified person brought to them a Kalashnikov and 75 bullets in a tennis racket bag. He emphasizes that those who claim the weapons had been captured from the pro-Yanukovich titushki on February 18 th are wrong. Bubenchik fired at police from a window situated behind columns farthest from the Maidan, targeting likely commanders betrayed by their "gesticulations." He expresses his pride in shooting the two commanders in the back of the skull and killing them and then shooting an unspecified number of other Berkut servicemen in the legs with the intent merely to wound. Bubenchik then moved out of the Conservatory onto the street and continued to fire on police from behind the shields of other protesters, who were moved "to tears of joy." After the police began to return fire, Bubenchik ran out of ammunition and was told by "people with status" that more was on the way. He does not clarify whether it arrived, but concludes by noting that two of his comrades in the Ninth hundred were killed: Igor Serdyuk and Bogdan Vaida. [53]

Numerous videos, including those used by the BBC and other documentaries cited herein, demonstrate that by January the Maidan protests were far from peaceful. Total police casualties from gunfire for February 18-20 were at least 17 killed and 196 wounded, according to one source. [54] Another set of figures holds that there were 578 police casualties, including killed, wounded, and injured; 80 of these were victims of gunshot wounds during these three February days. Later, almost all accounts settled on the figures of 85 protesters and 18 law enforcement officials, with hundreds wounded on both sides. [55] For the entire history of the Maidan protests, the Ukraine MVD's official figures are 20 police killed and approximately 600 wounded in Kiev alone. [56] Some 100 civilians were killed during the protests and violence. As the Maidan revolt radicalized, it increasingly came to represent western Ukrainians. It is not accidental that the residents of the ten westernmost of Ukraine's 26 regions comprise over half of the 'Heavenly Hundred' martyrs -- those 100 people killed on Maidan during the revolutionary wave of 29 November 2013 – 21 February 2014 (85 of them during February 18-20 -- and nearly two thirds of those who were citizens of Ukraine. Twenty percent (19 of the 99 victims with known residences and/or places of birth) were from the nationalist hotbed of Lviv Oblast', the heart of Galicia. [57]

Maidan Coverup?

In power, the EuroMaidan regime has stalled in investigating the February snipers' massacre and appeared to be engaged in an effort to cover up the leading role of pro-Maidan neo-fascist elements in shooting demonstrators. According to Katchanovski, numerous video and audio tapes used to charge the Berkut and Omega with all the casualties were edited to delete key pieces of information included in other sources cited by himslef and others showing that gunfire was coming from territory and buildings controlled by the EuroMaidan and its neo-fascist elements. Only the footage showing the Berkut and Omega firing on the streets is advertised by the Maidan regime, the West, and supportive media. [58] Two years after the snipers' massacre, the Maidan regime had yet to develop a believable account of the massacre that could convincingly place the blame solely or even for the most part on the Yanukovich regime and the Berkut. It is ostensibly investigating the shootings of protesters and police but in two separate investigations. No charges have been brought against anyone for shooting police, Berkut, or Omega personnel. When in autumn 2014 then Prosecutor General Oleh Makhnitskiy claimed that many of the protesters were shot with hunting rifles, as Katchanovski's research suggests, he was soon fired from his post. Later, in February 2016, leader of the command staff of the MDS, then SBU deputy head in the new Maidan government, and now Rada deputy from the nationalist People's Front, Andrey Levus tried to lay the blame for a crucial three-month 'delay' in the investigation on precisely Makhnitskiy, claiming the SBU had handed over to him a "mass of evidence." [59]

In autumn 2015 cases were brought against three arrested Berkut police for shooting protesters, but the charges and any supporting evidence have not been laid out in any detail, and what has been publicized has contradicted the GPO's indictment or been cast in grave doubt by grave discrepancies with other available facts such as those presented in this chapter. The prosecution's investigation only placed the accused in the general area of the shootings and could not specify particular victims, link bullets and firearms, or identify precise time and place of shootings. [60] A Reuters investigation even found major "flaws" in the probe. For example, one of the accused Berkut policeman is missing a hand and could not have fired the weapon as prosecutors claim. [61]

Moreover, the trial's revelations, Maidan regime General Prosecutor Office (GPO) court appeals, and resulting court decisions began to undermine the Maidan myth and support Katchanovski's version of events. The Maidan massacre trial revealed results of forensic ballistic reports which indicate that the majority of the 39 protesters were killed from the same single 7.62mm AKM, its hunting versions, or other firearms of the same caliber. Forensic medical reports concerning locations and directions of entry wounds, videos showing the moments of killings of most of these protesters, and testimonies of Maidan eyewitnesses show that these protesters were killed from this firearm from the Maidan-controlled Hotel Ukraina and not from the Berkut positions on the ground. According to Katchanovskii's most recent research based on the trial revelations, the forensic medical reports made public during the trial confirmed that the majority of the protesters were killed from very or relatively steep angles from nearby buildings and Maidan-controlled locations. At least 12 protesters out of 21, whose cases were examined during the trial, had wounds at significant angles, three protesters were shot from nearly horizontal positions, while specific directions of the wounds have not been revealed in the cases of six protesters. The Berkut policemen were positioned at nearly horizontal levels with the killed protesters. Trial evidence also revealed that even those killed protesters whose bullet trajectory was at nearly horizontal angles were shot from other such 7.62 caliber firearms and hunting weapons from Maidan-controlled locations, such as the Bank Arkada and Muzeinyi Lane buildings. Moreover still, according to Katchanovski, the investigation is denying its own findings submitted in a report to the Council of Europe. This report stated that the GPO investigation determined that at least three protesters were killed from the Hotel Ukraine and at least 10 others were killed from rooftops. [62] Nevertheless, on 26 January 2016, the GPO re-charged the Berkut commander and two Berkut members with killing not 39 but 48 out of 49 protesters as well as terrorism. The sole exception is apparently a Georgian protester exact circumstances and location of whose death could still not be confirmed. [63]

Despite claims by some Maidan Ukraine officials that the Russians were behind and/or carried out the February 2014 shootings, Maidan Ukraine's legal system has begun to investigate RS fighters' involvement in the killing at least some of the Berkut police and MBD Internal Troops by January 2016 and at least demonstrator. This was was reflected in several Kiev court decisions, which also suggested that the GPO was beginning to investigate RS as possible suspects in the killings. Rulings by Kiev's Pechersk district court in November and December 2015 appeared in Ukraine's online database of court decisions and were publicized on Facebook and elsewhere by Professor Katchanovski and the present author, but they were reported by the Ukrainian or Western governments and media. The decisions state that the investigation had determined that two wounded attackers of a separatist checkpoint near Sloviansk in Donbas at 2:00am on April 20, 2014 used the same weapons used to kill two MVD troopers and wound three policemen on Maidan on 18 February 2014. [64] Two members of the RS's 'Viking' unit were being investigated by the GPO by the end of summer 2015 for the February 2014 killings of the police on the Maidan, following a public admission by one of this neo-Nazis. [65] Moreover, Kiev's Pecherskiy District Court decision shows that the GPO was then investigating at least one other member of the ultra-nationalist UNA-UNSO, one of the founding groups of the Right Sector, for murdering a protester by cutting his throat on February 18, 2014. [66] In February 2016 the Pecherskiy court had added 12 other RS members to the investigation of the Maidan shootings tied through weapons used near Sloviansk on 20 April 2014. [67]

The Ukrainian authorities have tried to tie the Maidan snipers' massacre to Putin. In February 2015, SBU chief Nalyvaichenko claimed that the SBU had evidence, which it has never produced, showing that Russian President Putin's advisor Vladislav Surkov organized and commanded the snipers massacre from an SBU base. By April a Rada deputy from President Petro Poroshenko's party (the Petro Poroshenko Bloc or PPB) revealed that Surkov arrived at 8:00pm on the evening of the 20 th , when the shooting was already over. Nalyvaichenko then toned down his story. Testifying at a hearing of the Anti-Corruption Committee in mid-April 2015, he was much more circumscribed in his claims about Surkov. He stated that Surkov was only in Kiev on February 20-21 and was reportedly seen in the company of then SBU chief Oleksandr Yakimenko and visited the presidential administration. Nalyvaichenko made no mention of Surkov coordinating the snipers' attacks at the hearings and he was soon fired. [68]

Only on 29 April 2015, a year and two months after the event, did prosecutors put out a public call for citizens to turn in any bullet shells they might have taken from Maidan during or after the snipers' massacre. [69] In May the Maidan-majority Rada's Anti-Corruption Committee, largely controlled by Poroshenko's PPB assessed the investigation into the massacre of protesters as unsatisfactory, finding "sabotage and negligence," and warned that if within two months progress is not made then it would seek the removal of the leaders of the General Prosecutors Office, MVD, and SBU. [70]

The GPO has gradually and only slightly moved in the direction of Katchanovski's version of Maidan massacre as an RS/SP-led false flag operation under the cover of the EuroMaidan 'self-defense' forces. Maidan Ukraine's first two GPs were Svoboda and Fatherland members, respectively, and they never mentioned that shots were fired from areas controlled by EuroMaidan such as the Hotel Ukraine. Its third GP appointed a new chief of the investigation, who has acknowledged that some maidan demosntrators were wounded by shots fired from the Hotel Ukraine. [71] By October 2015, Ukraine's new General Prosecutor Viktor Shokin acknowledged that there was no evidence of the Kremlin's involvement in the Maidan shootings. [72] On October 15 th Shokin had the offices and homes of three SP deputies searched as part of the investigation into the shootings, and these deputies were being summoned for questioning 'as witnesses.' [73] However, Shokin's move seems to have been a weapon deployed in the overall struggle power between the neo-fascist and oligarchic wings dominating post-Maidan Ukraine's polity. The day before, the SP and RS for the first time since Maidan held a joint march in Kiev ostensibly in order to honor World War II's OUN and UPA, but the slogans condemned President Poroshenko and called for a national revolution against what they regard as an oligarchic regime. [74] Thus, the investigation continued to bog down, and no one was fired as Poroshenko threatened. This suggests that there may be serious split over what direction the investigation should take between the more moderate Poroshenko and his PPB, on the one hand, and the ultra-nationalists of Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk's National Front, the Yulia Timoshenko's Fatherland Party, RS, and SNA, among others, on the other hand. In lieu of international pressure for an objective investigation, only a final showdown between the two wings of the Maidan regime won decisively by Poroshenko might lead to an objective investigation and prosecution of both the neo-fascist and Yanukovich regime perpetrators of the crimes committed by the 'snipers' of Maidan's February revolution.

Western international organizations have accused the Maidan authorities of poor progress in investigating, delaying, obstructing or covering up the events of February 20 th . For example, the Council of Europe's (CE) International Advisory Group concluded that "serious investigative deficiencies have undermined the authorities' ability to establish the circumstances of the Maidan-related crimes and to identify those responsible." It regards the investigation to be hindered by numerous "failures," "obstructiveness" (in particular on the part of the MVD), a lack of will, too few investigators, and a lack of investigatory independence and transparency. The CE panel also cited efforts by prosecutors and the MVD to help Berkut officers avoid prosecution or at least interrogation. [75] In its annual report for 2015, Amnesty International concluded: "Little progress was made in investigating violations and abuses related to the 2013-14 pro-European demonstration in the capital Kyiv ('Euromaydan') and in bringing the perpetrators to justice." [76] Citing "political motives" on Kiev's part, Interpol refused to accept Kiev's request for warrants on 23 Berkut officers, whom Kiev alleges killed 39 protesters in the Maidan shootings. [77] In June 2014, SP member and the Maidan government's then acting GP Makhnitskiy claimed the GPO had given audiotapes to the FBI for enhancement in connection with the investigation, but more than 20 months later the FBI has neither confirmed receiving the tapes nor released results of their investigation. [78] But neither Washington, Brussels, Berlin, London nor Paris have ever demanded an objective investigation, mentioning the issue only when questioned by journalists, usually those from Russia.

... ... ...

  1. onno says: March 15, 2016 at 4:21 am It's one large conspiracy against president Yanukovich and Ukrainian people who were left in a dream that UA would become part of the EU – which was NEVER the case. The USA and EU were represented in UA from 1991 and never undertook ANY investments in modernizing UA industries to meet western standards like DIN standards. As a result UA industry remained in a sub-Soviet standard not accepted by the west. All western money was used to modernize government offices and other State buildings. The main reason that corruption developed at the highest levels in government. However, today's corruption under Poroshenko is worse than under Kuchma and Yushchenko/Timoshenko.
    The main objective of Washington is to destroy Ukraine in the hope that people will become desperate and will turn their hate/violence against their fellow country men – like under Bandera in WW II – in the hope Russia will attack UA so USA/NATO have a reason to start WW III.
  1. korki says: April 17, 2016 at 11:47 am Meet Andriy Parubiy, the Neo-Nazi Leader Turned Speaker of Ukraine's Parliament

    http://www.globalresearch.ca/meet-andriy-parubiy-the-former-neo-nazi-leader-turned-speaker-of-ukraines-parliament/5520502

  1. Philip Owen says: July 29, 2016 at 3:19 pm The BBC had a piece at the time where one of their reporters was with a team of 4 policemen sheltered behind a wall, trying to identify and shoot the snipers. Their main concern like good policemen everywhere seemed to be the safety of ALL the public present.

    ... ... ...

[May 02, 2020] Bellingcat latest!

May 02, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

Moscow Exile April 28, 2020 at 4:00 am

Bellingcat latest!

Key MH17 Figure Identified As Senior FSB Official: Colonel General Andrey Burlaka
April 28, 2020

Oh golly gosh!!!!!

Mark Chapman April 28, 2020 at 9:40 am
Mmmm .right. His first name is Vladimir, but everyone calls him Andrei on the phone. The middle name "Ivanovich" is so unusual in Russia as to have led the investigators straight to him. Like if I was doing an investigation in America, and the people on the phone kept referring to a 'William Donald", and my team and I decided to accuse Roscoe Donald Peterson because he also has the middle name "Donald". Brilliant investigative work. Remind me to make a donation.
Jen April 28, 2020 at 3:32 pm
Maybe The Atlantic Council's algorithm that runs through the Moscow telephone-book database needs replacing. I'm sure it would be pretty worn out after identifying Ruslan Boshirov as Anatoly Chepiga and Alexander Petrov as Alexander Mishkin and is now prone to making mistakes such as confusing a name like "Vladimir" with "Andrei". Next thing you know, Bellingcrap will be telling us that Andrei Kozyrev is the current Russian President because his middle name is Vladimirovich too.

[May 02, 2020] Surprisingly Guardian report on the Russian medical contribution in Italy is not relentlessly negative.

May 02, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

Mark Chapman April 27, 2020 at 11:33 am

As I live and breathe – a report on the Russian medical contribution in Italy which is not relentlessly negative. And from the Grauniad, no less!

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/27/bergamo-field-hospital-russia-putin-italy-politics-aid

Oh, there are the customary snide asides to the effect that the Russian 'doctors' are actually all military-intelligence spies, but this report seems to shift the blame for that to La Stampa, and points out through the Italian staff that the equipment Russia supplied is both useful and of excellent quality and effectiveness. Responses to questions by the Russian medical staff who are interviewed are not portrayed as the most hilarious lies you ever heard, as they usually are.

I'm not foolish enough to think it signals a change in policy, but it is refreshing nonetheless.

Jen April 27, 2020 at 4:06 pm
The article was written by local Bergamo freelance writer, Anna Bonalume. She seems to be a recent recruit as she has just one other article at The Fraudian.

Anna Bonalume, "Devastated by coronavirus, did Bergamo's work ethic count against it?"

Lo and behold, the article suggests that Bergamischi self-reliance, enterprise, hard-nosed pragmatism, a strong work ethic and tendency to get going when the going gets tough might have doomed the city, when the natives should have done was to call for an immediate lockdown and then shutter all their businesses, batten down the hatches and wait for government largesse (if any) to flow through the streets.

Nothing in the article about how air pollution levels in the city – Bergamo is in that province (Lombardia) of northern Italy which is notorious for registering some of the highest air pollution levels in Europe, second or equal to parts of southern Poland where coal production is still dominant – together with the unique physical geography of the province (most cities in Lombardia are located in or near a river valley at the foot of the Alps: a perfect environment for annual thermal inversions in which cold air containing air pollutants sits under warm air so everyone keeps breathing polluted air) might have set a context in which COVID-19 or indeed any other major illness transmitted through respiratory and/or tactile channels could proliferate with devastating effects on the most vulnerable groups in society.

And speaking of air pollution:
Ron Bartlett, "Researchers Find Coronavirus on Pollution Particles"

" Jonathan Reid, a Bristol University professor researching airborne transmission of coronavirus, told The Guardian, "It is perhaps not surprising that while suspended in air, the small droplets could combine with background urban particles and be carried around." "

Looks like The Fraudian still has to get that information about air pollution particles carrying droplets of coronavirus out to Bonalume.

[May 02, 2020] The RD-180, sanctions and the relations between Russia and the USA

May 02, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

Uncle Volodya says, "Ignorance is always correctable. But what shall we do if we take ignorance to be knowledge?"

"There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."

― Issac Asimov

There's a prejudice against making fun of the mad that spans all cultures, all ethnicities; mock the mentally ill at your peril, for some fair-minded citizen will surely intervene. Possibly many, enough to make you take to your heels, because those who were born without the ability to reason, or had it and lost it, are perhaps God's most innocent children. There are few compensations for being born half-a-bubble off plumb, but one of them is anti-mockery armor. Having a laugh at the expense of the lunatic is bad form; something only dicks do, because it's cheap and easy.

That's what must be preventing Dmitry Rogozin from roaring with laughter; from falling helplessly to his knees and collapsing, wheezing, onto his side. If someone smart says something stupid, they are fair game. But laughing when someone whose openly-stated beliefs suggest they are suffering from dementia is inappropriate. His dilemma is both obvious, and acute – what to do?

First, some background; who is Dmitry Rogozin? A former Deputy Prime Minister in charge of the Russian Federation's defense industries, he also served as his country's Ambassador to NATO. He has degrees in philosophy and technology, and currently serves as the Russian Federation's Special Representative on Missile Defense. He is also the Director of Roscosmos, the Russian state's Space Industry. Some have talked him up as a possible replacement for Vladimir Putin, as President of the Russian Federation, but it is in his latter capacity, head of Roscosmos, that we are most interested today. He knows more about rockets than that they are pointy at one end and have fire at the other, if you get my drift.

A bit more background, and then I promise we can begin to tie things together; I think I can also promise you are going to laugh. Not because you're a dick. But I think you will find you do have to kind of snicker. Just be careful who hears you, okay? It's not as much of an insult if people don't know.

Most who have any understanding of space or rockets or satellites have heard of the RD-180 . But in case there are some readers who have never heard of it, it is the Russian Federation's workhorse rocket engine. Its first flight was 20 years ago, but it was built on the shoulders of the RD-170 , which has been in service since 1985, making it a Soviet project. The RD-180 is essentially a two-combustion-chamber RD-170, which has four and remains the most powerful rocket engine in the world. The RD-180 is used by the United States in its Atlas space vehicles.

For some time, that was a fairly comfortable arrangement. The USA made fun of Russia whenever it wanted to feel superior, just as it's always done, and made the occasional ideological stab at 'establishing freedom and democracy' by changing out its leader, but the Russian people were not particularly cooperative, and there were some problems getting a credible 'liberal opposition' started; even now, the best candidate still seems to be Alexey Navalny, who is kind of the granite canoe of opposition figures – not particularly well-known, nasty rather than compelling, spiteful as a balked four-year-old.

But then American ideologues in the US Department of State decided the time was ripe for a coup in Ukraine, and almost overnight, the United States and Russia were overt enemies. The United States, under Barack Obama, imposed sanctions designed to wreck the Russian economy , in the hope that despairing Russians would throw Putin out of office. America's European allies went along for the ride, and trade between Russia and its former trade partners and associates in Europe and the USA mostly dried up.

Not rocket engines, though. America made an exception for those, and continued to buy and stockpile RD-180's. The very suggestion that RD-180 engines might go on the sanctions list – US Federal Claims Court Judge Susan Braden postulated that funds used to purchase rocket engines might end up in Rogozin's pocket (he being head of the Space Program, and all), and he was under US sanctions – moved the Commander of the United States Air Force's Space and Missile Systems Center to note that without RD-180 engines, the Atlas program would have to be grounded .

All this is by way of highlighting a certain vulnerability. Of course, observers remarked, the United States is a major technological power – it could easily produce such engines itself. So, why didn't it, inquiring minds wanted to know.

Enter United Launch Alliance (ULA) CEO Tony Bruno, with what reporters described as a 'novel explanation'. Thanks much for the link, Patient Observer. The United States buys United Launch Alliance CEO Tory Bruno.Russian rocket engines to subsidize the Russian space industry , so that fired rocket scientists will not pack up the wife and kiddies and their few pitiful belongings, and depart for Iran or North Korea. You know; countries that really hate the United States. I swear I am not making that up. Look:

"The United States is buying Russian rocket engines not because of any problems with its domestic engine engineering programmes, but to subsidize Russian rocket scientists and to prevent them from seeking employment in Iran or North Korea, United Launch Alliance CEO Tory Bruno has intimated.

"The [US government] asked us to buy [Russian engines] at the end of the Cold War in order to keep the Russian Rocket Scientists from ending up in North Korea and Iran," Bruno tweeted, responding to a question about what motivates ULA to continue buying the Russian-made RD-180s."

Sadly, I had no Rogozin-like qualms about being thought a dick. I snorted what I was drinking (chocolate milk, I think) all over my hand, and gurgled with mirth for a good 20 seconds. Holy Moley – what a retarded explanation! How long did he grope for that, spluttering like Joe Biden trying to remember what office he is currently running for? Jeebus Cripes, the United States has no control at all over what rocket scientists are paid in the Russian Federation – what do they imagine prevents Putin The Diktator from just pocketing all the money himself, or spending it on sticky buns to feed to Rogozin, and throwing a few fish heads to the rocket scientists? Do they really believe some sort of symbiotic relationship exists between Russia's rocket scientists and the US Treasury Department? Really ? Have things actually gotten that far down the road to Simple? I tell you, I kind of felt a little sorry for Tony 'Lightning Rod' Bruno. But more sorry for his family, who has to go out and find him when he's wandering in the park with no pants on again, you know. Humanitarian concerns.

So I started doing a little digging. And right away, I made a couple of discoveries that made my synapses frizzle. One, the United States has a license to manufacture the RD-180 engine domestically . And apparently can't.

"Under RD AMROSS, Pratt & Whitney is licensed to produce the RD-180 in the United States. Originally, production of the RD-180 in the US was scheduled to begin in 2008, but this did not happen. According to a 2005 GAO Assessment of Selected Major Weapon Programs, Pratt & Whitney planned to start building the engine in the United States with a first military launch by 2012. This, too, did not happen. In 2014, the Defense Department estimated that it would require approximately $1 billion and five years to begin US domestic manufacture of the RD-180 engine."

It's only Wiki, but the references bear it out, such as the GAO's " Defense Acquisitions: Assessment of Selected Major Weapons Programs "; you want page 65.

Well, no wonder! It's a lot cheaper to slip some bucks to starving Russian rocket scientists than spend a Billion simoleons on a Pratt & Whitney program that will take five years (!!!) minimum to set up before it even starts producing an engine the Russians have been making for 20 years, and gave Pratt & Whitney the plans for. Seen in that light, it makes a weird kind of sense, dunnit? Minus the altruism and violins, of course.

Right about then, I made a second discovery that shook the fuzz off my fundament. Tony Bruno did not make that shit up . No, indeedy. It would have been simpler, and I have to say a bit more comforting, to assume Tony Bruno is the locus of American retardation. But he isn't; the poor bastard was just repeating an American doctrinal political talking-point. Behold !

"When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989, the US government worried about the possible consequences of lots of Russian rocket designers getting fired. What if they ended up working for regimes like Iran or North Korea?"

Pretty much word-for-word what poor Tony Bruno said. And that was posted 5 years ago.

But who cares, right? Just some wiggy space-nerd site.

Oh, but wait. Look at his reference . It's from NASA. And it does indeed include the paragraph he quoted.

"Moreover, several on the Space Council, as well as others in the Bush Administration, saw another reason to engage the post-Soviets in a cooperative space venture: as a way to help hold the Russian nation together at a time when the Russian economy was faltering and its society was reeling. In the words of Brian Dailey, Albrecht's sucessor, "If we did not do something in this time of social chaos in Russia, then there would be potentially a hemorrhaging of technology 'away from Russia' to countries who may not have a more peaceful intention behind the use of those technologies."

I'm not sure how reliable that is – the Americans still insist, in it, that they landed on the moon, and it points out that Dan Quayle was head of the National Space Council, dear Lord, have mercy. But it's NASA! There was apparently a school of thought, prevalent in American politics, that America had to support the Russian economy , for fear of its technological proteges high-siding it for Dangerville. Neither North Korea or Iran are mentioned by name, but they would certainly be easy to infer from the description.

So we could draw one of two conclusions; either (1) Obama was a witless tool who did not read that historical imperative (probably had his nose in a healthy-greens cookbook, some shit like that) and blundered ahead with a plan to wreck the Russian economy, loosing a torrent of Russian rocket scientists into a cynical Murka-hatin' world, or (2) Obama was a genius who applied sanctions with a surgeon's delicacy, avoiding sanctions on the Russian space program. Although he did apply sanctions directly on its..umm director. Okay, let's go with (1).

Anyway, it's kind of odd, I guess you'd say, to hear that same Brian Dailey, he who blubbered sympathetically (or so history records) "We have to do something in this time of social chaos in Russia" say this:

"The meeting was actually more or less a signing ceremony, a large event, so to speak, but it was one that was obviously going to be reaching into some very hard winds that would prevent us from really moving forward. That's a rather obtuse way of saying that we were having serious problems with the Russians. They wanted a lot of money for doing these things. They wanted to charge us a lot of money to hook up, and we didn't believe that since this was a government-to-government activity, that money should be appropriately involved, and it was the intention of the two Presidents to put something together that would be funded by their respective governments rather than us trying to fund something for Russia."

Say what? You had to do something for the Russian economy without money? Tell me more.

" At that point, Dan had got very upset with the Russians and proceeded to tell them that we were not going to do business with Semenov directly, but our opposite number was Yuri Koptev, and that he ought to start learning how to work with U.S. industry, and that we were not going to pay for this particular activity and we were not going to be blackmailed into paying them, so to speak, and insisted that this be taken off the table and we proceed to find ways of making this happen, not ways to slow it down or charge us for any kind of cooperative activities like this. "

This all had to do with cooperation on some sort of docking system for the Mir Space Station, nothing to do with the RD-180, but I think you can see why I would be a bit skeptical regarding Project Payola for the Russian rocket scientists.

You might be getting a tingly feeling – call it a suspicion – that the USA is kind of pulling our leg on the idea that it can make a superior multi-chamber rocket engine any time it feels like it, and is just buying the RD-180 on long-ago government orders to cut the Russians a break. You might suspect the RD-180 is actually a pretty good engine, but the United States can't make it for that kind of money, and perhaps can't make it at all. I know! Let's ask United Launch Alliance , that company that Tony Bruno is the CEO of.

"The Atlas launch vehicle's main booster engine, the RD-180, has demonstrated consistent performance with predictable environments over the past decade. The RD-180 has substantially contributed to the established a record of high reliability on Atlas launch vehicles since its debut on the Atlas III in May of 2000."

You don't say. Tell me more.

"In the early 1990s the closed cycle, LOx rich, staged combustion technology rumored to exist in Russia was originally sought out by General Dynamics because engines of this kind would be able to provide a dramatic performance increase over available U.S. rocket technology. Unlike its rocket building counterparts in the United States, Europe, China, and Japan, Russia was able to master a unique LOx rich closed cycle combustion technology which delivered a 25% performance increase."

But but I read the George H.W. Bush administration urged America to buy Russian rocket engines because they heard a rumor there was a suitcase sale on at the Energomash company store. And that, you know, the scientists might be planning a little trip.

"NPO Energomash, the leading designer of engines in Russia, had gone through hundreds of designs, each an improvement on the last, to harness the power of LOx rich combustion. This required a very careful approach to how the fuel is burned in the preburner so that the temperature field is uniform. It also required improvements in materials and production techniques. They found a way to take the chamber pressures to new limits while protecting the internal components from fire risks. This required a new class of high temperature resistant stainless steel invented to cope with the risks of the LOx rich environment."

Oh, seriously, c'mon – is it as good as all that?

"The demonstrated performance established during this process was beyond anything achieved in the United States. The RD-180 reaches chamber pressures up to 3,722psia which was more than double the chamber pressures achieved by comparable U.S. engines. Exposure to Russian design philosophy and the success of a high performance engine made U.S. engine designers question their own methods. This dual sided cross-cultural engineering approach which has persisted through the life of the RD-180 program adds depth to the understanding of engine capability and operational characteristics."

Okay, thanks, company that Tony Bruno is the CEO of. Good to know it wasn't just charity.

[May 02, 2020] EU should consider 'flexible' Russia sanctions

May 02, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

et Al April 28, 2020 at 10:18 am

I'm posting this for entertainment purposes:

Euractiv: EU should consider 'flexible' Russia sanctions over Ukraine: report
https://www.euractiv.com/section/europe-s-east/news/eu-should-consider-flexible-russia-sanctions-over-ukraine-report/

The EU should reconsider its 'all or nothing' approach on sanctions imposed on Russia for its role in the ongoing conflict in eastern Ukraine, as well as its annexation of Crimea, a new report from the International Crisis Group suggests. The Brussels-based think tank calls for the easing of certain sanctions in exchange for Russian progress towards peace in Ukraine.

"Inflexible sanctions are less likely to change behaviour," said Olga Oliker, Europe and Central Asia programme director. "Because of that, we urge considering an approach that would allow for the lifting of some sanctions in exchange for some progress, with a clear intent to reverse that rollback of sanctions if the progress itself is reversed."

.A major roadblock in the implementation of the Minsk deal has been the sequence of events supposed to bring an end to the conflict that has so far claimed more than 13,000 lives.

Kyiv wants to first regain control over its border with Russia before local elections in the war-torn region can be held, while Moscow believes that elections must come first
####

Door. Horse. Barn. Bolted.

The Intentional Critics Grope is yet again a $/€ short in the reality department.

You would think the Editor Gotev (the last two paras by him) would mention that the Minsk agreement clearly states elections come first and that Kiev has singularly refuse the other conditions of the agreement, but that really would be asking too much. From a professional journalist.

It's the same shit we got with the US-North Korea 4 point nuclear agreement where de-nuclearization of the region is the final stage yet it didn't take Washington and ball-licking corporate media to parrot 'denuclearization' as the first point as suddently decided by the Ovum Orifice.*

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agreed_Framework

Mark Chapman April 28, 2020 at 1:24 pm
They try it on again about every six months, just to see if the Russian negotiators have changed and if the new ones are dimwitted. I'm sure it is crystal clear to the Kremlin that if it gave Ukraine back exclusive control of the border, it would (a) call up troops and set up a cordon to make it impossible for eastern Ukraine to be reinforced, and (b) launch an all-out military push to re-take the breakaway regions. The west would then shout "Safe!!!", and the game would be over – Ukraine is (almost) whole again, praise Jeebus. There would be a propaganda storm that Russia was 'trying to meddle in the peace process' while Kuh-yiv rooted out and either imprisoned or executed all the 'rebel' leaders, and the west – probably the USA – would provide 'peacekeepers' to give Ukraine time to restore its complete control over the DNR and LPR. Then, presto! no elections required, we are all happy Ukrainians!

They knew 'inflexible sanctions were less likely to change behaviors' when they first agreed to impose them – but they were showing their belly to Washington, and don't know how to stop now. Serves them right if they are losing revenue and market share.

Mark Chapman April 29, 2020 at 8:42 am
I don't think Russia is very interested, beyond polite diplomatic raising of the eyebrows, in relaxing of sanctions under conditions the EU is careful to highlight could be reapplied in a trice, as soon as anyone was upset with Russia's performance. Because that moment would be literally only a moment away. The UK can be counted on to register blistering outrage at the drop of a hat, and while its influence on the EU will soon be limited, dogs-in-the-manger like Poland can always be relied upon to throw themselves about in an ecstasy of victimhood. It would be impossible to set up any sort of dependable supply chain, as the interval between orders would never be known with any degree of certainty. Fuck the EU. Russia is better off to press on as it has been doing. The EU has to buy oil and gas from Russia because the logistics and price of American supplies make them economically non-competitive, and best to just leave it there. The EU will bitch, but it will continue to buy, whereas any other commerce would be subject to theatrical hissy fits.

[May 02, 2020] The USSR engineering capabilities were tremendous: they were mostly misused on military and space projects

May 02, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

Patient Observer April 25, 2020 at 6:02 am

As a recovering space cadet, I can take a crack at some of the issues raised above. The F-1 engine was a "relaxed design" meaning it was analogous to a low pressure steam engine; a very big steam engine but not pushing engineering limits (beyond overcoming instability in the combustion chamber), fluid dynamics analysis or control requirements. For example, its chamber pressure was only about, IIRC, 800 psi or so. And it used an open cycle turbo pump meaning that a great deal of usable energy was wasted in order to minimize design and material challenges. The video linked below shows the launch of the Saturn V. At around 2:00, the vehicle is just liftinf off allowing a close up of the rocket exhaust. The dark band immediately below the nozzle is sooty and relatively cool exhaust from the turbines used to drive the fuel and oxidizer pumps. The gas temperature is low and the soot is from running fuel rich to eliminate free oxygen that would otherwise destroy hot metallic components.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/DKtVpvzUF1Y?version=3&rel=1&fs=1&autohide=2&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&wmode=transparent

The Russian solution embodied in the RD-170 were orders of magnitude more difficult from an engineering standpoint. Ultrahigh chamber pressure approaching 4,000 psi and oxygen-rich closed cycle turbopumps were viewed in the West as simply impossible to achieve. And, of course, Russian claims were initially dismissed as propaganda.

Back to the steam engine analogy. The RD-180 could be viewed as a state-of-the-art supercritical steam turbine designed to achieve close to the theoretical limits of performance. In various articles, US techno-apologists said that the US chose to focus to focus on engines using liquid hydrogen. True enough but it was due in part to an inability of to master the oxygen-rich closed cycle technology. Besides, the hydrogen engines on the Energia had higher performance than the SSME engines used on the US space shuttle (falsely claimed to be the most powerful and efficient hydrogen engine)

The above is important in understanding a nation's engineering capabilities as rocket technology involves just about every area of mechanical engineering.

The US manned lunar missions were impressive engineering feats more in terms of overall project management and in the amount of money spent with reasonable efficiency. In short the Russian had better engineering capability but the US far outspent them. Going to the moon with a cold war stunt carried out by solid, if uninspired, engineering and very good project management.

Why did the US not return to the moon? Short answer is that it served its propaganda purposes. A noisy fraction of the global population have been convinced that the lunar landing was of epic significance and will be the only thing remembered and venerated in the hazy future. Not the first artificial satellite (the real dawn of the space age) nor the first human in space (the start of human exploration of space). No, it was the AMERICANS who will be remembered! Or, so they think.

[May 02, 2020] It's ironic that Navalny who is paid by the west, is proposing a plan that no country in the west would ever implement

May 02, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

Moscow Exile April 27, 2020 at 4:36 am

Here are the bullshitter's 5 steps (5 shags!!! :-))as commented on in a Russian blog yesterday:

Вот так готовятся революции. О пяти шагах Навального

Here is how revolutions are prepared: about Navalny's Five Steps

I have read here about the five steps that Navalny is offering to Russia. All of them, I think, are already known. Articles have been read, a video watched, in which he talks about his five-step plan. Some support and approve of his plan. He believes that this is exactly what needs to be done in order to save the economy and financially support people left without work and without money during the coronavirus pandemic. Others criticize his plan, saying that this is pure populism, which has nothing to do with the real situation in the country and the financial capabilities of the state.

I have already said that I am not a professional in politics, economics, or finance. As they say, I am no college boy. If I talk about something, then I talk from the point of view of an ordinary ordinary person and from the point of view of common sense, so to speak. We are not academy graduates, but somehow we need to be determined on this or that issue. One cannot avoid this. For example, who to vote for in the election? Is it worth voting for Navalny? Or maybe a vote for the Communist Party? Or is it still better to vote for United Russia? And so on. And how do you make the right choice, make the right decision, if you are an ordinary person who does not have the necessary knowledge? And knowledgeable people often make mistakes as well.

So, looking at this Navalny plan, I as an ordinary person think that his plan is pure populism. He has not made any serious economic calculations. What the implementation of his plan will ultimately lead to, he does not know and cannot know. But some serious and responsible economists say that, given the current state of the Russian economy, this plan cannot lead to anything good. And we should not take an example from the developed countries of the West. You cannot blindly copy everything that is being done in the West. We copied it in 1991; we still cannot figure out what copy to make.

Let us quickly go over what Navalny offers us. The first step: he proposes to pay 20 thousand rubles to each adult and 10 thousand rubles to each child. This is the month of April. And then the question immediately arises: if you pay each and everyone, you will have to pay those who work and those who are left without work. Somehow, this is not very logical. If a person works, then what has changed for him? Nothing has changed for him; he receives the same salary as before. Then why and for what should the state pay him these 20 thousand?

Second step: if the quarantine is extended to May and June, the state will have to pay another 10 thousand rubles to each adult and child during those months. Well, here is the same question: why should the state pay money to workers?

Third step: the state must cancel the fee for any utilities for the period of the quarantine. This is very strange and incomprehensible. What does it mean to cancel? Take, for example, electricity. Who supplies us with electricity? A private company. Private! That is, we are buying electricity from a private company. And suddenly the state tells us that we may not pay for electricity. So who will pay the electric company? The question, as they say, is interesting. Or perhaps we will not be paying for food in the store? Why does Navalny not offer this?

Fourth step, also a bold one: the allocation 2 trillion rubles for direct gratuitous payments to small and medium-sized businesses. So take and give money to everyone in turn. And why, for example, do you need to give money to some hairdresser? Well, the hairdresser will not be working for two or three months. So what? Work will start up again. What can happen to a hairdresser in two to three months? Nothing may happen. So it is with other businesses. It will not be easy for them during quarantine, and then they will start working again. By the way, for other reasons, enterprises may be idle for some time or work on a reduced working day or week mode. Business is a risky business, and there can be all sorts of situations arising.

Fifth step: cancel for one year all taxes for small businesses (except personal income tax). The question is, why should a small business, if it works, not pay taxes? A barber, of course, will not be working. He does not work, so he does not pay taxes. Everything is clear there. But if some small business works, why should it not have to pay taxes for one year? Why such a benefit? Can anyone explain?

These are my questions about Navalny's plan. And doubts about his plan. It is with such populist plans that many revolutions begin. Distributing money is a simple matter. But to calculate what will happen next -- here you need to work very seriously and thoughtfully. Navalny did not have time to calculate everything. He hurries to take advantage of the situation in order to gratify his army of supporters. And the purpose of his plan is precisely this: his army of supporters will increase, of course. There is no doubt about that. We have a lot of freebie lovers. But Navalny's job is to rock the state boat. This is what he is busy with. And he does his job, admittedly, in quite a talented way. Only, I should warn you as regards unconditional faith in this person. Fraudsters are very talented. As, for example, was Mavrodi with his MMM. [Notorious Russian pyramid sales fraudster of the '90s -- ME]

A few words in conclusion. The state should have a reserve fund, that is, money for emergencies. And not only money, but also technical equipment and professional human resources. But each of us must have a reserve fund. We must realize that circumstances may arise where we lose our job, lose our source of income. And for such a case, on a rainy day, we must have a reserve fund. And each enterprise should also have a reserve fund. And then you will not have to beg for money from the state.

Under this article in my comments I will ask a few questions. Please answer them. I am interested to hear your opinion. If you want to personally tell me something, object to something, ask something and want to get an answer from me, then follow this link and write a comment there. This article will have number 34. On that page I posted my comments with numbers of numbered articles (not all articles are numbered) and their names. Find the comment "34. This is how revolutions are prepared. About the five steps of Navalny "and write your comment under my comment. This page structure will be more clear and understandable. Your comment on that page I will not leave unanswered. If I do not answer on the same day, I will definitely answer the next day. Well, if you want everyone to see your comment, write it under this article. I will also read them all during the first days, and perhaps somehow react to them.
I remind you and explain that likes and dislikes to my questions-comments are not approval or disapproval. They simply mean answers to the question posed.

Sounds like a clear-thinking kind of man or woman to me and not some soft Navalnyite kid with a yellow rubber duck or some liberast kreakl arsehole!

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James lake April 27, 2020 at 8:34 am
This person is spot on – individuals should always have "rainy day" money. We live in society that encourages us to live on credit and have instant gratification. The state can only do so much.

It's ironic that Navalny who is paid by the west, is proposing a plan that no country in the west would ever implement.

It's rude to say it but only naive fools, greedy opportunists and criminals would support such a plan.

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Moscow Exile April 27, 2020 at 9:54 am
That's how I was brought up. And I have never bummed money off anyone. "Never a borrower or lender be!" has always been my watchword, and when I've had neowt, I've done without. When I was young, you never got wed until you had a thousand quid in the bank: that's why you courted. My relatives all courted for 3 or 4 years before they got wed. I was lucky, in that I only married late, so I led the life of Reilly until I was in my 40s, but I have never spent what I have never had.

My wife thinks I'm a tight bastard. when I say I've never lent anybody anything and I've never asked anyone for money either.

I might start spending now what I have in the bank though, seeing as I've now turned 71.

As my granddad used to say: "There's no pockets in a shroud".

Miserable old bugger!

Glad I don't take after him!

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Mark Chapman April 27, 2020 at 11:01 am
Additionally, there is nothing to be gained by hanging on to your tax-deductible savings, either, at least not here. When you turn a certain age (I think it's 65) you must convert your Registered Retirement Savings Plan (RRSP) to a Registered Retirement Income Fund (RRIF) and start drawing it down. The banks don't want you getting a tax break during your saving years and then passing that benefit on to your wastrel offspring – they want it spent while you're still here on earth.

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Mark Chapman April 27, 2020 at 10:57 am
I agree, all except for the part that no western country would ever implement such a plan. Indeed they would, under the circumstances I described. Get the vote out of the way first, to be followed by the new government cutting budgets or taking other steps to recover its outlay.

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Jen April 27, 2020 at 9:28 pm
The problem is that in many Western societies, wages and salaries have not kept up with increases in the cost of living, and this forces individuals and households to buy on credit when they should be using whatever money comes in during the week from working (after making deductions for tax or paying bills). What happens instead is that weekly incomes end up servicing past debts.

Also in countries that have killed off their manufacturing (because it was outsourced overseas), the main way in which new money circulates in the economy is through lending for property investments. The property market is turned into a casino with the result that property prices rise. People wanting to buy apartments and houses to live in end up not only having to take out huge loans and mortgages for dwellings whose prices are several times inflated beyond what they originally cost to build, but the mortgagors end up having to use more of their incomes to service the loans when the money should be used for day-to-day expenses. In some parts of Australia, people are spending at least 30% of their weekly incomes servicing mortgages and more – that is considered to be a sign of mortgage stress.
https://www.ratecity.com.au/home-loans/mortgage-news/how-much-you-have-to-earn-to-buy-in-each-capital-city

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Patient Observer April 28, 2020 at 3:00 am
There is little doubt that official inflation rate in the US is understated resulting in a steady erosion of purchasing power. Families need both spouses working just to get by. Two cars are needed as the public transit systems are generally poor. On top of that we are driven into a shopping frenzy every Christmas season. We eat out way too much. adding costs and adding fat. One version of the American Dream is steadily increasing wealth; the dream ended long ago but with easy credit, a fake dream just keeps on going.

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Mark Chapman April 27, 2020 at 10:51 am
These are the sort of policies which prevail in western countries, and it is apparent people regard the benefits as free money which will never be accounted for. You will be able to tell who these people are after the 'pandemic' has passed, who want a new bridge or a new road such as was planned before the outbreak, and are now told "There's no money" by the bewildered look on their faces. What? There's no money? How can that be? We can't go into the past, obviously, and extract money from it, so money that is being thrown around now will either come out of future budgets or will be covered by gratuitous money-printing which will only devalue the currency.

Let me give you a rundown of what we are entitled to in BC, if you lost your job – temporarily or perhaps longer-term – due to COVID 19. First, everyone, BC and otherwise, can apply for the CERB, the Canada Emergency Response Benefit. That's $2000.00, straight into your account, and urgency has dictated that analysis of whether or not you qualify has been pretty cursory. There is a BC benefit, just for British Columbia residents, which pays a one-time $1000.00 under similar circumstances. There is EI, Employment Insurance (it used to be called UI, Unemployment Insurance, but progressives didn't like it, thought it sounded like people were being paid to not work, which was often a pretty accurate summation of the picture); that's based on your previous income, up to a maximum monthly amount. BC Hydro will forgive 3 months of payments for its customers who have lost their employment due to the 'pandemic', on successful application. No word at present on what they will do in cases where people give up economizing, knowing they have 3 months free electricity, and just leave everything on. The banks will hold your mortgage payments in abeyance on request, although that's not forgiven – you just pick up later and in the end will pay more because your time to pay out the full amount will have been extended for an extra couple of months of interest payments.

Many of these mirror Navalny's initiatives, just as they mirror Tymoshenko's when she was Prime Minister and wanted to give everyone a massive pay raise – the money has to come from somewhere, and western analysts on that latter occasion wrote that her plan 'flew in the face of fiscal responsibility". That meant 'Wasn't good". But programs which feature chucking handfuls of money at people are perennially popular, and few ever reason that they will be paying it back with interest down the road – they believe, instead, that they have caught you on the cusp of a momentary lapse of reason, and will be able to benefit from you having lost your mind.

Simply put, it is buying votes. The recovery of the money is delayed until after you have made your decision, and made your check-mark for the granter of the largess.

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Patient Observer April 28, 2020 at 3:09 am
Homer (no, not that Homer) has the answer:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/ZRBH5vHhm4c?version=3&rel=1&fs=1&autohide=2&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&wmode=transparent

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Mark Chapman April 28, 2020 at 9:34 am
Patterson had me until he said "The American people have never tolerated incompetence in their public officials; you are going to crash and burn, my fatheaded friend". The poor fool. Not only do Americans tolerate incompetence in their public officials, they expect it. I wouldn't go so far as to say they welcome it, but their disappointment at learning yet another public official is incompetent never seems to inspire a revolution such as America constantly urges on other countries when their public officials are incompetent, or even when America portrays their public officials as incompetents.

[May 02, 2020] It is the detestable habit of compradors to make use of a crisis to try to turn the public against its leaders. Sometimes it was the leaders' fault, and they deserve it, but on such occasions you usually find the compredors had either the same plan, no plan or no plan that made any sense.

May 02, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

Moscow Exile April 28, 2020 at 6:00 am

Well boo-fucking-hoo arseholes! You should have saved some of your ill-gotten gains:

Привет из 90-х: "средний класс" в России катится в бедность

Greetings from the 90s: the "middle class" in Russia is falling into poverty
The Kremlin believes that a separate plan to save the "middle class" is not required
Timur Khasanov 04/28/2020, 14: 48

The Russian "middle class", which is fundamental for the welfare and development of the state's economy, may descend into poverty. Yaroslav Kuzminov, the founder and rector of the Higher school of Economics (HSE), made such a statement. Falling incomes of economically active Russians will lead to a new social stratification of Russian society. The Kremlin considered such statements unconvincing

[I wonder which class Kuzminov and the rest of his fellow wankers at HSE consider themselves belonging to?]

The wealthy stratum of Russians will lose some of its income because of the coronavirus pandemic, but will retain its elite status and accumulated resources, whilst the "middle class" risks falling into poverty. This was stated by HSE rector Yaroslav Kuzminov in an interview with RBC TV channel .

"Most likely, incomes will fall in all levels of society, but if the impoverished rich still remain rich, and the poor continue to be poor, then for the middle class, which is now taking the brunt, there are serious risks of sliding into poverty", Kuzminov said live on TV channel.

According to the Rector of the Higher School of Economics, the downward trend in revenue relates primarily to the services market, including those related to intellectual and "impression" services. Recently, they have created a space for the development of new creative projects. [I presume "impression services" involve the the provision of élite goods and services that impress folk, such as French wine and cheeses -- ME]

"It has been the service sector that has contracted the most. Large cities have suffered the most from COVID-19, and their economies have mostly stopped",said Kuzminov.

According to the basic scenario of the Higher School of Economics, in 2020 the unemployment rate in Russia will reach 8%. The strongest job losses will be in the unincorporated sector of the economy. "The corporate sector will lose 700 thousand employees in 2020 versus 1.5 million people in the unincorporated sector, but then recovery is faster in the unincorporated sector", said the HSE rector. However, even in this scenario, unemployment will still be higher in 2024 than in 2019, he warned.

A much more dramatic development of events would suggest a pessimistic scenario for the HSE forecast: unemployment by the end of the year will rise to 9.5%, and next year it will grow to 9.8% "and will remain at high levels throughout the forecast period because of a weak recovery in the growth of the economy".

The corporate sector of the economy in 2020 will short of 1.2 million employees, compared with 2.2 million in the unincorporated sector. Labour market recovery in both sectors is expected only in 2022. At the same time, the total number of employed citizens in 2024 will still be noticeably behind the current year. Four years later, unemployment will still be almost twice as high as in the pre-crisis year of 2019, and will amount to 8.1%.

Kuzminov noted that the coronavirus pandemic has demonstrated to the world a new reality in the global economy as regards humanitarian considerations. Many states have shown a willingness to sacrifice part of economic growth in order to save the lives of citizens.

"We have moved on to a different reality, to a different correlation of morality and economics. For the first time, the world has stopped its economy and there has been a loss of 5–7% in GDP globally so that people -- older people, sick people -- may live three to five years longer. I believe that this is a colossal moral movement", said Kuzminov.

[So why are you b;eating about the impoverishment of the middle class? -- ME]

The Kremlin reacted with skepticism to forecasts about the risks in Russia of the "middle class" sliding into poverty.

According to Dmitry Peskov, Press Secretary of the Russian President, the state is making a lot of attempts to analyze the situation, but one thing is obvious: this is not easy to do and requires a lot of coordinated work from the authorities and participants in economic life.

"It is obvious that this threat of coronavirus and the consequences that this threat has provoked for economic life is so unprecedented that for the most part, many attempts to analyze it are unlikely to hit the bull's eye", RT quotes Peskov.

The official representative of the President also stressed that it is wrong to talk about the need for a separate plan to support the middle class in the country in connection with the pandemic. According to Peskov, we are now talking about the need to soften the blow of the crisis for all segments of citizens.

The definition of the "middle class", especially in Russia, is rather vague. Neither officials nor economists can give clear parameters for it. According to the World Bank definition, such a stratum in Russia can include citizens with incomes that are at least one and a half times higher than the poverty level. Accordingly, a person's income should not be lower than the median values for a particular region of residence.

The median salary divides all salaries of Russians in half: one half of employees receive a salary above this value, the other half-below. It turns out that only the upper half can relate to the middle class. Rosstat calculates the median salary in Russia once every two years -- in April of odd years. In 2019, this figure was equal to 34.3 thousand rubles.

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Moscow Exile April 28, 2020 at 6:01 am
Economists?

I've shat 'em!

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Moscow Exile April 28, 2020 at 6:25 am
I'm well below the 2019 median salary now, but I've been in the income sump since 1984 and have got quite used to it. The middle classes, however, live in mortal fear of entering the sump whence they or their not to distant forebears slithered forth.

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Mark Chapman April 28, 2020 at 9:51 am
I stop reading as soon as I come to "the Moscow Higher School of Economics", because it is the breeding-ground of wiggy liberals. If the Russian middle class slips into poverty – and I don't think it will – the Russian government will have the best excuse in the world: western governments and their international organizations persuaded us the only way to fight the coronavirus was to shut down the economy and make all the workers except essential personnel stay home. It was always a stupid plan that smacks of collusion, and it has proven to be ineffective at stopping the spread of the virus while nearly all countries have yielded their regular commerce in the attempt. If it was working, you would not see businesses opening again while the case count is still climbing. Is it national intent to keep borders closed until the last case has recovered? If not, retreating from the lockdown policy is an admission of failure, because international infections will find fertile ground among the uninfected majorities.

It is the detestable habit of liberalism to make use of a crisis to try to turn the public against its leaders. Sometimes it was the leaders' fault, and they deserve it, but on such occasions you usually find the liberals had either the same plan, no plan or no plan that made any sense. Navalny and his hamsters are all for just opening up the treasury and handing out money until there's an echo that means it is empty. Then, of course, they would lower taxes until the state had no income, and then they would take massive loans from the IMF, and then .well, you know what would happen then.

[May 02, 2020] A tougher attitude towards the clear enemies of Russia is growing

May 02, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

Moscow Exile April 26, 2020 at 11:00 pm

...

Либерализм с нечеловеческим лицом

Amongst the people, the demand for a tougher attitude towards the clear enemies of Russia is growing: towards all this "Echo of Moscow", "Dozhd", and other liberal Pro-Western media, as well as towards those bloggers who are carrying out obviously subversive work against the state and against Putin personally. In this regard, it does not matter at all whether one is politically coloured right or left, since either since either side of the political spectrum is clearly playing on the side of the West, which wants to eliminate Putin by any means necessary.

Russia has always been a "bone in the throat" for the West. The West has always tried to conquer and destroy Russia, from the time of Ancient Russia to the present day.

Yes, there were brief periods of a warming in relations, but they were soon followed by devastating wars.

All our history testifies to the fact that the West has always been the most ardent, implacable enemy of Russia, and thinking that the West can become a friend and partner of Russia is absurd.

Or deliberate treachery: a betrayal of Russia; a betrayal of its people. Perhaps some are sincerely mistaken in thinking that this is not so, that the West can become our friend. For those that think this, I refer them to the "Sacred '90s", when the West was our friend!

As a result of this friendship, it was only by a miracle that we did not lose our country, our Russia. And I do not believe that these bloggers and journalists who are calling on us to change the existing government or social system in Russia do not understand this!

And if they do understand this, then it means that they are consciously working for the enemies of Russia, and in this respect, they are also enemies of Russia.

And now, as Russia fights for its sovereignty and influence on the world stage, it is time to start a serious purge.

source: "Ваш опыт привел к "святым 90-м": Гаспарян дал личный совет предателю Горбачеву, позволившему себе "учить" Путина

THE RUSSIAN LIBERAST
(but he's tolerant, he's an ordinary kind of guy, he's a defender of human rights, he echoes Muscovites' thoughts, he positions himself, he's on Navalny's side and the anal and oral one as well )
His bark is heard amongst the troops and in the bazaar, beneath the very walls of the Kremlin itself, and is often searching with huge longing for fleas for dinner.

Tremble and despair ye pathetic Western fools!!!

"The Sacred '90s", refers to the Yeltsin years, and was a term used when political commentator Armen Gasparyan castigated Gorbachev on the radio: ""Ваш опыт привел к "святым 90-м" -- "Your experiment led to the 'Sacred '90s'"; he continued by saying: "And now you are trying to teach Putin!" -- ME.

et Al April 27, 2020 at 1:08 am
Limonov (late) is a 'Liberast'? I know eXile magazine had a hard on for him, but he was the leader of the national bolsevik party
Moscow Exile April 27, 2020 at 1:42 am
A man for all seasons was the late Limonov, I suspect.

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Mark Chapman April 27, 2020 at 9:42 am
Yes, he frequently took public positions which would put him in the liberal camp and seemed constantly to be crying for political change. I've noticed that's a feature of agitators worldwide, non-stop braying of "It's time for a change". Frequently it is, but unless the candidate they are supporting is elected, why, it's time for a change again with no pause for stability at all. I'm pretty confident that if 'their' candidate were elected, the cries for change would stop, at least from them.

For all of that, Limonov was one of the few I would say probably argued at least 50% of the time from the heart, and actually thought the changes he was proposing would be good for Russia. He might have taken money from the west from time to time, I don't know, but he seemed in an entirely different class from those wise-ass yappers like Ilya Yashin.

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karl1haushofer April 27, 2020 at 2:29 am
Limonov became a Putin supporter in his later years.

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Mark Chapman April 27, 2020 at 9:49 am
I don't know if I'd go that far. He might have occasionally supported positions taken by the state, and he was generally respectful of the head of state, but he usually thought things should be done a different way. Overall he wasn't a bad guy, and spoke as if he actually had some education rather than whining like that yob Navalny. Limonov grew up in Ukraine, and attended the pedagogical university there, but there's no real evidence that he distinguished himself in his academic pursuits and his on-again-off-again career as a writer seems to have been more informed by a drive to write than a natural aptitude for it.

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Moscow Exile April 27, 2020 at 10:33 am
He was an interesting writer, I believe, specializing in pornographic reminiscences of his decadent and impoverished life in New York and graphically describing his sodomistic practices, I have been led to believe. Whatever turns you on!

Limonov was only his "party name", based on the Russian slang for a hand grenade -- a "limon" [lemon]. His real name was Eduard Veniaminovich Savenko. A Ukrainian family name and a strange patronymic (to my English lugholes, at least) but he wasn't a Jew, although his first wife was and because of which he was allowed to emigrate from the USSR to Israel. He married his second wife in a Russian Orthodox church ceremony.

He lived as an impoverished writer in New York, but in the end managed to get a position as a butler of all things for some New York millionaire. And then he moved to Paris, the traditional home of starving artists in garrets, where he wowed literary circles there with his tales about his life in the Upper East Side of New York City. In the end he became a naturalised Frog, which can't be bad, I reckon.

However, when the USSR folded up, he came back home and became a Russian citizen.

He certainly was part of the liberal crowd here in the '90s, he and his gang participating in the protest marches of the time, but in the end he told the liberasts to go take a hike and became fully supportive of bringing the Crimea back into the fold and fucking the banderite Svidomites off. He was also 100% behind the Serbs during the NATO war of aggression against them.

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Mark Chapman April 27, 2020 at 9:32 am
Yeah, I just realized that a few of those featured are now no longer with us; Borya the Shagger for one. That gormless fat amorphous blob for another, I can never remember her name, used to be some kind of journalist and always had half of some kind of sweetie hanging out of her gob, under an expression that suggested she had quite recently been in contact with a live wire carrying high current. Her schtick was going up to the cops when they were providing security for another tiresome march, and demanding to be arrested. Must have heard they had ice cream at the jail.

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Moscow Exile April 27, 2020 at 10:38 am

Farewell, Valeriya! We miss you.

Novodvorskaya. They broke the mould when they made her -- thank Christ!

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Mark Chapman April 27, 2020 at 11:04 am
I don't know if they broke it, or it simply gave way under the strain.

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Jennifer Hor April 27, 2020 at 12:23 pm
Something certainly was broken at young Valeria's birth: the hospital scales used to weigh the bub. Maybe also the hospital's budgeted supply of thread needed to stitch up people after major operations. Poor old Mum must have looked and felt like the Bride of Frankenstein for a whole year.

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Moscow Exile April 27, 2020 at 12:59 pm
As a matter of fact, she looked like a normal, if not a somewhat chubby, little Soviet schoolgirl when she was a Soviet schoolgirl:

and I think she was quite pretty when a young woman:

So what happened to her?

Ate too much ice-cream, obviously.

She loathed Russia and Russians:

I cannot imagine how can anyone love a Russian for his laziness, for his lying, for his poverty, for his spinelessness, for his slavery. But maybe that's not all of his characteristics" -- Статьи и интервью В.Новодворской, фигурирующие в ее уголовном деле.

[Articles and interviews about and with V.Novodvorskaya that appeared in her criminal case.]

Our history has become malignant since the XV century, when the Golden Horde was replaced by the Moscow Horde. If we don't change our genetic code, we're finished.

The fact that we allowed Putin to make us a European garbage dump, which is shunned like a plague along with our Customs Union, is not only Putin's fault, it is the fault of the people.

The Ukraine is the Russia that stayed at home.

Source: Valeria Novodvorskaya: Immortal quotes of a fearless woman

Here's Anatole Karlin on On Liberasts and Liberasty

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Mark Chapman April 27, 2020 at 1:35 pm
Yes, it was definitely her I was thinking of, although the one who made a gimmick out of confronting the police at demonstrations and demanding to be arrested was actually Evgenia Albats. Then when she was let go, she would write up the horrors of her brutal confinement for The New Times.

Western fans are often led to believe that detention centers such as where Borya Nemtsov and Alexey Navalny regularly served their brief penances are just like prison. Ummm no. Prisons in Russia – and in fact throughout post-Soviet Eastern Europe – are for punishment, and are not remotely like Martha Stewart's Camp Cupcake. They are not meant to be fashion houses for prison chic like baggy pants that show a foot of your underwear, and make you walk as if you messed yourself. I'm sure Navalny's brother could tell you the difference; while they were being tried they were in jail, but after sentencing he went to prison, where I daresay he learned a thing or two.

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Moscow Exile April 27, 2020 at 10:38 pm
The Novodvorskaya quote below, which I have copied and pasted above, is a typical example of a translation made by a Russian into Russian-English:

"I cannot imagine how can anyone love a Russian for his laziness, for his lying, for his poverty, for his spinelessness, for his slavery. But maybe that's not all of his characteristics" .

In real English:

"I cannot imagine how anyone can love a Russian because of his laziness, his lying, his poverty, his spinelessness, his slavery. However, these may not be all of his characteristics".

Of course, "woke" native speakers of English would not use "his" above, but "their", which usage of "their", grammatically speaking, is crap.

That is my opinion, anyway.

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Mark Chapman April 28, 2020 at 8:23 am
https://www.feministcurrent.com/2020/04/13/whats-current-canadian-military-requires-all-personnel-to-stop-using-gendered-pronouns/

It was already difficult enough to write Personnel Evaluation Reports (PER's); the actual writing process occupies at least two months each year and for detached units such as ships the drafts go through multiple levels of review before they leave the unit, and every reviewer fancies himself/herself a writer so they always want a zillion changes. Now you have to use 'they' and 'their', no matter how awkward it makes the text sound, so as to conceal the preferred gender of the subject. Whenever you think, "It can't get stupider than this", you're wrong.

A PER is supposed to convey to the reader something essential about the human it is written on. But ceaseless efforts to depersonalize it result in a document that sounds as if it was written about an electric pencil-sharpener, or a hose spanner; a thing, an object. Because our leaders and supervisors of tomorrow are just products.

Thank God my time was up when it was; I had probably already stayed 10 years too long, because I had already seen a lot of stupid things I wished I hadn't. A military which is simply another PC project completely lacks that unit cohesion that comes from common purpose and shared values. And it can't fight for shit.

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Moscow Exile April 27, 2020 at 10:48 pm
Yes, I didn't wish to correct you, old chap, but Albats it was who used to beg to be arrested in the vicinity of demonstrations. She was also always pissed when she performed in that way.

I remember her once being lifted on the New Arbat after one of those "March of the Millions" had taken place, in which she did not take part, as she was seated in her car -- half-pissed. The cops made her get out of the vehicle, whereupon she began her performance.

I suspect she had been knocking them back at "French" café, where one may imbibe real Frog wine for rip-off prices, which place is (was?) much favoured by kreakly and others of the bourgeois chattering classes here. It is (was?) situated on the nearby Nikitskiy Boulevard.

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Moscow Exile April 27, 2020 at 11:11 pm
A Brave Jewish Voice in Putin's Russia
Evgenia Albats was called 'kikeface' as a kid in the Soviet Union and went on to become an intrepid reporter in Moscow. Visiting the U.S. recently, she spoke with Tablet about the state of Russian politics and what it's like for Jews there today.
BY
CATHY YOUNG
JANUARY 28, 2020


Boris Nemtsov's son Anton (second from left) and Russian journalist Yevgenia Albats during a ceremony to unveil a plaque in memory of Russian politician Boris Nemtsov in 2018

Oi vey!

Albats, who speaks accented but excellent English, talked about everything from crying when she first visited the United States in 1990 and saw black-garbed Orthodox Jews ("I had never imagined that Jews could walk about so freely and so openly") to the excellence of modern Russia's kosher supermarket chain, The Kosher Gourmet, to breaking the rules by sitting in the men's section of a Moscow shul wearing tallit and kippah.


Must be a different Russia,. Must be a different kind of Jew and Rabbi!


Moscow Choral Synagogue

About a mile from where I live.

Must be a different kind of synagogue to the ones which they have in the USA.


Must be in the Lower East Side of New York City!

The banner across Tverskaya Street (above) reads: ""Happy Independence Day to All Russian Citizens!"

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Moscow Exile April 27, 2020 at 11:13 pm
I should add that I have nothing against Jews and get on fine with the many Russian Jews whom I know and work with.

Can't stand professional whining Jews such as Albats is, though!

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Moscow Exile April 28, 2020 at 12:36 am
The "gulags" in which Navalny has been incarcerated have been local bridewells or in remand prisons, the latter known as СИЗО (Следственный изолятор [investigative isolator] SIZO ) in Russian, a pretrial detention facility that provides isolation of the following categories of suspects and accused:

-- those who are under investigation and awaiting trial
-- defendants who are on trial.
-- convicts awaiting escort or in transit to correctional colonies [camps, called "open prison" in the UK and "gulags" in the Western media; educational colonies, settlement colonies (for persons who have been sentenced to imprisonment for crimes committed through negligence , as well as persons who have committed crimes of small or medium gravity for the first time)
-- detainees awaiting extradition .

. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/5e/Prison-korovniki-yar.jpg/260px-Prison-korovniki-yar.jpg
a SIZO in Yaroslavl.


a women's colony

Pre-Trial Detention Centre No. 4, Moscow


SIZO No.4, Moskva


SIZO No.2, Moskva

Putin's Russia!

Hell on earth!!!!!

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Jen April 28, 2020 at 3:26 pm
The sad fact of life for us women is that once we are past the child-bearing years and go menopausal, collagen in the body starts to break down (due to lower oestrogen levels) and muscle tone starts going down. This explains why so many women, once they are in their 50s, seem to go flabby and fat in spite of all the exercise they do (and maybe even increase).

One odd consequence of having reduced oestrogen levels for some women is that if the level goes low enough, the normal low level of testosterone, while it doesn't rise, starts to have an effect on their appearance and their voices. Some women in their 50s and beyond can look a bit masculine and have very deep voices indeed.

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Mark Chapman April 28, 2020 at 5:21 pm
Whereas men just get more virile and attractive to women of all ages.

Seriously, though, you're absolutely right; that's totally what happened to Rush Limbaugh. Once he was post-menopausal, he started to look and sound almost like a man.

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Moscow Exile April 27, 2020 at 1:32 am

Those two liberasts above are having a slanging match at the moment: Sobchak left; Sobol right.

21: 46 , 24 апреля 2020
Отвечаю Ксении Собчак про кампанию "5 шагов для России"

I reply to Ksenia Sobchak about the campaign "5 steps for Russia"

The "5 steps" are proposals given by bullshitter Navalny for the good governance of Russia.

The Russian blogoshere is now awash with praise for the conman. They all seem to have been written by children. They ask how good a president the thief would be and go on about how he had not been allowed to run for president and if he had been then blah blah blah blah.

No mention of course that the US agent could not get enough signatures to enable him to stand for election. Same happened with Sobol, and investigations were taken as regards her falsification of signatures.

A counterattack made against this inundation of blogs praising the conman has now started. The Navalny critics state that clearly the lovers of Russia and all that is good and wholesome are using criticism government policy as regards this dose of flu that is doing the rounds as means to attack the the "regime".

Navalny is standing back from this tiff between the two women pictured above..

Sobol presents herself thus in her Echo of Moscow column:

Classic PR pose: arms crossed, a woman to be taken into account.

She labels herself as "Lawyer to the Fund for the Struggle Against Corruption"

I thought Lyosha was a lawyer.

Her legal qualifications are, as are his, questionable.

As is the authenticity of Vasilyeva's dissertation for a Ph.D. in ophthalmology.

Vasilyeva could perhaps be labelled as "Doctor to the Fund for the Fight Against Corruption".

https://i.insider.com/5e750da8c4854052646f0543?width=1200&format=jpeg
Trust me!

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Moscow Exile April 27, 2020 at 1:38 am

No, trust ME!

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Moscow Exile April 27, 2020 at 3:47 am
Apart from his not amassing the required number of signatures in support of his participation in the 2018 presidential elections, the refusal of which participation the Navalnyites, who are now swamping the blogosphere with articles in support of his becoming president of Russia, simply describe as the powers-that-be not allowing him to be elected, there is the not too small matter of the shyster having been convicted not one but twice for criminal offences.

In 2013, Washington's agent in Russia was convicted of embezzlement at a state-owned enterprise and given a 5-year suspended sentence. According to the laws of the Russian Federation, a convicted person serving a sentence, be it custodial or suspended, forfeits the right to be elected to public office.

A reminder of the Kirovles affair: the fighter against corruption was engaged in illegal deforestation by means of a state-owned enterprise and then sold timber at a significantly reduced price, thereby robbing the state budget of more than 16 million rubles.

And the second conviction of the Washington agent was brought about as a result of Navalny and his brother defrauding the firm "Yves Rocher", whereby the Navalny brothers laundering illegal money fraudulently gained from the firm. For that fraud, Navalny received 3.5 years of imprisonment, and his brother went to a general prison for 4 years.

Of course, the Navalnys lodged a complaint with the ECHR in January 2015 following the "Yves Rocher" case , which court thereupon found for the dynamic duo, ruling that their conviction for fraud in 2014 had been "arbitrary and manifestly unreasonable" and ordered Russia to pay Navalny compensation.

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Mark Chapman April 27, 2020 at 8:37 am
Good to see old Alexeeva in there; I thought she had kicked the bucket. These people are an irritant, but in and of themselves they are a living argument against liberalism. Sobchak jets around, very much in the mainstream, dispensing her sarcasm, but it is plain to anyone who watches her for more than five minutes that she is a born agitator who does not have time for the boring work of governance. Look at fat, lazy Navalny, the perpetual victim, who does the occasional stretch in the jug just to prove that he's a man of the people and not simply directing the gullible on fruitless PR missions; again, five minutes observation without distractions is enough to see he has no plans of his own, and is merely the front-man for a western housecleaning operation – he complains endlessly about the way things are done, but offers no solutions, or recommends actions that would be popular in the short term (because they are giveaways) but are unsustainable without going deeply into debt. Nobody in their right mind would follow Yashin; he also is a born agitator with the typical liberal fascination for investment and wealth, the 'rising tide' that will lift all boats but somehow only ever ends up enriching the already-rich. Except in the liberal world, the rich are rich because they are purposeful; risk-takers, daring entrepreneurs, while the people are listless sludge that is just pushed this way and that way. Anyone who is content with what he's got is out of place in the liberal world. Bykhov cares only for the pursuit of pleasure, and attempts to cast him as an incisive social engineer and deep thinker are ludicrous. And people can see that.

Nobody in Russia really wants to be led by Navalny, or Sobchak or Yashin. Everyone understands that in order for individual Russians to leapfrog straight to staggering profit, control of national assets must be surrendered to wealthy international investors who will take them private and sell shares and make fortunes. Left to its own devices, Russia was making good progress toward raising the standards of living, education and health without having to depend on its western 'partners', until Obama decided to have another kick at destroying the economy in hope that angry Russians would kick out their leader and let the west have a go at social engineering. It is best to have the stuffed-shirt liberal element which currently prevails because it has no realistic chance of becoming a force in national decision-making, and is mostly just wasting the west's money.

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[May 02, 2020] The action of a coward: Navalny has refused to debate with Maria Zakharova

May 02, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

Moscow Exile May 1, 2020 at 11:09 am

Getting too narrow up there:

Мужской поступок. Навальный отказался от дебатов с Марией Захаровой

The action of a man: Navalny has refused to debate with Maria Zakharova

Yesterday, Maria Zakharova challenged Alexei Navalny to a debate: the reason was another "sensational" investigation by Alexei. And Maria offered to meet him in order to show that he was misleading everyone.

And it seems that Mr. Navalny agreed to the debate.

When I saw this on the news, my first thought was that no debate would take place.

I shall explain why. It is one thing when Alexei exposes everyone on his channel, and another when he enters into a dispute with someone, especially if the opponent is smart and educated. As an example, I shall cite the debate that Navalny and Chubais had, when the experienced old wolf Chubais, with one straight left smashed Navalny to smithereens. Only a few feathers were left floating around. Since then, Lyosha has carefully avoided a debate every possible way he can.

However, with Maria Zakharova it was impossible to give a refusal at once, especially since a woman had challenged him to a debate, so he allegedly agreed. Well, after that, there were technical matters to be dealt with, as Maria has written: Navalny's secretary called her at first and said they would have Aleksei Pivovarov as a moderator. Okay, says Zakharova. Then a new condition appears: there should only one topic debated. "How come?" Maria exclaims, because this is a debate. How can there be only one topic? "That's how it is", they say into the phone.

Then Zakharova asks if she can talk directly with Navalny and then they will discuss everything. In response, the secretary comes out with a brilliant phrase. I really do think that this has to be included in the Anti-Corruption Foundation gold reserves:

Of course not. That is not possible. He is a free man and, accordingly, free from direct conversation.

Isn't it just wonderful how they dream up such phrases: the intellectual baggage of Navalny's team is immediately visible.

You can se now the whole scheme of these gentlemen: Zakharova says to them: "Guys, let's have a debate on any platform. I am the only woman who has challenged your chief, leader or whatever you call him. But in response, there is a lot of shuffling around: firstly, a moderator is urgently needed -- Well, OK then, she agrees; next, there is only one topic to be discussed; and finally, Navalny does not want to enter into direct communication with her.

And here, if Maria had agreed to that, then these guys would have come up with another condition for the debate. For example, Navalny would speak for an hour, and Zakharova for ten seconds. If she had agreed with that, then the debate would have ben on. However, in the end, Navalny would simply not have turned up for it and that would have been that!

As a result, Maria could not stand it any more and refused to participate in this obscure game. And rightly so: no debate on any topic would have taken place, but one can easily get bogged down with such endless discussions about procedure.

Maria Zakharova has once again demonstrated that she is a smart and bright woman. But Navalny's behavior makes you think about the value of his investigations. Although, personally, everything about them is clear to me!

Patient Observer May 1, 2020 at 11:56 am
Actually, Maria handled it very well indeed! As many have said, the liberal "opposition" is inherently repugnant to a large majority of Russians. Thus, the Russian government actively promotes opportunities for their message to be heard – Russia out of Crimea! LGBT?# values!

The Saker had a fairly good analysis of the above strategy including examples of how the Russian government provides platforms for the liberals to spout their nonsense.

Navalny knows the above hence his reluctance to engage in a debate where his numerous embarrassing utterance will be dragged out of him by a skillful and charismatic opponent.

A bad strategy would be to jail Navalny or to "silence" the opposition. Let them blather on, spend NGO money and make themselves pariahs.

Mark Chapman May 1, 2020 at 1:44 pm
Well, that's not the way he is spinning it, and every mention of his name in print is pure gold to him. He's getting free publicity and lots of it, and probably quite a few people are saying "Who's this Navalny fellow?" The state is playing Navalny's game now, to his rules, and they should stop before they do him any more favours; he can dance around like this forever, pretending open willingness. Zakharova lost her temper, and it is proving to be expensive.
Patient Observer May 1, 2020 at 4:29 pm
My take is quite different. It is more like the end game for Navalny.

An opposition is needed to show the majority that they have freedom to think what they like.

et Al May 1, 2020 at 12:07 pm
JusttheNewscom: FBI found no 'derogatory' Russia evidence on Flynn, planned to close case before leaders intervened
https://justthenews.com/accountability/russia-and-ukraine-scandals/fbi-found-no-derogatory-russia-evidence-flynn-planned

FBI memos show case was to be closed with a defensive briefing before a second interview with Flynn was sought.

Evidence withheld for years from Michael Flynn's defense team shows the FBI found "no derogatory" Russia evidence against the former Trump National Security Adviser and that counterintelligence agents had recommended closing down the case with a defensive briefing before the bureau's leadership intervened in January 2017

In the text messages to his team, Strzok specifically cited "the 7th floor" of FBI headquarters, where then-Director James Comey and then-Deputy Director Andrew McCane worked, as the reason he intervened.

"Hey if you haven't closed RAZOR, don't do so yet," Strzok texted on Jan. 4, 2017
####

JFC.

Remember kids, the United States is a well oiled machine that dispenses justice equitably along with free orange juce to the tune of 'One Nation Under a Groove.'

So, I think Mark asked about 'legal action', but as you can see Barr and others are going through this stuff with a fine tooth comb so it is as solid when it goes public. More importantly, it can be used as evidenec to reform such corruption and put some proper controls in place to stop it happening again at least for a few years

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Mark Chapman May 1, 2020 at 1:53 pm
And meanwhile everybody who thinks they might be in the line of fire at some future moment is destroying evidence as fast as they can make it unfindable.

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Moscow Exile May 1, 2020 at 12:33 pm
By the way, as very many here in Mordor know full well, Navalny has never had a proper business. At the beginning of his career he worked as a lawyer on a small salary.

Navalny's parents are pensioners: they receive a pension and have a small business about 20 miles beyond the Moscow beltway. Navalny would be classed by many here as coming from the middle-class.

Now get this: Navalny was able to buy himself a Mercedes GL class on this low salary that he earned as a lawyer. The vehicle was then worth about 3.5 million rubles. Not bad, despite the fact that his salary in those years was estimated to have been no more than 100 thousand rubles.

And guess what? As soon as Navalny started his "opposition" activities, he immediately sold the Merc. You see, it wouldn't have done for a popular oppositionist to be seen riding around in a Mercedes.

The Bullshitter-in-Chief now says that his present salary depends on donations, and amounts to no more than 100 thousand rubles, that he cannot afford to run a car, because he supports his wife and 2 children, one of whom now studying in the good ol' US of A.

And so Navalny's headquarters decided to rent a car for his use: not to rent when need be, but on a permanent basis. The car, by the way, is not quite a popular mark: it is a Land Rover Freelander. Moreover, the car is rented with a driver

Navalny's headquarters pays out about 240 thousand rubles per month to rent this car with a driver,.

And this money all comes from donations, they say; from people who want to eradicate corruption in what Navalny refers to as "this" country.

And below, you can see where some folk think the money for the Bullshitter's car rental really comes from.

That's the sight that greeted Navalny when he woke up one morning in Kostroma, following PARNASSUS crushing electoral defeat there. Unknown persons on a Twitter feed that had the above image posted labelled the above vehicle a "State Department combat vehicle".

Now I ask you: how many ordinary Joes here -- not that slimy BBC get who reports from Moscow and his oppo Rainsford, not the owners of "Moscow Times", not those who run RFE/RL but your regular Ivan and Natasha -- really believe that Navalny will eradicate corruption in "this" country?

[May 02, 2020] Narrative control is the name of the game in the Skripal case.

May 02, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

Cortes April 26, 2020 at 12:17 pm

Narrative control is the name of the game in the Skripal case.

A couple of articles about a phenomenon which was thought to exist only in pre-Revolutionary France – the lettre de cachet – but seems to have been given a new lease of life:

http://johnhelmer.net/sergei-and-yulia-skripal-in-prison-together-or-in-solitary/

http://johnhelmer.net/how-many-witnesses-are-there-of-sergei-and-yulia-skripal-at-the-salisbury-hospital-in-march-2018-when-they-were-under-the-supervision-of-these-medical-staff/

Mark Chapman April 26, 2020 at 5:43 pm
I would love to see the British government and Porton Down nailed to the barn door for this. There's no telling if that will ever happen, but just on general principles their collective evasiveness speaks volumes. When the truth is on your side and you know it, you shout it from the rooftops. You don't obfuscate and hide behind national security, and pretend like amazing technical and spycraft secrets might be compromised if you reveal your evidence.

If anyone can make it happen, it's Helmer. I've never seen such a talent for detail and cause-and-effect. Remarkable.

Like Like

Moscow Exile April 26, 2020 at 12:22 pm
I wonder if the NHS staff that took care of the Skripals and who have been keeping stumm about that hapless duo's alleged poisoning by the Orcs with the most deadly nerve agent known to man have performed a dance routine yet on Tik-Tok?

Heroes all!

[May 02, 2020] Skripal false flag: Czech variant

This is yet another demonstration that Western intelligence services became influential political players. As Chich Republic is a NATO country its intellignce services are partially controlled by outsiders. They also might have their own home grown neocon in the high ranks.
May 02, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

et Al April 28, 2020 at 10:40 am

al-Beeb s'Allah: Police protecting Prague mayor after 'Russian murder plot'
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-52455223

Czech newspaper Respekt alleges a Russian agent carrying the poison ricin arrived in the country three weeks ago.

Mayor Zdenek Hrib refused to say why he was under protection but said he had told police he was being followed .
####

Plenty more bs at the link.

When does the national intelligence services leak to anything but national media? When it needs suckers! Vis the Christopher Steel Dossier of Steaming Bullshit to the Steaming Pile of Bullshit masquerading as journalism known as Buttfeed.

We must remember that the Czech Republic is the United States' intelligence hub for Central and Eastern Europe. Even then, a large portion of Czech citizens don't buy the 'Russia threat' propaganda, coz they voted for Babis as PM who has been under investigation since elected because his is not anti-Russian.

These investigations have turned up nothing apart from a possible conflict of ethics according to Brussels, which is ironic considering the latters refusal to publish minutes of its Trilogues (closed door meetings between heads of the European Parliament, Commission & Council) to agree EU policy before it is voted on in the Parliament – i.e. pre-baked in secret, it's failure to have a de facto register of lobbyists etc. etc. What is happening in Czechia is an ongoing soft coup which will not stop until Babis and others that don't sign on are out of power. It's the wrong kind of democracy , innit?

[May 02, 2020] Gazprom ramps up its export capacity to China via the Power of Siberia line, plans to add a second compressor station this year

May 02, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

Mark Chapman April 27, 2020 at 3:59 pm

Gazprom ramps up its export capacity to China via the Power of Siberia line, plans to add a second compressor station this year. Drill rigs at the Kovykta Field are expected to go from 7 this year to 18 next year, and the extraction flows added to the Power of Siberia capacity.

https://www.spglobal.com/platts/en/market-insights/latest-news/natural-gas/041420-russias-gazprom-eyes-capacity-increase-on-china-gas-export-link

[May 02, 2020] The servants of Washington in the EU will try to extract every last concession they can before the pipeline is completed, but they absolutely want it and will back down if they think Russia would actually give up on completing it

May 02, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

Mark Chapman May 1, 2020 at 1:41 pm

The servants of Washington in the EU will try to extract every last concession they can before the pipeline is completed, but they absolutely want it and will back down if they think Russia would actually give up on completing it. Their strategy all along was to let Russia build it, but ensure its operation fell under the control of EU regulators so that they could get plenty of gas when they needed it, but use it as a negotiating tool when they had lots in reserve, start complaining about the price and try to get more pipeline volume for competitors, variations on the ideal where the Russians would absorb all the costs of building it, but would yield all advantages of the completed pipeline to the EU. Right up until the moment the first volumes go through the pipeline, the EU is going to act as a spoiler on a project they absolutely want to be completed.

If Russia said, all right then, fuck you; Get your gas from the Americans, if that's what you want, two things would happen – one, The Donald would come in his pants, and two, Brussels would go wait wait wait wait hold on. No need to be hasty.

But they think they are in a super-strong position now, because their American pals stopped it when it was just a whisker away from completion, and gave them breathing space to renegotiate a deal that was already set, and make up a bunch of new rules using that was then, this is now for a rationale. I hope Russia does the same to them once it's complete, and says yeah, you THOUGHT that was the price, but that was then, and charges them just enough under the American price that dropping them in favour of the Americans is not feasible, but still much more than they thought they would pay.

karl1haushofer May 1, 2020 at 12:40 pm
Another setback for Nord Stream 2: https://sputniknews.com/europe/202005011079159594-german-regulator-plans-to-deny-nord-stream-2-waiver-from-new-gas-directive -- reports/

[May 02, 2020] It'd be nice to think Russia is going to complete Nord Stream II right away just to spite Washington and its endless meddling, but as we have discussed before, there really is no hurry

May 02, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

Mark Chapman April 27, 2020 at 9:27 am

That's funny; I just checked her position last night, and it said she was bound for Nakhodka, due early in July.

Yeah; making 10 knots for Nakhodka, due there July 1st. That's where she left from originally, but so far as I could make out there is nothing in Nakhodka which might lead to the belief she will be there undergoing updates and tweaks for her employment finishing Nord Stream II.

https://www.vesselfinder.com/vessels/AKADEMIK-CHERSKIY-IMO-8770261-MMSI-273399760

It'd be nice to think Russia is going to complete Nord Stream II right away just to spite Washington and its endless meddling, but as we have discussed before, there really is no hurry. Russia is locked into a new medium-term transit contract with Ukraine, the Russian state has reduced income available due to the oil-price mess and low demand owing to the 'pandemic', and would be forging ahead with work that would cost it just as much money to do now as it would later, when it likely will have more cash available. I've read the AKADEMIK CHERKSIY needs a short refit and a little updating to ready her for Nord Stream work, since being principal pipelayer for that line possibly requires some different equipment or at least some adjustments. It likely would require crewing by some more specialists, as well, and there's no reason to believe they have been aboard all this time. I suppose they could meet the ship in Nakhodka, but there is nothing at this point to suggest that.

The only thing that argues for Russia pressing ahead now is the weather, which should be entering the season when it would be best for that kind of work. Otherwise, nothing suggests Russia is in a tearing rush to get on with it. Certainly the partners have not been told anything, and they don't appear to be unduly alarmed at the lack of immediate progress.

https://neftegaz.ru/en/news/companies/523680-no-plan-b-presented-to-austria-s-omv-on-nord-stream-2-gas-link-ceo/

[May 01, 2020] 22 years ago Madeleine Albright declared the United States to be the "indispensable nation": "If we have to use force, it is because we are America; we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future, and we see the danger here to all of us."

Notable quotes:
"... Albright's original statement was an aggressive assertion that America was both extraordinarily powerful and unusually farsighted, and that legitimized the frequent U.S. recourse to using force. ..."
"... After two decades of calamitous failures that have highlighted our weaknesses and foolishness, even she can't muster up the old enthusiasm that she once had. No one could look back at the last 20 years of U.S. foreign policy and still honestly say that "we see further" into the future than others. ..."
Apr 30, 2020 | www.theamericanconservative.com

Originally from: It Took COVID To Expose the Fraud of 'American Exceptionalism' The American Conservative by Daniel Larison

... ... ...

It was 22 years ago when then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright publicly declared the United States to be the "indispensable nation": "If we have to use force, it is because we are America; we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future, and we see the danger here to all of us."

In a recent interview with The New York T imes, Albright sounded much less sure of her old position: "There's nothing in the definition of indispensable that says "alone." It means that the United States needs to be engaged with its partners. And people's backgrounds make a difference." Albright's original statement was an aggressive assertion that America was both extraordinarily powerful and unusually farsighted, and that legitimized the frequent U.S. recourse to using force.

After two decades of calamitous failures that have highlighted our weaknesses and foolishness, even she can't muster up the old enthusiasm that she once had. No one could look back at the last 20 years of U.S. foreign policy and still honestly say that "we see further" into the future than others. Not only are we no better than other countries at anticipating and preparing for future dangers, but judging from the country's lack of preparedness for a pandemic we are actually far behind many of the countries that we have presumed to "lead." It is impossible to square our official self-congratulatory rhetoric with the reality of a government that is incapable of protecting its citizens from disaster.

[May 01, 2020] Antiwar and anto0interialsim voters who voted for Trump in 2016 are up to a cold shower: it is Trump driving US hostility and escalation in the world, and not only those around him. He is the biggest US imperialist for the last 30 years.

May 01, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Passer by , May 1 2020 15:58 utc | 37

Just as i said many times, it is Trump driving US hostility and escalation in the world, and not only those around him. He is the biggest US imperialist for the last 30 years.

A racist white man goes crazy the moment he understands he does not have the "biggest dick" anymore, and is humiliated due to that, since this wasn't supposed to happen to the people who ruled the world for 500 years.

What will happen is that american white male right wingers will start going crazy. Lashing out in hatred against the world, after understanding they are no longer "number 1", and that their fate will not be pretty.

You should expect US right wingers to go crazy as the US further declines. These people thought they would rule the world. Instead they started to decline. This wasn't supposed to happen to such superior people.

US elite will simply go crazy as the "best country in the world" loses its power.

Expect anglo craziness, outbursts of hate and hysteria. The US elite will become a mental institution. If not for nukes, they would have started a world war already.

[May 01, 2020] RUSSIAN FEDERATION SITREP 30 APRIL 2020 by Patrick Armstrong

May 01, 2020 | turcopolier.typepad.com

RUSSIA AND COVID. Today's numbers: total cases: 106K; total deaths: 1073; tests per 1 million: 24K. Why so few deaths per cases? One theory is that Russia has done more tests than most large countries so the denominator is larger; another is the the idea that the BCG vaccine has some effect ; Russophobes (of course) say that Russia is lying (as if it could cover up lots of deaths given today's social media). Moscow, where half the cases are, is now, after a very unsteady start, tracking people electronically . Putin has extended the lockdown (with full pay) until 11 May . The PM has it .

POST COVID. Russians turn out to have quite a bit saved : 16% say they have enough for a year or more; 25% for 3-6 months; 29% for 1-2 months; 30% report none. The quoted piece sees this as a disaster but, when you add in the support measures the state has provided during the shutdown, low health, education and housing costs, Russians will come out of this better off than many other countries. ( Thanks to Jon Hellevig ).

RUSSIA'S DOOMED AGAIN. COVID this time . And oil .

OIL WARS. The bottom has dropped out of the business. Full tankers lined up ; negative futures prices ; current price about $17 . Lots more Saudi oil on its way to the USA . The agreement to cut production doesn't seem to have had any effect. Did MBS launch it in a fit of pique ? As China's economy powers up again, it will need oil but apparently it's buying it mostly from Russia .

BLAME. The egregious failure of the USA and its minions is going to lead to a lot of accusations: we already see Chinadunnit in full cry in the two supposedly best prepared countries . China, Russia and Iran are all busy spreading disinformation says Pompeo and " disparaging " US efforts. If the story that Fauci gave money to the Wuhan lab to research bat coronaviruses is true , there will be an embarrassing back blast.

THE GREAT PUTIN DISAPPEARANCE II. " Putin Has Vanished, but Rumors Are Popping Up Everywhere " says the NYT. Memory lane trip time. For a modest retainer I will provide the West's intelligence agencies and media access to the top-secret, well-hidden and known-to-only-a-few-of-the-initiated information on his activities. (BTW, we need a new word in English to cover the concept of "stupid".)

HISTORY. A large church to " unite all Orthodox Christians serving in the Armed Forces" is nearly finished outside Moscow . (I do wish they'd stop translating " храм" as "cathedral"). RFE sneers ; Moscow Times melts down . Four halls will commemorate three warrior saints and a famous icon from the 1812 war. As I've said before, unlike some countries that prefer to airbrush their histor y or turn it upside down (as did the USSR, of course) modern Russia attempts to face it all: Stalin plus the Smolensk Icon ; it all happened, why pretend that half of it didn't?

MILITARY STUFF. It was revealed that the T-14 Armata MBT had been tested in Syria . Of course they never tell us if it just drove around in the dust and heat or actually shot at things. Syria is a big test-bed for Russian weapons. Paratroopers made a 10,000 metre jump in the Arctic . ( Video ) The Soviets practically pioneered large-scale parachute operations and today the Russian Airborne are still the only one that routinely drops AFVs and is not, therefore, merely light infantry when it hits the ground.

RUBBISH. The so-called Gerasimov Doctrine is back; sort of. Rubbish and projection I say .

DEATH OF IRONY. " Well, what we have seen is that Russia maintains military presence close to NATO borders and NATO countries, including in the Black Sea. "

ELBE. A Putin-Trump joint statement , which is something I guess as we move into the Russians-are- falsifying-history , we-really-won-it and the wrong-side-won season.

AMERICA-HYSTERICA. Looks like Flynn was set up by the FBI.

GOOD QUESTION. Why does the US have so many biolabs close to Russia ? Georgia . Ukraine . Armenia . It's not as if the safety record for the ones in the US is so good.

UKRAINE. For your amusement: " T he Peril of Polling in Crimea: Is It Possible to Measure Public Opinion in an Occupied Territory? " Unsurprisingly Ukraine's Foreign Minister concludes it isn't. Meanwhile Saakashvili's back . And land sales are on .

JamesT , 30 April 2020 at 07:24 PM

Speaking of Russian paratroopers, there is a Russian "reality TV show" about an all female battalion "of cadets determined to become officers in Russia's elite airborne troops" on youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucqgTWIg9DI

As someone interested in cultural differences I have found it interesting.

[Apr 29, 2020] Trump, despite pretty slick deception during his election campaign, is an typical imperialist and rabid militarist. His administration continuredand in some areas exceeded the hostility of Obama couse against Russia

Highly recommended!
One of trademarks of Trump administration is his that he despises international law and relies on "might makes right" principle all the time. In a way he is a one trick pony, typical unhinged bully.
In a way Pompeo is the fact of Trump administration foreign policy, and it is not pretty
Apr 29, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org
Passer by , Apr 29 2020 17:32 utc | 7
It is mostly, though not only, Trump related or libertarian pseudo "alt media" behind "just the flu" theories or "China unleashed virus to attack US".

There is a small military/zionist cabal at the White House that is pushing for that information war in order to prop up the dying US empire as well as US oligarhic business interests, and to secure Trump reelection prospects.

It is enough to see how Zerohedge have been turned into full blown imperialist media with many "evil China" outbursts every day.

Beware of Trumptards infiltrating alt media to prop up the dying US Empire and its business interests.

Trump is the biggest US imperialist for the last 30 years. He made a good job at deceiving many anti-system voices.

His WTO attacks are too part of US efforts to take over the organisation. His has no problem with international institutions as long as they are US empire controlled (such as OPCW, WADA, etc.)

Trump-tards and related libertarians (Zerohedge etc.) made their choice on the side of global US imperialism (driven by their hidden racism, hence the evil "chinks" making a good enemy) and are now the enemy of the multipolar world.

Trump is scum. He turned on Russia and Assange after he got into the White House and did far more against Russia than even Obama. I say that as someone who initially made the mistake to support him.

[Apr 29, 2020] Ethno Nationalism for all peoples of the world, protected by all peoples of the world, is the most sensible solution. Or does it ?

Was not German ethno-nationalism the main reason of the WWII?
Apr 29, 2020 | www.unz.com

Michael McCarthy , says: Show Comment April 29, 2020 at 9:30 pm GMT

Excellent, Mr. Unz. British, American and Jewish elites need to be isolated, they are obviously an enemy of the whole human race. Ethno Nationalism for all peoples of the world, protected by all peoples of the world, is the most sensible solution. Isolate the warmongers, secret societies and criminal's. No more war's and heal the earth. It's up to us.

[Apr 28, 2020] The water pipeline reason (water was being piped to Crimea from Russia through Ukraine, and making Crimea part of Ukraine helped simplify the administrative paperwork and communication) has been discussed as has also the possibility that Khrushchev wanted to thwart separatist tendencies in Ukraine

Apr 28, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Jen , Apr 28 2020 0:29 utc | 50

Grieved @ 54:

Stalin might have thwarted Zionist ambitions in the past but Nikita Khrushchev went some way in giving hope when he arbitrarily decided to make Crimea part of Ukraine. This decision was never put to the vote in the Supreme Soviet in 1954, for obvious reason: the legislators would never have agreed to pass it.

What motivated Khrushchev to make such a decision will perhaps never be known, though I know this may have been much discussed in past MoA comments forums or other comments forums I have visited. The water pipeline reason (water was being piped to Crimea from Russia through Ukraine, and making Crimea part of Ukraine helped simplify the administrative paperwork and communication) has been discussed as has also the possibility that Khrushchev wanted to thwart separatist tendencies in Ukraine - the CIA and MI6 had agents including the notorious Stepan Bandera active in western Ukraine at the time - by adding Crimea with its population of people identifying as Russian to the Soviet Republic.

lex talionis , Apr 28 2020 1:00 utc | 54

@ 54 Grieved and @ 62 Jen - you piqued my interest. I just looked Crimea up in my copy of Khrushchev Remembers. Page 260 "Once the Ukraine had been liberated, a paper was drafted by members of the Lozovsky committee.

It was addressed to Stalin and contained a proposal the the Crimea be made a Jewish Soviet Republic within the Soviet Union after the deportation from the Crimea of the Crimean Tatars. Stalin saw behind this proposal the hand of American Zionists operating through the Sovinformbureau.

The Committee members, he declared, were agents of American Zionism. They were trying to set up a Jewish state in the Crimea in order to wrest the Crimea away form the Soviet Union and to establish an outpost of American imperialism on our shores which would be a direct threat to the security of the Soviet Union."

[Apr 27, 2020] Anton Gerashenko is the person that put early (in the first few hours) MH17 propaganda on social media

Apr 27, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Peter AU1 , Apr 26 2020 23:24 utc | 39

rt.com/news
Further details on the case were shared by the Deputy Interior Minister Anton Gerashenko on his Facebook page. The ring involved the head of the clinic, her son, as well as two other Ukrainian and three Chinese nationals. They were charged with human trafficking that may lead to 12 years in prison with property confiscation.
The majority of the clinic's clients were single Chinese males of "certain orientation," as Gerashenko put it. While the exact number of trafficked babies remains unknown, at least 140 more Chinese nationals are under investigation, the official added.

Anton Gerashenko is the person that put early (in the first few hours) MH17 propaganda on social media. The so called intercepted radio calls between rebels and also photograph supposedly of BUK launch.
Looks like Gerashenko is doing his bit for the China decoupling.


[Apr 27, 2020] The Soviet Union inflicted "80 per cent of [German] battle casualties.

Apr 27, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Prof K , Apr 24 2020 17:38 utc | 1

The U.S. did not liberate Europe from fascism. The Soviet Union did that. Between 1942 and 1945 it destroyed the German Wehrmacht on the eastern front. One can reasonably argue that D-Day and the U.S. invasion of occupied France in June 1944 was a mere diversion for the much larger Operation Bagration the USSR was launching in the east.

And what please has the U.S. led but the wars on Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq and numerous other countries?

Instead of defending democracy on the continent the U.S. launched coup after coup whenever majorities in Greece, Italy or other countries voted for too leftish parties. And who by the way helped to hold up Spain's fascist dictatorship under Franco?

Then this:

There is a special irony: Germany and South Korea, both products of enlightened postwar American leadership, have become potent examples of best practices in the coronavirus crisis.

The "postwar American leadership" killed 20% of all Koreans and supported fascist dictatorships in South Korea up to 1987. It has since opposed any South Korean leader who has tried to make peace with North Korea. What please was "enlightened" in that.

Someone should tell that ignorant and uneducated claptrap writer that the U.S. hegemonic 'leadership' is over and that the world has sound reasons to be happy about that:

Many defenders of U.S. hegemony insist that the "liberal international order" depends on it. That has never made much sense. For one, the continued maintenance of American hegemony frequently conflicts with the rules of international order. The hegemon reserves the right to interfere anywhere it wants, and tramples on the sovereignty and legal rights of other states as it sees fit. In practice, the U.S. has frequently acted as more of a rogue in its efforts to "enforce" order than many of the states it likes to condemn. The most vocal defenders of U.S. hegemony are unsurprisingly some of the biggest opponents of international law -- at least when it gets in their way.

The relative decline of the U.S. is not a new development. It has been visible to outside observes for more than 20 years. But it is only now that some of the delusions that Hollywood, main stream media and the establishment have held up for the last 20 years are finally falling away.

More such delusions will be buried when the extent of the new great depression the pandemic will cause becomes more visible.

Posted by b on April 24, 2020 at 17:23 UTC | Permalink

The most important book on the Soviet Union's victorious efforts in WW2 is Richard Overy's, Russia's War: A History of the Soviet War Effort.

It is unsurpassed in English-language historiography. Overy's conclusion is correct: "the Soviet war effort remains an incomparable achievement, world-historical in a very real sense." (Page 327).

Overy also makes clear that the Soviet Union inflicted "80 per cent of [German] battle casualties." (Page 327) And it was on the Eastern Front "that the overwhelming weight of the Wehrmacht was concentrated until 1944." (Pages 327-8)

The Western front mattered only on the margins.

Ernesto , Apr 24 2020 19:05 utc | 30

Nazi-German munitions production share: 57-60% for air&sea warfare, only 30-33% for land warfare. Luftwaffe combat losses: 75% against western allies, 25% in eastern front. Losses of Kriegsmarine: 90-92% against western allied. German AA-artillery: 12-14% in Eastern Front. German concrete shelter construction (4.5 bn RM in 1943): 80% targeting western allied strategic air war.

All in all. Majority of German munition production was not targeting Eastern Front war. In fact 60% if not even 65% went to war against western allied. Why German war machine collapsed in east? Because 83% of Jagdwaffe from late 1943 was NOT in east.

If eastern front was "main front" then why great majority of German war effort (production, resources) was not targeting was against Soviet U?

Frankie , Apr 24 2020 19:35 utc | 38
Losing 14,600,000 soldiers deceased in 1941-45 was likely not best proof of "effective" Soviet Red Army (and 167,976 in Winter Was against Finns 1939-40). Pyrrhic victory playing certain role in process of collapse of Soviet Union. Even marshal Zhukov admitted in early 1960's that without western aid "we won't have been able to create our strategic reserves" and "continued the war".

So - did Soviet U really liberate Europe or was it Uncle Sam giving tools to do it? Soviet blood and western technology?

Prof K , Apr 24 2020 19:36 utc | 39
Ernesto is very wrong on the most important points.

In the east, Germany and her allies had 228 divisions, compared with 58 divisions in the west, only 15 of which were in the area of the Normandy battle in its initial stages.

Furthermore, more manpower and anti-aircraft artillery were deployed against bombing in the Reich than were available in France.

The German army was well aware of the greater threat: the revived Soviet war machine.

Finally, there was no major movement of manpower westward to cope with the invasion of France. And the Allied bridgehead in Normandy was contained, though not eliminated, with the troops already there.

[Apr 25, 2020] Now isn't the time to push for nuclear modernization

Apr 25, 2020 | www.defensenews.com

If the new coronavirus pandemic has taught us one thing, it is that we need to rethink what we need to do to keep America safe. That's why Secretary of Defense Mark Esper's recent tweet calling modernization of U.S. nuclear forces a "top priority ... to protect the American people and our allies" seemed so tone deaf.

COVID-19 has already killed more Americans than died in the 9/11 attacks and the Iraq and Afghan wars combined, with projections of many more to come. The pandemic underscores the need for a systematic, sustainable, long-term investment in public health resources, from protective equipment , to ventilators and hospital beds, to research and planning resources needed to deal with future outbreaks of disease.

As Kori Schake, the director of foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, has noted : "We're going to see enormous downward pressure on defense spending because of other urgent American national needs like health care." And that's as it should be, given the relative dangers posed by outbreaks of disease and climate change relative to traditional military challenges.

... ... ...

ICBMs are dangerous because of the short decision time a president would have to decide whether to launch them in a crisis to avoid having them wiped out in a perceived first strike -- a matter of minutes . This reality greatly increases the prospect of an accidental nuclear war based on a false warning of attack. This is a completely unnecessary risk given that the other two legs of the nuclear triad -- ballistic missile submarines and nuclear-armed bombers -- are more than sufficient to deter a nuclear attack, or to retaliate, should the unlikely scenario of a nuclear attack on the United States occur.

... ... ...

Eliminating ICBMs and reducing the size of the U.S. arsenal will face strong opposition in Washington, both from strategists who maintain that the nuclear triad should be sacrosanct, and from special interests that benefit from excess spending on nuclear weapons. The Senate ICBM Coalition , composed of senators from states with ICBM bases or substantial ICBM development and maintenance work, has been particularly effective in fending any changes in ICBM policy, from reducing the size of the force to merely studying alternatives, whether those alternatives are implemented or not. Shimizu Randall Personally I don't see why the Trident subs cannot be refurbished and have a extended life. I think the Minuteman missiles need to be replace. But I don't understand why the cost is exorbitant. Terry Auckland OMG.....what a sensible idea..Other nuclear capable countries will fall into line if this is adopted....peace could thrive and flourish ...sadly it could never happen..too much money at state...too many careers truncated...and too many lobbyists and thinktank type's and loyalist senators to cajole and appease..

A pipe dream I think. ..situation normal will continue to annhilation...

[Apr 22, 2020] Especially as the insane neoliberal economy we live in, we are ruled by a group of kleptocrats and vicious stooges. Which make allegations against Biden deserving a closer look but that does not make them automatically credible

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... The Progressive ..."
Apr 22, 2020 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

"Evidence" means testimony, writings, material objects, or other things presented to the senses that are offered to prove the existence or nonexistence of a fact. -- California Evidence Code sec 140

JTMcPhee , April 21, 2020 at 6:19 pm

... ... ...

Even the NYT acknowledged (before it erased the text in its story on Reade that noted there were no other sexual misconduct charges pending against him other than that long history of assaults and sniffing and hands-on, text removed by the Times at the instance of the Biden campaign staff?

Here's the original text: " The Times found no pattern of sexual misconduct by Mr. Biden, beyond the hugs, kisses and touching that women previously said made them uncomfortable." Waiting for the apologists to tell us why the edit to remove the last clause starting "beyond " is just "Good journalism."

He and Trump are bad examples of the male part of the species. Nothing to choose that I can see, other than who among the people that revise those bribes to them will be the first in line at the MMT watering hole

just_kate , April 21, 2020 at 8:54 pm

i had a lengthy discussion about this with my brother and sil, it came down to her saying I DON'T CARE ABOUT THAT re bidens history of being a ttl letch plus possible rapist and my brother questioning what is obvious discomfort in multiple video evidence.

They said defeating trump was paramount to anything against biden. i simply give up at this point.

cm , April 21, 2020 at 3:28 pm

No mention of Brett Kavanaugh or Christine Blasey Ford in the article

michael99 , April 21, 2020 at 6:30 pm

The Heart-Wrenching Trauma of the Christine Blasey Ford and Brett Kavanaugh Hearings
It's difficult. It hurts. It's unfair. But women will keep telling our stories.
By Joan Walsh
September 28, 2018

lyman alpha blob , April 21, 2020 at 5:46 pm

Lots of partisan hackery and TDS going around in the last few years in once respectable lefty publications. Mother Jones has gone completely to hell rather than raising any, as was once their mission statement. I haven't read the Nation as much in recent years – I let my subscription lapse a while ago as I found I just couldn't keep up with reading it. Coincidentally I think that was about the time I started reading NC. The Nation has a history of sheepdogging lefties to rally behind bad Dem candidates, which was another reason I didn't feel bad letting my subscription go.

I do still have my subscription to Harper's but they were getting on my nerves quite a bit to the point I considered cancelling them too. Rebecca Solnit wrote some truly cringe-worthy editorials for them after Trump's election. They seem to have removed her from writing the main editorial so maybe I wasn't the only one who felt she left a little to be desired. I'm quite fond of the newer woman they have doing editorials, Lionel Shriver. She seems like she'd fit in quite well here!

sierra7 , April 21, 2020 at 3:39 pm

I left (pun intended) the Nation pub in the dust way back in the 1990's and buried it post 9/11. Used to be a real good alternative press pub 30-40 years ago. Somewhere along the line it lost it's way and joined the wishy-washy "gatekeeper' society of "approved news."
RIP

urblintz , April 21, 2020 at 3:33 pm

Joan Walsh is a partisan fraud and The Nation's worst hire since . forever.

Olga , April 21, 2020 at 8:09 pm

The Nation was a sanity saviour back in late 70s and through 1980s; then something happened. Not clear when or what, but I know I let my subscription lapse. Tried again later, but it was never the same. It's mostly unbearable now, except for Stephen Cohen. Walsh has been in the unbearable category for many years now.

Voltaire Jr. , April 21, 2020 at 10:08 pm

Subscribed to The Nation and The Progressive in 1971. Read and learned for a decade or so, moved on. Also read every Henry George book I could.

marku52 , April 21, 2020 at 3:59 pm

Leonard Pitts just had an editorial in my local paper where he opined that even if Biden had sexually assaulted Reade, it didn't really matter because we had to vote against Trump.

I wrote this in reply:
So Leonard Pitts thinks that Biden's alleged sexual attack on Tara Reade isn't disqualifying, even if true. Strange, he didn't think that way about Brett Kavanagh. I didn't want to attack the columnist as a hypocrite without being sure, so I looked it up. Here is what he wrote:

"It's a confluence of facts that speak painfully and pointedly to just how unseriously America takes men's predations against women. You might disagree, noting that the Senate Judiciary Committee has asked Ford to testify. But if history is any guide, that will prove to be a mere formality – a sop to appearances – before the committee recommends confirmation."

Looks very much like "Well, It's excusable when our guys do it."

Not to me.

( Here is the link to his first opinion piece)
https://www.pressherald.com/2018/09/19/leonard-pitts-fairness-statute-has-not-run-out-on-allegations-against-kavanaugh/#

jo6pac , April 21, 2020 at 4:32 pm

The late Alexzander Cockburn would be most proud of this take down of joan walsh.

I don't read the nation and I'm sorry that LP feels that way.

Thanks Lambert and NC

I'll be voting Green again without Bernie in the race.

Reply ↓

Watt4Bob , April 21, 2020 at 4:34 pm

So disappointing.

It was the Nation that helped wake me politically back in the early 1970s with their reporting on the Chilean coup, and later, the murder of Orlando Letelier, and Ronnie Moffet .

Arguably, the first state-sponsored international terrorist attack on U.S. soil.

It has has since morphed into cat box liner.

Am I wrong to blame Katrina vanden Heuvel?

kirk seidenbecker , April 21, 2020 at 5:43 pm

Excuse me if this is a repeat –

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2020/04/evaluating-tara-reades-claims

Reply ↓

OpenThePodBayDoorsHAL , April 21, 2020 at 5:46 pm

Always had a crush on K v d Heuvel. (How's that for an opening to a post about misogyny and sexual misconduct)?

But can't we disqualify Joe! as the craven proponent of the worst neo-lib policies that got us exactly where we are today? Or, in polite company, ask politely whether he is even in a mental state to hand over the keys to the to the family car, let alone the nuclear football?

Let's take the Id out of IdPol, I don't care if the candidate has green skin and three eyes if the policies they would enact come within smelling distance of benefiting the 99% (or more precisely in Joe's case within hair smelling distance).

We can use his personal conduct as a component in our judgement but pleeease can we focus on the stuff that would actually affect our lives. In his case, for the absolute worse.

(Note: I sincerely doubt whether Joe is currently allowed to drive a car, please oh please Mr.God-Yahweh-Mohammed-Buddha-Obama can we not let him drive a nation).

[Apr 21, 2020] That just about sums it up: the 'Holodomor' was a myth cooked up by Nazi collaborators in the 1940s

Apr 21, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

bevin , Apr 20 2020 13:35 utc | 286

"If you thought the Holomodor was bad, you ain't seen nothing yet!" In my crosshairs@269

That just about sums it up: the 'Holodomor' was a myth cooked up by Nazi collaborators in the 1940s and designed solely to buttress the argument-beloved by fascists- that the Soviet Union was 'as bad' as the Nazi regime.

crosshairs is clearly a fascist troll with an agenda of ensuring that the capitalist system, which fascism treasures for all its worst aspects, should be preserved. He regards the deaths of a few million civilians, most of them elderly members of a generation fathered by the men who had crushed fascism on the battlefield, as a very tiny price to pay.

[Apr 20, 2020] How Red Army's 'Death to Spies' Counter-Intelligence Service Found Hitler's Remains

Apr 20, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

vk , Apr 19 2020 15:36 utc | 4

Curious information of the week:

How Red Army's 'Death to Spies' Counter-Intelligence Service Found Hitler's Remains

The article includes excerpts from an interview with FSB Lt. Gen. (ret.) Alexander Zdanovich, who prepared the mission himself.

[Apr 19, 2020] Who Is Really in Control of US Foreign Policy by Timothy Alexander Guzman

Notable quotes:
"... Baron Nathan Mayer de Rothschild once said "I care not what puppet is placed on the throne of England to rule the British Empire on which the sun never sets. The man that controls Britain's money supply controls the British Empire, and I control the British money supply." ..."
"... Unfortunately that system of control is evident in today's society. Special interests have been behind every US president including Trump. ..."
"... Trump is following his marching orders to big oil interests including his authorized theft of Syrian oil. ..."
"... Trump has given more support to Israel than any of his predecessors, which to the Pentagon is another important agenda. Israel is an important US ally in the Middle East besides Saudi Arabia. ..."
"... Trump first trip as President was to Saudi Arabia to sell more weapons, which is business as usual for the arms industry. ..."
"... "We will stop racing to topple foreign regimes that we know nothing about, that we shouldn't be involved with" ..."
"... "these events send a strong signal to the illegitimate regimes in Venezuela and Nicaragua that democracy and the will of the people will always prevail." ..."
"... 'War is a Racket.' ..."
"... "I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902–1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents" ..."
"... "This conjunction, of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry, is new in the American experience. The total influence – economic, political, even spiritual – is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the federal government. We recognise the imperative need for this development, yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists, and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes." ..."
"... (who was the emperor's private army by default is similar to Presidents relationship with the Military-Industrial Complex) ..."
"... "smash the CIA into a thousand pieces" ..."
"... "For we are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence–on infiltration instead of invasion, on subversion instead of elections, on intimidation instead of free choice, on guerrillas by night instead of armies by day. It is a system which has conscripted vast human and material resources into the building of a tightly knit, highly efficient machine that combines military, diplomatic, intelligence, economic, scientific and political operations. ..."
"... Its preparations are concealed, not published. Its mistakes are buried, not headlined. Its dissenters are silenced, not praised. No expenditure is questioned, no rumor is printed, no secret is revealed. It conducts the Cold War, in short, with a war-time discipline no democracy would ever hope or wish to match." ..."
"... " tightly knit, highly efficient machine " ..."
"... 'The World According to Jesse' ..."
"... TruTV's 'Conspiracy Theory with Jesse Ventura' ..."
"... "About a month after I was elected governor, I was requested into the basement of the capital to be interviewed by 23 members of the Central Intelligence Agency, the CIA, they were very formal, there was governor, sir and all that, but they put me in a chair and they were in a big half-moon around me, and I said to them, look before I answer any of your questions, I want to know what are you doing here? because in the CIA mission statement, it says that they are not operational inside the United States of America. Well, they wouldn't really give me an answer on that and then I said I want to go around the room and I want each one of you to tell me your name and what you do, half of them wouldn't. Now isn't that bizarre, I'm the governor and these guys wouldn't answer questions from me. Then they started questioning me and it was all about how I got elected. You know what was the most bizarre thing about it was? There was every array of person you could imagine, young people, old people, all nationalities and that's what really got to me. These were people you would see every day. They look like your neighbors." ..."
"... Presidents come and go, and even the parties in power change, but the main political direction does not change, That's why, in the grand scheme of things, we don't care who's the head of the United States, we know more or less what's going to happen. And so, in this regard, even if we wanted to, it wouldn't make sense for us to interfere ..."
"... Timothy Alexander Guzman writes on his blog, Silent Crow News, where this article was originally published. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research. ..."
Feb 22, 2020 | www.globalresearch.ca
First published on January 2, 2020

Baron Nathan Mayer de Rothschild once said "I care not what puppet is placed on the throne of England to rule the British Empire on which the sun never sets. The man that controls Britain's money supply controls the British Empire, and I control the British money supply."

Unfortunately that system of control is evident in today's society. Special interests have been behind every US president including Trump.

Trump is following his marching orders to big oil interests including his authorized theft of Syrian oil.

Trump has given more support to Israel than any of his predecessors, which to the Pentagon is another important agenda. Israel is an important US ally in the Middle East besides Saudi Arabia.

Trump first trip as President was to Saudi Arabia to sell more weapons, which is business as usual for the arms industry.

There is a power structure that sets the rules of the game in Washington. The Military-Industrial Complex (MIC) has an agenda and that is war. A US led war in the Middle East with Iran is increasingly coming close to reality. It would affect Syria, Lebanon and the Palestinians.

At some point, the war will reach Latin America targeting Venezuela because of its oil reserves since Trump likes the "oil". As of now, Bolivia, Chile and Ecuador are in chaos due to new US-backed fascistic governments that re-established neoliberal economic policies which will lead to the impoverishment of the masses.

The U.S. military has over 800 bases ranging from torture sites to drone hubs in over 70 countries. US tensions are more intense that in any period of time with Iran, Syria and Hezbollah as Trump signed off on a new defense budget worth $738 billion including funds for his new Space Force. Despite the fact that the Democrats are still angry over their election defeat to Trump and are still pushing the Russia collusion hoax and now the farcical impeachment scandal, but when it comes to foreign policy, both Democrats and Republicans are unified with the same war agenda. The Trump administration continues its regime change operations despite the fact that Trump said no more regime change wars when he was a candidate in 2016. "We will stop racing to topple foreign regimes that we know nothing about, that we shouldn't be involved with"

Fast-forward to 2019, Trump's CIA and others from his administration such as Eliot Abrams, a Reagan-era neocon was given the green-light to conduct another regime change operation with a nobody named Juan Guaido leading the Venezuelan opposition against the Maduro government which failed. Bolivia on the other hand was a success for Washington which was planned the day Evo Morales was elected President of Bolivia and was allied with Washington's adversaries in Latin America including Venezuela, Ecuador, Nicaragua and Brazil (before Balsonaro of course). Trump continued the pentagon's agenda when he praised the new fascist Bolivian regime who forced Morales from power with Washington's approval of course. Trump even threatened Nicaragua and Venezuela with new attempts of regime change when he said that "these events send a strong signal to the illegitimate regimes in Venezuela and Nicaragua that democracy and the will of the people will always prevail." In other words, Trump is not in charge.

US Presidents do have some room to make decisions concerning domestic issues such as taxes or healthcare, but when it comes to foreign policy, its a different story. It's not a conspiracy theory.

Soleimani's Assassination: An Act of Psychological Warfare

Many people in power has told the world who is really in charge from politicians, Wall Street bankers to military generals. In a 1935 speech by a Marine General Smedley titled 'War is a Racket.'

A veteran in the Spanish-American War who rose through the ranks during the course of his career. From 1898 until his retirement in 1931 he was part of numerous interventions all around the world. Butler was also the most decorated Marine ever with two Medals of Honor added to his resume. He said the following:

"I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902–1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents"

He was correct. General Butler could have given notorious gangsters such as Al Capone a few lessons in how to run a business empire. Then in 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower made it clear who had the real power inside Washington in a farewell address he gave to the American public. Eisenhower issued a stark warning on the dangers of the MIC posed to humanity.

Here is a part of the speech:

"This conjunction, of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry, is new in the American experience. The total influence – economic, political, even spiritual – is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the federal government. We recognise the imperative need for this development, yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists, and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes."

Eisenhower seemed like he was not in agreement with the deep state's decision to drop the atomic bombs during World War II, perhaps he was cornered by the growing power of the deep state. A comparison between the Roman Empire and America today is uncanny. In Rome for example, choosing an emperor was made difficult by the ruling elite, political debates dominated how new emperors were selected by old emperors, the senate, those who were influential and the Praetorian Guard which is today's version of the Military-Industrial Complex. The political and industrial heavyweights and its intelligence agencies select the best two candidates from the only two political parties who are bought and paid for by corporate and political interests make the important decisions. The Praetorian Guard (who was the emperor's private army by default is similar to Presidents relationship with the Military-Industrial Complex) had dominated the election process for the next century or so resulting in targeted assassinations of several emperors they did not want in power before Rome's collapse. They were assassinations and attempted assassinations on US presidents resulting in four deaths, the most notable assassination in the 20th century was President John F. Kennedy who wanted to "smash the CIA into a thousand pieces" gave a speech on April 27th, 1961 at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City, many believe, including myself, that it was the speech that eventually got him killed:

"For we are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence–on infiltration instead of invasion, on subversion instead of elections, on intimidation instead of free choice, on guerrillas by night instead of armies by day. It is a system which has conscripted vast human and material resources into the building of a tightly knit, highly efficient machine that combines military, diplomatic, intelligence, economic, scientific and political operations.

Its preparations are concealed, not published. Its mistakes are buried, not headlined. Its dissenters are silenced, not praised. No expenditure is questioned, no rumor is printed, no secret is revealed. It conducts the Cold War, in short, with a war-time discipline no democracy would ever hope or wish to match."

The " tightly knit, highly efficient machine " Kennedy spoke about directs U.S. presidents to authorize wars or a covert operations to topple foreign governments. Kennedy exposed that fact and followed that same fate as those emperors in Rome. Even in Domestic politics, the U.S. government deep state apparatus is in control as the former Governor of Minnesota Jesse Ventura , who is also a former Navy Seal, actor and professional wrestler who now has his own show on RT news called 'The World According to Jesse' admitted on TruTV's 'Conspiracy Theory with Jesse Ventura' on how the CIA interrogated him shortly after he became governor:

"About a month after I was elected governor, I was requested into the basement of the capital to be interviewed by 23 members of the Central Intelligence Agency, the CIA, they were very formal, there was governor, sir and all that, but they put me in a chair and they were in a big half-moon around me, and I said to them, look before I answer any of your questions, I want to know what are you doing here? because in the CIA mission statement, it says that they are not operational inside the United States of America. Well, they wouldn't really give me an answer on that and then I said I want to go around the room and I want each one of you to tell me your name and what you do, half of them wouldn't. Now isn't that bizarre, I'm the governor and these guys wouldn't answer questions from me. Then they started questioning me and it was all about how I got elected. You know what was the most bizarre thing about it was? There was every array of person you could imagine, young people, old people, all nationalities and that's what really got to me. These were people you would see every day. They look like your neighbors."

The US president including all elected congress members are all bought and paid for by the arms industry, major corporations, bankers, Big Pharma, Big Oil, the media and a handful of lobbyists with the Israel lobby being the most powerful. Trump is no exception. He will follow the road given to him by those who are in charge and he will continue the path to a world war, an agenda that been long in the making. One of America's favorite enemies, Russian President Vladimir Putin was interviewed by Megan Kelly of NBC news in 2017 and was asked about the so-called Russian collusion conspiracy theory and he said the following:

Presidents come and go, and even the parties in power change, but the main political direction does not change, That's why, in the grand scheme of things, we don't care who's the head of the United States, we know more or less what's going to happen. And so, in this regard, even if we wanted to, it wouldn't make sense for us to interfere

Whether Trump wants war or even peace, it won't matter, he will do the right thing, for the deep state that is.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Timothy Alexander Guzman writes on his blog, Silent Crow News, where this article was originally published. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

[Apr 18, 2020] Endless NYT Propaganda War on Russia by Stephen Lendman

Apr 18, 2020 | stephenlendman.org

Endless NYT Propaganda War on Russia

by Stephen Lendman ( stephenlendman.org – Home – Stephen Lendman )

The Times long ago abandoned journalism the way it's supposed to be. All the news it claims fit to print isn't fit to read.

Its daily editions feature state-approved managed news misinformation and disinformation -- notably against sovereign independent nations on the US target list for regime change.

Russia notably has been a prime target since its 1917 revolution, ending its czarist dictatorship.

Except during WW II and Boris Yeltsin's 1990s rule, Times anti-Russia propaganda was and remains relentless, notably throughout the Vladimir Putin era, the nation's most distinguished ever political leader.

When Yeltsin died in April 2007, the Times shamefully called him "a Soviet-era reformer the country's democratic father and later a towering figure of his time as the first freely elected leader of Russia, presiding over the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the demise of the Communist Party (sic)."

He presided over Russia's lost decade. Under him, over half the population became impoverished.

His adoption of US shock therapy produced economic genocide. GDP plunged 50%. Life expectancy fell sharply.

Democratic freedoms died. An oligarch class accumulated enormous wealth.

Western interests profited at the expense of millions of exploited Russians.

Yeltsin let corruption and criminality flourish. One scandal followed others. Grand theft became sport. So did money laundering.

Billions in stolen wealth were secreted in Western banks and offshore tax havens.

A critic reviled him, saying throughout much of his tenure, he "slept, drank, was ill, relaxed, didn't show his face before the people and simply did nothing," adding:

"Despised by the majority of (Russians, he'll) go down in history as the first president of Russia, having corrupted (the country) to the breaking point, not by his virtues and or by his defects, but rather by his dullness, primitiveness, and unbridled power lust of a hooligan."

He was a Western/establishment media favorite, notably by the Times, mindless of the human misery and economic wreckage he caused.

Putin is a preeminent world leader, towering over his inferior Western counterparts, especially in the US, why the Times reviles him.

On Monday, its propaganda machine falsely accused him of waging a long war on US science, claiming he's promoting disinformation to "encourage the spread of deadly illnesses (sic)."

Not a shred of evidence was presented because none exists. The Times' disinformation report was slammed in a preceding article.

On Wednesday, the self-styled newspaper of record was at it again -- reactivating the Big Lie that won't die, saying with no corroborating evidence that "Russia may have sown disinformation in a dossier used to investigate a former Trump campaign aide (sic)," adding:

"Carter Page, a former Trump campaign aide with numerous links to Russia was probably a Russian agent (sic)."

Disinformation the Times cited came from former UK intelligence agent Christopher Steele's dodgy dossier, financed by the DNC and Hillary campaign.

Its spurious accusations were exposed as fake news, notably phony accusations of Russian US election interference that didn't happened.

Probes by Robert Mueller, House and Senate committees found no credible evidence of an illegal or improper Trump campaign connection to Russia or election interference by the Kremlin -- because there was none of either.

According to the Times, Steele's dodgy dossier "was potentially influenced by a 'Russian disinformation campaign to denigrate US foreign relations,' " citing FBI Big Lies as its source.

Another article on Russia this week claimed "many people who don't work for the government or in deep-pocketed state enterprises face economic devastation," adding:

Domestic violence increased because of social distancing and sheltering in place.

Not mentioned in the article is that mass unemployment and other COVID-19 fallout affect Western and other countries adversely.

Putin was slammed for sending COVID-19 aid to the US, calling it "a propaganda coup for the Kremlin -- tempered by an intensifying epidemic at home."

Outbreaks in Russia are a small fraction of US numbers, around 21,000 through Wednesday -- compared to nearly 650,000 in the US and over 28,000 deaths.

Spain, Italy, France, Germany and Britain have five-to-eightfold more outbreaks than Russia.

NYC has over 110,000 cases. In the NY, NJ, CT tristate area, around 300,000 cases were reported, almost as many COVID-19 deaths as outbreaks in Russia -- through Wednesday.

Putin is dealing with what's going on responsibly, stressing "we certainly must not relax, as long as outbreaks occur.

A paid holiday is in effect through end of April for Russian workers, likely to be extended if needed.

Essential workers continue on the job -- at home if able, otherwise operating as before.

National efforts continue to control outbreaks, aid ordinary Russians at a time of duress, and work to restore more normal conditions.

While dealing with outbreaks at home, Russia supplied Italy, Serbia, and the US with aid to combat the virus.

Yet Pompeo falsely accused Russia, China, and Iran with spreading disinformation about COVID-19.

Gratitude and good will aren't US attributes, just the opposite.

[Apr 18, 2020] I think Chuikov's version of Stalingrad battel is both precise and honest

Apr 18, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

vk , Apr 17 2020 22:29 utc | 129

@ Posted by: H.Schmatz | Apr 17 2020 21:44 utc | 122

The book is called (in American English) "The Battle for Stalingrad". It is, in practice, Marshall Vassily Ivanovich Chuikov's personal testimony (with post-war conclusions) of the Battle of Stalingrad. He was commander of the 62nd Army - the one who fought directly againt the 6th Army, inside the city itself.

You can find the English version in the internet. It is from 1968.

The British English version is titled "The Beginning of the Road" and was first published in 1963.

The original, in Russian, is from 1959.

The pages I quoted (from the American version) is the subchapter titled "The Binding Force", pages 291-306. But, evidently, I recommend to read the book in full, as it is a primary source for one of the most important moments of one of the most important wars in History.

Overall, I think Chuikov's version is precise and honest. The only weird thing to me was his complete omission of Stalin (he even avoided Stalin's name when it was unavoidable, calling him simply "supreme commander") and he mentions everytime he saw Krushchev in action - sometimes, apparently, superflously (WWII history is not my field of expertise, so I may be wrong on this one). Looks like they reflect the "destalinization" camapaign initiated by Krushchev after he took de facto power in 1953.

Although, it is important to highlight, Krushchev seemed to be really popular among the WWII-Post-war military: he was only able to neutralize the stalinist forces after 1953 because he had ample support from the new generation of Red Army officers - including Zhukov. It is not farfetched to speculate he really impressed during the war - even though as a commissar.

[Apr 18, 2020] Contrary to western post-war beliefs, the role of the commissar in WWII was not indoctrination of the masses. It was stiffening the resistance tot he enemy.

Apr 18, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

vk , Apr 17 2020 16:12 utc | 33

[...]Naval Secretary Thomas Motly -- who missed his calling as a political commissar in the old Red Army[...]

I know this is a rant aimed to an American readership, but it's important to clarify the history and nature of the commissariat of the Red Army.

First of all, the commissars were born out of sheer, immediate, necessity - not out of ideology. The Russian Revolution happened without an army - the Russian Empire simply disintegrated and the Bolsheviks literally walked through the Winter Palace (there were only seven dead - probably the last idealist guards remaining - in the October Revolution per se).

The old imperial army and the imperial "air force" (or the joke the czar called air force) also disintegrated by themselves in the October Revolution. Only the Navy survived intact - but it was confined the the Bay of Finland, in the ports of St. Petersburg (future Leningrad).

The Bolsheviks took power without an army, but, soon after, the future White Army begun to be assembled by the imperial powers. As a result, the Bolsheviks needed an army literally for yesterday.

The Red Army was then created literally by decree, in February 1918. The problem is that modern warfare required experience and specific knowledge, so they literally had to forgive old imperial army officers in exchange for their services. Not all of them accepted, and the few who did were obviously suspected of a possible military coup. The commissar was then created.

Contrary to western post-war beliefs, the role of the commissar was not indoctrination of the masses. The Bolsheviks already had overwhelming popular support in 1917 - even though the peasants supported them not because they had become communists, but because they were granted land and peace thanks to them. The commissar was there as a Damocles' Sword for the ex-imperial army officers.

During WWII, the threat of internal sabotage among the imperial officers in the Red Army still existed, but was vestigial - the German menace was simply to great and too obvious to give any room for a military coup. Ironically, the commissar's role in the Red Army didn't vanish - but was enhanced - during this period, albeit in a modified form.

Here's a contemporary document from Vasily Ivanovich Chuikov, commander of the 62nd Army (which fought in the city of Stalingrad, against the Wehrmacht's 6th Army):

Considering the beginning of the battle for Stalingrad as the opening of a new stage in the war, the Communist Party mobilized the whole Soviet people to carry out the operation successfully. This was the way, the only way, we saw the development of the battle by the Volga. All mankind owes a debt to the Communist Party and its Central Committee for organizing the defeat of the German armies at Stalingrad, bringing a crucial change in the progress of the second world war.

This answer is inadequate, however, unless we add that the Communist Party was preparing for this change in unbelievably difficult conditions and long before the beginning of the Battle of Stalingrad.

As we know, in the first year of the war many of our industrial areas were occupied by the enemy. In the shortest possible space of time the factories on defense production, which had been transferred to the east, had to be restarted. What skill, talent and will-power this required from Communists working behind the lines, organizing the assembly of the factories evacuated to almost barren plains, organizing labour for them, obtaining electricity and raw materials and going full speed ahead to produce everything needed for the front!

In addition to overcoming the economic difficulties, the Party had to undertake enormous and complicated work on the strictly military plane, so as to overcome the consequences of the so-called surprise attack. I say 'so-called', because we could not but know of the concentration of Nazi troops at the frontiers of the Soviet Union.
[...]

Preparing to seize the oil regions of the Caucasus, the German armies broke through to the Crimea, destroyed our bridgehead at Feodosiya[...]

Such a situation could not but give rise to alarm.[...]

Without hiding this from the Party organizations and the people as a whole, the Central Committee of the Party intervened and put forward the slogan: 'Not a step back!'

[...]

The leadership of the political administration and of the most important sections of Front H.Q. was taken in hand by energetic Party workers, members of the Central Committee and secretaries of regional committees, Comrades Chuyanov, Doronin and Serdyuk. Thousands of Communists with extensive experience of Party political work joined the troops at the front. In the 62nd Army alone, of the ten thousand Communists summoned from various regions of the country, there were more than five hundred secretaries who had been in charge of departments of, and instructors from, district, regional and city committees, secretaries of collective farm and factory organizations, and other Party workers. To strengthen the Army's political section the Central Committee sent I. V. Kirillov and A. N. Kruglov; a Deputy People's Commissar of the R.S.F.S.R., A. D. Stupov, and others, also came. A strong Party nucleus had been formed in the Army. There was no company without a substantial stratum of Party members, and in the 33rd, 37th and 39th Guards Divisions many battalions consisted exclusively of Communist Party and Komsomol members.

The Party's forces were posted to all the Army's key sectors. On marches, in the trenches and in battle, Communists, by their personal example, showed how to fight to carry out the demand of the Party, of the nation, that there should be 'Not a step back!' Hundreds, thousands, of Communists explained to the men that there could be no further retreat, that the enemy could not only be halted, but could be thrown back. For this, all that was needed was only determination and skill. The example and spirit of self-sacrifice of the Communists were a force that it is impossible to measure; its influence on the minds of every soldier will never be understood by the modern writers of fat volumes published in the west about the last war, or by those who refuse to admit that the decisive blow, the one which brought a turning point in the course of the war, was delivered by the Soviet armed forces.

[...]

As I have said, the Party's forces were posted to all the most important sectors, and that means that the political work was not carried out as something separate from the Army's tasks, but in the units themselves, so as to ensure that military orders were carried out.
We are now accustomed to reading articles and reports that the 'soldiers of the 62nd Army fought to the death'. It was not a simple matter, however, to prepare men to resist so tenaciously.
Imagine a soldier marching in a column along a dusty road towards the Volga. He is tired and can hardly keep his eyes open for dust and sweat; on his shoulder he has an anti-tank rifle or a tommy-gun, on his belt a cartridge-pouch with bullets and grenades; on his back he has a knapsack with provisions and bits and pieces given him by his wife or mother for the long road. In addition, somewhere, a long way away, he has left his mother, his wife, his children. He is thinking about them, is hoping to go back to them. But here he is approaching the Volga, and he sees the sky, lit crimson by the fires; he can already hear the thunder of explosions, and again he thinks about his home, his wife, his children. Only this time he thinks something different: 'How will they manage to live without me?' And if at this moment you don't remind him about the mortal danger that hangs over his country, of his sacred duty to his homeland, the weight of his thoughts will make him stop or slow down. But he goes on, he does not stop: along the sides of the road are posters, slogans, eagerly calling him on:
'Comrade! If you don't stop the enemy in Stalingrad, he will enter your home and destroy your village!'
The enemy must be crushed and destroyed in Stalingrad!'
'Soldier, your country will not forget your exploit.'
Evening falls. He arrives at the ferry. Alongside the landing-stage are smashed-up boats, an armoured boat with holes in its sides. Along the bank, under bushes, under broken­ down poplars, in shell-holes and ditches, are men. Hundreds of men, but there is silence: with bated breath they are watching the city across the Volga, the city enveloped in flames. The very stones there seem to be on fire. In places the glow lights up the clouds. Are men really alive and
fighting in that inferno? How can they breathe? What is it they are defending -- smouldering ruins, heaps of stones? . . . But there is an order to cross to the other side in the ferry, and go straight into battle ...
Yes, there is such an order, but if you rely on one order, without preparing the morale of men to carry it out, then it will be a slow process getting the men on to the ferry, and as soon as the boat comes under fire the men will abandon it and swim, not to the blazing inferno, not towards the battle, but back, back to the bank they have just set out from. What do you do in this situation? In this case posters and slogans won't help you. Someone has to set an example. In every company, in every platoon, there is a man who will swim, not back, but forward, and will lead the men to the bank of the blazing city . .. And there were such men not only in the companies and platoons, but in every squad. They were Communist Party and Komsomol members. Carrying out their commanders' orders, they set a personal example of what to do in the situation, and how to do it.
[...]
It must be borne in mind that in the conditions of street fighting, when continuously, night and day, for weeks and months at a stretch, the noise of battle roared, the political workers could not, had no opportunity to, hold big meetings and rallies of Red Army men, so as to explain to them the most important Party decisions and the orders from Front Command. There was neither place nor time for long, passionate speeches. The Party agitator or propagandist would
often explain Party policy in a short chat with a soldier in a cellar or under a staircase, more often than not while the battle was raging, showing in practice how to use weapons and carry out the commander's instructions. Quite frankly, such a demonstration had a greater effect on the men than a long speech would have done. The political workers of the 62nd Army, therefore, had to be fully conversant with the tactics of street fighting, and be able themselves to make first-class use of weapons, primarily tommy-guns and grenades. And the majority of them coped well with the task.
[...] It seems to me that the basic service performed by the 62nd Army's Party organizations was that, after clarifying the characteristics of street fighting, the political workers transferred the centre of gravity of their work to the companies, to the platoons, to the storm groups. The basic form of the work of the political instructors, the Party and Komsomol organizers, and the instructors from the political sections became the individual conversation. This was the only way of helping each soldier to understand that he could and must put everything he had into the fight, even in the eventuality of his remaining alone behind enemy lines. He had to make use of the trust placed in him by his commanders, the right to act on his own, intelligently; he had to bear in mind the task that had been set for the whole regiment, division and Army. Trust, trust and more trust -- that was what made it possible to raise the creative, fighting efficiency of the mass of the soldiers. This was painstaking, complicated and responsible work, and, as we know, it produced excellent results. We can say without exaggeration that thanks to such activity by the Party organizations, every man defending the city became an insuperable obstacle in the path of the enemy.
The work of the Party organizations to ensure that military orders were carried out was conducted effectively and with a clear purpose. The inspectors and instructors of the Army's political section would go out to the sectors where the most difficult and complicated tasks had to be carried out. They went with the well-defined aim of taking the Army's orders to every soldier, of mobilizing the Party and Komsomol organizations to carry out military orders in all conditions. Conditions, as we know, were complex and different on every sector. And it was very good to see that the political workers selected their form and methods of work with the troops in accordance with the circumstances, did not sit waiting for an appropriate moment, but went straight to the storm group, to the machine-gunners, the infantrymen, the sappers, wherever they might be. No break in carrying out mass political work among the troops -- that was what the
political sections constantly demanded of their workers.

Hitler's late reforms seem to confirm Chuikov's testimony. When the war was already lost and the battlefield went to Germany proper, he desperately tried to emulate the office of commissar in the Wehrmacht. You know an aspect of an army is extremely successful when your enemy tries to copy you.

[Apr 18, 2020] Putin's foreign minister bristles at suggestion Russia is using coronavirus pandemic to boost its global influence - MarketWatc

Apr 18, 2020 | www.marketwatch.com

During a conference call with reporters, Lavrov dismissed Western claims that the Kremlin provided the assistance hoping it would help persuade the European Union to lift sanctions against Russia.

The U.S. and EU sanctions, imposed in response to Russia's 2014 annexation of Ukraine's Crimea and support for a separatist insurgency in eastern Ukraine, have limited Russia's access to global financial markets and blocked transfers of Western technologies. Russia responded by banning imports of most Western agricultural products.

Asked if Moscow would push the EU to lift the restrictions, Lavrov said that Russia wouldn't ask for it. "If the EU realizes that this method has exhausted itself and renounces the decisions that were made in 2014, we will be ready to respond in kind," he added.

Lavrov also criticized those in the West who suggested that China should pay compensation for allegedly failing to provide early enough warnings about the country's virus cases, which were reported in December.

"The claims that China must pay everyone for the outbreak and the alleged failure to give timely information about it cross all limits and go beyond any norms of decency," Lavrov said, emphasizing that China has offered assistance to many nations. "My hair stands on end when I hear that."

Without mentioning the United States by name, Russia's top diplomat also countered Washington's criticism of the World Health Organization.

Last week, U.S. President Donald Trump accused the U.N. health agency of being "China-centric" and alleged that WHO officials had "criticized" his ban of travel from China as the new virus spread from the central Chinese city of Wuhan.

[Apr 17, 2020] MH17 was the tool to separate EU from Russia.

Apr 17, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Peter AU1 , Apr 16 2020 2:31 utc | 95

MH17 was the tool to separate EU and the US west from Russia. Covid-19 is the tool to separate the US west from China.

Majority of people in the west will believe the anti China - China dunnit crap that is being pumped out by the US and all MSN.

Reuters running an article on Iran speed boats harassing US coast guard vessels When they were innocently conducting helicopter integration exercises. I guess Iran moved its country to close to the US.

Trump regime says it wants to have discussions with Iraq in June about moving out. I guess that means Trump will be making his move on Persian gulf oil before June.

Whatever is coming this covid bullshit is just the beginning - a planned move setting the stage for what is to come.

[Apr 17, 2020] Coronavirus in Russia The Latest News - The Moscow Times

Apr 17, 2020 | www.themoscowtimes.com

April 16: 3 things you need to know today

  1. Russia confirmed 3,448 new coronavirus infections on Thursday, bringing the country's official number of cases to 27,938 and marking the fifth consecutive one-day record in new cases.
  2. President Vladimir Putin postponed a landmark military parade to mark the 75th anniversary of Soviet victory in World War II as Russia struggles to contain the rapid spread of the coronavirus.
  3. Moscow authorities said they have switched to random checks of public transit passengers' quarantine passes rather than checking each person's pass after large queues formed outside metro stations during rush hour Wednesday.
More updates

-- Russian tech giant Yandex will start delivering coronavirus tests to the homes of Moscow residents aged 65 and older. The first 10,000 tests will be delivered at no cost, the company said, and the test delivery service will later be expanded to all age groups.

-- Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin signed a decree to provide the city's doctors with free taxi rides to and from work, as well as free hotel accommodation, during the coronavirus outbreak.

-- President Vladimir Putin believes the global coronavirus pandemic is an opportunity for his country to work together with the United States, the Kremlin said. U.S. President Donald Trump on Wednesday offered to send ventilators to Russia.

-- One-third of all coronavirus infections in the Leningrad region are concentrated in a crowded hostel that houses migrant workers involved in construction at an IKEA-owned shopping mall, local media reported .

... ... ... -- The Murmansk region will use electronic bracelets to monitor the movements of coronavirus patients self-isolating at home and people suspected of having the coronavirus, the investigative Novaya Gazeta newspaper reported .

-- The head of Moscow's main coronavirus hospital has recovered from the virus two weeks after he tested positive.

-- Nine doctors at a hospital in the Moscow region have been infected with coronavirus, the RBC news website reported Tuesday. Doctors there had complained that the hospital doesn't isolate patients suspected of having coronavirus and that there's a shortage of personal protective equipment.

At least 170 doctors and patients at a hospital in central Russia have tested positive for coronavirus in preliminary tests, the state-run RIA Novosti news agency reported .

-- The head doctor at Moscow's Davydovsky hospital, Yelena Vasiliyeva, has tested positive for coronavirus, the Mash Telegram channel reported . Because she continued to work and attend conferences while waiting for the test results, more than 500 patients and doctors who were in contact with her are now self-quarantining and getting tested for the virus.

[Apr 17, 2020] I have read transcripts from lavrov and putin on many occasions, I seem to recall listening to putin speak a few times in english; these guys are always level headed, competent, rational; and first and foremost, taking care of their people.

Apr 17, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

karlof1 , Apr 15 2020 20:16 utc | 38

David F @25--

Here's the missing link . Note the vastly different approach to the crisis:

"Sergey Lavrov: Of course, the pandemic has created very serious problems, the most important of which is saving people's lives, ensuring their security, biomedical safety and the preservation of the human environment, which should be comfortable and pose no threats to life and health."

David F , Apr 15 2020 20:36 utc | 46

karlof@38

Thanks for the link. Russia has the best leadership in the world right now. I have read transcripts from lavrov and putin on many occasions, I seem to recall listening to putin speak a few times in english; these guys are always level headed, competent, rational; and first and foremost, taking care of their people.

As an american, I am jealous. Just compare them to any of our leaders in my lifetime (50yrs), and for that matter, I haven't even read about too many of our leaders being real statesmen, absolutely no comparison.

karlof1 , Apr 15 2020 21:58 utc | 65
38 Cont'd--

Lavrov is an artist cloaked in diplomatic disguise. I find him very pleasurable to read. Yes, he said a great many things in answer to a wide variety of questions. Aside from the quote cited @38, for me there were two important points. The first was the Outlaw US Empire's offer to resume discussions on arms control and outer space, although I suspect the upcoming election is tied to the offer. Second relates to my thesis that nations can be seen as Nurturing or Parasitic based on their behavior during this crisis. One of the attributes of Nurturing nations is the collective aspect of their socio-cultural composition:

Question: "However, there is a lack of global unity and joint efforts to fight the pandemic. In addition, the existing alliances have proven ineffective in these conditions. In your opinion, how will all this affect the future world order? What will it look like after the pandemic?

"Sergey Lavrov: In my response to one of the first questions I said that apart from fighting the pandemic and resolving economic problems at the national and global levels the third greatest challenge is to understand what lies ahead for multilateral institutions, what role they will play in the future and whether they will remain relevant. The outcome of the fight against the coronavirus will show which countries and multilateral structures have withstood the test of this horrible threat, this crisis. I understand your concern that the egoistic aspirations we are currently witnessing in the behaviour of some countries could prevail, leading to future attempts to self-insulate from the outside world . We are already witnessing anxious debates about Schengen Area countries on their shared future and neighbourly relations. In the end, I think that a collective approach will prevail. It may take some time though. It will require meetings and persuasion. However, this is the only possible way forward ." [My Emphasis]

The unilateral, Rugged Individual, Herd Immunity, Neoliberal approach has failed bigtime despite frantic efforts to keep them afloat--note that such approaches were opposed by the publics of those nations whose "leaders" trod that path. I recall the aim of The Man in the Wilderness was to return to his collective--his family--and the fear that gripped the collective that abandoned him. (There's a very big lesson there if people think upon it while watching the film.) The attempt to glorify the Rugged Individual is unique, began in the 1820s with the popular writings of James Fenimore Cooper, and solely belongs to the Outlaw US Empire and its attempt to cultivate the myth of Manifest Destiny and American Exceptionalism.

It appears the only collectivism to be allowed within the Outlaw US Empire is that of the Money Power; all others are to be atomized, restricted in their ability to act together except when laboring to feed the Money Power. Something like Orwell's description of the Proles in 1984 --joyfully ignorant and powerless. The only way to thwart the Money Power's plan for ongoing dominance and pauperization of the Outlaw US Empire's masses is for those masses to discover how to act collectively. Yes, it's been done before but the effort was abandoned prior to the final goal being attained in 1900. There was another attempt to establish a mass collective during the early 1930s, but that too was thwarted and its memory washed away by War and the pseudo war that followed--do note the concerted attack on collective effort made from 1946-1964. The one major collective organization that remained in 1972--the draft-based civilian military--was then disbanded, and nothing has arisen to replace it. Even the mass politicking that had grown during the 1960s withered to where only a ghost remains.

An ongoing discourse here at MoA deals with the question of how to get people to again come together as a collective to create the change that's so badly needed to preserve our own wellbeing, which is in the collective interest of 330+ million people, as well as that of the planet's populous. IMO, the answer lies in seizing advantage of the obvious failure of the unilateral go-it-alone, damn the torpedoes, approach to COVID-19 that deliberately omitted the needs of 330+ million people and directly threatened their wellbeing.

If there was ever a teachable moment to educate an entire nation, that time is upon us. Fortunately, part of the message is already there and just needs to be spread further along with its associated rationale: Not Me, US! The formula for success isn't Top->Down it's Bottom->Up since it's decentralized and very hard to defuse.

[Apr 17, 2020] 74 Russian secondary school students had arrived in the US under the Secondary School Student Program, supervised by the @StateDept . Now the programme is being suspended due to the pandemic. The host party does not bear any responsibility for the children..

Apr 17, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Peter AU1 , Apr 16 2020 0:38 utc | 85

An interesting twitter thread.
Dmitry Polyanskiy First Deputy Permanent Representative of Russia Flag of Russia to the UN.
https://twitter.com/Dpol_un/status/1250495480087355392
Dmitry Polyanskiy
@Dpol_un
1/5 Maria #Zakharova: 74 Russian secondary school students had arrived in the US under the Secondary School Student Program, supervised by the
@StateDept
. Now the programme is being suspended due to the pandemic. The host party does not bear any responsibility for the children..

2/5 ...and has not even provided the lists and information about their whereabouts. Russian MFA was not informed of any programmes that involve sending our students to the US.Their implementation was not coordinated with us, it happened behind the backs of the Russian authorities

3/5 Back in 2014, Russia was forced to withdraw from the FLEX school exchange programme supervised by the Department of State. This was due to the inability of the organisers to guarantee the safe return of Russian children home. We had to stop such events, but Washington...

4/5 ..did not calm down and began to act in secret. The critical situation has brought this scam to light. We are currently seeking comprehensive information about our schoolchildren. We also demanded an explanation as to why the Americans took them from Russia.

5/5 Implementation of any projects that involve sending minor Russian citizens abroad without proper coordination with the Russian competent authorities is unacceptable. All responsibility for the consequences of such fraud lies entirely with those who took the children there


[Apr 15, 2020] Putin says Russia has 'a lot of problems' and 'certainly can't relax' when it comes to coronavirus

If you want to lose hope in the relevant segment of the USA population commenting on Yahoo sanity, then read the comments to this Yahoo post.
Apr 15, 2020 | news.yahoo.com

Yahoo Reader, 15 hours ago

Ezekiel 25:17.

"The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who, in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of the darkness.

For he is truly his brother's keeper and the finder of lost children.

And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers.

And you will know I am the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon you."

[Apr 15, 2020] Putin says Russia has 'a lot of problems' and 'certainly can't relax' when it comes to coronavirus

If you want to lose hope in the relevant segment of the USA population commenting on Yahoo sanity, then read the comments to this Yahoo post.
Apr 15, 2020 | news.yahoo.com

Yahoo Reader, 15 hours ago

Ezekiel 25:17.

"The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who, in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of the darkness.

For he is truly his brother's keeper and the finder of lost children.

And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers.

And you will know I am the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon you."

[Apr 13, 2020] The Salisbury Poisonings Two Years On A Riddle, Wrapped in a Cover Up, Inside a Hoax

Apr 13, 2020 | www.theblogmire.com

I've said some stupid things in my time, but up there with the best of them was a comment I uttered to my wife on the morning of Tuesday 6 th March 2018. The previous night the news had broken that an ex-spy by the name of Sergei Skripal had apparently been one of two people hospitalised on the Sunday afternoon on a bench in The Maltings in Salisbury. At that time the opioid, Fentanyl, was thought to be connected to it. Was this about to be a huge international story? Or was it going to soon be forgotten about? I was decidedly of the latter opinion. "Don't worry," I told her. "Probably just a drug overdose. It'll soon blow over."​

​Two years later ​

​Actually, two years on and most people have pretty much forgotten about it. Yes, they remember that it happened; yes, they remember that it was a mighty odd occurrence with a number of peculiarities about it; and for the people of Salisbury, I'm quite sure they will recall the police, the cordons, the helicopters, the place swarming with international media, and of course let's not forget the baby wipes. But by and large, it happened, it's done with, and the case was solved a long while ago.​

​Except that it wasn't. Not by any stretch of the imagination. The fact is that two of the many Russians who were in Salisbury on 3 rd and 4 th March, and who were charged with the incident -- Petrov and Boshirov -- have never been charged with the subsequent incident in Amesbury. This is very important. If the British authorities' case against the two men in Salisbury is to be believed, there must be a clear link between them and the second case in Amesbury. And yet it is impossible to reasonably connect the two cases based on the British authorities' explanation of the Salisbury event. Unless, that is, you believe that the two suspects were carrying a cellophane-wrapping machine with them with which to wrap the bottle of lethal nerve agent they had apparently just used before dumping it in a bin. But nobody could be daft enough to believe that, could they? Which leads to the question: if the cases cannot be linked using the British authorities' explanation of the first incident -- which they can't (hence the reason the two men have not been charged for the second) -- then how can we accept their explanation for the first? The answer is that we cannot, and for a whole host of reasons, as I hope to show in a moment.

For those who have accepted The Met's and Government's account of the case, I am struck by a couple of things. Firstly, their claims that those who haven't accepted it are conspiracy theorists is really quite funny when you begin to count the number of absurd, implausible and sometimes downright impossible things that one has to believe to accept that official account (of which more below). But secondly, I am struck by their remarkable apathy and complacency, given what they claim to believe. Let me put it this way: if I truly believed that agents of a foreign power had come to my country and had entered my home city carrying, using and discarding enough deadly nerve agent to kill thousands of people in my neighbourhood, I would not only be livid at that foreign Government; I would be absolutely furious with the British authorities for their pathetic, feeble response. Two dozen diplomats expelled in response to the use of the (apparently) deadliest nerve agent known to man, which could have wiped out half the population of Salisbury? It's the equivalent of sentencing an attempted murderer to a £100 fine. Of course, while I accept that a declaration of war in response to such a reckless act would have been a step too far, given that Russia is a nuclear-armed country with a hugely powerful military, I would certainly want a response that was far closer to that than the paltry expelling of a few diplomats. However, the fact that those who bark the loudest about the alleged use of a nerve agent that could have killed 10,000 people are prepared to accept the expulsion of a few diplomats as an adequate response, suggests that many of them are not nearly as convinced as they make out that a lethal nerve agent was indeed used. ​Either that or they're just a bit wet!

​I am, however, livid at the British authorities for an entirely different reason. And it is this: I really don't like being lied to. I really don't like handing over hard-earned money in taxation, only to see it squandered away by people who devise the most elaborate deceptions to divert attention away from what really happened. Nothing personal, you understand. I don't like the fact that anyone has their hard-earned cash frittered away in this way.

That's a big claim I just made. Elaborate deceptions are not accusations I bandy about lightly. But as I hope to show below, I can see no other explanation for the many absurdities, implausibilities and downright impossibilities in the case put forward by the Government and Metropolitan Police (The Met) for what took place in Salisbury.

Let's begin with the case against the two Russians who have been charged over the Salisbury incident. Whenever I have been involved in a discussion on this case with folks on Twitter, invariably someone pops up to say that the case is closed, and the guilt of this pair has been shown to be true. Incontrovertibly. Yet when examined carefully, the evidence of the apparent guilt of this pair turns out to be incredibly threadbare. There are three basic parts to it:

That they were in the vicinity of Mr Skripal's house on 4 th March, as seen on footage taken outside a Shell garage on Salisbury's Wilton Road That "Novichok" was found in the hotel room they stayed in the night before That they were/are agents of the GU (Russian military police)

On that first point, the fact is that the Shell garage is approximately 500 yards from 47 Christie Miller Road. Whilst this may be "in the vicinity" in a very general sense, it is nothing like "the vicinity" that would be needed to convince a juror that they actually went there, much less that they daubed the door handle with a substance, and needless to say, one cannot simply daub a door handle from 500 yards away.

Furthermore, in the footage shown of them, they were seen walking on the opposite side of the road to the two routes (a path or a road) which they would have to have taken to reach the house. If I had been going to Christie Miller Road along that route, I would either have crossed the road before then, or I would have crossed at the small traffic island opposite the garage, which can just be seen on the footage. Yet they did not appear to cross or to be about to cross.

However, there is more. Although The Met showed these few seconds from this camera, what they failed to inform the public is that there is a second camera just after the first, one which does cover both routes to chez Skripal. And so if the men had taken either of these routes that they would have needed to take to get to Christie Miller Road, this second camera would have shown it. Why was it not shown then? That's probably more a question for The Met than for me, but if I was a juror in the case, I should most definitely want to see the footage from that second camera in order to confirm or deny whether they did indeed cross the road to use those routes. In short: the footage from the first camera is certainly not proof that they actually went to Mr Skripal's house; the refusal to use footage from the second camera casts serious doubts that they did.

And of course given who Mr Skripal was, his house and front door would have been covered by CCTV. In which case, if the men actually did go there, The Met could show it. But they never have.

The second point is even flimsier. It was claimed that the tiniest trace of "Novichok" was found in the hotel room they were staying in. However, a second swab apparently turned up nothing. In other words, you need to trust The Met and Porton Down on this. Right? Er no. Firstly, we are talking about the same people that allegedly found the "Novichok" at the beginning of May 2018, yet failed to inform the hotel owner until September of that year of their finding in his hotel (I'm not into suing, but he should have sued). Not only this, but they also failed to trace those who had stayed at the hotel from 4th March to May. Not exactly convincing, is it?

But in any case, the idea is self-evidently ludicrous. Why would there have been a tiny trace of the stuff in the hotel room? If there was a leak, why wasn't the hotel closed, and the trains the men travelled on decontaminated? Or are we supposed to believe that the guys took it out to have a sniff the night before, and spilled just enough for one, but not two swabs? Yep, that's what we're asked to believe. Fine, believe it, if it gives you pleasure. But to those with more discerning minds, it does sound suspiciously like a detail made up by people who make stuff up, doesn't it?

The third point -- that the two suspects were agents of the GU (Russian military intelligence) -- is by far the most serious. I accept that they probably were, although I do so with the caveat that one of the most strikingly odd things about this case is that this has never been officially confirmed. Sure, an organisation that rhymes with Smellingrat has stated this, and so too have numerous politicians, but it has not actually been stated on the official charges against them. To this day, the Crown Prosecution Service's charges against them still use their apparent pseudonyms -- Petrov and Boshirov -- and do not mention their apparent true identities. I find that very odd.

Nonetheless, as I say I accept that they probably were agents of Russian Military Intelligence. It is this which is enough for many to confirm their guilt as attempted assassins. Well, if their actions comported with how military intelligence officers on assassination missions act, I would be inclined to agree. But they don't. Not even remotely. There is nothing about their actions, as shown by The Met, that in any way convince that they were on a state-sanctioned assassination mission. They travelled together. They operated in broad daylight. They made no attempt to evade detection by CCTV. They cavorted with a prostitute the night before. They smoked dope and attracted attention in their hotel room the night before. After allegedly finishing their top-secret mission, they strolled into town. They took pictures. They went window shopping. Nerve agent assassins? I think not!

"Oh," comes the scoffing reply, "so you believe their story about being tourists come to see the cathedral and Old Sarum? Idiot."

"No," comes my equally scoffing reply. "Why should I? But why would I limit myself to two possibilities -- tourists or deadly assassins -- neither of which actually fit their actions? Have we not imagination enough to think of more than two options? Goodness, what do they teach them in these schools!?"

How about this: Yes, they were in Salisbury on a mission from the Russian state, but no it was not an assassination attempt -- not unless Vladimir Putin has taken to employing muppets to carry out highly sensitive and dangerous missions of the Russian state. But seriously, does he strike you as someone who would tend to give the most highly sensitive missions to a couple of pot-smoking, prostitute-cavorting, picture-snapping, CCTV-friendly, window-shopping dudes? Hardly!

Yet they were almost certainly doing something there other than tourism, as they claimed, and my guess is that it was connected to where they went on the Saturday 3 rd March, which The Met laughably tried to tell us was a reconnaissance mission to check out Mr Skripal's house. A reconnaissance mission? Ha ha! Reminder: this is Salisbury, not Afghanistan or Idlib. You can walk about unhindered, unmolested, and you can even locate 47 Christie Miller Road using Google Maps. So why would they have needed to do reconnaissance on a house that they allegedly walked up to in broad daylight the following day?

But even more than this, if they went to check out the house on the Saturday, why did they not daub the door handle then? The Skripals were out at the time. It would have been the ideal time to do it, if that was what they were intending. But no, The Met wants you to believe that they came to Salisbury, secretly made their way to Mr Skripal's house, saw it, noted that no one was at home, decided not to "Novichok" the door handle there and then, but instead go back to London (where they had apparently left their "Novichok" all day long in their hotel room), and come back the following day to do it when -- according to The Met -- the Skripals were at home and their car in the drive!

It really is such an utterly stupid and preposterous proposition, that I have no doubt this is why The Met decided to give no timeline of where and when they went in Salisbury on the Saturday; to present no footage; and to show no pictures, save for one at the train station. For had they shown such footage, I am quite sure that far from it showing them going out of the town towards Mr Skripal's house for reconnaissance, it would show them going into town for reconnaissance, probably near The Mill pub and the Maltings, where the following day they just happened to be in the vicinity of the Skripals at about 1:45 -- far closer than the Shell garage footage shows them in the vicinity of the house.

None of the above evidence would pass muster in a courtroom. It is flimsy, it's pathetic and it's full of holes.

But talking of holes, let's now set this all in the context of the entire story presented by The Met and the Government. I mentioned above the number of absurd, implausible and sometimes downright impossible things that one has to believe to accept their account. Below, I've recounted 40 of the most glaring, although I'm sure regular readers here can think of many, many more. In case of doubt, I have annexed a comment next to each point, depending on whether it fits into the absurd, implausible or impossible category, although I understand that some readers may well think it remiss of me not to have given some of them more than one of those descriptions:

That two men put themselves and everyone on their flight in jeopardy, by boarding a plane with at least one, possibly two, bottles of the World's Deadliest Nerve Agent (WDNA) in their luggage. ​(ABSURD) That the two suspects dropped an unused package of the WDNA in a bin somewhere, whilst taking the used bottle of nerve agent back to Moscow with them. ​(ABSURD) Or alternatively, that they only had one package of WDNA with them, but brought a cellophane wrapping machine to Salisbury to wrap the used box up in, before discarding it. ​(ABSURD) That the two men sprayed WDNA in an open space, without wearing any protective clothing. ​(ABSURD) That after they had done this, rather than legging it, they decided to spend an hour in the city centre window-shopping and taking pictures. ​(ABSURD) That Mr Skripal and his daughter both somehow managed to touch the door handle of his front door on their way out (try it with someone next time you exit your house).​ (IMPLAUSIBLE) That despite being contaminated with WDNA, they showed no effects for hours afterwards​. (IMPLAUSIBLE) That when they did show effects hours later, it was at precisely the same time, despite their very different heights, weights and metabolisms. (IMPLAUSIBLE) That despite being contaminated with WDNA, they went into town, fed ducks, went for a meal, then went to a pub for a drink.​ (IMPLAUSIBLE) That despite having hands contaminated with WDNA, Mr Skripal handed a piece of bread to a local boy who ate it without becoming contaminated. (IMPLAUSIBLE) That despite having hands that were contaminated with WDNA, Mr Skripal somehow managed to contaminate the table in Zizzis, but not the door or door handle on the way in. (IMPLAUSIBLE) That despite having hands that were contaminated with WDNA, Mr Skripal somehow managed not to contaminate the manager of Zizzis when he shook hands with him (confirmed to me by a local source). (IMPLAUSIBLE) That after becoming extremely aggressive in Zizzis, which some assume was the effects of poisoning with WDNA​, Mr Skripal wolfed down a plate of seafood risotto before sauntering over to the pub for a drink. (IMPLAUSIBLE) That no CCTV of Mr Skripal or his daughter on 4 th March could be shown to the public to jog their memories, because of something called "National Security". (ABSURD) That no CCTV could be shown of The Maltings, on the grounds of National Security, even though according to the official story no crime took place there. (ABSURD) That the Russian couple who were filmed on CCTV camera at 15:47 in Market Walk (confirmed by a reliable source in the comment section on this blog), were not in any way connected with the case. (IMPLAUSIBLE) That the only CCTV the public were allowed to see of this pair was an absurd, blurred, fuzzy image taken second hand on a mobile phone, when they could have shown crystal clear footage from the CCTV camera at the other end of Market Walk. (ABSURD) That the Skripals were somehow in Zizzis at the same time that they were actually in the Mill pub (The Met's timeline shows them to have been in Zizzis from 14:20 and 15:35, which is demonstrably untrue ). (IMPOSSIBLE) That the Metropolitan Police are unable to put out correct timelines. (IMPLAUSIBLE) That WDNA deteriorated so much after an hour on a door handle, that it was too weak to kill the Skripals. (IMPLAUSIBLE) That this same WDNA, which allegedly deteriorated in an hour, was then found three weeks later after exposure to the elements and after being touched by many human hands, to be in a state of "high purity, persistent and weather resistant". (IMPOSSIBLE) That WDNA, which was allegedly sprayed on a door handle, somehow managed to spread to the roof of the house, meaning that it had to be replaced. (IMPOSSIBLE) Yet that same WDNA, 2mg of which is apparently enough to kill a person (according to BBC Panorama), and which causes whole roofs to have to be replaced and cars to be destroyed, can be cleansed by members of the public using baby wipes. (ABSURD) That the police cars which attended the Maltings needed to be destroyed, yet the ones that attended Mr Skripal's house, where the poison was apparently most concentrated, did not. (ABSURD) That Detective Sergeant Nicholas Bailey managed to be a first responder at the bench when the two Russians were on it, at the same time as not being at the bench when the two Russians were on it. (IMPOSSIBLE) That Mr Bailey entered Mr Skripal's house via the back door, because he couldn't open the front door; but also managed to enter the house via the front door because he was able to open it. (IMPOSSIBLE) That he was wearing a forensic suit to enter the house of someone who had apparently overdosed in a park on Fentanyl. (ABSURD) That he managed to get contaminated by WDNA despite wearing a forensic suit. (IMPLAUSIBLE) That the numerous police officers not wearing forensic suits, who went in and out of the house on 4 th and 5 th March, did not become contaminated by WDNA, even though it was allegedly found to be most concentrated there three weeks later, and in a state of "high purity". (IMPOSSIBLE) That the police somehow managed to miss all four of Mr Skripal's pets (two cats and two guinea pigs), so leaving them to starve to death. (IMPLAUSIBLE) That an air ambulance was called for what looked like a drug overdose on a park bench, when a land ambulance can get to the hospital just as quickly, if not quicker given where the helicopter had to land. (ABSURD) That the chief nurse of the British Army just happened to be shopping near the bench when the two Russians were on it. (ABSURD) That there just happened to be two Porton Down trained doctors at Salisbury District Hospital. (ABSURD) That despite The Met, the Government and the media referring to the substance used as "Novichok", in their only official statement to a court of law, Porton Down were unable to confirm this, instead referring to it as "a nerve agent or related compound" and "a Novichok class nerve agent or closely related agent." (ABSURD) That Porton Down were able to identify a substance within 36 hours that apparently no other country on earth makes, has made, or can make. (IMPLAUSIBLE) That "Novichok" can only be made in Russia, despite variants of it having been synthesised or stocked in numerous countries including Czechia, Sweden, Germany, Iran, the US, and Britain (Boris Johnson having unwittingly confirmed this when he blurted out that they had samples of it at Porton Down). (IMPOSSIBLE) That after she and her father were allegedly poisoned by the Russian state, Yulia Skripal said she wanted to return there. (ABSURD) That Mr Skripal and his daughter have never been seen together since -- not even in a single photo. (IMPLAUSIBLE) That nothing has ever been heard from Mr Skripal since (national security won't wash – his daughter was able to appear in a video). (ABSURD) That Salisbury had its first case of Fentanyl poisoning on the same day, at the same time, and in the same shopping centre apparently involving another couple. (IMPLAUSIBLE)

Remember, this list of the absurd, the implausible, and the downright impossible is not a bunch of lunacy that I or anyone else looking into the case has concocted. No, they are things that the Government of Great Britain, and The Metropolitan Police have concocted. It's their story, not mine, and I'm just pointing it out and saying, "Hey, come look at this. No clothes and all that!" That being said, it is of course those who point out this absurd, implausible and impossible folly who are called conspiracy theorists by the keepers of the narrative and their devotees, which is rather like being called a scruffbag by Dominic Cummings. But no matter, better to be called a conspiracy theorist for pointing out patent absurdities and things which are impossible than to be a Believer in Patent Absurdities and Impossible Things.


Speculation Corner

Having cleared that Stuff and Nonsense out of the way, what did happen on 4 th March 2018 in Salisbury? I am bound to disappoint people looking for the answer, as I simply don't know. I don't know because the keepers of the keys of the Stuff and Nonsense have not only done their utmost to keep the truth away from the light (such as refusing to release even a jot of CCTV footage of the Skripals that day), but the sheer number of absurdities and conflicting stories they have put out make it impossible for those watching from afar to be sure about which things happened on that day, and which things were subsequently added to obscure the truth. All we can say, for sure, is what didn't happen (see above).

Nevertheless, there are a couple of big clues that allow us to speculate as to something of the nature of the thing. These are The Mill Pub and Detective Sergeant Nicholas Bailey. They are not clues in the sense of us being able to know what role they played. But they are clues in the sense of the authorities never being able to come out with a straight answer about the location and the man, thereby giving rise to speculation that the bizarre and conflicting tales about them are extremely important.

Take Mr Bailey, for instance. Where exactly was he on that evening and where exactly did he succumb to poisoning? As hinted at above, he has been placed in multiple places, depending on who has been telling the story and when they've been telling it. He has been:

A first responder to the incident at the bench Not a first responder to the incident at the bench Not at the bench when the two Russians were there At the bench after the incident happened At the house at midnight entering by the front door At the house at midnight but unable to enter the front door Admitted to Salisbury District Hospital on the Monday morning Not admitted to Salisbury District hospital on the Monday morning, but on the Tuesday Morning Admitted to Salisbury District Hospital on the Monday morning, discharged but readmitted on the Tuesday

How can it have been so difficult to establish where he was? His movements would have been easy to trace. Why were they not and why have so many different stories been mooted? As I wrote back here :

"I would submit that the most reasonable view to take -- until evidence confirms otherwise -- is that Detective Sergeant Bailey was poisoned neither at the bench nor the house, but somewhere else altogether."

Actually, I think that there is some evidence for this. Here is what a Freedom of Information request revealed about how The Met were to deal with questions posed by the media about Mr Bailey. Note that this was on 9 th March, two weeks before the door handle claim was first made:

"IF ASKED: Why was a detective sergeant (Nick Bailey) a first responder?

ANSWER: He attended the initial scene in the town centre.

IF ASKED: It's been suggested DS Bailey was contaminated at Skripal's house. Did he go to the house? Can you confirm he definitely went to the Maltings?

ANSWER: He was a first responder to the initial scene in the town centre. We are not discussing further [my italics]."

So he was a first responder to the "initial scene" in the town centre. Okay, but according to Mr Bailey himself, on the BBC Panorama Programme, he was not a first responder at the bench when the Russian pair were there. He claimed to have wandered down there sometime after it had all finished, which means that he was not a first responder at that scene. Which means what? It means that there was another scene . That is implied in the phrase "initial scene". Clearly, if there was an initial scene, there must have also been a subsequent scene. And equally clearly, it cannot have been anything to do with the house or the door handle, because on 9 th March, when this instruction was given, there was officially only one scene -- that is, the bench. The door handle story had not yet emerged.

Put all that together and what is the inescapable conclusion? Mr Bailey was indeed injured, but it was at an initial scene -- that is at a scene that occurred prior to whatever happened at the bench .

Let's come back to that after looking at the other big clue, The Mill. In the aftermath of 4 th March, the back of the Mill was closed off and the chaps in HazMats were busy doing their thing there. But hang on a minute. Why was this? That area was never any part of the official story. There was never any suggestion whatsoever that Mr Skripal or his daughter had been there, and so why would it have needed cleaning up? From what?

In addition, we know that the then Manager of the Mill, Greg Townsend was interviewed intensively by investigators from The Met, no less than eight times in the week after 4 th March. According to Mr Townsend, he felt like he was being treated as " a terror suspect ". Again, why? According to the official story, what did Mr Skripal and his daughter do there? They went in. They had a drink. They left. Big deal. Why on earth would the most intense questioning and focus be at that location then?

But thirdly, and most crucially, is the incorrect timeline put out by The Met about the Skripals' visit to this pub. Here's what they said:

13:40 – Sergei and Yulia arrive at the Sainsbury's upper level car park in The Maltings
The pair go to The Mill pub in Salisbury
Approximately 14.20 – The father and daughter eat at Zizzi restaurant on Castle Street
15:35 – They leave the restaurant

This is simply wrong. They did not go to The Mill pub before Zizzis. They went to Zizzis between about 2:00pm and 2:45pm, and then on to the Mill from around 3:00pm to 3:30pm. Every single one of the original witness statements in the early days of the case confirms this, and I have also had independent corroboration locally that this was the case ( see here for details ). So why did The Met put out a timeline saying that the Skripals were in Zizzis between 3:00pm and 3:30pm, when in fact they were in The Mill? Unfortunately, the only conclusion I can draw from this is that it was done deliberately, with the purpose of drawing attention away from that location as being the place the Skripals visited before the bench incident.

Put that together with the oddities around the location of the poisoning of Detective Sergeant Nicholas Bailey, and it seems to me -- and I admit this is highly speculative -- that there was an incident prior to the bench incident, that it most probably occurred at the back of The Mill, and it was there -- not the bench or the house -- that Mr Bailey became contaminated. Let me stress that this is speculation, and it may well be incorrect, yet it seems to me to be the most plausible explanation for the extremely strange ambiguity surrounding Mr Bailey's movements, the claim that he was injured as a first responder to "the initial scene", and the bait and switch between Zizzis and The Mill given in The Met's timeline.

I would add one further element that may hint at this, which is this extraordinary claim in an article on 6 th March 2018 in The Sun (also carried in The Mail ):

"As emergency crews cleared the substance left near the bench, others were called to decontaminate the hospital. First reports suggested traces of the opiate fentanyl -- a synthetic toxin many times stronger than heroin -- had been detected at the scene. But that was later linked to unconnected incident involving another couple coincidentally in the shopping centre."

That really is extraordinary. Another incident, this time a Fentanyl poisoning, the first of its kind in Salisbury, on the same day, around the same time, and in the same shopping centre as a nerve agent incident. That's about as likely as the British Army's Chief Nurse happening to be there at that exact same moment, isn't it? Did it really happen? I have no idea. But if it did, was this something to do with the " initial scene" -- the one that saw Mr Bailey and two of his colleagues taken to hospital ( here is a link to BBC article confirming that two police officers were contaminated, as well as a third member of the emergency services, who was clearly Mr Bailey)?

Questions, questions, questions. To which there must be answers, answers, answers. Unfortunately, those controlling the narrative are not about to give them any time soon, and they will no doubt continue to perpetuate the absurd, the implausible, and the impossible, rather than coming clean with the truth.

Perhaps it will take a whistleblower to leak the truth. But then who would do such a thing and who would publish it? A man who published secrets about war crimes that the US Government didn't want revealing, is currently being treated in Belmarsh Prison and Woolwich Crown Court in much the same way that Soviet political dissidents and enemies of the state were treated back in the day. Another man who is tenaciously publishing the truth behind the OPCW's sham investigation into the Douma chemical incident is smeared and slandered as a charlatan by those who are not fit to lick his shoes.

This is the kind of country we are becoming. This is the kind of society that those behind this riddle, wrapped in a cover up, inside a hoax, are leading us to. A national security state, where the truth is buried underneath an avalanche of deception, and where those who try to honestly get to the bottom of it are labelled enemies of the state, treated shamefully, so that others are deterred from following suit. It rather minds me of this, from one of the early church fathers, St. Anthony:

"A time is coming when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him, saying, 'You are mad; you are not like us.'"

It's not the kind of society I hoped to see when I was growing up. It's not the kind of society I hoped my children would grow up in. My guess is that it's not even the kind of society that those who are playing these elaborate games wanted to grow up in. Yet it is what it is, and I am persuaded that those who have brought us to this point have more trouble sleeping than I do. I would urge them to consider this, before it is too late:

"For nothing is hidden that will not be made manifest, nor is anything secret that will not be known and come to light." – Jesus Christ (Luke 8:17)

POSTSCRIPT

I just wanted to say thanks once again for all the many wonderful commenters and their thoughtful analysis of this case over the last couple of years. Your contributions are much appreciated. Once again, it is my intention to write about other things, and my sincere hope is that I don't find myself writing a 3rd anniversary piece.

I also wanted to draw your attention to a new book on the subject, Skripal in Prison , by John Helmer. I regret that I would have liked to be in a position to be able to make one or two comments on the book, but unfortunately I have not had the time to read it myself yet. But given John's pieces on the subject on his blog, I have no doubt that it will be a most interesting and enlightening read. You can get a copy of it here:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Skripal-Prison-John-Helmer/dp/B084PY9W4R

[Apr 12, 2020] Unintended consequences of #MeToo movement causing 'gender segregation' on Wall Street

Female psychopath are especially dangerous as "reverse sexual predators". Assumption that all women are honest in their accusations is extremely naive. Revenge and other inferior motives are pretty common, especially in academic setting.
"A sense of walking on eggshells" is a sure sign of unhealthy psychopath dominated environment.
Notable quotes:
"... Two female reporters for Bloomberg interviewed 30 Wall Street executives and found that while it's true that women might be afraid to speak up for fear of losing their careers, men are also so afraid of being falsely accused that they won't even have dinner, or even one-to-one business meetings with a female colleague. They worry that a simple comment or gesture could be misinterpreted. "It's creating a sense of walking on eggshells," one Morgan Stanley executive said. ..."
"... All these extreme strategies being adopted by men to avoid falling victim to an unjust #MeToo scandal are creating a kind of "gender segregation" on Wall Street, the reporters say. ..."
"... "If men avoid working or traveling with women alone, or stop mentoring women for fear of being accused of sexual harassment, those men are going to back out of a sexual harassment complaint and right into a sex discrimination complaint," ..."
Dec 09, 2018 | www.rt.com

The #MeToo movement was supposed to make life easier for women in the workplace. It was all about respect and making real abusers pay a price for their behavior. But is it possible to have too much of a good thing?

One of the aims of the movement was to force a change in the conduct of men who said and did sexually inappropriate things in the workplace -- a concept which few people could quibble with. A year on from its beginnings, however, it seems the movement has morphed into something else entirely -- and ironically, it's hurting both men and women.

The 'Pence Effect' and 'gender segregation'

The #MeToo movement has taken down men across a wide spectrum of industries -- but so far, Wall Street has avoided a huge public scandal -- despite its reputation for being, well, a fairly sexist and male-oriented environment. So why has it escaped the #MeToo spotlight?

Two female reporters for Bloomberg interviewed 30 Wall Street executives and found that while it's true that women might be afraid to speak up for fear of losing their careers, men are also so afraid of being falsely accused that they won't even have dinner, or even one-to-one business meetings with a female colleague. They worry that a simple comment or gesture could be misinterpreted. "It's creating a sense of walking on eggshells," one Morgan Stanley executive said.

Bloomberg dubbed the phenomenon the 'Pence Effect' after the US vice president who previously admitted that he would never dine alone with any woman other than his wife. British actor Taron Egerton recently also said he now avoided being alone with women for fear of finding himself in #MeToo's crosshairs.

I remember when a woman I was friendly/kind with perceived me as someone who wanted "more." She wrote me a message about how she was uncomfortable. I'm gay. https://t.co/7z0X7Dwzkp

-- Andy C. Ngo (@MrAndyNgo) December 4, 2018

All these extreme strategies being adopted by men to avoid falling victim to an unjust #MeToo scandal are creating a kind of "gender segregation" on Wall Street, the reporters say.

Hurting women's progress?

The most ironic outcome of a movement that was supposed to be about women's empowerment is that now, even hiring a woman on Wall Street has become an "unknown risk," according to one wealth advisor, who said there is always a concern that a woman might take something said to her in the wrong way.

With men occupying the most senior positions on Wall Street, women need male mentors who can teach them the ropes and help them advance their careers, but what happens when men are afraid to play that role with their younger female colleagues? The unintended consequence of the #MeToo movement on Wall Street could be the stifling of women's progress and a sanitization of the workplace to the point of not even being able to have a private meeting with the door closed.

Another irony is that while men may think they are avoiding one type of scandal, could find themselves facing another: Discrimination complaints.

"A Wall Street rule for the #MeToo era: Avoid women at all cost." https://t.co/TCGk9UzT4R "Secular sharia" has arrived, as I predicted here: https://t.co/TTrWY6ML34 pic.twitter.com/YpEz78iamJ

-- Niall Ferguson (@nfergus) December 3, 2018

"If men avoid working or traveling with women alone, or stop mentoring women for fear of being accused of sexual harassment, those men are going to back out of a sexual harassment complaint and right into a sex discrimination complaint," Stephen Zweig, an employment attorney with FordHarrison told Bloomberg.

Not all men are responding to the #MeToo movement by fearfully cutting themselves off from women, however. "Just try not to be an asshole," one said, while another added: "It's really not that hard."

It might not be that simple, however. It seems there is no escape from the grip of the #MeToo movement. One of the movements most recent victims of the viral hashtag movement is not a man, but a song -- the time-honored classic 'Baby It's Cold Outside' -- which is being banished from American radio stations because it has a "rapey" vibe.

Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!

[Apr 12, 2020] Restraint and Reorienting US National Security by Daniel Larison

Rabid militarism is the result of "Full Spectrum Dominance Doctrine". It can't be changed without changing the doctrine. Which requires elimination of neocons from foreign policy establishment. But the there is not countervailing force to MIC to push for this.
Apr 08, 2020 | www.theamericanconservative.com
|

11:34 pm

Oona Hathaway makes the case for radically reorienting U.S. national security policy to address the real significant threats to the country. Among other things, that means winding down the endless war and our preoccupation with militarized counter-terrorism:

If one believes, as I do, that the fundamental goal of a national security program should be to protect American lives, then we clearly have our priorities out of place. Just as the 9/11 attacks led to a reorientation of national security policy around a counterterrorism mission, the COVID-19 crisis can and should lead to a reorientation of national security policy. There should be a commission styled on the 9/11 Commission to assess the failures of the U.S. government, both federal and local, to respond to the pandemic and to chart a better course forward. Until then, a few key steps that we should take are already clear:

First, we should spend less time and resources on counterterrorism efforts abroad. The "endless wars" that began after 9/11 should finally come to a close.

The U.S. should be ending the "war on terror" in any case because the threat does not merit the enormous resources devoted to fighting it, and the militarized overkill over the last two decades has helped to create far more terrorist groups than there were before it began. On top of that, the U.S. has much bigger concerns that pose far greater and more immediate threats to the lives of our people and to our way of life than terrorism ever could. A pandemic is a threat that is now obvious to all of us, but for the last two decades it was not taken nearly as seriously as imaginary Iraqi WMDs and potential Iranian nukes. We have been straining at gnats for at least half of my lifetime, and when the real danger appeared many of us were oblivious to it. Not only have other threats been blown out of proportion, but the more serious threat that is now upon us received virtually no attention until it was already upon us. Like Justinian wasting decades waging useless wars, we have been caught unawares by a plague, but in our case we have far less excuse because there were many warnings that something like this was coming and could be brought under control. Nonetheless, we allowed our defenses against it to grow weaker, and the current administration did as much as possible to dismantle what was left.

Once the immediate crisis is over, the U.S. needs to shift its focus away from fruitless military campaigns in Asia. We need to reallocate resources away from the bloated military budget, which has had so little to do with actually protecting us, and plow most of those resources into pandemic preparedness, scientific research, and building up a much more resilient health care system. Pandemics aren't wars, but guarding against pandemics is an important part of national security and it is arguably much more important than having the ability to project power to the far corners of the world. Because pandemics are global phenomena, guarding the U.S. against them will entail more intensive international cooperation than before. Hathaway continues:

One clear lesson of this crisis is that when it comes to a pandemic, no nation can protect itself on its own. International cooperation is essential. The World Health Organization has played an important role in battling the virus. But it has been hobbled by limited funding, and it's busy fundraising to support its work even as it's trying to undertake ambitious programs. The United Nations Security Council, meanwhile, has been mostly absent from the conversation. The pandemic is global and it requires a global approach. But these international institutions have not had the funding or the international support to play the role they should have in coordinating a quick global response to the spread of the virus. When this crisis is over, it will be essential to evaluate how to coordinate a faster, more effective global response when the next pandemic arises.

All nations have a shared interest in pooling resources and sharing information to bring outbreaks like the current one under control. As tempting as it may be for some hard-liners to engage in great power rivalry in the midst of such a disaster, the responsible course of action is to pause these contests for the sake of resolving the crisis sooner. The U.N. response has been hobbled by mutual recriminations between some of the permanent members of the Security Council, specifically the U.S. and China, and if there is to be an effective and coordinated global response that sort of demagoguery and point-scoring will have to end.

Scaling back the size of the military budget will necessarily involve reducing the U.S. military footprint around the world. It is not reasonable or safe to expect a smaller military to support a strategy of primacy. Primacy was always unsustainable, and it was just a matter of time before the time came when it would have to be abandoned. It turns out that the time for abandoning the pursuit of primacy came earlier than expected. The U.S. should have started making this transition many years ago, but recent events make it imperative that we begin now.

Feral Finster Baruch Dreamstalker • 3 days ago

Forever War is a bipartisan thing.
This comment is awaiting moderation. − +

Clyde Schechter Baruch Dreamstalker • 3 days ago

There is not, and has not been since the Cold War, any daylight between the Republican and Democratic parties on foreign policy. Both have been consistently in the thrall of the neocons. While a few Democratic contenders took anti-war stances this year (Sanders, Warren, Gabbard), the rest did not, and Biden, specifically has been on the wrong side of all of these issues in the past. There is no reason to think he will not continue the endless wars and, probably, start new ones if elected.

Since relatively few people vote for third parties, it is a sure thing that the vast majority of Americans will vote for one of the two warmongers on offer from the major parties. And so it was in 2016: whether you voted for Clinton or Trump, you were voting for more endless war. Those who supported Clinton mostly knew that; many who voted for Trump deluded themselves into thinking otherwise.

kouroi • 4 days ago
DoD, the War on Terror are not about protecting American lives....
ZizaNiam • 3 days ago
All well and good, but will israel allow the US to withdraw from the Middle East? Not likely.
veteran2013 • 3 days ago
And the overwhelming majority of Americans are going to vote for more of all of this horror, again!

[Apr 11, 2020] Tchaikovsky - Hymn of the Cherubim - USSR Ministry Of Culture Chamber Choir

Apr 11, 2020 | www.youtube.com

YellowDaffodil , 3 months ago

Perhaps if the US had a Ministry of Culture producing these soul elevating music videos we would not be becoming a godless country.

Bless Russia and May she grow in Grace and Peace.

Louis XXV , 11 months ago

"The music could exist even if the Universe doesn't." Schopenhauer

[Apr 11, 2020] Tchaikovsky - Hymn of the Cherubim - USSR Ministry Of Culture Chamber Choir

Apr 11, 2020 | www.youtube.com

YellowDaffodil , 3 months ago

Perhaps if the US had a Ministry of Culture producing these soul elevating music videos we would not be becoming a godless country.

Bless Russia and May she grow in Grace and Peace.

Louis XXV , 11 months ago

"The music could exist even if the Universe doesn't." Schopenhauer

[Apr 11, 2020] Hamish de Bretton-Gordon

An interesting connection between Skripal false flag and Syria false flag.
Notable quotes:
"... Main Stream Media ..."
"... "The same people who assured you Saddam Hussein had WMDs now assure you Russian 'Novichok' nerve agents are being wielded by Vladimir Putin to attack people on British soil." [4] ..."
Apr 11, 2020 | sunray22b.net

Hamish de Bretton-Gordon is the pretentious name used by a fellow who seems to have been a lieutenant colonel in the British Army and a chemical weapons expert. He has access to the media and markets the Party Line . Whose? The Foreign Office's version of truth, one that denies the very active role of the Israel Lobby in using American forces to make war in the Middle East.

de Bretton Gordon's public position is that chemical weapons are nasty dangerous things being used by Bashar al Assad , the president of Syria to attack innocent civilians. Before believing this story look at what Seymour Hersh has to say; that the Syria Gas Attack Carried Out By America .

... ... ...

Civilians were under fire, he went on. He failed to mention that Al-Nusra might be holding them as human shields, as they did in Eastern Aleppo. The Syrian army liberated that area in December twenty-sixteen.

The UNHCR tweeted in October last year : 'After years of darkness, city of # Aleppo is lit at night, we hope that # Syrians find light at the end of the tunnel finally # SupportSyrians '

We ran a report on Aleppo's liberation at the time .

For the first time in five years the city's Christians were able to celebrate Christmas free from constant bombardment from the Al-Nusra terrorists in the east.
Celebrating Christmas in Aleppo December 2016.
Celebrating Christmas in Aleppo December 2016.

The US and UK Governments and the mainstream media hated the liberation of Eastern Aleppo. They will equally bewail the liberation of Eastern Ghouta, when it comes.

Indeed, during the BBC interview, Hamish de Bretton-Gordon came across as nothing more than a UK government sock-puppet. He confirmed this when he commended what he said were 'the peace talks in Geneva'. We shall come to that below.

Doctors Under Fire
Mr David Nott is a respected surgeon but blames 'Assad' for everything.

Mr David Nott is a respected surgeon but blames 'Assad' for everything.

But what of this man, and what of 'Doctors Under Fire'? Well, the latter has apparently just two members, De Bretton Gordon and one David Nott, a surgeon who has been in war-torn areas. Mr Nott similarly finds no good word to say about the Syrian government.

Oddly, in a video on Vimeo from 2016 he says Doctors Under Fire will be a charity. The Charity Commission has no record of it, nor of 'Medics under Fire' which is what the Doctors Under Fire website is called. When you go to the website , at this time of writing, you're invited to a rally on 7th May. On further investigation, that is 7th May 2016. Their website is two years out of date. Of course hospitals should not be attacked in war zones, but the Doctors Under Fire platform gives Messrs De B-G and Nott credibility to advance another agenda.

Hospital bombing scam
Furthermore, this astonishing video collated all the times the 'last hospital' in eastern Aleppo was put out of action by 'Syrian regime airstrikes'. Can you guess how many it was? And how do the mainstream media source their footage of sick children, hospitals, and dare we add, 'doctors under fire'? They are entirely dependent on the terrorists. No western journalist can venture into their areas. Why? For fear of being kidnapped and held for ransom by the very people they champion.

De Bretton Gordon also claimed on the BBC a hospital in eastern Ghouta had been hit. That was why they gave him a platform under his 'Doctors Under Fire' persona. But again, it was second-hand terrorist propaganda. Here, the impressive 'Off-Guardian' website exposes the Syrian totem head of the 'White Helmets', which was a British Foreign Office creation, as we investigated here . This relentless tugging at western heart-strings is a scam and the msm [ Main Stream Media ] know it.

Hamish de Bretton-Gordon SecureBio spun off from Hamish De Bretton-Gordon's time in the British Army

SecureBio spun off from Hamish De Bretton-Gordon's time in the British Army

Hamish de Bretton-Gordon is a retired Colonel with an OBE. He commanded NATO's Rapid Reaction Chemical Biological Radiological and Nuclear (CBRN) Battalion. He ran a company called SecureBio with, we read on this 'military speakers' website , 'an impressive list of blue chip clients globally.' However, Companies House says SecureBio resolved to go into liquidation in June 2015.

The Colonel now apparently works for a company which makes breathing masks, Avon Protection . His LinkedIn profile claims he is 'Managing Director CBRN' of Avon, despite not actually being a director. He also claims still to be director of SecureBio. He does not mention that company was dissolved in August 2017 with debts over £715,000.

Call for France to drop bombs on Syria

De Bretton-Gordon has teamed up with Avon Protection which makes breathing masks.

De Bretton-Gordon teamed up with Avon in 2014 . Avon then took over the SecureBio name in June 2015 as SecureBio Ltd shut down. Avon did not take over SecureBio Ltd's large debts.

De Bretton-Gordon no longer has any connection with military field-work. Nevertheless, he has continued access to the world's media when subjects like Syria and alleged chemical weapons come up.

Securebio's YouTube channel is still online and has a number of videos of the colonel calling for 'safe havens' for terrorists. He has appeared frequently on Sunni-Muslim Qatar's Al Jazeera TV channel.

And as this Guardian opinion piece shows , he is not slow to blame 'Assad' and 'Putin' for each and every alleged chemical attack, just as the UK Foreign Office would want him to do. In this belligerent BBC article he even calls on France to declare war by dropping bombs on Syria.

Geneva vs Astana Peace Talks

Finally, why did the Colonel's promotion of the Geneva peace talks raise the alarm? Because this is a UK-driven political view. In reality the Geneva talks stalled in February twenty-seventeen. The Kurds took against the inconsequential opposition in exile pompously called the High Negotiations Committee.

The Geneva talks finally collapsed in November when the Syrians would not agree to President Assad stepping aside, a key, but stupid, UK and US demand. The Guardian's highly-respected Patrick Wintour says the talks De Bretton Gordon extols are 'perilously shorn of credibility'.

Meanwhile, the real peace talks, unmentioned by the Colonel, have been held in Astana, capital of Kazakhstan. They are brokered by Russia, so the UK wants them to fail. But the UN's Staffan de Mistura says the Astana talks are making small but 'clear progress' to reducing violence in Syria. They have now moved to Sochi on the Black Sea and we need to pray for them.

Terrorists should lay down their arms

Make no mistake, the UK government helped start the dreadful civil war in Syria . Even now its tame media pundits cannot bear the idea that the Islamic terrorists we assisted are mercifully losing.

They need to lay down their arms. But don't expect the Colonel to agree. The Bible says in Psalm 120:7:

I am for peace: but when I speak, they are for war.

Colonel Hamish de Bretton-Gordon will keep ringing the UK Government bell. A knighthood cannot be far away. But we must take what he and the rest of the BBC's pro-Foreign Office pundits say with a very large pinch of salt.

Hamish de Bretton-Gordon ex Wikispooks
Hamish de Bretton-Gordon (born September 1963) is a chemical weapons expert and chief operating officer of SecureBio Limited . He was formerly a British Army officer for 23 years and Commanding Officer of the UK's Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear (CBRN) Regiment and NATO 's Rapid Reaction CBRN Battalion. [1]

De Bretton-Gordon is Managing Director CBRN at Avon Protection , the recognised global market leader in respiratory protection system technology specialising primarily in Military, Law Enforcement, Firefighting, and Industrial. [2]

Novichok nerve agent
On 4 March 2018, a Russian double agent Sergei Skripal was reported to have been poisoned in Salisbury with a nerve agent which British authorities identified as Novichok . Theresa May told Parliament that she held Russia responsible for Skripal's attempted murder.

According to Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, Novichok was allegedly developed in the Soviet Union at a laboratory complex in Shikhany, in central Russia. Vil Mirzayanov , a Russian chemist involved in the development of Novichok, who later defected to the United States , said the Novichok was tested at Nukus, in Uzbekistan . [3]

Former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray , who visited the site at Nukus, said it had been dismantled with US help. He is among those advocating scepticism about the UK placing blame on Russia for the poisoning of Sergei Skripal. In a blog post, Murray wrote:

"The same people who assured you Saddam Hussein had WMDs now assure you Russian 'Novichok' nerve agents are being wielded by Vladimir Putin to attack people on British soil." [4]
Deployments
Hamish de Bretton-Gordon's operational deployments included the 1st Gulf War , Cyprus , Bosnia , Kosovo , Iraq (multiple tours) and Afghanistan (2 tours) and has been in Syria & Iraq frequently in the last 3 years. This considerable experience in the field places Hamish de Bretton-Gordon as one of the world's leading and most current experts in chemical and biological counter terrorism and warfare.

De Bretton-Gordon is a visiting lecturer in disaster management at Bournemouth University . [5]

Doctors Under Fire
In December 2017, Hamish de Bretton-Gordon and fellow director David Nott of Doctors Under Fire highlighted the case of seven children with curable cancer who were said to be dying in Ghouta, Syria, for want of drugs and nourishment. They claimed Union of Syrian Medical Care and Relief Organisations (UOSSM) hospitals in Ghouta were on their knees with very few medicines left, and that kind words for the dying children were the only palliative care available. [6]
UNQUOTE
This Christian has been abused; he does not approve of Homosexuality or abortion. In other words, he is not a heretic.

Hamish de Bretton-Gordon ex Wiki
Hamish de Bretton-Gordon OBE (born September 1963) is a chemical weapons expert and chief operating officer of SecureBio Limited. He was formerly a British Army officer for 23 years and commanding officer of the UK's CBRN Regiment and NATO's Rapid Reaction CBRN Battalion . [1] He is a visiting lecturer in disaster management at Bournemouth University . [2] He attended Tonbridge School and has a degree in agriculture from the University of Reading (1987).

Joint Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear Regiment ex Wiki
 A temporary formation that has been and gone.

Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear Defence Battalion
 A NATO outfit.

Al-Nusra Front ex Wiki
Al-Nusra Front or Jabhat al-Nusra ( Arabic : جبهة النصرة ‎), known as the Jabhat Fateh al-Sham ( Arabic : جبهة فتح الشام ‎, transliteration : Jabhat Fataḥ al-Šām ) after July 2016, and also described as al-Qaeda in Syria or al-Qaeda in the Levant, [34] [35] is a Salafist jihadist organization fighting against Syrian government forces in the Syrian Civil War , with the aim of establishing an Islamic state in the country. [36] The group announced its formation on 23 January 2012. [37]

The United States designated Jabhat al-Nusra as a foreign terrorist organization, followed by the United Nations Security Council and many other countries. [38] It was the official Syrian branch of al-Qaeda until July 2016, when it ostensibly split. [39] [40]

In early 2015, the group became one of the major components of the powerful jihadist joint operations room named the Army of Conquest , which took over large territories in Northwestern Syria . It also operates in neighbouring Lebanon . [41] In November 2012, The Washington Post described al-Nusra as the most successful arm of the rebel forces. [[42]

In July 2016, al-Nusra formally separated from al-Qaeda and re-branded as Jabhat Fateh al-Sham ("Front for the Conquest of the Levant"). [39]

On 28 January 2017, following violent clashes with Ahrar al-Sham and other rebel groups, Jabhat Fateh al-Sham merged with four other groups to become Their al-Sham .

Al-Qaeda ex Wiki
Al-Qaeda ( / æ l ˈ k aɪ d ə , ˌ æ l k ɑː ˈ iː d ə / ; Arabic : القاعدة ‎ al-qāʿidah , IPA: [ælqɑːʕɪdɐ] , translation: "The Base", "The Foundation" or " The Fundament " and alternatively spelled al-Qaida, al-Qæda and sometimes al-Qa'ida) is a militant Sunni Islamist multi-national organization founded in 1988 [31] by Osama bin Laden , Abdullah Azzam , [32] and several other Arab volunteers who fought against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980s. [6]

Christian Voice ex Wiki
Christian Voice (CV) is a Christian advocacy group based in the United Kingdom . [1] Its stated objective is "to uphold Christianity as the Faith of the United Kingdom, to be a voice for Biblical values in law and public policy, and to defend and support traditional family life." [2] It is independent of religious, denominational, or political parties. [3]

CV is led by Stephen Green, with Lord Ashburn as its patron. [3] Green is the group's spokesperson, producing scores of press releases from 2005 to 2010. According to Green, Christian Voice had in excess of 600 members in 2005. [4]

The group has been criticised for its positions. David Peel, leader of the United Reformed Church called Christian Voice "a disgrace" [4] and described their "claim to represent Christians" in the UK as "absurd". [[5]

Leadership
Stephen Green
The leader, and sole staff member, of Christian Voice is Stephen Green [6] , a former Chairman of the Conservative Family Campaign, who attends an Assemblies of God Church. In the early 1990s, Green was a prominent campaigner against homosexuality through the Conservative Family Campaign, and wrote a book called The Sexual Dead-End .

In January 2011, Green's former wife, Caroline Green, accused him of repeatedly physically assaulting her and their children, including one incident where he allegedly beat her with a weapon until she bled, and another in which their son allegedly required hospital treatment after having been beaten with a piece of wood. The couple subsequently divorced. [7] Stating that the article was "highly defamatory" and calling it a "catalogue of smears and distortions stitched together," Green denied some of the allegations. On his blog he wrote: [8]

I sincerely tried to lead my marriage and household in a loving and responsible way, and one which was faithful to the Lord.

... ... ...

https://ww.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/04/08/will-chemical-weapons-attacks-like-douma-fail-punish-assad-crimes/

Medics Under Fire - com

Medics Under Fire - org
Anti-Syrian government [ of 2016 ]
The repeated targeting of healthcare workers and hospitals by the Russian and Syrian governments are war crimes. We call on you to give Syria's heroic healthcare workers and the communities they serve a zone free from bombing to ensure their protection. The international community has agreed the bombs need to stop. The resolutions are in place. They simply need to be enforced.

Secure Bio Limited ex Companies House
Registered office address
Bell Advisory, Tenth Floor 3 Hardman Street, Spinningfields, Manchester, M3 3H
Company status
Dissolved
Dissolved on
17 August 2017
Company type
Private limited Company
Incorporated on
29 June 2011
Last accounts made up to 31 December 2013
Nature of business (SIC)
82990 - Other business support service activities not elsewhere classified

Appointment of Hamish De Bretton-Gordon as a director View PDF Appointment of Hamish De Bretton-Gordon as a director - link opens in a new window - 3 pages (3 pages)
05 Sep 2011 Appointment of Andrew Duckworth as a director View PDF Appointment of Andrew Duckworth as a director - link opens in a new window - 3 pages (3 pages)
29 Jun 2011 Termination of appointment of Yomtov Jacobs as a director

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5589207/Syrian-government-intensifies-offensive-against-rebel-stronghold-Eastern-Ghouta.html awful innit?

Syrian activists and doctors being trained to combat chemical attacks - Allegation Made By Bretton Gordon
 More Quislinggraph , more propaganda.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/04/08/dozens-reported-dead-chemical-attack-insyria-us-blames-russia/
 Believe it if you want.

[Apr 08, 2020] Feudal Japan Edo and the US Empire by Hiroyuki Hamada

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... "Representative democracy" ..."
"... "people should be shaking up a little" ..."
Apr 08, 2020 | off-guardian.org

After the warlord period of the 15th century, Japan was united by a few families then by a shogun family. The period is called the Edo period. They disarmed civilians and established a mild caste system.

The country was closed except for a few ports controlled by the central government, travel restrictions were put in place and certain technological developments were prohibited.

The period also had an interesting feature called sankinkoutai .

It forced regional leaders to march across the country in formal costumes along with their armies in order to alternate their residences between their home regions and the capital of the feudal Japan, Edo. It also forced leaders' wives and family members to remain in Edo at all time. It was an elaborate system to keep the hierarchical structure intact.

The reign lasted a few centuries with no conflicts within the land until the US forced to open Japan in order to use its ports for whaling business. I've been suspecting that the aim of some people among the ruling class circle is to establish such a closed hierarchical system which can function in a "sustainable" manner. But of course it is not exactly a system of equality and sharing as it would be advertised.

The notion of "sustainable" is also very much questionable as we see blatant lies hidden behind carbon trade schemes, nuclear energy, "humanitarian" colonialism rampant in Africa and other areas and so on.

I mentioned about the special feature, sankinkoutai , since I see an interesting parallel between it and "representative democracy" within the capitalist West today. Of course, we don't have such an obvious requirement among us, but similar dynamics occur within our capitalist framework. Our thoughts and activities are always subservient to the moneyed transactions guided by the economic networks.

Our economic restrictions can force us to make decisions to do away with our needs -- we might abandon our skills, interests, friendships, life styles, philosophies, ideologies, community obligations and so on.

In fact, some of us are forced to live on streets, die of treatable illness, suffer under heavy debt and so on as we struggle. In a way, we surrender our basic needs as hostages to the system just as the Japanese regional leaders had to leave their family members under the watch of the Shogun family. Moreover, the more our thoughts differ from that of neoliberal capitalist framework, the more we must put our efforts in adjusting to it. Some of us might be labeled as "dissidents", and such a label can create obstacles in our social activities.

This functions similar to the fact that Japanese feudal regional leaders who were further away from the capital geographically had to put more efforts in marching across the country, requiring them to expend more resources. In a capitalist system, this occurs economically as well -- those who are already oppressed by the economic strife must spend more resources to conform to the draconian measures to survive.

Now, one might wonder why regional leaders had subjected themselves to such an inhumane scheme. The march across the country was considered as a show of strength and authority -- it was a proud moment to put on their costume to show off. The populations across the country were forced to respect this process with reverence and awe. There were strict regulations regarding how to treat such marches.

This situation can be compared to our political process -- Presidential election in particular, in which our powers and interests are put in the corporate political framework to be shaped, tweaked and distorted. Sanctioned by capitalist mandates and agendas, political candidates march across the nation while people proudly cheer their favorite ones. The more complacent to the capitalist framework the candidates are, the more lavish the marches. This forces the contents of political discourse to remain within the capitalist framework while excluding candidates and their supporters whose ideas are not subservient to it.

"Representative democracy" within a capitalist framework can be one of the most strong ways to install values, beliefs and norms of the ruling class into minds of the people whose interests can be significantly curtailed by those ideas. All this can be achieved in the name of "democracy", "free election" and so on.

Since people's minds and their collective mode of operations are deeply indoctrinated to be a part of the capitalist structure, any crisis would strengthen the fundamental integrity of the structure. I heard a Trump supporter saying that "people should be shaking up a little" . That's actually a very appropriate description. You shake their ground, people try to hold onto whatever they think is a solid structure. Some of us might, however, try to hold onto a Marxist perspective for example.

That, of course, provokes triggering reactions by those who go along with the capitalist framework, because they are particularly threatened, sensing that their entire belief system might fall. Examination of facts and contexts during the time of crisis can generate divisions and opportunities to control and moderate opposing views.

Capitalist institutions are dominated by this mentality which might explain the extremely quick mobilization of the draconian restrictions and the demand for more restrictions during the time of "crisis". Economic incentives, as well as self-preservation within the system, force people to engage actively in unquestioning manner.

For example, we have observed concerted efforts in mobilizing media, government agencies, legal system and so on to "combat" "drug issues", "inner-city violence" and so on which has led to mass incarceration, police killings and "gentrification" of primarily minority communities.

Needless to say, 9/11 has created enormous momentum of colonial wars against middle eastern countries. No major media outlets or politicians questioned blatant lies surrounding WMD claim against Iraq for example. As a result, many countries were destroyed while one out of a hundred people on the planet became refugees. Draconian regulations became normal, racism and xenophobia among people intensified and the term "global surveillance" became a household term.

This situation requires further examination since there are a few layers which must be identified.

First, we must recognize that there is an industry that commodifies "dissenting voices". The people who engage in this have no intention of examining the exploitive mechanism of capitalist hierarchy. Some of them typically chose topics of government wrongdoings in contexts of fascist ideologies (jews are taking over the world, for example), space aliens and so on. The angles are calibrated to keep serious inquiries away but they nonetheless garner major followings.

When certain topics fall into their hands, discussing them can become tediously unproductive as it prompts a label "conspiracy". It also contributes in herding dissidents toward fascist ideology while keeping them away from understanding actual social structure.

The second point is related to the first, when the topic enters the realm of "conspiracy", and when we lose means to confirm facts, many of us experience cognitive dissonance. The unspoken fear of the system becomes bigger than any of the topics at hand, and some of us shut down our thought process. As a result, we are left with hopelessness, cynicism and complacency. This is a major tool of the system of extortion. It makes some of us say "if there is a President who tries to overthrow capitalism, he or she will be assassinated".

Such a statement illustrates the fact that understanding of the violent system, fear and complacency can firmly exist in people's minds without openly admitting to it.

Third, aside from the unspoken fear toward the destructive system, there is also unspoken recognition that the system is inherently unsustainable to itself and to its environment. The cultish faith in capitalist framework is upheld by myths of white supremacy, American exceptionalism and most of all by our structural participation to it.

Any cult with an unsustainable trajectory eventually faces its doomsday phase. It desires a demise of everything, which allows cultists to avoid facing the nature of the cult. It allows them to fantasize a rebirth. This, in turn, allows the system to utilize a catastrophic crisis as a springboard to shift its course while implementing draconian measures to prop itself up. "The time of survival" normalizes the atrocity of structural violence in reinforcing the hierarchical order, while those with relative social privilege secretly rejoice the arrival of "the end".

Any of those three dynamics can be actively utilized by those who are determined to manipulate and control the population.

Now, there is another interesting coincidence with the Japanese history. The title Shogun had been a figurehead status given by the imperial family of Japan long before the Edo period. Shogun is a short version of Seiitaishogun, which can be translated as Commander-in-Chief of the Expeditionary Force Against the Barbarians. The title indicates the nature of the trajectory more bluntly than the US presidency which is also Commander in Chief–which has engaged in numerous colonial expeditions over the generations.

But as I mentioned above, the Edo period was not a time of fighting "barbarians", it was a time of a closed feudal system and its hierarchy was strictly controlled by its customs and regulations. The current trajectory of our time prompts one to suspect that the inevitable path to be a similar one.

Our thoughts and ideas have been already controlled by capitalist framework for generations. We knowingly and unknowingly participate in this hostage taking extortion structure. While shaken by crisis after crisis, we have gone through waves of changes, which have implemented rigid social restrictions against our ability to see through lies and rise above the feudal order of money and violence.

I must say that I do understand that above discussion is very much generalized. One can certainly argue against validity of the parallel based on historical facts and contexts. Some might also argue that Edo period to be far more humane on some regards, in terms of how people related to their natural surroundings, or the system being actually sustainable, for instance. But I believe that my main points still stand as valid and worthy of serious considerations.

Also, it is not my intention to label, demean and demonize policy makers of our time in cynical manner. My intention is to put the matter as a topic of discussion among those who are concerned in a constructive manner. The comparison was used as a device for us to step back from our time and space in evaluating our species' path today.

Doctortrinate ,

there's no doubt -- the game has many strings to its bow, not helped by the peoples alacrity of contribution -- notably, when called to Vote.

Generations through generation, used and abused, oppressed and distressed, and still they returned to the spiders labyrinth to sustain the fabric of its future slaves to it's design, expanding the web, sanctioning Its cause all the while, to a degeneration of theirs.

Example after example of the corruption, deviance, distortions and exploitation, and again they return, depersonalized by repetition saturation, caught in a Stockholm syndrome victim captor beguilement of slavery Is freedom -- and what of this latest attack, the warring virus -- will the mass of unhinged automotons view it as another rescue -- condemning us "all" to a big tech digitally enslaved end.

Or, will they finally, Wake Up and see the light ?

Charlotte Russe ,

"The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimate there's been over 30 million cases of influenza during America's flu season, which began in September 2019, with a death toll exceeding 20,000." It must be noted, that in 2018 45 million were infected with the flu in the US, and there were 80,000 deaths. As of this moment, the World-O-Meter cites 338,999 cases of Covid-19 in the US with 9,687 deaths. This mortality rate indicates the deaths resulting from COVID-19 could be much "lower" than those resulting from the 2018 flu where the touted vaccine did NOT work.

I think it's safe to say, we'll trully never know the source of Covid-19. We can only speculate. It could have been transmitted from bats in a Wuhan wet market, or it could have leaked out of a military lab. What can be definitely said, is that the panic associated with the pandemic benefitted the rulers of ALL major capitalist dictatorships.

Fascist nation-states like China and Russia are grasping for a chance to make new friends in high places as a way to replace the numero-uno superpower. And while China and Russia are attempting to build new alliances the infighting persists within the EU. In the end, it makes no difference which member of this sinister trio becomes the "big macher"– the working-class, middle-class, and the working-poor will remain victims of exploitative leeches.

Simply put, a landlord might sell his property to a new owner, but the occupying tenant will still be required to pay rent, and might actually see an increase in their monthly fee. It's like jumping from the frying pan into the fire.

Worldwide every country is "infected" with a bunch of crumb-bum leaders. A crisis intensifies their lechery. This is especially the case for those who have very little. We see this constantly, every time there's an ecological disaster whether it's a flood, hurricane, earthquake, typhoon, etc Disasters always wipeout the most vulnerable. These populations possess fewer resources, hence fewer options. This has been the case for time and immemorial. We're just more cognizant every time a disaster occurs because of surveillance technology and globalization.

The real question which needs to be explored is why does the human species remain so flawed. Human nature has not evolved in thousands of years. The same brutish sociopathic tendencies which existed 10,000 years ago exist today. Perhaps Homo sapiens, are in an evolutionary quagmire where only the "dung and malarkey" are allowed to rise to the top.

Whatever the case may be, billions are organized by various forms of "muck authority" who yield significantly more power than 15th Century Edo feudal lords. In addition, if the entire worldwide capitalist system collapsed 90 percent of the world's population would perish. The sustenance of billions are too intertwined within the capitalist resource system. Interestingly enough, primitive societies (if any are left) and survivalists might be the small remainders of a civilization which became too big for its breaches.

So what are the options you might be thinking, since many of us never bothered to hone those imperative life saving survival skills. The only answer is "reform." Groups with shared interests need to organize and mobilize. Peaceful, but tenaciously protests could force concessions without alienating the remaining population. This could be done. It happened in the 1930's and the outcome of mass demonstrations lead to the New Deal. It's something to think about, once the world stops self-isolating. The options are limited -- the path either leads to neo-feudalism or barbarism. Unless of course, someone can figure out how to eliminate the sociopathic gene within the human species.

Rhys Jaggar ,

I think I can answer this question: the fact is that when a leader rules by fear, power and crushing dissent, only those displaying similar characteristics will thrive under them.

Back when the human condition was rather tenuous and being eaten by big predators a significant possibility, the traits selected for were ruthless killing, hunting and, in the case of males, winning the right to breed. There were no 11 pluses for selecting breeders, rather punch ups, elimination of rivals and the like. The females were selected for childbearing capabilities, since giving birth was one of the most hazardous activities a female would undertake. They were not selected for religious evolution, nor for philosophical insight.

As a result, the hierarchies of human society grew around those more primitive traits and, by and large, remain there, albeit diluted down somewhat.

But thuggery, chicaneries, spying and lying are still the traits most valued in a dog-eat-dog world. Insight can be stolen, bled dry and then dumped.

Who needs a brain when you can steal someone else's ey?

Charlotte Ruse ,

To put it simply, deviant ruthless behavior is baked into the cake.

[Apr 08, 2020] About neoliberalization of China and Russia

Apr 08, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

King Lear , Apr 8 2020 19:14 utc | 56

VK #2
Yet you are fooled by the phony Socialism of "Red" China, which is really Neoliberalism in disguise (I highly doubt Marx, Lenin, Stalin, or even the confused, Pro-U$ Mao would believe Sweatshops, Stock Exchanges, and Billionaires represents the Socialist model of production). I agree with you that Bernie Sanders is a gutless fraud and faux Socialist (he's merely a Centre-Left Social Democrat yet he portrayed his movement as some sort of "Revolution", LOL), who sadly represents the best you would ever get in the White House, in the sense that at least he wouldn't have started any new wars, wouldn't have given any tax cuts to corporations and the wealthy, and wouldn't have outsourced any more jobs in new free trade agreements (these are the reasons I would have held my nose and voted for him if he had been nominated, despite my much more Leftist beliefs).

However, I believe it smells of intense hypocrisy to call out Bernie Sanders as faux Socialism (he is), while simultaneously bowing at the alter of Xi Jinping thought, which along with being yet another form of faux Socialism like Bernies Social Democracy, isn't just due to the naivety of believing that the phony Liberal Democratic process (in Marxist terms the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie), can actually achieve meaningful reforms for the Working class and not just pacify them. In reality, it represents something much more devious, a country that had a Communist Revolution and established a Planned Socialist economic system, yet decided to sell out its citizens for an alliance with the U$ and massive wealth for the Communist Party leadership, who proceeded to turn their formerly Socialist country into a Neoliberal, Neocolonial, Sweatshop, that by giving 15 Trillion dollars in surplus value to Wall Street is one of the biggest sponsors of U$ Imperialism (remember, according to Lenin Imperialism is not just launching Wars against small countries, but includes when Western Corporation exploit third world populations for massive super profits through resource extraction and cheap labor sweatshops). In reality their are only two countries today (Cuba and North Korea) that are in the Socialist mode of production according to the Marxist-Leninist definition, sadly their used to be many more (the USSR, the other Eastern Bloc countries, Maoist China, etc.) which all succumb to Capitalist counterrevolution (the USSR and the other Eastern Bloc countries etc.), or the ruling Communist Party embracing such extreme revisionism that over time they basically restored the Capitalist mode of production and Dictatorship of the Proletariat, in all but name only. The reason for both of these tragic events was the fact that due to a long-term revisionist trend after the death of Stalin and Maos ridiculous Sino-Soviet split, the leadership of these countries became corrupted by the desire for the U$-style "Good life" of mass consumerism and hedonistic materialism (not Dialectical Materialism), thus proving that the real threat to Socialism is the Neoliberal culture of decedent consumerism which corrupt the leadership and enchants the masses of nations around the world.

[Apr 07, 2020] Three big claims of 'Russian disinformation' and 'Russian trolls/bots' on social media.

Apr 07, 2020 | consortiumnews.com

John A , April 7, 2020 at 04:09

Over the last week, there have, to my knowledge, been three big claims of 'Russian disinformation' and 'Russian trolls/bots' on social media.
1. Last week, Russian equipment and support sent to Italy to help fight Covid-19. Nato stenographers claim and spread the disinformation that '80% of the equipment was useless', citing one anonymous source. Total lies.

2. Swedish minister claims social media campaign against a 5G network in Sweden is run by russian trolls. Turns out it is a 64 year old grandmother living in Stockholm who is behind the campaign.

3. Yesterday afternoon, russia media report, according to a National Health Service source, Boris Johnson is on a ventilator in hospital. Utter nonsense say MSM, Russian disinformation. Overnight headlines in British media – Boris in intensive care.

The western media are so totally venally corrupt in serving the 1% yet get found out in their lies time after time and yet carry on. I try to read as many different media as possible, but have no doubt, which are more credible, and it aint NATO stenographers

AnneR , April 7, 2020 at 14:33

Yes, John A. Truly there is something warped about the western ruling elites' mindset. But I guess they have to have a bugaboo and Russia (then China, sometimes Iran and others) is the primary, western created, go-to one. Even among those who did not grow up, or were only young, during the cold war.

I am only thankful that, despite my father's Tory politics (all but regarding the land, which he believed should be nationalized and 50 acres given to every male [well, he was sexist]; an curious, decidedly not Tory viewpoint) the USSR as was then never was on either his or my mother's agenda. Indeed, we used to watch with much pleasure the Red Army choir, once we got a television (not till 1958, when I was 10), which toured the UK, I *think*

No ducking under school desks. Nor any other weird thing

[Apr 06, 2020] Pompeo problem: how to continue to bully when the bullied can very effectively shoot back?

Apr 06, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Bemildred , Apr 6 2020 15:25 utc | 187

Posted by: Walter | Apr 6 2020 15:03 utc | 185

Re: Pompeo and his West Point clique and their associates, I have not spent much time on it, didn't seem like a useful or entertaining thing to do, but my impression is they have lots of plans and very little grasp of what is required to carry them out. (One thinks of Modi here.) This has been ongoing since the Iranians shot our fancy drone down there last year. The first shot across the bow. We are now withdrawing from Syria, Iraq & Afghanistan, however haltingly, as it has dawned on the commanders on the ground there how exposed they really are to Iranian fire, and that of their allies. Israel seems to be struggling with the same problem, how to continue to bully when the bullied can very effectively shoot back?

Many unseemly things being said about Crozier and the Teddy R. situation too. Lot's of heat, very little light. Trump says there is light at the end of the tunnel, I seem to remember that from somewhere in the past. I think that's about where we are again.

[Apr 05, 2020] Esper tone deafness: a sad illustration of wildly misplaced priorities of military industrial complex

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Modernizing our strategic nuclear forces is a top priority for the @DeptofDefense and the @POTUS to protect the American people and our allies. ..."
"... As a pandemic ravages the nation, a sad illustration of wildly misplaced priorities ..."
Apr 05, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

b on April 5, 2020 at 14:28 UTC | Permalink

Tone deafness: @EsperDoD @EsperDoD - 16:09 UTC 4 Apr 2020

Modernizing our strategic nuclear forces is a top priority for the @DeptofDefense and the @POTUS to protect the American people and our allies.
Kingston Reif @KingstonAReif - 18:29 UTC - Apr 4 2020
As a pandemic ravages the nation, a sad illustration of wildly misplaced priorities.

Initial FY 2021 budget requests for:

[Apr 05, 2020] The ability to create infinite money provides those in charge with almost infinite power; digital fiat currency provides the banksters with the ability to manipulate/rig all markets, fund endless war (see All Wars are Bankers Wars), control the media and educational systems, etc etc.

Apr 05, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Perimetr , Apr 5 2020 16:47 utc | 20

RE: John Merryman | Apr 5 2020 15:47 utc | 14

You entirely miss the point that the "money" you describe is fiat currency, mostly in digital form, which is entirely under the control of the Central Banks that have the ability to create infinite amounts of it . Digital/paper fiat has no intrinsic value, it is fungible by decree, because governments require that you accept this "legal tender" for goods and services.

The ability to create infinite money provides those in charge with almost infinite power; digital fiat currency provides the banksters with the ability to manipulate/rig all markets, fund endless war (see All Wars are Bankers Wars ), control the media and educational systems, etc etc. That is the hidden function of Central Banks. As a famous Rothschild once said, "Give me control of a nation's money and I care not who makes it's laws"

The COVID-19 pandemic very conveniently happened to come along at a time when the credit markets were imploding, requiring the exponential growth of the fiat currencies (which had reached the end of their always limited life-spans and had entered into a crack-up boom). What a great excuse to openly move into producing trillions and trillions of dollars (much, much more to come). In the US, the Treasury has essentially merged with the Federal Reserve; the "bail outs" will be used to provide endless interest free money to the banks, which will then loan the money to the small businesses (at 5.75% interest) being destroyed by the shutdowns. See, the system is working!

The banks HAD to move into an exponential growth phase of its currencies in order to prevent the collapse of the Western financial system. The growth of fiat/debt-based currency is now similar to the exponential growth of the coronavirus. This is a hyperinflationary event that will lead to the abandonment of the dollar as the global reserve currency.

[Apr 05, 2020] US sidestepped OWN SANCTIONS against Russia to save American lives from Covid-19... If only it cared as much about Iranian live

Notable quotes:
"... "It's like being on eBay" ..."
"... "They big-footed us" ..."
"... "We're going broke." ..."
"... "We're on our own." ..."
"... "viable" ..."
"... "money laundering" ..."
"... "propaganda ploy." ..."
Apr 03, 2020 | www.rt.com

US sidestepped OWN SANCTIONS against Russia to save American lives from Covid-19... If only it cared as much about Iranian lives

Scott Ritter is a former US Marine Corps intelligence officer. He served in the Soviet Union as an inspector implementing the INF Treaty, in General Schwarzkopf's staff during the Gulf War, and from 1991-1998 as a UN weapons inspector. Follow him on Twitter @RealScottRitter is a former US Marine Corps intelligence officer. He served in the Soviet Union as an inspector implementing the INF Treaty, in General Schwarzkopf's staff during the Gulf War, and from 1991-1998 as a UN weapons inspector.

Russian plane with medical aid unloaded at JFK airport, United States, New York City © Ruptly Follow RT on

When it comes to saving American lives, sanctions are not an obstacle to the provision of life-saving medical equipment. Ramping up sanctions on struggling Iran is okay however – which goes to show the US price tag on human life. It was a sight that warmed the heart of even the most cynical American opponent of Vladimir Putin's Russia -- a giant An-124 aircraft, loaded with boxes of desperately needed medical supplies, being offloaded at JFK Airport. When President Trump spoke on the phone with his Russian counterpart on March 31, he mentioned America's need for life-saving medical supplies, including ventilators and personal protective equipment. Two days later the AN-124 arrived in New York.

As the aircraft was being unloaded, however, it became clear that at least some of the equipment being offloaded had been delivered in violation of existing US sanctions. Boxes clearly marked as containing Aventa-M ventilators, produced by the Ural Instrument Engineering Plant (UPZ), could be seen. For weeks now President Trump has made an issue about the need for ventilators in the US to provide life-saving care for stricken Americans.

There was just one problem -- the manufacturer of the Aventa-M, UPZ, is a subsidiary of Concern Radio-Electronic Technologies (KRET) which, along with its parent holding company ROSTEC, has been under US sanctions since 2014. Complicating matters further is the fact that the shipment of medical supplies was paid in part by the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF), a Russian sovereign wealth fund which, like ROSTEC, was placed on the US lending blacklist in 2014 following Russia's intervention in Crimea. Half of the Russian aid shipment was paid for by the US State Department, and the other half by RDIF.

Read more Russian declaration aimed at stopping sanctions amid coronavirus crisis REJECTED at UN General Assembly

According to a State Department spokesperson, the sanctions against RDIF do not apply to purchases of medical equipment. KRET, however, is in the strictest SDN (Specially Designated Persons) sanctions list , which means US citizens and permanent residents are prohibited from doing business with it. So while the letter of the sanctions may not have been violated, the spirit certainly has been.

One only need talk to the embattled Governor of New York State, Andrew Cuomo, to understand the difficulty in trying to purchase much-needed medical equipment during a global pandemic where everyone else is trying to do the same. New York has been competing with several other states to purchase much-needed ventilators from China. "It's like being on eBay" , Cuomo recently told the press, with 50 states bidding against one another, driving the price up. The issue became even more complicated when the Federal Emergency Management Agency, FEMA, entered the bidding war. "They big-footed us" , Cuomo said, driving the price per ventilator up to $25,000. "We're going broke."

Cuomo estimates that New York will need upwards of 40,000 ventilators to be able to handle the influx of stricken patients when the outbreak hits its peak. At the moment, New York has 17,000 ventilators available -- including 2,500 on order from China -- and Cuomo doesn't expect any more. "We're on our own." Plans are in place to begin imposing a triage system to prioritize ventilator availability if and when the current stockpile is exhausted. These plans include the issuance of an emergency waiver that permits health care providers to take a patient off a ventilator to make it available for another patient deemed to be more "viable" -- that is, who has a greater expectation of surviving the disease.

Cuomo's predicament is being played out around the world, in places like Italy, Spain -- and Iran, where the outbreak of coronavirus has hit particularly hard. The difference, however, is that while the US, Italy and Spain are able to scour the global market in search of life-saving medical supplies, Iran is not. US sanctions targeting the Iranian financial system, ostensibly imposed to prevent "money laundering" by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Command, which has been heavily sanctioned by the US over the years, have made it virtually impossible for Iran to pay for humanitarian supplies needed to fight the coronavirus outbreak.

Also on rt.com 'This is NUTS!' Russiagaters see red over Putin's planeload of corona-aid for Trump, queue to look gift-horse in mouth

As bad as it is for Governor Cuomo, at least he can enter a bidding war for medical supplies. Iran can't even get its foot in the door, and it is costing lives. Making matters worse, at a time when the international community is pleading for the US to ease sanctions so Iran can better cope with an outbreak that is taking a life every ten minutes, the US instead doubled down, further tightening its death grip on the Iranian economy.

The global coronavirus pandemic will eventually end, and when it does there will be an accounting for how nations behaved. Nations like Russia and China have been repeatedly vilified in the US media for any number of reasons -- even the Russian aid shipment containing the sanctioned ventilators has been dismissed as a "propaganda ploy." What, then, do you call the US' blatant disregard for select human lives?

The callous indifference displayed by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and other officials to the suffering of the Iranian people by increasing sanctions at a time when the situation cries out for them to be lifted in order to save lives, when contrasted to the ease in which US sanctions on Russia are ignored when life-saving medical equipment is needed, drives home the point that, as far as the US is concerned, human life only matters when it is an American one. That might play well among American voters (it shouldn't), but for the rest of the world it is a clear sign that hypocrisy, not humanitarianism, is the word that will define the US going forward.

EDITOR'S NOTE: A previous version of this article erroneously stated that entering a financial relationship with RDIF is prosecutable under the US sanctions regime. In reality, RDIF is under sectoral sanctions that only apply to certain interactions, which, according to a State Department spokesperson, do not include purchases of medical equipment. The article has been changed accordingly.

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[Apr 04, 2020] It doesn't seem to matter how much the US hoses the EU they'll still fall in lockstep when Trump says "jump"

Apr 04, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Tobi , Apr 4 2020 0:26 utc | 103

Posted by: Likklemore | 94

It doesn't seem to matter how much the US hoses the EU they'll still fall in lockstep when Trump says "jump".

Russian declaration aimed at stopping sanctions amid coronavirus crisis REJECTED at UN General Assembly

A User , Apr 4 2020 1:22 utc | 108

I realise few will since amerikans are 100% exceptionalist right up to their last breath but please read the best article by far on masks & respirators cleaning issues esp such ones as 'steam' cleaning are on this link I posted earlier.

It is written by Dr John Campbell who has been writing on this virus for several months. My brother the retired journo recommended him to me in early February, so naturally I have been assiduous in ignoring the bloke for that reason, combined with the fact Campbell is an englander, but he has put together an excellent piece on masks & respirators, one which uses y'know those pesky fact things to support his statements about assorted items efficacy, longevity and ability to be cleaned. With respirators 95% & above he recommends having several and rotating them so that they cop 4-5 days down time which should be enough time for the virus to kark it of its own accord.

I don't believe for a moment that will stop the continual spouting of uninformed claptrap, but I tried.

[Mar 31, 2020] Putin's was delivered on 25 March

Mar 31, 2020 | en.kremlin.ru

, Trump gave his speech on 11 March . It should come as no surprise that Putin's speech framing and proposals were far superior to Trump's, who employed the Big Lie at the top of his speech:

"Because of the economic policies that we have put into place over the last three years, we have the greatest economy anywhere in the world, by far.

"Our banks and financial institutions are fully capitalized and incredibly strong. Our unemployment is at a historic low. This vast economic prosperity gives us flexibility, reserves, and resources to handle any threat that comes our way.

"This is not a financial crisis, this is just a temporary moment of time that we will overcome together as a nation and as a world."

Absolutely nothing he said above is true and in many cases he was immediately proved wrong. In stark contrast, Putin chose the following to begin his speech:

"By taking precautionary measures, we have been largely able to prevent the infection from rapidly spreading and limit the incidence rate. However, we have to understand that Russia cannot insulate itself from this threat, simply considering its geography. There are countries along our borders that have already been seriously affected by the epidemic, which means that in all objectivity it is impossible to stop it from spilling over into Russia.

"That said, being professional, well organised and proactive is what we can do and are already doing. The lives and health of our citizens is our top priority .

"We have mobilised all the capabilities and resources for deploying a system of timely prevention and treatment. I would like to specially address doctors, paramedics, nurses, staff at hospitals, outpatient clinics, rural paramedic centres, ambulance services, and researchers: you are at the forefront of dealing with this situation. My heartfelt gratitude to you for your dedicated efforts." [My Emphasis]

We must also consider the numerous gaffs Trump committed prior to his speech, his earlier gleeful gloating over China's troubles in January, and his politicizing of the crisis along with that of Pompeo. Then there's his escalation of the illegal attacks on Iran and Venezuela specifically, which are crimes against humanity. Yes, I readily admit my anti-Trump bias, but I'm not blinded like those who applaud him. Putin had immediate proposals for aid to his people that they can count on, while Trump did next to nothing by comparison. But do please read them both and make your own determination as to which nation and leader you'd rather have during this sort of crisis.

Posted by: karlof1 | Mar 31 2020 16:07 utc | 141

[Mar 30, 2020] As a Russian I don't approve of this aid that Putin sent to Italy. That's Soviet-slyle showmanship, when our country objectively cannot afford it.

Mar 30, 2020 | www.unz.com

Felix Keverich , says: Show Comment March 26, 2020 at 1:22 pm GMT

As a Russian I don't approve of this aid that Putin sent to Italy. That's Soviet-slyle showmanship, when our country objectively cannot afford it. Stalin was sending grain to East Germany, when Russia was starving. Now Putin is doing something similar.

At the very least he should have extracted some payment for it – Italy is a rich country, has bigger GDP than Russia, and can totally pay.

Cyrano , says: Show Comment March 26, 2020 at 8:28 pm GMT
@Felix Keverich I would have to disagree with you on this, my friend. Italy is famous for being one of the most communist friendly countries in the western world. During "communism" Italy's Fiat gave the license to build their cars to many Eastern block countries: Poland, Yugoslavia, and yes USSR.

The original Lada was nothing else but Fiat 124 model. As a sign of gratitude the Russians even renamed the city where the Lada was being made into Togliatti – after an Italian communist. I think the friendship and respect between Italy and Russia goes way back, and now the Russians are just trying to continue that tradition by helping as much as they can Italy in these difficult times.

NoseytheDuke , says: Show Comment March 27, 2020 at 1:38 am GMT
@Felix Keverich Soft power is much. much cheaper than hard power. Russia has been constantly demonised in the West and a show of compassion of this magnitude reveals the lies for what they are. It will be much more difficult to garner support for harsh measures against Russians when people everywhere see them as being "just like us". This is especially true of Europe whose support is very much needed by the US and it's minions like the UK, Poland and the usual flunkies.

Why did you label Cyrano's response to you to be trolling? It was polite and sincere, I thought.

csucsu , says: Show Comment March 27, 2020 at 4:46 am GMT
@Felix Keverich If a Russian military gaining experience against an unknown enemy , isn't
that a form of payment ?
I am not a Russian , but I am sure your president knows what he is doing.
yurivku , says: Show Comment March 27, 2020 at 10:57 am GMT
@Cyrano As a Russian I do support this action, despite it obviously will have no positive changes in Italy's policy.
Not all Russians are like Felix (if he's really Russian, which I'm not sure).

[Mar 28, 2020] The Prosecutor General Office of Ukraine reportedly plans to arrest two prominent recent members of the parliament and far right activists on charges of their involvement in the Maidan massacre. The Ukrainian media reports that Parasiuk has already disappeared.

Mar 28, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

1union , Mar 28 2020 0:40 utc | 69

As reported by Ivan Katchanovski on Facebook:

The Prosecutor General Office of Ukraine reportedly plans to arrest two prominent recent members of the parliament and far right activists on charges of their involvement in the Maidan massacre.

The Ukrainian media reports citing anonymous sources in the Prosecutor General Office of Ukraine that they plan to charge Volodymyr Parasiuk with the massacre of the Berkut policemen on February 20, 2014, and Tetiana Chornovol with a deadly arson of the Party of Regions office that resulted in killing of a computer admin there on February 18, 2014.

My studies concerning the Maidan massacre and the far right in Ukraine found that the Parasiuk-led company of Maidan snipers was involved in the Maidan massacre and that Chornovol and far right Maidan activists were involved in this deadly arson attack that involved the far right.

Both of them were hailed by the Ukrainian and even some Western media and politicians as Maidan and national heroes, while their involvement in the Maidan massacre and the far right background were deliberately ignored or denied. Parasiuk was affiliated with the far right Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists and Svoboda before the Maidan and was a company commander in the Right Sector-led Dnipro paramilitary battalion after the Maidan. Chornovol was an activist of the far right UNA-UNSO before the Maidan and in the Fatherland/Peoples Front during and after the Maidan. The Ukrainian media reports that Parasiuk has already disappeared.

[Mar 25, 2020] A Brand New Military What an ass!

Mar 25, 2020 | turcopolier.typepad.com

Just heard the orange god deliver this line at the daily CODIV-19 task force briefing. For this fool, the military is a pile of new "stuff," He bought it, he paid for the "stuff" so, he has created a "brand new military." What about the people who served throughout the miserably stupid war in Iraq and the equally stupid post 2009 attempt to pacify Afghanistan, a country that never was and never will be. Think of the money and blood that we pissed away there. Even the Pompous one sees the necessity to withdraw our support from the wretches who run the government there or pretend to do that. Or perhaps Trump told him to stick it to them, at long last. Trump's experience of "military service" was his corrective enrollment at a private military high school, but he has stated that he knows "all about it.

Someone remarked to me once that it had been a miracle that the US could create an army for WW2. I asked him in response what sort of occupation Marshall, Eisenhower, MacArthur and Patton had been involved with before the war. Shoe sales? Gas station ownership" Insurance sales? What?

It would be tempting to think that one might vote for the Democrat. Biden the demented? Sanders the Marxist dreamer? Cuomo the massive NY City creep egotist?

No, we Deplorables are stuck with El Trumpo. pl

Fred , 25 March 2020 at 07:13 PM

Col.,

"we Deplorables are stuck with El Trumpo."

On a bright note today is another day where Hilary is not President.

Deap , 25 March 2020 at 07:37 PM
If MSM were in the business of posting facts instead of partisan hyperbole, you would think the Dems would have run something far better than a Sanders or a Biden at this particular juncture of history.

So did we get are handed a choice among "deplorables"; or an echo of equal deplorables. Right now, I will continue to dance with the gal who brung me. Trump is seasoning well and growing into the job. I would like to see what his next four years will bring. He knows the inside game now.

Who was it who said ask a government insider to do something and you get a string of excuses why it can't be done. Demurr to a business person who asks to get something done, and he/she will say fine, now go find me someone who can get it done. KAG 2020.

[Mar 25, 2020] The judge in the MH17 trial has issued an order for the US satelite data showing images of the Buk missile being launched to be made available.

Mar 25, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

ADKC , Mar 24 2020 17:21 utc | 22

The judge in the MH17 trial has issued an order for the US satelite data showing images of the Buk missile being launched to be made available. If the prosecution is unable (or refuses) to produce these images then this would strongly indicate that:

1. There was no Buk and MH17 was shot down by a Ukrainian jet (which the very first, on the ground, eyewitnesses indicated).

2. The US was involved in this crime.

JUDGE DROPS A BOMBSHELL IN MH17 TRIAL – DUTCH PROSECUTORS CONCEAL COURT ORDER TO PRODUCE US SATELLITE DATA ALLEGEDLY SHOWING BUK MISSILE FIRING (John Helmer)

Peter AU1 , Mar 24 2020 17:58 utc | 24

ADKC 22

I tend to think US does have sat recording of the missile. It will show launch flare and rocket burn. It was quite clear by what Kerry said that this is what their sats pick up. Launch flare will show launch position to within a few meters.

Robert Parry did a piece on it a few weeks after the shootdown. His contact in the US intel thought sat pics of the position were showing Ukraine military.

ADKC , Mar 24 2020 19:29 utc | 40
Perter AU1 @24

This is what Kerry said within a few days of the MH17 downing:

"We saw the take-off. We saw the trajectory. We saw the hit. We saw this aeroplane disappear from the radar screens. So there is really no mystery about where it came from and where these weapons have come from."

But still, nearly 6 years later, no evidence has been provided? Surely you can see how inauthentic Kerry's statement is? Perhaps, Kerry could clear the matter up by being a witness at the MH17 trial?

Robert Parry's CIA source feels like an authorised leak and psyop exercise that reinforces the idea of a Buk and expresses concern about the possibility of Ukrainian military involvement (the true purpose of which is to create distance and absolve the US) whilst at the same time being meaningless and of no real value.

You "tend" to believe Kerry and a CIA leak and discount what ordinary Ukrainians witnessed on the day of the shootdown? Why????

[Mar 24, 2020] Western Journalists Really Want There to be a Huge Corona Epidemic in Russia by Anatoly Karlin

Mar 24, 2020 | www.unz.com

The stream of articles suggesting that Russia is covering up its Corona numbers has increased from a stream to a veritable flood:

Russia's coronavirus count under scrutiny as Putin government denies hiding cases Moscow Times: Russia Says It Has Very Few Coronavirus Cases. The Numbers Don't Tell the Full Story. Reuters: Sharp increase in Moscow pneumonia cases fuels fears over coronavirus statistics Business Insider: Doctors in Russia are accusing the government of covering up its coronavirus outbreak and denying them protective equipment CNN: Why does Russia, population 146 million, have fewer coronavirus cases than Luxembourg? Financial Times: Vladimir Putin keeps political plan on track despite virus crisis

Let's take a look at that last article , written by FT's Henry Foy today, and one of the more balanced (read: less PDS-afflicted) journalists doing the Russia beat (not to mention the most prominent in the above sample, having scored an exclusive interview with Putin in 2019).

"The present number of patients with coronavirus will be hidden from us," said Anastasia Vasilieva, chairman of Doctors' Alliance, a Russian lobby group affiliated with opposition politician Alexei Navalny.

Now Foy, to his credit, at least has the journalistic integrity to acknowledge that this doctors' group (which I have never heard of before now) is affiliated with Navalny, whose entire shtick is to oppose everything and anything the Kremlin does.

A political tilt that its chairwoman helpfully confirms:

"The value of human life for our president is nil . . . We don't want to admit to any pandemic," said Ms Vasilieva. "We know of hospitals that are completely full and nurses who are asked to sew face masks from gauze."

***

But otherwise it follows the usual template on Russia COVID-19 coverage.

She claimed Moscow was instead classifying cases of the virus as pneumonia, the incidence of which increased by almost 40 per cent in January compared with a year previously, government data showed.

The aim here is to insinuate that there was a raging coronavirus epidemic camouflaged as the flu from as early as January 2020.

Oh Corona, where to start.

1. Flu mortality fluctuates wildly season to season by a factor of as high as 4x . So this is a perfectly meaningless fact from the outset.

2. Even China's epidemic only broke 1,000 cases in January 25. Where were Russians getting infected??

3. If this was true, it is Russia, not Italy, that would be the center of the COVID-19 epidemic now -- something that would certainly be noticed, e.g. in overflowing hospitals (no sign of that to date) or in exported cases (but that was all China in February, and predominantly Italy, Iran, and other EU nations now). It is Britons that Vietnam has started barring ten days ago, not Russians.

Here's what I guess happened. People got agitated by reports from China, and were more likely to consult doctors, producing more flu diagnoses. Even though the actual chance of Russians having COVID-19 in January if they hadn't been to Wuhan was on the order of a meteorite hitting them on the head.

While other foreign leaders have steeled their citizens for a long crisis and have spoken of a "war" against the pandemic, Mr Putin has played down the threat and urged citizens to remain calm in an effort to minimise panic -- and ensure the nationwide ballot on April 22 takes place.

"The virus is a challenge and comes at a very bad moment for him," said Tatiana Stanovaya, founder of R. Politik, a political analyst. "Putin doesn't want to postpone and is insisting that the referendum takes place as soon as possible . . . The longer they wait, the more risks will appear."

LOL. Trump was saying Corona was fake news/nothingburger up until the end of February.

The US epidemic (22k cases) is about two orders of magnitude more advanced than Russia's (306 cases), but most states have continued to hold primaries for the Dem nomination.

And in any case Putin has allowed the possibility that the April 22 Constitutional Referendum may be postponed. There's no indication it's a hard, immovable date.

At the same time, Mr Putin has sought to project an image of control, continuing with his diary of local visits and meetings with senior officials, shaking hands and never wearing a face mask.

Although it would be nice for Putin to set a better example, this is the rule, internationally -- not the exception. Stressing this is so petty, LOL.

"No matter what happens in the next 35 days, they have to lie, hush up, and deny. It doesn't matter at all what really will happen to coronavirus in Russia, whether there will be a moderate outbreak or tens of thousands are killed," said Igor Pitsyn, a doctor in Yaroslavl, a city 250km north-east of Moscow.

"By Putin's decree all information about this is declared a state secret until April 22 . . . This 'nationwide vote' will be held at all costs."

First time I hear of this. Searching "путин коронавирус гостайна" doesn't produce any relevant results. This doctor must have some very high placed sources.

Or perhaps Foy had to travel all the way to Yaroslavl to get a sufficiently juicy quote.

While officials have cited the low number as proof of the success of swiftly closing its border with China in January and steadily cutting flights to affected countries, experts have questioned how the country has proved far more immune than almost any other. Neighbouring Belarus has five times more infections per capita than Russia, and France, which has roughly half Russia's population, has more than 50 times the number of cases.

Russia doesn't have large numbers of Gastarbeiters in the EU, unlike Belarus. Our Belorussian commenters also tell us that there are next to no control measures in place.

But Ukraine has perhaps 20x more Gastarbeiters in the EU than Belarus, and yet 2 days ago reported only 1/3 as many Corona cases (16 vs. 51). Which suggests where Western journalists covering Eastern Europe should really focus their attention .

If they, you know, cared about the Corona situation in Eastern Europe. As opposed to promoting the US line that Russia bad and China bad.

***

Incidentally, an update on Ukraine, two days after my alarm-raising article , in which I suggested that it's likely there's a big cluster developing undetected in Ukraine.

Even though testing in Ukraine remains extremely patchy -- even in per capita terms, its ~500 tests are two orders of magnitude lower than Russia's ~150k, or for that matter Belarus' ~16k -- the past two days have seen a surge of new cases from 16 to 41. The majority of those cases, some 25 of them, are concentrated in Chernivtsi oblast, which also saw the death of a 33 year old woman from existing problems magnified by the coronavirus.

The unlikelihood of such a mortality profile, coupled with the flood of new cases despite continued low testing rates, strongly suggests that this is just the tip of the iceberg, and that a cluster is developing in Chernivtsi oblast.

This suggestion is backed up by an observation by Twitter user from_kherson :

There's a reason Chernivtsi has so many cases -- large # of people go to Italy for work.

An acquaintance of mine from there confirmed his business partner just tested positive for the virus.

But just in case you think I am piling on to Ukraine because of my own political obsessions you would be mistaken.

I will say that after Ukraine, probably the second biggest undetected Corona timebomb in Europe may be Serbia. Unfortunately, the Wikipedia page on COVID-19 testing doesn't have information for Serbia. However, one of my Serbian friends on Thursday wrote me that:

We are still testing around 50 per day, with 1/5 being positive

So both the intensity of testing and the rate of positives is similar to Ukraine.

This Friday, he continued:

We still have competent health care workers (the decision not to test the wider population is purely political, as was the decision no to close schools until 5 days ago), relatively functioning health care system, about 1500 respirators on a population that is 7+ million.

On the other hand, we have the second lowest reported total test volume anywhere in the world, after Malorossiya :), at 545 total as of this morning, one of the highest positive rates per 1000 tests (after Italy, Spain, Ecuador and the Philippines). We have seen an influx of over 250 000 gastarbeiters from Western Europe in the past 10 days Many people are breaking the 14 day mandatory self isolation. When I say many, I'm talking about thousands every day

We have 3 things potentially on our side. God, warmth, and Sun. Or it's all just God?

And to think that Serbia was one of the first countries in the world to eradicate smallpox in the 1830s Under the lifelong illiterate knyaz Miloš

The large number of Gastarbeiters in Western Europe, most of whom are now going to be let go, is another similarity that Serbia shares with Ukraine. And is something that will be a very problematic issue going forwards.

Fortunately, it appears that China (and Russia ) are going to bail Serbia out with test kits.

Extraordinary address the president of Serbia, the largest #EU membership candidate now banned from importing medical kit. "European solidarity does not exist. It was a fairy-tale the only country who can help us out of this difficult situation is China." #coronavirus https://t.co/JTbtPCS6NK 

-- Bojan Pancevski (@bopanc) March 16, 2020

Despite their rather different geopolitical viewpoints, European attitudes to both Serbia and the Ukraine are quite similar. They are to be exploited to the extent they are useful; otherwise discarded as needed. It's a lesson they should mull over.

Dmitry , says: Show Comment March 21, 2020 at 11:11 pm GMT

Why are you sensitive about what some article said in an American newspaper about Russia? Who cares? Half of articles in Russian websites are often ten times more stupid than even articles in American websites (which are already stupid), and people in America don't care about that.

Also, I read only CNN's article on the topic, and I notice it follows the pattern that CNN report more accurately outside America, than they do in America. I.e. They are more objective (like most people) writing about things which are far away from them
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/03/21/europe/putin-coronavirus-russia-intl/index.html

Felix Keverich , says: Show Comment March 21, 2020 at 11:37 pm GMT

Business Insider: Doctors in Russia are accusing the government of covering up its coronavirus outbreak and denying them protective equipment

I have to say that on reddit this kind of conspiratorial crap gets a LOT of interest and upvotes, an order of magnitude more upvotes than the factual Russian news. It seems that a large chunk of Western public feels better about themselves and their situation, "knowing" that there is terrible epidemic going on in Russia.

So these articles are actually having therapeutic effect on Western societies: ordinary people in West take comfort in [imaginary] Russian suffering.

Dmitry , says: Show Comment March 21, 2020 at 11:40 pm GMT
Serbia and Ukraine should have less developed epidemic of coronavirus, compared to most European countries, as they are one of the minority of European countries which is not in the EU.

As a result, they should have less per capita connectivity to Northern Italy, that is the "staging point" for the coronavirus epidemic's invasion into Europe.

Well, perhaps I am wrong about Serbia, as it is a neighbouring country to Italy. But the EU has a very intense labour mobility and incredibly amount of flights between themselves, if we would look at flightradar on a normal week.

Of course, now flightradar is pretty crazy and not quite representative of last month. https://www.flightradar24.com/59.77,29.75/8

But EU is still covered by flights. While planes are generally avoiding Serbia and Ukraine. Russia is almost disconnected from Europe now by planes (except for cargo planes). However, even in normal, pre-Coronavirus times, Russia (as well as Ukraine) is far more disconnected than any EU country, and is never blanketed by flights on flightradar in the same way as Europe.

Perhaps Serbia still receives a lot of entry by people in buses and cars.

Aedib , says: Show Comment March 22, 2020 at 12:24 am GMT
Wishing the virus to hit hard Russia is a way Westerners try to cover their incompetence. There is an explosion of new cases in the USA but the American MSM keeps its Russophobe obsession.

Today new cases in USA reached the numbers of Italy

Mikhail , says: Website Show Comment March 22, 2020 at 12:36 am GMT
@Anatoly Karlin From the MSN homepage:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/why-does-russia-population-144-million-have-fewer-coronavirus-cases-than-luxembourg/ar-BB11vhDw?li=BBnb7Kz

Mikhail , says: Website Show Comment March 22, 2020 at 12:47 am GMT
In line:

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/coronavirus-coming-russia-134797

Not among the worst:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/20/world/europe/russia-coronavirus-covid-19.html

utu , says: Show Comment March 22, 2020 at 4:35 am GMT
https://www.rt.com/russia/483744-russia-doctor-coronavirus-holiday/
" A leading infectious diseases specialist in Russia's southern Stavropol region endangered the lives of dozens of her colleagues and students by failing to self-quarantine after a holiday in Spain, where she contracted coronavirus."
last straw , says: Show Comment March 22, 2020 at 4:41 am GMT
I think some Western journalists also want to see a second wave in China/Asia.
JimDandy , says: Show Comment March 22, 2020 at 4:57 am GMT
Just read the headline and thought, "Western journalists really want there to be a huge corona epidemic in America ."

We all remember Bill Maher, to his credit, admitting to wanting what so many Progressives pray for -- a brutal recession that would sink Tump's chances of reelection -- but I am continually astounded by the fact that the MSM's hysterical, cult-like fervor for destroying Trump, even to the tragic detriment of the American people, simply will not exhaust itself. It is, if you will, a virus that keeps mutating into more and more virulent strains.

I think American-journalist-as-suicide-bomber is the number one potential threat to the United States, and preventing this should be the FBI's number one priority. Thx.

Alfa158 , says: Show Comment March 22, 2020 at 7:33 am GMT
@yakushimaru The Chinese economy has at least one good thing going for it. They are the world's manufacturing floor. Ultimately they can still make things unlike the US which has hollowed itself out. Refilling the world supply chain gives them an advantage in recovering faster than the US will.
JL , says: Show Comment March 22, 2020 at 8:04 am GMT
@Dmitry Don't be silly, there are entire organizations in the West dedicated to fact checking Russian news agencies and publishing their mistakes. So Anatoly's counterparts in the West do seem to care, they seem to care very much. Furthermore, there is the asymmetry between the geopolitical power of the two countries which makes what Americans write about Russia much more important than the inverse.

AK has been covering this topic for years, so it may not be interesting to you, but it is to him. And we come here, partly, because he writes about what he wants to, not what others want him to. You, yourself, pointed this out.

Realist , says: Show Comment March 22, 2020 at 11:33 am GMT

Western Journalists Really Want There to be a Huge Corona Epidemic in Russia

Correction: The Deep State Really Want There to be a Huge Corona Epidemic in Russia and China.

Beckow , says: Show Comment March 22, 2020 at 12:07 pm GMT
Western media openly wishing that a plague strikes Russia is very low class. It has a minor therapeutic role for the West to show that the evil ones are also suffering. But it is basically a continuing descent into hysteria. Next we will hear that Putin was spotted poisoning wells in Italy. (Sneaky bastard, probably used a face-mask, he is after all a trained KGB spy.)

Regarding facts: it is a truism that all numbers are understated. There must be at this point millions of people around the world who have been exposed and most will never know about it. Corona hurts the old and the sick, most other people probably wouldn't know it was happening without the media. In a preventive way it might actually benefit young, healthy people to be exposed when their bodies can develop immunity -- you don't in general get the same virus twice.

But a decision was made to protect our elders and it is a humane thing to do. And the usual suspects can't avoid their low class ideological manias, attacking China, Russia and/or Trump. These days they mostly work in the Western media. One wonders how that happened.

LondonBob , says: Show Comment March 22, 2020 at 12:16 pm GMT
@Aedib That Russia proves, like China, to be more competent again is another nail in the coffin for the ruling sixties liberal ideology.
Realist , says: Show Comment March 22, 2020 at 12:50 pm GMT
@LondonBob Another excellent article by Caitlin Johnstone.

https://medium.com/@caityjohnstone/liberal-npcs-hate-russia-conservative-npcs-hate-china-9b4ac2f853

Ms Karlin-Gerard , says: Show Comment March 22, 2020 at 1:50 pm GMT
@utu This was actually going to be the subject of my next post. She is the chief infectious disease doctor for Stavropol!

She went to Madrid , from March 6th- March 9th- the exact period when cases in Spain started ballooning up (420 went to 1200)

She has infected 11 other people, at least, in Stavropol and also taken part in a conference there where about 1000 people attended.

I don't know if it was definitely a holiday -- sure, those are weekend dates and Madrid is a wonderful place but infections there then still exceeded
the number in Russia now.

Dacian Julien Soros , says: Show Comment March 22, 2020 at 2:54 pm GMT
This weaponizing of random indignation is a classic tool of the Western propaganda. In Romania, we heard for a decade how the national-populists masquerading as socialists are to blame for the lack of highways. It's been a few years since idiot Romanians gather in random cities to complain that their city is not yet hooked to the Austro-Hungarian highway system, despite the lack of traffic between their city and Austro-Hungary.

It is my understanding that, once highway construction will start, there will be protests about natural or archeological treasures presumably endangered by the construction. It has been decently working in Russia, with that Khimki forest.

Anything that can be thrown at a government threatening to leave the NWO will be used. It's even worse for governments that are already one foot out, like Russia / China, or completely out, like Iran / North Korea. Putin will be blamed for epidemics, earthquakes, tsunamis, and even eclipses. If an earthquake would kill only a few, we will hear about "failure to respond". If the earthquake doesn't kill anybody. we will be told that Putin exploited it for propaganda.

One of the ways that CIA and Soros use, in order to weaponize Romania's presumed lack of highways, is to pay some useful idiots, who call themselves "The Association for the Betterment of Highways", "The Pro-Infrastructura Brigade", and so on. Most of these NGOs consist of a single person, who posts videos of them ranting next to a construction site. Using the model that BoJo used for the upcoming marriage (three men and one dog), the more Soros/CIA-resistant types call them "The One-Incel-And-His-Drone Association".

By that same standard, I suspect we call this Doctors' Alliance "Vasilievna-and-her-thermometer Association". Whatever she says about Moscow hospitals is probably informed by her thermometer anyway. I doubt you can tell how things are in a 10-million city, especially if you are a marginal clown.

Is she an ophthalmologist, like The Part-Time Virologist Martyr of Wuhan? Dentist, perhaps?

[Mar 24, 2020] Western vs Russian propaganda

Mar 24, 2020 | www.unz.com

Ms Karlin-Gerard , says: Show Comment March 23, 2020 at 12:32 am GMT

@Dmitry Can you show me even ONE article or report from Izvestiya, life, kp. Vz, RBK, vesti, Channel 1 etc that is stupid about the west? I can't because most of them are extremely well written.
The inverse situation? . I have just read 3 cretinous western lie reports about Russia/coronavirus in the last half an hour! Each one born out of jealousy or CIA psyops There is no comparison to make at all. You are doing false equivalence.

Gayropa DOES exist. It is a thing, an ideology

Your premise is absurd-50 % because Russian journalists are a lot more intellectual than their western counterparts . and the other 50 % is quite naturally because millions of Russians have closely admired or studied or been influenced by western practises and popular culture in the last 30 years .. than vice versa.

Kiselyov has had an American wife, speaks English, family in Germany and has done many excellent reports on western countries.

Brilyev speaks perfect English and is a British citizen.

Solovyov knows Italy and the US very well and on his talk shows he has done many objective, constructive/positive comments about American business climate and bureaucracy, for instance.

Can you compare any of those guys to their dumb as f ** k western counterparts trying to do a report on Russia?

Different matter if you are talking about RT – that is lowest of the low, anti-russian, garbage.

who cares? Half of Russian articles are 10 times more stupid than US ones

Who cares ? Because the culmination of these deceitful idiot scumbag stories is what creates the momentum to ban Russia from the Olympics based on "collective" not individual punishment , pull Ukraine away from Russia, make a friend of mine be too scared to come to Russia on holiday because "the police will arrest you there for no reason" BS.,dissuade investors from billions in investment because of PR, not practical reasons. create the conditions so that self-discrediting freaks like Browder and Rodchenkov can say any BS as a pretext to sanction russia with zero chance of getting refuted because of the "they will get killed" by Russian agents if they go into the public (whilst going to the public) theory- a hypothesis based on other lie reporting.

Russian media will make clear that its a disgrace the number of people the US police shoot dead each year- but they won't say or imply that Russian tourists will get shot by US police or dissuade them from going on holiday there.

[Mar 24, 2020] "Anastasia Vasilieva and her thermometer" NGO

Mar 24, 2020 | www.unz.com

Let's take a look at that last article , written by FT's Henry Foy today, and one of the more balanced (read: less PDS-afflicted) journalists doing the Russia beat (not to mention the most prominent in the above sample, having scored an exclusive interview with Putin in 2019).

"The present number of patients with coronavirus will be hidden from us," said Anastasia Vasilieva, chairman of Doctors' Alliance, a Russian lobby group affiliated with opposition politician Alexei Navalny.

Now Foy, to his credit, at least has the journalistic integrity to acknowledge that this doctors' group (which I have never heard of before now) is affiliated with Navalny, whose entire shtick is to oppose everything and anything the Kremlin does.

A political tilt that its chairwoman helpfully confirms:

"The value of human life for our president is nil . . . We don't want to admit to any pandemic," said Ms Vasilieva. "We know of hospitals that are completely full and nurses who are asked to sew face masks from gauze."

Dacian Julien Soros , says: Show Comment March 22, 2020 at 2:54 pm GMT

This weaponizing of random indignation is a classic tool of the Western propaganda. In Romania, we heard for a decade how the national-populists masquerading as socialists are to blame for the lack of highways. It's been a few years since idiot Romanians gather in random cities to complain that their city is not yet hooked to the Austro-Hungarian highway system, despite the lack of traffic between their city and Austro-Hungary.

It is my understanding that, once highway construction will start, there will be protests about natural or archeological treasures presumably endangered by the construction. It has been decently working in Russia, with that Khimki forest.

Anything that can be thrown at a government threatening to leave the NWO will be used. It's even worse for governments that are already one foot out, like Russia / China, or completely out, like Iran / North Korea. Putin will be blamed for epidemics, earthquakes, tsunamis, and even eclipses. If an earthquake would kill only a few, we will hear about "failure to respond". If the earthquake doesn't kill anybody. we will be told that Putin exploited it for propaganda.

One of the ways that CIA and Soros use, in order to weaponize Romania's presumed lack of highways, is to pay some useful idiots, who call themselves "The Association for the Betterment of Highways", "The Pro-Infrastructura Brigade", and so on. Most of these NGOs consist of a single person, who posts videos of them ranting next to a construction site. Using the model that BoJo used for the upcoming marriage (three men and one dog), the more Soros/CIA-resistant types call them "The One-Incel-And-His-Drone Association".

By that same standard, I suspect we call this Doctors' Alliance "Vasilievna-and-her-thermometer Association". Whatever she says about Moscow hospitals is probably informed by her thermometer anyway. I doubt you can tell how things are in a 10-million city, especially if you are a marginal clown.

Is she an ophthalmologist, like The Part-Time Virologist Martyr of Wuhan? Dentist, perhaps?

[Mar 21, 2020] RUSSIAN FEDERATION SITREP 19 MARCH 2020 (by Patrick Armstrong) - Sic Semper Tyrannis

Mar 21, 2020 | turcopolier.typepad.com

RUSSIAN FEDERATION SITREP 19 MARCH 2020 (by Patrick Armstrong)


(NOTE: Away in Feb, felled by severe cold this moth. Not.not CV)

PUTIN 4EVER. ( Russian Constitution text .) In January Putin suggested some amendments to the Constitution to be discussed and put to national vote in a referendum. Which is, I suppose, close enough to the amending procedure set out in Chapter 9. A commission was quickly set up and amendment suggestions came in. The final ones reflected the rather traditionalist flavour of Russia – marriage is between a man and a woman, a reference to God, indissolubility of Russian territory and some social guarantees. ( Wikipedia list .)

Two proposals reflect what Russia has learned in the three decades since the first version. Russian legislation will now take primacy over international law and office holders cannot have dual citizenship or foreign residency permits. This is understandable: the original text had been written at a time when Russians were much more hopeful about the outside world than they are now: grim experience has taught them that "international institutions" are another stick to beat them with. (And, given the chaos and destruction that the self-proclaimed " Rules-Based International Order" has produced, even laudable.)

Among the changes suggested by Putin and approved was the removal from Article 81.3 of "for more than two terms running"; in short two terms only for a president. So what we were looking at was a slightly less president-dominated system with a two-term president, the end of naïve expectations about the " Rules-Based International Order " and some declarations to make conservatives happy.

(I do not now remember why the term limit was in the Constitution – my vague memory is that Western advisors insisted on it so as to reduce dictatorship possibilities. There were, I remember, much fear of the Communists coming back in those days. But, a term limit is not normal world practice and most countries don't worry about it – MacKenzie King was PM of Canada for more than 21 years.)

So far so good and all reasonable enough and sensible.

Enter Valentina Tereshkova . Since we're changing the Constitution, said she, then we should start the presidential term counting clock all over again. In other words, when Putin finishes this term in 2024, he can run twice more. Did she think this up on her own or was she put up to it? No one seems to know. Putin addressed the Duma, said it was OK with him if the Constitutional Court approved. Which it did. At this point it is reasonable to observe that it is hardly "constitutional" if you rule that any president can restart the clock by making a few twiddles to the Constitution, is it?

The full package has not yet been approved by a referendum on 22 April but all indications are that it will be: a recent poll showed that a solid majority was quite happy to have Putin stay in office. Meretriciously the voters will be asked to approve the whole package or nothing .

So, what to say about all this? There are, as usual, several theories. First are those who have said from the beginning that Putin would contrive a way to stay on forever. Well, there isn't much of a retort to them except to to wonder why he didn't just amend Article 81.3, is there? Another theory holds that Putin feels he has to stay on because only he can manage things in the dangerous times of the decline of the Imperium Americanum. In his speech to the Duma he referred to Roosevelt's breaking the two-term custom, adding: " When a country is going through such upheavals and such difficulties (in our case we have not yet overcome all the problems since the USSR, this is also clear), stability may be more important and must be given priority. " Well, that decline is undeniably dangerous and there will be many crisis points; but it will take several dangerous decades and Putin certainly won't be here when the power earthquake is finally over. And there's always some crisis, somewhere. Another idea is that what he has really done is leave the possibility of running again thereby avoiding a lame duck period before he does go in 2024. Maybe: Putin is coy in this interview .

But, altogether, the manoeuvre leaves a bad taste in the mouth: manipulative, shabby, slipshod, legal only in the most pedantic sense, arbitrary, second-rate and poorly thought out. Very disappointing to someone who thought Putin did not want to be the Turkmenbashi of Russia.

The Twisted Genius , 19 March 2020 at 05:50 PM

Patrick, thanks for the detailed explanation of this move. I share your disappointment, but I'm not at all surprised. The earlier constitutional changes left an opening for Putin to continue ruling Russia. This change just makes that opening into a four lane highway. To be fair, I think the majority of politicians vying to lead their countries think they are their countries' best hope. Putin is no different.

When the USSR first collapsed, the void was immediately filled by many Academy of Science technicians. That didn't last long. They were quickly shunted aside by former CPSU members, a decidedly younger and more pragmatic bunch than the CPSU old guard, but with the same background. I knew some of the academics that were shunted aside. That's why I see only minor differences between the Russia of the Bolsheviki (as my great grandmother called all Russians) and today's Russia of the Russkii.

Hope you recover from your cold. SWMBO and I had colds for several weeks now and are fearful of being hauled off to an isolation ward if we cough in public.

Barbara Ann , 19 March 2020 at 06:02 PM
Good to see you back Patrick.

"..office holders cannot have dual citizenship or foreign residency permits." No constitution is complete without similar safeguards IMO. Compare and contrast with Iraq, where a dual US citizen, formerly of Bremmer's CPA no less, has just been appointed PM-designate. Perhaps one day Iraq too will get to exert sovereignty over its own constitution.

Do you have any thoughts on the OPEC+ bust up? Have Putin & MBS cooked this up together to challenge the petrodollar or just poach market share? Thanks.

Voatboy , 19 March 2020 at 06:27 PM
>, legal only in the most pedantic sense,

I am not a lawyer, but all modern laws seem corrupt to me. All modern laws seem to uphold the letter of the law and subvert the spirit of the law. All modem laws seem to be legal only in a pedantic sense. Let us pray that my perception is wrong about this, or at least let us hope that most people don't share my perception, because a nation state that is widely perceived to be without meaningful law lacks legitimacy, and thus is unstable.

Patrick Armstrong , 19 March 2020 at 07:01 PM
OIL price.
My first thoughts are 1) yes Putin & Co have decided that it's time to strike at the US 2) lower energy prices will help China a) recover from Covid b) take a big step forward. If so, the next punch may come from Beijing.

What's going on with MbS? Haven't a clue but I doubt he'll be smiling as the price war drags on.

Are we going through a Really Big Change Point? My thoughts when Covid appeared (and I'm collecting data) is that 2020 will be the year the West lost its mojo. No longer the Leader, the Most Competent, the Saviour.
For example this (all based on the prime directive that we're best https://www.statista.com/chart/19790/index-scores-by-level-of-preparation-to-respond-to-an-epidemic/?fbclid=IwAR2dmwOy9_c387cdrOL4f-PdXmr4aWSI684cJx3M98zm31wVIFdw_62tsZg). Hasn't worn well has it?

So maybe Putin is staying on because he's fired a barrage and wants to be around to mastermind the next stages.

JerseyJeffersonian , 19 March 2020 at 09:59 PM
Patrick,

I think that this oil thing is, indeed, aimed at the fracking "industry". Yes, it is impressive that it is done at all, but it is not now, nor will it ever be likely to be profitable. The yield so rapidly declines, that the capital investment required is not going to be recouped in the vast majority of instances. Thus far, the only thing that has kept it even marginally viable has been the oil price being high enough, coupled with the willingness of investors to set large sums of money on fire. Unless the whole thing were to be nationalized, and accepting plunging into a black hole of misallocated resources by the Fed (nothing new there, so never say never...), that sector is toast.

But I suspect that Putin has had enough of the Saudis, and the jihadi-supporting Gulfies, setting the Middle East ablaze with the sponsorship of this stuff made possible by the price of oil. This is a matter of national security for Russia, which has had to fight down Wahabbist types in their country, as well as in their near abroad. By slashing the oil price, they undermine that high price and the ability to both support the Wahabbists, and to content their growing and mostly unproductive home populations. I am quite sure that the Russians are also mindful of the threats made against them by the Gulfies around the time of the Sochi Olympics, and it is payback time now. They have helped fight the Islamists to a standstill, and now they are letting the Saudis & ilk reflect on the errors of their ways.

But the Russians are not just settling into a comfortably numb leaning on the Chinese. As recently clearly seen, China has some feet of clay, and all the big talk about the Belt & Road is scarcely a dome deal. Andrei Martyanov just put up a post about how the Russians are working on developing an access through Azerbaijan & Iran to the Indian Ocean, and thence to India, as well as many other points. It is The Grand Game Redux. And why not, because they are thereby not putting all of their eggs in the Chinese basket.

And pace McCain, being a gas station with nukes (but way, way more than that...) confers some real advantages. It comes down to EROEI, energy returned on energy invested, and not being limited to "tight oil" as a nationally, territorially controlled resource gives them a leg over. I think of money, in the context of a modern, technological society as nothing more than a proxy for access to energy, and currently it seems as if the Russians have it all over the US & Europe.

Big doings, and having such an experienced hand on the tiller, with the broad vision that Putin and his team exhibits is a material advantage. Why toss it away when your nation's sovereignty may depend on access to this asset?

Peter AU1 , 19 March 2020 at 10:16 PM
I very much doubt Putin will run for president again. His one request for change to the constitution was that "in a row" clause be removed. He has laid the foundations and more. There will be others who can continue the job.

When the government changed, some of the old guard government moved I think to the security council. Medvedev at least went to the security council. Putin spoke about it in the Tass interviews. If I recall correctly some new planning bodies were set up.
I suspect this is where Putin is planning to head at the end of his current term.

Fred , 19 March 2020 at 10:41 PM
"Russian legislation will now take primacy over international law and office holders cannot have dual citizenship or foreign residency permits"

A couple of ideas we need to return too ourselves.

"If so, the next punch may come from Beijing."

Yep, economic warfare from the East. We need to treat it as such.

Christian J Chuba , 20 March 2020 at 08:41 AM
"If the system that he and his team spent 20 years building doesn't work without him then it doesn't work."

Agreed. In the Oliver Stone interview, derided by his lessers in our MSM, asked a series of questions revealing Putin to be one of those micro-managers who can't delegate. Ironic that Yeltsin, who crushed Russia, managed to find an obscure St. Petersburg politician to succeed him to bring Russia back from ruin.

Any thoughts on how Russia was able to contain Coronavirus so well? I'm certain do more commerce w/China but Russia still has significant contact.

Patrick Armstrong , 20 March 2020 at 09:29 AM
As to Russia and Covid-19. As you may recall Moscow shut its borders pretty quickly -- long before the West did. I hear from contacts that if you arrive at Sheremetyevo, your temperature is taken immediately and other checks are made by people in hazmat suits. Again, anecdotal evidence says this isn't happening in the West. Moscow is building a big hospital (quickly although not as quickly as Beijing did.) Other factors I would suggest is that Russians by and large trust their govt and Moscow has serious civil defence preparations.
This piece makes interesting reading today. https://www.statista.com/chart/19790/index-scores-by-level-of-preparation-to-respond-to-an-epidemic/?fbclid=IwAR2dmwOy9_c387cdrOL4f-PdXmr4aWSI684cJx3M98zm31wVIFdw_62tsZg
Patrick Armstrong , 20 March 2020 at 10:30 AM
Of course there may be a simpler answer: looking across the pond, Putin sees an election between Biden (b Nov 1942) and Trump (b June 1946) and realises that he (b Oct 1952) is just at the start of his career.
Paul Anderson , 20 March 2020 at 11:23 AM
Patrick,
I have to largely agree with your coda. Chretien, King ... while I agree that there need be nothing sacrosanct about term limits, time waits for no man. I lean towards the lame duck thesis, because I suspect the man has to be tired and really would like to take a step back.

For instance, although the RF seems to be handling this as well as or better than the Western countries (low bar, I know), I have so far seen no evidence that V.V. Putin sees the COVID response as a strategically vital threat / opportunity. If Russia is able to emerge relatively quickly and whole, to join with China and East Asia among those that have demonstrated the efficacy of their cultural / civilizational models, this might prove decisive indeed, and might even succeed in prising Europe from the grip of the U.S. and the comprador Atlanticists.

With the medical diplomacy to Italy, France, Cuba, Venezuela ... China I think may already be acting on this. I've been surprised not to see more evidence of Russia / China solidarity and joint actions (pace the joint denunciation of Iran sanctions). But, then again, maybe the oil-price war is a coordinated element of this.

Though the decline of the Imperium will, as you say, not be the work of a day, this particular moment is as dangerous and turbulent as anything we've seen since the Cuban missile crisis. The slope of decline might be quite a bit steeper than any cautious thinker might have imagined just three months ago. Maybe he just can't commit to stepping back now. It does seem sloppy though. Be well, in whatever part of the Dominion that you happen to inhabit.

Sincerely
@EmpireinWinter

Joe Kowalski , 20 March 2020 at 01:38 PM
Patrick,
I would suggest that a much more important reason for the new presidential amendment in Russia is the likely, imminent collapse of the United States economy. You need to read and study Rotislav Ischenko's 2015 post which is as follows;
http://thesaker.is/time-is-running-out-for-pax-americanas-apologists/

In this post, Ischenko sees that some time in 2016 the U.S. will only get an "hard landing. He ends this post with:

"The point of no return will pass once and for all sometime in 2016, and America's elite will no longer be able to choose between the provisions of compromise and collapse. The only thing that they will then be able to do is to slam the door loudly, trying to drag the rest of the world after them into the abyss."

Knowledgeable analysts are writing that this collapse, because of the Coronavirus being a catalyst, will take place in 2020.

https://www.goldmoney.com/research/goldmoney-insights/the-journey-to-monetary-gold-and-silver

If the U.S. can stay in its current stagnation mode for the mid-term, IMO Russia would not have made plans to change the constitution in the way you reported. It's governance is in great shape, and I am confident that the new prime minister can continue Putin's work. If the U,.S. economy collapses, we have a different scenario. Putin is needed to manage the U.S. slamming the door when its economy drops into the abyss.

Patrick Armstrong , 20 March 2020 at 01:57 PM
There's a lot of ruin in a nation and the USA still has a lot left that isn't ruined.
But Covid is certainly going to kick it a step down (and the West too) and China will be kicked a step up; so it's a major tremor in the geopolitical tectonic plate movement.
So I'm sure that that's in there somewhere in the Putin Team's calculation. I do notice that when he talks about the oil price "war" he says "we have a solid safety margin for several years" which suggests a timeline of <5years.
The problem is that we/I are just speculating: nobody expected this. But we ARE dealing with a team that has shown it can think long term so it is certainly possible that they foresee (accurately IMO) that oil price+covid will be a bad combination for NATOland and the pilot wants to remain at the helm.

[Mar 17, 2020] Russia Strikes Back Where It Hurts American Oil by Scott Ritter

Mar 17, 2020 | www.theamericanconservative.com

R ussia and Saudi Arabia are engaged in an oil price war that has sent shockwaves around the world, causing the price of oil to tumble and threatening the financial stability, and even viability, of major international oil companies.

On the surface, this conflict appears to be a fight between two of the world's largest producers of oil over market share. This may, in fact, be the motive driving Saudi Arabia, which reacted to Russia's refusal to reduce its level of oil production by slashing the price it charged per barrel of oil and threatening to increase its oil production, thereby flooding the global market with cheap oil in an effort to attract customers away from competitors.

Russia's motives appear to be far different -- its target isn't Saudi Arabia, but rather American shale oil. After absorbing American sanctions that targeted the Russian energy sector, and working with global partners (including Saudi Arabia) to keep oil prices stable by reducing oil production even as the United States increased the amount of shale oil it sold on the world market, Russia had had enough. The advent of the Coronavirus global pandemic had significantly reduced the demand for oil around the world, stressing the American shale producers. Russia had been preparing for the eventuality of oil-based economic warfare with the United States. With U.S. shale producers knocked back on their heels, Russia viewed the time as being ripe to strike back. Russia's goal is simple: to make American shale oil producers " share the pain ".

The United States has been slapping sanctions on Russia for more than six years, ever since Russia took control (and later annexed) the Crimean Peninsula and threw its weight behind Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine. The first sanctions were issued on March 6, 2014, through Executive Order 13660 , targeting "persons who have asserted governmental authority in the Crimean region without the authorization of the Government of Ukraine that undermine democratic processes and institutions in Ukraine; threaten its peace, security, stability, sovereignty, and territorial integrity; and contribute to the misappropriation of its assets."

The most recent round of sanctions was announced by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on February 18, 2020, by sanctioning Rosneft Trading S.A., a Swiss-incorporated, Russian-owned oil brokerage firm, for operating in Venezuela's oil sector. The U.S. also recently targeted the Russian Nord Stream 2 and Turk Stream gas pipeline projects.

Russia had been signaling its displeasure over U.S. sanctions from the very beginning. In July 2014, Russian President Vladimir Putin warned that U.S. sanctions were "driving into a corner" relations between the two countries, threatening the "the long-term national interests of the U.S. government and people." Russia opted to ride out U.S. sanctions, in hopes that there might be a change of administrations following the 2016 U.S. Presidential elections. Russian President Vladimir Putin made it clear that he hoped the U.S. might elect someone whose policies would be more friendly toward Russia, and that once the field of candidates narrowed down to a choice between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, Putin favored Trump .

"Yes, I did," Putin remarked after the election, during a joint press conference with President Trump following a summit in Helsinki in July 2018. "Yes, I did. Because he talked about bringing the U.S.-Russia relationship back to normal."

Putin's comments only reinforced the opinions of those who embraced allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. Presidential election as fact and concluded that Putin had some sort of hold over Trump. Trump's continuous praise of Putin's leadership style only reinforced these concerns.

Even before he was inaugurated, Trump singled out Putin's refusal to respond in kind to President Obama's levying of sanctions based upon the assessment of the U.S. intelligence community that Russia had interfered in the election. "Great move on delay (by V. Putin) – I always knew he was very smart!" Trump Tweeted . Trump viewed the Obama sanctions as an effort to sabotage any chance of a Trump administration repairing relations with Russia, and interpreted Putin's refusal to engage, despite being pressured to do so by the Russian Parliament and Foreign Ministry, as a recognition of the same.

This sense of providing political space in the face of domestic pressure worked both ways. In January 2018, Putin tried to shield his relationship with President Trump by calling the release of a list containing some 200 names of persons close to the Russian government by the U.S. Treasury Department as a hostile and "stupid" move .

"Ordinary Russian citizens, employees and entire industries are behind each of those people and companies," Putin remarked. "So all 146 million people have essentially been put on this list. What is the point of this? I don't understand."

From the Russian perspective, the list highlighted the reality that the U.S. viewed the entire Russian government as an enemy and is a byproduct of the "political paranoia" on the part of U.S. lawmakers. The consequences of this, senior Russian officials warned, "will be toxic and undermine prospects for cooperation for years ahead."

While President Trump entered office fully intending to " get along with Russia ," including the possibility of relaxing the Obama-era sanctions , the reality of U.S.-Russian relations, especially as viewed from Congress, has been the strengthening of the Obama sanctions regime. These sanctions, strengthened over time by new measures signed off by Trump, have had a negative impact on the Russian economy, slowing growth and driving away foreign investment .

While Putin continued to show constraint in the face of these mounting sanctions, the recent targeting of Russia's energy sector represented a bridge too far. When Saudi pressure to cut oil production rates coincided with a global reduction in the demand for oil brought on by the Coronavirus crisis, Russia struck.

The timing of the Russian action is curious, especially given the amount of speculation that there was some sort of personal relationship between Trump and Putin that the Russian leader sought to preserve and carry over into a potential second term. But Putin had, for some time now, been signaling that his patience with Trump had run its course. When speaking to the press in June 2019 about the state of U.S.-Russian relations, Putin noted that "They (our relations) are going downhill, they are getting worse and worse," adding that "The current [i.e., Trump] administration has approved, in my opinion, several dozen decisions on sanctions against Russia in recent years."

By launching an oil price war on the eve of the American Presidential campaign season, Putin has sent as strong a signal as possible that he no longer views Trump as an asset, if in fact he ever did. Putin had hoped Trump could usher in positive change in the trajectory of relations between the two nations; this clearly had not happened. Instead, in the words of close Putin ally Igor Sechin , the chief executive of Russian oil giant Rosneft, the U.S. was using its considerable energy resources as a political weapon, ushering in an era of "power colonialism" that sought to expand U.S. oil production and market share at the expense of other nations.

From Russia's perspective, the growth in U.S. oil production -- which doubled in output from 2011 until 2019 -- and the emergence of the U.S. as a net exporter of oil, was directly linked to the suppression of oil export capability in nations such as Venezuela and Iran through the imposition of sanctions. While this could be tolerated when the target was a third party, once the U.S. set its sanctioning practices on Russian energy, the die was cast.

If the goal of the Russian-driven price war is to make U.S. shale companies "share the pain," they have already succeeded. A similar price war, initiated by Saudi Arabia in 2014 for the express purpose of suppressing U.S. shale oil production, failed, but only because investors were willing to prop up the stricken shale producers with massive loans and infusion of capital. For shale oil producers, who use an expensive methodology of extraction known as "fracking," to be economically viable, the breakeven price of oil per barrel needs to be between $40 and $60 dollars. This was the price range the Saudi's were hoping to sustain when they proposed the cuts in oil production that Russia rejected.

The U.S. shale oil producers, saddled by massive debt and high operational expenses, will suffer greatly in any sustained oil price war. Already, with the price of oil down to below $35 per barrel, there is talk of bankruptcy and massive job layoffs -- none of which bode well for Trump in the coming election.

It's clear that Russia has no intention of backing off anytime soon. According to the Russian Finance Ministry , said on Russia could weather oil prices of $25-30 per barrel for between six and ten years. One thing is for certain -- U.S. shale oil companies cannot.

In a sign that the Trump administration might be waking up to the reality of the predicament it faces, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin quietly met with Russia's Ambassador to the U.S., Anatoly Antonov. According to a read out from the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the two discussed economic sanctions, the Venezuelan economy, and the potential for "trade and investment." Mnuchin, the Russians noted, emphasized the "importance of orderly energy markets."

Russia is unlikely to fold anytime soon. As Admiral Josh Painter, a character in Tom Clancy's "The Hunt for Red October," famously said , "Russians don't take a dump without a plan."

Russia didn't enter its current course of action on a whim. Its goals are clearly stated -- to defeat U.S. shale oil -- and the costs of this effort, both economically and politically (up to and including having Trump lose the 2020 Presidential election) have all been calculated and considered in advance. The Russian Bear can only be toyed with for so long without generating a response. We now know what that response is; when the Empire strikes back, it hits hard.

Scott Ritter is a former Marine Corps intelligence officer who served in the former Soviet Union implementing arms control treaties, in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm, and in Iraq overseeing the disarmament of WMD. He is the author of several books, including his forthcoming, Scorpion King: America's Embrace of Nuclear Weapons From FDR to Trump (2020).

[Mar 15, 2020] US seeking to carve out Sunni state as its influence in Iraq wanes: Wehrmacht occupying Ukraine vs US occupying Iraq.

Mar 15, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Kali , Mar 14 2020 18:26 utc | 18

The neocons trying to control Trump are going to have a hard time this year because of the election. Trump knows his people voted for him because of his promises to get the troops back home. Of course the neocons want to build up more and more troops in Iraq or even split Iraq into 3 different countries. The Iraqi and Iranian leaders with the Syrians to a lesser degree will try to take advantage of Trump's dilemma. The Kurds are involved also. This is all explored by Pam Ho How Much Do You Suck (To lose a popularity contest with Saddam Hussein)

Willy2 , Mar 14 2020 18:32 utc | 19

- The US knows it "influence" is waning and tries to "carve out" a sunni "rump state" in North-West Iraq. First the US fights ISIS in that same area/region from the year 2014 onwards and now they are supposed to fight in FAVOUR of the sunnis/ISIS ?

"US seeking to carve out Sunni state as its influence in Iraq wanes"

https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/us-seeking-carve-out-sunni-state-its-influence-iraq-wanes

- Some politicians are recognizing that the killing of Qassam Sulemani has weakened the US position in the Middle East.

"Killing Soleimani made US 'weaker' in Middle East, US senator says".

https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/killing-soleimani-made-us-weaker-middle-east-us-senator-says

arata , Mar 14 2020 19:37 utc | 29
General McKenzie said they have bombed a civilian air port in Karbala was a right decision, Iraqi police force who were killed, they shouldn't be there!
See the video 13:00 onward.
Peter AU1 , Mar 14 2020 19:50 utc | 32
arata 29
Rueters had a piece on it which I linked in the last Iraq thread. Total yank arrogance and exceptionalism.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-iraq-security-usa-iran-retaliation-mi/iraq-condemns-u-s-air-strikes-warns-of-consequences-idUSKBN2101AD?il=0
""These locations that we struck are clear locations of terrorist bases," said Marine General Kenneth McKenzie, head of the U.S. military's Central Command.

"If Iraqis were there and if Iraqi military forces were there, I would say it's probably not a good idea to position yourself with Kataib Hezbollah in the wake of a strike that killed Americans and coalition members," he told a Pentagon news briefing."

dltravers , Mar 14 2020 21:40 utc | 40
Despite Trump the Iraq policy transcends his administration and will continue in some form in the future. There will be a continued presence in some form and in some part of the country. Our beloved ally in the region demands our presence.

They smartly keep the presence small with no draft remembering that is what took them out of Nam. An angry draft worthy populace, a counter culture disillusioned with the murder of their liberal anti war leadership by the state, and ample media coverage of the war carnage.

All of that is long gone, and even with the age of internet reporting the populace has been bought off with entertainment, amazon, porn, and bullshit.

Abe , Mar 15 2020 0:39 utc | 54
@43

Parallel is IMO very interesting, Wehrmacht occupying Ukraine and US occupying Iraq. In both cases there was minority that welcomed occupier with open arms, wanting to oppress majority of own country folks due to earlier grievances. In both cases, invader didn't want to bother with using that minority to own goals, as they saw them all as inferior race. And invader was in both cases more interested in conquering more powerful neighbor to the east.

Irony is that, if Nazi Germany/US didn't look at Ukraine/Iraq people as inferior race they could use them for own goal to fight Russia/Iran. But, dumb as they are, they stuck all those Ukrainians into camps(lot of them sympathizers to Germany/rabidly against Russia)/ disbanding ex. Saddam's army and made kernel of future anti US force into region, not to mention Kurdish question.


Peter AU1 , Mar 15 2020 0:39 utc | 55
53 Snake put up a link back up the thread.
https://www.presstv.com/Detail/2020/03/14/620858/Iraq-military-demands-foreign-forces-swiftly-withdraw-following-US-air-raids
"Iraqi lawmakers unanimously approved a bill on January 5, demanding the withdrawal of all foreign military forces..."

"Later on January 9, former Iraqi prime minister Adel Abdul-Mahdi called on the United States to dispatch a delegation to Baghdad tasked with formulating a mechanism for the move.

According to a statement released by his office at the time, Abdul-Mahdi "requested that delegates be sent to Iraq to set the mechanisms to implement the parliament's decision for the secure withdrawal of (foreign) forces from Iraq" in a phone call with US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo."

US in response moved to a few bases they intended to occupy and give the two finger salute to Iraq. Trump threatened sanctions and theft of Iraq's oil money which is in the US. Pentagon now moving patriots in.

Jackrabbit , Mar 15 2020 2:43 utc | 69
Question to b @53: ... it was a non-binding resolution.

It's "non-binding" on USA only because the Prime Minister conducts foreign policy and there's no current written basing agreement between Iraq and USA that can be terminated. The resolution demands that the Prime Minister arrange for the departure of US troops.

The resolution is binding on the Prime Minister because it was a valid vote in accordance with Iraqi Parliamentary procedure.

USA refused to discuss leaving Iraq and claimed that the Parliamentary vote was "non-binding" because it was unrepresentative (USA got their Sunni and Kurd sympathizers to boycott the vote). But Parliament still had a quorum, so the vote is legal and binding.

<> <> <> <> <> <>

Is it enforceable?

USA/NATO are very unlikely to leaving willingly. We are seeing the start of a civil war in Iraq because most Sunnis and Kurds support USA/NATO remaining while Shia want USA/NATO to leave.

!!

james , Mar 15 2020 2:36 utc | 67
just start with the first lie and go from their... usa / uk lied the world into going to war on iraq... and from their the lies just keep on getting stacked.. if you can't acknowledge the first lie, you probably are incapable of recognizing all the other lies that have been thrown on the same bullshit pile... one big pile of lies and bullshite - a specialty of the exceptional country..
james , Mar 15 2020 2:25 utc | 65
@ 63 question.. you like this usa style bullshit that buys politicians in iraq and when that doesn't work, they go on to the next attempt at installing a politician willing to agree to their bullshite? interesting bullshit concept of democracy if you ask me... everything has a price tag and honour is something you can pick up at the grocery store... right..

[Mar 13, 2020] US send 20,000 soldiers to Europe for killing practice (Defender Europe) while locking down US. Are they immune? How

Highly recommended!
Mar 13, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

charliechan , Mar 13 2020 20:36 utc | 115

charlie chan wonders why entire media world fear mongering.

The CDC test kits error 49% to positive.

And charlie chan not hear of one case of flu death. Did Corona Virus cure the flu?

US send 20,000 soldiers to Europe for killing practice (Defender Europe) while locking down US. Are they immune? How?

[Mar 13, 2020] Daffy Duck. cartoon was made in 1953 and like many Looney Tune cartoon's, they are an extreme parody of life. It dawned on me that this cartoon is an almost perfect description of US Military policy and action.

Highly recommended!
Mar 13, 2020 | thesaker.is

Vaughan on March 12, 2020 , · at 7:43 pm EST/EDT

Recently, I was watching the old Looney Tunes Cartoons with my Grandchild and we were watching, "Duck Dodges in the 21st and a Half Century"
I don't know if you've watched this cartoon starring Daffy Duck. You can view it here
https://vimeo.com/76668594

This cartoon was made in 1953 and like many Looney Tune cartoon's, they are an extreme parody of life. But while watching this cartoon, it dawned on me that this cartoon is an almost perfect description of US Military policy and action.
I could write an article on this but I think we'll leave it as a note with a snide laugh to be had by all.

Patricia Ormsby on March 12, 2020 , · at 8:16 pm EST/EDT
Laughter is one of the best medicines. Thank you for this!

[Mar 12, 2020] The Democratic Party Surrenders to Nostalgia by Bill Blum

Highly recommended!
Trump does not have a party with the program that at least pretends to pursue "socialism for a given ethnic group". He is more far right nationalist then national socialist. But to the extent neoliberalism can be viewed as neofascism Trump is neo-fascist, he definitly can be called a "national neoliberal."
Notable quotes:
"... I am nothing if not a realist. The idea that Sanders might have become the Democratic candidate was always a fantasy, not unlike my youthful dreams of one day becoming an NFL quarterback. Even after Sanders' triumph in the Nevada caucuses, I never thought the party establishment would ever allow a socialist -- even a mild social democratic one, such as Sanders -- to head its ticket. ..."
"... Of the two campaigns, Trump's will be decidedly more toxic. The "Make America Great Again" slogan that propelled Trump to victory in 2016 and the "Keep America Great" slogan he will try to sell this time around are neo-fascist in nature, designed to invoke an imaginary and false state of mythical past national glory ..."
"... The fascist designation is not a label I apply to Trump cavalierly. I use it, as I have before in this column , because Trump meets many of the standard and widely respected definitions of the term. ..."
"... Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion. ..."
"... An appeal to a frustrated middle class that is suffering from an economic crisis of humiliation and fear of the pressure exerted by lower social groups. ..."
"... Joe Biden is not a fascist. He is, instead, a standard-bearer of neoliberalism. As with fascism, there are different definitions of neoliberalism, prompting some exceptionally smug mainstream commentators like New York Magazine's Jonathan Chait to claim that the concept is little more than a left-wing insult. In truth, however, the concept describes an all-too-real set of governing principles. ..."
"... Neoliberalism , by contrast, deemphasizes federal economic intervention in favor of initiatives calling for deregulation, corporate tax cuts, private-public partnerships, and international trade agreements that augment the free flow of capital while undermining the power and influence of trade unions. ..."
"... Until the arrival of Trump and his brand of neo-fascism, both major parties since Reagan had embraced this ideology. And while neoliberals remain more benign on issues of race and gender than Trump and Trumpism ever will be, neoliberalism offers little to challenge hierarchies based on social class. Indeed, income inequality accelerated during the Obama years and today rivals that of the Gilded Age . ..."
Mar 11, 2020 | www.truthdig.com
Now that the Michigan Democratic primary is over and Joe Biden has been declared the winner , it's time to read the handwriting on the political wall: Biden will be the Democratic nominee for president, and Bernie Sanders will be the runner-up once again come the party's convention in July. Sanders might influence the party's platform, but platforms are never binding for the nominee. Sanders has lost, and so have his many progressive supporters, myself included.

I am nothing if not a realist. The idea that Sanders might have become the Democratic candidate was always a fantasy, not unlike my youthful dreams of one day becoming an NFL quarterback. Even after Sanders' triumph in the Nevada caucuses, I never thought the party establishment would ever allow a socialist -- even a mild social democratic one, such as Sanders -- to head its ticket.

Funded by wealthy donors, run by Beltway insiders and aided and abetted by a corporate media dedicated to promoting the notion that Sanders was " unelectable ," the Democratic Party never welcomed Sanders as a legitimate contender. Not in 2016 and not in 2020. In several instances, it even resorted to some good old-fashioned red-baiting to frighten voters; the party is, after all, a capitalist institution. Working and middle-class families support the Democrats largely because they have no other place to go on Election Day besides the completely corrupt and craven GOP.

Now we are left with Donald Trump and Biden to duke it out in the fall. Yes, it has come to that.

In terms of campaign rhetoric and party policies, the general election campaign will be a battle for America's past far more than it will be a contest for its future. The battle will be fueled on both sides by narratives and visions that are illusory, regressive and, in important respects, downright dangerous.

Of the two campaigns, Trump's will be decidedly more toxic. The "Make America Great Again" slogan that propelled Trump to victory in 2016 and the "Keep America Great" slogan he will try to sell this time around are neo-fascist in nature, designed to invoke an imaginary and false state of mythical past national glory that ignores our deeply entrenched history of patriarchal white supremacy and brutal class domination.

The fascist designation is not a label I apply to Trump cavalierly. I use it, as I have before in this column , because Trump meets many of the standard and widely respected definitions of the term.

As the celebrated Marxist playwright Bertolt Brecht wrote in 1935 , fascism "is a historic phase of capitalism the nakedest, most shameless, most oppressive and most treacherous form of capitalism." Trumpism, along with its international analogs in Brazil, India and Western Europe, neatly accords with Brecht's theory.

Trumpism similarly meets the definition of fascism offered by Robert Paxton in his classic 2004 study, " The Anatomy of Fascism ":

Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.

Trump and Trumpism similarly embody the 14 common factors of fascism identified by the great writer Umberto Eco in his 1995 essay, Ur Fascism :

Joe Biden is not a fascist. He is, instead, a standard-bearer of neoliberalism. As with fascism, there are different definitions of neoliberalism, prompting some exceptionally smug mainstream commentators like New York Magazine's Jonathan Chait to claim that the concept is little more than a left-wing insult. In truth, however, the concept describes an all-too-real set of governing principles.

To grasp what neoliberalism means, it's necessary to understand that it does not refer to a revival of the liberalism of the New Deal and New Society programs of the 1930s and 1960s. That brand of liberalism advocated the active intervention of the federal government in the economy to mitigate the harshest effects of private enterprise through such programs as Social Security, the National Labor Relations Act, the Fair Labor Standards Act, Medicare, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. That brand of liberalism imposed high taxes on the wealthy and significantly mitigated income inequality in America.

Neoliberalism , by contrast, deemphasizes federal economic intervention in favor of initiatives calling for deregulation, corporate tax cuts, private-public partnerships, and international trade agreements that augment the free flow of capital while undermining the power and influence of trade unions.

Until the arrival of Trump and his brand of neo-fascism, both major parties since Reagan had embraced this ideology. And while neoliberals remain more benign on issues of race and gender than Trump and Trumpism ever will be, neoliberalism offers little to challenge hierarchies based on social class. Indeed, income inequality accelerated during the Obama years and today rivals that of the Gilded Age .

As transformational a politician as Barack Obama was in terms of race, he too pursued a predominantly neoliberal agenda. The Affordable Care Act, Obama's singular domestic legislative achievement, is a perfect example of neoliberal private-public collaboration that left intact a health industry dominated by for-profit drug manufacturers and rapacious insurance companies, rather than setting the stage for Medicare for All, as championed by Sanders.

Biden never tires of reminding any audience willing to put up with his gaffes, verbal ticks and miscues that he served as Obama's vice president. Those ties are likely to remain the centerpiece of his campaign, as he promises a return to the civility of the Obama era and a restoration of America's standing in the world.

History, however, only moves forward. As charming and comforting as Biden's imagery of the past may be, it is, like Trump's darker outlook, a mirage. If Trump has taught us anything worthwhile, it is that the past cannot be replicated, no matter how much we might wish otherwise.

[Mar 12, 2020] The Democratic Party Surrenders to Nostalgia by Bill Blum

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion. ..."
Mar 12, 2020 | www.truthdig.com

Mar 11, 2020

Now that the Michigan Democratic primary is over and Joe Biden has been declared the winner , it's time to read the handwriting on the political wall: Biden will be the Democratic nominee for president, and Bernie Sanders will be the runner-up once again come the party's convention in July. Sanders might influence the party's platform, but platforms are never binding for the nominee. Sanders has lost, and so have his many progressive supporters, myself included.

I am nothing if not a realist. The idea that Sanders might have become the Democratic candidate was always a fantasy, not unlike my youthful dreams of one day becoming an NFL quarterback. Even after Sanders' triumph in the Nevada caucuses, I never thought the party establishment would ever allow a socialist -- even a mild social democratic one, such as Sanders -- to head its ticket.

Funded by wealthy donors, run by Beltway insiders and aided and abetted by a corporate media dedicated to promoting the notion that Sanders was " unelectable ," the Democratic Party never welcomed Sanders as a legitimate contender. Not in 2016 and not in 2020. In several instances, it even resorted to some good old-fashioned red-baiting to frighten voters; the party is, after all, a capitalist institution. Working and middle-class families support the Democrats largely because they have no other place to go on Election Day besides the completely corrupt and craven GOP.

Now we are left with Donald Trump and Biden to duke it out in the fall. Yes, it has come to that.

In terms of campaign rhetoric and party policies, the general election campaign will be a battle for America's past far more than it will be a contest for its future. The battle will be fueled on both sides by narratives and visions that are illusory, regressive and, in important respects, downright dangerous.

Of the two campaigns, Trump's will be decidedly more toxic. The "Make America Great Again" slogan that propelled Trump to victory in 2016 and the "Keep America Great" slogan he will try to sell this time around are neo-fascist in nature, designed to invoke an imaginary and false state of mythical past national glory that ignores our deeply entrenched history of patriarchal white supremacy and brutal class domination.

The fascist designation is not a label I apply to Trump cavalierly. I use it, as I have before in this column , because Trump meets many of the standard and widely respected definitions of the term.

As the celebrated Marxist playwright Bertolt Brecht wrote in 1935 , fascism "is a historic phase of capitalism the nakedest, most shameless, most oppressive and most treacherous form of capitalism." Trumpism, along with its international analogs in Brazil, India and Western Europe, neatly accords with Brecht's theory.

Trumpism similarly meets the definition of fascism offered by Robert Paxton in his classic 2004 study, " The Anatomy of Fascism ":

Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.

Trump and Trumpism similarly embody the 14 common factors of fascism identified by the great writer Umberto Eco in his 1995 essay, Ur Fascism :

Joe Biden is not a fascist. He is, instead, a standard-bearer of neoliberalism. As with fascism, there are different definitions of neoliberalism, prompting some exceptionally smug mainstream commentators like New York Magazine's Jonathan Chait to claim that the concept is little more than a left-wing insult. In truth, however, the concept describes an all-too-real set of governing principles.

To grasp what neoliberalism means, it's necessary to understand that it does not refer to a revival of the liberalism of the New Deal and New Society programs of the 1930s and 1960s. That brand of liberalism advocated the active intervention of the federal government in the economy to mitigate the harshest effects of private enterprise through such programs as Social Security, the National Labor Relations Act, the Fair Labor Standards Act, Medicare, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. That brand of liberalism imposed high taxes on the wealthy and significantly mitigated income inequality in America.

Neoliberalism , by contrast, deemphasizes federal economic intervention in favor of initiatives calling for deregulation, corporate tax cuts, private-public partnerships, and international trade agreements that augment the free flow of capital while undermining the power and influence of trade unions.

Until the arrival of Trump and his brand of neo-fascism, both major parties since Reagan had embraced this ideology. And while neoliberals remain more benign on issues of race and gender than Trump and Trumpism ever will be, neoliberalism offers little to challenge hierarchies based on social class. Indeed, income inequality accelerated during the Obama years and today rivals that of the Gilded Age .

As transformational a politician as Barack Obama was in terms of race, he too pursued a predominantly neoliberal agenda. The Affordable Care Act, Obama's singular domestic legislative achievement, is a perfect example of neoliberal private-public collaboration that left intact a health industry dominated by for-profit drug manufacturers and rapacious insurance companies, rather than setting the stage for Medicare for All, as championed by Sanders.

Biden never tires of reminding any audience willing to put up with his gaffes, verbal ticks and miscues that he served as Obama's vice president. Those ties are likely to remain the centerpiece of his campaign, as he promises a return to the civility of the Obama era and a restoration of America's standing in the world.

History, however, only moves forward. As charming and comforting as Biden's imagery of the past may be, it is, like Trump's darker outlook, a mirage. If Trump has taught us anything worthwhile, it is that the past cannot be replicated, no matter how much we might wish otherwise.

[Mar 11, 2020] Steve Rosenberg @BBCSteveR: In an interview, Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova claims that "politics is dominating" in the #MH17 case and calls me "a piece of propaganda."

Mar 11, 2020 | twitter.com

Serbian Patriot @PatriotSerbian · Mar 9 Replying to @BBCSteveR Fundamental flaws remain in the JIT's final verdict. Feel free to debate these critical points Steve: ( https:// 21stcenturywire.com/2019/06/23/des pite-its-official-verdict-fundamental-flaws-remain-in-dutch-jit-mh17-investigation/ ) Despite its 'Official' Verdict, Fundamental Flaws Remain in Dutch JIT MH17 Investigation 21WIRE | After an elaborate five year, NATO member state-led process, not everyone is convinced by the JIT's politicized conclusion. 21stcenturywire.com taseenb @taseenb · 19h Replying to @BBCSteveR She's amazing and she's right. I would have called you a mercenary though, which is more accurate orbi @kwo_vadis · Mar 9 Replying to @BBCSteveR Have you talked to the Skripals? Deborah Wylde @flamingyam · Mar 9 Replying to @BBCSteveR Why did you ignore her questions? Instead, avoiding them by throwing more accusations at her. Mark Curtis @markcurtis30 · Mar 9 I've written a lot on the media over the years but the current state of UK press reporting on UK foreign policy is shocking. There is no news system, the public is being misinformed, the press (from Tory to "liberal") acts largely as an appendage of the state. Please see thread. https:// twitter.com/declassifiedUK Arthur Tewungwa @ATewungwa · Mar 9 Replying to @BBCSteveR Love the way Mahathir Mohammed the PM of the country's whose plane has been shot down is relegated to a spectator. The BBC shamelessly tie his rejection of the allegation thrown at Russia with the sale of Palm oil, further portraying Malaysia as an economic basket case. Really Thinking face

[Mar 11, 2020] Apparently the Dutch are actually going ahead with a trial over the MH-17 plane shootdown, seeking to convict in absentia three Russians and a Ukrainian.

Mar 11, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

jayc , Mar 10 2020 20:56 utc | 26

Apparently the Dutch are actually going ahead with a trial over the MH-17 plane shootdown, seeking to convict in absentia three Russians and a Ukrainian. It is my understanding that a Dutch military report effectively ruled out exactly the scenario proposed for this trial, and did so several years ago.

Malaysia has provided the dissent to the MH-17 investigation to date, although a newly elected government may seek to pull back from overt criticism in the future. A Malaysian diplomat who has been involved has rather pointed things to say about the politicization of the investigation and the questionable motivations of the Ukrainians, and claims the court case is based on hearsay and a voice recording with no provenance.
https://asiatimes.com/2020/03/is-malaysias-position-on-mh-17-tragedy-shifting/

[Mar 10, 2020] Oil war between KSA and Russia

Mar 10, 2020 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

timbers , March 9, 2020 at 8:04 am

It could crash Mr Market oil stocks and wipe out fracking and such, creating possible liquidity issues and bankruptcies which could spread. But honestly I'm not up on the details if this could even cause any domino affects with bankruptcies, or not.

But to the Fed, Mr Market is the whole economy and nothing but the economy, Fed job #1 being to make stocks always go up.

Saudi Arabia is far more dependent on oil and tourism (also being hit) than Russia. Hence Russia's reserves I think would last far longer that SA's can.

The Rev Kev , March 9, 2020 at 8:37 am

Saudi Arabia is already in the hurt locker and has run down their financial reserves under Mohammad Bin Salman Al Saud. In addition, their little expedition to Yemen is costing them billions of dollars per month which is not helping. With international tourism fading away, the threat of some two million pilgrims not being able to travel to Mecca and spending their money there as well as plummeting oil prices, 2020 is not going to be a good year for Saudi Arabia. Just to make things worse, they have their own problems with Coronavirus which may knock out important links in the Royal family.

timbers , March 9, 2020 at 8:58 am

Indeed. A pattern with Salman seems to be emerging, of him rashly starting wars or policies he can't win/finish. Makes you wonder if others in the royal family are seeing this and noticing SA is burning thru it's reserves and the solution might be a change in leadership?

The Rev Kev , March 9, 2020 at 9:06 am

I was just reading an article saying how Saudi Arabia need $60 a barrel for their budget but that now it is heading towards $20 a barrel. If they wanted to achieve a massive cost-saving, they could give their Royal Family the chop – perhaps literally so. Last I heard there were over 6,000 of them-

https://asiatimes.com/2020/03/oil-to-hit-20-amid-saudi-russian-price-war/

vlade , March 9, 2020 at 9:16 am

SA would have more problems with reserves than Russia, that's definite – if nothing else, Russia exports/has other things than oil, SA doesn't.

Oil stock crash would not cause Western recession. It could well cause recession in Texas and similar, but I very much doubt it would cause even US recession, as the problems in Texas & co would be offset by the much lower prices at the pump.

Oil debt crash would be much worse, but still I suspect brunt of it would be borne by investors, not banks.

farmboy , March 9, 2020 at 10:01 am

best energy writer Gregor McDonald breaks it down

barefoot charley , March 9, 2020 at 12:21 pm

Thanks for this excellent analysis! When oil consumption permanently plateaus, as it's about to, the stock and debt value of the industry . . . flatlines.
That's the good news from Grow or Die.

[Mar 10, 2020] The American conference in Bratislava in the Slovak Republic in April 2000 made the American goal for Europe clear: An Iron Curtain between the Baltic Sea and the Black Sea, with hopefully Russia be eventually divided or broken up into smaller states

Mar 10, 2020 | www.unz.com

Malbrough , says: Show Comment March 10, 2020 at 2:50 am GMT

In an op-ed in the Financial Times on March 4th, he [Soros] urged that "Europe must stand with Turkey over Putin's war crimes in Syria," an astonishing misreading of the situation in the region as Turkey is the aggressor while Russia is fighting to eliminate the last major terrorist enclave in Idlibt.

" Defender 2020" is a "maneuvre of shame"
by Willy Wimmer
former State Secretary at the German Ministry of Defence

"The German Chancellor, Dr Angela Merkel, is breaking a taboo by allowing German soldiers to participate in the biggest NATO manoeuvre since the end of the Cold War against Russia .

It is therefore no wonder that the German Federal Government in May 2019 did not commemorate the "Versailles" of one hundred years ago, nor did the German President do so in a commemoration ceremony for which he can be held accountable. Versailles does not only mean "the demon of revenge", but also a deliberate inability to strive for peace.

This way of thinking is expressed once again in the NATO major manoeuvre, deliberately planned for the 9 May, the day the war ended in 1945. As if the fact had needed further proof that the "NATO West" cannot make peace, it can only make war, be that war cold or hot.

The American conference in Bratislava in the Slovak Republic in April 2000 made the American goal for Europe clear: An Iron Curtain between the Baltic Sea and the Black Sea, Russia can stay anywhichwhere, and be divided or broken up into smaller states. The NATO manoeuvre called "Defender 2020" is a "manoeuvre of shame" that only serves the warmongers . "

[Mar 10, 2020] The Long Roots of Our Russophobia by Jeremy Kuzmarov

Notable quotes:
"... Creating Russophobia: From the Great Religious Schism to Anti-Putin Hysteria ..."
"... Mettan defines Russophobia as the promotion of negative stereotypes about Russia that associate the country with despotism, treachery, expansion, oppression and other negative character traits. In his view, it is "not linked to specific historical events" but "exists first in the head of the one who looks, not in the victim's alleged behavior or characteristics." ..."
"... The New York Times ..."
"... Russophobia in the United States has been advanced most insidiously by the nation's foreign policy elite who have envisioned themselves as grand chess-masters seeking to checkmate their Russian adversary in order to control the Eurasian heartland. ..."
"... This view is little different than European colonial strategists who had learned of the importance of molding public opinion through disinformation campaigns that depicted the Russian bear as a menace to Western civilization. ..."
Mar 06, 2020 | www.counterpunch.org
For the last five years, the American media has been filled with scurrilous articles demonizing Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Putin has been accused of every crime imaginable, from shooting down airplanes, to assassinating opponents, to invading neighboring countries, to stealing money to manipulating the U.S. president and helping to rig the 2016 election.

Few of the accusations directed against Putin have ever been substantiated and the quality of journalism has been at the level of "yellow journalism."

In a desperate attempt to sustain their political careers, centrist Democrats like Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton accused their adversaries of being Russian agents – again without proof.

And even the progressive hero Bernie Sanders – himself a victim of red-baiting – has engaged in Russia bashing and unsubstantiated accusations for which he offers no proof.

Guy Mettan's book, Creating Russophobia: From the Great Religious Schism to Anti-Putin Hysteria (Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2017) provides needed historical context for our current political moment, showing how anti-Russian hysteria has long proliferated as a means of justifying Western imperialism.

Mettan is a Swiss journalist and member of parliament who learned about the corruption of the media business when his reporting on the world anticommunist league rankled his newspapers' shareholders, and when he realized that he was serving as a paid stenographer for the Bosnian Islamist leader Alija Izetbegovic in the early 1990s.

Mettan defines Russophobia as the promotion of negative stereotypes about Russia that associate the country with despotism, treachery, expansion, oppression and other negative character traits. In his view, it is "not linked to specific historical events" but "exists first in the head of the one who looks, not in the victim's alleged behavior or characteristics."

Like anti-semitism, Mettan writes, "Russophobia is a way of turning specific pseudo-facts into essential one-dimensional values, barbarity, despotism, and expansionism in the Russian case in order to justify stigmatization and ostracism."

The origins of Russophobic discourse date back to a schism in the Church during the Middle Ages when Charlemagne was crowned emperor of the Roman empire and modified the Christian liturgy to introduce reforms execrated by the Eastern Orthodox Churches of the Byzantine empire.

Mettan writes that "the Europe of Charlemagne and of the year 1000 was in need of a foil in the East to rebuild herself, just as the Europe of the 2000s needs Russia to consolidate her union."

Before the schism, European rulers had no negative opinions of Russia. When Capetian King Henri I found himself a widower, he turned towards the prestigious Kiev kingdom two thousand miles away and married Vladimir's granddaughter, Princess Ann.

A main goal of the new liturgy adopted by Charlemagne was to undermine any Byzantine influence in Italy and Western Europe.

Over the next century, the schism evolved from a religious into a political one.

The Pope and the top Roman administration made documents disappear and truncated others in order to blame the Easterners.

Byzantium and Russia were in turn rebuked for their "caesaropapism," or "Oriental style despotism," which could be contrasted which the supposedly enlightened, democratic governing system in the West.

Russia was particularly hated because it had defied efforts of Western European countries to submit to their authority and impose Catholicism.

In the 1760s, French diplomats working with a variety of Ukrainian, Hungarian and Polish political figures produced a forged testament of Peter 1 ["The Great"] purporting to reveal Russia's 'grand design' to conquer most of Europe.

This document was still taken seriously by governments during the Napoleanic wars; and as late as the Cold War, President Harry Truman found it helpful in explaining Stalin.

In Britain, the Whigs, who represented the liberal bourgeois opposition to the Tory government and its program of free-trade imperialism, were the most virulent Russophobes, much like today's Democrats in the United States.

The British media also enflamed public opinion by taking hysterical positions against Russia – often on the eve of major military expeditions.

The London Times during the 1820s Greek Independence war editorialized that no "sane person" could "look with satisfaction at the immense and rapid overgrowth of Russian power." The same thing was being written in The New York Times in the 2010s.

A great example of the Orientalist stereotype was Bram Stoker's novel Dracula , whose main character was modeled after Russian ruler, Ivan the Terrible. As if no English ruler in history was cruel either.

The Nazis took Russo-phobic discourse to new heights during the 1930s and 1940s, combining it with a virulent anti-bolshevism and anti-semitism.

A survey of German high school texts in the 1960s found little change in the image of Russia. The Russians were still depicted as "primitive, simple, very violent, cruel, mean, inhuman, cupid and very stubborn."

The same stereotypes were displayed in many Hollywood films during the Cold War, where KGB figures were particularly maligned. No wonder that when a former KGB agent, Vladimir Putin, took power, people went insane. Russophobia in the United States has been advanced most insidiously by the nation's foreign policy elite who have envisioned themselves as grand chess-masters seeking to checkmate their Russian adversary in order to control the Eurasian heartland.

This view is little different than European colonial strategists who had learned of the importance of molding public opinion through disinformation campaigns that depicted the Russian bear as a menace to Western civilization.

Guy Mettan has written a thought-provoking book that provides badly needed historical context for the anti-Russian delirium gripping our society.

Breaking the taboo on Russophobia is of vital importance in laying the groundwork for a more peaceful world order and genuinely progressive movement in the United States. Unfortunately, recent developments don't inspire much confidence that history will be transcended. Join the debate on Facebook More articles by: Jeremy Kuzmarov Jeremy Kuzmarov is the author of The Russians are Coming, Again: The First Cold War as Tragedy, the Second as Farce (Monthly Review Press, 2018) and Obama's Unending Wars: Fronting for the Foreign Policy of the Permanent Warfare State (Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2019).

[Mar 09, 2020] Ending the Myth That Trump is Ending the Wars by Khury Petersen-Smith

Mar 06, 2020 | www.counterpunch.org
There was this moment during the State of the Union Address that I can't stop thinking about.

When President Trump spoke to army wife Amy Wiliams during his speech and told her he'd arranged her husband's return home from Afghanistan as a "special surprise," it was difficult to watch.

Sgt. Townsend Williams then descended the stairs to reunite with his family after seven months of deployment. Congress cheered. A military family's reunion -- with its complicated feelings that are typically handled in private or on a base -- was used for an applause line.

That gimmick was the only glimpse many Americans will get of the human reality of our wars overseas. There is no such window into the lives or suffering of people in Yemen, Somalia, Afghanistan, or beyond.

That's unacceptable. And so is the myth that Trump is actually ending the wars.

The U.S. has reached a deal with the Taliban to remove 3,400 of the 12,000 U.S. troops currently in Afghanistan, with the pledge to withdraw more if certain conditions are met. That's a long overdue first step, as U.S. officials are finally recognizing the war is a disaster and are negotiating an exit.

But taking a step back reveals a bigger picture in which, from West Africa to Central Asia, Trump is expanding and deepening the War on Terror -- and making it deadlier.

Far from ending the wars, U.S. airstrikes in Somalia and Syria have skyrocketed under Trump, leading to more civilian casualties in both countries. In Somalia, the forces U.S. operations are supposedly targeting have not been defeated after 18 years of war. It received little coverage in the U.S., but the first week of this year saw a truck bombing in Mogadishu that killed more than 80 people.

Everywhere, ordinary people, people just like us except they happen to live in other countries, pay the price of these wars. Last year saw over 10,000 Afghan civilian casualties -- the sixth year in a row to reach those grim heights.

And don't forget, 2020 opened with Trump bringing the U.S. to the brink of a potentially catastrophic war with Iran. And he continues to escalate punishing sanctions on the country, devastating women, children, the elderly, and other vulnerable people.

Trump is not ending wars, but preparing for more war. Over the past year, he has deployed 14,000 more troops in the Middle East -- beyond the tens of thousands already there.

If this seems surprising, it's in part because the problem has been bipartisan. Indeed, many congressional Democrats have actually supported these escalations.

In December, 188 House Democrats joined Republicans in passing a nearly $740 billion military budget that continues the wars. They passed the budget after abandoning anti-war measures put forward by California Representative Barbara Lee and the precious few others trying to rein in the wars.

It's worth remembering that State of the Union visual, of Congress rising in unison and joining the president in applause for his stunt with the Williams family. Because there has been nearly that level of consensus year after year in funding, and expanding, the wars.

Ending them will not be easy. Too many powerful interests -- from weapons manufacturers to politicians -- are too invested. But ending the wars begins with rejecting the idea that real opposition will come from inside the White House.

As with so many other issues -- like when Trump first enacted the Muslim Ban and people flocked to airports nationwide in protest, or the outpouring against caging children at the border -- those of us who oppose the wars need to raise our voices, and make the leaders follow. Join the debate on Facebook More articles by: Khury Petersen-Smith

[Mar 09, 2020] Defender of Europe 2020: a Dangerous Provocation on Russia's Border

Mar 09, 2020 | www.counterpunch.org
by Ellen Taylor At this very moment thousands of US soldiers are disembarking from troop transports in six European countries and rushing toward prepositioned munitions around Europe, to deploy weapons as swiftly as possible.

This excitement marks the beginning of "Defender Europe 2020", the largest military exercises to be staged in Europe in over 25 years. Strategists will record how swiftly our forces can reach the Russian border, and test our NATO allies.

There has already been a massive US build-up in the countries bordering Russia.

In the words of Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy, "The last 18 years of conflict built muscle memory in counterinsurgency, but with this came atrophy in other areas. We are now engaging these other muscle groups."

General Tod Wolters, Commander of US forces in Europe and of NATO, has stated, "I'm in favor of a flexible first-use (nuclear weapon) policy."

The US has withdrawn from the INF treaty.

Most diabolical and chilling of all: the exercises will come to a climax in June, which is the 75 th anniversary of Operation Barbarossa, Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, which killed 27 million people. Russians born in 1930 turn 90 this year. They remember. The heart and soul of Russia remembers as well.

Russian Chief General Gerasimov is convinced the US is preparing for war. All it would take for an attack is one false-flag operation.

The people of the world lie in helpless ignorance. And the Doomsday clock moves 20 seconds closer to midnight.

[Mar 09, 2020] HMG novel on what happened to the Skripal's is unbelievable. Has the quality of modern day Agatha Christie's deteriorated that much?

Mar 09, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Tom , Mar 8 2020 22:57 utc | 38

New article from John Helmer "MI6 & BBC REVEAL OPERATION MINCEPIE – SKRIPAL BLOOD-TESTS AT SALISBURY HOSPITAL FAILED TO SHOW NERVE AGENT UNTIL PORTON DOWN ADDED IT FOR THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT TO ANNOUNCE".

"The evidence of the Salisbury hospital personnel has been reviewed by a sharp-eyed English analyst who prefers anonymity and an internet handle called Twiki. He has discovered that the blood testing of the Skripals for at least 36 hours after their hospitalisation – that is between their admission on Sunday afternoon March 4, and the following Tuesday morning March 6 – did not (repeat not) reveal a marker for organo-phosphate nerve agent poisoning; that is, the level of acetylcholinesterase (ACE) in the bloodstream.*"

It seems to me that HMG fiction writers need to up their game. HMG novel on what happened to the Skripal's is unbelievable. Has the quality of modern day Agatha Christie's deteriorated that much? It seems that the events on March 4th in Salisbury were not anticipated and a clusterfuck of the coverup has no clothes on it.

[Mar 09, 2020] When two US Senators, Patrick Leahy and Tom Daschle, sought to slow the rush of the US executive into emergency measures and war, they and the US Congress they served were hit hard by a military grade bioweapon, anthrax

Mar 09, 2020 | www.unz.com

The importance of getting to the factual roots of what happened to put humanity on this epidemiological trajectory should be especially clear after the debacle of September 11, 2001. Without any sustained investigation of the 9/11 crimes, Americans were rushed into cycles of seemingly perpetual warfare abroad, police state and surveillance state interventions at home. This cycle of fast responses began within a month of 9/11 with a full-fledge military invasion of Afghanistan, an invasion that continues yet.

When two US Senators, Patrick Leahy and Tom Daschle, sought to slow the rush of the US executive into emergency measures and war, they and the US Congress they served were hit hard by a military grade bioweapon, anthrax. The violent tactic of the saboteurs proved effective in easing aside close scrutiny that might have slowed down the fast approval by the end of October of Congress's massive Patriot Act.

Since then a seemingly endless cycle of military invasions has been pushed forward in the Middle East and Eurasia. The emergency measure powers claimed by the executive branch of the US government extended to widespread illegal torture, domestic spying, media censorship and a meteoric rise in extrajudicial murders especially by drones. This list is far from complete.

All of these crimes against humanity were justified on the basis of an unproven official explanation of 9/11. Subsequent scholarly investigations have demonstrated unequivocally for the attentive that officialdom's explanations of what transpired on the fateful day in September were wrong, severely wrong. The initial interpretations are strongly at variance with the evidentiary record available on the public record.

We must not allow ourselves to be hoodwinked in the same manner once again. The stakes are too large, maybe even larger than was the case in 2001. The misinterpreted and misrepresented events of 9/11 were exploited in conformity with the " Shock Doctrine ," a strategy for instituting litanies of invasive state actions that the public would not otherwise have accepted.

The conscientious portion of humanity, many of whose members have done independent homework of their own on the events of 9/11, will well understand the importance of identifying the actual originating source of the Wuhan Coronavirus epidemic.

No less than in the wake of the 9/11 debacle , there are grave dangers entailed in being too quick or too naïve or too trustful in immediately accepting as gospel fact the Chinese government's initial explanations of the COVID-19 outbreak. Why not take the time to investigate and test the current interpretations of the authorities that proved themselves to be so wrong in their decision to reprimand Dr. Li?

Especially when the stakes are extremely high, the need is great for objective, third-party adjudication to establish what really happened irrespective of official interpretations. History provides abundant evidence to demonstrate that official interpretations of transformative events often veer away from the truth in order to serve and protect the interests of entrenched power.

All semblance of due process and the rule of law can quickly evaporate when powerful institutions advance interpretations of catastrophic events used to justify their own open-ended invocation of unlimited emergency measure powers. The well-documented examples of the misrepresentation and exploitation of the 9/11 debacle demonstrate well the severity of the current danger. The origins of the Wuhan Coronavirus epidemic have yet to be adequately addressed and explained by a panel of genuinely independent investigators.

The Chinese Ambassador to the United States, Cui Tiankai, acknowledged on Feb. 9 on CBS's Face the Nation that there is no certainty about the origins of COVID-19. When asked by CBS's Margaret Brennan where the virus came from, the Chinese Ambassador responded, "We still don't know yet."

[Mar 09, 2020] Russia's 2020 federal budget assumes a price of $42.4 per barrel of Urals crude oil blend (

Mar 09, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

S , Mar 9 2020 6:19 utc | 73

@Likklemore #26:
Russia will be fine all the way down to $20//bbl

Russia's 2020 federal budget assumes a price of $42.4 per barrel of Urals crude oil blend (the prices of other oil & gas exports, such as other crude oil blends, natural gas, LNG and petroleum products, are converted into Urals blend prices using statistical formulas). If the market price turns out to be higher, the surplus goes into the National Wealth Fund ($124 bn as of December 1, 2019; currency composition is 45% U.S. dollars, 45% euros, 10% pound sterling); conversely, if the price is lower, the deficit is financed from the NWF. This is known in Russia as "the budget rule" ( бюджетное правило ).

You can see the prices of various crude oil blends at the OilPrice.com 's Oil Price Charts page, but note that the Urals blend prices shown are lagging by three days as of the time of this comment. Generally, Urals blend price is somewhere between WTI and Brent blend prices, so it should be around $32/bbl at the moment. Meaning, Russia will now have to start taking money from the NWF.

If the low prices persist for a long period of time, Russia can balance the budget by devaluing the ruble, as its foreign debt is one of the lowest in the world -- no budget cuts are necessary. Russia's foreign exchange reserves currently stand at $570 bn (77.1% foreign currencies, 1.2% SDR, 0.7% reserve position in the IMF, 21.0% gold).

[Mar 06, 2020] Records show that at their meeting on February 12, 2016, the JIT officials agreed that the "requested information" identified in the December 4, 2015, meeting and including the US satellite data, was "yet to be completed

Mar 06, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

evilempire , Mar 6 2020 1:01 utc | 42

New leaked documents in the mh17 investigation revealed by Max Van der Werff

and expounded upon by John Helmer:

"These records show that at their meeting on February 12, 2016, the JIT officials agreed that the "requested information" identified in the December 4, 2015, meeting and including the US satellite data, was "yet to be completed."

Instead, the only civilian satellite evidence which the JIT later said it has used, comes from the European Space Agency. In the JIT report of September 28, 2016, the Dutch said "the European Space Agency (ESA) has aided the investigation team extensively in the search for relevant images from satellites. This has shown to be of great value: Not only did ESA obtain images of all relevant civilian satellites, but they also have experts who have assessed these images. The conclusions drawn by ESA confirm the conclusions of the investigation team with regard to the launch site."

Note that the JIT refers here to civilian satellites.

The leak last month from the JIT files of two reports from MIVD, the Dutch military intelligence agency, both dated September 21, 2016, has identified US and NATO military satellite intelligence ("partner informatie") as the source for MIVD's conclusions that no Russian BUK missile radar and launch units had crossed the border into Ukraine before or on July 17, 2014; no BUK missile radar targeting or firing on MH17 had been detected; and no identified Russian units on the Russian side of the border had launched missiles."

If the US and military satellite images contradict the ESA images, then one set of images is a fabrication. We
can deduce that the ESA images are almost certainly fabrications because if no Russian buk crossed the border then
all those photos and videos the jit lynch mob have been trumpeting are fake, essentially reducing the jit's credibility to zero.

[Mar 05, 2020] Intelligence Officials Sow Discord By Stoking Fear of Russian Election Meddling by Dave DeCamp

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Under Trump, NATO has strengthened and held its largest war games since the cold war. The Trump administration withdrew from the Reagan-era nuclear arms treaty, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF), an arms control agreement that prohibited Russia and the US from developing medium-range nuclear and ballistic missiles. Shortly after tearing up the treaty, the Pentagon began developing and testing missiles that were banned under the INF. ..."
"... Despite all the drama over military aid to Ukraine, Trump never actually delayed it, and the new National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) includes $300 million in lethal aid to Ukraine , $50 million more than the previous year. The NDAA also calls for mandatory sanctions against any companies working on completing the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, a natural gas pipeline that connects Russia and Germany. Of all Trump's hawkish policies, his effort to kill the Nord Stream 2 and the pressure he puts on Germany not to buy gas from Russia can do the most damage to Russia's economy. ..."
"... The policies listed above are just a few examples of Trump's hostility towards Russia. Others include attempting to overthrow Russia's ally in Venezuela, maintaining a troop presence in Syria to "secure the oil," sanctioning Russian officials and businessman, and much more . ..."
"... Despite all these provocations towards Russia, Trump is still accused of being a "puppet" of Vladimir Putin. No matter how much the president moves the US closer to direct confrontation with Russia, the talking heads and pundits of the mainstream media take superficial examples – like the 2018 Helsinki conference – as proof of Trump's loyalty to Putin. Trump's words are put under a microscope, while his policies that make nuclear war more possible are largely ignored. ..."
Feb 24, 2020 | original.antiwar.com
Another presidential election year is upon us, and the intelligence agencies are hard at work stoking fears of Russian meddling. This time it looks like the Russians do not only like the incumbent president but also favor who appears to be the Democratic front-runner, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders.

On Thursday, The New York Times ran a story titled , "Lawmakers Are Warned That Russia Is Meddling to Re-elect Trump." The story says that on February 13 th US lawmakers from the House were briefed by intelligence officials who warned them, "Russia was interfering in the 2020 campaign to try to get President Trump re-elected."

The story provides little detail into the briefing and gives no evidence to back up the intelligence officials' claims. It mostly rehashes old claims from the 2016 election, such as Russians are trying to "stir controversy" and "stoke division." The intelligence officials also said the Russians are looking to interfere with the 2020 Democratic primaries.

It looks like other intelligence officials are already undermining the leaked briefing. CNN ran a story on Sunday titled "US intelligence briefer appears to have overstated assessment of 2020 Russian interference." The CNN article reads, "The US intelligence community has assessed that Russia is interfering in the 2020 election and has separately assessed that Russia views Trump as a leader they can work with. But the US does not have evidence that Russia's interference this cycle is aimed at re-electing Trump, the officials said."

According to The Times, President Trump was upset with acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire for letting the briefing happen, and Republican lawmakers did not agree with the conclusion since Trump has been "tough" on Russia. In his three years in office, Trump certainly has been tough on Russia, and it is hard to believe that Putin would work to reelect such a Russia hawk.

Under Trump, NATO has strengthened and held its largest war games since the cold war. The Trump administration withdrew from the Reagan-era nuclear arms treaty, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF), an arms control agreement that prohibited Russia and the US from developing medium-range nuclear and ballistic missiles. Shortly after tearing up the treaty, the Pentagon began developing and testing missiles that were banned under the INF.

The Trump Administration might let another nuclear arms treaty lapse. The New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) limits the number of nuclear warheads that Russia and the US can have deployed. The US does not want to re-sign the treaty and is using the excuse that it wants to include China in the deal. China's nuclear arsenal is estimated to be around 300 warheads , which is just one-fifth of the amount that Russia and the US are allowed to have deployed under the New START. It makes no sense for China to limit its deployment of nuclear warheads when its arsenal is nothing compared to the other two superpowers. China appears to be a scapegoat for the US to blame if the treaty does not get renewed. Without the New START, there will be nothing limiting the number of nukes the US and Russia can deploy, making the world a much more dangerous place.

Despite all the drama over military aid to Ukraine, Trump never actually delayed it, and the new National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) includes $300 million in lethal aid to Ukraine , $50 million more than the previous year. The NDAA also calls for mandatory sanctions against any companies working on completing the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, a natural gas pipeline that connects Russia and Germany. Of all Trump's hawkish policies, his effort to kill the Nord Stream 2 and the pressure he puts on Germany not to buy gas from Russia can do the most damage to Russia's economy.

The policies listed above are just a few examples of Trump's hostility towards Russia. Others include attempting to overthrow Russia's ally in Venezuela, maintaining a troop presence in Syria to "secure the oil," sanctioning Russian officials and businessman, and much more .

Despite all these provocations towards Russia, Trump is still accused of being a "puppet" of Vladimir Putin. No matter how much the president moves the US closer to direct confrontation with Russia, the talking heads and pundits of the mainstream media take superficial examples – like the 2018 Helsinki conference – as proof of Trump's loyalty to Putin. Trump's words are put under a microscope, while his policies that make nuclear war more possible are largely ignored.

The leaked briefing harkens back to an intelligence assessment that came out in January 2017 during the last days of the Obama administration. The assessment concluded that Vladimir Putin himself ordered the election interference to help Trump get elected. At first, a falsehood spread through the media that all 17 US intelligence agencies agreed with the conclusion. But later testimony from Obama-era intelligence officials revealed the assessment was prepared by hand-picked analysts from the CIA, FBI, and NSA. The assessment offered no evidence for the claim and mostly focused on media coverage of the presidential candidates on Russian state-funded media.

On Friday, The Washington Post piled on to the Russia hysteria and ran a story titled "Bernie Sanders briefed by US officials that Russia is trying to help his campaign." The story says Sanders received a briefing on Russian efforts to boost his campaign. The details are again scant and The Post admits that "It is not clear what form that Russian assistance has taken."

The few progressive journalists that have been right on Russiagate all along had the foresight to see how accusations of Russian meddling would ultimately be used to hurt Sanders' campaign. Unfortunately, Sanders did not have that same foresight and frequently played into the Russiagate narrative.

Last week, during a Democratic primary debate in Las Vegas, when criticized for his supporters' behavior on social media, Sanders pointed the finger at Russia . "All of us remember 2016, and what we remember is efforts by Russians and others to try to interfere in our elections and divide us up. I'm not saying that's happening, but it would not shock me," Sanders said.

In comments after The Post story was published, Sanders said he was briefed on Russian interference "about a month ago." Sanders raised the issue with the timing of the story, having been published on the eve of the Nevada caucus. But the story did not slow down Sanders' momentum in the polls, and he came out the clear victor of the Nevada caucus. Sanders' victory seemed to rattle the Democratic establishment, and some wild accusations were thrown around during coverage of the caucus.

Political analyst James Carville appeared on MSNBC as Sanders took an early and substantial lead in Nevada. Carville said, "Right now, it's about 1:15 Moscow time. This thing is going very well for Vladimir Putin. I promise you. He's probably staying up watching this right now." What could be played off as a joke was followed up with some serious accusations from Carville, "I don't think the Sanders campaign in any way is collusion or collaboration. I think they don't like this story, but the story is a fact, and the reason that the story is a fact is Putin is doing everything that he can to help Trump, including trying to get Sanders the Democratic nomination."

This delusional attitude about the Russians rigging the Democratic primary is underpinned by claims of meddling from the 2016 election. Central to Robert Mueller's claim that Russia engaged in "multiple, systematic efforts to interfere in our election" is the St. Petersburg based company, the Internet Research Agency (IRA).

The IRA is accused of running a troll farm that sought to interfere in the 2016 election in favor of Trump over Hillary Clinton. Mueller failed to tie the IRA directly to the Kremlin, and further research into their social media campaign shows most of the posts had nothing to do with the election. A study on the IRA by the firm New Knowledge found just "11 percent" of the IRA's content "was related to the election."

Many believe the Russian government is responsible for hacking the DNC email server and providing the emails to WikiLeaks. But there are many holes in Mueller's story to support this claim. And WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange – who Mueller did not interview – has said the Russian government was not the source of the emails.

Regardless of who leaked the DNC emails to WikiLeaks, they show that DNC leadership had a clear bias against Bernie Sanders back in 2016. The emails' contents were never disputed, and Democratic voters had every right to see the corruption within the DNC. With the release of the DNC emails, and later the Podesta emails, the American people were able to make a more informed choice in the presidential election. This type of transparency provided by WikiLeaks would be celebrated in a healthy democracy, not portrayed as the work of a foreign power.

Sanders would be wise to keep a watchful eye on how the DNC operates over the next few months. The debacle that was the Iowa caucus shows the Democrats can "stoke division" and "stir controversy" just fine on their own.

These claims of Russian meddling will continue throughout the election season. President Trump's defense that he is "tough" on Russia is nothing to be proud of, but that is inevitably where these accusations lead. Trump is encouraged to be more hawkish towards Russia in an effort to quiet the claims of Putin's preference for him. And if Bernie Sanders plays into this narrative now, can we believe that he will make any real foreign policy change towards Russia if he gets the nomination and beats Trump?

Dave DeCamp is assistant editor at Antiwar.com and a freelance journalist based in Brooklyn NY, focusing on US foreign policy and wars. He is on Twitter at @decampdave .

[Mar 05, 2020] Who Or What Started The Wuhan Coronavirus Epidemic

Mar 05, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

There has been considerable scholarly scrutiny of the anthrax attacks targeting the US Congress and some media organizations in early October of 2001. The anthrax attacks constitute the most serious assault ever on the operations of the US Congress, the primary interface between law and politics in the United States.

These attacks have come to be understood as an integral part of the large body of crimes committed in Manhattan and Washington DC on 9/11. The anthrax attacks killed five people including two postal workers. Seventeen people were injured and Congress was shut down for a few days.

Anthrax-laden letter attacks were specifically directed at two Democratic Party Senators, Patrick Leahy and Tom Daschle. When they received the contaminated letters both lawmakers were engaged in questioning provisions of the post-9/11 emergency measures legislation known as the Patriot Act. Both Senators Leahy and Daschle were hesitant to rubber stamp the enactment that was seemingly instantly drafted and put before Congress within three weeks of the 9/11 debacle.

The anthrax attacks took place just as the US Armed Forces began invading Afghanistan where the culprits of the 9/11 crimes were supposed to be hiding out. The perpetrators of the anthrax attack, who we were supposed to imagine at the time as al-Qaeda terrorists, succeeded in easing aside the major locus of opposition to the Patriot Act's speedy passage in late October. Why, one might legitimately ask, ask, would Islamic jihadists want the Patriot Act to be rushed through Congress. In early October the US Armed Forces invaded Afghanistan at the same time that the US executive branch was seeking with the Patriot a license to kill and torture and steal without any checks of accountability.

Once the US Armed Forces went to war with Afghanistan on the basis of a fraudulent explanation of 9/11's genesis, there was basically no chance that a genuine and legitimate evidence-based investigation of the September 11 crimes would ever take place. To this day the Global War on Terror continues to unfold on a foundation of lies and illusions that have had devastating consequences for the quality of life for average people throughout the United States and the world.

In his 2005 book, Biowarfare and Terrorism , Prof. Boyle's analysis pointed to major problems in the FBI's investigation of the anthrax attacks including the agency's destruction of relevant evidence. To Prof. Boyle, the highly refined military-grade quality of the anthrax made it almost certain that the anthrax bioweapon was produced within the US Armed Forces at the lab in Fort Detrick Maryland. Anthrax, or Bacillus anthracis , is a rod-shaped bacteria found naturally in soil.

Looking back at the episode Dr. Boyle observed , "The Pentagon and the C.I.A. are ready, willing, and able to launch biowarfare when it suits their interests. They already attacked the American People and Congress and disabled our Republic with super-weapons-grade anthrax in October 2001."

Prof. Boyle's interpretation was later verified and expanded upon in a book by Canadian Prof. Graeme MacQueen. Prof. Boyle acknowledges the veracity of Prof. MacQueen's study of the anthrax deception as part of a "domestic conspiracy." He sees The 2001 Anthrax Deception as the most advanced finding of academic research on the topic so far.

Prof. MacQueen is prominent among a very large group of academics and public officials who condemn the official narrative of 9/11 for its dramatic inconsistencies with the available evidence. Those who share this understanding include former Italian Prime Minister Francesco Cossiga, former German Defence Minister Andreas von Bülow, former UK Minister of the Environment Michael Meacher, former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury Paul Craig Roberts, former Director of the US Star Wars Missile Defense Program Lt. Col. Bob Bowman, Princeton International Law Professor Richard Falk, and the author of ten academic books on different aspects of the 9/11 debacle, Claremont Graduate University Professor David Ray Griffin.

Prof. Francis Boyle shared the 9/11 skepticism of many when he asked ,

Could the real culprits behind the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001, and the immediately-following terrorist anthrax attacks upon Congress ultimately prove to be the same people? Could it truly be coincidental that two of the primary intended victims of the terrorist anthrax attacks - Senators Daschle and Leahy - were holding up the speedy passage of the pre-planned USA Patriot Act ... an act which provided the federal government with unprecedented powers in relation to US citizens and institutions?

In his coverage of the Wuhan Coronavirus epidemic, Spiro Skouras highlighted the proceedings known as Event 201. Event 201 brought together in New York on October 18, 2019 an assembly of delegates hosted by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Economic Forum and the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. The gathering anticipated the COVID-19 crisis by just a few weeks. I retrospect it is almost as if Event 201 announced many of the controversies about to arise with the outbreak of the real epidemic in Wuhan China. Event 201 performed functions similar to those of the drills that frequently mimic the engineered scenarios animating false flag terror events but especially those of 9/11.

A major subject of the meeting highlighted the perceived need to control communications during an epidemic. Levan Thiru of the Monetary Authority of Singapore went as far as to call for "a step up on the part of governments to take action against Fake News." Thiru called for recriminatory litigation aimed at criminalizing "bad actors." Cautioning against this kind of censorship, Skouras asked, Who is going to decide what constitutes "Fake News"? If fact checkers are to be employed, "who will fact check the fact checkers"?

Hasti Taghi, a media executive with NBC Universal in New York, was especially outspoken in condemning the activities of "conspiracy theorists" that have organized themselves to question the motives and methods of the complex of agencies involved in developing and disseminating vaccines. She frequently condemned the role of "conspiracy theories" in energizing public distrust of the role of pharmaceutical companies and media conglomerates in their interactions with government.

Tom Ingelsby of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security injected an interesting twist into the discussion. He asked, "How much control of information should there be? By whom should control of information be exercised? How can false information be effectively challenged?" Ingelsby then added, "What happens if the false information is coming from companies and governments?"

https://www.youtube.com/embed/AoLw-Q8X174

This final question encapsulates a major problem for conscientious citizens trying to find their way through the corruption and disinformation that often permeates our key institutions. Those that try to counter the problem that governments and corporations sometimes peddle false information can pretty much expect to face accusations that they are "conspiracy theorists." Too often the calculations involved in deciding whom or what is credible (or not) depends primarily on simple arithmetic favouring the preponderance of wealth and power.

Spiro Skouras gives careful consideration to the possibility that the United States instigated the COVID-19 epidemic starting in Wuhan China.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/WE8m309gKVE

https://www.youtube.com/embed/p0DDXsPKGHw

He notes the precedent set in 1945 on the atomic attacks by the US government on the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Skouras points out that there is proof that since the Second World War, the US government has conducted at least 239 experiments, secretly deploying toxic chemical and biological agents against portions of its own population.

On the history of US involvement in biological warfare see here , here and here .

Skouras highlights the window presented for a covert US bioweapon attack at the World Military Games in Wuhan China in the second half of October of 2019. He notes that 300 US soldiers participated as athletes in the Wuhan Military Games together with a large contingent of American support personnel. The timing and the circumstances of the event were more or less ideal to open up a new pathogenic front in the US government's informal "hybrid war" against China .

On Feb. 15 at the Munich Security Conference, US Defence Secretary, Mark T. Esper, developed a highly critical characterization of Chinese wrongdoing in order to seemingly justify recriminatory actions. Esper asserted , "China's growth over the years has been remarkable, but in many ways it is fuelled by theft, coercion, and exploitation of free market economies, private companies, and colleges and universities Huawei and 5G are today's poster child for this nefarious activity.

The US antagonism to Huawei's leadership in the design and worldwide dissemination of 5 G technology might well be a factor in the scandal generated by the Chinese connection to intertwined research in microbiology at the level 4 labs in Winnipeg and Wuhan.

Back in 2000 the notorious report entitled Rebuilding America's Defenses , a publication brought forward by the neoconservative Project for the New American Century (PNAC), proposed that the US government should refurbish and invoke its capacity to wage biological warfare. PNAC was the think tank that anticipated the events of September 11, 2001 by outlining a strategic scheme that could only be realized by mobilizing American public opinion with "a catalytic event like a New Pearl Harbor."

After 9/11, the PNAC Team of related neoconservative activists and Zionist organizations pretty much took over the governance of the United States along with the build up and deployment of its formidable war machine. PNAC called for the invocation of "advanced forms of biological warfare that can 'target' specific genotypes." In this fashion "biological warfare might be transformed into a politically useful tool."

The relationship of this pandemic to internal disagreements within China has been put on full display in Steve Bannon's coverage of the crisis entitled War Room: Pandemic . A prominent member of US President Donald Trump's inner circle , Steve Bannon is often accompanied on the daily show by Chinese billionaire dissident, Miles Guo (aka Guo Wengui, Miles Haoyun, Miles Kwok).

Guo is an outspoken Chinese refugee . He is a persistent critic of virtually every facet of the policies and actions of the Chinese Communist Party.

Guo regularly condemns those who dominate China's one-party system, a system run by an elite who, he alleges, are corrupt, incompetent and inveterate liars. Guo regularly asserts that all of the Chinese government's numbers on the pandemic, including death rates and infection rates, can probably be multiplied by 10X or even 100X to get closer to accuracy.

[On the 10X guestimate of mortality and infection see this .]

Clearly Bannon and Guo would like to see the emergency conditions created by the pandemic as a wedge of division, protest and regime change within China. One of the subjects they regularly raise, as do others who accuse the Chinese government of systematic lying and deception, is that the crematoriums in Wuhan and nearby Chongqing are burning corpses of dead people at a rate far higher than official death figures. Some reports indicated that portable incinerators were being brought into the most infected core of the Wuhan Coronavirus epidemic.

It is troubling, to say the least, that some reports indicate dead people are being cremated far faster and at far higher rates than the Chinese government and the World Health Organization are reporting. Some reckoning with the apparent disparity between reported and actual deaths has led to widespread suspicions about what is actually going in the scenes of violent and angry exchanges between people in the Wuhan area.

Many of these videos show brutal confrontations between Chinese civilians and Chinese security police. The displays of desperation by some of those trying to escape apprehensions by uniformed officials seem sometimes to suggest the severity of a life or death struggle . It is made to seem that those seeking to escape the grip of authorities are aware that their failure to do so might lead to a quick death and a quick exit by incineration. These reflections are, of course, speculative rather than definitive.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/yvouHwAEYCk

Questions concerning who we are supposed to believe or not in this crisis are becoming ever more pressing and volatile. One of the emerging themes in the discourse developed at War Room: Pandemic is the propensity of some of the core agencies of mainstream media in the United States to accept at face value the reports they receive from official media outlets answering to the Chinese Communist Party. To Banning and Guo this pattern makes media organizations like the New York Times , The Washington Post , and CNN essentially propaganda extensions of the Chinese government.

The Chinese people themselves are clearly grappling in new ways with the problem of how to understand the information and directives given them by the governing apparatus of the Chinese Communist Party. Clearly the Party initially failed the people by not intervening early and decisively enough after the first cases of Coronavirus illness began to show up. The exit from Wuhan of almost five million people in prior to the Chinese Lunar New Year celebrations had huge implications for spreading the contagion.

As noted in the introduction, the death in Wuhan of Dr. Li Wenliang on 7 February has become a flash point for popular criticism of the Chinese Communist Party led by General Secretary Xi Jinping. Dr. Li wrote to members of his medical school alumnus group suggesting that some significant action should be taken in response to the appearance of SARS-like symptoms that suddenly afflicted his patients.

For sending out this unauthorized communication, Dr. Li was summoned along with seven other supposed offenders to the Public Security Bureau. There he was warned by police to stop "making false statements." He was ordered to cease and desist "spreading rumors," and "acting illegally to disturb social order."

Dr. Li signed a form indicating he would refrain from continuing to do what he had been accused of doing. The chastised professional returned to his medical practice. He took his own advice and began treating patients exhibiting signs of the new illness. He himself soon died from COVID-19 when it was still known as 19-nCoV.

Is Twitter's permanent deplatforming of the Zero Hedge web site a North American version of the police intervention in China with the goal of silencing Dr. Li? Is the censorship of the Internet in the name of opposing "conspiracy theorists" repeating the Chinese Communist Party's effort to silence Dr. Li?

Is Dr. Li to be appropriately understood as a Chinese version of a "conspiracy theorist"? How different was his treatment for allegedly "spreading rumours" and "acting illegally to disturb social order" from the treatment of those in the Occident who have been deplatformed, smeared and professionally defrocked for attempting to speak truth to power?

I have developed responses to these incursions based on hard-won experiences facing the propaganda blows of an especially powerful political lobby able to seize control of the governing board of my university. These professional lobbyists seek to discredit academic analysis of their own violations of law, ethics and civility by labelling critics of their zealotry as "conspiracy theorists" or worse.

More recently I have been grappling against a variation on this process in trying to counter the censorious attacks on the American Herald Tribune . These assaults on free expression and open debate began with the machinations of military hawks whose hit job instructions were passed along to the disinformation specialists at CNN and the Washington Post .

https://www.youtube.com/embed/1MXdLwZ6spE

No one can say for sure where the Wuhan Coronavirus epidemic is taking the world. Wherever we are headed, however, we are leaving behind an era that can never be recreated. Whatever happened to originate the contagion, this crisis is forcing us to take stock of the framework of biological warfare as it has been developing in China, Russia, Israel and probably many other countries.

Nowhere, however, is biological warfare being more expansively and expensively developed and probably deployed than by the US Armed Forces. The death and destruction that humanity is presently experiencing should signal to us that it is time to get much more serious about inspecting military facilities and enforcing the terms of the Biological Warfare Convention of 1972. It is, in fact, time to get much more serious about enforcing all aspects of international criminal law in balanced ways that transcend the biases of Victors' Justice.

It is time to throw off the weight of the pseudo-laws introduced after 9/11 through abhorrent tactics like the inside-job military anthrax attack on Congress. Most certainly, it is time to draw a clear distinction between research in the field of public health and research in the development of lethal bioweapons. Better yet, we should work towards putting an end altogether to militarization through the massive expansion of the "death sciences." The vile activities of fallen practitioners of the endangered life sciences are, for starters, undermining the integrity of our besieged institutions of higher learning.

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[Mar 05, 2020] Salisbury poisoning unleashed Russian bogeyman ... but where are the Skripals 2 years on by Simon Rite

Mar 04, 2020 | www.rt.com
Forget Where's Wally, what we really want to know is where are the Skripals? It's exactly two years to the day since the Russian spy and his daughter were novichoked in Salisbury, and we've still not seen hide nor hair of them. Former double agent Sergei has been completely off-grid, while Yulia Skripal was seen in a highly staged video in 2018, filmed in an anonymous but pleasant leafy glade shortly after recovering from her poisoning ordeal; but, apart from that, there has been no statements or updates about them at all.

The most recent piece of 'information', and I use that term loosely, to leak out about their whereabouts came this weekend from Britain's Mail on Sunday, courtesy of a source which became ubiquitous throughout the Skripal saga, the reliably unreliable "security insiders." It's always amazing how willing these apparent insiders are to release top-level secrets to the home of the "sidebar of shame."

The latest speculation from 'security insiders' is that the Skripals are hoping to head for a new life down under in Australia after "effectively living under house arrest since the attack." This means either those insiders are the leakiest spies in the world, or the Skripals are going to be nowhere near Australia anytime soon.

Read more Hospitalized children & dead ducks? The 'official' Skripal narrative goes completely quackers

The house arrest must be at Julian Assange in Belmarsh levels of security, because even the Skripals' family in Russia say they haven't heard from them in months.

So all quiet on the Skripal front and, frankly speaking, it's all quiet on the geopolitical front, too, and in the media. The disputed events of March 4, 2018, over poisoned spies and their aftermath formed the biggest story on the planet, and not just because the whole world finally started paying attention to the majesty of Salisbury cathedral's glorious 123-metre spire.

This incident seemed like it might have genuine life-changing political consequences. Britain entered the phrase "highly likely" into the lexicon of geopolitics, and [then-PM] Theresa May's declaration that it was "highly likely" that the Kremlin was to blame was deemed strong enough to see the West turn en masse against Moscow, and Russian diplomats and 'diplomats' were expelled by the dozen, by London and its allies across the world. It seemed the bar for state-to-state accusations had been lowered.

Russia to this day denies involvement in what happened in Salisbury.

So what has changed? If anything, all that has changed over the last two years is a desire to get back to business, to rebuild ties and move on. Some of those expelled diplomats have reportedly moved back .

French leader Emmanuel Macron is pushing hard for relations between the West and Moscow to be repaired, something Germany needs little encouragement for.

The Brexit dividend (for Russia)... In 2019, British imports of Russian oil jumped by a whopping 57% compared to the previous year, as Boris Johnson's government unleashed the potential of their country. https://t.co/ZSIJGvpFif

-- Bryan MacDonald (@27khv) February 27, 2020

Britain is still pretending to be in a huff, but British imports of Russian oil were up 57 percent last year, so realpolitik reigns supreme in London, as ever.

Boris Johnson is now the prime minister and with a thumping majority doesn't need to use bogeyman Russia as a tool to look strong quite as much as his predecessor did. Johnson and Putin even met in January and there are reports the prime minister is considering an invitation to attend a second world war commemoration parade in Moscow this May.

And as for the media, it's all gone quiet there, too. Skripal coverage is about as common in the mainstream now as coverage of Julian Assange's imprisonment. He's a journalist whose supporters say is 'highly likely' a victim of a demonstrable state campaign against him because he attempted to uncover the misdeed of power. However, a boring attack on free speech is nowhere near as exciting as a poisoned spy, is it?!

Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!

Simon Rite is a writer based in London for RT, in charge of several projects including the political satire group #ICYMI. Follow him on Twitter @SiWrites

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.

[Mar 04, 2020] Why Are We Being Charged? Surprise Bills From Coronavirus Testing Spark Calls for Government to Cover All Costs by Jake Johnson

Highly recommended!
Notes of disaster capitalism in action...
Notable quotes:
"... The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is not billing patients for coronavirus testing, according to Business Insider . "But there are other charges you might have to pay, depending on your insurance plan, or lack thereof," Business Insider noted. "A hospital stay in itself could be costly and you would likely have to pay for tests for other viruses or conditions." ..."
"... Congress needs to immediately pass a bill appropriating funding to cover 100% of the cost of all coronavirus testing & care within the United States. We will not have a chance at containing it otherwise. @tedlieu - as my rep, can you please ensure this is brought up? ..."
"... In the case of the Wucinskis, Kliff reported that "the ambulance company that transported [them] charged the family $2,598 for taking them to the hospital." ..."
"... Last week, the Miami Herald reported that Osmel Martinez Azcue "received a notice from his insurance company about a claim for $3,270" after he visited a local hospital fearing that he contracted coronavirus during a work trip to China. ..."
"... Did anyone expect the unconscionable greed of capitalism to cease when a public health crisis emerges? This is just testing for the virus, wait until a vaccine has been developed so expensive that the majority of the US populace can not afford it at all and people are dropping like flies. Wall Street, never-the-less, will continue to have its heydays ..."
"... The very idea that the defense and "Homeland" security budgets are bloated and additional funding approved year after year but the citizens of this country are not afforded 100% health coverage In a time of global health crisis that could become a pandemic. ..."
Mar 03, 2020 | www.commondreams.org

"Huge surprise medical bills [are] going to make sure people with symptoms don't get tested. That is bad for everyone." by Jake Johnson, staff writer Public health advocates, experts, and others are demanding that the federal government cover coronavirus testing and all related costs after several reports detailed how Americans in recent weeks have been saddled with exorbitant bills following medical evaluations.

Sarah Kliff of the New York Times reported Saturday that Pennsylvania native Frank Wucinski "found a pile of medical bills" totaling $3,918 waiting for him and his three-year-old daughter after they were released from government-mandated quarantine at Marine Corps Air Station in Miramar, California.

"My question is why are we being charged for these stays, if they were mandatory and we had no choice in the matter?" asked Wucinski, who was evacuated by the U.S. government last month from Wuhan, China, the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak.

"I assumed it was all being paid for," Wucinski told the Times . "We didn't have a choice. When the bills showed up, it was just a pit in my stomach, like, 'How do I pay for this?'"

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is not billing patients for coronavirus testing, according to Business Insider . "But there are other charges you might have to pay, depending on your insurance plan, or lack thereof," Business Insider noted. "A hospital stay in itself could be costly and you would likely have to pay for tests for other viruses or conditions."

Lawrence Gostin, a professor of global health law at Georgetown University, told the Times that

"the most important rule of public health is to gain the cooperation of the population."

"There are legal, moral, and public health reasons not to charge the patients,"

Gostin said.

Congress needs to immediately pass a bill appropriating funding to cover 100% of the cost of all coronavirus testing & care within the United States. We will not have a chance at containing it otherwise. @tedlieu - as my rep, can you please ensure this is brought up?

-- William LeGate (@williamlegate) March 2, 2020

In the case of the Wucinskis, Kliff reported that "the ambulance company that transported [them] charged the family $2,598 for taking them to the hospital."

"An additional $90 in charges came from radiologists who read the patients' X-ray scans and do not work for the hospital," Kliff noted.

The CDC declined to respond when Kliff asked whether the federal government would cover the costs for patients like the Wucinskis.

The Intercept 's Robert Mackey wrote last Friday that the Wucinskis' situation spotlights "how the American government's response to a public health emergency, like trying to contain a potential coronavirus epidemic, could be handicapped by relying on a system built around private hospitals and for-profit health insurance providers."

We should be doing everything we can to encourage people with #COVIDー19 symptoms to come forward. Huge surprise medical bills is going to make sure people with symptoms don't get tested. That is bad for everyone, regardless of if you are insured. https://t.co/KOUKTSFVzD

-- Saikat Chakrabarti (@saikatc) March 1, 2020

Play this tape to the end and you find people not going to the hospital even if they're really sick. The federal government needs to announce that they'll pay for all of these bills https://t.co/HfyBFBXhja

Last week, the Miami Herald reported that Osmel Martinez Azcue "received a notice from his insurance company about a claim for $3,270" after he visited a local hospital fearing that he contracted coronavirus during a work trip to China.

"He went to Jackson Memorial Hospital, where he said he was placed in a closed-off room," according to the Herald . "Nurses in protective white suits sprayed some kind of disinfectant smoke under the door before entering, Azcue said. Then hospital staff members told him he'd need a CT scan to screen for coronavirus, but Azcue said he asked for a flu test first."

Azcue tested positive for the flu and was discharged. "Azcue's experience shows the potential cost of testing for a disease that epidemiologists fear may develop into a public health crisis in the U.S.," the Herald noted.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, highlighted Azcue's case in a tweet last Friday.

"The coronavirus reminds us that we are all in this together," Sanders wrote. "We cannot allow Americans to skip doctor's visits over outrageous bills. Everyone should get the medical care they need without opening their wallet -- as a matter of justice and public health."

Last week, as Common Dreams reported , Sanders argued that the coronavirus outbreak demonstrates the urgent need for Medicare for All.

The coronavirus reminds us that we are all in this together. We cannot allow Americans to skip doctor's visits over outrageous bills.

Everyone should get the medical care they need without opening their wallet -- as a matter of justice and public health. https://t.co/c4WQMDESHU

-- Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) February 28, 2020

The number of confirmed coronavirus cases in the U.S. surged by more than two dozen over the weekend, bringing the total to 89 as the Trump administration continues to publicly downplay the severity of the outbreak.

Dr. Matt McCarthy, a staff physician at NewYork–Presbyterian Hospital, said in an appearance on CNBC 's "Squawk Box" Monday morning that testing for the coronavirus is still not widely available.

"Before I came here this morning, I was in the emergency room seeing patients," McCarthy said. "I still do not have a rapid diagnostic test available to me."

"I'm here to tell you, right now, at one of the busiest hospitals in the country, I don't have it at my finger tips," added McCarthy. "I still have to make my case, plead to test people. This is not good. We know that there are 88 cases in the United States. There are going to be hundreds by middle of week. There's going to be thousands by next week. And this is a testing issue."

Our work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. Feel free to republish and share widely.

Harry_Pjotr 13h

Did anyone expect the unconscionable greed of capitalism to cease when a public health crisis emerges? This is just testing for the virus, wait until a vaccine has been developed so expensive that the majority of the US populace can not afford it at all and people are dropping like flies. Wall Street, never-the-less, will continue to have its heydays

Smerl fern 12h

A wall street bank or private predator may own your emergency room. A surprise bill may await your emergency treatment above insurance payments or in some instances all of the bill.

An effort was made recently in congress to stop surprise billings but enough dems joined repubs to kill it. More important to keep campaign dollars flowing than keep people alive. fern Smerl 12h I know emergency rooms are being purchased by organizations like Tenet (because they are some of the most expensive levels of care) and M.D.s provided by large agencies. I'm not as up on this as I should be but a friend of mine tells me that some of this is illegal. I have received bills that were later discharged by challenge. This is worth investigating further. Atlas oldie 11h Hmmmm A virus that overwhelmingly kills the elderly and/or those with pre-exisitng conditions.

Sounds like a medical insurance companies wet dream. As well as .gov social security/medicare wet dream.

Just sayin'

Ticki 11h

The very idea that the defense and "Homeland" security budgets are bloated and additional funding approved year after year but the citizens of this country are not afforded 100% health coverage In a time of global health crisis that could become a pandemic. And as has been stated, the unconscionable idea suggested that a possible vaccine (a long way away or perhaps not developed at all) might not be affordable to the workers who pay the taxes that fund the government? That's insane.

leftonadoorstep 11h

Another example of "American Exceptionalism." China doesn't charge its coronavirus patients, neither does South Korea. I guess they are simply backward countries.

Barton 11h

I own my own home after years of hard work paying it off. It's the only thing of value, besides my old truck, that I have. If I get the virus, I will stay home and try to treat it the best I can. I can't afford to go to the hospital and pay thousands in medical bills, with the chance that they'll come after my possessions. America, the land of the _______. Fill in the blank. (Hint: it's no longer free).

fern 1 Barton 11h

There are other ways to protect your home. Homesteading or living trust. I'm not good at this but I know there are ways to do it. Hopefully, it would never come to that but outcomes are not certain even with treatment in this case.

Giovanna-Lepore oldie 11h

As someone who lost a mother at 5 years old I can sympathize with your grief in losing a daughter-in-law and especially seeing her four children orphaned. However, I think you miss the point here: This is about we becoming a society invested in each others welfare and not a company town that commodifies everything including the health and well being of us all.

fern 1 Giovanna-Lepore 11h

I'm going by: https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/senate-bill/1129/text

As a revision it is better but flawed. It is a cost containment bill based on the same research as the republican plan with global budgets and block grants.

Edited: I encourage you to read this:
-ttps://www.rand.org/blog/2018/10/misconceptions-about-medicare-for-all.html Giovanna-Lepore 10h oldie:

Part D

Higher education is not free but they do need to become free for the students and payed by us as a society.

Part D is a scam, a Republican scam also supported by corporate democrats because of its profit motive and its privatization

Medicare only covers 80% and does not cover eye and dental care and older folks especially need these services. Medicaid helps but there are limits and one cannot necessarily use it where one needs to go. Expanded, Improved Medicare For All is a vast improvement. because it covers everyone in one big pool and, therefore, much more dignified than the rob Paul to pay peter system we have.

Social Security too can be improved. Why should it simply be based on the income of the person which means that a person working in a low paying job in a capitalist system gone wild with greed will often work until they die.

Pell grants can be eliminated when we have what the French have: publicly supported education for everyone.

The demise of unions certainly did not help but it was part of the long strategy of the Right to privatize everything to the enrichment of the few.

Yunzer SuspiraDeProfundis 10h

Thank goodness for the "/s". Poe's Law you know

The overall competence that Canada is handling this outbreak, compared to the USA, is stark. First world (Canada) versus third-world (USA). Testing is practically available for free, to any suspect person, sick or not, as Toronto alone can run 1000 tests a day and have results in 4 hours. That is far more than all the US's capacity for 330 million people.

I wonder how long before Canada closes its borders to USAns? Me and my wife (both in a vulnerable age/medical group) should seriously consider fleeing to my brother's place in Toronto as the first announced cases in Pittsburgh are probably only days away. What about our poor cat though? We could try to smuggle her across the border, but she is a loud and talkative kitty

Greenwich 10h

Don't want to discourage anyone from any protective measures – but the "low down" from my veggie store today was that a lot of health professionals shop there and they think it's being hyped by media. Did get this from my NJ Sen. Menendez –

Center for Disease and Control and Prevention (CDC)

There is currently no vaccine to prevent coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). The best way to prevent illness is to avoid being exposed to this virus. However, everyday preventive actions can help prevent the spread of respiratory diseases:

  • Wash your hands often
  • Avoid close contact with people who are sick.
  • Avoid touching your eyes, nose, and mouth.
  • Stay home when you are sick.
  • Cover your cough or sneeze with a tissue, then throw the tissue in the trash.
  • For more information : htps://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/about/prevention-treatment.html
  • How it spreads : The virus is thought to spread mainly from person-to-person. It may be possible that a person can get COVID-19 by touching a surface or object that has the virus on it and then touching their own mouth, nose, or possibly their eyes, but this is not thought to be the main way the virus spreads. [Read more.]
    https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/about/transmission.html )
  • Symptoms : For confirmed coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) cases, reported illnesses have ranged from mild symptoms to severe illness and death. Symptoms can include fever, cough, and shortness of breath.
Seeker 9h Greenwich:

Don't want to discourage anyone from any protective measures – but the "low down" from my veggie store today was that a lot of health professionals shop there and they think it's being hyped by media.

I agree it is being hyped by the media to the point of being fear mongering. At the same time it is being ignored by the administration to such an extent that really little almost nothing is being done. At some point the two together will create an even bigger problem.

It is like the old adage: "Just because you are paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you." Each over/under reach in considering the reality of the situation has its own problem, which multiply when combined. Every morning when I wake up I say a little atheistic prayer to myself before I get out of bed: "Another day and for better or worse...".

Seeker 8h

Well, two reported here in Florida tonight. One in my county, one in the county next door. And more of the "we already knew, but told you late". One person checked into the hospital on Wednesday. We hear it Monday night. Both were ignored far a long time it seems, and 84 in particular are being watched (roommates, friends, hospital workers not alerted for several days, the usual). But no one knows every place they had been since becoming infected.

Oh, and they have tested a handful of people. No worry?

I can't see anyway that this level of incompetency is an accident. Spring break is just starting usually a 100's of thousand tourist bonanza.

So the question is do they want to kill us, or just keep us in fear?

I think the later. But the end result is a crap shoot. So once again, it is a gamble with our lives.

Archie1954 7h

The business of America is business. Sometimes that can go too far and this is one of those times. Making money from the loss, distress, harm and suffering of others is perverse beyond belief.

[Mar 04, 2020] Cyber Soldiers Penetrate the Skripal Case

Mar 04, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

John Gilberts , Mar 4 2020 10:24 utc | 123

fyi Helmer reports cyber attacks...

Cyber Soldiers Penetrate the Skripal Case

https://twitter.com/bears_with/status/1235099510889566209

"Cyber attacks have been launched to stop you reading The Blogmire, Dances With Bears and the new book Skripal in Prison."

[Mar 03, 2020] "Predatory capitalism", which clearly describes what neoliberalism is.

Highly recommended!
Mar 03, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

chu teh , Mar 4 2020 0:50 utc | 80

Tonymike | Mar 3 2020 18:08 utc | 26

re ... Your house foreclosed upon by shady bank: naked capitalism, .0001% paid on interest savings: naked capitalism, poor wages: naked capitalism, dangerous workplace: naked capitalism, etc. ...

"naked capitalism" is not a clear description. Consider using "predatory capitalism", which clearly describes what it is.

Here's the Wiki dictionary definition:

Predatory--

1. relating to or denoting an animal or animals preying naturally on others.
synonyms: predacious, carnivorous, hunting, raptorial, ravening;
Example: "predatory birds".

2. seeking to exploit or oppress others.
synonyms: exploitative, wolfish, rapacious, greedy, acquisitive, avaricious
Example: "I could see a predatory gleam in his eyes"

Note where the word comes from:
The Latin "praedator", in English meaning "plunderer".

And "plunderer" helps the reader understand and perhaps recognize what is happening.

Every plunderer understands.

[Mar 03, 2020] Neoliberals curse

Mar 03, 2020 | caucus99percent.com

It took a rabid nationalist like Donald Trump to end the war in Afghanistan , whereas faithful neoliberal Barack Obama kept the war around because it provided "markets" for weapons corporations.

[Mar 02, 2020] Neoliberals Weaponized Human Rights to Justify Global Exploitation by Neve Gordon

Mar 02, 2020 | www.truthdig.com

Truthdig

In the mid-1980s, Rony Brauman, who, at the time, was the president of the leading humanitarian organization Médecins sans Frontières, established a new human rights group called Liberté sans Frontières. For the inaugural colloquium, Brauman invited a number of speakers, among them Peter Bauer, a recently retired professor from the London School of Economics. Bauer was an odd choice given that he was a staunch defender of European colonialism; he had once responded to a student pamphlet that accused the British of taking "the rubber from Malaya, the tea from India, [and] raw materials from all over the world," by arguing that actually "the British took the rubber to Malaya and the tea to India." Far from the West causing Third World poverty, Bauer maintained that "contacts with the West" had been the primary agents of the colonies' material progress.

Bauer hammered on this point at the colloquium, claiming that indigenous Amazonians were among the poorest people in the world precisely because they enjoyed the fewest "external contacts." Taiwan, Hong Kong, Malaysia, and Singapore, he continued, showed proof of the economic benefits such contacts brought. "Whatever one thinks of colonialism it can't be held responsible for Third World poverty," he argued.

In her illuminating new book, "The Morals of the Market: Human Rights and the Rise of Neoliberalism," Jessica Whyte recounts this story only to ask why Brauman, a leading humanitarian activist, invited Bauer -- whom The Economist had described as being as hostile to foreign aid as Friedrich Hayek had been to socialism -- to deliver a talk during the opening event for a new human rights organization. Her response is multifaceted, but, as she traces the parallel histories of neoliberalism and human rights, it becomes clear that the two projects are not necessarily antithetical, and actually have more in common than one might think.

Click here to read long excerpts from "The Morals of the Market" at Google Books.

Indeed, Liberté sans Frontières went on to play a central role in delegitimizing Third World accounts of economic exploitation. The organization incessantly challenged the accusations that Europe's opulence was based on colonial plunder and that the world economic system made the rich richer and the poor poorer. And while it may have been more outspoken in its critique of Third Worldism than more prominent rights groups, it was in no way an outlier. Whyte reveals that in the eyes of organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, for instance, the major culprit for the woes of postcolonial states was neither Europe nor the international economic order but rather corrupt and ruthless Third World dictators who violated the rights of their populations as they undermined the development of a free economy. This approach coincides neatly with neoliberal thought.

Whyte contends that we cannot understand why human rights and neoliberalism flourished together if we view neoliberalism as an exclusively economic doctrine that favors privatization, deregulation, and unfettered free markets over public institutions and government. Although she strives to distinguish herself from thinkers like Wendy Brown and Michel Foucault, she ends up following their footsteps by emphasizing the moral dimension of neoliberal thought: the idea that a competitive market was not "simply a more efficient means of distributing resources; it was the basic institution of a moral and 'civilised' society, and a necessary support for individual rights."

She exposes how neoliberal ideas informed the intense struggle over the meaning of "human rights," and chronicles how Western rights groups and neoliberals ultimately adopted a similar interpretation, one that emphasizes individual freedoms at the expense of collective and economic rights. This interpretation was, moreover, in direct opposition to many newly independent postcolonial leaders.

Whyte describes, for instance, how just prior to the adoption of the two 1966 human rights covenants -- the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights -- Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of independent Ghana, coined the term "neo-colonialism" to refer to a series of mechanisms that perpetuate colonial patterns of exploitation in the wake of formal independence. Nkrumah "argued that the achievement of formal sovereignty had neither freed former colonies from the unequal economic relations of the colonial period nor given them political control over their own territories," thus preventing these states from securing the basic rights of their inhabitants. A "state in the grip of neo-colonialism," he wrote, "is not master of its own destiny."

Nkrumah thought that only when postcolonial states fully controlled their natural resources would they be able to invest in the population's well-being. In the meantime, neo-colonial economic arrangements were denying African states the ability to provide adequate education and health care as well as other economic and social rights to their populations, thus revealing how these economic arrangements were welded in a Gordian knot with international politics. Any attempt to understand one without the other provided a distorted picture of reality.

Such combining of the economy with the political, however, was anathema to neoliberal thought. In 1927, exactly three decades before Ghana's new leader led his country to independence, Hayek's mentor, economist Ludwig von Mises, had already argued that colonialism took advantage of the superior weaponry of the "white race" to subjugate, rob, and enslave weaker peoples. But Mises was careful to distinguish colonial oppression from the economic goals of a competitive market, noting that Britain was different since its form of colonialism pursued "grand commercial objectives." Similarly, the British economist Lionel Robbins separated the benign economic sphere from the merciless political one, writing in the 1930s that "[n]ot capitalism, but the anarchic political organization of the world is the root disease of our civilization."

These thinkers set the tone for many neoliberal economists who have since defined colonial imperialism as a phenomenon of politics, not capitalism, while casting the market as a realm of mutually beneficial, free, peaceful exchange. In this view, it is the political realm that engenders violence and coercion, not the economic sphere. Yet, during the period of decolonization neoliberals also understood that they needed to introduce moral justifications for the ongoing economic exploitation of former colonies. Realizing that human rights were rapidly becoming the new lingua franca of global moral speak, Whyte suggests that they, like Nkrumah, began mobilizing rights talk -- except that neoliberals deployed it as a weapon against states who tried to gain control over their country's natural resources as well as a shield from any kind of criticism directed toward their vision of a capitalist market.

Their relation to the state was complicated, but was not really different from the one espoused by their liberal predecessors. Neoliberal thinkers understood that states are necessary to enforce labor discipline and to protect corporate interests, embracing states that served as handmaidens to competitive markets. If, however, a state undermined the separation of political sovereignty from economic ownership or became attuned to the demands of its people to nationalize resources, that state would inevitably be perceived as a foe. The solution was to set limits on the state's exercise of sovereignty. As Friedrich Hayek, the author of "The Road to Serfdom," put it, the "taming of the savage" must be followed by the "taming of the state."

Shaping the state so that it advances a neoliberal economic model can, however, be a brutal undertaking, and the consequences are likely to generate considerable suffering for large segments of the population. Freed from any commitment to popular sovereignty and economic self-determination, the language of liberal human rights offered neoliberals a means to legitimize transformative interventions that would subject states to the dictates of international markets. This is why a conception of human rights, one very different from the notion of rights advanced by Nkrumah, was needed.

In Whyte's historical analysis the free-market ideologues accordingly adopted a lexicon of rights that buttressed the neoliberal state, while simultaneously pathologizing mass politics as a threat to individual freedoms. In a nutshell, neoliberal economists realized that human rights could play a vital role in the dissemination of their ideology, providing, in Whyte's words, "competitive markets with a moral and legal foundation."

At about the same time that neoliberalism became hegemonic, human rights organizations began sprouting in the international arena. By the early 1970s, Amnesty International and the International Commission of Jurists were already active in numerous countries around the globe, and Americas Watch (a precursor to Human Rights Watch) had just been established. According to Samuel Moyn, a professor of history at Yale and author of the best seller "The Last Utopia," it was precisely during this period that human rights first achieved global prominence. That Western human rights organizations gained influence during the period of neoliberal entrenchment is, Whyte argues, not coincidental.

Although Whyte emphasizes the writings of leading neoliberal thinkers, a slightly more nuanced approach would have framed these developments as the reflection of a conjunctural moment, whereby the rise of neoliberalism and of human rights NGOs was itself part of numerous economic, social, and cultural shifts. Chile serves as a good example of this conjuncture, revealing how a combination of historical circumstances led neoliberal economics and a certain conception of human rights to merge.

Notwithstanding the bloody takeover, the extrajudicial executions, the disappearances and wholesale torture of thousands of dissidents, Hayek's response to Pinochet's 1973 coup was that "the world shall come to regard the recovery of Chile as one of the great economic miracles of our time." Milton Friedman, a key figure in the Chicago School, later echoed this assessment, describing Chile as an economic and political "miracle." The two Nobel Prize winners were not detached observers, having provided advice to Pinochet on how to privatize state services such as education, health care, and social security, and it was Friedman's former students, the "Chicago Boys," who occupied central positions within the authoritarian regime, ensuring that these ideas became policy.

What is arguably even more surprising is the reaction of human rights organizations to the bloody coup in Chile. Whyte acknowledges that Naomi Klein covered much of this ground in "The Shock Doctrine," where she details how Amnesty International obscured the relationship between neoliberal "shock therapy" and political violence. Characterizing the Southern Cone as a "laboratory" for both neoliberalism and grassroots human rights activism, Klein argued that, in its commitment to impartiality, Amnesty occluded the reasons for the torture and killing, and thereby "helped the Chicago School ideology to escape from its first bloody laboratory virtually unscathed." While Whyte concurs with Klein's assessment, she has a slightly different point to make.

To do so, she shows how Samuel Moyn contested Klein's claim that the human rights movement was complicit in the rise of neoliberalism; he argued that the "chronological coincidence of human rights and neoliberalism" is "unsubstantiated" and that the so-called "Chilean miracle" is just as much due to the country's "left's own failures." Moyn's comment, Whyte cogently observes, "raises the question of why, in the period of neoliberal ascendancy, international human rights organisations flourished, largely escaping the repression that was pursued so furiously against leftists, trade unionists, rural organizers and indigenous people in countries such as Chile."

She points out that the CIA-trained National Intelligence Directorate had instructions to carry out the "total extermination of Marxism," but in an effort to present Chile as a modern civilized nation, the junta did not disavow the language of human rights, and at the height of the repression allowed overseas human rights organizations such as Amnesty International and the International Commission of Jurists to enter the country, giving them extensive freedom of movement.

Whyte explains that in focusing their attention on state violence while upholding the market as a realm of freedom and voluntary cooperation, human rights NGOs strengthened the great neoliberal dichotomy between coercive politics and free and peaceful markets. Allende's government had challenged the myth of the market as a realm of voluntary, non-coercive, and mutually beneficial relations, and the Chilean leader paid for it with his life. By contrast, the junta with the Chicago Boys' aid sought to uphold this myth, while using the state both to enhance a neoliberal economic order and to decimate collective political resistance. Whyte acknowledges that in challenging the junta's torturous means, human rights NGOs arguably helped restrain the worst of its violence, but they did so at the cost of abandoning the economy as a site of political contestation.

Whyte's claim is not simply that the human rights NGOs dealt with political violence in isolation from the country's economic transformations, as Klein had argued. Rather, she shows that the gap between Amnesty's version of human rights and the version espoused by postcolonial leaders, like Nkrumah, was wide. Indeed, Amnesty International invoked human rights in a way that had little in common with Nkrumah's program of economic self-determination, and the organization was even hostile to the violent anti-colonial struggles promoted by UN diplomats from postcolonial societies during the same period. The story of human rights and neoliberalism in Chile is not, as Whyte convincingly shows, simply a story of the massive human rights violations carried out in order to allow for market reforms, or of the new human rights NGOs that contested the junta's violence. It is also the story of the institutionalization of a conservative and market-driven vision of neoliberal human rights, one that highlights individual rights while preserving the inequalities of capitalism by protecting the market from the intrusions of "the masses."

Expanding Whyte's analysis to the present moment (the book focuses on the years between 1947 and 1987) while thinking of the relation between neoliberalism and human rights as part of a historical conjuncture, it becomes manifest that many if not most human rights NGOs operating today have been shaped by this legacy. One of its expressions is that rights groups rarely represent "the masses" in any formal or informal capacity. Consider Human Rights Watch, whose longstanding executive director Kenneth Roth oversees an annual budget of over $75 million and a staff of roughly 400 people. In four years' time, Roth will outstrip Robert Mugabe's 30-year tenure in office; while Roth has dedicated most of his adult life struggling against social wrongs, he has never had to compete in elections to secure his post. Indeed, due to the corporate structure of his organization the only constituency to which he is accountable are Human Rights Watch's board members and donors -- those who benefit from neoliberal economic arrangements -- rather than the people whose rights the NGO defends or, needless to say, the "masses." Moreover, Human Rights Watch is not exceptional within the rights-world, and even though rights organizations across the globe say they are interested in what the "people want," sovereignty of the people in any meaningful sense, wherein the people can control the decisions that affect their lives most, is not really on the agenda.

Undoubtedly, Human Rights Watch has shed light on some of the most horrendous state crimes carried out across the globe over the past several decades. Exposing egregious violations is not an easy task and is a particularly important endeavor in our post-truth era. However, truth-telling, in and of itself, is not a political strategy. Even if exposing violations is conceived of as a component of a broader political mobilization, the truths that NGOs like Human Rights Watch have been revealing are blinkered. Given that they interpret human rights in an extremely narrow way, one that aligns quite neatly with neoliberal thought, their strategy therefore fails to provide tools for those invested in introducing profound and truly transformative social change.

From the get-go, most Western human rights NGOs had been attuned to Cold War politics and refrained from advocating for economic and social rights for decades, inventing numerous reasons to justify this stance: from the claim that the right to education and health care were not basic human rights like freedom of speech and freedom from torture, to the assertion that economic and social rights lacked a precise definition, thus rendering them difficult to campaign for. It took close to a decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the ongoing campaigning of Third World activists for the leading human rights organizations to acknowledge that economic and social rights, such as the right to health care, education, and social security, were indeed human rights, rights that they should dedicate at least some of its resources to fight for. But even today, almost 20 years after their integration within Human Rights Watch's agenda, the resources allocated to the protection of these rights is relatively small, and the way that the organization strives to secure them is deeply skewed by the neoliberal view that politics and markets are separate realms and that human rights work should avoid interference with the capitalist structure of competitive markets. Wittingly or not, organizations like Human Rights Watch have not only bolstered the neoliberal imagination, but have produced a specific arsenal of human rights that shapes social struggles in a way that weakens those who aim to advance a more egalitarian political horizon.

Several years ago, Roth tried to justify Human Rights Watch's approach, claiming that the issues it deals with are determined by its "methodology," and that the "essence of that methodology [ ] is not the ability to mobilize people in the streets, to engage in litigation, to press for broad national plans, or to provide technical assistance. Rather, the core of our methodology is our ability to investigate, expose, and shame." The hallmark of human rights work, in his view, is uncovering discrimination, while the unequal arrangement of the local and international economy leading to discrimination are beyond the organization's purview. Not unlike the neoliberal thinkers discussed in Whyte's book, Human Rights Watch limits its activism to formal equality, adopting a form of inquiry that ignores and ultimately disavows the structural context, which effectively undercuts forms of collective struggle.

Returning to Rony Brauman and the creation of Liberté sans Frontières, toward the end of the book Whyte recounts how in a 2015 interview he understood things differently than he had in the mid-1980s. "I see myself and the small group that I brought together as a kind of symptom of the rise of neoliberalism [ ] We had the conviction that we were a kind of intellectual vanguard, but no," he laughed, "we were just following the rising tendency."

Whyte suggests that this assessment is, if anything, too modest: rather than being a symptom, the humanitarians who founded Liberté sans Frontières explicitly mobilized the language of human rights in order to contest the vision of substantive equality that defined the Third Worldist project. Brauman and his organization benefited from the neo-colonial economic arrangements and, she notes,

were not powerless companions of the rising neoliberals, but active, enthusiastic and influential fellow travellers. Their distinctive contribution was to pioneer a distinctly neoliberal human rights discourse, for which a competitive market order accompanied by a liberal institutional structure was truly the last utopia.

The destructive legacy that Whyte so eloquently describes suggests that the convergence between neoliberals and rights practitioners has defanged human rights from any truly emancipatory potential. Formal rights without the redistribution of wealth and the democratization of economic power, as we have learned not only from the ongoing struggles of postcolonial states but also from the growing inequality in the Global North, simply do not lead to justice. So if the objectives of a utopian imagination include equitable distribution of resources and actual sovereignty of the people, we urgently need a new vocabulary of resistance and novel methods of struggle.

This review originally appeared on the Los Angeles Review of Books .

Neve Gordon / Los Angeles Review of Books

[Mar 02, 2020] Truthdig

Mar 02, 2020 | www.truthdig.com

Feb 24, 2020 Print Bookmark Opinion | TD originals The Zionist Colonization of Palestine comments

Mr. Fish / Truthdig
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not the product of ancient ethnic hatreds. It is the tragic clash between two peoples with claims to the same land. It is a manufactured conflict, the outcome of a 100-year-old colonial occupation by Zionists and later Israel, backed by the British, the United States and other major imperial powers. This project is about the ongoing seizure of Palestinian land by the colonizers. It is about the rendering of the Palestinians as non-people, writing them out of the historical narrative as if they never existed and denying them basic human rights. Yet to state these incontrovertible facts of Jewish colonization -- supported by innumerable official reports and public and private communiques and statements, along with historical records and events -- sees Israel's defenders level charges of anti-Semitism and racism.

Rashid Khalidi , the Edward Said professor of modern Arab studies at Columbia University, in his book " The Hundred Years' War on Palestine : A History of Settler Colonization and Resistance, 1917-2017" has meticulously documented this long project of colonization of Palestine. His exhaustive research, which includes internal, private communications between the early Zionists and Israeli leadership, leaves no doubt that the Jewish colonizers were acutely aware from the start that the Palestinian people had to be subjugated and removed to create the Jewish state. The Jewish leadership was also acutely aware that its intentions had to be masked behind euphemisms, the patina of biblical legitimacy by Jews to a land that had been Muslim since the seventh century, platitudes about human and democratic rights, the supposed benefits of colonization to the colonized and a mendacious call for democracy and peaceful co-existence with those targeted for destruction.

"This is a unique colonialism that we've been subjected to where they have no use for us," Khalidi quotes Said as having written. "The best Palestinian for them," Said wrote, "is either dead or gone. It's not that they want to exploit us, or that they need to keep us there in the way of Algeria or South Africa as a subclass."

Zionism was birthed from the evils of anti-Semitism. It was a response to the discrimination and violence inflicted on Jews, especially during the savage pogroms in Russia and Eastern Europe in the late 19th century and early 20th century that left thousands dead. The Zionist leader Theodor Herzl in 1896 published "Der Judenstaat," or "The Jewish State," in which he warned that Jews were not safe in Europe, a warning that within a few decades proved terrifyingly prescient with the rise of German fascism.

Britain's support of a Jewish homeland was always colored by anti-Semitism. The 1917 decision by the British Cabinet, as stated in the Balfour Declaration , to support "the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people" was a principal part of a misguided endeavor based on anti-Semitic tropes. It was undertaken by the ruling British elites to unite "international Jewry" -- including officials of Jewish descent in senior positions in the new Bolshevik state in Russia -- behind Britain's flagging military campaign in World War I. The British leaders were convinced that Jews secretly controlled the U.S. financial system. American Jews, once promised a homeland in Palestine, would, they thought, bring the United States into the war and help finance the war effort. To add to these bizarre anti-Semitic canards, the British believed that Jews and Dönmes -- or "crypto-Jews" whose ancestors had converted to Christianity but who continued to practice the rituals of Judaism in secret -- controlled the Turkish government. If the Zionists were given a homeland in Palestine, the British believed, the Jews and Dönmes would turn on the Turkish regime, which was allied with Germany in the war, and the Turkish government would collapse. World Jewry, the British were convinced, was the key to winning the war.

"With 'Great Jewry' against us," warned Britain's Sir Mark Sykes , who with the French diplomat François Georges-Picot created the secret treaty that carved up the Ottoman Empire between Britain and France, there would be no possibility of victory. Zionism, Sykes said, was a powerful global subterranean force that was "atmospheric, international, cosmopolitan, subconscious and unwritten, nay often unspoken."

The British elites, including Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour , also believed that Jews could never be assimilated in British society and it was better for them to emigrate. It is telling that the only Jewish member of Prime Minister David Lloyd George's government, Edwin Montagu, vehemently opposed the Balfour Declaration. He argued that it would encourage states to expel its Jews. "Palestine will become the world's ghetto," he warned.

This turned out to be the case after World War II when hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees, many rendered stateless, had nowhere to go but Palestine. Often, their communities had been destroyed during the war or their homes and land had been confiscated. Those Jews who returned to countries like Poland found they had nowhere to live and were often victims of discrimination as well as postwar anti-Semitic attacks and even massacres.

The European powers dealt with the Jewish refugee crisis by shipping victims of the Holocaust to the Middle East. So, while leading Zionists understood that they had to uproot and displace Arabs to establish a homeland, they were also acutely aware that they were not wanted in the countries from which they had fled or been expelled. The Zionists and their supporters may have mouthed slogans such as "a land without a people for a people without a land" in speaking of Palestine, but, as the political philosopher Hannah Arendt observed, European powers were attempting to deal with the crime carried out against Jews in Europe by committing another crime, one against Palestinians. It was a recipe for endless conflict, especially since giving the Palestinians under occupation full democratic rights would risk loss of control of Israel by the Jews.

Ze'ev Jabotinsky, the godfather of the right-wing ideology that has dominated Israel since 1977, an ideology openly embraced by Prime Ministers Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Shamir, Ariel Sharon, Ehud Olmert and Benjamin Netanyahu, wrote bluntly in 1923: "Every native population in the world resists colonists as long as it has the slightest hope of being able to rid itself of the danger of being colonized. That is what the Arabs in Palestine are doing, and what they will persist in doing as long as there remains a solitary spark of hope that they will be able to prevent the transformation of 'Palestine' into the 'Land of Israel.' "

This kind of public honesty, Khalidi notes, was rare among leading Zionists. Most of the Zionist leaders "protested the innocent purity of their aims and deceived their Western listeners, and perhaps themselves, with fairy tales about their benign intentions toward the Arab inhabitants of Palestine," he writes. The Zionists -- in a situation similar to that of today's supporters of Israel -- were aware it would be fatal to acknowledge that the creation of a Jewish homeland required the expulsion of the Arab majority. Such an admission would cause the colonizers to lose the world's sympathy. But among themselves the Zionists clearly understood that the use of armed force against the Arab majority was essential for the colonial project to succeed. "Zionist colonization can proceed and develop only under the protection of a power that is independent of the native population -- behind an iron wall, which the native population cannot breach," Jabotinsky wrote.

The Jewish colonizers knew they needed an imperial patron to succeed and survive. Their first patron was Britain, which sent 100,000 troops to crush the Palestinian revolt of the 1930s and armed and trained Jewish militias known as the Haganah. The savage repression of that revolt included wholesale executions and aerial bombardment and left 10% of the adult male Arab population killed, wounded, imprisoned or exiled. The Zionists' second patron became the United States, which now, generations later, provides more than $3 billion a year to Israel. Israel, despite the myth of self-reliance it peddles about itself, would not be able to maintain its Palestinian colonies but for its imperial benefactors. This is why the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement frightens Israel. It is also why I support the BDS movement.

The early Zionists bought up huge tracts of fertile Palestinian land and drove out the indigenous inhabitants. They subsidized European Jewish settlers sent to Palestine, where 94% of the inhabitants were Arabs. They created organizations such as the Jewish Colonization Association, later called the Palestine Jewish Colonization Association, to administer the Zionist project.

But, as Khalidi writes, "once colonialism took on a bad odor in the post-World War II era of decolonization, the colonial origins and practice of Zionism and Israel were whitewashed and conveniently forgotten in Israel and the West. In fact, Zionism -- for two decades the coddled step-child of British colonialism -- rebranded itself as an anticolonial movement."

"Today, the conflict that was engendered by this classic nineteenth-century European colonial venture in a non-European land, supported from 1917 onward by the greatest Western imperial power of its age, is rarely described in such unvarnished terms," Khalidi writes. "Indeed, those who analyze not only Israeli settlement efforts in Jerusalem, the West Bank, and the occupied Syrian Golan Heights, but the entire Zionist enterprise from the perspective of its colonial settler origins and nature are often vilified. Many cannot accept the contradiction inherent in the idea that although Zionism undoubtedly succeeded in creating a thriving national entity in Israel, its roots are as a colonial settler project (as are those of other modern countries: the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand). Nor can they accept that it would not have succeeded but for the support of the great imperial powers, Britain and later the United States. Zionism, therefore, could be and was both a national and a colonial settler movement at one and the same time."

One of the central tenets of the Zionist and Israeli colonization is the denial of an authentic, independent Palestinian identity. During the British control of Palestine, the population was officially divided between Jews and "non-Jews." "There were no such thing as Palestinians they did not exist," onetime Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir quipped. This erasure, which requires an egregious act of historical amnesia, is what the Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerling called the "politicide" of the Palestinian people. Khalidi writes, "The surest way to eradicate a people's right to their land is to deny their historical connection to it."

The creation of the state of Israel on May 15, 1948, was achieved by the Haganah and other Jewish groups through the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians and massacres that spread terror among the Palestinian population. The Haganah, trained and armed by the British, swiftly seized most of Palestine. It emptied West Jerusalem and cities such as Haifa and Jaffa, along with numerous towns and villages, of their Arab inhabitants. Palestinians call this moment in their history the Nakba, or the Catastrophe.

"By the summer of 1949, the Palestinian polity had been devastated and most of its society uprooted," Khalidi writes. "Some 80 percent of the Arab population of the territory that at war's end became the new state of Israel had been forced from their homes and lost their lands and property. At least 720,000 of the 1.3 million Palestinians were made refugees. Thanks to this violent transformation, Israel controlled 78 percent of the territory of former Mandatory Palestine, and now ruled over the 160,000 Palestinian Arabs who had been able to remain, barely one-fifth of the prewar Arab population."

Since 1948, Palestinians have heroically mounted one resistance effort after another, all unleashing disproportionate Israeli reprisals and a demonization of the Palestinians as terrorists. But this resistance has also forced the world to recognize the presence of Palestinians, despite the feverish efforts of Israel, the United States and many Arab regimes to remove them from historical consciousness. The repeated revolts, as Said noted, gave the Palestinians the right to tell their own story, the "permission to narrate."

The colonial project has poisoned Israel, as feared by its most prescient leaders, including Moshe Dayan and Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who was assassinated by a right-wing Jewish extremist in 1995. Israel is an apartheid state that rivals and often surpasses the onetime savagery and racism of apartheid South Africa. Its democracy -- which was always exclusively for Jews -- has been hijacked by extremists, including current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who have implemented racial laws that were once championed mainly by marginalized fanatics such as Meir Kahane . The Israeli public is infected with racism. "Death to Arabs" is a popular chant at Israeli soccer matches. Jewish mobs and vigilantes, including thugs from right-wing youth groups such as Im Tirtzu, carry out indiscriminate acts of vandalism and violence against dissidents, Palestinians, Israeli Arabs and the hapless African immigrants who live crammed into the slums of Tel Aviv. Israel has promulgated a series of discriminatory laws against non-Jews that eerily resemble the racist Nuremberg Laws that disenfranchised Jews in Nazi Germany. The Communities Acceptance Law permits exclusively Jewish towns in Israel's Galilee region to bar applicants for residency on the basis of "suitability to the community's fundamental outlook." The late Uri Avnery, a left-wing politician and journalist, wrote that "Israel's very existence is threatened by fascism."

In recent years, up to 1 million Israelis have left to live in the United States , many of them among Israel's most enlightened and educated citizens. Within Israel, human rights campaigners, intellectuals and journalists -- Israeli and Palestinian -- have found themselves vilified as traitors in government-sponsored smear campaigns, placed under state surveillance and subjected to arbitrary arrests. The Israeli educational system, starting in primary school, is an indoctrination machine for the military. The Israeli army periodically unleashes massive assaults with its air force, artillery and mechanized units on the largely defenseless 1.85 million Palestinians in Gaza, resulting in thousands of Palestinian dead and wounded. Israel runs the Saharonim detention camp in the Negev Desert, one of the largest detention centers in the world, where African immigrants can be held for up to three years without trial.

The great Jewish scholar Yeshayahu Leibowitz, whom Isaiah Berlin called "the conscience of Israel," saw the mortal danger to Israel of its colonial project. He warned that if Israel did not separate church and state and end its colonial occupation of the Palestinians it would give rise to a corrupt rabbinate that would warp Judaism into a fascistic cult. "Religious nationalism is to religion what National Socialism was to socialism," said Leibowitz, who died in 1994. He saw that the blind veneration of the military, especially after the 1967 war in which Israel captured the West Bank and East Jerusalem, would result in the degeneration of the Jewish society and the death of democracy.

"Our situation will deteriorate to that of a second Vietnam [a reference to the war waged by the United States in the 1970s], to a war in constant escalation without prospect of ultimate resolution," Leibowitz wrote. He foresaw that "the Arabs would be the working people and the Jews the administrators, inspectors, officials, and police -- mainly secret police. A state ruling a hostile population of 1.5 million to 2 million foreigners would necessarily become a secret-police state, with all that this implies for education, free speech and democratic institutions. The corruption characteristic of every colonial regime would also prevail in the State of Israel. The administration would have to suppress Arab insurgency on the one hand and acquire Arab Quislings on the other. There is also good reason to fear that the Israel Defense Force, which has been until now a people's army, would, as a result of being transformed into an army of occupation, degenerate, and its commanders, who will have become military governors, resemble their colleagues in other nations."

The Zionists could never have colonized the Palestinians without the backing of Western imperial powers whose motives were tainted by anti-Semitism. Many of the Jews who fled to Israel would not have done so but for the virulent European anti-Semitism that by the end of World War II saw 6 million Jews murdered. Israel was all that many impoverished and stateless survivors, robbed of their national rights, communities, homes and often most of their relatives, had left. It became the tragic fate of the Palestinians, who had no role in the European pogroms or the Holocaust, to be sacrificed on the altar of hate.

[Mar 02, 2020] It appears the US-Taliban interim peace arrangement has hit a snag:

Mar 02, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Likklemore , Mar 1 2020 20:58 utc | 30

appears the US-Taliban interim peace arrangement has hit a snag:

Afghan President Ashraf Ghani rejects Taliban prisoner release under U.S deal


Afghan President Ashraf Ghani rejected on Sunday a Taliban demand for the release of 5,000 prisoners as a condition for talks with Afghanistan's government and civilians – included in a deal between the United States and the Islamist militants.

"The government of Afghanistan has made no commitment to free 5,000 Taliban prisoners," Ghani told reporters in Kabul, a day after the deal was signed in Qatar to start a political settlement aimed at ending the United States' longest war.[.]

was the Afghan government not a party to the negotiations? Strange!

[Mar 02, 2020] The myth of the mujaheddin victory over the Soviets

It was a stalemate, in which Afghan government held power over central towns and mujahidins over part of provinces. Neither can defeat each other. This stalemate was ruptured by the collapse of the USSR.
Mar 02, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org
Ghost Ship , Mar 1 2020 18:54 utc | 17
Afghanistan
Now that the Americans have been defeated in Afghanistan perhaps they'll go back with a more critical eye to look at what happened in the Afghan-Soviet war against the mujaheddin. The Soviet Union decided to withdraw because it had reached a stalemate but the communist government managed to soldier on for three more years, and it was the collapse of the Soviet Union for financial reasons that resulted in funds being cutoff to the communist government that in turn led to the collapse of the government, so the Soviet Union was not brought down/defeated by the mujaheddin.
Will coronavirus lead to the collapse of the Washington establishment? I don't know if it will but the descendants of the mujaheddin will no doubt claim responsibility for the defeat of the United States if it occurs.
Yet again, Washington demonstrates that it doesn't really understand war.

[Mar 01, 2020] Countering Nationalist Oligarchy by Ganesh Sitaraman

Highly recommended!
The article is mostly junk. But it contains some important insights into the rise of Trympism (aka "national neoliberalism") -- nationalist oligarchy. Including the following " the governments that have emerged from the new populist moment are, to date, not actually pursuing policies that are economically populist."
The real threat to liberal democracy isn't authoritarianism -- it's nationalist oligarchy. Here's how American foreign policy should change. The real threat to liberal democracy isn't authoritarianism -- it's nationalist oligarchy. Here's how American foreign policy should change.
Notable quotes:
"... Fascism: A Warning ..."
"... Can it Happen Here? Authoritarianism in America ..."
"... the governments that have emerged from the new populist moment are, to date, not actually pursuing policies that are economically populist. ..."
"... The better and more useful way to view these regimes -- and the threat to democracy emerging at home and abroad because of them -- is as nationalist oligarchies. Oligarchy means rule by a small number of rich people. In an oligarchy, wealthy elites seek to preserve and extend their wealth and power. In his definitive book titled Oligarchy ..."
"... Oligarchies remain in power through two strategies: first, using divide-and-conquer tactics to ensure that a majority doesn't coalesce, and second, by rigging the political system to make it harder for any emerging majority to overthrow them. ..."
"... Rigging the system is, in some ways, a more obvious tactic. It means changing the legal rules of the game or shaping the political marketplace to preserve power. Voting restrictions and suppression, gerrymandering, and manipulation of the media are examples. The common theme is that they insulate the minority in power from democracy; they prevent the population from kicking the rulers out through ordinary political means. ..."
"... Classical Greek Oligarchy ..."
"... Framing today's threat as nationalist oligarchy not only clarifies the challenge but also makes clear how democracy is different -- and what democracy requires. Democracy means more than elections, an independent judiciary, a free press, and various constitutional norms. For democracy to persist, there must also be relative economic equality. If society is deeply unequal economically, the wealthy will dominate politics and transform democracy into an oligarchy. And there must be some degree of social solidarity because, as Lincoln put it, "A house divided against itself cannot stand." ..."
"... We see a number of disturbing signs the United States is breaking down along these dimensions. ..."
"... The view that money is speech under the First Amendment has unleashed wealthy individuals and corporations to spend as much as they want to influence politics. The "doom loop of oligarchy," as Ezra Klein has called it, is an obvious consequence: The wealthy use their money to influence politics and rig policy to increase their wealth, which in turn increases their capacity to influence politics. Meanwhile, we're increasingly divided into like-minded enclaves, and the result is an ever-more toxic degree of partisanship. ..."
"... The Counterinsurgent's Constitution: Law in the Age of Small Wars ..."
"... The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution: Why Economic Inequality Threatens our Republic ..."
Dec 31, 2019 | democracyjournal.org
from Winter 2019, No. 51 – 31 MIN READ

Tagged Authoritarianism Democracy Foreign Policy Government nationalism oligarchy

Ever since the 2016 election, foreign policy commentators and practitioners have been engaged in a series of soul-searching exercises to understand the great transformations taking place in the world -- and to articulate a framework appropriate to the challenges of our time. Some have looked backwards, arguing that the liberal international order is collapsing, while others question whether it ever existed. Another group seems to hope the current messiness is simply a blip and that foreign policy will return to normalcy after it passes. Perhaps the most prominent group has identified today's great threat as the rise of authoritarianism, autocracy, and illiberal democracy. They fear that constitutional democracy is receding as norms are broken and institutions are under siege.

Unfortunately, this approach misunderstands the nature of the current crisis. The challenge we face today is not one of authoritarianism, as so many seem inclined to believe, but of nationalist oligarchy. This form of government feeds populism to the people, delivers special privileges to the rich and well-connected, and rigs politics to sustain its regime.

... ... ..

Authoritarianism or What?

Across the political spectrum, commentators and scholars have identified -- and warned of -- the global rise of autocracies and authoritarian governments. They cite Russia, Hungary, the Philippines, and Turkey, among others. Distinguished commentators are increasingly worried. Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright recently published a book called Fascism: A Warning . Cass Sunstein gathered a variety of scholars for a collection titled, Can it Happen Here? Authoritarianism in America .

The authoritarian lens is familiar from the heroic narrative of democracy defeating autocracies in the twentieth century. But as a framework for understanding today's central geopolitical challenges, it is far too narrow. This is mainly because those who are worried about the rise of authoritarianism and the crisis of democracy are insufficiently focused on economics. Their emphasis is almost exclusively political and constitutional -- free speech, voting rights, equal treatment for minorities, independent courts, and the like. But politics and economics cannot be dissociated from each other, and neither are autonomous from social and cultural factors. Statesmen and philosophers used to call this "political economy." Political economy looks at economic and political relationships in concert, and it is attentive to how power is exercised. If authoritarianism is the future, there must be a story of its political economy -- how it uses politics and economics to gain and hold power. Yet the rise-of-authoritarianism theorists have less to say about these dynamics.

To be sure, many commentators have discussed populist movements throughout Europe and America, and there has been no shortage of debate on the extent to which a generation of widening economic inequality has been a contributing factor in their rise. But whatever the causes of popular discontent, the policy preferences of the people, and the bloviating rhetoric of leaders, the governments that have emerged from the new populist moment are, to date, not actually pursuing policies that are economically populist.

The better and more useful way to view these regimes -- and the threat to democracy emerging at home and abroad because of them -- is as nationalist oligarchies. Oligarchy means rule by a small number of rich people. In an oligarchy, wealthy elites seek to preserve and extend their wealth and power. In his definitive book titled Oligarchy , Jeffrey Winters calls it "wealth defense." Elites engage in "property defense," protecting what they already have, and "income defense," preserving and extending their ability to hoard more. Importantly, oligarchy as a governing strategy accounts for both politics and economics. Oligarchs use economic power to gain and hold political power and, in turn, use politics to expand their economic power.

Those who worry about the rise of authoritarianism and fear the crisis of democracy are insufficiently focused on economics.

The trouble for oligarchs is that their regime involves rule by a small number of wealthy elites. In even a nominally democratic society, and most countries around the world today are at least that, it should be possible for the much larger majority to overthrow the oligarchy with either the ballot or the bullet. So how can oligarchy persist? This is where both nationalism and authoritarianism come into play. Oligarchies remain in power through two strategies: first, using divide-and-conquer tactics to ensure that a majority doesn't coalesce, and second, by rigging the political system to make it harder for any emerging majority to overthrow them.

The divide-and-conquer strategy is an old one, and it works through a combination of coercion and co-optation. Nationalism -- whether statist, ethnic, religious, or racial -- serves both functions. It aligns a portion of ordinary people with the ruling oligarchy, mobilizing them to support the regime and sacrifice for it. At the same time, it divides society, ensuring that the nationalism-inspired will not join forces with everyone else to overthrow the oligarchs. We thus see fearmongering about minorities and immigrants, and claims that the country belongs only to its "true" people, whom the leaders represent. Activating these emotional, cultural, and political identities makes it harder for citizens in the country to unite across these divides and challenge the regime.

Rigging the system is, in some ways, a more obvious tactic. It means changing the legal rules of the game or shaping the political marketplace to preserve power. Voting restrictions and suppression, gerrymandering, and manipulation of the media are examples. The common theme is that they insulate the minority in power from democracy; they prevent the population from kicking the rulers out through ordinary political means. Tactics like these are not new. They have existed, as Matthew Simonton shows in his book Classical Greek Oligarchy , since at least the time of Pericles and Plato. The consequence, then as now, is that nationalist oligarchies can continue to deliver economic policies to benefit the wealthy and well-connected.

It is worth noting that even the generation that waged war against fascism in Europe understood that the challenge to democracy in their time was not just political, but economic and social as well. They believed that the rise of Nazism was tied to the concentration of economic power in Germany, and that cartels and monopolies not only cooperated with and served the Nazi state, but helped its rise and later sustained it. As New York Congressman Emanuel Celler, one of the authors of the Anti-Merger Act of 1950, said, quoting a report filed by Secretary of War Kenneth Royall, "Germany under the Nazi set-up built up a great series of industrial monopolies in steel, rubber, coal and other materials. The monopolies soon got control of Germany, brought Hitler to power, and forced virtually the whole world into war." After World War II, Marshall Plan experts not only rebuilt Europe but also exported aggressive American antitrust and competition laws to the continent because they believed political democracy was impossible without economic democracy.

Framing today's threat as nationalist oligarchy not only clarifies the challenge but also makes clear how democracy is different -- and what democracy requires. Democracy means more than elections, an independent judiciary, a free press, and various constitutional norms. For democracy to persist, there must also be relative economic equality. If society is deeply unequal economically, the wealthy will dominate politics and transform democracy into an oligarchy. And there must be some degree of social solidarity because, as Lincoln put it, "A house divided against itself cannot stand."

We see a number of disturbing signs the United States is breaking down along these dimensions. Electoral losers in places like North Carolina seek to entrench their power rather than accept defeat. The view that money is speech under the First Amendment has unleashed wealthy individuals and corporations to spend as much as they want to influence politics. The "doom loop of oligarchy," as Ezra Klein has called it, is an obvious consequence: The wealthy use their money to influence politics and rig policy to increase their wealth, which in turn increases their capacity to influence politics. Meanwhile, we're increasingly divided into like-minded enclaves, and the result is an ever-more toxic degree of partisanship.

Addressing our domestic economic and social crises is critical to defending democracy, and a grand strategy for America's future must incorporate both domestic and foreign policy. But while many have recognized that reviving America's middle class and re-stitching our social fabric are essential to saving democracy, less attention has been paid to how American foreign policy should be reformed in order to defend democracy from the threat of nationalist oligarchy.

The Varieties of Nationalist Oligarchy

Just as there are many variations on liberal democracy -- the Swedish model, the French model, the American model -- there are many varieties of nationalist oligarchy. The story is different in every country, but the elements of nationalist oligarchy are trending all over the world.

... ... ...

... the European Union funds Hungary's oligarchy, as Orbán draws on EU money to fund about 60 percent of the state projects that support "the new Fidesz-linked business elite." Nor do Orbán and his allies do much to hide the country's crony capitalist model. András Lánczi, president of a Fidesz-affiliated think tank, has boldly stated that "if something is done in the national interest, then it is not corruption." "The new capitalist ruling class," one Hungarian banker comments, "make their money from the government."

The commentator Jan-Werner Müller captures Orbán's Hungary this way: "Power is secured through wide-ranging control of the judiciary and the media; behind much talk of protecting hard-pressed families from multinational corporations, there is crony capitalism, in which one has to be on the right side politically to get ahead economically."

Crony capitalism, coupled with resurgent nationalism and central government control, is also an issue in China. While some commentators have emphasized "state capitalism" -- when government has a significant ownership stake in companies -- this phenomenon is not to be confused with crony capitalism. Some countries with state capitalism, like Norway, are widely seen as extremely non-corrupt and, indeed, are often held up as models of democracy. State capitalism itself is thus not necessarily a problem. Crony capitalism, in contrast, is an "instrumental union between capitalists and politicians designed to allow the former to acquire wealth, legally or otherwise, and the latter to seek and retain power." This is the key difference between state capitalism and oligarchy.

... ... ...

Ganesh Sitaraman is a professor of law and Chancellor's faculty fellow at Vanderbilt Law School, and the author of The Counterinsurgent's Constitution: Law in the Age of Small Wars and The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution: Why Economic Inequality Threatens our Republic .

[Feb 29, 2020] A very interesting and though provoking presentation by Ambassador Chas Freeman "America in Distress: The Challenges of Disadvantageous Change"

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... the American-led takedown of the post-World War II international system has shattered long-standing rules and norms of behavior. ..."
"... The combination of disorder at home and abroad is spawning changes that are increasingly disadvantageous to the United States. With Congress having essentially walked off the job, there is a need for America's universities to provide the information and analysis of international best practices that the political system does not. ..."
Feb 29, 2020 | angrybearblog.com

likbez , February 29, 2020 7:38 pm

A very interesting and though provoking presentation by Ambassador Chas Freeman "America in Distress: The Challenges of Disadvantageous Change"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvILLCbOFo4

I think this would be very informative for anybody seriously interested in the USA foreign policy. Listening to him is so sad to realize that instead of person of his caliber we have Pompous Pompeo, who forever is frozen on the level of a tank repair mechanical engineer, as the Secretary of State.

Published on Feb 24, 2020

In the United States and other democracies, political and economic systems still work in theory, but not in practice. Meanwhile, the American-led takedown of the post-World War II international system has shattered long-standing rules and norms of behavior.

The combination of disorder at home and abroad is spawning changes that are increasingly disadvantageous to the United States. With Congress having essentially walked off the job, there is a need for America's universities to provide the information and analysis of international best practices that the political system does not.

Ambassador Chas W. Freeman, Jr. is a senior fellow at Brown University's Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, a former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Defense, ambassador to Saudi Arabia (during operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm), acting Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, and Chargé d'affaires at both Bangkok and Beijing. He began his diplomatic career in India but specialized in Chinese affairs. (He was the principal American interpreter during President Nixon's visit to Beijing in 1972.)

Ambassador Freeman is a much sought-after public speaker (see http://chasfreeman.net ) and the author of several well-received books on statecraft and diplomacy. His most recent book, America's Continuing Misadventures in the Middle East was published in May 2016. Interesting Times: China, America, and the Shifting Balance of Prestige, appeared in March 2013. America's Misadventures in the Middle East came out in 2010, as did the most recent revision of The Diplomat's Dictionary, the companion volume to Arts of Power: Statecraft and Diplomacy. He was the editor of the Encyclopedia Britannica entry on "diplomacy."

Chas Freeman studied at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and in Taiwan, and earned an AB magna cum laude from Yale University as well as a JD from the Harvard Law School.

He chairs Projects International, Inc., a Washington-based firm that for more than three decades has helped its American and foreign clients create ventures across borders, facilitating their establishment of new businesses through the design, negotiation, capitalization, and implementation of greenfield investments, mergers and acquisitions, joint ventures, franchises, one-off transactions, sales and agencies in other countries.

He is the author of several books including the most recent

Interesting times: China, America, and the shifting balance of prestige (2013)

[Feb 29, 2020] Secret Wars, Forgotten Betrayals, Global Tyranny. Who s Really In Charge Of The US Military by Cynthia Chung

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Thus, it should be no surprise to anyone in the world at this point in history, that the CIA holds no allegiance to any country. And it can be hardly expected that a President, who is actively under attack from all sides within his own country, is in a position to hold the CIA accountable for its past and future crimes ..."
Jan 21, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Cynthia Chung via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

"There is a kind of character in thy life, That to the observer doth thy history, fully unfold."

– William Shakespeare

Once again we find ourselves in a situation of crisis, where the entire world holds its breath all at once and can only wait to see whether this volatile black cloud floating amongst us will breakout into a thunderstorm of nuclear war or harmlessly pass us by. The majority in the world seem to have the impression that this destructive fate totters back and forth at the whim of one man. It is only normal then, that during such times of crisis, we find ourselves trying to analyze and predict the thoughts and motives of just this one person. The assassination of Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani, a true hero for his fellow countrymen and undeniably an essential key figure in combating terrorism in Southwest Asia, was a terrible crime, an abhorrently repugnant provocation. It was meant to cause an apoplectic fervour, it was meant to make us who desire peace, lose our minds in indignation. And therefore, that is exactly what we should not do.

In order to assess such situations, we cannot lose sight of the whole picture, and righteous indignation unfortunately causes the opposite to occur. Our focus becomes narrower and narrower to the point where we can only see or react moment to moment with what is right in front of our face. We are reduced to an obsession of twitter feeds, news blips and the doublespeak of 'official government statements'.

Thus, before we may find firm ground to stand on regarding the situation of today, we must first have an understanding as to what caused the United States to enter into an endless campaign of regime-change warfare after WWII, or as former Chief of Special Operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff Col. Prouty stated, three decades of the Indochina war.

An Internal Shifting of Chess Pieces in the Shadows

It is interesting timing that on Sept 2, 1945, the very day that WWII ended, Ho Chi Minh would announce the independence of Indochina. That on the very day that one of the most destructive wars to ever occur in history ended, another long war was declared at its doorstep. Churchill would announce his "Iron Curtain" against communism on March 5th, 1946, and there was no turning back at that point. The world had a mere 6 months to recover before it would be embroiled in another terrible war, except for the French, who would go to war against the Viet Minh opponents in French Indochina only days after WWII was over.

In a previous paper I wrote titled "On Churchill's Sinews of Peace" , I went over a major re-organisation of the American government and its foreign intelligence bureau on the onset of Truman's de facto presidency. Recall that there was an attempted military coup d'état, which was exposed by General Butler in a public address in 1933, against the Presidency of FDR who was only inaugurated that year. One could say that there was a very marked disapproval from shadowy corners for how Roosevelt would organise the government.

One key element to this reorganisation under Truman was the dismantling of the previously existing foreign intelligence bureau that was formed by FDR, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) on Sept 20, 1945 only two weeks after WWII was officially declared over. The OSS would be replaced by the CIA officially on Sept 18, 1947, with two years of an American intelligence purge and the internal shifting of chess pieces in the shadows. In addition, de-facto President Truman would also found the United States National Security Council on Sept 18, 1947, the same day he founded the CIA. The NSC was a council whose intended function was to serve as the President's principal arm for coordinating national security, foreign policies and policies among various government agencies.

In Col. Prouty's book he states,

" In 1955, I was designated to establish an office of special operations in compliance with National Security Council (NSC) Directive #5412 of March 15, 1954. This NSC Directive for the first time in the history of the United States defined covert operations and assigned that role to the Central Intelligence Agency to perform such missions , provided they had been directed to do so by the NSC, and further ordered active-duty Armed Forces personnel to avoid such operations. At the same time, the Armed Forces were directed to "provide the military support of the clandestine operations of the CIA" as an official function . "

What this meant, was that there was to be an intermarriage of the foreign intelligence bureau with the military, and that the foreign intelligence bureau would act as top dog in the relationship, only taking orders from the NSC. Though the NSC includes the President, as we will see, the President is very far from being in the position of determining the NSC's policies.

An Inheritance of Secret Wars

" There is no instance of a nation benefitting from prolonged warfare. "

– Sun Tzu

On January 20th, 1961, John F. Kennedy was inaugurated as President of the United States. Along with inheriting the responsibility of the welfare of the country and its people, he was to also inherit a secret war with communist Cuba run by the CIA.

JFK was disliked from the onset by the CIA and certain corridors of the Pentagon, they knew where he stood on foreign matters and that it would be in direct conflict for what they had been working towards for nearly 15 years. Kennedy would inherit the CIA secret operation against Cuba, which Prouty confirms in his book, was quietly upgraded by the CIA from the Eisenhower administration's March 1960 approval of a modest Cuban-exile support program (which included small air drop and over-the-beach operations) to a 3,000 man invasion brigade just before Kennedy entered office.

This was a massive change in plans that was determined by neither President Eisenhower, who warned at the end of his term of the military industrial complex as a loose cannon, nor President Kennedy, but rather the foreign intelligence bureau who has never been subject to election or judgement by the people. It shows the level of hostility that Kennedy encountered as soon as he entered office, and the limitations of a President's power when he does not hold support from these intelligence and military quarters.

Within three months into JFK's term, Operation Bay of Pigs (April 17th to 20th 1961) was scheduled. As the popular revisionist history goes; JFK refused to provide air cover for the exiled Cuban brigade and the land invasion was a calamitous failure and a decisive victory for Castro's Cuba. It was indeed an embarrassment for President Kennedy who had to take public responsibility for the failure, however, it was not an embarrassment because of his questionable competence as a leader. It was an embarrassment because, had he not taken public responsibility, he would have had to explain the real reason why it failed. That the CIA and military were against him and that he did not have control over them. If Kennedy were to admit such a thing, he would have lost all credibility as a President in his own country and internationally, and would have put the people of the United States in immediate danger amidst a Cold War.

What really occurred was that there was a cancellation of the essential pre-dawn airstrike, by the Cuban Exile Brigade bombers from Nicaragua, to destroy Castro's last three combat jets. This airstrike was ordered by Kennedy himself. Kennedy was always against an American invasion of Cuba, and striking Castro's last jets by the Cuban Exile Brigade would have limited Castro's threat, without the U.S. directly supporting a regime change operation within Cuba. This went fully against the CIA's plan for Cuba.

Kennedy's order for the airstrike on Castro's jets would be cancelled by Special Assistant for National Security Affairs McGeorge Bundy, four hours before the Exile Brigade's B-26s were to take off from Nicaragua, Kennedy was not brought into this decision. In addition, the Director of Central Intelligence Allen Dulles, the man in charge of the Bay of Pigs operation was unbelievably out of the country on the day of the landings.

Col. Prouty, who was Chief of Special Operations during this time, elaborates on this situation:

" Everyone connected with the planning of the Bay of Pigs invasion knew that the policy dictated by NSC 5412, positively prohibited the utilization of active-duty military personnel in covert operations. At no time was an "air cover" position written into the official invasion plan The "air cover" story that has been created is incorrect. "

As a result, JFK who well understood the source of this fiasco, set up a Cuban Study Group the day after and charged it with the responsibility of determining the cause for the failure of the operation. The study group, consisting of Allen Dulles, Gen. Maxwell Taylor, Adm. Arleigh Burke and Attorney General Robert Kennedy (the only member JFK could trust), concluded that the failure was due to Bundy's telephone call to General Cabell (who was also CIA Deputy Director) that cancelled the President's air strike order.

Kennedy had them.

Humiliatingly, CIA Director Allen Dulles was part of formulating the conclusion that the Bay of Pigs op was a failure because of the CIA's intervention into the President's orders. This allowed for Kennedy to issue the National Security Action Memorandum #55 on June 28th, 1961, which began the process of changing the responsibility from the CIA to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. As Prouty states,

" When fully implemented, as Kennedy had planned, after his reelection in 1964, it would have taken the CIA out of the covert operation business. This proved to be one of the first nails in John F. Kennedy's coffin. "

If this was not enough of a slap in the face to the CIA, Kennedy forced the resignation of CIA Director Allen Dulles, CIA Deputy Director for Plans Richard M. Bissell Jr. and CIA Deputy Director Charles Cabell.

In Oct 1962, Kennedy was informed that Cuba had offensive Soviet missiles 90 miles from American shores. Soviet ships with more missiles were on their way towards Cuba but ended up turning around last minute. Rumours started to abound that JFK had cut a secret deal with Russian Premier Khrushchev, which was that the U.S. would not invade Cuba if the Soviets withdrew their missiles. Criticisms of JFK being soft on communism began to stir.

NSAM #263, closely overseen by Kennedy, was released on Oct 11th, 1963, and outlined a policy decision " to withdraw 1,000 military personnel [from Vietnam] by the end of 1963 " and further stated that " It should be possible to withdraw the bulk of U.S. personnel [including the CIA and military] by 1965. " The Armed Forces newspaper Stars and Stripes had the headline U.S. TROOPS SEEN OUT OF VIET BY '65. Kennedy was winning the game and the American people.

This was to be the final nail in Kennedy's coffin.

Kennedy was brutally shot down only one month later, on Nov, 22nd 1963. His death should not just be seen as a tragic loss but, more importantly, it should be recognised for the successful military coup d'état that it was and is . The CIA showed what lengths it was ready to go to if a President stood in its way. (For more information on this coup refer to District Attorney of New Orleans at the time, Jim Garrison's book . And the excellently researched Oliver Stone movie "JFK")

Through the Looking Glass

On Nov. 26th 1963, a full four days after Kennedy's murder, de facto President Johnson signed NSAM #273 to begin the change of Kennedy's policy under #263. And on March 4th, 1964, Johnson signed NSAM #288 that marked the full escalation of the Vietnam War and involved 2,709,918 Americans directly serving in Vietnam, with 9,087,000 serving with the U.S. Armed Forces during this period.

The Vietnam War, or more accurately the Indochina War, would continue for another 12 years after Kennedy's death, lasting a total of 20 years for Americans.

Scattered black ops wars continued, but the next large scale-never ending war that would involve the world would begin full force on Sept 11, 2001 under the laughable title War on Terror, which is basically another Iron Curtain, a continuation of a 74 year Cold War. A war that is not meant to end until the ultimate regime changes are accomplished and the world sees the toppling of Russia and China. Iraq was destined for invasion long before the vague Gulf War of 1990 and even before Saddam Hussein was being backed by the Americans in the Iraq-Iran war in the 1980s. Iran already suffered a CIA backed regime change in 1979.

It had been understood far in advance by the CIA and US military that the toppling of sovereignty in Iraq, Libya, Syria and Iran needed to occur before Russia and China could be taken over. Such war tactics were formulaic after 3 decades of counterinsurgency against the CIA fueled "communist-insurgency" of Indochina. This is how today's terrorist-inspired insurgency functions, as a perfect CIA formula for an endless bloodbath.

Former CIA Deputy Director (2010-2013) Michael Morell, who was supporting Hillary Clinton during the presidential election campaign and vehemently against the election of Trump, whom he claimed was being manipulated by Putin, said in a 2016 interview with Charlie Rose that Russians and Iranians in Syria should be killed covertly to 'pay the price' .

Therefore, when a drone stroke occurs assassinating an Iranian Maj. Gen., even if the U.S. President takes onus on it, I would not be so quick as to believe that that is necessarily the case, or the full story. Just as I would not take the statements of President Rouhani accepting responsibility for the Iranian military shooting down 'by accident' the Boeing 737-800 plane which contained 176 civilians, who were mostly Iranian, as something that can be relegated to criminal negligence, but rather that there is very likely something else going on here.

I would also not be quick to dismiss the timely release, or better described as leaked, draft letter from the US Command in Baghdad to the Iraqi government that suggests a removal of American forces from the country. Its timing certainly puts the President in a compromised situation. Though the decision to keep the American forces within Iraq or not is hardly a simple matter that the President alone can determine. In fact there is no reason why, after reviewing the case of JFK, we should think such a thing.

One could speculate that the President was set up, with the official designation of the IRGC as "terrorist" occurring in April 2019 by the US State Department, a decision that was strongly supported by both Bolton and Pompeo, who were both members of the NSC at the time. This made it legal for a US military drone strike to occur against Soleimani under the 2001 AUMF, where the US military can attack any armed group deemed to be a terrorist threat. Both Bolton and Pompeo made no secret that they were overjoyed by Soleimani's assassination and Bolton went so far as to tweet "Hope this is the first step to regime change in Tehran." Bolton has also made it no secret that he is eager to testify against Trump in his possible impeachment trial.

Former CIA Director Mike Pompeo was recorded at an unknown conference recently, but judging from the gross laughter of the audience it consists of wannabe CIA agents, where he admits that though West Points' cadet motto is "You will not lie, cheat, or steal, or tolerate those who do.", his training under the CIA was the very opposite, stating " I was the CIA Director. We lied, we cheated, we stole. It was like we had entire training courses. (long pause) It reminds you of the glory of the American experiment. "

Thus, it should be no surprise to anyone in the world at this point in history, that the CIA holds no allegiance to any country. And it can be hardly expected that a President, who is actively under attack from all sides within his own country, is in a position to hold the CIA accountable for its past and future crimes .

Tags Politics War Conflict

ThomasChase1776 , 3 minutes ago link

General Smedley Butler had an answer. Read his book.

https://www.americanswhotellthetruth.org/portraits/major-general-smedley-butler

Is-Be , 8 minutes ago link

Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani, a true hero for his fellow countrymen

All his countrymen?

Element , 15 minutes ago link

Who's Really In Charge Of The US Military? - Cynthia Chung via The Strategic Culture Foundation

Donald Trump, you stupid time-wasting twat .

ThomasChase1776 , 5 minutes ago link

LOL. That's a good one.

Assuming Trump is doing what he said he would, why isn't our military guarding our border?
Why hasn't our military left the middle east already?

Who really runs our government?

InTheLandOfTheBlind , 1 hour ago link

As much as I hate the CIA, mi6 had more of hand in overthrowing iran than Langley did

ThomasChase1776 , 4 minutes ago link

Is that supposed to be an excuse?

GRDguy , 1 hour ago link

". . . the CIA holds no allegiance to any country." But they sure kiss the *** of the financial sociopaths who write their paychecks and finance the black ops.

ThomasChase1776 , 4 minutes ago link

and Mossad

Slaytheist , 1 hour ago link

Does this bitch not know that the CIA is the currency mafia police....ffs, that's a **** ton of words.

oneno , 1 hour ago link

She knows ...

SRV , 1 hour ago link

Fletcher Prouty's book The Secret Team is a must read... he was on the inside and watched the formation of the permanent team established in the late 50s that assumed the power of the president.

JFK fought that team...

cynicalskeptic , 1 hour ago link

Look at who the OSS recruited - Ivy League Skull and Bones types from rich families that made their fortunes in often questionable ventures.

If you're the patriarch of some super wealthy family wouldn't you be thrilled to have younger family members working for the nation's intelligence agencies? Sort of the ultimate in 'inside information'. Plus these families had experience in things like drug smuggling, human trafficking and anything else you can imagine..... While the Brits started the opium trade with China, Americans jumped right in bringing opium from Turkey.

Didn't take long before the now CIA became owned by the families whose members staffed it.

InTheLandOfTheBlind , 43 minutes ago link

Again ignoring the British influence. The CIA does not have a monopoly on intelligence

Spiritual Anunnaki , 2 hours ago link

One major aspect pertaining American involvment in Veitnam was something like 90% of the rubber produced Globally came from the region.

It is more diverse now, being 3rd, with the association revealing that in 2017, Vietnam earned US$2.3 billion from export of 1.4 million tonnes of natural rubber, up 36% in value and 11.4% in volume year on year.

Haboob , 2 hours ago link

Fighting for rubber monopoly in Vietnam,fighting for oil monopoly in the middle east.

That's life.

Benito_Camela , 1 hour ago link

Gunboat diplomacy is nothing new. War is and always has been a racket.

InTheLandOfTheBlind , 38 minutes ago link

Unfortunately it is a winning racket.

Art_Vandelay , 2 hours ago link

Betrayals, secrets, tyranny? Who's in charge? **** Cheney & Co.

Benito_Camela , 1 hour ago link

Mike Pimpeo. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPt-zXn05ac

InTheLandOfTheBlind , 36 minutes ago link

The British crown

Kan , 2 hours ago link

Rockfellers formed the OSS then the CIA which is the brute force for the CFR which they also run and own. The bankers run y our country and bought and blackmailed all your politicians... Only buttplug and pedo's get to be in charge now folks.... and some 9th circle witches of course...

TeethVillage88s , 1 hour ago link

OSS & CIA were formed from Ivy League Schools/Uni's... who turned out to be Traitors to England & USSR... Same today I

[Feb 29, 2020] A very interesting and though provoking presentation by Ambassador Chas Freeman "America in Distress: The Challenges of Disadvantageous Change"

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... the American-led takedown of the post-World War II international system has shattered long-standing rules and norms of behavior. ..."
"... The combination of disorder at home and abroad is spawning changes that are increasingly disadvantageous to the United States. With Congress having essentially walked off the job, there is a need for America's universities to provide the information and analysis of international best practices that the political system does not. ..."
Feb 29, 2020 | angrybearblog.com

likbez , February 29, 2020 7:38 pm

A very interesting and though provoking presentation by Ambassador Chas Freeman "America in Distress: The Challenges of Disadvantageous Change"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvILLCbOFo4

I think this would be very informative for anybody seriously interested in the USA foreign policy. Listening to him is so sad to realize that instead of person of his caliber we have Pompous Pompeo, who forever is frozen on the level of a tank repair mechanical engineer, as the Secretary of State.

Published on Feb 24, 2020

In the United States and other democracies, political and economic systems still work in theory, but not in practice. Meanwhile, the American-led takedown of the post-World War II international system has shattered long-standing rules and norms of behavior.

The combination of disorder at home and abroad is spawning changes that are increasingly disadvantageous to the United States. With Congress having essentially walked off the job, there is a need for America's universities to provide the information and analysis of international best practices that the political system does not.

Ambassador Chas W. Freeman, Jr. is a senior fellow at Brown University's Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, a former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Defense, ambassador to Saudi Arabia (during operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm), acting Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, and Chargé d'affaires at both Bangkok and Beijing. He began his diplomatic career in India but specialized in Chinese affairs. (He was the principal American interpreter during President Nixon's visit to Beijing in 1972.)

Ambassador Freeman is a much sought-after public speaker (see http://chasfreeman.net ) and the author of several well-received books on statecraft and diplomacy. His most recent book, America's Continuing Misadventures in the Middle East was published in May 2016. Interesting Times: China, America, and the Shifting Balance of Prestige, appeared in March 2013. America's Misadventures in the Middle East came out in 2010, as did the most recent revision of The Diplomat's Dictionary, the companion volume to Arts of Power: Statecraft and Diplomacy. He was the editor of the Encyclopedia Britannica entry on "diplomacy."

Chas Freeman studied at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and in Taiwan, and earned an AB magna cum laude from Yale University as well as a JD from the Harvard Law School.

He chairs Projects International, Inc., a Washington-based firm that for more than three decades has helped its American and foreign clients create ventures across borders, facilitating their establishment of new businesses through the design, negotiation, capitalization, and implementation of greenfield investments, mergers and acquisitions, joint ventures, franchises, one-off transactions, sales and agencies in other countries.

He is the author of several books including the most recent

Interesting times: China, America, and the shifting balance of prestige (2013)

[Feb 29, 2020] Learning Nothing From the Ghost of Congress Past by Andrew J. Bacevich

The USA is an imperial country. And wars is how empire is sustained and expanded. Bacevich does not even mention this fact.
Notable quotes:
"... While perfunctory congressional hearings may yet occur, a meaningful response -- one that would demand accountability, for example -- is about as likely as a bipartisan resolution to the impeachment crisis. ..."
"... This implicit willingness to write off a costly, unwinnable, and arguably unnecessary war should itself prompt sober reflection. What we have here is a demonstration of how pervasive and deeply rooted American militarism has become. ..."
"... we have become a nation given to misusing military power, abusing American soldiers, and averting our gaze from the results. ..."
"... The impeachment hearings were probably the reason the WaPo published when it did. After all, the article tells us little that any semi-sentient observer hasn't known for over a decade now. ..."
"... Then, today, we have another American trooper killed in Afghanistan, with many Afghans. Then, we have Trump, jutting his jaw out, as usual, to show how tough he is and...by golly, how tough America is. How patriotic! Damn it! Rah rah. He pardons and receives a war criminal at the white house, one of those Seals that murdered Afghans. ..."
"... By military standards, there is supposed to be rules of engagement and punishment for outright breaking of such rules. But no, Trump is one ignorant, cold dude and the misery in numerous US invaded nations means nothing to this bum with a title and money ..."
"... Were our senior government leaders more familiar with military service, especially as front line soldiers, they might have been less inclined to dawdle in these matters, agree with obfuscated results for political reasons, and waste so much effort. ..."
Dec 23, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

The Afghanistan Papers could have been the start of redemption, but it's all been subsumed by impeachment and an uninterested public.

....

While perfunctory congressional hearings may yet occur, a meaningful response -- one that would demand accountability, for example -- is about as likely as a bipartisan resolution to the impeachment crisis.

This implicit willingness to write off a costly, unwinnable, and arguably unnecessary war should itself prompt sober reflection. What we have here is a demonstration of how pervasive and deeply rooted American militarism has become.

Take seriously the speechifying heard on the floor of the House of Representatives in recent days and you'll be reassured that the United States remains a nation of laws, with Democrats and Republicans alike affirming their determination to defend our democracy and preserve the Constitution, even while disagreeing on what that might require at present.

Take seriously the contents of the Afghanistan Papers and you'll reach a different conclusion: we have become a nation given to misusing military power, abusing American soldiers, and averting our gaze from the results. U.S. military expenditures and the Pentagon's array of foreign bases far exceed those of any other nation on the planet. In our willingness to use force, we (along with Israel) lead the pack. Putative adversaries such as China and Russia are models of self-restraint by comparison. And when it comes to cumulative body count, the United States is in a league of its own.

Yet since the end of the Cold War and especially since 9/11, U.S. forces have rarely accomplished the purposes for which they are committed, the Pentagon concealing failure by downsizing its purposes. Afghanistan offers a good example. What began as Operation Enduring Freedom has become in all but name Operation Decent Interval, the aim being to disengage in a manner that will appear responsible, if only for a few years until the bottom falls out.

So the real significance of the Post 's Afghanistan Papers is this: t hey invite Americans to contemplate a particularly vivid example what our misplaced infatuation with military power produces. Sadly, it appears evident that we will refuse the invitation. Don't blame Trump for this particular example of Washington's egregious irresponsibility.

Andrew Bacevich is president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. His new book, The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory , will be published next month.

Sid Finster • a day ago
The impeachment hearings were probably the reason the WaPo published when it did. After all, the article tells us little that any semi-sentient observer hasn't known for over a decade now.

Anyway, nobody likes a bipartisan fiasco that cannot be neatly blamed on Team R (or Team D).

John Achterhof Sid Finster • 12 hours ago
Just give credit where it is due: the Post's reporting on the Afghanistan Papers is journalism at its very best.
Fayez Abedaziz • 21 hours ago
Then, today, we have another American trooper killed in Afghanistan, with many Afghans. Then, we have Trump, jutting his jaw out, as usual, to show how tough he is and...by golly, how tough America is. How patriotic! Damn it! Rah rah. He pardons and receives a war criminal at the white house, one of those Seals that murdered Afghans.

By military standards, there is supposed to be rules of engagement and punishment for outright breaking of such rules. But no, Trump is one ignorant, cold dude and the misery in numerous US invaded nations means nothing to this bum with a title and money. What a joke this nations foreign policy is and the ignorant, don't care American people have become. Like never before. There were years when people actually talked about subjects. Not now, if you mention the weather they cower and look pained. The old days really were better.

One example aside from the above: compare President Kennedy to Trump. What a riot...

polistra24 • 21 hours ago
Well, these documents are highly unsurprising. Everybody has known the facts for a long time. Everybody also knows that the US "government" will not change its ways. Its sole purpose and mission is to obliterate everything except Israel, and these documents are evidence of massive SUCCESS in its mission, not evidence of failure.
Richard • 13 hours ago
When the troops start to mutiny, the war will end.
Marcus • 9 hours ago
Were our senior government leaders more familiar with military service, especially as front line soldiers, they might have been less inclined to dawdle in these matters, agree with obfuscated results for political reasons, and waste so much effort.

This is also to say that misleading documents and briefings from the military about progress in Afghanistan, while contemptible, did not cause the strategic failure. Contemporary reports from the press and other agencies indicated the effort was not working out plainly to anyone who wanted to pay attention. Our political leaders chose to ignore the truth for political gain.

A more realistic temperament chastened by experience would have been more inclined to criticize and make corrections, and summon the courage to cut our losses rather than crow ignominiously about "cutting and running." Few such temperaments, it seems at least, make it to the top thee days.

[Feb 28, 2020] Chas Freeman America in Distress The Challenges of Disadvantageous Change

Highly recommended!
I think everybody should listen the initial 47 minutes
Notable quotes:
"... Wanted to add that the malaise that is gripping the U.S. institutions is completely visible, it is not the opaque and obsequies portrait drawn by the punditry, news organizations, and elites. Seems most obvious to those of us outside the beltway that can clearly delineate between the failure of DC and the projections and marketing to the population that passes as wonky prose. Stupidity lacks the clarity, but brings the temerity making the facade not so subtle. ..."
"... Literally the only endorsement I've heard of Tulsi Gabbard - and a strikingly convincing one ..."
"... Isn't it just a question of the profits in the military business? ..."
Feb 24, 2020 | www.youtube.com

https://youtu.be/mvILLCbOFo4

In the United States and other democracies, political and economic systems still work in theory, but not in practice. Meanwhile, the American-led takedown of the post-World War II international system has shattered long-standing rules and norms of behavior. The combination of disorder at home and abroad is spawning changes that are increasingly disadvantageous to the United States. With Congress having essentially walked off the job, there is a need for America's universities to provide the information and analysis of international best practices that the political system does not.

Ambassador Chas W. Freeman, Jr. is a senior fellow at Brown University's Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, a former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Defense, ambassador to Saudi Arabia (during operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm), acting Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, and Chargé d'affaires at both Bangkok and Beijing. He began his diplomatic career in India but specialized in Chinese affairs. (He was the principal American interpreter during President Nixon's visit to Beijing in 1972.)

Ambassador Freeman is a much sought-after public speaker (see http://chasfreeman.net ) and the author of several well-received books on statecraft and diplomacy. His most recent book, America's Continuing Misadventures in the Middle East was published in May 2016. Interesting Times: China, America, and the Shifting Balance of Prestige, appeared in March 2013. America's Misadventures in the Middle East came out in 2010, as did the most recent revision of The Diplomat's Dictionary, the companion volume to Arts of Power: Statecraft and Diplomacy. He was the editor of the Encyclopedia Britannica entry on "diplomacy."

Chas Freeman studied at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and in Taiwan, and earned an AB magna cum laude from Yale University as well as a JD from the Harvard Law School. He chairs Projects International, Inc., a Washington-based firm that for more than three decades has helped its American and foreign clients create ventures across borders, facilitating their establishment of new businesses through the design, negotiation, capitalization, and implementation of greenfield investments, mergers and acquisitions, joint ventures, franchises, one-off transactions, sales and agencies in other countries.

Trade Prosper , 3 days ago (edited)

Well worth the watch and hope more see it, especially the presentation in the initial 47 minutes. We Americans take our deficits and the $ as the reserve currency far too lightly.

strezztechnoid , 2 days ago

Wanted to add that the malaise that is gripping the U.S. institutions is completely visible, it is not the opaque and obsequies portrait drawn by the punditry, news organizations, and elites. Seems most obvious to those of us outside the beltway that can clearly delineate between the failure of DC and the projections and marketing to the population that passes as wonky prose. Stupidity lacks the clarity, but brings the temerity making the facade not so subtle.

yes it's me , 3 days ago

Literally the only endorsement I've heard of Tulsi Gabbard - and a strikingly convincing one

Bob Trajkoski , 3 days ago

Way the US is Warmongering state and threat to humanity, on the planet.? Nukes in the hand's of gangsters

strezztechnoid , 2 days ago (edited)

No, not mercenaries, this is a protection racket. The U.N. address in late 2018 by the President (the laughter spoke volumes) was about as insightful as a "goodfellas" scene where the shakedown of the little guy is highlighted. It was the speeches by other countries at the meeting that was most informative.

A definitive pullback from U.S. hegemony was palpable, real, and un-moderated. Large and small countries all expressed an unwillingness to be held under the thumb of the global bully. This is the result of having an over abundance of a particle within D.C.; not the electron, photon, or neutron...but the moron.

Frank , 3 days ago

Aura of imperial purpose.

Dan Good , 7 hours ago

Isn't it just a question of the profits in the military business?

[Feb 28, 2020] Media s Deafening Silence On Latest WikiLeaks Drops Is Its Own Scandal by Caitlin Johnstone

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Yet the mass media, freakishly, has had absolutely nothing to say about this extremely newsworthy story. ..."
"... The mass media's stone-dead silence on the OPCW scandal is becoming its own scandal, of equal or perhaps even greater significance than the OPCW scandal itself. It opens up a whole litany of questions which have tremendous importance for every citizen of the western world; questions like, how are people supposed to participate in democracy if all the outlets they normally turn to to make informed voting decisions adamantly refuse to tell them about the existence of massive news stories like the OPCW scandal? How are people meant to address such conspiracies of silence when there is no mechanism in place to hold the entire mass media to account for its complicity in it? And by what mechanism are all these outlets unifying in that conspiracy of silence? ..."
"... This is the FOURTH leak showing how the OPCW fabricated a report on a supposed Syrian 'chemical' attack," tweeted journalist Ben Norton. "And mainstream Western corporate media outlets are still silent, showing how authoritarian these 'democracies' are and how tightly they control info." "Media silence on this story is its own scandal," "Media silence on this story is its own scandal," "Media silence on this story is its own scandal," tweeted journalist Aaron Maté. ..."
Dec 28, 2019 | caitlinjohnstone.com

This is getting really, really, really weird. WikiLeaks has WikiLeaks has published yet another set of leaked internal documents from within the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) adding even more material to the mountain of evidence that we've been lied to about an alleged chemical weapons attack in Douma, Syria last year which resulted in airstrikes upon that nation from the US, UK and France.

... ... ...

[Feb 28, 2020] Chas Freeman America in Distress The Challenges of Disadvantageous Change

Highly recommended!
I think everybody should listen the initial 47 minutes
Notable quotes:
"... Wanted to add that the malaise that is gripping the U.S. institutions is completely visible, it is not the opaque and obsequies portrait drawn by the punditry, news organizations, and elites. Seems most obvious to those of us outside the beltway that can clearly delineate between the failure of DC and the projections and marketing to the population that passes as wonky prose. Stupidity lacks the clarity, but brings the temerity making the facade not so subtle. ..."
"... Literally the only endorsement I've heard of Tulsi Gabbard - and a strikingly convincing one ..."
"... Isn't it just a question of the profits in the military business? ..."
Feb 24, 2020 | www.youtube.com

https://youtu.be/mvILLCbOFo4

In the United States and other democracies, political and economic systems still work in theory, but not in practice. Meanwhile, the American-led takedown of the post-World War II international system has shattered long-standing rules and norms of behavior. The combination of disorder at home and abroad is spawning changes that are increasingly disadvantageous to the United States. With Congress having essentially walked off the job, there is a need for America's universities to provide the information and analysis of international best practices that the political system does not.

Ambassador Chas W. Freeman, Jr. is a senior fellow at Brown University's Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, a former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Defense, ambassador to Saudi Arabia (during operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm), acting Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, and Chargé d'affaires at both Bangkok and Beijing. He began his diplomatic career in India but specialized in Chinese affairs. (He was the principal American interpreter during President Nixon's visit to Beijing in 1972.)

Ambassador Freeman is a much sought-after public speaker (see http://chasfreeman.net ) and the author of several well-received books on statecraft and diplomacy. His most recent book, America's Continuing Misadventures in the Middle East was published in May 2016. Interesting Times: China, America, and the Shifting Balance of Prestige, appeared in March 2013. America's Misadventures in the Middle East came out in 2010, as did the most recent revision of The Diplomat's Dictionary, the companion volume to Arts of Power: Statecraft and Diplomacy. He was the editor of the Encyclopedia Britannica entry on "diplomacy."

Chas Freeman studied at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and in Taiwan, and earned an AB magna cum laude from Yale University as well as a JD from the Harvard Law School. He chairs Projects International, Inc., a Washington-based firm that for more than three decades has helped its American and foreign clients create ventures across borders, facilitating their establishment of new businesses through the design, negotiation, capitalization, and implementation of greenfield investments, mergers and acquisitions, joint ventures, franchises, one-off transactions, sales and agencies in other countries.

Trade Prosper , 3 days ago (edited)

Well worth the watch and hope more see it, especially the presentation in the initial 47 minutes. We Americans take our deficits and the $ as the reserve currency far too lightly.

strezztechnoid , 2 days ago

Wanted to add that the malaise that is gripping the U.S. institutions is completely visible, it is not the opaque and obsequies portrait drawn by the punditry, news organizations, and elites. Seems most obvious to those of us outside the beltway that can clearly delineate between the failure of DC and the projections and marketing to the population that passes as wonky prose. Stupidity lacks the clarity, but brings the temerity making the facade not so subtle.

yes it's me , 3 days ago

Literally the only endorsement I've heard of Tulsi Gabbard - and a strikingly convincing one

Bob Trajkoski , 3 days ago

Way the US is Warmongering state and threat to humanity, on the planet.? Nukes in the hand's of gangsters

strezztechnoid , 2 days ago (edited)

No, not mercenaries, this is a protection racket. The U.N. address in late 2018 by the President (the laughter spoke volumes) was about as insightful as a "goodfellas" scene where the shakedown of the little guy is highlighted. It was the speeches by other countries at the meeting that was most informative.

A definitive pullback from U.S. hegemony was palpable, real, and un-moderated. Large and small countries all expressed an unwillingness to be held under the thumb of the global bully. This is the result of having an over abundance of a particle within D.C.; not the electron, photon, or neutron...but the moron.

Frank , 3 days ago

Aura of imperial purpose.

Dan Good , 7 hours ago

Isn't it just a question of the profits in the military business?

[Feb 27, 2020] An interesting view on Russian "intelligencia" by the scientist and writer Zinoviev expressed during "perestroika" in 1991

Highly recommended!
Feb 27, 2020 | en.wikipedia.org

If intellectuals replace the current professional politicians as the leaders of society the situation would become much worse. Because they have neither the sense of reality, nor common sense. For them, the words and speeches are more important than the actual social laws and the dominant trends, the dominant social dynamics of the society. The psychological principle of the intellectuals is that we could organize everything much better, but we are not allowed to do it.

But the actual situation is as following: they could organize the life of society as they wish and plan, in the way they view is the best only if under conditions that are not present now are not feasible in the future. Therefore they are not able to act even at the level of current leaders of the society, which they despise. The actual leaders are influenced by social pressures, by the current social situation, but at least they doing something. Intellectuals are unhappy that the real stream of life they are living in. They consider it wrong. that makes them very dangerous, because they look really smart, while in reality being sophisticated professional idiots.

[Feb 27, 2020] The Obama Administration Wrecked Libya for a Generation by Doug Bandow

Jan 10, 2020 | The American Conservative
Foreign Affairs

'We came, we saw, he died' -- Hillary Clinton smirked when she said it. She had no idea how many people that would apply to. A fighter loyal to the Libyan internationally-recognised Government of National Accord (GNA) fires a heavy machine gun. (MAHMUD TURKIA/AFP via Getty Images)

Libya's ongoing destruction belongs to Hillary Clinton more than anyone else. It was she who pushed President Barack Obama to launch his splendid little war, backing the overthrow of Moammar Gaddafi in the name of protecting Libya's civilians. When later asked about Gaddafi's death, she cackled and exclaimed: "We came, we saw, he died."

Alas, his was not the last death in that conflict, which has flared anew, turning Libya into a real-life Game of Thrones . An artificial country already suffering from deep regional divisions, Libya has been further torn apart by political and religious differences. One commander fighting on behalf of the Government of National Accord (GNA), Salem Bin Ismail, told the BBC: "We have had chaos since 2011."

Arrayed against the weak unity government is the former Gaddafi general, U.S. citizen, and one-time CIA adjunct Khalifa Haftar. For years, the two sides have appeared to be in relative military balance, but a who's who of meddlesome outsiders has turned the conflict into an international affair. The latest playbook features Egypt, France, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Russia supporting Haftar, while Italy, Qatar, and Turkey are with the unity government.

In April, Haftar launched an offensive to seize Tripoli. It faltered until Russian mercenaries made an appearance in September, bringing Haftar to the gates of Tripoli. He apparently is also employing Sudanese mercenaries, though not with their nation's backing. Now Turkey plans to introduce troops to bolster the official government.

Washington's position is at best confused. It officially recognizes the GNA. When Haftar started his offensive, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo issued a statement urging "the immediate halt to these military operations." However, President Donald Trump then initiated a friendly phone call to Haftar "to discuss ongoing counterterrorism efforts and the need to achieve peace and stability in Libya," according to the White House. More incongruously, "The president recognized Field Marshal Haftar's significant role in fighting terrorism and securing Libya's oil resources, and the two discussed a shared vision for Libya's transition to a stable, democratic political system." The State Department recently urged both sides to step back. However, Haftar continues to advance, and just days ago captured the coastal city of Sirte.

In recent years, Libya had been of little concern to the U.S. It was an oil producer, but Gaddafi had as much incentive to sell the oil as did King Idris I, whom Gaddafi and other members of the "Free Officers Movement" ousted. Gaddafi carefully balanced interests in Libya's complex tribal society and kept the military weak over fears of another coup. He was a geopolitical troublemaker, supporting a variety of insurgent and terrorist groups. But he steadily lost influence, alienating virtually every African and Middle Eastern government.

Of greatest concern to Washington, Libyan agents organized terrorist attacks against the U.S. -- bombing an American airliner and a Berlin disco frequented by American soldiers -- leading to economic sanctions and military retaliation. However, those days were long over by 2011. Eight years before, in the aftermath of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Gaddafi repudiated terrorism and ended his missile and nuclear programs in a deal with the U.S. and Europe. He was feted in European capitals. His government served as a non-permanent member of the UN Security Council from 2008 to 2009. American officials congratulated him for his assistance against terrorism and discussed possible assistance in return. All seemed forgiven.

Then in 2011, the Arab Spring engulfed Libya, as people rose against Gaddafi's rule. He responded with force to reestablish control. However, Western advocates of regime change warned that genocide was possible and pushed for intervention under United Nations auspices. In explaining his decision to intervene, Obama stated: "We knew that if we waited one more day, Benghazi could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world." Russia and China went along with a resolution authorizing "all necessary measures to prevent the killing of civilians."

In fact, the fears were fraudulent. Gaddafi was no angel, but he hadn't targeted civilians, and his florid rhetoric, cited by critics, only attacked those who had taken up arms. He even promised amnesty to those who abandoned their weapons. With no civilians to protect, NATO, led by the U.S., bombed Libyan government forces and installations and backed the insurgents' offensive. It was not a humanitarian intervention, but a lengthy, costly, low-tech, regime-change war, mostly at Libyan expense. Obama claimed: "We had a unique ability to stop the violence." Instead his administration ensured that the initial civil war would drag on for months -- and the larger struggle ultimately for years.

On October 20, 2011, Gaddafi was discovered hiding in a culvert in Sirte. He was beaten, sodomized with a bayonet, shot, and killed. That essentially ended the first phase of the extended Libyan civil war. Gaddafi had done much to earn his fate, but his death led to an entirely new set of problems.

A low level insurgency continued, led by former Gaddafi followers. Proposals either to disband militia forces or integrate them into the National Transitional Council (NTC) military went unfulfilled, and this developed into the conflict's second phase. Elections delivered fragmented results, as ideological, religious, and other divisions ran deep. Militias were accused of misusing government funds, employing violence, and kidnapping and assassinating their opponents. Islamist groups increasingly attempted to impose religious rule. Violence and insecurity worsened.

In February 2014, Haftar challenged the General National Congress (GNC). Hostilities broadly evolved between the GNC/GNA, backed by several militias, which controlled Tripoli and much of the country's west, and the Tobruk-based House of Representatives, which was supported by Haftar and his Libyan National Army. Multiple domestic factions, forces, and militias also were involved. Among them was the Islamic State, which murdered Egyptian Coptic (Christian) laborers.

The African Union and the United Nations promoted various peace initiatives. However, other governments fueled hostilities. Most notable now is the potential entry of Turkish troops.

In mid-December, Turkey's parliament approved an agreement to provide equipment, military training, technical aid, and intelligence. (The Erdogan government also controversially set maritime boundaries with Libya that conflict with other claims, most notably from Cyprus, Egypt, Greece, and Israel.) Ankara introduced some members of the dwindling Syrian insurgents once aligned against the Assad regime to Libya and raised the possibility of adding its "quick reaction force" to the fight.

At the end of last month, the Erdogan government introduced, and parliament approved, legislation to authorize the deployment of combat forces. President Erdogan criticized nations that backed a "putschist general" and "warlord" and promised to support the GNA "much more effectively." While noting that Turkey doesn't "go where we are not invited" (except, apparently, Syria), Erdogan added that "since now there is an invitation [from the GNA], we will accept it."

But Haftar refused to back down. Last week, he called on "men and women, soldiers and civilians, to defend our land and our honor." He continued: "We accept the challenge and declare jihad and a call to arms."

Turkish legislator Ismet Yilmaz supported the intervention and warned that the conflict might "spread instability to Turkey." More likely the intervention is a grab for energy, since Ankara has devoted significant resources of late to exploring the Eastern Mediterranean for oil and gas. Libya has oil deposits, of course, which could be exploited under a friendly government. Perhaps most important, Ankara wants to ensure that its interests are respected in the Eastern Mediterranean.

However, direct intervention is an extraordinarily dangerous step. It puts Turkey in the line of fire, as in Syria. Ankara's forces could clash with those of Russia, which maintains the merest veneer of deniability over its role in Libya. And other powers -- Egypt, perhaps, or the UAE -- might ramp up their involvement in an effort to thwart Erdogan's plans.

In response, the U.S. attempted to warn Turkey against intervening. "External military intervention threatens prospects for resolving the conflict," said State Department spokeswoman Morgan Ortagus with no hint of irony. Congress might go further: some of its members have already proposed sanctioning Russia for the introduction of mercenaries, and Ankara has few friends left on Capitol Hill. Nevertheless it is rather late for Washington to cry foul. Its claim to essentially a monopoly on Mideast meddling can only be seen as risible by other powers.

The Arab League has also criticized "foreign interference." In a resolution passed in late December, the group expressed "serious concern over the military escalation further aggravating the situation in Libya and which threatens the security and stability of neighboring countries and the entire region." However, Arab League is no less hypocritical. Egypt, the UAE, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, all deeply involved in the conflict, are members of the league. And no one would be surprised if some or all of them decided to expand their participation in the fighting. Egyptian president Abdel Fatah al-Sisi insisted: "We will not allow anyone to control Libya. It is a matter of Egyptian national security."

Although the fighting is less intense than in, say, Syria, combat has gone high-tech. According to the Washington Post : "Eight months into Libya's worst spasm of violence in eight years, the conflict is being fought increasingly by weaponized drones." ISIS is one of the few beneficiaries of these years of fighting. GNA-allied militias that once cooperated with the U.S. and other states in counterterrorism are now focused on Haftar, allowing militants to revive, set up desert camps, and organize attacks. Washington still employs drones, but they rely on accurate intelligence, best gathered on the ground, and even then well-directed hits are no substitute for local ground operations.

The losers are the Libyan people. The fighting has resulted in thousands of deaths and tens of thousands of refugees. Divisions, even among tribes, are growing. The future looks ever dimmer. Fathi Bashagha, the GNA interior minister, lamented: "Every day we are burying young people who should be helping us build Libya." Absent a major change, many more will be buried in the future.

Yet the air of unreality surrounding the conflict remains. In late December, President Trump met with al-Sisi and, according to the White House, the two "rejected foreign exploitation and agreed that parties must take urgent steps to resolve the conflict before Libyans lose control to foreign actors." However, the latter already happened -- nine years ago when America first intervened.

The Obama administration did not plan to ruin Libya for a generation. But its decision to take on another people's fight has resulted in catastrophe. Hillary Clinton's malignant gift keeps on giving. Such is the cost of America's promiscuous war-making.

Doug Bandow is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. He is a former special assistant to President Ronald Reagan and the author of several books, including Foreign Follies: America's New Global Empire .

[Feb 27, 2020] An interesting view on Russian "intelligencia" by the scientist and writer Zinoviev expressed during "perestroika" in 1991

Highly recommended!
Feb 27, 2020 | en.wikipedia.org

If intellectuals replace the current professional politicians as the leaders of society the situation would become much worse. Because they have neither the sense of reality, nor common sense. For them, the words and speeches are more important than the actual social laws and the dominant trends, the dominant social dynamics of the society. The psychological principle of the intellectuals is that we could organize everything much better, but we are not allowed to do it.

But the actual situation is as following: they could organize the life of society as they wish and plan, in the way they view is the best only if under conditions that are not present now are not feasible in the future. Therefore they are not able to act even at the level of current leaders of the society, which they despise. The actual leaders are influenced by social pressures, by the current social situation, but at least they doing something. Intellectuals are unhappy that the real stream of life they are living in. They consider it wrong. that makes them very dangerous, because they look really smart, while in reality being sophisticated professional idiots.

[Feb 25, 2020] Another strong nail in the coffin cover of the official version of the "investigation" of the MH-17 crash in Ukraine in 2014

Feb 25, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

alaff , Feb 23 2020 15:49 utc | 9

Another strong nail in the coffin cover of the official version of the "investigation" of the MH-17 crash in Ukraine in 2014.

However, liars will bring this six-year farce to the end. Soon the so-called "court" will take place, and we will see another funny performance of the clowns (aka "investigators").

[Feb 24, 2020] Bush Family s Project Hammer

Notable quotes:
"... Deanna Spingola's articles are copyrighted but may be republished, reposted, or emailed. However, the person or organization must not charge for subscriptions or advertising. The article must be copied intact and full credit given. Deanna's web site address must also be included. ..."
Dec 15, 2019 | www.spingola.com

The Bush Family's Project Hammer
By Deanna Spingola
Edited by Ken Freeland
February 7, 2010

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Hammering the USSR's Economy

In 1989 President George H. W. Bush began the multi-billion dollar Project Hammer program using an investment strategy to bring about the economic destruction of the Soviet Union including the theft of the Soviet treasury, the destabilization of the ruble, funding a KGB coup against Gorbachev in August 1991 and the seizure of major energy and munitions industries in the Soviet Union. Those resources would subsequently be turned over to international bankers and corporations. On November 1, 2001, the second operative in the Bush regime, President George W. Bush, issued Executive Order 13233 on the basis of "national security" and concealed the records of past presidents, especially his father's spurious activities during 1990 and 1991. Consequently, those records are no longer accessible to the public. [1] The Russian coup plot was discussed in June 1991 when Yeltsin visited with Bush in conjunction with his visit to the United States. On that same visit, Yeltsin met discreetly with Gerald Corrigan, the chairman of the New York Federal Reserve. [2]

Because of numerous Presidential Executive Orders, the ethically questionable Project Hammer was deemed legal. Many of Reagan's executive orders were actually authored by Vice President Bush or his legal associates, and it is possible that Project Hammer was created by Reagan's CIA Director, William Casey, who had directed OSS operations through Alan Dulles in Europe during World War II. Prior to his OSS affiliation, Casey worked for the Board of Economic Warfare which allegedly targeted "Hitler's economic jugular." [3] Allen Dulles, brother of John Foster Dulles, was the Director of the CIA (1953-1961). He was a senior partner at the Wall Street firm of Sullivan and Cromwell, which represented the Rockefeller Empire and other mammoth trusts, corporations and cartels.

Project Hammer was staffed with CIA operatives and others associated with the National Security apparatus. Covert channels were already in place as a result of other illegal Bush activities. Thus, it was a given (1) that the project would use secret, illegal funds for unapproved covert operations, and (2) that the American public and Congress would not be informed about the illegal actions perpetrated in foreign countries. The first objective was allegedly to crush Communism, a growing political philosophy and social movement that was initially funded by the usual group of international bankers who now supported their demise. To this end, the "Vulcans," under George H. W. Bush, waged war against the Soviet Union. [4]

The Return of the Vulcans

In their reincarnation in the administration of George W. Bush, the Vulcans functioned as a supposedly benign group, led by Council of Foreign Relations (CFR) member Condoleezza Rice, who attempted to augment and compensate for the Bush's lack of experience and education concerning foreign policy during his presidential campaign. Rice had been President George H. W. Bush's Soviet and East European Affairs Advisor in the National Security Council during the Soviet Union's dissolution and during the German reunification (July 1, 1990). The resurrected Vulcan group included Richard Armitage, Robert Blackwill, Stephen Hadley, Richard Perle, Rabbi Dov S. Zakheim, Robert Zoellick and Paul Wolfowitz. Other key campaign figures included Dick Cheney, George P. Shultz and Colin Powell, all influential but not actually a part of the Vulcan Group. All of these people, associated with the George H. W. Bush administration, returned to powerful, strategic positions in George W. Bush's administration.

Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz have been accused of being agents for the Israeli government. Investigations by Congress and the FBI have substantiated those allegations. Zakheim and his family were heavily involved in Yeshivat Sha'alvim, an educational organization in which students are taught to render absolute commitment to the State of Israel. [5]

Many of these individuals were also members of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) which was established in the spring of 1997 with the intention of promoting American Global leadership at any cost. The chairman and co-founder was William Kristol, son of Irving Kristol (CFR), considered the godfather of neo-conservatism which promotes the ideas of Max Shachtman and Leo Strauss, a noted Zionist and professor of political science at the University of Chicago. Kristol's co-founder was Robert W. Kagan (CFR). Kristol is also the editor and co-founder, along with John Podhoretz, of the Weekly Standard Magazine , established September 17, 1995 and owned by Rupert Murdoch until August 2009. This "conservative" magazine is edited by William Kristol and Fred Barnes and promotes Middle East warfare and a huge military budget, a mentality that infects the most popular "conservative" talk show radio hosts. Kristol is a trustee for the Manhattan Institute which was founded by CIA Director William Casey and was staffed with former CIA officers.

The Vulcans had almost limitless financing from a cache known by several names – the Black Eagle Trust, the Marcos gold, Yamashita's Gold, the Golden Lily Treasure, or the Durham Trust. Japan, under Emperor Hirohito, appointed a brother, Prince Chichibu, to head Golden Lily, established in November 1937 before Japan's infamous Rape of Nanking , to accompany and follow the military. The Golden Lily operation carried out massive plunder throughout Asia and included an army of jewelers, financial experts and smelters. [6] The Japanese were allegedly very organized and methodical. After the Allied blockade, Golden Lily headquarters were moved from Singapore to Manila where 175 storage sites were built by slave laborers and POWs. Billions of dollars worth of gold and other plundered treasures were stockpiled in these underground caverns, some of which were dis covered by the notorious Cold Warrior, Edward G. Lansdale who directed the recovery of some of the vaults. Truman and subsequent presidents, without congressional knowledge, have used those resources to finance the CIA's chaotic clandestine activities throughout the world. Much of the Middle East chaos is financed by those pillaged funds. A tiny portion of that treasure was the source of Ferdinand Marcos' vast wealth. Marcos worked with the CIA for decades using Golden Lily funds to bribe nations to support the Vietnam War. In return, Marcos was allowed to sell over $1 trillion in gold through Australian brokers. [7]

In July 1944, the leaders of forty-four nations met at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire to plan the post-war economy and to discuss organizing a global political action fund which would use the Black Eagle Trust ostensibly to fight communism, bribe political leaders, enhance the treasuries of U.S. allies, and manipulate elections in foreign countries and other unconstitutional covert operations. Certainly, those politicos who managed the funds also received financial benefits. This trust was headed by Secretary of War Henry Stimson, assisted by John J. McCloy (later head of the World Bank) and Robert Lovett (later Secretary of Defense) and consultant Robert B. Anderson (later Secretary of the Treasury). [8] Anderson later operated the Commercial Exchange Bank of Anguilla in the British West Indies and was convicted of running illegal offshore banking operations and tax evasion. Investors lost about $4.4 million. Consequently, he was sent to prison for a token amount of time, one month. He was also under house arrest for five years. He could have received a ten-year sentence but Judge Palmieri considered Anderson's "distinguished service" to the country in the "top levels of Government." [9]

Between 1945 and 1947 huge quantities of gold and platinum were deposited in prominent banks throughout the world. These deposits came to be known as the Black Eagle Trust. Swiss banks, because of their neutrality, were pivotal in maintaining these funds. These funds were allocated to fighting communism and paying bribes and fixing elections in places like Italy, Greece, and Japan. [10] Stimson and McCloy, both retired from government service, continued their involvement in the management of the Black Eagle Trust. Robert B. Anderson, who toured the treasure sites with Douglas MacArthur, set up the Black Eagle Trust and later became a member of Eisenhower's cabinet. [11] In order to maintain secrecy about the Trust, Washington officials insisted that the Japanese did not plunder the countries they invaded. Japanese officials who wanted to divulge the facts were imprisoned or murdered in a way that made it look like suicide, a common CIA tactic. [12] The Germans paid reparations to thousands of victims while the Japanese paid next to nothing. Military leaders who opposed foreign policies that embraced exploitation of third world countries were suicided or died from mysterious causes, which includes individuals such as George S. Patton, Smedley D. Butler and James V. Forrestal.

The Vulcan's effort to crush Communism and end the Cold War was largely funded by that Japanese plunder. The Vulcans were resurrected when George W. Bush was installed as president in 2000, facilitated by election maneuvers, probably lots of payoffs, and Jeb Bush's purge of Florida voters. They conducted other illegal operations, like securities fraud and money laundering. This entailed murder and false imprisonment to prevent penitent participants from divulging the activities of the group. During the process of accomplishing the main objective of destroying the Soviet Union, the operatives made massive profits. In September 1991, George H. W. Bush and Alan Greenspan, both Pilgrims Society members, financed $240 billion in illegal bonds to economically decimate the Soviet Union and bring Soviet oil and gas resources under the control of Western investors, backed by the Black Eagle Trust and supported later by Putin who for the right price purged certain oligarchs. The $240 billion in illegal bonds were apparently replaced with Treasury notes backed by U.S. taxpayers. [13] To conceal the clearance of $240 billion in securities, the Federal Reserve, within two months, increased the money supply to pre-9/11 numbers which resulted in the American taxpayer refinancing the $240 billion. [14]

The Takeover of Russia's Oil Industry

BP Amoco became the largest foreign direct investor in Russia in 1997 when it paid a half-billion dollars to buy a 10 percent stake in the Russian oil conglomerate Sidanko. Then in 1999, Tyumen Oil bought Sidanko's prize unit, Chernogorneft which allegedly made BP Amoco's investment worthless. Tyumen offered to cooperate with BP Amoco on the development of Chernogorneft but BP Amoco was not interested. [15] In October 1998, Halliburton Energy Services had entered into an agreement with Moscow-based Tyumen Oil Company (TNK). Their efforts were focused on the four western Siberia fields, the first one being the Samotlorskoye field. [16] TNK has proven oil reserves of 4.3 billion barrels and possibly as many as 6.1 billion barrels, with crude oil production and refining capabilities of 420,000 barrels/day and 230,000 barrels/day, respectively. TNK markets gasoline through 400 retail outlets. [17] In 2002 Halliburton and Sibneft, Russia's fifth largest crude oil producer, signed an agreement. Sibneft will use Halliburton's new technologies to improve well construction and processing while Halliburton directs all project management. [18]

Tyumenskaya Neftyanaya Kompaniya (Tyumen Oil Company) was established in 1995 by government decree. It is now TNK-BP, the leading Russian oil company and ranks among the top ten privately owned oil companies worldwide in terms of crude oil production. The company, formed in 2003, resulted from the merger of BP's Russian oil and gas assets and the oil and gas assets of Alfa, Access/Renova group (AAR). BP and AAR each own fifty percent of TNK-BP. The shareholders of TNK-BP own almost fifty percent of Slavneft, a vertically integrated Russian oil company. [19] This transaction was the biggest in Russian corporate history and was managed by Vladimir Lechtman, the Moscow partner for Jones Day, a global law firm with thirty offices and 2,200 lawyers worldwide. TNK-BP, Russia's second-largest oil company employs almost 100,000 people and operates in Samotlor. [20]

Reportedly, Putin was financially rewarded by the collaborators and was happy to purge some annoying industrialists who stood in the way. Mikhail Khodorkovsky was the manager of Yukos, the company that he built into Russia's second-largest oil company after acquiring it for $168 million when his Bank MENATEP, the first privately owned but notoriously corrupt bank since 1917 and wiped out in August 1998, purchased it through a controversial government privatization auction in 1995. MENATEP was named as a defendant in the Avisma lawsuit which was filed on August 19, 1999. [21] The bank may have facilitated the large-scale theft of Soviet Treasury funds before and following the USSR's collapse in 1991. [22] His company had borrowed hundreds of millions of dollars from western banks. [23] He was arrested on October 25, 2003 and sentenced in June 2005 to eight years on fraud and tax evasion charges. He was allegedly targeted as a political enemy by President Vladimir Putin who went after other big business owners who apparently made money by acquiring states assets. Yukos was sold piecemeal to pay off $28 billion in back tax charges. Yukos was seized and given to Rosneft. [24]

When Khodorkovsky was arrested, his secretive business arrangement with the Rothschild family was exposed as Jacob Rothschild assumed Khodorkovsky's 26% control of Yukos while Khodorkovsky's directorial seat on the Yukos board went to Edgar Ortiz, a former Halliburton vice president during Dick Cheney's reign as CEO at Halliburton. Cheney, as President and CEO of Halliburton, automatically had an association with the State Oil Company of Azerbaijan Republic (SOCAR) . [25] In November 1997, Dick Cheney, in anticipation of imminent events, had appointed Edgar Ortiz as president of Halliburton Energy Services, their global division. [26]

The Yukos Oil Company merged with the smaller Sibneft Oil Company on October 3, 2003 which created Russia's largest oil and gas business and the world's fourth-largest private oil company. [27] On May 11, 2007 Halliburton announced they had made an agreement with the Tyumen State Oil and Gas University to open a new employee-training center in Russia to grow their business in that country and in the surrounding region. They are currently training students from five countries, Kazakhstan, the Netherlands, Norway, Russia and the United Kingdom. [28] Halliburton was awarded a $33 million contract by TNK-BP to provide oil field services to develop the Ust-Vakh field in Western Siberia. [29]

September 11 – Black Op Cover-up

Three top securities brokers had offices in the World Trade Center, Cantor Fitzgerald, Euro Brokers and Garbon Inter Capital. Flight 11 struck just under the floors where Cantor Fitzgerald was located. Cantor Fitzgerald, with possible connections to the U.S. Intelligence apparatus, was America's biggest securities broker and apparently the main target. Within minutes, an explosion in the North Tower's vacant 23 rd floor, right under the offices of the FBI and Garbon Inter Capital on the 25 th floor caused a huge fire from the 22 nd through the 25 th floors. At the same time, there was an explosion in the basement of the North Tower. [30] A vault in the North Tower basement held less than $1 billion in gold, much of which was reportedly moved before 9/11. However, the government had hundreds of billions of dollars of securities which were summarily destroyed. The Federal Reserve, untouched by the crisis at its downtown offices (as they had everything backed up to a remote location), assumed emergency powers that afternoon. The $240 billion in securities were electronically cleared. [31] Then, at 9:03, Flight 175 slammed into the 78 th floor of the South Tower just below the 84 th floor where Euro Brokers were located. [32] Brian Clark, the manager at Euro Brokers, heard numerous explosions, apparently unrelated to what he referred to as the oxygen-starved fire caused by the plane crash.

The September 11 attacks related to the financial improprieties during the preceding ten years which spurred at least nine federal investigations which were initiated in 1997-1998, about the same time that Osama bin Laden, after twenty years as a CIA asset, announced a fatwa against the U.S. The records of many of those investigations were held in the Buildings Six and Seven and on the 23 rd floor of the North Tower. Those investigations were sure to reveal the black Eagle Trust shenanigans. [33] Building Seven, not hit by a plane, collapsed at 5:20:33 p.m. but was vacated as early as 9:00 when evacuees claimed to see dead bodies and sporadic fires within the building.

By 2008 and even earlier the covert securities were worth trillions. The securities used to decimate the Soviets and end the Cold War were stored in certain broker's vaults in the World Trade Center where they were destroyed on September 11, 2001. They would have come due for settlement and clearing on September 12, 2001. [34] The federal agency investigating these bonds, the Office of Naval Intelligence was in the section of the Pentagon that was destroyed on September 11. Renovations at the Pentagon were due to be completed on September 16, 2001. However, the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI), the entity that often monitors war games, was hurriedly moved. If they were monitoring the simultaneous war games that morning, they would have realized that the games were used as a distraction from the actual assault. Whatever hit the pentagon struck the Navy Command Center and the offices of the Chief of Naval Operations Intelligence Plot (CNO-IP). [35] There were 125 fatalities in the Pentagon, thirty-one percent of them were people who worked in the Naval Command Center, the location of the Office of Naval Intelligence. Thirty-nine of the forty people who worked in the Office of Naval Intelligence died . [36]

On September 10, 2001 Rumsfeld announced that the Pentagon couldn't account for $2.3 trillion, "We are, as they say, tangled in our anchor chain. Our financial systems are decades old. According to some estimates, we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions. We cannot share information from floor to floor in this building because it's stored on dozens of technological systems that are inaccessible or incompatible." [37] It was forgotten the following morning. Accountants, bookkeepers and budget analysts who were in the section of the Pentagon being renovated met their unexpected deaths. The destruction of accounting facts and figures will prevent discovery of where that money went. I am quite certain someone knows where it is. Certainly this is not merely gross incompetence but private seizure of public funds. [38] At the time Rabbi Dov Zakheim was chief-financial officer for the Department of Defense. [39] In 1993, Zakheim worked for SPS International, part of System Planning Corporation, a defense contractor. His firm's subsidiary, Tridata Corporation directed the investigation of the first "terrorist" attack on the World Trade Center in 1993. [40]

Certain National Security officials who had participated in the Cold War victory in 1991 thus comprised the collateral damage of the Cold War. They, along with hundreds of innocent people were in the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon. Their deaths were presumably required to conceal the existence of the Black Eagle Trust, along with the numerous illegal activities it had funded for over 50 years. This massive destruction, and the lost lives, constitutes a massive cover-up and continued lawlessness by the brotherhood of death, Skull and Bones, and their accomplices, the Enterprise. [41] The Enterprise was established in the 1980s as a covert fascist Cold Warriors faction working with other groups like Halliburton's private security forces and the Moonies. Citibank is connected to the Enterprise, along with all the CIA front banks, Nugen Hand and BCCI.

Double Dipping

Alvin B. "Buzzy" Krongard was elected Chief Executive Officer of Alexander Brown and Sons in 1991 and Chairman of the Board in 1994. Bankers Trust purchased Alexander Brown and Sons in 1997 to form BT Alex Brown. Krongard relinquished his investments in Alex Brown to Banker's Trust as part of the merger. He became Vice Chairman of Banker's Trust where he personally interacted with wealthy clients who were intimately linked to drug money laundering. After a year of possible networking, Krongard joined (or as Michael Ruppert suggests, rejoined ) the CIA in 1998 where his friend, Director George Tenet, concentrated his skills on private banking ventures within the elite moneyed community. Senate investigations verify that private banking firms frequently engage in money laundering from illicit drugs and corporate crime operations. [42] On January 28, 2000 the Reginald Howe and GATA Lawsuit was filed which accused certain U.S. bullion banks of illegally dumping U.S. Treasury gold on the market. The lawsuit named Deutsche bank Alex Brown, the U.S. Treasury, Alan Greenspan, the Federal Reserve, and Citibank, Chase, as defendants. Gerald Corrigan was accused of having private knowledge of the scheme. [43] Krongard became the Executive Director of the CIA, essentially the Chief Operating Officer, and the number three man on March 16, 2001. Krongard, while at the CIA, arranged for Blackwater's Erik Prince to get his first contract with the U.S. government, and later joined its board.

Richard Wagner, a data retrieval expert, estimated that more than $100 million in illegal transactions appeared to have rushed through the WTC computers before and during the disaster on September 11, 2001. A Deutsche Bank employee verified that approximately five minutes before the first plane hit the tower that the Deutsche Bank computer system in their WTC office was seized by an outside, unknown entity. Every single file was swiftly uploaded to an unidentified locality. This employee escaped from the building, but lost many of his friends. He knew, from his position in the company, that Alex Brown, the Deutsche Bank subsidiary participated in insider trading. Senator Carl Levin claimed that Alex Brown was just one of twenty prominent U.S. banks associated with money laundering. [44]

Andreas von Bülow, a Social Democratic Party member of the German parliament (1969-1994), was on the parliamentary committee on intelligence services, a group that has access to classified information. Von Bülow was also a member of the Schalck-Golodkowski investigation committee which investigates white-collar crime. He has estimated that inside trader profits surrounding 9/11 totaled approximately $15 billion. Von Bülow told The Daily Telegraph "If what I say is right, the whole US government should end up behind bars." Further, he said, "They have hidden behind a veil of secrecy and destroyed the evidence they invented the story of 19 Muslims working within Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda in order to hide the truth of their own covert operation." He also said, "I'm convinced that the US apparatus must have played a role and my theory is backed up by the [Washington] government's refusal to present any proof whatsoever of what happened." [45]

On September 26, CBS reported that the amount was more than $100 million and that seven countries were investigating the irregular trades. Two newspapers, Reuters and the New York Times, and other mainstream media reported that the CIA regularly monitors extraordinary trades and economic irregularities to ascertain possible criminal activities or financial assaults. In fact, the CIA uses specialized software, PROMIS, to scrutinize trades. [46]

Numerous researchers believe, with justification, that the transactions in the financial markets are indicative of foreknowledge of the events of 9/11, the attacks on the twin towers and the pentagon. One of the trades, for $2.5 million, a pittance compared to the total, went unclaimed. Alex Brown, once managed by Krongard, was the firm that placed the put options on United Airlines stock. President Bush awarded Krongard by appointing him as CIA Executive Director in 2004. [47]

Between September 6 and 7, 2001, the Chicago Board Options Exchange received purchases of 4,744 put options on United Airlines and only 396 call options. If 4,000 of those options were purchased by people with foreknowledge, they would have accrued about $5 million. On September 10, the Chicago exchange received 4,516 put options on American Airlines compared to 748 calls. The implications are that some insiders might profit by about $4 million. These two incidents were wholly irregular and at least six times higher than normal. [48]

Morgan Stanley Dean Witter & Company, who occupied floors 43-46, 56, 59-74 of the World Trade Center, Tower 2, saw 2,157 of its October $45 put options bought in the three trading days before Black Tuesday. This compares to an average of 27 contracts per day before September 6. Morgan Stanley's share price fell from $48.90 to $42.50 in the aftermath of the attacks. Assuming that 2,000 of these options contracts were bought based upon knowledge of the approaching attacks, their purchasers could have profited by at least $1.2 million. The U.S. government never again mentioned the trade irregularities after October 12, 2001. [49] Catastrophic events serve two purposes for the top criminal element in society – the perpetrators seize resources while their legislative accomplices impose burdensome restrictions on the citizens to make them more submissive and silent.

[1] Collateral Damage: U.S. Covert Operations and the Terrorist Attacks on September 11, 2001 by E.P. Heidner, pp. 4-5
[2] Ibid, p. 20
[3] Ibid, pp. 4-5
[4] Ibid
[5] September 11 Commission Report by E. P. Heidner, 2008, p. 108
[6] Gold Warriors, America's Secret Recovery of Yamashita's Gold by Sterling and Peggy Seagrave, Verso Publishing, 2003, pp. 32-43
[7] Ibid, pp. 318
[8] Ibid, pp. 14-15
[9] Ex-Treasury Chief Gets 1-Month Term in Bank Fraud Case by Frank J. Prial, New York Times, June 28, 1987
[10] Gold Warriors, America's Secret Recovery of Yamashita's Gold by Sterling and Peggy Seagrave, Verso Publishing, 2003, p. 5
[11] Ibid, p. 98
[12] Ibid, p. 102
[13] Collateral Damage: U.S. Covert Operations and the Terrorist Attacks on September 11, 2001 by E. P. Heidner, pp. 4-6
[14] Ibid, p. 29
[15] Tyumen Oil of Russia Seeks Links to Old Foes After Winning Fight By Neela Banerjee, New York Times, December 2, 1999
[16] Halliburton Energy Services Enters Into Alliance Agreement With Tyumen Oil Company, Press Release, October 15, 1998, http://www.halliburton.com/news/archive/1998/hesnws_101598.jsp
[17] Ibid
[18] Halliburton Press Release, Halliburton And Russian Oil Company Sibneft Sign Framework Agreement, February 7, 2002, http://www.halliburton.com/news/archive/2002/corpnws_020702.jsp
[19] TNK-BP, Our company, http://www.tnk-bp.com/company/
[20] Russia's largest field is far from depleted By Jerome R. Corsi, Word Net Daily, November 04, 2005, http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=47219
[21] Collateral Damage: U.S. Covert Operations and the Terrorist Attacks on September 11, 2001 by E.P. Heidner, p. 28
[22] Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky, Source Watch, http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Mikhail_B._Khodorkovsky
[23] Russia's Ruling Robbers by Mark Ames, Consortium News, March 11, 1999, http://www.consortiumnews.com/1999/c031199a.html
[24] "Sovest" Group Campaign for Granting Political Prisoner Status to Mikhail Khodorkovsky, February 7, 2008
[25] Halliburton Man to Sub for Khodorkovsky, Simon Ostrovsky, Moscow Times, April 30, 2004 as noted in the September 11 Commission Report, p. 233; See also Arrested Oil Tycoon Passed Shares to Banker, Washington Times, November 2, 2003
[26] Halliburton Press Release, Ortiz Named President Of Halliburton Energy Services, November 19, 1997, http://www.halliburton.com/news/archive/1997/hesnws_111997.jsp
[27] Russia: Yukos-Sibneft union forms world's No. 4 oil producer, Global Finance, Jun 2003, http://mikhail_khodorkovsky_society.blogspot.com/
[28] Halliburton Opens Russia Training Center, International Business Times, May 11, 2007, http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/20070511/halliburton-training.htm
[29] Halliburton gets Russia work, Oil Daily, January 26, 2006, http://goliath.ecnext.com/coms2/summary_0199-5579583_ITM
[30] Collateral Damage: U.S. Covert Operations and the Terrorist Attacks on September 11, 2001 by E. P. Heidner, p. 2
[31] Ibid, p. 29
[32] Ibid, pp. 2
[33] Ibid, p. 28-29
[34] "Sioux City, Iowa, July 25, 2005 TomFlocco.com , According to leaked documents from an intelligence file obtained through a military source in the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI), on or about September 12, 1991 non-performing and unauthorized gold-backed debt instruments were used to purchase ten-year "Brady" bonds. The bonds in turn were illegally employed as collateral to borrow $240 billion--120 in Japanese Yen and 120 in
Deutsch Marks--exchanged for U.S. currency under false pretenses; or counterfeit and unlawful conversion of collateral against which an unlimited amount of money could be created in derivatives and debt instruments " from Cash payoffs, bonds and murder linked to White House 9/11 finance, Tom Flocco, tomflocco.com
[35] Collateral Damage: U.S. Covert Operations and the Terrorist Attacks on September 11, 2001 by E.P. Heidner, p. 45
[36] Ibid, p. 2
[37] Rumsfeld's comments were on the Department of defense web site but have been understandably removed, http://www.defenselink.mil/speeches/2001/s20010910-secdef.ht
[38] The War On Waste Defense Department Cannot Account For 25% Of Funds -- $2.3 Trillion, http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/01/29/eveningnews/main325985.shtml
[39] September 11 Commission Report by E. P. Heidner, 2008, p. 108
[40] Following Zakheim and Pentagon Trillions to Israel and 9-11By Jerry Mazza, July 31, 2006, http://www.rense.com/general75/latest.htm
[41] Collateral Damage: U.S. Covert Operations and the Terrorist Attacks on September 11, 2001 by E. P. Heidner, p. 6
[42] Crossing the Rubicon, the Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil by Michael C. Ruppert, New Society Publishers, Canada, 2004, p. 56
[43] Collateral Damage: U.S. Covert Operations and the Terrorist Attacks on September 11, 2001 by E. P. Heidner, p. 28
[44] Crossing the Rubicon, the Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil by Michael C. Ruppert, New Society Publishers, Canada, 2004, pp. 243-247
[45] USA staged 9/11 Attacks, German best-seller by Kate Connolly, National Post & London Telegraph, November 20, 2003
[46] Crossing the Rubicon, the Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil by Michael C. Ruppert, New Society Publishers, Canada, 2004, pp. 243-247
[47] Ibid, pp. 243-247
[48] Ibid, pp. 243-247
[49] Ibid, pp. 243-247

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[Feb 23, 2020] Previously oppressed group, given a lucky chance, most often strive for dominance and oppression of other groups including and especially former dominant group. This is an eternal damnation of ethno/cultural nationalism

Highly recommended!
Dec 29, 2019 | crookedtimber.org

likbez 12.28.19 at 9:17 am

Peter T 12.28.19 at 5:50 am @38

I'm finding it hard to think of examples where the formerly norm-giving group becomes derided or humiliated.

You can probably try to look at the situation in (now independent) republics of the former USSR. Simplifying previously oppressed group, given a lucky chance, most often strive for dominance and oppression of other groups including and especially former dominant group. This is an eternal damnation of ethno/cultural nationalism.

And not only it (look at Mutual Help and The State in Shantytowns.) In them ethnic comminutes often own protection markets, offer services that hire people and replace the state, pay off gang leaders. they also provide some community support for particular ethnic group, enforce the rules of trade within themselves, etc. In GB the abuse of children by ethnic gangs was sickening ( https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2012/sep/30/abuse-children-asian-communities )

In many cases of ethnic/cultural nationalism this looks more like a competition for resources with the smoke screen of noble intentions/human rights/past oppression/ humiliations/etc

Or you can look at the language policy in the USA and the actual situation in some areas/institutions of Florida and California and how English speakers feel in those areas/institutions. Or in some areas of Quebec in Canada.

That actually suggests another meaning of famous Randolph Bourne quote " War is the health of the state " (said in the midst of the First World War.) It bring the unity unachievable in peace time or by any other methods, albeit temporarily (from Ch 14. Howard Zinn book A People's History of the United States ):

the governments flourished, patriotism bloomed, class struggle was stilled, and young men died in frightful numbers on the battlefields-often for a hundred yards of land, a line of trenches.

In the United States, not yet in the war, there was worry about the health of the state. Socialism was growing. The IWW seemed to be everywhere. Class conflict was intense. In the summer of 1916, during a Preparedness Day parade in San Francisco, a bomb exploded, killing nine people; two local radicals, Tom Mooney and Warren Billings, were arrested and would spend twenty years in prison. Shortly after that Senator James Wadsworth of New York suggested compulsory military training for all males to avert the danger that "these people of ours shall be divided into classes." Rather: "We must let our young men know that they owe some responsibility to this country."

The supreme fulfillment of that responsibility was taking place in Europe. Ten million were to die on the battlefield; 20 million were to die of hunger and disease related to the war. And no one since that day has been able to show that the war brought any gain for humanity that would be worth one human life. The rhetoric of the socialists, that it was an "imperialist war," now seems moderate and hardly arguable. The advanced capitalist countries of Europe were fighting over boundaries, colonies, spheres of influence; they were competing for Alsace-Lorraine, the Balkans, Africa, the Middle East.

Neo-McCarthyism now serves a somewhat similar purpose in the USA. Among other thing (like absolving Hillary from her fiasco to "deux ex machine" trick instead of real reason -- the crisis and rejection of neoliberalism by the sizable strata of the USA population) it is an attempt to unify the nation after 2016.

[Feb 23, 2020] Welcome to the American Regime

Highly recommended!
Feb 23, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

4 hours ago

Is America a 'regime'?

In the language of the American Oligarchy and it's tame and owned presstitutes on the MSM, any country targeted for destabilisation, destruction and rape – either because it doesn't do what America tells it do (Russia), because it has rich natural resources or has a 'socialist' state (Venezuela) or because lunatic neo-cons and even more lunatic Christian Evangelicals (hoping to provoke The End Times ) want it to happen (Syria and Iran) – is first labelled as a 'regime'.

That's because the word 'regime' is associated with dictatorships and human rights abuses and establishing a non-compliant country as a 'regime' is the US government's and MSM's first step at manufacturing public consent for that country's destruction.

Unfortunately if you sit back and talk a cool-headed, factual look at actions and attitudes that we're told constitute a regime then you have to conclude that America itself is 'a regime'.

So, here's why America is a regime:

4 hours ago

America's Military is Killing – Americans!

In 2018, Republicans (AND Democrats) voted to cut $23 billion dollars from the budget for food stamps (42 million Americans currently receive them).

Fats forward to 21 December 2019 and Donald Trump signed off on a US defense budget of a mind boggling $738 billion dollars.

To put that in context  --  the annual US government Education budget is sround $68 billion dollars.

Did you get that  --  $738 billion on defense, $68 billion on education?

That means the government spends more than ten times on preparations to kill people than it does on preparing children for life in the adult world.

Wow!

How ******* psychotic and death-affirming is that? It gets even worse when you consider that that $716 billion dollars is only the headline figure – it doesn't include whatever the Deep State siphons away into black-ops and kick backs. And .America's military isn't even very good – it's hasn't 'won' a conflict since the second world war, it's proud (and horrifically expensive) aircraft carriers have been rendered obsolete by Chinese and Russian hypersonic missiles and its 'cutting edge' weapons are so good (not) that everyone wants to buy the cheaper and better Russian versions: classic example – the F-35 jet program will screw $1.5 TRILLION (yes, TRILLION) dollars out of US taxpayers but but it's a piece of **** plane that doesn't work properly which the Russians laughingly refer to as 'a flying piano'.

In contrast to America's free money for the military industrial complex defense budget, China spends $165 billion and Russia spends $61 billion on defense and I don't see anyone attacking them (well, except America, that is be it only by proxy for now).

Or, put things another way. The United Kingdom spent £110 billion on it's National Health Service in 2017. That means, if you get sick in England, you can see a doctor for free. If you need drugs you pay a prescription charge of around $11.50(nothing, if unemployed, a child or elderly), whatever the market price of the drugs. If you need to see a consultant or medical specialist, you'll see one for free. If you need an operation, you'll get one for free. If you need on-going care for a chronic illness, you'll get it for free.

Fully socialised, free at the point of access, healthcare for all. How good is that?

US citizens could have that, too.

Allowing for the US's larger population, the UK National Health Service transplanted to America could cost about $650 billion a year. That would still leave $66 billion dollars left over from the proposed defense budget of $716 billion to finance weapons of death and destruction   --  more than those 'evil Ruskies' spend.

The US has now been at war, somewhere in the world (i.e in someone elses' country where the US doesn't have any business being) continuously for 28 years. Those 28 years have coincided with (for the 'ordinary people', anyway) declining living standards, declining real wages, increased police violence, more repression and surveillance, declining lifespans, declining educational and health outcomes, more every day misery in other words, America's military is killing Americans. Oh, and millions of people in far away countries (although, obviously, those deaths are in far away countries and they are of brown-skinned people so they don't really count, do they?).

Time for a change, perhaps?

[Feb 23, 2020] Where Have You Gone, Smedley Butler The Last General To Criticize US Imperialism by Danny Sjursen

Here's a link to a free online copy of War is a Racket if anyone wants to read it. It's a short read. Pretty good too. https://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/warisaracket.html
From comments (Is the USA government now a "regime"): In 2018, Republicans (AND Democrats) voted to cut $23 billion dollars from the budget for food stamps (42 million Americans currently receive them). Regimes disobey international law. Like America's habit of blowing up wedding parties with drones or the illegal presence of its troops in Syria, Iraq and God knows where else. Regimes carry out illegal assassination programs – I need say no more here than Qasem Soleimani. Regimes use their economic power to bully and impose their will – sanctioning countries even when they know those sanctions will, for example, be responsible for the death of 500,000 Iraqi children (the 'price worth paying', remember?). Regimes renege on international treaties – like Iran nuclear treaty, for example. Regimes imprison and hound whistle-blowers – like Chelsea manning and Julian Assange. Regimes imprison people. America is the world leader in incarceration. It has 2.2 million people in its prisons (more than China which has 5 times the US's population), that's 25% of the world's prison population for 5% of the world's population, Why does America need so many prisoners? Because it has a massive, prison-based, slave labour business that is hugely profitable for the oligarchy.
Regimes censor free speech. Just recently, we've seen numerous non-narrative following journalists and organisations kicked off numerous social media platforms. I didn't see lots of US senators standing up and saying 'I disagree completely with what you say but I will fight to the death to preserve your right to say it'. Did you?
Regimes are ruled by cliques. I don't need to tell you that America is kakistocratic Oligarchy ruled by a tiny group of evil, rich, Old Men, do I?
Regimes keep bad company. Their allies are other 'regimes', and they're often lumped together by using another favourite presstitute term – 'axis of evil'. America has its own little axis of evil. It's two main allies are Saudi Arabia – a homophobic, women hating, head chopping, terrorist financing state currently engaged in a war of genocide (assisted by the US) in Yemen – and the racist, genocidal undeclared nuclear power state of Israel.
Regimes commit human rights abuses. Here we could talk about…ooh…let's think. Last year's treatment of child refugees from Latin America, the execution of African Americans for 'walking whilst black' by America's militarized, criminal police force or the millions of dollars in cash and property seized from entirely innocent Americans by that same police force under 'civil forfeiture' laws or maybe we could mention huge American corporations getting tax refunds whilst ordinary Americans can't afford decent, effective healthcare.
Regimes finance terrorism. Mmmm….just like America financed terrorists to help destroy Syria and Libya and invested $5 billion dollars to install another regime – the one of anti-Semites and Nazis in Ukraine…
Highly recommended!
Some comments edited for clarity...
Notable quotes:
"... But after retirement, Smedley Butler changed his tune. ..."
"... "I spent thirty-three years and four months in active military service... And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street, and for the Bankers." ..."
"... Smedley Butler's Marine Corps and the military of his day was, in certain ways, a different sort of organization than today's highly professionalized armed forces. History rarely repeats itself, not in a literal sense anyway. Still, there are some disturbing similarities between the careers of Butler and today's generation of forever-war fighters. All of them served repeated tours of duty in (mostly) unsanctioned wars around the world. Butler's conflicts may have stretched west from Haiti across the oceans to China, whereas today's generals mostly lead missions from West Africa east to Central Asia, but both sets of conflicts seemed perpetual in their day and were motivated by barely concealed economic and imperial interests. ..."
"... When Smedley Butler retired in 1931, he was one of three Marine Corps major generals holding a rank just below that of only the Marine commandant and the Army chief of staff. Today, with about 900 generals and admirals currently serving on active duty, including 24 major generals in the Marine Corps alone, and with scores of flag officers retiring annually, not a single one has offered genuine public opposition to almost 19 years worth of ill-advised, remarkably unsuccessful American wars . As for the most senior officers, the 40 four-star generals and admirals whose vocal antimilitarism might make the biggest splash, there are more of them today than there were even at the height of the Vietnam War, although the active military is now about half the size it was then. Adulated as many of them may be, however, not one qualifies as a public critic of today's failing wars. ..."
"... The big three are Secretary of State Colin Powell's former chief of staff, retired Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson ; Vietnam veteran and onetime West Point history instructor, retired Colonel Andrew Bacevich ; and Iraq veteran and Afghan War whistleblower , retired Lieutenant Colonel Danny Davis . All three have proven to be genuine public servants, poignant voices, and -- on some level -- cherished personal mentors. For better or worse, however, none carry the potential clout of a retired senior theater commander or prominent four-star general offering the same critiques. ..."
"... Consider it an irony of sorts that this system first received criticism in our era of forever wars when General David Petraeus, then commanding the highly publicized " surge " in Iraq, had to leave that theater of war in 2007 to serve as the chair of that selection committee. The reason: he wanted to ensure that a twice passed-over colonel, a protégé of his -- future Trump National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster -- earned his star. ..."
"... At the roots of this system lay the obsession of the American officer corps with " professionalization " after the Vietnam War debacle. This first manifested itself in a decision to ditch the citizen-soldier tradition, end the draft, and create an "all-volunteer force." The elimination of conscription, as predicted by critics at the time, created an ever-growing civil-military divide, even as it increased public apathy regarding America's wars by erasing whatever " skin in the game " most citizens had. ..."
"... One group of generals, however, reportedly now does have it out for President Trump -- but not because they're opposed to endless war. Rather, they reportedly think that The Donald doesn't "listen enough to military advice" on, you know, how to wage war forever and a day. ..."
"... That beast, first identified by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, is now on steroids as American commanders in retirement regularly move directly from the military onto the boards of the giant defense contractors, a reality which only contributes to the dearth of Butlers in the military retiree community. For all the corruption of his time, the Pentagon didn't yet exist and the path from the military to, say, United Fruit Company, Standard Oil, or other typical corporate giants of that moment had yet to be normalized for retiring generals and admirals. Imagine what Butler would have had to say about the modern phenomenon of the " revolving door " in Washington. ..."
"... Today, generals don't seem to have a thought of their own even in retirement. And more's the pity... ..."
"... Am I the only one to notice that Hollywood and it's film distributors have gone full bore on "war" productions, glorifying these historical events while using poetic license to rewrite history. Prepping the numbheads. ..."
"... Forget rank. As Mr Sjursen implies, dissidents are no longer allowed in the higher ranks. "They" made sure to fix this as Mr Butler had too much of a mind of his own (US education system also programmed against creative, charismatic thinkers, btw). ..."
"... Today, the "Masters of the Permawars" refer to the international extortion, MIC, racket as "Defending American Interests"! .....With never any explanation to the public/American taxpayer just what "American Interests" the incredible expenditures of American lives, blood, and treasure are being defended! ..."
"... "The Americans follow the principle that when one lies, one should lie big, and stick to it. They keep up their lies, even at the risk of looking ridiculous." - Jospeh Goebbels ..."
"... The greatest anti-imperialist of our times is Michael Parenti: ..."
"... The obvious types of American fascists are dealt with on the air and in the press. These demagogues and stooges are fronts for others. Dangerous as these people may be, they are not so significant as thousands of other people who have never been mentioned. The really dangerous American fascists are not those who are hooked up directly or indirectly with the Axis. The FBI has its finger on those. The dangerous American fascist is the man who wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian way. The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power. ..."
"... If we define an American fascist as one who in case of conflict puts money and power ahead of human beings, then there are undoubtedly several million fascists in the United States. There are probably several hundred thousand if we narrow the definition to include only those who in their search for money and power are ruthless and deceitful. Most American fascists are enthusiastically supporting the war effort. ..."
Feb 23, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Danny Sjursen via TomDispatch.com,

There once lived an odd little man - five feet nine inches tall and barely 140 pounds sopping wet - who rocked the lecture circuit and the nation itself. For all but a few activist insiders and scholars, U.S. Marine Corps Major General Smedley Darlington Butler is now lost to history. Yet more than a century ago, this strange contradiction of a man would become a national war hero, celebrated in pulp adventure novels, and then, 30 years later, as one of this country's most prominent antiwar and anti-imperialist dissidents.

Raised in West Chester, Pennsylvania, and educated in Quaker (pacifist) schools, the son of an influential congressman, he would end up serving in nearly all of America's " Banana Wars " from 1898 to 1931. Wounded in combat and a rare recipient of two Congressional Medals of Honor, he would retire as the youngest, most decorated major general in the Marines.

A teenage officer and a certified hero during an international intervention in the Chinese Boxer Rebellion of 1900, he would later become a constabulary leader of the Haitian gendarme, the police chief of Philadelphia (while on an approved absence from the military), and a proponent of Marine Corps football. In more standard fashion, he would serve in battle as well as in what might today be labeled peacekeeping , counterinsurgency , and advise-and-assist missions in Cuba, China, the Philippines, Panama, Nicaragua, Mexico, Haiti, France, and China (again). While he showed early signs of skepticism about some of those imperial campaigns or, as they were sardonically called by critics at the time, " Dollar Diplomacy " operations -- that is, military campaigns waged on behalf of U.S. corporate business interests -- until he retired he remained the prototypical loyal Marine.

But after retirement, Smedley Butler changed his tune. He began to blast the imperialist foreign policy and interventionist bullying in which he'd only recently played such a prominent part. Eventually, in 1935 during the Great Depression, in what became a classic passage in his memoir, which he titled "War Is a Racket," he wrote:

"I spent thirty-three years and four months in active military service... And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street, and for the Bankers."

Seemingly overnight, the famous war hero transformed himself into an equally acclaimed antiwar speaker and activist in a politically turbulent era. Those were, admittedly, uncommonly anti-interventionist years, in which veterans and politicians alike promoted what (for America, at least) had been fringe ideas. This was, after all, the height of what later pro-war interventionists would pejoratively label American " isolationism ."

Nonetheless, Butler was unique (for that moment and certainly for our own) in his unapologetic amenability to left-wing domestic politics and materialist critiques of American militarism. In the last years of his life, he would face increasing criticism from his former admirer, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the military establishment, and the interventionist press. This was particularly true after Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany invaded Poland and later France. Given the severity of the Nazi threat to mankind, hindsight undoubtedly proved Butler's virulent opposition to U.S. intervention in World War II wrong.

Nevertheless, the long-term erasure of his decade of antiwar and anti-imperialist activism and the assumption that all his assertions were irrelevant has proven historically deeply misguided. In the wake of America's brief but bloody entry into the First World War, the skepticism of Butler (and a significant part of an entire generation of veterans) about intervention in a new European bloodbath should have been understandable. Above all, however, his critique of American militarism of an earlier imperial era in the Pacific and in Latin America remains prescient and all too timely today, especially coming as it did from one of the most decorated and high-ranking general officers of his time. (In the era of the never-ending war on terror, such a phenomenon is quite literally inconceivable.)

Smedley Butler's Marine Corps and the military of his day was, in certain ways, a different sort of organization than today's highly professionalized armed forces. History rarely repeats itself, not in a literal sense anyway. Still, there are some disturbing similarities between the careers of Butler and today's generation of forever-war fighters. All of them served repeated tours of duty in (mostly) unsanctioned wars around the world. Butler's conflicts may have stretched west from Haiti across the oceans to China, whereas today's generals mostly lead missions from West Africa east to Central Asia, but both sets of conflicts seemed perpetual in their day and were motivated by barely concealed economic and imperial interests.

Nonetheless, whereas this country's imperial campaigns of the first third of the twentieth century generated a Smedley Butler, the hyper-interventionism of the first decades of this century hasn't produced a single even faintly comparable figure. Not one. Zero. Zilch. Why that is matters and illustrates much about the U.S. military establishment and contemporary national culture, none of it particularly encouraging.

Why No Antiwar Generals

When Smedley Butler retired in 1931, he was one of three Marine Corps major generals holding a rank just below that of only the Marine commandant and the Army chief of staff. Today, with about 900 generals and admirals currently serving on active duty, including 24 major generals in the Marine Corps alone, and with scores of flag officers retiring annually, not a single one has offered genuine public opposition to almost 19 years worth of ill-advised, remarkably unsuccessful American wars . As for the most senior officers, the 40 four-star generals and admirals whose vocal antimilitarism might make the biggest splash, there are more of them today than there were even at the height of the Vietnam War, although the active military is now about half the size it was then. Adulated as many of them may be, however, not one qualifies as a public critic of today's failing wars.

Instead, the principal patriotic dissent against those terror wars has come from retired colonels, lieutenant colonels, and occasionally more junior officers (like me), as well as enlisted service members. Not that there are many of us to speak of either. I consider it disturbing (and so should you) that I personally know just about every one of the retired military figures who has spoken out against America's forever wars.

The big three are Secretary of State Colin Powell's former chief of staff, retired Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson ; Vietnam veteran and onetime West Point history instructor, retired Colonel Andrew Bacevich ; and Iraq veteran and Afghan War whistleblower , retired Lieutenant Colonel Danny Davis . All three have proven to be genuine public servants, poignant voices, and -- on some level -- cherished personal mentors. For better or worse, however, none carry the potential clout of a retired senior theater commander or prominent four-star general offering the same critiques.

Something must account for veteran dissenters topping out at the level of colonel. Obviously, there are personal reasons why individual officers chose early retirement or didn't make general or admiral. Still, the system for selecting flag officers should raise at least a few questions when it comes to the lack of antiwar voices among retired commanders. In fact, a selection committee of top generals and admirals is appointed each year to choose the next colonels to earn their first star. And perhaps you won't be surprised to learn that, according to numerous reports , "the members of this board are inclined, if not explicitly motivated, to seek candidates in their own image -- officers whose careers look like theirs." At a minimal level, such a system is hardly built to foster free thinkers, no less breed potential dissidents.

Consider it an irony of sorts that this system first received criticism in our era of forever wars when General David Petraeus, then commanding the highly publicized " surge " in Iraq, had to leave that theater of war in 2007 to serve as the chair of that selection committee. The reason: he wanted to ensure that a twice passed-over colonel, a protégé of his -- future Trump National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster -- earned his star.

Mainstream national security analysts reported on this affair at the time as if it were a major scandal, since most of them were convinced that Petraeus and his vaunted counterinsurgency or " COINdinista " protégés and their " new " war-fighting doctrine had the magic touch that would turn around the failing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In fact, Petraeus tried to apply those very tactics twice -- once in each country -- as did acolytes of his later, and you know the results of that.

But here's the point: it took an eleventh-hour intervention by America's most acclaimed general of that moment to get new stars handed out to prominent colonels who had, until then, been stonewalled by Cold War-bred flag officers because they were promoting different (but also strangely familiar) tactics in this country's wars. Imagine, then, how likely it would be for such a leadership system to produce genuine dissenters with stars of any serious sort, no less a crew of future Smedley Butlers.

At the roots of this system lay the obsession of the American officer corps with " professionalization " after the Vietnam War debacle. This first manifested itself in a decision to ditch the citizen-soldier tradition, end the draft, and create an "all-volunteer force." The elimination of conscription, as predicted by critics at the time, created an ever-growing civil-military divide, even as it increased public apathy regarding America's wars by erasing whatever " skin in the game " most citizens had.

More than just helping to squelch civilian antiwar activism, though, the professionalization of the military, and of the officer corps in particular, ensured that any future Smedley Butlers would be left in the dust (or in retirement at the level of lieutenant colonel or colonel) by a system geared to producing faux warrior-monks. Typical of such figures is current chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Army General Mark Milley. He may speak gruffly and look like a man with a head of his own, but typically he's turned out to be just another yes-man for another war-power -hungry president.

One group of generals, however, reportedly now does have it out for President Trump -- but not because they're opposed to endless war. Rather, they reportedly think that The Donald doesn't "listen enough to military advice" on, you know, how to wage war forever and a day.

What Would Smedley Butler Think Today?

In his years of retirement, Smedley Butler regularly focused on the economic component of America's imperial war policies. He saw clearly that the conflicts he had fought in, the elections he had helped rig, the coups he had supported, and the constabularies he had formed and empowered in faraway lands had all served the interests of U.S. corporate investors. Though less overtly the case today, this still remains a reality in America's post-9/11 conflicts, even on occasion embarrassingly so (as when the Iraqi ministry of oil was essentially the only public building protected by American troops as looters tore apart the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, in the post-invasion chaos of April 2003). Mostly, however, such influence plays out far more subtly than that, both abroad and here at home where those wars help maintain the record profits of the top weapons makers of the military-industrial complex.

That beast, first identified by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, is now on steroids as American commanders in retirement regularly move directly from the military onto the boards of the giant defense contractors, a reality which only contributes to the dearth of Butlers in the military retiree community. For all the corruption of his time, the Pentagon didn't yet exist and the path from the military to, say, United Fruit Company, Standard Oil, or other typical corporate giants of that moment had yet to be normalized for retiring generals and admirals. Imagine what Butler would have had to say about the modern phenomenon of the " revolving door " in Washington.

Of course, he served in a very different moment, one in which military funding and troop levels were still contested in Congress. As a longtime critic of capitalist excesses who wrote for leftist publications and supported the Socialist Party candidate in the 1936 presidential elections, Butler would have found today's nearly trillion-dollar annual defense budgets beyond belief. What the grizzled former Marine long ago identified as a treacherous nexus between warfare and capital "in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives" seems to have reached its natural end point in the twenty-first century. Case in point: the record (and still rising ) "defense" spending of the present moment, including -- to please a president -- the creation of a whole new military service aimed at the full-scale militarization of space .

Sadly enough, in the age of Trump, as numerous polls demonstrate, the U.S. military is the only public institution Americans still truly trust. Under the circumstances, how useful it would be to have a high-ranking, highly decorated, charismatic retired general in the Butler mold galvanize an apathetic public around those forever wars of ours. Unfortunately, the likelihood of that is practically nil, given the military system of our moment.

Of course, Butler didn't exactly end his life triumphantly. In late May 1940, having lost 25 pounds due to illness and exhaustion -- and demonized as a leftist, isolationist crank but still maintaining a whirlwind speaking schedule -- he checked himself into the Philadelphia Navy Yard Hospital for a "rest." He died there, probably of some sort of cancer, four weeks later. Working himself to death in his 10-year retirement and second career as a born-again antiwar activist, however, might just have constituted the very best service that the two-time Medal of Honor winner could have given the nation he loved to the very end.

Someone of his credibility, character, and candor is needed more than ever today. Unfortunately, this military generation is unlikely to produce such a figure. In retirement, Butler himself boldly confessed that, "like all the members of the military profession, I never had a thought of my own until I left the service. My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of higher-ups. This is typical..."

Today, generals don't seem to have a thought of their own even in retirement. And more's the pity...

2 minutes ago
Am I the only one to notice that Hollywood and it's film distributors have gone full bore on "war" productions, glorifying these historical events while using poetic license to rewrite history. Prepping the numbheads.
14 minutes ago
TULSI GABBARD.

Forget rank. As Mr Sjursen implies, dissidents are no longer allowed in the higher ranks. "They" made sure to fix this as Mr Butler had too much of a mind of his own (US education system also programmed against creative, charismatic thinkers, btw).

The US Space Force has been created as part of a plan to disclose the deep state's Secret Space Program (SSP), which has been active for decades, and which has utilized, and repressed, advanced technologies that would provide free, unlimited renewable energy, and thus eliminate hunger and poverty on a planetary scale.

14 minutes ago
14 minutes ago

ALL wars are EVIL. Period .

29 minutes ago

Sadly enough, in the age of Trump, as numerous polls demonstrate, the U.S. military is the only public institution Americans still truly trust. Under the circumstances, how useful it would be to have a high-ranking, highly decorated, charismatic retired general in the Butler mold galvanize an apathetic public around those forever wars of ours. Unfortunately, the likelihood of that is practically nil, given the military system of our moment.

This is why I feel an oath keeping constitutionally oriented American general is what we need in power, clear out all 545 criminals in office now, review their finances (and most of them will roll over on the others) and punish accordingly, then the lobbyist, how many of them worked against the country? You know what we do with those.

And then, finally, Hollywood, oh yes I long to see that **** hole burn with everyone in it.

30 minutes ago
Republicrat: the two faces of the moar war whore.
32 minutes ago

Given the severity of the Nazi threat to mankind

Do tell, from what I've read the Nazis were really only a threat to a few groups, the rest of us didn't need to worry.

35 minutes ago
Today, the "Masters of the Permawars" refer to the international extortion, MIC, racket as "Defending American Interests"! .....With never any explanation to the public/American taxpayer just what "American Interests" the incredible expenditures of American lives, blood, and treasure are being defended!

Why are we sending our children out into the hellholes of the world to be maimed and killed in the fauxjew banksters' quest for world domination.

How stupid can we be!

41 minutes ago
(Edited) "Smedley Butler"... The last time the UCMJ was actually used before being permanently turned into a "door stop"!
49 minutes ago
He was correct about our staying out of WWII. Which, BTW, would have never happened if we had stayed out of WWI.
22 minutes ago
(Edited) Both wars were about the international fauxjew imposition of debt-money central bankstering.

Both wars were promulgated by the Financial oligarchyof New York. The communist Red Army of Russia was funded and supplied by the Financial oligarchyof New York. It was American Financial oligarchythat built the Russian Red Army that vexed the world and created the Cold War. How many hundreds of millions of goyim were sacrificed to create both the Russian and the Chinese Satanic behemoths.......and the communist horror that is now embedded in American academia, publishing, American politics, so-called news, entertainment, The worldwide Catholic religion, the Pentagon, and the American deep state.......and more!

How stupid can we be. Every generation has the be dragged, kicking and screaming, out of the eternal maw of historical ignorance to avoid falling back into the myriad dark hellholes of history. As we all should know, people who forget their own history are doomed to repeat it.

53 minutes ago
Today's General is a robot with with a DNA.
54 minutes ago
All the General Staff is a bunch of #asskissinglittlechickenshits
57 minutes ago
want to stop senseless Empire wars>>well do this

War = jobs and profit..we get work "THEY" get the profit.. If we taxed all war related profit at 99% how many wars would our rulers start? 1 hour ago

Here is a simple straightforward trading maxim that might apply here: if it works or is working keep doing it, but if it doesn't work or stops working, then STOP doing it. There are plenty of people, now poorer, for not adhering to that simple principle. Where is the Taxpayer's return on investment from the Combat taking place on their behalf around the globe? 'Nuff said - it isn't working. It is making a microscopic few richer & all others poorer so STOP doing it. 36 seconds ago We don't have to look far to figure out who they are that are getting rich off the fauxjew permawars.

How can we be so stupid???

1 hour ago

See also:

TULSI GABBARD

1 hour ago

The main reason you don't see the generals criticizing is that the current crop have not been in actual long term direct combat with the enemy and have mostly been bureaucratic paper pushers.

Take the Marine Major General who is the current commander of CENTCOM. By the time he got into the Iraq/Afghanistan war he was already a Lieutenant Colonel and far removed from direct action.

He was only there on and off for a few years. Here are some of his other career highlights aft as they appear on his official bio:

In short, these top guys aren't warriors they're bureaucrats so why would we expect them to be honest brokers of the truth?

51 minutes ago

are U saying Chesty Puller he's NOT? 1 hour ago
(Edited) The purpose of war is to ensure that the Federal Reserve Note remains the world reserve paper currency of choice by keeping it relevant and in demand across the globe by forcing pesky energy producing nations to trade with it exclusively.

It is a 49 year old policy created by the private owners of quasi public institutions called central banks to ensure they remain the Wizards of Oz doing gods work conjuring magic paper into existence with a secret spell known as issuing credit.

How else is a technologically advanced society of billions of people supposed to function w/out this divinely inspired paper?

1 hour ago

Goebbels in "Churchill's Lie Factory" where he said: "The Americans follow the principle that when one lies, one should lie big, and stick to it. They keep up their lies, even at the risk of looking ridiculous." - Jospeh Goebbels, "Aus Churchills Lügenfabrik," 12. january 1941, Die Zeit ohne Beispiel

1 hour ago

The greatest anti-imperialist of our times is Michael Parenti:

Imperialism has been the most powerful force in world history over the last four or five centuries, carving up whole continents while oppressing indigenous peoples and obliterating entire civilizations. Yet, it is seldom accorded any serious attention by our academics, media commentators, and political leaders. When not ignored outright, the subject of imperialism has been sanitized, so that empires become "commonwealths," and colonies become "territories" or "dominions" (or, as in the case of Puerto Rico, "commonwealths" too). Imperialist military interventions become matters of "national defense," "national security," and maintaining "stability" in one or another region. In this book I want to look at imperialism for what it really is.

https://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/imperialism.html

49 minutes ago
"Imperialism has been the most powerful force in world history over the last four or five centuries, carving up whole continents while oppressing indigenous peoples and obliterating entire civilizations. Yet, it is seldom accorded any serious attention by our academics, media commentators, and political leaders."

Why would it when they who control academia, media and most of our politicians are our enemies.

1 hour ago

"The big three are Secretary of State Colin Powell's former chief of staff, retired Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson ; ..."

Yep, Wilkerson, who leaked Valerie Plame's name, not that it was a leak, to Novak, and then stood by to watch the grand jury fry Scooter Libby. Wilkerson, that paragon of moral rectitude. Wilkerson the silent, that *******.

sheesh,

1 hour ago
(Edited)

" A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty. The means of defence against foreign danger, have been always the instruments of tyranny at home. Among the Romans it was a standing maxim to excite a war, whenever a revolt was apprehended. Throughout all Europe, the armies kept up under the pretext of defending, have enslaved the people."

James Madison Friday June 29, 1787

https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/debates_629.asp

"What, Sir, is the use of a militia? It is to prevent the establishment of a standing army, the bane of liberty.... Whenever Governments mean to invade the rights and liberties of the people, they always attempt to destroy the militia, in order to raise an army upon their ruins." (Rep. Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts, spoken during floor debate over the Second Amendment [I Annals of Congress at 750, August 17, 1789])

http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/amendIIs6.html

1 hour ago

A particularly pernicious example of intra-European imperialism was the Nazi aggression during World War II, which gave the German business cartels and the Nazi state an opportunity to plunder the resources and exploit the labor of occupied Europe, including the slave labor of concentration camps. - M. PARENTI, Against empire

See Alexander Parvus

1 hour ago

Collapse is the cure. It's too far gone.

1 hour ago

Russia Wants to 'Jam' F-22 and F-35s in the Middle East: Report

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/russia-wants-jam-f-22-and-f-35s-middle-east-report-121041

1 hour ago

ZH retards think that the American mic is bad and all other mics are good or don't exist. That's the power of brainwashing. Humans understand that war in general is bad, but humans are becoming increasingly rare in this world.

1 hour ago

The obvious types of American fascists are dealt with on the air and in the press. These demagogues and stooges are fronts for others. Dangerous as these people may be, they are not so significant as thousands of other people who have never been mentioned. The really dangerous American fascists are not those who are hooked up directly or indirectly with the Axis. The FBI has its finger on those. The dangerous American fascist is the man who wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian way. The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power.

If we define an American fascist as one who in case of conflict puts money and power ahead of human beings, then there are undoubtedly several million fascists in the United States. There are probably several hundred thousand if we narrow the definition to include only those who in their search for money and power are ruthless and deceitful. Most American fascists are enthusiastically supporting the war effort.

https://truthout.org/articles/the-dangers-of-american-fascism/

2 hours ago
The swamp is bigger than the military alone. Substitute Bureaucrat, Statesman, or Beltway Bandit for General and Colonel in your writing above and you've got a whole new article to post that is just as true.
2 hours ago
(Edited) War = jobs and profit..we get work "THEY" get the profit..If we taxed all war related profit at 99% how many wars would our rulers start?
2 hours ago [edited for clarity]
War is a racket. And nobody loves a racket more than Financial oligarchy. Americans come close though, that's why Financial oligarchy use them to project their own rackets and provide protection reprisals.

[Feb 23, 2020] Previously oppressed group, given a lucky chance, most often strive for dominance and oppression of other groups including and especially former dominant group. This is an eternal damnation of ethno/cultural nationalism

Highly recommended!
Dec 29, 2019 | crookedtimber.org

likbez 12.28.19 at 9:17 am

Peter T 12.28.19 at 5:50 am @38

I'm finding it hard to think of examples where the formerly norm-giving group becomes derided or humiliated.

You can probably try to look at the situation in (now independent) republics of the former USSR. Simplifying previously oppressed group, given a lucky chance, most often strive for dominance and oppression of other groups including and especially former dominant group. This is an eternal damnation of ethno/cultural nationalism.

And not only it (look at Mutual Help and The State in Shantytowns.) In them ethnic comminutes often own protection markets, offer services that hire people and replace the state, pay off gang leaders. they also provide some community support for particular ethnic group, enforce the rules of trade within themselves, etc. In GB the abuse of children by ethnic gangs was sickening ( https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2012/sep/30/abuse-children-asian-communities )

In many cases of ethnic/cultural nationalism this looks more like a competition for resources with the smoke screen of noble intentions/human rights/past oppression/ humiliations/etc

Or you can look at the language policy in the USA and the actual situation in some areas/institutions of Florida and California and how English speakers feel in those areas/institutions. Or in some areas of Quebec in Canada.

That actually suggests another meaning of famous Randolph Bourne quote " War is the health of the state " (said in the midst of the First World War.) It bring the unity unachievable in peace time or by any other methods, albeit temporarily (from Ch 14. Howard Zinn book A People's History of the United States ):

the governments flourished, patriotism bloomed, class struggle was stilled, and young men died in frightful numbers on the battlefields-often for a hundred yards of land, a line of trenches.

In the United States, not yet in the war, there was worry about the health of the state. Socialism was growing. The IWW seemed to be everywhere. Class conflict was intense. In the summer of 1916, during a Preparedness Day parade in San Francisco, a bomb exploded, killing nine people; two local radicals, Tom Mooney and Warren Billings, were arrested and would spend twenty years in prison. Shortly after that Senator James Wadsworth of New York suggested compulsory military training for all males to avert the danger that "these people of ours shall be divided into classes." Rather: "We must let our young men know that they owe some responsibility to this country."

The supreme fulfillment of that responsibility was taking place in Europe. Ten million were to die on the battlefield; 20 million were to die of hunger and disease related to the war. And no one since that day has been able to show that the war brought any gain for humanity that would be worth one human life. The rhetoric of the socialists, that it was an "imperialist war," now seems moderate and hardly arguable. The advanced capitalist countries of Europe were fighting over boundaries, colonies, spheres of influence; they were competing for Alsace-Lorraine, the Balkans, Africa, the Middle East.

Neo-McCarthyism now serves a somewhat similar purpose in the USA. Among other thing (like absolving Hillary from her fiasco to "deux ex machine" trick instead of real reason -- the crisis and rejection of neoliberalism by the sizable strata of the USA population) it is an attempt to unify the nation after 2016.

[Feb 23, 2020] Did not Pompous Pompeo accidentally found a good method to ensure vassals compliance?

Notable quotes:
"... He is making the USA a laughing stock, very threatening for sure, but he is a laughing stock and he perfectly sets up the scenario to ridicule his mongrel stupid president. ..."
Feb 14, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Piotr Berman , Feb 11 2020 23:08 utc | 26

On the big issue though I cant help seeing Pontious Pompeo as hurling himself about the globe tilting at windmills. He is making the USA a laughing stock, very threatening for sure, but he is a laughing stock and he perfectly sets up the scenario to ridicule his mongrel stupid president.

uncle tungsten | Feb 11 2020 22:52 utc | 30

Isn't it a good method? This way, the vassals can comply with a smile.

[Feb 23, 2020] Did not Pompous Pompeo accidentally found a good method to ensure vassals compliance?

Notable quotes:
"... He is making the USA a laughing stock, very threatening for sure, but he is a laughing stock and he perfectly sets up the scenario to ridicule his mongrel stupid president. ..."
Feb 14, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Piotr Berman , Feb 11 2020 23:08 utc | 26

On the big issue though I cant help seeing Pontious Pompeo as hurling himself about the globe tilting at windmills. He is making the USA a laughing stock, very threatening for sure, but he is a laughing stock and he perfectly sets up the scenario to ridicule his mongrel stupid president.

uncle tungsten | Feb 11 2020 22:52 utc | 30

Isn't it a good method? This way, the vassals can comply with a smile.

[Feb 23, 2020] The US Is World Leader In Bio-Weapons Research, Production, Use Against Mankind

This is mostly fear mongering as an affective bioengineered virus will create a pandemic, but the truth is that Anthrax false flag attack after 9/11 was not an accident...
Trump administration beahaves like a completely lawless gang (stealing Syrian oil is one example. Killing Soleimani is another ) , as for its behaviour on international arena, but I do not believe they go that far. Even for for such "ruptured" gangster as Pompeo
Notable quotes:
"... Consider that a deadly virus created by the U.S. and used against another country was found out and verified, and in retaliation, that country or others decided to strike back with other toxic agents against America. Where would this end, and over time, how many billions could be affected in such a scenario? ..."
"... "In vast laboratories in the Ministry of Peace, and in experimental stations, teams of experts are indefatigably at work searching for new and deadlier gases; or for soluble poisons capable of being produced in such quantities as to destroy the vegetation of whole continents; or for breeds of disease germs immunised against all possible antibodies." ..."
"... Additional notes: here , here , here , here , here and here . ..."
Feb 23, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

... ... ...

Interestingly, in the past, U.S. universities and NGOs went to China specifically to do illegal biological experimentation, and this was so egregious to Chinese officials, that forcible removal of these people was the result. Harvard University, one of the major players in this scandal, stole the DNA samples of hundreds of thousands of Chinese citizens, left China with those samples, and continued illegal bio-research in the U.S. It is thought that the U.S. military, which puts a completely different spin on the conversation, had commissioned the research in China at the time. This is more than suspicious.

The U.S. has, according to this article at Global Research , had a massive biological warfare program since at least the early 1940s, but has used toxic agents against this country and others since the 1860s . This is no secret, regardless of the propaganda spread by the government and its partners in criminal bio-weapon research and production.

As of 1999, the U.S. government had deployed its Chemical and Biological Weapons (CBW) arsenal against the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Vietnam, China, North Korea, Laos, Cambodia, Cuba, Haitian boat people, and our neighbor Canada according to this article at Counter Punch . Of course, U.S. citizens have been used as guinea pigs many times as well, and exposed to toxic germ agents and deadly chemicals by government.

Keep in mind that this is a short list, as the U.S. is well known for also using proxies to spread its toxic chemicals and germ agents, such as happened in Iraq and Syria. Since 1999 there have been continued incidences of several different viruses, most of which are presumed to be manmade , including the current Coronavirus that is affecting China today.

There is also much evidence of the research and development of race-specific bio-warfare agents. This is very troubling. One would think, given the idiotic race arguments by post-modern Marxists, that this would consume the mainstream news, and any participants in these atrocious race-specific poisons would be outed at every level. That is not happening, but I believe it is due to obvious reasons, including government cover-up, hypocrisy at all levels, and leftist agenda driven objectives that would not gain ground with the exposure of this government-funded anti-race science.

I will say that it is not just the U.S. that is developing and producing bio-warfare agents and viruses, but many developed countries around the globe do so as well. But the United States, as is the case in every area of war and killing, is by far the world leader in its inhuman desire to be able to kill entire populations through biological and chemical warfare means. Because these agents are extremely dangerous and uncontrollable, and can spread wildly, the risk to not only isolated populations, but also the entire world is evident. Consider that a deadly virus created by the U.S. and used against another country was found out and verified, and in retaliation, that country or others decided to strike back with other toxic agents against America. Where would this end, and over time, how many billions could be affected in such a scenario?

All indications point to the fact that the most toxic, poisonous, and deadly viruses ever known are being created in labs around the world. In the U.S. think of Fort Detrick, Maryland, Pine Bluff Arsenal, Arkansas, Horn Island, Mississippi, Dugway Proving Ground, Utah, Vigo Ordinance Plant, Indiana, and many others. Think of the fascist partnerships between this government and the pharmaceutical industry. Think of the U.S. military installations positioned all around the globe. Nothing good can come from this, as it is not about finding cures for disease, or about discovering vaccines, but is done for one reason only, and that is for the purpose of bio-warfare for mass killing.

The drive to find biological weapons that will sicken and kill millions at a time is not only a travesty, but is beyond evil. This power is held by the few, but the potential victims of this madness include everyone on earth. How can such insanity at this level be allowed to continue? If any issue could ever unite the masses, governments participating in biological and germ warfare, race-specific killing, and creating viruses with the potential to affect disease and death worldwide, should cause many to stand together against it. The first step is to expose that governments, the most likely culprit being the U.S. government, are planting these viruses purposely to cause great harm. Once that is proven, the unbelievable risk to all will be known, and then people everywhere should put their divisiveness aside, stand together, and stop this assault on mankind.

"In vast laboratories in the Ministry of Peace, and in experimental stations, teams of experts are indefatigably at work searching for new and deadlier gases; or for soluble poisons capable of being produced in such quantities as to destroy the vegetation of whole continents; or for breeds of disease germs immunised against all possible antibodies." ~ George Orwell – 1984

Additional notes: here , here , here , here , here and here .

[Feb 23, 2020] Sick trash by PaulR

Notable quotes:
"... In 2017, a woman working with frontline families told me why she didn't want reintegration. 'These [the population of rebel-held Donbass] are people with a minimum level of human development, people raised by their TVs. Okay, so we live together, then what? We're trying to build a completely new society.' ..."
"... And there once again you have it – one of the primary causes of the war in Ukraine: the contempt with which the post-Maidan government and its activist supporters regard a significant portion of their fellow citizens, the 'sick trash' of Donbass with their 'minimum level of human development'. ..."
Feb 18, 2020 | irrussianality.wordpress.com

I'd never heard of the Euro-Atlantic Security Leadership Group (EASLG) until today, even though it turns out that one of its members has the office next door to mine. Its website says that it seeks to respond to the challenge of East-West tensions by convening 'former and current officials and experts from a group of Euro-Atlantic states and the European union to test ideas and develop proposals for improving security in areas of existential common interest'. It hopes thereby to 'generate trust through dialogue.'

It's hard to object to any of this, but its latest statement , entitled 'Twelve Steps Toward Greater Security in Ukraine and the Euro-Atlantic Region', doesn't inspire a lot of confidence. The 'twelve steps' the EASLG proposes to improve security in Eastern Ukraine are generally pretty uninspiring, being largely of the 'set up a working group to explore' variety, or of such a vaguely aspirational nature as to be almost worthless (e.g. 'Advance reconstruction of Donbas An essential first step is to conduct a credible needs assessment for the Donbas region to inform a strategy for its social-economic recovery.' Sounds nice, but in reality doesn't amount to a hill of beans).

For the most part, these proposals attempt to treat the symptoms of the war in Ukraine without addressing the root causes. In a sense, that's fine, as symptoms need treating, but it's sticking plaster when the patient needs some invasive surgery. At the end of its statement, though, the EASLG does go one step further with 'Step 12: Launch a new national dialogue about identity', saying:

A new, inclusive national dialogue across Ukraine is desirable and could be launched as soon as possible. Efforts should be made to engage with perspectives from Ukraine's neighbors, especially Poland, Hungary, and Russia. This dialogue should address themes of history and national memory, language, identity, and minority experience. It should include tolerance and respect for ethnic and religious minorities in order to increase engagement, inclusiveness, and social cohesion.

This is admirably trendy and woke, but in the Ukrainian context somewhat explosive, as it implicitly challenges the identity politics of the post-Maidan regime. Unsurprisingly, it's gone down like a lead balloon in Kiev. The notorious website Mirotvorets even went so far as to add former German ambassador Wolfgang Ischinger to its blacklist of enemies of Ukraine for having had the temerity to sign the EASLG statement and thus 'taking part in Russia's propaganda events aimed against Ukraine.' Katherine Quinn-Judge of the International Crisis Group commented on Twitter, 'As the idea of dialogue becomes more mainstream, backlash to the concept grows fiercer.' 'In Ukraine, prominent pro-Western politicians, civic activists, and media, have called Step 12 "a provocation" and "dangerous",' she added

Quinn-Judge comes across as generally sympathetic to the Ukrainian narrative about the war in Donbass, endorsing the idea that it's largely a product of 'Russian aggression'. But she also recognizes that the war has an internal, social dimension which the Ukrainian government and its elite-level supporters refuse to acknowledge. Consequently, they also reject any sort of dialogue, either with Russia or with the rebels in Donbass. As Quinn-Judge notes in another Tweet:

An advisor to one of Ukraine's most powerful pol[itician]s told us recently of his concern about talk of dialogue in international and domestic circles. 'We have all long ago agreed among ourselves. We need to return our territory, and then work with that sick – sick – population.'

This isn't an isolated example. Quinn-Judge follows up with a couple more similar statements:

Social resentments underpin some opposition to disengagement, for example. An activist in [government-controlled] Shchastye told me recently that she feared disengagement and the reopening of the bridge linking the isolated town to [rebel-held] Luhansk: 'I don't want all that trash coming over here.'

In 2017, a woman working with frontline families told me why she didn't want reintegration. 'These [the population of rebel-held Donbass] are people with a minimum level of human development, people raised by their TVs. Okay, so we live together, then what? We're trying to build a completely new society.'

And there once again you have it – one of the primary causes of the war in Ukraine: the contempt with which the post-Maidan government and its activist supporters regard a significant portion of their fellow citizens, the 'sick trash' of Donbass with their 'minimum level of human development'. You can fiddle with treating Donbass' symptoms as much as you like, ŕ la EASLG, but unless you tackle this fundamental problem, the disease will keep on ravaging the subject for a long time to come. In due course, I suggest, the only realistic cure will be to remove the patient entirely from the cause of infection.

Mao Cheng Ji says: February 18, 2020 at 5:02 pm Yeah, but that's just their standard narrative.

See here, for example:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/uNupUPjLdUI?version=3&rel=1&fs=1&autohide=2&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&wmode=transparent

And it's been there, either officially or beneath the surface, since forever. Since the Habsburgs, probably, when it was first introduced in Ruthenia.

Guest says: February 21, 2020 at 5:27 am

This person speaks so casually of genocide!!!

It's disgusting that such people have been empowered and such ideas are mainstream.
Calling people sick trash is the start on the road to genocide

Mao Cheng Ji says: February 22, 2020 at 1:46 pm

He's still there, working. Popular journalist and blogger.

dewittbourchier says: February 18, 2020 at 6:01 pm
All that you have described above is very sad, but not very surprising – which is itself very sad. I think Patrick Armstrong is right that a lot of the reason Ukraine is not and has never been a functional polity is because much if not most of the population cannot accept that the right side won WWII.
Mikhail says: February 18, 2020 at 10:15 pm

Hypocritically denounces the USSR, while seeking that entity's Communist created/inherited boundaries

akarlin says: February 18, 2020 at 6:48 pm

Contempt and loathing towards the Donbass is a pretty popular feeling amongst Ukrainian svidomy. E.g., one of the two regular pro-Ukrainian commenters on my blog.

To his credit, he supports severing the Donbass from Ukraine (as one would a gangrenous limb – his metaphor) as opposed to trying to claw it back. Which is an internally consistent position.

Mikhail says: February 18, 2020 at 10:13 pm

Same guy who doesn't consider Yanukovych as having been overthrown under coup like circumstances, while downplaying Poland's past subjugation of Rus territory.

Lyttenburgh says: February 19, 2020 at 8:18 pm

In Part I and II we saw how much truth is there in Herr Karlin's claim of being a model of the rrrracially purrrre Rrrrrrrussian plus some personal views.

Part III (this one) gives a peek into his cultural and upbringing limits, which "qualify" him as an expert of all things Russian, who speaks on behalf of the People and the Country.

Exhibit "A"

" I left when I was six, in 1994 , so I'm not really the best person to ask this question of – it should probably be directed to my parents, or even better, the Russian government at the time which had for all intents and purposes ceased paying academics their salaries.

I went to California for higher education and because its beaches and mountains made for a nice change from the bleakness of Lancashire.

I returned to Russia because if I like Putler so much, why don't I go back there? Okay, less flippancy. I am Russian, I do not feel like a foreigner here, I like living in Moscow, added bonus is that I get much higher quality of life for the buck than in California ."

Exhibit "B"

"I never went to school, don't have any experience with writing in Russian, and have been overexposed to Anglo culture , so yes, it's no surprise that my texts will sound strange."

Vladimir says: February 20, 2020 at 8:46 am

The Russian branch of Carnegie Endowment did a piece on this issue. It mostly fits your ideas, but the author suggests it was a compromise, short-term solution – what steps can be taken right now, without crossing red lines of either side – but compromise is unwelcome among both parties. The official Russian reaction was quite cold too.

"Удаленные 12 шагов. Почему в Мюнхене испугались собственных предложений по Донбассу"
https://carnegie.ru/commentary/81093

Mikhail says: February 20, 2020 at 4:54 pm

Upon a quick perusal of the website of the org at issue, Alexey Arbatov and Susan Eisenhower have some kind of affiliation with it, thus maybe explaining the compromise approach you mention.

This matter brings to mind Trump saying one thing during his presidential bid – only to then bring in people in key positions who don't agree with what he campaigned on.

In terms of credentials and name status, the likes of Rand Paul, Tulsi Gabbard, Stephen Cohen and Jim Jatras, are needed in Trump's admin for the purpose of having a more balanced foreign policy approach that conforms with US interests (not to be necessarily confused with what neocons and neolibs favor).

Instead, Trump has been top heavy with geopolitical thinking opposites. He possibly thought that having them in would take some of the criticism away from him.

The arguably ideal admin has both sides of an issue well represented, with the president intelligently deciding what's best.

Guest says: February 21, 2020 at 5:23 am

On the BBC and on other media there are films of Ukrainians attacking a bus with people evacuated from China. These people even wanted to burn down the hospital where the peoplew were taken (along with other unrelated patients)

This is a sign of a degraded society – attacking people who may or may not be ill!!!

Ukraine will eventually break up
The nationalist agenda is just degrading the society.

-The economy is failing
-People who can, are leaving
-The elected government has no control over the violent people who take to the streets

It's clear Zelensky is a puppet no different to Poroshenko – this destroys the idea that democracy is a good thing.

It's very sad that the EU and the Americans under Obama – empowered these decisive elements and then blame Russia.

Crimea did the right thing leaving Ukraine – Donbass hopefully will follow.

Lyttenburgh says: February 21, 2020 at 11:16 am

"And there once again you have it – one of the primary causes of the war in Ukraine: the contempt with which the post-Maidan government and its activist supporters regard a significant portion of their fellow citizens, the 'sick trash' of Donbass"

[ ]

Only them?

[ ]

Yesterday marks yet another milestone on the Ukrainian glorious шлях перемог and long and arduous return to the Family of the European Nations. The Civil Society ™ of the Ukraine rose as one in the mighty CoronavirusMaidan, against the jackbooted goons of the crypto-Napoleon (and agent of Putin) Zelensky. Best people from Poltava oblast' (whose ancestors without doubt, welcomed Swedish Euro-integrators in 1709) and, most important of all, from the Best (Western) Ukrajina, who 6 years ago made the Revolution of Dignity in Kiev the reality and whom pan Poroshenko called the best part of the Nation, said their firm "Геть вiд Москви!"

to their fellow Ukrainian citizens, evacuated from Wuhan province in China

The Net is choke full of vivid, memorable videos, showing that 6 years after Maidan, the Ukraine now constitute a unified, эдiна та соборна country. You all, no doubt, already watched these clips, where a brave middle-aged gentleman from the Western Ukraine, racially pure Ukr, proves his mental acuity by deducing, that crypto-tyrant (and "не лох") Zelensky wants to settle evacuees in his pristine oblast out of vengeance, because the Best Ukrajina didn't vote for him during the election. Or a clip about a brave woman from Poltava oblast, suggesting to relocate the Trojan-horse "fellow countrymen" to Chernobol's Zone. Or even the witty comments and suggestions by the paragons of the Ukrainian Civil Society, " волонтэры ":


Shy and conscientious members of the Ukrainian (national!) intelligentsia had their instincts aligned rrrrrright. When they learned about that their hospital will be the one receiving the evacuees from Wuhan, the entire medical personell of that Poltava oblast medical facility rose to their feet and sang "Shenya vmerla". Democracy and localism proved once again the strongest suit of the pro-European Ukraine, with Ternopol's oblast regional council voting to accept the official statement to the crypto-tyrant Zelensky, which calls attempts to place evacuees on their Holy land "an act of Genocide of the Ukrainian People" (c)

Just the headlines .

[ ]

That's absolutely "normal", predictable reaction of the "racially pure Ukrainians" to their own fellow citizens. Now, Professor, are you insisting on seeking or even expecting "compromise" with them ? What to do, if after all these years, there is no such thing as the united Ukrainian political nation?

Like Like Reply

Lyttenburgh says: February 21, 2020 at 2:12 pm

"Ukraine's democracy is flourishing like never before due to the tireless efforts of grassroots, pro-democracy, civil-society groups. Many Ukrainians say their country is now firmly set on an irreversible, pro-Western trajectory. Moreover, the country has also undertaken a top-to-bottom cultural, economic, and political divorce from its former Soviet overlord.

Today, Ukraine is a democratic success story in the making, despite Russia's best efforts to the contrary."
– Nolan Peterson, a former special operations pilot and a combat veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, is The Daily Signal's foreign correspondent based in Ukraine

International recognition of the fact:

[Feb 23, 2020] Welcome to the American Regime

Highly recommended!
Feb 23, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

4 hours ago

Is America a 'regime'?

In the language of the American Oligarchy and it's tame and owned presstitutes on the MSM, any country targeted for destabilisation, destruction and rape – either because it doesn't do what America tells it do (Russia), because it has rich natural resources or has a 'socialist' state (Venezuela) or because lunatic neo-cons and even more lunatic Christian Evangelicals (hoping to provoke The End Times ) want it to happen (Syria and Iran) – is first labelled as a 'regime'.

That's because the word 'regime' is associated with dictatorships and human rights abuses and establishing a non-compliant country as a 'regime' is the US government's and MSM's first step at manufacturing public consent for that country's destruction.

Unfortunately if you sit back and talk a cool-headed, factual look at actions and attitudes that we're told constitute a regime then you have to conclude that America itself is 'a regime'.

So, here's why America is a regime:

4 hours ago

America's Military is Killing – Americans!

In 2018, Republicans (AND Democrats) voted to cut $23 billion dollars from the budget for food stamps (42 million Americans currently receive them).

Fats forward to 21 December 2019 and Donald Trump signed off on a US defense budget of a mind boggling $738 billion dollars.

To put that in context  --  the annual US government Education budget is sround $68 billion dollars.

Did you get that  --  $738 billion on defense, $68 billion on education?

That means the government spends more than ten times on preparations to kill people than it does on preparing children for life in the adult world.

Wow!

How ******* psychotic and death-affirming is that? It gets even worse when you consider that that $716 billion dollars is only the headline figure – it doesn't include whatever the Deep State siphons away into black-ops and kick backs. And .America's military isn't even very good – it's hasn't 'won' a conflict since the second world war, it's proud (and horrifically expensive) aircraft carriers have been rendered obsolete by Chinese and Russian hypersonic missiles and its 'cutting edge' weapons are so good (not) that everyone wants to buy the cheaper and better Russian versions: classic example – the F-35 jet program will screw $1.5 TRILLION (yes, TRILLION) dollars out of US taxpayers but but it's a piece of **** plane that doesn't work properly which the Russians laughingly refer to as 'a flying piano'.

In contrast to America's free money for the military industrial complex defense budget, China spends $165 billion and Russia spends $61 billion on defense and I don't see anyone attacking them (well, except America, that is be it only by proxy for now).

Or, put things another way. The United Kingdom spent £110 billion on it's National Health Service in 2017. That means, if you get sick in England, you can see a doctor for free. If you need drugs you pay a prescription charge of around $11.50(nothing, if unemployed, a child or elderly), whatever the market price of the drugs. If you need to see a consultant or medical specialist, you'll see one for free. If you need an operation, you'll get one for free. If you need on-going care for a chronic illness, you'll get it for free.

Fully socialised, free at the point of access, healthcare for all. How good is that?

US citizens could have that, too.

Allowing for the US's larger population, the UK National Health Service transplanted to America could cost about $650 billion a year. That would still leave $66 billion dollars left over from the proposed defense budget of $716 billion to finance weapons of death and destruction   --  more than those 'evil Ruskies' spend.

The US has now been at war, somewhere in the world (i.e in someone elses' country where the US doesn't have any business being) continuously for 28 years. Those 28 years have coincided with (for the 'ordinary people', anyway) declining living standards, declining real wages, increased police violence, more repression and surveillance, declining lifespans, declining educational and health outcomes, more every day misery in other words, America's military is killing Americans. Oh, and millions of people in far away countries (although, obviously, those deaths are in far away countries and they are of brown-skinned people so they don't really count, do they?).

Time for a change, perhaps?

[Feb 23, 2020] General Butler speeches

Feb 23, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

3 hours ago

No link to one of his speeches or book. Worth your time.

9 minute video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3_EXqJ8f-0

Full audio book: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26O-2SVcrw0

4 hours ago

This article fails to mention his most important contribution . He tipped off Roosevelt that a fascist plot was being prepared to take over the American government "

The Wall Street Putsch, as it's known today, was a plot by a group of right-wing financiers.

"They thought that they could convince Roosevelt, because he was of their, the patrician class, they thought that they could convince Roosevelt to relinquish power to basically a fascist, military-type government," Denton says.

4 hours ago

The US foreign policy was never about Spreading Democracy, it's always about elevating the dictator we can do business with.

Always.

4 hours ago

Surprisingly, Butlers book The Plot to Seize the White House, where a cabal of bankers sought to use Butler as a front man to oust FDR getS little to no notice.

[Feb 23, 2020] Where Have You Gone, Smedley Butler The Last General To Criticize US Imperialism by Danny Sjursen

Here's a link to a free online copy of War is a Racket if anyone wants to read it. It's a short read. Pretty good too. https://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/warisaracket.html
From comments (Is the USA government now a "regime"): In 2018, Republicans (AND Democrats) voted to cut $23 billion dollars from the budget for food stamps (42 million Americans currently receive them). Regimes disobey international law. Like America's habit of blowing up wedding parties with drones or the illegal presence of its troops in Syria, Iraq and God knows where else. Regimes carry out illegal assassination programs – I need say no more here than Qasem Soleimani. Regimes use their economic power to bully and impose their will – sanctioning countries even when they know those sanctions will, for example, be responsible for the death of 500,000 Iraqi children (the 'price worth paying', remember?). Regimes renege on international treaties – like Iran nuclear treaty, for example. Regimes imprison and hound whistle-blowers – like Chelsea manning and Julian Assange. Regimes imprison people. America is the world leader in incarceration. It has 2.2 million people in its prisons (more than China which has 5 times the US's population), that's 25% of the world's prison population for 5% of the world's population, Why does America need so many prisoners? Because it has a massive, prison-based, slave labour business that is hugely profitable for the oligarchy.
Regimes censor free speech. Just recently, we've seen numerous non-narrative following journalists and organisations kicked off numerous social media platforms. I didn't see lots of US senators standing up and saying 'I disagree completely with what you say but I will fight to the death to preserve your right to say it'. Did you?
Regimes are ruled by cliques. I don't need to tell you that America is kakistocratic Oligarchy ruled by a tiny group of evil, rich, Old Men, do I?
Regimes keep bad company. Their allies are other 'regimes', and they're often lumped together by using another favourite presstitute term – 'axis of evil'. America has its own little axis of evil. It's two main allies are Saudi Arabia – a homophobic, women hating, head chopping, terrorist financing state currently engaged in a war of genocide (assisted by the US) in Yemen – and the racist, genocidal undeclared nuclear power state of Israel.
Regimes commit human rights abuses. Here we could talk about…ooh…let's think. Last year's treatment of child refugees from Latin America, the execution of African Americans for 'walking whilst black' by America's militarized, criminal police force or the millions of dollars in cash and property seized from entirely innocent Americans by that same police force under 'civil forfeiture' laws or maybe we could mention huge American corporations getting tax refunds whilst ordinary Americans can't afford decent, effective healthcare.
Regimes finance terrorism. Mmmm….just like America financed terrorists to help destroy Syria and Libya and invested $5 billion dollars to install another regime – the one of anti-Semites and Nazis in Ukraine…
Highly recommended!
Some comments edited for clarity...
Notable quotes:
"... But after retirement, Smedley Butler changed his tune. ..."
"... "I spent thirty-three years and four months in active military service... And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street, and for the Bankers." ..."
"... Smedley Butler's Marine Corps and the military of his day was, in certain ways, a different sort of organization than today's highly professionalized armed forces. History rarely repeats itself, not in a literal sense anyway. Still, there are some disturbing similarities between the careers of Butler and today's generation of forever-war fighters. All of them served repeated tours of duty in (mostly) unsanctioned wars around the world. Butler's conflicts may have stretched west from Haiti across the oceans to China, whereas today's generals mostly lead missions from West Africa east to Central Asia, but both sets of conflicts seemed perpetual in their day and were motivated by barely concealed economic and imperial interests. ..."
"... When Smedley Butler retired in 1931, he was one of three Marine Corps major generals holding a rank just below that of only the Marine commandant and the Army chief of staff. Today, with about 900 generals and admirals currently serving on active duty, including 24 major generals in the Marine Corps alone, and with scores of flag officers retiring annually, not a single one has offered genuine public opposition to almost 19 years worth of ill-advised, remarkably unsuccessful American wars . As for the most senior officers, the 40 four-star generals and admirals whose vocal antimilitarism might make the biggest splash, there are more of them today than there were even at the height of the Vietnam War, although the active military is now about half the size it was then. Adulated as many of them may be, however, not one qualifies as a public critic of today's failing wars. ..."
"... The big three are Secretary of State Colin Powell's former chief of staff, retired Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson ; Vietnam veteran and onetime West Point history instructor, retired Colonel Andrew Bacevich ; and Iraq veteran and Afghan War whistleblower , retired Lieutenant Colonel Danny Davis . All three have proven to be genuine public servants, poignant voices, and -- on some level -- cherished personal mentors. For better or worse, however, none carry the potential clout of a retired senior theater commander or prominent four-star general offering the same critiques. ..."
"... Consider it an irony of sorts that this system first received criticism in our era of forever wars when General David Petraeus, then commanding the highly publicized " surge " in Iraq, had to leave that theater of war in 2007 to serve as the chair of that selection committee. The reason: he wanted to ensure that a twice passed-over colonel, a protégé of his -- future Trump National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster -- earned his star. ..."
"... At the roots of this system lay the obsession of the American officer corps with " professionalization " after the Vietnam War debacle. This first manifested itself in a decision to ditch the citizen-soldier tradition, end the draft, and create an "all-volunteer force." The elimination of conscription, as predicted by critics at the time, created an ever-growing civil-military divide, even as it increased public apathy regarding America's wars by erasing whatever " skin in the game " most citizens had. ..."
"... One group of generals, however, reportedly now does have it out for President Trump -- but not because they're opposed to endless war. Rather, they reportedly think that The Donald doesn't "listen enough to military advice" on, you know, how to wage war forever and a day. ..."
"... That beast, first identified by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, is now on steroids as American commanders in retirement regularly move directly from the military onto the boards of the giant defense contractors, a reality which only contributes to the dearth of Butlers in the military retiree community. For all the corruption of his time, the Pentagon didn't yet exist and the path from the military to, say, United Fruit Company, Standard Oil, or other typical corporate giants of that moment had yet to be normalized for retiring generals and admirals. Imagine what Butler would have had to say about the modern phenomenon of the " revolving door " in Washington. ..."
"... Today, generals don't seem to have a thought of their own even in retirement. And more's the pity... ..."
"... Am I the only one to notice that Hollywood and it's film distributors have gone full bore on "war" productions, glorifying these historical events while using poetic license to rewrite history. Prepping the numbheads. ..."
"... Forget rank. As Mr Sjursen implies, dissidents are no longer allowed in the higher ranks. "They" made sure to fix this as Mr Butler had too much of a mind of his own (US education system also programmed against creative, charismatic thinkers, btw). ..."
"... Today, the "Masters of the Permawars" refer to the international extortion, MIC, racket as "Defending American Interests"! .....With never any explanation to the public/American taxpayer just what "American Interests" the incredible expenditures of American lives, blood, and treasure are being defended! ..."
"... "The Americans follow the principle that when one lies, one should lie big, and stick to it. They keep up their lies, even at the risk of looking ridiculous." - Jospeh Goebbels ..."
"... The greatest anti-imperialist of our times is Michael Parenti: ..."
"... The obvious types of American fascists are dealt with on the air and in the press. These demagogues and stooges are fronts for others. Dangerous as these people may be, they are not so significant as thousands of other people who have never been mentioned. The really dangerous American fascists are not those who are hooked up directly or indirectly with the Axis. The FBI has its finger on those. The dangerous American fascist is the man who wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian way. The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power. ..."
"... If we define an American fascist as one who in case of conflict puts money and power ahead of human beings, then there are undoubtedly several million fascists in the United States. There are probably several hundred thousand if we narrow the definition to include only those who in their search for money and power are ruthless and deceitful. Most American fascists are enthusiastically supporting the war effort. ..."
Feb 23, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Danny Sjursen via TomDispatch.com,

There once lived an odd little man - five feet nine inches tall and barely 140 pounds sopping wet - who rocked the lecture circuit and the nation itself. For all but a few activist insiders and scholars, U.S. Marine Corps Major General Smedley Darlington Butler is now lost to history. Yet more than a century ago, this strange contradiction of a man would become a national war hero, celebrated in pulp adventure novels, and then, 30 years later, as one of this country's most prominent antiwar and anti-imperialist dissidents.

Raised in West Chester, Pennsylvania, and educated in Quaker (pacifist) schools, the son of an influential congressman, he would end up serving in nearly all of America's " Banana Wars " from 1898 to 1931. Wounded in combat and a rare recipient of two Congressional Medals of Honor, he would retire as the youngest, most decorated major general in the Marines.

A teenage officer and a certified hero during an international intervention in the Chinese Boxer Rebellion of 1900, he would later become a constabulary leader of the Haitian gendarme, the police chief of Philadelphia (while on an approved absence from the military), and a proponent of Marine Corps football. In more standard fashion, he would serve in battle as well as in what might today be labeled peacekeeping , counterinsurgency , and advise-and-assist missions in Cuba, China, the Philippines, Panama, Nicaragua, Mexico, Haiti, France, and China (again). While he showed early signs of skepticism about some of those imperial campaigns or, as they were sardonically called by critics at the time, " Dollar Diplomacy " operations -- that is, military campaigns waged on behalf of U.S. corporate business interests -- until he retired he remained the prototypical loyal Marine.

But after retirement, Smedley Butler changed his tune. He began to blast the imperialist foreign policy and interventionist bullying in which he'd only recently played such a prominent part. Eventually, in 1935 during the Great Depression, in what became a classic passage in his memoir, which he titled "War Is a Racket," he wrote:

"I spent thirty-three years and four months in active military service... And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street, and for the Bankers."

Seemingly overnight, the famous war hero transformed himself into an equally acclaimed antiwar speaker and activist in a politically turbulent era. Those were, admittedly, uncommonly anti-interventionist years, in which veterans and politicians alike promoted what (for America, at least) had been fringe ideas. This was, after all, the height of what later pro-war interventionists would pejoratively label American " isolationism ."

Nonetheless, Butler was unique (for that moment and certainly for our own) in his unapologetic amenability to left-wing domestic politics and materialist critiques of American militarism. In the last years of his life, he would face increasing criticism from his former admirer, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the military establishment, and the interventionist press. This was particularly true after Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany invaded Poland and later France. Given the severity of the Nazi threat to mankind, hindsight undoubtedly proved Butler's virulent opposition to U.S. intervention in World War II wrong.

Nevertheless, the long-term erasure of his decade of antiwar and anti-imperialist activism and the assumption that all his assertions were irrelevant has proven historically deeply misguided. In the wake of America's brief but bloody entry into the First World War, the skepticism of Butler (and a significant part of an entire generation of veterans) about intervention in a new European bloodbath should have been understandable. Above all, however, his critique of American militarism of an earlier imperial era in the Pacific and in Latin America remains prescient and all too timely today, especially coming as it did from one of the most decorated and high-ranking general officers of his time. (In the era of the never-ending war on terror, such a phenomenon is quite literally inconceivable.)

Smedley Butler's Marine Corps and the military of his day was, in certain ways, a different sort of organization than today's highly professionalized armed forces. History rarely repeats itself, not in a literal sense anyway. Still, there are some disturbing similarities between the careers of Butler and today's generation of forever-war fighters. All of them served repeated tours of duty in (mostly) unsanctioned wars around the world. Butler's conflicts may have stretched west from Haiti across the oceans to China, whereas today's generals mostly lead missions from West Africa east to Central Asia, but both sets of conflicts seemed perpetual in their day and were motivated by barely concealed economic and imperial interests.

Nonetheless, whereas this country's imperial campaigns of the first third of the twentieth century generated a Smedley Butler, the hyper-interventionism of the first decades of this century hasn't produced a single even faintly comparable figure. Not one. Zero. Zilch. Why that is matters and illustrates much about the U.S. military establishment and contemporary national culture, none of it particularly encouraging.

Why No Antiwar Generals

When Smedley Butler retired in 1931, he was one of three Marine Corps major generals holding a rank just below that of only the Marine commandant and the Army chief of staff. Today, with about 900 generals and admirals currently serving on active duty, including 24 major generals in the Marine Corps alone, and with scores of flag officers retiring annually, not a single one has offered genuine public opposition to almost 19 years worth of ill-advised, remarkably unsuccessful American wars . As for the most senior officers, the 40 four-star generals and admirals whose vocal antimilitarism might make the biggest splash, there are more of them today than there were even at the height of the Vietnam War, although the active military is now about half the size it was then. Adulated as many of them may be, however, not one qualifies as a public critic of today's failing wars.

Instead, the principal patriotic dissent against those terror wars has come from retired colonels, lieutenant colonels, and occasionally more junior officers (like me), as well as enlisted service members. Not that there are many of us to speak of either. I consider it disturbing (and so should you) that I personally know just about every one of the retired military figures who has spoken out against America's forever wars.

The big three are Secretary of State Colin Powell's former chief of staff, retired Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson ; Vietnam veteran and onetime West Point history instructor, retired Colonel Andrew Bacevich ; and Iraq veteran and Afghan War whistleblower , retired Lieutenant Colonel Danny Davis . All three have proven to be genuine public servants, poignant voices, and -- on some level -- cherished personal mentors. For better or worse, however, none carry the potential clout of a retired senior theater commander or prominent four-star general offering the same critiques.

Something must account for veteran dissenters topping out at the level of colonel. Obviously, there are personal reasons why individual officers chose early retirement or didn't make general or admiral. Still, the system for selecting flag officers should raise at least a few questions when it comes to the lack of antiwar voices among retired commanders. In fact, a selection committee of top generals and admirals is appointed each year to choose the next colonels to earn their first star. And perhaps you won't be surprised to learn that, according to numerous reports , "the members of this board are inclined, if not explicitly motivated, to seek candidates in their own image -- officers whose careers look like theirs." At a minimal level, such a system is hardly built to foster free thinkers, no less breed potential dissidents.

Consider it an irony of sorts that this system first received criticism in our era of forever wars when General David Petraeus, then commanding the highly publicized " surge " in Iraq, had to leave that theater of war in 2007 to serve as the chair of that selection committee. The reason: he wanted to ensure that a twice passed-over colonel, a protégé of his -- future Trump National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster -- earned his star.

Mainstream national security analysts reported on this affair at the time as if it were a major scandal, since most of them were convinced that Petraeus and his vaunted counterinsurgency or " COINdinista " protégés and their " new " war-fighting doctrine had the magic touch that would turn around the failing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In fact, Petraeus tried to apply those very tactics twice -- once in each country -- as did acolytes of his later, and you know the results of that.

But here's the point: it took an eleventh-hour intervention by America's most acclaimed general of that moment to get new stars handed out to prominent colonels who had, until then, been stonewalled by Cold War-bred flag officers because they were promoting different (but also strangely familiar) tactics in this country's wars. Imagine, then, how likely it would be for such a leadership system to produce genuine dissenters with stars of any serious sort, no less a crew of future Smedley Butlers.

At the roots of this system lay the obsession of the American officer corps with " professionalization " after the Vietnam War debacle. This first manifested itself in a decision to ditch the citizen-soldier tradition, end the draft, and create an "all-volunteer force." The elimination of conscription, as predicted by critics at the time, created an ever-growing civil-military divide, even as it increased public apathy regarding America's wars by erasing whatever " skin in the game " most citizens had.

More than just helping to squelch civilian antiwar activism, though, the professionalization of the military, and of the officer corps in particular, ensured that any future Smedley Butlers would be left in the dust (or in retirement at the level of lieutenant colonel or colonel) by a system geared to producing faux warrior-monks. Typical of such figures is current chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Army General Mark Milley. He may speak gruffly and look like a man with a head of his own, but typically he's turned out to be just another yes-man for another war-power -hungry president.

One group of generals, however, reportedly now does have it out for President Trump -- but not because they're opposed to endless war. Rather, they reportedly think that The Donald doesn't "listen enough to military advice" on, you know, how to wage war forever and a day.

What Would Smedley Butler Think Today?

In his years of retirement, Smedley Butler regularly focused on the economic component of America's imperial war policies. He saw clearly that the conflicts he had fought in, the elections he had helped rig, the coups he had supported, and the constabularies he had formed and empowered in faraway lands had all served the interests of U.S. corporate investors. Though less overtly the case today, this still remains a reality in America's post-9/11 conflicts, even on occasion embarrassingly so (as when the Iraqi ministry of oil was essentially the only public building protected by American troops as looters tore apart the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, in the post-invasion chaos of April 2003). Mostly, however, such influence plays out far more subtly than that, both abroad and here at home where those wars help maintain the record profits of the top weapons makers of the military-industrial complex.

That beast, first identified by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, is now on steroids as American commanders in retirement regularly move directly from the military onto the boards of the giant defense contractors, a reality which only contributes to the dearth of Butlers in the military retiree community. For all the corruption of his time, the Pentagon didn't yet exist and the path from the military to, say, United Fruit Company, Standard Oil, or other typical corporate giants of that moment had yet to be normalized for retiring generals and admirals. Imagine what Butler would have had to say about the modern phenomenon of the " revolving door " in Washington.

Of course, he served in a very different moment, one in which military funding and troop levels were still contested in Congress. As a longtime critic of capitalist excesses who wrote for leftist publications and supported the Socialist Party candidate in the 1936 presidential elections, Butler would have found today's nearly trillion-dollar annual defense budgets beyond belief. What the grizzled former Marine long ago identified as a treacherous nexus between warfare and capital "in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives" seems to have reached its natural end point in the twenty-first century. Case in point: the record (and still rising ) "defense" spending of the present moment, including -- to please a president -- the creation of a whole new military service aimed at the full-scale militarization of space .

Sadly enough, in the age of Trump, as numerous polls demonstrate, the U.S. military is the only public institution Americans still truly trust. Under the circumstances, how useful it would be to have a high-ranking, highly decorated, charismatic retired general in the Butler mold galvanize an apathetic public around those forever wars of ours. Unfortunately, the likelihood of that is practically nil, given the military system of our moment.

Of course, Butler didn't exactly end his life triumphantly. In late May 1940, having lost 25 pounds due to illness and exhaustion -- and demonized as a leftist, isolationist crank but still maintaining a whirlwind speaking schedule -- he checked himself into the Philadelphia Navy Yard Hospital for a "rest." He died there, probably of some sort of cancer, four weeks later. Working himself to death in his 10-year retirement and second career as a born-again antiwar activist, however, might just have constituted the very best service that the two-time Medal of Honor winner could have given the nation he loved to the very end.

Someone of his credibility, character, and candor is needed more than ever today. Unfortunately, this military generation is unlikely to produce such a figure. In retirement, Butler himself boldly confessed that, "like all the members of the military profession, I never had a thought of my own until I left the service. My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of higher-ups. This is typical..."

Today, generals don't seem to have a thought of their own even in retirement. And more's the pity...

2 minutes ago
Am I the only one to notice that Hollywood and it's film distributors have gone full bore on "war" productions, glorifying these historical events while using poetic license to rewrite history. Prepping the numbheads.
14 minutes ago
TULSI GABBARD.

Forget rank. As Mr Sjursen implies, dissidents are no longer allowed in the higher ranks. "They" made sure to fix this as Mr Butler had too much of a mind of his own (US education system also programmed against creative, charismatic thinkers, btw).

The US Space Force has been created as part of a plan to disclose the deep state's Secret Space Program (SSP), which has been active for decades, and which has utilized, and repressed, advanced technologies that would provide free, unlimited renewable energy, and thus eliminate hunger and poverty on a planetary scale.

14 minutes ago
14 minutes ago

ALL wars are EVIL. Period .

29 minutes ago

Sadly enough, in the age of Trump, as numerous polls demonstrate, the U.S. military is the only public institution Americans still truly trust. Under the circumstances, how useful it would be to have a high-ranking, highly decorated, charismatic retired general in the Butler mold galvanize an apathetic public around those forever wars of ours. Unfortunately, the likelihood of that is practically nil, given the military system of our moment.

This is why I feel an oath keeping constitutionally oriented American general is what we need in power, clear out all 545 criminals in office now, review their finances (and most of them will roll over on the others) and punish accordingly, then the lobbyist, how many of them worked against the country? You know what we do with those.

And then, finally, Hollywood, oh yes I long to see that **** hole burn with everyone in it.

30 minutes ago
Republicrat: the two faces of the moar war whore.
32 minutes ago

Given the severity of the Nazi threat to mankind

Do tell, from what I've read the Nazis were really only a threat to a few groups, the rest of us didn't need to worry.

35 minutes ago
Today, the "Masters of the Permawars" refer to the international extortion, MIC, racket as "Defending American Interests"! .....With never any explanation to the public/American taxpayer just what "American Interests" the incredible expenditures of American lives, blood, and treasure are being defended!

Why are we sending our children out into the hellholes of the world to be maimed and killed in the fauxjew banksters' quest for world domination.

How stupid can we be!

41 minutes ago
(Edited) "Smedley Butler"... The last time the UCMJ was actually used before being permanently turned into a "door stop"!
49 minutes ago
He was correct about our staying out of WWII. Which, BTW, would have never happened if we had stayed out of WWI.
22 minutes ago
(Edited) Both wars were about the international fauxjew imposition of debt-money central bankstering.

Both wars were promulgated by the Financial oligarchyof New York. The communist Red Army of Russia was funded and supplied by the Financial oligarchyof New York. It was American Financial oligarchythat built the Russian Red Army that vexed the world and created the Cold War. How many hundreds of millions of goyim were sacrificed to create both the Russian and the Chinese Satanic behemoths.......and the communist horror that is now embedded in American academia, publishing, American politics, so-called news, entertainment, The worldwide Catholic religion, the Pentagon, and the American deep state.......and more!

How stupid can we be. Every generation has the be dragged, kicking and screaming, out of the eternal maw of historical ignorance to avoid falling back into the myriad dark hellholes of history. As we all should know, people who forget their own history are doomed to repeat it.

53 minutes ago
Today's General is a robot with with a DNA.
54 minutes ago
All the General Staff is a bunch of #asskissinglittlechickenshits
57 minutes ago
want to stop senseless Empire wars>>well do this

War = jobs and profit..we get work "THEY" get the profit.. If we taxed all war related profit at 99% how many wars would our rulers start? 1 hour ago

Here is a simple straightforward trading maxim that might apply here: if it works or is working keep doing it, but if it doesn't work or stops working, then STOP doing it. There are plenty of people, now poorer, for not adhering to that simple principle. Where is the Taxpayer's return on investment from the Combat taking place on their behalf around the globe? 'Nuff said - it isn't working. It is making a microscopic few richer & all others poorer so STOP doing it. 36 seconds ago We don't have to look far to figure out who they are that are getting rich off the fauxjew permawars.

How can we be so stupid???

1 hour ago

See also:

TULSI GABBARD

1 hour ago

The main reason you don't see the generals criticizing is that the current crop have not been in actual long term direct combat with the enemy and have mostly been bureaucratic paper pushers.

Take the Marine Major General who is the current commander of CENTCOM. By the time he got into the Iraq/Afghanistan war he was already a Lieutenant Colonel and far removed from direct action.

He was only there on and off for a few years. Here are some of his other career highlights aft as they appear on his official bio:

In short, these top guys aren't warriors they're bureaucrats so why would we expect them to be honest brokers of the truth?

51 minutes ago

are U saying Chesty Puller he's NOT? 1 hour ago
(Edited) The purpose of war is to ensure that the Federal Reserve Note remains the world reserve paper currency of choice by keeping it relevant and in demand across the globe by forcing pesky energy producing nations to trade with it exclusively.

It is a 49 year old policy created by the private owners of quasi public institutions called central banks to ensure they remain the Wizards of Oz doing gods work conjuring magic paper into existence with a secret spell known as issuing credit.

How else is a technologically advanced society of billions of people supposed to function w/out this divinely inspired paper?

1 hour ago

Goebbels in "Churchill's Lie Factory" where he said: "The Americans follow the principle that when one lies, one should lie big, and stick to it. They keep up their lies, even at the risk of looking ridiculous." - Jospeh Goebbels, "Aus Churchills Lügenfabrik," 12. january 1941, Die Zeit ohne Beispiel

1 hour ago

The greatest anti-imperialist of our times is Michael Parenti:

Imperialism has been the most powerful force in world history over the last four or five centuries, carving up whole continents while oppressing indigenous peoples and obliterating entire civilizations. Yet, it is seldom accorded any serious attention by our academics, media commentators, and political leaders. When not ignored outright, the subject of imperialism has been sanitized, so that empires become "commonwealths," and colonies become "territories" or "dominions" (or, as in the case of Puerto Rico, "commonwealths" too). Imperialist military interventions become matters of "national defense," "national security," and maintaining "stability" in one or another region. In this book I want to look at imperialism for what it really is.

https://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/imperialism.html

49 minutes ago
"Imperialism has been the most powerful force in world history over the last four or five centuries, carving up whole continents while oppressing indigenous peoples and obliterating entire civilizations. Yet, it is seldom accorded any serious attention by our academics, media commentators, and political leaders."

Why would it when they who control academia, media and most of our politicians are our enemies.

1 hour ago

"The big three are Secretary of State Colin Powell's former chief of staff, retired Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson ; ..."

Yep, Wilkerson, who leaked Valerie Plame's name, not that it was a leak, to Novak, and then stood by to watch the grand jury fry Scooter Libby. Wilkerson, that paragon of moral rectitude. Wilkerson the silent, that *******.

sheesh,

1 hour ago
(Edited)

" A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty. The means of defence against foreign danger, have been always the instruments of tyranny at home. Among the Romans it was a standing maxim to excite a war, whenever a revolt was apprehended. Throughout all Europe, the armies kept up under the pretext of defending, have enslaved the people."

James Madison Friday June 29, 1787

https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/debates_629.asp

"What, Sir, is the use of a militia? It is to prevent the establishment of a standing army, the bane of liberty.... Whenever Governments mean to invade the rights and liberties of the people, they always attempt to destroy the militia, in order to raise an army upon their ruins." (Rep. Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts, spoken during floor debate over the Second Amendment [I Annals of Congress at 750, August 17, 1789])

http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/amendIIs6.html

1 hour ago

A particularly pernicious example of intra-European imperialism was the Nazi aggression during World War II, which gave the German business cartels and the Nazi state an opportunity to plunder the resources and exploit the labor of occupied Europe, including the slave labor of concentration camps. - M. PARENTI, Against empire

See Alexander Parvus

1 hour ago

Collapse is the cure. It's too far gone.

1 hour ago

Russia Wants to 'Jam' F-22 and F-35s in the Middle East: Report

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/russia-wants-jam-f-22-and-f-35s-middle-east-report-121041

1 hour ago

ZH retards think that the American mic is bad and all other mics are good or don't exist. That's the power of brainwashing. Humans understand that war in general is bad, but humans are becoming increasingly rare in this world.

1 hour ago

The obvious types of American fascists are dealt with on the air and in the press. These demagogues and stooges are fronts for others. Dangerous as these people may be, they are not so significant as thousands of other people who have never been mentioned. The really dangerous American fascists are not those who are hooked up directly or indirectly with the Axis. The FBI has its finger on those. The dangerous American fascist is the man who wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian way. The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power.

If we define an American fascist as one who in case of conflict puts money and power ahead of human beings, then there are undoubtedly several million fascists in the United States. There are probably several hundred thousand if we narrow the definition to include only those who in their search for money and power are ruthless and deceitful. Most American fascists are enthusiastically supporting the war effort.

https://truthout.org/articles/the-dangers-of-american-fascism/

2 hours ago
The swamp is bigger than the military alone. Substitute Bureaucrat, Statesman, or Beltway Bandit for General and Colonel in your writing above and you've got a whole new article to post that is just as true.
2 hours ago
(Edited) War = jobs and profit..we get work "THEY" get the profit..If we taxed all war related profit at 99% how many wars would our rulers start?
2 hours ago [edited for clarity]
War is a racket. And nobody loves a racket more than Financial oligarchy. Americans come close though, that's why Financial oligarchy use them to project their own rackets and provide protection reprisals.

[Feb 22, 2020] Was anyone aware that in 1991 in the Ukraine almost 100% of the population had indoor running water, but as of 2014 that was down to 87%?

That's typical deterioration of the standard of living for the country that was converted into the debt slave and de facto US colony
Feb 22, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org
William Gruff , Feb 22 2020 11:56 utc | 9
Was anyone aware that in 1991 in the Ukraine almost 100% of the population had indoor running water, but as of 2014 that was down to 87%? I'm talking of the western portion of the Ukraine here and not the part being attacked by neo-Nazis where it is unsurprising that infrastructure is being destroyed.

I was curious what happened to the Ukraine's infrastructure since the Soviet Union was dissolved so I asked some Ukrops what was up. Apparently Putin himself has been sneaking into the Ukraine at night and stealing the plumbing right out of people's houses. I kid thee not! Putin did it! Ukrops wouldn't lie about that, would they?

If you think what Putin is doing to America is bad, then just be thankful you are not in Ukropistan! Over there Putin causes people to stub their toes on the furniture when they get out of bed to take a leak at night. He tricks people into not bringing their umbrellas on days that it rains. He even causes babies to foul their diapers right after they were changed. Putin's evil knows no bounds!

[Feb 22, 2020] Trump Should Get Out of NATO Now, But Nicely by Ivan Eland

Notable quotes:
"... The NATO alliance was established to protect war-devastated Western European nations against a possible Soviet threat until they got on their feet economically again. Dwight Eisenhower even said that if American troops remained in Europe too long, NATO would have failed. Yet long after the European economic miracle -- amazing prosperity achieved during a robust recovery in the decade or so after the war -- and long after the Soviet Union collapsed, NATO, instead of going away, has expanded its territory and mission. The American military remains in Europe to guarantee the security of nations that have a combined GDP greater than that of the United States. Meanwhile, Russia, the successor "threat" to the Soviet Union, has a GDP equivalent to that of Spain. The overextended United States also has a staggering national debt of $23 trillion and eye-popping unfunded government mandates at all levels that amount to between $150 and $200 trillion. ..."
Feb 21, 2020 | www.theamericanconservative.com

Bossing, bullying, and nickel-and-diming won't make for an easy divorce. Donald Trump at NATO Summit, Brussels, in 2018

According to Politico , the American delegation to the illustrious Munich Security Conference -- the security counterpart to the elite World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland -- was apparently "dumbfounded" by the hostile reaction they received from European speakers, including French President Emmanuel Macron and German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier. Steinmeier even took aim at the Trump administration's hallowed "Make America Great Again" slogan, accusing the United States of "rejecting the idea of the international community." Steinmeier characterized Trump's position this way: "Every country should fend for itself and put its own interests over all others 'great again' -- even at the expense of neighbors and partners."

Ironically, Steinmeier's acerbic comments seem to conclude that if the United States becomes uncomfortable with continuing to effectively subsidize the defense of wealthy European states, which have long been capable of being at least the first line of defense for themselves, it is inflicting suffering on its allies and doesn't even believe in the "international community." Steinmeier's grumbling is akin to that of an entitled young adult still living at home after being told by his parents to get a job.

The NATO alliance was established to protect war-devastated Western European nations against a possible Soviet threat until they got on their feet economically again. Dwight Eisenhower even said that if American troops remained in Europe too long, NATO would have failed. Yet long after the European economic miracle -- amazing prosperity achieved during a robust recovery in the decade or so after the war -- and long after the Soviet Union collapsed, NATO, instead of going away, has expanded its territory and mission. The American military remains in Europe to guarantee the security of nations that have a combined GDP greater than that of the United States. Meanwhile, Russia, the successor "threat" to the Soviet Union, has a GDP equivalent to that of Spain. The overextended United States also has a staggering national debt of $23 trillion and eye-popping unfunded government mandates at all levels that amount to between $150 and $200 trillion.

One might conclude from this that Trump's policy of angrily haranguing and belittling his NATO allies into coughing up a few more dollars for their own defense is the right one. Trump crudely understands the problem but has come up with the wrong solution. The many Eurocentric analysts, who dominated the American foreign policy elite during the Cold War and are now trying to hang on to relevance, keep hyping the general Russia threat by excessively demonizing its president, Vladimir Putin, who is really just another tin-pot dictator.

A third way is still possible, one that avoids both placating the hand-wringing Eurocentric establishment and the nickel-and-diming of NATO allies that Trump desires.

The worst fear of the Eurocentrics is that Trump will, before leaving office, withdraw from the NATO alliance, much as he did with the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade pact, the international agreement on climate change, and the Intermediate Nuclear Forces treaty. Yet this is the proper, though radical, approach. It needs to be done immediately, so that it can't be reversed by the next president. The problem is that Trump has been rude and obnoxious enough to the Europeans that the divorce might very well make Britain's exit from the European Union look like a walk in the park. The ideal would have been to have had a previously cordial relationship with Europe, followed by a U.S. statement that the European economic miracle has allowed them to withstand a stagnant Russia and they need to finally take primary responsibility for their own defense.

This would have allowed the United States rebuild its dissipated power by reducing government spending and debt and reallocating the remaining military forces to the Pacific to hedge against a rising China. Such a change is critical, and it remains to be seen whether it can be achieved.

Ivan Eland is a senior fellow at the Independent Institute and director of the Independent Institute's Center on Peace & Liberty. His new book, War and the Rogue Presidency: Restoring the Republic After Congressional Failure, was released in May 2019.

joeo • a day ago • edited

"Trump Should Get Out Of NATO Now, But Nicely" is spot on. The Obama Administration pivot to the Pacific could have be continued in a cordial fashion but that is not the Donald way. The US needs to make a treaty with Russia and leave Europe with the possible exception of Ramstein AFB.
Bjorn Andresen • a day ago • edited
"Vladimir Putin is a tin pot dictator"

"Russia is stagnant"

These goofy neocon statements won't buy you anything. Stop giving legitimacy to the establishment's false narrative, it won't make the foreign policy elites accept you, you can't oppose the elite and at the same time work within the confines of the paradigm they created. Not only are such statements untrue, it's self defeating.

Selvar Bjorn Andresen • a day ago • edited
Is it really false to say that Russia is stagnant though? After all, Russia has a falling population (population peaked in the early 1990s), a relatively low life-expectancy, an economy that is smaller than that of Italy's in terms of nominal GDP, and a conventional military capability that is a mere shadow of what it once was in Soviet times. Other countries (China, the U.S. etc..) may have a low fertility rate as well, but China has a massive population to start with, and the U.S. can attract immigrants fairly well. Note: I am not saying that immigration is necessarily a good thing when it is used as a means of demographic replacement to make up for a low fertility rate, but it is one way to cope with the geopolitical and economic implications of a low birth rate, at least for a time.

Certainly, Russia is not doing too badly by Third World standards, and,to be fair, I do think Putin has utilized a fundamentally weak geopolitical hand rather well. It's also pretty clear that Putin played a significant role in bringing Russia back from the brink economically and culturally following the degradation it suffered in the 1990s. For that matter, I think his popularity is likely genuine among many people in Russia, even if he is a dictator of sorts. Still, if you look at the fundamental, long-term economic, demographic, and military trends, it's hard to escape the conclusion that Russia is a declining power. Over a long enough time frame, it almost certainly is.

Sid Finster Selvar • a day ago
Russia has not had a falling population for some time now.

Economic statistics are based on official numbers, which ignore the gray market economy that a lot of Russian people live on.

Selvar Sid Finster • 21 hours ago
Given the fact that Russia has not had an above replacement fertility rate since the fall of the USSR, and given that it's ability to attract immigrants is rather limited (how many third world immigrants would choose Russia, over, say, Germany?), I don't see how a falling population is not inevitable for Russia in the long term. This is especially a problem for Russia given the vastness of its eastern regions, as well as how few people live in those regions to begin with.

A consistent theme of Pat Buchanan's columns about Russia is that-- given the vast population disparities involved--China is likely to start slowly colonizing Siberia at some point, at least in an implicit, economic sort of way. I do wonder if this is a likely outcome.

kouroi Selvar • a day ago
Russia third world? A certain head needs to be pulled from a certain something, to put it bluntly.
Selvar kouroi • 21 hours ago • edited
I said that it's doing well by Third World standards, not that it necessarily is itself a Third World nation. Historically, Russia was considered a Second World country, which makes sense.
kouroi Selvar • 4 hours ago
Have a look at this second world country: https://halfreeman.wordpres...

While the US pretends to be a first world country...

Mandrake Selvar • 3 hours ago
Russia has an excellent education system, its medical services are good, it has a high literacy rate, it is white and Christian, with conservative values, and it has few gun massacres.

Leaving NATO is a no-brainer. The US and Russia have a common foe - the Chicoms.

Don Quijote • a day ago
The problem with disbanding NATO is that no one knows what will follow.
Would Europe go back to the intra power politics of the early 20th Century? In which case the US will likely sucked into their next war.
Or would the EU integrate it's defense and foreign policy and create a Federal Europe? And if they did, how long would it take Europe to be a peer competitor to the US?
Sid Finster Don Quijote • a day ago
How many European countries have territorial claims on each other? Few to none.
How many European countries are in competition for colonies? Few to none.
Don Quijote Sid Finster • a day ago
You don't need territorial issues for war, the US had no territorial issues with Iraq nor Afghanistan in 2001, it didn't prevent the US from invading both countries.

I can easily see something like social dumping starting a cascade that takes Europe to war. That is the main European fear about BREXIT.

=marco01= Sid Finster • a day ago
Russia
MPC =marco01= • a day ago
I think Russia is more worried about its southern flank than its western one in the long term especially once the US and its ambition is gone. Russia badly needs to get closer to Europe.
ericsiverson MPC • 8 minutes ago
Russia is in Europe
ericsiverson Don Quijote • 10 minutes ago
Germany will rule the E.U. just as they would have If Hitler had won the 2cd World war It will be national socialist which the Muslims will like .. The remaining Jews will have to leave or die
SatirevFlesti • a day ago
NATO should have been mothballed after the fall of the USSR and the Warsaw Pact. But the vested interests of the military-industrial-financial complex have kept it expanding, antagonizing Russia in its sphere of influence, seeking out new monsters (such as the unjust and illegal war on Serbia), and it mainly exists now to enrich arms producers and to support bureaucrats in Brussels with sinecures in their fancy headquarters building.
Sceptical Gorilla • a day ago
>The American military remains in Europe to guarantee the security of nations that have a combined GDP greater than that of the United States

I don't believe this is true anymore. The US passed the EU in nominal GDP in roughly 2018.

K squared • a day ago
Trump nicely=hyper oxymoron
Wally • a day ago • edited
As an anti-war lefty, I just love this destruction of the intelligence community and hope Trump really does abandon NATO... right before we drag him out of White House in shackles... or some such thing.

It's curious the complaint about debt in this post... didn't everyone just agree to increase the defense budget last year... again?

Personan0ngrata • a day ago
Trump Should Get Out of NATO Now, But Nicely

Agreed.

This would have allowed the United States rebuild its dissipated power by reducing government spending and debt and reallocating the remaining military forces to the Pacific to hedge against a rising China.

Why must the US hedge against a rising China in the Pacific ?

How is this a realistic plan of action?

China's rise has been through voluntary economic endeavors with other nations not through force of arms. Asian issues must be solved via Asian nations engaging in dialectical dialogue not US government gun-boat diplomacy.

The same logic that allows for a reduced US role in NATO (ie defending Europe) clearly shows that America's allies in the Pacific (eg Japan, S.Korea, Indonesia, etc) have more than recovered (eg Japan world's 3rd largest economy, S.Korea 12th largest, Indonesia 16th largest) from the devastation of WWII and the Korea War and are quite capable of defending themselves.

To paraphrase George Washington - trade with all entangling alliances with none.

https://www.investopedia.co...

The US has been running trillion dollar yearly deficits for over a decade with an acknowledged 23 trillion dollar debt (as of 2020) along with hundreds of trillions of dollars in unfunded future liabilities and deteriorating national infrastructure in need of over 3 trillion dollars in upgrades.

https://www.justfacts.com/n...

https://www.forbes.com/site...

https://www.maritime-execut...

In order to meet these pressing issues the US government needs to stop garrisoning (ie empire) the world under the tissue paper thin veneer of providing global stability and security (of which it can not even provide in Baltimore Md 50 miles from DC) and return it's myopic/megalomaniacal gaze to America.

kouroi • a day ago
The US doesn't want outside Europe and will be pushed out kicking and screaming. Of course the Poles will cry bloody murder... Never a smart polity...
Brigadier V Mahalingam • 19 hours ago
I don't think Trump is really interested in leaving NATO. US has a stable & a dependable market in Europe. US' presence in Europe prevents China & Russia spreading their wings there. It will also assist US in containing these major powers along side its efforts in South China Sea & the Info-Pacific. Internationally US gets the support of 27 Countries in all international fora. To my mind, the very reason why US continually keeps projecting Russia as an enemy is to ensure that the European countries remain tied to US.

Even if US is unwilling to let go Europe from the alliance, it is time EU abandons US & takes responsibility for itself. Europe has the potential to become an important & a powerful pole in a Multipolar world.

peter mcloughlin • 14 hours ago
Russia presents more of a danger today than during the height of the Cold War: then the Kremlin had a proper buffer zone, today it has not. There is the existential threat: the reason nations to war.
https://www.ghostsofhistory...
Rossbach • an hour ago
While I agree that NATO is now irrelevant and a significant waste of US tax dollars, shifting that expenditure to fight China might be an even bigger mistake. The US should withdraw its military forces from the Western Pacific for the same reason we should leave NATO. Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and the Philippines should be made responsible for making their own accommodations with China.

[Feb 21, 2020] Why Both Republicans And Democrats Want Russia To Become The Enemy Of Choice by Philip Giraldi

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Schiff insisted that Trump must be removed now to "assure the integrity" of the 2020 election. He elaborated somewhat ambiguously that "The president's misconduct cannot be decided at the ballot box, for we cannot be assured that the vote will be fairly won." Schiff also unleashed one of the most time honored but completely lame excuses for going to war, claiming that military assistance to Ukraine that had been delayed by Trump was essential for U.S. national security. He said "As one witness put it during our impeachment inquiry, the United States aids Ukraine and her people so that we can fight Russia over there, and we don't have to fight Russia here." ..."
"... Schiff, a lawyer who has never had to put his life on the line for anything and whose son sports a MOSSAD t-shirt, is one of those sunshine soldiers who finds it quite acceptable if someone else does the dying. Journalist Max Blumenthal observed that "Liberals used to mock Bush supporters when they used this jingoistic line during the war on Iraq. Now they deploy it to justify an imperialist proxy war against a nuclear power." Aaron Mate at The Nation added that "For all the talk about Russia undermining faith in U.S. elections, how about Russiagaters like Schiff fear-mongering w/ hysterics like this? Let's assume Ukraine did what Trump wanted: announce a probe of Burisma. Would that delegitimize a 2020 U.S. election? This is a joke." ..."
"... On Wednesday, Schiff maintained that "Russia is not a threat to Eastern Europe alone. Ukraine has become the de facto proving ground for just the types of hybrid warfare that the twenty-first century will become defined by: cyberattacks, disinformation campaigns, efforts to undermine the legitimacy of state institutions, whether that is voting systems or financial markets. The Kremlin showed boldly in 2016 that with the malign skills it honed in Ukraine, they would not stay in Ukraine. Instead, Russia employed them here to attack our institutions, and they will do so again." Not surprisingly, if one substitutes the "United States" for "Russia" and "Kremlin" and changes "Ukraine" to Iran or Venezuela, the Schiff comment actually becomes much more credible. ..."
"... Donald Trump's erratic rule has certainly dismayed many of his former supporters, but the Democratic Party is offering nothing but another helping of George W. Bush/Barack Obama establishment war against the world. We Americans have had enough of that for the past nineteen years. Trump may indeed deserve to be removed based on his actions, but the argument that it is essential to do so because of Russia lurking is complete nonsense. Pretty scary that the apparent chief promoter of that point of view is someone who actually has power in the government, one Adam Schiff, head of the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee. ..."
"... It is scary, but what else can Schiff say? They have no credible arguments against Trump, or for their own party. They are a bunch of lying scumbags that will kill, cheat, steal, mislead, carpet-bag and anything else unethical to achieve their sleazy goals. ..."
"... Since the US Sociopaths In Charge have totally Effed up the nation, and a significant portion of the world, they have to have SOMEBODY to blame. They certainly won't take the blame they deserve themselves. ..."
"... What the ZOG wants the ZOG gets ..."
"... It is appropriate to recall the words of Joseph Goebbels: "Give me the media, and I will make a herd of pigs from any nation," and pigs are easy to drive to the slaughterhouse. Only Russia can really resist such a situation in the world. Therefore, she is the enemy. ..."
"... The Centrist Democrats and Republicans want to paint the old school God and Country Conservatives Equality and Justice for the USA (Nationalist) into being Russian ..."
Feb 07, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com
Authored by Philip Giraldi via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

One of the more interesting aspects of the nauseating impeachment trial in the Senate was the repeated vilification of Russia and its President Vladimir Putin.

To hate Russia has become dogma on both sides of the political aisle, in part because no politician has really wanted to confront the lesson of the 2016 election, which was that most Americans think that the federal government is basically incompetent and staffed by career politicians like Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell who should return back home and get real jobs .

Worse still, it is useless, and much like the one trick pony the only thing it can do is steal money from the taxpayers and waste it on various types of self-gratification that only politicians can appreciate. That means that the United States is engaged is fighting multiple wars against make-believe enemies while the country's infrastructure rots and a host of officially certified grievance groups control the public space.

It sure doesn't look like Kansas anymore.

The fact that opinion polls in Europe suggest that many Europeans would rather have Vladimir Putin than their own hopelessly corrupt leaders is suggestive. One can buy a whole range of favorable t-shirts featuring Vladimir Putin on Ebay , also suggesting that most Americans find the official Russophobia narrative both mysterious and faintly amusing. They may not really be into the expressed desire of the huddled masses in D.C. to go to war to bring true U.S. style democracy to the un-enlightened.

One also must wonder if the Democrats are reading the tea leaves correctly. If they think that a slogan like "Honest Joe Biden will keep us safe from Moscow" will be a winner in 2020 they might again be missing the bigger picture. Since the focus on Trump's decidedly erratic behavior will inevitably die down after the impeachment trial is completed, the Democrats will have to come up with something compelling if they really want to win the presidency and it sure won't be the largely fictionalized Russian threat.

Nevertheless, someone should tell Congressman Adam Schiff, who chairs the House Intelligence Committee, to shut up as he is becoming an international embarrassment. His "closing arguments" speeches last week were respectively two-and-a-half hours and ninety minutes long and were inevitably praised by the mainstream media as "magisterial," "powerful," and "impressive." The Washington Post 's resident Zionist extremist Jennifer Rubin labeled it "a grand slam" while legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin called it "dazzling." Gail Collins of the New York Times dubbed it "a great job" and added that Schiff is now "a rock star." Daily Beast enthused that the remarks "will go down in history " and progressive activist Ryan Knight called it "a closing statement for the ages." Hollywood was also on board with actress Debra Messing tweeting "I am in tears. Thank you Chairman Schiff for fighting for our country."

Actually, a better adjective would have been "scary" and not merely due to its elaboration of the alleged high crimes and misdemeanors committed by President Trump, much of which was undeniably true even if not necessarily impeachable. It was scary because it was a warmongers speech, full of allusions to Russia, to Moscow's "interference" in 2016, and to the ridiculous proposition that if Trump were to be defeated in 2020 he might not concede and Russia could even intervene militarily in the United States in support of its puppet.

Schiff insisted that Trump must be removed now to "assure the integrity" of the 2020 election. He elaborated somewhat ambiguously that "The president's misconduct cannot be decided at the ballot box, for we cannot be assured that the vote will be fairly won." Schiff also unleashed one of the most time honored but completely lame excuses for going to war, claiming that military assistance to Ukraine that had been delayed by Trump was essential for U.S. national security. He said "As one witness put it during our impeachment inquiry, the United States aids Ukraine and her people so that we can fight Russia over there, and we don't have to fight Russia here."

Schiff, a lawyer who has never had to put his life on the line for anything and whose son sports a MOSSAD t-shirt, is one of those sunshine soldiers who finds it quite acceptable if someone else does the dying. Journalist Max Blumenthal observed that "Liberals used to mock Bush supporters when they used this jingoistic line during the war on Iraq. Now they deploy it to justify an imperialist proxy war against a nuclear power." Aaron Mate at The Nation added that "For all the talk about Russia undermining faith in U.S. elections, how about Russiagaters like Schiff fear-mongering w/ hysterics like this? Let's assume Ukraine did what Trump wanted: announce a probe of Burisma. Would that delegitimize a 2020 U.S. election? This is a joke."

Over at Antiwar Daniel Lazare explains how the Wednesday speech was "a fear-mongering, sword-rattling harangue that will not only raise tensions with Russia for no good reason, but sends a chilling message to [Democratic Party] dissidents at home that if they deviate from Russiagate orthodoxy by one iota, they'll be driven from the fold."

The orthodoxy that Lazare was writing about includes the established Nancy Pelosi/Chuck Schumer narrative that Russia invaded "poor innocent Ukraine" in 2014, that it interfered in the 2016 election to defeat Hillary Clinton, and that it is currently trying to smear Joe Biden. One might add to that the growing consensus that Russia can and will interfere again in 2020 to help Trump. Absent from the narrative is the part how the U.S. intervened in Ukraine first to remove its government and the fact that there is something very unsavory about Joe Biden's son taking a high-paying sinecure board position from a notably corrupt Ukrainian oligarch while his father was Vice President and allegedly directing U.S. assistance to a Ukrainian anti-corruption effort.

On Wednesday, Schiff maintained that "Russia is not a threat to Eastern Europe alone. Ukraine has become the de facto proving ground for just the types of hybrid warfare that the twenty-first century will become defined by: cyberattacks, disinformation campaigns, efforts to undermine the legitimacy of state institutions, whether that is voting systems or financial markets. The Kremlin showed boldly in 2016 that with the malign skills it honed in Ukraine, they would not stay in Ukraine. Instead, Russia employed them here to attack our institutions, and they will do so again." Not surprisingly, if one substitutes the "United States" for "Russia" and "Kremlin" and changes "Ukraine" to Iran or Venezuela, the Schiff comment actually becomes much more credible.

The compulsion on the part of the Democrats to bring down Trump to avoid having to deal with their own failings has brought about a shift in their established foreign policy, placing the neocons and their friends back in charge. For Schiff, who has enthusiastically supported every failed American military effort since 9/11, today's Russia is the Soviet Union reborn, and don't you forget it pardner! Newsweek is meanwhile reporting that the U.S. military is reading the tea leaves and is gearing up to fight the Russians. Per Schiff, Trump must be stopped as he is part of a grand Russian conspiracy to overthrow everything the United States stands for. If the Kremlin is not stopped now, it's first major step, per Schiff, will be to "remake the map of Europe by dint of military force."

Donald Trump's erratic rule has certainly dismayed many of his former supporters, but the Democratic Party is offering nothing but another helping of George W. Bush/Barack Obama establishment war against the world. We Americans have had enough of that for the past nineteen years. Trump may indeed deserve to be removed based on his actions, but the argument that it is essential to do so because of Russia lurking is complete nonsense. Pretty scary that the apparent chief promoter of that point of view is someone who actually has power in the government, one Adam Schiff, head of the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee.

Chain Man , 10 hours ago link

If the USA doesn't have a bogey man to be afraid of, the USA might worry more and to insist on fixing the problems within the Nation.

So many of our politicians are guilty of allowing un constitutional on going act like the removal of Due Process of law for some people and the on going bailout of Global Markets with the US Dollar. The Patriot act and FISA Courts should have been gone.

J Frank Parnell , 11 hours ago link

I never saw the problem with Russians. They practice the same religion as I do and are mostly the same color...

Sid Finch , 10 hours ago link

Agreed. He seems as about as close as a leader can get to genuinely liking his country and people. It seems the ones here only give a **** about carbon, Central and South Americans, and cutting off my kids genitalia.

Archeofuturist , 11 hours ago link

Well let see.... Who has a historical beef with Russia and controls both parties. I wonder?

globalintelhub , 11 hours ago link

It is scary, but what else can Schiff say? They have no credible arguments against Trump, or for their own party. They are a bunch of lying scumbags that will kill, cheat, steal, mislead, carpet-bag and anything else unethical to achieve their sleazy goals. When Trump wins in a landslide in 2020, they will claim it's because the Russians 'fixed' the election, and the Democratic party will break into pieces arguing about how they failed and what they did wrong. See www.splittingpennies.com

Alice-the-dog , 11 hours ago link

Since the US Sociopaths In Charge have totally Effed up the nation, and a significant portion of the world, they have to have SOMEBODY to blame. They certainly won't take the blame they deserve themselves.

John Hansen , 10 hours ago link

Don't leave out Israel, they aren't the American peoples friend either.

motiveunclear , 13 hours ago link

There used to be this thing we don't hear used much anymore called "diplomacy" and another useful thing in international politics called "tact".

https://skulltripper.com/2020/01/18/statesmanship/

44magnum , 12 hours ago link

What the ZOG wants the ZOG gets

toady , 13 hours ago link

McCarthyism II. Will the US be able put down a second "red scare"? Tune in next week. Same bat time, same bat channel.

sillycat , 13 hours ago link

lots of words and no answer to the title question. Giraldi does not see the deep ideological problems: Russia is not trying to diversify into a PoC country, they do not worship gays and may be the only white people nation with sustaining birth rate. The US will go to war there is no way to let this continue.

hispanicLoser , 13 hours ago link

The level of Russia hate coming out of the dems is so much greater than that coming out of repubs that one can safely ignore this retarded article.

Jeffersonian Liberal , 12 hours ago link

True. But their hatred is pretended hatred. It is a form of projection.

Dan The Man , 13 hours ago link

Its our own fault.

The smart ppl are doing a lousy job of informing the dumb ones about accepted policy like "America Always Needs An Enemy". Smart ones understand that, and see the bigger game because of it.

We fight the dumb ones who believe Russian boogeyman crap, instead of helping them understand they are being misled on who the enemy really is. The dumb ones then fight back and further entrench that brainwashing.

vasilievich , 13 hours ago link

I'm trying to imagine the Russian Army marching down Pennsylvania Avenue. But first, across the Atlantic Ocean.

ombon , 13 hours ago link

It is appropriate to recall the words of Joseph Goebbels: "Give me the media, and I will make a herd of pigs from any nation," and pigs are easy to drive to the slaughterhouse. Only Russia can really resist such a situation in the world. Therefore, she is the enemy.

Dan The Man , 13 hours ago link

Coming Soon... Why the Gullibles Will Believe Anything

south40_dreams , 14 hours ago link

....and the many thieves are gulping at the money spigot.....time to shut that sucker OFF

whatisthat , 14 hours ago link

I would observe there is evidence the corrupt establishment has done more damage to the US than any other country could ever imagine...

Chain Man , 15 hours ago link

The Centrist Democrats and Republicans want to paint the old school God and Country Conservatives Equality and Justice for the USA (Nationalist) into being Russian. How dare we expect enforcement of the Laws on the books against them. They want to be deemed Royalty with all the Elitist Rights.

The old rally call about Russia was always Communist Russia but, they don't do that anymore? Why ? They love their Communist China wage slaves. The Centrist love Communist labor in the name of profits . Human rights be damned it's all about the Global Elitist to them now.

[Feb 21, 2020] Why Both Republicans And Democrats Want Russia To Become The Enemy Of Choice by Philip Giraldi

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Schiff insisted that Trump must be removed now to "assure the integrity" of the 2020 election. He elaborated somewhat ambiguously that "The president's misconduct cannot be decided at the ballot box, for we cannot be assured that the vote will be fairly won." Schiff also unleashed one of the most time honored but completely lame excuses for going to war, claiming that military assistance to Ukraine that had been delayed by Trump was essential for U.S. national security. He said "As one witness put it during our impeachment inquiry, the United States aids Ukraine and her people so that we can fight Russia over there, and we don't have to fight Russia here." ..."
"... Schiff, a lawyer who has never had to put his life on the line for anything and whose son sports a MOSSAD t-shirt, is one of those sunshine soldiers who finds it quite acceptable if someone else does the dying. Journalist Max Blumenthal observed that "Liberals used to mock Bush supporters when they used this jingoistic line during the war on Iraq. Now they deploy it to justify an imperialist proxy war against a nuclear power." Aaron Mate at The Nation added that "For all the talk about Russia undermining faith in U.S. elections, how about Russiagaters like Schiff fear-mongering w/ hysterics like this? Let's assume Ukraine did what Trump wanted: announce a probe of Burisma. Would that delegitimize a 2020 U.S. election? This is a joke." ..."
"... On Wednesday, Schiff maintained that "Russia is not a threat to Eastern Europe alone. Ukraine has become the de facto proving ground for just the types of hybrid warfare that the twenty-first century will become defined by: cyberattacks, disinformation campaigns, efforts to undermine the legitimacy of state institutions, whether that is voting systems or financial markets. The Kremlin showed boldly in 2016 that with the malign skills it honed in Ukraine, they would not stay in Ukraine. Instead, Russia employed them here to attack our institutions, and they will do so again." Not surprisingly, if one substitutes the "United States" for "Russia" and "Kremlin" and changes "Ukraine" to Iran or Venezuela, the Schiff comment actually becomes much more credible. ..."
"... Donald Trump's erratic rule has certainly dismayed many of his former supporters, but the Democratic Party is offering nothing but another helping of George W. Bush/Barack Obama establishment war against the world. We Americans have had enough of that for the past nineteen years. Trump may indeed deserve to be removed based on his actions, but the argument that it is essential to do so because of Russia lurking is complete nonsense. Pretty scary that the apparent chief promoter of that point of view is someone who actually has power in the government, one Adam Schiff, head of the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee. ..."
"... It is scary, but what else can Schiff say? They have no credible arguments against Trump, or for their own party. They are a bunch of lying scumbags that will kill, cheat, steal, mislead, carpet-bag and anything else unethical to achieve their sleazy goals. ..."
"... Since the US Sociopaths In Charge have totally Effed up the nation, and a significant portion of the world, they have to have SOMEBODY to blame. They certainly won't take the blame they deserve themselves. ..."
"... What the ZOG wants the ZOG gets ..."
"... It is appropriate to recall the words of Joseph Goebbels: "Give me the media, and I will make a herd of pigs from any nation," and pigs are easy to drive to the slaughterhouse. Only Russia can really resist such a situation in the world. Therefore, she is the enemy. ..."
"... The Centrist Democrats and Republicans want to paint the old school God and Country Conservatives Equality and Justice for the USA (Nationalist) into being Russian ..."
Feb 07, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com
Authored by Philip Giraldi via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

One of the more interesting aspects of the nauseating impeachment trial in the Senate was the repeated vilification of Russia and its President Vladimir Putin.

To hate Russia has become dogma on both sides of the political aisle, in part because no politician has really wanted to confront the lesson of the 2016 election, which was that most Americans think that the federal government is basically incompetent and staffed by career politicians like Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell who should return back home and get real jobs .

Worse still, it is useless, and much like the one trick pony the only thing it can do is steal money from the taxpayers and waste it on various types of self-gratification that only politicians can appreciate. That means that the United States is engaged is fighting multiple wars against make-believe enemies while the country's infrastructure rots and a host of officially certified grievance groups control the public space.

It sure doesn't look like Kansas anymore.

The fact that opinion polls in Europe suggest that many Europeans would rather have Vladimir Putin than their own hopelessly corrupt leaders is suggestive. One can buy a whole range of favorable t-shirts featuring Vladimir Putin on Ebay , also suggesting that most Americans find the official Russophobia narrative both mysterious and faintly amusing. They may not really be into the expressed desire of the huddled masses in D.C. to go to war to bring true U.S. style democracy to the un-enlightened.

One also must wonder if the Democrats are reading the tea leaves correctly. If they think that a slogan like "Honest Joe Biden will keep us safe from Moscow" will be a winner in 2020 they might again be missing the bigger picture. Since the focus on Trump's decidedly erratic behavior will inevitably die down after the impeachment trial is completed, the Democrats will have to come up with something compelling if they really want to win the presidency and it sure won't be the largely fictionalized Russian threat.

Nevertheless, someone should tell Congressman Adam Schiff, who chairs the House Intelligence Committee, to shut up as he is becoming an international embarrassment. His "closing arguments" speeches last week were respectively two-and-a-half hours and ninety minutes long and were inevitably praised by the mainstream media as "magisterial," "powerful," and "impressive." The Washington Post 's resident Zionist extremist Jennifer Rubin labeled it "a grand slam" while legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin called it "dazzling." Gail Collins of the New York Times dubbed it "a great job" and added that Schiff is now "a rock star." Daily Beast enthused that the remarks "will go down in history " and progressive activist Ryan Knight called it "a closing statement for the ages." Hollywood was also on board with actress Debra Messing tweeting "I am in tears. Thank you Chairman Schiff for fighting for our country."

Actually, a better adjective would have been "scary" and not merely due to its elaboration of the alleged high crimes and misdemeanors committed by President Trump, much of which was undeniably true even if not necessarily impeachable. It was scary because it was a warmongers speech, full of allusions to Russia, to Moscow's "interference" in 2016, and to the ridiculous proposition that if Trump were to be defeated in 2020 he might not concede and Russia could even intervene militarily in the United States in support of its puppet.

Schiff insisted that Trump must be removed now to "assure the integrity" of the 2020 election. He elaborated somewhat ambiguously that "The president's misconduct cannot be decided at the ballot box, for we cannot be assured that the vote will be fairly won." Schiff also unleashed one of the most time honored but completely lame excuses for going to war, claiming that military assistance to Ukraine that had been delayed by Trump was essential for U.S. national security. He said "As one witness put it during our impeachment inquiry, the United States aids Ukraine and her people so that we can fight Russia over there, and we don't have to fight Russia here."

Schiff, a lawyer who has never had to put his life on the line for anything and whose son sports a MOSSAD t-shirt, is one of those sunshine soldiers who finds it quite acceptable if someone else does the dying. Journalist Max Blumenthal observed that "Liberals used to mock Bush supporters when they used this jingoistic line during the war on Iraq. Now they deploy it to justify an imperialist proxy war against a nuclear power." Aaron Mate at The Nation added that "For all the talk about Russia undermining faith in U.S. elections, how about Russiagaters like Schiff fear-mongering w/ hysterics like this? Let's assume Ukraine did what Trump wanted: announce a probe of Burisma. Would that delegitimize a 2020 U.S. election? This is a joke."

Over at Antiwar Daniel Lazare explains how the Wednesday speech was "a fear-mongering, sword-rattling harangue that will not only raise tensions with Russia for no good reason, but sends a chilling message to [Democratic Party] dissidents at home that if they deviate from Russiagate orthodoxy by one iota, they'll be driven from the fold."

The orthodoxy that Lazare was writing about includes the established Nancy Pelosi/Chuck Schumer narrative that Russia invaded "poor innocent Ukraine" in 2014, that it interfered in the 2016 election to defeat Hillary Clinton, and that it is currently trying to smear Joe Biden. One might add to that the growing consensus that Russia can and will interfere again in 2020 to help Trump. Absent from the narrative is the part how the U.S. intervened in Ukraine first to remove its government and the fact that there is something very unsavory about Joe Biden's son taking a high-paying sinecure board position from a notably corrupt Ukrainian oligarch while his father was Vice President and allegedly directing U.S. assistance to a Ukrainian anti-corruption effort.

On Wednesday, Schiff maintained that "Russia is not a threat to Eastern Europe alone. Ukraine has become the de facto proving ground for just the types of hybrid warfare that the twenty-first century will become defined by: cyberattacks, disinformation campaigns, efforts to undermine the legitimacy of state institutions, whether that is voting systems or financial markets. The Kremlin showed boldly in 2016 that with the malign skills it honed in Ukraine, they would not stay in Ukraine. Instead, Russia employed them here to attack our institutions, and they will do so again." Not surprisingly, if one substitutes the "United States" for "Russia" and "Kremlin" and changes "Ukraine" to Iran or Venezuela, the Schiff comment actually becomes much more credible.

The compulsion on the part of the Democrats to bring down Trump to avoid having to deal with their own failings has brought about a shift in their established foreign policy, placing the neocons and their friends back in charge. For Schiff, who has enthusiastically supported every failed American military effort since 9/11, today's Russia is the Soviet Union reborn, and don't you forget it pardner! Newsweek is meanwhile reporting that the U.S. military is reading the tea leaves and is gearing up to fight the Russians. Per Schiff, Trump must be stopped as he is part of a grand Russian conspiracy to overthrow everything the United States stands for. If the Kremlin is not stopped now, it's first major step, per Schiff, will be to "remake the map of Europe by dint of military force."

Donald Trump's erratic rule has certainly dismayed many of his former supporters, but the Democratic Party is offering nothing but another helping of George W. Bush/Barack Obama establishment war against the world. We Americans have had enough of that for the past nineteen years. Trump may indeed deserve to be removed based on his actions, but the argument that it is essential to do so because of Russia lurking is complete nonsense. Pretty scary that the apparent chief promoter of that point of view is someone who actually has power in the government, one Adam Schiff, head of the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee.

Chain Man , 10 hours ago link

If the USA doesn't have a bogey man to be afraid of, the USA might worry more and to insist on fixing the problems within the Nation.

So many of our politicians are guilty of allowing un constitutional on going act like the removal of Due Process of law for some people and the on going bailout of Global Markets with the US Dollar. The Patriot act and FISA Courts should have been gone.

J Frank Parnell , 11 hours ago link

I never saw the problem with Russians. They practice the same religion as I do and are mostly the same color...

Sid Finch , 10 hours ago link

Agreed. He seems as about as close as a leader can get to genuinely liking his country and people. It seems the ones here only give a **** about carbon, Central and South Americans, and cutting off my kids genitalia.

Archeofuturist , 11 hours ago link

Well let see.... Who has a historical beef with Russia and controls both parties. I wonder?

globalintelhub , 11 hours ago link

It is scary, but what else can Schiff say? They have no credible arguments against Trump, or for their own party. They are a bunch of lying scumbags that will kill, cheat, steal, mislead, carpet-bag and anything else unethical to achieve their sleazy goals. When Trump wins in a landslide in 2020, they will claim it's because the Russians 'fixed' the election, and the Democratic party will break into pieces arguing about how they failed and what they did wrong. See www.splittingpennies.com

Alice-the-dog , 11 hours ago link

Since the US Sociopaths In Charge have totally Effed up the nation, and a significant portion of the world, they have to have SOMEBODY to blame. They certainly won't take the blame they deserve themselves.

John Hansen , 10 hours ago link

Don't leave out Israel, they aren't the American peoples friend either.

motiveunclear , 13 hours ago link

There used to be this thing we don't hear used much anymore called "diplomacy" and another useful thing in international politics called "tact".

https://skulltripper.com/2020/01/18/statesmanship/

44magnum , 12 hours ago link

What the ZOG wants the ZOG gets

toady , 13 hours ago link

McCarthyism II. Will the US be able put down a second "red scare"? Tune in next week. Same bat time, same bat channel.

sillycat , 13 hours ago link

lots of words and no answer to the title question. Giraldi does not see the deep ideological problems: Russia is not trying to diversify into a PoC country, they do not worship gays and may be the only white people nation with sustaining birth rate. The US will go to war there is no way to let this continue.

hispanicLoser , 13 hours ago link

The level of Russia hate coming out of the dems is so much greater than that coming out of repubs that one can safely ignore this retarded article.

Jeffersonian Liberal , 12 hours ago link

True. But their hatred is pretended hatred. It is a form of projection.

Dan The Man , 13 hours ago link

Its our own fault.

The smart ppl are doing a lousy job of informing the dumb ones about accepted policy like "America Always Needs An Enemy". Smart ones understand that, and see the bigger game because of it.

We fight the dumb ones who believe Russian boogeyman crap, instead of helping them understand they are being misled on who the enemy really is. The dumb ones then fight back and further entrench that brainwashing.

vasilievich , 13 hours ago link

I'm trying to imagine the Russian Army marching down Pennsylvania Avenue. But first, across the Atlantic Ocean.

ombon , 13 hours ago link

It is appropriate to recall the words of Joseph Goebbels: "Give me the media, and I will make a herd of pigs from any nation," and pigs are easy to drive to the slaughterhouse. Only Russia can really resist such a situation in the world. Therefore, she is the enemy.

Dan The Man , 13 hours ago link

Coming Soon... Why the Gullibles Will Believe Anything

south40_dreams , 14 hours ago link

....and the many thieves are gulping at the money spigot.....time to shut that sucker OFF

whatisthat , 14 hours ago link

I would observe there is evidence the corrupt establishment has done more damage to the US than any other country could ever imagine...

Chain Man , 15 hours ago link

The Centrist Democrats and Republicans want to paint the old school God and Country Conservatives Equality and Justice for the USA (Nationalist) into being Russian. How dare we expect enforcement of the Laws on the books against them. They want to be deemed Royalty with all the Elitist Rights.

The old rally call about Russia was always Communist Russia but, they don't do that anymore? Why ? They love their Communist China wage slaves. The Centrist love Communist labor in the name of profits . Human rights be damned it's all about the Global Elitist to them now.

[Feb 21, 2020] Russia is playing the White Knight saving nations from marauding hordes

Feb 21, 2020 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

VietnamVet February 20, 2020 at 5:02 am

This article is war porn that assumes controlling oil fields is power. Instead Russia is playing the White Knight saving nations from marauding hordes. NBC News is twisting itself into tighter knots over Syria retaking Idlib Province back from the rebels. Turkey is threatening to send in its Army.

Strategically a full-blown war between a NATO member Turkey and Russian ally Syria would surpass the adverse effects of the quarantine of China or the rising temperatures that are sliding huge glaciers off of Western Antarctica into the sea (if the war engulfs Europe). The USA remains today in Syria and Iraq to control their oil fields since to Donald Trump it means more money for the USA. Actually, America's position there is militarily untenable. Both countries want the US gone. Iran's precision conventional ballistic missiles have mutually assured destruction with Israel and Saudi Arabia and can destroy US bases there at will.

When the Wuhan coronavirus engulfs the West, killing the elderly and the ill, for-profit healthcare will be overwhelmed. With nothing to sell, the global economy stops dead. There will be a glut of oil and natural gas. If they still have money, the trip to the grocery store will be Russian Roulette for senior citizens hoping there will be food to live for another month and not get viral pneumonia. The Doomsday Clock will be at midnight. American troops will have to find their way home. The forever wars and neoliberalism died with globalism.

The Rev Kev February 20, 2020 at 6:25 am

This article sounds like the Russians have just started to go into Iraq but they were there before the invasion nearly twenty years ago. In fact, in 2007 the US tried to get the Iraqis to void a contract the Iraqis had with Russia for the massive West Qurna oil field but that failed as the Iraqis would have been on the hook for all $13 billion in debt they owed Russia and the US would not help. But there is a military aspect to being rich in resources – there always is – and for Iraq it is particularly acute.

The Middle East is a rough neighbourhood and any country there has to be strong enough to defend itself or else be vulnerable. After the invasion the Coalition tried to organize Iraq so that they had no military but the Iraqi resistance put aid to that idea. But what would make the Iraqis think hard was when ISIS was marching on Baghdad. The US refused to use its air power to stop them and refused the Iraqis the use of pilots & paid-for aircraft training in Texas until the government would fulfill a laundry list of demands. It was the Russians – and the Iranians -that sent military equipment and specialists that helped stop ISIS before they got to Baghdad.

More recently the Iraqis had to buy Russian tanks to fight ISIS as the American tanks they had purchased were being deliberately not being serviced until the Iraqis fulfilled an American demand. There is a shift now to buy Russian equipment because of American fickleness with military gear. If that was not enough, the US has never gotten Iraqi electricity production back to pre-war levles in spite of billions spent. To add insult to injury, Trump demanded recently that Iraq hand over half of Iraqi oil production to repair the electrical grid with of course no guarantees that they would ever do the work.

So the long and the short is that there is no trust with the US and Russia is seen as a more reliable partner – as is China – and that there is no net benefit with going to the US. And you never know if a second-term Trump might not seize the Iraqi oil fields if he felt he could get away with it. It is a matter of being reliable-capable and it seems that the Russians are proving themselves that, hence their success here. Reliability is vital and cannot be replaced.

Polar Socialist February 20, 2020 at 7:36 am

Russia has been using soft power in Middle East ever since Peter the Great started fighting the Ottomans. Ever since the western powers (read: great Britain) always came to the rescue of turks if Russia had military success, so they seriously used the other alternative: economical, diplomatic and cultural influence in arab countries.
During the cold war they supported any regime in Middle East opposed to US-Israeli influence (or downright aggression).
After the cold war the Russian foreign minister, later prime minister Primakov, was an Arabist by training and personally knew almost every principal actor in Middle East. He is presumed to be the architect of the current Russian policy (which is a continuation of the old Soviet policy, which was based on the old Russian Empire policy).
It's a long, long history of using culture, diplomacy, economical help and weapon sales to have influence in an area important to the Russian security in their southern sphere.

Norb February 20, 2020 at 8:23 am

The US pats itself on the back and always talks about being the worlds "policeman". The American elite also want it both ways too- to bemoan having to do the police work in the first place, while also endlessly stressing that the world would go to pieces if her armed forces were not in foreign lands. Make up your mind please.

It would be very ironic if Russia proves to truly be an effective world "policeman"- as seems more evidently to be the case.

Propaganda aside, who brings more stability and peace.

In one respect, the war profiteers are the least of the problem. If Space Force and Nuclear rearmament are just more money boondoggles, while tragic, still survivable. If there is a faction that actually believes in this stuff as a viable national policy for defense- and offense- then when reality hits the road as the saying goes, the American psyche might not survive the impact, let alone the rest of the world.

Americans are shielded from the horrors of war to the nations detriment.

Kiers February 20, 2020 at 11:09 am

You guys are NOT thinking venally nor strategically enough. The US powers that be, love to put on this news story of foreign powers eating US cake. It's simply not credible imho. Post Iraq war in 2003, "W" bush played the same "eating our cake" story out about China taking Iraq oil for example. There are definitely other arrangements in place beneath the surface we are never told. Iraq is now US piggbank. It can trade that asset as it desires, sadly. Stories like this are just smoke.

John Wright February 20, 2020 at 11:29 am

I am struck by the size of the Russian investment ($20 billion) while the USA has "invested" nearly 6 trillion (300x) as much in war expenditure in the region.

And this has the Russians bettering the USA in Iraq with their relatively small strategic investment.

Maybe it is long overdue for the USA political class to reassess how it spends its citizens' resources in the Middle East.

But I'm not expecting that to occur.

[Feb 20, 2020] NSC Official Moved To Energy Department; White House Rejects Rumors She s Anonymous Anti-Trump Author

Feb 20, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

The White House has denied rumors that Deputy National Security Adviser Victoria Coates is the author of an anonymous New York Times op-ed and subsequent book criticizing the Trump administration, after Coates was abruptly moved to the Energy Department.

... ... ...

On Monday, Axios reported that Coates role at the NSC was on the chopping block amid rumors she was the author.

A statement from the NSC also said that Coates' move will help "ensure the continued close alignment of energy policy with national security objectives," and that her new position in the Energy Department will be as a senior adviser to the secretary. Her new assignment is effective Monday, they said.

"We are enthusiastic about adding Dr. Coates to DOE, where her expertise on the Middle East and national security policy will be helpful," said Energy Secretary Dan Brouillette. "She will play an important role on our team."

National Security Adviser Robert O'Brien said that he is "sad to lose an important member of our team," but said Coates "will be a big asset to Secretary Brouillette as he executes the president's energy security policy priorities." - Fox News

On Tuesday, President Trump said "I know who it is," after a reporter questioned him on anonymous, adding that he won't reveal the name publicly. 38 minutes ago What was your haftarah, ****?

1 hour ago

By their very natures, homosexuals, and heterosexual females are security risks.

I would sleep better at night knowing they weren't in positions related to the defense of my country.

By all means, y'all keep on spreading that social engineering ********. Eventually, it will kill a whole bunch of people.

1 hour ago

So she keeps her pay grade and pension? **** That.

1 hour ago

So who's spreading the rumor that Coates is Anonymous and why?

1 hour ago

In corporate America they just let you go. It is time that all bureaucrats get the same treatment that the taxpayers get. Pensions? What at those?

1 hour ago

and "let you go" is defined as a large Security guard walking you back to your office to get your coat and keys and then watches you drive off the property. not offers you a no show job in the backoffice with full pension and benefits.

2 hours ago

Not sure that having a queer in charge of intelligence is the right way to go. Plenty of fodder for blackmail. History shows that homos (or fags if that's the preferred name) have more skeletons in their collective closets than 99.9% of normal people. Most of them are perverts with dark and sordid pasts.

[Feb 19, 2020] Documents of the Ukrtainian Prosecutor General's office, which describes how in February 2014, the militants on the Maidan first opened fire on the "Berkut" were leaked

Google translation.
Notable quotes:
"... On Tuesday, the sixth anniversary of the beginning of the shootings on Kiev's Maidan was celebrated not only in Kiev, but also in Simferopol, the memory of three Crimeans – Dmitry Vlasenko, Vitaly Goncharov and Andrey Fedyukin, the first Berkut fighters who died on Maidan. We will remind that at the peak of the confrontation between law enforcement officers and maydanovites in February 2014, seven "berkutovites" were killed and about three hundred were injured. ..."
"... On the same day, which in Ukraine is still called by inertia the anniversary of the "revolution of dignity", deposed President Viktor Yanukovych addressed his compatriots, and in fact-to the current President Vladimir Zelensky. For some, the protests were a "revolution", but for the majority of the people they turned into a terrible tragedy, Yanukovych said and stressed: "After the 2019 presidential election, the people of Ukraine removed Poroshenko from power, giving President Zelensky and his team a chance to unite Ukraine." ..."
"... The document of the Prosecutor General's office of Ukraine in 2017 became public, which step by step indicates how and from what weapons the Maidan militants first began then – or rather 8 am on February 20 – to shoot the Berkut fighters who were standing in the cordon. A scan of the materials collected by the group of the head of the Department of special investigations of the Prosecutor General's office, Sergei Gorbatyuk, was published by the publication "Country". ..."
"... The document contains a full list of 34 Maidan activists involved in the shootings on February 20, 2014 in the center of Kiev. It turns out that in the fall of 2017, they were preparing to present a "suspicion". The 34 activists listed are members of the centurion Parasyuk group, mostly natives of the Lviv region. Vladimir Parasyuk, recall, took an active part in Euromaidan, later fought in the Donbass and made a political career in the Verkhovna Rada. On February 21, 2014, it was Parasyuk who appeared on the rostrum of the Maidan and announced the refusal of the protesters to fulfill the agreements concluded by the opposition leaders and Yanukovych. ..."
"... The person who actually started the "revolution", as it turns out, was a clear criminal. As noted in the publication "Country", just a month later, in March 2014, Yuskevich was caught in a robbery in his native Lviv region – and the weapon of the crime was the same gun "Chifsan". For this robbery, he received 7 years and is still in prison. So you don't have to look for it, if anything. It can be assumed that the main motive that prompted Yuskevich to participate in the shooting was the hatred of many criminals for the police. But it is significant that the published documents were put under the cloth. Bring Yuskevich suspected in the shooting of "Berkut" was blocked at the level of the head of the Department of special investigations of the Prosecutor General Sergei Gorbatyuk – it is possible that by order from above. ..."
"... "In the investigation of the death of the" heavenly hundred" held after the Maidan, falsification was carried out from the first days, "Yuriy Sivokonenko, a witness and participant in the tragic events, a veteran of the" Berkut " from Donetsk, said in a comment to the newspaper VZGLYAD. "Completely ignored the fact that the soldiers of the special forces "Berkut" and the internal troops of Ukraine did not have weapons until the morning of February 20, 2014, - said the source. – Four years later, we just started looking for trees on the battlefield, calculating bullet paths, although these trees have long been cut down. This in itself shows the scale of the fraud." ..."
"... The fact that firearms and ammunition could get to the Maidan, most likely, with the knowledge and consent of the future head of the presidential administration Sergei Pashinsky and the future speaker of the Verkhovna Rada Andrey Parubiy, still knew in 2014, said Sivokonenko. "This has been discussed many times. Pashinsky was even detained while trying to remove a sniper rifle from the Maidan in the trunk of his car in 2014. He, like Parubiy, has the most direct and direct relation to the blood on the Maidan," the veteran of "Berkut" stressed. ..."
"... Back in 2016, the Lviv radical Ivan Bubenchik admitted in a conversation with a journalist in the shooting of "berkutovtsev". But the nationalist protection provided him with immunity from prosecution. ..."
"... That is, fragments of the truth were already known before, but now they are for the first time formed into one clear picture. ..."
"... "These facts became known thanks to the active civil position of the former Minister of justice of Ukraine Elena Lukash and Deputy Andrey Portnov. They made this information public at their own risk, " sivokonenko recalled. However, now the official document of the Prosecutor General's office has been made public, and secondly, the full list of alleged shooters. ..."
"... "This is a key issue, in fact. Were the shooters acting on their own initiative or following a specific order? -the editor-in-chief of the online publication noted on Facebook "Страна.иа" Igor Guzhva. – How did they end up at the Conservatory?" Under what circumstances did Parasyuk appear on the podium the next day, February 21, and say that the Maidan will not fulfill the agreements reached with Yanukovych?". ..."
"... "I assume that the government team is trying to reduce pressure from radical groups, trying to reduce the level of exploitation of the Maidan theme, which is resorted to by supporters of Poroshenko and various right – wing groups," suggested political analyst Ruslan Bortnik. ..."
Feb 18, 2020 | vz.ru

Kiev released documents of the Prosecutor General's office, which describes how in February 2014, the militants on the Maidan first opened fire on the "Berkut". The names of the murderers and even the brands of weapons are named. Of course, such important documents are unlikely to get into the press without the sanction of the current leadership of the country. Now there is only one question: if the perpetrators of the Maidan massacre are named, will its customers be disclosed?

On Tuesday, the sixth anniversary of the beginning of the shootings on Kiev's Maidan was celebrated not only in Kiev, but also in Simferopol, the memory of three Crimeans – Dmitry Vlasenko, Vitaly Goncharov and Andrey Fedyukin, the first Berkut fighters who died on Maidan. We will remind that at the peak of the confrontation between law enforcement officers and maydanovites in February 2014, seven "berkutovites" were killed and about three hundred were injured.

On the same day, which in Ukraine is still called by inertia the anniversary of the "revolution of dignity", deposed President Viktor Yanukovych addressed his compatriots, and in fact-to the current President Vladimir Zelensky. For some, the protests were a "revolution", but for the majority of the people they turned into a terrible tragedy, Yanukovych said and stressed: "After the 2019 presidential election, the people of Ukraine removed Poroshenko from power, giving President Zelensky and his team a chance to unite Ukraine."

There was no response to Yanukovych's appeal, and it would be difficult to expect. But it seems that in recent time the myth of the Maidan, on which was based the Ukrainian government in the years 2014-2019, began to rapidly deteriorate. First of all, the legend of the "heavenly hundred"came down the other day. As already noted by the newspaper VZGLYAD, among the designated "heroes" were found: people killed in drunken fights, suicides, as well as those who were killed directly by the "maydanovites" themselves. On the sixth anniversary of the beginning of the massacre on Institutskaya street, the mythology of the "revolution of dignity" was dealt a second blow.

The document of the Prosecutor General's office of Ukraine in 2017 became public, which step by step indicates how and from what weapons the Maidan militants first began then – or rather 8 am on February 20 – to shoot the Berkut fighters who were standing in the cordon. A scan of the materials collected by the group of the head of the Department of special investigations of the Prosecutor General's office, Sergei Gorbatyuk, was published by the publication "Country".

The document contains a full list of 34 Maidan activists involved in the shootings on February 20, 2014 in the center of Kiev. It turns out that in the fall of 2017, they were preparing to present a "suspicion". The 34 activists listed are members of the centurion Parasyuk group, mostly natives of the Lviv region. Vladimir Parasyuk, recall, took an active part in Euromaidan, later fought in the Donbass and made a political career in the Verkhovna Rada. On February 21, 2014, it was Parasyuk who appeared on the rostrum of the Maidan and announced the refusal of the protesters to fulfill the agreements concluded by the opposition leaders and Yanukovych.

It is specified that some of the suspects from the list were questioned and even gave confessions. It is reported that the gang was organized in the first half of February 2014, stocked up on hunting rifles and arrived in the center of Kiev. Specific details of the beginning of the massacre are given: the first fire was opened by a certain Nazar Yuskevich – from the barricade he fired at least ten shots at a line of internal troops from a hunting rifle "Chifsan 555", after which the shooting was supported by his ten accomplices not named in the document.

VZGLYAD-The signal for the overthrow of Yanukovych was the shot of a criminal

The person who actually started the "revolution", as it turns out, was a clear criminal. As noted in the publication "Country", just a month later, in March 2014, Yuskevich was caught in a robbery in his native Lviv region – and the weapon of the crime was the same gun "Chifsan". For this robbery, he received 7 years and is still in prison. So you don't have to look for it, if anything. It can be assumed that the main motive that prompted Yuskevich to participate in the shooting was the hatred of many criminals for the police. But it is significant that the published documents were put under the cloth. Bring Yuskevich suspected in the shooting of "Berkut" was blocked at the level of the head of the Department of special investigations of the Prosecutor General Sergei Gorbatyuk – it is possible that by order from above.

As explained in the publication of "Country", the documents of the Gorbatyuk group as a whole were not given a go, since they contradicted the official version adopted under Poroshenko: berkutovtsy opened fire on the protesters, on the orders of Yanukovych, to break the spirit of the Maidan defenders.

"It is clear why under Poroshenko the information was put under the cloth – it would have been necessary to initiate appropriate criminal cases, prosecute a lot of Maidan activists, and even people's deputies," Ukrainian political analyst Ruslan Bortnik told the VZGLYAD newspaper.

"In the investigation of the death of the" heavenly hundred" held after the Maidan, falsification was carried out from the first days, "Yuriy Sivokonenko, a witness and participant in the tragic events, a veteran of the" Berkut " from Donetsk, said in a comment to the newspaper VZGLYAD. "Completely ignored the fact that the soldiers of the special forces "Berkut" and the internal troops of Ukraine did not have weapons until the morning of February 20, 2014, - said the source. – Four years later, we just started looking for trees on the battlefield, calculating bullet paths, although these trees have long been cut down. This in itself shows the scale of the fraud."

The fact that firearms and ammunition could get to the Maidan, most likely, with the knowledge and consent of the future head of the presidential administration Sergei Pashinsky and the future speaker of the Verkhovna Rada Andrey Parubiy, still knew in 2014, said Sivokonenko. "This has been discussed many times. Pashinsky was even detained while trying to remove a sniper rifle from the Maidan in the trunk of his car in 2014. He, like Parubiy, has the most direct and direct relation to the blood on the Maidan," the veteran of "Berkut" stressed.

Moreover, at least 6 out of 34 surnames from the list of Gorbatyuk were known earlier. Back in 2016, the Lviv radical Ivan Bubenchik admitted in a conversation with a journalist in the shooting of "berkutovtsev". But the nationalist protection provided him with immunity from prosecution. Another shooter – Dmitry Lipovoy, under interrogation by investigators (the video was published last year by media expert Anatoly Shari), he admitted to handing the tambourine And the father of the future Deputy Zinoviy Parasyuk a saiga carbine for shooting at security forces.

That is, fragments of the truth were already known before, but now they are for the first time formed into one clear picture.

"These facts became known thanks to the active civil position of the former Minister of justice of Ukraine Elena Lukash and Deputy Andrey Portnov. They made this information public at their own risk, " sivokonenko recalled. However, now the official document of the Prosecutor General's office has been made public, and secondly, the full list of alleged shooters.

However, the question remains open – whether Parasyuk's hundred (or Yuskevich's group-Bubenchik-Linden) acted independently or executed the order. In the draft suspicion that was presented to Yuskevich, investigators of the Prosecutor General's office say that the leaders of the Maidan did not want a war with Yanukovych, and the Parasyuk group simply "misunderstood" the goals of the protest.

"This is a key issue, in fact. Were the shooters acting on their own initiative or following a specific order? -the editor-in-chief of the online publication noted on Facebook "Страна.иа" Igor Guzhva. – How did they end up at the Conservatory?" Under what circumstances did Parasyuk appear on the podium the next day, February 21, and say that the Maidan will not fulfill the agreements reached with Yanukovych?".

But whatever it was, "sources in the Prosecutor General's office" did their job – and the sensational document has now become public. Experts suspect that the publication was sanctioned by President Vladimir Zelensky.

"I assume that the government team is trying to reduce pressure from radical groups, trying to reduce the level of exploitation of the Maidan theme, which is resorted to by supporters of Poroshenko and various right – wing groups," suggested political analyst Ruslan Bortnik.

"The accuracy of information may raise questions. But in any case, these materials should become an element of the investigation of the events on the Maidan, which continues today in Ukraine, " the expert added. And in any case, Bortnik believes, " Moscow's version is growing, according to which the Maidan was an illegal change of power, a coup that led to events in the Crimea and Donbas."

Supporters of Petro Poroshenko admitted on Tuesday that the publication of documents of the Prosecutor General's office was for them a" retaliatory blow " of the anti-Maidan.

"All these lists are an obvious provocation aimed at aggravating the conflict on the anniversary of the tragic events. The whole country saw who killed people on Maidan and who was killed. There are video frames!,- the head of the Kiev center for applied political research "Penta" Vladimir Fesenko told the newspaper VZGLYAD. – And these materials, authored by the then Deputy head of the administration of President Yanukovych – are an attempt by the anti-Maidan to strike back and present their version. This is an attempt to absolve yourself of responsibility for the evil, for the blood that was spilled then. Most Ukrainians remember who the killers were."

Fesenko hopes that the majority of Ukrainians will be able to keep on the side of the "revolution of Dignity". This will be easy to do. Most Ukrainian TV channels ignored the publication of documents of the Prosecutor General's office.

[Feb 19, 2020] Dr. Kelly may not have committed suicide.

Feb 19, 2020 | www.unz.com

JohnnyWalker123 , says: Show Comment February 18, 2020 at 7:58 am GMT

@Ron Unz

Damning new evidence that Dr Kelly DIDN'T commit suicide: The disturbing flaws in the official government story surrounding the death of Blair's chemical weapons expert https://t.co/izNiYtE8yI

-- JmRoyle #GTTO #WASPI (@MyArrse) February 13, 2020

Dr. Kelly may not have committed suicide.

[Feb 18, 2020] The West "Weeps" for What It Has Sowed by Stormy

Feb 16, 2020 | angrybearblog.com
At the Munich Security Conference the U.S. and its allies had no idea of how to handle China, a problem of their greed and stupidity. The West is divided, confused. What to do about Huawei? Really, what to do with China?

So when Mike Pompeo proclaimed "we are winning," the largely European audience was silent and worried in what sense "we" existed longer.
In the meantime, Europe, including the U.K, finds itself in a mincer between the U.S. and China

Unfortunately for us. China has followed the U.S. playbook and has outplayed the West, especially the U.S.

Walter Rostow of the Johnson administration, an avid anti-communist, wrote the playbook: How can an undeveloped nation take its place among the leaders of the world.

The answer : Industrialize as rapidly as possible. Do whatever it takes. China did just that.

In its five year plans, China acknowledged its debt to Rostow and started to industrialize. While I have described this process many years ago, I again outline it briefly here.

First : China entered the W.T.O. Bill Clinton and Congress were accommodating and instrumental:

Last fall, as all of you know, the United States signed an agreement to bring China into the W.T.O, on terms that will open its markets to American products and investments.
Bill Clinton speaking before Congress, March 9, 1998

Second : China offered dirt cheap labor, labor that had no effective right to bargain
Third : China did not require a company to obey any environmental regulations.
Fourth : China often offered a ten-year grace period without any taxation. If there were taxes they were less than those on its own indigenous firms.
Fifth : China manipulated its currency, making products cheaper to make but getting higher profits in the West.

The net resul t: Massive trade imbalance in favor of China. CEOs and their henchmen made enormous profits. Devastated American workers were told to go to school, to work harder, to make themselves invaluable to their companies. A cruel joke.

In droves, Western companies outsourced to China, emptying one factory after another. Anything that could be outsourced was outsourced. China, of course, was not the sole beneficiary of U.S. foolishness. India, Mexico, Vietnam wherever environmental standards were non-existent, wherever workers had no effective rights these were the third world countries the U.S. used. The health and safety of third world workers was of no concern. They were many–and they were expendable.

U.S. companies were so profitable that special arrangements were made to repatriate those profits back to the states: pennies on the dollar. Many billionaires should really be thanking China.

Americans were considered only consumers/ The more they consumed, the richer the rich became. Credit was made easy. George Bush's answer to 911 was: Go out and shop.+

Between The Financial Modernization Act of 1999 and Free trade insanity, the working class of American faced the crash of 2008.

China became the factory of the world, not through automation, but through dirt cheap labor. China poisoned its atmosphere and polluted its water. Face masks were everywhere. Nonetheless, China had become undeniable economic power, challenging the U.S.

At the same time, China educated great numbers of engineers, inventors, and scientists. Huwaii became the problem really, Huwaii is just an emblem of it.

The U.S. in its greed had became lazy. It poured money into weapons. The U.S. decided to build a space force. U.S. bullied countries with foolish sanctions if those countries did not make their billionaire class more profitable. Sanctions instead of competition became last gasp, the last grasp at profit. Flabby and greedy, the U.S.is no longer competitive. It has become just a bully, a threat to everyone.

Trump, of course, played both sides of the problem. He railed against the outsourcing, but has done little to correct it, giving instead massive tax breaks to the wealthy, gutting environmental regulations laying waste to everything he touches. Pelosi and Schumer pretend to care, but they have nothing to offer. Like Trump, they worry about China. Like Trump, they have no answer, except for more wars and more sanctions.

Hillary and Bill should take a bow. They began this debacle. Once things were made in the U.S.A. Go to any Walmart store and read the label: Made in China.

Pelosi and the free trade Democrats should take a bow as should all the Republicans. All of them should hold hands, give each other a quick hug and smile. They and their friends are rich.

To China belongs the future.

Terry , February 16, 2020 8:27 pm

Economics 101 says trade benefits all participants. The problem is not China but the United States. The oligarchs have sucked up all the benefits of trade and have bought the government to keep the good times going. Obama played along unlike FDR with the result that the oligarchs came out stronger than ever while everyone else had a second rate rather than a third rate health care system which Trump and the GOP are struggling to return to a third rate system. You can blame China or the "laziness " of Americans, but the real problem is the moneyed class who do not give a crap about the country or its citizens but only how to hang onto their privileged existence. I hate to even think it but I do not see this thing ending peacefully.

MARK LOHR , February 16, 2020 8:27 pm

And in turn funding China's considerable, unabated, and ongoing military expansion.
The screws are turning; the noose tightening.
That Western governments of all leanings have not counter-vailed for many decades now is a tale of enormous short-sightedness and cultural hubris.

davebarnes , February 16, 2020 9:24 pm

Didn't I read the same thing about Japan 20+ years ago?

MARK LOHR , February 16, 2020 10:50 pm

Yes. And to be sure, China faces all the limits inherent to a totalitarian system. However, unlike Japan, they have remilitarized and have demonstrated expansionist goals – artificial island military outposts, Belt and Road, etc.
Besides stealing/extorting etc our IP.

doug higgins , February 17, 2020 1:00 am

Mark,
Where do you get your information? China has one military base outside its borders. The U.S. has over 800. China does not pour its money into a military budge; the U.S. does.

Try the actual facts, for a change.

likbez , February 17, 2020 9:34 am

To China belongs the future.

I think it is too early to write down the USA. Historically the USA proved to be highly adaptable society (look at the New Deal). And I think that still there is a chance that it might be capable of jumping the sinking ship of neoliberalism. Although I have problems with Sanders's economic program, Sanders's victory might be instrumental for that change.

China adopted neoliberalism, much like the USA. It was just lucky to be on the receiving end of the outflow of the capital from the USA. It has a more competent leadership and avoided the fate of the USSR for which the attempt to the adoption of neoliberalism ( aka Perestroika ) proved to be fatal.

I suspect that the main problem for China is that Neoliberalism, as a social system, is incompatible with the rule of the Communist Party.

Fundamentally what China has now is a variation of the Soviet "New Economic Policy" (NEP) invented by Bolsheviks after the Civil War in Russia, and while providing a rapid economic development, China has all the problems that are known for this policy.

One is the endemic corruption of state officials due to the inability of capital to rise above a certain level of political influence and systematic attempts to buy this influence.

That necessitates periodic campaigns against corruption and purges/jailing of officials, which does not solve the fundamental problem which is systemic.

The other problem is that the Communist Party is such mode degrades into something like amorphous "holding company" staff for the country (managing state tier in the two tie economy -- state capitalism at the top; neoliberalism at the middle and the bottom)

Which necessitates the rule of a strong leader, the Father of the Nation, who is capable to conduct purges and hold the Party together by suppressing the appetite of local Party functionaries using brutal repressions. But the Party functionaries understand that they no longer conduct Marxist policies, and that undermines morale. That they are essentially renegades, and that creates a huge stimulus for "make money fast" behavior and illicit self-enrichment.

Which paradoxically necessitate the hostility with the USA as the mean to cement the Party and suppress the dissent. So not only the USA neocons and MIC are interested in China, China, China (and/or Russia, Russia, Russia) bogeyman.

That also creates for Chinese senior Communist Party leadership an incentive at some point to implement "Stalin-style solution" to the problems with New Economic Policy.

So it looks like Neo-McCarthyism in the USA has a long and prosperous future, as both sides are interested in its continuation 🙂

BTW another example of NEP as a policy was Tito Yugoslavia, which no longer exists.

Yet another example was Gorbachov's "Perestroika," which logically led to the dissolution of the USSR. With the subjective factor of the total incompetence of Gorbachov as a leader -- with some analogies as for this level of incompetence with Trump.

As well as general "simplification," and degeneration of Politburo similar to what we observe with the USA Congress now: the USSR in the 1980th has become a gerontocracy.

But the major factor was that the top KGB officials and several members of Politburo, including Gorbachov, became turncoats and changed sides attempting to change the system to neoliberalism, which was at the time on the assent; Russia always picks the worst possible time for the social change 😉

While neoliberalism is definitely in decline and its ideology is discredited, I still think there are fundamental problems in tis interaction with the Communist Party rule, that might eventually cause the social crisis for China.

But only time will tell

BTW Professor Stephen Cohen books contain very interesting information about NEP, Russia adoption of neoliberalism (and related dissolution of the USSR) and Russia social development in general

[Feb 16, 2020] An Illegal Assassination and the Lawless President by Daniel Larison

Highly recommended!
Feb 15, 2020 | www.theamericanconservative.com

The Trump administration's legal justification for the Soleimani assassination is as preposterous as you would expect it to be:

The White House delivered its legal justification for the January airstrike that killed Iranian General Qassem Soleimani, arguing that President Donald Trump was authorized to take the action under the Constitution and 2002 legislation authorizing the Iraq war.

The administration is no longer pretending that the assassination had anything to do with stopping an "imminent" attack. They no longer claim that this is why the assassination was ordered. That by itself is a remarkable admission of the illegality of the strike. If there was no "imminent" attack, the U.S. was taking aggressive action against a high-ranking official from another country. There is no plausible case to be made that this was an act of self-defense. Not only did the president lack the authority to do this on his own, but it would have been illegal under international law even if he had received approval from Congress before doing it. The administration spent weeks hiding behind the "imminent" attack lie because without it there was no justification for what they did.

Abandoning the "imminent" attack claim also means that the administration is trying to lower the bar for carrying out future strikes against Iran and its proxies. Ryan Goodman points this out in his analysis of the administration's statements:

The absence of an imminent threat is relevant not only to the legal and policy basis for the strike on Jan. 2. It is also relevant for potential future military action. The administration's position appears to boil down to an assertion that it can use military force against Iran without going to Congress even if responding to a threat from Iran that is not urgent or otherwise imminent.

In short, Trump and his officials want to make it easier for them to commit acts of war against both Iran and Iraqi militias.

Trying to distort the 2002 Iraq war AUMF to cover the assassination of an Iranian official just because he happened to be in Iraq at the time is ridiculous. Congress passed the disgraceful 2002 AUMF to give George W. Bush approval to attack and overthrow the Iraqi government. That did not and does not give later presidents carte blanche to use force in Iraq in perpetuity whenever they feel like it. The fact that they are resorting to such an obviously absurd argument shows that they know they don't have a leg to stand on. The Soleimani strike was illegal and unconstitutional, and there is not really any question about it. The administration's own justification condemns them.

The president's lawlessness in matters of war underscores why it is necessary for Congress to reassert its proper constitutional role. The Senate passed S.J.Res. 68, the Tim Kaine-sponsored war powers resolution, by a vote of 55-45 to make clear that the president does not have authorization for any further military action against Iran:

In a bipartisan rebuke of President Trump on Thursday, a Senate majority voted 55 to 45 to block the president from taking further military action against Iran -- unless first authorized by Congress. Eight GOP senators joined every Democrat to protest the president's decision to kill a top Iranian commander without complying with the War Powers Resolution of 1973.

The president has already said that he will veto the resolution, just as he vetoed the antiwar Yemen resolution last year. He is proving once again beyond a shadow of a doubt that he has no respect for the Constitution or Congress' role in matters of war.

Begemot • 16 hours ago

[Trump] is proving once again beyond a shadow of a doubt that he has no respect for the Constitution or Congress' role in matters of war.

Indeed he is. But when was the last President the US had who truly respected either one?

kouroi • 12 hours ago
What is the role of the Supreme Court in this and why nobody is taking that route, given that the US has signed the UN Charter, to get a judicial review and sanction of president's actions?
SueLynns Jem • an hour ago
I've been hearing this all my life. It ain't going to happen. The Constitution is broken, and can't be fixed

[Feb 16, 2020] Understanding the Ukraine Story by Joe Lauria

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Imagine if we substitute the U.S. for Russia and the country "invaded" was Canada, rather than Ukraine, the government overthrown was in Ottawa and not Kiev, and the provinces embroiled in a foreign-backed civil war have been Nova Scotia and New Brunswick rather the provinces of Eastern Ukraine? This report, written in 2016, may make it easier to understand what has been really going on in Ukraine. Clicking on the links is key to understanding the real story. ..."
"... Washington Post ..."
"... Versions of this article first appeared on ..."
"... Consortium News ..."
Feb 14, 2020 | consortiumnews.com

The impeachment hearings and trial of Donald Trump were filled with talk of Russian aggression against Ukraine and threats to the United States. But what would it be like if we switched the roles of Russia and the U.S.?

Imagine if we substitute the U.S. for Russia and the country "invaded" was Canada, rather than Ukraine, the government overthrown was in Ottawa and not Kiev, and the provinces embroiled in a foreign-backed civil war have been Nova Scotia and New Brunswick rather the provinces of Eastern Ukraine? This report, written in 2016, may make it easier to understand what has been really going on in Ukraine. Clicking on the links is key to understanding the real story.

By Joe Lauria
Special to Consortium News

T he United States has "invaded" Canada to support the breakaway Maritime provinces that are resisting a Moscow-engineered violent coup d'etat against the democratically elected government in Ottawa.

The U.S. move is to protect separatists in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia after Washington annexed Prince Edwards Island in a quickly arranged referendum .

The Islanders voted over 90 percent in favor of joining the United States following the Russian-backed coup. Moscow has condemned the referendum as illega l.

Hard-liners in the U.S. want Washington to annex all three Maritime provinces, whose fighters are defying the coup in Ottawa after Moscow installed an unelected prime minister.

Russian-backed Canadian federal troops have launched so-called "anti-terrorist" operations in the breakaway region to crush the rebellion, shelling residential areas and killing hundreds of civilians.

The violent coup.

The Canadian army are joined by Russian-supported neofascist battalions that played a crucial role in the overthrow of the Canadian government. In Halifax, the extremists have burned alive at least 40 pro-U.S. civilians who had taken refugee in a trade union building.

Proof that Russia was behind the overthrow of the elected Canadian prime minister is contained in a leaked conversation between Georgiy Yevgenevich Borisenko, foreign ministry chief of Moscow's North America department, and Alexander Darchiev, the Russian ambassador to Canada.

According to a transcript of the leaked conversation, Borisenko discussed who the new Canadian leaders should be six weeks before the coup took place.

Russia moved to launch the coup when Canada decided to take a loan package from the IMF that had fewer strings attached than a loan from Russia.

Russia's Beijing ally was reluctant to back the coup. But this seemed of little concern to Borisenko who is heard on the tape saying, "Fuck China."

Minister handing out cookies in the square.

Weeks before the coup Borisenko was filmed visiting protestors who had camped out in Parliament Square in Ottawa demanding the ouster of the prime minister. Borisenko is seen giving out cakes to the demonstrators.

The foreign ministers of Russian-allied Belarus and Cuba also marched with the protestors through the streets of Ottawa against the government. Russian media has portrayed the unconstitutional change of government an act of "democracy." Russian senators have met in public with extreme right-wing Canadian coup leaders, praising their rebellion.

Borisenko said in a speech that Russia had spent $5 billion over the past decade to "bring democracy" to Canada.

Senator meeting far-right coup leaders.

The money was spent on training "civil society." The use of non-governmental organizations to overthrow foreign governments that stand in the way of Russia's economic and geo-strategic interests is well documented, especially in a 1991 Washington Post column, "Innocence Abroad: The New World of Spyless Coups ."

The United States has thus moved to ban Russian NGOs from operating in the country.

The coup took place as protestors violently clashed with police, breaking through barricades and killing a number of officers. Snipers fired on the police and the crowd from a nearby building in Parliament Square in which the Russian embassy had set up offices just a few floors above, according to Samantha Power, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N.

Son Gets Job After Coup

Russian lawmakers compared President Barack Obama to Adolph Hitler for allegedly sending U.S. troops into the breakaway provinces and for annexing Prince Edward Island in an act of "American aggression." The Maritimes have had long ties to the U.S. dating back to the American Revolution.

Russia says it has intelligence proving that U.S. tanks have crossed the Maine border into New Brunswick, but have failed to make the evidence public. They have revealed no satellite imagery. Russian news media only reports American-backed rebels fighting in the Maritimes, not American troops.

Washington denies it has invaded but says some American volunteers have entered the Canadian province to join the fight.

Russia's puppet prime minister now in charge in Ottawa has only offered as proof six American passports of U.S. soldiers found in New Brunswick.

Son gets job on energy company board after his father's government backs violent coup.

The Maritime Canadian rebels have secured anti-aircraft weapons enabling them to shoot down a number of Royal Canadian Air Force transport planes.

A Malaysian airlines passenger jet was also shot down over Nova Scotia killing all on board. Russia has accused President Obama of being behind the incident, charging that the U.S. provided the anti-aircraft weapon.

Moscow has refused to release any intelligence to support its claim, other than statements by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.

Canada's economy is near collapse and is dependent on infusions of Russian aid. This comes despite a former Russian foreign ministry official being installed as Canada's finance minister, only receiving Canadian citizenship on her first day on the job.

Despite installing a Russian to run Canada's economy, President Putin told the U.N. General Assembly that Russia had "few economic interests" in the country. But Russian agribusiness companies have already taken stakes in Albertan wheat fields. And Ilya Medvedev, son of Russian Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev, as well as a Lavrov family friend joined the board of Canada's largest oil company just weeks after the coup.

Russia's ultimate aim, beginning with the imposition of sanctions on the U.S., appears to be a color revolution in Washington to overthrow Obama and install a Russian-friendly American president.

This is clear from numerous statements by Russian officials and academics. A former Russian national security advisor whom Putin consults on foreign policy said the United States should be broken into three countries.

He has also written that Canada is the stepping stone to the United States and that if the U.S. loses Canada it will fail to control North America.

Versions of this article first appeared on The Duran and Consortium News in 2016.

Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former correspondent for T he Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe , Sunday Times of London and numerous other newspapers. He can be reached at [email protected] and followed on Twitter @unjoe .

mary floyd , February 15, 2020 at 13:20

The most important takeaway in this article for me was that the US should be broken into three separate entities!
That would work well for most Americans. All in all, this is a great piece, Mr. Lauria!

Dao Gen , February 15, 2020 at 02:28

Joe, you are The Truth. The only thing you left out, no doubt for reasons of space and time, was the immortal statement made by a leading member of the Russian Duma, who said during a stirring and well-received speech that, “Canada is our crucial first line of defense against the US. If Canada weren’t there to stop the Americans, we’d have to fight them right here on our own doorstep.”

Herman , February 14, 2020 at 18:52

A very creative way of making the point. Still do not understand the depth of what often appears to be heart felt hate for Russia by very powerful and smart people. Remember reading a comment by Phil Girardi early in the Trump tour when he remarked at the depth of dislike of Russia within the spook community. He wrote he was surprised and had, I think, been part of that community.

Eddie S , February 15, 2020 at 14:51

RE: “…depth of dislike of Russia within the spook community”.
While I have no ‘special knowledge’ of the so-called ‘intelligence community’, there’s a few reasons for this that come to-mind:
— Job preservation. The most obvious. The US wouldn’t need ~80% of those spooks if there
weren’t big scary Russians/Chinese/Iranians/N.Koreans constantly plotting against the
peaceful, benevolent US.

— Spooks believe in what is mainly a distractionary ploy by US oligarchs/plutocrats. These
wealthy interests don’t want to lose some of their wealth to social reforms, so they constantly
financially support scare-mongering, which some spooks unquestioningly accept.

— The profession tends to attract some of the more paranoid elements in our society, so
they’re inclined that way by nature/personality.

robert e williamson jr , February 14, 2020 at 17:51

Well one thing for sure we would not be seeing a female anchor on CNN bemoaning the fact the because of the coronavirus many popular kids toys might not be available here in the U.S. for the up coming holidays (?).

Yes it did happen, hell I couldn’t make that up.

DARYL , February 14, 2020 at 15:45

…or better yet, substitute Central America for Ukraine, and Panama(canal) for Crimea, then you have the makings of an even more salient parallel.

Realist , February 14, 2020 at 15:42

The difference is that under your scenario the world would be a smoking heap of radioactive ashes already as the exceptional nation, unlike the ever cautious Russians, would have immediately made bombastic threats and then launched military attacks to protect its “security interests.” (Warring to “protect” security interests has replaced invasion and occupation to save souls.) Things would have escalated from there to its predestined thermonuclear climax, as they will in the real world if Uncle Sam doesn’t get a grip on his uncontrolled aggression, demanding whatever he wants whenever he wants it at the point of a gun. The world seems to be circling the drain whether or not Washington is allowed to micromanage the affairs of Russia, China, Iran and every last duchy, principality and people’s republic in addition to its own monumental mess it calls domestic affairs. We’ve only got two political parties in this madhouse and they are both equally bent on destroying civilisation if they can’t rule it all, which seems to be the only point they agree on. Each party thinks it preferable to allow an obscenely rich oligarch (what else should we call Trump or Bloomberg?) from the other side to rule rather than a “communist” like Bernie Sanders or a “naive peacenik” like Tulsi Gabbard to be elected president. If the space aliens land tomorrow and start recruiting colonists to populate newly terraformed planets in other solar systems, sign me up. Yeah, it’s become that absurd down here.

JOHN CHUCKMAN , February 14, 2020 at 15:22

Simply imperial rot and corruption of power on all sides.

Neither Democrats nor Republicans have an exclusive on those qualities.

Mark Thomason , February 14, 2020 at 12:37

This is a useful approach. It needs added to it the language and culture element: as if the part that wants out of the Moscow coup shares our own language and culture, while the rest of Canada does not, and the rest of Canada had gone on a spree to suppress that language and culture. It is hard to find a parallel in Canada to those facts, but it is what happened in Ukraine.

It is important to understanding to put oneself in the shoes of the other guys. It was once called walking a mile in the other guy’s moccasins, and given a Native wisdom attribution.

David G Horsman , February 14, 2020 at 12:01

I do this exercise mentally fairly often. This is the first time I saw it done in print. I would like to do an automated process.

[Feb 16, 2020] The highwater mark in SEAsia was the helicopters evacuating the last invaders from Saigon. The highwater mark in the ME is going to be similar scenes in Iraq.

Feb 16, 2020 | off-guardian.org

Dungroanin ,

It seems that history is about to repeat. The highwater mark in SEAsia was the helicopters evacuating the last invaders from Saigon. The highwater mark in the ME is going to be similar scenes in Iraq.

A final warning has been issued to US troops there – 40 days after Soleimanis assassination – the Resistance is ready to move, an irresistible force about to meet a not so immovable object.

Along with Idlib and Allepo its been amazing start to 2020. And its not even spring!

[Feb 16, 2020] An Illegal Assassination and the Lawless President by Daniel Larison

Highly recommended!
Feb 15, 2020 | www.theamericanconservative.com

The Trump administration's legal justification for the Soleimani assassination is as preposterous as you would expect it to be:

The White House delivered its legal justification for the January airstrike that killed Iranian General Qassem Soleimani, arguing that President Donald Trump was authorized to take the action under the Constitution and 2002 legislation authorizing the Iraq war.

The administration is no longer pretending that the assassination had anything to do with stopping an "imminent" attack. They no longer claim that this is why the assassination was ordered. That by itself is a remarkable admission of the illegality of the strike. If there was no "imminent" attack, the U.S. was taking aggressive action against a high-ranking official from another country. There is no plausible case to be made that this was an act of self-defense. Not only did the president lack the authority to do this on his own, but it would have been illegal under international law even if he had received approval from Congress before doing it. The administration spent weeks hiding behind the "imminent" attack lie because without it there was no justification for what they did.

Abandoning the "imminent" attack claim also means that the administration is trying to lower the bar for carrying out future strikes against Iran and its proxies. Ryan Goodman points this out in his analysis of the administration's statements:

The absence of an imminent threat is relevant not only to the legal and policy basis for the strike on Jan. 2. It is also relevant for potential future military action. The administration's position appears to boil down to an assertion that it can use military force against Iran without going to Congress even if responding to a threat from Iran that is not urgent or otherwise imminent.

In short, Trump and his officials want to make it easier for them to commit acts of war against both Iran and Iraqi militias.

Trying to distort the 2002 Iraq war AUMF to cover the assassination of an Iranian official just because he happened to be in Iraq at the time is ridiculous. Congress passed the disgraceful 2002 AUMF to give George W. Bush approval to attack and overthrow the Iraqi government. That did not and does not give later presidents carte blanche to use force in Iraq in perpetuity whenever they feel like it. The fact that they are resorting to such an obviously absurd argument shows that they know they don't have a leg to stand on. The Soleimani strike was illegal and unconstitutional, and there is not really any question about it. The administration's own justification condemns them.

The president's lawlessness in matters of war underscores why it is necessary for Congress to reassert its proper constitutional role. The Senate passed S.J.Res. 68, the Tim Kaine-sponsored war powers resolution, by a vote of 55-45 to make clear that the president does not have authorization for any further military action against Iran:

In a bipartisan rebuke of President Trump on Thursday, a Senate majority voted 55 to 45 to block the president from taking further military action against Iran -- unless first authorized by Congress. Eight GOP senators joined every Democrat to protest the president's decision to kill a top Iranian commander without complying with the War Powers Resolution of 1973.

The president has already said that he will veto the resolution, just as he vetoed the antiwar Yemen resolution last year. He is proving once again beyond a shadow of a doubt that he has no respect for the Constitution or Congress' role in matters of war.

Begemot • 16 hours ago

[Trump] is proving once again beyond a shadow of a doubt that he has no respect for the Constitution or Congress' role in matters of war.

Indeed he is. But when was the last President the US had who truly respected either one?

kouroi • 12 hours ago
What is the role of the Supreme Court in this and why nobody is taking that route, given that the US has signed the UN Charter, to get a judicial review and sanction of president's actions?
SueLynns Jem • an hour ago
I've been hearing this all my life. It ain't going to happen. The Constitution is broken, and can't be fixed

[Feb 16, 2020] Looking at various indices like median household income and average wage, it seems as if living standards in Russia are substantially below western European levels and even slightly below central Europe

Feb 16, 2020 | www.quora.com

Likbez,

Looking at various indices like median household income and average wage, it seems as if living standards in Russia are substantially below western European levels and even slightly below central Europe. (Estonia and Poland are consistently slightly higher, Hungary often a bit lower.) Compared to China, going by the same sources and others, Russian wages are roughly twice as high as China's

That creates separatist movements within the country, including Islamist movements in Muslim-dominated regions.

So their posture is strictly defensive, and probably is not much more than a mild defensive reaction to "Full-spectrum Dominance" doctrine and the aggressive foreign policy conducted by the USA neocons (which totally dominate NSC and the State Department, as we saw from Ukrainegate testimonies)

The USA coup d'état in Ukraine actually have a blowback for the USA -- it neutralized influence and political status of Russia neoliberal fifth column (neoliberal compradors), and if not Putin (who is paradoxically a pro-Western neoliberal; although of "national neoliberalism" flavor similar to Trumpism ) some of them probably would be now hanging from the lamp posts. They are really hated by population after hardships, comparable with WWII hardships, imposed on ordinary Russian during Western-enforced neoliberalization under marionette Yeltsin government and attempt to grab Russian resources for pennies on a dollar. "Marshall plan" for Russia instead of economic rape would be a much better policy.

I think Obama-Nuland plot to turn Ukraine into the USA vassal state was yet another very dangerous move, which hurts the USA national security and greatly increased chances of military confrontation with Russia (aka mutual annihilation)

It was worse then a crime, it was a blunder. And now the USA needs to support this vassal with money we do not have.

The role of NSC in militarizing the USA foreign policy is such that it neutralizes any impulses of any US administration (if we assume they exist) to improve relations with Russia.

Neoliberal Dems now is a second war party which bet on neo-McCarthyism to weaken Trump. They went into the complete status of psychosis in this area. I view it as a psychotic reaction to the first signs of the collapse of the USA-centered global neoliberal empire (which will happen anyway independently of Russian moves)

That's actually a very dangerous situation indeed, and I am really afraid that the person who will replace Putin will not have Putin steel nerves, diplomatic talent, and the affinity with the West. Then what ? another Sarajevo and another war?

With warmongering "raptured" crazies like Mike, "we killed up to 200 Russians" Pompeo, the situation can really become explosive like before WWI. Again, after Putin leaves the political scene, the Sarajevo incident is easy to stage, especially with such incompetent marionette of the military-industrial complex like Trump at the helm.

I believe antagonizing Russia was a reckless, very damaging to the USA interest move, the move initiated by Clinton administration and supported by all subsequent administration as weakening and possibly dismembering Russia is one of the key aspect of Full Spectrum Dominance doctrine. . And we will pay a huge price for this policy.

See also Professor Stephen Cohen books on the subject.

Barkley Rosser February 16, 2020 9:19 pm

JimH,

Why do you pose this as antagonizing either Russsia or Iran? They are somewhat allied, so in fact antagonizing Iran as we are doing also antagonizes Russia.

Likbez,

The relative economic position of Russia in terms of median income is no different today than it was 30 years ago before Yeltsin, except for the rise of China. It was behind the European nations to its west, both those that were under its domination and those that were not, and it still is. So no big deal.

And somehow you have this fantasy that if it were not for Obama-Nuland, Ukrainians would just loooove to be under Russian domination. f you think this, you ser both foolish and very ignorant.

likbez February 16, 2020 10:30 pm

And somehow you have this fantasy that if it were not for Obama-Nuland, Ukrainians would just loooove to be under Russian domination. f you think this, you ser both foolish and very ignorant.

I might well be foolish and ignorant (I am far from being the specialist in the region), but I suspect Ukrainians do prefer the exchange rate ~8.5 hrivnas to a dollar (before the coup) to the current 25 hrivnas to a dollar.

Especially taking into account stagnant salaries and actual parity of prices in dollars for many types of food (especially meat), industrial products, and services between the USA and Ukraine.

I recently talked with one Ukrainian woman who told me that the "bribe" (unofficial payments due to low salaries for doctors and nurses in state clinics) for the child delivery was $1000 in Kiev in 2014 and she gave birth exactly at the time when hrivna jumped from 8.5 to over 20 per dollar. That was a tragedy for her and her family.

And please remember that the average SS pension in Ukraine is around 1500 hrivna a month (~ $60). So to me, it is completely unclear how pensioners can survive at all while the government is buying super expensive American weapons "to defend the country from Russian aggression."

I would strongly recommend you to read the recent Consortium news story https://consortiumnews.com/2020/02/14/understanding-the-ukraine-story/

[Feb 16, 2020] Understanding the Ukraine Story by Joe Lauria

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Imagine if we substitute the U.S. for Russia and the country "invaded" was Canada, rather than Ukraine, the government overthrown was in Ottawa and not Kiev, and the provinces embroiled in a foreign-backed civil war have been Nova Scotia and New Brunswick rather the provinces of Eastern Ukraine? This report, written in 2016, may make it easier to understand what has been really going on in Ukraine. Clicking on the links is key to understanding the real story. ..."
"... Washington Post ..."
"... Versions of this article first appeared on ..."
"... Consortium News ..."
Feb 14, 2020 | consortiumnews.com

The impeachment hearings and trial of Donald Trump were filled with talk of Russian aggression against Ukraine and threats to the United States. But what would it be like if we switched the roles of Russia and the U.S.?

Imagine if we substitute the U.S. for Russia and the country "invaded" was Canada, rather than Ukraine, the government overthrown was in Ottawa and not Kiev, and the provinces embroiled in a foreign-backed civil war have been Nova Scotia and New Brunswick rather the provinces of Eastern Ukraine? This report, written in 2016, may make it easier to understand what has been really going on in Ukraine. Clicking on the links is key to understanding the real story.

By Joe Lauria
Special to Consortium News

T he United States has "invaded" Canada to support the breakaway Maritime provinces that are resisting a Moscow-engineered violent coup d'etat against the democratically elected government in Ottawa.

The U.S. move is to protect separatists in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia after Washington annexed Prince Edwards Island in a quickly arranged referendum .

The Islanders voted over 90 percent in favor of joining the United States following the Russian-backed coup. Moscow has condemned the referendum as illega l.

Hard-liners in the U.S. want Washington to annex all three Maritime provinces, whose fighters are defying the coup in Ottawa after Moscow installed an unelected prime minister.

Russian-backed Canadian federal troops have launched so-called "anti-terrorist" operations in the breakaway region to crush the rebellion, shelling residential areas and killing hundreds of civilians.

The violent coup.

The Canadian army are joined by Russian-supported neofascist battalions that played a crucial role in the overthrow of the Canadian government. In Halifax, the extremists have burned alive at least 40 pro-U.S. civilians who had taken refugee in a trade union building.

Proof that Russia was behind the overthrow of the elected Canadian prime minister is contained in a leaked conversation between Georgiy Yevgenevich Borisenko, foreign ministry chief of Moscow's North America department, and Alexander Darchiev, the Russian ambassador to Canada.

According to a transcript of the leaked conversation, Borisenko discussed who the new Canadian leaders should be six weeks before the coup took place.

Russia moved to launch the coup when Canada decided to take a loan package from the IMF that had fewer strings attached than a loan from Russia.

Russia's Beijing ally was reluctant to back the coup. But this seemed of little concern to Borisenko who is heard on the tape saying, "Fuck China."

Minister handing out cookies in the square.

Weeks before the coup Borisenko was filmed visiting protestors who had camped out in Parliament Square in Ottawa demanding the ouster of the prime minister. Borisenko is seen giving out cakes to the demonstrators.

The foreign ministers of Russian-allied Belarus and Cuba also marched with the protestors through the streets of Ottawa against the government. Russian media has portrayed the unconstitutional change of government an act of "democracy." Russian senators have met in public with extreme right-wing Canadian coup leaders, praising their rebellion.

Borisenko said in a speech that Russia had spent $5 billion over the past decade to "bring democracy" to Canada.

Senator meeting far-right coup leaders.

The money was spent on training "civil society." The use of non-governmental organizations to overthrow foreign governments that stand in the way of Russia's economic and geo-strategic interests is well documented, especially in a 1991 Washington Post column, "Innocence Abroad: The New World of Spyless Coups ."

The United States has thus moved to ban Russian NGOs from operating in the country.

The coup took place as protestors violently clashed with police, breaking through barricades and killing a number of officers. Snipers fired on the police and the crowd from a nearby building in Parliament Square in which the Russian embassy had set up offices just a few floors above, according to Samantha Power, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N.

Son Gets Job After Coup

Russian lawmakers compared President Barack Obama to Adolph Hitler for allegedly sending U.S. troops into the breakaway provinces and for annexing Prince Edward Island in an act of "American aggression." The Maritimes have had long ties to the U.S. dating back to the American Revolution.

Russia says it has intelligence proving that U.S. tanks have crossed the Maine border into New Brunswick, but have failed to make the evidence public. They have revealed no satellite imagery. Russian news media only reports American-backed rebels fighting in the Maritimes, not American troops.

Washington denies it has invaded but says some American volunteers have entered the Canadian province to join the fight.

Russia's puppet prime minister now in charge in Ottawa has only offered as proof six American passports of U.S. soldiers found in New Brunswick.

Son gets job on energy company board after his father's government backs violent coup.

The Maritime Canadian rebels have secured anti-aircraft weapons enabling them to shoot down a number of Royal Canadian Air Force transport planes.

A Malaysian airlines passenger jet was also shot down over Nova Scotia killing all on board. Russia has accused President Obama of being behind the incident, charging that the U.S. provided the anti-aircraft weapon.

Moscow has refused to release any intelligence to support its claim, other than statements by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.

Canada's economy is near collapse and is dependent on infusions of Russian aid. This comes despite a former Russian foreign ministry official being installed as Canada's finance minister, only receiving Canadian citizenship on her first day on the job.

Despite installing a Russian to run Canada's economy, President Putin told the U.N. General Assembly that Russia had "few economic interests" in the country. But Russian agribusiness companies have already taken stakes in Albertan wheat fields. And Ilya Medvedev, son of Russian Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev, as well as a Lavrov family friend joined the board of Canada's largest oil company just weeks after the coup.

Russia's ultimate aim, beginning with the imposition of sanctions on the U.S., appears to be a color revolution in Washington to overthrow Obama and install a Russian-friendly American president.

This is clear from numerous statements by Russian officials and academics. A former Russian national security advisor whom Putin consults on foreign policy said the United States should be broken into three countries.

He has also written that Canada is the stepping stone to the United States and that if the U.S. loses Canada it will fail to control North America.

Versions of this article first appeared on The Duran and Consortium News in 2016.

Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former correspondent for T he Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe , Sunday Times of London and numerous other newspapers. He can be reached at [email protected] and followed on Twitter @unjoe .

mary floyd , February 15, 2020 at 13:20

The most important takeaway in this article for me was that the US should be broken into three separate entities!
That would work well for most Americans. All in all, this is a great piece, Mr. Lauria!

Dao Gen , February 15, 2020 at 02:28

Joe, you are The Truth. The only thing you left out, no doubt for reasons of space and time, was the immortal statement made by a leading member of the Russian Duma, who said during a stirring and well-received speech that, “Canada is our crucial first line of defense against the US. If Canada weren’t there to stop the Americans, we’d have to fight them right here on our own doorstep.”

Herman , February 14, 2020 at 18:52

A very creative way of making the point. Still do not understand the depth of what often appears to be heart felt hate for Russia by very powerful and smart people. Remember reading a comment by Phil Girardi early in the Trump tour when he remarked at the depth of dislike of Russia within the spook community. He wrote he was surprised and had, I think, been part of that community.

Eddie S , February 15, 2020 at 14:51

RE: “…depth of dislike of Russia within the spook community”.
While I have no ‘special knowledge’ of the so-called ‘intelligence community’, there’s a few reasons for this that come to-mind:
— Job preservation. The most obvious. The US wouldn’t need ~80% of those spooks if there
weren’t big scary Russians/Chinese/Iranians/N.Koreans constantly plotting against the
peaceful, benevolent US.

— Spooks believe in what is mainly a distractionary ploy by US oligarchs/plutocrats. These
wealthy interests don’t want to lose some of their wealth to social reforms, so they constantly
financially support scare-mongering, which some spooks unquestioningly accept.

— The profession tends to attract some of the more paranoid elements in our society, so
they’re inclined that way by nature/personality.

robert e williamson jr , February 14, 2020 at 17:51

Well one thing for sure we would not be seeing a female anchor on CNN bemoaning the fact the because of the coronavirus many popular kids toys might not be available here in the U.S. for the up coming holidays (?).

Yes it did happen, hell I couldn’t make that up.

DARYL , February 14, 2020 at 15:45

…or better yet, substitute Central America for Ukraine, and Panama(canal) for Crimea, then you have the makings of an even more salient parallel.

Realist , February 14, 2020 at 15:42

The difference is that under your scenario the world would be a smoking heap of radioactive ashes already as the exceptional nation, unlike the ever cautious Russians, would have immediately made bombastic threats and then launched military attacks to protect its “security interests.” (Warring to “protect” security interests has replaced invasion and occupation to save souls.) Things would have escalated from there to its predestined thermonuclear climax, as they will in the real world if Uncle Sam doesn’t get a grip on his uncontrolled aggression, demanding whatever he wants whenever he wants it at the point of a gun. The world seems to be circling the drain whether or not Washington is allowed to micromanage the affairs of Russia, China, Iran and every last duchy, principality and people’s republic in addition to its own monumental mess it calls domestic affairs. We’ve only got two political parties in this madhouse and they are both equally bent on destroying civilisation if they can’t rule it all, which seems to be the only point they agree on. Each party thinks it preferable to allow an obscenely rich oligarch (what else should we call Trump or Bloomberg?) from the other side to rule rather than a “communist” like Bernie Sanders or a “naive peacenik” like Tulsi Gabbard to be elected president. If the space aliens land tomorrow and start recruiting colonists to populate newly terraformed planets in other solar systems, sign me up. Yeah, it’s become that absurd down here.

JOHN CHUCKMAN , February 14, 2020 at 15:22

Simply imperial rot and corruption of power on all sides.

Neither Democrats nor Republicans have an exclusive on those qualities.

Mark Thomason , February 14, 2020 at 12:37

This is a useful approach. It needs added to it the language and culture element: as if the part that wants out of the Moscow coup shares our own language and culture, while the rest of Canada does not, and the rest of Canada had gone on a spree to suppress that language and culture. It is hard to find a parallel in Canada to those facts, but it is what happened in Ukraine.

It is important to understanding to put oneself in the shoes of the other guys. It was once called walking a mile in the other guy’s moccasins, and given a Native wisdom attribution.

David G Horsman , February 14, 2020 at 12:01

I do this exercise mentally fairly often. This is the first time I saw it done in print. I would like to do an automated process.

[Feb 16, 2020] Imperialism and Liberation in the Middle East Feb 14, 2020 Written by P l Steigan, translated by Terje Maloy

Notable quotes:
"... Imperialism – the highest stage of capitalism ..."
"... Without the natives' consent and without the neighbouring countries approval, Moroccans, Somalis, and later Afghans and Syrians, found home in the EU thanks to madame Merkel. ..."
"... How ligitimate is that? ..."
Feb 16, 2020 | off-guardian.org

At the moment, the United States has great difficulty in retaining its hegemony in the Middle East. Its troops have been declared unwanted in Iraq; and in Syria, the US and their foreign legion of terrorists lose terrain and positions every month. The US has responded to this with a significant escalation, by deploying more troops and by constant threats against Iran. At the same time, we have seen strong protest movements in Lebanon, Iraq and Iran.

When millions of Iraqi took to the streets recently, their main slogan was "THE UNITED STATES OUT OF THE MIDDLE EAST!"

How should one analyze this?

Obviously, there are a lot of social tensions in the Middle East – class based, ethnic, religious and cultural. The region is a patchwork of conflicts and tensions that not only goes back hundreds of years, but even a few thousand.

There are always many reasons to rebel against a corrupt upper class, anywhere in the world. But no rebellion can succeed if it is not based on a realistic and thorough analysis of the specific conditions in the individual country and region.

Just as in Africa, the borders in the Middle East are arbitrarily drawn. They are the product of the manipulations of imperialist powers, and only to a lesser extent products of what the peoples themselves have wanted.

During the era of decolonization, there was a strong, secular pan-Arab movement that wanted to create a unified Arab world. This movement was influenced by the nationalist and socialist ideas that had strong popular support at the time.

King Abdallah I of Jordan envisaged a kingdom that would consist of Jordan, Palestine and Syria. Egypt and Syria briefly established a union called the United Arab Republic . Gaddafi wanted to unite Libya, Syria and Egypt in a federation of Arab republics .

In 1958, a quickly dissolved confederation was established between Jordan and Iraq, called the Arab Federation . All these efforts were transient. What remains is the Arab League, which is, after all, not a state federation and not an alliance. And then of course we have the demand for a Kurdish state, or something similar consisting of one or more Kurdish mini-states.

Still, the most divisive product of the First World War was the establishment of the state of Israel on Palestinian soil. During the First World War, Britain's Foreign Minister Arthur Balfour issued what became known as the Balfour Declaration , which " view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people."

But what is the basis for all these attempts at creating states? What are the prerequisites for success or failure?

The imperialist powers divide the world according to the power relations between them

Lenin gave the best and most durable explanation for this, in his essay Imperialism – the highest stage of capitalism . There, he explained five basic features of the era of imperialism:

The concentration of production and capital has developed to such a high stage that it has created monopolies which play a decisive role in economic life; The merging of bank capital with industrial capital, and the creation, on the basis of this "finance capital", of a financial oligarchy; The export of capital as distinguished from the export of commodities acquires exceptional importance; The formation of international monopolist capitalist associations which share the world among themselves; The territorial division of the whole world among the biggest capitalist powers is completed.

But Lenin also pointed out that capitalist countries are developing unevenly, not least because of the uneven development of productive forces in the various capitalist countries.

After a while, there arises a discrepancy between how the world is divided and the relative strength of the imperialist powers. This disparity will eventually force through a redistribution, a new division of the world based on the new relationship of strength. And, as Lenin states :

The question is: what means other than war could there be under capitalism to overcome the disparity between the development of productive forces and the accumulation of capital on the one side, and the division of colonies and spheres of influence for finance capital on the other?"

The two world wars were wars that arose because of unevenness in the power relationships between the imperialist powers. The British Empire was past its heyday and British capitalism lagged behind in the competition. The United States and Germany were the great powers that had the largest industrial and technological growth, and eventually this misalignment exploded. Not once, but twice.

Versailles and Yalta

The victors of the First World War divided the world between themselves at the expense of the losers. The main losers were Germany, Austria-Hungary, Russia (the Soviet Union) and the Ottoman Empire. This division was drawn up in the Versailles treaty and the following minor treaties.

Europe after the Versailles Treaties (Wikipedia)

This map shows how the Ottoman Empire was partitioned:

At the end of World War II, the victorious superpowers met in the city of Yalta on the Crimean peninsula in the Soviet Union. Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin made an agreement on how Europe should be divided following Germany's imminent defeat. This map shows how it was envisaged and the two blocs that emerged and became the foundation for the Cold War.

Note that Yugoslavia, created after Versailles in 1919, was maintained and consolidated as "a country between the blocs". So it is a country that carries in itself the heritage of both the Versailles- and Yalta agreements.

The fateful change of era when the Soviet Union fell

In the era of imperialism, there has always been a struggle between various great powers. The battle has been about markets, access to cheap labor, raw materials, energy, transport routes and military control. And the imperialist countries divide the world between themselves according to their strength. But the imperialist powers are developing unevenly.

If a power collapses or loses control over some areas, rivals will compete to fill the void. Imperialism follows the principle that Aristotle in his Physics called horror vacui – the fear of empty space.

And that was what happened when the Soviet Union lost the Cold War. In 1991, the Soviet Union ceased to exist, and soon the Eastern bloc was also history. And thus the balance was broken, the one that had maintained the old order. And now a huge area was available for re-division. The weakened Russia barely managed to preserve its own territory, and not at all the area that just before was controlled by the Soviet Union.

Never has a so large area been open for redivision. It was the result of two horrible world wars that anew was up for grabs. It could not but lead to war." Pål Steigan, 1999

"Never has a so large area been open for re-division. It was the result of two horrible world wars that anew was up for grabs. It could not but lead to war." Map: Countries either part of the Soviet Union, Eastern Bloc or non-aligned (Yugoslavia)

When the Soviet Union disintegrated, both the Yalta and Versailles agreements in reality collapsed, and opened up the way for a fierce race to control this geopolitical empty space.

This laid the foundation for the American Geostrategy for Eurasia , which concentrated on securing control over the vast Eurasian continent. It is this struggle for redistribution in favor of the United States that has been the basis for most wars since 1990: Somalia, the Iraq wars, the Balkan wars, Libya, Ukraine, and Syria.

The United States has been aggressively spearheading this, and the process to expand NATO eastward and create regime changes in the form of so-called "color revolutions" has been part of this struggle. The coup in Kiev, the transformation of Ukraine into an American colony with Nazi elements, and the war in Donbass are also part of this picture. This war will not stop until Russia is conquered and dismembered, or Russia has put an end to the US offensive.

So, to recapitulate: Because the world is already divided between imperialist powers and there are no new colonies to conquer, the great powers can only fight for redistribution. What creates the basis and possibilities for a new division is the uneven development of capitalism. The forces that are developing faster economically and technologically will demand bigger markets, more raw materials, more strategic control.

The results of two terrible wars are again up for grabs

World War I caused perhaps 20 million deaths , as well as at least as many wounded. World War II caused around 72 million deaths . These are approximate numbers, and there is still controversy around the exact figures, but we are talking about this order of magnitude.

The two world wars that ended with the Versailles and Yalta treaties thus caused just below 100 million dead, as well as an incredible number of other suffering and losses.

Since 1991, a low-intensity "world war" has been fought, especially by the US, to conquer "the void". Donald Trump recently stated that the United States have waged wars based on lies, which have cost $ 8 trillion ($ 8,000 billion) and millions of people's lives. So the United States' new distribution of the spoils has not happened peacefully.

"The Rebellion against Sykes-Picot"

In the debate around the situation in the Middle East, certain people that would like to appear leftist, radical and anti-imperialist say that it is time to rebel against the artificial boundaries drawn by the Sykes-Picot and Versailles treaties. And certainly these borders are artificial and imperialist. But how leftist and anti-imperialist is it to fight for these boundaries to be revised now?

In reality, it is the United States and Israel that are fighting for a redistribution of the Middle East. This is the basis underlying Donald Trump's "Deal of the Century", which aims to bury Palestine forever, and it is stated outright in the new US strategy for partitioning Iraq.

Again, this is just an updated version of the Zionist Yinon plan that aimed to cantonize the entire Middle East, with the aim that Israel should have no real opponents and would be able to dominate the entire region and possibly create a Greater Israel.

It is not the anti-imperialists that are leading the way to overhaul the imperialist borders from 1919. It is the imperialists. To achieve this, they can often exploit movements that are initially popular or national, but which then only become tools and proxies in a greater game.

This has happened so many times in history that it can hardly be counted.

Hitler's Germany exploited Croatian nationalism by using the Ustaša gangs as proxies. From 1929 to 1945, they killed hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Jews and Roma people. And their ideological and political descendants carried out an extremely brutal ethnic cleansing of the Krajina area and forced out more than 200,000 Serbs in their so-called Operation Storm in 1995.

Hitler also used the extreme Ukrainian nationalists of Stepan Bandera's OUN, and after Bandera's death, the CIA continued to use them as a fifth column against the Soviet Union.

The US low-intensity war against Iraq, from the Gulf War in 1991 to the Iraq War in 2003, helped divide the country into enclaves. Iraqi Kurdistan achieved autonomy in the oil-rich north with the help of a US "no-fly zone". The United States thus created a quasi-state that was their tool in Iraq.

Undoubtedly, the Kurds in Iraq had been oppressed under Saddam Hussein. But also undoubtedly, their Iraqi "Kurdistan" became a client state under the thumb of United States. And there is also no doubt that the no-fly zones were illegal, as UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali admitted in a conversation with John Pilger .

And now the United States is still using the Kurds in Northern Iraq in its plan to divide Iraq into three parts. To that end, they are building the world's largest consulate in Erbil. What they are planning to do, is simply "creating a country".

As is well known, the United States also uses the Kurds in Syria as a pretext to keep 27 percent of the country occupied. It does not help how much the Kurdish militias SDF and PYD invoke democracy, feminism and communalism; they have ended up pleading for the United States to maintain the occupation of Northeast Syria.

Preparations for a New World War

Israel and the US are preparing for war against Iran. In this fight, they will develop as much "progressive" rhetoric as is required to fool people. Real dissatisfaction in the area, which there is every reason to have, will be magnified and blown out of all proportion. "Social movements" will be equipped with the latest news in the Israeli and US "riot kits" and receive training and logistics support, in addition to plenty of cold hard cash.

There may be good reasons to revise the 1919 borders, but in today's situation, such a move will quickly trigger a major war. Some say that the Kurds are entitled to their own state, and maybe so. The question is ultimately decided by everyone else, except the Kurds themselves.

The problem is that in today's geopolitical situation, creating a unified Kurdistan will require that "one" defeats Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran. It's hard to see how that can happen without their allies, not least Russia and China, being drawn into the conflict.

And then we have a new world war on our hands. And in that case, we are not talking about 100 million killed, but maybe ten times as much, or the collapse of civilization as we know it. The Kurdish question is not worth that much.

This does not mean that one should not fight against oppression and injustice, be it social and national. One certainly should. But you have to realize that revising the map of the Middle East is a very dangerous plan and that you run the risk of ending up in very dangerous company. The alternative to this is to support a political struggle that undermines the hegemony of the United States and Israel and thereby creates better conditions for future struggles.

It is nothing new that small nations rely on geopolitical situations to achieve some form of national independence. This was the case, for example, for my home country Norway. It was France's defeat in the Napoleonic War that caused Denmark to lose the province of Norway to Sweden in 1814, but at the same time it created space for a separate Norwegian constitution and internal self rule.

All honor to the Norwegian founding fathers of 1814, but this was decided on the battlefields in Europe. And again, it was Russia's defeat in the Russo-Japanese War that laid the geopolitical foundation for the dissolution of the forced union with Sweden almost a hundred years later, in 1905. (This is very schematically presented and there are many more details, but there is no doubt that Russia's loss of most of its fleet in the Far East had created a power vacuum in the west, which was exploitable.)

Therefore, the best thing to do now is not to support the fragmentation of states, but to support a united front to drive the United States out of the Middle East. The Million Man March in Baghdad got the ball rolling. There is every reason to build up even more strength behind it. Only when the United States is out, will the peoples and countries in the region be able to arrive at peaceful agreements between themselves, which will enable a better future to be developed.

And in this context, it is an advantage that China develops the "Silk Road" (aka Belt and Road Initiative), not because China is any nobler than other major powers, but because this project, at least in the current situation, is non-sectarian, non-exclusive and genuinely multilateral. The alternative to a monopolistic rule by the United States, with a world police under Washington's control, is a multipolar world. It grows as we speak.

The days of the Empire are numbered. What this will look like in 20 or 50 years, remains to be seen.

This article is Creative Commons 4.0. Pål Steigan is a Norwegian veteran journalist and activist, presently editor of the independent news site Steigan.no . Translated by Terje Maloy. Facebook Twitter Reddit Pinterest WhatsApp vKontakte Email Filed under: 20th Century , historical perspectives , latest Tagged with: Croatia , Egypt , historical perspectives , imperialism , Israel , Jordan , Lenin , Middle East , Pal Steigan , Palestine , russia , Saudi Arabia , Stepan Bandera , Terje Maloy , ukraine , WWII can you spare $1.00 a month to support independent media

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George Mc ,

Off topic – but there's nowhere else to put this at the moment:

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/feb/16/fran-unsworth-bbc-election-coverge-licence-fee

The BBC was taken aback by leftwing attacks on its general election coverage

No idea what they are talking about. They patiently explained that Corbyn was Hitler. What more could they do?

Dungroanin ,

Ok roll up the sleeves, time to concentrate. I've had enough of being baited as a judae- phobe.

The 'Balfour Declaration' – he didn't write it and it was a contract published in the newspapers within hours of it being inveigled.

Ready?

'Balfour and Lloyd George would have been happy with an unvarnished endorsement of Zionism. The text that the foreign secretary agreed in August was largely written by Weizmann and his colleagues:

"His Majesty's Government accept the principle that Palestine should be reconstituted as the national home of the Jewish people and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object and will be ready to consider any suggestions on the subject which the Zionist Organisation may desire to lay before them."

Got that – AUGUST?

Dungroanin ,


The leading figure in that drama was a charismatic chemistry professor from Manchester, Chaim Weizmann – with his domed head, goatee beard and fierce intellect. Weizmann had gained an entrée into political circles thanks to CP Scott, the illustrious editor of the Manchester Guardian, and had then sold his Zionist project to government leaders, including David Lloyd George when he was chancellor of the exchequer.

Dungroanin ,

Author(s)
Walter Rothschild, Arthur Balfour, Leo Amery, Lord Milner

Signatories
Arthur James Balfour

Recipient
Walter Rothschild

Dungroanin ,

'In due course the blunt phrase about Palestine being "reconstituted as the national home of the Jewish people" was toned down into "the establishment of a home for the Jewish people in Palestine" – a more ambiguous formulation which sidestepped for the moment the idea of a Jewish state. '

Dungroanin ,

'Edwin Montagu, newly appointed as secretary of state for India, was only the third practising Jew to hold cabinet office. Whereas his cousin, Herbert Samuel (who in 1920 would become the first high commissioner of Palestine) was a keen supporter of Zionism, Montagu was an "assimilationist" – one who believed that being Jewish was a matter of religion not ethnicity. His position was summed up in the cabinet minutes:

Mr Montagu urged strong objections to any declaration in which it was stated that Palestine was the "national home" of the Jewish people. He regarded the Jews as a religious community and himself as a Jewish Englishman '

Dungroanin ,

'Montagu considered the proposed Declaration a blatantly anti-Semitic document and claimed that "most English-born Jews were opposed to Zionism", which he said was being pushed mainly by "foreign-born Jews" such as Weizmann, who was born in what is now Belarus.'

Dungroanin ,

The other critic of the proposed Declaration was Lord Curzon, a former viceroy of India, who therefore viewed Palestine within the geopolitics of Asia. A grandee who traced his lineage back to the Norman Conquest, Curzon loftily informed colleagues that the Promised Land was not exactly flowing with milk and honey, but nor was it an empty, uninhabited space.

According to the cabinet minutes, "Lord Curzon urged strong objections upon practical grounds. He stated, from his recollection of Palestine, that the country was, for the most part, barren and desolate a less propitious seat for the future Jewish race could not be imagined."

And, he asked, "how was it proposed to get rid of the existing majority of Mussulman [Muslim] inhabitants and to introduce the Jews in their place?"

Dungroanin ,

Sorry for the length of this bit – but it only makes sense in the whole:

'Between them, Curzon and Montagu had temporarily slowed the Zionist bandwagon. Lord Milner, another member of the war cabinet, hastily added two conditions to the proposed draft, in order to address the two men's respective concerns. The vague phrase about the rights of the "existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine" hints at how little the government knew or cared about those who constituted roughly 90 per cent of the population of what they, too, regarded as their homeland.

After trying out the new version on a few eminent Jews, both of Zionist and accommodationist persuasions, and also securing a firm endorsement from America's President Woodrow Wilson, Lloyd George and Balfour took the issue back to the war cabinet on 31 October. By now the strident Montagu had left for India, and on this occasion Balfour, who could often be moody and detached, led from the front, brushing aside the objections that had been raised and reasserting the propaganda imperative. According to the cabinet minutes, he stated firmly: "The vast majority of Jews in Russia and America, as, indeed, all over the world, now appeared to be favourable to Zionism. If we could make a declaration favourable to such an ideal, we should be able to carry on extremely useful propaganda both in Russia and America."

This was standard cabinet tactics: a strong lead from a minister supported by the PM, daring his colleagues to argue back. And this time Curzon did not, though he did make another telling comment. He "attached great importance to the necessity of retaining the Christian and Moslem Holy Places in Jerusalem and Bethlehem". If this were done, Curzon added, he "did not see how the Jewish people could have a political capital in Palestine".'

Dungroanin ,

Dates again crucial and the smoking gun:

'securing a firm endorsement from America's President Woodrow Wilson, Lloyd George and Balfour took the issue back to the war cabinet on 31 October.'

Dungroanin ,

The two conditions had bought off the two main critics. That was all that seemed to matter, even though the reference to the "rights of the existing non-Jewish communities" stood in potential conflict with the first two clauses about the British supporting and using their "best endeavours" for the "establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people".

Dungroanin ,

There is MORE but I'll pause and see how many are really interested in FACTS, as opposed to invented History, Economics and Capital instead of the only real human motivations of the ages – Money and Power.

George Mc ,

the only real human motivations of the ages – Money and Power.

If this is true then we are all doomed.

Dungroanin ,

Not if we are aware of it George.

Dungroanin ,

Ok a summary fom Brittanica:

'Balfour Declaration Quick Facts

The Balfour Declaration, issued through the continued efforts of Chaim Weizmann and Nahum Sokolow, Zionist leaders in London, fell short of the expectations of the Zionists, who had asked for the reconstitution of Palestine as "the" Jewish national home. The declaration specifically stipulated that "nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine." The document, however, said nothing of the political or national rights of these communities and did not refer to them by name. Nevertheless, the declaration aroused enthusiastic hopes among Zionists and seemed the fulfillment of the aims of the World Zionist Organization (see Zionism).

The British government hoped that the declaration would rally Jewish opinion, especially in the United States, to the side of the Allied powers against the Central Powers during World War I (1914–18). They hoped also that the settlement in Palestine of a pro-British Jewish population might help to protect the approaches to the Suez Canal in neighbouring Egypt and thus ensure a vital communication route to British colonial possessions in India.

The Balfour Declaration was endorsed by the principal Allied powers and was included in the British mandate over Palestine, formally approved by the newly created League of Nations on July 24, 1922.

In May 1939 the British government altered its policy in a White Paper recommending a limit of 75,000 further immigrants and an end to immigration by 1944, unless the resident Palestinian Arabs of the region consented to further immigration.

Zionists condemned the new policy, accusing Britain of favouring the Arabs. This point was made moot by the outbreak of World War II (1939–45) and the founding of the State of Israel in 1948.'

Dungroanin ,

But what about the timing?

Well there are twin tracks, here is the first.

'But talking about the return of the Jews to the land of Israel was only meaningful because that land seemed up for grabs after the Ottoman Empire sided with Germany in 1914. For Britain, France and Russia – though primarily focused on Europe – war against a declining power long dubbed the "Sick Man of Europe" opened up the prospect of vast gains in the Levant and the Middle East.

The Ottoman army, however, proved no walkover. In 1915 it threatened the Suez Canal, Britain's imperial artery to India, and then repulsed landings by British empire and French forces on the Dardanelles at Gallipoli. Although Baghdad fell in March 1917, two British assaults on Gaza that spring were humiliatingly driven back, with heavy losses. Deadlock in the desert added to Whitehall's list of woes.

In this prescribed narrative of remembrance for 1914-18, what happened outside the Western Front has been almost entirely obscured. The British army's "Historical Lessons, Warfare Branch" has published in-house a fascinating volume of essays about what it tellingly entitles "The Forgotten Fronts of the First World War" – with superb maps and illustrations. The collection covers not only Palestine and Mesopotamia (roughly modern-day Iraq and Kuwait), but also Italy, Africa, Russia, Turkey and the Pacific – indeed much of the world – but sadly it is not currently available to the public. '

Dungroanin ,

The second track is the 'money' track and what everything is about and why we live in such a miasma of blatant lies.

IT can only make sense by asking questions such as :

Can we follow the money?

When was the Fed set up? Why? By whom?
How much money did it lend &
to whom?

When was the first world war started?

When did US declare war?

When did US troops arrive in numbers to enter that war?

What happened in Russia at the same time?

And in Mesopotamia?

How did it end?

How did it fail to end?

What happened to the contract?

Etc.

I have attempted to research and answer some of these already above.

Next I will attempt to walk the other track but be warned that opens more ancient tracks.

Dungroanin ,

'On 2 November, Balfour sent his letter to Lord Rothschild.

7 November, Lenin and the Bolsheviks had seized power in Petrograd. ransacked the Tsarist archives, they published juicy extracts from the "secret treaties" that the Allied powers had made among themselves in 1915-16 to divide the spoils of victory.
The same day the Ottoman Seventh and Eighth Armies evacuated the town of Gaza

9 November Letter published in Times.

Mid November – The Bolsheviks did not discover that the British were also playing footsie with the Turks. In the middle of November 1917, secret meetings took place with Ottoman dissidents in Greece and Switzerland about trying to arrange an armistice in the Near East. The war cabinet recognised that, as bait, it might have to let the Ottomans keep parts of their empire in the region, or at least retain some appearance of control. When Curzon got wind of this, he was incensed: "Almost in the same week that we have pledged ourselves, if successful, to secure Palestine as a national home for the Jewish people, are we to contemplate leaving the Turkish flag flying over Jerusalem?"

End November. The Manchester Guardian's correspondent in Petrograd, Morgan Philips Price, was able to examine the key documents overnight, and his scoop was published by the paper at the end of November. It revealed to the world, among other things, that the British also had an understanding with the French – the Sykes-Picot agreement of January 1916 – to carve up the Near East between them once the Ottoman empire had been defeated. In this, Palestine was slated for some kind of international condominium – not the British protectorate envisaged in the Balfour Declaration.

11 December Allenby formally entered Jerusalem. '

So just a few loose ends left to tie up anyone actually want to go there?

George Mc ,

No.

Dungroanin ,

🤣

Dungroanin ,

Ok on the back stretch:

https://www.federalreservehistory.org/essays/feds_formative_years

The paramount goal of the Fed's founders was to eliminate banking panics, but it was not the only goal. The founders also sought to increase the amount of international trade financed by US banks and to expand the use of the dollar internationally. By 1913 the United States had the world's largest economy, but only a small fraction of US exports and imports were financed by American banks. Instead, most exports and imports were financed by bankers' acceptances drawn on European banks in foreign currencies. (Bankers' acceptances are a type of financial contract used for making payments in the future, for example, upon delivery of goods or services. Bankers' acceptances are drawn on and guaranteed, i.e., "accepted," by a bank.) The Federal Reserve Act allowed national banks to issue bankers' acceptances and open foreign branches, which greatly expanded their ability to finance international transactions Further the Act authorized the Reserve Banks to purchase acceptances in the open market to ensure a liquid market for them, thereby spurring growth of that market.

President Woodrow Wilson signed the Federal Reserve Act on December 23, 1913.

The task of determining the specific number of districts, district boundaries, and which cities would have Reserve Banks was assigned to a Reserve Bank Organization Committee.

On April 2, 1914, the Committee announced that twelve Federal Reserve districts would be formed, identified the boundaries of those districts, and named the cities that would have Reserve Banks.1 The Banks were quickly organized, officers and staff were hired, and boards of directors appointed. The Banks opened for business on November 16, 1914.
..

The Federal Reserve Act addressed perceived shortcomings by creating a new national currency -- Federal Reserve notes -- and requiring members of the Federal Reserve System to hold reserve balances with their local Federal Reserve Banks.

World War I began in Europe in August 1914, before the Federal Reserve Banks had opened for business. The war had a profound impact on the US banking system and economy, as well as on the Federal Reserve.

War disrupted European financial markets and reduced the supply of trade credit offered by European banks, providing US banks with an opening. Low US interest rates, abundant reserves, and new authority to issue trade acceptances enabled American banks to finance a growing share of world trade.

Dungroanin ,

So the denouement :

It appears that the 'first world war' was designed to diminish European banks and boost the US banks.

However the fuller history of the US bankers is worth knowing- the Jekyll Islanders story is widely publicised.

Into this time track enters the Balfour Declaration addressed to Lord Rothschild, steered by Milner (heir to Rhodes empire building and the old EIC), approved by the potus Wilson (another hireling) that finally sent US troops to overwhelm the Germans, while the great gamers took out the Romanovs and the Ottoman Empire.
-- --

When we try to understand such facts and timelines and are attacked as Judaeo-phobes, because we identify Bankers and Robber Barons, it becomes even clearer how deep and wide they have controlled history and it has NOTHING to do with RELIGION (except perhaps Ludism). Nothing to do with Judaism (except perhaps Old Jewry in the City, but Lombard Street was most powerful!) and EVERYTHING to do with POWER and it's representation MONEY. The obscuring of that through various Economic theories including Marxism is the work of the same old bastards who are responsible for all our current malaises.

Thankyou and good evening, if anyone made it this far!

😉

George Mc ,

Well OK Dunnie, let's say I go along with you and assume that all the shit we are facing has nothing to do with religion or all that "Marxian porridge" (as Guido Giacomo Preparata called it). The question is: What do we do about it?

Speaking of GGP , it seems to me that you and him have much in common. He also goes on about "Power" but seems to be on the verge of referring this "Power" to mystical entities in a disconcertingly Ickean manoeuvre. Not that I'm attibuting such a thing to yourself. (No irony intended.)

Dungroanin ,

George – i don't want you or anyone to just go along with me.

I want everyone to make their minds up on FACTS. That is the only way humanity has actually progressed by inventing the only self correcting philosophical system and method of the ages that goes beyond 'personal responsibility teligions' – SCIENTIFIC METHOD – that takes away arbitrary power to rule, from these that inhabit the top of the human pyramid by virtue of being born there and having control over the money and so the power to remain in these positions, which does not benefit the totality of humanity or all life on Earth.

I am not a messiah, I am angry as fuck and I am not going to sit around enjoying whatever soma has been handed to us to keep compliant and leave this Planet worse than I found it. That is the scientific conclusion I have reached.

I suppose some proto buddhist / zoroastrianism / animalist / Shinto / Jain & Quakers seek religious truth in inner experience, and place great reliance on conscience as the basis of morality.

I suppose Ghandi's non-violence rebellion against Imperialists is a model as are various peasants revolts – the Russian / Chinese / Korean / Vietnamese couldn't have survived without the literal grassroots!
..

As for Guido Giacomo Preparata that you have introduced to me – i had nevet heard of him before this morning – my first take on him is that he seems to have arrived at similar conclusions by similar methodology. He seems to have a lot of formal education and a enviable career so far – i'll have to look into him further but the interview that i just read seems to indicate concurrence with what i said above. I see no Ickean references – please give a link.

-- -

As a observation do you not find it funny that there is not a single objection to the verity of the facts which I have presented above?

Good luck George if you are a real seeker of truth. If not insta-karma awaits.

George Mc ,

The Preparata statement I was referring to is in this interview:

https://www.larsschall.com/2012/06/10/the-business-as-usual-behind-the-slaughter/

The statement itself is this:

Power is a purely human suggestion. Suggested by whom? That is the question. The NSDAP thus appeared to have been a front for some kind of nebula of Austro-German magi, dark initiates, and troubling literati (Dietrich Eckhart comes to mind), with very plausible extra-Teutonic ramifications of which we know next to nothing. Hitler came to be inducted in a lodge of this network, endowed as he seemed with a supernatural gift of inflaming oratory.

This is a theme that I am still studying, but from what I gathered, the adepts of the Thule Gesellschaft communed around the belief of being the blood heirs of a breed that seeks redemption / salvation / metempsychosis in some kind of eighth realm away from this earth, which is the shoddy creation of a lesser God -- the archangel of the Hebrews, Jehovah. It all sounds positively insane to post-modern ears, but it should be taken very seriously, I think.

Admittedly it isn't quite interdimensional reptiles but there is a distinct metaphysical flavour there.

I wouldn't go along with everything Preparata says but he is a wonderful writer and I have bought almost everything I can find by him. His "biggie" is "Conjuring Hitler". It was Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed that brought GGP to my attention via that book.

milosevic ,

images on this website look terrible, with very little colour. the problem seems to be caused by this rule, from the file "OffGstyle.css":

.content-wrap-spp img {

filter: sepia(20%) saturate(30%);

}

Open ,

This sepia effect usually works well with Off-Guardian articles, but with these maps in today's article it is definitely terrible. Why have maps if they don't want to show them clearly?
(any extra steps for the user to see the pictures clearly is not the answer)

Another area neglected on this website is crediting photos. The majority of images carry no atribution/credit, despite it [crediting photos] is the best ethical practice even for public domain pictures. I wish Admin gets expert advice on this.

Open ,

Look at the language used by the americans:

On feb. 12 [2020], Coalition forces, conducting a patrol near Qamishli, Syria , encountered a checkpoint occupied by pro-Syrian .. forces .

So, the supremacist unites states' army has found that Syrian forces are occupying Syrian land .. wow wow wow .. according to this logic, Russian forces are occupying Russian land. Iranian forces are occupying Iranian land (how dare they?!). But american forces are not occupying any land, and Israel is not occupying Palestinian and Syrian lands.

This language needs to be known more widely.

Open ,

The americans always use the term 'Coalition forces' when they talk about their illegal presence in Syria. I tried to search online for what countries are in this coalition. I recall I was able to find that in the past, but now, it seems this information is being pushed under wrap.

What are they afraid of? What are they hiding?

Joe ,

Just bring about the end of "Israel" and there'll be peace in the Middle East, and probably in the wider world, too.

Open ,

Ending the Israeli project is certainly a step in the right direction to improve global stability. However, alone, it will not bring about peace because the British/Five-Eyes/Washington's doctrine of spreading disorder and chaos permeates (saturates) the planet.

In fact, current disorders are the results of convergence of Israeli interests with those of Western White Supremacy's* resolve to dominate, erh, eveything.

* Western White Supremacy can also be called Western White Idiocy and Bigotry.

Israel manipulates the West's political and military might. The West also uses Israel to spread Chaos and Disorder.

Antonym ,

Right, back to the good old peace of the graveyard inspired by Mohamed's male sex riot ideology and plunder legitimization before the Westerners showed up with their superior (arms) tech legitimization for their plunder.
Before Israel's 1947 creation the world was a bed of roses .

Open ,

"srael's 1947 creation"

Without the natives' consent and without the neighbouring countries approval, Ukranians and Germans, and later South Americans, found home in the Middle East.

How ligitimate is that?

Antonym ,

Without the natives' consent and without the neighbouring countries approval, Moroccans, Somalis, and later Afghans and Syrians, found home in the EU thanks to madame Merkel.

How ligitimate is that?

Open ,

"Moroccans, Somalis, and later Afghans and Syrians .. etc.."

Do these comments reflect the Zionists' perspective? This is important because they prove that the whole existence of Israel is based on total fabrication and lies.

Maggie ,

Did you have to practice at being THAT stupid! Or did they lobotomise you in Langley?
Somalis, Afghans, Syrians would not have had any cause to leave their homeland had it not been for your employers the CIA/MOSSAD facilitating the raping and pillaging of their homes by the Oil Magnates, leaving them starving and desolate.
https://www.hiiraan.com/op2/2007/may/somalia_the_other_hidden_war_for_oil.aspx
and where does our Aid money go?

https://www.youtube.com/embed/5OInaYenHkU?version=3&rel=1&fs=1&autohide=2&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&wmode=transparent
But of course Antonym, if you were in their situation, you would just stick it out?
Shame on you .

To those who care, read "The confessions of an Economic Hitman by John Perkins" to understand how this corrupt system is conducted.

Richard Le Sarc ,

Its 'creation' in blood, murder, rape and terror, in a great ethnic cleansing-the sign of things to come, ceaselessly, for seventy years and ongoing.

paul ,

Ask the people in Gaza about the Zionist "peace of the graveyard."

Antonym ,

Gaza before 2005 was relatively peaceful + prosperous. After the Israeli withdrawal the inhabitants messed up their own economy but kept on making lots of babies just like before.
Quite the opposite of a graveyard or a Warsaw ghetto or a Dachau.

George Mc ,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_disengagement_from_Gaza

Despite the disengagement, the United Nations, international human rights organisations and most legal scholars regard the Gaza Strip to still be under military occupation by Israel, though this is disputed by Israel and other legal scholars. Following the withdrawal, Israel has continued to maintain direct external control over Gaza and indirect control over life within Gaza: it controls Gaza's air and maritime space, and six of Gaza's seven land crossings, it maintains a no-go buffer zone within the territory, and controls the Palestinian population registry, and Gaza remains dependent on Israel for its water, electricity, telecommunications, and other utilities.

Interesting definition of "withdrawal". It's amazing those Gazans even managed to have babies!

Richard Le Sarc ,

You would have made a grand Nazi, Antsie-cripes, you have!

paul ,

Gaza was, and is, a huge Zionist concentration camp hermetically sealed off from the outside world and blockaded just like the Warsaw Ghetto. With Zionist thugs and kiddie killers shooting hundreds of kids in the head for the fun of it with British sniper rifles and dum dum bullets, and periodically dropping 20,000 tons of bombs at a time on it, a higher explosive yield than Hiroshima. With parties of Jews going along to hold barbecues and picnics to watch all the fun. Nice people, those chosen folk.

Richard Le Sarc ,

I rather think that Epstein, Weinstein, Moonves and all those orthodox and ultra-orthodox who are such prolific patrons of the sex industry in Israel, know a bit about 'male sex riot ideology', Antsie.

Dungroanin ,

Pathetic.
'Nandy won a major boost when members of the Labour affiliate Jewish Labour Movement gave her their backing after a hustings, saying she understood the need to change the party's culture.'
From the Groaniad

How many members? How many by denomination?

As for the Balfour Contract there were actual English Jewish establishment figures against its premise. Actual imperial servants. The declaration was a stitch up by the new banking powers in the US which then sent in the yanks to stop the Germans in 1917.

History is rewritten daily to memory hole such facts.

Capricornia Man ,

The 'Jewish Labour Movement' is so Jewish that most of its members are not Jewish. And it is so Labour-affiliated that it did not support Labour in the December general election. But it has no shortage of money. It exists solely to prosecute the interests of a foreign power. Much the same could be said for any politician who accepts its endorsement.

Rhys Jaggar ,

Given that Jews are vastly outnumbered by non Jews, the simplest way to stop Jewish manipulation of politics is to form a party from which Jews are specifically banned.

You will not propose any policies harming Jews in any way, you will just make it clear that this is a party free from any Jewish influence in its constitution.

If Jews cannot accept that, then they are utterly racist and must be dealt with without sensibility.

Maggie ,

A better solution Rhys would be to form a party that denies all and any dual citizens
That way all the Zionists would be barred.

Richard Le Sarc ,

Full public financing of political parties would end Zionist control.

paul ,

Thornberry has just thrown in the towel.
She will now have more time to "get down on her hands and knees" and "beg forgiveness" from the Board of Deputies.
Those good little Shabbos are so easily trained.

Dungroanin ,

BoD's??? Another random organisation!

Who are they? Who do they represent? How many people? Which people? How did they get elected? How can they be fired?

Richard Le Sarc ,

The next world war has already started, with the bio-warfare atttack on China aka Covid19.

lundiel ,

Why no comment on the government reshuffle? I don't agree with the Indian middle-class uplifting but totally agree with neutering the ultra-conservative treasury.

Maggie ,

I think it's a case of who gives a fck. We now know that our elections are rigged, and so there is no point in us being involved. My family and I all realised and voted for the last time.
They are all bloody crap actors reading their scripts and playing their parts, whilst the never changing suits in the background pull the strings.
I had to explain to my 10 year old Grandson how politics work, and he said "Why doesn't anyone know the names of, or see the suits?"
What I want to know is why no-one ever asks this question or demands an answer?

tonyopmoc ,

Completely Brilliant Article, but it is Valentines Day, so as I am 66 years old, and in love with my wife (nearly 40 years together = LOVE), I wrote this in response to Craig Murray, who has banned me again.

It may be off topic for him, but it ain't off topic for me. I am still in Love.

"Churchill's mental deterioration from syphilis – which the Eton and Oxford ."

Never had it, and she didn't either. We were young and in love, but we didn't know, if either of us had sex before, but I had a spotty dick, and went to the VD clinic. I had a blood test, and they gave me some zinc cream.

She also had the same thing, and showed her Mum.

We were both completely innocent, and had a sexually transmitted disease called Thrush. It is relatively harmless, but can also give you a sore throat.

We both laughed at each other, and nearly got married.

Natural Yoghurt, is completely brilliant at preventing it.

Far better than Canestan.

Happy Valentines Day, for Everyone still In Love.

Let us all look forwad to a Brighter Day for our Grandchildren.

Tony

Loverat ,

Hey Tony

Dont worry. Craig Murray might not like you but I do. Your stories, here and elsewhere have entertained me for many years.

Mind you, if I were your other half I would have chucked you years ago.

paul ,

Tell him how much you like haggis and tossing your caber.

Dungroanin ,

Without Stalins say so Poland would not have had its borders at the end of ww2.
Also,
On these maps just off the right hand edges is missing Afghanistan.. which the imperialists invaded in 2002 as the Taliban wiped out the opium crops. Back to full production immediately after invasion and 18 years later secret negotiations to hand over to Taliban while leaving 8,000 CUA troops delivering the huge cash crop.

binra ,

Seeking possession and control – in competition with those you see as seeking to dispossess and control or deny you – is the identity or belief in 'kill or be killed'.
This belief overrides and subordinates others – such as to subsume all else to such private agenda that will seek alliance against common threat but only as a shifting strategy of possession and control.

One of the things about this 'game' of power struggle, is that it loses any sense of WHY – and so it is a driven mind or dictate of power or possession for it own sake that cannot really ENJOY or HAVE and share what it Has. The image of the hungry ghost comes to mind here. It will never have enough until you are dead – and even then will offer you torment beyond the grave.

Until this mindset is recognised and released as an 'insanity' it operates as accepted currency of exchange, and maps our a world of its own conflicting and conflicted meanings.

The willingness to destroy or kill, deny or undermine and invalidate others in order to GET for a private agenda set over the whole instead of finding balance within the whole – is destructive to life, no matter how ingenious the thinking that frames it to seem to be progressive, protective, or in fact powerful.
But in our collective alignment and allegiance with such a way of thinking and identifying – we all give power to the destructive – as if to protect the life that it gives us.

The hungry ghost is also in the mass population when separated from their land and lives to seek connection or meaning in proffered 'products and services' instead of creating out of our own lives. Products and services that operate a hidden agenda of possession and control or market and mind capture under threat of fear of pain of loss in losing even the little that we have.

Having – on a spiritual level is our being – and not a matter of stuffing a hole.
Madness that can no longer mask as anything else is all about – and brings a choice to conscious awareness as to whether to persist in it or decide to find another way of seeing and being.

This is not to say there is no place to call upon or seek to limit people in positions of trust from serving an unjust outcome by calling for transparency and accountability – but not to wait on that or make that the be all and end all.

If there is another way and a better way than war masking in and misusing and thus corrupting anything and everything, then it has to be lived one to another.

Everyone seeks a better experience – but many seek it in a negative framing. Negative in the sense of self-lack seeking power in the terms of its current identity. Evils work their own destruction, but find sustainability in selling destructive agenda or toxic debt as ingeniously complex instruments of deceit – by which the targeted buyer believes they have or shall save their 'self' or add to their 'self' rather than growing hollow to a driven mindset of reactive fear-addiction.

I don't need to 'tell this to those who refuse to listen' – but I share it with any moment of a willingness to listen. In the final analysis, we are the ones who live the result of choices in our lives, whatever the times and conditions.

The 'repackaging' of reality to self-deceit, is not new but part of the human mind and experience throughout history. The evil changes forms – as if the good has and shall triumph. But truth undoes illusion by being accepted. It doesn't war on illusion and thus make it real – and remain truth.

Judgement divides to rule.
Discernment arises from the unwillingness to division.
One is set apart from and over life as the invocation of an alien will, dealing death, and the other as the will of true desire revealed.

The idea of independent autonomy is relative to a limited sphere of responsibilities in the world.
The idea of living our own life is an alignment within the same for others and the freedom to do so cannot take from others without becoming possessed by our denials, debts and transgressions – no less so in the driven mind of ingeniously repackaged and wilfully defended narrative identity.

In our own experience, this is not a matter of applied analysis, so much as awareness or space in which to seek and find truth in some willingness of recognition and acceptance or choice, while the triggering or baiting to madness is loud or compelling as the dictate of fear seeking protection and grievance seeking retribution – as if these give freedom and power rather than locking into a fear-framed limitation as substitution for life set in defiance and refusal to look on or share in truth – and so to such a one, war is truth, and love is weakness to exploit, use and weaponise for getting.

paul ,

If you look at the proposed new map of the Middle East, it mirrors Kushner's Deal Of The Century for Palestine – because it has the same Zionist authorship.
The same old dirty Zionist games of divide and rule – break up countries in the region into tiny defenceless little statelets setting different ethnic and religious groups at each others' throats, so that they can rule the roost and steal whatever they wish.
You see this in the past and the recent past. The way Lebanon was torn away from Syria. Or Kuwait from Iraq. Or the Ruritanian petty Gulf dictatorships like Bahrain, Qatar, Dubai.
Trump was being honest for the first time in his miserable life when he said none of these satellites and satraps would last a fortnight if they were not propped up by the US.

paul ,

George Galloway described the whole region as a flock of sheep surrounded by ravenous wolves.

At the same time, there is more than a grain of truth in the Zionists' contention that the people of the region are to some extent the authors of their own misfortune.

They always fall for the divide-and-rule games of outside powers, Britain, America, Israel, who invade, bomb, slaughter, humiliate and exploit them. If they had been united, Israel would not have been created. Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, would not have been destroyed and bombed back to the Stone Age. These countries would be genuinely independent and at peace.

When I speak to ordinary moslems, it is surprising and depressing to see how much visceral hatred they express for Shia moslems. They seem blind to the way they are being manipulated to serve outside interests.

So we see moslem Saudi Arabia trying to incite America and Israel to destroy Iran, and offering to pay for the whole cost of the war. Or S. Arabia, Jordan, Qatar, UAE et al, in bed with Israel, paying billions to bankroll the terrorist head choppers in Syria. Or Egypt, which does not even protest, let alone lift a finger, when Israeli aircraft use its air space to carpet bomb Gaza. Or going further back in history, when countries like Egypt and Syria sent troops to join the 1991 US invasion of Iraq. Even though Iraq had sent its forces to the Golan Heights in 1973 to fight and die to prevent Syria being overrun by Israel. How contemptible is all that? Yet those are just a few of many examples of all the backstabbing that has occurred over the years. If these people don't respect themselves, why should anybody else?

paul ,

And this has been going on for hundreds of years.
1096 marked the beginning of The Crusades, a disaster for the region on a par with the creation of Israel.
At that time, London was a little village of 25,000. Baghdad and Alexandria and Cordoba were sophisticated modern cities with populations of hundreds of thousands. They dismissed the Crusaders as mere bandits who would do some looting, steal some cattle, and go home. But 3 years later Jerusalem had been conquered and its inhabitants slaughtered, the start of a 200 year disaster for the region. How? Why?
Because the Arabs were so busy fighting a civil war at the time they barely noticed the foreign invaders. The old, old story. Civil war between Sunnis and Shias.

One day, they will wake up and realise that they have to hang together, or hang separately.
But I wouldn't hold your breath.
There seems to be an endless supply of quisling stooge dictators ready to do the bidding of hostile outside powers. The Mubaraks, the Sisis, the King Abdullahs, the Sinioras, the MBS's, to name but a few.
Conforming to all the worst stereotypes about Arabs and moslems.
You could argue that they deserve all they get, when they are ever ready to bend over and drop their trousers.
Is it really any surprise that they have been invaded, slaughtered, bombed back to the Stone Age, robbed, exploited and humiliated from time immemorial.
Maybe one day they will discover an ounce of dignity and self respect. Who knows?

Maggie ,

"1096 marked the beginning of The Crusades, a disaster for the region on a par with the creation of Israel.
At that time, London was a little village of 25,000. Baghdad and Alexandria and Cordoba were sophisticated modern cities with populations of hundreds of thousands. They dismissed the Crusaders as mere bandits who would do some looting, steal some cattle, and go home. But 3 years later Jerusalem had been conquered and its inhabitants slaughtered, the start of a 200 year disaster for the region. How? Why?"
Because despite the mendacious lies that are told about Muslims, they are tolerant and forgiving. They believe in one God, and live exemplary modest, generous lives in the belief that they will enter in to the kingdom of heaven.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/_2LEgowbzSc?version=3&rel=1&fs=1&autohide=2&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&wmode=transparent
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uGz6nrWTsEI

And these are the people we are being encouraged to hate and fear? To enable the neo cons to invade and destroy everything in their path to get their oil.

Hundreds of millions of Muslims the world over 'live in democracies' of some shape or form, from Indonesia to Malaysia to Pakistan to Lebanon to Tunisia to Turkey. Tens of millions of Muslims' live in -- and participate in' -- Western democratic societies. The country that is on course to have the biggest Muslim population in the world in the next couple of decades is India, which also happens to be the world's biggest democracy. Yet a persistent pernicious narrative exists, particularly in the West, that Islam and democracy are incompatible. Islam is often associated with dictatorship, totalitarianism, and a lack of freedom, and many "well paid" analysts and pundits claim that Muslims are philosophically opposed to the idea of democracy .

Richard Le Sarc ,

'Democracy' as practised in the neo-liberal capitalist West, is a nullity, a fiction, a smoke-screen behind which the one and only power, that of the rich owners of the economy, acts alone.

Gall ,

I know. These Zionist morons droning on about how violent Islam is as religion yet ignoring the fact that the Bible is based on the God of Abraham granting them Canaan (like Trump giving the Israelis the Golan Heights, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank) and urging them to commit complete and utter genocidal annihilation of the inhabitants by not leaving a single living thing breathing.

No violence there folks. Nope. The book of love my ass!

paul ,

Their God was a demented estate agent, rather like Trump or Kushner.

Gall ,

Personally I believe that the chapters of the bible were written after their genocidal blood lust simply to justify their despicable acts. Claiming that God made 'em do it.

Loverat ,

My experience of muslims in the UK is many express support for the Palestinians but don't identify or understand those states which still speak up for their rights, Syria, Iran and a few others.

Sadly like the general UK population they have been exposed to propaganda which excuses evil and mass murder carried out by Saudi Arabia and their lackeys and Israel. This is changing however. People are gradually waking up. Muslims and the general UK public if they really knew the extent of this would be out demonstrating on the streets.

The realisation these policies have exposed all of us to nuclear wipe out in seconds should be enough motivation for any normal person.
The wipe out or (preferably) demonstrations will happen. Just a question of when. You can see why the establishment and people like Higgins, Lucas and York are so active recently. These idiots, blinded by their pay checks can't see the harm they are causing through their irresponsible lies even to their own families. Perhaps they all have nuclear shelters in their back garden.

Richard Le Sarc ,

Saudi Arabia is NOT 'Moslem'. It is Wahhabist, a genocide cult created by doenmeh, ie crypto-Jewish followers of the failed 17th century Messiah, Sabbatai Zevi, which is homicidally opposed to all Moslems but fellow Wahhabists.

milosevic ,

I thought it was created by the British Empire, in order to provide reliable stooges and puppet regimes.

Richard Le Sarc ,

What people must realise is that,for the Zionassty secular and Talmudic religious leaderships, by far the dominant forces in Israel and among many of the Diaspora sayanim, the drive to create 'Eretz Yisrael', '..from the Nile to the Euphrates' (and some include the Arabian Peninsula as well), is a real, religious, ambition-indeed an obligation. With the alliance with the 'Christian Zionist' lunatics in the USA, the fate of humanity is in the hands of the Evil Brain Dead.

BigB ,

I despair. This is why there is 'No Deal For Nature' because the hegemonic cultural movement is to extend cultural hegemony over nature. We cannot seem to help it or stop ourselves. Do we suppose a glossy website will change that? Or empty sloganneering subvertisements? Or waiving placards outside banks? Or some other futile conscience salving symbolic gesture?

No, we have to subvert the cultural hegemony over nature at every point at every chance. Which is thankless because cultural normativity is ubiquitous. And it's killing us. And BRI is the very antithesis of alternative an eternal return into the cultural consumerism and commodification that is the global hegemony at least at an elite level. And we are among that elite – in terms of consumption and pollution. We are the problem. If we seek to extend or preserve our own Eurocentric priviliges and consumptions we can only do so by extracting evermore global resources and maldeveloping the Rest. Which is also what Samir Amin said: following Wallerstein's World Systems Theory.

The progressive packaging of all our sins and transferring them to something called 'American Imperialism' is nothing less than mass psychological transference to a Fetish. By which we maintain autonomy from any blame in the ecological disaster we are co-creating. Which is why it is a powerful cultural narrative constructivism. 'We' do not have to reform: the scapegoated Otherised 'they' do. Whilst we all sit smugly in our inauthentic imaginary autonomy: the ecological destruction caused entirely by our collectivist consumption carries on. 'They' have to clean up 'their' act – not us. 'We' align with the 'counter-hegemonic alliance': the alternative BRI. 'We' are so bourgeois and progressive in our invented independence and totally aligned with the destructive forces of capitalist endocolonised culture because of our own internalised screening discourse. Which is why there is #NoDealForNature. 'We' don't actually give a flying fuck not beyond some hollow totemic gestures in transference of our own responsibility.

'We' are pushing for the financialisation of nature: as the teleology of our particular complicit cultural narratives. It's not just 'them'. Supply and demand are dialectically exponential. Who is demanding less, more fairly distributed North to South? Exponential expansionism via BRI is no more alternative than colonising the Moon or Mars. For nature to have a deal: we have to stop demanding growth. And in doing that: become self-responsible right through to the narratives we produce. For which every person in the global consumer bourgeoisie – that's us – will have to change their imperatives from culture to nature. Which means a new naturalised culture: not just complicitly advocating the 'same old, same old' exponential expansionism of the extractivist commodification of every last standing resource. Under the guise of new narrative constructions like this. That's not progress: it's capitalist propaganda and personal self-propaganda. We are among the consumer elite. Which is driving the financialisation and commodification of everything. For us.

#NoDealForNature until we take full and honest self-responsibility to create one with our every enaction including speech-enactivism.

Gall ,

I'm sure Thomas Robert Malthus and Charles Darwin are smiling upon you my child from their very special place in hell.

Richard Le Sarc ,

Charles Darwin? What on Earth are you on about?

Gall ,

Ever heard of social Darwinism? This is how the elite justify genocide and theft of resources. It is one of the basics of Neoliberalism.

Richard Le Sarc ,

Darwin had NOTHING to do with 'social Darwinism'. It's like blaming Jesus for the KKK.

Gall ,

Uh huh:

"With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilised men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.

The aid which we feel impelled to give to the helpless is mainly an incidental result of the instinct of sympathy, which was originally acquired as part of the social instincts, but subsequently rendered, in the manner previously indicated, more tender and more widely diffused. Nor could we check our sympathy, if so urged by hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature. The surgeon may harden himself whilst performing an operation, for he knows that he is acting for the good of his patient; but if we were intentionally to neglect the weak and helpless, it could only be for a contingent benefit, with a certain and great present evil. Hence we must bear without complaining the undoubtedly bad effects of the weak surviving and propagating their kind; but there appears to be at least one check in steady action, namely the weaker and inferior members of society not marrying so freely as the sound; and this check might be indefinitely increased, though this is more to be hoped for than expected, by the weak in body or mind refraining from marriage."
― Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man

BigB ,

Every appraisal from a cultural POV extends the cultural hegemony over nature – with no exceptions. If we do not address the false dichotomy of culture and nature – and invert the privileged status of cultural domination over nature – this never changes. If nothing changes its going to be a very short century the last in the history of culture.

I'm expressing my own private POV with the intention of at least highlighting the issue of only ever expressing the distorted cultural-centric POV. It would be nice if we could all agree to do something other than waste our privileged status and access to resources for other than meaningless sarcasm. It's not like we'd all benefit from a change in POV and the entailed potential in a change of course that can only happen if we think of nature first, is it? 😉

Gall ,

The only thing I don't like about the environmentally "woke" is that many are easily manipulated by the neoliberal elite. Greta is a perfect example.

That is they go after the little guy while the Military and big industry continue to pollute unhampered.

George Mc ,

I despair.

Well that's what you do.

Dungroanin ,

The M5 highway is secured. Allepo access points too and Idlib is surrounded- where are the US backed /Saudi paid / Tukish passport holding Uighars and various Turkmen proxy jihadist anti Chinese / anti Russian, Central asian caliphate establishing mercenaries supposed to go now??

Pompeo is buzzing around Africa now like a blue bottomed cadaverous fly, non-stop buzzing from piles of shot, trying to find them homes – no Libya doesn't want anymore of them, nor the UAE and Saudis, or Turks maybe dump them in Canada with all these ex Ukrainian still nazis? Its a big country nobody will know!
Or bring them to the US and give them a ticker tape parade?

Or let them surrender and have them testify as to how the fuck they let themselves be bought for $$$$ maybe just fry them with the low yield nuke and blame Assad for it!

Dumbass yanks, fukus, 5+1 eyed gollum and Nutty- 'it's the Belgian airforce bombing Russian weapons in Syria' -yahoo!

Up-Pompeos farce and buzzing is about to sizzle in the blue light of death for dumbfuck poison spreading flies.

normal wisdom ,

so much disrespect here hare here.

these takfiri these giants these beards are hero

of the oded yinon plan

they raped murdered and stole
dustified atomised the syriana so
is rael can become real

the red heffers have been cloned the temple will grow

the semites must leave for norway,sweden wales scotland and detroit
already

the khazar ashkanazim need the land returned to it's true owners from the turkic russio steppe

tonight back to back i watch reality
fiddler on the roof and exodus and schindlers lists.
i watch bbc simon scharmas new rabbi revised history of mighty israel.
every day it grows massive every day hezbollah become weak husk

shirley you can sea more that

my life already

Francis Lee ,

Very interesting and informative article. Lenin's 5 conditions of the imperialism of his time have been matched by similar conditions in our own time, as listed by the Egyptian Marxist, Samir Amin. These conditions being as follows.

1. Control of technology.

2. Access to natural resources.

3. Finance.

4. Global media.

5. The means of mass destruction.

Only by overturning these monopolies can real progress be made. Easily said. But a life and death struggle for humanity.

The collapse of the Soviet Union opened up the space for increased penetration of Europe to the East by the US and its West European allies in NATO. At that time the subaltern US powers in Europe were the UK and West Germany, as it then was. There was a semblance of sovereignty in France under De Gaulle, but this has since disappeared. Europe as a whole is now occupied and controlled by the US which has used EU/NATO bloc to push right up to the Russian border. Most, if not all, the non-sovereign quasi states, in Europe, particularly Eastern Europe, are Quisling-Petainist puppet regimes regardless of whether they are inside our outside of the EU. (I say 'states' but of course if a country is not sovereign it cannot be a 'state' in the full meaning of the word).

A political, social and economic crisis in Europe seems to be taking taking shape. Perhaps the key problem, particularly Eastern Europe, has been depopulation. There is not one European state in which fertility (replacement) rates has reached 2.1 children. Western European imperial states have to large degree been able to counter-act this tendency by immigration from their former colonies, particularly the UK and France. But this has not been possible in states such as Sweden and Germany where the migration of non-christian guest workers from Turkey to Germany and Islamic refugees
from the middle-east hot-spots have had a free passage to Sweden. This has become a serious social and economic problem; a problem resulting from a neoliberal open borders policy. The fact of the matter is that radically different cultures will tend to clash. Thank you Mr Soros.

British immigration policy was successful in so far as immigrants from the Caribbean were English speakers, they were also protestant Christians, and the culture was not very different from the UK. Later immigration from the Indian sub-continent and Indian settled East Africa were generally professional and middle-class business people. Again English speakers. Assimilation of these newcomers was not unduly difficult.

However it wouldn't be exaggerating to say that Eastern Europe is facing a demographic disaster. This particular zone is literally bleeding people. Ukraine for example has lost 10 million people since 1990. Every month it is estimated that 100,000 Ukrainians leave the country, usually for good. In terms of migration – no-one wants to go to Eastern Europe, but everyone wants to leave, asap. This process is complemented by low birth rates, and high death rates. These are un-developing states in an un-developing world. But now we have new kids on the bloc. A counter-hegemonic alliance. No guesses who.

BigB ,

Rubbish. There is no 'counter-hegemonic alliance' to humanities rapacious demand for fossil fuels and ecological resources. Where are the material consumption resources for BRI coming from – the Moon, Mars? Passing asteroids? Or from the Earth?

When its gone: its gone. Russia and China provide absolutely no alternative to this. China's consumption alone is driving us over the brink. To which the real alternative is a complicit silence. As we all align with culture-centric capitalist views: there is no naturalistic 'counter-hegemonic alliance'. Just some hunters in the Amazon we are having shot right now so we can have the privilige of extending cultural hegemony over nature.

When it's gone: it's gone. And so will we be too. Probably as we are still praising the wonders of the 'counter-hegemonic alliance' that killed us.

Gall ,

Actually there is a naturalistic alliance forming but it seems you haven't been paying attention because you seem stuck in some Malthusian mind set. In order to defeat capitalism you have to defeat Globalism so you first have to eliminate the Anglo-American Hegemony and get back to a multipolar world.

Ranting on about like Gretchen doesn't do any good.

BigB ,

Resources are finite and thermodynamics exist. These are the ineliminable, indisputable, and rock solid epistemology of the Earth System. Everything else is metaphysics – literally 'beyond nature; beyond physics'. Or, as it is more commonly known – economics. The imaginary epistemology of political economics and political theory. 'Theory' is the non-scientific sense of unfounded opinion and non-sense. A philosophical truth-theory that is not and cannot ever be true. Hypothetical non-sense.

I get my information from a wide range of sources that realise these foundational predicates. That is: a foundational set of beliefs that require no underpinning. I can only paraphrase Eddington on thermodynamics: "if your theory is found to be against the second law I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation."

Which is to say all modern political theory and economics – and by extension all opinions based on its internalisation – is the product of vivid and unfounded imagination. To which a naturalised epistemology is the only remedy.

There are lots of people working on the problem: but not in the political sphere. Which is why we are stuck in a hallucinated metaphysical political-economic theatre of the absurd and absolutised cultural non-sense. Which is not beyond anyone to rectify: if and when we accept the limitations of the physical-material Earth System. And apply them to our thinking.

#NoDealForNature until we accept that the thermodynamics of depletion naturally limit growth. Anything anyone says to the contrary should be treated with scepticism and cause a collapse into deepest humiliation of any rational thinker.

Richard Le Sarc ,

'Depopulation' is only a problem if you believe in the capitalist cancer cult of infinite growth on a finite planet, ie black magic. If you value Life on Earth, and its continuance, human depopulation is necessary. Best done slowly and humanely, by redistributing the wealth stolen by the capitalist parasites. The process seen in the Baltics and Ukraine is the capitalist way, cruel and inhumane. Even worse is planned for the Africans, south Asians and Chinese etc.

Gall ,

They don't for a minute believe in "infinite growth". They believe in the "bottom line","instant gratification" and "primitive accumulation". "Infinite growth" is a sales pitch that they use to sell the unwary on their rapaciousness. That is all. If they actually believed in "infinite growth" they've be investing in renewable resources not fracking, strip mining and other environmentally unfriendly practices.

Gall ,

The problem for Imperialists is that they only know how to plunder, rape and destroy thus all their weaponry and tactics is used for aggression they know nothing about actual defense which is their weak point. General George C Custer found this out some time back and so did Trump just recently when the American were assaulted by a barrage of missiles they couldn't stop.

Iran, Russia and China have one of the most advanced arsenal of defensive weapons ever developed such as the S- series of air defense system that can turn a Tomahawk attack into a turkey shoot. What was it? I think it was 100 Tomahawks fired on Syria after that false flag chemical attack and only 15 or so got through and this was the earlier version of the S missile defense S-300. They've already developed 500 which practically makes them impervious and is a true iron dome compared the iron sieve that the Israelis got for free during GW1 and then repackaged and sold back to the US Military for 15B with very few improvements except maybe for a pretty blue bow.

Not only that but they can return fire with hypersonic weapons that are unstoppable and can turn a base or Aircraft Carrier into a floating pinnate.

lundiel ,

Very well presented. Excellent article.

Gall ,

Actually the US proudly waving the banner of the East India Company is following in the footsteps of the deceased British Empire into the boneyard of empires which is Afghanistan. Iraq, Syria and Ukraine are just side shows. America can not escape history no matter what it does now since its days of empire are now numbered. Just as they were for the late unlamented Soviet Union.

The "New American Century" is ending preemptively early like Hitler's "Thousand Year Reich" and we can all breath a sigh of relief when it does.

Frank ,

The only thing that will get the bastard yanks out of the middle east is dead Americans.

Lots and lots of dead Americans.

Enough dead Americans to make the braindead jingoistic American masses notice.

Enough dead Americans to touch every family that produces grunts that serve their criminal state by raping and pillaging foreign countries.

Enough dead Americans to make dumbfuck Americans who say, 'Thank you for your service" squirm in literal pain at the words.

Dungroanin ,

They got brain damage in their bunkers in the best US base in the ME from just a handful of Kinetic energy missiles.

Their low yield nuke is their response.

The Israelis keep prodding the Bear – they even targeted a Russian Pantir system in Syria!

I suppose only a downing or infact destroying on the ground of a squadron of useless F35's with a threat to escalate into a full blown mobilisation is ever going to stop these imperialist chancers. Or a fully coordinated assassination campaign of the leads and their heirs as they frolic on their superyachts and space stations and secret Tracey islands.

And they can pay their taxes in full.

The Third world war is already fought – this really is a world war rather than some Anglo Imperialist bankers playing king of the castle – and they have LOST – the Empire is dead.

Long live the new Empire – the first not beholden to the bankers.

wardropper ,

Even with a new empire, our godless world would soon enough breed another generation of bankers to which we would be beholden.
That's what the fundamentally dishonest people in any society do.
Something wrong? Oh, well, we'll form a committee to discuss it, and in future we will look into creating a banking system which will enable us pay ourselves high wages for our invaluable contribution to human evolution.
It's MORALITY which is lacking today, not more legislation or a new constitution.

Gall ,

All one has to do is move off the centralized banking system developed and controlled by the Rothschilds that is totally based on creating finance out of thin air and return to a commodity based currency (not gold!!) that represents actual value like scrip or wampum or barter and the bankers will eventually starve.

Actually this system is starting to take hold in the US to a small extend to avoid the depredations of the IRS since Tax is based mostly on currency.

Stop using fiat currency and the problem's solved.

After WW II the French didn't have a press to press Francs so their standard of exchange became cigarettes and chocolate. It worked quite well until the presses started churning out paper again.

wardropper ,

My fear is that without the Rothschilds, some other over-ambitious family would simply step in and fill their shoes. It's the motivation to be greedy and wicked which needs addressing. How that would be done, of course, I have no idea.

Gall ,

This is only if you embrace the concept of centralized banking and the "magic" of compound interest. Current "banking" is all smoke and mirrors that favors the parasite who lives on the production of others through what is called "unearned income".

wardropper ,

I agree. But how to stop it?

Gall ,

Ignore the bastards instead. Just go off the grid.

wardropper ,

I can't deny the wisdom in that.

Dungroanin ,

The Red Shield ancient silk road trader and slaving company employees are only a family as say the Vatican is a family

wardropper ,

I know, but "only a family" with the wealth to buy whole nations
I find that very unsettling, to say the least.

Dungroanin ,

Indeed but there is always hope as the poet saw – THEY are the few, we are many.

Gall ,

Actually the Israelis are going a little slower now that isolated reports indicate that those flying turkeys AKA F-35s are getting popped out of the skies of Syria by antiquated Soviet SAMs. Of course there is no mention of this in the Mainstream Press. Just like there wasn't a word of a IDF General and his staff taken out by a shoulder launched RPG fired by Hezbollah in retaliation for attacking their media center in Beirut.

Antonym ,

Anybody who believes that the Israeli tail wags the US mil-ind. complex dog is contributing to the Jewish superiority myth.

Ken ,

They're not superior, but they do wag the US MIC dog in and ebb-and-flow kind of way. That 9/11 thing was quite the wag. Read Christopher Bollyn and study other aspects of the event if you're not sure of this.

Antonym ,

Langley and Riyadh love you; you fell for their ploy. See: Tel Aviv is much worse them.
The CIA/FBI failure explained.

The Mossad loves you too: for keeping mum on this Entebbe Mach 2.0 on their familiar New York crap they got huge US support in the ME.
Makes them look invincible too as a bonus .

5 dancing guys was all the proof needed – cheapest op in history.

Ken ,

"5 dancing guys was all the proof needed – cheapest op in history"

Oh please, that was such a minor bit of evidence of any Zionist/Israeli involvement, which spanned nearly every facet of the event and its aftermath.

The list of false flagging Zionist Jews in love with you is too long to list.

Gall ,

Oh please. What about the close to 200 Israelis who were arrested that day? Not to mention the helpful warning by Odigo which was only given to citizens of Israel?

Also one has to act who benefitted? Definitely not the Saudis or the Americans leaving Sharon who was trying to suppress a Palestinian uprising that he arrogantly started.

Speaking of your friendly five doing a fiddler on the roof on top of an Urban Moving Van that just happened to owned by another Israeli who fled the country. Didn't they say something stupid when arrested like "we are not your problem. It's the Palestinians who are your problem!"?

A pathetic frame up attempt but a frame none the less. Speaking of frame ups wasn't Fat Katz at SiteIntel (propaganda) who posted some stock footage of Palestinians celebrating which has been proven to be false since the only people who seem to celebrating that day was your friends the Dancing Israelis which doesn't prove their mental superiority at all but their arrogant stupidity,

Richard Le Sarc ,

The three, the USA, Saudi Arabia and the USA, are allies in destruction-the Real Axis of Evil. The dominant force, these days, given the control of the USA by Israel First Fifth Columnists, in the MSM, political 'contributions', the financial Moloch etc, is most certainly the Zionassties. Why don't you, like so many other Zionassties, glory in your power, Antsie. Nobody believes your ritual denials.

Gall ,

They don't really wag the dog by themselves. They have a lot of help from the Stand with Israel brain dead Christian Zionists who like Israelis consider themselves the chosen ones as well.

Ken ,

@Gall Yep! I had a long time friend who went Pentecostal and we drifted apart but still kept in touch. I lost him completely just after telling him that Israelis played a big part in 9/11.

Gall ,

Chuck Baldwin and a few other it seems have seen the light and are now questioning their colleagues undying support of Israel. Maybe you could show this article to your friend who seems enthralled by the terrorist snake er I mean state:
https://www.veteranstoday.com/2020/02/13/emperor-trump/

Ken ,

Thanks for that article. Were I ever able to get it in front of my estranged friend, it would make his head explode and kill him. Baldwin does seem to nail it. Chuck for president! I came across this rather intersting piece on 9/11 while at VT for your article.
https://www.veteranstoday.com/2020/02/10/9-11-the-bottom-line-an-open-letter-to-all-researchers/

Gall ,

Yes that pretty much sums up how 9/11 was carried on. Both Heinz Pommer and VT have done some excellent research based on facts not fantasy.

As far as your friend and many Christian Zionists in general. They seem to live in some alternative universe and dislike being confused by such irrelevant things as facts.

binra ,

It is a story that can be told in some detail – but when you say myth do you actually mean fallacy – ie – are you saying that Jewish power doesn't exercise considerable influence – if not control over US social and political and corporate development across of broad spectrum of leverages?

Richard Le Sarc ,

Yes-all those addresses of Congress, by Bibi, where the Congress critters compete to display the most extreme groveling and adulation, are just the natural expression of reverence and awe at his semi-Divine moral excellence. Denying the undeniable is SOP for Zionassties.

normal wisdom ,

what jews?
i do not see any jews
just a sea of khazar ashkanazim pirates
a kaballa talmudick race trick
a crime syndicate pretending to be semite
jew is just the cover
init

[Feb 15, 2020] Many People In NATO Countries Say No To Supporting A NATO Ally In Military Conflict With Russia

Feb 15, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

Many People In NATO Countries Say "No" To Supporting A NATO Ally In Military Conflict With Russia by Tyler Durden Sat, 02/15/2020 - 07:00 Authored by Adam Dick via The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity,

NATO is marketed as providing each member nation with the benefit that the other member nations are committed to coming to its aid militarily in the event of an attack by another nation, especially Russia .

However, Pew Research Center poll results released Sunday indicate that the majority or plurality of people in 11 of 16 NATO countries where individuals were questioned oppose their respective governments meeting this commitment, at least if the military adversary were Russia.

These poll results indicate that serious thought should be given to disbanding NATO , an organization with a primary objective that appears to be at odds with public opinion in many NATO countries.

When asked if their respective countries' governments should use military force to defend a NATO ally country neighboring Russia with which "Russia got into a serious military conflict," people living in the 16 NATO countries tended to answer in the negative.

"No" was the answer for the majority of polled individuals in eight countries -- France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Spain, Bulgaria, Slovakia, and Turkey.

In three more NATO countries -- the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland -- a plurality rejected military intervention.

Only in five countries -- the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Lithuania -- did more people (a majority in each case) support such military intervention than reject it.

[Feb 15, 2020] The Valdai Rest Home and Gagarin by Gilbert Doctorow

Feb 09, 2020 | www.antiwar.com

I open this essay about the Russian middle classes at leisure with one essential definition.

If you go to www.booking.com and type the transliterated Russian name of the establishment from which I am writing, "Dom Otdikha Valday," in the Search box, you be surprised by what you find.

The word for word translation from the Russian, namely "Valdai Rest Home," can lead speakers of English into confusion. That this is NOT an old folks home, you will see at once from the photos on the website. It would better be described as a hotel and wellness complex. Let us just say that Russian can be as quaint in its own way as the "Ye Olde" term so widely used in tourist English.

This year-round resort has a rich history dating back to Soviet times when it catered to Communist nomenklatura . About a decade ago, it was reconstructed and expanded to world class four or five star standards in preparation to receive what has become Vladimir Putin's annual gathering of political thinkers, mostly academics, from Russia and abroad known now as the Valdai Discussion Club. But the swelling numbers of invitees outgrew the physical capacity of the 250 seat conference hall in Valdai after the very first event there. The place name remains while the de facto location for the meetings has been in Sochi these past several years.

Nonetheless, Valdai has retained its association with the President of the Russian Federation to this day. Its location in the middle of a nature preserve of the same name situated half way between Moscow and St. Petersburg is the secret to its allure. Putin has a dacha in the area which he visits from time to time except in the late spring during the blooming of birch trees whose pollen he is allergic to. A special railway spur to that dacha was recently completed to provide a safer and less conspicuous access than by helicopter or motorcade.

The Valdai "rest home" is 15 km from the district town of that name in the hamlet of Roshchino. It is surrounded by a mixed birch and pine forest and it is adjacent to several interlinked lakes

In winter it offers cross-country skiing trails through the forest or, if there has been a long cold snap, across and along the lakes.

Last year the forest trails were encumbered by a lot of fallen branches and other debris carried by strong winds while the lake was well and truly frozen allowing for pleasurable long distance skiing on its flat surface. This year once we had a fresh 5 cm snowfall the forest trails were magnificent whereas the lake had only thin ice and was off limits.

In the summer, the lakes offer quiet boating and fishing. Due to the elevation and prevailing winds from the northwest, the water rarely rises above 18 degrees Centigrade and is swimmable only for hardy souls! But the attractive rooms of the main residential complex and the luxury fully detached "cottages" or dachas overlooking the lake find enthusiasts in all seasons. Many of the cottages have their own quays at lakeside.

According to one receptionist, the guests are split 50:50 between Muscovites and Petersburgers. In this sense, the two couples with whom we spend this vacation time in Valdai fit the average perfectly. Guests are also evenly divided between commercial visitors, like us, and federal or municipal employees who are given concessionary rates. The range of incomes goes from lower middle and middle middle class in the main hotel building, where rooms with full board for two cost slightly more than 100 euros a day in winter, and upper middle class in the cottages, which can rent for several hundred euros a day when they are in demand, meaning in summer. There are almost no foreigners.

At Valdai, the emphasis is on a healthy life style. There are no smokers and no drinkers. Not only do guests observe the no smoking rules indoors, but I have never seen a cigarette butt lying on the ground outdoors.

It must be emphasized that family values prevail. Most of the guests are young couples, probably in their late 20s, early 30s with their one, and more commonly two children, aged from toddlers to perhaps eight or ten years of age. Single women or men are exceptional. Gray heads are also exceptional and mostly belong to grandmas who are tagging along, or perhaps footing the bill, and are keeping an eye on the grandchildren during mealtime.

The cuisine might be called Institutional Russian. This is traditional fare that you will find in most any simple eatery or "stolovaya" across the country. For those who have not been to Russia and might imagine that it is one big "borscht belt" with caviar and pancakes thrown in for a touch of luxury, I aim to bring them back down to earth.

The cuisine is "light" in the sense that there is virtually no red meat. Instead, there is chicken and fish served as fillets or as patties, an occasional pasta dish and some hot specialty items made from low fat cottage cheese. There are lots of cold salads served nature , i.e., without mayonnaise or dressings. Soup is a must at lunch. Three types of hot cereal are on offer both at breakfast and supper. Indeed, the difference between the buffet assortment at breakfast, lunch and dinner is negligible. You take what you like when you like it. That said, coffee is provided only at breakfast, perhaps in keeping with the wellness principle.

The chilled beverages tend to be concentrated in berry juices, in sugared and unsugared variations, and in fermented milk products, meaning kefir, ryazhenka and liquid yoghurt. If there is any linkage between Institutional Russian cuisine and what Jewish emigrants brought to the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the first quarter of the last century, it would be precisely these sour milk concoctions, which at one time were the stock in trade of New York "milk bars" lasting into the '50's.

Desserts are modest, the most common and tasty being freshly made thin pancakes that you top with honey or jam or condensed milk (!) to suit your taste.

On balance, this diet is not fattening even if it is taken in copious amounts by the diners, who are otherwise exercising quite energetically either outdoors or in the splendid indoor pools. This is not to deny that a fair number of hotel guests are chubby. But very few are seriously overweight and none, not one during our stay three years in succession, could be described as obese. The heftier males may be assumed to be doing weightlifting and other workouts regularly, and quite possibly are body guards in their working lives.

As for entertainment, there is an extensive lending library. All the rooms have satellite television, 20 channels to be exact, including BBC World in English, which is not particularly commonplace in Russian hotels which have few or no foreign guests. This is complemented by daily film screenings in the conference hall, at 5.30pm for kids and at 8pm for adults.

So what is the resort management showing to its clientele of middle class Russians from the nation's capitals who have come for a good time in family surroundings?

There are some American films, to be sure, and some Central European offerings, such as the prize winning Illusionist that was projected a couple of nights ago, but they are outnumbered by the works of the Russian cinema industry. Russian films came back to life in the past twenty years. They offer high quality animation much appreciated by little kids and some surprisingly well balanced social and political satires for the adults.

In this closing third of my essay, I direct attention precisely at the films being shown because of what they say about the audience, its degree of self-awareness and sophistication.

The President's Vacation (2018 release)

This film, which was very unkindly described as 'trash' by the website Meduza , is noteworthy as a splendid example of the mistaken identity genre of farce handed down from 18th and 19 th centuries in Western Europe. Like the plays of Feydeau, it amuses as well as informs, and it tests the limits of social and political criticism of the Putin regime in a good humored yet probing discussion of corruption and other social ills.

We see a presidential administration keen on keeping the Leader in a bubble of Potemkin Village misinformation about the true state of the nation. This he tries to escape from by going off on vacation incognito without the usual cohort of body guards and sycophantic handlers. His lieutenants disobey his order to stay away but mistakenly take an unemployed fraudster and deadbeat for the President in his disguise, leading to promulgation of several scandalous presidential decrees during the week of the vacation while the real Vladimir Vladimirovich learns firsthand how people live and what the general population thinks of the St. Petersburg gang ( shaika ) of assistants he has brought to power.

Gagarin (2014 release)

Our intelligentsia friends declined to join us for the screening of Gagarin , which they expected to be a straightforward piece of propaganda, the sort of cheap patriotism they scorn. That is a pity because the film proved to be complex, with several layers of messages addressed to different segments of the expected theater audience.

Yes, at one level it was sports arena patriotism and nostalgia for Soviet culture. But at other levels it was celebrating the human courage of concrete historical personages in very trying circumstances. I have in mind here both the astronaut and Sergei Korolev, the rocket designer and leading figure in the soviet space program of the time.

Most importantly, the film underlined the awful poverty of a country that was basking in the triumph of having launched the first sputnik five years earlier and now, in 1961, was beating the USA, becoming the first to have launched a human into orbit and brought him back alive.

For Russians who were adults in the 1960s, still more for Russians who were active in the space industry back then as one of our friends had been, their country's poverty both in comparison to the great competitor of the time, the USA, and absolutely, is second nature and elicits no reflection. However, for an outsider, the producers' decision to bring this into high relief is one of the most surprising features of their film which raises questions about the Russian people that are highly relevant to the present day geopolitical situation.

In his post-acquittal hour long televised speech, Donald Trump remarked that from the moment he was elected in November 2016 all we heard was Russia, Russia, Russia thanks to the efforts of the Democrats to bring him down. The power of the Kremlin to wreck democracy, to frustrate the whole of US foreign policy and much more has been blown out if all proportion by our politicians, by our mass media. It is easy to forget that in the midst of the Cold War, i.e. the time setting of Gagarin , Russia was also made a bogeyman with a frighteningly vast military force and hostile intentions.

Today even as we see Russians under every rock our official policy line is that theirs is a declining power which acts as a spoiler. Thus, Russia's conventional and nuclear military might are played down rather than up.

The value of Gagarin is that it shows how the very successful Soviet space program, like the country at large, hit way above its weight. Korolev says at one point that he did want the Americans to see what he actually had for equipment lest they show their contempt.

It is commonplace today to stress that the GDP of the Russian Federation is ten times smaller than that of the USA. However, as we can see in Gagarin the reality of the respective economies was likely similar back in the midst of the Cold War if we look at what these economies actually delivered after deducting the inferior manufactured goods and the heavy losses in agriculture from farm to shop shelves. Thus, it is arguable that the Russian Federation, with half the population of the Soviet Union, is a much more potent adversary than the USSR ever was.

Gagarin underlines the personal qualities of its heroes, who were in fact even more extraordinary than shown. The producers held back, for example, that Korolev had spent five years in the Gulag before he was plucked out and promoted to the crucial position in the space program. The sense of duty and love of country of these personages is comparable to the merits of Russian soldiery in WWII. This factor of motivation and talent and self-sacrifice and idealism is what our foreign policy community in its hubris and bean counter approach to national greatness misses entirely.

That the Soviet Union in its poverty could yield the deeds of cutting edge engineering and human spirit of Gagarin is what made it a great power. That Russia today, with a military budget ten times smaller than America's, could come up with its great equalizers in new strategic weapons systems like its hypersonic rockets now in service is testimony to the same enduring national traditions that we ignore at our peril.

Gilbert Doctorow is a Brussels-based political analyst. His latest book Does Russia Have a Future? was published in August 2017. Reprinted with permission from his blog .

[Feb 14, 2020] Is Apartheid the Inevitable Outcome of Zionism? by Henry Siegman

Highly recommended!
Actually any supremacist ideology produces something like an apartheid regime for other nationalities.
The current situation looks like a dead end with little chances of reconciliation, especially after recent killing of protesters by Israel army/snipers. But in general, it is iether a two state solution of equal rights for Palestinians and Jews in the same state. The elements of theocratic state should be eliminated and right wing parties outlawed as neofascist parties which threatens democracy.
Notable quotes:
"... The peace process and the two-state solution failed because America -- the only country on which Israel could count on for generous diplomatic, military and economic support, and therefore the only country that has the necessary leverage to influence Israel's policies -- allowed it to fail. Consequently, most Israelis, including many belonging to the Blue/White party, headed by General Benny Gantz, oppose granting any future Palestinian entity the most basic features of sovereignty, including control of its own borders. Gantz refused to form a unity government with the Likud because of Netanyahu's indictment for multiple crimes, not because of differences over peace policy. What doubts anyone might have had on this subject were removed when Gantz just announced that he embraces Netanyahu's intention to annex the Jordan Valley to Israel. ..."
Jan 22, 2020 | responsiblestatecraft.org

The threat of a new war with Iran that might have replicated what has been the worst disaster in the history of America's international misadventures -- George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq based on fabricated lies -- sucked the air out of all other international diplomatic activity, not least of what used to be called the Middle East peace process.

Yet the failure of the peace process has not been the consequence of recent mindless and destructive actions by Donald Trump and of the clownish shenanigans of his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who was charged with helping Israeli hardliners in nailing down permanently the Palestinian occupation. For all the damage they caused (mainly to Palestinians), prospects for a two-state solution actually ended during President Barack Obama's administration, despite Secretary of State John Kerry's energetic efforts to renew the stalled negotiations. They were not resumed because Obama, like his predecessors, failed to take the tough measures that were necessary to overcome Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's determination to prevent the emergence of a Palestinian state, notwithstanding his pledge in his Bar-Ilan speech of 2009 to implement the agreements of the Oslo accords.

Yes, Obama and Kerry did warn that Israel's continued occupation might lead to an Israeli apartheid regime. But knowing how deeply the accusation of an incipient Israeli apartheid could anger right-wingers in Israel and in the U.S., they repeatedly followed that warning with the assurance that "America will always have Israel's back." It was the sequence of this two-part statement that convinced Netanyahu that AIPAC had succeeded in getting American presidents to protect Israel's impunity. Had Obama and Kerry reversed that sequence, first noting that the U.S. had always had Israel's back, and then warning that Israel is now on the verge of trading its democracy for apartheid, the warning might have had quite different implications for Israel's government.

The peace process and the two-state solution failed because America -- the only country on which Israel could count on for generous diplomatic, military and economic support, and therefore the only country that has the necessary leverage to influence Israel's policies -- allowed it to fail. Consequently, most Israelis, including many belonging to the Blue/White party, headed by General Benny Gantz, oppose granting any future Palestinian entity the most basic features of sovereignty, including control of its own borders. Gantz refused to form a unity government with the Likud because of Netanyahu's indictment for multiple crimes, not because of differences over peace policy. What doubts anyone might have had on this subject were removed when Gantz just announced that he embraces Netanyahu's intention to annex the Jordan Valley to Israel.

For the Palestinians, territory is the most critical of the final status issues. The current internationally recognized borders that separate Israel and the Occupied Territories reduced the territory originally assigned to Palestinians in the U.N. Partition Plan of 1947 from roughly half of Palestine to 22 percent. Israel, which was assigned originally roughly the other half of Palestine, now has 78 percent, not including Palestinian territory Israel has confiscated for its illegal settlements.

No present or prospective Palestinian leadership will accept any further reduction of territory from their promised state. Given the territory they already lost in 1947, and again in 1949, and given Israel's refusal to accept the return of Palestinian refugees to Israel, is it really reasonable to expect Palestinians to give up any further territory? Where else other than the West Bank could Palestine refugees return to?

The one-state solution that is preferred by many Israelis is essentially a continuation of the present de facto apartheid. It is not the one-state alternative any Palestinian would accept. Repeated polling has shown that a majority of Jewish Israelis are unprepared to grant equal rights to Palestinians in a one-state arrangement. This opposition is unsurprising, for the inclusion in Israel's body politic of West Bank and Gaza Palestinians would mean the end of Israel as a Jewish state, for Israel's non-Jewish citizens would then outnumber its Jewish ones, and may already do so. Of course, Israel could contrive a non-voting status for the West Bank's Palestinians, something many Jewish Israelis and political parties actually advocate, but that would not deceive anyone. It would mean the formal end of Israel's democracy.

The foregoing notwithstanding, I have long maintained that if Israel were compelled to choose between one state that grants full equality to Palestinians now under occupation and two states that conform substantially to existing agreements and international law, and no other options were available to it, the majority of Israelis would opt for two states. Why? Because as noted above, the overwhelming majority of Israelis oppose any arrangement that might produce a Palestinian majority with the same rights Israeli Jewish citizens enjoy. Of course, Israel has never been compelled to make such a choice, nor will they be compelled to do so by the international community.

However, they could be compelled to do so by the Palestinians, but only if Palestinians were finally to expel their current leadership and choose a more honest and courageous one. That new leadership would have to shut down the Palestinian Authority, which its present leaders allowed Israel to portray as an arrangement that places Palestinians on the path to statehood, of course in some undefined future. Israel has deliberately perpetuated that myth to conceal its real intention to keep the current occupation unchanged. The new Palestinian leadership would have to declare that since Israel has denied them their own state and established a one-state reality, Palestinians will no longer deny that reality. Consequently, the national struggle will now be for full citizenship in the one state that Israel has forced them into. I have argued for the past two decades that the one-state option is far more likely to open a path to a two-state solution, however counter intuitive that may seem to be. Palestinians rejected it categorically from the outset, but younger Palestinians have come around to accepting it -- even preferring it to the two-state model.

Unlike the struggle for a two-state solution, a goal that has so easily been manipulated by Israel to mean whatever serves their real goal of preventing such an outcome -- and also so easily allowed international actors to pretend they have not given up their efforts to achieve that outcome, an anti-apartheid struggle does not lend itself to such deceptions. South Africa has taught the world too well what apartheid looks like, as well as how the international community could deal with it. Of course, South Africa has also shown how long and bloody a struggle against apartheid can be, and the terrible price paid by the victims of such a regime. But Palestinians already live in such a regime, and have for long been paying a terrible price for their subjugation.

Yet deeper and more troubling questions are raised by the choices that now face Israel, including whether the original idea of the Zionist movement of a state that is both Jewish and democratic is not deeply oxymoronic, a question that not only Israelis but Jews outside of Israel must address. That question is underscored by the challenges to India's democracy posed by its prime minister's decision to turn his country into a Hindu nation. It is a question that did not escape some of the founders of the Zionist movement, who argued that Zionism should define the state as Jewish only in its ethnic and secular cultural dimensions. But that this is not how Jewish identity is treated in Israel is undeniable.

Imagine if Israel's laws defining national identity and citizenship, as recently reformulated by Israel's Knesset, were adopted by the U.S. Congress or by other Western democratic countries, and if Christianity in its "cultural dimensions" were declared to be their national identity, with citizenship also granted by conversion to the dominant religion, as is now the case in Israel, where arrangements for Jewish religious conversions are part of the Prime Minister's office.

Is this not what America's founders, and the waves of immigrants, including European Jews, sought to escape from? And how would Jews react today to legislation in the U.S. Congress that would explicitly seek to maintain the majority status of Christians in the U.S.? Are Jews to take pride in a Jewish state that adopts citizenship requirements that mirror those advocated by white Christian supremacists? These supremacists have already proclaimed jubilantly that Israel's policies vindicate the ones they have long been advocating.

It is true, of course, that for some Jews, aware of the history of anti-Semitism that has spanned the ages, and especially the Holocaust, Zionism's contradictions with democratic principles are an unpleasant but inescapable dilemma they can live with. As a survivor of the Holocaust, I can understand that. But I also understand that the likely consequences of these contradictions are not benign, and can yield their own terrible outcomes, particularly when they lead to the dalliances by the prime minister of a Jewish state with right-wing racist and xenophobic heads of state and of political parties that have fascist and anti-Semitic parentage.

Legislation proposed in the U.S. Congress and by Trump, and recently celebrated by his son-in-law Kushner in a New York Times op-ed, proposing that criticism of Zionism be outlawed as antisemitism , would be laughable, were it not so clearly -- and outrageously -- intended to deny freedom of speech on this subject. Yet laughable it is, for its first target would have to be Jews -- not liberal left-wingers but the most Orthodox Jews, known as Haredim, in Israel and in America.

At the very inception of the Zionist movement 150 years ago, not only the Haredim but the overwhelming majority of Orthodox Jewry everywhere was opposed to Zionism, which it considered to be a Jewish heresy, not only because the Zionists were mostly secularists, but because of an oath taken by Jewish leaders after the destruction of the Second Temple following their exile from Palestine, that Jews would not reestablish a Jewish kingdom except following the messianic era. Zionism was also bitterly opposed by much of the world's Jewish Reform movement, many of whose leaders insisted that Jewishness is a religion, not a political identity.

Much of Orthodox Jewry did not end its opposition to Zionism until after the war of 1967, but many if not most Haredis continue to oppose Zionism as heresy. Most of its members refuse to serve in Israel's military, to celebrate Israel's Independence Day, sing its national anthem, and do not allow prayers in their synagogues for the wellbeing of Israel's political leaders. Trump, Kushner, and the U.S. Congress would have to arrest them as anti-Semites.

I have no doubt that Trump's rage at the Jewish chairmen of the two Congressional committees that led the procedures for his impeachment will sooner or later explode in anti-Semitic expletives. The only reason it has not done so yet is because of Trump's fear of jeopardizing Evangelical support and Sheldon Adelson's mega bucks. After all, Trump already told us that the neo-Nazi rioters in Charlottesville declaiming "Jews will not replace us" included "very fine people." Netanyahu never criticized Trump's statement, for he too does not want to jeopardize certain relationships, namely the "very fine people" he has embraced -- leaders in Hungary, Poland, Austria, Italy, Brazil, Philippines, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere.

If Trump's son-in-law is searching for anti-Semites, he should have been told they are far closer at hand than in America's schools, for they are ensconced in the White House. They are also to be found in Jerusalem where they are being accorded honors by Netanyahu. The anti-Semitic dog whistling contained in Trump's attacks on the two Jewish congressmen were not misunderstood by his hardcore supporters -- who now include the entire leadership of the Republican party -- who Trump needs to take him to victory in the coming presidential elections, or to keep him in the White House were he to lose those elections.

If apartheid is coming (or has come) out of Zion, it should not shock that what may come out of Washington is a repeat by Trump's Republican shock troops of what occurred in Berlin in 1933, when the Bundestag was taken over by the Nazi party and ended Germany's democracy.

[Feb 14, 2020] More Lies on Iran The White House Just Can t Help Itself as New Facts Emerge by Philip Giraldi

Notable quotes:
"... It soon emerged that the Iranian was in fact in Baghdad to discuss with the Iraqi Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi a plan that might lead to the de-escalation of the ongoing conflict between Saudi Arabia and Iran, a meeting that the White House apparently knew about may even have approved. If that is so, events as they unfolded suggest that the US government might have encouraged Soleimani to make his trip so he could be set up and killed. Donald Trump later dismissed the lack of any corroboration of the tale of "imminent threat" being peddled by Pompeo, stating that it didn't really matter as Soleimani was a terrorist who deserved to die. ..."
"... It now appears that the original death of the American contractor that sparked the tit-for-tat conflict was not carried out by Kata'ib Hezbollah at all. An Iraqi Army investigative team has gathered convincing evidence that it was an attack staged by Islamic State. In fact, the Iraqi government has demonstrated that Kata'ib Hezbollah has had no presence in Kirkuk province, where the attack took place, since 2014. It is a heavily Sunni area where Shi'a are not welcome and is instead relatively hospitable to all-Sunni IS. It was, in fact, one of the original breeding grounds for what was to become ISIS. ..."
Feb 14, 2020 | www.unz.com

Admittedly the news cycle in the United States seldom runs longer than twenty-four hours, but that should not serve as an excuse when a major story that contradicts what the Trump Administration has been claiming appears and suddenly dies. The public that actually follows the news might recall a little more than one month ago the United States assassinated a senior Iranian official named Qassem Soleimani. Openly killing someone in the government of a country with which one is not at war is, to say the least, unusual, particularly when the crime is carried out in yet another country with which both the perpetrator and the victim have friendly relations. The justification provided by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, speaking for the administration, was that Soleimani was in Iraq planning an "imminent" mass killing of Americans, for which no additional evidence was provided at that time or since.

It soon emerged that the Iranian was in fact in Baghdad to discuss with the Iraqi Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi a plan that might lead to the de-escalation of the ongoing conflict between Saudi Arabia and Iran, a meeting that the White House apparently knew about may even have approved. If that is so, events as they unfolded suggest that the US government might have encouraged Soleimani to make his trip so he could be set up and killed. Donald Trump later dismissed the lack of any corroboration of the tale of "imminent threat" being peddled by Pompeo, stating that it didn't really matter as Soleimani was a terrorist who deserved to die.

The incident that started the killing cycle that eventually included Soleimani consisted of a December 27th attack on a US base in Iraq in which four American soldiers and two Iraqis were wounded while one US contractor, an Iraqi-born translator, was killed. The United States immediately blamed Iran, claiming that it had been carried out by an Iranian supported Shi'ite militia called Kata'ib Hezbollah. It provided no evidence for that claim and retaliated by striking a Kata'ib base, killing 25 Iraqis who were in the field fighting the remnants of Islamic State (IS). The militiamen had been incorporated into the Iraqi Army and this disproportionate response led to riots outside the US Embassy in Baghdad, which were also blamed on Iran by the US There then followed the assassinations of Soleimani and nine senior Iraqi militia officers. Iran retaliated when it fired missiles at American forces , injuring more than one hundred soldiers, and then mistakenly shot down a passenger jet , killing an additional 176 people. As a consequence due to the killing by the US of 34 Iraqis in the two incidents, the Iraqi Parliament also voted to expel all American troops.

It now appears that the original death of the American contractor that sparked the tit-for-tat conflict was not carried out by Kata'ib Hezbollah at all. An Iraqi Army investigative team has gathered convincing evidence that it was an attack staged by Islamic State. In fact, the Iraqi government has demonstrated that Kata'ib Hezbollah has had no presence in Kirkuk province, where the attack took place, since 2014. It is a heavily Sunni area where Shi'a are not welcome and is instead relatively hospitable to all-Sunni IS. It was, in fact, one of the original breeding grounds for what was to become ISIS.

This new development was reported in the New York Times in an article that was headlined "Was US Wrong About Attack That Nearly Started a War With Iran? Iraqi military and intelligence officials have raised doubts about who fired the rockets that started a dangerous spiral of events." In spite of the sensational nature of the report it generally was ignored in television news and in other mainstream media outlets, letting the Trump administration get away with yet another big lie, one that could easily have led to a war with Iran.

Iraqi investigators found and identified the abandoned white Kia pickup with an improvised Katyusha rocket launcher in the vehicle's bed that was used to stage the attack. It was discovered down a desert road within range of the K-1 joint Iraqi-American base that was hit by at least ten missiles in December, most of which struck the American area.

There is no direct evidence tying the attack to any particular party and the improvised KIA truck is used by all sides in the regional fighting, but the Iraqi officials point to the undisputed fact that it was the Islamic State that had carried out three separate attacks near the base over the 10 days preceding December 27th. And there are reports that IS has been increasingly active in Kirkuk Province during the past year, carrying out near daily attacks with improvised roadside bombs and ambushes using small arms. There had, in fact, been reports from Iraqi intelligence that were shared with the American command warning that there might be an IS attack on K-1 itself, which is an Iraqi air base in that is shared with US forces.

The intelligence on the attack has been shared with American investigators, who have also examined the pick-up truck. The Times reports that the US command in Iraq continue to insist that the attack was carried out by Kata'ib based on information, including claimed communications intercepts, that it refuses to make public. The US forces may not have shared the intelligence they have with the Iraqis due to concerns that it would be leaked to Iran, but senior Iraqi military officers are nevertheless perplexed by the reticence to confide in an ally.

If the Iraqi investigation of the facts around the December attack on K-1 is reliable, the Donald Trump administration's reckless actions in Iraq in late December and early January cannot be justified. Worse still, it would appear that the White House was looking for an excuse to attack and kill a senior Iranian official to send some kind of message, a provocation that could easily have resulted in a war that would benefit no one. To be sure, the Trump administration has lied about developments in the Middle East so many times that it can no longer be trusted. Unfortunately, demanding any accountability from the Trump team would require a Congress that is willing to shoulder its responsibility for truth in government backed up by a media that is willing to take on an administration that regularly punishes anyone or any entity that dares to challenge it

That is the unfortunate reality in America today.


AnonStarter , says: Show Comment February 14, 2020 at 12:25 am GMT

Well, the 9/11 Commission lied about Israeli involvement, Israeli neocons lied America into Iraq, and Netanyahu lied about Iranian nukes, so this latest news is just par for the course.
KA , says: Show Comment February 14, 2020 at 12:59 am GMT
@04398436986 lets stay focused.

Pompeo had evidence of immediate catastrophic attack. That turned out to be a lie and plain BS.
Why should we believe Pompeo or White House or intelligence about the situation developing around 27-29 Dec ? Is it because it's USA who is saying so?

anonymous [307] Disclaimer , says: Show Comment February 14, 2020 at 1:12 am GMT
[it would appear that the White House was looking for an excuse to attack and kill a senior Iranian official to send some kind of message, a provocation that could easily have resulted in a war that would benefit no one.]

The Jewish mafia stooge and fifth column, Trump, is a war criminal and an ASSASSIN.

... ... ...

melpol , says: Show Comment February 14, 2020 at 1:13 am GMT
War with Iran is off the table. Carpet bombing Iran would lead to the destruction of Israel and its nuclear facility...
Sean , says: Show Comment February 14, 2020 at 2:23 am GMT

Worse still, it would appear that the White House was looking for an excuse to attack and kill a senior Iranian official to send some kind of message, a provocation that could easily have resulted in a war that would benefit no one.

Soleimani was a soldier involved in covert operations, Iran's most celebrated hero, and had been featured in the Iraq media as the target of multiple Western assassination attempts. He did not have diplomatic status.

As it happens Iran did not declare war on America and America did not declare war on Iran. If Americans soldiers killed in Iraq should not have been there in the first place, then the same goes for an Iranian soldier killed there too.

KA , says: Show Comment February 14, 2020 at 2:30 am GMT
@04398436986 There is western assertion and western assertion only that Iran influences Iraqi administration and intelligence . It can be a projection from a failing America . It can be also a valid possibility .

But lying is America's alter ego . It comes easily and as default explanation even when admitting truth would do a better job .

Now let's focus on ISIS 's claims . Why is Ametica not taking it ( claim of ISIS) as truth and fact when USA has for last 19 years has jailed , bombed, attacked mentally retarded , caves and countries because somebody has pledged allegiance to Al Quida or to ISIS!!!

It seems neither truth nor lies , but what suits a particular psychopath at a particular time – that becomes USA's report ( kind of unassigned sex – neither truth nor lies – take your pick and find the toilet to flush it down memory hole) – so Pompeo lies to nation hoping no one in administration will ask . When administrative staff gets interested to know the truth , Pompeo tells them to suck it up , move on and get ready to explain the next batch of reality manufactured by a regime and well trained by philosopher Karl Rove

AnonStarter , says: Show Comment February 14, 2020 at 4:06 am GMT
@04398436986 conspiracy mongers

To what "conspiracy" are you referring? It's a well established fact that your ilk was, at the very least, aware that the 9/11 attacks would occur and celebrated them in broad daylight. No conspiracy theory needed. Mossad ordnance experts were living practically next door to the hijackers. Well established fact.

It's also undeniable that the 9/11 Commission airbrushed Israeli involvement from their report. No conspiracy theory there, either.

Same goes for Israeli neocons and their media mandarins using "faulty intel" to get their war in Iraq. "Clean Break"? "Rebuilding America's Defenses"? Openly written and published. Judith Miller's lies? Also no conspiracy.

And Israel's own intelligence directors were undermining Netanyahu's lies on Iran. Not a conspiracy in sight.

contemplating the outcome of normal everyday competition, influenced by good & bad luck, is just too much truth for some psychological makeups

That's one of the lamest attempts at deflection I've seen thus far, and I've seen quite a few here.

Those who deny the official version of 9/11 are in the majority now:

https://www.livescience.com/56479-americans-believe-conspiracy-theories.html

We've reached critical mass. Clearly, that's just too much truth for your psychological makeup. Were we really that worthy of ignoring, your people wouldn't be working 24/7/365 to peddle your malarkey in fora of this variety.

JUSA , says: Show Comment February 14, 2020 at 5:23 am GMT
I have thought that Trump's true impeachable crime was the illegal assassination of a foreign general who was not in combat. Pence should also be impeached for the botched coup in Venezuela. That was true embarrassment bringing that "El Presidente" that no one recognizes to the SOTU.

USA is basically JU-S-A now, Jews own and run this country from top to bottom, side to side, and because of it, pretty much run the world. China-Russia-Iran form their new "Axis of Evil" to be brought in line. It wouldn't surprise me one bit if the Covid-19 is a bioweapon, except not one created by China. Israel has been working on an ethnic based bioweapon for years. US sent 172 military "athletes" to the Military World Games in Wuhan in October, 2019, two weeks before the first case of coronavirus appeared. Almost too coincidental.

animalogic , says: Show Comment February 14, 2020 at 6:20 am GMT
@Sean He wasn't there as a soldier -- he was there in a diplomatic role. (regardless of his official "status"). It also appears he was lured there with intent to assaninate.
Your last para is not only terrible logic but ignores the point of the article. Iran likely was not responsible for the US deaths. Even had it been responsible it would still not legitimate such a baldly criminal action.
Sean , says: Show Comment February 14, 2020 at 6:29 am GMT
@JUSA

[I]illegal assassination of a foreign general who was not in combat

Lawful combat according to the Geneva Convention in which war is openly declared and fought between two countries each of which have regular uniformed forces that do all the actual fighting is an extremely rare thing. It is all proxy forces, deniability and asymmetric warfare in which one side (the stronger) is attacked by phantom combatants.

The Israeli PM publically alluded to the fact that Soleimani had almost been killed in the Mossad operation to kill Imad Mughniyeh a decade ago. The Iranian public knew that Soleimani had narrowly escaped death from Israeli drones, because Soleimani appeared on Iranian TV in October and told the story. A plot kill him by at a memorial service in Iran was supposedly foiled. He came from Lebanon by way of Syria into Iraq as if none of this had happened. Trump had sacked Bolton and failed to react to the drone attack on Saudi oil.

Iran seems to have thought that refusal to actually fight in the type of war that the international conventions were designed to regulate is a licence to exert pressure by launch attacks without being targeted oneself. Now do they understand.

Ace , says: Show Comment February 14, 2020 at 8:41 am GMT
@Sean American troops invaded Iraq under false pretenses, killed thousands, and caused great destruction. Chaos and vengeful Sunnis spilled over into Syria where the US proceeded to grovel before the terrorists we fret about. Soleimani was effective in organizing resistance in Iraq and Syria and was in both countries with the blessing of their governments.

How you get Soleimani shouldn't be there out of that I have no idea.

Zen , says: Show Comment February 14, 2020 at 12:04 pm GMT
@04398436986 Yet you ignore that the Neocons have lied about virtually every cause if war ever. Lied about Iraq, North Korea and Iran nuclear info actions, about chem weapons in Syria, lied about Kosovo, lied about Libya, lied about Benghazi, lied about Venezuela. So Whom I gonna believe, no government, but a Neocon led one least of all
Vojkan , says: Show Comment February 14, 2020 at 1:05 pm GMT
@Sean American soldiers went there uninvited. Soleimani went there because he was invited. That makes a hell of a difference.
Robjil , says: Show Comment February 14, 2020 at 1:05 pm GMT
It is common knowledge that ISIS is a US/Israeli creation. ISIS is the Israeli Secret Intelligence Service. Thus, the US/Israel staged the attack on the US base on 12.27.2019.

https://www.globalresearch.ca/isis-is-a-us-israeli-creation-top-ten-indications/5518627

ISIS is a US-Israeli Creation: Indication #2: ISIS Never Attacks Israel

It is more than highly strange and suspicious that ISIS never attacks Israel – it is another indication that ISIS is controlled by Israel. If ISIS were a genuine and independent uprising that was not covertly orchestrated by the US and Israel, why would they not try to attack the Zionist regime, which has attacked almost of all of its Muslim neighbors ever since its inception in 1948? Israel has attacked Egypt, Syria and Lebanon, and of course has decimated Palestine. It has systemically tried to divide and conquer its Arab neighbors. It continually complains of Islamic terrorism. Yet, when ISIS comes on the scene as the bloody and barbaric king of Islamic terrorism, it finds no fault with Israel and sees no reason to target a regime which has perpetrated massive injustice against Muslims? This stretches credibility to a snapping point.

ISIS and Israel don't attack each other – they help each other. Israel was treating ISIS soldiers and other anti-Assad rebels in its hospitals! Mortal enemies or best of friends?

Coward Corps , says: Show Comment February 14, 2020 at 1:07 pm GMT
The MQ-9 pilot and sensor operator will be looking over their shoulders for a long time. They're as famous as Soleimani. Their command chain is well known too, hide though they might far away.

And who briefed the president that terror Tuesday? The murder program isn't Air Force.

Eek , says: Show Comment February 14, 2020 at 1:25 pm GMT
Hey now, you learn to put the best gloss on things when your troops are pathetic little timmies scared of rocks and 12-year olds. Bunch of pussies.

https://southfront.org/dumbfucks-russian-troops-react-to-us-forces-using-firearms-against-syrian-villagers/

The IRGC is going to make mincemeat of these chumps.

Moi , says: Show Comment February 14, 2020 at 1:36 pm GMT
@anonymous The kind of crap Trump pulled in the assassination of Soleimani is what he should be impeached about–not the piss-ant stuff about Hunter Biden's job in the Ukaranian gas company and his pappy's role in it.
Sick of Orcs , says: Show Comment February 14, 2020 at 1:49 pm GMT
We're really benefitting, carrying water for (((our greatest ally.)))
Really No Shit , says: Show Comment February 14, 2020 at 1:59 pm GMT
Iraq an ally of the United States! Is it some kind of a joke? How can a master and slave be equal? We, the big dog want their oil and the tail that wags us, Israel, want all Muslims pacified and the Congress, which is us wether we like or not, compliant out of financial fears. Unless we curb our own greedy appetite for fossil fuels and at the same time tell an ally, which Israel is by being equal in a sense that it can get away with murder and not a pip is raised, to limit its ambition, nothing is going to be done to improve the situation. Until then it's an exercise in futility, at best!
anonymous [307] Disclaimer , says: Show Comment February 14, 2020 at 2:46 pm GMT
@Ozymandias You are so ignorant.

Iran has NO choice but to defend itself from the savages. It has not been Iran that invaded US, but US with a plan that design years before 9/11 invaded many countries. Remember: seven countries in five years. Soleimani was a wise man working towards peace by creating options for Iran to defend itself. Iran is not the aggressor, but US -Israel-UK are the aggressor for centuries now. Is this so difficult to understand. 9/11 was staged by US/Israel killing 3000 Christians to implement their criminal plan.

Soleimani, was on a peace mission, where was assassinated by Trump, an Israeli firster and a fifth column and the baby killer Netanyahu. Is this difficult to understand by the Trump worshiper, a traitor.

Now, Khamenie is saying the same thing: "Iran should be strong in military warfare and sciences to prevent war and maintain PEACE.

Only ignorant, arrogant, and racists don't understand this fact and refuse to understand how the victims have been pushed to defend themselves.

The Assassin at the black house should receive the same fate in order to bring the peace.

anonymous [307] Disclaimer , says: Show Comment February 14, 2020 at 2:48 pm GMT
@Moi I totally agree with you. Both parties are a fifth column and criminals.
Fiendly Neighbourhood Terrorist , says: Website Show Comment February 14, 2020 at 2:57 pm GMT
When does Amerikastan *not* lie about anything? If an Amerikastani tells you the sun rises in the east, you're probably on Venus, where it rises in the west.
DaveE , says: Show Comment February 14, 2020 at 3:05 pm GMT
I think this article is getting close to the truth, that this whole operation was and is an ISIS (meaning Israeli Secret Intelligence Service) affair designed to pit America against the zionists' most formidable enemy thus far, Iran.

I'm of the opinion that Trump did not order the hit on Soleimani, but was forced to take credit for it, if he didn't want to forfeit any chance of being reelected this year. The same ISIS (Israeli) forces that did the hit also orchestrated the "retaliation" that Mr. Giraldi so heroically documents in this piece.

As usual, this is looking more and more like a zionist /jewish false flag attack on the Muslim world, with the real dirty-work to be done by the American military.

Ahoy , says: Show Comment February 14, 2020 at 3:17 pm GMT
The dealer in the M.E. poker game is Putin. This is what drives the very elite crazy. How could this have happened? We had conquered Russia in 1917.

Well, you must have made a small mistake along the way. Trumpstein can't save you. Soon the dollar won't have any value. There is nothing behind it.

The new policeman in the M.E. will be Iran. The legacy of Lawrence of Arabia has died long time ago.

Greg Bacon , says: Website Show Comment February 14, 2020 at 3:33 pm GMT

It soon emerged that the Iranian was in fact in Baghdad to discuss with the Iraqi Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi a plan that might lead to the de-escalation of the ongoing conflict between Saudi Arabia and Iran, a meeting that the White House apparently knew about may even have approved.

It's now obvious that the slumlord son-in-law Jared Kushner is really running the USA's ME policy.
Kushner is not only a dear friend of at-large war criminal Bibi Nuttyahoo, he also belongs to the Judaic religious cult of Chabad Lubavitcher, whom make the war-loving Christian Evangelicals almost look sane. Chabad also prays for some kind of Armageddon to bring forth their Messiah, just like the Evangelicals.

One can tell by Kushner's nasty comments he makes about Arabs/Persians and Palestinians in particular, that he loathes and despises those people and has an idiotic ear to cry into in the malignant form of Zion Don, AKA President Trump.

It's been said that Kushner is also a Mossad agent or asset, which is a good guess, since that agency has been placing their agents into the WH since at least the days of Clinton, who had Rahm Emmanuel to whisper hate into his ear.

That the Iranian General Soleimani was lured into Iraq so the WH could murder the man probably most responsible for halting the terrorist activities of the heart-eating, head-chopping US/Israel/KSA creation ISIS brings to mind the motto of the Israeli version of the CIA, the Mossad.

"By way of deception thou shalt make war."

Between Trump's incompetence, his vanity–and yes, his stupidity– and his appointing Swamp creatures into his cabinet and allowing Jared to run the ME show, Trump is showing himself to be a worse choice than Hillary.
If that maniac gets another 4 years, humanity is doomed. Or at least the USA for sure will perish.

[Feb 14, 2020] Fascism in Ukraine the conspiracy of silence – OffGuardian

Feb 14, 2020 | off-guardian.org

Search Feb 15, 2020 3 Fascism in Ukraine: the conspiracy of silence Kit Knightly Joseph Altham The rise of the far right in Ukraine is one of the most disturbing trends in 21st century Europe. But it's a story you rarely get to read about in the British press.

These days, the mainstream media does not have much to say about Ukraine. And when Ukraine is mentioned, the main focus tends to be on Ukraine as it relates to the latest American political scandal, rather than on Ukraine itself. Six years ago, the revolt in Kyiv put Ukraine at the top of the news agenda, but now the papers have gone quiet.

This lack of interest in Ukraine is surprising, because Ukraine has some big stories that you would expert journalists to be reporting. The country has been going through a violent upheaval, and the fighting in Ukraine's eastern region still continues.

Supposedly, the reason for all the bloodshed was to secure Ukraine's European future? So how's that project going today? Not well. Ukraine is still a long way from full membership of the European Union, and remains one of Europe's poorest countries.

The ruins of Donetsk airport, December 2014 (Photo: Wikipedia)

Clearly, Ukraine is not working out. Of course, the nationalist uprising in Kyiv did achieve one of its core objectives: the termination of the old partnership with Moscow. But the uprising also aimed to end corruption in Ukraine and curb the power of the oligarchs. On both counts, Ukraine's political elite has performed badly. Ukraine's corruption rating is still poor, while Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine's current president, was helped into power by the influential billionaire, Ihor Kolomoisky.

All in all, Ukraine's "bright future" seems further away than ever, and the biggest losers from Ukraine's pro-Western course have been the Ukrainian people. But the Western press long ago settled on the story that Vladimir Putin is the big bully, and Ukraine has been cast in the role of his victim.

Because Vladimir Putin is labelled as the bad guy, and criticism of the Ukrainian government is thought to serve his agenda, Ukraine has become a no-go area. The powers that be don't want to admit how bad things are inside Ukraine, so The Guardian's "fearless investigative journalists" don't get to write about it.


Mikhail Bulgakov. During his lifetime, his work was censored by the Soviets. In 2014, the new Ukrainian government banned a TV dramatization of his novel, The White Guard. (Photo: Wikipedia)

Instead, the truth is being swept under the carpet. And the truth is that the nationalist forces that took control of Ukraine are bringing shame on their country. Ukraine has given way to crude nationalistic resentment, to the extent of vandalizing Soviet war memorials and banning books, TV dramas and films. And in its search for new national heroes to replace the Soviet heroes it is rejecting, Ukraine is glorifying the most despicable characters from its fascist past.

The Lviv pogrom, 1941 (Photo: Wikipedia)

The historical background is complicated. In the 1930s, Ukraine was oppressed by the Bolsheviks and millions died of famine. Then, during World War II, the German invasion of the USSR gave Ukrainian nationalists the opportunity to push for independence, in an uneasy alliance with Nazi Germany. By collaborating with Nazi Germany, the Ukrainian nationalists hoped that they would be rewarded with their own Ukrainian state.

As Ukraine fashions a new identity for itself, Ukrainians have been seeking inspiration from Stepan Bandera, Roman Shukhevych and the other Nazi collaborators who piggy-backed on German military victories to advance the Ukrainian nationalist cause.

Torchlit procession of Ukrainian nationalists (Photo: Wikipedia)

The trouble is that these Ukrainian nationalists, who proclaimed statehood in Lviv in 1941, were committed to more than just a tactical alliance with Nazi Germany. Their organization sympathized with Nazi ideas, too.

The Nazis regarded Jews, Poles and Russians as subhuman, and so did Stepan Bandera. The Ukrainian nationalists massacred Poles, perpetrated pogroms and were willing participants in the Holocaust. They even had their own division in the SS, the SS Galicia.

A photo of Stepan Bandera displayed during the Maidan uprising, January 2014 (Photo: Wikipedia)

The dark side of Ukraine's wartime history has become a point of reference for the new, post-Maidan regime. As monuments to Soviet commanders are demolished, new monuments to Ukrainian fascists are going up.

The Ukrainian government has designated 1st January, Stepan Bandera's birthday, as a national holiday. Statues of Bandera and Shukhevych have appeared in many cities, and streets are being named after war criminals. Ultranationalist organizations are invited to schools to give children a "patriotic" education. Nazi symbols are openly displayed at concerts and football matches, and antisemitic literature is sold on market stalls.

Meanwhile, monuments commemorating the Holocaust have been desecrated, and synagogues have been attacked.

"Death to the Yids": graffiti beside a synagogue in Odessa. The sign is a Wolfsangel, a common Nazi symbol. (Photo: Wikipedia)

Old poisons are rising to the surface. The figures openly praised by Ukrainian leaders are the scoundrels and fanatics who threw in their lot with Hitler. The new Ukraine is obsessed with its own national grievances, but it shows little respect for any of the non-Ukrainian victims of history. With its sickly blend of romanticism and self-pity, Ukraine is now a breeding ground for racism and extremism. But this is something the Western press is not yet ready to admit.

Instead, the press has been colluding in a conspiracy of silence and shutting its eyes to the danger. By putting up statues of fascists from the past, Ukraine is giving a green light to fascism today.

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Gall ,

Hey according to two faced Shifty Schiff Ukraine is "fighting the Russians so we don't have to". I mean another "great ally" like Israel who has been selling them arms hand over first despite the fact that the Ukrainians are truly "antisemitic" who unlike American "antisemites" that are always bellyaching about Israel's genocidal policies Ukrainians excel in their antisemitism by burning down synagogs and threatening the Jewish population er I mean offer them a one way train excursion all expenses paid.

I mean what greater "ally" does Israel need to convince more Jews to come the "promised land"and kill a few Palestinians and steal their land. I mean things haven't been as good since ol' Uncle 'Dolph signed the Transfer Agreement.

Aside from a some occasional burbling about antisemitism by NuttenYahoo like the Americans they continue to sell them arms so they can launch genocidal campaigns against Dombass and other ethnic Russian areas that aren't as Ukofriendly as Washington and Tel Aviv using their reconstituted Bandera Brigade AKA SS Galicia of inveterate Iron Guard. I mean these guys aren't just a bunch Neo-nazis skin heads but qualify as the real animal.

Thanks to Obama, Nuland and Clinton with the help of Soros deep pockets to fund color revolutions whom if you remember according to 60 Minute interview a ways back reveled in turning over Jewish property and Jews to the tender mercies of the 3rd Reich. I mean what a guy.

Well the reason you probably haven't heard anything is because the American government is just too modest about show casing yet another example of bringing "freedom and democracy" to the benighted who haven't experienced the joys of austerity, privatization and giving all their money to help those poor needy kleptocrats who are just millionaires and are striving to be another Jeff Bezos.

Loverat ,

Ukraine is almost identical to the rise of fascism in 1990s Croatia. I wonder when the Pope will visit and grant saint hood to these appalling monsters.

Jen ,

It must be said that the western parts of Ukraine, where the Ukrainian ultranationalist movement arose under people like Stepan Bandera, Roman Shukhevych and Yuri Stetsko, were actually under Polish rule and were subjected to forced Polonisation under an increasingly nationalist and fascist Polish government during the 1920s and 1930s. This explains why ethnic Polish people were fair game for torture and lynching by Ukrainian followers of Bandera & Co during Nazi rule in the 1940s. Western Ukraine mostly escaped the famines that affected Soviet Ukraine and other parts of the USSR in the 1930s.

[Feb 14, 2020] Damage: The Democrats on Russia

Full spectrum Dominance doctrine leaves no space for Russia. It needs to become a vassal or disappear in timi, dependents of the West statelests.
Feb 05, 2020 | responsiblestatecraft.org

Extracted from Presidential Election Politics are Damaging U.S. Foreign Policy Written by
Robert E. Hunter

It's not just the White House that is doing serious damage to U.S. interests abroad during this year's election campaign. Of even greater consequence (absent a new Middle East war) is the U.S. relationship with Russia. It's currently unthinkable that Washington will try to move beyond the status quo, even if Russian President Vladimir Putin were prepared to do so. Even before Trump was inaugurated, many Democrats began calling for his impeachment . Leading Democrats laid Hillary Clinton ' s defeat at the feet of Russian interference in the U.S. election -- a claim that stretched credulity past the breaking point. Further, as Democrats looked for grounds to impeach Trump (or at least terminally to reduce his reelection chances), the " Russia factor" was the best cudgel available. Charges included the notion that " Putin has something on Trump," which presumes he would sell out the nation ' s security for a mess of pottage.

All this domestic politicking ignores a geopolitical fact: while the Soviet Union lost the Cold War and, for some time thereafter, Russia could be dismissed, it was always certain that it would again become a significant power, at least in Europe. Thus, even before the Berlin Wall fell, President George H. W. Bush proposed creating a " Europe whole and free" and at peace. Bill Clinton built on what Bush began. Both understood that a renascent Russia could embrace revanchism, and for several years their efforts seemed to have a chance of succeeding.

Then the effort went off the rails. Putin took power in Russia, which made cooperation with the West difficult if not impossible. He worked to consolidate his domestic position, in part by alleging that the West was " disrespecting" Russia and trying to encircle it. For its part, the U.S. played into the Putin narrative by abandoning the Bush-Clinton vision of taking legitimate Russian interests into account in fashioning European security arrangements. The breaking point came in 2014, when Russia seized Crimea and sent " little green men" to fight in some other parts of Ukraine. The West necessarily responded, with economic sanctions and NATO's buildup of " trip wire" forces in Central Europe.

But despite the ensuing standoff, the critical requirement remains: the United States has to acknowledge Russia's inevitable rise as a major power while also impressing on Putin the need to trim his ambitions, if he is to avoid a new era of Russian isolation. There is also serious business that the two countries need to pursue, including strategic arms control, the Middle East (especially Iran), and climate change. Despite deep disagreements, including over Ukraine and parts of Central Europe, the U.S. needs to engage in serious discussions with Russia, which means the renewal of diplomacy which has been in the deep freeze for years.

All of this has been put in pawn by the role that the "Russia factor" has been permitted to play in American presidential politics, especially by Democrats. Longer-term U.S. interests are suffering, along with those of the European allies and Middle East partners. The task has been made even more difficult by those U.S. politicians, think tanks , and journalists who prefer to resurrect the term "cold war" rather than clearly examining the nation's strategic needs because of the blinkers imposed by domestic politics. Open discussion about alternatives in dealing with Russia is thus stifled, at serious cost to the United States and others.

In all three of these areas, the U.S. is paying a high price in terms of its national interests to the games political leaders, both Republicans and Democrats, are playing. Great efforts will be needed to dig out of this mess, beginning with U.S. willingness to do so. Leaders elsewhere must also be prepared to join in -- far from a sure thing! Unfortunately, there is currently little hope that, at least in the three critical areas discussed above, pursuit of U.S. interests abroad will prevail over today's parochial domestic politics.

[Feb 14, 2020] NSC Chief O'Brien on Vindmans: We're not a banana republic where a group of Lt. Colonels get together and decide what the policy is or should be

Are we? NSC hijecked functions of the Department of State and is a clear parallel structure, that functions in a way completely different from its initial role. They no longer serve they serve as the president's personal staff. NSC clearly strives to control foreign policy and thus control the President in this area.
And with people like Pompeo at the helm what are the benefits of expelling Vindmans
Feb 12, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com
National Security Adviser told a room full of Atlantic Council attendees on Tuesday that significant cuts were under way at the leak-prone White House National Security Council, confirming a Monday report in the Washington Examiner that up to 70 positions would be cut.

Robert O'Brien says the NSC will be down between 115 to 120 staffers by the end of this week. pic.twitter.com/FpleaBFh85

-- Josh Cremeans "DirtyTruth" (@AKA_RealDirty) February 12, 2020

While O'Brien pitched it as a return to "a manageable size," he didn't mention what the Examiner reported - namely, that most of the cuts would be Obama-era holdovers such as anti-Trump impeachment witness Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, 44, and his twin brother Yevgeny, who were fired from the NSC last week and escorted out of the White House by security.

O'Brian noted that the Vindmans "weren't fired," according to the Epoch Times , rather "Their services were no longer needed."

"It's really a privilege to work in the White House. It's not a right," he continued. "At the end of the day, the president is entitled to staffers that want to execute his policy, that he has confidence in, and I think every president's entitled to that."

" We're not a banana republic where a group of Lt. Colonels get together and decide what the policy is or should be ," he added.

The reorganization was consistent with the "Scowcroft model" used by Brent Scowcroft, who served as national security adviser for Presidents Gerald Ford and George H. W. Bush, according to O'Brien. The model emphasizes that the national security adviser shouldn't "be an advocate for one policy or another." Instead, the adviser should "ensure that the president is well served by the cabinet, departments, and agencies in obtaining counsel and formulating his policies."

The policies are then decided on by the president and the adviser makes sure they're carried out.

Most of the staff on the council actually work for other departments and agencies and are part of the council for a certain length of time. O'Brien suggested that some might not be serving in the way that top officials think they should. - Epoch Times

" When they come to the White House, they serve as the president's personal staff and it is our view that while they are at the National Security Council, they should not represent the views of their parent agencies or departments," said O'Brien. " They're not there as liaison officers, and they certainly shouldn't represent their own personal views. "

"The president has to have confidence in the folks on his National Security Council staff to ensure that they are committed to executing the agenda that he was elected by the American people to deliver," not a "mini State Department, a mini Pentagon, a mini Department of Homeland Security."

[Feb 14, 2020] Is Apartheid the Inevitable Outcome of Zionism? by Henry Siegman

Highly recommended!
Actually any supremacist ideology produces something like an apartheid regime for other nationalities.
The current situation looks like a dead end with little chances of reconciliation, especially after recent killing of protesters by Israel army/snipers. But in general, it is iether a two state solution of equal rights for Palestinians and Jews in the same state. The elements of theocratic state should be eliminated and right wing parties outlawed as neofascist parties which threatens democracy.
Notable quotes:
"... The peace process and the two-state solution failed because America -- the only country on which Israel could count on for generous diplomatic, military and economic support, and therefore the only country that has the necessary leverage to influence Israel's policies -- allowed it to fail. Consequently, most Israelis, including many belonging to the Blue/White party, headed by General Benny Gantz, oppose granting any future Palestinian entity the most basic features of sovereignty, including control of its own borders. Gantz refused to form a unity government with the Likud because of Netanyahu's indictment for multiple crimes, not because of differences over peace policy. What doubts anyone might have had on this subject were removed when Gantz just announced that he embraces Netanyahu's intention to annex the Jordan Valley to Israel. ..."
Jan 22, 2020 | responsiblestatecraft.org

The threat of a new war with Iran that might have replicated what has been the worst disaster in the history of America's international misadventures -- George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq based on fabricated lies -- sucked the air out of all other international diplomatic activity, not least of what used to be called the Middle East peace process.

Yet the failure of the peace process has not been the consequence of recent mindless and destructive actions by Donald Trump and of the clownish shenanigans of his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who was charged with helping Israeli hardliners in nailing down permanently the Palestinian occupation. For all the damage they caused (mainly to Palestinians), prospects for a two-state solution actually ended during President Barack Obama's administration, despite Secretary of State John Kerry's energetic efforts to renew the stalled negotiations. They were not resumed because Obama, like his predecessors, failed to take the tough measures that were necessary to overcome Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's determination to prevent the emergence of a Palestinian state, notwithstanding his pledge in his Bar-Ilan speech of 2009 to implement the agreements of the Oslo accords.

Yes, Obama and Kerry did warn that Israel's continued occupation might lead to an Israeli apartheid regime. But knowing how deeply the accusation of an incipient Israeli apartheid could anger right-wingers in Israel and in the U.S., they repeatedly followed that warning with the assurance that "America will always have Israel's back." It was the sequence of this two-part statement that convinced Netanyahu that AIPAC had succeeded in getting American presidents to protect Israel's impunity. Had Obama and Kerry reversed that sequence, first noting that the U.S. had always had Israel's back, and then warning that Israel is now on the verge of trading its democracy for apartheid, the warning might have had quite different implications for Israel's government.

The peace process and the two-state solution failed because America -- the only country on which Israel could count on for generous diplomatic, military and economic support, and therefore the only country that has the necessary leverage to influence Israel's policies -- allowed it to fail. Consequently, most Israelis, including many belonging to the Blue/White party, headed by General Benny Gantz, oppose granting any future Palestinian entity the most basic features of sovereignty, including control of its own borders. Gantz refused to form a unity government with the Likud because of Netanyahu's indictment for multiple crimes, not because of differences over peace policy. What doubts anyone might have had on this subject were removed when Gantz just announced that he embraces Netanyahu's intention to annex the Jordan Valley to Israel.

For the Palestinians, territory is the most critical of the final status issues. The current internationally recognized borders that separate Israel and the Occupied Territories reduced the territory originally assigned to Palestinians in the U.N. Partition Plan of 1947 from roughly half of Palestine to 22 percent. Israel, which was assigned originally roughly the other half of Palestine, now has 78 percent, not including Palestinian territory Israel has confiscated for its illegal settlements.

No present or prospective Palestinian leadership will accept any further reduction of territory from their promised state. Given the territory they already lost in 1947, and again in 1949, and given Israel's refusal to accept the return of Palestinian refugees to Israel, is it really reasonable to expect Palestinians to give up any further territory? Where else other than the West Bank could Palestine refugees return to?

The one-state solution that is preferred by many Israelis is essentially a continuation of the present de facto apartheid. It is not the one-state alternative any Palestinian would accept. Repeated polling has shown that a majority of Jewish Israelis are unprepared to grant equal rights to Palestinians in a one-state arrangement. This opposition is unsurprising, for the inclusion in Israel's body politic of West Bank and Gaza Palestinians would mean the end of Israel as a Jewish state, for Israel's non-Jewish citizens would then outnumber its Jewish ones, and may already do so. Of course, Israel could contrive a non-voting status for the West Bank's Palestinians, something many Jewish Israelis and political parties actually advocate, but that would not deceive anyone. It would mean the formal end of Israel's democracy.

The foregoing notwithstanding, I have long maintained that if Israel were compelled to choose between one state that grants full equality to Palestinians now under occupation and two states that conform substantially to existing agreements and international law, and no other options were available to it, the majority of Israelis would opt for two states. Why? Because as noted above, the overwhelming majority of Israelis oppose any arrangement that might produce a Palestinian majority with the same rights Israeli Jewish citizens enjoy. Of course, Israel has never been compelled to make such a choice, nor will they be compelled to do so by the international community.

However, they could be compelled to do so by the Palestinians, but only if Palestinians were finally to expel their current leadership and choose a more honest and courageous one. That new leadership would have to shut down the Palestinian Authority, which its present leaders allowed Israel to portray as an arrangement that places Palestinians on the path to statehood, of course in some undefined future. Israel has deliberately perpetuated that myth to conceal its real intention to keep the current occupation unchanged. The new Palestinian leadership would have to declare that since Israel has denied them their own state and established a one-state reality, Palestinians will no longer deny that reality. Consequently, the national struggle will now be for full citizenship in the one state that Israel has forced them into. I have argued for the past two decades that the one-state option is far more likely to open a path to a two-state solution, however counter intuitive that may seem to be. Palestinians rejected it categorically from the outset, but younger Palestinians have come around to accepting it -- even preferring it to the two-state model.

Unlike the struggle for a two-state solution, a goal that has so easily been manipulated by Israel to mean whatever serves their real goal of preventing such an outcome -- and also so easily allowed international actors to pretend they have not given up their efforts to achieve that outcome, an anti-apartheid struggle does not lend itself to such deceptions. South Africa has taught the world too well what apartheid looks like, as well as how the international community could deal with it. Of course, South Africa has also shown how long and bloody a struggle against apartheid can be, and the terrible price paid by the victims of such a regime. But Palestinians already live in such a regime, and have for long been paying a terrible price for their subjugation.

Yet deeper and more troubling questions are raised by the choices that now face Israel, including whether the original idea of the Zionist movement of a state that is both Jewish and democratic is not deeply oxymoronic, a question that not only Israelis but Jews outside of Israel must address. That question is underscored by the challenges to India's democracy posed by its prime minister's decision to turn his country into a Hindu nation. It is a question that did not escape some of the founders of the Zionist movement, who argued that Zionism should define the state as Jewish only in its ethnic and secular cultural dimensions. But that this is not how Jewish identity is treated in Israel is undeniable.

Imagine if Israel's laws defining national identity and citizenship, as recently reformulated by Israel's Knesset, were adopted by the U.S. Congress or by other Western democratic countries, and if Christianity in its "cultural dimensions" were declared to be their national identity, with citizenship also granted by conversion to the dominant religion, as is now the case in Israel, where arrangements for Jewish religious conversions are part of the Prime Minister's office.

Is this not what America's founders, and the waves of immigrants, including European Jews, sought to escape from? And how would Jews react today to legislation in the U.S. Congress that would explicitly seek to maintain the majority status of Christians in the U.S.? Are Jews to take pride in a Jewish state that adopts citizenship requirements that mirror those advocated by white Christian supremacists? These supremacists have already proclaimed jubilantly that Israel's policies vindicate the ones they have long been advocating.

It is true, of course, that for some Jews, aware of the history of anti-Semitism that has spanned the ages, and especially the Holocaust, Zionism's contradictions with democratic principles are an unpleasant but inescapable dilemma they can live with. As a survivor of the Holocaust, I can understand that. But I also understand that the likely consequences of these contradictions are not benign, and can yield their own terrible outcomes, particularly when they lead to the dalliances by the prime minister of a Jewish state with right-wing racist and xenophobic heads of state and of political parties that have fascist and anti-Semitic parentage.

Legislation proposed in the U.S. Congress and by Trump, and recently celebrated by his son-in-law Kushner in a New York Times op-ed, proposing that criticism of Zionism be outlawed as antisemitism , would be laughable, were it not so clearly -- and outrageously -- intended to deny freedom of speech on this subject. Yet laughable it is, for its first target would have to be Jews -- not liberal left-wingers but the most Orthodox Jews, known as Haredim, in Israel and in America.

At the very inception of the Zionist movement 150 years ago, not only the Haredim but the overwhelming majority of Orthodox Jewry everywhere was opposed to Zionism, which it considered to be a Jewish heresy, not only because the Zionists were mostly secularists, but because of an oath taken by Jewish leaders after the destruction of the Second Temple following their exile from Palestine, that Jews would not reestablish a Jewish kingdom except following the messianic era. Zionism was also bitterly opposed by much of the world's Jewish Reform movement, many of whose leaders insisted that Jewishness is a religion, not a political identity.

Much of Orthodox Jewry did not end its opposition to Zionism until after the war of 1967, but many if not most Haredis continue to oppose Zionism as heresy. Most of its members refuse to serve in Israel's military, to celebrate Israel's Independence Day, sing its national anthem, and do not allow prayers in their synagogues for the wellbeing of Israel's political leaders. Trump, Kushner, and the U.S. Congress would have to arrest them as anti-Semites.

I have no doubt that Trump's rage at the Jewish chairmen of the two Congressional committees that led the procedures for his impeachment will sooner or later explode in anti-Semitic expletives. The only reason it has not done so yet is because of Trump's fear of jeopardizing Evangelical support and Sheldon Adelson's mega bucks. After all, Trump already told us that the neo-Nazi rioters in Charlottesville declaiming "Jews will not replace us" included "very fine people." Netanyahu never criticized Trump's statement, for he too does not want to jeopardize certain relationships, namely the "very fine people" he has embraced -- leaders in Hungary, Poland, Austria, Italy, Brazil, Philippines, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere.

If Trump's son-in-law is searching for anti-Semites, he should have been told they are far closer at hand than in America's schools, for they are ensconced in the White House. They are also to be found in Jerusalem where they are being accorded honors by Netanyahu. The anti-Semitic dog whistling contained in Trump's attacks on the two Jewish congressmen were not misunderstood by his hardcore supporters -- who now include the entire leadership of the Republican party -- who Trump needs to take him to victory in the coming presidential elections, or to keep him in the White House were he to lose those elections.

If apartheid is coming (or has come) out of Zion, it should not shock that what may come out of Washington is a repeat by Trump's Republican shock troops of what occurred in Berlin in 1933, when the Bundestag was taken over by the Nazi party and ended Germany's democracy.

[Feb 14, 2020] On Afghanistan deal from NEO

Feb 14, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

uncle tungsten , Feb 13 2020 3:25 utc | 113

On Afghanistan from NEO
However, according to some reports, the United States and the Taliban have recently managed to define the main terms of a future peace deal:

- The Taliban guarantee that they will not allow international terrorist groups such as al-Qaeda (banned in Russia) to use Afghanistan as a training ground for attacks abroad;

– The US must withdraw its troops from the country. In particular, the terms include the following:
About 5,000 US soldiers are expected to be withdrawn immediately after the peace deal is signed, and the remaining troops will leave the country within the next two years;

– Against the backdrop of an indefinite truce in Afghanistan, the conflicting parties should begin an internal political dialogue.


The Taliban must be naive not to insist on a total cessation to military air assaults and reconnaissance. There is no way the USA will stop bombing Afghanistan into the stone age - because it can AND good live training for its murderous home pilots.


And then the predictable USA treachery and ingredient to walk back the treaty:

The Kabul government, however, is not taking part in those talks at the insistence of the Taliban, which considers the current official government to be a puppet. But the US is in favor of Kabul reaffirming its commitment to the peace terms, because otherwise the last condition of the agreement will not be fulfilled.

[Feb 14, 2020] An unusually well written piece on the US leaving Afghanistan.

Feb 14, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

J Swift , Feb 12 2020 18:05 utc | 38

I guess most of these open threads are going to gravitate to electoral politics--tis the season--but before it gets lost I did want to share what I thought was an unusually well written piece on the US leaving Afghanistan.

The author doesn't just go on a diatribe of criticism of the US, although obviously he feels the US needs to be leaving--the sooner the better, and likely will eventually be leaving whether it wants to or not. But he points out several "tells" related to just how serious the US might be any time it starts talking about leaving, or indeed starts leaving. I would highly recommend reading this article. Really thought provoking.

https://theduran.com/getting-out/

AntiSpin , Feb 12 2020 19:21 utc | 49

@ J Swift | Feb 12 2020 18:05 utc | 38

Thanks much for this link --
https://theduran.com/getting-out/

A very hard-hitting exposé of the US combination of criminality and blundering in Afghanistan, and what seems to be a comprehensive and completely rational plan for getting out of that country under the best possible terms for the people of that country, and for the people of the US.

Not so good for the US military and civilian satraps who are tearing things up, and raking it in.

Tough.

[Feb 14, 2020] Russia's military has declassified and released another trove of documents and photographs from its archives for those of us still interested in the events of WW2

Feb 14, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

karlof1 , Feb 13 2020 18:08 utc | 195

Russia's military has declassified and released another trove of documents and photographs from its archives for those of us still interested in the events of WW2. Liberation of Budapest , after the siege of Leningrad and the battle for Stalingrad, the longest engagement made by the Red Army and seen as a rehearsal for Berlin. As expected, everything's in Russian, so it's an opportunity to work on your language skills. I hope Russia's military continues these releases so other governments will follow, but I won't hold my breath for the West to come clean.

[Feb 14, 2020] The pro-Trump TV news channel One America News Network has produced a 50 minute documentary on Ukrainegate hoax. Half of it is however dedicated to the Maidan sniper massacre of February 2014.

Feb 14, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Petri Krohn , Feb 12 2020 17:57 utc | 36

The pro-Trump TV news channel One America News Network has produced a 50 minute documentary on Ukrainegate hoax. Half of it is however dedicated to the Maidan sniper massacre of February 2014.
'The Ukraine Hoax: Impeachment, Biden Cash, Mass Murder' Debuting This Weekend On OAN

In the documentary, Caputo exposes the cover-up that led to the impeachment of President Donald Trump and mass murder. The Democrats' crusade to kick our duly elected president out of office didn't start with a phone call. It began with Ukrainian corruption, election meddling and a bloody coup that cleared a path for Hunter Biden to get rich.

Tune in this weekend, Saturday and Sunday at 10PM EST / 7PM PST – only on One America News!

The above page only contains a four minute introduction : OAN's Jack Posobiec sat down with Michael Caputo to discuss his new special, "One America News Investigates – The Ukraine Hoax: Impeachment, Biden Cash, Mass Murder."

I have not been able to find the original English language version online. I only found a version dubbed in Russian via Colonel Cassad.

Украинский обман One America News

Note, that the video is age restricted by YouTube, meaning that you can only view it if you have registered and logged into your Google account. Commenting on the video is disabled, as is saving it to a playlist or downloading it through some easy to use online service.

The reason for this censorship cannot be "community guidelines". The FCC places far stringent restrictions on what can be broadcast on television during prime time on Saturday evenings.

[Feb 10, 2020] Trump lost anti-war republicans and independents; he now might lose the elections

Feb 10, 2020 | www.theamericanconservative.com

Caroline Dorminey and Sumaya Malas do an excellent job of making the case for extending New START:

One of the most critical arms control agreements, the New Strategic Reduction Arms Treaty (New START), will disappear soon if leaders do not step up to save it. New START imposes limits on the world's two largest nuclear arsenals, Russia and the United States, and remains one of the last arms control agreements still in effect. Those limits expire in exactly one year from Wednesday, and without it, both stockpiles will be unconstrained for the first time in decades.

Democrats in Congress already express consistent support for the extension of New START, turning the issue into a Democratic Party agenda item. But today's hyper-partisan landscape need not dictate that arms control must become solely a Democratic priority. Especially when the treaty in question still works, provides an important limit on Russian nuclear weapons, and ultimately increases our national security.

Dorminey and Malas are right that there should be broad support for extending the treaty. The treaty's ratification was frequently described as a "no-brainer" win for U.S. national security when it was being debated ten years ago, and the treaty's extension is likewise obviously desirable for both countries. The trouble is that the Trump administration doesn't judge this treaty or any other international agreement on the merits, and only a few of the Republicans that voted to ratify the treaty are still in office. Trump and his advisers have been following the lead of anti-arms control ideologues for years. That is why the president seized on violations of the INF Treaty as an excuse to get rid of that treaty instead of working to resolve the dispute with Russia, and that is why he expressed his willingness to pull out of the Open Skies Treaty. Trump has encountered no resistance from the GOP as he goes on a treaty-killing spree, because by and large the modern Republican Party couldn't care less about arms control.

Like these hard-liners, Trump doesn't think there is such a thing as a "win-win" agreement with another government, and for that he reason he won't support any treaty that imposes the same restrictions on both parties. We can see that the administration isn't serious about extending the treaty when we look at the far-fetched demands they insist on adding to the existing treaty. These additional demands are meant to serve as a smokescreen so that the administration can let the treaty die, and the administration is just stalling for time until the expiration occurs. The Russian government has said many times that it is ready and willing to accept an extension of the treaty without any conditions, and the U.S. response has been to let them eat static.

It would be ideal if Trump suddenly changed his position on all this and just extended the treaty, but all signs point in the opposite direction. What we need to start thinking about is what the next administration is going to have to do to rebuild the arms control architecture that this administration has demolished. There will be almost no time for the next president to extend the treaty next year, so it needs to be a top priority. If New START lapses, the U.S. and Russia would have to negotiate a new treaty to replace it, and in the current political climate the odds that the Senate would ratify an arms control treaty (or any treaty) are not good. It would be much easier and wiser to keep the current treaty alive, but we need to start preparing for the consequences of Trump's unwillingness to do that.

[Feb 10, 2020] Stench of Netanyahu in attack on K-1 base near Kirkuk: Did Washington Use a False Pretext for Its Recent Escalation in Iraq?

Notable quotes:
"... New York Times's ..."
Feb 08, 2020 | responsiblestatecraft.org

In a key piece of actual extensive, on-the-ground reporting , the New York Times's Alissa Rubin has raised serious questions about the official US account of who it was that attacked the K-1 base near Kirkuk, in eastern Iraq, on December 27. The United States almost immediately accused the Iran-backed Ketaib Hizbullah (KH) militia of responsibility. But Rubin quotes by name Brig. General Ahmed Adnan, the chief of intelligence for the Iraqi federal police at the same base, as saying, "All the indications are that it was Daesh" -- that is, ISIS.

She also presents considerable further detailed reporting on the matter. And she notes that though U.S. investigators claim to have evidence about KH's responsibility for the attack, they have presented none of it publicly. Nor have they shared it with the Iraqi government.

KH is a paramilitary organization that operates under the command of the Iraqi military and has been deeply involved in the anti-ISIS campaigns throughout the country.

The December 27 attack killed one Iraqi-American contractor and was cited by the Trump administration as reason to launch a large-scale attack on five KH bases some 400 miles to the west which killed around 50 KH fighters. Outraged KH fighters then mobbed the US embassy in Baghdad, breaking through an outside perimeter on its large campus, but causing no casualties. On January 2, Pres. Trump decided to escalate again, ordering the assassination of Iran's Gen. Qasem Soleimani and bringing the region and the world close to a massive shooting war.

The new evidence presented by Rubin makes it look as if Trump and his advisors had previously decided on a broad-scale plan to attack Iran's very influential allies in Iraq and were waiting for a triggering event– any triggering event!– to use as a pretext to launch it. The attack against the K-1 base presented them with that trigger, even though they have not been able to present any evidence that it was KH that undertook it.

This playbook looks very similar to the one that Ariel Sharon, who was Israel's Defense Minister in summer 1982, used to launch his wide attack against the PLO's presence in Lebanon in June that year. The "trigger" Sharon used to launch his long-prepared attack was the serious (but not fatal) wounding of Israel's ambassador in London, Shlomo Argov, which the Israeli government immediately blamed on the PLO.

Regarding London in 1982, as regarding K-1 last December, the actual identity of the assailant(s) was misreported by the government that used it as a trigger for escalation. In London, the police fairly speedily established that it was not the PLO but operatives of an anti-PLO group headed by a man called Abu Nidal who had attacked Argov. But by the time they had discovered and publicized that fact, Israeli tanks were already deep inside Lebanon.

The parallels and connections between the two cases go further. If, as now seems likely, the authors of the K-1 attack were indeed Da'esh, then they succeeded brilliantly in triggering a bitter fight between two substantial forces in the coalition that had been fighting against them in Iraq. Regarding the 1982 London attack, its authors also succeeded brilliantly in triggering a lethal conflict between two forces (one substantial, one far less so) that were both engaged in bitter combat against Abu Nidal's networks.

Worth noting: Abu Nidal's main backer, throughout his whole campaign against the PLO, was Saddam Hussein's brutal government in Iraq. (The London assailants deposited their weapons in the Iraqi embassy after completing the attack.) Many senior strategists and planners for ISIS in Iraq were diehard remnants of Saddam's formerly intimidating security forces.

Also worth noting: Three months in to Sharon's massive 1982 invasion of Lebanon, it seemed to have successfully reached its goals of expelling the PLO's fighting forces from Lebanon and installing a strongly pro-Israeli government there. But over the longer haul, the invasion looked much less successful. The lengthy Israeli occupation of south Lebanon that followed 1982 served to incubate the birth and growth of the (pro-Iranian) Hizbullah there. Today, Hizbullah is a strong political movement inside Lebanon that commands a very capable fighting force that expelled Israel's last presence from Lebanon in 2000, rebuffed a subsequent Israeli invasion of the country six years later, and still exerts considerable deterrent power against Israel today

Very few people in Israel today judge the 1982 invasion of Lebanon to have been a wise move. How will the historians of the future view Trump's decision to launch his big escalation against Iran's allies in Iraq, presumably as part of his "maximum pressure" campaign against Tehran?

This article has been republished with permission from Just World News .

[Feb 10, 2020] Location, location, location Why Russian LNG can beat competition from US Australia

Feb 10, 2020 | www.rt.com

Russia's geographical position makes its exports of liquefied natural gas (LNG) more profitable and competitive with American and Australian supplies, according to Russia's Energy Minister Alexander Novak. Russia ships most of its LNG (around 69 percent) to Asian markets, where the bulk of global LNG supplies are sent. The country could also export its LNG via traditional Russian pipeline gas European routes, due to low cost and short transportation distance, the minister wrote, in an article for the Energy Policy journal.

Also on rt.com Trump urges Europe to buy American natural gas to ensure their energy security

"Russia's convenient geographical position between Europe and Asia allows our LNG to be profitable at current prices and to win competition from the US and Australia," Novak said. "If necessary, we can deliver liquefied gas to any European country, and it will be faster and cheaper than many other suppliers."

The Northern Sea Route (NSR) could be a key transport link to connect massive Arctic energy projects Russia is currently developing with target markets. The route, which lies in Arctic waters and within Russia's Exclusive Economic Zone, could cut the transportation time by a third, compared to shipments via the Suez Canal.

Also on rt.com India could become first non‑Arctic state to develop Russia's Arctic resources

Russia is one of the world's leading exporters of natural gas. Last year, it produced more than 40 billion cubic meters of LNG – a nearly 50 percent increase from 27 billion cubic meters it had in 2018. By 2035, Novak expects the country to boost production to 120 million tons, amounting to around a fifth of the forecasted global LNG production.

For more stories on economy & finance visit RT's business section

[Feb 09, 2020] Trump demand for 50% of Iraq oil revenue sound exactly like a criminal mob boss

Highly recommended!
Jan 21, 2020 | www.unz.com

Tucker , says: Show Comment January 21, 2020 at 12:27 pm GMT

I've heard and read about a claim that Trump actually called PM Abdul Mahdi and demanded that Iraq hand over 50 percent of their proceeds from selling their oil to the USA, and then threatened Mahdi that he would unleash false flag attacks against the Iraqi government and its people if he did not submit to this act of Mafia-like criminal extortion. Mahdi told Trump to kiss his buttocks and that he wasn't going to turn over half of the profits from oil sales.

This makes Trump sound exactly like a criminal mob boss, especially in light of the fact that the USA is now the world's #1 exporter of oil – a fact that the arrogant Orange Man has even boasted about in recent months. Can anyone confirm that this claim is accurate? If so, then the more I learn about Trump the more sleazy and gangster like he becomes.

I mean, think about it. Bush and Cheney and mostly jewish neocons LIED us into Iraq based on bald faced lies, fabricated evidence, and exaggerated threats that they KNEW did not exist. We destroyed that country, captured and killed it's leader – who used to be a big buddy of the USA when we had a use for him – and Bush's crime gang killed close to 2 million innocent Iraqis and wrecked their economy and destroyed their infrastructure. And, now, after all that death, destruction and carnage – which Trump claimed in 2016 he did not approve of – but, now that Trump is sitting on the throne in the Oval office – he has the audacity and the gall to demand that Iraq owes the USA 50 percent of their oil profits? And, that he won't honor and respect their demand to pull our troops out of their sovereign nation unless they PAY US back for the gigantic waste of tax payers money that was spent building permanent bases inside their country?

Not one Iraqi politician voted for the appropriations bill that financed the construction of those military bases; that was our mistake, the mistake of our US congress whichever POTUS signed off on it.

melpol , says: Show Comment January 21, 2020 at 1:41 pm GMT
...Trump learned the power of the purse on the streets of NYC, he survived by playing ball with the Jewish and Italian Mafia. Now he has become the ultimate Godfather, and the world must listen to his commands. Watch and listen as the powerful and mighty crumble under US Hegemony.
World War Jew , says: Show Comment January 21, 2020 at 1:42 pm GMT
Right TG, traditionally, as you said up there first, and legally too, under the supreme law of the land. Economic sanctions are subject to the same UNSC supervision as forcible coercion.

UN Charter Article 41: "The Security Council may decide what measures not involving the use of armed force are to be employed to give effect to its decisions, and it may call upon the Members of the United Nations to apply such measures. These may include complete or partial interruption of economic relations and of rail, sea, air, postal, telegraphic, radio, and other means of communication, and the severance of diplomatic relations."

https://www.un.org/en/charter-united-nations/index.html

US "sanctions" require UNSC authorization. Unilateral sanctions are nothing but illegal coercive intervention, as the non-intervention principle is customary international law, which is US federal common law.

The G-192, that is, the entire world, has affirmed this law. That's why the US is trying to defund UNCTAD as redundant with the WTO (UNCTAD is the G-192's primary forum.) In any case, now that the SCO is in a position to enforce this law at gunpoint with its overwhelmingly superior missile technology, the US is going to get stomped and tased until it complies and stops resisting.

Charlie , says: Show Comment January 21, 2020 at 7:53 pm GMT
@Tucker This idea that the US is any sort of a net petroleum exporter is just another lie.

https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=268&t=6

In 2018 total US petroleum production was under 18 million barrels per day, total consumption north of 20 mmb/d. What does it matter if the US exports a bunch of super light fracked product the US itself can't refine if it turns around and imports it all back in again and then some.

The myths we tell ourselves, like a roaring economy that nevertheless generates a $1 trillion annual deficit, will someday come back to bite us. Denying reality is not a winning game plan for the long run.

Christophe GJ , says: Show Comment January 21, 2020 at 8:00 pm GMT
I long tought that US foreign policies were mainly zionist agenda – driven, but the Venezuelan affair and the statements of Trump himself about the syrian oil (ta be "kept" (stolen)) make you think twice.

Oil seems to be at least very important even if it's not the main cause of middle east problems

So maybe it's the cause of illegal and cruel sanctions against Iran : Get rid of competitor to sell shale oil everywhere ?( think also of Norstream 2 here)

Watch out US of A. in the end there is something sometimes referred to as the oil's curse . some poor black Nigerians call oil "the shit of the devil", because it's such a problem – related asset Have you heard of it ? You get your revenues from oil easily, so you don't have to make effort by yourself. And in the end you don't keep pace with China on 5G ? Education fails ? Hmm
Becommig a primary sector extraction nation sad destiny indeed, like africans growing cafe, bananas and cacao for others. Not to mention environmental problems
What has happened to the superb Nation that send the first man on the moon and invented modern computers ?
Disapointment
Money for space or money for war following the Zio. Choose Uncle Sam !
Difficult to have both

OverCommenter , says: Show Comment January 21, 2020 at 8:24 pm GMT
Everyone seems to forget how we avoided war with Syria all those years ago It was when John Kerry of all people gaffed, and said "if Assad gives up all his chemical weapons." That was in response to a reporter who asked "is there anything that can stop the war?" A intrepid Russian ambassador chimed in loud enough for the press core to hear his "OK" and history was averted. Thinking restricting the power of the President will stop brown children from dying at the hands of insane US foreign policy is a cope. "Bi-partisanship" voted to keep troops in Syria, that was only a few months ago, have you already forgotten? Dubya started the drone program, and the magical African everyone fawns over, literally doubled the remote controlled death. We are way past pretending any elected official from either side is actually against more ME war, or even that one side is worse than the other.

The problem with the supporters Trump has left is they so desperately want to believe in something bigger than themselves. They have been fed propaganda for their whole lives, and as a result can only see the world in either "this is good" or "this is bad." The problem with the opposition is that they are insane. and will say or do anything regardless of the truth. Trump could be impeached for assassinating Sulimani, yet they keep proceeding with fake and retarded nonsense. Just like keeping troops in Syria, even the most insane rabid leftoids are just fine with US imperialism, so long as it's promoting Starbucks, Marvel and homosex, just like we see with support for HK. That is foreign meddling no matter how you try to justify it, and it's not even any different messaging than the hoax "bring democracyhumanrightsfreedom TM to the poor Arabs" justification that was used in Iraq. They don't even have to come up with a new play to run, it's really quite incredible.

Just passing through , says: Show Comment January 21, 2020 at 8:44 pm GMT
@OverCommenter A lot of right-wingers also see military action in the Middle East as a way for America to flex its muscles and bomb some Arabs. It also serves to justify the insane defence budget that could be used to build a wall and increase funding to ICE.

US politics has become incredibly bi-partisan, criticising Trump will get you branded a 'Leftist' in many circles. This extreme bipartisanship started with the Obama birth certificate nonsense which was being peddled by Jews like Orly Taitz, Philip J. Berg, Robert L. Shulz, Larry Klayman and Breitbart news – most likely because Obama was pursuing the JCPOA and not going hard enough on Iran – and continued with the Trump Russian agent angle.

Now many Americans cannot really think critically, they stick to their side like a fan sticks to their sports team.

Weston Waroda , says: Show Comment January 21, 2020 at 9:11 pm GMT
The first person I ever heard say sanctions are acts of war was Ron Paul. The repulsive Madeleine Albright infamously said the deaths of 500,000 Iranian children due to US sanctions was worth it. She ought to be tried as a war criminal. Ron Paul ought to be Secretary of State.

[Feb 09, 2020] The Deeper Story Behind The Assassination Of Soleimani

Highly recommended!
Looks like the end of Full Spectrum Dominance the the USA enjoyed since 1991. Alliance of Iran, Russia and China (with Turkey and Pakistan as two possible members) is serious military competitor and while the USA has its set of trump cards, the military victory against such an alliance no longer guaranteed.
Jan 09, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Federico Pieraccini via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

Days after the assassination of General Qasem Soleimani, new and important information is coming to light from a speech given by the Iraqi prime minister. The story behind Soleimani's assassination seems to go much deeper than what has thus far been reported, involving Saudi Arabia and China as well the US dollar's role as the global reserve currency .

The Iraqi prime minister, Adil Abdul-Mahdi, has revealed details of his interactions with Trump in the weeks leading up to Soleimani's assassination in a speech to the Iraqi parliament. He tried to explain several times on live television how Washington had been browbeating him and other Iraqi members of parliament to toe the American line, even threatening to engage in false-flag sniper shootings of both protesters and security personnel in order to inflame the situation, recalling similar modi operandi seen in Cairo in 2009, Libya in 2011, and Maidan in 2014. The purpose of such cynicism was to throw Iraq into chaos.

Here is the reconstruction of the story:

[Speaker of the Council of Representatives of Iraq] Halbousi attended the parliamentary session while almost none of the Sunni members did. This was because the Americans had learned that Abdul-Mehdi was planning to reveal sensitive secrets in the session and sent Halbousi to prevent this. Halbousi cut Abdul-Mehdi off at the commencement of his speech and then asked for the live airing of the session to be stopped. After this, Halbousi together with other members, sat next to Abdul-Mehdi, speaking openly with him but without it being recorded. This is what was discussed in that session that was not broadcast:

Abdul-Mehdi spoke angrily about how the Americans had ruined the country and now refused to complete infrastructure and electricity grid projects unless they were promised 50% of oil revenues, which Abdul-Mehdi refused.

The complete (translated) words of Abdul-Mahdi's speech to parliament:

This is why I visited China and signed an important agreement with them to undertake the construction instead. Upon my return, Trump called me to ask me to reject this agreement. When I refused, he threatened to unleash huge demonstrations against me that would end my premiership.

Huge demonstrations against me duly materialized and Trump called again to threaten that if I did not comply with his demands, then he would have Marine snipers on tall buildings target protesters and security personnel alike in order to pressure me.

I refused again and handed in my resignation. To this day the Americans insist on us rescinding our deal with the Chinese.

After this, when our Minister of Defense publicly stated that a third party was targeting both protestors and security personnel alike (just as Trump had threatened he would do), I received a new call from Trump threatening to kill both me and the Minister of Defense if we kept on talking about this "third party".

Nobody imagined that the threat was to be applied to General Soleimani, but it was difficult for Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi to reveal the weekslong backstory behind the terrorist attack.

I was supposed to meet him [Soleimani] later in the morning when he was killed. He came to deliver a message from Iran in response to the message we had delivered to the Iranians from the Saudis.

We can surmise, judging by Saudi Arabia's reaction , that some kind of negotiation was going on between Tehran and Riyadh:

The Kingdom's statement regarding the events in Iraq stresses the Kingdom's view of the importance of de-escalation to save the countries of the region and their people from the risks of any escalation.

Above all, the Saudi Royal family wanted to let people know immediately that they had not been informed of the US operation:

The kingdom of Saudi Arabia was not consulted regarding the US strike. In light of the rapid developments, the Kingdom stresses the importance of exercising restraint to guard against all acts that may lead to escalation, with severe consequences.

And to emphasize his reluctance for war, Mohammad bin Salman sent a delegation to the United States. Liz Sly , the Washington Post Beirut bureau chief, tweated:

Saudi Arabia is sending a delegation to Washington to urge restraint with Iran on behalf of [Persian] Gulf states. The message will be: 'Please spare us the pain of going through another war'.

What clearly emerges is that the success of the operation against Soleimani had nothing to do with the intelligence gathering of the US or Israel. It was known to all and sundry that Soleimani was heading to Baghdad in a diplomatic capacity that acknowledged Iraq's efforts to mediate a solution to the regional crisis with Saudi Arabia.

It would seem that the Saudis, Iranians and Iraqis were well on the way towards averting a regional conflict involving Syria, Iraq and Yemen. Riyadh's reaction to the American strike evinced no public joy or celebration. Qatar, while not seeing eye to eye with Riyadh on many issues, also immediately expressed solidarity with Tehran, hosting a meeting at a senior government level with Mohammad Zarif Jarif, the Iranian foreign minister. Even Turkey and Egypt , when commenting on the asassination, employed moderating language.

This could reflect a fear of being on the receiving end of Iran's retaliation. Qatar, the country from which the drone that killed Soleimani took off, is only a stone's throw away from Iran, situated on the other side of the Strait of Hormuz. Riyadh and Tel Aviv, Tehran's regional enemies, both know that a military conflict with Iran would mean the end of the Saudi royal family.

When the words of the Iraqi prime minister are linked back to the geopolitical and energy agreements in the region, then the worrying picture starts to emerge of a desperate US lashing out at a world turning its back on a unipolar world order in favor of the emerging multipolar about which I have long written .

The US, now considering itself a net energy exporter as a result of the shale-oil revolution (on which the jury is still out), no longer needs to import oil from the Middle East. However, this does not mean that oil can now be traded in any other currency other than the US dollar.

The petrodollar is what ensures that the US dollar retains its status as the global reserve currency, granting the US a monopolistic position from which it derives enormous benefits from playing the role of regional hegemon.

This privileged position of holding the global reserve currency also ensures that the US can easily fund its war machine by virtue of the fact that much of the world is obliged to buy its treasury bonds that it is simply able to conjure out of thin air. To threaten this comfortable arrangement is to threaten Washington's global power.

Even so, the geopolitical and economic trend is inexorably towards a multipolar world order, with China increasingly playing a leading role, especially in the Middle East and South America.

Venezuela, Russia, Iran, Iraq, Qatar and Saudi Arabia together make up the overwhelming majority of oil and gas reserves in the world. The first three have an elevated relationship with Beijing and are very much in the multipolar camp, something that China and Russia are keen to further consolidate in order to ensure the future growth for the Eurasian supercontinent without war and conflict.

Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, is pro-US but could gravitate towards the Sino-Russian camp both militarily and in terms of energy. The same process is going on with Iraq and Qatar thanks to Washington's numerous strategic errors in the region starting from Iraq in 2003, Libya in 2011 and Syria and Yemen in recent years.

The agreement between Iraq and China is a prime example of how Beijing intends to use the Iraq-Iran-Syria troika to revive the Middle East and and link it to the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative.

While Doha and Riyadh would be the first to suffer economically from such an agreement, Beijing's economic power is such that, with its win-win approach, there is room for everyone.

Saudi Arabia provides China with most of its oil and Qatar, together with the Russian Federation, supply China with most of its LNG needs, which lines up with Xi Jinping's 2030 vision that aims to greatly reduce polluting emissions.

The US is absent in this picture, with little ability to influence events or offer any appealing economic alternatives.

Washington would like to prevent any Eurasian integration by unleashing chaos and destruction in the region, and killing Soleimani served this purpose. The US cannot contemplate the idea of the dollar losing its status as the global reserve currency. Trump is engaging in a desperate gamble that could have disastrous consequences.

The region, in a worst-case scenario, could be engulfed in a devastating war involving multiple countries. Oil refineries could be destroyed all across the region, a quarter of the world's oil transit could be blocked, oil prices would skyrocket ($200-$300 a barrel) and dozens of countries would be plunged into a global financial crisis. The blame would be laid squarely at Trump's feet, ending his chances for re-election.

To try and keep everyone in line, Washington is left to resort to terrorism, lies and unspecified threats of visiting destruction on friends and enemies alike.

Trump has evidently been convinced by someone that the US can do without the Middle East, that it can do without allies in the region, and that nobody would ever dare to sell oil in any other currency than the US dollar.

Soleimani's death is the result of a convergence of US and Israeli interests. With no other way of halting Eurasian integration, Washington can only throw the region into chaos by targeting countries like Iran, Iraq and Syria that are central to the Eurasian project. While Israel has never had the ability or audacity to carry out such an assassination itself, the importance of the Israel Lobby to Trump's electoral success would have influenced his decision, all the more so in an election year .

Trump believed his drone attack could solve all his problems by frightening his opponents, winning the support of his voters (by equating Soleimani's assassination to Osama bin Laden's), and sending a warning to Arab countries of the dangers of deepening their ties with China.

The assassination of Soleimani is the US lashing out at its steady loss of influence in the region. The Iraqi attempt to mediate a lasting peace between Iran and Saudi Arabia has been scuppered by the US and Israel's determination to prevent peace in the region and instead increase chaos and instability.

Washington has not achieved its hegemonic status through a preference for diplomacy and calm dialogue, and Trump has no intention of departing from this approach.

Washington's friends and enemies alike must acknowledge this reality and implement the countermeasures necessary to contain the madness.

Boundless Energy , 1 minute ago link

Very good article, straight to the point. In fact its much worse. I know is hard to swallow for my US american brother and sisters.

But as sooner you wake up and see the reality as it is, as better chances the US has to survive with honor. Stop the wars around the globe and do not look for excuses. Isnt it already obvious what is going on with the US war machine? How many more examples some people need to wake up?

Noob678 , 8 minutes ago link

For those who love to connect the dots:

Iran Situation from Someone Who Knows Something

Not all said in video above is accurate but the recent events in Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Africa are all related to prevent China from overtaking the zionist hegemonic world and to recolonize China (at least the parasite is trying to hop to China as new host).

Trade war, Huawei, Hong Kong, Xinjiang, Tibet ..... the concerted efforts from all zionist controlled media (ZeroHedge included) to slander, smearing, fake news against China should tell you what the Zionists agenda are :)

............

Trump Threatens to Kill Iraqi PM if He Doesn't Cancel China Oil Deal - MoA

The American President's threatened the Iraqi Prime Minister to liquidate him directly with the Minister of Defense. The Marines are the third party that sniped the demonstrators and the security men:

Abdul Mahdi continued:

"After my return from China, Trump called me and asked me to cancel the agreement, so I also refused, and he threatened me with massive demonstrations that would topple me. Indeed, the demonstrations started and then Trump called, threatening to escalate in the event of non-cooperation and responding to his wishes, so that the third party (Marines snipers) would target the demonstrators and security forces and kill them from the highest structures and the US embassy in an attempt to pressure me and submit to his wishes and cancel the China agreement, so I did not respond and submitted my resignation and the Americans still insist to this day on canceling the China agreement and when the defense minister said that who kills the demonstrators is a third party, Trump called me immediately and physically threatened me and defense minister in the event of talk about the third party."

.........


The Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Commission found George W. Bush guilty of war crimes in absentia for the illegal invasion of Iraq. Bush, **** Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and their legal advisers Alberto Gonzales, David Addington, William Haynes, Jay Bybee and John Yoo were tried in absentia in Malaysia.

... ... ..

Thom Paine , 9 minutes ago link

When Iran has nukes, what then Trump?

I think Israel's fear is loss of regional goals if Iran becomes untouchable

TupacShakur , 13 minutes ago link

Empire is lashing out of desperation because we've crossed peak Empire.

Things are going downhill and will get more volatile as we go.

Buckle up folks because the final act will be very nasty.

Stalking Wolf , 12 minutes ago link

Unfortunately, this article makes a lot of sense. The US is losing influence and lashing out carelessly. I hope the rest of the world realizes how detached majority of the citizens within the states are from the federal government. The Federal government brings no good to our nation. None. From the mis management of our once tax revenues to the corrupt Congress who accepts bribes from the highest bidder, it's a rats best that is not only harmful to its own people, but the world at large. USD won't go down without a fight it seems... All empires end with a bang. Be ready

[Feb 09, 2020] As someone born in Latin America, we never saw the US as anything but a brutal predator, whose honeyed words were belied by their deeds

Aug 05, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

The essential facts are these. In April 1898, the United States went to war with Spain. The war's nominal purpose was to liberate Cuba from oppressive colonial rule. The war's subsequent conduct found the United States not only invading and occupying Cuba, but also seizing Puerto Rico, completing a deferred annexation of Hawaii, scarfing up various other small properties in the Pacific, and, not least of all, replacing Spain as colonial masters of the Philippine Archipelago, located across the Pacific.

That the true theme of the war with Spain turned out to be not liberation but expansion should not come as a terrible surprise. From the very founding of the first British colonies in North America, expansion has constituted an enduring theme of the American project. Separation from the British Empire after 1776 only reinforced the urge to grow. Yet prior to 1898, that project had been a continental one. The events of that year signaled the transition from continental to extra-continental expansion. American leaders were no longer content to preside over a republic stretching from sea to shining sea.

In that regard, the decision to annex the Philippines stands out as especially instructive. If you try hard enough -- and some politicians at the time did -- you can talk yourself into believing that U.S. actions in the Caribbean in 1898 represented something other than naked European-style imperialism with all its brute force to keep the natives in line. After all, the United States did refrain from converting Cuba into a formal colony and by 1902 had even granted Cubans a sort of ersatz independence. Moreover, both Cuba and Puerto Rico fell within "our backyard," as did various other Caribbean republics soon to undergo U.S. military occupation. Geographically, all were located within the American orbit.

Yet the Philippines represented an altogether different case. By no stretch of the imagination did the archipelago fall within "our backyard." Furthermore, the Filipinos had no desire to trade Spanish rule for American rule and violently resisted occupation by U.S. forces. The notably dirty Philippine-American War that followed from 1899 to 1902 -- a conflict almost entirely expunged from American memory today -- resulted in something like 200,000 Filipino deaths and ended in a U.S. victory not yet memorialized on the National Mall in Washington.

Why Do We Still Have War Booty From the Philippines? Time to Break Up With the Philippines

So the Philippine Archipelago had become ours. In short order, however, authorities in Washington changed their mind about the wisdom of accepting responsibility for several thousand islands located nearly 7,000 miles from San Francisco.

The sprawling American colony turned out to be the ultimate impulse purchase. And as with most impulse purchases, enthusiasm soon enough gave way to second thoughts and even regret. By 1907, President Theodore Roosevelt was privately referring to the Philippines as America's "Achilles heel." The United States had paid Spain $20 million for an acquisition that didn't turn a profit and couldn't be defended given the limited capabilities of the U.S. Army and U.S. Navy. To complicate matters further, from Tokyo's perspective, the Philippines fell within its backyard. So far as Imperial Japan was concerned, imperial America was intruding on its turf.

Thus was the sequence of events leading to the Pacific War of 1941-1945 set in motion. I am not suggesting that Pearl Harbor was an inevitable consequence of the United States annexing the Philippines. I am suggesting that it put two rival imperial powers on a collision course.

One can, of course, find in the ensuing sequence of events matters worth celebrating -- great military victories at places like Midway, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa, culminating after 1945 in a period of American dominion. But the legacy of our flirtation with empire in the Western Pacific also includes much that is lamentable -- the wars in Korea and Vietnam, for example, and now an intensifying rivalry with China destined to lead we know not where.

If history could be reduced to a balance sheet, the U.S. purchase of the Philippines would rate as a pretty bad bargain. That first $20 million turned out to be only a down payment.

Eliseo Art Silva Mark Thomason • 6 hours ago

No. Absolutely not. We would have been much better off had the US not violently dismantled the first Republic of the Philippines.

The canard that our greatest generation of Filipinos (Generation of 1898) was not fit to govern us was a product of US Assimilation Schools designed to rid the Philippines of Filipinos- by wiring them to automatically think anything non-Filipino will always be better (intenalized racism) and to train the primarily to leave and work abroad and blend -in as Americans (objectification) and never stand out as self-respecting Filipinos who aspire to be the best they can be propelled by the Filipino story.

Our multiple Golden Ages only occurred prior to US invasion and colonization.

YES, the USA owes us. We are every American's 2nd original sin.

Eliseo Art Silva Mark Thomason • 5 hours ago
We do not owe US anything. The USA owes us a great big deal, More than any other country on earth.

THEY (USA) owes us:
1) For violently dismantling the first Republic of the Philippines at the cost of over a million martyrs from the greatest generation of Filipinos.

2) For US Assimilation Schools denying us the intensity of our golden ages prior to their invasion as our drivers for PH civilization, turning us into a country that trains its people to leave and assimilate in US culture and become workers for Americans and foreigners abroad. This results in a Philippines WITHOUT Filipinos.

3) For US bombs turning Intramuros into dust- the centerpiece of the Paris of the East, with treasures, publications and art much older that the US- without consent from any Filipino leader. And for dismantling our train system from La Union to Bicol.

4) For the US Rescission Act which denied Filipino veterans due recognition, dignity and honor- vets who fought THEIR war against Japan on our soil.

5) For the canard that Aguinaldo, our 29-year old father and liberator of the Republic of the Philippines, is a villain and a traitor, even inventing the heroism of Andres Bonifacio which ultimately resulted in "Toxic Nationalism" which Rizal warned us about in the persona of Simoun in El Filibusterismo who will drive our nation to self-destruction and turn a paradise into a desert by being automatically wired to think anything non-Filipino will and always be better.

The core of colonial mentality is the misguided belief that we cannot have been a greater country had the US not destroyed the first Republic of the Philippines- a lie that was embedded in our minds by the US discrediting Aguinaldo and the Generation of 1896/1898- the greatest generation of Filipinos.

bob balkas • 18 hours ago
It does seem to me that every country which was able and could afford to expand its territory did so. In Europe, exceptions to that a wish were Switzerland, Slovakia, Finland, Ireland, Norway, Slovenia, Ukraine, ?Romania and Chechia.
So, US had company!
Romulus • 11 hours ago
President William McKinley defends his decision to support the annexation of the Philippines in the wake of the U.S. war in that country:

"When I next realized that the Philippines had dropped into our laps I confess I did not know what to do with them. . . And one night late it came to me this way. . .1) That we could not give them back to Spain- that would be cowardly and dishonorable; 2) that we could not turn them over to France and Germany-our commercial rivals in the Orient-that would be bad business and discreditable; 3) that we not leave them to themselves-they are unfit for self-government-and they would soon have anarchy and misrule over there worse than Spain's wars; and 4) that there was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them, and by God's grace do the very best we could by them, as our fellow-men for whom Christ also died."

Making Christians of a country that had its first Catholic diocese 9 years before the Spanish Armada sailed for England, with 4 dioceses in place years before the English sailed for Jamestown.

Tommy Matic IV Romulus • 6 hours ago
Not to mention a full fledged university older than Harvard.
Michael Brand • 7 hours ago • edited
Dan Carlin did an outstanding podcast on the choices America faced after acquiring the Philippines. McKinley was anti-empire, but the industrialists in his administration hungered to thwart the British, French and Dutch empires in the Pacific by establishing a colony all of our own.

Worth a listen

Adriana Pena • 7 hours ago
As someone born in Latin America, we never saw the US as anything but a brutal predator, whose honeyed words were belied by their deeds. I wonder if it began with the Philippines. There was the Mexican war first, which wrested a lot of territory from Mexico. And then there was the invasion of Canada to bring the blessings of democracy to Canadians (it ended with the White House in flames). I suspect that the beliefe that you are exceptional and blessed by God can lead to want to straighten up other people "for their own good", and make a profit besides - a LOT of profit.

[Feb 09, 2020] US troops have stolen tens of millions in Iraq and Afghanistan

Many of these crimes grew out of shortcomings in the military's management of the deployments that experts say are still present: a heavy dependence on cash transactions, a hasty award process for high-value contracts, loose and harried oversight within the ranks, and a regional culture of corruption that proved seductive to the Americans troops transplanted there.
Notable quotes:
"... "this thing going on" ..."
"... a regional culture of corruption that proved seductive to the Americans troops transplanted there. ..."
May 09, 2015 | slate.com

The Fraud of War: U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan have stolen tens of millions through bribery, theft, and rigged contracts.

U.S. Army Specialist Stephanie Charboneau sat at the center of a complex trucking network in Forward Operating Base Fenty near the Afghanistan-Pakistan border that distributed daily tens of thousands of gallons of what troops called "liquid gold": the refined petroleum that fueled the international coalition's vehicles, planes, and generators.

A prominent sign in the base read: "The Army Won't Go If The Fuel Don't Flow." But Charboneau, 31, a mother of two from Washington state, felt alienated after a supervisor's harsh rebuke. Her work was a dreary routine of recording fuel deliveries in a computer and escorting trucks past a gate. But it was soon to take a dark turn into high-value crime.

She began an affair with a civilian, Jonathan Hightower, who worked for a Pentagon contractor that distributed fuel from Fenty, and one day in March 2010 he told her about "this thing going on" at other U.S. military bases around Afghanistan, she recalled in a recent telephone interview.

Troops were selling the U.S. military's fuel to Afghan locals on the side, and pocketing the proceeds. When Hightower suggested they start doing the same, Charboneau said, she agreed.

In so doing, Charboneau contributed to thefts by U.S. military personnel of at least $15 million worth of fuel since the start of the U.S. war in Afghanistan. And eventually she became one of at least 115 enlisted personnel and military officers convicted since 2005 of committing theft, bribery, and contract-rigging crimes valued at $52 million during their deployments in Afghanistan and Iraq, according to a comprehensive tally of court records by the Center for Public Integrity.

Many of these crimes grew out of shortcomings in the military's management of the deployments that experts say are still present: a heavy dependence on cash transactions, a hasty award process for high-value contracts, loose and harried oversight within the ranks, and a regional culture of corruption that proved seductive to the Americans troops transplanted there.

Charboneau, whose Facebook posts reveal a bright-eyed woman with a shoulder tattoo and a huge grin, snuggling with pets and celebrating the 2015 New Year with her children in Seattle Seahawks jerseys, now sits in Carswell federal prison in Fort Worth, Texas, serving a seven-year sentence for her crime.

[Feb 09, 2020] Infamy at Sea Israel s Attack on the USS Liberty 50 Years Later by Jeffrey St. Clair

Notable quotes:
"... Only hours after the Liberty arrived it was spotted by the Israeli military. The IDF sent out reconnaissance planes to identify the ship. They made eight trips over a period of three hours. The Liberty was flying a large US flag and was easily recognizable as an American vessel. ..."
"... Soon more planes came. These were Israeli Mirage III fighters, armed with rockets and machine guns. As off-duty officers sunbathed on the deck, the fighters opened fire on the defenseless ship with rockets and machine guns. ..."
"... Attack on the Liberty ..."
"... Attack on the Liberty ..."
"... Dangerous Liaison, ..."
"... In January 1968, the arms embargo on Israel was lifted and the sale of American weapons began to flow. By 1971, Israel was buying $600 million of American-made weapons a year. Two years later the purchases topped $3 billion. Almost overnight, Israel had become the largest buyer of US-made arms and aircraft. ..."
"... Perversely, then, the IDF's strike on the Liberty served to weld the US and Israel together, in a kind of political and military embrace. Now, every time the IDF attacks defenseless villages in Gaza and the West Bank with F-16s and Apache helicopters, the Palestinians quite rightly see the bloody assaults as a joint operation, with the Pentagon as a hidden partner. ..."
Jun 02, 2017 | www.counterpunch.org

In early June of 1967, at the onset of the Six Day War, the Pentagon sent the USS Liberty from Spain into international waters off the coast of Gaza to monitor the progress of Israel's attack on the Arab states. The Liberty was a lightly armed surveillance ship.

Only hours after the Liberty arrived it was spotted by the Israeli military. The IDF sent out reconnaissance planes to identify the ship. They made eight trips over a period of three hours. The Liberty was flying a large US flag and was easily recognizable as an American vessel.

Soon more planes came. These were Israeli Mirage III fighters, armed with rockets and machine guns. As off-duty officers sunbathed on the deck, the fighters opened fire on the defenseless ship with rockets and machine guns.

A few minutes later a second wave of planes streaked overhead, French-built Mystere jets, which not only pelted the ship with gunfire but also with napalm bomblets, coating the deck with the flaming jelly. By now, the Liberty was on fire and dozens were wounded and killed, excluding several of the ship's top officers.

The Liberty's radio team tried to issue a distress call, but discovered the frequencies had been jammed by the Israeli planes with what one communications specialist called "a buzzsaw sound." Finally, an open channel was found and the Liberty got out a message it was under attack to the USS America, the Sixth Fleet's large aircraft carrier.

Two F-4s left the carrier to come to the Liberty's aid. Apparently, the jets were armed only with nuclear weapons. When word reached the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara became irate and ordered the jets to return. "Tell the Sixth Fleet to get those aircraft back immediately," he barked. McNamara's injunction was reiterated in saltier terms by Admiral David L. McDonald, the chief of Naval Operations: "You get those fucking airplanes back on deck, and you get them back down." The planes turned around. And the attack on the Liberty continued.

After the Israeli fighter jets had emptied their arsenal of rockets, three Israeli attack boats approached the Liberty. Two torpedoes were launched at the crippled ship, one tore a 40-foot wide hole in the hull, flooding the lower compartments, and killing more than a dozen American sailors.

As the Liberty listed in the choppy seas, its deck aflame, crew members dropped life rafts into the water and prepared to scuttle the ship. Given the number of wounded, this was going to be a dangerous operation. But it soon proved impossible, as the Israeli attack boats strafed the rafts with machine gun fire. No body was going to get out alive that way.

After more than two hours of unremitting assault, the Israelis finally halted their attack. One of the torpedo boats approached the Liberty. An officer asked in English over a bullhorn: "Do you need any help?"

The wounded commander of the Liberty, Lt. William McGonagle, instructed the quartermaster to respond emphatically: "Fuck you."

The Israeli boat turned and left.

A Soviet destroyer responded before the US Navy, even though a US submarine, on a covert mission, was apparently in the area and had monitored the attack. The Soviet ship reached the Liberty six hours before the USS Davis. The captain of the Soviet ship offered his aid, but the Liberty's conning officer refused.

Finally, 16 hours after the attack two US destroyers reached the Liberty. By that time, 34 US sailors were dead and 174 injured, many seriously. As the wounded were being evacuated, an officer with the Office of Naval Intelligence instructed the men not to talk about their ordeal with the press.

The following morning Israel launched a surprise invasion of Syria, breaching the new cease-fire agreement and seizing control of the Golan Heights.

Within three weeks, the Navy put out a 700-page report, exonerating the Israelis, claiming the attack had been accidental and that the Israelis had pulled back as soon as they realized their mistake. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara suggested the whole affair should be forgotten. "These errors do occur," McNamara concluded.

***

In Assault on the Liberty , a harrowing first-hand account by James Ennes Jr., McNamara's version of events is proven to be as big a sham as his concurrent lies about Vietnam. Ennes's book created a media storm when it was first published by Random House in 1980, including (predictably) charges that Ennes was a liar and an anti-Semite. Still, the book sold more than 40,000 copies, but was eventually allowed to go out of print. Now Ennes has published an updated version, which incorporates much new evidence that the Israeli attack was deliberate and that the US government went to extraordinary lengths to disguise the truth.

It's a story of Israel aggression, Pentagon incompetence, official lies, and a cover-up that persists to this day. The book gains much of its power from the immediacy of Ennes's first-hand account of the attack and the lies that followed.

Now, decades later, Ennes warns that the bloodbath on board the Liberty and its aftermath should serve as a tragic cautionary tale about the continuing ties between the US government and the government of Israel.

The Attack on the Liberty is the kind of book that makes your blood seethe. Ennes skillfully documents the life of the average sailor on one of the more peculiar vessels in the US Navy, with an attention for detail that reminds one of Dana or O'Brien. After all, the year was 1967 and most of the men on the Liberty were certainly glad to be on a non-combat ship in the middle of the Mediterranean, rather than in the Gulf of Tonkin or Mekong Delta.

But this isn't Two Years Before the Mast. In fact, Ennes's tour on the Liberty last only a few short weeks. He had scarcely settled into a routine before his new ship was shattered before his eyes.

Ennes joined the Liberty in May of 1967, as an Electronics Material Officer. Serving on a "spook ship", as the Liberty was known to Navy wives, was supposed to be a sure path to career enhancement. The Liberty's normal routine was to ply the African coast, tuning in its eavesdropping equipment on the electronic traffic in the region.

The Liberty had barely reached Africa when it received a flash message from the Joint Chiefs of Staff to sail from the Ivory Coast to the Mediterranean, where it was to re-deploy off the coast of the Sinai to monitor the Israeli attack on Egypt and the allied Arab nations.

As the war intensified, the Liberty sent a request to the fleet headquarters requesting an escort. It was denied by Admiral William Martin. The Liberty moved alone to a position in international waters about 13 miles from the shore at El Arish, then under furious siege by the IDF.

On June 6, the Joint Chiefs sent Admiral McCain, father of the senator from Arizona, an urgent message instructing him to move the Liberty out of the war zone to a position at least 100 miles off the Gaza Coast. McCain never forwarded the message to the ship.

A little after seven in the morning on June 8, Ennes entered the bridge of the Liberty to take the morning watch. Ennes was told that an hour earlier a "flying boxcar" (later identified as a twin-engine Nord 2501 Noratlas) had flown over the ship at a low level.

Ennes says he noticed that the ship's American flag had become stained with soot and ordered a new flag run up the mast. The morning was clear and calm, with a light breeze.

At 9 am, Ennes spotted another reconnaissance plane, which circled the Liberty. An hour later two Israeli fighter jets buzzed the ship. Over the next four hours, Israeli planes flew over the Liberty five more times.

When the first fighter jet struck, a little before two in the afternoon, Ennes was scanning the skies from the starboard side of the bridge, binoculars in his hands. A rocket hit the ship just below where Ennes was standing, the fragments shredded the men closest to him.

After the explosion, Ennes noticed that he was the only man left standing. But he also had been hit by more than 20 shards of shrapnel and the force of the blast had shattered his left leg. As he crawled into the pilothouse, a second fighter jet streaked above them and unleashed its payload on the hobbled Liberty.

At that point, Ennes says the crew of the Liberty had no idea who was attacking them or why. For a few moments, they suspected it might be the Soviets, after an officer mistakenly identified the fighters as MIG-15s. They knew that the Egyptian air force already had been decimated by the Israelis. The idea that the Israelis might be attacking them didn't occur to them until one of the crew spotted a Star of David on the wing of one of the French-built Mystere jets.

Ennes was finally taken below deck to a makeshift dressing station, with other wounded men. It was hardly a safe harbor. As Ennes worried that his fractured leg might slice through his femoral artery leaving him to bleed to death, the Liberty was pummeled by rockets, machine-gun fire and an Italian-made torpedo packed with 1,000-pounds of explosive.

After the attack ended, Ennes was approached by his friend Pat O'Malley, a junior officer, who had just sent a list of killed and wounded to the Bureau of Naval Personnel. He got an immediate message back. "They said, 'Wounded in what action? Killed in what action?'," O'Malley told Ennes. "They said it wasn't an 'action,' it was an accident. I'd like for them to come out here and see the difference between an action and an accident. Stupid bastards."

The cover-up had begun.

***

The Pentagon lied to the public about the attack on the Liberty from the very beginning. In a decision personally approved by the loathsome McNamara, the Pentagon denied to the press that the Liberty was an intelligence ship, referring to it instead as a Technical Research ship, as if it were little more than a military version of Jacques Cousteau's Calypso.

The military press corps on the USS America, where most of the wounded sailors had been taken, were placed under extreme restrictions. All of the stories filed from the carrier were first routed through the Pentagon for security clearance, objectionable material was removed with barely a bleat of protest from the reporters or their publications.

Predictably, Israel's first response was to blame the victim, a tactic that has served them so well in the Palestinian situation. First, the IDF alleged that it had asked the State Department and the Pentagon to identify any US ships in the area and was told that there were none. Then the Israeli government charged that the Liberty failed to fly its flag and didn't respond to calls for it to identify itself. The Israelis contended that they assumed the Liberty was an Egyptian supply ship called El Quseir, which, even though it was a rusting transport ship then docked in Alexandria, the IDF said it suspected of shelling Israeli troops from the sea. Under these circumstances, the Israeli's said they were justified in opening fire on the Liberty. The Israelis said that they halted the attack almost immediately, when they realized their mistake.

"The Liberty contributed decisively toward its identification as an enemy ship," the IDF report concluded. This was a blatant falsehood, since the Israelis had identified the Liberty at least six hours prior to the attack on the ship.

Even though the Pentagon knew better, it gave credence to the Israeli account by saying that perhaps the Liberty's flag had lain limp on the flagpole in a windless sea. The Pentagon also suggested that the attack might have lasted less than 20 minutes.

After the initial battery of misinformation, the Pentagon imposed a news blackout on the Liberty disaster until after the completion of a Court of Inquiry investigation.

The inquiry was headed by Rear Admiral Isaac C. Kidd. Kidd didn't have a free hand. He'd been instructed by Vice-Admiral McCain to limit the damage to the Pentagon and to protect the reputation of Israel.

The Kidd interviewed the crew on June 14 and 15. The questioning was extremely circumscribed. According to Ennes, the investigators "asked nothing that might be embarrassing to Israeland testimony that tended to embarrass Israel was covered with a 'Top Secret' label, if it was accepted at all."

Ennes notes that even testimony by the Liberty's communications officers about the jamming of the ship's radios was classified as "Top Secret." The reason? It proved that Israel knew it was attacking an American ship. "Here was strong evidence that the attack was planned in advance and that our ship's identity was known to the attackers (for it its practically impossible to jam the radio of a stranger), but this information was hushed up and no conclusions were drawn from it," Ennes writes.

Similarly, the Court of Inquiry deep-sixed testimony and affidavits regarding the flag-Ennes had ordered a crisp new one deployed early on the morning of the attack. The investigators buried intercepts of conversations between IDF pilots identifying the ship as flying an American flag.

It also refused to accept evidence about the IDF's use of napalm during the attacks and choose not to hear testimony regarding the duration of the attacks and the fact that the US Navy failed to send planes to defend the ship.

"No one came to help us," said Dr. Richard F. Kiepfer, the Liberty's physician. "We were promised help, but no help came. The Russians arrived before our own ships did. We asked for an escort before we ever came to the war zone and we were turned down."

None of this made its way into the 700-page Court of Inquiry report, which was completed within a couple of weeks and sent to Admiral McCain in London for review.

McCain approved the report over the objections of Captain Merlin Staring, the Navy legal officer assigned to the inquiry, who found the report to be flawed, incomplete and contrary to the evidence.

Staring sent a letter to the Judge Advocate General of the Navy disavowing himself from the report. The JAG seemed to take Staring's objections to heart. It prepared a summary for the Chief of Naval Operations that almost completely ignored the Kidd/McCain report. Instead, it concluded:

that the Liberty was easily recognizable as an American naval vessel; that it's flag was fully deployed and flying in a moderate breeze; that Israeli planes made at least eight reconnaissance flights at close range; the ship came under a prolonged attack from Israeli fighter jets and torpedo boats.

This succinct and largely accurate report was stamped Top Secret by Navy brass and stayed locked up for many years. But it was seen by many in the Pentagon and some in the Oval Office. But here was enough grumbling about the way the Liberty incident had been handled that LBJ summoned that old Washington fixer Clark Clifford to do damage control. It didn't take Clifford long to come up with the official line: the Israelis simply had made a tragic mistake.

It turns out that the Admiral Kidd and Captain Ward Boston, the two investigating officers who prepared the original report for Admiral McCain, both believed that the Israeli attack was intentional and sustained. In other words, the IDF knew that they were striking an American spy ship and they wanted to sink it and kill as many sailors as possible. Why then did the Navy investigators produce a sham report that concluded it was an accident?

Twenty-five years later we finally found out. In June of 2002, Captain Boston told the Navy Times: "Officers follow orders."

It gets worse. There's plenty of evidence that US intelligence agencies learned on June 7 that Israel intended to attack the Liberty on the following day and that the strike had been personally ordered by Moshe Dayan.

As the attacks were going on, conversations between Israeli pilots were overheard by US Air Force officers in an EC121 surveillance plane overhead. The spy plane was spotted by Israeli jets, which were given orders to shoot it down. The American plane narrowly avoided the IDF missiles.

Initial reports on the incident prepared by the CIA, Office of Naval Intelligence and the National Security Agency all reached similar conclusions.

A particularly damning report compiled by a CIA informant suggests that Israeli Defense minister Moshe Dayan personally ordered the attack and wanted it to proceed until the Liberty was sunk and all on board killed. A heavily redacted version of the report was released in 1977. It reads in part:

"[The source] said that Dayan personally ordered the attack on the ship and that one of his generals adamantly opposed the action and said, 'This is pure murder.' One of the admirals who was present also disapproved of the action, and it was he who ordered it stopped and not Dayan."

This amazing document generated little attention from the press and Dayan was never publicly questioned about his role in the attack.

The analyses by the intelligence agencies are collected in a 1967 investigation by the Defense Subcommittee on Appropriations. Two and half decades later that report remains classified. Why? A former committee staffer said: "So as not to embarrass Israel."

More proof came to light from the Israeli side. A few years after Attack on the Liberty was originally published, Ennes got a call from Evan Toni, an Israeli pilot. Toni told Ennes that he had just read his book and wanted to tell him his story. Toni said that he was the pilot in the first Israeli Mirage fighter to reach the Liberty. He immediately recognized the ship to be a US Navy vessel. He radioed Israeli air command with this information and asked for instructions. Toni said he was ordered to "attack." He refused and flew back to the air base at Ashdod. When he arrived he was summarily arrested for disobeying orders.

***

How tightly does the Israeli lobby control the Hill? For the first time in history, an attack on an America ship was not subjected to a public investigation by Congress. In 1980, Adlai Stevenson and Barry Goldwater planned to open a senate hearing into the Liberty affair. Then Jimmy Carter intervened by brokering a deal with Menachem Begin, where Israel agreed to pony up $6 million to pay for damages to the ship. A State Department press release announced the payment said, "The book is now closed on the USS Liberty."

It certainly was the last chapter for Adlai Stevenson. He ran for governor of Illinois the following year, where his less than perfect record on Israel, and his unsettling questions about the Liberty affair, became an issue in the campaign. Big money flowed into the coffers of his Republican opponent, Big Jim Thompson, and Stevenson went down to a narrow defeat.

But the book wasn't closed for the sailors either, of course. After a Newsweek story exposed the gist of what really happened on that day in the Mediterranean, an enraged Admiral McCain placed all the sailors under a gag order. When one sailor told an officer that he was having problems living with the cover-up, he was told: "Forget about it, that's an order."

The Navy went to bizarre lengths to keep the crew of the Liberty from telling what they knew. When gag orders didn't work, they threatened sanctions. Ennes tells of the confinement and interrogation of two Liberty sailors that sounds like something right out of the CIA's MK-Ultra program.

"In an incredible abuse of authority, military officers held two young Liberty sailors against their will in a locked and heavily guarded psychiatric ward of the base hospital," Ennes writes. "For days these men were drugged and questioned about their recollections of the attack by a 'therapist' who admitted to being untrained in either psychiatry or psychology. At one point, they avoided electroshock only by bolting from the room and demanding to see the commanding officer."

Since coming home, the veterans who have tried to tell of their ordeal have been harassed relentlessly. They've been branded as drunks, bigots, liars and frauds. Often, it turns out, these slurs have been leaked by the Pentagon. And, oh yeah, they've also been painted as anti-Semites.

In a recent column, Charley Reese describes just how mean-spirited and petty this campaign became. "When a small town in Wisconsin decided to name its library in honor of the USS Liberty crewmen, a campaign claiming it was anti-Semitic was launched," writes Reese. "And when the town went ahead, the U.S. government ordered no Navy personnel to attend, and sent no messages. This little library was the first, and at the time the only, memorial to the men who died on the Liberty."

***

So why then did the Israelis attack the Liberty?

A few days before the Six Days War, Israel's Foreign Minister Abba Eban visited Washington to inform LBJ about the forthcoming invasion. Johnson cautioned Eban that the US could not support such an attack.

It's possible, then, that the IDF assumed that the Liberty was spying on the Israeli war plans. Possible, but not likely. Despite the official denials, as Andrew and Leslie Cockburn demonstrate in Dangerous Liaison, at the time of the Six Days War the US and Israel had developed a warm covert relationship. So closely were the two sides working that US intelligence aid certainly helped secure Israel's devastating and swift victory. In fact, it's possible that the Liberty had been sent to the region to spy for the IDF.

A somewhat more likely scenario holds that Moshe Dayan wanted to keep the lid on Israel's plan to breach the new cease-fire and invade into Syria to seize the Golan.

It has also been suggested that Dayan ordered the attack on the Liberty with the intent of pinning the blame on the Egyptians and thus swinging public and political opinion in the United States solidly behind the Israelis. Of course, for this plan to work, the Liberty had to be destroyed and its crew killed.

There's another factor. The Liberty was positioned just off the coast from the town of El Arish. In fact, Ennes and others had used town's mosque tower to fix the location of the ship along the otherwise featureless desert shoreline. The IDF had seized El Arish and had used the airport there as a prisoner of war camp. On the very day the Liberty was attacked, the IDF was in the process of executing as many as 1,000 Palestinian and Egyptian POWs, a war crime that they surely wanted to conceal from prying eyes. According to Gabriel Bron, now an Israeli reporter, who witnessed part of the massacre as a soldier: "The Egyptian prisoners of war were ordered to dig pits and then army police shot them to death."

The bigger question is why the US government would participate so enthusiastically in the cover-up of a war crime against its own sailors. Well, the Pentagon has never been slow to hide its own incompetence. And there's plenty of that in the Liberty affair: bungled communications, refusal to provide an escort, situating the defenseless Liberty too close to a raging battle, the inability to intervene in the attack and the inexcusably long time it took to reach the battered ship and its wounded.

That's but par for the course. But something else was going on that would only come to light later. Through most of the 1960s, the US congress had imposed a ban on the sale of arms to both Israel and Jordan. But at the time of the Liberty attack, the Pentagon (and its allies in the White House and on the Hill) was seeking to have this proscription overturned. The top brass certainly knew that any evidence of a deliberate attack on a US Navy ship by the IDF would scuttle their plans. So they hushed it up.

In January 1968, the arms embargo on Israel was lifted and the sale of American weapons began to flow. By 1971, Israel was buying $600 million of American-made weapons a year. Two years later the purchases topped $3 billion. Almost overnight, Israel had become the largest buyer of US-made arms and aircraft.

Perversely, then, the IDF's strike on the Liberty served to weld the US and Israel together, in a kind of political and military embrace. Now, every time the IDF attacks defenseless villages in Gaza and the West Bank with F-16s and Apache helicopters, the Palestinians quite rightly see the bloody assaults as a joint operation, with the Pentagon as a hidden partner.

Thus, does the legacy of Liberty live on, one raid after another.

A version of this essay appeared in The Politics of Anti-Semitism by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair.

[Feb 09, 2020] Bush older acted as a gangster in Kuwait war: he was determined to "seize the unipolar moment."

Bush older was the first president from CIA. He was already a senior CIA official at the time of JFK assassination and might participate in the plot to kill JFK. At least he was in Dallas at the day of assassination. .
Jan 21, 2020 | www.unz.com

SolontoCroesus , says: Show Comment January 21, 2020 at 5:20 pm GMT

That Iraq is to say the least unstable is attributable to the ill-advised U.S. invasion of 2003.

Nothing to do with 9 years of sanctions on Iraq that killed a million Iraqis, "half of them children," and US control of Iraqi air space, after having killed Iraqi military in a turkey-shoot, for no really good reason other than George H W Bush seized the "unipolar moment" to become king of the world?

Maybe it's just stubbornness: I think Papa Bush is responsible for the "imperial pivot," in the Persian Gulf war aka Operation Desert Storm, 29 years and 4 days ago -- January 17, 1991.

According to Jeffrey Engel, Bush's biographer and director of the Bush library at Southern Methodist University, Gorbachev harassed Bush with phone calls, pleading with him not to go to war over Kuwait

https://www.c-span.org/video/?310832-1/into-desert-reflections-gulf-war

(It's worth noting that Dennis Ross was relatively new in his role on Jim Baker's staff when Baker, Brent Skowcroft, Larry Eagleburger & like minded urged Bush to take the Imperial Pivot.)

According to Vernon Loeb, who completed the writing of King's Counsel after Jack O'Connell died, Jordan's King Hussein, in consultation with retired CIA station chief O'Connell, parlayed with Arab leaders to resolve the conflict on their own, i.e. Arab-to-Arab terms, and also pleaded with Bush to stay out, and to let the Arabs solve their own problems. Bush refused.
https://www.c-span.org/video/?301361-6/kings-counsel

See above: Bush was determined to "seize the unipolar moment."

Once again insist on entering into the record: George H Bush was present at the creation of the Global War on Terror, July 4, 1979, the Jerusalem Conference hosted by Benzion and Benjamin Netanyahu and heavily populated with Trotskyites – neocons.

International Terrorism: Challenge and Response, Benjamin Netanyahu, ed., 1981.
(Wurmser became Netanyahu's acolyte)

Z-man , says: Show Comment January 21, 2020 at 7:05 pm GMT
@SolontoCroesus

I think Papa Bush is responsible for the "imperial pivot," in the Persian Gulf war aka Operation Desert Storm, 29 years and 4 days ago -- January 17, 1991.

Yes I remember it well. I came back from a long trip & memorable vacation, alas I was a young man, to the television drama that was unfolding with Arthur Kent 'The Scud Stud' and others reporting from the safety of their hotel balconies filming aircaft and cruise missiles. It was surreal.
You are correct of course.

[Feb 09, 2020] Trump demand for 50% of Iraq oil revenue sound exactly like a criminal mob boss

Highly recommended!
Jan 21, 2020 | www.unz.com

Tucker , says: Show Comment January 21, 2020 at 12:27 pm GMT

I've heard and read about a claim that Trump actually called PM Abdul Mahdi and demanded that Iraq hand over 50 percent of their proceeds from selling their oil to the USA, and then threatened Mahdi that he would unleash false flag attacks against the Iraqi government and its people if he did not submit to this act of Mafia-like criminal extortion. Mahdi told Trump to kiss his buttocks and that he wasn't going to turn over half of the profits from oil sales.

This makes Trump sound exactly like a criminal mob boss, especially in light of the fact that the USA is now the world's #1 exporter of oil – a fact that the arrogant Orange Man has even boasted about in recent months. Can anyone confirm that this claim is accurate? If so, then the more I learn about Trump the more sleazy and gangster like he becomes.

I mean, think about it. Bush and Cheney and mostly jewish neocons LIED us into Iraq based on bald faced lies, fabricated evidence, and exaggerated threats that they KNEW did not exist. We destroyed that country, captured and killed it's leader – who used to be a big buddy of the USA when we had a use for him – and Bush's crime gang killed close to 2 million innocent Iraqis and wrecked their economy and destroyed their infrastructure. And, now, after all that death, destruction and carnage – which Trump claimed in 2016 he did not approve of – but, now that Trump is sitting on the throne in the Oval office – he has the audacity and the gall to demand that Iraq owes the USA 50 percent of their oil profits? And, that he won't honor and respect their demand to pull our troops out of their sovereign nation unless they PAY US back for the gigantic waste of tax payers money that was spent building permanent bases inside their country?

Not one Iraqi politician voted for the appropriations bill that financed the construction of those military bases; that was our mistake, the mistake of our US congress whichever POTUS signed off on it.

melpol , says: Show Comment January 21, 2020 at 1:41 pm GMT
...Trump learned the power of the purse on the streets of NYC, he survived by playing ball with the Jewish and Italian Mafia. Now he has become the ultimate Godfather, and the world must listen to his commands. Watch and listen as the powerful and mighty crumble under US Hegemony.
World War Jew , says: Show Comment January 21, 2020 at 1:42 pm GMT
Right TG, traditionally, as you said up there first, and legally too, under the supreme law of the land. Economic sanctions are subject to the same UNSC supervision as forcible coercion.

UN Charter Article 41: "The Security Council may decide what measures not involving the use of armed force are to be employed to give effect to its decisions, and it may call upon the Members of the United Nations to apply such measures. These may include complete or partial interruption of economic relations and of rail, sea, air, postal, telegraphic, radio, and other means of communication, and the severance of diplomatic relations."

https://www.un.org/en/charter-united-nations/index.html

US "sanctions" require UNSC authorization. Unilateral sanctions are nothing but illegal coercive intervention, as the non-intervention principle is customary international law, which is US federal common law.

The G-192, that is, the entire world, has affirmed this law. That's why the US is trying to defund UNCTAD as redundant with the WTO (UNCTAD is the G-192's primary forum.) In any case, now that the SCO is in a position to enforce this law at gunpoint with its overwhelmingly superior missile technology, the US is going to get stomped and tased until it complies and stops resisting.

Charlie , says: Show Comment January 21, 2020 at 7:53 pm GMT
@Tucker This idea that the US is any sort of a net petroleum exporter is just another lie.

https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=268&t=6

In 2018 total US petroleum production was under 18 million barrels per day, total consumption north of 20 mmb/d. What does it matter if the US exports a bunch of super light fracked product the US itself can't refine if it turns around and imports it all back in again and then some.

The myths we tell ourselves, like a roaring economy that nevertheless generates a $1 trillion annual deficit, will someday come back to bite us. Denying reality is not a winning game plan for the long run.

Christophe GJ , says: Show Comment January 21, 2020 at 8:00 pm GMT
I long tought that US foreign policies were mainly zionist agenda – driven, but the Venezuelan affair and the statements of Trump himself about the syrian oil (ta be "kept" (stolen)) make you think twice.

Oil seems to be at least very important even if it's not the main cause of middle east problems

So maybe it's the cause of illegal and cruel sanctions against Iran : Get rid of competitor to sell shale oil everywhere ?( think also of Norstream 2 here)

Watch out US of A. in the end there is something sometimes referred to as the oil's curse . some poor black Nigerians call oil "the shit of the devil", because it's such a problem – related asset Have you heard of it ? You get your revenues from oil easily, so you don't have to make effort by yourself. And in the end you don't keep pace with China on 5G ? Education fails ? Hmm
Becommig a primary sector extraction nation sad destiny indeed, like africans growing cafe, bananas and cacao for others. Not to mention environmental problems
What has happened to the superb Nation that send the first man on the moon and invented modern computers ?
Disapointment
Money for space or money for war following the Zio. Choose Uncle Sam !
Difficult to have both

OverCommenter , says: Show Comment January 21, 2020 at 8:24 pm GMT
Everyone seems to forget how we avoided war with Syria all those years ago It was when John Kerry of all people gaffed, and said "if Assad gives up all his chemical weapons." That was in response to a reporter who asked "is there anything that can stop the war?" A intrepid Russian ambassador chimed in loud enough for the press core to hear his "OK" and history was averted. Thinking restricting the power of the President will stop brown children from dying at the hands of insane US foreign policy is a cope. "Bi-partisanship" voted to keep troops in Syria, that was only a few months ago, have you already forgotten? Dubya started the drone program, and the magical African everyone fawns over, literally doubled the remote controlled death. We are way past pretending any elected official from either side is actually against more ME war, or even that one side is worse than the other.

The problem with the supporters Trump has left is they so desperately want to believe in something bigger than themselves. They have been fed propaganda for their whole lives, and as a result can only see the world in either "this is good" or "this is bad." The problem with the opposition is that they are insane. and will say or do anything regardless of the truth. Trump could be impeached for assassinating Sulimani, yet they keep proceeding with fake and retarded nonsense. Just like keeping troops in Syria, even the most insane rabid leftoids are just fine with US imperialism, so long as it's promoting Starbucks, Marvel and homosex, just like we see with support for HK. That is foreign meddling no matter how you try to justify it, and it's not even any different messaging than the hoax "bring democracyhumanrightsfreedom TM to the poor Arabs" justification that was used in Iraq. They don't even have to come up with a new play to run, it's really quite incredible.

Just passing through , says: Show Comment January 21, 2020 at 8:44 pm GMT
@OverCommenter A lot of right-wingers also see military action in the Middle East as a way for America to flex its muscles and bomb some Arabs. It also serves to justify the insane defence budget that could be used to build a wall and increase funding to ICE.

US politics has become incredibly bi-partisan, criticising Trump will get you branded a 'Leftist' in many circles. This extreme bipartisanship started with the Obama birth certificate nonsense which was being peddled by Jews like Orly Taitz, Philip J. Berg, Robert L. Shulz, Larry Klayman and Breitbart news – most likely because Obama was pursuing the JCPOA and not going hard enough on Iran – and continued with the Trump Russian agent angle.

Now many Americans cannot really think critically, they stick to their side like a fan sticks to their sports team.

Weston Waroda , says: Show Comment January 21, 2020 at 9:11 pm GMT
The first person I ever heard say sanctions are acts of war was Ron Paul. The repulsive Madeleine Albright infamously said the deaths of 500,000 Iranian children due to US sanctions was worth it. She ought to be tried as a war criminal. Ron Paul ought to be Secretary of State.

[Feb 09, 2020] The Deeper Story Behind The Assassination Of Soleimani

Highly recommended!
Looks like the end of Full Spectrum Dominance the the USA enjoyed since 1991. Alliance of Iran, Russia and China (with Turkey and Pakistan as two possible members) is serious military competitor and while the USA has its set of trump cards, the military victory against such an alliance no longer guaranteed.
Jan 09, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Federico Pieraccini via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

Days after the assassination of General Qasem Soleimani, new and important information is coming to light from a speech given by the Iraqi prime minister. The story behind Soleimani's assassination seems to go much deeper than what has thus far been reported, involving Saudi Arabia and China as well the US dollar's role as the global reserve currency .

The Iraqi prime minister, Adil Abdul-Mahdi, has revealed details of his interactions with Trump in the weeks leading up to Soleimani's assassination in a speech to the Iraqi parliament. He tried to explain several times on live television how Washington had been browbeating him and other Iraqi members of parliament to toe the American line, even threatening to engage in false-flag sniper shootings of both protesters and security personnel in order to inflame the situation, recalling similar modi operandi seen in Cairo in 2009, Libya in 2011, and Maidan in 2014. The purpose of such cynicism was to throw Iraq into chaos.

Here is the reconstruction of the story:

[Speaker of the Council of Representatives of Iraq] Halbousi attended the parliamentary session while almost none of the Sunni members did. This was because the Americans had learned that Abdul-Mehdi was planning to reveal sensitive secrets in the session and sent Halbousi to prevent this. Halbousi cut Abdul-Mehdi off at the commencement of his speech and then asked for the live airing of the session to be stopped. After this, Halbousi together with other members, sat next to Abdul-Mehdi, speaking openly with him but without it being recorded. This is what was discussed in that session that was not broadcast:

Abdul-Mehdi spoke angrily about how the Americans had ruined the country and now refused to complete infrastructure and electricity grid projects unless they were promised 50% of oil revenues, which Abdul-Mehdi refused.

The complete (translated) words of Abdul-Mahdi's speech to parliament:

This is why I visited China and signed an important agreement with them to undertake the construction instead. Upon my return, Trump called me to ask me to reject this agreement. When I refused, he threatened to unleash huge demonstrations against me that would end my premiership.

Huge demonstrations against me duly materialized and Trump called again to threaten that if I did not comply with his demands, then he would have Marine snipers on tall buildings target protesters and security personnel alike in order to pressure me.

I refused again and handed in my resignation. To this day the Americans insist on us rescinding our deal with the Chinese.

After this, when our Minister of Defense publicly stated that a third party was targeting both protestors and security personnel alike (just as Trump had threatened he would do), I received a new call from Trump threatening to kill both me and the Minister of Defense if we kept on talking about this "third party".

Nobody imagined that the threat was to be applied to General Soleimani, but it was difficult for Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi to reveal the weekslong backstory behind the terrorist attack.

I was supposed to meet him [Soleimani] later in the morning when he was killed. He came to deliver a message from Iran in response to the message we had delivered to the Iranians from the Saudis.

We can surmise, judging by Saudi Arabia's reaction , that some kind of negotiation was going on between Tehran and Riyadh:

The Kingdom's statement regarding the events in Iraq stresses the Kingdom's view of the importance of de-escalation to save the countries of the region and their people from the risks of any escalation.

Above all, the Saudi Royal family wanted to let people know immediately that they had not been informed of the US operation:

The kingdom of Saudi Arabia was not consulted regarding the US strike. In light of the rapid developments, the Kingdom stresses the importance of exercising restraint to guard against all acts that may lead to escalation, with severe consequences.

And to emphasize his reluctance for war, Mohammad bin Salman sent a delegation to the United States. Liz Sly , the Washington Post Beirut bureau chief, tweated:

Saudi Arabia is sending a delegation to Washington to urge restraint with Iran on behalf of [Persian] Gulf states. The message will be: 'Please spare us the pain of going through another war'.

What clearly emerges is that the success of the operation against Soleimani had nothing to do with the intelligence gathering of the US or Israel. It was known to all and sundry that Soleimani was heading to Baghdad in a diplomatic capacity that acknowledged Iraq's efforts to mediate a solution to the regional crisis with Saudi Arabia.

It would seem that the Saudis, Iranians and Iraqis were well on the way towards averting a regional conflict involving Syria, Iraq and Yemen. Riyadh's reaction to the American strike evinced no public joy or celebration. Qatar, while not seeing eye to eye with Riyadh on many issues, also immediately expressed solidarity with Tehran, hosting a meeting at a senior government level with Mohammad Zarif Jarif, the Iranian foreign minister. Even Turkey and Egypt , when commenting on the asassination, employed moderating language.

This could reflect a fear of being on the receiving end of Iran's retaliation. Qatar, the country from which the drone that killed Soleimani took off, is only a stone's throw away from Iran, situated on the other side of the Strait of Hormuz. Riyadh and Tel Aviv, Tehran's regional enemies, both know that a military conflict with Iran would mean the end of the Saudi royal family.

When the words of the Iraqi prime minister are linked back to the geopolitical and energy agreements in the region, then the worrying picture starts to emerge of a desperate US lashing out at a world turning its back on a unipolar world order in favor of the emerging multipolar about which I have long written .

The US, now considering itself a net energy exporter as a result of the shale-oil revolution (on which the jury is still out), no longer needs to import oil from the Middle East. However, this does not mean that oil can now be traded in any other currency other than the US dollar.

The petrodollar is what ensures that the US dollar retains its status as the global reserve currency, granting the US a monopolistic position from which it derives enormous benefits from playing the role of regional hegemon.

This privileged position of holding the global reserve currency also ensures that the US can easily fund its war machine by virtue of the fact that much of the world is obliged to buy its treasury bonds that it is simply able to conjure out of thin air. To threaten this comfortable arrangement is to threaten Washington's global power.

Even so, the geopolitical and economic trend is inexorably towards a multipolar world order, with China increasingly playing a leading role, especially in the Middle East and South America.

Venezuela, Russia, Iran, Iraq, Qatar and Saudi Arabia together make up the overwhelming majority of oil and gas reserves in the world. The first three have an elevated relationship with Beijing and are very much in the multipolar camp, something that China and Russia are keen to further consolidate in order to ensure the future growth for the Eurasian supercontinent without war and conflict.

Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, is pro-US but could gravitate towards the Sino-Russian camp both militarily and in terms of energy. The same process is going on with Iraq and Qatar thanks to Washington's numerous strategic errors in the region starting from Iraq in 2003, Libya in 2011 and Syria and Yemen in recent years.

The agreement between Iraq and China is a prime example of how Beijing intends to use the Iraq-Iran-Syria troika to revive the Middle East and and link it to the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative.

While Doha and Riyadh would be the first to suffer economically from such an agreement, Beijing's economic power is such that, with its win-win approach, there is room for everyone.

Saudi Arabia provides China with most of its oil and Qatar, together with the Russian Federation, supply China with most of its LNG needs, which lines up with Xi Jinping's 2030 vision that aims to greatly reduce polluting emissions.

The US is absent in this picture, with little ability to influence events or offer any appealing economic alternatives.

Washington would like to prevent any Eurasian integration by unleashing chaos and destruction in the region, and killing Soleimani served this purpose. The US cannot contemplate the idea of the dollar losing its status as the global reserve currency. Trump is engaging in a desperate gamble that could have disastrous consequences.

The region, in a worst-case scenario, could be engulfed in a devastating war involving multiple countries. Oil refineries could be destroyed all across the region, a quarter of the world's oil transit could be blocked, oil prices would skyrocket ($200-$300 a barrel) and dozens of countries would be plunged into a global financial crisis. The blame would be laid squarely at Trump's feet, ending his chances for re-election.

To try and keep everyone in line, Washington is left to resort to terrorism, lies and unspecified threats of visiting destruction on friends and enemies alike.

Trump has evidently been convinced by someone that the US can do without the Middle East, that it can do without allies in the region, and that nobody would ever dare to sell oil in any other currency than the US dollar.

Soleimani's death is the result of a convergence of US and Israeli interests. With no other way of halting Eurasian integration, Washington can only throw the region into chaos by targeting countries like Iran, Iraq and Syria that are central to the Eurasian project. While Israel has never had the ability or audacity to carry out such an assassination itself, the importance of the Israel Lobby to Trump's electoral success would have influenced his decision, all the more so in an election year .

Trump believed his drone attack could solve all his problems by frightening his opponents, winning the support of his voters (by equating Soleimani's assassination to Osama bin Laden's), and sending a warning to Arab countries of the dangers of deepening their ties with China.

The assassination of Soleimani is the US lashing out at its steady loss of influence in the region. The Iraqi attempt to mediate a lasting peace between Iran and Saudi Arabia has been scuppered by the US and Israel's determination to prevent peace in the region and instead increase chaos and instability.

Washington has not achieved its hegemonic status through a preference for diplomacy and calm dialogue, and Trump has no intention of departing from this approach.

Washington's friends and enemies alike must acknowledge this reality and implement the countermeasures necessary to contain the madness.

Boundless Energy , 1 minute ago link

Very good article, straight to the point. In fact its much worse. I know is hard to swallow for my US american brother and sisters.

But as sooner you wake up and see the reality as it is, as better chances the US has to survive with honor. Stop the wars around the globe and do not look for excuses. Isnt it already obvious what is going on with the US war machine? How many more examples some people need to wake up?

Noob678 , 8 minutes ago link

For those who love to connect the dots:

Iran Situation from Someone Who Knows Something

Not all said in video above is accurate but the recent events in Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Africa are all related to prevent China from overtaking the zionist hegemonic world and to recolonize China (at least the parasite is trying to hop to China as new host).

Trade war, Huawei, Hong Kong, Xinjiang, Tibet ..... the concerted efforts from all zionist controlled media (ZeroHedge included) to slander, smearing, fake news against China should tell you what the Zionists agenda are :)

............

Trump Threatens to Kill Iraqi PM if He Doesn't Cancel China Oil Deal - MoA

The American President's threatened the Iraqi Prime Minister to liquidate him directly with the Minister of Defense. The Marines are the third party that sniped the demonstrators and the security men:

Abdul Mahdi continued:

"After my return from China, Trump called me and asked me to cancel the agreement, so I also refused, and he threatened me with massive demonstrations that would topple me. Indeed, the demonstrations started and then Trump called, threatening to escalate in the event of non-cooperation and responding to his wishes, so that the third party (Marines snipers) would target the demonstrators and security forces and kill them from the highest structures and the US embassy in an attempt to pressure me and submit to his wishes and cancel the China agreement, so I did not respond and submitted my resignation and the Americans still insist to this day on canceling the China agreement and when the defense minister said that who kills the demonstrators is a third party, Trump called me immediately and physically threatened me and defense minister in the event of talk about the third party."

.........


The Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Commission found George W. Bush guilty of war crimes in absentia for the illegal invasion of Iraq. Bush, **** Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and their legal advisers Alberto Gonzales, David Addington, William Haynes, Jay Bybee and John Yoo were tried in absentia in Malaysia.

... ... ..

Thom Paine , 9 minutes ago link

When Iran has nukes, what then Trump?

I think Israel's fear is loss of regional goals if Iran becomes untouchable

TupacShakur , 13 minutes ago link

Empire is lashing out of desperation because we've crossed peak Empire.

Things are going downhill and will get more volatile as we go.

Buckle up folks because the final act will be very nasty.

Stalking Wolf , 12 minutes ago link

Unfortunately, this article makes a lot of sense. The US is losing influence and lashing out carelessly. I hope the rest of the world realizes how detached majority of the citizens within the states are from the federal government. The Federal government brings no good to our nation. None. From the mis management of our once tax revenues to the corrupt Congress who accepts bribes from the highest bidder, it's a rats best that is not only harmful to its own people, but the world at large. USD won't go down without a fight it seems... All empires end with a bang. Be ready

[Feb 09, 2020] The Oil War by Jean-Pierre Séréni

Notable quotes:
"... The Iraq war was about oil. Recently declassified US government documents confirm this ( 1 ), however much US president George W Bush, vice-president Dick Cheney, defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld and their ally, the British prime minister Tony Blair, denied it at the time. ..."
Mar 06, 2013 | www.zcommunications.org

Source: Le Monde Diplomatique

The Iraq war was about oil. Recently declassified US government documents confirm this ( 1 ), however much US president George W Bush, vice-president Dick Cheney, defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld and their ally, the British prime minister Tony Blair, denied it at the time.

When Bush moved into the White House in January 2001, he faced the familiar problem of the imbalance between oil supply and demand. Supply was unable to keep up with demand, which was increasing rapidly because of the growth of emerging economies such as China and India. The only possible solution lay in the Gulf, where the giant oil-producing countries of Saudi Arabia, Iran and Iraq, and the lesser producing states of Kuwait and Abu Dhabi, commanded 60% of the world's reserves.

For financial or political reasons, production growth was slow. In Saudi Arabia, the ultra-rich ruling families of the Al-Saud, the Al-Sabah and the Zayed Al-Nayan were content with a comfortable level of income, given their small populations, and preferred to leave their oil underground. Iran and Iraq hold around 25% of the world's hydrocarbon reserves and could have filled the gap, but were subject to sanctions -- imposed solely by the US on Iran, internationally on Iraq -- that deprived them of essential oil equipment and services. Washington saw them as rogue states and was unwilling to end the sanctions.

How could the US get more oil from the Gulf without endangering its supremacy in the region? Influential US neoconservatives, led by Paul Wolfowitz, who had gone over to uninhibited imperialism after the fall of the Soviet Union, thought they had found a solution. They had never understood George Bush senior's decision not to overthrow Saddam Hussein in the first Gulf war in 1991. An open letter to President Bill Clinton, inspired by the Statement of Principles of the Project for the New American Century, a non-profit organisation founded by William Kristol and Robert Kagan, had called for a regime change in Iraq as early as 1998: Saddam must be ousted and big US oil companies must gain access to Iraq. Several signatories to the Statement of Principles became members of the new Republican administration in 2001.

In 2002, one of them, Douglas Feith, a lawyer who was undersecretary of defense to Rumsfeld, supervised the work of experts planning the future of Iraq's oil industry. His first decision was to entrust its management after the expected US victory to Kellog, Brown & Root, a subsidiary of US oil giant Halliburton, of which Cheney had been chairman and CEO. Feith's plan, formulated at the start of 2003, was to keep Iraq's oil production at its current level of 2,840 mbpd (million barrels per day), to avoid a collapse that would cause chaos in the world market.

Privatising oil

Experts were divided on the privatisation of the Iraqi oil industry. The Iraqi government had excluded foreign companies and successfully managed the sector itself since 1972. By 2003, despite wars with Iran (1980-88) and in Kuwait (1990-91) and more than 15 years of sanctions, Iraq had managed to equal the record production levels achieved in 1979-1980.

The experts had a choice -- bring back the concession regime that had operated before nationalisation in 1972, or sell shares in the Iraqi National Oil Company (INOC) on the Russian model, issuing transferrable vouchers to the Iraqi population. In Russia, this approach had very quickly led to the oil sector falling into the hands of a few super-rich oligarchs.

Bush approved the plan drawn up by the Pentagon and State Department in January 2003. The much-decorated retired lieutenant general Jay Gardner, was appointed director of the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, the military administration set up to govern post-Saddam Iraq. Out of his depth, he stuck to short-term measures and avoided choosing between the options put forward by his technical advisers.

Reassuring the oil giants

The international oil companies were not idle. Lee Raymond, CEO of America's biggest oil company ExxonMobil, was an old friend of Dick Cheney. But where the politicians were daring, he was cautious. The project was a tempting opportunity to replenish the company's reserves, which had been stagnant for several years, but Raymond had doubts: would Bush really be able to assure conditions that would allow the company to operate safely in Iraq? Nobody at ExxonMobil was willing to die for oil. (Its well-paid engineers do not dream of life in a blockhouse in Iraq.) The company would also have to be sure of its legal position: what would contracts signed by a de facto authority be worth when it would be investing billions of dollars that would take years to recover?

In the UK, BP was anxious to secure its own share of the spoils. As early as 2002 the company had confided in the UK Department of Trade and Industry its fears that the US might give away too much to French, Russian and Chinese oil companies in return for their governments agreeing not to use their veto at the UN Security Council ( 2 ). In February 2003 those fears were removed: France's president Jacques Chirac vetoed a resolution put forward by the US, and the third Iraq war began without UN backing. There was no longer any question of respecting the agreements Saddam had signed with Total and other companies (which had never been put into practice because of sanctions).

To reassure the British and US oil giants, the US government appointed to the management team Gary Vogler of ExxonMobil and Philip J Carrol of Shell. They were replaced in October 2003 by Rob McKee of ConocoPhilips and Terry Adams of BP. The idea was to counter the dominance of the Pentagon, and the influential neocon approach (which faced opposition from within the administration). The neocon ideologues, still on the scene, had bizarre ideas: they wanted to build a pipeline to transport Iraq's crude oil to Israel, dismantle OPEC (Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries) and even use "liberated" Iraq as a guinea pig for a new oil business model to be applied to all of the Middle East. The engineers and businessmen, whose priorities were profits and results, were more down-to-earth.

In any event, the invasion had a devastating impact on Iraq's oil production, less because of the bombing by the US air force than because of the widespread looting of government agencies, schools, universities, archives, libraries, banks, hospitals, museums and state-owned enterprises. Drilling rigs were dismantled for the copper parts they were believed to contain. The looting continued from March to May 2003. Only a third of the damage to the oil industry was caused during the invasion; the rest happened after the fighting was over, despite the presence of the RIO Task Force and the US Corps of Engineers with its 500 contractors, specially prepared and trained to protect oil installations. Saddam's supporters were prevented from blowing up the oil wells by the speed of the invasion, but the saboteurs set to work in June 2003.

Iraq's one real asset

The only buildings protected were the gigantic oil ministry, where 15,000 civil servants managed 22 subsidiaries of the Iraq National Oil Company. The State Oil Marketing Organisation and the infrastructure were abandoned. The occupiers regarded the oil under the ground as Iraq's one real asset. They were not interested in installations or personnel. The oil ministry was only saved at the last minute because it housed geological and seismic data on Iraq's 80 known deposits, estimated to contain 115bn barrels of crude oil. The rest could always be replaced with more modern US-made equipment and the knowhow of the international oil companies, made indispensible by the sabotage.

Thamir Abbas Ghadban, director-general of planning at the oil ministry, turned up at the office three days after the invasion was over, and, in the absence of a minister for oil (since Iraq had no government), was appointed second in command under Micheal Mobbs, a neocon who enjoyed the confidence of the Pentagon. Paul Bremer, the US proconsul who headed Iraq's provisional government from May 2003 to June 2004, presided over the worst 12 months in the oil sector in 70 years. Production fell by 1 mbpd -- more than $13bn of lost income.

The oil installations, watched over by 3,500 underequipped guards, suffered 140 sabotage attacks between May 2003 and September 2004, estimated to have caused $7bn of damage. "There was widespread looting," said Ghadban. "Equipment was stolen and in most cases the buildings were set on fire." The Daura refinery, near Baghdad, only received oil intermittently, because of damage to the pipeline network. "We had to let all the oil in the damaged sections of the pipeline burn before we could repair them." Yet the refinery continued to operate, no mean achievement considering that the workers were no longer being paid.

The senior management of the national oil company also suffered. Until 1952 almost all senior managers of the Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC) were foreigners, who occupied villas in gated and guarded compounds while the local workforce lived in shantytowns. In 1952 tension between Iraq and Muhammad Mossadegh's Iran led the IPC to review its relations with Baghdad, and a clause of the new treaty concerned the training of Iraqi managers. By 1972, 75% of the thousand skilled jobs were filled by Iraqis, which helped to ensure the success of the IPC's nationalisation. The new Iraq National Oil Company gained control of the oilfields and production reached unprecedented levels.

Purge of the Ba'ath

After the invasion, the US purged Ba'athist elements from INOC's management. Simply belonging to the Ba'ath, Iraq's single political party, which had been in power since 1968, was grounds for dismissal, compulsory retirement or worse. Seventeen of INOC's 24 directors were forced out, along with several hundred engineers, who had kept production high through wars and foreign sanctions. The founding fathers of INOC were ousted by the Deba'athification Commission, led by former exiles including Iraq's prime minister Nuri al-Maliki, who replaced them with his own supporters, as incompetent as they were partisan.

Rob McKee, who succeeded Philip J Carrol as oil adviser to the US proconsul, observed in autumn 2003: "The people themselves are patently unqualified and are apparently being placed in the ministry for religious, political or personal reasons... the people who nursed the industry through Saddam's years and who brought it back to life after the liberation, as well as many trained professionals, are all systematically being pushed to the sidelines" ( 3 ).

This purge opened the door to advisers, mostly from the US, who bombarded the oil ministry with notes, circulars and reports directly inspired by the practices of the international oil industry, without much concern for their applicability to Iraq.

The drafting of Iraq's new constitution and an oil law provided an opportunity to change the rules. Washington had decided in advance to do away with the centralised state, partly because of its crimes against the Kurds under Saddam and partly because centralisation favours totalitarianism. The new federal, or even confederal, regime was decentralised to the point of being de-structured. A two-thirds majority in one of the three provinces allows opposition to veto central government decisions.

Baghdad-Irbil rivalry

Only Kurdistan had the means and the motivation to do so. Where oil was concerned, power was effectively divided between Baghdad and Irbil, seat of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), which imposed its own interpretation of the constitution: deposits already being exploited would remain under federal government control, but new licenses would be granted by the provincial governments. A fierce dispute arose between the two capitals, partly because the KRG granted licenses to foreign oil companies under far more favourable conditions than those offered by Baghdad.

The quarrel related to the production sharing agreements. The usual practice is for foreign companies that provide financial backing to get a share of the oil produced, which can be very significant in the first few years. This was the formula US politicians and oil companies wanted to impose. They were unable to do so.

Iraq's parliament, so often criticised in other matters, opposed this system; it was supported by public opinion, which had not forgotten the former IPC. Tariq Shafiq, founding father of the INOC, explained to the US Congress the technical reasons for the refusal ( 4 ). Iraq's oil deposits were known and mapped out. There was therefore little risk to foreign companies: there would be no prospecting costs and exploitation costs would be among the lowest in the world. From 2008 onwards, Baghdad started offering major oil companies far less attractive contracts -- $2/barrel for the bigger oilfields, and no rights to the deposits.

ExxonMobil, BP, Shell, Total, and Russian, Chinese, Angolan, Pakistani and Turkish oil companies nevertheless rushed to accept, hoping that things would turn to their advantage. Newsweek (24 May 2010) claimed Iraq had the potential to become "the next Saudi Arabia." But although production is up (over 3 mbpd in 2012), the oil companies are irritated by the conditions imposed on them: investment costs are high, profits are mediocre and the oil still underground is not counted as part of their reserves, which affects their share price.

ExxonMobil and Total disregarded the federal government edict that threatened to strip rights from oil companies that signed production-sharing agreements relating to oilfields in Kurdistan. Worse, ExxonMobil sold its services contract relating to Iraq's largest oilfield, West Qurna, where it had been due to invest $50bn and double the country's current production. Baghdad is now under pressure: if it continues to refuse the conditions requested by the foreign oil companies, it will lose out to Irbil, even if Kurdistan's deposits are only a third of the size of those in the south. Meanwhile, Turkey has done nothing to improve its relations with Iraq by offering to build a direct pipeline from Kurdistan to the Mediterranean. Without the war, would the oil companies have been able to make the Iraqis and Kurds compete? One thing is certain: the US is far from achieving its goals in the oil sector, and in this sense the war was a failure.

Alan Greenspan, who as chairman of the US Federal Reserve from 1987 to 2006 was well placed to understand the importance of oil, came up with the best summary of the conflict: "I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil" ( 5 ).

[Feb 09, 2020] The Real Reason for the Iraq War

Notable quotes:
"... Like most lefty journalists, I assumed that George Bush and Tony Blair invaded Iraq to buy up its oil fields, cheap and at gun-point, and cart off the oil. We thought we knew the neo-cons true casus belli ..."
"... But the truth in the Options for Iraqi Oil Industry was worse than "Blood for Oil". Much, much worse. The key was in the flow chart on page 15, Iraq Oil Regime Timeline & Scenario Analysis: "...A single state-owned company ...enhances a government's relationship with OPEC." ..."
Feb 09, 2020 | www.vice.com

Because it was marked "confidential" on each page, the oil industry stooge couldn't believe the US State Department had given me a complete copy of their secret plans for the oil fields of Iraq.

Actually, the State Department had done no such thing. But my line of bullshit had been so well-practiced and the set-up on my mark had so thoroughly established my fake identity, that I almost began to believe my own lies.

I closed in. I said I wanted to make sure she and I were working from the same State Department draft. Could she tell me the official name, date and number of pages? She did.

Bingo! I'd just beaten the Military-Petroleum Complex in a lying contest, so I had a right to be chuffed.

After phoning numbers from California to Kazakhstan to trick my mark, my next calls were to the State Department and Pentagon. Now that I had the specs on the scheme for Iraq's oil -- that State and Defense Department swore, in writing, did not exist -- I told them I'd appreciate their handing over a copy (no expurgations, please) or there would be a very embarrassing story on BBC Newsnight .

Within days, our chief of investigations, Ms Badpenny, delivered to my shack in the woods outside New York a 323-page, three-volume programme for Iraq's oil crafted by George Bush's State Department and petroleum insiders meeting secretly in Houston, Texas.

I cracked open the pile of paper -- and I was blown away.

Like most lefty journalists, I assumed that George Bush and Tony Blair invaded Iraq to buy up its oil fields, cheap and at gun-point, and cart off the oil. We thought we knew the neo-cons true casus belli : Blood for oil.

But the truth in the Options for Iraqi Oil Industry was worse than "Blood for Oil". Much, much worse. The key was in the flow chart on page 15, Iraq Oil Regime Timeline & Scenario Analysis: "...A single state-owned company ...enhances a government's relationship with OPEC."

[Feb 08, 2020] Is Iraq About To Switch From US to Russia

Highly recommended!
Feb 08, 2020 | angrybearblog.com

likbez , February 8, 2020 8:56 pm

NSC Russia expert freshly appointed Andrew Peek, who was walked out like Vindman, with him only freshly appointed after Fiona Hill and the Tim Morrioson resigned.

There is a big problems with "experts" in NSC -- often they represent interests of the particular agency, or a think tank, not that of the country.

Look at former NSC staffer Fiona Hill. She can be called "threat inflation" specialist.

NSC tries to usurp the role of the State Department and overly militarize the USA foreign policy, while having much lower class specialists. It is a kind of CIA backdoor into defining the USA foreign policy.

I would advocate creating "shadow NSC" by the party who is in opposition, so that it can somehow provide countervailing opinions. But with both parties being now war parties, this is no that effective.

Cutting NSC staff to the bones, so that such second rate personalities like Fiona Hill and Vindman are automatically excluded might also help a little bit.

The size above a dozen or two is probably excessive, as like any bureaucracy, it will try to control the President, not so much help him/her.
( https://docs.house.gov/meetings/FA/FA00/20160908/105276/HHRG-114-FA00-Transcript-20160908.pdf ):

One common explanation is that the NSC mission creep results from the NSC staff growing too large and the easy solution is to limit the size of the staff. I am sympathetic to that feeling because we don't want it to
be too large and we don't want it to be usurping things that the State Department or the Agency should do.

[Feb 08, 2020] Our fundamental disagreement about WWII, Hitler, Jews and race by Saker

Notable quotes:
"... The undeniable historical truth is that the centuries long occupation of the Russian eastern frontier lands by the Poles and their Latin masters created so much hatred between all the nationalities involved that it appears that every time they had a chance to try to persecute or kill each other, they immediately did so. ..."
"... The Ukrainian nationalists, in contrast, were "multi-defeat" losers: they were defeated by the Germans, the Russians and even the Poles (who rarely attack anybody unless their prospective victim is already agonizing or unless there is some "big guy" protecting them – Churchill was quite right with his " greedy hyena of Europe " comment!). And now, more recently, they were soundly defeated not once, but TWICE, by the Novorussians. That kind of "performance" will often result in a nationalistic reaction . ..."
Feb 08, 2020 | www.unz.com

The topic of Russians and Jews is clearly a "hot" one. Over the past few years I wrote several articles on this topic including " Putin and Israel A Complex and Multi-Layered Relationship ", " Why Is Putin "Allowing" Israel to Bomb Syria? ", " Russia, Israel and the Values of "Western Civilization" – Where Is the Truth? " and " Debunking the Rumors About Russia Caving in to Israel ". And yet, for a while now I have felt that there is much more which could, and should, be said on this topic.

Recent events (including Putin's and Zelenskii's recent trip to Israel or the latest Polish-Ukrainian theory about the USSR being an accomplice to the Holocaust) again gave me that strong feeling that the way Jews are seen in the West is truly very different from how Jews are viewed in Russia. Yet, in the West, this difference is often (almost always, really!) overlooked and assumptions are made about Russia and Russians which are simply not warranted and which end up being highly misleading. This is why I will try to debunk some of these assumptions today.

First, a very quick and very short look into our recent history

The very best book to read on Russian-Jewish relations is " 200 Years Together " by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. The problem with this book is that has never been officially translated into English. Yup, that's right. A CRUCIAL book by a Nobel Prize winner can be so controversial that nobody in the publishing business has dared to print it. Happily, a number of websites offer unofficial " samizdat " translations, see here , here and here . I cannot vouch for the quality of these translations as I read the book in Russian, not in English. But yeah, in the "land of the free", the putative "brave" do not get to read a book if that book debunks the western narrative about Russia and Jews. By the way, Solzhenitsyn's masterpiece is not the only such book which exists only in Russian, there are many more including Andrei Dikii's " Jews in Russia and the USS R" which can also only be found on the Internet Archive here .

I can't even begin to try to summarize that most interesting, and controversial history here. All I will say for right now is that when we speak of "Russians" and "Jews" we need to separate these categories into 4 subcategories:

These four subgroups have had a very different historical experience and they need to be considered separately, as lumping them all together really does not allow any analysis.

Besides, and as I have also mentioned it in the past , the Ukrainian nationalist propaganda does, in fact, have some truth to it. Yes, it is a grossly distorted truth, and it is mixed in with an avalanche of lies, but still, not all of it can simply be dismissed. For example, while there never was any "Ukraine" in history, and while what is called today the "Ukrainian language" is not really Ukrainian at all (the " surzhik " would be the real thing), it still remains an undeniable fact that the Polish occupation of southern and eastern Russia (which is what "the Ukraine" is – Russia's southeastern "borderland" which is what the word "Ukraine" originally meant) left an extremely profound mark on those Russians who lived under the Polish-Latin occupation . I won't go into historical details today as I already did that here and here , but I will just say that this tragic history eventually inspired one of the favorite slogans of Ukrainian nationalists: " to drown all the Polaks and the Moskals in Kike blood " (or any variation of these three nationalities).

Charming, no?

The undeniable historical truth is that the centuries long occupation of the Russian eastern frontier lands by the Poles and their Latin masters created so much hatred between all the nationalities involved that it appears that every time they had a chance to try to persecute or kill each other, they immediately did so. Here area few examples of that kind of violence:

I could list more examples, but I think that these are sufficient for our purposes. What we can immediately see is that there are significant differences between what took place in modern Russia and in the modern Ukraine, including:

An example of a crucial geographical difference would be " pogroms " which, contrary to western propaganda, pogroms all took place in what would be the modern Ukraine today, never in Russia.

There is also a difference in time : Russians in the Ukraine were persecuted by Poles and Jews for centuries whereas Russians in what is modern Russia today were primarily persecuted by Bolshevik Jews "only" between 1917 and Stalin's purges of the party in the late 1930s.

And then, there is the crucial, truly immense, difference which WWII made.

Next, a look at what happened during World War II and the Nazi occupation

When the Nazis launched their attack on the Soviet Union there were a lot of Russians and Ukrainians who welcomed the Nazis, not necessarily because they liked the Nazi ideology but because many of them hated their Bolshevik oppressors even more than they disliked the Germans. After all, the horrors of the Civil War and of the Collectivization were still present in the mind of millions of people both in the (newly created) Ukrainian SSR and in the Russian SSR.

I would like to remind all those who nowadays try very hard to forget it, that the Nazi ideology characterizes both Russians and Ukrainians as subhumans ( Untermensch ) whose sole purpose would be to serve their Aryan master race overlords ( Herrenvolk ) in the newly conquered living space ( Lebensraum ). Simply put: Hitler promised his followers that they would be very happy slave owners! It is no wonder that the prospective slaves felt otherwise

In the course of the war, however, profound differences began to emerge:

First, in the Ukraine, the Nazi ideology DID inspire a lot of nationalists for the exact same reasons that Nazi ideology inspired nationalist Poles (who were Hitler's first most loyal allies only to later be betrayed by him). Over the centuries the Papacy not only created the Ukrainian nationalist identity, it then actively fostered it every time Russia was weakened (if that topic is of interest to you, see here ). The bitter truth which folks in the West don't like to be reminded of is that the regimes of Petain, Franco, Pavelic, Pilsudksi, etc. were all created and supported by the Papacy which, of course, also supported Bandera and his Ukronazi deathsquads. As for Hitler himself, he was initially strongly supported by the UK (just as Trotsky was supported by the Jewish bankers in the US). Indeed, russophobia has a long and "distinguished" history in the West : western leaders change, as do their ideological rationalizations, but their hatred and fear of Russia always remains.

In contrast, General Andrei Vlasov, who created the "Russian Liberation Army" (ROA) had exactly zero support in the West, and very little support in Russia proper. The ideology of the ROA was a mix of moderate nationalism with some no less moderate socialism. In hindsight, it never stood a chance of becoming truly popular in Russia simply because the sight of a Russian general wearing a Nazi uniform was not something that most Russians could serenely look at, whereas in the current Nazi-occupied Ukraine, Nazi uniforms and symbols are still very popular .

Last, but certainly not least, the demented and outright genocidal policies of the Nazis in occupied Russia resulted in such a blowback that the war to liberate Russia from the Nazis became a war of national survival which the vast majority of Russians fully supported.

It is also interesting how differently the Anglo powers treated the Ukronazis and the Russians of the ROA: the West lovingly imported to the US and Canada all the Ukronazis it could get its hands on, yet at the same time the West forcibly repatriated millions of Russians, including POW and ROA members, with often horrible consequences for the repatriates . As for General Vlasov himself, he was executed along with other officers accused of treason.

For the Ukrainian nationalists, WWII began as a God-sent chance to finally bring about their dream to " drown all the Polaks and the Moskals in Kike blood", and then this dream was crushed by the Soviet counter-attack and subsequent annihilation of most (about 80%) of the German military machine. And while many Ukrainians (and Poles) did see the Soviets as their liberators from the Nazi horrors, the Ukronazis obviously saw the Soviet Army solely as an occupation force which they resisted for as long as they could (after the end of the war, it still took the Soviets several years to finally crush the Ukronazi underground). And while most Russians felt like they were the real victors of WWII, the Ukronazi nationalists felt that they had been defeated. Again. The same goes for the Poles, by the way (this trauma gave birth to something I refer to as the " Pilban syndrome ").

Now for the self-evident truism about Jews: while many Russians remained acutely aware of the Jewish role in the Bolshevik revolution and, especially, in the class terror which followed, they did not see ALL Jews as enemies of Russia, especially not when

There were plenty of patriotic Jews who loved Russia and/or the USSR That Hitler's demented racism inevitably had to bring Jews and Russians together, even if only for a while and mostly under the "common enemy" heading. Many (most?) Russians know for a fact that Nazi concentration/extermination camps did , in fact, exist even if they did not kill 6M Jews, even if they had no gas chambers and no crematoria (except to deal with insect-born diseases). Why? Because it was the Soviet military which liberated most of these camps and because there were plenty of non-Jewish Russians/Soviets in these camps. Finally, besides the camps themselves, most Russians also know about the infamous Einsatzgruppen which probably murdered even more Jews (and non-Jews) than all the concentration/extermination camps combined. The fact is that Nazi atrocities are not seriously challenged by most Russian historians.

The bottom line is this: whatever (at the time very real) hostility history had created between Jews and Russians, World War II had a huge impact on these perceptions. That is not to say that the Russians have forgotten the genocidal policies of Lenin and Trotsky, but only that after WWII, most Russians justly felt that they were victors, not defeated losers.

The Ukrainian nationalists, in contrast, were "multi-defeat" losers: they were defeated by the Germans, the Russians and even the Poles (who rarely attack anybody unless their prospective victim is already agonizing or unless there is some "big guy" protecting them – Churchill was quite right with his " greedy hyena of Europe " comment!). And now, more recently, they were soundly defeated not once, but TWICE, by the Novorussians. That kind of "performance" will often result in a nationalistic reaction .

And that is true not only for the Ukraine, but also very much applies to the West of 2020.

Does the collective West also suffer from the same "multi-defeat" complex?

It seems to me that most people reading these lines already know that the "collective West" aka the "AngloZionist Empire" is in terrible shape. Just look at the political chaos in the US, the UK, France, Germany and all the rest of the NATO/EU countries. The West is not only losing militarily and economically, it is also agonizing culturally, socially, morally and spiritually. Furthermore, that which we all used to think of as "western values" is now being replaced by some insipid "multiculturalism" which seems to pious euphemism for the obvious plan to erase pretty much all of the western historical and cultural legacy. Like all forms of persecution, this one is also resulting in an increasingly powerful case of ideological blowback: a very dangerous and toxic resurgence of both Fascism and National-Socialism.

How could a person (Hitler) and an ideology (National-Socialism) be both declared uniquely evil AND, at the same time, undergo at least a partial rehabilitation in the same society? Simple! The only condition necessary to make that happen is to condition people to accept cognitive dissonances and not to be too troubled when they happen. The average citizen of the Empire has been conditioned to accept, and even embrace, such cognitive dissonances quite literally since birth and he has become very, very good at that. But there is also a historiographical blowback in action here:

Following WWII and, especially, following the 1970s, the Zionists made what I consider to be a disastrous mistake: they decided to present Hitler and his ideology as some kind of special and unique form of evil which supersedes any and all, past or even future, imaginable forms of evil. And just to make sure that this claim would stick, they decided to add some highly specific claims including the "official'" figure of 6 million murdered Jews, the gas chambers and crematoria being the most famous ones, but there were many more (including electrocution pools, human skin lamp shades and human fat soaps – but which had to be ditched after being proven false). Eventually these claims all came under very effective attack by the so-called "revisionist historians" who have since proven beyond reasonable doubt that these specific claims were false. That did not make these historians very popular with the rulers of the Empire who, instead of allowing for of a healthy historical debate, decided to make "revisionism" a criminally punishable thoughtcrime for which historians could be jailed, sometimes for years! The reaction to that kind of abuse of power was inevitable.

One of the most pernicious result of this policy of criminalizing historical investigations into WWII has been the fact that many people in the West concluded that since these specific claims were bunk, then all of the claims about Nazi atrocities were bunk too . Huge logical mistake! The fact that these specific claims have already been debunked in no way implies that OTHER widely reported atrocities did not occur.

For example, the fact that gas chambers were probably not used to kill anybody (at least not in significant amounts) does not at all imply that many hundreds of thousands, or even million of people, were not killed by execution, starvation or disease (typhus, dysentery, etc.). Just look at the death rates in Japanese POW camps, and they had no gas chambers or crematoria. As for the Soviets, they deported "class enemies" from their homes and simply released them in the middle of the Siberian taiga during the winter and with no survival gear: most of them also quickly died, simply from exposure.

The simple truth is that any modern state has the means to murder people on an industrial scale even without the use of such exotic (and, frankly, ill-suited) techniques as gas chambers or crematoria (in Rwanda, they mostly used crude machetes). But western historians are banned from even researching these topics!

This situation resulted in an environment in the West in which one cannot criticize (or even doubt!) Jews or things Jewish without immediately being called an "anti-Semite". Ditto for anybody daring to present another version of WWII. That this kind of collective brainwashing would inevitably result in a massive blowback was easy to predict but, alas, the Zionists never had the foresight to see this coming. Either that, or they were quite happy to report a "surge in anti-Semitism" in the West to extort even more political power (and money!). Whatever may be the case, it is close to impossible in the current West to freely and openly discuss these topics.

Now a quick comparison with modern Russia

The political environment in Russia is radically different. For one thing, it is not illegal (or even improper) in Russia to criticize Jews, or modern "Judaism" (really a modern form of rabbinical Phariseism) or Israel or the Zionist ideology (which, by the way, the USSR did denounce and oppose as a form of racism ).

Yes, there are still (pretty bad) laws on the books forbidding the promotion of national hatred and "extremist speech", but the truth is that as long as you only investigate historical topics (such as the real number of Jews murdered by the Nazis) and you do not advocate (or engage in) violence you will be fine. Not only that, but you can find pretty much any and all anti-Jewish/Zionist books on the Russian Internet for easy and free download. Finally, while a lot of Jews did leave the USSR, those who stayed (or have since returned) did that of their own free will and that strongly suggests that, unlike their brethren in Israel, many (most?) Russian Jews do not have feelings of hatred for Russia, the Russian people or even the Orthodox Church (some do, of course, but this is a minority).

Some near sighted Jews regularly deplore that the political discourse in Russia is not as tightly controlled as the one in the West. I would simply like to remind them that the much more permissive intellectual environment of Russia has NOT resulted in an automatic fusion between patriotism and hostility to Jews, as is sadly the case in the West (unless, of course, we are dealing with what French philosopher and dissident Alain Soral calls "National-Zionism" which is a separate phenomenon which I discussed in some detail here ).

True, when patriotism (love for one's country) turns into nationalism (love of one's ethnicity), then things typically go south, but that is a danger of which the Kremlin is acutely aware of and that is why Russian nationalists are, after Russian Wahabis, the most frequently jailed people in Russia under anti extremism laws (keep in mind that both Russian nationalists and Russian Wahabis typically not only disseminate "extremist literature" but they also are typically engaged in one form of violence or another, thus they are often jailed on terrorism charges too).

An increasing number of Russia are, however, puzzled by what they see as a slow-motion rehabilitation of Hitler and the Nazi regime. For example, while in the West the official doxa is still that Hitler and the Nazis were the worst evil in history, there is a rapidly growing "alternative" viewpoint, mostly found on the Internet, of course, in which Hitler is viewed as a much more complex person, who has been unjustly demonized and whose actions need to be placed in a "correct" historical context. And, in fact, there is some truth to that – Hitler was a complex personality and the Nazis were demonized beyond way beyond anything reasonable. Finally, the proponents of this "rehabilitation" will always point out that Hitler's enemies were at least as ruthless and evil has he was. Again, there is also much truth to that. However, when the EU declares in a solemn vote that Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were both equally responsible for WWII , then a fundamental red line is crossed, one which places an "equal" sign not only between the aggressor and the aggressed but also between those who were defeated and those who were victorious.

As I have often written in the past, under international law the ultimate, most evil, crime is not "genocide" or "crimes against humanity". It is the "crime of aggression" because, in the words of the US judge who declared this principle, "the crime of aggression contains all the other crimes", which is only logical. Thus by accusing the USSR of aggression, the EU is basically annulling them findings of the Nuremberg Tribunal, it makes the USSR every bit as guilty of all the atrocities of WWII as the Nazis.

Are the Russians correct when they say that there is a slow-motion rehabilitation of Hitler and his ideology in the West?

Absolutely!

ORDER IT NOW

The fact that this slo-mo rehabilitation is still currently and mostly confined to the margins of the political discourse does not change the Russian awareness that no matter how much Hitler and his minions are disliked or even hated in the West, Russia and Russians will always be hated even much more. This is also true of what the West calls "Islamic extremism" which is only "bad" when it is not fully controlled by the West (terrorists!!), and which is "good", axiomatically so, when directed against Russia or other Orthodox nations (freedom fighters!!).

Under these circumstances, is it really surprising that many (most?) Russians feel like the West is a much bigger danger to the Russian civilizational realm than any anti-Russian plans concocted by Jews, Zionists or the Israelis?

Absolutely not!

Not only do most Russians hate Hitler and everything he stood for, they also truly understand that the vast majority of Jews murdered by the Third Reich were simple, innocent, people whose only crime was to be of the same ethnicity/religion as some other Jews who did, indeed, richly deserved to be hated for their racist messianism (be it religious or secular). That is a fundamental injustice which Russians will never accept because accepting it would be a betrayal of truth (a hugely important concept for the Russian civilization ) and no less of a betrayal of the memory of all the innocents murdered by the Nazis.

Conclusion one: history matters, a lot!

Whatever we all may think of Jewish identity politics or whatever our opinion of the Soviet Union, it is undeniable that Hitler's policies inflicted unspeakable suffering upon both Russians and Jews. Western Alt-Righters, who still delude themselves into thinking that Russians share in their racist delusions, can deny and denounce this, but the fact is that history has forever created a bond between Jews and Russians: their common memory of the mass atrocities perpetuated against them by the Nazis . No amount of political gesticulations will change that.

That does not, of course, mean that Putin, the Kremlin or anybody else is an "ally" of Israel or that Putin and Bibi Netanyahu are working together (or for each other). This utter nonsense is a completely false conclusion resulting from a fundamental and profound misreading of Russian history and Russian culture. But it goes even further than that. I would argue that the history of the Russian culture is also fundamentally incompatible with any racist/racialist ideas.

The ideology of pre-1917 Russia can be described as "Orthodox monarchism". This is not really correct for a long list of reasons (reality is always more complex than buzz-words and slogans), but by and large you could say that what was considered morally right or morally wrong was defined by the Russian Orthodox Church. Well, it just so happens that while original Christianity (i.e. Orthodoxy) was very critical of rabbinical "Judaism" (the religion and wordview), that same original Christianity was far less hostile to Jews (the ethnicity) then western Christian demominations . In fact, true Christianity has always been pro-patriotic but anti-nationalistic. This was also the practice in the Eastern Roman Empire (whose political structure Russia inherited). By the way, this is also true for the 2 nd religion of Russia, Islam.

Then, after the 1917 Revolution, Russia was initially submitted to two decades of Jewish terror, especially a kind of terror directed against the Russian people and the Orthodox faith. With the coming to power of Stalin, however, major changes took place (and most of those who had drowned Russia in innocent blood were themselves executed during the famous "purges"). And while Stalin never was an "anti-Semite" (this is silly nonsense which both Stalin's actions and writings directly contradict), his purges (and reforms) did profoundly change the nature of the Soviet regime, including the ethnic composition of the leaders of the CPSU which became much more diverse.

Speaking of the Soviet Union in general, it is also important to remember that the Marxist-Leninist ideology also rejects racial and ethnic differences and, instead, advocates a solidarity of all people against their class oppressors .

Thus neither the pre-1917 nor the post-1917 mainstream Russian ideology/worldview are a viable ground to try to promote racist ideas. And, thankfully, neither is modern ("Putin's") Russia.

The truth is that Russia which, as I mentioned above, is the political heir to the East Roman Empire (aka "Byzantium" in western parlance) has ALWAYS been multi-religious, multi-cultural, multi-ethnic and pretty much any and all other "multi-something" you can think of. For all the many sins of the Russian people during their history, racism was never one of them!

For example, this is also why, while most people in the West see Islam (and Muslims) as " aliens ", most Russians are totally used to them and see them as longtime neighbors . That does not mean that Russian's don't remember the dozen or so wars Russia fought against the Ottomans, nor does it mean that Russia has forgiven the Wahabi atrocities in Chechnia. It simply and only means that Muslims, and even Turks, are not see as "national enemies" by Russians.

The same is true for Jews. Yes, the Russians do remember what Jews did to them during the early years of the Bolshevik regime, but that memory, that awareness, does NOT typically result into any kind of racism, including any type of anti-Jewish racism. Nor do the horrors committed by Jewish Bolsheviks obfuscate all the very real contributions of various Jews to the Russian culture.

By the way, it is important to remember here that while it is true that most first-generation Bolsheviks were Jews, it is not true that most Jews were Bolsheviks. In fact, Jews were found pretty much everywhere, including amongst Menshevik's, anarchists, Bundists, etc

So yes, Jews and Russians mostly lived together for about 200 years, and much of our common history is tragic, painful and even shameful, but at the end of the day, it would be false to think that most Russians either dislike or fear Jews. They do not. Even when they are critical of this or that personality, ideology or religion (original Christianity will always be the ultimate enemy of rabbinical Judaism, just as rabbinical Judaism will always remain the ultimate enemy of original Christianity; we can understand why that is so, or we can deplore it, but we should never forget or deny this!).

If any self-described anti-Semite reads these words and is absolutely outraged by what I just wrote, please also make sure to read " The Invention of the Jewish People " by Shlomo Sand" which will show to you that the very notion of "ethnicity" (whether Jewish or non-Jewish) is a modern invention with very little actual basis in history, especially in the history of multi-cultural empires. Simply put: in a culture which does not really believe in the importance of ethnicity no truly racist ideology can develop. It is really that simple!

Yes, I know about Dostoevskii's and Rozanov's dislike for Jews (and Poles, by the way), and yes I know about the Pale of Settlement (won't touch this here, but it sure was not what western historians in the West think it was – just read Solzhenitsyn!). I also know about the "Blood Libel" (won't touch this one either, but I will recommend you read the 2007 book by Israeli historian Ariel Toaff " Passovers of Blood ") and about all the other myths spread in the West (by Jews and non-Jews) about "Russian anti-Semitism". But the truth is simple: while there were many instances in history when Jews and Russians clashed (including the 10 th century destruction of Khazaria by Russian forces or the 15 th century struggle against the " Heresy of the Judaizers " – which, by the way, Wikipedia does a very bad job describing: in reality this was an early attempt by Kabbalists to infiltrate the Russian Orthodox Church just as they had successfully infiltrated the Papacy). Yet, these conflicts did not resulted in any major hostility of Russians towards Jews (the inverse is, alas, not nearly as true).

Conclusion two: Putin, Zelenskii and the Israelis

The recent trip of both Zelenskii and Putin to Israel has, again, brought the topic of the Jewish, Russian and Ukrainian "triangle" to the front page news. The Poles also seized the opportunity to make things worse for themselves when they chimed in on it all. You read the stories, so no need to repeat it all here. What was most impressive about this event was that Zelenskii decided that he would travel to Israel, only to then declare that he would not participate in the commemorative events. Why? Clearly, he was terrified that the Ukronazis will denounce him for caving in to Zionist pressure.

Putin did the exact opposite, not only did he travel to Israel and he spoke at the event, he also reminded the (mostly Jewish) audience of the horrors which the Russian people also suffered at the hands of the Nazis. Clearly, Putin did not fear that some Russian nationalists would accuse him of caving in to Zionist pressure. Why not?

Why could Putin speak so freely?

For two very simple reasons:

First, and unlike the Ukrainians or the Poles, the Russians have exactly zero guilt about what happened in WWII. In spite of all the lies currently spread in the West, the Soviet Union did not start WWII – the Soviet Union pretty much single-handedly defeated Hitler and ended the war ( the entire Anglo effort was worth no more than 20% and only came after the Soviets defeated the Wehrmacht and the SS in Stalingrad and elsewhere ).

Second, Jewish supremacism was very short lived in the USSR (roughly from 1917 to 1937) and neither Putin nor any other Russian political leader will let claims of exclusive "special" Jewish suffering go unchallenged. And while most Russian politicians don't feel the need to express any doubts about the "official" 6 million figure, they do like to remind their Jewish friends that the Russian nation suffered anywhere between 20 to 27 million dead people during WWII, thus denying Jewish victims any superior victim status over non-Jewish victims.

Our fundamental disagreement about WWII, Hitler and Jews

Likewise, it is BECAUSE Russians have zero sense of guilt towards Jews, that Putin could mention this figure of 80-85% of Jews in the first Bolshevik regime in front of an assembly of Haredi rabbis (see the video here for yourself:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/7bSAB5OPkwQ?feature=oembed

Can you imagine Merkel or Trump daring to say these things in front of such an audience?

Unthinkable!

Conclusion three:

Ever since Vladimir Putin came to power, Russia has been gradually and steadily separating herself from the collective West. This process is not so much about being "against" the West as it is about being "different" from the West, but unapologetically so! This is especially visible in the nature and quality of the political discourse in Russia which is truly dramatically different from the kind of hyper-controlled (and, of course, hyper-manipulated) political discourse in the West. Simply put, Russians live in a much more open and diverse intellectual landscape than their western neighbors. As a result, it would be a major mistake to assume, for example, that Russian patriots hold views similar to those held by western nationalists. Hence the existence of what we could call "Our fundamental disagreement about WWII, Hitler, Jews and race".

The Saker

Val , says: Show Comment February 7, 2020 at 9:08 pm GMT
Another example of the rampant disposition toward a pathological preoccupation with the past, in the world. and an inability to carry on toward a viable future.
Lot , says: Show Comment February 7, 2020 at 7:25 am GMT
You're a bit nuts, but great article.
Anonymous [174] Disclaimer , says: Show Comment February 7, 2020 at 11:58 am GMT
Slav/Eastern European countries are the most pro-Jew in the world. Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary and Russia are all extremely pro-Zionist, more so than most Western governments are.

Many Eastern European countries are also making it easy for Jews to get citizenship, pandering to Jews seems to be a key policy of "right wing" civic nationalist Eastern European governments, they are pathetic.

A Portuguese Man , says: Show Comment February 7, 2020 at 1:23 pm GMT
Beware the author has an axe to grind against the Catholic Church and the Pope, which he seems to believe have been historically manipulating Poles and others against Russians and Orthodox Christians. This is what he means by "Latin masters".

IMO, most of us in the West and, particularly, in historically Catholic countries, are unaware of the religious backdrop of this feud. Which is hard to explain if it were actually fundamentally religious as the author purports elsewhere in his writings.

I can confidently say that I've never read anything around here that portrayed Orthodox Christians or Russia as a threat to Catholicism, except specifically in regards to Communism.

melpol , says: Show Comment February 7, 2020 at 1:29 pm GMT
History of the Ashkenazim in Eastern Europe has been negatively propagandized. They were a class of high achievers who were used and respected by European royalty. Most never attended a Synagogue but considered themselves members of a new age Jewish race. Malcontents often blamed the Ashkenazim for their misery. Ignorant mobs burnt some Ashkenazim homes in anger.

But the well being of the Ashkenazim was never severely disturbed. Hitler attempted to murder the Ashkenazim and seize their wealth but he failed. Today the Ashkenazim have the highest standard of living in the world.

Sean , says: Show Comment February 7, 2020 at 3:39 pm GMT

https://www.nationalreview.com/2008/04/genocide-loophole-jonah-goldberg/
Russia's lower house of parliament passed a resolution insisting that Josef Stalin's man-made 1932-33 famine -- called the Holodomor in Ukrainian -- wasn't genocide. resolution indignantly states: "There is no historical proof that the famine was organized along ethnic lines." It notes that victims included "different peoples and nationalities living largely in agricultural areas of the country." Translation: We didn't kill millions of farmers because they were Ukrainians; we killed millions of Ukrainians because they were farmers. And that's all it takes to be acquitted of genocide.

The Ukrainian famine was entirely deliberate and designed to kill off those who were eating up the surplus. Nazis saw the Soviet liquidation of useless eaters of the surplus in rural areas as the logical outcome of a correct economic analysis of rural overpopulation. The Nazis thought the Soviets had shown the way the East could develop. For German economists was the East was not only suffering to many people living on the land and consuming everything that was produced but but a burgeoning and increasingly impoverished Jewish minority that had outgrown its niche of occupying trades and peddling that had already blocked the upward mobility of the rural population and the retarded the development of an indigenous middle class. The Poles wanted the Jews to emigrate, but few did.

Poles rarely attack anybody unless their prospective victim is already agonizing or unless there is some "big guy" protecting them

As late as 1939 Hitler wanted to attack the USSR, but Poland would not agree so Hitler made a pact with Stalin to divide Poland between them. The Soviets then killed more people in their part of Poland than the Nazis did in theirs. Truly, no good deed goes unpunished.

Sherlockohms , says: Show Comment February 7, 2020 at 3:43 pm GMT
"However, when the EU declares in a solemn vote that Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were both equally responsible for WWII, then a fundamental red line is crossed, "

Yes and that line is crossed (as you admonish) by again ignoring history. WWII was obviously caused by WWI and the greed of the Western victors and leading Zionists who after that war ground down Germany to a point of less than bankruptcy and paved the way for a leader who would lift the nation and its people to new found prosperity.

nsa , says: Show Comment February 7, 2020 at 3:45 pm GMT
@freddiex "jew oligarchs who raped Russia with yeltsin"

In the early 1990s, the (west) parachuted Jeff Sachs and his IMF jooboys into the former USSR to install a western style democracy .the word "democracy" meaning the jew and his useful idiots run and loot it.

They developed a clever chit system for dividing up the resources of the former USSR. Surprise, surprise, jews ended up with most the chits i.e. resources of the former USSR. 16 time zones is a lot of resources to loot, but where easy money is to be had ..the jew is usually up to the task.

This looting could not have been accomplished without the connivance of the local traitorous jews making up a large portion of the nomenklature in the USSR of the late 1980s. To this day, Russia is in the clutches of the jew ..but at least trying to free itself, unlike North America which revels in grovelling before the jew. Ask any non-jew Russian about the pernicious jew in Russia, and you will get quite an earful.

melpol , says: Show Comment February 7, 2020 at 3:58 pm GMT
Faulty thinkers who are trying to excise Jews from the essence of Capitalism are doomed to failure. Jewish characteristics are contained within Capitalism and they are its personification. Capitalism is a Jew and a Jew is Capitalism. It also means that all people beneath their façade are Capitalists, and all people are really Jews. Shalom my friends.
Anatoly Karlin , says: Website Show Comment February 7, 2020 at 4:02 pm GMT
@neutral A quite consensual and mostly non-violent white genocide that most Western whites are perfectly fine with, versus violent and decidedly non-consensual genocides against certain subsets of the white race in service of Germanic supremacism. You are very free to think that Hitler did nothing wrong, but you then probably shouldn't expect much in the way of support from Russians and Poles (who ofc otherwise have their own major arguments with each other).

barr , says: Show Comment February 7, 2020 at 5:39 pm GMT
@Sean 1934 = Mutually assured Non-Aggression Pact Germany-Poland is signed for 10 year period.

• 1935 = During a visit to Warsaw H. Goering, appointed by Hitler to lead and groom a warming German-Polish relationship, proposes to his hosts to join in a "probable" future expansion to the East promising them a part of Soviet Ukraine as a war trophy /1/.

• 1938 = March 17th: Encouraged by the success of its ally, Poland presents Lithuania with an ultimatum,
• 1938 = Sept. 19th: The Polish Government expresses its agreement with Hitler's opinion

• 1938 = Sept. 21st:
Large border conflict is provoked in the early morning hours at the German-Czech border.
Poland presents Czechoslovakia with a demand
Polish airplane routinely violate Czechoslovak air space. The real news is scarcely reported abroad, except for "Pravda" in the Soviet Union /2/11.
• 1938 = Sept. 29th:
1. The infamous Munich conference begins, in rather peculiar manner: the high representatives of the four Central European Powers deliberate, in the presence of other nations' observers, but the party whose fate is being discussed and decided upon
• Sudetenland is to be annexed by Germany starting on Oct. 1st and to be completed by Oct. 10th; within 3 months Czechoslovakia is to give up its lands on which claims are laid by Poland and Hungary, and to submit to their demands for annexation -- he phase of real actions:[13]
• 1938 = Sept. 30th:
• 1. By 01:00h the Munich Agreement is signed– Czechoslovakia is to give up its lands on which claims are laid by Poland and Hungary, and to submit to their demands for annexation
•
•
https://www.globalresearch.ca/truth-80-years-beginning-wwii-october-1938/5690808

John Johnson , says: Show Comment February 7, 2020 at 6:29 pm GMT
@Sean As late as 1939 Hitler wanted to attack the USSR, but Poland would not agree so Hitler made a pact with Stalin to divide Poland between them. The Soviets then killed more people in their part of Poland than the Nazis did in theirs. Truly, no good deed goes unpunished.

You didn't mention the part of Poland not wanting to becoming a satellite state.

Hitler didn't need Poland to attack the USSR. It would have been useful if they aligned but Germany but wasn't strategically required.

The truth is that Hitler wanted to eliminate Poland and take their land.

That is why Warsaw was bombed so heavily. The Nazi command discussed turning it into a lake.

Saving European countries from the Jews and Communism by indiscriminate bombing. What a swell guy.

Half of our problems today come from that psychopath.

Anonymous [762] Disclaimer , says: Show Comment February 7, 2020 at 6:33 pm GMT

the West is a much bigger danger to the Russian civilizational realm than any anti-Russian plans concocted by Jews

Except that the Jews have concocted those dangerous (((Western))) plans, Saker. Iran is in the cross-hairs for the greater Israel project and Russia/China for the (((NWO))).

Alfred , says: Show Comment February 7, 2020 at 7:17 pm GMT
I am in no doubt that Russia has in its archives ample evidence that can blow the official Holocaust story out of the water. After all, it is undeniable that it was the Soviet Army that liberated the "Death Camps". The question is why is Russia so reluctant to release these archives? What are they getting in return?

It is not as though it is protecting them in any way from the Jewish-controlled media. For me, that is a great mystery.

Sean , says: Show Comment February 7, 2020 at 8:43 pm GMT
@John Johnson It was American capitalism inseparable from its Jewish component that Hitler saw as the mortal foe of Germany. Hitler was obsessed with the massive emigration of the best Germans that resulted in German Americans being used against their ancestral homeland in WW1. Hitler thought that the most valuable German blood would continue to hemorrhage across the ocean unless he conquered land in the East that could provide a lifestyle to rival what America continued to offer. Poland was never going to be that. The real prize was the Soviet Union, and if Hitler could fight it alone the result was a forgone conclusion (it was only his order to stop for two months in from of Smelesk that denied Von Bock the chance to smash the bulk of the Soviet Army). Failure to follow up Army Goup Centre's sucess in a timely manner was was an error fatal for Hitlers'a scheme and thus he was guilty in his own terms.

https://www.unz.com/mhudson/the-history-of-debt-cancellation-and-austerity-in-europe/
Michael Hudson [00:34:47] The bank models predict that Germany's population must fall, living standards must fall by 20 or 30 percent and your lifespans must shorten, your suicide rates must go up and your skilled labor must emigrate in order for your real estate market to provide the revenue to the keep banking system solvent as private-sector debt increases at today's rates. That will make your banking system look like the American and British banking system, where eighty percent of bank credit goes into real estate. It's a circular flow, pushing up the price of housing, causing an umbrella for rents to go up. Germany will end up looking like Greece. That is the "business as usual" economic plan. Your economic leaders of all your parties except the Linke want Germany to end up looking like Greece.. They say that that's progress, but it's only progress for the banking class. This is the implicit war, which somehow is not being discussed in Germany

Sean , says: Show Comment February 7, 2020 at 9:31 pm GMT
@Just passing through

https://www.youtube.com/embed/ParxL_mmi-Y?feature=oembed

What? The Jews were shot? I hear it here for the first time."

As Aly and Heim show in their book Architects of Annihilation the top technocratic brains of Germany were trying make the East into an economically dynamic paradise for Germans on. They weren't planning to kill off all the Poles and other conquered peoples immediately , like was being done with the Jews because they prevented the economic development of the gentile middle classes. Von Manstein approved as it would suppress partisan activity.

Anyway certain peoples in the conquered territories that were thought suitable for Germanization in the new order were assessed, but not according to physical racial characteristics. No. it was 'achievement orientation' over a number of generations that the Germans were looking for. Economically successful upwardly mobile individuals and families in other words.

Basehonoluluhaole , says: Show Comment February 7, 2020 at 10:45 pm GMT
@Val Your comment is short, to the point and eminently sensible. Bravo!
John Johnson , says: Show Comment February 7, 2020 at 11:18 pm GMT
@Sean It was American capitalism inseparable from its Jewish component that Hitler saw as the mortal foe of Germany.

No it was clear in his book and his actions that all Jews were the enemy. He viewed them as a racial enemy regardless of where they were.

He needlessly wasted resources tracking down Jews across Europe that had nothing to do with Communism.

In 1944 he rounded up the small Greek Jewish population and sent them to camps.

So even when the war was clearly lost he was trying to kill as many Jews as possible, even in countries like Greece where the Jews were well integrated and had practically zero influence in political affairs.

Hitler thought that the most valuable German blood would continue to hemorrhage across the ocean unless he conquered land in the East that could provide a lifestyle to rival what America continued to offer. Poland was never going to be that. The real prize was the Soviet Union

He wanted Poland and the USSR. From a military point of view invading Poland was not required to invade the Soviet Union.

He needlessly gambled that the Allies wouldn't start a war over Poland. It was a stupid gamble since losing meant world war. Then he gambled he could make a deal with the British which didn't work either.

Hitler said his main enemy was the USSR and then carpet bombed a Christian anti-Communist country and split it with Stalin. The savior of Europe, coming to bomb your children.

RJJCDA , says: Show Comment February 7, 2020 at 11:38 pm GMT
But the very word "patriot" derives from:

Greek patriōtēs, from patrios, of one's fathers, from patēr, patr-, father; see pəter- in Indo-European roots.

Implying that there is a genetic component.

skopros , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 12:01 am GMT
Re the "turncoat" Russian General Andrei Vlasov, who created the "Russian Liberation Army" (ROA) fightng with the Wehrmacht, see "The Last Secret," by British author Nicholas Bethel, a harrowing tale of shameful forced repatriation by Allies of prisoners caught outside the Soviet Union. Stalin had them summarily slaughtered lest their exposure to the West "infect" Soviet society back in Russia.
RJJCDA , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 12:09 am GMT
Stefan Molyneux has an axiom: "Diversity plus proximity equals conflict." I think it is a mistake to take Russia's unique experience (and others) and project it as indicating universal truths.
John Johnson , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 12:13 am GMT
@Just passing through

National Socialist obsession with race has been severely played up by the victors according to the smattering of reading I've done. Did the Germans believe they as a group were better than other groups? Absolutely. BUt did they really want to take over the world and genocide all the 'subhumans'? I don't think so.

So did you not read about how German troops were given orders to show no mercy in the Eastern front because it was a racial war? There are plenty of letters sent back home from German troops describing their brutality if you think it is all propaganda. There are also plenty of quotes from Hitler himself.

From Hitler's Table talk:

We'll let the Russian towns fall to pieces – let them know just enough to understand our highway signs, so that they won't get themselves run over by our vehicles! .. There is only duty: to Germanise this country by the immigration of Germans, and to look upon the natives as Redskins. I have no feelings about the idea of wiping out Kiev, Moscow or St. Petersburg

Curmudgeon , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 12:40 am GMT
@John Johnson

Hitler completely ignored how the Poles had fought off the communists after WWI.

How would you like to have risked your life fighting communists only to be sent to a camp by the great anti-communist dictator?

I suggest you stop reading the New York Times. Hitler didn't ignore it at all. The NSDAP was always about defeating the communist menace. After all, many of the NSDAP, including Hitler himself, had fought in the Freikorps against the communist overthrow of the Bavarian and Berlin Governments by the Bolshevik Jews Luxembourg and Liebknecht who declared them Soviet Republics.

The NSDAP signed a non-aggression pact with Poland's leader Pilsudski and was working towards settling territorial disputes peacefully. The attacks on ethnic Germans in Poland were reduced. After Pilsudski died his successor ignored Pilsudski's advice to make peace with Germany. Germany gave up claims to a number of territories in order to work to that end. Pilsudski's successor Smygli-Rydz refused any dialogue with Germany, ramped up the attacks on ethnic Germans, occupied Danzig, which was under the League of Nations mandate, and mobilized its army to attack Germany. When it comes to wars, nobody's hands are clean, but the fact of the matter is peace was there to be had, Smygli-Rydz chose to ignore it.

James N. Kennett , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 12:50 am GMT

The undeniable historical truth is that the centuries long occupation of the Russian eastern frontier lands by the Poles and their Latin masters created so much hatred between all the nationalities involved that it appears that every time they had a chance to try to persecute or kill each other, they immediately did so. Here area few examples of that kind of violence:

The examples you give all post-date the partition of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth by the Russian, Prussian and Austrian Empires. The Commonwealth itself had much better religious tolerance than its successor states.

It is also worth remembering that Kiev was a political centre for centuries before Moscow even existed, and Western Ukraine came under Muscovite rule only 200 years ago. Before then, the lands of "Great Russia" and "Small Russia" had never been unified.

An example of a crucial geographical difference would be "pogroms" which, contrary to western propaganda, pogroms all took place in what would be the modern Ukraine today, never in Russia.

It seems that you are just as confused as everybody else about the identity of these territories. Are they "Russian eastern frontier lands" whose rule by Poland was an "occupation"? Or are they something distinct from Russia?

Before 1917, most Jews in the Russian Empire were confined to the "Pale of Settlement" – approximately the territory that had belonged to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. This is where the pogroms took place. They were part of the territory of the Russian Empire, and the countries now called Belarus and Ukraine did not exist.

It seems to me that most people reading these lines already know that the "collective West" aka the "AngloZionist Empire" is in terrible shape. Just look at the political chaos in the US, the UK, France, Germany and all the rest of the NATO/EU countries. The West is not only losing militarily and economically, it is also agonizing culturally, socially, morally and spiritually. Furthermore, that which we all used to think of as "western values" is now being replaced by some insipid "multiculturalism" which seems to pious euphemism for the obvious plan to erase pretty much all of the western historical and cultural legacy.

This is true, except that the USA is still the world's strongest most military power, by a large margin.

Like all forms of persecution, this one is also resulting in an increasingly powerful case of ideological blowback: a very dangerous and toxic resurgence of both Fascism and National-Socialism.

How could a person (Hitler) and an ideology (National-Socialism) be both declared uniquely evil AND, at the same time, undergo at least a partial rehabilitation in the same society?

Because the idea of partial rehabilitation isn't actually true. Anybody in the West who doesn't agree with all the multi-culti nonsense is deemed to be "filled with hatred", and anyone who opposes mass immigration from the Third World is declared to be "literally Hitler". You must remember this when you read the Western media.

davidgmillsatty , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 2:12 am GMT
Failure by the Russians to release to the world all of the documentation they have disproving the myths of the holocaust, will be at their peril, our peril, and most likely the rest of the world's as well.

It seems obvious that American Jews will do everything possible to keep American gentiles in the dark about the myths the Jews have rammed down the gentiles' throats.

Those of us who long have wanted to stop the mad American doctrine of world hegemony, and who vehemently disagree with it, can not rouse our fellow countrymen to our side if we have no solid proof that the lies are lies.

Ian Smith , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 4:55 am GMT
Sometimes I agree with Saker, sometimes not. But every article comes down to: Russia good, Russian enemies bad.
utu , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 5:06 am GMT
@Just passing through "But did they really want to take over the world and genocide all the 'subhumans'? " – And so here you constructed a straw man against which you argue. Then you excerpt something about Chinese and Eskimos against whom Nazis did not feel any animus so they could afford making charitable statement about them because in Nazi vision of the 1000 year Reich they did not seek for Lebensraum in China or Alaska.

Our task is to humbly accept the laws that govern our human existence, and to accept the fact that we are born Germans in Germany, not as Chinese or Eskimos.

But they planned to find the Lebensraum in Poland, Belarus, Ukraine and Russia. So perhaps you should look for policy documents from Race Relations Office of NSDPA concerning what they thought and planned for Russians, Poles and Ukrainians. For example Dr. Erhard Wetzel (the head of the Race-Political Office of the NSDAP) who actually did not talk about extermination directly but he wrote a lot about curtailing of birth rate proposing various programs which were being implemented in the occupied territories to reduce population. The memoranda he wrote in 1939, 1940 and 1942 concerning demographic policy with respect to Jews, Poles, Russian and Ukrainians with annotations of Martin Bormann were found after war. Actually reading these documents shows how German thinking and policies were evolving.

utu , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 5:27 am GMT
@Ian Smith Saker can't be taken serious. He is a child engaging in wishful thinking and wish fulfillment of his childhood fantasies. This perhaps might be understandable as he grew up in a milieu of White Russian emigres and a fatherless, iirc, family. He is an emotional man-child who engages in endless stream of rationalizations, twisting reality and justifications for the right cause in his mind, the cause of Russia, Mother Russia – the entity that only exists in childhood dreams that were fed by his mother, the entity that never existed even before the Bolshevik Revolution.

This kind of fantasizing that is data poor but theory rich is something that Russians may have a proclivity for. It often amounts to casting the spells against reality.

Felix Keverich , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 5:39 am GMT
Saker sinks to deeper depths of delusion. Russians are simply being duped by Jewry (just like goyim in the West). Russians don't remember their history, and history itself has been heavily sanitized by the Soviets to remove everything that might provoke "anti-Semitism" and ethnic strife in general. So Polish and Banderite crimes are also mostly unknown.
Anonymous [598] Disclaimer , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 6:18 am GMT
@Smith Wow! The death camps were a hoax? How weak and fragile must someone be to be in denial about outright obvious hatred Hitler had toward Jews, Slav and anyone else that that ignorant and distorted mental case German racist (primitive tribal fanatic) decided to demonize. When you have Nazis themselves admitting that the death camps existed and their intent was to kill as many of the inmates as possible through both direct and indirect means denial is a clear signs of cowardice and weakness.

Now I admit that Saker does come across as a typical overseas diaspora immigrant romanticising his "homeland" and casting his culture in a ridiculously idealistic way. For instance he makes a ridiculous claim that Russian culture doesn't contain any racial or racialist basis in its history: that is plainly a ridiculous claim by someone someone who does not live in Russia and therefore is not really qualified to make that judgement. I'm sure Central Asian workers in Russia that have been the subject of brutal Russian beatings murder and violence would differ with this Tsarist Russian wannabe's foolish characterization of the lack of racism in Russian culture.

The sad thing for Saker is that his blog continues to go downhill because he has surrounded himself with acolytes (some of his moderators allow absolutely not criticism of him or his holy cows). The moderation quality ranges from idiotic and emotional to profession depending on who is on shift. Just go to his blog and see how much fawning there is there and the very weak criticism.

Tusk , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 8:57 am GMT
@Weston Waroda

We need to be thankful that the Saker continually reminds us readers of the Unz Review that anti-Semitism is a sin, that Unz does not promote anti-Semitism, and that nationalism (but not patriotism) is also a sin. You still believe there are such things as sins, right?

I sure hope this is a satire comment.

It's not a sin to dislike Jews anymore than it's a sin to dislike apples. Dostoevsky is free to dislike Jews as much as he wants, and considering he never harmed a Jew at all to imply he is "guilty" for simply having a different opinion from Jews and jew lovers is ridiculous.

One doesn't have to like everything in the world and to even expect that of people is pure folly. Anti-Semitism these days is equated to a wide arrangement of offences, from criticising Israel and noting their influence on politics, to criticising Jewish overrepresenation in numerous fields. Perhaps it's anti-Semitic of me to want to ban circumcision, a disgusting ancient desert rite that has nothing to do with the modern world, but I guess that's a hate crime for trying to stop their 'freedom of religion' to abuse children.

Anti-Semitism is an opinion and an opinion isn't sin. It would be a crime, and perhaps a sin, if I was to go out and pogrom some Jews. But nobody here is advocating for that at all. Why is wanting to be free of Jews a sin? Why are Jews de facto part of your society and you can never remove them? Once again this is total idiocy. Only the Jews have the right to not be criticised and be part of your state, whereas you are banned from their ethno-state and to even want to go there could be seen as an 'invasion' as foreigners try to undermine their sovereignty.

Seraphim , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 9:46 am GMT
@Weston Waroda The truth is that, if you read Dostoevsky and not his (presumably Jewish) biographer(s), he didn't feel any guilt about his feelings about the Jews. He knew (as we do) that he was right (and history tragically proved him right hundred times over). And the Jews know that he was right as well, but they can't get over it.
Seraphim , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 10:22 am GMT
@Rich That foaming at the mouth about 'Banderastan', 'Ukronazis' is a means to divert attention from the fact that Ukraine is in firm control of the Zionazis! It is impossible to believe that the Saker, who is an above average intelligent and informed person, is not aware of the real situation. But, as he says: "The topic of Russians and Jews is clearly a "hot" one". A too hot potato that must be handled with kid gloves.
German_reader , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 2:27 pm GMT
@utu "but he wrote a lot about curtailing of birth rate proposing various programs"

iirc the stuff about propaganda for abortion in occupied Russia was more of a casual aside, not a coherent programme. But Wetzel did write a lot about Germanization of "racially valuable" Slavs and deportation of the rest to Siberia or somewhere else; at the very least he was proposing ethnic cleansing programmes of unprecedented scale (and he seems to have been a "moderate" compared to some at least in the SS). Whether those would have escalated to mass murder after a German victory like had happened with Jewish policy during 1940-1942 can never be known with certainty imo.
Wetzel's Generalplan Ost memoranda in the German original can be read here (article by Helmut Heiber starting on p. 281):
https://www.ifz-muenchen.de/heftarchiv/1958_3.pdf

Some attempts at the ethnic cleansing programmes were actually made during the war, notably Aktion Zamość in 1942/43:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_cleansing_of_Zamojszczyzna_by_Nazi_Germany

There were also orders for the expulsion of all inhabitants from Crimea (marked for German colonization) in 1942, but those were halted due to military necessities.

A previous commenter tried to claim Walter Groß wasn't that extreme after all. I hadn't heard of the man before, so I googled him, and actually he seems to have been a hardliner who in 1941 lobbied for treating "half-Jews" the same as "full" Jews. But such distortions aren't surprising among the Unz commentariat.

I still don't have any sympathy for Saker's demented anti-Western ramblings though. If he doesn't make me exactly think that Hitler did nothing wrong, I'm sure beginning to wonder if the crusaders who sacked Constantinople in 1204 didn't have a point.

but an humble craftsman , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 2:42 pm GMT
@Anatoly Karlin After both having stolen so much German land, one expects Polish and Russian unity in this one question.

Anything else would raise other, rather unpleasant questions.

The Germans sheepily going along with this nonsense is a sight to behold.

utu , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 5:48 pm GMT
@German_reader The comment I was responding to was ridiculous which unfortunately was amplified by Ron Unz highlighting it. Wetzel did not advocate direct or indirect extermination (there is no paper trail for it) but he left enough documents that support the suprematist position.

As far as Saker and Constantinople there is something to it. On Saker I commented in #59 where I almost did not allude to Eastern Orthodoxy but I did. Eastern Orthodox is anti-intellectual. That's why some Russian writers like Saker seem to be so obtuse. They are conflicted and full of contradictions in their anti-West sentiments. There is also this potential for violence in Eastern Orthodoxy. Why Judeo-Bolsheviks succeeded in Russia? Because Russian were too meek or perhaps because they were too violent? What was the role of Orthodox priests in instigating the Volhynia massacre during WWII one of the ugliest events of WWII.

Genrick Yagoda , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 6:09 pm GMT
@Anonymous QUOTE When you have Nazis themselves admitting that the death camps existed and their intent was to kill as many of the inmates as possible through both direct and indirect means END QUOTE

That is a lie.

German_reader , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 6:16 pm GMT
@utu

Wetzel did not advocate direct or indirect extermination

He knew about (and apparently approved of) the mass murder of the Jews though. In the Generalplan Ost memorandum I linked to, he wrote that such methods can't be used to solve the Polish question, instead Poles should emigrate to Siberia or Brazil. But who knows if that position would have prevailed or something even more radical would have been implemented. In any case, his proposals clearly amounted to the abolition of Poland. Poles must have been really confused, as Saker tells us they were enthusiastic Nazis after all.

Dutch Boy , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 7:26 pm GMT
Speaking of WWII, Solzhenitsyn believed that Stalin was actually responsible for more deaths in the USSR than Hitler. The relentless purges, the use of penal battalions to wipe out unreliable troops, and the mass deportation of entire ethnic groups (e.g., the Chechens) to forbidding wastelands all caused many millions of deaths.

[Feb 08, 2020] Is Iraq About To Switch From US to Russia

Highly recommended!
Feb 08, 2020 | angrybearblog.com

likbez , February 8, 2020 8:56 pm

NSC Russia expert freshly appointed Andrew Peek, who was walked out like Vindman, with him only freshly appointed after Fiona Hill and the Tim Morrioson resigned.

There is a big problems with "experts" in NSC -- often they represent interests of the particular agency, or a think tank, not that of the country.

Look at former NSC staffer Fiona Hill. She can be called "threat inflation" specialist.

NSC tries to usurp the role of the State Department and overly militarize the USA foreign policy, while having much lower class specialists. It is a kind of CIA backdoor into defining the USA foreign policy.

I would advocate creating "shadow NSC" by the party who is in opposition, so that it can somehow provide countervailing opinions. But with both parties being now war parties, this is no that effective.

Cutting NSC staff to the bones, so that such second rate personalities like Fiona Hill and Vindman are automatically excluded might also help a little bit.

The size above a dozen or two is probably excessive, as like any bureaucracy, it will try to control the President, not so much help him/her.
( https://docs.house.gov/meetings/FA/FA00/20160908/105276/HHRG-114-FA00-Transcript-20160908.pdf ):

One common explanation is that the NSC mission creep results from the NSC staff growing too large and the easy solution is to limit the size of the staff. I am sympathetic to that feeling because we don't want it to
be too large and we don't want it to be usurping things that the State Department or the Agency should do.

[Feb 08, 2020] 'Gas Wars' In The Mediterranean by Mike Whitney

Feb 08, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Mike Whitney via The Unz Review,

The unexpected alliance between Turkey and Libya is a geopolitical earthquake that changes the balance of power in the eastern Mediterranean and across the Middle East.

Turkey's audacious move has enraged its rivals in the region and cleared the way for a dramatic escalation in the 9 year-long Libyan civil war. It has also forced leaders in Europe and Washington to decide how they will counter Turkey's plan to defend the U.N-recognized Government of National Accord (GNA) , and to extend its maritime borders from Europe to Africa basically creating "a water corridor through the eastern Mediterranean linking the coasts of Turkey and Libya."

Leaders in Ankara believe that the agreement "is a major coup in energy geopolitics" that helps defend Turkey's "sovereign rights against the gatekeepers of the regional status quo." But Turkey's rivals strongly disagree. They see the deal as a naked power grab that undermines their ability to transport natural gas from the East Mediterranean to Europe without crossing Turkish waters. In any event, the Turkey-Libya agreement has set the stage for a broader conflict that will unavoidably involve Egypt, Israel, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Europe, Russia and the United States. All parties appear to have abandoned diplomatic channels altogether and are, instead, preparing for war.

On November 27, Turkey and Libya signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) that commits Turkey to providing military assistance to Libya's Government of National Accord (GNA). The MoU also redraws Turkey's maritime boundaries in a way that dramatically impacts the transport of gas from the East Mediterranean to Europe. Israel is particularly worried that this new deal will undermine its plans for a 1,900-kilometer EastMed pipeline connecting the Leviathan gas field, off the coast of Israel, to the EU. YNET News summarized Israel's concerns in an ominously titled article: "Turkey's maneuver could block Israel's access to the sea". Here's an excerpt:

"Two of Israel's wars (1956 Sinai campaign and 1967 Six-Day War) broke out over navigation rights. Israel must take note of a new reality taking hold in the Mediterranean. It must regard Turkey's actions as a substantial strategic threat and consider what it may do to respond to it

This EEZ (Exclusive Economic Zones) designation essentially carved up much of the energy-rich Eastern Mediterranean between Turkey and Libya, prompting a wave of international condemnations first and foremost from Greece, Egypt, and Cyprus, who may be directly or indirectly affected ..Turkey's disregard for the economic waters of Greece, Cyprus, and Egypt.

Ankara is in effect annexing those areas pending an appeal to international tribunals, which can take many years to resolve. In practical terms, Turkey created a sea border the width of the entire Mediterranean ." ( "Turkey's maneuver could block Israel's access to the sea" , ynet news )

The analysis from America's premier Foreign Policy magazine was no less foreboding. Check it out:

"Turkey is meshing together two Mediterranean crises in a desperate bid to reshape the region in its own favor, with potentially nasty implications both for the ongoing civil war in Libya and future energy development in the eastern Mediterranean.

This month, Turkey's unusual outreach to the internationally recognized government of Libya has resulted in a formal agreement for Ankara to provide military support, including arms and possibly troops, in its bid to hold off an offensive from Russian-backed rebels in the eastern part of the country. The military agreement came just weeks after Turkey and that same Government of National Accord reached an unusual agreement to essentially carve up much of the energy-rich eastern Mediterranean between them -- threatening to cut out Greece and Cyprus from the coming bonanza ." ("Newly Aggressive Turkey Forges Alliance With Libya", Foreign Policy )

While these new developments are likely to intensify the fighting on the ground in Libya, they also portend a deepening of divisions within the region itself where new coalitions are forming and battle-lines are being drawn. On the one side is the Turkey-Libya Axis, while on the other is Greece, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Israel, France, Germany, UK and probably the United States although the Trump administration has not yet clarified its position. In any event, the war between Libya's internationally-recognized government and Haftar's Libyan National Army (LNA) is just a small part of a much larger struggle over vital hydrocarbons in a strategically-located area of the Mediterranean. Here's a clip from an article at War On The Rocks that helps to underscore the stakes involved:

"The discovery of significant deposits of natural gas in the Eastern Mediterranean beginning in 2009 was a game-changer that upended regional geopolitics. It prompted new and unexpected alliances between Israel, Greece, Cyprus, and Egypt to maximize their chances of energy self-sufficiency. The bulk of the gas lies in Egypt's Zohr field, the Leviathan and Tamar fields in Israeli waters, and the Aphrodite near the island of Cyprus. With recoverable natural gas reserves in the region estimated at upward of 120 trillion cubic feet, the strategic implications could not be bigge r. This is about the same amount as the proven gas in the whole of Iraq, the 12th largest reserve globally .(Israel's gas field) Leviathan is estimated to hold 22 trillion cubic feet of recoverable natural gas, and a potential half a million barrels of oil." ("Hydrocarbon Diplomacy: Turkey's Gambit Might Yet Pay a Peace Dividend", warontherocks.com)

Turkey's ambitious gambit makes it more likely that its rivals will increase their support for the Libyan warlord, Haftar, who is, by-most-accounts, a CIA asset that was sent to Libya in 2014 to topple the government in Tripoli and unify the country under a US puppet. Haftar's forces currently control more than 70% of the Libyan territory while almost 60% of the population is under the control of the GNA led by Prime Minister Fayez al-Sarraj. According to Turkish news: "More than half of Haftar's troops are mercenaries from Russia and Sudan, who are mainly paid by the Gulf states."

In April, 2019, Haftar launched an offensive on the government in Tripoli but was easily repelled. In recent days, however, Haftar has resumed his attacks on the city of Misrata and on the Tripoli airport in clear violation of the Berlin ceasefire agreement. He has also received shipments of weapons from the UAE despite an arms embargo that was unanimously approved two weeks ago at the same Berlin Conference. We expect that support for Haftar will continue to grow in the months ahead as Berlin, Paris and particularly Washington settle on a plan for reinforcing proxies to prosecute the ground war and for blunting Turkey's power projection in the Mediterranean.

The Turkey-Libya agreement is a clumsy attempt to impose Turkey's preferred maritime boundaries on the other countries bordering the Mediterranean. Naturally, Washington will not allow this unilateral assertion of power to go unchallenged.

And while Washington's strategy has not yet been announced, that merely indicates that the foreign policy establishment was caught off-guard by Turkey's November 27 announcement . It does not mean that Washington will accept the status quo. To the contrary, US war-planners are undoubtedly putting the finishing touches on a new strategy aimed at achieving their objectives in Libya while at the same time dealing a stinging blow to a NATO ally that has grown closer to Russia, caused endless headaches in Syria, and is now disrupting Washington's plans for controlling vital resources in the East Mediterranean.

Washington sees Turkey's assertive foreign policy as a sign of "defiance" which requires a iron-fisted response. But any attack on Turkey or Turkish interests will only intensify the bad blood between Ankara and Washington, it will only put more pressure on the threadbare NATO alliance, and it will only push Turkish president Erdogan further into Moscow's corner. Indeed, the Trump team should realize that an overreaction on their part could trigger a fateful realignment that could reshape the region while hastening the emergence of a new order.

[Feb 07, 2020] How They Sold the Iraq War by Jeffrey St. Clair

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Americans were the victims of an elaborate con job, pelted with a daily barrage of threat inflation, distortions, deceptions and lies, not about tactics or strategy or war plans, but about justifications for war. The lies were aimed not at confusing Saddam's regime, but the American people. By the start of the war, 66 per cent of Americans thought Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11 and 79 per cent thought he was close to having a nuclear weapon. ..."
"... This charade wouldn't have worked without a gullible or a complicit press corps. Victoria Clarke, who developed the Pentagon plan for embedded reports, put it succinctly a few weeks before the war began: "Media coverage of any future operation will to a large extent shape public perception." ..."
"... During the Vietnam War, TV images of maimed GIs and napalmed villages suburbanized opposition to the war and helped hasten the U.S. withdrawal. The Bush gang meant to turn the Vietnam phenomenon on its head by using TV as a force to propel the U.S.A. into a war that no one really wanted. ..."
"... When the Pentagon needed a heroic story, the press obliged. Jessica Lynch became the war's first instant celebrity. Here was a neo-gothic tale of a steely young woman wounded in a fierce battle, captured and tortured by ruthless enemies, and dramatically saved from certain death by a team of selfless rescuers, knights in camo and night-vision goggles. ..."
"... Back in 1988, the Post felt much differently about Saddam and his weapons of mass destruction. When reports trickled out about the gassing of Iranian troops, the Washington Post's editorial page shrugged off the massacres, calling the mass poisonings "a quirk of war." ..."
"... The Bush team displayed a similar amnesia. When Iraq used chemical weapons in grisly attacks on Iran, the U.S. government not only didn't object, it encouraged Saddam. ..."
"... Nothing sums up this unctuous approach more brazenly than MSNBC's firing of liberal talk show host Phil Donahue on the eve of the war. The network replaced the Donahue Show with a running segment called Countdown: Iraq, featuring the usual nightly coterie of retired generals, security flacks, and other cheerleaders for invasion. ..."
Mar 20, 2018 | www.counterpunch.org

The war on Iraq won't be remembered for how it was waged so much as for how it was sold. It was a propaganda war, a war of perception management, where loaded phrases, such as "weapons of mass destruction" and "rogue state" were hurled like precision weapons at the target audience: us.

To understand the Iraq war you don't need to consult generals, but the spin doctors and PR flacks who stage-managed the countdown to war from the murky corridors of Washington where politics, corporate spin and psy-ops spooks cohabit.

Consider the picaresque journey of Tony Blair's plagiarized dossier on Iraq, from a grad student's website to a cut-and-paste job in the prime minister's bombastic speech to the House of Commons. Blair, stubborn and verbose, paid a price for his grandiose puffery. Bush, who looted whole passages from Blair's speech for his own clumsy presentations, has skated freely through the tempest. Why?

Unlike Blair, the Bush team never wanted to present a legal case for war. They had no interest in making any of their allegations about Iraq hold up to a standard of proof. The real effort was aimed at amping up the mood for war by using the psychology of fear.

Facts were never important to the Bush team. They were disposable nuggets that could be discarded at will and replaced by whatever new rationale that played favorably with their polls and focus groups. The war was about weapons of mass destruction one week, al-Qaeda the next. When neither allegation could be substantiated on the ground, the fall back position became the mass graves (many from the Iran/Iraq war where the U.S.A. backed Iraq) proving that Saddam was an evil thug who deserved to be toppled. The motto of the Bush PR machine was: Move on. Don't explain. Say anything to conceal the perfidy behind the real motives for war. Never look back. Accuse the questioners of harboring unpatriotic sensibilities. Eventually, even the cagey Wolfowitz admitted that the official case for war was made mainly to make the invasion palatable, not to justify it.

The Bush claque of neocon hawks viewed the Iraq war as a product and, just like a new pair of Nikes, it required a roll-out campaign to soften up the consumers. The same techniques (and often the same PR gurus) that have been used to hawk cigarettes, SUVs and nuclear waste dumps were deployed to retail the Iraq war. To peddle the invasion, Donald Rumsfeld and Colin Powell and company recruited public relations gurus into top-level jobs at the Pentagon and the State Department. These spinmeisters soon had more say over how the rationale for war on Iraq should be presented than intelligence agencies and career diplomats. If the intelligence didn't fit the script, it was shaded, retooled or junked.

Take Charlotte Beers whom Powell picked as undersecretary of state in the post-9/11 world. Beers wasn't a diplomat. She wasn't even a politician. She was a grand diva of spin, known on the business and gossip pages as "the queen of Madison Avenue." On the strength of two advertising campaigns, one for Uncle Ben's Rice and another for Head and Shoulder's dandruff shampoo, Beers rocketed to the top of the heap in the PR world, heading two giant PR houses: Ogilvy and Mathers as well as J. Walter Thompson.

At the State Department Beers, who had met Powell in 1995 when they both served on the board of Gulf Airstream, worked at, in Powell's words, "the branding of U.S. foreign policy." She extracted more than $500 million from Congress for her Brand America campaign, which largely focused on beaming U.S. propaganda into the Muslim world, much of it directed at teens.

"Public diplomacy is a vital new arm in what will combat terrorism over time," said Beers. "All of a sudden we are in this position of redefining who America is, not only for ourselves, but for the outside world." Note the rapt attention Beers pays to the manipulation of perception, as opposed, say, to alterations of U.S. policy.

Old-fashioned diplomacy involves direct communication between representatives of nations, a conversational give and take, often fraught with deception (see April Glaspie), but an exchange nonetheless. Public diplomacy, as defined by Beers, is something else entirely. It's a one-way street, a unilateral broadcast of American propaganda directly to the public, domestic and international, a kind of informational carpet-bombing.

The themes of her campaigns were as simplistic and flimsy as a Bush press conference. The American incursions into Afghanistan and Iraq were all about bringing the balm of "freedom" to oppressed peoples. Hence, the title of the U.S. war: Operation Iraqi Freedom, where cruise missiles were depicted as instruments of liberation. Bush himself distilled the Beers equation to its bizarre essence: "This war is about peace."

Beers quietly resigned her post a few weeks before the first volley of tomahawk missiles battered Baghdad. From her point of view, the war itself was already won, the fireworks of shock and awe were all after play.

Over at the Pentagon, Donald Rumsfeld drafted Victoria "Torie" Clarke as his director of public affairs. Clarke knew the ropes inside the Beltway. Before becoming Rumsfeld's mouthpiece, she had commanded one of the world's great parlors for powerbrokers: Hill and Knowlton's D.C. office.

Almost immediately upon taking up her new gig, Clarke convened regular meetings with a select group of Washington's top private PR specialists and lobbyists to develop a marketing plan for the Pentagon's forthcoming terror wars. The group was filled with heavy-hitters and was strikingly bipartisan in composition. She called it the Rumsfeld Group and it included PR executive Sheila Tate, columnist Rich Lowry, and Republican political consultant Rich Galen.

The brain trust also boasted top Democratic fixer Tommy Boggs, brother of NPR's Cokie Roberts and son of the late Congressman Hale Boggs of Louisiana. At the very time Boggs was conferring with top Pentagon brass on how to frame the war on terror, he was also working feverishly for the royal family of Saudi Arabia. In 2002 alone, the Saudis paid his Qorvis PR firm $20.2 million to protect its interests in Washington. In the wake of hostile press coverage following the exposure of Saudi links to the 9/11 hijackers, the royal family needed all the well-placed help it could buy. They seem to have gotten their money's worth. Boggs' felicitous influence-peddling may help to explain why the references to Saudi funding of al-Qaeda were dropped from the recent congressional report on the investigation into intelligence failures and 9/11.

According to the trade publication PR Week, the Rumsfeld Group sent "messaging advice" to the Pentagon. The group told Clarke and Rumsfeld that in order to get the American public to buy into the war on terrorism, they needed to suggest a link to nation states, not just nebulous groups such as al-Qaeda. In other words, there needed to be a fixed target for the military campaigns, some distant place to drop cruise missiles and cluster bombs. They suggested the notion (already embedded in Rumsfeld's mind) of playing up the notion of so-called rogue states as the real masters of terrorism. Thus was born the Axis of Evil, which, of course, wasn't an "axis" at all, since two of the states, Iran and Iraq, hated each other, and neither had anything at all to do with the third, North Korea.

Tens of millions in federal money were poured into private public relations and media firms working to craft and broadcast the Bush dictat that Saddam had to be taken out before the Iraqi dictator blew up the world by dropping chemical and nuclear bombs from long-range drones. Many of these PR executives and image consultants were old friends of the high priests in the Bush inner sanctum. Indeed, they were veterans, like Cheney and Powell, of the previous war against Iraq, another engagement that was more spin than combat .

At the top of the list was John Rendon, head of the D.C. firm, the Rendon Group. Rendon is one of Washington's heaviest hitters, a Beltway fixer who never let political affiliation stand in the way of an assignment. Rendon served as a media consultant for Michael Dukakis and Jimmy Carter, as well as Reagan and George H.W. Bush. Whenever the Pentagon wanted to go to war, he offered his services at a price. During Desert Storm, Rendon pulled in $100,000 a month from the Kuwaiti royal family. He followed this up with a $23 million contract from the CIA to produce anti-Saddam propaganda in the region.

As part of this CIA project, Rendon created and named the Iraqi National Congress and tapped his friend Ahmed Chalabi, the shady financier, to head the organization.

Shortly after 9/11, the Pentagon handed the Rendon Group another big assignment: public relations for the U.S. bombing of Afghanistan. Rendon was also deeply involved in the planning and public relations for the pre-emptive war on Iraq, though both Rendon and the Pentagon refuse to disclose the details of the group's work there.

But it's not hard to detect the manipulative hand of Rendon behind many of the Iraq war's signature events, including the toppling of the Saddam statue (by U.S. troops and Chalabi associates) and videotape of jubilant Iraqis waving American flags as the Third Infantry rolled by them. Rendon had pulled off the same stunt in the first Gulf War, handing out American flags to Kuwaitis and herding the media to the orchestrated demonstration. "Where do you think they got those American flags?" clucked Rendon in 1991. "That was my assignment."

The Rendon Group may also have had played a role in pushing the phony intelligence that has now come back to haunt the Bush administration. In December of 2002, Robert Dreyfuss reported that the inner circle of the Bush White House preferred the intelligence coming from Chalabi and his associates to that being proffered by analysts at the CIA.

So Rendon and his circle represented a new kind of off-the-shelf PSYOPs , the privatization of official propaganda. "I am not a national security strategist or a military tactician," said Rendon. "I am a politician, and a person who uses communication to meet public policy or corporate policy objectives. In fact, I am an information warrior and a perception manager."

What exactly, is perception management? The Pentagon defines it this way: "actions to convey and/or deny selected information and indicators to foreign audiences to influence their emotions, motives and objective reasoning." In other words, lying about the intentions of the U.S. government. In a rare display of public frankness, the Pentagon actually let slip its plan (developed by Rendon) to establish a high-level den inside the Department Defense for perception management. They called it the Office of Strategic Influence and among its many missions was to plant false stories in the press.

Nothing stirs the corporate media into outbursts of pious outrage like an official government memo bragging about how the media are manipulated for political objectives. So the New York Times and Washington Post threw indignant fits about the Office of Strategic Influence; the Pentagon shut down the operation, and the press gloated with satisfaction on its victory. Yet, Rumsfeld told the Pentagon press corps that while he was killing the office, the same devious work would continue. "You can have the corpse," said Rumsfeld. "You can have the name. But I'm going to keep doing every single thing that needs to be done. And I have."

At a diplomatic level, despite the hired guns and the planted stories, this image war was lost. It failed to convince even America's most fervent allies and dependent client states that Iraq posed much of a threat. It failed to win the blessing of the U.N. and even NATO, a wholly owned subsidiary of Washington. At the end of the day, the vaunted coalition of the willing consisted of Britain, Spain, Italy, Australia, and a cohort of former Soviet bloc nations. Even so, the citizens of the nations that cast their lot with the U.S.A. overwhelmingly opposed the war.

Domestically, it was a different story. A population traumatized by terror threats and shattered economy became easy prey for the saturation bombing of the Bush message that Iraq was a terrorist state linked to al-Qaeda that was only minutes away from launching attacks on America with weapons of mass destruction.

Americans were the victims of an elaborate con job, pelted with a daily barrage of threat inflation, distortions, deceptions and lies, not about tactics or strategy or war plans, but about justifications for war. The lies were aimed not at confusing Saddam's regime, but the American people. By the start of the war, 66 per cent of Americans thought Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11 and 79 per cent thought he was close to having a nuclear weapon.

Of course, the closest Saddam came to possessing a nuke was a rusting gas centrifuge buried for 13 years in the garden of Mahdi Obeidi, a retired Iraqi scientist. Iraq didn't have any functional chemical or biological weapons. In fact, it didn't even possess any SCUD missiles, despite erroneous reports fed by Pentagon PR flacks alleging that it had fired SCUDs into Kuwait.

This charade wouldn't have worked without a gullible or a complicit press corps. Victoria Clarke, who developed the Pentagon plan for embedded reports, put it succinctly a few weeks before the war began: "Media coverage of any future operation will to a large extent shape public perception."

During the Vietnam War, TV images of maimed GIs and napalmed villages suburbanized opposition to the war and helped hasten the U.S. withdrawal. The Bush gang meant to turn the Vietnam phenomenon on its head by using TV as a force to propel the U.S.A. into a war that no one really wanted.

What the Pentagon sought was a new kind of living room war, where instead of photos of mangled soldiers and dead Iraqi kids, they could control the images Americans viewed and to a large extent the content of the stories. By embedding reporters inside selected divisions, Clarke believed the Pentagon could count on the reporters to build relationships with the troops and to feel dependent on them for their own safety. It worked, naturally. One reporter for a national network trembled on camera that the U.S. Army functioned as "our protectors." The late David Bloom of NBC confessed on the air that he was willing to do "anything and everything they can ask of us."

When the Pentagon needed a heroic story, the press obliged. Jessica Lynch became the war's first instant celebrity. Here was a neo-gothic tale of a steely young woman wounded in a fierce battle, captured and tortured by ruthless enemies, and dramatically saved from certain death by a team of selfless rescuers, knights in camo and night-vision goggles. Of course, nearly every detail of her heroic adventure proved to be as fictive and maudlin as any made-for-TV-movie. But the ordeal of Private Lynch, which dominated the news for more than a week, served its purpose: to distract attention from a stalled campaign that was beginning to look at lot riskier than the American public had been hoodwinked into believing.

The Lynch story was fed to the eager press by a Pentagon operation called Combat Camera, the Army network of photographers, videographers and editors that sends 800 photos and 25 video clips a day to the media. The editors at Combat Camera carefully culled the footage to present the Pentagon's montage of the war, eliding such unsettling images as collateral damage, cluster bombs, dead children and U.S. soldiers, napalm strikes and disgruntled troops.

"A lot of our imagery will have a big impact on world opinion," predicted Lt. Jane Larogue, director of Combat Camera in Iraq. She was right. But as the hot war turned into an even hotter occupation, the Pentagon, despite airy rhetoric from occupation supremo Paul Bremer about installing democratic institutions such as a free press, moved to tighten its monopoly on the flow images out of Iraq. First, it tried to shut down Al Jazeera, the Arab news channel. Then the Pentagon intimated that it would like to see all foreign TV news crews banished from Baghdad.

Few newspapers fanned the hysteria about the threat posed by Saddam's weapons of mass destruction as sedulously as did the Washington Post. In the months leading up to the war, the Post's pro-war op-eds outnumbered the anti-war columns by a 3-to-1 margin.

Back in 1988, the Post felt much differently about Saddam and his weapons of mass destruction. When reports trickled out about the gassing of Iranian troops, the Washington Post's editorial page shrugged off the massacres, calling the mass poisonings "a quirk of war."

The Bush team displayed a similar amnesia. When Iraq used chemical weapons in grisly attacks on Iran, the U.S. government not only didn't object, it encouraged Saddam. Anything to punish Iran was the message coming from the White House. Donald Rumsfeld himself was sent as President Ronald Reagan's personal envoy to Baghdad. Rumsfeld conveyed the bold message than an Iraq defeat would be viewed as a "strategic setback for the United States." This sleazy alliance was sealed with a handshake caught on videotape. When CNN reporter Jamie McIntyre replayed the footage for Rumsfeld in the spring of 2003, the secretary of defense snapped, "Where'd you get that? Iraqi television?"

The current crop of Iraq hawks also saw Saddam much differently then. Take the writer Laura Mylroie, sometime colleague of the New York Times' Judy Miller, who persists in peddling the ludicrous conspiracy that Iraq was behind the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.

How times have changed! In 1987, Mylroie felt downright cuddly toward Saddam. She wrote an article for the New Republic titled "Back Iraq: Time for a U.S. Tilt in the Mideast," arguing that the U.S. should publicly embrace Saddam's secular regime as a bulwark against the Islamic fundamentalists in Iran. The co-author of this mesmerizing weave of wonkery was none other than Daniel Pipes, perhaps the nation's most bellicose Islamophobe. "The American weapons that Iraq could make good use of include remotely scatterable and anti-personnel mines and counterartillery radar," wrote Mylroie and Pipes. "The United States might also consider upgrading intelligence it is supplying Baghdad."

In the rollout for the war, Mylroie seemed to be everywhere hawking the invasion of Iraq. She would often appear on two or three different networks in the same day. How did the reporter manage this feat? She had help in the form of Eleana Benador, the media placement guru who runs Benador Associates. Born in Peru, Benador parlayed her skills as a linguist into a lucrative career as media relations whiz for the Washington foreign policy elite. She also oversees the Middle East Forum, a fanatically pro-Zionist white paper mill. Her clients include some of the nation's most fervid hawks, including Michael Ledeen, Charles Krauthammer, Al Haig, Max Boot, Daniel Pipes, Richard Perle, and Judy Miller. During the Iraq war, Benador's assignment was to embed this squadron of pro-war zealots into the national media, on talk shows, and op-ed pages.

Benador not only got them the gigs, she also crafted the theme and made sure they all stayed on message. "There are some things, you just have to state them in a different way, in a slightly different way," said Benador. "If not, people get scared." Scared of intentions of their own government.

It could have been different. All of the holes in the Bush administration's gossamer case for war were right there for the mainstream press to expose. Instead, the U.S. press, just like the oil companies, sought to commercialize the Iraq war and profit from the invasions. They didn't want to deal with uncomfortable facts or present voices of dissent.

Nothing sums up this unctuous approach more brazenly than MSNBC's firing of liberal talk show host Phil Donahue on the eve of the war. The network replaced the Donahue Show with a running segment called Countdown: Iraq, featuring the usual nightly coterie of retired generals, security flacks, and other cheerleaders for invasion. The network's executives blamed the cancellation on sagging ratings. In fact, during its run Donahue's show attracted more viewers than any other program on the network. The real reason for the pre-emptive strike on Donahue was spelled out in an internal memo from anxious executives at NBC. Donahue, the memo said, offered "a difficult face for NBC in a time of war. He seems to delight in presenting guests who are anti-war, anti-Bush and skeptical of the administration's motives."

The memo warned that Donahue's show risked tarring MSNBC as an unpatriotic network, "a home for liberal anti-war agenda at the same time that our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity." So, with scarcely a second thought, the honchos at MSNBC gave Donahue the boot and hoisted the battle flag.

It's war that sells.

There's a helluva caveat, of course. Once you buy it, the merchants of war accept no returns.

This essay is adapted from Grand Theft Pentagon.

[Feb 07, 2020] Poroshenko asked the USA help in fighting criminal cases against him in Ukraine

Feb 07, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

Moscow Exile

July 31, 2019 at 9:08 pm
Порошенко попросил у США помощи с уголовными делами на Украине, пишут СМИ

Poroshenko has asked the US for help with criminal cases in the Ukraine, writes media
05:31
MOSCOW, 1 Jul – RIA Novosti. The former President of the Ukraine Petro Poroshenko is in Istanbul, where he has turned to American companies to lobby for protection from criminal cases, reports " Ukraine News " with reference to sources.

It has been noted that in the Ukraine changes have been made as regards the criminal cases against Poroshenko. In particular, in May 2019, the former-president's lawyer Igor Golovan stated that these criminal cases would not entail any legal consequences, but now Poroshenko's entourage realizes that the criminal prosecution of the former president has noticeably intensified and may have consequences.

Therefore, according to the newspaper, in Turkey Poroshenko has started to lobbying U.S. companies, in particular, the BGR group, for assistance in resolving these cases.

"He is well aware that everything that happens in the RRG (State Bureau of investigation – trans. ed.) is taken very seriously, and he intends to defend himself against attacks. He can, for example, be expecting public support in Washington if there is an attempt made to arrest him", said the source.

In addition, the publication cites the words of Ukrainian political scientist Alexei Yakubin, who has noted that Poroshenko could repeat the "Saakashvili scenario".

"For example, he'll leave for treatment in London, where part of his entourage has entrenched itself. But this model complicates the public protection of his business assets within the country, which assets might be seized", he said.

The case against Poroshenko
Poroshenko has previously been involved in eleven criminal cases, in particular, as regards his abuse of power and his official position in the distribution of posts in "Tsentrenergo", his treason in connection with the incident in the Kerch Strait, his usurpation of judicial power and his misappropriation of the TV channel "Direct", his falsification of documents in the formation of Deputy factions in 2016, and his illegal appointment of a government, and the seizure of power.

In addition, as a witness, he was questioned about civilian deaths during the Euromaidan protests in 2014.

Poroshenko himself, speaking at the party congress of "European Business", said that he is responsible only before the Ukrainian people and is not afraid of persecution.

Mark Chapman August 1, 2019 at 2:44 am
Quite right, old man; keep your chin up. I daresay they're staying in quite prestigious digs in Istanbul, as befits visiting royalty. He seems to be labouring under a misapprehension that he is valuable somehow to Washington, whereas that would only be true if Washington were unwilling to work with Zelenskiy, and wanted him out of the way. So far as I can see, Washington is quite satisfied with Zelenskiy so far, while the people would not countenance a Poroshenko return. So he's not really much use, is he? Especially if the USA wishes to publicly support Zelenskiy's supposed battle with official corruption.

I could see them having a quiet word with Zelenskiy, maybe leave the old man out of it, what do you say? But Washington is already accused – with substantial justification, I would say – of running the show in Ukraine, and there are limits to how much obvious interfering it can do; especially after Biden's bragging about getting the state prosecutor fired.

Mark Chapman August 1, 2019 at 5:34 pm
Yes, I was sort of getting at the probability that Clan Poroshenko is just installed in a very nice hotel. I doubt he will want to be plunking down money for an actual property so long as the status of his assets still in Ukraine is still up in the air. I should imagine the Ukrainian government will take steps, if it has not already, to prevent his simply withdrawing their cash value.
Moscow Exile August 1, 2019 at 8:52 am
Same story from TASS [Eng]:

1 AUG, 14:07
In Saakashvili's shoes? Poroshenko asks US lobbyists to shield him from criminal charges
According to Vesti Ukraine, the ex-president sought help from the BGR Group, whose senior adviser is US Special Envoy for Ukraine Kurt Volker


Trust me!

yalensis August 1, 2019 at 4:24 pm
The thing about the pindosi, though, is that they always hedge their bets .
I vangize that they will pressure Zel to pardon Porky. So that they have a spare.
I hope I am wrong, but I don't think I am.
Mark Chapman August 1, 2019 at 5:45 pm
I doubt it, simply because it would kick the timbers right out from under Zelenskiy's anti-corruption platform, which is the issue on which he was voted in, and there would be no way to do it under the radar. The Ukrainian people must be following Porky's flight with great interest, and inferring that it means he has something to hide. Therefore an abrupt discontinuing of the pursuit, and a refocusing elsewhere, would tell them accountability is not attributed to the powerful and wealthy. Which is uhhh exactly the opposite of Zelenskiy's message.

[Feb 07, 2020] How They Sold the Iraq War by Jeffrey St. Clair

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Americans were the victims of an elaborate con job, pelted with a daily barrage of threat inflation, distortions, deceptions and lies, not about tactics or strategy or war plans, but about justifications for war. The lies were aimed not at confusing Saddam's regime, but the American people. By the start of the war, 66 per cent of Americans thought Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11 and 79 per cent thought he was close to having a nuclear weapon. ..."
"... This charade wouldn't have worked without a gullible or a complicit press corps. Victoria Clarke, who developed the Pentagon plan for embedded reports, put it succinctly a few weeks before the war began: "Media coverage of any future operation will to a large extent shape public perception." ..."
"... During the Vietnam War, TV images of maimed GIs and napalmed villages suburbanized opposition to the war and helped hasten the U.S. withdrawal. The Bush gang meant to turn the Vietnam phenomenon on its head by using TV as a force to propel the U.S.A. into a war that no one really wanted. ..."
"... When the Pentagon needed a heroic story, the press obliged. Jessica Lynch became the war's first instant celebrity. Here was a neo-gothic tale of a steely young woman wounded in a fierce battle, captured and tortured by ruthless enemies, and dramatically saved from certain death by a team of selfless rescuers, knights in camo and night-vision goggles. ..."
"... Back in 1988, the Post felt much differently about Saddam and his weapons of mass destruction. When reports trickled out about the gassing of Iranian troops, the Washington Post's editorial page shrugged off the massacres, calling the mass poisonings "a quirk of war." ..."
"... The Bush team displayed a similar amnesia. When Iraq used chemical weapons in grisly attacks on Iran, the U.S. government not only didn't object, it encouraged Saddam. ..."
"... Nothing sums up this unctuous approach more brazenly than MSNBC's firing of liberal talk show host Phil Donahue on the eve of the war. The network replaced the Donahue Show with a running segment called Countdown: Iraq, featuring the usual nightly coterie of retired generals, security flacks, and other cheerleaders for invasion. ..."
Mar 20, 2018 | www.counterpunch.org

The war on Iraq won't be remembered for how it was waged so much as for how it was sold. It was a propaganda war, a war of perception management, where loaded phrases, such as "weapons of mass destruction" and "rogue state" were hurled like precision weapons at the target audience: us.

To understand the Iraq war you don't need to consult generals, but the spin doctors and PR flacks who stage-managed the countdown to war from the murky corridors of Washington where politics, corporate spin and psy-ops spooks cohabit.

Consider the picaresque journey of Tony Blair's plagiarized dossier on Iraq, from a grad student's website to a cut-and-paste job in the prime minister's bombastic speech to the House of Commons. Blair, stubborn and verbose, paid a price for his grandiose puffery. Bush, who looted whole passages from Blair's speech for his own clumsy presentations, has skated freely through the tempest. Why?

Unlike Blair, the Bush team never wanted to present a legal case for war. They had no interest in making any of their allegations about Iraq hold up to a standard of proof. The real effort was aimed at amping up the mood for war by using the psychology of fear.

Facts were never important to the Bush team. They were disposable nuggets that could be discarded at will and replaced by whatever new rationale that played favorably with their polls and focus groups. The war was about weapons of mass destruction one week, al-Qaeda the next. When neither allegation could be substantiated on the ground, the fall back position became the mass graves (many from the Iran/Iraq war where the U.S.A. backed Iraq) proving that Saddam was an evil thug who deserved to be toppled. The motto of the Bush PR machine was: Move on. Don't explain. Say anything to conceal the perfidy behind the real motives for war. Never look back. Accuse the questioners of harboring unpatriotic sensibilities. Eventually, even the cagey Wolfowitz admitted that the official case for war was made mainly to make the invasion palatable, not to justify it.

The Bush claque of neocon hawks viewed the Iraq war as a product and, just like a new pair of Nikes, it required a roll-out campaign to soften up the consumers. The same techniques (and often the same PR gurus) that have been used to hawk cigarettes, SUVs and nuclear waste dumps were deployed to retail the Iraq war. To peddle the invasion, Donald Rumsfeld and Colin Powell and company recruited public relations gurus into top-level jobs at the Pentagon and the State Department. These spinmeisters soon had more say over how the rationale for war on Iraq should be presented than intelligence agencies and career diplomats. If the intelligence didn't fit the script, it was shaded, retooled or junked.

Take Charlotte Beers whom Powell picked as undersecretary of state in the post-9/11 world. Beers wasn't a diplomat. She wasn't even a politician. She was a grand diva of spin, known on the business and gossip pages as "the queen of Madison Avenue." On the strength of two advertising campaigns, one for Uncle Ben's Rice and another for Head and Shoulder's dandruff shampoo, Beers rocketed to the top of the heap in the PR world, heading two giant PR houses: Ogilvy and Mathers as well as J. Walter Thompson.

At the State Department Beers, who had met Powell in 1995 when they both served on the board of Gulf Airstream, worked at, in Powell's words, "the branding of U.S. foreign policy." She extracted more than $500 million from Congress for her Brand America campaign, which largely focused on beaming U.S. propaganda into the Muslim world, much of it directed at teens.

"Public diplomacy is a vital new arm in what will combat terrorism over time," said Beers. "All of a sudden we are in this position of redefining who America is, not only for ourselves, but for the outside world." Note the rapt attention Beers pays to the manipulation of perception, as opposed, say, to alterations of U.S. policy.

Old-fashioned diplomacy involves direct communication between representatives of nations, a conversational give and take, often fraught with deception (see April Glaspie), but an exchange nonetheless. Public diplomacy, as defined by Beers, is something else entirely. It's a one-way street, a unilateral broadcast of American propaganda directly to the public, domestic and international, a kind of informational carpet-bombing.

The themes of her campaigns were as simplistic and flimsy as a Bush press conference. The American incursions into Afghanistan and Iraq were all about bringing the balm of "freedom" to oppressed peoples. Hence, the title of the U.S. war: Operation Iraqi Freedom, where cruise missiles were depicted as instruments of liberation. Bush himself distilled the Beers equation to its bizarre essence: "This war is about peace."

Beers quietly resigned her post a few weeks before the first volley of tomahawk missiles battered Baghdad. From her point of view, the war itself was already won, the fireworks of shock and awe were all after play.

Over at the Pentagon, Donald Rumsfeld drafted Victoria "Torie" Clarke as his director of public affairs. Clarke knew the ropes inside the Beltway. Before becoming Rumsfeld's mouthpiece, she had commanded one of the world's great parlors for powerbrokers: Hill and Knowlton's D.C. office.

Almost immediately upon taking up her new gig, Clarke convened regular meetings with a select group of Washington's top private PR specialists and lobbyists to develop a marketing plan for the Pentagon's forthcoming terror wars. The group was filled with heavy-hitters and was strikingly bipartisan in composition. She called it the Rumsfeld Group and it included PR executive Sheila Tate, columnist Rich Lowry, and Republican political consultant Rich Galen.

The brain trust also boasted top Democratic fixer Tommy Boggs, brother of NPR's Cokie Roberts and son of the late Congressman Hale Boggs of Louisiana. At the very time Boggs was conferring with top Pentagon brass on how to frame the war on terror, he was also working feverishly for the royal family of Saudi Arabia. In 2002 alone, the Saudis paid his Qorvis PR firm $20.2 million to protect its interests in Washington. In the wake of hostile press coverage following the exposure of Saudi links to the 9/11 hijackers, the royal family needed all the well-placed help it could buy. They seem to have gotten their money's worth. Boggs' felicitous influence-peddling may help to explain why the references to Saudi funding of al-Qaeda were dropped from the recent congressional report on the investigation into intelligence failures and 9/11.

According to the trade publication PR Week, the Rumsfeld Group sent "messaging advice" to the Pentagon. The group told Clarke and Rumsfeld that in order to get the American public to buy into the war on terrorism, they needed to suggest a link to nation states, not just nebulous groups such as al-Qaeda. In other words, there needed to be a fixed target for the military campaigns, some distant place to drop cruise missiles and cluster bombs. They suggested the notion (already embedded in Rumsfeld's mind) of playing up the notion of so-called rogue states as the real masters of terrorism. Thus was born the Axis of Evil, which, of course, wasn't an "axis" at all, since two of the states, Iran and Iraq, hated each other, and neither had anything at all to do with the third, North Korea.

Tens of millions in federal money were poured into private public relations and media firms working to craft and broadcast the Bush dictat that Saddam had to be taken out before the Iraqi dictator blew up the world by dropping chemical and nuclear bombs from long-range drones. Many of these PR executives and image consultants were old friends of the high priests in the Bush inner sanctum. Indeed, they were veterans, like Cheney and Powell, of the previous war against Iraq, another engagement that was more spin than combat .

At the top of the list was John Rendon, head of the D.C. firm, the Rendon Group. Rendon is one of Washington's heaviest hitters, a Beltway fixer who never let political affiliation stand in the way of an assignment. Rendon served as a media consultant for Michael Dukakis and Jimmy Carter, as well as Reagan and George H.W. Bush. Whenever the Pentagon wanted to go to war, he offered his services at a price. During Desert Storm, Rendon pulled in $100,000 a month from the Kuwaiti royal family. He followed this up with a $23 million contract from the CIA to produce anti-Saddam propaganda in the region.

As part of this CIA project, Rendon created and named the Iraqi National Congress and tapped his friend Ahmed Chalabi, the shady financier, to head the organization.

Shortly after 9/11, the Pentagon handed the Rendon Group another big assignment: public relations for the U.S. bombing of Afghanistan. Rendon was also deeply involved in the planning and public relations for the pre-emptive war on Iraq, though both Rendon and the Pentagon refuse to disclose the details of the group's work there.

But it's not hard to detect the manipulative hand of Rendon behind many of the Iraq war's signature events, including the toppling of the Saddam statue (by U.S. troops and Chalabi associates) and videotape of jubilant Iraqis waving American flags as the Third Infantry rolled by them. Rendon had pulled off the same stunt in the first Gulf War, handing out American flags to Kuwaitis and herding the media to the orchestrated demonstration. "Where do you think they got those American flags?" clucked Rendon in 1991. "That was my assignment."

The Rendon Group may also have had played a role in pushing the phony intelligence that has now come back to haunt the Bush administration. In December of 2002, Robert Dreyfuss reported that the inner circle of the Bush White House preferred the intelligence coming from Chalabi and his associates to that being proffered by analysts at the CIA.

So Rendon and his circle represented a new kind of off-the-shelf PSYOPs , the privatization of official propaganda. "I am not a national security strategist or a military tactician," said Rendon. "I am a politician, and a person who uses communication to meet public policy or corporate policy objectives. In fact, I am an information warrior and a perception manager."

What exactly, is perception management? The Pentagon defines it this way: "actions to convey and/or deny selected information and indicators to foreign audiences to influence their emotions, motives and objective reasoning." In other words, lying about the intentions of the U.S. government. In a rare display of public frankness, the Pentagon actually let slip its plan (developed by Rendon) to establish a high-level den inside the Department Defense for perception management. They called it the Office of Strategic Influence and among its many missions was to plant false stories in the press.

Nothing stirs the corporate media into outbursts of pious outrage like an official government memo bragging about how the media are manipulated for political objectives. So the New York Times and Washington Post threw indignant fits about the Office of Strategic Influence; the Pentagon shut down the operation, and the press gloated with satisfaction on its victory. Yet, Rumsfeld told the Pentagon press corps that while he was killing the office, the same devious work would continue. "You can have the corpse," said Rumsfeld. "You can have the name. But I'm going to keep doing every single thing that needs to be done. And I have."

At a diplomatic level, despite the hired guns and the planted stories, this image war was lost. It failed to convince even America's most fervent allies and dependent client states that Iraq posed much of a threat. It failed to win the blessing of the U.N. and even NATO, a wholly owned subsidiary of Washington. At the end of the day, the vaunted coalition of the willing consisted of Britain, Spain, Italy, Australia, and a cohort of former Soviet bloc nations. Even so, the citizens of the nations that cast their lot with the U.S.A. overwhelmingly opposed the war.

Domestically, it was a different story. A population traumatized by terror threats and shattered economy became easy prey for the saturation bombing of the Bush message that Iraq was a terrorist state linked to al-Qaeda that was only minutes away from launching attacks on America with weapons of mass destruction.

Americans were the victims of an elaborate con job, pelted with a daily barrage of threat inflation, distortions, deceptions and lies, not about tactics or strategy or war plans, but about justifications for war. The lies were aimed not at confusing Saddam's regime, but the American people. By the start of the war, 66 per cent of Americans thought Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11 and 79 per cent thought he was close to having a nuclear weapon.

Of course, the closest Saddam came to possessing a nuke was a rusting gas centrifuge buried for 13 years in the garden of Mahdi Obeidi, a retired Iraqi scientist. Iraq didn't have any functional chemical or biological weapons. In fact, it didn't even possess any SCUD missiles, despite erroneous reports fed by Pentagon PR flacks alleging that it had fired SCUDs into Kuwait.

This charade wouldn't have worked without a gullible or a complicit press corps. Victoria Clarke, who developed the Pentagon plan for embedded reports, put it succinctly a few weeks before the war began: "Media coverage of any future operation will to a large extent shape public perception."

During the Vietnam War, TV images of maimed GIs and napalmed villages suburbanized opposition to the war and helped hasten the U.S. withdrawal. The Bush gang meant to turn the Vietnam phenomenon on its head by using TV as a force to propel the U.S.A. into a war that no one really wanted.

What the Pentagon sought was a new kind of living room war, where instead of photos of mangled soldiers and dead Iraqi kids, they could control the images Americans viewed and to a large extent the content of the stories. By embedding reporters inside selected divisions, Clarke believed the Pentagon could count on the reporters to build relationships with the troops and to feel dependent on them for their own safety. It worked, naturally. One reporter for a national network trembled on camera that the U.S. Army functioned as "our protectors." The late David Bloom of NBC confessed on the air that he was willing to do "anything and everything they can ask of us."

When the Pentagon needed a heroic story, the press obliged. Jessica Lynch became the war's first instant celebrity. Here was a neo-gothic tale of a steely young woman wounded in a fierce battle, captured and tortured by ruthless enemies, and dramatically saved from certain death by a team of selfless rescuers, knights in camo and night-vision goggles. Of course, nearly every detail of her heroic adventure proved to be as fictive and maudlin as any made-for-TV-movie. But the ordeal of Private Lynch, which dominated the news for more than a week, served its purpose: to distract attention from a stalled campaign that was beginning to look at lot riskier than the American public had been hoodwinked into believing.

The Lynch story was fed to the eager press by a Pentagon operation called Combat Camera, the Army network of photographers, videographers and editors that sends 800 photos and 25 video clips a day to the media. The editors at Combat Camera carefully culled the footage to present the Pentagon's montage of the war, eliding such unsettling images as collateral damage, cluster bombs, dead children and U.S. soldiers, napalm strikes and disgruntled troops.

"A lot of our imagery will have a big impact on world opinion," predicted Lt. Jane Larogue, director of Combat Camera in Iraq. She was right. But as the hot war turned into an even hotter occupation, the Pentagon, despite airy rhetoric from occupation supremo Paul Bremer about installing democratic institutions such as a free press, moved to tighten its monopoly on the flow images out of Iraq. First, it tried to shut down Al Jazeera, the Arab news channel. Then the Pentagon intimated that it would like to see all foreign TV news crews banished from Baghdad.

Few newspapers fanned the hysteria about the threat posed by Saddam's weapons of mass destruction as sedulously as did the Washington Post. In the months leading up to the war, the Post's pro-war op-eds outnumbered the anti-war columns by a 3-to-1 margin.

Back in 1988, the Post felt much differently about Saddam and his weapons of mass destruction. When reports trickled out about the gassing of Iranian troops, the Washington Post's editorial page shrugged off the massacres, calling the mass poisonings "a quirk of war."

The Bush team displayed a similar amnesia. When Iraq used chemical weapons in grisly attacks on Iran, the U.S. government not only didn't object, it encouraged Saddam. Anything to punish Iran was the message coming from the White House. Donald Rumsfeld himself was sent as President Ronald Reagan's personal envoy to Baghdad. Rumsfeld conveyed the bold message than an Iraq defeat would be viewed as a "strategic setback for the United States." This sleazy alliance was sealed with a handshake caught on videotape. When CNN reporter Jamie McIntyre replayed the footage for Rumsfeld in the spring of 2003, the secretary of defense snapped, "Where'd you get that? Iraqi television?"

The current crop of Iraq hawks also saw Saddam much differently then. Take the writer Laura Mylroie, sometime colleague of the New York Times' Judy Miller, who persists in peddling the ludicrous conspiracy that Iraq was behind the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.

How times have changed! In 1987, Mylroie felt downright cuddly toward Saddam. She wrote an article for the New Republic titled "Back Iraq: Time for a U.S. Tilt in the Mideast," arguing that the U.S. should publicly embrace Saddam's secular regime as a bulwark against the Islamic fundamentalists in Iran. The co-author of this mesmerizing weave of wonkery was none other than Daniel Pipes, perhaps the nation's most bellicose Islamophobe. "The American weapons that Iraq could make good use of include remotely scatterable and anti-personnel mines and counterartillery radar," wrote Mylroie and Pipes. "The United States might also consider upgrading intelligence it is supplying Baghdad."

In the rollout for the war, Mylroie seemed to be everywhere hawking the invasion of Iraq. She would often appear on two or three different networks in the same day. How did the reporter manage this feat? She had help in the form of Eleana Benador, the media placement guru who runs Benador Associates. Born in Peru, Benador parlayed her skills as a linguist into a lucrative career as media relations whiz for the Washington foreign policy elite. She also oversees the Middle East Forum, a fanatically pro-Zionist white paper mill. Her clients include some of the nation's most fervid hawks, including Michael Ledeen, Charles Krauthammer, Al Haig, Max Boot, Daniel Pipes, Richard Perle, and Judy Miller. During the Iraq war, Benador's assignment was to embed this squadron of pro-war zealots into the national media, on talk shows, and op-ed pages.

Benador not only got them the gigs, she also crafted the theme and made sure they all stayed on message. "There are some things, you just have to state them in a different way, in a slightly different way," said Benador. "If not, people get scared." Scared of intentions of their own government.

It could have been different. All of the holes in the Bush administration's gossamer case for war were right there for the mainstream press to expose. Instead, the U.S. press, just like the oil companies, sought to commercialize the Iraq war and profit from the invasions. They didn't want to deal with uncomfortable facts or present voices of dissent.

Nothing sums up this unctuous approach more brazenly than MSNBC's firing of liberal talk show host Phil Donahue on the eve of the war. The network replaced the Donahue Show with a running segment called Countdown: Iraq, featuring the usual nightly coterie of retired generals, security flacks, and other cheerleaders for invasion. The network's executives blamed the cancellation on sagging ratings. In fact, during its run Donahue's show attracted more viewers than any other program on the network. The real reason for the pre-emptive strike on Donahue was spelled out in an internal memo from anxious executives at NBC. Donahue, the memo said, offered "a difficult face for NBC in a time of war. He seems to delight in presenting guests who are anti-war, anti-Bush and skeptical of the administration's motives."

The memo warned that Donahue's show risked tarring MSNBC as an unpatriotic network, "a home for liberal anti-war agenda at the same time that our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity." So, with scarcely a second thought, the honchos at MSNBC gave Donahue the boot and hoisted the battle flag.

It's war that sells.

There's a helluva caveat, of course. Once you buy it, the merchants of war accept no returns.

This essay is adapted from Grand Theft Pentagon.

[Feb 07, 2020] Are you honestly expecting the little people in the US to believe the DC chickenhawks or the MSM again? Yes I do

Mar 02, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

Schmoe , Feb 28, 2019 5:28:15 PM | link

@paveway 48

I do not know where you are going with this: "Are you honestly expecting the little people in the US to believe the DC chickenhawks or the MSM again?"

Trump received massive support for firing missiles into Syria after the purported gas attacks including from ~ 50% in public opinion polls, so IMO there is no doubt that the "little people" will buy into the next war hook, line and sinker with 65% approval if there is a long lead-up. The Iran / 9-11 trial balloon is being floated in some rightwing media outlets.

[Feb 07, 2020] Iraq Russia Look To Boost Military Ties While US Threatens Sanctions

Feb 07, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

Iraq & Russia Look To Boost Military Ties While US Threatens Sanctions by Tyler Durden Fri, 02/07/2020 - 19:45 0 SHARES In more continuing fallout over the Jan.3 assassination by drone of the IRGC's Gen. Qassem Soleimani, Iraq and Russia are preparing for deepening military coordination , reports the AP .

Iraq's Defense Ministry announced Thursday that increased "cooperation and coordination" is being discussed with Moscow amid worsened relations with Washington, which even last month included President Trump issuing brazen threats of "very big" sanctions on Baghdad if American troops are kicked out of the country.

This week Iraqi army chief of staff Lt. Gen. Othman Al-Ghanimi and Russian Ambassador Maksim Maksimov met to discuss future military cooperation. Crucially, Gen. Ghanimi highlighted Russia's successful anti-ISIS operations over the past years , especially in Syria where the Russian military has supported Assad since being invited there in 2015.

Iraqi helicopters file image.

On Russia's role in Iraq, Ghanimi said Moscow had provided "our armed forces with advanced and effective equipment and weapons that had a major role in resolving many battles," according to the ministry statement.

It's been long rumored that since late summer Baghdad and Moscow have been in talks to deliver either Russia's advanced S-400 or S-300 anti-air missile defense systems - a prospect which US officials have condemned.

Like other areas of the Middle East, as US adventurism heightens pressure for a US withdrawal, Russia appears to be seizing the opportunity to move in. This much was affirmed in AP's reporting, via at least one anonymous senior official :

A senior Iraqi military intelligence official told The Associated Press that Russia, among other countries, has come forward to offer military support in the wake of fraught US.-Iraq relations following Soleimani's killing .

"Iraq still needs aerial reconnaissance planes. There are countries that have given signals to Iraq to support us or equip us with reconnaissance planes such as Russia and Iran," said the official, who requested anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the information.

Many military analysts have of late noted that the "blowback" from the incredibly risky operation which killed Soleimani will be a hastening of American forces' exit from the region.

It could also actually serve to increase Baghdad's dependency on Iran - something which appears to be already in the works. And now we have confirmation that Moscow will seek to benefit as well from the worsened US-Iraq relations, certainly now at the lowest point since the 2003 invasion and US attempt to build a new government. Tags Politics War Conflict

Toshie , 6 minutes ago link

After bombing Iraq for the last 29 years, It's actually surprising that the Iraqis still let US soldiers on Iraqi soil.

BobEore , 21 minutes ago link

At last! After a full week of playing coy... about delivering any further bad newz from the muddled east which might further demolish the spirits of our local lovers of spirit cookin, 'death to amerika' shoutin jihadi huggin regimes

our fearless ferret newz aggregator have delivered us something to chew on.. and spit out! What febrile gems of crude agitprop await the wondering gaze of the gallery? How bout...

Russia, among other countries, has come forward to offer military support in the wake of fraught US.-Iraq relations following Soleimani's killing .

as a clear example of the genre of laughable attacks upon common sense and truth in media... faculties which - when employed - direct our attention to some simple facts curious scrubbed from this whitewash with which "white hat" superhero Russkies... trundle around the globe delivering toyz that made loud noise... to downtrodden 'strongman' regimes

as mere tokens of friendly 'solidarity fo'ever or whatever. Simple facts... such as...

due to an unfortunate episode in fellow neo-Bolshevik statecapitalist paradise Sinostan... the neo-Bolshie paradise on the Muscovy is facing a collapse of its bread earner gas n oil sales... such that the only thing tween it and yet abother state bankruptcy... is the burgeoning Russian armaments industry! Selling guns and munitions to downtrodden strongman regimes is the last best hope it seems... for a Russia foiled at every turn by Urusalems steady burnnnn

and with a neo-mercantilist flourish which it has clearly learned... from watching the chinks perform their 'resource extractive' shakedown ... of shaky regimes around the world.... Moscow now seeks to extract from cash poor states which need guns with which to threaten either their own citizens, or those of neighboring states..

UUUGE concessions in the form of .... diamonds, metals, petroleum resources... or strategic real estate... in return for its deadly 'product line!' All of which is 'totally fine'... if you read tween lines...

so that ...WHEN EVIL CHABADDY talmudic GANGSTERS living in the wester world... peddle their wares of weaponry to weirdo regimes.... THAT IS .... A BAD THANG!

BUT butt... when evil chabbaddy talmudic oilygarch GANGTAS WITH RUSSKY PASSPORTS do the peddlin.... with the approval of the Kremlin puppet regime...

its all GOOD!

HE HE HEH... WHO really buys into this ******** anyhoo? Only an echo chamber o tiresome russo-talmudic trolls workin the board nite n day!

Brazen Heist II , 29 minutes ago link

You can tell alot from Amercuh's reaction to the Russian strategy of ringfencing the world with defensive weapons like the S-400/S-300.

Who gets triggered like a little temper tantrum princess over defensive weapons? Offensive assholes, that's who!

Americuh had it good for so long, but now there's competition and they are squealing like pigs.

Don't buy Iranian oil! Don't buy Huawei! Don't build Nordstream! Hey sport...shut the **** up. Countries will trade with who ever the hell they want.

booboo , 21 minutes ago link

I probably wouldn't mind it so much if Hillary wasn't complicit in helping the Russians "Ringfencing the world"

https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/429292-the-case-for-russia-collusion-against-the-democrats

Einstein101 , 8 minutes ago link

Who gets triggered like a little temper tantrum princess over defensive weapons? Offensive assholes, that's who!

I think you got it all wrong. It's not about defensive or Offensive. It's about money and market share, who sells to whom what, and who's profiting.

Brazen Heist II , 35 minutes ago link

Its a no brainer.

Russia and Iran actually fight ISIS.

Meanwhile da sanctmonious west, israel and ksa support an entire cosmos of headchoppers then bitch about terryrism!

The west is morally bankrupt in this fight. It supports terrorism to justify its occupations.

Iraq is better off partnering with Russia. The US needs to piss off from MENA, its a goddamn cancer.

China can provide reconstruction aid without the (((moronic strings attached)))

Einstein101 , 7 minutes ago link

Just remind me who killed the head of ISIS.

El Chapo Read , 43 minutes ago link

Do you know who should be looking to make strategic military partnerships with Russia?

The USA.

To contain Red China and Israel.

Two predominantly Christian nations should look out for one another.

Freddie , 39 minutes ago link

The USA is not run by Christians.

El Chapo Read , 37 minutes ago link

Where did I say that?

I know we have our own internal issues to deal with.

Putin started de-zionizing from day one of his command.

BobEore , 19 minutes ago link

lol...

Two predominantly Christian nations

please provide details.

Tom Angle , 13 minutes ago link

America is far from a Christian nation. No nation that murders babies for body parts is a Christian nation (yes abortion funded by the government and the part being sold). America will feel the rather of God for that.

frankthecrank , 47 minutes ago link

Those helicopters just look like junk--total pieces of ****. I know two guys who saw them up close and personal--not even as advanced inside as US gear in the late '60s.

LOL

too f'n funny.

El Chapo Read , 41 minutes ago link

They work and can be serviced by a Russian farmboy - as designed.

Now go back to sucking Lockeed Martin/Boeing/Raytheon's cut cocks, as well as their (((financiers))) and the whole of K Street.

Brazen Heist II , 32 minutes ago link

They're called flying tanks for a reason

Too bad your state of da art militrary couldn't take down goat herders in Afghanistan after 20 years. The Russians at least pulled out after 10 years. Does that mean America is doubly stoopid?

LOL

Einstein101 , 21 minutes ago link

"goat herders in Afghanistan" hiding in caves in the mountains are a challenge to any military. The Russians were there too, you know.

Tom Angle , 12 minutes ago link

Yes that was said about the T34.

frankthecrank , 51 minutes ago link

two losers in the same pea pod. How cute.

This way, when the Russian soldiers run away crying from US soldiers in Syria, the I-Ranians can run away with them.

Maxamillia , 59 minutes ago link

I Love President Putin...

I have Not Said That Lately.

I Think He Knows it...

Yes I Live In My Own mind...

But as Mere Humans Do We Not All...

They Are Your Friends If You Let Them... Just make Sure The Friendship Is Based On TRUTH.

Hold Not Back your Faith, President Putin... These people Need Yahushua..........

frankthecrank , 51 minutes ago link

https://twitter.com/staceyheaver/status/649730231041847296/photo/1

Einstein101 , 50 minutes ago link

Just make Sure The Friendship Is Based On TRUTH.

Don't kid yourself. Putin is smart, probably the smartest leader out there. But what motivates him are the best interests of Russia. He doesn't care much about Friendships, not with Iran, not with Syria or Israel...

Arising , 1 hour ago link

...certainly now at the lowest point since the 2003 invasion and US attempt to build a new government.

U.S meddling and regime change- nothing new.

Besides- anyone buying Russian military equipment will get much more 'bang for their buck' compared to over-priced, failure ridden U.S (((M.I.C))) crap.

Einstein101 , 1 hour ago link

Baghdad and Moscow have been in talks to deliver either Russia's advanced S-400 or S-300 anti-air missile defense systems

I don't think those systems are that advanced. Both are quite old. I'm sure US (and Israel) have the means to jam and neutralize both those system, about the same as the Israelis evade the whole Syrian air defense system.

hoytmonger , 1 hour ago link

The Russians have in their possession several undamaged Israeli missiles which landed in the Syrian desert.

Including a David's Sling missile.

I'm sure the Russians have developed electronic measures against them by now.

Einstein101 , 1 hour ago link

I'm sure the Russians have developed electronic measures against them by now.

Could be... though I think the Israelis probably made the needed modifications.

ComeOnThink , 53 minutes ago link

Yeah, sure, because the Israelis will know what electronic measures the Russians have developed as a result of examining those missiles, right?

How, exactly?

Do the Russians send the Israelis the results of their studies, along with a Request For Comment?

Honestly, you are so full of it.

frankthecrank , 50 minutes ago link

Yeah--that tube gear sure rocks in this day and age.

For stereos...............

Shue , 1 hour ago link

"Lowest point since the 2003 invasion and US attempt to build a new government."

There's the problem right there, the JUSA thinks "their type of Government" has to be accepted by Iraqi's. This is why amongst countless other thing Iraqi's have had it with the JUSA.

hoytmonger , 1 hour ago link

Israel has been getting three quarters of their oil from the Kurds in Iraq, illegally and at a discounted price.

The US is rumored to be establishing a new "state" in the oil rich areas of Western Iraq and Eastern Syria, presumably for the Kurds.

If this is true, the US will inevitably come under attack.

The Syrian Army has begun to block their patrols recently.

Einstein101 , 1 hour ago link

The Syrian Army has begun to block their patrols recently.

Are you kidding me? the Syrian army is a wreck . It will never confront the US military.

hoytmonger , 1 hour ago link

Really?

https://southfront.org/in-video-syrian-army-confronts-u-s-patrol-in-northern-al-hasakah/

https://www.almasdarnews.com/article/syrian-army-blocks-us-military-convoy-from-important-highway-in-hasakah/

Einstein101 , 1 hour ago link

Note this:

"According to the Damascus-based Al-Watan newspaper," enough said.

Freddie , 37 minutes ago link

Mr. Vindman - how's your brother? Is he at temple?

Dickweed Wang , 1 hour ago link

Maybe if sanctions don't work in the future the US can make countries they don't like go to their room without supper.

ThrowAwayYourTV , 1 hour ago link

Is this what they call global trade?

tmosley , 1 hour ago link

If Russia can ally with Iraq, Iran, and Azerbaijan, they can bypass Turkey into Syria, at least to some extent. That would allow the US to exit.

gino the hood , 1 hour ago link

they can sail past or through turkey. they have treaties. russia is already in the countries you mentioned. they are just quiet about it.

tmosley , 1 hour ago link

Russia can't sail past or through Turkey while also being at war with them, which is what they are going to have to do if they want to stop Turkey from taking Syrian (then Iraqi, then Kuwaiti, then Saudi) oil fields, in the absence of a US presence in the region.

Shue , 58 minutes ago link

Turks have a weak army, remember when Sultan Erdo fired the majority of capable generals and Officers?

sirpo , 1 hour ago link

the 2003 invasion and US attempt to build a new government.

build a new government.?

Ho Ho Ho you funny man you make me laugh

HoserF16 , 1 hour ago link

"Blow-Back" can be a real ************...

Hoser

Einstein101 , 1 hour ago link

Iraq & Russia Look To Boost Military Ties While US Threatens Sanctions

What I think about that? I'm not quite sure, but my gut feeling is that US need not impose itself on someone that does not want us.

Marman , 50 minutes ago link

There is another guy that posts here with your exact name.

He is a suspected Hasbara agent and would be screaming about Iran being behind this and therefore Israel has the right to preemptively nuke Iraq.

Dart Vader , 1 hour ago link

SITUATION CRITICAL: 2020 What You REALLY DO Need To Be Afraid Of. Mannarino https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sIjFRR2Iec&feature=em-uploademail

Nov1917Sucks , 1 hour ago link

Putin suks as much Netanyahu dik as Trump. And the dum arz Christians in Russia, much like US Christians dont give a faq!! Christians have been ignorant sheep to dictators for 2000 years!

gino the hood , 1 hour ago link

just because every oligarch is jewish doesnt mean christians are stupid.... hhhmmm? how many millions have been murdered by jewish invented communism?

madashellron , 1 hour ago link

The Joos best friend Trump just **** in his diaper after reading this article.

Dart Vader , 1 hour ago link

..time for a good spanking before changing the diaper..

hanekhw , 1 hour ago link

...except the Russians are not complete morons to let themselves get screwed like the US. Just ask the people of Venezuela how Russia has 'saved' their country.

Aussiestirrer , 1 hour ago link

Hahaha keep up the good job of creating more and more enemies chump you fool.....once a bully, always a bully and that goes for chump and the usa

has bear r us , 1 hour ago link

no single military in the world can beat the usa military but a coalition of many of them will kick zionazi ***. putin is building a real coalition of the willing to counter the dying zionazi empire.

Dr. Winston O'boogie , 1 hour ago link

Putin is Chabad Lubavitch.

A great many awakening people continue to be in thrall to the cult of personality that's been built around Vladimir Putin. They have passively and uncritically accepted the endless barrage of Putin-worshiping propaganda put out by sellouts in the alternative media, and they have not bothered to look into things for themselves. If you are one of these people, take a moment to set down emotionally-held beliefs and open your mind.

http://www.dutchanarchy.com/vladimir-putin-chabad-lubavitch-mobster-globalist-messiah/

has bear r us , 1 hour ago link

https://www.fort-russ.com/2020/01/putin-gives-respects-to-palestinian-color-guard-invites-abbas-to-victory-day/

there is a large and powerful jewish presence in russia. do you think they would approve of this? who is controlling who?

kanoli , 2 hours ago link

Russia wants three things:

1. Buyers for their weapon systems, which are admittedly superior to those made in the USA, especially air defense.

2. Reduce the footprint of the Anglo-American Empire in the Middle East and Asia, which are their backyard.

3. Eliminate US-Saudi-Israel-funded terrorists in Daesh/Al Queda in the ME.

I wish them all the best in all three of those goals.

zoo , 1 hour ago link

Yea, but are those weapons Environmentally friendly? are they Greta approved?

Arising , 1 hour ago link

Answers:

1. Russia, unlike the U.S, is building a lot of civilian industries and Putin recently asked his military factories to adjust to other civilian industries and requirements- The U.S is going in the opposite direction.

2. This is already happening- other countries have seen how loyal Russia has been to their promises to the Assad government. The U.S turns on a dime as is convenient in any given week.

3. To the frustration of the axis of evil (US-Saudi-Occupied Palestine) this has been Russians biggest success to date.

Nov1917Sucks , 2 hours ago link

I have always wondered why the world that is being sanctioned does not hack and attack the US financial system more. Maybe just a matter of time. You cant tell me that Malta, The Caymans, Panama and others are not vulnerable!

kanoli , 1 hour ago link

That's coming. First they had to build their own system. Destroying the Anglo-American financial system without an alternative is like cutting off your air supply while 200 feet underwater.

J S Bach , 2 hours ago link

Yes, indeed. Why WOULDN'T the Iraqis seek relations with ANY country outside the sphere of their destroyers to bond with? The Iraqi people, though "primitive" by our standards, are still human beings with as much right to grow, develop and live as we zombies of Zionism in the once noble West. We, of course, will be propagandized to the contrary. They will be shown as "terrorists" or "Russiaphiles" if they dare to resist the mantle of tyranny imposed on them by the Israeli/U.S. forces.

mike_1010 , 2 hours ago link

If USA imposes sanctions on too many countries, then USA will end up sanctioning itself.

Iraq is now producing close to 5 million barrels of oil a day, most of which is for export. If USA sanctions this oil production and sale, then some countries will need to choose between paying sky high prices for oil, or pay for Iraqi oil in alternative currencies and ignore US sanctions.

5 million barrels of oil a day even Saudi Arabia doesn't have the capacity to replace.

And if alternative currencies become popular for buying and selling oil, then US ability to run trade deficits and budget deficits will be curtailed by declining US dollar and higher interest rates for borrowing in US dollars in international markets.

Iraq is pumping record oil

RafterManFMJ , 2 hours ago link

The US has a one word diplomatic lexicon: Sanctions!

Im sure it gets tiring for the rest of the planet

Nov1917Sucks , 2 hours ago link

Trump responded by sending Putin a photo of him suking Netanyahus dik!

[Feb 05, 2020] Stumbling Into Catastrophe by Daniel McAdams

Feb 04, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Daniel McAdams via The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity,

There is a real danger for foreign policy advisors and analysts – and especially those they serve – when they are in a bubble, an echo chamber, and all of their conclusions are based on faulty inputs. Needless to say it's even worse when they believe they can create their own reality and invent outcomes out of whole cloth.

Things seldom go as planned in these circumstances.

President Trump was sold a bill of goods on the assassination of Iran's revered military leader, Qassim Soleimani, likely by a cabal around Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and the long-discredited neocon David Wurmser. A former Netanyahu advisor and Iraq war propagandist, Wurmser reportedly sent memos to his mentor, John Bolton, while Bolton was Trump's National Security Advisor (now, of course, he's the hero of the #resistance for having turned on his former boss) promising that killing Soleimani would be a cost-free operation that would catalyze the Iranian people against their government and bring about the long-awaited regime change in that country. The murder of Soleimani – the architect of the defeat of ISIS – would "rattle the delicate internal balance of forces and the control over them upon which the [Iranian] regime depends for stability and survival," wrote Wurmser.

As is most often the case with neocons, he was dead wrong.

The operation was not cost-free. On the contrary. Assassinating Soleimani on Iraqi soil resulted in the Iraqi parliament – itself the product of our "bringing democracy" to the country – voting to expel US forces even as the vote by the people's representatives was roundly rejected by the people who brought the people the people's representatives. In a manner of speaking.

Trump's move had an effect opposite to the one promised by neocons. It did not bring Iranians out to the street to overthrow their government – it catalyzed opposition across Iraq's various political and religious factions to the continued US military presence and further tightened Iraq's relationship with Iran. And short of what would be a catastrophic war initiated by the US (with little or no support from allies), there is not a thing Trump can do about it.

Iran's retaliatory attack on two US bases in Iraq was initially sold by President Trump as merely a pin-prick. No harm, no foul, no injuries. This despite the fact that he must have known about US personnel injured in the attack. The reason for the lie was that Trump likely understands how devastating it would be to his presidency to escalate with Iran. So the truth began to trickle out slowly – 11 US military members were injured, but it was just "like a headache." Now we know that 50 US troops were treated for traumatic brain injury after the attack. This may not be the last of it – but don't count on the mainstream media to do any reporting.

The Iranian FARS news agency reported at the time of the attack that US personnel had been injured and the response by the US government was to completely take that media outlet off the Internet by order of the US Treasury !

Last week the US House voted to cancel the 2002 authorization for war on Iraq and to prohibit the use of funds for war on Iran without Congressional authorization. It is a significant, if largely symbolic, move to rein in the oft-used excuse of the Iraq war authorization for blatantly unrelated actions like the assassination of Soleimani and Obama's thousands of airstrikes on Syria and Iraq .

President Trump has argued that prohibiting funds for military action against Iran actually makes war more likely, as he would be restricted from the kinds of military-strikes-short-of-war like his attack on Syria after the alleged chemical attack in Douma in 2018 (claims which have recently fallen apart ). The logic is faulty and reflects again the danger of believing one's own propaganda. As we have seen from the Iranian military response to the Soleimani assassination, Trump's military-strikes-short-of-war are having a ratchet-like effect rather than a pressure-release or deterrent effect.

As the financial and current events analysis site ZeroHedge put it recently:

[S]ince last summer's "tanker wars", Trump has painted himself into a corner on Iran, jumping from escalation to escalation (to this latest "point of no return big one" in the form of the ordered Soleimani assassination) -- yet all the while hoping to avoid a major direct war. The situation reached a climax where there were "no outs" (Trump was left with two 'bad options' of either back down or go to war).

The Iranians have little to lose at this point and America's European allies are, even if impotent, fed up with the US obsession with Saudi Arabia and Israel as a basis for its Middle East policy.

So why open this essay with a photo of Trump celebrating his dead-on-arrival "Deal of The Century" for Israel and Palestine? Because this is once again a gullible and weak President Trump being led by the nose into the coming Middle East conflagration. Left without even a semblance of US sympathy for their plight, the Palestinians after the roll-out of this "peace" plan will again see that they have no friends outside Syria, Iran, and Lebanon. As Israel continues to flirt with the idea of simply annexing large parts of the West Bank, it is clear that the brakes are off of any Israeli reticence to push for maximum control over Palestinian territory. So what is there to lose?

Trump believes he's advancing peace in the Middle East, while the excellent Mondoweiss website rightly observes that a main architect of the "peace plan," Trump's own son-in-law Jared Kushner, "taunts Palestinians because he wants them to reject his 'peace plan.'" Rejection of the plan is a green light to a war of annihilation on the Palestinians.

It appears that the center may not hold, that the self-referential echo chamber that passes for Beltway "expert" analysis will again be caught off guard in the consequence-free profession that is neocon foreign policy analysis. "Gosh we didn't see that coming!" But the next day they are back on the teevee stations as great experts.

Clouds gathering...

Minamoto , 23 minutes ago link

It is hard to believe that Trump has any confidence in Jared Kushner. Yet, he does enough to go public with a one-sided plan developed without Palestinian input.

francis scott falseflag , 41 minutes ago link

a real danger for foreign policy advisors and analysts – and especially those they serve – when they are in a bubble, an echo chamber, and all of their conclusions are based on faulty inputs.

The same is true of the economists and financial analysts who live in the bubble of the NSYE and the echo chamber of Manhattan. All of their conclusions are based on faulty inputs.

Ruler , 1 hour ago link

The problem all incompetent leaders have, is seeing how their opponents see them.

Bokkenrijder , 1 hour ago link

If Trump continues to be 'dumb' enough to consistently hire these people and consistently listen to them, and if his supporters continue to be dumb enough to consistently believe all the lies and excuses, then Trump and his supporters are 100% involved in the neoCON.

RafterManFMJ , 1 hour ago link

Dude, it's 666D chess!

The Real John Bolton

[Feb 05, 2020] Flynn was a friend of neocon Leeden, who essentially formulated the neocon foreign policy in his famous quote "Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business".

Feb 05, 2020 | off-guardian.org

Louis N. Proyect ,

"It does not take a poli sci major to figure out that Flynn's immediate removal from the Administration was essential to undermining Trump's entire foreign policy initiatives including no new interventionist wars, peace with Russia and US withdrawal from Syria and Afghanistan."

This is baloney, as I pointed out here: https://louisproyect.org/2017/02/19/deep-state-deep-confusion/

I always get a chuckle out of the notion that Trump and the neocons are mortal enemies. Do you know who co-wrote Michael Flynn's "The Field of Fight: How We Can Win the Global War Against Radical Islam and Its Allies"? Does the name Michael Ledeen ring a bell? A profile on Flynn in the New Yorker Magazine revealed that much of the book is practically plagiarized from Ledeen's sorry body of books and articles. Ledeen is the Freedom Scholar at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. This is about as neocon as you can get with founder Clifford D. May now serving as President, who is also a member of the Henry Jackson Society, an outfit that is infamous for supporting the war in Iraq. Here is Ledeen on the countries posing the greatest threat to the USA:

It's no coincidence. Russia, Iran and North Korea are in active cahoots. They are pooling resources, including banking systems (the better to bust sanctions), intelligence and military technology, as part of an ongoing war against the West, of which the most melodramatic battlefields are in Syria/Iraq and Ukraine.

To judge by their language, the leaders of the three countries think the tide of world events is flowing in their favor. Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei delivered an ultimatum to the West, saying that Iran's war against "evil" would only end with the removal of America. Russian President Vladimir Putin marches on in Ukraine, blaming the West for all the trouble, and the North Koreans are similarly bellicose.

They are singing from the same hymnal. And they aim to do us in.

Right, they aim to do us in. So it turns out that the guy that Flynn is most closely allied to ideologically is ten times scarier than Hillary Clinton. If you still have doubts about Flynn's close ties to Ledeen, I recommend The New Yorker profile linked to above. It states:

Flynn and Ledeen became close friends; in their shared view of the world, Ledeen supplied an intellectual and historical perspective, Flynn a tactical one. "I've spent my professional life studying evil," Ledeen told me. Flynn said, in a recent speech, "I've sat down with really, really evil people" -- he cited Al Qaeda, the Taliban, Russians, Chinese generals -- "and all I want to do is punch the guy in the nose."

Get that, people? Flynn said he'd like to punch a Russian in the nose. People get confused over Flynn's ideological core beliefs by missing that his interest in Russia is solely based on its usefulness against ISIS. Just because he favored a united military front against ISIS, it does not mean that he has the same affinity for the Kremlin that someone like Stephen F. Cohen has. Just remember that the USA and Stalin were allied against Hitler. You know how far that went.

lundiel ,

Funny you should bring up Ledeen, just after I posted a comment about him, eh Louis?
For whatever reason, Flynn decided to work with Trump and his removal, by his compatriots, is testament to his problematic policy shift. Who knows if he had a paradigm shift or thought he knew which side his bread was buttered. The thing is, as Renee says, the FBI are very much involved in internal politics.

[Feb 04, 2020] Trump uses force when he doesn't have to, he uses more of it than is required, and he rewards the men who use it to commit war crimes. His foreign policy is one of rejecting restraint. In addition to the buildup of troops and the continuation of illegal, unauthorized military involvement in Syria, Iraq, and Yemen, Trump has also presided over a sharp increase in drone strikes, and he has loosened the rules of engagement in all US bombing campaigns

Feb 04, 2020 | www.theamericanconservative.com

Edward Wong considers the growing backlash in the U.S. against the forever war, and he reviews Trump's record to show how he has continued and expanded U.S. military engagement overseas:

Despite his denunciations of endless wars, Mr. Trump's policies and actions have gone in the opposite direction. In December, he ordered 4,500 troops to the Middle East, adding to the 50,000 already there. In the last two years, the American military dropped bombs and missiles on Afghanistan at a record pace. In April, Mr. Trump vetoed a bipartisan congressional resolution to end American military involvement in Yemen's devastating civil war.

Perhaps most significant, Mr. Trump withdrew in 2018 from a landmark nuclear containment deal with Iran and reimposed sanctions, setting off the chain of events that led to the killing of General Suleimani and a retaliatory missile strike by Iran that caused traumatic brain injuries to at least 64 American service members.

This is a pretty good summary of the damage Trump has done, but it understates how bad it has been. In addition to the buildup of troops and the continuation of illegal, unauthorized military involvement in Syria, Iraq, and Yemen, Trump has also presided over a sharp increase in drone strikes , and he has loosened the rules of engagement in all U.S. bombing campaigns. In the past week, we learned that the U.S. dropped more bombs on Afghanistan in 2019 than in any previous year of the war:

American aircraft released 7,423 munitions in the country in 2019, according to figures published Monday by U.S. Air Forces Central Command. Coalition aircraft flew nearly 8,800 sorties during the period, over a quarter of which carried out strikes.

The tally surpasses the previous record set last year when 7,362 munitions were released and comes amid ongoing discussion between American and Taliban officials aimed at ending America's longest war.

Trump is sometimes described as "reluctant" to use force, but as these numbers show the U.S. military has been dropping bombs and launching missiles in even greater numbers under Trump. If anything, the president is only too eager to order attacks on other states when there is no justification for them, as the illegal attacks on Syria and the illegal assassination of Soleimani should make clear. Trump uses force when he doesn't have to, he uses more of it than is required, and he rewards the men who use it to commit war crimes. His foreign policy is one of rejecting restraint . He doesn't end the endless wars because doing so would require the kind of diplomatic engagement that he abhors, and he doesn't end them because he is a militarist. The president is continuing and adding to the long, ugly record of our excessive use of force overseas.

To change that, the U.S. won't just need different leadership, but we will also need an entirely different way of thinking about the U.S. role in the world. We need to stop viewing and treating other countries as if they are our bombing ranges. We need to recognize that our hyper-militarized foreign policy achieves nothing except to foment more conflict that kills and displaces innocent people in huge numbers. We need to insist that our government resorts to force only as a last resort, and then we need to make our leaders pay a political price if they start or join unnecessary wars. If we are satisfied with empty slogans instead of genuine peace, empty slogans and ceaseless war will be what we get.

Kent • 11 hours ago

"We need to recognize that our hyper-militarized foreign policy achieves nothing except to foment more conflict that kills and displaces innocent people in huge numbers."

That's called a "self-licking ice cream cone". The more you spend on something to fix something else, it only causes an increase in the something else, which causes you to have to spend more. It is the entire basis of the US defense, healthcare and legal markets.

kouroi • 10 hours ago
But how else will the US force the other countries to renounce their sovereign status and relinquish their economies to the extractive, parasitic greed of Wall Street? Andrew Mellon's brother, Richard, used to say that being in the business of steel making, one needs a machine gun... When one seeks to be the Hegemon (ultimate monopolist), one needs "full spectrum dominance"!
TomG • 6 hours ago
It seems fair to assert that the vast majority of Americans have no idea how many bombs we are dropping around the world. I suspect most assume things are mostly wound-down in Afghanistan with troops there for no other purpose than to have troops spread throughout the region. And we've seen with little pressure on our senators to override Trump's veto, that Yemen doesn't rise even close to the outrage that any daily dose of tweets can muster when it feeds Trump derangement syndrome.

Yet I do hope and pray we end the wars, the sanctions and the global military presence.

gnt • 6 hours ago
Anyone who believes that Donald Trump was serious about reducing our military adventurism is deluding themselves.

The theme of forcing other countries to support our aims is central to his foreign policy, and he escalates all conflicts in hopes of forcing others to concede. None of that was hidden during 2016. It's also consistent with how his businesses have treated small vendors. The Trump you see is not some creation of the deep state, or a product of aggressive investigations. It's the Trump that has always been there. He's a bully. He's always been a bully, and he always will be a bully.

You might have missed the evidence in 2016, but you can't pretend in 2020 that Trump is the guy who will minimize the use of force to accomplish his goals.

[Feb 04, 2020] Democrats concluded some time ago that the only viable strategy for removing Trump requires demonization of Russia as our enemy

Feb 04, 2020 | www.thenation.com

Michael Robertson says: February 3, 2020 at 3:39 pm

Democrats concluded some time ago that the only viable strategy for removing Trump requires demonization of Russia as our enemy. And Ukraine as our ally. No one questions how this came to be, or demands any real reporting about Ukraine. It's a black hole, and we are expected to simply accept the framing of the Dems. Those who question it are accused of being brainwashed by RT, or of secretly loving Mr. Trump. And they are simply befuddled by accusations of neo-McCarthyism.

Clark Shanahan says: February 3, 2020 at 8:03 pm

As the professor warns us, we have gone through some very backwards times:
"Speaker Nancy Pelosi is connecting the dots -- "all roads lead to Putin," she says -- and making the argument that Trump's pressure campaign on Ukraine was not an isolated incident but part of a troubling bond with the Russian president reaching back to special counsel Robert Mueller's findings on the 2016 election.

"This has been going on for 2 1/2 years," Pelosi said Friday.

"This isn't about Ukraine," she explained a day earlier. "'It's about Russia. Who benefited by our withholding of that military assistance? Russia.""
(AP Dec 6, Lisa Mascaro/Mary Clare Jalonick)
Schiff has claimed that the Evil Vlad wakes up every morning, plotting to destroy our virginal democracy because the US makes Russia look shabby.. He happens to receive a lot of funding from the arms industry.
Nadler equated Russian meddling to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor..

If these three actually believe their own spin, heaven help us.
It truly is obscene.
The Battle of Stalingrad ended February 2, 1943.
Listening to our Russophobes, it seems the wrong people won that war. It is so ugly.

Clark Shanahan says: February 3, 2020 at 8:21 pm

on topic:

https://thegrayzone.com/2020/02/03/huffpost-uk-editor-censorship-dsma-russia-jess-brammar/

[Feb 03, 2020] White House Warriors: How the National Security Council Transformed the American Way of War

Highly recommended!
This book sheds some light into the story of how Administrative assistants to Present became independent heavily influenced by CIA body controlling the USA foreign policy and to a large extent controlling the President. Recent revolt of NSC (Aka Ukrainegate) shows that the servant became the master
The books contains some interesting information about forming NSC by Truman --- the father of the US National Security State. And bureaucratic turf war the preceded it. It wwas actually Eisenhower who created forma position of a "special assistant to the president for national security affairs"
The author also cover a little bit disastrous decision to launch a "surge" (ironically by the female chickenhawk Meghan O'Sullivan), -- which attests neocon nature of current NSC and level of indoctrination of staffers in "Full Spectrum Dominance" doctrine quite clearly. That's why a faction of NSC launched a coup d'état against Trump in t he form of Ukrainegate and probably was instrumental in Russiagate as well.
Notable quotes:
"... Starting in the 1960s, the NSC dethroned the State Department in providing analysis, intelligence, and even some diplomacy to the diplomat in chief. In the years after September 11th, the staff also began to take greater responsibility, especially for planning, from the military and the rest of the Pentagon. Both departments have struggled and often failed to reclaim lost ground and influence in Washington. ..."
"... Yet war is a hard thing to try to manage from the Executive Office Building. Thousands of miles from the frontlines and far from harm, the NSC make recommendations based on what they come to know from intelligence reports, news sources, phone calls, video-teleconferences, and visits to the front. Even with advice based only on this limited and limiting view, the NSC staff has transformed how the United States fights its wars. ..."
"... Although presidents bear the ultimate responsibilities for these decisions, the NSC staff played an essential, and increasing, role in the thinking behind each bold move. In conflict after conflict, a more powerful NSC staff has fundamentally altered the American way of war. It is now far less informed by the perspective of the military and the view from the frontlines. It is less patient for progress and more dependent on the clocks in the Executive Office Building and Washington than those in theater. It is far more combative, less able to accept defeat, and more willing to risk a change of course. ..."
"... The NSC common law's kept the peace in Washington for years after Iran-Contra. The restrictions against outright advocacy and outsized operational responsibilities were accepted by those at the White House as well as in the agencies during Republican and Democratic administrations. Yet as many in Washington believed the world grew more interconnected and the national security stakes increased, especially after September 11th, a more powerful NSC has given staffers the opportunity to bend, and occasionally break, the common laws, as they have been expected to and allowed to take on more responsibilities for developing strategies and new r ideas from those in the bureaucracy and military. ..."
"... ...Meanwhile, others, including the anonymous author of the infamous September 2018 New York Times opinion piece, believe government officials who comprise a "steady state" amid Trump's chaotic presidency are "unsung heroes" resisting his worst instincts and overreaches. 13 Thus, it is no surprise that more and more Americans are concerned: a 2018 poll found that 74 percent of Americans feel a group of officials arc able to control government policy without accountability. ..."
"... it is no wonder some Americans have taken to assuming the worst of their public servants. ..."
"... Each member of the NSC staff needs to remember that their growing, unaccountable power has helped give evidence to the worries about a deep state. Although no one in Washington gives up influence voluntarily, the staff, even its warriors, need to remember it is not just what they fight for but whether a fight is necessary at all. ..."
"... ... Too many in Washington, including at the Executive Office Building, have forgotten that public service is a privilege that bestows on them great responsibility. Although the NSC has long justified its actions in the name of national security, the means with which its members have pursued that objective have made for a more aggressive American way of war, a more fractious Washington, and more conspiracies about government. ..."
"... The question is for what and for whom they will fight in the years and wars ahead. ..."
Feb 03, 2020 | www.amazon.com

The men and women walking the hushed corridors of the Executive Office Building do not look like warriors. Most are middle-aged professionals with penchants for dark business suits and prestigious graduate degrees, who have spent their lives serving their country in windowless offices, on far-off battle-fields, or at embassies abroad. Before arriving at the NSC, many joined the military or the nation's diplomatic corps, some dedicated themselves to teaching and writing about national security, and others spent their days working for the types of politicians who become presidents. By the time they joined the staff, each had shown the pluck -- and the good fortune -- required to end up staffing a president.

When each NSC staffer first walks up the steps to the Executive Office Building, he or she joins an institution like no other in government. Compared to the Pentagon and other bureaucracies, the staff is small, hierarchically flat with only a few titles like directors and senior directors reporting to the national security advisor and his or her deputies. Compared to all those at the agencies, even most cabinet secretaries, the staff are also given unparalleled access to the president and the discussions about the biggest decisions in national security.

Yet despite their access, the NSC staff was created as a political, legal, and bureaucratic afterthought. The National Security Council was established both
to better coordinate foreign policy after World War II and as part of a deal to create what became known as the Defense Department. Since the army and navy only agreed to be unified under a single department and a civilian cabinet secretary if each still had a seat at the table where decisions about war were expected to be made, establishing the National Security Council was critical to ensuring passage of the National Security Act of 1947. The law, as well as its amendments two years later, unified the armed forces while also establishing the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Office of the Secretary of Defense, as well as the CIA.

... ... ...

Fans of television's the West Wing would be forgiven for expecting that once in the Oval Office, all a staffer needs to do to change policy is to deliver a well-timed whisper in the president's car or a rousing speech in his company. It is not that such dramatic moments never occur, but real change in government requires not just speaking up but the grinding policy work required to have something new to say.

A staffer, alone or with NSC and agency colleagues, must develop an idea until feasible and defend it from opposition driven by personal pique, bureaucratic jealousy, or substantive disagreement, and often all three.

Granted none of these fights are over particularly new ideas, as few proposals in war are truly novel. If anything, the staffs history is a reminder of how little new there is under the guise of national security. Alter all, escalations, ultimatums, and counterinsurgency are only innovative in the context of the latest conflicts. The NSC staff is usually proposing old ideas, some as old as war itself like a surge of troops, to new circumstances and a critical moment.

Yet even an old idea can have real power in the right hands at the right time, so it is worth considering how much more influence the NSC brings to its fights today.

... ... ...

A larger staff can do even more thanks to technology. With the establishment of the Situation Room in 1961 and its subsequent upgrades, as well as the widespread adoption of email in the 1980s, the classified email system during the 2000s, and desktop video teleconferencing systems in the 2010s, White House technology upgrades have been justified because the president deserves the latest and the fastest. These same advances give each member of the staff global reach, including to war zones half a world away, from the safety of the Executive Office Building.

The NSC has also grown more powerful along with the presidency it serves. The White House, even in the hands of an inexperienced and disorganized president like Trump, drives the government's agenda, the news media's coverage, and the American public's attention. The NSC staff can, if skilled enough, leverage the office's influence for their own ideas and purposes. Presidents have also explicitly empowered the staff in big ways -- like putting them in the middle of the policymaking process -- and small -- like granting them ranks that put them on the same level as other agency officials.

Recent staffers have also had the president's ear nearly every day, and sometimes more often, while secretaries of state and defense rarely have that much face time in the Oval Office. Each has a department with tens of thousands (and in the Pentagon's case millions) of employees to manage. Most significantly, both also answer not just to the president but to Congress, which has oversight authority for their departments and an expectation for regular updates. There are few more consequential power differences between the NSC and the departments than to whom each must answer.

Even more, the NSC staff get to work and fight in anonymity. Members of Congress, journalists, and historians are usually too busy keeping track of the National Security Council principals to focus on the guys and gals behind the national security advisors, who are themselves behind the president. Few in Washington, and fewer still across the country, know the names of the staff advising the president let alone what they arc saying in their memos and moments with him.

Today, there arc too many unnamed NSC staffers for anyone's good, including their own. Even with the recent congressional limit on policy staffers, the NSC is too big to be thoroughly managed or effective. National security advisors and their deputies are so busy during their days that it is hard to keep up with all their own emails, calls, and reading, let alone ensure each member of the staff is doing their own work or doing it well. The common law and a de tacto honor system has also struggled to keep staff in check as they try to handle every issue from war to women's rights and every to-do list item from drafting talking points to doing secret diplomacy.

Although many factors contribute to the NSC's success, history suggests they do best with the right-size job. The answer to better national security policy and process is not a bigger staff but smaller writs. The NSC should focus on fewer issues, and then only on the smaller stuff, like what the president needs for calls and meetings, and the big, what some call grand strategic, questions about the nation's interests, ambitions, and capacities that should be asked and answered before any major decision.

... ... ...

Along the way, the staff has taken on greater responsibilities from agencies like the departments of state and defense as each has grown more bureaucratic and sclerotic. Starting in the 1960s, the NSC dethroned the State Department in providing analysis, intelligence, and even some diplomacy to the diplomat in chief. In the years after September 11th, the staff also began to take greater responsibility, especially for planning, from the military and the rest of the Pentagon. Both departments have struggled and often failed to reclaim lost ground and influence in Washington.

As a result, today the NSC has, regretfully, become the strategic engine of the government's national security policymaking. The staff, along with the national security advisor, determine which issues -- large and small -- require attention, develop the plans for most of them, and try to manage day-to-day the implementation of each strategy. That is too sweeping a remit for a couple hundred unaccountable staffers sitting at the Executive Office Building thousands of miles from war zones and foreign capitals. Such immense responsibility also docs not make the best use of talent in government, leaving the military and the nation's diplomats fighting with the White House over policies while trying to execute plans they have less and less ownership over.

... ... ...

Although protocol still requires members of the NSC to sit on the backbench in National Security Council meetings, the staff s voice and advice can carry as much weight as those of the principals sitting at the table, just as the staff has taken on more of each department's responsibilities, the NSC arc expected to be advisors to the president, even on military strategy. With that charge, the staff has taken to spending more time and effort developing their own policy ideas -- and fighting for them.

Yet war is a hard thing to try to manage from the Executive Office Building. Thousands of miles from the frontlines and far from harm, the NSC make recommendations based on what they come to know from intelligence reports, news sources, phone calls, video-teleconferences, and visits to the front. Even with advice based only on this limited and limiting view, the NSC staff has transformed how the United States fights its wars.

The American way of war, developed over decades of thinking and fighting, informs how and why the nation goes to battle. Over the course of American history and, most relevantly, since the end of World War II, the US military and other national security professionals have developed, often through great turmoil, strategic preferences and habits, like deploying the latest technology possible instead of the largest number of troops. Despite the tremendous planning that goes into these most serious of undertakings, each new conflict tests the prevailing way of war and often finds it wanting.

Even knowing how dangerous it is to relight the last war, it is still not easy to find the right course for a new one. Government in general and national security specifically are risk-averse enterprises where it is often simpler to rely on standard operating procedures and stay on a chosen course, regardless of whether progress is slow and the sense of drift is severe. Even then, many in the military, who often react to even the mildest of suggestions and inquiries as unnecessary or even dangerous micromanagement, defend the prevailing approach with its defining doctrine and syndrome.

As Machiavelli recommended long ago, there is a need for hard questions in government and war in particular. He wrote that a leader "ought to be a great askcr, and a patient hearer of the truth." 7 From the Executive Office Building, the NSC staff, who are more distanced from the action as well as the fog of war, have tried to fill this role for a busy and often distracted president. They are, however, not nearly as patient as Machiavelli recommended: they have proven more willing, indeed too willing at times, to ask about what is working and what is not.

Warfighters are not alone in being frustrated by questions: everyone from architects to zookeepers believes they know how best to do their job and that with a bit more time, they will get it right. Without any of the responsibility for the doing, the NSC staff not only asks hard questions but, by avoiding implementation bias, is willing to admit, often long before those in the field, that the current plan is failing. A more technologically advanced NSC, with the ability to reach deep into the chain of command and war zones for updates, has also given the staff the intelligence to back up its impatience.

Most times in history, the NSC staff has correctly predicted that time is running against a chosen strategy. Halperin. and others on the Nixon NSC, were accurate in their assessments of Vietnam. Dur and his Reagan NSC colleagues were right to worry that diplomacy was moving too slowly in Lebanon. Haass and Vershbow were correct when they were concerned with how windows of opportunity for action were shrinking in the Gulf and Balkans respectively, just as O'Sullivan was right that things needed to change relatively soon in Iraq.

Yet an impatient NSC staff has a worse track record giving the president answers to what should come next. The NSC staff naturally have opinions and ideas about what can be done when events and war feel out of control, but ideas about what can be done when events and war feel out of control, but the very distance and disengagement that allow' the NSC to be so effective at measuring progress make its ideas less grounded in operational realities and more clouded by the fog of Washington. The NSC, often stridently, wants to do something more, to "go big when wc can," as one recent staffer encouraged his president, to fix a failing policy or win a w r ar, but that is not a strategy, nor does that ambition make the staff the best equipped to figure out the next steps."

With their proposals for a new plan, deployment, or initiative, the staff has made more bad recommendations than good. The Diem coup and the Beirut mission are two examples, and particularly tragic ones at that, of NSC staff recommendations gone awry. The Iraq surge was certainly a courageous decision, but by committing so many troops to that country, the manpower w r as not available for a war in Afghanistan that was falling off track. Even the more successful NSC recommendations for changes in US strategy in the Gulf War and in Bosnia did not end up exactly as planned, in part because even good ideas in war rarely do.

Although presidents bear the ultimate responsibilities for these decisions, the NSC staff played an essential, and increasing, role in the thinking behind each bold move. In conflict after conflict, a more powerful NSC staff has fundamentally altered the American way of war. It is now far less informed by the perspective of the military and the view from the frontlines. It is less patient for progress and more dependent on the clocks in the Executive Office Building and Washington than those in theater. It is far more combative, less able to accept defeat, and more willing to risk a change of course.

And it is characterized by more frequent and counterproductive friction between the civilian and military leaders.

... ... ...

Through it all, as the NSC's voice has grown louder in the nation's war rooms, the staff has transformed how Washington works, and more often does not work. The NSC's fights to change course have had another casualty: the ugly collapse of the common law' that has governed Washington policymaking for more than a generation. The result today is a government that trusts less, fights more, and decides much slower.

National security policy- and decision-making was never supposed to be a fair fight. Eliot Cohen, a civil-military scholar with high-level government experience, has called the give-and-take of the interagency process an "unequal" dialogue -- one in which presidents are entitled to not just make the ultimate decision but also to ask questions, often with the NSC's help, at any time and about any topic.* Everyone else, from the secretaries of state and defense in Washington dow r n to the commanders and ambassadors abroad, has to expect and tolerate such presidential interventions and then carry out his orders.

Even an unfair fight can have rules, however. The NSC common law's kept the peace in Washington for years after Iran-Contra. The restrictions against outright advocacy and outsized operational responsibilities were accepted by those at the White House as well as in the agencies during Republican and Democratic administrations. Yet as many in Washington believed the world grew more interconnected and the national security stakes increased, especially after September 11th, a more powerful NSC has given staffers the opportunity to bend, and occasionally break, the common laws, as they have been expected to and allowed to take on more responsibilities for developing strategies and new r ideas from those in the bureaucracy and military.

... ... ...

...Meanwhile, others, including the anonymous author of the infamous September 2018 New York Times opinion piece, believe government officials who comprise a "steady state" amid Trump's chaotic presidency are "unsung heroes" resisting his worst instincts and overreaches. 13 Thus, it is no surprise that more and more Americans are concerned: a 2018 poll found that 74 percent of Americans feel a group of officials arc able to control government policy without accountability.

In an era when Americans can see on reality television how their fish are caught, meals arc cooked, and businesses are financed, it is strange that few have ever heard the voice of an NSC staffer. The Executive Office Building is not the only building out of reach: most of the government taxpayers' fund is hard, and getting harder, to see. With bigger security blockades, longer waits on declassification, and more severe crackdowns on leaks, it is no wonder some Americans have taken to assuming the worst of their public servants.

The American people need to know the NSC's war stories if for no other reason than each makes clear that there is no organized deep state in Washington. If one existed, there would be little need for the NSC to fight so hard to coordinate the government's various players and parts. However, this history also makes plain that though the United States can overcome bad decisions and survive military disasters, a belief in a deep state is a threat to the NSC and so much more.

... ... ...

Each member of the NSC staff needs to remember that their growing, unaccountable power has helped give evidence to the worries about a deep state. Although no one in Washington gives up influence voluntarily, the staff, even its warriors, need to remember it is not just what they fight for but whether a fight is necessary at all. Shortcuts and squabbles may make sense when every second feels like it counts, but the best public servants do what is necessary for the president even as they protect, for years to come, the health of the institutions and the very democracy in which they serve. As hard as that can be to remember when the clock in the Oval Office is ticking, doing things the right way is even more important than the latest crises, war, or meeting with the president.

... ... ...

... Too many in Washington, including at the Executive Office Building, have forgotten that public service is a privilege that bestows on them great responsibility. Although the NSC has long justified its actions in the name of national security, the means with which its members have pursued that objective have made for a more aggressive American way of war, a more fractious Washington, and more conspiracies about government.

Centuries ago, Plato argued that civilians must hope for warriors who could be trusted to be both "gentle to their own and cruel to their enemies." At a time when many doubt government and those who serve in it, the NSC staff s history demonstrates just what White House warriors arc capable of. The question is for what and for whom they will fight in the years and wars ahead.

... ... ...

The legendary British double agent Kim Philby wrote: "just because a document is a document it has a glamour which tempts the reader to give it more weight than it deserves An hour of a serious discussion with a trustworthy informant is often more valuable than any number of original documents. Of course, it is best to have both."

Alexandra Jones , September 15, 2019

The Untold History of the NSC

A must-read for anyone interested in history or foreign policy. Gans pulls back the curtain on arguably the most powerful yet opaque body in foreign policy decision-making, the National Security Council. Each chapter recounts a different administration -- as told through the work of an NSC staffer. Through these beautifully-written portraits of largely unknown staffers, Gans reveals the chilling, outsized influence of this small, unelected institution on American war and peace. From this perspective, even the policy success stories seem more luck than skill -- leaving readers concerned about the NSC's continued unchecked power.

[Feb 03, 2020] White House Warriors: How the National Security Council Transformed the American Way of War

Highly recommended!
This book sheds some light into the story of how Administrative assistants to Present became independent heavily influenced by CIA body controlling the USA foreign policy and to a large extent controlling the President. Recent revolt of NSC (Aka Ukrainegate) shows that the servant became the master
The books contains some interesting information about forming NSC by Truman --- the father of the US National Security State. And bureaucratic turf war the preceded it. It wwas actually Eisenhower who created forma position of a "special assistant to the president for national security affairs"
The author also cover a little bit disastrous decision to launch a "surge" (ironically by the female chickenhawk Meghan O'Sullivan), -- which attests neocon nature of current NSC and level of indoctrination of staffers in "Full Spectrum Dominance" doctrine quite clearly. That's why a faction of NSC launched a coup d'état against Trump in t he form of Ukrainegate and probably was instrumental in Russiagate as well.
Notable quotes:
"... Starting in the 1960s, the NSC dethroned the State Department in providing analysis, intelligence, and even some diplomacy to the diplomat in chief. In the years after September 11th, the staff also began to take greater responsibility, especially for planning, from the military and the rest of the Pentagon. Both departments have struggled and often failed to reclaim lost ground and influence in Washington. ..."
"... Yet war is a hard thing to try to manage from the Executive Office Building. Thousands of miles from the frontlines and far from harm, the NSC make recommendations based on what they come to know from intelligence reports, news sources, phone calls, video-teleconferences, and visits to the front. Even with advice based only on this limited and limiting view, the NSC staff has transformed how the United States fights its wars. ..."
"... Although presidents bear the ultimate responsibilities for these decisions, the NSC staff played an essential, and increasing, role in the thinking behind each bold move. In conflict after conflict, a more powerful NSC staff has fundamentally altered the American way of war. It is now far less informed by the perspective of the military and the view from the frontlines. It is less patient for progress and more dependent on the clocks in the Executive Office Building and Washington than those in theater. It is far more combative, less able to accept defeat, and more willing to risk a change of course. ..."
"... The NSC common law's kept the peace in Washington for years after Iran-Contra. The restrictions against outright advocacy and outsized operational responsibilities were accepted by those at the White House as well as in the agencies during Republican and Democratic administrations. Yet as many in Washington believed the world grew more interconnected and the national security stakes increased, especially after September 11th, a more powerful NSC has given staffers the opportunity to bend, and occasionally break, the common laws, as they have been expected to and allowed to take on more responsibilities for developing strategies and new r ideas from those in the bureaucracy and military. ..."
"... ...Meanwhile, others, including the anonymous author of the infamous September 2018 New York Times opinion piece, believe government officials who comprise a "steady state" amid Trump's chaotic presidency are "unsung heroes" resisting his worst instincts and overreaches. 13 Thus, it is no surprise that more and more Americans are concerned: a 2018 poll found that 74 percent of Americans feel a group of officials arc able to control government policy without accountability. ..."
"... it is no wonder some Americans have taken to assuming the worst of their public servants. ..."
"... Each member of the NSC staff needs to remember that their growing, unaccountable power has helped give evidence to the worries about a deep state. Although no one in Washington gives up influence voluntarily, the staff, even its warriors, need to remember it is not just what they fight for but whether a fight is necessary at all. ..."
"... ... Too many in Washington, including at the Executive Office Building, have forgotten that public service is a privilege that bestows on them great responsibility. Although the NSC has long justified its actions in the name of national security, the means with which its members have pursued that objective have made for a more aggressive American way of war, a more fractious Washington, and more conspiracies about government. ..."
"... The question is for what and for whom they will fight in the years and wars ahead. ..."
Feb 03, 2020 | www.amazon.com

The men and women walking the hushed corridors of the Executive Office Building do not look like warriors. Most are middle-aged professionals with penchants for dark business suits and prestigious graduate degrees, who have spent their lives serving their country in windowless offices, on far-off battle-fields, or at embassies abroad. Before arriving at the NSC, many joined the military or the nation's diplomatic corps, some dedicated themselves to teaching and writing about national security, and others spent their days working for the types of politicians who become presidents. By the time they joined the staff, each had shown the pluck -- and the good fortune -- required to end up staffing a president.

When each NSC staffer first walks up the steps to the Executive Office Building, he or she joins an institution like no other in government. Compared to the Pentagon and other bureaucracies, the staff is small, hierarchically flat with only a few titles like directors and senior directors reporting to the national security advisor and his or her deputies. Compared to all those at the agencies, even most cabinet secretaries, the staff are also given unparalleled access to the president and the discussions about the biggest decisions in national security.

Yet despite their access, the NSC staff was created as a political, legal, and bureaucratic afterthought. The National Security Council was established both
to better coordinate foreign policy after World War II and as part of a deal to create what became known as the Defense Department. Since the army and navy only agreed to be unified under a single department and a civilian cabinet secretary if each still had a seat at the table where decisions about war were expected to be made, establishing the National Security Council was critical to ensuring passage of the National Security Act of 1947. The law, as well as its amendments two years later, unified the armed forces while also establishing the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Office of the Secretary of Defense, as well as the CIA.

... ... ...

Fans of television's the West Wing would be forgiven for expecting that once in the Oval Office, all a staffer needs to do to change policy is to deliver a well-timed whisper in the president's car or a rousing speech in his company. It is not that such dramatic moments never occur, but real change in government requires not just speaking up but the grinding policy work required to have something new to say.

A staffer, alone or with NSC and agency colleagues, must develop an idea until feasible and defend it from opposition driven by personal pique, bureaucratic jealousy, or substantive disagreement, and often all three.

Granted none of these fights are over particularly new ideas, as few proposals in war are truly novel. If anything, the staffs history is a reminder of how little new there is under the guise of national security. Alter all, escalations, ultimatums, and counterinsurgency are only innovative in the context of the latest conflicts. The NSC staff is usually proposing old ideas, some as old as war itself like a surge of troops, to new circumstances and a critical moment.

Yet even an old idea can have real power in the right hands at the right time, so it is worth considering how much more influence the NSC brings to its fights today.

... ... ...

A larger staff can do even more thanks to technology. With the establishment of the Situation Room in 1961 and its subsequent upgrades, as well as the widespread adoption of email in the 1980s, the classified email system during the 2000s, and desktop video teleconferencing systems in the 2010s, White House technology upgrades have been justified because the president deserves the latest and the fastest. These same advances give each member of the staff global reach, including to war zones half a world away, from the safety of the Executive Office Building.

The NSC has also grown more powerful along with the presidency it serves. The White House, even in the hands of an inexperienced and disorganized president like Trump, drives the government's agenda, the news media's coverage, and the American public's attention. The NSC staff can, if skilled enough, leverage the office's influence for their own ideas and purposes. Presidents have also explicitly empowered the staff in big ways -- like putting them in the middle of the policymaking process -- and small -- like granting them ranks that put them on the same level as other agency officials.

Recent staffers have also had the president's ear nearly every day, and sometimes more often, while secretaries of state and defense rarely have that much face time in the Oval Office. Each has a department with tens of thousands (and in the Pentagon's case millions) of employees to manage. Most significantly, both also answer not just to the president but to Congress, which has oversight authority for their departments and an expectation for regular updates. There are few more consequential power differences between the NSC and the departments than to whom each must answer.

Even more, the NSC staff get to work and fight in anonymity. Members of Congress, journalists, and historians are usually too busy keeping track of the National Security Council principals to focus on the guys and gals behind the national security advisors, who are themselves behind the president. Few in Washington, and fewer still across the country, know the names of the staff advising the president let alone what they arc saying in their memos and moments with him.

Today, there arc too many unnamed NSC staffers for anyone's good, including their own. Even with the recent congressional limit on policy staffers, the NSC is too big to be thoroughly managed or effective. National security advisors and their deputies are so busy during their days that it is hard to keep up with all their own emails, calls, and reading, let alone ensure each member of the staff is doing their own work or doing it well. The common law and a de tacto honor system has also struggled to keep staff in check as they try to handle every issue from war to women's rights and every to-do list item from drafting talking points to doing secret diplomacy.

Although many factors contribute to the NSC's success, history suggests they do best with the right-size job. The answer to better national security policy and process is not a bigger staff but smaller writs. The NSC should focus on fewer issues, and then only on the smaller stuff, like what the president needs for calls and meetings, and the big, what some call grand strategic, questions about the nation's interests, ambitions, and capacities that should be asked and answered before any major decision.

... ... ...

Along the way, the staff has taken on greater responsibilities from agencies like the departments of state and defense as each has grown more bureaucratic and sclerotic. Starting in the 1960s, the NSC dethroned the State Department in providing analysis, intelligence, and even some diplomacy to the diplomat in chief. In the years after September 11th, the staff also began to take greater responsibility, especially for planning, from the military and the rest of the Pentagon. Both departments have struggled and often failed to reclaim lost ground and influence in Washington.

As a result, today the NSC has, regretfully, become the strategic engine of the government's national security policymaking. The staff, along with the national security advisor, determine which issues -- large and small -- require attention, develop the plans for most of them, and try to manage day-to-day the implementation of each strategy. That is too sweeping a remit for a couple hundred unaccountable staffers sitting at the Executive Office Building thousands of miles from war zones and foreign capitals. Such immense responsibility also docs not make the best use of talent in government, leaving the military and the nation's diplomats fighting with the White House over policies while trying to execute plans they have less and less ownership over.

... ... ...

Although protocol still requires members of the NSC to sit on the backbench in National Security Council meetings, the staff s voice and advice can carry as much weight as those of the principals sitting at the table, just as the staff has taken on more of each department's responsibilities, the NSC arc expected to be advisors to the president, even on military strategy. With that charge, the staff has taken to spending more time and effort developing their own policy ideas -- and fighting for them.

Yet war is a hard thing to try to manage from the Executive Office Building. Thousands of miles from the frontlines and far from harm, the NSC make recommendations based on what they come to know from intelligence reports, news sources, phone calls, video-teleconferences, and visits to the front. Even with advice based only on this limited and limiting view, the NSC staff has transformed how the United States fights its wars.

The American way of war, developed over decades of thinking and fighting, informs how and why the nation goes to battle. Over the course of American history and, most relevantly, since the end of World War II, the US military and other national security professionals have developed, often through great turmoil, strategic preferences and habits, like deploying the latest technology possible instead of the largest number of troops. Despite the tremendous planning that goes into these most serious of undertakings, each new conflict tests the prevailing way of war and often finds it wanting.

Even knowing how dangerous it is to relight the last war, it is still not easy to find the right course for a new one. Government in general and national security specifically are risk-averse enterprises where it is often simpler to rely on standard operating procedures and stay on a chosen course, regardless of whether progress is slow and the sense of drift is severe. Even then, many in the military, who often react to even the mildest of suggestions and inquiries as unnecessary or even dangerous micromanagement, defend the prevailing approach with its defining doctrine and syndrome.

As Machiavelli recommended long ago, there is a need for hard questions in government and war in particular. He wrote that a leader "ought to be a great askcr, and a patient hearer of the truth." 7 From the Executive Office Building, the NSC staff, who are more distanced from the action as well as the fog of war, have tried to fill this role for a busy and often distracted president. They are, however, not nearly as patient as Machiavelli recommended: they have proven more willing, indeed too willing at times, to ask about what is working and what is not.

Warfighters are not alone in being frustrated by questions: everyone from architects to zookeepers believes they know how best to do their job and that with a bit more time, they will get it right. Without any of the responsibility for the doing, the NSC staff not only asks hard questions but, by avoiding implementation bias, is willing to admit, often long before those in the field, that the current plan is failing. A more technologically advanced NSC, with the ability to reach deep into the chain of command and war zones for updates, has also given the staff the intelligence to back up its impatience.

Most times in history, the NSC staff has correctly predicted that time is running against a chosen strategy. Halperin. and others on the Nixon NSC, were accurate in their assessments of Vietnam. Dur and his Reagan NSC colleagues were right to worry that diplomacy was moving too slowly in Lebanon. Haass and Vershbow were correct when they were concerned with how windows of opportunity for action were shrinking in the Gulf and Balkans respectively, just as O'Sullivan was right that things needed to change relatively soon in Iraq.

Yet an impatient NSC staff has a worse track record giving the president answers to what should come next. The NSC staff naturally have opinions and ideas about what can be done when events and war feel out of control, but ideas about what can be done when events and war feel out of control, but the very distance and disengagement that allow' the NSC to be so effective at measuring progress make its ideas less grounded in operational realities and more clouded by the fog of Washington. The NSC, often stridently, wants to do something more, to "go big when wc can," as one recent staffer encouraged his president, to fix a failing policy or win a w r ar, but that is not a strategy, nor does that ambition make the staff the best equipped to figure out the next steps."

With their proposals for a new plan, deployment, or initiative, the staff has made more bad recommendations than good. The Diem coup and the Beirut mission are two examples, and particularly tragic ones at that, of NSC staff recommendations gone awry. The Iraq surge was certainly a courageous decision, but by committing so many troops to that country, the manpower w r as not available for a war in Afghanistan that was falling off track. Even the more successful NSC recommendations for changes in US strategy in the Gulf War and in Bosnia did not end up exactly as planned, in part because even good ideas in war rarely do.

Although presidents bear the ultimate responsibilities for these decisions, the NSC staff played an essential, and increasing, role in the thinking behind each bold move. In conflict after conflict, a more powerful NSC staff has fundamentally altered the American way of war. It is now far less informed by the perspective of the military and the view from the frontlines. It is less patient for progress and more dependent on the clocks in the Executive Office Building and Washington than those in theater. It is far more combative, less able to accept defeat, and more willing to risk a change of course.

And it is characterized by more frequent and counterproductive friction between the civilian and military leaders.

... ... ...

Through it all, as the NSC's voice has grown louder in the nation's war rooms, the staff has transformed how Washington works, and more often does not work. The NSC's fights to change course have had another casualty: the ugly collapse of the common law' that has governed Washington policymaking for more than a generation. The result today is a government that trusts less, fights more, and decides much slower.

National security policy- and decision-making was never supposed to be a fair fight. Eliot Cohen, a civil-military scholar with high-level government experience, has called the give-and-take of the interagency process an "unequal" dialogue -- one in which presidents are entitled to not just make the ultimate decision but also to ask questions, often with the NSC's help, at any time and about any topic.* Everyone else, from the secretaries of state and defense in Washington dow r n to the commanders and ambassadors abroad, has to expect and tolerate such presidential interventions and then carry out his orders.

Even an unfair fight can have rules, however. The NSC common law's kept the peace in Washington for years after Iran-Contra. The restrictions against outright advocacy and outsized operational responsibilities were accepted by those at the White House as well as in the agencies during Republican and Democratic administrations. Yet as many in Washington believed the world grew more interconnected and the national security stakes increased, especially after September 11th, a more powerful NSC has given staffers the opportunity to bend, and occasionally break, the common laws, as they have been expected to and allowed to take on more responsibilities for developing strategies and new r ideas from those in the bureaucracy and military.

... ... ...

...Meanwhile, others, including the anonymous author of the infamous September 2018 New York Times opinion piece, believe government officials who comprise a "steady state" amid Trump's chaotic presidency are "unsung heroes" resisting his worst instincts and overreaches. 13 Thus, it is no surprise that more and more Americans are concerned: a 2018 poll found that 74 percent of Americans feel a group of officials arc able to control government policy without accountability.

In an era when Americans can see on reality television how their fish are caught, meals arc cooked, and businesses are financed, it is strange that few have ever heard the voice of an NSC staffer. The Executive Office Building is not the only building out of reach: most of the government taxpayers' fund is hard, and getting harder, to see. With bigger security blockades, longer waits on declassification, and more severe crackdowns on leaks, it is no wonder some Americans have taken to assuming the worst of their public servants.

The American people need to know the NSC's war stories if for no other reason than each makes clear that there is no organized deep state in Washington. If one existed, there would be little need for the NSC to fight so hard to coordinate the government's various players and parts. However, this history also makes plain that though the United States can overcome bad decisions and survive military disasters, a belief in a deep state is a threat to the NSC and so much more.

... ... ...

Each member of the NSC staff needs to remember that their growing, unaccountable power has helped give evidence to the worries about a deep state. Although no one in Washington gives up influence voluntarily, the staff, even its warriors, need to remember it is not just what they fight for but whether a fight is necessary at all. Shortcuts and squabbles may make sense when every second feels like it counts, but the best public servants do what is necessary for the president even as they protect, for years to come, the health of the institutions and the very democracy in which they serve. As hard as that can be to remember when the clock in the Oval Office is ticking, doing things the right way is even more important than the latest crises, war, or meeting with the president.

... ... ...

... Too many in Washington, including at the Executive Office Building, have forgotten that public service is a privilege that bestows on them great responsibility. Although the NSC has long justified its actions in the name of national security, the means with which its members have pursued that objective have made for a more aggressive American way of war, a more fractious Washington, and more conspiracies about government.

Centuries ago, Plato argued that civilians must hope for warriors who could be trusted to be both "gentle to their own and cruel to their enemies." At a time when many doubt government and those who serve in it, the NSC staff s history demonstrates just what White House warriors arc capable of. The question is for what and for whom they will fight in the years and wars ahead.

... ... ...

The legendary British double agent Kim Philby wrote: "just because a document is a document it has a glamour which tempts the reader to give it more weight than it deserves An hour of a serious discussion with a trustworthy informant is often more valuable than any number of original documents. Of course, it is best to have both."

Alexandra Jones , September 15, 2019

The Untold History of the NSC

A must-read for anyone interested in history or foreign policy. Gans pulls back the curtain on arguably the most powerful yet opaque body in foreign policy decision-making, the National Security Council. Each chapter recounts a different administration -- as told through the work of an NSC staffer. Through these beautifully-written portraits of largely unknown staffers, Gans reveals the chilling, outsized influence of this small, unelected institution on American war and peace. From this perspective, even the policy success stories seem more luck than skill -- leaving readers concerned about the NSC's continued unchecked power.

[Feb 03, 2020] Running the World The Inside Story of the National Security Council and the Architects of Americ

Feb 03, 2020 | www.amazon.com

>

Newton Ooi , July 22, 2017

Too much focus on the big names.

When it comes to US foreign policy, the names in the news usually include our President, Secretary of Defense, Secretary of State, National Security Advisor and a couple big name generals depending on the war. Of course, there are many more people involved, and the entire process is supposed to run through the National Security Council. Hence I bought this book with the intention of learning more about the decision making process from someone who has served in government and dealt with the NSC. The book is a chronological history of the NSC from its inception to the administration of George W. Bush post 9/11. It focuses on the major personalities that have served on the NSC, and how its functioning have changed with each administration under the guidance or negligence of the President. Some Presidents, like Eisenhower, made sure the NSC ran like a well-oiled machine that harnessed the wisdom, skills and opinions of all its members and their agencies. Other Presidents, like Nixon and W. Bush used it essentially as a committee to bottleneck ideas while they worked with their favorites on major decisions. The book does a great job showing how individuals as disparate as Henry Kissinger and Condoleeza Rice have utilized the NSC.

However, what I found lacking in this book is its complete minimization of the role of big corporations in affecting US foreign policy. A quick google search will show that every member of the NSC has sat on the boards of multiple corporations prior to joining the NSC. It is safe to assume that these corporations chose these board members due in large part to their ability to influence US foreign policy. And so the book covers very little in terms of tariffs and economic treaties. The biggest economic item covered by the book are trade sanctions, and even then focuses mainly on the sanctions applied to Iraq after the first Gulf War.

Also lacking in the book was any significant discussion on US efforts in combating the international trade in narcotics, weapons and slaves. Wars are a big issue, but I doubt they take up all the time of the NSC. Looking up the NSC in Wikipedia, one sees that it includes members tasked with fighting America's drug wars; and our drug wars are probably the big ticket item in dealing with Latin America. Yet narcotics, heroine, and cocaine do not even show up in the book's index. Overall, I consider this book an interesting read for those new to foreign policy, but it misses out on a lot.

Jack Lechelt , July 31, 2005
Interesting, important, and poorly edited

Why the rush? There are a surprising number of little mistakes that should have been picked up in the editing process. Granted, the topic is timely and important, but would the world have collapsed if the publishers held on to the book for an extra month for another round of read-throughs? Also, there is just too much writing. Editors should have crossed out a lot of unnecessary stuff.

There are two reasons I point out one factual error I came across. First, it makes me feel smarter. That is less important to everyone else, but it makes me feel good. Second, if I found one error, people who specialize in other areas may have noticed other errors, and those should be pointed out. Anyway, on pages 218-219, Rothkopf describes Reagan's National Security Planning Group (NSPG) as having been "chaired by Bush and [it] ended up dealing with issues like the spate of terrorist attacks and other crises that confronted the administration." The NSPG did indeed deal with important issues, and in some sense it probably dealt with the issues he pointed out, but Rothkopf is confusing the NSPG with the Crisis Management Team, which later became the Special Situations Group, both of which were chaired by VP Bush. The NSPG, however, was more accurately described by Bush's VP chief of staff, Craig Fuller: "The [NSPG] is the most restricted national security council meeting that is called. It is usually confined to the principals, meaning the Secretaries of State, Defense, Vice President, ... the Director of Central Intelligence, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the President's Chief of Staff, [the National Security Adviser and deputy NSA] and ... usually the Attorney General and Secretary of the Treasury, but it can be expanded depending on the topic." No more than a dozen people usually attended, and only the President and Vice President brought their chiefs of staff (p. 923). There were usually two NSPG meetings per month. The Tower Commission report noted that the NSC meetings were becoming a bit too big for productive discussions among the principals, so the President turned to the NSPG. And from everything I have read, Reagan was at most of the meetings. This is not a major error, but at the same time, the NSPG was an incredibly important component of Reagan Administration foreign/national security policy. Perhaps there are other errors.

One of the funnier errors: the Washington Post Book World review pointed out that the picture on the cover is more likely from a Cabinet meeting. Elaine Chao, Secretary of Labor, who is not on the NSC, is clearly visible in the picture. Was it really that difficult to come up with a better, more accurate picture? If people do judge books by the cover, this one has not put its best foot forward.

The good stuff: Rothkopf's description of policy viewpoints is interesting. Rather than the constant chatter about the personal spats between major members of foreign policy (although those are included in the book too), we should hear more about what these people think. This important stuff is shaping the world. Another great aspect of the book is that Rothkopf got an amazing amount of access to the key players through interviews. These are the people who have shaped the world over the past four or so decades. The quotations, although a bit long, are practically a primary source of data for other researchers. Hopefully someday Rothkopf will make his interview transcripts available to other researchers. Great stuff there.

William Podmore , November 1, 2007
Useful, if over-enthusiastic, study of USA's ruling class

David J. Rothkopf was a junior member of the Clinton administration. In this fascinating book, he studies the post-1947 record of the American foreign policy élite, the National Security Council and its staff, about 200 people. This exclusive establishment, which he actually calls an `aristocracy', is the part of the US ruling class that runs national policy across Republican and Democrat administrations.

He contrasts 1947 with post-2001, finding `a stunningly different set of conclusions about what to do with American power and prestige'. He supports the multilateralism of NATO, the Marshall Plan, the IMF, the World Bank and the UN, under the slogan of globalisation, and argues against Bush's unilateralism, which puts the USA `above and beyond the influence of global institutions or the rule of law'. He agrees with Carter's national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, that terrorism is a tactic not an enemy.

He notes `the debacle in Iraq', yet misunderstands the region completely when he writes, "it is the decay of Middle Eastern civilisation that is the threat to us." Not the US state's unpopular alliances with the Saudi and Israeli states then!

He describes the USA's whole political system as suffering "an irresponsible separation between the will of the majority of America and the will of the representatives of the American people." But if the people's supposed representatives do not represent them, how can this be a democracy?

Finally, Rothkopf warns, "The real strategic threats come from those who would offer an alternative to our leadership." These "will argue that our system has exacerbated rather than resolved basic problems of inequity in the world." With some justice, since, as he admits, "the majority of the world's population are today effectively disenfranchised from reaping the benefit of the world we have been leading." If this US leadership, exercised through the institutions which he so admires, has not benefited the majority of the world's people, what good is it?

Izaak VanGaalen , September 18, 2005
Global Crisis Management

David J Rothkopf has written a valuable book about a government agency that one hears very little about in the daily news. "Running the World" is an insider's account of the inner workings of the National Security Council (created by the National Security Act of 1947). The National Security Council is an executive body within the White House that includes cabinet level officials involved in diplomacy and defense. Rothkopf's account is about the key players that were responsible for the successes and failures of the National Security Council's management of America's foreign policy since the end of World War II.

Rothkopf's insider credentials are impressive: he is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, he was under-secretary of commerce during the Clinton Administration, he served as managing director of Kissinger and Associates, he also served as Chairman and CEO of Intellibridge, and he is currently visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

There is an interesting section in this book called "Two Degrees of Henry Kissinger," which shows that the 13 national security advisors (NSAs) that followed Kissinger have either worked with him, for him, or worked with or for one of the members of his staff.

After Nixon was elected President, Kissinger was appointed NSA. Kissinger not only assembled one of the most talented teams in the history of the NSC (Lawrence Eagleberger, Anthony Lake, Alexander Haig, Brent Scowcroft, and Robert MacFarlane), he also took control, either directly or indirectly, of all the interagency policy groups. Kissinger was Nixon's entire inner circle in matters of foreign policy.

When the Watergate scandel broke, Nixon became distracted and virtually left Kissinger to his own devices. As a result, Kissinger may have been the most powerful non-elected official in American history and certainly every NSA since has operated in his shadow.

The title of this book "Running the World" is more than a little pretentious. As has been noted by other reviewers, it is an account of the old boys network written by an old boy and tends toward self-importance. A more accurate and humble title would have been the one I chose for this review: "Global Crisis Management." The NSC does not run the world. The NSC, which consists of the senior cabinet members and White House staff members, is more than likely trying to control crises as they occur than trying to direct the course of events. And as Rothkopf makes clear, the response to a given crisis depends very much on the personalities of the members who are in the president's favor at the given moment.

Rothkopf is very critical of the current Bush Administration's track record. He argues that they have lost sight of the liberal internationalist values set forth by Truman at the end of World War II when the council was founded. At the time, the US enjoyed a position of power that was not unlike its position after 9/11. The Truman Adminsistration established international institutions that deferred America's power to the good of international system. The Bush Administration, under the sway of Cheney, Rumsfeld, and other neoconservatives, decided to reassert American national interest through the use of military force, the consequences of which we are still suffering today.

Critics of this book have called Rothkopf an apologist for the Clinton administration. Far from it, Rothkopf has enumerated the foreign policy disasters that occured during Clinton's watch: namely, the failures in Somalia, Bosnia, Haiti, and Rwanda. The picture that Rothkopf paints of the NSC is not one that runs the world but rather one that tries to maintain the status quo in the face of an ever-changing world.

J. Adams , July 24, 2005
A report from a blind fly on the wall

I read the reviews of this book and made the mistake of buying it based upon them, but this is really a very superficial book. From a historical point of view, it shows us how the NSC was created by Truman, primarily because he was so out of the loop while Vice President that he didn't even know about the Manhattan project to build the atom bomb, but as the book moves into more current events, political slants take over the turn the book into a very one-sided view of the US options available in today's world. Rothkopf is a "pragmatist" in the Kissinger mold, which I guess he would have to be since he ran Kissinger's shop, but his opinions really show very little depth, and really no historical perspective of options available in dealing with bin Laden and terrorism back when it could have been much more easily dealt with. There are some insights about how Clinton seldom attended NSC meetings when tectonic changes were taking place as he dallied with Monica, but this book isn't really a very sophisticated examination of the world today and how we got here, other than to criticize W Bush for the state of the world today without looking at the limited hand he was dealt by his predecessors when it came to Islamic terrorism. I would have given the book one star but the book's history of the NSC gives it some redeeming social value, but the last half of the book is really pretty worthless because it is so unbalanced and political.

[Feb 03, 2020] Trump, Netanyahu Dictate Terms of Palestinian Surrender to Israel

| theintercept.com

Flanked by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu but no Palestinian leader, President Donald Trump unveiled “a vision for peace” in the Middle East on Tuesday which permits Israel to annex much of the occupied West Bank immediately, offering the Palestinians only local control in isolated Bantustans surrounded by Israeli territory.

As many Israeli political observers noted, the timing of the announcement, just hours after Netanyahu was indicted on corruption charges in Jerusalem, looked like an effort to boost the prime minister’s bid to win reelection in March, his best hope for avoiding prison.

A US President facing impeachment and an Israeli Prime Minister indicted for corruption, leading an interim minority government, are about to announce a plan to solve the conflict with the Palestinians, without any Palestinian present. Unbelievable farce. — Anshel Pfeffer (@AnshelPfeffer) January 28, 2020

The release of the 180-page plan — which was drafted by aides to Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and an old family friend of Netanyahu — was staged as a celebration, and acted as a dual campaign rally, with the American president and the Israeli prime minister boasting of all they had achieved for Israel to a room filled with far-right supporters of the Jewish state, including business magnate Sheldon Adelson, the Republican and Likud megadonor who spent millions of dollars to elect both leaders.

Trump, who intervened in a previous Israeli election campaign on Netanyahu’s behalf — by recognizing Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights last year — gave the embattled prime minister a podium at the White House to detail conditions imposed on the Palestinians which sounded like terms of surrender.

To start with, Netanyahu said, the Palestinians would be required to recognize Israel as a Jewish state, cede the entire Jordan Valley, disarm Hamas, and abandon hope for both the return of refugees who fled homes in what is now Israel and for a capital in Jerusalem’s Old City.

pic.twitter.com/RmKVVWh9F2 — Benjamin Netanyahu (@netanyahu) January 28, 2020

“Your peace plan offers the Palestinians a pathway to a future state,” Netanyahu told Trump. “I know that it may take them a very long time to reach the end of that path; it may even take them a very long time to get to the beginning of that path,” he added.

??????: ???? ???? ??? ???? ?? ????????? ?? ???? ?????? ?????. ?????? ????? ?????? > https://t.co/uNITb9vblN pic.twitter.com/JR6LzrKTz8 — ?????? (@NewsChannelIL) January 28, 2020

In fact, as Crisis Group analyst Tareq Baconi observed, “The plan sets out parameters that are impossible for Palestinians to accept, and effectively provides Israel with a blueprint to sustain the one-state reality that exists on the ground.”

That sentiment was echoed by Hagai El-Ad, the executive director of B’Tselem, an Israeli rights group that monitors the occupation. “What the Palestinians are being ‘offered’ now is not rights or a state, but a permanent state of Apartheid. No amount of marketing can erase this disgrace or blur the facts,” El-Ad wrote. “The reality on the ground is already one of full Israeli control over the entire area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea and everyone living in it. It is a reality of one, inherently undemocratic, state.”

The plan was rejected by Palestinian rights activists in the region and abroad.

Netanyahu logic: If Palestinians agree to land theft, annexation, no refugee return, subjugation and no means of defense, Israel will negotiate with us. — Diana Buttu (@dianabuttu) January 28, 2020

They want to put us in permanent, high-tech cages and call it peace. #DealOfTheCentury #ApartheidDeal #Palestine #PalestinianFreedom — Noura Erakat (@4noura) January 28, 2020

CNN interviews Palestinian human rights attorney on the Trump plan. "This is not a deal, this is a plan to consolidate Israel's colonial takings." @4noura https://t.co/dFfNuKnH08 — Mairav Zonszein ??? ??????? (@MairavZ) January 29, 2020

The US is a colonial state trying to broker a "solution" which favors another settler-colonial state. The only message is, commit enough massacres, create enough judicial procedures, create enough diplomatic jargon, and all is allowed. #Palestine #TrumpDeal — ???? ???????? (@MariamBarghouti) January 28, 2020

#Palestinian refugees in Lebanon's Ein El-Helweh camp who have been deprived of a homeland for years protest and say NO to the so-called #DealOfTheCentury and tell Trump: Our fate is not for you to decide. pic.twitter.com/Y7We93iIRA — We Are Not Numbers #Gaza (@WeAreNotNumbers) January 28, 2020

“An impeached and bigoted President works in tandem with a criminally indicted and racist Prime Minister to perpetuate the reality of apartheid and subjugation,” Jamil Dakwar, a Palestinian American who was born in Haifa and now leads the ACLU’s human rights program, wrote on Twitter. “Palestinians will not be coerced to give up their human rights to live as free and equal human beings.”

Saeb Erekat, the chief negotiator for the Palestine Liberation Organization, described the plan delivered by Kushner to Trump as “100 percent the ideas I personally heard many times from Netanyahu and his negotiators. I can assure you that the American so-called peace team have only copied and pasted Netanyahu’s and the settlers’ councils plan.”

Amid accusations that his plan was largely based on concepts and details dictated by Netanyahu, Kushner cast himself as an independent expert on the conflict in an interview with Sky News Arabia on Tuesday. “I’ve been studying this now for three years,” he told Sky News Arabia, “I’ve read 25 books on the subject.”

At least one of those books appears to have been written by Netanyahu, however. As Dylan Williams of the liberal, pro-Israel group J Street pointed out, Kushner’s plan appeared at one point to borrow language from one of the Israeli prime minister’s books.

On the left, an excerpt from Netanyahu’s book “A Durable Peace.”

On the right, the Trump/Kushner “peace” proposal.

I don’t know an academic integrity panel at any university that would let this fly. pic.twitter.com/NvgzWOsL2r — Dylan Williams (@dylanotes) January 29, 2020

In a subsequent interview, Kushner even seemed unaware of the length of the proposal released by his team, referring to the 181-page document as “an over 80-page proposal.” He appeared to be echoing an error made by Trump during his prepared remarks the White House ceremony when he said, “our plan is 80 pages.”

Speaking in Ramallah, at a rare gathering of leaders of the major Palestinian factions, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said that the proposal was not “the deal of the century,” as Trump and the Israelis described it, but “the slap of the century.”

“Trump, Jerusalem is not for sale. Our rights are not for sale. Your conspiracy deal will not pass,” Abbas said, in comments reported by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.

While Trump said that Palestinians could eventually have a capital in Jerusalem, the plan suggested that this would be outside of the city, in a neighborhood close to, but not in the city, as Telegraph correspondent Raf Sanchez pointed out.

IMPORTANT: the detail plan of the plan confirms that Palestinians will not get any part of Jerusalem inside the security barrier.

That means they get a few far-flung eastern neighbourhoods as their capital but none of the Old City or areas where most East Jerusalemites live. pic.twitter.com/ZL6AJVJ565 — Raf Sanchez (@rafsanchez) January 28, 2020

Within hours of the plan’s release, Netanyahu said that his government would move on Sunday to formally annex the 131 Jewish-only settlements in the occupied West Bank, all of which are illegal under international law, as well as the Jordan Valley and the northern Dead Sea. The plan’s map of the newly expanded Greater Israel, and the fragmented Palestinian enclaves, were shared on Twitter by Trump.

??? ?? ?? ???? ???? ???? ?????? ?????????? ?????? ?? ????? ?? ????? ???????. pic.twitter.com/CFuYwwjSso — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 28, 2020

In his remarks, Trump said that Netanyahu had “authorized the release of a conceptual map” showing the contours of the land to be annexed, and their two governments would soon form a joint committee “to convert the conceptual map into a more detailed and calibrated rendering so that recognition can be immediately achieved.”

Because the Israeli settlement blocs, which are home to more than 400,000 settlers, are stitched together with a network of roads and checkpoints that restrict the freedom of movement of Palestinians, the territory Trump said his plan “allocated” for a future Palestinian state would exist only as a series of enclaves inside Israel.

As Ben Silverstein of J Street, a liberal pro-Israel lobbying group in Washington, explained, the “conceptual map” included in the plan gave an “appearance of contiguity” that facts on the ground would make impossible.

This map is verrrrry generously shaded to give appearance of contiguity.

100% final map will appear closer to archipelago map on the right. pic.twitter.com/pLcaWak4R2 — Ben Silverstein (@bensilverstein) January 28, 2020

Yousef Munayyer, who directs the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights, noted on Twitter that the reality would look a lot more like what the French illustrator Julien Bousac sketched out more than a decade ago for Le Monde Diplomatique to show the impossibility of a functioning state compromised of enclaves.

The West Bank Archipelago pic.twitter.com/FBIeOKmnUd — (((YousefMunayyer))) (@YousefMunayyer) January 28, 2020

Daniel Seidemann, director of Terrestrial Jerusalem, pointed out that previous administrations had privately accepted the erosion of Palestinian hopes for a contiguous state.

Perspective, for those who think this started with Trump.

This is a slide/map, I presented to a senior official in the Obama White House. His chilling response: you’re probably right, but the sun still will rise, birds sing, and life will go on.

Sound familiar? Look familiar? pic.twitter.com/mJ2ZQPzgef — Daniel Seidemann (@DanielSeidemann) January 28, 2020

Shibley Telhami, a scholar of the region at the University of Maryland, pointed to another disturbing detail of the plan: a provision to further ethnically cleanse Israel by revoking the citizenship of Palestinians living in one section of the state, and forcing that region to merge with those parts of the West Bank not annexed by Israel.

One shocking feature of Trump's "American" plan is that Israel would carve out Israeli-Arab towns in the "Triangle" region, strip them of Israeli citizenship, and place them under Palestinian jurisdiction -- something majorities oppose. Un-American Plan. https://t.co/eQNFzRLvdG pic.twitter.com/bn143hVSRr — Shibley Telhami (@ShibleyTelhami) January 28, 2020

Trump’s plan was denounced by both Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, among the leading contenders for the Democratic nomination to challenge Trump for the presidency. While Sanders called the plan “unacceptable,” Warren went further, promising to “oppose unilateral annexation in any form — and reverse any policy that supports it.”

Trump's "peace plan" is a rubber stamp for annexation and offers no chance for a real Palestinian state. Releasing a plan without negotiating with Palestinians isn't diplomacy, it's a sham. I will oppose unilateral annexation in any form—and reverse any policy that supports it. — Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) January 28, 2020

It must end the Israeli occupation and enable Palestinian self-determination in an independent state of their own alongside a secure Israel. Trump's so-called 'peace deal' doesn't come close, and will only perpetuate the conflict. It is unacceptable. — Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) January 28, 2020

Former Vice President Joe Biden, a staunch defender of Netanyahu who reportedly frustrated Obama administration efforts to confront him over the occupation, did not immediately comment on the plan.

Politico reported on Tuesday that the Democratic Majority for Israel, a pro-Israel super PAC led by the Democratic pollster Mark Mellman, plans to run an attack ad in Iowa this week “that raises concerns about Bernie Sanders’ 2019 heart attack and calls him too liberal to beat President Donald Trump.”

As I reported earlier this year, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the conservative pro-Israel lobbying group known as AIPAC, paid for a pressure campaign on Facebook targeting Sanders, who would be the first Jewish president of the United States — one who has expressed concern for Palestinian rights and described Netanyahu as “a racist.”

[Feb 02, 2020] The most interesting issue is the role of NSC in this impeachment story

Highly recommended!
Edited for clarity
Notable quotes:
"... Currently they can wrap themselves into constitution defenders flag and be pretty safe from any criticism. Because charges that Schiff brought to the floor are bogus, and probably were created out of thin air by NSC plotters. Senators on both sides understand this, creating a classic Kabuki theater environment. ..."
"... In any case, it is clear that Trump is just a marionette of more powerful forces behind him, and his impeachment does not means much, if those forces are untouchable. Impeachment Kabuki theatre is an attempt of restoration of NSC (read neocons) favored foreign policy from which Trump slightly deviated. ..."
Feb 02, 2020 | angrybearblog.com

likbez , February 2, 2020 10:40 pm

Far more interesting issue is the role of NSC in this impeachment story.

Potential whistleblower (actually CIA informant) was from NSC as were Fiona Hill, Alex Vindman and a couple of other major Ukrainegate players.

In this NSC coup d'état against the President or what ? About earlier role of NSC see

https://off-guardian.org/2020/02/01/secret-wars-forgotten-betrayals-global-tyranny-who-is-really-in-charge-of-the-u-s-military/

As for "evil republican senators", they would be viewed as evil by electorate if and only only if actual crimes of Trump regime like Douma false flag, Suleimani assassination (actually here Trump was set up By Bolton and Pompeo) and other were discussed.

Currently they can wrap themselves into constitution defenders flag and be pretty safe from any criticism. Because charges that Schiff brought to the floor are bogus, and probably were created out of thin air by NSC plotters. Senators on both sides understand this, creating a classic Kabuki theater environment.

Both sides are afraid to discuss real issues, real Trump regime crimes.

Schiff proved to be patently inept in this whole story even taking into account limitations put by Kabuki theater on him, and in case of Trump acquittal *which is "highly probable" borrowing May government terminology in Skripals case :-) to resign would be a honest thing for him to do.

Assuming that he has some honestly left. Which is highly doubtful with statements like:

"The United States aids Ukraine and her people so that we can fight Russia over there so we don't have to fight Russia here."

And

"More than 15,000 Ukrainians have died fighting Russian forces and their proxies. 15,000."

Actually it was the USA interference in Ukraine (aka Nulandgate) that killed 15K Ukrainians, mainly Donbas residents and badly trained recruits of the Ukrainian army sent to fight them, as well as volunteers of paramilitary "death squads" like Asov battalion financed by oligarch Igor Kolomyskiy

In any case, it is clear that Trump is just a marionette of more powerful forces behind him, and his impeachment does not means much, if those forces are untouchable. Impeachment Kabuki theatre is an attempt of restoration of NSC (read neocons) favored foreign policy from which Trump slightly deviated.

[Feb 02, 2020] The most interesting issue is the role of NSC in this impeachment story

Highly recommended!
Edited for clarity
Notable quotes:
"... Currently they can wrap themselves into constitution defenders flag and be pretty safe from any criticism. Because charges that Schiff brought to the floor are bogus, and probably were created out of thin air by NSC plotters. Senators on both sides understand this, creating a classic Kabuki theater environment. ..."
"... In any case, it is clear that Trump is just a marionette of more powerful forces behind him, and his impeachment does not means much, if those forces are untouchable. Impeachment Kabuki theatre is an attempt of restoration of NSC (read neocons) favored foreign policy from which Trump slightly deviated. ..."
Feb 02, 2020 | angrybearblog.com

likbez , February 2, 2020 10:40 pm

Far more interesting issue is the role of NSC in this impeachment story.

Potential whistleblower (actually CIA informant) was from NSC as were Fiona Hill, Alex Vindman and a couple of other major Ukrainegate players.

In this NSC coup d'état against the President or what ? About earlier role of NSC see

https://off-guardian.org/2020/02/01/secret-wars-forgotten-betrayals-global-tyranny-who-is-really-in-charge-of-the-u-s-military/

As for "evil republican senators", they would be viewed as evil by electorate if and only only if actual crimes of Trump regime like Douma false flag, Suleimani assassination (actually here Trump was set up By Bolton and Pompeo) and other were discussed.

Currently they can wrap themselves into constitution defenders flag and be pretty safe from any criticism. Because charges that Schiff brought to the floor are bogus, and probably were created out of thin air by NSC plotters. Senators on both sides understand this, creating a classic Kabuki theater environment.

Both sides are afraid to discuss real issues, real Trump regime crimes.

Schiff proved to be patently inept in this whole story even taking into account limitations put by Kabuki theater on him, and in case of Trump acquittal *which is "highly probable" borrowing May government terminology in Skripals case :-) to resign would be a honest thing for him to do.

Assuming that he has some honestly left. Which is highly doubtful with statements like:

"The United States aids Ukraine and her people so that we can fight Russia over there so we don't have to fight Russia here."

And

"More than 15,000 Ukrainians have died fighting Russian forces and their proxies. 15,000."

Actually it was the USA interference in Ukraine (aka Nulandgate) that killed 15K Ukrainians, mainly Donbas residents and badly trained recruits of the Ukrainian army sent to fight them, as well as volunteers of paramilitary "death squads" like Asov battalion financed by oligarch Igor Kolomyskiy

In any case, it is clear that Trump is just a marionette of more powerful forces behind him, and his impeachment does not means much, if those forces are untouchable. Impeachment Kabuki theatre is an attempt of restoration of NSC (read neocons) favored foreign policy from which Trump slightly deviated.

[Feb 02, 2020] Secret Wars, Forgotten Betrayals, Global Tyranny. Who Is Really in Charge of the U.S. Military by Cynthia Chung

Notable quotes:
"... One key element to this reorganisation under Truman was the dismantling of the previously existing foreign intelligence bureau that was formed by FDR, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) on Sept 20, 1945 only two weeks after WWII was officially declared over. The OSS would be replaced by the CIA officially on Sept 18, 1947, with two years of an American intelligence purge and the internal shifting of chess pieces in the shadows. ..."
"... In addition, de-facto President Truman would also found the United States National Security Council on Sept 18, 1947, the same day he founded the CIA. The NSC was a council whose intended function was to serve as the President's principal arm for coordinating national security, foreign policies and policies among various government agencies. ..."
"... What this meant, was that there was to be an intermarriage of the foreign intelligence bureau with the military, and that the foreign intelligence bureau would act as top dog in the relationship, only taking orders from the NSC. Though the NSC includes the President, as we will see, the President is very far from being in the position of determining the NSC's policies. ..."
"... Kennedy would inherit the CIA secret operation against Cuba, which Prouty confirms in his book, was quietly upgraded by the CIA from the Eisenhower administration's March 1960 approval of a modest Cuban-exile support program (which included small air drop and over-the-beach operations) to a 3,000 man invasion brigade just before Kennedy entered office. ..."
"... Humiliatingly, CIA Director Allen Dulles was part of formulating the conclusion that the Bay of Pigs op was a failure because of the CIA's intervention into the President's orders. This allowed for Kennedy to issue the National Security Action Memorandum #55 on June 28th, 1961, which began the process of changing the responsibility from the CIA to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. ..."
"... As Prouty states, "When fully implemented, as Kennedy had planned, after his reelection in 1964, it would have taken the CIA out of the covert operation business. This proved to be one of the first nails in John F. Kennedy's coffin." ..."
"... Rumours started to abound that JFK had cut a secret deal with Russian Premier Khrushchev, which was that the U.S. would not invade Cuba if the Soviets withdrew their missiles. Criticisms of JFK being soft on communism began to stir. ..."
"... This was to be the final nail in Kennedy's coffin. ..."
"... Kennedy was brutally shot down only one month later, on Nov, 22nd 1963. His death should not just be seen as a tragic loss but, more importantly, it should be recognised for the successful military coup d'état that it was and is. The CIA showed what lengths it was ready to go to if a President stood in its way. (For more information on this coup refer to District Attorney of New Orleans at the time, Jim Garrison's book . And the excellently researched Oliver Stone movie "JFK") ..."
"... Scattered black ops wars continued, but the next large scale-never ending war that would involve the world would begin full force on Sept 11, 2001 under the laughable title War on Terror, which is basically another Iron Curtain, a continuation of a 74 year Cold War. A war that is not meant to end until the ultimate regime changes are accomplished and the world sees the toppling of Russia and China. ..."
"... Iraq was destined for invasion long before the vague Gulf War of 1990 and even before Saddam Hussein was being backed by the Americans in the Iraq-Iran war in the 1980s. Iran already suffered a CIA backed regime change in 1979. ..."
"... Former CIA Deputy Director (2010-2013) Michael Morell, who was supporting Hillary Clinton during the presidential election campaign and vehemently against the election of Trump, whom he claimed was being manipulated by Putin, said in a 2016 interview with Charlie Rose that Russians and Iranians in Syria should be killed covertly to 'pay the price' . ..."
"... I would also not be quick to dismiss the timely release, or better described as leaked, draft letter from the US Command in Baghdad to the Iraqi government that suggests a removal of American forces from the country. Its timing certainly puts the President in a compromised situation. Though the decision to keep the American forces within Iraq or not is hardly a simple matter that the President alone can determine. In fact there is no reason why, after reviewing the case of JFK, we should think such a thing. ..."
"... Former CIA Director Mike Pompeo was recorded at an unknown conference recently , but judging from the gross laughter of the audience it consists of wannabe CIA agents, where he admits that though West Points' cadet motto is "You will not lie, cheat, or steal, or tolerate those who do.", his training under the CIA was the very opposite, stating: ..."
"... "Iran already suffered a CIA backed regime change in 1979." Ahem. Somehow I doubt the CIA had to do with THAT regime change 🙂 Try 1953? ..."
"... Reminiscent of Karl Rove's :"We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and thats how things will sort out." ..."
"... It should be noted, that in 1963 shortly following JFK's assassination Truman stated in the Washington Post regret about establishing the CIA: "I think it has become necessary to take another look at the purpose and operations of our Central Intelligence Agency . For some time I have been disturbed by the way CIA has been diverted from its original assignment. It has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the Government. This has led to trouble and may have compounded our difficulties in several explosive areas." ..."
"... The entire bureaucratic leadership of the Nazis. And it proved to be a smashing success – transforming the U.S. into the fourth Reich. ..."
"... You see the same price gouging in the drug and insurance monopolies. A gigantic slush fund to buy foreign and domestic politicians and journalists like so many street corner whores. ..."
"... There is also a $100 billion "Intelligence" empire. ..."
"... That is why Oceania will always be at war with Eastasia, and why that war will never be won. Wars are not intended to be won, just to carry on for ever, making more and more money and providing more and more opportunities for graft for the people who matter. Weapons are not intended to work, just to make money. ..."
"... That's why flying turkeys like the F22 and F35 are produced. Like the cargo planes full of pallets of shrink wrapped $100 bills that were flown into Iraq that promptly disappeared. ..."
"... But JFK was not shot down like a dog in broad daylight with millions of people watching because he challenged these interests. It was because he was trying to stop the nuclear weapons programme of the Zionist Regime. That was what cost him his life. ..."
"... JFK also wanted to end the control of the US economy of the Federal Reserve, a coalition of private banks, nearly all controlled by Jewish interests. He really wanted to be hit, that fella. ..."
Feb 01, 2020 | off-guardian.org

There is a kind of character in thy life, That to the observer doth thy history, fully unfold."
William Shakespeare

Once again we find ourselves in a situation of crisis, where the entire world holds its breath all at once and can only wait to see whether this volatile black cloud floating amongst us will breakout into a thunderstorm of nuclear war or harmlessly pass us by.

The majority in the world seem to have the impression that this destructive fate totters back and forth at the whim of one man. It is only normal then, that during such times of crisis, we find ourselves trying to analyze and predict the thoughts and motives of just this one person.

The assassination of Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani, a true hero for his fellow countrymen and undeniably an essential key figure in combating terrorism in Southwest Asia, was a terrible crime, an abhorrently repugnant provocation. It was meant to cause an apoplectic fervour, it was meant to make us who desire peace, lose our minds in indignation. And therefore, that is exactly what we should not do.

In order to assess such situations, we cannot lose sight of the whole picture, and righteous indignation, unfortunately, causes the opposite to occur. Our focus becomes narrower and narrower to the point where we can only see or react moment to moment with what is right in front of our face. We are reduced to an obsession of twitter feeds, news blips and the doublespeak of 'official government statements'.

Thus, before we may find firm ground to stand on regarding the situation of today, we must first have an understanding as to what caused the United States to enter into an endless campaign of regime-change warfare after WWII, or as former Chief of Special Operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff Col. Prouty stated, three decades of the Indochina war.

An Internal Shifting of Chess Pieces in the Shadows

It is interesting timing that on Sept 2, 1945, the very day that WWII ended, Ho Chi Minh would announce the independence of Indochina. That on the very day that one of the most destructive wars to ever occur in history ended, another long war was declared at its doorstep.

Churchill would announce his "Iron Curtain" against communism on March 5th, 1946, and there was no turning back at that point. The world had a mere 6 months to recover before it would be embroiled in another terrible war, except for the French, who would go to war against the Viet Minh opponents in French Indochina only days after WWII was over.

In a previous paper I wrote titled "On Churchill's Sinews of Peace" , I went over a major re-organisation of the American government and its foreign intelligence bureau on the onset of Truman's de facto presidency.

Recall that there was an attempted military coup d'état, which was exposed by General Butler in a public address in 1933 , against the Presidency of FDR who was only inaugurated that year. One could say that there was a very marked disapproval from shadowy corners for how Roosevelt would organise the government.

One key element to this reorganisation under Truman was the dismantling of the previously existing foreign intelligence bureau that was formed by FDR, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) on Sept 20, 1945 only two weeks after WWII was officially declared over. The OSS would be replaced by the CIA officially on Sept 18, 1947, with two years of an American intelligence purge and the internal shifting of chess pieces in the shadows.

In addition, de-facto President Truman would also found the United States National Security Council on Sept 18, 1947, the same day he founded the CIA. The NSC was a council whose intended function was to serve as the President's principal arm for coordinating national security, foreign policies and policies among various government agencies.

In Col. Prouty's book he states:

In 1955, I was designated to establish an office of special operations in compliance with National Security Council (NSC) Directive #5412 of March 15, 1954. This NSC Directive for the first time in the history of the United States defined covert operations and assigned that role to the Central Intelligence Agency to perform such missions, provided they had been directed to do so by the NSC , and further ordered active-duty Armed Forces personnel to avoid such operations. At the same time, the Armed Forces were directed to "provide the military support of the clandestine operations of the CIA" as an official function .

What this meant, was that there was to be an intermarriage of the foreign intelligence bureau with the military, and that the foreign intelligence bureau would act as top dog in the relationship, only taking orders from the NSC. Though the NSC includes the President, as we will see, the President is very far from being in the position of determining the NSC's policies.

An Inheritance of Secret Wars

There is no instance of a nation benefitting from prolonged warfare."
Sun Tzu

On January 20th, 1961, John F. Kennedy was inaugurated as President of the United States. Along with inheriting the responsibility of the welfare of the country and its people, he was to also inherit a secret war with communist Cuba run by the CIA.

JFK was disliked from the onset by the CIA and certain corridors of the Pentagon, they knew where he stood on foreign matters and that it would be in direct conflict for what they had been working towards for nearly 15 years.

Kennedy would inherit the CIA secret operation against Cuba, which Prouty confirms in his book, was quietly upgraded by the CIA from the Eisenhower administration's March 1960 approval of a modest Cuban-exile support program (which included small air drop and over-the-beach operations) to a 3,000 man invasion brigade just before Kennedy entered office.

This was a massive change in plans that was determined by neither President Eisenhower, who warned at the end of his term of the military industrial complex as a loose cannon, nor President Kennedy, but rather the foreign intelligence bureau who has never been subject to election or judgement by the people.

It shows the level of hostility that Kennedy encountered as soon as he entered office, and the limitations of a President's power when he does not hold support from these intelligence and military quarters.

Within three months into JFK's term, Operation Bay of Pigs (April 17th to 20th 1961) was scheduled. As the popular revisionist history goes; JFK refused to provide air cover for the exiled Cuban brigade and the land invasion was a calamitous failure and a decisive victory for Castro's Cuba.

It was indeed an embarrassment for President Kennedy who had to take public responsibility for the failure, however, it was not an embarrassment because of his questionable competence as a leader. It was an embarrassment because, had he not taken public responsibility, he would have had to explain the real reason why it failed.

That the CIA and military were against him and that he did not have control over them.

If Kennedy were to admit such a thing, he would have lost all credibility as a President in his own country and internationally, and would have put the people of the United States in immediate danger amidst a Cold War.

What really occurred was that there was a cancellation of the essential pre-dawn airstrike, by the Cuban Exile Brigade bombers from Nicaragua, to destroy Castro's last three combat jets. This airstrike was ordered by Kennedy himself.

Kennedy was always against an American invasion of Cuba, and striking Castro's last jets by the Cuban Exile Brigade would have limited Castro's threat, without the U.S. directly supporting a regime change operation within Cuba. This went fully against the CIA's plan for Cuba.

Kennedy's order for the airstrike on Castro's jets would be cancelled by Special Assistant for National Security Affairs McGeorge Bundy, four hours before the Exile Brigade's B-26s were to take off from Nicaragua, Kennedy was not brought into this decision.

In addition, the Director of Central Intelligence Allen Dulles, the man in charge of the Bay of Pigs operation was unbelievably out of the country on the day of the landings.

Col. Prouty, who was Chief of Special Operations during this time, elaborates on this situation:

Everyone connected with the planning of the Bay of Pigs invasion knew that the policy dictated by NSC 5412, positively prohibited the utilization of active-duty military personnel in covert operations. At no time was an "air cover" position written into the official invasion plan The "air cover" story that has been created is incorrect."

As a result, JFK who well understood the source of this fiasco, set up a Cuban Study Group the day after and charged it with the responsibility of determining the cause for the failure of the operation. The study group, consisting of Allen Dulles, Gen. Maxwell Taylor, Adm. Arleigh Burke and Attorney General Robert Kennedy (the only member JFK could trust), concluded that the failure was due to Bundy's telephone call to General Cabell (who was also CIA Deputy Director) that cancelled the President's air strike order.

Kennedy had them.

Humiliatingly, CIA Director Allen Dulles was part of formulating the conclusion that the Bay of Pigs op was a failure because of the CIA's intervention into the President's orders. This allowed for Kennedy to issue the National Security Action Memorandum #55 on June 28th, 1961, which began the process of changing the responsibility from the CIA to the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

As Prouty states, "When fully implemented, as Kennedy had planned, after his reelection in 1964, it would have taken the CIA out of the covert operation business. This proved to be one of the first nails in John F. Kennedy's coffin."

If this was not enough of a slap in the face to the CIA, Kennedy forced the resignation of CIA Director Allen Dulles, CIA Deputy Director for Plans Richard M. Bissell Jr. and CIA Deputy Director Charles Cabell.

In Oct 1962, Kennedy was informed that Cuba had offensive Soviet missiles 90 miles from American shores. Soviet ships with more missiles were on their way towards Cuba but ended up turning around last minute.

Rumours started to abound that JFK had cut a secret deal with Russian Premier Khrushchev, which was that the U.S. would not invade Cuba if the Soviets withdrew their missiles. Criticisms of JFK being soft on communism began to stir.

NSAM #263, closely overseen by Kennedy, was released on Oct 11th, 1963, and outlined a policy decision "to withdraw 1,000 military personnel [from Vietnam] by the end of 1963" and further stated that "It should be possible to withdraw the bulk of U.S. personnel [including the CIA and military] by 1965." The Armed Forces newspaper Stars and Stripes had the headline U.S. TROOPS SEEN OUT OF VIET BY '65. Kennedy was winning the game and the American people.

This was to be the final nail in Kennedy's coffin.

Kennedy was brutally shot down only one month later, on Nov, 22nd 1963. His death should not just be seen as a tragic loss but, more importantly, it should be recognised for the successful military coup d'état that it was and is. The CIA showed what lengths it was ready to go to if a President stood in its way. (For more information on this coup refer to District Attorney of New Orleans at the time, Jim Garrison's book . And the excellently researched Oliver Stone movie "JFK")

Through the Looking Glass

On Nov. 26th 1963, a full four days after Kennedy's murder, de facto President Johnson signed NSAM #273 to begin the change of Kennedy's policy under #263. And on March 4th, 1964, Johnson signed NSAM #288 that marked the full escalation of the Vietnam War and involved 2,709,918 Americans directly serving in Vietnam, with 9,087,000 serving with the U.S. Armed Forces during this period.

The Vietnam War, or more accurately the Indochina War, would continue for another 12 years after Kennedy's death, lasting a total of 20 years for Americans.

Scattered black ops wars continued, but the next large scale-never ending war that would involve the world would begin full force on Sept 11, 2001 under the laughable title War on Terror, which is basically another Iron Curtain, a continuation of a 74 year Cold War. A war that is not meant to end until the ultimate regime changes are accomplished and the world sees the toppling of Russia and China.

Iraq was destined for invasion long before the vague Gulf War of 1990 and even before Saddam Hussein was being backed by the Americans in the Iraq-Iran war in the 1980s. Iran already suffered a CIA backed regime change in 1979.

It had been understood far in advance by the CIA and US military that the toppling of sovereignty in Iraq, Libya, Syria and Iran needed to occur before Russia and China could be taken over. Such war tactics were formulaic after 3 decades of counterinsurgency against the CIA fueled "communist-insurgency" of Indochina.

This is how today's terrorist-inspired insurgency functions, as a perfect CIA formula for an endless bloodbath.

Former CIA Deputy Director (2010-2013) Michael Morell, who was supporting Hillary Clinton during the presidential election campaign and vehemently against the election of Trump, whom he claimed was being manipulated by Putin, said in a 2016 interview with Charlie Rose that Russians and Iranians in Syria should be killed covertly to 'pay the price' .

Therefore, when a drone stroke occurs assassinating an Iranian Maj. Gen., even if the U.S. President takes onus on it, I would not be so quick as to believe that that is necessarily the case, or the full story.

Just as I would not take the statements of President Rouhani accepting responsibility for the Iranian military shooting down 'by accident' the Boeing 737-800 plane which contained 176 civilians, who were mostly Iranian, as something that can be relegated to criminal negligence, but rather that there is very likely something else going on here.

I would also not be quick to dismiss the timely release, or better described as leaked, draft letter from the US Command in Baghdad to the Iraqi government that suggests a removal of American forces from the country. Its timing certainly puts the President in a compromised situation. Though the decision to keep the American forces within Iraq or not is hardly a simple matter that the President alone can determine. In fact there is no reason why, after reviewing the case of JFK, we should think such a thing.

One could speculate that the President was set up, with the official designation of the IRGC as "terrorist" occurring in April 2019 by the US State Department, a decision that was strongly supported by both Bolton and Pompeo, who were both members of the NSC at the time.

This made it legal for a US military drone strike to occur against Soleimani under the 2001 AUMF, where the US military can attack any armed group deemed to be a terrorist threat. Both Bolton and Pompeo made no secret that they were overjoyed by Soleimani's assassination and Bolton went so far as to tweet "Hope this is the first step to regime change in Tehran." Bolton has also made it no secret that he is eager to testify against Trump in his possible impeachment trial.

Former CIA Director Mike Pompeo was recorded at an unknown conference recently , but judging from the gross laughter of the audience it consists of wannabe CIA agents, where he admits that though West Points' cadet motto is "You will not lie, cheat, or steal, or tolerate those who do.", his training under the CIA was the very opposite, stating:

I was the CIA Director. We lied, we cheated, we stole. It was like we had entire training courses. (long pause) It reminds you of the glory of the American experiment."

Thus, it should be no surprise to anyone in the world at this point in history, that the CIA holds no allegiance to any country. And it can be hardly expected that a President, who is actively under attack from all sides within his own country, is in a position to hold the CIA accountable for its past and future crimes.

Originally published at Strategic Culture

Cynthia Chung is a lecturer, writer and co-founder and editor of the Rising Tide Foundation (Montreal, Canada).

Gerda Halvorsen ,

"Iran already suffered a CIA backed regime change in 1979." Ahem. Somehow I doubt the CIA had to do with THAT regime change 🙂 Try 1953?

Doctortrinate ,

Is just another work of Theatre ..for all the world, a Staged play – along with legion of dramatic action to arouse spectator participation – its a merge inducing show – and each time the curtain falls, the crowd screams "more" so, extending its run.

Hugh O'Neill ,

Reminiscent of Karl Rove's :"We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and thats how things will sort out."

George Cornell ,

Ah yes, the Roveing Lunatic.

Doctortrinate ,

" We're history's actors and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do "

Suskind/Rove.

and so it continues .. 🙂

Vierotchka ,

The actual quote:

The aide said that guys like me [Suskind] were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

Charlotte Russe ,

It should be noted, that in 1963 shortly following JFK's assassination Truman stated in the Washington Post regret about establishing the CIA: "I think it has become necessary to take another look at the purpose and operations of our Central Intelligence Agency . For some time I have been disturbed by the way CIA has been diverted from its original assignment. It has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the Government. This has led to trouble and may have compounded our difficulties in several explosive areas."

Well, NO president after Kennedy tried to put that Genie back in the bottle. In fact, the Genie has taken total control and has mushroomed into thousands of bottles planted throughout the planet hatching multiple schemes designed to undermine and overthrow numerous nation-states.

What many don't know is that "decades after World War II, the C.I.A. and other United States agencies employed at least a thousand Nazis as Cold War spies and informants (this was known as Operation Paperclip) ..At the height of the Cold War in the 1950s, law enforcement and intelligence leaders like J. Edgar Hoover at the F.B.I. and Allen Dulles at the C.I.A. aggressively recruited onetime Nazis of all ranks as secret, anti-Soviet "assets," declassified records show. They believed the ex-Nazis' intelligence value against the Russians outweighed what one official called "moral lapses" in their service to the Third Reich. The CIA hired one former SS officer as a spy in the 1950s, for instance, even after concluding he was probably guilty of minor war crimes.

And in 1994, a lawyer with the C.I.A. pressured prosecutors to drop an investigation into an ex-spy outside Boston implicated in the Nazis' massacre of tens of thousands of Jews in Lithuania, according to a government official."

Is there no wonder, the CIA is so proficient at torture techniques, they learned from the very best–the Nazis.

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/27/us/in-cold-war-us-spy-agencies-used-1000-nazis.html

Richard Le sarc ,

They 'hired' Klaus Barbie, a in no ways 'minor' war criminal. The US took over the surviving Nazi terror apparatus, lock, stock and barrel.

nottheonly1 ,

The entire bureaucratic leadership of the Nazis. And it proved to be a smashing success – transforming the U.S. into the fourth Reich.

paul ,

You just have to look at existing realities. There is a military budget of $1,134 billion, greater than the rest of the world combined. This is the true figure, not the bogus official one.

There is a secret black budget of over $50 billion, with zero accountability to anyone.

$21 trillion, $21,000,000,000,000, has officially "gone missing" from the military budget. This sum is nearly as large as the official National Debt.

This represents a cornucopia of waste, graft, theft, corruption, and wholesale looting on an unimaginable scale.

A single screw can cost $500. You see the same price gouging in the drug and insurance monopolies. A gigantic slush fund to buy foreign and domestic politicians and journalists like so many street corner whores.

There is also a $100 billion "Intelligence" empire.

That is why Oceania will always be at war with Eastasia, and why that war will never be won. Wars are not intended to be won, just to carry on for ever, making more and more money and providing more and more opportunities for graft for the people who matter. Weapons are not intended to work, just to make money.

That's why flying turkeys like the F22 and F35 are produced. Like the cargo planes full of pallets of shrink wrapped $100 bills that were flown into Iraq that promptly disappeared.

Even with the best will in the world, even if all the people involved were persons of outstanding integrity, it would probably simply be impossible to control this vast sprawling octopus of mega arms corporations and competing military and spook and administrative fiefdoms. So you get different players and actors who are a law unto themselves, beyond any real control, pursuing their own agendas with little regard for their own government and its policies, and often blatantly opposing it.

Obama and Trump tried to make limited agreements with Russia over what was happening on the ground in Syria. These agreements were deliberately sabotaged by people like Ashton Carter in less than 24 hours. With complete impunity. Sensitive negotiations with North Korea were deliberately sabotaged by Bolton.

A great deal of the economic and military power of America is dissipated in this way. The same destructive turf wars between competing agencies were a characteristic feature of the Third Reich. A model of waste, corruption, muddle and inefficiency.

But JFK was not shot down like a dog in broad daylight with millions of people watching because he challenged these interests. It was because he was trying to stop the nuclear weapons programme of the Zionist Regime. That was what cost him his life.

Richard Le Sarc ,

JFK also wanted to end the control of the US economy of the Federal Reserve, a coalition of private banks, nearly all controlled by Jewish interests. He really wanted to be hit, that fella.

paul ,

Yes, any goys who threaten Chosen interests would do well to steer clear of grassy knolls.
JFK, Bernadotte, Arafat, Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein, Chavez, Soleimani, it's all the same story.
Corbyn could well have gone the same way if rigging the election against him had failed.

Antonym ,

Nice example of Richard Le Sarc's non-sensical anti Israelism: Here he writes that Lower Manhattan is run by Jews, while scrolling one page up he is telling that the US (=Fairfax county) took over the Nazi terror apparatus. Some combination!

Both places are run mainly by ex-Christian/ secular Americans, with only money/power as their God.

Richard Le Sarc ,

Leading Zionassties like Jabotinsky ('We'll kill anyone who gets in our way')were outright fascists, an, in his case, admirers of Mussolini. Yitzhak Shamir (I have an image of Shamir in my mind when I read your contributions)offered Jewish 'fighters' to work with the Nazis. German Zionists actively worked with the Nazis to transfer Jews and German investment to Palestine. And the similarities hardly end there. The Zionassties and the German Nazis both see themselves as Herrenvolk. They both desire lebensraum for their people, at the expense of Slavic or Palestinian and other Arab untermenschen. Both hold International Law in open contempt. However, the Zionassties have far more political power than the German Nazis ever dreamed of. And the German Nazis never had nukes, or only very primitive ones.

Harry Stotle ,

"The secret to understanding US foreign policy is that THERE IS NO SECRET. Principally, one must come to the realization that the United States strives to dominate the world, for which end it is prepared to use any means necessary. Once one understands that, much of the apparent confusion, contradiction, and ambiguity surrounding Washington's policies fades away. To express this striving for dominance numerically, one can consider that since the end of World War II the United States has:
1) Endeavored to overthrow more than 50 foreign governments, most of which were democratically elected;
2) Grossly interfered in democratic elections in at least 30 countries;
3) Attempted to assassinate more than 50 foreign leaders;
4) Dropped bombs on the people of more than 30 countries;
5) Attempted to suppress a populist or nationalist movement in 20 countries."
― William Blum, America's Deadliest Export: Democracy – The Truth About US Foreign Policy and Everything Else

Brian Harry ,

The older I get, the more I believe that it was the USA/CIA?MIC who made Australia's Prime Minister, Harold Holt, "disappear" in heavy surf off a Victorian beach on 17th, December 1967. His body was never found. I think he was getting "cold feet" about the "American War" in Vietnam as it was getting going, and possibly wanted 'out'.
It was said that a Chinese submarine took him, but, I don't think submarines are designed to operate in relatively shallow water and heavy surf.
Another Australian PM(Gough Whitlam) was "removed" in a Coup in 1975 which was heavily influenced by the British and American secret services

Richard Le Sarc ,

And Kevin Rudd was offed by a gang of hard Right Labor rats, led by US 'protected source' (as outlined in the Wikileaks from Manning)Bill Shorten. Principal among Rudd's crimes was a lack of enthusiasm for the anti-China campaign (his successor, the Clinton-loving Julia Gillard, was very happy to join the Crusade)and changes to Australia's votes re. Occupied Palestine in the UN. And he expelled a MOSSAD agent from the Israeli 'Embassy', after the MOSSAD stole Australian passport identities for operations like the ritual killing of a Hamas operative in Dubai. They had done it before, and 'promised' not to do it again. Rudd was advised by our 'intelligence', stooges of the USA one and all, to do this, which I suspect was a set-up to mobilise the local Sabbat Goyim.

Binra ,

Who is in control is the idea of Notional Security within a world of 'Threat' that is pre-emptively struck before it can speak – and analysed and engineered in all it is, does or says, for assets, allies, ammunition and narrative reinforcement. (Possession and control as marketising and weaponising – as the drive rising from fear of pain of loss).

Insanity is given 'control' by the fear-threat of an unowned projected mind of intention. The devil is cast out in illusion that is then underpinned by shadow forces that operate 'negatively' as the illusion of victory in subjugation or eradication of evils – that simply change form within a limiting and limited narrative account. This short term override has become set as our long term default consciousness and given allegiance and identity as our source of self-protection.

Imagination is Creative – and fear-framed imagination is the attempt to control an 'evil' imagination CAST OUTSIDE a notional self exceptionalism.

There is a pattern here that CAN be recognised but that the invested identity under fear of pain of loss does NOT WANT to allow and so refuses and includes the revealing of heart-felt truth as THREAT to established or surviving order – hence its association and demonisation with fear, treachery, heresy and evil power that must be denied Voice at ANY cost – because 'survival' depends on NOT hearing the Voice for truth – when survival is equated with separated or split minds – set apart from the living and over them – while struggling within a hateful world that fails the judging imagination of a private self-gratification.

Fascination with evil and the 'dynamic' of conflict is the willing investment of identity in its frame – as if THIS TIME – a meaningful result will follow from insane premises. And THIS TIME is repeated over and over – through millennia.

The 'dynamic' of conflict is the device by which Peace or Wholeness of being is denied awareness. A polarised play of shifting mutually exclusive and contradictory 'meanings' as a 'doublethink' by which to COVER over lack of substance and SEEM to be in control. Reactive resistance and opposition provides 'proof' or reinforcement to the narrative frame of the control. Such is the manipulative power struggle for dominance over the other' subjection or loss.

A world of sock puppets enacts the script given them.
The living dead willingly give themselves to the specialness that excepts them from feared lack and loss of validity as the claim to moral outrage or alignment in compliance with its dictate.

The realm of a phishing ruse is that of a mis-taken identity. At this level a simple error can set in motion the most complex deceit. Its signature is in the pride or self-inflation that sets up the 'fall' – and the fool.

Problems are set in forms that persist through apparent resolving. To truly resolve, heal or undo a problem, we have to go upstream to the level in which it was set up as a conflict-block – perhaps as an unseen consequence of a false sense of possession or attempt to control. At some point there will be no other option BUT to yield to truth – because there is a limit to our tolerance for pain of conflict, protected and worshipped as power over Life, and sustained as a bubble reality of exclusive and inverted 'meanings' while Infinity is all about you.

If a mistaken identity is the 'stealing of the mind of the king, and the realm and all it oversees, then the 'Naked Emperor' story is speaking to your ongoing and persistent loss of Sovereign will to a fear of being exposed invalid, revealed as without substance, and utterly undone of not only your self-presentations – but your right to be. IN the story it was visiting courtiers who insinuated a sense of lack in the Emperor's thought to then offer the means to cover over it with special and impressive presentation – as a masking that demanded sacrifice of truth in order to seem to be real.

This inversion operates from lack-based thinking that splits or disconnects from currently felt and shared presence to seek OUTSIDE itself for what it's thought frames it in being denied or deprived of.

How does one deal with a dissociated madman massively armed and beset with fears, grievance, betrayal, and a deep sense of being cornered with no where else to go?
This is our human predicament at this time.
For every instance of its manifestation will be a fear-framed narrative of struggle in ancient hate.

Willingness to open to that we may be wrong, is the release of the assertion of belief as 'knowing' and the opportunity to re-evaluate the belief in the light of a current relational honesty. 'Acceptance of 'not knowing' is the condition in which an innocence of being spontaneously moves us to recognise and release error from its presenting as true.

A false idea of power is being played out as a world of the corruption of the true.

I met this on a random find for a search yesterday:

FIRST RAY:

Pure qualities:
Traditionally as the ray of power and will, yet from a deeper understanding the first ray represents the creative drive. This is the desire for self-expression, a willingness to experiment, even when the outcome of the experiment cannot be known ahead of time. Also a willingness to flow with life and learn from every experience. The first ray gives rise to the sense that everything matters, that life is exciting and that the individual truly can make a positive difference. The first ray is also the key to your willingness to work for raising the whole, instead of raising only yourself.

Perversions:
The perversion of the creative will is a fear of the unknown, which is expressed as an ability to abuse power in order to control one's circumstances, including other people. There is a fear of engaging in activities where the outcome cannot be predicted or guaranteed, which obviously stifles creativity. People with perverted first ray qualities are often engaged in a variety of power games with other people, all based on the desire to control the outcome. This is an attempt to quell the very life force itself, which always points towards self-transcendence, and instead protect the separate self and what it thinks it can own in this world. This can lead to a sense of ownership over other people, which is one of the major sources of conflict on this planet. In milder cases, people have a fear of being creative and a sense of powerlessness, feeling that nothing really matters and that an individual cannot make a difference -- thus, why even bother trying.

From
http://www.ascendedmasteranswers.com/teachings/676-an-overview-of-the-seven-rays
(I was checking a reminder on the seven primary qualities of being).
The idea of a pure intent and it corrupted or perverted distortion is real to me.

I also like the pages opening three para:

Everything you do is done with the energy of one or several of the spiritual rays. The entire material world is made from the seven rays.
• Every limitation you face is created out of a perversion of one or more of the seven spiritual rays.
• The ONLY way to transcend a given limitation is to free yourself from a): the belief that created the limitation and b): the low-frequency energy that has been generated.
• The ONLY way to transform the low-frequency energy that is created by perverting a given ray is to invoke the pure energy of that ray. Any ray is the anti-dote to the perverted energy from that ray.

George Cornell ,

Pompeo's epic statement "we lied we cheated we stole" will be be an American catchphrase or hashtag for the ages.
In most of the world it would be a confession. In the US it is a boast.

wardropper ,

And after a short while it will no longer be considered to be worth a second thought.
Came, saw, conquered . . . might as well add lied, cheated, stole
Morality is stone dead in Washington. Might as well face it, then perhaps a serious search for ways of bringing it back to life can begin.

Richard Le Sarc ,

Lying is now the lingua franca of all Western kakistocracies. Here in Australia, not long ago, to be caught lying ended a political career. Now it is ubiquitous, inescapable and attended by a smug arrogance that says, 'You can do NOTHING about my personal and group moral insanity. WE have the power, and we will use it ANY way we, and our Masters in Washington and Tel Aviv wish to!' It is best and most suicidally seen in this denialist regime's utter contempt for science and facts, as the country alternatively burns down, or is pummeled by giant hail-stones and violent tempests, or inundated by record, unprecedented, deluges.

George Cornell ,

Sad but true

Antonym ,

Hear, hear!

An expert on lying opens his mouth again, and again, and again, and again, ..

lundiel ,

Very interesting article.

Hugh O'Neill ,

"Former CIA Director Mike Pompeo was recorded at an unknown conference recently, but judging from the gross laughter of the audience it consists of wannabe CIA agents, where he admits that though West Points' cadet motto is "You will not lie, cheat, or steal, or tolerate those who do.", his training under the CIA was the very opposite, stating: I was the CIA Director. We lied, we cheated, we stole".

Cynthia. The "unknown conference" you refer to was an address to Texas A&M University, which had former CIA director Robert Gates as President. Another former CIA spook teaches espionage for wannabe spooks. These are scoundrel patriots, devoid of any moral compass, self awareness or intelligence. Academics need not apply but liars, thieves, cheats, torturers and assassins are welcome.

The CIA has a stranglehold upon the American psyche. The oft quoted Bill Casey "Our work will be complete when everything Americans believe is false" cannot bode well for the glory of the American Experiment. If fat mafiosi thugs like Pompeo and ghouls devoid of any humanity like Bolton, Clinton, Allbright run the show, then the question must be asked: how can such amoral stupidity hold the world to ransom? That the CIA were able to assassinate JFK, MLK, RFK in broad daylight, aided and abetted by the MSM, means their masks have long fallen and demons boldly walk among us.

"Who is in charge of the US Military?" Well it certainly isn't the president. There is no doubt that both the military and the CIA are controlled by unelected faceless money men, which presumably is the MIC that Eisenhower warned about (as did Teddy Roosevelt). Perhaps "skull and bones" is indeed a satanic cult?

Gall ,

Yes the National Security Act sent the nation to hell from purgatory. The most insidious and Orwellian bill ever passed until the oxymoronic "Patriot Act" that is.

George Cornell ,

The West Point oath should be modified to " we will not lie, cheat or steal . as long as we have the CIA, the FBI, the Secretary of State, Congress, the MSM, and the DNC to do it for us. We're not stoopid."

George Mc ,

The majority in the world seem to have the impression that this destructive fate totters back and forth at the whim of one man.

Yes this magical thinking is still pretty widespread – although it's difficult to figure out how many think this way. The MSM project this magical view themselves and thereby project the notion that everyone believes it. Nevertheless, going by the talk I have with others, a lot do swallow this. It's a bit like the world fundamentalist Bible believers live in.

Richard Le Sarc ,

The really salient feature of the murder of Soliemani was the sheer treachery of inviting him to Iraq on a peace mission, only to set him up for butchery. It has the Zionasties blood-soaked paw-prints all over it.

Mike Ellwood ,

Ironically, it's the sort of stunt the Nazi's might have pulled, back in their day.

Brian Harry ,

I have asked the same question on other platforms and no one seems to know the Answer. "Who are the CIA, and the Pentagon answerable to?" They seem to operate outside of the control of the American Government. The CIA seemingly involved in "False Flags" at any point around the globe, like the attack on the American Warship, in the gulf of Tonkin which was the excuse for "The American War, in Vietnam(as it is known to the Vietnamese).
And, of course, the attack on Iraq, because Sadam Hussein had Weapons of Mass Destruction, which, to this day have never been found(whilst Hussein was hung) after being found guilty of 'something' by an American "military Court'.
The Pentagon has "lost TRILLIONS of dollars which it cannot account for, and nobody is even investigating the matter, seemingly the American President cannot demand it.
And, of course, the Israeli Airforce attack on the USS Liberty in the Mediterranean Sea in 1967, killing and wounding over 200 sailors, brought NO response whatsoever from the American Military.
President Eisenhower warned the USA(and the World) about the Military Industrial Complex when he left office, and it has been completely ignored.
It seems that Mossad("By deception, we will make War") are heavily involved in the CIA(and the MIC of course), so, WHO is in control of the USA?

Antonym ,

Follow the money. The CIA – military have unlimited funds -> the FED can print unlimited paper dollars -> oil and gas are traded in US dollars only via the New York FED -> Sunni Arab royals own a lot of oil and gas reserves but need body guards -> Anglo- Arab oil dollar protection pact made long ago.
A similar deal was not possible with the USSR before or with Iran now. Canada is the US back garden as is Venezuela.

The Israelis hitched on after 1974 and their job is to be punch ball to distract from the above in exchange for US & hidden Arab royals support.

So who are in charge of the US? A few dozen characters in Fairfax county, lower Manhattan and Riyadh with inputs from Caribbean tax heavens.

Richard Le Sarc ,

Silly stuff. The Zionasties and Judeofascists have taken charge in the USA since they bank-rolled Truman, got away with the USS Liberty atrocity and took over US politics through straight bribery. US Congress critters don't throw themselves to the floor in ecstasies of subservience, as they do for Bibi, when any Saudi potentate addresses the Congress. Come to think of it-has any Saudi ever had that 'honour'? Come to think of it, we'd better go back to 1913 when a coalition of private banks, nearly all Jewish-controlled took over the US economy as the so-called Federal Reserve.

Antonym ,

Israeli sand vs Saudi/ Kuwaiti/ UAE oil & gas: easy choice for American predators.

Richard Le Sarc ,

You keep forgetting the 'Binyamins', Antsie. What would you rather control-an inevitably diminishing pool of hydrocarbons, or the Federal Reserve that creates US dollars, ex nihilo, by the trillions?

Richard Le Sarc ,

The CIA is the US ruling class, armed and in love with murder and destruction. The nature and extent of US global power is the pre-eminent cause of the global Holocaust that is about to consume humanity.

Gal ,

What Fletcher Prouty mentioned in the above article called "Capitalism's Invisible Army".

Norn ,

Here is a list of what the CIA include: The FIVE-EYES branches operate as CIA branches (I think this is undisputable). The FIVE-EYES is a White Christian Fundementalist organisation, and they share their intelligence (surveillance data) with the Israelis. Their Israelis set many actions on the FIVE-EYES agenda.
Murdoch's press operate as a CIA shopfront, and so many of (maybe all of them?) the NGOs scattered around third world countries. Evangelists fully support the CIA agenda. What is the hell South Korean Evangelists doing in Syria as the war rages on?
Many Jihadist groups as well as unhinged Muslim preachers/Imams serve the CIA agenda very very well and receive considerable support from both Saudi Arabia and the US. Remember, the first Jihadist posters were printed by the CIA?. Of course, now the posters would have their brainwashing digital equivalent. And of course, there are full-timers and part-timers.
That's what we know from just reading the news. There are definitely large amounts of unkowns to humble folks. Who else would you think, make part of the list? 50% of politicians in Western so-called Democracies?

Barovsky ,

Outside the government? Are you that naive? This is a fantasy that was promoted as long ago as the time of Iran-Contra; the idea that the CIA is composed of a bunch of 'loose cannons', operating beyond the control of the capitalist state. Whilst it is true that the US security state has different tactics from different elements within it, the objectives are unvarying, achieving hegemony. What differs is the route chosen to achieve that end. Of course, competence (or otherwise) is involved, they're not omnipotent and quite obviously have no long term vision. I think the correct word is HUBRIS that leads them astray. We saw this in Vietnam; we see it Afghanistan; we see it in Syria.

The US empire is no British Empire of yore. When the leaders of the two dominant Imperialist powers of the 19th century, the UK and the US met in the 1890s, they drew up a plan for the next 100 years, that between them they could conquer the world for capitalism using the UK's control of the oceans and the industrial might of the US economy.

Surely the fact that the US is now 'led' by an ignoramus reveals the bankrupt nature of late capitalism?

milosevic ,

WHO is in control of the USA?

here's an informative article about that question:

Joël van der Reijden -- Four Establishment Model of western politics

also have a look at the rest of that website; it's rather eye-opening.

Vierotchka ,

There it this article too:

https://worldbeyondwar.org/shadow-government-controls-america-notes/

Richard Le Sarc ,

The 'Deep State' IS the State. The surface pantomime is a puppet play, perhaps a shadow play, where the real rulers manipulate the political marionettes to do their bidding, NOT that of the 'useless eaters'. Under capitalism politics is the shadow cast on society by Big Business, as John Dewey observed.

MASTER OF UNIVE ,

Every single solitary individual Central Intelligence Agency Civil Servant of the United States of America does indeed hold allegiance to the flag & country I assure you. Not only do they hold allegiance for their country but they most assuredly hold allegiance to their government paycheques too. Without their paycheques they would likely constitute further troubles systemically.

Governments hire skilled personnel in Intel. They are by & large likely normal people that work for bad governance. The CIA is headed by Bloody Gina Haspel. Read Jane Mayer's _The Dark Side_ to get Haspel's role.

Haspel epitomizes allegiance to CIA secrecy.

She is a bot.

MOU

Brian Harry ,

"Every single solitary individual Central Intelligence Agency Civil Servant of the United States of America does indeed hold allegiance to the flag & country I assure you".

You sound very naïve. How can you be so sure. There's no real evidence to back up your assurance. How can the Pentagon be allowed to get away with "losing" TRILLIONS of dollars, and no one's head has rolled? It is a ludicrous situation, and there's no investigation .WTF!

milosevic ,

How can you be so sure.

personal experience?

Authoritative pronouncements of this sort are typical of the disinfo troll personae. Apparently, they're supposed to impress the audience, as evidence of direct knowledge and expertise, to preclude any further doubts or questions about the Official Story.

MASTER OF UNIVE ,

I'm an unemployed Social Assistance recipient and have not had a full time job since 1985. If I had two nickels to scrape together I would not even be on Internet, frankly.
If I worked Intel I would not be on Off-G at all.

I guess life is more interesting for you when you fantasize about losers like moi being Intel operatives but I can assure you that I have never worked government Intel for even one hour in my lifetime.

When I applied to work Intel upon graduation I was flatly denied & turned down back in the late 90s. Today, I would have to get false teeth to be presentable for employment and as a welfare recipient I cannot afford dental work at all.

Stop being an accusatory jerk off, Milosevic.

MOU

George Cornell ,

Well I for one am saddened to hear of your circumstances. Your mind certainly seems sharp.

MASTER OF UNIVE ,

I am a Marxist by circumstance. In CANADA Marxist proponents are marginalized by the state & corporatocracy to the extent of abject poverty.
My professors at university made sure I was blacklisted so that I would never get any money or employment because of my political ethos & cosmology. Instead of promoting my career advancement they chose to excommunicate my membership in the cartel.

Being excluded from the work world & employment by the establishment is the reason why the establishment was taken down in 08. Excluding myself from employment & career opportunity only sufficed to annihilate the USA, EU, & Neoliberalism.

The end game is Zero Sum.

MOU

John Thatcher ,

Or in MoUs case ,a common or garden nutter.

George Cornell ,

He sounds like he is down on his luck and you find it in your heart to call him crazy? Is this what they call subhuman empathy?

milosevic ,

yes, down on his luck, and controlling the world:

Being excluded from the work world & employment by the establishment is the reason why the establishment was taken down in 08. Excluding myself from employment & career opportunity only sufficed to annihilate the USA, EU, & Neoliberalism. -- MASTER OF UNIVE

common nutter, or disinfo persona?

MASTER OF UNIVE ,

I was raised by a Chartered Accountant Civil Servant. The Pentagon accountants were assassinated by their bosses in the Pentagon as a warning to any & all that want to forensically investigate their double sets of books. The GAO-General Accountability Office gets to do the forensic accounting from a distance now.

No investigation is forthcoming because Congress has not initiated discovery yet.

MOU

Fair dinkum ,

'Who's in charge of the US military?' C'mon Cynthia, you know the answer to that. It's the owners, shareholders, directors and CEOs of the MIC. Nothing or no one, will stand in their way.

MASTER OF UNIVE ,

The 08 Great Financial Crisis not only stood in the way of the USA MIC & NATO but it forced BREXIT, TARP, & end to the Fractional Reserve Banking empire of the Western world.

Empiricism destroyed the USA & Capitalism hands down to leave it insolvent, destitute, & poised for global bankruptcy as the third world banana republic it really is helmed by a tin pot dictator like Trump stumping for Deutsche Bank so that his loans don't get called.

MOU

[Feb 02, 2020] JFK tried to put CIA under contol and was killed. NO president after Kennedy tried to put that Genie back in the bottle

Feb 02, 2020 | off-guardian.org

Charlotte Russe ,

It should be noted, that in 1963 shortly following JFK's assassination Truman stated in the Washington Post regret about establishing the CIA: "I think it has become necessary to take another look at the purpose and operations of our Central Intelligence Agency .
For some time I have been disturbed by the way CIA has been diverted from its original assignment. It has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the Government. This has led to trouble and may have compounded our difficulties in several explosive areas."

Well, NO president after Kennedy tried to put that Genie back in the bottle. In fact, the Genie has taken total control and has mushroomed into thousands of bottles planted throughout the planet hatching multiple schemes designed to undermine and overthrow numerous nation-states.

What many don't know is that "decades after World War II, the C.I.A. and other United States agencies employed at least a thousand Nazis as Cold War spies and informants (this was known as Operation Paperclip) ..At the height of the Cold War in the 1950s, law enforcement and intelligence leaders like J. Edgar Hoover at the F.B.I. and Allen Dulles at the C.I.A. aggressively recruited onetime Nazis of all ranks as secret, anti-Soviet "assets," declassified records show. They believed the ex-Nazis' intelligence value against the Russians outweighed what one official called "moral lapses" in their service to the Third Reich. The CIA hired one former SS officer as a spy in the 1950s, for instance, even after concluding he was probably guilty of minor war crimes.
And in 1994, a lawyer with the C.I.A. pressured prosecutors to drop an investigation into an ex-spy outside Boston implicated in the Nazis' massacre of tens of thousands of Jews in Lithuania, according to a government official."

Is there no wonder, the CIA is so proficient at torture techniques, they learned from the very best–the Nazis.

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/27/us/in-cold-war-us-spy-agencies-used-1000-nazis.html

[Feb 02, 2020] The US calls for apartheid and ethnic cleansing in its primary ME protectorate

Feb 02, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

paul , Feb 2 2020 16:56 utc | 5

The US calls for apartheid and ethnic cleansing in its primary ME protectorate. Global powers supposedly concerned with uphholding international law smile knowingly and applaud gently. Yes it was always going to end this way. Mmmmmm. Might Makes Right. Mmmmmmm. That alone is international law. Mmmmmmm. More champagne? More vodka?

Walter , Feb 2 2020 17:01 utc | 7

Paul, I'm not so sure. Dynamite has a two state solution.

Might is not a static circumstance, and neither are the interests of the numerous "voters"- those with power.

The one thing that never stops, despite the pols' great effort, is Time.

I try to keep in mind that world affairs is perhaps similar to a multi-body problem with an insane Alice-in Wonderland mathematics.

[Feb 02, 2020] Kushner's "peace plan" is just another real estate scam

Feb 02, 2020 | turcopolier.typepad.com

"The Arab League rejected Trump's plan, saying in a communique it would not lead to a just peace deal and adding it will not cooperate with the United States to execute the plan.
The ministers affirmed Palestinian rights to create a future state based on the land captured and occupied by Israel in the 1967 Middle East war, with East Jerusalem as capital, the final communique said.
Israeli officials expressed hope Saturday that the League's rejection could bring the U.S. closer to green-lighting unilateral annexation of parts of the West Bank, in light of the fact that Jared Kushner opposed immediate steps toward annexation because he thought the Arab League might support the plan. " Haaretz

----------

Well, pilgrims, the truth is that nobody in the States who matters gives a damn about what happens to the Palestinians and it was always thus. Kushner's "peace plan" is just another real estate scam. pl

https://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/palestinians/arab-foreign-ministers-meet-in-cairo-to-discuss-trump-s-mideast-plan-1.8475812

Posted at 01:24 PM in Israel , Middle East , Palestine | Permalink | Comments (1) But..but...Jared said that he had read 25 books on the conflict!!!

King Salman called Abbas to reassure him of Saudi support on the agreed upon outline drawn up long ago. MbS thinks otherwise, and he is the one who really runs Saudi policy.

Posted by: Jane | 01 February 2020 at 02:50 PM

[Feb 02, 2020] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/30/opinion/middle-east-peace-plan.html

Feb 02, 2020 | www.nytimes.com

Opinion Every Time Palestinians Say 'No,' They Lose Things rarely go well for those who try to live history backward.
By Bret Stephens SimonEsposito 2 days ago ( Edited ) Functionally, this proposition makes no sense. The imbalance of power is so great that Palestinians couldn't stop any amount more of encroachment on the occupied territories. So why would the encroachment stop at this arbitrary point?

It's absurd to think that the settler movement is going to be stopped by the proposed four-year freeze. (I view that as a booby-trap planted by Likud - and they surely must be expecting a fair chance of defeat - to make the next government quickly use up its political capital fighting media-savvy settlers.) Max21c 3 days ago If these things are decided on the basis of "might makes right" then the position of the PRC to take sea-space in the South China Sea is acceptable to Washington and its supporters? Similar per a variety of other territorial disputes around the globe? Max21c 3 days ago ( Edited ) Prior UN Resolutions hold precedent until such times as the parties themselves agree upon a mutually agreed solution.

Modus Vivendi not Modus Dictatum! Max21c 3 days ago The United States Senate ratified the United Nations Charter on July 28, 1945. Article 6 of the Constitution of the United States maintains that "all treaties made...under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme law of the land..." The United States is a signatory to the UN Charter and it has passed the US Senate. There is no Treaty which transfers the Golan Heights to the State of Israel. There is no Treaty which transfers Palestinian lands to the State of Israel. The Constitution of the United States of America does not construct, create, convey, or confer the power or authority to the President of the United States of America to change the borders of other peoples, lands, or countries. An American President can say whatever they want as to policy. The United States is not necessarily bound by such situ per statements, proclamations, declarations, pronouncements, announcements, dictatum, et cetera. There is a well known and existing mechanism for the exchange of lands and territories between nation states via diplomacy, diplomatic negotiations, resolution of the dispute by treaty, or genuine negotiations & diplomacy and resolution in accordance with International law, et cetera. An American President holds exclusive authority over foreign policy and diplomacy with the exception of passage of a treaty by the US Senate. The existing mechanisms and ways of International Law and diplomacy are brought into American Constitutionality by way of the Supremacy Clause, thus, there exists a potential exclusive instance of an exclusion to a President's authority per differentiation between the "policy" of an Administration or pronouncements thereof and the "laws of the land." Thus one could well surmise that the United States is on an ongoing basis bound by the laws of the land rather than the pro tempore policy statements in this instance. An American President is neither a Global Sovereign nor King of the World. Border disputes generally remain the domain between the corresponding sovereigns, sovereign nations, or bordering parties. The role of the United States as a third party is generally limited to diplomacy. The United States can assist, facilitate, or provide guidance on the potential resolution of the dispute. The United States can propose solutions, fanciful or not, well meaning or not, realistic or reasonable or not, reasoned or not, genuine or not, bonne foi or not, yet it cannot impose such solutions unless the agreement of the parties be gained according to the fashion, manner, and mechanisms that are well know and existing under International law and well recognized within the realm of the community of nations and the diplomacy therein. zbarski 3 days ago ( Edited ) UN resolutions are not treaties. The former are generic opinions or recommendations, which have no legal effect, unless accepted by a sovereign.

Treaties, unlike UN resolutions, become laws of the land once ratified by a sovereign's parliament.

So, all your UN resolutions on Israel and fake Palestinians are pieces of toilet paper. Max21c 3 days ago It's none of Washington's business. They should let the parties themselves work out an agreement if they can. It's not up to Washingtonians to impose a solution.

If the parties cannot come to a settlement at this time then the status quo prior borders remain. Washington should abide by the existing regimen and provisions thereof until or if the parties themselves alter such by mutual agreement. The borders can only be changed by agreement between the parties.

There are long established, longstanding, and well know mechanisms for discussing and possibly resolving territorial disputes and those pathways and methods should be followed by both sides.
Respect 1 Reply Share link Copy Report zbarski 3 days ago ( Edited ) First, you come up with bogus definitions. Next, when I take apart those, you respond: it's none of Washington's business. LOL.

The fact stands: UN resolutions are generic/advisory/opinions. The have no legal significance, unless accepted by a sovereign. Last time I checked, Israel has not accepted any... .

Having said that, I agree with you that Washington should leave the issue to the parties. It is the US, which has been preventing Israel from resolving the territorial dispute. Any other country would have resolved the issue long time ago. That Israel can't or won't do it, is a crime against the Jews.

Think of this: what would the US do, if let's say, Quebec had separated from the rest of Canada and then started launching rockets at Vermont? Hint: Quebec would have been nuked...
Respect 2 Reply Share link Copy Report Max21c 3 days ago Washington should abide by International law and respect the existing UN resolution per lands/borders until such time as the parties themselves resolve the situ.

The US should not become a party to the dispute.
Respect 1 Reply Share link Copy Report GLA 3 days ago you are right. the United States is not a world government. Our government can make recommendations and offer support. that is it.

The United Nations is an organization formed to promote peace among nations. It is not a world government, it is not a legislative body, and it has no lawmaking authority.
Respect 2 Reply Share link Copy Report GLA 3 days ago Palestinian leadership should develop and present their own peace plan. That is their right. Palestinian leadership should hold town hall meetings in Gaza and the West Bank on their peace plan and give voice to every Palestinian. That is their right. Respect 2 Reply Share link Copy Report Mike_71 2 days ago But the Palestinian leaderships of both Hamas and Fatah have never done that, as allowing the average Palestinian to participate in nominating and electing their own candidates and publicly voicing their own opinions, particularly when they contradict those of the leadership, is no more tolerated in the Palestinian Territories, than it is in the Peoples' Republic of China. The leadership of the soon to be dissolved "Palestinian Authority" will be by "President for Life" Mahmoud Abbas, now in the 16th year of the four year term to which he was elected in 2005. Likewise, Ismael Haniyeh, Yoyo Sinwar and others in Hamas, have never faced a Palestinian electorate at the ballot box.
Respect 1 Reply Share link Copy Report Orville 3 days ago One thing Mr. Mackey leaves out is the US's treating the Golan Heights as Israeli territory, rather than occupied Syrian territory. Mike_71 2 days ago While International Law unequivocally condemns initiating wars of aggression for the purpose of acquiring territory, it is silent when the victim of that aggression retains land captured in a "defensive war of necessity." Thus, like the Soviet Union retaining land captured in the "Great Patriotic War" until 1991, Israel's retaining the Golan Heights, likewise captured in a "defensive war of necessity," the 1967 "Six Day War," does not violate International Law. As the victorious belligerent in a "defensive war of necessity," Israel may retain the Golan Heights until such time as possession is modified by treaty. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uti_possidetis
(Latin: As you possess, you may possess henceforth) Note that the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula, likewise captured by Israel in the "Six Day War," was returned to Egyptian sovereignty after an agreement was negotiated and after a withdrawal period, pursuant to the terms of the Egyptian-Israeli peace agreement. As in the instance of the Egyptian Sinai, the Golan Heights could be returned to Syria, were the Syrians willing to negotiate a peace agreement with Israel.
Respect 1 Reply Share link Copy Report xochtl 3 days ago

Settler colonialism, white supremacy, and the "special relationship" between the U.S. and Israel 10 March 2015
Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions/From our Staff and Members/Voices of JVP February 24, 2015 talk by JVP Deputy Director Cecilie Surasky at Portland State University from Environmental Destruction and the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement: a panel on international resistance

1. The 'special relationship' between Israel and the United States is rooted in our common national narratives and founding mythology. 2. Settler colonialism and white supremacy is the right, holistic frame with which to understand Israel and Palestine, as well as the U.S. -- it helps us understand what we're really struggling against, and holds us accountable to ways we may inadvertently be serving the status quo. 3. If the basis of the special relationship is a common narrative of 'manifest destiny', and the feelings of superiority over others that it engenders, then to resist we must counter that narrative. One question we often ask ourselves is why Americans so easily accept the dominant Israeli narrative without question, and I think the answer is obvious. We have literally been primed, for generations, by our own national narrative ttler colonialism, white supremacy, and the "special relationship" between the U.S. and Israel We all are well versed with language about the "special relationship" between Israel and the United States. And in fact, it is real. Over time, no other country in the world has been the recipient of more economic and military aid from the U.S., or from any other country for that matter. Furthermore, many of us hold a power analysis which says that the key to ending Israel's ongoing occupation and oppression of Palestinians is ending that unconditional special relationship -- so understanding the roots of this relationship is not idle curiosity. It's essential if we are to ever achieve a just and durable peace, for both peoples. There are many reasons for this so-called special relationship, and it has evolved over time, but I think the foundational aspects of it relate to remarkably similar national narratives which shape, in an ongoing way, how we see and understand ourselves and our actions as representatives of a collective national identity -- how we justify killing, extraction, land theft, and so on, in transcendent moral terms. We have mythical national narratives of two settler colonial peoples, who both believe that we have a divine mandate, to settle a so-called empty or savage land, and make it into a kind of heaven on earth. Ethnic cleansing, even genocide -- these are all divinely justified. Israel is to be a light unto nations. What would become the United States, a kind of heaven on earth. Both peoples believe ourselves to be somehow specially chosen by God. As Donald E. Pease, Dartmouth literary critic wrote about this land, in The New American Exceptionalism: "Virgin Land" depopulated the landscape in the imaginary register so that it might be perceived as unoccupied territory in actuality. The metaphor turned the landscape into a blank page, understood to be the ideal surface onto which to inscribe the history of the nation's Manifest Destiny". "Virgin Land narratives placed the movement of the national people across the continent in opposition to the savagery attributed to the wilderness as well as the native peoples who figured as indistinguishable from the wilderness, and, later, it fostered an understanding of the campaign of Indian removal as nature's beneficent choice of the Anglo-American settlers over the native inhabitants for its cultivation " Sounds familiar doesn't it? The Zionist version is the famous slogan -- a Land with No People for a People with No Land. And Israel's "miraculous" military victories have always been seen as signs of God the adjudicator's hand. Of course, that notion of heaven on earth, or A Light Unto Nations, is predicated on a system of racial and ethnic superiority -- who gets to be human and "civilized", and who is subhuman. Who exists, and who is invisible or must be disappeared. Who can claim the land, and who has no rights to it. And the fundamental root of all that we like to call the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is this essential fact -- it was a land with people. And specifically, the wrong people who by definition could not be part of an ethnic exclusivist state. Remember that the original violence of the Nakba, the ethnic cleansing of the land of Palestinians, continues on a daily basis to this day. The process of colonization never stopped. Although today we call them "facts on the ground", and Palestinians are talked about, not as equal human beings with the same hopes aspirations and rights to freedom, but rather as a "demographic threat."

European Colonialism and White Supremacy What makes this issue so complex and deeply challenging is that early European Zionists, who first started coming to Palestine in the late 1800s, had themselves suffered from a profoundly long history of fierce Christian European anti-Jewish oppression -- forced conversions, ghettoes, pogroms, institutional repression and discrimination and so on, which as we know, culminated in the horrific genocide during World War II, the Holocaust or Shoah. They believed the only solution to this history was for Jews to have a state of their own. But while all genocides and acts of violence have their unique features, and they must be studied and understood, I believe it is critical to situate the genocide of Jews, in a broader context -- and not as an exceptional, metaphysically unique event. Some 6 million Jews died, but another 5 million people were also targeted for annihilation because they were considered less than human, including the Roma people, gays, Poles, Ukrainians and so on, totaling 11 million. In Poland alone, Nazis murdered 3 million ethnic Poles and 3 million Polish Jews. Had they not been stopped, those numbers would have been infinitely higher in their march to the East. Further, to state the obvious, the Holocaust did not mark the sudden and inexplicable birth of the white European capacity to commit genocide. No one knows this better than the indigenous people of this continent, or the descendants of enslaved Africans. Or the people of the Congo, where 10 million died under the rule of King Leopold of Belgium. I could go on. I could also go on about U.S. Empire. In Europe, while the specifics looked different, one could be Jewish or a colonized subject and be called an insect, vermin, an animal -- subhuman. In other words, it is important that we situate what is happening in Israel and Palestine today, and the work we must do in the US for justice, as part of a lengthy historical cascade of impacts rooted in European colonialism, white racism, US Empire, anti-Muslim and anti-Jewish oppression, corporate greed and so on. I'm underscoring this because similarly, even though we understand that historic Palestine was colonized by the British, there is a tendency to also remove the story of Israel and Palestine from broader historical contexts and the sweep of history and to see it as somehow utterly unique, beyond time, and as saying something essential about Jews and the Arab world especially. The extreme and bigoted versions of this essentializing view is: -- you either believe that the only story that matters is that the world and especially Muslims hate Jews and always will, that the hatred of Jews is an essential part of humanity -- or you believe that Jews are exceptionally powerful and devious, and have managed to manipulate an otherwise beneficent and inherently just and reasonable U.S. foreign policy establishment into doing wrong by the Palestinians. Talk about divide and conquer. If we believe either of these stories, all of us who are natural allies in the struggle against corporate greed, the destruction of our world, systemic racism and settler colonialism and so on -- we remain divided from each other. We literally can't build a unified and strong movement. We create a circular firing range, and we unwittingly become the agents of that which we should be fighting against. Which is why understanding our struggles as connected -- which is what's happening on campuses throughout the U.S. and world today -- is so unbelievably powerful, and threatening. I have seen these views manifest in the movement for Palestinian liberation: sometimes people chant "2-4-6-8 Israel is a racist state", or decry the disappearance 400 Palestinian villages when Israel was created, without even a hint of irony or self-reflection that one is literally standing on land built on slavery and the (still happening) genocide of indigenous peoples. In some cases, we have seen Israeli human rights advocates try to emphasize the growth of Israeli racism by comparing it unfavorably to racism here, where presumably, they suggest we have mostly won the battle. All of that said, what is also absolutely clear is that Early Zionist leaders were simultaneously both the victims of, and willing agents of white supremacist colonialism. In fact, they made their case quite explicitly to British colonizers who they knew did not want Jews at home but who did want to maintain colonial designs on the Middle East. As the Israeli analyst Tom Segev reports in One Palestine Complete: "The Jewish state in Palestine, Theodor Herzl wrote, would be Europe's bulwark against Asia. "We can be the vanguard of culture against barbarianism." And about early Zionist leader and writer Max Nordau: "..Max Nordau believed the Jews would not lose their European culture in Palestine and adopt Asia's inferior culture, just as the British had not become Indians in America, Hottentots in Africa, or Papuans in Australia. "We will endeavor to do in the Near East what the English did in India. It is our intention to come to Palestine as the representatives of culture and to take the moral borders of Europe to the Euphrates River." Early Zionist leaders actually appealed to the anti-Jewish hatred of European colonizers, making the case that helping to create a Jewish state elsewhere was a win-win because it would help them get rid of the Jews. Theodore Herzl wrote, "the anti-Semites will become our most dependable friends, the anti-Semitic countries our allies" And they internalized the same white supremacist hierarchy which had been used against them. The "new Jew" was blond, blue eyed, healthy and muscular, vs. the shtetl Jew who was small, dark, hunched over, religious, an embarrassment. I want to recognize there is sensitivity about even raising this issue- but this has nothing to do with Jews specifically and everything to do with human beings. Virtually every colonized or oppressed group internalizes the eyes, in some way, of their oppressors, as Frantz Fanon wrote about so eloquently. Women can be the agents of the patriarchy, blacks can internalize white supremacy, LGBT people can internalize transphobia and homo-phobia. In a sense, we're all colonized in some way. This shouldn't be a controversial observation, it's just fact about what it means to be human. The fact remains that many early European Zionist leaders' disdain for the local Arab populations was only matched by their disdain for other Jews from the Middle East. The founder of Zionist Revisionism, precursor to Likud, Zev Jabotinsky wrote: "We Jews have nothing in common with what is called the 'Orient,' thank God. To the extent that our uneducated masses have ancient spiritual traditions and laws that call the Orient, they must be weaned away from them, and this is in fact what we are doing in every decent school, what life itself is doing with great success. We are going in Palestine, first for our national convenience, [second] to sweep out thoroughly all traces of the 'Oriental soul.' As for the [Palestinians] Arabs in Palestine, what they do is their business; but if we can do them a favor, it is to help them liberate themselves from the Orient.'" (One Palestine Complete, Tom Segev) And the effort was "successful". As Arab Jewish scholar Ella Shohat has written, "in a generation or two, millennia of rooted Oriental civilization, unified even in its diversity," had been wiped out. Jews from Arab countries were forced to choose between being either Arab or Jewish, but they could not be both. ( Ella Shohat, "Sephardim in Israel: Zionism from the Standpoint of its Jewish Victims," Social Text, No.19/20 (1988)) Of course those Jews who survived had the right to their homes after they were ripped from their homes, and their world literally obliterated -- but it wasn't Palestinians or the Arab world that owed them reparations or a homeland. It was Europe. But thanks to settler colonialism, it has been Palestinians who have been forced to pay the price ever since.
The Manipulation of Jewish Trauma I can't underscore enough the extent to which the profound Jewish trauma over genocide and oppression has been manipulated and deliberately retriggered over and over by people and institutions who have instrumentalized Jewish suffering to justify Israeli expansionism and repression. Everyone from Abraham Foxman and the Anti-Defamation League to the Simon Wiesenthal Center perform this role effectively through a steady-drip of "the world hates us" iconography, statements, and Boy-Cries-Wolf overwrought hysteria, which of course cheapens the charge of anti-Semitism. I grew up with a tante who would literally shake with rage when she described her childhood in Poland. My father didn't talk about his family story, so as kids we didn't understand. But later we learned the horror stories, realized it was our own extended families in those pictures of pogroms and prisoner camps, and we internalized the sense of perpetual fear. After the war, Jews did not talk about the Holocaust, there was much shame. But it eventually became our central access to our identity, thanks in no small part to efforts to give the young nation of Israel a perpetual free pass. And in the process, it was given a kind of mystical exceptionalism. Rather than teaching us lessons about systems of oppression, it became the horror to end all horrors, which cast a shadow over history's other horrors. Many children would be taught to ask, not Why throughout history groups of people hated other groups? or Why do governments oppress people? We were taught to ask instead, "Why does everyone hate the Jews? " Further, from a U.S. Empire perspective, it makes sense that the Shoah is commemorated in a massive museum on the Mall in DC, while there is still no national slavery museum or indigenous genocide museum. Better to point the finger elsewhere, while shoring up our sense of collective superiority as heroic Americans. To this day, Jews and our aspirations for freedom have been unwittingly made a tool of Empire- the struggle against anti-Jewish hatred has been coopted into the effort to demonize the Arab and Muslim world in order to justify US wars and intervention- for profit. And of course, to justify Israeli expansionism. When Netanyahu encourages Danish or French Jews to mass migrate to Israel -- he's cynically exploiting real fear and trauma to push his expansionist agenda -- new immigrants will be sent to settlements, not inside 67 borders. Similarly, classic anti-Semitism itself is a tool of Empire– Jews are scapegoated as a 'secret cabal' that controls the world's finances, conveniently distracting potential resistance movements from the actual corporate, government and military sources of global economic exploitation and control. In the end, if we don't fight this, we all lose. Rather than joining together to resist power, we instead end up fighting each other over manufactured hatreds and bigotries. Narrative If the root of this special relationship is not as much AIPAC and money, as much as it is our national narrative and the feelings it engenders -- and an unquestioning belief that Israel has an infinite right to expand onto other people's land, then it is narrative that holds unconditional support in place, and our resistance must also be at the level of narrative. So let's start with ourselves. All of us in this movement have to decolonize our minds -- and it is a constant process, we stumble all the time -- because we are fighting the very air we breathe. But here is our work: We must insist that Israel does not get a free pass, and nor do I as a white Jew, or anyone else, only because of a personal or collective history of oppression. We all have to be held accountable to the power we hold when we hold it, like anyone else, like any other country. Because it is not only possible but likely that many of us will hold multiple positions at one time- marginalized in some ways and possessing power and privilege in others. We have to be mindful of Orientialism on the left: just as the left has projected on, fetishized, related transactionally to many native peoples, it happens in this movement. There is a tendency to want all Palestinians to either be helpless grandmothers waiting for a Great White Hope (heroic in the streets activists) -- or Che Guevera. Well , Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank are also sports fans, software developers, and capitalists. Freedom is freedom. The Palestinian struggle is not simply an excuse for us to reflect on how moral the Jewish or Christian or leftist or (fill in the blank) people are. It is not the surface on which we write our own story, or a mirror that interests us only because it shows us our own reflection. We have to simply be allies who love, yes love, our Palestinian friends and colleagues enough to simply say: Tell me how I can support you? Knowing, also, with humility, that in the past, present or future–we too need support in our struggles. And for those of us given a platform because we are "safe" because we are white or Jewish, for example, we have to know when to shut up, and cede the platform to our Palestinian friends. Most important, rather than framing the story of Palestinian struggle for freedom and justice in a historical and political vacuum -- as many do -- and as a unique and exceptional story, for example, about a reasonable US foreign policy hijacked by an all-powerful Jewish lobby, we should understand it as part of a much longer unfolding of Christian European Colonialism, greed, and white supremacy -- that continues to this day and operates everywhere. Narrative's power is not just about knowing facts, it is a means to exert psychological control, and to dampen the will to resist. Palestinian American scholar Steven Salaita wrote in The Holy Land in Transit, Colonialism and the Quest for Canaan: Ethnic cleansing is the removal of humans in order that narratives will disappear .a blinding of the national imagination so colonial history will be removed along with the dispossessed. It is only through ethnic cleansing that the average American can accept without nagging guilt the history of her nation, which is known to all but decontextualized from its present " The same is true for the Jewish settler, living in a home that once belonged to a Palestinian family. Salaita goes on: "It is a mistake to conceptualize ethnic cleansing simply as a physical act. It's importance lies in its psychological power." Which is why in the US, we are waging this struggle at the level of narrative. And why universities are on the very front line of this battle. As even Zev Jabotinsky wrote about years ago, this is war of attrition. Boycott Divestment Sanctions (BDS) campaigns create a moral crisis, and replace either a conspiracy of total silence, or the monologue of the Israeli narrative masquerading as a dialogue -- and it places the Palestinian story right where it belongs -- up front. One of the beautiful elements of the BDS movement is the way that is has challenged the engineered invisibility of the Palestinian narrative and analysis -- divestment and boycott votes demand real communication, revealing that what often passes for dialogue, is monologue. We have to reprogram our neural pathways -- through social media, through BDS campaigns, through reinterpreting, re-covering and re-writing our own religious and cultural language. Campuses are the front line, but so are artists and religious practitioners and community-builders. And we must rewrite our own language. We began with a slogan -- a land with no people for a people with no land. But now I'll leave with a new slogan to help us tell a new story -- a rewriting we have embraced in my community of Jews -- all of us unwavering in our belief that never again means never again for all people, unwavering in our pursuit of justice and freedom unwavering in our belief that Jewish liberation and Palestinian liberation are not opposed, but intertwined That new slogan is: All people are chosen, All land is holy. NationalismSettler-Colonialism Jewish Voice for Peace is a national member-driven organization dedicated to a U.S. foreign policy based on peace, human rights, and respect for international law.

Respect 3 Reply Share link Copy Report Wnt 3 days ago I still would like to see an actual graph: Palestinian land area as a function of time, number of Palestinians as a function of time. We should be able to extrapolate not if but when a final solution to the crisis becomes inevitable.
Respect 2 Reply Share link Copy Report lchabin 3 days ago Stop whining. The Palestinians haven't accepted any offers of peace. They could have had their own state a long time ago. Wake up folks; a number of Arab states seem just fine with this peace proposal. Israel isn't going anywhere, and they get it.

@Richard Pierce - so much bile and ignorance. Yes, Israel is a democracy, and Iran not a democracy. It takes a lot of hate and/or ignorance not to understand that. Seeing a few of your posts, my money is on hate. Respect 3 Reply Share link Copy Report zbarski 3 days ago

It takes a lot of hate and/or ignorance not to understand that
It also takes a few missing chromosomes.
Respect 2 Reply Share link Copy Report Richard_Pearce 3 days ago No, just takes being old enough to remember when folks used your sort of 'reasoning' to call the White State in South Africa an 'island of civilisation amongst savages', the Shah the 'beloved leader' of Iran, Saddam Hussein AND Osama bin Laden good guys, Nelson Mandela a radical terrorist, and spent a few years dealing with guys who's survival often came down to their ability to lie to others convincingly, and who's ability to look in the mirror and see something they didn't hate came down to their ability to reject reality even more fervently than supporters of the Israeli regime have to, street addicts.
That results in a finely honed male cow patty detector, as well as robust immunity to bullying and peer pressure.

Respect 4 Reply Share link Copy Report Richard_Pearce 4 days ago If you present the American population a choice between the 'one state solution' (one country 'between the river and the sea' with equal rights for all) and the 'two state solution' (which requires voiding the Geneva Conventions, the UN charter, close to a dozen human rights laws, barring the ICC and ICJ from exerting jurisdiction, and the rewriting of the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid and 2002 Rome Statute of the ICC) they're about equally split.
Guess what happens if you tell them the truth, that the 'two state solution' is a fraud that will never be accepted and therefore is not an option.
If you guessed that the vast majority of the American population chooses to support the same solution that the 'terrorist' Hamas and the 'genocidal' Iranian government support.

Respect 2 Reply Share link Copy Report Mike_71 2 days ago If you prefer the "one state solution" with equal rights for all citizens living between the river and the sea, then Israel has been that "single state" since June 10, 1967, when it prevailed in a "defensive war of necessity" against Palestinian and Arab invaders. Since that time, the Palestinians have rejected all Israeli offers for negotiating for peace and a state of their own, which Palestinians rejected in 1967, 2000, 2008 and more recently. There is no "Apartheid," or "ethnic cleansing" in Israel, despite Palestinian efforts to impose them there. In an "Orwellian Inversion (war is peace, poverty is plenty and ignorance is strength)," Palestinians seek to impose a 20% minority "Arab Supremacist Apartheid Regime," over a 75 % Israeli Jewish majority population. How that would differ from the former "Apartheid South Africa," once ruled by a 10% minority "White Supremacist Apartheid Regime" over a 90% Black and Mixed Race African majority, they refuse to explain, or justify. Just as South Africans are entitled to democratic and majority rule in their nation, Israelis are entitled to those same rights in theirs.

Have you ever studied the founding documents of both the P.L.O. and Hamas? Both call for the "ethic cleansing"of Jews from their ancestral homeland in which they were indigenous for over 3,000 years. Read them here:

The P.L.O Charter: https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/plocov.asp

The Hamas Covenant: https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/hamas.asp

In rejecting the two state solution, as provided under UNGAR 181 in 1947 and numerous Israeli offers since, the Palestinians have forfeited all rights to statehood, thus by default making Israel the "one state" solution, with equal rights for all Israeli citizens, Arabs, Christians, Druze and Jews. Preferring to remaining stateless to having a state of their own, Palestinians have sealed their fate. There is no "two state" solution, as Palestinians never wanted it.

Palestinian "rejectionists" seek to accomplish by propaganda that which they are unable to achieve through war and terrorism. The Palestinians violated the 1949 Geneva Conventions during the "Second Intifada" in deliberately targeting and killing over 1,000 Israeli civilians in bus and cafe bombings in acts defined as "War Crimes, " violating the human rights of Israeli citizens. The I.C.C has no jurisdiction, as Israel was never a party to the Rome Statute creating the Court, and "Palestine" is not a "state," as required to become a signatory to the Rome Statute. Having failed in all other means, including war and terrorism, Palestinians are grasping at straws to try to achieve statehood, which they can only obtain through direct negotiation with Israel. The conflict will continue until such time as Palestinians adopt the requirements of UNSCR 242 and 338, which require:

"Termination of all claims or states of belligerency and respect for and acknowledgement of the sovereignty, territorial integrity, and political independence of every state in the area and the right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries free from fear or acts of force."

The Palestinian demand for a "one state" solution has backfired on them, making Israel the "one state" solution, while making themselves stateless, impoverished and isolated in a rapidly changing Middle-East.
Respect 1 Reply Share link Copy Report Richard_Pearce 4 days ago If the propasals the US has put forward are 'peace plans', then this https://c1.staticflickr.com/1/79/278375333_dfc587574c.jpg is brain surgery. Dysnomia 4 days ago The U.S. itself is a settler-colonial state that only exists because of its genocide of Native Americans. U.S. victory over the native population, and U.S. control from the Atlantic to the Pacific, is now a fait accompli, and that's exactly what they want for Israel. Max21c 4 days ago ( Edited )

Lebensraum. Definition: the territory that a state or nation believes is needed for its natural development. The German concept of Lebensraum comprises policies and practices of settler colonialism which proliferated in Germany from the 1890s to the 1940s.
Strikingly ironic that they seeks lands in the East!
Irredentism: a policy of advocating the restoration to a country of any territory formerly belonging to it.
Both sides are wrong. Both sides yield to or harbor irredentist notions, practices, policies, factions, groups, and beliefs. Some Israelis want to practice irredentist beliefs and restore the lands of ancient Israel or its Kingdoms. Other Israelis want to harken back to their heyday when they had freshly captured Gaza and the West Bank and return to or retain some form of the status quo that prevailed from winning battles. There are various other groups that want some degree or flavor of irredentism. Some Palestinians want the Israelis gone entirely and an end to the Israeli state. Some want a return to earlier borders. The "right of return" is in itself a form of irredentism as those seeking are essentially seeking political power and control within Israel.
Trump plan is dead. It's DOA DEAD. It's double DOA dead! Hopefully, it won't lead to too many deaths or be the cause of future warfare or wars.
There are alternatives. There are alternate paths. Peace can be built in the region. Just not this way and likely not now. There are good and better pathways that can at some point be explored in the search for peace! mgr 4 days ago Sounds not unlike the way the neocons of the Bush admin plunged headlong and chest out into the briar patch, er, Iraq, where grateful citizens waited eagerly to throw flowers on these conquering heroes as they marched on to Iran. Castles made of sand... Toots 4 days ago OK, we know how the Palestinians will feel about this, but what cards do they hold? 4 days ago The only card the Palestinians hold is resistance.

Maybe it's time for the PLO to withdraw from the Oslo Accords, and the PA to be dissolved. Everyone knows that the PA/Fatah is a collaborationist organization. The illusion of Palestinian sovereignty in PA-"controlled" areas is too useful to Israel. It lets them pretend they don't really exercise full control from the river to the sea and deny they're running an apartheid system. Let there be no illusions.
Respect 4 Reply Share link Copy Report Richard_Pearce 4 days ago The same one that the Bantus held.
It's only one card, undervalued, dismissed, at least when genuine (The forgeries, ironically, are over valued and loudly proclaimed, but their fake nature causes them to turn to dust) but durable enough to wear all the others to dust over time.

Respect 2 Reply Share link Copy Report REALITYCHECK 4 days ago They did the experiment on giving land back to Islamists in Gaza and Lebanon. They wont be making that mistake again. Respect 3 Reply Share link Copy Report TheManj 4 days ago Spare us your tired lies. Respect 3 Reply Share link Copy Report Krasny 4 days ago Women and homosexuals are protected in Israel...if you care about them.
Respect 1 Reply Share link Copy Report PerfunctoryUsername 4 days ago Pfft. Just yell "SQUIRREL" and save everyone some time. Respect 1 Reply Share link Copy Report Art 4 days ago

They did the experiment on giving land back to Islamists in Gaza and Lebanon.
Gaza? The world's largest open-air prison?! HA! Some "give back," with thousands of innocents assassinated while peacefully protesting their captivity.

You condone murder and assassination.
Respect 5 Reply Share link Copy Report REALITYCHECK 4 days ago Progs and other useful idiots, you are going to have to learn to live with Islamist control of only 99.8% of the land area of the Middle East and 51 Islamic Apartheid nations. Need a hankey? Respect 3 Reply Share link Copy Report TheManj 4 days ago 'Hankey' is the Hebrew spelling, I suppose. Respect 1 Reply Share link Copy Report Orville 3 days ago Fortunately, the Islamists only control Saudi Arabia, portions of Libya, chunks of Afghanistan and Pakistan, various segments of Africa, and (thanks to Syria, Iran, and Russia) a declining amount of Syria. Respect 2 Reply Share link Copy Report ljg500 4 days ago Disgusting. It is tragic that a nation forged under the horrific tragedy of the Holocaust, should now bow to virulent racism- obliterating its legitimacy in exchange for puerile and cynical politics. Respect 7 Reply Share link Copy Report Alex 3 days ago NOW?? LEGITIMACY??

It's time to wake up and realize that Zionism has always been an extremely racist, supremacist, violent form of European settler-colonialism which is exactly the reason this creation never had any legitimacy at all.

The Zionist plans for the violent colonisation and ethnical cleansing of Palestine from it's native population have been made decades before Hitler even appeared on the political stage. Actually the reason that Zionists and Nazis cooperated so well, were their common believe that members of a self-declared master race are free to steal and murder sub-humans.

Respect 1 Reply Share link Copy Report Mike_71 2 days ago Zionism is the National Liberation Movement of the Jewish people. Like the Vietnamese National Liberation Front, it has had to fight racist, colonialist, supremacist, bigoted and Imperialist forces to win national independence. In the pre-state periods of their respective national struggles, in 1946 David Ben Gurion and Ho Chi Minh met in Paris, where the two founders of their respective nations developed an affinity, with Ho offering Ben Gurion a Jewish homeland in Vietnam. Ben Gurion declined Ho's offer, as the indigenous Jewish homeland was in the Middle-East, not Vietnam. In 1975, Vietnam finally won its national struggle and since a border clash with China in 1979, Vietnam has not engaged in war since. For Israel, however, the "armed struggle" continues!

Don't believe this historic meeting of two revolutionary founders? Google Israeli-Vietnamese relations and learn about the Gallil (assault rifle) factory Israel built in Vietnam and negotiations for joint Israeli-Vietnamese army training and operations. You will be amazed and educated!
Respect 1 Reply Share link Copy Report CraigPurcell 4 days ago Do I detect foreign influence (like Trump) in the campaign against Sanders ? With Facebook ads and all the rest. No doubt business would pay many to get rid of Sanders. Respect 1 Reply Share link Copy Report SimonEsposito 4 days ago One point that maybe isn't being brought out adequately is that this deal won't satisfy Jewish nationalists either. This is one of those situations where everything you need to assess the situation is obvious from just one wide-scale map. Nationalists will still see this as a territorial threat at the heart of Israel, and the use of settlements as an unofficial security strategy will continue.

And, in any case, the allocated Palestinian territories are not just broken into dozens of islands, they will be subject to years of being negotiated down even further. No-one will stop the settler movement continuing to encroach in the meantime, especially because the territories shown have no stable logic or legal viability to them. (The last remotely viable territorial unit is 1967.)

So it's actually a plan to formalize and stabilize the gains made so far in the making of one single territorial state in Palestine. Rinse and repeat.

I like that Elizabeth Warren is emphatically supporting the legitimate status quo - for the purposes of the two-state solution - of international law and traditional US policy. It should not be for outsiders to impose the one-state solution, which is what Western far-right politicians know they are doing. This is opening Israel-Palestine up to the hazards of historic struggle, and the potential for great suffering, to decide the character of its one state. What they are unleashing is no more likely to end in ethno-religious apartheid (as some on the far right explicitly want) than it is in an inclusive constitutional democracy.

For all practical purposes, by this plan, there will soon be two equal and coterminous sovereignties in the lands from the Jordan River to the sea (including Gaza and Golan). No involuntary shrinking of Palestinian sovereignty beyond 1967 borders has moral force, and in fact the unilateral abrogation of 1967 leaves the entire territory constitutionally up for grabs.

Progressive politics in the US can at least start articulating the characteristics of a state that deserves a continuing security guarantee from the US, or at least continuing aid. For me it's common rights for all the inhabitants of Israel-Palestine, under a constitution built on the spirit of Israel's declaration of independence, based on a belief that the best friends the Jews and non-Jews of Palestine could ever have in the world are each other.
Respect 2 Reply Share link Copy Report SimonEsposito 4 days ago One of the most difficult problems in a dignified constitutional settlement, where international help would be needed (for Jordan and Lebanon as well as Israel-Palestine) - and where international aid needs to be directed - is to agree on some form of negotiated-down right of return, with just compensation. The Kushner-Netanyahu plan appears to simply cancel the right altogether, unilaterally. Respect 2 Reply Share link Copy Report Art 4 days ago

What they are unleashing is no more likely to end in ethno-religious apartheid...
I hate to have to break it to you but unfortunately Israel is already an Apartheid state.
Respect 4 Reply Share link Copy Report SimonEsposito 2 days ago I guess, to be really precise about it, what it is now is "proto-apartheid". It's a piecemeal collection of segregationist measures, failures to administer existing law justly, and the perverse outcomes of repeated decisions by the US to veto efforts to uphold the 1967 "reference standard". The Kushner-Netanyahu plan is a scheme to break 1967 forever, legitimize settlements, and create a permanent apartheid structure embedded in international law.

The only way two states can work is on the basis of 1967. And actually I don't see why a Palestine on pre-1967 borders couldn't include a large Jewish minority, in a mirror image of Israel. So when Elizabeth Warren re-affirmed the "reference standard" without equivocation, there's an subtle radicalism there. The settler movement can't finally extinguish 1967, as a theoretical option at least, unless it forms a Jewish majority in the occupied territories.

To be generous to the administrations that used the veto, I think it was originally intended to protect the ability of the Zionist left to win the case for two states in friendship. The veto protection should really have been ended before 2000. On the other hand, it was always likely that the Israeli far right would win the political contest.

So, however this works out, the best anyone can do is allow Israel-Palestine's future to be the result of self-determination by its inhabitants. That doesn't exclude boycotts and sanctions, though, or the suspension of various forms of aid, because that is the sovereign decision of other polities about who is "fit and proper" to deal with. (Conciliation within the South African system was still fundamentally self determined, despite the steady pressure of boycotts.)

It remains the case that Jewish nationalists are the ones with the deep choice to make: accept the unalterable reality of 1967 for the foundation of two states, or open up a long struggle to determine the character (and level of isolation) of one state with its competing sovereignties. Respect Reply Share link Copy Report Mike_71 2 days ago But, the Palestinians seek to impose a minority dominated "Arab Supremacist Apartheid Regime," over a conquered and subjugated Jewish majority population, which would then be subjected to "ethnic cleansing." As the Palestinians have unequivocally rejected the concept of "two states for two peoples," in favor of a "single state," the question thus becomes will it become a "majority ruled" state, as 75% of the Israeli population is Jewish, or a "minority ruled" state, like the former "White Supremacist Apartheid Regime" of South Africa, as only 20% of the Israeli population is Arab. It becomes more an issue of minority rule vs majority rule, as opposed to "Apartheid vs "Non-Apartheid." Minority ruled racist regimes, such as the former "White Supremacist Apartheid Regime" of South Africa, tend to be unstable and subject to violent internal revolts, such as those led by Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress, as would a minority ruled "Arab Supremacist Apartheid Regime. Minority ruled racist "Apartheid Regimes," like that of South Africa, cannot last when subjected to repeated popular revolt!
Respect 1 Reply Share link Copy Report Art 2 days ago It's the zionist Jewish colonialists who have - or should have - no rights to the place whatsoever.
Respect 1 Reply Share link Copy Report Mike_71 22 hours ago Even the United Nations, today hardly a rampant pro-Zionist organization, recognized the rights of the Jews to a significant part of their ancestral homeland in 1947, pursuant to UNGAR 181, the UN partitioned the former British Mandate into two proposed states, "one Arab and one Jewish." The Israelis accepted the proposal, while the Palestinians, joined by the Arab League member nations, rejected it by declaring war on Israel. They lost that war, as well as the subsequent 1967 "Six Day War," resulting in the capture of all West Bank land, for which the Palestinians refused to negotiate peace to obtain its return. See my discussion concerning about the difference between "wars of aggression" for the purpose of territorial expansion and territory captured in the course of "defensive wars of necessity" and the comparison of land captured by the U.S.S.R. in the "Great Patriotic War" and Israel in the 1967 "Six Day War." If the Palestinian - Israeli Conflict is strictly a "one to the exclusion of the other" proposition, and a compromise through direct negotiations is not an option, as specified in the founding documents of both the P.L.O. and Hamas, then Israel is entitled to the entirety of the land captured in the 1967 "Six Day War," a "defensive war of necessity." One does not "colonize," or "occupy" one's ancestral homeland of over 3,000 years. "From the river to the sea, Palestine will never be!"

Respect 1 Reply Share link Copy Report Art 59 minutes ago Ardent Zionists like you will never acknowledge anything like justice for Palestinians.
Respect 1 Reply Share link Copy Report The_Wolf 4 days ago Wow, only 7 comments. Guess there are other things going on. Respect 2 Reply Share link Copy Report Toots 4 days ago You're smart. You think just like me. Respect Reply Share link Copy Report Art 4 days ago I guess the zionists are busy on other comment boards. But don't worry, they'll come back here in a day or so.
Respect 1 Reply Share link Copy Report Mona 4 days ago "How I How Israel exploits Holocaust Remembrance Day" https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/how-israel-exploits-holocaust-remembrance-day

Surviving Auschwitz
Esther Bejarano, now in her nineties, was sent to Auschwitz as a girl. There she played in the women's orchestra – as long as the camp commanders were happy, she and her fellow musicians avoided being murdered. She is still a performing musician today. Her parents Rudolf and Margarethe Loewy did not survive. They were murdered by the Nazis in Lithuania in 1941. After the war, Bejarano emigrated to Palestine, but eventually returned to her native Germany, disgusted at how Palestinians were being treated. She says that even she – an Auschwitz survivor – has been labeled an anti-Semite for speaking out for Palestinian rights. Yet she is not deterred. Refusing to be silent, she told The Electronic Intifada in 2018 that Israel's government is "fascist" and that she supports BDS – boycott, divestment and sanctions – if it helps challenge Israel's persecution of Palestinians. Jacques Bude, a retired professor from Belgium, survived the Nazi genocide because he was saved by farmers who hid him as a child. His parents were deported and murdered in Auschwitz. After the war, he was sent to Palestine against his will as a Zionist settler. "I really felt in exile," Bude told The Electronic Intifada in 2017. "I was destroyed by German militarism and I came to Israel and again encountered militarism." He returned home to Belgium. The Nazi ideology "led to the genocide of the Jews, the Roma, the Sinti, homosexuals and the mentally disabled," Bude said. "It is the worst dehumanization that happened until today. It was industrial and they went all the way. They dehumanized them completely, to a pile of hair and gold." "So the duty of memory is to say never more dehumanization," Bude added. "If we say 'never again,' we have to decide where we stand and condemn it." And that includes condemning Israel's crimes: "I am against ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, which is a form of dehumanization." Hajo Meyer was deported to Auschwitz in 1944. After surviving the war, he returned to the Netherlands where he had a long career as a physicist. He was also a fierce anti-Zionist and staunch supporter of Palestinian rights. That made him a target of relentless smears from Israel's supporters, even after his death in 2014. But he too was never silenced by such attacks. In his last interview, which was with The Electronic Intifada, Meyer urged Palestinians "not to give up their fight," even if that meant armed struggle. The lesson Israel wants us to take from the Holocaust is that it has the right to do whatever it wants to Palestinians with impunity in the name of protecting Jews. But the right lesson to take – and it is more urgent than ever – is that all of us must stand together against racial and religious hatred and oppression, no matter who its victims are.
Respect 14 Reply Share link Copy Report Art 4 days ago Good excerpt.
Respect Reply Share link Copy Report AtheistInChief 4 days ago The control over Palestinians is SO complete, that Palestinians don't have rights not only to the water under their feet, but also to the earth's magnetic field that passes through the air (lest they make electricity out of it). But you'd have to read Max Blumenthal to find that kind of stuff out, definitely not the apartheid complicit NYTimes.
Respect 4 Reply Share link Copy Report Andrew_Nichols 4 days ago The Euros will mumble some indignation ...and then pursue business as usual...beating up on Palestinian rights like BDS , selling Irrael more weapons anmd inviting them to join NATO training. ...all to be expected from cowardly vassals. Respect 6 Reply Share link Copy Report photosymbiosis 4 days ago If anything demonstrates the sheer scale of propagandistic media control in the United States and around the world, it's the Israel story. It's just the same old tedious boilerplate narrative, from the 'left' to the 'right'. The glaring issues just are not allowed to get any air. These issues are:

1) Israel has a 'covert' nuclear weapons program, and under the terms of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, it's a violation of the treaty to for a nuclear signatory to that treaty to assist another country with their nuclear weapons program ; the USA's NNSA (DOE division) has close relations with the Israeli nuclear weapons program. There are other treaty violations with other countries relating to the Pakistani and Indian nuclear weapons programs as well, but the silence on Israel is pretty hilarious. They've got over 100 ballistic-weapon capable boosted fission-fusion nukes with working delivery systems! Yes, they're not going to give them up, fine, but at least make them admit to it in international forums. And about that $4 billion a year in U.S. taxpayer money... why do they need that, again?

2) Israel and Saudi Arabia, the closest US Empire allies, are not democracies. You cannot claim to be a democracy while giving special rights to one religious or ethnic group , and the only way Israel would become a real democracy is to grant the Arab Muslim population the same rights as the European Jewish population has, on immigration, land ownership, and yes, that means giving all the human beings in the West Bank and Gaza Strip voting rights in the Israeli national elections, I mean that's just common sense. Okay, you then have parity between Jews and Muslims, who cares, it's like the Protestants vs. the Catholics in medieval Europe, and ditto for the Sunnis and Shias in Saudi Arabia. Why are we involved with these backwards feudal assholes anyway? We don't need the oil, we don't need the money, we don't need the entangling relationships with dictators and crooks, just get out already.

Even from the whole imperial perspective, I mean, the whole rationale for being involved in the region was control of the oil and the money from the oil, and since the world is getting off oil, the Middle East will soon become as economically attractive as sub-Saharan Africa, so why not just limit involvement to arms-length diplomacy and let the maniacs try to solve their own problems themselves?

As far as all the anti-Semitism claims, how about a proposal to spend oh, $2 billion year rebuilding all the synagogues the Nazis destroyed across Europe instead, and cut off all aid to Israel? Now, that would really piss off the real anti-Semites, wouldn't it?
Respect 13 Reply Share link Copy Report Art 4 days ago Yep, good post.
Respect 3 Reply Share link Copy Report Wnt 4 days ago A cute idea, but technically rebuilding synagogues would be establishment of religion, whether inside or outside the U.S., and therefore unconstitutional. But our politicians don't seem to have any problem with not being racist against blacks while not giving them money, and they were impoverished by our version of nazis, not nazis from europe.
Respect 1 Reply Share link Copy Report The_Wolf 4 days ago ( Edited ) Establishment of religion is an American constitutional precept. Not sure about European countries in which the Nazis destroyed synagogues.

Good points otherwise, and in fact the Nazis from Europe actually looked to the segregated American south and Jim Crow as a model for how to impose their racist ideology on the people of Germany and the countries they were to conquer in Europe.

Bill Moyers: You begin the book with a meeting of Nazi Germany's leading lawyers on June 5, 1934, which happens, coincidentally, to be the day I was born. James Whitman: Oh boy, you were born under a dark star.

[...snip...]

Moyers: A stenographer was present to record a verbatim transcript of that meeting. Reading that transcript you discovered a startling fact. Whitman: Yes -- the fact is that they began by discussing American law. The minister of justice presented a memorandum on American race law that included a great deal of detailed discussion of the laws of American states. American law continued to be a principle topic throughout that meeting and beyond. It's also a startling fact that the most radical lawyers in that meeting -- the most vicious among the lawyers present -- were the most enthusiastic for the American example.

https://billmoyers.com/story/hitler-america-nazi-race-law/

Respect 3 Reply Share link Copy Report mgr 4 days ago ( Edited ) photo: Well put. Slightly related, I understand that Tom Perez, in addition to lobbyists, added a number of Israeli-firsters to the DNC nomination council for the 2020 election.
Respect 1 Reply Share link Copy Report Wnt 4 days ago I think the acid test of any such plan would be an airport. I mean, in theory "Palestine", the nation, can have an international airport, right? Somebody can get on board a plane in Russia, land in "Palestine", walk through Customs & Immigration, make a claim for asylum or citizenship at the courthouse, right?

I think it would be interesting if the Palestinians would try this, just to see whether the Israelis have the courage to shoot down civilian airplanes on regular flights in the name of stopping terrorism. I have little doubt they would disappoint ... my expectations, that is.

Any word on whether the "peace" plan explicitly would ban this?
Respect 1 Reply Share link Copy Report zbarski 4 days ago ( Edited ) If they do, you can take all commenters above with you (take Mackey + Electronik Intifada too) and go on that flight. If the plane doesn't get shut down, you could walk through the customs and ask for polutical asylum.

Indeed, it'll be interesting to see...
Respect 2 Reply Share link Copy Report Wnt 4 days ago With millions of their own citizens locked on the wrong side of a border for almost a century simply because they fled to avoid a war zone for a little while, I think Palestine's immigration agency, if they ever get one, is going to have quite a backlog to clear before they get around to any actual foreigners.
Respect 1 Reply Share link Copy Report zbarski 3 days ago

if they ever get one, is going to have quite a backlog to clear before they get around to any actual foreigners.
Ahh. What a pity. Such a deserving crowd above.
Respect 2 Reply Share link Copy Report Alex 3 days ago What happened to Gaza Airport? Donor nations invested millions, it operated about 2 years under israeli control and then the Judeonazis bombed it....

There is absolutely no reason to believe, that anything invested/built in Kushner's "Palestinian State" would meet a better fate.

Respect 2 Reply Share link Copy Report zbarski 3 days ago Still recovering from your:

The story that Iran shut down the Ukranian airliner is BS. Iran is perfectly capable of distinguishing between civilian and military objects.

[Feb 02, 2020] Rewriting History Of World War II Is Ominous Warning

Feb 02, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

Rewriting History Of World War II Is Ominous Warning by Tyler Durden Sun, 02/02/2020 - 07:00 0 SHARES Via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

It is astounding and deeply disturbing that 75 years after the end of World World Two the history of that event is being re-written before our very eyes.

That war resulted in over 50 million dead with more than half of the victims from the Soviet Union. It incorporated the worst crimes against humanity, including the systematic mass murder of millions carried out by Nazi Germany, known as the Holocaust. The victims included Jews, Slavs, Roma, Soviet prisoners-of-war and others whom the fascist Nazis deemed to be "Untermensch" ("Subhumans").

The Soviet Red Army fought back the Nazi forces all the way from Russia through Eastern Europe, eventually defeating the Third Reich in Berlin. Nearly 90 per cent of all Wehrmacht casualties incurred during the entire war were suffered on the Eastern Front against the Red Army. That alone testifies how it was the Soviet Union among the allied nations which primarily accomplished the defeat of Nazi Germany.

Seventy-five years ago, on January 27, 1945, it was Red Army soldiers who liberated the notorious Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp. It was during the Vistula-Oder Offensive which drove the Nazis out of Poland paving the way for the eventual final victorious battle in Berlin some three months later.

It is incredible that within living memory, these objective facts of history about the most cataclysmic war ever waged are being falsified or insidiously distorted.

Germany's most-read magazine Der Spiegel, American-European journal Politico, a U.S. embassy announcement, as well as American Vice President Mike Pence, are among recent sources who have either falsified or downplayed the heroic role of the Soviet Union in liberating Auschwitz. This is part of a disconcerting trend of rewriting the history of World War Two, by which, preposterously, the Soviet Union is being equated with Nazi Germany. Such pernicious fiction must be resisted and repudiated by all conscientious historians and citizens.

Der Spiegel and the U.S. embassy in Denmark both had to issue embarrassed apologies after they separately stated that it was American forces which liberated Auschwitz. It is mind-boggling how such an error on the 75th anniversary of one of the most iconic events in history could have been made – by a leading magazine and a diplomatic corps.

More sinister was an article published in Politico on January 24 written by the Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki which claimed, "Far from being a liberator, the Soviet Union was a facilitator of Nazi Germany."

The Polish politician is no exception. It has become a staple argument in recent years contended by other Polish leaders and politicians from the Baltic states who seek to revise the history of the war, blaming the Soviet Union for being an accomplice with Nazi Germany. The corruption of history is partly driven by a desire to whitewash the nefarious role played by these countries as quislings to the Third Reich who helped it carry out the Holocaust.

Vice President Pence's speech at the Holocaust memorial event in Jerusalem on January 23 was another deplorable sleight of hand. In his address, he never once mentioned the fact of the Soviet forces blasting open the gates of Auschwitz. Pence merely said, "When soldiers opened the gates of Auschwitz " A sentence later, he went on to mention how "American soldiers liberated Europe from tyranny."

It is quite astonishing how brazenly false narratives about World War Two are being told, not merely by Neo-Nazi sympathizers and cranks beyond the pale, but by supposedly senior politicians and respectable media. It is perplexing how the heroic role of Soviet commanders, soldiers and people is being eroded, airbrushed and even maligned into something grotesquely opposite.

Washington's belligerent geopolitical agenda of trying to isolate and undermine Russia is no doubt underlying the process of re-writing history in order to deprive Russia of moral authority and recast it as a malign nation. Of course the obsessive Russophobia of Polish and Baltic politicians neatly plays into this agenda.

This reprehensible revisionism is in flagrant contradiction and denial of international libraries of documented history, archives, official and personal correspondence, photographs, as well as first-hand witness accounts.

An excellent essay by Martin Sieff this week recounts how Soviet soldiers and medics tended to the remaining 7,000 wretched inmates of Auschwitz. More than a million others had been exterminated by the Nazis before they fled from the advancing Soviet forces.

The Soviet officer in command of liberating Auschwitz was Lieutenant Colonel Anatoly Shapiro. He was himself a Russian-born Jew. The Soviet soldiers spoke of their horror and heartbreak upon discovering the hellish conditions in which skeletal men, women and children were teetering on the brink of death. Bodies of dead lay everywhere among pools of frozen blood.

Another Jewish Soviet officer Colonel Elisavetsky told how Russian doctors and nurses worked without sleep or food to try to save the emaciated inmates.

As Sieff notes:

"For Colonel Shapiro, the idea that he, his Red Army comrades and the medical staff who fought and died to liberate Auschwitz and who worked so hard to save its pitifully few survivors should be casually equated with the Nazis mass-killers would have been ludicrous and contemptible The true story of the liberation of Auschwitz needs to be told and retold. It needs to be rammed down the throats of Russia-hating bigots and warmongers everywhere."

Maintaining the historical record about World War Two – its fascist origins and its defeat – is not just a matter of national pride for Russians. Ominously, if history can be denied, falsified and distorted, then the danger of repetition returns. We must never let the heroic role of the Soviet Union be forgotten or belittled, especially by people who seem to have a penchant for fascism.

simpson seers , 2 minutes ago link

The point of the article is revisionism, for example......" It is astounding and deeply disturbing that 75 years after the end of World World Two the history of that event is being re-written before our very eyes."

and....... Vice President Pence's speech at the Holocaust memorial event in Jerusalem on January 23 was another deplorable sleight of hand. In his address, he never once mentioned the fact of the Soviet forces blasting open the gates of Auschwitz. Pence merely said, "When soldiers opened the gates of Auschwitz " A sentence later, he went on to mention how "American soldiers liberated Europe from tyranny."

******* muricans lie, twist and distort at every opportunity. They conveniently ignore the truth so they can brag about their

imaginary conquests.

Lost in korea, still losing in korea 70 ******* years later, lost in iran, still losing 50 years later, lost in afghanistan, still losing 20 years later, lost in iraq, syria, ukraine,venezuela, couldn't put the russians away when they were on their knees,

can't get into space without riding the russian rocket. Yet here they are running their lips as though they have actually done one good thing for the planet. A nation of revisionist lying hypocrite douchebags....

Profits über Alles! American Corporations and Hitler

https://www.globalresearch.ca/profits-ber-alles-american-corporations-and-hitler/4607

In 'Eisenhower's Death Camps':
A U.S. Prison Guard Remembers

https://www.ihr.org/jhr/v10/v10p161_Brech.html

Hitler's American Friends: The Third Reich's Supporters in the United States

https://www.chapters.indigo.ca/en-ca/books/hitlers-american-friends-the-third/9781250148964-item.html

https://www.fort-russ.com/2020/01/u-s-regime-has-killed-20-30-million-people-since-world-war-ii/

TruthDetector , 16 minutes ago link

The problem is government by criminal psychopathic cartels , NOT the Russian, German, American or French people.

And NOTHING in this article addresses this fundamental evil of government by criminal psychopathic cartels.

Leftist-fascist-socialist-communist-globalist-control everybody-else-but-themselves, is a SPECTRUM that describes the varieties of governments created by criminal psychopathic cartels.

They're all the same, they differ as to the degree of evil.

According to the University of Hawaii, " death by GOVERNMENT " (" democide ") is the problem.

https://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/NOTE5.HTM

" I soon was overwhelmed by the unbelievable repetitiveness of regime after regime, ruler after ruler, murdering people under their control or rule by shooting, burial alive, burning, hanging, knifing, starvation, flaying, beating, torture, and so on and on.

Year after year.

Not hundreds, not thousands, not tens of thousands of these people, but millions & millions.

The awful toll may even reach above 300,000,000 , the equivalent in dead (human beings) of a nuclear war stretched out over decades."

The COMMUNIST Russian GOVERNMENT aren't saints: Stalin is responsible for 100 MILLION slaughtered.

China even MORE millions slaughtered, making Hitler look like a literal piker by comparison.

"The strategic culture foundation" must be owned lock stock & barrel by A VERSION of the leftist-fascist-socialist-communist-globalist-control everybody-else-but-themselves-absolutely-certifiable- psychopathic loonies .

BIG GOVERNMENT is the problem, not the relative cultures.

VodkaInKrakow , 12 minutes ago link

While American CEO's insisted that they had to honor their contracts with Nazi Germany, leaving The US without the resources - as late as 1942 - to build armaments.

FDR threatened those treasonous a**hats with treason - a death penalty offense which could also lead to confiscation of property. FDR also directed the US government to finance new companies that would supply resources and armaments to The US Government. Created millions of jobs. Reynolds Aluminum and other corporations were created that way.

Money has no loyalty. You can see that with American CEO's who watch their stock prices (and thus compensation) rise as they ship jobs and factories to China or Mexico or elsewhere. What was China supposed to do? REFUSE? No.

THERE IS YOUR F*CKING PROBLEM.

Government is not a real person who can do anything. Voters elect the people who act in the name of government. Big Business buys the best government money can buy in America.

Stop blaming Government because there is no a**hat that was born, named Government.

Got a bad Government? A**hats like Trump and Pelosi and McConnell and prior a**hats such as Obama and Bush and The Clintons on down the line.

It's funny when voters who elect the people to represent them and act in their name as a "government" to watch those voters turn around and blame government. When the voter is responsible for those politicians being there in the first place.

A voter like that is simply an a**hat moron who deserves to be ruled by their masters and elites.

Slartybartfast , 6 minutes ago link

Government does nothing well.. Big Government even less.

VodkaInKrakow , 4 minutes ago link

Ask Hitler how it turned out when the Allied Governments opposed him.

Incompetent people elected to government, never do well. Incompetent people re-elected by incompetent voters.

[Feb 01, 2020] the Houthis have imposed a massive defeat on the Saudis at Marib - 3500 Saudi forces killed, wounded or captured, along with 400 trophie

Feb 01, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Yonatan , Feb 1 2020 16:29 utc | 106

In other news, the Houthis have imposed a massive defeat on the Saudis at Marib - 3500 Saudi forces killed, wounded or captured, along with 400 trophies. It is bigger than the earlier massive defeat at Najran.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lW1cRRtH9Vc

or for those that don't want to log in:

https://www.nsfwyoutube.com/watch?v=lW1cRRtH9Vc

[Feb 01, 2020] The clash of civilizations doctrine makes sense both to Americans and Europeans, but in different ways.

Feb 01, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

vk , Feb 1 2020 17:27 utc | 113

I perfectly understand why Westerners still love capitalism (and will continue to do so for the forseeable future): capitalism represents (and will forever represent) the first and only time in human history the so-called western culture became universal and the center of humanity. In fact, I would be surprised if the opposite case was true.

The clash of civilizations doctrine makes sense both to Americans and Europeans, but in different ways.

For the Americans, it creates a legitimizing narrative for the masses to draw capitalist Russia to its sphere of influence, divide Eurasia again and then essentially kill two birds with one stone: the destruction of China and socialism.

For the Europeans, it creates a narrative where Europe, somehow, reborns from the ashes and make a spectacular comeback to the center stage of the imperialist game. That is the case because it fantasizes about some kind of western culture solidarity where the USA, by magic, begins to treat Europe as equals, and not as vassals (because they have "the same culture"). The USA then self-dissolves in order for a "Westernia" to rise in the North Atlantic, with a foothold in the Pacific thanks to Australia. Socialism in the form of Western European welfare state will be allowed to exist because what matters is not capitalism vs socialism, but western culture vs eastern culture. USA and Western Europe then make amends, and fuse together in a Western Paradise (Eden).

I must say, this is a very inventive - even ingenious doctrine. Shame the Europeans waste their creativity with such useless garbage.

P.S.: nobody was complaining on "being raped" when it was the First World countries benefitting from globalization during the "golden age of capitalism" (post-war miracle). The narrative was completely different: the Third World was the uncivilized and corrupt monkeys, who were being blessed by the charity of the First World, and should be forever thankful for that. It's not funny when you're on the receiving end, it seems.

[Feb 01, 2020] U.S. envoy warns Palestinians against raising opposition to U.S. peace plan at U.N.

Feb 01, 2020 | news.yahoo.com

By Michelle Nichols

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Kelly Craft warned the Palestinians on Friday that bringing their displeasure with the U.S. peace plan to the world body would only "repeat the failed pattern of the last seven decades."

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas will speak in the U.N. Security Council in the next two weeks about the plan, Palestinian U.N. envoy Riyad Mansour said on Wednesday, adding that he hoped the 15-member council would also vote on a draft resolution on the issue.

However, the United States is certain to veto any such resolution, diplomats said. That would allow the Palestinians to take the draft text to the 193-member U.N. General Assembly, where a vote would publicly show how the Trump administration's peace plan has been received internationally.

Craft said that while the Palestinians' initial reaction to the plan was anticipated, "why not instead take that displeasure and channel it into negotiations?"

"Bringing that displeasure to the United Nations does nothing but repeat the failed pattern of the last seven decades. Let's avoid those traps and instead take a chance on peace," she told Reuters.

Craft said the United States was ready to facilitate talks and that she was "happy to play any role" that contributes to the Israeli-Palestinian peace plan unveiled by U.S. President Donald Trump on Tuesday.

Mansour said on Thursday: "There is not a single Palestinian official (who) will meet with American officials now after they submitted an earthquake, the essence of it the destruction of the national aspirations of the Palestinian people. This is unacceptable."

Israel's U.N. mission signaled on Tuesday that it was preparing for the Palestinians to pursue U.N. action, saying in a statement that it was "working to thwart these efforts, and will lead a concerted diplomatic campaign with the U.S."

[Jan 31, 2020] Kushner: Palestinians Have Never Done Anything Right in Their Sad, Pathetic Lives

Jan 31, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Mao , Jan 31 2020 13:53 utc | 178

Kushner: Palestinians Have Never Done Anything Right in Their Sad, Pathetic Lives

The first son-in-law has warned Palestinians not to "screw up this opportunity" at peace that he's so graciously given to them.

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/01/jared-kushner-peace-plan-palestinians

[Jan 31, 2020] The present Dutch PM Rutte is more of a CIA poodle than Tony Blair was. MH17 a case in point.

Jan 31, 2020 | off-guardian.org

Antonym ,

The present Dutch PM Rutte is more of a CIA poodle than Tony Blair was. MH17 a case in point. The Dutch judicial set up is populated with similar drones: the assassin of prominent Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn is walking free after less jail time than other criminals. Holland is gone to the dogs.

[Jan 31, 2020] How Washington Liberates Free Countries by Andre Vltchek

Notable quotes:
"... Presently, the West is trying to overthrow governments in several independent countries, on different continents. From Bolivia (the country has been already destroyed) to Venezuela, from Iraq to Iran, to China and Russia. The more successful these countries get, the better they serve their people, the more vicious the attacks from abroad are, the tougher the embargos and sanctions imposed on them are. The happier the citizens are, the more grotesque the propaganda disseminated from the West gets. ..."
"... In Hong Kong, some young people, out of financial interest, or out of ignorance, keep shouting: "President Trump, Please Liberate Us!" Or similar, but equally treasonous slogans. They are waving U.S., U.K. and German flags. They beat up people who try to argue with them, including their own Police Force. ..."
"... So, let us see, how the United States really "liberates" countries, in various pockets of the world. ..."
"... Let us visit Iran, a country which (you'd never guess it if consuming only Western mass media) is, despite the vicious embargos and sanctions, on the verge of the "highest human development index bracket" (UNDP). How is it possible? Simple. Because Iran is a socialist country (socialism with the Iranian characteristics). It is also an internationalist nation which is fighting against Western imperialism. It helps many occupied and attacked states on our planet, including Venezuela, Cuba, Bolivia (before), Syria, Yemen, Palestine, Lebanon, Afghanistan and Iraq, to name just a few. ..."
"... Washington is getting more and more aggressive, in all parts of the world. It also pays more and more for collaboration. And it is not shy to inject terrorist tactics into allied troops, organizations and non-governmental organizations. Hong Kong is no exception. ..."
"... Thank god the US is heading, quite unmistakably now, down the same flush which swallowed the USSR! ..."
"... Yep. America bringing "freedom and democracy" to the world one bomb and bullet at a time. Pretty soon they'll be nobody left to freedomize and democratize. ..."
"... The Democrats deplore humanitarian reasons prior to invading a sovereign nation-state, while Republicans says militarism will keep us safe, however, in actuality the objectives of the political duopoly as reflected in the military/security/surveillance corporate state is rather consistent they're interested in usurping precious resources by acquiring hegemony over significant geostrategic territories. ..."
"... Orwellian speech aside, everything currently boils down to genuine freedom in all its forms not just physical slavery (like in the neoliberal/neocon/zionist wars and its outcomes) but also the mental slavery that leads us to physical slavery. Unfortunately we do not live at the best of times currently, the net of complete neo- slavery is almost upon us and we only have a small window of opportunity to try to stop it. The Smart Grid/IoT system is almost on top of us. Let's fight it with sharing info; and hopefully as a very large population make the establishment listen to us through sustained, strategic non-violent civil disobedience.
"... After 500+ years of Western colonial & now neocolonial plunder and mayhem, maybe it's time to look a bit deeper into how Western cultural narratives have shaped a way of seeing ourselves, others and the world not shared by literally most of the human family. The WEIRD research is an illuminating and interesting examination of some of these differences and how they challenge the very concept of "human nature" associated with Western societies. ..."
"... "Closely related to the depoliticising practices of neoliberalism, the politics of social atomisation and a failed sociality is the existence of a survival of the fittest ethos that drives oppressive narratives used to define both agency and our relationship to others. Mimicking the logic of a war culture, neoliberal pedadogy creates a predatory culture in which the demand of hyper – competitiveness pits individuals against each other through a market based logic in which compassion and caring for the other is replaced by a culture of winners and losers" ..."
"... Neo-liberalism ends in neo-feudalism, with 99.9% of humanity serfs and villeins, and a tiny ruling elite controlling EVERYTHING. The project proceeds apace, with road-kill like Corbyn and the 500,000 'antisemites' who joined Labour littering the road to Hell on Earth. ..."
www.slate.com
Jan 29, 2020 | off-guardian.org

There are obviously some serious linguistic issues and disagreements between the West and the rest of the world. Essential terms like "freedom", "democracy", "liberation", even "terrorism", are all mixed up and confused; they mean something absolutely different in New York, London, Berlin, and in the rest of the world.

Before we begin analyzing, let us recall that countries such as the United Kingdom, France, Germany and the United States, as well as other Western nations, have been spreading colonialist terror to basically all corners of the world.

And in the process, they developed effective terminology and propaganda, which has been justifying, even glorifying acts such as looting, torture, rape and genocides. Basically, first Europe, and later North America literally "got away with everything, including mass murder".

The native people of Americas, Africa and Asia have been massacred, their voices silenced. Slaves were imported from Africa. Great Asian nations, such as China, what is now "India" and Indonesia, got occupied, divided and thoroughly plundered.

And all was done in the name of spreading religion, "liberating" people from themselves, as well as "civilizing them".

Nothing has really changed.

To date, people of great nations with thousands of years of culture, are treated like infants; humiliated, and as if they were still in kindergarten, told how to behave, and how to think.

Sometimes if they "misbehave", they get slapped. Periodically they get slapped so hard, that it takes them decades, even centuries, to get back to their feet. It took China decades to recover from the period of "humiliation". India and Indonesia are presently trying to recuperate, from the colonial barbarity, and from, in the case of Indonesia, the 1965 U.S.-administered fascist coup.

But if you go back to the archives in London, Brussels or Berlin, all the monstrous acts of colonialism, are justified by lofty terms. Western powers are always "fighting for justice"; they are "enlightening" and "liberating". No regrets, no shame and no second thoughts. They are always correct!

Like now; precisely as it is these days.

Presently, the West is trying to overthrow governments in several independent countries, on different continents. From Bolivia (the country has been already destroyed) to Venezuela, from Iraq to Iran, to China and Russia. The more successful these countries get, the better they serve their people, the more vicious the attacks from abroad are, the tougher the embargos and sanctions imposed on them are. The happier the citizens are, the more grotesque the propaganda disseminated from the West gets.

*

In Hong Kong, some young people, out of financial interest, or out of ignorance, keep shouting: "President Trump, Please Liberate Us!" Or similar, but equally treasonous slogans. They are waving U.S., U.K. and German flags. They beat up people who try to argue with them, including their own Police Force.

So, let us see, how the United States really "liberates" countries, in various pockets of the world.

Let us visit Iran, a country which (you'd never guess it if consuming only Western mass media) is, despite the vicious embargos and sanctions, on the verge of the "highest human development index bracket" (UNDP). How is it possible? Simple. Because Iran is a socialist country (socialism with the Iranian characteristics). It is also an internationalist nation which is fighting against Western imperialism. It helps many occupied and attacked states on our planet, including Venezuela, Cuba, Bolivia (before), Syria, Yemen, Palestine, Lebanon, Afghanistan and Iraq, to name just a few.

So, what is the West doing? It is trying to ruin it, by all means; ruin all good will and progress. It is starving Iran through sanctions, it finances and encourages its "opposition", as it does in China, Russia and Latin America. It is trying to destroy it.

Then, it just bombs their convoy in neighboring Iraq, killing its brave commander, General Soleimani. And, as if it was not horrid enough, it turns the tables around, and starts threatening Teheran with more sanctions, more attacks, and even with the destruction of its cultural sites.

Iran, under attack, confused, shot down, by mistake, a Ukrainian passenger jet. It immediately apologized, in horror, offering compensation. The U.S. straightway began digging into the wound. It started to provoke (like in Hong Kong) young people. The British ambassador, too, got involved!

As if Iran and the rest of the world should suddenly forget that during its attack on Iraq, more than 3 decades ago, Washington actually shot down an Iranian wide-body passenger plane (Iran Air flight 655, an Airbus-300), on a routine flight from Bandar Abbas to Dubai. In an "accident", 290 people, among them 66 children, lost their lives. That was considered "war collateral".

Iranian leaders then did not demand "regime change" in Washington. They were not paying for riots in New York or Chicago.

As China is not doing anything of that nature, now.

The "Liberation" of Iraq (in fact, brutal sanctions, bombing, invasion and occupation) took more than a million Iraqi lives, most of them, those of women and children. Presently, Iraq has been plundered, broken into pieces, and on its knees.

Is this the kind of "liberation" that some of the Hong Kong youngsters really want?

No? But if not, is there any other performed by the West, in modern history?

*

Washington is getting more and more aggressive, in all parts of the world. It also pays more and more for collaboration. And it is not shy to inject terrorist tactics into allied troops, organizations and non-governmental organizations. Hong Kong is no exception.

Iran, Iraq, Syria, Russia, China, Venezuela, but also many other countries, should be carefully watching and analyzing each and every move made by the United States. The West is perfecting tactics on how to liquidate all opposition to its dictates.

It is not called a "war", yet. But it is. People are dying. The lives of millions are being ruined.

Rhisiart Gwilym ,

Thank god the US is heading, quite unmistakably now, down the same flush which swallowed the USSR!

Gall ,

Yep. America bringing "freedom and democracy" to the world one bomb and bullet at a time. Pretty soon they'll be nobody left to freedomize and democratize.

Hey we voted against all this BS but what does that matter in what they call "democracy" or even "republicanism" in the land of the free fire zone?

Charlotte Russe ,

The Democrats deplore humanitarian reasons prior to invading a sovereign nation-state, while Republicans says militarism will keep us safe, however, in actuality the objectives of the political duopoly as reflected in the military/security/surveillance corporate state is rather consistent they're interested in usurping precious resources by acquiring hegemony over significant geostrategic territories.

Norn ,

150 years ago, The US saw Korea as too isolationist and decided to [what else?] ' liberate ' the Koreans.

Western Disturbance in the Shinmi 1871 year – Korea

On 10 June 1871, about 650 American invaders landed [on korean shores] and captured several forts, killing over 200 Korean troops with a loss of only three American dead.

Tallis Marsh ,

Orwellian speech aside, everything currently boils down to genuine freedom in all its forms not just physical slavery (like in the neoliberal/neocon/zionist wars and its outcomes) but also the mental slavery that leads us to physical slavery. Unfortunately we do not live at the best of times currently, the net of complete neo- slavery is almost upon us and we only have a small window of opportunity to try to stop it. The Smart Grid/IoT system is almost on top of us. Let's fight it with sharing info; and hopefully as a very large population make the establishment listen to us through sustained, strategic non-violent civil disobedience.

To make a start: are you as confused as I am/was about why too many of the general public are just not informed, not 'awake? Why they do not seem to know the reality about the lies & corruption by a small global-establishment; how our world is really run; who is running it; and what their plans and ultimate agenda is? The following video so precisely pin-points how & why; it would be a terrible shame if people did not watch it and share it. Thank you to a leader who did share it – so much appreciated!

The Eight Veils:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/oPNI1-n_szQ?version=3&rel=1&fs=1&autohide=2&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&wmode=transparent

tonyopmoc ,

Tallis Marsh, Great video, and I agree with a lot of it, but I think the numerology stuff is bollocks, as is the idea that "the elite" have this secret very advanced technology, and can perform "magic powers", beyond the basic principles of physics and maths.

However, the Truth is quite horrendous. I personally felt, I had been physically kicked very hard in my guts, and to the depths of my soul, when in a moment, I became personally convinced that the Official US Government story of 9/11 was impossible, because it did not comply with the basic principles of physics and maths.

I understood all the implications in that moment in February 2003. It was not an alien culture, that I did not understand, that did this atrocity, it was my culture, and I knew almost exactly what was going to happen.

Most people, don't want to know, and won't even look, because they are not mentally capable of tolerating the horror. The truth will send many such people mad. They are better off not knowing, carrying on their lives as best they can. Most people are good, and not guilty of anything. It's just that they won't be able to cope with the truth, that it is our culture, our governments, our institutions, and our religions, which are so evil.

Why isn't Tony Blair on trial for War Crimes Against Humanity?

Its because the entire system is rotten to the core, and will eventually collapse.

Tony

Tallis Marsh ,

I have a few questions (that imo are vital). How would you define magic/magick?

What about magic/magick being the manipulation of sound and vision to influence/control others?

Observe our industries like the publishing industry – newspapers, academic books, brands, logos, internet; tv, film internet video industry; music industry Who founded and instituted all these industries using the particular system of 'words', numerals, symbols, music and sounds – these are now all-pervasive in our world; who is using them to manipulate us and for what purposes? What are the meanings of these sounds and symbols, etc? E.g. What are the hidden meanings of words/parts of words e.g. el as in elder, elite, election, elevate ? Traditionally 'el' was Saturn.

What is the real history of our world, country, local area (and who is in charge of academia, publishing of all kinds – are they the ones who have rewritten history in order to keep almost all of us in the dark)? How can we find out the true history of our world and know its accuracy? E.g. Why are the worshipers of El/Saturn; and all their Saturnalian symbols around us in the world? e.gs: black gowns worn by the judiciary, priests, graduates; black cubes/squares found on hats of religious leaders, graduates' hats and black cubes found as monuments in such culturally-different places around the world like Saudi Arabia, NYC, Denmark, Australia?

Note: I do not have the answers (I'm still researching) but are these not good questions to explore because the more you look/hear, the more you see that many of the things mentioned above seem to be related; and some would call this magic/magick. To be clear, I am not superstitious and I do not believe in or practice these things myself but as far as I know, a group with immense power do seem to believe these things described.

Tallis Marsh ,

For symbols, a good place to start for research is geometry and alchemy. Traditionally, a major part of elite education studied/studies geometry (including 'sacred geometry') and ancient education studied alchemy/chemistry and subjects like astrology/astronomy? Part of the Seven Liberal Arts (the trivium and quadrivium combined), I think.

For history, it is good to research the ancient places and cultures of Phoenicia, Canaan, Ur, Sumeria and Babylon (apparently all of which were brought together into a hidden eclectic culture through the elites which moved into ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome and then moved into/by Celtic/Druidic culture in Central and Northern Europe and now practised in various forms (some hidden but apparent in symbols) in major religions, the freemasons and modern royalty?

Tallis Marsh ,

Re: Saturnalian symbols. Forgot to mention – almost all, if not all corporate brand logos (which companies buy for extortionate prices?! Who and why gives out the ideas for brand logos?) seem to be a variation of Saturnalian symbols like the planet's rings, the colour black, cubes, hexagrams; and parts of these things like XX, swish, etc

Tim Drayton ,

Not confused, frankly. The ruling classses must always devote massive resources to promoting the dominant ideology that underpins their rule or else they are finished. The hight priests who pump out this ideology have always had high status – look at Rupert Murdoch.

nottheonly1 ,

Just remember one 'thing(k)':

EVERYTHING you know was told to you by another human.
Everything human believes in was made up by human to suit his needs.
Human makes stuff up as it goes.
God/religion/the unknown – is all evidence for 'not knowing'.

For it is the one who sees and hears 'thinks' the way they are.
That everything is and human has absolutely no clue as to why.

No whatsoever clue. But lots of all kinds of stories.

There is only one veil – the veil of delusion. To be deluded enough not
to understand that 'The Universe' is an Organism (with all kinds of organs)
that lives and grows.

On Earth, this Organism has cancer. Mankind is that cancer on The Universe.
Mankind is Earth's cancer.

Those who have the porential to look through it all – already do.
Those who don't have the potential to look through it all – never will.

One day, the 'history' of mankind will also become just another story.
With no one to listen to.

Gary Weglarz ,

After 500+ years of Western colonial & now neocolonial plunder and mayhem, maybe it's time to look a bit deeper into how Western cultural narratives have shaped a way of seeing ourselves, others and the world not shared by literally most of the human family. The WEIRD research is an illuminating and interesting examination of some of these differences and how they challenge the very concept of "human nature" associated with Western societies.

https://psmag.com/social-justice/joe-henrich-weird-ultimatum-game-shaking-up-psychology-economics-53135

https://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~henrich/pdfs/WeirdPeople.pdf

lundiel ,

I like it but I don't know how to achieve it.

Dungroanin ,

"To date, people of great nations with thousands of years of culture, are treated like infants; humiliated, and as if they were still in kindergarten, told how to behave, and how to think."

As happenned right HERE in the UK last month at the polls – when they were offered the first REAL hope of lifting the yoke of the ancient imperialist forces for over half a century- the election of a GENUINE social democratic Labour government.

"..the West is trying to overthrow governments in several independent countries, on different continents." confirms Vltchek.

As the West (the ancient imperialists to be exact) DID overthrow what should be the current UK government BEFORE it could take office – a Advance Coup – avoiding all the nastiness of having actual military parking its tanks in Whitehall and having Betty supporting it as beardy gets dragged off for crucifixion.

Achieved by the dirtiest election EVER in UK history using the combined forces of the 5+1 eyed Empire ordered into action, by Up Pompeo Caesar General, who visits his latest victorious battlefield today. Here to collect his tributes for delivering his Gauntlet to stop the Corbynite Labour government taking office – by vote rigging using the favourite DS big data Canadian company CGI and its monopoly, of the privatised postal vote system of the UK.

Here to celebrate a brexit so long planned and also to deliver the final final solution victory for a Israeli APARTHEID state – which like a lightning rod is doomed to be struck by such forces.

A coup. A junta. At the heart of a diseased, decrepit, shrinking Empire – doomed just like Rome.

Morbidly persuing a 'last ditch' master plan to reverse the decline from ever deeper bunker mentality and hoping to form a Singapore on Thames to keep its ancient City home.

Huzzah! the crowds lining the grand avenues sceam as he arrives to claim his triumph.

In his dreams.

UP POMPEO! UP YOURS!

Francis Lee ,

"As happenned right HERE in the UK last month at the polls – when they were offered the first REAL hope of lifting the yoke of the ancient imperialist forces for over half a century- the election of a GENUINE social democratic Labour government."

Errrm the Labour party is not a genuine social-democratic formation. It is a pantomime horse consisting of the party in the country and the Parliamentary party – a parliamentary party that is thoroughly Blairite and shows no signs of becoming anything other. Moreover, there is the 'Labour Friends of Israel' a zionist-front organisation consisting of a majority in the Parliamentary party which takes its its foreign policy cue from Tel Aviv. In this respect it has accepted the IHRA definition of anti-semitism. Jewish members of the Labour have been expelled for alleged anti-semitism. Bizarre or what.

You see the problem with the Labour party is that it wants to be thought of as being respectable, moderate, non-threatening and so forth. Therefore, it is Pro monarchy, pro-NATO, pro-Trident, pro-FTTP, pro-Remainer and consists of a Shadow cabinet key positions of inter alia, Emily Thornberry, Keir Starmer, John MacDonnell, who seems to have had a Damascene conversion. The position left vacant by the departure of Tom Watson is still unfilled. Is this the team that is going to lead us to the social democratic society. In short it is a thoroughly conservative (small c)political party and organization being pulled in several different directions at the same time. It has only gained office (I say office rather than power) by detaching itself from its radicalism and then sucking up to a new constituency of the professional and managerial middle class, which is precisely where its leadership is drawn from.

But socialism or even social-democracy if it wants to be taken seriously as a movement which fundamentally change the landscape of British politics must cease this sucking up to the PTB and playing their game and stop being nice, cuddly and respectable. Unfortunately I do not see any sign of this happening, now or in at any time in the future.

Dungroanin ,

Ah Francis "Errrm the Labour party is not a genuine social-democratic formation."

I would guess you would say the same of the 1945 Labour party too.

You 'Marxist' tools of the bankers since the C19th have like a religious order been insistent on promoting nationalist rebellion against a social democratic world.

Thats why you sell not just brexit but a HARD brexit while incantating Marxsist creed – for your Banker masters if two centuries.

Enjoy your damp squib celebrations in two days – 11 pm,not midnight, because the bankers don't even control time anymore!

As the FartAgers embarrassed us all with their willy waving union jocks the rest of the EU held hands and sang Auld lang syne to us.

Lol.

paul ,

Labour is a waste of space and a waste of a man's rations. The sooner it consigns itself to oblivion the better.

nottheonly1 ,

There are obviously two Andre Vitschek.

But if you go back to the archives in London, Brussels or Berlin, all the monstrous acts of colonialism, are justified by lofty terms. Western powers are always "fighting for justice"; they are "enlightening" and "liberating". No regrets, no shame and no second thoughts. They are always correct!

It is much worse. The fascists rewrite history as we type. Everywhere. Soon, WWII was started by Russia and brave American murderers taught the Bolsheviks a lesson: Get Nukes!!!

Here is the Holy Grail of fascism. The God of fascism. The real 'uniter'. All the lies about how bad Hitler was are Bolshevik propaganda and character defamation – against which a dead person cannot protest.

Some say that not all humans are like that. Like those who recklessly and generously dispose off the well being of others, including their lives. Someone, however, must have told them that it is okay to perpetrate crimes against humanity when you call them 'collateral damages'. But there is truth to that.

Humanity will experience the collateral damages of the religious freaks that are – see above – ready to follow the worst dictator ever – or others – into ruins. Based on the story that there is an 'Afterlife'. People who seriously believe in someone standing there at a gate in the sky dtermining if you are allowed to eternally be with virgins, or do whatever is now worthless, because there are no one-sided situations in a world of action and reaction.

Homo Sapiens is dead. He was replaced by Homo Consumos, Homo Gullibilitens, Homo Terroristicus, Homo Greediensis, Homo Friocorazoniens and Homo Networkiens Isolatiens et insane al.

This is not working. Because close to eight billion people are helpless, because it would take one billion to remove the one million that have hijacked the evolution of Homo Sapiens into a being that better goes extinct before it can further spread.

That's the little fact that goes a very long way.

Samsara, so to speak.

Gall ,

All ya gotta do is read Mein Kampt to realize that uncle 'Dolf was nuttier than a fruit cake and a total loony tune and that he should have been transferred from Landsberg to the nearest sanitarium but then they took him seriously and as they say the rest is history

Gezzah Potts ,

Millions upon millions of fellow human beings dead due to the direct consequences of imperialism, neo colonialism, sanctions and rampant neoliberal economic policies that destroy people's lives and the notions of solidarity and compassion.

Today, one of my mag customers said to me: "people have become disposable and forgotten about now, especially those struggling to survive". I couldn't have said it better myself. It's all like a dog eat dog race to the bottom for most of us. So many human beings just disposable and thrown on the scrap heap to die while the billionaires gorge themselves from the rank exploitation and deaths of so many people.

How many of them would have shares in the merchants of death like Raytheon or Lockheed Martin or the Big Banks? Such dizzying levels of vast wealth and opulence next to grinding poverty, despair and chasms of inequality.

Here's a quote from an article called 'Depoliticization Is A Deadly Weapon of Neoliberal Fascism' by Henry Giroux:

"Closely related to the depoliticising practices of neoliberalism, the politics of social atomisation and a failed sociality is the existence of a survival of the fittest ethos that drives oppressive narratives used to define both agency and our relationship to others. Mimicking the logic of a war culture, neoliberal pedadogy creates a predatory culture in which the demand of hyper – competitiveness pits individuals against each other through a market based logic in which compassion and caring for the other is replaced by a culture of winners and losers"

And meanwhile, most of us stare, trance like, at our digital screens or we shop shop shop till we drop, or sadly, the more sensitive souls fully lose themselves in drugs or gambling or alcohol to deaden the gnawing pain of living in a dystopic, cruel, neoliberal society.

Or as Thatcher said: 'there is no such thing as society'. Bitch. And things are only going to get worse. I really really get your anger and frustration Andre.

nottheonly1 ,

Or as Thatcher said: 'there is no such thing as society'. Bitch.

There is a song (electronic music) by Haldolium that uses a Thatcher impersonator to repeat throughout the song:

"Yes, I am with You all the way – to the end of the government."

We are witnessing the transfer of governance into private hands. The hands of the owner class. Let's see how they see the problems of the many, the masses. Oh? They're not even looking?

Yes, this is a Dead End.

lundiel ,

Don't rely on music. Stormsy & Co won't liberate you. They are supporting the establishment. I who love R&B, the music of struggle, know corporate bursaries to enter the class system when I see them.

Gezzah Potts ,

N probably already told you, but there's a huge site called Neoliberalism Softpanorama with many hundreds of linked articles (if you have lots and lots of spare time!). Every subject imaginable related to this warped cancer, espec the role of the media presstitutes.

Will check out that song later. Music helps keep me sane, as well as venting my spleen here and elsewhere! Bands such as Hammock, Whale Fall, Maiak, Hiva Oa, Yndi Halda. Six Organs Of Admittance to name just a handful in my collection. Highly contemplative and soothing. Especially knowing how things are and what's coming, what most of us see.

Richard Le Sarc ,

Neo-liberalism ends in neo-feudalism, with 99.9% of humanity serfs and villeins, and a tiny ruling elite controlling EVERYTHING. The project proceeds apace, with road-kill like Corbyn and the 500,000 'antisemites' who joined Labour littering the road to Hell on Earth.

Gezzah Potts ,

Yes it does. You see where all this is heading. I see where all this is heading (tho can be a bit naive at times) and except for our pet trolls who visit here, nearly everyone else at OffG can see where all this is heading.

It's bloody frustrating that the large majority refuse to open their eyes, even when you explain what is happening, and direct them to sites like here or The Saker or The Grayzone, etc.

Things are going to get really ugly and brutal, tho they already are for the tens of millions just discarded like a bit of flotsam, all the homeless, and those living in grinding poverty, those one or two paychecks away from losing their homes . Society has become very callous and judgemental and atomised. Just how the 0.01% planned it.

Richard Le Sarc ,

It's like the Protocols. Whether a 'forgery' by the Russians, or created as a pre-emptive fabrication by certain Jewish figures (in order for the truth to be distorted and denied)it describes behaviour that we do see. Just as all the 'antisemitic conspiracy theories' that are denounced, concerning the attempts by Jewish and Zionist elites to control the West, are attested by evidence that is impossible to deny. Except it MUST be denied. It is like the JFK, RFK hits, the 9/11 fiasco and countless other examples. The truth is out there, and it does NOT come anywhere near the Official Version. Meanwhile the Sabbat Goy Trump, and the Zionist terrorist thug, simply eviscerate International Law in Occupied Palestinians, and NOT ONE Western MSM presstitute scum-bag dares to say so. That is power.

Gezzah Potts ,

Yes, the much heralded, deal of the century, Peace Plan, another stinking pile of lies and garbage to further (if that's possible) screw the Palestinians into the dirt and rob them of everything.
With scores more dead kiddies blown up or shot in the head or burned alive by the settler fascists, and the World's most moral army. Kiddie killers.
I'll have a look at Mondoweiss and Electronic Intifada shortly.
This outrage, decade after decade, is another main reason I boycott the whore filth masquerading as . 'journalists'.

paul ,

People talk about the Protocols either as a genuine document or a forgery.
I think it is more likely to have been something of a dystopian piece of writing, like Orwell's 1984.
– This is what lies in store for you if you don't watch out, etc.

Looking at the Zionist stranglehold over the world today, the author would probably say, "You can't say I didn't warn you."

Fair dinkum ,

Andre, Chris and Mr Fish are on the same page here>>
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-disaster-of-utopian-engineering/

lundiel ,

Seriously, how do we get the "woke" generation to stop dicking around with identity and "social media influencers" and see just what they've bought into? It's not like it's even hard to understand, there seems to be a miasma over Britain with the old seeking solace in social conservatism and the young resigned to neoliberalism, debt, multiple careers, impossible targets, performance evaluation, micromanagement, Specific, Measurable, Ambitious, Realistic and Time specified goals (SMART) for your "stakeholders and customers". It's all so Disney. No wonder people are going mad.

Fair dinkum ,

Just when I thought business jargon couldn't get any slimier.
'SMART' sounds like an MBA having a wet dream.

Harry Stotle ,

When working men and women were sent off to die in the trenches during WWI most, I suspect, would have known virtually nothing about the geopolitics driving the conflict.

Now we have boundless information streams yet the public is more outraged by some dickhead sounding off on Twitter than they are about cruelty and trauma arising from brutal regime change wars.
Surely it is glaringly obvious that this kind of carnage is orchestrated by amoral politicians acting at the behest of rapacious corporations and a crazed military?

What has gone wrong: unlike earlier generations they do not have the excuse of saying we didn't know what has happening?
They do, or should know, for example, that around 3 million Vietnamese were killed because of a childish theory (the domino theory), yet to them Twitter etiquette seems the more pressing issue.

Gall ,

Twatter's useless. Jack and his team of imperial censors shadowban anything that might upset the comfortable applecart of consumerism. This is why you don't see anything relevant other than the latest football, basket ball and baseball scores. If I was into sports betting I'd be on twatter otherwise it's a waste of time.

nottheonly1 ,

You should stop dicking around with identity.

Fair dinkum ,

The history of (mainly) white men and their religions, whether they be Christian or Mammon, is a history of exploitation, human and ecological.
As a white western male I am ashamed.
Extinction will be too good for us.

Jasper ,

As a brown western male, I can say that you should not be ashamed. You are also one of the exploited, the 'cannon fodder' during the wars contained high proportions of white western males and we can see the contempt with which white working class communities are treated in the west today.

Gall ,

True what they call "white trash" are beat up multiculturally as well as by the self righteous white limousine liberal elitists. I'd say they are the most oppressed group in the country right now.

Some of their trailer parks have worse poverty than Pine Ridge and that's saying something. Many of them go to the city looking for gainful employment end up living on the streets or in their cars even when they have job because the cost of living exceeds their income.

San Francisco is a perfect example.

Peter Charles ,

Not "The history of (mainly) white men "

People only think that because that is the modern (edited at that) history we are familiar with. Look a little deeper and we can see it is the history of Man, period, throughout our existence. Man, black, white, yellow or anything in-between is and always has been greedy, acquisitive, violent and jealous, it is our innate nature, likely the exact reason we are the most successful animal species on the planet. Probably because we developed our intelligence during the drastic changes that drove our predecessors from the trees to the plains and then out of Africa. Civilisation and a satisfactory quality of life somewhat tempers these natural urges but as soon as things get difficult we revert.

At the same time we have a small proportion of people that make these characteristics the bedrock of their lives and for the majority of people they are the pack alphas they all too willingly look up to and follow.

Fair dinkum ,

Most successful?
Reckon the cockroach family might prove that wrong.

Peter Charles ,

Hence the reason I included 'animal' in the phrase, or do you maintain that there has been another animal more successful than Man?

Fair dinkum ,

Point taken Peter.

Rhisiart Gwilym ,

"Successful", Peter? "Man"? Really?

anonymous bosch ,

"Throughout our existence, Man, black, white, yellow or anything in-between is and always has been greedy, acquisitive, violent and jealous, it is our innate nature, likely the exact reason we are the most successful animal species on the planet."

Firstly, so that is our 'innate nature' ? I wonder how many would agree with that assertion ? Secondly, in respect of "we are the most successful animal species on the planet", I must question the use of the word "successful" here – for what have "succeeded" in doing right up until now has actually brought us to the brink of extinction – are you suggesting that our "innate nature" is to bring an end to everything ?

Ramdan ,

greedy, acquisitive, violent and jealous, it is our innate nature

,

To be closer to truth this is just one side of the "innate nature". We are not black OR white (inside) we are BOTH. that means we are also loving, compassionate, collaborative creatures. Like in that native american tale: there are two wolves (black&white) the one you feed is the one that prevails.
Unfortunately, humanity-from the very beggening- fed the black wolf : the rapacious predator and elevated the most egregious of all beigns to positions of leadership. They were made kings, presidents, prime ministers.
Meanwhile, the white wolfs were given a cross and placed at an almost unreachable distance venerated with our tongue, desacrated with our actions.
This behaviour has reached its peak and today, competition, killing, betrayal, economical success, hedonism have been elevated to the level of virtues.

Interestingly, those characteristic you mention (greedy, acquisitive, violent and jealous) Buddha calls them: poisons of the mind, the defining symptom of a deranged mind ..but well, that was another white wolf: Buddha, a MAN not a HU-man.

We'll do well and not wrong, if we took some time for internal exporation . To continue to postpone our internal growth means postponing humanity's survival.

Gall ,

Not true. Some cultures are more willing to share with others. What you're are talking about are those who have embraced the Social Darwinist "philosophy" of survival of the fittest which is dominated mainly by whites but there are also other races who embrace this twisted 'philosophy" then there are those who consider themselves the "chosen ones" 'cause the bible or torah or talmud tells them so.

Antonym ,

As China is not doing anything of that nature, now.

Only if you close your eyes

How China Is Interfering in Taiwan's Election

Who is hiding behind bully no.1, the CIA/FED US?
Bully no.2, Xi / CCP-China.

Richard Le Sarc ,

Coming from an apologist for the planet's Number Two bully-boy, Israel, with its hatred of others, belligerence, aggression, utter hateful contempt for International Law, dominance of industries of exploitation like arms trafficking, surveillance methodologies and equipment, 'blood diamonds', human organs trafficking,sex trafficking, pornography, 'binary options', online gambling, pay-day lending etc,that takes real CHUTZPAH.

Antonym ,

All that with just 6.5 million Israeli Jews in total; Compare that to 1.3 billion Chinese in China or 1.4 billions Sunnis.
Dyscalculia much?

Fair dinkum ,

The Chinese do not claim to be perfect, but then they also make no claim to be the chosen.

Antonym ,

No, China just calls itself modestly "Zhongguo" Central or Middle Kingdom, while for Sunnis all others are infidel s.

Richard Le Sarc ,

Chinese civilization aims for harmony within society and between societies. Talmudic Judaism sees all non-Jews as inferior, barely above animals, and enemies. Chalk and cheese.

Richard Le Sarc ,

Yes, you really are busy little beavers, aren't you. With perhaps 40% of Israeli Jews actually opposed to Israeli State fascism and terror, the numbers become even more stark. But what counts is the money, the 'Binyamins' as they say in Brooklyn, and the CONTROL that they purchase.

Antonym ,

Sure, plenty of Jews are not happy with Netanyahu's hard line. Your number reduces the supporting Israelis to 3.9 million, even less. One big city size in the ME.

Money / control: Ali Baba's cave with gold and treasure is not in Lower Manhattan -paper dollars + little gold- but along the Arabian West coast- real oil and gas. The Anglo American and Brit 0.1% know that, but you don't apparently.

Richard Le Sarc ,

Very poor quality hasbara. The Sauds are rich, the petro-dollar vital to US economic dominance, but compared to Jewish elite control of Western finances, of US politics, of US MSM, of the commanding heights of US Government and of the Ivy League colleges, it is PEANUTS. And, in any case, the Sauds are doenmeh.

Richard Le Sarc ,

Jewish control of the West is mediated by the number of 'Binyamins' dispensed to the political Sabbat Goyim, not the numbers of Jewish people. You know that-why dissemble? Can't help yourself, can you.

paul ,

Olga Guerin at the state controlled, Zionist BBC, is apparently the latest Corbyn style rabid anti-semite to be unmasked by the Board of Deputies.

In her coverage of the Holocaust Industry's Auschwitz Jamboree, she made a very brief passing reference to Palestinians living under occupation, and apparently that is unpardonable anti Semitism.

Capricornia Man ,

Rich. you forgot to mention gross, systematic interference in the politics of the UK, US, Australia and who knows how many other countries.

paul ,

There are some grounds for optimism despite the utter undisguised barbarism of the US, Israel and their satellites.
These vile regimes are having their last hurrah.
The US is on the brink of imploding. It will collapse politically, financially, economically, socially, culturally, morally and spiritually.
When it does, its many satraps and satellites in the EU, the Gulf dictatorships, Israel, will go down with it. It will be like eastern Europe in 1989.
All it takes is for the front door to be kicked in and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down. Some sudden crisis or unforeseen event will bring this about. A sudden unwinding of the Debt and Derivatives time bombs. Another war or crisis in any one of a number of destabilised regions, Iran being an obvious favourite. There are many possibilities.
And the blueprint for a better world already exists. In fact, it is already being implemented.
Russia, China and Iran have survived the aggression directed against them. They have been left with few illusions about the nature of the US regime and the implacable hatred and violence they can expect from it.
These are the key players in the Belt And Road, which provides a new template for development and mutual prosperity throughout the planet.
China has built infrastructure and industry in Africa and elsewhere in a single generation which colonial powers neglected to provide in centuries of genocide, slaughter, slavery and rapacious exploitation. It is not surprising that these achievements have been denigrated and traduced by western regimes, who seek to ascribe and transfer their own dismal record of behaviour to China.
The Zio Empire is lashing out like a wounded beast. It is even attacking its own most servile satellites and satraps. It just has to be fended off and left to die like a mad dog. Then a better world will emerge.

George Cornell ,

Taiwan has been a US vassal for a very long time and its location next to China, its history as a part of China and its lack of recognition should not be ignored. Its people are ethnically Chinese, speak Chinese and follow most Chinese customs. For you to equate this to the presence of American bases all over the world, meddling in hundreds of elections, assassinating elected leaders who won't kowtow, invading country after country and causing millions of deaths for "regime changes" is absolutely ridiculous.

paul ,

Taiwan is just another part of China that was brutally hacked off its body by rapacious western imperial powers. Like Hong Kong, Tsingtao and Manchuria.

paul ,

Or Shanghai. No self respecting nation would accept this, but China has been a model of restraint in not using force, but patient diplomacy, to rectify this imperial plunder.

Antonym ,

Or the Tibet, Aksai Chin, the Shaksgam Valley or the South China Sea. What's next, Siberia?

paul ,

Tibet was Chinese before the United Snakes or Kosherstan even existed.
The South China Sea was recognised as Chinese until 1949, when the US puppet Chiang Kai Shek was booted out and skulked around on Taiwan.
Then suddenly the SC Sea was no longer Chinese. Lord Neptune in Washington decreed otherwise.

Martin Usher ,

I remember the downing of flight 655 because it was on the evening news in the US. Literally. The Vincennes, the ship that shot down the airliner, had a news crew on board and they recorded the entire incident, the excitement of the incoming threat, the firing of a couple of Standard missiles at the threat, the cheering when the threat was neutralized followed by the "Oh, shit!" moment when they realized what they had done. This was in the pre-youTube days and the footage was only shown once to the best of my recollection so its probably long gone and buried. The lessons learned from that incident was that the crew needed better training -- they appeared to be near panic -- and you shouldn't really have those sorts of weapons near civilian airspace. Another lesson that's worth remembering is that this was 30 years ago, far enough in the past that the state of the art missile carrier has long been scrapped as obsolete (broken up in 2011). Put another way, we (the US) have effectively been in a state of war with Iran for over 40 years. Its expensive and pointless but I suppose the real goal is to keep our aerospace companies supplied with work.

johny conspiranoid ,

Yes, I remember that news clip as well. It was shown in the UK. There was one young 'dude' on a swivel seat working the aiming device and a bunch of people cheering him on, then "oh shit!" as you say. I also wonder if the whole thing was staged latter though, for damage limitation.

Grafter ,

It's all here .. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Onk_wI3ZVME

Frank Speaker ,

I remember seeing clips at the time, but this documentary is excellent, thanks for sharing. The Capt of the USS Vincennes should have been put behind bars.

Richard Le Sarc ,

But he got a medal! The Vincennes returned to the USA to a 'heroes' welcome'. 'Warriors' one and all.

Gall ,

No surprise. Many of the low life cretins that were responsible for the Wounded Knee Massacre received the Congressional Medal of Honor. Ironic that many of the post humous awards and the Purple Hearts received were those wounded or killed by the 7th's own "friendly fire".

[Jan 30, 2020] So it is a matter of change the flag in the US bases and all will be OK?

Jan 30, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

DFC , Jan 30 2020 18:02 utc | 63

A bit off-topic but seems that may be US will be Iraq, but who remains is NATO:

https://middle-east-online.com/en/iraq-considers-nato-role-instead-us-led-coalition

So it is a matter of change the flag in the US bases and all will be OK?

[Jan 30, 2020] So it is a matter of change the flag in the US bases and all will be OK?

Jan 30, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

DFC , Jan 30 2020 18:02 utc | 63

A bit off-topic but seems that may be US will be Iraq, but who remains is NATO:

https://middle-east-online.com/en/iraq-considers-nato-role-instead-us-led-coalition

So it is a matter of change the flag in the US bases and all will be OK?

[Jan 30, 2020] The Neocons Strike Back by Jacob Heilbrunn

Notable quotes:
"... A chorus of neocons rushed to second his praise: Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former CIA officer and prominent Never Trumper, lauded Trump's intestinal fortitude, while Representative Liz Cheney hailed Trump's "decisive action." It was Carlson who was left sputtering about the forever wars. "Washington has wanted war with Iran for decades," Carlson said . "They still want it now. Let's hope they haven't finally gotten it." ..."
"... Neoconservatism as a foreign policy ideology has been badly discredited over the last two decades, thanks to the debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan. But in the blinding flash of one drone strike, neoconservatism was easily able to reinsert itself in the national conversation. It now appears that Trump intends to make Soleimani's killing -- which has nearly drawn the U.S. into yet another conflict in the Middle East and, in typical neoconservative fashion, ended up backfiring and undercutting American goals in the region -- a central part of his 2020 reelection bid . ..."
"... The neocons are starting to realize that Trump's presidency, at least when it comes to foreign policy, is no less vulnerable to hijacking than those of previous Republican presidents, including the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. The leading hawks inside and outside the administration shaping its approach to Iran include Robert O'Brien, Bolton's disciple and successor as national security adviser; Secretary of State Mike Pompeo; Special Representative for Iran Brian Hook; Mark Dubowitz, the CEO of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies; David Wurmser, a former adviser to Bolton; and Senators Lindsey Graham and Tom Cotton. Perhaps no one better exemplifies the neocon ethos better than Cotton, a Kristol protégé who soaked up the teachings of the political philosopher Leo Strauss while studying at Harvard. Others who have been baying for conflict with Iran include Rudy Giuliani, the former New York City mayor who is now Trump's personal lawyer and partner in Ukrainian crime. In June 2018, Giuliani went to Paris to address the National Council of Resistance of Iran, whose parent organization is the Iranian opposition group Mujahedin-e-Khalq, or MeK. Giuliani, who has been on the payroll of the MeK for years, demanded -- what else? -- regime change. ..."
"... The fresh charge into battle of what Sidney Blumenthal once aptly referred to as an ideological light brigade brings to mind Hobbes's observation in Leviathan : "All men that are ambitious of military command are inclined to continue the causes of war; and to stir up trouble and sedition; for there is no honor military but by war; nor any such hope to mend an ill game, as by causing a new shuffle." The neocons, it appears, have caused a new shuffle. ..."
"... the killing of Soleimani revealed that the neocon military-intellectual complex is very much still intact, with the ability to spring back to life from a state of suspended animation in an instant. Its hawkish tendencies remain widely prevalent not only in the Republican Party but also in the media, the think-tank universe, and in the liberal-hawk precincts of the Democratic Party. Meanwhile, the influence and reach of the anti-war right remains nascent; even if this contingent has popular support, it doesn't enjoy much backing in Washington beyond the mood swings of the mercurial occupant of the Oval Office. ..."
"... The neocons supplied the patina of intellectual legitimacy for policies that might once have seemed outré. ..."
"... But it was the neoconservatives, not the paleocons, who amassed influence in the 1990s and took over the GOP's foreign policy wing. Veteran neocons like Michael Ledeen were joined by a younger generation of journalists and policymakers that included Robert Kagan, Bill Kristol (who founded The Weekly Standard in 1994), Paul Wolfowitz, and Douglas J. Feith. The neocons consistently pushed for a hard line against Iraq and Iran. In his 1996 book, Freedom Betrayed, for example, Ledeen, an expert on Italian fascism, declared that the right, rather than the left, should adhere to the revolutionary tradition of toppling dictatorships. In his 2002 book, The War Against the Terror Masters, Ledeen stated , "Creative destruction is our middle name. We tear down the old order every day." ..."
"... Still, a number of neocons, including David Frum, Max Boot, Anne Applebaum, Jennifer Rubin, and Kristol himself, have continued to condemn Trump vociferously for his thuggish instincts at home and abroad. They are not seeking high-profile government careers in the Trump administration and so have been able to reinvent themselves as domestic regime-change advocates, something they have done quite skillfully. In fact, their writings are more pungent now that they have been liberated from the costive confines of the movement. ..."
"... And so, urged on by Mike Pompeo, a staunch evangelical Christian, and Iraq War–era figures like David Wurmser , Trump is apparently prepared to target Iran for destruction. In a tweet, he dismissed his national security adviser, the Bolton protégé Robert O'Brien, for declaring that the strike against Soleimani would force Iran to negotiate: "Actually, I couldn't care less if they negotiate," he said . "Will be totally up to them but, no nuclear weapons and 'don't kill your protesters.'" Neocons have been quick to recognize the new, more belligerent Trump -- and the potential maneuvering room he's now created for their movement. Jonathan S. Tobin, a former editor at Commentary and a contributor to National Review , rejoiced in Haaretz that "the neo-isolationist wing of the GOP, for which Carlson is a spokesperson, is losing the struggle for control of Trump's foreign policy." Tobin, however, added an important caveat: "When it comes to Iran, Trump needs no prodding from the likes of Bolton to act like a neoconservative. Just as important, the entire notion of anyone -- be it Carlson, former White House senior advisor Steve Bannon, or any cabinet official like Secretary of State Mike Pompeo -- being able to control Trump is a myth." ..."
"... One reason is institutional. The Foundation for Defense of Democracies, Hudson Institute, and AEI have all been sounding the tocsin about Iran for decades. Once upon a time, the neocons were outliers. Now they're the new establishment, exerting a kind of gravitational pull on debate, pulling politicians and a variety of news organizations into their orbit. The Hudson Institute, for example, recently held an event with former Iranian Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, who exhorted Iran's Revolutionary Guard to "peel away" from the mullahs and endorsed the Trump administration's maximum pressure campaign. ..."
"... Meanwhile, Wolfowitz, also writing in the Times , has popped up to warn Trump against trying to leave Syria: "To paraphrase Trotsky's aphorism about war, you may not be interested in the Middle East, but the Middle East is interested in you." With the "both-sides" ethos that prevails in the mainstream media, neocon ideas are just as good as any others for National Public Radio or The Washington Post, whose editorial page, incidentally, championed the Iraq War and has been imbued with a neocon, or at least liberal-hawk, tinge ever since Fred Hiatt took it over in 2000. ..."
"... Above all, Trump hired Michael Flynn as his first national security adviser. Flynn was the co-author with Ledeen of a creepy tract called Field of Fight, in which they demanded a crusade against the Muslim world ..."
"... At a minimum, the traditional Republican hard-line foreign policy approach has now fused with neoconservatism so that the two are virtually indistinguishable. At a maximum, neoconservatism shapes the dominant foreign policy worldview in Washington, which is why Democrats were falling over themselves to assure voters that Soleimani -- a "bad guy" -- had it coming. Any objections that his killing might boomerang back on the U.S. are met with cries from the right that Democrats are siding with the enemy. This truly is a policy of "maximum pressure" at home and abroad. ..."
Jan 23, 2020 | newrepublic.com

There was a time not so long ago, before President Donald Trump's surprise decision early this year to liquidate the Iranian commander Qassem Soleimani, when it appeared that America's neoconservatives were floundering. The president was itching to withdraw U.S. forces from Afghanistan. He was staging exuberant photo-ops with a beaming Kim Jong Un. He was reportedly willing to hold talks with the president of Iran, while clearly preferring trade wars to hot ones.

Indeed, this past summer, Trump's anti-interventionist supporters in the conservative media were riding high. When he refrained from attacking Iran in June after it shot down an American drone, Fox News host Tucker Carlson declared , "Donald Trump was elected president precisely to keep us out of disaster like war with Iran." Carlson went on to condemn the hawks in Trump's Cabinet and their allies, who he claimed were egging the president on -- familiar names to anyone who has followed the decades-long neoconservative project of aggressively using military force to topple unfriendly regimes and project American power over the globe. "So how did we get so close to starting [a war]?" he asked. "One of [the hawks'] key allies is the national security adviser of the United States. John Bolton is an old friend of Bill Kristol's. Together they helped plan the Iraq War."

By the time Trump met with Kim in late June, becoming the first sitting president to set foot on North Korean soil, Bolton was on the outs. Carlson was on the president's North Korean junket, while Trump's national security adviser was in Mongolia. "John Bolton is absolutely a hawk," Trump told NBC in June. "If it was up to him, he'd take on the whole world at one time, OK?" In September, Bolton was fired.

The standard-bearer of the Republican Party had made clear his distaste for the neocons' belligerent approach to global affairs, much to the neocons' own entitled chagrin. As recently as December, Bolton, now outside the tent pissing in, was hammering Trump for "bluffing" through an announcement that the administration wanted North Korea to dismantle its nuclear weapons program. "The idea that we are somehow exerting maximum pressure on North Korea is just unfortunately not true," Bolton told Axios . Then Trump ordered the drone strike on Soleimani, drastically escalating a simmering conflict between Iran and the United States. All of a sudden the roles were reversed, with Bolton praising the president and asserting that Soleimani's death was " the first step to regime change in Tehran ." A chorus of neocons rushed to second his praise: Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former CIA officer and prominent Never Trumper, lauded Trump's intestinal fortitude, while Representative Liz Cheney hailed Trump's "decisive action." It was Carlson who was left sputtering about the forever wars. "Washington has wanted war with Iran for decades," Carlson said . "They still want it now. Let's hope they haven't finally gotten it."

Neoconservatism as a foreign policy ideology has been badly discredited over the last two decades, thanks to the debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan. But in the blinding flash of one drone strike, neoconservatism was easily able to reinsert itself in the national conversation. It now appears that Trump intends to make Soleimani's killing -- which has nearly drawn the U.S. into yet another conflict in the Middle East and, in typical neoconservative fashion, ended up backfiring and undercutting American goals in the region -- a central part of his 2020 reelection bid .

The anti-interventionist right is freaking out. Writing in American Greatness, Matthew Boose declared , "[T]he Trump movement, which was generated out of opposition to the foreign policy blob and its endless wars, was revealed this week to have been co-opted to a great extent by neoconservatives seeking regime change." James Antle, the editor of The American Conservative, a publication founded in 2002 to oppose the Iraq War, asked , "Did Trump betray the anti-war right?"

In the blinding flash of one drone strike, neoconservatism was easily able to reinsert itself in the national conversation.

Their concerns are not unmerited. The neocons are starting to realize that Trump's presidency, at least when it comes to foreign policy, is no less vulnerable to hijacking than those of previous Republican presidents, including the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. The leading hawks inside and outside the administration shaping its approach to Iran include Robert O'Brien, Bolton's disciple and successor as national security adviser; Secretary of State Mike Pompeo; Special Representative for Iran Brian Hook; Mark Dubowitz, the CEO of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies; David Wurmser, a former adviser to Bolton; and Senators Lindsey Graham and Tom Cotton. Perhaps no one better exemplifies the neocon ethos better than Cotton, a Kristol protégé who soaked up the teachings of the political philosopher Leo Strauss while studying at Harvard. Others who have been baying for conflict with Iran include Rudy Giuliani, the former New York City mayor who is now Trump's personal lawyer and partner in Ukrainian crime. In June 2018, Giuliani went to Paris to address the National Council of Resistance of Iran, whose parent organization is the Iranian opposition group Mujahedin-e-Khalq, or MeK. Giuliani, who has been on the payroll of the MeK for years, demanded -- what else? -- regime change.

The fresh charge into battle of what Sidney Blumenthal once aptly referred to as an ideological light brigade brings to mind Hobbes's observation in Leviathan : "All men that are ambitious of military command are inclined to continue the causes of war; and to stir up trouble and sedition; for there is no honor military but by war; nor any such hope to mend an ill game, as by causing a new shuffle." The neocons, it appears, have caused a new shuffle.

Donald Trump has not dragged us into war with Iran (yet). But the killing of Soleimani revealed that the neocon military-intellectual complex is very much still intact, with the ability to spring back to life from a state of suspended animation in an instant. Its hawkish tendencies remain widely prevalent not only in the Republican Party but also in the media, the think-tank universe, and in the liberal-hawk precincts of the Democratic Party. Meanwhile, the influence and reach of the anti-war right remains nascent; even if this contingent has popular support, it doesn't enjoy much backing in Washington beyond the mood swings of the mercurial occupant of the Oval Office.

But there was a time when the neoconservative coalition was not so entrenched -- and what has turned out to be its provisional state of exile lends some critical insight into how it managed to hang around respectable policymaking circles in recent years, and how it may continue to shape American foreign policy for the foreseeable future. When the neoconservatives came on the scene in the late 1960s, the Republican old guard viewed them as interlopers. The neocons, former Trotskyists turned liberals who broke with the Democratic Party over its perceived weakness on the Cold War, stormed the citadel of Republican ideology by emphasizing the relationship between ideas and political reality. Irving Kristol, one of the original neoconservatives, mused in 1985 that " what communists call the theoretical organs always end up through a filtering process influencing a lot of people who don't even know they're being influenced. In the end, ideas rule the world because even interests are defined by ideas."

At pivotal moments in modern American foreign policy, the neocons supplied the patina of intellectual legitimacy for policies that might once have seemed outré. Jeane Kirkpatrick's seminal 1979 essay in Commentary, "Dictatorships and Double Standards," essentially set forth the lineaments of the Reagan doctrine. She assailed Jimmy Carter for attacking friendly authoritarian leaders such as the shah of Iran and Nicaragua's Anastasio Somoza. She contended that authoritarian regimes might molt into democracies, while totalitarian regimes would remain impregnable to outside influence, American or otherwise. Ronald Reagan read the essay and liked it. He named Kirkpatrick his ambassador to the United Nations, where she became the most influential neocon of the era for her denunciations of Arab regimes and defenses of Israel. Her tenure was also defined by the notion that it was perfectly acceptable for America to cozy up to noxious regimes, from apartheid South Africa to the shah's Iran, as part of the greater mission to oppose the red menace.

The neocons supplied the patina of intellectual legitimacy for policies that might once have seemed outré.

There was always tension between Reagan's affinity for authoritarian regimes and his hard-line opposition to Communist ones. His sunny persona never quite gelled with Kirkpatrick's more gelid view that communism was an immutable force, and in 1982, in a major speech to the British Parliament at Westminster emphasizing the power of democracy and free speech, he declared his intent to end the Cold War on American terms. As Reagan's second term progressed and democracy and free speech actually took hold in the waning days of the Soviet Union, many hawks declared that it was all a sham. Indeed, not a few neocons were livid, claiming that Reagan was appeasing the Soviet Union. But after the USSR collapsed, they retroactively blessed him as the anti-Communist warrior par excellence and the model for the future. The right was now a font of happy talk about the dawn of a new age of liberty based on free-market economics and American firepower.

The fall of communism, in other words, set the stage for a new neoconservative paradigm. Francis Fukuyama's The End of History appeared a decade after Kirkpatrick's essay in Commentary and just before the Berlin Wall was breached on November 9, 1989. Here was a sharp break with the saturnine, realpolitik approach that Kirkpatrick had championed. Irving Kristol regarded it as hopelessly utopian -- "I don't believe a word of it," he wrote in a response to Fukuyama. But a younger generation of neocons, led by Irving's son, Bill Kristol, and Robert Kagan, embraced it. Fukuyama argued that Western, liberal democracy, far from being menaced, was now the destination point of the train of world history. With communism vanquished, the neocons, bearing the good word from Fukuyama, formulated a new goal: democracy promotion, by force if necessary, as a way to hasten history and secure the global order with the U.S. at its head. The first Gulf War in 1991, precipitated by Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, tested the neocons' resolve and led to a break in the GOP -- one that would presage the rise of Donald Trump. For decades, Patrick Buchanan had been regularly inveighing against what he came to call the neocon " amen corner" in and around the Washington centers of power, including A.M. Rosenthal and Charles Krauthammer, both of whom endorsed the '91 Gulf War. The neocons were frustrated by the measured approach taken by George H.W. Bush. He refused to crow about the fall of the Berlin Wall and kicked the Iraqis out of Kuwait but declined to invade Iraq and "finish the job," as his hawkish critics would later put it. Buchanan then ran for the presidency in 1992 on an America First platform, reviving a paleoconservative tradition that would partly inform Trump's dark horse run in 2016.

But it was the neoconservatives, not the paleocons, who amassed influence in the 1990s and took over the GOP's foreign policy wing. Veteran neocons like Michael Ledeen were joined by a younger generation of journalists and policymakers that included Robert Kagan, Bill Kristol (who founded The Weekly Standard in 1994), Paul Wolfowitz, and Douglas J. Feith. The neocons consistently pushed for a hard line against Iraq and Iran. In his 1996 book, Freedom Betrayed, for example, Ledeen, an expert on Italian fascism, declared that the right, rather than the left, should adhere to the revolutionary tradition of toppling dictatorships. In his 2002 book, The War Against the Terror Masters, Ledeen stated , "Creative destruction is our middle name. We tear down the old order every day."

We all know the painful consequences of the neocons' obsession with creative destruction. In his second inaugural address, three and a half years after 9/11, George W. Bush cemented neoconservative ideology into presidential doctrine: "It is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world." The neocons' hubris had already turned into nemesis in Iraq, paving the way for an anti-war candidate in Barack Obama.

But it was Trump -- by virtue of running as a Republican -- who appeared to sound neoconservatism's death knell. He announced his Buchananesque policy of "America First" in a speech at Washington's Mayflower Hotel in 2016, signaling that he would not adhere to the long-standing Reaganite principles that had animated the party establishment.

The pooh-bahs of the GOP openly declared their disdain and revulsion for Trump, leading directly to the rise of the Never Trump movement, which was dominated by neocons. The Never Trumpers ended up functioning as an informal blacklist for Trump once he became president. Elliott Abrams, for example, who was being touted for deputy secretary of state in February 2017, was rejected when Steve Bannon alerted Trump to his earlier heresies (though he later reemerged, in January 2019, as Trump's special envoy to Venezuela, where he has pushed for regime change). Not a few other members of the Republican foreign policy establishment suffered similar fates.

Kristol's The Weekly Standard, which had held the neoconservative line through the Bush years and beyond , folded in 2018. Even the office building that used to house the American Enterprise Institute and the Standard, on the corner of 17th and M streets in Washington, has been torn down, leaving an empty, boarded-up site whose symbolism speaks for itself.

Still, a number of neocons, including David Frum, Max Boot, Anne Applebaum, Jennifer Rubin, and Kristol himself, have continued to condemn Trump vociferously for his thuggish instincts at home and abroad. They are not seeking high-profile government careers in the Trump administration and so have been able to reinvent themselves as domestic regime-change advocates, something they have done quite skillfully. In fact, their writings are more pungent now that they have been liberated from the costive confines of the movement.

It was Trump -- by virtue of running as a Republican -- who appeared to sound neoconservatism's death knell.

But other neocons -- the ones who want to wield positions of influence and might -- have, more often than not, been able to hold their noses. Stephen Wertheim, writing in The New York Review of Books, has perceptively dubbed this faction the anti-globalist neocons. Led by John Bolton, they believe Trump performed a godsend by elevating the term globalism "from a marginal slur to the central foil of American foreign policy and Republican politics," Wertheim argued . The U.S. need not bother with pesky multilateral institutions or international agreements or the entire postwar order, for that matter -- it's now America's way or the highway.

And so, urged on by Mike Pompeo, a staunch evangelical Christian, and Iraq War–era figures like David Wurmser , Trump is apparently prepared to target Iran for destruction. In a tweet, he dismissed his national security adviser, the Bolton protégé Robert O'Brien, for declaring that the strike against Soleimani would force Iran to negotiate: "Actually, I couldn't care less if they negotiate," he said . "Will be totally up to them but, no nuclear weapons and 'don't kill your protesters.'" Neocons have been quick to recognize the new, more belligerent Trump -- and the potential maneuvering room he's now created for their movement. Jonathan S. Tobin, a former editor at Commentary and a contributor to National Review , rejoiced in Haaretz that "the neo-isolationist wing of the GOP, for which Carlson is a spokesperson, is losing the struggle for control of Trump's foreign policy." Tobin, however, added an important caveat: "When it comes to Iran, Trump needs no prodding from the likes of Bolton to act like a neoconservative. Just as important, the entire notion of anyone -- be it Carlson, former White House senior advisor Steve Bannon, or any cabinet official like Secretary of State Mike Pompeo -- being able to control Trump is a myth."

In other words, whether the neocons themselves are occupying top positions in the Trump administration is almost irrelevant. The ideology itself has reemerged to a degree that even Trump himself seems hard pressed to resist it -- if he even wants to.

How were the neocons able to influence another Republican presidency, one that was ostensibly dedicated to curbing their sway?

One reason is institutional. The Foundation for Defense of Democracies, Hudson Institute, and AEI have all been sounding the tocsin about Iran for decades. Once upon a time, the neocons were outliers. Now they're the new establishment, exerting a kind of gravitational pull on debate, pulling politicians and a variety of news organizations into their orbit. The Hudson Institute, for example, recently held an event with former Iranian Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, who exhorted Iran's Revolutionary Guard to "peel away" from the mullahs and endorsed the Trump administration's maximum pressure campaign. The event was hosted by Michael Doran, a former senior director on George W. Bush's National Security Council and a senior fellow at the institute, who wrote in The New York Times on January 3, "The United States has no choice, if it seeks to stay in the Middle East, but to check Iran's military power on the ground." Then there's Jamie M. Fly, a former staffer to Senator Marco Rubio who was appointed this past August to head Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty; he previously co-authored an essay in Foreign Affairs contending that it isn't enough to bomb Iranian nuclear facilities: "If the United States seriously considers military action, it would be better to plan an operation that not only strikes the nuclear program but aims to destabilize the regime, potentially resolving the Iranian nuclear crisis once and for all."

Meanwhile, Wolfowitz, also writing in the Times , has popped up to warn Trump against trying to leave Syria: "To paraphrase Trotsky's aphorism about war, you may not be interested in the Middle East, but the Middle East is interested in you." With the "both-sides" ethos that prevails in the mainstream media, neocon ideas are just as good as any others for National Public Radio or The Washington Post, whose editorial page, incidentally, championed the Iraq War and has been imbued with a neocon, or at least liberal-hawk, tinge ever since Fred Hiatt took it over in 2000.

But there are plenty of institutions in Washington, and neoconservatism's seemingly inescapable influence cannot be chalked up to the swamp alone. Some etiolated form of what might be called Ledeenism lingered on before taking on new life at the outset of the Trump administration. Trump's overt animus toward Muslims, for example, meant that figures such as Frank Gaffney, who opposed arms-control treaties with Moscow as a member of the Reagan administration and resigned in protest of the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, achieved a new prominence. During the Obama administration, Gaffney, the head of the Center for Security Policy, claimed that the Muslim Brotherhood had infiltrated the White House and National Security Agency.

Above all, Trump hired Michael Flynn as his first national security adviser. Flynn was the co-author with Ledeen of a creepy tract called Field of Fight, in which they demanded a crusade against the Muslim world: "We're in a world war against a messianic mass movement of evil people." It was one of many signs that Trump was susceptible to ideas of a civilizational battle against "Islamo-fascism," which Norman Podhoretz and other neocons argued, in the wake of 9/11, would lead to World War III. In their millenarian ardor and inflexible support for Israel, the neocons find themselves in a position precisely cognate to evangelical Christians -- both groups of true believers trying to enact their vision through an apostate. But perhaps the neoconservatives' greatest strength lies in the realm of ideas that Irving Kristol identified more than three decades ago. The neocons remain the winners of that battle, not because their policies have made the world or the U.S. more secure, but by default -- because there are so few genuinely alternative ideas that are championed with equal zeal. The foreign policy discussion surrounding Soleimani's killing -- which accelerated Iran's nuclear weapons program, diminished America's influence in the Middle East, and entrenched Iran's theocratic regime -- has largely occurred on a spectrum of the neocons' making. It is a discussion that accepts premises of the beneficence of American military might and hegemony -- Hobbes's "ill game" -- and naturally bends the universe toward more war.

At a minimum, the traditional Republican hard-line foreign policy approach has now fused with neoconservatism so that the two are virtually indistinguishable. At a maximum, neoconservatism shapes the dominant foreign policy worldview in Washington, which is why Democrats were falling over themselves to assure voters that Soleimani -- a "bad guy" -- had it coming. Any objections that his killing might boomerang back on the U.S. are met with cries from the right that Democrats are siding with the enemy. This truly is a policy of "maximum pressure" at home and abroad.

As Trump takes an extreme hard line against Iran, the neoconservatives may ultimately get their long-held wish of a war with the ayatollahs. When it ends in a fresh disaster, they can always argue that it only failed because it wasn't prosecuted vigorously enough -- and the shuffle will begin again.

Jacob Heilbrunn is the editor of The National Interest and the author of They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons. @ JacobHeilbrunn

Read More Politics , The Soapbox , Donald Trump , Islamic Republic of Iran , Qassem Soleimani , Bill Kristol , Irving Kristol , David Frum , John Bolton , Norman Podhoretz , Doug Feith , Paul Wolfowitz , George W. Bush , George H.W. Bush , Ronald Reagan , Pat Buchanan , Mike Pompeo , Tom Cotton , Lindsey Graham , Rudy Giuliani , Gulf War , Iraq War , Cold War , Francis Fukuyama , Jeane Kirkpatrick

[Jan 30, 2020] Impeachment's Biggest Absurdity Our Toxic Fixation On Useless And Corrupting Ukraine Aid

They are not helping Ukraine citizen of which after 2014 live in abject poverty. So in now way this an aid. They are arming Ukraine to kill Russians and maintain a hot spot on Russian border.
The USA, specifically Brennan, Nuland and Biden create civil war out of nothing pushing far right nationalist to suppress eastern population by brute forces (they burned alive 200 hundred or more people on Odessa and killed people in Mariupol before Donbass flared up)
They are despicable MIC bottomfeeders. Neocon calculation is that Russia will not respond to this provocation, because it is too weak after the economic rape of 1991-2000. While Putin is a very patient politician they might be wrong.
Notable quotes:
"... Authored by James Bovard via JimBovard.com, ..."
"... "corruption is positively correlated with aid received from the United States." ..."
"... "I think it makes no sense to give aid money to countries that are corrupt." ..."
"... " remains skeptical after a history of broken promises [from the Ukraine govt]. Kiev hasn't successfully completed any of a series of IMF bailout packages over the past two decades, with systemic corruption at the heart of much of that failure." ..."
"... "Most foreign aid winds up with outside consultants, the local military, corrupt bureaucrats, the new NGO [nongovernmental organizations] administrators, and Mercedes dealers." ..."
"... James Bovard is the author of " ..."
"... Attention Deficit Democracy ..."
"... The Bush Betrayal ..."
"... Terrorism and Tyranny ..."
"... ," and other books. Bovard is on the USA Today Board of Contributors. He is on Twitter at @jimbovard. His website is at ..."
"... www.jimbovard.com ..."
Jan 30, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com
Authored by James Bovard via JimBovard.com,

The campaign to convict and remove President Donald Trump in the Senate hinges on delays in disbursing U.S. aid to Ukraine. Ukraine was supposedly on the verge of great progress until Trump pulled the rug out from under the heroic salvation effort by U.S. government bureaucrats. Unfortunately, Congress has devoted a hundred times more attention to the timing of aid to Ukraine than to its effectiveness. And most of the media coverage has ignored the biggest absurdity of the impeachment fight.

The temporary postponement of the Ukrainian aid was practically irrelevant considering that U.S. assistance efforts have long fueled the poxes they promised to eradicate – especially kleptocracy, or government by thieves .

A 2002 American Economic Review analysis concluded that "increases in [foreign] aid are associated with contemporaneous increases in corruption" and that "corruption is positively correlated with aid received from the United States."

Then-President George W. Bush promised to reform foreign aid that year, declaring , "I think it makes no sense to give aid money to countries that are corrupt." Regardless, the Bush administration continued delivering billions of dollars in handouts to many of the world's most corrupt regimes .

Then-President Barack Obama, recognizing the failure of past U.S. aid efforts, proclaimed at the United Nations in 2010 that the U.S. government is " leading a global effort to combat corruption ." The following year, congressional Republicans sought to restrict foreign aid to fraud-ridden foreign regimes. Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton wailed that restricting handouts to nations that fail anti-corruption tests "has the potential to affect a staggering number of needy aid recipients."

The Obama administration continued pouring tens of billions of U.S. tax dollars into sinkholes such as Afghanistan, which even its president, Ashraf Ghani, admitted in 2016 was "one of the most corrupt countries on earth ." John Sopko, the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction (SIGAR), declared that "U.S. policies and practices unintentionally aided and abetted corruption" in Afghanistan.

Since the end of the Soviet Union, the U.S. has provided more than $6 billion in aid to Ukraine. At the House impeachment hearings, a key anti-Trump witness was acting U.S. ambassador to the Ukraine, William B. Taylor Jr. The Washington Post hailed Taylor as someone who " spent much of the 1990s telling Ukrainian politicians that nothing was more critical to their long-term prosperity than rooting out corruption and bolstering the rule of law, in his role as the head of U.S. development assistance for post-Soviet countries." A New York Times editorial lauded Taylor and State Department deputy assistant secretary George Kent as witnesses who "came across not as angry Democrats or Deep State conspirators, but as men who have devoted their lives to serving their country."

After their testimony spurred criticism, a Washington Post headline captured the capital city's reaction: "The diplomatic corps has been wounded. The State Department needs to heal." But not nearly as much as the foreigners supposedly rescued by U.S. bureaucrats.

The Wall Street Journal reported on Oct. 31 that the International Monetary Fund, which has provided more than $20 billion in loans to Ukraine, " remains skeptical after a history of broken promises [from the Ukraine govt]. Kiev hasn't successfully completed any of a series of IMF bailout packages over the past two decades, with systemic corruption at the heart of much of that failure."

The IMF concluded that Ukraine continued to be vexed by " shortcomings in the legal framework, pervasive corruption, and large parts of the economy dominated by inefficient state-owned enterprises or by oligarchs." That last item is damning for the U.S. benevolent pretensions. If a former Soviet republic cannot even terminate its government-owned boondoggles, then why in hell was the U.S. government bankrolling them?

Transparency International, which publishes an annual Corruption Perceptions Index, shows that corruption surged in Ukraine in the late 1990s (after the U.S. decided to rescue them) and remains at abysmal levels. Ukraine is now ranked as the 120th most corrupt nation in the world -- a lower ranking than received by Egypt and Pakistan, two other major U.S. aid recipients also notorious for corruption.

Actually, the best gauge of Ukrainian corruption is the near-total collapse of its citizens' trust in government or in their own future. Since 1991, the nation has lost almost 20% of its population as citizens flee abroad like passengers leaping off a sinking ship.

And yet, the House impeachment hearings and much of the media gushed over career U.S. government officials despite their strikeouts. It was akin to a congressional committee resurrecting Col. George S. Custer in 1877 and fawning as he offered personal insights in dealing with uprisings by Sioux Indians (while carefully avoiding awkward questions about the previous year at the Little Big Horn ).

Foreign aid is virtue signaling with other people's money. As long the aid spawns press releases and photo opportunities for presidents and members of Congress and campaign donations from corporate and other beneficiaries, little else matters. Congress almost never conducts thorough investigations into the failure of aid programs despite their legendary pratfalls. The Agency for International Development ludicrously evaluated its programs in Afghanistan based on their "burn rate" – whether they were spending money as quickly as possible, almost regardless of the results. SIGAR's John Sopko "found a USAID lessons-learned report from 1980s on Afghan reconstruction but nobody at AID had read it ."

After driving around the world, investment guru Jim Rogers declared: "Most foreign aid winds up with outside consultants, the local military, corrupt bureaucrats, the new NGO [nongovernmental organizations] administrators, and Mercedes dealers." After the Obama administration promised massive aid to Ukraine in 2014, Hunter Biden jumped on the gravy train – as did legions of well-connected Washingtonians and other hustlers around the nation. Similar largesse assures that there will never be a shortage of overpaid individuals and hired think tanks ready to write op-eds or letters to the editor of the Washington Post whooping up the moral greatness of foreign aid or some such hokum.

When it comes to the failure of U.S. aid to Ukraine, almost all of Trump's congressional critics are like the " dog that didn't bark " in the Sherlock Holmes story. The real outrage is that Trump and prior presidents, with Congress cheering all the way, delivered so many U.S. tax dollars to Kiev that any reasonable person knew would be wasted. If Washington truly wants to curtail foreign corruption, ending U.S. foreign aid is the best first step.

* * *

James Bovard is the author of " Attention Deficit Democracy ," " The Bush Betrayal ," " Terrorism and Tyranny ," and other books. Bovard is on the USA Today Board of Contributors. He is on Twitter at @jimbovard. His website is at www.jimbovard.com Tags Politics

Pair Of Dimes Shift , 12 minutes ago link

ALL foreign aid is a kickback scheme.

End it!

Savyindallas , 27 minutes ago link

paying billions to corrupt Jewish Ukranians is just another way to support Israel. Christian Zionists understand and approve of this. So what's the big deal? It's free money. Money that grows on trees. What does it cost to print billions of free money by a few electronic entries? Nothing. We should print more. Free **** is a beautiful thing.

We can postpone judgment day for at least another decade or so. By then, all the smart Harvard educated guys and gals at Goldman Sachs and Wall Street will figure out how to kick the can down the road for another decade or so.

When it all collapses, half of India and Africa and central America will already have replaced what used to be the American population. The few remaining Americans aside from the immigrants will be unrecognizable anyway. many will have left. Many more will have been reduced by failure to procreate and replace themselves. Christians will be a despised,(even the idiotic Zio-Christians who looked the other way on important issues as long as we were bombing and killing for their beloved Israel) We will have a dying population as many will have chosen the gay LGBTQ lifestyle and we are replaced by subservient obedient, uneducated immigrants who are happy to work for $8 an hour and live in a single room apartment they share with other immigrant families.

NosferatuZodd , 27 minutes ago link

Ukraine was a failed state since day one and it got much worse since US/EU instigated coup. I don't see any light at the end of tunnel. Zielensky is a more friendly face, but that's it. He obviously doesn't have power to change the course. He can promise anything while abroad, but he has to appease the nazis at home or they will get rid of him. In other words Ukraine is doomed.

SadhakaPadma , 19 minutes ago link

Zielensky is more than friendly face...he signed many deals with Putin and behave as responsible politician who wanna bring normalization and peace. Same forces overthrow Yanukovitch will try it with Zielensky, because they not wanna peace, but their interest is war....so Zielensky is in danger.

various1 , 31 minutes ago link

TF are you talking about, idiot!

Ukraine has biggest potential of all countries. Has richest on a planet soil, educated European population, is poor so money go long way. And of course bridge to forcing Russia being our ally, and adhere to nationalism, vs being corrupted by globalists.

chunga , 45 minutes ago link

No ****, it's absurd. The Wretched City was practically unanimous in the screeching about sending weapons to Ukraine because Crimea voted to join Russia, something they describe up there as being "annexed". Especially so now because since then Iraq voted to kick the US out of their country and has been ignored, themselves being "annexed".

This is something that is accepted to a certain degree as a result of Bob Mueller.

wehadtopullit , 5 minutes ago link

3 words: Victoria J. Nuland

John Hansen , 49 minutes ago link

Certainly makes you wonder if there was a reason the Russians only took Crimea.

Corruption ridden Ukraine certainly is a "gift" that keeps on giving.

SadhakaPadma , 47 minutes ago link

Crimea is military important for their security...that why they had naval base there..they cant afford lose this point and Black Sea....

Soviets were not willing to colonize these satelites like Poland, Czechoslovakia etc. they were relevant after ww2 and Russians were scared of another war...day they become irrelevant thanks of new weapons they abandon these states.

Russians are not hurry up into wars.

John Hansen , 45 minutes ago link

You are missing the point.

Ukraine is a corrupt, corrupting mess, now it is the West's mess.

SadhakaPadma , 43 minutes ago link

I know they are corrupted one...but USA is careless toward Ukraine fortunes...they use them to provoke conditions to create cold war two...military industry need big enemies for sake of hundreds bilions usd profits...how would you explain your citizens you pay one third of budget and no enemies??? so Deep state want cold war two.

More than milion Ukrainians left to Russia...while EU has closed Ukrainian borders...so who care more of Ukrainian people?

John Hansen , 37 minutes ago link

They could have had their cold war for MIC without absorbing the Ukraine. The whole cold war thing is obvious and academic.

The Russians wanted the West to have Ukraine. It is like the Americans giving the aboriginals the Small Pox blankets.

The corruption in the Ukraine is like a virus and it has spread West, just look at how it has infected the US political process.

SadhakaPadma , 29 minutes ago link

Russians were victims of all of this...red line was Crimea...and Putin did right...otherwise Russian nuclear security would be doomed if you allow NATO troops to Crimea.

US politicians not do it first time...did you know most wealthy Kosovian is Magdalene All Bright?? i live in postcommunist state and whole my life witness western proxies stealing all valuable stakes here....Communism created state ownership of big industries...domestic politicians alongside western snakes steal it very ugly way.IN SO CALLED PRIVATIZATION..wheather it is Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania etc. even information networks are owed by westeners....we are absolutely blackmailed.

Russians and partly Ukrainians did not allow foreigers to entry ...they tried it..here and there something got, whole 90s was going on this big fight among Russians and plus western snakes for stakes....Putin created order in it alongside Russian oligarchy and normalization....that why Russians like him.

bismillah , 51 minutes ago link

Are these idiotic Democrats and Russia haters crazy?

Russia has a population and GDP roughly the same as Mexico and they're on the other side of the planet (unless you're in Alaska). There is exactly zero chance Russia will invade or attack Western Europe or the USA.

The USA should be concerned with the USA, and not whether Russia will act to safeguard its border.

SadhakaPadma , 53 minutes ago link

When Soviet Union left...military industry for sake of their profits needed to create big enemy....they created terrorism and islamic wars......now as it failing apart they need new enemies..big one to explain you why is necessary to give one third of your taxes into military toys...so they create conflicts around China and Russia with hope to dig in into cold war two.

Russians and Chinese have not big corporate bussines behind their military...their spending is tiny compared to US military industry profits....so they have no interest in wars...while US seek them.

Be aware Americans...your military is not only milking you, but risking of whole humanity throwing into military disasters even as an accidents . Putin explained it many times...computer supersystems can be activated so easily if some misteps happen...

MushroomCloud2020 , 56 minutes ago link

If Quid Pro Que is legal, then the swamp is drained. The swamp isn't doing anything wrong. They have been following the law all this time. Ask the president.

[Jan 30, 2020] The Nazis made a primitive and unforgivable error in thinking it was the Jewish population was the "problem", when the problem resided in the Jewish/banking and intellectual elites (e.g. Rothchilds).

Jan 30, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Kabobyak , Jan 30 2020 14:35 utc | 21

A P , Jan 30 2020 14:58 utc | 22

To Florin 3, and then all who replied:

YES, YES, YES!

Words matter, they can be as precise as scalpels or as blunt as a sledgehammer. In skilled hands, a word-tool can be either be a scalpel or a sledgehammer.

Jewish ethnonationalism (Zionism) was well underway from the mid-1800s, and well-supported (at least in terms of "solving the Jewish problem") in some elite circles in the early 1900s as the Balfour Declaration proves. The Nazis erred in thinking it was the Jewish population was the "problem", when the problem resided in the Jewish/banking and intellectual elites (e.g. Rothchilds).

AIPAC etc. shows this malignant ideology continues to grow in scope and influence.

We here at MoA should adopt Florin's more correct terms and use them here at MoA AND ANYWHERE ELSE WE POST... From and acorn of an idea, a mighty oak of understanding may grow. But it won't grow if we don't nurture it.

Semitism refers to speakers of Semitic languages, of which Hebrew-speakers are but one part... most of the rest are Arabic speakers. The term antisemitism was hijacked in the early 1800's.

https://www.etymonline.com/word/anti-Semitism

"... also antisemitism, 1881, from German Antisemitismus, first used by Wilhelm Marr (1819-1904) German radical, nationalist and race-agitator, who founded the Antisemiten-Liga in 1879; see anti- + Semite.

Not etymologically restricted to anti-Jewish theories, actions, or policies, but almost always used in this sense. Those who object to the inaccuracy of the term might try Hermann Adler's Judaeophobia (1881). Anti-Semitic (also antisemitic) and anti-Semite (also antisemite) also are from 1881, like anti-Semitism they appear first in English in an article in the "Athenaeum" of Sept. 31, in reference to German literature. Jew-hatred is attested from 1881. As an adjective, anti-Jewish is from 1817."
---------

Words matter as the Israel Project's "Global Language Dictionary"(IP-GLG) demonstrates, the Jewish ethnonationalists (Zionists) use words to hide their intentions. Why not call the IP-GLD "Propaganda Language to support the theft of, and genocide in, Palestine"? It's a far more accurate description of the contents and intents... but being honest and transparent is not what the international Jew/Israel Lobby/elite is all about.
https://www.transcend.org/tms/2014/08/global-language-dictionary/

[Jan 30, 2020] For Israel, a rejection of this ultimatum benefits them far more than any Palestinian acceptance.

Jan 30, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Peter , Jan 30 2020 18:19 utc | 67

Here a view by someone who since his stance against the Iraq war as an UN inspector I respect very much
https://www.rt.com/op-ed/479422-israel-palestine-deal-ultimatum/

Trump and his Israeli partners are betting on Palestine's Arab friends to recognize the finality of the window of opportunity that has presented itself and prevail upon the Palestinian people to act accordingly.

For Israel, a rejection of this ultimatum benefits them far more than any Palestinian acceptance. This fact, more than anything else, opens the door to the possibility that the Palestinians can be dissuaded from their current hardline position rejecting the deal.


<

[Jan 30, 2020] Kushner deal makes me think of a mobster saying Nice home you have there, be a shame if something happened to it

Jan 30, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Bubbles , Jan 30 2020 18:37 utc | 72

Posted by: Peter | Jan 30 2020 18:19 utc | 67

The so called deal makes me think of a mobster saying Nice home you have there, be a shame if something happened to it.

Watch this interview with Kushner, if you can stand it, and see what comes to mind.

https://twitter.com/BradCabana/status/1222299392574537730

[Jan 30, 2020] Most see this deal as cover for Israel's annexation of Occupied Palestine. The deal was made public yesterday. Bibi rushed home today for the vote on Sunday to annex the Jordan Valley and West Bank Settlements.

Jan 30, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Likklemore , Jan 30 2020 19:30 utc | 82

Kushner lost his hymnal. Contradicts Bibi.

Most see this deal as cover for Israel's annexation of Occupied Palestine. The deal was made public yesterday. Bibi rushed home today for the vote on Sunday to annex the Jordan Valley and West Bank Settlements. This agreement was constructed for the occupiers and negotiations did not include proprietors of the land.
Read on it is for the sole benefit of Israel.
Why the rush?
Kushner said not so soon...wait a month. but in Israel ......


"We have been working on this for three years, hundreds of hours, to bring the best agreement in Israel," the source noted, adding that Trump's move to recognize the application of Israeli law to the Jordan Valley, the Northern Dead Sea, Judea and Samaria was "a huge thing" and an undeniable success for Israel.

The source clarified that the US side had preferred an Israeli annexation of these territories "all at once" instead of a slice-by-slice approach, calling this a "technical problem" but emphasizing that there was "no argument about the essence" of the matter.[.]

Well, King Donald Trump giveth. The same king who abrogates international treaties has no respect for the rights of others.

Ok btw. Mike Bloomberg is not really running a campaign to be president. He said, "I am spending my money to get rid of Trump." Thing is whoever comes after must be approved by the landlords.

[Jan 30, 2020] Zionist are simply using the illegitimate authority process as overwhelmingly demonstrated by Milgram and Zimbardo, using Bernay's sociopathic propaganda recipes.

It's actually not only Zionism, but any far right nationalism...
Jan 30, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org
Walter , Jan 30 2020 14:06 utc | 15
@Florin (3) (semantics, rhetoric, naming)

...In point of fact, of course, the zionist program to get lebensraum by liquidation or enslaving the Semitic native populations is telling, definitive.

... ... ...

(The Quakers say "tell the truth and shame the devil"... With the idea implied that truth saying is a duty under god, whatever it costs. The Quakers used to be significant in US history, but like CPUSA, are under reliable and useful control as agents of X. (ask Ruth Paine, of the curator group for Oswald operation))

[Jan 30, 2020] Putin is nothing if not a pragmatist. A nationalist as well. See where Russia was when he began his first term as President and where it is now which is even more impressive when resistance from the US and 'friends' is taken into account.

Jan 30, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Bubbles , Jan 30 2020 15:32 utc | 27

Posted by: paul | Jan 30 2020 13:49 utc | 12

Putin is nothing if not a pragmatist. A nationalist as well. See where Russia was when he began his first term as President and where it is now which is even more impressive when resistance from the US and 'friends' is taken into account.

Being pragmatic doesn't always satisfy everyone. He doesn't have the same political system as the US and Western Democracies either, so there's that. I think a large part of his appeal to those who see him objectively is his attempts to be a broker rather than a hot head reactionary and that would apply to the nasties in Israel. Capt Obvious says Israel isn't a standalone problem.

Hoarsewhisperer , Jan 30 2020 15:57 utc | 30

Putin and Netanyahu's relationship is too close for comfort.
Posted by: SharonM | Jan 30 2020 13:01 utc | 6

Name one national leader to whom Putin displays a lack of respect?
He's not a big-mouthed AmeriKKKan or a sleazy Pom. It's Russian (and Chinese) policy to keep the door to the path of diplomacy open at all times.

I'm surprised that everyone is pretending not to notice that Trump hasn't finished helping the "Israelis" to outsmart themselves. He's made several of their criminally psychotic dreams come true and they've lapped them up without any apparent reservations about the legal and moral ramifications.
He'll keep 'giving' them increasingly ridiculous concessions because he's probably as curious as everyone else to discover if there's a practical limit to the quality and quantity of asinine bullshit the "Israelis" will believe.

moe , Jan 30 2020 18:33 utc | 71
Extremely informative article about Putin - concentrating on his leadership style and his character: https://russialist.org/sharon-tennison-shake-up-in-the-kremlin-putin-selects-a-new-leader.
AntiSpin , Jan 30 2020 20:01 utc | 88
@ moe | Jan 30 2020 18:33 utc | 71

Thank you for the informative article by Sharon Tennison, about Putin.

Those who find it interesting and/or informative will also be interested in this much earlier, much more detailed article that she wrote six years ago, about her initial and considerable interactions with him when he was a civil-servant bureaucrat in St Petersbug in the 90s.
http://www.russiaotherpointsofview.com/2014/04/russia-report-putin-.html

I wholeheartedly recommend this linked article (along with the one from Moe, above), and am sure that anyone reading it will find it informative and a very helpful tool with regard to understanding Putin's actions in today's world.

Ian2 , Jan 30 2020 21:21 utc | 104
@88 & 102:

I believe this Russia Report: Putin [2014] is what AntiSpin was referring to.

AntiSpin , Jan 31 2020 1:02 utc | 136
@ Ian2 | Jan 30 2020 21:06 utc | 102
"FYI. Dead link. Goes to Center for Citizen Initiatives."

Rats!

Thanks for the heads up -- the article is here now:
https://russiaotherpointsofview.typepad.com/russia_other_points_of_vi/2014/04/russia-report-putin-.html

Sharon Tennison's rather in-depth account of the Vladimir Putin that she knew and dealt with when he was a civil-servant bureaucrat in St Petersburg in the 90s will shed a lot of light on the actions of today's Putin.

Well worth reading!

[Jan 30, 2020] The Fate of the China-Russia Alliance by Lyle J. Goldstein

Jan 30, 2020 | nationalinterest.org

The first alteration in the global balance of power enabled by Russia-China cooperation took place during the 1950s, of course. In that period, the PRC went from being a military "basket case," with no defense industry to speak of, to possessing a reasonably modern force within a span of just a decade. That super-energized process was inspired by the hard school of war against a vastly better-armed opponent in the bloody Korean conflict, as is well known. But the massive progress in Chinese military capabilities also could not have taken place without enormous Soviet assistance. With respect to naval-related arms transfers, Moscow had already given ten torpedo boats and eighty-three aircraft by the beginning of 1953, according to the scholarly journal. The process accelerated during 1953–55 with a total of eight-one additional vessels transferred (amounting to 27,234 tons) and 148 aircraft. Among these ships were four destroyers, four frigates, and thirteen submarines.

Additionally, the Russians provided the Chinese with more than five hundred torpedoes and over fifteen hundred sea mines, as well as coastal artillery pieces, radar and communications equipment. A third batch of naval transfers was comprised of sixty-three vessels and seventy-eight aircraft. Added to these very substantial allocations, five Chinese shipyards apparently produced another 116 naval vessels, relying heavily on advisors, designs and technology purchased from the USSR, during the period up until 1957. Finally, several transfers agreed to in early 1959 "caused China's Navy to enter into the missile age." Notably, these transfers included the R-11 , a primitive submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM), and also the P-15 , one of the earliest anti-ship cruise missiles (ASCM). Yes, these are the earliest progenitors of today's JL-3 and YJ-12 missiles that now present quite credible threats.

In keeping with the presently jovial mood surrounding current Russia-China relations, very little is said in this Chinese article regarding the Sino-Soviet conflict that brought the two Eurasian giants to the brink of war in the late 1960s. The authors imply that the break was really between the two respective Communist parties, rather than between the two navies, but it is noted that the Kremlin's stated objective to form a "joint fleet" was viewed in China as an encroachment on Chinese sovereignty. Nevertheless, this substantial military cooperation between Moscow and Beijing during the 1950s is evaluated in this Chinese appraisal to have had "major historical impact [重要历史作用]." These authors contend that it "effectively decreased the threat of American imperialism [有效抵制美帝国主义的军事威胁]. They additionally conclude regarding this period: "The achievements of building up the Chinese Navy cannot be separated from the assistance of Soviet experts [中国海军建设的成绩是与苏联专家的帮助分不开的]."

For a long time, "Soviet revisionists" were not given such favorable treatment by Chinese scholars, but now evidently the "east wind" is blowing once more. If the USSR very substantially helped boost PRC military prospects during the 1950s, this paper by two Chinese naval analysts argues cogently that a similarly ambitious and fateful program of Russia-China military cooperation has had an analogous effect, starting in 1991. When seen in aggregate, the numbers are indeed quite impressive. Russia has sold China, according to this Chinese accounting, more than five hundred military aircraft, including Su-27, Su-30, Su-35, and Il-76 variants. Almost as significant, Russia provided China with more than two hundred Mi-171 helicopters. Just as these pivotal purchases launched China's air and land forces into a new era, so the Chinese acquisition of four Sovremeny destroyers, along with twelve Kilo -class submarines helped to provide the PLA Navy with the technological wherewithal to enter the twenty-first century on a robust footing. That shortlist here, moreover, does not even catalog other vital systems transferred, such as advanced air defense systems, which have formed a bedrock of Chinese purchases from Russia.

Citing a Russian source, these Chinese authors claim that China spent $13 billion on Russian weapons between 2000–05. That amounts to a decently hefty sum of cash, especially by rather penurious post-Soviet standards. In fact, this raft of deals was not only intended to rescue the PLA from obsolescence but simultaneously aimed to "resolve . . . the survival and development problems [解决 . . . 生存和发展问题]"of the post-Soviet Russian military-industrial complex too. Just as important as these technical transfers, however, have been the human capital investments in cooperation. Here, this study points out that two thousand intermediate and high-level Chinese officers have already graduated from Russian military academies. The upper ranks of the PLA Navy, in particular, are said to be full of these graduates, as reported in this study. Perhaps most critically for the future of the Chinese armed forces, cooperation with Russia has entailed "in particular, promoting the development of domestic weapons development levels and concepts. [尤其带动了国内武器研制水平和理念的提升]." Take, for example, the YJ-18 ASCM, which seems to be superior to any U.S. variants, is a derivative of the Russian SSN-27 missile and is now becoming pervasive throughout the Chinese fleet, with both surface and sub-launched variants.

For all the major results on the regional balance of power wrought by these two major periods of Russian-Chinese security collaboration, however, there are very real reasons to doubt that such a partnership will truly alter global politics. After all, the Chinese analysis points out that arms sales from Russia to China have declined substantially from the peak in 2005. Joint military exercises, moreover, are now quite regular, but they actually do not seem to exhibit a bellicose trend toward larger and larger demonstrations of military might. These tendencies may reflect new confidence in Beijing regarding its own abilities to produce advanced weapons, of course, but also might reflect a certain degree of restraint -- a realization that too close a Russia-China military alignment could provide ample fuel for a new Cold War that might be in the offing.

Still, American defense analysts must evaluate the possible results of a significantly closer Russia-China security relationship, whether it is formalized into an actual "alliance" or not. China and Russia currently have numerous joint development projects underway, including both a large commercial airliner, as well as a heavy-lift helicopter. In the future, will cooperative endeavors encompass frigates and VSTOL fighters, or nuclear submarines and stealth bombers, or even aircraft carriers? Will Moscow and Beijing begin to launch joint exercises of a large scale that have major strategic implications in highly sensitive areas? Are third countries, such as Iran, set for "junior associate" status in the so-called "quasi-alliance? And will China and Russia strive to coordinate strategic initiatives to bring about common favorable strategic circumstances in the coming decades?

Such a future is certainly not beyond the realm of possibility. The combination of Russian weapons design genius with Chinese organizational and production prowess could be formidable, indeed. That will be another reason for states comprising the West to now exercise restraint, embrace multi-polarity, and seek to avoid a return to the 1950s "with Chinese characteristics."

Lyle J. Goldstein is Associate Professor at the China Maritime Studies Institute (CMSI) at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, RI. The opinions expressed in this analysis are his own and do not represent the official assessments of the U.S. Navy or any other agency of the U.S. Government.

[Jan 30, 2020] RUSSIAN FEDERATION SITREP 30 JANUARY 2020 by Patrick Armstrong - Sic Semper Tyrannis

Jan 30, 2020 | turcopolier.typepad.com

RUSSIAN FEDERATION SITREP 30 JANUARY 2020 by Patrick Armstrong

Russian flag

KREMLINOLOGY. I've been at this business for a while and one of the things I've learned is that "Kremlinology" is a waste of time: speculating about who's who and the meaning of personnel appointments is worthless . Why? Because we simply don't know: we don't know why X was given that particular job and not another, we don't know how X and Y get along together and how they interact with Z . In fact we really don't know very much about X, what he thinks, why he thinks it and how he reacts to new things . It's all a black box: we see some of what goes in and what comes out and have little idea of what happened inside the box . (We don't know these things about our own countries – was Freeland promoted or demoted ? – so what makes anyone think that we know these things about far-away Russia?) So it's hardly surprising that Kremlinology has been a complete bust – every move, including Putin's latest, surprises its practitioners . So I don't waste my time speculating : I don't know enough; nobody does. (The only worthwhile legacy of years of wasted effort is the HAT .)

NEW GOVERNMENT. That having been said, the new government seems to have a lot of ministers who are specialists in their ministry's field . We'll see how that goes. MacDonald gives names and backgrounds , Saker says the "Atlantic Integrationists" are weakened , Doctorow suggests it's connected with the feeble implementation of the National Projects . I say it's a step towards The Team's replacement with younger people who will carry the project on. I still expect that Putin will leave with a successor firmly positioned . Tennison, who met him way back when, thinks so too .

CONSTITUTION. Robinson doesn't see such a huge change . The usual outlets say Putin forever ! (Can we pause a moment for a brief think? If he wanted power forever, all he had to do was drop clause 81.3 . Nah, turn off brain and outgas : "some" "reportedly" and so on .) The other thing that we have learned is that Putin wants to make the two term restriction absolute .

DEMOGRAPHICS. A fall in the net population (immigration failed to compensate) because of the decrease in the number of women of reproductive age (fallout from the hard times of the 1990s.) Natural increase is expected to resume in three or four years. This month Putin announced a substantial increase in programs to encourage births and support families .

CORRUPTION. The ( ex ) policemen who framed Golunov will be charged . N ot truly a case of protest forcing a change (although there were strong protests) but the system operating properly pretty quickly .

SANCTIONS. Russia now exports beef . (!)

FAKE NEWS. US Army liberated Auschwitz says the US Embassy in Denmark and Der Spiegel . Israel knows who did it, though . The US won the war; Hollywood told us so .

ANNIVERSARY. Saturday, as I calculate it, marked the day when the US and its minions had been in Afghanistan twice as long as the Soviets were. Record year for bombing, too .

AMERICA-HYSTERICA. " There is ... a strong possibility that all Steele's material has been fabricated. " I always thought it was a complete fake with no Russian input ( except maybe Skripal's ). I reiterate: there was no Russian interference and no collusion. It's a phoney story to explain away Clinton's failure.

ASSASSINATION. Did Pompeo threaten Russian and Chinese officials with assassination? Misreported say I ( Veterans Today and Pravda.ru – not a winning combination); don't see it in the actual speech .

NOT ON YOUR "NEWS" OUTLET. UNSC meeting on OPCW fakery. Thousands , tens of thousands , hundreds of thousands . You decide .

NUGGETS FROM THE STUPIDITY MINE. Schiff: Trump made a 'religious man' out of Putin. Pillow man, another of Schiff's nuggets . Reflect that his present career is based on his "knowledge" of Putin.

US DOLLAR. I'm interested that The Economist gets it (as the Mean Sea Level of conventional opinion, what it chooses to cover is significant): "But it is only under President Donald Trump that America has used its powers routinely and to their full extent, by engaging in financial warfare... They have in turn prompted other countries to seek to break free of American financial hegemony." If it's used as a weapon , it's no longer convenient. This man predicts the collapse of the USD this year . Russia has half a trillion's worth in its FOREX and gold kitty .

EUROPEANS ARE REVOLTING. UK approves limited use of Huawei ; Pompeo not happy .

RUSSIA/CHINA. Donald Trump must split up Putin and Xi, the new odd couple . Not only does the author not realise that train left the station a long time ago, he's not even sure where the station is.

© Patrick Armstrong Analysis, Canada Russia Observer How dare you refer to the Europeans as "REVOLTING." Who do you think you are? They are not REVOLTING. I think it is more appropriate to refer to them as ANNOYING.

(Sorry, couldn't resist the opportunity to go full Rosanna Rosanna Danna on your excellent piece.)

Posted by: Larry Johnson | 30 January 2020 at 01:41 PM Bill H I think this is pertinent to the "Russian Sitrep" issue. Can one or more persons with a clearer view than mine comment on the constant rhetoric regarding Ukraine being "at war with Russia" and more specifically in a "hot war with Russia?"

Likewise with the hold on the aid to Ukraine being an "endangerment to US national security" because it "encouraged Russian aggression in Ukraine."

My perception is that such talk is nonsensical, but both sides are using it and the endless repetion is beginning to make me question my own mind.

Posted by: Bill H | 30 January 2020 at 02:35 PM Patrick Armstrong Well, in a word, it's BS. It's a civil war (note where the shooting started https://patrickarmstrong.ca/2016/02/27/fracking-slavyansk-and-war/) in which both NATO and Russia have their fingers on the scales.
But the Russia invaded meme is so baked in by now that no one can think outside of it. The neocons because Russia is in the way of their desires and the Dems because they are so committed to the Russia stole the election nonsense that they can't say anything else either.
Here's a quickie to get started with
https://consortiumnews.com/2019/11/14/ray-mcgovern-ukraine-for-dummies/

Posted by: Patrick Armstrong | 30 January 2020 at 02:46 PM Bill H Thanks, Patrick. I recall some time ago a Russian official (I believe it was Lavrov) being questioned about Russia having invaded eastern Ukraine and replying that, "If we had invaded Ukraine you would not have to be asking if we had done it." IIRC, he went on to ask if anyone was wondering whether or not we had invaded Iraq.

Is it known to what (if any) degree the Russian government is assisting the eastern separatists, and if so are they providing tanks? My understanding is that Russian individuals, many of them military veterans, are going to Ukraine as volunteers.

Posted by: Bill H | 30 January 2020 at 03:04 PM b @Bill H

The question if Russia was or is somehow militarily intervening in the Ukraine was recently put to the German equivalent of the Congressional Research Service (both have an excellent reputation).

The 'Scientific Service of the Bundestag' did find lots of media reports but no factual evidence that any Russian military intervention had happened or is taking place.

A report, in German, on the issue can be found here:

https://www.heise.de/tp/features/Ueber-die-militaerische-Involvierung-Russlands-im-Ukraine-Konflikt-gibt-es-keine-belastbaren-Fakten-4635857.html

That site is reliable. You can use Google translate to read it.

Posted by: b | 30 January 2020 at 03:57 PM Lyttenburgh Re: Kremlinology.

I've said it a long time ago, that actual science (Political, Social, and in some cases – "Hard" one as well) had been replaced with the Shamanism by now. It's latest iteration is no longer a perverse union of the Press and think-tank(er)s, but anonymous Telegram channel. Now, THEY know everything! Reliable insider, each and every one of them.

None of them predicted the contents of Putin's speech. None of them predicted who'd be a new PM (read this article and despair at the narrowness of their thinking: https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-russia-putin-candidates-factbox/possible-candidates-for-russias-new-prime-minister-idUKKBN1ZE271?il=0)

These failures of various "experts"/modern day Shamans, reminded me of some events in Russia's past, that took place nearly a millennium ago:

"Year 6579 ( 1071) At this time, a magician appeared inspired by the devil. He came to Kiev and informed the inhabitants that after the lapse of five years the Dnieper would flow backward, and that the various countries would change their locations, so that Greece would be where Rus' was, and Rus' where Greece was, and that other lands would be similarly dislocated. The ignorant believed him, but the faithful ridiculed him and told him that the devil was only deluding him to his ruin. This was actually the case, for in the course of one night, he disappeared altogether

"A magician likewise appeared at Novgorod in the principate of Gleb. He harangued the people, and by representing himself as a god he deceived many of them; in fact, he humbugged almost the entire city. For he claimed to know all things, and he blasphemed against the Christian faith, announcing that he would walk across the Volkhov River in the presence of the public

"Then Gleb hid an axe under his garments, approached the magician, and inquired of him whether he know what was to happen on the morrow or might even occur before evening. The magician replied that he was omniscient. Then Gleb inquired whether he even knew what was about to occur that very day. The magician answered that he himself should perform great miracles. But Gleb drew forth the axe and smote him, so that he fell dead, and the people dispersed. Thus the man who had sold himself to the devil perished body and soul."
- The Russian Primary Chronicle (Laurentian text).

Posted by: Lyttenburgh | 30 January 2020 at 05:43 PM james thanks patrick!

bill h... if you want to keep your head in the spin cycle, here's another dispatch today from propaganda central on the topic of ukraine and russian ''malign'' influence..
https://www.state.gov/secretary-pompeos-visit-to-ukraine/

Posted by: james | 30 January 2020 at 05:50 PM Lyttenburgh 2 Bill H,

Re: "Can one or more persons with a clearer view than mine comment on the constant rhetoric regarding Ukraine being "at war with Russia" and more specifically in a "hot war with Russia?""

Ukraine is waging tireless, constant, unrelenting war against Russia without declaring war against Russia, without closing borders with Russia, without severing diplomatic relations with Russia, without banning its citizens from travelling and working in Russia. And, of course, Ukraine dares not to hinder its oligarchs from earning money by trading with Russia. Yes, including Poroshenko. The scandal that erupted shortly before the elections, uncovered a scheme by his party member, which allowed to supply the mighty Ukrainian military with the sub-par spare parts made in Russia.

Needless to say – Ukraine also trades with DNR and LNR. Rinat Akhmetov, in fact, became slightly richer since the victory of the Glorious Maidan Revolution of Dignity.

Re: US military assistance to Ukraine.

US military aid is so numerous, crucial and important, that a fetishistic love for the "Javelin" rockets became a meme. The Ukrainian military loves "Javelins" so much, that don't give them to their frontline troopers. Most (not yet sold out by underpaid Ukrainian warrant officers) of the American hardware is placed in secure (ha-ha!) storage in the Western Ukrainian depots that under the glorious reign of Poroshenko often suffered unexplainable explosive combustions mere weeks before expected revisions of their contents.

So, yes, Bill H! Only American military aid helps Gondor-Ukraine to resist constant onslaught of Mordor-Russia! So, American taxpayers – gib more! And if not the Ukrainians, Putin will surely march to the English Channel. Any moment now. Juuuuuuust wait.

Posted by: Lyttenburgh | 30 January 2020 at 05:57 PM rg Hey Larry, the Gilda Radner character you have in mind was actually Emily Litella. I made the same mistake once and was corrected.

Posted by: rg | 30 January 2020 at 06:37 PM

[Jan 29, 2020] Campaign Promises and Ending Wars

Highly recommended!
Jan 29, 2020 | www.theamericanconservative.com

lizabeth Warren wrote an article outlining in general terms how she would bring America's current foreign wars to an end. Perhaps the most significant part of the article is her commitment to respect Congress' constitutional role in matters of war:

We will hold ourselves to this by recommitting to a simple idea: the constitutional requirement that Congress play a primary role in deciding to engage militarily. The United States should not fight and cannot win wars without deep public support. Successive administrations and Congresses have taken the easy way out by choosing military action without proper authorizations or transparency with the American people. The failure to debate these military missions in public is one of the reasons they have been allowed to continue without real prospect of success [bold mine-DL].

On my watch, that will end. I am committed to seeking congressional authorization if the use of force is required. Seeking constrained authorizations with limited time frames will force the executive branch to be open with the American people and Congress about our objectives, how the operation is progressing, how much it is costing, and whether it should continue.

Warren's commitment on this point is welcome, and it is what Americans should expect and demand from their presidential candidates. It should be the bare minimum requirement for anyone seeking to be president, and any candidate who won't commit to respecting the Constitution should never be allowed to have the powers of that office. The president is not permitted to launch attacks and start wars alone, but Congress and the public have allowed several presidents to do just that without any consequences. It is time to put a stop to illegal presidential wars, and it is also time to put a stop to open-ended authorizations of military force. Warren's point about asking for "constrained authorizations with limited time frames" is important, and it is something that we should insist on in any future debate over the use of force. The 2001 and 2002 AUMFs are still on the books and have been abused and stretched beyond recognition to apply to groups that didn't exist when they were passed so that the U.S. can fight wars in countries that don't threaten our security. Those need to be repealed as soon as possible to eliminate the opening that they have provided the executive to make war at will.

Michael Brendan Dougherty is unimpressed with Warren's rhetoric:

But what has Warren offered to do differently, or better? She's made no notable break with the class of experts who run our failing foreign policy. Unlike Bernie Sanders, and like Trump or Obama, she hasn't hired a foreign-policy staff committed to a different vision. And so her promise to turn war powers back to Congress should be considered as empty as Obama's promise to do the same. Her promise to bring troops home would turn out to be as meaningless as a Trump tweet saying the same.

We shouldn't discount Warren's statements so easily. When a candidate makes specific commitments about ending U.S. wars during a campaign, that is different from making vague statements about having a "humble" foreign policy. Bush ran on a conventional hawkish foreign policy platform, and there were also no ongoing wars for him to campaign against, so we can't say that he ever ran as a "dove." Obama campaigned against the Iraq war and ran on ending the U.S. military presence there, and before his first term was finished almost all U.S. troops were out of Iraq. It is important to remember that he did not campaign against the war in Afghanistan, and instead argued in support of it. His subsequent decision to commit many more troops there was a mistake, but it was entirely consistent with what he campaigned on. In other words, he withdrew from the country he promised to withdraw from, and escalated in the country where he said the U.S. should be fighting. Trump didn't actually campaign on ending any wars, but he did talk about "bombing the hell" out of ISIS, and after he was elected he escalated the war on ISIS. His anti-Iranian obsession was out in the open from the start if anyone cared to pay attention to it. In short, what candidates commit to doing during a campaign does matter and it usually gives you a good idea of what a candidate will do once elected.

If Warren and some of the other Democratic candidates are committing to ending U.S. wars, we shouldn't assume that they won't follow through on those commitments because previous presidents proved to be the hawks that they admitted to being all along. Presidential candidates often tell us exactly what they mean to do, but we have to be paying attention to everything they say and not just one catchphrase that they said a few times. If voters want a more peaceful foreign policy, they should vote for candidates that actually campaign against ongoing wars instead of rewarding the ones that promise and then deliver escalation. But just voting for the candidates that promise an end to wars is not enough if Americans want Congress to start doing its job by reining in the executive. If we don't want presidents to run amok on war powers, there have to be political consequences for the ones that have done that and there needs to be steady pressure on Congress to take back their role in matters of war. Voters should select genuinely antiwar candidates, but then they also have to hold those candidates accountable once they're in office.

[Jan 29, 2020] US Halts All Weapons Deliveries To Iraq As Local Demands For Troop Exit Grow

Notable quotes:
"... When have contracts ever meant anything to the USA? ..."
Jan 29, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com
Sign in to comment filter_list Viewing Options arrow_drop_down

Gringo Viejo , 21 minutes ago link

For those of you unaware, hundreds if not thousands Iraqis are being slaughtered.

For our need for their oil. And of course, Israeli needs.

hhabana2112 , 27 minutes ago link

Stable genius, President Bone Spurs, fucked this one up. Focus on the country, you dumb ***.

bing dang , 33 minutes ago link

China selling air conditioner to iraq. Usa sells f16. Uhhh who is more popular in a desert?

ThunderStruck , 1 hour ago link

No problem, Putin will happily sell them superior fighter/bombers that can actually fly in the rain and not succumb to small arms fire from the ground. He'll also equip them with the S-400 anti-aircraft missile system that can easily knock that flying barrel of pig ****, better known as the F-35, out of the sky with one shot..

ToSoft4Truth , 58 minutes ago link

Later when we mention the Wounded Warrior headache issues we'll get down arrows.

not-me---it-was-the-dog , 58 minutes ago link

great......then iraq can sell their used f-16's to iran.

ShakenNotStirred , 54 minutes ago link

"Superior" like the S-400, world-famous for MIA?

dogismycopilot , 1 hour ago link

I think Iraq needs a potable water infrastructure more than some overpriced F-16 Falcons. Base models probably at that!

MsCreant , 46 minutes ago link

Wow. What a way to win friends and influence people. Help them. What a concept. Invade and erase their standard of living. Then take their oil.

Spinifex , 17 minutes ago link

Invade and erase their standard of living.

Correction. Sadam was 'supported by the U.$. (so U.$ didn't really have to invade, except U.$. stabbed him in the back, and Iraqi's had MUCH higher standard of living under Sadam... until U.$. put sanctions on them and KILLED a half million Iraqi children because the 'PRICE WAS WORTH IT' (according to *** Princess Madeleine Albright)

Aussiestirrer , 1 hour ago link

Well done chump...keep isolating the usa...now iraq can buy russian weapons. Haha what a dumb clam....

has bear r us , 1 hour ago link

the trump card is not playing 6million d chess. he is playing the jewlander card of killing the top dog over and over again as just a bloody murderous act that achieves nothing. hamas is stronger than ever. trump is a stable genius among horses not humans.

the murder of soulmani is just another jewlander directed clusterfuck move of many clusterfuck moves since shrub avenged the death threat to his father and the wmds that were found to be degraded chemical weapons sold to saddam during the war with iran.

luffy0212 , 1 hour ago link

2010-2020 Was the Stalingrad for the world. The decade the empire and their americunt fodder capitulated on all fronts. The decade that'd serve to fully turn the tie of history in favor of those God has deemed worthy of him. The following decade is the mass decline of the empire and its parasites till they reach the end of the precipice to feel in full the misery they've seethed onto their victims.

Lost in translation , 1 hour ago link

When have contracts ever meant anything to the USA?

Savvy , 1 hour ago link

I agree gtfo, but why scorch them again and again and again when they never harmed the US??????

STR88 , 1 hour ago link

They deserve to be bombed because they asked the US to leave, after destroying their country based on a lie and then occupying it for 20 years? You are a complete ******* idiot.

Bebochek , 25 minutes ago link

On sale now, America bombed my country into Democracy and all I got was this lousy T-shirt.

omegaone , 1 hour ago link

Been sayin that for years bro. With the world pretty much filled up except for the tundra, I think a good old fashioned dose of self-determination is in order. No more immigration. No more refugees. Let every country fix their own goddamned problems and let the bodies fall where they may. Period.

Spinifex , 23 minutes ago link

Leave a scorched earth.

Oh yeah..? Scorched Earth??? What the **** for? Iraq never harmed the U.$. Russia never harmed the U.$. North Korea never harmed the U.$. Iran never harmed the U.$. Venezuela never harmed the U.$. Bolivia never harmed the U.$.!! Libya, Somalia, Vietnam etc etc etc... What did they ever do to the U.$. And look what the **** you are doing to them. You're a ******* hypocrite. U.$. needs a good SCORCHED EARTH Policy imposed on it. And hardly a country on the planet will shed a tear... Not even IsraHell...

luffy0212 , 8 minutes ago link

Where's sherman when you need him?

P Dunne , 1 hour ago link

This is how American Foreign Policy alienated Venezuela, Venezuela was one of the first export customers for the F16 but sbsequently GHW Bush refused to sell Venezuela spare parts unless they acquiesced to American pressure on oil royalties.

Venezuela shifted to Russia and has spent more than $40 Billion modernizing their military, none of the weapons were purchased from the USA.

Savvy , 1 hour ago link

That's how the US rolls. Selling friends and buying enemies. Only Trump has been very very clear about that unlike his predecessors.

luffy0212 , 1 hour ago link

Trump lacks Tact. Good because it has speed up the demise of the empire.

TBT or not TBT , 1 hour ago link

And now Venezuela bestrides the planet like a colossus! Such an amazing strategy.

luffy0212 , 36 minutes ago link

Why haven't you pussies attacked it?

Afraid Venezuela will set the example for all of Latin America on how to slap a yankee bitch.

DEDA CVETKO , 1 hour ago link

Funny that the locals are not happy with our gift-bearing. human pyramid-building saviors. How so utterly ungrateful. We brought them democracy, human rights and genocide, and they now want us out. Shame!

We should immediately send them Madeleine Albright to explain to them that the deaths of 600,000 Iraqi babies was actually a good thing and "God's work". That'll do!

you_do , 1 hour ago link

It shows how evil the USSA is:

They do not honour a contract from 2016 and come up with a non-existent contract about costs when they are asked to leave...

Whopper Goldberg , 1 hour ago link

Jews gotta ***

Cardinal Fang , 1 hour ago link

Stevie Wonder: Iraq, Iran, Ukraine and Chevrolet...Chevrolet...lol

https://youtu.be/RxsBc5p-dPU

attah-boy-Luther , 1 hour ago link

Iraq is presently in negotiations for the S-300 and S-400 systems.

So......a big Ouch....for MIC......

Whopper Goldberg , 1 hour ago link

bullies and aggressors NEVER win in the long run

Adios, Useless Snakes!!!!!!!!!!!!

TBT or not TBT , 58 minutes ago link

The long run is made up of a series of short runs.

mailll , 1 hour ago link

Good, now the Iraqi's can get missile defense systems from Russia instead, that aren't designed to turn off when Israel ends up attacking them. But then again, they will need no missile defenses systems, since they have become closer allies to their former enemies, Iran and the Saudi's, thanks to us. Winning!

alter , 1 hour ago link

We should bomb the **** out of Iraq again, destroy their military equipment, raid their banks, blow up their refineries and then leave, because they want us to.

Savvy , 1 hour ago link

Might take a while, still looking for those WMD.

Spinifex , 14 minutes ago link

still looking for those WMD

I thought they found 'some'... 200 can of fly spray bought from 7/11 in warehouse somewhere... Tony Blaire was right. WMD found.

Shemp 4 Victory , 1 hour ago link

We should bomb the **** out of Iraq again, destroy their military equipment, raid their banks, blow up their refineries and then leave, because they want us to.

Microcephaly detected.

Savvy , 1 hour ago link

/s not.

luffy0212 , 1 hour ago link

You're one piece of ****. I'm glad to know nothing but fire awaits you below.

veteranstoday.com/2020/01/28/trumps-headache-victims-and-fakers-list-now-number-50-real-tbi-wounded/

Another 50 cunts to add to the list. At least they'll feed the planet with rotten decomposing matter.

alter , 1 hour ago link

Still crying about Salami, ******* muzzrat? lol

luffy0212 , 1 hour ago link

https://www.veteranstoday.com/2020/01/28/middle-east-monitor-cia-chief-behind-soleimani-assassination-killed-in-downed-plane-in-afghanistan/

Another Iranian journalist who writes for Mashregh newspaper, described as having close links to IRGC, tweeted not long after the news broke out: "We will attack them on the same level as they are attacking us."

The world weeps a hero against you parasitic scum.

Aussiestirrer , 1 hour ago link

So do a complete rerun again???

Bebochek , 21 minutes ago link

America already tried that and it didn't work alter.

ebworthen , 1 hour ago link

Well uh...yeah.

Conquer or leave.

We decided to waste a lot of lives, **** around, not leave but leave, let Iran move in.

roark183 , 1 hour ago link

Good decision President Trump.

Now you just need to follow it up with a complete troop withdrawal from Iraq. You can abandon that 100 acre military compound, disguised as an embassy.

The Iraqi government want US troops out. The Iraqi people want US troops out of their country. Shucks, even the American people want US troops out of Iraq, so they can come home and defend our southern border.

Let the Iraqis and Iranians sort out their own differences.

Aussiestirrer , 58 minutes ago link

Dont you mean the joooos?

4Celts , 1 hour ago link

Iraq has many more important infrastructure needs at the moment , and 1.8 Billion spent on these particular missile systems seems fishy .

mailll , 1 hour ago link

And China is coming to the rescue. All of our brave American soldiers that died so Iran and China can get the spoils. Winning!

Kan , 1 hour ago link

If you think the isrhll held companies that own those wells give a **** about china showing, your crazy, they own china, they funded the communist party out of jewyork.... Who do you think got all those oil wells in syria, iraq, libya.... Genie oil and some other inclusive board member oils companies.... They run china so they care not a bit either way, probably thank them for the good cheap labor that knows how to read and write..

4Celts , 1 hour ago link

The US and Israel are purposely denying Iraq And Syria from using their oil sales to rebuild both their countries, and sovereign wealth funds . Gross.

TBT or not TBT , 59 minutes ago link

Ha ha ha ha.

Aussiestirrer , 56 minutes ago link

Us soldiers did not die for victory..they died for the rich! As a well known line that often gets tossed around says...War is not meant to be won....it's meant to be continued

logically possible , 33 minutes ago link

It's sad American soldiers are too young, too brainwashed, too low IQ to realize this before it"s too late.

Whopper Goldberg , 1 hour ago link

Looks like Russia and China will have some new customers.

TBT or not TBT , 1 hour ago link

They're such a great credit risk after all.

Minamoto , 1 hour ago link

America destroyed most of Iraq's infrastructure during the invasion and its aftermath... has America compensated Iraq?

RenegadeOutcast , 1 hour ago link

yes, it has dutifully sold it a ton more weaponry and other stuff, and only at 150% markup.

liberty, yeah?

TBT or not TBT , 1 hour ago link

Liberty is not a big thing in Islamic infected places.

flashmansbroker , 1 hour ago link

The West really need to cut our losses and leave.

It is a worry about who will move in, probably china and Russia but we can't keep on a perpetual war.

Nixon, for all his faults did get the U.S. out of Vietnam and I think Trump will have to do the same.

Reign in Fact , 1 hour ago link

islam is perpetually at war with us, however it's true that we should GTFO and send all islamists back to sort their affairs in the desert.

Fair trade. We get our soldiers back, and station them along our own border instead of protecting theirs, and they get their jihadis back.

FestusBro , 1 hour ago link

Get their Jihadis back in plastic bags in cardboard boxes.

TBT or not TBT , 57 minutes ago link

Ilhan Omar is ready to ship. Tlaib too. All our imams and CAIR members. Let's do this.

CamCam , 1 hour ago link

No kidding, if not for anything else but we can't afford it any longer (let alone the ethical violations)

Element , 1 hour ago link

What ******* war? There's not even an insurgency.

Heavenstorm , 1 hour ago link

If US leaves anytime soon, I figure Bolton will testify against Trump this week and lies about it.

DogeCoin , 1 hour ago link

We will stay there so long as AIPAC, Israel, and the MIC demand that we stay there. The dumbed down US populace won't do **** all about it as we bleed our treasure, resources, and lives for American Corporate Imperialism and Greater Israel. Don't you Trumptards love your Messiah delivering the greatest Middle East Piece plan of all time?

tmosley , 1 hour ago link

>Trumptards

You are ignored.

LetThemEatRand , 1 hour ago link

I wonder if when tmosley logs in and reads the comment section to ZH he sees like 3 comments.

logically possible , 1 hour ago link

All three comments are his.

[Jan 29, 2020] Campaign Promises and Ending Wars

Highly recommended!
Jan 29, 2020 | www.theamericanconservative.com

lizabeth Warren wrote an article outlining in general terms how she would bring America's current foreign wars to an end. Perhaps the most significant part of the article is her commitment to respect Congress' constitutional role in matters of war:

We will hold ourselves to this by recommitting to a simple idea: the constitutional requirement that Congress play a primary role in deciding to engage militarily. The United States should not fight and cannot win wars without deep public support. Successive administrations and Congresses have taken the easy way out by choosing military action without proper authorizations or transparency with the American people. The failure to debate these military missions in public is one of the reasons they have been allowed to continue without real prospect of success [bold mine-DL].

On my watch, that will end. I am committed to seeking congressional authorization if the use of force is required. Seeking constrained authorizations with limited time frames will force the executive branch to be open with the American people and Congress about our objectives, how the operation is progressing, how much it is costing, and whether it should continue.

Warren's commitment on this point is welcome, and it is what Americans should expect and demand from their presidential candidates. It should be the bare minimum requirement for anyone seeking to be president, and any candidate who won't commit to respecting the Constitution should never be allowed to have the powers of that office. The president is not permitted to launch attacks and start wars alone, but Congress and the public have allowed several presidents to do just that without any consequences. It is time to put a stop to illegal presidential wars, and it is also time to put a stop to open-ended authorizations of military force. Warren's point about asking for "constrained authorizations with limited time frames" is important, and it is something that we should insist on in any future debate over the use of force. The 2001 and 2002 AUMFs are still on the books and have been abused and stretched beyond recognition to apply to groups that didn't exist when they were passed so that the U.S. can fight wars in countries that don't threaten our security. Those need to be repealed as soon as possible to eliminate the opening that they have provided the executive to make war at will.

Michael Brendan Dougherty is unimpressed with Warren's rhetoric:

But what has Warren offered to do differently, or better? She's made no notable break with the class of experts who run our failing foreign policy. Unlike Bernie Sanders, and like Trump or Obama, she hasn't hired a foreign-policy staff committed to a different vision. And so her promise to turn war powers back to Congress should be considered as empty as Obama's promise to do the same. Her promise to bring troops home would turn out to be as meaningless as a Trump tweet saying the same.

We shouldn't discount Warren's statements so easily. When a candidate makes specific commitments about ending U.S. wars during a campaign, that is different from making vague statements about having a "humble" foreign policy. Bush ran on a conventional hawkish foreign policy platform, and there were also no ongoing wars for him to campaign against, so we can't say that he ever ran as a "dove." Obama campaigned against the Iraq war and ran on ending the U.S. military presence there, and before his first term was finished almost all U.S. troops were out of Iraq. It is important to remember that he did not campaign against the war in Afghanistan, and instead argued in support of it. His subsequent decision to commit many more troops there was a mistake, but it was entirely consistent with what he campaigned on. In other words, he withdrew from the country he promised to withdraw from, and escalated in the country where he said the U.S. should be fighting. Trump didn't actually campaign on ending any wars, but he did talk about "bombing the hell" out of ISIS, and after he was elected he escalated the war on ISIS. His anti-Iranian obsession was out in the open from the start if anyone cared to pay attention to it. In short, what candidates commit to doing during a campaign does matter and it usually gives you a good idea of what a candidate will do once elected.

If Warren and some of the other Democratic candidates are committing to ending U.S. wars, we shouldn't assume that they won't follow through on those commitments because previous presidents proved to be the hawks that they admitted to being all along. Presidential candidates often tell us exactly what they mean to do, but we have to be paying attention to everything they say and not just one catchphrase that they said a few times. If voters want a more peaceful foreign policy, they should vote for candidates that actually campaign against ongoing wars instead of rewarding the ones that promise and then deliver escalation. But just voting for the candidates that promise an end to wars is not enough if Americans want Congress to start doing its job by reining in the executive. If we don't want presidents to run amok on war powers, there have to be political consequences for the ones that have done that and there needs to be steady pressure on Congress to take back their role in matters of war. Voters should select genuinely antiwar candidates, but then they also have to hold those candidates accountable once they're in office.

[Jan 29, 2020] How The U.S. Regime And Its Allies Enforce Their Smears And Their Other Lies by Eric Zuesse

Notable quotes:
"... the West's equivalent to the former Soviet Union's systematic, and equally pervasive, truth-suppression, to fool the public into thinking that the Government represents them, no matter how much it does not. ..."
"... (The chief trick in this regard is to fool them into thinking that since there is more than one political party, one of them will be "good," even though the fact may actually be that each of the parties represents simply a different faction of a psychopathically evil aristocracy. After all: each party lied and supported invading Iraq in 2003, Libya in 2011, and Syria constantly; and no party acknowledges that the 2014 regime-change in Ukraine was a U.S. coup instead of a domestic Ukrainian democratic revolution. On such important matters, they all lie, and in basically the same ways. These lies are bipartisan, even though most of the other political lies are heavily partisan.) ..."
"... The great then-independent investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald headlined about that interview, at Salon on 18 April 2012, "Attacks on RT and Assange reveal much about the critics: Those who pretend to engage in adversarial journalism will invariably hate those who actually do it." How true that was, and unfortunately still is! And Assange himself is the best example of it. ..."
"... Let's examine the unstated premises at work here. There is apparently a rule that says it's perfectly OK for a journalist to work for a media outlet owned and controlled by a weapons manufacturer (GE/NBC/MSNBC), or by the U.S. and British governments (BBC/Stars & Stripes/Voice of America), or by Rupert Murdoch and Saudi Prince Al-Waleed Bin Talal (Wall St. Journal/Fox News), or by a banking corporation with long-standing ties to right-wing governments (Politico), or by for-profit corporations whose profits depend upon staying in the good graces of the U.S. government ( Kaplan/The Washington Post ), or by loyalists to one of the two major political parties (National Review/TPM/countless others), but it's an intrinsic violation of journalistic integrity to work for a media outlet owned by the Russian government. Where did that rule come from? ..."
"... This is the American gospel, and it is called "capitalism." Oddly, after Russia switched to capitalism in 1991, the American gospel switched instead to pure global conquest -- über -imperialism -- and the American public didn't even blink. So: nowadays, capitalism has come to mean über-imperialism. That's today's American gospel. Adolf Hitler would be smiling, upon today's Amerika. ..."
Jan 29, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Eric Zuesse via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

Without enforced suppression of truth, there would be no way that the U.S. and its allied regimes could continue hiding the lies that were behind their invasions of Iraq in 2003 , and of Syria since 2012 , and their coup against Ukraine in 2014 , and also of their takeovers and attempted takeovers of other countries that had refused to be bullied by the U.S. regime into complying with its obsessive anti-Russian demands -- America's subterranean continuation of the Cold War, even after Russia had quit the Cold War in 1991 .

All of the lies are still being propounded by the U.S. regime and remain fully enforced by suppression of the truth about these matters.

That's being done in all news-media except a few of the non -mainstream ones.

So: this is about an actual Western samizdat - the West's equivalent to the former Soviet Union's systematic, and equally pervasive, truth-suppression, to fool the public into thinking that the Government represents them, no matter how much it does not.

(The chief trick in this regard is to fool them into thinking that since there is more than one political party, one of them will be "good," even though the fact may actually be that each of the parties represents simply a different faction of a psychopathically evil aristocracy. After all: each party lied and supported invading Iraq in 2003, Libya in 2011, and Syria constantly; and no party acknowledges that the 2014 regime-change in Ukraine was a U.S. coup instead of a domestic Ukrainian democratic revolution. On such important matters, they all lie, and in basically the same ways. These lies are bipartisan, even though most of the other political lies are heavily partisan.)

Right now, Julian Assange is rotting to death inside Britain's equivalent to the U.S. regime's Guantanamo Bay prison, which is Belmarsh Prison, in London. As the CIA-edited and written Wikipedia's article on Belmarsh Prison retrospectively admits, "Between 2001 and 2002, Belmarsh Prison was used to detain a number of people indefinitely without charge or trial under the provisions of the Part 4 of the Anti-terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001, leading it to be called the 'British version of Guantanamo Bay'." However, only because of the case of Julian Assange is it now publicly known that this characterization of that prison is -- at least for him -- equally true today . And Assange is, indeed, being held there "indefinitely without charge or trial," even after his having previously been held in various other forms of confinement, ever since at least 12 April 2012, when -- being then 'temporarily' under house-arrest in Norfolk England, while awaiting trial on a manufactured rape-charge against him which was reluctantly abandoned by the Government only when the alleged victim refused to testify against him -- Assange broadcast an interview for RT, Russian Television, an interview of the head of Lebanon's Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah.

The U.S.-and-allied regimes' billionaires-owned-and-controlled 'news'-media condemned Assange for this interview, because it enabled whomever still had an open mind, amongst the Western public, to hear from one of those billionares' destruction-targets (Nasrallah), and for Assange's doing this on the TV-news network of the main country that America's billionaires are especially trying to conquer, which is (and since 26 July 1945 has consistently been ) Russia.

The great then-independent investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald headlined about that interview, at Salon on 18 April 2012, "Attacks on RT and Assange reveal much about the critics: Those who pretend to engage in adversarial journalism will invariably hate those who actually do it." How true that was, and unfortunately still is! And Assange himself is the best example of it. Greenwald wrote:

Let's examine the unstated premises at work here. There is apparently a rule that says it's perfectly OK for a journalist to work for a media outlet owned and controlled by a weapons manufacturer (GE/NBC/MSNBC), or by the U.S. and British governments (BBC/Stars & Stripes/Voice of America), or by Rupert Murdoch and Saudi Prince Al-Waleed Bin Talal (Wall St. Journal/Fox News), or by a banking corporation with long-standing ties to right-wing governments (Politico), or by for-profit corporations whose profits depend upon staying in the good graces of the U.S. government ( Kaplan/The Washington Post ), or by loyalists to one of the two major political parties (National Review/TPM/countless others), but it's an intrinsic violation of journalistic integrity to work for a media outlet owned by the Russian government. Where did that rule come from?

But from 'temporary' house-arrest there, Assange was allowed asylum by Ecuador's progressive President Rafael Correa on 20 June 2012 , to stay in London's Ecuadoran Embassy, so as not to be seized by the UK regime to be sent to prison and probable death-without-trial in the U.S. To Correa's shock, it turned out that Correa's successor, Vice President Lenin Moreno, was actually a U.S. agent, who promptly forced Assange out of the Embassy, into Belmarsh prison, to die there or else become extradited to die in a U.S. prison, also without trial.

And, for what, then, is Assange being imprisoned, and perhaps murdered? He divulged government secrets that should never even have been secrets! He raised the blanket of lies, which covers over these actually dictatorial clandestine international operations. He exposed these evil imperialistic operations, which are hidden behind (and under) that blanket of imperialists' lies. For this, he is being martyred -- a martyr for democracy, where there is no actual democracy (but only those lies).

Here is an example:

On December 29th, I headlined "Further Proof: U.S., UK, & France Committed War-Crime on 14 April 2018" and reported highlights of the latest Wikileaks document-dumps regarding a U.S.-UK-French operation to cover-up (via their control over the OPCW) their having committed an international war-crime when they had fired 105 missiles against Syria on 14 April 2018, which was done allegedly to punish Syria for having perpetrated a gas-attack in Douma seven days before -- except that there hadn't been any such gas-attack, but the OPCW simply lied and said that there might have been one, and that the Syrian Government might have done it! That's playing the public for suckers.

Back on 3 November 2019, Fox News bannered "Fox News Poll: Bipartisan majorities want some U.S. troops to stay in Syria" and reported that when citing ISIS as America's enemy that must be defeated, 69% of U.S. respondents wanted U.S. troops to stay in Syria. But when did ISIS ever constitute a threat to U.S. national security? And under what international law is any U.S. soldier, who is inside Syria, anything other than an invader there? The answer, to both of these questions, is obviously "never" and "none." But if you are an investor in Lockheed Martin, don't you want Americans to be suckers about both ? And, so, they are . People such as Julian Assange don't want the public anywhere to be lied-to. Anyone who is in the propaganda-business -- serving companies such as Lockheed Martin -- wants the public to be suckers.

This is the way the free market actually works. It works by lying, and in such a country the Government serves the people who have the money, and not the people who don't. The people who don't have the money are supposed to be lied-to. And, so, they are. But this is not democracy.

Democracy, in fact, is impossible if the public are predominantly deceived.

If the public are predominantly deceived, then the people who do the deceiving will be the dictators there. And if a country has dictators, then it's no democracy. In a totally free market, only the people with the most money will have any freedom at all; everyone else will be merely their suckers, who are fooled by the professionals at doing that -- lying.

The super-rich enforce their smears, and their other lies, by hiring people to do this.

When Barack Obama said that "The United States is and remains the one indispensable nation" - so that each other nation is "dispensable" - he was merely exemplifying the view that only the most powerful is indispensable, and that therefore everyone else is dispensable. Of course, this is the way that he, and Donald Trump, both have governed in the U.S. And Americans overwhelmingly endorse this viewpoint . They're fooled by both parties, because both parties serve only their respective billionaires -- and billionaires are above the law; they are the law, in America and its allied regimes. That's the way it is.

This is the American gospel, and it is called "capitalism." Oddly, after Russia switched to capitalism in 1991, the American gospel switched instead to pure global conquest -- über -imperialism -- and the American public didn't even blink. So: nowadays, capitalism has come to mean über-imperialism. That's today's American gospel. Adolf Hitler would be smiling, upon today's Amerika.

And as far as whistleblowers -- such as Julian Assange, and Edward Snowden, and Chelsea Manning, and other champions of honesty and of democracy -- are concerned: Americans agree with the billionaires, who detest and destroy such whistleblowers. Champions of democracy are shunned here, where PR reigns and real journalism is almost non-existent.

[Jan 29, 2020] Turkey isn't amused

Jan 29, 2020 | twitter.com

"Turkey: The goal of American peace is to destroy and plunder Palestine."

"Turkish Foreign Ministry:
The fake US plan for peace in the Middle East was born 'dead'.
We will not allow actions to legitimize Israeli occupation and oppression."

Yet another cord in the knot tying Turkey to the West is severed. Word is the Turkish convoy has turned around and will not be constructing another OP near Saraqib.

This may surprise some people :

"Denouncing Trump Plan as 'Unacceptable,' Sanders Declares It Is Time to 'End the Israeli Occupation:'

"'Trump's so-called 'peace deal,' warned the White House hopeful, 'will only perpetuate the conflict, and undermine the security interests of Americans, Israelis, and Palestinians.'"

But isn't that exactly what the plan's supposed to do?

Posted by: karlof1 | Jan 28 2020 21:12 utc | 33

Posted by: dltravers | Jan 28 2020 21:23 utc | 35 Laguerre @28--

Here's UAE's response via tweet :

"Ambassador Yousef Al Otaiba Statement on Peace Plan:

"The United Arab Emirates appreciates continued US efforts to reach a Palestine-Israel peace agreement. This plan is a serious initiative that addresses many issues raised over the years. (1/3)"

From what I've read, Egypt also favors the plan, although I've yet to read anything official from Egypt's government. But Hezbollah's correct, IMO.

"The only way to guarantee a lasting solution is to reach an agreement between all concerned parties. The UAE believes that Palestinians and Israelis can achieve lasting peace and genuine coexistence with the support of the international community. (2/3)"

"The plan announced today offers an important starting point for a return to negotiations within a US-led international framework. (3/3)"

Part of Hezbollah's response :

"This deal would not have taken place without the collusion and treason of a number of Arab regimes, both secret and public. The peoples of our nation will never forgive those rulers who forsook resistance to maintain their fragile thrones."

Posted by: karlof1 | Jan 28 2020 21:26 utc | 36
Oman and Bahrain join UAE :

"Trump greenlights Netanyahu to annex at least 1/3 of the West Bank.

"Never forget that Oman, Bahrain and the UAE were present in that room [where the speech was made]."

I'm very surprised at Oman. This indicates to me both the Iranian and Russian collective security proposals are now dead and the situation will now escalate further.

Posted by: karlof1 | Jan 28 2020 21:41 utc | 39
But isn't that exactly what the plan's supposed to do?

Posted by: karlof1 | Jan 28 2020 21:12 utc | 33

"In the remaining weeks before the March 2 Israeli elections, and the few months left until elections in the United States, Trump's peace plan will primarily serve the goal for which it was designed: election propaganda for Israel's right-wing."

https://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2020/01/israel-us-palestinians-iran-donald-trump-benjamin-netanyahu.html#ixzz6CMb2xwxV

+Bonus prize = Stay out of jail card for Netanyahu if he remains Prime Minister.


"In the near term, the 80-page plan is most likely to stir up Israeli and American politics. Mr. Trump is sure to cite the plan's pro-Israel slant on the 2020 campaign trail to win support from conservative Jewish Americans in Florida and other key states, along with the Evangelical Christians who are some of his strongest backers and support Israeli expansion in the Holy Land."

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/28/world/middleeast/peace-plan.html

Let's not forget the far right Zionist money men AIPAC members who lavish millions on trump and GOP campaigns. ie Sheldon Adelson was seated in the front row when trump and netanyahu made their announcement. I would say these are the things it's intended to do.

Posted by: Bubbles | Jan 28 2020 21:44 utc | 40

[Jan 29, 2020] Trump's l-P 'Deal of the Century' Unveiled

Jan 29, 2020 | caucus99percent.com

Via RT.com Jan. 27, ' Iran slams Trump's 'delusional' Middle East peace plan, calls on US to accept Tehran's proposal instead'

Instead of a delusional "Deal of the Century" -- which will be D.O.A. -- self-described "champions of democracy" would do better to accept Iran's democratic solution proposed by Ayatollah @khamenei_ir :A referendum whereby ALL Palestinians -- Muslim, Jew or Christian -- decide their future .

-- Javad Zarif (@JZarif) January 27, 2020

"In anticipation of a strongly pro-Israeli plan, Palestinian leaders in Ramallah and Gaza have also condemned the upcoming deal and called for a "day of rage" on Tuesday. They urged Palestinians to boycott American goods, and remove all US symbols remaining in the West Bank."

'Remarks by President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu of the State of Israel Upon Arrival', January 27, 2020 , whitehouse.gov (a stomach-churning read, but not as much as the joint presser in the Rose Garden above)

The jerusalem post has some very partial transcripts:

'Deal of Century establishes Palestinian state, Jewish control of Jerusalem; "I have to do a lot for the Palestinians or it just wouldn't be fair.", Jan 28, 202O

"US President Donald Trump unveiled his "Deal of the Century" together with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the White House on Tuesday.

The peace plan, which Trump said was already supported by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his main rival Blue and White head Benny Gantz, would give Israel full control of the settlements and its undivided capital in Jerusalem.

"If they are genuinely prepared to make peace with the Jewish state," Netanyahu said, "Israel will be there. Israel will be prepared to negotiate peace right away."

Trump said that the United States will recognize Israeli sovereignty over any land that "my vision provides to to be part of the State of Israel" and will require the Palestinians to recognize Israel as the Jewish state and to agree to solve the refugee problem outside of Israel.

The plan also establishes a Palestinian state with its capital in East Jerusalem .

As part of the plan, Trump will reveal a map delineating Israeli and Palestinian state borders. He said the map will make clear the "territorial sacrifices that Israel is willing to make for peace."

Trump said the plan will "more than double Palestinian territory No Palestinians will be uprooted from their homes."

Moreover, he said that although Israel will maintain control of Jerusalem, the status quo will remain on the Temple Mount and Israel will work with Jordan to ensure that all Muslims who want to pray at Al-Aqsa Mosque will be able to do so.

The president said that if the Palestinians choose to accept the plan, some $50 billion will be infused into this new Palestinian state.

"There are many countries that want to partake in this," he said. "The Palestinian poverty rate will be cut in half and their GDP will double and triple." He then called for "peace and prosperity for the Palestinian people."

But Trump noted that the transition to the two-state solution will present "no incremental security risk to the State of Israel whatsoever.

But Trump noted that the transition to the two-state solution will present "no incremental security risk to the State of Israel whatsoever.

"Peace requires compromise, but we will never require Israel to compromise on it security," he continued.

Netanyahu in his speech said that he has agreed to negotiate peace with the Palestinians on the basis of Trump's peace plan. The prime minister noted several key reasons, but namely that rather than "pay lip service to Israel's security," the president "recognizes that Israel must have sovereignty in places that enable Israel to defend itself by itself.

"For too long, the heart of Israel has been outrageously branded as illegally occupied territory," Netanyahu continued . "Today, Mr. President, you are puncturing this big lie. You are recognizing Israel's sovereignty over all Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria – large and small alike."

However, Israel agreed that it will maintain the status quo in all areas that the peace plan does not designate as Jewish for four years to allow for an opportunity for negotiation. At the same time, as per the plan, Israel will immediately apply sovereignty over the Jordan Valley and other areas that the plan does recognize as Israeli .

'The 'Deal of the Century': What are its key points?', jpost.com, Jan. 28, 2020

Borders: Trump's plan features a map of what Israel's new borders will be should it enact the plan fully. Israel retains 20% of the West Bank, and will lose a small amount of land in the Negev, near the Gaza-Egypt border. The Palestinians will have a pathway to a state on 80% of the West Bank. Israel will maintain control of all borders. This is the first time a US president has provided a detailed map of this kind.

Jerusalem: The Palestinians will have a capital in Jerusalem based on northern and eastern neighborhoods that are outside the Israeli security fence – Kfar Aqab, Abu Dis and half of Shuafat.

Settlements: Israel would retain the Jordan Valley and all Israeli settlements in the West Bank, in the broadest definition possible, meaning not the municipal borders of each settlement, but their security perimeters. This also includes 15 isolated settlements , which will be enclaves within an eventual Palestinian state, unable to expand for four years. The IDF will have access to the isolated settlements . In order for the settlement part of the plan to go into effect, Israel will have to take action to apply sovereignty to the settlements.

Security: Israel will be in control of security from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. The IDF will not have to leave the West Bank. No change to Israel's approach to Judea and Samaria would be needed.

Palestinian State: The plan does not include immediate recognition of a Palestinian state; rather, it expects a willingness on Israel's part to create a pathway towards Palestinian statehood based on specific territory, which is 80% of Judea and Samaria, including areas A and B and half of Area C. The state will only come into existence in four years if the Palestinians accept the plan, if the Palestinian Authority stops paying terrorists and inciting terror, and Hamas and Islamic Jihad put down its weapons . In addition, the American plan calls on the Palestinians to give up corruption, respect human rights, freedom of religion and a free press, so that they don't have a failed state. If those conditions are met, the US will recognize a Palestinian state and implement a massive economic plan to assist it.

Refugees: A limited number of Palestinian refugees and their descendants will be allowed into the Palestinian state. None will enter Israel ."

On the other hand, from mondoweiss.net: ' The 'Deal of the Century' is Apartheid, Sheena Anne Arackal January 28, 2020 (some outtakes)


"With great fanfare, President Trump finally unveiled his long-anticipated Middle East peace proposal. The proposal was labeled 'The Deal of the Century' because it was supposed to offer an even-handed and just solution to one of the world's most intractable conflicts. Instead it does something very different. The 'Deal of the Century' resurrects and restores grand apartheid, a racist political system that should have been left in the dustbins of history.

Under President Trump's newly unveiled peace plan, the Palestinians will be granted limited autonomy within a Palestinian homeland that consists of multiple non-contiguous enclaves scattered throughout the West Bank and Gaza. The government of Israel will retain security control over the Palestinian enclaves and will continue to control Palestinian borders, airspace, aquifers, maritime waters, and electromagnetic spectrum . Israel will be allowed to annex the Jordan Valley and Jewish communities in the West Bank. The Palestinians will be allowed to select the leaders of their new homeland but will have no political rights in Israel , the state that actually rules over them."

'Trump unveils peace plan, promising more land and control for Israel', Yumna Patel, January 28, 2020 , mondowiess.net (a few snippets)

"The room was filled with familiar faces -- Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, Jason Greenblatt, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Sara Netanyahu, and US Ambassador to Israel David Friedman, Israeli Ambassador to the US Ron Dermer -- and dozens of Israel's supporters, who clapped and cheered throughout the announcement.
..
"After the press conference, reports surfaced saying that Netanyahu would be announcing Israel's full annexation of the settlements in the West Bank on Sunday, and that Ambassador Friedman expressed that Israel was "free to annex settlements in the West Bank at any time "

While Trump boasted that his plan would promise a contiguous Palestinian state, doubled in size from its current form, the "conceptual map" released by his administration shows a fragmented and dwindling territory, connected by a series of proposed bridges and tunnels."
..
"We are asking the Palestinians to meet the challenges of peaceful coexistence," Trump said.

"This includes adopting basic laws enshrining human rights, protecting against political and financial corruption ending incitement of hatred against Israel, and ending financial compensation to terrorists," he said, referring to pensions paid by the Palestinian Authority to the families of prisoners and martyrs.

In his speech, Netanyahu demanded that Palestinians recognize Israel as the Jewish State , and that Israel will maintain military control of the entire Jordan Valley to establish a permanent eastern border in the area."
..
"Throughout his speech, Trump repeatedly praised Israel for "wanting peace badly," and praised Netanyahu for "willing to endorse the plan as the basis for direct negotiations."

He boasted about everything he has done for Israel, listing off the recognition of Jerusalem as its capital, moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem, and recognizing Israel's sovereignty over the occupied Golan Heights."

"Over the next 10 years, 1 million great new Palestinian jobs will be created," he said, adding that the poverty rate will be cut in half, and the Palestinian GDP will "double and triple."

"Our vision will end the cycle of Palestinian dependency on charity and financial aid. They will do fine by themselves. They are a very capable people ," he said."

What none of the above coverage had included was that in the video Bibi had high-fived Trump for ridding the Middle East of the greatest terrorist in the world (or close to that, meaning the assassination of General Qassem Soleimani. Bibi'd also laughed and said 'It takes someone [like Trump] who knows real estate'.

The White House is pleased to share President @realDonaldTrump 's Vision for a comprehensive peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians. https://t.co/7o3jPHpcLv

-- The White House (@WhiteHouse) January 28, 2020

The so-called "Vision for Peace" is simply the dream project of a bankruptcy-ridden real estate developer.

But it is a nightmare for the region and the world

And, hopefully, a wake-up call for all the Muslims who have been barking up the wrong tree. #LetsUniteForPalestinians pic.twitter.com/j2CJ9JaH9c

-- Javad Zarif (@JZarif) January 28, 2020

(cross-posted from Café Babylon ) Tags: continuing war crimes against Palestinians up 5 users have voted.

Comments

humphrey on Tue, 01/28/2020 - 5:57pm

The Onion gets it.

White House Rolls Out Middle East Peace Plan https://t.co/Cke1QOPW6d #WhatDoYouThink ? pic.twitter.com/eXWDjAmvhn

-- The Onion (@TheOnion) January 28, 2020

[Jan 29, 2020] Palestinian Rejection End of Oslo Peace Process and the Trump-Netanyahu Apartheid "Steal of the Century" by Juan Cole

Jan 28, 2020 | www.globalresearch.ca
Informed Comment 27 January 2020 Region: Middle East & North Africa , USA Theme: Law and Justice In-depth Report: PALESTINE

The Palestinian leadership has entirely rejected what is known of the Trump plan for Israel and Palestine, and warned that they see it as destroying the Oslo Peace accords. The Trump administration did not consult the Palestinians in drawing up the plan, which gives away East Jerusalem and 30% of the Palestinian West Bank to Israel. The Palestinians may as well, Palestine foreign minister Saeb Erekat said, just withdraw from the 1995 Interim Agreement on Oslo.

Trump appears to have decided to unveil the Israel-Palestine plan on Tuesday to take the pressure off from his Senate impeachment trial and to shore up his support from the Jewish and evangelical communities. A majority of Americans in polls say they want Trump impeached and removed from office.

Trump's plan may also bolster beleaguered Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu , who has been indicted for corruption and is fighting for his political life as Israel's third election in a year approaches. Rushing the details of an important policy like Israel and Palestine for the sake of politics, however, could backfire big time.

Erekat also warned that the plan virtually assures that Israel will ultimately have to absorb the Palestinians, and give them the vote inside Israel. Mr. Erekat may, however, be overly optimistic, since it is much more likely that the Palestinians will be kept in a Warsaw Ghetto type of situation and simply denied a meaningful vote entirely.

The Future of Statehood: Israel & Palestine

Al-Quds al-`Arabi reports that Donald Trump attempted to call Palestine president Mahmoud Abbas during the past few days and that Mr. Abbas refused to take the call.

The plan, according to details leaked to the Israeli press, will propose a Palestinian statelet on 70% of the West Bank, to be established in four years. The hope is apparently that Mahmoud Abbas will no longer be president of Palestine in four years, and his successor will be more pliable.

This so-called state, however, will be demilitarized and will lack control over borders and airspace, and will be denied the authority to make treaties with other states. In other words, it will be a Bantustan of the sort the racist, Apartheid South African government created to denaturalize its Black African citizens.

Netanyahu has pledged that there will be no Palestinian state as long as he is prime minister.

Palestinians are under Israeli military rule and are being deprived of basic human rights, including the right to have citizenship in a state. They do not have passports but only laissez-passer certificates that are rejected for travel purposes by most states. Israeli squatters continually steal their land and property and water, and Palestinians have no recourse, being without a state to protect them.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Juan Cole is the founder and chief editor of Informed Comment. He is Richard P. Mitchell Professor of History at the University of Michigan and an adjunct professor, Gulf Studies Center, Qatar University. He is author of, among many other books, Muhammad: Prophet of Peace amid the Clash of Empires . Follow him on Twitter at @jricole or the Informed Comment Facebook Page

The original source of this article is Informed Comment Copyright © Juan Cole , Informed Comment , 2020

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[Jan 29, 2020] The Jewish Combat Commander Who Liberated Auschwitz -- Strategic Culture

Jan 29, 2020 | www.strategic-culture.org

The Jewish Combat Commander Who Liberated Auschwitz Martin Sieff January 27, 2020 © Photo: Wikimedia Retired Red Army Lieutenant Colonel Anatoly Shapiro was proud of his lifetime service in the Red Army: He spent the last years of his life combatting the Big Lie of Holocaust denial by neo-Nazis.

But never in his wildest dreams did Colonel Shapiro imagine that his own contribution to history and that of the entire Red Army in ending the Nazi genocide of the Jewish and Russian peoples would itself be cast into the black hole of denial.

For Colonel Shapiro, who died in 2005 at the age of 92, has become a non-person himself: Because he was the Red Army officer who commandeered the liberation of Auschwitz the greatest and most frightful death camp of all.

Shapiro had not planned to become a soldier. The son of a Jewish family in Konstantinograd in the Poltava region of Russia, he joined the Red Army in 1935. He saw action throughout World War II and was repeatedly promoted and decorated for gallantry. In the great 1943 showdown battle between the Red Army and the Wehrmacht around Kursk, he was seriously injured and had to spend time in hospital.

When Colonel Shapiro received his orders from Major General Petr Zubov's 322nd Division of the First Ukrainian Front, commanded by legendary Soviet Marshal Ivan Konev to ready his elite 1085th 'Tarnopol' Rifle Regiment for immediate action on January 25, 1945 he knew his force was being tapped to liberate a Nazi death camp, but neither he nor any of his men dreamed what lay ahead.

The war was still raging in full fury in the east and the Nazis fought with demented fanaticism to try and prevent the Red Army troops from exposing their most hellish secrets.

On the way to the camp, Shapiro's forces ran into a minefield. A doctor and five nurses were killed. As British historian Michael K. Jones wrote in his acclaimed 2011 book "Total War: From Stalingrad to Berlin" "The following morning the regiment encountered strong enemy opposition and even had to fend off a counter-attack."

Lieutenant Ivan Martynushkin, a junior officer told Jones in an interview more than 60 years later: "As we approached Auschwitz we had to fight for every settlement, every house." Yet as the 1085 the1085th's combat journal laconically recorded, "No one wanted to turn back."

It was early morning of January 27, after much heavy fighting that the 1085th advanced into Auschwitz itself in the face of ferocious Nazi artillery fire. By 11 am, Shapiro's men had crossed the Sola River and he gave the order "Break into Auschwitz."

The fighting continued to be fierce. Dozens of Red Army troops died. Shapiro and his men entered the camp. The Nazis had evacuated most of the surviving prisoners and sent them on a death march towards the German border. However, the camp still held at least 1,200 people as well as another 5,800 at Birkenau, including 611 children.

"The gates were padlocked. Snow was falling and there was a smell of burning in the air. Inside, were rows of barracks but not a person could be seen," Jones wrote. The Red Army men shot the locks off the doors with their submachine guns. For the next 60 years, Shapiro vividly recalled what they found inside. Decades later, he said in an interview: "I had seen many innocent people killed. I had seen hanged people. I had seen burned people. But I was still unprepared for Auschwitz The stench was overpowering. It was a women's barracks, and there were frozen pools of blood, and dead bodies lay on the floor."

Outside one barracks, a sign said 'kinder.' However, Shapiro recalled "There were only two children alive; all the others had been killed in gas chambers, or were in the 'hospital' where the Nazis performed medical experiments on them. When we went in, the children were screaming, 'We are not Jews!' They were in fact Jewish children, and mistaking us for German soldiers evidently thought we were going to take them to the gas chambers. We stared at them aghast This was the hardest sight of all."

Shapiro recalled that the Russian Red Cross rapidly entered the camp and started cooking chicken soup and vegetable soup for the starving survivors.

Another senior Red Army officer of Jewish origins, Colonel Georgi Elisavetsky became its very first commandant after its liberation. His testimony is preserved in the excellent Russian Holocaust Center in Moscow and was also cited by Jones.

The response of Marshal Konev's forces to the humanitarian catastrophe they had uncovered was exemplary. Elisavetsky testified, "We knew immediate action had to be taken to try and It is impossible to describe how our doctors, nurses, officers and soldiers worked – without sleep or food – to try and help those unfortunates, how they fought for every life."

Red Army Military Hospital Number 2962 run by Dr. Maria Zhilinskaya, Jones noted, "Nevertheless managed to save 2,819 inmates."

After the war, Shapiro never lost his faith in and love for the Soviet Union. Following its disintegration, he moved with his family to the United States and settled on Long Island. He wrote several books on the subject and on his own experiences before his death on October 8, 2005.

For Colonel Shapiro, the idea that he, his Red Army comrades and the medical staff who fought and died to liberate Auschwitz and who worked so hard to save it's pitifully few survivors should be casually equated with the Nazis mass-killers would have been ludicrous and contemptible. President Vladimir Putin recognizes this too, he is commemorating the anniversary this year in Israel.

The true story of the Liberation of Auschwitz needs to be told and retold. It needs to be rammed down the throats of Russia-hating bigots and warmongers everywhere.

[Jan 29, 2020] Dead President Walking OffGuardian

Jan 29, 2020 | off-guardian.org

lundiel ,

Apologies, my figures are vastly under exaggerated. Closer to 17 million Soviet citizens died in the second world war, along with 20 million Chinese ..yet we hear nothing.

RobG ,

Depending on whose figures you go on, anywhere between 25 million and 28 million Russians were killed in the Second World War.

To paraphrase Galloway, if it weren't for the Red Army we'd all be speaking German now; and all proper historians will agree with that.

Barely ever mentioned is that the Red Army liberated Auschwitz, and most of the other death camps. Also, about 40% of the jews killed during the Nazi era were Soviet jews.

If you're not familiar with all this stuff do a search for 'Nazi Einsatzgruppen' for starters.

I'm just one of many people who are absolutely disgusted by the way the Holocaust has been totally hijacked by the modern day Nazis in America and Israel.

Francis Lee ,

"17 million Soviet citizens died in the Great Patriotic War." I take it you mean civilians? 10 million Soviet soldiers also died in WW2. All in all some 50 million died in WW2. Mostly Russians, but also including other significant groups, Jews certainly, along with Roma people, homosexuals, Jehovah's witnesses, and political groups like the Communists (including German Communists) Polish nationalists and so forth.

Back in 1980 I visited the infamous concentration camp, Buchenwald, just outside of the famous city of Weimar in the old DDR. On its gates was the motto 'Jeden das Seinem' literally translated as 'each to what he deserves.' Looking at the cemetary all the above groups could and included Soviet POWs as well British and Canadian paratroops for some reason. There was also a little shrine to Ernst Thälmann leader of the German communists – the KPD – at the spot where he was murdered in 1944.

Additionally, given the size and scope of the ethnic cleansing, Nazi and local Fascist groups were recruited in Latvia, Lithuania and Ukraine in a grotesque sort of mass murder outsourcing. And they carried out their role with considerable alacrity, sometimes even shocking the German Waffen SS Units and Einsatzgruppen (death Squads).

Just thought I'd put the record straight.

paul ,

I think you'll find the figures are a lot higher, L.
There is an estimate of 27 million dead in Russia, about 1 in 7 of a population of nearly 200 million in 1941. That includes all the deaths from starvation and disease. So there were about 650,000 battle deaths around Leningrad and another 900,000 who starved to death. This is quite plausible, though for many years a figure of "over 20 million" was given. Attempts to come up with a more accurate casualty toll produced figures of 23, 25, 27 million. But maybe nobody will ever give a wholly accurate figure.
There was an estimate of 10 million dead in the Congo Basin during the first 20 years of Belgian rule, 1890 – 1910, half the population of Central Africa. That is quite plausible, though the Belgian overlords of the period probably didn't value African lives highly enough to bother counting them. A similar figure has been given for the present day resource wars in DRC.
But African lives and Asian lives don't count for much anyway. Nobody ever bothered counting the dead in Iraq, maybe 2 million, but who knows? Who cares? Certainly nobody in this country, with half a million children under 5 dying from sanctions, 1991 – 2003. Just gooks and blacks and sand niggers, who aren't all that important in our "Rules Based Order."
40,000 dead in Venezuela so far? How many in DPRK, Iran, Syria? Who knows? Who cares?
The real global holocaust was in the New World, with over 100 million native American victims.

By contrast, the much touted "holocaust" of the 1940s appears a highly dubious affair that doesn't bear much scrutiny. The post war global Jewish population was only slightly lower than the pre war one.
A brass plaque referring to "4 million dead Jews" at Auschwitz was quietly removed and replaced with another one giving a figure of "1.4 million." What happened to the 2.5 million missing Jews has never been explained.
During the 1960s-70s, there were frequent references to "3,500,000 Jews gassed at Auschwitz." Over the years, there were steady downwards revisions to 2.5 million, 2 million, and the current "over a million, 1.1 million, mainly Jews," perhaps to quietly acknowledge the presence of so many non Jews there. It has been speculated that over the next few years there will be further downward revisions to "900,000", or "700-900,000."
Post war "reparations" to Israel extorted from Germany specified a figure of £6,600 (in 1950s money) per alleged dead victim. So there was an obvious incentive to inflate the figures as much as possible.
It is quite possible that the true figure is in the region of several hundred thousand, if you include Jews killed fighting in the Russian and allied forces, in aerial bombing, and deaths from wartime conditions. Maybe even as high as 1 million.
"6 million" seems to be something of a favourite Talmudic figure that has been banded about from time immemorial. Though the same source gives a figure of 42 billion (with a b) Jews "holocausted" by the Romans.
Though of course just speculating on these events you could end up in jail for 5 years all over Europe. And probably over here soon as well, if Tony Blair, the Board of Deputies, and the Jewish oligarch Kantor have their way. Makes you wonder what they've got to hide.

[Jan 29, 2020] Poland's Kaczy ski is demanding reparations from Russia, both for WWII and even going back to WWI. Saying they missed out on Versailles reparations, but it's never too late to demand.

Jan 29, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

yalensis January 25, 2020 at 2:33 pm

Right on topic: Poland's Kaczyński is demanding reparations from Russia, both for WWII and even going back to WWI. Saying they missed out on Versailles reparations, but it's never too late to demand.

Recall that in 2018 Poland calculated Germany still owed them 850 billion Euros in unpaid reparations. And figure Russia owes them twice as much.

Some history: In 1953 Poland received a check from Germany, and then the two countries agreed that was it. The Germans say that an agreement from 1990 made everything moot, and there can be no futher reparations.
Meanwhile, the Russian Duma says that if Poland demands more $$$ from Russia, then Russia will present a bill for all the $$$ the Soviet Union plowed into rebuilding Poland after the war.
The Russians also say that Poland has opened a Pandora's box that could lead to its (Poland's) shrinking of boundaries. Since their current boundaries were determined by the victors at Potsdam and Yalta. If the Poles continue to tear down the whole world order as determined by Nuremberg, then they must be prepared to pay the price of negating all those territorities they gained from Germany.

At the Potsdam Conference in 1945, it was determined that Poland would receive its share of reparations from the share allotted to the USSR from the Eastern sector of Germany. In 1954, the 3 countries, the USSR, Poland, and East Germany all agreed mutually to end the reparations. Everybody knows that the USSR picked up the lion's share of the tab to restore all the Eastern bloc countries; and by joining the Warsaw Pact, East Germany had atoned for the sins of Hitler.
But now all of that has been blown to bits, and it's anybody's game. Poland just needs to learn a valuable lesson, namely: Be careful what you wish for!

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Moscow Exile January 26, 2020 at 12:05 am
Since their current boundaries were determined by the victors at Potsdam and Yalta. If the Poles continue to tear down the whole world order as determined by Nuremberg

Which is what they did after Versailles, 1919: they did not accept the boundaries as set at the WWI victors' conference, which took place during an armistice; the war only officially ended when the Versailles treaties had been signed by the WWI victors in 1919 and up that time, the Royal Navy continued to blockade the German Empire, which blockade caused many thousands of unnecessary deaths of German citizens, especially children, because the place had been near starving since 1916. And remember, these were "good Germans" that I am writing about, not Nazi lunatics, just ordinary Fritzes. The Central Powers diplomats were not allowed to take part in the conference, hence the Germans called the decisions made at Versailles a Diktat .

Hardly had the ink been dry at Versailles when the Poles decided to ignore the boundaries as fixed at the conference and launched the Polish Soviet-War so as to start rebuilding their Polack "Commonwealth" again. And The Poles did not accept the boundaries of the created at Versailles state of Lithuania: they claimed that Vilnius was a Polish city, by virtue of its population. One could also have argued that it really was a Jewish city. I believe that at the time, Vilnius had the biggest Jewish population of any city in Europe. (Where did they go, I wonder? Likewise the Jews of Latvia and Estonia -- they must have all emigrated to the Lower East Side!)

Interesting that! The Polish annexation of Vilnius and its environs, as well as Czech territory in the 7-day War, the Polish–Czechoslovak War 1919 , could be likened to the Russian annexation of the Crimea in more recent times. But remember kiddies: Poland -- good; Russia -- bad!!!

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et Al January 25, 2020 at 3:15 pm
Great stuff ME!

It seems to me that the propaganda effort is aimed at atomizing history in to small chunks with only the 'right bits' being highlighted, rather than holistically (Khalkin Gol/Jp). WWII is all about ME! ME! ME!

The Polish government must have known that the guarantees from GB & Fr were meaningless as much as the latter did, but were hoping for a hail mary pass, not to mention everyone throwing their last cards on to the deck to say "Well we didn't start it" in the newspapers.

As for the invasion of the SU, I guess we'll never know if Hitler's tantrum and demand of immediate invasion of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia for telling him to bugger off delayed the ultimate invasion by just enough to push the odds of failure to 51/49. Even if they had managed to start earlier, what of spring mud and roads unsuitable for heavy equipment?

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Moscow Exile January 26, 2020 at 1:03 am
Yes, we can now say in hindsight that the British and French "guarantees" made to Poland were laughable.

Actually, I think many at the time also thought they were laughable, but said nothing.

Just how the hell could the French and British provide military help to Poland if it was attacked?

How were the Frogs going to march from behind their Maginot Line to Poland -- or were they thinking of flying there?

Hardly!

Logistically impossible then.

Oh, I know! They could have gone there by sea!!!

Cherbourg -- along the Channel -- North Sea -- around Danish Jutland -- into the Baltic Sea -- a short cruise by the German Pomerania coast -- disembark at Gdansk (Danzig).

Piece of piss!

Titter ye not!

The British Royal Navy did, in fact, consider entering the Baltic so as to help the brave Poles, but thought better of it.

And guess who dreamed up that idea?

Why, that same military genius that dreamed up the WWI Gallipoli campaign and WWII allied attack against the "Soft Underbelly of Europe", aka the Italian Campaign 1943-1945; that self-same military chump who sent HMS Prince of Wales and HMS Repulse to the Far East without air cover, those two capital ships earning, as a result of his decision, the unenviable distinction of being the first capital ships in history to have been sunk solely by air power.

See: Operation Catherine

The fact remains, though, that on September 1st 1939, Great Britain and France were officially Poland's allies: they had given Poland certain guarantees. When Nazi Germany invaded Poland, thereby breaking its ten-year pact of non-aggression, which pact the Poles still considered to be extant on September 1st 1939, it took 3 days for Poland's allies to do what they were supposed to do and declare war on Germany.

What did Poland's Western allies do next?

Sweet FA!

Why? Because they were afraid of the USSR?

I think not.

Yes, the RAF dropped leaflets over Germany and then, 9 days later, on Sept 12, the allied Franco-British command met in Abbeville, France, and decided that Poland had already been defeated, so there was no point in them doing anything more.

Pity they didn't bother to inform their Polish allies of this fact, because the Polish army continued to fight the Nazis for another 24 days.

By the time the so-called September Campaign was over, 6th October 1939, many war crimes had already been committed on Polish soldiers and civilians alike. From the outset this was a war of Poland's total annihilation.

Poles, no matter what they liked to think, were in Nazi eyes, Slav Untermenschen , and the Polish so-called intelligentsia (according to Marxist theory, not a true social class but, nevertheless, always 10% of the population) was to be be exterminated, and the rest made to serve as helots.

[To go slightly off topic, as regards Poles thinking that they are a cut above yer average Slav, I had a Polish lady friend once, who really disliked being called a Slav. She was a cracker, by the way, and really smart. I should add, that for many years I had a few Polish workmates, coal miners all, and they were all good blokes: hard workers and hard drinkers -- ME]

When for over a month practically the entire German army was engaged in Poland, the larger and generally better equipped French army could have overrun Germany in matter of days, with or without British assistance. That was just one, perhaps the last opportunity the West had of avoiding WWII.

Earlier they could have played out Hitler's ridiculous demands regarding the Sudetenland quite differently and brought his political career to an abrupt end.

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yalensis January 26, 2020 at 11:17 am
Poles could have put up a better defense against Germany if they had actually fortified their Western border. In reality, they left their Western border fairly open, in the dreamy hope that Hitler would be their friend; and instead spent all their $$$ fortifying their border against the USSR. Either way, it didn't take all that much to bowl them over.

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rkka January 26, 2020 at 5:11 pm
"Actually, I think many at the time also thought they were laughable, but said nothing."

Liddell-Hart says the guarantee was given against the advice of the Chiefs of Staff.

"Just how the hell could the French and British provide military help to Poland if it was attacked?"

This was the position of the Chiefs of Staff.

Chamberlain intended it to only be a political deterrent, to persuade Adolf to go along with his idea of " Germany and England as two pillars of European peace and buttresses against Communism" Neville continued to cling to this idea until Adolf betrayed him by sending Herr Ribbentrop to Moscow.

However, he had not given up on that idea, he just wouldn't deal with Adolf any more. A new German government, without Adolf, would have breathed new life into Anglo-German relations. In mid-October 1939 John Colville, while a young staffer at 10 Downing Street, noted in his diary the position of Chamberlain's Principle Private Secretary (Chief of Staff for Americans) Sir Arthur Rucker:

"Arthur Rucker says he thinks that Communism is now the great danger, greater even than Nazi Germany. All the independent states of Europe are anti-Russian (nothing new there,-rkka) but Communism is a plague that does not stop at national boundaries, and with the advance of the Soviet into Poland the states of Eastern Europe will find their powers of resistance to Communism very much weakened. It is thus vital that we should play our hand very carefully with Russia, and not destroy the possibility of uniting, if necessary, with a new German government against the common danger."

This was six weeks into the war. I think this explains how not one milligram of British high explosives detonated on German territory between 3 September 1939 and 10 May 1940.

So Neville Chamberlain, while he declared war, refused actually waging it in any way that would prevent Anglo-German agreement if Adolf had been removed.

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yalensis January 27, 2020 at 4:03 am
Totally makes sense, and explains the "phoniness" of the Phony War. It was just a bluff. The English hoped for a "regime change" in Germany that would leave the Nazi system intact but just remove Hitler, who was sort of a wild-card in the deck.

[Jan 29, 2020] The New Kremlin Stooge

Jan 29, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

Moscow Exile January 26, 2020 at 2:56 am


Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki: "Attempts to paint Poland as a perpetrator, rather than a victim, can't be tolerated".

"And although the Red Army subsequently did liberate Auschwitz, the concentration camp could have been liberated six months earlier. In the summer of 1944, the Soviet Army stood at positions 200 miles from Auschwitz, but the offensive stopped, giving the Germans time to retreat and continue organising deportations up until January 1945. Saving Jews was never a priority for Stalin and the Red Army." -- Morawiecki in Politico

Response to Mr Morawiecki – Why the Red Amy Did Not Liberate Auschwitz Earlier
January 23, 2020
Stalker Zone


The two women pictured above, each holding a toddler, are dirty, filthy subhuman Orcs, by the way.

Well, besides Germany, the main fault lies with Poland for the fact that Auschwitz generally appeared as a death camp.

Because Poland itself hated Jews too and even took it to the official level, as the words of Poland's ambassador to Nazi Germany prove. Poland is guilty because it until the last minute flirted with Nazi Germany, hoping to hit the USSR along with it. Poland is to blame for failing to provide decent resistance to Hitler. In addition to Poland, the blame lies certainly with France and Great Britain, which, as allies of Poland and promising to save it in the event of Hitler's attack, simply spat on it and did not come to its rescue. They did not come with a military force that could destroy the Third Reich. Instead of real fighting, a simulation was made, surely hoping that after Poland fell, Hitler's next goal would be the USSR. But the calculation was a little off, and Hitler's next victim was France and the British expeditionary force in Dunkirk .

Soviet soldiers paid with their blood for the world to live. And they liberated Auschwitz exactly when they were able to, having passed before this along a path that no one in the world can possibly pass. Ordinary men – Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusian, Georgians, Kyrgyz, Kazakhs – all nationalities of the Soviet Union in one structure, did as much as the rest of the world did. And now they are openly spat on in their memory, and those whose graves are scattered all over Europe are mocking. And many still don't have graves.

And Soviet women too, I should like to add.

And as regards the unknown whereabouts of many of the fallen, my elder daughter every Victory Day holiday proudly yet sadly joins the march of the "Immortal Regiment", carrying a placard that I made, which has a photograph of her great Uncle Stepan, who, whilst serving in the Red Army, fell in 1942 fighting the invader. He left home and never came back and nobody knows where his remains lie -- out there, somewhere to the West, in Belorussia, maybe, or the Ukraine or nearer to his home, which was Moskva.

Of course, home grown filth here, the kreakly and liberasts say the "Immortal Regiment" marches are fake and its participants receive handouts off the Evil One to attend.

They Did Not Use Artillery, but Went on the Attack with Doctors: How Soviet Troops Liberated Auschwitz
January 25, 2020
Stalker Zone

Moscow Exile January 26, 2020 at 7:18 am
And get this, you Polish revisionists!

From Spiegel , which, in case you have forgotten, is a German publication:

Die Rote Armee war es, die die Vernichtungslager befreite und die meisten eigenen Opfer zu beklagen hatte, das ist wichtig zu betonen, weil in Russland der Eindruck entstanden ist, dies werde allmählich vergessen.

It was the Red Army that liberated the extermination camps and had to suffer and mourn the most losses [during WWII]: this is important to emphasize, because in Russia the impression has been created that this is gradually being forgotten.

[My stress -- ME}

And at the fore of those who are conducting this forgetfullness are Polish historical revisionists!

See:

Zwei KZ-Befreier erinnern sich
"Dieser Geruch, dieser fürchterliche Geruch"
Der US-Soldat Don Greenbaum und Rotarmist Iwan Stepanowitsch Martynuschkin beschreiben den Moment, als sie vor 75 Jahren dem Grauen ins Gesicht sahen.
Von Susanne Beyer , Christian Esch und René Pfister
25.01.2020, 19:02 Uhr

Two concentration camp liberators remember
"That smell, that horrible smell"
US soldier Don Greenbaum and Red Army soldier Ivan Stepanovich Martynushkin describe the moment when they faced horror 75 years ago.
By Susanne Beyer , Christian Esch and René Pfister
25.01.2020, 19:02

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Moscow Exile January 27, 2020 at 1:43 am
There is an RT article today that features that self-same Ivan Martynushkin, one of the Red Army liberators of Auschwitz, who was interviewed by Spiegel (see above):

'People want to know the truth': Red Army veteran speaks out on liberation of Auschwitz & distortions of history
27 Jan, 2020 06:15 / Updated 1 hour ago

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Moscow Exile January 27, 2020 at 1:49 am
Famous for its beautiful architecture, the Red Army was instructed to make sure it remained intact as much as possible.

Those RT translators and proofreaders want f**king!

The Red Army is famous many things, but I don't think the it has ever been famous for its architecture!

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Moscow Exile January 27, 2020 at 1:56 am
And the usual comments to the above, such as:

Another b.s. article trying to glorify jewish bolshevik red terror.

and:

murdered 15 million Christian Russians in their reign of terror and 4 million Ukrainians. WW2 was used by Rothschilde to decimated European Christians mostly and American whites. really wake up and look at the big picture

ad nauseam

No doubt posted by citizens of the Exceptional Nation.

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yalensis January 27, 2020 at 3:59 am
Ugh! The RT comment forum can often be a cesspool of ultra-righties and Jew-haters. If one were blindfolded, one might think they were reading Unz and not RT.

The RT editors bring it on themselves, and I suspect that some of them are ideological fascists themselves. For example, whenever they decide to do a piece on American culture, they always hire some nauseating semi-racist ALT-Rightie, like the 4chan types, or whatever. And the tone is just plain nasty sometimes. And those are the articles , not even the comments, which are worse!

Mark Chapman January 26, 2020 at 9:38 am
Additionally, the site of Auschwitz itself – Auschwitz.org – reflects that the Red Army did not even know of the exact location or existence of Auschwitz-Birkenau until the liberation of Krakow. The Red Army therefore marched on Auschwitz as soon as it could.

"The Red Army obtained detailed information about Auschwitz only after the liberation of Cracow, and was therefore unable to reach the gates of Auschwitz before January 27, 1945."

http://auschwitz.org/en/history/liberation/day-of-liberation/

The ancestors of the people who liberated Auschwitz are today spat upon and reviled, and their monuments torn down by self-important bubbleheads on the orders of know-nothing bureaucrats – while the ancestors of the people who staffed the camps and murdered hundreds of thousands by the most repugnant methods imaginable are among the most highly-regarded and respectable of Europe's citizens.

Well, but they did apologize.

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Moscow Exile January 26, 2020 at 10:05 am
From the above Auschwitz.org link:

It was a paradox of history that soldiers formally representing Stalinist totalitarianism brought freedom to the prisoners of Nazi totalitarianism.

Formally representing Stalinist totalitarianism?

Fighting in the defence of the USSR, I should have thought, or the Rodina -- the Motherland [Родина].

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yalensis January 26, 2020 at 10:59 am
Those are powerful posters. Shows, once again, that the most powerful propaganda is when it represents the deeper Truth.

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Mark Chapman January 26, 2020 at 12:29 pm
Yes, I saw that little drop of poison in there, too – it's comical sometimes how westerners are convinced they live in free countries, the whole time their governments are hoovering up their private information in a way that would make any true totalitarian ideologue proud. I saw a discussion this morning on the requirement now that smartphones and other such devices sold in Russia now must have Russian cultural and moral software installed. You don't have to use it, goes the government line, but it must be available as an option.

I need hardly say the western commenters had a field day with that, speculating that it is tracing software used to identify and pinpoint the homos in Russia. This evolved to speculation of what a smartphone would be like if built in Russia – hospital green in colour, twice as big and heavy as western smartphones and with less than half the features, that sort of thing. Yandex is poised to launch its own smartphone (social media giants such as Facebook have tried to get into the market, but had to drop out on disappointing reception), and it sounded pretty techie. But of course westerners know better. Russia doesn't make anything, and if it did, it would be crudely carved from wood.

https://gizmodo.com/report-russia-says-smartphones-sold-in-the-country-mus-1841223725

https://www.ft.com/content/025d31d6-f860-11e8-af46-2022a0b02a6c

I just started re-reading Richard Preston's "The Cobra Event", which I never forgot although I must have read it 20 years ago; I highly recommend it, it's a ripping story with lots of real bio-warfare history in it. Anyway, on second reading and after my global attitudes have realigned, I'm noticing how the Russians and the Iraqis are the dissembling tricksters, ever trying to fool the honest Americans who are victims of their own trusting natures, having grown up free. I'm exaggerating a little for effect, but it really is a lot like that. I just never picked up on it before. In passages which purport to be historical fact, the author recounts how the US military found and destroyed Iraq's nuclear program in the first Gulf War. Which they never did.

https://read.amazon.ca/kp/card?preview=inline&linkCode=xm2&ref_=k4w_oembed_HKyfKndnoxdfWE&asin=B000P28WYO&tag=duc12-20

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Jennifer Hor January 26, 2020 at 12:27 pm
It bears repeating that all the major death camps like the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp complex were located in very remote parts of Poland, often as in the case of Auschwitz itself at the end of a railway line. That way, there would be few external witnesses to what was going on inside the camps, and information about them could be controlled by the Nazi authorities.

No doubt if the Soviets had reached Auschwitz six months earlier, that would then be used by the likes of Morawiecki to damn them as invaders for liberating the inmates while the Nazis were still working them to death in the factories there or killing them at the Birkenau camp site.

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Mark Chapman January 26, 2020 at 12:35 pm
Germans who were adults during Willy Twice claim to this day that they believed Auschwitz was a sausage factory or some similar commercial enterprise.

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yalensis January 27, 2020 at 3:53 am
I can believe that some, maybe even most Germans, didn't really know what was going on. Since the Hitlerites took some pains to conceal what they were doing. A lot of ordinary krauts probably thought the Jews and other undesirables were just being banished to other countries. Not that most of them would have even given a sh*t even if they knew what was really going on.
And even if they cared, there wasn't much they could do about it anyhow. That's why a dictatorship is a dictatorship.

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et Al January 27, 2020 at 6:25 am
I'm sure there were rumors (railway people for starters) that no-one wanted to believe and were pushed further away when compared with dealing with daily life. I'm also sure all the allies knew it. Stalin had formidable intelligence services and the UK flew photo recon flights which would have picked up these isolated end-of line concentration/death camps. Those photos would have been analysed primarily to see if it had bearing on war materiel (could it be a secret underground factory for weapons for example) and when they realized it was probably something else, "Sir, these pictures are rather odd," it would have been kicked upstairs and compartmentalized – "If you come across stuff like this again, just bring it straight to me."

We forget that strict secrecy was taken very seriously and many said nothing about what they did, let alone saw. I would guess those photo-interpreters too.

This evidence and more is still secret (like the Hess files as mentioned earlier).

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Patrick Armstrong January 27, 2020 at 11:22 am
FWIW Speer reported that he had been in von Papen's office the day after and saw some blood in a corner that hadn't been mopped up yet. He reports that he made the conscious decision to not look at it and to try and forget it. I think a lot of people carefully didn't look in certain places.

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et Al January 27, 2020 at 1:00 pm
I read one of Speer's books last century some time. Now thinking back about it and having had a quick internet look up, I do seem to recall that he claimed he was enthralled at his architechtural plans of building a Third Reich to last for a thousand years, huge boulevards, buildings etc. and didn't let himself think further which he could have without much effort.

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Mark Chapman January 27, 2020 at 11:23 am
So much of history is 'who knew what, when?' And most of it will always remain a secret, as might just about anything which cannot be proven. Poland's embrace of the Nazis, however, is a matter of record and can be proven.

Yes, there were Russians among the German military formations which did not consist of Germans, just as there were Ukrainian and Polish battalions. But there were plenty of documentary references to Hitler's loathing of the Russians. Had Hitler outlived Stalin, I'm pretty sure he would not have thrown a state funeral in Berlin for Stalin as he did for Pilsudsky, nor leave behind documentary references to Germany's gratitude for such a loyal ally. The sad fact remains that most people cannot be bothered with history, and much prefer to adopt narratives which speak glowingly of the heroism of their own alongside the general falling-short of everyone else – who doesn't like to think they are descended from wholesome goodness rather than villainy? Political forces which constantly seek greater wealth and influence for themselves and their own kind are well aware of the pitfalls of honest introspection and repentance, and seek to forestall their emergence with bracing bromides about heroism and benevolent values in their own military forces.

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Jen January 27, 2020 at 2:03 pm
In response to Et Al's comment on whether Allied forces knew what was going on southern Poland:

From The New York Times archives:
1/ a wireless from Jerusalem on 25 November 1942 "Details Reaching Palestine"

https://www.nytimes.com/svc/oembed/html/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F1942%2F11%2F25%2Farchives%2Fdetails-reaching-palestine.html

JERUSALEM, Nov. 24 -- Information received here of methods by which the Germans in Poland are carrying out the slaughter of Jews includes accounts of trainloads of adults and children taken to great crematoriums at Oswiencim, near Cracow.

2/ special cable also dated 25 November 1942 "HIMMLER PROGRAM KILLS POLISH JEWS; Slaughter of 250,000 in Plan to Wipe Out Half in Country This Year Is Reported REGIME IN LONDON ACTS Officials of Poland Publish Data -- Dr. Wise Gets Check Here by State Department"

https://www.nytimes.com/svc/oembed/html/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F1942%2F11%2F25%2Farchives%2Fhimmler-program-kills-polish-jews-slaughter-of-250000-in-plan-to.html

LONDON, Nov. 24 -- Old persons, children, infants and cripples among the Jewish population of Poland are being shot, killed by various other methods or forced to undergo hardships that inevitably cause death as a means of carrying out an order by Heinrich Himmler, Nazi Gestapo chief, that half the remaining Polish Jews must be exterminated by the end of this year, according to a report issued today by the Polish Government in London.

To get access to the full reports in the archives you have to subscribe to the NYT.

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Moscow Exile January 27, 2020 at 8:14 pm
re the statement above about Albert Speer, whose memoirs written after his release from Spandau Gaol, Berlin, I read many, many years ago, which memoirs have long since been criticized as being "selective":

he [Speer] made the conscious decision to not look at it and to try and forget it.

Yes, the German Intelligentsia, of which Speer was a typical member, practised "Inner Emigration" [ Innere Emigration auf Deutsch ]: " a controversial concept of German writers who were opposed to Nazism, yet chose to remain in Germany after the Nazis seized power in 1933. "

They knew what was happening, or at least had serious reservations and suspicions about Nazi policies, but chose to look the other way.

And that quotation above from Wiki as regards the Nazis seizing power really pisses me off no end! It implies that the Germans suddenly woke up one morning, only to find that they had an Austrian arsehole as Chancellor.

Hitler was at first legally appointed as Chancellor by President Hindenburg and many voted for the Nazi Party, albeit that at the time of Hitler's chancellorship, it seemed that the Nazi party was rapidly losing its popularity.

After the Nazis had got within the citadel, so to speak, and following Hindenburg's death, Hitler then passed the enabling acts and became Chancellor/President with dictatorial powers.

Hitler became Chancellor because of the violence that his party had organized, which violence on the streets was equally matched by that of the Communist Party. Germany was in danger of falling into a state of civil war.

The election in 1932 resulted in the "anti-democratic" parties (the Nazis and the Communists) getting more than 50% of the seats, meaning that it was impossible to create a "democratic" majority government.

After one minority government had failed, another election had much the same result, and the conservative president Hindenburg finally, on the 30th of January 1933, accepted a government that was a coalition of the Nazi party and the Nationalist Party.

It was decided to hold a new election at the beginning of March 1933. Six days before that election the Reichstag building was set on fire.

Nobody knows for sure who did it, but in any case the fire was seized upon as an opportunity by the Nazis, who blamed the Communists and proposed an emergency decree that basically suspended all rights, such as habeas corpus , giving the new government temporary dictatorial powers.

As soon as the act was passed, most leading communists were arrested and the social democrat leadership went into exile (in Switzerland, as far as I recall), crippling them as well.

Despite all these decidedly undemocratic and openly violent goings on, the Nazis still only got 43% of the vote, making another coalition necessary.

At that point Hitler created the so called "Enabling Act", which in practice made Germany a complete dictatorship.

When voting for this act was to be carried out, the Nazis arranged to have loads of SA thugs present as an intimidating gesture inside and outside the chamber (usual Nazi tactic) to make sure the act was passed.

Like most democracies in Europe, the German parliamentary system then as now does not use a first-past-the-post system of voting. It is, therefore, not at all uncommon for no one party in such a system of proportional representation, as the Germans have, to have an outright majority, so somebody becoming head of the government with barely a third of the vote (as Hitler did) is quite feasible.

Hitler made use of this fact. At the end of the last free elections held in the Weimar Republic, the Nazis and the Communists did so well that there was basically no way of forming a government without one of them. Not a great choice there, as both parties were against the very idea of the Weimar Republic. But the Nazis were deemed the lesser of the two evils, and there's the rub!

Hitler's price for being part of any coalition government was to be named Chancellor. That was deemed a relatively powerless position, so they, the movers and shakers, which included the top military, agreed. But then the Austrian layabout managed to scare President Hindenburg, who, by the way, detested the "Bohemian corporal" Hitler, into essentially declaring Martial Law, thereby disempowering the Reichstag. After that, it was all systems go for Hitler and chums.

So one could say that Hitler did initially achieve office democratically -- and "democracy" comes in many flavours -- though he never had the electoral support of a majority.

Hey, hang on though .!

Isn't that what's happened in .?

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Moscow Exile January 26, 2020 at 12:59 pm
I chanced upon this in the Russian blogosphere:

Мы больше так не будем, поляки!
17 January

We won't do it again, Poles!

Today is the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Warsaw from the fascists. From the German fascists, I mean: their own have remained there and are still alive. And on this significant date, a fireworks salute of 3,000 fireworks (I shall write down the number: THREE THOUSAND) will be let off over Moscow. And the Ministry of Defence has today declassified documents on the liberation of Warsaw from the Germans.

I just don't get it!

First of all, I don't understand why the documents on the liberation of Warsaw should have been kept secret. What could have been kept secret?!

Secondly, I don't understand why we are celebrating "Warsaw's liberation", if the Poles themselves call this day "the change of occupation regimes". We have to celebrate the "VICTORY of the Red Army over German troops at Warsaw". Because, I repeat, we defeated only German fascists, and the Polish ones are still alive and well, as it turns out.

And I absolutely do not understand why we should arrange fireworks about the liberation of that city, which itself is not happy about this liberation, destroying monuments to the liberators and covering them with abusive words. Because under the Nazis they had concentration camps in Poland, and that meant a lot of needed jobs for Poles and Ukrainians. Ivan came, and he got rid of the concentration camps and deprived Poles and Ukrainians of their favorite jobs The Poles got grief, and we are, like, happy.

It's not nice, comrades. On the contrary – we should express condolences to the Poles on the liberation of Warsaw from the Nazis by the Red Army. And say to them "Forgive us, Poles, for our having to deprive you of your government and all that was nice and convenient for you so that we could get to Berlin. WE WON'T DO IT ANYMORE! Never again. And don't even ask us to do it."

That's what they'll understand and appreciate. For the time being

Today we should congratulate our veterans, but no way Poland.

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yalensis January 26, 2020 at 11:03 am
"Because Poland itself hated Jews too and even took it to the official level, as the words of Poland's ambassador to Nazi Germany prove. Poland is guilty because it until the last minute flirted with Nazi Germany, hoping to hit the USSR along with it. Poland is to blame for failing to provide decent resistance to Hitler."

Hear hear! The Truth really hurts, don't it, Poland?

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Moscow Exile January 26, 2020 at 5:20 am
Как перед Мировой войной польская армия деградировала? Поляки готовились к войне с СССР, но жестоко ошиблись

How had the Polish army deteriorated before the World War? The Poles had been preparing for war against the USSR, but they had made a terrible mistake.

In the 1930s, while all the armies of Europe were moving ahead with the times, the Polish army was becoming out of date. At the end of the 1920s, both in tanks and artillery, Poland would still have been a serious opponent if there had been a war against the USSR.

In the next decade, however, the USSR and Germany made serious progress, while Poland was stuck in the past. An almost effortless defeat could already be guaranteed for the Polish army. The reason for this was, as always, a lack of money, resources, as well as the hope for support from their allies, France and Great Britain.

But the Polish army had simply not become focused on waging war against Germany, but against the USSR. This explains the prohibitive number of cavalry divisions for World War II. Another problem was the ethnic composition of the army, which included the Germans in the west, and Ukrainians and Belarussians in the east.

Alexei Isayev together with historian Yegor Yakovlev – more than 1 hour. [VIDEO]

Video discussion in Russian.

Historians Alexei Isayev and Yegor Yakovlev discuss the fate of Poland at the beginning of World War II. What were the chances for the Polish army after the Wehrmacht invasion? What did the military allies of Warsaw plan and behave like? Why is the claim that the Soviet Union hit the Poles in the back wrong? All this in a conversation between the founder of "Digital History" and one of the most authoritative experts on the history of World War II and the Great Patriotic War.

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Mark Chapman January 26, 2020 at 9:53 am
Virtually all of modern history of the period is a dual campaign to invest the efforts of the western allies with nobility, and the efforts of the Soviet Union with shame and infamy.

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Moscow Exile January 26, 2020 at 5:25 am

Polish troops entering Czech Cieszyn, 1938.

Springtime for Poland and Germany?

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Moscow Exile January 27, 2020 at 12:45 am
Appeasing Hitler by Tim Bouverie review – how Britain fell for a delusion
A gripping account of the nation's greatest mistake is timely and relevant


Heil, mein Führer! Awfully glad to meet you, old chap! -- Neville Chamberlainshakes hands with Adolf Hitler in Bad Godesberg, on 22 September 1938 during the Sudeten crisis.

One month later:


Polish Army entering enter Český Těšín (Czech)/Czeski Cieszyn (Polish)/Tschechisch-Teschen (German).

"Amid the general euphoria in Poland – the acquisition of Teschen was a very popular development – no one paid attention to the bitter comment of the Czechoslovak general who handed the region over to the incoming Poles. He predicted that it would not be long before the Poles would themselves be handing Teschen over to the Germans " -- Watt, Richard M. (1998): "Bitter Glory. Poland and its fate 1918–1939", New York: Hippocrene Books, p. 511. ISBN 0-7818-0673-9.

Historically, the largest specified ethnic group inhabiting this area were Poles. Under Austrian rule, Cieszyn Silesia was initially divided into three (Bielitz, Friedek and Teschen), and later into four districts (plus Freistadt). One of them, Frýdek, had a mostly Czech population, the other three were mostly inhabited by Poles. During the 19th century the number of ethnic Germans grew. After declining at the end of the 19th century, at the beginning of the 20th century and later from 1920 to 1938, the Czech population grew significantly (mainly as a result of immigration and the assimilation of locals) and Poles became a minority, which they are to this day. Another significant ethnic group were the Jews, but almost the entire Jewish population was murdered during World War II by Nazi Germany.

See: Zaolzie

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Patient Observer January 26, 2020 at 7:20 am
Simply marvelous research ME. The Vatican was and is still in the forefront of anti-Russian/anti-SU/anti-Slav Orthodox in Europe. It goes back to the crusades. Of course, Croatia is the gold-standard for Catholic Slavs hating Orthodox Slavs.

Your research helped highlight this fundamentally important force in the war against the Orthodox Slavs. Thank you.

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yalensis January 26, 2020 at 11:46 am
Meanwhile, the Persians prove once again that they are a wise and ancient and intelligent race of people. Who are much smarter than nematodes.
For example: They refused to hand over to the Ukrainian government the "black box" of the Boeing that they themselves (the Persians) admitted to shooting down by accident.
Admitting that they can sometimes be dumb and make a dumb mistake, but that doesn't mean that they are complete morons.

"The black box will remain in Iran and will be deciphered on Iranian territory," the Iranian government announced.

Thus proving that they are smarter than worms learning to run a maze.
In scientific experiments, the worms needed hundreds of tries before they learned where were the obstacles in the maze, and what nefarious tricks they should avoid.

After only one example (=MH17), the Persians learned the key lesson: Never trust Ukrainian Nazis with your black box!

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Moscow Exile January 26, 2020 at 12:09 pm
You saying that Persians are smarter than my host nation?

I should let you know that my wife is a Russian and she ain't dumb, albeit she married me!

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yalensis January 27, 2020 at 3:47 am
Your wife is a genius! I heard that she married you for your natty wardrobe, your choice of vintage wines, your posh British accent, and also for your money.

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Moscow Exile January 27, 2020 at 4:05 am
I possess none of those above things that you assume she married me for!

She once confessed that before we wed, she saw me buy a taco at Lenin Library metro station, which edible I immediately and voraciously consumed in lightning quick time, unaware that I was being observed.

She felt sorry for me.

Mothering instinct, I suppose.

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Jennifer Hor January 26, 2020 at 12:35 pm
Am guessing that the flight crew would have used Russian amongst themselves and English with ATC in Tehran so the Iranians need at least interpreters knowledgeable in both languages who also understand the terminology used by airline flight crews.

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Mark Chapman January 26, 2020 at 11:36 pm
Speaking of Poland – and we were, the whole post is about Poland – that truculent nation has announced it will not renew its gas contract with Gazprom under any circumstances. It has a cunning plan: it will replace Russian imports (63% of its annual consumption in 2017) with American LNG (37%) and supply from Norway (43%) by 2022!! Its own production is forecast to decline from 26% in 2017 to 20% in 2022.

This is a recipe for catastrophe, and only a government of ideological eejits would try it. We have become so accustomed to lying from Poland lately that its announcement that it can buy American LNG cheaper than pipeline gas from Russia will come as no surprise – the Poles' American brothers are going to transport it all the way across the sea for them and then sell it to them at a loss to themselves.

https://www.dw.com/en/us-trumps-russian-gas-as-poland-eyes-gazprom-exit/a-45981553

Of course the USA is touting this as a major victory, because it wants to get a toehold in Europe for gas that it really needs to sell. But if it sells at a loss, the relationship is not going to last long. Perhaps it hopes to sell at a break-even price until it has established a reputation as a reliable partner, and then incrementally increase its prices until it reaches a happy place. But it is not going to happen. In truth, there is lots of room in the European market for US LNG without inconveniencing Gazprom overmuch, but the major determining factor is the US can't supply gas in any significant amounts and still make money, not if it is looking to present an alternative to Russian gas. Because as I have pointed out before, Russia's production costs are in rubles while its sales are in Euros. No matter how low the market price goes, Russia can still make money.

But Poland must be encouraged to do it. Take the plunge, Poland, and get off the Gazprom tit!! Moreover, no matter what attempts at rapprochement may be made in the future, Moscow must not make a new gas deal with Poland. Fuck the Poles! It will not be very long before they are begging Europe to help them with their energy situation, and if Europe wants to buy Russian gas at market prices and sell it to Poland cheap, that is their affair. But Norway's gas supplies are in permanent decline, and the USA cannot supply Poland at the price Poland wants to pay and make money.

https://oilprice.com/Energy/Natural-Gas/Shrinking-Norwegian-Natural-Gas-Production-Puts-Europe-In-Dire-Situation.html

According to Oilprice.com, Norway's gas production was forecast at 2014/15 to decline by more than 40% by 2025. To the best of my knowledge no major new Norwegian discoveries have been made since that time.

This is typical Polish stubbornness – it will plunge ahead, and the situation will magically rectify itself to Poland's satisfaction. Except it won't, and once again Poland will cut off its nose to spite its face.

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et Al January 27, 2020 at 6:42 am
They'll still claim their transit fees Now if it were me, I'd pay them with bags of rouble notes!

Apparently Norway are leaders in decarbonizing natural gas but

S&P Global Platts: EU gas sellers want to keep buying from Russia in low-CO₂ future
https://www.spglobal.com/platts/en/market-insights/latest-news/natural-gas/080119-eu-gas-sellers-want-to-keep-buying-from-russia-in-low-co2-future

01 Aug 2019

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Patient Observer January 27, 2020 at 7:29 am
If natural gas is decarbonized, the result in hydrogen gas and carbon in some form (most likely CO2). Hydrogen gas would have little potential to replace natural gas for many reasons. Or does decarbonizing mean something else?

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et Al January 27, 2020 at 8:31 am
Natural gas/LNG to Hydrogen:

https://www.pipeline-journal.net/news/gas-grid-conversion-hydrogen-decarbonise-homes-northern-england-2034

https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy-environment/news/eu-clarifies-fossil-fuel-stance-no-lock-in-into-natural-gas/

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Patient Observer January 27, 2020 at 8:52 am
Thanks for the links.

The report says that clean hydrogen can be produced from natural gas using existing technology, at a self-powered 12-gigawatt production facility with carbon capture technology.

Splitting methane into hydrogen and carbon takes energy so the process can not be "self-powered" unless the carbon is oxidized to CO2. The first link did mention sequestering the carbon (likely in the form of CO2) which in itself an energy intensive and expensive process.

Using hydrogen for space heating is simply dangerous and crazy expensive – invisible flame, pipe failures from hydrogen embrittlement, large leakage losses, etc.

I suppose an entirely new gas distribution system with entirely new heating systems could be developed but the ROI would liely be crazy bad. The more likely heating future in northern England involves lots of sweaters and hats. This story is a variation of the wunderwaffen shtick. Just an opinion.

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Mark Chapman January 27, 2020 at 1:10 pm
I would need convincing that 'biomethane' is a 'green' gas. LNG is mostly methane, and when it is burnt as a fuel it is almost completely consumed. When it is spilled into the sea, it boils away. But its release unburnt causes tremendous greenhouse-gas damage, methane is probably the worst. Use of it as a ship's fuel is demonstrably much cleaner than the previous standby, marine diesel. It is the gas which escapes during extraction and at LNG terminals during regasification that make it overall just as much a pollutant. If escape of natural gas unburnt during those operations could be substantially tightened up, it'd be a winner.

I am suspicious of the process of 'greening by labeling', as we saw with 'clean coal'.

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Patient Observer January 27, 2020 at 3:20 pm
its more of a "brown" gas.

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Mark Chapman January 28, 2020 at 11:21 am
Ha, ha! So it is.

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Mark Chapman January 27, 2020 at 11:36 am
I'm pretty confident Poland cannot claim transit fees for gas which is delivered from Europe to Poland as a customer. And that is what they seem to be hoping will happen – that when they drop Gazprom, Europe and the Americans will come to the rescue with cheap gas, cheaper than they were getting it from the Russians. Of course the real intent may not be to drop Russian gas at all, merely to take a hard line so the filthy Russians will offer Poland a can't-say-no deal. But Poland will be oh, so sorry if it goes through with it, especially if the door is firmly closed to ever resuming supply from Russia, because while Washington plainly regards these peelings-away of various countries from Russia as strategic triumphs, it equally plainly expects Europe to fund them. At some point Europe will tire of being saddled with poor Eastern-European ticks sucking its finances, and the charity will stop with a bump. Europe already has little cash to spare, and interest in subsidizing Ukraine is already well on the wane – Europe does not need to begin subsidizing Poland with cheap gas as well. If Europe has to buy Russian gas at market prices through Germany and then backhand it at a discount to Poland and Ukraine, I predict complaints will not be long in coming. If instead Poland and Ukraine have to pay market prices which are higher than they were paying for pipeline gas direct from Russia, well, that's called 'stupidity tax'.

Anyway, you can count on strong support from Washington for any policy which shifts away from hydrocarbons; the United States is not a major exporter or consumer of hydrocarbons.

Oh .wait

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et Al January 27, 2020 at 1:11 pm
it equally plainly expects Europe to fund them.

Brussels's last mega tranch of ~EUR104b finishes this year, then Poland can only claim the usual. Looking up further info for the decarbonization links I posted above, I came across views that say much too much is being spent on gas infrastructure and is essentially a waste.

The thing is, Bru likes such projects because they show that they are doing something and makes it look good for PR brownie points. Who doesn't like a reverse-flow gas interconnector or two in the neighborhood? And of course, once it is built no-one wants to take it away even if it isn't used much.

Personally, I like pipelines, especially if you can travel through them like James Bond in The Living Daylights. It's like a personal (and sexy) version of Elong Must's Hyperloop poop! Maybe even Russias Great White Hope (aka A. Navalny) can use it in case he needs to make a quick get away in future from mobs of ripped off hamsters and kreakles

https://www.entegrasolutions.com/2018/03/07/james-bond-pipeline-travel/

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et Al January 27, 2020 at 1:25 pm
Still some serious cash around:

Poland: €676 million worth of EU investments in better rails and roads
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/IP_19_5552

13 September 2019

####

From a link at the bottom, ~EUR373 billion for 2021-2027 Cohesion Funds for the whole of the EU.

I was watching something (ARTE?) or read something that pointed out that Poland had taken practically no advantage of the Vitsula to shift heavy goods/reduce carbon emissions etc. etc. despite the significant impact it could have despite its long periods of low water:

https://www.maritimejournal.com/news101/marine-civils/port,-harbour-and-marine-construction/polands-inland-waterways-to-become-international-shipping-routes

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Northern Star January 27, 2020 at 12:52 pm
Ummm Mark
You gotta keep up all that stuff about the IMPOSSIBILITY of USA
LNG being capable of displacing
Gazprom in the EU market; that was proved flat out on this blog like two years ago

USA Memory hole!!!

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Mark Chapman January 28, 2020 at 12:04 am
Well, it could not displace it, but there is certainly room in the European market for the little bit of gas the USA could supply by sea. For anyone who wanted to pay more. Because molecules of freedom ain't free.

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Moscow Exile January 27, 2020 at 5:21 am
I have just come across a translation into Russian of Lucas's article in the Times that appeared a couple of weeks ago and which rants on and on about how evil the M-R Pact was and how evil the Russians are for hypocritically allying themselves with Hitler and for aiding and abetting the Nazis until June 22 1941 etc., etc. , and how the wicked Putin is twisting history and arguing the Stalin line with a view to rebuilding Stalinism and an evil totalitarian, Stalinist Russian Empire and they're gonna take over the world, I tell yer! They really are!!!!! They're EVIL!!! EVIL BEYOND BELIEF!!!! .

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karl1haushofer January 27, 2020 at 7:16 am
Taleban apparently shot down an airplane carrying US soldiers in Afghanistan. No confirmation yet though.

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Mark Chapman January 27, 2020 at 11:26 am
In fact there are specific refutations of any indication that it was shot down by the Taliban forces. That, of course, does not mean it wasn't and might only mean it suits their purposes for now to deny it – but it is thus far not 'apparent'.

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Patient Observer January 27, 2020 at 7:23 am
I will provide a link since Karl seems unwilling to do so:

https://www.rt.com/news/479303-taliban-claims-ghazni-plane-crash/

Various reports suggest 83 were on board and all were killed. The Taliban suggests high ranking CIA officials were on board. Since they have access to the crash site as evidenced by video, such claims are plausible.

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Patient Observer January 27, 2020 at 7:32 am
Sputnik has better coverage than RT:

https://sputniknews.com/asia/202001271078148595-ariana-afghan-airlines-plane-crashes-in-eastern-afghanistan -- tv/

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et Al January 27, 2020 at 7:54 am
Meanwhile the US want to replace the Afghan Air Force's easy to maintain and operate Mi-17s with its CH-47 Chinooks which will be destined to become hangar queens once the corrupt authorites figure out how expensive they will be to maintain or the US pulls its support:

http://alert5.com/2020/01/26/u-s-plans-to-provide-ch-47s-to-afghanistan/

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Patient Observer January 27, 2020 at 8:27 am
Spare parts and maintenance business profit potential can exceed by several times the profit on the original sale. Yes, the Afghan government will be enslaved by those purchases.

Regarding the major air disaster in Afghanistan (83 US military personnel killed?), the Yahoo story was about 16th in ranking on Yahoo behind various impeachment stories, a better mousetrap and the Kobe Bryant helicopter crash.

If the plane were brought down by the Taliban, what would Trump do? As a guess, he would say it was a mechanical failure and ooze praise over the victims.

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Mark Chapman January 27, 2020 at 12:52 pm
He would threaten to sanction the Taliban 'like they've never seen before'.

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Mark Chapman January 27, 2020 at 12:50 pm
Not according to those who fly them – they say it's a workhorse that just keeps going and going.

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/14540/chinooks-over-afghanistan-the-unsung-workhorse-of-americas-never-ending-war

It is a Boeing product, though, and there's an obvious interest in shunting money to Boeing. And it's a perfectly valid point that any dependence on an American product is a vulnerability that casts an American shadow over one's political decision-making. The 'wrong' decision could mean the termination of your spare-parts chain and the withdrawal of technical support.

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et Al January 27, 2020 at 1:40 pm
They could just flog them off to India or anyone else who want the parts or airframes. I don't doubt that they are very reliable and robust, but Russian Mils are renoun for easy maintenance with a can of oil and wire even by lowly and not very educated maintainers.

Ironically, and we've mentioned this before, the US previously funded buys of Russian helicopters until it became politically incorrect and even then India (which has a large support base) conveniently picked up the slack and has even provided extra airframes. I don't see India providing that level of support for CH-47s if at all. Local corruption is just as a big threat.

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Trond January 27, 2020 at 9:24 am
Someone commented under that article that:

" Sadly it has been confirmed ,,,Mike Pompeo was NOT on board 😦 "

😦

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Mark Chapman January 28, 2020 at 12:07 am
That's brilliant. Not everyone hates him, I'm sure, but quite a lot of people do.

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Patient Observer January 27, 2020 at 12:00 pm
Its official:

US Air Force Chief of Staff General David Goldfein has confirmed that the country has lost one of its Bombardier E-11A communications network aircraft in Afghanistan. He didn't elaborate on the cause of the crash and said no information on casualties was available at the time.

https://sputniknews.com/world/202001271078154833-us-confirms-american-e-11a-aircraft-crashed-in-afgha

Also, the Taliban reported shooting down a helicopter in the region; possibly related to the plane crash.

I would imagine that the crew size would be on the order of 10-15 personnel.

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Mark Chapman January 28, 2020 at 12:15 am
Pretty hard to imagine how that got confused with an airliner with 80-some people on board.

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Patient Observer January 27, 2020 at 12:25 pm
MoA has already run a post which including data indicating a sharp rise in aircraft losses (4 or possibly 5 helicopters in January).

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2020/01/the-air-war-in-afghanistan-expands-on-both-sides.html#more

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et Al January 27, 2020 at 7:44 am
I was listening to al-Beeb s'Allah this morning. A lady presenter led her interview with an Auschwitz survivor by revealing that it was liberated by the Soviet Army!* Well, as everyone knows, details look after themselves so no need to mention them when broad brushstrokes will do , or as the British don't say "If you look after the pounds, the pennies will look after themselves!"

* The Soviet Army was the main land-based branch of the Soviet Armed Forces between February 1946 and December 1991

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_Army

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Moscow Exile January 27, 2020 at 10:23 am
Little shit jumps on the bandwagon:

Zelensky Accused the USSR of Unleashing World War II and the Holocaust
January 27, 2020
Stalker Zone

The Ukraine is in solidarity with Poland that the Soviet Union is guilty of the outbreak of World War II and the Holocaust.
This was stated on January 27th by the Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky during a briefing after a meeting with his Polish colleague Andrzej Duda during a visit to Warsaw.

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Mark Chapman January 27, 2020 at 10:28 am
Yes, now that they've got their gas deal. But they deeply, deeply admire the United States, whose national mantra is 'never apologize for anything, or you'll never stop'. And it plainly does not offend the Ukrainian soul – or the Polish soul, comes to that – to have been responsible for hundreds of thousands of needless deaths, as both Poles and Ukrainians happily participated in pogroms of their Jewish citizens. No; if they could get Russia, as the inheritor of the Soviet Union, to admit to having started the Second World War, then the matter of reparations would arise, and the flow into the Ukrainian and Polish treasuries of some of that $557 Billion in reserves. All of it, if they had their way.

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Moscow Exile January 27, 2020 at 11:21 am
Зеленский повесил вину за Холокост на СССР

Zelensky pins the blame for the Holocaust on the USSR

After Zelensky's failed trip to Israel, during which he decided not to go to the Holocaust forum, where leaders from more than 40 countries had gathered, some social network wit predicted: "Now he can safely go to Poland, where there won't be any Putin, and tell them that Auschwitz was liberated by the Ukrainians."

And Vladimir Zelensky really went to visit Andrzej Duda on the 75th anniversary of the liberation of that concentration camp. And he didn't let Internet forecasters down. In his speech, he spoke in all seriousness, about a Ukrainian tank commander who rammed the gates of Auschwitz, the soldiers of the 100th Lviv Division under the command of a Poltava resident, the soldiers of the First Ukrainian Front The words "Red Army" or "Soviet troops" were not heard once. And, not knowing history, it could be assumed that a certain abstract Ukrainian Army had freed the world from fascism. Moreover, not even once did Duda utter such words thanking soldiers of the Ukrainian Front for the liberation.

[NOTE: "FRONT" as in "Ukrainian Front" is Russian and Polish terminology for what in British and US English would be called the "Ukraine Army Group". The "Ukrainian Front" started off as the "Voronezh Front" and it was from that front line in the RSFSR, between Moskva to the north and Stalingrad to the south and on which the city of Voronezh stands, where the Nazi central thrust into the Russian heartland was halted at the Voronezh River. From this halt-line, that army group named the Voronezh Front began rolling back the Wehrmacht to Berlin. As the Voronezh Front approached the UkSSR, its name was changed to the "Ukrainian Front". The army group was NOT a Ukrainian army! -- ME]

The President of Poland, in turn, proposed that this year mark the 100th anniversary of the Battle of Warsaw. And Zelensky gladly accepted this proposal, although it looked a tad dumb. According to the Riga Peace Treaty, after the Soviet-Polish war, Poland took a piece of Western Ukraine as far as Zhytomyr, and fought against the Bolsheviks and with an undisguised anti-Semitic undertone, neither sparing its own Jews nor those of the Ukraine.

Yet according to Zelensky, amongst those who died later in the Holocaust, every fourth Jew was a Ukrainian. Towards the close of the show, the president of "Independent Ukraine" had an unhealthy and discouraging thought.

"Poland and the Polish people were the first to feel the collusion of totalitarian regimes. This led to the outbreak of World War II and allowed the deadly Holocaust flywheel to start spinning", said the grandson of the commander of a rifle company in the 174th regiment of the 57th Guards Rifle Division. It was as if he was pinning the blame for the extermination of Jews on both Nazi Germany and the USSR. It seems that an epistolary saboteur had got into Zelensky's speechwriter camp. But it is now clear why the president of the Ukraine fled the forum in Israel. Nobody would have understood him there.

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Patient Observer January 27, 2020 at 11:27 am
All the masks are slipping. As many have said, the Nazi heart is beating strongly throughout Europe. The end of WW II brought a high level management shakeup but the stakeholders remain the same. It would be easy to imagine Iron Curtain 2.0 on the way.

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Patient Observer January 27, 2020 at 11:44 am
The biggest stakeholders in Nazism are the Vatican and the Anglo empire. Israel is the swing vote in a sense. Just opining.

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Moscow Exile January 27, 2020 at 12:11 pm

In Poland, the President of the Ukraine presented with his colleague Andrzej Duda an alternative vision of the history of World War II

Stalin and Hitler concluded an "illegitimate pact," from which "Poland and the Polish people were the first to suffer". The Second World War immediately began, which "allowed the Nazis to launch the deadly flywheel of the Holocaust".

Clear logical and temporary inconsistencies in this "historical reconstruction" are striking, but who pays attention to such trifles? The main thing is another: to indicate the indestructible unity of Poland and the Ukraine in countering the pronounced "Russian aggression".

What urgently needs to be done? First of all, according to Zelensky, do not be silent. And who is silent? Europe and the world. They stupidly ignore the "real course of history", show "indifference and inaction." And only the the Ukrainian and Polish presidents, holding hands and "lowering the degree in bilateral relations," have joined forces in bringing the world the true truth about 1939. Here is an alternative version of the Holocaust forum in Israel. Duda did not go there. Zelensky flew in, but handed in the tickets to "surviving victims of the tragedy". I didn't want to listen to "Putin's version of World War II".

In Poland, an "alternative political platform" was organized for the presentation of the concept of the "conspiracy of totalitarian regimes" (Germany and the USSR), from which the "Polish and Ukrainian nations" suffered. Duda and Zelensky called on "all states of the world to say resolutely no to totalitarian ideologies, aggression, repression, any manifestations of hatred and intolerance". This, dear friends, is a serious bid for alternative leadership in the global world.

The former director of the Alzheimer's Institute of National Remembrance, the deputy of the European Solidarity faction, Vyatrovich, should weep [with joy] : his "ideological reconstruction of history" from the time of Peter Alekseevich [first Russian Emperor Petr I -- ME} has turned out to be in demand. Moreover, it has been the recipient of creative development. A new centre of "historical justice" has emerged on the basis of Poland and the the Ukraine, which will "dictate its will" to those very Jews, who have no idea how everything really happened and who exactly had "spun the Holocaust flywheel".

It's clear that this "construct" was whipped up by American strategists in the framework of "expanding opposition to the growing influence of the Kremlin". Since millions of Ukrainians have become active participants in the "programme for the economic revival of Poland", it is time to organize a "geopolitical alliance" from them. That's how they are constantly because of the Volyn massacre, the monuments of the OUN-UPA and other "historical misunderstandings". The process has gone too far, and therefore it is necessary to combine them in a single anti-Russian project.

First, there was a "community of history," which was closely implicated in a "joint struggle against the Bolsheviks." Isn't that pretty? Polish President Andrzej Duda suggested Zelensky "jointly honour the memory of Polish and Ukrainian soldiers who, in 1920, fought shoulder to shoulder against Bolshevism"; Petliura and Pilsudski as symbols of the new historical unity of the Ukraine and Poland.

Naturally, Zelensky gratefully accepted Duda's proposal. You can even say that he was fired up with the idea. He called the "Battle of Warsaw, the centenary of which we will celebrate in August, a unifying page in our history". Apparently, these guys are not shy at all. They play as if from a script "A common anti-Bolshevik history", "a common enemy in the Second World War" and, finally, a common strategic goal of our time – "to stop the growing influence of the Russian Federation".

I have no illusions about the long-term effectiveness of this alternative historical coalition. But the fact that the policy of Petro Poroshenko is being continued by the new president of the Ukraine is, as they say, obvious. True, Zelensky does not call himself the leader of the "world anti-Putin coalition." He lacks the hysteria of his predecessor and the knowledge of the local language. Volodya still speaks Ukrainian with difficulty. Therefore, the palm in this case, it seems, goes to Poland. However, Zelensky is a talented comedian and therefore will show his best "qualities" already in May, when the celebration of the 75th anniversary of the Great Victory will be held in Moscow

source

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Jen January 27, 2020 at 3:31 pm
This is so painful to read. The Poles must be laughing hard at Zelensky and his grovelling. At what point does a person stop feeling pity for him?

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Mark Chapman January 28, 2020 at 12:30 am
Groveling seems to be his natural style – remember his obsequious waffling to Trump during his phone call, telling him he was one thousand percent correct or some such flannel? He seems to have zero dignity, but instead to just leap all over everyone like a puppy.

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Moscow Exile January 28, 2020 at 2:08 am
Тягнибок вслед за Качиньским затребовал от РФ "репарации" за Вторую мировую
28.01.20 AF-News

Following Kaczynski', Tyagnibok has demanded from the Russian Federation "reparations" for the Second World War
28.01.20 AF-News


Above: an arsehole, metaphorically speaking.

Keiv should follow the example of Warsaw and demand from Moscow compensation for World War II.

This was written in the Telegram-channel by Oleg Tyagnibok, leader of the nationalist party "All-Ukrainian Union 'Freedom'"

Tyagnibok reminded that the leader of the ruling Polish party "PiS" Jaroslaw Kaczynski had demanded from Russia "reparations" for World War II.

Tyagnibok is outraged that against a backdrop of similar claims made against Russia by the Baltic States Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, the Ukrainian authorities "do not even mumble about mention such a thing".

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yalensis January 28, 2020 at 3:47 am
Tyagnibok is an open, out-of-the-closet Nazi.
Since when does the losing side of a war demand reparations of the winners?
Only on Bizarro Planet, I reckon.

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Moscow Exile January 28, 2020 at 4:22 am
As I've often said on here before, I've met weirdos such as he, and long before the shit hit the Maidan fan.

Having found out that I am British, they always started slagging off Russians in my presence, because they clearly thought I must be a tosser like certain of my fellow countrymen, e.g. Harding, Lucas, Walker-of-the Dill, and Higgins etc., etc.

Almost from day one after having first met these Svidomite freaks, I realized that their fundamental problem lies in the fact that they and ther team (Team Adolf) were well and truly defeated by what they consider to be subhumans, which results in what they have in replacement for brains short-circuiting.

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Mark Chapman January 28, 2020 at 12:38 pm
Smashing idea!! I hope it catches on!

Seriously, it will be just talk and will go nowhere. Because success would establish precedent. And then how long would it be before it occurred, say, to Iraq that it could and should sue the United States for reparations for a war the protagonist admits it fabricated the justifications for initiating?

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/12/leadup-iraq-war-timeline/

Or any of the other countries America leveled, wrecked or damaged in pursuit of corporate interests? Open and shut case, m'Lud; Paul Wolfowits said on the record that weapons of mess destruction was just a handy hook that everyone could hang their hats on; no such weapons were ever found in Iraq, despite occasional assurances from the Jackass American President Of The Moment that they were finding so much WMD, you wouldn't even believe it.

https://zfacts.com/zfacts.com/p/581.html

Dear God; I could win that case, and I'd work cheaper than a lawyer – did you hear me, Mr. Iraqi Ambassador?

Tyagnibok would say anything to see his name in print, but he is a nobody in Ukraine. If the Presidential Comedian takes it into his head to actually pursue such a claim, he will open such a bag of snakes that he will wish he had stuck to making people laugh for a living. Which, in a way, I guess he has.

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yalensis January 27, 2020 at 3:03 pm
That's a very good point about the naming conventions for these army groups. Since ancient times, these army groups have been named (sometimes informally) after the next geographical goal that has been assigned to them.
In the same way that military commanders are named after their most outstanding recent victory, e.g., Alexander Nevsky (after his victory on the Neva River), etc.
Hence, the "Ukraine Army Group" had nothing to do with Ukrainians per se, it was just their next target for victory, e.g., the Ukraine. The victors probably included ethnic Ukrainians, along with Russians and many other USSR peoples. Zelensky HAS to know this! Or is he just a complete low-IQ and low-informational idiot? (Possible, I suppose.)

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Patient Observer January 27, 2020 at 7:41 pm
An eerie resemblance to Mr. Bean.

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yalensis January 27, 2020 at 3:09 pm
He also stated that the parties "managed to reduce the degree of emotions relative to the common past". Thus, the Ukrainian side lifted the moratorium on search operations.
That tells me that the Polish side achieved a main objective: heretore the Ukies were forbidding them to dig and poke around for Polish skeletons, victims of the Banderite pogroms.

So, now the Poles can resume their digging. Good for them! Let the Poles dig up as many graves as they can, even those liars won't claim the Russians did it, everybody knows it was Bandera what dunnit.

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Pavlo Svolochenko January 28, 2020 at 12:44 pm
Ukrainian nationalists frequently attribute the crimes of the UPA to Soviet partisans in UPA uniforms.

Do you think Poles will never adopt this explanation, and lay the blame for the Volhynia genocide on Russia? Do you think that highly of them?

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Mark Chapman January 28, 2020 at 2:05 pm
Maybe the whole of the Wehrmacht was just Russians disguised in field grey, looking to pin the rap on the Germans. Maybe Hitler was secretly a Russian agent! Go big, or go home.

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Northern Star January 27, 2020 at 11:36 am
The question as to whether or not the German population at large was aware of the unfolding
systematic mass murder of millions is ill posed. The only reasonable query is how could they NOT have known.
Fundamental characteristics of human nature dictate that there was simply no way that the German population could have remained oblivious to the fate of millions of their suddenly disappeared fellow Germans,with whom they had lived with as neighbors for centuries.
All of the people -civilian and military-who actually carried out the murders had friends, families, colleagues etc. to whom they surely divulged the enormity of depravity in which they had participated. Who in turn relayed the accounts to others ,who then in turn and so on.
That's human nature 101.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2001/feb/17/johnezard
https://www.timesofisrael.com/what-did-germans-know-secret-anti-nazi-diary-gives-voice-to-man-in-the-street/

That the Reich was Mass Murder Inc. was apparent even before Wansee 20 January 1942.
https://www.bl.uk/learning/histcitizen/voices/testimonies/life/backgd/before.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wannsee_Conference

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Patient Observer January 27, 2020 at 11:51 am
Yes, the question is how Joe Schmidt could claim not to have known. They knew of and were proud of the atrocities toward Russians committed by their army as evidenced by letters from the front.

We are dealing with civilizational values here and those tend to persist a very looong time. The Vatican is a repository of those values regenerated in successive generations, Russia and China should. act accordingly.

I like to think that the US is not as tainted but, that is only a hope.

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Jen January 27, 2020 at 3:27 pm
As I mentioned earlier, the death camps where Soviet PoWs, Jewish people, homosexuals, Roma / Sinti, people with inborn mental and physical disabilities and others – even people condemned for helping Jews – were killed were located in remote parts of Poland, at the ends of railway lines, so that entry into and exit out of these camps could be controlled by Nazi German authorities. That meant to a large extent information about these camps was also controlled by the Nazi government.

One big problem in knowing how much ordinary people in Germany knew what was happening is figuring out how much they were allowed to know about anything at all within Germany, and then working out how much they could know about things going on in neighbouring countries where the languages are very different. Especially as in Germany the government was secretive about its policies towards minority groups and deliberately used euphemistic language to describe policies that its own politicians and civil servants knew were murderous; the language effectively becomes a secret jargon to communicate ideas in public that to ordinary people would have been baffling.

Guards and others working at these camps were often either local people (Polish or Galician or other) or were recruited from the prisoners themselves. The people who disposed of the remains of those killed in gas chambers were camp prisoners themselves known as Sonderkommandos. Jewish Sonderkommandos were employed at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

The people who died in these camps came from all over central, eastern and southeastern Europe. About 45,000 Jews from the Jewish community in Thessaloniki (northern Greece) were killed in Auschwitz-Birkenau. From May 1944, two months after Germany occupied Hungary, up to January 1945, over half a million Jews from Hungary were killed at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

In addition the Nazis took advantage of local longstanding conflicts and prejudices between different groups to enlist collaborators (in western Ukraine, the Baltic states, the Balkans and other parts of eastern Europe) to their side in the areas they conquered. There are diaspora populations of ethnic groups from these areas in the Americas and Australia that still see nothing wrong in their collaboration with Nazis in killing or rounding up people they either despised or resented.

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yalensis January 27, 2020 at 3:47 pm
"There are diaspora populations of ethnic groups from these areas in the Americas and Australia that still see nothing wrong in their collaboration with Nazis in killing or rounding up people they either despised or resented."
Very very true. At the same time, these diaspora descendants know that their ancient resentments and hatreds, and particularly the heinous crimes committed by their grandparents, would not necessarily elicit sympathy or understanding among the mainstream populations. Which is why they have learned to be duplicitous and wear a mask as they were growing up.
The cunning and the duplicity are passed down from one generation to the other, it's like a secret society, what these people say to each other in secret is very different from what they say in public.

I think I told the story once, how a Ukrainian pal of mine (this was a few years back) walked me into a Ukrainian National Home building in New York City, a place I would never dare to enter on my own. The old Banderites were friendly and didn't actually care that I spoke Russian. The coffee tables were stacked with photo albums glorifying Nazi and Banderite graves, and suchlike. And I got, like, a tiny glimpse. of what these completely unregenerate Nazis were like when in their home base and thinking they were just among friends.

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Moscow Exile January 27, 2020 at 9:47 pm
Witness the Canadian Foreign Minister for the Ukraine, who, I believe, speaks Ukrainian at home so as not to forget "The Old country" and that it not be forgotten by her progeny. Yet some of her forebears on her paternal side are British -- Scots, if I am not mistaken -- which fact she makes use of when presenting her alter ego, publically expressing her pride in her grandfather's contribution in overthrowing Nazism. She does not mean her grandpa Chomiak.


Freeland's paternal grandfather (above) served in the air force during WWII. Her paternal grandmother was from Glasgow.

see: How Chrystia Freeland became Justin Trudeau's first star

Above: PR for Freeland.

Michael Chomiak Freeland's grandfather] was a lawyer and journalist before the Second World War, but "they knew the Soviets would invade western Ukraine (and) fled and, like a lot of Ukrainians, ended up after the war in a displaced persons camp in Germany where my mother was born."

Along the way Michael and Alexandra had six children, the last two born in Canada. They lived in poverty after they arrived; he couldn't practise or go to law school and eventually worked for years as a lab assistant.

"(Their experience) had a very big effect on me," Freeland says. "They had heated political discussions They were also committed to the idea, like most in the (Ukrainian) diaspora, that Ukraine would one day be independent and that the community had a responsibility to the country they had been forced to flee to keep that flame alive."

Yes, Chomiak knew the Soviets would invade whilst chasing the USSR invading Nazis back to where they had come from in 1941 via Galicia, which the Poles had annexed in 1920 after having launched and won a war of aggression against the Ukraine and Belorussia and the proto-USSR, which seized by Poland territories the USSR re-occupied on September 17, 1939, after the Nazis had defeated Poland in that same month and the Polish state had ceased to exist.

Yes, Chomiak knew

CANADIANS LOSE UKRAINE ELECTION -- CHRYSTIA FREELAND FOR PRESIDENT OF GALICIA

As controversy has intensified in Canada over Freeland's coverup for Chomiak [her maternal grandfather] , she arranged in the parliament lobby for a reporter to ask the question Freeland's staff had planted: "Recently, there has been a series of articles about you and your maternal grandparents making accusations that he was a Nazi collaborator in pro-Russian websites. I'd like to get your view on do you see this as a disinformation campaign by the Russians to try to smear you and discredit you? Which they have to have a tendency to have done." In answer Freeland avoided the Chomiak evidence. Instead, she blamed Russian efforts "to destabilize" the US and Canadian political systems. "I am confident", Freeland declared on March 6, "in our country's democracy, and I am confident that we can stand up to and see through those efforts." For the full story, click .

On March 9 Freeland was reported in the Washington Post as saying: "Russia should stop calling my grandfather a Nazi".

In Warsaw, a file on Chomiak has been discovered at the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN is the Polish acronym), which is part of the state's Commission for the Prosecution of Crimes against the Polish Nation. There are four items in the file, which have been photographed, and are published here for the first time. The IPN has tagged the Chomiak file No. Kr 010/5606.

THE IPN FILE NOTE FOR THE CHOMIAK FILE IN WARSAW

The three original documents in the file comprise Chomiak's identity card of 1941, issued by the German authorities; and two later documents in Polish, indicating a Polish intelligence and police search for Chomiak.

CHOMIAK'S GERMAN IDENTITY CARD OF SEPTEMBER 20, 1941

The document shows that Chomiak, then 36 years old, was in Vienna at the time the German authorities issued his identification. He was no longer a reporter or journalist, but titled Hauptschriftleiter – Editor in Chief. The card also confirms that although a Ukrainian by nationality, and a native of Lemberg (the German name for Lvov), Chomiak had been living and working for some time in Cracow, then occupied Poland. Cracow was the administrative capital of the Generalgouvernment, whose governor-general was a German, Hans Frank. Gassner, whom Chomiak's own papers identify as his boss, was Frank's spokesman and head of press operations for the Galician region .

When exactly Chomiak arrived in Cracow, and how long he spent in training in Vienna aren't revealed in the Polish file. The ID card suggests that Chomiak was in Vienna between July and September of 1941, before he was ordered back to Cracow, reporting there to Gassner. "This document destroys the narrative of the Chomiak apologists that he was just an administrative functionary and didn't write much," comments Stanislas Balcerac from Warsaw. "The card is very important evidence. Editor in Chief Chomiak was no mere small fish, caught in the tidal wave of the war. The Germans placed high value on him. Three months after the invasion [of the USSR] he was sent from Vienna to Cracow. With the title of Editor in Chief, I believe he was trained in Vienna; perhaps Vienna is the hidden part of his war record, with Cracow used initially as a cover for him during the first years of the German occupation of Poland, 1939-41."

The papers Chomiak left behind at his death in Canada do not reveal what he was doing with the Germans in the 2-year interval. Polish sources suspect Chomiak arrived in Cracow soon after Frank became governor, offering himself as an agent of influence to inform the Germans on what fellow Ukrainians and anti-Russian nationalists then active in and around Lviv were thinking and planning. His work as a journalist was a cover for espionage on behalf of the Germans, Polish sources suspect.

There is no corroboration for this in the Polish files discovered to date. Two other documents in the IPN dossier, dating well after the German defeat and the end of the war, indicate that whatever Chomiak had been doing for the Germans became a fresh issue of interest to the Polish authorities in the mid-1960s.

WARSAW POLICE FILES ON CHOMIAK, APRIL 1966-MARCH 1980

source

Later, the Polish ambassador to Canada praised Freeland as a true friend of Poland, saying that the Polish investigation into her grandfather's doings in Krakow were the result of a mistaken identity.

War is hell and Chrystia Freeland has nothing to be ashamed of: Paul Wells

The tales also appear to be founded in demonstrable fact. The truth of Chomiak's stint at a Nazi-controlled newspaper in occupied Krakow has been known to Freeland for more than 20 years. Her uncle, historian John-Paul Himka, wrote about Chomiak in a 1996 journal article. Freeland helped edit the article.

There's no evidence Chomiak wrote any of the anti-Jewish diatribes that flowed like sewage through the pages of the newspaper, Krakivski Visti. His state of mind at the time cannot be known to us. After the war he told his family he had worked with the anti-Nazi resistance, helping its members get false papers. Perhaps it's true. Perhaps it's one of the stories people tell themselves later, as they try to live with the things they did to stay alive in hell.

What we know is that if Chomiak was still alive at the end of the war, it's because he took pains to stay on the right side of the murderers who had occupied Ukraine and Poland for the war's duration. Everyone did. Everyone had to. You might be a resister for three hours a day after collaborating the other 21. Those who didn't manage to escape to the West, as Chomiak and his family did, stayed behind and spent generations staying on the right side of the new occupiers, the Stalinist murderers who took over from the Nazis.

Chrystia Freeland is in the business of helping societies -- ours, Ukraine's, the world's -- stay on the side of sanity. It makes her a target. The fact that her family existed in the damned 20th century gives her opponents ammunition. None of this takes away the legitimacy of her important work.

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Mark Chapman January 28, 2020 at 11:41 am
I see. Excuses galore for poor Chomiak, who only did what he had to do to stay alive and protect his precious family – coming from the same people who insist the USSR signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact as a means of forging a partnership with Nazi Germany which would enable thievery on a grand scale and plunge the world into conflagration. Lots of slack for Chomiak (hey, that rhymes), but for Stalin, not so much. It is simply not possible to see him as a leader who had gone 'round the table looking for alliances against Germany, and been given the cold shoulder, and who made a non-aggression pact with Hitler after all his potential allies had already done so.

I'm certainly not a Stalin fan in any way, but the selectivity employed here is striking. Also, Freeland's present Ukrainian-nationalist sentiments must be seen in context; she was raised to loathe the Russians and to make excuses for the Nazis, and her justifications are written by those cut from the same cloth.

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Jen January 28, 2020 at 3:15 pm
I suppose according to Paul Wells people who refused to collaborate with the Nazis – because they considered working with them a betrayal of their own values and those of their own people – and who ended up dying ghastly deaths are fools to be ignored and whose deeds are not worth remembering. Presumably if Wells found himself in a similar situation as Mihaylo Chomiak, he wouldn't even think to hesitate in collaborating with a criminal regime. At least he, like Chomiak before him, gets to choose: other people would be denied even that opportunity.

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Mark Chapman January 28, 2020 at 5:35 pm
Yes, we have been privileged with a preview of which way Wells would break if he was under pressure; good to know.

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Northern Star January 27, 2020 at 11:49 am
Iraqi 'security forces' using live ammo on protesters..12 dead thus far.

[Jan 28, 2020] Our losses in Afghanistan are negligible

Notable quotes:
"... It would be highly ironic if these American military aircraft were shot down with the (in)famous US Stinger missiles that America gave to Afghan jihadists against the Soviet Union in the 1980s. ..."
"... Uncle Sam has declared War on the World, thinking it is just a bunching bag. Now he is finding out that sometimes punching bags can punch back... ..."
Jan 28, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

c1ue , Jan 27 2020 16:17 utc | 4

If the $1.6 trillion cost of the US military being in Afghanistan is correct, then the loss of 4 helicopters and even the E11 won't significantly increase US overall spend there. $1.6 trillion over 18 years is a tad under $250 million per day

Walter , Jan 27 2020 17:24 utc | 16

...I recall a quotation from that good man, Winston C, who wrote long ago about Afghanistan...{populated by} "poverty-stricken illiterate tribesmen possessed of the finest Martini-Henry Rifles..."

That was over 100 years ago...

Now, it seem, "possessed of the finest surface to air missiles."

Well now, who'd a think...

ak74 , Jan 27 2020 17:37 utc | 20
It would be highly ironic if these American military aircraft were shot down with the (in)famous US Stinger missiles that America gave to Afghan jihadists against the Soviet Union in the 1980s.

Reap what you sow.

Trailer Trash , Jan 27 2020 17:42 utc | 23
Uncle Sam has declared War on the World, thinking it is just a bunching bag. Now he is finding out that sometimes punching bags can punch back...

[Jan 28, 2020] Our losses in Afghanistan are negligible

Notable quotes:
"... It would be highly ironic if these American military aircraft were shot down with the (in)famous US Stinger missiles that America gave to Afghan jihadists against the Soviet Union in the 1980s. ..."
"... Uncle Sam has declared War on the World, thinking it is just a bunching bag. Now he is finding out that sometimes punching bags can punch back... ..."
Jan 28, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

c1ue , Jan 27 2020 16:17 utc | 4

If the $1.6 trillion cost of the US military being in Afghanistan is correct, then the loss of 4 helicopters and even the E11 won't significantly increase US overall spend there. $1.6 trillion over 18 years is a tad under $250 million per day

Walter , Jan 27 2020 17:24 utc | 16

...I recall a quotation from that good man, Winston C, who wrote long ago about Afghanistan...{populated by} "poverty-stricken illiterate tribesmen possessed of the finest Martini-Henry Rifles..."

That was over 100 years ago...

Now, it seem, "possessed of the finest surface to air missiles."

Well now, who'd a think...

ak74 , Jan 27 2020 17:37 utc | 20
It would be highly ironic if these American military aircraft were shot down with the (in)famous US Stinger missiles that America gave to Afghan jihadists against the Soviet Union in the 1980s.

Reap what you sow.

Trailer Trash , Jan 27 2020 17:42 utc | 23
Uncle Sam has declared War on the World, thinking it is just a bunching bag. Now he is finding out that sometimes punching bags can punch back...

[Jan 28, 2020] Syria Army Liberates Maarat al-Numan - U.S. Plans New Mischief

Jan 28, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

John Gilberts , Jan 28 2020 20:10 utc | 23

Terrorism to Turkey means the PKK/YPG Kurds in Syria which also fight Turkish forces within Turkey and Iraq. In east Syria the Kurds are cooperating with U.S. troops who occupy the Syrian oil resources. Turkey wants Syria to at least disarm the Kurds. The Kurds though use their U.S. relations to demand autonomy and to prevent any agreement with the Syrian government.

Neither Ankara nor Damascus seem yet ready to make peace. But both countries have economic problems and will have to come to some solution. There are still ten thousand of Jihadis in Idleb governorate that need to be cleaned out. Neither country wants to keep these people. The export of these Jihadis to Libya which Turkey initiated points to a rather unconventional solution to that problem.

The U.S. has still not given up its efforts to overthrow the Syrian government through further economic sanctions. It also pressures Iraq to keep its troops in the country.

After the U.S. murder of the Iranian general Soleimani and the Iraqi PMU leader al-Muhandis its position in Iraq is under severe threat . If the U.S. were forced to leave Iraq it would also have to remove its hold on Syria's oil. To prevent that the U.S. has reactivated its old plan to split Iraq into three statelets :

At the height of the war in Iraq Joe Biden publicly supported it. The original plan failed when in 2006 Hizbullah defeated Israel's attack on Lebanon and when the Iraqi resistance overwhelmed the U.S. occupation forces.

It is doubtful that the plan can be achieved as long as the government in Baghdad is supported by a majorities of Shia. Baghdad as well as Tehran will throw everything they have against the plan.

After the U.S. murder of Soleimani Iran fired well aimed ballistic missiles against U.S. forces at the Ain al Assad airbase west of Ramadi in Anbar province and against the airport of Erbil in the Kurdish region. This because those are exactly the bases the U.S. wants to keep control of. The missiles demonstrated that the U.S. would have to fight a whole new war to implement and protect its plan.

From the perspective of the resistance the new plan is just another U.S. attempt to rule the region after its many previous attempts have failed.

Posted by b on January 28, 2020 at 16:28 UTC | Permalink

Nine months ago, a group of Iraqi politicians and businessmen from Anbar, Salah al-Din and Nineveh provinces were invited to the private residence of the Saudi ambassador to Jordan in Amman.

Their host was the Saudi minister for Gulf affairs, Thamer bin Sabhan al-Sabhan, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's point man for the region.

It is not known whether Mohammed al-Halbousi, the speaker of parliament with ties to both Iran and Saudi Arabia, attended the secret Amman conference, but it is said that he was informed of the details.

On the agenda was a plan to push for a Sunni autonomous region, akin to Iraqi Kurdistan.

The plan is not new. But now an idea which has long been toyed with by the US, as it battles to keep Iraq within its sphere of influence, has found a new lease of life as Saudi Arabia and Iran compete for influence and dominance.

Anbar comprises 31 percent of the Iraqi state's landmass. It has significant untapped oil, gas and mineral reserves. It borders Syria.

If US troops were indeed to be forced by the next Iraqi government to quit the country, they would have to leave the oil fields of northern Syria as well because it is from Anbar that this operation is supplied. Anbar has four US military bases.

The western province is largely desert, with a population of just over two million. As an autonomous region, it would need a workforce. This, the meeting was told, could come from Palestinian refugees and thus neatly fit into Donald Trump's so-called "Deal of the Century" plans to rid Israel of its Palestinian refugee problem.

Anbar is almost wholly Sunni, but Salah al-Din and Nineveh aren't. If the idea worked in Anbar, other Sunni-dominated provinces would be next.

At least three large meetings have already been held over the plan, the last one in the United Arab Emirates. The timing indicates that the plan was initiated when John Bolton as Trump's national security advisor.

To split Iraq into three statelets the U.S. would control is a long standing neoconservative dream .

Canada also has troops in the Kurdish/Erbil region. One wonders if/when Iraq will demand they go as well, since they are part of the US-led coalition and reflect US/Israeli geostrategic objectives there

dh , Jan 28 2020 20:18 utc | 24

@20 Strange isn't it? The statement by ISIS is most unusual. Prevailing wisdom has them allied with US/Israel against the Syrian government.
les7 , Jan 28 2020 20:24 utc | 25
It seems to me that in the Idlib pocket we are seeing an emerging Russian form of offensive/deterrence military strategy when up against proxies backed by the overwhelming force of empire.

By using proxies the empire forfeits much of its military mass advantage.

The repeated strike and ceasefire combined with continual negotiation approach negates the hybrid/media warfare of the empire which requires a period of time to mobilize public opinion. The empire cannot maintain more than three foci for that dis-information campaign due to the social engineered response it has manufactured

By constantly maneuvering, especially in coordinating with friends like Xi, opportunities of attack open up

Choosing moments of maximum empire distraction is also part of the process

This is a far cry from the classic mass formation attack strategy that most present warfare strategists endlessly debate.

Let the empire wear out it's own heart through an abuse of the hybrid/media warfare til it's own people vomit up the diet of fear

[Jan 28, 2020] 'Mideast Peace Plan Trump Unveils His 'Deal of the Century'

Notable quotes:
"... Trump was adamant that Palestinians would be forced to accept his plan in the end. "We have the support of the prime minister, we have the support of the other parties, and we think we will ultimately have the support of the Palestinians, but we're going to see," he said on Monday. ..."
"... Trump has largely outsourced the creation of the plan to his adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner. The initial idea was to publish it after the April 2019 election in Israel, but the uncertainty hanging over the Knesset over the past year has delayed the announcement. ..."
Jan 28, 2020 | sputniknews.com

The announcement comes after Trump met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his main political rival Benjamin 'Benny' Gantz. The Palestinian authorities have repeatedly objected to the plan, as its details were trickling out, and mass protests are expected in the Palestinian territories as Israel tightens security measures. US President Donald Trump has unveiled his long-anticipated Middle East plan – effectively his administration's vision for the resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Trump said that under his plan Jerusalem will remain Israel's 'undivided' capital.

Israel's West Bank settlements would be recognised by the United States.

However, Israel would freeze the construction of new settlements on Palestinian territories for four years while Palestinian statehood is negotiated. Trump said that the US will open an embassy to Palestine in East Jerusalem.

The US president said that his Palestine-Israel map would "more than double" the Palestinian territory.

"I want this deal to be a great deal for the Palestinians, it has to be. Today's agreement is a historic opportunity for the Palestinians to finally achieve an independent state of their own," Trump said. "These maps will more than double Palestinian territory and provide a Palestinian capital in Eastern Jerusalem where America will proudly open its embassy."

He added that the US and Israel would create a committee to implement the proposed peace plan.

"My vision presents a win-win opportunity for both sides, a realistic two-state solution that resolves the risk of Palestinian statehood to Israel's security," Trump said during a press conference.

On Monday, Donald Trump held separate meetings with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and opposition leader Benny Gantz. Neither of the two managed to achieve a decisive victory in general elections in April or September last year, and a third vote is scheduled for March to break the impasse.

Benny Gantz, the leader of the centre-right Blue and White alliance, praised Trump's plan following Monday's meeting in Washington and promised to put it into practice if he wins the March election. Netanyahu has not commented publicly on it yet.

There has been some speculation in the media that Trump wants Netanyahu and Gantz to work together toward implementing the plan.

No Palestinians at the table

Trump had not met with any Palestinian representatives prior to the announcement; Palestinian National Authority President Mahmoud Abbas had reportedly turned down several offers to discuss the proposal.

Palestinian leaders in the West Bank and Gaza have called for mass protests against the peace plan, prompting the Israeli military to reinforce troops in the Jordan Valley.

President Abbas reportedly greenlighted a "Day of Rage" over the Trump plan on Wednesday, paving the way for violent clashes between protesters and Israeli forces. He is currently holding an emergency meeting of the executive bodies of the Palestine Liberation Organisation and the Fatah party.

Palestinians have also floated the possibility of quitting the Oslo accords, which created the Palestinian Authority and regulate its relations with the state of Israel.

The Oslo accords, signed in the 1990s, officially created the Palestinian Authority as a structure tasked with exercising self-governance over the territories of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

A long path behind
Trump was adamant that Palestinians would be forced to accept his plan in the end. "We have the support of the prime minister, we have the support of the other parties, and we think we will ultimately have the support of the Palestinians, but we're going to see," he said on Monday.

Trump has largely outsourced the creation of the plan to his adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner. The initial idea was to publish it after the April 2019 election in Israel, but the uncertainty hanging over the Knesset over the past year has delayed the announcement.

Jared Kushner unveiled the economic portion of the plan this past summer at a conference in Bahrain, but failed to shore up support from Palestinians and faced widespread condemnation instead.

Israelis and Palestinians have been embroiled in a conflict ever since the State of Israel came into existence. Previous American administrations, in line with the United Nations's approach, had long favoured an arrangement that envisaged an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, with its capital in East Jerusalem.

The Trump administration reversed that policy and made a series of decidedly pro-Israel moves in the past three years. Those included moving the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and recognising the Golan Heights (which it annexed illegally from Syria) and Israeli settlements in the West Bank (illegal under international law) as parts of Israel.

[Jan 28, 2020] Trump's Annexation and Apartheid Plan

Jan 28, 2020 | www.theamericanconservative.com

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[Jan 28, 2020] US plane crashes in Ghazni, killing scores of officers

Jan 28, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

S , Jan 27 2020 16:43 utc | 7

One of the main Taliban Twitter accounts, @Zabehulah_M33 , has posted the following tweets (machine translated):
US invasion plane crashes in Ghazni, killing scores of officers

Following a raid today in Sadukhel district of Dehik district of Ghazni province, a US special aircraft carrier was flying over an intelligence mission in the area.

The aircraft was destroyed with all its crew and crew, including the major US intelligence officers (CIA).

It is noteworthy that recently, in the provinces of Helmand, Balkh and some other parts of the country, large numbers of enemy aircraft and helicopters have fallen and fallen.

( source )

# Important News:
A Ghazni helicopter crashed in the area near Sharana, the capital of Paktika province, this evening after the Ghazni incident.
The helicopter crew and the soldiers were all destroyed.

( source )

So Taliban has not taken responsibility for the E-11A crash (although many news outlets are reporting it, including Russian ones). Meanwhile, yet another helicopter crashed after the E-11A crash, so it's two crashes in one day.

c1ue , Jan 27 2020 16:17 utc | 4

If the $1.6 trillion cost of the US military being in Afghanistan is correct, then the loss of 4 helicopters and even the E11 won't significantly increase US overall spend there. $1.6 trillion over 18 years is a tad under $250 million per day
Piotr Berman , Jan 27 2020 17:15 utc | 13
When a colonial war goes wrong, one salient question was: who sold guns to the savages?

Among more recent examples, who explained technologically inept Iraqis how to make IEDs?

In the case of smaller weapons, the usual suspect is responsible. NYT By C. J. Chivers Aug. 24, 2016

... In all, Overton found, the Pentagon provided more than 1.45 million firearms to various security forces in Afghanistan and Iraq, including more than 978,000 assault rifles, 266,000 pistols and almost 112,000 machine guns. These transfers formed a collage of firearms of mixed vintage and type: Kalashnikov assault rifles left over from the Cold War; recently manufactured NATO-standard M16s and M4s from American factories; machine guns of Russian and Western lineage; and sniper rifles, shotguns and pistols of varied provenance and caliber, including a large order of Glock semiautomatic pistols, a type of weapon also regularly offered for sale online in Iraq.

----

That said, one needs something more sophisticated against helicopters and planes. I suspect that even if Iran were inclined to provide them to Taliban, it would not give them their own products, and, for sure, they cannot purchase Western missiles on regular markets. However, as valiant freedom fighters in Syria are provided with such weapons while being woefully underpaid...

[Jan 27, 2020] The assessment of the key players in Global Chessboard party

Notable quotes:
"... They look so great only because the Empire and its sidekicks have morons at the helm (I don't mean disposable figureheads, "presidents", "chancellors", and "PMs", but real powers behind the throne). ..."
Jan 27, 2020 | www.unz.com

AnonFromTN , says: Show Comment January 27, 2020 at 3:45 pm GMT

@PeterMX

I think President Putin is a great leader and the greatest in the world today.

Putin is just a man with normal quite ordinary intelligence, like Xi. They look so great only because the Empire and its sidekicks have morons at the helm (I don't mean disposable figureheads, "presidents", "chancellors", and "PMs", but real powers behind the throne).

[Jan 27, 2020] The assessment of the key players in Global Chessboard party

Notable quotes:
"... They look so great only because the Empire and its sidekicks have morons at the helm (I don't mean disposable figureheads, "presidents", "chancellors", and "PMs", but real powers behind the throne). ..."
Jan 27, 2020 | www.unz.com

AnonFromTN , says: Show Comment January 27, 2020 at 3:45 pm GMT

@PeterMX

I think President Putin is a great leader and the greatest in the world today.

Putin is just a man with normal quite ordinary intelligence, like Xi. They look so great only because the Empire and its sidekicks have morons at the helm (I don't mean disposable figureheads, "presidents", "chancellors", and "PMs", but real powers behind the throne).

[Jan 27, 2020] Russia had long been the butt of jokes by other Europeans about its backwardness, "Asiatic" crudeness and atavistic religiosity and when news of the Japanese victory over the Russians in 1905 reached Europe they expressed openly their schadenfreude and glee for Russia's distress in hard times, especially for "dishonouring" European arms for being defeated by an Asiatic nation

Notable quotes:
"... How did they do it? Reading the reports and contemporary press (1924), plus the "Western" governments plots now with the Germans also part of the gang, everyone predicted the Soviets' experiment – who could not run a chicken raffle, let alone a huge country – would collapse by itself and the Russian wealthy emigres in Paris were preparing their return home on the back of the Great Powers armies under the command of Gen. Hoffmann. ..."
"... How did they do it? Perhaps the answer is revealed if we ask: what is different now? And the answer is that the Russian people were building a new country from the ruins of the old for themselves. In the process they were building Socialism. For the many detractors of the USSR here, that is the greatest sin. In their view, people should work as slaves for their masters: the capitalist class, coincidentally mostly Jewish, to rub salt into the wound. ..."
Jan 27, 2020 | www.unz.com

Parfois1 , says: Show Comment January 27, 2020 at 12:34 pm GMT

@FB What I find most surprising (and revolting) is the virulent rancour of many commenters towards the Revolutionary and WWII Russians for (and I can't see any other plausible explanation) having deposed Tsarism and Nazism respectively and, subsequently, constructing a successful competitor to the economic orthodoxy of Capitalism.

All that done from scratch within a short span of time on their own by their own efforts, a feat unequal in human history.

How they did it? After all, Russia had long been the butt of jokes by other Europeans about its backwardness, "Asiatic" crudeness and atavistic religiosity and when news of the Japanese victory over the Russians in 1905 reached Europe they expressed openly their schadenfreude and glee for Russia's distress in hard times, especially for "dishonouring" European arms for being defeated by an Asiatic nation. Not only that, by 1917 Russia was literally on its knees, the people starving, the soldiers at the front neglected, the countryside devastated, the German armies outside Petrograd and the Kerensky government making plans to leave the capital. Then the foreign invasions at Murmansk, Archangel, Baku, Manchuria and Vladivostok by Entente powers, Finland, Poland, US and Japan all ganged up in support of the Whites in the civil war that further devastated the countryside to the point that it ceased to function as a country without money and the economy ran on "war Communism" (the state had to provided all the basic needs to everyone). Famine ensued.

From that disaster that Russia was, gradually emerged a nation licking its wounds and grieving its ten million plus dead (perhaps then the greatest calamity visiting a nation ever) by putting its back to the wall and rebuilding itself, on their own and facing the hostility of all the Great Powers through sanctions and blockades.

How did they do it? Reading the reports and contemporary press (1924), plus the "Western" governments plots now with the Germans also part of the gang, everyone predicted the Soviets' experiment – who could not run a chicken raffle, let alone a huge country – would collapse by itself and the Russian wealthy emigres in Paris were preparing their return home on the back of the Great Powers armies under the command of Gen. Hoffmann.

How did they do it? Perhaps the answer is revealed if we ask: what is different now? And the answer is that the Russian people were building a new country from the ruins of the old for themselves. In the process they were building Socialism. For the many detractors of the USSR here, that is the greatest sin. In their view, people should work as slaves for their masters: the capitalist class, coincidentally mostly Jewish, to rub salt into the wound.

[Jan 27, 2020] The Dangers of Conflating and Inflating Interests

Notable quotes:
"... Taylor exaggerates what the conflict is about by saying that Ukraine is defending "the West." That's not true. Ukraine is defending itself. The U.S. does not have a vital interest in this conflict, but Taylor talks about it as if we do. He says that the relationship with Ukraine is "key" to our national security, but that is simply false. To say that it is key to our national security means that we are supposed to believe that it is crucially important to our national security. That suggests that U.S. national security would seriously compromised if that relationship weakened, but that doesn't make any sense. We usually don't even talk about our major treaty allies this way, so what justification is there for describing a relationship with a weak partner government like this? ..."
"... The op-ed reads like a textbook case of clientitis, in which a former U.S. envoy ends up making the Ukrainian government's argument for them ..."
"... To support Ukraine is to support a rules-based international order that enabled major powers in Europe to avoid war for seven decades. It is to support democracy over autocracy. It is to support freedom over unfreedom. Most Americans do. ..."
"... These make for catchy slogans, but they are lousy policy arguments. This rhetoric veers awfully close to saying that you aren't on the side of freedom if you don't support a particular policy option. In my experience, advocates for more aggressive measures use rhetoric like this because the rest of their argument isn't very strong. It is possible to reject illegal military interventions of all governments without wanting to throw weapons at the problem. ..."
"... Taylor has set up the policy argument in such a way that there seems to be no choice, but the U.S. doesn't have to support Ukraine's war effort. He oversells Ukraine's importance to the U.S. to justify U.S. support, because an accurate assessment would make the current policy of arming their government much harder to defend. Ukraine isn't really that important to U.S. security and our security doesn't require us to provide military assistance to them. Of course, our government has chosen to do it anyway, but this is just one more optional entanglement that the U.S. could have avoided without jeopardizing American or allied security. ..."
Jan 27, 2020 | www.theamericanconservative.com

ormer ambassador William Taylor wrote an op-ed on Ukraine in an attempt to answer Pompeo's question about whether Americans care about Ukraine. It is not very persuasive. For one thing, he starts off by exaggerating the importance of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine to make it seem as if the U.S. has a major stake in the outcome:

Here's why the answer should be yes: Ukraine is defending itself and the West against Russian attack. If Ukraine succeeds, we succeed. The relationship between the United States and Ukraine is key to our national security, and Americans should care about Ukraine.

Taylor exaggerates what the conflict is about by saying that Ukraine is defending "the West." That's not true. Ukraine is defending itself. The U.S. does not have a vital interest in this conflict, but Taylor talks about it as if we do. He says that the relationship with Ukraine is "key" to our national security, but that is simply false. To say that it is key to our national security means that we are supposed to believe that it is crucially important to our national security. That suggests that U.S. national security would seriously compromised if that relationship weakened, but that doesn't make any sense. We usually don't even talk about our major treaty allies this way, so what justification is there for describing a relationship with a weak partner government like this?

The op-ed reads like a textbook case of clientitis, in which a former U.S. envoy ends up making the Ukrainian government's argument for them. The danger of exaggerating U.S. interests and conflating them with Ukraine's is that we fool ourselves into thinking that we are acting out of necessity and in our own defense when we are really choosing to take sides in a conflict that does not affect our security. This is the kind of thinking that encourages people to spout nonsense about "fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them here." If we view Ukraine as "the front line" of a larger struggle, that will also make it more difficult to resolve the conflict. When a local conflict is turned into a proxy fight between great powers, the local people will be the ones made to suffer to serve the ambitions of the patrons. Once the U.S. insists that its own security is bound up with the outcome of this conflict, there is an incentive to be considered the "winner," but the reality is that Ukraine will always matter less to the U.S. than it does to Russia.

If this relationship were so important to U.S. security, how is it that the U.S. managed to get along just fine for decades after the end of the Cold War when that relationship was not particularly strong? As recently as the Obama administration, our government did not consider Ukraine to be important enough to supply with weapons. Ukraine was viewed correctly as being of peripheral interest to the U.S., and nothing has changed in the years since then to make it more important.

Taylor keeps repeating that "Ukraine is the front line" in a larger conflict between Russia and the West, but that becomes true only if Western governments choose to treat it as one. He concludes his op-ed with a series of ideological assertions:

To support Ukraine is to support a rules-based international order that enabled major powers in Europe to avoid war for seven decades. It is to support democracy over autocracy. It is to support freedom over unfreedom. Most Americans do.

These make for catchy slogans, but they are lousy policy arguments. This rhetoric veers awfully close to saying that you aren't on the side of freedom if you don't support a particular policy option. In my experience, advocates for more aggressive measures use rhetoric like this because the rest of their argument isn't very strong. It is possible to reject illegal military interventions of all governments without wanting to throw weapons at the problem.

Taylor has set up the policy argument in such a way that there seems to be no choice, but the U.S. doesn't have to support Ukraine's war effort. He oversells Ukraine's importance to the U.S. to justify U.S. support, because an accurate assessment would make the current policy of arming their government much harder to defend. Ukraine isn't really that important to U.S. security and our security doesn't require us to provide military assistance to them. Of course, our government has chosen to do it anyway, but this is just one more optional entanglement that the U.S. could have avoided without jeopardizing American or allied security.

[Jan 27, 2020] American Pravda Mossad Assassinations by Ron Unz

Jan 27, 2020 | www.unz.com

From the Peace of Westphalia to the Law of the Jungle

The January 2nd American assassination of Gen. Qassem Soleimani of Iran was an event of enormous moment.

Gen. Soleimani had been the highest-ranking military figure in his nation of 80 million, and with a storied career of 30 years, one of the most universally popular and highly regarded. Most analysts ranked him second in influence only to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's elderly Supreme Leader, and there were widespread reports that he was being urged to run for the presidency in the 2021 elections.

The circumstances of his peacetime death were also quite remarkable. His vehicle was incinerated by the missile of an American Reaper drone near Iraq's Baghdad international airport just after he had arrived there on a regular commercial flight for peace negotiations originally suggested by the American government.

Our major media hardly ignored the gravity of this sudden, unexpected killing of so high-ranking a political and military figure, and gave it enormous attention. A day or so later, the front page of my morning New York Times was almost entirely filled with coverage of the event and its implications, along with several inside pages devoted to the same topic. Later that same week, America's national newspaper of record allocated more than one-third of all the pages of its front section to the same shocking story.

But even such copious coverage by teams of veteran journalists failed to provide the incident with its proper context and implications. Last year, the Trump Administration had declared the Iranian Revolutionary Guard "a terrorist organization," drawing widespread criticism and even ridicule from national security experts appalled at the notion of classifying a major branch of Iran's armed forces as "terrorists." Gen. Soleimani was a top commander in that body, and this apparently provided the legal figleaf for his assassination in broad daylight while on a diplomatic peace mission.

But consider that Congress has been considering legislation declaring Russia an official state sponsor of terrorism , and Stephen Cohen, the eminent Russia scholar, has argued that no foreign leader since the end of World War II has been so massively demonized by the American media as Russian President Vladimir Putin. For years, numerous agitated pundits have denounced Putin as "the new Hitler," and some prominent figures have even called for his overthrow or death. So we are now only a step or two removed from undertaking a public campaign to assassinate the leader of a country whose nuclear arsenal could quickly annihilate the bulk of the American population. Cohen has repeatedly warned that the current danger of global nuclear war may exceed that which we faced during the days of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, and can we entirely dismiss such concerns?

Even if we focus solely upon Gen. Solemaini's killing and entirely disregard its dangerous implications, there seem few modern precedents for the official public assassination of a top-ranking political figure by the forces of another major country. In groping for past examples, the only ones that come to mind occurred almost three generations ago during World War II, when Czech agents assisted by the Allies assassinated Reinhard Heydrich in Prague in 1941 and the US military later shot down the plane of Japanese admiral Isoroku Yamamoto in 1943. But these events occurred in the heat of a brutal global war, and the Allied leadership hardly portrayed them as official government assassinations. Historian David Irving reveals that when one of Adolf Hitler's aides suggested that an attempt be made to assassinate Soviet leaders in that same conflict, the German Fuhrer immediately forbade such practices as obvious violations of the laws of war.

The 1914 terrorist assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, was certainly organized by fanatical elements of Serbian Intelligence, but the Serbian government fiercely denied its own complicity, and no major European power was ever directly implicated in the plot. The aftermath of the killing soon led to the outbreak of World War I, and although many millions died in the trenches over the next few years, it would have been completely unthinkable for one of the major belligerents to consider assassinating the leadership of another.

A century earlier, the Napoleonic Wars had raged across the entire continent of Europe for most of a generation, but I don't recall reading of any governmental assassination plots during that era, let alone in the quite gentlemanly wars of the preceding 18th century when Frederick the Great and Maria Theresa disputed ownership of the wealthy province of Silesia by military means. I am hardly a specialist in modern European history, but after the 1648 Peace of Westphalia ended the Thirty Years War and regularized the rules of warfare, no assassination as high-profile as that of Gen. Soleimani comes to mind.

The bloody Wars of Religion of previous centuries did see their share of assassination schemes. For example, I think that Philip II of Spain supposedly encouraged various plots to assassinate Queen Elizabeth I of England on grounds that she was a murderous heretic, and their repeated failure helped persuade him to launch the ill-fated Spanish Armada; but being a pious Catholic, he probably would have balked at using the ruse of peace-negotiations to lure Elizabeth to her doom. In any event, that was more than four centuries ago, so America has now placed itself in rather uncharted waters.

Different peoples possess different political traditions, and this may play a major role in influencing the behavior of the countries they establish. Bolivia and Paraguay were created in the early 18th century as shards from the decaying Spanish Empire, and according to Wikipedia they have experienced nearly three dozen successful coups in their history, the bulk of these prior to 1950, while Mexico has had a half-dozen. By contrast, the U.S. and Canada were founded as Anglo-Saxon settler colonies, and neither history records even a failed attempt.

During our Revolutionary War, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and our other Founding Fathers fully recognized that if their effort failed, they would all be hanged by the British as rebels. However, I have never heard that they feared falling to an assassin's blade, nor that King George III ever considered such an underhanded means of attack. During the first century and more of our nation's history, nearly all our presidents and other top political leaders traced their ancestry back to the British Isles, and political assassinations were exceptionally rare, with Abraham Lincoln's death being one of the very few that come to mind.

At the height of the Cold War, our CIA did involve itself in various secret assassination plots against Cuba's Communist dictator Fidel Castro and other foreign leaders considered hostile to US interests. But when these facts later came out in the 1970s, they evoked such enormous outrage from the public and the media, that three consecutive American presidents -- Gerald R. Ford , Jimmy Carter , and Ronald Reagan -- issued successive Executive Orders absolutely prohibiting assassinations by the CIA or any other agent of the US government.

Although some cynics might claim that these public declarations represented mere window-dressing, a March 2018 book review in the New York Times strongly suggests otherwise. Kenneth M. Pollack spent years as a CIA analyst and National Security Council staffer, then went on to publish a number of influential books on foreign policy and military strategy over the last two decades. He had originally joined the CIA in 1988, and opens his review by declaring:

One of the very first things I was taught when I joined the CIA was that we do not conduct assassinations. It was drilled into new recruits over and over again.

Yet Pollack notes with dismay that over the last quarter-century, these once solid prohibitions have been steadily eaten away, with the process rapidly accelerating after the 9/11 attacks of 2001. The laws on our books may not have changed, but

Today, it seems that all that is left of this policy is a euphemism.

We don't call them assassinations anymore. Now, they are "targeted killings," most often performed by drone strike, and they have become America's go-to weapon in the war on terror.

The Bush Administration had conducted 47 of these assassinations-by-another-name, while his successor Barack Obama, a constitutional scholar and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, had raised his own total to 542. Not without justification, Pollack wonders whether assassination has become "a very effective drug, but [one that] treats only the symptom and so offers no cure."

Thus over the last couple of decades American policy has followed a very disturbing trajectory in its use of assassination as a tool of foreign policy, first restricting its use to only the most extreme circumstances, next targeting small numbers of high-profile "terrorists" hiding in rough terrain, then escalating those same such killings to the many hundreds. And now under President Trump, the fateful step has been taken of America claiming the right to assassinate any world leader not to our liking whom we unilaterally declare worthy of death.

Pollack had made his career as a Clinton Democrat, and is best known for his 2002 book The Threatening Storm that strongly endorsed President Bush's proposed invasion of Iraq and was enormously influential in producing bipartisan support for that ill-fated policy. I have no doubt that he is a committed supporter of Israel, and he probably falls into a category that I would loosely describe as "Left Neocon."

But while reviewing a history of Israel's own long use of assassination as a mainstay of its national security policy, he seems deeply disturbed that America might be following along that same terrible path. Less than two years later, our sudden assassination of a top Iranian leader demonstrates that his fears may have been greatly understated.

"Rise and Kill First" ORDER IT NOW

The book being reviewed was Rise and Kill First by New York Times reporter Ronen Bergman, a weighty study of the Mossad, Israel's foreign intelligence service, together with its sister agencies. The author devoted six years of research to the project, which was based upon a thousand personal interviews and access to some official documents previously unavailable. As suggested by the title, his primary focus was Israel's long history of assassinations, and across his 750 pages and thousand-odd source references he recounts the details of an enormous number of such incidents.

That sort of topic is obviously fraught with controversy, but Bergman's volume carries glowing cover-blurbs from Pulitzer Prize-winning authors on espionage matters, and the official cooperation he received is indicated by similar endorsements from both a former Mossad chief and Ehud Barak, a past Prime Minister of Israel who himself had once led assassination squads. Over the last couple of decades, former CIA officer Robert Baer has become one of our most prominent authors in this same field, and he praises the book as "hands down" the best he has ever read on intelligence, Israel, or the Middle East. The reviews across our elite media were equally laudatory.

Although I had seen some discussions of the book when it appeared, I only got around to reading it a few months ago. And while I was deeply impressed by the thorough and meticulous journalism, I found the pages rather grim and depressing reading, with their endless accounts of Israeli agents killing their real or perceived enemies, with the operations sometimes involving kidnappings and brutal torture, or resulting in considerable loss of life to innocent bystanders. Although the overwhelming majority of the attacks described took place in the various countries of the Middle East or the occupied Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza, others ranged across the world, including Europe. The narrative history began in the 1920s, decades before the actual creation of the Jewish Israel or its Mossad organization, and ranged up to the present day.

The sheer quantity of such foreign assassinations was really quite remarkable, with the knowledgeable reviewer in the New York Times suggesting that the Israeli total over the last half-century or so seemed far greater than that of any other country. I might even go farther: if we excluded domestic killings, I wouldn't be surprised if the body-count exceeded the combined total for that of all other major countries in the world. I think all the lurid revelations of lethal CIA or KGB Cold War assassination plots that I have seen discussed in newspaper stories might fit comfortably into just a chapter or two of Bergman's extremely long book.

[Jan 27, 2020] MANPADS represent a large leap in the 'death by 1000 cuts' equation for the US forices in Afghanistan

Jan 27, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Chevrus , Jan 27 2020 17:29 utc | 17

9K38-Igla-M
MANPADS represent a large leap in the 'death by 1000 cuts' equation.

The stinger missile made a huge difference in the battle dynamics when the Soviets were in Afganistan. 2000 Iglas trickled into Afganistan would be a huge headache for occupying forces. No more close air support, very dangerous take-off and landings along with possible higher altitude interceptions.

In regard to the financing of the ongoing operations, war profiteers are happy to continue that ad infinitum. The American war in Viet-Nam was a test run of sorts, how to keep things running for maximum profit and burn. Weapons in and commodities (hmmmm...)out makes for quite a killing.

The sense I get is that the escalation cause by the various air strikes and assassinations was designed as a last ditch effort to keep things escalating lest peace and stability break out. Granted that is a distant horizon, but if Iran and the KSA found some common ground, Syria was mopped up and Lebanon was able to shake off the elements that continually throw spanners in the works USA/isreal interests would definitely be less likely to prosper. Given the pattern of provocation by the USA trying to get Iran to do something extreme in order to justify all out war, the murder of the highly prized generals seems not to have worked as intended. Rather than striking out impulsively, the Resistance appears to have engaged in a broad spectrum highly controlled campaign to do just what it has promised. Expel the USA from the MidEast.

We live in world of countermeasures and gone are the days of total domination by the usual suspects. Anti aircraft missile defense is the current keystone to this balance. As with many things MANPADS are very much a double edged sword, so one must be judicious with sales and distribution. There is nothing stopping them from biting the manufacturer in the arse.

Not long ago such missiles would be easier to trace, but given the amount of exports and knock-offs they could filter into the Afgan theater from anywhere. If there are in fact a quantity of them in play, then the occupiers are going to have a very bad day(s) indeed.

Per/Norway , Jan 27 2020 17:30 utc | 18

"4) Can't understand Yankee justification for hammering Afghanistan, unless it involved stealing sovereign wealth."

Posted by: Ant. | Jan 27 2020 17:03 utc | 10

It is ALL about the cia opium trade,, Afghanistan is the "poppy greenhouse" of the cia and fukus terrorist regimes..

Per/Norway , Jan 27 2020 17:34 utc | 19
"WHAT are the Americans actually bombing?
Let me suggest - nothing, just an opportunity to use up the existing arsenal."

Posted by: Alex_Gorsky | Jan 27 2020 17:14 utc | 12
No, they are bombing homes and trying to genocide the Pashtuns that live on/over a fortune in minerals and whatnot,.-
Try to research how many Pashtun children the united states of terrorist and nato terrorists have raped and killed, ALL just to steal Afghanistans wealth.

A P , Jan 27 2020 18:42 utc | 33
To Ant 10, Per/Norway 18: Afghanistan is a vast source of mineral wealth, and has valuable potential oil/gas pipeline routes. As usual, US/ZATO wants to "protect" these for their pet corporate thieves. That the CIA/Mossad runs the opium industry is just a cash-cow to pay-off the local drug kingpins/warlords.

The Taliban had decimated the opium industry a couple times, but the CIA/Mossad always pushes back in and keeps the country in chaos.

The Taliban are no angels, but at least they eradicate the opium industry. If the US/ZATO and CIA/Mossad got out of Afghanistan, it wouldn't take long for the locals to throw out the Taliban. The locals put up with the Taliban because they are slightly less destructive than the US/ZATO/CIA/Mossad thugs.

Red Ryder , Jan 27 2020 18:49 utc | 34
Ukies got Javelin anti-tank weapons. (though the US controls them or half of them would be sold off).
Then, there was a counter-move. Not in Donbass. Elsewhere.
Taliban have MANPADS.

Soon, the Iraqi PMF will have MANPADS.

It's a weapons war that the US cannot win.

Too many people want the Hegemon out of their country.

We see this weapons war in Africa. Russia and China are there to teach the weapons' use.

You don't need big nukes and aircraft to win a war.

Vietnam won with artillery, sappers and AK-47s.
Houthis are winning with homemade missiles and drones.

Taliban will force out the US. Russia and China will do whatever they can to see that will be the outcome.

DFC , Jan 27 2020 19:16 utc | 39
There must be some Iranian special Quods force operating deep inside Afghanistan using their own SAM, not giving them to the Taliban, who are their longtgerm enemies.

The Iranians will choose how, when and where they are going to kill US soldiers and CIA opertatives with total deniability if required; probably in this plane there were some CIA dudes involved in dirty operations in the ME affecting Iran, now they have reaped what they sown

Montreal , Jan 27 2020 19:20 utc | 40
If I wanted to attack the US I would do it in Afghanistan. Hostile territory, hostile population, impossible lines of communication. If it isn't Taliban, then it probably someone in alliance with them. China? Shares a border with Afghanistan (even if a bit inaccessible). Pakistan? Iraq? Iran? Russia (I doubt it but you never know). There must be so much general ordnance kicking around in the Middle East, most of it supplied or sourced by the US. I'm surprised it hasn't been done before. Certainly, if whoever it is has a regular supply of surface to air missiles, Bhagram, and the US are toast.
Mckinnon , Jan 27 2020 19:27 utc | 41
The afghans canteach the iraqi how to bring down those planes, then the NATO would be a sitting duck in Iraq and the only option to get out alive would be a peacedeal the israeli can not refuse.
karlof1 , Jan 27 2020 19:35 utc | 43
Quixotic 1 @38--

I tend to agree with that thinking. The Outlaw US Empire will need to be ousted from wherever it occupies as with 'Nam, although there's still the question of the Current Oligarchy's domestic viability and ability to retain control over the federal government. What's promising in the latter regard is the very strong pushback aimed at DNC Chair Perez's committee appointments , which is being called Trump's Re-election Campaign Committee for good reasons. However IMO, people need to look beyond Trump and the Duopoly at those pulling the strings. And the easiest way to cut the strings is to elect people without any.

ben , Jan 27 2020 19:41 utc | 44
This ongoing war in Afghanistan has morphed into a live fire training program for the U$ military. Totally illegal and disgusting.

"it's just business, get over it."

Oh, but DJT promised to end it, did he not?

karlof1 , Jan 27 2020 19:48 utc | 45
DFC @39--

Hard to say just what the Iranian-Taliban relationship is at this juncture. Tehran continues to deny supplying them, but it's clear Taliban are the only force capable to defeating the Outlaw US Empire's Terrorist Foreign Legion it imported into the Afghan theatre. Iran's watched the Taliban up close and personal for 24+ years now, so I'd be very surprised if there wasn't at least a strong backchannel com between them. IIRC, Iran okayed Taliban's inclusion in the Moscow talks and has suggested they become a part of any future Afghan government.

Likklemore , Jan 27 2020 20:14 utc | 49
@ 38 Quixotic 1
Guarantee you- "the Empire is not going to cede its position anywhere on the globe. It's not going to leave Syria, it's not going to leave Iraq, and it certainly is not going to leave it's foothold in the underbelly of Eurasia.
Because to do so would mean the end of the Hegemonic project.

I have 1st dibs on that Guarantee
by 2025. Be ready to deliver in gold.

Here is how. Watch KSA and that old 1973 deal to price oil in USD$; follows then ALL countries need USD to buy oil. Fast Forward. KSA wants in on their share of oil to China AND the price will be paid in Yuan. Ask Qatar.

See the historical Timeline of currencies at link.

The USD is losing its appeal because Uncle Sam foolishly weaponized its currency. A review of history: Bullies have a limited life as do Reserve Currencies all things end. And sanctions are wearing thin.

The epitaph reads "US$, aka the greenback, met its demise by sanctions."

DFC , Jan 27 2020 20:41 utc | 51
@ karlof1 | Jan 27 2020 19:48 utc | 45

Well may be the Iranians could supply the Taliban with weapons, or may be they supply them to the Hazara, that are much more close to them and are the real allies in Afghanistan, and it is a way to protect them un a post-US future. So may be the Hazara could become the new Houthies in Afghanistan

DFC , Jan 27 2020 21:33 utc | 61
@ james | Jan 27 2020 21:16 utc | 57

Johan Galtung predicted, in the year 2000, the end of the US Empire in 2020, he also predicted, in the year 1980, the end of the Soviet Empire before the end of that decade, and he nailed.

This is an interview in 2010, but the book with his predictions is much old:

https://www.democracynow.org/2010/6/7/johan_galtung_on_the_fall_of

He said:
"It's an empire against a wall; an empire in despair; an empire, I would say, in its last phase. My prediction in the book that is here, that you mentioned, The Fall of the US Empire–And Then What?, is that it cannot last longer than 'til about 2020. In 1980, I predicted for the Soviet empire that it will crack at its weakest point, the wall of Berlin, within ten years, and it happened in November 1989, and the Soviet empire followed. So my prediction is a similar one for the US empire"

In another interview he said that after the cracks in the Empire and the loss of the Imperial Wealth Pump:

"The most dangerous variable is the definitive end of the American dream, due to domestic hardship. This would lead to the functional breakdown of the establishment and Treaty of the Union, which would be the political end of the North American multi-state entity. At this point, Galtung says, the empire would be split into a confederation of states, more or less powerful, that would seek an independent solution to the external and internal crisis."

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2019/03/18/2020-and-the-end-of-the-american-empire/

occupatio , Jan 27 2020 23:35 utc | 79
Can someone explain to mean what 'ZATO' (as in 'US/ZATO') means on this site?

As for China being a possible source for the anti-aircraft missiles, I doubt it is via the Xinjiang/Afghanistan border and must instead be using established smuggling routes and intermediaries groups.

I've heard it said that the missiles fired by Houthis on the Abqaiq oil facility are based on Iran designs, some of which are in turn copies or reverse-engineered from Chinese designs. If the Afghanistan situation is like that, then the Chinese connection is mediated instead of immediate, such as via Iran. The missiles doesn't even need to be reverse-engineered --- just swap out some parts for generic ones. For various reasons, such as plausible deniability, I doubt that China would directly supply Taliban with such equipment.

bevin , Jan 28 2020 0:08 utc | 84
Native people were classified as militarily apt and militarily inept, and recruitment to
colonial armies was guided by that principle. Arabs were typically classified as inept,
unlike Gurkhas and the Sikh. Persians were not recruited, but they were known to colonial
leaders who had education in classics."
iotr Berman@48
This is Raj History 101 bullshit recycled. Far from being classified as inept- Arabs, particularly Sunni
desert Arabs were very highly regarded by the British for their military prowess. Hence the entrusting to
the current Gulf rulers of the British protectorates handed back in the 1960s.
The Arab Legion in 1948 came out of the war with its reputation intact.
So far as their educational achievements are concerned: it was the Arabs who brought Europe the Renaissance.
Anyone who really believes that Arabs are incapable of developing IEDs is likely to be
part of that unfortunate portion of humanity that holds them to be 'sand niggers' etc. And likely to suffer
the fate of racist fools throughout history.
karlof1 , Jan 28 2020 0:09 utc | 85
psychohistorian @83--

I continue to see Twitter reports, like this one that the Prince of Darkness aka Mike de Andrea was killed in that shootdown. As with the commander at the base Iran attacked in Iraq who is now rumored to have died, the easiest refutation would be for them to appear in public.

Piotr Berman , Jan 28 2020 0:41 utc | 89
2) The Soviet Union never invaded Afghanistan, they were invited in in by then sovereign UN-recognised Gov of Afghan (golly wonder why)

Posted by: Ant. | Jan 27 2020 17:03 utc | 10

Wiki (quite accurate): Meanwhile, increasing friction between the competing factions of the PDPA -- the dominant Khalq and the more moderate Parcham -- resulted (in July–August 1979) in the dismissal of Parchami cabinet members and the arrest of Parchami military officers under the pretext of a Parchami coup.[62]

In September 1979, President Taraki was assassinated in a coup within the PDPA orchestrated by fellow Khalq member Hafizullah Amin, who assumed the presidency. The situation in the country deteriorated under Amin and thousands of people went missing.[63] The Soviet Union was displeased with Amin's government and decided to intervene and invade the country on 27 December 1979, killing Amin that same day.[64]

A Soviet-organized regime, led by Parcham's Babrak Karmal but inclusive of both factions (Parcham and Khalq), filled the vacuum.

------

Perhaps Taraki invited Soviets just as he was beset by assassins, or Amin did it for reasons he never got a chance to explain. Honestly, left to their own devices, PDPA, the Afghan Communists, were making royal mess. In any case, the western supported anti-progress guerilla, fighting horrors like schools for girls, predated Soviet "invasion".

necromancer , Jan 28 2020 0:58 utc | 91
Easiest route for Afghan Taliban to obtain weapons is from Pakistani Taliban, with ISI permission.
Remember Pakistani ISI ran Al-Qaeda back in the day.
It is also forgotten that the Tallys prevent the muj warlords from raping the country's teenagers, of both genders, their favorite sport. Thus they are forgiven for suppressing the poppy farming.
karlof1 , Jan 28 2020 2:16 utc | 93
The Prince of Darkness's death seems to be as confirmed as we might get according to this and its thread :

"The US govt seems to be actively hiding this information from the public, but the Taliban has verified this to the Iranians, who in turn passed the message to the GCC states. There is a gruesome photograph of one of the passengers who died, & he has the same profile as D'Andrea."

And:

"The CIA's Michael D'Andrea, who was in charge of the CIA's anti-Iran operations, was in fact killed yesterday in a plane crash in Afghanistan, which the Iranian-backed Taliban claims to have downed. He was killed alongside 4 other people, including 2 USAF pilots & 2 CIA figures."

Not equivalent in stature to Soleimani but important nonetheless. I'll add a small caveat that this still isn't 100% confirmed.

TEP , Jan 28 2020 2:26 utc | 94
@ S (club) 7 and karlofi 93
Yes I'm hearing Ayatollah Mike was one of the several CIA officers among the dead. BIG loss for US and good retaliatory strike (if true) for Iran. The Dark Prince Mike was indeed head of CIA anti-Iran operations and likely played a big part in the Soleimani assassination. We may never know for sure, but the premature departure of CIA officers is always good for the rest of humankind.
psychedelicatessen , Jan 28 2020 2:35 utc | 95
DFC @ 39

Claims of high ranking CIA officers aboard. I suppose U.S. missiles would have been appropriate. Stock from Obama and Clinton's private arms dealing perhaps?

dltravers , Jan 28 2020 2:49 utc | 98
I have long wondered why the Russians have not paid back the US for their aid to the Afghan guerrilla in the 1980's. The US supplied stinger missiles and other anti-aircraft systems and at one point they were knocking down one Russian aircraft a day. Maybe the Russians smell Western blood on the water and have chosen this as the time to pay them back with select arms deliveries to the Taliban.

It was this loss of aviation support that hastened their departure and it would certainly hasten a US departure. I do not think the US has it in them to ramp it up at this point...

Let us remember...

The Soviet War in Afghanistan, 1979 - 1989

[Jan 27, 2020] The assessment of the key players in Global Chessboard party

Notable quotes:
"... They look so great only because the Empire and its sidekicks have morons at the helm (I don't mean disposable figureheads, "presidents", "chancellors", and "PMs", but real powers behind the throne). ..."
Jan 27, 2020 | www.unz.com

AnonFromTN , says: Show Comment January 27, 2020 at 3:45 pm GMT

@PeterMX

I think President Putin is a great leader and the greatest in the world today.

Putin is just a man with normal quite ordinary intelligence, like Xi. They look so great only because the Empire and its sidekicks have morons at the helm (I don't mean disposable figureheads, "presidents", "chancellors", and "PMs", but real powers behind the throne).

[Jan 27, 2020] How an Obscure National Security Council Staffer Changed the Balkans - War on the Rocks

Jan 27, 2020 | warontherocks.com

In this episode of Horns of a Dilemma, John Gans, director of communications and research at Perry World House at the University of Pennsylvania, gives a talk at the University of Texas at Austin to discusses his book, White House Warriors: How the National Security Council Transformed the American Way of War . In this talk, Gans focuses on the career and the accomplishments of a single NSC staffer, who ultimately perished during his duties in Bosnia. He uses the story of Nelson Drew as a way to illustrate both the power and the process that exists within the NSC. This talk took place at the University of Texas at Austin and was sponsored by the Clements Center.

[Jan 27, 2020] Contrasting Views on How to Code a Nuclear Crisis - Texas National Security Review

Oct 03, 2019 | tnsr.org

Nuclear Strategy - Contrasting Views on How to Code a Nuclear Crisis Nuclear Strategy October 03, 2019

Brendan Rittenhouse Green , Austin Long , Mark S. Bell , Julia Macdonald

In this issue's correspondence section, Brendan Rittenhouse Green and Austin Long offer up an alternative way to code nuclear crises in response to Mark S. Bell and Julia Macdonald's article in the February 2019 issue of TNSR. Bell and Macdonald, in turn, offer a response to Green and Long's critique.
Facebook Share facebook facebook Linkedin Share linkedin linkedin Google Plus Share google-plus google-plus Twitter Share twitter twitter Mail Share mail mail In Response to "How to Think About Nuclear Crises"

Brendan Rittenhouse Green and Austin Long

In their article in the February 2019 issue of the Texas National Security Review , Mark S. Bell and Julia Macdonald make a cogent argument that all nuclear crises are not created equal. 1 We agree with their basic thesis: There really are different sorts of nuclear crises, which have different risk and signaling profiles. We also concur that the existence of a variety of political and military dynamics within nuclear crises implies that we should exercise caution when interpreting the results of cross-sectional statistical analysis. If crises are not in fact all the same, then quantitative estimates of variable effects have a murkier meaning. 2 We should not be surprised that, to date, multiple studies have produced different results.

Nevertheless, the article also highlights an alternate hypothesis for nuclear scholarship's inconsistent findings about crisis outcomes and dynamics: Nuclear crises are intrinsically hard to interpret. The balance of resolve between adversaries -- one of the most important variables in any crisis -- is influenced by many factors and is basically impossible to code ex ante . The two variables identified as critical by Bell and Macdonald for determining the shape of a crisis -- the nuclear balance and the controllability of escalation -- are only somewhat more tractable to interpretation. The consequence is that nuclear crises are prone to ambiguity, with coding challenges and case interpretations often resolved in favor of the analyst's pre-existing models of the world. In short, nuclear crises suffer from an especially pernicious interdependence between fact and theory. 3

To the extent that this problem can be ameliorated -- although it cannot be resolved entirely -- the solution is to employ the best possible conceptual and measurement standards for each key variable. Below we provide best practices for coding the nuclear balance, with particular focus on Bell and Macdonald's interpretation of the Cuban Missile Crisis. We argue that, following much of the extant literature, Bell and Macdonald make interpretive choices that unintentionally truncate the history that underlies their coding of the nuclear balance in this case. In our view, they incorrectly conclude that the United States had no military incentives to use nuclear weapons first in 1962.

Below, we analyze their interpretation of the Cuba crisis by examining two indicators that might be used to establish the nuclear balance: the operational capabilities of both sides and the perceptions of key U.S. policymakers. We conclude by drawing out some broader implications of the crisis for their conceptual framework, offering a friendly amendment.

What Were the Operational Capabilities on Both Sides in 1962?

Bell and Macdonald's characterization of the nuclear balance in the Cuban Missile Crisis is a central part of their argument, as it is their sole empirical example of a crisis that "was not characterized by incentives for deliberate first nuclear use." They base this assertion on a brief overview of the balance of U.S. and Soviet strategic forces in 1962, followed by a claim that "[t]he U.S. government did not know where all of the Soviet warheads were located, and there were concerns that U.S. forces were too inaccurate to successfully target the Soviet arsenal." 4

Yet, any calculation of the incentives for deliberate first use must be based on the full context of the military balance. This hinges on the operational capabilities of both sides in the crisis, which includes a concept of operations of a first strike as well as the ability of both sides to execute nuclear operations. The available evidence on operational capabilities suggests that a U.S. first strike would have been likely to eliminate much, if not all, of the Soviet nuclear forces capable of striking the United States, as we summarize briefly below.

Any concept of operations for a U.S. first strike would have been unlikely to rely solely, or even primarily, on relatively inaccurate ballistic missiles, as Bell and Macdonald imply. In a sketch of such an attack drafted by National Security Council staffer Carl Kaysen and Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Harry Rowen during the Berlin Crisis of 1961, the strike would have been delivered by a U.S. bomber force rather than with missiles. As Kaysen and Rowen describe, all Soviet nuclear forces of the time were "soft" targets, so U.S. nuclear bombers would have been more than accurate enough to destroy them. Moreover, a carefully planned bomber attack could have exploited the limitations of Soviet air defense in detecting low flying aircraft, enabling a successful surprise attack. 5 Kaysen would retrospectively note that U.S. missiles, which were inaccurate but armed with multi-megaton warheads, could also have been included in an attack, concluding, "we had a highly confident first strike." 6

Kaysen's confidence was based on his understanding of the relative ability of both sides to conduct nuclear operations. In terms of targeting intelligence, while the United States may not have known where all Soviet nuclear warheads were, it had detailed knowledge of the location of Soviet long-range delivery systems. This intelligence came from a host of sources, including satellite reconnaissance and human sources. U.S. intelligence also understood the low readiness of Soviet nuclear forces. 7 As Kaysen would later note, "By this time we knew that there were no goddamn missiles to speak of, we knew that there were only 6 or 7 operational ones and 3 or 4 more in the test sites and so on. As for the Soviet bombers, they were in a very low state of alert." 8

Of course, Kaysen's assessment of the balance of forces in 1961 might have been overly optimistic or no longer true a year later during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Yet, other contemporary analysts concurred. Andrew Marshall, who had access to the closely held targeting intelligence of this period, subsequently described the Soviet nuclear force, particularly its bombers, as "sitting ducks." 9 James Schlesinger, writing about four months before the crisis, noted, "During the next four or five years, because of nuclear dominance, the credibility of an American first-strike remains high." 10 The authors of the comprehensive History of the Strategic Arms Competition , drawing on a variety of highly classified U.S. sources, reach a similar conclusion:

[T]he Soviet strategic situation in 1962 might thus have been judged little short of desperate. A well-timed U.S. first strike, employing then-available ICBM [intercontinental ballistic missile] and SLBM [submarine-launched ballistic missile] forces as well as bombers, could have seemed threatening to the survival of most of the Soviet Union's own intercontinental strategic forces. Furthermore, there was the distinct, if small, probability that such an attack could have denied the Soviet Union the ability to inflict any significant retaliatory damage upon the United States. 11

The Soviet nuclear-armed submarines of 1962 were likewise vulnerable to U.S. anti-submarine warfare, as they would have had to approach within a few hundred miles of the U.S. coast to launch their missiles. As early as 1959, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Nathan Twining testified that while "one or two isolated submarines" might reach the U.S. coast, in general, the United States had high confidence in its anti-submarine warfare capabilities. 12 The performance of these capabilities during the Cuban Missile Crisis, when multiple Soviet submarines were detected and some forced to surface, confirms their efficacy, as Bell and Macdonald acknowledge in their description of an attack on a Soviet submarine during the crisis. 13

How Was the Nuclear Balance Perceived in 1962?

Bell and Macdonald offer three data points for their argument that U.S. policymakers did not perceive meaningful American nuclear superiority during the Cuban Missile Crisis. First, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and other veterans of the Kennedy administration attested retrospectively that nuclear superiority did not play an important role in the Cuba crisis. 14 Second, President John F. Kennedy received a Joint Chiefs of Staff briefing on the Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP) -- the U.S plan for strategic nuclear weapons employment -- in 1961, which reported that Soviet retaliation should be expected under all circumstances, even after an American pre-emptive strike. 15 Third, the president expressed ambivalence about the nuclear balance on the first day of the Cuba crisis. 16

But this evidence is a combination of truncated, biased, and weak. The retrospective testimony of Kennedy administration alumni is highly dubious. McNamara, National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy, and others were all highly motivated political actors, speaking two decades after the fact in the context of fierce nuclear policy debates on which they had taken highly public positions, as Bell and Macdonald acknowledge in a footnote. 17 The problems with giving much weight to such statements are especially evident given the fact that, as Bell and Macdonald acknowledge, 18 these very same advisers made remarks during the Cuba crisis that were much more favorably disposed to the idea of American nuclear superiority. 19

The Joint Chiefs of Staff briefing to Kennedy on SIOP-62 is evidence, contrary to Bell and Macdonald's interpretation, of American nuclear superiority in 1962. Bell and Macdonald make much of the briefing's caution that "Under any circumstances -- even a preemptive attack by the US -- it would be expected that some portion of the Soviet long-range nuclear force would strike the United States." 20 But interpreting this comment as evidence that the United States did not possess "politically meaningful damage limitation" capabilities makes sense only if one has already decided that the relevant standard for political meaning is a perfectly disarming strike. 21 Scott Sagan, in commenting on the briefing, underscores that "although the United States could expect to suffer some unspecified nuclear damage under any condition of war initiation, the Soviet Union would confront absolutely massive destruction regardless of whether it struck first or retaliated." 22

Crucially, the Joint Chiefs of Staff argued for maintaining a U.S. first-strike capability in a memorandum to McNamara commenting on his plans for strategic nuclear forces for fiscal years 1964­–68. This memorandum, sent shortly after the crisis, argues that the United States could not, in the future, entirely eliminate Soviet strategic forces. Yet, the memorandum continues: "The Joint Chiefs of Staff consider that a first-strike capability is both feasible and desirable, although the degree or level of attainment is a matter of judgment and depends upon the US reaction to a changing Soviet capability." 23 In short, not only did the Joint Chiefs of Staff conclude the United States had a meaningful first-strike capability in 1962, they believed such a capability could and should be maintained in the future.

As for Kennedy's personal views, it is important not just to consider isolated quotes during the Cuban crisis -- after all, he made several comments that point in opposite directions. 24 One has to consider the political context of the Cuban affair writ large: the multi-year contest with the Soviets over the future of Berlin, and effectively, the NATO alliance. Moreover, Kennedy had deliberately built Western policy during the Berlin crisis on a foundation of nuclear superiority. NATO planning assumed that nuclear weapons would ultimately be used, and probably on a massive scale. 25

As Kennedy put it to French President Charles de Gaulle in June of 1961, "the advantage of striking first with nuclear weapons is so great that if [the] Soviets were to attack even without using such weapons, the U.S. could not afford to wait to use them." In July, he told the Joint Chiefs of Staff that "he felt the critical point is to be able to use nuclear weapons at a crucial point before they use them." In January of 1962, expecting the Berlin Crisis to heat up in the near future, he stressed the importance of operational military planning, and of thinking "hard about the ways and means of making decisions that might lead to nuclear war." As he put it at that meeting, "the credibility of our nuclear deterrent is sufficient to hold our present positions throughout the world" even if American conventional military power "on the ground does not match what the communists can bring to bear." 26

But the president recognized that this military strength was a wasting asset: The development of Soviet nuclear forces meant that the window of American nuclear superiority was closing. For this reason, Kennedy thought it important to bring the Berlin Crisis to a head as soon as possible, while the United States still possessed an edge. "It might be better to let a confrontation to develop over Berlin now rather than later," he argued just two weeks before the Cuba crisis. After all, "the military balance was more favorable to us than it would be later on." 27 Two months after the crisis, his views were little different. Reporting on a presidential trip to Strategic Air Command during which Kennedy was advised that "the really neat and clean way to get around all these complexities [about the precise state of the nuclear balance] was to strike first," Bundy "said that of course the President had not reacted with any such comments, but Bundy's clear implication was that the President felt that way." 28

Broader Implications

Our argument about the nuclear balance during the Cuban Missile Crisis, if correct, requires some friendly amendments to Bell and Macdonald's framework for delineating types of nuclear crisis.

Our discussion of the operational capabilities and policymaker perceptions during the Cuba crisis underscores that Bell and Macdonald's first variable -- "the strength of incentives to use nuclear weapons first in a crisis" 29 -- probably ought to be unpacked into two separate variables: military incentives for a first strike, and political bargaining incentives for selective use. After all, whatever the exact nuclear balance was during 1962, the United States was certainly postured for asymmetric escalation. The salience of America's posture is thrown into especially bold relief once the political context of the crisis is recognized: The Cuban affair was basically the climax of the superpower confrontation over Berlin, in which American force structure and planning was built around nuclear escalation. Indeed, this is how policymakers saw the Cuba crisis, where the fear of Soviet countermoves in Berlin hung as an ever-present cloud over discussions within the Executive Committee of the National Security Council. 30

According to Bell and Macdonald, either kind of incentive is sufficient to put a case into the "high" risk category for deliberate use. But in truth, political incentives to use nuclear weapons selectively -- even if only against military targets -- are ever present. They are just seldom triggered until matters have gone seriously awry on the battlefield. In short, we believe Bell and Macdonald were right to expend extra effort looking for military first-strike incentives, which add genuinely different sorts of risk to a crisis. We argue that operational capabilities and policymaker perceptions in the Cuba crisis show that such incentives are more common than generally credited.

So, we would build on Bell and Macdonald's central insight that different types of nuclear crisis have different signaling and risk profiles by modestly amending their framework. We suggest that there are three types of nuclear crisis: those with political bargaining incentives for selective nuclear use (Type A); those with risks of both selective use and non-rational uncontrolled escalation (Type B); and those with political risks, non-rational risks, and military incentives for a nuclear first strike (Type C).

Type A crises essentially collapse Bell and Macdonald's "staircase" and "stability-instability" models, and are relatively low risk. 31 Any proposed nuclear escalation amounts to a "threat to launch a disastrous war coolly and deliberately in response to some enemy transgression." 32 Such threats are hard to make credible until military collapse has put a state's entire international position at stake. Outcomes of Type A crises will be decided solely by the balance of resolve. We disagree with Bell and Macdonald's argument that the conventional military balance can ever determine the outcome of a nuclear crisis, since any conventional victory stands only by dint of the losing side's unwillingness to escalate. But the lower risks of a Type A crisis mean that signals of resolve are harder to send, and must occur through large and not particularly selective or subtle means -- essentially, larger conventional and nuclear operations.

Type B crises are similar to Bell and Macdonald's "brinksmanship" model. 33 These have a significantly greater risk profile, since they also contain genuine risks of uncontrolled escalation in addition to political risks. Crisis outcomes remain dependent on the balance of resolve, but signaling is easier and can be much finer-grained than in Type A crises. The multiple opportunities for uncontrolled escalation mean that there are simply many more things a state can do at much lower levels of actual violence to manipulate the level of risk in a crisis. For instance, alerting nuclear forces will often not mean much in a Type A crisis (at least before the moment of conventional collapse), since there is no way things can get out of control. But alerting forces in a Type B crisis could set off a chain of events where states clash due to the interaction between each other's rules of nuclear engagement, incentivize forces inadvertently threatened by conventional operations to fire, or misperceive each other's actions. Any given military move will have more political meaning and will also be more dangerous.

Type C crises are similar to Bell and Macdonald's "firestorm" model. 34 These are the riskiest sorts of nuclear crisis, since there are military reasons for escalation as well as political and non-rational risks. Outcomes will be influenced both by the balance of resolve and the nuclear balance: either could give states incentives to manipulate risk. Such signals will be the easiest to send, and the finest-grained of any type of crisis. But because the risk level jumps so much with any given signal, the time in which states can bargain may be short. 35

In sum, Bell and Macdonald have made an important contribution to the study of nuclear escalation by delineating different types of crisis with different risk and signaling profiles. We believe they understate the importance of American nuclear superiority during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and that these coding problems highlight some conceptual issues with their framework. In the end, though, our amendments appear to us relatively minor, further underscoring the importance of Bell and Macdonald's research. We hope that they, and other scholars, will continue to build on these findings.

Brendan R. Green, Cincinnati, Ohio

Austin Long, Arlington, Virginia

In Response to a Critique

Mark S. Bell and Julia Macdonald

We thank Brendan Rittenhouse Green and Austin Long for their positive assessment of our work and for engaging with our argument so constructively. 36 Their contribution represents exactly the sort of productive scholarly debate we were hoping to provoke. As we stated in our article, we intended our work to be only an initial effort to think through the heterogeneity of nuclear crises, and we are delighted that Green and Long have taken seriously our suggestion for scholars to continue to think in more detail about the ways in which nuclear crises differ from one another. Their arguments are characteristically insightful, offer a range of interesting and important arguments and suggestions, and have forced us to think harder about a number of aspects of our argument.

In this reply, we briefly lay out the argument we made in our article before responding to Green and Long's suggestion that we underestimate the incentives to launch a nuclear first-strike during the Cuban Missile Crisis and their proposal of an alternative typology for understanding nuclear crises.

Our Argument

In our article, we offer a framework for thinking through the heterogeneity of nuclear crises. 37 While the existing literature on such crises assumes that they all follow a certain logic (although there is disagreement on what that logic is), we identify factors that might lead nuclear crises to differ from one another in consequential ways. In particular, we argue that two factors -- whether incentives are present for nuclear first use and the extent to which escalation is controllable by the leaders involved -- lead to fundamentally different sorts of crises. These two variables generate four possible "ideal type" models of nuclear crises: "staircase" crises (characterized by high first-use incentives and high controllability), "brinkmanship" crises (low first-use incentives and low controllability), "stability-instability" crises (low first-use incentives and high controllability), and "firestorm" crises (high first-use incentives and low controllability).

Each of these ideal types exhibits distinctive dynamics and offers different answers to important questions, such as, how likely is nuclear escalation, and how might it occur? How feasible is signaling within a crisis? What factors determine success? For example, crises exhibiting high incentives for nuclear first use combined with low crisis controllability -- firestorm crises -- are particularly volatile, and the most dangerous of all four models in terms of likelihood of nuclear war. These are the crises that statesmen should avoid except under the direst circumstances or for the highest stakes. By contrast, where incentives for the first use of nuclear weapons are low and there is high crisis controllability -- the stability-instability model -- the risk of nuclear use is lowest. When incentives for nuclear first use are low and crisis controllability is also low -- brinkmanship crises -- or when incentives for first use are high and crisis controllability is also high -- the staircase model -- there is a moderate risk of nuclear use, although through two quite different processes. For the brinkmanship model, low levels of crisis controllability combined with few incentives for nuclear first use mean that escalation to the nuclear level would likely only happen inadvertently and through a process of uncontrolled, rather than deliberate, escalation. On the other hand, high levels of crisis controllability combined with high incentives for nuclear first use -- characteristic of the staircase model -- mean that escalation would more likely occur through a careful, deliberate process.

First-Use Incentives in the Cuban Missile Crisis

First, Green and Long address the extent of incentives for launching a nuclear first strike during the Cuban Missile Crisis. In short, they argue that there were substantial military incentives for America to strike first during the crisis and that these were understood and appreciated by American leaders. 38

While space constraints meant that our analysis of the nuclear balance in the Cuban Missile Crisis was briefer than we would have liked, we certainly agree that the United States possessed nuclear superiority over the Soviet Union during the crisis. 39 The debate between us and Green and Long is, therefore, primarily over whether the nuclear balance that we (more or less) agree existed in 1962 was sufficiently lopsided as to offer meaningful incentives for nuclear first use, and whether it was perceived as such by the leaders involved. In this, we do have somewhat different interpretations of how much weight to assign to particular pieces of evidence. For example, we believe that the retrospective assessment of key participants does have evidentiary value, although we acknowledge (as we did in our article) the biases of such assessments in this case. Given the rapidly shifting nuclear balance, we place less weight on President John F. Kennedy's statements in years prior to the crisis than on those he made during the crisis itself, 40 which were more consistently skeptical of the benefits associated with U.S. nuclear superiority at a time when the stakes were at their highest. 41 We also place somewhat less weight than Green and Long on the 1961 analysis of Carl Kaysen, given doubts about whether his report had much of an effect on operational planning. 42 And finally, we put less weight on the Joint Chiefs of Staff document from 1962 cited by Green and Long in support of their argument, given that it acknowledges the U.S. inability to eliminate Soviet strategic nuclear forces -- thus highlighting the dangers of a U.S. nuclear first strike -- as well as focuses on future force planning in the aftermath of the crisis.

We would also note that our assessment that U.S. nuclear superiority in the Cuban Missile Crisis did not obviously translate into politically meaningful incentives for first use is in line with standard interpretations of this case, including among scholars that Green and Long cite. For Marc Trachtenberg, for example, "[t]he American ability to 'limit damage' by destroying an enemy's strategic forces did not seem, in American eyes, to carry much political weight" during the Cuban Missile Crisis. 43 Similarly, the relative lack of incentives for rational first use in the crisis motivated Thomas Schelling's assessment that only an "unforeseeable and unpredictable" process could have led to nuclear use in the crisis. 44

Regardless of whether participants in the Cuban Missile Crisis understood the advantages (or lack thereof) associated with nuclear superiority, in some ways, our disagreement with Green and Long is more of a conceptual one: where to draw the threshold at which a state's level of nuclear superiority (and corresponding ability to limit retaliatory damage) should be deemed "politically meaningful," i.e., sufficiently lopsided to offer incentives for first use. This is a topic about which there is certainly room for legitimate disagreement. "Political relevance" is a tricky concept, which reinforces Green and Long's broader argument that "nuclear crises are intrinsically hard to interpret" -- a point with which we agree. 45 But Green and Long seem to view any ability to limit retaliatory damage as politically meaningful, since they argue that a nuclear balance that would have likely left a number of American cities destroyed (and potentially more), even in the aftermath of a U.S. first strike, nonetheless provided strong military incentives for first use. By contrast, our view is that the threshold should be somewhat higher than this, though lower than Green and Long's characterization of our position: We do not, in fact, think that the relevant standard for political meaning "is a perfectly disarming strike."

Part of our motivation in wanting a threshold higher than "any damage limitation capability" is that it increases the utility of the typology we offer by allowing us to draw the line in such a way that a substantial number of empirical cases exist on either side of that threshold. Green and Long, by contrast, seem more satisfied to draw the line in such a way that cases exhibiting very different incentives for first use -- a crisis with North Korea today compared to the Cuban Missile Crisis, for example -- would both be classified on the same side of the threshold. 46 Green and Long's approach would ignore the important differences between these cases by treating both crises as exhibiting strong incentives for nuclear first use. This would be akin to producing a meteorological map that rarely shows rain because the forecaster judges the relevant threshold to be "catastrophic flooding." There is nothing fundamentally incorrect about making such a choice, but it is not necessarily the most helpful approach to shedding light on the empirical variation we observe in the historical record.

An Alternative Typology of Nuclear Crises

Second, Green and Long offer an alternative typology for understanding the heterogeneity of nuclear crises. Green and Long argue that there are three types of crisis: "those with political bargaining incentives for selective nuclear use (Type A); those with risks of both selective use and non-rational uncontrolled escalation (Type B); and those with political risks, non-rational risks, and military incentives for a nuclear first strike (Type C)." This is an interesting proposal and we have no fundamental objections to their typology. 47 After all, one can categorize the same phenomenon in different ways, and different typologies may be useful for different purposes. Space constraints inevitably prevent Green and Long from offering a full justification for their typology, and we would certainly encourage them to offer a more fleshed out articulation of it and its merits. Their initial discussion of the different types of signals that states can send within different types of crises is especially productive and goes beyond the relatively simple discussion of the feasibility of signaling that we included in our article. We offer two critiques that might be helpful as they (and others) continue to consider the relative merits of these two typologies and build upon them.

First, it is not clear how different their proposed typology is from the one we offer. At times, for example, Green and Long suggest that their typology simply divides up the same conceptual space we identify using our two variables, but does so differently. For example, they argue that they are essentially collapsing two of our quadrants (stability-instability crises and staircase crises) into Type A crises, while Type B crises are similar to our brinkmanship crises and Type C crises are similar to our firestorm crises. If so, their typology does not really suggest a fundamentally different understanding of how nuclear crises vary, but merely of where the most interesting variation occurs within the conceptual space we identify. The key question, then, in determining the relative merits of the two typologies, is whether there is important variation between the two categories that Green and Long collapse. We continue to think the distinctions between stability-instability crises and staircase crises are important. Although both types of crises are relatively controllable and have limited risk of what Green and Long call "non-rational uncontrolled escalation," they have very different risks when it comes to nuclear use: lower in stability-instability crises and higher in staircase crises. The factors that determine success in stability-instability crises -- primarily the conventional military balance due to the very low risk of nuclear escalation -- do not necessarily determine success in staircase crises, in which the nuclear balance may matter. As a result, we think that collapsing these two categories is not necessarily a helpful analytical move.

Second, to the extent that their typology differs from our own, it does so in ways that are not necessarily helpful in shedding light on the variation across nuclear crises that we observe. In particular, separating incentives for first use into "political bargaining incentives" and "military incentives" is an intriguing proposal but we are not yet fully persuaded of its merits. Given that one of Green and Long's goals is to increase the clarity of the typology we offer, and given that they acknowledge the difficulties of coding the nuclear balance, demanding even more fine-grained assessments in order to divide incentives for first use into two separate (but conceptually highly connected) components may be a lot to ask of analysts. Moreover, given Green and Long's assertion that "political incentives to use nuclear weapons selectively are ever present," their argument in fact implies (as mentioned above) that political incentives for first use are not a source of interesting variation within nuclear crises. We disagree with this conclusion substantively, but it is worth noting that it also has important conceptual implications for Green and Long's typology: It means that their three types of crises all exhibit political incentives for nuclear first use. If this is the case, then political incentives for nuclear first use simply fall out of the analysis. In effect, crises without political incentives for nuclear first use are simply ruled out by definition. This analytic move renders portions of their argument tautologous. For example, they argue that the conventional balance cannot "ever determine the outcome of a nuclear crisis," but this is only because they assume that there are always political incentives to use nuclear weapons first, and thus, "any conventional victory stands only by dint of the losing side's unwillingness to escalate." More broadly, this approach seems to us at least somewhat epistemologically problematic. In our view, it is better to be conceptually open to the existence of certain types of crises and then discover that such crises do not occur empirically, than it is to rule them out by definition and risk discovering later that such crises have, in fact, taken place.

In sum, while we are not fully persuaded by Green and Long's critiques, we are extremely grateful for their insightful, thorough, and constructive engagement with our article and look forward to their future work on these issues. We hope that they, along with other scholars, will continue to explore the ways in which nuclear crises differ from one another, and the implications of such differences for crisis dynamics.

Mark S. Bell, Minneapolis, Minnesota

Julia Macdonald, Denver, Colorado

Endnotes 1 Mark S. Bell and Julia Macdonald, "How to Think About Nuclear Crises," Texas National Security Review 2, no. 2 (February 2019): 40–64, http://dx.doi.org/10.26153/tsw/1944 .

2 Bell and Macdonald, "How to Think About Nuclear Crises," 42, 63.

3 For an excellent treatment of this problem in the international relations context, see Robert Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), 154–72.

4 Bell and Macdonald, "How to Think About Nuclear Crises," 55.

5 See Memorandum for General Maxwell Taylor from Carl Kaysen, "Strategic Air Planning and Berlin," Sept. 5, 1961, from National Archives, Record Group 218, Records of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB56/BerlinC1.pdf .

6 Marc Trachtenberg, David Rosenberg, and Stephen Van Evera, "An Interview with Carl Kaysen," MIT Security Studies Program (1988), 9, http://web.mit.edu/SSP/publications/working_papers/Kaysen%20working%20paper.pdf .

7 Austin Long and Brendan Rittenhouse Green, "Stalking the Secure Second Strike: Intelligence, Counterforce, and Nuclear Strategy," Journal of Strategic Studies 38, no. 1–2 (2015): 44–46, https://doi.org/10.1080/01402390.2014.958150 .

8 "An Interview with Carl Kaysen," 9.

9 Quoted in Long and Green, "Stalking the Secure Second Strike," 46.

10 James R. Schlesinger, "Some Notes on Deterrence in Western Europe," (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, June 30, 1962), 8.

11 Ernest R. May, John D. Steinbruner, and Thomas M. Wolfe, History of the Strategic Arms Competition 1945–1972 , v.1 (Washington D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1981), 475.

12 Quoted in Scott Sagan, "SIOP-62: The Nuclear War Plan Briefing to President Kennedy," International Security 12, no. 1 (Summer 1987): 34, https://www.jstor.org/stable/2538916 .

13 Bell and Macdonald, "How to Think About Nuclear Crises," 56. See also, May, Steinbruner, and Wolfe, History of the Strategic Arms Competition , 475; and Owen Coté, The Third Battle: Innovation in the US Navy's Silent Cold War Struggle with Soviet Submarines (Newport, RI: Naval War College, 2003), 42.

14 Bell and Macdonald, "How to Think About Nuclear Crises," 55, 59.

15 Bell and Macdonald, "How to Think About Nuclear Crises," 55.

16 Bell and Macdonald, "How to Think About Nuclear Crises," 55.

17 Bell and Macdonald, "How to Think About Nuclear Crises," 59, fn 96. For more on Bundy, see, e.g., McGeorge Bundy et al., "Nuclear Weapons and the Atlantic Alliance," Foreign Affairs 60, no. 4 (Spring 1982): 753–68, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/1982-03-01/nuclear-weapons-and-atlantic-alliance .

18 Bell and Macdonald, "How to Think About Nuclear Crises," 55.

19 Matthew Kroenig, The Logic of American Nuclear Strategy: Why Strategic Superiority Matters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 88.

20 Sagan, "SIOP-62," 50.

21 Bell and Macdonald, "How to Think About Nuclear Crises," 55.

22 Sagan, "SIOP-62," 36, and esp. n. 49.

23 Joint Chiefs of Staff Memorandum 907-62 to McNamara, Nov. 20, 1962, in Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS), 1961-1963 , Vol. 8, 387–89, quotation on 388, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1961-63v08/d109 .

24 For example, consider his remark, just after the peak of the crisis, that "My guess is, well, everybody sort of figures that, in extremis, everybody would use nuclear weapons," before strongly implying massive U.S. preemption would be preferable to tactical use. See ExComm Meeting, Oct. 29, 1962, in Ernest R. May and Philip Zelikow, eds., The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House During the Cuban Missile Crisis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 657.

25 For excellent accounts of Kennedy's Berlin policy and his views on nuclear superiority, which we draw upon heavily, see Marc Trachtenberg, A Constructed Peace: The Making of the European Settlement, 1945-1963 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), chap. 8; Francis J. Gavin, Nuclear Statecraft: History and Strategy in America's Atomic Age (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012), chaps. 2–3.

26 Trachtenberg, A Constructed Peace , 292, 293, 294, 295.

27 Trachtenberg, A Constructed Peace , 353, 351.

28 Legere memorandum for the record of the White House daily staff meeting, Dec. 10, 1962, National Defense University, Taylor Papers, Chairman's Staff Group December 1962-January 1963; quoted in FRUS 1961-1963 , Vol. 8, 436. https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1961-63v08/d118 .

29 Bell and Macdonald, "How to Think About Nuclear Crises," 43.

30 See, e.g., Trachtenberg, A Constructed Peace , 353, n. 3.

31 Bell and Macdonald, "How to Think About Nuclear Crises," 46, 47–49.

32 Thomas C. Schelling, Arms and Influence (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1966), 97.

33 Bell and Macdonald, "How to Think About Nuclear Crises," 46, 49.

34 Bell and Macdonald, "How to Think About Nuclear Crises," 46, 49–50.

35 Schelling, Arms and Influence , 102.

36 This work was supported by U.S. Air Force Academy (USAFA) and Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) Project on Advanced Systems and Concepts for Countering WMD (PASCC) award FA7000-19-2-0008. The opinions, findings, views, conclusions or recommendations contained herein are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies or endorsements, either expressed or implied, of USAFA, DTRA or the U.S. Government.

37 Mark S. Bell and Julia Macdonald, "How to Think About Nuclear Crises," Texas National Security Review 2, no. 2 (February 2019): 40-64, http://dx.doi.org/10.26153/tsw/1944 . For additional applications of our framework, see Mark S. Bell and Julia Macdonald, "Toward Deterrence: The Upside of the Trump-Kim Summit," War on the Rocks , June 15, 2018, https://warontherocks.com/2018/06/toward-deterrence-the-upside-of-the-trump-kim-summit/ ; Mark S. Bell and Julia Macdonald, "How Dangerous Was Kargil? Nuclear Crises in Comparative Perspective," Washington Quarterly 42, no. 2 (Summer 2019): 135–48, https://doi.org/10.1080/0163660X.2019.1626691 .

38 One minor correction to Green and Long's argument: The Cuban Missile Crisis is not the "sole empirical example" in our article of a crisis characterized by a lack of incentives for first use. In the article we also argue that the 2017 Doklam Crisis between India and China lacked strong incentives for first use, and we suspect there are plenty more crises of this sort in the historical record. Bell and Macdonald, "How to Think About Nuclear Crises," 60–61.

39 Bell and Macdonald, "How to Think About Nuclear Crises," 55.

40 The quote from the crisis that Green and Long cite does not really support their argument. Green and Long state: "consider [Kennedy's] remark, just after the peak of the crisis, that 'My guess is, well, everybody sort of figures that, in extremis, everybody would use nuclear weapons,' before strongly implying massive U.S. preemption would be preferable to tactical use." In fact, consider the full quote: "My guess is, well, everybody sort of figures that, in extremis, everybody would use nuclear weapons. The decision to use any kind of a nuclear weapon, even the tactical ones, presents such a risk of it getting out of control so quickly." Kennedy then trails off but "appears to agree" with an unidentified participant who states, "But Cuba's so small compared to the world." This suggests that Kennedy was expressing deep skepticism of any sort of nuclear use remaining limited, as well as doubts about the merits of taking such risks over Cuba, rather than making any sort of clear comparison between the merits of tactical use and massive pre-emption as Green and Long suggest. Ernest R. May and Philip Zelikow, eds., The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House During the Cuban Missile Crisis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 657.

41 For a recent analysis of Kennedy's behavior during the Cuban Missile Crisis that concludes that he was deeply skeptical of the benefits of nuclear superiority during the crisis, see James Cameron, The Double Game: The Demise of America's First Missile Defense System and the Rise of Strategic Arms Limitation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 29–37.

42 For example, see Francis Gavin's assessment that "little was done with" Kaysen's plan, a claim which echoes Marc Trachtenberg's earlier assessment that "it is hard to tell, however, what effect [Kaysen's analysis] had, and in particular whether, by the end of the year, the Air Force was prepared in operational terms to launch an attack of this sort." Francis J. Gavin, Nuclear Statecraft: History and Strategy in America's Atomic Age (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012), 38; Marc Trachtenberg, History and Strategy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 225.

43 Marc Trachtenberg, "The Influence of Nuclear Weapons in the Cuban Missile Crisis," International Security 10, no. 1 (Summer 1985), 162, http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/2538793 .

44 Thomas C. Schelling, Arms and Influence (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1966), 97.

45 Indeed, at the risk of adding even more complexity, the relevant threshold likely varies with the stakes of the crisis: Leaders are likely to view lesser damage limitation capabilities as politically relevant when the stakes are higher than they are when the stakes involved are lower.

46 For discussion of the North Korean case, see Bell and Macdonald, "Toward Deterrence," and Bell and Macdonald, "How to Think About Nuclear Crises," 61–62.

47 We do, however, suggest that our labels offer somewhat more joie de vivre than the alphabetic labels that Green and Long offer. Related Articles What Went Wrong? U.S.-China Relations from Tiananmen to Trump What Went Wrong? U.S.-China Relations from Tiananmen to Trump History Winter 2019 - 2020

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In Response to "How to Think About Nuclear Crises" Brendan Rittenhouse Green and Austin Long In their article in the February 2019 issue of the Texas National Security Review , Mark S. Bell and Julia Macdonald make a cogent argument that all nuclear crises are not created equal. [1] We agree with their basic thesis: There really are different sorts of nuclear crises, which have different risk and signaling profiles. We also concur that the existence of a variety of political and military dynamics within nuclear crises implies that we should exercise caution when interpreting the results of cross-sectional statistical analysis. If crises are not in fact all the same, then quantitative estimates of variable effects have a murkier meaning. [2] We should not be surprised that, to date, multiple studies have produced different results. Nevertheless, the article also highlights an alternate hypothesis for nuclear scholarship's inconsistent findings about crisis outcomes and dynamics: Nuclear crises are intrinsically hard to interpret. The balance of resolve between adversaries -- one of the most important variables in any crisis -- is influenced by many factors and is basically impossible to code ex ante . The two variables identified as critical by Bell and Macdonald for determining the shape of a crisis -- the nuclear balance and the controllability of escalation -- are only somewhat more tractable to interpretation. The consequence is that nuclear crises are prone to ambiguity, with coding challenges and case interpretations often resolved in favor of the analyst's pre-existing models of the world. In short, nuclear crises suffer from an especially pernicious interdependence between fact and theory. [3] To the extent that this problem can be ameliorated -- although it cannot be resolved entirely -- the solution is to employ the best possible conceptual and measurement standards for each key variable. Below we provide best practices for coding the nuclear balance, with particular focus on Bell and Macdonald's interpretation of the Cuban Missile Crisis. We argue that, following much of the extant literature, Bell and Macdonald make interpretive choices that unintentionally truncate the history that underlies their coding of the nuclear balance in this case. In our view, they incorrectly conclude that the United States had no military incentives to use nuclear weapons first in 1962. Below, we analyze their interpretation of the Cuba crisis by examining two indicators that might be used to establish the nuclear balance: the operational capabilities of both sides and the perceptions of key U.S. policymakers. We conclude by drawing out some broader implications of the crisis for their conceptual framework, offering a friendly amendment. What Were the Operational Capabilities on Both Sides in 1962? Bell and Macdonald's characterization of the nuclear balance in the Cuban Missile Crisis is a central part of their argument, as it is their sole empirical example of a crisis that "was not characterized by incentives for deliberate first nuclear use." They base this assertion on a brief overview of the balance of U.S. and Soviet strategic forces in 1962, followed by a claim that "[t]he U.S. government did not know where all of the Soviet warheads were located, and there were concerns that U.S. forces were too inaccurate to successfully target the Soviet arsenal." [4] Yet, any calculation of the incentives for deliberate first use must be based on the full context of the military balance. This hinges on the operational capabilities of both sides in the crisis, which includes a concept of operations of a first strike as well as the ability of both sides to execute nuclear operations. The available evidence on operational capabilities suggests that a U.S. first strike would have been likely to eliminate much, if not all, of the Soviet nuclear forces capable of striking the United States, as we summarize briefly below. Any concept of operations for a U.S. first strike would have been unlikely to rely solely, or even primarily, on relatively inaccurate ballistic missiles, as Bell and Macdonald imply. In a sketch of such an attack drafted by National Security Council staffer Carl Kaysen and Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Harry Rowen during the Berlin Crisis of 1961, the strike would have been delivered by a U.S. bomber force rather than with missiles. As Kaysen and Rowen describe, all Soviet nuclear forces of the time were "soft" targets, so U.S. nuclear bombers would have been more than accurate enough to destroy them. Moreover, a carefully planned bomber attack could have exploited the limitations of Soviet air defense in detecting low flying aircraft, enabling a successful surprise attack. [5] Kaysen would retrospectively note that U.S. missiles, which were inaccurate but armed with multi-megaton warheads, could also have been included in an attack, concluding, "we had a highly confident first strike." [6] Kaysen's confidence was based on his understanding of the relative ability of both sides to conduct nuclear operations. In terms of targeting intelligence, while the United States may not have known where all Soviet nuclear warheads were, it had detailed knowledge of the location of Soviet long-range delivery systems. This intelligence came from a host of sources, including satellite reconnaissance and human sources. U.S. intelligence also understood the low readiness of Soviet nuclear forces. [7] As Kaysen would later note, "By this time we knew that there were no goddamn missiles to speak of, we knew that there were only 6 or 7 operational ones and 3 or 4 more in the test sites and so on. As for the Soviet bombers, they were in a very low state of alert." [8] Of course, Kaysen's assessment of the balance of forces in 1961 might have been overly optimistic or no longer true a year later during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Yet, other contemporary analysts concurred. Andrew Marshall, who had access to the closely held targeting intelligence of this period, subsequently described the Soviet nuclear force, particularly its bombers, as "sitting ducks." [9] James Schlesinger, writing about four months before the crisis, noted, "During the next four or five years, because of nuclear dominance, the credibility of an American first-strike remains high." [10] The authors of the comprehensive History of the Strategic Arms Competition , drawing on a variety of highly classified U.S. sources, reach a similar conclusion:
[T]he Soviet strategic situation in 1962 might thus have been judged little short of desperate. A well-timed U.S. first strike, employing then-available ICBM [intercontinental ballistic missile] and SLBM [submarine-launched ballistic missile] forces as well as bombers, could have seemed threatening to the survival of most of the Soviet Union's own intercontinental strategic forces. Furthermore, there was the distinct, if small, probability that such an attack could have denied the Soviet Union the ability to inflict any significant retaliatory damage upon the United States. [11]
The Soviet nuclear-armed submarines of 1962 were likewise vulnerable to U.S. anti-submarine warfare, as they would have had to approach within a few hundred miles of the U.S. coast to launch their missiles. As early as 1959, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Nathan Twining testified that while "one or two isolated submarines" might reach the U.S. coast, in general, the United States had high confidence in its anti-submarine warfare capabilities. [12] The performance of these capabilities during the Cuban Missile Crisis, when multiple Soviet submarines were detected and some forced to surface, confirms their efficacy, as Bell and Macdonald acknowledge in their description of an attack on a Soviet submarine during the crisis. [13] How Was the Nuclear Balance Perceived in 1962? Bell and Macdonald offer three data points for their argument that U.S. policymakers did not perceive meaningful American nuclear superiority during the Cuban Missile Crisis. First, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and other veterans of the Kennedy administration attested retrospectively that nuclear superiority did not play an important role in the Cuba crisis. [14] Second, President John F. Kennedy received a Joint Chiefs of Staff briefing on the Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP) -- the U.S plan for strategic nuclear weapons employment -- in 1961, which reported that Soviet retaliation should be expected under all circumstances, even after an American pre-emptive strike. [15] Third, the president expressed ambivalence about the nuclear balance on the first day of the Cuba crisis. [16] But this evidence is a combination of truncated, biased, and weak. The retrospective testimony of Kennedy administration alumni is highly dubious. McNamara, National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy, and others were all highly motivated political actors, speaking two decades after the fact in the context of fierce nuclear policy debates on which they had taken highly public positions, as Bell and Macdonald acknowledge in a footnote. [17] The problems with giving much weight to such statements are especially evident given the fact that, as Bell and Macdonald acknowledge, [18] these very same advisers made remarks during the Cuba crisis that were much more favorably disposed to the idea of American nuclear superiority. [19] The Joint Chiefs of Staff briefing to Kennedy on SIOP-62 is evidence, contrary to Bell and Macdonald's interpretation, of American nuclear superiority in 1962. Bell and Macdonald make much of the briefing's caution that "Under any circumstances -- even a preemptive attack by the US -- it would be expected that some portion of the Soviet long-range nuclear force would strike the United States." [20] But interpreting this comment as evidence that the United States did not possess "politically meaningful damage limitation" capabilities makes sense only if one has already decided that the relevant standard for political meaning is a perfectly disarming strike. [21] Scott Sagan, in commenting on the briefing, underscores that "although the United States could expect to suffer some unspecified nuclear damage under any condition of war initiation, the Soviet Union would confront absolutely massive destruction regardless of whether it struck first or retaliated." [22] Crucially, the Joint Chiefs of Staff argued for maintaining a U.S. first-strike capability in a memorandum to McNamara commenting on his plans for strategic nuclear forces for fiscal years 1964­–68. This memorandum, sent shortly after the crisis, argues that the United States could not, in the future, entirely eliminate Soviet strategic forces. Yet, the memorandum continues: "The Joint Chiefs of Staff consider that a first-strike capability is both feasible and desirable, although the degree or level of attainment is a matter of judgment and depends upon the US reaction to a changing Soviet capability." [23] In short, not only did the Joint Chiefs of Staff conclude the United States had a meaningful first-strike capability in 1962, they believed such a capability could and should be maintained in the future. As for Kennedy's personal views, it is important not just to consider isolated quotes during the Cuban crisis -- after all, he made several comments that point in opposite directions. [24] One has to consider the political context of the Cuban affair writ large: the multi-year contest with the Soviets over the future of Berlin, and effectively, the NATO alliance. Moreover, Kennedy had deliberately built Western policy during the Berlin crisis on a foundation of nuclear superiority. NATO planning assumed that nuclear weapons would ultimately be used, and probably on a massive scale. [25] As Kennedy put it to French President Charles de Gaulle in June of 1961, "the advantage of striking first with nuclear weapons is so great that if [the] Soviets were to attack even without using such weapons, the U.S. could not afford to wait to use them." In July, he told the Joint Chiefs of Staff that "he felt the critical point is to be able to use nuclear weapons at a crucial point before they use them." In January of 1962, expecting the Berlin Crisis to heat up in the near future, he stressed the importance of operational military planning, and of thinking "hard about the ways and means of making decisions that might lead to nuclear war." As he put it at that meeting, "the credibility of our nuclear deterrent is sufficient to hold our present positions throughout the world" even if American conventional military power "on the ground does not match what the communists can bring to bear." [26] But the president recognized that this military strength was a wasting asset: The development of Soviet nuclear forces meant that the window of American nuclear superiority was closing. For this reason, Kennedy thought it important to bring the Berlin Crisis to a head as soon as possible, while the United States still possessed an edge. "It might be better to let a confrontation to develop over Berlin now rather than later," he argued just two weeks before the Cuba crisis. After all, "the military balance was more favorable to us than it would be later on." [27] Two months after the crisis, his views were little different. Reporting on a presidential trip to Strategic Air Command during which Kennedy was advised that "the really neat and clean way to get around all these complexities [about the precise state of the nuclear balance] was to strike first," Bundy "said that of course the President had not reacted with any such comments, but Bundy's clear implication was that the President felt that way." [28] Broader Implications Our argument about the nuclear balance during the Cuban Missile Crisis, if correct, requires some friendly amendments to Bell and Macdonald's framework for delineating types of nuclear crisis. Our discussion of the operational capabilities and policymaker perceptions during the Cuba crisis underscores that Bell and Macdonald's first variable -- "the strength of incentives to use nuclear weapons first in a crisis" [29] -- probably ought to be unpacked into two separate variables: military incentives for a first strike, and political bargaining incentives for selective use. After all, whatever the exact nuclear balance was during 1962, the United States was certainly postured for asymmetric escalation. The salience of America's posture is thrown into especially bold relief once the political context of the crisis is recognized: The Cuban affair was basically the climax of the superpower confrontation over Berlin, in which American force structure and planning was built around nuclear escalation. Indeed, this is how policymakers saw the Cuba crisis, where the fear of Soviet countermoves in Berlin hung as an ever-present cloud over discussions within the Executive Committee of the National Security Council. [30] According to Bell and Macdonald, either kind of incentive is sufficient to put a case into the "high" risk category for deliberate use. But in truth, political incentives to use nuclear weapons selectively -- even if only against military targets -- are ever present. They are just seldom triggered until matters have gone seriously awry on the battlefield. In short, we believe Bell and Macdonald were right to expend extra effort looking for military first-strike incentives, which add genuinely different sorts of risk to a crisis. We argue that operational capabilities and policymaker perceptions in the Cuba crisis show that such incentives are more common than generally credited. So, we would build on Bell and Macdonald's central insight that different types of nuclear crisis have different signaling and risk profiles by modestly amending their framework. We suggest that there are three types of nuclear crisis: those with political bargaining incentives for selective nuclear use (Type A); those with risks of both selective use and non-rational uncontrolled escalation (Type B); and those with political risks, non-rational risks, and military incentives for a nuclear first strike (Type C). Type A crises essentially collapse Bell and Macdonald's "staircase" and "stability-instability" models, and are relatively low risk. [31] Any proposed nuclear escalation amounts to a "threat to launch a disastrous war coolly and deliberately in response to some enemy transgression." [32] Such threats are hard to make credible until military collapse has put a state's entire international position at stake. Outcomes of Type A crises will be decided solely by the balance of resolve. We disagree with Bell and Macdonald's argument that the conventional military balance can ever determine the outcome of a nuclear crisis, since any conventional victory stands only by dint of the losing side's unwillingness to escalate. But the lower risks of a Type A crisis mean that signals of resolve are harder to send, and must occur through large and not particularly selective or subtle means -- essentially, larger conventional and nuclear operations. Type B crises are similar to Bell and Macdonald's "brinksmanship" model. [33] These have a significantly greater risk profile, since they also contain genuine risks of uncontrolled escalation in addition to political risks. Crisis outcomes remain dependent on the balance of resolve, but signaling is easier and can be much finer-grained than in Type A crises. The multiple opportunities for uncontrolled escalation mean that there are simply many more things a state can do at much lower levels of actual violence to manipulate the level of risk in a crisis. For instance, alerting nuclear forces will often not mean much in a Type A crisis (at least before the moment of conventional collapse), since there is no way things can get out of control. But alerting forces in a Type B crisis could set off a chain of events where states clash due to the interaction between each other's rules of nuclear engagement, incentivize forces inadvertently threatened by conventional operations to fire, or misperceive each other's actions. Any given military move will have more political meaning and will also be more dangerous. Type C crises are similar to Bell and Macdonald's "firestorm" model. [34] These are the riskiest sorts of nuclear crisis, since there are military reasons for escalation as well as political and non-rational risks. Outcomes will be influenced both by the balance of resolve and the nuclear balance: either could give states incentives to manipulate risk. Such signals will be the easiest to send, and the finest-grained of any type of crisis. But because the risk level jumps so much with any given signal, the time in which states can bargain may be short. [35] In sum, Bell and Macdonald have made an important contribution to the study of nuclear escalation by delineating different types of crisis with different risk and signaling profiles. We believe they understate the importance of American nuclear superiority during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and that these coding problems highlight some conceptual issues with their framework. In the end, though, our amendments appear to us relatively minor, further underscoring the importance of Bell and Macdonald's research. We hope that they, and other scholars, will continue to build on these findings. Brendan R. Green, Cincinnati, Ohio Austin Long, Arlington, Virginia In Response to a Critique Mark S. Bell and Julia Macdonald We thank Brendan Rittenhouse Green and Austin Long for their positive assessment of our work and for engaging with our argument so constructively. [36] Their contribution represents exactly the sort of productive scholarly debate we were hoping to provoke. As we stated in our article, we intended our work to be only an initial effort to think through the heterogeneity of nuclear crises, and we are delighted that Green and Long have taken seriously our suggestion for scholars to continue to think in more detail about the ways in which nuclear crises differ from one another. Their arguments are characteristically insightful, offer a range of interesting and important arguments and suggestions, and have forced us to think harder about a number of aspects of our argument. In this reply, we briefly lay out the argument we made in our article before responding to Green and Long's suggestion that we underestimate the incentives to launch a nuclear first-strike during the Cuban Missile Crisis and their proposal of an alternative typology for understanding nuclear crises. Our Argument In our article, we offer a framework for thinking through the heterogeneity of nuclear crises. [37] While the existing literature on such crises assumes that they all follow a certain logic (although there is disagreement on what that logic is), we identify factors that might lead nuclear crises to differ from one another in consequential ways. In particular, we argue that two factors -- whether incentives are present for nuclear first use and the extent to which escalation is controllable by the leaders involved -- lead to fundamentally different sorts of crises. These two variables generate four possible "ideal type" models of nuclear crises: "staircase" crises (characterized by high first-use incentives and high controllability), "brinkmanship" crises (low first-use incentives and low controllability), "stability-instability" crises (low first-use incentives and high controllability), and "firestorm" crises (high first-use incentives and low controllability). Each of these ideal types exhibits distinctive dynamics and offers different answers to important questions, such as, how likely is nuclear escalation, and how might it occur? How feasible is signaling within a crisis? What factors determine success? For example, crises exhibiting high incentives for nuclear first use combined with low crisis controllability -- firestorm crises -- are particularly volatile, and the most dangerous of all four models in terms of likelihood of nuclear war. These are the crises that statesmen should avoid except under the direst circumstances or for the highest stakes. By contrast, where incentives for the first use of nuclear weapons are low and there is high crisis controllability -- the stability-instability model -- the risk of nuclear use is lowest. When incentives for nuclear first use are low and crisis controllability is also low -- brinkmanship crises -- or when incentives for first use are high and crisis controllability is also high -- the staircase model -- there is a moderate risk of nuclear use, although through two quite different processes. For the brinkmanship model, low levels of crisis controllability combined with few incentives for nuclear first use mean that escalation to the nuclear level would likely only happen inadvertently and through a process of uncontrolled, rather than deliberate, escalation. On the other hand, high levels of crisis controllability combined with high incentives for nuclear first use -- characteristic of the staircase model -- mean that escalation would more likely occur through a careful, deliberate process. First-Use Incentives in the Cuban Missile Crisis First, Green and Long address the extent of incentives for launching a nuclear first strike during the Cuban Missile Crisis. In short, they argue that there were substantial military incentives for America to strike first during the crisis and that these were understood and appreciated by American leaders. [38] While space constraints meant that our analysis of the nuclear balance in the Cuban Missile Crisis was briefer than we would have liked, we certainly agree that the United States possessed nuclear superiority over the Soviet Union during the crisis. [39] The debate between us and Green and Long is, therefore, primarily over whether the nuclear balance that we (more or less) agree existed in 1962 was sufficiently lopsided as to offer meaningful incentives for nuclear first use, and whether it was perceived as such by the leaders involved. In this, we do have somewhat different interpretations of how much weight to assign to particular pieces of evidence. For example, we believe that the retrospective assessment of key participants does have evidentiary value, although we acknowledge (as we did in our article) the biases of such assessments in this case. Given the rapidly shifting nuclear balance, we place less weight on President John F. Kennedy's statements in years prior to the crisis than on those he made during the crisis itself, [40] which were more consistently skeptical of the benefits associated with U.S. nuclear superiority at a time when the stakes were at their highest. [41] We also place somewhat less weight than Green and Long on the 1961 analysis of Carl Kaysen, given doubts about whether his report had much of an effect on operational planning. [42] And finally, we put less weight on the Joint Chiefs of Staff document from 1962 cited by Green and Long in support of their argument, given that it acknowledges the U.S. inability to eliminate Soviet strategic nuclear forces -- thus highlighting the dangers of a U.S. nuclear first strike -- as well as focuses on future force planning in the aftermath of the crisis. We would also note that our assessment that U.S. nuclear superiority in the Cuban Missile Crisis did not obviously translate into politically meaningful incentives for first use is in line with standard interpretations of this case, including among scholars that Green and Long cite. For Marc Trachtenberg, for example, "[t]he American ability to 'limit damage' by destroying an enemy's strategic forces did not seem, in American eyes, to carry much political weight" during the Cuban Missile Crisis. [43] Similarly, the relative lack of incentives for rational first use in the crisis motivated Thomas Schelling's assessment that only an "unforeseeable and unpredictable" process could have led to nuclear use in the crisis. [44] Regardless of whether participants in the Cuban Missile Crisis understood the advantages (or lack thereof) associated with nuclear superiority, in some ways, our disagreement with Green and Long is more of a conceptual one: where to draw the threshold at which a state's level of nuclear superiority (and corresponding ability to limit retaliatory damage) should be deemed "politically meaningful," i.e., sufficiently lopsided to offer incentives for first use. This is a topic about which there is certainly room for legitimate disagreement. "Political relevance" is a tricky concept, which reinforces Green and Long's broader argument that "nuclear crises are intrinsically hard to interpret" -- a point with which we agree. [45] But Green and Long seem to view any ability to limit retaliatory damage as politically meaningful, since they argue that a nuclear balance that would have likely left a number of American cities destroyed (and potentially more), even in the aftermath of a U.S. first strike, nonetheless provided strong military incentives for first use. By contrast, our view is that the threshold should be somewhat higher than this, though lower than Green and Long's characterization of our position: We do not, in fact, think that the relevant standard for political meaning "is a perfectly disarming strike." Part of our motivation in wanting a threshold higher than "any damage limitation capability" is that it increases the utility of the typology we offer by allowing us to draw the line in such a way that a substantial number of empirical cases exist on either side of that threshold. Green and Long, by contrast, seem more satisfied to draw the line in such a way that cases exhibiting very different incentives for first use -- a crisis with North Korea today compared to the Cuban Missile Crisis, for example -- would both be classified on the same side of the threshold. [46] Green and Long's approach would ignore the important differences between these cases by treating both crises as exhibiting strong incentives for nuclear first use. This would be akin to producing a meteorological map that rarely shows rain because the forecaster judges the relevant threshold to be "catastrophic flooding." There is nothing fundamentally incorrect about making such a choice, but it is not necessarily the most helpful approach to shedding light on the empirical variation we observe in the historical record. An Alternative Typology of Nuclear Crises Second, Green and Long offer an alternative typology for understanding the heterogeneity of nuclear crises. Green and Long argue that there are three types of crisis: "those with political bargaining incentives for selective nuclear use (Type A); those with risks of both selective use and non-rational uncontrolled escalation (Type B); and those with political risks, non-rational risks, and military incentives for a nuclear first strike (Type C)." This is an interesting proposal and we have no fundamental objections to their typology. [47] After all, one can categorize the same phenomenon in different ways, and different typologies may be useful for different purposes. Space constraints inevitably prevent Green and Long from offering a full justification for their typology, and we would certainly encourage them to offer a more fleshed out articulation of it and its merits. Their initial discussion of the different types of signals that states can send within different types of crises is especially productive and goes beyond the relatively simple discussion of the feasibility of signaling that we included in our article. We offer two critiques that might be helpful as they (and others) continue to consider the relative merits of these two typologies and build upon them. First, it is not clear how different their proposed typology is from the one we offer. At times, for example, Green and Long suggest that their typology simply divides up the same conceptual space we identify using our two variables, but does so differently. For example, they argue that they are essentially collapsing two of our quadrants (stability-instability crises and staircase crises) into Type A crises, while Type B crises are similar to our brinkmanship crises and Type C crises are similar to our firestorm crises. If so, their typology does not really suggest a fundamentally different understanding of how nuclear crises vary, but merely of where the most interesting variation occurs within the conceptual space we identify. The key question, then, in determining the relative merits of the two typologies, is whether there is important variation between the two categories that Green and Long collapse. We continue to think the distinctions between stability-instability crises and staircase crises are important. Although both types of crises are relatively controllable and have limited risk of what Green and Long call "non-rational uncontrolled escalation," they have very different risks when it comes to nuclear use: lower in stability-instability crises and higher in staircase crises. The factors that determine success in stability-instability crises -- primarily the conventional military balance due to the very low risk of nuclear escalation -- do not necessarily determine success in staircase crises, in which the nuclear balance may matter. As a result, we think that collapsing these two categories is not necessarily a helpful analytical move. Second, to the extent that their typology differs from our own, it does so in ways that are not necessarily helpful in shedding light on the variation across nuclear crises that we observe. In particular, separating incentives for first use into "political bargaining incentives" and "military incentives" is an intriguing proposal but we are not yet fully persuaded of its merits. Given that one of Green and Long's goals is to increase the clarity of the typology we offer, and given that they acknowledge the difficulties of coding the nuclear balance, demanding even more fine-grained assessments in order to divide incentives for first use into two separate (but conceptually highly connected) components may be a lot to ask of analysts. Moreover, given Green and Long's assertion that "political incentives to use nuclear weapons selectively are ever present," their argument in fact implies (as mentioned above) that political incentives for first use are not a source of interesting variation within nuclear crises. We disagree with this conclusion substantively, but it is worth noting that it also has important conceptual implications for Green and Long's typology: It means that their three types of crises all exhibit political incentives for nuclear first use. If this is the case, then political incentives for nuclear first use simply fall out of the analysis. In effect, crises without political incentives for nuclear first use are simply ruled out by definition. This analytic move renders portions of their argument tautologous. For example, they argue that the conventional balance cannot "ever determine the outcome of a nuclear crisis," but this is only because they assume that there are always political incentives to use nuclear weapons first, and thus, "any conventional victory stands only by dint of the losing side's unwillingness to escalate." More broadly, this approach seems to us at least somewhat epistemologically problematic. In our view, it is better to be conceptually open to the existence of certain types of crises and then discover that such crises do not occur empirically, than it is to rule them out by definition and risk discovering later that such crises have, in fact, taken place. In sum, while we are not fully persuaded by Green and Long's critiques, we are extremely grateful for their insightful, thorough, and constructive engagement with our article and look forward to their future work on these issues. We hope that they, along with other scholars, will continue to explore the ways in which nuclear crises differ from one another, and the implications of such differences for crisis dynamics. Mark S. Bell, Minneapolis, Minnesota Julia Macdonald, Denver, Colorado [post_title] => Contrasting Views on How to Code a Nuclear Crisis [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => open [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => contrasting-views-on-how-to-code-a-nuclear-crisis [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2020-01-09 11:06:24 [post_modified_gmt] => 2020-01-09 16:06:24 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => http://tnsr.org/?p=1948 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw [lead] => In this issue's correspondence section, Brendan Rittenhouse Green and Austin Long offer up an alternative way to code nuclear crises in response to Mark S. Bell and Julia Macdonald's article in the February 2019 issue of TNSR. Bell and Macdonald, in turn, offer a response to Green and Long's critique. [pubinfo] => [issue] => Vol 2, Iss 4 [quotes] => [style] => framing [type] => Framing [style_label] => The Foundation [download] => Array ( [title] => PDF Download [file] => 2442 ) [authors] => Array ( [0] => 279 [1] => 138 [2] => 258 [3] => 259 ) [endnotes] => Array ( [title] => Endnotes [endnotes] => [1] Mark S. Bell and Julia Macdonald, "How to Think About Nuclear Crises," Texas National Security Review 2, no. 2 (February 2019): 40–64, http://dx.doi.org/10.26153/tsw/1944 . [2] Bell and Macdonald, "How to Think About Nuclear Crises," 42, 63. [3] For an excellent treatment of this problem in the international relations context, see Robert Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), 154–72. [4] Bell and Macdonald, "How to Think About Nuclear Crises," 55. [5] See Memorandum for General Maxwell Taylor from Carl Kaysen, "Strategic Air Planning and Berlin," Sept. 5, 1961, from National Archives, Record Group 218, Records of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB56/BerlinC1.pdf . [6] Marc Trachtenberg, David Rosenberg, and Stephen Van Evera, "An Interview with Carl Kaysen," MIT Security Studies Program (1988), 9, http://web.mit.edu/SSP/publications/working_papers/Kaysen%20working%20paper.pdf . [7] Austin Long and Brendan Rittenhouse Green, "Stalking the Secure Second Strike: Intelligence, Counterforce, and Nuclear Strategy," Journal of Strategic Studies 38, no. 1–2 (2015): 44–46, https://doi.org/10.1080/01402390.2014.958150 . [8] "An Interview with Carl Kaysen," 9. [9] Quoted in Long and Green, "Stalking the Secure Second Strike," 46. [10] James R. Schlesinger, "Some Notes on Deterrence in Western Europe," (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, June 30, 1962), 8. [11] Ernest R. May, John D. Steinbruner, and Thomas M. Wolfe, History of the Strategic Arms Competition 1945–1972 , v.1 (Washington D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1981), 475. [12] Quoted in Scott Sagan, "SIOP-62: The Nuclear War Plan Briefing to President Kennedy," International Security 12, no. 1 (Summer 1987): 34, https://www.jstor.org/stable/2538916 . [13] Bell and Macdonald, "How to Think About Nuclear Crises," 56. See also, May, Steinbruner, and Wolfe, History of the Strategic Arms Competition , 475; and Owen Coté, The Third Battle: Innovation in the US Navy's Silent Cold War Struggle with Soviet Submarines (Newport, RI: Naval War College, 2003), 42. [14] Bell and Macdonald, "How to Think About Nuclear Crises," 55, 59. [15] Bell and Macdonald, "How to Think About Nuclear Crises," 55. [16] Bell and Macdonald, "How to Think About Nuclear Crises," 55. [17] Bell and Macdonald, "How to Think About Nuclear Crises," 59, fn 96. For more on Bundy, see, e.g., McGeorge Bundy et al., "Nuclear Weapons and the Atlantic Alliance," Foreign Affairs 60, no. 4 (Spring 1982): 753–68, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/1982-03-01/nuclear-weapons-and-atlantic-alliance . [18] Bell and Macdonald, "How to Think About Nuclear Crises," 55. [19] Matthew Kroenig, The Logic of American Nuclear Strategy: Why Strategic Superiority Matters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 88. [20] Sagan, "SIOP-62," 50. [21] Bell and Macdonald, "How to Think About Nuclear Crises," 55. [22] Sagan, "SIOP-62," 36, and esp. n. 49. [23] Joint Chiefs of Staff Memorandum 907-62 to McNamara, Nov. 20, 1962, in Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS), 1961-1963 , Vol. 8, 387–89, quotation on 388, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1961-63v08/d109 . [24] For example, consider his remark, just after the peak of the crisis, that "My guess is, well, everybody sort of figures that, in extremis, everybody would use nuclear weapons," before strongly implying massive U.S. preemption would be preferable to tactical use. See ExComm Meeting, Oct. 29, 1962, in Ernest R. May and Philip Zelikow, eds., The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House During the Cuban Missile Crisis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 657. [25] For excellent accounts of Kennedy's Berlin policy and his views on nuclear superiority, which we draw upon heavily, see Marc Trachtenberg, A Constructed Peace: The Making of the European Settlement, 1945-1963 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), chap. 8; Francis J. Gavin, Nuclear Statecraft: History and Strategy in America's Atomic Age (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012), chaps. 2–3. [26] Trachtenberg, A Constructed Peace , 292, 293, 294, 295. [27] Trachtenberg, A Constructed Peace , 353, 351. [28] Legere memorandum for the record of the White House daily staff meeting, Dec. 10, 1962, National Defense University, Taylor Papers, Chairman's Staff Group December 1962-January 1963; quoted in FRUS 1961-1963 , Vol. 8, 436. https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1961-63v08/d118 . [29] Bell and Macdonald, "How to Think About Nuclear Crises," 43. [30] See, e.g., Trachtenberg, A Constructed Peace , 353, n. 3. [31] Bell and Macdonald, "How to Think About Nuclear Crises," 46, 47–49. [32] Thomas C. Schelling, Arms and Influence (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1966), 97. [33] Bell and Macdonald, "How to Think About Nuclear Crises," 46, 49. [34] Bell and Macdonald, "How to Think About Nuclear Crises," 46, 49–50. [35] Schelling, Arms and Influence , 102. [36] This work was supported by U.S. Air Force Academy (USAFA) and Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) Project on Advanced Systems and Concepts for Countering WMD (PASCC) award FA7000-19-2-0008. The opinions, findings, views, conclusions or recommendations contained herein are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies or endorsements, either expressed or implied, of USAFA, DTRA or the U.S. Government. [37] Mark S. Bell and Julia Macdonald, "How to Think About Nuclear Crises," Texas National Security Review 2, no. 2 (February 2019): 40-64, http://dx.doi.org/10.26153/tsw/1944 . For additional applications of our framework, see Mark S. Bell and Julia Macdonald, "Toward Deterrence: The Upside of the Trump-Kim Summit," War on the Rocks , June 15, 2018, https://warontherocks.com/2018/06/toward-deterrence-the-upside-of-the-trump-kim-summit/ ; Mark S. Bell and Julia Macdonald, "How Dangerous Was Kargil? Nuclear Crises in Comparative Perspective," Washington Quarterly 42, no. 2 (Summer 2019): 135–48, https://doi.org/10.1080/0163660X.2019.1626691 . [38] One minor correction to Green and Long's argument: The Cuban Missile Crisis is not the "sole empirical example" in our article of a crisis characterized by a lack of incentives for first use. In the article we also argue that the 2017 Doklam Crisis between India and China lacked strong incentives for first use, and we suspect there are plenty more crises of this sort in the historical record. Bell and Macdonald, "How to Think About Nuclear Crises," 60–61. [39] Bell and Macdonald, "How to Think About Nuclear Crises," 55. [40] The quote from the crisis that Green and Long cite does not really support their argument. Green and Long state: "consider [Kennedy's] remark, just after the peak of the crisis, that 'My guess is, well, everybody sort of figures that, in extremis, everybody would use nuclear weapons,' before strongly implying massive U.S. preemption would be preferable to tactical use." In fact, consider the full quote: "My guess is, well, everybody sort of figures that, in extremis, everybody would use nuclear weapons. The decision to use any kind of a nuclear weapon, even the tactical ones, presents such a risk of it getting out of control so quickly." Kennedy then trails off but "appears to agree" with an unidentified participant who states, "But Cuba's so small compared to the world." This suggests that Kennedy was expressing deep skepticism of any sort of nuclear use remaining limited, as well as doubts about the merits of taking such risks over Cuba, rather than making any sort of clear comparison between the merits of tactical use and massive pre-emption as Green and Long suggest. Ernest R. May and Philip Zelikow, eds., The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House During the Cuban Missile Crisis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 657. [41] For a recent analysis of Kennedy's behavior during the Cuban Missile Crisis that concludes that he was deeply skeptical of the benefits of nuclear superiority during the crisis, see James Cameron, The Double Game: The Demise of America's First Missile Defense System and the Rise of Strategic Arms Limitation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 29–37. [42] For example, see Francis Gavin's assessment that "little was done with" Kaysen's plan, a claim which echoes Marc Trachtenberg's earlier assessment that "it is hard to tell, however, what effect [Kaysen's analysis] had, and in particular whether, by the end of the year, the Air Force was prepared in operational terms to launch an attack of this sort." Francis J. Gavin, Nuclear Statecraft: History and Strategy in America's Atomic Age (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012), 38; Marc Trachtenberg, History and Strategy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 225. [43] Marc Trachtenberg, "The Influence of Nuclear Weapons in the Cuban Missile Crisis," International Security 10, no. 1 (Summer 1985), 162, http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/2538793 . [44] Thomas C. Schelling, Arms and Influence (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1966), 97. [45] Indeed, at the risk of adding even more complexity, the relevant threshold likely varies with the stakes of the crisis: Leaders are likely to view lesser damage limitation capabilities as politically relevant when the stakes are higher than they are when the stakes involved are lower. [46] For discussion of the North Korean case, see Bell and Macdonald, "Toward Deterrence," and Bell and Macdonald, "How to Think About Nuclear Crises," 61–62. [47] We do, however, suggest that our labels offer somewhat more joie de vivre than the alphabetic labels that Green and Long offer. ) [contents] => Array ( [title] => [contents] => ) ) [queried_object_id] => 1948 [request] => SELECT wp_posts.* FROM wp_posts WHERE 1=1 AND ( ( YEAR( wp_posts.post_date ) = 2019 AND MONTH( wp_posts.post_date ) = 10 ) ) AND wp_posts.post_name = 'contrasting-views-on-how-to-code-a-nuclear-crisis' AND wp_posts.post_type = 'post' ORDER BY wp_posts.post_date DESC [posts] => Array ( [0] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 1948 [post_author] => 279 [post_date] => 2019-10-03 05:00:03 [post_date_gmt] => 2019-10-03 09:00:03 [post_content] => In Response to "How to Think About Nuclear Crises" Brendan Rittenhouse Green and Austin Long In their article in the February 2019 issue of the Texas National Security Review , Mark S. Bell and Julia Macdonald make a cogent argument that all nuclear crises are not created equal. [1] We agree with their basic thesis: There really are different sorts of nuclear crises, which have different risk and signaling profiles. We also concur that the existence of a variety of political and military dynamics within nuclear crises implies that we should exercise caution when interpreting the results of cross-sectional statistical analysis. If crises are not in fact all the same, then quantitative estimates of variable effects have a murkier meaning. [2] We should not be surprised that, to date, multiple studies have produced different results. Nevertheless, the article also highlights an alternate hypothesis for nuclear scholarship's inconsistent findings about crisis outcomes and dynamics: Nuclear crises are intrinsically hard to interpret. The balance of resolve between adversaries -- one of the most important variables in any crisis -- is influenced by many factors and is basically impossible to code ex ante . The two variables identified as critical by Bell and Macdonald for determining the shape of a crisis -- the nuclear balance and the controllability of escalation -- are only somewhat more tractable to interpretation. The consequence is that nuclear crises are prone to ambiguity, with coding challenges and case interpretations often resolved in favor of the analyst's pre-existing models of the world. In short, nuclear crises suffer from an especially pernicious interdependence between fact and theory. [3] To the extent that this problem can be ameliorated -- although it cannot be resolved entirely -- the solution is to employ the best possible conceptual and measurement standards for each key variable. Below we provide best practices for coding the nuclear balance, with particular focus on Bell and Macdonald's interpretation of the Cuban Missile Crisis. We argue that, following much of the extant literature, Bell and Macdonald make interpretive choices that unintentionally truncate the history that underlies their coding of the nuclear balance in this case. In our view, they incorrectly conclude that the United States had no military incentives to use nuclear weapons first in 1962. Below, we analyze their interpretation of the Cuba crisis by examining two indicators that might be used to establish the nuclear balance: the operational capabilities of both sides and the perceptions of key U.S. policymakers. We conclude by drawing out some broader implications of the crisis for their conceptual framework, offering a friendly amendment. What Were the Operational Capabilities on Both Sides in 1962? Bell and Macdonald's characterization of the nuclear balance in the Cuban Missile Crisis is a central part of their argument, as it is their sole empirical example of a crisis that "was not characterized by incentives for deliberate first nuclear use." They base this assertion on a brief overview of the balance of U.S. and Soviet strategic forces in 1962, followed by a claim that "[t]he U.S. government did not know where all of the Soviet warheads were located, and there were concerns that U.S. forces were too inaccurate to successfully target the Soviet arsenal." [4] Yet, any calculation of the incentives for deliberate first use must be based on the full context of the military balance. This hinges on the operational capabilities of both sides in the crisis, which includes a concept of operations of a first strike as well as the ability of both sides to execute nuclear operations. The available evidence on operational capabilities suggests that a U.S. first strike would have been likely to eliminate much, if not all, of the Soviet nuclear forces capable of striking the United States, as we summarize briefly below. Any concept of operations for a U.S. first strike would have been unlikely to rely solely, or even primarily, on relatively inaccurate ballistic missiles, as Bell and Macdonald imply. In a sketch of such an attack drafted by National Security Council staffer Carl Kaysen and Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Harry Rowen during the Berlin Crisis of 1961, the strike would have been delivered by a U.S. bomber force rather than with missiles. As Kaysen and Rowen describe, all Soviet nuclear forces of the time were "soft" targets, so U.S. nuclear bombers would have been more than accurate enough to destroy them. Moreover, a carefully planned bomber attack could have exploited the limitations of Soviet air defense in detecting low flying aircraft, enabling a successful surprise attack. [5] Kaysen would retrospectively note that U.S. missiles, which were inaccurate but armed with multi-megaton warheads, could also have been included in an attack, concluding, "we had a highly confident first strike." [6] Kaysen's confidence was based on his understanding of the relative ability of both sides to conduct nuclear operations. In terms of targeting intelligence, while the United States may not have known where all Soviet nuclear warheads were, it had detailed knowledge of the location of Soviet long-range delivery systems. This intelligence came from a host of sources, including satellite reconnaissance and human sources. U.S. intelligence also understood the low readiness of Soviet nuclear forces. [7] As Kaysen would later note, "By this time we knew that there were no goddamn missiles to speak of, we knew that there were only 6 or 7 operational ones and 3 or 4 more in the test sites and so on. As for the Soviet bombers, they were in a very low state of alert." [8] Of course, Kaysen's assessment of the balance of forces in 1961 might have been overly optimistic or no longer true a year later during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Yet, other contemporary analysts concurred. Andrew Marshall, who had access to the closely held targeting intelligence of this period, subsequently described the Soviet nuclear force, particularly its bombers, as "sitting ducks." [9] James Schlesinger, writing about four months before the crisis, noted, "During the next four or five years, because of nuclear dominance, the credibility of an American first-strike remains high." [10] The authors of the comprehensive History of the Strategic Arms Competition , drawing on a variety of highly classified U.S. sources, reach a similar conclusion:
[T]he Soviet strategic situation in 1962 might thus have been judged little short of desperate. A well-timed U.S. first strike, employing then-available ICBM [intercontinental ballistic missile] and SLBM [submarine-launched ballistic missile] forces as well as bombers, could have seemed threatening to the survival of most of the Soviet Union's own intercontinental strategic forces. Furthermore, there was the distinct, if small, probability that such an attack could have denied the Soviet Union the ability to inflict any significant retaliatory damage upon the United States. [11]
The Soviet nuclear-armed submarines of 1962 were likewise vulnerable to U.S. anti-submarine warfare, as they would have had to approach within a few hundred miles of the U.S. coast to launch their missiles. As early as 1959, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Nathan Twining testified that while "one or two isolated submarines" might reach the U.S. coast, in general, the United States had high confidence in its anti-submarine warfare capabilities. [12] The performance of these capabilities during the Cuban Missile Crisis, when multiple Soviet submarines were detected and some forced to surface, confirms their efficacy, as Bell and Macdonald acknowledge in their description of an attack on a Soviet submarine during the crisis. [13] How Was the Nuclear Balance Perceived in 1962? Bell and Macdonald offer three data points for their argument that U.S. policymakers did not perceive meaningful American nuclear superiority during the Cuban Missile Crisis. First, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and other veterans of the Kennedy administration attested retrospectively that nuclear superiority did not play an important role in the Cuba crisis. [14] Second, President John F. Kennedy received a Joint Chiefs of Staff briefing on the Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP) -- the U.S plan for strategic nuclear weapons employment -- in 1961, which reported that Soviet retaliation should be expected under all circumstances, even after an American pre-emptive strike. [15] Third, the president expressed ambivalence about the nuclear balance on the first day of the Cuba crisis. [16] But this evidence is a combination of truncated, biased, and weak. The retrospective testimony of Kennedy administration alumni is highly dubious. McNamara, National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy, and others were all highly motivated political actors, speaking two decades after the fact in the context of fierce nuclear policy debates on which they had taken highly public positions, as Bell and Macdonald acknowledge in a footnote. [17] The problems with giving much weight to such statements are especially evident given the fact that, as Bell and Macdonald acknowledge, [18] these very same advisers made remarks during the Cuba crisis that were much more favorably disposed to the idea of American nuclear superiority. [19] The Joint Chiefs of Staff briefing to Kennedy on SIOP-62 is evidence, contrary to Bell and Macdonald's interpretation, of American nuclear superiority in 1962. Bell and Macdonald make much of the briefing's caution that "Under any circumstances -- even a preemptive attack by the US -- it would be expected that some portion of the Soviet long-range nuclear force would strike the United States." [20] But interpreting this comment as evidence that the United States did not possess "politically meaningful damage limitation" capabilities makes sense only if one has already decided that the relevant standard for political meaning is a perfectly disarming strike. [21] Scott Sagan, in commenting on the briefing, underscores that "although the United States could expect to suffer some unspecified nuclear damage under any condition of war initiation, the Soviet Union would confront absolutely massive destruction regardless of whether it struck first or retaliated." [22] Crucially, the Joint Chiefs of Staff argued for maintaining a U.S. first-strike capability in a memorandum to McNamara commenting on his plans for strategic nuclear forces for fiscal years 1964­–68. This memorandum, sent shortly after the crisis, argues that the United States could not, in the future, entirely eliminate Soviet strategic forces. Yet, the memorandum continues: "The Joint Chiefs of Staff consider that a first-strike capability is both feasible and desirable, although the degree or level of attainment is a matter of judgment and depends upon the US reaction to a changing Soviet capability." [23] In short, not only did the Joint Chiefs of Staff conclude the United States had a meaningful first-strike capability in 1962, they believed such a capability could and should be maintained in the future. As for Kennedy's personal views, it is important not just to consider isolated quotes during the Cuban crisis -- after all, he made several comments that point in opposite directions. [24] One has to consider the political context of the Cuban affair writ large: the multi-year contest with the Soviets over the future of Berlin, and effectively, the NATO alliance. Moreover, Kennedy had deliberately built Western policy during the Berlin crisis on a foundation of nuclear superiority. NATO planning assumed that nuclear weapons would ultimately be used, and probably on a massive scale. [25] As Kennedy put it to French President Charles de Gaulle in June of 1961, "the advantage of striking first with nuclear weapons is so great that if [the] Soviets were to attack even without using such weapons, the U.S. could not afford to wait to use them." In July, he told the Joint Chiefs of Staff that "he felt the critical point is to be able to use nuclear weapons at a crucial point before they use them." In January of 1962, expecting the Berlin Crisis to heat up in the near future, he stressed the importance of operational military planning, and of thinking "hard about the ways and means of making decisions that might lead to nuclear war." As he put it at that meeting, "the credibility of our nuclear deterrent is sufficient to hold our present positions throughout the world" even if American conventional military power "on the ground does not match what the communists can bring to bear." [26] But the president recognized that this military strength was a wasting asset: The development of Soviet nuclear forces meant that the window of American nuclear superiority was closing. For this reason, Kennedy thought it important to bring the Berlin Crisis to a head as soon as possible, while the United States still possessed an edge. "It might be better to let a confrontation to develop over Berlin now rather than later," he argued just two weeks before the Cuba crisis. After all, "the military balance was more favorable to us than it would be later on." [27] Two months after the crisis, his views were little different. Reporting on a presidential trip to Strategic Air Command during which Kennedy was advised that "the really neat and clean way to get around all these complexities [about the precise state of the nuclear balance] was to strike first," Bundy "said that of course the President had not reacted with any such comments, but Bundy's clear implication was that the President felt that way." [28] Broader Implications Our argument about the nuclear balance during the Cuban Missile Crisis, if correct, requires some friendly amendments to Bell and Macdonald's framework for delineating types of nuclear crisis. Our discussion of the operational capabilities and policymaker perceptions during the Cuba crisis underscores that Bell and Macdonald's first variable -- "the strength of incentives to use nuclear weapons first in a crisis" [29] -- probably ought to be unpacked into two separate variables: military incentives for a first strike, and political bargaining incentives for selective use. After all, whatever the exact nuclear balance was during 1962, the United States was certainly postured for asymmetric escalation. The salience of America's posture is thrown into especially bold relief once the political context of the crisis is recognized: The Cuban affair was basically the climax of the superpower confrontation over Berlin, in which American force structure and planning was built around nuclear escalation. Indeed, this is how policymakers saw the Cuba crisis, where the fear of Soviet countermoves in Berlin hung as an ever-present cloud over discussions within the Executive Committee of the National Security Council. [30] According to Bell and Macdonald, either kind of incentive is sufficient to put a case into the "high" risk category for deliberate use. But in truth, political incentives to use nuclear weapons selectively -- even if only against military targets -- are ever present. They are just seldom triggered until matters have gone seriously awry on the battlefield. In short, we believe Bell and Macdonald were right to expend extra effort looking for military first-strike incentives, which add genuinely different sorts of risk to a crisis. We argue that operational capabilities and policymaker perceptions in the Cuba crisis show that such incentives are more common than generally credited. So, we would build on Bell and Macdonald's central insight that different types of nuclear crisis have different signaling and risk profiles by modestly amending their framework. We suggest that there are three types of nuclear crisis: those with political bargaining incentives for selective nuclear use (Type A); those with risks of both selective use and non-rational uncontrolled escalation (Type B); and those with political risks, non-rational risks, and military incentives for a nuclear first strike (Type C). Type A crises essentially collapse Bell and Macdonald's "staircase" and "stability-instability" models, and are relatively low risk. [31] Any proposed nuclear escalation amounts to a "threat to launch a disastrous war coolly and deliberately in response to some enemy transgression." [32] Such threats are hard to make credible until military collapse has put a state's entire international position at stake. Outcomes of Type A crises will be decided solely by the balance of resolve. We disagree with Bell and Macdonald's argument that the conventional military balance can ever determine the outcome of a nuclear crisis, since any conventional victory stands only by dint of the losing side's unwillingness to escalate. But the lower risks of a Type A crisis mean that signals of resolve are harder to send, and must occur through large and not particularly selective or subtle means -- essentially, larger conventional and nuclear operations. Type B crises are similar to Bell and Macdonald's "brinksmanship" model. [33] These have a significantly greater risk profile, since they also contain genuine risks of uncontrolled escalation in addition to political risks. Crisis outcomes remain dependent on the balance of resolve, but signaling is easier and can be much finer-grained than in Type A crises. The multiple opportunities for uncontrolled escalation mean that there are simply many more things a state can do at much lower levels of actual violence to manipulate the level of risk in a crisis. For instance, alerting nuclear forces will often not mean much in a Type A crisis (at least before the moment of conventional collapse), since there is no way things can get out of control. But alerting forces in a Type B crisis could set off a chain of events where states clash due to the interaction between each other's rules of nuclear engagement, incentivize forces inadvertently threatened by conventional operations to fire, or misperceive each other's actions. Any given military move will have more political meaning and will also be more dangerous. Type C crises are similar to Bell and Macdonald's "firestorm" model. [34] These are the riskiest sorts of nuclear crisis, since there are military reasons for escalation as well as political and non-rational risks. Outcomes will be influenced both by the balance of resolve and the nuclear balance: either could give states incentives to manipulate risk. Such signals will be the easiest to send, and the finest-grained of any type of crisis. But because the risk level jumps so much with any given signal, the time in which states can bargain may be short. [35] In sum, Bell and Macdonald have made an important contribution to the study of nuclear escalation by delineating different types of crisis with different risk and signaling profiles. We believe they understate the importance of American nuclear superiority during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and that these coding problems highlight some conceptual issues with their framework. In the end, though, our amendments appear to us relatively minor, further underscoring the importance of Bell and Macdonald's research. We hope that they, and other scholars, will continue to build on these findings. Brendan R. Green, Cincinnati, Ohio Austin Long, Arlington, Virginia In Response to a Critique Mark S. Bell and Julia Macdonald We thank Brendan Rittenhouse Green and Austin Long for their positive assessment of our work and for engaging with our argument so constructively. [36] Their contribution represents exactly the sort of productive scholarly debate we were hoping to provoke. As we stated in our article, we intended our work to be only an initial effort to think through the heterogeneity of nuclear crises, and we are delighted that Green and Long have taken seriously our suggestion for scholars to continue to think in more detail about the ways in which nuclear crises differ from one another. Their arguments are characteristically insightful, offer a range of interesting and important arguments and suggestions, and have forced us to think harder about a number of aspects of our argument. In this reply, we briefly lay out the argument we made in our article before responding to Green and Long's suggestion that we underestimate the incentives to launch a nuclear first-strike during the Cuban Missile Crisis and their proposal of an alternative typology for understanding nuclear crises. Our Argument In our article, we offer a framework for thinking through the heterogeneity of nuclear crises. [37] While the existing literature on such crises assumes that they all follow a certain logic (although there is disagreement on what that logic is), we identify factors that might lead nuclear crises to differ from one another in consequential ways. In particular, we argue that two factors -- whether incentives are present for nuclear first use and the extent to which escalation is controllable by the leaders involved -- lead to fundamentally different sorts of crises. These two variables generate four possible "ideal type" models of nuclear crises: "staircase" crises (characterized by high first-use incentives and high controllability), "brinkmanship" crises (low first-use incentives and low controllability), "stability-instability" crises (low first-use incentives and high controllability), and "firestorm" crises (high first-use incentives and low controllability). Each of these ideal types exhibits distinctive dynamics and offers different answers to important questions, such as, how likely is nuclear escalation, and how might it occur? How feasible is signaling within a crisis? What factors determine success? For example, crises exhibiting high incentives for nuclear first use combined with low crisis controllability -- firestorm crises -- are particularly volatile, and the most dangerous of all four models in terms of likelihood of nuclear war. These are the crises that statesmen should avoid except under the direst circumstances or for the highest stakes. By contrast, where incentives for the first use of nuclear weapons are low and there is high crisis controllability -- the stability-instability model -- the risk of nuclear use is lowest. When incentives for nuclear first use are low and crisis controllability is also low -- brinkmanship crises -- or when incentives for first use are high and crisis controllability is also high -- the staircase model -- there is a moderate risk of nuclear use, although through two quite different processes. For the brinkmanship model, low levels of crisis controllability combined with few incentives for nuclear first use mean that escalation to the nuclear level would likely only happen inadvertently and through a process of uncontrolled, rather than deliberate, escalation. On the other hand, high levels of crisis controllability combined with high incentives for nuclear first use -- characteristic of the staircase model -- mean that escalation would more likely occur through a careful, deliberate process. First-Use Incentives in the Cuban Missile Crisis First, Green and Long address the extent of incentives for launching a nuclear first strike during the Cuban Missile Crisis. In short, they argue that there were substantial military incentives for America to strike first during the crisis and that these were understood and appreciated by American leaders. [38] While space constraints meant that our analysis of the nuclear balance in the Cuban Missile Crisis was briefer than we would have liked, we certainly agree that the United States possessed nuclear superiority over the Soviet Union during the crisis. [39] The debate between us and Green and Long is, therefore, primarily over whether the nuclear balance that we (more or less) agree existed in 1962 was sufficiently lopsided as to offer meaningful incentives for nuclear first use, and whether it was perceived as such by the leaders involved. In this, we do have somewhat different interpretations of how much weight to assign to particular pieces of evidence. For example, we believe that the retrospective assessment of key participants does have evidentiary value, although we acknowledge (as we did in our article) the biases of such assessments in this case. Given the rapidly shifting nuclear balance, we place less weight on President John F. Kennedy's statements in years prior to the crisis than on those he made during the crisis itself, [40] which were more consistently skeptical of the benefits associated with U.S. nuclear superiority at a time when the stakes were at their highest. [41] We also place somewhat less weight than Green and Long on the 1961 analysis of Carl Kaysen, given doubts about whether his report had much of an effect on operational planning. [42] And finally, we put less weight on the Joint Chiefs of Staff document from 1962 cited by Green and Long in support of their argument, given that it acknowledges the U.S. inability to eliminate Soviet strategic nuclear forces -- thus highlighting the dangers of a U.S. nuclear first strike -- as well as focuses on future force planning in the aftermath of the crisis. We would also note that our assessment that U.S. nuclear superiority in the Cuban Missile Crisis did not obviously translate into politically meaningful incentives for first use is in line with standard interpretations of this case, including among scholars that Green and Long cite. For Marc Trachtenberg, for example, "[t]he American ability to 'limit damage' by destroying an enemy's strategic forces did not seem, in American eyes, to carry much political weight" during the Cuban Missile Crisis. [43] Similarly, the relative lack of incentives for rational first use in the crisis motivated Thomas Schelling's assessment that only an "unforeseeable and unpredictable" process could have led to nuclear use in the crisis. [44] Regardless of whether participants in the Cuban Missile Crisis understood the advantages (or lack thereof) associated with nuclear superiority, in some ways, our disagreement with Green and Long is more of a conceptual one: where to draw the threshold at which a state's level of nuclear superiority (and corresponding ability to limit retaliatory damage) should be deemed "politically meaningful," i.e., sufficiently lopsided to offer incentives for first use. This is a topic about which there is certainly room for legitimate disagreement. "Political relevance" is a tricky concept, which reinforces Green and Long's broader argument that "nuclear crises are intrinsically hard to interpret" -- a point with which we agree. [45] But Green and Long seem to view any ability to limit retaliatory damage as politically meaningful, since they argue that a nuclear balance that would have likely left a number of American cities destroyed (and potentially more), even in the aftermath of a U.S. first strike, nonetheless provided strong military incentives for first use. By contrast, our view is that the threshold should be somewhat higher than this, though lower than Green and Long's characterization of our position: We do not, in fact, think that the relevant standard for political meaning "is a perfectly disarming strike." Part of our motivation in wanting a threshold higher than "any damage limitation capability" is that it increases the utility of the typology we offer by allowing us to draw the line in such a way that a substantial number of empirical cases exist on either side of that threshold. Green and Long, by contrast, seem more satisfied to draw the line in such a way that cases exhibiting very different incentives for first use -- a crisis with North Korea today compared to the Cuban Missile Crisis, for example -- would both be classified on the same side of the threshold. [46] Green and Long's approach would ignore the important differences between these cases by treating both crises as exhibiting strong incentives for nuclear first use. This would be akin to producing a meteorological map that rarely shows rain because the forecaster judges the relevant threshold to be "catastrophic flooding." There is nothing fundamentally incorrect about making such a choice, but it is not necessarily the most helpful approach to shedding light on the empirical variation we observe in the historical record. An Alternative Typology of Nuclear Crises Second, Green and Long offer an alternative typology for understanding the heterogeneity of nuclear crises. Green and Long argue that there are three types of crisis: "those with political bargaining incentives for selective nuclear use (Type A); those with risks of both selective use and non-rational uncontrolled escalation (Type B); and those with political risks, non-rational risks, and military incentives for a nuclear first strike (Type C)." This is an interesting proposal and we have no fundamental objections to their typology. [47] After all, one can categorize the same phenomenon in different ways, and different typologies may be useful for different purposes. Space constraints inevitably prevent Green and Long from offering a full justification for their typology, and we would certainly encourage them to offer a more fleshed out articulation of it and its merits. Their initial discussion of the different types of signals that states can send within different types of crises is especially productive and goes beyond the relatively simple discussion of the feasibility of signaling that we included in our article. We offer two critiques that might be helpful as they (and others) continue to consider the relative merits of these two typologies and build upon them. First, it is not clear how different their proposed typology is from the one we offer. At times, for example, Green and Long suggest that their typology simply divides up the same conceptual space we identify using our two variables, but does so differently. For example, they argue that they are essentially collapsing two of our quadrants (stability-instability crises and staircase crises) into Type A crises, while Type B crises are similar to our brinkmanship crises and Type C crises are similar to our firestorm crises. If so, their typology does not really suggest a fundamentally different understanding of how nuclear crises vary, but merely of where the most interesting variation occurs within the conceptual space we identify. The key question, then, in determining the relative merits of the two typologies, is whether there is important variation between the two categories that Green and Long collapse. We continue to think the distinctions between stability-instability crises and staircase crises are important. Although both types of crises are relatively controllable and have limited risk of what Green and Long call "non-rational uncontrolled escalation," they have very different risks when it comes to nuclear use: lower in stability-instability crises and higher in staircase crises. The factors that determine success in stability-instability crises -- primarily the conventional military balance due to the very low risk of nuclear escalation -- do not necessarily determine success in staircase crises, in which the nuclear balance may matter. As a result, we think that collapsing these two categories is not necessarily a helpful analytical move. Second, to the extent that their typology differs from our own, it does so in ways that are not necessarily helpful in shedding light on the variation across nuclear crises that we observe. In particular, separating incentives for first use into "political bargaining incentives" and "military incentives" is an intriguing proposal but we are not yet fully persuaded of its merits. Given that one of Green and Long's goals is to increase the clarity of the typology we offer, and given that they acknowledge the difficulties of coding the nuclear balance, demanding even more fine-grained assessments in order to divide incentives for first use into two separate (but conceptually highly connected) components may be a lot to ask of analysts. Moreover, given Green and Long's assertion that "political incentives to use nuclear weapons selectively are ever present," their argument in fact implies (as mentioned above) that political incentives for first use are not a source of interesting variation within nuclear crises. We disagree with this conclusion substantively, but it is worth noting that it also has important conceptual implications for Green and Long's typology: It means that their three types of crises all exhibit political incentives for nuclear first use. If this is the case, then political incentives for nuclear first use simply fall out of the analysis. In effect, crises without political incentives for nuclear first use are simply ruled out by definition. This analytic move renders portions of their argument tautologous. For example, they argue that the conventional balance cannot "ever determine the outcome of a nuclear crisis," but this is only because they assume that there are always political incentives to use nuclear weapons first, and thus, "any conventional victory stands only by dint of the losing side's unwillingness to escalate." More broadly, this approach seems to us at least somewhat epistemologically problematic. In our view, it is better to be conceptually open to the existence of certain types of crises and then discover that such crises do not occur empirically, than it is to rule them out by definition and risk discovering later that such crises have, in fact, taken place. In sum, while we are not fully persuaded by Green and Long's critiques, we are extremely grateful for their insightful, thorough, and constructive engagement with our article and look forward to their future work on these issues. We hope that they, along with other scholars, will continue to explore the ways in which nuclear crises differ from one another, and the implications of such differences for crisis dynamics. Mark S. Bell, Minneapolis, Minnesota Julia Macdonald, Denver, Colorado [post_title] => Contrasting Views on How to Code a Nuclear Crisis [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => open [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => contrasting-views-on-how-to-code-a-nuclear-crisis [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2020-01-09 11:06:24 [post_modified_gmt] => 2020-01-09 16:06:24 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => http://tnsr.org/?p=1948 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw [lead] => In this issue's correspondence section, Brendan Rittenhouse Green and Austin Long offer up an alternative way to code nuclear crises in response to Mark S. Bell and Julia Macdonald's article in the February 2019 issue of TNSR. Bell and Macdonald, in turn, offer a response to Green and Long's critique. [pubinfo] => [issue] => Vol 2, Iss 4 [quotes] => [style] => framing [type] => Framing [style_label] => The Foundation [download] => Array ( [title] => PDF Download [file] => 2442 ) [authors] => Array ( [0] => 279 [1] => 138 [2] => 258 [3] => 259 ) [endnotes] => Array ( [title] => Endnotes [endnotes] => [1] Mark S. Bell and Julia Macdonald, "How to Think About Nuclear Crises," Texas National Security Review 2, no. 2 (February 2019): 40–64, http://dx.doi.org/10.26153/tsw/1944 . [2] Bell and Macdonald, "How to Think About Nuclear Crises," 42, 63. [3] For an excellent treatment of this problem in the international relations context, see Robert Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), 154–72. [4] Bell and Macdonald, "How to Think About Nuclear Crises," 55. [5] See Memorandum for General Maxwell Taylor from Carl Kaysen, "Strategic Air Planning and Berlin," Sept. 5, 1961, from National Archives, Record Group 218, Records of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB56/BerlinC1.pdf . [6] Marc Trachtenberg, David Rosenberg, and Stephen Van Evera, "An Interview with Carl Kaysen," MIT Security Studies Program (1988), 9, http://web.mit.edu/SSP/publications/working_papers/Kaysen%20working%20paper.pdf . [7] Austin Long and Brendan Rittenhouse Green, "Stalking the Secure Second Strike: Intelligence, Counterforce, and Nuclear Strategy," Journal of Strategic Studies 38, no. 1–2 (2015): 44–46, https://doi.org/10.1080/01402390.2014.958150 . [8] "An Interview with Carl Kaysen," 9. [9] Quoted in Long and Green, "Stalking the Secure Second Strike," 46. [10] James R. Schlesinger, "Some Notes on Deterrence in Western Europe," (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, June 30, 1962), 8. [11] Ernest R. May, John D. Steinbruner, and Thomas M. Wolfe, History of the Strategic Arms Competition 1945–1972 , v.1 (Washington D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1981), 475. [12] Quoted in Scott Sagan, "SIOP-62: The Nuclear War Plan Briefing to President Kennedy," International Security 12, no. 1 (Summer 1987): 34, https://www.jstor.org/stable/2538916 . [13] Bell and Macdonald, "How to Think About Nuclear Crises," 56. See also, May, Steinbruner, and Wolfe, History of the Strategic Arms Competition , 475; and Owen Coté, The Third Battle: Innovation in the US Navy's Silent Cold War Struggle with Soviet Submarines (Newport, RI: Naval War College, 2003), 42. [14] Bell and Macdonald, "How to Think About Nuclear Crises," 55, 59. [15] Bell and Macdonald, "How to Think About Nuclear Crises," 55. [16] Bell and Macdonald, "How to Think About Nuclear Crises," 55. [17] Bell and Macdonald, "How to Think About Nuclear Crises," 59, fn 96. For more on Bundy, see, e.g., McGeorge Bundy et al., "Nuclear Weapons and the Atlantic Alliance," Foreign Affairs 60, no. 4 (Spring 1982): 753–68, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/1982-03-01/nuclear-weapons-and-atlantic-alliance . [18] Bell and Macdonald, "How to Think About Nuclear Crises," 55. [19] Matthew Kroenig, The Logic of American Nuclear Strategy: Why Strategic Superiority Matters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 88. [20] Sagan, "SIOP-62," 50. [21] Bell and Macdonald, "How to Think About Nuclear Crises," 55. [22] Sagan, "SIOP-62," 36, and esp. n. 49. [23] Joint Chiefs of Staff Memorandum 907-62 to McNamara, Nov. 20, 1962, in Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS), 1961-1963 , Vol. 8, 387–89, quotation on 388, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1961-63v08/d109 . [24] For example, consider his remark, just after the peak of the crisis, that "My guess is, well, everybody sort of figures that, in extremis, everybody would use nuclear weapons," before strongly implying massive U.S. preemption would be preferable to tactical use. See ExComm Meeting, Oct. 29, 1962, in Ernest R. May and Philip Zelikow, eds., The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House During the Cuban Missile Crisis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 657. [25] For excellent accounts of Kennedy's Berlin policy and his views on nuclear superiority, which we draw upon heavily, see Marc Trachtenberg, A Constructed Peace: The Making of the European Settlement, 1945-1963 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), chap. 8; Francis J. Gavin, Nuclear Statecraft: History and Strategy in America's Atomic Age (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012), chaps. 2–3. [26] Trachtenberg, A Constructed Peace , 292, 293, 294, 295. [27] Trachtenberg, A Constructed Peace , 353, 351. [28] Legere memorandum for the record of the White House daily staff meeting, Dec. 10, 1962, National Defense University, Taylor Papers, Chairman's Staff Group December 1962-January 1963; quoted in FRUS 1961-1963 , Vol. 8, 436. https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1961-63v08/d118 . [29] Bell and Macdonald, "How to Think About Nuclear Crises," 43. [30] See, e.g., Trachtenberg, A Constructed Peace , 353, n. 3. [31] Bell and Macdonald, "How to Think About Nuclear Crises," 46, 47–49. [32] Thomas C. Schelling, Arms and Influence (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1966), 97. [33] Bell and Macdonald, "How to Think About Nuclear Crises," 46, 49. [34] Bell and Macdonald, "How to Think About Nuclear Crises," 46, 49–50. [35] Schelling, Arms and Influence , 102. [36] This work was supported by U.S. Air Force Academy (USAFA) and Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) Project on Advanced Systems and Concepts for Countering WMD (PASCC) award FA7000-19-2-0008. The opinions, findings, views, conclusions or recommendations contained herein are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies or endorsements, either expressed or implied, of USAFA, DTRA or the U.S. Government. [37] Mark S. Bell and Julia Macdonald, "How to Think About Nuclear Crises," Texas National Security Review 2, no. 2 (February 2019): 40-64, http://dx.doi.org/10.26153/tsw/1944 . For additional applications of our framework, see Mark S. Bell and Julia Macdonald, "Toward Deterrence: The Upside of the Trump-Kim Summit," War on the Rocks , June 15, 2018, https://warontherocks.com/2018/06/toward-deterrence-the-upside-of-the-trump-kim-summit/ ; Mark S. Bell and Julia Macdonald, "How Dangerous Was Kargil? Nuclear Crises in Comparative Perspective," Washington Quarterly 42, no. 2 (Summer 2019): 135–48, https://doi.org/10.1080/0163660X.2019.1626691 . [38] One minor correction to Green and Long's argument: The Cuban Missile Crisis is not the "sole empirical example" in our article of a crisis characterized by a lack of incentives for first use. In the article we also argue that the 2017 Doklam Crisis between India and China lacked strong incentives for first use, and we suspect there are plenty more crises of this sort in the historical record. Bell and Macdonald, "How to Think About Nuclear Crises," 60–61. [39] Bell and Macdonald, "How to Think About Nuclear Crises," 55. [40] The quote from the crisis that Green and Long cite does not really support their argument. Green and Long state: "consider [Kennedy's] remark, just after the peak of the crisis, that 'My guess is, well, everybody sort of figures that, in extremis, everybody would use nuclear weapons,' before strongly implying massive U.S. preemption would be preferable to tactical use." In fact, consider the full quote: "My guess is, well, everybody sort of figures that, in extremis, everybody would use nuclear weapons. The decision to use any kind of a nuclear weapon, even the tactical ones, presents such a risk of it getting out of control so quickly." Kennedy then trails off but "appears to agree" with an unidentified participant who states, "But Cuba's so small compared to the world." This suggests that Kennedy was expressing deep skepticism of any sort of nuclear use remaining limited, as well as doubts about the merits of taking such risks over Cuba, rather than making any sort of clear comparison between the merits of tactical use and massive pre-emption as Green and Long suggest. Ernest R. May and Philip Zelikow, eds., The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House During the Cuban Missile Crisis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 657. [41] For a recent analysis of Kennedy's behavior during the Cuban Missile Crisis that concludes that he was deeply skeptical of the benefits of nuclear superiority during the crisis, see James Cameron, The Double Game: The Demise of America's First Missile Defense System and the Rise of Strategic Arms Limitation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 29–37. [42] For example, see Francis Gavin's assessment that "little was done with" Kaysen's plan, a claim which echoes Marc Trachtenberg's earlier assessment that "it is hard to tell, however, what effect [Kaysen's analysis] had, and in particular whether, by the end of the year, the Air Force was prepared in operational terms to launch an attack of this sort." Francis J. Gavin, Nuclear Statecraft: History and Strategy in America's Atomic Age (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012), 38; Marc Trachtenberg, History and Strategy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 225. [43] Marc Trachtenberg, "The Influence of Nuclear Weapons in the Cuban Missile Crisis," International Security 10, no. 1 (Summer 1985), 162, http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/2538793 . [44] Thomas C. Schelling, Arms and Influence (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1966), 97. [45] Indeed, at the risk of adding even more complexity, the relevant threshold likely varies with the stakes of the crisis: Leaders are likely to view lesser damage limitation capabilities as politically relevant when the stakes are higher than they are when the stakes involved are lower. [46] For discussion of the North Korean case, see Bell and Macdonald, "Toward Deterrence," and Bell and Macdonald, "How to Think About Nuclear Crises," 61–62. [47] We do, however, suggest that our labels offer somewhat more joie de vivre than the alphabetic labels that Green and Long offer. ) [contents] => Array ( [title] => [contents] => ) ) ) [post_count] => 1 [current_post] => -1 [in_the_loop] => [post] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 1948 [post_author] => 279 [post_date] => 2019-10-03 05:00:03 [post_date_gmt] => 2019-10-03 09:00:03 [post_content] => In Response to "How to Think About Nuclear Crises" Brendan Rittenhouse Green and Austin Long In their article in the February 2019 issue of the Texas National Security Review , Mark S. Bell and Julia Macdonald make a cogent argument that all nuclear crises are not created equal. [1] We agree with their basic thesis: There really are different sorts of nuclear crises, which have different risk and signaling profiles. We also concur that the existence of a variety of political and military dynamics within nuclear crises implies that we should exercise caution when interpreting the results of cross-sectional statistical analysis. If crises are not in fact all the same, then quantitative estimates of variable effects have a murkier meaning. [2] We should not be surprised that, to date, multiple studies have produced different results. Nevertheless, the article also highlights an alternate hypothesis for nuclear scholarship's inconsistent findings about crisis outcomes and dynamics: Nuclear crises are intrinsically hard to interpret. The balance of resolve between adversaries -- one of the most important variables in any crisis -- is influenced by many factors and is basically impossible to code ex ante . The two variables identified as critical by Bell and Macdonald for determining the shape of a crisis -- the nuclear balance and the controllability of escalation -- are only somewhat more tractable to interpretation. The consequence is that nuclear crises are prone to ambiguity, with coding challenges and case interpretations often resolved in favor of the analyst's pre-existing models of the world. In short, nuclear crises suffer from an especially pernicious interdependence between fact and theory. [3] To the extent that this problem can be ameliorated -- although it cannot be resolved entirely -- the solution is to employ the best possible conceptual and measurement standards for each key variable. Below we provide best practices for coding the nuclear balance, with particular focus on Bell and Macdonald's interpretation of the Cuban Missile Crisis. We argue that, following much of the extant literature, Bell and Macdonald make interpretive choices that unintentionally truncate the history that underlies their coding of the nuclear balance in this case. In our view, they incorrectly conclude that the United States had no military incentives to use nuclear weapons first in 1962. Below, we analyze their interpretation of the Cuba crisis by examining two indicators that might be used to establish the nuclear balance: the operational capabilities of both sides and the perceptions of key U.S. policymakers. We conclude by drawing out some broader implications of the crisis for their conceptual framework, offering a friendly amendment. What Were the Operational Capabilities on Both Sides in 1962? Bell and Macdonald's characterization of the nuclear balance in the Cuban Missile Crisis is a central part of their argument, as it is their sole empirical example of a crisis that "was not characterized by incentives for deliberate first nuclear use." They base this assertion on a brief overview of the balance of U.S. and Soviet strategic forces in 1962, followed by a claim that "[t]he U.S. government did not know where all of the Soviet warheads were located, and there were concerns that U.S. forces were too inaccurate to successfully target the Soviet arsenal." [4] Yet, any calculation of the incentives for deliberate first use must be based on the full context of the military balance. This hinges on the operational capabilities of both sides in the crisis, which includes a concept of operations of a first strike as well as the ability of both sides to execute nuclear operations. The available evidence on operational capabilities suggests that a U.S. first strike would have been likely to eliminate much, if not all, of the Soviet nuclear forces capable of striking the United States, as we summarize briefly below. Any concept of operations for a U.S. first strike would have been unlikely to rely solely, or even primarily, on relatively inaccurate ballistic missiles, as Bell and Macdonald imply. In a sketch of such an attack drafted by National Security Council staffer Carl Kaysen and Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Harry Rowen during the Berlin Crisis of 1961, the strike would have been delivered by a U.S. bomber force rather than with missiles. As Kaysen and Rowen describe, all Soviet nuclear forces of the time were "soft" targets, so U.S. nuclear bombers would have been more than accurate enough to destroy them. Moreover, a carefully planned bomber attack could have exploited the limitations of Soviet air defense in detecting low flying aircraft, enabling a successful surprise attack. [5] Kaysen would retrospectively note that U.S. missiles, which were inaccurate but armed with multi-megaton warheads, could also have been included in an attack, concluding, "we had a highly confident first strike." [6] Kaysen's confidence was based on his understanding of the relative ability of both sides to conduct nuclear operations. In terms of targeting intelligence, while the United States may not have known where all Soviet nuclear warheads were, it had detailed knowledge of the location of Soviet long-range delivery systems. This intelligence came from a host of sources, including satellite reconnaissance and human sources.

U.S. intelligence also understood the low readiness of Soviet nuclear forces. [7] As Kaysen would later note, "By this time we knew that there were no goddamn missiles to speak of, we knew that there were only 6 or 7 operational ones and 3 or 4 more in the test sites and so on.

As for the Soviet bombers, they were in a very low state of alert." [8]

Of course, Kaysen's assessment of the balance of forces in 1961 might have been overly optimistic or no longer true a year later during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Yet, other contemporary analysts concurred. Andrew Marshall, who had access to the closely held targeting intelligence of this period, subsequently described the Soviet nuclear force, particularly its bombers, as "sitting ducks." [9] James Schlesinger, writing about four months before the crisis, noted, "During the next four or five years, because of nuclear dominance, the credibility of an American first-strike remains high." [10]

The authors of the comprehensive History of the Strategic Arms Competition , drawing on a variety of highly classified U.S. sources, reach a similar conclusion:

[T]he Soviet strategic situation in 1962 might thus have been judged little short of desperate. A well-timed U.S. first strike, employing then-available ICBM [intercontinental ballistic missile] and SLBM [submarine-launched ballistic missile] forces as well as bombers, could have seemed threatening to the survival of most of the Soviet Union's own intercontinental strategic forces. Furthermore, there was the distinct, if small, probability that such an attack could have denied the Soviet Union the ability to inflict any significant retaliatory damage upon the United States. [11]
The Soviet nuclear-armed submarines of 1962 were likewise vulnerable to U.S. anti-submarine warfare, as they would have had to approach within a few hundred miles of the U.S. coast to launch their missiles. As early as 1959, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Nathan Twining testified that while "one or two isolated submarines" might reach the U.S. coast, in general, the United States had high confidence in its anti-submarine warfare capabilities. [12] The performance of these capabilities during the Cuban Missile Crisis, when multiple Soviet submarines were detected and some forced to surface, confirms their efficacy, as Bell and Macdonald acknowledge in their description of an attack on a Soviet submarine during the crisis. [13]

How Was the Nuclear Balance Perceived in 1962?

Bell and Macdonald offer three data points for their argument that U.S. policymakers did not perceive meaningful American nuclear superiority during the Cuban Missile Crisis. First, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and other veterans of the Kennedy administration attested retrospectively that nuclear superiority did not play an important role in the Cuba crisis. [14] Second, President John F. Kennedy received a Joint Chiefs of Staff briefing on the Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP) -- the U.S plan for strategic nuclear weapons employment -- in 1961, which reported that Soviet retaliation should be expected under all circumstances, even after an American pre-emptive strike. [15] Third, the president expressed ambivalence about the nuclear balance on the first day of the Cuba crisis. [16] But this evidence is a combination of truncated, biased, and weak. The retrospective testimony of Kennedy administration alumni is highly dubious. McNamara, National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy, and others were all highly motivated political actors, speaking two decades after the fact in the context of fierce nuclear policy debates on which they had taken highly public positions, as Bell and Macdonald acknowledge in a footnote. [17] The problems with giving much weight to such statements are especially evident given the fact that, as Bell and Macdonald acknowledge, [18] these very same advisers made remarks during the Cuba crisis that were much more favorably disposed to the idea of American nuclear superiority. [19] The Joint Chiefs of Staff briefing to Kennedy on SIOP-62 is evidence, contrary to Bell and Macdonald's interpretation, of American nuclear superiority in 1962. Bell and Macdonald make much of the briefing's caution that "Under any circumstances -- even a preemptive attack by the US -- it would be expected that some portion of the Soviet long-range nuclear force would strike the United States." [20] But interpreting this comment as evidence that the United States did not possess "politically meaningful damage limitation" capabilities makes sense only if one has already decided that the relevant standard for political meaning is a perfectly disarming strike. [21] Scott Sagan, in commenting on the briefing, underscores that "although the United States could expect to suffer some unspecified nuclear damage under any condition of war initiation, the Soviet Union would confront absolutely massive destruction regardless of whether it struck first or retaliated." [22] Crucially, the Joint Chiefs of Staff argued for maintaining a U.S. first-strike capability in a memorandum to McNamara commenting on his plans for strategic nuclear forces for fiscal years 1964­–68. This memorandum, sent shortly after the crisis, argues that the United States could not, in the future, entirely eliminate Soviet strategic forces. Yet, the memorandum continues: "The Joint Chiefs of Staff consider that a first-strike capability is both feasible and desirable, although the degree or level of attainment is a matter of judgment and depends upon the US reaction to a changing Soviet capability." [23] In short, not only did the Joint Chiefs of Staff conclude the United States had a meaningful first-strike capability in 1962, they believed such a capability could and should be maintained in the future. As for Kennedy's personal views, it is important not just to consider isolated quotes during the Cuban crisis -- after all, he made several comments that point in opposite directions. [24] One has to consider the political context of the Cuban affair writ large: the multi-year contest with the Soviets over the future of Berlin, and effectively, the NATO alliance. Moreover, Kennedy had deliberately built Western policy during the Berlin crisis on a foundation of nuclear superiority. NATO planning assumed that nuclear weapons would ultimately be used, and probably on a massive scale. [25] As Kennedy put it to French President Charles de Gaulle in June of 1961, "the advantage of striking first with nuclear weapons is so great that if [the] Soviets were to attack even without using such weapons, the U.S. could not afford to wait to use them." In July, he told the Joint Chiefs of Staff that "he felt the critical point is to be able to use nuclear weapons at a crucial point before they use them." In January of 1962, expecting the Berlin Crisis to heat up in the near future, he stressed the importance of operational military planning, and of thinking "hard about the ways and means of making decisions that might lead to nuclear war." As he put it at that meeting, "the credibility of our nuclear deterrent is sufficient to hold our present positions throughout the world" even if American conventional military power "on the ground does not match what the communists can bring to bear." [26] But the president recognized that this military strength was a wasting asset: The development of Soviet nuclear forces meant that the window of American nuclear superiority was closing. For this reason, Kennedy thought it important to bring the Berlin Crisis to a head as soon as possible, while the United States still possessed an edge. "It might be better to let a confrontation to develop over Berlin now rather than later," he argued just two weeks before the Cuba crisis. After all, "the military balance was more favorable to us than it would be later on." [27] Two months after the crisis, his views were little different. Reporting on a presidential trip to Strategic Air Command during which Kennedy was advised that "the really neat and clean way to get around all these complexities [about the precise state of the nuclear balance] was to strike first," Bundy "said that of course the President had not reacted with any such comments, but Bundy's clear implication was that the President felt that way." [28]

Broader Implications

Our argument about the nuclear balance during the Cuban Missile Crisis, if correct, requires some friendly amendments to Bell and Macdonald's framework for delineating types of nuclear crisis. Our discussion of the operational capabilities and policymaker perceptions during the Cuba crisis underscores that Bell and Macdonald's first variable -- "the strength of incentives to use nuclear weapons first in a crisis" [29] -- probably ought to be unpacked into two separate variables: military incentives for a first strike, and political bargaining incentives for selective use. After all, whatever the exact nuclear balance was during 1962, the United States was certainly postured for asymmetric escalation. The salience of America's posture is thrown into especially bold relief once the political context of the crisis is recognized: The Cuban affair was basically the climax of the superpower confrontation over Berlin, in which American force structure and planning was built around nuclear escalation. Indeed, this is how policymakers saw the Cuba crisis, where the fear of Soviet countermoves in Berlin hung as an ever-present cloud over discussions within the Executive Committee of the National Security Council. [30] According to Bell and Macdonald, either kind of incentive is sufficient to put a case into the "high" risk category for deliberate use. But in truth, political incentives to use nuclear weapons selectively -- even if only against military targets -- are ever present. They are just seldom triggered until matters have gone seriously awry on the battlefield. In short, we believe Bell and Macdonald were right to expend extra effort looking for military first-strike incentives, which add genuinely different sorts of risk to a crisis. We argue that operational capabilities and policymaker perceptions in the Cuba crisis show that such incentives are more common than generally credited. So, we would build on Bell and Macdonald's central insight that different types of nuclear crisis have different signaling and risk profiles by modestly amending their framework. We suggest that there are three types of nuclear crisis: those with political bargaining incentives for selective nuclear use (Type A); those with risks of both selective use and non-rational uncontrolled escalation (Type B); and those with political risks, non-rational risks, and military incentives for a nuclear first strike (Type C). Type A crises essentially collapse Bell and Macdonald's "staircase" and "stability-instability" models, and are relatively low risk. [31] Any proposed nuclear escalation amounts to a "threat to launch a disastrous war coolly and deliberately in response to some enemy transgression." [32] Such threats are hard to make credible until military collapse has put a state's entire international position at stake. Outcomes of Type A crises will be decided solely by the balance of resolve. We disagree with Bell and Macdonald's argument that the conventional military balance can ever determine the outcome of a nuclear crisis, since any conventional victory stands only by dint of the losing side's unwillingness to escalate. But the lower risks of a Type A crisis mean that signals of resolve are harder to send, and must occur through large and not particularly selective or subtle means -- essentially, larger conventional and nuclear operations. Type B crises are similar to Bell and Macdonald's "brinksmanship" model. [33] These have a significantly greater risk profile, since they also contain genuine risks of uncontrolled escalation in addition to political risks. Crisis outcomes remain dependent on the balance of resolve, but signaling is easier and can be much finer-grained than in Type A crises. The multiple opportunities for uncontrolled escalation mean that there are simply many more things a state can do at much lower levels of actual violence to manipulate the level of risk in a crisis. For instance, alerting nuclear forces will often not mean much in a Type A crisis (at least before the moment of conventional collapse), since there is no way things can get out of control. But alerting forces in a Type B crisis could set off a chain of events where states clash due to the interaction between each other's rules of nuclear engagement, incentivize forces inadvertently threatened by conventional operations to fire, or misperceive each other's actions. Any given military move will have more political meaning and will also be more dangerous. Type C crises are similar to Bell and Macdonald's "firestorm" model. [34] These are the riskiest sorts of nuclear crisis, since there are military reasons for escalation as well as political and non-rational risks. Outcomes will be influenced both by the balance of resolve and the nuclear balance: either could give states incentives to manipulate risk. Such signals will be the easiest to send, and the finest-grained of any type of crisis. But because the risk level jumps so much with any given signal, the time in which states can bargain may be short. [35] In sum, Bell and Macdonald have made an important contribution to the study of nuclear escalation by delineating different types of crisis with different risk and signaling profiles. We believe they understate the importance of American nuclear superiority during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and that these coding problems highlight some conceptual issues with their framework. In the end, though, our amendments appear to us relatively minor, further underscoring the importance of Bell and Macdonald's research. We hope that they, and other scholars, will continue to build on these findings. Brendan R. Green, Cincinnati, Ohio Austin Long, Arlington, Virginia

In Response to a Critique Mark S. Bell and Julia Macdonald We thank Brendan Rittenhouse Green and Austin Long for their positive assessment of our work and for engaging with our argument so constructively. [36] Their contribution represents exactly the sort of productive scholarly debate we were hoping to provoke. As we stated in our article, we intended our work to be only an initial effort to think through the heterogeneity of nuclear crises, and we are delighted that Green and Long have taken seriously our suggestion for scholars to continue to think in more detail about the ways in which nuclear crises differ from one another. Their arguments are characteristically insightful, offer a range of interesting and important arguments and suggestions, and have forced us to think harder about a number of aspects of our argument. In this reply, we briefly lay out the argument we made in our article before responding to Green and Long's suggestion that we underestimate the incentives to launch a nuclear first-strike during the Cuban Missile Crisis and their proposal of an alternative typology for understanding nuclear crises.

Our Argument

In our article, we offer a framework for thinking through the heterogeneity of nuclear crises. [37] While the existing literature on such crises assumes that they all follow a certain logic (although there is disagreement on what that logic is), we identify factors that might lead nuclear crises to differ from one another in consequential ways. In particular, we argue that two factors -- whether incentives are present for nuclear first use and the extent to which escalation is controllable by the leaders involved -- lead to fundamentally different sorts of crises. These two variables generate four possible "ideal type" models of nuclear crises: "staircase" crises (characterized by high first-use incentives and high controllability), "brinkmanship" crises (low first-use incentives and low controllability), "stability-instability" crises (low first-use incentives and high controllability), and "firestorm" crises (high first-use incentives and low controllability). Each of these ideal types exhibits distinctive dynamics and offers different answers to important questions, such as, how likely is nuclear escalation, and how might it occur? How feasible is signaling within a crisis? What factors determine success? For example, crises exhibiting high incentives for nuclear first use combined with low crisis controllability -- firestorm crises -- are particularly volatile, and the most dangerous of all four models in terms of likelihood of nuclear war. These are the crises that statesmen should avoid except under the direst circumstances or for the highest stakes. By contrast, where incentives for the first use of nuclear weapons are low and there is high crisis controllability -- the stability-instability model -- the risk of nuclear use is lowest. When incentives for nuclear first use are low and crisis controllability is also low -- brinkmanship crises -- or when incentives for first use are high and crisis controllability is also high -- the staircase model -- there is a moderate risk of nuclear use, although through two quite different processes. For the brinkmanship model, low levels of crisis controllability combined with few incentives for nuclear first use mean that escalation to the nuclear level would likely only happen inadvertently and through a process of uncontrolled, rather than deliberate, escalation. On the other hand, high levels of crisis controllability combined with high incentives for nuclear first use -- characteristic of the staircase model -- mean that escalation would more likely occur through a careful, deliberate process.

First-Use Incentives in the Cuban Missile Crisis

First, Green and Long address the extent of incentives for launching a nuclear first strike during the Cuban Missile Crisis. In short, they argue that there were substantial military incentives for America to strike first during the crisis and that these were understood and appreciated by American leaders. [38] While space constraints meant that our analysis of the nuclear balance in the Cuban Missile Crisis was briefer than we would have liked, we certainly agree that the United States possessed nuclear superiority over the Soviet Union during the crisis. [39] The debate between us and Green and Long is, therefore, primarily over whether the nuclear balance that we (more or less) agree existed in 1962 was sufficiently lopsided as to offer meaningful incentives for nuclear first use, and whether it was perceived as such by the leaders involved. In this, we do have somewhat different interpretations of how much weight to assign to particular pieces of evidence. For example, we believe that the retrospective assessment of key participants does have evidentiary value, although we acknowledge (as we did in our article) the biases of such assessments in this case. Given the rapidly shifting nuclear balance, we place less weight on President John F. Kennedy's statements in years prior to the crisis than on those he made during the crisis itself, [40] which were more consistently skeptical of the benefits associated with U.S. nuclear superiority at a time when the stakes were at their highest. [41] We also place somewhat less weight than Green and Long on the 1961 analysis of Carl Kaysen, given doubts about whether his report had much of an effect on operational planning. [42] And finally, we put less weight on the Joint Chiefs of Staff document from 1962 cited by Green and Long in support of their argument, given that it acknowledges the U.S. inability to eliminate Soviet strategic nuclear forces -- thus highlighting the dangers of a U.S. nuclear first strike -- as well as focuses on future force planning in the aftermath of the crisis. We would also note that our assessment that U.S. nuclear superiority in the Cuban Missile Crisis did not obviously translate into politically meaningful incentives for first use is in line with standard interpretations of this case, including among scholars that Green and Long cite. For Marc Trachtenberg, for example, "[t]he American ability to 'limit damage' by destroying an enemy's strategic forces did not seem, in American eyes, to carry much political weight" during the Cuban Missile Crisis. [43] Similarly, the relative lack of incentives for rational first use in the crisis motivated Thomas Schelling's assessment that only an "unforeseeable and unpredictable" process could have led to nuclear use in the crisis. [44] Regardless of whether participants in the Cuban Missile Crisis understood the advantages (or lack thereof) associated with nuclear superiority, in some ways, our disagreement with Green and Long is more of a conceptual one: where to draw the threshold at which a state's level of nuclear superiority (and corresponding ability to limit retaliatory damage) should be deemed "politically meaningful," i.e., sufficiently lopsided to offer incentives for first use. This is a topic about which there is certainly room for legitimate disagreement. "Political relevance" is a tricky concept, which reinforces Green and Long's broader argument that "nuclear crises are intrinsically hard to interpret" -- a point with which we agree. [45] But Green and Long seem to view any ability to limit retaliatory damage as politically meaningful, since they argue that a nuclear balance that would have likely left a number of American cities destroyed (and potentially more), even in the aftermath of a U.S. first strike, nonetheless provided strong military incentives for first use. By contrast, our view is that the threshold should be somewhat higher than this, though lower than Green and Long's characterization of our position: We do not, in fact, think that the relevant standard for political meaning "is a perfectly disarming strike." Part of our motivation in wanting a threshold higher than "any damage limitation capability" is that it increases the utility of the typology we offer by allowing us to draw the line in such a way that a substantial number of empirical cases exist on either side of that threshold. Green and Long, by contrast, seem more satisfied to draw the line in such a way that cases exhibiting very different incentives for first use -- a crisis with North Korea today compared to the Cuban Missile Crisis, for example -- would both be classified on the same side of the threshold. [46] Green and Long's approach would ignore the important differences between these cases by treating both crises as exhibiting strong incentives for nuclear first use. This would be akin to producing a meteorological map that rarely shows rain because the forecaster judges the relevant threshold to be "catastrophic flooding." There is nothing fundamentally incorrect about making such a choice, but it is not necessarily the most helpful approach to shedding light on the empirical variation we observe in the historical record. An Alternative Typology of Nuclear Crises Second, Green and Long offer an alternative typology for understanding the heterogeneity of nuclear crises. Green and Long argue that there are three types of crisis: "those with political bargaining incentives for selective nuclear use (Type A); those with risks of both selective use and non-rational uncontrolled escalation (Type B); and those with political risks, non-rational risks, and military incentives for a nuclear first strike (Type C)." This is an interesting proposal and we have no fundamental objections to their typology. [47] After all, one can categorize the same phenomenon in different ways, and different typologies may be useful for different purposes. Space constraints inevitably prevent Green and Long from offering a full justification for their typology, and we would certainly encourage them to offer a more fleshed out articulation of it and its merits. Their initial discussion of the different types of signals that states can send within different types of crises is especially productive and goes beyond the relatively simple discussion of the feasibility of signaling that we included in our article. We offer two critiques that might be helpful as they (and others) continue to consider the relative merits of these two typologies and build upon them. First, it is not clear how different their proposed typology is from the one we offer. At times, for example, Green and Long suggest that their typology simply divides up the same conceptual space we identify using our two variables, but does so differently. For example, they argue that they are essentially collapsing two of our quadrants (stability-instability crises and staircase crises) into Type A crises, while Type B crises are similar to our brinkmanship crises and Type C crises are similar to our firestorm crises. If so, their typology does not really suggest a fundamentally different understanding of how nuclear crises vary, but merely of where the most interesting variation occurs within the conceptual space we identify. The key question, then, in determining the relative merits of the two typologies, is whether there is important variation between the two categories that Green and Long collapse. We continue to think the distinctions between stability-instability crises and staircase crises are important. Although both types of crises are relatively controllable and have limited risk of what Green and Long call "non-rational uncontrolled escalation," they have very different risks when it comes to nuclear use: lower in stability-instability crises and higher in staircase crises. The factors that determine success in stability-instability crises -- primarily the conventional military balance due to the very low risk of nuclear escalation -- do not necessarily determine success in staircase crises, in which the nuclear balance may matter. As a result, we think that collapsing these two categories is not necessarily a helpful analytical move. Second, to the extent that their typology differs from our own, it does so in ways that are not necessarily helpful in shedding light on the variation across nuclear crises that we observe. In particular, separating incentives for first use into "political bargaining incentives" and "military incentives" is an intriguing proposal but we are not yet fully persuaded of its merits. Given that one of Green and Long's goals is to increase the clarity of the typology we offer, and given that they acknowledge the difficulties of coding the nuclear balance, demanding even more fine-grained assessments in order to divide incentives for first use into two separate (but conceptually highly connected) components may be a lot to ask of analysts. Moreover, given Green and Long's assertion that "political incentives to use nuclear weapons selectively are ever present," their argument in fact implies (as mentioned above) that political incentives for first use are not a source of interesting variation within nuclear crises. We disagree with this conclusion substantively, but it is worth noting that it also has important conceptual implications for Green and Long's typology: It means that their three types of crises all exhibit political incentives for nuclear first use. If this is the case, then political incentives for nuclear first use simply fall out of the analysis. In effect, crises without political incentives for nuclear first use are simply ruled out by definition. This analytic move renders portions of their argument tautologous. For example, they argue that the conventional balance cannot "ever determine the outcome of a nuclear crisis," but this is only because they assume that there are always political incentives to use nuclear weapons first, and thus, "any conventional victory stands only by dint of the losing side's unwillingness to escalate." More broadly, this approach seems to us at least somewhat epistemologically problematic. In our view, it is better to be conceptually open to the existence of certain types of crises and then discover that such crises do not occur empirically, than it is to rule them out by definition and risk discovering later that such crises have, in fact, taken place. In sum, while we are not fully persuaded by Green and Long's critiques, we are extremely grateful for their insightful, thorough, and constructive engagement with our article and look forward to their future work on these issues. We hope that they, along with other scholars, will continue to explore the ways in which nuclear crises differ from one another, and the implications of such differences for crisis dynamics.

[Jan 27, 2020] The Emergence of Progressive Foreign Policy

Jan 27, 2020 | warontherocks.com

Since the end of the Cold War, two camps can claim victory on most U.S. foreign policy outcomes: neoconservatives and liberal internationalists. The neoconservatives have been defined by their support for unilateral military interventions, democracy promotion, and military supremacy. The liberal internationalists have focused on global economic liberalization, multilateral humanitarian interventions, and the promotion of human rights abroad. Both camps gained confidence from the supposed " end of history " and America's " unipolar moment ." And both camps have undergone a serious reckoning after the Afghanistan, Iraq, and forever wars, as well as the global financial crisis calling into question neoliberal economic policies -- namely, deregulation, liberalization, privatization, and austerity. Prominent foreign policy advocates have quite publicly engaged in soul-searching as they confronted these changes, and debates about the future of foreign policy abound.

The emergence of a distinctively progressive approach to foreign policy is perhaps the most interesting -- and most misunderstood -- development in these debates. In speeches and articles, politicians like Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Sen. Bernie Sanders have outlined an approach to foreign policy that does not fall along the traditional fault-lines of realist versus idealist or neoconservative versus liberal internationalist (disclosure: I have been a longtime advisor to Sen. Warren). Their speeches come alongside an increasing number of articles exploring the contours of a progressive foreign policy. Even those who might not consider themselves progressive are sounding similar themes .

From this body of work, it is now possible to sketch out the framework of a distinctively progressive approach to foreign policy. While its advocates, like those in other foreign policy camps, discuss a wide range of issues -- from climate change to reforming international institutions -- at the moment, five themes mark this emerging approach as a specific framework for foreign policy.

First, progressive foreign policy breaks the silos between domestic and foreign policy and between international economic policy and foreign policy. It places far greater emphasis on how foreign policy impacts the United States at home -- and particularly on how foreign policy (including international economic policy) has impacted the domestic economy. To be sure, there have always been analysts and commentators who recognized these interrelationships. But progressive foreign policy places this at the center of its analysis rather than seeing it as peripheral. The new progressive foreign policy takes the substance of both domestic and international economic policies seriously, and its adherents will not support economic policies on foreign policy grounds if they exacerbate economic inequality at home. For example, the argument that trade deals must be ratified on national security grounds even though they have problematic distributional consequences does not carry much weight for progressives who believe that an equitable domestic economy is the foundation of national power.

Second, progressive foreign policy holds that one of the important threats to American democracy at home is nationalist oligarchy (or, alternatively, authoritarian capitalism ) abroad. Countries like Russia and China are not simply authoritarian governments, and neither can their resurgence and assertion of power be interpreted as merely great power competition. The reason is that their economic systems integrate economic and political power. Crony/state capitalism is not a bug, it is the central feature. In a global society, economic interrelationships weaponize economic power into political power . China, for example, already uses its economic power as leverage in political disputes with other Asian countries. Its growing share of global GDP is one of the most consequential facts of the 21st century. As a result of these dynamics, progressives are also highly skeptical of a foreign policy based on the premise that the countries of the world will all become neoliberal democracies. Instead, they take seriously the risks that come from economic integration with nationalist oligarchies.

Third, the new progressive foreign policy values America's alliances and international agreements, but not because it thinks that such alliances and rules can convert nationalist oligarchies into liberal democracies. Rather, alliances should be based on common values or common goals, and, going forward, they will be critical to balancing and countering the challenges from nationalist oligarchies. Progressives are thus far more skeptical of alliances with countries like Saudi Arabia and far more interested in reinforcing and deepening ties with allies like Japan -- and are concerned about the erosion of alliances like NATO from within.

[Jan 27, 2020] The Federal Assembly Speech; Putin vows to rein in capitalism and shore up sovereignty by Mike Whitney

Jan 27, 2020 | www.unz.com

Western elites and their lackeys in the media despise Russian president Vladimir Putin and they make no bones about it. The reasons for this should be fairly obvious. Putin has rolled back US ambitions in Syria and Ukraine, aligned himself with Washington's biggest strategic rival in Asia, China, and is currently strengthening his economic ties with Europe which poses a long-term threat to US dominance in Central Asia. Putin has also updated his nuclear arsenal which makes it impossible for Washington to use the same bullyboy tactics it's used on other, more vulnerable countries. So it's understandable that the media would want to demonize Putin and disparage him as cold-blooded "KGB thug". That, of course, is not true, but it fits with the bogus narrative that Putin is maniacally conducting a clandestine war against the United States for purely evil purposes. In any event, the media's deep-seated Russophobia has grown so extreme that they're unable to cover even simple events without veering wildly into fantasy-land. Take, for example, the New York Times coverage of Putin's recent Address to the Federal Assembly, which took place on January 15. The Times screwball analysis shows that their journalists have no interest in conveying what Putin actually said, but would rather use every means available to persuade their readers that Putin is a calculating tyrant driven by his insatiable lust for power. Check out this excerpt from the article in the Times:

"Nobody knows what's going on inside the Kremlin right now. And perhaps that's precisely the point. President Vladimir V. Putin announced constitutional changes last week that could create new avenues for him to rule Russia for the rest of his life .(wrong)

The fine print of the legislation showed that the prime minister's powers would not be expanded as much as first advertised, while members of the State Council would still appear to serve at the pleasure of the president. So maybe Mr. Putin's plan is to stay president, after all? .(wrong again)

A journalist, Yury Saprykin, offered a similar sentiment on Facebook, but in verse:

We'll be debating over how he won't leave,
We'll be guessing, will he leave or won't he.
And then -- lo! -- he won't be leaving.
That is, before the elections he won't leave,
And after that, he definitely won't leave." (wrong, a third time)

( " Big Changes? Or Maybe Not. Putin's Plans Keep Russia Guessing" , New York Times )

This is really terrible analysis. Yes, "Putin announced constitutional changes last week", but they have absolutely nothing to do with some sinister plan to stay in power, and anyone who read the speech would know that. Unfortunately, most of the other 100-or-so "cookie cutter" articles on the topic, draw the same absurd conclusion as the Times , that is, that the changes Putin announced in his speech merely conceal his real intention which is to extend his time in office for as long as possible. Once again, there's nothing in the speech itself to support these claims, it's just another attempt to smear Putin.

So what did Putin actually say in his annual Address to the Federal Assembly?

Well, that's where it gets interesting. He announced changes to the social safety net, more financial assistance for young families, improvements to the health care system, higher wages for teachers, more money for education, hospitals, schools, libraries. He promised to launch a system of "social contracts" that commit the state to reducing poverty and raising standards of living. He pledged to provide healthier meals to schoolchildren, lower interest rates for first-time home buyers, greater economic support for working families, higher payouts to pensioners, raises to the minimum wage, additional funding for a "network of extracurricular technology and engineering centers". Putin also added this gem:

"It is very important that children who are in preschool and primary school adopt the true values ​​of a large family – that family is love, happiness, the joy of motherhood and fatherhood, that family is a strong bond of several generations, united by respect for the elderly and care for children, giving everyone a sense of confidence, security, and reliability. If the younger generations accept this situation as natural, as a moral and an integral part and reliable background support for their adult life, then we will be able to meet the historical challenge of guaranteeing Russia's development as a large and successful country."

Naturally, heartfelt statements like this never appear on the pages of the Times or any of the other western media for that matter. Instead, Americans are deluged with more of the same relentless Putin-psychobabble that's become a staple of cable news. The torrent of lies, libels and fabrications about Putin are so constant and so overwhelming, that the only thing of which one can be absolutely certain, is that nothing that is written about Putin in the MSM can be trusted. Of that, there is no doubt.

That said, Putin is a politician which means he might not deliver on his promises at all. That is a very real possibility. But if that's the case, then why did his former-Prime Minister, Dmitry Medvedev, resign immediately after the speech? Medvedev and his entire cabinet resigned because they realized that Putin has abandoned the western model of capitalism and is moving in a different direction altogether. Putin is now focused on strengthening welfare state programs that lift people out of poverty, raise living standards, and narrow the widening inequality gap. And he wants a new team to help him implement his vision, which is why Medvedev and crew got their walking papers. Here's how The Saker summed it up in a recent article at the Unz Review :

"The new government clearly indicates that, especially with the nominations of Prime Minister Mishustin and his First Deputy Prime Minister Andrey Belousov: these are both on record as very much proponents of what is called "state capitalism" in Russia: meaning an economic philosophy in which the states does not stifle private entrepreneurship, but one in which the state is directly and heavily involved in creating the correct economic conditions for the government and private sector to grow. Most crucially, "state capitalism" also subordinates the sole goal of the corporate world (making profits) to the interests of the state and, therefore, to the interests of the people. In other words, goodbye turbo-capitalism à la Atlantic Integrationists!" ( "The New Russian Government" , The Saker)

This is precisely what is taking place in Russia right now. Putin is breaking away from Washington's parasitic model of capitalism and replacing it with a more benign version that better addresses the needs of the people. This new version of 'managed capitalism' places elected officials at the head of the system to protect the public from the savagery of market forces and from perennial-grinding austerity. It's a system aimed at helping ordinary people not Wall Street or the global bank Mafia.

But while the changes to Russia's economic model are significant, it's Putin's political changes that have drawn the most attention. Here's what he said:

(The) "requirements of international law and treaties as well as decisions of international bodies can be valid on the Russian territory only to the point that they do not restrict the rights and freedoms of our people and citizens and do not contradict our Constitution ."

What does this mean? Does it mean that Putin will not respect international law or the treaties it has signed with its neighbors? No, it doesn't, in fact, Putin has been an enthusiastic proponent of international law and the UN Security Council. He strongly believes that these institutions play a crucial role in maintaining global security, an issue that is very close to his heart. What the Russian president appears to be saying is that the rights of the Russian people and of the sovereign Russian government take precedent over foreign corporations, treaties or free trade agreements. Russia will not allow the powerful and insidious globalist multinationals to take control of the political and economic levers of state power as they've done in countries around the world. Putin further clarified this point saying:

"Russia can remain Russia only as a sovereign state. Our nation's sovereignty must be unconditional. We have done a great deal to achieve this. We restored our state's unity and overcome the situation when certain powers in the government were essentially usurped by oligarch clans. We created powerful reserves, which increases our country's stability and capability to protect (us) from any attempts of foreign pressure."

For Putin sovereignty, which is the supreme power of a state to govern itself, is the bedrock principle which legitimizes the state provided the state faithfully represents the will of the people. He elaborates on this point later in his speech saying:

"The opinion of people, our citizens as the bearers of sovereignty and the main source of power must be decisive. In the final analysis everything is decided by the people, both today and in the future."

So while there may be significant differences between Russian and US democracy, the basic principle remains the same, the primary responsibility of the government is to carry out the "will of the people". In this respect, Putin's political philosophy is not much different from that of the framers of the US Constitution. What is different, however, is Putin's approach to free trade. Unlike the US, Putin does not believe that free trade deals should diminish the authority of the state. Most Americans don't realize that trade agreements like NAFTA often include provisions that prevent the government from acting in the best interests of their people. Globalist trade laws prevent governments from providing incentives to companies to slow the outsourcing of manufacturing jobs, they undermine environmental regulations and food safety laws. Some of these agreements even shield sweatshop owners and other human rights abusers from penalty or prosecution.

Is it any wonder why Putin does not want to participate in this unethical swindle? Is it any wonder why he feels the need to clearly state that Russia will only comply with those laws and treaties that "do not restrict the rights and freedoms of our people and citizens and do not contradict our Constitution"? Here's Putin again:

"Please, do not forget what happened to our country after 1991. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, .there were also threats, dangers of a magnitude no one could have imagined ever before. .Therefore We must create a solid, reliable and invulnerable system that will be absolutely stable in terms of the external contour and will securely guarantee Russia's independence and sovereignty."

So what happened following the dissolution of the Soviet Union?

The United States dispatched a cabal of cutthroat economists to Moscow to assist in the "shock therapy" campaign that collapsed the social safety net, savaged pensions, increased unemployment, homelessness, poverty, and alcoholism by many orders of magnitude, accelerated the slide to privatization that fueled a generation of voracious oligarchs, and sent the real economy plunging into an excruciating long-term depression.

Economist Joseph Stiglitz followed events closely in Russia at the time and summed it up like this:

"In Russia, the people were told that capitalism was going to bring new, unprecedented prosperity. In fact, it brought unprecedented poverty, indicated not only by a fall in living standards, not only by falling GDP, but by decreasing life spans and enormous other social indicators showing a deterioration in the quality of life ..

The number of people in poverty in Russia, for instance, increased from 2 percent to somewhere between 40 and 50 percent, with more than one out of two children living in families below poverty. The market economy was a worse enemy for most of these people than the Communists had said it would be. In some (parts) of the former Soviet Union, the GDP, the national income, fell by over 70 percent. And with that smaller pie it was more and more unequally divided, so a few people got bigger and bigger slices, and the majority of people wound up with less and less and less . (PBS interview with Joseph Stiglitz, Commanding Heights)

At the same time Washington's agents were busy looting Moscow, NATO was moving its troops, armored divisions and missile sites closer to Russia's border in clear violation of promises that were made to Mikhail Gorbachev not to move its military "one inch east". At present, there are more combat troops and weaponry on Russia's western flank than at any time since the German buildup for operation Barbarossa in June 1941. Naturally, Russia feels threatened by this flagrantly hostile force on its border. (BTW, this week, "The US is carrying out its biggest and most provocative deployment to Europe since the Cold War-era. According to the US Military in Europe Website: "Exercise DEFENDER-Europe 20 is the deployment of a division-size combat-credible force from the United States to Europe .The Pentagon and its NATO allies are recklessly simulating a full-blown war with Russia to prevent Moscow from strengthening its economic ties with Europe.) Here's more from Putin:

"I am convinced that it is high time for a serious and direct discussion about the basic principles of a stable world order and the most acute problems that humanity is facing. It is necessary to show political will, wisdom and courage. The time demands an awareness of our shared responsibility and real actions."

This is a theme that Putin has reiterated many times since his groundbreaking speech at Munich in 2007 where he said:

"We are seeing a greater and greater disdain for the basic principles of international law. And independent legal norms are, as a matter of fact, coming increasingly closer to one state's legal system. One state and, of course, first and foremost the United States, has overstepped its national borders in every way. This is visible in the economic, political, cultural and educational policies it imposes on other nations. Well, who likes this? Who is happy about this? ." ("Wars not diminishing': Putin's iconic 2007 Munich speech, you tube)

What Putin objects to is the US acting unilaterally whenever it chooses. It's Washington's capricious disregard for international law that has destabilized vast regions across the Middle East and Central Asia and has put world leaders on edge never knowing where the next crisis will pop up or how many millions of people will be impacted. As Putin said in Munich, "No one feels safe." No one feels like they can count on the protection of international law or UN Security Council resolutions.

Putin:

"Just look at the situation in the Middle East and Northern Africa Instead of bringing about reforms, aggressive intervention destroyed government institutions and the local way of life. Instead of democracy and progress, there is now violence, poverty, social disasters and total disregard for human rights, including even the right to life

The power vacuum in some countries in the Middle East and Northern Africa obviously resulted in the emergence of areas of anarchy, which were quickly filled with extremists and terrorists. The so-called Islamic State has tens of thousands of militants fighting for it, including former Iraqi soldiers who were left on the street after the 2003 invasion. Many recruits come from Libya whose statehood was destroyed as a result of a gross violation of UN Security Council Resolution 1973 ."

Is Putin overstating Washington's role in decimating Iraq, Libya, Syria and Afghanistan or is this a fair assessment of America's pernicious and destabilizing role in the region? Entire civilizations have been laid to waste, millions have been killed or scattered across the region to achieve some nebulous strategic advantage or to help Israel eliminate its perceived enemies. And all this military adventurism can be traced back to the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the triumphalist response from US powerbrokers who saw Russia's collapse as a green light for their New World Order.

Washington reveled in its victory and embraced its ability to dominate global decision-making and intervene unilaterally wherever it saw fit. The indispensable nation no longer had to bother with formalities like the UN Security Council or international law. Even sovereignty was dismissed as an archaic notion that had no place in the new borderless corporate empire. What really mattered was spreading western-style capitalism to the four corners of the earth particularly those areas that contained vital resources (ME) or explosive growth potential. (Eurasia) Those regions were the real prize.

But then something unexpected happened. Washington's wars dragged on ad infinitum while newer centers of power gradually emerged. Suddenly, the globalist utopia was no longer within reach, the American Century had ended before it had even begun. Meanwhile Russia and China were growing more powerful all the time. They demanded an end to unilateralism and a return to international law, but their demands were flatly rejected. The wars and interventions dragged on even though the prospects for victory grew more and more remote. Here's Putin again:

"We have no doubt that sovereignty is the central notion of the entire system of international relations. Respect for it and its consolidation will help underwrite peace and stability both at the national and international levels First of all, there must be equal and indivisible security for all states." (Meeting of the Valdai International Discussion Club, " The Future in Progress: Shaping the World of Tomorrow, From the Office of the President of Russia)

Indeed, sovereignty is the foundational principle upon which global security rests, and yet, it is sovereignty that western elites are so eager to extinguish. Powerhouse multinationals want to erase existing borders to facilitate the unfettered, tariff-free flow of goods and people in one giant, interconnected free trade zone that spans the entire planet. And while their plan has been derailed by Putin in Syria and Ukraine, they have made gains in Africa, South America and Southeast Asia. The virus cannot be contained, it can only be eradicated. Here's Putin:

"Essentially, the entire globalisation project is in crisis today and in Europe, as we know well, we hear voices now saying that multiculturalism has failed. I think this situation is in many respects the result of mistaken, hasty and to some extent over-confident choices made by some countries' elites a quarter-of-a-century ago. Back then, in the late 1980s-early 1990s, there was a chance not just to accelerate the globalization process but also to give it a different quality and make it more harmonious and sustainable in nature.

But some countries that saw themselves as victors in the Cold War, not just saw themselves this way but said it openly, took the course of simply reshaping the global political and economic order to fit their own interests.

In their euphoria, they essentially abandoned substantive and equal dialogue with other actors in international life, chose not to improve or create universal institutions, and attempted instead to bring the entire world under the spread of their own organizations, norms and rules. They chose the road of globalization and security for their own beloved selves, for the select few, and not for all." (Meeting of the Valdai International Discussion Club)

As Putin says, there was an opportunity to "make globalization more harmonious and sustainable", (perhaps, China's Belt and Road initiative will do just that.) but Washington elites rejected that idea choosing instead to impose its own self-aggrandizing vision on the world. As a result, demonstrations and riots have cropped up across Europe, right-wing populist parties are on the rise, and a majority of the population no longer have confidence in basic democratic institutions. The west's version of globalization has been roundly repudiated as a scam that showers wealth on scheming billionaires while hanging ordinary working people out to dry. Here's Putin again:

"It seems as if the elites do not see the deepening stratification in society and the erosion of the middle class (but the situation) creates a climate of uncertainty that has a direct impact on the public mood.

Sociological studies conducted around the world show that people in different countries and on different continents tend to see the future as murky and bleak. This is sad. The future does not entice them, but frightens them. At the same time, people see no real opportunities or means for changing anything, influencing events and shaping policy." (Meeting of the Valdai International Discussion Club)

True, life is harder now and it looks to get harder still, but what is Putin's remedy or does he have one? Is he going to stem the tide and reverse the effects of globalization? Is he going to sabotage Washington's plan to control vital resources in the Middle East, become the the main player in Central Asia, and tighten its grip on global power?

No, Putin is not nearly that ambitious. As he indicates in his speech, his immediate goal is to reform the economy so that poverty is eliminated and wealth is more equally distributed. These are practical remedies that help to soften capitalism and decrease the probability of social unrest. He also wants to fend off potential threats to the state by shoring up Russian sovereignty. That's why he is adding amendments to the Constitution. The objective is to protect Russia from pernicious foreign agents or fifth columnists operating within the state. Bottom line: Putin sees what's going on in the world and has charted a course that best serves the interests of the Russian people. Americans would be lucky to have a leader who did the same.

Digital Samizdat , says: Show Comment January 26, 2020 at 8:21 am GMT

@Westcosast

He is now granted $40 billion in tax breaks to the biggest fossil fuel oligarchs–Rosneft and Gazprom. These are privatised companies that were formerly state companies in the former USSR. Instead of reversing the trend Putin has escalated privatization.

It seems you were misinformed. Rosneft and Gazprom are still state-owned, the latter mostly and the former entirely. So if indeed Putin did grant them these tax breaks, it's just one branch of the government transferring money to another branch of government–sort of like when the Social Security Administration here in the US buy bonds from the Treasury Department. It's just an accounting gimmick, not gift to 'oligarchs'. (BTW, why is it that the media never refer to Soros, Bezos or the Rockefellers as 'oligarchs'? Why only Russians?)

Miro23 , says: Show Comment January 26, 2020 at 8:29 am GMT

For Putin sovereignty, which is the supreme power of a state to govern itself, is the bedrock principle which legitimizes the state provided the state faithfully represents the will of the people. He elaborates on this point later in his speech saying:

"The opinion of people, our citizens as the bearers of sovereignty and the main source of power must be decisive. In the final analysis everything is decided by the people, both today and in the future."

This is what has been missing from so called US Democracy for a while now.

The present day US is a hegemony of Special Interests busy looting the place under cover their propaganda department (US MSM).

St-Germain , says: Show Comment January 26, 2020 at 1:07 pm GMT
Great article, Mike Whitney. So far it's the only one I've seen that reveals a coherent hard core in what Putin seeks to achieve with a seemingly bureaucratic rejiggering of the constitution and ruling echelon. Maybe he's finally ending the humiliating indecision that has stymied Russia the past three decades: Will the country keep trying to be yet another pale copy of the financialized U.S. economic sphere, powered by dollar hegemony? Or, will it free itself from predatory corporate domination in order to duplicate the obvious success of sovereign next-door China? If your analysis is on the mark, Putin may have now found the answer to Russia's debilitating post-Soviet identity crisis.

Trump's unexpected election and the parallel rise of nationalism in docile Europe suggests that much the same crisis has now emerged within the Western empire. Will it be borderless neofeudal corporatism for the benefit of those at the top of the social pyramid or will working people regain a voice in their own government? Reading those troubled tea leaves, Putin may have picked the right moment to launch Russia on the more promising path.

geokat62 , says: Show Comment January 26, 2020 at 1:30 pm GMT

Is Putin overstating Washington's role in decimating Iraq, Libya, Syria and Afghanistan or is this a fair assessment of America's pernicious and destabilizing role in the region? Entire civilizations have been laid to waste, millions have been killed or scattered across the region to achieve some nebulous strategic advantage or to help Israel eliminate its perceived enemies.

No need to qualify the cause of this nefarious plan by referencing some nebulous objective. There was nothing nebulous about it. The plan to Remake the Middle East was clearly articulated by Richard Perle, well before the GWOT was launched, in A Clean Break, A New Strategy for Securing the Realm .

The Scalpel , says: Website Show Comment January 26, 2020 at 2:07 pm GMT
@Tucker

Sooner or later, every Bully will push the wrong opponent and wind up getting his ass stomped in the dirt.

Sad, but true. I think everyone hopes that the US pulls off some sort of last minute transformation and repentance, because the takedown would be very ugly for everyone

Franklin Ryckaert , says: Show Comment January 26, 2020 at 2:42 pm GMT
@geokat62 Don't forget to mention the Oded Yinon Plan, the plan to shatter all Israel's neighbors into small, dysfunctional, quarrelling statelets. See, Global Research : "Greater Israel" : The Zionist Plan for the Middle East.
Desert Fox , says: Show Comment January 26, 2020 at 2:52 pm GMT
God bless Putin and Russia for saving Syria from the terrorists created by the ZUS and Israel and ZBritain and ZNATO , these terrorists AL CIADA aka ISIS and all offshoots thereof were created and armed and funded to destroy the middle east for the zionist greater Israel project and all of this was brought on by the joint Israeli and ZUS attack on the WTC on 911 and blamed on the arabs.

Who is the greater terrorist, the terrorists or the ones who created them.

bluedog , says: Show Comment January 26, 2020 at 2:57 pm GMT
@Sean Russia will do very well they are moving in the right direction, they are putting regulations on those that need it, and better programs for the people.

I once read that you can start out with a strong generation and from that strong generation ever generation after will become weaker and weaker, until you end up with a generation like the U.S. has that's like clay in the hands of a master, they can't think nor even act they just follow the dictates of the master.!!!

Desert Fox , says: Show Comment January 26, 2020 at 3:11 pm GMT
@Old and grumpy In regards to sanctions Russia for the last 3 years has been the greatest producer and exporter of grain, and since food is the most important thing, the ZUS is pissing into the wind with sanctions on Russia.
RoyJ , says: Show Comment January 26, 2020 at 3:15 pm GMT
"This is sad. The future does not entice them, but frightens them. At the same time, people see no real opportunities or means for changing anything, influencing events and shaping policy." (Meeting of the Valdai International Discussion Club)"

Jeez ain't that the truth. I live in Virginia and it seems that no matter how I vote it just never changes anything. We just had big demonstrations against the stupid new gun laws our despotic governor wants to enact and from where I'm sitting it didn't make one iota of difference. The rank and file have zero to say in how they are governed But we sure get to finance it with our taxes.

Huxley , says: Show Comment January 26, 2020 at 4:01 pm GMT
@Anonymous You are delusional and have obviously spent no time in Russia. When the Pussy Riot grrrls desecrated the altar at St. Savior, Russians went ballistic, from the Patriarchs down to the blue collar diesel mechanics.

Your so-called "faith" in the US and Europe has already sold out to Globohomo completely. Most priests are gay and have been buggering the altar boys for decades. Protestant sects have lesbian bishops. Your "faithful" have not only totally surrendered to the Globohomo takeover, they now EMBRACE it proudly. "All are welcome." There is now no difference between Vatican II Catholicism and Unitarian Universalism. Western Europe is so far gone, so anti-life, there's hardly a white child left. Muslims are sharpening their machetes.

So you think there's no substance behind Orthodoxy. You are mistaken. (I'm Latin Mass Catholic, BTW)

Take 3 minutes to listen to Patriarch Kirill:

LIBERAL IDEA IS A SIN:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/CZgykarzaM4?feature=oembed

Greg S. , says: Show Comment January 26, 2020 at 4:01 pm GMT
@John Chuckman

It's only consistent with his past behavior of reining in post-Soviet Russian Oligarchs.

And there is the real reason why the "west" hates him. Because who controls the west? Who owns all of the media, owns the politicians, and controls the narrative? Our very own Oligarchs, indistinguishable from the Russian version and in fact interchangeable (borders mean nothing to them). So of course they are pissed if Putin is rolling them back over in Russia. How dare he.

Also, have you ever noticed that the word "Oligarch" is only every applied in the same sentence as "Russian?"

[Jan 26, 2020] Asking the Right Question About Nationalism Democracy Journal

Jan 26, 2020 | democracyjournal.org

Where Judis is on more solid ground, it seems to me, is in his reminder that liberals should not be too dismissive of nationalism, since nationalism, "by itself, is neither good nor evil, liberal nor conservative."

You wouldn't know it from the way the term is tossed about in popular discourse, but as a historical matter this is more or less incontestable: The nationalism of Donald Trump is only one of many varieties.

It's not the nationalism that emerged amidst the French Revolution, as part of an attempt to make sense of the revolutionary doctrine of popular sovereignty. Neither is it the anti-colonial nationalism marshaled to support a range of twentieth-century independence movements. Nor is it rooted in philosophical ruminations on the identity-shaping role played by language, or culture, or history -- any one of which could be associated with a range of thinkers who would be appalled by the MAGA-hat crowd.

Recognizing nationalism's protean nature is, in fact, a first step toward what might be a productive exercise for anybody hoping to revitalize the left at this moment in history. Assume that, at least over the short and medium term, the current global system of bordered nation-states is not going to disappear (even if it is undergoing transformation). And assume that, for many people, everyday thought and behavior will adhere to (largely unconscious) scripts that serve to locate them in particular settings, communities, associations, and so on.

Given these realities, what kind of collective self-understandings would it be useful to promote? American history doesn't lack for precedents; there are left-nationalist themes in texts like the Gettysburg Address, in FDR's 1936 nomination speech (the one featuring his denunciation of "economic royalists"), and in Martin Luther King Jr.'s metaphor of a promissory note .

Samuel H. Beer, one of the twentieth century's leading scholars of American politics, once described the great moments of American reform as responses to crises of nationhood : "[T]he crisis of sectionalism, culminating in the Civil War; the crisis of industrialism, culminating in the Great Depression and the New Deal; and the crisis of racism, which continues to rack our country."

In Beer's view, these moments of active reform counteracted destructive centrifugal forces; they made the nation " more of a nation ." This emphasis on "making" a nation through politics is a good reminder that nations were not found, but invented; they are not immune to political refashioning. And if they're unlikely to disappear anytime soon, it might be a good idea to start thinking about which kinds we can live with.

[Jan 25, 2020] You Think Americans Really Give A Fk About Ukraine - Pompeo Flips Out On NPR Reporter

How tank maintenance mechanical engineer and military contractor who got into congress pretending to belong to tea party can became the Secretary of state? Only in America ;-)
Jan 25, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com
"You Think Americans Really Give A F**k About Ukraine?" - Pompeo Flips Out On NPR Reporter by Tyler Durden Sat, 01/25/2020 - 15:05 0 SHARES

Democrats' impeachment proceedings were completely overshadowed this week by the panic over the Wuhan coronavirus. Still, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is clearly tired of having his character repeatedly impugned by the Dems and the press claiming he hung one of his ambassadors out to dry after she purportedly resisted the administration's attempts to pressure Ukraine.

That frustration came to a head this week when, during a moment of pique, Secretary Pompeo launched into a rant and swore at NPR reporter Mary Louise Kelly after she wheedled him about whether he had taken concrete steps to protect former Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch.

House Democrats last week released a trove of messages between Giuliani associate Lev Parnas and Connecticut Republican Congressional candidate Robert Hyde. The messages suggested that Yovanovitch might have been under surveillance before President Trump recalled her to Washington. One of the messages seems to reference a shadowy character able to "help" with Yovanovitch for "a price."

Kelly recounted the incident to her listeners (she is the host of "All Things Considered")

After Kelly asked Pompeo to specify exactly what he had done or said to defend Yovanovitch, whom Pompeo's boss President Trump fired last year, Pompeo simply insisted that he had "done what's right" with regard to Yovanovitch, while becoming visibly annoyed.

Once the interview was over, Pompeo glared at Kelly for a minute, then left the room, telling an aide to bring Kelly into another room at the State Department without her recorder, so they could have more privacy.

Once inside, Pompeo launched into what Kelly described as an "expletive-laden rant", repeatedly using the "f-word." Pompeo complained about the questions about Ukraine, arguing that the interview was supposed to be about Iran.

"Do you think Americans give a f--k about Ukraine?" Pompeo allegedly said.

The outburst was followed by a ridiculous stunt: one of Pompeo's staffers pulled out a blank map and asked the reporter to identify Ukraine, which she did.

"People will hear about this," Pompeo vaguely warned.

Ironically, Pompeo is planning to travel to Kiev this week.

The questions came after Michael McKinley, a former senior adviser to Pompeo, told Congress that he resigned after the secretary apparently ignored his pleas for the department to show some support for Yovanovitch.

Listen to the interview here. A transcript can be found here .

NPR's Mary Louise Kelly says the following happened after the interview in which she asked some tough questions to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. pic.twitter.com/cRTb71fZvX

-- Daniel Dale (@ddale8) January 24, 2020

Last we checked, the team at NPR is waiting on Pompeo to apologize

Mike Pompeo Does in fact owe Yovanovitch an apology https://t.co/imazFrG3Q6

-- Molly Jong-Fast (@MollyJongFast) January 25, 2020

We suspect they might be waiting a while...

CarteroAtómico , 5 minutes ago link

He's right. American don't give a **** about Ukraine. But why did Clinton and Obama and now Trump and Pompeo? Why are they spending our money there instead of either taking care of problems here or paying off the national debt?

MOLONAABE , 8 minutes ago link

The best thing that could happen to the Ukraine is for Russia to take it back.. they would clean up that train wreck of a country... they've proven themselves as to being the scumbags they are gypsies and grifters...

Goodsport 1945 , 11 minutes ago link

The Bidens do, so there must be $omething very attractive over there.

carman , 13 minutes ago link

He's right. Nobody cares about Ukraine. NPR= National Propaganda Radio.

CarteroAtómico , 1 minute ago link

But why are Trump and Pompeo continuing the policy of Obama and Clinton there? Remember Trump said he would pay off the national debt in 8 years? How about stop spending our money on the War Party's foreign interventions for a starter.

kindasketchy , 17 minutes ago link

I wish the same level of questioning was directed at Pompeo regarding Syria and Iran. You may like his response because of the particular topic, but it doesn't change the fact that he's a psycho neo-con fucktard who should be shot for treason.

Collectivism Killz , 21 minutes ago link

Truth. Most Americans know nothing about Ukraine, some just know orange man bad and orange man bad for Ukr

roach clipper , 21 minutes ago link

I despise fkn traitor Pompus from USMA (traitor training school) but in this case he doesn't owe yovanobitch anything.

morefunthanrum , 27 minutes ago link

People care about a secretary of state who supports his diplomats...about a president whose not a lying conniving spoiled piece of ****

roach clipper , 22 minutes ago link

There are NO diplomats in the Dept. of State, otherwise we wouldn't have been at war all century.

[Jan 25, 2020] Aftermath: The Iran War After the Soleimani Assassination by Jim Kavanagh

Notable quotes:
"... It always goes to Iran ..."
"... But even I was flabbergasted by what Trump did. Absolutely gobsmacked. Killing Qassem Soleimani, Iranian general, leader of the Quds forces, and the most respected military leader in the Middle East? And ..."
"... The first thing, the thing that is so sad and so infuriating and so centrally symptomatic of everything wrong with American political culture, is that, with painfully few exceptions, Americans have no idea of what their government has done. They have no idea who Qassem Soleimani was, what he has accomplished, the web of relationships, action, and respect he has built, what his assassination means and will bring. The last person who has any clue about this, of course, is Donald Trump, who called Soleimani " a total monster ." His act of killing Soleimani is the apotheosis of the abysmal, arrogant ignorance of U.S. political culture. ..."
"... Washington Post ..."
"... Whatever their elected governments say, we'll will keep our army in Syria to "take the oil," and in Iraq to well, to do whatever the hell we want. ..."
"... Sure, we make the rules and you follow our orders. ..."
"... with nobody even noticing ..."
"... Christian Science Monitor ..."
"... under Trump's leadership ..."
Jan 24, 2020 | www.counterpunch.org

"Praise be to God, who made our enemies fools."

– Ayatollah Khamenei

The Killing

I've been writing and speaking for months about the looming danger of war with Iran, often to considerable skepticism.

In June, in an essay entitled " Eve of Destruction: Iran Strikes Back ," after the U.S. initiated its "maximum pressure" blockade of Iranian oil exports, I pointed out that "Iran considers that it is already at war," and that the downing of the U.S. drone was a sign that "Iran is calling the U.S. bluff on escalation dominance."

In an October essay , I pointed out that Trump's last-minute calling off of the U.S. attack on Iran in June, his demurral again after the Houthi attack on Saudi oil facilities, and his announced withdrawal of U.S. troops from Syria were seen as "catastrophic" and "a big win for Iran" by the Iran hawks in Israel and America whose efforts New York Times (NYT) detailed in an important article, " The Secret History of the Push to Strike Iran ." I said, with emphasis, " It always goes to Iran ," and underlined that Trump's restraint was particularly galling to hard-line zionist Republican Senators, and might have opened a path to impeachment. I cited the reported statement of a "veteran political consultant" that "The price of [Lindsey] Graham's support would be an eventual military strike on Iran."

And in the middle of December, I went way out on a limb, in an essay suggesting a possible relation between preparations for war in Iran and the impeachment process. I pointed out that the strategic balance of forces between Israel and Iran had reached the point where Israel thinks it's "necessary to take Iran down now ," in "the next six months," before the Iranian-supported Axis of Resistance accrues even more power. I speculated that the need to have a more reliable and internationally-respected U.S. President fronting a conflict with Iran might be the unseen reason -- behind the flimsy Articles of Impeachment -- that explains why Pelosi and Schumer "find it so urgent to replace Trump before the election and why they think they can succeed in doing that."

So, I was the guy chicken-littling about impending war with Iran.

But even I was flabbergasted by what Trump did. Absolutely gobsmacked. Killing Qassem Soleimani, Iranian general, leader of the Quds forces, and the most respected military leader in the Middle East? And Abu Mahdi al-Mohandes, Iraqi commander of the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) unit, Kataib Hezbollah? Did not see that coming. Rage. Fear. Sadness. Anxiety. A few days just to register that it really happened. To see the millions of people bearing witness to it. Yes, that happened.

Then there was the anxious anticipation about the Iranian response, which came surprisingly quickly, and with admirable military and political precision, avoiding a large-scale war in the region, for the moment.

That was the week that was.

But, as the man said: "It ain't over 'til it's over." And it ain't over. Recognizing the radical uncertainty of the world we now live in, and recognizing that its future will be determined by actors and actions far away from the American leftist commentariat, here's what I need to say about the war we are now in.

The first thing, the thing that is so sad and so infuriating and so centrally symptomatic of everything wrong with American political culture, is that, with painfully few exceptions, Americans have no idea of what their government has done. They have no idea who Qassem Soleimani was, what he has accomplished, the web of relationships, action, and respect he has built, what his assassination means and will bring. The last person who has any clue about this, of course, is Donald Trump, who called Soleimani " a total monster ." His act of killing Soleimani is the apotheosis of the abysmal, arrogant ignorance of U.S. political culture.

It's virtually impossible to explain to Americans because there is no one of comparable stature in the U.S. or in the West today. As Iran cleric Shahab Mohadi said , when talking about what a "proportional response" might be: "[W]ho should we consider to take out in the context of America? 'Think about it. Are we supposed to take out Spider-Man and SpongeBob? 'All of their heroes are cartoon characters -- they're all fictional." Trump? Lebanese Hezbollah's Hassan Nasrallah said what many throughout the world familiar with both of them would agree with: "the shoe of Qassem Soleimani is worth the head of Trump and all American leaders."

To understand the respect Soleimani has earned, not only in Iran (where his popularity was around 80% ) but throughout the region and across political and sectarian lines, you have to know how he led and organized the forces that helped save Christians , Kurds , Yazidis and others from being slaughtered by ISIS, while Barack Obama and John Kerry were still " watching " ISIS advance and using it as a tool to "manage" their war against Assad.

In an informative interview with Aaron Maté, Former Marine Intelligence Officer and weapons inspector, Scott Ritter, explains how Soleimani is honored in Iraq for organizing the resistance that saved Baghdad from being overrun by ISIS -- and the same could be said of Syria, Damascus, or Ebril:

He's a legend in Iran, in Iraq, and in Syria. And anywhere where, frankly speaking, he's operated, the people he's worked with view him as one of the greatest leaders, thinkers, most humane men of all time. I know in America we demonize him as a terrorist but the fact is he wasn't, and neither is Mr. Mohandes.

When ISIS [was] driving down on the city of Baghdad, the U.S. armed and trained Iraqi Army had literally thrown down their weapons and ran away, and there was nothing standing between ISIS and Baghdad

[Soleimani] came in from Iran and led the creation of the PMF [Popular Mobilization Forces] as a viable fighting force and then motivated them to confront Isis in ferocious hand-to-hand combat in villages and towns outside of Baghdad, driving Isis back and stabilizing the situation that allowed the United States to come in and get involved in the Isis fight. But if it weren't for Qassem Soleimani and Mohandes and Kataib Hezbollah, Baghdad might have had the black flag of ISIS flying over it. So the Iraqi people haven't forgotten who stood up and defended Baghdad from the scourge of ISIS.

So, to understand Soleimani in Western terms, you'd have to evoke someone like World War II Eisenhower (or Marshall Zhukov, but that gets another blank stare from Americans.) Think I'm exaggerating? Take it from the family of the Shah :

Beyond his leadership of the fight against ISIS, you also have to understand Soleimani's strategic acumen in building the Axis of Resistance -- the network of armed local groups like Hezbollah in Lebanon as well as the PMF in Iraq, that Soleimani helped organize and provide with growing military capability. Soleimani meant standing up; he helped people throughout the region stand up to the shit the Americans, Israelis, and Saudis were constantly dumping on them

More apt than Eisenhower and De Gaulle, in world-historical terms, try something like Saladin meets Che. What a tragedy, and travesty, it is that legend-in-his-own-mind Donald Trump killed this man.

Dressed to Kill

But it is not just Trump, and not just the assassination of Soleimani, that we should focus on. These are actors and events within an ongoing conflict with Iran, which was ratcheted up when the U.S. renounced the nuclear deal (JCPOA – Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) and instituted a "maximum pressure" campaign of economic and financial sanctions on Iran and third countries, designed to drive Iran's oil exports to zero.

The purpose of this blockade is to create enough social misery to force Iran into compliance, or provoke Iran into military action that would elicit a "justifiable" full-scale, regime-change -- actually state-destroying -- military attack on the country.

From its inception, Iran has correctly understood this blockade as an act of war, and has rightfully expressed its determination to fight back. Though it does not want a wider war, and has so far carefully calibrated its actions to avoid making it necessary, Iran will fight back however it deems necessary.

The powers-that-be in Iran and the U.S. know they are at war, and that the Soleimani assassination ratcheted that state of war up another significant notch; only Panglossian American pundits think the "w" state is yet to be avoided. Sorry, but the United States drone-bombed an Iranian state official accompanied by an Iraqi state official, in Iraq at the invitation of the Iraqi Prime Minister, on a conflict-resolution mission requested by Donald Trump himself. In anybody's book, that is an act of war -- and extraordinary treachery, even in wartime, the equivalent of shooting someone who came to parley under a white flag.

Indeed, we now know that the assassination of Soleimani was only one of two known assassination attempts against senior Iranian officers that day. There was also an unsuccessful strike targeting Abdul Reza Shahlai, another key commander in Iran's Quds Force who has been active in Yemen. According to the Washington Post , this marked a "departure for the Pentagon's mission in Yemen, which has sought to avoid direct involvement" or make "any publicly acknowledged attacks on Houthi or Iranian leaders in Yemen."

Of course, because it's known as "the world's worst humanitarian crisis," the Pentagon wants to avoid "publicly" bloodying its hands in the Saudi war in Yemen. Through two presidential administrations, it has been trying to minimize attention to its indispensable support of, and presence in, Saudi Arabia's war in Yemen with drone strikes , special forces operations , refueling of aircraft, and intelligence and targeting. It's such a nasty business that even the U.S. Congress passed a bipartisan resolution to end U.S. military involvement in that war, which was vetoed by Trump.

According to the ethic and logic of American exceptionalism, Iran is forbidden from helping the Houthis, but the U.S. is allowed to assassinate their advisors and help the Saudis bomb the crap out of them.

So, the Trump administration is clearly engaged in an organized campaign to take out senior Iranian leaders, part of what it considers a war against Iran. In this war, the Trump administration no longer pretends to give a damn about any fig leaf of law or ethics. Nobody takes seriously the phony "imminence" excuse for killing Soleimani, which even Trump say s "doesn't matter," or the "bloody hands" justification, which could apply to any military commander. And let's not forget: Soleimani was " talking about bad stuff ."

The U.S. is demonstrating outright contempt for any framework of respectful international relations, let alone international law. National sovereignty? Democracy? Whatever their elected governments say, we'll will keep our army in Syria to "take the oil," and in Iraq to well, to do whatever the hell we want. "Rules-based international order"? Sure, we make the rules and you follow our orders.

The U.S.'s determination to stay in Iraq, in defiance of the explicit, unequivocal demand of the friendly democratic government that the U.S. itself supposedly invaded the country to install, is particularly significant. It draws the circle nicely. It demonstrates that the Iraq war isn't over. Because it, and the wars in Libya and Syria, and the war that's ratcheting up against Iran are all the same war that the U.S. has been waging in the Middle East since 2003. In the end is the beginning, and all that.

We're now in the endgame of the serial offensive that Wesley Clark described in 2007, starting with Iraq and "finishing off" with Iran. Since the U.S. has attacked, weakened, divided, or destroyed every other un-coopted polity in the region (Iraq, Syria, Libya) that could pose any serious resistance to the predations of U.S. imperialism and Israel colonialism, it has fallen to Iran to be the last and best source of material and military support which allows that resistance to persist.

And Iran has taken up the task, through the work of the Quds Force under leaders like Soleimani and Shahlai, the work of building a new Axis of Resistance with the capacity to resist the dictates of Israel and the U.S. throughout the region. It's work that is part of a war and will result in casualties among U.S. and U.S.-allied forces and damage to their "interests."

What the U.S. (and its wards, Israel and Saudi Arabia) fears most is precisely the kind of material, technical, and combat support and training that allows the Houthis to beat back the Saudis and Americans in Yemen, and retaliate with stunningly accurate blows on crucial oil facilities in Saudi Arabia itself. The same kind of help that Soleimani gave to the armed forces of Syria and the PMF in Iraq to prevent those countries from being overrun and torn apart by the U.S. army and its sponsored jihadis, and to Hezbollah in Lebanon to deter Israel from demolishing and dividing that country at will.

It's that one big "endless" war that's been waged by every president since 2003, which American politicians and pundits have been scratching their heads and squeezing their brains to figure out how to explain, justify (if it's their party's President in charge), denounce (if it's the other party's POTUS), or just bemoan as "senseless." But to the neocons who are driving it and their victims -- it makes perfect sense and is understood to have been largely a success. Only the befuddled U.S. media and the deliberately-deceived U.S. public think it's "senseless," and remain enmired in the cock-up theory of U.S. foreign policy, which is a blindfold we had better shed before being led to the next very big slaughter.

The one big war makes perfect sense when one understands that the United States has thoroughly internalized Israel's interests as its own. That this conflation has been successfully driven by a particular neocon faction, and that it is excessive, unnecessary and perhaps disruptive to other effective U.S. imperial possibilities, is demonstrated precisely by the constant plaint from non-neocon, including imperialist, quarters that it's all so "senseless."

The result is that the primary object of U.S. policy (its internalized zionist imperative) in this war is to enforce that Israel must be able, without any threat of serious retaliation, to carry out any military attack on any country in the region at any time, to seize any territory and resources (especially water) it needs, and, of course, to impose any level of colonial violence against Palestinians -- from home demolitions, to siege and sniper killings (Gaza), to de jure as well as de facto apartheid and eventual further mass expulsions, if deems necessary.

That has required, above all, removing -- by co-option, regime change, or chaotogenic sectarian warfare and state destruction -- any strong central governments that have provided political, diplomatic, financial, material, and military support for the Palestinian resistance to Israeli colonialism. Iran is the last of those, has been growing in strength and influence, and is therefore the next mandatory target.

For all the talk of "Iranian proxies," I'd say, if anything, that the U.S., with its internalized zionist imperative, is effectively acting as Israel's proxy.

It's also important, I think, to clarify the role of Saudi Arabia (KSA) in this policy. KSA is absolutely a very important player in this project, which has been consistent with its interests. But its (and its oil's) influence on the U.S. is subsidiary to Israel's, and depends entirely on KSA's complicity with the Israeli agenda. The U.S. political establishment is not overwhelmingly committed to Saudi/Wahhabi policy imperatives -- as a matter, they think, of virtue -- as they are to Israeli/Zionist ones. It is inconceivable that a U.S. Vice-President would declare "I am a Wahhabi," or a U.S. President say "I would personally grab a rifle, get in a ditch, and fight and die" for Saudi Arabia -- with nobody even noticing . The U.S. will turn on a dime against KSA if Israel wants it; the reverse would never happen. We have to confront the primary driver of this policy if we are to defeat it, and too many otherwise superb analysts, like Craig Murray, are mistaken and diversionary, I think, in saying things like the assassination of Soleimani and the drive for war on Iran represent the U.S. " doubling down on its Saudi allegiance ." So, sure, Israel and Saudi Arabia. Batman and Robin.

Iran has quite clearly seen and understood what's unfolding, and has prepared itself for the finale that is coming its way.

The final offensive against Iran was supposed to follow the definitive destruction of the Syrian Baathist state, but that project was interrupted (though not yet abandoned) by the intervention of Syria's allies, Russia and Iran -- the latter precisely via the work of Soleimani and the Quds Force.

Current radical actions like the two assassination strikes against Iranian Quds Force commanders signal the Trump administration jumping right to the endgame, as that neocon hawks have been " agitating for ." The idea -- borrowed, perhaps from Israel's campaign of assassinating Iranian scientists -- is that killing off the key leaders who have supplied and trained the Iranian-allied networks of resistance throughout the region will hobble any strike from those networks if/when the direct attack on Iran comes.

Per Patrick Lawrence , the Soleimani assassination "was neither defensive nor retaliatory: It reflected the planning of the administration's Iran hawks, who were merely awaiting the right occasion to take their next, most daring step toward dragging the U.S. into war with Iran." It means that war is on and it will get worse fast.

It is crucial to understand that Iran is not going to passively submit to any such bullying. It will not be scared off by some "bloody nose" strike, followed by chest-thumping from Trump, Netanyahu, or Hillary about how they will " obliterate " Iran. Iran knows all that. It also knows, as I've said before , how little damage -- especially in terms of casualties -- Israel and the U.S. can take. It will strike back. In ways that will be calibrated as much as possible to avoid a larger war, but it will strike back.

Iran's strike on Ain al-Asad base in Iraq was a case in point. It was preceded by a warning through Iraq that did not specify the target but allowed U.S. personnel in the country to hunker down. It also demonstrated deadly precision and determination, hitting specific buildings where U.S. troops work, and, we now know, causing at least eleven acknowledged casualties.

Those casualties were minor, but you can bet they would have been the excuse for a large-scale attack, if the U.S. had been entirely unafraid of the response. In fact, Trump did launch that attack over the downing of a single unmanned drone -- and Pompeo and the neocon crew, including Republican Senators, were " stunned " that he called it off in literally the last ten minutes . It's to the eternal shame of what's called the "left" in this country that we may have Tucker Carlson to thank for Trump's bouts of restraint.

There Will Be Blood

But this is going to get worse, Pompeo is now threatening Iran's leaders that "any attacks by them, or their proxies of any identity, that harm Americans, our allies, or our interests will be answered with a decisive U.S. response." Since Iran has ties of some kind with most armed groups in the region and the U.S. decides what "proxy" and "interests" means, that means that any act of resistance to the U.S., Israel, or other "ally" by anybody -- including, for example, the Iraqi PMF forces who are likely to retaliate against the U.S. for killing their leader -- will be an excuse for attacking Iran. Any anything. Call it an omnibus threat.

The groundwork for a final aggressive push against Iran began back in June, 2017, when, under then-Director Pompeo, the CIA set up a stand-alone Iran Mission Center . That Center replaced a group of "Iran specialists who had no special focus on regime change in Iran," because "Trump's people wanted a much more focused and belligerent group." The purpose of this -- as of any -- Mission Center was to "elevate" the country as a target and "bring to bear the range of the agency's capabilities, including covert action" against Iran. This one is especially concerned with Iran's "increased capacity to deliver missile systems" to Hezbollah or the Houthis that could be used against Israel or Saudi Arabia, and Iran's increased strength among the Shia militia forces in Iraq. The Mission Center is headed by Michael D'Andrea, who is perceived as having an "aggressive stance toward Iran." D'Andrea, known as "the undertaker" and " Ayatollah Mike ," is himself a convert to Islam, and notorious for his "central role in the agency's torture and targeted killing programs."

This was followed in December, 2017, by the signing of a pact with Israel "to take on Iran," which took place, according to Israeli television, at a "secret" meeting at the White House. This pact was designed to coordinate "steps on the ground" against "Tehran and its proxies." The biggest threats: "Iran's ballistic missile program and its efforts to build accurate missile systems in Syria and Lebanon," and its activity in Syria and support for Hezbollah. The Israelis considered that these secret "dramatic understandings" would have "far greater impact" on Israel than Trump's more public and notorious recognition of Jerusalem as Israeli's capital.

The Iran Mission Center is a war room. The pact with Israel is a war pact.

The U.S. and Israeli governments are out to "take on" Iran. Their major concerns, repeated everywhere, are Iran's growing military power, which underlies its growing political influence -- specifically its precision ballistic missile and drone capabilities, which it is sharing with its allies throughout the region, and its organization of those armed resistance allies, which is labelled "Iranian aggression."

These developments must be stopped because they provide Iran and other actors the ability to inflict serious damage on Israel. They create the unacceptable situation where Israel cannot attack anything it wants without fear of retaliation. For some time, Israel has been reluctant to take on Hezbollah in Lebanon, having already been driven back by them once because the Israelis couldn't take the casualties in the field. Now Israel has to worry about an even more battle-hardened Hezbollah, other well-trained and supplied armed groups, and those damn precision missiles . One cannot overstress how important those are, and how adamant the U.S. and Israel are that Iran get rid of them. As another Revolutionary Guard commander says : "Iran has encircled Israel from all four sides if only one missile hits the occupied lands, Israeli airports will be filled with people trying to run away from the country."

This campaign is overseen in the U.S. by the likes of " praying for war with Iran " Christian Zionists Mike Pompeo and Mike Pence, who together " urged " Trump to approve the killing of Soleimani. Pence, whom the Democrats are trying to make President, is associated with Christians United For Israel (CUFI), which paid for his and his wife's pilgrimage to Israel in 2014, and is run by lunatic televangelist John Hagee, whom even John McCain couldn't stomach. Pompeo, characterized as the "brainchild" of the assassination, thinks Trump was sent by God to save Israel from Iran. (Patrick Lawrence argues the not-implausible case that Pompeo and Defense Secretary Esper ordered the assassination and stuck Trump with it.) No Zionists are more fanatical than Christian Zionists. These guys are not going to stop.

And Iran is not going to surrender. Iran is no longer afraid of the escalation dominance game. Do not be fooled by peace-loving illusions -- propagated mainly now by mealy-mouthed European and Democratic politicians -- that Iran will return to what's described as "unconditional" negotiations, which really means negotiating under the absolutely unacceptable condition of economic blockade, until the U.S. gets what it wants. Not gonna happen. Iran's absolutely correct condition for any negotiation with the U.S. is that the U.S. return to the JCPOA and lift all sanctions.

Also not gonna happen, though any real peace-loving Democratic candidate would specifically and unequivocally commit to doing just that if elected. The phony peace-loving poodles of Britain, France, and Germany (the EU3) have already cast their lot with the aggressive American policy, triggering a dispute mechanism that will almost certainly result in a " snapback " of full UN sanctions on Iran within 65 days, and destroy the JCPOA once and for all. Because, they, too, know Iran's nuclear weapons program is a fake issue and have "always searched for ways to put more restrictions on Iran, especially on its ballistic missile program." Israel can have all the nuclear weapons it wants, but Iran must give up those conventional ballistic missiles. Cannot overstate their importance.

Iran is not going to submit to any of this. The only way Iran is going to part with its ballistic missiles is by using them. The EU3 maneuver will not only end the JCPOA, it may drive Iran out of the Nuclear Weapons Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). As Moon of Alabama says, the EU3 gambit is "not designed to reach an agreement but to lead to a deeper conflict" and ratchet the war up yet another notch. The Trump administration and its European allies are -- as FDR did to Japan -- imposing a complete economic blockade that Iran will have to find a way to break out of. It's deliberately provocative, and makes the outbreak of a regional/world war more likely. Which is its purpose.

This certainly marks the Trump administration as having crossed a war threshold the Obama administration avoided. Credit due to Obama for forging ahead with the JCPOA in the face of fierce resistance from Netanyahu and his Republican and Democratic acolytes, like Chuck Schumer. But that deal itself was built upon false premises and extraordinary conditions and procedures that -- as the current actions of the EU3 demonstrate -- made it a trap for Iran.

With his Iran policy, as with Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, what Trump is doing -- and can easily demonstrate -- is taking to its logical and deadly conclusion the entire imperialist-zionist conception of the Middle East, which all major U.S. politicians and media have embraced and promulgated over decades, and cannot abandon.

With the Soleimani assassination, Trump both allayed some of the fears of Iran war hawks in Israel and the U.S. about his "reluctance to flex U.S. military muscle" and re-stoked all their fears about his impulsiveness, unreliability, ignorance, and crassness. As the the Christian Science Monitor reports, Israel leaders are both "quick to praise" his action and "having a crisis of confidence" over Trump's ability to "manage" a conflict with Iran -- an ambivalence echoed in every U.S. politician's "Soleimani was a terrorist, but " statement.

Trump does exactly what the narrative they all promote demands, but he makes it look and sound all thuggish and scary. They want someone whose rhetorical finesse will talk us into war on Iran as a humanitarian and liberating project. But we should be scared and repelled by it. The problem isn't the discrepancy in Trump between actions and attitudes, but the duplicity in the fundamental imperialist-zionist narrative. There is no "good" -- non-thuggish, non-repellent way -- way to do the catastrophic violence it demands. Too many people discover that only after it's done.

Trump, in other words, has just started a war that the U.S. political elite constantly brought us to the brink of, and some now seem desperate to avoid, under Trump's leadership . But not a one will abandon the zionist and American-exceptionalist premises that make it inevitable -- about, you know, dictating what weapons which countries can "never" have. Hoisted on their own petard. As are we all.

To be clear: Iran will try its best to avoid all-out war. The U.S. will not. This is the war that, as the NYT reports , "Hawks in Israel and America have spent more than a decade agitating for." It will start, upon some pretext, with a full-scale U.S. air attack on Iran, followed by Iranian and allied attacks on U.S. forces and allies in the region, including Israel, and then an Israeli nuclear attack on Iran -- which they think will end it. It is an incomprehensible disaster. And it's becoming almost impossible to avoid.

The best prospect for stopping it would be for Iran and Russia to enter into a mutual defense treaty right now. But that's not going to happen. Neither Russia nor China is going to fight for Iran. Why would they? They will sit back and watch the war destroy Iran, Israel, and the United States.

Happy New Year.

[Jan 25, 2020] Trump opened a modern Pandora box in the Middle East

Jan 25, 2020 | www.theatlantic.com

In 1958, U.S. leaders stood at the threshold of an American era in the Middle East, conflicted about whether it was worth the trouble to usher in.

... ... ...

More than half a century later, the future of the United States' military presence in the Middle East is once again up for discussion, as Iraq calls on the U.S. to end its roughly 5,000-strong troop presence in the country and Trump struggles to remove American forces from Syria and Afghanistan as well. U.S. politicians are now grappling with the possibility of a post-American period in the region.

... ... ..

And even if Trump doesn't get his way entirely, he will undoubtedly seize on additional opportunities to reduce the American military presence in the Middle East, as fed-up Americans and progressive presidential candidates push in the same direction. When Eisenhower elected to open that "Pandora's Box" back in 1958, his justification was that it would be "disastrous" if "we don't."

Perhaps nothing signals the coming post-American era in the Middle East more than the fact that so many U.S. leaders these days fear the disastrous consequences of leaving the box open.

[Jan 25, 2020] Why the West Can't Beat Putin or His Policies by Phil Butler

Notable quotes:
"... Finally, the political dysfunction that now eats away at the United States' reputation, is not a factor that we should underestimate. Donald Trump's administration treats no one as equal. Only Israel and at times Saudi Arabia seem like favored nations if not full-fledged equals. Speaking of brotherhood and loyalty, Mr. Putin's loyalty to and rescuing of Syria's Assad has not gone unnoticed in these regions. At the same moment the US-led coalition tries to stabilize it's invaded satraps, Putin continues a more than forty-year tradition of sticking by the Syrian leadership. And the Russian president has capitalized on this aspect to expand Russian influence worldwide. ..."
Jan 25, 2020 | astutenews.com

Whenever there's an examination of Russia's resurgence in Middle Eastern and African affairs, the narrative is always about weapons, economic competition, and Cold War-era detente. Few analysts or reporters examine the non-transactional elements of the policies of Vladimir Putin. To really understand the recent successes of Mr. Putin and Russia, we must understand the somewhat obscure aspects of Russia's foreign policy.

A perfect example of how trade statistics dominate western thought process on Russia policy can be found at almost any Washington or London think tank. Take this Chatham House report last year by Dr. Alex Vines OBE, for instance. The Africa Programme at Chatham House is not immune from the disease that causes western experts to oversimplify and underestimate Putin's external policies. To quote Dr. Vines:

"Russia has, for several years, been quietly investing in Soviet-era partnerships and forging new alliances by offering security, arms training, and electioneering services in exchange for mining rights and other opportunities."

As you can see, Vines is totally focused on transactional aspects of Russia's relationships, adhering to what political scientists refer to as "rentierism" – or the new imperialism. As you may know, the concept of the rentier state is Marxist, thought to have come into practical use in the time of Lenin. But while the so-called rentier mentality which dominates much of the Middle East and Africa does affect Russia and policy, the deeper implications of Russia's new relationships are equally important.

Dr. Vines, Chatham House, and nearly all the west's other analytical stables discuss Russia's wielding of soft power. This is true because their approaches and understanding of world affairs is from purely a businessman's or a general's world perspective. This is the part of the reason west-east relations are so mucked up. Every reporter on a policy beat in New York or Washington can write a biography on Vladimir Putin and "what he wants," but there's no one who really understands how Russia's president is winning at world detente.

In much the same way business relationships are fostered in a highly competitive economic environment, Russia's successful policies often win out because of the more subtle factors. In Africa, for instance, the history of the Soviet Union's, and later Russia's criticisms of Cold War-era neocolonialism play a role. Make no mistake, ideologically, Mr. Putin's efforts and outreaches are far more appealing than those of the US, France, Britain, Germany, and others with the Anglo-European mindset toward these nations. As for the Middle East, Mr. Putin's policies win out in large part because of a more "fraternal relationships" – like the one between Russian and Middle Eastern Islamic communities. Samuel Ramani and Theodore Karasik point these out in a report last year at LobeLog .

The western discussion centers around accusing Russia and Mr. Putin for what US policies are centered around. It's as if the greatest minds in the western world cannot fathom establishing cultural or ideological linkages with people of these nations. The Americans, French, Brits, and Germans look at Russia policy success as bankers and weapons dealers, from a superiority and exceptionalism standpoint. While Russia seems to address the Middle East and Africa on a more equal footing.

Finally, the political dysfunction that now eats away at the United States' reputation, is not a factor that we should underestimate. Donald Trump's administration treats no one as equal. Only Israel and at times Saudi Arabia seem like favored nations if not full-fledged equals. Speaking of brotherhood and loyalty, Mr. Putin's loyalty to and rescuing of Syria's Assad has not gone unnoticed in these regions. At the same moment the US-led coalition tries to stabilize it's invaded satraps, Putin continues a more than forty-year tradition of sticking by the Syrian leadership. And the Russian president has capitalized on this aspect to expand Russian influence worldwide.

Russia is supplanting western powers as the more "reliable partner" for many reasons. And it does not hurt that Donald Trump and his European allies continually stumble over their archaic ideas about emerging countries. Sure Russian business will prosper from this dynamic shift in Africa and the Middle East, but the profit will not be nearly as one-sided as it is with the neocolonialists. This AI-Monitor report puts it this way in a discussion of Mr. Putin's "Gulf Security Plan":

"He [Putin] might believe his is ultimately the only meaningful diplomatic channel; his stock rises, even if incrementally, simply by playing on traditionally American turf; and the Gulf states, and maybe even the United States and the EU, might eventually come around to avoid an unwanted crisis and conflict."

In short, Putin and Russia have been so successful, winning nowadays is about watching the US and allies make mistakes as much as it is about created dynamic policies. For those unfamiliar, the Russian concept for the Gulf area is a strategy that will work. That is if the western hegemony can agree to try a new game for peace and prosperity in these regions. I find it interesting that the official documentation of this Putin plan is framed in the form of an invitation to Washington and the others, to take part in a broader coalition for peace and security. Obviously, the Anglo-European cabal did not accept.

"Russia's proposals are in no way final and represent a kind of invitation to start a constructive dialogue on ways to achieve long-term stabilization in the Gulf region. We are ready to work closely with all stakeholders in both official settings and in sociopolitical and expert circles."

Yes, Russia wants trade and economic wins in both the Middle East and Africa. No, Vladimir Putin does not want to leverage regions and continents in a global domination game intended to destroy America and allies. Destroying markets, after all, is not a way to do good business. As for analyzing Putin, the experts should examine the other variables of his success. That is, even if the goal of think tanks is to find an enemy's weakness. So far, Putin does not seem to have any.

By Phil Butler
Source: New Eastern Outlook

[Jan 25, 2020] Mikhail Khodorkovsky the Man, the Myth, the Movie by Lucy Komisar

Jan 22, 2020 | www.thenation.com
"It seemed to me that ideologically he [Putin] was one of our people," the former Russian oligarch says in the new Alex Gibney documentary Citizen K .

M ikhail Borisovich Khodorkovsky, MBK in his homeland, is the most famous Russian "oligarch," the name given by their compatriots to a handful of men who, when communism fell, turned it into gangster capitalism. With an estimated $16 billion fortune, he became the richest man in Russia. When the rules changed, he didn't adapt and spent a decade in prison.

Alex Gibney's new documentary Citizen K , which opened in New York last week, tells how MBK and others took advantage of schemes promoted by President Boris Yeltsin to privatize state companies in order to raise the money he needed to win reelection. Gibney blames the chaos of the times more than the thieves' venality.

Avoiding damning details, Citizen K casts its subject as a reformed sinner and even a fighter for justice against an evil President Vladimir Putin. From the beginning, there's a significant difference between reality and MBK's film portrayal.

The film says Khodorkovsky got involved in the Komsomol, the communist youth organization, because the government relaxed restrictions on free enterprise for the group. The film doesn't explain that as the deputy head of a Komsomol cell at a local technical institute, MBK obtained and sold computers at inflated prices and laundered Soviet credits with other imported goods that he converted into hard currency. With the profits, he set up Menatep bank.

Then came the theft of Russia's patrimony. The film shows that the Yeltsin government, egged on by American free-market boosters, announced a program to give citizens vouchers worth $40 each. The scheme was then promoted by a US team sent to end Russian state control of enterprises and open them to the West. Vouchers could be traded, sold, or exchanged for shares in state enterprises. MBK and others bought them from citizens unaware of their value.

The film explains that Yeltsin, with a 3 percent approval rating, was going to lose the 1996 election. The government needed cash to pay salaries and pensions, so under "loans for shares," banksters made loans the government wouldn't repay, and when it defaulted, they got Russia's state enterprises in sham auctions. The film depicts Khodorkovsky as "a man of intelligence and great vision," but Gibney admits this was gangster capitalism.

He recounts that Khodorkovsky's Menatep was the only bidder for the oil giant, Yukos, valued at $5 billion. The bank ran the auction itself and paid just $310 million for a 78 percent stake in the company. Khodorkovsky declares, "I don't think this was a bad deal for the state." The film cuts to shots of idle operations starting up.

Moscow Times founder Derk Sauer says in the film that Khodorkovsky was "using every trick in the book available to him." There are no details. The film doesn't tell how MBK, not satisfied with getting Yukos for a steal, then, according to Russian charges , laundered multi-billions of dollars in profits that would have represented evaded taxes and dividends for minority investors.

Peter Bond , an Isle of Man shell company operator, set up a transfer-pricing and money-laundering scheme that sold Yukos oil to fake companies at below-market prices and then to real buyers at market . Stephen Curtis, managing director of Khodorkovsky's $30 billion holding company Menatep, ran the operation out of London. Swiss authorities would discover and freeze almost $4 billion of suspected cash in Khodorkovsky's shell accounts. None of this is in the film.

Bond also helped Khodorkovsky cheat Russia and minority shareholders of Avisma , a titanium company he also got at a rigged auction. Kenneth Dart , heir to the Dart disposable cup fortune, former investor in Russia William Browder, and their New York partner Francis Baker bought Avisma from MBK, on the understanding that profit-stripping would continue. When Bond showed there is no honor among thieves and didn't pass on the cash, they sued. An affidavit by attorney Anthony Wollenberg said they were told that "a significant part of the profits which Avisma was able to earn on the sale of its product were taken offshore through TMC," Titanium Metals Co. He said that "was central to the entire transaction," that "without the right to those profits, investment in Avisma was not an attractive proposition." This, too, is not in the film.

In 1999 the ailing, drunk Yeltsin resigned and his prime minister, Vladimir Putin, took over. The film suggests that Khodorkovsky was arrested for attacking Putin. It recounts that in 2003, Putin summoned Russia's top businessmen to a televised roundtable about corruption. Khodorkovsky came with slides which reported that some Russians felt that corruption existed at the highest levels of government, telling Putin that "25 per cent of the population believe that you are among those taking bribes."

In fact, Khodorkovsky and Yukos were not singled out. Oil major Lukoil settled a claim for $200 million in taxes evaded in a similar scheme.

The details of the transfer-pricing scams matter, because MBK followed the same business model for the fertilizer company Apatit. He was initially arrested in 2003 for rigging the Apatit privatization auction and embezzling profits. This is also not in the film.

The unreported Stephen Curtis story also figures in the film's attack on Putin. Gibney declares that in England over 15 years there have been a growing number of mysterious deaths related to Russia. He screenshots a New York Times story that says Curtis, Khodorkovsky's lawyer, was killed in a helicopter crash, implying that Putin ordered his death.

Former Financial Times journalist Thomas Catan's version was different. He wrote that Curtis approached UK intelligence agencies weeks before the crash offering to provide information, probably about Yukos. The UK's National Criminal Intelligence Service had assigned Curtis to a handler just days before his new Agusta 109E helicopter crashed in March 2004. Someone close to British intelligence told Catan, "My sense was that he was fearful of being prosecuted by the Russian authorities for being party to assisting in the capital flight and that he thought that going to the UK authorities would give him some sort of top cover."

Khodorkovsky says in the film that in the beginning, "it seemed to me that ideologically he [Putin] was one of our people." Putin had told the oligarchs he wouldn't question their rigged auction acquisitions if they kept out of politics.

In fact, MBK's conflict with Putin was not about charges of corruption by a man mired in corruption but over MBK's decision to use his ill-gotten wealth for political influence.

Moscow Times founder Sauer says in the film, "Now he has all this money, he started thinking about what's next." Later on Sauer says, "Putin had a very valid point. Half of the parliament is on the payroll of Khodorkovsky, many of the top people in the oil ministry are people appointed by the oligarchs. What is this? If I want to be a real president, I need to have my own people, and I need to get these people out of politics."

Gibney confronts MBK: "It was said at the time that you were busy courting or even buying influence in the Duma." Khodorkovsky replies, "We only dealt with our industry-related problems . It was exactly as it happens in the United States Congress. Will you support our campaign in the next election?" This answer is never challenged by Gibney.

However, the film does note MBK's other mistake: deciding to make Yukos a public company and seek a merger with ExxonMobil, giving foreigners control of Russia's oil.

The film says Russia got back Yukos in a bankruptcy auction won by "a mysterious, newly created company, Baikal Finance Group," which sold it to the government-controlled Rosneft. In the film, Putin explains, "You all know perfectly well how privatization took place in the early '90s. Many market players at that time received state property worth many billions. Today the state, using absolutely legal market tools, establishes its interests. I think this is quite normal."

Sauer notes, "In most countries in the world oil companies are owned by the state. Nothing wrong with this. Good news for the Russians. That's how 99 percent of the people saw it." Another journalist says in the film, "The fact that the oligarchs were so reviled and resented by the Russian people was a fantastically useful tool for Putin . And when he did bring the oligarchs to heel, it was incredibly popular." All true. But Gibney avoids detailing why MBK was reviled.

He says, "Out of prison, Khodorkovsky is looking for a third act." Khodorkovsky speaks in Kiev in 2014 at a rally in favor of the US-supported coup against Ukraine president Viktor Yanukovych, whom Washington considered too close to Russia.

There's a lot about MBK suffering in prison and thinking about his children. Gibney asks, "Do you think that being in prison gave you special insight into Putin and the people around him?"

"Yes. The way that the criminals think is exactly that way that the criminal group around Putin thinks. It's a criminal mentality." That could explain his quips that "in Russia laws are an iffy question" and "the strictness of Russian laws is compensated by the lack of obligation to follow them."

He gave Gibney an opening: "As a co-owner of Yukos I had to make enormous efforts to protect this property. I had to close my eyes and put up with many things all for the sake of my personal wealth, preserving and increasing it." But Gibney doesn't take it. He never asks for details. Or how MBK can return what he stole.

[Jan 25, 2020] 25 years ago: the Fright of a Norwegian rocket launch almost caused a nuclear war

Jan 25, 2020 | www.wsws.org

This week in history

January 25, 2020

Black Brant XII rocket

On January 25, 1995, the Russian military mistook a Black Brant XII missile launched by a group of scientists from Norway and the United States to study the Northern lights over Svalbard for a nuclear attack by the US Navy with a Trident ballistic missile. It was the first case when the Russian leader brought the nuclear suitcase in a state of combat readiness.

The rocket, which was equipped to study the Northern lights, was launched from the island's Andøya Rocket Range, located off the North-West coast of Norway. It was moving along the same trajectory that US Intercontinental nuclear missiles could fly towards Moscow. Alarm sirens sounded in the Russian radar center, where technical specialists recorded the flight of the missile, and where the message about the us missile attack came from.

Russian President Boris Yeltsin summoned the generals and military advisers, and a "nuclear suitcase" "Cheget"was delivered to him. He had less than ten minutes to decide whether the Russian military would strike back. "I really used my" little black box "with a button for the first time yesterday, which is always with me," Yeltsin told the press the next day, after narrowly avoiding a nuclear disaster. -- I immediately contacted the Ministry of defense and all the military commanders I needed, and we tracked the movement of this missile from start to finish."

A few years later, Spiegel Online noted that Yeltsin left Russian nuclear missiles in his mines at the time, probably "because relations between Russia and the United States in 1995 were relatively trusting."

The scientists who conducted the study, starting in 1962, launched more than 600 missiles, but the Black Brant XII rocket was larger than the previous ones and more like an American ballistic missile. A month before this launch, a team of researchers instructed the Norwegian foreign Ministry to notify neighboring countries of their experiment. Russian officials received such a notification from Oslo three weeks before the launch, but it was apparently ignored by them. The radar crews of the Russian missile warning system (SPRn) were also not informed and reported that it was a potentially nuclear missile moving towards Russia.

Peter Pry, a former CIA officer, wrote that although there were other false alarms in the nuclear age, none of them went as far as the Norwegian missile incident, "the single most dangerous moment of the nuclear missile era."

[Jan 25, 2020] Putin's Now Purged the West from the Kremlin

Jan 19, 2020 | astutenews.com

It came as the biggest shock of the day on Wednesday. The Russian government resigned. The day before President Vladimir Putin gave his State of the Nation address and outlined a slate of constitutional changes.

That speech prompted an overhaul of Russia's government.

Putin's plan is to devolve some of the President's overwhelming power to the legislature and the State Council, while beefing up the Constitutional Court's ability to provide checks on legislation.

From TASS:

In Wednesday's State of the Nation Address, Putin put forward a number of initiatives changing the framework of power structures at all levels, from municipal authorities to the president. The initiatives particularly stipulate that the powers of the legislative and judicial branches, including the Constitutional Court, will be expanded. The president also proposed to expand the role of the Russian State Council. Putin suggested giving the State Duma (the lower house of parliament) the right to approve the appointment of the country's prime minister, deputy prime ministers and ministers.

The bigger shock was that in response to this Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev dissolved the current government willingly and resigned as Prime Minister.

Within hours Putin recommended Federal Tax Service chief, Mikhail Mishustin as Prime Minister. The State Duma approved Putin's recommendation and Mishustin was sworn in by Putin all within a day.

While this came on suddenly it also shouldn't be a surprise. These changes have been discussed for months leading up to Putin's speech. And it's been clear for the past few years that Putin has been engaged in the second phase of his long-term plan to first rebuild and then remake Russia during his time in office.

The first phase was rescuing Russia from economic, societal and demographic collapse. It was in serious danger of this when Putin took over from Boris Yeltsin.

It meant regaining control over strategic state resources, rebuilding Russia's economy and defense, stabilizing its population, getting some semblance of political control within the Kremlin and bringing hope back to a country in desperate need of it.

Hostile analysts, both domestic and foreign, criticized Putin constantly for his tactics. Russia's reliance on its base commodities sectors to revive its economy was seen as a structural weakness. But, an honest assessment of the situation begs the question, "How else was Putin going to back Russia away from the edge of that abyss?"

These same experts never seem to have an answer.

And when those critics were able to answer, since they were people connected to monied interests in the West who Putin stymied from continuing to loot Russia's natural wealth, their answer was usually to keep doing that.

Don't kid yourself, most of the so-called Russia experts out there are deeply tied back to Wall St. through one William Browder and his partner-in-crime Mikhail Khordokovsky.

Nearly all of them in the U.S. Senate are severely compromised or just garden variety neocons still hell-bent on subjugating Russia to their hegemonic plans.

Their voices should be discounted heavily since they are the same criminals actively destroying U.S. and European politics today.

In the West these events were spun to suggest Putin is consolidating power. The initial reports were that he would remove the restraint on Presidential service of two consecutive terms. And that this would pave the way to his staying in office after his current term expires in 2024.

That, as always when regarding Russia, is the opposite of the truth. Putin's recommendation is to remove the word "consecutive" from the Constitution making it clear that a President can only ever serve two terms. Moreover, that president will have had to have lived in Russia for the previous 25 years.

No one will be allowed to rule Russia like he has after he departs the office. Because Putin understands that the Russian presidency under the current constitution is far to powerful and leaves the country vulnerable to a man who isn't a patriot being corrupted by that power.

There are a number of issues that most commentators and analysts in the West do not understand about Putin. Their insistence on presenting Putin only in the worst possible terms is tired and nonsensical to anyone who spends even a cursory amount of time studying him.

These events of the past couple of days in Russia are the end result of years of work on Putin's part to purge the Russian government and the Kremlin of what The Saker calls The Atlanticist Fifth Column.

And they have been dug in like ticks in a corrupt bureaucracy that has taken Putin the better part of twenty years to tame.

It's been a long and difficult road that even I only understand the surface details of. But it's clear that beginning in 2012 or so, Putin began making the shift towards the next phase of Russia's strategic comeback.

And that second phase is about taking a stable Russia and elevating its institutions to a more sustainable model.

Once birth rates improved and demographic collapse averted the next thing to do was to reform an economy rightly criticized for being too heavily dependent on oil and gas revenues.

And that is a much tougher task. It meant getting control over the Russian central bank and the financial sector. Putin was given that opportunity during the downturn in oil prices in 2014.

Using the crisis as an opportunity Putin began the decoupling of Russia's economy from the West. During the early boom years of his Presidency oil revenue strengthened both the Russian state coffers and the so-called oligarchs who Putin was actively fighting for control.

He warned the CEO's of Gazprom, Rosneft and Sberbank that they were too heavily exposed to the U.S. dollar this way in the years leading up to the crash in oil prices in 2014-16.

And when the U.S. sanctioned Russia in 2014 over the reunification with Crimea these firms all had to come to Putin for a bailout. Their dollar-denominated debt was swapped out for euro and ruble debt through the Bank of Russia and he instructed the central bank to allow the ruble to fall, to stop defending it.

Taking the inflationary hit was dangerous but necessary if Russia was to become a truly independent economic force.

Since then it's been a tug of war with the IMF-trained bureaucracy within the Bank of Russia to set monetary policy in accordance with Russia's needs not what the international community demanded.

That strong Presidency was a huge boon. But, now that the job is mostly done, it can be an albatross.

Putin understands that a Russia flush with too much oil money is a Russia ruled by that money and becomes lazy because of that money. Contrary to popular opinion, Putin doesn't want to see oil prices back near $100 per barrel.

Because Russia's comparative advantage in oil and gas is so high relative to everyone else on the world stage and to other domestic industries that money retards innovation and investment in new technologies and a broadening of the Russian domestic economy.

And this has been Putin's focus for a while now. Oil and gas are geostrategic assets used to shore up Russia's position as a regional power, building connections with its new partners while opening up new markets for Russian businesses.

But it isn't the end of the Russian story of the future, rather the beginning.

And the slow privatization of those industries is happening, with companies like Gazprom and Rosneft selling off excess treasury shares to raise capital and put a larger share of them into public hands.

Again, this is all part of the next stage of Russia's development and democratizing some of the President's power has to happen if Russia is going to survive him leaving the stage.

Because it is one thing to have a man of uncommon ability and patriotism wielding that power responsibly. It's another to believe Russia can get another man like Putin to take his place.

So, Putin is again showing his foresight and prudence in pushing for these changes now. It shows that he feels comfortable that this new structure will insulate Russia from external threats while strengthening the domestic political scene.

Gilbert Doctorow has an excellent early reaction to this dramatic turn by Putin which I encourage everyone to read in full. The subtle point he makes is:

To understand what comes next, you have to take into account a vitally important statement which Putin made a few moments before he set out his proposed constitutional reforms. He told his audience that his experience meeting with the leaders of the various Duma parties at regular intervals every few weeks showed that all were deeply patriotic and working for the good of the country. Accordingly, he said that all Duma parties should participate in the formation of the cabinet.

And so, we are likely to see in the coming days that candidates for a number of federal ministries in the new, post-Medvedev cabinet will be drawn precisely from parties other than United Russia. In effect, without introducing the word "coalition" into his vocabulary, Vladimir Putin has set the stage for the creation of a grand coalition to succeed the rule of one party, United Russia, over which Dimitri Medvedev was the nominal chairman.

The end result of this move to devolve the cabinet appointments to the whole of the Duma is to ensure that a strong President which Putin believes is best for Russia is tempered by a cabinet drawn from the whole of the electorate, including the Prime Minister.

That neither opens the door to dysfunctional European parliamentary systems nor closes it from a strong President leading Russia during crisis periods.

Once the amendments to the constitution are finalized Putin will put the whole package to a public vote.

This is the early stage of this much-needed overhaul of Russia's constitutional order and the neocons in the West are likely stunned into silence knowing that they can no longer just wait Putin out and sink their hooks into his most likely successor.

Sometimes the most important changes occur right under our noses, right out in the open. Contrast that with the skullduggery and open hostility of the political circus in D.C. and you can which direction the two countries are headed.

By Tom Luongo
Source: Gold Goats 'n Guns

[Jan 24, 2020] How Are Iran and the "Axis of the Resistance" Affected by the US Assassination of Soleimani by Elijah J. Magnier

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... The US President Donald Trump assassinated the commander of the "Axis of the Resistance", the (Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps) IRGC – Quds Brigade Major General Qassem Soleimani at Baghdad airport with little consideration of the consequences of this targeted killing. It is not to be excluded that the US administration considered the assassination would reflect positively on its Middle Eastern policy. Or perhaps the US officials believed the killing of Sardar Soleimani would weaken the "Axis of the Resistance": once deprived of their leader, Iran's partners' capabilities in Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen would be reduced. Is this assessment accurate? ..."
Jan 22, 2020 | www.globalresearch.ca

The US President Donald Trump assassinated the commander of the "Axis of the Resistance", the (Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps) IRGC – Quds Brigade Major General Qassem Soleimani at Baghdad airport with little consideration of the consequences of this targeted killing. It is not to be excluded that the US administration considered the assassination would reflect positively on its Middle Eastern policy. Or perhaps the US officials believed the killing of Sardar Soleimani would weaken the "Axis of the Resistance": once deprived of their leader, Iran's partners' capabilities in Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen would be reduced. Is this assessment accurate?

A high-ranking source within this "Axis of the Resistance" said " Sardar Soleimani was the direct and fast track link between the partners of Iran and the Leader of the Revolution Sayyed Ali Khamenei. However, the command on the ground belonged to the national leaders in every single separate country. These leaders have their leadership and practices, but common strategic objectives to fight against the US hegemony, stand up to the oppressors and to resist illegitimate foreign intervention in their affairs. These objectives have been in place for many years and will remain, with or without Sardar Soleimani".

"In Lebanon, Hezbollah's Secretary General Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah leads Lebanon and is the one with a direct link to the Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. He supports Gaza, Syria, Iraq and Yemen and has a heavy involvement in these fronts. However, he leads a large number of advisors and officers in charge of running all military, social and relationship affairs domestically and regionally. Many Iranian IRGC officers are also present on many of these fronts to support the needs of the "Axis of the Resistance" members in logistics, training and finance," said the source.

In Syria, IRGC officers coordinate with Russia, the Syrian Army, the Syrian political leadership and all Iran's allies fighting for the liberation of the country and for the defeat of the jihadists who flocked to Syria from all continents via Turkey, Iraq and Jordan. These officers have worked side by side with Iraqi, Lebanese, Syrian and other nationals who are part of the "Axis of the Resistance". They have offered the Syrian government the needed support to defeat the "Islamic State" (ISIS/IS/ISIL) and al-Qaeda and other jihadists or those of similar ideologies in most of the country – with the exception of north-east Syria, which is under US occupation forces. These IRGC officers have their objectives and the means to achieve a target already agreed and in place for years. The absence of Sardar Soleimani will hardly affect these forces and their plans.

In Iraq, over 100 Iranian IRGC officers have been operating in the country at the official request of the Iraqi government, to defeat ISIS. They served jointly with the Iraqi forces and were involved in supplying the country with weapons, intelligence and training after the fall of a third of Iraq into the hands of ISIS in mid-2014. It was striking and shocking to see the Iraqi Army, armed and trained by US forces for over ten years, abandoning its positions and fleeing the northern Iraqi cities. Iranian support with its robust ideology (with one of its allies, motivating them to fight ISIS) was efficient in Syria; thus, it was necessary to transmit this to the Iraqis so they could stand, fight, and defeat ISIS.

The Lebanese Hezbollah is present in Syria and Yemen, and also in Iraq. The Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki asked Sayyed Nasrallah to provide his country with officers to stand against ISIS. Dozens of Hezbollah officers operate in Iraq and will be ready to support the Iraqis if the US forces refuse to leave the country. They will abide by and enforce the decision of the Parliament that the US must leave by end January 2021. Hezbollah's long warfare experience has resulted in painful experiences with the US forces in Lebanon and Iraq throughout several decades and has not been forgotten.

Sayyed Nasrallah, in his latest speech, revealed the presence in mid-2014 of Hezbollah officials in Kurdistan to support the Iraqi Kurds against ISIS. This was when the same Kurdish Leader Masoud Barzani announced that it was due to Iran that the Kurds received weapons to defend themselves when the US refused to help Iraq for many months after ISIS expanded its control in northern Iraq.

The Hezbollah leaders did not disclose the continuous visits of Kurdish representatives to Lebanon to meet Hezbollah officials. In fact, Iraqi Sunni and Shia officials, ministers and political leaders regularly visit Lebanon to meet Hezbollah officials and its leader. Hezbollah, like Iran, plays an essential role in easing the dialogue between Iraqis when these find it difficult to overcome their differences together.

The reason why Sayyed Nasrallah revealed the presence of his officers in Kurdistan when meeting Masoud Barzani is a clear message to the world that the "Axis of the Resistance" doesn't depend on one single person. Indeed, Sayyed Nasrallah is showing the unity which reigns among this front, with or without Sardar Soleimani. Barzani is part of Iraq, and Kurdistan expressed its readiness to abide by the decision of the Iraqi Parliament to seek the US forces' departure from the country because the Kurds are not detached from the central government but part of it.

Prior to his assassination, Sardar Soleimani prepared the ground to be followed (if killed on the battlefield, for example) and asked Iranian officials to nominate General Ismail Qaani as his replacement. The Leader of the revolution Sayyed Ali Khamenei ordered Soleimani's wish to be fulfilled and to keep the plans and objectives already in place as they were. Sayyed Khamenei, according to the source, ordered an "increase in support for the Palestinians and, in particular, to all allies where US forces are present."

Sardar Soleimani was looking for his death by his enemies and got what he wished for. He was aware that the "Axis of the Resistance" is highly aware of its objectives. Those among the "Axis of the Resistance" who have a robust internal front are well-established and on track. The problem was mainly in Iraq. But it seems the actions of the US have managed to bring Iraqi factions together- by assassinating the two commanders. Sardar Soleimani could have never expected a rapid achievement of this kind. Anti-US Iraqis are preparing this coming Friday to express their rejection of the US forces present in their country.

Sayyed Ali Khamenei , in his Friday prayers last week, the first for eight years, set up a road map for the "Axis of the Resistance": push the US forces out of the Middle East and support Palestine.

All Palestinian groups, including Hamas, were present at Sardar Soleimani's funeral in Iran and met with General Qaani who promised, "not only to continue support but to increase it according to Sayyed Khamenei's request," said the source. Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas Leader, said from Tehran: "Soleimani is the martyr of Jerusalem".

Many Iraqi commanders were present at the meeting with General Qaani. Most of these have a long record of hostility towards US forces in Iraq during the occupation period (2003-2011). Their commander, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandes, was assassinated with Sardar Soleimani and they are seeking revenge. Those leaders have enough motivation to attack the US forces, who have violated the Iraq-US training, cultural and armament agreement. At no time was the US administration given a license to kill in Iraq by the government of Baghdad.

The Iraqi Parliament has spoken: and the assassination of Sardar Soleimani has indeed fallen within the ultimate objectives of the "Axis of the Resistance". The Iraqi caretaker Prime Minister has officially informed all members of the Coalition Forces in Iraq that "their presence, including that of NATO, is now no longer required in Iraq". They have one year to leave. But that absolutely does not exclude the Iraqi need to avenge their commanders.

Palestine constitutes the second objective, as quoted by Sayyed Khamenei. We cannot exclude a considerable boost of support for the Palestinians, much more than the actually existing one. Iran is determined to support the Sunni Palestinians in their objective to have a state of their own in Palestine. The man – Soleimani – is gone and is replaceable like any other man: but the level of commitment to goals has increased. It is hard to imagine the "Axis of the Resistance" remaining idle without engaging themselves somehow in the US Presidential campaign. So, the remainder of 2020 is expected to be hot.

*

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[Jan 24, 2020] Peter Hitchen to Eliot Higgins of Bellingcat: You're not in the ladies' lingerie trade now, sweetie

Highly recommended!
Kevin Smith: "Higgins is currently frantically trying to prop up the Douma narrative against a mountain of evidence disproving his conclusions. For those who’ve followed his story, it’s clear that Higgins is an intelligence asset, set up to take the fall when the currently collapsing narratives take hold in the mainstream.
Jan 24, 2020 | off-guardian.org

"You didn't think that one through, did you, @eliothiggins sweetie? You're not in the ladies' lingerie trade now. This discussion is about truth, which endures, is not held together by elastic, and is not for sale." ~Peter Hitchens responding to Eliot Higgins of Bellingcat over the OPCW scandal on Twitter – 2 January 2020.

[Jan 24, 2020] Crimes of the century truth, perception and punishment

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... I believe more people nowadays recognise that the devastating wars in Iraq and Libya and events in Syria were pushed by our governments and media. They can even accept, when you explain, that we've been assisting terrorists to unseat governments for years. But they seem hesitant of taking the next step and we need to encourage them on this path. ..."
"... This path leads to recognising the sheer evil in our midst and getting out of this mindset that criminal behavior and lying in governments and in our media is normal or should in any way be tolerated. Perhaps some people appreciate this already but don't want to address it out of concern to what they might find. Maybe some people dread the thought of a global conflict so ignore it. But we need to hammer home the consequences of simply doing nothing. ..."
"... I've been trying to think of an analogy to try to get this point across. I sometimes say to people, we wouldn't have released a serial killer like Harold Shipman from prison and appointed him Foreign Secretary. Therefore, why do we tolerate a long line of Foreign Secretaries complicit in laying waste to the world? Sadly, with this analogy most people usually look back at me blankly so I have been searching for one more complete and rooted in history which people can relate better to events today. ..."
Jan 24, 2020 | off-guardian.org

Kevin Smith

"You didn't think that one through, did you, @eliothiggins sweetie? You're not in the ladies' lingerie trade now. This discussion is about truth, which endures, is not held together by elastic, and is not for sale."
Peter Hitchens responding to Eliot Higgins of Bellingcat over the OPCW scandal on Twitter – 2 January 2020.

Like many, I've been following the Douma scandal for some time and particularly since the OPCW whistleblowers and leaked emails blew the lid off the official narrative that Assad used chemical weapons there.

This issue is being discussed on one of my 'go to' accounts on Twitter – Peter Hitchens who has brought this to the attention of the mainstream .

For the past few weeks he's been debating the topic with Eliot Higgins of Bellingcat, Scott Lucas and various Middle East based journalists who created and then pushed the false narrative.

In fact, it's not really a debate. Peter Hitchens is quite literally slaughtering these narrative managers – his logic and clear thinking – and wit exposing the numerous gaps in their story and their desperate deflections.

Hitchens position is not exactly the same as many of us here hold – that Douma was a clear false flag. What he is saying is the evidence points to there being no chemical attack by the Syrian government, the pretext used for the attack on Syria. He doesn't wish to speculate on matters which aren't conclusively proven, for example precisely on what did actually happen.

I respect that position in many ways and his refusal to comment on the dead civilians in the Douma images makes sense from a journalist in the mainstream. I think by having a position which is clear and unassailable enables him to easily brush off his online detractors and not allow them to deflect to other issues.

While I don't agree with everything he says, Hitchens has a calm and rational argument for all the issues he covers. This puts clear ground between him and his online opponents who often resort to childish abuse.

My 80-year old mum admires him too. She describes him as 'frightfully posh'. Perhaps someone who might have belonged in a previous age – but I'm glad we have him in this one.

Anyway, I think we can be sure that Hitchens will continue his important work within the remit he's chosen and others will investigate the unanswered questions which arise from the Douma incident.

Ultimately the question about the dead civilians in the images is simply too dreadful to ignore.

This is because if a chemical attack did not take place and Assad was not responsible it seems highly likely that the civilians including children were murdered to facilitate a fabrication.

And were our own intelligence agencies involved in a staged event, considering the refusal to even establish the basic facts in the days following?

And then, of course, the resulting air strikes nearly caused us to go to war with Russia, with all that would entail.

While these investigations continue, I think it's timely to see where these events fit into the way the general public think and perceive wrongdoing and to try to radically to change this.

I believe more people nowadays recognise that the devastating wars in Iraq and Libya and events in Syria were pushed by our governments and media. They can even accept, when you explain, that we've been assisting terrorists to unseat governments for years. But they seem hesitant of taking the next step and we need to encourage them on this path.

This path leads to recognising the sheer evil in our midst and getting out of this mindset that criminal behavior and lying in governments and in our media is normal or should in any way be tolerated. Perhaps some people appreciate this already but don't want to address it out of concern to what they might find. Maybe some people dread the thought of a global conflict so ignore it. But we need to hammer home the consequences of simply doing nothing.

I've been trying to think of an analogy to try to get this point across. I sometimes say to people, we wouldn't have released a serial killer like Harold Shipman from prison and appointed him Foreign Secretary. Therefore, why do we tolerate a long line of Foreign Secretaries complicit in laying waste to the world? Sadly, with this analogy most people usually look back at me blankly so I have been searching for one more complete and rooted in history which people can relate better to events today.

So, here follows an analogy of a character who lived in the 17th century. His traits, his crimes, the political climate and peoples misguided perceptions in response can be compared to recent events and one particular individual causing havoc in the world today.

Of course I refer to Eliot Higgins of Bellingcat.

Eliot ( 'suck my balls' ) Higgins and Titus Oates 1. Eliot Higgins and Bellingcat

Higgins probably doesn't need much of an introduction here. It seems he has no specific qualifications relevant to his role and a bit of a drop-out in terms of education.

Higgins has been quoted as saying :

Before the Arab spring I knew no more about weapons than the average Xbox owner. I had no knowledge beyond what I'd learned from Arnold Schwarzenegger and Rambo."

But this didn't prevent him blogging about world events and then setting himself up and his site as investigator for several incidents most notably the shooting down of the MH17 passenger plane over Ukraine and allegations of chemical weapons use in Syria. It's now known that Bellingcat is funded by pro-war groups including the Atlantic Council

Higgins has been accused by chemical weapons experts, academics and independent journalists on the ground of fabricating evidence to reach a predetermined outcome decided on by his funders.

His rise to prominence was fast and apparently some media editors now refer their journalists to Bellingcat fabrications rather than allowing them to do any journalism themselves.

Higgins is currently frantically trying to prop up the Douma narrative against a mountain of evidence disproving his conclusions.

For those who've followed his story, it's clear that Higgins is an intelligence asset, set up to take the fall when the currently collapsing narratives take hold in the mainstream.

2. Titus Oates and the Popish Plot

Oates was a foul-mouthed charlatan , serial liar and master of deception who lived in the 17th century. His earlier life included being expelled from school and he was labelled a 'dunce' by people who knew him. He became a clergyman and later joined the Navy. His career was plagued by various sex scandals and charges of perjury.

In the 1670s during the time of Charles II, religious tensions threatened to spill over into civil war but the pragmatic King, by and large, kept a lid on it.

However, along with Dr Israel Tonge an anti-Catholic rector, Oates started writing conspiracy theories and inventing plots and later began writing a manuscript alleging of a plan to assassinate King Charles II and replace him with his openly Catholic brother.

When the fabrication started to gather momentum, the King had an audience with Oates and was unconvinced and was said to have found discrepancies in his story.

However, the tense political and religious climate at that time was ideal for conspiracy theories and scaremongering. The King's ministers took Oates at his word and over a dozen Catholics were executed for treason. This story created panic and paranoia lasting several years taking the nation to the brink of civil war.

Over time Oates lies were exposed and when the Catholic King James II came to the throne, he tried Oates with perjury and he was whipped and placed in the pillory.

After James II fled England during the so-called 'Glorious Revolution' King William and Queen Mary pardoned Oates and gave him a pension.

For me, this whole episode has many obvious parallels with Higgins, the long-running Russia and the anti-Semitism witch-hunts in the media and the false narratives over Iraq, Libya and Syria. Like those in power today, Oates had a knack for getting away with it. And I guess we can all relate this to Julian Assange – the victims or whistleblowers being punished and the perpetrators getting off.

I had wondered why James II, often ruthless and unforgiving had not executed Oates. But apparently the crime of perjury even then didn't carry the death sentence. The judge who convicted Oates was said to have tried his best to finish him off through the whipping, though he survived.

But perhaps even the King and judiciary in failing in this or not using other means at their disposal, couldn't comprehend the enormity of his crimes. Oates was after all a rather absurd character, open to ridicule.

Perhaps this is a bit similar to people today when discovering that Eliot Higgins is also a foul-mouthed fraud – but they can't reconcile this comical ex-lingerie employee as a menace to humanity.

3. Modern day

In the past few weeks I've read various older articles on Iraq and Syria. US troops shooting people for fun from a helicopter . The perpetrators are still free – the whistle-blowers who exposed that, and other events in prison or exile.

Last year we learned about a shocking massacre of Syrian children, unreported in the mainstream media . Mainstream journalists through their one-sided distortions of the conflict and silence, perpetuating the myth that the terrorists who carried out this mass murder are freedom fighters.

And as I've mentioned, we've seen firmer evidence of what many of us knew along – that Douma was a staged fabrication as a pretext for air-strikes and dangerously escalating the Syrian war. The likes of Eliot Higgins and others in the media, colluding in the cover-up of mass murder which likely facilitated this event. And for those honest journalists and experts who bring the truth of these staged events to us, smears will no doubt continue .

Higgins and others in the media who lie, misinform or remain silent are no better than those shooting civilians from helicopters or starting these wars in the first place. In fact, they have killed more and keep killing.

This modern-day Titus Oates, and others share a big responsibility for death and destruction in the Middle East and a dangerous new Cold War.

As I say, I think people are waking up to the distorted narratives and misdirections which have inflicted war on others. Now they need to take the next step and grasp the sheer enormity of the crimes and the risks of global conflict if we don't act.

So, how do we achieve this and get in a position of holding the criminals and war propagandists to account?

By confronting them directly and mercilessly. As Jeremy Corbyn should have done over the anti-Semitism hoax. Perhaps we should adopt some of the tactics they use against the truth-tellers and whistle-blowers. I don't mean by lies or smears. Maybe even ridiculing these people and their nonsense might have the effect of trivialising the crimes they have committed.

No, I think it is time for plainer, no-holds-barred language describing these people for the true evil they are – until the truth and label sticks.

We need to recognise more the seriousness of the crimes. This commentary from the usually measured Piers Robinson about the staged event in Douma reflects the true gravity of the situation in terms of the OPCW complicity .

4. The hijacking of OPCW

The cover-up of evidence that the Douma incident was staged is not merely misconduct. As the staging of the Douma incident entailed mass murder of civilians, those in OPCW who have suppressed the evidence of staging are, unwittingly or otherwise, colluding with mass murder."

We need to now apply this strong language to all crimes committed, be it from the soldiers on the ground, the governments starting these wars or supplying terrorists or the media which promote mass murder through their lies, distortions and silence when presented with the true facts.

We need to go on the offensive and call out the criminals and spell out in no uncertain terms what we are dealing with. With the evidence and fact-based analogies or arguments we publish we should be using more commentary such as 'mass murderer', 'traitor' or 'terrorist propagandist'.

This is particularly important in light of events in recent days. The assassination of General Qasem Soleimani has been normalised in both mainstream and on social media. The people legitimising state-sponsored murder in offices thousands of miles away from Iran, woefully ignorant of the potential of this causing a chain of events which could visit our door soon.

Above all, we should specifically name and shame the individuals promoting war. This needs to be relentless. The official war narratives which have crumbled so far are ample evidence of wrongdoing on a vast scale. So, we can be confident in doing this with the truth firmly on our side.

Filed under: Douma "Chemical Attack" , historical perspectives , latest , Syria Tagged with: Bellingcat. Eliot Higgins , douma chemical attack , Glorious Revelution , Kevin Smith , OPCW , Peter Hitchens , Titus Oates can you spare $1.00 a month to support independent media

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wardropper ,

No, I think it is time for plainer, no-holds-barred language describing these people for the true evil they are – until the truth and label sticks.
Yes indeed.
I was, however, reminded today of the huge mountain we yet have to climb before it can be normal again NOT to be corrupt and wicked. The scenario was a session of acrimony in a US Senate chamber, and according to the NYTimes, "Tensions grew so raw after midnight that Chief Justice Roberts cut in just before 1 a.m. to admonish the managers and the president's lawyers to "remember where they are" and return to "civil discourse." "
"Remembering where you are", when dealing with Titus Oates and other vulgar frauds is perhaps not entirely appropriate ?

wardropper ,

Apologies, I forgot to set the first sentence in quotes

Thom ,

Hitchens may be on the level on this particular issue but it is part of a wider deception where Hitchens poses as a friend to critical thinkers and then tells them they are helpless and/or can do nothing about it. If he really had journalistic integrity he wouldn't be taking a salary from the Mail on Sunday, a newspaper that relentlessly lied for the Tories at the last election, with the help of the itelligence agencies.

Koba ,

As good as Hitchens has done here he's still at heart a Trotskyist he lives a good split and a toothless display just like the Trotskyists he used to side with. His brother went from Trotskyist to soft neocon and peter went from Trotskyist to an ardent Christian Conservative in a veeeeeery short space of time. Plus there dad was deeeeep in with the establishment and his mum Jewish. So .

Richard Le Sarc ,

what?

Gall ,

Bellingcrap is just another scam like Dupes (Snopes) and Politi"facts". All of them are funded by the Atlantic Council and the CIA front National Endowment for "Democracy". Their cover as an "independent objective fact checking service" is about as transparent as Saran Wrap.

tonyopmoc ,

I really liked this when I read it this morning, before the grandkids came round, but I thought some of the comments a bit severe..

I mean this photo is of some 40 year old kid, who lives in Leicester, and his Mum/wife/sister or whatever works in the local Post Office .

I personally had never heard of Brown Noses, and I have never personnally succeeded in getting anything I wrote, posted above our below the line, since The Manchester Guardian moved from Manchester to London, and whilst I do love reading some of the posters' comments well look face it.

Even though Rhys probabaly doesn't like what this kid writes – Elliot is it? he is hardly going to come round with a chainsaw, to cut his head off is he? He probably never even thought of it.

He did say he is small fry, and he probably is still a virgin (been brainwashed – so he actually belives the model doll is better. What has he got to compare it to?)

So I can't blame any of them.

There are alternatives as well as Facebook, Youtube, Instagram, and all those Dating Websites, when almost everything you write gets deleted.

Just go down the local pub when there is a good band on. Even I can pull there, but I am better looking than both Rhys and Elliot

I Like Girls.

I am a man. It's Normal

Just keep fit dancing and smiling, and you will be O.K.

Tony

paul ,

The prime importance of these endless hoaxes, smears, lies, fabrications and official approved conspiracy theories, lies not so much in the events themselves as what it says about the nature of the people who rule over us and their courtiers and handmaidens in the MSM.

It would take a whole forest of trees merely to catalogue all their lies over the years, whether it's the Iraq Incubator Babies, the black Viagra fuelled rape gangs in Libya, the Syrian Gas Hoaxes, 9/11, Iraq's WMD, Iran's non existent nuclear weapons, Skripal, Russiagate, Ukrainegate, or the communist spy/ terrorist/ anti semitic smear campaign against Corbyn. And that is only the tip of a very large iceberg. You could go back further to Gladio, Operation Northwoods, Tonkin Gulf, the "Holocaust", Zinoviev Letter, Bayonetted Belgian Babies, Raped Belgian Nuns, Human Bodies Made Into Soap. The list is endless.

We have been lied to consistently for years, decades, and generations. And these lies have been peddled endlessly in the MSM, no matter how ludicrous and transparently false they are. In the absence of direct personal knowledge or very convincing evidence to the contrary, you just have to assume that everything we have ever been told, are being told, and will be told, and most of the accepted historical record, are simply false. Nothing, nothing at all, can ever be taken at face value.

And those who rule over us and who are responsible for these lies are psychopathic subhuman filth devoid of any moral values or any redeeming features whatsoever. They are a thousand times worse than the worst mass murderers or child killers who have ever been through our courts. The Moors Murderers, the Ted Bundys, the Jeffrey Dahmers, were seriously damaged individuals who killed a handful of victims. And they did their own dirty work. The Blairs, the Campbells, the Straws, the Bushes, the Cheneys, the Rumsfelds, the Allbrights, the Macrons, the Camerons, the Netanyahus, the Trumps, have the blood of millions on their hands. They and their wire pullers are responsible for the death, starvation and misery of tens and hundreds of millions.

So when Blair, or Johnson, or Trump or whoever is interviewed on television, you have to remember that individual is a thousand times worse than the Moors Murderers, and we would actually be that much better off if Brady or Hindley were ruling over us. They deserve no respect or deference or legitimacy. They plot the murders of millions and the starvation of tens of millions – and laugh and giggle as they do so. They should be simply recognised for what they awe – psychopathic subhuman filth.

austrian peter ,

I do agree with you Paul and of course all you say is true. One of the main problems is that these people have the power to build artificial constructs sufficient for the masses to believe and perpetuated through their bought and paid for MSM whose journalists are mere foot soldiers and wish only to get their pay checks. They have no reason to question the lies and distortions pedaled to them by TPTB – they merely repeat the false narrative:
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" – Upton Sinclair

And we, the great 99%, have little power to change things except within our local network. We can shout all we like on social media but it changes nothing until the great crisis reoccurs and perhaps the masses will rise and demand a just and equitable system. Until that day perhaps this little video will provide an understanding:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/rStL7niR7gs?version=3&rel=1&fs=1&autohide=2&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&wmode=transparent

Roberto ,

The business of the MSM throughout the ages has been to traumatise or at least just generally worry the public with headlines focused on fear, envy, anger, revenge, and hate. Include all five in your story and you're well on the way to a Pulitzer Prize, bestowed on the profession by one of the great muckrakers of all time. It's not incidental that there have been a disturbing number of winners that have turned out to be dissembling frauds. Add to this the fact that 'journalism' training apparently does not teach entrants to distinguish the difference between opinion and news, and the die is cast: propaganda as news.

Dungroanin ,

Here is what BellEndScat supporting Rusbridger is moaning about.

"For some years now – largely unreported – two chancery court judges have been dealing with literally hundreds of cases of phone hacking against MGN Ltd and News Group, the owners, respectively, of the Daily Mirror and the Sun (as well as the defunct News of the World).
The two publishers are, between them, forking out eye-watering sums to avoid any cases going to trial in open court. Because the newspaper industry lobbied so forcefully to scrap the second part of the Leveson inquiry, which had been due to shine a light on such matters, we can only surmise what is going on.

But there are clues. Mirror Group (now Reach) had by July 2018 set aside more than £70m to settle phone-hacking claims without risking any of them getting to court. The BBC reported last year that the Murdoch titles had paid out an astonishing £400m in damages and calculated that the total bill for the two companies could eventually reach £1bn."

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jan/19/there-is-a-reason-why-royals-demonised-but-wont-read-all-about-it-prince-harry-meghan-markle

On the overall perfidious msm he quips:

"Because the newspaper industry lobbied so forcefully to scrap the second part of the Leveson inquiry, which had been due to shine a light on such matters, we can only surmise what is going on."

-- --

Completely ignoring that the Integrity Iniative infested Guardian ITSELF objected to the recommendation of Levesons thoroughly public Inquiry and opposition to a independent press regulator!

It would have been a building block and certainly stopped most of the continued press misbehaviour over the last 5 years.

Neither Fish nor Fowl Mr Rusbridger. More sinner that saint, more like.

Hugh O'Neill ,

Going to the heart of what Bellingcat, MI6 and CIA is Pompeo's: "We lie, we cheat, we steal." These evil filth are devoid of any moral code and have no respect whatsoever for the laws of God or Man. At which point, consider Moses' (how apt) Ten Commandments. There among them is: "Thou shalt not bear false witness". Think what you will of these Ten, but as a moral code, they were quite useful.

Richard Le Sarc ,

Would that all these scum could share the fate of their progenitor, Streicher-without the ' necktie party'. Life at hard labour would do the lot of them much good.

Brianeg ,

I looked at the Veterans Today link and it all sounds very plausible'

However in today's world nothing makes sense especially when the questions arise.

Is it possible to change the signal of an aircrafts transponder remotely. Can the target acquisition radar on the missile be spoofed remotely. Just why did the flight control officer sanction the take off of this plane in the middle of a war unless they were party to the whole thing.. Just what were the six Israeli F-35 jets doing flying close to the Iranian border?

Okay there is a lot of smoke but just where is the fire.

Just as interesting is that none of the twelve Iranian missiles was intercepted and there are rumours that the Iranians were able to take out of action American air defences.

I am sure that like with Douma when the majority of NATO missiles were intercepted by missiles that were decades old, you wonder what might happen when most of the middle east is covered by the S-300 and later versions.

This is a story that has got a long way to run and we might never hear the ending.

Dungroanin ,

Facts are inconvenient.
Many planes took off.
This one was delayed by the pilot 'to remove overloading'.
Reports of Cruise missiles heading in.

Mucho ,

For the best info on this, go to Brendon O' Connell's channel and watch 1 to 3 and number 22. You will get answers there.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYaLxbD7Rix3p1rdGY3IMjg?pbjreload=10

Also go to the Antedote and listen to Greg and Jeremy's latest offering.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMf1qGR8km1c8vg_dtpzzVQ

Dungroanin ,

It sounds a bit MAGA.

The thing about 'chips' is they could easily be identified by putting them in a black box and watching what they do using a chip which only does that!

The whole bs about it's THEM not US crap falls away. Just need some open source simple 'custodian' chip manufacturer to make that available. If it can be made a 'gate keeper' than we are all safe.

Mucho ,

"It sounds a bit MAGA. "
After this, I will never, ever read any of your comments ever again. Get lost!

Mucho ,

You talk so much crap. Please, keep it to yourself

Dungroanin ,

I ain't saying that is your opinion am I?

The bit I watched was him being gung-ho about getting back 'control of microprocessors' !!!

There is a big difference between designing chips and 'manufacturing' facilities'.

Have you never wondered why most actual building of small electrical component equipment takes place in Asia?

I don't care wherher you read my comments- i am free to post what I want on whatevet article and whoevers comment. And stick to facts.

Mucho ,

"The bit I watched ".
Honestly, I am so tired of people who comment on things they know nothing about. Everything you say is wrong, because you are speaking from a position of total ignorance, because you haven't watched the films.
Watch 1 to 3. Watch 22 and 23 ALL THE WAY THROUGH, not skimming. Then comment. Every inaccurate comment you make is covered in detail. Honestly it's no wonder we're so fucked.

From 2005 after one google search, time spent on this, 10 seconds:
"While Yona was developed in partnership with one of Intel's California centers, the 65nm microprocessor product is the first to be developed in its entirety, both the architecture and strategy, by Intel engineers at its Israel plants in Haifa and Yakum. "
https://www.israel21c.org/intels-new-chip-design-developed-in-israel/

You know zilch, you understand nothing, you make assumptions, you don't watch or read the material, and then in your total ignorance, you spew your feeble thoughts on this forum. Moron

Mucho ,

You define the phrase "ignorant Brit"

Dungroanin ,

Mucho since you FAILED instantly in your promise to ignore me – i will respond to your toy throwing out of the parambulator.

First just telling people to WATCH something without explaining what the salient point to be learnt – is not the way to influence or educate.

I prefer reading an argument- I definitely do not spend hours watching TV or listening to propaganda by msm / indy or 'shock jocks' – that last was the personality I saw and didn't feel the need to hear anymore as I don't when Nigel Farage and his ilk do on the radio here.

If you want to inform or prove something to me or anyone else kindly post a link to a written piece.

Second, chips are designed eveywhere there is such competence. Chip manufacturing mainly improved theough research in top universities.
The UK was a lead chip designer too.

None of that means the Israelis haven't monopolosed tech and own many patents. The fact is the Israelis ARE part of the 5+1 eyed world Empire – they are the plus one. Snowdens whistleblowing makes absolutely clear that the +1 gets a higher clearance than the +4.

That's as nice as I am prepared to be, so finally, that last paragraph is what is known as PROJECTION. Look it up and learn that it comes from your fav bogeymen brainfuckers.

That is some serious self-hate you have going on – work on it.

Take it easy ok?

Mucho ,

Number 23 is totally relevant too, going deep into chips, backdooring and kill switch usage

Koba ,

So the mocking of maga is what set you off? Fuck maga and it's idiot supporters great nations don't slaughter civilians for capital

bevin ,

Has this link been cited?
https://thewallwillfall.org/2020/01/19/important-douma-opcw-update-from-prof-piers-robinson/

norman wisdom ,

chris morris is very funny has a fine body of twisted comedick works
for all his charm his role is too destroy society degrade
he is khazar after all

sacha baron co hen the names speaks for itself an empty cruel tool
never trust a coen cohen khan or cowen or co they cookoo

eliot mcfuck higgins is not oirish
he is not certainly related to snooker loopy or is it darts i cannot remember hero alex higgins.

eliot"s dad is rita katz from site intel group amaq news
his mom barbera lerner spector
or is it vice versa
versa vice
whatever
shirley you

get my the friends of the oirish israel drift
so to speaks
or sum such

Mucho ,

Brilliant, insightful, logical hypothesis of the recent plane downing over Iran by Jeremy Rothe Kushel. Ignore the video, this is about the written article.

The Prime Suspect in Ukrainian PS752 Shootdown: Israel's Unit 8200
https://www.veteranstoday.com/2020/01/10/ps752/

Mucho ,

For further info about Israeli tech domination, what it is, where it comes from and the implications of this, go to Brendon O Connell's YT channel. Number 22 in his list is very important.

Mucho ,

Jeremy Rothe-Kushel is a very important member of the truth community, in no small part due to the fact that he is an Ashkenazi Jew. My personal belief is that in the end, the Jewish community will play a pivotal role in weeding out the evil that rules over us. I wish we didn't have these labels, that we could have true freedom to play our chosen role in our God created realm, but at this stage in the game, we're stuck with our divide and rule labels and systems of control.
Jeremy's style is to the point, he has great depth of knowledge, an encyclopedic knowledge of his field and is a highly astute commentator. He presents a lot of complex information in fairly easy to digest chunks with his co-host, Greg McCarron, on their show "The Antedote" on YT, as well as doing a lot of guerilla style activism in US politics. Highly recommended.

norman wisdom ,

i met elliot many years ago
the chap on the 8 year old lap top above
we called him fat face down the synagogue ohh how we laughed
he laughed as well everytime someone said it
such fun
are rabbi one day organised a trip and lecture tour of chatham house the belly of the beast.
we learnt all about how tough regime change was and how difficult it is to do on a bbc size budget.

what we learnt was that having are people everywhere really helped
scripted up to speed influencer roles in media in public on track on page working cog like.
a kind of khazar collective non semites only for security reasons of course.
we could work from a very low pound dollar and shekels base and still be very effective.

never under estimate the benjamins or elliots it is folks like this that are the real hero of the oded yinon
yes sir
already my life
fat face eliot boy done good

and like all khazar he hates the sephardim jewisher and the unclean arab which is shirley a bonus is it not

George Mc ,

First off, if folks haven't a clue who Harold Shipman is, you're not going to get far with Titus Oats. At the most they might think it's a character from Gormenghast.

Second, I initially misread the article and thought that the figure from the 17th century actually WAS Higgins of Bellingcat. And if that seems an absurd assumption to make, even temporarily, it doesn't seem much more absurd than some of the stuff he says e.g.

I had no knowledge beyond what I'd learned from Arnold Schwarzenegger and Rambo.

The point has been raised that there are psyops perpetrated with a malicious sense of humour as if to say, "These suckers will swallow anything". Higgins with his "education" from Arnold and Rambo may be an example of one of those jokes.

Third, and to end on an optimistic note, I like the 17th century sentencing and recommend we bring it back:

and he was whipped and placed in the pillory.

Dungroanin ,

Admin – a suggestion on keeping recent articles available from the top of the page.

Problem: As you add new aricles at top left the ones on the very right drop away! Almost as if being binned into a memory hole.

Solution: allow a scroll at the right hand edge so that these older links are easily available to readers. Only a minor coding change without any change to your front page.

Tallis Marsh ,

I concur! I'm sure many of us will appreciate a scroll on the right hand edge so we can access the older articles. Thanks in advance, OffG!

Oliver ,

HM Armed Forces operations in Syria follow the doctrine of Major General Sir Frank Kitson who learnt his stuff in Kenya in the 1950s. Murder, torture, rape the staples of the British military's modern terrorist ability. NATO doctrine too.

Joe ,

https://www.youtube.com/embed/0oLfNr4JjeI?version=3&rel=1&fs=1&autohide=2&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&wmode=transparent

BigB ,

This is an important article: one of the few that dares to express that Douma et al are not mere false flags they a darkly psychotic form of 'snuff propaganda porn' (including the recycling and rearanging of 'props' that were until recently animate human souls with a lifetime of possibility abnegated for ideology). The Working Group on Syria is part of a small counter-narrative subset – along with Sister Agnes Mariam, Vanessa Beeley, RT (on occasion), UK Column, The Indicter, Prof. Marcello Ferrada de Noli – who are willing to state plainly that this is child murder. Now I wholeheartedly commend Kevin that we should name and shame the culprits and their supporters.

"No, I think it is time for plainer, no-holds-barred language describing these people for the true evil they are – until the truth and label sticks."

I had a similar epiphany in early 2016. The barbaric of murder of starved and thirsty children at Rashidin – Syrian innocence lured by much needed sweets and drinks only to be blown apart in front of their mothers. Anyone who supports the White Helmets terrorist construct and their NATO-proxy child-murderers needs to be exposed. But what if that trail of exposure leads back to the leader of the Labour party: who had just personally endorsed the charity funding of the White Helmets? And continued to support the Jo Cox Foundation of Syrian humanitarian bombers and R2P interventionists? Which itself is a front for the dark money web of 'philanthrocapitalism' that is the shadow support network for regime change crimes against humanity. This is when righteous indignation meets the dark wall of silence around the social construction of reality. Especially if you put Jeremy Corbyn in the frame.

What this means is the ability to frame dark actors for the true evil they are has to be a two-way flow. Meaning is created across networks, not just by naming but by naming and agreeing across narrative communities. Again, this is not abstruse: it is social reality. Social reality is not reality: it is a consensual constructivism. Significant numbers of others have to be in a position of consensual agreement in order to challenge the dominant narrative(s). So I echo the sentiment that many can see that the dominant narrative – especially concerning Syria – is deeply flawed. But they are as yet unwilling to admit that the depth of the flaw is in fact a tear in social reality that cannot be easily healed.

This is the aspect of social reality called 'universe maintenance'. Doxa is the reality constructing belief set – the episteme of interacting beliefs. The narrative has two main aspects: ortho-doxa and hetero-doxa – the orthodox maintaining and heterodox subverting discourses. In order to truly subvert the hegemonic orthodoxy – there has to be a social moment of criticality when the heterodox is no longer deniable. To reach that point: the intrajecting true has to be believable to the hegemonic orthodoxy. Now we have a third mode: para-doxa when the true 'state of affairs' is not believable – it is easily rejected as paradoxical to the reigning consensus covenant of the true. This is universe maintaining: whereby the the totality of the dominant discourse actually subsumes or repels any paradox as a half-truth or ameliorated, disarmed less-than-true ('conspiracy theory'). This is known as 'recuperation'. Anything that meets the dominant discourse has to be explained in the terms of the dominant discourse accommodative and recommending itself to the dominant discourse. Which then becomes a part of the dominant universe of discourse.

A moment of the true is like a barb to a bubble. It has to be contained and wrapped in narrative that describes and explains it into a consumable form. The full realisation of the propagandic child murder in Syria – tacitly supported by the Labour Party and Jeremy Corbyn in particular – would destroy the symbolic universe of social reality. Of which it is my personal experience no one really wants to do. The correlations, direct and indirect links, and universally maintained orthodoxy of narrative discourse point to an accomodation. An explanation or multivariate set of explanations that problem shift and ascribe blame to imaginary actors. To deflect or defend the personal self. Because the personal self is independently situated outside the social sphere. Or is it?

Seeing the real event as it happens requires the perspicacity of social inclusion. We all create social reality together: with our without layers of dualising exclusion that protects us from the way the world really is. Who would vote to legitimise the supporters of NATO and the child-murderers of Syria? 31 million legitimising independent social actors just did. Do you suppose they did so in full knowledge that it is child-murder they were supporting? Or did they create universe maintaining accommodations to the truth? That is how powerful the screening discourses and legitimising orthodoxic narrative mythology is. It is not that it cannot be subverted: its just that calling out the true evil has to be heard in unison by large or social small assemblages willing to totally change everything – including themselves. In order to transition to a different social reality one that accommodates the truth. One which will look nothing like the social reality we choose to maintain as is.

Francis Lee ,

My first attempt didn't get through. Herewith second.

It seems to me that the internal affairs of the Russian Federation, although they may have some impact on external geopolitical issues, are a matter for them. At the present time the relevant question regarding the RF is as follows: Question 1. Is Russia a revionist state intent on an expansionist foreign policy? Answer NO. But it is not going to tolerate NATO expansion into its own strategic zones, namely, Ukraine, Georgia and the North Caucusas. Question 2. Is the Anglo-Zionist empire in open of pursuit of a world empire intent on destroying any sovereign state – including first and foremost Russia – which stands in its way? Answer YES. This really is so blatant that anyone who is ethnically challenged should seek psychiatric help. In Polls conducted around the world the US is always cited as the most dangerous enemy of world peace, including in the US itself. Thus a small influential (unfortunately deranged) cabal based in the west has insinuated its way into the institutions of power and poses a real and present danger to world peace.

This being the case it is imperative to push all and any 'normal' western governments and shape public opinion and discourse (except the nut-jobs like Poland and the Baltics) into diplomacy. Wind down NATO just as the Warsaw Pact was wound down. that will do for starters. Of course the PTB in all the western institutions – the media (whores) the deep state, the Atlantic Council, the Council on Foreign Relations, Chatham House the Arms merchants, the security services GCHQ, the CIA, Mossad and the rest will oppose this with all the power at their command. This is the present primary site of struggle, mainly propagandistic, cultural and economic, but with overtones of kinetic warfare.

Similar diplomatic initiatives must be directed at China. Yes, I know all about China's social credit policy, I don't particularly like the idea of 24 hour system of surveillance, and I wouldn't want to live there, but is already a virtual fait accompli in the west. Again it bears repeating that sovereign states should be left to their own devices. After all 'States have neither permanent friends of allies, only permanent interests. (Lord Palmerston, 19 century British Statesman). No more 'humanitarian interventions' thank you very much. How about Mind our own Business non-interventions.

I make no apologies for being a foreign policy realist – if that hasn't become apparent by this stage!

BigB ,

Francis:

The Russian Federation is involved is strategic partnership with China in consolidating the Eurasian 'supercontinent' into the world island. One which is slowly being drawn together into a massive market covering 70% of the world's population, 75% of energy resources, and 70% of GDP. I'd call that expansionist, wouldn't you?

Market mechanisms and methodology are exponentially expansionist, extractivist, and extrapolative. Market propaganda is free and equal exchange coupled with mutual development through comparative advantage. Everyone benefits, right?

No: markets operate as vast surplus value extractors that only operate unequally to deliver maximum competitive advantage to the suprasovereign core. Surplus value valorises surplus capital which cannot be contained in a single domestic market: so it seeks to exploit underdeveloped foreign markets setting up dependencies and peripheries in the satellite states. Which keeps them maldeveloped. In short: Russia and China's wealth is not just their own.

Russia and China are globalisation now. Globalist exponential expansionism, extractivism, and extrapolation is the repression of humanism and destruction of the biosphere. It can't stop growing in the cancer stage of hyper-capitalism. We are currently consuming every resource at a material throughput increase of 3% per annum year on year. That's a 23 year exponential doubling of material resources. And a 46 year doubling of the doubling. How long before globalisation uses everything? How far into the race to the bottom will the market collapse?

It would be really nice to return to a Westphalian System of non-expansionist, non-extractivist sovereign nation states. It is just not even plausible under market mechanisms of extraction. There can be no material decoupling and development remains contingent on an impossible infinity: because development remains parallel and assymetrically maintained. And all major resources are depleting exponentially too. Including the nominative renewable and sustainable ones.

Degrowth; self-sufficiency; localised 'anti-fragility', steady-state; asymmetric development of the marginalised and the peripheralised; regenerative agroecological agriculture; human development not abstract market development; are just some of the pre-requisites of a return to sovereign states. Russia 'sovereigntist' globalisation is the expansionist opposite to that. The RF is part of the biggest market in the world that hoovers up as much surplus value as it can before sending a large tranche of it to London. As much as $25bn a year in capital flight into the offshore nexus of secrecy jurisdictions. It's a globalist expansionist market mechanism that hoovers all vitality out of the life-ground. That: I call expansionist and imperialist of which Russia and China are now the major part.

Francis Lee ,

"The Russian Federation is involved is strategic partnership with China in consolidating the Eurasian 'supercontinent' into the world island. One which is slowly being drawn together into a massive market covering 70% of the world's population, 75% of energy resources, and 70% of GDP. I'd call that expansionist, wouldn't you?"

No, I wouldn't actually. Building roads, rail connections and other trade routes doesn't strike me as imperial expansion. No-one is being forced to join the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) or into reconfiguring their internal political and economic structures, as the US does in Latin America or as the British did in India and Southern Africa. (East India Company and the British British South Africa Chartered Company). The SCO is a voluntary arrangement. Uzbekistan for example has decided not to join the central Asian Eurasian Economic Union – well that's its prerogative. No-one is going to send any gun-boats to force them. (I am aware that Uzbekistan is a landlocked country, but I was talking figuratively.)

The EEU's genesis has along with the SCO and BRI has been forced upon the China/Russia axis as part of an emerging counter-hegemonic alliance against the US's imperial aggrandisement with its kowtowing vassals in tow. Russia has no claims on any of its neighbours since it is already endowed with ample land and mineral deposits. China is a key part of this essentially geopolitical bloc quite simply because the US imperial hegemon is determined to stop China's development by all means necessary including the dragooning of contiguous military bases in US proxy states around China's maritime borders.

A distinction should be made between rampant imperialism of the Anglo-zi0nist empire, and the response of an increasingly bloc of states who find both their sovereignty and even their existence threatened by the imperial juggernaut. What exactly did you expect them to do given the hostility and destructive intent of the Empire? Defence against imperialism is not imperialism. The defence of autonomy and sovereignty of international society and the creation of an anti-hegemonic have the potential to finally create a transformative new world order (and goodness knows we need one) announced at the end of the Cold War in 1991. This ambition finds support not only in Russia and China but in other countries ready to align with them, but also in many western countries. I obviously need to put the question again. Who is and who is not the greatest threat to world peace? Surely to pose the question is to answer it.

Dungroanin ,

Agree Francis.
There is a move to suggest that the Old Empire retains a 'maritime' world and the SCO confines itself to the Eurasian land mass.
Dream on.
The Empire is DEAD. Long live the new Empire!

BigB ,

Who is the greatest threat to world peace and to the world itself? We are. The global carbon consumption/pollution bourgeoisie. It is the global expansionist mindset that is increasing its demands for growth – as the only solution to social problems, maldevelopment, and maldistribution caused by excessive growth. Supply has to be met by exponentially expanding markets. Whether this is voluntaristic or coerced makes very little difference to the market cancer subsuming the globe. Benign or aggressive forms of cancer are still cancer. And the net effect is the same.

Russia and China – the 'East' – uphold exactly the same corporate model of global governance that the 'West' does. Which has been made clear in every joint communique – especially BRICS communiques. I have made the case – following Professor Patrick Bond – that BRICS in particular (a literal Goldman Sachs globalist marketing ploy) – are sub-imperial, not anti-imperial. All their major institutions are dollar denominated for loans; BRI finance is in dollars; BRICS re-capitalised the IMF; Contingency Reserve Arrangements come with an IMF neoliberalising structural adjustment policy; etc. It is the same model East and West. One is merely the pseudo-benign extension of the other. The alternative to neoliberal globalisation is neoliberal globalisation. This became radiantly clear at SPIEF 2019: TINA there is no alternative.

The perceived alternative is the reproduction of neoliberalism – which has long been think-tanked and obvious – and its transformation from 'globalisation 3.0' to 'globalisation 4.0' trade in goods and services, with the emphasis on a transition to high-speed interconnectivity and decoupled service economies. Something like the Trans-Eurasian Information Super Highway (TASIM)? With a sovereigntist and social inclusivity compact. So the neoliberal leopard can change its spots?

No. Whilst your argument is sound and well constructed: it is reliant on the early 20th century Leninist definition of 'imperialism' as a purely militarist phenomena. Imperialism mutated since then – from military to financial (which are not necessarily exclusive sets) – and is set to metastasise again into 'green imperialism' of man over man (and it is an andrarchic principle) and man (culture) over nature. Here your argument falls down to an ecological and bio-materialist critique. Cancer is extractivist and expansionist wherever it grows.

Russia is the fourth largest primary energy consumer on the planet. Disregarding hydro – which is not truly ecological – it has a 1% renewable penetration. It is a hydrocarbon behemoth set to grow the only way it knows how – consuming more hydrocarbons. They cannot go 'green': no one can. And a with a global ecological footprint of 3.3 planets per capita, per annum, this is not sustainable. Now or ever.

So a distinction needs to be made between the old rampant neoliberal globalisation model (3.0) – the Anglo-Zionist imperialist model – and the emergent neoliberal globalisation model (4.0) of Russia/China's rampant ecological imperialism? And a further distinction needs to be made about what humanity has to do to survive this distinction between aggressive and quasi-benign cancer forms. Because we will be just as dead, just as quick if we cannot even identify the underlying cancer we are all suffering from.

Koba ,

Big B sit down ultra! China and Russia rent empires and have no desire to be! If you're a left winger you're another poor example of one and more than likely a Trotskyist

Richard Le Sarc ,

Love the nickname, Josef.

Louis Proyect ,

This is because if a chemical attack did not take place and Assad was not responsible it seems highly likely that the civilians including children were murdered to facilitate a fabrication.

And were our own intelligence agencies involved in a staged event, considering the refusal to even establish the basic facts in the days following?

-- -

This is the sort of conclusion you must come to if you are into Islamophobic conspiracy theories. The notion that this kind of slaughter took place to "facilitate" a false flag is analogous to the 9/11 conspiracism that was on display here a while back and that manifested itself through the inclusion of NYU 9/11 Truther Mark Crispin Miller on Tim Hayward's Assadist propaganda team.

Sad, really.

Harry Stotle ,

Go on Louis, remind us about the 'terrorist passport' miraculously found at the foot of the collapsed tower with a page coveniently left open displaying a 'Tora Bora' stamp – I kove that bit.

I mean who, apart from half the worlds scientific community is not totally convinced by such compelling evidence, especially when allied to the re-writing of the laws of physics in order to rationlise the ludicrous 2 planes 3 towers conspiracy theory?

Next you'll be telling us it was necessary for the US to invade Afghanistan and Iraq for reasons few American'srecall beyond the neocon fantasy contructed on 11th Septemember, 2001.

Dave Hansell ,

It's clear to a blind man on a galloping horse from this comment of yours Mr Proyect that concepts such as objective evidence, logical and rational deduction, the scientific method etc are beyond your ken.

Faced with the facts of a collapsing narrative of obvious bullshit and lies you have bought into, which you are incapable of facing up to, it is unsurprising that you are reduced to such puerile school playground level deflections.

So come on, try getting out of the gutter and upping your game. Because this fare is nothing short of sad and pathetic.

We know from the evidence of those who actually know their arse from their elbow on these matters that the claims of an attack using chemical weapons on this site are unsustainable.

Which leaves the issue of the bodies at the site. Given they did not lose their lives as a result of the unscientific bullshit explanation you desperately and clearly want to be the case the question is how did those civilians lose their lives? How did their corpses find their way to that location?

Did Assad and his "regime" murder them and move the bodies to that site (over which they had no control) in order to create a false flag event to get themselves falsely accused of an NBC attack Louis? Because that's the only reasonable and rational deduction one can imply from your argument and approach.

It is certainly more reasoned, rational and in keeping with the scientific method (you might want to try it sometime) to surmise that the bodies on site, having not been the result of the claimed and unsustainable narrative you have naively committed to, either died on site from some other cause or were brought to the site for the purpose of creating your fantasy narrative.

In the latter case it is further a matter of rational and reasoned deduction that such an occurrence could only be carried it in circumstances in which whoever carried it out had actual, effective and physical control of a geographical location and area situated within a wider conflict zone.

Again, it remains a piece of factual reality that this location was not under the control of the Assad 'regime.' Not least because otherwise there would be no logical or rational military reason for the de facto Syrian Government and it's armed forces to waste resources attacking it.

Unless of course he buys I to the conspiracy theory and hat they somehow organised a false flag implicating themselves?

I'm sure everyone else here in the reality based community is waiting with bated breath for you to 'explain' how they did this Louis.

I know I am. I could do with a good laugh.

George Mc ,

This is the sort of conclusion you must come to if you are into Islamophobic conspiracy theories.

Umm – the assumption that Muslims DIDN'T do it is "Islamophobic"? Even on your own terms you're not making much sense these days, Louis.

lundiel ,

There was little doubt that British special forces were captured in Eastern Ghouta when the SAA prevented an all out attack on Damascus. European precursors and British munitions were uncovered along with factories within the tunnel complex, itself a product of western engineering and slave labour. This was no propaganda, evidence was collected, statements were taken and everything was documented. Douma was a direct follow-on from that failure and yet, you refuse the evidence piling up, but accept testimony of journalists based in Jordan and Turkey? The "conspiracy" is wholly yours Louis and you are guilty of malicious intent, false representation and pretending to be a "Marxist" when you are a Zionist neocon.

lundiel ,

Hi I'm Louis an unrepentant Marxist and I willfully refuse to use block-quotes.

Richard Le Sarc ,

More proyectile vomitus in defence of child-murdering salafist vermin. How low can this creature descend?

Louis Proyect ,

Richard, such abusive language only indicates your inability to discuss the matter at hand. In general, a detached sarcasm works much better in polemics. You need to read Lenin to see how it is done. I should add that I am referring to V.I. Lenin, not John Lenin who wrote "Crippled Inside".

Richard Le Sarc ,

You defended the salafist butchers with lies, proyectile-do you not even comprehend your own sewage? Or did someone else write it and you just appended your paw-print?

Dave Hansell ,

Apologies here. There is an open goal and the ball needs to be put in the back of the net:

Seems that Louis here is well ahead of the curve in terms of Fukuyama's well known observation about the end of history.

For Louise history, in terms of the progress and development of human knowledge, stopped around a century ago with whatever Lenin wrote.

But that's what happens to those who only read one book.

Sad really.

Dungroanin ,

You come across more as Yaxley – Lenin mr Tommy Proyect – but he is a MI5 stooge unlike you cough cough.

Koba ,

Lenin hates Trotsky! Trotsky was a power mad maniac who wanted a permanent war state to somehow spread his specific brand of "ahem" socialism, which won't win you friends! "Hi yeah sorry we killed your family in a war we started to save you but yippee Trotsky is now in charge so stop complaining"! You're just a bunch of liars the trots

Maggie ,

learn to use the internet which has the information you need to learn the truth:

Acting out a chemical attack?

https://www.youtube.com/embed/o63VnLJpwuc?version=3&rel=1&fs=1&autohide=2&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&wmode=transparent

Jimmy Dore hits the nail every time!!

https://www.youtube.com/embed/FLRQSfSKoJo?version=3&rel=1&fs=1&autohide=2&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&wmode=transparent

Didn't you just love George Carlin, identifies just what the problem is with dicks like Proyect.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/KLODGhEyLvk?version=3&rel=1&fs=1&autohide=2&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&wmode=transparent

Maggie ,

Here's another Jimmy Dore Vid from 2017
Watch and learn

https://www.youtube.com/embed/MnSAB4qeDug?version=3&rel=1&fs=1&autohide=2&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&wmode=transparent

Koba ,

Maggie don't take jimmy bore as some truth teller he's a bland progressive with revolutionary slogans like proyect! He also has a habit of equating Stalin with Hitler in that god awful nasal accent of his

Richard Le Sarc ,

Thems White Helmets is always so neat and tidy. Their mammies must have insisted that they always look their best.

paul ,

The British taxpayer funded head choppers and throat slitters in Syria routinely committed massacres and filmed their victims. The resulting footage was passed off by tame media hacks as "evidence" of regime atrocities.

Koba ,

Death to the Trotskyists
Fuck proyect your name calling says it all!
Islamophobes indeed?! What an idiot

Harry Stotle ,

The alternative media, and a smattering of truth tellers are locked in an asymmetrical information-war with the establishment – with an all too obvious 'David & Goliath' sort of dynamic underlying it.

The question asked at the heart of this article is how to break the vice like grip information managers hold over various geopolitical narratives, referencing events in Douma in particular.

Alnost reflexively 9/11 comes to mind – a fairly unambiguous example of mass murder for which the official account does not withstand even the most cursory form of scrutiny.
Professionals even went so far as to purger themselves while the investigating committee admitted they were 'set up to fail' (to quote its chairman).

Yet the public, instead of shredding Bush, limb from limb (for the lies that were told) rolled onto their back while the neoncons tickled their collective belly as you might do with a particulalrly adorable puppy,
So if we can't even get to the bottom of events in the middle of New York what realistic chance of doing so in a hostile war zone like Douma?

On balance racism, together with other forms of collective loathing is the most likely reason why this unsatisfactory state of affairs is unlikely to change.

A collective 'them and us' mindset makes it far easier for information managers to manipulate a visceral hatred and fear of 'the other'.
Today it is Qasem Soleimani westerners are taugyt to despise, yesterday it was Bashar al-Assad, before that Vladimir Putin, Saddam Hussein, Muammar al-Gaddafi, Nicolás Maduro . the list just goes on and on.
Information managers simply wind the public up so that collective anger can be directed toward governments or individuals they are trying to bring down – recent history tells us that the public are largely oblivious to this process, so thus never learn from their mistakes.

Perhaps one thing western leaders, and the US in particular can always rely on, is the ease with which the public can be persuaded to believe that certain bogeymen pose a grave threat to 'our way of life' while failing to notice that it is in fact our own leaders who are carrying out the worst atrocities.

harry law ,

Harry Stotle, .."Perhaps one thing western leaders, and the US in particular can always rely on, is the ease with which the public can be persuaded to believe that certain bogeymen pose a grave threat to 'our way of life'. That's true Hermann Goring had it about right with this quote
"Why of course the people don't want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally the common people don't want war: neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But after all it is the leaders of a country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or fascist dictatorship, or a parliament or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peace makers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country."

[Jan 24, 2020] Lawrence Wilkerson Lambasts 'the Beast of the National Security State' by Adam Dick

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Wilkerson provided a harsh critique of US foreign policy over the last two decades. Wilkerson states: ..."
"... America exists today to make war. How else do we interpret 19 straight years of war and no end in sight? It's part of who we are. It's part of what the American Empire is. ..."
"... We are going to lie, cheat and steal, as [US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo] is doing right now, as [President Donald Trump] is doing right now, as [Secretary of Defense Mark Esper] is doing right now, as [Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC)] is doing right now, as [Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR)] is doing right now, and a host of other members of my political party -- the Republicans -- are doing right now. We are going to cheat and steal to do whatever it is we have to do to continue this war complex. That's the truth of it, and that's the agony of it. ..."
"... That base voted for Donald Trump because he promised to end these endless wars, he promised to drain the swamp. Well, as I said, an alligator from that swamp jumped out and bit him. And, when he ordered the killing of Qassim Suleimani, he was a member of the national security state in good standing, and all that state knows how to do is make war. ..."
Jan 13, 2020 | ronpaulinstitute.org

Lawrence Wilkerson, a College of William & Mary professor who was chief of staff for Secretary of State Colin Powel in the George W. Bush administration, powerfully summed up the vile nature of the US national security state in a recent interview with host Amy Goodman at Democracy Now.

Asked by Goodman about the escalation of US conflict with Iran and how it compares with the prior run-up to the Iraq War, Wilkerson provided a harsh critique of US foreign policy over the last two decades. Wilkerson states:

Ever since 9/11, the beast of the national security state, the beast of endless wars, the beast of the alligator that came out of the swamp, for example, and bit Donald Trump just a few days ago, is alive and well.

America exists today to make war. How else do we interpret 19 straight years of war and no end in sight? It's part of who we are. It's part of what the American Empire is.

We are going to lie, cheat and steal, as [US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo] is doing right now, as [President Donald Trump] is doing right now, as [Secretary of Defense Mark Esper] is doing right now, as [Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC)] is doing right now, as [Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR)] is doing right now, and a host of other members of my political party -- the Republicans -- are doing right now. We are going to cheat and steal to do whatever it is we have to do to continue this war complex. That's the truth of it, and that's the agony of it.

What we saw President Trump do was not in President Trump's character, really. Those boys and girls who were getting on those planes at Fort Bragg to augment forces in Iraq, if you looked at their faces, and, even more importantly, if you looked at the faces of the families assembled along the line that they were traversing to get onto the airplanes, you saw a lot of Donald Trump's base. That base voted for Donald Trump because he promised to end these endless wars, he promised to drain the swamp. Well, as I said, an alligator from that swamp jumped out and bit him. And, when he ordered the killing of Qassim Suleimani, he was a member of the national security state in good standing, and all that state knows how to do is make war.

Wilkerson, over the remainder of the two-part interview provides many more insightful comments regarding US foreign policy, including recent developments concerning Iran. Watch Wilkerson's interview here:

Wilkerson is an Academic Board member for the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity.

Copyright © 2020 by RonPaul Institute. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit and a live link are given.
Please donate to the Ron Paul Institute Related

[Jan 24, 2020] It's amazing all the money in the State Department and other intelligence agencies should be attracting the best minds. Yet a bunch of us sitting here watching this from our boring office jobs realize how genuinely stupid US foreign policy has been.

Jan 24, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Danny , Jan 24 2020 15:11 utc | 25

It's amazing all the money in the State Department and other intelligence agencies should be attracting the best minds. Yet a bunch of us sitting here watching this from our boring office jobs realize how genuinely stupid US foreign policy has been.

A separate Sunni state in West Iraq would be doomed. We need to leave these people alone, we've made enough foolish mistakes and this will get a lot of people killed. That's along with US troops being put in harms way for ridiculous reasons like stealing Syrian oil and now occupying Iraq against their parliaments wishes.

Back in the day you told someone you were American and they wanted to shake your hand and ask you about this place or that. Now they want to spit in our faces

[Jan 24, 2020] It's amazing all the money in the State Department and other intelligence agencies should be attracting the best minds. Yet a bunch of us sitting here watching this from our boring office jobs realize how genuinely stupid US foreign policy has been.

Jan 24, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Danny , Jan 24 2020 15:11 utc | 25

It's amazing all the money in the State Department and other intelligence agencies should be attracting the best minds. Yet a bunch of us sitting here watching this from our boring office jobs realize how genuinely stupid US foreign policy has been.

A separate Sunni state in West Iraq would be doomed. We need to leave these people alone, we've made enough foolish mistakes and this will get a lot of people killed. That's along with US troops being put in harms way for ridiculous reasons like stealing Syrian oil and now occupying Iraq against their parliaments wishes.

Back in the day you told someone you were American and they wanted to shake your hand and ask you about this place or that. Now they want to spit in our faces

[Jan 24, 2020] How Are Iran and the "Axis of the Resistance" Affected by the US Assassination of Soleimani by Elijah J. Magnier

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... The US President Donald Trump assassinated the commander of the "Axis of the Resistance", the (Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps) IRGC – Quds Brigade Major General Qassem Soleimani at Baghdad airport with little consideration of the consequences of this targeted killing. It is not to be excluded that the US administration considered the assassination would reflect positively on its Middle Eastern policy. Or perhaps the US officials believed the killing of Sardar Soleimani would weaken the "Axis of the Resistance": once deprived of their leader, Iran's partners' capabilities in Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen would be reduced. Is this assessment accurate? ..."
Jan 22, 2020 | www.globalresearch.ca

The US President Donald Trump assassinated the commander of the "Axis of the Resistance", the (Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps) IRGC – Quds Brigade Major General Qassem Soleimani at Baghdad airport with little consideration of the consequences of this targeted killing. It is not to be excluded that the US administration considered the assassination would reflect positively on its Middle Eastern policy. Or perhaps the US officials believed the killing of Sardar Soleimani would weaken the "Axis of the Resistance": once deprived of their leader, Iran's partners' capabilities in Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen would be reduced. Is this assessment accurate?

A high-ranking source within this "Axis of the Resistance" said " Sardar Soleimani was the direct and fast track link between the partners of Iran and the Leader of the Revolution Sayyed Ali Khamenei. However, the command on the ground belonged to the national leaders in every single separate country. These leaders have their leadership and practices, but common strategic objectives to fight against the US hegemony, stand up to the oppressors and to resist illegitimate foreign intervention in their affairs. These objectives have been in place for many years and will remain, with or without Sardar Soleimani".

"In Lebanon, Hezbollah's Secretary General Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah leads Lebanon and is the one with a direct link to the Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. He supports Gaza, Syria, Iraq and Yemen and has a heavy involvement in these fronts. However, he leads a large number of advisors and officers in charge of running all military, social and relationship affairs domestically and regionally. Many Iranian IRGC officers are also present on many of these fronts to support the needs of the "Axis of the Resistance" members in logistics, training and finance," said the source.

In Syria, IRGC officers coordinate with Russia, the Syrian Army, the Syrian political leadership and all Iran's allies fighting for the liberation of the country and for the defeat of the jihadists who flocked to Syria from all continents via Turkey, Iraq and Jordan. These officers have worked side by side with Iraqi, Lebanese, Syrian and other nationals who are part of the "Axis of the Resistance". They have offered the Syrian government the needed support to defeat the "Islamic State" (ISIS/IS/ISIL) and al-Qaeda and other jihadists or those of similar ideologies in most of the country – with the exception of north-east Syria, which is under US occupation forces. These IRGC officers have their objectives and the means to achieve a target already agreed and in place for years. The absence of Sardar Soleimani will hardly affect these forces and their plans.

In Iraq, over 100 Iranian IRGC officers have been operating in the country at the official request of the Iraqi government, to defeat ISIS. They served jointly with the Iraqi forces and were involved in supplying the country with weapons, intelligence and training after the fall of a third of Iraq into the hands of ISIS in mid-2014. It was striking and shocking to see the Iraqi Army, armed and trained by US forces for over ten years, abandoning its positions and fleeing the northern Iraqi cities. Iranian support with its robust ideology (with one of its allies, motivating them to fight ISIS) was efficient in Syria; thus, it was necessary to transmit this to the Iraqis so they could stand, fight, and defeat ISIS.

The Lebanese Hezbollah is present in Syria and Yemen, and also in Iraq. The Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki asked Sayyed Nasrallah to provide his country with officers to stand against ISIS. Dozens of Hezbollah officers operate in Iraq and will be ready to support the Iraqis if the US forces refuse to leave the country. They will abide by and enforce the decision of the Parliament that the US must leave by end January 2021. Hezbollah's long warfare experience has resulted in painful experiences with the US forces in Lebanon and Iraq throughout several decades and has not been forgotten.

Sayyed Nasrallah, in his latest speech, revealed the presence in mid-2014 of Hezbollah officials in Kurdistan to support the Iraqi Kurds against ISIS. This was when the same Kurdish Leader Masoud Barzani announced that it was due to Iran that the Kurds received weapons to defend themselves when the US refused to help Iraq for many months after ISIS expanded its control in northern Iraq.

The Hezbollah leaders did not disclose the continuous visits of Kurdish representatives to Lebanon to meet Hezbollah officials. In fact, Iraqi Sunni and Shia officials, ministers and political leaders regularly visit Lebanon to meet Hezbollah officials and its leader. Hezbollah, like Iran, plays an essential role in easing the dialogue between Iraqis when these find it difficult to overcome their differences together.

The reason why Sayyed Nasrallah revealed the presence of his officers in Kurdistan when meeting Masoud Barzani is a clear message to the world that the "Axis of the Resistance" doesn't depend on one single person. Indeed, Sayyed Nasrallah is showing the unity which reigns among this front, with or without Sardar Soleimani. Barzani is part of Iraq, and Kurdistan expressed its readiness to abide by the decision of the Iraqi Parliament to seek the US forces' departure from the country because the Kurds are not detached from the central government but part of it.

Prior to his assassination, Sardar Soleimani prepared the ground to be followed (if killed on the battlefield, for example) and asked Iranian officials to nominate General Ismail Qaani as his replacement. The Leader of the revolution Sayyed Ali Khamenei ordered Soleimani's wish to be fulfilled and to keep the plans and objectives already in place as they were. Sayyed Khamenei, according to the source, ordered an "increase in support for the Palestinians and, in particular, to all allies where US forces are present."

Sardar Soleimani was looking for his death by his enemies and got what he wished for. He was aware that the "Axis of the Resistance" is highly aware of its objectives. Those among the "Axis of the Resistance" who have a robust internal front are well-established and on track. The problem was mainly in Iraq. But it seems the actions of the US have managed to bring Iraqi factions together- by assassinating the two commanders. Sardar Soleimani could have never expected a rapid achievement of this kind. Anti-US Iraqis are preparing this coming Friday to express their rejection of the US forces present in their country.

Sayyed Ali Khamenei , in his Friday prayers last week, the first for eight years, set up a road map for the "Axis of the Resistance": push the US forces out of the Middle East and support Palestine.

All Palestinian groups, including Hamas, were present at Sardar Soleimani's funeral in Iran and met with General Qaani who promised, "not only to continue support but to increase it according to Sayyed Khamenei's request," said the source. Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas Leader, said from Tehran: "Soleimani is the martyr of Jerusalem".

Many Iraqi commanders were present at the meeting with General Qaani. Most of these have a long record of hostility towards US forces in Iraq during the occupation period (2003-2011). Their commander, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandes, was assassinated with Sardar Soleimani and they are seeking revenge. Those leaders have enough motivation to attack the US forces, who have violated the Iraq-US training, cultural and armament agreement. At no time was the US administration given a license to kill in Iraq by the government of Baghdad.

The Iraqi Parliament has spoken: and the assassination of Sardar Soleimani has indeed fallen within the ultimate objectives of the "Axis of the Resistance". The Iraqi caretaker Prime Minister has officially informed all members of the Coalition Forces in Iraq that "their presence, including that of NATO, is now no longer required in Iraq". They have one year to leave. But that absolutely does not exclude the Iraqi need to avenge their commanders.

Palestine constitutes the second objective, as quoted by Sayyed Khamenei. We cannot exclude a considerable boost of support for the Palestinians, much more than the actually existing one. Iran is determined to support the Sunni Palestinians in their objective to have a state of their own in Palestine. The man – Soleimani – is gone and is replaceable like any other man: but the level of commitment to goals has increased. It is hard to imagine the "Axis of the Resistance" remaining idle without engaging themselves somehow in the US Presidential campaign. So, the remainder of 2020 is expected to be hot.

*

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[Jan 24, 2020] Peter Hitchen to Eliot Higgins of Bellingcat: You're not in the ladies' lingerie trade now, sweetie

Highly recommended!
Kevin Smith: "Higgins is currently frantically trying to prop up the Douma narrative against a mountain of evidence disproving his conclusions. For those who’ve followed his story, it’s clear that Higgins is an intelligence asset, set up to take the fall when the currently collapsing narratives take hold in the mainstream.
Jan 24, 2020 | off-guardian.org

"You didn't think that one through, did you, @eliothiggins sweetie? You're not in the ladies' lingerie trade now. This discussion is about truth, which endures, is not held together by elastic, and is not for sale." ~Peter Hitchens responding to Eliot Higgins of Bellingcat over the OPCW scandal on Twitter – 2 January 2020.

[Jan 24, 2020] Crimes of the century truth, perception and punishment

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... I believe more people nowadays recognise that the devastating wars in Iraq and Libya and events in Syria were pushed by our governments and media. They can even accept, when you explain, that we've been assisting terrorists to unseat governments for years. But they seem hesitant of taking the next step and we need to encourage them on this path. ..."
"... This path leads to recognising the sheer evil in our midst and getting out of this mindset that criminal behavior and lying in governments and in our media is normal or should in any way be tolerated. Perhaps some people appreciate this already but don't want to address it out of concern to what they might find. Maybe some people dread the thought of a global conflict so ignore it. But we need to hammer home the consequences of simply doing nothing. ..."
"... I've been trying to think of an analogy to try to get this point across. I sometimes say to people, we wouldn't have released a serial killer like Harold Shipman from prison and appointed him Foreign Secretary. Therefore, why do we tolerate a long line of Foreign Secretaries complicit in laying waste to the world? Sadly, with this analogy most people usually look back at me blankly so I have been searching for one more complete and rooted in history which people can relate better to events today. ..."
Jan 24, 2020 | off-guardian.org

Kevin Smith

"You didn't think that one through, did you, @eliothiggins sweetie? You're not in the ladies' lingerie trade now. This discussion is about truth, which endures, is not held together by elastic, and is not for sale."
Peter Hitchens responding to Eliot Higgins of Bellingcat over the OPCW scandal on Twitter – 2 January 2020.

Like many, I've been following the Douma scandal for some time and particularly since the OPCW whistleblowers and leaked emails blew the lid off the official narrative that Assad used chemical weapons there.

This issue is being discussed on one of my 'go to' accounts on Twitter – Peter Hitchens who has brought this to the attention of the mainstream .

For the past few weeks he's been debating the topic with Eliot Higgins of Bellingcat, Scott Lucas and various Middle East based journalists who created and then pushed the false narrative.

In fact, it's not really a debate. Peter Hitchens is quite literally slaughtering these narrative managers – his logic and clear thinking – and wit exposing the numerous gaps in their story and their desperate deflections.

Hitchens position is not exactly the same as many of us here hold – that Douma was a clear false flag. What he is saying is the evidence points to there being no chemical attack by the Syrian government, the pretext used for the attack on Syria. He doesn't wish to speculate on matters which aren't conclusively proven, for example precisely on what did actually happen.

I respect that position in many ways and his refusal to comment on the dead civilians in the Douma images makes sense from a journalist in the mainstream. I think by having a position which is clear and unassailable enables him to easily brush off his online detractors and not allow them to deflect to other issues.

While I don't agree with everything he says, Hitchens has a calm and rational argument for all the issues he covers. This puts clear ground between him and his online opponents who often resort to childish abuse.

My 80-year old mum admires him too. She describes him as 'frightfully posh'. Perhaps someone who might have belonged in a previous age – but I'm glad we have him in this one.

Anyway, I think we can be sure that Hitchens will continue his important work within the remit he's chosen and others will investigate the unanswered questions which arise from the Douma incident.

Ultimately the question about the dead civilians in the images is simply too dreadful to ignore.

This is because if a chemical attack did not take place and Assad was not responsible it seems highly likely that the civilians including children were murdered to facilitate a fabrication.

And were our own intelligence agencies involved in a staged event, considering the refusal to even establish the basic facts in the days following?

And then, of course, the resulting air strikes nearly caused us to go to war with Russia, with all that would entail.

While these investigations continue, I think it's timely to see where these events fit into the way the general public think and perceive wrongdoing and to try to radically to change this.

I believe more people nowadays recognise that the devastating wars in Iraq and Libya and events in Syria were pushed by our governments and media. They can even accept, when you explain, that we've been assisting terrorists to unseat governments for years. But they seem hesitant of taking the next step and we need to encourage them on this path.

This path leads to recognising the sheer evil in our midst and getting out of this mindset that criminal behavior and lying in governments and in our media is normal or should in any way be tolerated. Perhaps some people appreciate this already but don't want to address it out of concern to what they might find. Maybe some people dread the thought of a global conflict so ignore it. But we need to hammer home the consequences of simply doing nothing.

I've been trying to think of an analogy to try to get this point across. I sometimes say to people, we wouldn't have released a serial killer like Harold Shipman from prison and appointed him Foreign Secretary. Therefore, why do we tolerate a long line of Foreign Secretaries complicit in laying waste to the world? Sadly, with this analogy most people usually look back at me blankly so I have been searching for one more complete and rooted in history which people can relate better to events today.

So, here follows an analogy of a character who lived in the 17th century. His traits, his crimes, the political climate and peoples misguided perceptions in response can be compared to recent events and one particular individual causing havoc in the world today.

Of course I refer to Eliot Higgins of Bellingcat.

Eliot ( 'suck my balls' ) Higgins and Titus Oates 1. Eliot Higgins and Bellingcat

Higgins probably doesn't need much of an introduction here. It seems he has no specific qualifications relevant to his role and a bit of a drop-out in terms of education.

Higgins has been quoted as saying :

Before the Arab spring I knew no more about weapons than the average Xbox owner. I had no knowledge beyond what I'd learned from Arnold Schwarzenegger and Rambo."

But this didn't prevent him blogging about world events and then setting himself up and his site as investigator for several incidents most notably the shooting down of the MH17 passenger plane over Ukraine and allegations of chemical weapons use in Syria. It's now known that Bellingcat is funded by pro-war groups including the Atlantic Council

Higgins has been accused by chemical weapons experts, academics and independent journalists on the ground of fabricating evidence to reach a predetermined outcome decided on by his funders.

His rise to prominence was fast and apparently some media editors now refer their journalists to Bellingcat fabrications rather than allowing them to do any journalism themselves.

Higgins is currently frantically trying to prop up the Douma narrative against a mountain of evidence disproving his conclusions.

For those who've followed his story, it's clear that Higgins is an intelligence asset, set up to take the fall when the currently collapsing narratives take hold in the mainstream.

2. Titus Oates and the Popish Plot

Oates was a foul-mouthed charlatan , serial liar and master of deception who lived in the 17th century. His earlier life included being expelled from school and he was labelled a 'dunce' by people who knew him. He became a clergyman and later joined the Navy. His career was plagued by various sex scandals and charges of perjury.

In the 1670s during the time of Charles II, religious tensions threatened to spill over into civil war but the pragmatic King, by and large, kept a lid on it.

However, along with Dr Israel Tonge an anti-Catholic rector, Oates started writing conspiracy theories and inventing plots and later began writing a manuscript alleging of a plan to assassinate King Charles II and replace him with his openly Catholic brother.

When the fabrication started to gather momentum, the King had an audience with Oates and was unconvinced and was said to have found discrepancies in his story.

However, the tense political and religious climate at that time was ideal for conspiracy theories and scaremongering. The King's ministers took Oates at his word and over a dozen Catholics were executed for treason. This story created panic and paranoia lasting several years taking the nation to the brink of civil war.

Over time Oates lies were exposed and when the Catholic King James II came to the throne, he tried Oates with perjury and he was whipped and placed in the pillory.

After James II fled England during the so-called 'Glorious Revolution' King William and Queen Mary pardoned Oates and gave him a pension.

For me, this whole episode has many obvious parallels with Higgins, the long-running Russia and the anti-Semitism witch-hunts in the media and the false narratives over Iraq, Libya and Syria. Like those in power today, Oates had a knack for getting away with it. And I guess we can all relate this to Julian Assange – the victims or whistleblowers being punished and the perpetrators getting off.

I had wondered why James II, often ruthless and unforgiving had not executed Oates. But apparently the crime of perjury even then didn't carry the death sentence. The judge who convicted Oates was said to have tried his best to finish him off through the whipping, though he survived.

But perhaps even the King and judiciary in failing in this or not using other means at their disposal, couldn't comprehend the enormity of his crimes. Oates was after all a rather absurd character, open to ridicule.

Perhaps this is a bit similar to people today when discovering that Eliot Higgins is also a foul-mouthed fraud – but they can't reconcile this comical ex-lingerie employee as a menace to humanity.

3. Modern day

In the past few weeks I've read various older articles on Iraq and Syria. US troops shooting people for fun from a helicopter . The perpetrators are still free – the whistle-blowers who exposed that, and other events in prison or exile.

Last year we learned about a shocking massacre of Syrian children, unreported in the mainstream media . Mainstream journalists through their one-sided distortions of the conflict and silence, perpetuating the myth that the terrorists who carried out this mass murder are freedom fighters.

And as I've mentioned, we've seen firmer evidence of what many of us knew along – that Douma was a staged fabrication as a pretext for air-strikes and dangerously escalating the Syrian war. The likes of Eliot Higgins and others in the media, colluding in the cover-up of mass murder which likely facilitated this event. And for those honest journalists and experts who bring the truth of these staged events to us, smears will no doubt continue .

Higgins and others in the media who lie, misinform or remain silent are no better than those shooting civilians from helicopters or starting these wars in the first place. In fact, they have killed more and keep killing.

This modern-day Titus Oates, and others share a big responsibility for death and destruction in the Middle East and a dangerous new Cold War.

As I say, I think people are waking up to the distorted narratives and misdirections which have inflicted war on others. Now they need to take the next step and grasp the sheer enormity of the crimes and the risks of global conflict if we don't act.

So, how do we achieve this and get in a position of holding the criminals and war propagandists to account?

By confronting them directly and mercilessly. As Jeremy Corbyn should have done over the anti-Semitism hoax. Perhaps we should adopt some of the tactics they use against the truth-tellers and whistle-blowers. I don't mean by lies or smears. Maybe even ridiculing these people and their nonsense might have the effect of trivialising the crimes they have committed.

No, I think it is time for plainer, no-holds-barred language describing these people for the true evil they are – until the truth and label sticks.

We need to recognise more the seriousness of the crimes. This commentary from the usually measured Piers Robinson about the staged event in Douma reflects the true gravity of the situation in terms of the OPCW complicity .

4. The hijacking of OPCW

The cover-up of evidence that the Douma incident was staged is not merely misconduct. As the staging of the Douma incident entailed mass murder of civilians, those in OPCW who have suppressed the evidence of staging are, unwittingly or otherwise, colluding with mass murder."

We need to now apply this strong language to all crimes committed, be it from the soldiers on the ground, the governments starting these wars or supplying terrorists or the media which promote mass murder through their lies, distortions and silence when presented with the true facts.

We need to go on the offensive and call out the criminals and spell out in no uncertain terms what we are dealing with. With the evidence and fact-based analogies or arguments we publish we should be using more commentary such as 'mass murderer', 'traitor' or 'terrorist propagandist'.

This is particularly important in light of events in recent days. The assassination of General Qasem Soleimani has been normalised in both mainstream and on social media. The people legitimising state-sponsored murder in offices thousands of miles away from Iran, woefully ignorant of the potential of this causing a chain of events which could visit our door soon.

Above all, we should specifically name and shame the individuals promoting war. This needs to be relentless. The official war narratives which have crumbled so far are ample evidence of wrongdoing on a vast scale. So, we can be confident in doing this with the truth firmly on our side.

Filed under: Douma "Chemical Attack" , historical perspectives , latest , Syria Tagged with: Bellingcat. Eliot Higgins , douma chemical attack , Glorious Revelution , Kevin Smith , OPCW , Peter Hitchens , Titus Oates can you spare $1.00 a month to support independent media

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wardropper ,

No, I think it is time for plainer, no-holds-barred language describing these people for the true evil they are – until the truth and label sticks.
Yes indeed.
I was, however, reminded today of the huge mountain we yet have to climb before it can be normal again NOT to be corrupt and wicked. The scenario was a session of acrimony in a US Senate chamber, and according to the NYTimes, "Tensions grew so raw after midnight that Chief Justice Roberts cut in just before 1 a.m. to admonish the managers and the president's lawyers to "remember where they are" and return to "civil discourse." "
"Remembering where you are", when dealing with Titus Oates and other vulgar frauds is perhaps not entirely appropriate ?

wardropper ,

Apologies, I forgot to set the first sentence in quotes

Thom ,

Hitchens may be on the level on this particular issue but it is part of a wider deception where Hitchens poses as a friend to critical thinkers and then tells them they are helpless and/or can do nothing about it. If he really had journalistic integrity he wouldn't be taking a salary from the Mail on Sunday, a newspaper that relentlessly lied for the Tories at the last election, with the help of the itelligence agencies.

Koba ,

As good as Hitchens has done here he's still at heart a Trotskyist he lives a good split and a toothless display just like the Trotskyists he used to side with. His brother went from Trotskyist to soft neocon and peter went from Trotskyist to an ardent Christian Conservative in a veeeeeery short space of time. Plus there dad was deeeeep in with the establishment and his mum Jewish. So .

Richard Le Sarc ,

what?

Gall ,

Bellingcrap is just another scam like Dupes (Snopes) and Politi"facts". All of them are funded by the Atlantic Council and the CIA front National Endowment for "Democracy". Their cover as an "independent objective fact checking service" is about as transparent as Saran Wrap.

tonyopmoc ,

I really liked this when I read it this morning, before the grandkids came round, but I thought some of the comments a bit severe..

I mean this photo is of some 40 year old kid, who lives in Leicester, and his Mum/wife/sister or whatever works in the local Post Office .

I personally had never heard of Brown Noses, and I have never personnally succeeded in getting anything I wrote, posted above our below the line, since The Manchester Guardian moved from Manchester to London, and whilst I do love reading some of the posters' comments well look face it.

Even though Rhys probabaly doesn't like what this kid writes – Elliot is it? he is hardly going to come round with a chainsaw, to cut his head off is he? He probably never even thought of it.

He did say he is small fry, and he probably is still a virgin (been brainwashed – so he actually belives the model doll is better. What has he got to compare it to?)

So I can't blame any of them.

There are alternatives as well as Facebook, Youtube, Instagram, and all those Dating Websites, when almost everything you write gets deleted.

Just go down the local pub when there is a good band on. Even I can pull there, but I am better looking than both Rhys and Elliot

I Like Girls.

I am a man. It's Normal

Just keep fit dancing and smiling, and you will be O.K.

Tony

paul ,

The prime importance of these endless hoaxes, smears, lies, fabrications and official approved conspiracy theories, lies not so much in the events themselves as what it says about the nature of the people who rule over us and their courtiers and handmaidens in the MSM.

It would take a whole forest of trees merely to catalogue all their lies over the years, whether it's the Iraq Incubator Babies, the black Viagra fuelled rape gangs in Libya, the Syrian Gas Hoaxes, 9/11, Iraq's WMD, Iran's non existent nuclear weapons, Skripal, Russiagate, Ukrainegate, or the communist spy/ terrorist/ anti semitic smear campaign against Corbyn. And that is only the tip of a very large iceberg. You could go back further to Gladio, Operation Northwoods, Tonkin Gulf, the "Holocaust", Zinoviev Letter, Bayonetted Belgian Babies, Raped Belgian Nuns, Human Bodies Made Into Soap. The list is endless.

We have been lied to consistently for years, decades, and generations. And these lies have been peddled endlessly in the MSM, no matter how ludicrous and transparently false they are. In the absence of direct personal knowledge or very convincing evidence to the contrary, you just have to assume that everything we have ever been told, are being told, and will be told, and most of the accepted historical record, are simply false. Nothing, nothing at all, can ever be taken at face value.

And those who rule over us and who are responsible for these lies are psychopathic subhuman filth devoid of any moral values or any redeeming features whatsoever. They are a thousand times worse than the worst mass murderers or child killers who have ever been through our courts. The Moors Murderers, the Ted Bundys, the Jeffrey Dahmers, were seriously damaged individuals who killed a handful of victims. And they did their own dirty work. The Blairs, the Campbells, the Straws, the Bushes, the Cheneys, the Rumsfelds, the Allbrights, the Macrons, the Camerons, the Netanyahus, the Trumps, have the blood of millions on their hands. They and their wire pullers are responsible for the death, starvation and misery of tens and hundreds of millions.

So when Blair, or Johnson, or Trump or whoever is interviewed on television, you have to remember that individual is a thousand times worse than the Moors Murderers, and we would actually be that much better off if Brady or Hindley were ruling over us. They deserve no respect or deference or legitimacy. They plot the murders of millions and the starvation of tens of millions – and laugh and giggle as they do so. They should be simply recognised for what they awe – psychopathic subhuman filth.

austrian peter ,

I do agree with you Paul and of course all you say is true. One of the main problems is that these people have the power to build artificial constructs sufficient for the masses to believe and perpetuated through their bought and paid for MSM whose journalists are mere foot soldiers and wish only to get their pay checks. They have no reason to question the lies and distortions pedaled to them by TPTB – they merely repeat the false narrative:
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" – Upton Sinclair

And we, the great 99%, have little power to change things except within our local network. We can shout all we like on social media but it changes nothing until the great crisis reoccurs and perhaps the masses will rise and demand a just and equitable system. Until that day perhaps this little video will provide an understanding:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/rStL7niR7gs?version=3&rel=1&fs=1&autohide=2&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&wmode=transparent

Roberto ,

The business of the MSM throughout the ages has been to traumatise or at least just generally worry the public with headlines focused on fear, envy, anger, revenge, and hate. Include all five in your story and you're well on the way to a Pulitzer Prize, bestowed on the profession by one of the great muckrakers of all time. It's not incidental that there have been a disturbing number of winners that have turned out to be dissembling frauds. Add to this the fact that 'journalism' training apparently does not teach entrants to distinguish the difference between opinion and news, and the die is cast: propaganda as news.

Dungroanin ,

Here is what BellEndScat supporting Rusbridger is moaning about.

"For some years now – largely unreported – two chancery court judges have been dealing with literally hundreds of cases of phone hacking against MGN Ltd and News Group, the owners, respectively, of the Daily Mirror and the Sun (as well as the defunct News of the World).
The two publishers are, between them, forking out eye-watering sums to avoid any cases going to trial in open court. Because the newspaper industry lobbied so forcefully to scrap the second part of the Leveson inquiry, which had been due to shine a light on such matters, we can only surmise what is going on.

But there are clues. Mirror Group (now Reach) had by July 2018 set aside more than £70m to settle phone-hacking claims without risking any of them getting to court. The BBC reported last year that the Murdoch titles had paid out an astonishing £400m in damages and calculated that the total bill for the two companies could eventually reach £1bn."

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jan/19/there-is-a-reason-why-royals-demonised-but-wont-read-all-about-it-prince-harry-meghan-markle

On the overall perfidious msm he quips:

"Because the newspaper industry lobbied so forcefully to scrap the second part of the Leveson inquiry, which had been due to shine a light on such matters, we can only surmise what is going on."

-- --

Completely ignoring that the Integrity Iniative infested Guardian ITSELF objected to the recommendation of Levesons thoroughly public Inquiry and opposition to a independent press regulator!

It would have been a building block and certainly stopped most of the continued press misbehaviour over the last 5 years.

Neither Fish nor Fowl Mr Rusbridger. More sinner that saint, more like.

Hugh O'Neill ,

Going to the heart of what Bellingcat, MI6 and CIA is Pompeo's: "We lie, we cheat, we steal." These evil filth are devoid of any moral code and have no respect whatsoever for the laws of God or Man. At which point, consider Moses' (how apt) Ten Commandments. There among them is: "Thou shalt not bear false witness". Think what you will of these Ten, but as a moral code, they were quite useful.

Richard Le Sarc ,

Would that all these scum could share the fate of their progenitor, Streicher-without the ' necktie party'. Life at hard labour would do the lot of them much good.

Brianeg ,

I looked at the Veterans Today link and it all sounds very plausible'

However in today's world nothing makes sense especially when the questions arise.

Is it possible to change the signal of an aircrafts transponder remotely. Can the target acquisition radar on the missile be spoofed remotely. Just why did the flight control officer sanction the take off of this plane in the middle of a war unless they were party to the whole thing.. Just what were the six Israeli F-35 jets doing flying close to the Iranian border?

Okay there is a lot of smoke but just where is the fire.

Just as interesting is that none of the twelve Iranian missiles was intercepted and there are rumours that the Iranians were able to take out of action American air defences.

I am sure that like with Douma when the majority of NATO missiles were intercepted by missiles that were decades old, you wonder what might happen when most of the middle east is covered by the S-300 and later versions.

This is a story that has got a long way to run and we might never hear the ending.

Dungroanin ,

Facts are inconvenient.
Many planes took off.
This one was delayed by the pilot 'to remove overloading'.
Reports of Cruise missiles heading in.

Mucho ,

For the best info on this, go to Brendon O' Connell's channel and watch 1 to 3 and number 22. You will get answers there.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYaLxbD7Rix3p1rdGY3IMjg?pbjreload=10

Also go to the Antedote and listen to Greg and Jeremy's latest offering.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMf1qGR8km1c8vg_dtpzzVQ

Dungroanin ,

It sounds a bit MAGA.

The thing about 'chips' is they could easily be identified by putting them in a black box and watching what they do using a chip which only does that!

The whole bs about it's THEM not US crap falls away. Just need some open source simple 'custodian' chip manufacturer to make that available. If it can be made a 'gate keeper' than we are all safe.

Mucho ,

"It sounds a bit MAGA. "
After this, I will never, ever read any of your comments ever again. Get lost!

Mucho ,

You talk so much crap. Please, keep it to yourself

Dungroanin ,

I ain't saying that is your opinion am I?

The bit I watched was him being gung-ho about getting back 'control of microprocessors' !!!

There is a big difference between designing chips and 'manufacturing' facilities'.

Have you never wondered why most actual building of small electrical component equipment takes place in Asia?

I don't care wherher you read my comments- i am free to post what I want on whatevet article and whoevers comment. And stick to facts.

Mucho ,

"The bit I watched ".
Honestly, I am so tired of people who comment on things they know nothing about. Everything you say is wrong, because you are speaking from a position of total ignorance, because you haven't watched the films.
Watch 1 to 3. Watch 22 and 23 ALL THE WAY THROUGH, not skimming. Then comment. Every inaccurate comment you make is covered in detail. Honestly it's no wonder we're so fucked.

From 2005 after one google search, time spent on this, 10 seconds:
"While Yona was developed in partnership with one of Intel's California centers, the 65nm microprocessor product is the first to be developed in its entirety, both the architecture and strategy, by Intel engineers at its Israel plants in Haifa and Yakum. "
https://www.israel21c.org/intels-new-chip-design-developed-in-israel/

You know zilch, you understand nothing, you make assumptions, you don't watch or read the material, and then in your total ignorance, you spew your feeble thoughts on this forum. Moron

Mucho ,

You define the phrase "ignorant Brit"

Dungroanin ,

Mucho since you FAILED instantly in your promise to ignore me – i will respond to your toy throwing out of the parambulator.

First just telling people to WATCH something without explaining what the salient point to be learnt – is not the way to influence or educate.

I prefer reading an argument- I definitely do not spend hours watching TV or listening to propaganda by msm / indy or 'shock jocks' – that last was the personality I saw and didn't feel the need to hear anymore as I don't when Nigel Farage and his ilk do on the radio here.

If you want to inform or prove something to me or anyone else kindly post a link to a written piece.

Second, chips are designed eveywhere there is such competence. Chip manufacturing mainly improved theough research in top universities.
The UK was a lead chip designer too.

None of that means the Israelis haven't monopolosed tech and own many patents. The fact is the Israelis ARE part of the 5+1 eyed world Empire – they are the plus one. Snowdens whistleblowing makes absolutely clear that the +1 gets a higher clearance than the +4.

That's as nice as I am prepared to be, so finally, that last paragraph is what is known as PROJECTION. Look it up and learn that it comes from your fav bogeymen brainfuckers.

That is some serious self-hate you have going on – work on it.

Take it easy ok?

Mucho ,

Number 23 is totally relevant too, going deep into chips, backdooring and kill switch usage

Koba ,

So the mocking of maga is what set you off? Fuck maga and it's idiot supporters great nations don't slaughter civilians for capital

bevin ,

Has this link been cited?
https://thewallwillfall.org/2020/01/19/important-douma-opcw-update-from-prof-piers-robinson/

norman wisdom ,

chris morris is very funny has a fine body of twisted comedick works
for all his charm his role is too destroy society degrade
he is khazar after all

sacha baron co hen the names speaks for itself an empty cruel tool
never trust a coen cohen khan or cowen or co they cookoo

eliot mcfuck higgins is not oirish
he is not certainly related to snooker loopy or is it darts i cannot remember hero alex higgins.

eliot"s dad is rita katz from site intel group amaq news
his mom barbera lerner spector
or is it vice versa
versa vice
whatever
shirley you

get my the friends of the oirish israel drift
so to speaks
or sum such

Mucho ,

Brilliant, insightful, logical hypothesis of the recent plane downing over Iran by Jeremy Rothe Kushel. Ignore the video, this is about the written article.

The Prime Suspect in Ukrainian PS752 Shootdown: Israel's Unit 8200
https://www.veteranstoday.com/2020/01/10/ps752/

Mucho ,

For further info about Israeli tech domination, what it is, where it comes from and the implications of this, go to Brendon O Connell's YT channel. Number 22 in his list is very important.

Mucho ,

Jeremy Rothe-Kushel is a very important member of the truth community, in no small part due to the fact that he is an Ashkenazi Jew. My personal belief is that in the end, the Jewish community will play a pivotal role in weeding out the evil that rules over us. I wish we didn't have these labels, that we could have true freedom to play our chosen role in our God created realm, but at this stage in the game, we're stuck with our divide and rule labels and systems of control.
Jeremy's style is to the point, he has great depth of knowledge, an encyclopedic knowledge of his field and is a highly astute commentator. He presents a lot of complex information in fairly easy to digest chunks with his co-host, Greg McCarron, on their show "The Antedote" on YT, as well as doing a lot of guerilla style activism in US politics. Highly recommended.

norman wisdom ,

i met elliot many years ago
the chap on the 8 year old lap top above
we called him fat face down the synagogue ohh how we laughed
he laughed as well everytime someone said it
such fun
are rabbi one day organised a trip and lecture tour of chatham house the belly of the beast.
we learnt all about how tough regime change was and how difficult it is to do on a bbc size budget.

what we learnt was that having are people everywhere really helped
scripted up to speed influencer roles in media in public on track on page working cog like.
a kind of khazar collective non semites only for security reasons of course.
we could work from a very low pound dollar and shekels base and still be very effective.

never under estimate the benjamins or elliots it is folks like this that are the real hero of the oded yinon
yes sir
already my life
fat face eliot boy done good

and like all khazar he hates the sephardim jewisher and the unclean arab which is shirley a bonus is it not

George Mc ,

First off, if folks haven't a clue who Harold Shipman is, you're not going to get far with Titus Oats. At the most they might think it's a character from Gormenghast.

Second, I initially misread the article and thought that the figure from the 17th century actually WAS Higgins of Bellingcat. And if that seems an absurd assumption to make, even temporarily, it doesn't seem much more absurd than some of the stuff he says e.g.

I had no knowledge beyond what I'd learned from Arnold Schwarzenegger and Rambo.

The point has been raised that there are psyops perpetrated with a malicious sense of humour as if to say, "These suckers will swallow anything". Higgins with his "education" from Arnold and Rambo may be an example of one of those jokes.

Third, and to end on an optimistic note, I like the 17th century sentencing and recommend we bring it back:

and he was whipped and placed in the pillory.

Dungroanin ,

Admin – a suggestion on keeping recent articles available from the top of the page.

Problem: As you add new aricles at top left the ones on the very right drop away! Almost as if being binned into a memory hole.

Solution: allow a scroll at the right hand edge so that these older links are easily available to readers. Only a minor coding change without any change to your front page.

Tallis Marsh ,

I concur! I'm sure many of us will appreciate a scroll on the right hand edge so we can access the older articles. Thanks in advance, OffG!

Oliver ,

HM Armed Forces operations in Syria follow the doctrine of Major General Sir Frank Kitson who learnt his stuff in Kenya in the 1950s. Murder, torture, rape the staples of the British military's modern terrorist ability. NATO doctrine too.

Joe ,

https://www.youtube.com/embed/0oLfNr4JjeI?version=3&rel=1&fs=1&autohide=2&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&wmode=transparent

BigB ,

This is an important article: one of the few that dares to express that Douma et al are not mere false flags they a darkly psychotic form of 'snuff propaganda porn' (including the recycling and rearanging of 'props' that were until recently animate human souls with a lifetime of possibility abnegated for ideology). The Working Group on Syria is part of a small counter-narrative subset – along with Sister Agnes Mariam, Vanessa Beeley, RT (on occasion), UK Column, The Indicter, Prof. Marcello Ferrada de Noli – who are willing to state plainly that this is child murder. Now I wholeheartedly commend Kevin that we should name and shame the culprits and their supporters.

"No, I think it is time for plainer, no-holds-barred language describing these people for the true evil they are – until the truth and label sticks."

I had a similar epiphany in early 2016. The barbaric of murder of starved and thirsty children at Rashidin – Syrian innocence lured by much needed sweets and drinks only to be blown apart in front of their mothers. Anyone who supports the White Helmets terrorist construct and their NATO-proxy child-murderers needs to be exposed. But what if that trail of exposure leads back to the leader of the Labour party: who had just personally endorsed the charity funding of the White Helmets? And continued to support the Jo Cox Foundation of Syrian humanitarian bombers and R2P interventionists? Which itself is a front for the dark money web of 'philanthrocapitalism' that is the shadow support network for regime change crimes against humanity. This is when righteous indignation meets the dark wall of silence around the social construction of reality. Especially if you put Jeremy Corbyn in the frame.

What this means is the ability to frame dark actors for the true evil they are has to be a two-way flow. Meaning is created across networks, not just by naming but by naming and agreeing across narrative communities. Again, this is not abstruse: it is social reality. Social reality is not reality: it is a consensual constructivism. Significant numbers of others have to be in a position of consensual agreement in order to challenge the dominant narrative(s). So I echo the sentiment that many can see that the dominant narrative – especially concerning Syria – is deeply flawed. But they are as yet unwilling to admit that the depth of the flaw is in fact a tear in social reality that cannot be easily healed.

This is the aspect of social reality called 'universe maintenance'. Doxa is the reality constructing belief set – the episteme of interacting beliefs. The narrative has two main aspects: ortho-doxa and hetero-doxa – the orthodox maintaining and heterodox subverting discourses. In order to truly subvert the hegemonic orthodoxy – there has to be a social moment of criticality when the heterodox is no longer deniable. To reach that point: the intrajecting true has to be believable to the hegemonic orthodoxy. Now we have a third mode: para-doxa when the true 'state of affairs' is not believable – it is easily rejected as paradoxical to the reigning consensus covenant of the true. This is universe maintaining: whereby the the totality of the dominant discourse actually subsumes or repels any paradox as a half-truth or ameliorated, disarmed less-than-true ('conspiracy theory'). This is known as 'recuperation'. Anything that meets the dominant discourse has to be explained in the terms of the dominant discourse accommodative and recommending itself to the dominant discourse. Which then becomes a part of the dominant universe of discourse.

A moment of the true is like a barb to a bubble. It has to be contained and wrapped in narrative that describes and explains it into a consumable form. The full realisation of the propagandic child murder in Syria – tacitly supported by the Labour Party and Jeremy Corbyn in particular – would destroy the symbolic universe of social reality. Of which it is my personal experience no one really wants to do. The correlations, direct and indirect links, and universally maintained orthodoxy of narrative discourse point to an accomodation. An explanation or multivariate set of explanations that problem shift and ascribe blame to imaginary actors. To deflect or defend the personal self. Because the personal self is independently situated outside the social sphere. Or is it?

Seeing the real event as it happens requires the perspicacity of social inclusion. We all create social reality together: with our without layers of dualising exclusion that protects us from the way the world really is. Who would vote to legitimise the supporters of NATO and the child-murderers of Syria? 31 million legitimising independent social actors just did. Do you suppose they did so in full knowledge that it is child-murder they were supporting? Or did they create universe maintaining accommodations to the truth? That is how powerful the screening discourses and legitimising orthodoxic narrative mythology is. It is not that it cannot be subverted: its just that calling out the true evil has to be heard in unison by large or social small assemblages willing to totally change everything – including themselves. In order to transition to a different social reality one that accommodates the truth. One which will look nothing like the social reality we choose to maintain as is.

Francis Lee ,

My first attempt didn't get through. Herewith second.

It seems to me that the internal affairs of the Russian Federation, although they may have some impact on external geopolitical issues, are a matter for them. At the present time the relevant question regarding the RF is as follows: Question 1. Is Russia a revionist state intent on an expansionist foreign policy? Answer NO. But it is not going to tolerate NATO expansion into its own strategic zones, namely, Ukraine, Georgia and the North Caucusas. Question 2. Is the Anglo-Zionist empire in open of pursuit of a world empire intent on destroying any sovereign state – including first and foremost Russia – which stands in its way? Answer YES. This really is so blatant that anyone who is ethnically challenged should seek psychiatric help. In Polls conducted around the world the US is always cited as the most dangerous enemy of world peace, including in the US itself. Thus a small influential (unfortunately deranged) cabal based in the west has insinuated its way into the institutions of power and poses a real and present danger to world peace.

This being the case it is imperative to push all and any 'normal' western governments and shape public opinion and discourse (except the nut-jobs like Poland and the Baltics) into diplomacy. Wind down NATO just as the Warsaw Pact was wound down. that will do for starters. Of course the PTB in all the western institutions – the media (whores) the deep state, the Atlantic Council, the Council on Foreign Relations, Chatham House the Arms merchants, the security services GCHQ, the CIA, Mossad and the rest will oppose this with all the power at their command. This is the present primary site of struggle, mainly propagandistic, cultural and economic, but with overtones of kinetic warfare.

Similar diplomatic initiatives must be directed at China. Yes, I know all about China's social credit policy, I don't particularly like the idea of 24 hour system of surveillance, and I wouldn't want to live there, but is already a virtual fait accompli in the west. Again it bears repeating that sovereign states should be left to their own devices. After all 'States have neither permanent friends of allies, only permanent interests. (Lord Palmerston, 19 century British Statesman). No more 'humanitarian interventions' thank you very much. How about Mind our own Business non-interventions.

I make no apologies for being a foreign policy realist – if that hasn't become apparent by this stage!

BigB ,

Francis:

The Russian Federation is involved is strategic partnership with China in consolidating the Eurasian 'supercontinent' into the world island. One which is slowly being drawn together into a massive market covering 70% of the world's population, 75% of energy resources, and 70% of GDP. I'd call that expansionist, wouldn't you?

Market mechanisms and methodology are exponentially expansionist, extractivist, and extrapolative. Market propaganda is free and equal exchange coupled with mutual development through comparative advantage. Everyone benefits, right?

No: markets operate as vast surplus value extractors that only operate unequally to deliver maximum competitive advantage to the suprasovereign core. Surplus value valorises surplus capital which cannot be contained in a single domestic market: so it seeks to exploit underdeveloped foreign markets setting up dependencies and peripheries in the satellite states. Which keeps them maldeveloped. In short: Russia and China's wealth is not just their own.

Russia and China are globalisation now. Globalist exponential expansionism, extractivism, and extrapolation is the repression of humanism and destruction of the biosphere. It can't stop growing in the cancer stage of hyper-capitalism. We are currently consuming every resource at a material throughput increase of 3% per annum year on year. That's a 23 year exponential doubling of material resources. And a 46 year doubling of the doubling. How long before globalisation uses everything? How far into the race to the bottom will the market collapse?

It would be really nice to return to a Westphalian System of non-expansionist, non-extractivist sovereign nation states. It is just not even plausible under market mechanisms of extraction. There can be no material decoupling and development remains contingent on an impossible infinity: because development remains parallel and assymetrically maintained. And all major resources are depleting exponentially too. Including the nominative renewable and sustainable ones.

Degrowth; self-sufficiency; localised 'anti-fragility', steady-state; asymmetric development of the marginalised and the peripheralised; regenerative agroecological agriculture; human development not abstract market development; are just some of the pre-requisites of a return to sovereign states. Russia 'sovereigntist' globalisation is the expansionist opposite to that. The RF is part of the biggest market in the world that hoovers up as much surplus value as it can before sending a large tranche of it to London. As much as $25bn a year in capital flight into the offshore nexus of secrecy jurisdictions. It's a globalist expansionist market mechanism that hoovers all vitality out of the life-ground. That: I call expansionist and imperialist of which Russia and China are now the major part.

Francis Lee ,

"The Russian Federation is involved is strategic partnership with China in consolidating the Eurasian 'supercontinent' into the world island. One which is slowly being drawn together into a massive market covering 70% of the world's population, 75% of energy resources, and 70% of GDP. I'd call that expansionist, wouldn't you?"

No, I wouldn't actually. Building roads, rail connections and other trade routes doesn't strike me as imperial expansion. No-one is being forced to join the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) or into reconfiguring their internal political and economic structures, as the US does in Latin America or as the British did in India and Southern Africa. (East India Company and the British British South Africa Chartered Company). The SCO is a voluntary arrangement. Uzbekistan for example has decided not to join the central Asian Eurasian Economic Union – well that's its prerogative. No-one is going to send any gun-boats to force them. (I am aware that Uzbekistan is a landlocked country, but I was talking figuratively.)

The EEU's genesis has along with the SCO and BRI has been forced upon the China/Russia axis as part of an emerging counter-hegemonic alliance against the US's imperial aggrandisement with its kowtowing vassals in tow. Russia has no claims on any of its neighbours since it is already endowed with ample land and mineral deposits. China is a key part of this essentially geopolitical bloc quite simply because the US imperial hegemon is determined to stop China's development by all means necessary including the dragooning of contiguous military bases in US proxy states around China's maritime borders.

A distinction should be made between rampant imperialism of the Anglo-zi0nist empire, and the response of an increasingly bloc of states who find both their sovereignty and even their existence threatened by the imperial juggernaut. What exactly did you expect them to do given the hostility and destructive intent of the Empire? Defence against imperialism is not imperialism. The defence of autonomy and sovereignty of international society and the creation of an anti-hegemonic have the potential to finally create a transformative new world order (and goodness knows we need one) announced at the end of the Cold War in 1991. This ambition finds support not only in Russia and China but in other countries ready to align with them, but also in many western countries. I obviously need to put the question again. Who is and who is not the greatest threat to world peace? Surely to pose the question is to answer it.

Dungroanin ,

Agree Francis.
There is a move to suggest that the Old Empire retains a 'maritime' world and the SCO confines itself to the Eurasian land mass.
Dream on.
The Empire is DEAD. Long live the new Empire!

BigB ,

Who is the greatest threat to world peace and to the world itself? We are. The global carbon consumption/pollution bourgeoisie. It is the global expansionist mindset that is increasing its demands for growth – as the only solution to social problems, maldevelopment, and maldistribution caused by excessive growth. Supply has to be met by exponentially expanding markets. Whether this is voluntaristic or coerced makes very little difference to the market cancer subsuming the globe. Benign or aggressive forms of cancer are still cancer. And the net effect is the same.

Russia and China – the 'East' – uphold exactly the same corporate model of global governance that the 'West' does. Which has been made clear in every joint communique – especially BRICS communiques. I have made the case – following Professor Patrick Bond – that BRICS in particular (a literal Goldman Sachs globalist marketing ploy) – are sub-imperial, not anti-imperial. All their major institutions are dollar denominated for loans; BRI finance is in dollars; BRICS re-capitalised the IMF; Contingency Reserve Arrangements come with an IMF neoliberalising structural adjustment policy; etc. It is the same model East and West. One is merely the pseudo-benign extension of the other. The alternative to neoliberal globalisation is neoliberal globalisation. This became radiantly clear at SPIEF 2019: TINA there is no alternative.

The perceived alternative is the reproduction of neoliberalism – which has long been think-tanked and obvious – and its transformation from 'globalisation 3.0' to 'globalisation 4.0' trade in goods and services, with the emphasis on a transition to high-speed interconnectivity and decoupled service economies. Something like the Trans-Eurasian Information Super Highway (TASIM)? With a sovereigntist and social inclusivity compact. So the neoliberal leopard can change its spots?

No. Whilst your argument is sound and well constructed: it is reliant on the early 20th century Leninist definition of 'imperialism' as a purely militarist phenomena. Imperialism mutated since then – from military to financial (which are not necessarily exclusive sets) – and is set to metastasise again into 'green imperialism' of man over man (and it is an andrarchic principle) and man (culture) over nature. Here your argument falls down to an ecological and bio-materialist critique. Cancer is extractivist and expansionist wherever it grows.

Russia is the fourth largest primary energy consumer on the planet. Disregarding hydro – which is not truly ecological – it has a 1% renewable penetration. It is a hydrocarbon behemoth set to grow the only way it knows how – consuming more hydrocarbons. They cannot go 'green': no one can. And a with a global ecological footprint of 3.3 planets per capita, per annum, this is not sustainable. Now or ever.

So a distinction needs to be made between the old rampant neoliberal globalisation model (3.0) – the Anglo-Zionist imperialist model – and the emergent neoliberal globalisation model (4.0) of Russia/China's rampant ecological imperialism? And a further distinction needs to be made about what humanity has to do to survive this distinction between aggressive and quasi-benign cancer forms. Because we will be just as dead, just as quick if we cannot even identify the underlying cancer we are all suffering from.

Koba ,

Big B sit down ultra! China and Russia rent empires and have no desire to be! If you're a left winger you're another poor example of one and more than likely a Trotskyist

Richard Le Sarc ,

Love the nickname, Josef.

Louis Proyect ,

This is because if a chemical attack did not take place and Assad was not responsible it seems highly likely that the civilians including children were murdered to facilitate a fabrication.

And were our own intelligence agencies involved in a staged event, considering the refusal to even establish the basic facts in the days following?

-- -

This is the sort of conclusion you must come to if you are into Islamophobic conspiracy theories. The notion that this kind of slaughter took place to "facilitate" a false flag is analogous to the 9/11 conspiracism that was on display here a while back and that manifested itself through the inclusion of NYU 9/11 Truther Mark Crispin Miller on Tim Hayward's Assadist propaganda team.

Sad, really.

Harry Stotle ,

Go on Louis, remind us about the 'terrorist passport' miraculously found at the foot of the collapsed tower with a page coveniently left open displaying a 'Tora Bora' stamp – I kove that bit.

I mean who, apart from half the worlds scientific community is not totally convinced by such compelling evidence, especially when allied to the re-writing of the laws of physics in order to rationlise the ludicrous 2 planes 3 towers conspiracy theory?

Next you'll be telling us it was necessary for the US to invade Afghanistan and Iraq for reasons few American'srecall beyond the neocon fantasy contructed on 11th Septemember, 2001.

Dave Hansell ,

It's clear to a blind man on a galloping horse from this comment of yours Mr Proyect that concepts such as objective evidence, logical and rational deduction, the scientific method etc are beyond your ken.

Faced with the facts of a collapsing narrative of obvious bullshit and lies you have bought into, which you are incapable of facing up to, it is unsurprising that you are reduced to such puerile school playground level deflections.

So come on, try getting out of the gutter and upping your game. Because this fare is nothing short of sad and pathetic.

We know from the evidence of those who actually know their arse from their elbow on these matters that the claims of an attack using chemical weapons on this site are unsustainable.

Which leaves the issue of the bodies at the site. Given they did not lose their lives as a result of the unscientific bullshit explanation you desperately and clearly want to be the case the question is how did those civilians lose their lives? How did their corpses find their way to that location?

Did Assad and his "regime" murder them and move the bodies to that site (over which they had no control) in order to create a false flag event to get themselves falsely accused of an NBC attack Louis? Because that's the only reasonable and rational deduction one can imply from your argument and approach.

It is certainly more reasoned, rational and in keeping with the scientific method (you might want to try it sometime) to surmise that the bodies on site, having not been the result of the claimed and unsustainable narrative you have naively committed to, either died on site from some other cause or were brought to the site for the purpose of creating your fantasy narrative.

In the latter case it is further a matter of rational and reasoned deduction that such an occurrence could only be carried it in circumstances in which whoever carried it out had actual, effective and physical control of a geographical location and area situated within a wider conflict zone.

Again, it remains a piece of factual reality that this location was not under the control of the Assad 'regime.' Not least because otherwise there would be no logical or rational military reason for the de facto Syrian Government and it's armed forces to waste resources attacking it.

Unless of course he buys I to the conspiracy theory and hat they somehow organised a false flag implicating themselves?

I'm sure everyone else here in the reality based community is waiting with bated breath for you to 'explain' how they did this Louis.

I know I am. I could do with a good laugh.

George Mc ,

This is the sort of conclusion you must come to if you are into Islamophobic conspiracy theories.

Umm – the assumption that Muslims DIDN'T do it is "Islamophobic"? Even on your own terms you're not making much sense these days, Louis.

lundiel ,

There was little doubt that British special forces were captured in Eastern Ghouta when the SAA prevented an all out attack on Damascus. European precursors and British munitions were uncovered along with factories within the tunnel complex, itself a product of western engineering and slave labour. This was no propaganda, evidence was collected, statements were taken and everything was documented. Douma was a direct follow-on from that failure and yet, you refuse the evidence piling up, but accept testimony of journalists based in Jordan and Turkey? The "conspiracy" is wholly yours Louis and you are guilty of malicious intent, false representation and pretending to be a "Marxist" when you are a Zionist neocon.

lundiel ,

Hi I'm Louis an unrepentant Marxist and I willfully refuse to use block-quotes.

Richard Le Sarc ,

More proyectile vomitus in defence of child-murdering salafist vermin. How low can this creature descend?

Louis Proyect ,

Richard, such abusive language only indicates your inability to discuss the matter at hand. In general, a detached sarcasm works much better in polemics. You need to read Lenin to see how it is done. I should add that I am referring to V.I. Lenin, not John Lenin who wrote "Crippled Inside".

Richard Le Sarc ,

You defended the salafist butchers with lies, proyectile-do you not even comprehend your own sewage? Or did someone else write it and you just appended your paw-print?

Dave Hansell ,

Apologies here. There is an open goal and the ball needs to be put in the back of the net:

Seems that Louis here is well ahead of the curve in terms of Fukuyama's well known observation about the end of history.

For Louise history, in terms of the progress and development of human knowledge, stopped around a century ago with whatever Lenin wrote.

But that's what happens to those who only read one book.

Sad really.

Dungroanin ,

You come across more as Yaxley – Lenin mr Tommy Proyect – but he is a MI5 stooge unlike you cough cough.

Koba ,

Lenin hates Trotsky! Trotsky was a power mad maniac who wanted a permanent war state to somehow spread his specific brand of "ahem" socialism, which won't win you friends! "Hi yeah sorry we killed your family in a war we started to save you but yippee Trotsky is now in charge so stop complaining"! You're just a bunch of liars the trots

Maggie ,

learn to use the internet which has the information you need to learn the truth:

Acting out a chemical attack?

https://www.youtube.com/embed/o63VnLJpwuc?version=3&rel=1&fs=1&autohide=2&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&wmode=transparent

Jimmy Dore hits the nail every time!!

https://www.youtube.com/embed/FLRQSfSKoJo?version=3&rel=1&fs=1&autohide=2&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&wmode=transparent

Didn't you just love George Carlin, identifies just what the problem is with dicks like Proyect.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/KLODGhEyLvk?version=3&rel=1&fs=1&autohide=2&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&wmode=transparent

Maggie ,

Here's another Jimmy Dore Vid from 2017
Watch and learn

https://www.youtube.com/embed/MnSAB4qeDug?version=3&rel=1&fs=1&autohide=2&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&wmode=transparent

Koba ,

Maggie don't take jimmy bore as some truth teller he's a bland progressive with revolutionary slogans like proyect! He also has a habit of equating Stalin with Hitler in that god awful nasal accent of his

Richard Le Sarc ,

Thems White Helmets is always so neat and tidy. Their mammies must have insisted that they always look their best.

paul ,

The British taxpayer funded head choppers and throat slitters in Syria routinely committed massacres and filmed their victims. The resulting footage was passed off by tame media hacks as "evidence" of regime atrocities.

Koba ,

Death to the Trotskyists
Fuck proyect your name calling says it all!
Islamophobes indeed?! What an idiot

Harry Stotle ,

The alternative media, and a smattering of truth tellers are locked in an asymmetrical information-war with the establishment – with an all too obvious 'David & Goliath' sort of dynamic underlying it.

The question asked at the heart of this article is how to break the vice like grip information managers hold over various geopolitical narratives, referencing events in Douma in particular.

Alnost reflexively 9/11 comes to mind – a fairly unambiguous example of mass murder for which the official account does not withstand even the most cursory form of scrutiny.
Professionals even went so far as to purger themselves while the investigating committee admitted they were 'set up to fail' (to quote its chairman).

Yet the public, instead of shredding Bush, limb from limb (for the lies that were told) rolled onto their back while the neoncons tickled their collective belly as you might do with a particulalrly adorable puppy,
So if we can't even get to the bottom of events in the middle of New York what realistic chance of doing so in a hostile war zone like Douma?

On balance racism, together with other forms of collective loathing is the most likely reason why this unsatisfactory state of affairs is unlikely to change.

A collective 'them and us' mindset makes it far easier for information managers to manipulate a visceral hatred and fear of 'the other'.
Today it is Qasem Soleimani westerners are taugyt to despise, yesterday it was Bashar al-Assad, before that Vladimir Putin, Saddam Hussein, Muammar al-Gaddafi, Nicolás Maduro . the list just goes on and on.
Information managers simply wind the public up so that collective anger can be directed toward governments or individuals they are trying to bring down – recent history tells us that the public are largely oblivious to this process, so thus never learn from their mistakes.

Perhaps one thing western leaders, and the US in particular can always rely on, is the ease with which the public can be persuaded to believe that certain bogeymen pose a grave threat to 'our way of life' while failing to notice that it is in fact our own leaders who are carrying out the worst atrocities.

harry law ,

Harry Stotle, .."Perhaps one thing western leaders, and the US in particular can always rely on, is the ease with which the public can be persuaded to believe that certain bogeymen pose a grave threat to 'our way of life'. That's true Hermann Goring had it about right with this quote
"Why of course the people don't want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally the common people don't want war: neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But after all it is the leaders of a country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or fascist dictatorship, or a parliament or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peace makers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country."

[Jan 24, 2020] Putin Calls for a New System Guided by the UN Charter But Is It Possible by Matthew Ehret

Jan 24, 2020 | off-guardian.org

Anyone looking with sober eyes upon today's world and the feeble economic and geopolitical underpinnings holding the system together must accept the fact that a new system WILL be created.

This is not an opinion, but a fact. We are moving towards eight billion lives on this globe and the means of productive powers to sustain that growing population (at least in the west) has been permitted to decay terribly over the recent half century while monetary values have grown like a hyperinflationary cancer to unimaginable proportions.

Derivatives speculation alone under the deregulated "too big to fail" banking system has resulted in over $1.5 quadrillion in nominal values which have ZERO connection to the real world (GDP globally barely accounts for $80 trillion). Over the past 5 months $415 billion of QE bailouts have been released into the bankrupt banks to prevent a collapse. So, economically it's foundation of sand.

Militarily, the west has followed the earlier Roman empire of yesteryear by overextending itself beyond capacity creating situations of global turmoil, death and unbounded resentment at the dominant Anglo American powers controlling NATO and the Military-industrial complex.

The recent near-war with Iran at the start of 2020 put the world on a fast track towards a nuclear war with Iran's allies Russia and China.

Culturally, the disconnection from the traditional values that gave western civilization it's moral fitness to survive and grow has resulted in a post-truth age now spanning over three generations (from the baby boomers to today's young adults) who have become the most confused class of people in modern history losing all discrimination of "needs" vs "wants", "right" vs "wrong", "beauty" vs "ugliness" or even "male" and "female".

Without ranting on anymore, it suffices to say that this thing is not sustainable.

So the question is not "will we get a new system?" but rather "whom will this new system serve?"

Will this new system serve an oligarchical agenda at the expense of the nations and people of the earth or will it serve the interests of the nations and people of the earth at the expense of the oligarchy?

Putin Revives a Forgotten Vision

President Putin's January 15 State of the Union was a breath of fresh air for this reason, as the world leader who has closely allied his nation's destiny to China's Belt and Road Initiative, laid out a call for a new system to be created by the five largest nuclear powers as common allies under a multi-polar paradigm.

After speaking about Russia's vision for internal improvements, Putin shifted towards the international arena saying:

I am convinced that it is high time for a serious and direct discussion about the basic principles of a stable world order and the most acute problems that humanity is facing. It is necessary to show political will, wisdom and courage. The time demands an awareness of our shared responsibility and real actions."

Calling for Russia, the USA, UK, China and France to organize a new architecture that goes far beyond merely military affairs, Putin stated:

The founding countries of the United Nations should set an example. It is the five nuclear powers that bear a special responsibility for the conservation and sustainable development of humankind. These five nations should first of all start with measures to remove the prerequisites for a global war and develop updated approaches to ensuring stability on the planet that would fully take into account the political, economic and military aspects of modern international relations."

Putin's emphasis that "the United Nations should set an example" is not naďve fantasy, nor "crypto globalist rhetoric" as some of his critics have stated.

Putin knows that the UN has been misused by anti-nation state ideologues for a very long time. He also knows his history better than his critics and is aware that the original mandate of the United Nations was premised upon the defense of the sovereign nation state. Article 2.1 of the charter clearly says:

The Organization is based on the principle of the sovereign equality of all its Members."

For readers who are perhaps rightfully cynical that such organizations as the UN could ever play a truly positive role in world affairs, it is important to recall that the UN was never intended to have any unilateral authority over nation-states, or military power unto itself when was created in 1945.

Its purpose was intended to provide a platform for dialogue where sovereign nation-states could harmonize their policies and overcome misunderstanding with the aim of protecting the general welfare of the people of the earth.

Articles 1.3-4 state clearly that the UN's is designed "to achieve international co-operation in solving international problems of an economic, social, cultural, or humanitarian character, and in promoting and encouraging respect for human rights and for fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion and to be a centre for harmonizing the actions of nations in the attainment of these common ends."

If the United Nations principles as enunciated in its pre-amble and core articles were to ever be followed (just like America's own admirable constitution): then wars of aggression and regime change would not be possible.

Article 2.4 directly addresses this saying:

All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state".

These principles stand in stark contrast to the earlier 1919 Round Table/RIIA-orchestrated attempt at a post-national world order under the failed League of Nations which was rightfully put out of its misery by nationalists of the 1920s.

FDR's 1944 vision, as Putin is well aware, was based not on "world government", but rather upon the concept of a community of sovereign nations collaborating on vast development and infrastructure projects which were intended to be the effect of an "internationalization" of the New Deal that transformed America in the years following the Great Depression.

The closest approximation to this spirit in practice in our modern age is found in China's Belt and Road Initiative .

Thousands of Asian, African and South American engineers and statesmen were invited to visit the USA during the 1930s and early 1940s to study the Tennessee Valley Authority and other great New Deal water, agriculture and energy projects in order to bring those ideas back to their countries as a driver to break out of the shackles of colonialism both politically, culturally and economically.

In opposition to FDR, Churchill the unrepentant racist was okay with offering political independence, but never the cultural or economic means to achieve it.

Although the world devolved into an Anglo-American alliance with FDR's death in 1945, the other Bretton Woods Institutions which were meant to provide international productive credit to those large scale infrastructure projects to end colonialism were taken over by FDR's enemies who purged the IMF and World Bank of all loyalists to FDR's international New Deal vision throughout the years of the red scare.

Whether these corrupt financing institutions can be brought back to their original intention or whether they must simply be replaced with new lending mechanisms such as the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank, BRICS New Development Bank or Silk Road Investment Fund remains to be seen.

What is vital to keep in mind is that Putin (just like FDR before him) knows that neither Britain nor Britain's Deep State loyalists in America can trusted.

Yet, in spite of their mistrust, they both knew that a durable world order could only be accomplished if these forces were reined in under a higher law imposed by the authority of truly sovereign nations, and this is why FDR's post-war plans involved a USA-Russia-China-UK partnership to provide the impetus to global development initiatives and achieve the goals of the Atlantic Charter.

This partnership was sabotaged over FDR's dead body as the Cold War and Truman Doctrine broke that alliance. The goal of ending colonialism had to wait another 80 years.

At the 2007 Munich Security Conference, Putin had already laid his insight into history clearly on the table when he said:

This universal, indivisible character of security is expressed as the basic principle that "security for one is security for all."

As Franklin D. Roosevelt said during the first few days that the Second World War was breaking out:

When peace has been broken anywhere, the peace of all countries everywhere is in danger I consider that the unipolar model is not only unacceptable but also impossible in today's world. And this is not only because if there was individual leadership in today's – and precisely in today's – world, then the military, political and economic resources would not suffice. What is even more important is that the model itself is flawed because at its basis there is and can be no moral foundations for modern civilisation."

Putin is not naďve to call for the United Nations charter to serve as the guiding light of a new military, political, economic architecture.

Nor is he naďve to think that such untrustworthy nations as the USA, UK and France should serve in partnership with Russia and China since Putin knows that it will be Russia and China shaping the terms of the new system and not the collapsing basket-cases of the west whose excess bluff and bluster betrays a losing hand, which is why certain forces have been so desperate to overthrow the poker table over the past few years.

The fact that Putin, Xi and their growing allies have not permitted this chaos agenda to unfold has not only driven "end of history" imperialists into rage fits but also gives FDR's vision for a community of sovereign nation-states a second chance at life.

Originally published by Strategic Culture . Facebook Twitter Reddit Pinterest WhatsApp vKontakte Email Filed under: latest , Russia Tagged with: Belt and Road Initiative , china , FDR , Matthew Ehret , russia , UN , UN Charter , United Nations , Vladimir Putin can you spare $1.00 a month to support independent media

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Gall ,

The big mistake was giving France, UK and the US or FUKU or FUKUS, USSR NKA Russia and China any veto over the other independent Nations on the planet. Especially since the first two were responsible for hobbling together the Frankenstein monster known as the United States of America that was created by rapacious theft and genocide of the indigenous population followed by almost total ecocide and now has been loosed upon the world it seems to accomplish the same thing under the cover of bringing it "freedom and democracy".

Paul ,

It's a pity the experience of the League of Nations isn't examined any longer because it is instructive. OK Congress declined to approve it so the Pilot Wilson was missing but more serious was the problem of totally partisan and self serving decisions that made its provisions a mockery. Italy was 'allowed' to keep on occupying Ethiopia and sanctions eg on oil were simply declined, partly because the US supplied the oil and wasn't going to stop selling it, especially to Mussolini who was rapidly becoming a client state of America in enormous debt.

BigB ,

Someone said it was "banal" of me to oppose 'The Western Intellectual Tradition' (TWIT). Well, here is its vision *in extremis*. If you do not recognise it: this is 'Platonic Humanism' in all its glory.

It reads well. It is sensible and intelligible in its clearly written propositions. It has meaning and clearly denotes real world events – right? And yet it is ultimately unintelligible and non-sensical in an early Wittgensteinian sense of its underlying logic. If you did not immediately recognise the subtextual vision of Lyndon LaRouche: you might want to read it again?

The underlying logic is one of economic infinity: completely decoupled from the neo-Malthusian sustainable 'green iron cage' that prohibits the *productive* economy growing forever as per the deluded LaRouchian proscription. Which is utterly banal: if not actually exceedingly dangerous.

This fact of life is the essential proof that not only mankind but the universe is unbounded in its potential for constant self-perfectibility and thus ANTI-ENTROPIC in its essence.

https://orientalreview.org/2019/07/31/the-genocidal-roots-of-the-green-new-deal-the-limits-to-growth-and-the-unchaining-of-prometheus/

To illustrate my point: this is from an earlier text. I never actually know where I stand: because "anti-entropy" is laced through much of the commentary here. Which is why this text may appeal on a superficial reading? It ticks a lot of boxes: including perpetual capitalist growth; expansion of the SCO/BRI/BRICS/EAEU/CPEC colonisation of the Eurasian 'supercontinent'; and development of an anti-hegemonic sovereigntist bloc. All of which seem as a fashionable vogue for the internet progressive about town. But in multipolar alliance with Donald Trump! Infinite anti-entropic capitalistic growth – guided by the UN Charter – with Putin, Xi AND Trump at the helm in an "alliance for a new just economic order"? Sounds like hell to me.

https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2019/07/06/trumps-relationship-to-russia-and-china-a-revival-of-the-henry-wallace-doctrine-for-the-post-war-world/

My point is that perhaps we should learn to read more deeply? Perhaps at the underlying paradigmatic logic of the text? Power is transmitted in mysterious ways. Everyone is paranoid about "mind-control" and "hidden agendas". Well, Matthew's is a prime exemplar of hidden context perhaps not to be uncritically assimilated? Unless, perhaps you share the vision of unlimited self-perfectibility; infinite nuclear fusion powered bourgeois ecumenical consumerism decoupled from ecological neo-Malthusian 'limits-to-growth'; and ANTI-ENTROPY? In which case you may be a banal Platonist TWIT too? 🙂

LaRouche was a cultic delusionist who took cherrypicked ideas to assemble an intelligible and sensible montage of beliefs that did not hang together. Which makes his writing absurd nonsense and a philosophical non-entity. Any putative logical link to the real world is severed by its premises. This piece is reduced to a mere a Trojan Horse for gibberish. It is a meaning-less 'language game'.

As unfortunate as it may seem: entropy exists as a fundamental property of the ecosphere. Resources deplete and growth is thermodynamically limited. We need a new system: one which actually addresses the extinction level ecological crisis we are in the midst of. Something we need to understand and embrace: not illogically deny. This text subverts that strategic denial to its own ends. Let the reader be aware of the paradigmatic subtext.

paul ,

Russia and China have always been status quo powers, more concerned with their own internal development than implementing insane Neocon/ James Bond Villain-style fantasies of world domination. This was true even during the period of communist rule. Their growth and influence in the world can only be viewed as a positive development.

China built the infrastructure in the Third World that was neglected during centuries of colonialism.

China builds things.
America (and its cringing satellites like Britain and France) bomb things.
Most people in Africa and elsewhere prefer building things to bombing things.

Dungroanin ,

A good piece – The UN is not fit for purpose.
The SCO already operates under a 'charter' – which goes past religion and cultural hagemony by any one nation or peoples. Since it already represents more than half the worlds population and the majority of its land mass – it is only a matter of time that the defunct UN is upgraded to these standards and absorbed into it OR crashes and burns.

Today there were hundreds of thousands of Iraqis – maybe over million, in showing the US and its allies that they really are serious about their national sovereignty and demand that the foreign forces fuck off!

The US response? To revive the old divide and rule option. Break up Iraq into religion and sectarian areas – using the 'never learning Charlie Brown' proxy Kurds by offering them tet another football to kick!

While the world accelerates towards a new order which puts economic security and mutual defence at its core, the US and its gunfighter professional gamblers resort to poker terminology – 'we are ALL IN' in keeping the Iranians and Syrians (and Turkey?) out of the SCO to stop a nonstop link from the Med to the Pacific and Artic to the Southern Seas.

All in! Lol. They going to lose their shirts and be overturning the table and demanding a shootout to keep from paying up their bet.
It's a bluff and sitting with pocket rockets a simple CALL by the new, new world order.

Philip Roddis ,

Excellent. Worthy of wide dissemination for its first nine paragraphs alone.

BigB ,

Phillip, my friend this is not a personal attack, but – have you heard of Lyndon LaRouche? I suggest you might want to read up on his agenda then re-read the text in its wider context? The subtleties are not explicit: but if you are aware of LaRouche – or read some of the authors other texts – they are obvious in the subtext.

The basic premise – unstated herein – is for Trump, Putin, and Xi to form a wider multipolar alliance against the British economic empire (the British Deep State infiltrators) for untrammeled infinite global economic growth – with maximum penetration of nuclear power (eventually nuclear fission) into every economy of the world. To the ends of a global bourgeois consumer culture serviced by the BRI intitiative. Unrestricted by neo-Malthusian ecologists like me, who say this is impossible.

We may not always see eye to eye: but I'm pretty sure you do not envisage a hypothetically- infinite ecumenical consumerism as humanities apex culture? Not least as I assume that you would agree that this is actual ecological fantasy – the world is finite, as are resources – which means this text needs to be shredded not further disseminated?

https://www.strategic-culture.org/contributors/matthew-ehret/

Norn ,

UN Charter .. "sustainable development of humankind"

One of the top priorities must be: Swift actions to STOP poisoning our food.

Seamus Padraig ,

A very sanguine view of FDR. To be sure, it's impossible to say with 100% certainty what he would have done had he survived the war, but it boggles the mind to think that he was going to be forever cool with the idea of sharing the world with Russia and China, when he abjectly refused to share it with Germany and Japan in his own lifetime.

And please don't believe that old canard about the Japanese wanting to take over America; it was actually Roosevelt who precipitated the whole war with Japan, with his oil embargo and what not. He even had advance knowledge of Pearl Harbor from multiple sources, but deliberately withheld that intelligence from his own navy. FDR clearly wanted the attack on Pearl Harbor to be as devastating as possible, so as to drag his recalcitrant countrymen to war, and it worked. In fact, eighty years later, we're still at war. That's the real legacy of FDR, not the long-gone New Deal, of which only Social Security survives (for now). All the other 'alphabet soup' programs he initiated are gone.

I will always wonder wistfully how our history would have turned out had Huey Long become president instead.

seriouslyman ,

Everything Putin says is perfect. There is nothing bad that can be said about Russia on offguardian. Anyone with any mild criticism of russia is a pro imperialist bastard and cannot be engaged with. Offguardian has rightly attacked almost every significant political figure on earth from corbyn to trump. Putin is the only person who can save us. There is no flaw in his character or politics and anyone who suggests otherwise is a conspiracy theorist. Good on Offguardian for never publishing any negative stories about this brilliant intelligent fair play hero who will save us all from hell.

paul ,

No, Little Greta is going to save us.
Vlad isn't going to do that, but he has done quite a good job so far of stopping the Exceptional And Indispensable People from blowing up the planet.
This gives Greta the chance to save us all from the global warming and the polar bears.

Andy ,

Sarcasm can be an effective tool for making a point. This is an example of it not being.

Francis Lee ,

I am trying hard to assess your contribution but couldn't find anything either interesting or relevant to say about it, other than it is little more than sarcastic rant. How does it, or is it even meant to, increase our understanding of international relations? Who exactly makes those claims about Putin?

What I would say about Putin is that he is simply talking like a foreign policy realist. More power to his elbow I say; we could do with some more realism. His political position is very similar to American foreign policy realists such John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt who to their credit put the Zionist noses (AIPAC, JINSA, ADL, AEI) out of joint with the publication of – "The Israel Lobby". Putin's views could have come straight out of the Treaty of Westphalia (1648) which brought an end to the Wars of the Reformation could have come straight from the Treaty, which were based on the following precepts which of course support a multipolar not a unipolar system. Liberal imperialism, humanitarian intervention, call it what you will is a deadly threat to the future of mankind. In contrast multipolarism as an alternative. See below.

1. States existed within recognised borders.
2. Each states sovereignty was recognised by the others
3. Principles of non-interference were agreed.
4. Religious differences between states were tolerated.
5. States might be monarchies, republics, democracies, as was their wont
6. Permanent state interests or raison d'etat was the organizing principle of interntional relations.
7. War was not entirely eliminated, yet it was mitigated by diplomacy and balance-of-power politics.
9. The object of the balance of power was to prevent one state from becoming so powerful that it could conquer others and destroy world order.

Sounds like straight common sense to me.

BigB ,

seriouslyman has a point. The progressive world is extremely slow to recognise the capitalist colonisation of 70% of the Eurasian globe as an existential threat to humanity. As I have been pointing out: capitalism does not transform to a benign humanist alternative as it travels West to East. Russia and China's economic expansionist extractivisim is inimical to all life on Earth. Especially as China has taken a coal-fired 'Great Leap Backwards' to maintain growth in the face of the secular synchronised global economic slowdown.

When the very real extinction level threat of industrialised financialised capitalism is reduced to a personification and represented as the personality of one man – VVP – this is nothing more than a masking discourse that conceals the globalised extinctionism of fossil fuel capitalism. Perhaps the time to reflect on the superior personality of VVP will come when we are all gasping for our last breath – breathing in petrol?

Capitalism thrives on such personal Fetishism. Power is the invisibilising of capitalism's truly destructive force. No one even wants to open the discourse into what underlies Russia's welfare capitalism. Which is infinite market mechanism extraction and quasi-eternal expansionism of fossil fueled growth. Which will kill us all just as soon as America's big guns and bombs.

George Mc ,

You know BigB I can't help but get the feeling that behind all that polysyllabic pontificating, everything you say comes down to a kind of masked reactionary claptrap. You call yourself "neo-Malthusian". Well that's comparatively candid. Malthus being the most obvious case of a capitalist apologist of the most brutal sort. And how interesting that you are having a go at Putin here – as if to suggest that even some kind of socialist transformation isn't going to save us. So what then? Some kind of reaching back to some healthy sparsely populated savannah filled with Conan the barbarian types?

And this:

"Perhaps the time to reflect on the superior personality of VVP will come when we are all gasping for our last breath – breathing in petrol?"

Seems to me you are secretly longing for that moment of last breath when you can finally gleefully shout, "Nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah – Told you so!" before croaking.

Frank ,

Sorry, but this doesn't sound much like satire.

It sounds like an 8-year-old taught you everything you know about geopolitics, and unfortunately it all went a bit over your head.

George Mc ,

Two points:

First, I fail to see the point of pillorying Putin when the entire Western media is already doing so.

Second, to pillory Putin on the pretence of "a plague on all their houses" takes us nicely into that pleasant non-committal "higher sphere" where all-is-one-and-one-is-all. The old con trick of "being reasonable" in order to sit on an all-facing fence and basically have no opinion at all.

Estaugh ,

So far, Vlad has being doing a very good job, (saving us all from Hell), and it seems, most of the world is increasingly backing him up. That's tough on 'pro-imperialist bastards' but that's cricket.

[Jan 24, 2020] Making Sense of Russia's New Cabinet by Gilbert Doctorow

Jan 22, 2020 | original.antiwar.com
Tuesday evening, 21 January, the composition of Russia's new cabinet was announced to the nation and the world. Russian state television was caught as unawares as any of us in the broad public when the names of the departing ministers, the names and biographical details of arriving ministers and the few changes in reporting lines were released to the wire services. Their correspondents hastened to find Duma members, think tank celebrities and others whom they hoped could make sense of the changes for their viewers.

Eventually, late in the night, a picture emerged of what the latest seismic wave in Russian politics means. I will try to present the generalities here. I will not go into detailed examination of each minister, because such micro-investigation is neither my specialty, nor is it likely to interest an international readership for whom 'which way the wind is blowing' is quite sufficient.

Of course, in the past week, even the contours of political change have appeared inscrutable to Western media who could only fall back on the assumptions that whatever Putin is up to cannot be good. Hence, the flurry of articles following Mr. Putin's address to the bicameral legislature a week ago which sought to portray the constitutional changes he promised as serving only one purpose: to perpetuate his dominance and control over Russian politics after his presidential term ends in 2024. That was so despite the fact that nothing whatsoever in his proposed reforms would facilitate the stated objective and despite the fact that the changes, which diminish his power when implemented, would come four years before he has to relinquish his office.

However, even the harshest critics of Russia and Putin are beginning to change their minds.

The New York Times' "Morning Briefing" today told its online subscribers:

Quote

On social media, our correspondent writes from Moscow , Russian political analysts "have put forward so many different theories that they paint a picture of a nation in collective befuddlement."

Case in point: Mr. Putin's announcement prompted a string of high-level resignations and unexpected appointments. Yet the new cabinet, announced on Tuesday, includes the most prominent members of the last one.

Background: Many analysts initially thought that the constitutional changes were intended to allow Mr. Putin, 67, to take up a powerful role when his second presidential term expires in 2024. Now they aren't so sure.

Unquote

Chapeau! This is one of the rare instances when the editors of The New York Times have followed the facts to an inconvenient truth about Putin and Russia – and have shared with their readership what they found.

Surely the confusion in the minds of the Russian public, as well as domestic and foreign political observers, over how to understand all the changes and prospective changes in Russia's federal government was not by accident, but by design. The intention of Mr. Putin and of Sergei Kiriyenko, his close assistant in these reforms within his presidential administration, was surely to conflate two very different political disruptions: first, the introduction of constitutional reforms that rebalance the power sharing between executive, legislative and judicial branches of the federal government; and second, the change of cabinet to remove ineffectual and unpopular ministers, to bring in fresh blood from among the most successful administrative and technical talent operating at the higher levels of the federal government and groomed for succession these past several years. Both very separate measures share one common feature: to lay the groundwork for the Duma elections scheduled to be held in September 2021. They will likely generate more excitement in the public and will be more consequential than would otherwise be the case.

As for the proposed constitutional changes, I believe they serve a very clearly defined purpose: to prepare Russia for the post-Putin era by introducing checks and balances that will prevent any one branch of government, meaning the executive, from 'running away with the show' and changing the vector of Russia's development and its orientation in the world as the result of the unforeseeable popularity and electoral victory by a candidate to the presidency put up by the Opposition, or even by factions within the Ruling Party and other 'Duma parties' in 2024 and thereafter.

Commentators have often speculated on whom Putin was grooming as his successor. We now have the answer: no one. And this is a wise approach to the issue, because no one in Russia would be capable of filling the shoes of Vladimir Putin, who is a once in a hundred years political phenomenon. And so the shoes to be filled in 2024 and thereafter have been downsized via the power sharing provisions of the proposed constitutional reforms.

Now let us turn our attention to the new cabinet of ministers which Mr. Putin convened and welcomed last night.

In the past few days, many have asked why Putin prompted Dimitri Medvedev and his ministers to resign a week ago. One of my fellow panelists in a Turkish international English television (TRT World) program yesterday devoted to Putin's announced reforms offered the explanation that Medvedev was, in effect, forced out because he is so unpopular in the country. See here.

Indeed, unpopular he was, but that is not a new development. Rather, I believe the fate of Dimitri Medvedev and his cabinet was decided in the presidential administration back in December when the weak results on implementation of the president's high priority National Projects during 2019 came in and when it also became clear that GDP growth during the year had been anemic, trailing rather than matching or exceeding global trends. A government shakeup was already in the cards from that moment.

... ... ...

It must be remembered that during his tenure as president, Medvedev showed himself to be the most outgoing, the most friendly to the West of all Russian and Soviet heads of state in the last hundred years or more. It was a very regrettable mistake by Western leaders that his initiative to begin talks on revising the security architecture of Europe was spurned, and that he was intentionally misled about NATO intentions in Libya when the UN, with Russian support, voted to allow military intervention for humanitarian purposes.

Personal unpopularity or battle fatigue may explain the decision not to reappoint several members of the outgoing cabinet. The first rule pertains to Minister of Culture Vladimir Medinsky, who is guilty of graphomania and has been filling a whole library shelf with his overly nationalistic and simplistic histories while in office. Moreover, he got embroiled in quite controversial issues of what is permitted as artistic expression, making many enemies.

Then there was the non-reappointment of Vitaly Mutko who had been the Sports Minister until 2016 and carried all the baggage of Russia's shame over doping, of its strained relations with FIFA. Mutko had been 'kicked upstairs' to a deputy premiership more for the sake of defying Western allegations against him than because of any personal merit justifying his new position. Clearly it was time to move on and reward others more worthy.

As for Minister of Health Dr. Veronika Skvortsova, who was omnipresent in the country overseeing a vast reform program to bring quality health care to the rural population and also raise the level of diagnosis and early treatment for cardiovascular and oncological illnesses everywhere, the best guess is that she was simply worn down by the task and needed to pass the baton to someone else.

In my two essays on the planned constitutional reforms over the past week, I expressed the optimistic hope that President Putin would use the occasion of appointing a new cabinet to take the first step towards power sharing with the Duma. Specifically, I suggested that he might bring into the cabinet parliamentarians from the minority parties in the Duma, allotting to them portfolios in the more innocent domains such as labor, social welfare and culture, in effect forming a coalition government and thereby consolidating the Russian political landscape.

Reviewing the list of new ministers in the incoming cabinet, it is clear that quite the opposite has happened: the cabinet has been de-politicized . To be sure, nearly all members of the cabinet are members of the United Russia party. But they are what we may call just card-carrying members, whereas the former prime minister Dimitri Medvedev was and remains the head of United Russia.

The new cabinet members are concentrated in the 'economic block' and in the 'social block' of ministries, the two areas that rank very high in the fulfillment of President Putin's pledges to the nation to raise living standards through fulfillment of his National Projects. They are what the Russians call хозяйственники or управленцы, which we may translate as highly competent managers with proven success in getting things done. Technocrats, by another name. One or two come from the administration of Moscow mayor Sobyanin, who oversees the country's most successful municipality. One or two come from among the Prime Minister's former colleagues in the Federal Tax Service, which is a model of technological innovation and efficiency.

At the same time, the most experienced and successful ministers from the Medvedev cabinet have been kept on in their posts. In particular, I point to Anton Siluanov at Finance, Sergei Lavrov at the Foreign Ministry, Sergei Shoigu at Defense, Alexander Novak at Energy. While Siluanov has been stripped of his rank as first deputy prime minister, he received moral compensation by being assigned the additional responsibility for State Property. I explain Siluanov's removal from the deputy prime minister list as resulting from the ambitions of PM Mikhail Mishustin, who is himself a very experienced financial expert, to have free hands in this domain.

Now we will have to wait till just after the September 2021 Duma elections to see to what extent Mr. Putin intends to bring the lower house of parliament into the middle of national policy making by granting them seats in the cabinet.

Gilbert Doctorow is a Brussels-based political analyst. His latest book Does Russia Have a Future? was published in August 2017. Reprinted with permission from his blog .

© Gilbert Doctorow, 2020

[Jan 24, 2020] One real Trump crime about which DemoRats are afraid to talk: OPCW Investigator testifies at UN that no Chemical Attack Took Place in Douma, Syria

Notable quotes:
"... Video and a transcript of former OPCW engineer and dissenter Ian Henderson's UN testimony appears at the end of this report. ..."
"... Video of the session follows at the bottom of this article, along with a full transcript of Henderson's testimony ..."
"... The New York Times ..."
"... Ian Henderson's testimony begins at 57:30 in this official UN video ..."
Jan 24, 2020 | dissidentvoice.org

by Ben Norton / January 23rd, 2020

Video and a transcript of former OPCW engineer and dissenter Ian Henderson's UN testimony appears at the end of this report.

A former lead investigator from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) has spoken out at the United Nations, stating in no uncertain terms that the scientific evidence suggests there was no gas attack in Douma, Syria in April 2018.

The dissenter, Ian Henderson, worked for 12 years at the international watchdog organization, serving as an inspection team leader and engineering expert. Among his most consequential jobs was assisting the international body's fact-finding mission (FFM) on the ground in Douma.

He told a UN Security Council session convened on January 20 by Russia's delegation that OPCW management had rejected his group's scientific research, dismissed the team, and produced another report that totally contradicted their initial findings.

"We had serious misgivings that a chemical attack had occurred," Henderson said, referring to the FFM team in Douma.

The former OPCW inspector added that he had compiled evidence through months of research that "provided further support for the view that there had not been a chemical attack."

Western airstrikes based on unsubstantiated allegations by foreign-backed jihadists

Foreign-backed Islamist militants and the Western government-funded regime-change influence operation known as the White Helmets accused the Syrian government of dropping gas cylinders and killing dozens of people in the city of Douma on April 7, 2018. Damascus rejected the accusation, claiming the incident was staged by the insurgents.

At the time, Douma was controlled by the extremist Salafi-jihadist militia Jaysh al-Islam , which was created and funded by Saudi Arabia and formerly allied with Syria's powerful al-Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra .

The governments of the United States, Britain, and France responded to the allegations of a chemical attack by launching airstrikes against the Syrian government on April 14. The military assault was illegal under international law, as the countries did not have UN authorization.

Numerous OPCW whistleblowers and leaks challenge Western government claims

In May 2019, an internal OPCW engineering assessment was leaked to the public. The document, authored by Ian Henderson, said the "dimensions, characteristics and appearance of the cylinders" in Douma "were inconsistent with what would have been expected in the case of either cylinder having been delivered from an aircraft," adding that there is "a higher probability that both cylinders were manually placed at those two locations rather than being delivered from aircraft."

After reviewing the leaked report, MIT professor emeritus of Science, Technology and International Security Theodore Postol told The Grayzone, "The evidence is overwhelming that the gas attacks were staged." Postol also accused OPCW leadership of overseeing "compromised reporting" and ignoring scientific evidence .

In November, a second OPCW whistleblower came forward and accused the organization's leadership of suppressing countervailing evidence , under pressure by three US government officials .

WikiLeaks has published numerous internal emails from the OPCW that reveal allegations that the body's management staff doctored the Douma report.

As the evidence of internal suppression grew, the OPCW's first director-general, José Bustani, decided to speak out. "The convincing evidence of irregular behavior in the OPCW investigation of the alleged Douma chemical attack confirms doubts and suspicions I already had," Bustani stated.

"I could make no sense of what I was reading in the international press. Even official reports of investigations seemed incoherent at best. The picture is certainly clearer now, although very disturbing," the former OPCW head concluded.

OPCW whistleblower testimony at UN Security Council meeting on Douma

On January 20, 2020, Ian Henderson delivered his first in-person testimony, alleging suppression by OPCW leadership. He spoke at a UN Security Council Arria-Formula meeting on the fact-finding mission report on Douma.

( Video of the session follows at the bottom of this article, along with a full transcript of Henderson's testimony .)

China's mission to the UN invited Ian Henderson to testify in person at the Security Council session. Henderson said in his testimony that he had planned to attend, but was unable to get a visa waiver from the US government. (The Trump administration has repeatedly blocked access to the UN for representatives from countries that do not kowtow to its interests, turning UN visas into a political weapon in blatant violation of the international body's headquarters agreement .)

Henderson told the Security Council in a pre-recorded video message that he was not the only OPCW inspector to question the leadership's treatment of the Douma investigation.

"My concern, which was shared by a number of other inspectors, relates to the subsequent management lockdown and the practices in the later analysis and compilation of a final report," Henderson explained.

Soon after the alleged incident in Douma in April 2018, the OPCW FFM team had deployed to the ground to carry out an investigation, which it noted included environmental samples, interviews with witnesses, and data collection.

In July 2018, the FFM published its interim report , stating that it found no evidence of chemical weapons use in Douma. ("The results show that no organophosphorous nerve agents or their degradation products were detected in the environmental samples or in the plasma samples taken from alleged casualties," the report indicated.)

"By the time of release of the interim report in July 2018, our understanding was that we had serious misgivings that a chemical attack had occurred," Henderson told the Security Council.

After this inspection that led to the interim report, however, Henderson said the OPCW leadership decided to create a new team, "the so-called FFM core team, which essentially resulted in the dismissal of all of the inspectors who had been on the team deployed to locations in Douma and had been following up with their findings and analysis."

Then in March 2019, this new OPCW team released a final report, in which it claimed that chemical weapons had been used in Douma.

"The findings in the final FFM report were contradictory, were a complete turnaround with what the team had understood collectively during and after the Douma deployments," Henderson remarked at the UN session.

"The report did not make clear what new findings, facts, information, data, or analysis in the fields of witness testimony, toxicology studies, chemical analysis, and engineering, and/or ballistic studies had resulted in the complete turn-around in the situation from what was understood by the majority of the team, and the entire Douma [FFM] team, in July 2018," Henderson stated.

The former OPCW expert added, "I had followed up with a further six months of engineering and ballistic studies into these cylinders, the result of which had provided further support for the view that there had not been a chemical attack."

via @ BenjaminNorton

A former OPCW inspection team leader and engineering expert told the UN Security Council that their investigation in Douma, Syria suggested no chemical attack took place. But their findings were suppressed and reversed

Read more here: https://t.co/HI028MZl0k

via @BenjaminNorton pic.twitter.com/rmaSzWzs5Z

-- The Grayzone (@TheGrayzoneNews) January 22, 2020

US government pressure on the OPCW

The US government responded to this historic testimony at the UN session by attacking Russia, which sponsored the Arria-Formula meeting.

Acting US representative Cherith Norman Chalet praised the OPCW, aggressively condemned the "Assad regime," and told the UN that the "United States is proud to support the vital, life-saving work of the White Helmets" – a US and UK-backed organization that collaborated extensively with ISIS and al-Qaeda and have been involved in numerous executions in Syrian territory occupied by Islamist extremists .

The US government has a long history of pressuring and manipulating the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. During the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, the George W. Bush administration threatened José Bustani, the first director of the OPCW, and pressured him to resign.

In 2002, as the Bush White House was preparing to wage a war on Iraq, Bustani made an agreement with the Iraqi government of Saddam Hussein that would have permitted OPCW inspectors to come to the country unannounced for weapons investigations. This infuriated the US government.

Then-Under Secretary of State John Bolton told Bustani in 2002 that US Vice President Dick " Cheney wants you out ." Bolton threatened the OPCW director-general, stating, "You have 24 hours to leave the organization, and if you don't comply with this decision by Washington, we have ways to retaliate against you We know where your kids live."

Attacking the credibility of Ian Henderson

While OPCW managers have kept curiously silent amid the scandal over their Douma report, an interventionist media outlet called Bellingcat has functioned as an outsourced press shop, aggressively defending the official narrative and attacking its most prominent critics, including Ian Henderson.

Bellingcat is funded by the US government's regime-change arm, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), and is part of an initiative bankrolled by the British Foreign Office.

Following Henderson's testimony, Bellingcat founder Eliot Higgins tried to besmirch the former OPCW engineer's credibility by implying he was being used by Russia . Until 2019, Higgins worked at the Atlantic Council , a pro-war think tank financed by the American and British governments , as well as by NATO.

Supporters of the OPCW's apparently doctored final report have relied heavily on Bellingcat to try to discredit the whistleblowers and growing leaks. Scientific expert Theodor Postol, who debated Higgins, has noted that Bellingcat "have no scientific credibility at any level." Postol says he even suspects that OPCW management may have relied on Bellingcat's highly dubious claims in its own compromised reporting.

Higgins has no expertise or scientific credentials, and even The New York Times acknowledged in a highly sympathetic piece that "Higgins attributed his skill not to any special knowledge of international conflicts or digital data, but to the hours he had spent playing video games, which, he said, gave him the idea that any mystery can be cracked."

In his testimony before the UN Security Council, Ian Henderson stressed that he was speaking out in line with his duties as a scientific expert.

Henderson said he does not even like the term whistleblower and would not use it to describe himself, because, "I'm a former OPCW specialist who has concerns in an area, and I consider this a legitimate and appropriate forum to explain again these concerns."

Russia's UN representative added that Moscow had also invited the OPCW director-general and representatives of the organization's Technical Secretariat, but they chose not to participate in the session.

Video of the UN Security Council session on the OPCW's Douma report

Ian Henderson's testimony begins at 57:30 in this official UN video :

https://www.un.org/webcast/1362235914001/B1J3DDQJf_default/index.html?videoId=6125087582001

Transcript: Testimony by OPCW whistleblower Ian Henderson at the UN Security Council

"My name is Ian Henderson. I'm a former OPCW inspection team leader, having served for about 12 years. I heard about this meeting and I was invited by the minister, councilor of the Chinese mission to the UN. Unfortunately due to unforeseen circumstances around my ESTA visa waiver status, I was not able to travel. I thus submitted a written statement, to which I will now add a short introduction.

I need to point out at the outset that I'm not a whistleblower; I don't like that term. I'm a former OPCW specialist who has concerns in an area, and I consider this a legitimate and appropriate forum to explain again these concerns.

Secondly, I must point out that I hold the OPCW in the highest regard, as well as the professionalism of the staff members who work there. The organization is not broken; I must stress that. However, the concern I have does relate to some specific management practices in certain sensitive missions.

The concern, of course, relates to the FFM investigation into the alleged chemical attack on the 7th of April in Douma, in Syria. My concern, which was shared by a number of other inspectors, relates to the subsequent management lockdown and the practices in the later analysis and compilation of a final report.

There were two teams deployed; one team, which I joined shortly after the start of field deployments, was to Douma in Syria; the other team deployed to country X.

The main concern relates to the announcement in July 2018 of a new concept, the so-called FFM core team, which essentially resulted in the dismissal of all of the inspectors who had been on the team deployed to locations in Douma and had been following up with their findings and analysis.

The findings in the final FFM report were contradictory, were a complete turnaround with what the team had understood collectively during and after the Douma deployments. And by the time of release of the interim report in July 2018, our understanding was that we had serious misgivings that a chemical attack had occurred.

What the final FFM report does not make clear, and thus does not reflect the views of the team members who deployed to Douma -- in which case I really can only speak for myself at this stage -- the report did not make clear what new findings, facts, information, data, or analysis in the fields of witness testimony, toxicology studies, chemical analysis, and engineering, and/or ballistic studies had resulted in the complete turn-around in the situation from what was understood by the majority of the team, and the entire Douma team, in July 2018.

In my case, I had followed up with a further six months of engineering and ballistic studies into these cylinders, the result of which had provided further support for the view that there had not been a chemical attack.

This needs to be properly resolved, we believe through the rigors of science and engineering. In my situation, it's not a political debate. I'm very aware that there is a political debate surrounding this.

Perhaps a closing comment from my side is that I was also the inspection team leader who developed and launched the inspections, the highly intrusive inspections, of the Barzah SSRC facility, just outside Damascus. And I did the inspections and wrote the reports for the two inspections prior to, and the inspection after the chemical facility, or the laboratory complex at Barzah SSRC, had been destroyed by the missile strike.

That, however, is another story altogether, and I shall now close. Thank you."

• Article first published in The Grayzone

Ben Norton is a journalist, writer, and filmmaker. He is the assistant editor of The Grayzone, and the producer of the Moderate Rebels podcast, which he co-hosts with editor Max Blumenthal. His website is BenNorton.com and he tweets at @ BenjaminNorton . Read other articles by Ben , or visit Ben's website .

This article was posted on Thursday, January 23rd, 2020 at 12:37pm and is filed under Chemical weapons , Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) , Syria , United Nations , WikiLeaks .

[Jan 24, 2020] This shows how the steady stream of propaganda impacts.....

Jan 24, 2020 | caucus99percent.com

https://thehill.com/policy/defense/479795-poll-41-approve-of-trump-airst...

A new poll shows a plurality of Americans approve of President Trump's decision to order the drone strike that killed Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani.

Forty-one percent of Americans agreed with the decision, according to the Associated Press and NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll released Friday. Thirty percent disapproved and the remaining 30 percent were indifferent.

On Jan. 3 the U.S. killed Soleimani at the Baghdad airport. The move raised tensions in the Middle East and fears of a new war. Iran launched rocket attacks on two bases with U.S. personnel in Iraq days later.

[Jan 24, 2020] Lawrence Wilkerson Lambasts 'the Beast of the National Security State' by Adam Dick

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Wilkerson provided a harsh critique of US foreign policy over the last two decades. Wilkerson states: ..."
"... America exists today to make war. How else do we interpret 19 straight years of war and no end in sight? It's part of who we are. It's part of what the American Empire is. ..."
"... We are going to lie, cheat and steal, as [US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo] is doing right now, as [President Donald Trump] is doing right now, as [Secretary of Defense Mark Esper] is doing right now, as [Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC)] is doing right now, as [Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR)] is doing right now, and a host of other members of my political party -- the Republicans -- are doing right now. We are going to cheat and steal to do whatever it is we have to do to continue this war complex. That's the truth of it, and that's the agony of it. ..."
"... That base voted for Donald Trump because he promised to end these endless wars, he promised to drain the swamp. Well, as I said, an alligator from that swamp jumped out and bit him. And, when he ordered the killing of Qassim Suleimani, he was a member of the national security state in good standing, and all that state knows how to do is make war. ..."
Jan 13, 2020 | ronpaulinstitute.org

Lawrence Wilkerson, a College of William & Mary professor who was chief of staff for Secretary of State Colin Powel in the George W. Bush administration, powerfully summed up the vile nature of the US national security state in a recent interview with host Amy Goodman at Democracy Now.

Asked by Goodman about the escalation of US conflict with Iran and how it compares with the prior run-up to the Iraq War, Wilkerson provided a harsh critique of US foreign policy over the last two decades. Wilkerson states:

Ever since 9/11, the beast of the national security state, the beast of endless wars, the beast of the alligator that came out of the swamp, for example, and bit Donald Trump just a few days ago, is alive and well.

America exists today to make war. How else do we interpret 19 straight years of war and no end in sight? It's part of who we are. It's part of what the American Empire is.

We are going to lie, cheat and steal, as [US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo] is doing right now, as [President Donald Trump] is doing right now, as [Secretary of Defense Mark Esper] is doing right now, as [Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC)] is doing right now, as [Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR)] is doing right now, and a host of other members of my political party -- the Republicans -- are doing right now. We are going to cheat and steal to do whatever it is we have to do to continue this war complex. That's the truth of it, and that's the agony of it.

What we saw President Trump do was not in President Trump's character, really. Those boys and girls who were getting on those planes at Fort Bragg to augment forces in Iraq, if you looked at their faces, and, even more importantly, if you looked at the faces of the families assembled along the line that they were traversing to get onto the airplanes, you saw a lot of Donald Trump's base. That base voted for Donald Trump because he promised to end these endless wars, he promised to drain the swamp. Well, as I said, an alligator from that swamp jumped out and bit him. And, when he ordered the killing of Qassim Suleimani, he was a member of the national security state in good standing, and all that state knows how to do is make war.

Wilkerson, over the remainder of the two-part interview provides many more insightful comments regarding US foreign policy, including recent developments concerning Iran. Watch Wilkerson's interview here:

Wilkerson is an Academic Board member for the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity.

Copyright © 2020 by RonPaul Institute. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit and a live link are given.
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[Jan 24, 2020] Dennis Kucinich, Antiwar to His Core by Adam Dick

Jan 10, 2020 | ronpaulinstitute.org

A Thursday article by Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone discusses Dennis Kucinich's work in politics, from Kucinich's eight terms in the United Sates House of Representatives to his two presidential campaigns to his activities since leaving political office. Taibbi, in the article focused much on Kucinich's long-term devotion to advancing the case for peace, describes Kucinich as "antiwar to his core."

Read Taibbi's article here .

Kucinich is an Advisory Board member for the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity.

Copyright © 2020 by RonPaul Institute. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit and a live link are given.
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[Jan 23, 2020] The crimes of Iraq war still are unpunished

Jan 23, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

karlof1 , Jan 23 2020 22:33 utc | 106

"The REAL 'terrorists' –-death is not a laughing matter, murder is a crime."

Vanessa Beeley provides a short, incomplete, list.

I look at the pictures of today's refugees and see the faces of yesterday's. I see the conditions they inhabit, the squalor and filth, and I see the same in pictures from the past. I read the words of hatred directed at those innocents and recall the same words being said of their predecessors.

And the source of the words and plight of the innocents both present and past come from the same portals or power--The Imperialist West and its Zionist progeny. How many millions have died to enrich their purse, to increase the size of the estates, to serve as their slaves? How many more in the future will share their fate?

Will humans ever evolve to become peaceful animals and save themselves?

[Jan 23, 2020] The USA wanted Germany to inflict as much damage as possible on the Soviets.

Jan 23, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Carson , Jan 23 2020 18:46 utc | 47

karlof1 @ 35

I'd like to read some of the material documenting the fight against communism before WWII. I've been pondering this for a while. I've entertained the notion that although the US, Britain, and the Soviets were technically allies in the fight against Germany and the Axis, that the bigger war was between the USA and the USSR.

Maybe I'm crazy, but it sort of seems like the UK and USA showed up in Europe just in time to prevent the USSR from taking Berlin and all of Germany, perhaps into France. Almost as though they wanted Germany to inflict as much damage as possible on the Soviets.

And then the US forces in the Pacific made a huge push to get Japan to surrender before the Soviets could invade from Manchuria.

Makes you go "Hmmmm......."

[Jan 22, 2020] Wikipedia is nothing but a tool for the concealment of truth.

Jan 22, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Arch Mangle , Jan 21 2020 14:04 utc | 3

The Wikipedia article on the Douma attack makes no mention of the recent OPCW leaks:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Douma_chemical_attack

It's clear to me that Wikipedia is nothing but a tool for the concealment of truth.

somebody , Jan 22 2020 12:39 utc | 96

Posted by: Walter | Jan 22 2020 12:30 utc | 95

Of course. Intelligence services wordwide and their governments knew this as soon as they saw the image.

But Western main stream media does not report on it.

[Jan 22, 2020] The End Of US Military Dominance Unintended Consequences Forge A Multipolar World Order

Notable quotes:
"... The decision to invade Afghanistan following the events of September 11, 2001, while declaring an "axis of evil" to be confronted that included nuclear-armed North Korea and budding regional hegemon Iran, can be said to be the reason for many of the most significant strategic problems besetting the U.S.. ..."
"... The U.S. often prefers to disguise its medium- to long-term objectives by focusing on supposedly more immediate and short-term threats. Thus, the U.S.'s withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM Treaty) and its deployment of the Aegis Combat System (both sea- and land-based) as part of the NATO missile defense system, was explained as being for the purposes of defending European allies from the threat of Iranian ballistic missiles. ..."
"... As was immediately clear to most independent analysts as well as to President Putin , the deployment of such offensive systems are only for the purposes of nullifying the Russian Federation's nuclear-deterrence capability . Obama and Trump faithfully followed in the steps of George W. Bush in placing ABM systems on Russia's borders, including in Romania and Poland. ..."
"... There is no defense against such Russian systems as the Avangard hypersonic glide vehicle, which serves to restore the deterrence doctrine of mutually assured destruction (MAD), which in turn serves to ensure that nuclear weapons can never be employed so long as this "balance of terror" exists. Moscow is thus able to ensure peace through strength by showing that it is capable of inflicting a devastating second strike with regard regard for Washington's vaunted ABM systems. ..."
"... In addition to the continued economic and military pressure placed on Iran, one of the most immediate consequences of the U.S. withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA, better known as the Iran nuclear deal) has been Tehran being forced to examine all options. Although the country's leaders and political figures have always claimed that they do not want to develop a nuclear weapon, stating that it is prohibited by Islamic law, I should think that their best course of action would be to follow Pyongyang's example and acquire a nuclear deterrent to protect themselves from U.S. aggression. ..."
"... Once again, Washington has ended up shooting itself in the foot by inadvertently encouraging one of its geopolitical opponents to behave in the opposite manner intended. Instead of stopping nuclear proliferation in the region, the U.S., by scuppering of the JCPOA, has only encouraged the prospect of nuclear proliferation. ..."
"... Trump's short-sightedness in withdrawing from the JCPOA is reminiscent of George W. Bush's withdrawal from the ABM Treaty. By triggering necessary responses from Moscow and Tehran, Washington's actions have only ended up leaving it at a disadvantage in certain critical areas relative to its competitors. ..."
Jan 21, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Federico Pieraccini via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

Starting from the presidency of George W. Bush to that of Trump, the U.S. has made some missteps that not only reduce its influence in strategic regions of the world but also its ability to project power and thus impose its will on those unwilling to genuflect appropriately .

Some examples from the recent past will suffice to show how a series of strategic errors have only accelerated the U.S.'s hegemonic decline.

ABM + INF = Hypersonic Supremacy

The decision to invade Afghanistan following the events of September 11, 2001, while declaring an "axis of evil" to be confronted that included nuclear-armed North Korea and budding regional hegemon Iran, can be said to be the reason for many of the most significant strategic problems besetting the U.S..

The U.S. often prefers to disguise its medium- to long-term objectives by focusing on supposedly more immediate and short-term threats. Thus, the U.S.'s withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM Treaty) and its deployment of the Aegis Combat System (both sea- and land-based) as part of the NATO missile defense system, was explained as being for the purposes of defending European allies from the threat of Iranian ballistic missiles. This argument held little water as the Iranians had neither the capability nor intent to launch such missiles.

As was immediately clear to most independent analysts as well as to President Putin , the deployment of such offensive systems are only for the purposes of nullifying the Russian Federation's nuclear-deterrence capability . Obama and Trump faithfully followed in the steps of George W. Bush in placing ABM systems on Russia's borders, including in Romania and Poland.

Following from Trump's momentous decision to withdraw from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF Treaty), it is also likely that the New START (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty) will also be abandoned, creating more global insecurity with regard to nuclear proliferation.

Moscow was forced to pull out all stops to develop new weapons that would restore the strategic balance, Putin revealing to the world in a speech in 2018 the introduction of hypersonic weapons and other technological breakthroughs that would serve to disabuse Washington of its first-strike fantasies.

Even as Washington's propaganda refuses to acknowledge the tectonic shifts on the global chessboard occasioned by these technological breakthroughs, sober military assessments acknowledge that the game has fundamentally changed.

There is no defense against such Russian systems as the Avangard hypersonic glide vehicle, which serves to restore the deterrence doctrine of mutually assured destruction (MAD), which in turn serves to ensure that nuclear weapons can never be employed so long as this "balance of terror" exists. Moscow is thus able to ensure peace through strength by showing that it is capable of inflicting a devastating second strike with regard regard for Washington's vaunted ABM systems.

In addition to ensuring its nuclear second-strike capability, Russia has been forced to develop the most advanced ABM system in the world to fend off Washington's aggression. This ABM system is integrated into a defensive network that includes the Pantsir, Tor, Buk, S-400 and shortly the devastating S-500 and A-235 missile systems. This combined system is designed to intercept ICBMs as well as any future U.S. hypersonic weapons

The wars of aggression prosecuted by George W. Bush, Obama and Trump have only ended up leaving the U.S. in a position of nuclear inferiority vis-a-vis Russia and China. Moscow has obviously shared some of its technological innovations with its strategic partner, allowing Beijing to also have hypersonic weapons together with ABM systems like the Russian S-400.

No JCPOA? Here Comes Nuclear Iran

In addition to the continued economic and military pressure placed on Iran, one of the most immediate consequences of the U.S. withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA, better known as the Iran nuclear deal) has been Tehran being forced to examine all options. Although the country's leaders and political figures have always claimed that they do not want to develop a nuclear weapon, stating that it is prohibited by Islamic law, I should think that their best course of action would be to follow Pyongyang's example and acquire a nuclear deterrent to protect themselves from U.S. aggression.

While this suggestion of mine may not correspond with the intentions of leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran, the protection North Korea enjoys from U.S. aggression as a result of its deterrence capacity may oblige the Iranian leadership to carefully consider the pros and cons of following suit, perhaps choosing to adopt the Israeli stance of nuclear ambiguity or nuclear opacity, where the possession of nuclear weapons is neither confirmed nor denied. While a world free of nuclear weapons would be ideal, their deterrence value cannot be denied, as North Korea's experience attests.

While Iran does not want war, any pursuit of a nuclear arsenal may guarantee a conflagration in the Middle East. But I have long maintained that the risk of a nuclear war (once nuclear weapons have been acquired) does not exist , with them having a stabilizing rather than destabilizing effect, particularly in a multipolar environment.

Once again, Washington has ended up shooting itself in the foot by inadvertently encouraging one of its geopolitical opponents to behave in the opposite manner intended. Instead of stopping nuclear proliferation in the region, the U.S., by scuppering of the JCPOA, has only encouraged the prospect of nuclear proliferation.

Trump's short-sightedness in withdrawing from the JCPOA is reminiscent of George W. Bush's withdrawal from the ABM Treaty. By triggering necessary responses from Moscow and Tehran, Washington's actions have only ended up leaving it at a disadvantage in certain critical areas relative to its competitors.

The death of Soleimani punctures the myth of the U.S. invincibility

I wrote a couple of articles in the wake of General Soleimani's death that examined the incident and then considered the profound ramifications of the event in the region.

What seems evident is that Washington appears incapable of appreciating the consequences of its reckless actions. Killing Soleimani was bound to invite an Iranian response; and even if we assume that Trump was not looking for war (I explained why some months ago), it was obvious to any observer that there would be a response from Iran to the U.S.'s terrorist actions.

The response came a few nights later where, for the first time since the Second World War, a U.S. military base was subjected to a rain of missiles (22 missiles each with a 700kg payload). Tehran thereby showed that it possessed the necessary technical, operational and strategic means to obliterate thousands of U.S. and allied personnel within the space of a few minutes if it so wished, with the U.S. would be powerless to stop it.

U.S. Patriot air-defense systems yet again failed to do their job, reprising their failure to defend Saudi oil and gas facilities against a missile attack conducted by Houthis a few months ago.

We thus have confirmation, within the space of a few months, of the inability of the U.S. to protect its troops or allies from Houthi, Hezbollah and Iranian missiles. Trump and his generals would have been reluctant to respond to the Iranian missile attack knowing that any Iranian response would bring about uncontrollable regional conflagration that would devastate U.S. bases as well as oil infrastructure and such cities of U.S. allies as Tel Aviv, Haifa and Dubai.

After demonstrating to the world that U.S. allies in the region are defenseless against missile attacks from even the likes of the Houthis, Iran drove home the point by conducting surgical strikes on two U.S. bases that only highlights the disconnect between the perception of U.S. military invincibility and the reality that would come in the form of a multilayered missile conflict.

Conclusion

Washington's diplomatic and military decisions in recent years have only brought about a world world that is more hostile to Washington and less inclined to accept its diktats, often being driven instead to acquire the military means to counter Washington's bullying. Even as the U.S. remains the paramount military power, its ineptitude has resulted in Russia and China surpassing it in some critical areas, such that the U.S. has no chance of defending itself against a nuclear second strike, with even Iran having the means to successfully retaliate against the U.S. in the region.

As I continue to say, Washington's power largely rests on perception management helped by the make-believe world of Hollywood. The recent missile attacks by Houthis on Saudi Arabia's oil facilities and the Iranian missile attack a few days ago on U.S. military bases in Iraq (none of which were intercepted) are like Toto drawing back the curtain to reveal Washington's military vulnerability. No amount of entreaties by Washington to pay no attention to the man behind the curtain will help.

The more aggressive the U.S. becomes, the more it reveals its tactical, operational and strategic limits, which in turn only serves to accelerate its loss of hegemony.

If the U.S. could deliver a nuclear first strike without having to worry about a retaliatory second strike thanks to its ABM systems, then its quest for perpetual unipolarity could possibly be realistic. But Washington's peer competitors have shown that they have the means to defend themselves against a nuclear first strike by being able to deliver an unstoppable second strike, thereby communicating that the doctrine of mutually assured destruction (MAD) is here to stay. With that, Washington's efforts to maintain its status as uncontested global hegemon are futile.

In a region vital to U.S. interests , Washington does not have the operational capacity to stand in the way of Syria's liberation. When it has attempted to directly impose its will militarily, it has seen as many as 80% of its cruise missiles knocked down or deflected , once again highlighting the divergence between Washington's Hollywood propaganda and the harsh military reality.

The actions of George W. Bush, Obama and Trump have only served to inadvertently accelerate the world's transition away from a unipolar world to a multipolar one. As Trump follows in the steps of his predecessors by being aggressive towards Iran, he only serves to weaken the U.S. global position and strengthen that of his opponents.

Big Sky Country , 1 hour ago link

Up to the election of our current President, I agree that we were bullying for the personal gain of a few and our military was being used as a mercenary force. The current administration is working on getting us out of long term conflicts. What do you think "drain the swamp" means? It is a huge undertaking and need to understand what the "deep state" is all about and their goals.

The death of Soleimani was needed and made the world a safer place. Dr. Janda / Freedom Operation has had several very intriguing presentations on this issue. It is my firm belief that there is a worldwide coalition to make the world a better and safer place. If you want to know about the "deep state" try watching: www.youtube.com/watch?v=6cYZ8dUgPuU

Roacheforque , 2 hours ago link

All mostly true, but the constant drone of this type of article gets old, as the comments below attest. We really don't need more forensic analysis by the SCF, what we need is an answer to America's dollar Imperialism problem. But we'll never get it, just as England never got an answer to it's pound Imperialism problem.

I like Tulsi Gabbard, but she can never truly reveal the magnitude of the dollar Imperialism behind her "stop these endless wars" sloganism. Besides, she doesn't have the billions required to mount any real successful campaign. Only billionaires like Bloomberg need apply these days.

The Truth is that NO ONE will stand up to Wall Street and it's system of global dollar corporatism (from which Bloomberg acquired his billions, and to which the USG is bound). It's suicide to speak the truth to the masses. The dollar must die of its own disease.

Trump is America's Chemo. The cure nearly as bad as the cancer, but the makers of it have a vested interest in its acceptance.

messystateofaffairs , 3 hours ago link

General Bonespur murders a genuine military man from the comfort of his golf course. America is still dangerous, Pinky might be tired but the (((Brain))) is working feverishly on solutions for the jaded .

msamour , 2 hours ago link

There has been a perception in the last 25 years that the US could win a nuclear war. This perception is extremely dangerous as it invites the US armed forces to commit atrocities and think they can get away with it (they are for now). The world opinion has turned, but the citizens of the United States of America are not listening.

If the US keeps going down the path they are currently on, they are ensuring that war will eventually reach its coast.

Jazzman , 4 hours ago link

To challenge the US Empire the new Multipolar World is focused on a two-pronged strategy:

1. Nullifying the US nuclear first strike (at will) as part of the current US military doctrine - accomplished (for a decade maybe).
2. Outmaneuvering the US petrodollar in trade, the tool to control the global fossil fuel resources on the planet - in progress.

What makes 2.) decisive is that the petrodollar as reserve currency is the key to recycle the US federal budget deficit via foreign investment in U.S. Treasury Bonds (IOUs) by the central banks, thus enabling the global military presence and power projection of the US military empire.

rtb61 , 4 hours ago link

All their little plots and schemes failed, as corrupt arsehole after corrupt arsehole stole the funding from those plots and schemes to fill their own pockets. They also put the most corrupt individuals they could find into power, so as much as possible could be stolen and voila, everywhere they went, everything collapsed, every single time.

Totally and utterly ludicrous decades, of not punishing failure after failure has resulted in nothing but more failure, like, surprise, surprise, surprise.

Routine failures have forced other nation to go multipolar or just rush straight to global economic collapse as a result of out of control US corruption. Russia and China did not outsmart the USA, the USA did it entirely to itself by not prosecuting corruption at high levels, even when it failed time and time again, focusing more on how much they could steal, then on bringing what ever plot or scheme to a successful conclusion.

Falcon49 , 4 hours ago link

The use of the terms "Unintended Consequences", shortsightedness, mistakes, stupidity, or ignorance provides the avenue to transfer or divert the blame. It excuses it away as bad decisions so that the truth and those responsible are never really exposed and held accountable. The fact is, these actions were not mistakes or acts of shortsightedness...they were deliberate and planned and the so-called "unintended consequences" were actually intended and part of their plan. Looking back and linking the elites favorite process to drive change (problem, reaction, solution)...one can quickly make the connection to many of the so-called "unintended consequences" as they are very predictable results their actions. It becomes very clear that much of what has occurred over the last few decades has been deliberate with planned/intended outcomes.

mike_1010 , 6 hours ago link

I think the biggest advantage USA used to have was that they claimed to stand for Freedom and Democracy. And for a time, many people believed them. That's partly why the USSR fell apart, and for a time USA had a lot of goodwill among ordinary Russians.

But US political leaders squandered this goodwill when they used NATO to attack Yugoslavia against Russia's objections and expanded NATO towards Russia's borders. This has been long forgotten in USA. But many ordinary Russians still seethe about these events. This was the turning point for them that motivated them to support Putin and his rebuilding of Russia's military.

When you have goodwill among your potential competitors, then they don't have much motivation to increase their capabilities against you. This was the situation USA was in after the USSR fell apart. But USA squandered all of this goodwill and motivated the Russians to do what they did.

And now, USA under Trump has done something like this with China. USA used to have a lot of goodwill among the ordinary Chinese. But now this is gone as a result of US tariffs, sanctions, and its support for separatism in Taiwan and Hong Kong. Now, the Chinese will be as motivated as the Russians to do their best at promoting their interests at the expense of USA. And together with Russia, they have enough people and enough natural resources to do more than well against USA and its allies.

I think USA could've maintained a lot more influence around the world through goodwill with ordinary people, than through sanctions, threats, and military attacks. If USA had left Iraq under Saddam Hussein alone, then Iran wouldn't have had much influence in there. And if USA had left Iran alone, then the young people there might've already rebelled against their strict Islamic rule and made their government more friendly with USA.

Doing nothing, except business and trade, would've left USA in a much better position, than the one USA is in now.

Now USA is bankrupting itself with unsustainable military spending and still falling behind its competitors. USA might still have the biggest economy in the world in US Dollar terms. But this doesn't take into account the cost of living and purchasing parity. With purchasing parity taken into account, China now has a bigger economy than that of USA. Because internally, they can manufacture and buy a lot more for the same amount of money than USA can. A lot of US military spending is on salaries, pensions, and healthcare of its personnel. While such costs in Russia and China are comparatively small. They are spending most of their money on improving and building their military technology. That's why in the long run, USA will probably fall behind even more.

abodasho , 4 hours ago link

The Anglos in the U.S. are not from there and are imposters who are claiming characteristics and a culture that doesn't belong to them. They're using it as a way to hide from scrutiny, so you blame "Americans", when its really them. That's why there's such a huge disconnect between stated values and actions. The values belong to another group of people, TRUE Americans, while the actions belong to Anglos, who have a history of aggressive and forced, irrational violence upon innocents.

mike_1010 , 3 hours ago link

It's true that ordinary people are often different from their government, including in Russia, in China, in Iran, in USA, and even in Nazi Germany in the past.

But the people in such a situation are usually powerless and unable to influence their government. So, their difference is irrelevant in the way their government behaves and alienates people around the world.

USA is nominally a democracy, where the government is controlled by the people. But in reality, the people are only a ceremonial figurehead, and the real power is a small minority of rich companies and individuals, who fund election campaigns of politicians.

That's why for example most Americans want to have universal healthcare, just like all other developed countries have. But most elected politicians from both major parties won't even consider this idea, because their financial donors are against it. And if the people are powerless even within their own country, then outside with foreigners, they have even less influence.

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/08/28/most-americans-now-support-medicare-for-all-and-free-college-tuition.html

MalteseFalcon , 2 hours ago link

The USA completely squandered their "soft" power.

nuerocaster , 7 hours ago link

Anyone interested in the real story?

1. Nation Building? It worked with Germany and Japan, rinse and repeat. So what if it's comparing apples to antimatter?

2. US won the Cold War? So make the same types of moves made during Reagan adm? The real reason the Soviet Empire collapsed was because it was a money losing empire while the US was a money making empire. Just review the money pits they invested in.

3. Corruption? That was your grandfather's time. The US has been restructured. Crime Syndicate and Feudal templates are the closest. Stagnation and decline economically and technologically are inevitable.

4. Evaluating the competition is problematic. However perhaps the most backward and regressive elements in this society are branding themselves as progressive and getting away with it. That can't work.

[Jan 22, 2020] How Our Economic Warfare Brings the World to Heel

Jan 22, 2020 | www.theamericanconservative.com

How Our Economic Warfare Brings the World to Heel

Unprecedented hubris is drawing a global blowback that will leave America in a very dangerous place. Sorin Alb/Shutterstock

January 2, 2020

|

12:01 am

Doug Bandow Economic sanctions are an important foreign policy tool going back to America's founding. President Thomas Jefferson banned trade with Great Britain and France, which left U.S. seamen unemployed while failing to prevent military conflict with both.

Economic warfare tends to be equally ineffective today. The Trump administration made Cuba, Venezuela, Russia, Iran, and North Korea special sanctions targets. So this strategy has failed in every case. In fact, "maximum pressure" on both Iran, which has become more threatening, and North Korea, which appears to be preparing a tougher military response, has dramatically backfired.

The big difference between then and now is Washington's shift from primary to secondary sanctions. Trade embargoes, such as first applied to Cuba in 1960, once only prevented Americans from dealing with the target state. Today Washington attempts to conscript the entire world to fight its economic wars.

This shift was heralded by the 1996 Helms-Burton Act, which extended Cuban penalties to foreign companies, a highly controversial move at the time. Sudan was another early target of secondary sanctions, which barred anyone who used the U.S. financial system from dealing with Khartoum. Europeans and others grumbled about Washington's arrogance, but were not willing to confront the globe's unipower over such minor markets.

However, sanctions have become much bigger business in Washington. One form is a mix of legislative and executive initiatives applied against governments in disfavor. There were five countries under sanction when George W. Bush took office in 2001. The Office of Foreign Assets Control currently lists penalties against the Balkans, Belarus, Burundi, Central African Republic, Cuba, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Mali, Nicaragua, North Korea, Somalia, Sudan, South Sudan, Syria, Ukraine-Russia, Venezuela, Yemen, and Zimbabwe. In addition are special programs: countering America's adversaries, counter-narcotics, counter-terrorism, cyber warfare, foreign election interference, Global Magnitsky, Magnitsky, proliferation, diamond trade, and transnational crime.

Among today's more notable targets are Cuba for being communist, Venezuela for being crazy communist, Iran for having once sought nuclear weapons and currently challenging Saudi and U.S. regional hegemony, Russia for beating up on Ukraine and meddling in America's 2016 election, Syria for opposing Israel and brutally suppressing U.S.-supported insurgents, and North Korea for developing nuclear weapons. Once on Washington's naughty list, countries rarely get off.

The second penalty tier affects agencies, companies, and people who have offended someone in Washington for doing something considered evil, inappropriate, or simply inconvenient. Individual miscreants often are easy to dislike. Penalizing a few dubious characters or enterprises creates less opposition than sanctioning a country.

However, some targets merely offended congressional priorities. For instance, as part of the National Defense Authorization Act Congress authorized sanctions against Western companies, most notably the Swiss-Dutch pipe-laying venture Allseas Group, involved in the Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline project. GOP Senators Ted Cruz and Ron Johnson threatened Allseas: "continuing to do the work -- for even a single day after the president signs the sanctions legislation -- would expose your company to crushing and potentially fatal legal and economic sanctions."

Penalizing what OFAC calls "Specially Designated Nationals" and "blocked persons" has become Washington sport. Their number hit 8000 last year. The Economist noted that the Trump administration alone added 3100 names during its first three years, almost as many as George W. Bush included in eight years. Today's target list runs an incredible 1358 pages.

The process has run wildly out of control. Policymakers' first response to a person, organization, or government doing something of which they disapprove now seems to be to impose sanctions -- on anyone or anything on earth dealing with the target. Unfortunately, reliance on economic warfare, and sanctions traditionally are treated as an act of war, has greatly inflated U.S. officials' geopolitical ambitions. Once they accepted that the world was a messy, imperfect place. Today they intervene in the slightest foreign controversy. Even allies and friends, most notably Europe, Japan, South Korea, and India, are threatened with economic warfare unless they accept Washington's self-serving priorities and mind-numbing fantasies.

At the same time the utility of sanctions is falling. Unilateral penalties usually fail, which enrages advocates, who respond by escalating sanctions, again without success. Of course, embargoes and bans often inflict substantial economic pain, which sometimes lead proponents to claim victory. However, the cost is supposed to be the means to another end. Yet the Trump administration has failed everywhere: Cuba maintains communist party rule, Iran has grown more truculent, North Korea has refused to disarm, Russia has not given back Crimea, and Venezuela has not defenestrated Nicolas Maduro.

Much the same goes for penalties applied to individuals, firms, and other entities. Those targeted often are hurt, and most of them deserve to be hurt. But they usually persist in their behavior or others replace them. What dictator has been deposed, policy has been changed, threat has been countered, or wrong has been righted as a result of economic warfare? There is little evidence that U.S. sanctions achieve much of anything, other than encourage sanctimonious moral preening.

Noted the Economist , "If they do not change behavior, sanctions risk becoming less a tool of coercion than an expensive and rather arbitrary extraterritorial form of punishment." One that some day might be turned against Americans.

Contra apparent assumptions in Washington, it is not easy to turn countries into America's image. Raw nationalism usually triumphs. Americans should reflect on how they would react if the situation was reversed. No one wants to comply with unpopular foreign dictates.

In fact, economic warfare often exacerbates underlying conflicts. Rather than negotiate with Washington from a position of weakness, Iran has threatened maritime traffic in the Persian Gulf, shut down Saudi oil exports, and loosed affiliates and irregulars on American and allied forces. Russia has challenged against multiple Washington policy priorities. Cuba has shifted power to the post-revolutionary generation and extended its authority private businesses as the Trump administration's policies have stymied growth and undermined entrepreneurs.

The almost endless expansion of sanctions also punishes American firms and foreign companies active in America. Compliance is costly. Violating one rule, even inadvertently, is even more so. Chary companies preemptively forego legal business in a process called "de-risking."

Even humanitarian traffic suffers: Who wants to risk an expensive mistake in handling relatively low value transactions? Such effects might not bother smug U.S. policymakers, but should weigh heavily on the rest of us.

Perhaps most important, Washington's overreliance on secondary sanctions is building resistance to American financial dominance. Warned Treasury Secretary Jack Lew in 2016: "The more we condition use of the dollar and our financial system on adherence to U.S. foreign policy, the more the risk of migration to other currencies and other financial systems in the medium-term grows."

Overthrowing the almighty dollar will be no mean feat. Nevertheless, arrogant U.S. attempts to regulate the globe have united much of the world, including Europe, Russia, and China, against American extraterritoriality. Noted attorney Bruce Zagaris, Washington is "inadvertently mobilizing a club of countries and international organizations, including U.S. allies, to develop ways to circumvent U.S. sanctions."

Merchant ships and oil tankers turn off transponders. Vessels transfer cargoes at sea. Firms arrange cash and barter deals. Major powers such as China aid and abet violations and dare Washington to wreck much larger bilateral economic relationships. The European Union passed "Blocking Legislation" to allow recovery of damages from U.S. sanctions and limit Europeans' compliance with such rules. The EU also developed a barter facility, known as Instex, to allow trade with Iran without reliance on U.S. financial institution.

Russia has pushed to de-dollarize international payments and worked with China to settle bilateral trade in rubles and renminbi. Foreign central banks have increased their purchases of gold. At the recent Islamic summit Malaysia proposed using gold and barter for trade to thwart future sanctions. Venezuela has been selling gold for euros. These measures do not as yet threaten America's predominant financial role but foreshadow likely future changes.

Indeed, Washington's attack on plans by Germany to import natural gas from Russia might ignite something much greater. Berlin is not just an incidental victim of U.S. policy. Rather, Germany is the target. Complained Foreign Minister Heiko Maas "European energy policy is decided in Europe, not in the U.S." Alas, Congress thinks differently.

However, Europeans are ever less willing to accept this kind of indignity. Washington is penalizing even close allies for no obvious purpose other than demonstrating its power. In Nord Stream 2's case, Gazprom likely will complete the project if necessary. Germany's Deputy Foreign Minister Niels Annen argued that "Europe needs new instruments to be able to defend itself from licentious extraterritorial sanctions."

Commercial penalties have a role to play in foreign policy, but economic warfare is warfare. It can trigger real conflicts -- consider Imperial Japan's response to the Roosevelt administration's cut-off of oil exports. And economic warfare can kill innocents. When UN Ambassador Madeleine Albright was asked about the deaths of a half million Iraqi babies from U.S. sanctions, her response was chilling: "We think the price is worth it." Yet most of the time economic war fails, especially if a unilateral effort by one power applied against the rest of the world.

Washington policymakers need to relearn the meaning of humility. Incompetent and arrogant sanctions policies hurt Americans as well as others. Unfortunately, the resulting blowback will only increase.

Doug Bandow is a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute. A former Special Assistant to President Ronald Reagan, he is author of Foreign Follies: America's New Global Empire.

Fran Macadam • 21 days ago

Under the official Full Spectrum Dominance policy of national security, the goal is that all other nations will be satrapies under U.S. jurisdiction. There are both punishments for using the U.S. dollar, and punishments for not using it.
Cesar Jeopardy MattMusson • 20 days ago
I'm afraid it will be the U.S. that suffers. Other countries will no longer subordinate their interests to those of the U.S. I think the U.S. will have to fight all future wars, and accept all blow-back, on her own.
Gary Sellars • 21 days ago
It's a waste of time trying to appeal to the commonsense of the Washington Elites. They are too arrogant and sociopathic to care, and lack anything that remotely resembles a moral compass.
Markus • 21 days ago
Sanctions are ineffective because the effects don't fall on those making decisions that are adverse to the US. After fifty years of sanctions, Fidel died in bed in great comfort. Sanctions on top of the crazy Juche policies make life hard for the ordinary North Korean, but Kim doesn't appear to have lost any weight. Our officials pat themselves on the back for their militancy without checking for effectiveness.
Disqus10021 • 20 days ago
Would it be correct to say that the US embargo on oil exports to Japan in August 1941 led to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor a few months later (Dec. 7)? Was FDR trying to provoke a war with Japan at the time?
Comment-1 Disqus10021 • 20 days ago
Discuss 10021. Yes. I used to study East Asia and even reading standard collections of articles, on the article announcing the embargo of steel and oil, and from British controlled territories in East Asia, one's reaction would be, "This means war." (In like, Pres. Carter said if Saudi Arabia refused to sell oil to the US we would invade and take over oil fields.) Se our reaction was similar to that of Japan, though we would blame them and us doing the same would be good. The US military assessment was, I have forgotten exactly, but that Japan would be without heat, power, lighting, factories closed (no oil or steel) and they would be on the point of starvation within, I have forgotten, 9 months to 1 1/2 years. So they "had to do something".. Their war plan was not to invade the US but start a surprise war and strike quickly hoping to get forward bases in the Pacific and we would need to negotiate and turn on the spigot. Japanese assessment was if they did not achieve this by the end of 1942 they were finished. Interestingly, Hitler's assessment of Germany's war was if they had not defeated USSR and gone after United Kingdom by the end of 1942, they, also, were finished. If I recall the report, Eleanor Roosevelt had told on US writer the day the attack occurred, something like, "We thought they were going to attack, but we thought it would be in the Philippines, not Hawaii."
ask zippy Comment-1 • 19 days ago
So the sanctions had nothing to do with the invasion of French Indo-China? Who taught the class, Noam Chomsky
Robert Levine • 20 days ago
Sanctions are now a form of virtue-signaling for both the right and the left.
BillSamuel • 18 days ago
The hubris is overwhelming. All empires fall, and the USA certainly seems headed for a fall. However, we still have a choice. We could reject empire, stop all our illegal foreign wars, close all our foreign military bases, drastically reduce our military budget (it is NOT a "defense" budget; it is an offense military budget), end our campaigns of economic sanctions, and stop being the Big Bully of the world. The result would be to free enormous resources for our own country which ranks behind almost all other affluent nations - and sometimes many not-so-affluent nations - in almost all indicators of ecnomic and social well being. Replacing the military sector of our economy with civilian alternatives would be a big boon. Weapons are notable for not continuing in the economic cycle as civilian products do. There are many more jobs per dollars spent in the civilian sector than the military sector. Empire is killing our country even as it is killing other countries.
Gary Sellars BillSamuel • 17 days ago • edited
Agreed, but the elites make BILLIONS from Empire & the associated militarism. Psychopaths don't care about the damage they inflict on others, even their own countrymen, and they won't willingly surrender the machinery that generates their wealth and privilege.

[Jan 22, 2020] Russia's definition of international law, narrowly based on the UN Charter and Security Council resolutions, as opposed to a "rules-based order" that Russia defines as expansive and promoting the interests of Western powers.

Jan 22, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

somebody , Jan 22 2020 14:52 utc | 101

Posted by: Hausmeister | Jan 22 2020 13:37 utc | 97

I used Google News and "OPCW UN" as search

Telepolis reports on it and German RT. And of course German Sputnik. In English media Max Blumenthal, the Grayzone reports.

Interesting enough, Carnegie Endowment for Peace analyzes Russian Foreign Policy in a kind of appreciating way.

Russia's participation in the UN is governed by an interlocking series of concepts, starting with Russia's definition of international law, narrowly based on the UN Charter and Security Council resolutions, as opposed to a "rules-based order" that Russia defines as expansive and promoting the interests of Western powers. This division enables Russia to reject on principle commitments regarding human rights and democratic governance. A second concept, multipolarity, asserts that an oligarchic group of states must take collective action on the basis of equality and consensus. At the UN, this plays out among the permanent members of the UNSC as an alliance with China against Western interests.

The concept of a multipolar oligarchy leads to the Russian concept that true sovereignty is possessed by only a few great powers; the sovereignty of states it views as dependent on great powers is limited. The territory of true sovereigns and those states under Russian protection is sacrosanct and can be defended by force; for the others, it is impermissible to regain territory that is "in dispute" by force. As an example of the former, consider the lengths to which Russia has gone to protect Syria's use of armed force against its own population, whereas the sovereignty of former Soviet states such as Azerbaijan, Moldova, Georgia, and Ukraine must be negotiated.

Russia's defense of Syria demonstrates another concept that flows from sovereignty: legitimacy. In Russian practice, the legitimacy of recognized governments is absolute regardless of their origins, governance, human rights record, or any other external norm. This concept echoes Russian domestic preoccupations in the era of color revolutions, the Arab Spring, and domestic unrest.

The rejection of all external norms has led to the breakdown of the modus vivendi at the UN since the days of the Korean War: deferring issues involving great power interests while engaging elsewhere in peacekeeping, mediation, and humanitarian relief. Neutral powers that share democratic values are best placed to defend against the legitimation of autocratic governance.

....

The record of the great powers of the West -- of colonialism in previous centuries and of neoconservative proselytization for spreading democracy by force more recently -- has seriously compromised their ability to debate Russia on these issues in the UN. It falls to other states that share the values of democratic governance and universal human rights to step up to the responsibility of promoting those values to member states that waver between traditionalist, militarist, and absolutist values on the one side and those of a humanist and democratic world on the other.

It sounds like they are taking the "external rule based order" off the table.

[Jan 22, 2020] The plans to nuke USSR were being drawn prior to the Trinity test. Levine's essay buttresses this quite well, though essentially in background

Jan 22, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Walter , Jan 22 2020 14:30 utc | 100

William Gruff | Jan 22 2020 13:48 utc | 98

That's right. I used to know the guys at Gannet in a major US city. Nice people, but not technically aware, and politically-philosophically innocent. Naifs. Put on nice parties where they chatted about their pasts in foreign places entirely unaware of the objective and obvious exploitation going on right before their eyes.

I might add that the engineering students dread, as a rule, English 1-A, and do, generally, quite poorly. (My wife used to teach that class)

The result is a nice antipodal bar-bell shaped arrangement whereby neither group sees reality, but only a simulacrum of one part or another.

In this regard, Yasha Levine > " Weaponizing Fascism for Democracy: The Beginning " Begins in the DP camps...

I've said before that the plans to nuke USSR were being drawn prior to the Trinity test. Levine's essay buttresses this quite well, though essentially in background...he says nothing about the bomb. He doen't have to...

[Jan 21, 2020] The Revelations of WikiLeaks: No. 6 -- US Diplomatic Cables Spark 'Arab Spring,' Expose Spying at UN Elsewhere

Notable quotes:
"... Today we resume our series ..."
"... with little more than a month before the extradition hearing for imprisoned ..."
"... publisher Julian Assange begins. This is the sixth in a series that is looking back on the major works of the publication that has altered the world since its founding in 2006. The series is an effort to counter mainstream media coverage, which is ignoring ..."
"... work, and is instead focusing on Julian Assange's personality. It is ..."
"... uncovering of governments' crimes and corruption that set the U.S. after Assange, ultimately leading to his arrest on April 11 last year and indictment under the U.S. Espionage Act. ..."
"... Special to Consortium News ..."
"... Der Spiegel ..."
"... to the Winter Fund Drive. ..."
"... World Socialist Website ..."
"... Foreign Policy ..."
"... The Guardian ..."
"... The New York Times ..."
"... The Green Left ..."
"... The Green Left Weekly ..."
"... The Guardian ..."
"... CORRECTION: CableDrum is an independent Twitter feed and is not associated with ..."
"... as was incorrectly reported here. ..."
Jan 21, 2020 | consortiumnews.com

January 14, 2020 • 7 Comments

WikiLeaks ' publication of "Cablegate" in late 2010 dwarfed previous releases in both size and impact and helped cause what one news outlet called a political meltdown for United States foreign policy.

Today we resume our series The Revelations of WikiLeaks with little more than a month before the extradition hearing for imprisoned WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange begins. This is the sixth in a series that is looking back on the major works of the publication that has altered the world since its founding in 2006. The series is an effort to counter mainstream media coverage, which is ignoring WikiLeaks' work, and is instead focusing on Julian Assange's personality. It is WikiLeaks' uncovering of governments' crimes and corruption that set the U.S. after Assange, ultimately leading to his arrest on April 11 last year and indictment under the U.S. Espionage Act.

'A Political Meltdown for US Foreign Policy'

By Elizabeth Vos
Special to Consortium News

O f all WikiLeaks' releases, probably the most globally significant have been the more than a quarter of a million U.S. State Department diplomatic cables leaked in 2010, the publication of which helped spark a revolt in Tunisia that spread into the so-called Arab Spring, revealed Saudi intentions towards Iran and exposed spying on the UN secretary general and other diplomats.

The releases were surrounded by a significant controversy (to be covered in a separate installment of this series) alleging that WikiLeaks purposely endangered U.S. informants by deliberately revealing their names. That allegation formed a major part of the U.S. indictment on May 23 of WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange under the Espionage Act, though revealing informants' names is not a crime, nor is there evidence that any of them were ever harmed.

WikiLeaks ' publication of "Cablegate," beginning on Nov. 28, 2010, dwarfed previous WikiLeaks releases, in both size and impact. The publication amounted to 251,287 leaked American diplomatic cables that, at the time of publication, Der Spiegel described as"no less than a political meltdown for United States foreign policy."

Cablegate revealed a previously unknown history of diplomatic relations between the United States and the rest of the world, and in doing so, exposed U.S. views of both allies and adversaries. As a result of such revelations, Cablegate's release was widely condemned by the U.S. political class and especially by then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

The Twitter handle Cable Drum, called it,

" The largest set of confidential documents ever to be released into the public domain. The documents will give people around the world an unprecedented insight into U.S. Government foreign activities. The cables, which date from 1966 up until the end of February 2010, contain confidential communications between 274 embassies in countries throughout the world and the State Department in Washington DC. 15,652 of the cables are classified Secret."

Among the historic documents that were grouped with Cablegate in WikiLeaks ' Public Library of U.S. Diplomacy are 1.7 million that involve Henry Kissinger, national security adviser and secretary of state under President Richard Nixon; and 1.4 million related to the Jimmy Carter administration.

Der Spiegel reported that the majority were "composed by ambassadors, consuls or their staff. Most contain assessments of the political situation in the individual countries, interview protocols and background information about personnel decisions and events. In many cases, they also provide political and personal profiles of individual politicians and leaders."

Cablegate rounded out WikiLeaks' output in 2010, which had seen the explosive publication of previous leaks also from Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning including " Collateral Murder ," the " Afghan War Diaries " and " Iraq War Logs ," the subject of earlier installments in this series. As in the case of the two prior releases, WikiLeaks published Cablegate in partnerships with establishment media outlets.

The "Cablegate" archive was later integrated with the WikiLeaks Public Library of U.S. Diplomacy , which contains over 10 million documents.

Global U.S. Empire Revealed

The impact of "Cablegate" is impossible to fully encapsulate, and should be the subject of historical study for decades to come. In September 2015 Verso published " The WikiLeaks Files: The World According to U.S. Empire ," with a foreword by Assange. It is a compendium of chapters written by various regional experts and historians giving a broader and more in-depth geopolitical analysis of U.S. foreign policy as revealed by the cables.

"The internal communications of the US Department of State are the logistical by-product of its activities: their publication is the vivisection of a living empire, showing what substance flowed from which state organ and when. Only by approaching this corpus holistically – over and above the documentation of each individual abuse, each localized atrocity – does the true human cost of empire heave into view," Assange wrote in the foreword.

' WikiLeaks Revolt' in Tunisia

The release of "Cablegate" provided the spark that many argue heralded the Arab Spring, earning the late-November publication the moniker of the " WikiLeaks Winter ."

Eventually, many would also credit WikiLeaks' publication of the diplomatic cables with initiating a chain-reaction that spread from the Middle East ( specifically from Egypt) to the global Occupy Wall Street movement by late 2011.

The first of the Arab uprisings was Tunisia's 28-day so-called Jasmine Revolution, stretching from Dec. 17, 2010, to Jan. 14, 2011, described as the "first WikiLeaks revolution."

Cables published by WikiLeaks revealed the extent of the Tunisian ruling family's corruption, and were widely accessible in Tunisia thanks to the advent of social media platforms like Twitter. Then-President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali had been in power for over two decades at the time of the cables' publication.

Please Donate to the Winter Fund Drive.

One State Department cable, labeled Secret , said:

"President Ben Ali's extended family is often cited as the nexus of Tunisian corruption. Often referred to as a quasi-mafia, an oblique mention of 'the Family' is enough to indicate which family you mean. Seemingly half of the Tunisian business community can claim a Ben Ali connection through marriage, and many of these relations are reported to have made the most of their lineage."

A June 2008 cable said: "Whether it's cash, services, land, property, or yes, even your yacht, President [Zine el Abidine] Ben Ali's family is rumored to covet it and reportedly gets what it wants."

Symbolic middle finger gesture representing the Tunisian Revolution and its influences in the Arab world. From left to right, fingers are painted as flags of Libya, Egypt, Tunisia, Sudan and Algeria. (Khalid from Doha, CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons)

The cables revealed that Ben Ali's extended family controlled nearly the entire Tunisian economy, from banking to media to property development, while 30 percent of Tunisians were unemployed. They showed that state-owned property was expropriated to be passed on to private ownership by family members.

"Lax oversight makes the banking sector an excellent target of opportunity, with multiple stories of 'First Family' schemes," one cable read. ""With real estate development booming and land prices on the rise, owning property or land in the right location can either be a windfall or a one-way ticket to expropriation," said another.

The revolt was facilitated once the U.S. abandoned Ali. Counterpunch reported that: "The U.S. campaign of unwavering public support for President Ali led to a widespread belief among the Tunisian people that it would be very difficult to dislodge the autocratic regime from power. This view was shattered when leaked cables exposed the U.S. government's private assessment: that the U.S. would not support the regime in the event of a popular uprising."

The internet and large social media platforms played a crucial role in the spread of public awareness of the cables and their content amongst the Tunisian public. "Thousands of home-made videos of police repression and popular resistance have been posted on the web. The Tunisian people have used Facebook, Twitter and other social networking sites to organize and direct the mobilizations against the regime," the World Socialist Website wrote.

Foreign Policy magazine reported:

"WikiLeaks acted as a catalyst: both a trigger and a tool for political outcry. Which is probably the best compliment one could give the whistle-blower site." The magazine added: "The people of Tunisia shouldn't have had to wait for Wikileaks to learn that the U.S. saw their country just as they did. It's time that the gulf between what American diplomats know and what they say got smaller."

The Guardian published an account in January 2011 by a young Tunisian, Sami Ben Hassine, who wrote: "The internet is blocked, and censored pages are referred to as pages "not found" – as if they had never existed. And then, WikiLeaks reveals what everyone was whispering. And then, a young man [Mohamed Bouazizi] immolates himself. And then, 20 Tunisians are killed in one day. And for the first time, we see the opportunity to rebel, to take revenge on the 'royal' family who has taken everything, to overturn the established order that has accompanied our youth."

Protester in Tunis, Jan. 14, 2011, holding sign. Translation from French: "Ben Ali out." (Skotch 79, CC0, Wikimedia Commons)

On the first day of Chelsea Manning's pretrial in December 2011, Daniel Ellsberg told Democracy Now:

"The combination of the WikiLeaks and Bradley Manning exposures in Tunis and the exemplification of that by Mohamed Bouazizi led to the protests, the nonviolent protests, that drove Ben Ali out of power, our ally there who we supported up 'til that moment, and in turn sparked the uprising in Egypt, in Tahrir Square occupation, which immediately stimulated the Occupy Wall Street and the other occupations in the Middle East and elsewhere. I hope [Manning and Assange] will have the effect in liberating us from the lawlessness that we have seen and the corruption -- the corruption -- that we have seen in this country in the last 10 years and more, which has been no less than that of Tunis and Egypt."

Clinton Told US Diplomats to Spy at UN

The cables' revelation that the U.S. State Department under then-Secretary-of-State Clinton had demanded officials act as spies on officials at the United Nations -- including the Secretary General -- was particularly embarrassing for the United States.

El Pais summarized the bombshell: "The State Department sent officials of 38 embassies and diplomatic missions a detailed account of the personal and other information they must obtain about the United Nations, including its secretary general, and especially about officials and representatives linked to Sudan, Afghanistan, Somalia, Iran and North Korea.

El Pais continued: "Several dispatches, signed 'Clinton' and probably made by the office of Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, contain precise instructions about the myriad of inquiries to be developed in conflict zones, in the world of deserters and asylum seekers, in the engine room of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or about the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Russia and China to know their plans regarding the nuclear threat in Tehran."

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton & UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon in 2012. (Foreign and Commonwealth Office/Flickr)

CNN described the information diplomats were ordered to gather: "In the July 2009 document, Clinton directs her envoys at the United Nations and embassies around the world to collect information ranging from basic biographical data on foreign diplomats to their frequent flyer and credit card numbers and even 'biometric information on ranking North Korean diplomats.' Typical biometric information can include fingerprints, signatures and iris recognition data."

Der Spiegel reported that Clinton justified the espionage orders by emphasizing that "a large share of the information that the US intelligence agencies works with comes from the reports put together by State Department staff around the world."

Der Spiegel added: "The US State Department also wanted to obtain information on the plans and intentions of UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and his secretariat relating to issues like Iran, according to the detailed wish list in the directive. The instructions were sent to 30 US embassies around the world, including the one in Berlin."

Philip J. Crowley as assistant secretary of state for public affairs in 2010. (State Department)

The State Department responded to the revelations, with then- State-Department-spokesman P.J. Crowley reportedly disputing that American diplomats had assumed a new role overseas.

"Our diplomats are just that, diplomats," he said. "They represent our country around the world and engage openly and transparently with representatives of foreign governments and civil society. Through this process, they collect information that shapes our policies and actions. This is what diplomats, from our country and other countries, have done for hundreds of years."

In December 2010, just after the cables' publication, Assange told Time : "She should resign if it can be shown that she was responsible for ordering U.S. diplomatic figures to engage in espionage in the United Nations, in violation of the international covenants to which the U.S. has signed up."

Saudis & Iran

A diplomatic cable dated April 20, 2008, made clear Saudi Arabia's pressure on the United States to take action against its enemy Iran, including not ruling out military action against Teheran:

"[Then Saudi ambassador to the US Abbdel] Al-Jubeir recalled the King's frequent exhortations to the US to attack Iran and so put an end to its nuclear weapons program. 'He told you to cut off the head of the snake,' he recalled to the Charge', adding that working with the US to roll back Iranian influence in Iraq is a strategic priority for the King and his government. 11. (S) The Foreign Minister, on the other hand, called instead for much more severe US and international sanctions on Iran, including a travel ban and further restrictions on bank lending. Prince Muqrin echoed these views, emphasizing that some sanctions could be implemented without UN approval. The Foreign Minister also stated that the use of military pressure against Iran should not be ruled out."

Dyncorp & the 'Dancing Boys' of Afghanistan

The cables indicate that Afghan authorities asked the United States government to quash U.S. reporting on a scandal stemming from the actions of Dyncorp employees in Afghanistan in 2009.

Employees of Dyncorp, a paramilitary group with an infamous track-record of alleged involvement in sex trafficking and other human rights abuses in multiple countries, were revealed by Cablegate to have been involved with illegal drug use and hiring the services of a "bacha bazi," or underage dancing boy.

A 2009 cable published by WikiLeaks described an event where Dyncorp had purchased the service of a "bacha bazi." The writer of the cable does not specify what happened during the event, describing it only as "purchasing a service from a child," and he tries to convince a journalist not to cover the story in order to not "risk lives."

Although Dyncorp was no stranger to controversy by the time of the cables' publication, the revelation of the mercenary force's continued involvement in bacha bazi provoked further questions as to why the company continued to receive tax-payer funded contracts from the United States.

Sexual abuse allegations were not the only issue haunting Dyncorp. The State Department admitted in 2017 that it "could not account for" more than $1 billion paid to the company, as reported by Foreign Policy .

The New York Times later reported that U.S. soldiers had been told to turn a blind eye to the abuse of minors by those in positions of power: "Soldiers and Marines have been increasingly troubled that instead of weeding out pedophiles, the American military was arming them in some cases and placing them as the commanders of villages -- and doing little when they began abusing children."

Australia Lied About Troop Withdrawal

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd of Australia, left, with U.S. President Barack Obama, in the Oval Office, Nov. 30, 2009, to discuss a range of issues including Afghanistan and climate change. (White House/Pete Souza)

The Green Left related that the cables exposed Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's double talk about withdrawing troops. "Despite government spin about withdrawing all 'combat forces,' the cables said some of these forces could be deployed in combat roles. One cable said, "[d]espite the withdrawal of combat forces, Rudd agreed to allow Australian forces embedded or seconded to units of other countries including the U.S. to deploy to Iraq in combat and combat support roles with those units."

US Meddling in Latin America

Cables revealed that U.S. ambassadors to Ecuador had opposed the presidential candidacy of Raphael Correa despite their pretense of neutrality, as observed by The Green Left Weekly .

Additional cables revealed the Vatican attempted to increase its influence in Latin America with the aid of the U.S. Further cables illustrated the history of Pope Francis while he was a cardinal in Argentina, with the U.S. appearing to have a positive outlook on the future pontiff.

Illegal Dealings Between US & Sweden

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange wrote in his affidavit :

"Through the diplomatic cables I also learned of secret, informal arrangements between Sweden and the United States. The cables revealed that Swedish intelligence services have a pattern of lawless conduct where US interests are concerned. The US diplomatic cables revealed that the Swedish Justice Department had deliberately hidden particular intelligence information exchanges with the United States from the Parliament of Sweden because the exchanges were likely unlawful."

Military Reaction

On Nov. 30, 2010, the State Department declared it would remove the diplomatic cables from its secure network in order to prevent additional leaks. Antiwar.com added: "The cables had previously been accessible through SIPRNet, an ostensibly secure network which is accessible by millions of officials and soldiers. It is presumably through this network that the cables were obtained and leaked to WikiLeaks ."

The Guardian described SIPRNet as a "worldwide US military internet system, kept separate from the ordinary civilian internet and run by the Defence Department in Washington."

Political Fury

On Nov. 29, 2010, then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said of the "Cablegate" release:

"This disclosure is not just an attack on America's foreign policy; it is an attack on the international community, the alliances and partnerships, the conventions and negotiations that safeguard global security and advance economic prosperity."

The next day, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee called for Chelsea Manning's execution, according to Politico .

Some political figures did express support for Assange, including U.K. Labor leader Jeremy Corbyn, who wrote via Twitter days after Cablegate was published: "USA and others don't like any scrutiny via wikileaks and they are leaning on everybody to pillory Assange. What happened to free speech?"

Other notable revelations from the diplomatic cables included multiple instances of U.S. meddling in Latin America, the demand by then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that diplomatic staff act as spies , the documentation of misconduct by U.S. paramilitary forces, the fallout of the 2008 financial crisis in Iceland, the deployment of U.S. nuclear weapons in Germany and other European countries, that the Vatican attempted to increase its influence in Latin America with the aid of the U.S. , that U.S. diplomats had essentially spied on German Chancellor Angele Merkel, and much more.

Der Spiegel reported on Hillary Clinton's demand that U.S. diplomats act as spies:

"As justification for the espionage orders, Clinton emphasized that a large share of the information that the U.S. intelligence agencies works with comes from the reports put together by State Department staff around the world. The information to be collected included personal credit card information, frequent flyer customer numbers, as well as e-mail and telephone accounts. In many cases the State Department also requested 'biometric information,' 'passwords' and 'personal encryption keys.' "

Der Spiegel added: "The U.S. State Department also wanted to obtain information on the plans and intentions of UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and his secretariat relating to issues like Iran, according to the detailed wish list in the directive. The instructions were sent to 30 U.S. embassies around the world, including the one in Berlin."

Elizabeth Vos is a freelance reporter and co-host of CN Live.

CORRECTION: CableDrum is an independent Twitter feed and is not associated with WikiLeaks as was incorrectly reported here.

jmg , January 15, 2020 at 09:53

A truly great series, thank you.

The Revelations of WikiLeaks -- Consortium News Series

1. The Video that Put Assange in US Crosshairs -- April 23, 2019
2. The Leak That 'Exposed the True Afghan War' -- May 9, 2019
3. The Most Extensive Classified Leak in History -- May 16, 2019
4. The Haunting Case of a Belgian Child Killer and How WikiLeaks Helped Crack It -- July 11, 2019
5. Busting the Myth WikiLeaks Never Published Damaging Material on Russia -- September 23, 2019
6. US Diplomatic Cables Spark 'Arab Spring,' Expose Spying at UN & Elsewhere -- January 14, 2020

For an updated list with links to the articles, a Google search is:

"The Revelations of WikiLeaks" site:consortiumnews.com For an updated list with links to the articles, a Google search is:

"The Revelations of WikiLeaks" site:consortiumnews.com

– – –

Consortium News wrote:
> Today we resume our series The Revelations of WikiLeaks with little more than a month before the extradition hearing for imprisoned WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange begins.

Yes and, shockingly, Julian has been allowed only 2 hours with his lawyers in the last month, crucial to prepare the extradition hearings. See:

Summary from Assange hearing at Westminster Magistrates Court this morning -- Tareq Haddad -- Thread Reader -- Jan 13th 2020

[Jan 21, 2020] How a Hidden Parliamentary Session Revealed Trump's True Motives in Iraq by Whitney Webb

Notable quotes:
"... The Americans are the ones who destroyed the country and wreaked havoc on it. They have refused to finish building the electrical system and infrastructure projects. They have bargained for the reconstruction of Iraq in exchange for Iraq giving up 50% of oil imports. So, I refused and decided to go to China and concluded an important and strategic agreement with it. Today, Trump is trying to cancel this important agreement. ..."
"... After my return from China, Trump called me and asked me to cancel the agreement, so I also refused, and he threatened [that there would be] massive demonstrations to topple me. Indeed, the demonstrations started and then Trump called, threatening to escalate in the event of non-cooperation and responding to his wishes, whereby a third party [presumed to be mercenaries or U.S. soldiers] would target both the demonstrators and security forces and kill them from atop the highest buildings and the US embassy in an attempt to pressure me and submit to his wishes and cancel the China agreement." ..."
"... It could also explain why President Trump is so concerned about China's growing foothold in Iraq, since it risks causing not only the end of the U.S. military hegemony in the country but could also lead to major trouble for the petrodollar system and the U.S.' position as a global financial power. Trump's policy aimed at stopping China and Iraq's growing ties is clearly having the opposite effect, showing that this administration's "gangster diplomacy" only serves to make the alternatives offered by countries like China and Russia all the more attractive. ..."
Jan 21, 2020 | www.unz.com

... ... ...

After the feed was cut, MPs who were present wrote down Abdul-Mahdi's remarks, which were then given to the Arabic news outlet Ida'at . Per that transcript , Abdul-Mahdi stated that:

The Americans are the ones who destroyed the country and wreaked havoc on it. They have refused to finish building the electrical system and infrastructure projects. They have bargained for the reconstruction of Iraq in exchange for Iraq giving up 50% of oil imports. So, I refused and decided to go to China and concluded an important and strategic agreement with it. Today, Trump is trying to cancel this important agreement. "

Abdul-Mahdi continued his remarks, noting that pressure from the Trump administration over his negotiations and subsequent dealings with China grew substantially over time, even resulting in death threats to himself and his defense minister:

After my return from China, Trump called me and asked me to cancel the agreement, so I also refused, and he threatened [that there would be] massive demonstrations to topple me. Indeed, the demonstrations started and then Trump called, threatening to escalate in the event of non-cooperation and responding to his wishes, whereby a third party [presumed to be mercenaries or U.S. soldiers] would target both the demonstrators and security forces and kill them from atop the highest buildings and the US embassy in an attempt to pressure me and submit to his wishes and cancel the China agreement."

"I did not respond and submitted my resignation and the Americans still insist to this day on canceling the China agreement. When the defense minister said that those killing the demonstrators was a third party, Trump called me immediately and physically threatened myself and the defense minister in the event that there was more talk about this third party."

Very few English language outlets reported on Abdul-Mahdi's comments. Tom Luongo, a Florida-based Independent Analyst and publisher of The Gold Goats 'n Guns Newsletter, told MintPress that the likely reasons for the "surprising" media silence over Abdul-Mahdi's claims were because "It never really made it out into official channels " due to the cutting of the video feed during Iraq's Parliamentary session and due to the fact that "it's very inconvenient and the media -- since Trump is doing what they want him to do, be belligerent with Iran, protected Israel's interests there."

"They aren't going to contradict him on that if he's playing ball," Luongo added, before continuing that the media would nonetheless "hold onto it for future reference .If this comes out for real, they'll use it against him later if he tries to leave Iraq." "Everything in Washington is used as leverage," he added.

Given the lack of media coverage and the cutting of the video feed of Abdul-Mahdi's full remarks, it is worth pointing out that the narrative he laid out in his censored speech not only fits with the timeline of recent events he discusses but also the tactics known to have been employed behind closed doors by the Trump administration, particularly after Mike Pompeo left the CIA to become Secretary of State.

For instance, Abdul-Mahdi's delegation to China ended on September 24, with the protests against his government that Trump reportedly threatened to start on October 1. Reports of a "third side" firing on Iraqi protesters were picked up by major media outlets at the time, such as in this BBC report which stated:

Reports say the security forces opened fire, but another account says unknown gunmen were responsible .a source in Karbala told the BBC that one of the dead was a guard at a nearby Shia shrine who happened to be passing by. The source also said the origin of the gunfire was unknown and it had targeted both the protesters and security forces . (emphasis added)"

U.S.-backed protests in other countries, such as in Ukraine in 2014, also saw evidence of a " third side " shooting both protesters and security forces alike.

After six weeks of intense protests , Abdul-Mahdi submitted his resignation on November 29, just a few days after Iraq's Foreign Minister praised the new deals, including the "oil for reconstruction" deal, that had been signed with China. Abdul-Mahdi has since stayed on as Prime Minister in a caretaker role until Parliament decides on his replacement.

Abdul-Mahdi's claims of the covert pressure by the Trump administration are buttressed by the use of similar tactics against Ecuador, where, in July 2018, a U.S. delegation at the United Nations threatened the nation with punitive trade measures and the withdrawal of military aid if Ecuador moved forward with the introduction of a UN resolution to "protect, promote and support breastfeeding."

The New York Times reported at the time that the U.S. delegation was seeking to promote the interests of infant formula manufacturers. If the U.S. delegation is willing to use such pressure on nations for promoting breastfeeding over infant formula, it goes without saying that such behind-closed-doors pressure would be significantly more intense if a much more lucrative resource, e.g. oil, were involved.

Regarding Abdul-Mahdi's claims, Luongo told MintPress that it is also worth considering that it could have been anyone in the Trump administration making threats to Abdul-Mahdi, not necessarily Trump himself. "What I won't say directly is that I don't know it was Trump at the other end of the phone calls. Mahdi, it is to his best advantage politically to blame everything on Trump. It could have been Mike Pompeo or Gina Haspel talking to Abdul-Mahdi It could have been anyone, it most likely would be someone with plausible deniability .This [Mahdi's claims] sounds credible I firmly believe Trump is capable of making these threats but I don't think Trump would make those threats directly like that, but it would absolutely be consistent with U.S. policy."

Luongo also argued that the current tensions between U.S. and Iraqi leadership preceded the oil deal between Iraq and China by several weeks, "All of this starts with Prime Minister Mahdi starting the process of opening up the Iraq-Syria border crossing and that was announced in August. Then, the Israeli air attacks happened in September to try and stop that from happening, attacks on PMU forces on the border crossing along with the ammo dump attacks near Baghdad This drew the Iraqis' ire Mahdi then tried to close the air space over Iraq, but how much of that he can enforce is a big question."

As to why it would be to Mahdi's advantage to blame Trump, Luongo stated that Mahdi "can make edicts all day long, but, in reality, how much can he actually restrain the U.S. or the Israelis from doing anything? Except for shame, diplomatic shame To me, it [Mahdi's claims] seems perfectly credible because, during all of this, Trump is probably or someone else is shaking him [Mahdi] down for the reconstruction of the oil fields [in Iraq] Trump has explicitly stated "we want the oil."'

As Luongo noted, Trump's interest in the U.S. obtaining a significant share of Iraqi oil revenue is hardly a secret. Just last March, Trump asked Abdul-Mahdi "How about the oil?" at the end of a meeting at the White House, prompting Abdul-Mahdi to ask "What do you mean?" To which Trump responded "Well, we did a lot, we did a lot over there, we spent trillions over there, and a lot of people have been talking about the oil," which was widely interpreted as Trump asking for part of Iraq's oil revenue in exchange for the steep costs of the U.S.' continuing its now unwelcome military presence in Iraq.

With Abdul-Mahdi having rejected Trump's "oil for reconstruction" proposal in favor of China's, it seems likely that the Trump administration would default to so-called "gangster diplomacy" tactics to pressure Iraq's government into accepting Trump's deal, especially given the fact that China's deal was a much better offer. While Trump demanded half of Iraq's oil revenue in exchange for completing reconstruction projects (according to Abdul-Mahdi), the deal that was signed between Iraq and China would see around 20 percen t of Iraq's oil revenue go to China in exchange for reconstruction. Aside from the potential loss in Iraq's oil revenue, there are many reasons for the Trump administration to feel threatened by China's recent dealings in Iraq.

The Iraq-China oil deal – a prelude to something more?

When Abdul-Mahdi's delegation traveled to Beijing last September, the "oil for reconstruction" deal was only one of eight total agreements that were established. These agreements cover a range of areas, including financial, commercial, security, reconstruction, communication, culture, education and foreign affairs in addition to oil. Yet, the oil deal is by far the most significant.

Per the agreement, Chinese firms will work on various reconstruction projects in exchange for roughly 20 percent of Iraq's oil exports, approximately 100,00 barrels per day, for a period of 20 years. According to Al-Monitor , Abdul-Mahdi had the following to say about the deal: "We agreed [with Beijing] to set up a joint investment fund, which the oil money will finance," adding that the agreement prohibits China from monopolizing projects inside Iraq, forcing Bejing to work in cooperation with international firms.

The agreement is similar to one negotiated between Iraq and China in 2015 when Abdul-Mahdi was serving as Iraq's oil minister. That year, Iraq joined China's Belt and Road Initiative in a deal that also involved exchanging oil for investment, development and construction projects and saw China awarded several projects as a result. In a notable similarity to recent events, that deal was put on hold due to "political and security tensions" caused by unrest and the surge of ISIS in Iraq, that is until Abdul-Mahdi saw Iraq rejoin the initiative again late last year through the agreements his government signed with China last September.

Chinese President Xi Jinping, center left, meet with Iraqi Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi, center right, in Beijing, Sept. 23, 2019. Lintao Zhang | AP

Notably, after recent tensions between the U.S. and Iraq over the assassination of Soleimani and the U.S.' subsequent refusal to remove its troops from Iraq despite parliament's demands, Iraq quietly announced that it would dramatically increase its oil exports to China to triple the amount established in the deal signed in September. Given Abdul-Mahdi's recent claims about the true forces behind Iraq's recent protests and Trump's threats against him being directly related to his dealings with China, the move appears to be a not-so-veiled signal from Abdul-Mahdi to Washington that he plans to deepen Iraq's partnership with China, at least for as long as he remains in his caretaker role.

Iraq's decision to dramatically increase its oil exports to China came just one day after the U.S. government threatened to cut off Iraq's access to its central bank account, currently held at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, an account that currently holds $35 billion in Iraqi oil revenue. The account was set up after the U.S. invaded and began occupying Iraq in 2003 and Iraq currently removes between $1-2 billion per month to cover essential government expenses. Losing access to its oil revenue stored in that account would lead to the " collapse " of Iraq's government, according to Iraqi government officials who spoke to AFP .

Though Trump publicly promised to rebuke Iraq for the expulsion of U.S. troops via sanctions, the threat to cut off Iraq's access to its account at the NY Federal Reserve Bank was delivered privately and directly to the Prime Minister, adding further credibility to Abdul-Mahdi's claims that Trump's most aggressive attempts at pressuring Iraq's government are made in private and directed towards the country's Prime Minister.

Though Trump's push this time was about preventing the expulsion of U.S. troops from Iraq, his reasons for doing so may also be related to concerns about China's growing foothold in the region. Indeed, while Trump has now lost his desired share of Iraqi oil revenue (50 percent) to China's counteroffer of 20 percent, the removal of U.S. troops from Iraq may see American troops replaced with their Chinese counterparts as well, according to Tom Luongo.

"All of this is about the U.S. maintaining the fiction that it needs to stay in Iraq So, China moving in there is the moment where they get their toe hold for the Belt and Road [Initiative]," Luongo argued. "That helps to strengthen the economic relationship between Iraq, Iran and China and obviating the need for the Americans to stay there. At some point, China will have assets on the ground that they are going to want to defend militarily in the event of any major crisis. This brings us to the next thing we know, that Mahdi and the Chinese ambassador discussed that very thing in the wake of the Soleimani killing."

Indeed, according to news reports, Zhang Yao -- China's ambassador to Iraq -- " conveyed Beijing's readiness to provide military assistance" should Iraq's government request it soon after Soleimani's assassination. Yao made the offer a day after Iraq's parliament voted to expel American troops from the country. Though it is currently unknown how Abdul-Mahdi responded to the offer, the timing likely caused no shortage of concern among the Trump administration about its rapidly waning influence in Iraq. "You can see what's coming here," Luongo told MintPress of the recent Chinese offer to Iraq, "China, Russia and Iran are trying to cleave Iraq away from the United States and the U.S. is feeling very threatened by this."

Russia is also playing a role in the current scenario as Iraq initiated talks with Moscow regarding the possible purchase of one of its air defense systems last September, the same month that Iraq signed eight deals, including the oil deal with China. Then, in the wake of Soleimani's death, Russia again offered the air defense systems to Iraq to allow them to better defend their air space. In the past, the U.S. has threatened allied countries with sanctions and other measures if they purchase Russian air defense systems as opposed to those manufactured by U.S. companies.

The U.S.' efforts to curb China's growing influence and presence in Iraq amid these new strategic partnerships and agreements are limited, however, as the U.S. is increasingly relying on China as part of its Iran policy, specifically in its goal of reducing Iranian oil export to zero. China remains Iran's main crude oil and condensate importer, even after it reduced its imports of Iranian oil significantly following U.S. pressure last year. Yet, the U.S. is now attempting to pressure China to stop buying Iranian oil completely or face sanctions while also attempting to privately sabotage the China-Iraq oil deal. It is highly unlikely China will concede to the U.S. on both, if any, of those fronts, meaning the U.S. may be forced to choose which policy front (Iran "containment" vs. Iraq's oil dealings with China) it values more in the coming weeks and months.

Furthermore, the recent signing of the "phase one" trade deal with China revealed another potential facet of the U.S.' increasingly complicated relationship with Iraq's oil sector given that the trade deal involves selling U.S. oil and gas to China at very low cost , suggesting that the Trump administration may also see the Iraq-China oil deal result in Iraq emerging as a potential competitor for the U.S. in selling cheap oil to China, the world's top oil importer.

The Petrodollar and the Phantom of the Petroyuan

In his televised statements last week following Iran's military response to the U.S. assassination of General Soleimani, Trump insisted that the U.S.' Middle East policy is no longer being directed by America's vast oil requirements. He stated specifically that:

Over the last three years, under my leadership, our economy is stronger than ever before and America has achieved energy independence. These historic accomplishments changed our strategic priorities. These are accomplishments that nobody thought were possible. And options in the Middle East became available. We are now the number-one producer of oil and natural gas anywhere in the world. We are independent, and we do not need Middle East oil . (emphasis added)"

Yet, given the centrality of the recent Iraq-China oil deal in guiding some of the Trump administration's recent Middle East policy moves, this appears not to be the case. The distinction may lie in the fact that, while the U.S. may now be less dependent on oil imports from the Middle East, it still very much needs to continue to dominate how oil is traded and sold on international markets in order to maintain its status as both a global military and financial superpower.

Indeed, even if the U.S. is importing less Middle Eastern oil, the petrodollar system -- first forged in the 1970s -- requires that the U.S. maintains enough control over the global oil trade so that the world's largest oil exporters, Iraq among them, continue to sell their oil in dollars. Were Iraq to sell oil in another currency, or trade oil for services, as it plans to do with China per the recently inked deal, a significant portion of Iraqi oil would cease to generate a demand for dollars, violating the key tenet of the petrodollar system.

Chinese representatives speak to defense personnel during a weapons expo organized by the Iraqi defense ministry in Baghdad, March, 2017. Karim Kadim | AP

As Kei Pritsker and Cale Holmes noted in an article last year for MintPress :

The takeaway from the petrodollar phenomenon is that as long as countries need oil, they will need the dollar. As long as countries demand dollars, the U.S. can continue to go into massive amounts of debt to fund its network of global military bases, Wall Street bailouts, nuclear missiles, and tax cuts for the rich."

Thus, the use of the petrodollar has created a system whereby U.S. control of oil sales of the largest oil exporters is necessary, not just to buttress the dollar, but also to support its global military presence. Therefore, it is unsurprising that the issue of the U.S. troop presence in Iraq and the issue of Iraq's push for oil independence against U.S. wishes have become intertwined. Notably, one of the architects of the petrodollar system and the man who infamously described U.S. soldiers as "dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns in foreign policy", former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, has been advising Trump and informing his China policy since 2016.

This take was also expressed by economist Michael Hudson, who recently noted that U.S. access to oil, dollarization and U.S. military strategy are intricately interwoven and that Trump's recent Iraq policy is intended "to escalate America's presence in Iraq to keep control of the region's oil reserves," and, as Hudson says, "to back Saudi Arabia's Wahabi troops (ISIS, Al Qaeda in Iraq, Al Nusra and other divisions of what are actually America's foreign legion) to support U.S. control of Near Eastern oil as a buttress of the U.S. dollar."

Hudson further asserts that it was Qassem Soleimani's efforts to promote Iraq's oil independence at the expense of U.S. imperial ambitions that served one of the key motives behind his assassination.

America opposed General Suleimani above all because he was fighting against ISIS and other U.S.-backed terrorists in their attempt to break up Syria and replace Assad's regime with a set of U.S.-compliant local leaders – the old British "divide and conquer" ploy. On occasion, Suleimani had cooperated with U.S. troops in fighting ISIS groups that got "out of line" meaning the U.S. party line. But every indication is that he was in Iraq to work with that government seeking to regain control of the oil fields that President Trump has bragged so loudly about grabbing. (emphasis added)"

Hudson adds that " U.S. neocons feared Suleimani's plan to help Iraq assert control of its oil and withstand the terrorist attacks supported by U.S. and Saudi's on Iraq. That is what made his assassination an immediate drive."

While other factors -- such as pressure from U.S. allies such as Israel -- also played a factor in the decision to kill Soleimani, the decision to assassinate him on Iraqi soil just hours before he was set to meet with Abdul-Mahdi in a diplomatic role suggests that the underlying tensions caused by Iraq's push for oil independence and its oil deal with China did play a factor in the timing of his assassination. It also served as a threat to Abdul-Mahdi, who has claimed that the U.S. threatened to kill both him and his defense minister just weeks prior over tensions directly related to the push for independence of Iraq's oil sector from the U.S.

It appears that the ever-present role of the petrodollar in guiding U.S. policy in the Middle East remains unchanged. The petrodollar has long been a driving factor behind the U.S.' policy towards Iraq specifically, as one of the key triggers for the 2003 invasion of Iraq was Saddam Hussein's decision to sell Iraqi oil in Euros opposed to dollars beginning in the year 2000. Just weeks before the invasion began, Hussein boasted that Iraq's Euro-based oil revenue account was earning a higher interest rate than it would have been if it had continued to sell its oil in dollars, an apparent signal to other oil exporters that the petrodollar system was only really benefiting the United States at their own expense.

Beyond current efforts to stave off Iraq's oil independence and keep its oil trade aligned with the U.S., the fact that the U.S. is now seeking to limit China's ever-growing role in Iraq's oil sector is also directly related to China's publicly known efforts to create its own direct competitor to the petrodollar, the petroyuan.

Since 2017, China has made its plans for the petroyuan -- a direct competitor to the petrodollar -- no secret, particularly after China eclipsed the U.S. as the world's largest importer of oil.

As CNBC noted at the time:

The new strategy is to enlist the energy markets' help: Beijing may introduce a new way to price oil in coming months -- but unlike the contracts based on the U.S. dollar that currently dominate global markets, this benchmark would use China's own currency. If there's widespread adoption, as the Chinese hope, then that will mark a step toward challenging the greenback's status as the world's most powerful currency .The plan is to price oil in yuan using a gold-backed futures contract in Shanghai, but the road will be long and arduous."

If the U.S. continues on its current path and pushes Iraq further into the arms of China and other U.S. rival states, it goes without saying that Iraq -- now a part of China's Belt and Road Initiative -- may soon favor a petroyuan system over a petrodollar system, particularly as the current U.S. administration threatens to hold Iraq's central bank account hostage for pursuing policies Washington finds unfavorable.

It could also explain why President Trump is so concerned about China's growing foothold in Iraq, since it risks causing not only the end of the U.S. military hegemony in the country but could also lead to major trouble for the petrodollar system and the U.S.' position as a global financial power. Trump's policy aimed at stopping China and Iraq's growing ties is clearly having the opposite effect, showing that this administration's "gangster diplomacy" only serves to make the alternatives offered by countries like China and Russia all the more attractive.

anonymous [331] Disclaimer , says: Show Comment January 18, 2020 at 5:54 am GMT

One can see how all these recent wars and military actions have a financial motive at their core. Yet the mass of gullible Americans actually believe the reasons given, to "spread democracy" and other wonderful things. Only a small number can see things for what they really are. It's very frustrating to deal with the stupidity of the average person on a daily basis.

This is not Trump's policy, it is American policy and the variation is in how he implements it. Any other person would have fallen in line with it as well. US policy has it's own inner momentum that can't change course. The US depends upon continuation of the dollar as the world's reserve currency. Were that to be lost the US likely would descend into chaos without end. When the USSR came apart it was eventually able to downsize into the Russian state. We don't have that here; there is no core ethnicity with it's own territory left anymore, it's just a jumble. For the US it's a matter of survival.

John Chuckman , says: Website Show Comment January 18, 2020 at 3:04 pm GMT
Yes, but we also have this

It is reported this morning (CNN) that Trump bragged about the killing to a crowd at a big fundraising dinner.

Just sick, official state murder for campaign donations.

That's what America is reduced to.

[Jan 21, 2020] Trump Tries Real Hard to Start a War for Israel. He Should be Impeached Because He is a War Criminal by Kurt Nimmo

Notable quotes:
"... In my last post, I said it was time to close down this blog, mostly due to its ineffectiveness, short reach, and choir preaching. I wrote that I might as well pound sand for all the good it did. ..."
"... The US began targeting Iran following the 1979 Islamic Revolution. This included "freezing" -- polite-speak for theft -- around $12 billion in Iranian assets, including gold, property, and bank holdings. After Obama agreed to return this filched property and money as part of the nuke deal (minus any real nukes), neocons said he gave away US taxpayer money to international terrorists. This warped lie became part of the narrative, yet another state-orchestrated fake news "alternative fact." ..."
Jan 06, 2020 | www.globalresearch.ca

In my last post, I said it was time to close down this blog, mostly due to its ineffectiveness, short reach, and choir preaching. I wrote that I might as well pound sand for all the good it did.

A few days later, Trump killed a high level Iranian military leader and I have decided a post is in order, never mind that a round of tiddlywinks will have about the same influence as a post here. The wars just keep on coming, no matter what we do.

Let's turn to social media where dimwits, neocon partisans, and clueless Democrats are running wild after corporate Mafia boss and numero uno Israeli cheerleader Donald Trump ordered a hit on Gen. Qasem Soleimani and others near Baghdad's international airport on Thursday.

Let's begin with this teleprompter reader and "presenter" from Al Jazeera:

"This is what happens when you put a narcissistic, megalomaniacal, former reality TV star with a thin skin and a very large temper in charge of the world's most powerful military You know who else attacks cultural sites? ISIS. The Taliban." – me on Trump/Iran on MSNBC today: pic.twitter.com/YCRARB2anv

-- Mehdi Hasan (@mehdirhasan) January 5, 2020

It is interesting how the memory of such people only goes back to the election of Donald Trump.

The US began targeting Iran following the 1979 Islamic Revolution. This included "freezing" -- polite-speak for theft -- around $12 billion in Iranian assets, including gold, property, and bank holdings. After Obama agreed to return this filched property and money as part of the nuke deal (minus any real nukes), neocons said he gave away US taxpayer money to international terrorists. This warped lie became part of the narrative, yet another state-orchestrated fake news "alternative fact."

Here's another idiot. He was the boss of the DNC for a while and unsuccessfully ran for president.

Nice job trump and Pompeo you dimwits. You've completed the neocon move to have Iraq become a satellite of Iran. You have to be the dumbest people ever to run the US government. You can add that to being the most corrupt. Get these guys out of here. https://t.co/gQHhHSeiJQ

-- Howard Dean (@GovHowardDean) January 5, 2020

Once again, history is lost in a tangle of lies and omission. Centuries before John Dean thought it might be a good idea to run for president, Persians and Shias in what is now Iraq and Iran were crossing the border -- later drawn up by invading Brits and French -- in pilgrimages to the shrines of Imam Husayn and Abbas in Karbala. We can't expect an arrogant sociopath like Mr. Dean to know about Ashura, Shia pilgrimages, the Remembrance of Muharram, and events dating back to 680 AD.

Shias from Iran pilgrimage to other Iraqi cities as well, including An-Najaf, Samarra, Mashhad, and Baghdad (although the latter is more important to Sunnis).

Corporate fake news teleprompter reader Stephanopoulos said the Geneva Conventions (including United Nations Security Council Resolution 2347) outlaw the targeting of cultural sites, which Trump said he will bomb.

Trump said there are 52 different sites; the number is not arbitrary, it is based on the 52 hostages, many of them CIA officers, taken hostage during Iran's revolution against the US-installed Shah and his brutal secret police sadists.

Pompeo said Trump won't destroy Iran's cultural and heritage sites. Pompeo, as a dedicated Zionist operative, knows damn well the US will destroy EVERYTHING of value in Iran, same as it did in Iraq and later Libya and Syria. This includes not only cultural sites, but civilian infrastructure -- hospitals, schools, roads, bridges, and mosques.

STEPHANOPOULOS: The Geneva Conventions outlaws attacks on cultural objects & places of worship. Why is Trump threatening Iran w/ war crimes?

POMPEO: We'll behave lawfully

S: So to be clear, Trump's threat wasn't accurate?

P: Every target that we strike will be a lawful target pic.twitter.com/zOGTpfYmba

Invoking the United Nations' Historic "Uniting for Peace" Resolution 377 Before Trump Embroils Us in War with Iran

-- Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 5, 2020

Although I believe Jill Stein is living in a Marxian fantasy world, I agree with her tweet in regard to the Zionist hit on Soleimani:

Now THIS is grounds for #impeachment – treachery unleashing the unthinkable for Americans & people the world over: Trump asked Iraqi prime minister to mediate with #Iran then assassinated Soleimani – on a mediation mission. https://t.co/f0F9FEMALD

-- Dr. Jill Stein 🌻 (@DrJillStein) January 5, 2020

Trump should be impeached -- tried and imprisoned -- not in response to some dreamed-up and ludicrous Russian plot or even concern about the opportunist Hunter Biden using his father's position to make millions in uber-corrupt Ukraine, but because he is a war criminal responsible for killing women and children.

As for the planned forever military occupation of Iraq, USA Today reports:

Iraq's Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi told lawmakers that a timetable for the withdrawal of all foreign troops, including U.S. ones, was required "for the sake of our national sovereignty." About 5,000 American troops are in various parts of Iraq.

The latest:
-- Iraqi lawmakers voted to oust U.S. troops
-- U.S.-led coalition fighting ISIS has paused operations
-- Hundreds of thousands mourned General Suleimani in Iran
-- President Trump said the U.S. has 52 possible targets in Iran in case of retaliation https://t.co/pmUuAQdKlc

-- The New York Times (@nytimes) January 5, 2020

No way in hell will Sec. State Pompeo and his Zionist neocon handlers allow this to happen without a fight. However, it shouldn't be too difficult for the Iraqis to expel 5,000 brainwashed American soldiers from the country, bombed to smithereens almost twenty years ago by Bush the Neocon Idiot Savant.

Never mind Schumer's pretend concern about another war. This friend of Israel from New York didn't go on national television and excoriate Obama and his cutthroat Sec. of State Hillary Clinton for killing 30,000 Libyans.

I'm concerned President Trump's impulsive foreign policy is dragging America into another endless war in the Middle East that will make us less safe.

Congress must assert itself.

President Trump does not have authority for war with Iran. pic.twitter.com/tra71uY9Ao

-- Chuck Schumer (@SenSchumer) January 5, 2020

Meanwhile, it looks like social media is burning the midnight oil in order to prevent their platforms being used to argue against Trump's latest Zionist-directed insanity.

It is absolutely crazy that Twitter is auto-locking the accounts of anyone who posts this "No war on Iran" image, and forcing them to delete the anti-war tweet in order to unlock their account.

Will @TwitterSupport say what's going on? Very screwed up https://t.co/zGTvVfNNqt

-- Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) January 5, 2020

More lies from The Washington Post, the CIA's crown jewel of propaganda:

Trump faces Iran crisis with fewer experienced advisers and strained relations with traditional allies https://t.co/Xi3vKw9Bw9

-- Steven Ginsberg (@stevenjay) January 5, 2020

This is complete and utter bullshit, but I'm sure the American people will gobble it down without question. Trump's advisers are neocons and they are seriously experienced in the art of promoting and engineering assassination, cyber-attacks, invasions, and mass murder.

Newsmax scribbler John Cardillo thinks he has it all figure out.

"In mid-October Soleimani instructed his top ally in Iraq, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, and other powerful militia leaders to step up attacks on U.S. targets in the country using sophisticated new weapons provided by Iran "

That's why we hit him https://t.co/56XKm9Kqwe

-- John Cardillo (@johncardillo) January 5, 2020

Imagine this, however improbable and ludicrous: Iran invades America and assassinates General Hyten or General McConville, both top members of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff. Now imagine the response by the "exceptional nation."

We can't leave out the Christian Zionist from Indiana, Mike Pence. Mike wants you to believe Iran was responsible for 9/11, thus stirring up the appropriate animosity and consensus for mass murder.

Neither Iran nor Soleimani were linked to the terror attack in the "9/11 Commission Report." Pence didn't even get the number of hijackers right. https://t.co/QtQZm2Yyh9

-- HuffPost Politics (@HuffPostPol) January 5, 2020

Finally, here is the crown jewel of propaganda -- in part responsible for the death of well over a million Iraqis -- The New York Times showing off its rampant hypocrisy.

In Opinion

The editorial board writes, "It is crucial that influential Republican senators like Lindsey Graham, Marco Rubio and Mitch McConnell remind President Trump of his promise to keep America out of foreign quagmires" https://t.co/2swusvBWbg

-- The New York Times (@nytimes) January 5, 2020

Never mind Judith Miller, the Queen of NYT pro-war propaganda back in the day, spreading neocon fabricated lies about Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction. America -- or rather the United States (the government) -- is addicted to quagmires and never-ending war. This is simply more anti-Trump bullshit by the NYT editorial board. The newspaper loves war waged in the name of Israel, but only if jumpstarted by Democrats.

Trump the fool, the fact-free reality TV president will eventually unleash the dogs of war against Iran, much to the satisfaction of Israel, its racist Zionists, Israel-first neocons in America, and the chattering pro-war class of "journalists," and "foreign policy experts" (most former Pentagon employees).

Expect more nonsense like that dispensed by the robot Mike Pence, the former tank commander now serving as Sec. of State, and any number of neocon fellow travelers, many with coveted blue checkmarks on Twitter while the truth-tellers are expelled from the conversation and exiled to the political wilderness.

*

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Kurt Nimmo writes on his blog, Another Day in the Empire, where this article was originally published. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

[Jan 21, 2020] The Geopolitics Of Epistemological Warfare From Babylon To Neocon

Jan 21, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

The Geopolitics Of Epistemological Warfare: From Babylon To Neocon by Tyler Durden Tue, 01/21/2020 - 00:00 0 SHARES

Authored by Matthew Ehret via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

I think any sane human being can agree that while war was never a good idea, war in the 21st century is an absolutely intolerable one. The problem we currently face is that many of the forces driving world events towards an all-out war of "Mutually Assured Annihilation" are anything but sane.

While I'm obviously referring here to a certain category of people who fall under a particularly virulent strain of imperial thinking which can be labelled "neo-conservative" and while many of these disturbing figures honestly believe that a total war of annihilation is a risk worth taking in order to achieve their goals of total global hegemony, I would like to make one subtle yet very important distinction which is often overlooked.

What is this distinction?

Under the broad umbrella of "neo-conservative" one should properly differentiate those who really believe in their ideology and are trapped under the invisible cage of its unexamined assumptions vs. that smaller yet more important segment that created and manages the ideology from the top. I brushed on this grouping in a recent 3 part study called Origins of the Deep State and Myth of the Jewish Conspiracy .

To re-state my meaning: This group doesn't necessarily believe in the ideological group they manage any more than a parent believes in that tooth fairy which they promote in order to achieve certain behavioral patterns in their children.

While belief in the tooth fairy is slightly less destructive than belief in a misanthropic neocon worldview of a Bolton, Pompeo or Cheney, the analogy is useful to communicate the point.

Cult Managers: Ancient Babylon and Now

Modern ideology-shapers serve the same role as those ancient high priests of Babylon, Persia and Rome who managed the many cults and countless pagan mystery religions recorded throughout the ages. It is well documented that any cult could comfortably exist under Rome's control, as long as said cult denied any claim to objective truthfulness- making the rise of Abrahamic monotheistic faiths more than a little antagonistic to empire.

Did the high priests necessarily BELIEVE in those dogmas which they created and managed?

Hell no.

Was it politically necessary to create them?

Of course.

Why?

Because an Empire, like everything in the world, exist as a whole with parts but since they deny any principle of natural law (justice, love, goodness, etc) , empires are merely a sum of parts and their rules of organization can be nothing but zero sum. Each cultish group may coexist as an echo chamber alongside other groups sacrificing to whatever deity they wish without judgement of moral right or wrong bounded only by a common blind faith in their group's beliefs- but nothing universal about justice, creative reason, or human nature is otherwise permitted. Here the a-moral "peace" of "equilibrium" can be achieved by an oligarchy which wishes to lord over the slaves. Whether we are dealing with Caesar Augustus, Lord Metternich's Congress of Vienna, Aldous Huxley, Sir Henry Kissinger, or Leo Strauss (father of modern neo-conservativism), "Peace" can never be anything more than a mathematical "balancing of parts".

Now it is a good moment to ask: What does this phenomenon look like in our modern age?

To answer this, let us leap over a couple of millennia and take a look at something a bit more personal: Adam Smith and the doctrine of free trade.

Smith at Her Majesty's Service

Do Smith's modern followers sincerely believe in the "self-regulating forces of the free market"?

Sure they do.

Did Adam Smith actually believe in his own system?

Whether he did or not, according to recent research conducted by historian Jeffrey Steinberg, Smith received his commission to compose his seminal book Wealth of Nations (published 1776) while riding with Lord Shelburne himself in a carriage ride from Edinburgh to London in 1763. The date 1776 is not a coincidence as this was the same Lord Shelburne who essentially managed the British Empire during the American Revolution and who always despised all colonial aspirations to use protective tariffs, emit productive credit or channel said credit towards internal improvements as Benjamin Franklin had championed in his 1729 Necessity of Paper Currency and Colonial Script.

Why develop Industry, asked Smith, when the new "Law" of "absolute advantage" demanded that everyone just do what they are good at for the best price possible? America has a lot of land, so they should stick with agriculture and slave-driven cotton. Britain had a lot of industry (don't ask how that happened because it wasn't through free trade), so they should stick with that! India had advanced textiles, but Britain had to destroy that so that India could then have a lot of opium fields so she could do that which China could then smoke to death under the watch of British Gunships. "Free Trade" demanded it so.

Let's look at another example: Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection

A Not-too-Natural Selection

Darwin's theory published in his Origins of Species (1859) was based on the assumption that all changes in the biosphere are driven by "laws" of "survival of the fittest" within an assumed closed ecosystem of diminishing returns. Just as Smith asserted that an "invisible hand" brought creative order to the chaos of unregulated vice and self-interest, Darwin asserted that creative order on the large scale evolution of species could be explained by chaotic mutations on the micro level beyond a wall that no power of reason, free will or God could pass.

Did Charles Darwin believe his system? Probably.

But how about Thomas Huxley (aka: "Darwin's Bulldog") whose efforts to destroy all competing theories which included "purpose", "meaning", or "design" were crushed and ridiculed into obscurity? Huxley himself was on record saying he did not believe in Darwin's system. So why was this theory promoted by forces (like Huxley's X Club ) who recognized its many flaws? Well, here again it helps to refer to Darwin's own account of his discovery from his autobiography where he wrote:

"In October 1838, fifteen months after I had begun my systematic inquiry, I happened to read for amusement Malthus on Population, and being prepared to appreciate the struggle for existence which everywhere goes on, from long-continued observation of the habits of animals and plants, it at once struck me that under these circumstances favourable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavourable ones to be destroyed. The result would be the formation of a new species. Here then, I had at last got a theory by which to work".

Malthus's 'Dismal Science'

And here we have it! Reverend Thomas Malthus (the cold hearted "Man of God" who taught economics at the British East India Company's Haileybury College) provided the very foundation upon which Darwin's system stood! Thomas Huxley and the other "high priests" of Huxley's X Club were always Malthusian (even before there was Malthus) since empires have always been more focused on monopolizing the finite resources of an age, rather than encouraging creative discoveries and new inventions which would bring new resources into being- overcoming nature's "limits to growth" (a dis-equilibrium not to be tolerated). Whether Malthus actually believed in the system which bears his name, as generations of his adherents sincerely do, remains to be seen. However his own awareness of the needed extermination of the "unfit" by the Ubermenschen of the British Aristocracy preceded Social Darwinism by a full century when he coldly called for the encouragement of the plague and other "natural forms of destruction" to cull the herd of the unfit in his Essay on the Principle of Population ( 1799):

"We should facilitate, instead of foolishly and vainly endeavoring to impede, the operations of nature in producing this mortality; and if we dread the too frequent visitation of the horrid form of famine, we should sedulously encourage the other forms of destruction, which we compel nature to use. In our towns we should make the streets narrower, crowd more people into the houses, and court the return of the plague."

A little later, Malthus even argued for the early extermination of poor babies who were of low value to society when he said:

"I should propose a regulation to be made, declaring that no child born from any marriage taking place after the expiration of a year from the date of the law, and no illegitimate child born two years from the same date, should ever be entitled to parish assistance The infant is, comparatively speaking, of little value to society, as others will immediately supply its place."

The neo-Malthusian revivalists such as Princes Bernhardt, Philip Mountbatten and Huxley's own grandson Sir Julian who birthed the misanthropic deformity today called the Green New Deal were not ignorant to this tradition. The disastrous effect of this worldview upon races deemed "unfit" in the global south should also not be ignored. It is no coincidence that those three neo-Malthusian oligarchs founded the World Wildlife Fund, 1001 Nature Trust and Club of Rome which imposed a technological apartheid upon the third world over the bodies of countless statesmen during the Cold War.

The Danger of Creative Thought to an Empire

Encouraging creative thought and cooperation among diverse nations, linguistic, religious and ethnic groups tends to result in new uncontrolled systems of potential as humanity increases its capacity to sustain itself while imperial systems lose their ability to parasitically drain their host. In Lincoln's great 1859 speech , the martyred leader stood up against this Malthusian paradigm endemic of the British Empire when he said:

"All creation is a mine, and every man, a miner. The whole earth, and all within it, upon it, and round about it, including himself, in his physical, moral, and intellectual nature, and his susceptibilities, are the infinitely various "leads" from which, man, from the first, was to dig out his destiny Man is not the only animal who labors; but he is the only one who improves his workmanship. This improvement, he effects by Discoveries, and Inventions."

Lincoln's economic commitments to protective tariffs, state credit (greenbacks) and internal improvements are inextricably linked to this view of man also shared by the earlier Ben Franklin.

Today, the positive paradigm which Lincoln died to defend is most clearly represented by the leaders of such nations as Russia and China- both of whom have come out repeatedly attacking the post-truth neo-liberal order and also the win-lose philosophy of Hobbesian geopolitics. The folly of America's new dance with impeachment and the neocon hand shaping Trump's disastrous foreign policy agenda is tied to the oligarchy's absolute fear of losing America to a new Eurasian partnership which Trump has promoted repeatedly since entering office in 2017.

Xi Jinping and Putin have not only responded to this obsolete system by creating an alternative system of win-win cooperation driven by unbounded scientific and technological progress but they have also managed to expose the Achilles heal of the empire. These statesmen have demonstrated a clear recognition that those ideologies ranging from neo-liberalism to neo-conservativism are entirely unsustainable, and defeatable (but not militarily) . Xi expressed this insight most clearly during his recent trip to Greece.

Even though leaders like Putin and Xi understand this, citizens of the west will continue to be woefully unequipped to either make sense of these chaotic systems of belief, extract them from their own hearts if they are so contaminated or resist them effectively, without understanding that those who fabricated and manage these belief structures never truly believed in them.

Neoconservative founding fathers such as Leo Strauss, Sir Henry Kissinger and Sir Bernard Lewis absolutely never believed in the ideologies their cultish golems like Bolton, Cheney or Kristol have adhered to so religiously. Their belief was only that the sum-of-parts called humanity must ultimately be governed by a Hobbesian Leviathan (aka: a new globalized Roman Empire), and that Leviathan could only be created in response to an intolerably painful period of chaos which their twisted tooth fairies would usher into this world.

[Jan 21, 2020] The first term of the Trump administration has revealed that the US war empire is run by the military-intelligence apparatus, not by President administration. Trump is simply a puppet.

Notable quotes:
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Jan 21, 2020 | www.informationclearinghouse.info

Originally from: Opinion - The Angry Arab US Violated Unspoken Rule of Engagement with Iran

As'ad AbuKhalil analyzes the Trump administration's decision

to escalate hostilities with Iran and its regional allies.

By As`ad AbuKhalil

January 21, 2020 " Information Clearing House " - S omething big and unprecedented has happened in the Middle East after the assassination of one of Iran's top commanders, Qasim Suleimani.

The U.S. has long assumed that assassinations of major figures in the Iranian "resistance-axis" in the Middle East would bring risk to the U.S. military-intelligence presence in the Middle East. Western and Arab media reported that the U.S. had prevented Israel in the past from killing Suleimani. But with the top commander's death, the Trump administration seems to think a key barrier to U.S. military operations in the Middle East has been removed.

The U.S. and Israel had noticed that Hizbullah and Iran did not retaliate against previous assassinations by Israel (or the U.S.) that took place in Syria (of Imad Mughniyyah, Jihad Mughniyyah, Samir Quntar); or for other attacks on Palestinian and Lebanese commanders in Syria.

The U.S. thus assumed that this assassination would not bring repercussions or harm to U.S. interests. Iranian reluctance to retaliate has only increased the willingness of Israel and the U.S. to violate the unspoken rules of engagement with Iran in the Arab East.

For many years Israel did perpetrate various assassinations against Iranian scientists and officers in Syria during the on-going war. But Israel and the U.S. avoided targeting leaders or commanders of Iran. During the U.S. occupation of Iraq, the U.S. and Iran collided directly and indirectly, but avoided engaging in assassinations for fear that this would unleash a series of tit-for-tat.

But the Trump administration has become known for not playing by the book, and for operating often according to the whims and impulses of President Donald Trump.

Different Level of Escalation

The decision to strike at Baghdad airport, however, was a different level of escalation. In addition to killing Suleimani it also killed Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, a key leader of Hashd forces in Iraq. Like Suleimani, al-Muhandis was known for waging the long fight against ISIS. (Despite this, the U.S. media only give credit to the U.S. and its clients who barely lifted a finger in the fight against ISIS.)

On the surface of it, the strike was uncharacteristic of Trump. Here is a man who pledged to pull the U.S. out of the Middle East turmoil -- turmoil for which the U.S and Israel bear the primary responsibility. And yet he seems willing to order a strike that will guarantee intensification of the conflict in the region, and even the deployment of more U.S. forces.

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The first term of the Trump administration has revealed the extent to which the U.S. war empire is run by the military-intelligence apparatus. There is not much a president -- even a popular president like Barack Obama in his second term -- can do to change the course of empire. It is not that Obama wanted to end U.S. wars in the region, but Trump has tried to retreat from Middle East conflicts and yet he has been unable due to pressures not only from the military-intelligence apparatus but also from their war advocates in the U.S. Congress and Western media, D.C. think tanks and the human-rights industry. The pressures to preserve the war agenda is too powerful on a U.S. president for it to cease in the foreseeable future. But Trump has managed to start fewer new wars than his predecessors -- until this strike.

Trump's Obama Obsession

Trump in his foreign policy is obsessed with the legacy and image of Obama. He decided to violate the Iran nuclear agreement (which carried the weight of international law after its adoption by the UN Security Council) largely because he wanted to prove that he is tougher than Obama, and also because he wanted an international agreement that carries his imprint. Just as Trump relishes putting his name on buildings, hotels, and casinos he wants to put his name on international agreements. His decision, to strike at a convoy carrying perhaps the second most important person in Iran was presumably attached to an intelligence assessment that calculated that Iran is too weakened and too fatigued to strike back directly at the U.S.

Iran faced difficult choices in response to the assassination of Suleimani. On the one hand, Iran would appear weak and vulnerable if it did not retaliate and that would only invite more direct U.S. and Israeli attacks on Iranian targets.

On the other hand, the decision to respond in a large-scale attack on U.S. military or diplomatic targets in the Middle East would invite an immediate massive U.S. strike inside Iran. Such an attack has been on the books; the U.S military (and Israel, of course) have been waiting for the right moment for the U.S. to destroy key strategic sites inside Iran.

Furthermore, there is no question that the cruel U.S.-imposed sanctions on Iran have made life difficult for the Iranian people and have limited the choices of the government, and weakened its political legitimacy, especially in the face of vast Gulf-Western attempts to exploit internal dissent and divisions inside Iran. (Not that dissent inside Iran is not real, and not that repression by the regime is not real).

Nonetheless, if the Iranian regime were to open an all-out war against the U.S., this would certainly cause great harm and damage to U.S. and Israeli interests.

Iran Sending Messages

In the last year, however, Iran successfully sent messages to Gulf regimes (through attacks on oil shipping in the Gulf, for which Iran did not claim responsibility, nor did it take responsibility for the pin-point attack on ARAMCO oil installations) that any future conflict would not spare their territories.

That quickly reversed the policy orientations of both Saudi Arabia and the UAE, which suddenly became weary of confrontation with Iran, and both are now negotiating (openly and secretively) with the Iranian government. Ironically, both the UAE and Saudi regimes -- which constituted a lobby for war against Iran in Western capitals -- are also eager to distance themselves from U.S. military action against Iran . And Kuwait quickly denied that the U.S. used its territory in the U.S. attack on Baghdad airport, while Qatar dispatched its foreign minister to Iran (officially to offer condolences over the death of Suleimani, but presumably also to distance itself and its territory from the U.S. attack).

The Iranian response was very measured and very specific. It was purposefully intended to avoid causing U.S. casualties; it was intended more as a message of Iranian missile capabilities and their pin point accuracy. And that message was not lost on Israel.

Hasan Nasrallah, the leader of Hizbullah, sent a more strident message. He basically implied that it would be left to Iran's allies to engineer military responses. He also declared a war on the U.S. military presence in the Middle East, although he was at pains to stress that U.S. civilians are to be spared in any attack or retaliation.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/6yyC897UliI

Supporters of the Iran resistance axis have been quite angry in the wake of the assassination. The status of Suleimani in his camp is similar to the status of Nasrallah although Nasrallah -- due to his charisma and to his performance and the performance of his party in the July 2006 war -- may have attained a higher status.

It would be easy for the Trump administration to ignite a Middle East war by provoking Iran once again, and wrongly assuming that there are no limits to Iranian caution and self-restraint. But if the U.S. (and Israel with it or behind it) were to start a Middle East war, it will spread far wider and last far longer than the last war in Iraq, which the U.S. is yet to complete.

As'ad AbuKhalil is a Lebanese-American professor of political science at California State University, Stanislaus. He is the author of the "Historical Dictionary of Lebanon" (1998), "Bin Laden, Islam and America's New War on Terrorism (2002), and "The Battle for Saudi Arabia" (2004). He tweets as @asadabukhal

This article was originally published by " Consortium News " -

[Jan 21, 2020] A New Definition of Warfare by Philip Giraldi

Notable quotes:
"... Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is ..."
Jan 21, 2020 | www.unz.com

Supporters of Donald Trump often make the point that he has not started any new wars. One might observe that it has not been for lack of trying, as his cruise missile attacks on Syria based on fabricated evidence and his recent assassination of Iranian general Qassem Soleimani have been indisputably acts of war. Trump also has enhanced troop levels both in the Middle East and in Afghanistan while also increasing the frequency and lethality of armed drone attacks worldwide.

Congress has been somewhat unseriously toying around with a tightening of the war powers act of 1973 to make it more difficult for a president to carry out acts of war without any deliberation by or authorization from the legislature. But perhaps the definition of war itself should be expanded. The one area where Trump and his team of narcissistic sociopaths have been most active has been in the imposition of sanctions with lethal intent. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has been explicit in his explanations that the assertion of "extreme pressure" on countries like Iran and Venezuela is intended to make the people suffer to such an extent that they rise up against their governments and bring about "regime change." In Pompeo's twisted reckoning that is how places that Washington disapproves of will again become "normal countries."

The sanctions can kill. Those imposed by the United States are backed up by the U.S. Treasury which is able to block cash transfers going through the dollar denominated international banking system. Banks that do not comply with America's imposed rules can themselves be sanctioned, meaning that U.S. sanctions are de facto globally applicable, even if foreign banks and governments do not agree with the policies that drive them. It is well documented how sanctions that have an impact on the importation of medicines have killed thousands of Iranians. In Venezuela, the effect of sanctions has been starvation as food imports have been blocked, forcing a large part of the population to flee the country just to survive.

The latest exercise of United States economic warfare has been directed against Iraq. In the space of one week from December 29 th to January 3 rd , the American military, which operates out of two major bases in Iraq, killed 25 Iraqi militiamen who were part of the Popular Mobilization Units of the Iraqi Army. The militiamen had most recently been engaged in the successful fight against ISIS. It followed up on that attack by killing Soleimani, Iraqi militia general Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, and eight other Iraqis in a drone strike near Baghdad International Airport. As the attacks were not approved in any way by the Iraqi government, it was no surprise that rioting followed and the Iraqi Parliament voted to remove all foreign troops from its soil. The decree was signed off on by Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi, based on the fact that the U.S. military was in Iraq at the invitation of the country's government and that invitation had just been revoked by parliament.

That Iraq is to say the least unstable is attributable to the ill-advised U.S. invasion of 2003. The persistence of U.S. forces in the country is ostensibly to aid in the fight against ISIS, but the real reason is to serve as a check on Iranian influence in Iraq, which is a strategic demand made by Israel and not responsive to any actual American interest. Indeed, the Iraqi government is probably closer politically to Tehran than to Washington, though the neocon line that the country is dominated by the Iranians is far from true.

Washington's response to the legitimate Iraqi demand that its troops should be removed consisted of threats. When Prime Minister Mahdi spoke with Pompeo on the phone and asked for discussions and a time table to create a "withdrawal mechanism" the Secretary of State made it clear that there would be no negotiations. A State Department written response entitled "The U.S. Continued Partnership with Iraq" asserted that American troops are in Iraq to serve as a "force for good" in the Middle East and that it is "our right" to maintain "appropriate force posture" in the region.

The Iraqi position also immediately produced presidential threats and tweets about "sanctions like they have never seen," with the implication that the U.S. was more than willing to wreck the Iraqi economy if it did not get its way. The latest threat to emerge involves blocking Iraq access to its New York federal reserve bank account, where international oil sale revenue is kept, creating a devastating cash crunch in Iraq's financial system that might indeed destroy the Iraqi economy. If taking steps to ruin a country economically is not considered warfare by other means it is difficult to discern what might fit that description.

After dealing with Iraq, the Trump Administration turned its guns on one of its oldest and closest allies. Great Britain, like most of the other European signatories to the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) has been reluctant to withdraw from the agreement over concern that Iran will as a result decide to develop nuclear weapons. According to the Guardian , a United States representative from the National Security Council named Richard Goldberg, had visited London recently to make clear to the British government that if it does not follow the American lead and withdraw from the JCPOA and reapply sanctions it just might be difficult to work out a trade agreement with Washington post-Brexit. It is a significant threat as part of the pro-Brexit vote clearly was derived from a Trump pledge to make up for some of the anticipated decline in European trade by increasing U.K. access to the U.S. market. Now the quid pro quo is clear: Britain, which normally does in fact follow the Washington lead in foreign policy, will now be expected to be completely on board all of the time and everywhere, particularly in the Middle East.

During his visit, Goldberg told the BBC: "The question for prime minister Johnson is: 'As you are moving towards Brexit what are you going to do post-31 January as you come to Washington to negotiate a free-trade agreement with the United States?' It's absolutely in [your] interests and the people of Great Britain's interests to join with President Trump, with the United States, to realign your foreign policy away from Brussels, and to join the maximum pressure campaign to keep all of us safe."

And there is an interesting back story on Richard Goldberg, a John Bolton protégé anti-Iran hardliner, who threatened the British on behalf of Trump. James Carden, writing at The Nation , posits "Consider the following scenario: A Washington, DC–based, tax-exempt organization that bills itself as a think tank dedicated to the enhancement of a foreign country's reputation within the United States, funded by billionaires closely aligned with said foreign country, has one of its high-ranking operatives (often referred to as 'fellows') embedded within the White House national security staff in order to further the oft-stated agenda of his home organization, which, as it happens, is also paying his salary during his year-long stint there. As it happens, this is exactly what the pro-Israel think tank the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD) reportedly achieved in an arrangement brokered by former Trump national security adviser John Bolton."

The FDD senior adviser in question, who was placed on the National Security Council, was Richard Goldberg. FDD is largely funded by Jewish American billionaires including vulture fund capitalist Paul Singer and Home Depot partner Bernard Marcus. Its officers meet regularly with Israeli government officials and the organization is best known for its unrelenting effort to bring about war with Iran. It has relentlessly pushed for a recklessly militaristic U.S. policy directed against Iran and also more generally in the Middle East. It is a reliable mouthpiece for Israel and, inevitably, it has never been required to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938.

To be sure, Trump also has other neocons advising him on Iran, including David Wurmser, another Bolton associate, who has the president's ear and is a consultant to the National Security Council. Wurmser has recently submitted a series of memos to the White House advocating a policy of "regime disruption" with the Islamic Republic that will destabilize it and eventually lead to a change of government. He may have played a key role in giving the green light to the assassination of Soleimani.

The good news, if there is any, is that Goldberg resigned on January 3rd, allegedly because the war against Iran was not developing fast enough to suit him and FDD, but he is symptomatic of the many neoconservative hawks who have infiltrated the Trump Administration at secondary and tertiary levels, where much of the development and implementation of policy actually takes place. It also explains that when it comes to Iran and the irrational continuation of a significant U.S. military presence in the Middle East, it is Israel and its Lobby that are steering the ship of state.

Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is [email protected] .

TG , says: Show Comment January 21, 2020 at 12:53 am GMT

Blockades are traditionally considered to be acts of war. Surely a trade embargo of sufficient degree should be considered the same thing.
onebornfree , says: Website Show Comment January 21, 2020 at 1:18 am GMT
This " just" in:

1] "war is the health of the state" Randolph Bourne https://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/Randolph_Bourne

2] "Because they are all ultimately funded via both direct and indirect theft [taxes], and counterfeiting [central bank monopolies], all governments are essentially, at their very cores, 100% corrupt criminal scams which cannot be "reformed"or "improved",simply because of their innate criminal nature." onebornfree http://onebornfree-mythbusters.blogspot.com/

Therefor, if you have [always criminal] governments in the first place, then, as night follows day, you must have [always criminal] government-made wars .

Regards, onebornfree

Reality Check , says: Show Comment January 21, 2020 at 2:16 am GMT
US President Donald Trump chose as the deputy chairwoman [also appointed by Trump, the current chairman is Steve Feinberg] of the intelligence advisory board a Jewish national security expert who is well known in the pro-Israel national security community.

Ravich, a former deputy national security adviser to vice president Dick Cheney, is a senior adviser to the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, an influential hawkish pro-Israel think tank. She is also a senior adviser to the Chertoff Group, founded by Michael Chertoff, a homeland security secretary in the George W. Bush administration, and has worked with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

She has also worked with the pro-Israel community helping to raise money for Israel Bonds.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/trump-names-jewish-security-expert-to-senior-intelligence-post/

Chepo , says: Show Comment January 21, 2020 at 3:31 am GMT
It is evident that Trump will win re-election and go to war with Iran afterwards. All this Impeachment mania is simply theatre created by Jews from both sides of the political spectrum in order to prepare Trump for the Zionist vs. Iran war.

The Greater Israel Project has always been the main objective of American foreign policy. Now, Israel hacked the 2016 election and selected Trump as he attains the required personality, theatre and following in order to deepen the control towards the masses.

Chepo , says: Show Comment January 21, 2020 at 3:36 am GMT
@Reality Check Trump destroyed the Republican contenders in the 2016 Primaries, easily. At the time, there was minimal Zionist influence over the Trump campaign – the Jewish factor was heavily focused on the other Republican rivals. Trump won the Primaries in a generic and motivational fashion. Afterwards, the Zionists took over Trump and related entities. The real MAGA Trump factor ended once the Primaries were won – enter the Zionists.

Israel rigged the election by fixing the actual voting numbers.
Robert Mercer and Zuckerberg rigged the election by compromising the masses on Facebook.

Tony Hall , says: Show Comment January 21, 2020 at 5:49 am GMT
For the government of one country to designate another country's armed forces as a "terrorist organization" is essentially a declaration of war. When in April of 2019 Netanyahu claimed credit for Trump's designation of the IRGC as a terrorist organization, he created the pseudo-law framework which became part of the justification for the Israeli-US war crime of 2 Jan. 2020.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/netanyahu-says-trump-designated-iran-guards-a-terror-group-at-his-request/

Now the pressure is being placed squarely on the NATO countries, but especially Canada, to follow the Netanyahu-Trump lead by designating the IRGC as a terrorist organization. The Canadian branch of the ADL has even gone as far as giving an ultimatum to Justin Trudeau, an ultimatum to make the designation within a month or else. Is the agenda to get NATO ensnared in a US war against Iran to serve Israel?

https://ahtribune.com/world/americas/canada/3826-act-of-war-to-designate-irgc-a-terrorist-organization.html

Ever since the misrepresentation of the events of 9/11 we have been engulfed in a massive propaganda campaign aimed at giving the appearance of legitimacy to pseudo-laws founded in major war crimes extending from Sept. of 2001 until today. The continuing reign of the ongoing lies and crimes of 9/11 has brought us to this point where the Axis of Deception, whose mascot of human degradation is Jeffrey Epstein, stands against the Axis of Resistance. In recent days a guiding spirit of the Axis of Resistance has become the martyred holy warrior, Qassem Soleimani.

mikemikev , says: Show Comment January 21, 2020 at 10:38 am GMT
Coincidentally the FDD just produced an article agreeing that sanctions are a form of war.
https://www.fdd.org/analysis/2020/1/20/war-by-other-means
Naturally they're only concerned about Israel.
peter mcloughlin , says: Show Comment January 21, 2020 at 11:31 am GMT
Sanctions can kill and cause great human suffering. Sanctions are presented as a humane alternative to war, cheaper and means to avoid military action with uncertain consequences. But history warns that sanctions aimed at bringing about capitulation or regime change lead to full-scale conflict. If they are too effective or ineffective one side must escalate.
https://www.ghostsofhistory.wordpress.com/
World War Jew , says: Show Comment January 21, 2020 at 1:42 pm GMT
Right TG, traditionally, as you said up there first, and legally too, under the supreme law of the land. Economic sanctions are subject to the same UNSC supervision as forcible coercion.

UN Charter Article 41: "The Security Council may decide what measures not involving the use of armed force are to be employed to give effect to its decisions, and it may call upon the Members of the United Nations to apply such measures. These may include complete or partial interruption of economic relations and of rail, sea, air, postal, telegraphic, radio, and other means of communication, and the severance of diplomatic relations."

https://www.un.org/en/charter-united-nations/index.html

US "sanctions" require UNSC authorization. Unilateral sanctions are nothing but illegal coercive intervention, as the non-intervention principle is customary international law, which is US federal common law.

The G-192, that is, the entire world, has affirmed this law. That's why the US is trying to defund UNCTAD as redundant with the WTO (UNCTAD is the G-192's primary forum.) In any case, now that the SCO is in a position to enforce this law at gunpoint with its overwhelmingly superior missile technology, the US is going to get stomped and tased until it complies and stops resisting.

almondflake , says: Show Comment January 21, 2020 at 2:19 pm GMT
Sanctions are the modern day equivalent of laying a siege on the enemy's castle. Such tactic has been an integral part of warfare ever since the first castles were built by man.

This 21st century crusade against the muslim world is fast approaching its final climax. Everything is going as planned by the ruler-wannabes and the whole of middle earth seems destined to be theirs for once and for all.

We are all contemporary witnesses to the war campaign of the MILLENNIUM that was prescribed by the bible and the tora and few recognize the historic significance.

Will we get to see which of the New Testament and the Tora prevails, not that we want to, but because we have no choice but to see? Or will there be a rarest of rare black swan event that will produce an unanticipated course of history?

JUSA , says: Show Comment January 21, 2020 at 2:41 pm GMT
Protocol #1:
The Basic Doctrine: "Right Lies in Might"

Protocol #2:
Economic War and Disorganization Lead to International Government

Desert Fox , says: Show Comment January 21, 2020 at 3:04 pm GMT
The war on Iran is in the formative stage with sanctions and the murder of Soleimani who was helping defeat the AL CIADA aka ISIS terrorists who were created and funded and armed by the US and Israel and Britain and NATO and for that reason he was murdered...
anastasia , says: Show Comment January 21, 2020 at 3:46 pm GMT
Terrific article, but I would not use the word "infiltrate" when speaking of theneocons in the Trump administration. They are there by open invitation by the biggest neo-con of them all – Trump.
If you review newspaper articles concerning Iran from 2003 onward, you see very clearly the slow escalation to war and that that war with Iran is inevitable no matter who is in office. In my opinion, that is why Trump is in office. Maybe they thought there would be too much lag time with theother Republican or Democrat candidates when he was running in 2016, but if he gets re-elected, we will see war with Iran. That is thepurpose of the sanctions. To provoke not only thepeople to war against the gov't, but to provoke the government to war. We did it to the Japanese, we did it to Iraq during Saddam Hussein's time, and we are doing it now.

It is pretty obvious that they wish to keep the mid east in a state of complete and utter chaos,. That is what Israel wants, and that is exactly what they are going to get. Israel has been trying to help themselves to the land of other countries for many years. You cannot do that with a vialbe and unified country. You have to break it all up first – turn it tribal.

But when it is all over, and the Shia Muslims who hate us now, hate us more after their countries have been all bombedto smithereens, and when China and Russia, who are biding their time, are strong enough, we will eventually get a taste our just desserts.

I doubt I will be here for that last course.

Sir Launcelot Canning , says: Show Comment January 21, 2020 at 5:08 pm GMT
I hope that if any Iranian or English people are reading this, that they know that none of this was the idea of the average American. That we have actually lost our nation and have no control over it anymore. And that the only Americans left supporting this foreign "policy" are Evangelical holy rollers from the South and Midwest, dinosaur Baby Boomers who still think it is civil defense, dupes and suckers who buy into the "support the troops" cult of military, and the slowly decreasing number of misinformed and brainwashed Americans who get their "news" from the (((corporate media))).
9/11 Inside job , says: Show Comment January 21, 2020 at 6:55 pm GMT
@anastasia Agree that "It is pretty obvious that they wish to keep the mid east in a state of complete and utter chaos ." In "Greater Israel and the Balkanization of the Middle East : Oded Yinon's Strategy for
Israel " globalresearch.ca , Adeyinke Makinde argues that balkanization has always formed a part of the rationalization of political Zionism stating "After the establishment of Israel in 1948 , a national policy of weakening Arab and Muslim states , balkanising them, or keeping them under a neo-colonial state of affairs has persisted . The prevailing logic was and always has been that any stable , nationalist government in the Arab world poses an existential threat to Israel ."

[Jan 21, 2020] Putin Eliminates the Medvedev Faction From the Kremlin

Jan 21, 2020 | www.anti-empire.com

Putin Eliminates the Medvedev Faction From the Kremlin Putin's reorganization a huge setback for system liberals John Helmer 17 Jan 20 17 Jan 20 Politics 2051 9

In law courts, justice must not only be done but be seen to be done. In politics, too.

The problem with what President Vladimir Putin announced in his Federal Assembly address this week, and what he did immediately after, is that things don't look the way he says they should.

The difference was written on Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev's face. He thinks Putin has destroyed the political forces of the candidate with the best chance of winning the presidential election of 2024 -- himself. The businessmen and government officials who have depended on Medvedev are acknowledging this realization on the telephone.

An hour after this picture was taken, at a meeting with Putin of the assembled ministers at Government House (Kremlin term for White House), Medvedev announced : "as the Government of the Russian Federation we must give the President of this country an opportunity to make all the necessary decisions for this. Under the circumstances, it would be correct for the entire Government of the Russian Federation to resign in accordance with Article 117 of the Constitution."

He looked and sounded unconvinced that his exit was "correct".

The constitutional provision to which Medvedev referred is a notorious relic. Article 117 was created by President Boris Yeltsin after he used the military to crush parliament's opposition in October 1993. Several hundred people inside the White House were killed.

The new constitution was voted two months later by the disputable margin of 58% in a disputable turnout of 54%. Article 117 then gave the president the power to block a prime minister's resignation ; veto a vote of no-confidence in the government by the State Duma; and the power to decide whether and when to dissolve parliament and hold new elections.

In Putin's speech on Wednesday, he began his proposals for a constitutional amendment with the announcement: "We have overcome the situation when certain powers in the government were essentially usurped by oligarch clans." Usurpation of power by Yeltsin at the expense of the Congress of People's Deputies in 1993 was not explained then, nor since, by the operations of the oligarchs. They came later. In Russian public opinion, the oligarchs continue to be extra-constitutionally powerful today. The polls show Putin's claim is not believed.

The proposals Putin has announced change the balance of power between the presidency and the parliament. But they also change the balance of power between the houses of parliament, and also between the central power in Moscow and the regions. The State Duma, according to Putin, will have the new power to appoint "the Prime Minister of the Russian Federation, and then all deputy prime ministers and federal ministers at the Prime Minister's recommendation. At the same time the President will have to appoint them, so he will have no right to turn down the candidates approved by the Parliament." This implies the State Duma will be able to exercise a veto over ministers' performance with votes of no-confidence the president cannot override. This is not yet certain.

Also unclear is who would prevail if the president decides to dismiss the government which holds the confidence of parliament. Putin said he proposes to keep "the right to dismiss the prime minister, his deputies and federal ministers in case of improper execution of duties or due to loss of trust." The constitution is silent on the terms, improper execution and loss of trust. They are powder the president aims to keep dry for himself.

The Kremlin has immediately convened what it calls a "working group on drafting proposals for amendments to the Constitution". No elected constitutional convention; no constitutional assembly provided for in Chapter 9 of the present charter; no principle of representation; no decision or voting rules for the novel body. It was hand-picked by the President's staff -- "75 politicians, legislators, scholars and public figures". The Kremlin has published photographs, but no list of the names yet.

The oligarch class, as Putin calls them, is represented by Alexander Shokhin (centre picture above, left); the working class – to whom no one refers – is represented by the man seated by the Kremlin next to Shokhin, Mikhail Shmakov, head of the trade union federation.

Noone in uniform is seated at the Kremlin table. The military appears to have one seat; that's occupied by retired Army General Boris Gromov (above right), 76, now titled "Chairman of the Brothers in Arms National Veteran Public Organisation". Gromov's political career after the Army rules him out as representing the General Staff or the Defence Ministry.

Putin's proposals create a fork in the balance of power by assigning domestic policy-making, including the budget, to the parliament's appointees to government; while reserving defence, military, and security powers, and their budgets, to the executive. "The president also exercises direct command over the Armed Forces and the entire law enforcement system. In this regard, I believe another step is necessary to provide a greater balance between the branches of power. In this connection, point six: I propose that the president should appoint heads of all security agencies following consultations with the Federation Council."

This preserves the imbalance – Putin's terminology -- let's say concentration of policy-making and enforcement powers in the Kremlin; it also guards the incumbent president during the transition between now and 2024, as well as afterwards. "I believe," said Putin, "this approach will make the work of security and law enforcement agencies more transparent and accountable to citizens." The Russian public opinion polls are very sceptical.

The first test of what this step will mean in practice will be the names of the new ministers of defence, internal affairs, foreign affairs, the Federal Security Service, the intelligence agencies, and the two state law enforcement organs, the Prosecutor-General and the Investigative Committee. In the small print of Putin's speech, he proposes to centralize authority even more than the present by reducing the power of regional authorities to control their prosecutors. "I am confident that a greater independence of prosecution agencies from local authorities would be beneficial for citizens regardless of the region," Putin said. Public distrust of both federal and regional prosecutors, recorded in the polls, suggests otherwise.

The Putin scheme also creates a competing source of legislative power by expanding the State Council , hitherto a talking shop; and by expanding the powers of the Constitutional Court to rule, on the Kremlin's application, against parliament, as well as against regional governors and regional parliaments.

The State Council in its last Kremlin session, December 26, 2019. In his speech on Wednesday Putin proposed to "cardinally increase the role of governors in decision-making at the federal level . As you know, back in 2000 the State Council was restored at my initiative, where the heads of all regions participate. Over the past period the State Council has proven its high effectiveness; its working groups provide for the professional, comprehensive and qualified examination of issues that are most important for people and Russia. I believe it would be appropriate to fix the status and role of the State Council in the Russian Constitution." On Thursday he ignored the State Council by appointing a different group to consider the constitutional amendments. No Russian commentator has published the question, why

In theory, Putin is creating more checks and balances than have existed before . Differences of view and interest between experts, parties, factions, the military, and classes – Putin's term – are inevitable and natural. The vote to adopt the proposals will, however, be an all-or-nothing one. "I believe it necessary to hold a vote of Russian citizens on the entire package of the proposed amendments to the Constitution of the Russian Federation. The final decision must be made only on the basis of its results," the president concluded in his speech.

This looks like a referendum, but Article 136 of the current Constitution is ambiguous. The 2008 amendments to the Constitution were adopted , not by referendum but by votes of the State Duma and the Federation Council. There has been no referendum under the present constitution.

How much of the proposed scheme is a fine distinction of powers without a change in their division? Putin told Medvedev at the meeting with the outgoing ministers:

"There is a clear-cut presidential block of issues, and there is a Government block of issues, even though the President, of course, is responsible for everything, but the presidential block includes primarily matters of security, defence and the like. Mr Medvedev has always been in charge of these matters. From the point of view of increasing our defence capability and security, I consider it possible and have asked him to deal with these matters in the future. I consider it possible and will, in the near future, introduce the position of Deputy Chairman of the Security Council. As you are aware, the President is its Chairman. If we need to amend the applicable law, I will do so soon and I want State Duma deputies to support this as well. We just need the lawyers to provide assessments on this account."

Sources in Russian business and government interpret Medvedev's new job as a gold-plated watch -- consolation prize for losing the presidential succession race. Sources are unanimous in judging what has happened to be the liquidation of the Medvedev faction.

Politically, the rationale is obvious. Public disapproval of the government's performance, and the stress which the ongoing US war is inflicting on Russia's domestic growth, have been showing a consistent trend.

It is equally clear that the Medvedev faction, and also the pro-American supporters behind Alexei Kudrin at the Accounting Chamber, German Gref at Sberbank, and Anatoly Chubais at the state high-technology conglomerate Rusnano, are the short-term losers of the reorganisation Putin has proposed. The short-term gainers are not so obvious. Sources among them ask why the Kremlin staff calculated that a renovation of the government ministers should be dressed up as a constitutional reform.

These sources suggest that on the sincerity test, Putin's proposals will not be believed for what he says they are. They add they are encouraged, also hopeful, that he is acting now to restrict the damage that faction-fighting over the succession can do over the next three years. Liquidating one of the factions has been an option advocated by many for some time. On the other hand, the sources point out that if Putin were sincere in his commitment to enhanced power-sharing with the parliamentary political parties, why sack the present prime minister now, and not wait for the State Duma to vote its approval for the new man under the new rules? This is a question which answers itself, most Russians think.

By the war test -- how the proposals will affect the regime-change strategy of the US and NATO – the combination of constitutional plans and the replacement of Medvedev by Mikhail Mishustin (lead image, in car next to Putin) is judged to be no gain, no concession to the other side. Not yet.

That leaves the poll test. To choose Mishustin to become the prime minister is the biggest surprise of the week , and a curious selection to win public approval. If Gogol were to use the name, he would be tagging its possessor with something like the caricature, "busy baker", since to the Russian ear, the roots of the word suggest someone who makes his living mixing things, like a baker; and who is visibly busy at that work. Mishustin himself likes to identify his recreation as ice-hockey. On the rink he plays forward and back, but not goalie.

Left: Mikhail Mishustin makes his nomination speech at the State Duma, his debut as a national political figure. Watch the speech , which was read from a paper script and lacked direct eye or any other personal contact with the deputies. They responded to the speech with brief, tepid applause. Right: Mishustin in his hockey uniform

The Russian biographic record for Mishustin, records his long technocratic training in computer science and economics; his PhD was on tax administration. He first started in state tax agency in 1998.

A 53-year old native of Moscow, Mishustin is reported to be part-Armenian by origin ; his Soviet birth certificate may indicate that at birth one of his parents held Armenian nationality. If so, he would automatically hold Armenian citizenship . According to Putin's constitutional proposals, the prime minister and other senior officials may "have no foreign citizenship or residence permit or any other document that allows them to live permanently in a foreign state."

A protégé of Boris Fyodorov in the Yeltsin-era finance administration, Mishustin spent a brief period, 2008-2010, working in the Moscow investment banking business of UFG Partners, first established by Fyodorov. By the time Mishustin arrived, the company was owned by Deutsche Bank and run by Charles Ryan, an American; Fyodorov died of a stroke a few months into Mishustin's term at UFG. In April 2010, Mishustin returned to run the tax agency, and he has remained there for a decade. Tax evasion and embezzlement of value added tax (VAT) fill the kompromat records which have been published about Mishustin over this period.

Mishustin told the State Duma yesterday he is in favour of reducing the regulatory burden on Russian business. The Communist Party faction announced it would abstain from voting to confirm the prime minister because it was impossible to know what policies he stands for. Suspicion that Mishustin will try to cut social welfare benefits is widespread. The confirmation vote was 383 in favour; 41 abstentions; no one opposed. For the record of the Duma vote, read this .

One oligarch vote of confidence in Mishustin has been announced. Vladimir Lisin , head of the Novolipetsk steel and coal-mining group, told a Moscow newspaper: "We evaluate Mikhail Mishustin's work as head of the Federal Tax Service positively. Under his leadership, the service increased tax collection, virtually eliminated schemes used by unscrupulous businesses in competition, and reduced the number of on-site inspections several times by introducing a risk-based approach. Despite the fact that we had quite difficult debates, we always found a common
civilized solution."

Mishustin has appeared only once before this week in Putin's Kremlin office. That was on November 21, 2016, Tax Workers' Day. In their meeting Mishustin's recital of his agency's performance was unexceptional. Putin said nothing out of the ordinary. In the Russian photo archive for Mishustin, not one picture shows a smile on his face. A reluctant grin he managed for his last birthday, March 3, 2019, according to the Russian Ice Hockey Federation.

Putin has selected factotums before, men whose technical expertise was their asset, along with their lack of political constituency and electoral ambition. Mikhail Fradkov was the first, between 2004 and 2008; Victor Zubkov the second, between 2007 and 2008. When Putin appointed them, they made no changes to the power ministries. Mishustin is the third in this line. If he announces the end of the long terms in office of Sergei Shoigu and Sergei Lavrov, and General Valery Gerasimov is replaced at the General Staff, then Putin is deciding much more than he has admitted so far.

Source: Dances With Bears

[Jan 21, 2020] The Middle East Strategic "Balance" Shredded -- Strategic Culture

Jan 21, 2020 | www.strategic-culture.org

The U.S. was having some success with turning protest messaging against Iran – until, that is – its killing and wounding of so many Iraqi security force members last week (Ketaib Hizbullah is a part of Iraq's armed forces).

Escalation of maximum-pressure was one thing (Iran was confident of weathering that); but assassinating such a senior official on his state duties, was quite something else. We have not observed a state assassinating a most senior official of another state before.

And the manner of its doing, was unprecedented too. Soleimani was officially visiting Iraq. He arrived openly as a VIP guest from Syria, and was met on the tarmac by an equally senior Iraqi official, Al-Muhandis, who was assassinated also, (together with seven others). It was all open. General Soleimani regularly used his mobile phone as he argued that as a senior state official, if he were to be assassinated by another state, it would only be as an act of war.

This act, performed at the international airport of Baghdad, constitutes not just the sundering of red lines, but a humiliation inflicted on Iraq – its government and people. It will upend Iraq's strategic positioning. The erstwhile Iraqi attempt at balancing between Washington and Iran will be swept away by Trump's hubristic trampling on the country's sovereignty. It may well mark the beginning of the end of the U.S. presence in Iraq (and therefore Syria, too), and ultimately, of America's footprint in the Middle East.

Trump may earn easy plaudits now for his "We're America, Bitch!", as one senior White House official defined the Trump foreign policy doctrine; but the doubts – and unforeseen consequences soon may come home to roost.

Why did he do it? If no one really wanted 'war', why did Trump escalate and smash up all the crockery? He has had an easy run (so far) towards re-election, so why play the always unpredictable 'wild card' of a yet another Mid-East conflict?

Was it that he wanted to show 'no Benghazi'; no U.S. embassy siege 'on my watch' – unlike Obama's handling of that situation? Was he persuaded that these assassinations would play well to his constituency (Israeli and Evangelical)? Or was he offered this option baldly by the Netanyahu faction in Washington? Maybe.

Some in Israel are worried about a three or four front war reaching Israel. Senior Israeli officials recently have been speculating about the likelihood of regional conflict occurring within the coming months. Israel's PM however, is fighting for his political life, and has requested immunity from prosecution on three indictments – pleading that this was his legal right, and that it was needed for him to "continue to lead Israel" for the sake of its future. Effectively, Netanyahu has nothing to lose from escalating tensions with Iran -- but much to gain.

Opposition Israeli political and military leaders have warned that the PM needs 'war' with Iran -- effectively to underscore the country's 'need' for his continued leadership. And for technical reasons in the Israeli parliament, his plea is unlikely to be settled before the March general elections. Netanyahu thus may still have some time to wind up the case for his continued tenure of the premiership.

One prime factor in the Israeli caution towards Iran rests not so much on the waywardness of Netanyahu, but on the inconstancy of President Trump: Can it be guaranteed that the U.S. will back Israel unreservedly -- were it to again to become enmeshed in a Mid-East war? The Israeli and Gulf answer seemingly is 'no'. The import of this assessment is significant. Trump now is seen by some in Israel – and by some insiders in Washington – as a threat to Israel's future security vis à vis Iran. Was Trump aware of this? Was this act a gamble to guarantee no slippage in that vital constituency in the lead up to the U.S. elections? We do not know.

So we arrive at three final questions: How far will Iran absorb this new escalation? Will Iran confine its retaliation to within Iraq? Or will the U.S. cross another 'red line' by striking inside Iran itself, in any subsequent tit for tat?

Is it deliberate (or is it political autism) that makes Secretary Pompeo term all the Iraqi Hash'd a-Sha'abi forces – whether or not part of official Iraqi forces – as "Iran-led"? The term seems to be used as a laissez-passer to attack all the many Hash'd a-Sha'abi units on the grounds that, being "Iran-linked", they therefore count as 'terrorist forces'. This formulation gives rise to the false sequitur that all other Iraqis would somehow approve of the killings. This would be laughable, if it were not so serious. The Hash'd forces led the war against ISIS and are esteemed by the vast majority of Iraqis. And Soleimani was on the ground at the front line, with those Iraqi forces.

These forces are not Iranian 'proxies'. They are Iraqi nationalists who share a common Shi'a identity with their co-religionists in Iran, and across the region. They share a common zeitgeist, they see politics similarly, but they are no puppets (we write from direct experience).

But what this formulation does do is to invite a widening conflict: Many Iraqis will be outraged by the U.S. attacks on fellow Iraqis and will revenge them. Pompeo (falsely) will then blame Iran. Is that Pompeo's purpose: casus belli?

But where is the off-ramp? Iran will respond Is this affair simply set to escalate from limited military exchanges and from thence, to escalate until what? We understand that this was not addressed in Washington before the President's decision was made. There are no real U.S. channels of communication (other than low level) with Iran; nor is there a plan for the next days. Nor an obvious exit. Is Trump relying on gut instinct again?

[Jan 21, 2020] The Many Matryoska Dolls to America's Way of Imagining Iran -- Strategic Culture

Notable quotes:
"... The Open Society and its Enemies ..."
"... "Since President Donald Trump ordered the drone strike that killed [Soleimani – justified in terms of deterrence, and allegedly halting an attack] a handful of Trump's advisers, however, [espied another] strategic benefit to killing Soleimani: Call it regime disruption ..."
"... "The case for disruption is outlined in a series of unclassified memos sent to [John Bolton]in May and June 2019 their author, David Wurmser, is a longtime adviser to Bolton who then served as a consultant to the National Security Council. Wurmser argues that Iran is in the midst of a legitimacy crisis. Its leadership, he writes, is divided between camps that seek an apocalyptic return of the Hidden Imam, and those that favour of the preservation of the Islamic Republic. All the while, many Iranians have grown disgusted with the regime's incompetence and corruption. ..."
"... "Wurmser's crucial insight [is that] – were unexpected, rule-changing actions taken against Iran, it would confuse the regime. It would need to scramble," he writes. Such a U.S. attack would "rattle the delicate internal balance of forces and the control over them upon which the regime depends for stability and survival." Such a moment of confusion, Wurmser writes, will create momentary paralysis -- and the perception among the Iranian public that its leaders are weak. ..."
"... "Wurmser's memos show that the Trump administration has been debating the blow against Soleimani since the current crisis began, some seven months ago After Iran downed a U.S. drone [in June], Wurmser advised Bolton that the U.S. response should be overt and designed to send a message that the U.S. holds the Iranian regime, not the Iranian people, responsible. "This could even involve something as a targeted strike on someone like Soleimani or his top deputies," Wurmser wrote in a June 22 memo. ..."
"... In these memos, Wurmser is careful to counsel against a ground invasion of Iran. He says the U.S. response "does not need to be boots on the ground (in fact, it should not be)." Rather, he stresses that the U.S. response should be calibrated to exacerbate the regime's domestic legitimacy crisis. ..."
"... Coping with Crumbling States ..."
"... Clean Break ..."
Jan 21, 2020 | www.strategic-culture.org

lastair Crooke January 20, 2020 © Photo: Flickr / DonkeyHotey On the 17 September 1656, Oliver Cromwell, a Protestant Puritan, who had won a civil war, and had the English king beheaded in public, railed against England's enemies. There was, he told Parliament that day, an axis of evil abroad in the world. And this axis – led by Catholic Spain – was, at root, the problem of a people that had placed themselves at the service of 'evil'. This 'evil', and the servitude that it beget, was the evil of a religion – Catholicism – that refused the English peoples' desire for simple liberties: " [an evil] that put men under restraint under which there was no freedom and under which, there could be 'no liberty of individual consciousness'".

That was how the English protestant leader saw Catholic Spain in 1656. And it is very close to how key orientations in the U.S. sees Iran today : The evil of religion – of Shi'ism – subjecting (they believe) Iranians to repression, and to serfdom. In Europe, this ideological struggle against the 'evil' of an imposed religious community (the Holy 'Roman' Axis, then) brought Europe to 'near-Armageddon', with the worst affected parts of Europe seeing their population decimated by up to 60% during the conflict.

Is this faction in the U.S. now intent on invoking a new, near-Armageddon – on this occasion, in the Middle East – in order, like Cromwell, to destroy the religious 'community known' as the Shi'a Resistance Axis, seen to stretch across the region, in order to preserve the Jewish "peoples' desire for simple liberties"?

Of course, today's leaders of this ideological faction are no longer Puritan Protestants (though the Christian Evangelicals are at one with Cromwell's 'Old Testament' literalism and prophesy). No, its lead ideologues are the neo-conservatives, who have leveraged Karl Popper's hugely influential The Open Society and its Enemies – a seminal treatise, which to a large extent, has shaped how many Americans imagine their 'world'. Popper's was history understood as a series of attempts, by the forces of reaction, to smother an open society with the weapons of traditional religion and traditional culture:

Marx and Russia were cast as the archetypal reactionary threat to open societies. This construct was taken up by Reagan, and re-connected to the Christian apocalyptic tradition (hence the neo-conservative coalition with Evangelists yearning for Redemption , and with liberal interventionists, yearning for a secular millenarianism). All concur that Iran is reactionary, and furthermore, the posit, poses a grave threat to Israel's self-proclaimed 'open society'.

The point here is that there is little point in arguing with these people that Iran poses no threat to the U.S. (which is obvious) – for the 'project' is ideological through and through. It has to be understood by these lights. Popper's purpose was to propose that only liberal globalism would bring about a "growing measure of humane and enlightened life" and a free and open society – period.

All this is but the outer Matryoshka – a suitable public rhetoric, a painted image – that can be used to encase the secret, inner dolls. Eli Lake, writing in Bloomberg , however, gives away the next doll:

"Since President Donald Trump ordered the drone strike that killed [Soleimani – justified in terms of deterrence, and allegedly halting an attack] a handful of Trump's advisers, however, [espied another] strategic benefit to killing Soleimani: Call it regime disruption

"The case for disruption is outlined in a series of unclassified memos sent to [John Bolton]in May and June 2019 their author, David Wurmser, is a longtime adviser to Bolton who then served as a consultant to the National Security Council. Wurmser argues that Iran is in the midst of a legitimacy crisis. Its leadership, he writes, is divided between camps that seek an apocalyptic return of the Hidden Imam, and those that favour of the preservation of the Islamic Republic. All the while, many Iranians have grown disgusted with the regime's incompetence and corruption.

"Wurmser's crucial insight [is that] – were unexpected, rule-changing actions taken against Iran, it would confuse the regime. It would need to scramble," he writes. Such a U.S. attack would "rattle the delicate internal balance of forces and the control over them upon which the regime depends for stability and survival." Such a moment of confusion, Wurmser writes, will create momentary paralysis -- and the perception among the Iranian public that its leaders are weak.

"Wurmser's memos show that the Trump administration has been debating the blow against Soleimani since the current crisis began, some seven months ago After Iran downed a U.S. drone [in June], Wurmser advised Bolton that the U.S. response should be overt and designed to send a message that the U.S. holds the Iranian regime, not the Iranian people, responsible. "This could even involve something as a targeted strike on someone like Soleimani or his top deputies," Wurmser wrote in a June 22 memo.

In these memos, Wurmser is careful to counsel against a ground invasion of Iran. He says the U.S. response "does not need to be boots on the ground (in fact, it should not be)." Rather, he stresses that the U.S. response should be calibrated to exacerbate the regime's domestic legitimacy crisis.

So there it is – David Wurmser is the 'doll' within: no military invasion, but just a strategy to blow apart the Iranian Republic. Wurmser, Eli Lake reveals, has quietly been advising Bolton and the Trump Administration all along. This was the neo-con, who in 1996, compiled Coping with Crumbling States (which flowed on from the infamous Clean Break policy strategy paper, written for Netanyahu, as a blueprint for destructing Israel's enemies). Both these papers advocated the overthrow of the Secular-Arab nationalist states – excoriated both as "crumbling relics of the 'evil' USSR" (using Popperian language, of course) – and inherently hostile to Israel (the real message).

Well ( big surprise ), Wurmser has now been at work as the author of how to 'implode' and destroy Iran. And his insight? "A targeted strike on someone like Soleimani"; split the Iranian leadership into warring factions; cut an open wound into the flesh of Iran's domestic legitimacy; put a finger into that open wound, and twist it; disrupt – and pretend that the U.S. sides with the Iranian people, against its government.

Eli Lake seems, in his Bloomberg piece, to think that the Wurmser strategy has worked. Really? The problem here is that narratives in Washington are so far apart from the reality that exists on the ground – they simply do not touch at any point. Millions attended Soleimani's cortege. His killing gave a renewed cohesion to Iran. Little more than a dribble have protested.

Now let us unpack the next 'doll': Trump bought into Wurmser's 'play', albeit, with Trump subsequently admitting that he did the assassination under intense pressure from Republican Senators. Maybe he believed the patently absurd narrative that Iranians would 'be dancing in the street' at Soleimani's killing. In any event, Trump is not known, exactly, for admitting his mistakes. Rather, when something is portrayed as his error, the President adopts the full 'salesman' persona: trying to convince his base that the murder was no error, but a great strategic success – "They like us", Trump claimed of protestors in Iran.

Tom Luongo has observed : "Trump's impeachment trial in the Senate begins next week, and it's clear that this will not be a walk in the park for the President. Anyone dismissing this because the Republicans hold the Senate, simply do not understand why this impeachment exists in the first place. It is [occurring because it offers] the ultimate form of leverage over a President whose desire to end the wars in the Middle East is anathema to the entrenched powers in the D.C. Swamp." Ah, so here we arrive at another inner Matryoshka.

This is Luongo's point: Impeachment was the leverage to drive open a wedge between Republican neo-conservatives in the Senate – and Trump. And now the Pelosi pressure on Republican Senators is escalating . The Establishment threw cold water over Trump's assertion of imminent attack, as justification for murdering Soleimani, and Trump responds by painting himself further into a corner on Iran – by going the full salesman 'monte'.

On the campaign trail, the President goes way over-the-top, calling Soleimani a "son of a b -- -", who killed 'thousands' and furthermore was responsible for every U.S. veteran who lost a limb in Iraq. And he then conjures up a fantasy picture of protesters pouring onto the streets of Tehran, tearing down images of Soleimani, and screaming abuse at the Iranian leadership.

It is nonsense. There are no mass protests (there have been a few hundred students protesting at one main Tehran University). But Trump has dived in pretty deep, now threatening the Euro-Three signatories to the JCPOA, that unless they brand Iran as having defaulted on JCPOA at the UNSC disputes mechanism, he will slap an eye-watering 25% tariff on their automobiles.

So, how will Trump avoid plunging in even deeper to conflict if – and when – Americans die in Iraq or Syria at the hands of militia – and when Pompeo or Lindsay Graham will claim, baldly, 'Iran's proxies did it'? Sending emollient faxes to the Swiss to pass to Tehran will not do. Tehran will not read them, or believe them, even if they did.

It all reeks of stage-management; a set up: a very clever stage-management, designed to end with the U.S. crossing Iran's 'red line', by striking at a target within Iranian territory. Here, finally, we arrive at the innermost doll.

Cui bono ? Some Senators who never liked Trump, and would prefer Pence as President; the Democrats, who would prefer to run their candidate against Pence in November, rather than Trump. But also, as someone who once worked with Wurmser observed tartly: when you hear that name (Wurmser), immediately you think Netanyahu, his intimate associate.

Matryoshka herself?

[Jan 21, 2020] At the start of a new decade, Merkel seems to be on the wrong side of history

Neoliberals are mostly neocons and neocons are mostly neoliberals. They can't understand the importance of Brexit and the first real crack in neoliberal globalization facade.
She really was on the wrong side of history: a tragedy for a politician. EU crumles with the end of her political career which was devoted to straightening EU and neoliberalism, as well as serving as the USA vassal. While she was sucessful in extracting benefits for Germany multinationals she increased Germany dependency (and subservience) on the USA. She also will be remembered for her handing of Greece crisis.
Notable quotes:
"... The UK's departure will continue to hang over Brussels and Berlin -- the countdown for a trade deal will coincide with Germany's presidency of the EU in the second half of this year. ..."
"... Brexit is a "wake-up call" for the EU. Europe must, she says, respond by upping its game, becoming "attractive, innovative, creative, a good place for research and education . . . Competition can then be very productive." This is why the EU must continue to reform, completing the digital single market, progressing with banking union -- a plan to centralise the supervision and crisis management of European banks -- and advancing capital markets union to integrate Europe's fragmented equity and debt markets. ..."
"... its defence budget has increased by 40 per cent since 2015, which is "a huge step from Germany's perspective". ..."
"... Ms Merkel will doubtless be remembered for two bold moves that changed Germany -- ordering the closure of its nuclear power stations after the Fukushima disaster of 2011, and keeping the country's borders open at the height of the 2015 refugee crisis. That decision was her most controversial, and there are some in Germany who still won't forgive her for it. But officials say Germany survived the influx, and has integrated the more than 1m migrants who arrived in 2015-16. ..."
Jan 21, 2020 | www.ft.com

It's a grim winter's day in Berlin, and the political climate matches the weather. Everywhere Angela Merkel looks there are storm clouds, as the values she has upheld all her career come under sustained attack. At the start of a new decade, Europe's premier stateswoman suddenly seems to be on the wrong side of history.Shortly, the UK will leave the EU. A volatile US president is snubbing allies and going it alone in the Middle East. Vladimir Putin is changing the Russian constitution and meddling in Libya and sub-Saharan Africa. Trade tensions continue, threatening the open borders and globalised value chains that are the cornerstones of Germany's prosperity.

Ms Merkel, a former physicist renowned for her imperturbable, rational manner is a politician programmed for compromise. But today she faces an uncompromising world where liberal principles have been shoved aside by the law of the jungle.

Her solution is to double down on Europe, Germany's anchor. "I see the European Union as our life insurance," she says. "Germany is far too small to exert geopolitical influence on its own, and that's why we need to make use of all the benefits of the single market."

Speaking in the chancellery's Small Cabinet Room, an imposing wood-panelled hall overlooking Berlin's Tiergarten park, Ms Merkel does not come across as under pressure. She is calm, if somewhat cagey, weighing every word and seldom displaying emotion.

But the message she conveys in a rare interview is nonetheless urgent. In the twilight of her career -- her fourth and final term ends in 2021 -- Ms Merkel is determined to preserve and defend multilateralism, a concept that in the age of Trump, Brexit and a resurgent Russia has never seemed so embattled. This is the "firm conviction" that guides her: the pursuit of "the best win-win situations . . . when partnerships of benefit to both sides are put into practice worldwide". She admits that this idea is coming "under increasing pressure". The system of supranational institutions like the EU and United Nations were, she says, "essentially a lesson learnt from the second world war, and the preceding decades". Now, with so few witnesses of the war still alive, the importance of that lesson is fading.

Of course President Donald Trump is right that bodies like the World Trade Organization and the UN require reform. "There is no doubt whatsoever about any of that," she says. "But I do not call the world's multilateral structure into question. "Germany has been the great beneficiary of Nato, an enlarged EU and globalisation. Free trade has opened up vast new markets for its world-class cars, machines and chemicals. Sheltered under the US nuclear umbrella, Germany has barely spared a thought for its own security. But the rise of "Me First" nationalism threatens to leave it economically and politically unmoored. In this sense, Europe is existential for German interests, as well as its identity.

Ms Merkel therefore wants to strengthen the EU -- an institution that she, perhaps more than any other living politician, has come to personify. She steered Europe through the eurozone debt crisis, albeit somewhat tardily: she held Europe together as it imposed sanctions on Russia over the annexation of Crimea; she maintained unity in response to the trauma of Brexit.

The UK's departure will continue to hang over Brussels and Berlin -- the countdown for a trade deal will coincide with Germany's presidency of the EU in the second half of this year. Berlin worries a post-Brexit UK that reserves the right to diverge from EU rules on goods, workers' rights, taxes and environmental standards could create a serious economic competitor on its doorstep. But Ms Merkel remains a cautious optimist. Brexit is a "wake-up call" for the EU. Europe must, she says, respond by upping its game, becoming "attractive, innovative, creative, a good place for research and education . . . Competition can then be very productive." This is why the EU must continue to reform, completing the digital single market, progressing with banking union -- a plan to centralise the supervision and crisis management of European banks -- and advancing capital markets union to integrate Europe's fragmented equity and debt markets.

In what sounds like a new European industrial policy, Ms Merkel also says the EU should identify the technological capabilities it lacks and move fast to fill in the gaps. "I believe that chips should be manufactured in the European Union, that Europe should have its own hyperscalers and that it should be possible to produce battery cells," she says. It must also have the confidence to set the new global digital standards. She cites the example of the General Data Protection Regulation, which supporters see as a gold standard for privacy and proof that the EU can become a rulemaker, rather than a rule taker, when it comes to the digital economy. Europe can offer an alternative to the US and Chinese approach to data. "I firmly believe that personal data does not belong to the state or to companies," she says. "It must be ensured that the individual has sovereignty over their own data and can decide with whom and for what purpose they share it."

The continent's scale and diversity also make it hard to reach a consensus on reform. Europe is deeply split: the migration crisis of 2015 opened up a chasm between the liberal west and countries like Viktor Orban's Hungary which has not healed. Even close allies like Germany and France have occasionally locked horns: Berlin's cool response to Emmanuel Macron's reform initiatives back in 2017 triggered anger in Paris, while the French president's unilateral overture to Mr Putin last year provoked irritation in Berlin. And when it comes to reform of the eurozone, divisions still exist between fiscally challenged southern Europeans and the fiscally orthodox new Hanseatic League of northern countries.

Ms Merkel remains to a degree hostage to German public opinion. Germany, she admits, is still "slightly hesitant" on banking union, "because our principle is that everyone first needs to reduce the risks in their own country today before we can mutualise the risks". And capital markets union might require member states to seek closer alignment on things like insolvency law. These divisions pale in comparison to the gulf between Europe and the US under president Donald Trump. Germany has become the administration's favourite punching bag, lambasted for its relatively low defence spending, big current account surplus and imports of Russian gas. German business dreads Mr Trump making good on his threat to impose tariffs on European cars.

It is painful for Ms Merkel, whose career took off after unification. In an interview last year she described how, while coming of age in communist East Germany, she yearned to make a classic American road trip: "See the Rocky Mountains, drive around and listen to Bruce Springsteen -- that was my dream," she told Der Spiegel.

The poor chemistry between Ms Merkel and Mr Trump has been widely reported. But are the latest tensions in the German-US relationship just personal -- or is there more to it? "I think it has structural causes," she says. For years now, Europe and Germany have been slipping down the US's list of priorities.

"There's been a shift," she says. "President Obama already spoke about the Asian century, as seen from the US perspective. This also means that Europe is no longer, so to say, at the centre of world events."She adds: "The United States' focus on Europe is declining -- that will be the case under any president."The answer? "We in Europe, and especially in Germany, need to take on more responsibility."

Germany has vowed to meet the Nato target of spending 2 per cent of GDP on defence by the start of the 2030s. Ms Merkel admits that for those alliance members which have already reached the 2 per cent goal, "naturally this is not enough". But there's no denying Germany has made substantial progress on the issue: its defence budget has increased by 40 per cent since 2015, which is "a huge step from Germany's perspective".

Ms Merkel insists the transatlantic relationship "remains crucial for me, particularly as regards fundamental questions concerning values and interests in the world". Yet Europe should also develop its own military capability. There may be regions outside Nato's primary focus where "Europe must -- if necessary -- be prepared to get involved. I see Africa as one example," she says.

Defence is hardly the sole bone of contention with the US. Trade is a constant irritation. Berlin watched with alarm as the US and China descended into a bitter trade war in 2018: it still fears becoming collateral damage.

"Can the European Union come under pressure between America and China? That can happen, but we can also try to prevent it. "Germany has few illusions about China. German officials and businesspeople are just as incensed as their US counterparts by China's theft of intellectual property, its unfair investment practices, state-sponsored cyber-hacking and human rights abuses in regions like Xinjiang.

Once seen as a strategic partner, China is increasingly viewed in Berlin as a systemic rival. But Berlin has no intention of emulating the US policy of "decoupling" -- cutting its diplomatic, commercial and financial ties with China. Instead, Ms Merkel has staunchly defended Berlin's close relationship with Beijing. She says she would "advise against regarding China as a threat simply because it is economically successful".

"As was the case in Germany, [China's] rise is largely based on hard work, creativity and technical skills," she says. Of course there is a need to "ensure that trade relations are fair". China's economic strength and geopolitical ambitions mean it is a rival to the US and Europe. But the question is: "Do we in Germany and Europe want to dismantle all interconnected global supply chains . . . because of this economic competition?" She adds: "In my opinion, complete isolation from China cannot be the answer."Her plea for dialogue and co-operation has set her on a collision course with some in her own party.

China hawks in her Christian Democratic Union share US mistrust of Huawei, the Chinese telecoms equipment group, fearing it could be used by Beijing to conduct cyber espionage or sabotage. Ms Merkel has pursued a more conciliatory line. Germany should tighten its security requirements towards all telecoms providers and diversify suppliers "so that we never make ourselves dependent on one firm" in 5G. But "I think it is wrong to simply exclude someone per se," she says.

The rise of China has triggered concern over Germany's future competitiveness. And that economic "angst" finds echoes in the febrile politics of Ms Merkel's fourth term. Her "grand coalition" with the Social Democrats is wracked by squabbling. The populist Alternative for Germany is now established in all 16 of the country's regional parliaments. A battle has broken out for the post-Merkel succession, with a crop of CDU heavy-hitters auditioning for the top job.

Many in the political elite worry about waning international influence in the final months of the Merkel era.While she remains one of the country's most popular politicians, Germans are asking what her legacy will be. For many of her predecessors, that question is easy to answer: Konrad Adenauer anchored postwar Germany in the west; Willy Brandt ushered in detente with the Soviet Union; Helmut Kohl was the architect of German reunification. So how will Ms Merkel be remembered?

Vladimir Putin: liberalism has 'outlived its purpose'

She brushes away the question. "I don't think about my role in history -- I do my job." But what about critics who say the Merkel era was mere durchwurschteln -- muddling through? That word, she says, in a rare flash of irritation, "isn't part of my vocabulary". Despite her reputation for gradualism and caution, Ms Merkel will doubtless be remembered for two bold moves that changed Germany -- ordering the closure of its nuclear power stations after the Fukushima disaster of 2011, and keeping the country's borders open at the height of the 2015 refugee crisis. That decision was her most controversial, and there are some in Germany who still won't forgive her for it. But officials say Germany survived the influx, and has integrated the more than 1m migrants who arrived in 2015-16.

She prefers to single out less visible changes. Germany is much more engaged in the world: just look, she says, at the Bundeswehr missions in Africa and Afghanistan. During the Kohl era, even the idea of dispatching a ship to the Adriatic to observe the war in Yugoslavia was controversial. She also mentions efforts to end the war in Ukraine, its role in the Iran nuclear deal, its assumption of ever more "diplomatic, and increasingly also military responsibility". "It may become more in future, but we are certainly on the right path," she says.

The Merkel era has been defined by crisis but thanks to her stewardship most Germans have rarely had it so good. The problem is the world expects even more of a powerful, prosperous Germany and its next chancellor.Letter in response to this article:At last, I understand Brexit's real purpose / From John Beadsmoore, Great Wilbraham, Cambs, UK

[Jan 21, 2020] Russia Asks OPCW to Meet to Resolve Issues Over Report on Chemical Use in Syria Envoy - Sputnik International

Notable quotes:
"... Reports about an alleged chemical attack in Eastern Ghouta's Duma emerged on April 7, 2018. The European Union and the United States promptly accused Damascus of being behind it, while the Syrian government denied any involvement. Syria and Russia, a close ally of the former, said that the attack was staged by local militants and the White Helmets group. ..."
"... A week later, without waiting for the results of an international investigation, the United States, the United Kingdom and France hit what they called Syria's chemical weapons facilities with over 100 missiles in response to the reported attack. ..."
Jan 21, 2020 | sputniknews.com

Russia urged to convene a briefing with the participation of OPCW Fact-Finding-Mission (FFM) experts, who worked on the report on alleged chemical attack in Syria's Duma in April 2018, to reach an agreement on this controversial case, Alexander Shulgin, Russia's envoy to OPCW, said at a Security Council meeting. On Monday, members of the UN Security Council, at the request of the Russian mission, held an informal meeting to assess the situation around the FMM's Final Report on the incident in the Arab Republic .

In November, whistleblowing website WikiLeaks published an email, sent by a member of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) mission to Syria to his superiors, in which he voiced his "gravest" concerns over the redacted version of the report in question, which he co-authored. According to the OPCW employee, the document, which is understood to have been edited by the secretariat, misrepresented facts, omitted certain details and introduced "unintended bias," having "morphed into something quite different to what was originally drafted."

"We once again propose to resolve the conflicting situation through the means of holding of a briefing under the auspices of the OPCW and, possibly, with the assistance of all concerned countries and with the participation of all experts of the Fact-Finding-Mission, who worked on the Duma incident, to find a consensus on this resonant incident," Shulgin said on Monday.

Shulgin also suggested that the working methods of FFM must be improved, stressing the necessity for its members to personally visit sites of alleged use of chemical weapons and collect evidence samples, as well as strictly adhere to the chain of custody over the items of evidence and guarantee geographically-balanced makeup of the mission.

In July, Shulgin said that the head of the mission probing claims of a chemical attack in Duma had never travelled to this city.

Reports about an alleged chemical attack in Eastern Ghouta's Duma emerged on April 7, 2018. The European Union and the United States promptly accused Damascus of being behind it, while the Syrian government denied any involvement. Syria and Russia, a close ally of the former, said that the attack was staged by local militants and the White Helmets group.

A week later, without waiting for the results of an international investigation, the United States, the United Kingdom and France hit what they called Syria's chemical weapons facilities with over 100 missiles in response to the reported attack.

[Jan 21, 2020] Goldstein 2.0 ISIS has a new big bad leader

Notable quotes:
"... For starters, don't be surprised if his "fortification" of ISIS means Donald Trump can't pull out of Syria after all. Or maybe if ISIS attacks on Iraqi civilians/militias result in the Iraqi parliament revoking their request for the US to remove their troops from Iraqi soil. ..."
"... There's the possibility that ISIS will start a resurgence in Libya, meaning that NATO has to get in there and sort things out. Maybe some furious ISIS fighters will be the ones who assassinate Iranian generals in future. It's much less messy that way. ..."
Jan 21, 2020 | off-guardian.org

For starters, don't be surprised if his "fortification" of ISIS means Donald Trump can't pull out of Syria after all. Or maybe if ISIS attacks on Iraqi civilians/militias result in the Iraqi parliament revoking their request for the US to remove their troops from Iraqi soil.

There's the possibility that ISIS will start a resurgence in Libya, meaning that NATO has to get in there and sort things out. Maybe some furious ISIS fighters will be the ones who assassinate Iranian generals in future. It's much less messy that way.

Or, hell, maybe we'll return to the hits of the 90s and early 2000s, and Islamic jihadists will get back to work in Chechnya.

Whatever happens, ISIS are back baby. And that means that some way, somehow, Mr al-Salbi is about to make the foreign policy goals of the United States much easier.

That's what Goldsteins are for.

harry law ,

.... The US have used Islamic state against both Syria and Iraq, [the enemy of my enemy is my friend].

There can be no doubt that the US are going to use Islamic state to disrupt Iraq, just as they had no qualms about watching [from satellites and spotter aircraft] Islamic state travel 100's of kilometres from Syria to Northern Iraq [Mosul] across the desert, whipping up tons of dust in their Toyota jeeps to put pressure on the Iraqi government. Also as they watched on with equanimity when the Islamic state transported thousands of tanker loads of oil from Syria to Turkey, that is until the Russians bombed those convoys, the US must think everyone is as stupid as they are. If the Iraqis don't drive the US out using all means including violence, they deserve to be slaves.

"Sergey Lavrov earlier called the US-led coalition's refusal to combat al-Nusra "absolutely unacceptable."

"Iraqi security expert Kazim al-Haaj said "US Army troops are preparing and training the ISIL militants in al-Qadaf and Wadi al-Houran regions of Al-Anbar province with the aim of carrying out terrorist attacks and restarting insecurity in Iraq." https://stephenlendman.org/2020/01/trump-regime-shifting-isis-terrorists-from-syria-to-iraq/

[Jan 21, 2020] Possession of a core ethnicity doesn't invariably guarantee stability or even constitute a nation

Jan 21, 2020 | www.unz.com

Weston Waroda , says: Show Comment January 18, 2020 at 5:19 pm GMT

@anonymous

The US depends upon continuation of the dollar as the world's reserve currency. Were that to be lost the US likely would descend into chaos without end. When the USSR came apart it was eventually able to downsize into the Russian state. We don't have that here; there is no core ethnicity with it's own territory left anymore, it's just a jumble. For the US it's a matter of survival.

Possession of a core ethnicity doesn't invariably guarantee stability or even constitute a nation and I don't believe this is why Russia survives as a nation today. Russia itself is a country with a great many nationalities, and there are almost as many Asian as European faces in the country. Furthermore, the Ukraine was part of the USSR, has what you term a core ethnicity, and yet has descended into chaos without end since the collapse of the USSR. Clearly, a nation consists of something other than ethnic identity, language or even religion.

The 19th century French historian Ernest Renan in a famous lecture at the time "What is a Nation" stated: "A nation is a soul, a spiritual principle A nation is therefore a large-scale solidarity, constituted by the feeling of the sacrifices that one has made in the past and of those that one is prepared to make in the future. It presupposes a past; it is summarized, however, in the present by a tangible fact, namely, consent, the clearly expressed desire to continue a common life .

"Man is a slave neither of his race nor his language, nor of his religion, nor of the course of rivers nor of the direction taken by mountain chains. A large aggregate of men, healthy in mind and warm of heart, creates the kind of moral conscience which we call a nation."

A nation is an organic entity not dependent on a common language, religion or bounded by geography. Whether or not a nation or nations survive the collapse of the American Empire will depend on the willingness of the people to live together with a shared collective memory of the past. Renan makes the point that national traumas are more unifying than national triumphs. The chaos that will surely follow the Empire's collapse will become part of the shared trauma, out of which a new nation or nations will arise, if the people so will.

https://web.archive.org/web/20110827065548/http://www.cooper.edu/humanities/core

EliteCommInc. , says: Show Comment January 18, 2020 at 11:02 pm GMT
"I see you have successfully internalized The Cuck's Credo."

I won;t speak to the explication of what nationhood is as described. But clearly skin color is not a cohesive enough glue. The white colonists comprised of varying ethnic cultures went to war against whites in great britain. And by all indications of history the whites in Europe spent more than 1800 years killing each other in country and out --

So any claim that whiteness is a cohesive glue or embodies a cohesive glue cementing nationality is thoroughly rejected by history. That anyone contends it against the evidence is peculiar.

Curmudgeon , says: Show Comment January 18, 2020 at 11:09 pm GMT
@Weston Waroda

The 19th century French historian Ernest Renan in a famous lecture at the time "What is a Nation" stated: "A nation is a soul, a spiritual principle

Why was the lecture famous? Was it because Renan decided to redefine nation?
https://www.etymonline.com/word/nation

Weston Waroda , says: Show Comment January 19, 2020 at 12:32 am GMT
@Daniel.I Oh, are you ever missing the point. What Renan wrote elsewhere, "that which makes a nation is the willingness of its members to live together," (ce qui fait une nation c'est la volunté de ses membres de vivre ensemble) cuts both ways. It not only expains why Russia successfully transitioned the fall of the USSR, while the Ukraine has not yet: the Russians chose to live together. It also explains why nationalists like you continue to choose by your own volition to identify as American despite your pissing and moaning. You and the Russians and the Ukrainians are making your own volitional choices about the nation you choose to be a member of. Those choices multiplied by the millions of inhabitants demonstrate how this is an organic process. Furthermore, Renan wrote well before the current idea of globalism had developed any traction, and he is writing from observation of history as a historian. He had no globalist agenda to promote. I have read quite a lot of what the hard right nationalists have had to say in their comments on the Unz Review, and frankly, the arguments are unconvincing. I would suggest reading the Renan lecture I posted the link to, it clears up the mess and shows a third way between you and the globalists, the way of how things really come down. It shows reality.
Oscar Peterson , says: Show Comment January 19, 2020 at 1:55 am GMT
@EliteCommInc.

So any claim that whiteness is a cohesive glue or embodies a cohesive glue cementing nationality is thoroughly rejected by history. That anyone contends it against the evidence is peculiar.

No matter what the core identity of a society, there will be at least episodic internal violence. But that doesn't mean that people don't need identity.

What identity, in your view, should the people focusing on whiteness as symbolic of their sense of belonging, be adopting?

It's obvious that being "an American" is becoming less and less psychologically satisfying. So what is the answer?

Daniel.I , says: Show Comment January 19, 2020 at 9:56 am GMT
@Weston Waroda I am Eastern European living in my homeland.
So I can see right through your ZOG-manufactured bullshit.
Daniel.I , says: Show Comment January 19, 2020 at 10:01 am GMT
@EliteCommInc. You have no idea how satisfying it is to watch the Anglo – after having forced liberalism down the throat of everyone else – finding himself on the receiving end of it.

Keep celebrating your own dissolution, cuck.

Weston Waroda , says: Show Comment January 20, 2020 at 6:36 am GMT
@Polemos The nation in Renan's thinking transcends consideration of the one and the many through a kind of political metaphysic: the nation is spiritual, the nation is a mystery. The national myth of shared trauma creates a past while organic human volition results in a spiritual recognition of both the individual and others as participants in this mystery, this nation, this Gestalt . Charles de Gaulle touched this in his benediction "vive la France eternelle," as did Ronald Reagan with the metaphor from the Gospels, "a city on a hill."
Wizard of Oz , says: Show Comment January 20, 2020 at 6:53 am GMT
@Daniel.I I get the general use by Americans to use "liberal" for what the rest of the Anglophone countries would probably call "left wing" (although I think Americans also say "neo liberalism" mraning something quite different). But I struggle to understand what you mean by "liberalism". Derived from which lot of Anglos? Thrust down throats by which lot of Anglos? I would like to learn more from you about the ideology or philosophy or political movement you are referring to.

As a prompt to leap out of a narrowly based view I note that the main conservative right of centre party which often forms Australian governments is the Liberal Party.

Vojkan , says: Show Comment January 20, 2020 at 8:07 am GMT
@Weston Waroda "A nation is an organic entity not dependent on a common language, religion or bounded by geography."

Is it to say that the German, the English, the Swede, the Polish, the Norwegians, the Danes, the Czech, the Slovak, the Italian, the Greek, the Hungarian, the Romanian, the Bulgarian, the Portuguese, the Irish, the various nations that emerged from the former Yugoslavia or the USSR are not organic entities but only the Belgian are? Is it to say that African states with borders drawn across ethnicities by colonial powers are nations? Today's France is proof of the contrary to your statement and Renan's theory. You are the one disconnected from reality as your idea of what constitutes a nation is a pure abstract disproven by empirical evidence.

Miro23 , says: Show Comment January 20, 2020 at 9:02 am GMT
@Weston Waroda

Renan makes the point that national traumas are more unifying than national triumphs.

It's interesting that the places that the Empire has been unable to control are often ex-Communist (Russia, China, Eastern Europe) which experienced national trauma, but were also outside of the Zio-Glob Empire in its critical post 1945 growth period (the map of US overseas bases).

Also, Imperial institutions like NATO are looking irrelevant. European leaders may well wonder why they're necessary. In 1945, the US was the world's leading industrial economy/ international creditor with a legitimate reserve currency – now not so much – with the US clinging onto power using violence, threats and sanctions and generally alienating everyone.

Mustapha Mond , says: Show Comment January 20, 2020 at 2:14 pm GMT
Israel is a very successful example of a strongly ethnocentric state that has its endless internal squabbles between the various groups within that identity, but yet remain fairly united against potential threats from outsiders (i.e., the"others"). This most definitely applies to the critical matter of immigration.

Wisely, they do not easily accept immigrants, except those who are proven to be of their own ilk, and they are currently exploring, via internal public dialog, whether their already relatively stringent standards are not restrictive enough. (See here: https://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/6-out-of-7-immigrants-to-Israel-not-Jewish-611842 )

They know they will be internally weakened, displaced, and ultimately, replaced if they do otherwise. They 'see the writing on the wall'.

Jews are not stupid people. It would seem equally wise for the US, Canada, and the European states to emulate their example, preserving their shared heritages and commonalities, which provide strength and unity in the face of adversities and against foreign enemies, both abroad and domestically.

What is sauce for the (jewish) goose is sauce for the (goyim) ganders .

[Jan 21, 2020] Russia A Groundbreaking Powershift by Peter Koenig

Jan 16, 2020 | dissidentvoice.org
In groundbreaking news President Putin announced today, 15 January, in his annual address to the Nation, major changes in his government. First, he announced that Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev and his entire cabinet resigned and will eventually be replaced by a new PM and a new cabinet. A timeline was not given. In the meantime, they would carry on with their functions as 'normal'. Well, how normal can this be for a group of "lame ducks"?

A second important point of Mr. Putin's speech focused on shifting power away from the Presidency to the Duma, or Parliament. The Duma shall have more power in a better balancing act between the Presidency and the voice of the people; i.e., the Parliament. The possibility of referenda, with people voting, is also foreseen. A move towards more 'democracy'. Some interpret this as a reaction to western criticism of Russia being a dictatorial state and this move should alleviate Russia from this accusation. I don't think so. Western accusations are random, when it suits them, never based on facts, but on lies.

For example, the change in government power foresees some changes in the Russian Constitution, but not a rewrite at all, as Mr. Putin stressed. The term-limitation of the Presidency should also not change, no more than two. It appears the "no more than two in a row" – should be amended, and the "in a row" deleted. That would mean, that President Putin would have to leave the Presidency definitely in 2024 when his current term is up. This may be one of those Constitutional areas to be confirmed by the Duma – or not.

But could Mr. Putin become PM and still run Russia from behind the scene as he did from 2008 – 2012, under then President Dmitry Medvedev? This was not discussed.

When PM Medvedev explained his resignation, he referred to Article 117 of the Russian Constitution, which states that the government can offer its resignation to the president, who, in turn, can either accept or reject it. Mr. Putin, of course, accepted it, thanking PM Medvedev and his Ministers for their good work and service to Russia. Although there was no visible hostility between Putin and Medvedev, this move has most likely been discussed and negotiated months ago.

Mr. Medvedev was offered the post of Deputy Secretary of Russia's Security Council, a job that first had to be created, according to Mr. Putin. This rank is clearly a few steps down from Prime-Minister. PM Medvedev and President Putin are both members of the United Russia Party , but Medvedev has the reputation of being an Atlantist, meaning, leaning strongly towards the west, western political philosophy. The Russian financial sector is still infiltrated with Atlantists, some may call them Fifth Columnists.

All the while seeking to improve relations with Europe – a logical step – President Putin is adamant to detach from the US-dollar dominated "sanction-prone" economy. And rightly so. Might this explain the departure of PM Medvedev? As of this morning, there was no mention of a favored replacement as PM. This may take a while. Seemingly no problem as all the key activities are still covered by the "caretaker" government. The entire change of government was presented as "relaxed", "no big deal", a natural process for improving the functioning of the Russian government. Yet, this has never happened in "modern" Russia, in the last 20 years, under Mr. Putin's leadership.

Duma members interviewed saw it generally as a positive move. They will now have more power, and more responsibility. They will have a say in key appointments, including of the Prime-Minister and his cabinet, while the final decision rests still with the President.

What is important to notice is that the present "democratization" of the Russian government comes at a time when Mr. Putin's public approval is still around 70%, a slight drop since his reelection in 2018 with 77%.

The Duma, with its new powers, will be asked to look at some aspects of the Constitution (as of yet no details are officially defined) with a view of possibly modifying them. Given Mr. Putin's high popularity and Russia's economic and political stability, Russia's military superiority – despite the constant western interference, or attempted interferences – preserving that stability and continuous economic prosperity is important; i.e., continuity in the Presidency and the Government is crucial. Thus, wouldn't it be conceivable that the Duma might lift the term-limit for the Presidency altogether?

Although, at this stage much of this is speculation. But assuming that some of the strategy behind this change – the "power equalizing move" – goes in this direction, then the timing is perfect. A new Decade, a new Era. And Putin remains the key player – the one who has made of Russia what she is today – a proud, independent, autonomous nation, that has despite all sanctions and western demonization not only prevailed, but come out on top brilliantly as a sovereign world super power. Why would the Russian people want to risk giving up this hard-deserved privilege?

Peter Koenig is an economist and geopolitical analyst. He is also a former World Bank staff and worked extensively around the world in the fields of environment and water resources. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for independent media. He is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed - fiction based on facts and on 30 years of World Bank experience around the globe. He is also a co-author of The World Order and Revolution! - Essays from the Resistance . Read other articles by Peter .

This article was posted on Thursday, January 16th, 2020 at 7:02am and is filed under President Vladimir Putin , Russia .

[Jan 20, 2020] The Iraqis want American out, and one day American will leave.

Jan 20, 2020 | www.unz.com

Ko , says: Show Comment January 20, 2020 at 7:23 pm GMT

American interests are to protect oil companies, and fight the inevtible douche (british definition) American's will feel once the dollar is deflated. In a lesser way, wars and interventions are indeed to protect americans – from a massive, sudden, econimic depression of the likes the world has never seen. China and the rest of the world no American empire is going to retract. I only hope we have a sensible leader who can parlay Ameria's role in the world to become a partner in the BRI – ion some way.

The Asia Pivot was never destined to be anything but bluster. Asia is lost, the Asian nations will satellite around China. Southeast Asia is even more lost, Cambodia mioght as well fly the Chinese flag, Thailand will pretend, as it always has, to never have been colonized. Well, Thailand was/is a dog of a nation that's laid down on its back for every nation advancing on it's border.

Myanmar just signed on to the BRI and has given China its derired dams. It's already full of Chinese. The only thing holding China back in Myanmar is the amount of money it has to give spoon to the military, generals, cronies,etc. China already owns almost all of Manadaly and thousands of square milies surrounding Mandalay. It has gas and oil fields in a warm water where those pesky Bengali Jihadis once tried to dominate.
https://www.irrawaddy.com/news/burma/myanmar-china-sign-dozens-deals-bri-projects-cooperation-xis-visit.html

Indial too has bought into Myanmar.
https://www.irrawaddy.com/opinion/guest-column/india-many-reasons-engage-myanmar.html

So, it's no wonder Iraq is the last stop of the retreat from the Middle East. The Chinese are moving forward with only the Saudis standing in the way. And who the hell really likes the House of Saud? They're doomed soon, and good riddence. The Iraqis want American out, and one day American will leave.

[Jan 19, 2020] The frantic attempt to deflect attention from US foreign wars and mainly derisive media coverage of Tulsi Gabbard is a case in point. Is she the harbinger of a growing political movement aiming to dismantle the military empire project?

Highly recommended!
Trump has been a kind of part deranged, part clever political monkey wrench thrown into the works of the USA military machine
Notable quotes:
"... I begin with the premise that the United States is a longstanding cultural catastrophe, and is far along the way in the process of destroying itself, after having destroyed or damaged the prospects of much of the planet. ..."
"... Within the context of the attack on Indochina, on the ground and taking place within the spaces left alive after the B52 bombers et al, there was the 'Phoenix Program'. euphemism for the CIA's ambitious program of technocratic torture, assassination, bribery, corruption, and so on, with tens of thousands of murdered victims. And the military destroyed uncounted villages, a la My Lai. ..."
"... Note then that Trump has almost patented the 'fake news' meme. The idea that the msm is lying about and hiding the truth, non-stop propaganda, is an idea that Trump has pushed repeatedly. Most people on the MofA etc are well aware of that. But for many 'normies', that's not quite as obvious. ..."
"... And yes, he himself could be described as the liar in chief. But doesn't deflect from the great collapse in the status of the msm propaganda machine. And that propaganda machine has been very much associated with the CIA via operation Mockingbird and its generations long progeny. ..."
"... So the attack on the media via fake news is a direct attack on the basic indispensable control mechanism of the deep state, and CIA. ..."
"... Note too that after three Years of Trump, the long standing criminality and corruption of the FBI has never looked as obvious. Again, we don't have to give Trump credit. But it happened on his 'watch'. ..."
"... We're not talking miracle cures here. But Trump has been a kind of part deranged, part clever political monkey wrench thrown into the works. As to whether his disruptive arrival has provided openings for more sensible political and cultural innovations remains to be seen. ..."
"... Many of the internal difficulties that the US faces are distinct from militarism, but related to militarism in the sense that a police state keeping control via surveillance and bs, etc, and spending its money on empire, is not going to prioritize clear honest discourse. In the end, one overarching question for the US like the rest of us is: can we achieve honesty and common sense? ..."
Jan 19, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org
Robert Snefjella , Jan 17 2020 23:50 utc | 64
Previously, most discussions of the Trump presidency reflexively proceeded to either visceral disgust etc or accolades of some species. Trumps words and manners dominated. As things developed, and actual results were recorded, a body of more sober second thought developed. And a variation on these more experience/reality based assessments is what b has delivered above.

Some of my points that follow are repeats, some are new. On the whole I see Trump as a helpful and positive-result really bad President.

I begin with the premise that the United States is a longstanding cultural catastrophe, and is far along the way in the process of destroying itself, after having destroyed or damaged the prospects of much of the planet.

As one aspect of this cultural catastrophe, let's refer back to the United States attack on Indochina, which accomplished millions of dead and millions of wounded people, and birth defects still in uncounted numbers as a legacy of dioxin etc laden chemical warfare. The millions of dead included some tens of thousands of American soldiers, and even more wounded physically, and even more wounded 'mentally'.

Within the context of the attack on Indochina, on the ground and taking place within the spaces left alive after the B52 bombers et al, there was the 'Phoenix Program'. euphemism for the CIA's ambitious program of technocratic torture, assassination, bribery, corruption, and so on, with tens of thousands of murdered victims. And the military destroyed uncounted villages, a la My Lai.

When asked what it was all about, Kissinger lied in an inadvertently illuminating way: "basically nothing" was how he put it, if memory serves.

During and after the attack on Indochina, the US trained, aided, financed, etc active death squads in Central and South America, demonstrating that the United States was an equal opportunity death dealer.

Now this was a bit of a meander away from the Trump topic, but note that Trump came to power within the above cultural context and much more pathology besides, talking about ending the warfare state. Again, this is not an attempt to portray Trump as either sincere or insincere in that policy. In terms of ideas, it was roughly speaking a good idea.

Another main part of the Trump message was 'let's rebuild America'. And along with the de-militarization and national program of rejuvenation there was the 'drain the swamp' meme, which again resonated. And once again, I am not arguing that Trump was sincere, or for that matter insincere. That's irrelevant to the point I'm trying to make: which could essentially by reduced to: what will be the actual meaning and potential impact of Trump?

Note then that Trump has almost patented the 'fake news' meme. The idea that the msm is lying about and hiding the truth, non-stop propaganda, is an idea that Trump has pushed repeatedly. Most people on the MofA etc are well aware of that. But for many 'normies', that's not quite as obvious.

And yes, he himself could be described as the liar in chief. But doesn't deflect from the great collapse in the status of the msm propaganda machine. And that propaganda machine has been very much associated with the CIA via operation Mockingbird and its generations long progeny.

So the attack on the media via fake news is a direct attack on the basic indispensable control mechanism of the deep state, and CIA.

Note too that after three Years of Trump, the long standing criminality and corruption of the FBI has never looked as obvious. Again, we don't have to give Trump credit. But it happened on his 'watch'.

Now the deep cultural, including political, pathology in the United States, in its many manifestations remain. We're not talking miracle cures here. But Trump has been a kind of part deranged, part clever political monkey wrench thrown into the works. As to whether his disruptive arrival has provided openings for more sensible political and cultural innovations remains to be seen.

The frantic attempt to deflect attention from and give mainly derisive media coverage to Tulsi Gabbard is a case in point. Is she the harbinger of a growing political movement aiming to dismantle the military empire project?

Many of the internal difficulties that the US faces are distinct from militarism, but related to militarism in the sense that a police state keeping control via surveillance and bs, etc, and spending its money on empire, is not going to prioritize clear honest discourse. In the end, one overarching question for the US like the rest of us is: can we achieve honesty and common sense?

[Jan 19, 2020] Jihadi exodus from Syria to Libya is underway

Jan 19, 2020 | www.voltairenet.org

In accordance with the agreement closed between the Tunisian and Turkish presidents, Kaïs Saïed and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, on Christmas Day, the migration of jihadists from Syria via Tunisia to Libya has begun. [ 1 ]

The pendulum has swung back, when considering that the Free Syrian Army was created by the jihadists of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), who had joined the ranks of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, then served as NATO's footsoldiers in Libya. [ 2 ]

According to Middle East Eye , the Sultan Murad Division, the Suqour al-Sham Brigades (Hawks of the Levant) and especially the Faylaq al-Sham (Legion of the Levant) (photo) are already on the move. [ 3 ] The SOHR, a British association linked to the Muslim Brotherhood, has confirmed the arrival in Tripoli of the first 300 combatants.

The Sultan Murad division is made up of Syrian Turkmen. The Hawks of the Levant comprise numerous French fighters and the Legion of the Levant is an imposing army of at least 4,000 men. The latter group is directly affiliated with the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood.

Turkey has urged several other jihadist groups to follow suit and to flee ahead of the liberation of the Idlib governorate by the Syrian Arab Army.

The jihadists sent to Libya are expected to balance out the forces present in the country by supporting the government installed by the UN, while elements of Sudan's Rapid Support Forces and the Russian mercenaries have lined up with the Bengazi-based government.

[Jan 19, 2020] Greece ready to intervene against Turkey in Libya

Jan 19, 2020 | www.voltairenet.org

In 22 December 2019, Greek Minister of Foreign Affairs, Conservative lawyer Nikos Dendias, travelled to Benghazi to meet the ministers designated by the Tobruk House of Representatives and their military leader, Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar. He then moved on to Cairo and Cyprus.

Simultaneously, during a ceremony at the Gölcük Naval shipyard, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan announced the decision to expedite Turkey's submarine construction program. The 6 New Type 214 submarines which Turkey is building with German Howaldtswerke-Deutsche Werft (HDW) should be near completion.

Under the agreement signed with the Government of National Accord (GNA) headed by Fayez Al-Sarraj, in addition to military ports in occupied Cyprus, Turkey could have access to a home port in Libya, from where it could extend its influence over the entire eastern Mediterranean.

After the delivery of Turkish military equipment to Tripoli flown in by a civilian Boeing 747-412, Field Marshal Haftar proclaimed that he would not hesitate to shoot down any civilian aircraft carrying weapons for the GNA.

[Jan 19, 2020] Turkey negotiating mass transfer of jihadists towards Libya

Dec 27, 2019 | www.voltairenet.org

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has entered into a military alliance with the Libyan "government of national accord" (GNA), chaired by Fayez Al-Sarraj, based in Tripoli and backed by the United Nations. Erdoğan has already arranged for the delivery of armored vehicles and drones, but has yet to deploy regular troops.

In Ankara, the Grand National Assembly is expected imminently to authorize the Turkish army to send regular soldiers to Libya.

At the same time, however, the Turkish army is keeping out of Idlib (Syria) where the jihadists are under attack by the Syrian Arab army, in coordination with the Russian air force, and where two Turkish observation posts have been hemmed in by the Syrian Arab army. Tens of thousands of jihadists have been moving into Turkey.

On 25 December 2019, President Erdoğan paid a spur-of-the-moment visit to Tunisia. He was notably flanked by Hakan Fidan, the head of Turkey's national intelligence (Millî İstihbarat Teşkilatı), as well as by his Foreign Affairs and Defense Ministers. The delegation was received by Tunisia's President Kaïs Saïed, a jurist, who is supported by the Muslim Brotherhood. He gave his Turkish counterpart the green light to use the airport and the port of Djerba for the mass transfer of jihadists to Tripoli and Misrata.

[Jan 19, 2020] ISIS had become a proxy army of the CIA; that's likely why Soleimani had to be killed.

Jan 19, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

michael888 , Jan 19 2020 13:19 utc | 114

Almost all of the "terrorism" affecting the West has been Wahabbi Salafist Sunni driven. Iran, despite their religious head, is a more modern sectarian nation than Saudi Arabia. ISIS had become a proxy army of the CIA; that's likely why Soleimani had to be killed. It is time to align with Iran and the Shia for a change. They also have oil! Would send a nice message to our "allies" Israel and Saudi Arabia as well.

Sasha , Jan 19 2020 13:23 utc | 115

Trump has given signals of opposition to the wisdom of the use of jihadi proxies,

@Posted by: BM | Jan 19 2020 11:09 utc | 107

Really?

Revealed: US moves IS leaders to Al-Anbar, Iraq

After only a week or so after this heinous crime, we are assisting already to a new campaign on whitewashing Trump at each of the US military blogs...SST at the head...as always...but following the rest...be it a editorial level, be it at commentariat level...

What part of Trump admitting he personally ordered the murder you have not understood?

What part of Soleimani and Al Muhandis being the main strategic heads of real anti-IS front have you not understood?

[Jan 19, 2020] Putin Proposes Changes to Constitution, Medvedev Resigns What's Going On Consortiumnews

Jan 19, 2020 | consortiumnews.com

As I've discussed many times before, Russia was on the verge of being a failed state in 2000 when Putin took the helm. There were crises in every major area of state governance: the military was in shambles, the economy had collapsed, crime was rampant, massive poverty pervaded the country, and Russians were experiencing the worst mortality crisis since World War II.

Putin's Three Priorities

Having studied Putin's governance and how Russia has fared over the two decades in which he has ruled, it's clear that he's had three main priorities for Russia in the following order:

Ensuring Russia's national security and sovereignty as an independent nation. In previous writings, I've explained the importance of national security to Russians as a result of their history and geography; Improving the economy and living standards for Russians; and, The gradual democratization of the country.

These three priorities are reflected in this week's address to the Federal Assembly, the equivalent of the U.S. president's annual state of the union. Putin reiterated to his audience that the first priority of national security and state sovereignty had been secured:

"For the first time ever – I want to emphasise this – for the first time in the history of nuclear missile weapons, including the Soviet period and modern times, we are not catching up with anyone, but, on the contrary, other leading states have yet to create the weapons that Russia already possesses.

The country's defence capability is ensured for decades to come, but we cannot rest on our laurels and do nothing. We must keep moving forward, carefully observing and analysing the developments in this area across the world, and create next-generation combat systems and complexes. This is what we are doing today."

Putin goes on to emphasize that success on this first priority enables Russia to focus even more seriously on the second priority:

"Reliable security creates the basis for Russia's progressive and peaceful development and allows us to do much more to overcome the most pressing internal challenges, to focus on the economic and social growth of all our regions in the interest of the people, because Russia's greatness is inseparable from dignified life of its every citizen. I see this harmony of a strong power and well-being of the people as a foundation of our future."

In light of the abysmal living conditions that Putin inherited in 2000, he did a remarkable job over the next decade of cutting poverty, improving infrastructure, restoring regular pension payments as well as increasing the amount, raising wages, etc. Russians, whether they agree with everything Putin does or not, no matter how frustrated they may get with him regarding particular issues, are generally grateful to him for this turnaround in their country. This progress on his second priority has underpinned his approval ratings, which have never dipped below the 60's.

But his comments during his address reflected mixed success currently as economic conditions for Russians have stagnated over the past few years. One contributing factor has been the sanctions imposed by the West in response to Russia's reunification with Crimea as a result of the 2014 coup in Ukraine.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko climb the stairs in the House of Chimeras in Kyiv, Ukraine, en route to a working lunch following a bilateral meeting and news conference on July 7, 2016. (State Department)

Putin has done a respectable job of cushioning the Russian economy from the worst effects of the sanctions and even using them to advantage with respect to import substitution in the agricultural and industrial sectors. However, polls of the population have consistently shown over the past two-to-three years that Russians are losing patience with the lack of improvement in living standards.

Another problem that is limiting economic progress is the pattern of local bureaucrats not implementing Putin's edicts. For example, in his 2018 and 2019 addresses, Putin laid out an expensive plan for economic improvement based on infrastructure projects throughout the country as well as improving health and education. Budget allocations were made for these projects and the funds released, but many have only been partially realized. Confirming what has been reported in some quarters , Putin complained about the deficiencies in the roll-out of these policies during his address.

I believe this is connected to the subsequent resignation of Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev who will now step into the newly created role of deputy chairman of the Security Council, while his cabinet remains in a caretaker capacity until a new government is formed.

Medvedev has not been particularly effective as prime minister and has been very unpopular over the past several years as suspicions of corruption have swirled around him. He is also problematic ideologically as he has always embraced neoliberal economic policy which has no traction with most of the Russian people due to the experience of the 1990's when neoliberal capitalists ran amok. He also lacks the charisma and creative problem-solving skills of Putin.

Dmitry Medvedev with Vladimir Putin in 2008. (Wikimedia Commons)

But in all fairness, no prime minister will have an easy job in Russia if significant changes are needed or a transition is still in progress. Throughout Russia's history, whenever leaders wanted to reform the system, they've always encountered the problem of implementation in terms of the bureaucracy. Whether out of malevolence, fear of losing perceived benefits, inertia, or incompetence, bureaucrats lower down the chain don't always put the reforms effectively or consistently in place. Putin has complained at various times of local bureaucrats' intransigence and its negative effects on average citizens whom they are supposed to be serving.

Mikhail Mishustin. (Wikimedia Commons)

Not much is known about Medvedev's immediate replacement , Mikhail Mishustin , except that he is a former businessman and has served as head of Russia's Tax Service since 2010. In his capacity leading the tax agency, he is held in positive regard, credited with modernizing and streamlining the historically onerous tax collection system.

The third priority of Putin has been gradual democratization of the country. Putin is often characterized in the west as an autocrat and a dictator. However, as I've written before, there are many democratic reforms that have been implemented under Putin's rule that are often ignored by Western media and analysts. It is not that democracy has not been a priority for Putin, it's that it was to be subordinated to the other two priorities. Putin, as well as many other Russians, have been nervous about possible instability. With their history of constant upheaval over the past 120 years – two revolutions, two world wars, numerous famines, the Great Terror, and a national collapse – this is understandable.

Putin inherited a system of governance that featured a strong president and a weak parliamentary system as reflected in the 1993 constitution ushered in by Yeltsin – the origins of which are explained here . Putin has used this system effectively throughout his 20 years in power – 16 of them as president – to try to solve the various crises mentioned earlier. Such strong, centralized power is necessary when a state is dealing with multiple existential emergencies.

At this point, I think Putin realizes that Russia, though it still has significant problems to be addressed, is no longer in a state of emergency. Therefore, it is no longer necessary to keep quite the same level of power concentrated in the office of the presidency, which is open to abuse by future occupants. Here is what Putin said about this:

"Russian society is becoming more mature, responsible and demanding. Despite the differences in the ways to address their tasks, the main political forces speak from the position of patriotism and reflect the interests of their followers and voters."

The constitutional reforms Putin goes on to discuss include giving the parliament the right to appoint the prime minister and his/her cabinet, no foreign citizenship or residency of major office holders at the federal level (president, prime minister, cabinet members, parliamentarians, national security agents, judges, etc.), expanding the authority of local governmental bodies, and strengthening the Constitutional Court and the independence of judges. He also mentioned codifying certain aspects of socioeconomic justice into the constitution:

"And lastly, the state must honour its social responsibility under any conditions throughout the country. Therefore, I believe that the Constitution should include a provision that the minimum wage in Russia must not be below the subsistence minimum of the economically active people. We have a law on this, but we should formalise this requirement in the Constitution along with the principles of decent pensions, which implies a regular adjustment of pensions according to inflation."

In other words, Putin realizes that the system as it is currently constructed has outlived its usefulness and some modest changes are needed to keep the country moving forward. Despite the constant nonsense that passes for news and analysis of Russia in the west, civil society is alive and well in Russia. Putin is aware of the citizen-led initiatives that have been occurring throughout the country to improve local communities and it appears that he is ready to allow more space for this new participation of average Russians to solve problems for which the official bureaucracy seems to be stuck:

"Our society is clearly calling for change. People want development, and they strive to move forward in their careers and knowledge, in achieving prosperity, and they are ready to assume responsibility for specific work. Quite often, they have better knowledge of what, how and when should be changed where they live and work, that is, in cities, districts, villages and all across the nation.

The pace of change must be expedited every year and produce tangible results in attaining worthy living standards that would be clearly perceived by the people. And, I repeat, they must be actively involved in this process."

How these changes will actually be instituted and what the results will be is, of course, unknown at this time. Putin suggested that the eventual package of constitutional amendments will be voted on by the Russian people. It also appears that Putin will indeed step down at the end of his presidential term in 2024, but it is still very likely that he will remain in an active advisory role.

Unlike the knee-jerk malign motives that are automatically attributed to anything Putin does by the western political class, I see this as a calculated risk that Putin is ready to take to make further progress on his second and third priorities for Russia.

Natylie Baldwin is author of "The View from Moscow: Understanding Russia and U.S.-Russia Relations." She is co-author of "Ukraine: Zbig's Grand Chessboard & How the West Was Checkmated." She has traveled throughout western Russia since 2015 and has written several articles based on her conversations and interviews with a cross-section of Russians. She blogs at natyliesbaldwin.com .

This article is from natyliesbaldwin.com .

Eddie S , January 19, 2020 at 17:03

Good analysis/deep-background article! It's SO refreshing to read something about Russia here in the US press that isn't the simplistic 'Russia bad! US good! Anything else is Putin-stooge talk or what-about-ism'. I'm sure that the US & British MSM will attribute only evil motives by Putin for all of this and will somehow try to ascribe Russian world-domination designs to it, no-matter how much contortion and out-of-left-field fantasizing that requires, after all that's their job, they've had a lot of practice, and they get amply rewarded

ranney , January 19, 2020 at 16:29

Thank you Natalie ( and CN for publishing this); your explanations are extremely helpful . Also what a relief to finally read something that isn't filled with hate and false assumptions about Russia. When Rachel at MSNBC starts in on Putin I start to feel sick and I have to turn off the TV Her hatred is frightening.
I hope we'll see more of your writing, Natalie.

[Jan 19, 2020] Pompeo idea of deterence means "deterrence to protect [the financial and energy hegemony of] America".

Notable quotes:
"... Pompeo omitted a crucial part of this sentence: "deterrence to protect [the financial and energy hegemony of] America". ..."
"... a regular part of the MSM/cinema diet masticated by the general public that we have completely forgotten that the basic function of the armed forces is the pursuit of vested interests through superior violence. ..."
"... No qualms or BS 'deterrence', armies are for taking other people's stuff by force (land-grabs, etc). I would respect Pompeo a whole lot more (but not much more...) if he just once came out and said: "Iran is run by people who don't want us to take their stuff; we want to undermine them and replace them with paid yes-men who will let us take Iran's stuff. We will use violence and armed force to make this happen. ..."
"... But we have no intention of distributing this loot evenly among our citizens. Instead it will be paid as dividends to select shareholders and spent retooling the military for next poor bastards who stand up to us." ..."
Jan 19, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Patroklos , Jan 19 2020 5:40 utc | 84

"...deterrence to protect America."

Pompeo omitted a crucial part of this sentence: "deterrence to protect [the financial and energy hegemony of] America".

While this might be obvious to us, the narrative that US foreign policy is about protecting citizens, values and apple pie from 'bad guys' -- and indeed that the militaries of all Western countries are benign police forces preventing ISIS from burning your old Eagles albums and other violations of 'freedom' -- is such a regular part of the MSM/cinema diet masticated by the general public that we have completely forgotten that the basic function of the armed forces is the pursuit of vested interests through superior violence.

It always seemed strange to me that the post-ww2 cinematic template for war-movies, and by extension the basic plot of all reporting of western military activity in the media, always represented the enemy as evil precisely because they use militaries in an instrumental way (i.e for the purpose they were designed). The Germans, or for that matter the Persians in 300 , or any baddies in war films, seek to extend and protect their interests (real or imagined) by deploying armed forces.

The good guys are always identifiable through this idea of 'deterrence': "hey man, all we want is just to live and let live, but you pushed us so we pushed back." Then one stirs in a little 'preemptive deterrence': you looked like you were going to push so we acted. If we 'accidentally' go too far, it's because there is a deranged C-in-C: Hitler, or Xerxes, or some other naughty boy who can be the fall-guy, scapegoat, etc.

To get serious we need to go back a very long way, to, say, the Iliad , which, like all Greek (and Roman) literature, assumes as a premise (and it's tragedy) that the warrior's basic function is to kill, pillage, rape and occasionally protect others from the same. But mostly take by force .

No qualms or BS 'deterrence', armies are for taking other people's stuff by force (land-grabs, etc). I would respect Pompeo a whole lot more (but not much more...) if he just once came out and said: "Iran is run by people who don't want us to take their stuff; we want to undermine them and replace them with paid yes-men who will let us take Iran's stuff. We will use violence and armed force to make this happen.

But we have no intention of distributing this loot evenly among our citizens. Instead it will be paid as dividends to select shareholders and spent retooling the military for next poor bastards who stand up to us."

Just once.

[Jan 19, 2020] Death and Neglect in the 7th Fleet

Jan 19, 2020 | www.propublica.org

. A firsthand account from a U.S. Naval officer is eye opening (emphasis mine).

He'd seen his ship, one of the Navy's fleet of 11 minesweepers, sidelined by repairs and maintenance for more than 20 months. Once the ship, based in Japan, returned to action, its crew was only able to conduct its most essential training -- how to identify and defuse underwater mines -- for fewer than 10 days the entire next year . During those training missions, the officer said, the crew found it hard to trust the ship's faulty navigation system: It ran on Windows 2000.

Sonar which identifies dishwashers, crab traps and cars as possible mines, can hardly be considered a rebuilt military. The Navy's eleven minesweepers built more than 25 years ago, have had their decommissioning continually delayed because no replacement plan was implemented. I'll await the deeper understanding of 'deterrence' from b, even as I consider willingness to commit and brag about war crimes as beyond the point of no return.

Posted by: psychedelicatessen | Jan 19 2020 9:14 utc | 98

[Jan 19, 2020] Internal Boeing Emails Claim 777X Shares MAX Problem

Jan 19, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

Internal emails from Boeing staff members working on the 737 MAX were made public earlier this month have revealed new safety problems for the company's flagship 777X, a long-range, wide-body, twin-engine passenger jet, currently in development that is expected to replace the aging 777-200LR and 777-300ER fleets, reported The Telegraph .

Already, damning emails released via a U.S. Senate probe describes problems during the MAX development and qualification process. The emails also highlight how Boeing employees were troubled by the 777X – could be vulnerable to technical issues.

Emails dated from June 2018, months before the first MAX crash, said the "lowest ranking and most unproven" suppliers used on the MAX program were being shifted towards the 777X program.

>

The email further said the "Best part is we are re-starting this whole thing with the 777X with the same supplier and have signed up to an even more aggressive schedule."

Another Boeing employee warned about cost-cutting measures via selecting the "lowest-cost suppliers" for both MAX and 777X programs.

"We put ourselves in this position by picking the lowest-cost supplier and signing up to impossible schedules. Why did the lowest ranking and most unproven suppliers receive the contract? Solely based on the bottom dollar. Not just the Max but also the 777X! Supplier management drives all these decisions."

Like the MAX, the 777X is an update of an outdated airframe from decades ago, which is an attempt by Boeing to deliver passenger jets that are more efficient and provide better operating economics for airlines.

Back in September, we noted how the door of a new 777X flew off the fuselage while several FAA inspectors were present to evaluate a structural test.

Boeing's problem could stem from how it used the "lowest-cost suppliers" to develop high-tech planes on old airframes to compete with Airbus. The result has already been devastating: two MAX planes have crashed, killing 346 people, due to a malfunctioning flight control system, and 777X failing a structural ground test.

Boeing's C-suite executives push for profitability (at the apparent expense of safety) has, by all appearances, been a disaster; sacrificing the safety of the planes to drive sales higher to unlock tens of billions of dollars in stock buybacks - that would allow executives to dump their stock options at record high stock prices.

[Jan 19, 2020] Gangsternomics in directing the course of Iraq's future economic and political development

Jan 19, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Likklemore , Jan 19 2020 5:20 utc | 83

@ Peter AU1 78

Tom Luongo, who frequently cites b, has coined a new word for Trump's and his minions tactics. Tom asks:

Does Gangsternomics Meet its End in the Iraqi Desert?

In the aftermath of the killing of Iranian IRGC General Qassem Soleimani a lot of questions hung in the air. The big one was, in my mind, "Why now?"

There are a lot of angles to answer that question. Many of them were supplied by caretaker Iraqi Prime Minister Adel Abdul-Mahdi who tried to let the world know through official (and unofficial) channels of the extent of the pressure he was under by the U.S.

In short, President Trump was engaged in months of what can best be described as gangsternomics in directing the course of Iraq's future economic and political development.[/]

Iraq's importance goes much farther than just protecting the petrodollar to the U.S. It is the fulcrum now on which the entire U.S. defense against Eurasian integration rests. The entire region is slipping out of the grasp of the U.S.

And this started with Russia moving into Syria in 2015 successfully. We are downstream of this as it has blown open the playbook and revealed it for how ugly it is.

Trump's crude gangster tactics in Iraq, Venezuela, Bolivia and to a lesser extent in Syria cannot be hidden behind the false veil of moral preening and virtue signaling about bringing democracy to these benighted places.[/]

What began in Syria with Russia, Iran, Hezbollah and China standing up together and saying, "No," continues today in Iraq. To this point Iran has been the major actor. Tomorrow it will be Russia, China and India.

And that is what is ultimately at stake here, the ability of the U.S. to employ gangsternomics in the Middle East and make it stick.[.]

By the time Trump is done threatening people over S-400's and pipelines the entire world will be happy to trade in yuan and/or rubles rather than dollars.[.]

full article here

[Jan 19, 2020] The once oppressed have become oppressors.

Jan 19, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

ben , Jan 19 2020 3:31 utc | 72

@71 said in part; "The once oppressed have become oppressors."

A succinct description of the Israelis..

[Jan 19, 2020] Johnson was probably one of the architects of Skripal fake poisoning and now can't admit that this false flag operation failed

Jan 19, 2020 | www.politico.eu

https://www.politico.eu/article/boris-johnson-vladimir-putin-uk-russia-relations-still-poisoned/

In a statement , No. 10 Downing Street said: "He was clear there had been no change in the U.K.'s position on Salisbury, which was a reckless use of chemical weapons and a brazen attempt to murder innocent people on U.K. soil. He said that such an attack must not be repeated."

There was no immediate statement by the Kremlin, but Putin has rejected the British allegations as baseless and Russian officials repeatedly demanded that U.K. authorities come forward with hard evidence.

In its statement, No. 10 portrayed Johnson as unbudging in his insistence that Russia end its extra-territorial mischief and said he had reiterated the two countries' responsibilities as world powers.

"The Prime Minister said that they both had a responsibility to address issues of international security including Libya, Syria, Iraq and Iran," the statement said. "The Prime Minister said there will be no normalization of our bilateral relationship until Russia ends the destabilizing activity that threatens the U.K. and our allies and undermines the safety of our citizens and our collective security."

Johnson and Putin were in the German capital for an international conference aimed at achieving a cease-fire to end a long-running civil war in Libya.

[Jan 19, 2020] Now BoneSpurs Opened the Pandora's Box of Open State Level Assassinations Not Ethical - Inhumane and Imbecilic, really. That's why I am voting for Gabbard this Time. A 2nd Gen Navy Vet. Been to War Zones in the Gulf.

Jan 19, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

IronForge , Jan 18 2020 3:03 utc | 93

The MIC were running about without leashes.

Once they delved into "Conquest and Exploitation", the Military were OverScoped and Few People thought of rebuilding/modernizing Civil Infrastructure and Economy of the Conquered.

Also, IMHO, every Govt-Job that affect the Military and Veterans' Lives should be held by Veterans. Need them to be where the Rubber Meets the Road before sending others into harm's way. I'd go as far to require WH, Congress, Supremes to be Previously Assigned to Combat Units/Hot Zones (FatBoy Pompeo Fails here) - and have Combat Eligible Family be in Active Duty or Drilling Reserves - ready to be sent to the Front Lines should they call for War while running the Republic-turned-Hegemon.

That would include BoneShards' Adult Children and Spouses.

WH have been on a PetroUSD/MIC/PNAC7/AIPAC Bandwagon - which drive down Non-Yielding Nation-States with Sanctions.

Now BoneShards Opened the Pandora's Box of Open State Level Assassinations using Diplomatic Peace Missions as Venues. Worse? Against a Nation-State which can Respond in Kind - AND Develop+Deploy Nuclear WMDs. Not Ethical - Inhumane and Imbecilic, really. That's why I am voting for Gabbard this Time. A 2nd Gen Navy Vet. Been to War Zones in the Gulf.

lysias , Jan 18 2020 3:24 utc | 97

This retired Lieutenant Commander of the U.S. Navy has also been donating to Gabbard.

[Jan 19, 2020] The frantic attempt to deflect attention from US foreign wars and mainly derisive media coverage of Tulsi Gabbard is a case in point. Is she the harbinger of a growing political movement aiming to dismantle the military empire project?

Highly recommended!
Trump has been a kind of part deranged, part clever political monkey wrench thrown into the works of the USA military machine
Notable quotes:
"... I begin with the premise that the United States is a longstanding cultural catastrophe, and is far along the way in the process of destroying itself, after having destroyed or damaged the prospects of much of the planet. ..."
"... Within the context of the attack on Indochina, on the ground and taking place within the spaces left alive after the B52 bombers et al, there was the 'Phoenix Program'. euphemism for the CIA's ambitious program of technocratic torture, assassination, bribery, corruption, and so on, with tens of thousands of murdered victims. And the military destroyed uncounted villages, a la My Lai. ..."
"... Note then that Trump has almost patented the 'fake news' meme. The idea that the msm is lying about and hiding the truth, non-stop propaganda, is an idea that Trump has pushed repeatedly. Most people on the MofA etc are well aware of that. But for many 'normies', that's not quite as obvious. ..."
"... And yes, he himself could be described as the liar in chief. But doesn't deflect from the great collapse in the status of the msm propaganda machine. And that propaganda machine has been very much associated with the CIA via operation Mockingbird and its generations long progeny. ..."
"... So the attack on the media via fake news is a direct attack on the basic indispensable control mechanism of the deep state, and CIA. ..."
"... Note too that after three Years of Trump, the long standing criminality and corruption of the FBI has never looked as obvious. Again, we don't have to give Trump credit. But it happened on his 'watch'. ..."
"... We're not talking miracle cures here. But Trump has been a kind of part deranged, part clever political monkey wrench thrown into the works. As to whether his disruptive arrival has provided openings for more sensible political and cultural innovations remains to be seen. ..."
"... Many of the internal difficulties that the US faces are distinct from militarism, but related to militarism in the sense that a police state keeping control via surveillance and bs, etc, and spending its money on empire, is not going to prioritize clear honest discourse. In the end, one overarching question for the US like the rest of us is: can we achieve honesty and common sense? ..."
Jan 19, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org
Robert Snefjella , Jan 17 2020 23:50 utc | 64
Previously, most discussions of the Trump presidency reflexively proceeded to either visceral disgust etc or accolades of some species. Trumps words and manners dominated. As things developed, and actual results were recorded, a body of more sober second thought developed. And a variation on these more experience/reality based assessments is what b has delivered above.

Some of my points that follow are repeats, some are new. On the whole I see Trump as a helpful and positive-result really bad President.

I begin with the premise that the United States is a longstanding cultural catastrophe, and is far along the way in the process of destroying itself, after having destroyed or damaged the prospects of much of the planet.

As one aspect of this cultural catastrophe, let's refer back to the United States attack on Indochina, which accomplished millions of dead and millions of wounded people, and birth defects still in uncounted numbers as a legacy of dioxin etc laden chemical warfare. The millions of dead included some tens of thousands of American soldiers, and even more wounded physically, and even more wounded 'mentally'.

Within the context of the attack on Indochina, on the ground and taking place within the spaces left alive after the B52 bombers et al, there was the 'Phoenix Program'. euphemism for the CIA's ambitious program of technocratic torture, assassination, bribery, corruption, and so on, with tens of thousands of murdered victims. And the military destroyed uncounted villages, a la My Lai.

When asked what it was all about, Kissinger lied in an inadvertently illuminating way: "basically nothing" was how he put it, if memory serves.

During and after the attack on Indochina, the US trained, aided, financed, etc active death squads in Central and South America, demonstrating that the United States was an equal opportunity death dealer.

Now this was a bit of a meander away from the Trump topic, but note that Trump came to power within the above cultural context and much more pathology besides, talking about ending the warfare state. Again, this is not an attempt to portray Trump as either sincere or insincere in that policy. In terms of ideas, it was roughly speaking a good idea.

Another main part of the Trump message was 'let's rebuild America'. And along with the de-militarization and national program of rejuvenation there was the 'drain the swamp' meme, which again resonated. And once again, I am not arguing that Trump was sincere, or for that matter insincere. That's irrelevant to the point I'm trying to make: which could essentially by reduced to: what will be the actual meaning and potential impact of Trump?

Note then that Trump has almost patented the 'fake news' meme. The idea that the msm is lying about and hiding the truth, non-stop propaganda, is an idea that Trump has pushed repeatedly. Most people on the MofA etc are well aware of that. But for many 'normies', that's not quite as obvious.

And yes, he himself could be described as the liar in chief. But doesn't deflect from the great collapse in the status of the msm propaganda machine. And that propaganda machine has been very much associated with the CIA via operation Mockingbird and its generations long progeny.

So the attack on the media via fake news is a direct attack on the basic indispensable control mechanism of the deep state, and CIA.

Note too that after three Years of Trump, the long standing criminality and corruption of the FBI has never looked as obvious. Again, we don't have to give Trump credit. But it happened on his 'watch'.

Now the deep cultural, including political, pathology in the United States, in its many manifestations remain. We're not talking miracle cures here. But Trump has been a kind of part deranged, part clever political monkey wrench thrown into the works. As to whether his disruptive arrival has provided openings for more sensible political and cultural innovations remains to be seen.

The frantic attempt to deflect attention from and give mainly derisive media coverage to Tulsi Gabbard is a case in point. Is she the harbinger of a growing political movement aiming to dismantle the military empire project?

Many of the internal difficulties that the US faces are distinct from militarism, but related to militarism in the sense that a police state keeping control via surveillance and bs, etc, and spending its money on empire, is not going to prioritize clear honest discourse. In the end, one overarching question for the US like the rest of us is: can we achieve honesty and common sense?

[Jan 19, 2020] Why Neocons Hate Russia Even More Than They Hate Any Other Nation

Jan 19, 2020 | www.strategic-culture.org

Eric Zuesse July 27, 2018 © Photo: Public domain

Neoconservatism started in 1953 with Henry "Scoop" Jackson, the Democratic Party US Senator from the state of Washington (1953-1983), who became known as a 'defense' hawk, and as "the Senator from Boeing," because Boeing practically owned him. The UK's Henry Jackson Society was founded in 2005 in order to carry forward Senator Jackson's unwavering and passionate endorsement of growing the American empire so that the US-UK alliance will control the entire world (and US weapons-makers will dominate in every market).

Later, during the 1990s, neoconservatism became taken over by the Mossad and the lobbyists for Israel and came to be publicly identified as a 'Jewish' ideology, despite its having -- and having long had -- many champions who were 'anti-communist' or 'pro-democracy' or simply even anti-Russian, but who were neither Jewish nor even focused at all on the Middle East. Republicans Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and John McCain; and the Democrat, CIA Director James Woolsey -- the latter of whom was one of the patrons of Britain's Henry Jackson Society -- were especially prominent neoconservatives, who came to prominence even before neocons became called "neoconservatives." What all neocons have always shared in common has been a visceral hatred of Russians. That comes above anything else -- and even above NATO (the main neocon organization).

During recent decades, neocons have been hating Iranians and more generally Shiites -- such as in Syria and in Lebanon, and now also in Yemen -- and not only hating Russians.

When the Israel lobby during the 1990s and after, pumped massive resources into getting the US Government to invade first Iraq and then Iran, neoconservatism got its name, but the ideology itself did not change. However, there are a few neoconservatives today who are too ignorant to know, in any coherent way, what their own underlying beliefs are, or why, and so who are anti-Russians (that's basic for any neocon) who either don't know or else don't particularly care that Iran and Shia Muslims generally, are allied with Russia. Neoconservatives such as this, are simply confused neocons, people whose underlying ideology is self-contradictory, because they've not carefully thought things through.

An example is Vox's Alex Ward, who built his career as an anti-Russia propagandist , and whose recent ten-point tirade against Russia I then exposed as being false on each one of its ten points , each of those points having been based upon mere allegations by US neocons against Russia without any solid evidence whatsoever. Indictments, and other forms of accusations, are not evidence for anything. But a stupid 'journalist' accepts them as if they were evidence, if those accusations come from 'the right side' -- but not if they come from 'the wrong side'. They don't understand even such a simple distinction as that between an indictment, and a conviction. A conviction is at least a verdict (though maybe based on false 'evidence' and thus false itself), but all that an accusation is an accusation -- and all accusations (in the American legal system) are supposed to be disbelieved, unless and until there is at least a verdict that gives the accusation legal force. (This is called "innocent unless proven guilty.")

Earlier, Mr. Ward had headlined as if he were an anti -neocon, when he posted his "America is fueling the war in Yemen. Congress is finally pushing back." What can account for that seemingly incongruous article?

Mr. Ward is a Democrat -- an heir to Senator Jackson's allegedly anti-communist though actually anti-Russian ideology -- but, since Ward isn't as intelligent as the ideology's founder was, Ward becomes anti -neocon when a Republican-led Administration is doing things (such as Ward there criticizes) that are even more-neocon than today's Democratic Party itself is. In other words: 'journalists' (actually, propagandists) such as he, are more partisan in favor of support of Democratic Party billionaires against Republican Party billionaires, than in support of conquering Russia as opposed to cooperating with Russia (and with all other countries). They're unaware that all American billionaires support expansion of the US empire -- including over Yemen (to bring Yemen in, too -- which invasion Ward incongruously opposes). But politicians (unlike their financial backers) need to pretend not to be so bloodthirsty or so beholden to the military-industrial complex. Thus, an American doesn't need to be intelligent in order to build his or her career in 'journalism', on the basis of having previously served as a propagandist writing for non-profits that are mere fronts for NATO and for Israel, and which are fronts actually for America's weapons-manufacturing firms, who need those wars in order to grow their profits. Such PR for front-organizations for US firms such as Lockheed Martin, is excellent preparation for a successful career in American 'journalism'. If a person is stupid, then it's still necessary to be stupid in the right way, in order to succeed; and Ward is, and does.

This, for example, is how it makes sense that Ward had previously been employed at the War on the Rocks website that organized the Republican neoconservative campaign against Donald Trump during the 2016 Republican primaries : the mega-donors to both US Parties are united in favor of America conquering Russia. And that's why War on the Rocks had organized Republican neocons to oppose Trump: it was done in order to increase the chances for Trump's rabidly anti-Russia and pro-Israel competitors such as Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio to win that nomination instead, which would then have produced the billionaires' dream contest, between Hillary Clinton versus an equally neoconservative Republican nominee. A bipartisan neoconservatism controls both of the American political Parties. A 'journalist' who displays that sort of bipartisanship can't fail in America, no matter how incompetent at real journalism he or she might be. (However, they do have to be literate . Stupid, maybe; but literate, definitely.)

The core of America's form of capitalism has come to be the US aristocracy's bipartisan, liberal and conservative, Democratic and Republican, form of capitalism, which isn't merely fascist (which includes privatizing everything that can be privatized) but which is also imperialist (which means favoring the country's perpetration of invasions and coups in order to expand that nation's empire). The United States is now a globe-spanning empire, controlling not merely the aristocracies in a few banana republics such as Guatemala and Honduras, but also the aristocracies in richer countries such as France, Germany and UK, so as to extract from virtually the entire world -- by means mainly of deception but also sometimes public threats and clearly coercive -- unfair advantages for corporations that are within its borders, and against corporations that are headquartered in foreign countries. America's billionaires -- both the Democratic ones and the Republican ones -- are 100% in favor of America's conquering the world: this ideology is entirely bipartisan, in the United States. Though the billionaires succeeded, during the first Cold War -- the one that was nominally against communism -- at fooling the public to think they were aiming ultimately to conquer communism, George Herbert Walker Bush made clear, on the night of 24 February 1990, privately to the leaders of the US aristocracy's foreign allies, that the actual goal was world-conquest, and so the Cold War would now secretly continue on the US side , even after ending on the USS.R. side. When GHW Bush did that, the heritage of US Senator Jackson became no longer the formerly claimed one, of 'anti-communism', but was, clearly now and henceforth, anti-Russian. And that's what it is today -- not only in the Democratic Party, and not only in the Republican Party, and not only in the United States, but throughout the entire US alliance .

And this is what we are seeing today, in all of the US-and-allied propaganda-media. America is always 'the injured party' against 'the aggressors'; and, so, one after another, such as in Iraq, and in Libya, and in Syria, and in Iran, and in Yemen, and in China, all allies (or even merely friends) of Russia are 'the aggressors' and are 'dictatorships' and are 'threats to America', and only the US side represents 'democracy' . It's actually an aristocracy , which has deeply deceived its public, to think it's a democracy. Just as every aristocracy is based on lies and on coercion, this one is, too -- it is no exception; it's only that this particular empire is on a historically unprecedentedly large scale, dominating all continents. Support that, and you're welcomed into the major (i.e., billionaire-backed) 'news' media in America, and in its allied countries. This is America's 'democracy' . (Of course, an article such as this one is not 'journalism' in America and its allied countries; it's merely "blogging." So, it won't be found there though it's being submitted everywhere. It will be accepted and published at only the honest news-sites. A reader may Web-search the headline here in order to find out which ones those are. Not many 'news'media report the institutionalized corruptness of the 'news'media; they just criticize one-another, in the way that the politicians do, which is bipartisan -- the bipartisan dictatorship. But the rot that's actually throughout the 'news'media, is prohibited to be reported about and published, in and by any of them. It is totally suppressed reality. Only the few honest news-sites will publish this information and its documentation, the links here.)

However, actually, the first time that the term either "neoconservatism" or "neo-conservatism" is known to have been used, was in the British magazine, The Contemporary Review , January 1883, by Henry Dunkley, in his "The Conservative Dilemma" where "neo-conservative" appeared 8 times, and was contrasted to traditional "conservatism" because, whereas the traditional type "Toryism" was pro-aristocratic, anti-democratic, and overtly elitist; the new type was pro-democratic, anti-aristocratic, and overtly populist (which no form of conservatism honestly is -- they're all elitist): "What is this new creed of yours? That there must be no class influence in politics? That any half-dozen hinds on my estate are as good as so many dukes? That the will of the people is the supreme political tribunal? That if a majority at the polls bid us abolish the Church and toss the Crown into the gutter we are forthwith to be their most obedient servants?" "No: from whatever point of view we consider the question, it is plain that the attempt to reconstruct the Tory party on a Democratic basis cannot succeed." "The Tories have always been adepts at conservation, but the things they have been most willing to conserve were not our liberties but the restrictions put upon our liberties." "The practical policy of Conservatism would not alter, and could not be altered much, but its pretensions would have to be pitched in a lower key." "Here we seem to get within the smell of soup, the bustle of evening receptions, and the smiles of dowagers. The cares which weigh upon this couple of patriot souls cannot be described as august. It is hardly among such petty anxieties that the upholders of the Empire and the pilots of the State are bred." "The solemn abjuration which is now proposed in the name of Neo-conservatism resembles a charge of dynamite." He viewed neo-conservatives as being let's-pretend populists, whose pretense at being democrats will jeopardize the Empire, not strengthen it. Empire, and its rightness, were so deeply rooted in the rulers' psyche, it went unchallenged. In fact, at that very time, in the 1880s, Sir Cecil Rhodes was busy creating the foundation for the UK-US empire that now controls most of the world .

The modern pro-Israel neoconservatism arose in the 1960s when formerly Marxist Jewish intellectuals in New York City and Washington DC, who were even more anti-communist than anti-nazi, became impassioned with the US empire being extended to the entire world by spreading 'democracy' (and protection of Israel) as if this Israel-protecting empire were a holy crusade not only against the Soviet Union, which was demonized by them, but against Islam, which also was demonized by them (since they were ethnocentric Jews and the people whose land the 'Israelis' had stolen were overwhelmingly Muslims -- and now were very second-class citizens in their own long-ancestral and also birth-land). This was how they distinguished themselves from "paleoconservatism" which wasn't nearly so Messianic, but which was more overtly ethnocentric, though ethnic Christian, instead of ethnic Jewish. The "paleoconservatives" were isolationists, not imperialists. They originated from the opponents of America's entry into WW II against the imperialists of that time, who were the fascists. Those American "isolationists" would have given us a world controlled by Hitler and his Axis allies. All conservatism is absurd, but there are many forms of it, none of which makes intelligent sense.

The roots of neoconservatism are 100% imperialistic, colonialist, supremacist, and blatantly evil. They hate Russia because they still crave to conquer it , and don't know how, short of nuclear annihilation, which would be extremely dangerous, even for themselves. So, they endanger everyone.

[Jan 19, 2020] American hubris and bully-ism in the international arena has steadily grown since the end of the Cold War, since they somehow believe their system won. With Trump, the mask is off. "I'm taking the oil".

Jan 19, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Josh , Jan 17 2020 22:32 utc | 41

Totally agree with Daniel: "Trump is president and commander in chief. The buck stops with him. If he is too weak or stupid to prevent himself from getting manipulated by his creepy cadaverous son-in-law and the bunch of fanatics he hired and surrounds himself with he is unfit for the job. But given his many transgressions and war mongering ways, it's more likely he's just another fraud like every other POTUS."
American hubris and bully-ism in the international arena has steadily grown since the end of the Cold War, since they somehow believe their system won. With Trump, the mask is off. "I'm taking the oil". In fact, he's taking the oil even though he can't do much with it (can't develop it, limited selling options, etc). Pure child-like "it's mine, i'd rather break it than give it back".
I have decreasing confidence that there will not be a nuclear war. It seems to be increasingly likely that an overstretched American army will, at some point somewhere, be so outmaneuvered that they will hit the panic button. The world is currently counting on the Russians, Iranians, Chinese to be the sober ones, the cooler heads, the ones who hurriedly clear the roads for the drunk adolescent American roaming the streets.

[Jan 19, 2020] In Bullying Iraq, America is Starting to Look Like the New Evil Empire

Jan 19, 2020 | www.theamericanconservative.com

The U.S. has occasionally exerted pressure on democratic allies, but never treated them like servile pawns. Until now. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo (C) and his wife Susan (R) wait to board a helicopter to the US embassy at the terminal at Baghdad International Airport on January 9, 2019.(ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/AFP via Getty Images)

January 17, 2020

|

12:01 am

Ted Galen Carpenter A policy statement that the State Department issued on January 10 asserts that "America is a force for good in the Middle East." It adds, "We want to be a friend and partner to a sovereign, prosperous, and stable Iraq." Yet the Trump administration's recent conduct toward Iraq indicates a very different (and much uglier) policy. Washington is behaving like an impatient, imperial power that has concluded that an obstreperous colony requires a dose of corrective discipline.

Washington's late December airstrikes on Iraqi militia targets, in retaliation for the killing of an American civilian contractor working at a base in northern Iraq, greatly provoked the Iraqi government and population. Massive anti-American demonstrations erupted in several cities, and an assault on the U.S. embassy in Baghdad forced diplomats to take refuge in a special " safe room ."

The drone strike on Iranian General Qassem Soleimani outside Baghdad a few days later was an even more brazen violation of Iraq's sovereignty. Carrying out the assassination on Iraqi territory when Soleimani was there at the invitation of Prime Minister Adel Abdull Mahdi to discuss a new peace feeler from Saudi Arabia was especially clumsy and arrogant. It created suspicions that the United States was deliberately seeking to maintain turmoil in the Middle East to justify its continued military presence there. The killing of Soleimani (as well as two influential Iraqi militia leaders) led Iraq's government to pass a resolution calling on Mahdi to expel U.S. forces stationed in the country, and he promptly began to prepare legislation to implement that goal.

Trump's initial reaction to the prospect that Baghdad might order U.S. troops to leave was akin to a foreign policy temper tantrum. He threatened America's democratic ally with harsh economic sanctions if it dared to take that step. As Trump put it, "we will charge them sanctions like they've never seen before, ever. It'll make Iranian sanctions look somewhat tame."

Over the following days, it became apparent that the sanctions threat was not just a spontaneous, intemperate outburst on the part of President Trump. Compelling Iraq to continue hosting U.S. forces was official administration policy. Senior officials from the Treasury Department and other agencies began drafting specific sanctions that could be imposed. Washington explicitly warned the Iraqi government that it could lose access to its account held at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Such a freeze would amount to financial strangulation of the country's already fragile economy.

U.S. arrogance towards Baghdad seems almost boundless. When Mahdi asked the administration to " prepare a mechanism " for the exit of American forces and commence negotiations towards that transition, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo flatly refused . Indeed, the State Department's January 10 statement made it clear that there would be no such discussions: "At this time, any delegation sent to Iraq would be dedicated to discussing how to best recommit to our strategic partnership -- not to discuss troop withdrawal, but our right, appropriate force posture in the Middle East."

Throughout the Cold War, U.S. leaders proudly proclaimed that NATO and other American-led alliances were voluntary associations of free nations. Conversely, the Warsaw Pact alliance of Eastern European countries formed in response to NATO was a blatantly imperial enterprise of puppet regimes under the Kremlin's total domination. Moscow's brutal suppression of even modest political deviations within its satellite empire helped confirm the difference. Soviet tanks rolled into East Germany in 1953, Hungary in 1956, and Czechoslovakia in 1968 to crush reform factions and solidify a Soviet military occupation. Even when the USSR did not resort to such heavy-handed measures, it was clear that the "allies" were on a very short leash.

Although the United States has occasionally exerted pressure on its allies when they've opposed its objectives, it has not attempted to treat democratic partners as servile pawns. That is why the Trump administration's current behavior towards Iraq is so troubling and exhibits such unprecedented levels of crudeness. America is in danger of becoming the geopolitical equivalent of a middle school bully.

If Washington refuses to withdraw its forces from Iraq, defying the Baghdad government's calls to leave, those troops will no longer be guests or allies. They would constitute a hostile army of occupation, however elaborate the rhetorical facade.

At that point, America would no longer be a moral "force for good" in the Middle East or anywhere else. The United States would be behaving as an amoral imperial power imposing its authority on weaker democratic countries that dare adopt measures contrary to Washington's policy preferences. America might not yet have replaced the Soviet Union as (in Ronald Reagan's words) the "evil empire," but it will be disturbingly far along the path to that status.

Ted Galen Carpenter, a senior fellow in defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute and a contributing editor at The American Conservative , is the author of 12 books and more than 850 articles on international affairs.

me • 2 days ago

"America is in danger of becoming the geopolitical equivalent of a middle school bully"?

Its not a mere prospect, its history. The US has been a bully for many years, at least for the last 20 years, if not more.

It is 100% irrelevant what American think of their "moral standing" in the world. In terms of foreign policy, it only matter what OTHER countries think, right or wrong. The rest of the world already think the US govt is a bully. The fact that Trump, became president is simply the icing on the big reveal cake. Yes, foreign powers helped Trump win the election, but that was simply an effect on the margin. The majority of Trump supporters do not need Russian interference to be swayed by him. Trump action embodies that which his supports wanted for many many years.

What Trump has done is give foreign allies something tangible, indisputable proof to point to, every time the US come knocking on their door ask for help on "this", "that" and the "other thing". From now on, they will make sure the get favorable terms in writing, rather than verbal agreements.

Gary Sellars me • a day ago
Upvoted, even though you repeat the BS allegations of Russian "interference". Social media traffic mining by a privately-owned clickbait operation and an email leak to Wikileaks from the DNC by a disgruntled insider is not "Russian interference". A handful of FB ads taken out both before and after the elections, and slamming BOTH trump and Shrillary is likewise evidence of nothing.

"Russiagate" is a hoax, a monumental LIE foisted onto the US public by a vengeful Democrat party, their political-appointees within government agencies, the corporate media and the Deep State reptiles who need eternal hostility to Russia to justify the $1T per annum gravy train that so enriches them.

John Mann Gary Sellars • a day ago
Upvoted, even though your choice of description for the idiotic allegations of Russian interference is not appropriate for genteel society.
Aker John Mann • 20 hours ago • edited
Russiagate and other forms of Anti-Russian yapping are but an effort for a risingly dysfunctional society to blame outsiders for failure and dysfunction.

[Jan 19, 2020] In Europe the prime objective for the US is to prevent Russia and Germany coupling up, keeping the two tribes separate is the goal, at whatever cost.

Jan 19, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Baron , Jan 17 2020 23:35 utc | 60

@ wagelaborer | Jan 17 2020 19:04 utc

Read wagelaborer (3)

Read wagelaborer (3)

Read wagelaborer (3) because what he says is the core to the understanding US Foreign policy, everything else is unimportant, a side dish, a noise. One possible thing missing is that in Europe the prime objective for the US is to prevent Russia and Germany coupling up, keeping the two tribes separate is the goal, at whatever cost.

The pricing of oil (and oil derivatives) in dollars is a replacement for the gold-backed dollar scrapped by Nixon in early 70s. The pricing is a must, losing it would undermine the dollar as a reserve currency. Each year, those who need to buy oil plus oil derivates have to find trillions for the buy the black gold.

Consider: Each day some 100ml barrels are produced, that's 36bn barrels a year, at a cost of $75 per barrel it's some $2.7tr needed to buy the stuff. And that's just the crude. Add the derivatives (per barrel more expensive than crude), and one's talking some $5-7tr to be found. That's what allows the US to print either IOU's i.e. the Treasuries or actual cash without any worry whatever the IOU's will ever be brought back to the mainland US in haunting inflation.

The time the pricing of oil in dollars goes, the US hegemony gets a fatal knock, from which it would be near impossible to recover bar staring a war.

Cynica , Jan 17 2020 23:49 utc | 63

It's clear that Trump does not understand - or has not understood until recently - the true goals of US foreign policy (maintaining the dollar hegemony first, promoting US business interests second). His notion of winning a war is apparently being able to send the troops home. This is at odds with the "deep state", which has no problem spending money that it sees as coming from others, as long as that money keeps coming in and it's being spent in the furtherance of geopolitical goals. Hence the continued US military presence in Afghanistan must be furthering, if not fulfilling, one or more geopolitical goals. Those goals most likely do not include "defeating terrorism". Trump may well not be aware of what the goals are.

It may be useful to draw a comparison between the US military presence in Afghanistan and its presence in Vietnam. Like Afghanistan, Vietnam seems to have been a near-pointless expenditure of resources and people - on the surface. From the "deep state's" point of view, however, Vietnam served as a bulwark against encroachment by the non-dollar-aligned part of the world. Vietnam was only abandoned once a much bigger prize became available - China. Given Afghanistan's location, it stands to reason that it too is serving as a bulwark and that its importance in the "deep state's" eyes will diminish (if not disappear) once Iran and/or Russia experiences a "change of heart".

[Jan 19, 2020] US strategy and what the gas pipeline war is costing us by Manlio Dinucci

Jan 19, 2020 | www.voltairenet.org

30 December 2019

After having forbidden the Chinese company Huawei to compete in the calls for tender for the 5G network, the United States are now forbidding the Europeans to increase their supplies of Russian gas. While the first decision was aimed at maintaining the coherence of NATO, the second is not a result of Russophobia, but of the 1992 " Wolfowitz doctrine " - preventing the EU from becoming a competitor of the " American Empire ". In both cases, the point is to infantilise the EU and keep it in a situation of dependence.

Although they were locked in a convoluted struggle concerning the impeachment of President Trump, Republicans and Democrats in the Senate laid down their arms in order to vote, in quasi-unanimity, for the imposition of heavy sanctions on the companies participating in the construction of North Stream 2, the doubling of the gas pipeline which delivers Russian gas to Germany across the Baltic Sea. The main victims were the European companies which had helped finance the 11 billion dollar project with the Russian company Gazprom. The project is now 80 % finished. The Austrian company Omy, British/Dutch Royal Dutch Shell, French Engie, German companies Uniper and Wintershall, Italian Saipem and Swiss Allseas are also taking part in the laying of the pipeline.

The doubling of North Stream increases Europe's dependence on Russian gas, warn the United States. Above all, they are preoccupied by the fact that the gas pipeline – by crossing the Baltic in waters belonging to Russia, Finland, Sweden and Germany – thus avoids the Visegrad countries (Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland and Hungary), the Baltic States and Ukraine. In other words, the European countries which have the closest ties to Washington through NATO (to which we must add Italy).

Rather than being economic, the goal for the USA is strategic. This is confirmed by the fact that the sanctions on North Stream 2 are included in the National Defense Authorization Act , the legislative act which, for fiscal year 2020, hands the Pentagon the colossal sum of 738 billion dollars for new wars and new weapons (including space weapons), to which must be added other posts which bring the US military expenditure to approximately 1,000 billion dollars. The economic sanctions on North Stream 2 are part of a politico-military escalation against Russia.

An ulterior confirmation can be found in the fact that the US Congress has established sanctions not only against North Stream 2, but also against the Turk-Stream, which, in its final phase of realisation, will bring Russian gas across the Black Sea to Eastern Thrace,the small European area of Turkey. From there, by another pipeline, Russian gas should be delivered to Bulgaria, Serbia and other European countries. This is the Russian riposte to the US action which managed to block the South Stream pipeline in 2014. South Stream was intended to link Russia to Italy across the Black Sea and by land to Tarvisio (Udine). Italy would therefore have become a switch platform for gas in the EU, with notable economic advantages. The Obama administration was able to scuttle the project, with the collaboration of the European Union.

The company Saipem (Italian Eni Group), once again affected by the US sanctions against North Stream 2, was severely hit by the blockage of South Stream – in 2014, it lost contracts to the value of 2.4 billion Euros, to which other contracts would have been added if the project had continued. But at the time, no-one in Italy or in the EU protested against the burial of the project which was being organised by the USA. Now German interests are in play, and critical voices are being raised in Germany and in the EU against US sanctions against North Stream 2.

Nothing is being said about the fact that the European Union has agreed to import liquified natural gas (LNG) from the USA, an extract from bituminous shale by the destructive technique of hydraulic fracturation (fracking). In order to damage Russia, Washington is attempting to reduce its gas exports to the EU, obliging European consumers to foot the bill. Since President Donald Trump and the President of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, signed in Washington in July 2018 the Joint Statement of 25 July: European Union imports of U.S. Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) , the EU has doubled its importation of LNG from the USA, co-financing the infrastructures via an initial expenditure of 656 million Euros. However, this did not save European companies from US sanctions. Manlio Dinucci

Translation
Pete Kimberley

Source
Il Manifesto (Italy)

[Jan 18, 2020] Putin plants to prohibit dual citizens to serve in government

Highly recommended!
Jan 18, 2020 | www.unz.com

Peripatetic Commenter , says: Show Comment January 17, 2020 at 9:43 pm GMT

I don't think it will be long before we see Congress in the US calling for invasion of Russia on the grounds of a lack of diversity, lack of respect for LGBTP and so forth.

[Jan 18, 2020] The inability of the USA elite to tell the truth about the genuine aim of policy despite is connected with the fact that the real goal is to attain Full Spectrum Dominance over the planet and its people such that neoliberal bankers can rule the world

Highly recommended!
Jan 18, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

karlof1 , Jan 17 2020 19:24 utc | 6

Yes! The inability to tell the truth about the genuine aim of policy despite its being published because that policy goal--to attain Full Spectrum Dominance over the planet and its people such that neoliberal bankers can rule the world--is actually 100% against genuine American Values as expressed by the Four Freedoms (1.Freedom of speech; 2.Freedom of worship; 3.Freedom from want; 4.Freedom from fear) and the articulated goals/vision of the UN Charter--World Peace arrived at via collective security and diplomacy, not war--which are still taught in schools along with Wilson's 14 Points. Then of course, there's the war against British Tyranny known as the Spirit of '76 and the Revolutionary War for Independence and the documents that bookend that era. In 1948, Kennan stated, in an internal discussion that was never censored, the USA consumed 60% of global resources with only 5% of the population and needed to somehow come up with a policy to both continue and justify that great disparity to both the domestic and international audience. Yet, those truths were never provided in an overt manner to the American public or the international audience. The upshot being the US federal government since it dropped the bombs on Japan has been lying or misleading its people such that it's now habitual. And Trump's diatribe against the generals reflects the reality that he too was taken in by those lies.

[Jan 18, 2020] Eastern Ukrainians, who were the biggest losers in the post-Soviet deindustrilization, have harmed you by existing and dying of diseases of poverty and despair.

Jan 18, 2020 | www.unz.com

AP says: January 15, 2020 at 9:59 pm GMT 100 Words @Thulean Friend

That too. Ukraine is a split country on pro/anti-Russian attitudes

Rather strong and somewhat anachronistic statement. Ukraine was split prior to 2014.

There are still pro-Russian areas but being free of Crimea and Donbas means Ukraine can no longer be characterized as "split." Probably 1/4 of the population can be considered to be politically friendly to Russia. Given, say, Latvia's ethnic Russian population, that country is nowadays probably more "split" than Ukraine.

JPM , says: January 15, 2020 at 10:59 pm GMT

@AP d in a frozen conflict zone. After they were fucked by industrial collapse and job loss. Before that they were fucked by wars, famines and the Bolsheviks. They really can't seem to catch a break.

Europeans seem to be on the precipice of disaster everywhere. It would be nice to band together, rather than die while getting hung up on the narcissism of small differences. Probably just wishful thinking on my part though. I guess Americans can't understand how important it is for Ukrainians on one side of the Dniepr to show how different they are from Ukrainians on the other or how different they are from Russians for that matter.

[Jan 18, 2020] The inability of the USA elite to tell the truth about the genuine aim of policy despite is connected with the fact that the real goal is to attain Full Spectrum Dominance over the planet and its people such that neoliberal bankers can rule the world

Highly recommended!
Jan 18, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

karlof1 , Jan 17 2020 19:24 utc | 6

Yes! The inability to tell the truth about the genuine aim of policy despite its being published because that policy goal--to attain Full Spectrum Dominance over the planet and its people such that neoliberal bankers can rule the world--is actually 100% against genuine American Values as expressed by the Four Freedoms (1.Freedom of speech; 2.Freedom of worship; 3.Freedom from want; 4.Freedom from fear) and the articulated goals/vision of the UN Charter--World Peace arrived at via collective security and diplomacy, not war--which are still taught in schools along with Wilson's 14 Points. Then of course, there's the war against British Tyranny known as the Spirit of '76 and the Revolutionary War for Independence and the documents that bookend that era. In 1948, Kennan stated, in an internal discussion that was never censored, the USA consumed 60% of global resources with only 5% of the population and needed to somehow come up with a policy to both continue and justify that great disparity to both the domestic and international audience. Yet, those truths were never provided in an overt manner to the American public or the international audience. The upshot being the US federal government since it dropped the bombs on Japan has been lying or misleading its people such that it's now habitual. And Trump's diatribe against the generals reflects the reality that he too was taken in by those lies.

[Jan 18, 2020] Patrick Armstrong on the Russian Reshuffle -- Strategic Culture

Jan 18, 2020 | www.strategic-culture.org

(Written on the evening of. So subject to reconsideration/revision/outright denial as we learn more.)

I didn't expect any of it. Neither did anyone else, whatever the so-called experts outgassing on the US Garbage Media may be pretending. I don't know what it all means. Neither does anyone else. (Well Putin & Co do, but they keep their cards close to their chests. As we've just seen.)

What do we know? Putin gave his annual address to the Federal Council ( Rus ) ( Eng ) and started off with how important it was that the birthrate should be raised. Fair enough: he wants more Russians on the planet, the government's programs have ensured that there will be quite a few more but there are still more to come. Many programs planned; some of which will work: after all, not everything works out as we hoped does it? He mentioned how dangerous the world is – especially the MENA – and said at least Russia is pretty secure (as indeed it is except against lunatics addicted to the Book of Revelation .)

Then the constitutional stuff. He believes the Constitution needs a few tweaks. Important officials should really be Russians and not people with a get-out-of-jail-card/alternate-loyalty-card in their vests. Reasonable enough: they should "inseparably connect their lives with Russia and the Russian people without any assumptions and allowances." (Good idea actually. Can we in the West steal the idea? We vote for X but who does he vote for?) Russian law should take precedence over decrees contaminated by the " Rules-Based International Order" (" we make the rules , you follow our orders "). The PM should be named by the Duma. (A pretty big change, actually: let's have more details on the division of labour please. In some countries the head of state is The Boss – USA, Russia (now), France – in others the head of government is The Boss – Germany, Canada, Denmark. There is a serious carve up of powers question here that has to be worked out in detail.) Constitutional changes should be approved in a referendum. The President either should or should not be bound by the no-three-terms-in-a-row-rule (I personally can't figure out what "этим" refers to in "Не считаю, что этот вопрос принципиальный, но согласен с этим. Не считаю, что этот вопрос принципиальный, но согласен с этим." But, no doubt we will soon learn.)

So, a somewhat less presidential republic. Details to be decided. Many details. But I'm confident that it's been worked out and we will learn. Putin & Co have shown us over 20 years that they don't make things up on the fly.

Then we learned that the entire government had resigned – but individuals to stay in place until replaced. Then we learned – a fast few hours indeed! – that Dmitri Medvedev was replaced by somebody that no one (other than Russian tax specialists) had ever heard of: Mikhail Vladimirovich Mishustin. ( Russian Wiki entry – none in English so far.) Those cheering Medvedev's dismissal (something predicted and hoped for by a sector of Russianologists) had to then swallow this: not tossed out into ignominy and shame, as they wanted, but something else. Putin says that there is a clear distinction between government and presidential concerns; defence and security are clearly in the latter. But Medvedev has always been closely following defence and security issues and it is suitable and appropriate that he continue to do so. So a new position, deputy heard of the security council, will be created for him. So what are we to make of this? Medvedev has been given the boot and a sinecure? Or he's been given a crucial job in the new carve-up of responsibilities?

After all, Russia's problems keep getting bigger but nobody is getting any younger. Especially the problems from outside. For some years Washington, an implacable enemy of Moscow, has been getting less and less predictable. Lavrov and Kerry spend hours locked up negotiating a deal in Syria ; within a week the US military attacks a Syrian Army unit; "by mistake" . Who's in charge? Now with the murder of Soleimani, possibly on a Washington-approved peace mission, Washington has moved to another level of lawlessness and is exploring the next depth as it defies Baghdad's order to get out. A pirate power. The outside problems for Moscow aren't getting smaller, are they? Washington is certainly недоговороспособны – it's impossible to make an agreement with it and, if you should think you have done so, it will break it. A dangerous, uncontrollable madman, staggering around blowing everything up – is any foreign leader now to be assumed to be on Washington's murder list? Surviving its decay is a big job indeed. The problems are getting bigger in the Final Days of the Imperium Americanum.

So, maybe Moscow needs more people on the job.

So are we looking at a new division of labour in Moscow as part of managing the Transition? (To say nothing of the – what's the word? – Thucydides trap ? ). Mishustin looks after the nuts and bolt of Russia's economy and internal management. Medvedev looks after defence and security – something not likely to get smaller -- while Putin looks after the big picture?

But this is only the first step in The Transition and we will learn more soon.

NOTE 16 January. The Presidential website now has the actual words on the issue of defence and security:

There is a clear-cut presidential block of issues, and there is a Government block of issues, even though the President, of course, is responsible for everything, but the presidential block includes primarily matters of security, defence and the like.

Mr Medvedev has always been in charge of these matters. From the point of view of increasing our defence capability and security, I consider it possible and have asked him to deal with these matters in the future. I consider it possible and will, in the near future, introduce the position of Deputy Chairman of the Security Council. As you are aware, the President is its Chairman.

patrickarmstrong.ca The views of individual contributors do not necessarily represent those of the Strategic Culture Foundation. Tags: Russia Vladimir Putin Print this article January 18, 2020 | Editor's Сhoice Patrick Armstrong on the Russian Reshuffle Patrick ARMSTRONG

(Written on the evening of. So subject to reconsideration/revision/outright denial as we learn more.)

I didn't expect any of it. Neither did anyone else, whatever the so-called experts outgassing on the US Garbage Media may be pretending. I don't know what it all means. Neither does anyone else. (Well Putin & Co do, but they keep their cards close to their chests. As we've just seen.)

What do we know? Putin gave his annual address to the Federal Council ( Rus ) ( Eng ) and started off with how important it was that the birthrate should be raised. Fair enough: he wants more Russians on the planet, the government's programs have ensured that there will be quite a few more but there are still more to come. Many programs planned; some of which will work: after all, not everything works out as we hoped does it? He mentioned how dangerous the world is – especially the MENA – and said at least Russia is pretty secure (as indeed it is except against lunatics addicted to the Book of Revelation .)

Then the constitutional stuff. He believes the Constitution needs a few tweaks. Important officials should really be Russians and not people with a get-out-of-jail-card/alternate-loyalty-card in their vests. Reasonable enough: they should "inseparably connect their lives with Russia and the Russian people without any assumptions and allowances." (Good idea actually. Can we in the West steal the idea? We vote for X but who does he vote for?) Russian law should take precedence over decrees contaminated by the " Rules-Based International Order" (" we make the rules , you follow our orders "). The PM should be named by the Duma. (A pretty big change, actually: let's have more details on the division of labour please. In some countries the head of state is The Boss – USA, Russia (now), France – in others the head of government is The Boss – Germany, Canada, Denmark. There is a serious carve up of powers question here that has to be worked out in detail.) Constitutional changes should be approved in a referendum. The President either should or should not be bound by the no-three-terms-in-a-row-rule (I personally can't figure out what "этим" refers to in "Не считаю, что этот вопрос принципиальный, но согласен с этим. Не считаю, что этот вопрос принципиальный, но согласен с этим." But, no doubt we will soon learn.)

So, a somewhat less presidential republic. Details to be decided. Many details. But I'm confident that it's been worked out and we will learn. Putin & Co have shown us over 20 years that they don't make things up on the fly.

Then we learned that the entire government had resigned – but individuals to stay in place until replaced. Then we learned – a fast few hours indeed! – that Dmitri Medvedev was replaced by somebody that no one (other than Russian tax specialists) had ever heard of: Mikhail Vladimirovich Mishustin. ( Russian Wiki entry – none in English so far.) Those cheering Medvedev's dismissal (something predicted and hoped for by a sector of Russianologists) had to then swallow this: not tossed out into ignominy and shame, as they wanted, but something else. Putin says that there is a clear distinction between government and presidential concerns; defence and security are clearly in the latter. But Medvedev has always been closely following defence and security issues and it is suitable and appropriate that he continue to do so. So a new position, deputy heard of the security council, will be created for him. So what are we to make of this? Medvedev has been given the boot and a sinecure? Or he's been given a crucial job in the new carve-up of responsibilities?

After all, Russia's problems keep getting bigger but nobody is getting any younger. Especially the problems from outside. For some years Washington, an implacable enemy of Moscow, has been getting less and less predictable. Lavrov and Kerry spend hours locked up negotiating a deal in Syria ; within a week the US military attacks a Syrian Army unit; "by mistake" . Who's in charge? Now with the murder of Soleimani, possibly on a Washington-approved peace mission, Washington has moved to another level of lawlessness and is exploring the next depth as it defies Baghdad's order to get out. A pirate power. The outside problems for Moscow aren't getting smaller, are they? Washington is certainly недоговороспособны – it's impossible to make an agreement with it and, if you should think you have done so, it will break it. A dangerous, uncontrollable madman, staggering around blowing everything up – is any foreign leader now to be assumed to be on Washington's murder list? Surviving its decay is a big job indeed. The problems are getting bigger in the Final Days of the Imperium Americanum.

So, maybe Moscow needs more people on the job.

So are we looking at a new division of labour in Moscow as part of managing the Transition? (To say nothing of the – what's the word? – Thucydides trap ? ). Mishustin looks after the nuts and bolt of Russia's economy and internal management. Medvedev looks after defence and security – something not likely to get smaller -- while Putin looks after the big picture?

But this is only the first step in The Transition and we will learn more soon.

NOTE 16 January. The Presidential website now has the actual words on the issue of defence and security:

There is a clear-cut presidential block of issues, and there is a Government block of issues, even though the President, of course, is responsible for everything, but the presidential block includes primarily matters of security, defence and the like.

Mr Medvedev has always been in charge of these matters. From the point of view of increasing our defence capability and security, I consider it possible and have asked him to deal with these matters in the future. I consider it possible and will, in the near future, introduce the position of Deputy Chairman of the Security Council. As you are aware, the President is its Chairman.

patrickarmstrong.ca © 2010 - 2020 | Strategic Culture Foundation | Republishing is welcomed with reference to Strategic Culture online journal www.strategic-culture.org . The views of individual contributors do not necessarily represent those of the Strategic Culture Foundation. Also from EDITOR'S CHOICE EDITOR'S CHOICE Friedman's Hapless Fear-Mongering How the President Became a Drone Operator Cracks Appear in U.S.-China "Détente" Deal US to Iraq: 'Vote All You Want, We're Not Leaving!' #CNNIsTrash Trends As Pushback Grows Against Oligarchic Election Meddling Sign up for the Strategic Culture Foundation Newsletter Subscribe

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[Jan 18, 2020] Major Political Changes in Russia

Jan 18, 2020 | www.unz.com

Major announcements in this State of the Nation speech on Jan 15, 2020.

Here is a very brief summary to get the conversation started.

Immediate politics :

who reduced uncollected VAT from 20% to 1%. Source tells me FM Sergey Lavrov rumored to be permanently retiring.

Constitutional changes :

Demographics :

continued fall in Russia's fertility rates to 1.5 children per woman this year (up from post-Soviet peak of close to 1.8 in mid-2000s), setting 1.7 children per woman as the new target for 2024. Reaffirmed demographics as the first national priority. Maternity capital to be increased by further 150,000 rubles and constitute 616,617 rubles (≈$10,000) for a family with two children, to be annually indexed.

***

Some very tentative thoughts :

(1) I have long thought now that Putin's end game is to transition into an overseeing "elder statesman" role, along the model of Lee Kuan Yew/PAP in Singapore [see 1 , 2 , 3 ]. This appears to be the final confirmation that this is happening.

(2) Questions about the succession revolved around (a) The Belarus variant, in which it effectively constitutes a new state with Russia, allowing Putin to become the supreme head of that state; (b) A constitutional reshuffle such as the one we're seeing here. This question has also been answered.

utu , says: January 15, 2020 at 5:16 pm GMT

" Putin's end game is to transition into an overseeing "elder statesman" role" – Not always does it work: King Lear, Benedict 16.

"Lear gave up a God-given duty and right to rule his people. His tragic flaw 'hamartia' is presumptuousness. He presumes that he can divest himself of what God invested him with (the Elizabethan idea of the divine rights of the ruler), he grows in tragic stature as the play progresses." – found on google.

AnonFromTN , says: January 15, 2020 at 5:28 pm GMT

Putin's end game is to transition into an overseeing "elder statesman" role

Looks more like he plans to become a powerful Prime Minister after 2024, rather than elder statesman. Might be good in the medium term: politicians of his caliber are rare. Still, in the longer term Russia needs a real successor: rule by committee never works, even in smaller and simpler countries.

Anatoly Karlin , says: Website January 15, 2020 at 5:42 pm GMT
@AnonFromTN I think (and it's already been said for years) that's he too tired for the role of PM, which is more intensive than the Presidency and involved dealing with boring domestic crap whereas the Presidency, at least, offers more in the way of Grand Strategy, diplomacy, etc.

I think the likeliest game plan is for him to chair a much more empowered State Council after 2024. (This is what Nazarbayev did with the Security Council after retiring last year).

Felix Keverich , says: January 15, 2020 at 5:42 pm GMT

Presidential candidates should have been resident in Russia for 25 years (previously 10 years) and never had a foreign citizenship. (This rules out a large proportion of Atlanticists and crypto-Atlanticists).

Does this imply, that they'll allow an actual election in 2024? I'm getting excited

Speaking of constitutional changes, they should just get rid of the entire Yeltsin's text, and write a new one. Yeltsin's constitution is a mishmash of French and American constitutions, completely detached from the country's realities and tradition.

So union with Belarus is still on the table right? But if that happens it would be Belarus joining a continuous RF, under the newly modified constitution?

My take on this is that Lukashenka told Putin to piss off, and he did. So no union.

JPM , says: January 15, 2020 at 5:44 pm GMT

Reaffirmed demographics as the first national priority.

How about not importing all of Central Asia, so that wages aren't depressed. Higher wages might boost that low TFR.

Maternity capital to be increased by further 150,000 rubles and constitute 616,617 rubles (≈$10,000) for a family with two children, to be annually indexed.

Will that will help subsidize the Chechens, Avars, Laks etc. the most relative to their population size because Russia is a "Multinational" state with equality for all of its "constituent" nations?

Speaking of which will Uzbek and Tajik guests be able to get in on that too? A future Russian Duma might need to grant more rights to them because Russia will need more workers to support its aging population. They speak Russian after all, and there is a shared history. So, they will integrate well into society. I feel like that is what a future Russian PM will be arguing a few years down the line.

AnonFromTN , says: January 15, 2020 at 5:46 pm GMT
@Boswald Bollocksworth s everything that is going to befall it.
Second, Lukashenko himself is a problem. He might be qualified to run a small agrobusiness, but certainly nothing greater than that. Yet his outsized ego (common among morons, think Bush Jr) won't let him fade away peacefully.
Third, Belarus is subsidized by Russia, and many Russian citizens believe that the money would be much better spent inside Russia or helping countries that deserve this aid, like Syria.
Maybe Putin thinks differently, but he does a lot to remain popular. So, after pension reform hit to his support I don't think he is going to do something most people disapprove of.
Anatoly Karlin , says: Website January 15, 2020 at 5:48 pm GMT
@JPM Fortunately, there's very little Central Asian breeding going on it Russia – the pattern is for them to make their money (5-10x what they can make at home) and raise families at home.

Chechens, Avars, etc. will benefit disproportionately, but the program is after all primarily intended as an incentive. Personally, I think a childlessness tax will be much more effective, since people react better to penalties than rewards – plus it will rake in a net profit – but I don't suppose its politically feasible in the modern age.

Thulean Friend , says: January 15, 2020 at 5:53 pm GMT
Seems like a good balance between a liberal direction – limiting any one president to two absolute terms while substantially increasing the say of the parliament – and some common sense requirements (like on citizenship).

Putting it to a referendum is also welcome. The will of the people should not only be heard but increased.

Putin bemoaned continued fall in Russia's fertility rates to 1.5 children per woman this year (up from post-Soviet peak of close to 1.8 in mid-2000s), setting 1.7 children per woman as the new target for 2024.
Reaffirmed demographics as the first national priority.
Maternity capital to be increased by further 150,000 rubles and constitute 616,617 rubles (≈$10,000) for a family with two children, to be annually indexed.

I doubt this will work.

The biggest problem for fertility all over the world is housing. As long as the housing sector is neoliberalised, it will be a major impediment. Affordable housing is per definition low-margin and hence not interesting to private developers. For them, a perpetual housing shortage pushes up the profit margin. All firms are constantly seeking to maximise profits, so their behaviour is rational from a purely market fundamentalist point of view. That's why market fundamentalism need to be overthrown. There has to be a massive building spree to lower the cost of housing to no more than 4-5 years of annual (net) wages for a median worker to buy without debt. That would be the real game changer. Import the churkas and get it done.

The second problem is ideology and religiosity. If you look at Israel, a major component of their high fertility is the massively increasing Haredi sector. Even outside the Haredis, they have a high share of genuinely religious jews. For the seculars, TFR is still a respectable 2.5, which is likely explained by nationalism. Whatever Russian nationalism is, it isn't very fecund. Russians aren't very religious either, though Putin seems to be. Church attendence in Russia is quite low. At this stage, I don't believe high fertility can be solved without going into artificial wombs and more exotic solutions. A cultural revolution doesn't seem to be on the cards.

(2) Questions about the succession revolved around (a) The Belarus variant, in which it effectively constitutes a new state with Russia, allowing Putin to become the supreme head of that state; (b) A constitutional reshuffle such as the one we're seeing here. This question has also been answered.

I still think Belarus will be swallowed by Russia within this decade.

[Jan 18, 2020] The new role of Russian Federation State Council in Putin plan

Jan 18, 2020 | www.unz.com

Mitleser , says: January 15, 2020 at 6:13 pm GMT

@Aly so Chairman of the State Council.

The State Council includes the following members: the Speaker of the Federation Council of the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation, the Speaker of the State Duma of the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation, Presidential Plenipotentiary Envoys to the federal districts, senior officials (heads of the highest executive agencies of state power) in Russia's federal constituent entities, and the heads of the political parties in the State Duma.

http://en.kremlin.ru/structure/state-council

[Jan 18, 2020] Mishustin is a genius at reforming bureaucracies with IT systems

Jan 18, 2020 | www.unz.com

Philip Owen , says: January 15, 2020 at 6:28 pm GMT

Mishustin is a genius at reforming bureaucracies with IT systems. He is also an economist who thinks Russia should be less autarkic. He is in the Kudrin camp. For example, he is still scheduled to speak at the Gaidar forum. Shoigu seems to have fallen back. M is associated witht he Union of Right Forces.

There has been a huge Twitter storm of people/trolls posting this a Putin's effort to stay in power.

[Jan 18, 2020] More power to Parliament means Oligarchy control, like all western countries.

Jan 18, 2020 | www.unz.com

nickels , says: January 15, 2020 at 6:59 pm GMT

More power to Parliament means Oligarchy control, like all western countries.
Not good.
Maïkl Makfaïl , says: January 15, 2020 at 11:47 pm GMT
@nickels Exactly . Kudrin and his friends want parliament to have more power so that the russian people have less of it. They know they have 0 legitimacy , that the people hate them and that they would never survive at the top of the political elite if a real and intelligent nationalist comes to power in Russia one day ( Putin is a half-disapointment whose main merit is to have benefited from the work of Primakov ). They want the presidency to be paralysed . I hope they wont succeed and that there will always be a strong statesman on their way in Russia.
Thulean Friend , says: January 16, 2020 at 4:50 am GMT
@nickels control away from oligarchs, but that is more due to his own force of personality rather than the system itself.

In brief, whether a country will be beholden to oligarchs is less due to the governance structure and more about the general culture. Some countries have a very corrupt citizenry/culture and that will produce bad outcomes in most situations in the long run regardless of the political system. This can only be suspended temporarily by a very strong leader – but you only get them infrequently.

The only hope to reduce power of oligarchs when Putin leaves power is to attack corruption in society, at both high levels and ground levels.

nickels , says: January 16, 2020 at 3:17 pm GMT
@Thulean Friend 'The only institution ever devised by men for mastering the money powers in the state is the Monarchy.'
Napolean.

Belloc, for one, writes over and over on this theme.

Most European histories are Whig histories, and, hence, worthless on this topic. Which is not to discount your valid point about princes becoming indebted to jews. Aristocracy had this problem to a greater extent.

Daniel Chieh , says: January 16, 2020 at 5:30 pm GMT
@nickels advantage. Contrary to Thulean, I believe that universal rule of law actually weakens the state and its ability to control merchantile factions. Of course, casual acceptance of "rule of power" is a form of corruption and if it isn't limited to the strongman himself, results in wasteful factionalism.

However, this essential snubbing of the merchantile factions has the very obvious result of them working against the state, for "rule of law"(which benefits them), and of course, not helping their rivals in the warrior factions. In the long run, lack of access to liquidity can severely cripple governments that don't play well with potential creditors.

nickels , says: January 16, 2020 at 7:56 pm GMT
@Daniel Chieh

I believe that universal rule of law actually weakens the state and its ability to control merchantile factions.

Yes, I think this is the key factor. Government by committee is no government, which means the parasites will rise to take over.

Additionally, the western stupidity of tying everything to high flown abstractions, i.e. universal law and principles, is both idiotic and impossible. History demands the intervention of the intellect, i.e. the mind of the monarch or the autocrat.

Thulean Friend , says: January 16, 2020 at 8:06 pm GMT
@nickels e was not particularly involved in planning the conquest and the company self-financed much of the early stages of the conquest itself, ironically enough often from wealthy Indians who were given attractive financing options. The company innovated many things we take for granted today, such as the joint stock company. Of course, the British state did step in eventually but by that time much of the groundwork had already been set. Adjusted for inflation, the EIC was many times larger than either Google or Apple is today at its peak, closer to 4+ trillion USD.

Too much of history blindly focuses on kings and rulers while ignoring many non-state actors.

nickels , says: January 16, 2020 at 9:01 pm GMT
@Thulean Friend Sounds interesting, thx.
'Why War' by Frederic Clemson Howe had a similar theme about how the 'flag followed the dollar' in the lead up to WWI.
Philip Owen , says: January 17, 2020 at 12:11 am GMT
@Thulean Friend money from private trading as company employees were allowed to do. The less rich one commanded three regiments of cavalry at the 3rd siege of Seringapatam. He was elected Prize Officer and thus had an extra share.

They returned and with other East India men built a canal to a coal mine they opened on the hill above an iron works eventually connecting Clydach Gorge to the sea thus launching the industrial revolution in South Wales. So there are very direct links between profits from trade and the industrial revolution. They fed off each other. South Wales at one time produced most of the world's copper. This was in great demand in India for making brass.

[Jan 18, 2020] Today's Russia is a product of several factors

Jan 18, 2020 | www.unz.com

Today's Russia is a product of several factors:

[Jan 18, 2020] I mostly found Dimka to be that rarity in Russian politics a western-leaner with obvious admiration for western ways and the western lifestyle, but who genuinely loved Russia and wanted to do the best by it.

Jan 18, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

Mark Chapman January 15, 2020 at 7:10 pm

"The evening network news shows described the change as a naked grab for power so typical of Putin."

Well, they would, because if he were a western leader that's what it would be; since they don't really understand anything about Russia and view it as an enemy which nonetheless governs itself more or less by western rules, they are consistently wrong. Never seems to teach them anything, though, and they're always leaning into their next opportunity to be wrong again.

I mostly found Dimka to be that rarity in Russian politics – a western-leaner with obvious admiration for western ways and the western lifestyle, but who genuinely loved Russia and wanted to do the best by it. He couldn't really hold the highest office because he was still too easily seduced by the west, which had only to frame something as a tremendous gift to Russia to have him eagerly grab at it, but I don't think any of his decisions were ever meant to hurt the country. Some suggest Putin kept him on to make him serve out a sentence in which western bait would be constantly dangled in front of him, but he didn't have enough power to snatch it, but I don't think so and his service was mostly commendable as long as he was not allowed to make any decisions involving the west himself. I don't know anything about the new guy beyond what others have posted here, but you can be sure he is already the focus of intense western interest.

The bottom line is that whatever they were hoping, Putin is not going to disappear from politics and the very next day, Washington finally gets its man in charge. The succession will be carefully managed to ensure there are no regime-change loopholes.

Mark Chapman January 15, 2020 at 8:07 pm
Yes, that's all true, which is why western regime-changers would be more likely to put their money on a politically-savvy oligarch like Prokhorov, who I am only using as an example. Such a person follows national politics closely and would be much more likely to know the insider information the western influencers would like to know, but do not.

Mind you, that kind of meddling was always a risk, including under the previous system. And it didn't work very well then. Then, though, Khodorkovsky did not seem to have Putin fooled for one second. It remains to be seen if that perspicacity will survive him.

[Jan 18, 2020] Putin is putting forward several changes:

Jan 18, 2020 | www.rt.com

Putin is putting forward several changes :

A two-term limit for Presidential candidates Barring dual citizens, or those born outside Russia, from running for President Increasing the powers of the Duma (Russian legislative body) Having the Prime Minister selected by the Duma, rather than the President Enshrining the Russian Security Council in the constitution That the Russian constitution takes precedence over International Law, especially where it might infringe the legal rights of Russian citizens

These changes are to be put to the Russian people in a referendum by the end of the year "if it all is solved quickly", according to Russia's Central Election Commission.

Immediately following these announcements, the entire Russian government resigned – including Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev – though he will be offered a new job, reports RT :

So, what happens next?

Why have Medvedev and his government resigned en masse? Will the proposed reforms pass a referendum? What is the overall aim behind these changes? Does Putin plan to stay on past 2024, or is he strengthening the role of PM with an eye to taking that job, as some western commentators seem to think? Who will be the next President of Russia? Rhys Jaggar Given the Russia-bashing by US warmongers the past 20 years, it's been a jolly good thing for Russians that they had a very strong President for 20 years. Otherwise, they would have been back in the 1990s with declining birth rates, mass poverty and bloodsucking foreign oligarchs nicking everything Russian in sight.

As for the future, you can read this one of two ways:

The first option is that Putin now genuinely believes that Russia as a state is ready for democracy, and thus he is seeking to weaken the Presidency and strengthen the Duma as a key plank in that.

The second option is that he thinks that he needs to stay on for quite a bit longer as long as lunatics are running the DC asylum, so he is making plans to be Prime Minister post 2024.

It could of course be that he thinks both will be true, just that democracy may only be strong enough to repel Western rapaciousness after he has been in power for another decade or so.

What can honestly be said about Putin is that he has acted in the interests of Russia, not Zionazi oligarchs.

And as he answers to the Russian people not to Western imperialists, that is precisely what he should have been doing.

OH but Boris Johnson, his predecessors and his successors could do the same for Britain . 13 -2 Reply Jan 16, 2020 6:29 PM Gall Gall I totally agree with your assessment Rhys. I've been reading RI, RT, Fort-Russ etc and contrary to the Western "Media's" sensationalism this transition of power seems to be fully supported by the Russian people.

What's hysterical is that once again CIA was left out of the loop but that's no surprise. Putin once again used the idiotic Russiaphobic morons to his advantage.

Too bad he was born in Russia and not the US because he'd make a great President.

"Putin for President" 🙂 4 -1 Reply Jan 16, 2020 9:26 PM Vierotchka Vierotchka Had Putin been born in the US, he would have made a great Presiden only for ten years, though, not enough time to do for the US what he has done for Russia. 0 0 Reply Jan 16, 2020 9:36 PM Gall Gall Actually 8 or 2 terms due to 22 Amendment ratified after Roosevelt won 4 terms. That said I think the Russian voters are more intelligent than the voters in the US who exist on a diet of MSM pap served up regularly rather than any thing substantive and live under the delusion that they have a "free press". You know 'cause the Constitution says so which aside from the Declaration of Independence has to be the most disingenuous document ever written in history. It took me decades to come to this conclusion.

Whereas the Russian's are pretty savvy having lived under Communism and know what a controlled media looks like up close and personally.

Unfortunately Tocqueville was right about the place and still is today. 2 -1 Reply Jan 16, 2020 11:36 PM Vierotchka Vierotchka Correction – 8 and not 19 years. 0 0 Reply Jan 17, 2020 1:32 AM Vierotchka Vierotchka Drat, that darned age-related macular degeneration
8 and not 10 years. 0 0 Reply Jan 17, 2020 1:33 AM wardropper wardropper Agreed, Rhys and Gall.
The pathetic thing about today's U.S. is that there are plenty of shrewd, perceptive, imaginative and morally decent Americans who would also make great Presidents, and they shouldn't have to look to Russia to find role models either.
But the simpleton-owned media routinely stop such people in their tracks. 0 0 Reply Jan 17, 2020 2:27 AM Berlin beerman Berlin beerman To me, it seems Mr. Putin is shifting strength internally to limit the power of the PM as evident with the appointing of Mr. Mishustin.

If I were running the show I would want to transfer more power to the General Security Council , place my confidant and trusted number two beside me ( Mr. Medvedev – as evident by creating the new post and appointing him to it ) and then steer the ship from that helm.

Mr. Putin is already the director of the RGSC and with the new changes proposed – he will keep that position at the end of his term.

Most Western reporters like the CBC's man in Russia will report blundering reports.

I predict the referendum will have the complete opposite outcome to the one Mr. Cameron tried.

This is a win win for the Russian people and the country unless Mr. Putin turns senseless and senile. 5 -1 Reply Jan 16, 2020 4:58 PM Dungroanin Dungroanin It all sounds pretty sensible.

Meanwhile over here WE are getting started on removing the Supreme Courts legal authority over 'political' issues.

So as many illegal prorogations as JRM & the Queen wants!

I think when the prewar german elections resulted in letting in a bunch of beerhall bullies their Parliament didn't last.

Our Weatherspoon parkbench bullies seem to be going the same way and as the ancient parliament crumbles it becomes likely that it may never be restored!

It seems our establishment has decided it wants Nandy as the safe Blairite leader of the Opposition – and are setting the ground incase another wronguns get in. 1 -1 Reply Jan 16, 2020 12:35 PM Dungroanin Dungroanin Ooh er upset someone eh? Get back to your park bench.

1. Dual Nationality – there is no record of how many dual (or more) nationals are in government in the US or the UK.

It is evident that having more than one master leads to treachery.

2. Russia, like China,are evolving governing systems don't forget they didn't exist 100 years ago – they appear to be dovetailing towards a system less subject to the vagaries of 'western democracies' – corporatists; aristocratic; pork-barrelled; lobbied; media manufactured; owned by bankers.

Given that the systems of both countries have delivered massive growth, elimination of poverty and greater benefits for its populations allowing free-markets, entrepreneurs and billionaires to emerge, whilst preserving their resources from the usual global robber barons – it is not surprising that they look to preserve this legacy beyond personal human age limits by institutionalising such oversight. Compare India with it's legacy system and mass poverty still.

Putin & co are looking at strengthening their nwo that will encompass two thirds of the worlds land mass and the majority of the planets Humans – many still unnecessarily in poverty and being robbed blind as they havd been for centuries by the cover of western 'democracies'. 4 0 Reply Jan 16, 2020 3:59 PM Seamus Padraig I'm sure Putin'll be PM again after his presidential term expires. He was already PM once, from 2008-2012. Personally, I find that reassuring. Putin is the greatest statesman alive–probably the greatest since Bismarck. Francis Lee Much talk of a 'demographic' crisis needs further analysis. Russia's population fell during the Yeltsin years but has stabilised at the present time. Fertility rate is 1.76 but needs to be at least 2.1 for population growth. But this is true of the whole of Europe, East and West and even a fortiori , Japan. The real demographic crisis, however, is taking place in the ex-Soviet republics and Eastern Europe ex-satellites, the figures from the Baltics and Ukraine are frankly disastrous and only marginally better in Romania and Bulgaria. Low birth rates, emigration, increased death rates, drugs and health problems are a real and present threat to the future of these states.

The substantive problem facing Russia is the ongoing struggle between the Atlantic integrationists and the Eurasian sovereignists represented respectively on the one hand by the oligarch in chief and ultra-liberal Alexei Kudrin, and, in the Red corner, Russia's answer to Michael Hudson, Sergei Glazyev. Putin himself balances precariously between these two factions. But this cannot go on. To quote W.B.Yeats 'Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.'

The type of long-term nation-building strategy – state capitalism from above – has been the proven route out of semi-peripheral status and which is imperative for Russia is, however, being thwarted by the existence of a cosmopolitan oligarch class whose interests run counter to any such strategy and, moreover, who are perfectly content take profits from extractive exports and then invest them back into the centre of the capitalist system, usually in the shape of paper assets like US Treasury Bills and/or property. Cronyism, corruption, incompetence are endemic characteristics of this powerful group and they are unfortunately firmly ensconced in positions of influence and power in Russia.

It would be reasonable to surmise that a political, parasitic system of Yeltsin-lite is now extant in Russia and that a domestic head of steam is, judging by its internal critics, building up in opposition. For every action there is a reaction. (Boris Kargalitsky) 7 -1 Reply richard le sarc Obviously I hope that the Baltics and Ukraine quickly enjoy a decent form of governance, but at present I fear that they are getting their just desserts for returning the spawn of WW2 fascists from emigre' communities in the West to power, and embracing neo-liberal capitalism and licking the boots of the Empire. Jen The case of Maria Butina, imprisoned for 18 months for supposedly being a foreign unregistered agent of Russia, and apparently subjected to full body searches during the five months she was in jail every time after she met with lawyers and Russian consular officials, comes to mind.

This and other cases where Russian citizens were detained and imprisoned without correct due process in the US and other nations, and denied consular access – the case of Sergei and Julia Skripal comes to mind – may have been the instigation for this proposal. 30 -2 Reply Jan 16, 2020 1:58 AM richard le sarc richard le sarc Sexual humiliation through forced nakedness and 'body searches' is a favourite tactic of the Israelis, to humiliate and terrorise the Palestinians. There it is used against civilians, even children, and, with added viciousness, like the smearing of 'menstrual blood' was gifted to the US as torture tactics in Abu Ghraib ec. And, can you believe it, it has traveled to Australia, where strip searches of young people going to music festivals, have become a frequent and preferred tactic of State police forces. Roberto Perhaps, or maybe undoubtedly, Mr Putin is familiar with the example of Sulla, who exercised power as dictator for 6 months as allowed under Roman Law, then relinquished the dictatorship, then served as Consul. The time frame differs, and Putin is a strong leader but no dictator; he did have an awful mess to clean up and restored Russia to self-reliant productive and stable growth and enterprise from the looted ruins that existed at the end of the '90s.

The stated aim of these changes is to restore more power to the Duma, which cannot be a bad thing. The resignation of the entire government allows the new Prime Minister to restructure the government. It may be that many of the preceding actors are restored in different ministries, or not.

[Jan 18, 2020] Curbs to Presidential power could be intended to preserve Russia from a West-backed President

Notable quotes:
"... The economic/social model in the neo-liberal West is one of outright parasitism driving ever increasing inequality and elite wealth, which is the expression in real life of the psychopathic elites' INTENSE hatred of others. For Russia to follow China in creating a society of utilitarian concern for ALL the population, of poverty reduction and of social solidarity between all levels of the population, increases the risk of what Chomsky called 'the good example' ..."
"... 'He might be a son-of-a-bitch, but he's OUR son-of-a-bitch'. Surely a 'Yeltsin' must replace or join 'Quisling' in the popular lexicon as a title for a traitor, in future. ..."
Jan 18, 2020 | off-guardian.org

The US/NATO/EU bloc is eagerly awaiting the chance to replace Putin with a pro-Western neo-liberal. One who will increase national debt, implement austerity, privatise industry, gut the public sector, and open up Russia to the IMF just like has been done all over the Western world.

Search Jan 18, 2020 15 Russian Reforms: Is Putin planning for his successor? Curbs to Presidential power could be intended to preserve Russia from a West-backed President Kit Knightly Kit Knightly

Last week, after Putin put forward constitutional reforms that would "empower the legislative branch" and his entire government resigned, the Western press (and the West-backed "opposition" in Russia) went on at length about how Putin was preparing to "extend his power", to move to an office "without term limits", or something along those lines.

After years complaining about the amount of power the President of Russia has, the MSM decided that limiting those powers was ALSO bad (or perhaps, never even actually read the speech itself at all).

This isn't deliberate deception on their part, they are just trained animals after all. Criticising Putin is a Pavlovian response to the man saying, or doing absolutely anything.

There's no point in gain-saying it, or analysing it. It is dogs howling at the moon. Instinctive, base and – to a rational mind – entirely meaningless.

Forget what our press says. It is white noise. They have no insight and no interest in acquiring any.

However, even the alternative media are confused on this one. MoA is a good analyst, but he's not sure what's at play here .

.so what IS going on in Russia? Why the constitutional reforms?

Let's take a look at the headline proposals:

Limit the Presidency to a two-term maximum Empower the Duma to appoint the Prime Minister and cabinet, in place of the President Anyone running for President has to have lived in Russia for 25 years Dual-nationals are forbidden from holding public offices

Are these really steps designed centralize the power of the state in an individual? Do they logically support the argument "Putin wants to be in power for life"?

Given that list, I would say "no". I would say, quite the opposite.

The first two points limit the powers of the Presidency, whilst empowering the legislative branch. Why would Putin limit the powers of the President if he intends a third term?

Western "analysts" argue Putin plans to stay on as Prime Minister, but these rule changes don't empower the PM, they only empower the Duma to choose the PM.

If he were going to change the constitution to keep himself in power, why not just scrap term limits? Or increase the Presidental term length?

The third proposed change is interesting – "prevent dual nationals from holding public offices" – is this a way of limiting possible Western interference in Russian politics?

In the days of the Roman Empire, upon conquering a province the Romans would take children of members of the ruling class to back to Rome, to be fostered in Roman families and raised as Romans. Then, when they reached adulthood, the new Romanised Celts or Assyrians or Goths would be sent back to the land of their birth and rule as the province in Rome's name, serving Rome's interests.

The modern Rome, the United States, does exactly the same thing.

Juan Guaido is Venezuela's "acting President". He was educated at Georgetown University in Washington DC . Alexey Navalny is the "leader of the Russian opposition", he was a "world fellow" at Yale .

The US/NATO/EU bloc is eagerly awaiting the chance to replace Putin with a pro-Western neo-liberal. One who will increase national debt, implement austerity, privatise industry, gut the public sector, and open up Russia to the IMF just like has been done all over the Western world.

So: We have rules limiting the power of the office of President, and a rule clearly aimed at making it impossible for a US-backed puppet to be inserted into said office.

Here's where we get into some hardcore speculation:

I think, having done the hard work to fix many of Russia's societal and security-related problems, Putin is seeking to make systemic changes that prevent this work being undone.

I think Putin wants to go – or is at least considering it – and is trying to put rules in place to protect Russia from his possible successors.

To demonstrate my point, we should take a look at the other parts of Putin's speech – the parts no one in the Western press is interested in discussing.

In many ways, it was a speech you could have heard coming out of Jeremy Corbyn's mouth. Laying out a vision of Russia with improved healthcare, free (hot) school meals for all children, internet access for all Russian citizens. (You can read the whole thing here .)

If a British politician made this speech, it would be considered "radical". If an American had done so, they would be called a crazy socialist. But there's more to this than just socialist economic policies.

Here is Putin on pensions:

We have a law on this, but we should formalise this requirement in the Constitution along with the principles of decent pensions, which implies a regular adjustment of pensions according to inflation.

On minimum wage:

Therefore, I believe that the Constitution should include a provision that the minimum wage in Russia must not be below the subsistence minimum of the economically active people.

On local government:

the powers and practical opportunities of the local governments, a body of authority that is closest to the people, can and should be expanded and strengthened.

On the Judiciary:

The country's fundamental law should enshrine and protect the independence of judges, and their subordination only to the Constitution and federal law

On Russian sovereignty:

requirements of international law and treaties as well as decisions of international bodies can be valid on the Russian territory only to the point that they do not restrict the rights and freedoms of our people and citizens and do not contradict our Constitution.

On Constitutional law:

extending the powers of the Constitutional Court to evaluate not only laws, but also other regulatory legal acts adopted by various authorities at the federal and regional levels for compliance with the Constitution.

Is there a pattern here?

Enshrining economic reforms in the constitution Decentralizing the power for the federal government Legally protecting the independence of the courts Protecting Russian law from international bodies Reviewing future laws to make sure they don't breach the constitution

These could be interpreted as legal backstops. Safeguards on the progress Russia has made under Putin.

We've been over the numbers a lot. There's no need to repeat them. Suffice to say, under Putin Russian life expectancy, income, employment rate and birth rate are up. Violent crime, poverty, alcoholism and debt are down .

Under Yeltsin, Russia was a borderline failed state. Putin pulled them back from that brink.

Yeltsin's 1993 Constitutional Referendum drastically enhanced the powers of the President, he doesn't wield quite as supreme executive power as the office of POTUS, but it's comparable:

The referendum approved the new constitution, which significantly expanded the powers of the president, giving Yeltsin the right to appoint the members of the government, to dismiss the Prime Minister and, in some cases, to dissolve the Duma.

It could be argued Putin has used that power as it was intended – for the benefit of the Russian people. Perhaps he feels he cannot rely on anyone who comes after him to be as diligent.

By disempowering the role of President before he leaves office, he ensures that anyone who follows – be they a US-educated plant, a corrupt billionaire, or a hardline hawkish nationalist – can't undo all the good his administration has accomplished.

Whether or not Putin wants to be in "power for life" is an answer known only to the man himself, but there's nothing to suggest it in this speech, and none of the reforms put forward would appear to help in that regard at all. It looks more like a man securing his legacy.

Perhaps the question becomes not "does Putin want another term?", but rather does Putin even intend to serve all of this one?

Baron ,

(1) What he proposed isn't the final word, the proposals will be debated, (2) the danger of Navalny's getting in even with a strong push by the Americans, or their NGO poodles, is minimal, the greater risk is the communist and their fellow travellers gaining power, (3) the last twenty years have shown Putin may not be the ideal leader, but he's as close to an ideal as the Russians may ever hope to get, his remaining in a position of some power after his Presidency term expires should be a positive for Russia.

Putin infuriates the Western Governing Elites (GEs) because he totally contradicts their progressive, PC, woke agenda and, to make matters worse, his stance resonates with the Western unwashed. That's unforgivable for the GEs, but one hopes he'll continue doing so. Just as our Parliament functions best if the opposition has some muscle, so the world also needs a strong opposition to keep the GEs of the nation of the "exceptional people" in check.

Jen ,

The answer to KK's second question, that is, whether Putin intends to serve out his current term, is that any constitutional reforms such as what he proposed in his speech to the Federal Assembly need time to be discussed, analysed, put to referendum, approved and included in the Constitution. Also a succession plan needs to be in place by 2024 when Putin leaves the Presidency. By then we'll know if Mishustin or anyone else (Rogozhin? Glazyev?) might replace him as President....

richard le sarc ,

The economic/social model in the neo-liberal West is one of outright parasitism driving ever increasing inequality and elite wealth, which is the expression in real life of the psychopathic elites' INTENSE hatred of others. For Russia to follow China in creating a society of utilitarian concern for ALL the population, of poverty reduction and of social solidarity between all levels of the population, increases the risk of what Chomsky called 'the good example', like Cuba has been for sixty years as the rest of the Latin American continent, under US terror, descended into a charnel-house and mass immiseration. So 'Russia delenda est', and Putin is Hannibal, and, thankfully, the rotten cadaver called the 'Home of Free', in a fit of malignant self-delusion, ain't gonna produce no Scipios any time soon. They've been reduced to creating Pompeo Adiposus Minors.

Brianeg ,

...Watching a documentary about poverty and homelessness in America by Deutsche Welle, it is criminal what is going on in that country especially when it seems fit to up the military budget to $750 billion. Surely at some point civil war will come to that country to correct the gross imbalance.

Reading about the strange actions of the liquid magma going on deep underground, you almost wish that nature might intervene and deflect America away from its constant onslaught of war and interference in other countries politics.

RobG ,

Boris Yeltsin, (western installed) Russian President from 1991 to 1999, during which the former Soviet Union was totally plundered

https://www.youtube.com/embed/v9YnDirqwT4?version=3&rel=1&fs=1&autohide=2&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&wmode=transparent

richard le sarc ,

'He might be a son-of-a-bitch, but he's OUR son-of-a-bitch'. Surely a 'Yeltsin' must replace or join 'Quisling' in the popular lexicon as a title for a traitor, in future.

[Jan 18, 2020] As Lavrov frequently points out, the "rules-based order" is the US attempt to overthrow established international law, and replace it with "rules" invented by the US and changed to suit US goals, i.e. total spectrum dominance

Notable quotes:
"... The full spectrum support for the murder shows that the Establishment is firmly on board with it, which proves that it was not simply a whim of Trump's, or an action taken because a few neo-cons talked him into ordering it. Again, he can order military actions all he wants, (like the withdrawal of troops from Syria), but he isn't allowed to do anything that our rulers don't want done. ..."
"... There is no major FUNCTIONAL difference between the Rep/Dem when it comes to military/covert activities. So whether Trump or any of the Dem puppets fill the Oval Office. ..."
"... The "differences" are purely for domestic consumption, no foreign politician or diplomat with two functioning neurons is fooled by the quadrennial, prearranged "election" BS. ..."
Jan 18, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

wagelaborer , Jan 17 2020 19:04 utc | 3

Trump can't start a war without ruling class backing any more than he can end the wars if the rulers veto it.
US foreign policy is not run by White House puppets.

The US trash-talked Saddam Hussein and starved Iraqis for 14 years, but didn't actually invade until he started trading oil in Euros.

The US trash-talked Ghaddafi for decades, and even launched missiles which killed his child in the 80s, but didn't destroy Libya until Ghaddafi decided to sell oil in dinars.

The US has trash-talked and sanctioned Iran for decades, but it was the threat of Iran and Saudi Arabia making peace that pushed them to assassinate General Soleimani, as he arrived at the airport on that diplomatic mission.

If Iran and Saudi Arabia make peace, and the Saudis drop the petro-dollar, the US Empire crumbles.

It doesn't matter at all who is in the White House at the time, the Empire will never allow that.

The elections are a farce, by the way. We have no way to know how people vote, because they put in electronic voting machines after the 2000 election was stolen by the Supreme Court. We no longer have any idea how people voted, the talking heads on the TV just give us the name of the selected on, on Election Night.

wagelaborer , Jan 17 2020 19:56 utc | 12

As Lavrov frequently points out, the "rules-based order" is the US attempt to overthrow established international law, and replace it with "rules" invented by the US and changed to suit US goals, i.e. total spectrum dominance.

Note that although Trump has been attacked by the Deep State, the Democrats and the media 24/7 since 2016, the only complaint they have about his blatantly illegal assassination of Soleimani is that "he didn't tell us first". There is NO mention of international or national laws which outlaw such assassinations.

The full spectrum support for the murder shows that the Establishment is firmly on board with it, which proves that it was not simply a whim of Trump's, or an action taken because a few neo-cons talked him into ordering it. Again, he can order military actions all he wants, (like the withdrawal of troops from Syria), but he isn't allowed to do anything that our rulers don't want done.

A P , Jan 17 2020 21:22 utc | 25
@juliania: There is no major FUNCTIONAL difference between the Rep/Dem when it comes to military/covert activities. So whether Trump or any of the Dem puppets fill the Oval Office.

The "differences" are purely for domestic consumption, no foreign politician or diplomat with two functioning neurons is fooled by the quadrennial, prearranged "election" BS.

Americans may be sick of the US' forever war policy, but not as sick of it as the rest of the world is. And USicans aren't sick enough of it to turf out both parties and start again...

[Jan 18, 2020] Impeachment circus begins in earnest, and will change nothing -- RT Op-ed

Jan 18, 2020 | www.rt.com

... ... ...

The Republican-controlled Senate will almost certainly vote to acquit Trump. No concrete evidence of wrongdoing was revealed during the House Intelligence Committee's inquiry, and none of the second-hand witnesses to Trump's infamous phone call with Zelensky revealed any smoking gun evidence. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has ignored Democrat pleas to admit more witnesses and more evidence, arguing that the House's case be tried as is.

Meanwhile, Republicans ridiculed Pelosi for sitting on the impeachment articles for four weeks, despite Democrat claims that Trump posed a "clear and present danger" to national security, and Pelosi's insistence that removing him was an "urgent concern."

Any doubt that impeachment was a partisan affair was removed by Pelosi on Wednesday night, when she handed out souvenir pens to reporters after signing the articles, posing in front of a lectern with a placard reading "#defendourdemocracy" on it. McConnell described the signing ceremony as "The House's partisan process distilled into one last perfect visual. Not solemn or serious. A transparently political exercise from beginning to end."

Yesterday, the Speaker celebrated impeachment with souvenir pens, bearing her own golden signature, brought in on silver platters. The House's partisan process distilled into one last perfect visual. Not solemn or serious. A transparently political exercise from beginning to end. pic.twitter.com/AshajRLH2F

-- Leader McConnell (@senatemajldr) January 16, 2020

McConnell is not above partisan games either, and has openly pledged to work with the White House to see Trump acquitted.

Which begs the question, what was it all for? If Trump is acquitted, the Democratic Party has no political capital left to launch another impeachment campaign, even if Trump blatantly commits the "high crimes and misdemeanors" necessary to trigger an actual, bipartisan impeachment effort.

Trump then also gets to claim victory, with an acquittal justifying his cries of "witch hunt" and "presidential harassment," further solidifying his base and embarrassing the Democrats in front of undecided voters. Pelosi stated on Sunday that regardless of the trial's outcome, Trump is "impeached for life," but Trump is louder and brasher than Pelosi, and will milk an acquittal for all it's worth.

Even as the trial against him formally opened on Thursday, the president celebrated the passage of his US-Mexico-Canada Agreement, his second trade win in two days. His approval rating also rose to 51 percent, the highest it's been since he was impeached just over a month ago. All of this strengthens his argument against the party he's taken to calling "Do Nothing Democrats."

[Jan 18, 2020] Importance of Cyprus is gas wars

Jan 18, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Jon_in_AU , Jan 18 2020 15:35 utc | 140

Hausmeiseter@121

I can't say that I've dug into that in detail, although I do recall reading the post.

What I would like to say, however, is that the Cyprus question is one of the pivotal pieces in the current geopolitical situation.

A few points warranting further investigation to try and tie into a coherent whole:

1) The Cyprus banking crisis c. 2012-2013. This includes Russian oligarch/mafia money, and whether it was squirreled out of there before the buy-in orchestrated collapse of Laiki Bank of Cyprus as well as who was behind this push (IMF/NATO/GER/etc)

2) The Turkstream (1 & 2) gas projects (from which Turkey will extract considerable transit fees for decades to come). This also supports one of the main pillars of the Russian Federations' economy. Links also to US hegemon trying to kill off Nordstream 2.

3) The plans/MOU for Israel, Cyprus and Greece to build an undersea gas pipe network. This will effectively by-pass Turkstream, and is probably behind the push to have Israeli claims over the Golan Heights crystallise (along with the US staying put in Syria and Iraq). I also recall reading about ISIS shipments of stolen Syrian oil taking a cross-country route through Turkey to end up being refined in Israel, and on-sold to Greece (and others). This points at another whole behind-the-scenes dynamic.

4) Recent attempts by Turkey to get involved in Libya, create a new exclusive maritime zone, develop gas of the coast of Cyprus, and now military involvement. This is drawing rebuke from Israel, as it will scupper their planned pipe network. Greece likewise is now trying to send in troops (as observers/peace-keepers, LOL).
Cyprus is also rallying around to try and stop the Turkish plan from going ahead.

5) Recent arrests of Israeli intel assets in Cyprus of late also adds further heat to the situation.

I would really need to dedicate months of my life to try and untangle all of this, and by the time I did the situation would have moved on. (reminds me of the quote from Wagelaborers' blog: "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."
Karl Rove)

[Jan 18, 2020] Minutes before the crash caused by a missile strike, the AI pilots had also heard the controller give the Malaysian aircraft MH17 what is called "a direct routing". This permits an aircraft to fly straight, instead of tracking the regular route which is generally a zig-zag track that goes from one ground-based navigation aid or way point to another.

Jan 18, 2020 | www.unz.com

barr , says: Show Comment January 16, 2020 at 5:48 pm GMT

@JimDandy Hpw did the instruction to "Fly direct" prove fatal to MH 17

MUMBAI: The ministry of civil aviation's claim that there was no Air India flight near the ill-fated Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 when it was shot down over Ukraine on Thursday appears misleading.
An Air India Dreamliner flight going from Delhi to Birmingham was in fact less than 25km away from the Malaysian aircraft,

Minutes before the crash caused by a missile strike, the AI pilots had also heard the controller give the Malaysian aircraft MH17 what is called "a direct routing". This permits an aircraft to fly straight, instead of tracking the regular route which is generally a zig-zag track that goes from one ground-based navigation aid or way point to another. "Direct routing saves fuel and time and is preferred by pilots. In this case, it proved fatal," said an airline source.

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Air-India-flight-was-90-seconds-away-when-missile-struck-Malaysia-Airlines-Flight-MH17/articleshowprint/38702536.cms

1 Was India pressurized to deny the close proximity and 2 was it under pressure to deny that it heard the controller giving the instruction to MH 17????

[Jan 18, 2020] Putin plants to prohibit dual citizens to serve in government

Highly recommended!
Jan 18, 2020 | www.unz.com

Peripatetic Commenter , says: Show Comment January 17, 2020 at 9:43 pm GMT

I don't think it will be long before we see Congress in the US calling for invasion of Russia on the grounds of a lack of diversity, lack of respect for LGBTP and so forth.

[Jan 18, 2020] In the European Parliament Russia is accused of distorting the history of the Second World War

Jan 18, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

Moscow Exile January 16, 2020 at 12:48 am

В ЕП обвинили Россию в "искажении" истории Второй мировой войны
Короткая ссылка 09:18

In the European Parliament Russia is accused of distorting the history of the Second World War

"We in the European People's Party cannot accept Putin's attempts to rewrite history. Although the Soviet Union suffered huge losses during the war, and its soldiers showed heroism, there is no denying that the Molotov -- Ribbentrop Pact led to the outbreak of the Second World War".

Putin's attempts?

His own, personal, maniacal attempts??

The European People's Party -- leader, Donald Tusk.

"There is no denying " -- an appeal to ignorance.

Everybody knows this to be true!

In Poland there were the following Nazi extermination camps [ Vernichtungslager ]: Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Auschwitz-Birkenau, and Majdanek.

Why?

Makes one wonder, doesn't it?

After all, there's no denying that Poles are at heart anti-Semites, in that they are all devout Roman Catholics.

Mark Chapman January 16, 2020 at 10:20 am
If the west – and especially the Poles – could get the Russian Federation to apologize for the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, their lives would be complete. For maybe five minutes, before they moved on to the next deep grievance. It's all about getting the former Soviet Union to admit guilt, and the west can never get enough of that.
Moscow Exile January 16, 2020 at 5:43 am

Countries appearing with a deeper shade of green are ranked as more peaceful, countries appearing more red are ranked as more violent.

So now you know, courtesy of Global Peace Index , that Russia is far, far more belligerent than the USA.

Stands to reason, don't it?

Moscow Exile January 16, 2020 at 5:52 am
Russia is ranked as 10th most violent in the world at position 154 out of 163 and the USA is at position 128.
cartman January 16, 2020 at 6:36 am
Whoever invented this "index" really earned their crust from Master.
Moscow Exile January 16, 2020 at 9:19 am
I wonder if those who draw up this index ever consider that the perceived violence of a country be considered as a function of the deaths caused by the foreign policies of that country?
Jen January 16, 2020 at 2:24 pm
The index was developed by the Institute for Economics and Peace which is based in Sydney. Its partners include The Economist Intelligence Unit and the World Bank.
http://economicsandpeace.org/about/affiliations-and-partners/

Colombia a bit more peaceful than Venezuela and Mexico more peaceful than either? Brazil more peaceful than all three? Doesn't sound right to me.

Mark Chapman January 16, 2020 at 10:49 am
There certainly are advantages to stirring up shit abroad, setting up an opposition and then sending your soldiers haring off thereward to support it in an effort to overthrow the government. For one, you get labeled a super-peaceful country by some jag-off index you probably funded yourself. The USA does not fight in the USA. And until fairly recently, it got all its military adventures rubber-stamped by the UN as 'peacekeeping'. That, alas, proved too time-consuming, and so R2P doctrine was devised by that legendary peacekeeper, Sammy "Genocide" Power to expedite American military adventuring while still remaining loosely under the 'last resort, but we have to act' rubric.

[Jan 18, 2020] Once private ownership is banned people stop caring. Motivation to work hard is gone If you are deprived of the possibility to make money and own private property.

Jan 18, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

karl1haushofer January 15, 2020 at 11:17 am

Yalensis, earlier you said that Russia should restore communism to remove poverty.

How did that work the last time in 1917-1991? The Soviet Union collapsed and historical Russia was split into many different parts.

I expect that if Russia would experiment communism the second time the outcome would be another split of Russia. This time it would be the North Caucasus, Tatarstan, Bashkortostan and possible Siberia and the Far East breaking away from Moscow.

And why is that? Because communism doesn't work, period. It has been tried several times in many different parts of the world, and it has always failed.

The basics are simple. Once private ownership is banned people stop caring. Motivation to work hard is gone If you are deprived of the possibility to make money and own private property.

Say what you want about America but there is a good reason why basically all the greatest companies in the world are American, or at least from countries that have practiced capitalism for centuries: Microsoft, Apple, Exxon, Shell, Amazon, Intel, Ford, Mercedez Benz, Toyota, Samsung etc.

You can compare how a middle class American and a middle class Soviet citizen lived in the 1980s. While a typical middle class American lived in a big house in a suburb with two cars in the household, a typical Soviet middle class citizen lived in a "kommunalka" apartment where many families had to share the same bathroom and kitchen and a Soviet citizen had to work a certain amount of years before being allowed a right to own his or her own car, usually a Soviet made Lada. Most of the Soviet citizens never had a chance to get their own car but instead of to rely on public transport.

I know you are going to say that China is a good example that communism can work. But there is one problem: China is not really a communist country anymore. Actually the rise of China began at the same moment when Deng Xiaoping allowed private property and private enterprise. The horrendous communist policies of Mao Tse Tung killed tens of millions of Chinese people before that. Allowing people to work for their own well being was that made China what it is today (China is still a poor country compared to the West, but at least hundreds of millions of people are not starving anymore as was the case during Mao's rule).

If Russia ever restored communism again it would be the end of Russia.

Moscow Exile January 15, 2020 at 11:40 am
a typical Soviet middle class citizen lived in a "kommunalka" apartment

Really?

I lived in a modern, built in the 1970s block in Voronezh in 1989.: 3 large rooms, largish kitchen, bathroom and toilet, 2 balconies , 11th floor.

I live in a similar flat now, but on the 3rd floor, built 1976, central Administrative District, Taganskiy precinct, Moskva.

The only thing communal about those 2 dwellings is the central heating, which is turned on in October and turned off in May.

In England, during my childhood I lived in a slum street built in the 1850s: no central heating, no hot water, no bathroom, no toilet. The toilet was in the yard at the back. The dewelling had 2 downstairs rooms and 2 upstairs room, a so-called "two-up, two-down". I lived there until 1960.


Wilson St. in my home town, 1969

My hometown is situated in the first capitalist country in the world.

James lake January 15, 2020 at 12:04 pm
God that picture brings back memories – we lived in similar property in Birmingham until 1978. My family came over from Ireland in the 1960s and these type of houses were common place for working class families.

You can still find them in the midlands and the north, although they have been modernised to include bathrooms.

Northern Star January 15, 2020 at 12:49 pm
Capitalism and economic Nirvana are known to be one in the same in the minds of morons.

"Indications of this failure of capitalism are everywhere. Stagnation of investment punctuated by bubbles of financial expansion, which then inevitably burst, now characterizes the so-called free market.4 Soaring inequality in income and wealth has its counterpart in the declining material circumstances of a majority of the population. Real wages for most workers in the United States have barely budged in forty years despite steadily rising productivity.5 Work intensity has increased, while work and safety protections on the job have been systematically jettisoned. Unemployment data has become more and more meaningless due to a new institutionalized underemployment in the form of contract labor in the gig economy.6 Unions have been reduced to mere shadows of their former glory as capitalism has asserted totalitarian control over workplaces. With the demise of Soviet-type societies, social democracy in Europe has perished in the new atmosphere of "liberated capitalism."7

The capture of the surplus value produced by overexploited populations in the poorest regions of the world, via the global labor arbitrage instituted by multinational corporations, is leading to an unprecedented amassing of financial wealth at the center of the world economy and relative poverty in the periphery.8 Around $21 trillion of offshore funds are currently lodged in tax havens on islands mostly in the Caribbean, constituting "the fortified refuge of Big Finance."9 Technologically driven monopolies resulting from the global-communications revolution, together with the rise to dominance of Wall Street-based financial capital geared to speculative asset creation, have further contributed to the riches of today's "1 percent." Forty-two billionaires now enjoy as much wealth as half the world's population, while the three richest men in the United States -- Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffett -- have more wealth than half the U.S. population.10 In every region of the world, inequality has increased sharply in recent decades.11 The gap in per capita income and wealth between the richest and poorest nations, which has been the dominant trend for centuries, is rapidly widening once again.12 More than 60 percent of the world's employed population, some two billion people, now work in the impoverished informal sector, forming a massive global proletariat. The global reserve army of labor is some 70 percent larger than the active labor army of formally employed workers.

Adequate health care, housing, education, and clean water and air are increasingly out of reach for large sections of the population, even in wealthy countries in North America and Europe, while transportation is becoming more difficult in the United States and many other countries due to irrationally high levels of dependency on the automobile and disinvestment in public transportation. Urban structures are more and more characterized by gentrification and segregation, with cities becoming the playthings of the well-to-do while marginalized populations are shunted aside. About half a million people, most of them children, are homeless on any given night in the United States.14 New York City is experiencing a major rat infestation, attributed to warming temperatures, mirroring trends around the world."

Like Like

Patient Observer January 15, 2020 at 5:14 pm
Comrade Karl, the vast majority of poverty in this world is in capitalist countries. Latin America and Africa will toss your silly assertions in the trash bin of history.

And saying China is not communist is equivalent to saying the US is not capitalist. I leave it to your to figure out what the foregoing means.

[Jan 18, 2020] Lukashenko wants the prices for oil and natural gas for Belarus to be the same as for Russian regions, but refuses to behave like a Russian region.

Jan 18, 2020 | www.unz.com

AnonFromTN , says: January 15, 2020 at 6:42 pm GMT

@Shitposter him some fighter planes for free and he will build an airbase of the Belarus army.
6. Belarus makes gasoline and other products from Russian oils and resells them at a huge profit. Besides, he wants to export it all via Baltic statelets, providing their ports business that Putin is taking away from them by building Russian deep-sea ports, like Ust-Luga.
7. Not to mention that he talks about 10 times more than is wise, saying mostly BS (the latter is natural for a moron).
There are many more, but these are enough to explain how most Russians feel about him. Belarus either gets rid of that idiot, or suffers because of his stupidity.

[Jan 18, 2020] Germany behaviour in Naftogas-Gasprom conflict makes zero sense unless you believe that Germany was acting as a proxy on behalf of a greater power

Jan 18, 2020 | www.unz.com

,

Thulean Friend , says: Show Comment December 23, 2019 at 5:34 am GMT
About this whole Ukraine-Russia gas transit thing that Felix is panicking about. It seems Germany had a key role in facilitating the deal.

However, that risk receded this week after Moscow and Kyiv concluded a landmark agreement that will ensure Russian gas continues to transit through Ukraine even after Nord Stream 2 is completed. Germany played a critical role in brokering the agreement and pressuring Russia to maintain Ukraine's transit status.

Why would Germany spend all this time and resources to construct these pipelines and then suddenly pressure Russia to maintain the transit fees? That makes zero sense unless you believe that Germany was acting as a proxy on behalf of a greater power. My pet theory: Germany most likely caved to US pressure and tried to triangulate at the last minute in a bid to stave off a larger German-US conflict.

Thulean Friend , says: Show Comment December 24, 2019 at 4:43 am GMT
@Swedish Family

What Germany wants, it seems to me, is (1) cheap energy for German industry, (2) a maximally weak Russian hand visavi Ukraine (which is now in effect a NATO/EU dependency), and (3) good enough relations with the Kremlin for Russia not to go rogue. Goals (1) and (3) obviously sit uneasily with goal (2), which is why we see so much back and forth.

I agree with (1) and (3) but I'd disagree over (2). I am not convinced Germany cares much about Ukraine's well-being. It is a very small economy (barely over 100 billion USD) and Germany's trade exposure to Ukraine is minimal. It isn't part of NATO, EU or any other major Western framework.

If Ukraine collapsed it would create significant refugee streams but Ukrainians are very easily assimilated into Western European countries, unlike Syrians or Turks, so even in a worse-case scenario the fallout would not be a major problem. If Croats or Serbs can mix into Germany easily, I don't see why Ukrainians would be a problem. Germany's shrinking work force would in fact even need such an influx. The only kink would be Russia's expanding borders if both Belarus+Ukraine was swallowed up but Germany probably would calculate that Russia wouldn't attack a NATO ally (and they wouldn't be wrong). I'm not saying Germany would want such an outcome, only that the worst-case scenario wouldn't be a big problem for them.

I think this has the fingerprints of the US all over it. Trump personally hates Ukraine, which has been documented in leaked documents during the impeachment process and major personalities of the Trumpist movement like Tucker Carlson openly cheers for Russia. So it wasn't Trump or his people who pushed for this but rather the permanent national-security state that was behind it and they are obsessed with keeping Russia down, or inventing fake Russiagate hoaxes to justify their paranoia. Germany made a 180 and suddenly pressured Russia to do something which Germany itself had no interest in keeping for the longest time. That suggests Germany caved to US pressure and tried to do a compromise. The US interest would be for NS2 to be scrapped completely. This was a German attempt at triangulating.

Either way, Ukraine got a big win purely because of Great Power politics over which they had no direct control.

[Jan 17, 2020] Ukraine is a deeply sick patient. The destiny of ordinary Ukrainians is deeply tragic. Diaspora is greedy and want a piece of cake immediately

Highly recommended!
Edited for clarity
Notable quotes:
"... The infrastructure they inherited from the USSR mostly is now fully amortized. For example railway park in in complete ruin. Central heating pipeline communications in cities like Kiev are in ruins too. In the USSR they tried to reuse the heat from electric stations and have elaborate hot water delivery networks from each, which provided heat to a large city blocks. Now pipes are completely rusted (which in 30 years is no surprise) and are in the state of constant repair. ..."
"... But when the standard of living dropped to such extent as it dropped after 2014 sentiments toward even slightly different ethnic groups turn hostile too. This is the case in Ukraine. In this sense you are wrong. There is no more unity now then existed before 2014. I would say there is less unity now. ..."
"... Sentiments turned against both Donbass dwellers and Ukrainians from Western Ukraine. In Kiev the derogatory term for both categories is "ponaekhali" ("come to overcrowd the place and displace us", or something along those lines; it's difficult to translate, but the term carries strong derogatory meaning) ..."
"... The nationalistic hysteria of 2014-2017 now mostly changed into deep depression: how a tiny group of far right nationalist and football hooligan gangs managed to get to power against the will of the majority of the country and destroy its economy. That's why Zelensky was elected and most far right parliamentarians lost their seats. Most of Western Ukraine voted for him, which is telling you something. ..."
"... The problem for Ukraine is that with the cut of economic ties with Russia the natural path for economics is probably down. De-industrialization, Baltic style, is raining supreme. Many enterprises survived the period from 1991 to 2014 only due to orders from Russia. Especially remnants of military industrial complex and manufacturing industry. Now what? Selling land (like Zelensky is trying to do) ? ..."
Jan 17, 2020 | www.unz.com

likbez says:January 17, 2020 at 8:35 am GMT • 1,500 Words @AP AP,

I agree with JPM:

I feel like robber barons in Kyiv have harmed you more through their looting of the country than impoverished Eastern Ukrainians, who were the biggest losers in the post-Soviet deindustrilization, have harmed you by existing and dying of diseases of poverty and despair.

It reminds me of how coastal shit-libs in America talk about "fly-over" country and want all the poor whites in Appalachia to die. I'm living in a country whose soul is totally poisoned. A country that is dying. While all this is happening, whites have split themselves into little factions focused on political point scoring.

I doubt people like Zelensky, Kolomoisky, Poroshenko and all the rest are going to turn Ukraine into an earthly paradise. They're more likely to be Neros playing harps, while Ukraine burns.

Looks like your understanding of Ukraine is mostly based of a short trip to Lvov and reading neoliberal MSM and forums. That's not enough, unless you want to be the next Max Boot.

Ukraine is a deeply sick patient, which surprisingly still stands despite all hardships (Ukrainians demonstrated amazing, superhuman resilience in the crisis that hit them, which greatly surprised all experts).

The infrastructure they inherited from the USSR mostly is now fully amortized. For example railway park in in complete ruin. Central heating pipeline communications in cities like Kiev are in ruins too. In the USSR they tried to reuse the heat from electric stations and have elaborate hot water delivery networks from each, which provided heat to a large city blocks. Now pipes are completely rusted (which in 30 years is no surprise) and are in the state of constant repair.

And, what is really tragic Ukraine now it is a debt state. Usually the latter is the capital sentence for the county. Few managed to escape even in more favorable conditions (South Korea is one.) So chances of economic recovery are slim: with such level of parasitic rent to the West the natural path is down and down. Don't cry for me Argentina.

And there is no money to replace already destroyed due to bad maintenance infrastructure, but surprisingly large parts of Soviets era infrastructure still somehow hold. For example, electrical networks, subway cars. But other part are already crumbling.

For example, in Kiev that means in some buildings you have winter without central heating, you have elevators in 16-storey buildings that work one or two weeks in month, you have no hot water, sometimes you have no water at all for a week or more, etc). Pensioners have problem with paying heating bills, so some of them are forced to live in non-heated apartments.

And that's in Kiev/Kyiv (Western Ukrainians love to change established names, much like communists) . In provincial cities it is a real horror show when even electricity supply became a problem. The countryside dwellers at least has its own food, but the situation for them is also very very difficult.

Other big problem -- few jobs and almost no well paid job, unless you are young, know English and have a university education (and are lucky). Before 2014 approximately 70% of Ukrainian labor migrants (in total a couple of million) came from the western part of the country, in which migration had become a widespread method of coping with poverty, the absence of jobs and low salaries.

Now this practice spread to the whole county. That destroyed many families.

The USA plays its usual games selling vassals crap at inflated prices (arms, uranium rods, coal, locomotives, cars, etc) , which Ukrainians can't refuse. Trump is simply a typical gangster in this respect, running a protection racket.

The rate of emigration and shrinking population is another fundamental problem. Mass emigration ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Ukraine ) is continuing even after Zelensky election. Looting by the West also continues unabated. This is disaster capitalism in action.

Add to those problems inflated military expenses to fight the civil war in Donbass which deprives other sectors of necessary funds (with the main affect of completely alienating Russia) and "Huston, we have a problem."

May be this is a natural path for xUSSR countries after the dissolution of the USSR, I don't know.

But the destiny of ordinary Ukrainians is deeply tragic: they wanted better life and got a really harsh one. Especially pensioners (typical pension is something like $60-$70) a month in Kiev, much less outside of Kiev. How they physically survive I do not fully understand.

There are still pro-Russian areas but being free of Crimea and Donbass means Ukraine can no longer be characterized as "split."

I agree that there is a substantial growth of anti-Russian sentiments. It is really noticeable. As well as growth of the usage of the Ukrainian language (previously Kiev, unlike Lvov was completely Russian-language city).

And in Western Ukraine Russiphobia was actually always a part of "national identity". The negative definition of national identity, if you wish. See popular slogan "Hto ne skache toi moskal" ("those who do not jump are Moskal" -- where Moskal is the derogatory name for a Russian). Here is this slogan in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6rfqr9afMc ;-)

But when the standard of living dropped to such extent as it dropped after 2014 sentiments toward even slightly different ethnic groups turn hostile too. This is the case in Ukraine. In this sense you are wrong. There is no more unity now then existed before 2014. I would say there is less unity now.

Sentiments turned against both Donbass dwellers and Ukrainians from Western Ukraine. In Kiev the derogatory term for both categories is "ponaekhali" ("come to overcrowd the place and displace us", or something along those lines; it's difficult to translate, but the term carries strong derogatory meaning) .

"Donetskie" (former Donbass dwellers, often displaced by the war) are generally strongly resented and luxury cars, villas, etc and other excesses of neoliberal elite are attributed mostly to them (Donbass neoliberal elite did moved to Kiev, not Moscow) , while "zapadentsi" are also, albeit less strongly, resented because they often use clan politics within institutions, and often do not put enough effort (or are outright incompetent), as they rely on its own clan ties for survival.

This sentiment is stronger to the south of Kiev where the resentment is directed mainly against Western Ukrainians, not against "Donetskie" like in Kiev. And I am talking not only about Odessa. Western Ukrainians are now strongly associated with corrupt ways of getting lucrative positions (via family, clan or political connections), being incompetent and doing nothing useful.

What surprise me is that this resentment against "zapadentsi" and "Poloshenko clan" is shared by many people from Western Ukraine. The target is often slightly more narrow, for example Hutsuls in Lviv ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hutsuls )

The nationalistic hysteria of 2014-2017 now mostly changed into deep depression: how a tiny group of far right nationalist and football hooligan gangs managed to get to power against the will of the majority of the country and destroy its economy. That's why Zelensky was elected and most far right parliamentarians lost their seats. Most of Western Ukraine voted for him, which is telling you something.

The problem for Ukraine is that with the cut of economic ties with Russia the natural path for economics is probably down. De-industrialization, Baltic style, is raining supreme. Many enterprises survived the period from 1991 to 2014 only due to orders from Russia. Especially remnants of military industrial complex and manufacturing industry. Now what? Selling land (like Zelensky is trying to do) ?

Ukraine will probably eventually lose a large part of its chemical industry because without subsidies for gas it just can't complete even taking into account low labor costs. And manufacturing because without Russian market it is difficult to find a place for their production in already established markets, competing only in price and suffering in quality (I remember something about Iraq returning Ukrainians all ordered armored carriers due to defect is the the armor https://sputniknews.com/military/201705221053859853-armored-vehicles-defects-extent /). Although at least for the Ukrainian arm industry there is place on the market in countries which are used to old Soviet armaments, because those are rehashed Soviet products.

Add to this corrupt and greedy diaspora (all those Jaresko, Chalupas, Freelands, Vindmans, etc ) from the USA and Canada (and not only diaspora -- look at Biden, Kerry, etc) who want their piece of the pie after 2014 "Revolution of dignity" (what a sad joke) and you will see the problems more clearly. Not that much changed from the period 1991-2014 where Ukraine was also royally fleeced by own oligarchs allied with Western banksers, simply now this leads to quicker deterioration of the standard of living.

None of Eastern European countries benefited from a color revolution staged by the USA. This is about opening the country not only to multinationals (while they loot the county they at least behave within a certain legal bounds, demonstrating at least decency of gangsters like in Godfather), but to petty foreign criminals from diaspora and outside of it who allies with the local oligarchs and smaller nouveau riche and are siphoning all the county wealth to western banks as soon as possible. Greed of the disapora is simply unbounded. https://neweasterneurope.eu/2016/08/26/the-ukrainian-diaspora-as-a-recipient-of-oligarchic-cash/

Of course, Ukrainian diaspora is not uniform. Still, outside well-know types from the tiny Mid-Eastern country, the most dangerous people for Ukraine are probably Ukrainians from diaspora with dual citizenship

[Jan 17, 2020] AnonFromTN

Jan 17, 2020 | www.unz.com

says: January 15, 2020 at 6:42 pm GMT 200 Words @Shitposter Just a few off the top of my head:
1. Lukashenko wants the prices for oil and natural gas for Belarus to be the same as for Russian regions, but refuses to behave like a Russian region.
2. He got many loans from Russia and Russian semi-commercial entities (like Sberbank), but behaves as if his country is living within its means.
3. He prevented Russian companies from acquiring Minsk automotive plant (MAZ). In response, Russia switched the trucks for its mobile rockets from MAZ to domestic KaMAZ.
4. He never recognized South Ossetia and Abkhasia.
5. He refused Russian request for an airbase, suggesting that Russia gives him some fighter planes for free and he will build an airbase of the Belarus army.
6. Belarus makes gasoline and other products from Russian oils and resells them at a huge profit. Besides, he wants to export it all via Baltic statelets, providing their ports business that Putin is taking away from them by building Russian deep-sea ports, like Ust-Luga.
7. Not to mention that he talks about 10 times more than is wise, saying mostly BS (the latter is natural for a moron).
There are many more, but these are enough to explain how most Russians feel about him. Belarus either gets rid of that idiot, or suffers because of his stupidity.

[Jan 17, 2020] Ukraine is a deeply sick patient. The destiny of ordinary Ukrainians is deeply tragic. Diaspora is greedy and want a piece of cake immediately

Highly recommended!
Edited for clarity
Notable quotes:
"... The infrastructure they inherited from the USSR mostly is now fully amortized. For example railway park in in complete ruin. Central heating pipeline communications in cities like Kiev are in ruins too. In the USSR they tried to reuse the heat from electric stations and have elaborate hot water delivery networks from each, which provided heat to a large city blocks. Now pipes are completely rusted (which in 30 years is no surprise) and are in the state of constant repair. ..."
"... But when the standard of living dropped to such extent as it dropped after 2014 sentiments toward even slightly different ethnic groups turn hostile too. This is the case in Ukraine. In this sense you are wrong. There is no more unity now then existed before 2014. I would say there is less unity now. ..."
"... Sentiments turned against both Donbass dwellers and Ukrainians from Western Ukraine. In Kiev the derogatory term for both categories is "ponaekhali" ("come to overcrowd the place and displace us", or something along those lines; it's difficult to translate, but the term carries strong derogatory meaning) ..."
"... The nationalistic hysteria of 2014-2017 now mostly changed into deep depression: how a tiny group of far right nationalist and football hooligan gangs managed to get to power against the will of the majority of the country and destroy its economy. That's why Zelensky was elected and most far right parliamentarians lost their seats. Most of Western Ukraine voted for him, which is telling you something. ..."
"... The problem for Ukraine is that with the cut of economic ties with Russia the natural path for economics is probably down. De-industrialization, Baltic style, is raining supreme. Many enterprises survived the period from 1991 to 2014 only due to orders from Russia. Especially remnants of military industrial complex and manufacturing industry. Now what? Selling land (like Zelensky is trying to do) ? ..."
Jan 17, 2020 | www.unz.com

likbez says:January 17, 2020 at 8:35 am GMT • 1,500 Words @AP AP,

I agree with JPM:

I feel like robber barons in Kyiv have harmed you more through their looting of the country than impoverished Eastern Ukrainians, who were the biggest losers in the post-Soviet deindustrilization, have harmed you by existing and dying of diseases of poverty and despair.

It reminds me of how coastal shit-libs in America talk about "fly-over" country and want all the poor whites in Appalachia to die. I'm living in a country whose soul is totally poisoned. A country that is dying. While all this is happening, whites have split themselves into little factions focused on political point scoring.

I doubt people like Zelensky, Kolomoisky, Poroshenko and all the rest are going to turn Ukraine into an earthly paradise. They're more likely to be Neros playing harps, while Ukraine burns.

Looks like your understanding of Ukraine is mostly based of a short trip to Lvov and reading neoliberal MSM and forums. That's not enough, unless you want to be the next Max Boot.

Ukraine is a deeply sick patient, which surprisingly still stands despite all hardships (Ukrainians demonstrated amazing, superhuman resilience in the crisis that hit them, which greatly surprised all experts).

The infrastructure they inherited from the USSR mostly is now fully amortized. For example railway park in in complete ruin. Central heating pipeline communications in cities like Kiev are in ruins too. In the USSR they tried to reuse the heat from electric stations and have elaborate hot water delivery networks from each, which provided heat to a large city blocks. Now pipes are completely rusted (which in 30 years is no surprise) and are in the state of constant repair.

And, what is really tragic Ukraine now it is a debt state. Usually the latter is the capital sentence for the county. Few managed to escape even in more favorable conditions (South Korea is one.) So chances of economic recovery are slim: with such level of parasitic rent to the West the natural path is down and down. Don't cry for me Argentina.

And there is no money to replace already destroyed due to bad maintenance infrastructure, but surprisingly large parts of Soviets era infrastructure still somehow hold. For example, electrical networks, subway cars. But other part are already crumbling.

For example, in Kiev that means in some buildings you have winter without central heating, you have elevators in 16-storey buildings that work one or two weeks in month, you have no hot water, sometimes you have no water at all for a week or more, etc). Pensioners have problem with paying heating bills, so some of them are forced to live in non-heated apartments.

And that's in Kiev/Kyiv (Western Ukrainians love to change established names, much like communists) . In provincial cities it is a real horror show when even electricity supply became a problem. The countryside dwellers at least has its own food, but the situation for them is also very very difficult.

Other big problem -- few jobs and almost no well paid job, unless you are young, know English and have a university education (and are lucky). Before 2014 approximately 70% of Ukrainian labor migrants (in total a couple of million) came from the western part of the country, in which migration had become a widespread method of coping with poverty, the absence of jobs and low salaries.

Now this practice spread to the whole county. That destroyed many families.

The USA plays its usual games selling vassals crap at inflated prices (arms, uranium rods, coal, locomotives, cars, etc) , which Ukrainians can't refuse. Trump is simply a typical gangster in this respect, running a protection racket.

The rate of emigration and shrinking population is another fundamental problem. Mass emigration ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Ukraine ) is continuing even after Zelensky election. Looting by the West also continues unabated. This is disaster capitalism in action.

Add to those problems inflated military expenses to fight the civil war in Donbass which deprives other sectors of necessary funds (with the main affect of completely alienating Russia) and "Huston, we have a problem."

May be this is a natural path for xUSSR countries after the dissolution of the USSR, I don't know.

But the destiny of ordinary Ukrainians is deeply tragic: they wanted better life and got a really harsh one. Especially pensioners (typical pension is something like $60-$70) a month in Kiev, much less outside of Kiev. How they physically survive I do not fully understand.

There are still pro-Russian areas but being free of Crimea and Donbass means Ukraine can no longer be characterized as "split."

I agree that there is a substantial growth of anti-Russian sentiments. It is really noticeable. As well as growth of the usage of the Ukrainian language (previously Kiev, unlike Lvov was completely Russian-language city).

And in Western Ukraine Russiphobia was actually always a part of "national identity". The negative definition of national identity, if you wish. See popular slogan "Hto ne skache toi moskal" ("those who do not jump are Moskal" -- where Moskal is the derogatory name for a Russian). Here is this slogan in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6rfqr9afMc ;-)

But when the standard of living dropped to such extent as it dropped after 2014 sentiments toward even slightly different ethnic groups turn hostile too. This is the case in Ukraine. In this sense you are wrong. There is no more unity now then existed before 2014. I would say there is less unity now.

Sentiments turned against both Donbass dwellers and Ukrainians from Western Ukraine. In Kiev the derogatory term for both categories is "ponaekhali" ("come to overcrowd the place and displace us", or something along those lines; it's difficult to translate, but the term carries strong derogatory meaning) .

"Donetskie" (former Donbass dwellers, often displaced by the war) are generally strongly resented and luxury cars, villas, etc and other excesses of neoliberal elite are attributed mostly to them (Donbass neoliberal elite did moved to Kiev, not Moscow) , while "zapadentsi" are also, albeit less strongly, resented because they often use clan politics within institutions, and often do not put enough effort (or are outright incompetent), as they rely on its own clan ties for survival.

This sentiment is stronger to the south of Kiev where the resentment is directed mainly against Western Ukrainians, not against "Donetskie" like in Kiev. And I am talking not only about Odessa. Western Ukrainians are now strongly associated with corrupt ways of getting lucrative positions (via family, clan or political connections), being incompetent and doing nothing useful.

What surprise me is that this resentment against "zapadentsi" and "Poloshenko clan" is shared by many people from Western Ukraine. The target is often slightly more narrow, for example Hutsuls in Lviv ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hutsuls )

The nationalistic hysteria of 2014-2017 now mostly changed into deep depression: how a tiny group of far right nationalist and football hooligan gangs managed to get to power against the will of the majority of the country and destroy its economy. That's why Zelensky was elected and most far right parliamentarians lost their seats. Most of Western Ukraine voted for him, which is telling you something.

The problem for Ukraine is that with the cut of economic ties with Russia the natural path for economics is probably down. De-industrialization, Baltic style, is raining supreme. Many enterprises survived the period from 1991 to 2014 only due to orders from Russia. Especially remnants of military industrial complex and manufacturing industry. Now what? Selling land (like Zelensky is trying to do) ?

Ukraine will probably eventually lose a large part of its chemical industry because without subsidies for gas it just can't complete even taking into account low labor costs. And manufacturing because without Russian market it is difficult to find a place for their production in already established markets, competing only in price and suffering in quality (I remember something about Iraq returning Ukrainians all ordered armored carriers due to defect is the the armor https://sputniknews.com/military/201705221053859853-armored-vehicles-defects-extent /). Although at least for the Ukrainian arm industry there is place on the market in countries which are used to old Soviet armaments, because those are rehashed Soviet products.

Add to this corrupt and greedy diaspora (all those Jaresko, Chalupas, Freelands, Vindmans, etc ) from the USA and Canada (and not only diaspora -- look at Biden, Kerry, etc) who want their piece of the pie after 2014 "Revolution of dignity" (what a sad joke) and you will see the problems more clearly. Not that much changed from the period 1991-2014 where Ukraine was also royally fleeced by own oligarchs allied with Western banksers, simply now this leads to quicker deterioration of the standard of living.

None of Eastern European countries benefited from a color revolution staged by the USA. This is about opening the country not only to multinationals (while they loot the county they at least behave within a certain legal bounds, demonstrating at least decency of gangsters like in Godfather), but to petty foreign criminals from diaspora and outside of it who allies with the local oligarchs and smaller nouveau riche and are siphoning all the county wealth to western banks as soon as possible. Greed of the disapora is simply unbounded. https://neweasterneurope.eu/2016/08/26/the-ukrainian-diaspora-as-a-recipient-of-oligarchic-cash/

Of course, Ukrainian diaspora is not uniform. Still, outside well-know types from the tiny Mid-Eastern country, the most dangerous people for Ukraine are probably Ukrainians from diaspora with dual citizenship

[Jan 17, 2020] Ukraine demographic problem

Of course the USA do not care, but the trend ofter 2014 color revolution financed and organized by the USA (with Germany Poland and Sweden in supporting roles) is devastating...
Jan 17, 2020 | www.unz.com

AnonFromTN , says: January 15, 2020 at 6:12 pm GMT

@Anatoly Karlin Donbass people ran with the territories. In addition, half a million Ukrainian citizens got Russian citizenship in 2019. Optimists put Ukrainian population at 35 million, pessimists at 22-24 million, but half a million in a single year is a huge number in either case.

Finally, my interest in the opinions of me (or anything else, for that matter) of various "svidomy" and "svyadomy" personages is about the same as my interest in the opinions of cockroaches or ants. In one case, what they fought for has already befallen them, in the other – the same thing is likely to happen. In both cases Russia should not burden itself with unnecessary dead weight.

[Jan 17, 2020] German Parliament Office Reports No Russian Invasion of Eastern Ukraine, Rejects Media and Government Propaganda

Jan 17, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

Takes a look and finds no reliable information to support the claim John Helmer 1 day ago 1064 2

A report by a research unit of the German Bundestag, just released in Berlin, has defied the narrative of the European Union, NATO and the US, with the conclusion that since the Ukraine civil war began in early 2014, there has been no reliable evidence of Russian troop invasion or intervention by regular Russian military forces in the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine.

After a review of the press, official public releases and reports, as well as European court rulings, the Bundestag's experts have described the outcome with the German phrase, ohne belastbares Faktenmaterial – "without reliable fact material."

The Bundestag report, which runs to 17 pages and was completed on December 9, has been noted in the German-language media. To date, however, it has been ignored by the Anglo-American press, including the alt-media.

The new German report is entitled "Intervention in civil war zones: The role of Russia during the east Ukraine conflict". It was prepared by the foreign, international law and defence department (WD-2) of the Scientific Services Bureau of the Bundestag.

In a preface to the report, the authors say they "support the members of the German Bundestag with mandate-related activity. Their works do not express the view of the German Bundestag, its individual organs, or the management of the Bundestag." Responsibility for the research reporting is "the technical responsibility of the authors as well as the department management." No authors have been identified by name.

The full German report can be read at the official website link. No official English translation is available.

For five years Ukrainian armed forces and pro-Russian separatists have been fighting against each other in the Donbass/Donets Basin," the report says. " The territorial conflict shows classical identifiers of a non-international (internal) armed conflict. About the extent, quality and magnitude of the military involvement of Russia during the Ukraine conflict, there are few reliable facts and analyses aside from the numerous speculations, part-contradictory reports and press announcements, and denials from different sources. Altogether, however, the picture of the situation is not unequivocal."

"Also, the Federal [German] Government holds no reliable knowledge, according to its own information apparently, on how much influence today Russia actually exercises on the separatists in the East Ukraine that can be described as credible."

The report summarizes western media reports, social media posts, as well as NATO press releases in order to cast doubt on their veracity. "Reliable information about the parts of the region of the Ukrainian-Russian border not controlled by Kiev is rare." The German researchers are also sceptical of claims published by the monitoring mission of the area from the Organization for Security and Economic Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) which "has, in spite of its comprehensive mandate, only limited access to this area."

For background details of the anti-Russian leadership of the OSCE's special monitoring mission (SMM) in Ukraine, read this .

"The question of whether pro-Russian separatists in the Donbass region are currently under control and directed from Moscow, or whether regular Russian troops still remain on Ukrainian territory cannot be answered without reliable factual material, in particular without the appropriate and reliable secret service intelligence."

Source: Dances With Bears

Mychal Arnold • a day ago The West are liars! 3 • Reply • Share › − Avatar CHUCKMAN • a day ago Well, it's a small good thing, but where were they for all these years?

Four years of Poroshenko's destructive nonsense went unchallenged.

And why is Germany still supporting American sanctions against Russia?

I might add, too, wouldn't it be a sound idea to investigate first before supporting any hostile policies of America abroad, as in Syria or Iran?

Is it really too much to expect that one understands the facts before supporting hostilities?

But that's dreaming in Technicolor.

It's just not the world America has constructed for us all, by brute force.

[Jan 17, 2020] Russia fertility rate problem

Jan 17, 2020 | www.unz.com

Beckow says: January 15, 2020 at 7:12 pm GMT 200 Words @Anatoly Karlin All advanced countries need a no-children tax on free-loaders to survive. It is easy to implement and mostly fair (there are a few corner cases). It is not a penalty since it is a personal choice to be a parasite on the society and consume instead of raising children.

It can easily be implemented by including a number of children in retirement formula and in taxes. The no-kids parasites, the assorted barren women and gays, feminists and male scoundrels who abandon their families, would pay for the long-term support they get from the society – for the children that they will need to get pensions, medical care, etc Or we can just cut them off once they no longer work. No kids – no old-age benefits, unless you pay for them. This would be automatic in a normal society in the past.

Most modern people don't have children because they are lazy and because raising children is hard. It is a core role of any society to have families, so those who don't participate need to pay up.

Philip Owen , says: January 15, 2020 at 7:19 pm GMT

@Beckow The Soviet Union did have a tax on childless (or unmarried?) men for a while. It wasn't popular and didn't last.
Beckow , says: January 15, 2020 at 7:30 pm GMT
@Philip Owen opular with the parasites who have to pay, but all taxes are unpopular.

It is fundamentally the most fair way to handle generational issues – those who choose to be free-loaders, can't expect others' children to take care of them. This will happen regardless, all the pension obligations are imposed on people who never agreed to them, they will re-structure them in the future to benefit their own families.

In the West this is complicated by the diversity-migrant issue in the next generation – why should they pay for people who invited them for cheap labor? There is an assumption that they will pay, but why should they? This issue is coming.

AnonFromTN , says: January 15, 2020 at 8:08 pm GMT
@Philip Owen In Stalin's times that tax was imposed an all and gradually reduced with the number of children, so that only people who had three or more children did not pay "childless" tax. In Brezhnev's USSR that tax was on childless men and married childless women (on the assumption that marriage is male's choice, so a woman cannot be penalized when no one marries her).
inertial , says: January 15, 2020 at 8:23 pm GMT
@AnonFromTN Too many women whose potential husbands were killed in the war. Penalizing them with a tax on top of everything would've been heartless.
Abelard Lindsey , says: January 15, 2020 at 8:26 pm GMT
@Beckow The US already has this. One look at the IRS 1040 form and instructions will confirm this.
nonFromTN , says: January 15, 2020 at 8:30 pm GMT
@songbird Frankly, I don't know. I never lived in Stalin's times and never had enough siblings or three children. What I remember in the 1960s and 1970s, every school child in grade 1 (maybe 1 and 2) received a glass of free milk at school daily, and children from poorer families received free lunch (I never did).
Philip Owen , says: January 15, 2020 at 9:43 pm GMT
@AnonFromTN In the UK we had a small bottle, about a third of a pint, of free milk. The ones who needed it most never drank it. (My school was in a small town and contained all social classes). School meals were paid for by most but some had them free.

The Russian government has just introduced free school meals for all for certain years. I forget which.

[Jan 17, 2020] Putin plan will make US control of the positions of Russian President and Russian PM more difficult. It takes time, effort and money to build up a lobbying presence in a large parliament

Jan 17, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

Jen January 15, 2020 at 7:55 pm

I should think that the transfer of powers from the Presidency to the position of Prime Minister, and the holders of executive power being chosen by holders of legislative power, will make US control of the positions of Russian President and Russian PM more difficult. It takes time, effort and money to build up a lobbying presence in a large parliament; for one thing, the West needs to know who are the most significant organizations and agencies in Russia to penetrate and infiltrate, and then influence. Then these people need to know which politicians and which parties in the Federal Assembly to target. A parliamentary system where the holders of executive power are not chosen directly by the public but by political peers is likely to be more resistant to foreign infiltration if only because there are more people to target. The Russian language and alphabet, and current political culture are also likely to be barriers to penetration.

It was much easier in the Yeltsin period when Yeltsin appropriated powers that should have belonged to the Federal Assembly, for the US to control the Presidency; Yeltsin was moving the country's political structure to a centralized one that to some extent the Americans could relate to, because then it began to resemble the structures they knew and had experience with.

Like Like

[Jan 16, 2020] Battle of the Ages to stop Eurasian integration by Pepe Escobar

Jan 16, 2020 | www.asiatimes.com

Battle of the Ages to stop Eurasian integration

Coming decade could see the US take on Russia, China and Iran over the New Silk Road connection

The Raging Twenties started with a bang with the targeted assassination of Iran's General Qasem Soleimani.

Yet a bigger bang awaits us throughout the decade: the myriad declinations of the New Great Game in Eurasia, which pits the US against Russia, China and Iran, the three major nodes of Eurasia integration.

Every game-changing act in geopolitics and geoeconomics in the coming decade will have to be analyzed in connection to this epic clash.

The Deep State and crucial sectors of the US ruling class are absolutely terrified that China is already outpacing the "indispensable nation" economically and that Russia has outpaced it militarily . The Pentagon officially designates the three Eurasian nodes as "threats."

Hybrid War techniques – carrying inbuilt 24/7 demonization – will proliferate with the aim of containing China's "threat," Russian "aggression" and Iran's "sponsorship of terrorism." The myth of the "free market" will continue to drown under the imposition of a barrage of illegal sanctions, euphemistically defined as new trade "rules."

Yet that will be hardly enough to derail the Russia-China strategic partnership. To unlock the deeper meaning of this partnership, we need to understand that Beijing defines it as rolling towards a "new era." That implies strategic long-term planning – with the key date being 2049, the centennial of New China.

The horizon for the multiple projects of the Belt and Road Initiative – as in the China-driven New Silk Roads – is indeed the 2040s, when Beijing expects to have fully woven a new, multipolar paradigm of sovereign nations/partners across Eurasia and beyond, all connected by an interlocking maze of belts and roads.

The Russian project – Greater Eurasia – somewhat mirrors Belt & Road and will be integrated with it. Belt & Road, the Eurasia Economic Union, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank are all converging towards the same vision.

Realpolitik

So this "new era", as defined by the Chinese, relies heavily on close Russia-China coordination, in every sector. Made in China 2025 is encompassing a series of techno/scientific breakthroughs. At the same time, Russia has established itself as an unparalleled technological resource for weapons and systems that the Chinese still cannot match.

At the latest BRICS summit in Brasilia, President Xi Jinping told Vladimir Putin that "the current international situation with rising instability and uncertainty urge China and Russia to establish closer strategic coordination." Putin's response: "Under the current situation, the two sides should continue to maintain close strategic communication."

Russia is showing China how the West respects realpolitik power in any form, and Beijing is finally starting to use theirs. The result is that after five centuries of Western domination – which, incidentally, led to the decline of the Ancient Silk Roads – the Heartland is back, with a bang, asserting its preeminence.

On a personal note, my travels these past two years, from West Asia to Central Asia, and my conversations these past two months with analysts in Nur-Sultan, Moscow and Italy, have allowed me to get deeper into the intricacies of what sharp minds define as the Double Helix. We are all aware of the immense challenges ahead – while barely managing to track the stunning re-emergence of the Heartland in real-time.

In soft power terms, the sterling role of Russian diplomacy will become even more paramount – backed up by a Ministry of Defense led by Sergei Shoigu, a Tuvan from Siberia, and an intel arm that is capable of constructive dialogue with everybody: India/Pakistan, North/South Korea, Iran/Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan.

This apparatus does smooth (complex) geopolitical issues over in a manner that still eludes Beijing.

In parallel, virtually the whole Asia-Pacific – from the Eastern Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean – now takes into full consideration Russia-China as a counter-force to US naval and financial overreach.

Stakes in Southwest Asia

The targeted assassination of Soleimani, for all its long-term fallout, is just one move in the Southwest Asia chessboard. What's ultimately at stake is a macro geoeconomic prize: a land bridge from the Persian Gulf to the Eastern Mediterranean.

Last summer, an Iran-Iraq-Syria trilateral established that "the goal of negotiations is to activate the Iranian-Iraqi-Syria load and transport corridor as part of a wider plan for reviving the Silk Road."

There could not be a more strategic connectivity corridor, capable of simultaneously interlinking with the International North-South Transportation Corridor; the Iran-Central Asia-China connection all the way to the Pacific; and projecting Latakia towards the Mediterranean and the Atlantic.

What's on the horizon is, in fact, a sub-sect of Belt & Road in Southwest Asia. Iran is a key node of Belt & Road; China will be heavily involved in the rebuilding of Syria; and Beijing-Baghdad signed multiple deals and set up an Iraqi-Chinese Reconstruction Fund (income from 300,000 barrels of oil a day in exchange for Chinese credit for Chinese companies rebuilding Iraqi infrastructure).

A quick look at the map reveals the "secret" of the US refusing to pack up and leave Iraq, as demanded by the Iraqi Parliament and Prime Minister: to prevent the emergence of this corridor by any means necessary. Especially when we see that all the roads that China is building across Central Asia – I navigated many of them in November and December – ultimately link China with Iran.

The final objective: to unite Shanghai to the Eastern Mediterranean – overland, across the Heartland.

As much as Gwadar port in the Arabian Sea is an essential node of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, and part of China's multi-pronged "escape from Malacca" strategy, India also courted Iran to match Gwadar via the port of Chabahar in the Gulf of Oman.

So as much as Beijing wants to connect the Arabian Sea with Xinjiang, via the economic corridor, India wants to connect with Afghanistan and Central Asia via Iran.

Yet India's investments in Chabahar may come to nothing, with New Delhi still mulling whether to become an active part of the US "Indo-Pacific" strategy, which would imply dropping Tehran.

The Russia-China-Iran joint naval exercise in late December, starting exactly from Chabahar, was a timely wake-up for New Delhi. India simply cannot afford to ignore Iran and end up losing its key connectivity node, Chabahar.

The immutable fact: everyone needs and wants Iran connectivity. For obvious reasons, since the Persian empire, this is the privileged hub for all Central Asian trade routes.

On top of it, Iran for China is a matter of national security. China is heavily invested in Iran's energy industry. All bilateral trade will be settled in yuan or in a basket of currencies bypassing the US dollar.

US neocons, meanwhile, still dream of what the Cheney regime was aiming at in the past decade: regime change in Iran leading to the US dominating the Caspian Sea as a springboard to Central Asia, only one step away from Xinjiang and weaponization of anti-China sentiment. It could be seen as a New Silk Road in reverse to disrupt the Chinese vision.

Battle of the Ages

A new book, The Impact of China's Belt and Road Initiativ e , by Jeremy Garlick of the University of Economics in Prague, carries the merit of admitting that, "making sense" of Belt & Road "is extremely difficult."

This is an extremely serious attempt to theorize Belt & Road's immense complexity – especially considering China's flexible, syncretic approach to policymaking, quite bewildering for Westerners. To reach his goal, Garlick gets into Tang Shiping's social evolution paradigm, delves into neo-Gramscian hegemony, and dissects the concept of "offensive mercantilism" – all that as part of an effort in "complex eclecticism."

The contrast with the pedestrian Belt & Road demonization narrative emanating from US "analysts" is glaring. The book tackles in detail the multifaceted nature of Belt & Road's trans-regionalism as an evolving, organic process.

Imperial policymakers won't bother to understand how and why Belt & Road is setting a new global paradigm. The NATO summit in London last month offered a few pointers. NATO uncritically adopted three US priorities: even more aggressive policy towards Russia; containment of China (including military surveillance); and militarization of space – a spin-off from the 2002 Full Spectrum Dominance doctrine.

So NATO will be drawn into the "Indo-Pacific" strategy – which means containment of China. And as NATO is the EU's weaponized arm, that implies the US interfering on how Europe does business with China – at every level.

Retired US Army Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell's chief of staff from 2001 to 2005, cuts to the chase: "America exists today to make war. How else do we interpret 19 straight years of war and no end in sight? It's part of who we are. It's part of what the American Empire is. We are going to lie, cheat and steal, as Pompeo is doing right now, as Trump is doing right now, as Esper is doing right now and a host of other members of my political party, the Republicans, are doing right now. We are going to lie, cheat and steal to do whatever it is we have to do to continue this war complex. That's the truth of it. And that's the agony of it."

Moscow, Beijing and Tehran are fully aware of the stakes. Diplomats and analysts are working on the trend, for the trio, to evolve a concerted effort to protect one another from all forms of hybrid war – sanctions included – launched against each of them.

For the US, this is indeed an existential battle – against the whole Eurasia integration process, the New Silk Roads, the Russia-China strategic partnership, those Russian hypersonic weapons mixed with supple diplomacy, the profound disgust and revolt against US policies all across the Global South, the nearly inevitable collapse of the US dollar. What's certain is that the Empire won't go quietly into the night. We should all be ready for the battle of the ages.

[Jan 16, 2020] The US strategy is to control your economy in order to force you to sell your most profitable industrial sectors to US investors, to force you to invest in your industry only by borrowing from the United States.

Jan 16, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Daniel , Jan 16 2020 21:18 utc | 36

There is a lot of talk here and in comment sections at forums about how the American Empire is going to collapse soon due to its blunders and Russia and China gaining military superiority over it. This kind of talk is a type of magical thinking and has no basis in reality. The United States' most potent weapon isn't military, it's economic, and through it the US government controls the world. That weapon is the US Dollar and ever since Nixon took it off the gold standard it has been used to further the Empire's imperial hold on the global economy. The economist Michael Hudson in an article called A Note To China (link at bottom) explains how this works:
The U.S. strategy is to control your economy in order to force you to sell your most profitable industrial sectors to US investors, to force you to invest in your industry only by borrowing from the United States.

So the question is, how do China, Russia, Iran and other countries break free of this U.S. dollarization strategy?

There are a lot of articles on alt.media sites about how China and Russia are de-dollarizing their economies in order to resist, and eventually end, the US domination of the global economy that is preventing them from maintaining independent economic policies that benefit their citizens rather than global elites and US central bankers.

Russia managed to put a stop to overt US economic imperialism after the looting spree in the post-Soviet 1990s decimated Russia's ability to provide for its citizens and degraded the country's ability to maintain economic independence. But it still ultimately got caught in the neoliberal trap. Hudson again:

Yet Russia did not have enough foreign exchange to pay domestic ruble-wages or to pay for domestic goods and services. But neoliberal advisors convinced Russia to back all Ruble money or domestic currency credit it created by backing it with U.S. dollars. Obtaining these dollars involved paying enormous interest to the United States for this needless backing. There was no need for such backing. At the end of this road the United States convinced Russia to sell off its raw materials, its nickel mines, its electric utilities, its oil reserves, and ultimately tried to pry Crimea away from Russia.

China, Hudson argues, by accepting the advice of American and IMF/World Bank economic "experts" and through Chinese students schooled in American universities in American neoliberal theory is in great danger of falling into the same trap.

The U.S. has discovered that it does not have to militarily invade China. It does not have to conquer China. It does not have to use military weapons, because it has the intellectual weapon of financialization, convincing you that you need to do this in order to have a balanced economy. So, when China sends its students to the United States, especially when it sends central bankers and planners to the United States to study (and be recruited), they are told by the U.S. "Do as we say, not as we have done."

He concludes that:

The neoliberal plan is not to make you independent, and not to help you grow except to the extent that your growth will be paid to US investors or used to finance U.S. military spending around the world to encircle you and trying to destabilize you in Sichuan to try to pry China apart.

Look at what the United States has done in Russia, and at what the International Monetary Fund in Europe has done to Greece, Latvia and the Baltic states. It is a dress rehearsal for what U.S. diplomacy would like to do to you, if it can convince you to follow the neoliberal US economic policy of financialization and privatization.

De-dollarization is the alternative to privatization and financialization.

Loosening the Empire's hold on economic and geopolitical affairs and moving to a multipolar world order is a tough slog and the Empire will use everything it can to stop this from happening. But at the moment even countries under American sanctions and surrounded by its armies, with the possible exception of Iran, aren't really fighting back. That's a bitter pill for many to swallow but wishful thinking isn't going to change the world. After all, the new world has to be imagined before it can appear and right now it's still global capitalism all the way down.

Link to article: https://michael-hudson.com/2020/01/note-to-china/

The article in full, and Hudson's work generally, is well worth reading. He is one of only a few genuinely anti-imperialist economists and he is able to explain in layman's terms exactly how the US-centric global economy is a massive scam designed to benefit US empire at the rest of the world's expense.


Ian2 , Jan 16 2020 22:03 utc | 39

I was thinking about winston2's comment in the previous thread. A good way for China and Russia to respond is to go after those in the MIC; the CEO, lobbyists, financiers, etc... If they follow the money and take them out, I suspect we all would see a dramatic turn of events. No need to publicize their early retirement. Make it messy and public but not to the point of taking out innocents.
Patroklos , Jan 16 2020 22:20 utc | 40
@ Daniel | Jan 16 2020 21:18 utc | 36

Yes, Michael Hudson is excellent, mostly because he's rare economist, that is, one who begins from the premise that the 'economy' is a set of historically-situated and specific modes of exchange and forms of human relations. Aristotle located what we call the economy in ethics and politics; we follow the fairytales of neo-classical economics and global capital by imagining that it has some scientific autonomy from human social relations. Marx was right in following Aristotle's insight by critiquing the very idea of an autonomous economy, which the chief ideological fiction of late capitalism. Sam Chambers and Ellen Meiksens-Wood are also excellent critics of this obstacle to reimagining a viable alternative to the economy as it is propagated by the US neoliberal global apparatus.

Inkan1969 , Jan 16 2020 22:34 utc | 42 S , Jan 16 2020 22:37 utc | 43
@Daniel #36:
The United States' most potent weapon isn't military, it's economic, and through it the US government controls the world. That weapon is the US Dollar and ever since Nixon took it off the gold standard it has been used to further the Empire's imperial hold on the global economy.

But at the moment even countries under American sanctions and surrounded by its armies, with the possible exception of Iran, aren't really fighting back.

The dynamics of Russian reserves composition tell us that Russia is fighting back:

                    % Reserves
Date       Dollar  Euro  Yuan Other  Gold
30.06.2017   46.3  25.1   0.1  12.4  16.1
30.09.2017   46.2  23.9   1.0  12.2  16.7
31.12.2017   45.8  21.7   2.8  12.5  17.2
31.03.2018   43.7  22.2   5.0  11.9  17.2
30.06.2018   21.8  32.0  14.7  14.7  16.8
30.09.2018   22.6  32.1  14.4  14.3  16.6
31.12.2018   22.7  31.7  14.2  13.3  18.1
31.03.2019   23.6  30.3  14.2  13.7  18.2
30.06.2019   24.2  30.6  13.2  12.9  19.1
vk , Jan 16 2020 22:50 utc | 44
@ Posted by: Daniel | Jan 16 2020 21:18 utc | 36

Exclude me from this squad. I's always from the opinion that the USA would collapse slowly, i.e. degenerate/decay. I won't repeat my arguments again here so as to spare people who already know me the repetition.

However, consider this: when 2008 broke out, some people thought the USA would finally collapse. It didn't - in great part, because the USG also thought it could collapse, so it acted quickly and decisively. But it cost a lot: the USA fell from its "sole superpower" status, and, for the first time since 1929, the American people had to fell in the flesh the side effects of capitalism. It marked the end of the End of History, and the realization - mainly by Russia and China - that the Americans were not invincible and immortals. It may have marked the beginning of the multipolar era.

--//--

The world (bar China) never recovered from 2008. Indeed, world debt has grown to another record high:

Global debt hits a record high in 2019 at 322% of GDP, or $267trn

The world governments - specially the governments from the USA, Japan and Europe - absorbed private debt (through purchase of rotten papers and through QE) so the system could be saved. But this debt didn't disappear, instead, it became public debt. What's worse: private debt has already spiked up, and already is higher than pre-2008 levels. The Too Big To Fail philosophy of the central banks only bought them time.

--//--

Extending my previous link (from the previous Open Thread) about money laundering:

No tax and chill: Netflix's offshore network

The global TV subscription streaming company, Netflix made $1.2bn in profits in 2018, of which $430m was shifted into tax havens, reports Tax Watch UK.

The estimated revenue from UK subscribers was about $860m, but most of this was booked offshore in a tax haven Dutch subsidiary. Netflix claims its UK parent company got only $48m in revenue. When the costs of Netflix UK productions were put against this, Netflix was able to avoid paying any tax at all to the UK government. Indeed, it received tax reliefs for productions in the UK from the government.

Ghost Ship , Jan 16 2020 23:10 utc | 45
Why nobody should go to Moscow fuck with Russia.

A simple question requires a simple answer. Russia's defence expenditure in PPP terms is probably in excess of $180 billion per year which buys a shedload of "capable military equipment".

Bob , Jan 16 2020 23:26 utc | 46
8 On can only hope that the "Gharles De Gaulle" get destroyed and that the french military at least take some initiative to get rid of Macron.
karlof1 , Jan 16 2020 23:40 utc | 47
It should be noted that the point Hudson's trying to make in his "Note to China" is to warn China of what if faces by using historical examples. As S points out @43, Russia's Ruble is very sound and its dollar and T-Bill holdings are extremely low. The message to China and the entire SCO community is to cease supporting the Outlaw US Empire's military by supporting its balance of payments by buying T-Bills. The sooner the SCO community, or just the core nations, can produce a new currency for use in trade, the sooner a crisis can be created within the Outlaw US Empire--essentially by turning the "intellectual weapon of financialization" against the global rogue nation foe.

[Jan 16, 2020] There is a silver lining to that. If another term of Trump inspires the Europeans to abrogate NATO and put an end to that alliance and create their own NEATO ( North East Atlantic Treaty Organization)

Jan 16, 2020 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

drumlin woodchuckles , , January 14, 2020 at 7:29 pm

There is a silver lining to that. If another term of Trump inspires the Europeans to abrogate NATO and put an end to that alliance and create their own NEATO ( North East Atlantic Treaty Organization) withOUT America and withOUT Canada and maybe withOUT some of those no-great-bargain East European countries; then NEATO Europe could reach its own Separate Peace with Russia and lower that tension point.

And America could bring its hundred thousand hostages ( "soldiers") back home from not-NATO-anymore Europe.

[Jan 16, 2020] After Putin: Putin's Address to the Federal Assembly

Jan 16, 2020 | off-guardian.org

Search Jan 15, 2020 14 TRANSCRIPT: Putin's Address to the Federal Assembly Editor Below is a full (translated) transcript of Vladimir Putin's speech to the Federal Assembly on Wednesday the 15th of January 2020. It is taken from the Kremlin's official website , and presented here for Western audiences who are curious to read it, but aren't likely to be bothered trawling the Kremlin's website looking for it.

Members of the Federation Council, State Duma deputies, fellow Russians,

The Presidential Address to the Federal Assembly is delivered at the very beginning of the year for the first time. We need to address large-scale social, economic and technological tasks facing the country more quickly and without delay.

Their content and guidelines are reflected in the national projects, whose implementation will require a new quality of state governance and work on the part of the Government and state bodies at all levels, as well as direct dialogue with citizens.

Our society is clearly calling for change. People want development, and they strive to move forward in their careers and knowledge, in achieving prosperity, and they are ready to assume responsibility for specific work. Quite often, they have better knowledge of what, how and when should be changed where they live and work, that is, in cities, districts, villages and all across the nation.

The pace of change must be expedited every year and produce tangible results in attaining worthy living standards that would be clearly perceived by the people. And, I repeat, they must be actively involved in this process.

Colleagues,

Russia's future and historical perspective depend on how many of us there are (I would like to start the main part of my Address with demography), how many children are born in Russian families in one, five or ten years, on these children's upbringing, on what kind of people they become and what they will do for the country, as well as on the values they choose as their mainstay in life.

There are nearly 147 million of us now. But we have entered a difficult, a very difficult demographic period. The measures we took starting in the mid-2000s have had a positive effect on demography. We have even reached a stage of natural increase. This is why we have more children at schools now.

However, new families are being created now by the small generation of the 1990s. And the birth rate is falling again. This is the main problem of the current demographic period in Russia.

The aggregate birth rate, which is the key index showing the number of births per woman, was only 1.5 in 2019, according to tentative estimates. Is this few or many? It is not enough for our country. It is approximately equal to the figure reported in many European countries. But it is not enough for Russia.

I can tell you by way of comparison that the figure was 1.3 in 1943, during the Great Patriotic War. It was only lower in the 1990s: 1.16 in 1999, lower even than during the Great Patriotic War. There were very few families with two children, and some couples had to put off starting a family.

I want to say once again that we are alarmed by the negative demographic forecasts. It is our historic duty to respond to this challenge. We must not only get out of this demographic trap but ensure a sustainable natural population growth by 2025. The aggregate birth rate must be 1.7 in 2024.

Demography is a sector where universal or parochial solutions cannot be effective. Each step we take and each new law or government programme we adopt must be scrutinised from the viewpoint of our top national priority – the preservation and increase of Russia's population.

As we build a long-term policy to support families, it must be based on specific life situations. We need to look closely at difficulties faced by new families, families with many children or single-parent families.

The most sensitive and crucial issue is the opportunity to enrol one's child in a day nursery. Earlier, we allocated funds from the federal budget to help the regions create 255,000 new places in day nurseries by the end of 2021. However, in 2018 to 2019, instead of 90,000, 78,000 new places were created, out of which only 37,500 places can actually be provided to kids. Other places are unavailable simply because an educational licence is still not obtained. This means that these nurseries are not ready to enrol children.

Governors, heads of other constituent entities, my dear colleagues, this is not how work is done. Come on! It means we have created 77,700 places that are still not fully available. Half of them cannot operate – and we must create 177,300 by 2021. I am asking you to do everything (although it will be very difficult now, however, it needs to be done) to close this gap. Once again, we must work across all areas of family support.

But there is a daunting challenge that directly threatens our demographic future and it is the low income of a significant part of our citizens and families.

According to various estimates, roughly 70 to 80 percent of low-income families are families with children. You are well aware of this. It often happens that even when not one but both parents work, the income of such a family is still very modest.

What decisions have already been made? From January 2020, families with incomes below two subsistence minimums per person will receive monthly benefits for their first and second child. Moreover, these benefits will be paid until the child reaches the age of three rather than 18 months as was the case before. The benefit amount will depend on the subsistence minimum in a specific region. The nationwide average is over 11,000 rubles per child per month. Once again, this is an average and depends on a specific region.

Additionally, with the support of the federal budget we have started paying benefits for the third child and subsequent children in 75 constituent entities, now including all regions in the Urals, Siberia and the Far East.

All of this amounts to substantial support. But the following thought has crossed my mind, and I believe that you also realise this. Parents stop receiving payments when their child turns three, and this means that their family can immediately face financial problems. To be honest, this is happening already. We must prevent this, especially since I realise that mothers often find it hard to combine working and caring for their children before they start school.

We know from the experience of our own children and grandchildren that they often fall ill. Their mothers are therefore unable to work. In this connection, I suggest we introduce monthly payments for children aged between three and seven starting already from January 1, 2020.

Who will be covered by this measure, and how is it supposed to function?

Families whose incomes do not exceed per-capita subsistence minimum will receive these payments. That is, it concerns families facing a very difficult situation.

To obtain these payments, they will only have to file an application and list their official legal incomes. I would like to note that this procedure must become as convenient and simple as possible, so that people would be able to apply without queuing and clearing hurdles. Or they should do this online on the relevant state website.

As I have already said, incomes may vary from region to region. First stage payments will amount to 5,500 rubles, or 50 percent of the subsistence minimum. But that is not all. We will have to analyse and assess the operation of this system. And we will take the next step, if we see that some families are unable to achieve the subsistence minimum while receiving 5,500 rubles. From 2021, we will pay the subsistence minimum in full, or over 11,000 rubles, that will vary from region to region. I repeat, the specific sums will vary, but on average it will amount to 11,000 rubles per child per month.

We will need substantial resources for implementing the proposed measure, and we will also have to adjust the federal budget. I ask the Government and members of the Parliament to do this as quickly as possible. The regions should also complete their share of regulatory work.

What else should we do equally quickly?

In my Address last year I said that we should expand the system of social contracts. It should become an individual programme whereby every low-income family will be able to increase their income and enhance their quality of life. Under these contracts, the state will make regular payments to such families, finance retraining and advanced training and help them to find employment or start a small business.

While providing comprehensive assistance to low-income people, society and the state have a right to expect them to take steps as well to deal with their problems, including finding employment and taking a responsible attitude to their children and other family members.

The regions are already introducing the mechanism of social contracts. But it is not sufficiently effective yet, and it is not helping much to fight poverty or to increase family incomes.

Therefore, first of all I would like to ask the Government to analyse the experience of the pilot projects and revise the principles of social contracts. Second, we must increase financial assistance to the regions so that all of them introduce this mechanism in 2021.

I would like all our colleagues, including the regional heads, to note that we will assess their performance not by the number of social contracts signed but by poverty decline figures.

Colleagues,

Back in 2006, I said the following in my Address to the Federal Assembly: "And now for the most important matter. Indeed, what I want to talk about is love." It was then that I proposed launching the maternity capital programme aimed at helping the families that decided to have their second child.

This programme will expire on December 31, 2021. I know than many people wonder what the state will do after that. We will extend this programme to December 31, 2026 at the least. We must do this without fail. But this measure only is no longer enough.

We must support young people who are starting their families and, I am sure, dreaming about having children. In this sense, I would like to introduce new, additional decisions concerning the maternity capital, which should also come into effect on January 1, 2020.

Even when the first child is born, the family will have the right to the full amount of the maternity capital, which is 466,617 rubles after the indexation in January 2020. This is the sum that was paid when the second or the next child was born. This support will give families a chance to prepare for the birth of their second child.

But I believe that this is still not enough in today's conditions, considering the demographic challenges Russia is facing. We can and must do even more. I suggest increasing the maternity capital by a further 150,000 rubles. Families will have the right to this additional money for the maternity capital when their second child is born.

This means that the total amount of the maternity capital for a family with two children will amount to 616,617 rubles. It will be indexed annually in the future.

At the same time I believe that if a family already has a child, we must provide the new, increased maternity capital when the second child is born, which is, as I have already said, 616,617 rubles.

Let me add that we have already made the decision that when the third child is born, the government pays 450,000 rubles towards the family's mortgage loan. This means that overall a family with three children will be able to invest over one million rubles to solve their housing problems with the help of the government. In many regions, cities, and even regional capitals this amounts to almost half of the cost of a house or a flat.

Let me also remind you that a reduced mortgage interest rate, six percent per year, for families with two or more children has been extended for the entire time of the loan, which resulted in the number of people using this support measure growing almost 10-fold at once.

A social programme for young families has been launched in the Far East: mortgage loans at 2 percent interest rate. I ask the banks, and not just the banks with state capital, to become more actively involved in its implementation.

And here is another highly important matter. I have already mentioned a new payment for children aged between three and seven. But this is not all that we can and must do. Yes, when children start attending school, their parents, especially mothers, get more opportunities to work and earn an additional income. However, families have to pay more in order to send their children to school, they face extra problems, and we have to support them at that stage. In this connection, I suggest providing free hot meals to all primary school students from grade one through four.

I will not conceal the fact that we have had heated discussions on this subject. On the whole, some colleagues do not object, but they say that it would not be very fair that people with decent incomes and low incomes should receive the same amount of support from the state. They are not saying this because they do not want to support the children. Indeed, this argument has its own logic. But there is another logic that prevails in our society: everyone must have equal opportunities, and children and their parents who are often demeaned by the current situation must not think that they are even unable to feed their children.

I believe that this is very important for our society. Yes, they tell me that these benefits were not available even during the Soviet period, when there was large-scale social support for the people. But there was no great social stratification at that time either. I believe that this measure will be justified.

In order to provide free hot and, most importantly, healthy meals, I suggest channelling funding from three sources: the federal, regional and local budgets. But money is not the only thing that matters. We need to create the required infrastructure at schools, set up cafeterias and lunchrooms and put in place a system for supplying high-quality food. I would like to note that this was not done even during Soviet times, as I have already said. This, of course, will require time. But free hot meals must be provided starting from September 1, 2020 in those regions and schools that have the required level of technical equipment. I ask our colleagues to expedite this work. Primary school students must start receiving high-quality hot meals free of charge in all regions from September 1, 2023.

So colleagues, here is the point I want to make, in short. I would like to emphasise – all the steps we are taking are aimed at creating a streamlined, large-scale and, most importantly, an effectively working family support programme, so that people's incomes, especially for those raising children, are high enough for a decent life.

Secondly, what I said at the beginning of the Address: the steps that we took in previous years in the field of demographic development have already brought results. They have yielded results back then: a large generation is growing up in Russia. I am referring to children who are in preschool and primary school now. It is very important that they adopt the true values ​​of a large family – that family is love, happiness, the joy of motherhood and fatherhood, that family is a strong bond of several generations, united by respect for the elderly and care for children, giving everyone a sense of confidence, security, and reliability. If the younger generations accept this situation as natural, as a moral and an integral part and reliable background support for their adult life, then we will be able to meet the historical challenge of guaranteeing Russia's development as a large and successful country.

Colleagues,

Supporting families and family values ​​is always a forward-looking strategy addressing the generations that are to live in an age of tremendous technological and social changes, and something that will determine Russia's fate in the 21st century. So, to have these new generations participate in creating this future even now, to have them fully reveal their potential, we must create the necessary conditions for them, primarily for every child in every region of Russia to get a good education.

In the middle of the coming decade, Russia will have about 19 million schoolchildren, which is 6 million more than in 2010. Some say it is too difficult to influence objective demographic processes, so it is unadvisable to channel large resources for demographic development. However, in reality, we can see direct evidence of the opposite: family support policies are working, and sometimes their results even exceed our wildest expectations. It is great that there are so many children in our schools again. On the other hand, this situation should not affect the comfort and quality of their learning.

I ask the Government to coordinate with the regions, consider the demographic and other factors, estimate how many more children the schools need to serve, and make the necessary changes to the Education National Project. That will require flexible solutions: not only to build more schools, but also to efficiently use the entire educational and other infrastructure we have for these purposes, as well as the benefits of modern technology for education.

Almost all schools in Russia have internet access now. In 2021, they should no longer just be connected, but have high-speed internet access to fully embrace the digital transformation in national education; teachers and students should have access to advanced educational programmes; individual approach to teaching should be practiced to reveal each child's talents.

Our network of extracurricular technology and engineering centres is developing dynamically. Our children should also benefit from a modern environment for practicing music, art, and other forms of creativity.

Russia is allocating more than 8 billion rubles for equipment and musical instruments for children's art schools as part of the Culture National Project. But the problem is much wider. More than 1,000 art school premises are dilapidated and not fit for use as intended. I would like to ask the Government to help the regions improve them. And I ask the regional authorities not to forget that this is their responsibility.

Furthermore, a modern school implies forward-looking teaching staff enjoying high social status and prestige. By the middle of the next decade, the national professional advancement system should canvas at least half of the country's teachers, in the future including additional professional training, along with general education workers.

Class teachers are closest to their pupils. Their ongoing daily work including mentoring children and teaching them the right ways is a huge responsibility, and definitely requires special training and special support for these mentors. In this regard, I consider it necessary to introduce, from September 1, at least 5,000 rubles in additional payment to them financed from the federal budget.

There is a lot of controversy about this decision, because this is actually the responsibility of the regions. Those present in this room are well aware of this. But what is a class teacher? A mentor and supervisor, and those are federal functions.

But, of course, I would like to point this out: all current regional payments to class teachers should continue, colleagues; I am calling your attention to this. And I will definitely look at what will be happening in practice, in real life.

I pointed out more than once that the pay parameters for teachers, doctors and other public sector employees set out in the May 2012 Executive Orders must be strictly complied with. There is a reason why I keep returning to this subject. If we slacken control of this matter, this will create the temptation to neglect these provisions, as many of those present here know. This must not be allowed. I would like to emphasise that the issue concerns professionals working in the spheres of vital significance for society and the country, and they must receive good and fair pay for their work.

The number of school graduates will be increasing in the next few years. In light of this, we must ensure equal and fair access to free intramural university education. Therefore, I suggest that the number of university scholarships be increased every year. Moreover – what I am going to say next is very important, the priority in this matter must be given to regional universities, especially the regions that are lacking doctors, teachers and engineers.

Of course, we must not simply enrol more students but boost the development of regional universities with support from businesses and employers. In particular, we must strengthen their training, research and social infrastructure, as well as improve the system of training and advanced training of teachers for regional universities so that students receive up-to-date knowledge and can have successful careers in their regions.

The employment market is changing rapidly, with new professions appearing and higher requirements made to the existing ones. Our universities must be able to respond to these changes flexibly and quickly. I believe that third-year students must be offered an opportunity to choose a new path or curriculum, including related professions. This is not easy to do, but we must indeed do this. To ensure that talented and decent people play a major or leading role in our national development, we have launched the Russia – Land of Opportunity project. Over 3.5 million people have taken part in its competitions and Olympiads. We will continue to improve this system.

Colleagues,

Last year life expectancy in Russia exceeded 73 years for the first time, which is eight years longer than in 2000. This is the result of social and economic changes in Russia, the development of mass sports and promotion of healthy lifestyles. And, of course, the entire healthcare system made a significant contribution, especially the programmes of specialised, including high-tech aid, as well as maternity and childhood welfare and protection of health of mother and child.

The rate of infant mortality has reached a historic low. This indicator is even better than in some European countries. I am well aware that the public in many developed countries is very critical of the state of their national healthcare system, and you also know this. In fact, almost everywhere – no, everywhere – people criticise their healthcare system, however well organised it looks from here.

Still our achievements in this area show that if we set certain goals, we can achieve results. However, let me repeat this, people do not judge the healthcare system by figures and indicators. A person who has to travel dozens of kilometres to a polyclinic or spend a whole day waiting in line for an appointment with a specialist is not very interested in how life expectancy has grown on the average. People think about their lives, their health, about how to get high-quality and timely medical aid without obstacles and when they need it. This is why now we must focus our efforts on primary care, which all people and all families have to deal with. This is where we have the worst and most sensitive problems.

This year we are to fully complete the creation of a network of rural paramedic centres, as stipulated in the related national project. This does not mean, however, that all the problems of these rural paramedic centres have been settled. I would like to point out that the mission of these centres is not to make out prescriptions or refer patients to regional medical centres. Local specialists must be able to really help people by using modern equipment and high-speed internet. I would like to ask the Russian Popular Front to monitor the provision of equipment, construction and repair of rural paramedic centres.

On July 1 we will also launch a programme to modernise the system of primary healthcare. We will have to repair and provide new equipment to outpatient clinics, rural hospitals and first-aid stations in all our regions. We have allocated an additional 550 billion rubles for this purpose, more than 90 percent of which will come from the federal budget.

At the same time, I ask the regional authorities to find additional funds for providing housing to doctors and paramedics, in particular in villages, settlements and small towns, and to use all the available instruments towards this end, including employer-rented housing and private housing projects.

Training and recruitment are key elements of medical education. By 2024, all levels of healthcare, but first of all the primary healthcare level, must have the necessary number of specialists. In this connection, I suggest that the admission procedure to medical universities be changed significantly. For example, 70 percent of scholarships in the field of general medicine and 75 percent in paediatrics will be awarded to prospective students who will return to their native regions upon graduation. The quotas will be distributed based on requests filed by the regions, which must subsequently provide employment to the graduates who must be able to work where people need their services.

As for residency training, I suggest that almost 100 percent of scholarships be given to medical graduates in critically important spheres. Priority during enrolment will be given to those with practical experience in the field of primary healthcare, especially in rural areas. This system should be also stipulated for federal medical centres.

And lastly, just as we agreed, a new system of remuneration will be gradually introduced in healthcare starting this year. It is based on clear, fair and understandable rules, with a fixed share of salary in the overall income and a uniform list of compensation payments and commercial incentives for all regions.

I am aware that the implementation of all these goals requires extensive resources. If you go back to where I started, every goal needs a great deal of money. In this regard, I ask the Government to once again consider identifying priorities for our development while retaining the budget's stability. This is an advantage we have achieved in the past few years, and we must maintain it.

I know that last year a number of regions saw a disruption in medication supplies as the regions' purchases were not made, with certain officials treating it as if it were some sort of office supplies purchases claiming it was not a big deal and new tenders would be announced. But people were left without essential and vitally important medications. I should point out that such cases must never happen again.

This year, efforts will be made to launch an integrated comprehensive register of recipients of medications that are provided to citizens free of charge or with a considerable discount through a federal or regional subsidy to avoid any confusion in this regard in the future.

Also, certain legislative decisions have already been adopted that will allow for official and centralised imports of certain medications to Russia that are yet to receive regulatory approval. I ask the Government to promptly organise this work so that people, particularly the parents of sick children, do not find themselves in a desperate situation when they cannot legally find the necessary medications.

Control over pharmaceutical drugs will also significantly change. It will be tightened both at pharmaceutical companies and during all stages of medication circulation, including at pharmacy networks.

Colleagues,

In recent years, we have focused on strengthening macroeconomic sustainability, and it is something I just mentioned. The federal budget has had a surplus again. Our government reserves confidently cover our gross external debt. And here I am not talking about some abstract or theoretical indicators – I would like to emphasise that these figures are directly influencing the life of each and every person in our country, and have to do with the fulfilment of our social commitments. We can see the problems, even shocks that citizens of other states face, where government had no such cash cushion and their financial position turned out to be unstable.

The consistent work of the Government and the Bank of Russia has led to a stabilisation of prices. Last year, inflation stood at 3 percent, which is below the target level of 4 percent. True, the prices of certain goods and services have risen slightly, but overall, I repeat, inflation is at a predictably low level. The situation fundamentally differs from what it was five or ten years ago, when double-digit inflation was a tax on all citizens of the country, being an especially hard burden for those on a fixed salary or pension – retired people and workers in the public sector.

Now, relying on a stable macroeconomic foundation, we need to create conditions for a substantial increase in people's real incomes. Again, this is the most important responsibility of the Government and the Central Bank. To meet it, the national economy needs structural changes and higher efficiency. In 2021, Russia's GDP growth rates should be higher than the global ones.

To have this kind of dynamics, it is necessary to launch a new investment cycle, to seriously increase investment in the creation and upgrading of jobs, in infrastructure, in the development of industry, agriculture and the services sector. Starting this year, annual investment growth should be at least 5 percent, and investment share in the country's GDP, 25 percent by 2024 from the current 21 percent.

What needs to be done to encourage investment?

First of all, we agreed not to change the tax treatment for businesses over a period of the next six years and thus provide a wider horizon for investment planning. The deputies and the Government should speed up the adoption of a package of draft laws on protecting and promoting investment. As you are well aware, tax treatment for major important projects should remain unchanged for up to 20 years, and the requirements and standards for building production sites should remain the same for three years. These investor guarantees should become standard law.

Of course, in addition to major projects, small- and medium-sized businesses' initiatives should be supported as well. Today, the regions are entitled to provide an investment-based tax deduction and a three-year revenue tax break, but they rarely use them. It is clear why: they do so because regional budgets thus lose revenue. In this regard, we would like federal funds to compensate the regions for two-thirds of the lost revenue stemming from the use of an investment-related tax deduction.

Second, the reform of the oversight and supervisory activities must be completed in 2020, and businesses should thus see improvements in their operating environment.

Third, I have already submitted to the State Duma the amendments to remove vague criminal law provisions in part related to so-called frauds. Thus, entrepreneurs have repeatedly mentioned Article 210 of the Criminal Code, under which any company whose senior executives violated the law could qualify as an organised criminal group, meaning that almost all of its employees were liable. Tougher restrictive measures and punishment were put in place. Law enforcement agencies will henceforth be required to prove that an organisation or a company was initially deliberately created with an illegal purpose in mind.

Fourth. It is estimated that as soon as this summer the foreign currency reserves of the National Welfare Fund will pass the mark of 7 percent of GDP. We have accumulated these reserves to guarantee our stability and security, which means we can invest our additional revenue in development and the national economy.

Cost-effective projects that remove infrastructure restrictions for our territories must become our priority. This includes bypass roads for big cities, arterial roads between regional capitals and exit roads to federal motorways. These projects will inevitably bring about the growth of small businesses, tourism and social activity in the regions and locally.

Fifth. For investment to grow steadily, our economy needs long-term money. We all know this very well. This is a direct responsibility of the Central Bank. I appreciate its consistent course for making loans for the real sector of economy more accessible.

Of course, businesses, companies (especially large ones) must remember about their social and environmental responsibility. I would like to thank our parliament members for demonstrating integrity during their work on the emission quota law.

Obviously, it is necessary to act upon our plans faster. Our next steps include testing and implementing the air quality monitoring system and subsequently expanding this control system to cover the entire country. It is necessary to monitor not only the condition of air but also water and soil – that is, to develop a comprehensive environmental monitoring system.

Next. By the end of this year, at least 80 out of the 300 largest industrial facilities must complete the transition to best available technology and obtain complex environmental permits, which means a consistent reduction of hazardous emissions. Sixteen permits have been issued as of now but overall this work is on schedule. No matter what, we must not allow any disruptions here. It is necessary to drastically cut the amount of waste ending up in landfills, implement waste sorting and generally move towards the circular economy. By 2021, we must already launch the mechanism of extended producer responsibility when producers and importers of goods and packaging are responsible for recycling costs. To put it simply, contaminators must pay.

Colleagues,

I would like to stress that Russia is ready to support Russian and foreign scientists' joint research on ecology, climate change, environmental and ocean pollution. These are global development challenges shared by everyone.

Today the speed of technological change in the world is increasing manifold, and we must create our own technologies and standards in areas that define our future, such as, first of all, artificial intelligence, genetics, new materials, energy sources and digital technology. I am confident that we can reach a breakthrough here, as we did in defence. I will speak about this later.

In order to solve difficult technological tasks, we will continue to develop research infrastructure, including megascience-class facilities. I am sure that an opportunity to work with unique equipment and tackle the most ambitious tasks will encourage talented young people to work in science. This is already happening. According to estimates, by the middle of the decade every second scientist in Russia will be under 40.

We should give researchers, engineers and entrepreneurs the freedom they need to do their work and to conduct innovative scientific research. I ask the Government and State Duma deputies to fast-track the discussion of the technological legislative package. This year we must launch a flexible mechanism of experimental legal modes to design and introduce new technologies in Russia and establish up-to-date regulation of the big data turnover.

Next, we should establish a mechanism of social support for direct and venture finance tools based on the best global practices. The technological entrepreneur should have the right to take a risk, so that failing to implement an idea will not automatically mean inappropriate use of funds and a possible criminal prosecution. I mean that we should establish such legal and financial conditions that as many start-ups and pioneer teams as possible could become strong and successful innovative companies.

We need to support the export of high-tech products and, of course, to boost domestic demand for innovative products. In this context, I believe it would be right to fast-track the digital transformation of the real economy. A requirement should be set that national projects are largely carried out using domestic software.

We have already put in place, say, major digital television infrastructure, which, in terms of its technical characteristics, is one of the most advanced in the world. Currently, the digital television coverage in Russia is more expanded than, for example, in France, Austria or Switzerland.

The internet has become a must-have for people today. Russia is one of few countries in the world which has its own social networks, messengers, e-mail and search engines and other national resources.

Given all the things I've just mentioned, I suggest that the Affordable Internet project be developed and carried out and that free access to socially important domestic internet services be available across Russia. I repeat that in this case people will not have to pay for the internet service, for internet traffic.

Colleagues,

The high availability of the internet should become Russia's and our citizens' competitive advantage and create, across the board, an environment conducive to education, creative work, communications and the implementation of social and cultural projects. Of course, this means new opportunities for people to get involved in the life of the country. We appreciate every creative initiative of our citizens, public associations, non-profit organisations, as well as their willingness to contribute to national development.

It is very important that the volunteer movement is becoming more popular, and it unites schoolchildren, university students, and people of different generations and ages. The Victory Volunteers project embodies the tradition of mutual assistance and respect for older generations and our history.

This year, we will celebrate the 75th anniversary of Victory in the Great Patriotic War. For Russia, May 9 is the greatest and sacred holiday. We are proud of the generation of victors and honour their feat, and our memory is not only a tribute to our heroic past, but it also serves our future, inspires us and strengthens our unity.

It is our duty to defend the truth about the Victory; otherwise what shall we say to our children if a lie, like a disease, spreads all over the world? We must set facts against outrageous lies and attempts to distort history. Russia will create the largest and most complete set of archival documents, film and photo materials on the Second World War, accessible both for our citizens and for the whole world. This work is our duty as a winning country and our responsibility to the future generations.

Colleagues,

We can see how unpredictably, uncontrollably events are developing in the world, what is happening in the Middle East and North Africa literally in recent weeks and recent days, how regional conflicts can rapidly grow into threats to the entire international community.

I am convinced that it is high time for a serious and direct discussion about the basic principles of a stable world order and the most acute problems that humanity is facing. It is necessary to show political will, wisdom and courage. The time demands an awareness of our shared responsibility and real actions.

The founding countries of the United Nations should set an example. It is the five nuclear powers that bear a special responsibility for the conservation and sustainable development of humankind. These five nations should first of all start with measures to remove the prerequisites for a global war and develop updated approaches to ensuring stability on the planet that would fully take into account the political, economic and military aspects of modern international relations.

Russia is ready to enhance cooperation with all interested parties. We are not threatening anyone or seeking to impose our will on anyone. At the same time, I can assure everyone that our efforts to strengthen national security were made in a timely manner and in sufficient volume. For the first time ever – I want to emphasise this – for the first time in the history of nuclear missile weapons, including the Soviet period and modern times, we are not catching up with anyone, but, on the contrary, other leading states have yet to create the weapons that Russia already possesses.

The country's defence capability is ensured for decades to come, but we cannot rest on our laurels and do nothing. We must keep moving forward, carefully observing and analysing the developments in this area across the world, and create next-generation combat systems and complexes. This is what we are doing today.

Reliable security creates the basis for Russia's progressive and peaceful development and allows us to do much more to overcome the most pressing internal challenges, to focus on the economic and social growth of all our regions in the interest of the people, because Russia's greatness is inseparable from dignified life of its every citizen. I see this harmony of a strong power and well-being of the people as a foundation of our future.

Colleagues,

We can move towards this goal only with the active participation of society, our citizens and, of course, intense and productive work of all branches and levels of government, the potential of which should be expanded.

In this regard, I would like to spend a moment discussing state structure and domestic policy, which are defined by the Fundamental Law of our country – the Constitution of the Russian Federation. I keep getting these questions all the time, including at the most recent annual news conference.

Clearly, we cannot but agree with those who say that the Constitution was adopted over 25 years ago amidst a severe internal political crisis and the state of affairs has completely overturned since then. Thank goodness, there is no more armed confrontation in the capital or a hotbed of international terrorism in the North Caucasus.

Despite a number of acute unsolved problems that we talked about today, the socioeconomic situation has stabilised, after all. Today some political public associations are raising the issue of adopting a new Constitution.

I want to answer straight off: I believe there is no need for this. Potential of the 1993 Constitution is far from being exhausted and I hope that pillars of our constitutional system, rights and freedoms will remain the foundation of strong values for the Russian society for decades to come.

In the meantime, statements regarding changes to the Constitution have already been made. And I find it possible to express my view and propose a number of constitutional amendments for discussion, amendments that, in my opinion, are reasonable and important for the further development of Russia as a rule-of-law welfare state where citizens' freedoms and rights, human dignity and wellbeing constitute the highest value.

Firstly, Russia can be and can remain Russia only as a sovereign state. Our nation's sovereignty must be unconditional. We have done a great deal to achieve this. We restored our state's unity. We have overcome the situation when certain powers in the government were essentially usurped by oligarch clans. Russia has returned to international politics as a country whose opinion cannot be ignored.

We created powerful reserves, which multiplies our country's stability and capability to protect its citizens' social rights and the national economy from any attempts of foreign pressure.

I truly believe that it is time to introduce certain changes to our country's main law, changes that will directly guarantee the priority of the Russian Constitution in our legal framework.

What does it mean? It means literally the following: requirements of international law and treaties as well as decisions of international bodies can be valid on the Russian territory only to the point that they do not restrict the rights and freedoms of our people and citizens and do not contradict our Constitution.

Second, I suggest formalising at the constitutional level the obligatory requirements for those who hold positions of critical significance for national security and sovereignty. More precisely, the heads of the constituent entities, members of the Federation Council, State Duma deputies, the prime minister and his/her deputies, federal ministers, heads of federal agencies and judges should have no foreign citizenship or residence permit or any other document that allows them to live permanently in a foreign state.

The goal and mission of state service is to serve the people, and those who enter this path must know that by doing this they inseparably connect their lives with Russia and the Russian people without any assumptions and allowances.

Requirements must be even stricter for presidential candidates. I suggest formalising a requirement under which presidential candidates must have had permanent residence in Russia for at least 25 years and no foreign citizenship or residence permit and not only during the election campaign but at any time before it too.

I know that people are discussing the constitutional provision under which one person cannot hold the post of the President of the Russian Federation for two successive terms. I do not regard this as a matter of principle, but I nevertheless support and share this view.

I have already said before that our goal is to ensure high living standards and equal opportunities for all throughout the country. It is towards this goal that our national projects and development plans are aimed.

At the same time, you know about the problems to do with education, healthcare and other fields created by a divide between the federal and municipal authorities – I have pointed this out more than once. This divide and, at the same time, the complex system of powers are having a negative effect above all on the people.

The rights, opportunities and guarantees, that are legally equal for all citizens, are not provided equally in different regions and municipalities. This is unfair to people and is directly threatening our society and national integrity.

I believe that the Constitution must seal the principles of a unified system of public authority and effective interaction between the federal and municipal authorities. At the same time, the powers and practical opportunities of the local governments, a body of authority that is closest to the people, can and should be expanded and strengthened.

And lastly, the state must honour its social responsibility under any conditions throughout the country. Therefore, I believe that the Constitution should include a provision that the minimum wage in Russia must not be below the subsistence minimum of the economically active people. We have a law on this, but we should formalise this requirement in the Constitution along with the principles of decent pensions, which implies a regular adjustment of pensions according to inflation.

Fourth, Russia is a huge country, and every region has its specifics, problems and experience. Of course, this must be taken into account. I believe it is necessary to cardinally increase the role of governors in decision-making at the federal level. As you know, back in 2000 the State Council was restored at my initiative, where the heads of all regions participate. Over the past period the State Council has proven its high effectiveness; its working groups provide for the professional, comprehensive and qualified examination of issues that are most important for people and Russia. I believe it would be appropriate to fix the status and role of the State Council in the Russian Constitution.

Fifth, Russian society is becoming more mature, responsible and demanding. Despite the differences in the ways to address their tasks, the main political forces speak from the position of patriotism and reflect the interests of their followers and voters.

At the same time, almost all the parties represented in the State Duma – and you know that I have regular meetings with their leaders – believe that the Federal Assembly is ready to take more responsibility for forming the Government. (Applause.) I expected this round of applause, but I think you will have another opportunity for applause now; please listen until the end.

More responsibility for forming the Government means more responsibility for the Government's policy. I completely agree with this position.

What is the situation like now? In accordance with articles 111 and 112 of the Russian Constitution, the President only receives the consent of the State Duma to appoint the Prime Minister, and then appoints the head of the Cabinet, his deputies and all the ministers. I suggest changing the procedure and allowing the State Duma to appoint the Prime Minister of the Russian Federation, and then all deputy prime ministers and federal ministers at the Prime Minister's recommendation. At the same time the President will have to appoint them, so he will have no right to turn down the candidates approved by the Parliament. (Applause.)

All of this means drastic changes to the political system. However, let me repeat, considering the maturity of our main political organisations and parties as well as the reputation of civil society, I believe these proposals are justified. This will increase the role and importance of the State Duma and parliamentary parties as well as the independence and responsibility of the Prime Minister and other Cabinet members and make cooperation between the representative and executive branches of government more effective and substantive.

Colleagues,

I would like to emphasise that our country, with its vast territory, complex federal and administrative division and diverse cultural and historical traditions, cannot properly advance and even exist sustainably as a parliamentary republic.

Russia must remain a strong presidential republic. The president must undoubtedly retain the right to determine the Government's tasks and priorities, as well as the right to dismiss the prime minister, his deputies and federal ministers in case of improper execution of duties or due to loss of trust. The president also exercises direct command over the Armed Forces and the entire law enforcement system. In this regard, I believe another step is necessary to provide a greater balance between the branches of power.

In this connection, point six: I propose that the president should appoint heads of all security agencies following consultations with the Federation Council. I believe this approach will make the work of security and law enforcement agencies more transparent and accountable to citizens.

The principle of appointment following consultations can be applied to regional prosecutors as well. Currently they are appointed in coordination with regional legislative assemblies. Colleagues, this may lead to certain, including informal, obligations towards local authorities and ultimately to the risk of losing objectivity and impartiality.

As to the territories' position regarding a prosecutor candidacy in the constituent entities of the Federation, it can be considered during consultations in the Federation Council, which is in fact the chamber of the regions. We cannot have different local legislative systems in different regions; the prosecutor is a supreme authority who exercises control over the execution of laws irrespectively of any regional circumstances.

I am confident that a greater independence of prosecution agencies from local authorities would be beneficial for citizens regardless of the region. Colleagues, let us always be governed by the interests of our people.

And my seventh and final point: the judicial system – the Constitutional and Supreme courts – plays a key role in ensuring legality and citizens' rights. I would like to emphasise, along with judges' professionalism, their credibility should be unconditional as well. Being fair and having a moral right to make decisions that affect people's lives have always been considered of paramount importance in Russia. The country's fundamental law should enshrine and protect the independence of judges, and their subordination only to the Constitution and federal law.

At the same time, I consider it necessary to stipulate in the Constitution the Federation Council's authority to dismiss, on the proposal from the President, Constitutional and Supreme Court judges in the event of misconduct that defames a judge's honour and dignity, as well as in other cases provided for by federal constitutional law, that make it impossible for a person to maintain the status of a judge. This proposal is derived from the established practice. This is something Russia definitely needs today.

Furthermore, to improve the quality of domestic legislation, to reliably protect citizens' interests, I propose strengthening the role of the Constitutional Court, namely: to verify, at the President's request, the constitutionality of draft laws adopted by the Federal Assembly before they are signed by the head of state. We might also think about extending the powers of the Constitutional Court to evaluate not only laws, but also other regulatory legal acts adopted by various authorities at the federal and regional levels for compliance with the Constitution.

Colleagues,

Again, the proposals made today, by no means limit the discussion around possible amendments to the Constitution. I am sure that public associations, parties, regions, the legal community, and Russian citizens will express their ideas. The broadest public discussion is needed. But, opening this discussion, I would like to give it a start in a certain direction, or at least to show what challenges we are facing.

Please, do not forget what happened to our country after 1991. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, we still had the same ambitions and of course have preserved the colossal potential – the human, intellectual, resource, territorial, cultural and historical potential, and so on. But there were also threats, dangers of a magnitude no one could have imagined ever before. And that was a pity, as they should have thought about it in due time.

Therefore in our further state building efforts, we are facing seemingly contradictory tasks that serve as a guideline for values and may appear incompatible at first sight. What am I referring to? We must create a solid, reliable and invulnerable system that will be absolutely stable in terms of the external contour and will securely guarantee Russia's independence and sovereignty. At the same time, this system must be organic, flexible and capable of changing quickly in line with what is happening around us, and most importantly, in response to the development of Russian society. This system must ensure the rotation of those who are in power or occupy high positions in other areas. This renewal is indispensable for the progressive evolution of society and stable development that may not be infallible but ensures that the most important thing – Russia's interests ­– remains immutable.

What else do I consider important and would like to emphasise? The amendments that we will discuss do not concern the foundations of the Constitution and, hence, can be approved by Parliament in line with the existing procedure and law through the adoption of relevant constitutional laws.

At the same time, considering that the proposed amendments concern substantial changes in the political system and the work of the executive, legislative and judicial branches, I believe it necessary to hold a vote of Russian citizens on the entire package of the proposed amendments to the Constitution of the Russian Federation. The final decision must be made only on the basis of its results.

The opinion of people, our citizens as the bearers of sovereignty and the main source of power must be decisive. In the final analysis everything is decided by the people, both today and in the future. I am referring to both the choice of national development strategy and daily issues in each region, city or village. We will be able to build a strong, prosperous and modern Russia only on the basis of unconditional respect for the opinions of the people, the opinions of the nation.

The current year of 2020 is a landmark in many respects. It is a transition to the third decade of the 21st century. Russia is faced with breakthrough historical tasks and everyone's contribution is important for resolving them. Working together we are bound to change our lives for the better. I often mention the word "together" because Russia means all of us. I am referring not to the people present in this hall or rather not only to the people present in this hall but all citizens of this country because I believe that success is determined by our will for creation and development, for the implementation of the most ambitious plans, our labour for the sake of our families and loved ones, our children and their future, and hence, for the sake of Russia's greatness and the dignity of its citizens.

Thank you for your attention.

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Stephen Morrell ,

Putin clearly is the most informed and visionary bourgeois politician in the world today, by a country mile. He not only is attempting to address the very real real social, demographic and economic needs of Russia, in his usual comprehensive manner, but also and cannily is co-opting many of the expectations that the USSR used to fulfil, attempting to neutralise any socialist political sentiments in the Russian population. Putin is the Bismarck of Russia.

richard le sarc ,

Russia's economic situation, within the global capitalist system, with its large reserves, much in gold, no exposure to the toilet paper of US Treasuries, and substantial local self-sufficiency in agriculture (thank-you sanctions)means that when the Western debt Ponzi Himalaya implodes, the Russians will be pretty much immune to the consequences.

BigB ,

Fantastic set of propositions: of which there is nothing comparable – that I know of – in the West.

The problem is that I strongly suspect that no one can see the problem?

Our minds have become so dematerialised, idealised, and ecologically sanitised that I doubt anyone will agree? There are two things we cannot do going forward in the 21st century – exponentially grow the economy and/or exponentially grow the population. We have to degrow both – as compassionately and quickly as possible. We have too many people to sustain with depleting fossil fuels. We could sustain them agroecologically without: but we are not doing that. They may not be in the right places: but if Russia and China both try to correct demographic problems by increasing population the knock on effect is poverty and misery elsewhere.

As for material throughput: Russia's is quite large. In fact, they are the fourth primary energy consumer on the planet. With a pathetic renewables penetration of 3.6% of which only 1% is wind and solar. So good luck with decarbonisation and emissions targets. Which means only one thing: increased GDP is a function of increased hydrocarbon extraction and pollution. Russia faces another problem: its barely cured Dutch Disease a still high correlation of GDP to fossil fuel trading. An exogenous shock to the energy market will hit Russia badly as it did in 2008. They have diversified since then, only not enough.

With other countries set to decarbonise (barely disguised laughter) the overall market for fossil fuels will theoretically decrease which will hit the producers badly. And then there is the depression of global markets and the already extant oil glut. Good plan and beautiful state socialist sentiment only, has anyone got a spare planet?

Increasing hydrocarbon consumption plus all the other material resources allied to an industrial high-speed capitalist economy is another fossil relict. That is, if the ecological rationale is to survive. Growth is not an option. And population growth is irresponsible. What seems like a good state socialist plan falls apart ecologically. Of course, Russia is not isolated – the entire developed world wants to develop more 'sustainably'. Which is a form of insanity from a planetary perspective which too few have.

Consider, all those socialised benefits are equally viable if delinked from exponential GDP growth and thus delinked from exponential fossil fuel consumption. The best parts of socialisation are essentially free including the fucking for Mother Russia! Degrowth, decentralisation, decarbonisation do not mean less socialisation. They are totally dependent on holistic socialisation and cooperative social relations. Which are potentially permanent and truly sustainable with a just transition away from capitalism.

Why grow when it makes you vulnerable to exogenous market shocks? Russia has the resources to be quasi-self-sufficient internal to its own borders. There is no need to trade fossil fuels and prospect for more. We have too much carbon as it is: of which most should remain in the ground as 'unburnable carbon'. And there is definitely no need to make deals with despots and dictators like el-Sisi, Kagame, Museveni – who have murdered conservatively 12 million souls for corporate profit. Who now get their arms from Russia and their troops trained for free. And I could add Netanyahu and Erdogan, despots and murderers in their own right.

It has to start somewhere. Some group of people have to break ecological extinction's stranglehold and demand less. To transition monetised social relations to actual real social relations – independent of exponential fossil fuel extractivism, exponential market expansion, exponential GDP expansion, exponential population expansion (when the correct demographic is reached: will the population debreed?). It's a progressive plan: for the wrong planet at the wrong time.

But we will continue to grow – not degrow – both global economies and populations (with regional variations). Until we can't. When all those contingent and precarious market state socialisms will disappear. When we may live to rue the day we made our plans for social integration market and fossil fuel contingencies. We could have had it all if we were more savvy. If only everyone could see how.

Hugh O'Neill ,

Whilst I understand the gist of your argument (and you could not make it any more understandable, so please don't try) I still hold that the world is a better place because of Putin. With any other leader, the world would have been rendered uninhabitable by the Pentagon crazies. Russia has acted as the essential check on their warped ambitions to rule the Earth. The biggest threat to the planet is the US Military for the amount of oil they burn, the toxins they produce in their chemical warfare, their attempted theft of Ukraine for industrial farming, and their never-ending wars. Imagine if all the monies wasted on wars had gone to peaceful ends and proper support for renewable energy.
On the question of GDP, I would refer only to the speech by Robert Kennedy, in which he totally destroys the whole sordid concept of GDP as being a worthwhile measure of anything.

BigB ,

The world will be rendered uninhabitable by Russian extractivism, ecological expropriation, and human exploitation. Because Russian extractivism is not isolated: the entire globalist system is extractivist. Which is why ecologists use 'dynamic systems theory' to conceive of the emergent planetary 'super-organism' or 'fossil fuel amoeba'. When we isolate a bounded portion of the global extinction system; compare it with other isolated portions, and give it a human face we are invisibilising the ecological roots and genesis of capitalism's 'wealth' – oil and the exponential depletion of resources.

So what do we do when the life-ground of the planet no longer supports life? Celebrate the unequal distribution of rubles, pounds, yuan, and dollars? Or wish we had come to find a greater source of wealth in who we really are, when we are not destroying the planet and extracting surplus value from others less fortunate?

We live in a strange world when we cannot imagine life without capitalism and look beyond to see that the real source of wealth is humanity itself in its completeness. A completeness we will never know because of extractivism, ecological unequal exchange, and our own abdication of our self-alienated powers that make capitalism the taken-for-granted vehicle of extinctionism. If there is to be life after capitalism – and on the planetary scale there will be, though *homo economicus* is technologically fast bent on curtailing its species viability – some provision for systems transition has to be made now. The techno-dream bubble we can grow our way to humanism is about to burst then what?

richard le sarc ,

I agree entirely, but Putin has no alternative. Any chink in his armour and the USA will destroy Russia and break it up into fragments as they did in Yugoslavia, the USSR and wish to do in China. I rather think that Putin knows full well how dire is the global ecological situation, but he needs to balance less enlightened forces at home, and the 'Atlanticist' Quislings.

BigB ,

I don't disagree either: but that is not my point. The Atlanticists are waiting in the wings for another four years. Last time I checked: they still command 80% of Russian private property. And were expropriating $25bn pa annum in capital flight which has slowed slightly in the last few years. I read the Saker too. There is a deadlock and uneasy power sharing arrangement internally. But you may have missed the time when the Saker admitted "Putin is a neoliberal"?

It may be difficult to disentangle our vision from the neoliberal-statist-market ontology we are being repressed by but that is what we must do. We cannot expect neoliberal capitalist social inclusivity to save us from ecological catastrophe. Nor can we expect to grow economically into humanism: when exponential growth is what is destroying any lasting chance of a purely sustainable human-emancipatory freedom. Putin may not have a choice: but we do. The neoliberal-statist-market ontology is globally self-determined to produce total failure as its inevitable and only possible outcome. This is known a 'parametric determinism' when we automatically follow a maladaptive 'rational' self-optimising behaviour pattern long after it failed as it did in 2007. There is no recovery possible, and technology only speeds total failure whilst masking the ecological destruction it is accelerating.

States have to think and act in a pre-determined way that is true. But we do not have to think like that. Not if there is to be any alternative or succession of humanity ex-post the neoliberal-statist-market ontology which is morally, ecologically, humanistically and most importantly *actually* bankrupt at this point.

Do we exit a 350 year process of exponentially disproportionate wealth distribution, deliberate maldevelopment and global dehumanisation with all the wealth in the hands of those who benefited from the expropriation? Or do we attempt a redistribution and develop a new, hitherto unknown (and unknowable under capitalist alienation), value set where everyone globally has equal access to resources and a right to life as a birthright?

The decision is not beyond you or I: but it will take the development of the assessment of capitalism on other than its own neoliberal-statist-market ontological terms. No state or state leader can develop humanity on the path of less-is-more it needs to take but the people can. That's all.

richard le sarc ,

Putin is either a believing neo-liberal, in which case he is part of the problem you identify, or he is using it through necessity. I could not agree more with your diagnosis of the omnicidal nature of capitalism, and the inability of so many to visualise the end of capitalism-they more easily can conceive of the end of humanity. In fact I rather think that that is the way in which the ruling parasites intend to save their own bacon, by allowing the ecological Holocaust to cull the 90% of 'useless eaters' that the ruling elites fear and despise, and who they see only as a threat. Their labour is no longer required in an age of automation, robotisation and computerisation, and even their consumption is today superfluous. The ecological Holocaust has passed numerous tipping-points and points of no return, while the IPCC downplays the extremity of our situation, the Right still denies it is even happening, and the public is slowly waking up, too late of course. We've just experienced a fire Holocaust, yet the Pentecostal thug PM, 'Smoko' Morrison, who is surely seeing it all as God's Will and the sign of the coming End Times that his cult so longs for, utterly refuses to reduce CO2 emissions beyond a ludicrous 28% by 2030 from 2005 (base-line creep)levels, 'target', that we will not come close to. And now it is raining, a little, so the Great Austrayan Mediocracy can go back to their slumber. But they'll 'Wake in Fright', again, soon.

Hugh O'Neill ,

"It is very important that they adopt the true values ​​of a large family – that family is love, happiness, the joy of motherhood and fatherhood, that family is a strong bond of several generations, united by respect for the elderly and care for children, giving everyone a sense of confidence, security, and reliability. If the younger generations accept this situation as natural, as a moral and an integral part and reliable background support for their adult life, then we will be able to meet the historical challenge of guaranteeing Russia's development as a large and successful country."

I know very little of Russia alas, but the over-riding impression I take from this speech is President Putin's depth and breadth grasp of detail and concern for every aspect of Russian society – and his frustration that decisions made at federal level do not transform into concrete action at regional levels. The curse of bureaucracy and local fiefdoms jealous of their power and autonomy.

I was fully expecting him to come up a resonating phrase like: "Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask instead what you can for your country." For Russia to have (seemingly) escaped the rapacious talons of the vulture capitalists unleashed by the Yeltsin puppet ought to be a lesson for us all.

Finally, in international politics, he remains impeccably diplomatic, restrained and wise. Would that there were more world leaders of such calibre.

Vierotchka ,

Would that there were more world leaders of such calibre.

Imagine if the USA had a president like Putin

For starters, the Department of Defense would be just that, and not the Department of Offence with lipstick on.

Then, ponder this:

Just imagine if there was a Putin-like President of the USA

Hugh O'Neill ,

Leadership and Learning are indispensable to each other. Looking at the calibre of Presidents since JFK, it seems that all the best candidates were either killed off or scared off. All the Unspeakable can do is kill in answer to any and all problems.

richard le sarc ,

Imagine the money freed if US military expenditure was not 90% graft and inefficiency.

Hugh O'Neill ,

In the quote I used above, how often do we hear world leaders – other than the Pope – speak of love? Twisted minds might dismiss Putin's call for more Russian children as to provide cannon fodder for the Russian military, but why would he also wish to ensure their creativity and their arts education? It is quite refreshing to hear Humanity discussed as a desirable asset, rather than non-stop pro-death, pro-abortion as a Human Right brigade, "bomb-bomb-bomb Iran" hatred. I expect a bit of flak for defending the unborn. I can take it.

richard le sarc ,

His manifest virtues are precisely why the vermin of the Western ruling elites hate him so psychotically.

[Jan 16, 2020] This article from RT says Putin leaving 2024, and is also taking2 away a lot of the powers of the President

Jan 16, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Debs , Jan 16 2020 1:48 utc | 204

This article from RT says Putin leaving 2024, and is also taking2 away a lot of the powers of the President

https://www.rt.com/op-ed/478381-russian-government-resignation-mishustin/

[Jan 16, 2020] RUSSIAN FEDERATION SITREP 16 JANUARY 2020 by Patrick Armstrong - Sic Semper Tyrannis

Jan 16, 2020 | turcopolier.typepad.com

RUSSIAN FEDERATION SITREP 16 JANUARY 2020 by Patrick Armstrong

Russian flag

THE GREAT RESHUFFLE . I do expect Putin to retire and assume him to be working on a succession plan to keep the team's aims in operation. He's due to go in about four years. I would not be surprised if we see something à la Kazakhstan where Nazarbayev still has a significant advisory authority.

1. NEW PM. Mikhail Mishustin, head of Tax Service . Is he the chosen one? (Would be a blow to the Hirsute Analytical Tool , though.) ( Мишустин bio on Russian Wikipedia.)

2. CONSTITUTION. Putin suggested constitutional tweaks. A ban on any form of dual citizenship for certain positions: they must "inseparably connect their lives with Russia and the Russian people without any assumptions and allowances". The Duma should appoint the PM and the PM the government although little was said about exactly how responsibilities were to be divvied up. (Did he support removing the two consecutive term rule? Don't know – depends on what you think " этим " refers to.)

3. PRECEDENCE. Back when the world was simpler and happier and Russians naïve, the Constitution (Art 15.4) said "If an international treaty of the Russian Federation establishes rules other than those stipulated by the law, the rules of the international treaty apply." Brutal reality has taught Moscow the true nature of the " Rules-Based International Order" and Putin has proposed to reverse the authority.

4. MEDVEDEV. Deputy Chairman of the Security Council . I think it's a real job and not a sinecure.

WHAT'S IT MEAN? My take . Doctorow . MacDonald . We are broadly in step. Robinson discusses possibilities. Those who see Russia as one man and many robots of course see this as Putin hanging onto power forever . But their predictive track record is pretty pathetic, isn't it?

FEDERAL ASSEMBLY ADDRESS. In addition to the constitutional matters above, Putin's address ( Rus ) ( Eng ), touched on other subjects. He began with population – the births per woman were 1.5 and he wants to raise that to 1.7 and proposes more day care places and greatly extending existing financial support programs as well as spending to improve healthcare. All this is possible because "The federal budget has had a surplus again" and inflation is low. ( Robinson points out, quite correctly, that there's a gap between what The Boss decrees and what actually happens . Nonetheless I'd say Putin has been much more successful than most leaders.) Foreign matters received the barest mention: situation in MENA threatening, Russia ready to cooperate, "defence capability is ensured for decades to come".

RUSSIA INC. Awara does a study of Russian and American earnings and demonstrates that, in purchasing power, they're a lot closer than you would think. It's not just money: health, housing and education – big expenses in the USA – are negligible in Russia.

CORRUPTION. After an investigation, the Russian Academy of Sciences has forced the retraction of hundreds of scientific articles for plagiarism and other forms of fraudulent behaviour.

RUSSIA, SPORTS AND DRUGS. It's all fakery – Mark Chapman takes the trouble to put it all together .

USN ALWAYS HAS RoW. Again the US accuses the Russian Navy of dangerous behaviour, again it was the USN ship that should have given way . ( Give way to starboard vessel .) Speaking of rules-based.

IRAQ. It is reported that that Baghdad is in talks with Moscow on buying S-300 SAM systems . Baghdad orders Americans out; they refuse; Baghdad might need air defence that's independent of US backdoor programming.

TURKSTREAM . Formally launched by the two presidents in Turkey .

NOT IN YOUR "NEWS" OUTLET. Helmer discusses a German parliamentary report that shows that there really isn't any evidence that Russia "invaded" Ukraine or controls the rebels: "few reliable facts and analyses aside from the numerous speculations". It calls it a "civil war" (bürgerkriegs). Which is what it actually is (with assistance from NATO and Russia, to be sure). ( Report, German only ).

TROUBLE IN PARADISE. A contested presidential election led to pretty strong protests with the Supreme Court changing its ruling. The long and the short is that Raul Khajimba , an important player and President for six years, resigned on Monday . New elections will be held in March. Independent Abkhazia has not been very stable and I don't have any good sources to guide me on what's happening. Although I have been told it is determined on real independence, joining neither Russia nor Georgia.

NEW NWO. Iran has just demonstrated it belongs to the rather small club of countries which can precisely strike a target from far away . At least somebody got the message .

[Jan 16, 2020] Russia has risen in the ranking of the best countries in the world.

Jan 16, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

Moscow Exile

January 15, 2020 at 4:45 am
Жить стало легче: Россия поднялась в рейтинге лучших стран мира
Россия поднялась в рейтинге лучших стран мира на одну строчку
15.01.2020, 14:10

Life has become easier: Russia has risen in the ranking of the best countries in the world.
Russia has moved up one point in the ranking of the best countries in the world.

Russia has moved up one place in the ranking of the best countries in the world according to the American magazine US News & World Report, occupying a position in the third ten best ranked. At the same time, the authors of the list stressed that amongst the most powerful of world powers, our country was in second place, behind only the USA. Tourists, according to the study, have begun to go more willingly to Russia, and the growth rate of the Russian economy only appears below 11 countries in the world.

According to the 2019 results, Russia is still second amongst the world's strongest powers. The US News & World Report reports that Russia is second only to the US in terms of power, overtaking China.

Amongst the best countries in the world there are 73 states. The rating is compiled every year by the publication on the basis of a variety of criteria.

The magazine's main rating is "The Best Countries in the World". First place, according to the American edition, was taken by Switzerland, second by Canada, third by Japan. A year ago, Japan was second.

The first five "best countries" also included Germany and Australia. Russia is in 23rd place. Our country has risen one place.

So its true!!!!!

Rasha weeeeeaaaak!!!!!!

Amerika stronk!!!!!

Of all the countries that are "better" and "stronker" than "Rasha", I wonder how many of them have had sanctions hurled against them by "stronk Amerika" and its lickspittle vassals?

And how many of them lost more than 22 million citizens in WWII?

And how many of them had to endure an 80-year-old experiment whose aim was to create socialism?

Cue you-know-who .

[Jan 16, 2020] Seems like the Yeltsin/USA constitution is being s-canned for something that gives more power to the Duma. We can expect less cooperation with the West.

Jan 16, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

Patient Observer January 15, 2020 at 7:55 am

https://sputniknews.com/russia/202001151078046470-russian-government-101-how-did-it-work-and-whats-about-to-change/

How does the Russian government work?

According to the current Constitution, adopted in 1993, the government exercises executive power; it drafts and implements the federal budget and carries out the national policy in the sphere of finance, foreign policy, education, healthcare, culture, science, and so on.

The government may submit its resignation to the President who also has the power to dissolve it. Another way to dissolve the government is for the Duma, the lower house of parliament, to pass a motion of no confidence, which can be vetoed by the President.

The President appoints the Prime Minister with the Duma's consent; Vladimir Putin appointed Dmitry Medvedev as prime minister twice, in 2012 and in 2018, after winning presidential elections.

The President also appoints the deputy heads of government (there are 10 of them in the current cabinet) and the federal ministers at the Prime Minister's suggestion. It is in the President's power to dismiss both the Prime Minister and cabinet ministers.
What is to change?

In a move that looks set to significantly boost the power of parliament, Vladimir Putin called for changes to the Constitution that would enable the Duma to select the Prime Minister and cabinet ministers instead of the President.

Having announced the redistribution of power, Putin has stressed that Russia still needs to remain a "strong presidential republic". According to Russian law, Putin now has two weeks to appoint a new Prime Minister.

Lawmakers have already started drafting the legislation to put Putin's proposals into practice.

Seems like the Yeltsin/USA constitution is being s-canned for something that gives more power to the Duma. We can expect less cooperation with the West. Also, it will undoubtedly be reported in the West, that Putin is trying to handcuff his successor by giving more power to the Duma.

All in all, it would seem to bode well for greater Russian independence as Putin will be less hampered by the Western-leaning faction.

James lake January 15, 2020 at 8:25 am
It will depend on who is in the Duma – if they elect people with good qualities it will be positive.

(Although looking at the parliament here in the Uk. In my lifetime I have see a real sharp decline in the quality of people who become Members of parliament. I'm not sure why

Patient Observer January 15, 2020 at 8:30 am
The US has the same problem. Some of our congresspeople are devoid of common sense, intelligence or relevant knowledge on important issues. I think that Russians are too pragmatic to elect similar buffoons.
Mark Chapman January 15, 2020 at 2:26 pm
Voters only have the choice of those who stand for office. If the field consists of Clowns A through D, the winner is bound to be a Clown. The quality, altruism and dedication of the candidate pool has indeed receded, and that is throughout the western democracies.
Moscow Exile January 15, 2020 at 10:32 am
He's already chosen a replacement for Dimka:

Russian President Vladimir Putin has invited the head of the Federal Tax Service (FTS), Mikhail Mishustin, to become the new prime minister, TASS reports citing the Kremlin's press service.

source: Путин выбрал нового премьер-министра
19:12, 15 января 2020

Putin has chosen a new prime minister

Moscow Exile January 15, 2020 at 11:10 am
For Woden's sake! Kudrin is now spouting at the Gaidar Forum being held at RANEPA (The Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration under the President of the Russian Federation, the largest federal state-funded institution of higher professional education located in Moscow, and where my elder daughter, Yelena Denisovna is now studying and who is going to be the first Madam President of Russia), as is Dimka, another Western wannabe -- always was and still is.

Ye gods, I wouldn't be seen dead at a meeting that has Gaidar's name attached to it!

And that other '90s prick Chubais was spouting today, saying what they did wrong in the '90s.

I tell you what they did wrong, arsehole: they didn't put you in prison!

Mark Chapman January 15, 2020 at 3:40 pm
Refreshing, at least, even bracing to hear someone who was in the liberal vanguard in the 90's actually say that things were done wrong in the 90's, if that's actually what he said. Normally the liberal elite of Russia affect to believe the only thing that went wrong in the 90's was that Russian weakness caused her to falter without seeing the golden time through to its capitalist conclusion. Some would not have made it to the celebration party, of course, but that's reality, innit? You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs.

[Jan 16, 2020] Russia's new proposed PM Mikhail Mishustin.

Jan 16, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

yalensis January 15, 2020 at 3:55 pm

Russia's new (proposed) PM Mikhail Mishustin. Never heard of him before, but did quickie research. According to VZGLIAD reporters Andrei Rezchikov and Natalia Makarova:

This guy totally reformed the Russian tax system and implemented electronic automated system (woo hoo!), also implemented electronic signatures and other high-tech bling-blang.
A 100% pure-blooded technocat (yay! my kinda guy!)

Born 3 March 1966 in Moscow. Graduated from super-duper tech school in 1989. With certification as "Engineer – System Technician."
In 2003 successfully defended his dissertation on the topic of "The mechanics of governmental tax administration in Russia." Almost won a Pulitzer for that.

Continued on as geeky tax specialist. In 2008-2010 entered the realm of private investment business, with UFG Capital Partners and UFG Asset Management.

Hobbies: Mishustin enjoys playing hockey, as does President Putin. One speculates they may have encountered one another on the ice.
Religious views: Very religious, and was awarded the Order of Serafim Sarovsky.
That was the nice Russian saint who lived with a bear. I wrote about him on my blog – little plug there, sorry

Jen January 15, 2020 at 4:58 pm
Checked his bio on Wikipedia: Mishustin did indeed attend a technological university and graduated with an engineering degree. This suggests he had no exposure to competing political and economic ideologies in his youth apart from what was required of him as a student living in Soviet times.

Not quite as dramatic as living in a cave as a teenager, then digging ditches and later picking up a chemical engineering degree.
https://s.telegraph.co.uk/graphics/projects/xi-jinping-cave/

Patient Observer January 15, 2020 at 5:18 pm
I thought only in America could the humble ever reach the top. My my, what a world we live in.
Patient Observer January 15, 2020 at 7:03 pm

https://www.youtube.com/embed/SAYuR2jlzp0?version=3&rel=1&fs=1&autohide=2&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&wmode=transparent

Seems like a can-do technocrat. Still good.

Patient Observer January 15, 2020 at 5:45 pm
Definitely not an Atlanticist – all good so far.
Moscow Exile January 15, 2020 at 9:43 pm
And Dimka's gone! That's good enough for me!
Moscow Exile January 15, 2020 at 9:47 pm
re. the pingback below:

I didn't expect any of it. Neither did anyone else, whatever the so-called experts outgassing on the US Garbage Media may be pretending.

Yeah, Kremlin-Watchers, Kremlin Experts, Kremlinologists -- call them what you will -- they know sweet FA!!!!

I remember when the SU "fell" and none of these "experts" had any idea.

Of course, they al knew it was going to happen in hindsight.

[Jan 16, 2020] TRANSCRIPT Putin's Address to the Federal Assembly

Jan 16, 2020 | off-guardian.org

This is about fight with fifth column... The time for those changes is long overdue.

I truly believe that it is time to introduce certain changes to our country's main law, changes that will directly guarantee the priority of the Russian Constitution in our legal framework.

What does it mean? It means literally the following: requirements of international law and treaties as well as decisions of international bodies can be valid on the Russian territory only to the point that they do not restrict the rights and freedoms of our people and citizens and do not contradict our Constitution.

Second, I suggest formalising at the constitutional level the obligatory requirements for those who hold positions of critical significance for national security and sovereignty. More precisely, the heads of the constituent entities, members of the Federation Council, State Duma deputies, the prime minister and his/her deputies, federal ministers, heads of federal agencies and judges should have no foreign citizenship or residence permit or any other document that allows them to live permanently in a foreign state.

The goal and mission of state service is to serve the people, and those who enter this path must know that by doing this they inseparably connect their lives with Russia and the Russian people without any assumptions and allowances.

Requirements must be even stricter for presidential candidates. I suggest formalising a requirement under which presidential candidates must have had permanent residence in Russia for at least 25 years and no foreign citizenship or residence permit and not only during the election campaign but at any time before it too.

I know that people are discussing the constitutional provision under which one person cannot hold the post of the President of the Russian Federation for two successive terms. I do not regard this as a matter of principle, but I nevertheless support and share this view.

I have already said before that our goal is to ensure high living standards and equal opportunities for all throughout the country. It is towards this goal that our national projects and development plans are aimed.

Stephen Morrell ,

Putin clearly is the most informed and visionary bourgeois politician in the world today, by a country mile. He not only is attempting to address the very real real social, demographic and economic needs of Russia, in his usual comprehensive manner, but also and cannily is co-opting many of the expectations that the USSR used to fulfil, attempting to neutralise any socialist political sentiments in the Russian population. Putin is the Bismarck of Russia.

richard le sarc ,

Russia's economic situation, within the global capitalist system, with its large reserves, much in gold, no exposure to the toilet paper of US Treasuries, and substantial local self-sufficiency in agriculture (thank-you sanctions)means that when the Western debt Ponzi Himalaya implodes, the Russians will be pretty much immune to the consequences.

richard le sarc ,

I agree entirely, but Putin has no alternative. Any chink in his armour and the USA will destroy Russia and break it up into fragments as they did in Yugoslavia, the USSR and wish to do in China. I rather think that Putin knows full well how dire is the global ecological situation, but he needs to balance less enlightened forces at home, and the 'Atlanticist' Quislings.

BigB ,

I don't disagree either: but that is not my point. The Atlanticists are waiting in the wings for another four years. Last time I checked: they still command 80% of Russian private property. And were expropriating $25bn pa annum in capital flight which has slowed slightly in the last few years. I read the Saker too. There is a deadlock and uneasy power sharing arrangement internally. But you may have missed the time when the Saker admitted "Putin is a neoliberal"?

It may be difficult to disentangle our vision from the neoliberal-statist-market ontology we are being repressed by but that is what we must do. We cannot expect neoliberal capitalist social inclusivity to save us from ecological catastrophe. Nor can we expect to grow economically into humanism: when exponential growth is what is destroying any lasting chance of a purely sustainable human-emancipatory freedom. Putin may not have a choice: but we do. The neoliberal-statist-market ontology is globally self-determined to produce total failure as its inevitable and only possible outcome. This is known a 'parametric determinism' when we automatically follow a maladaptive 'rational' self-optimising behaviour pattern long after it failed as it did in 2007. There is no recovery possible, and technology only speeds total failure whilst masking the ecological destruction it is accelerating.

States have to think and act in a pre-determined way that is true. But we do not have to think like that. Not if there is to be any alternative or succession of humanity ex-post the neoliberal-statist-market ontology which is morally, ecologically, humanistically and most importantly *actually* bankrupt at this point.

Do we exit a 350 year process of exponentially disproportionate wealth distribution, deliberate maldevelopment and global dehumanisation with all the wealth in the hands of those who benefited from the expropriation? Or do we attempt a redistribution and develop a new, hitherto unknown (and unknowable under capitalist alienation), value set where everyone globally has equal access to resources and a right to life as a birthright?

The decision is not beyond you or I: but it will take the development of the assessment of capitalism on other than its own neoliberal-statist-market ontological terms. No state or state leader can develop humanity on the path of less-is-more it needs to take but the people can. That's all.

richard le sarc ,

Putin is either a believing neo-liberal, in which case he is part of the problem you identify, or he is using it through necessity. I could not agree more with your diagnosis of the omnicidal nature of capitalism, and the inability of so many to visualise the end of capitalism-they more easily can conceive of the end of humanity. In fact I rather think that that is the way in which the ruling parasites intend to save their own bacon, by allowing the ecological Holocaust to cull the 90% of 'useless eaters' that the ruling elites fear and despise, and who they see only as a threat. Their labour is no longer required in an age of automation, robotisation and computerisation, and even their consumption is today superfluous. The ecological Holocaust has passed numerous tipping-points and points of no return, while the IPCC downplays the extremity of our situation, the Right still denies it is even happening, and the public is slowly waking up, too late of course. We've just experienced a fire Holocaust, yet the Pentecostal thug PM, 'Smoko' Morrison, who is surely seeing it all as God's Will and the sign of the coming End Times that his cult so longs for, utterly refuses to reduce CO2 emissions beyond a ludicrous 28% by 2030 from 2005 (base-line creep)levels, 'target', that we will not come close to. And now it is raining, a little, so the Great Austrayan Mediocracy can go back to their slumber. But they'll 'Wake in Fright', again, soon.

Hugh O'Neill ,

"It is very important that they adopt the true values ​​of a large family – that family is love, happiness, the joy of motherhood and fatherhood, that family is a strong bond of several generations, united by respect for the elderly and care for children, giving everyone a sense of confidence, security, and reliability. If the younger generations accept this situation as natural, as a moral and an integral part and reliable background support for their adult life, then we will be able to meet the historical challenge of guaranteeing Russia's development as a large and successful country."

I know very little of Russia alas, but the over-riding impression I take from this speech is President Putin's depth and breadth grasp of detail and concern for every aspect of Russian society – and his frustration that decisions made at federal level do not transform into concrete action at regional levels. The curse of bureaucracy and local fiefdoms jealous of their power and autonomy.

I was fully expecting him to come up a resonating phrase like: "Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask instead what you can for your country." For Russia to have (seemingly) escaped the rapacious talons of the vulture capitalists unleashed by the Yeltsin puppet ought to be a lesson for us all.

Finally, in international politics, he remains impeccably diplomatic, restrained and wise. Would that there were more world leaders of such calibre.

Hugh O'Neill ,

Leadership and Learning are indispensable to each other. Looking at the calibre of Presidents since JFK, it seems that all the best candidates were either killed off or scared off. All the Unspeakable can do is kill in answer to any and all problems.

richard le sarc ,

Imagine the money freed if US military expenditure was not 90% graft and inefficiency.

richard le sarc ,

His manifest virtues are precisely why the vermin of the Western ruling elites hate him so psychotically.

[Jan 16, 2020] https://www.theguardian.com/news/2020/jan/07/freedom-without-constraints-how-the-us-squandered-its-cold-war-victory

Jan 16, 2020 | www.theguardian.com

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News Opinion Sport Culture Lifestyle The long read Freedom without constraints: how the US squandered its cold war victory cwt Composite: Guardian Design/Getty The US believed the American way of life was humankind's ultimate destiny. But unrestrained greed has led to an era of injustice and division. By Andrew Bacevich

Tue 7 Jan 2020 01.00 EST Last modified on Thu 16 Jan 2020 06.09 EST

Shares 1,002 'W ithout the Cold War, what's the point of being an American?" Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, the novelist John Updike's late-20th-century everyman, posed that question just as the "long twilight struggle" was winding down. More than quarter of a century later, the plaintive query still awaits a definitive answer.

Indeed, the passage of time has only sown confusion about whether there is a point to being an American. Even as the cold war was ending, Updike's everyman was not alone in feeling at a loss. By the 1980s, the cold war had become more than a mere situation or circumstance. It was a state of mind.

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Most Americans had come to take its existence for granted. Like the polar ice cap or baseball's status as the national pastime, it had acquired an appearance of permanence. So its passing caught citizens unaware. Those charged with managing the cold war were, if anything, even more surprised. The enterprise to which they had devoted their professional lives had suddenly vanished. Here was a contingency that the sprawling US national security apparatus, itself a product of the anti-communist crusade, had failed to anticipate.

On one level, of course, the surprise could not have been more gratifying. In the epic competition pitting west against east, the god-fearing against the godless and democracy against totalitarianism, "our side" had won. All-out nuclear war had been averted. The cause of freedom, which Americans felt certain they themselves embodied, had prevailed. Victory was decisive, sweeping and unequivocal.

In another sense, however, the passing of the cold war could not have been more disorienting. In 1987, Georgi Arbatov, a senior adviser to the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev , had warned: "We are going to do a terrible thing to you – we are going to deprive you of an enemy."

As the Soviet Union passed out of existence, Americans were left not just without that enemy, but without even a framework for understanding the world and their place in it. However imperfectly, the cold war had, for several decades, offered a semblance of order and coherence. The collapse of communism shattered that framework. Where there had been purposefulness and predictability, now there was neither.

Winning the cold war brought Americans face-to-face with a predicament comparable to that confronting the lucky person who wins the lottery: hidden within a windfall is the potential for monumental disaster. Putting that money to good use while avoiding the pitfalls inherent in suddenly acquired riches calls for prudence and self-awareness – not easily demonstrated when the big house, luxury car and holiday home you have always wanted are yours for the asking.

Similarly, the end of the cold war might have given Americans pause, especially since the issues at hand were of considerably greater significance than homes and cars. At least in theory, the moment might have invited reflection on some first-order questions, such as: what is the meaning of freedom? What does freedom allow? What obligations does it impose? Whom or what does it exclude?

O f course, Americans had been wrestling with such questions since well before 1776 , the answers evolving over time. During the several decades of the cold war, however, the exigencies of the east-west rivalry had offered a reason to throttle down impulses to explore freedom's furthermost boundaries. Except on the fringes of American politics, most citizens accepted the word from Washington that their way of life was under grave threat. In the pecking order of national priorities, addressing that threat – defending freedom rather than enlarging it – tended to take precedence over other considerations.

This is not to suggest that cold-war Americans were a compliant lot. They were not. From the 1950s, misleadingly enshrined as a decade of conformity, through the Ronald Reagan-dominated 80s, domestic crises and controversies were constants. Among the issues energising or enraging Americans were civil liberties, the nuclear arms race, mismanaged wars of dubious provenance, challenges to artistic tradition, leftwing and rightwing radicalism, crass materialism that coexisted with widespread poverty and a host of simmering issues connected to race, sex and gender. Yet through it all, a common outlook, centred on resistance to the "red threat", endured. For most citizens most of the time, the cold war itself sufficed to explain "the point of being an American".

The collapse of the Soviet empire between 1989 and 1991 robbed that outlook of its last vestiges of authority. Rarely, if ever, had the transition from one historical period to another occurred quite so abruptly, with such a precise set of demarcations, and with such profound implications. As if in an instant, the discipline that the cold war had imposed vanished. The absurdity of defining reality as an either/or choice – red or dead, slave or free, good v evil – now became blazingly apparent. The impact on American ambitions and expectations was akin to removing the speed limiter from an internal combustion engine. Suddenly the throttle opened up. The future appeared uniquely promising, offering Americans a seemingly endless array of choices, while confronting them with few evident constraints. Everything seemed possible.

Confident that an era of unprecedented US economic, military and cultural ascendancy now beckoned, members of an intoxicated elite threw caution to the winds. They devised – and promulgated – a new consensus consisting of four elements.

Germans on top of the Berlin Wall in front of the Brandenburg Gate on 10 November 1989. Photograph: Fabrizio Bensch/Reuters

The first of these was globalisation or, more precisely, globalised neoliberalism. Stripped to its essence, globalisation was all about wealth creation: unconstrained corporate capitalism operating on a planetary scale in a world open to the movement of goods, capital, ideas and people would create wealth on a hitherto unimagined scale.

The second element was global leadership, a euphemism for hegemony or, more simply still, for empire. At its core, global leadership was all about order: unchallengeable military might would enable the US to manage and police a postcolonial yet implicitly imperial order favourable to American interests and values. Through the exercise of global leadership, the US would enforce globalisation. Order and abundance would go hand in hand.

The third element of the consensus was freedom, an ancient word now drastically revised. The new conception of freedom emphasised autonomy, with traditional moral prohibitions declared obsolete and the removal of constraints maximising choice. Order and abundance together would underwrite freedom, relieving Americans of existential concerns about safety and survival to which those less privileged were still obliged to attend.

The final element of the consensus was presidential supremacy, with the occupant of the Oval Office accorded quasi-monarchical prerogatives and status. Implicit in presidential supremacy was a radical revision of the political order. While still treated as sacred writ, the constitution no longer described the nation's existing system of governance. Effectively gone, for example, was the concept of a federal government consisting of three equal branches. Ensuring the nation's prosperity, keeping Americans safe from harm, and interpreting the meaning of freedom, the president became the centre around which all else orbited, the subject of great hopes, and the target of equally great scorn should he fail to fulfil the expectations that he brought into office.

All these elements together constituted a sort of operating system. The purpose of this operating system, unseen but widely taken for granted, was to cement the primacy of the US in perpetuity, while enshrining the American way of life as the ultimate destiny of humankind. According to the calendar, the end of the 20th century, frequently referred to as the American century, was then drawing near. Yet with the cold war concluding on such favourable terms, the stage appeared set for a prolonged American epoch.

This, however, was not to be.

T he US wasted little time in squandering the advantages it had gained by winning the cold war. Events at home and abroad put the post-cold war consensus to the test, unmasking its contradictions and exposing its premises as delusional. Although globalisation did enable some to acquire great wealth, it left behind many more, while fostering egregious inequality. The assertion of global leadership provided American soldiers with plentiful opportunities to explore exotic and unfamiliar lands, but few would mistake the results for even an approximation of dominion, much less peace and harmony.

Instead, Americans came to accept war as habitual. And while the drive for individual empowerment removed constraints, it did little to promote the common good. An enlarged conception of freedom brought with it a whiff of nihilism. As for exalting the chief executive as a visionary leader, it yielded a succession of disappointments, before imploding in November 2016.

The post-cold war moment, dating from the early 90s and spanning the administrations of Bill Clinton , George W Bush and Barack Obama, turned out to be remarkably brief. By 2016, large numbers of ordinary Americans had concluded, not without reason, that the post-cold war consensus was irretrievably defective. Globalised neoliberalism, militarised hegemony, individual empowerment and presidents elevated to the status of royalty might be working for some, but not for them. They also discerned, again not without cause, that establishment elites subscribing to that consensus, including the leaders of both political parties, were deaf to their complaints and oblivious to their plight.

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By turning their country over to Donald Trump , those Americans signalled their repudiation of that very consensus. That Trump himself did not offer anything remotely like a reasoned alternative made his elevation to the presidency all the more remarkable. He was a protest candidate elected by a protest vote. In that regard, the 2016 presidential election marked a historical turning point comparable in significance to the fall of the Berlin Wall a quarter of a century earlier.

As the cold war had evolved from the late 40s into the 80s, the rhetoric of freedom remained central to American political discourse. Among members of the intelligentsia, fads came and went, but none displaced freedom as the defining issue of the age. As the designated "leader of the free world", each US president was in turn expected to talk the talk. From Truman through to Reagan, with differing levels of eloquence, none failed to do so.

The way it ended – with euphoric young Germans dancing on the wall – imparted to the entire cold war a retrospective moral clarity that it did not deserve. The cold war tainted everything it touched. As an episode in world history, it was a tragedy of towering proportions. So its passing ought to have called for reflection, remorse, repentance, even restitution. Yet the prevailing mood allowed for none of these, at least as far as most Americans were concerned. Instead, out of an era punctuated throughout by anxiety and uncertainty came a sense that a dazzling future lay just ahead.

In effect, the passing of the cold war relieved Americans of any further obligation to exhibit more than nominal cohesion. Except as a matter of personal preference, virtues such as self-discipline and self-denial, once deemed essential to enabling a nation to stand firm against existential threats, now became passé. The spirit of the post-cold war era prioritised self-actualisation and self-indulgence over self-sacrifice.

The demise of communism removed the last remaining constraints on the operation of global capitalism. By leaving the US militarily pre-eminent, the end of the cold war removed any remaining constraints on the use of American coercive power. Similarly, for many ordinary Americans, particularly those of a progressive bent, the passing of the cold war did away with any lingering constraints on matters related to "lifestyle". No longer would they defer to the customary arbiters of propriety and "good taste" in determining what was permissible and what was not. For transcendent authority, progressives looked to the autonomous self.

'A t the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life." So wrote supreme court justice Anthony Kennedy in a famous decision handed down shortly after the cold war ended.

Kennedy's reformulation of liberty, however grandiose, was well suited to the mood that swept through elite quarters at the end of history . By comparison, the inalienable rights specified in the famous Declaration of Independence in 1776 now seemed cramped, stingy and inadequate. Freedom was in line for a makeover.

The emerging post-cold war conception of freedom was nothing if not expansive. It recognised few limits and imposed fewer obligations, with one notable exception: compliance was non-negotiable. As always, the American definition of liberty, however recently revised, was universally applicable, as valid in Bogotá and Dakar as it was in Boston and Denver.

What did this signify in practice? Allowing individuals maximum latitude to reach their own conclusions regarding the concepts of existence, meaning, the universe and the mystery of human life yielded what sort of society? The quarter-century that elapsed between the fall of the Berlin Wall and Donald Trump's election provided a tentative answer to that question. Part of that answer came in the form of progress towards eliminating the remaining vestiges of racism, empowering women and reducing discrimination experienced by LGBTQ+ Americans.

Granted, progress does not imply decisive and irreversible success. Yet during the post-cold war period, American society became more tolerant, more open, more accepting and less judgmental. Attitudes toward people of colour, women and gays that in the 50s had been normative and remained widespread in the 60s and 70s had, by 2016, become unacceptable in polite society. Yet for more than a few Americans, Justice Kennedy's notion of liberty as an opportunity to ponder life's ultimate questions had little relevance. In practical terms, the exercise of freedom, undertaken in an environment in which consumption and celebrity had emerged as preeminent values, encouraged conformity rather than independence. At least notionally, Americans now enjoyed more freedom than ever before. Yet from every direction, but especially from Madison Avenue, Hollywood and Silicon Valley, came cues for how to make the most of the freedom now on offer. And however much you had, you always needed more.

President Ronald Reagan (R) with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in Washington in December 1987. Photograph: Gary Hershorn/Reuters

So along with freedom came stress, anxiety and a sense of not quite measuring up, or a fear of falling behind as the demands of daily life seemed to multiply. For some, freedom meant alienation, anomie and despair. It did nothing to prevent, and in some instances arguably fostered, self-destructive or antisocial behaviour.

So in 2016, as another presidential election approached, Americans were able to claim the following distinctions:

• One in six were taking prescription psychiatric drugs such as antidepressants or anti-anxiety meds.

• More than 16 million adults and more than 3 million adolescents were suffering from significant depression.

• More than 1.9 million Americans were regularly using cocaine, with a half million hooked on heroin and 700,000 on methamphetamine.

• That year opioid overdoses killed 46,000, a new record.

• Binge drinking had reached epidemic proportions, with one in six US adults binge drinking several times a month and consuming seven drinks per binge; according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, bingeing was especially common among younger and more affluent Americans.

• Nearly 45,000 were taking their own lives annually, the national suicide rate increased by 24% since 1999; within the previous decade the suicide rate of teenage girls had doubled and of boys had jumped by 40%.

• Smartphone addiction was joining more traditional compulsions, with the average person checking their smartphone 110 times a day, impelled by Fomo – a fear of missing out.

• Compulsive-buying syndrome, AKA shopping addiction, afflicted an estimated 6% of the population; a comparable number were compulsive hoarders.

• On a daily basis, 11 million Americans, mostly women, struggled with eating disorders such as anorexia and bulimia, while roughly 40% of adults and nearly 19% of children and adolescents were obese.

• Cosmetic surgeons were performing more than 17m procedures annually, with buttock augmentation and labiaplasty enjoying a particular spike in popularity.

• Forty-million Americans were regularly visiting online porn sites.

• The number of Americans infected with sexually transmitted diseases in 2016 surpassed 2 million, according to the CDC, "the highest number ever".

• An estimated 24.7 million children were growing up in fatherless households, with such children substantially more likely to drop out of school, abuse drugs and alcohol and kill themselves; girls raised without a father present were four times more likely to get pregnant as teenagers.

• Although difficult to quantify with precision, 676,000 American children in 2016 were victims of abuse or neglect.

• Exercising their right to choose, American women were terminating around 650,000 unwanted pregnancies each year, despite the widespread availability of contraceptives.

• Exercising their right to bear arms, Americans had accumulated more than 40% of the planet's small arms; the US arsenal in private hands was larger than that of the next 25 countries combined.

• Meanwhile, more than 33,000 Americans were being killed in firearms-related incidents annually.

• Year in and year out, the US had the world's highest incarceration rate, no other developed nation coming anywhere close.

• Polling data showed that social trust – how Americans felt about government institutions and their fellow citizens – had sunk to an all-time low. Perhaps for that reason, when it came to voting, most Americans couldn't be bothered; voter turnout in the US lagged behind that of most other developed countries.

• In an increasingly networked society, with two-thirds of Americans on Facebook, chronic loneliness afflicted a large portion of the population.

• In a phenomenon described as "deaths by despair", the life expectancy of white working-class American males was dropping, a trend without historical precedent.

• The nation's birthrate had fallen below the rate needed to sustain a stable overall population; America had ceased to reproduce itself.

• Not to be overlooked, in their pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness, Americans were polluting, wasting food and generating trash with abandon, leading the world in each category.

A rguably, Americans were enjoying more freedom than ever. Were they happier as a consequence? Polls suggested otherwise. In the 2007 "world happiness" standings, the US had ranked third among developed countries. By 2016, its position had plummeted to 13th.

By no means am I suggesting that a single such statistic holds the key to assessing life in the US. It does not. Nor do the various penchants and pathologies enumerated above. Yet taken together, they suggest a society in which discontent, dysfunction and sheer perversity were rampant.

As with globalised neoliberalism, some Americans not only coped with seemingly limitless freedom, but also luxuriated in the opportunities that it offered. For sophisticates inhabiting Brooklyn's Park Slope, radical autonomy could well prove to be a boon; for those stuck in a ghetto on Chicago's South Side, not so much. As for the accompanying underside, those in possession of sufficient resources could insulate themselves from its worst effects – just as the affluent were able to insulate themselves from the accumulating post-cold war military misadventures by simply allowing others to shoulder the burden.

What role did Trump play in shaping this US that worked nicely for some while leaving many others adrift and vulnerable? None at all. Globalisation, the pursuit of militarised hegemony, a conception of freedom conferring rights without duties, and a political system centred on a quasi-monarchical chief of state each turned out to have a substantial downside. Yet the defects of each made their appearance well before Trump's entry into politics, even if elites, held in thrall by the post-cold war outlook, were slow to appreciate their significance. None of those defects can be laid at his feet.

If anything, Trump himself had displayed a considerable aptitude for turning such defects to his own advantage. In the US, post-cold war, he was prominent among those who enriched themselves, lived large and let others do the dirty work, while also shielding themselves from the difficulties that made life a trial for many of their fellow citizens. In an era of con artists, cowards and cynics, Trump became a modern equivalent of showman PT Barnum, parlaying the opportunities at hand into fortune, celebrity, lots of golf, plenty of sex and eventually the highest office in the land.

Yet for our purposes, the key point is this: Trump did not create the conditions in which the campaign of 2016 was to take place. Instead, to a far greater extent than any of his political rivals, he demonstrated a knack for translating those conditions into votes. Here, the moment met the man.

Trump's critics saw him as an abomination. Perhaps he was. Yet he was also very much a man of his time. In the end, what won him the presidency was his capacity to push the buttons of millions of voters who believed themselves ill-served and left behind – abandoned, even – by establishment politicians of both parties.

Implicit in his promise to "make America great again" was an admission that greatness itself, which Americans had long since come to believe was theirs by right, had been lost, with no one taking responsibility and no one, apart from Trump himself, venturing to explain how it had even happened. The critical word that imparted to his campaign slogan its formidable persuasive power was "again". As Tom Engelhardt has written, it represented an acknowledgment that self-congratulatory terms such as "great", "super", "exceptional" or "indispensable" no longer reflected the actually existing American condition. Millions of ordinary citizens recognised this as self-evidently true. Arrangements, agreements and advantages that Americans had once prized had been squandered or thrown away. And yet no politician other than Trump dared to utter that truth aloud.

As a strategic thinker, Trump had no particular talent. Yet as a strategic sensor, he was uniquely gifted, possessing an intuitive genius for reading the temper of his supporters and stoking their grievances. Yet by no means did Trump create those grievances – they had festered during the quarter-century after the cold war ended. He merely recognised their existence and, in doing so, made himself the champion of the aggrieved and the one person they came to believe who might respond to their plight.

The post-cold war recipe for renewing the American century has been tried and found wanting. A patently amoral economic system has produced neither justice nor equality, and will not. Grotesquely expensive and incoherent national security policies have produced neither peace nor a compliant imperium, and will not. A madcap conception of freedom unmoored from any overarching moral framework has fostered neither virtue nor nobility nor contentment, and won't anytime soon. Sold by its masterminds as a formula for creating a prosperous and powerful nation in which all citizens might find opportunities to flourish, it has yielded no such thing. This, at least, describes the conclusion reached by disenchanted Americans in numbers sufficient to elect as president someone vowing to run the post-cold war consensus through a shredder.

Donald Trump's detractors charge him with dividing the country when, in fact, it was pervasive division that vaulted him to the centre of American politics in the first place. The divide is deepest and least reconcilable between those Americans for whom the trajectory of events since the cold war pointed upward, and those who found in those same events evidence of decline and decay, and who sensed they had been had. At the most fundamental level, the inhabitants of one camp believe that talent, skills and connections will enable them to determine their own destiny; they are masters of their own fate. In the other camp are those who see themselves as victims. As Obama put it while campaigning for the presidency in 2008, "they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them, or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations".

Trump did not create this cleavage. He merely turned it to his personal advantage. So, regardless of the date or terms of Trump's departure from office, the schism that allowed him to become president is likely to persist after he is gone. It's that schism, rather than the antics of the tycoon/reality TV star/demagogue who exploited it, that merits far more attention than it has received.

This is an edited extract from The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory by Andrew Bacevich, published by Metropolitan Books/Holt

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[Jan 16, 2020] Looking back on the Soviet Union's foreign policy in the 1930s it is entirely understandable that a cardinal objective was to rebuild the Entente of 1914 to deter Germany.

Jan 16, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

bevin , Jan 15 2020 2:11 utc | 112

Copeland@100
Orwell's problem was that the Soviet Union was pursuing Russia's strategic interests. Much of his criticism was justifiable but only in a context in which the malignant and pro-fascist attitudes of the 'neutral'"democracies" (UK, France US) were taken for granted. Looking back on the Soviet Union's foreign policy in the 1930s it is entirely understandable that a cardinal objective was to rebuild the Entente of 1914 to deter Germany. This excellent article
https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2020/01/12/what-poland-has-to-hide-about-the-origins-of-world-war-ii/
that karlofi linked to the other day is a reminder of this.
The Soviet Union was desperately trying to prevent the alliance between Nazis and Liberals that it realised was, in ideological terms, almost inevitable.

As we look around the world today it can be seen that they were right then. But that the alliance was not really between the, related, ideologies of liberalism and fascism but the geo-political realities that they masked. Namely the imperialism of western Europe and the maritime Empire (now HQ'd in Washington, then centred in London, previously in Amsterdam).

Nothing is changed- Eurasia is still, as it has been since Vasco da Gama's time, the main dish on the imperialist menu. And the Empire is determined to treat China, Russia and the vast lands (including Iran) that depend on their protection, as the enemy.
That is what Pompeo and Trump are about and that is why the poodles (who actually form a pack of hunting hounds kept by the Master of the Washington-Wall St Hunt) are doing what they do.
And that too is why the Trudeau-Freeland axis continues to pursue the policies of using Poland, Ukraine and the Baltic statelets, to weaken and harass Russia. Trudeau's sympathy for fascism, incidentally, is inherited from his father who, in his youth, during the War, rode a motor bike with a wehrmacht helmet, long before Hells Angels dreamed of such things.

[Jan 16, 2020] RUSSIAN RESHUFFLE by Patrick Armstrong - Sic Semper Tyrannis

Jan 16, 2020 | turcopolier.typepad.com

RUSSIAN RESHUFFLE by Patrick Armstrong

(Written on the evening of. So subject to reconsideration/revision/outright denial as we learn more.)

I didn't expect any of it. Neither did anyone else, whatever the so-called experts outgassing on the US Garbage Media may be pretending. I don't know what it all means. Neither does anyone else. (Well Putin & Co do, but they keep their cards close to their chests. As we've just seen.)

What do we know? Putin gave his annual address to the Federal Council ( Rus ) ( Eng ) and started off with how important it was that the birthrate should be raised. Fair enough: he wants more Russians on the planet, the government's programs have ensured that there will be quite a few more but there are still more to come. Many programs planned; some of which will work: after all, not everything works out as we hoped does it? He mentioned how dangerous the world is – especially the MENA – and said at least Russia is pretty secure (as indeed it is except against lunatics addicted to the Book of Revelation .)

Then the constitutional stuff. He believes the Constitution needs a few tweaks. Important officials should really be Russians and not people with a get-out-of-jail-card/alternate-loyalty-card in their vests. Reasonable enough: they should "inseparably connect their lives with Russia and the Russian people without any assumptions and allowances." (Good idea actually. Can we in the West steal the idea? We vote for X but who does he vote for?) Russian law should take precedence over decrees contaminated by the " Rules-Based International Order" (" we make the rules , you follow our orders "). The PM should be named by the Duma. (A pretty big change, actually: let's have more details on the division of labour please. In some countries the head of state is The Boss – USA, Russia (now), France – in others the head of government is The Boss – Germany, Canada, Denmark. There is a serious carve up of powers question here that has to be worked out in detail.) Constitutional changes should be approved in a referendum. The President either should or should not be bound by the no-three-terms-in-a-row-rule (I personally can't figure out what "этим" refers to in "Не считаю, что этот вопрос принципиальный, но согласен с этим. Не считаю, что этот вопрос принципиальный, но согласен с этим." But, no doubt we will soon learn.)

So, a somewhat less presidential republic. Details to be decided. Many details. But I'm confident that it's been worked out and we will learn. Putin & Co have shown us over 20 years that they don't make things up on the fly.

Then we learned that the entire government had resigned – but individuals to stay in place until replaced. Then we learned – a fast few hours indeed! – that Dmitri Medvedev was replaced by somebody that no one (other than Russian tax specialists) had ever heard of: Mikhail Vladimirovich Mishustin. ( Russian Wiki entry – none in English so far.) Those cheering Medvedev's dismissal (something predicted and hoped for by a sector of Russianologists) had to then swallow this: not tossed out into ignominy and shame, as they wanted, but something else. Putin says that there is a clear distinction between government and presidential concerns; defence and security are clearly in the latter. But Medvedev has always been closely following defence and security issues and it is suitable and appropriate that he continue to do so. So a new position, deputy heard of the security council, will be created for him. So what are we to make of this? Medvedev has been given the boot and a sinecure? Or he's been given a crucial job in the new carve-up of responsibilities?

After all, Russia's problems keep getting bigger but nobody is getting any younger. Especially the problems from outside. For some years Washington, an implacable enemy of Moscow, has been getting less and less predictable. Lavrov and Kerry spend hours locked up negotiating a deal in Syria ; within a week the US military attacks a Syrian Army unit; "by mistake" . Who's in charge? Now with the murder of Soleimani, possibly on a Washington-approved peace mission, Washington has moved to another level of lawlessness and is exploring the next depth as it defies Baghdad's order to get out. A pirate power. The outside problems for Moscow aren't getting smaller, are they? Washington is certainly недоговороспособны – it's impossible to make an agreement with it and, if you should think you have done so, it will break it. A dangerous, uncontrollable madman, staggering around blowing everything up – is any foreign leader now to be assumed to be on Washington's murder list? Surviving its decay is a big job indeed. The problems are getting bigger in the Final Days of the Imperium Americanum.

So, maybe Moscow needs more people on the job.

So are we looking at a new division of labour in Moscow as part of managing the Transition? (To say nothing of the – what's the word? – Thucydides trap ? ). Mishustin looks after the nuts and bolt of Russia's economy and internal management. Medvedev looks after defence and security – something not likely to get smaller while Putin looks after the big picture?

But this is only the first step in The Transition and we will learn more soon.

[Jan 16, 2020] US Attack on Soleimani is a Signal to Russia-Iran-China Triumvirate to Cease Cooperation by Ekaterina Blinova

Jan 07, 2020 | sputniknews.com

The US is trying to stop Eurasia's economic and political integration in order to delay its own demise, say international observers, explaining what message the US sent to the Russia-China-Iran "triumvirate" by killing Quds Commander Qasem Soleimani. The assassination of Qasem Soleimani, an Iranian major general in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and commander of the Quds Force, in a targeted US air strike on 3 January came on the heels of joint naval exercise launched by Russia, Iran and China in the Indian Ocean and Gulf of Oman.

The "growing Russia-China-Iran trilateral convergence", as The Diplomat dubbed it in late December, is seemingly hitting a raw nerve in Washington : speaking to Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB) on 2 January, Rear Admiral Khanzadi, the Iranian navy commander, said that Washington and its allies had held an emergency meeting aimed at disrupting the drills.

US Opposes Rapprochement of Russia, China and Iran Amid Policy of 'Maximum Pressure'
"Recent violent US attacks against Iranian allies in Iraq and Syria, culminating in the killing of Iran's Major General Qasem Soleimani, are, in the wider geopolitical sense, meant to send signals to the building Eurasian triumvirate to cease their collaborative activities, let alone longer-term strategic and Belt and Road Initiative-linked designs," says Pye Ian, an American economic analyst and private equity executive.

According to Ian, the US decision to step up pressure on Tehran might be stemming from Washington's apparent belief that Iran is "the 'weakest link' in the strengthening Eurasian alliance".

However, "Russia, China and Iran cannot be attacked overtly, let alone invaded, occupied or 'regime changed'," the economic analyst highlights.

Christopher C. Black, a Toronto-based international criminal lawyer with 20 years of experience in war crimes and international relations, echoes the American economist.

"It is in response to the close relationship between Russia, Iran and China and it is no coincidence that this murder took place just as the joint naval exercises in the Persian Gulf came to an end," he said. "Further, it is a threat to Russian strategic interests in Syria and to Syria itself."

Apart from this, the move indicates that "one of the reasons for US pressure on Iran is to control the oil supply to China in order to cripple China's development," Black suggests.

Russia and its military successes in the region have become yet another irritant for Washington, according to Max Parry, an independent American journalist and geopolitical analyst.

"The US likely feels the need to re-assert itself as a hegemonic power in the region, considering it is Moscow that emerged as the new honest peace broker in the Middle East with the Syrian conflict," Parry notes. "Russia completely outmanoeuvred Washington and by the end of the war, Turkey was practically in Moscow's camp. Trump has reset US foreign policy with the withdrawal from Syria and the targeting of Iran."

By killing Soleimani, the US "has completely overplayed its hand and this could be the beginning of the end for Washington because a war with Iran would be no cakewalk", he emphasises.

© AFP 2019 / ALY SONG / POOL Russian President Vladimir Putin (L), Chinese President Xi Jinping (C) and Iran's President Hassan Rouhani attend the Expo Center before the opening ceremony at the Expo Center at the fourth Conference on Interaction and Confidence Building Measures in Asia (CICA) summit in Shanghai on May 21, 2014 Eurasian 'Triumvirate' is Moving Away From the US Dollar

According to Ian, in addition to being a thorn in Washington's flesh, Moscow, Beijing and Tehran have something else in common: the three nations have increasingly been drifting away from the US dollar.

The trend followed the Trump administration's:

· unilateral withdrawal from the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Actions (JCPOA) in May 2018;

· trade war waged against the People's Republic of China by Washington since March 2018;

· series of anti-Russian sanctions imposed against Moscow under the pretext of the latter's interference in the US 2016 presidential elections, something that Russia resolutely denies.

The economic analyst explains that "the dollar's universal confidence trick requires uniform adherence, by natural adoption or by force". While the US allies remain obedient to the dollar- dominated system, those who resisted it such as Iraq under Saddam, Libya under Gaddafi and Venezuela under Chavez "triggered some Atlanticist force, either overtly or clandestinely, in order to try and put those nations back on a compliant page."

However, "the current state of dollar printing by the US Fed ad infinitum cannot last forever," Ian stresses.

"The global East and South are already ahead of Transatlantic banking, in a sense, by shifting further out of the dollar and Treasury securities into their own, or bilateral, currency exchanges, gold, and/or domestic or collaborative cryptocurrency endeavours," he says.

Russia, China, Iran, as well as India and some other Eurasian nations are switching to trading in local currencies and continuing to amass gold at a steady pace . Thus, for instance, Russia produced over 185.1 tonnes of gold in the first six months of 2019; the country's bullion reserves reached 72.7 million troy ounces (2,261 tonnes) as of 1 December 2019. For its part, the People's Bank of China (PBoC) has accumulated 1,948.3 tonnes of the precious metal as of December 2019, according to World Gold Council.

Ian foresees that if the world's nations continue to shift out of US Treasury obligations and choose alternative currencies for energy pricing, trading and reserves recycling, it may "cause US interest rates to fly higher, cratering consumer, institutional and public debt obligations and re-importing an obscene level of inflation back into the US".

The views and opinions expressed in the article do not necessarily reflect those of Sputnik.

[Jan 16, 2020] The US extorted their own "allies" to get them to betray Iran and destroy their own reputations

Jan 16, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

b , Jan 15 2020 19:40 utc | 175

woah

WaPo: Days before Europeans warned Iran of nuclear deal violations, Trump secretly threatened to impose 25% tariff on European autos if they didn't

The U.S. effort to coerce European foreign policy through tariffs, a move one European official equated to "extortion," represents a new level of hardball tactics with the United States' oldest allies, underscoring the extraordinary tumult in the transatlantic relationship.
...
U.S. officials conveyed the threat directly to officials in London, Berlin and Paris rather than through their embassies in Washington, said a senior European official, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive negotiations.

Kadath , Jan 15 2020 20:05 utc | 179

Yes the US extorted their own "allies" to get them to betray Iran and destroy their own reputations. I must say the one thing i begrudgingly like about Trump is his honest upfront thuggist actions. After the backroom betrayals of Obama bush clinton merkel and the rest its almost refreshingly honest. Also i can think of no quicker way of destroying the US empire than by threatening your own allies the MIC must be desperate to start a new never ending war, although perhaps they should be careful of what they wish for

[Jan 15, 2020] Democracy in action: voters choice in 2016 was limited to the choice between brain cancer and leprosy

Jan 08, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Trailer Trash , Jan 8 2020 16:32 utc | 105

Trump is such a douchebag. He claims there were no lives lost due to their "early warning system" -- no mention that the "early warning system" was a phone call!

Now he's once again justifying assassination, etc.

pretzelattack , Jan 8 2020 16:39 utc | 110

there was no "better choice" between trump and clinton. i still think clinton represented a greater danger than trump of getting into a war with russia, but they are both warmongers first class. for our next election, we may have a choice between ebola and flesh eating bacteria, or brain cancer and leprosy. if the game is rigged there's no winning it playing by the game's "rules".

[Jan 15, 2020] Democracy in action: voters choice in 2016 was limited to the choice between brain cancer and leprosy

Jan 08, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Trailer Trash , Jan 8 2020 16:32 utc | 105

Trump is such a douchebag. He claims there were no lives lost due to their "early warning system" -- no mention that the "early warning system" was a phone call!

Now he's once again justifying assassination, etc.

pretzelattack , Jan 8 2020 16:39 utc | 110

there was no "better choice" between trump and clinton. i still think clinton represented a greater danger than trump of getting into a war with russia, but they are both warmongers first class. for our next election, we may have a choice between ebola and flesh eating bacteria, or brain cancer and leprosy. if the game is rigged there's no winning it playing by the game's "rules".

[Jan 15, 2020] Just Trust Us, Says the Most Dishonest Administration Ever

Notable quotes:
"... On Sunday, the Washington Post, citing a senior U.S official, reported that "Pompeo first spoke with Trump about killing Suleimani months ago but neither the president nor Pentagon officials were willing to countenance such an operation." On Thursday, CNN's Nicole Gaouette and Jamie Gangel reported that "Pompeo was a driving force behind President Donald Trump's decision to kill" the Iranian general. The CNN story said that Pompeo, who was the director of the Central Intelligence Agency under Trump before he moved to the State Department, viewed Suleimani as the mastermind of myriad operations targeting Americans and U.S interests. It also quoted an unnamed source close to Pompeo, who recalled the Secretary of State telling friends, "I will not retire from public service until Suleimani is off the battlefield." ..."
theamericanconservative.com
One of the new bogus explanations that the administration has been offering up is that there was a threat to one or more U.S. embassies that led to the assassination. Rep. Justin Amash notes this morning that they have presented no evidence to Congress to back up any of this or their original claim of an "imminent" attack:
The administration didn't present evidence to Congress regarding even one embassy. The four embassies claim seems to be totally made up. And they have never presented evidence of imminence -- a necessary condition to act without congressional approval -- with respect to any of this. The administration didn't present evidence to Congress regarding even one embassy. The four embassies claim seems to be totally made up. And they have never presented evidence of imminence -- a necessary condition to act without congressional approval -- with respect to any of this. https://t.co/Eg0vaCnqFd -- Justin Amash (@justinamash) -- Justin Amash (@justinamash) -- Justin Amash (@justinamash) January 12, 2020
The administration's story keeps changing, because they are just making up unconvincing justifications for what they did. The president invents new excuses for the illegal assassination, and his subordinates feel obliged to follow his lead because they are implicated in his decision. The strange thing is that this administration still expects to be believed on something as important as this despite their constant lying to Congress and the public about everything else. The president and Secretary of State have trashed their credibility long ago, so there is no chance that we would give them the benefit of the doubt now. As a result, there is much more healthy and appropriate skepticism about the administration's claims since January 2nd than there usually is. We are still piecing together what happened at the start of this year in the days leading up to the assassination, but the picture we are getting is one of a push by determined hard-line ideologues to take military action against a government they hate. Pompeo was the leading advocate for doing this. John Cassidy The administration's story keeps changing, because they are just making up unconvincing justifications for what they did. The president invents new excuses for the illegal assassination, and his subordinates feel obliged to follow his lead because they are implicated in his decision. The strange thing is that this administration still expects to be believed on something as important as this despite their constant lying to Congress and the public about everything else. The president and Secretary of State have trashed their credibility long ago, so there is no chance that we would give them the benefit of the doubt now. As a result, there is much more healthy and appropriate skepticism about the administration's claims since January 2nd than there usually is. We are still piecing together what happened at the start of this year in the days leading up to the assassination, but the picture we are getting is one of a push by determined hard-line ideologues to take military action against a government they hate. Pompeo was the leading advocate for doing this. John Cassidy We are still piecing together what happened at the start of this year in the days leading up to the assassination, but the picture we are getting is one of a push by determined hard-line ideologues to take military action against a government they hate. Pompeo was the leading advocate for doing this. John Cassidy We are still piecing together what happened at the start of this year in the days leading up to the assassination, but the picture we are getting is one of a push by determined hard-line ideologues to take military action against a government they hate. Pompeo was the leading advocate for doing this. John Cassidy reports :
On Sunday, the Washington Post, citing a senior U.S official, reported that "Pompeo first spoke with Trump about killing Suleimani months ago but neither the president nor Pentagon officials were willing to countenance such an operation." On Thursday, CNN's Nicole Gaouette and Jamie Gangel reported that "Pompeo was a driving force behind President Donald Trump's decision to kill" the Iranian general. The CNN story said that Pompeo, who was the director of the Central Intelligence Agency under Trump before he moved to the State Department, viewed Suleimani as the mastermind of myriad operations targeting Americans and U.S interests. It also quoted an unnamed source close to Pompeo, who recalled the Secretary of State telling friends, "I will not retire from public service until Suleimani is off the battlefield."
Pompeo has Pompeo has lied constantly about Iran and the nuclear deal before and after he became Secretary of State, so it is not surprising that he has been the administration's public face as they lie to Congress and the public about this illegal assassination. No wonder he doesn't want to appear before Congress to testify.

kouroi • 32 minutes ago

Add to this the concomitant attempt made in Yemen, where there is no American presence other than the bombs dropping from the sky, against an Iranian operative, and it shows the push of the administration to go for the kill as the main factor. The US is becoming more and more like Israel: kill first, no excuses, we are the chosen ones - The "revenge" of Dinah's brothers, Genesis 34:25. This is The US of A's diplomacy nowadays. The world has really been put on notice. And the world will be reacting, see the visit of Chancellor Merkel to Moscow immediately after that.

The question is what the American citizens are going to do? What are they going to vote for?

JSC2397 • 18 minutes ago • edited
Why shouldn't Trump and his Administration's creatures "expect to be believed"? He and his toadies have misstated, misled, BS-ed and outright lied to the public for three years now; and - despite a "credibility gap" of Vallis Marineris proportions - have gotten no appreciable pushback from the media.
The right-wing media simply cheerlead him, as usual: and everybody else just sort of nods, grunts, and moves on.

[Jan 15, 2020] Macron's Great Leap East Revives the Spirit of De Gaulle

Dec 07, 2019 | canadianpatriot.org
Macron is a going through a crisis.

On the one hand he is a creature of the technocratic neo-liberal order which is committed to unilateralism and "post-nation-statism". On the other hand he is a creature of France – a nation with strong (though easily forgotten) nationalist traditions stretching back to King Louis XI, the founder of the first modern nation state, Cardinal Mazarin who organized the Peace of Westphalia that established modern thoughts on nation states, Jean-Baptiste Colbert who's economic theories gave meaning to economic sovereignty in the modern era, to Sadi Carnot who's application of Colbertist economics and resistance to British manipulation got him killed in 1895, to Charles de Gaulle, who established the 5 th Republic and devoted his life to resisting the Deep State on the basis of peaceful relations with Russia and China.

Then there is the populist rage of the French which dates back to the colorful days of the French revolution which established a unique tradition of mass revolts against the established order when it becomes abusive of the people this provides a "bottom up" factor which any politician desirous of keeping their heads attached to their necks must keep in mind.

For these two reasons (top down traditions of statecraft and bottom up traditions of freeing corrupt leaders' of their heads from their bodies), Macron has found himself joining President Trump's call to re-introduce Russia back into the G8, and has made major maneuvers to re-orient France towards a pro-China policy becoming the guest of honor at China's International Expo where $15 billion of deals were signed on energy, aerospace and agricultural initiatives.

Macron has even enraged Europe's technocratic elite by questioning the foundations of the European Union's viability while at the same time aptly criticizing NATO of 'brain death' . The crisis caused by the unravelling of the globalist vision of a post-nation state world order has resulted in an emergency conference in London to figure out how NATO can be saved from its total irrelevance. Faced with the anti-NATO sentiment expressed by Macron and Trump in recent months, and the emergence of the new multipolar order which is attracting ever more nation states (including NATO members) into its sphere of influence, Jens Stoltenberg made the desperate assertion that China must be made a target of the military alliance saying that China "is coming closer to us, investing heavily in infrastructure. We see them in Africa, we see them in the Arctic, we see them in cyber space and China now has the second-largest defense budget in the world."

The NATO Disorder and the Economic Meltdown

Today, after decades of neoliberal practices have undermined the once powerful agro-industrial capacities of France under the "post-industrial" Euro, it has become evident that austerity and increased taxes are the only solutions which the technocrats running the European Central Bank will permit. Since Euro membership forbids any nation to create a debt which is greater than 3% of GDP, the means to generate sufficient state credit to build large scale projects needed for an economic recovery do not exist.

In other words, from the standpoint of the Trans-Atlantic rules of the game, the situation is hopeless.

For all of his problems, Macron isn't blind to this fact and can see that Russia and China have successfully transformed the international order with the advent of the Belt and Road Initiative. He can see that this system uniquely offers western leaders (who wish to keep their heads in the face of the oncoming economic collapse), the only viable means to provide jobs, security and long term economic growth to their people since it is rooted in long term, open system thinking which is not connected to Hobbesian closed system geopolitics. De Gaulle would be happy to see this shift.

The Revival of de Gaulle

Charles de Gaulle was among a network of leaders who fought valiantly against the cancerous deep state that had formerly supported fascism in WWII. While Franklin Roosevelt had to do battle with such pro-fascist organizations such as the JP Morgan-funded Liberty League and Council on Foreign Relations from 1933-1945, President De Gaulle had to contend with the pro-Nazi Petain government whose agents immediately took over controls of France in the wake of WWII, and didn't go away upon the General's ascension to the Presidency during the near collapse of the 5 th republic in 1959.

De Gaulle strategically fought tooth and nail against the pro-NATO fascists led by General Challe who attempted two coup attempts against De Gaulle in 1960 and 1961 and later worked with MI6 and the CIA using private contractors like Permindex to arrange over 30 assassination attempts from 1961-1969.

De Gaulle was not only successful at taking France out of the NATO cage in 1966 , but he had organized to ensure Algeria's independence against the will of the entire deep state of France who often worked with Dulles' State Department to preserve France's colonial possessions. De Gaulle also recognized the importance of breaking the bipolar rules of the Cold War by reaching out to Russia calling for a renewed Europe " from the Atlantic to the Urals " and also an alliance with China with the intent of resolving the fires lit by western arsonists in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam whose independence he was committed to guaranteeing. De Gaulle wrote of his plan in his Memoires:

"My aim, then, was to disengage France, not from the Atlantic Alliance, which I intended to maintain by way of ultimate precaution, but from the integration carried out by NATO under American command; to establish relations with each of the states of the East bloc, first and foremost Russia, with the object of bringing about a détente, followed by understanding and cooperation; to do likewise, when the time was ripe, with China"

After arranging a treaty with China's Prime Minister Zhou Enlai, India's Prime Minster Nehru and the leadership of Cambodia in 1963 to create a China led block to resolve the crisis in Southeast Asia with France's help, De Gaulle became the first western head of state to recognize China and establish diplomatic relations with the Mainland on January 31, 1964. He saw that China's growth would become a driving force of world development and saw a friendship based on scientific and technological progress to be a source of France's renewal. Attacking the false dichotomy of "Free liberal capitalism" vs "totalitarian communism", De Gaulle expressed the Colbertist traditions of "dirigisme" which have historically driven France's progress since the 17 th century when he said "We are not going to commit ourselves to the empire of liberal capitalism, and nobody can believe that we are ever going to submit to the crushing totalitarianism of communism."

The De Gaulle-Kennedy Alliance

De Gaulle had great hopes to find like-minded anti-colonialist leaders and collaborators who were fighting against the deep state in other countries. In America he was inspired by the fresh leadership of the young John F. Kennedy whom he first met in Paris in May 1961. Of Kennedy he wrote "The new President was determined to devote himself to the cause of freedom, justice, and progress. It is true that, persuaded that it was the duty of the United States and himself to redress wrongs, he would be drawn into ill-advised interventions. But the experience of the statesman would no doubt have gradually restrained the impulsiveness of the idealist. John Kennedy had the ability, and had it not been for the crime which killed him, might have had the time to leave his mark on our age."

De Gaulle's advice to Kennedy was instrumental in the young President's decision to stay out of a land war in Vietnam and led to Kennedy's National Security Action Memorandum 263 to begin a phase out of American military from Vietnam on October 2, 1963. Kenney and De Gaulle both shared the view (alongside Italian industrialist Enrico Mattei with whom both collaborated) that Africa, Asia and South America needed advanced scientific and technological progress, energy sovereignty and sanitation in order to be fully liberated by the colonial structures of Europe. All three fought openly for this vision and all three fell in the line of battle (one to a plane crash in 1961, another to several shooters in Dallas in 1963 and the last to a staged "colour revolution" in 1969.) [1]

If De Gaulle, Kennedy and Mattei were alive today, it is guaranteed they would recognize in the Belt and Road Initiative and broader Eurasian alliance, the only viable pathway to a future worth living in and the only means to save the souls of their own nations. The question is: Will Macron continue on this Gaullist path and will other nations grow the balls to follow suite, or will those imperial fascists who overthrew De Gaulle's vision in 1969 succeed once more?

Footnote

[1] It is noteworthy that the same Montreal-based Permindex Corporation which was expelled from France for having orchestrated at least two attempts on De Gaulle's life was found by New Orleans D.A. Jim Garrison to be at the heart of the November 22, 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy.

*The author can be reached at [email protected]

[Jan 15, 2020] Trump Officials Stumble and Bumble Over 'Imminent Threats'

Jan 15, 2020 | www.theamericanconservative.com

s the debate over presidential war powers intensifies in Congress, a coterie of key Trump officials hit the Sunday talk shows last weekend to ratchet up the rhetoric on the "imminence" of the attack Iranian General Qassem Soleimani had allegedly planned.

The debate took on added significance after an intelligence briefing provided to House and Senate officials laying out the justification for Soleimani's killing was blasted by members on both sides of the aisle as "insulting," "demeaning," " dismissive " of Congress, and " disdainful ."

"It was this attitude that we don't have to tell Congress, we don't have to include Congress," said Senator Tim Kaine, Democrat of Virginia. He added that after various scenarios were presented by senators, the administration refused to provide any "commitment to ever come to Congress" no matter what the circumstances.

The president cannot take military action against another nation without Congress's approval, unless it is to defend against an imminent threat to U.S. territories, possessions, or citizens.​

The U.S. is not officially at war with Iran. Yet the Trump administration took the unprecedented step of openly ordering the killing of an Iranian senior state official of a country, without an authorization of military force against that country and without briefing Congress.

On Friday, Pompeo said the attacks were justified because there was "a series of imminent attacks that were being plotted by Qasem Soleimaini, we don't know precisely when and we don't precisely where."

Members of Congress and the media seized upon the quote, charging that it does not sound like the definition of "imminent."

President Trump himself seemed to grasp the importance of stressing that the attack was "imminent" when he added details Friday on Fox News, asserting that Soleimani was plotting attacks on four U.S. embassies.

"I think it would have been four embassies," Trump said. "Could have been military bases, could have been a lot of other things too. But it was imminent."

"We did it because they were looking to blow up our embassy," Trump added. "He was looking very seriously at our embassies, and not just the embassy in Baghdad. I can reveal that I believe it would have been four embassies."

But members of Congress say they were not told that four embassies had been targeted. And when Trump officials were asked Sunday whether that claim was true, one by one they were left sputtering.

Pentagon Chief Mark Esper conceded he "didn't see" intelligence indicating that on CBS's Face the Nation .

"I didn't see one with regard to four embassies," Esper said . "What I'm saying is I share the president's view."

"What the president said was he believed there probably and could've been attacks against additional embassies. I shared that view," said Esper.

National Security adviser Robert O'Brien seemed to imply that members of Congress were at fault for not extracting that information from their intelligence briefing.

"It does seem to be a contradiction. [Trump is] telling Laura Ingraham [about imminent attacks], but in a 75-minute classified briefing, your top national security people never mentioned this to members of Congress. Why not?" Chris Wallace asked O'Brien on Fox News Sunday .

"I wasn't at the briefing," O'Brien answered, "and I don't know how the Q&A went back and forth. Sometimes it depends on the questions that were asked or how they were phrased."

On Meet the Press , O'Brien asserted that "exquisite" intelligence he was privy to showed that "the threat was imminent."

When pressed by Chuck Todd about what the U.S. did to protect the other three embassies under alleged imminent threat, O'Brien declined to give details.

"Is 'imminent' months, not weeks? Are people misinterpreting that word?" asked Todd.

"I think imminent, generally, means soon, quickly, you know, in process. So you know, I think those threats were imminent. And I don't want to get into the definition further than that," said O'Brien.

Pompeo's claim that an attack could be "imminent" even though the U.S. did not "know where or when" it would come is "pretty inconsistent," Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, replied Sunday on Meet the Press.

"To me there's a bigger question too. This is what really infuriated me about the briefing [Trump officials] maintain both in private and in public that a vote by Congress in 2003 or 2002 to go after Saddam Hussein was a vote that now allows them to still be in Iraq and do whatever they want, including killing a foreign general from Iran," said Paul. "And I don't think that's what Congress meant in 2002. We really need to have a debate about whether we should still be in Iraq or in Afghanistan. There needs to be authorization from Congress."

Paul argued that presidents from both parties have, for decades, usurped Congress's war powers, and that it is time for Congress to claw them back.

Said Paul, the founders "wanted to make it difficult to go to war, and I think we've been drifting away from that for a long time, but that's why I'm willing to stand up, not because I distrust President Trump -- actually think he has shown remarkable restraint -- but I'm willing to stand up even against a president of my party because we need to stand up and take back the power."

While the debate over war powers continues, Trump supporters have counter-attacked by questioning the patriotism of those who don't fall in line with their narrative.

Former White House spokesperson Sarah Huckabee-Sanders "can't think of anything dumber" than Congress deciding matters of war and peace. Nikki Haley accused Democrats of "mourning" General Soleimani. Congressman Doug Collins said Democrats are " in love with terrorists ." And Lindsey Graham said senators like Lee and Paul are "empowering the enemy" by trying to rein in Trump's war powers.

On Monday, Trump added on Twitter: "The Fake News Media and their Democrat Partners are working hard to determine whether or not the future attack by terrorist Soleimani was 'imminent' or not, & was my team in agreement. The answer to both is a strong YES., but it doesn't really matter because of his horrible past!" If Trump's team was really in agreement, they sure had a good way of hiding it. about the author Barbara Boland is TAC's foreign policy and national security reporter. Previously, she worked as an editor for the Washington Examiner and for CNS News. She is the author of Patton Uncovered , a book about General George Patton in World War II, and her work has appeared on Fox News, The Hill , UK Spectator , and elsewhere. Boland is a graduate from Immaculata University in Pennsylvania. Follow her on Twitter @BBatDC .

=marco01= • 4 hours ago

Trump supporters literally do not care if the Trump admin lies to them.

They trust Trump 100%, he can lie to them as much as he wants.

[Jan 14, 2020] Impeachment Of President Trump An Imperial War Game by By Barbara Boyd

Highly recommended!
Barbara Boyd correctly called Kent testimony "obsine" becase it was one grad neocon gallisination, which has nothing to do with real facts on the ground.
She attributed those dirty games not only to the USA but also to London.
Nov 22, 2019 | futurefastforward.com

If you want to stop the coup against the President, you must understand how Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton's State Department carried out a coup against the democratically elected government of Ukraine in 2014.

In a November 16 webcast, LaRouche PAC's Barbara Boyd presented the real story behind the present impeachment farce: how the very forces running the attack on President Trump, used thugs as their enforcers, in order to turn Ukraine into a pawn in the British geopolitical war drive against Russia.

https://youtu.be/uBg3vLjWePI

[Jan 14, 2020] Freeland's New Role as Deputy Prime Minister Puts her 2nd in Command (of the Titanic?)

Notable quotes:
"... "positions her as one of the top candidates to take over the liberal party after Trudeau" ..."
"... Government Operations Committee ..."
"... "All liberal democracies in the world today are facing huge challenges, and for me the conclusion that pushed me to is; there are only 37 million Canadians. Hugely challenging world threats posed to the rules-based international order, greater threats since the 2nd World War. We have to be united in how we confront those challenges." ..."
"... Ever since her appointment to the role of Cabinet Minister in 2015, Freeland played the role assigned to her as a high level Rhodes Scholar and priestess of neo-liberalism. Springing from a Nazi-connected Ukrainian family based out of Alberta, Freeland made her mark working as lead editor in British Intelligence-controlled news agencies the London Economist, Thompson-Reuters, Financial Times and later Canada's Globe and Mail. Through these positions as "perception manager" of the super elite, she became friends with some of the most vicious Russian, Ukrainian and other eastern European oligarchs who rose to power under Perestroika and the liberalization of the east-bloc. ..."
"... The author is the founder of the Canadian Patriot Review and Director of the Rising Tide Foundation of Canada. He has authored 3 volumes of the series "The Untold History of Canada" and can be reached at [email protected] ..."
Jan 14, 2020 | canadianpatriot.org

editor / November 27, 2019 An interesting victory has been won for forces in Canada who have wished to clean up the mess made by the two disastrous years Chrystia Freeland has spent occupying the position of Foreign Minister of Canada. This victory has taken the form of a Freeland's removal from the position which she has used to destroy diplomatic relations with China, Russia and other nations targeted for regime change by her London-based controllers. Taking over the helm as Minister of Global Affairs is Francois-Philippe Champagne, former Minister of Infrastructure and ally of "old guard" Liberal elder Jean Chretien- both of whom have advocated positive diplomatic and business relations with China in opposition to Freeland for years.

As positive of a development as this is, the danger which Freeland represents to world peace and Canada's role in the New Emerging system led by the Eurasian Alliance should not be ignored, since she has now been given the role of Deputy Prime Minister, putting her into a position to easily take over the Party and the nation as 2 nd in command.

Already the Canadian press machine on all sides of the aisle are raising the prospect of Freeland's takeover of the Liberal Party as it "positions her as one of the top candidates to take over the liberal party after Trudeau" as one Globe and Mail reporter stated.

The Strange Case of Deputy Prime Ministers

The very role of Deputy Prime Minister is a strange one which has had many pundits scratching their heads, since the Privy Council position is highly under-defined, and was only created by Justin's father Pierre in 1977 as part of his "cybernetics revolution" which empowered the Privy Council Office and Prime Minister's Office under "scientific management" of a technocratic elite. Although it is technically the position of 2nd in Command, it is not like the position of Vice-President whose function has much greater constitutional clarity.

In some cases, the position has been ceremonial, and in others, like the case of Brian Mulroney's Dep. PM Don Mazankowski (1986-1993) who chaired the Government Operations Committee and led in imposing the nation-stripping NAFTA, the position was very powerful indeed. Some Prime Ministers have chosen not even to have a Deputy PM, and the last one (Anne McLellan) ended with the downfall of Paul Martin in 2006. McLellan and another former Deputy Prime Minister John Manley were both leading figures behind the creation of the think tank Canada2020 in 2003 that soon brought Justin and Obamaton behaviorists into a re-structuring of the Liberal Party of Canada during the Harper years, shedding it of its pro-China, pro-Russia, anti-NATO influences that had been represented by less technocratically-minded statesmen like Jean Chretien years earlier.

Personally, as a Canadian-based journalist who has done a fair bit of homework on Canadian history, and the structures of Canada's government, I honestly don't think the question of Freeland's becoming Prime Minister matters nearly as much as many believe for the simple reason that Justin is a well-known cardboard cut-out who simply doesn't know how to do anything terribly important without a teleprompter and experienced handlers. This is not a secret to other world leaders, and anyone familiar with the mountains of video footage taken from G7 events featuring the pathetic scene of little Justin chronically ignored by his peers goes far enough to demonstrate the point.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/JQwNIYB2Z6s?feature=oembed

Freeland's role in Canada has never had much to do with Canada, as much as it has with Canada's role as a geopolitical chess piece in a turbulent and changing world and her current role as Deputy Prime Minister as well as Minister for Intergovernmental Affairs can only be understood in those global terms.

Unity for the Sake of Greater Division

For Canada to play a useful role in obstructing the Eurasian-led New Silk Road paradigm sweeping across the globe in recent years, it requires the fragmenting American monarchy be kept in line.

The problem for the British Empire in this regard, is that the recent elections have demonstrated how divided Canada is with the Liberal Party suffering total losses across the Provinces of Alberta, Saskatchewan and Quebec due to the technocratic adherence to the Green New Deal agenda and resistance to actual industrial development initiatives. The collapse of living standards, and the lack of any policies for rebuilding the industrial base that 30 years of NAFTA have destroyed, has resulted not only in the rejection of the Liberal Party but has also awoken a renewed demand for separation in all three provinces.

Referring implicitly to the crisis of such "authoritarian regimes" as China, Russia, Iran and Trump's USA, as well as the need to decarbonize the world, Freeland put the problem she is assigned to fix in the following terms : "All liberal democracies in the world today are facing huge challenges, and for me the conclusion that pushed me to is; there are only 37 million Canadians. Hugely challenging world threats posed to the rules-based international order, greater threats since the 2nd World War. We have to be united in how we confront those challenges."

To put it simply, if centralized control were to break down at a time when the Belt and Road Initiative ( and its Polar Silk Road extension ) is redefining the world system OUTSIDE of the control of the western oligarchy, then it is clearly understood that the Green Agenda will fail, but the dynamics of the BRI will become hegemonic as Canada realizes (like the Greeks and Italians currently) that the only viable policies for growing the real economy is coming from China.

Some final words on Freeland, Neo-liberal High Priestess

Ever since her appointment to the role of Cabinet Minister in 2015, Freeland played the role assigned to her as a high level Rhodes Scholar and priestess of neo-liberalism. Springing from a Nazi-connected Ukrainian family based out of Alberta, Freeland made her mark working as lead editor in British Intelligence-controlled news agencies the London Economist, Thompson-Reuters, Financial Times and later Canada's Globe and Mail. Through these positions as "perception manager" of the super elite, she became friends with some of the most vicious Russian, Ukrainian and other eastern European oligarchs who rose to power under Perestroika and the liberalization of the east-bloc. She also became close friends with such golems as George Soros, Larry Summers and Al Gore embedding their institutions ever more deeply into Canada since she was brought into Canada2020 (her move to politics was facilitated by fellow Rhodes Scholar/Canada2020 leader Bob Rae abdicating his position as MP for Ontario in 2013).

When Foreign Minister Stephane Dion committed the crime of attempting to heal relations with China and called for a Russia-Canada Summit to deal mutually with Arctic development, counter-terrorism and space cooperation , he had to go. After an abrupt firing, Freeland was given his portfolio and immediately went to work in turning China and Russia into public enemies #1 and #2, passing the Magnintsky Act in 2017 allowing for the sanctioning of nations for human rights (easily falsified when Soros' White Helmets and other CIA/MI6-affiliated NGOs are seen as "on-the-ground" authorities documenting said abuse).

Her role as champion of NAFTA which Trump rightly threatened to scrap in order to re-introduce protective tariffs elevated her to a technocratic David fighting some orange Goliath, and her advocacy of the Green New Deal has been behind some of the most extreme energy/arctic anti-development legislation passed in Canada's history.

Whether it is though individual provinces claiming their rights to form independent treaties with Eurasian powers around cooperation on the BRI, or whether Canada can be returned to a pro-nation state orientation under the "Chretien faction" in the federal government, the current future of Canada is as under-defined as the role of "deputy minister". Either way the nation chooses navigate through the storm, it is certain that any commitment to staying on board the deck of the Titanic known as the "western neoliberal order" has only one cold and tragic outcome which Freeland and her ilk will drown before admitting to.

The author is the founder of the Canadian Patriot Review and Director of the Rising Tide Foundation of Canada. He has authored 3 volumes of the series "The Untold History of Canada" and can be reached at [email protected]

Facebook Twitter WordPress Print Kindle It November 27, 2019 in Miscellaneous . Tags: deep state , freeland , rhodes scholar , world government Related posts Unravelling the Mystery of the 'Annexation Movement of 1849' The 'Greta Effect': Are We Really This Time, for Certain Certain, Heading for the End Times? Living Under the Spectre of Hyperinflation: 1923 Weimar and Today Filters Video Player

https://www.youtube.com/embed/7QByzhXiF1U?controls=0&rel=0&disablekb=1&showinfo=0&modestbranding=0&html5=1&iv_load_policy=3&autoplay=0&end=0&loop=0&playsinline=0&start=0&nocookie=false&enablejsapi=1&origin=http%3A%2F%2Fcanadianpatriot.org&widgetid=1 00:00 16:37 © 2020 The Canadian Patriot

[Jan 14, 2020] Freeland's New Role as Deputy Prime Minister Puts her 2nd in Command (of the Titanic?)

Notable quotes:
"... "positions her as one of the top candidates to take over the liberal party after Trudeau" ..."
"... Government Operations Committee ..."
"... "All liberal democracies in the world today are facing huge challenges, and for me the conclusion that pushed me to is; there are only 37 million Canadians. Hugely challenging world threats posed to the rules-based international order, greater threats since the 2nd World War. We have to be united in how we confront those challenges." ..."
"... Ever since her appointment to the role of Cabinet Minister in 2015, Freeland played the role assigned to her as a high level Rhodes Scholar and priestess of neo-liberalism. Springing from a Nazi-connected Ukrainian family based out of Alberta, Freeland made her mark working as lead editor in British Intelligence-controlled news agencies the London Economist, Thompson-Reuters, Financial Times and later Canada's Globe and Mail. Through these positions as "perception manager" of the super elite, she became friends with some of the most vicious Russian, Ukrainian and other eastern European oligarchs who rose to power under Perestroika and the liberalization of the east-bloc. ..."
"... The author is the founder of the Canadian Patriot Review and Director of the Rising Tide Foundation of Canada. He has authored 3 volumes of the series "The Untold History of Canada" and can be reached at [email protected] ..."
Jan 14, 2020 | canadianpatriot.org

editor / November 27, 2019 An interesting victory has been won for forces in Canada who have wished to clean up the mess made by the two disastrous years Chrystia Freeland has spent occupying the position of Foreign Minister of Canada. This victory has taken the form of a Freeland's removal from the position which she has used to destroy diplomatic relations with China, Russia and other nations targeted for regime change by her London-based controllers. Taking over the helm as Minister of Global Affairs is Francois-Philippe Champagne, former Minister of Infrastructure and ally of "old guard" Liberal elder Jean Chretien- both of whom have advocated positive diplomatic and business relations with China in opposition to Freeland for years.

As positive of a development as this is, the danger which Freeland represents to world peace and Canada's role in the New Emerging system led by the Eurasian Alliance should not be ignored, since she has now been given the role of Deputy Prime Minister, putting her into a position to easily take over the Party and the nation as 2 nd in command.

Already the Canadian press machine on all sides of the aisle are raising the prospect of Freeland's takeover of the Liberal Party as it "positions her as one of the top candidates to take over the liberal party after Trudeau" as one Globe and Mail reporter stated.

The Strange Case of Deputy Prime Ministers

The very role of Deputy Prime Minister is a strange one which has had many pundits scratching their heads, since the Privy Council position is highly under-defined, and was only created by Justin's father Pierre in 1977 as part of his "cybernetics revolution" which empowered the Privy Council Office and Prime Minister's Office under "scientific management" of a technocratic elite. Although it is technically the position of 2nd in Command, it is not like the position of Vice-President whose function has much greater constitutional clarity.

In some cases, the position has been ceremonial, and in others, like the case of Brian Mulroney's Dep. PM Don Mazankowski (1986-1993) who chaired the Government Operations Committee and led in imposing the nation-stripping NAFTA, the position was very powerful indeed. Some Prime Ministers have chosen not even to have a Deputy PM, and the last one (Anne McLellan) ended with the downfall of Paul Martin in 2006. McLellan and another former Deputy Prime Minister John Manley were both leading figures behind the creation of the think tank Canada2020 in 2003 that soon brought Justin and Obamaton behaviorists into a re-structuring of the Liberal Party of Canada during the Harper years, shedding it of its pro-China, pro-Russia, anti-NATO influences that had been represented by less technocratically-minded statesmen like Jean Chretien years earlier.

Personally, as a Canadian-based journalist who has done a fair bit of homework on Canadian history, and the structures of Canada's government, I honestly don't think the question of Freeland's becoming Prime Minister matters nearly as much as many believe for the simple reason that Justin is a well-known cardboard cut-out who simply doesn't know how to do anything terribly important without a teleprompter and experienced handlers. This is not a secret to other world leaders, and anyone familiar with the mountains of video footage taken from G7 events featuring the pathetic scene of little Justin chronically ignored by his peers goes far enough to demonstrate the point.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/JQwNIYB2Z6s?feature=oembed

Freeland's role in Canada has never had much to do with Canada, as much as it has with Canada's role as a geopolitical chess piece in a turbulent and changing world and her current role as Deputy Prime Minister as well as Minister for Intergovernmental Affairs can only be understood in those global terms.

Unity for the Sake of Greater Division

For Canada to play a useful role in obstructing the Eurasian-led New Silk Road paradigm sweeping across the globe in recent years, it requires the fragmenting American monarchy be kept in line.

The problem for the British Empire in this regard, is that the recent elections have demonstrated how divided Canada is with the Liberal Party suffering total losses across the Provinces of Alberta, Saskatchewan and Quebec due to the technocratic adherence to the Green New Deal agenda and resistance to actual industrial development initiatives. The collapse of living standards, and the lack of any policies for rebuilding the industrial base that 30 years of NAFTA have destroyed, has resulted not only in the rejection of the Liberal Party but has also awoken a renewed demand for separation in all three provinces.

Referring implicitly to the crisis of such "authoritarian regimes" as China, Russia, Iran and Trump's USA, as well as the need to decarbonize the world, Freeland put the problem she is assigned to fix in the following terms : "All liberal democracies in the world today are facing huge challenges, and for me the conclusion that pushed me to is; there are only 37 million Canadians. Hugely challenging world threats posed to the rules-based international order, greater threats since the 2nd World War. We have to be united in how we confront those challenges."

To put it simply, if centralized control were to break down at a time when the Belt and Road Initiative ( and its Polar Silk Road extension ) is redefining the world system OUTSIDE of the control of the western oligarchy, then it is clearly understood that the Green Agenda will fail, but the dynamics of the BRI will become hegemonic as Canada realizes (like the Greeks and Italians currently) that the only viable policies for growing the real economy is coming from China.

Some final words on Freeland, Neo-liberal High Priestess

Ever since her appointment to the role of Cabinet Minister in 2015, Freeland played the role assigned to her as a high level Rhodes Scholar and priestess of neo-liberalism. Springing from a Nazi-connected Ukrainian family based out of Alberta, Freeland made her mark working as lead editor in British Intelligence-controlled news agencies the London Economist, Thompson-Reuters, Financial Times and later Canada's Globe and Mail. Through these positions as "perception manager" of the super elite, she became friends with some of the most vicious Russian, Ukrainian and other eastern European oligarchs who rose to power under Perestroika and the liberalization of the east-bloc. She also became close friends with such golems as George Soros, Larry Summers and Al Gore embedding their institutions ever more deeply into Canada since she was brought into Canada2020 (her move to politics was facilitated by fellow Rhodes Scholar/Canada2020 leader Bob Rae abdicating his position as MP for Ontario in 2013).

When Foreign Minister Stephane Dion committed the crime of attempting to heal relations with China and called for a Russia-Canada Summit to deal mutually with Arctic development, counter-terrorism and space cooperation , he had to go. After an abrupt firing, Freeland was given his portfolio and immediately went to work in turning China and Russia into public enemies #1 and #2, passing the Magnintsky Act in 2017 allowing for the sanctioning of nations for human rights (easily falsified when Soros' White Helmets and other CIA/MI6-affiliated NGOs are seen as "on-the-ground" authorities documenting said abuse).

Her role as champion of NAFTA which Trump rightly threatened to scrap in order to re-introduce protective tariffs elevated her to a technocratic David fighting some orange Goliath, and her advocacy of the Green New Deal has been behind some of the most extreme energy/arctic anti-development legislation passed in Canada's history.

Whether it is though individual provinces claiming their rights to form independent treaties with Eurasian powers around cooperation on the BRI, or whether Canada can be returned to a pro-nation state orientation under the "Chretien faction" in the federal government, the current future of Canada is as under-defined as the role of "deputy minister". Either way the nation chooses navigate through the storm, it is certain that any commitment to staying on board the deck of the Titanic known as the "western neoliberal order" has only one cold and tragic outcome which Freeland and her ilk will drown before admitting to.

The author is the founder of the Canadian Patriot Review and Director of the Rising Tide Foundation of Canada. He has authored 3 volumes of the series "The Untold History of Canada" and can be reached at [email protected]

Facebook Twitter WordPress Print Kindle It November 27, 2019 in Miscellaneous . Tags: deep state , freeland , rhodes scholar , world government Related posts Unravelling the Mystery of the 'Annexation Movement of 1849' The 'Greta Effect': Are We Really This Time, for Certain Certain, Heading for the End Times? Living Under the Spectre of Hyperinflation: 1923 Weimar and Today Filters Video Player

https://www.youtube.com/embed/7QByzhXiF1U?controls=0&rel=0&disablekb=1&showinfo=0&modestbranding=0&html5=1&iv_load_policy=3&autoplay=0&end=0&loop=0&playsinline=0&start=0&nocookie=false&enablejsapi=1&origin=http%3A%2F%2Fcanadianpatriot.org&widgetid=1 00:00 16:37 © 2020 The Canadian Patriot

[Jan 14, 2020] Impeachment Of President Trump An Imperial War Game by By Barbara Boyd

Highly recommended!
Barbara Boyd correctly called Kent testimony "obsine" becase it was one grad neocon gallisination, which has nothing to do with real facts on the ground.
She attributed those dirty games not only to the USA but also to London.
Nov 22, 2019 | futurefastforward.com

If you want to stop the coup against the President, you must understand how Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton's State Department carried out a coup against the democratically elected government of Ukraine in 2014.

In a November 16 webcast, LaRouche PAC's Barbara Boyd presented the real story behind the present impeachment farce: how the very forces running the attack on President Trump, used thugs as their enforcers, in order to turn Ukraine into a pawn in the British geopolitical war drive against Russia.

https://youtu.be/uBg3vLjWePI

[Jan 12, 2020] MIC along with Wall Street controls the government and the country

Highly recommended!
Jan 12, 2020 | angrybearblog.com

  1. likbez , January 12, 2020 5:30 pm

    Everyone keeps dancing around it: Iraqi PM Abdul-Mahdi has reported that Soleimani was on the way to see him with a reply to a Saudi peace proposal. Who profits from Peace? Who does not?

    The killing of Soleimani, while a tragic even with far reaching consequences, is just an illustration of the general rule: MIC does not profit from peace. And MIC dominates any national security state, into which the USA was transformed by the technological revolution on computers and communications, as well as the events of 9/11.

    The USA government can be viewed as just a public relations center for MIC. That's why Trump/Pompeo/Esper/Pence gang position themselves as rabid neocons, which means MIC lobbyists in order to hold their respective positions. There is no way out of this situation. This is a classic Catch 22 trap.

    The fact that a couple of them are also "Rapture" obsessed religious bigots means that the principle of separation of church and state does no matter when MIC interests are involved.

    The health of MIC requires maintaining an inflated defense budget at all costs. Which, in turn, drives foreign wars and the drive to capture other nations' resources to compensate for MIC appetite. The drive which is of course closely allied with Wall Street interests (disaster capitalism.)

    In such conditions fake "imminent threat" assassinations necessarily start happening. Although the personality of Pompeo and the fact that he is a big friend of the current head of Mossad probably played some role.

    It's really funny that Trump (probably with the help of his "reference group," which includes Adelson and Kushner), managed to appoint as the top US diplomat a person who was trained as a mechanic engineer and specialized as a tank repair mechanic. And who was a long-time military contractor. So it is quite natural that he represents interests of MIC.

    IMHO under Trump/Pompeo/Esper trio some kind of additional skirmishes with Iran are a real possibility: they are necessary to maintain the current inflated level of defense spending.

    State of the US infrastructure, the actual level of unemployment (U6 is ~7% which some neolibs call full employment ;-), and the level of poverty of the bottom 33% of the USA population be damned. Essentially the bottom 33% is the third world country within the USA.

    "If you make more than $15,000 (roughly the annual salary of a minimum-wage employee working 40 hours per week), you earn more than 32.2% of Americans

    The 894 people that earn more than $20 million make more than 99.99989% of Americans, and are compensated a cumulative $37,009,979,568 per year. "

    ( https://www.huffpost.com/entry/income-inequality-crisis_n_4221012 )

[Jan 12, 2020] Why the West Falsifies the History of World War II -- Strategic Culture

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Historians interpret and reinterpret history. It is a normal process except when politicians do the reinterpreting. Their interests are not intellectual but rather political. They seek justification for their politics by evoking the past, history as they need it to be. ..."
"... The greatest blow to collective security came in September 1938 when France and Britain concluded the Munich accords which sanctioned the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia ..."
"... After the war, the west launched a campaign accusing Stalin of being Hitler's "ally" ..."
"... Western propaganda claimed that the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were "allies". World War II was entirely their fault, while France, Britain and Poland were innocent victims of totalitarianism ..."
"... After the 2014 putsch, Ukrainian Nazi collaborators like Stepan Bandera were made into national heroes ..."
"... As mightily as Poland seeks to falsify history, it cannot cover up the atrocities of Ukrainian Nazi collaborators against Poles, remembered in a recently released Polish hit film, "Volhynia" ..."
Jan 12, 2020 | www.strategic-culture.org

Why the West Falsifies the History of World War II Michael Jabara Carley November 29, 2016 © Photo: Public domain

Historians interpret and reinterpret history. It is a normal process except when politicians do the reinterpreting. Their interests are not intellectual but rather political. They seek justification for their politics by evoking the past, history as they need it to be.

The origins and waging of World War II are of special interest to western politicians, past and present. This was true even early on. In December 1939 the British government decided to lay a white paper on the Anglo-Franco-Soviet negotiations during the spring and summer of that year to organise a war-fighting alliance against Hitlerite Germany. Foreign Office officials carefully picked out a hundred or so documents to show that they and the French had been serious about organising an anti-German alliance and that the USSR was principally responsible for the failure of the negotiations. In early January 1940 the white paper reached the stage of page proofs. Nearly everyone in London was impatient to publish it. All that was needed was the approval of France and the Polish government in exile. Much to the surprise of British officials, France opposed the publication of the white paper, and so did the Polish government in exile. This may also come as a surprise to present day readers. Why would French and Polish officials be opposed to a publication considered "good propaganda" by the British to blacken the reputation of the Soviet Union?

Let's allow the French ambassador in London to explain in his own words. "The general impression which arises from reading [the white paper]", he wrote in a memorandum dated 12 January 1940, "is that from beginning to end the Russian government never ceased to insist on giving the agreement [being negotiated] the maximum scope and efficacy. Sincere or not, this determination of the Soviet government to cover effectively all the possible routes of a German aggression appears throughout the negotiations to collide with Anglo-French reluctance and with the clear intention of the two governments to limit the field of Russian intervention".

And the French ambassador did not stop there. He observed that critics who felt that the USSR had been forced into agreement with Nazi Germany by Anglo-French "repugnance" to make genuine commitments in Moscow would find in the white paper "a certain number of arguments in their favour." The language used here was in the finest traditions of diplomatic understatement, but the Foreign Office nevertheless got the message. The more so because there was this further, telling irritatant to Gallic sensibilities that the documents selected for the white paper failed to show that they, the French, had been more anxious to conclude with Moscow than their British allies. What would happen, the French wondered, if the Soviet government published its own collection of documents in reply to a white paper? Who would public opinion believe? The French were not sure of the answer.

As for the Poles in exile, they could not much insist, but they too preferred that the white paper not be published. Even in those early days Polish exiles were not anxious to publicise their responsibilities in the origins of the war and their swift defeat at the hands of the Wehrmacht.

In fact, all three governments, British, French and Polish, had much to hide, not just their conduct in 1939, but during the entire period following Adolf Hitler's rise to power in January 1933. The Soviet government was quick to ring the alarm bells of danger and to propose a defensive, anti-Nazi alliance to France and Britain. And yes, Moscow also made overtures to Poland. The Soviet commissar for foreign affairs, M. M. Litvinov, even hoped to bring fascist Italy into an anti-Nazi coalition. In Bucharest, the Soviet government made concerted efforts to gain Romanian participation in a broad anti-German alliance redolent of the Entente coalition of World War I.

Were all these Soviet efforts a ruse to dupe the west while Soviet diplomats secretly negotiated with Nazi Germany? Not at all, Russian archives appear conclusive on this point. The Soviet overtures were serious, but its would-be allies demurred, one after the other, except for Poland, which never for a moment considered joining an anti-Nazi alliance with the Soviet Union. Commissar Litvinov watched as Soviet would-be allies sought to compose with Nazi Germany. Poland persistently obstructed Soviet policy and Romania, under Polish and German pressure, backed away from better relations with Moscow. One Soviet ambassador even recommended that the Soviet government not break off all relations with Berlin in order to send a message, especially to Paris and London, that the USSR could also compose with Nazi Germany. The four most important French diplomats in Moscow during the 1930s warned repeatedly that France must protect its relations with the USSR or risk seeing it come to terms with Berlin. In Paris their reports disappeared into the files, ultimately unheeded. The greatest blow to collective security came in September 1938 when France and Britain concluded the Munich accords which sanctioned the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia. Neither Czechoslovak nor Soviet diplomats were invited to participate in the negotiations. As for Poland, it allied itself with Nazi Germany. "If Hitler obtains Czechoslovak territories," said Polish diplomats before Munich, "then we will have our part too".

The greatest blow to collective security came in September 1938 when France and Britain concluded the Munich accords which sanctioned the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia

Could it be a surprise that after nearly six years of failed attempts to organise an anti-Nazi front, that the Soviet government would lose all confidence in the French and British governments and cut a deal with Berlin to stay out of a war, which everyone recognised was imminent? This was the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact signed on 23 August 1939. As for the Poles, in their hubris and blindness, they mocked the idea of an alliance with the USSR right up until the first day of the war.

The Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact was the result of the failure of six years of Soviet policy to conclude an anti-Nazi alliance with the west and not the cause of that failure. The British ambassador in Moscow accused the Soviet government of "bad faith", but that was just Pot calling Kettle black. Even in the last days of peace, the British and French governments looked for a way out of war. "Although we cannot in the circumstances avoid declaring war," said one British minister, "we can always fulfill the letter of a declaration of war without immediately going all out." In fact, France and Britain scarcely raised a finger to help Poland when it was invaded on 1 September 1939. Having brought disaster on itself, the Polish government fled Warsaw after the first days of fighting, its members crossing into Romania to be interned.

If France and Britain would not help the Poles in their moment of desperation, could Joseph Stalin have reasonably calculated that the British and French would have done more to help the Soviet Union, had it entered the war in September 1939? Clearly not. The USSR would have to look to its own defences. No one should be surprised therefore that a few months later the French and Poles in exile would oppose publication of a white paper which could open a Pandora's box of questions about the origins of the war and their failure to join an anti-Nazi alliance. Better to let sleeping dogs lie and hope that government archives would not be opened for a long time.

After the war, the west launched a campaign accusing Stalin of being Hitler's "ally"

After the war, however, the fiasco surrounding the British white paper was long forgotten. The sleeping dogs awakened and began to bay. The west launched a campaign accusing Stalin of being Hitler's "ally". In 1948 the US State Department issued a collection of documents entitled Nazi-Soviet Relations, 1939-1941, to which the Soviet government replied with Falsifiers of History. The propaganda war was on, as was the western especially American attempt to attribute to the USSR as much as to Nazi Germany the responsibility for setting off World War II.

The American propaganda was preposterous given the history of the 1930s as we now know it from various European archives. Was there ever a gesture of ingratitude greater than US accusations blaming the USSR for the origins of the war and covering up the huge contribution of the Red Army to the common victory against Nazi Germany? These days in the west the role of the Soviet people in destroying Nazism is practically unknown. Few are aware that the Red Army fought almost alone for three years against the Wehrmacht all the while demanding a second front in France from its Anglo-American allies. Few know that the Red Army inflicted more than 80% of all casualties on the Wehrmacht and its allies, and that the Soviet people suffered losses so high that no one knows the exact numbers, though they are estimated at 26 to 27 million civilians and soldiers. Anglo-American losses were trivial by comparison.

Ironically, the anti-Russian campaign to falsify history intensified after the dismemberment of the USSR in 1991. The Baltic states and Poland led the charge. Like a tail wagging the dog, they stampeded all too willing European organisations, like the OSCE and PACE and the EU Parliament in Strasbourg, into ridiculous statements about the origins of World War II. It was the triumph of ignorance by politicians who knew nothing or who calculated that the few who did know something about the war, would not be heard. After all, how many people have read the diplomatic papers in various European archives detailing Soviet efforts to build an anti-Nazi alliance during the 1930s? How many people would know of the responsibilities of London, Paris, and Warsaw in obstructing the common European defence against Nazi Germany? "Not many," must have been the conclusion of European governments. The few historians and informed citizens who did or do know the truth could easily be shouted down, marginalised or ignored.

Western propaganda claimed that the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were "allies". World War II was entirely their fault, while France, Britain and Poland were innocent victims of totalitarianism

Thus it was that Hitler and Stalin became accomplices, the two pals and the two "totalitarians". The Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were "allies". World War II was entirely their fault. France, Britain and Poland were innocent victims of totalitarianism. The OSCE and PACE issued resolutions to this effect in 2009, declaring 23 August a day of remembrance of the victims of the Nazi-Soviet "alliance", as if the non-aggression pact signed on that day came out of the blue and had no context other than totalitarian evil.

In 2014 after the US and EU supported a coup d'état in Kiev, a fascist junta took power in the Ukraine, and the propaganda campaign to falsify history intensified. Ukrainian Nazi collaborators like Stepan Bandera were made into national heroes. The Ukrainian paramilitary forces, the so-called Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (OUN/UPA), which fought alongside the Wehrmacht and SS, were likewise transformed into forces of liberation.

After the 2014 putsch, Ukrainian Nazi collaborators like Stepan Bandera were made into national heroes

It looked like Poland and the Baltic states had gained an ally for their ugly anti-Russian campaigns. SS veterans paraded in the Baltic countries, and Polish hooligans vandalised Red Army graves while the Warsaw government bulldozed memorials to the Soviet liberators of Poland. Just this autumn Warsaw has attempted to control the thematic messages of a new museum of the Second World War being opened in Gdansk so that they conform to Polish government propaganda. The ruling Law and Justice Party wants to make Poland into a noble victim and the main story of World War II. In fact, Poland was a main story of the 1930s though not in any noble role. It was a spoiler of European collective security.

In October of this year the Polish and Ukrainian legislative assemblies passed resolutions vesting responsibility for World War II in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Given Poland's role in collaborating with Nazi Germany and obstructing Soviet efforts to create an anti-Nazi alliance in the 1930s, this resolution is surreal. Equally perverse is the Ukrainian equivalent resolution by a government celebrating Nazi collaboration during World War II.

Ironically, the the Law and Justice Partyhas its own troubles in its "alliance" with fascist Ukraine. Those Ukrainian collaborators, who fought with the Nazis and committed atrocities against Soviet citizens, also committed mass murder in Poland during the latter part of the war. As mightily as Poland seeks to falsify history, it cannot cover up the atrocities of Ukrainian Nazi collaborators against Poles, remembered in a recently released Polish hit film, "Volhynia". It looks like a poetic falling out amongst thieves who must bury the history of Ukrainian fascism and Nazi collaboration in order to unite against the common Russian foe. If only the numerous Ukrainians now living in southern Poland would stop putting up illegal monuments to remember Ukrainian Nazi collaborators. The poor Poles are caught between a rock and hard place. It is equally disagreeable to remember that the Red Army liberated Poland and stopped the atrocities of Ukrainian Nazi collaborators.

As mightily as Poland seeks to falsify history, it cannot cover up the atrocities of Ukrainian Nazi collaborators against Poles, remembered in a recently released Polish hit film, "Volhynia"

Will Russia and Poland finally bury the hatchet to rid themselves of the new wave of Ukrainian fascists in their midst? This is unlikely. The Polish government also had to choose in the 1930s between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. It chose collaboration with Nazi Germany and spurned an anti-Nazi alliance with the Soviet Union. No wonder history must be falsified. There is so much for western governments and Poland to hide. The views of individual contributors do not necessarily represent those of the Strategic Culture Foundation. Tags: World War I World War II

[Jan 12, 2020] US has been preaching human rights while mounting wars and lying.

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Over $7 trillion spent while homelessness is rampant. Healthcare is unaffordable for the 99% of the population. ..."
Jan 12, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Likklemore , Jan 11 2020 17:48 utc | 201

At 2016, here is the long bombing list of the 32 countries by the late William Blum. Did I mention sanctions is an Act of War?

Little u.s. has been preaching human rights while mounting wars and lying. Albright thought the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children were worth it. !!! it was worth killings and maiming.

Over $7 trillion spent while homelessness is rampant. Healthcare is unaffordable for the 99% of the population.

The u.s. will leave Iraq and Syria aka Saigon 1975 or horizontal. It's over.

2020: u.s. Stands Alone.

Searching for friends. Now, after Russiagate here is little pompous: "we want to be friends with Russia." Sanctions much excepting we need RD180 engines, seizure of diplomatic properties. Who are you kidding?

"we seek a constructive and productive relationship with the Russian Federation".

What a bunch of hypocrites? How dare you criticize commenters who see little u.s. in the light of day, not a shining beacon on the hill..

[Jan 12, 2020] Why Canada Defends Ukrainian Fascism -- Strategic Culture

Jan 12, 2020 | www.strategic-culture.org

Strategic Culture

Search History Why Canada Defends Ukrainian Fascism Michael Jabara Carley March 9, 2018 © Photo: Public domain

Canada has a reputation for being a relatively progressive state with universal, single-payer health care, various other social benefits, and strict gun laws, similar to many European countries but quite unlike the United States. It has managed to stay out of some American wars, for example, Vietnam and Iraq, portrayed itself as a neutral "peace keeper", pursuing a so-called policy of "multilateralism" and attempting from time to time to keep a little independent distance from the United States.

Behind this veneer of respectability lies a not so attractive reality of elite inattention to the defence of Canadian independence from the United States and intolerance toward the political and syndicalist left. Police repression against communist and left-wing unionists and other dissidents after World War I was widespread. Strong support for appeasement of Nazi Germany, overt or covert sympathy for fascism, especially in Québec, and hatred of the Soviet Union were widespread in Canada during the 1930s. The Liberal prime minister, William Lyon Mackenzie King, hobnobbed with Nazi notables including Adolf Hitler, and thought that his British counterpart Neville Chamberlain had not gone far enough in appeasing Hitlerite Germany. Mackenzie King and many others of the Canadian elite saw communism as a greater threat to Canada than fascism. As in Europe, the Canadian elite -- Liberal or Conservative did not matter -- was worried by the Spanish civil war (1936-1939). In Québec French public opinion under the influence of the Catholic Church hoped for fascist victory and the eradication of communism. In 1937 a Papal encyclical whipped up the Red Scare amongst French Canadian Catholics. Rejection of Soviet offers of collective security against Hitler was the obverse side of appeasement. The fear of victory over Nazi Germany in alliance with the USSR was greater than the fear of defeat against fascism. Such thoughts were either openly expressed over dinner at the local gentleman's club or kept more discrete by people who did not want to reveal the extent of their sympathy for fascism.

The Liberal prime minister, William Lyon Mackenzie King, hobnobbed with Nazi notables including Adolf Hitler, and thought that his British counterpart Neville Chamberlain had not gone far enough in appeasing Hitlerite Germany

Even after the Nazi invasion of the USSR in June 1941, and the formation of the Grand Alliance against the Axis, there was strong reticence amongst the governing elite in Canada toward the Soviet Union. It was a shotgun marriage, a momentary arrangement with an undesirable partner, necessitated by the over-riding threat of the Nazi Wehrmacht. "If Hitler invaded Hell," Winston Churchill famously remarked, "I would make at least a favourable reference to the devil in the House of Commons." Once Hitler was beaten, however, it would be back to business as usual. The Grand Alliance was a "truce", as some of my students have proposed to me, in a longer cold war between the west and the USSR. This struggle began in November 1917 when the Bolsheviks seized power in Petrograd; it resumed after 1945 when the "truce", or if you like, the Grand Alliance, came to a sudden end.

This was no more evident than in Canada where elite hatred of communism was a homegrown commodity and not simply an American imitation. So it should hardly be a surprise that after 1945 the Canadian government -- Mackenzie King was still prime minister -- should open its doors to the immigration of approximately 34,000 "displaced persons", including thousands of Ukrainian fascists and Nazi collaborators , responsible for heinous war crimes in the Ukraine and Poland. These were veterans of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), the Waffen SS Galicia and the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), all collaborators of Nazi Germany during World War II.

Chrystia Freeland, the current Canadian minister for external affairs

The most notorious of the Nazi collaborators who immigrated to Canada was Mykhailo Chomiak , a mid-level Nazi operative in Poland, who came under US protection at the end of the war and eventually made his way to Canada where he settled in Alberta. Had he been captured by the Red Army, he would quite likely have been hanged for collaboration with the enemy. In Canada however he prospered as a farmer. His grand-daughter is the "Ukrainian-Canadian" Chrystia Freeland, the present minister for external affairs. She is a well-known Russophobe, persona non grata in the Russian Federation, who long claimed her grandfather was a "victim" of World War II. Her claims to this effect have been demonstrated to be untrue by the Australian born journalist John Helmer , amongst many others.

In 1940 the Liberal government facilitated the creation of the Canadian Ukrainian Congress (UCC) , one of many organisations used to fight or marginalise the left in Canada, in this case amongst Canadian Ukrainians. The UCC is still around and appears to dominate the Ukrainian-Canadian community . Approximately 1.4 million people living in Canada claim full or partial Ukrainian descent though generally the latter. Most "Ukrainian-Canadians" were born in Canada; well more than half live in the western provinces. The vast majority has certainly never set foot in the Ukraine. It is this constituency on which the UCC depends to pursue its political agenda in Ottawa.

The Canadian Ukrainian Congress (UCC) president Paul Grod

After the coup d'état in Kiev in February 2014 the UCC lobbied the then Conservative government under Stephen Harper to support the Ukrainian "regime change" operation which had been conducted by the United States and European Union. The UCC president, Paul Grod, took the lead in obtaining various advantages from the Harper government, including arms for the putschist regime in Kiev. It survives only through massive EU and US direct or indirect financial/political support and through armed backing from fascist militias who repress dissent by force and intimidation. Mr. Grod claims that Russia is pursuing a policy of "aggression" against the Ukraine. If that were true, the putschists in Kiev would have long ago disappeared. The Harper government allowed fund raising for Pravyi Sektor , a Ukrainian fascist paramilitary group, through two organisations in Canada including the UCC, and even accorded "charitable status" to one of them to facilitate their fund raising and arms buying. Harper also sent military "advisors" to train Ukrainian forces, the backbone of which are fascist militias. The Trudeau government has continued that policy. "Canada should prepare for Russian attempts to destabilize its democracy," according to Minister Freeland : "Ukraine is a very important partner to Canada and we will continue to support its efforts for democracy and economic growth." For a regime that celebrates violence and anti-Russian racism, represses political opposition, burns books, and outlaws the Russian language, "democracy" is an Orwellian portrayal of actual realities in the Ukraine. Nevertheless, late last year the Canadian government approved the sale of arms to Kiev and a so-called Magnitsky law imposing sanctions on Russian nationals.

The Harper government allowed fund raising for Pravyi Sektor , a Ukrainian fascist paramilitary group

There is no political opposition in the House of Commons to these policies. Even the New Democratic Party (NDP), that burnt out shell of Canadian social democracy, supported the Harper government, at the behest of Mr. Grod, a Ukrainian lobbyist who knows his way around Ottawa. In 2015 the UCC put a list of questions to party leaders, one of which was the following: "Does your party support listing the Luhansk People's Republic and the Donetsk People's Republic as terrorist organizations?" The Lugansk and Donetsk republics are of course anti-fascist resistance movements that emerged in reaction to the violent coup d'état in Kiev. They are most certainly not "terrorist" organisations, although they are subjected to daily bombardments against civilian areas by Kiev putschist forces. Nevertheless, the then NDP leader, Thomas Mulcair, who would have agreed to almost anything to win power, answered in the affirmative. This must have been a moment of dismay for Canadians who still harboured illusions about the NDP as a progressive alternative to the Liberal and Conservative parties. How could it support a US/EU installed putschist regime which governs by intimidation and violence? In fact, it was a Conservative electoral strategy to obtain the votes of people of Ukrainian and East European descent by backing putschist Kiev and denouncing Russia. Mulcair was trying to outflank Harper on his right, but that did not work for he himself was outflanked on his left.

Some Canadians harboured illusions about the NDP as a progressive alternative to the Liberal and Conservative parties

In the 2015 federal elections the Liberals under Justin Trudeau, outwitted poor Mr. Mulcair and won the elections. The NDP suffered heavy electoral losses. Mulcair looked like someone who had made a Faustian bargain for nothing in return, and he lost a bid to remain as party leader. The Liberals campaigned on re-establishing better relations with the Russian Federation, but that promise did not hold up. The minister for external affairs, Stéphane Dion, tried to move forward on that line, but appears to have been stabbed in the back by Mr. Trudeau, with Ms. Freeland guiding his hand in the fatal blow. In early 2017 Dion was sacked and Freeland replaced him. That was the end of the Liberal promise to improve relations with the Russian government. Since then, under Freeland, Russian-Canadian relations have worsened.

The influential Mr. Grod appears to keep the Canadian government in his hip pocket. There are photographs of him side by side with Mr. Harper and then with Mr. Trudeau, with Ms. Freeland on his left. Mr. Grod has been a great success in backing putschist Kiev. Last summer Mr. Trudeau even issued a traditional Ukrainian fascist salute, "SlavaUkraini!" , to celebrate the anniversary of Ukrainian independence. The prime minister is a great believer in identity politics.

The influential Mr. Grod appears to keep the Canadian government in his hip pocket

The latest gesture of the Canadian government is to approve $1.4 million as a three year grant to promote a "Holodomor National Awareness Tour". Ukrainian "nationalists" summon up the memory of the "Holodomor", a famine in the Ukraine in 1932-1933, deliberately launched by Stalin, they say, in order to emphasise their victimisation by Russia. According to the latest Stalin biographer, Steven Kotkin, there was indeed a famine in the USSR that affected various parts of the country, the Ukraine amongst other regions. Kazakhstan, not the Ukraine suffered most. Between five and seven million people died. Ten millions starved. "Nonetheless, the famine was not intentional. It resulted from Stalin's policies of forced collectivization ,"Kotkin writes, himself no advocate of the Soviet Union. Compulsion, peasant rebellion, bungling, mismanagement, drought, locust infestations, not targeting ethnicities, led to the catastrophe. "Similarly, there was no 'Ukrainian' famine," according to Kotkin, "the famine was [a] Soviet[-wide disaster]" ( Stalin , 2017, vol. 2, pp. 127-29). So the Liberal government is spending public funds to perpetuate a politically motivated myth to drum up hatred of Russia and to support putschist Kiev.

Identity politics and Canadian multiculturalism are now invoked to defend Ukrainian fascism celebrated in the streets of Kiev with torchlight parades and fascist symbols, remembering and celebrating Nazi collaborators and collaboration during World War II

The Canadian government also recently renewed funding for a detachment of 200 "advisors" to train Ukrainian militias, along with twenty-three million dollars -- it is true a pittance by American standards -- for "non-lethal" military aid, justified by Ms. Freeland to defend Ukrainian "democracy". Truly, we live in a dystopian world where reality is turned on its head. Fascism is democracy; resistance to fascism is terrorism. Identity politics and Canadian multiculturalism are now invoked to defend Ukrainian fascism celebrated in the streets of Kiev with torchlight parades and fascist symbols, remembering and celebrating Nazi collaborators and collaboration during World War II. " Any country sending representatives to Russia's celebration of the 70th anniversary of their victory against Adolf Hitler," warned putschist Kiev in April 2015, "will be blacklisted by Ukraine."

"The further a society drifts from the truth," George Orwell once said, "the more it will hate those that speak it." Well, here is one truth that Mr. Trudeau and Ms. Freeland will not want to hear, hate it or not: 42,000 Canadian soldiers, not to mention 27 million Soviet citizens, died during the war against the Axis. Memories must be fading, for now we have come to this pass, where our government is supporting a violent, racist regime in Kiev directly descended from that very enemy against which Canada and its allies fought during World War II. The views of individual contributors do not necessarily represent those of the Strategic Culture Foundation. Tags: Canada Chrystia Freeland Print this article Michael Jabara Carley March 9, 2018 | History Why Canada Defends Ukrainian Fascism

Canada has a reputation for being a relatively progressive state with universal, single-payer health care, various other social benefits, and strict gun laws, similar to many European countries but quite unlike the United States. It has managed to stay out of some American wars, for example, Vietnam and Iraq, portrayed itself as a neutral "peace keeper", pursuing a so-called policy of "multilateralism" and attempting from time to time to keep a little independent distance from the United States.

Behind this veneer of respectability lies a not so attractive reality of elite inattention to the defence of Canadian independence from the United States and intolerance toward the political and syndicalist left. Police repression against communist and left-wing unionists and other dissidents after World War I was widespread. Strong support for appeasement of Nazi Germany, overt or covert sympathy for fascism, especially in Québec, and hatred of the Soviet Union were widespread in Canada during the 1930s. The Liberal prime minister, William Lyon Mackenzie King, hobnobbed with Nazi notables including Adolf Hitler, and thought that his British counterpart Neville Chamberlain had not gone far enough in appeasing Hitlerite Germany. Mackenzie King and many others of the Canadian elite saw communism as a greater threat to Canada than fascism. As in Europe, the Canadian elite -- Liberal or Conservative did not matter -- was worried by the Spanish civil war (1936-1939). In Québec French public opinion under the influence of the Catholic Church hoped for fascist victory and the eradication of communism. In 1937 a Papal encyclical whipped up the Red Scare amongst French Canadian Catholics. Rejection of Soviet offers of collective security against Hitler was the obverse side of appeasement. The fear of victory over Nazi Germany in alliance with the USSR was greater than the fear of defeat against fascism. Such thoughts were either openly expressed over dinner at the local gentleman's club or kept more discrete by people who did not want to reveal the extent of their sympathy for fascism.

The Liberal prime minister, William Lyon Mackenzie King, hobnobbed with Nazi notables including Adolf Hitler, and thought that his British counterpart Neville Chamberlain had not gone far enough in appeasing Hitlerite Germany

Even after the Nazi invasion of the USSR in June 1941, and the formation of the Grand Alliance against the Axis, there was strong reticence amongst the governing elite in Canada toward the Soviet Union. It was a shotgun marriage, a momentary arrangement with an undesirable partner, necessitated by the over-riding threat of the Nazi Wehrmacht. "If Hitler invaded Hell," Winston Churchill famously remarked, "I would make at least a favourable reference to the devil in the House of Commons." Once Hitler was beaten, however, it would be back to business as usual. The Grand Alliance was a "truce", as some of my students have proposed to me, in a longer cold war between the west and the USSR. This struggle began in November 1917 when the Bolsheviks seized power in Petrograd; it resumed after 1945 when the "truce", or if you like, the Grand Alliance, came to a sudden end.

This was no more evident than in Canada where elite hatred of communism was a homegrown commodity and not simply an American imitation. So it should hardly be a surprise that after 1945 the Canadian government -- Mackenzie King was still prime minister -- should open its doors to the immigration of approximately 34,000 "displaced persons", including thousands of Ukrainian fascists and Nazi collaborators , responsible for heinous war crimes in the Ukraine and Poland. These were veterans of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), the Waffen SS Galicia and the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), all collaborators of Nazi Germany during World War II.

Chrystia Freeland, the current Canadian minister for external affairs

The most notorious of the Nazi collaborators who immigrated to Canada was Mykhailo Chomiak , a mid-level Nazi operative in Poland, who came under US protection at the end of the war and eventually made his way to Canada where he settled in Alberta. Had he been captured by the Red Army, he would quite likely have been hanged for collaboration with the enemy. In Canada however he prospered as a farmer. His grand-daughter is the "Ukrainian-Canadian" Chrystia Freeland, the present minister for external affairs. She is a well-known Russophobe, persona non grata in the Russian Federation, who long claimed her grandfather was a "victim" of World War II. Her claims to this effect have been demonstrated to be untrue by the Australian born journalist John Helmer , amongst many others.

In 1940 the Liberal government facilitated the creation of the Canadian Ukrainian Congress (UCC) , one of many organisations used to fight or marginalise the left in Canada, in this case amongst Canadian Ukrainians. The UCC is still around and appears to dominate the Ukrainian-Canadian community . Approximately 1.4 million people living in Canada claim full or partial Ukrainian descent though generally the latter. Most "Ukrainian-Canadians" were born in Canada; well more than half live in the western provinces. The vast majority has certainly never set foot in the Ukraine. It is this constituency on which the UCC depends to pursue its political agenda in Ottawa.

The Canadian Ukrainian Congress (UCC) president Paul Grod

After the coup d'état in Kiev in February 2014 the UCC lobbied the then Conservative government under Stephen Harper to support the Ukrainian "regime change" operation which had been conducted by the United States and European Union. The UCC president, Paul Grod, took the lead in obtaining various advantages from the Harper government, including arms for the putschist regime in Kiev. It survives only through massive EU and US direct or indirect financial/political support and through armed backing from fascist militias who repress dissent by force and intimidation. Mr. Grod claims that Russia is pursuing a policy of "aggression" against the Ukraine. If that were true, the putschists in Kiev would have long ago disappeared. The Harper government allowed fund raising for Pravyi Sektor , a Ukrainian fascist paramilitary group, through two organisations in Canada including the UCC, and even accorded "charitable status" to one of them to facilitate their fund raising and arms buying. Harper also sent military "advisors" to train Ukrainian forces, the backbone of which are fascist militias. The Trudeau government has continued that policy. "Canada should prepare for Russian attempts to destabilize its democracy," according to Minister Freeland : "Ukraine is a very important partner to Canada and we will continue to support its efforts for democracy and economic growth." For a regime that celebrates violence and anti-Russian racism, represses political opposition, burns books, and outlaws the Russian language, "democracy" is an Orwellian portrayal of actual realities in the Ukraine. Nevertheless, late last year the Canadian government approved the sale of arms to Kiev and a so-called Magnitsky law imposing sanctions on Russian nationals.

The Harper government allowed fund raising for Pravyi Sektor , a Ukrainian fascist paramilitary group

There is no political opposition in the House of Commons to these policies. Even the New Democratic Party (NDP), that burnt out shell of Canadian social democracy, supported the Harper government, at the behest of Mr. Grod, a Ukrainian lobbyist who knows his way around Ottawa. In 2015 the UCC put a list of questions to party leaders, one of which was the following: "Does your party support listing the Luhansk People's Republic and the Donetsk People's Republic as terrorist organizations?" The Lugansk and Donetsk republics are of course anti-fascist resistance movements that emerged in reaction to the violent coup d'état in Kiev. They are most certainly not "terrorist" organisations, although they are subjected to daily bombardments against civilian areas by Kiev putschist forces. Nevertheless, the then NDP leader, Thomas Mulcair, who would have agreed to almost anything to win power, answered in the affirmative. This must have been a moment of dismay for Canadians who still harboured illusions about the NDP as a progressive alternative to the Liberal and Conservative parties. How could it support a US/EU installed putschist regime which governs by intimidation and violence? In fact, it was a Conservative electoral strategy to obtain the votes of people of Ukrainian and East European descent by backing putschist Kiev and denouncing Russia. Mulcair was trying to outflank Harper on his right, but that did not work for he himself was outflanked on his left.

Some Canadians harboured illusions about the NDP as a progressive alternative to the Liberal and Conservative parties

In the 2015 federal elections the Liberals under Justin Trudeau, outwitted poor Mr. Mulcair and won the elections. The NDP suffered heavy electoral losses. Mulcair looked like someone who had made a Faustian bargain for nothing in return, and he lost a bid to remain as party leader. The Liberals campaigned on re-establishing better relations with the Russian Federation, but that promise did not hold up. The minister for external affairs, Stéphane Dion, tried to move forward on that line, but appears to have been stabbed in the back by Mr. Trudeau, with Ms. Freeland guiding his hand in the fatal blow. In early 2017 Dion was sacked and Freeland replaced him. That was the end of the Liberal promise to improve relations with the Russian government. Since then, under Freeland, Russian-Canadian relations have worsened.

The influential Mr. Grod appears to keep the Canadian government in his hip pocket. There are photographs of him side by side with Mr. Harper and then with Mr. Trudeau, with Ms. Freeland on his left. Mr. Grod has been a great success in backing putschist Kiev. Last summer Mr. Trudeau even issued a traditional Ukrainian fascist salute, "SlavaUkraini!" , to celebrate the anniversary of Ukrainian independence. The prime minister is a great believer in identity politics.

The influential Mr. Grod appears to keep the Canadian government in his hip pocket

The latest gesture of the Canadian government is to approve $1.4 million as a three year grant to promote a "Holodomor National Awareness Tour". Ukrainian "nationalists" summon up the memory of the "Holodomor", a famine in the Ukraine in 1932-1933, deliberately launched by Stalin, they say, in order to emphasise their victimisation by Russia. According to the latest Stalin biographer, Steven Kotkin, there was indeed a famine in the USSR that affected various parts of the country, the Ukraine amongst other regions. Kazakhstan, not the Ukraine suffered most. Between five and seven million people died. Ten millions starved. "Nonetheless, the famine was not intentional. It resulted from Stalin's policies of forced collectivization ,"Kotkin writes, himself no advocate of the Soviet Union. Compulsion, peasant rebellion, bungling, mismanagement, drought, locust infestations, not targeting ethnicities, led to the catastrophe. "Similarly, there was no 'Ukrainian' famine," according to Kotkin, "the famine was [a] Soviet[-wide disaster]" ( Stalin , 2017, vol. 2, pp. 127-29). So the Liberal government is spending public funds to perpetuate a politically motivated myth to drum up hatred of Russia and to support putschist Kiev.

Identity politics and Canadian multiculturalism are now invoked to defend Ukrainian fascism celebrated in the streets of Kiev with torchlight parades and fascist symbols, remembering and celebrating Nazi collaborators and collaboration during World War II

The Canadian government also recently renewed funding for a detachment of 200 "advisors" to train Ukrainian militias, along with twenty-three million dollars -- it is true a pittance by American standards -- for "non-lethal" military aid, justified by Ms. Freeland to defend Ukrainian "democracy". Truly, we live in a dystopian world where reality is turned on its head. Fascism is democracy; resistance to fascism is terrorism. Identity politics and Canadian multiculturalism are now invoked to defend Ukrainian fascism celebrated in the streets of Kiev with torchlight parades and fascist symbols, remembering and celebrating Nazi collaborators and collaboration during World War II. " Any country sending representatives to Russia's celebration of the 70th anniversary of their victory against Adolf Hitler," warned putschist Kiev in April 2015, "will be blacklisted by Ukraine."

"The further a society drifts from the truth," George Orwell once said, "the more it will hate those that speak it." Well, here is one truth that Mr. Trudeau and Ms. Freeland will not want to hear, hate it or not: 42,000 Canadian soldiers, not to mention 27 million Soviet citizens, died during the war against the Axis. Memories must be fading, for now we have come to this pass, where our government is supporting a violent, racist regime in Kiev directly descended from that very enemy against which Canada and its allies fought during World War II. © 2010 - 2020 | Strategic Culture Foundation | Republishing is welcomed with reference to Strategic Culture online journal www.strategic-culture.org . The views of individual contributors do not necessarily represent those of the Strategic Culture Foundation. Also by this author Michael Jabara Carley Professor of history at the Université de Montréal. He has published widely on Soviet relations with the West What Poland Has to Hide About the Origins of World War II The Canadian Prime Minister Needs a History Lesson The Russian V-Day Story (Or the History of World War II Not Often Heard in the West) The Skripal Affair: A Lie Too Far? Lament for Canada Sign up for the Strategic Culture Foundation Newsletter Subscribe

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© 2010 - 2020 | Strategic Culture Foundation | Republishing is welcomed with reference to Strategic Culture online journal www.strategic-culture.org . The views of individual contributors do not necessarily represent those of the Strategic Culture Foundation. <div><img src="https://mc.yandex.ru/watch/10970266" alt=""/></div>

[Jan 12, 2020] MIC along with Wall Street controls the government and the country

Highly recommended!
Jan 12, 2020 | angrybearblog.com

  1. likbez , January 12, 2020 5:30 pm

    Everyone keeps dancing around it: Iraqi PM Abdul-Mahdi has reported that Soleimani was on the way to see him with a reply to a Saudi peace proposal. Who profits from Peace? Who does not?

    The killing of Soleimani, while a tragic even with far reaching consequences, is just an illustration of the general rule: MIC does not profit from peace. And MIC dominates any national security state, into which the USA was transformed by the technological revolution on computers and communications, as well as the events of 9/11.

    The USA government can be viewed as just a public relations center for MIC. That's why Trump/Pompeo/Esper/Pence gang position themselves as rabid neocons, which means MIC lobbyists in order to hold their respective positions. There is no way out of this situation. This is a classic Catch 22 trap.

    The fact that a couple of them are also "Rapture" obsessed religious bigots means that the principle of separation of church and state does no matter when MIC interests are involved.

    The health of MIC requires maintaining an inflated defense budget at all costs. Which, in turn, drives foreign wars and the drive to capture other nations' resources to compensate for MIC appetite. The drive which is of course closely allied with Wall Street interests (disaster capitalism.)

    In such conditions fake "imminent threat" assassinations necessarily start happening. Although the personality of Pompeo and the fact that he is a big friend of the current head of Mossad probably played some role.

    It's really funny that Trump (probably with the help of his "reference group," which includes Adelson and Kushner), managed to appoint as the top US diplomat a person who was trained as a mechanic engineer and specialized as a tank repair mechanic. And who was a long-time military contractor. So it is quite natural that he represents interests of MIC.

    IMHO under Trump/Pompeo/Esper trio some kind of additional skirmishes with Iran are a real possibility: they are necessary to maintain the current inflated level of defense spending.

    State of the US infrastructure, the actual level of unemployment (U6 is ~7% which some neolibs call full employment ;-), and the level of poverty of the bottom 33% of the USA population be damned. Essentially the bottom 33% is the third world country within the USA.

    "If you make more than $15,000 (roughly the annual salary of a minimum-wage employee working 40 hours per week), you earn more than 32.2% of Americans

    The 894 people that earn more than $20 million make more than 99.99989% of Americans, and are compensated a cumulative $37,009,979,568 per year. "

    ( https://www.huffpost.com/entry/income-inequality-crisis_n_4221012 )

[Jan 12, 2020] Strategic Culture

Jan 12, 2020 | www.strategic-culture.org

Search History History as Propaganda: Why the USSR Did Not 'Win' World War II (I) Michael Jabara Carley March 19, 2016 © Photo: Public domain

The title of this article is intended to be ironic because of course the Red Army did play the predominant role in destroying Nazi Germany during World War II. You would not know it, however, reading the western Mainstream Media (MSM), or watching television, or going to the cinema in the west where the Soviet role in the war has almost entirely disappeared.

If in the West the Red Army is largely absent from World War II, the Soviet Union's responsibility for igniting the war is omnipresent. The MSM and western politicians tend to regard the Nazi invasion of the USSR in June 1941 as the Soviet Union's just reward for the 1939 Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact. As British Prime Minister Winston Churchill put it, the USSR "brought their own fate upon themselves when by their Pact with [Joachim von] Ribbentrop they let Hitler loose on Poland and so started the war " Operation Barbarossa, the Nazi invasion of the USSR, was Stalin's fault and therefore an expatiation of sins, so that Soviet resistance should not be viewed as anything more than penitence.

Whereas France and Britain "appeased" Nazi Germany, one MSM commentator recently noted , the USSR "collaborated" with Hitler. You see how western propaganda works, and it's none too subtle. Just watch for the key words and read between the lines. France and Britain were innocents in the woods, who unwisely "appeased" Hitler in hopes of preserving European peace. On the other hand, the totalitarian Stalin "collaborated" with the totalitarian Hitler to encourage war, not preserve the peace. Stalin not only collaborated with Hitler, the USSR and Nazi Germany were "allies" who carved up Europe. The USSR was "the wolf"; the West was "the lamb". These are not only metaphors of the English-speaking world; France 2 has promoted the same narrative in the much publicised television series, "Apocalypse" (2010) and " Apocalypse Staline " (2015). World War II erupted because of the non-aggression pact, that dirty deal, which marked the beginning of the short-lived " alliance " of the two "totalitarian" states. Hitler and Stalin each had a foot in the same boot.

MSM "journalists" like to underscore Stalin's duplicity by pointing to the abortive Anglo-Franco-Soviet negotiations in the summer of 1939 to create an anti-Nazi alliance. No wonder they failed, how could the naďve French and British, the lambs, think they could strike a deal with Stalin, the wolf? Even professional historians sometimes take this line : the 1939 negotiations failed because of Soviet "intransigence" and "duplicity".

If ever Pot called Kettle black, this has to be it. And of course the trope of the Pot and the Kettle is a frequent device of western or MSM propaganda to blacken the USSR and, by implication, to blacken Russia and its president Vladimir Putin. There is just one problem with the western approach: the MSM "journalist" or western politician or historian who wants to incriminate Stalin for igniting World War II has one large obstacle in the way, the facts. Not that facts ever bother skilled propagandists, but still, perhaps, the average citizen in the West may yet have an interest in them.

Consider just a few of the facts that the West likes to forget. It was the USSR which first rang the alarm bells in 1933 about the Nazi threat to European peace. Maksim M. Litvinov, the Commissar for Foreign Affairs, became the chief Soviet proponent of "collective security" in Europe.

He warned over and over again of the danger: Nazi Germany is a "mad dog", he said in 1934, "that can't be trusted with whom no agreements can be made, and whose ambition can only be checked by a ring of determined neighbours". That sounds about right, doesn't it? Litvinov was the first European statesman to conceive of a grand alliance against Nazi Germany, based on the World War I coalition against Wilhelmine Germany. Soviet would-be allies, France, Britain, the United States, Romania, Yugoslavia, even fascist Italy, all fell away, one after the other, during the mid-1930s. Even Poland, Litvinov hoped, could be attracted to collective security. Unlike the other reluctant powers, Poland never showed the slightest interest in Litvinov's proposals and sought to undermine collective security right up until the beginning of the war.

Litvinov reminds me of Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov in his thankless dealings with the Russophobic West. During the interwar years, the Russophobia was mixed with Sovietophobia: it was a clash of two worlds between the West and the USSR, the Silent Conflict , Litvinov called it. When things were going badly, Litvinov appears occasionally to have sought consolation in Greek mythology and the story of Sisyphus, the Greek king, doomed by Zeus to push forever a large rock to the top of a mountain, only to see it fall back down each time. Like Sisyphus, Litvinov was condemned to pointless efforts and endless frustration. So too, it seems, is Lavrov. The French philosopher, Albert Camus, imagined that Sisyphus was happy in his struggles, but that's an existentialist philosopher for you, and Camus never had to deal with that damned rock. Litvinov did, and never could stick it on the mountaintop.

My point is that it was the West, notably the United States, Britain, and France – yes, that's right, the same old gang – which dismissed Litvinov's repeated warnings and spurned his efforts to organise a grand alliance against Nazi Germany.

Dominated by conservative elites, often sympathetic to fascism, the French and British governments looked for ways to get on with Nazi Germany, rather than to go all out to prepare their defences against it. Of course, there were "white crows", as one Soviet diplomat called them, who recognised the Nazi threat to European security and wanted to cooperate with the USSR, but they were only a powerless minority. The MSM won't tell you much about the widespread sympathy for fascism amongst conservative European elites. It's like the dirty secrets of the family in the big house at the top of the hill.

Poland also played a despicable role in the 1930s, though the MSM won't tell you about that either. The Polish government signed a non-aggression pact with Germany in 1934, and in subsequent years sabotaged Litvinov's efforts to build an anti-Nazi alliance. In 1938 it sided with Nazi Germany against Czechoslovakia and participated in the carve-up of that country sanctioned by the Munich accords on 30 September 1938. It's a day the West likes to forget. Poland was thus a Nazi collaborator and an aggressor state in 1938 before it became a victim of aggression in 1939.

By early 1939, Litvinov had been rolling his rock (let's call it collective security) up that wretched mountain for more than five years. Stalin, who was no Albert Camus, and not happy about being repeatedly spurned by the West, gave Litvinov one last chance to obtain an alliance with France and Britain. This was in April 1939. The craven French, rotted by fascist sympathies, had forgotten how to identify and protect their national interests, while the British stalled Litvinov, sneering at him behind his back.

So Sisyphus-Litvinov's rock fell to the bottom of the mountain one last time. Enough, thought Stalin, and he sacked Litvinov and brought in the tougher Vyacheslav M. Molotov.

Still, for a few more months, Molotov tried to stick the rock on the mountaintop, and still it fell back again. In May 1939 Molotov even offered support to Poland, quickly rejected by Warsaw. Had the Poles lost their senses; did they ever have any? When British and French delegations arrived in Moscow in August to discuss an anti-Nazi alliance, you might think they would have been serious about getting down to business. War was expected to break out at any time. But no, not even then: British instructions were to "go very slowly". The delegations did too. It took them five days to get to Russia in an old, chartered merchantman, making a top speed of 13 knots. The British head of delegation did not have written powers giving him authority to conclude an agreement with his Soviet "partners". For Stalin, that must have been the camel breaking straw. The Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact was signed on 23 August 1939. The failure of the negotiations with the British and French led to the non-aggression pact, rather than the other way around.

Sauve qui peut motivated Soviet policy, never a good idea in the face of danger, but far from the MSM's narrative explaining the origins of World War II. Good old Perfidious Albion acted duplicitously to the very end. During the summer of 1939 British government officials still negotiated for a deal with German counterparts, as if no one in Moscow would notice. And that was not all, the British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, boasted privately to one of his sisters about how he would fool Moscow and get around the Soviet insistence on a genuine war-fighting alliance against Nazi Germany. So who betrayed who?

Historians may debate whether Stalin made the right decision or not in concluding the non-aggression pact. But with potential "partners" like France and Britain, one can understand why sauve qui peut looked like the only decent option in August 1939. And this brings us back to Pot calling Kettle black. The West foisted off its own responsibilities in setting off World War II onto Stalin and the Soviet Union.

( to be continued )

The views of individual contributors do not necessarily represent those of the Strategic Culture Foundation. Tags: World War II Print this article Michael Jabara Carley March 19, 2016 | History History as Propaganda: Why the USSR Did Not 'Win' World War II (I)

The title of this article is intended to be ironic because of course the Red Army did play the predominant role in destroying Nazi Germany during World War II. You would not know it, however, reading the western Mainstream Media (MSM), or watching television, or going to the cinema in the west where the Soviet role in the war has almost entirely disappeared.

If in the West the Red Army is largely absent from World War II, the Soviet Union's responsibility for igniting the war is omnipresent. The MSM and western politicians tend to regard the Nazi invasion of the USSR in June 1941 as the Soviet Union's just reward for the 1939 Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact. As British Prime Minister Winston Churchill put it, the USSR "brought their own fate upon themselves when by their Pact with [Joachim von] Ribbentrop they let Hitler loose on Poland and so started the war " Operation Barbarossa, the Nazi invasion of the USSR, was Stalin's fault and therefore an expatiation of sins, so that Soviet resistance should not be viewed as anything more than penitence.

Whereas France and Britain "appeased" Nazi Germany, one MSM commentator recently noted , the USSR "collaborated" with Hitler. You see how western propaganda works, and it's none too subtle. Just watch for the key words and read between the lines. France and Britain were innocents in the woods, who unwisely "appeased" Hitler in hopes of preserving European peace. On the other hand, the totalitarian Stalin "collaborated" with the totalitarian Hitler to encourage war, not preserve the peace. Stalin not only collaborated with Hitler, the USSR and Nazi Germany were "allies" who carved up Europe. The USSR was "the wolf"; the West was "the lamb". These are not only metaphors of the English-speaking world; France 2 has promoted the same narrative in the much publicised television series, "Apocalypse" (2010) and " Apocalypse Staline " (2015). World War II erupted because of the non-aggression pact, that dirty deal, which marked the beginning of the short-lived " alliance " of the two "totalitarian" states. Hitler and Stalin each had a foot in the same boot.

MSM "journalists" like to underscore Stalin's duplicity by pointing to the abortive Anglo-Franco-Soviet negotiations in the summer of 1939 to create an anti-Nazi alliance. No wonder they failed, how could the naďve French and British, the lambs, think they could strike a deal with Stalin, the wolf? Even professional historians sometimes take this line : the 1939 negotiations failed because of Soviet "intransigence" and "duplicity".

If ever Pot called Kettle black, this has to be it. And of course the trope of the Pot and the Kettle is a frequent device of western or MSM propaganda to blacken the USSR and, by implication, to blacken Russia and its president Vladimir Putin. There is just one problem with the western approach: the MSM "journalist" or western politician or historian who wants to incriminate Stalin for igniting World War II has one large obstacle in the way, the facts. Not that facts ever bother skilled propagandists, but still, perhaps, the average citizen in the West may yet have an interest in them.

Consider just a few of the facts that the West likes to forget. It was the USSR which first rang the alarm bells in 1933 about the Nazi threat to European peace. Maksim M. Litvinov, the Commissar for Foreign Affairs, became the chief Soviet proponent of "collective security" in Europe.

He warned over and over again of the danger: Nazi Germany is a "mad dog", he said in 1934, "that can't be trusted with whom no agreements can be made, and whose ambition can only be checked by a ring of determined neighbours". That sounds about right, doesn't it? Litvinov was the first European statesman to conceive of a grand alliance against Nazi Germany, based on the World War I coalition against Wilhelmine Germany. Soviet would-be allies, France, Britain, the United States, Romania, Yugoslavia, even fascist Italy, all fell away, one after the other, during the mid-1930s. Even Poland, Litvinov hoped, could be attracted to collective security. Unlike the other reluctant powers, Poland never showed the slightest interest in Litvinov's proposals and sought to undermine collective security right up until the beginning of the war.

Litvinov reminds me of Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov in his thankless dealings with the Russophobic West. During the interwar years, the Russophobia was mixed with Sovietophobia: it was a clash of two worlds between the West and the USSR, the Silent Conflict , Litvinov called it. When things were going badly, Litvinov appears occasionally to have sought consolation in Greek mythology and the story of Sisyphus, the Greek king, doomed by Zeus to push forever a large rock to the top of a mountain, only to see it fall back down each time. Like Sisyphus, Litvinov was condemned to pointless efforts and endless frustration. So too, it seems, is Lavrov. The French philosopher, Albert Camus, imagined that Sisyphus was happy in his struggles, but that's an existentialist philosopher for you, and Camus never had to deal with that damned rock. Litvinov did, and never could stick it on the mountaintop.

My point is that it was the West, notably the United States, Britain, and France – yes, that's right, the same old gang – which dismissed Litvinov's repeated warnings and spurned his efforts to organise a grand alliance against Nazi Germany.

Dominated by conservative elites, often sympathetic to fascism, the French and British governments looked for ways to get on with Nazi Germany, rather than to go all out to prepare their defences against it. Of course, there were "white crows", as one Soviet diplomat called them, who recognised the Nazi threat to European security and wanted to cooperate with the USSR, but they were only a powerless minority. The MSM won't tell you much about the widespread sympathy for fascism amongst conservative European elites. It's like the dirty secrets of the family in the big house at the top of the hill.

Poland also played a despicable role in the 1930s, though the MSM won't tell you about that either. The Polish government signed a non-aggression pact with Germany in 1934, and in subsequent years sabotaged Litvinov's efforts to build an anti-Nazi alliance. In 1938 it sided with Nazi Germany against Czechoslovakia and participated in the carve-up of that country sanctioned by the Munich accords on 30 September 1938. It's a day the West likes to forget. Poland was thus a Nazi collaborator and an aggressor state in 1938 before it became a victim of aggression in 1939.

By early 1939, Litvinov had been rolling his rock (let's call it collective security) up that wretched mountain for more than five years. Stalin, who was no Albert Camus, and not happy about being repeatedly spurned by the West, gave Litvinov one last chance to obtain an alliance with France and Britain. This was in April 1939. The craven French, rotted by fascist sympathies, had forgotten how to identify and protect their national interests, while the British stalled Litvinov, sneering at him behind his back.

So Sisyphus-Litvinov's rock fell to the bottom of the mountain one last time. Enough, thought Stalin, and he sacked Litvinov and brought in the tougher Vyacheslav M. Molotov.

Still, for a few more months, Molotov tried to stick the rock on the mountaintop, and still it fell back again. In May 1939 Molotov even offered support to Poland, quickly rejected by Warsaw. Had the Poles lost their senses; did they ever have any? When British and French delegations arrived in Moscow in August to discuss an anti-Nazi alliance, you might think they would have been serious about getting down to business. War was expected to break out at any time. But no, not even then: British instructions were to "go very slowly". The delegations did too. It took them five days to get to Russia in an old, chartered merchantman, making a top speed of 13 knots. The British head of delegation did not have written powers giving him authority to conclude an agreement with his Soviet "partners". For Stalin, that must have been the camel breaking straw. The Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact was signed on 23 August 1939. The failure of the negotiations with the British and French led to the non-aggression pact, rather than the other way around.

Sauve qui peut motivated Soviet policy, never a good idea in the face of danger, but far from the MSM's narrative explaining the origins of World War II. Good old Perfidious Albion acted duplicitously to the very end. During the summer of 1939 British government officials still negotiated for a deal with German counterparts, as if no one in Moscow would notice. And that was not all, the British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, boasted privately to one of his sisters about how he would fool Moscow and get around the Soviet insistence on a genuine war-fighting alliance against Nazi Germany. So who betrayed who?

Historians may debate whether Stalin made the right decision or not in concluding the non-aggression pact. But with potential "partners" like France and Britain, one can understand why sauve qui peut looked like the only decent option in August 1939. And this brings us back to Pot calling Kettle black. The West foisted off its own responsibilities in setting off World War II onto Stalin and the Soviet Union.

( to be continued )

© 2010 - 2020 | Strategic Culture Foundation | Republishing is welcomed with reference to Strategic Culture online journal www.strategic-culture.org . The views of individual contributors do not necessarily represent those of the Strategic Culture Foundation. Also by this author Michael Jabara Carley Professor of history at the Université de Montréal. He has published widely on Soviet relations with the West What Poland Has to Hide About the Origins of World War II The Canadian Prime Minister Needs a History Lesson The Russian V-Day Story (Or the History of World War II Not Often Heard in the West) The Skripal Affair: A Lie Too Far? Why Canada Defends Ukrainian Fascism Sign up for the Strategic Culture Foundation Newsletter Subscribe

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[Jan 12, 2020] Why the West Falsifies the History of World War II -- Strategic Culture

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Historians interpret and reinterpret history. It is a normal process except when politicians do the reinterpreting. Their interests are not intellectual but rather political. They seek justification for their politics by evoking the past, history as they need it to be. ..."
"... The greatest blow to collective security came in September 1938 when France and Britain concluded the Munich accords which sanctioned the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia ..."
"... After the war, the west launched a campaign accusing Stalin of being Hitler's "ally" ..."
"... Western propaganda claimed that the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were "allies". World War II was entirely their fault, while France, Britain and Poland were innocent victims of totalitarianism ..."
"... After the 2014 putsch, Ukrainian Nazi collaborators like Stepan Bandera were made into national heroes ..."
"... As mightily as Poland seeks to falsify history, it cannot cover up the atrocities of Ukrainian Nazi collaborators against Poles, remembered in a recently released Polish hit film, "Volhynia" ..."
Jan 12, 2020 | www.strategic-culture.org

Why the West Falsifies the History of World War II Michael Jabara Carley November 29, 2016 © Photo: Public domain

Historians interpret and reinterpret history. It is a normal process except when politicians do the reinterpreting. Their interests are not intellectual but rather political. They seek justification for their politics by evoking the past, history as they need it to be.

The origins and waging of World War II are of special interest to western politicians, past and present. This was true even early on. In December 1939 the British government decided to lay a white paper on the Anglo-Franco-Soviet negotiations during the spring and summer of that year to organise a war-fighting alliance against Hitlerite Germany. Foreign Office officials carefully picked out a hundred or so documents to show that they and the French had been serious about organising an anti-German alliance and that the USSR was principally responsible for the failure of the negotiations. In early January 1940 the white paper reached the stage of page proofs. Nearly everyone in London was impatient to publish it. All that was needed was the approval of France and the Polish government in exile. Much to the surprise of British officials, France opposed the publication of the white paper, and so did the Polish government in exile. This may also come as a surprise to present day readers. Why would French and Polish officials be opposed to a publication considered "good propaganda" by the British to blacken the reputation of the Soviet Union?

Let's allow the French ambassador in London to explain in his own words. "The general impression which arises from reading [the white paper]", he wrote in a memorandum dated 12 January 1940, "is that from beginning to end the Russian government never ceased to insist on giving the agreement [being negotiated] the maximum scope and efficacy. Sincere or not, this determination of the Soviet government to cover effectively all the possible routes of a German aggression appears throughout the negotiations to collide with Anglo-French reluctance and with the clear intention of the two governments to limit the field of Russian intervention".

And the French ambassador did not stop there. He observed that critics who felt that the USSR had been forced into agreement with Nazi Germany by Anglo-French "repugnance" to make genuine commitments in Moscow would find in the white paper "a certain number of arguments in their favour." The language used here was in the finest traditions of diplomatic understatement, but the Foreign Office nevertheless got the message. The more so because there was this further, telling irritatant to Gallic sensibilities that the documents selected for the white paper failed to show that they, the French, had been more anxious to conclude with Moscow than their British allies. What would happen, the French wondered, if the Soviet government published its own collection of documents in reply to a white paper? Who would public opinion believe? The French were not sure of the answer.

As for the Poles in exile, they could not much insist, but they too preferred that the white paper not be published. Even in those early days Polish exiles were not anxious to publicise their responsibilities in the origins of the war and their swift defeat at the hands of the Wehrmacht.

In fact, all three governments, British, French and Polish, had much to hide, not just their conduct in 1939, but during the entire period following Adolf Hitler's rise to power in January 1933. The Soviet government was quick to ring the alarm bells of danger and to propose a defensive, anti-Nazi alliance to France and Britain. And yes, Moscow also made overtures to Poland. The Soviet commissar for foreign affairs, M. M. Litvinov, even hoped to bring fascist Italy into an anti-Nazi coalition. In Bucharest, the Soviet government made concerted efforts to gain Romanian participation in a broad anti-German alliance redolent of the Entente coalition of World War I.

Were all these Soviet efforts a ruse to dupe the west while Soviet diplomats secretly negotiated with Nazi Germany? Not at all, Russian archives appear conclusive on this point. The Soviet overtures were serious, but its would-be allies demurred, one after the other, except for Poland, which never for a moment considered joining an anti-Nazi alliance with the Soviet Union. Commissar Litvinov watched as Soviet would-be allies sought to compose with Nazi Germany. Poland persistently obstructed Soviet policy and Romania, under Polish and German pressure, backed away from better relations with Moscow. One Soviet ambassador even recommended that the Soviet government not break off all relations with Berlin in order to send a message, especially to Paris and London, that the USSR could also compose with Nazi Germany. The four most important French diplomats in Moscow during the 1930s warned repeatedly that France must protect its relations with the USSR or risk seeing it come to terms with Berlin. In Paris their reports disappeared into the files, ultimately unheeded. The greatest blow to collective security came in September 1938 when France and Britain concluded the Munich accords which sanctioned the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia. Neither Czechoslovak nor Soviet diplomats were invited to participate in the negotiations. As for Poland, it allied itself with Nazi Germany. "If Hitler obtains Czechoslovak territories," said Polish diplomats before Munich, "then we will have our part too".

The greatest blow to collective security came in September 1938 when France and Britain concluded the Munich accords which sanctioned the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia

Could it be a surprise that after nearly six years of failed attempts to organise an anti-Nazi front, that the Soviet government would lose all confidence in the French and British governments and cut a deal with Berlin to stay out of a war, which everyone recognised was imminent? This was the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact signed on 23 August 1939. As for the Poles, in their hubris and blindness, they mocked the idea of an alliance with the USSR right up until the first day of the war.

The Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact was the result of the failure of six years of Soviet policy to conclude an anti-Nazi alliance with the west and not the cause of that failure. The British ambassador in Moscow accused the Soviet government of "bad faith", but that was just Pot calling Kettle black. Even in the last days of peace, the British and French governments looked for a way out of war. "Although we cannot in the circumstances avoid declaring war," said one British minister, "we can always fulfill the letter of a declaration of war without immediately going all out." In fact, France and Britain scarcely raised a finger to help Poland when it was invaded on 1 September 1939. Having brought disaster on itself, the Polish government fled Warsaw after the first days of fighting, its members crossing into Romania to be interned.

If France and Britain would not help the Poles in their moment of desperation, could Joseph Stalin have reasonably calculated that the British and French would have done more to help the Soviet Union, had it entered the war in September 1939? Clearly not. The USSR would have to look to its own defences. No one should be surprised therefore that a few months later the French and Poles in exile would oppose publication of a white paper which could open a Pandora's box of questions about the origins of the war and their failure to join an anti-Nazi alliance. Better to let sleeping dogs lie and hope that government archives would not be opened for a long time.

After the war, the west launched a campaign accusing Stalin of being Hitler's "ally"

After the war, however, the fiasco surrounding the British white paper was long forgotten. The sleeping dogs awakened and began to bay. The west launched a campaign accusing Stalin of being Hitler's "ally". In 1948 the US State Department issued a collection of documents entitled Nazi-Soviet Relations, 1939-1941, to which the Soviet government replied with Falsifiers of History. The propaganda war was on, as was the western especially American attempt to attribute to the USSR as much as to Nazi Germany the responsibility for setting off World War II.

The American propaganda was preposterous given the history of the 1930s as we now know it from various European archives. Was there ever a gesture of ingratitude greater than US accusations blaming the USSR for the origins of the war and covering up the huge contribution of the Red Army to the common victory against Nazi Germany? These days in the west the role of the Soviet people in destroying Nazism is practically unknown. Few are aware that the Red Army fought almost alone for three years against the Wehrmacht all the while demanding a second front in France from its Anglo-American allies. Few know that the Red Army inflicted more than 80% of all casualties on the Wehrmacht and its allies, and that the Soviet people suffered losses so high that no one knows the exact numbers, though they are estimated at 26 to 27 million civilians and soldiers. Anglo-American losses were trivial by comparison.

Ironically, the anti-Russian campaign to falsify history intensified after the dismemberment of the USSR in 1991. The Baltic states and Poland led the charge. Like a tail wagging the dog, they stampeded all too willing European organisations, like the OSCE and PACE and the EU Parliament in Strasbourg, into ridiculous statements about the origins of World War II. It was the triumph of ignorance by politicians who knew nothing or who calculated that the few who did know something about the war, would not be heard. After all, how many people have read the diplomatic papers in various European archives detailing Soviet efforts to build an anti-Nazi alliance during the 1930s? How many people would know of the responsibilities of London, Paris, and Warsaw in obstructing the common European defence against Nazi Germany? "Not many," must have been the conclusion of European governments. The few historians and informed citizens who did or do know the truth could easily be shouted down, marginalised or ignored.

Western propaganda claimed that the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were "allies". World War II was entirely their fault, while France, Britain and Poland were innocent victims of totalitarianism

Thus it was that Hitler and Stalin became accomplices, the two pals and the two "totalitarians". The Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were "allies". World War II was entirely their fault. France, Britain and Poland were innocent victims of totalitarianism. The OSCE and PACE issued resolutions to this effect in 2009, declaring 23 August a day of remembrance of the victims of the Nazi-Soviet "alliance", as if the non-aggression pact signed on that day came out of the blue and had no context other than totalitarian evil.

In 2014 after the US and EU supported a coup d'état in Kiev, a fascist junta took power in the Ukraine, and the propaganda campaign to falsify history intensified. Ukrainian Nazi collaborators like Stepan Bandera were made into national heroes. The Ukrainian paramilitary forces, the so-called Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (OUN/UPA), which fought alongside the Wehrmacht and SS, were likewise transformed into forces of liberation.

After the 2014 putsch, Ukrainian Nazi collaborators like Stepan Bandera were made into national heroes

It looked like Poland and the Baltic states had gained an ally for their ugly anti-Russian campaigns. SS veterans paraded in the Baltic countries, and Polish hooligans vandalised Red Army graves while the Warsaw government bulldozed memorials to the Soviet liberators of Poland. Just this autumn Warsaw has attempted to control the thematic messages of a new museum of the Second World War being opened in Gdansk so that they conform to Polish government propaganda. The ruling Law and Justice Party wants to make Poland into a noble victim and the main story of World War II. In fact, Poland was a main story of the 1930s though not in any noble role. It was a spoiler of European collective security.

In October of this year the Polish and Ukrainian legislative assemblies passed resolutions vesting responsibility for World War II in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Given Poland's role in collaborating with Nazi Germany and obstructing Soviet efforts to create an anti-Nazi alliance in the 1930s, this resolution is surreal. Equally perverse is the Ukrainian equivalent resolution by a government celebrating Nazi collaboration during World War II.

Ironically, the the Law and Justice Partyhas its own troubles in its "alliance" with fascist Ukraine. Those Ukrainian collaborators, who fought with the Nazis and committed atrocities against Soviet citizens, also committed mass murder in Poland during the latter part of the war. As mightily as Poland seeks to falsify history, it cannot cover up the atrocities of Ukrainian Nazi collaborators against Poles, remembered in a recently released Polish hit film, "Volhynia". It looks like a poetic falling out amongst thieves who must bury the history of Ukrainian fascism and Nazi collaboration in order to unite against the common Russian foe. If only the numerous Ukrainians now living in southern Poland would stop putting up illegal monuments to remember Ukrainian Nazi collaborators. The poor Poles are caught between a rock and hard place. It is equally disagreeable to remember that the Red Army liberated Poland and stopped the atrocities of Ukrainian Nazi collaborators.

As mightily as Poland seeks to falsify history, it cannot cover up the atrocities of Ukrainian Nazi collaborators against Poles, remembered in a recently released Polish hit film, "Volhynia"

Will Russia and Poland finally bury the hatchet to rid themselves of the new wave of Ukrainian fascists in their midst? This is unlikely. The Polish government also had to choose in the 1930s between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. It chose collaboration with Nazi Germany and spurned an anti-Nazi alliance with the Soviet Union. No wonder history must be falsified. There is so much for western governments and Poland to hide. The views of individual contributors do not necessarily represent those of the Strategic Culture Foundation. Tags: World War I World War II

[Jan 12, 2020] What Poland Has to Hide About the Origins of World War II -- Strategic Culture

Jan 12, 2020 | www.strategic-culture.org

On 20 December 2019 President Vladimir Putin intervened very publicly to correct the West's fake history of the origins and waging of World War II. Four days later, obviously exasperated, he took aim at Poland, characterising the Polish ambassador in Berlin during the latter 1930s, Jósef Lipski, as " a bastard and anti-Semitic pig ". The Polish governing elite was notoriously anti-Semitic, and in 1938 Lipski told Adolf Hitler that the Poles would "'erect him a beautiful monument in Warsaw' if he carried out [a] plan to expel European Jews to Africa." In reaction, the Polish parliament, with a bipartisan majority, has indicated its intention "to pass a law that criminalizes lies about the causes of World War II." Putin's language about Lipski was n ot very presidential, but he was clearly outraged. He had reasons to be.

General (later Marshal) Józef Piłsudski, immediately set about gathering in eastern territories in the Ukraine and Byelorussia, leading to war with Soviet Russia.

Last August the Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, issued a statement lamenting the "infamous" Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact, concluded on 23 August 1939. Trudeau equated the Soviet Union with Nazi Germany in bringing " untold suffering upon people across Europe ". Obviously, Trudeau knows nothing about the origins and unfolding of World War II, but he is not alone. A few weeks later the European Parliament in Strasbourg (PACE) approved a resolution along the same lines as Trudeau's statement: the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact "paved the way for the outbreak of the Second World War." The resolution appears to have originated with a group of Polish MEPs representing the right-wing, so-called ECR Group . For PACE and the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), such resolutions are old hat. In 2008-2009 PACE established a bogus holiday on 23 August to commemorate the victims of fascist and communist "totalitarianism" and the signing of the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact. East Europeans and the NATO (read the United States) Parliamentary Assembly were also behind the launch of the new "holiday". The Poles would do well not to raise questions about the origins of the World War II. It is rather like digging with a stick into a pile of manure. As soon as you stir it up, the manure begins to stink.

Let's start at the beginning. The Polish state was re-established at the end of World War I; it was led by conservative Polish nationalists who sought to recreate Poland as a great power within its frontiers of 1772. General (later Marshal) Józef Piłsudski, immediately set about gathering in eastern territories in the Ukraine and Byelorussia, leading to war with Soviet Russia. Piłsudski had large ambitions and in December 1919 sent unofficial agents to Paris to obtain French consent for a major eastern offensive in the spring of 1920. The position in Paris was important because France was a key ally and major supplier of arms to the Polish government. The French were careful not to approve openly the offensive: they said it was a Polish decision to make, all the while continuing to supply arms to Warsaw. The French government was deeply hostile to Soviet Russia and if Poland could be used to weaken it, well then, all the better. The Poles had their own ambitions to retake long lost territories, including Kiev, in the contested borderlands over which Poles, Lithuanians, and Muscovites and Russians had fought for six centuries.

The Polish state was re-established at the end of World War I; it was led by conservative Polish nationalists who sought to recreate Poland as a great power within its frontiers of 1772.

The Poles launched their offensive in late April 1920 and reached Kiev on 7 May. The Red Army had withdrawn from the city to launch a counteroffensive which forced the Poles to retreat. That retreat became a debacle and continued to the outskirts of Warsaw in early August. There, the Poles launched their own successful counteroffensive driving back the Red Army. An armistice was concluded in October and the treaty of Riga signed in February 1921. The Poles would have been better to have foresworn their offensive and signed an earlier peace offered by Moscow. They ended up with less territory than they had held in April, but they still occupied areas where the population in majority was Byelorussian or Ukrainian. Neither side was satisfied with the Riga peace. Poland did not obtain its 1772 frontiers, and Soviet Russia had to concede territories which it regarded as Russian. It was not a good foundation upon which to improve relations in the future.

During the 1920s the Soviet government attempted to improve relations with France, and because Poland was a French ally, also attempted to improve relations with Poland. Unfortunately, neither France nor Poland was interested in Soviet overtures. In May 1926 Piłsudski led a coup d'état and assumed essentially dictatorial or quasi-dictatorial powers which he maintained until his death in May 1935. He was not disposed to pursue better relations with the USSR. Everywhere in Europe, "Sovietophobia and Russophobia," as one Soviet diplomat put it, were flourishing.

The Soviet commissar for foreign affairs, Maksim M. Litvinov, did not give up on the Poles, and invited his counterpart Józef Beck to Moscow for talks in February 1934.

This became a serious problem in 1933 when Adolf Hitler assumed power in Germany. Before Hitler took power, the Soviet government had maintained tolerable political and economic relations with Weimar Germany, enabled through the treaty of Rapallo in 1922. The new Nazi government abandoned that policy and launched a propaganda campaign against the USSR. Alarm bells went off in Moscow. At first, Soviet officials hoped to maintain the Rapallo policy, in spite of Hitler's assumption of power, but this early position was soon abandoned. In December 1933 the Soviet cabinet, that is, the Politburo, launched a new policy based on collective security and mutual assistance against Nazi Germany. The Soviet idea was to re-establish the World War I anti-German entente, composed of France, Britain, the United States, and even fascist Italy. Although not stated publicly, it was a policy of containment and preparation for war, should containment fail. The League of Nations also became an important element of Soviet strategy to be strengthened and readied for use against Nazi Germany. The USSR would become a League member in 1934.

France was to be a "pivot" of Soviet policy and so, just as in the 1920s, the USSR attempted to improve relations with Poland. In 1933 there seemed to be some forward movement in that direction. Soviet and Polish diplomats were talking, but the Poles were also talking to the Germans. Soviet diplomats did their best to bring Poland on side, but they had indications that the Polish government had gone courting in Berlin. Even the French were concerned. A few months later, on 26 January 1934, the Poles signed a non-aggression pact with Nazi-Germany.

From that point on, Soviet-Polish relations went downhill. The Soviet commissar for foreign affairs, Maksim M. Litvinov, did not give up on the Poles, and invited his counterpart Józef Beck to Moscow for talks in February 1934. There was a long discussion of the Nazi-Polish non-aggression pact. Litvinov rang the alarm bells, but Beck brushed him off.

Hitler signed the non-aggression pact, said Beck, because he realised that Poland was not some "little, fair-weather government" which could easily be disregarded.

You have terribly miscalculated, Litvinov replied. Don't confuse short-term tactics, for long-term strategy. Hitler is concealing his territorial ambitions for the time-being, but he will strike when the time is right. It is only a question of when and where he will strike first.

Beck brushed off Litvinov's concerns. "I do not see at the present time," said the Polish minister, "a danger from the side of Germany or in general the danger of war in Europe,"

Litvinov's record of his meetings with Beck was so striking and prophetic, that Soviet authorities declassified it in 1965 and published it in the years thereafter. One wonders whether Beck remembered his conversations with Litvinov a little more than five years later, as he fled Warsaw on 4 September 1939 with the Wehrmacht closing in on the capital. He was so sure that he was right and Litvinov wrong. Beck could never admit that a Soviet commissar, a Jew born in tsarist Poland ironically, could ever be right.

One wonders whether Beck remembered his conversations with Litvinov a little more than five years later, as he fled Warsaw on 4 September 1939 with the Wehrmacht closing in on the capital.

Litvinov concluded that Soviet-Polish cooperation against Nazi Germany was dead in the water. In fact, it was worse than that. Poland began to side with Nazi Germany to block Soviet efforts to build a system of collective security in Europe. Even the French were annoyed. "We will count on Russia," said the French foreign minister, Louis Barthou, "and not bother any more about Poland." That idea did not last long for Barthou was killed in Marseille in October 1934 as a result of the assassination of the Yugoslav king Alexander. Soviet policy maintained an open door to Warsaw in the event that the Polish government "came to its senses" and changed direction. In the meantime Soviet intelligence exercised "maximum vigilance" on Polish-German relations.

Already in the spring of 1934 Soviet diplomats noted that the Poles were trying to stir up trouble with Czechoslovakia over the question of the Těšín district where there was an important Polish population. "The Austrian question," the German annexation of Austria, was also on Polish minds in 1934. The Polish ambassador in Moscow opined that annexation was inevitable. "Poland was not so interested in the Austrian question," he said, "and so powerful that it could prevent Anschluss. " Nor was Poland interested in cooperating with the Soviet government to guarantee the security of the Baltic states and to keep the Germans out. As one prominent Polish conservative politician, commented in the press, "the rapprochement with the USSR has already gone too far and it should not be developed further, but rather slowed down." That was the view at the top, the so-called "Piłsudski line", and it was to continue after the marshal's death in 1935 until the beginning of the war. It proved to be a formula for ruin.

Soviet diplomats repeatedly warned their Polish counterparts that Poland was headed to its doom if it did not change policy. Germany would turn on them and crush them when the time was right.

The Polish elite never hid its preference for a rapprochement with Germany rather than for better relations with the USSR. In 1933 Polish diplomats had flirted with their Soviet counterparts as bait to attract Berlin. The Poles became spoilers of collective security sabotaging Soviet attempts to organise an anti-German entente. Soviet diplomats repeatedly warned their Polish counterparts that Poland was headed to its doom if it did not change policy. Germany would turn on them and crush them when the time was right. Could Soviet diplomats overcome Polish reticence? Or put another way, more cynically, could Poles stop being Poles in order to strengthen the security of their country? Unfortunately not, Polish officials laughed at such warnings, dismissed them out of hand. From 1934 onward, the Poles worked against Soviet diplomacy in London, Paris, Bucharest, Berlin, even Tokyo, anywhere they could put a spoke in the Soviet wheel.

The chickens started coming home to roost in 1938. In March Austria disappeared. The Wehrmacht marched into Vienna without a shot fired, greeted by rapturous crowds. The next target was Czechoslovakia and the German populated Sudeten territories. In April the Soviet commissariat for foreign affairs sent instructions to its ambassador in Paris to start a press campaign to warn the Poles of their "fourth partition", that is their destruction, if they continued their pro-German line. The French, still allied to Poland, asked the Polish ambassador in Paris in May what the Polish government would do if Nazi Germany threatened Czechoslovakia. "Nothing," came the reply, "We'll not move." And what is the Polish government's attitude toward the Soviet Union, the French wanted to know? Poland "considered the Russians to be enemies." If they try to help the Czechoslovaks by crossing Polish territory, "we will oppose them by force."

Poles considered Russia, no matter who governed it, to be "enemy no. 1," according to Edward Rydz-Śmigły, the Polish commander in chief: "If the German remains an adversary, he is not less a European and an homme d'ordre The Russian is a barbarian, an Asiatic, a corrupt and poisonous element, with which any contact is perilous and any compromise, lethal." The choice between the two was easy to make. In the event of war over Czechoslovakia, the French président du Conseil , Édouard Daladier, thought the Poles might turn against France and "strike [us] in the back". The French ambassador in Berlin told his Soviet counterpart that Poland was "clearly helping Germany." The Polish government had its eyes riveted on the Czechoslovak district of Těšín. In late September, as the Czechoslovak crisis was reaching its climax, Foreign Minister Beck told the British ambassador in Warsaw that Poland "could not agree that German demands [for the Sudeten territories] being satisfied, Poland should receive nothing." The Polish role in the Anglo-French betrayal of Czechoslovakia was the inevitable dead-end of the "Piłsudski line". In 1938 Poland was a Nazi ally and accomplice before it became a Nazi victim in 1939. "Vultures grovelling in villainy," Winston Churchill wrote of the Poles. One disgusted French diplomat (Roland de Margerie) likened the Poles to "ghouls who in former centuries crawled the battlefields to kill and rob the wounded ."

Poland had one last chance to save itself in 1939. There were negotiations between Britain, France, and the Soviet Union to organise resistance against further Hitlerite aggression. The Soviet door was still open if Poland cared to walk through it. Unfortunately, the Polish government declined to participate in any organisation of mutual assistance which included the Soviet Union. In early May, Vyacheslav M. Molotov, who succeeded Litvinov as commissar for foreign affairs, offered Soviet assistance against Nazi Germany. No thank you, came the Polish reply. The rising crisis in the spring of 1939 seemed of so little consequence, that Beck authorised his ambassador in Moscow to take summer holidays. The French ambassador in the Soviet capital was astonished by Beck's lack of concern. When a Soviet border guard was shot and killed by Polish troops, it was the Polish chargé d'affaires who had to deal with the angry Soviet reaction. When France and Britain asked for Polish cooperation with the USSR as the crisis mounted in the summer, the Poles again declined, although it is true that the British and French did not try very hard to make the Polish government see reason. France and Britain were themselves not serious about concluding a war-fighting alliance with the Soviet Union, but that is another story which I have told elsewhere . These were the circumstances that led to the conclusion of the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact on 23 August 1939. The initial reaction of the Polish everyman in Warsaw to the news from Moscow, according to the British ambassador, was bemused indifference. "Isn't Vasily a swine!" they were heard to say.

The Soviet volte-face did not take place in a vacuum. It was the direct result of nearly six years of failed policy to organise collective security and mutual assistance against Hitlerite Germany. No government in Europe wanted to ally wholeheartedly, or at all with the Soviet Union against the Nazi menace. They all sought agreements in Berlin to turn the wolf toward other prey. As for the Poles, they were spoilers and saboteurs of collective security. The Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact was the direct result of British, French, and Polish policy, and especially of the Munich accords selling out Czechoslovakia. What was sauce for the goose, remarked a French diplomat, was sauce for the gander. It was the policy of the "nice surprise" -- a turn of phrase Litvinov had once used -- that is, the policy of last resort after collective security failed. It was the door for the Poles which finally closed.

President Putin's recent comments in Moscow about the origins of the war are supported by the archival evidence. Polish government indignation, supported by comments from the know-nothing US ambassador in Warsaw and from Berlin of all places, is pure propaganda based on politically motivated fake history. "The USSR, left isolated," Putin concluded, "had to accept the reality which the Western states created with their own hands." This statement seems to me to sum up how and why war broke out in September 1939.

[Jan 12, 2020] The Canadian Prime Minister Needs a History Lesson -- Strategic Culture

Jan 12, 2020 | www.strategic-culture.org

The Canadian Prime Minister Needs a History Lesson Michael Jabara Carley September 1, 2019 © Photo: Wikimedia On August 23 rd the Canadian Prime Minister's office issued a statement to remember the so-called "black ribbon day," a bogus holiday established in 2008-2009 by the European Parliament to commemorate the victims of fascist and communist "totalitarianism" and the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact in 1939. Various centre-right political groupings inside the European Parliament, along with the NATO (read US) Parliamentary Assembly initiated or backed the idea. In 2009, the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, meeting in Lithuania, also passed a resolution "equating the roles of the USSR and Nazi Germany in starting World War II."

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's statement follows along similar lines. Here is an excerpt: "Black Ribbon Day marks the sombre anniversary of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Signed between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany in 1939 to divide Central and Eastern Europe , the infamous pact set the stage for the appalling atrocities these regimes would commit . In its wake, they stripped countries of their autonomy, forced families to flee their homes, and tore communities apart, including Jewish and Romani communities, and others . The Soviet and Nazi regimes brought untold suffering upon people across Europe , as millions were senselessly murdered and denied their rights, freedoms, and dignity [italics added]."

As a statement purporting to summarise the origins and unfolding of the Second World War, it is a parody of the actual events of the 1930s and war years. It is politically motivated "fake history"; it is in fact a whole cloth of lies.

Let's start at the beginning. In late January 1933 President Paul von Hindenburg, appointed Adolf Hitler as German chancellor. Within months Hitler's government declared illegal the German Communist and Socialist parties and commenced to establish a one party Nazi state. The Soviet government had heretofore maintained tolerable or correct relations with Weimar Germany, established through the treaty of Rapallo in 1922. The new Nazi government however abandoned that policy and launched a propaganda campaign against the Soviet Union and against its diplomatic, trade, and business representatives working in Germany. Soviet business offices were sometimes trashed and their personnel roughed up by Nazi hooligans.

Soviet Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Maksim M. Litvinov

Alarm bells went off in Moscow. Soviet diplomats and notably the Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Maksim M. Litvinov, had read Hitler's Mein Kampf , his blueprint for the German domination of Europe, published in the mid-1920s. The book became a bestseller in Germany and was a necessary addition to the mantel piece or the living room table in any German home. For those of you who may not know, Mein Kampf identified Jews and Slavs as Untermenschen , sub humans, good only for slavery or death. The Jews were not to be the only targets of Nazi genocide. Soviet territories eastward to the Ural Mountains were to become German. France was also named as a habitual enemy which had to be eliminated.

"What about Hitler's book?" Litvinov often asked German diplomats in Moscow. Oh that, they said, don't pay it any mind. Hitler doesn't really mean what he wrote. Litvinov smiled politely in reaction to such statements, but did not believe a word of what he heard from his German interlocutors.

In December 1933 the Soviet government established officially a new policy of collective security and mutual assistance against Nazi Germany. What did this new policy mean exactly? The Soviet idea was to re-establish the World War I anti-German entente, to be composed of France, Britain, the United States, and yes, even fascist Italy. Although not stated publically, it was a policy of containment and preparation for war against Nazi Germany should containment fail.

In October 1933 Litvinov went to Washington to settle the terms of US diplomatic recognition of the USSR. He had discussions with the new US president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, about collective security against Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany. Iosif Stalin, Litvinov's boss in Moscow, gave his approval to these discussions. Soviet-US relations were off to a good start, but in 1934 the State Department -- almost to a man, anti-communists -- sabotaged the rapprochement launched by Roosevelt and Litvinov.

At the same time Soviet diplomats in Paris were discussing collective security with the French foreign minister, Joseph Paul-Boncour. In 1933 and 1934 Paul-Boncour and his successor Louis Barthou strengthened ties with the USSR. The reason was simple: both governments felt threatened by Hitlerite Germany. Here too promising Franco-Soviet relations were sabotaged by Pierre Laval, who succeeded Barthou after the latter was killed in Marseilles during the assassination of the Yugoslav King Alexander I in October 1934. Laval was an anti-communist who preferred a rapprochement with Nazi Germany to collective security with the USSR. He gutted a Franco-Soviet mutual assistance pact which was finally signed in May 1935 only to delay its ratification in the French National Assembly. I call the pact the coquille vide , or empty shell. Laval lost power in January 1936 but the damage had been done. After the fall of France in 1940, Laval became a Nazi collaborator and was shot for treason in the autumn of 1945.

In Britain too Soviet diplomats were active and sought to launch an Anglo-Soviet rapprochement. Its aim was to establish the base for collective security against Nazi Germany. Here too the policy was sabotaged, first by the conclusion of the Anglo-German naval agreement in June 1935. This was a bilateral pact on German naval rearmament. The Soviet and French governments were stunned and considered the British deal with Germany to be a betrayal. In early 1936 a new British Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, put a stop to the rapprochement because of communist "propaganda". Soviet diplomats thought Eden was a "friend". He was nothing of the sort.

Fascism represented force, power, and masculinity for European elites who often doubted themselves and feared communism

In each case, the United States, France, and Britain halted promising discussions with the Soviet Union. Why would these governments do something so seemingly incomprehensive in hindsight? Because anti-communism and Sovietophobia were stronger motives amongst the US, French, and British governing elites than the perception of danger from Nazi Germany. On the contrary, these elites in large measure were sympathetic to Hitler. Fascism was a bulwark mounted in defence of capitalism, against the spread of communism and against the extension of Soviet influence into Europe. The great question of the 1930s was "who is enemy no. 1", Nazi Germany or the USSR? All too often these elites, not all, but the majority, got the answer to that question wrong. They preferred a rapprochement with Nazi Germany to collective security and mutual assistance with the USSR. Fascism represented force, power, and masculinity for European elites who often doubted themselves and feared communism. Leather uniforms, the odor of sweat from tens of thousands of marching fascists with their drums, banners, and torches were like aphrodisiacs for elites unsure of their own virility and of their security against the growth of Soviet influence. The Spanish civil war, which erupted in July 1936, polarised European politics between right and left and rendered impossible mutual assistance against Germany.

Italy was a peculiar case. The Soviet government maintained tolerable relations with Rome even though Italy was fascist and Russia, a communist state. Italy had fought on the side of the Entente during World War I and Litvinov wanted to keep it on side in the new coalition he was trying to build. Benito Mussolini had colonial ambitions in East Africa, however, launching a war of aggression against Abyssinia, the last parcel of African territory which had not been colonised by the European powers. To make a long story short, the Abyssinian crisis was the beginning of the end of Litvinov's hopes to keep Italy on side.

In Romania too Soviet diplomats had some early successes. The Romanian foreign minister, Nicolae Titulescu, favoured collective security and worked closely with Litvinov to improve Soviet-Romanian relations. It was Titulescu who backed Litvinov in trying to obtain agreement with France in 1935 for a pact of mutual assistance in spite of Laval's conniving and bad faith. Between Titulescu and Litvinov there were discussions about mutual assistance. These too came to nothing. Romania was dominated by a far right elite which disapproved of better Soviet relations. In August 1936 Titulescu found himself politically isolated and was compelled to resign. He spent much of his time abroad because he feared for his life in Bucharest.

British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain

In Czechoslovakia, Eduard Beneš, like Titulescu, favoured collective security against the Nazi menace. In May 1935 Beneš, the Czechoslovak president, signed a mutual assistance pact with the USSR, but he weakened it to avoid going beyond the scope of the Soviet pact with France, sabotaged by Laval. The Czechoslovaks feared Nazi Germany, and rightly so, but they would not ally closely with the USSR without the full backing of Britain and France, and this they would never obtain.

Czechoslovakia and Romania looked to a strong France and would not go beyond French commitments to the USSR. France looked to Britain. The British were the key, if they were ready to march, ready to ally themselves with the USSR, everyone else would fall into line. Without the British -- who would not march -- everything fell apart.

The Soviet Union also tried to improve relations with Poland. Here too Soviet diplomats failed when the Polish government signed a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany in January 1934. The Polish elite never hid its preference for a rapprochement with Germany rather than for better relations with the USSR. The Poles became spoilers of collective security sabotaging Soviet attempts to organise an anti-German entente. They were at their worst in 1938 as Nazi accomplices in the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia before they became victims of Nazi aggression in 1939. Soviet diplomats repeatedly warned their Polish counterparts that Poland was headed to its doom if it did not change policy. Germany would turn on them and crush them when the time was right. The Poles laughed at such warnings, dismissed them out of hand. Russians are "barbarians", they said, the Germans, a "civilised" people. The choice between the two was easy to make.

Let me be clear here. The archival evidence leaves no doubts, the Soviet government offered collective security and mutual assistance to France, Britain, Poland, Romania, Czechoslovakia, even fascist Italy, and in every case their offers were rejected, indeed spurned contemptuously in the case of Poland, the great spoiler of collective security in the lead-up to war in 1939. In the United States, the State Department sabotaged improving relations with Moscow. In the autumn of 1936, all Soviet efforts for mutual assistance had failed, and the USSR found itself isolated. No one wanted to ally with Moscow against Nazi Germany; all the above mentioned European powers conducted negotiations with Berlin to lure the wolf away from their doors. Yes, even the Czechoslovaks. The idea, both stated and unstated, was to turn Hitler's ambitions eastward against the USSR.

Munich: selling out your friends to buy off your enemies

Then came the Munich betrayal in September 1938. Britain and France sold out the Czechoslovaks to Germany. "Peace in our time," Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister, declared. Czechoslovakia was dismembered to buy "peace" for France and Britain. Poland got a modest share of the booty as part of the dirty deal. "Jackals," Winston Churchill called the Poles. In February 1939 the Manchester Guardian called Munich, selling out your friends to buy off your enemies. That description is apt.

In 1939 there was one last chance to conclude an Anglo-Franco-Soviet pact of mutual assistance against Nazi Germany. I call it the " alliance that never was ". In April 1939 the Soviet government offered France and Britain a political and military alliance against Nazi Germany. The terms of the alliance proposal were submitted on paper to Paris and London. In the spring of 1939 war looked inevitable. Rump Czechoslovakia had disappeared in March, gobbled up by the Wehrmacht without a shot fired. Later that month Hitler claimed the German populated Lithuanian city of Memel. In April a Gallup poll in Britain showed massive popular support for a Soviet alliance. In France too public opinion backed an alliance with Moscow. Churchill, then a Conservative backbencher, declared in the House of Commons that without the USSR there could be no successful resistance against Nazi aggression.

Logically, you would think that the French and British governments would have seized Soviet offers with both hands. It did not happen. The Foreign Office rejected the Soviet alliance proposal with the French grudgingly trailing behind. Litvinov was sacked as commissar and replaced by Viacheslav M. Molotov, Stalin's right arm. For a time Soviet policy continued unchanged. In May Molotov sent a message to Warsaw that the Soviet government would support Poland against German aggression if so desired. Incredible as it may seem, on the very next day, the Poles declined Molotov's proffered hand.

The Foreign Office rejected the Soviet alliance proposal with the French grudgingly trailing behind

In spite of the initial British rejection of Soviet proposals, Anglo-Franco-Soviet negotiations continued through the summer months of 1939. At the same time however British officials got caught negotiating with the Germans in search of a détente of the last hour with Hitler. It became public news in the British papers at the end of July as the British and French were preparing to send military missions to Moscow to conclude an alliance. The news caused a scandal in London and raised understandable Soviet doubts about Anglo-French good faith. It was then that Molotov began to show an interest in German overtures for an agreement.

There was more scandal to come. The Anglo-French military missions traveled to Moscow on a slow chartered merchantman making a top speed of thirteen knots. One Foreign Office official had proposed sending the missions in a fleet of fast British cruisers to make a point. The Foreign Secretary, Edward Lord Halifax, thought that idea was too provocative. So the French and British delegations went on a chartered merchantman and took five days to get to the USSR. Five days mattered when war could break out at any moment.

Could the situation become any more tragic, any more a farce? Indeed it could. The British chief negotiator, Admiral Sir Reginald Drax, had no written powers to sign an agreement with the Soviet side. His French counterpart, General Joseph Doumenc, had a vague letter of authority from the French président du Conseil. He could negotiate but not sign an agreement. Doumenc and Drax were supernumeraries. On the other hand, the Soviet side was represented by its commissar for war with full plenipotentiary powers. "All indications so far go to show," advised the British ambassador in Moscow, "that Soviet military negotiators are really out for business." In contrast, formal British instructions were to "go very slowly". When Drax met the Foreign Secretary Halifax before leaving for Moscow, he asked about the "possibility of failure" in the negotiations. "There was a short but impressive silence," according to Drax, "and the Foreign Secretary then remarked that on the whole it would be preferable to draw out the negotiations as long as possible." Doumenc remarked that he had been sent to Moscow with "empty hands." They had nothing to offer their Soviet interlocutors. The British could send two divisions to France at the outset of a European war. The Red Army could immediately mobilise one hundred divisions, and Soviet forces had just thrashed the Japanese in heavy fighting on the Manchurian frontier. What the hell? "They are not serious," Stalin concluded. And he was right. The French and British governments thought they could play Stalin for a fool. That was a mistake.

After the bad faith, after all the conniving, what would you have done in Stalin's boots, or any Russian leader's boots? Take the Poles, for example, they worked against Soviet diplomacy in London, Paris, Bucharest, Berlin, even Tokyo anywhere they could put a spoke in the Soviet wheel. They shared with Hitler in the spoils of Czechoslovak dismemberment. In 1939 they attempted until the last moment to sidetrack an anti-Nazi alliance in which the USSR was a signatory. I know, it is all too incredible to believe, like an implausible story line in a bad novel, but it was true. And then the Poles had the temerity to accuse the Soviet side of stabbing them in the back. It was Satan rebuking sin. The Polish governing elite brought ruin upon itself and its people. Even today it is the same old Poland. The Polish government is marking the beginning of the Second World War by inviting to Warsaw the former Axis powers, but not the Russian Federation, even though it was the Red Army which liberated Poland at high cost in dead and wounded. This is a fact of history which Polish nationalists simply cannot bear to hear and which they seek to erase from our memories.

The French and British governments thought they could play Stalin for a fool. That was a mistake

After nearly six years of trying to create a broad anti-German entente in Europe, notably with Britain and France, the Soviet government had nothing to show for its efforts. Nothing . By late 1936 the USSR was effectively isolated, and still Soviet diplomats tried to obtain agreement with France and Britain. The British and French, and the Romanians, and even the Czechoslovaks, and especially the Poles sabotaged, spurned or dodged Soviet offers, weakened agreements with Moscow and tried themselves to negotiate terms with Berlin to save their own skins. It was like they were doing Moscow a favour by humoring, with polite, knowing smiles, Soviet diplomats who talked about Mein Kampf and warned of the Nazi danger. The Soviet government feared being left in the lurch to fight the Wehrmacht alone while the French and the British sat on their hands in the west. After all, this is exactly what the French and British did while Poland collapsed at the beginning of September in a matter of days at the hands of the invading Wehrmacht. If France and Britain would not help Poland, would they have done more for the USSR? It is a question which Stalin and his colleagues most certainly asked themselves.

The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was the result of the failure of nearly six years of Soviet effort to form an anti-Nazi alliance with the western powers. The pact was ugly. It was Soviet sauve qui peut , and it contained a secret codicil which foresaw the creation of "spheres of influence" in Eastern Europe "in the event of territorial and political rearrangement[s]". But it was not worse than what the French and British had done at Munich. " C'est la réponse du berger à la bergère , the French ambassador in Moscow remarked, what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. The dismemberment of Czechoslovakia was the precedent for what then followed. As the late British historian A.J.P. Taylor so aptly put it long ago: violent western reproaches against the USSR "came ill from the statesmen who went to Munich . The Russians, in fact, did only what the Western statesmen had hoped to do; and Western bitterness was the bitterness of disappointment, mixed with anger that professions of Communism were no more sincere than their own professions of democracy [in dealing with Hitler]."

There then occurred a period of Soviet appeasement of Hitlerite Germany no more attractive than the Anglo-French appeasement which preceded it. And Stalin made a huge miscalculation. He disregarded his own military intelligence warning of a Nazi invasion of the USSR. He thought Hitler would not be such a fool as to invade the Soviet Union while Britain was still a belligerent power. How wrong he was. On 22 June 1941 the Axis powers invaded the Soviet Union with a huge military force along a front from the Baltic to the Black Seas.

It was the beginning of the Great Patriotic War, 1418 days of the most horrendous, intense violence. The USSR allied, finally, with Britain and the United States against Hitlerite Germany. It was the so-called Grand Alliance. France of course had disappeared, crushed by the German army in a military debacle in May 1940. During the first three years of fighting from June 1941 until June 1944, the Red Army fought nearly alone against the Nazi Wehrmacht. How ironic. Stalin had done all he could to avoid facing Hitlerite Germany alone, and yet there he was, the Red Army fighting nearly alone against the Wehrmacht and Axis Powers. The tide of battle turned at Stalingrad, sixteen months before the western allies landed in Normandy. Here is what President Roosevelt wrote to Stalin on 4 February 1943, the day after the last German forces surrendered in Stalingrad. "As Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of the United States of America, I congratulate you on the brilliant victory at Stalingrad of the armies under your Supreme Command. The 162 days of epic battle for the city which has for ever honored your name and the decisive result which all Americans are celebrating today will remain one of the proudest chapters in this war of the peoples united against Nazism and its emulators. The commanders and fighters of your armies at the front and the men and women, who have supported them, in factory and field, have combined not only to cover with glory their country's arms, but to inspire by their example fresh determination among all the United Nations to bend every energy to bring about the final defeat and unconditional surrender of the common enemy." As Churchill put it to Roosevelt at about the same time: "Listen, who is really fighting today? Stalin alone! And look how he is fighting " Yes, indeed, we should not, even now, forget how the Red Army fought.

From June 1941 until September 1943 there was not a single US, British, or Canadian division fighting on the ground of continental Europe, not one. The fighting in North Africa was a sideshow where Anglo-American forces faced two German divisions when more than two hundred German divisions were arrayed on the Soviet Front. The Italian campaign which began in September 1943 was a fiasco tying down more Allied divisions than German. When the western allies finally arrived in France, the Wehrmacht was a beaten-up shadow of what it had been when German soldiers stepped across Soviet frontiers in June 1941. Normandy was an anti-climax, enabled by the Red Army, and by no means the "decisive" battle of World War II which the western Mainstream Media have made it out to be.

Whatever sins, whatever turpitudes, whatever mistakes the Soviet government committed between September 1939 and June 1941, they were paid for in full by the colossal sacrifices and victory of Soviet arms against Hitlerite Germany

In the Soviet Union the Germans pillaged, burned, murdered relentlessly in an attempted genocide of the Soviet people, Slavs and Jews alike. An estimated 17 million civilians died at the hands of Nazi armies and their Ukrainian and Baltic collaborators. Ten million Red Army soldiers died in the war to liberate the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and to run down the Nazi beast in its Berlin lair. Large areas of the Soviet Union from Stalingrad in the east to the Caucasus and Sevastopol in the south to the Romanian, Polish and Baltic frontiers in the west and the north were laid waste. While there were Nazi massacres of civilians at Ouradour-sur-Glâne in France and in Lidice in Czechoslovakia, there were hundreds of such massacres in the Soviet Union in Byelorussia and the Ukraine in places of which we do not know the names or which are known only in still unexplored or unpublished Soviet archives. Whatever sins, whatever turpitudes, whatever mistakes the Soviet government committed between September 1939 and June 1941, they were paid for in full by the colossal sacrifices and victory of Soviet arms against Hitlerite Germany.

In the light of these facts , the Trudeau August 23 rd statement is politically motivated anti-Russian propaganda which serves no Canadian national interest. Trudeau gratuitously insulted not only the government of the Russian Federation, but also all Russians whose parents and grandparents fought in the Great Patriotic War. He attempts to delegitimise the emancipatory character of the war of the USSR against the Hitlerite invader and thereby to discredit the Soviet war effort. Trudeau's statement panders to the interests of his Ukrainian minister for foreign affairs in Ottawa, Chrystia Freeland, a known Russophobe, who celebrates the life of her late grandfather, a Ukrainian Nazi collaborator in occupied Poland. She supports a regime in Kiev which emerged from the violent, so-called Maidan coup d'état against the elected Ukrainian president, backed by fascist militias and from abroad by the European Union and the United States. As preposterous as it may sound, this regime celebrates the deeds of World War II Nazi collaborators, now treated as national heroes. The Canadian prime minister desperately needs a history lesson before he again insults the Russian people, and indeed denigrates the sacrifices of Canadian soldiers and sailors allied with the USSR against the common foe. Michael Jabara Carley September 1, 2019 | History The Canadian Prime Minister Needs a History Lesson On August 23 rd the Canadian Prime Minister's office issued a statement to remember the so-called "black ribbon day," a bogus holiday established in 2008-2009 by the European Parliament to commemorate the victims of fascist and communist "totalitarianism" and the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact in 1939. Various centre-right political groupings inside the European Parliament, along with the NATO (read US) Parliamentary Assembly initiated or backed the idea. In 2009, the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, meeting in Lithuania, also passed a resolution "equating the roles of the USSR and Nazi Germany in starting World War II."

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's statement follows along similar lines. Here is an excerpt: "Black Ribbon Day marks the sombre anniversary of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Signed between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany in 1939 to divide Central and Eastern Europe , the infamous pact set the stage for the appalling atrocities these regimes would commit . In its wake, they stripped countries of their autonomy, forced families to flee their homes, and tore communities apart, including Jewish and Romani communities, and others . The Soviet and Nazi regimes brought untold suffering upon people across Europe , as millions were senselessly murdered and denied their rights, freedoms, and dignity [italics added]."

As a statement purporting to summarise the origins and unfolding of the Second World War, it is a parody of the actual events of the 1930s and war years. It is politically motivated "fake history"; it is in fact a whole cloth of lies.

Let's start at the beginning. In late January 1933 President Paul von Hindenburg, appointed Adolf Hitler as German chancellor. Within months Hitler's government declared illegal the German Communist and Socialist parties and commenced to establish a one party Nazi state. The Soviet government had heretofore maintained tolerable or correct relations with Weimar Germany, established through the treaty of Rapallo in 1922. The new Nazi government however abandoned that policy and launched a propaganda campaign against the Soviet Union and against its diplomatic, trade, and business representatives working in Germany. Soviet business offices were sometimes trashed and their personnel roughed up by Nazi hooligans.

Soviet Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Maksim M. Litvinov

Alarm bells went off in Moscow. Soviet diplomats and notably the Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Maksim M. Litvinov, had read Hitler's Mein Kampf , his blueprint for the German domination of Europe, published in the mid-1920s. The book became a bestseller in Germany and was a necessary addition to the mantel piece or the living room table in any German home. For those of you who may not know, Mein Kampf identified Jews and Slavs as Untermenschen , sub humans, good only for slavery or death. The Jews were not to be the only targets of Nazi genocide. Soviet territories eastward to the Ural Mountains were to become German. France was also named as a habitual enemy which had to be eliminated.

"What about Hitler's book?" Litvinov often asked German diplomats in Moscow. Oh that, they said, don't pay it any mind. Hitler doesn't really mean what he wrote. Litvinov smiled politely in reaction to such statements, but did not believe a word of what he heard from his German interlocutors.

In December 1933 the Soviet government established officially a new policy of collective security and mutual assistance against Nazi Germany. What did this new policy mean exactly? The Soviet idea was to re-establish the World War I anti-German entente, to be composed of France, Britain, the United States, and yes, even fascist Italy. Although not stated publically, it was a policy of containment and preparation for war against Nazi Germany should containment fail.

In October 1933 Litvinov went to Washington to settle the terms of US diplomatic recognition of the USSR. He had discussions with the new US president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, about collective security against Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany. Iosif Stalin, Litvinov's boss in Moscow, gave his approval to these discussions. Soviet-US relations were off to a good start, but in 1934 the State Department -- almost to a man, anti-communists -- sabotaged the rapprochement launched by Roosevelt and Litvinov.

At the same time Soviet diplomats in Paris were discussing collective security with the French foreign minister, Joseph Paul-Boncour. In 1933 and 1934 Paul-Boncour and his successor Louis Barthou strengthened ties with the USSR. The reason was simple: both governments felt threatened by Hitlerite Germany. Here too promising Franco-Soviet relations were sabotaged by Pierre Laval, who succeeded Barthou after the latter was killed in Marseilles during the assassination of the Yugoslav King Alexander I in October 1934. Laval was an anti-communist who preferred a rapprochement with Nazi Germany to collective security with the USSR. He gutted a Franco-Soviet mutual assistance pact which was finally signed in May 1935 only to delay its ratification in the French National Assembly. I call the pact the coquille vide , or empty shell. Laval lost power in January 1936 but the damage had been done. After the fall of France in 1940, Laval became a Nazi collaborator and was shot for treason in the autumn of 1945.

In Britain too Soviet diplomats were active and sought to launch an Anglo-Soviet rapprochement. Its aim was to establish the base for collective security against Nazi Germany. Here too the policy was sabotaged, first by the conclusion of the Anglo-German naval agreement in June 1935. This was a bilateral pact on German naval rearmament. The Soviet and French governments were stunned and considered the British deal with Germany to be a betrayal. In early 1936 a new British Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, put a stop to the rapprochement because of communist "propaganda". Soviet diplomats thought Eden was a "friend". He was nothing of the sort.

Fascism represented force, power, and masculinity for European elites who often doubted themselves and feared communism

In each case, the United States, France, and Britain halted promising discussions with the Soviet Union. Why would these governments do something so seemingly incomprehensive in hindsight? Because anti-communism and Sovietophobia were stronger motives amongst the US, French, and British governing elites than the perception of danger from Nazi Germany. On the contrary, these elites in large measure were sympathetic to Hitler. Fascism was a bulwark mounted in defence of capitalism, against the spread of communism and against the extension of Soviet influence into Europe. The great question of the 1930s was "who is enemy no. 1", Nazi Germany or the USSR? All too often these elites, not all, but the majority, got the answer to that question wrong. They preferred a rapprochement with Nazi Germany to collective security and mutual assistance with the USSR. Fascism represented force, power, and masculinity for European elites who often doubted themselves and feared communism. Leather uniforms, the odor of sweat from tens of thousands of marching fascists with their drums, banners, and torches were like aphrodisiacs for elites unsure of their own virility and of their security against the growth of Soviet influence. The Spanish civil war, which erupted in July 1936, polarised European politics between right and left and rendered impossible mutual assistance against Germany.

Italy was a peculiar case. The Soviet government maintained tolerable relations with Rome even though Italy was fascist and Russia, a communist state. Italy had fought on the side of the Entente during World War I and Litvinov wanted to keep it on side in the new coalition he was trying to build. Benito Mussolini had colonial ambitions in East Africa, however, launching a war of aggression against Abyssinia, the last parcel of African territory which had not been colonised by the European powers. To make a long story short, the Abyssinian crisis was the beginning of the end of Litvinov's hopes to keep Italy on side.

In Romania too Soviet diplomats had some early successes. The Romanian foreign minister, Nicolae Titulescu, favoured collective security and worked closely with Litvinov to improve Soviet-Romanian relations. It was Titulescu who backed Litvinov in trying to obtain agreement with France in 1935 for a pact of mutual assistance in spite of Laval's conniving and bad faith. Between Titulescu and Litvinov there were discussions about mutual assistance. These too came to nothing. Romania was dominated by a far right elite which disapproved of better Soviet relations. In August 1936 Titulescu found himself politically isolated and was compelled to resign. He spent much of his time abroad because he feared for his life in Bucharest.

British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain

In Czechoslovakia, Eduard Beneš, like Titulescu, favoured collective security against the Nazi menace. In May 1935 Beneš, the Czechoslovak president, signed a mutual assistance pact with the USSR, but he weakened it to avoid going beyond the scope of the Soviet pact with France, sabotaged by Laval. The Czechoslovaks feared Nazi Germany, and rightly so, but they would not ally closely with the USSR without the full backing of Britain and France, and this they would never obtain.

Czechoslovakia and Romania looked to a strong France and would not go beyond French commitments to the USSR. France looked to Britain. The British were the key, if they were ready to march, ready to ally themselves with the USSR, everyone else would fall into line. Without the British -- who would not march -- everything fell apart.

The Soviet Union also tried to improve relations with Poland. Here too Soviet diplomats failed when the Polish government signed a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany in January 1934. The Polish elite never hid its preference for a rapprochement with Germany rather than for better relations with the USSR. The Poles became spoilers of collective security sabotaging Soviet attempts to organise an anti-German entente. They were at their worst in 1938 as Nazi accomplices in the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia before they became victims of Nazi aggression in 1939. Soviet diplomats repeatedly warned their Polish counterparts that Poland was headed to its doom if it did not change policy. Germany would turn on them and crush them when the time was right. The Poles laughed at such warnings, dismissed them out of hand. Russians are "barbarians", they said, the Germans, a "civilised" people. The choice between the two was easy to make.

Let me be clear here. The archival evidence leaves no doubts, the Soviet government offered collective security and mutual assistance to France, Britain, Poland, Romania, Czechoslovakia, even fascist Italy, and in every case their offers were rejected, indeed spurned contemptuously in the case of Poland, the great spoiler of collective security in the lead-up to war in 1939. In the United States, the State Department sabotaged improving relations with Moscow. In the autumn of 1936, all Soviet efforts for mutual assistance had failed, and the USSR found itself isolated. No one wanted to ally with Moscow against Nazi Germany; all the above mentioned European powers conducted negotiations with Berlin to lure the wolf away from their doors. Yes, even the Czechoslovaks. The idea, both stated and unstated, was to turn Hitler's ambitions eastward against the USSR.

Munich: selling out your friends to buy off your enemies

Then came the Munich betrayal in September 1938. Britain and France sold out the Czechoslovaks to Germany. "Peace in our time," Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister, declared. Czechoslovakia was dismembered to buy "peace" for France and Britain. Poland got a modest share of the booty as part of the dirty deal. "Jackals," Winston Churchill called the Poles. In February 1939 the Manchester Guardian called Munich, selling out your friends to buy off your enemies. That description is apt.

In 1939 there was one last chance to conclude an Anglo-Franco-Soviet pact of mutual assistance against Nazi Germany. I call it the " alliance that never was ". In April 1939 the Soviet government offered France and Britain a political and military alliance against Nazi Germany. The terms of the alliance proposal were submitted on paper to Paris and London. In the spring of 1939 war looked inevitable. Rump Czechoslovakia had disappeared in March, gobbled up by the Wehrmacht without a shot fired. Later that month Hitler claimed the German populated Lithuanian city of Memel. In April a Gallup poll in Britain showed massive popular support for a Soviet alliance. In France too public opinion backed an alliance with Moscow. Churchill, then a Conservative backbencher, declared in the House of Commons that without the USSR there could be no successful resistance against Nazi aggression.

Logically, you would think that the French and British governments would have seized Soviet offers with both hands. It did not happen. The Foreign Office rejected the Soviet alliance proposal with the French grudgingly trailing behind. Litvinov was sacked as commissar and replaced by Viacheslav M. Molotov, Stalin's right arm. For a time Soviet policy continued unchanged. In May Molotov sent a message to Warsaw that the Soviet government would support Poland against German aggression if so desired. Incredible as it may seem, on the very next day, the Poles declined Molotov's proffered hand.

The Foreign Office rejected the Soviet alliance proposal with the French grudgingly trailing behind

In spite of the initial British rejection of Soviet proposals, Anglo-Franco-Soviet negotiations continued through the summer months of 1939. At the same time however British officials got caught negotiating with the Germans in search of a détente of the last hour with Hitler. It became public news in the British papers at the end of July as the British and French were preparing to send military missions to Moscow to conclude an alliance. The news caused a scandal in London and raised understandable Soviet doubts about Anglo-French good faith. It was then that Molotov began to show an interest in German overtures for an agreement.

There was more scandal to come. The Anglo-French military missions traveled to Moscow on a slow chartered merchantman making a top speed of thirteen knots. One Foreign Office official had proposed sending the missions in a fleet of fast British cruisers to make a point. The Foreign Secretary, Edward Lord Halifax, thought that idea was too provocative. So the French and British delegations went on a chartered merchantman and took five days to get to the USSR. Five days mattered when war could break out at any moment.

Could the situation become any more tragic, any more a farce? Indeed it could. The British chief negotiator, Admiral Sir Reginald Drax, had no written powers to sign an agreement with the Soviet side. His French counterpart, General Joseph Doumenc, had a vague letter of authority from the French président du Conseil. He could negotiate but not sign an agreement. Doumenc and Drax were supernumeraries. On the other hand, the Soviet side was represented by its commissar for war with full plenipotentiary powers. "All indications so far go to show," advised the British ambassador in Moscow, "that Soviet military negotiators are really out for business." In contrast, formal British instructions were to "go very slowly". When Drax met the Foreign Secretary Halifax before leaving for Moscow, he asked about the "possibility of failure" in the negotiations. "There was a short but impressive silence," according to Drax, "and the Foreign Secretary then remarked that on the whole it would be preferable to draw out the negotiations as long as possible." Doumenc remarked that he had been sent to Moscow with "empty hands." They had nothing to offer their Soviet interlocutors. The British could send two divisions to France at the outset of a European war. The Red Army could immediately mobilise one hundred divisions, and Soviet forces had just thrashed the Japanese in heavy fighting on the Manchurian frontier. What the hell? "They are not serious," Stalin concluded. And he was right. The French and British governments thought they could play Stalin for a fool. That was a mistake.

After the bad faith, after all the conniving, what would you have done in Stalin's boots, or any Russian leader's boots? Take the Poles, for example, they worked against Soviet diplomacy in London, Paris, Bucharest, Berlin, even Tokyo anywhere they could put a spoke in the Soviet wheel. They shared with Hitler in the spoils of Czechoslovak dismemberment. In 1939 they attempted until the last moment to sidetrack an anti-Nazi alliance in which the USSR was a signatory. I know, it is all too incredible to believe, like an implausible story line in a bad novel, but it was true. And then the Poles had the temerity to accuse the Soviet side of stabbing them in the back. It was Satan rebuking sin. The Polish governing elite brought ruin upon itself and its people. Even today it is the same old Poland. The Polish government is marking the beginning of the Second World War by inviting to Warsaw the former Axis powers, but not the Russian Federation, even though it was the Red Army which liberated Poland at high cost in dead and wounded. This is a fact of history which Polish nationalists simply cannot bear to hear and which they seek to erase from our memories.

The French and British governments thought they could play Stalin for a fool. That was a mistake

After nearly six years of trying to create a broad anti-German entente in Europe, notably with Britain and France, the Soviet government had nothing to show for its efforts. Nothing . By late 1936 the USSR was effectively isolated, and still Soviet diplomats tried to obtain agreement with France and Britain. The British and French, and the Romanians, and even the Czechoslovaks, and especially the Poles sabotaged, spurned or dodged Soviet offers, weakened agreements with Moscow and tried themselves to negotiate terms with Berlin to save their own skins. It was like they were doing Moscow a favour by humoring, with polite, knowing smiles, Soviet diplomats who talked about Mein Kampf and warned of the Nazi danger. The Soviet government feared being left in the lurch to fight the Wehrmacht alone while the French and the British sat on their hands in the west. After all, this is exactly what the French and British did while Poland collapsed at the beginning of September in a matter of days at the hands of the invading Wehrmacht. If France and Britain would not help Poland, would they have done more for the USSR? It is a question which Stalin and his colleagues most certainly asked themselves.

The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was the result of the failure of nearly six years of Soviet effort to form an anti-Nazi alliance with the western powers. The pact was ugly. It was Soviet sauve qui peut , and it contained a secret codicil which foresaw the creation of "spheres of influence" in Eastern Europe "in the event of territorial and political rearrangement[s]". But it was not worse than what the French and British had done at Munich. " C'est la réponse du berger à la bergère , the French ambassador in Moscow remarked, what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. The dismemberment of Czechoslovakia was the precedent for what then followed. As the late British historian A.J.P. Taylor so aptly put it long ago: violent western reproaches against the USSR "came ill from the statesmen who went to Munich . The Russians, in fact, did only what the Western statesmen had hoped to do; and Western bitterness was the bitterness of disappointment, mixed with anger that professions of Communism were no more sincere than their own professions of democracy [in dealing with Hitler]."

There then occurred a period of Soviet appeasement of Hitlerite Germany no more attractive than the Anglo-French appeasement which preceded it. And Stalin made a huge miscalculation. He disregarded his own military intelligence warning of a Nazi invasion of the USSR. He thought Hitler would not be such a fool as to invade the Soviet Union while Britain was still a belligerent power. How wrong he was. On 22 June 1941 the Axis powers invaded the Soviet Union with a huge military force along a front from the Baltic to the Black Seas.

It was the beginning of the Great Patriotic War, 1418 days of the most horrendous, intense violence. The USSR allied, finally, with Britain and the United States against Hitlerite Germany. It was the so-called Grand Alliance. France of course had disappeared, crushed by the German army in a military debacle in May 1940. During the first three years of fighting from June 1941 until June 1944, the Red Army fought nearly alone against the Nazi Wehrmacht. How ironic. Stalin had done all he could to avoid facing Hitlerite Germany alone, and yet there he was, the Red Army fighting nearly alone against the Wehrmacht and Axis Powers. The tide of battle turned at Stalingrad, sixteen months before the western allies landed in Normandy. Here is what President Roosevelt wrote to Stalin on 4 February 1943, the day after the last German forces surrendered in Stalingrad. "As Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of the United States of America, I congratulate you on the brilliant victory at Stalingrad of the armies under your Supreme Command. The 162 days of epic battle for the city which has for ever honored your name and the decisive result which all Americans are celebrating today will remain one of the proudest chapters in this war of the peoples united against Nazism and its emulators. The commanders and fighters of your armies at the front and the men and women, who have supported them, in factory and field, have combined not only to cover with glory their country's arms, but to inspire by their example fresh determination among all the United Nations to bend every energy to bring about the final defeat and unconditional surrender of the common enemy." As Churchill put it to Roosevelt at about the same time: "Listen, who is really fighting today? Stalin alone! And look how he is fighting " Yes, indeed, we should not, even now, forget how the Red Army fought.

From June 1941 until September 1943 there was not a single US, British, or Canadian division fighting on the ground of continental Europe, not one. The fighting in North Africa was a sideshow where Anglo-American forces faced two German divisions when more than two hundred German divisions were arrayed on the Soviet Front. The Italian campaign which began in September 1943 was a fiasco tying down more Allied divisions than German. When the western allies finally arrived in France, the Wehrmacht was a beaten-up shadow of what it had been when German soldiers stepped across Soviet frontiers in June 1941. Normandy was an anti-climax, enabled by the Red Army, and by no means the "decisive" battle of World War II which the western Mainstream Media have made it out to be.

Whatever sins, whatever turpitudes, whatever mistakes the Soviet government committed between September 1939 and June 1941, they were paid for in full by the colossal sacrifices and victory of Soviet arms against Hitlerite Germany

In the Soviet Union the Germans pillaged, burned, murdered relentlessly in an attempted genocide of the Soviet people, Slavs and Jews alike. An estimated 17 million civilians died at the hands of Nazi armies and their Ukrainian and Baltic collaborators. Ten million Red Army soldiers died in the war to liberate the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and to run down the Nazi beast in its Berlin lair. Large areas of the Soviet Union from Stalingrad in the east to the Caucasus and Sevastopol in the south to the Romanian, Polish and Baltic frontiers in the west and the north were laid waste. While there were Nazi massacres of civilians at Ouradour-sur-Glâne in France and in Lidice in Czechoslovakia, there were hundreds of such massacres in the Soviet Union in Byelorussia and the Ukraine in places of which we do not know the names or which are known only in still unexplored or unpublished Soviet archives. Whatever sins, whatever turpitudes, whatever mistakes the Soviet government committed between September 1939 and June 1941, they were paid for in full by the colossal sacrifices and victory of Soviet arms against Hitlerite Germany.

In the light of these facts , the Trudeau August 23 rd statement is politically motivated anti-Russian propaganda which serves no Canadian national interest. Trudeau gratuitously insulted not only the government of the Russian Federation, but also all Russians whose parents and grandparents fought in the Great Patriotic War. He attempts to delegitimise the emancipatory character of the war of the USSR against the Hitlerite invader and thereby to discredit the Soviet war effort. Trudeau's statement panders to the interests of his Ukrainian minister for foreign affairs in Ottawa, Chrystia Freeland, a known Russophobe, who celebrates the life of her late grandfather, a Ukrainian Nazi collaborator in occupied Poland. She supports a regime in Kiev which emerged from the violent, so-called Maidan coup d'état against the elected Ukrainian president, backed by fascist militias and from abroad by the European Union and the United States. As preposterous as it may sound, this regime celebrates the deeds of World War II Nazi collaborators, now treated as national heroes. The Canadian prime minister desperately needs a history lesson before he again insults the Russian people, and indeed denigrates the sacrifices of Canadian soldiers and sailors allied with the USSR against the common foe.

© 2010 - 2020 | Strategic Culture Foundation | Republishing is welcomed with reference to Strategic Culture online journal www.strategic-culture.org . The views of individual contributors do not necessarily represent those of the Strategic Culture Foundation. On August 23 rd the Canadian Prime Minister's office issued a statement to remember the so-called "black ribbon day," a bogus holiday established in 2008-2009 by the European Parliament to commemorate the victims of fascist and communist "totalitarianism" and the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact in 1939. Various centre-right political groupings inside the European Parliament, along with the NATO (read US) Parliamentary Assembly initiated or backed the idea. In 2009, the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, meeting in Lithuania, also passed a resolution "equating the roles of the USSR and Nazi Germany in starting World War II."

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's statement follows along similar lines. Here is an excerpt: "Black Ribbon Day marks the sombre anniversary of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Signed between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany in 1939 to divide Central and Eastern Europe , the infamous pact set the stage for the appalling atrocities these regimes would commit . In its wake, they stripped countries of their autonomy, forced families to flee their homes, and tore communities apart, including Jewish and Romani communities, and others . The Soviet and Nazi regimes brought untold suffering upon people across Europe , as millions were senselessly murdered and denied their rights, freedoms, and dignity [italics added]."

As a statement purporting to summarise the origins and unfolding of the Second World War, it is a parody of the actual events of the 1930s and war years. It is politically motivated "fake history"; it is in fact a whole cloth of lies.

Let's start at the beginning. In late January 1933 President Paul von Hindenburg, appointed Adolf Hitler as German chancellor. Within months Hitler's government declared illegal the German Communist and Socialist parties and commenced to establish a one party Nazi state. The Soviet government had heretofore maintained tolerable or correct relations with Weimar Germany, established through the treaty of Rapallo in 1922. The new Nazi government however abandoned that policy and launched a propaganda campaign against the Soviet Union and against its diplomatic, trade, and business representatives working in Germany. Soviet business offices were sometimes trashed and their personnel roughed up by Nazi hooligans.

Soviet Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Maksim M. Litvinov

Alarm bells went off in Moscow. Soviet diplomats and notably the Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Maksim M. Litvinov, had read Hitler's Mein Kampf , his blueprint for the German domination of Europe, published in the mid-1920s. The book became a bestseller in Germany and was a necessary addition to the mantel piece or the living room table in any German home. For those of you who may not know, Mein Kampf identified Jews and Slavs as Untermenschen , sub humans, good only for slavery or death. The Jews were not to be the only targets of Nazi genocide. Soviet territories eastward to the Ural Mountains were to become German. France was also named as a habitual enemy which had to be eliminated.

"What about Hitler's book?" Litvinov often asked German diplomats in Moscow. Oh that, they said, don't pay it any mind. Hitler doesn't really mean what he wrote. Litvinov smiled politely in reaction to such statements, but did not believe a word of what he heard from his German interlocutors.

In December 1933 the Soviet government established officially a new policy of collective security and mutual assistance against Nazi Germany. What did this new policy mean exactly? The Soviet idea was to re-establish the World War I anti-German entente, to be composed of France, Britain, the United States, and yes, even fascist Italy. Although not stated publically, it was a policy of containment and preparation for war against Nazi Germany should containment fail.

In October 1933 Litvinov went to Washington to settle the terms of US diplomatic recognition of the USSR. He had discussions with the new US president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, about collective security against Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany. Iosif Stalin, Litvinov's boss in Moscow, gave his approval to these discussions. Soviet-US relations were off to a good start, but in 1934 the State Department -- almost to a man, anti-communists -- sabotaged the rapprochement launched by Roosevelt and Litvinov.

At the same time Soviet diplomats in Paris were discussing collective security with the French foreign minister, Joseph Paul-Boncour. In 1933 and 1934 Paul-Boncour and his successor Louis Barthou strengthened ties with the USSR. The reason was simple: both governments felt threatened by Hitlerite Germany. Here too promising Franco-Soviet relations were sabotaged by Pierre Laval, who succeeded Barthou after the latter was killed in Marseilles during the assassination of the Yugoslav King Alexander I in October 1934. Laval was an anti-communist who preferred a rapprochement with Nazi Germany to collective security with the USSR. He gutted a Franco-Soviet mutual assistance pact which was finally signed in May 1935 only to delay its ratification in the French National Assembly. I call the pact the coquille vide , or empty shell. Laval lost power in January 1936 but the damage had been done. After the fall of France in 1940, Laval became a Nazi collaborator and was shot for treason in the autumn of 1945.

In Britain too Soviet diplomats were active and sought to launch an Anglo-Soviet rapprochement. Its aim was to establish the base for collective security against Nazi Germany. Here too the policy was sabotaged, first by the conclusion of the Anglo-German naval agreement in June 1935. This was a bilateral pact on German naval rearmament. The Soviet and French governments were stunned and considered the British deal with Germany to be a betrayal. In early 1936 a new British Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, put a stop to the rapprochement because of communist "propaganda". Soviet diplomats thought Eden was a "friend". He was nothing of the sort.

Fascism represented force, power, and masculinity for European elites who often doubted themselves and feared communism

In each case, the United States, France, and Britain halted promising discussions with the Soviet Union. Why would these governments do something so seemingly incomprehensive in hindsight? Because anti-communism and Sovietophobia were stronger motives amongst the US, French, and British governing elites than the perception of danger from Nazi Germany. On the contrary, these elites in large measure were sympathetic to Hitler. Fascism was a bulwark mounted in defence of capitalism, against the spread of communism and against the extension of Soviet influence into Europe. The great question of the 1930s was "who is enemy no. 1", Nazi Germany or the USSR? All too often these elites, not all, but the majority, got the answer to that question wrong. They preferred a rapprochement with Nazi Germany to collective security and mutual assistance with the USSR. Fascism represented force, power, and masculinity for European elites who often doubted themselves and feared communism. Leather uniforms, the odor of sweat from tens of thousands of marching fascists with their drums, banners, and torches were like aphrodisiacs for elites unsure of their own virility and of their security against the growth of Soviet influence. The Spanish civil war, which erupted in July 1936, polarised European politics between right and left and rendered impossible mutual assistance against Germany.

Italy was a peculiar case. The Soviet government maintained tolerable relations with Rome even though Italy was fascist and Russia, a communist state. Italy had fought on the side of the Entente during World War I and Litvinov wanted to keep it on side in the new coalition he was trying to build. Benito Mussolini had colonial ambitions in East Africa, however, launching a war of aggression against Abyssinia, the last parcel of African territory which had not been colonised by the European powers. To make a long story short, the Abyssinian crisis was the beginning of the end of Litvinov's hopes to keep Italy on side.

In Romania too Soviet diplomats had some early successes. The Romanian foreign minister, Nicolae Titulescu, favoured collective security and worked closely with Litvinov to improve Soviet-Romanian relations. It was Titulescu who backed Litvinov in trying to obtain agreement with France in 1935 for a pact of mutual assistance in spite of Laval's conniving and bad faith. Between Titulescu and Litvinov there were discussions about mutual assistance. These too came to nothing. Romania was dominated by a far right elite which disapproved of better Soviet relations. In August 1936 Titulescu found himself politically isolated and was compelled to resign. He spent much of his time abroad because he feared for his life in Bucharest.

British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain

In Czechoslovakia, Eduard Beneš, like Titulescu, favoured collective security against the Nazi menace. In May 1935 Beneš, the Czechoslovak president, signed a mutual assistance pact with the USSR, but he weakened it to avoid going beyond the scope of the Soviet pact with France, sabotaged by Laval. The Czechoslovaks feared Nazi Germany, and rightly so, but they would not ally closely with the USSR without the full backing of Britain and France, and this they would never obtain.

Czechoslovakia and Romania looked to a strong France and would not go beyond French commitments to the USSR. France looked to Britain. The British were the key, if they were ready to march, ready to ally themselves with the USSR, everyone else would fall into line. Without the British -- who would not march -- everything fell apart.

The Soviet Union also tried to improve relations with Poland. Here too Soviet diplomats failed when the Polish government signed a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany in January 1934. The Polish elite never hid its preference for a rapprochement with Germany rather than for better relations with the USSR. The Poles became spoilers of collective security sabotaging Soviet attempts to organise an anti-German entente. They were at their worst in 1938 as Nazi accomplices in the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia before they became victims of Nazi aggression in 1939. Soviet diplomats repeatedly warned their Polish counterparts that Poland was headed to its doom if it did not change policy. Germany would turn on them and crush them when the time was right. The Poles laughed at such warnings, dismissed them out of hand. Russians are "barbarians", they said, the Germans, a "civilised" people. The choice between the two was easy to make.

Let me be clear here. The archival evidence leaves no doubts, the Soviet government offered collective security and mutual assistance to France, Britain, Poland, Romania, Czechoslovakia, even fascist Italy, and in every case their offers were rejected, indeed spurned contemptuously in the case of Poland, the great spoiler of collective security in the lead-up to war in 1939. In the United States, the State Department sabotaged improving relations with Moscow. In the autumn of 1936, all Soviet efforts for mutual assistance had failed, and the USSR found itself isolated. No one wanted to ally with Moscow against Nazi Germany; all the above mentioned European powers conducted negotiations with Berlin to lure the wolf away from their doors. Yes, even the Czechoslovaks. The idea, both stated and unstated, was to turn Hitler's ambitions eastward against the USSR.

Munich: selling out your friends to buy off your enemies

Then came the Munich betrayal in September 1938. Britain and France sold out the Czechoslovaks to Germany. "Peace in our time," Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister, declared. Czechoslovakia was dismembered to buy "peace" for France and Britain. Poland got a modest share of the booty as part of the dirty deal. "Jackals," Winston Churchill called the Poles. In February 1939 the Manchester Guardian called Munich, selling out your friends to buy off your enemies. That description is apt.

In 1939 there was one last chance to conclude an Anglo-Franco-Soviet pact of mutual assistance against Nazi Germany. I call it the " alliance that never was ". In April 1939 the Soviet government offered France and Britain a political and military alliance against Nazi Germany. The terms of the alliance proposal were submitted on paper to Paris and London. In the spring of 1939 war looked inevitable. Rump Czechoslovakia had disappeared in March, gobbled up by the Wehrmacht without a shot fired. Later that month Hitler claimed the German populated Lithuanian city of Memel. In April a Gallup poll in Britain showed massive popular support for a Soviet alliance. In France too public opinion backed an alliance with Moscow. Churchill, then a Conservative backbencher, declared in the House of Commons that without the USSR there could be no successful resistance against Nazi aggression.

Logically, you would think that the French and British governments would have seized Soviet offers with both hands. It did not happen. The Foreign Office rejected the Soviet alliance proposal with the French grudgingly trailing behind. Litvinov was sacked as commissar and replaced by Viacheslav M. Molotov, Stalin's right arm. For a time Soviet policy continued unchanged. In May Molotov sent a message to Warsaw that the Soviet government would support Poland against German aggression if so desired. Incredible as it may seem, on the very next day, the Poles declined Molotov's proffered hand.

The Foreign Office rejected the Soviet alliance proposal with the French grudgingly trailing behind

In spite of the initial British rejection of Soviet proposals, Anglo-Franco-Soviet negotiations continued through the summer months of 1939. At the same time however British officials got caught negotiating with the Germans in search of a détente of the last hour with Hitler. It became public news in the British papers at the end of July as the British and French were preparing to send military missions to Moscow to conclude an alliance. The news caused a scandal in London and raised understandable Soviet doubts about Anglo-French good faith. It was then that Molotov began to show an interest in German overtures for an agreement.

There was more scandal to come. The Anglo-French military missions traveled to Moscow on a slow chartered merchantman making a top speed of thirteen knots. One Foreign Office official had proposed sending the missions in a fleet of fast British cruisers to make a point. The Foreign Secretary, Edward Lord Halifax, thought that idea was too provocative. So the French and British delegations went on a chartered merchantman and took five days to get to the USSR. Five days mattered when war could break out at any moment.

Could the situation become any more tragic, any more a farce? Indeed it could. The British chief negotiator, Admiral Sir Reginald Drax, had no written powers to sign an agreement with the Soviet side. His French counterpart, General Joseph Doumenc, had a vague letter of authority from the French président du Conseil. He could negotiate but not sign an agreement. Doumenc and Drax were supernumeraries. On the other hand, the Soviet side was represented by its commissar for war with full plenipotentiary powers. "All indications so far go to show," advised the British ambassador in Moscow, "that Soviet military negotiators are really out for business." In contrast, formal British instructions were to "go very slowly". When Drax met the Foreign Secretary Halifax before leaving for Moscow, he asked about the "possibility of failure" in the negotiations. "There was a short but impressive silence," according to Drax, "and the Foreign Secretary then remarked that on the whole it would be preferable to draw out the negotiations as long as possible." Doumenc remarked that he had been sent to Moscow with "empty hands." They had nothing to offer their Soviet interlocutors. The British could send two divisions to France at the outset of a European war. The Red Army could immediately mobilise one hundred divisions, and Soviet forces had just thrashed the Japanese in heavy fighting on the Manchurian frontier. What the hell? "They are not serious," Stalin concluded. And he was right. The French and British governments thought they could play Stalin for a fool. That was a mistake.

After the bad faith, after all the conniving, what would you have done in Stalin's boots, or any Russian leader's boots? Take the Poles, for example, they worked against Soviet diplomacy in London, Paris, Bucharest, Berlin, even Tokyo anywhere they could put a spoke in the Soviet wheel. They shared with Hitler in the spoils of Czechoslovak dismemberment. In 1939 they attempted until the last moment to sidetrack an anti-Nazi alliance in which the USSR was a signatory. I know, it is all too incredible to believe, like an implausible story line in a bad novel, but it was true. And then the Poles had the temerity to accuse the Soviet side of stabbing them in the back. It was Satan rebuking sin. The Polish governing elite brought ruin upon itself and its people. Even today it is the same old Poland. The Polish government is marking the beginning of the Second World War by inviting to Warsaw the former Axis powers, but not the Russian Federation, even though it was the Red Army which liberated Poland at high cost in dead and wounded. This is a fact of history which Polish nationalists simply cannot bear to hear and which they seek to erase from our memories.

The French and British governments thought they could play Stalin for a fool. That was a mistake

After nearly six years of trying to create a broad anti-German entente in Europe, notably with Britain and France, the Soviet government had nothing to show for its efforts. Nothing . By late 1936 the USSR was effectively isolated, and still Soviet diplomats tried to obtain agreement with France and Britain. The British and French, and the Romanians, and even the Czechoslovaks, and especially the Poles sabotaged, spurned or dodged Soviet offers, weakened agreements with Moscow and tried themselves to negotiate terms with Berlin to save their own skins. It was like they were doing Moscow a favour by humoring, with polite, knowing smiles, Soviet diplomats who talked about Mein Kampf and warned of the Nazi danger. The Soviet government feared being left in the lurch to fight the Wehrmacht alone while the French and the British sat on their hands in the west. After all, this is exactly what the French and British did while Poland collapsed at the beginning of September in a matter of days at the hands of the invading Wehrmacht. If France and Britain would not help Poland, would they have done more for the USSR? It is a question which Stalin and his colleagues most certainly asked themselves.

The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was the result of the failure of nearly six years of Soviet effort to form an anti-Nazi alliance with the western powers. The pact was ugly. It was Soviet sauve qui peut , and it contained a secret codicil which foresaw the creation of "spheres of influence" in Eastern Europe "in the event of territorial and political rearrangement[s]". But it was not worse than what the French and British had done at Munich. " C'est la réponse du berger à la bergère , the French ambassador in Moscow remarked, what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. The dismemberment of Czechoslovakia was the precedent for what then followed. As the late British historian A.J.P. Taylor so aptly put it long ago: violent western reproaches against the USSR "came ill from the statesmen who went to Munich . The Russians, in fact, did only what the Western statesmen had hoped to do; and Western bitterness was the bitterness of disappointment, mixed with anger that professions of Communism were no more sincere than their own professions of democracy [in dealing with Hitler]."

There then occurred a period of Soviet appeasement of Hitlerite Germany no more attractive than the Anglo-French appeasement which preceded it. And Stalin made a huge miscalculation. He disregarded his own military intelligence warning of a Nazi invasion of the USSR. He thought Hitler would not be such a fool as to invade the Soviet Union while Britain was still a belligerent power. How wrong he was. On 22 June 1941 the Axis powers invaded the Soviet Union with a huge military force along a front from the Baltic to the Black Seas.

It was the beginning of the Great Patriotic War, 1418 days of the most horrendous, intense violence. The USSR allied, finally, with Britain and the United States against Hitlerite Germany. It was the so-called Grand Alliance. France of course had disappeared, crushed by the German army in a military debacle in May 1940. During the first three years of fighting from June 1941 until June 1944, the Red Army fought nearly alone against the Nazi Wehrmacht. How ironic. Stalin had done all he could to avoid facing Hitlerite Germany alone, and yet there he was, the Red Army fighting nearly alone against the Wehrmacht and Axis Powers. The tide of battle turned at Stalingrad, sixteen months before the western allies landed in Normandy. Here is what President Roosevelt wrote to Stalin on 4 February 1943, the day after the last German forces surrendered in Stalingrad. "As Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of the United States of America, I congratulate you on the brilliant victory at Stalingrad of the armies under your Supreme Command. The 162 days of epic battle for the city which has for ever honored your name and the decisive result which all Americans are celebrating today will remain one of the proudest chapters in this war of the peoples united against Nazism and its emulators. The commanders and fighters of your armies at the front and the men and women, who have supported them, in factory and field, have combined not only to cover with glory their country's arms, but to inspire by their example fresh determination among all the United Nations to bend every energy to bring about the final defeat and unconditional surrender of the common enemy." As Churchill put it to Roosevelt at about the same time: "Listen, who is really fighting today? Stalin alone! And look how he is fighting " Yes, indeed, we should not, even now, forget how the Red Army fought.

From June 1941 until September 1943 there was not a single US, British, or Canadian division fighting on the ground of continental Europe, not one. The fighting in North Africa was a sideshow where Anglo-American forces faced two German divisions when more than two hundred German divisions were arrayed on the Soviet Front. The Italian campaign which began in September 1943 was a fiasco tying down more Allied divisions than German. When the western allies finally arrived in France, the Wehrmacht was a beaten-up shadow of what it had been when German soldiers stepped across Soviet frontiers in June 1941. Normandy was an anti-climax, enabled by the Red Army, and by no means the "decisive" battle of World War II which the western Mainstream Media have made it out to be.

Whatever sins, whatever turpitudes, whatever mistakes the Soviet government committed between September 1939 and June 1941, they were paid for in full by the colossal sacrifices and victory of Soviet arms against Hitlerite Germany

In the Soviet Union the Germans pillaged, burned, murdered relentlessly in an attempted genocide of the Soviet people, Slavs and Jews alike. An estimated 17 million civilians died at the hands of Nazi armies and their Ukrainian and Baltic collaborators. Ten million Red Army soldiers died in the war to liberate the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and to run down the Nazi beast in its Berlin lair. Large areas of the Soviet Union from Stalingrad in the east to the Caucasus and Sevastopol in the south to the Romanian, Polish and Baltic frontiers in the west and the north were laid waste. While there were Nazi massacres of civilians at Ouradour-sur-Glâne in France and in Lidice in Czechoslovakia, there were hundreds of such massacres in the Soviet Union in Byelorussia and the Ukraine in places of which we do not know the names or which are known only in still unexplored or unpublished Soviet archives. Whatever sins, whatever turpitudes, whatever mistakes the Soviet government committed between September 1939 and June 1941, they were paid for in full by the colossal sacrifices and victory of Soviet arms against Hitlerite Germany.

In the light of these facts , the Trudeau August 23 rd statement is politically motivated anti-Russian propaganda which serves no Canadian national interest. Trudeau gratuitously insulted not only the government of the Russian Federation, but also all Russians whose parents and grandparents fought in the Great Patriotic War. He attempts to delegitimise the emancipatory character of the war of the USSR against the Hitlerite invader and thereby to discredit the Soviet war effort. Trudeau's statement panders to the interests of his Ukrainian minister for foreign affairs in Ottawa, Chrystia Freeland, a known Russophobe, who celebrates the life of her late grandfather, a Ukrainian Nazi collaborator in occupied Poland. She supports a regime in Kiev which emerged from the violent, so-called Maidan coup d'état against the elected Ukrainian president, backed by fascist militias and from abroad by the European Union and the United States. As preposterous as it may sound, this regime celebrates the deeds of World War II Nazi collaborators, now treated as national heroes. The Canadian prime minister desperately needs a history lesson before he again insults the Russian people, and indeed denigrates the sacrifices of Canadian soldiers and sailors allied with the USSR against the common foe. The views of individual contributors do not necessarily represent those of the Strategic Culture Foundation. Tags: Chamberlain Germany Nazism Stalin USSR World War II Print this article See also November 3, 2016 How Hitler Became Hitler and Why It's Important Today December 12, 2017 Countering Anti-Russian Propaganda March 19, 2016 History as Propaganda: Why the USSR Did Not 'Win' World War II (I) June 8, 2019 US Billionaire Tries to Nullify Soviet Role in WWII Victory January 12, 2020 What Poland Has to Hide About the Origins of World War II January 1, 2020 Putin Reminds the West: Those Who Ignore History Are Doomed to Repeat it January 12, 2020 A New Year's Fantasy December 26, 2019 From Colluding With Hitler Against the USSR to an Anti-Hitler Coalition November 5, 2019 Living Under the Spectre of Hyperinflation: 1923 Weimar and Today September 14, 2019 The War – Again December 14, 2019 Czech-Russian Relations and the ROA: Conflicting Historical Narratives November 24, 2019 On Churchill's 'Sinews of Peace' October 4, 2019 Teaching Boris Johnson Three Dates of Destiny October 2, 2019 The America of Trump's Father: an Aspirational Fascism Reigned in New York October 1, 2019 Misrepresentations of American & Soviet Roles in WWII and the Cold War September 8, 2019 Lessons From the Liberation of Majdanek December 11, 2019 NATO Secretary General Targets 'Rising China': Why Cold War Newspeak Never Went Away December 10, 2019 Why the Results of the Normandy Four Summit Were Predetermined Almost November 16, 2019 Charlottesville and Ukraine: the Parallels That Mainstream Media Don't Want You to See November 4, 2019 Thuringia Foretells the Fracturing of Germany October 23, 2019 America's Post-WWII Victory for Fascism and Nazism September 10, 2019 Japan and Germany Hysterically Race to Shut Down Nuclear Power (and Their Sovereignty) Also by this author Michael Jabara Carley Professor of history at the Université de Montréal. He has published widely on Soviet relations with the West What Poland Has to Hide About the Origins of World War II The Russian V-Day Story (Or the History of World War II Not Often Heard in the West) The Skripal Affair: A Lie Too Far? Why Canada Defends Ukrainian Fascism Lament for Canada Sign up for the Strategic Culture Foundation Newsletter Subscribe See also

[Jan 12, 2020] The Politics Behind Banning Russia From the Olympics -- Strategic Culture

Jan 12, 2020 | www.strategic-culture.org

Michael Averko January 11, 2020 © Photo: Government.ru There've been ongoing propaganda pieces that skirt over some inconvenient realities, for those seeking to unfairly admonish Russia in the Olympic movement. One case in point is the January 2 Reuters article " Use 1992 Yugoslavia Precedent for Russians in Tokyo – Historian ". With a stated " some Russians ", that article suggestively under-represents the actual number of 2018 Russian Winter Olympians at Pyeongchang, while supporting a hypocritically flawed aspect, having to do with Yugoslavia in 1992.

The downplaying of Russian participation at Pyeongchang, is seemingly done to spin the image of many Russian cheats being kept out. At the suggestion of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), the International Olympic Committee (IOC) closely vetted Russians for competition at the 2018 Winter Olympics. In actuality, the 2018 Russian Winter Olympic participation wasn't so off the mark, when compared to past Winter Olympiads – something which (among other things) puts a dent into the faulty notion that Russia should be especially singled out for sports doping.

At the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics, Russia had its largest ever Winter Olympic contingent of 232 , on account of the host nation being allowed a greater number of participants. The 168 Russian Winter Olympians at Pyeongchang is 9 less than the Russians who competed at the 2010 Winter Olympics. Going back further, Russian Winter Olympic participation in 2006 was at 190 , with its 2002 contingent at 151 , 1998 having 122 and 1994 (Russia's first formal Winter Olympic appearance as Russia) 113 .

The aforementioned Reuters piece references a " historian ", Bill Mallon, who is keen on using the 1992 Summer Olympic banning of Yugoslavia (then consisting of Serbia and Montenegro) as a legitimate basis to ban Russia from the upcoming Summer Olympics. In this instance, Alan Dershowitz's periodic reference to the " if the shoe is on the other foot " test is quite applicable . Regarding Mallon, " historian " is put in quotes because his historically premised advocacy is very much incomplete and overly propagandistic.

For consistency sake and contrary to Mallon, Yugoslavia should've formally participated at the 1992 Summer Olympics. The Olympic banning of Yugoslavia was bogus, given that the IOC and the IOC affiliated sports federations didn't ban the US and USSR for their respective role in wars, which caused a greater number of deaths than what happened in 1990s Bosnia. The Reuters article at issue references a United Nations resolution for sanctions against Yugoslavia, without any second guessing, in support of the preference (at least by some) to keep politics out of sports as much as possible.

Mallon casually notes that Yugoslav team sports were banned from the 1992 Summer Olympics, unlike individual Yugoslav athletes, who participated as independents. At least two of the banned Yugoslav teams were predicted to be lead medal contenders.

Croatia was allowed to compete at the 1992 Summer Olympics, despite that nation's military involvement in the Bosnian Civil War. During the 1992 Summer and Winter Olympics, the former USSR participated in individual and team sports as the Unified Team (with the exception of the three former Soviet Baltic republics, who competed under their respective nation). With all this in mind, the ban on team sports from Yugoslavia at the 1992 Summer Olympics, under a neutral name, appears to be hypocritical and ethically challenged.

BS aside, the reality is that geopolitical clout (in the form of might making right), is what compels the banning of Yugoslavia, unlike superpowers engaged in behavior which isn't less egregious. Although a major world power, contemporary Russia lacks the overall geopolitical influence of the USSR. Historian Stephen Cohen and some others, have noted that post-Soviet Russia doesn't get the same (for lack of a better word) respect accorded to the USSR. This aspect underscores how becoming freer, less militaristic and more market oriented doesn't (by default) bring added goodwill from a good number of Western establishment politicos and the organizations which are greatly influenced by them.

On the subject of banning Russia from the Olympics, Canadian sports legal politico Dick Pound, continues to rehash an inaccurate likening with no critical follow-up. ( An exception being yours truly .) Between 2016 and 2019 , Pound references the Olympic banning of South Africa, as a basis for excluding Russia. South Africa was banned when it had apartheid policies, which prevented that country's Black majority from competing in organized sports. Russia has a vast multiethnic participation in sports and other sectors.

As previously noted , the factual premise to formally ban Russia from the Olympics remains suspect. The Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) is set to review Russia's appeal to have the recommended WADA ban against Russia overturned, as Western mass media at large and sports politicos like Pound continue to push for a CAS decision against Russia.

[Jan 12, 2020] The Skripal Affair A Lie Too Far -- Strategic Culture

Jan 12, 2020 | www.strategic-culture.org

Strategic Culture

Search World The Skripal Affair: A Lie Too Far? Michael Jabara Carley April 18, 2018 © Photo: Public domain

On 4 March 2018 it was a foggy day in southern England, and the MI6 Russian spy Sergei Viktorovich Skripal and his daughter Yulia stepped out for a stroll, stopped at the local pub in Salisbury, went to lunch at a nearby restaurant, and then took a walk in the park where they collapsed on a park bench. What had happened to them? Did they suffer from food poisoning? Or was Sergei Skripal involved in some dark affaire and the object of a hit by persons unknown, his daughter being an accidental victim?

The police received a call that day at 4:15pm reporting two people in distress. Emergency services were despatched immediately. The Skripals were rushed to hospital, while the local police launched an investigation. It began to look like attempted murder, but the police urged patience, saying it could take months before they might know what had happened and who, if anyone, was responsible.

The Conservative government decided that it did not need to wait for a police investigation. "The Russians" had tried to assassinate a former intelligence officer turned informant for MI6. Skripal went to jail for that, but was released four years later in an exchange of agents with the United States. Now, "the Russians," so the Tory hypothesis goes, wanted to settle old scores. Less than 24 hours after the incident in Salisbury, the British foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, suggested that the Russian government was the prime suspect in what looked like an attempt gone wrong to assassinate Sergei Skripal.

On 12 March the foreign secretary summoned the Russian ambassador to inform him that a nerve agent, A-234, had been used against the Skripals. How did you do it, Johnson wanted to know, or did the Russian government lose control of its stocks of chemical weapons? He gave the Russian ambassador 24 hours to respond. In point of fact, the Russian government does not possess any stockpiles of chemical weapons or nerve agents, having destroyed them all as of September 2017.

Later that day, the British prime minister, Theresa May, declared in the House of Commons that the Skripals, then said to be in a coma, were poisoned with "a military-grade nerve agent of a type developed by Russia " (italics added) called a 'novichok', a Russian word having various possible translations into English (beginner, novice, newcomer, etc.). May claimed that since the Soviet Union was known to have produced this chemical weapon, or nerve agent (also known as A-234), that it was " highly likely " that the Russian government was guilty of the attack on the Skripals.

Here is what the prime minister said in the House of Commons: "Either this was a direct act by the Russian State against our country. Or the Russian government lost control of this potentially catastrophically damaging nerve agent and allowed it to get into the hands of others." The hurried British accusations were redolent of those in 2014 alleging Russian government complicity or direct involvement in the shooting down of Malaysian Airlines MH 17 over the Ukraine. Within hours of the destruction of MH 17, the United States and its vassals, including Britain, accused Russia of being responsible.

The western modus operandi is the same in the Skripal case. The Tories rushed to conclusions and issued a 24-hour ultimatum to the Russian government to prove its innocence, or rather to admit its guilt. How was the so-called novichok delivered to London, did President Vladimir Putin authorise the attack, did Russia lose control of its stockpile? The prime minister and her foreign secretary had in effect declared Russia guilty as charged. No objective police investigation, no due process, no presumption of innocence, no evidence was necessary: it was "sentence first, verdict later", as the Red Queen declared in Alice in Wonderland .

On 13 March the Russian embassy informed the Foreign Office that the Russian Federation was not involved in any way with the Salisbury incident. We will not respond to an ultimatum, came the reply from Moscow. The eloquent Russian foreign ministry spokesperson, Mariia Zakharova, characterised the British démarche as a "circus show". Actually, Foreign Office clerks must have told Boris Johnson that Russia would not respond to such an ultimatum so that it was a deliberate British attempt to provoke a negative Russian reply.

The Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, stated for the record that "as soon as the rumors, fed by the British leadership, about the poisoning of Skripal appeared, we immediately requested access to this [toxic] substance so that our experts could analyze it in accordance with the Convention on the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons." After the British ambassador visited the Russian foreign ministry on 13 March to receive the formal Russian reply to the British ultimatum, the foreign ministry in Moscow issued a communiqué: " The [Salisbury] incident appears to be yet another crooked attempt by the UK authorities to discredit Russia. Any threat to take 'punitive' measures against Russia will meet with a response. The British side should be aware of that." The Russian government in fact proposed that the alleged poisoning of the Skripals should be examined by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in The Hague, according to procedures to which Britain itself had agreed when the OPCW was established in 1997.

On 14 March the British government expelled 23 Russian diplomats, and a few days later the Russian side expelled 23 British diplomats and shuttered the offices of the British Council in Russia. At the same time, the British appealed to their allies and to the European Union to show solidarity by expelling Russian diplomats. Twenty-eight countries did so, though for most it was one or two expulsions, tokenism to appease the British. Other countries -- for example, Austria, Bulgaria, Greece, Portugal -- refused to join the stampede. Going over the top, the United States expelled sixty diplomats and closed the Russian consulate in Seattle. The Russians responded in kind with sixty expulsions and the closure of the US consulate in St. Petersburg. Momentum seemed to be building toward a major confrontation. The British prime minister even alluded to the possibility of military action .

In the meantime, President Putin weighed in. "I guess any reasonable person [has] realised," he said, "that this is complete absurd[ity] and nonsense. [How could] anybody in Russia allow themselves such actions on the eve of the [Russian] presidential election and the football World Cup? This is unthinkable." In any police inquiry, investigators look for means, motive and opportunity. On these grounds did the trail of guilt lead to Moscow?

Momentum is sometimes like a balloon, it blows up and then it suddenly bursts. The British case against Russia began to fall apart almost from the time it was made. In late March the Russian newspaper Kommersant leaked a British PowerPoint presentation sent to eighty embassies in Moscow. It asserted, inter alia , that the British chemical weapons facility at Porton Down had positively identified the substance, which allegedly poisoned the Skripals, as a Novichok, "developed only by Russia". Both these statements are false. On 3 April Porton Down stated publicly that it could not determine the origin of the substance that poisoned the Skripals. It also came out that the formula for making a so-called novichok was published in a book by a Russian dissident and chemist, Vil Mirzayanov, who now lives in the United States. You can buy his book (published in 2008), which includes the formula, on Amazon.com . In fact, any number of governments or smart chemists or even bright undergraduate chemistry students with the proper facilities could make this nerve agent. Amongst those governments having access to the original formula are Britain and the United States. The Russian embassy in London noted in a published report that "neither Russia nor the Soviet Union has ever developed an agent named 'Novichok'." The report further stated that "While Soviet scientists did work on new types of chemical poisons, the word 'Novichok' was introduced in the West in mid-1990s to designate a series of new chemical agents developed there on the basis of information made available by Russian expat researchers. The British insistence to use the Russian word 'Novichok' is an attempt to artificially link the substance to Russia."

The British PowerPoint presentation did not stop with its two main canards. It goes on to refer to "Russian malign activity" including, inter alia , the "invasion" of Georgia in 2008, the "destabilisation" of the Ukraine and the shooting down of MH17 in 2014, and interference in the US elections in 2016. All of these claims are audacious lies , easily deconstructed and unpacked. The referenced events are also unrelated to the Salisbury incident and were raised in an attempt to smear the Russian Federation. In fact, the British PowerPoint slides represent vulgar propaganda, bourrage de crâne , as preposterous as any seen during the Cold War.

As Minister Lavrov pointed out, the Skripal case should have gone for resolution to the OPCW in The Hague. Russia would then be directly involved in the investigation and would have access to the alleged toxin, and other evidence to try to determine what had happened and who were the perpetrators. The British government at first refused to go to the OPCW, and then when it did, refused to authorise the Russian government to have access to the alleged substance, which had sickened the Skripals. That idea is "perverse", said British authorities. Actually, not at all, it is the procedure laid out in OPCW statutes, to which Britain itself agreed but has refused to respect. When the Russian representative at the OPCW proposed a resolution to the executive council, that it should respect its own statutes, he could not obtain the required vote of approval. The British were attempting to hijack the OPCW as a potential tool against the Russian Federation. Thus far, that stratagem has not worked. On 12 April the OPCW released a report stating that it had "confirm[ed] the findings of the United Kingdom relating to the identity of the toxic chemical that was used in Salisbury ." The report said nothing about the origin of the so-called "toxic chemical". The British accusation against Russia thus remained unsubstantiated.

What I could not understand when I read the OPCW communiqué, is why the Skripals were still alive. The OPCW says that the toxic chemical used against the Skripals was "of high purity". Was it a nerve agent? Oddly, the OPCW published report avoids a straight answer. If it was a nerve agent, being of "high purity," it should have been instant acting and killed the Skripals almost immediately. Yet both have survived at the time of this writing. Something does not make sense. Of course, there could be a simple explanation for this puzzling mystery.

On 14 April, Minister Lavrov at a meeting in Moscow provided the answer. The substance used to attack the Skripals was laced with a substance know as BZ which incapacitates rather than kills and takes longer to work than an instant acting nerve agent which kills immediately. The United States, Britain and other NATO countries have developed this toxin and put it into service; the Soviet Union never did so. Traces of A-234 were also identified, but according to experts, such a concentration of the A-234 agent would cause death to anyone affected by it. "Moreover," according to the Russian embassy in London , "considering its high volatility, the detection of this substance in its initial state (pure form and high concentration) is extremely suspicious as the samples have been taken several weeks since the poisoning," Could Britsh authorities have tampered with the samples? The public OPCW report gives no details, and refers only to a "toxic chemical". Nor did the report say that the OPCW had submitted specimens of the substance to a well-known Swiss lab , which promptly reported back its surprising results. The OPCW authorities thus lied when they said that the tests "confirmed" the British identify of the "toxic chemical". Unless Porton Down knew that the substance used against the Skripals was a BZ type toxin, and so informed the OPCW, or, unless the Tory government lied in claiming publicly that it was a novichok nerve agent. The British attempted hijacking of the OPCW has compromised its independence, for the public report issued on 12 April is misleading. Moreover, since the BZ toxin is made by the US, Britain and other NATO countries, it begs the same questions, which the Tories put to Moscow: how did the perpetrators obtain the BZ toxin and bring it to Salisbury, did MI5 or MI6 authorise a false flag attack against the Skripals, or was it authorised by the British cabinet or by the prime minister alone? Or did British authorities lose control of their stockpiles? The trail of evidence does not lead to Moscow; it leads to London.

A prima facie case can be made that the British government is lying about the Skripal affaire . Suspicion always falls upon those who act deviously, who hide behind clever turns of phrase and procedural and rhetorical smokescreens. British authorities are now saying that they have other top secret evidence, which explains everything, but unfortunately it can't be publicised. Nevertheless, the British government appears to have leaked it to the press. The Times published a story about a covert Russian lab producing nerve agents and it spread like wild fire across the Mainstream Media. The Daily Mirror put out a story about a Russian secret assassins' training manual. These stories are laughable. Is the Tory government that desperate? Is the British "everyman" that gullible?

The secret assassin's manual reminds me of the 1924 "Zinoviev Letter", a counterfeit document produced by White Russians in Germany, purporting to demonstrate Soviet interference in British elections and planning for a socialist revolution. It was early days of "fake news". Parliamentary elections were underway in October 1924 and the Tories used the letter to attack the credibility of the Labour party. It was whipping up the red scare, and it worked like a charm. The Tories won a majority government. Soviet authorities claimed that the letter was bogus and they demanded a third party, independent investigation to ascertain the truth, just as the Russian government has done now. In 1924, the Tories refused, and understandably so, since they had a lot to hide. It took seventy-five years to determine that "the letter" was in fact counterfeit.

The Tories are again acting as if they have something to hide. It is déjŕ vu. Will it take seventy-five years to get at the truth? Are there any honest British cops, judges, civil servants ready to reveal the truth?

There is other evidence to suggest that the British narrative on the Salisbury incident is bogus. The London Metropolitan Police have sought to prevent any outside contact with the Skripals. They have taken away a recovered Yulia Skripal to an unknown location. They have until now denied Russian consular authorities access to a Russian citizen in violation of British approved consular agreements. Is there any chapter of international law, which the British government now respects? British authorities have denied access to Yulia Skripal's family in Russia; they have denied a visa to Yulia's cousin, Viktoria, to visit with her. Are British spooks grooming Yulia, briefing her to stay on the Tory narrative? Is she being manipulated like some kind of Manchurian Candidate? Have they induced her to betray her country in exchange for emoluments, a new identity in the United States, a house, a BMW and money? Are they playing upon her loyalty to her father? Based on a statement attributed to Yulia by the London Metropolitan Police, it begins to look that way . Or, is the message, sounding very British and official, quite simply a fake? The Russian embassy in London suspects that it is. What is certain is that British authorities are acting as though they have something to hide. Even German politicians, amongst others, have criticised the British rush to indict Russia. Damage control is underway. Given all the evidence, can any person with reasonable abilities to think critically believe anything the Tories are saying about the Salisbury affair?

"They are liars. And they know that they are liars," the late Egyptian writer and Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz once wrote: "And we know that they are liars. Even so, they keep lying ." Mahfouz was not writing about the British, but all the same, he could have been. Are not his well-known lines apposite to the present government in London?

The Tories are trying doggedly to maintain control of the narrative. Stakes are high for if it eventuates that the Tories have lied deliberately for political gain, at the risk of destabilising European, indeed world peace and security, the Tory government should be forced to resign and new elections, called. Then, the British electorate can decide whether it wants to be governed by reckless, mendacious Tory politicians who risk to provoke war against the Russian Federation. The views of individual contributors do not necessarily represent those of the Strategic Culture Foundation. Tags: May OPCW United Kingdom Print this article Michael Jabara Carley April 18, 2018 | World The Skripal Affair: A Lie Too Far?

On 4 March 2018 it was a foggy day in southern England, and the MI6 Russian spy Sergei Viktorovich Skripal and his daughter Yulia stepped out for a stroll, stopped at the local pub in Salisbury, went to lunch at a nearby restaurant, and then took a walk in the park where they collapsed on a park bench. What had happened to them? Did they suffer from food poisoning? Or was Sergei Skripal involved in some dark affaire and the object of a hit by persons unknown, his daughter being an accidental victim?

The police received a call that day at 4:15pm reporting two people in distress. Emergency services were despatched immediately. The Skripals were rushed to hospital, while the local police launched an investigation. It began to look like attempted murder, but the police urged patience, saying it could take months before they might know what had happened and who, if anyone, was responsible.

The Conservative government decided that it did not need to wait for a police investigation. "The Russians" had tried to assassinate a former intelligence officer turned informant for MI6. Skripal went to jail for that, but was released four years later in an exchange of agents with the United States. Now, "the Russians," so the Tory hypothesis goes, wanted to settle old scores. Less than 24 hours after the incident in Salisbury, the British foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, suggested that the Russian government was the prime suspect in what looked like an attempt gone wrong to assassinate Sergei Skripal.

On 12 March the foreign secretary summoned the Russian ambassador to inform him that a nerve agent, A-234, had been used against the Skripals. How did you do it, Johnson wanted to know, or did the Russian government lose control of its stocks of chemical weapons? He gave the Russian ambassador 24 hours to respond. In point of fact, the Russian government does not possess any stockpiles of chemical weapons or nerve agents, having destroyed them all as of September 2017.

Later that day, the British prime minister, Theresa May, declared in the House of Commons that the Skripals, then said to be in a coma, were poisoned with "a military-grade nerve agent of a type developed by Russia " (italics added) called a 'novichok', a Russian word having various possible translations into English (beginner, novice, newcomer, etc.). May claimed that since the Soviet Union was known to have produced this chemical weapon, or nerve agent (also known as A-234), that it was " highly likely " that the Russian government was guilty of the attack on the Skripals.

Here is what the prime minister said in the House of Commons: "Either this was a direct act by the Russian State against our country. Or the Russian government lost control of this potentially catastrophically damaging nerve agent and allowed it to get into the hands of others." The hurried British accusations were redolent of those in 2014 alleging Russian government complicity or direct involvement in the shooting down of Malaysian Airlines MH 17 over the Ukraine. Within hours of the destruction of MH 17, the United States and its vassals, including Britain, accused Russia of being responsible.

The western modus operandi is the same in the Skripal case. The Tories rushed to conclusions and issued a 24-hour ultimatum to the Russian government to prove its innocence, or rather to admit its guilt. How was the so-called novichok delivered to London, did President Vladimir Putin authorise the attack, did Russia lose control of its stockpile? The prime minister and her foreign secretary had in effect declared Russia guilty as charged. No objective police investigation, no due process, no presumption of innocence, no evidence was necessary: it was "sentence first, verdict later", as the Red Queen declared in Alice in Wonderland .

On 13 March the Russian embassy informed the Foreign Office that the Russian Federation was not involved in any way with the Salisbury incident. We will not respond to an ultimatum, came the reply from Moscow. The eloquent Russian foreign ministry spokesperson, Mariia Zakharova, characterised the British démarche as a "circus show". Actually, Foreign Office clerks must have told Boris Johnson that Russia would not respond to such an ultimatum so that it was a deliberate British attempt to provoke a negative Russian reply.

The Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, stated for the record that "as soon as the rumors, fed by the British leadership, about the poisoning of Skripal appeared, we immediately requested access to this [toxic] substance so that our experts could analyze it in accordance with the Convention on the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons." After the British ambassador visited the Russian foreign ministry on 13 March to receive the formal Russian reply to the British ultimatum, the foreign ministry in Moscow issued a communiqué: " The [Salisbury] incident appears to be yet another crooked attempt by the UK authorities to discredit Russia. Any threat to take 'punitive' measures against Russia will meet with a response. The British side should be aware of that." The Russian government in fact proposed that the alleged poisoning of the Skripals should be examined by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in The Hague, according to procedures to which Britain itself had agreed when the OPCW was established in 1997.

On 14 March the British government expelled 23 Russian diplomats, and a few days later the Russian side expelled 23 British diplomats and shuttered the offices of the British Council in Russia. At the same time, the British appealed to their allies and to the European Union to show solidarity by expelling Russian diplomats. Twenty-eight countries did so, though for most it was one or two expulsions, tokenism to appease the British. Other countries -- for example, Austria, Bulgaria, Greece, Portugal -- refused to join the stampede. Going over the top, the United States expelled sixty diplomats and closed the Russian consulate in Seattle. The Russians responded in kind with sixty expulsions and the closure of the US consulate in St. Petersburg. Momentum seemed to be building toward a major confrontation. The British prime minister even alluded to the possibility of military action .

In the meantime, President Putin weighed in. "I guess any reasonable person [has] realised," he said, "that this is complete absurd[ity] and nonsense. [How could] anybody in Russia allow themselves such actions on the eve of the [Russian] presidential election and the football World Cup? This is unthinkable." In any police inquiry, investigators look for means, motive and opportunity. On these grounds did the trail of guilt lead to Moscow?

Momentum is sometimes like a balloon, it blows up and then it suddenly bursts. The British case against Russia began to fall apart almost from the time it was made. In late March the Russian newspaper Kommersant leaked a British PowerPoint presentation sent to eighty embassies in Moscow. It asserted, inter alia , that the British chemical weapons facility at Porton Down had positively identified the substance, which allegedly poisoned the Skripals, as a Novichok, "developed only by Russia". Both these statements are false. On 3 April Porton Down stated publicly that it could not determine the origin of the substance that poisoned the Skripals. It also came out that the formula for making a so-called novichok was published in a book by a Russian dissident and chemist, Vil Mirzayanov, who now lives in the United States. You can buy his book (published in 2008), which includes the formula, on Amazon.com . In fact, any number of governments or smart chemists or even bright undergraduate chemistry students with the proper facilities could make this nerve agent. Amongst those governments having access to the original formula are Britain and the United States. The Russian embassy in London noted in a published report that "neither Russia nor the Soviet Union has ever developed an agent named 'Novichok'." The report further stated that "While Soviet scientists did work on new types of chemical poisons, the word 'Novichok' was introduced in the West in mid-1990s to designate a series of new chemical agents developed there on the basis of information made available by Russian expat researchers. The British insistence to use the Russian word 'Novichok' is an attempt to artificially link the substance to Russia."

The British PowerPoint presentation did not stop with its two main canards. It goes on to refer to "Russian malign activity" including, inter alia , the "invasion" of Georgia in 2008, the "destabilisation" of the Ukraine and the shooting down of MH17 in 2014, and interference in the US elections in 2016. All of these claims are audacious lies , easily deconstructed and unpacked. The referenced events are also unrelated to the Salisbury incident and were raised in an attempt to smear the Russian Federation. In fact, the British PowerPoint slides represent vulgar propaganda, bourrage de crâne , as preposterous as any seen during the Cold War.

As Minister Lavrov pointed out, the Skripal case should have gone for resolution to the OPCW in The Hague. Russia would then be directly involved in the investigation and would have access to the alleged toxin, and other evidence to try to determine what had happened and who were the perpetrators. The British government at first refused to go to the OPCW, and then when it did, refused to authorise the Russian government to have access to the alleged substance, which had sickened the Skripals. That idea is "perverse", said British authorities. Actually, not at all, it is the procedure laid out in OPCW statutes, to which Britain itself agreed but has refused to respect. When the Russian representative at the OPCW proposed a resolution to the executive council, that it should respect its own statutes, he could not obtain the required vote of approval. The British were attempting to hijack the OPCW as a potential tool against the Russian Federation. Thus far, that stratagem has not worked. On 12 April the OPCW released a report stating that it had "confirm[ed] the findings of the United Kingdom relating to the identity of the toxic chemical that was used in Salisbury ." The report said nothing about the origin of the so-called "toxic chemical". The British accusation against Russia thus remained unsubstantiated.

What I could not understand when I read the OPCW communiqué, is why the Skripals were still alive. The OPCW says that the toxic chemical used against the Skripals was "of high purity". Was it a nerve agent? Oddly, the OPCW published report avoids a straight answer. If it was a nerve agent, being of "high purity," it should have been instant acting and killed the Skripals almost immediately. Yet both have survived at the time of this writing. Something does not make sense. Of course, there could be a simple explanation for this puzzling mystery.

On 14 April, Minister Lavrov at a meeting in Moscow provided the answer. The substance used to attack the Skripals was laced with a substance know as BZ which incapacitates rather than kills and takes longer to work than an instant acting nerve agent which kills immediately. The United States, Britain and other NATO countries have developed this toxin and put it into service; the Soviet Union never did so. Traces of A-234 were also identified, but according to experts, such a concentration of the A-234 agent would cause death to anyone affected by it. "Moreover," according to the Russian embassy in London , "considering its high volatility, the detection of this substance in its initial state (pure form and high concentration) is extremely suspicious as the samples have been taken several weeks since the poisoning," Could Britsh authorities have tampered with the samples? The public OPCW report gives no details, and refers only to a "toxic chemical". Nor did the report say that the OPCW had submitted specimens of the substance to a well-known Swiss lab , which promptly reported back its surprising results. The OPCW authorities thus lied when they said that the tests "confirmed" the British identify of the "toxic chemical". Unless Porton Down knew that the substance used against the Skripals was a BZ type toxin, and so informed the OPCW, or, unless the Tory government lied in claiming publicly that it was a novichok nerve agent. The British attempted hijacking of the OPCW has compromised its independence, for the public report issued on 12 April is misleading. Moreover, since the BZ toxin is made by the US, Britain and other NATO countries, it begs the same questions, which the Tories put to Moscow: how did the perpetrators obtain the BZ toxin and bring it to Salisbury, did MI5 or MI6 authorise a false flag attack against the Skripals, or was it authorised by the British cabinet or by the prime minister alone? Or did British authorities lose control of their stockpiles? The trail of evidence does not lead to Moscow; it leads to London.

A prima facie case can be made that the British government is lying about the Skripal affaire . Suspicion always falls upon those who act deviously, who hide behind clever turns of phrase and procedural and rhetorical smokescreens. British authorities are now saying that they have other top secret evidence, which explains everything, but unfortunately it can't be publicised. Nevertheless, the British government appears to have leaked it to the press. The Times published a story about a covert Russian lab producing nerve agents and it spread like wild fire across the Mainstream Media. The Daily Mirror put out a story about a Russian secret assassins' training manual. These stories are laughable. Is the Tory government that desperate? Is the British "everyman" that gullible?

The secret assassin's manual reminds me of the 1924 "Zinoviev Letter", a counterfeit document produced by White Russians in Germany, purporting to demonstrate Soviet interference in British elections and planning for a socialist revolution. It was early days of "fake news". Parliamentary elections were underway in October 1924 and the Tories used the letter to attack the credibility of the Labour party. It was whipping up the red scare, and it worked like a charm. The Tories won a majority government. Soviet authorities claimed that the letter was bogus and they demanded a third party, independent investigation to ascertain the truth, just as the Russian government has done now. In 1924, the Tories refused, and understandably so, since they had a lot to hide. It took seventy-five years to determine that "the letter" was in fact counterfeit.

The Tories are again acting as if they have something to hide. It is déjŕ vu. Will it take seventy-five years to get at the truth? Are there any honest British cops, judges, civil servants ready to reveal the truth?

There is other evidence to suggest that the British narrative on the Salisbury incident is bogus. The London Metropolitan Police have sought to prevent any outside contact with the Skripals. They have taken away a recovered Yulia Skripal to an unknown location. They have until now denied Russian consular authorities access to a Russian citizen in violation of British approved consular agreements. Is there any chapter of international law, which the British government now respects? British authorities have denied access to Yulia Skripal's family in Russia; they have denied a visa to Yulia's cousin, Viktoria, to visit with her. Are British spooks grooming Yulia, briefing her to stay on the Tory narrative? Is she being manipulated like some kind of Manchurian Candidate? Have they induced her to betray her country in exchange for emoluments, a new identity in the United States, a house, a BMW and money? Are they playing upon her loyalty to her father? Based on a statement attributed to Yulia by the London Metropolitan Police, it begins to look that way . Or, is the message, sounding very British and official, quite simply a fake? The Russian embassy in London suspects that it is. What is certain is that British authorities are acting as though they have something to hide. Even German politicians, amongst others, have criticised the British rush to indict Russia. Damage control is underway. Given all the evidence, can any person with reasonable abilities to think critically believe anything the Tories are saying about the Salisbury affair?

"They are liars. And they know that they are liars," the late Egyptian writer and Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz once wrote: "And we know that they are liars. Even so, they keep lying ." Mahfouz was not writing about the British, but all the same, he could have been. Are not his well-known lines apposite to the present government in London?

The Tories are trying doggedly to maintain control of the narrative. Stakes are high for if it eventuates that the Tories have lied deliberately for political gain, at the risk of destabilising European, indeed world peace and security, the Tory government should be forced to resign and new elections, called. Then, the British electorate can decide whether it wants to be governed by reckless, mendacious Tory politicians who risk to provoke war against the Russian Federation. © 2010 - 2020 | Strategic Culture Foundation | Republishing is welcomed with reference to Strategic Culture online journal www.strategic-culture.org . The views of individual contributors do not necessarily represent those of the Strategic Culture Foundation. Also by this author Michael Jabara Carley Professor of history at the Université de Montréal. He has published widely on Soviet relations with the West What Poland Has to Hide About the Origins of World War II The Canadian Prime Minister Needs a History Lesson The Russian V-Day Story (Or the History of World War II Not Often Heard in the West) Why Canada Defends Ukrainian Fascism Lament for Canada Sign up for the Strategic Culture Foundation Newsletter Subscribe

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© 2010 - 2020 | Strategic Culture Foundation | Republishing is welcomed with reference to Strategic Culture online journal www.strategic-culture.org . The views of individual contributors do not necessarily represent those of the Strategic Culture Foundation. <div><img src="https://mc.yandex.ru/watch/10970266" alt=""/></div>

[Jan 12, 2020] Iran's accidental downing of a Ukrainian plane is already being used to smear MH-17 skeptics by Max Parry

Notable quotes:
"... What no one is mentioning is: the US airstrikes on Iraqi military bases, and Soleimani's murder contributed greatly to the hair trigger response of Iran's air defense forces. If Washington did not turn the heat up on both Iraq and Iran there would have been no need for Iran's retaliation, and thus the level of Iran's domestic defense forces would not have been so nervous as to pull the trigger downing the airliner. ..."
"... Former CIA high-ranking official accidentally reveals the type of the false flag operation that the US imperialists will orchestrate to start a war with Iran https://failedevolution.blogspot.com/2020/01/former-cia-high-ranking-official.html ..."
"... It reminds me too much of MH-17, which was not hit with a BUK but with bullets. Iran should have closed its airspace because such tricks are to be expected, irrespective of the cause of the current accident. ..."
Jan 11, 2020 | www.unz.com

When the Pentagon confirmed the assassination of Iranian Major General Qasem Soleimani, U.S. President Donald Trump took to social media to post a single image of the American flag to the adulation of his followers. Unfortunately, most Americans are ignorant of the other flag synonymous with U.S. foreign policy, that of the 'false flag' utilized to deceive the public and stir up support for endless war abroad. While the chicken hawk defenders of Trump's reckless decision to murder one of the biggest contributors in the defeat of ISIS salivated over possible war with Iran, their appetite was spoiled by Tehran's retaliatory precision strikes of two U.S. bases in Iraq that deliberately avoided casualties while in accordance with the Islamic Republic's right to self defense under Article 51 of the United Nations charter. The reprisal successfully deescalated the crisis but sent a clear message Iran was willing to stand up to the U.S. with the backing of Russia and China, while Washington underestimated Tehran which forewarned the Iraqi government of its impending counterattack so U.S. personnel could evacuate.

In the hours following the ballistic missile strikes, reports came in that a Boeing 737 international passenger flight scheduled from Tehran to Kiev, Ukraine had crashed shortly after takeoff from Imam Khomeini International Airport, killing all 176 passengers and flight crew on board. Initial video of the crash of Ukrainian International Airlines Flight 752 (PS752) showed that the aircraft was already in flames while descending to the ground, leading to speculation it was shot down amid the heightened political crisis between Iran and Washington. In the days following, a second obscure video surfaced which only increased this suspicion. Meanwhile, Western governments quickly concluded that an anti-aircraft surface-to-air missile brought PS752 down and were eager to point the finger at Iran before any formal investigation. Many people, including this author, were admittedly skeptical as to how a plane taking off from Tehran could have been mistaken five hours after the strikes in Iraq.

Nevertheless, those with reservations turned out to be wrong when days later the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) came clean that its aerospace forces made a "human error" and accidentally shot the passenger plane down after mistaking it for a incoming cruise missile when it flew close to a military base during a heightened state of alert in anticipation of U.S. attack. Many have noted that Iran's honorable decision to take responsibility for the catastrophe is in sharp contrast with Washington's response in 1988 when the U.S. Navy shot down Iran Air Flight 655 scheduled from Tehran to Dubai over the Strait of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf, killing all 290 occupants, after failing to cover it up. Just a month later, Vice President George H.W. Bush would notoriously state he would " never apologize for the United States of America. Ever. I don't care what the facts are ." Although he was not directly referring to the incident, one can only imagine what the reaction would be if Iranian President Hassan Rouhani were to say the same weeks after shooting down the Ukrainian plane, let alone an American one. Predictably, Tehran's transparency has gone mostly unappreciated while the Trump administration is already trying to use the disaster to further demonize Iran.

Oddly enough, Ukrainian International Airlines is partly owned by the infamous Ukrainian-Israeli oligarch, politician and energy tycoon Igor Kolomoisky, who was notably one of the biggest financiers of the anti-Russian, pro-EU coup d'etat which overthrew the democratically elected government of Viktor Yanukovych in 2014. Kolomoisky is also a principal backer of current Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky whose dubious phone call with Trump resulted in the 45th U.S. president's impeachment last month. In another astounding coincidence, Kolomoisky's Privat Group is believed to control Burisma Holdings, the Cypress-based company whose executive board 2020 presidential candidate Joe Biden's son Hunter was appointed to following the Maidan junta. The former Vice President admitted that he bribed Ukraine into firing its top prosecutor who was looking into his son's corruption by threatening to withhold $1 billion in loan guarantees.

Kolomoisky, AKA "the Chameleon", is one of the wealthiest people in the ex-Soviet country and was formerly appointed as governor of an administrative region bordering Donbass in eastern Ukraine following the 2014 putsch. He has also funded a battalion of volunteer neo-Nazi mercenaries fighting alongside the Ukrainian army in the War in Donbass against Russian-speaking separatists which the military aid temporarily withheld by the Trump administration that was disputably contingent upon an investigation of Biden and his son goes to. In 2014, another infamous plane shootdown made international headlines when Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 (MH17) scheduled from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur was shot down over the breakaway Donetsk People's Republic (DPR) in eastern Ukraine, killing all 298 passengers and crew.

From the get-go, the Obama administration was adamant that the missile which shot down the Boeing 777 came from separatist rebel territory. However, Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir bin Mohamad denounced the charges brought against the Russian and Ukrainian nationals indicted in the NATO-led investigation, dismissing the entire probe as a politically motivated effort predetermined to scapegoat Moscow and exclude Malaysian participation in the inquiry from the very beginning. Mohamad is featured in the excellent documentary MH17: Call for Justice made by a team of independent journalists which contests the NATO-scripted narrative and reveals that the Buk missile was more likely launched from Ukrainian Army-controlled territory than the DPR. One of Kolomoisky's hired guns could also have been responsible.

Shamefully, Iran's admission of guilt in the PS752 downing is already being used by establishment propagandists to discredit skeptics and conflated with similar contested past events like MH17 in order to intimidate dissenting voices from speaking up in the future. The Bellingcat 'investigative journalism' collective which made its name incriminating Moscow for the MH17 tragedy are the principle offenders. Bellingcat bills itself as an 'independent' citizen journalism group even though its founder Eliot Higgins is employed by the Atlantic Council think tank which receives funding from NATO, the U.S. State Department, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), George Soros' Open Society Foundation NGO, and numerous other regime change factories. Despite its enormous conflict of interest, Bellingcat remains highly cited by corporate media as a supposedly reputable source. At the outset, nearly everything about the PS752 tragedy gave one déjà vu of the MH17 disaster, including the rush to judgement by Western governments, so it was only natural for many to distrust the official narrative until more facts came out.

None of this changes that the use of commercial passenger jets as false flag targets for U.S. national security subterfuge is a verifiable historical fact, not a 'conspiracy theory.' In 1997, the U.S. National Archives declassified a 1962 memo proposed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Department of Defense for then-Secretary of State Robert McNamara entitled " Justification for U.S. Military Intervention in Cuba ." The document outlined a series of 'false flag' terrorist attacks, codenamed Operation Northwoods, to be carried out on a range of targets and blamed on the Cuban government to give grounds for an invasion of Havana in order to depose Fidel Castro. These scenarios included targets within the U.S., in particular Miami, Florida, which had become a haven of right-wing émigrés and defectors following the Cuban Revolution. In addition to the sinking of a Cuban refugee boat, one Northwoods plan included the staging of attacks on a civilian jet airliner and a U.S. Air Force plane to be pinned on Castro's government:

"8. It is possible to create and incident which will demonstrate convincingly that a Cuban aircraft has attacked and shot down a chartered civil airliner enroute from the United States to Jamaica, Guatemala, Panama or Venezuela. The destination would be chosen only to cause the flight plan route to cross Cuba. The passengers could be a group of college students off on a holiday or any grouping of persons with a common interest to support chartering a non-scheduled flight.

9. It is possible to create an incident which will make it appear that Communist Cuban MIGs have destroyed a USAF aircraft over international waters in an unprovoked attack."

Although Operation Northwoods was rejected by then-U.S. President John F. Kennedy which many believe was a factor in his subsequent assassination, Cuban exiles with the support of U.S. intelligence would later be implicated in such an attack the following decade with the bombing of Cubana Airlines Flight 455 in 1976 which killed all 73 passengers and crew on board. In 2005, documents released by the National Security Archive showed that the CIA under then-director George H.W. Bush had advanced knowledge of the plans of a Dominican Republic-based Cuban exile terrorist organization, the Coordination of United Revolutionary Organizations (CORU), at the direction of former CIA operative Luis Posada Carriles to blow up the airliner. The U.S. later refused to extradite Carriles to Cuba to face charges and although he never admitted to masterminding the bombing of the jet, he publicly confessed to other attacks on tourist hotels in Cuba during the 1990s and was later arrested in 2000 for attempting to blow up an auditorium in Panama trying to assassinate Castro.

In 1962, the planners of Operation Northwoods concluded that such deceptive operations would shift U.S. public opinion unanimously against Cuba.

"World opinion and the United Nations forum should be favorably affected by developing the international image of Cuban government as rash and irresponsible, and as an alarming and unpredictable threat to the peace of the Western Hemisphere."

The same talking points are used by the U.S. government to demonize Iran today. Initially, some Western intelligence sources also concluded that it was a malfunction or overheated engine that brought PS752 down in corroboration with the Iranian government's original explanation until the narrative abruptly shifted the following day. That they were so quick to hold Iran accountable without any investigation gave the apparent likelihood that PS752 could have fallen prey to a Northwoods-style false flag operation designed to further isolate Iran and defame its leaders after they took precautions to avoid U.S. casualties in their retaliatory strikes for the killing of Soleimani. Maintaining the image of Iran as a nefarious regime is crucial in justifying hawkish U.S. policies toward the country and Iran's noted restraint in its retaliation put a dent in that impression, so many were suspicious and rightly so.

It was also entirely plausible that U.S. special operations planners could have consulted the Northwoods playbook replacing Cuba with Iran and the right-wing gusanos who were to assist the staged attacks in Miami with the Iranian opposition group known as Mujahedin e-Khalq (MEK/People's Mujahedin of Iran) to do the same in Tehran. In July of last year, Trump's personal lawyer and former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani gave a paid speech at the cult-like group's compound in Albania where he not only referred to the group as Iran's "government-in-exile" but stated the U.S's explicit intentions to use them for regime change in Iran. The MEK enjoys high level contacts in the Trump administration and the group was elated at his decision to murder Soleimani in Baghdad.

From 1997 until 2012, the MEK was on the State Department's list of terrorist organizations until it was removed by the Obama administration after its expulsion from Iraq in order to relocate the group to fortified bases in Albania and the NATO protectorate of Kosovo. The latter disputed territory is a perfect fit for the rebranded group having been founded by another deregistered foreign terrorist organization, the al-Qaeda linked Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), whose leader, Hashim Thaçi, presides over the partially-recognized state. The MEK are no longer designated as such despite the State Department's own account of its bloody history:

"During the 1970s, the MEK staged terrorist attacks inside Iran to destabilize and embarrass the Shah's regime; the group killed several US military personnel and civilians working on defense projects in Tehran. The group also supported the takeover in 1979 of the US Embassy in Tehran. In April 1992 the MEK carried out attacks on Iranian embassies in 13 different countries, demonstrating the group's ability to mount large-scale operations overseas."

Declassified documents revealing the sinister plans in Operation Northwoods which shockingly made it all the way to the desk of the president of the United States and the foreknowledge of Cubana Airlines Flight 455 are just two examples of solid proof that false flag attacks against civilian passenger planes are a part of the Pentagon's modus operandi as disclosed in its own archives and there is no reason to believe that such practices have been discontinued. That the U.S. is still cozy with "former" terror groups like MEK seeking to repatriate is good reason to believe its use of militant exiles for covert operations like those from Havana has not been retired. If there were jumps to conclusions that proven serial liars could be looking for an excuse to stage an attack to lay the blame on Iran, it is only because the distinct probability was overwhelming. Even so, a stopped clock strikes the right time twice per day and that is all Iran's acknowledgment of its liability proves -- that even the world's most unreliable and criminal sources in Washington and Langley can be accurate sometimes

the grand wazoo , says: Show Comment January 12, 2020 at 2:34 am GMT

What no one is mentioning is: the US airstrikes on Iraqi military bases, and Soleimani's murder contributed greatly to the hair trigger response of Iran's air defense forces. If Washington did not turn the heat up on both Iraq and Iran there would have been no need for Iran's retaliation, and thus the level of Iran's domestic defense forces would not have been so nervous as to pull the trigger downing the airliner.
But, if's a huge word.
Flint Clint , says: Show Comment January 12, 2020 at 5:41 am GMT
I disagree.

https://m.jpost.com/Defense/WikiLeaks-Russia-gave-Israel-Iranian-codes

Israel has had control of Iran's Russian middle systems for years. Russia gave them the codes.

I think Israel blew up the aircraft. I can't find a link but I heard a huge number of Soleimani loyalists were arrested in Iran. Someone should have a link to that from Twitter or somewhere.

I think that there was some kind of collaboration between Khamenei, Israel and the US to remove Soleimani who had designs on a coup.

I don't know if this is a good or bad thing.

I also don't know who was on that plane. So it's unclear if it was good or bad it was destroyed. Who knows who those 176 dual Iranian Nationals were.

I just know that if Israel had control of those missile units and it would embarrass Iran for that to be revealed it makes sense for Iran to claim the lesser of two deep shames.

Particularly if there has been some kind of tacit acceptance of a status as a vassal state to either the US or Israel behind the scenes to preserve the regime.

Perhaps the MEK or a different vassal ruler who is really crypto Jewish will be appointed in Solemeinis place, and Iran will hence offer a symbolic enemy to justify the continuation of the military industrial complex in both Israel and the US.

Just one feasible theory.

Ilya G Poimandres , says: Show Comment January 12, 2020 at 6:46 am GMT
Even a blind squirrel, even a broken clock twice a day.. The Empire's statements and blind accusations could have been for any tragedy in a country they were psyopsing, only a matter of chance for them to be right at some time. In any case, it wasn't intentional on Iran's part.
nmb , says: Show Comment January 12, 2020 at 7:27 am GMT
Former CIA high-ranking official accidentally reveals the type of the false flag operation that the US imperialists will orchestrate to start a war with Iran
https://failedevolution.blogspot.com/2020/01/former-cia-high-ranking-official.html
Lol just lol , says: Show Comment January 12, 2020 at 8:09 am GMT
"Accidental" lol

Only if accidental means a joint Russian/Iranian hit on a Ukrainian plane carrying fleeing cia/mossad agents.

This whole situation has once again displayed how easy it is for the zio-media to control what we see and hear and believe. Disturbingly, that means that things like metoo and "believe all women" are operations too.

We are f*cked no matter what.

Crazy Horse , says: Website Show Comment January 12, 2020 at 8:56 am GMT
@the grand wazoo I wouldn't be surprised it the FDR shows that the plane strayed off its registered Flightpath and was involved in a covert recon mission that went bad.
Antares , says: Show Comment January 12, 2020 at 9:15 am GMT
It reminds me too much of MH-17, which was not hit with a BUK but with bullets. Iran should have closed its airspace because such tricks are to be expected, irrespective of the cause of the current accident. There is no immediate reason for Iranians to fly to Ukraine, or anywhere else. It may sound silly but flying is still a special and dangerous thing and should not be taken for granted.

For someone who doesn't watch television or read Iranian newspapers it was only reported on Twitter and then repeated by PressTV and others on internet. Which parts of the story are real?

Alfred , says: Show Comment January 12, 2020 at 9:30 am GMT
Of course, it was a huge and most regrettable mistake. Doubtless, the Iranians will compensate the victims for what that is worth. Most of the passengers were Iranians. I suspect that many of the "Canadians" Trudeau is on about are of Iranian descent. They would certainly be considered to be Iranians in Iran.

The series of coincidences highlighted in this article are remarkable. It has synchronicity splashed all over it.

I worked at Tehran airport for some years prior to the Revolution. After the Revolution, I volunteered to return on behalf of Raytheon (of all companies) to get some money owing. No one else was prepared to go there. Iran Air personnel were delighted to meet me again and they promptly paid the bill. I took a holiday to the Caspian with my ex-girlfriend.

A further piece of synchronicity is that I am currently visiting Kiev. The world is a truly incestuous place.

... ... ...

Wizard of Oz , says: Show Comment January 12, 2020 at 10:15 am GMT
@the grand wazoo "What no one is mentioning ."??? Really? That's almost exactly what some Iranian spokesmen have been saying.
Wizard of Oz , says: Show Comment January 12, 2020 at 10:29 am GMT
Set aside the beatup of two operations that neither the CIA or any American agency carried out the author has apparently failed to see the obvious. That is that the Iranians had no possibility of covering up the missile strike. Or did he imagine that everyone who might tell the truth could be kept permanently separated from plane parts and bodies which would have shown unmistakeable and undeniable evidences of the strike.

[Jan 12, 2020] US has been preaching human rights while mounting wars and lying.

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Over $7 trillion spent while homelessness is rampant. Healthcare is unaffordable for the 99% of the population. ..."
Jan 12, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Likklemore , Jan 11 2020 17:48 utc | 201

At 2016, here is the long bombing list of the 32 countries by the late William Blum. Did I mention sanctions is an Act of War?

Little u.s. has been preaching human rights while mounting wars and lying. Albright thought the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children were worth it. !!! it was worth killings and maiming.

Over $7 trillion spent while homelessness is rampant. Healthcare is unaffordable for the 99% of the population.

The u.s. will leave Iraq and Syria aka Saigon 1975 or horizontal. It's over.

2020: u.s. Stands Alone.

Searching for friends. Now, after Russiagate here is little pompous: "we want to be friends with Russia." Sanctions much excepting we need RD180 engines, seizure of diplomatic properties. Who are you kidding?

"we seek a constructive and productive relationship with the Russian Federation".

What a bunch of hypocrites? How dare you criticize commenters who see little u.s. in the light of day, not a shining beacon on the hill..

[Jan 12, 2020] Our Orwellian surveillance state the term imminent has been redefined ala doublespeak to mean at any time possible.

Jan 12, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

UserFriendly , Jan 12 2020 0:53 utc | 338

Can there be any "imminent threat" when one does not know the "who, what, when, where" of the threat?

Ahh you made the common mistake of thinking words have meaning. Just like our Orwellian surveillance state the term imminent has been redefined ala doublespeak to mean at any time possible.
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2020/01/lies-the-bethlehem-doctrine-and-the-illegal-murder-of-soleimani/

[Jan 12, 2020] Nobody, not even Russia and china, can afford to stay in the sidelines in a nuclear war in the 2020s.

Notable quotes:
"... What i find truly amazing is that American Zionists still believe crushing Iran is easy enough. Israel, with 8 million jews stuffed in a small country, is nothing more than a carrier battle group marooned on land ..."
Jan 12, 2020 | smoothiex12.blogspot.com

Axiosromano • 2 days ago

The tramp & nutNyahoo machismo show continues to be fun to watch. Both show off their penis worms as they arrogantly claim they can crush iran. Both the usa and israel keep banging on the doors and walls of their pissed-off neighbors' houses. That eventually gets you murdered whether in baltimore or baghdad.

A crushable iran is true if and only if they can mount a full-on nuclear war on Iran. But such horrendous cheating means all bets are off, and iran's allies will provide the nukes required to melt down the American homeland too. Nobody, not even Russia and china, can afford to stay in the sidelines in a nuclear war in the 2020s.

What i find truly amazing is that American Zionists still believe crushing Iran is easy enough. Israel, with 8 million jews stuffed in a small country, is nothing more than a carrier battle group marooned on land. Sitting ducks, with nice armor, nukes and all, are ... still sitting ducks. nutNyahoo should ask his technical crew just how few megatons are needed, or just a few thousand modern missiles are required to transform sitting ducks into nicely roasted peking ducks.

So a conventional war it is. The usa and israel has exactly zero, zilch and nada chances of winning a war with iran. The usa keeps forgetting that it is a dying empire with dying funding value and mental resources. Just like israel which oddly thinks dozens of f-35s will give it immunity through air superiority. Proof of this fact that iran will win comes from simply asking american and israeli war experts to go on cnn or the washington post on how they intend to win a war with iran.

Im sure these expert bloviators will say that it is as easy as winning a naval war against china, which is capable of launching only 3 new warships in a week. Or an even easier time against russia, which can launch only a few thousand hypersonic nuke missiles because its GDP is no bigger than that of texas.

Rob Naardin • 2 days ago

The Pentagon is super slow to adapt and learn. If you understand that bureaucracy is an ancient organizational structure and that the organizational culture of the Pentagon is pathologically dysfunctional you could have predicted the moral and financial bankruptcy of America 15-20 years ago. The "Why?", finally made sense when I discovered what a sociopath was.

It's about time the US practices what it preachs and start behaving like a normal country instead of a spoiled narcissistic brat. see more

tic_Fox Rob Naardin • 2 days ago • edited

US military & strategic thought became lazy during the late days of the Cold War. It mirrored the decline & fall of the foundations of its opponent, USSR. Post-Cold War, US military & strategic thinking flushed into the sewer. It was all about maintaining the military as some sort of a social policy jobs program, operating legacy tech as the mission. And then came the "world-improvers" -- beginning w the Clinton Admin -- who worked to turn the world into a global "urban renewal" project; meaning to mirror the success US Big Govt showed in the slums of American cities from sea to sea. The past 30 yrs of US strategic thinking and related governance truly disgusts me. see more

Vasya Pypkin Arctic_Fox • 2 days ago

Soviet union fall had very different reasons and Soviet military thought was doing quite well then along with military. Current russian military wonders is completion of what was started then and not finished earlier because of the disintegration of the Soviet state.
The soviet fall however is extremely regrettable because there was a new way how things can be done that Soviet union was showing to the world. USA fall long term is a very good thing because USA is a paragon of how things should be done the old way and basically a huge parasite. Many negative trends that are afflicting the world were started by USA. Unlimited individualism and consumerism would be a couple of those. see more

Drapetomania Vasya Pypkin • 17 hours ago
Why does almost every person on Earth feel the need to force others to bend the knee to their beliefs?

Religious beliefs are what one thinks should be done to promote survival in an afterlife, political beliefs are what one thinks should be done to promote survival in this world.

The world would be a far better, more civilized, of world if such beliefs were only shared on a voluntary basis.

As for individualism, I would rather be free than live in a modern day egalitarian hunter-gatherer tribe run by modern day psychopathic alpha-males.

That is certainly not a recipe for success. see more

AriusArmenian Arctic_Fox • 2 days ago

It also mirrors the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. It was Emperor Augustus that decided the costs to further expand the Empire were too great after losing one (or two?) legions against the Germanic tribes.

The US has reached its greatest extent. We are living through it. The US didn't go forward into war with Iran twice. The odds of humanity surviving this immense turn of history is looking better. see more

Vasya Pypkin AriusArmenian • 2 days ago • edited

Frankly, nothing in common. I read this comparison all the time. Yes, Augustus decided not to continue along with expansion into Germany after losing 3 Varus legions due to ambush.

But he famously noted that it does not worth to go fishing with golden hook. Basically speaking, Germany was not worth fighting for. Poor and remote it had nothing to offer. Just a drain on resources. As long as conquest was moving smoothly it was ok, but after losses were inflicted Augustus decided it was not worth it.

Roman expansion under augustus was carried mostly to consolidate previous conquests and create strategical debth along core and strategical provinces also creating linkage.

When enemy far stronger than germans posed resources which made the whole conquest worthy no amount of resistance saved Dacians and Parthia also almost died under Trajan attack.

Roman policies were adequate and wise. Treaties were respected, allies supported and benefited. Empire was build around Mediterranean creating good communication and routes considering obviously limits of that day technology.

Rome did not behave like crazy and did not deliver threats that she could not follow through. When war was decided upon thorough preparations were taken. Political goals were achieved. Wars were won. When Adrian considered that empire was overextended in Parthis, he simply abandoned all conquered territories. Just like that.

Logical calm thinking USA,is not capable of. Rome truly based upon superior military and diplomacy dominance lasted many centuries. USA few decades. One hit wonder, lucky fool I would call it. see more

Arctic_Fox Vasya Pypkin • 17 hours ago

Interesting account of Roman strategic concept of forward presence, versus administering the internal lines of communication... see more

WHAT • 2 days ago

They left equipment in the open on that base and ran away. No AA fire whatsoever. This is how much they are ready to take a punch. see more

smoothieX12 . Mod WHAT • 2 days ago

Yes, this is somewhat puzzling. As I said, let's wait and see where it all develops to, but as Twisted Genius succinctly observed -- Iran now controls tempo because she has conventional superiority. Anyone who has precision-guided, stand off weaponry in good numbers will be on top. see more

Arctic_Fox smoothieX12 . • 2 days ago

The old submarine saying is, "There are two kinds of ships; submarines, and targets."
.
The new version for land ops is, "There are two kinds of land-based military assets; precision-guided missiles, and targets." (And per the photos, those Iranian missiles were quite precise; bulls-eyes.)
.
Iran and its missiles demonstrated that the entire strategic foundation for US mil presence in the Middle East is now obsolete. Everything the US would ever want to do there is now subject to Iran's version of "steel rain." Every runway, hangar, aircraft parking area; every supply depot or warehouse; every loading pier, fuel site, naval pier. Everything... is a target. And really... there's no amount of US "airpower" and "tech" than can mitigate the Iran missile threat.
.
Meanwhile, related thinking... Iran's true strategic interest is NOT fighting a near-term war w/ USA. Iran wants US to exit Middle East; and Iran wants to be able to pursue its nuclear program. Soleimani or no, Iran appears to have its eyeballs fixed on the long-term goals. see more

smoothieX12 . Mod Arctic_Fox • 2 days ago • edited
The new version for land ops is, "There are two kinds of land-based military assets; precision-guided missiles, and targets."

Exactly, and Iran has long-range TLAMs in who knows what numbers, That, in its turn, brings about the next issue of range for Iranian indigenous anti-ship missiles. Not, of course, to mention the fact of only select people knowing if Russia transferred P-800 Onyx to Iran She certainly did it for Syria. If that weapon is there--the Persian Gulf and Hormuz Strait will be shut completely closed and will push out CBGs far into the Indian Ocean. see more

Vasya Pypkin smoothieX12 . • a day ago

It is simply pathetic after decades of talking non stop about developments of anti missiles and huge amounts wasted and nobody is responsible. This is the way capitalism works.profits is everything and outcomes secondary. Thankfully russia has got soviet foundation and things so far are working well. I come to think that in our times no serious industrial processes should be allowed to stay in private hands. Only services and so.e other simpler stuff under heavy state control to ensure quality. Otherwise profit orientation will eventually destroy everything like with Boeing.

Drapetomania Vasya Pypkin • 16 hours ago observerBG smoothieX12 . • 2 days ago • edited

I know, i already wrote a full scale war scenario in one of the comments. Iran can destroy all US bases in 2000 km range. But this does not mean that it can not be bombed back to the stone age, if the US really wishes so. The problem for the US is the high cost as well as the high debt levels, but it does have the technical capability to do that after 2 - 3 years of bombing.

Also low yield tactical nukes are designed to lower the treshold of the use of nukes in otherwise conventional war, producing less international outrage than the megaton city buster bombs. Why do you think the US is developing them again? Because they would want to use them in conventional conflicts.

Here btw is Yurasumy, he also says that the US can technically bomb Iran back to the stone age, but the cost will be too high.

Play Hide

https://cdn.embedly.com/

smoothieX12 . Mod observerBG • 2 days ago • edited
if the US really wishes so.

Again--what's the plan and what's the price? Iran HAS Russia's ISR on her side in case of such SEAD.

Does the United States want to risk lives of thousands of its personnel (not to speak of expensive equipment) in Qatar, KSA, Iraq. Does Israel want to "get it"?

There are numbers which describe such an operation (it was. most likely, already planned as contingency). Immediate question: when was the last time USAF operated in REAL dense ECM and ECCM environment? I do not count some brushes with minimal EW in Syria.

Russia there uses only minimally required option, for now. Iran has a truck load EW systems, including some funny Russian toys which allowed Iran to take control of US UAVs, as an example. As I say, this is not Iraq and by a gigantic margin. see more

observerBG smoothieX12 . • 2 days ago • edited

I already said that debt levels do not allow it and the price would be too high, but yes, the US does have the military capability to destroy Iran. By conventional means. It is another question that it is not in good fiscal shape. Anyway, US ballistic missiles (non nuclear armed) will be hard to stop by EW. Even if Iran gets rid of 50 % of incoming TLAMs, the US will keep sending more and more until most infrastructure, bridges, oil refineries, power plants, factories, ports etc. are destroyed. This is why i said it would take 2 - 3 years. see more

smoothieX12 . Mod observerBG • 2 days ago
but yes, the US does have the military capability to destroy Iran. By conventional means

That is the whole point: NO, it doesn't. Unless US goes into full mobilization mode and addresses ALL (plus a million more not listed) requirements for such a war which I listed in the post. Well, that or nukes. see more

observerBG smoothieX12 . • 2 days ago

Yurasumy is a pretty good analist and he thinks that they can. I do not see it for the US being too hard to produce more TLAMS, ICBMs and IRBMs (conventional) to sustain the effort for 2 years, by that time most iranian infrastructure will be destroyed. If the fiscal situation allowes it. see more

smoothieX12 . Mod observerBG • 2 days ago

I don't know who Yarasumy is and what is his background, but unlike him I actually write books, including on modern warfare. This is not to show off, but I am sure I can make basic calculations. This is not to mention the fact that even Sivkov agrees with my points and Sivkov, unlike Yarsumy, graduated Popov's VVMURE, served at subs, then graduated Kuznetsov Academy, then Academy of the General Staff and served in Main Operational Directorate (GOU) until retiring in the rank of Captain 1st Rank from the billet of Combat Planning group. So, I would rather stick to my opinion. see more

observerBG smoothieX12 . • 2 days ago

Why do you think that the US can not destroy Iran with IRBMs? Actually this is their strategy vs China. If they think its viable vs China, then it should be viable vs Iran too. see more

smoothieX12 . Mod observerBG • 2 days ago • edited

Because unlike the US, Russia's Air Defenses have a rather very impressive history of shifting the balance in wars in favor of those who have them, when used properly. But then I can quote for you a high ranking intelligence officer:

A friend of mine who has expertise in these matters wrote me:

Any air defense engineer with a securityclearance that isn't lying through his teeth will admit that Russia'sair defense technology surpassed us in the 1950's and we've never been able to catch up. The systems thy have in place surrounding Moscow make our Patriot 3's look like fucking nerf guns.

Read the whole thing here:

https://turcopolier.typepad...

Mathematics is NOT there for the United States for a real combined operations war of scale with Iran. Unless US political class really wants to see people with pitch-forks. see more

Arctic_Fox smoothieX12 . • 17 hours ago

"Mathematics is not there..."
.
Neither is the industrial base, including supply lines. Not the mines, mills, factories to produce any significant levels of warfighting materiel such as we're talking about here. Not the workforce, either. Meanwhile, where are the basic designs for these weps? The years of lab work, bench tests, pilot specimens & prototypes, the development pipeline? The contractors to build them? the Tier 2, 3, 4 suppliers? Where are the universities that train such people as are needed? Where is the political will? Where is the government coordination? Where is the money? Indeed, every Democrat and probably half the Republicans who run for office campaign on controlling military spending; not that USA gets all that much benefit from the current $800 billion per year. see more

observerBG smoothieX12 . • 2 days ago • edited

That would require S-500 - ballistic missile defense. Maybe 15 - 20 S-500 in Iran will be needed. And it is not yet in the army. see more

smoothieX12 . Mod observerBG • 2 days ago

You see, here is the difference--I can calculate approximate required force for that but I don't want to. It is Friday. You can get some basic intro into operational theory (and even into Salvo Equations) in my latest book. Granted, my publisher fought me tooth and nail to remove as much match as possible. But I'll give you a hint--appearance of S-500 on any theater of operations effectively closes it off effectively for any missile or aircraft operations when deployed in echeloned (multi-layer) AD. see more

[Jan 12, 2020] The petrodollar is the way in which the US gets the rest of the world to fund its wars

Notable quotes:
"... Economic growth is more about financialising goods and services that were previously free or are/were social goods. There is no real growth; just taxing the living. ..."
"... So, in my view, the only restraint on destroying Iran is capability, is the cost and the risk of retaliation (not just from Iran) - not the destruction of Iran's capital - better for Iran's capital to be destroyed than for Iran to be independent or a competitor. ..."
Jan 12, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

ADKC , Jan 12 2020 2:10 utc | 359

vk @334

My comment @342 should have read: "The petrodollar is the way in which the US gets the rest of the world to fund its wars,"

---------

Your comment about capitalist accumulation doesn't hold (as a motivator for the US) when we have a capitalist monopolist situation. Rate of profit is not about growth (of real goods); it is about reducing competition and scarcity. When you are the monopolist you can charge what you like but profit becomes meaningless - the monopolist power comes from the control of resources - the monopolistic capitalist becomes a ruler/monarch. You no longer need ever-increasing customers so you can dispense with them if you so chose (by reducing the population). One bottle of water is far more valuable and a lot less trouble to produce that 100 millions bottles of water. There is no point in AI to provide for the needs of "the many"; AI becomes a means to dispense with "the many" altogether.

Economic growth is more about financialising goods and services that were previously free or are/were social goods. There is no real growth; just taxing the living.

So, in my view, the only restraint on destroying Iran is capability, is the cost and the risk of retaliation (not just from Iran) - not the destruction of Iran's capital - better for Iran's capital to be destroyed than for Iran to be independent or a competitor.

[Jan 11, 2020] "When They Kill One Sureimani, A Thousand More Are Born": spectacular betrail by Trump of his voters

Notable quotes:
"... Peter Certo is the editorial manager of the Institute for Policy Studies and editor of Foreign Policy In Focus. ..."
Jan 03, 2020 | fpif.org

Originally published in OtherWords .

Trump's Iran Aggression Deserves Full-Throated Opposition - FPIF By Peter Certo

Trump is betraying his voters and threatening millions of lives.

In a full-blown U.S. war with Iran, up to a million people could die initially.

Hundreds of thousands more could die in the vacuum to follow. Millions would be made refugees. That's the conclusion of experts surveyed by Vox reporter Alex Ward . "The worst-case scenarios here are quite serious," Middle East scholar Michael Hanna warned.

With the brazen assassination of Iranian military commander Qasem Soleimani in Iraq, President Trump has brought us leaps and bounds closer to that conflagration -- a decision Trump appears to have made while golfing at Mar-a-Lago .

Lawmakers need to move before it's too late.

The Iranians may respond cautiously , perhaps forestalling a full-blown conflict. But there can be no doubt the White House has been driving in that direction from day one.

In a few short years, Trump has blown up the Iran nuclear deal, put a horrific economic stranglehold on the country, and sent a stunning 14,000 new troops to the Middle East since just last spring. Some 3,500 more are now on their way.

"Hope this is the first step to regime change in Tehran," John Bolton tweeted about the assassination . Bolton may have left the White House, but clearly his spirit lives on.

What next? Get ready to hear a lot about what a " bad guy " Soleimani was, and how Iran is a "state sponsor" of terrorism.

No doubt, Soleimani had blood on his hands -- he was a general. Yet after two decades of U.S. wars in the Middle East, that's the pot calling the kettle black. It was the U.S. who invaded Iraq, started a civil war, and paved the way for a literal terrorist state, ISIS, to occupy the country afterward (a force Soleimani himself was instrumental in dismantling).

That senseless war caused hundreds of thousands of deaths, exploded the terrorist threat, and is destabilizing the region to this day. Yet somehow, war hawks like Secretary of State Mike Pompeo can go on TV and -- with a straight face -- predict ordinary Iranians will essentially thank the U.S. for murdering their general.

"People not only in Iraq but in Iran will view the American action last night as giving them freedom," Pompeo said the morning after the assassination. You couldn't caricature a better callback to Dick Cheney's infamous prediction that Iraqis would "greet us as liberators" if you tried.

This war-mongering should be as toxic politically as it is morally . Trump rode into office promising to end America's wars, winning him crucial votes in swing states with large military and veteran populations. Huge bipartisan majorities, including 58 percent of Republicans, say they want U.S. troops out of the Middle East.

Trump is betraying them spectacularly.

Yet too many Democrats are merely objecting to Trump's failure to consult them. Speaker Nancy Pelosi complained the strike "was taken without the consultation of the Congress." South Bend mayor Pete Buttigieg offered colorlessly that "there are serious questions about how this decision was made." Others complained about the apparent lack of a "strategy."

It's illegal for a president to unilaterally launch a war -- that's important. But these complaints make it sound like if you want to kill a million people for no reason, you just have to go to the DMV first. As if Trump's base doesn't love it when he cuts the line in Washington.

Senator Bernie Sanders, who warned that "Trump's dangerous escalation brings us closer to another disastrous war in the Middle East that could cost countless lives and trillions more dollars," came closer to communicating the real threat.

Millions of lives are at stake. Trump's aggression demands -- and voters will more likely reward -- real opposition. Call him on it before it's too late.

Peter Certo is the editorial manager of the Institute for Policy Studies and editor of Foreign Policy In Focus.

[Jan 11, 2020] A leak from the Ukrainian side about the investigation: Compare the behaviour of Iranian authorities and Ukrainian Provitional Goverment(junta) in case of MH17

Jan 11, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Another leak (ukr) from the Ukrainian side of the investigation gives some hints on how the plane came down (machine translation):

"We took up the restoration of fragments of the aircraft. It was necessary to determine how these pieces of metal dumped into a huge pile should be interconnected.

The intrigue remained until late. The fact is that there were no damages on most parts of the aircraft. There was no explosion and no fire in the engines or on the wings. It is possible that the plane could fall almost intact. Unlike the remains of the Boeing MN-17, there were no immediately visible signs of defeat by combat elements on the fuselage and wings. A lot of damage to the case is the result of a fall. But after laying out all the fragments of the aircraft, it became obvious that the bottom of the cockpit was missing.

Among the wreckage, fragments of the upper part of the cabin were identified. And then the find finally took place - at about 22 hours. On a fragment of the cockpit, we found holes in the damaging elements of the warhead of the rocket, which pierced the skin. We found! For the first time, direct evidence appeared in this case, which made it possible to prove what caused the death of the aircraft. For us it was a turning point.

So what we now understand:

Russian anti-aircraft missile "Tor" hit the liner in the lower part of the front of the fuselage, directly under the cockpit.

A direct hit and the cabin flared up inside. Instantly turned off the transponder of the aircraft, which gives signals about the flight. Instantly lost contact.

While there is no data, one or two missiles have caused such damage. It is possible that the second missile also hit the fuselage from below close to the first. But all this remains to be clarified.

We continue to lay out fragments of the aircraft until the complete collection of all surviving parts.

We expect that today we will gain access to all objective control data.

In cooperation with Iranian colleagues, we get the impression that those who contact us sincerely want to help themselves and figure it out, in general, there are no problems. Let's hope that such a mood and working contacts remain with us now."

[Jan 11, 2020] Big Money in Politics Doesn't Just Drive Inequality. It Drives War. - FPIF

Notable quotes:
"... Citizens United ..."
Jan 11, 2020 | fpif.org

Big Money in Politics Doesn't Just Drive Inequality. It Drives War.

Military contractors have shelled out over $1 million to the 2016 presidential candidates -- including over $200,000 to Hillary Clinton alone.

By Rebecca Green , April 27, 2016 . Originally published in OtherWords .

Print Friendly, PDF & EmailPrint Military-Industrial Diagnosis

Khalil Bendib / OtherWords.org

The 2016 presidential elections are proving historic, and not just because of the surprising success of self-proclaimed socialist Bernie Sanders, the lively debate among feminists over whether to support Hillary Clinton, or Donald Trump's unorthodox candidacy.

The elections are also groundbreaking because they're revealing more dramatically than ever the corrosive effect of big money on our decaying democracy.

Following the 2010 Citizens United Supreme Court decision and related rulings, corporations and the wealthiest Americans gained the legal right to raise and spend as much money as they want on political candidates.

The 2012 elections were consequently the most expensive in U.S. history. And this year's races are predicted to cost even more. With the general election still six months away, donors have already sunk $1 billion into the presidential race -- with $619 million raised by candidates and another $412 million by super PACs.

Big money in politics drives grave inequality in our country. It also drives war.

After all, war is a profitable industry. While millions of people all over the world are being killed and traumatized by violence, a small few make a killing from the never-ending war machine.

During the Iraq War, for example, weapons manufacturers and a cadre of other corporations made billions on federal contracts.

Most notoriously this included Halliburton, a military contractor previously led by Dick Cheney. The company made huge profits from George W. Bush's decision to wage a costly, unjustified, and illegal war while Cheney served as his vice president.

Military-industrial corporations spend heavily on political campaigns. They've given over $1 million to this year's presidential candidates so far -- over $200,000 of which went to Hillary Clinton, who leads the pack in industry backing.

These corporations target House and Senate members who sit on the Armed Forces and Appropriations Committees, who control the purse strings for key defense line items. And cleverly, they've planted factories in most congressional districts. Even if they provide just a few dozen constituent jobs per district, that helps curry favor with each member of Congress.

Thanks to aggressive lobbying efforts, weapons manufacturers have secured the five largest contracts made by the federal government over the last seven years. In 2014, the U.S. government awarded over $90 billion worth of contracts to Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Raytheon, and Northrop Grumman.

Military spending has been one of the top three biggest federal programs every year since 2000, and it's far and away the largest discretionary portion. Year after year, elected officials spend several times more on the military than on education, energy, and the environment combined.

Lockheed Martin's problematic F-35 jet illustrates this disturbingly disproportionate use of funds. The same $1.5 trillion Washington will spend on the jet, journalist Tom Cahill calculates , could have provided tuition-free public higher education for every student in the U.S. for the next 23 years. Instead, the Pentagon ordered a fighter plane that can't even fire its own gun yet.

Given all of this, how can anyone justify war spending?

Some folks will say it's to make us safer . Yet the aggressive U.S. military response following the 9/11 attacks -- the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, the NATO bombing of Libya, and drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen -- has only destabilized the region. "Regime change" foreign policies have collapsed governments and opened the doors to Islamist terrorist groups like ISIS.

Others may say they support a robust Pentagon budget because of the jobs the military creates . But dollar for dollar, education spending creates nearly three times more jobs than military spending.

We need to stop letting politicians and corporations treat violence and death as "business opportunities." Until politics become about people instead of profits, we'll remain crushed in the death grip of the war machine.

And that is the real national security threat facing the United States today. Share this:

[Jan 11, 2020] Meet the CEOs Raking It in from Trump's Aggression Toward Iran - FPIF

Notable quotes:
"... Sarah Anderson directs the Global Economy Project at the Institute for Policy Studies and co-edits the IPS publication Inequality.org. Follow her at @SarahDAnderson1. ..."
Jan 11, 2020 | fpif.org

Meet the CEOs Raking It in from Trump's Aggression Toward Iran

Major military contractors saw a stock surge from the U.S. assassination of an Iranian general. For CEOs, that means payday comes early.

By Sarah Anderson , January 6, 2020 . Originally published in Inequality.org .

Print Friendly, PDF & EmailPrint military-industrial-complex-arms-contractors

Chris Devers / Flickr

CEOs of major U.S. military contractors stand to reap huge windfalls from the escalation of conflict with Iran. This was evident in the immediate aftermath of the U.S. assassination of a top Iranian military official last week. As soon as the news reached financial markets, these companies' share prices spiked, inflating the value of their executives' stock-based pay.

I took a look at how the CEOs at the top five Pentagon contractors were affected by this surge, using the most recent SEC information on their stock holdings.

Northrop Grumman executives saw the biggest increase in the value of their stocks after the U.S. airstrike that killed Qasem Suleimani on January 2. Shares in the B-2 bomber maker rose 5.43 percent by the end of trading the following day.

Wesley Bush, who turned Northrop Grumman's reins over to Kathy Warden last year, held 251,947 shares of company stock in various trusts as of his final SEC Form 4 filing in May 2019. (Companies must submit these reports when top executives and directors buy and sell company stock.) Assuming Bush is still sitting on that stockpile, he saw the value grow by $4.9 million to a total of $94.5 million last Friday.

New Northrop Grumman CEO Warden saw the 92,894 shares she'd accumulated as the firm's COO expand in value by more than $2.7 million in just one day of post-assassination trading.

Lockheed Martin, whose Hellfire missiles were reportedly used in the attack at the Baghdad airport, saw a 3.6 percent increase in price per share on January 3. Marillyn Hewson, CEO of the world's largest weapon maker, may be kicking herself for selling off a considerable chunk of stock last year when it was trading at around $307. Nevertheless, by the time Lockheed shares reached $413 at the closing bell, her remaining stash had increased in value by about $646,000.

What about the manufacturer of the MQ-9 Reaper that carried the Hellfire missiles? That would be General Atomics. Despite raking in $2.8 billion in taxpayer-funded contracts in 2018, the drone maker is not required to disclose executive compensation information because it is a privately held corporation.

We do know General Atomics CEO Neal Blue is worth an estimated $4.1 billion -- and he's a major investor in oil production, a sector that also stands to profit from conflict with a major oil-producing country like Iran.

*Resigned 12/22/19. **Resigned 1/1/19 while staying on as chairman until 7/19. New CEO Kathy Warden accumulated 92,894 shares in her previous position as Northrop Grumman COO.

Suleimani's killing also inflated the value of General Dynamics CEO Phebe Novakovic's fortune. As the weapon maker's share price rose about 1 percentage point on January 3, the former CIA official saw her stock holdings increase by more than $1.2 million.

Raytheon CEO Thomas Kennedy saw a single-day increase in his stock of more than half a million dollars, as the missile and bomb manufacturer's share price increased nearly 1.5 percent. Boeing stock remained flat on Friday. But Dennis Muilenberg, recently ousted as CEO over the 737 aircraft scandal, appears to be well-positioned to benefit from any continued upward drift of the defense sector.

As of his final Form 4 report, Muilenburg was sitting on stock worth about $47.7 million. In his yet to be finalized exit package, the disgraced former executive could also pocket huge sums of currently unvested stock grants.

Hopefully sanity will soon prevail and the terrifyingly high tensions between the Trump administration and Iran will de-escalate. But even if the military stock surge of this past Friday turns out to be a market blip, it's a sobering reminder of who stands to gain the most from a war that could put millions of lives at risk.

We can put an end to dangerous war profiteering by denying federal contracts to corporations that pay their top executives excessively. In 2008, John McCain, then a Republican presidential candidate, proposed capping CEO pay at companies receiving taxpayer bailouts at no more than $400,000 (the salary of the U.S. president). That notion should be extended to companies that receive massive taxpayer-funded contracts.

Sen. Bernie Sanders, for instance, has a plan to deny federal contracts to companies that pay CEOs more than 150 times what their typical worker makes.

As long as we allow the top executives of our privatized war economy to reap unlimited rewards, the profit motive for war in Iran -- or anywhere -- will persist. Share this:

Sarah Anderson directs the Global Economy Project at the Institute for Policy Studies and co-edits the IPS publication Inequality.org. Follow her at @SarahDAnderson1.

[Jan 11, 2020] The main problem of the United States in the existing political and economic system, which began to be intensively created by the American banking layer since 1885 and was fixed in 1913.

Jan 11, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

Helg Saracen , 55 minutes ago link

The main problem of the United States in the existing political and economic system, which began to be intensively created by the American banking layer since 1885 and was fixed in 1913. This became possible only thanks to the Civil War of 1861-1865. I will explain. Before the Civil War, each state had its own banking structure, its own banknotes (there were not so many states, there were still territories that did not become states yet). Before the American Civil War, there was no single banking system. Abraham Linkol was a protege of the banking houses of the cities of New York and Chicago, they rigged the election (bought the election). It may sound rude to the Americans, but Lincoln was a rogue in the eyes of some US citizens of that time. And this became the main reason for the desire of some states (not only southern, and some northern) to withdraw from the United States. Another good reason for the exit was the persistent attempts of bankers in New York and Chicago to take control of the banking system of the South. These are two main reasons, as old as the World, the struggle for control and money. The war (unfortunately) began the South. Under a federal treaty, South and North were supposed to jointly contain US forts for protection. The fighting began on April 12, 1861 with an attack by southerners on such a fort Sumter in Charleston Bay. These are the beginnings of war.

This is important - I advise everyone to read the memoirs of generals, and especially the memoirs of Ulysses Grant, the future president of the United States. The war was with varying success, but the emissaries of the banks of New York and Chicago always followed the army of the North, who, taking advantage of the disastrous situation in the battlefields, bought up real estate, land and other assets. They were called the "Carpetbagger". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carpetbagger They were engaged in the purchase throughout the war and up to 1885.

To make it clear to you, in the history of the USA, the period from 1865 to 1885 is called the "Great American Depression" (this is the very first great depression and lasted 20 years). During this time, the bankers of New York and Chicago completely subjugated the US banking system to themselves and their interests, trampled the South (robbed), after which the submission of the US as a state directly to the banking mafia began. At present (since 1913) in the USA there is not capitalism, but an evil parody of capitalism.

I can call it this: American clan-corporate oligarchic "capitalism" (with the suppression of free markets, with unfair competition and the creation of barriers to the dissemination of reliable information). Since such "capitalism" cannot work (like socialism or utopian communism), constant wars are needed that bring profit to the bankers, owners of the military-industrial complex, political "service staff", make oligarchs richer, and ordinary Americans poorer. We are now observing this, since this system has come to its end and everything has become obvious.

For example, in the early 80s, the middle class of the United States was approximately 70% of the population employed in production and trade, now it is no more than 15%.

The gap between the oligarchs and ordinary Americans widened. My essay is how I see what is happening in the USA and why I do not like it. It's my personal opinion. In the end, my favorite phrase is that Americans are suckers and boobies (but we still love them). Good luck everyone.

[Jan 11, 2020] In Iraq The U.S. Is Again An Occupation Force As It Rejects To Leave As Demanded

Jan 11, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

In Iraq The U.S. Is Again An Occupation Force As It Rejects To Leave As Demanded

Iraq's Prime Minister Adel Abdul-Mahdi is following Iraq's Parliament decision to remove all foreign forces from Iraq. But his request for talks with the U.S. about the U.S. withdrawal process was answered with a big "F*** You":

Iraq's caretaker prime minister asked Washington to start working out a road map for an American troop withdrawal, but the U.S. State Department on Friday bluntly rejected the request, saying the two sides should instead talk about how to "recommit" to their partnership.

Thousands of anti-government protesters gathered in the capital and southern Iraq, many calling on both Iran and America to leave Iraq, reflecting anger and frustration over the two rivals -- both Baghdad's allies -- trading blows on Iraqi soil.

The request from Prime Minister Adel Abdul-Mahdi pointed to his determination to push ahead with demands for U.S. troops to leave Iraq, stoked by the American drone strike on Jan. 3 that killed top Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani. In a phone call Thursday night, he told U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo that recent U.S. strikes in Iraq were an unacceptable breach of Iraqi sovereignty and a violation of their security agreements, his office said.

He asked Pompeo to "send delegates to Iraq to prepare a mechanism" to carry out the Iraqi Parliament's resolution on withdrawing foreign troops, according to the statement.

"The prime minister said American forces had entered Iraq and drones are flying in its airspace without permission from Iraqi authorities, and this was a violation of the bilateral agreements," the statement added.

The Associated Press errs when it says that the move was "stoked by the American drone strike on Jan. 3 that killed top Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani". The move was stoked five days earlier when the U.S. killed 31 Iraqi security forces near the Syrian border despite the demands by the Iraqi prime minister and president not to do so. It was further stoked when the U.S. assassinated Abu Mahdi al-Muhandes , the deputy commander of the Popular Militia Forces and a national hero in Iraq.

The State Department issued a rather aggressive response to Abdul-Mahdi's request:

Cont. reading: In Iraq The U.S. Is Again An Occupation Force As It Rejects To Leave As Demanded

[Jan 11, 2020] America's Other Dark Legacy In Iraq by Joy Gordon

Mar 25, 2013 | fpif.org
coalition-provisional-authority-cpa-iraq-oil-looting-contracts-corruptWhen the United States, the United Kingdom, and the "coalition of the willing" attacked Iraq in March 2003, millions protested around the world. But the war of "shock and awe" was just the beginning. The subsequent occupation of Iraq by the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority bankrupted the country and left its infrastructure in shambles.

It's not just a question of security. Although the breathtaking violence that attended Iraq's descent into sectarian nightmare has been well documented in many retrospectives on the 10-year-old war, what's often overlooked is that by far more mundane standards, the United States did a spectacularly poor job of governing Iraq.

It's not that Iraq was flourishing before the occupation. From 1990 to 2003, the UN Security Council imposed economic sanctions on Iraq that were the harshest in the history of global governance. But along with the sanctions, at least, came an elaborate system of oversight and accountability that drew in the Security Council, nine UN agencies, and General Secretary himself.

The system was certainly imperfect, and the effects of the sanctions on the Iraqi people were devastating. But when the United States arrived, all semblance of international oversight vanished.

Under enormous pressure from Washington, in May 2003 the Security Council formally recognized the occupation of Iraq by the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in Resolution 1483. Among other things, this resolution gave the CPA complete control over all of Iraq's assets.

At the same time, the Council removed all the forms of monitoring and accountability that had been in place: there would be no reports on the humanitarian situation by UN agencies, and there would be no committee of the Security Council charged with monitoring the occupation. There would be a limited audit of funds, after they were spent, but no one from the UN would directly oversee oil sales. And no humanitarian agencies would ensure that Iraqi funds were being spent in ways that benefitted the country.

Humanitarian concerns

In January 2003, the UN prepared a working plan anticipating the impact of a possible war. Even with only "medium impact" from the invasion, the UN expected that humanitarian conditions would be severely compromised.

Because the Iraqi population was so heavily reliant on the government's food distribution system (a consequence of international sanctions), the UN anticipated that overthrowing the Iraqi regime would also undermine food security. And because the population already suffered from extensive malnutrition, this disruption would be quite lethal, putting 30 percent of Iraqi children under five at risk of death. The UN noted that if water and sewage treatment plants were damaged in the war, or if the electrical system could not operate, Iraqis would lose access to potable water, which would likely precipitate epidemics of water-borne diseases. And if electricity, transportation, and medical equipment were compromised, then the medical system would be unable to respond effectively to these epidemics.

During the occupation, much of this came to pass. A June 2003 UN report noted that the postwar water and sewage systems for Baghdad and other central and southern governorates were "in crisis." In Baghdad alone, the report estimated that 40 percent of the city's water distribution network was damaged, leading to a loss of up to half of the city's potable water through leaks and breaks in the system. And direr still, the UN reported that neither of Baghdad's two sewage treatment plants was functional, leading to a massive discharge of raw sewage into the Tigris River.

The food situation was similar. The UN found that farming had collapsed due to "widespread insecurity and looting, the complete collapse of ministries and state agencies -- the sole providers of essential farming inputs and services -- together with significant damages to power supplies."

Likewise, the health system deteriorated dramatically. Less than 50 percent of the Iraqi population had access to medical care, due in part to the dangers associated with travel. Additionally, the report estimated that 75 percent of all health-care institutions were affected by the looting and chaos that occurred in the aftermath of the war. As of June 2003, the health system as a whole was functioning at 30-50 percent of its pre-war capacity. The impact was immediate. By early summer, acute malnutrition rates had doubled, dysentery was widespread, and little medical care was available. In August, when a power outage blacked out New York, the joke going around Baghdad was "I hope they're not waiting for the Americans to fix it."

The CPA gave responsibility for humanitarian relief to the U.S. military -- not to agencies with experience in humanitarian crises -- and marginalized the UN's humanitarian relief agencies. Over the 14-month course of the CPA's administration, the humanitarian crisis worsened. Preventable diseases like dysentery and typhoid ran rampant. Malnutrition worsened, claiming the lives of ever more infants, mothers, and young children. All told, there was an estimated 100,000 "excess deaths" during the invasion and occupation -- well above and beyond the mortality rate under Saddam Hussein, even under international sanctions.

The CPA's priorities were clear. After the invasion, during the widespread looting and robbery, occupation authorities did little to protect water and sewage treatment plants, or even pediatric hospitals. By contrast, they provided immediate protection for the oil ministry offices, hired a U.S. company to put out oil field fires, and immediately provided protection for the oil fields as well.

Corruption

In addition, the U.S.-led CPA was deeply corrupt. Much of Iraq's revenues, from oil sales or other sources, went to contracts with U.S. companies. Of contracts for more than $5 million, 74 percent went to U.S. companies, with most of the remainder going to U.S. allies. Only 2 percent went to Iraqi companies.

Over the course of the occupation, huge amounts of money simply disappeared. Kellogg, Brown, and Root (KBR), a subsidiary of Halliburton, received over 60 percent of all contracts paid for with Iraqi funds, although it was repeatedly criticized by auditors for issues of honesty and competence. In the last six weeks of the occupation, the United States shipped $5 billion of Iraqi funds, in cash, into the country, to be spent before the Iraqi-led government took over. Auditor reports indicated that Iraqi funds were systematically looted by the CPA officials: "One contractor received a $2 million payment in a duffel bag stuffed with shrink-wrapped bundles of currency," read one report . "One official was given $6.75 million in cash, and was ordered to spend it one week before the interim Iraqi government took control of Iraqi funds."

U.S. officials were apparently unconcerned about the gross abuses of the funds with which they were entrusted. In one instance, the CPA transferred some $8.8 billion of Iraqi money without any documentation as to how the funds were spent. When questioned about how the money was spent, Admiral David Oliver, the principal deputy for financial matters in the CPA, replied that he had "no idea" and didn't think it was particularly important. "Billions of dollars of their money?" he asked his interlocutor. "What difference does it make?"

In the end, none of this should be terribly surprising -- the corruption, the indifference to human needs, the singular concern with controlling Iraq's oil wealth. It was obvious from the moment that the Security Council, under enormous pressure from the United State, passed Resolution 1483.

By systematically removing nearly every form of oversight from their self-imposed administration of Iraq, the United States and its allies laid the foundation for the looting of an entire nation's wealth, abetted by their own wanton indifference to the needs and rights of Iraqis. Ten years after the start of the war, the CPA's disastrous governance of Iraq stands alongside the country's horrifying descent into violence as a dark legacy in its own right.

[Jan 10, 2020] The Saker interviews Michael Hudson

Highly recommended!
Looks like Iran is Catch22 for the USA: it can destroy it, but only at the cost of losing empire and dollar hegemony...
Notable quotes:
"... The United States is now turning on the screws demanding that other countries sacrifice their growth in order to finance the U.S. unipolar empire. In effect, foreign countries are beginning to respond to the United States what the ten tribes of Israel said when they withdrew from the southern kingdom of Judah, whose king Rehoboam refused to lighten his demands (1 Kings 12). They echoed the cry of Sheba son of Bikri a generation earlier: "Look after your own house, O David!" The message is: What do other countries have to gain by remaining in the US unipolar neoliberalized world, as compared to using their own wealth to build up their own economies? It's an age-old problem. ..."
"... The dollar will still play a role in US trade and investment, but it will be as just another currency, held at arms length until it finally gives up its domineering attempt to strip other countries' wealth for itself. However, its demise may not be a pretty sight. ..."
"... Conflict in the ME has traditionally almost always been about oil [and of course Israel]. This situation is different. It is only partially about oil and Israel, but OVERWHHEMINGLY it is about the BRI. ..."
"... The salient factor as I see it is the Oil for Technology initiative that Iraq signed with China shortly before it slid into this current mess. ..."
"... This was a mechanism whereby China would buy Iraq oil and these funds would be used directly to fund infrastructure and self-sufficiency initiatives and technologies that would help to drag Iraq out of the complete disaster that the US war had created in this country. A key part of this would be that China would also make extra loans available at the same time to speed up this development. ..."
"... "Iraq's Finance Ministry that the country had started exporting 100,000 barrels per day (bpd) of crude oil to China in October as part of the 20-year oil-for-infrastructure deal agreed between the two countries." ..."
"... "For Iraq and Iran, China's plans are particularly far-reaching, OilPrice.com has been told by a senior oil industry figure who works closely with Iran's Petroleum Ministry and Iraq's Oil Ministry. China will begin with the oil and gas sector and work outwards from that central point. In addition to being granted huge reductions on buying Iranian oil and gas, China is to be given the opportunity to build factories in both Iran and Iraq – and build-out infrastructure, such as railways – overseen by its own management staff from Chinese companies. These are to have the same operational structure and assembly lines as those in China, so that they fit seamlessly into various Chinese companies' assembly lines' process for whatever product a particular company is manufacturing, whilst also being able to use the still-cheap labour available in both Iraq and Iraq." ..."
"... Hudson is so good. He's massively superior to most so called military analysts and alternative bloggers on the net. He can clearly see the over arching picture and how the military is used to protect and project it. The idea that the US is going to leave the middle east until they are forced to is so blind as to be ridiculous. ..."
"... I'd never thought of that "stationary aircraft carrier" comparison between Israel and the British, very apt. ..."
"... Trump et al assassinated someone who was on a diplomatic mission. This action was so far removed from acceptable behavior that it must have been considered to be "by any means and at all costs". ..."
"... This article, published by Strategic Culture, features a translation of Mahdi's speech to the Iraqi parliament in which he states that Trump threatened him with assassination and the US admitted to killing hundreds of demonstrators using Navy SEAL snipers. ..."
"... This description provided by Mr Hudson is no Moore than the financial basis behind the Cebrowski doctrine instituted on 9/11. https://www.voltairenet.org/article ..."
"... "The leading country breaking up US hegemony obviously is the United States itself. That is Trump's major contribution The United States is now turning on the screws demanding that other countries sacrifice their growth in order to finance the U.S. unipolar empire." ..."
"... The US govt. have long since paid off most every European politician. Thusly, Europe, as separate nations that should be remain still under the yolk of the US Financial/Political/Military power. ..."
"... In any event, it is the same today. Energy underlies, not only the military but, all of world civilization. Oil and gas are overwhelmingly the source of energy for the modern world. Without it, civilization collapses. Thus, he who controls oil (and gas) controls the world. ..."
"... the link between the US $$$ and Saudi Oil, is the absolute means of the American Dollar to reign complete. This payment system FEEDS both the US Military, but WALL STREET, hedge funds, the US/EU oligarchs – to name just a few entities. ..."
Jan 09, 2020 | thesaker.is

[this interview was made for the Unz Review ]

Introduction: After posting Michael Hudson's article " America Escalates its "Democratic" Oil War in the Near East " on the blog, I decided to ask Michael to reply to a few follow-up questions. Michael very kindly agreed. Please see our exchange below.

The Saker

-- -- -

The Saker: Trump has been accused of not thinking forward, of not having a long-term strategy regarding the consequences of assassinating General Suleimani. Does the United States in fact have a strategy in the Near East, or is it only ad hoc?

Michael Hudson: Of course American strategists will deny that the recent actions do not reflect a deliberate strategy, because their long-term strategy is so aggressive and exploitative that it would even strike the American public as being immoral and offensive if they came right out and said it.

President Trump is just the taxicab driver, taking the passengers he has accepted – Pompeo, Bolton and the Iran-derangement syndrome neocons – wherever they tell him they want to be driven. They want to pull a heist, and he's being used as the getaway driver (fully accepting his role). Their plan is to hold onto the main source of their international revenue: Saudi Arabia and the surrounding Near Eastern oil-export surpluses and money. They see the US losing its ability to exploit Russia and China, and look to keep Europe under its control by monopolizing key sectors so that it has the power to use sanctions to squeeze countries that resist turning over control of their economies and natural rentier monopolies to US buyers. In short, US strategists would like to do to Europe and the Near East just what they did to Russia under Yeltsin: turn over public infrastructure, natural resources and the banking system to U.S. owners, relying on US dollar credit to fund their domestic government spending and private investment.

This is basically a resource grab. Suleimani was in the same position as Chile's Allende, Libya's Qaddafi, Iraq's Saddam. The motto is that of Stalin: "No person, no problem."

The Saker: Your answer raises a question about Israel: In your recent article you only mention Israel twice, and these are only passing comments. Furthermore, you also clearly say the US Oil lobby as much more crucial than the Israel Lobby, so here is my follow-up question to you: On what basis have you come to this conclusion and how powerful do you believe the Israel Lobby to be compared to, say, the Oil lobby or the US Military-Industrial Complex? To what degree do their interests coincide and to what degree to they differ?

Michael Hudson: I wrote my article to explain the most basic concerns of U.S. international diplomacy: the balance of payments (dollarizing the global economy, basing foreign central bank savings on loans to the U.S. Treasury to finance the military spending mainly responsible for the international and domestic budget deficit), oil (and the enormous revenue produced by the international oil trade), and recruitment of foreign fighters (given the impossibility of drafting domestic U.S. soldiers in sufficient numbers). From the time these concerns became critical to today, Israel was viewed as a U.S. military base and supporter, but the U.S. policy was formulated independently of Israel.

I remember one day in 1973 or '74 I was traveling with my Hudson Institute colleague Uzi Arad (later a head of Mossad and advisor to Netanyahu) to Asia, stopping off in San Francisco. At a quasi-party, a U.S. general came up to Uzi and clapped him on the shoulder and said, "You're our landed aircraft carrier in the Near East," and expressed his friendship.

Uzi was rather embarrassed. But that's how the U.S. military thought of Israel back then. By that time the three planks of U.S. foreign policy strategy that I outlined were already firmly in place.

Of course Netanyahu has applauded U.S. moves to break up Syria, and Trump's assassination choice. But the move is a U.S. move, and it's the U.S. that is acting on behalf of the dollar standard, oil power and mobilizing Saudi Arabia's Wahabi army.

Israel fits into the U.S.-structured global diplomacy much like Turkey does. They and other countries act opportunistically within the context set by U.S. diplomacy to pursue their own policies. Obviously Israel wants to secure the Golan Heights; hence its opposition to Syria, and also its fight with Lebanon; hence, its opposition to Iran as the backer of Assad and Hezbollah. This dovetails with US policy.

But when it comes to the global and U.S. domestic response, it's the United States that is the determining active force. And its concern rests above all with protecting its cash cow of Saudi Arabia, as well as working with the Saudi jihadis to destabilize governments whose foreign policy is independent of U.S. direction – from Syria to Russia (Wahabis in Chechnya) to China (Wahabis in the western Uighur region). The Saudis provide the underpinning for U.S. dollarization (by recycling their oil revenues into U.S. financial investments and arms purchases), and also by providing and organizing the ISIS terrorists and coordinating their destruction with U.S. objectives. Both the Oil lobby and the Military-Industrial Complex obtain huge economic benefits from the Saudis.

Therefore, to focus one-sidedly on Israel is a distraction away from what the US-centered international order really is all about.

The Saker: In your recent article you wrote: " The assassination was intended to escalate America's presence in Iraq to keep control the region's oil reserves ." Others believe that the goal was precisely the opposite, to get a pretext to remove the US forces from both Iraq and Syria. What are your grounds to believe that your hypothesis is the most likely one?

Michael Hudson: Why would killing Suleimani help remove the U.S. presence? He was the leader of the fight against ISIS, especially in Syria. US policy was to continue using ISIS to permanently destabilize Syria and Iraq so as to prevent a Shi'ite crescent reaching from Iran to Lebanon – which incidentally would serve as part of China's Belt and Road initiative. So it killed Suleimani to prevent the peace negotiation. He was killed because he had been invited by Iraq's government to help mediate a rapprochement between Iran and Saudi Arabia. That was what the United States feared most of all, because it effectively would prevent its control of the region and Trump's drive to seize Iraqi and Syrian oil.

So using the usual Orwellian doublethink, Suleimani was accused of being a terrorist, and assassinated under the U.S. 2002 military Authorization Bill giving the President to move without Congressional approval against Al Qaeda. Trump used it to protect Al Qaeda's terrorist ISIS offshoots.

Given my three planks of U.S. diplomacy described above, the United States must remain in the Near East to hold onto Saudi Arabia and try to make Iraq and Syria client states equally subservient to U.S. balance-of-payments and oil policy.

Certainly the Saudis must realize that as the buttress of U.S. aggression and terrorism in the Near East, their country (and oil reserves) are the most obvious target to speed the parting guest. I suspect that this is why they are seeking a rapprochement with Iran. And I think it is destined to come about, at least to provide breathing room and remove the threat. The Iranian missiles to Iraq were a demonstration of how easy it would be to aim them at Saudi oil fields. What then would be Aramco's stock market valuation?

The Saker: In your article you wrote: " The major deficit in the U.S. balance of payments has long been military spending abroad. The entire payments deficit, beginning with the Korean War in 1950-51 and extending through the Vietnam War of the 1960s, was responsible for forcing the dollar off gold in 1971. The problem facing America's military strategists was how to continue supporting the 800 U.S. military bases around the world and allied troop support without losing America's financial leverage. " I want to ask a basic, really primitive question in this regard: how cares about the balance of payments as long as 1) the US continues to print money 2) most of the world will still want dollars. Does that not give the US an essentially "infinite" budget? What is the flaw in this logic?

Michael Hudson: The U.S. Treasury can create dollars to spend at home, and the Fed can increase the banking system's ability to create dollar credit and pay debts denominated in US dollars. But they cannot create foreign currency to pay other countries, unless they willingly accept dollars ad infinitum – and that entails bearing the costs of financing the U.S. balance-of-payments deficit, getting only IOUs in exchange for real resources that they sell to U.S. buyers.

This is the situation that arose half a century ago. The United States could print dollars in 1971, but it could not print gold.

In the 1920s, Germany's Reichsbank could print deutsche marks – trillions of them. When it came to pay Germany's foreign reparations debt, all it could do was to throw these D-marks onto the foreign exchange market. That crashed the currency's exchange rate, forcing up the price of imports proportionally and causing the German hyperinflation.

The question is, how many surplus dollars do foreign governments want to hold. Supporting the dollar standard ends up supporting U.S. foreign diplomacy and military policy. For the first time since World War II, the most rapidly growing parts of the world are seeking to de-dollarize their economies by reducing reliance on U.S. exports, U.S. investment, and U.S. bank loans. This move is creating an alternative to the dollar, likely to replace it with groups of other currencies and assets in national financial reserves.

The Saker: In the same article you also write: " So maintaining the dollar as the world's reserve currency became a mainstay of U.S. military spending. " We often hear people say that the dollar is about to tank and that as soon as that happens, then the US economy (and, according to some, the EU economy too) will collapse. In the intelligence community there is something called tracking the "indicators and warnings". My question to you is: what are the economic "indicators and warnings" of a possible (probable?) collapse of the US dollar followed by a collapse of the financial markets most tied to the Dollar? What shall people like myself (I am an economic ignoramus) keep an eye on and look for?

Michael Hudson: What is most likely is a slow decline, largely from debt deflation and cutbacks in social spending, in the Eurozone and US economies. Of course, the decline will force the more highly debt-leveraged companies to miss their bond payments and drive them into insolvency. That is the fate of Thatcherized economies. But it will be long and painfully drawn out, largely because there is little left-wing socialist alternative to neoliberalism at present.

Trump's protectionist policies and sanctions are forcing other countries to become self-reliant and independent of US suppliers, from farm crops to airplanes and military arms, against the US threat of a cutoff or sanctions against repairs, spare parts and servicing. Sanctioning Russian agriculture has helped it become a major crop exporter, and to become much more independent in vegetables, dairy and cheese products. The US has little to offer industrially, especially given the fact that its IT communications are stuffed with US spyware.

Europe therefore is facing increasing pressure from its business sector to choose the non-US economic alliance that is growing more rapidly and offers a more profitable investment market and more secure trade supplier. Countries will turn as much as possible (diplomatically as well as financially and economically) to non-US suppliers because the United States is not reliable, and because it is being shrunk by the neoliberal policies supported by Trump and the Democrats alike. A byproduct probably will be a continued move toward gold as an alternative do the dollar in settling balance-of-payments deficits.

The Saker: Finally, my last question: which country out there do you see as the most capable foe of the current US-imposed international political and economic world order? whom do you believe that US Deep State and the Neocons fear most? China? Russia? Iran? some other country? How would you compare them and on the basis of what criteria?

Michael Hudson: The leading country breaking up US hegemony obviously is the United States itself. That is Trump's major contribution. He is uniting the world in a move toward multi-centrism much more than any ostensibly anti-American could have done. And he is doing it all in the name of American patriotism and nationalism – the ultimate Orwellian rhetorical wrapping!

Trump has driven Russia and China together with the other members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), including Iran as observer. His demand that NATO join in US oil grabs and its supportive terrorism in the Near East and military confrontation with Russia in Ukraine and elsewhere probably will lead to European "Ami go home" demonstrations against NATO and America's threat of World War III.

No single country can counter the U.S. unipolar world order. It takes a critical mass of countries. This already is taking place among the countries that you list above. They are simply acting in their own common interest, using their own mutual currencies for trade and investment. The effect is an alternative multilateral currency and trading area.

The United States is now turning on the screws demanding that other countries sacrifice their growth in order to finance the U.S. unipolar empire. In effect, foreign countries are beginning to respond to the United States what the ten tribes of Israel said when they withdrew from the southern kingdom of Judah, whose king Rehoboam refused to lighten his demands (1 Kings 12). They echoed the cry of Sheba son of Bikri a generation earlier: "Look after your own house, O David!" The message is: What do other countries have to gain by remaining in the US unipolar neoliberalized world, as compared to using their own wealth to build up their own economies? It's an age-old problem.

The dollar will still play a role in US trade and investment, but it will be as just another currency, held at arms length until it finally gives up its domineering attempt to strip other countries' wealth for itself. However, its demise may not be a pretty sight.

The Saker: I thank you very much for your time and answers! ­

Col...'the farmer from NZ' on January 09, 2020 , · at 5:19 pm EST/EDT

What a truly superb interview!

Another one that absolutely stands for me out is the below link to a recent interview of Hussein Askary.

As I wrote a few days ago IMO this too is a wonderful insight into the utterly complicated dynamics of the tinderbox that the situation in Iran and Iraq has become.

Conflict in the ME has traditionally almost always been about oil [and of course Israel]. This situation is different. It is only partially about oil and Israel, but OVERWHHEMINGLY it is about the BRI.

The salient factor as I see it is the Oil for Technology initiative that Iraq signed with China shortly before it slid into this current mess.

This was a mechanism whereby China would buy Iraq oil and these funds would be used directly to fund infrastructure and self-sufficiency initiatives and technologies that would help to drag Iraq out of the complete disaster that the US war had created in this country. A key part of this would be that China would also make extra loans available at the same time to speed up this development.

In essence, this would enable the direct and efficient linking of Iraq into the BRI project. Going forward the economic gains and the political stability that could come out of this would be a completely new paradigm in the recovery of Iraq both economically and politically. Iraq is essential for a major part of the dynamics of the BRI because of its strategic location and the fact that it could form a major hub in the overall network.

It absolutely goes without saying that the AAA would do everything the could to wreck this plan. This is their playbook and is exactly what they have done. The moronic and extraordinarily impulsive Trump subsequently was easily duped into being a willing and idiotic accomplice in this plan.

The positive in all of this is that this whole scheme will backfire spectacularly for the perpetrators and will more than likely now speed up the whole process in getting Iraq back on track and working towards stability and prosperity.

Please don't anyone try to claim that Trump is part of any grand plan nothing could be further from the truth he is nothing more than a bludgeoning imbecile foundering around, lashing out impulsively indiscriminately. He is completely oblivious and ignorant as to the real picture.

I urge everyone involved in this Saker site to put aside an hour and to listen very carefully to Askary's insights. This is extremely important and could bring more clarity to understanding the situation than just about everything else you have read put together. There is hope, and Askary highlights the huge stakes that both Russia and China have in the region.

This is a no brainer. This is the time for both Russia and China to act and to decisively. They must cooperate in assisting both Iraq and Iran to extract themselves from the current quagmire the one that the vicious Hegemon so cruelly and thoughtlessly tossed them into.

Cheers from the south seas
Col

And the link to the Askary interview: . https://youtu.be/UD1hWq6KD44

Col...'the farmer from NZ' on January 09, 2020 , · at 8:22 pm EST/EDT
Also interesting is what Simon Watkins reports in his recent article entitled "Is Iraq About To Become A Chinese Client State?"

To quote from the article:

"Iraq's Finance Ministry that the country had started exporting 100,000 barrels per day (bpd) of crude oil to China in October as part of the 20-year oil-for-infrastructure deal agreed between the two countries."

and

"For Iraq and Iran, China's plans are particularly far-reaching, OilPrice.com has been told by a senior oil industry figure who works closely with Iran's Petroleum Ministry and Iraq's Oil Ministry. China will begin with the oil and gas sector and work outwards from that central point. In addition to being granted huge reductions on buying Iranian oil and gas, China is to be given the opportunity to build factories in both Iran and Iraq – and build-out infrastructure, such as railways – overseen by its own management staff from Chinese companies. These are to have the same operational structure and assembly lines as those in China, so that they fit seamlessly into various Chinese companies' assembly lines' process for whatever product a particular company is manufacturing, whilst also being able to use the still-cheap labour available in both Iraq and Iraq."

and

"The second key announcement in this vein made last week from Iraq was that the Oil Ministry has completed the pre-qualifying process for companies interested in participating in the Iraqi-Jordanian oil pipeline project. The U$5 billion pipeline is aimed at carrying oil produced from the Rumaila oilfield in Iraq's Basra Governorate to the Jordanian port of Aqaba, with the first phase of the project comprising the installation of a 700-kilometre-long pipeline with a capacity of 2.25 million bpd within the Iraqi territories (Rumaila-Haditha). The second phase includes installing a 900-kilometre pipeline in Jordan between Haditha and Aqaba with a capacity of 1 million bpd. Iraq's Oil Minister – for the time being, at least – Thamir Ghadhban added that the Ministry has formed a team to prepare legal contracts, address financial issues and oversee technical standards for implementing the project, and that May will be the final month in which offers for the project from the qualified companies will be accepted and that the winners will be announced before the end of this year. Around 150,000 barrels of the oil from Iraq would be used for Jordan's domestic needs, whilst the remainder would be exported through Aqaba to various destinations, generating about US$3 billion a year in revenues to Jordan, with the rest going to Iraq. Given that the contractors will be expected to front-load all of the financing for the projects associated with this pipeline, Baghdad expects that such tender offers will be dominated by Chinese and Russian companies, according to the Iran and Iraq source."

Cheers
Col

And the link https://oilprice.com/Geopolitics/Middle-East/Is-Iraq-About-To-Become-A-Chinese-Client-State.html#

Anonymouse on January 09, 2020 , · at 5:20 pm EST/EDT
Hudson is so good. He's massively superior to most so called military analysts and alternative bloggers on the net. He can clearly see the over arching picture and how the military is used to protect and project it. The idea that the US is going to leave the middle east until they are forced to is so blind as to be ridiculous.

They will not sacrifice the (free) oil until booted out by a coalition of Arab countries threatening to over run them and that is why the dollar hegemonys death will be slow, long and drawn out and they will do anything, any dirty trick in the book, to prevent Arab/Persian unity. Unlike many peoples obsession with Israel and how important they feel themselves to be I think Hudson is correct again. They are the middle eastern version of the British – a stationary aircraft carrier who will allow themselves to be used and abused whilst living under the illusion they are major players. They aren't. They're bit part players in decline, subservient to the great dollar and oil pyramid scheme that keeps America afloat. If you want to beat America you have to understand the big scheme, that and the utter insanity that backs it up. It is that insanity of the leites, the inability to allow themselves to be 'beaten' that will keep nuclear exchange as a real possibility over the next 10 to 15 years. Unification is the only thing that can stop it and trying to unite so many disparate countries (as the Russians are trying to do despite multiple provocations) is where the future lies and why it will take so long. It is truly breath taking in such a horrific way, as Hudson mentions, that to allow the world to see its 'masters of the universe' pogram to be revealed:

"Of course American strategists will deny that the recent actions do not reflect a deliberate strategy, because their long-term strategy is so aggressive and exploitative that it would even strike the American public as being immoral and offensive if they came right out and said it."

Would be to allow it to be undermined at home and abroad. God help us all.

Little Black Duck on January 09, 2020 , · at 7:01 pm EST/EDT
They're bit part players in decline, subservient to the great dollar and oil pyramid scheme that keeps America afloat.

So who owns the dollar? And who owns the oil companies?

Osori on January 09, 2020 , · at 8:06 pm EST/EDT
I'd never thought of that "stationary aircraft carrier" comparison between Israel and the British, very apt.
Zachary Smith on January 09, 2020 , · at 9:53 pm EST/EDT
Clever would be a better word. Looking at my world globe, I see Italy, Greece, and Turkey on that end of the Mediterranean. Turkey has been in NATO since 1952. Crete and Cyprus are also right there. Doesn't Hudson own a globe or regional map?

That a US Admiral would be gushing about the Apartheid state 7 years after the attempted destruction of the USS Liberty is painful to consider. I'd like to disbelieve the story, but it's quite likely there were a number of high-ranking ***holes in a Naval Uniform.

44360 on January 09, 2020 , · at 5:34 pm EST/EDT
The world situation reminds us of the timeless fable by Aesop of The North Wind and the Sun.

Trump et al assassinated someone who was on a diplomatic mission. This action was so far removed from acceptable behavior that it must have been considered to be "by any means and at all costs".

Perhaps the most potent weapon Iran or anyone else has at this critical juncture, is not missiles, but diplomacy.

Ahmed on January 09, 2020 , · at 5:37 pm EST/EDT
"Therefore, to focus one-sidedly on Israel is a distraction away from what the US-centered international order really is all about."

Thank you for saying this sir. In the US and around the world many people become obsessively fixated in seeing a "jew" or zionist behind every bush. Now the Zionists are certinly an evil, blood thirsty bunch, and certainly deserve the scorn of the world, but i feel its a cop out sometimes. A person from the US has a hard time stomaching the actions of their country, so they just hoist all the unpleasentries on to the zionists. They put it all on zionisim, and completly fail to mention imperialism. I always switced back and forth on the topic my self. But i cant see how a beachead like the zionist state, a stationary carrier, can be bigger than the empire itself. Just look at the major leaders in the resistance groups, the US was always seen as the ultimate obstruction, while israel was seen as a regional obstruction. Like sayyed hassan nasrallah said in his recent speech about the martyrs, that if the US is kicked out, the Israelis might just run away with out even fighting. I hate it when people say "we are in the middle east for israel" when it can easily be said that "israel is still in the mid east because of the US." If the US seized to exist today, israel would fall rather quickly. If israel fell today the US would still continue being an imperalist, bloodthirsty entity.

Azorka1861 on January 09, 2020 , · at 5:57 pm EST/EDT
The Deeper Story behind the Assassination of Soleimani

This article, published by Strategic Culture, features a translation of Mahdi's speech to the Iraqi parliament in which he states that Trump threatened him with assassination and the US admitted to killing hundreds of demonstrators using Navy SEAL snipers.

https://www.veteranstoday.com/2020/01/08/vital-the-deeper-story-behind-the-assassination-of-soleimani/

..

Nils on January 09, 2020 , · at 6:05 pm EST/EDT
This description provided by Mr Hudson is no Moore than the financial basis behind the Cebrowski doctrine instituted on 9/11. https://www.voltairenet.org/article

I wish the Saker had asked Mr Hudson about some crucial recent events to get his opinion with regards to US foreign policy. Specifically, how does the emergence of cryptocurrency relate to dollar finance and the US grand strategy? A helpful tool for the hegemon or the emergence of a new currency that prevents unlimited currency printing? Finally, what is global warming and the associated carbon credit system? The next planned model of continuing global domination and balance of payments? Or true organic attempt at fair energy production and management?

Much thanks for this interview, Saker

Col...'the farmer from NZ' on January 09, 2020 , · at 6:26 pm EST/EDT
With all due respect, these are huge questions in themselves and perhaps could to be addressed in separate interviews. IMO it doesn't always work that well to try to cover too much ground in just one giant leap.

Regards
Col

Mike from Jersey on January 09, 2020 , · at 7:26 pm EST/EDT
I have never understood the Cebrowski doctrine. How does the destruction of Middle Eastern state structures allow the US to control Middle East Oil? The level of chaos generated by such an act would seem to prevent anyone from controlled the oil.
Outlaw Historian on January 09, 2020 , · at 7:48 pm EST/EDT
Dr. Hudson often appears on RT's "Keiser Report" where he covers many contemporary topics with its host Max Keiser. Many of the shows transcripts are available at Hudson's website . Indeed, after the two Saker items, you'll find three programs on the first page. Using the search function at his site, you'll find the two articles he's written that deal with bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, although I think he's been more specific in the TV interviews.

As for this Q&A, its an A+. Hudson's 100% correct to playdown the Zionist influence given the longstanding nature of the Outlaw US Empire's methods that began well before the rise of the Zionist Lobby, which in reality is a recycling of aid dollars back to Congress in the form of bribes.

RR on January 09, 2020 , · at 7:59 pm EST/EDT
Nils: Good Article. The spirit of Nihilism.
Quote from Neocon Michael Ladeen.

"Creative destruction is our middle name, both within our own society and abroad. We tear down the old order every day, from business to science, literature, art, architecture, and cinema to politics and the law. Our enemies have always hated this whirlwind of energy and creativity, which menaces their traditions (whatever they may be) and shames them for their inability to keep pace. Seeing America undo traditional societies, they fear us, for they do not wish to be undone. They cannot feel secure so long as we are there, for our very existence -- our existence, not our politics -- threatens their legitimacy. They must attack us in order to survive, just as we must destroy them to advance our historic mission."

Frank on January 09, 2020 , · at 10:27 pm EST/EDT
@NILS As far as crypto currency goes it is a brilliant idea in concept. But since during the Bush years we have been shown multiple times, who actually owns [and therefore controls] the internet. Many times now we have also been informed that through the monitoring capability's of our defense agency's, they are recording every key stroke. IMO, with the flip of a switch, we can shut down the internet. At the very least, that would stop us from being able to trade in crypto, but they have e-files on each of us. They know our passwords, or can easily access them. That does not give me confidence in e=currency during a teotwawki situation.
Anonymous on January 09, 2020 , · at 6:34 pm EST/EDT
A truly superb interview, thanks Michael Hudson.
David on January 09, 2020 , · at 6:39 pm EST/EDT
One thing that troubles me about the petrodollar thesis is that ANNUAL trade in oil is about 2 trillion DAILY trade in $US is 4 trillion. I can well believe the US thinks oil is the bedrock if dollar hegemony but is it? I see no alternative to US dollar hegemony.
Mike from Jersey on January 09, 2020 , · at 7:17 pm EST/EDT
Excellent article.

The lines that really got my attention were these:

"The leading country breaking up US hegemony obviously is the United States itself. That is Trump's major contribution The United States is now turning on the screws demanding that other countries sacrifice their growth in order to finance the U.S. unipolar empire."

That is so completely true. I have wondered why – to date – there had not been more movement by Europe away from the United States. But while reading the article the following occurred to me. Maybe Europe is awaiting the next U.S. election. Maybe they hope that a new president (someone like Biden) might allow Europe to keep more of the "spoils."

If that is true, then a re-election of Trump will probably send Europe fleeing for the exits. The Europeans will be cutting deals with Russia and China like the store is on fire.

Rubicon on January 09, 2020 , · at 10:22 pm EST/EDT
The critical player in forming the EU WAS/IS the US financial Elites. Yes, they had many ultra powerful Europeans, especially Germany, but it was the US who initiated the EU.

Purpose? For the US Financial Powerhouses & US politicians to "take Europe captive." Notice the similarities: the EU has its Central Bank who communicates with the private Banksters of the FED. Much austerity has ensued, especially in Southern nations: Greece, Italy, etc. Purpose: to smash unions, worker's pay, eliminate unions, and basically allowing US/EU Financial capital to buy out Italy, most of Greece, and a goodly section of Spain and Portugal.

The US govt. have long since paid off most every European politician. Thusly, Europe, as separate nations that should be remain still under the yolk of the US Financial/Political/Military power.

Craig Mouldey on January 09, 2020 , · at 8:19 pm EST/EDT
I have a hard time wrapping my head around this but it sounds like he is saying that the U.S. has a payment deficit problem which is solved by stealing the world's oil supplies. To do this they must have a powerful, expensive military. But it is primarily this military which is the main cause of the balance deficit. So it is an eternally fuelled problem and solution. If I understand this, what it actually means is that we all live on a plantation as slaves and everything that is happening is for the benefit of the few wealthy billionaires. And they intend to turn the entire world into their plantation of slaves. They may even let you live for a while longer.
Mike from Jersey on January 09, 2020 , · at 9:25 pm EST/EDT
Actually, oil underlies everything.

I didn't know this until I read a history of World War I.

As you know, World War One was irresolvable, murderous, bloody trench warfare. People would charge out of the trenches trying to overrun enemy positions only to be cutdown by the super weapon of the day – the machine gun. It was an unending bloody stalemate until the development of the tank. Tanks were immune to machine gun fire coming from the trenches and could overrun enemy positions. In the aftermath of that war, it became apparently that mechanization had become crucial to military supremacy. In turn, fuel was crucial to mechanization. Accordingly, in the Sykes Picot agreement France and Britain divided a large amount of Middle Eastern oil between themselves in order to assure military dominance. (The United States had plenty of their own oil at that time.)

In any event, it is the same today. Energy underlies, not only the military but, all of world civilization. Oil and gas are overwhelmingly the source of energy for the modern world. Without it, civilization collapses. Thus, he who controls oil (and gas) controls the world.

That is one third of the story. The second third is this.

Up till 1971, the United States dollar was the most trusted currency in the world. The dollar was backed by gold and lots and lots of it. Dollars were in fact redeemable in gold. However, due to Vietnam War, the United States started running huge balance of payments deficits. Other countries – most notably France under De Gaulle – started cashing in dollars in exchange for that gold. Gold started flooding out of the United States. At that point Nixon took the United States off of the gold standard. Basically stating that the dollar was no longer backed by gold and dollars could not be redeemed for gold. That caused an international payments problem. People would no longer accept dollars as payment since the dollar was not backed up by anything. The American economy was in big trouble since they were running deficits and people would no longer take dollars on faith.

To fix the problem, Henry Kissinger convinced the Saudis to agree to only accept dollars in payment for oil – no matter who was the buyer. That meant that nations throughout the world now needed dollars in order to pay for their energy needs. Due to this, the dollars was once again the most important currency in the world since – as noted above – energy underlies everything in modern industrial cultures. Additionally, since dollars were now needed throughout the world, it became common to make all trades for any product in highly valued dollars. Everyone needed dollars for every thing, oil or not.

At that point, the United States could go on printing dollars and spending them since a growing world economy needed more and more dollars to buy oil as well as to trade everything else.

That leads to the third part of the story. In order to convince the Saudis to accept only dollars in payments for oil (and to have the Saudis strong arm other oil producers to do the same) Kissinger promised to protect the brutal Saudi regime's hold on power against a restive citizenry and also to protect the Saudi's against other nations. Additionally, Kissinger made an implicit threat that if the Saudi's did not agree, the US would come in and just take their oil. The Saudis agreed.

Thus, the three keys to dominance in the modern world are thus: oil, dollars and the military.

Thus, Hudson ties in the three threads in his interview above. Oil, Dollars, Military. That is what holds the empire together.

Rubicon on January 09, 2020 , · at 10:26 pm EST/EDT
Thank you for thinking through this. Yes, the link between the US $$$ and Saudi Oil, is the absolute means of the American Dollar to reign complete. This payment system FEEDS both the US Military, but WALL STREET, hedge funds, the US/EU oligarchs – to name just a few entities.
Stanislaw Janowicz on January 09, 2020 , · at 8:58 pm EST/EDT
I should make one note only to this. That "no man, no problem" was Stalin's motto is a myth. He never said that. It was invented by a writer Alexei Rybnikov and inserted in his book "The Children of Arbat".
Greg Horrall on January 09, 2020 , · at 9:42 pm EST/EDT
Wow! Absolutely beautiful summation of the ultimate causes that got us where we are and, if left intact, will get us to where we're going!

So, the dreamer says: If only we could throw-off our us-vs-them BS political-economic ideology & religious doctrine-faith issues, put them into live-and-let-live mode, and see that we are all just humans fighting over this oil resource to which our modern economy (way of life) is addicted, then we might be able to hammer out some new rules for interacting, for running an earth-resource sustainable and fair global economy We do at least have the technology to leave behind our oil addiction, but the political-economic will still is lacking. How much more of the current insanity must we have before we get that will? Will we get it before it's too late?

Only if we, a sufficient majority from the lowest economic classes to the top elites and throughout all nations, are able to psychologically-spiritually internalize the two principles of Common Humanity and Spaceship Earth soon enough, will we stop our current slide off the cliff into modern economic collapse and avert all the pain and suffering that's already now with us and that will intensify.

The realist says we're not going to stop that slide and it's the only way we're going to learn, if we are indeed ever going to learn.

Ann Watson on January 09, 2020 , · at 10:42 pm EST/EDT
So now we know why Michael Hudson avoids the Israel involvment – Like Pepe.
Лишний Человек on January 09, 2020 , · at 11:02 pm EST/EDT
Thank you for this excellent interview. You ask the kind of questions that we would all like to ask. It's regrettable that Chalmers Johnson isn't still alive. I believe that you and he would have a lot in common.

Naxos has produced an incredible, unabridged cd audiobook of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. One of Gibbon's observations really resonates today: "Assassination is the last resource of cowards". Thanks again.

[Jan 10, 2020] Trump betrayed his voters and is not invulnerable: Shadowy Big Tech Group Raising $100 Million Warchest to Beat Trump

Jan 10, 2020 | www.breitbart.com

3:02

A shadowy Silicon Valley group that, largely unnoticed, bankrolled Democrat candidates up and down the country in the 2018 midterms, will spend up to $140 million to topple President Trump in 2020, according to Recode.

The group, called "Mind the Gap," is led by Stanford law school professor Barbara Field, former Obama staffer Graham Gottlieb, and former Hewlett Foundation president Paul Brest.

The group uses a data-driven approach to target funding to seats where donors' dollars will have the maximum impact, funded 20 Democrat candidates in 2018, ten of whom won.

Via Recode:

In 2018, the group, which is led by Stanford law school professor Barbara Fried , raised about $500,000 for 20 different Democratic congressional challengers , many of whom were underdogs to win their bids. Ten of them won. Mind the Gap became a hit in Silicon Valley in particular because it asked tech leaders to fund races where it had calculated each dollar would have the greatest marginal impact on Democrats taking back the House, which synced with the industry's data-driven thinking.

This time around, the group is asking its donors to fund three separate voter-registration programs: the Voter Participation Center (VPC) and the Center for Voter Information (CVI), which in September alone sent out 7.1 million voter registration applications by mail, according to Mind the Gap. The last endorsed group is Everybody Votes (EV), which is training organizers to sign up voters in local communities and has used some of the $35 million that Mind the Gap has already raised to register Democratic voters in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Minnesota. (Future money from the group is going to do the same in Florida, Arizona, and Nevada.)

In this cycle, the group aims to raise over $100 million to fund get-out-the-vote efforts and other political activities:

Mind the Gap told prospective donors last fall that it had already raised at least $35 million in political contributions for voter registration efforts, which is part of a fundraising goal that could stretch to $100 million, according to a memo obtained by Recode.

Mind the Gap is also seeking another estimated $30 million for get-out-the-vote work along with another estimated $10 million for "orphan races" -- which means primarily funding candidates for state legislatures that the group sees as wrongly under-funded.

Read the full article at Recode .

Are you an insider at Facebook, YouTube, Google, Reddit or any other tech company who wants to confidentially reveal wrongdoing or political bias at your company? Reach out to Allum Bokhari at his secure email address [email protected] .

Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News.

[Jan 10, 2020] The level of disinformation produced by fake news outliets controlled by intelligence agencies is just staggering. You cna't beleve a single work in politically changed fortin covergarate

They really are able to turn white into black and black into white.
Notable quotes:
"... 1) Occurs as Iran is on brink of war with USA?; 2) Indications of USA using info war tactics; 3) airliner owner by Kolomoisky? 4) No communication with tower? 5) USA and Israel history of duplicity and narrative management (example: MH-17). ..."
"... NATO has weaponized aircraft accident investigations. Lawfare in combination with state terrorism. ..."
"... The Ukies know how to obliterate a debris field. MH-17 -- They used artillery for months to keep OSCE and Dutch officials away, and despite the locals working to protect the deceased and the debris, body parts have been found years later. ..."
Jan 10, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org
Rob , Jan 10 2020 17:46 utc | 2
There were also clear sightings of a missile to bring down TWA 800. Except it didn't. As an Navy Pilot , flight instructor and 737 captain this does not at 1st or 2nd glance appear to be a missile strike. Catastropic engine failure is my bet. They made most of the turn back to the airport before losing integrity or loss of thrust.

Good analysis.

vk , Jan 10 2020 17:52 utc | 3

US Claim of Ukrainian Boeing 737 Plane Being Hit by Missile Aims to Manipulate Stock Markets
On Wednesday, Boeing's shares plummeted by 2.3 percent ($3.4bn) after the Ukrainian Boeing 737-800 aircraft crashed in Tehran due to encountering a technical glitch.

On Thursday, the stock rose by 3 percent after unnamed Pentagon officials claimed that the Ukrainian passenger plane was most likely brought down by anti-aircraft missiles, and US President Donald Trump implicitly supported the claim. This has been read by analysists as an attempt to manipulate the stock market; a measure that would both overshadow Trump's failure in Iraq and save Boeing from bankruptcy.

Russia says no grounds to blame Iran for Ukrainian plane crash: TASS

I didn't find the article on TASS. Maybe it was in its Russian version, or in its TV/Radio/Podcast version.

I don't discard a terrorist attack from the inside, or sabotage of the plane by the Ukrainian government. What I think is missile attack can be pretty much discarded: the evidence the Iranians already have through their air control data discard any possibility, by sheer logic alone, that that was the case.

Unless, of course, the Iranians are lying. But then there isn't any cui bono for Iran to lie about it (if it was a mistake they wanted to cover, they could blame a random independent militia so as to give plausible deniability) with the technical malfunction argument, and now Russia's foreign minister Ryabkov is on the boat with it - so I don't see the cui bono for Russia either.

ninel , Jan 10 2020 17:58 utc | 4
A little guide to Iran's modern history.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1988_executions_of_Iranian_political_prisoners
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chain_murders_of_Iran
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_student_protests,_July_1999
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zahra_Kazemi
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_foreign_nationals_detained_in_Iran
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_in_Iran
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_Iran

Perseus wore a magic cap so that the monsters he hunted down might not see him. Some of you choose to draw the magic cap down over your eyes and ears so as to make-believe that there are no monsters in Iran.

Per/Norway , Jan 10 2020 18:03 utc | 5
Posted by: ninel | Jan 10 2020 17:58 utc | 4

"Some of you choose to draw the magic cap down over your eyes and ears so as to make-believe that there are no monsters in Iran."

No, it is a lot easier than that.

Most of us dont get paid to post bs about the imperial enemies like you, and most off us still know how to use our brain.
That is it, nothing more nothing less.

PavewayIV , Jan 10 2020 18:10 utc | 6
Rob@2 - What do you make of the loss of ADS-B? Could a catastrophic engine failure take out both power buses? The ADS-B transceiver? I know a the turbine blades turn into little missile blades when they decide to leave the engine, but I have no idea of the way power is transferred when either bus or the standby goes down. I assume automatic? Are the transfer switches anywhere near the engines? Does the APU automatically fire up? I assume the ADS-B box is in the electronics bay, but where is the antenna?

karlof1 , Jan 10 2020 18:37 utc | 12
Thanks b! As I commented towards the end of the previous thread on this topic, the mundane evidence has already been shown. IMO, if a missile or bomb was employed, the Iranians would be yelling louder than anyone and the denials would be coming from BigLie Media instead of accusations. And as I answered psychohistorian, the massive coverage by BigLie media serves as narrative distraction from what's being obfuscated--casualties taken by Outlaw US Empire troops and the BDA presented by Iranian Military.

In that regard, The Saker's update sticks to the important facts of the now escalated ongoing war between Iran and the Evil Empire.


Jackrabbit , Jan 10 2020 19:11 utc | 17
Sorry, but there's good reasons to suspect foul play - as I and others have explained on the last thread.

1) Occurs as Iran is on brink of war with USA?; 2) Indications of USA using info war tactics; 3) airliner owner by Kolomoisky? 4) No communication with tower? 5) USA and Israel history of duplicity and narrative management (example: MH-17).

<> <> <> <>

Also: IMO it's dangerous for Iran to invite experts from a group of Western countries. What is likely to happen is that all the Western experts will be pressure to disagree with Iran's findings. CIA knows that people will believe the "group of experts!" over Iran.

!!

pleasebeleafme , Jan 10 2020 19:12 utc | 18
I don't know how anal Iran is about keeping track of ordinance but they must be pretty certain as to whether they downed the plane or not! Looks like they are being transparent and open. If they come out of this proving engine failure or something else then this could be a great pr coup.
There would be a lot of egg on many faces trying to explain how the intelligence is wrong yet again. I look forward to watching trudeau walk that back. Hopefully!
Gary , Jan 10 2020 19:17 utc | 19
One explanation is the Boeing was used as a human shield, a military plane hides behind a slow moving plane when detected. The ukrainians did it with the MH17 and the israeli with the russian plane and tried it with the attack on damascus. In both cases there was a lot of dis-info and blaming right away. But the iranian would have known what the target was, and mentioned it, so very unlikely.

Another question is the possibility a smaller missile only damaged the plane, also very unlikely.

Head of Iran Civil Aviation Organization Ali Abedzadeh exaggerates: "From a scientific viewpoint, it is impossible that a missile hit the Ukrainian plane."

"We can say that the airplane, considering the kind of the crash and the pilot's efforts to return it to Imam Khomeini airport, didn't explode in the air. So, the allegation that it was hit by missiles is totally ruled out," the official noted.

Walter , Jan 10 2020 19:25 utc | 20
Dude, when you're in Wyoming and see critter tracks down by the creek, you would assume it was Martians rather than antelope? Get real. The Ukie blew a crappy GE engine...they have this characteristic...

Stay real, use Occam's Razor + physical evidence. Otherwise it's distraction and TBS...

TJ , Jan 10 2020 19:26 utc | 21
@11 Ernesto Che

Craig Murray has been tracking a propagandist Wikipedia editor called "Philip Cross", here is the main article, but there are others on his site The Philip Cross Affair

karlitozulu , Jan 10 2020 19:38 utc | 24
ninel@ #4

here is a little reminder of Murica's recent history:

From 1945 until today - 20 to 30 million people killed by the USA

https://www.voltairenet.org/article204021.html

so, when you talk about monsters are you talking about yourself? ;)

Piotr , Jan 10 2020 19:39 utc | 25
ICAO is in contact with the States involved and will assist them if called upon. Its leadership is stressing the importance of avoiding speculation into the cause of the tragedy pending the outcomes of the investigation ...

ICAO may be a worthy organization (some staff changes seem to be warranted), but isn't it a bit too much?! If this is a sincere wish of democratically elected heads of democratic nations that they want to form a harmonious chorus and speculate, then no mundane power can stop them. BTW, what is wrong with Zelensky that he did not join? PTSD after the brutal telephonies calls? I would add it to the list of proven damages to the security of those several states that will be debated in the Senate. [end of snark, "several states" is the entity named in the so-called Constitution of The United States of America].

journey80 , Jan 10 2020 19:50 utc | 26
The flight originated in Teheran, bound for Kiev, but where was it before it arrived in Iran? It could have been sabotaged anywhere; then easy, right, to set off an onboard bomb by remote control from the ground? I'm sure Iran is crawling with Mosssad/MI6/CIA spooks.
ninel , Jan 10 2020 19:51 utc | 27
@karlitozulu

So you turn a blind eye to atrocities committed by other countries or peoples because the US government is responsible for the most? Did you even complete your high school education with that sort of reasoning? I never absolved the US or any other country. Simpletons like you seem to live in a black and white world in which one side must be chosen over the other. I feel unfortunate for b or anyone else who frequents this blog who does not view the world in such a profoundly problematic way.

I am far more informed about Iranian politics, history, culture and religion than most people here. Please don't allow your hate for the USA, well justified, to cloud your judgment.

Symen Danziger , Jan 10 2020 19:53 utc | 28
NATO has weaponized aircraft accident investigations. Lawfare in combination with state terrorism.

It's time for new rules and regulations. ICAO Annex 13 was drafted in different times. A rule based order is ancient history.

People should be able to chose their destination, route and carrier based on personal preferences like price and comfort, not on factors like the latest or next conflict zone, corruption in the countries along the route, military and political adventurism, etc.

The world has gone crazy.

Willy2 , Jan 10 2020 20:01 utc | 33
- As said before: I didn't believe for one second that that ukrainian plane was shot down. It would have given the US simply another stick to beat up the iranian government. I assume the iranians are smart enough to know that. They simply don't want to escalate the situation more. Although Iran has now the "moral high ground" it is still (very) vulnerable in a number of ways.

- I think the ukrainian tourists were small traders. I.e. buy stuff e.g. clothing and other "merchandise" in Teheran, bring it into the Ukraine and then sell that "merchandise" in Ukraine with a (big) profit.

William Gruff , Jan 10 2020 20:05 utc | 35
We have a distinguished professor in our midst! Quite unlike the lowly regular professors or inconsequential adjunct instructors that normally grace these pages. Let me kick back and get a tan from the brilliance pouring out of this one! Us high latitude types have to get our Vitamin D wherever we can.

As for my lack of criticism of Iran's government, that's the business of the Iranian people and none of my own. The Evil Empire attacking Iran? That, unfortunately, is everyone's business whether they want it to be or not.

Why is it that these wise guys from the West (Americans mostly) feel it is their duty to criticize everyone else's governments and cultures when the examples they are setting themselves are so appallingly bad? Maybe these distinguished critics of other peoples' ways of life feel that it is easier to fix those other peoples' societies than it is to fix their own. After all, they apparently feel that fixing other countries just requires some number of bombs, while fixing their own country... where do they even start? How do you fix perfection?

Jen , Jan 10 2020 20:06 utc | 36
I'd be curious to know whether the flight crew on board Flight PS752 had had sufficient rest. Three hours of resting do not seem like sufficient time but that depends on the journey the plane made to Tehran, the duration of that journey and where it started. Was the plane also checked for signs of wear and tear during the three-hour-plus pause?

Are UIA's owners (among them Ihor Kolomoisky) working their employees and hardware assets too hard and too cheaply as well?

Walter , Jan 10 2020 20:33 utc | 43
@ Rob | Jan 10 2020 17:46 utc | 2

Yes. I think so too. Looks like the engine ran at reduced thrust as they turned, and then failed entirely at below minimum control speed, with the expected result, asymmetrical stall, yaw, roll, bang.

There are pictures of severe erosion of what looks like compressor wheel from, presumably, ingestion of foreign material. Crap on the runway probably, and pencil-whipped maintenance, I should imagine.

foolisholdman , Jan 10 2020 20:36 utc | 44
bevin | Jan 10 2020 18:52 utc | 15

Reuters was bought by Rothschild some years ago.

PavewayIV , Jan 10 2020 21:01 utc | 49
journey80@26 - Kiev is Ukrainian Airlines main hub. The 737 arrived from Kiev earlier that morning and was returning there.

Jen@36 - No reason to do anything but a cursory safety check at Tehran. The airline's mechanics are in Kiev - anything beyond a normal pre-flight check involving maintenance would be done there, not Tehran. I doubt the crew was rested. That's not how UAI rolls on it's hub round-trips.

UAI is also bleeding money like crazy. They're nearly bankrupt and stole the money they collect from passengers for the Ukraine Civil Aviation Authority fees. Tens of millions USD. The new CEO promises to fix everything somehow. I guess by overworking crews, skipping maintenance and crappy service. Those are always money-savers for cheap, poorly-run airlines (prior to bankruptcy). Too bad. Supposedly it wasn't that bad of an airline when they first added passenger service to their existing cargo ops a decade ago, but has been going downhill ever since.

"Some real gems you got following your blog b."
So why are you here?

Peter AU1 , Jan 10 2020 21:39 utc | 56
Ocams razor... bookies odds... planes fall out o the sky from time to time for all sorts of reasons not related to malicious activity. What are the odds of this occurring in Iran shortly after an Iran strike on a US base.

The US has and does use terrorist tactics such as shooting down passenger jets. Trump threatened Iran with retribution against cultural sites and so forth (terrorist actions). Fifty two targets of fifty two ways of getting back at Iran.

What are the odds US would down a passenger jet in Iran within hours of Iran's strike against their base.

I have to go with US terrorist actions for that one. Similar to the protests in Iraq. The people had genuine grievances as do all good color revolutions but the were just too advantageous for the US for it not to be a made in the US color revolution style protest. We now know from the Iraq PM that is exactly what it was.

Walter , Jan 10 2020 22:05 utc | 58
The odds are unrelated unless there's agency. No agency has been credibly proposed. You know this is so, as the probability maths in se have been discussed previously @ MoA.

But of course, the US does murder all over the place, so if there is agency, then I tend to agree with the idea that "they" or their cohort in zionishland may be causative. What are the "odds" that the engine shown has severe blade erosion? Again 100% . Engine swallows scrap off the tarmac...a dependent relation, drop junk in engine, blades damaged, run at 100%, 100% "chance" of engine failure.

Repeating the essence of the matter of odds>

"Two events are independent, statistically independent, or stochastically independent if the occurrence of one does not affect the probability of occurrence of the other (equivalently, does not affect the odds). Similarly, two random variables are independent if the realization of one does not affect the probability distribution of the other."

ie without a dependent relationship the odds are whatever the odds are for engine failure and crash. And the other odds don't exist, because those events, the shooting, was not random or accidental. The odds of Iran firing rockets in reprisal was dependent on the US attacks, ie 100%

But if you're building engines at GE, or obsolete defective airplanes in Seattle, then of course the odds are that you devoutly wish it was a rocket up the tailpipe... Pay-day's come Friday, and all of that...

dave , Jan 10 2020 22:29 utc | 59
@PavewayIV

The APU will auto-shutdown for the following reasons:

Fire
Low oil pressure
High oil temperature / Fault
Overspeed

http://www.b737.org.uk/apu.htm

t , Jan 10 2020 22:38 utc | 62
Would like to see debunk the NYT video: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/09/video/iran-plane-missile.html

Have checked it myself (google earth etc) after being skeptical and the landmarks and sounds do indeed seem to match.

Bigben , Jan 10 2020 22:51 utc | 66
This link is worth reading. I can't play the video on my computer, but we will see if this theory gains traction during the next few days.

https://www.veteranstoday.com/2020/01/10/video-of-ukrainian-airliner-in-failed-landing-with-burning-engine-makes-trump-a-chump/

t , Jan 10 2020 23:02 utc | 69
@Poor,

I know NYT is a sham, and believe me I held my intellectual nose as I went into its site. It's not somewhere I frequent at all.

I did think about the point you made too, but there are 2 issues:

1) In the other 2 videos we see the plane as it's already burning, we don't see it in its "before" state. For me it's reasonable to imagine the hit on the impact caused some initial burning which was extinguished due to wind, and then started back up again a few moments after the NYT video ended and before the other 2 videos began.

2) If the NYT video is indeed doctored (and for me it would be a pretty convincing doctor), why wouldn't the creator simply keep the light going until the end of the vid?

Likklemore , Jan 10 2020 23:39 utc | 74
Iran to Announce Cause of Ukraine Jet Crash Tomorrow - Reports
Iran will announce the cause of the Ukrainian Boeing 737 crash after the accident investigation commission meeting on Saturday, the Fars News agency reported on Thursday, citing a source familiar with the matter.

"Tomorrow, after the meeting of the civil aviation accident investigation commission, the cause of the crash of the Ukrainian passenger plane will be announced", the source said.

Domestic and foreign parties, whose citizens died in the crash, will take part in the Saturday meeting, the outlet added. They will announce the reason for the accident after reviewing the preliminary report.

Ukraine says Iran cooperating with Boeing crash probe, calls to reduce media speculation

[.]Foreign Minister Vadym Prystaiko asked that the media not spread "unconfirmed" information on Friday, pleading with reporters to "reduce the level of speculation" while the probe continues. The experts are still analyzing evidence, looking at the bodies of the victims and the wreckage in hope of gaining insight into what took down Ukraine International Airlines Flight PS752, killing all 176 people on board.[,]
A User , Jan 11 2020 1:27 utc | 78
If no one had engaged with nine-drongos the thread would not have been disrupted and perhaps a useful dialog about the plane crash could have ensued. Those who did swallow the hook are just as guilty the original whatabouter of making this thread useless - good job. I would say exercise some discipline but that would be a waste of breath given the insecurities about their beliefs too many here apparently have. Letting some arsehole spout uninterrupted is a better indication of your point of view than anger, hysteria or ad hominem. Your stupidity has caused a thread to fail.
Red Ryder , Jan 11 2020 1:34 utc | 82
The Ukies know how to obliterate a debris field. MH-17 -- They used artillery for months to keep OSCE and Dutch officials away, and despite the locals working to protect the deceased and the debris, body parts have been found years later.

Patience, folks. The truth will come out.

Tom , Jan 11 2020 2:03 utc | 83
#57 posted by Poor Ramin Mazaheri who works for Press TV and has had many articles published on The Saker. He would describe the Iranian economy as socialist with Iranian charters. The link to the article below is an excellent source for information on Iran's economy.

What comes as a surprise to me is ICAO seems to have some integrity. It seems the US and friends haven't completely taken it over.

You can judge someone by their friends. NATO and the terrorists in Idlib have backed the killing of Soleimani. Who seems to enjoy killing civilians? The US just droned killed 60 civilians in Afghanistan. Information provided by the Iraqi prime minister showed the US is willing to use snipers and paid protesters to tear Iraq apart. They utterly destroyed Mosul and Raqqa without regard for civilians. The Syrian government has tried to avoid civilian deaths, which is why those who want to cause chaos in the region always accuses them of targeting civilians. So the US would have no problem getting MEK to or some other group to shoot the plane down but I'm leaning against that scenario.

The US has been planning to control oil for a long time. In 1975 a feasibility study was prepared for the Special Subcommittee on Investigations of the Committee on International Relations on "Oil fields as military objectives", better described as bringing Democracy to the Middle East. Well, they did that sorta in Iraq, and now the Iraq government has politely asked the US to leave and the Iranians have demonstrated to them why they should leave. I'm not sure if the Ukrainian plane crashing is the next move the US has made in this great game, but I would put my money on shoddy management of the Ukrainian plane. Why not, the country is barely functioning. I doubt the plane was hit with a missle. More likely the US can't pass up an opportunity for stirring trouble and the MSM has no problem memory holing another lie.

http://thesaker.is/sanctions-on-khamenei-ending-the-myth-of-the-millionaire-mullah/

[Jan 10, 2020] In Iraq The U.S. Is Again An Occupation Force As It Rejects To Leave As Demanded

Notable quotes:
"... Shorter Pompeo: "Our troops will stay and you better do what we say." A foreign force that is asked to leave a country and does not do so is an occupation force. It must and will be opposed. ..."
"... The murder of the 31 security forces and the assassination of al-Mahandes have still not been avenged. The PMU will do their moral duty and fight the foreign occupation forces until they leave. ..."
"... After my return from China, Trump called me and asked me to cancel the agreement, so I still refused, and he threatened me with massive demonstrations that would topple me. Indeed, the demonstrations started and then Trump called, threatening to escalate in the event I did not cooperate and do as he asked ..."
"... Iraq is again negotiating with Russia to acquire S-300 air defense systems. It will need them as the U.S. will have to leave and leave it will. The only choice for its soldiers is between leaving horizontally or vertically, dead or alive. ..."
"... In 2006 US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice famously celebrated Israel's assault on Lebanon as "the birth pangs of a new Middle East." The child she dreamed of was never born. Israel lost that war against Hizbullah and the Resistance Axis has been winning ever since while the U.S. has lost again and again. It is time for the U.S. to end that useless engagement and to withdraw from the Middle East. ..."
Jan 10, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Iraq's Prime Minister Adel Abdul-Mahdi is following Iraq's Parliament decision to remove all foreign forces from Iraq. But his request for talks with the U.S. about the U.S. withdrawal process was answered with a big "F*** You":

Iraq's caretaker prime minister asked Washington to start working out a road map for an American troop withdrawal, but the U.S. State Department on Friday bluntly rejected the request, saying the two sides should instead talk about how to "recommit" to their partnership.

Thousands of anti-government protesters gathered in the capital and southern Iraq, many calling on both Iran and America to leave Iraq, reflecting anger and frustration over the two rivals -- both Baghdad's allies -- trading blows on Iraqi soil.

The request from Prime Minister Adel Abdul-Mahdi pointed to his determination to push ahead with demands for U.S. troops to leave Iraq, stoked by the American drone strike on Jan. 3 that killed top Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani. In a phone call Thursday night, he told U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo that recent U.S. strikes in Iraq were an unacceptable breach of Iraqi sovereignty and a violation of their security agreements, his office said.

He asked Pompeo to "send delegates to Iraq to prepare a mechanism" to carry out the Iraqi Parliament's resolution on withdrawing foreign troops, according to the statement.

"The prime minister said American forces had entered Iraq and drones are flying in its airspace without permission from Iraqi authorities, and this was a violation of the bilateral agreements," the statement added.

The Associated Press errs when it says that the move was "stoked by the American drone strike on Jan. 3 that killed top Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani". The move was stoked five days earlier when the U.S. killed 31 Iraqi security forces near the Syrian border despite the demands by the Iraqi prime minister and president not to do so. It was further stoked when the U.S. assassinated Abu Mahdi al-Muhandes , the deputy commander of the Popular Militia Forces and a national hero in Iraq.

The State Department issued a rather aggressive response to Abdul-Mahdi's request:

America is a force for good in the Middle East. Our military presence in Iraq is to continue the fight against ISIS and as the Secretary has said, we are committed to protecting Americans, Iraqis, and our coalition partners. We have been unambiguous regarding how crucial our D-ISIS mission is in Iraq. At this time, any delegation sent to Iraq would be dedicated to discussing how to best recommit to our strategic partnership -- not to discuss troop withdrawal, but our right, appropriate force posture in the Middle East. Today, a NATO delegation is at the State Department to discuss increasing NATO's role in Iraq, in line with the President's desire for burden sharing in all of our collective defense efforts. There does, however, need to be a conversation between the U.S. and Iraqi governments not just regarding security, but about our financial, economic, and diplomatic partnership. We want to be a friend and partner to a sovereign, prosperous, and stable Iraq.

Shorter Pompeo: "Our troops will stay and you better do what we say." A foreign force that is asked to leave a country and does not do so is an occupation force. It must and will be opposed.

The murder of the 31 security forces and the assassination of al-Mahandes have still not been avenged. The PMU will do their moral duty and fight the foreign occupation forces until they leave.

The demonstrators in Baghdad will not be able to prevent that from happening. It is interesting, by the way, that the Washington Post bureau chief in Baghdad thought she knew what they would demand even before they came together:

Louisa Loveluck @leloveluck - 9:48 UTC · Jan 10, 2020
Activists have called for fresh rallies in Baghdad's Tahrir Square today, and crowds expected to build after midday prayers. The demonstrators are rejecting parliament's decision to oppose a US troop presence, fearing repercussions that might follow.

A few hours later Loveluck had to admit that she was, as usual, wrong:

Louisa Loveluck @leloveluck - 11:13 UTC · Jan 10, 2020
"No to Iran, no to America" say signs and chants in Baghdad's Tahrir Square as crowds start to swell. Protesters say they are fed up of their country being someone else's battlefield. "We deserve to live in peace," says 21 year old Zahraa.
...
Rejecting a narrow parliamentary vote backed by Shiite political elites is not the same as openly supporting the US. Chants in Tahrir today reject both the US and Iran.

The U.S. will need to pay better Iraqi 'activists' if it wants them to demand what Donald Trump wishes.

As the Iraqi Prime Minister explained (also here ):

After my return from China, Trump called me and asked me to cancel the agreement, so I still refused, and he threatened me with massive demonstrations that would topple me. Indeed, the demonstrations started and then Trump called, threatening to escalate in the event I did not cooperate and do as he asked

Iraq is again negotiating with Russia to acquire S-300 air defense systems. It will need them as the U.S. will have to leave and leave it will. The only choice for its soldiers is between leaving horizontally or vertically, dead or alive.

As Elijah Magnier say in his summarization of the last week's events: A New Middle East "made in Iran" is about to be born

The US President – who promised to end the " endless wars " – killed the Iraqi commander Abu Mahdi al-Muhandes and the Iranian Major General Qassem Soleimani believing he could win control of Iraq and achieve regime change in Iran. On the brink of triggering a major war, Trump has spectacularly lost Iran and is about to lose Iraq.

" Beautiful military equipment doesn't rule the world, people rule the world, and the people want the US out of the region", said Iran Foreign Minister Jawad Zarif. President Trump doesn't have many people in the Middle East on his side, not even among his allies, whose leaders have been repeatedly insulted . Iran could not have dreamt of a better President to rejuvenate its position domestically and regionally. All Iran's allies are jubilant, standing behind the "Islamic Republic" that fulfilled its promise to bomb the US. A "New Middle East" is about to be born; it will not be "Made in the USA" but "Made in Iran". Let us hope warmongers' era is over. The time has come to recognise and rely on intelligent diplomacy in world affairs.

In 2006 US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice famously celebrated Israel's assault on Lebanon as "the birth pangs of a new Middle East." The child she dreamed of was never born. Israel lost that war against Hizbullah and the Resistance Axis has been winning ever since while the U.S. has lost again and again. It is time for the U.S. to end that useless engagement and to withdraw from the Middle East.

Posted by b on January 10, 2020 at 19:09 UTC | Permalink

Jen , Jan 10 2020 19:30 utc | 1

The sheer arrogance and wilful blindness expressed in the US State Department press statement and WaPo staffer Louisa Loveluck's tweets are astounding beyond belief. It's as if the entire capital city of the US has become a mental asylum / Hotel California, where one can enter but never leave spiritually and morally, though one can take many physical trips in and out of the madhouse.

Iraq definitely does need the S-300 missile defence systems. The most pressing issue though is whether the Iraqis will suffer the delays Syria suffered in acquiring those systems even after paying for them. Time now is of the essence. Iraqi operators need to be trained in those systems. Syria may be able to supply some training but at the risk of letting down its guard in sending some of its operators to Baghdad and exposing them to US drone attacks.

Likklemore , Jan 10 2020 19:39 utc | 2
Thanks b, for your continuing coverage and insights.

the u.s'. leadership believes it can do the same thing over, and over, and over with different results. They will need a very long ladder with the upcoming repeat of Saigon 1975.

They have always underestimated the will and cultures of people they would make subservient.

How is this working for the Iran Puppet Master: Pompous one?

Here is the big mighty with world's powerful military; on their bended knees -

We want to discuss Return to Strategic Partnership With Iraq Instead of Troop Withdrawal

[.]The press release further noted that Washington seeks to be "a friend and partner to a sovereign, prosperous, and stable Iraq", while stating that the US military presence in the country will persist in order to fight Daesh* and protect Americans, Iraqis, and US-led coalition partners.[.]

Yes, some friend and partner eh? Insults and thuggery. Exiting will be horizontal.
Go pound sand.


In other news, tomorrow Iran will announce cause of UAI plane crash.

Bubbles , Jan 10 2020 19:43 utc | 3
From the US State Dept's 'aggressive response' link,

"not to discuss troop withdrawal, but our right, appropriate force posture in the Middle East. Today, a NATO delegation is at the State Department to discuss increasing NATO's role in Iraq, in line with the President's desire for burden sharing in all of our collective defense efforts. "

"BUT OUR RIGHT" ??

...


"President's desire for burden sharing in all of our collective defense efforts."

https://www.state.gov/the-u-s-continued-partnership-with-iraq/


Seems like just yesterday that man trump was jabbering on about how the US should get out of NATO and leave those 'losers' to defend themselves.

Geopolitics in the Shining City of the Hill has come to this?

Grabs roll of tinfoil..are the Globalists using this buffoon to makes people yearn for some normalcy only they can provide?

Likklemore , Jan 10 2020 19:50 utc | 4
And with such liars who needs a stick. Narrative changes depending the hour.

Last night: Pompeo told Foxnews-

Pompeo Says US Had No Information on Date, Place of Possible Attack Allegedly Planned by Soleimani
LINK

US President Donald Trump earlier claimed that Washington had eliminated the top Iranian military commander to halt Tehran's plans to blow up the US Embassy in Baghdad.
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on a national broadcast that the United States possessed no information about the date and place of an alleged attack planned by assassinated General Qasem Soleimani.[.]

"We don't know precisely when - and we don't know precisely where. But it was real ...

Today
Trump Claims Soleimani Was Planning Attacks on 4 US Embassies


US President Donald Trump in an interview with Fox News said that top Iranian commander Qasem Soleimani was plotting attacks on four American embassies in the Middle East region before being assassinated by US forces.
"I can reveal that I believe it probably would've been four embassies," Trump said when asked whether large-scale attacks were planned against other embassies.

The House of Fools. Something is out of focus if they have to keep making justifications for the killing.


psychohistorian , Jan 10 2020 19:51 utc | 5
Thanks for focus on the Iran front of the civilization war humanity is in. I find the Ukraine plane crash to be distracting from the bigger picture.

The piece from the US State Department is quite the lie. Bottom line is that Iran is currently sovereign but would cease to be so is they became the "normal" country that private finance empire wants. Iran would then live under the dictatorship of global private finance like the rest of us that mythically believe we are sovereign nations and individuals.

I am pleased to see that humanity is at this juncture in spite of the threat of extinction. Our species is crippled by the cult that owns global private finance in the West and even if this process seems quite indirect to me, at least the socialism/barbarism war is being fought.

Jackrabbit , Jan 10 2020 19:52 utc | 6
USA stays - as predicted by MoA commenters.

b foresees an eventual win by Iraq and Iran but that is uncertain and years away.

USA is not leaving. They believe UN 2249 gives them the right to stay in Syria and Iraq - despite USA claim that ISIS is defeated.

We will likely see a rebranding of USA troops to NATO, an " ISIS resergence", and a civil war in Iraq.

!!

dadoronron , Jan 10 2020 19:55 utc | 7
A few days ago I saw a tweet that Russia was going to sell S-400s to Iran. Has anyone seen confirmation?
Abe , Jan 10 2020 20:00 utc | 8
Good. Iran will star escalating (via proxy force, or maybe even directly if they are feeling bold and determined) and US will start to have casualties. Being nice to bully never works.
nemo , Jan 10 2020 20:04 utc | 9
"A force for good!!??" How Orwellian can you get? If you are truly a force for good, then get out as you have been asked to do!
Sammy , Jan 10 2020 20:09 utc | 10
The sooner Tehran is glass, the sooner the US can pull out of the ME.
Zanon , Jan 10 2020 20:13 utc | 11
Iraq, every parliament party, could start themselves showing they want the americans to leave. They have not done this,
and this is the reason US give not to leave:

US is not willing to withdraw troops from Iraq, says Pompeo

The US argues that the Iraqi parliamentary vote was non-binding, and that its legitimacy was undermined by neither Iraqi Kurds or Sunnis participating.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jan/10/us-not-willing-to-withdraw-troops-from-iraq-mike-pompeo

At the same time, that will never occur since kurds and sunnis support the americans.
Quid pro quo.

pretzelattack , Jan 10 2020 20:16 utc | 12
why do sunnis support the americans? i can see it with kurds, who have been playing this game for a long time.
pretzelattack , Jan 10 2020 20:17 utc | 13
lofl at "a force for good". same old shit, same old bottle.
Bubbles , Jan 10 2020 20:17 utc | 14
New Rome suffers the same maladies as the first. Uprisings in the Provinces.

Lest we forget, Rome's demands;


" "First, Iran must declare to the IAEA a full account of the prior military dimensions of its nuclear program, and permanently and verifiably abandon such work in perpetuity."

"Second, Iran must stop uranium enrichment and never pursue plutonium reprocessing. This includes closing its heavy water reactor."

"Third, Iran must also provide the IAEA with unqualified access to all sites throughout the entire country."

"Iran must end its proliferation of ballistic missiles and halt further launching or development of nuclear-capable missile systems."

"Iran must release all U.S. citizens, as well as citizens of our partners and allies, each of them detained on spurious charges."

"Iran must end support to Middle East terrorist groups, including Lebanese Hizballah [Hezbollah], Hamas, and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad."

"Iran must respect the sovereignty of the Iraqi Government and permit the disarming, demobilization, and reintegration of Shia militias."

"Iran must also end its military support for the Houthi militia and work towards a peaceful political settlement in Yemen."

"Iran must withdraw all forces under Iranian command throughout the entirety of Syria."

"Iran, too, must end support for the Taliban and other terrorists in Afghanistan and the region, and cease harboring senior Al Qaida leaders."

"Iran, too, must end the IRG [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] Qods Force's [Quds Force's] support for terrorists and militant partners around the world."

"And too, Iran must end its threatening behavior against its neighbors – many of whom are U.S. allies. This certainly includes its threats to destroy Israel, and its firing of missiles into Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. It also includes threats to international shipping and destructive – and destructive cyberattacks."

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/20989/pompeos-12-demands-for-iran-read-more-like-a-declaration-of-war-than-a-path-to-peace


Saudi millions/ billions for spreading Wahhabi 7th Century violent ideology around the world is A OK though.

What? It's all about MAGA, right?

james , Jan 10 2020 20:17 utc | 15
thanks b... i share jens view on how outrageous usa official words on this are...

"At this time, any delegation sent to Iraq would be dedicated to discussing how to best recommit to our strategic partnership -- not to discuss troop withdrawal, but our right, appropriate force posture in the Middle East." they just don't give a fuck... everyone here knew that already... as a few of us have been saying - there is no way the usa is going to leave.. they are intent up the same agenda they have been intent on for what seems like forever...

@ 4 Likklemore quote - "Something is out of focus if they have to keep making justifications for the killing." the liar in command saying he was going to cause trouble at 4 embassies.. jesus what a liar and retard trump is if he thinks anyone who has a brain would believe that b.s.

@ 10 sammy... the sooner washington d.c. is glass the sooner americans can wake the fuck up..

Fernando Martinez , Jan 10 2020 20:19 utc | 16
The Iraquis voted on a non-binding resolution. So by being wishy washy, they won't force the USA to leave anywhere.
Linda Jean Doucett , Jan 10 2020 20:25 utc | 17
Who dares to stop them?
Surely no sane country wants to stand against JUSA.

Israel is shaking in its boots so its American poodle must stay to protect them. The sooner the world gets rid of the Jewish infestation from their governments the safer the world will be.

Bubbles , Jan 10 2020 20:29 utc | 18
Fernando 16

"The Iraquis voted on a non-binding resolution. So by being wishy washy, they won't force the USA to leave anywhere."


You should walk a mile in their shoes.

Then opine.

powerandpeople , Jan 10 2020 20:30 utc | 19
As always with the USA President, this is about 2 aspects:
1. Cutting costs to USA
2. Making money for USA

This is the 'leverage' (blackmail, if you prefer)to obtain 'good deals' on the way out the door.

China (Russia to a limited extent) is providing up-front funding for repair to 'war' damaged infrastructure done by the USA.

In return, China gets hydrocarbons.

These are big, expensive projects that China excels at, cutting out the corruption to officials standing in the middle.

Revamping and extending rail infrastructure in Iraq connecting to Iran and also towards Central Asia and beyond.

Big oil pipeline projects taking Iraqi oil to Jordan. Later projects taking hydrocarbons through Syria to the Med, and into Turkey as well.

https://oilprice.com/Geopolitics/Middle-East/Is-Iraq-About-To-Become-A-Chinese-Client-State.html

That's why Pres. Trump is jockeying for a small bite of the pie. He has a good chance of getting it. But small.

Evelyn , Jan 10 2020 20:42 utc | 20
#10
Turning Tehran [ substitute : North Korea/Iraq/other designated U.S. enemy] "to glass" in some quarters seems popular.

Facile, reckless, terrorism run amok.

Probably the same gene pool spouting "They hate us for our freedoms."

Lurk , Jan 10 2020 20:43 utc | 21
@ Jackrabbit | Jan 10 2020 19:52 utc | 6
We will likely see a rebranding of USA troops to NATO

Some of their NATO vassals still care about the rule of law and international law. Mikey and Donny might discover that these backward states are "not very helpful" to their cause of rules based order.

USA runs a serious risk of overplaying its hand and alienating some of their european allies. Likely not all, but almost certainly some. That would create a rift in NATO and possibly the EU and compromise USA control over these organizations and their members.

PavewayIV , Jan 10 2020 20:45 utc | 22
Fernando Martinez@16 - You're misunderstanding the situation. The Iraqi parliament did get the majority they needed to pass the resolution as specified in their constitution. They will turn it over to the existing or new PM for implementation. Nothing wishy-washy about it. It's a done deal despite the terrified Kurds and Sunnis not voting to save their own butts from reprisal - either by Iraqi Shia or by the US. I would have done the same thing.

It is the US that is claiming the resolution is nonbinding (in their 'legal' opinion) because the vote wasn't sufficiently representative (in the mind of the US dual-citizen chickenhawk neocons) - despite the fact that two-thirds of Iraqis are Shia and there was more than enough votes to pass the resolution despite the Sunni and Kurd representatives' absence. The US is pouting and will hold its breath until the Iraqis defy their constitution and obey the will of their American masters. In the meantime, the US has refused to recognize the vote and will oppose any efforts for implementation by the Iraqi PM. Trump or Pompeo or one of those idiots stated that clearly and unambiguously - the US has no plans to leave no matter what.

I guess we'll see. Plan B for the US is probably to agitate for the original plan of uprisings to partition Iraq into Kurd, Sunni and Shia statelets. The obedient Kurd and Shia leaders will allow eternal US presence and as many bases as the US wants. It will be enough territory to block the feared 'Shia Crescent' - the US will insist the Kurd and Sunni statelets extend from Turkey down the Syrian border to Jordan, blocking any attempts to connect the Shia statelet to Syria. That's the US plan B for this problem if they can't use 'other means' to stay in present-day Iraq for 'anti-ISIS' operations.

Peter AU1 , Jan 10 2020 20:45 utc | 23
US was hitting Iraqi militias even back when ISIS still held territory and the militias where driving ISIS back.
Then the recent strike on the militia's formally incorporated into Iraqi military and the strike that killed the Iraqi and Iranian.... but then the Iraqi's declare Iran's strike on the US base a breach of sovereignty. Iraqi's that should be allied with Iran for the purpose of driving the US out. US will be in Iraq and the Syrian oilfields for quite some time.
There was the same talk about militia's and whatever hitting US in Syria but that hasn't eventuated and I doubt any thing serious against US will happen in Iraq either. US will have proxies out and about - using its bases as fire support bases with air and artillery to back up its proxies.
karlof1 , Jan 10 2020 20:56 utc | 24
a narrow parliamentary vote...

The vote count I saw was unanimous. Clearly, the Evil Outlaw US Empire is throwing as much bullshit at everything in the hopes that some sticks and clogs peoples's minds. The 737 crash is similar in pointing over there instead of looking at what's just occurred at your feet. Now Trump says four embassies were going to be attacked as he further demonstrates he's losing his mind. Lies and Bluster are the hallmarks of a Paper Tiger.

Meanwhile, what stands for genuine Progressives and the Left are clearly gaining ground as numerous Anti-war rallies took place yesterday and an article appeared in my local rag saying the D-Party Establishment is afraid of a Sanders nomination--2016 in play all over again except no HRC and we know more about the DNC's evilness in not at all being responsive to the public or voting results. IMO, the Political Fight required for genuine change has finally begun and will escalate.

Globally, the current battles are a new phase of a 3 millennial-long war between the Current Oligarchy and the 99% as to who will be the Sovereign--the people collectively or those who've stolen their wealth. Class War--You Bet! We now have definitive proof of how it works and how long it's been ongoing. What we've yet to see is if the 99% have enough brains and solidarity to undo 3,000+ years of Tyranny.

Within this article is a photo of Iranian general Ali Amir Hajizadeh standing at a podium in front of a phalanx of 9 flags belonging to the Axis of Resistance. We need to add our own flags to that Alliance for the enemies of Iran are the enemies of all Earth's people and employ the likes of sammy and other Terrorists to do their bidding.

Kali , Jan 10 2020 20:58 utc | 25
The Iranians attacked by the US in this episode was always about Iraq being seen as moving out of the American-Euro orbit and into the China-Iran-Russia orbit. So of course they will not voluntarily leave, instead they will either be forced out by attacks or more likely they will force either a change in leadership of Iraq or threaten the leadership or bribe the leadership into accepting permanent occupation for "their safety" ala a Mob Protection Racket. This is exposed here Pax Americana: Between Iraq and A Hard Place
ben , Jan 10 2020 21:04 utc | 26
Well, I'm shocked, just shocked, that the U$A won't be leaving as per Iraq's request...NOT!

Did any serious person believe they would?

Empire uber alles...

And still, many will support this regime of cretinous grifters..

Stonebird , Jan 10 2020 21:08 utc | 27
Couple of small points;
1) 32-35 soldiers (4-5 commanders and their command posts - US dixit) were killed in the earlier US attacks, which were heavier in Syria and against the Herzbollah, than those against Iraqian forces on the Syria-Iraqi border. The command posts were eliminated very accurately. This is possibly because they had previously collectively stated that they wanted to eliminate the terrorists in the Anbar desert. (Thought; those "terrorists" may have included embedded "special forces" or mercenaries which the US wanted to protect.)
2) I believe that Iraq was trying to get the S400, (The one that can "see" F35's) rather than the S300.

3) OT? Just who gets the profits from the Oil stolen from Syria, and would have a kickback from the oil that was demanded from Iraq (Al-Mahdi statement)? Conventionally we attribute the money going to the "Pentagon" or "CIA". But I seem to remember that the complete Erdogan family was benefitting before they were kicked out. Is it possible that the Syrian oil is now going straight into a slush fund for some Generals or members of the administration? Is that really why the US doesn't want leave? Profits not geo-politics?

karlof1 , Jan 10 2020 21:09 utc | 28
PavewayIV @22 & Peter AU 1 @23--

Well, we shall soon see what the Iraqis are made of and where their will lies. I expect we'll begin getting that answer this weekend. It does appear Iraqi Patriots will need to drag their fellows along with them, but IMO none will get a better future unless the Outlaw US Empire is driven from Southwest Asia.

Das Kommentariat , Jan 10 2020 21:12 utc | 29
@Lurk | Jan 10 2020 20:43 utc | 21

I expect some spineless eastern European countries (Romania, Poland, etc.) will lend themselves for this. The other members will tacitly accept the NATO branding ...

uncle tungsten , Jan 10 2020 21:14 utc | 30
The last Make America Go Away event was in Ho Chi Minh city.

It was decisive, the only non binding aspect was the ability of the USA to win.

What is it about GO AWAY that the USA elite dont understand? I guess, like Joe Biden a fist full of oil makes it comprehensible. Neandertals.

Likklemore , Jan 10 2020 21:15 utc | 31
@10 sammy

Very telling, but you will envy the dead.

The sooner Iran No. more likely

the sooner Israhell, stripped to its 1948 boundaries, is glass we will have peace on planet earth. Fighting Israhell's wars have daily cost in blood and treasure. In $ 7 trillions and counting.

Hmm. Why? running scared.

Reuters: but Russia denies.
Russian navy ship 'aggressively approached' U.S. destroyer in Arabian Sea: U.S. Navy
"DUBAI (Reuters) - A Russian navy ship "aggressively approached" a U.S. Navy destroyer in the North Arabian Sea on Thursday, the U.S. Navy's Bahrain-based Fifth Fleet said in a statement on Friday.
[.]
"The Russian ship initially refused but ultimately altered course and the two ships opened distance from one another," the statement said."

JB , Jan 10 2020 21:19 utc | 32
There will be blood.

No one should cheer this. The people of the Middle East have been bleeding way too long.
The million dollar question is: how tostop a serial killer on the loose, operating in plain sight, when everyone else is either afraid, in a deal or trying to avoid blowing up the whole place (world).

It's tough because the serial killer, (together with his partners in crime EU/NATO), have dismantled the existing world order, however fragile it was. The law is no more.

You would expect that in a situation like this the nations of the world, through the UN, would say - now you must leave Iraq because the Iraqi parliament has spoken. That's the only way the weaker can enforce their decisions agains the stronger peacefully, with the support of the global community. But that doesn't happen because the worst offenders, the serial killers, are members of the UN Security Council. And, the UN General Assembly almost never meets to discuss events crucial for world peace, justice, fairness and equality, such as these.

When all hinges on force, chaos and blood are in store. It is absolutely immoral, unjust and heinous that the people of Iraq, Iran Syria, Lebanon and others should again fight to their death to set themselves free from the deadly claws of parasitic states that are veto-holding members of the UN body entrusted with maintaining world peace, law and order!!! This entire theatre of the absurd is unbearable and should be a call to action for every single decent human being on this beautiful planet.

Here's a rarely excellent, succinct piece:' Why the War never Ends" :
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/52828.htm

ben , Jan 10 2020 21:19 utc | 33
Stonebird @ 27 asked; "Is that really why the US doesn't want leave? Profits not geo-politics?"


IMO, in this new age of corporate ascendancy, profits drive Geo-Politics

Peter AU1 , Jan 10 2020 21:22 utc | 34
karlof1

Magnier has a few comments on the Iraqi divides at his twitter thread and is exactly what I have thought for the last month or so. Those Iraqi groups that are solidly allied with Iran in the fight against ISIS and US are a small minority and US and Israel have been hitting them with impunity for several years now. Most Iraqi's including Shia seem tied up in small time domestic disputes. No Nasrallah's or Kharmenei's in Iraq. Only Muqtada al-Sadr types. Perhaps Sistani may do something but he also seems very much small time domestic - not interested or not capable in the big picture.

ben , Jan 10 2020 21:27 utc | 35
JB @ 32; Kudos JB, an absolutely on target rant. Thanks for the link...
karlof1 , Jan 10 2020 21:28 utc | 36
JB @32--

Yes, you're quite correct, there will be blood, just as there's been blood flowing for the last 3,000 years. That's why I wrote our flags must join those of the Axis of Resistance--this War isn't theirs alone; it's every Earthling's War whether they realize it or not.

james , Jan 10 2020 21:29 utc | 37
@31 likklemore.. in the videos clearly the usa ship is in the wrong...

https://www.rt.com/news/477976-us-russian-ships-aggressive-approach/

Eudoxia , Jan 10 2020 21:30 utc | 38
What if the government of Iraq asks Russia to assist it in safeguarding its airspace from unauthorized entry? The Russians will bring the equipment and the operators & they are already just across in Syria.
PJB , Jan 10 2020 21:31 utc | 39
Totally Orwellian.

Empire of Chaos, Lies and Deceit.

"War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength." George Orwell in '1984'.

Could any statement better sum up the world we now live in?

karlof1 , Jan 10 2020 21:37 utc | 40
Peter AU 1 @34--

Thanks for your reply! The rhetorical counter to the non-Patriot Iraqis will be that the Evil Outlaw US Empire intends to treat them just like the Zionists treat their Palestinian slaves and have demonstrated so already. There are essentially three choices: Fight, help others to fight, pack up and move to another nation as you're no longer an Iraqi.

William Gruff , Jan 10 2020 21:39 utc | 41
I have often stated that the United States is suffering from mass insanity and violent psychosis.

This is not hyperbole. This is a simple factual statement.

You cannot reason with a rabid dog, and that is what America is right now.

Bubbles , Jan 10 2020 21:39 utc | 42
27

"Just who gets the profits from the Oil stolen from Syria, "

Best estimates I've seen say the oil fields trump is so bent on denying the Assad government from accessing are so damaged they produce 31,000 bpd at best. Whatever discount price comes from that after it's trucked to some market in Turkey or maybe Iraq, it would be less profitable than trump's Taj mahal casino venture.

But hey, he's the greatest business man ever. Just ask him?

It's not about profit, it's about making a dollar here and there to give to the Kurds and keep their America is our friend dreams alive and denying Assad that oil.

It would cost a great deal of money to return the fields east of the Euphrates to their previous production levels.

The Netanyahu plan is to deny the Syrian gov't and it's people the revenue from those wells they used to access to pay for their needs. Only the needs of trump and his people matter.

Joshua , Jan 10 2020 21:43 utc | 43
The current regime in the United States seems to believe that people are only able to believe what the regime tells them to believe. This is not the case. Even the American people want the US military to withdraw from Iraq, from Syria, from the Middle East.
Joshua , Jan 10 2020 21:46 utc | 44
This has been illustrated repeatedly. But, after every 'election', and after every 'poll', the regime chews on the results and rolls it over until they come up with a 'storyline' that says they can do whatever the hell they feel like anyway. More and more people are catching on to this.
Annie , Jan 10 2020 21:48 utc | 45
Elijah Magnier in a Tweet today seemed to imply that Al Mahdi didn't stand up to the US forcefully enough and that there is a split between shia and Sunni as to US presence. Some want the US to stay. He also said Iraq needs a stronger PM that will implement US kicking out of Iraq. He also mentioned that Al Mahdi did not give the ok for PMU forces to go up against US in Iraq.
We will have to see. But if the Iraqi people are demanding US is kicked out then Al Mahdi may be forced to act.
Jackrabbit , Jan 10 2020 21:50 utc | 46
PavewayIV @22

Yeah, that's right.

As in virtual every representative democracy, the Iraqi government carries out the will of the people as expressed through their representatives. So the vote by the Iraqi Parliament is binding on the Iraqi government, not a foreign government .. duh!

AFAIK USA is in Iraq at invitation of the Iraqi government but there's no formal agreement (aka SOFA). So the Iraqi government can ask USA to leave at any time.

Iraq was being nice and diplomatic to invite USA to provide input that helps the Iraqi government determine the timetable for USA to leave. Since USA has refused, we should expect the Iraqi government to demand that USA leave immediately.

Of course, USA has already stated their reasons for remaining despite any lawful demand that they do so.

!!

Cortes , Jan 10 2020 21:51 utc | 47
ben @33

Corporate ascendancy's was accurately described in perhaps the greatest novel of the pomp of the USA:


https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Space_Merchants

Pohl's sequel takes it to a terrestrial conclusion.

Likklemore , Jan 10 2020 21:52 utc | 48
@ james 37

Thanks james. Give the u.s. uniformed boys and girls some slack. They are running scared, having to look over their shoulders knowing they are targets and that now things have changed - U.S. stands alone without friends. It's vassal states waiver. after Soleimani killing suddenly, except for IL, the U.S. is alone . article from earlier comment posting is a good read.

Manny , Jan 10 2020 21:55 utc | 49
This site is a mountain of bs.
karlof1 , Jan 10 2020 21:56 utc | 50
james @37--

Here's b's Tweet on the matter:

"'Power-driven vessel A approaches the port side of power-driven vessel B. Vessel A is considered the give-way vessel. As the give-way vessel, A must take EARLY and SUBSTANTIAL action to keep clear and avoid crossing the stand-on vessel B.'
Farragut (A) should have passed behind B."

As b notes, this is almost an exact repeat of what happened last year. The idiots commenting on the USN's twitter thread are pathetic and clearly don't know squat.

And speaking of the Russian Navy, Putin's business today began with "a meeting with the Defence Ministry leadership and the Russian Navy commanders to discuss the key areas of short- and long-term development of the Navy. The meeting was held while the Supreme Commander-in-Chief was visiting the Nakhimov Black Sea Naval Academy" after observing/participating in the previous day's naval exercises on the Black Sea. Currently, the USN is rated as "weak and marginal" by the Heritage Institute, a patriotic think tank, which is outwardly displayed by the lack of navigation skills.

Jackrabbit , Jan 10 2020 21:58 utc | 51
Annie !45: He also said Iraq needs a stronger PM ...

I don't think Mahdi's being a caretaker' PM should matter.

Any democratic government is supposed to carry out the wishes of the people as express by Parliament.

USA is trying to muddy the waters and throw up BS because they fundamentally WILL NOT LEAVE.

!!

Joshua , Jan 10 2020 22:02 utc | 52
And another thing...
Did anybody notice how the 'goodguy badguy show' (impeachment dog & pony show) got shoved to the back burner all of a sudden? Now I guess they are going to wait and see how this 'breakout' aggression move is going to pan out for them.
Ben Zanotto , Jan 10 2020 22:04 utc | 53
"America is a force for good in the Middle East."

Recall that the phrase "for good" also has the second meaning of "permanently, forever, or perpetually."

Surely this was unintentional phrase selection on part of the Imperial spokesman.

jayc , Jan 10 2020 22:18 utc | 54
ISIS was the means - the Trojan horse - to justify the permanent garrisoning of NATO in Iraq and Syria. Before Russia's intervention, NATO and politicians from NATO countries were uniform in proclaiming the "fight" against ISIS would be a "generational struggle" which would take at least 20-30 years to achieve victory. Even after major fighting has reduced the organization to almost nothing, this rationale lives on in the guise of a "continuing threat" represented by ISIS' ideology or aspirations. Permanent NATO garrisons in Iraq and Syria remains the extant policy (ISIS always just the pretext). If the European NATO members balk at the Iraq civil war which the US will quietly propose in the interest of supporting this policy, then it is likely the Kurd regions will suffice as a breakaway NATO protectorate.
ChasMark , Jan 10 2020 22:21 utc | 55
This information was in a comment on Unz.com
Can anyone verify?

("Iris" = the prequel; the Erebus comment tells a story totally different from what Pompeo, congressmen, MSM etc. are reporting.)

Killing Inside Iraq to Punish Iran
Trump-Pompeo foreign policy is not only incoherent, it is insane
PHILIP GIRALDI • JANUARY 7, 2020 •

Iris says:
https://www.unz.com/pgiraldi/killing-inside-iraq-to-punish-iran/#comment-3650417

January 8, 2020 at 1:37 pm GMT •
Iris responded to:

Now Trump will be able to deescalate and Iran will save its face by claiming 80 or so American soldiers dead

with:

"It is good to gather facts, information and try to cross-check it before making educated assumptions on subjects ordinary citizens are not privy to.
Countless insightful American commenters propose very well-supported cases, but come to opposite conclusions with regard to President Trump's real intentions. How could we then know Iran's strategic roadmap?
The Iranian reaction was long coming. The writing was on the wall when Hassan Nasrallah, following one too many Israeli strike on Syria, detailed in his Sept 2019 address that the "Resistance Axis" had the capability to hit strategic Israeli targets that he named.
It is not normal that US sources have not communicated any detail of the consequences of the strikes, so many hours after they took place. The Danes have stated there were "no casualties amongst them", which hints there were casualties amongst other Western nationalities.
Your cynicism is justified by how real-politik is actually conducted. However, it is also very possible that we are living a cornerstone moment in ME's History, a reverse moment of the 2003 invasion of Iraq."

• Replies: @Erebus

Erebus says:
January 9, 2020 at 10:20 am GMT •
@Iris

"Some of what's come out suggests the US has gone full Mafia in response to the last few years' developments in the M.E. There's no geo-political strategy. There's only (bad) gangsterism.
Countless insightful American commenters propose very well-supported cases, but come to opposite conclusions with regard to President Trump's real intentions.

Russia's textbook demonstration of how to combine diplomatic acumen and military efficiency in sorting problems has given impetus to a Russian authored, Chinese backed regional security and development proposal that's been making the rounds through the region's capitals since late summer (at least). Promoted by Iran (mostly via Oman) as a new paradigm in M.E. affairs, it's been well received everywhere except Saudi Arabia who've apparently cited their inability to throw off the American yoke as the primary impediment to their overt support. Notwithstanding, the Saudis have been talking quietly with all parties and have reportedly even sent emissaries to Tehran for "informal" talks on the hush-hush. Soleimani was a significant player in these talks, which were being mediated by Iraq.

In his speech to the Iraqi parliament subsequent to Soleimani's murder, Iraqi Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi revealed an astonishing tale of the sort of strongarming tactics America has employed in response. His speech was to be carried live on Iraqi TV, but the feed was cut immediately after he started by the Speaker.

Nevertheless, his words have leaked to the public. In it he told that Trump had demanded 50% of Iraq's oil revenues, or the US wouldn't go ahead with promised infrastructure rebuilding of the country they destroyed. Mahdi refused that proposal and headed to China where he promptly made a deal to rebuild the country. When the US learned of it, Trump called him to demand that the deal be rescinded and when Mahdi refused Trump threatened to unleash violent protests against Mahdi's rule.

Sure enough, violent protests began shortly thereafter. Again Trump called and when Mahdi again refused to rescind the China deal, Trump threatened him with Maidan-style snipers. Again Mahdi refused, and Iraq's Minister of Defence spoke publicly of "third party" provocateurs killing both protestors and police, threatening to drive the country back into civil war.
Again Trump called, and Mahdi reports that this time he threatened Mahdi and the Defence Minister with assassination if they didn't shut up about "third party" provocateurs. Meanwhile, Mahdi continued to mediate Iranian-Saudi talks and Soleimani was carrying Iran's response to the latest Saudi message. He was to meet Mahdi later the morning of his assassination.

The upshot of all that is that the intent behind Soleimani's gangland slaying was to send the US' message to Mahdi specifically, but also to Iran, the Saudis, and anyone else contemplating M.E. rapprochement that murder awaited them if they continued to work towards peace in the region.
It is not normal that US sources have not communicated any detail of the consequences of the strikes, so many hours after they took place.

Details are emerging re the Al Assad Air Base attack, and if you're an American strategist they ain't pretty. The lack of casualties notwithstanding, satellite photos show that the Iranian salvo hit targets with a very high level of combat efficiency. Any damage assessment will reveal that technically, Iran can hit whatever it wants to hit.

Qiam missiles were used. They're a cheap 'n cheerful derivative of the Soviet SCUD, and Iran has 1,000s of them. Hezbollah likely has 1,000s as well, so the picture is even less pretty if you're an Israeli strategist. Furthermore
Iran informed the Swiss Embassy in Tehran (who represent American interests in Iran) an hour or more before the attack. More than enough time to get personnel out of harm's way. FARS' reports of 80 killed and ~200 injured, frankly look to be a narrative for domestic consumption. It's hard to believe that with the hour+ warning that that many people were hanging around in the line of fire.

My guess about the delay is that the US is simply stunned.

However, it is also very possible that we are living a cornerstone moment in ME's History, a reverse moment of the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

I believe that's true regardless of what got hit and the number of casualties. This was a message sending exercise. As unimaginative as it may appear, the salvo sent an unmistakeable signal that went through the region's capitals and beyond. Here's why they're all paying attention

1. Iran struck American assets directly, in a brazenly overt manner. No plausible deniability, proxies or non-state actors involved. It was a State attack on another State's assets. If there is any doubt that the hit on Suleimani was an act of war, there can be no doubt about Iran's response. The bully got punched in the nose in front of his entourage and they're now waiting to see what he'll do. However

2. The IRGC's very high level of confidence in its missiles & missile corps is obviously warranted. If the US and its satraps expected amateur hour, they got the diametric opposite – the equivalent of getting your knife shot out of your hand – and that puts the US in a bad spot.

3. The Qiam salvo was no Kalibrs-from-the-Caspian demonstration of technical prowess, but so far as I can currently tell, more than half of the missiles targetting Al Assad hit bull's eyes and American AD failed to intercept any of them. This stands in stark contrast to Syria's success at knocking down Tomahawks. The Americans claim that the Al Assad airbase had no missile defence systems installed, which seems incredible, but with the silence of the Patriot batteries of Abqaiq looming in the background, all of the USM's regional assets have been exposed as ducks in a barrel. The US simply can't defend them.

It is clear that with its S300 systems and indigenous air defence in place, Iran can destroy American assets while minimizing its own losses. What's more, Iran's S300s have reportedly been networked into Russia's regional air defence systems, and that installing S400s is being actively considered. With either development, Iran's air space is effectively closed. Iran's status as the pre-eminent regional power has been cemented into place, and with the Kremlin's backing there is no way to dislodge it. Every capital must now run its calculus and begin re-thinking its role in the region, or its relationship with it.
Without high efficiency air defence, CENTCOM can't defend even itself, never mind the region's oil infrastructure and perverse allied monarchies. That is now plain as day. Remaining perceptions of its ability to provide security guarantees to its satraps are now gone, and so the US' options have been reduced to a choice between escalation, or going home. There's no there there, and everybody now knows it. The message couldn't be clearer.

Iran has opened the exit door and we're all waiting to see what heads prevail in Washington as the facts settle into them. To keep the Americans focussed, one can expect to see the Iraqi militias begin ratcheting up attacks on American assets in Iraq, and in collaboration with domestic militia's in Syria as well.

The question now revolves around whether the US needs a thousand cuts to absorb the message that its dominance of the M.E. is over.


ADKC , Jan 10 2020 22:25 utc | 56
If the US withdraws from the Middle East the Petrodollar will come to an end and the whole US and the Western financial system collapses. The US and West are trapped by their stupidity in abusing the financial system to fund their wars and build up a level of debt that can never and will never be paid. How can the US leave even if they wanted to?
Pft , Jan 10 2020 22:25 utc | 57
Well, the sun rose in the East again today, so why would anyone be surprised the US wont leave Iraq and all that black gold. Heck, we never left Germany, Japan and South Korea and they got nothing but location going for them (as does Iraq)

As for losing. Wars are not fought with an ending as the principle goal, at least not since WWII. Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace. Welcome to Orwells 1984, sans the boot in Oceania (thus far). Cold War followed by GWOT. When the GWOT began to fizzle a mini Cold War with Russia was started by Obama and AQ was replaced with ISIS. Those are fizzling so Trumps pulled Iran from Obamas dust bin.

Empires need enemies to hold them together so they can keep feed the MIC beast and keep it from devouring the hand that feeds them. If an enemy does not exist one is created.

It helps that the majority can be made to believe anything. Ignorance and effective propaganda, the elimination of a free press, and control of education and entertainment make that possible. Nothing can reverse this. Sure, a few might break out of the matrix but they are of no consequence unless they become too visible.

winston2 , Jan 10 2020 22:34 utc | 58
27
The S300 can see F35s just fine.Its not at a fixed model,the appellation is a generic, and denotes a class of missile with a range of 300km.Radars and c&c systems are updated constantly.
They are not your daddys S300s that Greece never updated, you're in for a rude surprise if you think so.
Really?? , Jan 10 2020 22:47 utc | 59
Jen @ 1
"The sheer arrogance and wilful blindness expressed in the US State Department press statement and WaPo staffer Louisa Loveluck's tweets are astounding beyond belief. "
+++++++

One is left gobsmacked and speechless.
An interloper is told to get the hell out of your house and he retorts: "No, we are here to stay and renew our marriage vows with you!"
This is insane.
Surely the world can see that Pompeo and others at State are deranged, out of touch with reality.

Honestly, one is at a loss for words.

As ever, more thanks to b for keeping up with all of this.

chet380 , Jan 10 2020 22:51 utc | 60
@ Sammy 10

The sooner Tel Aviv is glass, the sooner the US WILL pull out of the ME.

Formerly T-Bear , Jan 10 2020 22:57 utc | 61
@ karlof1 | Jan 10 2020 20:56 utc | 24

Referring your observations here concerning DNC may be problematic, instead it might have better standing to fact if DLC (Democratic Leadership Committee) is used as it is a construct of the Clintons in their takeover of the D-party for the 1992 election. It is highly unlikely Hillary replaced that organisation for her attempts at high office. It is also highly unlikely Obama had the interest or motive to replace the Clinton organisation in his Presidency, he hardly replaced Bush 43's administration at the end of eight years. All too much of this information has gone down memory holes and no longer carries sufficient significance to matter for the public but should definitely matter to those interested in modern historical developments. Verification may likely be found by analysing the membership of the D-party's financial committee (membership should be matter of public record) and determine their political allegiances
YMMV

Really?? , Jan 10 2020 22:59 utc | 62
"Iraqi's declare Iran's strike on the US base a breach of sovereignty. Iraqi's that should be allied with Iran for the purpose of driving the US out."

One Iraqi. Two Iraqis .

No apostrophe for plural.

Just for possessive, e.g., "Iran's."

Is that so hard?

No, it is not hard.

Abe , Jan 10 2020 22:59 utc | 63
On completely unrelated note, b, you are aware that your website, as set as it is, gives us government technical ability to identify each and every one of posters here? Regardless where you host your website.

You website imports contents from ajax.googleapis.com. It is spyware used for tracking users across whole internet, every site that uses google api is voluntarily enabling google to track people so they can build surfing history/profile for everyone.

google shares that info with us government.

government compares timestamps of posts here, and can identify people.

HTTPS website doesn't protects anyone here in this regard.

Just for posters to know there is technical possibility.

bjd , Jan 10 2020 23:12 utc | 64
Subvert, Sabotage, Eliminate.
bjd , Jan 10 2020 23:19 utc | 65
Iraq has Trump by the short hairs.
In a few months the election circus will really get underway. If they're smart and patriottic, the PMF will slowly start hitting US targets, forcing Trump's hand. An increased campaign of pressure.
Like Tet '68. The Bagdad Olympics.
Really?? , Jan 10 2020 23:26 utc | 66
karlof1 @50
""'Power-driven vessel A approaches the port side of power-driven vessel B. Vessel A is considered the give-way vessel. As the give-way vessel, A must take EARLY and SUBSTANTIAL action to keep clear and avoid crossing the stand-on vessel B.'
Farragut (A) should have passed behind B."

Video was taken on the US ship, right (voice? Looks to me like the Russian ship (top left) was crossing the US ship's bow from port to starboard of US (closer) ship. I.e., from the port side. Not "approaching the port side." So, as far as I can see, the US vessel had the right of way; the Russian ship should have given way/changed course.

Cf. "1. If another vessel is approaching you from the port -- or left -- side of your boat, you have the right of way and should maintain your speed and direction."

J-Dogg , Jan 10 2020 23:32 utc | 67
I am going to go out on a limb and say the reason for all the western obfuscation is that Boeing is already in trouble due to the 737MAX issues. Boeing being a major component in USA economy needs to be protected from the fact they just lost another plane to mechanical/design error.
karlof1 , Jan 10 2020 23:35 utc | 68
ChasMark @55--

There's lots of info to verify in those comments. For the most part, they're all correct. The exception comes to Iranian air defences, their indigenous designed S-400 equivalent, overall radar net, EW capabilities, and independent internet communications. The overall conclusion is Iran is far better prepared and equipped than Outlaw US Empire/NATO knew. It should also be reiterated that Iran's under Russia's nuclear aegis, which was publicly stated by Putin and an adjutant and clearly repeated to Pompeo and Trump by both Lavrov and Putin. Furthermore as publicly stated, China has Iran's back fiscally. In other words, Iran and its allies have more oomph collectively than the Outlaw US Empire and its vassals, many of the latter actually desire better relations with the CRI troika.

Perhaps the key point made is the supposed inability of Saudi to free itself from the Empire's shackles, which actually does make sense when one thinks long term. The logic of Iran's HOPE Proposal is impeccable and is the only genuine route out of the current dilemma. Clearly, it's been determined the Outlaw US Empire is the sole impediment to implementing HOPE and thus must be ousted from its ability to impede. I wrote back in September when HOPE was introduced at the UNGA that Trump would be a fool not to embrace it instead of oppose it as he could then call the Empire a partner in the project. Clearly, he was advised not to do so.

james , Jan 10 2020 23:40 utc | 69
@ likklemore and karlof1.. i liked the comment on moa twitter feed - "This was an american driving school marked with a very big "L" means "learner". Please drive carefully with max. consideration."

@ 66 really? the other video is better then the one shown in b's twitter feed clip.. check it out in the first video of 2 shown on the rt link.. cheers..

Tony , Jan 10 2020 23:41 utc | 70
The sooner that fat, lying, smirking terrorist thug Pompeo is sacked or killed, the better. He is a huge liability to our world.
karlof1 , Jan 10 2020 23:48 utc | 71
Really?? @66--

That's the impression you'd get when the USN is crossing the oncoming RuN path. I run into those sorts of helmsmen all the time on the ocean outside of Newport, Oregon. Additionally, with all the incidents of terrible navigation abilities seen over the past 3+ years and the lies made to cover them, the USN has zero credibility just like its parent organization the Outlaw US Empire.

Figleaf23 , Jan 10 2020 23:53 utc | 72
It occurs to me that a host country that is no in conflict with an over-staying force can make their life very challenging without having to actually fight them.

Outlaw any commerce between occupying forces and local businesses. Cut the roads to and from the bases. Fly unarmed drones in the path of their aircraft. Delay, deny, defy any requests for cooperation. Divert streams to flood their bases. Get really creative and make their life hell.

William Gruff , Jan 11 2020 0:01 utc | 73
The US Navy never backs down from any challenge! [ video ]
karlof1 , Jan 11 2020 0:07 utc | 74
Formerly T-Bear @61--

Thanks for your reply! From what I observe, there's a lot of political angst within the Empire that Trump's actions and subsequent BigLies have enhanced and brought to the surface. The Act of War was the biggest domestic political error he could have committed, which shows he has zero sense. Sanders is now the #1 D-Party candidate, and he and Gabbard with a genuinely Progressive & Anti-war platform ought to win handily if allowed to.

You may have seen these one two links I've previously posted dealing with the beginnings of the 2020 election season. The first is the initial episode of a series in which I've seen the second, which is here . The second of the three is very entertaining, and all are just shy of 30 min.

Hope you're doing well in post-Brexit Ireland!

ebolax , Jan 11 2020 0:13 utc | 75
Sadly and unfortunately, the US will only withdrawal after it has suffered another catastrophic loss, similar to what befell the soldiers in Lebanon. This is a criminal enterprise sitting atop the US Military. You would figure people putting their ass on the line would try and understand what they're really fighting for, but alas, most do not find out until after they come home.
DFC , Jan 11 2020 0:18 utc | 76
The US has started the chess game in a very poor position, with the pawns and horses deployed too forward in the chessboard (only 5.200 soldiers in Iraq and 10.000 in Kuwait), and the USA military leadership are in a very bad situation, if they try to send massive troops and equipment reinforcement Iran will not be iddle waiting how US is preparing to destroy them as the stupid Saddam did in 1991 and again in 2003, no, Iran will start the war with any pretext before new troops & equipment is deployed in significant amounts.

On the other hand, if Iran escalate, the CENTCOM cannot support the "lost" garrison in Iraq and Kuwait, they do not have enough forces deployed in the theater, and an airlift operation of this magnitude under fire is very dangerous and a ride through hundreds of miles through hostile terrain under harassment from Iranians and PMU troops "Hezbollah style" (as IDF suffer in 2006), and without heavy armor scort and close air support will be almost suicidal.

Iranian have been preparing for a war with USA from 1979, but now the situation is better than ever, I do not give a cent on USA now if they do not retreat quickly from Syria and Iraq (if Trump is enough intelligent it will order soon, but I am afraid he wants to play poker once more), and stop to make threats and provocations.
But they "cannot" retreat, you know, is an electoral year and Trump want to be re-elected above all.

Checkmate!

div> Those oil deals Iraq made with China in exchange for Iraqi electrical infrastructure projects are something Trump will not allow and has threatened Iraq with the terrors of the earth. As Karloff1 suggests the Iraqis have few choices, Trumps State department have been blunt... you are vassals and you will do as you are told or you will be punished. That's plain and we can all be thankful for Trumps honesty. The ball is now in the Iraqi court, either refuse to be vassals and fight for your sovereignty or bow your heads and vacate the field.

Posted by: Harry law , Jan 11 2020 0:30 utc | 77

Those oil deals Iraq made with China in exchange for Iraqi electrical infrastructure projects are something Trump will not allow and has threatened Iraq with the terrors of the earth. As Karloff1 suggests the Iraqis have few choices, Trumps State department have been blunt... you are vassals and you will do as you are told or you will be punished. That's plain and we can all be thankful for Trumps honesty. The ball is now in the Iraqi court, either refuse to be vassals and fight for your sovereignty or bow your heads and vacate the field.

Posted by: Harry law | Jan 11 2020 0:30 utc | 77

juliania , Jan 11 2020 0:33 utc | 78
I am seeing the position of Iraq against Iran as being very similar to the position of Ukraine vis a vis Russia -- as 'younger' to 'elder brother'. Not as lesser to greater, but as family, the ones nearby. Crimea grabbed onto that lifeline - as well they might!

Now a new element of the multipolar world is at early stages of being born. And this was put in effect, if we go back and look, immediately up the invasion of Iraq by Bush Jr. But, clearly, Iraq went through more horror, more destabilization than did Ukraine. The latter had a governmental coup resulting in internal strife; Iraq had a military invasion. So, hopefully the Resistance will be patient with it - like Syria, it is in great need of aid, comfort, and reassurance that no further hegemony will be visited upon it. Sovereignty is the issue and rightfully so.

There are lessons to be learned, after we finish mourning the murders of men who were apparently engaged in the diplomatic efforts to establish this new multipolarity, or at least lay some groundwork for future talks along that line. You don't murder diplomats. Case closed; invaders out! And that is more difficult, more delicate, if up till now you have only yourself survived as a nation by clinging to the skirts of the American empire. Difficult but inevitable.

Iraq now can look toward Ukraine. Has that country done well taking the unipolar path? Hardly. Did South Vietnam? Hardly. But as spring approaches, how are each changing course? The dust is settling; you can see better. Travel with Pepe over the great mountains following real trading routes, of the centuries past. Bring your own unique assets to the fore and let friends visit and see what it is that makes you you. Another name for the Axis of Resistance is Peace and Prosperity. Mutual benefit. It's coming.

In this country, the US, long ago there was a mighty empire, the empire of the Anasazis, in the center of the Southwest. They caused to be built mighty edifices and they suborned the surrounding farming peoples because they had power to predict the seasonal changes and supposedly command rain to fall. Everyone believed it and everyone obeyed. For a time. There was no alternative. Until it didn't rain, and it didn't rain. So, the people left, they went where there were rivers, they abandoned the great Anasazi centre. It is in ruins today. But the people have survived.

We are suddenly in another pivotal moment. And it will be difficult for those of us who willingly or not have benefited from empire. But many of us say with you - invaders out! Peace and blessings to all!

Walter , Jan 11 2020 0:36 utc | 79
: Likklemore | Jan 10 2020 21:15 utc | 31

The COLREGS do not apply to the exceptionals...

US destroyer blatantly violated international rules for preventing collisions at sea by making a manoeuvre to cross the Russian ship's course in the North Arabian Sea - @MoD_Russia🇷🇺

ben , Jan 11 2020 0:44 utc | 80
Cortes @ 47; Thanks for the link. Interesting Si-Fi. Maybe not that far fetched after all..

Manny @ 49; Welcome. Keep reading, and once you get through middle-school, maybe you'll change your mind.

Pft @ 57; Good read, thanks!

Walter , Jan 11 2020 0:58 utc | 81
Bearing in mind that Pravda ain't what it used to be this policy, described bluntly in article title : "If NATO strikes Kaliningrad, Russia will seize Baltic in 48 hours" if real, would probably extend to the prevention of similar build-up in the matter of the Iraqi and Iranian "MAGA" programs now developing.

Quote from Pravda> "As soon as we can see the concentration of American aircraft on airfields in Europe - they cannot reach us in any other way - we will simply destroy those airfields by launching our medium-range ballistic missiles at those targets. Afterwards, our troops will go on offensive in the Baltic direction and take control of the entire Baltic territory within 48 hours. NATO won't even have time to come to its senses - they will see a very powerful military buildup on the borders with Poland. Then they will have to think whether they should continue the war. As a result, all this will end with NATO losing the Baltic States," Mikhail Alexandrov told Pravda.Ru describing one of the scenarios for a possible development of events in case of Russia's response to NATO aggression.
Another variant for the breakthrough of the missile defense system in Kaliningrad provides for a massive cruise missile attack on the Russian territory. According to the expert, Russia has cruise and ballistic missiles that it can launch on the territory of the United States.
"If the Americans launch a missile attack on Kaliningrad, then we will strike, say, Seattle, where largest US aircraft factories are located. Having destroyed those factories we will deprive the Americans of the possibility to build their aircraft. They will no longer be able to build up their fleet of military aircraft," said Mikhail Alexandrov.
Russia has efficient air defense systems to intercept cruise missiles. If it goes about a ballistic missile strike, the expert reminded that Russia has a missile defense area in Moscow that can intercept at least 100 missiles and maybe even more, since there are no restrictions associated with the ABM Treaty.


One might assume the same policy would apply for all Ru, and Iran too, as Iran is critical to the survival of Ru.

Paul Damascene , Jan 11 2020 1:01 utc | 82
On the topic of Iran not waiting for a military build up as a precursor to a US assault on Iran...

I wonder if an intermediate step for Iran might be, in cooperation with the PMU, to threaten to attack any new forces coming into Iraq, taking this to be escalation prior to an invasion, and therefore a threat that must countered before it worsens.

Medusa - Perseus , Jan 11 2020 1:14 utc | 83
Posted by: powerandpeople | Jan 10 2020 20:30 utc | 19

you might be interestted in Gordon Hahn's take:

https://gordonhahn.com/2020/01/07/russia-the-eurasian-triangle-and-the-soleiman-assassination/

January 7, 2020
Russia, the Eurasian Triangle, and the Soleiman Assassination

***********************

Likklemore , Jan 11 2020 1:14 utc | 84
@ Walter 79

but there is this query: what are the consequences of taunting? A review of the past year saw the u.s. losing stature and, since 2014, its dollar as world reserve currency being shunned.

Once that goes. Hmmm, and in the Gulf:

2015: Reuters Qatar launches first Chinese yuan clearing hub in Middle East

2017: China will 'compel' Saudi Arabia to trade oil in yuan and that will affect the dollar

FF
2019: Abqaig - After the Houthis take down of KSA oil facilities, and failure of US defenses does KSA still feel secure?

Working closely with Russia, Soleimani was instrumental in the battles for Syria, Lebanon and Yemen.
Trump, the braggart, stunned the world. Even their special relationship Brits!
It is reported when Boris was told of Soleimani's murder he said, O, F**K.

January 3, 2020 everything changed and they know not what they have done on behalf of Israel.

jiri , Jan 11 2020 1:18 utc | 85
The attack on al Assad airbase was the US's Suez Moment.

What remains now is to decide how to dismantle the Empire.

Harry law , Jan 11 2020 1:20 utc | 86
An exit from Iraq would make the occupation and theft of oil from Syria untenable,and the land route from Iran to Syria and Lebanon less hazardous. This would be fatal for Israel and will insist the US stay in Iraq. Unfortunately for the US 5,000 will not cut the mustard, how many US troops could Trump put into Iraq to quell an uprising in election year? US bases in the Gulf are extremely vulnerable especially the largest base Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar who many regard as being located in enemy territory. Trump is gambling and many shrinks think he's nuts, I agree..... Psychiatrists: Urgent action must be taken against Trump for creating Iran crisis
https://www.presstv.com/Detail/2020/01/10/615852/Trump-is-%E2%80%98dangerous-and-incapacitated%E2%80%99-Psychiatrists
Really?? , Jan 11 2020 1:24 utc | 87
James @ 69

The two videos don't look like the same situation.
The first appears to have been shot from the Farragut's port side; the second, from her starboard side.

And in the first the Russian ship appears to be bearing down on the Farragut off the Farragut's port bow. In the second the Russian ship appears to be overtaking the Farragut, coming up from the starboard side. I don't see how the videos can have been taken at the same time. The rule that seems to apply to the situ in video 1 is:

"Crossing Situation.

When two power-driven vessels are crossing so as to involve risk of collision, the vessel which has the other on her own starboard side shall keep out of the way and shall, if the circumstances of the case admit, avoid crossing ahead of the other vessel."

Since the Russian vessel appears to have the Farragut on her starboard side, the Russian vessel should change course and presumably deflect to starboard. (Once the two vessels were as close as they were, both should have deflected to starboard.) But instead it looks as though the Russian vessel at the last minute deflected to port.

However, video 2 looks like a totally different situ. So to me it remains unclear what the actual disposition of the vessels was. The videos must have been taken at two different points in the encounter.

diveshopingoa , Jan 11 2020 1:26 utc | 88
Thank you b for these great articles and allowing comments.

I want to nod out to ChasMark | Jan 10 2020 22:21 utc | 55 for a great comment.

For decades the US has controlled the world through petro dollars and counterinsurgency warfare. They lost every time at this but its more about the money spent and keeping fluidity within economic circles.

With Iran's missile attack being an eye opener I hope the US is smart enough to know they have lost. MIC spokes person when asked why the base did not protect itself. He said they did not have the hardware to do it. No Patriots because they owned the sky up to that point. What is a Patriot to counterinsurgency. They had a M-901 (TEL) which they got rid of years ago supposedly. It is loaded with six TOW missiles and would generally be used to disable bomb laden vehicles approaching the gate. Counterinsurgency again.

Those days are over. It is the day of the missile and belt and road economic plans. No longer can air craft carriers hang off the coast to control the skies. How will the stunned US MIC bring in additional troops and equipment. Planes or ships are small targets but highly valuable ones. It is not always easy to know how things happen. Like the ships struck this past year in the gulf or KSA oil infrastructure hit, who did it and how is hard to determine.

I imagine the MIC is burning the mid-night oil with the realization that they are now in a war they are totally unprepared to fight. They have 15,000 soldiers strung out in Iraq unprotected from missile attack and no way to protect them. They will talk all BS but it is empty and they know it. They do have two things. One is fear and the other nukes.

There is much talk of weak knees among the Iraqi people and government. That is with good reason. The destruction of city after city. Some they find through the birth of deformed children that some of their cities are radioactive. Of course they are afraid the USA killed a million of them and turned 24 million into refugees. As time goes on they will realize that the bully is not what it was and every new strike by Iran will build the confidence to push the Americans out.

I wonder if the day of the nuke is coming to an end as well. Temper tantrum Trump decides to nuke either Iran or Iraq the world will speak up. Perhaps strike back as the Russians have said. If the point is the oil and gas in the area and the control of it then nukes will destroy that value.

If there was a time that America wet itself it is now. If the 9 flags stand together then move as one their cries will drive the heathen from their home. I also believe that if it happens then the USA is done. Played out.

Richard Steven Hackr , Jan 11 2020 1:27 utc | 89
"Iran could not have dreamt of a better President to rejuvenate its position domestically and regionally."

The problem is that Israel could not have dreamt of a better President to get a war with Launched. In fact, Ayelet Shaked, the Israeli Minister of Justice (some irony there), once said as much explicitly, albeit over the issue of the West Bank, not Iran.

Ayelet Shaked urges Israel to take advantage of Trump and annex West Bank
https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/aylet-shaked-urges-israel-take-advantage-trump-presidency-annex-west-bank

Quote:

In a tweet following a Jerusalem Post conference in New York on Sunday, Ayelet Shaked said it was time for Israel to "establish facts on the ground".
"There is no better time than now," Shaked, who earlier this month was sacked by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as justice minister, wrote on Twitter.
"Do not miss Trump's reign - that's what I just said at the Jerusalem Post in New York."

End Wuote

This is because Trump is devoted to Israel and devoted to an antipathy to Iran. The more Iran gains ground in the Middle East, the more Israel will push Trump (and any successor to Trump) to attack Iran. And he will do it - either deliberately or out of incompetence - and the difference doesn't matter.

Really?? , Jan 11 2020 1:31 utc | 90
It occurs to me that a host country that is no in conflict with an over-staying force can make their life very challenging without having to actually fight them.

. . .

Posted by: Figleaf23 | Jan 10 2020 23:53 utc | 72

++++++++++++++
Change all the road and street signs! OK, there are fewer signs in Iraq than there were in Czechoslovakia, but it would still be worth a shot.

William H Warrick , Jan 11 2020 1:40 utc | 91
Condo, Dubya's "House Negro", got a Stillborn baby instead.
Really?? , Jan 11 2020 1:42 utc | 92
That's the impression you'd get when the USN is crossing the oncoming RuN path. . . .

Posted by: karlof1 | Jan 10 2020 23:48 utc | 71
++++++++++

Well, when two ships are approaching each other at an angle, they are both crossing each other's path. What counts is, who is going faster and thus will cross the other's bow sooner. It sure looks to me like when they got close the Ru vessel had the Farragut on her (Ru's) starboard side. If the two vessels were going opposite directions but on parallel tracks, they would pass same side to same side (i.e., port to port; starboard to starboard). If they are approaching at an angle, the relative relationship of the two sides will change with the speed of the vessels. You must visualize the situ from each vessel, not one, and gauge speed and relationship when the two courses cross. However, both vessels in proximity have the obligation to take action to avoid a collision. In that situ I believe the default is for both to deflect to starboard.

Wait to see who says uncle first at sea is a stupid game of chicken. Basically IMO both captains broke the rule of avoiding collisions and endangered their crews and their vessels.

Lurk , Jan 11 2020 1:45 utc | 93
Abe | Jan 10 2020 22:59 utc | 63

The "decentraleyes" addon for firefox mitigates some of these data leaks. Apple IOS users are probably fucked any which way.

Jen , Jan 11 2020 1:51 utc | 94
Really @ 66, 87:

In the video where the Russian ship is in the top left-hand corner, the USS Farragut is moving away from the Russian ship. In that video, the Russian ship is travelling behind the US ship and crosses from the

Harry law , Jan 11 2020 1:53 utc | 95
Here is a wonderful and witty must read article by Gary Brecher [the War Nerd] which puts the US predicament in the Gulf into perspective
"Ships currently have no defense against a ballistic missile attack."
That's right: no defense at all. The truth is that they have very feeble defenses against any attack with anything more modern than cannon. I've argued before no carrier group would survive a saturation attack by huge numbers of low-value attackers, whether they're Persians in Cessnas and cigar boats or mass-produced Chinese cruise missiles. But at least you could look at the missile tubes and Phalanx gatlings and pretend that you were safe. But there is no defense, none at all, against something as obvious as a ballistic missile.
http://exiledonline.com/the-war-nerd-this-is-how-the-carriers-will-die/all/1/
Jen , Jan 11 2020 1:55 utc | 96
Sorry, accidentally posted too early @ 94 after being interrupted. I meant to say that the Russian ship, travelling behind the Farragut, crossed from that ship's starboard side to its portside. This suggests that the Farragut did not give way in the first video when the Russian ship first approached but steamed on ahead and went in front of the Russian ship.
ben , Jan 11 2020 1:56 utc | 97
Medusa-Perseus @ 83: Thanks for the link. Despite the authors speaking, in the first paragraph, about Iran's "provocations", it's an informative and well written piece.

An excerpt;

"Again, it is high time that Washington get off its high horse and begin to negotiate a new world order with globe's major powers. The prospects for this, however, appear less likely than ever. Unfortunately, when there was still an opportunity to use American power to reshape rather than destabilize the world, the Obama administration chose the latter. With the opportunity to shift course in a mode more imposed by, rather than imposed on the U.S. virtually dissipated, the Trump administration is continuing in the Obama mode of destabilization while falling back on the one-sidedness of the military option–with all the predictable consequences."

imo , Jan 11 2020 2:14 utc | 98
For what it is worth...

An American (a professor at that, but not of culture) once asked back around 2011 the following: "Why do people in the Middle East talk so frequently about humiliation and dignity? Other countries were colonized or lost wars, yet they do not speak about humiliation and dignity. I assume that an answer to this question will help me understand Middle Eastern culture."

The differences between shame and guilt based cultures are interesting.
The terminology was popularized by Ruth Benedict in The Chrysanthemum and the Sword , who described American culture as a "guilt culture" and Japanese culture as a "shame culture." The Islamic Middle East is generally a shame based culture.

In east-west interactions these two distinct worldviews and values systems operate -- i.e. guilt vs shame. For example:

"Loyalty: All Arabs belong to a group or tribe. Loyalty to the family tribe is considered paramount to maintaining honor. One does not question the correctness of the elders or tribes in front of outsiders. It is paramount that the tribe sticks together in order to survive. Once again, Arab history and folklore are full of stories of heroes who were loyal to the end."

http://www.islam-watch.org/Others/Honour-and-Shame-in-Islam.htm

In the Eastern view (well Islamic anyway), there is a stronger sense that one has 'it' (honor) by birth and then risks losing it through various shameful actions etc. As distinct from a work ethic stance where working towards something is the goal.

The main issue at play in the recent Iran-US-Iraqi dynamic from this point of view is not the surface level simpleton MSM narrative of who was the good & bad guys etc. Leave that for the childish unsophisticated 'super hero' mentalities raised on comics.

Rather, in this case, it is the fact/perception that the Arab Iraqi 'host' failed to uphold the accepted ancient honor codes of protecting an invited guest (well at least for three days). Only barbarians do not understand and play by this value system.

So, the USA, as the said culturally ignorant actors, is actually not really the core issue in this case. That is just an inconvenient fact of history.

What is more real and politically charged is the fact that the Iraqi Arab nation (leadership) invited an Iranian (Persian) guest -- allegedly to talk peace deals with the Wahhabi gang -- and failed to uphold/honor the ancient host-guest codes. Even if there was no duplicity involved, the fact remains scratched into the historical record that they failed -- ergo, shame must now be dealt with.

Therefore, the future events will more than likely unfold one way or another according to the honor-shame etiquette process.

Now, of course some in the US hierarchy may well know and understand this dynamic and apply it -- and Gregory Bateson used the term "Schismogenesis" in the 1930s and played his part in WW2 within the (then) Office of Strategic Services (OSS), an institutional precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), against Japanese held territories in the Pacific. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schismogenesis )

Likklemore , Jan 11 2020 2:19 utc | 99
They went for two:

AP reports: US tried to take out another Iranian leader, but failed

LINK
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The U.S. military tried, but failed, to take out another senior Iranian commander on the same day that an American airstrike killed the Revolutionary Guard's top general, U.S. officials said Friday.

The officials said a military airstrike by special operations forces targeted Abdul Reza Shahlai, a high-ranking commander in Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps but the mission was not successful. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity in order to discuss a classified mission.[.]

Officials said both Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani and Shahlai were on approved military targeting lists, which indicates a deliberate effort by the U.S. to cripple the leadership of Iran's Quds force, which has been designated a terror organization by the U.S. Officials would not say how the mission failed.[.]

Shocked I am. NOT.

Parisian Guy , Jan 11 2020 2:20 utc | 100
There has been a similar incident between US and Russian navies a few months ago.

Same claims from the USN against the Russians.
Guess what? The video clearly showed the Russians on the starboard side of the USN ship.

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[Jan 10, 2020] Lord Salisbury was credited with having said that the problem with those British strategists who saw Russia as a menace to India was that they were using maps of such small scale that the enormous distances and formidable physical barriers that lay between Moscow of Delhi were neglected.

Jan 10, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

bevin , Jan 10 2020 18:52 utc | 15

"Reuters is a British agency.."
Or is it Canadian? Or is it both? It probably doesn't matter.

as b says it is economic warfare-maximum pressure- designed to impoverish and isolate Iranians.

Lord Salisbury was credited with having said that the problem with those British strategists who saw Russia as a menace to India was that they were using maps of such small scale that the enormous distances and formidable physical barriers that lay between Moscow of Delhi were neglected.

In this case the problem the US has is that it seems to look at Iran only from the west, forgetting that overland access from the east and north- the New Silk Road- is equally possible. Sometimes it looks as if the strategy of the US is to do all it can to advance China's BRI and to tighten the bonds between Eurasia's vast populations.

[Jan 10, 2020] Incidentally there is a new documentary "MH-17: In Search of Truth" doing the rounds of online alternative news media. The fellow who made the documentary, Vasily Prozorov, is a former SBU security officer

Jan 10, 2020 | off-guardian.org

Jen Flight PS752 passenger list shows that the huge majority of passengers carrying Iranian, Canadian and EU passports were Iranian.

These people were most likely visiting relatives in Iran over Christmas / New Year and were returning home. They were using UIA because the airline offers cheap flights between North America, Europe and western Asia with Kiev as a stop-over. Most of these people would have got off in Kiev and flown back to their home countries on other connecting flights.

Also as far as I know, the plane crashed not long after take-off. That, er, might suggest a problem with the plane itself. But the Boeing plane is not of the same model as the two Boeing 737 MAX 8 planes that crashed in Indonesia in 2018 and Ethiopia in 2019.

Incidentally there is a new documentary "MH-17: In Search of Truth" doing the rounds of online alternative news media. The fellow who made the documentary, Vasily Prozorov, is a former SBU security officer. It makes an interesting claim about the involvement of Western intelligence agencies and the SBU in creating and carrying out an incident and distraction, and in controlling and shaping the narrative and the disinformation.

I'm now starting to wonder if there may be a link between the MH17 shoot-down and the Skripal poisoning incident in March 2018. 3 -1 Reply Jan 9, 2020 9:42 PM

richard le sarc ,

No visual sighting of missile tracks, I see, and the video of the explosion then crash does not appear to show any. Details, mere details-the presstitute vermin are in full vilification propaganda mode already.

richard le sarc ,

I'm sorry-Iran ' refuses to hand over the black boxes'???!! To whom? To Bibi Nuttyyahoo, perhaps? Iran leads the investigation, so they decipher the 'black boxes'. The case of MH17 where the black box information has simply disappeared, tells you what you could expect if the West ever got their hands on these.

RobG ,

It's standard MO that the western powers take out civilian airliners.

It's called Murder Inc. and people in the West vote these psychopaths into power.

Gall ,

Never mind 9/11 where any blackbox data was most likely fabricated like the planes themselves.

Yonatan ,

Iran is apparently refusing to hand over the black boxes from the crashed plane.

should be

Under ICAO rules, Iran has no obliation to pass on the black boxes from the crashed plane to the maker. All it need do is pass them on to any laboratory of its chosing that has ICAO certification.

[Jan 10, 2020] Turkey discovered how dependent its economy had become on Russia including Russian gas during the trade embargo that ensued upon the shootdown of SU-24

Jan 10, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

karlof1 , Jan 8 2020 20:09 utc | 228

Walter @215--

Thanks for your reply! Some years ago prior to Russia's Syrian intervention, I examined where genuine Turkish national interests lay and concluded they weren't in the EU given the numerous repulses when attempting membership but rather they lay to the North and East in rekindling relations with longtime rivals Russia and Iran. Putin noted this rekindling's been ongoing for awhile:

"I would like to note that Russia has been exporting gas to Turkey for 30 years, even though not everyone knows about it. It was initially shipped through the Trans-Balkan gas pipeline, then through the direct, transit-free Blue Stream pipeline. Last year alone, 24 billion cubic metres of fuel was delivered to our Turkish partners."

Turkey discovered how dependent its economy had become on Russia during the trade embargo that ensued upon the shootdown of the Mig, which IMO is the main reason a spiteful Erdogan released the torrent of refugees into the EU as he finally realized Turkey's been used for decades by the West with no real tangible benefits to show. And yes, IMO he was returning to sender Terrorists to Libya, and it was no small number as it was several thousand.

IMO, Qatar and Turkey have Seen the Light when it comes to sponsoring terrorist affiliated organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood; That all they've done is contribute to the Evil Outlaw US Empire's plan for continuous destabilization of the Persian Gulf region as part of its strategy to interdict Eurasian Integration, the latter of which is in both Qatar's and Turkey's genuine national interest.

[Jan 10, 2020] Almost six years down the road we are still waiting for the MH17 satellite imagery that exist according to John Kerry. He was lying or the images and the narrative don't match. Hint: the second option.

Jan 10, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

A P , Jan 9 2020 18:35 utc | 28

Eyewitnesses saw one engine on fire before the crash, the plane still on a glide, but the 737-800 can fly on one engine, others have done so and landed safely.

There are two fire detection loops in each engine, plus extinguisher and other cut-off systems.
http://www.b737.org.uk/fireprotection.htm#Engines

This leads one to believe this was not a simple "engine on fire" situation.

If indeed it was a shoot-down, it was far enough away from the security-protected area of the airport, but not so high that a simple manpad-type weapon would be ruled out.

Another option is a small bomb placed in an engine cowl, which could be activated by altitude sensing or remote control (the plane wasn't very high, and the probable flight path well known). Big enough device to damage the engine and start a fire and maybe knock out the shut-off and fire suppression systems, but not big enough to be obvious. The engine fails, spits out turbine blades which damage the wing and puncture fuel tanks, damage the avionics for the whole plane. Rotor speeds will be in the multiple-10,000s RPM, so a LOT of kinetic energy when these things come apart.

Cui bono? The obvious answer is the Deep State Zionists in Israel and the US, so this may have been a Mossad operation, with or without the knowledge of the CIA or US military.

The fact Trumpty Dumbdy is playing the "deescalation card" so strongly could indicate he didn't authorize it and hopes to stop Nuttyyahoo/Mossad from frog-marching him into a war that would lose him the next election for being a flip-flopper on his last election "end the endless proxy wars" rhetoric.

"By deception shall you do war"... the Mossad mission statement.

Symen Danziger , Jan 9 2020 18:36 utc | 29

If US officials claim they are "confident", that actually means they don't have a shred of evidence. Intelligence lingo.

It's too early to call but POTUS claims Iran shot down the Ukrainian 737 near Tehran. On CBS fake News they suggest that the US have satellite imagery showing two SAM launches right before the crash.

Almost six years down the road we are still waiting for the MH17 satellite imagery that exist according to John Kerry. He was lying or the images and the narrative don't match. Hint: the second option.

To prevent crashing airliners, PSYOPS, sanctions, fake trials etc. steer well clear of the Ukraine, Ukrainians, Ukrainian airspace, the Ukrainian army, Ukrainian missiles and Ukrainian planes. You don't want to touch the Ukraine, not even with a very long stick.

We can be confident (in the normal sense of the word) that Bellingcat will be involved. Those NATO sponsored citizen propagandist will spend countless hours doctoring "evidence" and spinning neocon lies to their heart's content.

It must have been a Russian BUK that was driven on the back of a trailer by Putin's niece all the way from Kursk to Tehran, a direct order from the Kremlin!

In Turkey the trailer almost overran Bana Alabed and evil Assad provided some Novichok along the way to coat the throttles of the 737 in case the missile wouldn't hit its intended target. Boeing 737's don't fall from the sky on their own.

A fact finding mission from the OPCW has left The Hague for Tehran, they might even find some cannisters containing chlorine in the wreckage. It looks like they dropped from the air, they were not placed there manually.

The Dutch Safety Board is 100% independent from NATO influence and could conduct the accident investigation in an impartial way. No conflict of interest whatsoever.

The Ukraine will be part of the Joint Investigation Team that does the criminal investigation and to assure everything will be done according to law they will even get a veto right over the investigation.

Iran can be confident that justice will be served.

[Jan 10, 2020] The Saker interviews Michael Hudson

Highly recommended!
Looks like Iran is Catch22 for the USA: it can destroy it, but only at the cost of losing empire and dollar hegemony...
Notable quotes:
"... The United States is now turning on the screws demanding that other countries sacrifice their growth in order to finance the U.S. unipolar empire. In effect, foreign countries are beginning to respond to the United States what the ten tribes of Israel said when they withdrew from the southern kingdom of Judah, whose king Rehoboam refused to lighten his demands (1 Kings 12). They echoed the cry of Sheba son of Bikri a generation earlier: "Look after your own house, O David!" The message is: What do other countries have to gain by remaining in the US unipolar neoliberalized world, as compared to using their own wealth to build up their own economies? It's an age-old problem. ..."
"... The dollar will still play a role in US trade and investment, but it will be as just another currency, held at arms length until it finally gives up its domineering attempt to strip other countries' wealth for itself. However, its demise may not be a pretty sight. ..."
"... Conflict in the ME has traditionally almost always been about oil [and of course Israel]. This situation is different. It is only partially about oil and Israel, but OVERWHHEMINGLY it is about the BRI. ..."
"... The salient factor as I see it is the Oil for Technology initiative that Iraq signed with China shortly before it slid into this current mess. ..."
"... This was a mechanism whereby China would buy Iraq oil and these funds would be used directly to fund infrastructure and self-sufficiency initiatives and technologies that would help to drag Iraq out of the complete disaster that the US war had created in this country. A key part of this would be that China would also make extra loans available at the same time to speed up this development. ..."
"... "Iraq's Finance Ministry that the country had started exporting 100,000 barrels per day (bpd) of crude oil to China in October as part of the 20-year oil-for-infrastructure deal agreed between the two countries." ..."
"... "For Iraq and Iran, China's plans are particularly far-reaching, OilPrice.com has been told by a senior oil industry figure who works closely with Iran's Petroleum Ministry and Iraq's Oil Ministry. China will begin with the oil and gas sector and work outwards from that central point. In addition to being granted huge reductions on buying Iranian oil and gas, China is to be given the opportunity to build factories in both Iran and Iraq – and build-out infrastructure, such as railways – overseen by its own management staff from Chinese companies. These are to have the same operational structure and assembly lines as those in China, so that they fit seamlessly into various Chinese companies' assembly lines' process for whatever product a particular company is manufacturing, whilst also being able to use the still-cheap labour available in both Iraq and Iraq." ..."
"... Hudson is so good. He's massively superior to most so called military analysts and alternative bloggers on the net. He can clearly see the over arching picture and how the military is used to protect and project it. The idea that the US is going to leave the middle east until they are forced to is so blind as to be ridiculous. ..."
"... I'd never thought of that "stationary aircraft carrier" comparison between Israel and the British, very apt. ..."
"... Trump et al assassinated someone who was on a diplomatic mission. This action was so far removed from acceptable behavior that it must have been considered to be "by any means and at all costs". ..."
"... This article, published by Strategic Culture, features a translation of Mahdi's speech to the Iraqi parliament in which he states that Trump threatened him with assassination and the US admitted to killing hundreds of demonstrators using Navy SEAL snipers. ..."
"... This description provided by Mr Hudson is no Moore than the financial basis behind the Cebrowski doctrine instituted on 9/11. https://www.voltairenet.org/article ..."
"... "The leading country breaking up US hegemony obviously is the United States itself. That is Trump's major contribution The United States is now turning on the screws demanding that other countries sacrifice their growth in order to finance the U.S. unipolar empire." ..."
"... The US govt. have long since paid off most every European politician. Thusly, Europe, as separate nations that should be remain still under the yolk of the US Financial/Political/Military power. ..."
"... In any event, it is the same today. Energy underlies, not only the military but, all of world civilization. Oil and gas are overwhelmingly the source of energy for the modern world. Without it, civilization collapses. Thus, he who controls oil (and gas) controls the world. ..."
"... the link between the US $$$ and Saudi Oil, is the absolute means of the American Dollar to reign complete. This payment system FEEDS both the US Military, but WALL STREET, hedge funds, the US/EU oligarchs – to name just a few entities. ..."
Jan 09, 2020 | thesaker.is

[this interview was made for the Unz Review ]

Introduction: After posting Michael Hudson's article " America Escalates its "Democratic" Oil War in the Near East " on the blog, I decided to ask Michael to reply to a few follow-up questions. Michael very kindly agreed. Please see our exchange below.

The Saker

-- -- -

The Saker: Trump has been accused of not thinking forward, of not having a long-term strategy regarding the consequences of assassinating General Suleimani. Does the United States in fact have a strategy in the Near East, or is it only ad hoc?

Michael Hudson: Of course American strategists will deny that the recent actions do not reflect a deliberate strategy, because their long-term strategy is so aggressive and exploitative that it would even strike the American public as being immoral and offensive if they came right out and said it.

President Trump is just the taxicab driver, taking the passengers he has accepted – Pompeo, Bolton and the Iran-derangement syndrome neocons – wherever they tell him they want to be driven. They want to pull a heist, and he's being used as the getaway driver (fully accepting his role). Their plan is to hold onto the main source of their international revenue: Saudi Arabia and the surrounding Near Eastern oil-export surpluses and money. They see the US losing its ability to exploit Russia and China, and look to keep Europe under its control by monopolizing key sectors so that it has the power to use sanctions to squeeze countries that resist turning over control of their economies and natural rentier monopolies to US buyers. In short, US strategists would like to do to Europe and the Near East just what they did to Russia under Yeltsin: turn over public infrastructure, natural resources and the banking system to U.S. owners, relying on US dollar credit to fund their domestic government spending and private investment.

This is basically a resource grab. Suleimani was in the same position as Chile's Allende, Libya's Qaddafi, Iraq's Saddam. The motto is that of Stalin: "No person, no problem."

The Saker: Your answer raises a question about Israel: In your recent article you only mention Israel twice, and these are only passing comments. Furthermore, you also clearly say the US Oil lobby as much more crucial than the Israel Lobby, so here is my follow-up question to you: On what basis have you come to this conclusion and how powerful do you believe the Israel Lobby to be compared to, say, the Oil lobby or the US Military-Industrial Complex? To what degree do their interests coincide and to what degree to they differ?

Michael Hudson: I wrote my article to explain the most basic concerns of U.S. international diplomacy: the balance of payments (dollarizing the global economy, basing foreign central bank savings on loans to the U.S. Treasury to finance the military spending mainly responsible for the international and domestic budget deficit), oil (and the enormous revenue produced by the international oil trade), and recruitment of foreign fighters (given the impossibility of drafting domestic U.S. soldiers in sufficient numbers). From the time these concerns became critical to today, Israel was viewed as a U.S. military base and supporter, but the U.S. policy was formulated independently of Israel.

I remember one day in 1973 or '74 I was traveling with my Hudson Institute colleague Uzi Arad (later a head of Mossad and advisor to Netanyahu) to Asia, stopping off in San Francisco. At a quasi-party, a U.S. general came up to Uzi and clapped him on the shoulder and said, "You're our landed aircraft carrier in the Near East," and expressed his friendship.

Uzi was rather embarrassed. But that's how the U.S. military thought of Israel back then. By that time the three planks of U.S. foreign policy strategy that I outlined were already firmly in place.

Of course Netanyahu has applauded U.S. moves to break up Syria, and Trump's assassination choice. But the move is a U.S. move, and it's the U.S. that is acting on behalf of the dollar standard, oil power and mobilizing Saudi Arabia's Wahabi army.

Israel fits into the U.S.-structured global diplomacy much like Turkey does. They and other countries act opportunistically within the context set by U.S. diplomacy to pursue their own policies. Obviously Israel wants to secure the Golan Heights; hence its opposition to Syria, and also its fight with Lebanon; hence, its opposition to Iran as the backer of Assad and Hezbollah. This dovetails with US policy.

But when it comes to the global and U.S. domestic response, it's the United States that is the determining active force. And its concern rests above all with protecting its cash cow of Saudi Arabia, as well as working with the Saudi jihadis to destabilize governments whose foreign policy is independent of U.S. direction – from Syria to Russia (Wahabis in Chechnya) to China (Wahabis in the western Uighur region). The Saudis provide the underpinning for U.S. dollarization (by recycling their oil revenues into U.S. financial investments and arms purchases), and also by providing and organizing the ISIS terrorists and coordinating their destruction with U.S. objectives. Both the Oil lobby and the Military-Industrial Complex obtain huge economic benefits from the Saudis.

Therefore, to focus one-sidedly on Israel is a distraction away from what the US-centered international order really is all about.

The Saker: In your recent article you wrote: " The assassination was intended to escalate America's presence in Iraq to keep control the region's oil reserves ." Others believe that the goal was precisely the opposite, to get a pretext to remove the US forces from both Iraq and Syria. What are your grounds to believe that your hypothesis is the most likely one?

Michael Hudson: Why would killing Suleimani help remove the U.S. presence? He was the leader of the fight against ISIS, especially in Syria. US policy was to continue using ISIS to permanently destabilize Syria and Iraq so as to prevent a Shi'ite crescent reaching from Iran to Lebanon – which incidentally would serve as part of China's Belt and Road initiative. So it killed Suleimani to prevent the peace negotiation. He was killed because he had been invited by Iraq's government to help mediate a rapprochement between Iran and Saudi Arabia. That was what the United States feared most of all, because it effectively would prevent its control of the region and Trump's drive to seize Iraqi and Syrian oil.

So using the usual Orwellian doublethink, Suleimani was accused of being a terrorist, and assassinated under the U.S. 2002 military Authorization Bill giving the President to move without Congressional approval against Al Qaeda. Trump used it to protect Al Qaeda's terrorist ISIS offshoots.

Given my three planks of U.S. diplomacy described above, the United States must remain in the Near East to hold onto Saudi Arabia and try to make Iraq and Syria client states equally subservient to U.S. balance-of-payments and oil policy.

Certainly the Saudis must realize that as the buttress of U.S. aggression and terrorism in the Near East, their country (and oil reserves) are the most obvious target to speed the parting guest. I suspect that this is why they are seeking a rapprochement with Iran. And I think it is destined to come about, at least to provide breathing room and remove the threat. The Iranian missiles to Iraq were a demonstration of how easy it would be to aim them at Saudi oil fields. What then would be Aramco's stock market valuation?

The Saker: In your article you wrote: " The major deficit in the U.S. balance of payments has long been military spending abroad. The entire payments deficit, beginning with the Korean War in 1950-51 and extending through the Vietnam War of the 1960s, was responsible for forcing the dollar off gold in 1971. The problem facing America's military strategists was how to continue supporting the 800 U.S. military bases around the world and allied troop support without losing America's financial leverage. " I want to ask a basic, really primitive question in this regard: how cares about the balance of payments as long as 1) the US continues to print money 2) most of the world will still want dollars. Does that not give the US an essentially "infinite" budget? What is the flaw in this logic?

Michael Hudson: The U.S. Treasury can create dollars to spend at home, and the Fed can increase the banking system's ability to create dollar credit and pay debts denominated in US dollars. But they cannot create foreign currency to pay other countries, unless they willingly accept dollars ad infinitum – and that entails bearing the costs of financing the U.S. balance-of-payments deficit, getting only IOUs in exchange for real resources that they sell to U.S. buyers.

This is the situation that arose half a century ago. The United States could print dollars in 1971, but it could not print gold.

In the 1920s, Germany's Reichsbank could print deutsche marks – trillions of them. When it came to pay Germany's foreign reparations debt, all it could do was to throw these D-marks onto the foreign exchange market. That crashed the currency's exchange rate, forcing up the price of imports proportionally and causing the German hyperinflation.

The question is, how many surplus dollars do foreign governments want to hold. Supporting the dollar standard ends up supporting U.S. foreign diplomacy and military policy. For the first time since World War II, the most rapidly growing parts of the world are seeking to de-dollarize their economies by reducing reliance on U.S. exports, U.S. investment, and U.S. bank loans. This move is creating an alternative to the dollar, likely to replace it with groups of other currencies and assets in national financial reserves.

The Saker: In the same article you also write: " So maintaining the dollar as the world's reserve currency became a mainstay of U.S. military spending. " We often hear people say that the dollar is about to tank and that as soon as that happens, then the US economy (and, according to some, the EU economy too) will collapse. In the intelligence community there is something called tracking the "indicators and warnings". My question to you is: what are the economic "indicators and warnings" of a possible (probable?) collapse of the US dollar followed by a collapse of the financial markets most tied to the Dollar? What shall people like myself (I am an economic ignoramus) keep an eye on and look for?

Michael Hudson: What is most likely is a slow decline, largely from debt deflation and cutbacks in social spending, in the Eurozone and US economies. Of course, the decline will force the more highly debt-leveraged companies to miss their bond payments and drive them into insolvency. That is the fate of Thatcherized economies. But it will be long and painfully drawn out, largely because there is little left-wing socialist alternative to neoliberalism at present.

Trump's protectionist policies and sanctions are forcing other countries to become self-reliant and independent of US suppliers, from farm crops to airplanes and military arms, against the US threat of a cutoff or sanctions against repairs, spare parts and servicing. Sanctioning Russian agriculture has helped it become a major crop exporter, and to become much more independent in vegetables, dairy and cheese products. The US has little to offer industrially, especially given the fact that its IT communications are stuffed with US spyware.

Europe therefore is facing increasing pressure from its business sector to choose the non-US economic alliance that is growing more rapidly and offers a more profitable investment market and more secure trade supplier. Countries will turn as much as possible (diplomatically as well as financially and economically) to non-US suppliers because the United States is not reliable, and because it is being shrunk by the neoliberal policies supported by Trump and the Democrats alike. A byproduct probably will be a continued move toward gold as an alternative do the dollar in settling balance-of-payments deficits.

The Saker: Finally, my last question: which country out there do you see as the most capable foe of the current US-imposed international political and economic world order? whom do you believe that US Deep State and the Neocons fear most? China? Russia? Iran? some other country? How would you compare them and on the basis of what criteria?

Michael Hudson: The leading country breaking up US hegemony obviously is the United States itself. That is Trump's major contribution. He is uniting the world in a move toward multi-centrism much more than any ostensibly anti-American could have done. And he is doing it all in the name of American patriotism and nationalism – the ultimate Orwellian rhetorical wrapping!

Trump has driven Russia and China together with the other members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), including Iran as observer. His demand that NATO join in US oil grabs and its supportive terrorism in the Near East and military confrontation with Russia in Ukraine and elsewhere probably will lead to European "Ami go home" demonstrations against NATO and America's threat of World War III.

No single country can counter the U.S. unipolar world order. It takes a critical mass of countries. This already is taking place among the countries that you list above. They are simply acting in their own common interest, using their own mutual currencies for trade and investment. The effect is an alternative multilateral currency and trading area.

The United States is now turning on the screws demanding that other countries sacrifice their growth in order to finance the U.S. unipolar empire. In effect, foreign countries are beginning to respond to the United States what the ten tribes of Israel said when they withdrew from the southern kingdom of Judah, whose king Rehoboam refused to lighten his demands (1 Kings 12). They echoed the cry of Sheba son of Bikri a generation earlier: "Look after your own house, O David!" The message is: What do other countries have to gain by remaining in the US unipolar neoliberalized world, as compared to using their own wealth to build up their own economies? It's an age-old problem.

The dollar will still play a role in US trade and investment, but it will be as just another currency, held at arms length until it finally gives up its domineering attempt to strip other countries' wealth for itself. However, its demise may not be a pretty sight.

The Saker: I thank you very much for your time and answers! ­

Col...'the farmer from NZ' on January 09, 2020 , · at 5:19 pm EST/EDT

What a truly superb interview!

Another one that absolutely stands for me out is the below link to a recent interview of Hussein Askary.

As I wrote a few days ago IMO this too is a wonderful insight into the utterly complicated dynamics of the tinderbox that the situation in Iran and Iraq has become.

Conflict in the ME has traditionally almost always been about oil [and of course Israel]. This situation is different. It is only partially about oil and Israel, but OVERWHHEMINGLY it is about the BRI.

The salient factor as I see it is the Oil for Technology initiative that Iraq signed with China shortly before it slid into this current mess.

This was a mechanism whereby China would buy Iraq oil and these funds would be used directly to fund infrastructure and self-sufficiency initiatives and technologies that would help to drag Iraq out of the complete disaster that the US war had created in this country. A key part of this would be that China would also make extra loans available at the same time to speed up this development.

In essence, this would enable the direct and efficient linking of Iraq into the BRI project. Going forward the economic gains and the political stability that could come out of this would be a completely new paradigm in the recovery of Iraq both economically and politically. Iraq is essential for a major part of the dynamics of the BRI because of its strategic location and the fact that it could form a major hub in the overall network.

It absolutely goes without saying that the AAA would do everything the could to wreck this plan. This is their playbook and is exactly what they have done. The moronic and extraordinarily impulsive Trump subsequently was easily duped into being a willing and idiotic accomplice in this plan.

The positive in all of this is that this whole scheme will backfire spectacularly for the perpetrators and will more than likely now speed up the whole process in getting Iraq back on track and working towards stability and prosperity.

Please don't anyone try to claim that Trump is part of any grand plan nothing could be further from the truth he is nothing more than a bludgeoning imbecile foundering around, lashing out impulsively indiscriminately. He is completely oblivious and ignorant as to the real picture.

I urge everyone involved in this Saker site to put aside an hour and to listen very carefully to Askary's insights. This is extremely important and could bring more clarity to understanding the situation than just about everything else you have read put together. There is hope, and Askary highlights the huge stakes that both Russia and China have in the region.

This is a no brainer. This is the time for both Russia and China to act and to decisively. They must cooperate in assisting both Iraq and Iran to extract themselves from the current quagmire the one that the vicious Hegemon so cruelly and thoughtlessly tossed them into.

Cheers from the south seas
Col

And the link to the Askary interview: . https://youtu.be/UD1hWq6KD44

Col...'the farmer from NZ' on January 09, 2020 , · at 8:22 pm EST/EDT
Also interesting is what Simon Watkins reports in his recent article entitled "Is Iraq About To Become A Chinese Client State?"

To quote from the article:

"Iraq's Finance Ministry that the country had started exporting 100,000 barrels per day (bpd) of crude oil to China in October as part of the 20-year oil-for-infrastructure deal agreed between the two countries."

and

"For Iraq and Iran, China's plans are particularly far-reaching, OilPrice.com has been told by a senior oil industry figure who works closely with Iran's Petroleum Ministry and Iraq's Oil Ministry. China will begin with the oil and gas sector and work outwards from that central point. In addition to being granted huge reductions on buying Iranian oil and gas, China is to be given the opportunity to build factories in both Iran and Iraq – and build-out infrastructure, such as railways – overseen by its own management staff from Chinese companies. These are to have the same operational structure and assembly lines as those in China, so that they fit seamlessly into various Chinese companies' assembly lines' process for whatever product a particular company is manufacturing, whilst also being able to use the still-cheap labour available in both Iraq and Iraq."

and

"The second key announcement in this vein made last week from Iraq was that the Oil Ministry has completed the pre-qualifying process for companies interested in participating in the Iraqi-Jordanian oil pipeline project. The U$5 billion pipeline is aimed at carrying oil produced from the Rumaila oilfield in Iraq's Basra Governorate to the Jordanian port of Aqaba, with the first phase of the project comprising the installation of a 700-kilometre-long pipeline with a capacity of 2.25 million bpd within the Iraqi territories (Rumaila-Haditha). The second phase includes installing a 900-kilometre pipeline in Jordan between Haditha and Aqaba with a capacity of 1 million bpd. Iraq's Oil Minister – for the time being, at least – Thamir Ghadhban added that the Ministry has formed a team to prepare legal contracts, address financial issues and oversee technical standards for implementing the project, and that May will be the final month in which offers for the project from the qualified companies will be accepted and that the winners will be announced before the end of this year. Around 150,000 barrels of the oil from Iraq would be used for Jordan's domestic needs, whilst the remainder would be exported through Aqaba to various destinations, generating about US$3 billion a year in revenues to Jordan, with the rest going to Iraq. Given that the contractors will be expected to front-load all of the financing for the projects associated with this pipeline, Baghdad expects that such tender offers will be dominated by Chinese and Russian companies, according to the Iran and Iraq source."

Cheers
Col

And the link https://oilprice.com/Geopolitics/Middle-East/Is-Iraq-About-To-Become-A-Chinese-Client-State.html#

Anonymouse on January 09, 2020 , · at 5:20 pm EST/EDT
Hudson is so good. He's massively superior to most so called military analysts and alternative bloggers on the net. He can clearly see the over arching picture and how the military is used to protect and project it. The idea that the US is going to leave the middle east until they are forced to is so blind as to be ridiculous.

They will not sacrifice the (free) oil until booted out by a coalition of Arab countries threatening to over run them and that is why the dollar hegemonys death will be slow, long and drawn out and they will do anything, any dirty trick in the book, to prevent Arab/Persian unity. Unlike many peoples obsession with Israel and how important they feel themselves to be I think Hudson is correct again. They are the middle eastern version of the British – a stationary aircraft carrier who will allow themselves to be used and abused whilst living under the illusion they are major players. They aren't. They're bit part players in decline, subservient to the great dollar and oil pyramid scheme that keeps America afloat. If you want to beat America you have to understand the big scheme, that and the utter insanity that backs it up. It is that insanity of the leites, the inability to allow themselves to be 'beaten' that will keep nuclear exchange as a real possibility over the next 10 to 15 years. Unification is the only thing that can stop it and trying to unite so many disparate countries (as the Russians are trying to do despite multiple provocations) is where the future lies and why it will take so long. It is truly breath taking in such a horrific way, as Hudson mentions, that to allow the world to see its 'masters of the universe' pogram to be revealed:

"Of course American strategists will deny that the recent actions do not reflect a deliberate strategy, because their long-term strategy is so aggressive and exploitative that it would even strike the American public as being immoral and offensive if they came right out and said it."

Would be to allow it to be undermined at home and abroad. God help us all.

Little Black Duck on January 09, 2020 , · at 7:01 pm EST/EDT
They're bit part players in decline, subservient to the great dollar and oil pyramid scheme that keeps America afloat.

So who owns the dollar? And who owns the oil companies?

Osori on January 09, 2020 , · at 8:06 pm EST/EDT
I'd never thought of that "stationary aircraft carrier" comparison between Israel and the British, very apt.
Zachary Smith on January 09, 2020 , · at 9:53 pm EST/EDT
Clever would be a better word. Looking at my world globe, I see Italy, Greece, and Turkey on that end of the Mediterranean. Turkey has been in NATO since 1952. Crete and Cyprus are also right there. Doesn't Hudson own a globe or regional map?

That a US Admiral would be gushing about the Apartheid state 7 years after the attempted destruction of the USS Liberty is painful to consider. I'd like to disbelieve the story, but it's quite likely there were a number of high-ranking ***holes in a Naval Uniform.

44360 on January 09, 2020 , · at 5:34 pm EST/EDT
The world situation reminds us of the timeless fable by Aesop of The North Wind and the Sun.

Trump et al assassinated someone who was on a diplomatic mission. This action was so far removed from acceptable behavior that it must have been considered to be "by any means and at all costs".

Perhaps the most potent weapon Iran or anyone else has at this critical juncture, is not missiles, but diplomacy.

Ahmed on January 09, 2020 , · at 5:37 pm EST/EDT
"Therefore, to focus one-sidedly on Israel is a distraction away from what the US-centered international order really is all about."

Thank you for saying this sir. In the US and around the world many people become obsessively fixated in seeing a "jew" or zionist behind every bush. Now the Zionists are certinly an evil, blood thirsty bunch, and certainly deserve the scorn of the world, but i feel its a cop out sometimes. A person from the US has a hard time stomaching the actions of their country, so they just hoist all the unpleasentries on to the zionists. They put it all on zionisim, and completly fail to mention imperialism. I always switced back and forth on the topic my self. But i cant see how a beachead like the zionist state, a stationary carrier, can be bigger than the empire itself. Just look at the major leaders in the resistance groups, the US was always seen as the ultimate obstruction, while israel was seen as a regional obstruction. Like sayyed hassan nasrallah said in his recent speech about the martyrs, that if the US is kicked out, the Israelis might just run away with out even fighting. I hate it when people say "we are in the middle east for israel" when it can easily be said that "israel is still in the mid east because of the US." If the US seized to exist today, israel would fall rather quickly. If israel fell today the US would still continue being an imperalist, bloodthirsty entity.

Azorka1861 on January 09, 2020 , · at 5:57 pm EST/EDT
The Deeper Story behind the Assassination of Soleimani

This article, published by Strategic Culture, features a translation of Mahdi's speech to the Iraqi parliament in which he states that Trump threatened him with assassination and the US admitted to killing hundreds of demonstrators using Navy SEAL snipers.

https://www.veteranstoday.com/2020/01/08/vital-the-deeper-story-behind-the-assassination-of-soleimani/

..

Nils on January 09, 2020 , · at 6:05 pm EST/EDT
This description provided by Mr Hudson is no Moore than the financial basis behind the Cebrowski doctrine instituted on 9/11. https://www.voltairenet.org/article

I wish the Saker had asked Mr Hudson about some crucial recent events to get his opinion with regards to US foreign policy. Specifically, how does the emergence of cryptocurrency relate to dollar finance and the US grand strategy? A helpful tool for the hegemon or the emergence of a new currency that prevents unlimited currency printing? Finally, what is global warming and the associated carbon credit system? The next planned model of continuing global domination and balance of payments? Or true organic attempt at fair energy production and management?

Much thanks for this interview, Saker

Col...'the farmer from NZ' on January 09, 2020 , · at 6:26 pm EST/EDT
With all due respect, these are huge questions in themselves and perhaps could to be addressed in separate interviews. IMO it doesn't always work that well to try to cover too much ground in just one giant leap.

Regards
Col

Mike from Jersey on January 09, 2020 , · at 7:26 pm EST/EDT
I have never understood the Cebrowski doctrine. How does the destruction of Middle Eastern state structures allow the US to control Middle East Oil? The level of chaos generated by such an act would seem to prevent anyone from controlled the oil.
Outlaw Historian on January 09, 2020 , · at 7:48 pm EST/EDT
Dr. Hudson often appears on RT's "Keiser Report" where he covers many contemporary topics with its host Max Keiser. Many of the shows transcripts are available at Hudson's website . Indeed, after the two Saker items, you'll find three programs on the first page. Using the search function at his site, you'll find the two articles he's written that deal with bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, although I think he's been more specific in the TV interviews.

As for this Q&A, its an A+. Hudson's 100% correct to playdown the Zionist influence given the longstanding nature of the Outlaw US Empire's methods that began well before the rise of the Zionist Lobby, which in reality is a recycling of aid dollars back to Congress in the form of bribes.

RR on January 09, 2020 , · at 7:59 pm EST/EDT
Nils: Good Article. The spirit of Nihilism.
Quote from Neocon Michael Ladeen.

"Creative destruction is our middle name, both within our own society and abroad. We tear down the old order every day, from business to science, literature, art, architecture, and cinema to politics and the law. Our enemies have always hated this whirlwind of energy and creativity, which menaces their traditions (whatever they may be) and shames them for their inability to keep pace. Seeing America undo traditional societies, they fear us, for they do not wish to be undone. They cannot feel secure so long as we are there, for our very existence -- our existence, not our politics -- threatens their legitimacy. They must attack us in order to survive, just as we must destroy them to advance our historic mission."

Frank on January 09, 2020 , · at 10:27 pm EST/EDT
@NILS As far as crypto currency goes it is a brilliant idea in concept. But since during the Bush years we have been shown multiple times, who actually owns [and therefore controls] the internet. Many times now we have also been informed that through the monitoring capability's of our defense agency's, they are recording every key stroke. IMO, with the flip of a switch, we can shut down the internet. At the very least, that would stop us from being able to trade in crypto, but they have e-files on each of us. They know our passwords, or can easily access them. That does not give me confidence in e=currency during a teotwawki situation.
Anonymous on January 09, 2020 , · at 6:34 pm EST/EDT
A truly superb interview, thanks Michael Hudson.
David on January 09, 2020 , · at 6:39 pm EST/EDT
One thing that troubles me about the petrodollar thesis is that ANNUAL trade in oil is about 2 trillion DAILY trade in $US is 4 trillion. I can well believe the US thinks oil is the bedrock if dollar hegemony but is it? I see no alternative to US dollar hegemony.
Mike from Jersey on January 09, 2020 , · at 7:17 pm EST/EDT
Excellent article.

The lines that really got my attention were these:

"The leading country breaking up US hegemony obviously is the United States itself. That is Trump's major contribution The United States is now turning on the screws demanding that other countries sacrifice their growth in order to finance the U.S. unipolar empire."

That is so completely true. I have wondered why – to date – there had not been more movement by Europe away from the United States. But while reading the article the following occurred to me. Maybe Europe is awaiting the next U.S. election. Maybe they hope that a new president (someone like Biden) might allow Europe to keep more of the "spoils."

If that is true, then a re-election of Trump will probably send Europe fleeing for the exits. The Europeans will be cutting deals with Russia and China like the store is on fire.

Rubicon on January 09, 2020 , · at 10:22 pm EST/EDT
The critical player in forming the EU WAS/IS the US financial Elites. Yes, they had many ultra powerful Europeans, especially Germany, but it was the US who initiated the EU.

Purpose? For the US Financial Powerhouses & US politicians to "take Europe captive." Notice the similarities: the EU has its Central Bank who communicates with the private Banksters of the FED. Much austerity has ensued, especially in Southern nations: Greece, Italy, etc. Purpose: to smash unions, worker's pay, eliminate unions, and basically allowing US/EU Financial capital to buy out Italy, most of Greece, and a goodly section of Spain and Portugal.

The US govt. have long since paid off most every European politician. Thusly, Europe, as separate nations that should be remain still under the yolk of the US Financial/Political/Military power.

Craig Mouldey on January 09, 2020 , · at 8:19 pm EST/EDT
I have a hard time wrapping my head around this but it sounds like he is saying that the U.S. has a payment deficit problem which is solved by stealing the world's oil supplies. To do this they must have a powerful, expensive military. But it is primarily this military which is the main cause of the balance deficit. So it is an eternally fuelled problem and solution. If I understand this, what it actually means is that we all live on a plantation as slaves and everything that is happening is for the benefit of the few wealthy billionaires. And they intend to turn the entire world into their plantation of slaves. They may even let you live for a while longer.
Mike from Jersey on January 09, 2020 , · at 9:25 pm EST/EDT
Actually, oil underlies everything.

I didn't know this until I read a history of World War I.

As you know, World War One was irresolvable, murderous, bloody trench warfare. People would charge out of the trenches trying to overrun enemy positions only to be cutdown by the super weapon of the day – the machine gun. It was an unending bloody stalemate until the development of the tank. Tanks were immune to machine gun fire coming from the trenches and could overrun enemy positions. In the aftermath of that war, it became apparently that mechanization had become crucial to military supremacy. In turn, fuel was crucial to mechanization. Accordingly, in the Sykes Picot agreement France and Britain divided a large amount of Middle Eastern oil between themselves in order to assure military dominance. (The United States had plenty of their own oil at that time.)

In any event, it is the same today. Energy underlies, not only the military but, all of world civilization. Oil and gas are overwhelmingly the source of energy for the modern world. Without it, civilization collapses. Thus, he who controls oil (and gas) controls the world.

That is one third of the story. The second third is this.

Up till 1971, the United States dollar was the most trusted currency in the world. The dollar was backed by gold and lots and lots of it. Dollars were in fact redeemable in gold. However, due to Vietnam War, the United States started running huge balance of payments deficits. Other countries – most notably France under De Gaulle – started cashing in dollars in exchange for that gold. Gold started flooding out of the United States. At that point Nixon took the United States off of the gold standard. Basically stating that the dollar was no longer backed by gold and dollars could not be redeemed for gold. That caused an international payments problem. People would no longer accept dollars as payment since the dollar was not backed up by anything. The American economy was in big trouble since they were running deficits and people would no longer take dollars on faith.

To fix the problem, Henry Kissinger convinced the Saudis to agree to only accept dollars in payment for oil – no matter who was the buyer. That meant that nations throughout the world now needed dollars in order to pay for their energy needs. Due to this, the dollars was once again the most important currency in the world since – as noted above – energy underlies everything in modern industrial cultures. Additionally, since dollars were now needed throughout the world, it became common to make all trades for any product in highly valued dollars. Everyone needed dollars for every thing, oil or not.

At that point, the United States could go on printing dollars and spending them since a growing world economy needed more and more dollars to buy oil as well as to trade everything else.

That leads to the third part of the story. In order to convince the Saudis to accept only dollars in payments for oil (and to have the Saudis strong arm other oil producers to do the same) Kissinger promised to protect the brutal Saudi regime's hold on power against a restive citizenry and also to protect the Saudi's against other nations. Additionally, Kissinger made an implicit threat that if the Saudi's did not agree, the US would come in and just take their oil. The Saudis agreed.

Thus, the three keys to dominance in the modern world are thus: oil, dollars and the military.

Thus, Hudson ties in the three threads in his interview above. Oil, Dollars, Military. That is what holds the empire together.

Rubicon on January 09, 2020 , · at 10:26 pm EST/EDT
Thank you for thinking through this. Yes, the link between the US $$$ and Saudi Oil, is the absolute means of the American Dollar to reign complete. This payment system FEEDS both the US Military, but WALL STREET, hedge funds, the US/EU oligarchs – to name just a few entities.
Stanislaw Janowicz on January 09, 2020 , · at 8:58 pm EST/EDT
I should make one note only to this. That "no man, no problem" was Stalin's motto is a myth. He never said that. It was invented by a writer Alexei Rybnikov and inserted in his book "The Children of Arbat".
Greg Horrall on January 09, 2020 , · at 9:42 pm EST/EDT
Wow! Absolutely beautiful summation of the ultimate causes that got us where we are and, if left intact, will get us to where we're going!

So, the dreamer says: If only we could throw-off our us-vs-them BS political-economic ideology & religious doctrine-faith issues, put them into live-and-let-live mode, and see that we are all just humans fighting over this oil resource to which our modern economy (way of life) is addicted, then we might be able to hammer out some new rules for interacting, for running an earth-resource sustainable and fair global economy We do at least have the technology to leave behind our oil addiction, but the political-economic will still is lacking. How much more of the current insanity must we have before we get that will? Will we get it before it's too late?

Only if we, a sufficient majority from the lowest economic classes to the top elites and throughout all nations, are able to psychologically-spiritually internalize the two principles of Common Humanity and Spaceship Earth soon enough, will we stop our current slide off the cliff into modern economic collapse and avert all the pain and suffering that's already now with us and that will intensify.

The realist says we're not going to stop that slide and it's the only way we're going to learn, if we are indeed ever going to learn.

Ann Watson on January 09, 2020 , · at 10:42 pm EST/EDT
So now we know why Michael Hudson avoids the Israel involvment – Like Pepe.
Лишний Человек on January 09, 2020 , · at 11:02 pm EST/EDT
Thank you for this excellent interview. You ask the kind of questions that we would all like to ask. It's regrettable that Chalmers Johnson isn't still alive. I believe that you and he would have a lot in common.

Naxos has produced an incredible, unabridged cd audiobook of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. One of Gibbon's observations really resonates today: "Assassination is the last resource of cowards". Thanks again.

[Jan 09, 2020] Opposing War With Iran: Three Reasons by Anthony DiMaggio

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... War will allow Trump to claim the mantle of "national" wartime leader, while diverting attention away from his impeachment trial. And in light of the intensification of belligerent rhetoric from this administration, war appears to be increasingly likely. ..."
"... The American people have a moral responsibility to question not only Trump's motives, but to consider the humanitarian disaster that inevitably accompanies war. ..."
"... is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Lehigh University. He holds a PhD in political communication, and is the author of the newly released: The Politics of Persuasion: Economic Policy and Media Bias in the Modern Era (Paperback, 2018), and Selling War, Selling Hope: Presidential Rhetoric, the News Media , and U.S. Foreign Policy After 9/11 (Paperback: 2016). He can be reached at: [email protected] ..."
Jan 09, 2020 | www.counterpunch.org

The U.S. stands at the precipice of war. President Trump's rhetorical efforts to sell himself as the "anti-war" president have been exposed as a fraud via his assault on Iran. Most Orwellian of all is Trump's claim that the assassination of Iranian General Qassam Soleimani was necessary to avert war, following the New Year's Eve attack on the U.S. embassy in Baghdad. In reality the U.S. hit on Soleimani represents a criminal escalation of the conflict between these two countries. The general's assassination was rightly seen as an act of war , so the claim that the strike is a step toward peace is absurd on its face. We should be perfectly clear about the fundamental threat to peace posed by the Trump administration. Iran has already promised "harsh retaliation" following the assassination, and announced it is pulling out of the 2015 multi-national agreement prohibiting the nation from developing nuclear weapons. Trump's escalation has dramatically increased the threat of all-out war. Recognizing this threat, I sketch out an argument here based on my initial thoughts of this conflict, providing three reasons for why Americans need to oppose war.

#1: No Agreement about an Iranian Threat

Soleimani was the head of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps – the Quds Force – a clandestine military intelligence organization that specializes in paramilitary-style operations throughout the Middle East, and which is described as seeking to further Iranian political influence throughout the region. Trump celebrated the assassination as necessary to bringing Soleimani's "reign of terror" to an end. The strike, he claimed, was vital after the U.S. caught Iran "in the act" of planning "imminent and sinister attacks on American diplomats and military personnel."

But Trump's justification for war comes from a country with a long history of distorting and fabricating evidence of an Iranian threat. American leaders have disingenuously and propagandistically portrayed Iran as on the brink of developing nuclear weapons for decades. Presidents Bush and Obama were both rebuked, however, by domestic intelligence and international weapons inspectors , which failed to uncover evidence that Iran was developing these weapons, or that it was a threat to the U.S.

Outside of previous exaggerations, evidence is emerging that the Trump administration and the intelligence community are not of one mind regarding Iran's alleged threat. Shortly after Soleimani's assassination, the Department of Homeland Security declared there was "no specific, credible threat" from Iran within U.S. borders. And U.S. military officials disagree regarding Trump's military escalation. As the New York Times reports :

"In the chaotic days leading to the death of Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, Iran's most powerful commander, top American military officials put the option of killing him -- which they viewed as the most extreme response to recent Iranian-led violence in Iraq -- on the menu they presented to President Trump. They didn't think he would take it. In the wars waged since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Pentagon officials have often offered improbable options to presidents to make other possibilities appear more palatable."

"Top pentagon officials," the Times reports , "were stunned" by the President's order. Furthermore, the paper reported that "the intelligence" supposedly confirming Iranian plans to attack U.S. diplomats was "thin," in the words of at least one U.S. military official who was privy to the administration's deliberations. According to that source , there is no evidence of an "imminent" attack in the foreseeable future against American targets outside U.S. borders.

U.S. leaders have always obscured facts, distorted intelligence, and fabricated information to stoke public fears and build support for war. So it should come as no surprise that this president is politicizing intelligence. He certainly has reason to – in order to draw attention away from his Senate impeachment trial, and considering Trump's increasingly desperate efforts to demonstrate that he is a serious President, not a tin-pot authoritarian who ignores the rule of law, while shamelessly coercing and extorting foreign leaders in pursuit of domestic electoral advantage.

Independent of the corruption charges against Trump, it is unwise for Americans to take the President at his word, considering the blatant lies employed in the post-9/11 era to justify war in the Middle East. Not so long ago the American public was sold a bill of goods regarding Iraq's alleged WMDs and ties to terrorism. Neither of those claims was remotely true, and Americans were left footing the bill for a war that cost trillions , based on the lies of an opportunistic president who was dead-set on exploiting public fears of terrorism in a time of crisis. The Bush administration sold war based on intelligence they knew was fraudulent, manipulating the nation into on a decade-long war that led to the murder of more than 1 million Iraqis and more than 5,000 American servicemen, resulting in a failed Iraqi state, and paving the way for the rise of ISIS. All of this is to say that the risks of beginning another war in the Middle East are incredibly high, and Americans would do well to seriously consider the consequences of entering a war based (yet again) on questionable intelligence.

#2: The "War on Terrorism" as a Red Herring

U.S. leaders have long used the rhetoric of terrorism to justify war. But this strategy represents a serious distortion of reality, via the conflation of terrorism – understood as premeditated acts of violence to intimidate civilians – with acts of war. Trump fed into this misrepresentation when he described Soleimani's "reign of terror" as encompassing not only the alleged targeting of U.S. diplomats, but attacks on "U.S. military personnel." The effort to link the deaths of U.S. soldiers in wartime to terrorism echoes the State Department's 2019 statement , which designated Iran's Quds Force a "terrorist" organization, citing its responsibility "for the deaths of at least 603 American service members in Iraq" from "2003 to 2011" via its support for Iraqi militias that were engaging in attacks on U.S. forces.

As propaganda goes, the attempt to link these acts of war to "terrorism" is quite perverse. U.S. military personnel killed in Iraq were participating in a criminal, illegal occupation, which was widely condemned by the international community. The U.S. war in Iraq was a crime of aggression under the Nuremberg Charter, and it violated the United Nations Charter's prohibition on the use of force, which is only allowed via Security Council authorization (which the U.S. did not have), or in the case of military acts undertaken in self-defense against an ongoing attack (Iraq was not at war with the U.S. prior to the 2003 invasion). Contrary to Trump's and the State Department's propaganda, there are no grounds to classify the deaths of military personnel in an illegal war as terrorism. Instead, one could argue that domestic Iraqi political actors (of which Iraqi militias are included, regardless of their ties to Iran) were within their legal rights under international law to engage in acts of self-defense against American troops acting on behalf of a belligerent foreign power, which was conducting an illegal occupation.

#3: More War = Further Destabilization of the Middle East

The largest takeaway from recent events should be to recognize the tremendous danger that escalation of war poses to the U.S. and the region. The legacy of U.S. militarism in the Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia, is one of death, destruction, and instability. Every major war involving the U.S. has produced humanitarian devastation and mass destruction, while fueling instability and terrorism. With the 1979 Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan, U.S. support for Mujahedeen radicals led to the breakdown of social order, and the rise of the radical Taliban regime, which housed al Qaeda fundamentalists in the years prior to the September 11, 2001 terror attacks. The 2001 U.S. invasion of Afghanistan contributed to the further deterioration of Afghan society, and was accompanied by the return of the Taliban, ensuing in a civil war that has persisted over the last two decades.

With Iraq, the U.S. invasion produced a massive security vacuum following the collapse of the Iraqi government, which made possible the rise of al Qaeda in Iraq. The U.S. fueled numerous civil wars, in Iraq during the 2000s and Syria in the 2010s, creating mass instability, and giving rise to ISIS, which became a mini-state of its own operating across both countries. And then there was the 2011 U.S.-NATO supported rebellion against Muammar Gaddafi, which not only resulted in the dictator's overthrow, but in the rise of another ISIS affiliate within Libya's border. Even Obama, the biggest cheerleader for the war, subsequently admitted the intervention was his "worst mistake," due to the civil war that emerged after Gaddafi's overthrow, which opened the door for the rise of ISIS.

All of these conflicts have one thing in common. They brought tremendous devastation to the countries under assault, via scorched-earth military campaigns, which left death, misery, and destruction in their wake. The U.S. is adept at destroying countries, but shows little interest in, or ability to reconstruct them. These wars provided fertile ground for Islamist radicals, who took advantage of the resulting chaos and instability.

The primary lesson of the "War on Terror" should be clear to rationally minded observers: U.S. wars breed not only instability, but desperation, as the people victimized by war become increasingly tolerant of domestic extremist movements. Repressive states are widely reviled by the people they subjugate. But the only thing worse than a dictatorship is no order at all, when societies collapse into civil war, anarchy, and genocide. The story of ISIS's rise is one of citizens suffering under war and instability, and becoming increasingly tolerant of extremist political actors, so long as they are able to provide order in times of crisis. This point is consistently neglected in U.S. political and media discourse – a sign of how propagandistic "debates" over war have become, nearly 20 years into the U.S. "War on Terrorism."

Where Do We Go From Here?

Trump followed up the Soleimani assassination with a Twitter announcement that the U.S. has "targeted" 52 additional "Iranian sites," which will be attacked "if Iran strikes any Americans or American assets." There's no reason in light of recent events to chalk this announcement up to typical Trump-Twitter bluster. This President is desperate to begin a war with Iran, as Trump has courted confrontation with the Islamic republic since the early days of his presidency.

War will allow Trump to claim the mantle of "national" wartime leader, while diverting attention away from his impeachment trial. And in light of the intensification of belligerent rhetoric from this administration, war appears to be increasingly likely.

The American people have a moral responsibility to question not only Trump's motives, but to consider the humanitarian disaster that inevitably accompanies war. War with Iran will only make the Middle East more unstable, further fueling anti-American radicalism, and increasing the terror threat to the U.S. This conclusion isn't based on speculation, but on two decades of experience with a "War on Terror" that's done little but destroy nations and increase terror threats. The American people can reduce the dangers of war by protesting Trump's latest provocation, and by pressuring Congress to pass legislation condemning any future attack on Iran as a violation of national and international law.

To contact your Representative or Senator, use the following links:

Join the debate on Facebook

More articles by: Anthony DiMaggio

Anthony DiMaggio is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Lehigh University. He holds a PhD in political communication, and is the author of the newly released: The Politics of Persuasion: Economic Policy and Media Bias in the Modern Era (Paperback, 2018), and Selling War, Selling Hope: Presidential Rhetoric, the News Media , and U.S. Foreign Policy After 9/11 (Paperback: 2016). He can be reached at: [email protected]

[Jan 09, 2020] Protecting the Dollar Standard is the main national security objective of the USA

Jan 09, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

vk , Jan 9 2020 19:35 utc | 43

@ Posted by: Cynica | Jan 9 2020 19:20 utc | 38

I agree that, today, protecting the Dollar Standard is the main national security objective of the USA. That is so because issuing the universal fiat currency is a conditio sine qua non of keeping the financial superpower status.

I also agree that the Petrodollar is the base that sustains the Dollar Standard.

But I disagree with the rest:

1) the Cold War didn't begin in 1945, but in 1917 - right after the October Revolution. There's overwhelming documental evidence of that and, in fact, the years of 1943-1945 was the only break it had. Until Stalingrad, the Western allies were still waiting to see if the USSR and the Third Reich could still mutually anihilate themselves (yes, it is a myth the Allies were really allies from 1939, but that's not a very simple demonstration);

2) in the aftermath of WWII, the USA emerged as both the industrial and financial superpower in the capitalist world (i.e. the West). But this was an accidental - and very unlikely - alignment of events. The USA always had imperial ambitions from its foundation (the Manifest Destiny), but there's no evidence it was scheming to dominate the world before 1945. The American ascension was more a fruit of the European imperial superpowers destroying themselves than by any American (or Jewish, as the far-right likes to speculate) design;

3) the USSR had nothing to do with Bretton Woods. BW was a strictly capitalist affair. And it could not be any difference: the USSR was a socialist country, therefore, it didn't have money-capital (money in the capitalist system has three functions: reserve of value, means of exchange and means of payment). The only way it had to trade with the capitalist half of the world was to exchange essential commodities (oil) for hard currency, with which it bought what it needed for its own development (mainly, high technological machines which it could copy and later develop on). So, the USSR didn't "balk" at BW - it was literally impossible for it to pertain to the agreement.

Cynica , Jan 9 2020 19:20 utc | 39

@Kali #22

Michael Hudson is not the only one who's come to understand that maintaining the reserve-currency status of the US dollar (the "dollar hegemony") is the primary goal of US foreign policy. Indeed, it's been the primary goal of US foreign policy since the end of World War II, when the Bretton Woods agreement was put into effect. Notably, the Soviets ended up balking at that agreement, and the Cold War did not start until afterwards. This means that even the Cold War was not really about ideology - it was about money.

It's also important to note that the point of the "petrodollar" is to ensure that petroleum - one of the most globally traded commodities and a commodity that's fundamental to the global economy - is traded primarily, if not exclusively, in terms of the US dollar. Ensuring that as much global/international trade happens in US dollars helps ensure that the US dollar keeps its reserve-currency status, because it raises the foreign demand for US dollars.

vk , Jan 9 2020 19:35 utc | 43
@ Posted by: Cynica | Jan 9 2020 19:20 utc | 38

I agree that, today, protecting the Dollar Standard is the main national security objective of the USA. That is so because issuing the universal fiat currency is a conditio sine qua non of keeping the financial superpower status.

I also agree that the Petrodollar is the base that sustains the Dollar Standard.

But I disagree with the rest:

1) the Cold War didn't begin in 1945, but in 1917 - right after the October Revolution. There's overwhelming documental evidence of that and, in fact, the years of 1943-1945 was the only break it had. Until Stalingrad, the Western allies were still waiting to see if the USSR and the Third Reich could still mutually anihilate themselves (yes, it is a myth the Allies were really allies from 1939, but that's not a very simple demonstration);

2) in the aftermath of WWII, the USA emerged as both the industrial and financial superpower in the capitalist world (i.e. the West). But this was an accidental - and very unlikely - alignment of events. The USA always had imperial ambitions from its foundation (the Manifest Destiny), but there's no evidence it was scheming to dominate the world before 1945. The American ascension was more a fruit of the European imperial superpowers destroying themselves than by any American (or Jewish, as the far-right likes to speculate) design;

3) the USSR had nothing to do with Bretton Woods. BW was a strictly capitalist affair. And it could not be any difference: the USSR was a socialist country, therefore, it didn't have money-capital (money in the capitalist system has three functions: reserve of value, means of exchange and means of payment). The only way it had to trade with the capitalist half of the world was to exchange essential commodities (oil) for hard currency, with which it bought what it needed for its own development (mainly, high technological machines which it could copy and later develop on). So, the USSR didn't "balk" at BW - it was literally impossible for it to pertain to the agreement.

vk , Jan 9 2020 19:40 utc | 45
@ Posted by: vk | Jan 9 2020 19:35 utc | 42

Correction: the three functions of money in capitalism are reserve/store of value, means of exchange and unit of account . I basically wrote "means of exchange" twice in the original comment.

karlof1 , Jan 9 2020 19:45 utc | 47
Cynica @38--

Hello! Michael Hudson first set forth the methodology of the Outlaw US Empire's financial control of the world via his book Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire in 1972. In 2003, he issued an updated edition which you can download for free here .

If you're interested, here's an interview he gave while in China that's autobiographical . And here's his most recent Resume/CV/Bibliography , although it doesn't go into as much detail about his recent work as he does in and forgive them their debts: Lending, Foreclosure, and Redemption From Bronze Age Finance to the Jubilee Year , which for me is fascinating.

His most recent TV appearances are here and here .

karlof1 , Jan 9 2020 19:55 utc | 48
Walter @39--

Bingo! You're the first person here to make that connection aside from myself. You'll note from Hudson's assessment of Soleimani's killing he sees the Outlaw US Empire as using the Climate Crisis as a weapon:

"America's attempt to maintain this buttress explains U.S. opposition to any foreign government steps to reverse global warming and the extreme weather caused by the world's U.S.-sponsored dependence on oil. Any such moves by Europe and other countries would reduce dependence on U.S. oil sales, and hence on the U.S's ability to control the global oil spigot as a means of control and coercion. These are viewed as hostile acts.

"Oil also explains U.S. opposition to Russian oil exports via Nordstream. U.S. strategists want to treat energy as a U.S. national monopoly. Other countries can benefit in the way that Saudi Arabia has done – by sending their surpluses to the U.S. economy – but not to support their own economic growth and diplomacy. Control of oil thus implies support for continued global warming as an inherent part of U.S. strategy....

"This strategy will continue, until foreign countries reject it. If Europe and other regions fail to do so, they will suffer the consequences of this U.S. strategy in the form of a rising U.S.-sponsored war via terrorism, the flow of refugees, and accelerated global warming (and extreme weather)."

c1ue , Jan 9 2020 19:58 utc | 49
@Cynica #38
Financially, the US dollar as reserve currency is enormously beneficial to the US government's ability to spend.
And oil has historically been both a tactical and a strategic necessity; when the US was importing half its oil, this is a lot of money. 8 million bpd @ $50/barrel = $146B. Add in secondary value add like transport, refining, downstream industries, etc and it likely triples the impact or more - but this is only tactical.
Worldwide, the impact is 10X = $1.5 trillion annually. Sure, this is a bit under 10% of the $17.7T in world trade in 2017, but it serves as an "anchor tenant" to the idea of world reserve currency. A second anchor is the overall role of US trade, which was $3.6T in 2016 (imports only).
If we treat central bank reserves as a proxy for currency used in trade, this means 60%+ of the $17.7T in trade is USD. $3.6T is direct, but the $7 trillion in trade that doesn't impact the US is the freebie. To put this in perspective, the entire monetary float of the USD domestically is about $3.6T.
USD as world reserve currency literally doubles (at least) the float - from which the US government can issue debt (money) to fund its activities. In reality, it is likely a lot more since foreigners using USD to fund trade means at least some USD in Central Banks, plus the actual USD in the transaction, plus corporate/individual USD reserves/float.
Again, nothing above is formally linked - I just wanted to convey an idea of just how advantageous the petrodollar/USD as world trade reserve currency really is.

[Jan 09, 2020] Duck Soup Donald Trump, Dancing to the Tune of the Military Industrial Empire

Notable quotes:
"... The 1933 Marx brothers film Duck Soup was meant to be a satirical look at Benito Mussolini, ruler of Italy. In the film the mythical country of Freedonia , ruled by the effervescent Rufus T. Firefly ( played by Groucho), due to an insult by the ambassador of rival nation Sylvania, declares war. Laughs abound. Well, in our own nation of ' Free markets', ' Free enterprise' and ' Free use of war' whenever it pleases us, we are led by another Firefly, who is as comedic as he is dangerous to peace. ..."
"... Philip A Farruggio is a contributing editor for The Greanville Post. He is also frequently posted on Global Research, Nation of Change, World News Trust and Off Guardian sites. He is the son and grandson of Brooklyn NYC longshoremen and a graduate of Brooklyn College, class of 1974. Since the 2000 election debacle Philip has written over 300 columns on the Military Industrial Empire and other facets of life in an upside down America. He is also host of the ' It's the Empire Stupid ' radio show, co produced by Chuck Gregory. Philip can be reached at [email protected] ..."
Jan 09, 2020 | www.globalresearch.ca

The 1933 Marx brothers film Duck Soup was meant to be a satirical look at Benito Mussolini, ruler of Italy. In the film the mythical country of Freedonia , ruled by the effervescent Rufus T. Firefly ( played by Groucho), due to an insult by the ambassador of rival nation Sylvania, declares war. Laughs abound. Well, in our own nation of ' Free markets', ' Free enterprise' and ' Free use of war' whenever it pleases us, we are led by another Firefly, who is as comedic as he is dangerous to peace.

Of course, the major difference with movie's Freedonia and our own is like night and day. In the film the leader, Firefly, had full control of every decision needed to be made. In our Freemerika , Mr. Trump, regardless of the image he portrays as an absolute ruler, has to dance to the tune of the Military Industrial Empire, just like ALL our previous presidents. Folks, sorry to say, but presidents are not so much harnessed by our Constitution or Congress ( or even the Supreme Court) but by the wizards who the empire picks to advise him. They decide the ' when and if' of such dramatic actions like the other day's drone missile murder in Iraq of the Iranian general. Unlike when Groucho decides he was insulted by Trentino, the Sylvanian ambassador, and declares ' This means war!', Mr. Trump gave the order for the assassination but ONLY after those behind the curtain advised him.

Violence Is as Violence Does. All in the Name of "Restoring Democracy"

To believe that our presidents have carte blanche to do the heinous deeds is foolish at best . LBJ's use of the Gulf of Tonkin phony incident to gung ho in Vietnam was not just one man making that call.

Or Nixon's Christmas carpet bombing of Hanoi, Bush Sr.'s attack on Iraq in 1991 , his son's ditto against Iraq in 2003, Obama's use of NATO to destroy Libya in 2011, or this latest arrogance by Trump, were all machinations by this empire's wizards who advised them. When the late Senator Robert Byrd stood before a near empty Senate chamber in 2003 to warn of this craziness, that told it all! We are not led by Rufus T. Firefly, rather a Cabal that most in this government do not even realize who in the hell these people are!

Of course, the embedded mainstream media does the usual job of demonizing who the empire chooses to be our enemies. As with this recent illegal act by our government of crossing into another nation's sovereignty to do the deed, now they all tell us how deadly this Iranian general was. Yet, how many of the news outlets ever mentioned this guy for what they now tell us he was, for all these years? Well, here is the kicker. I do not know what this man was responsible for , regarding acts of insurgency against US forces in Iraq. Maybe he did aid in the attacks on US personnel. Maybe he also was there to neutralize the fanatical ISIS terrorists who were killing US and Iraqi personnel in Iraq and Syria. What I do know is that, in the first place, we had no business ever invading and occupying Iraq period! Thus, the rest of this Duck Soup becomes postscript.

Philip A Farruggio is a contributing editor for The Greanville Post. He is also frequently posted on Global Research, Nation of Change, World News Trust and Off Guardian sites. He is the son and grandson of Brooklyn NYC longshoremen and a graduate of Brooklyn College, class of 1974. Since the 2000 election debacle Philip has written over 300 columns on the Military Industrial Empire and other facets of life in an upside down America. He is also host of the ' It's the Empire Stupid ' radio show, co produced by Chuck Gregory. Philip can be reached at [email protected]

[Jan 09, 2020] The USA Has Been Bombing Iraq For 29 Years

Jan 09, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

The USA Has Been Bombing Iraq For 29 Years by Tyler Durden Wed, 01/08/2020 - 21:05 0 SHARES

Over the past days while little real debate over the Iran crisis has happened in Washington or Congress (instead it's merely the default drones and "bombs away" as usual), the American public has been busy online and in living rooms debating the merits or lack thereof of escalation and potential war with Iran.

However, like with many other instances of US foreign policy adventurism, this is typically a "debate" lacking in necessary recent historical context or appreciation for how the domino effect of disasters now facing American security were often brought on by prior US action in the first place. As a case in point, it's not recognized often enough in public discourse that it was the United States under the neocon Bush administration which handed Iraq over to "Iranian influence" and the Shia clerics in the first place .

It must be remembered that Saddam Hussein was a secular Sunni dictator presiding over a Shia majority population, and he was enemy #1 of Iran. Team USA's short-sighted and criminal 2003 invasion and overthrow of Saddam based on WMD lies had the immediate benefit to Tehran of handing the Ayatollah the greatest gift that Iran waged a nearly decade-long war to accomplish, but couldn't (the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq War).

U.S. bombing of Baghdad in 2003.

And the neocons within the bowels of the national security state have ever since been attempting to salvage their failed legacy in Iraq by the futile effort of trying to contain Iran and roll back Shia dominance in Baghdad, as Seymour Hersh detailed in his famous 2006 New Yorker piece The Redirection , which accurately predicted the 'long war' against the Hezbollah-Damascus-Baghdad-Tehran axis which would unfold, and did indeed unfold, especially in Syria of the past eight years.

To "situate" the past week's dramatic events, it's also crucial to understand, as The Libertarian Institute's Scott Horton has pointed out , that "The U.S.A. has been bombing Iraq for 29 years. And it looks like it's not over yet."

Below is an essential timeline compiled by Horton of that nearly three decade long history where Iraq has been consistently subject to American bombs and intervention -- yet ironically (and some might say predictably) the situation is still getting worse, more unstable, and more dangerous.

* * *

The U.S.A. has been bombing Iraq for 29 years. And it looks like it's not over yet:

Iraq War I : January -- February 1991 (aka The Gulf War, Operation Desert Storm, liberation of Kuwait)

Iraq War I 1/2 : February 1991 -- March 2003 (The rest of Bush I, Bill Clinton years, economic blockade and no-fly zone bombings)

Iraq War II : March 2003 -- December 2011 (aka Operation Iraqi Freedom, W. Bush's invasion and war for the Shi'ite side)

Iraq War III : August 2014 -- December 2017 (aka Operation Inherent Resolve, the war against the Islamic State, which America had helped to build up in Syria but then launched this war to destroy, on behalf of the Shi'ite government in Baghdad, after ISIS had seized the predominately Sunni west of the country in the early summer of 2014 and declared the Islamic State "Caliphate")

Iraq War III 1/2 : December 2017 -- January 2020 (The "mopping-up" war against the remnants of ISIS which has had the U.S. still allied with the very same Shi'ite militias they fought Iraq War II and III for, but are now attacking)

Iraq War IV : Now -- ?

NEW from me: We asked folks to identify Iran on an unlabeled map.

28% of them got it right. Here's where they guessed. https://t.co/XhP5OU9s2n pic.twitter.com/IQ8HYFDKxE

-- Joanna Piacenza (@jpiacenza) January 8, 2020

As Scott Horton suggests, the roots of the current crisis lie all the way back in the mid-20th century :

In 1953, the American CIA overthrew the elected prime minister of Iran in favor of the Shah Reza Pahlavi who ruled a dictatorship there for 26 years until in 1979 a popular revolution overthrew his government and installed the Shi'ite Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in power.

So in 1980, President Jimmy Carter's government gave Iraq's Saddam Hussein the green light to invade Iran, a war which the U.S. continued to support throughout the Ronald Reagan years, though they also sold weapons to the Iranian side at times.

But then in 1990, Iraq invaded Kuwait in a dispute over debts from the recent war with Iran, with some encouragement by the U.S. government, leading to America's Iraq War I, aka the first Gulf War or Operation Desert Storm at the beginning of 1991.

And that was merely the very beginning.

Read the rest of the story and the excellent brief history of how we got here over at The Libertarian Institute .

Wahooo , 1 minute ago link

I think by now that you understand the US exists to kill people overseas or you are simply mindless and stupid.

Wahooo , 1 minute ago link

I think by now that you understand the US exists to kill people overseas or you are simply mindless and stupid.

J S Bach , 3 minutes ago link

"The USA Has Been Bombing Iraq For 29 Years"

Yep. And the initial excuse (WMDs) was proven absolutely to have been a contrived hoax. Yet, all of the people of that decimated country and surrounding nations who have a vendetta against us are labeled "terrorists". I guess the English language has evolved beyond my comprehension since the usurpation by the tribe of our media and government.

By the definition of "terrorist" - terrorist | ˈterərəst | noun a person who uses unlawful violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims: - I see only the United States of Israel as befitting this word.

[Jan 09, 2020] Major General Soleimani's Assassination Isn't Going to Start World War III

Jan 09, 2020 | www.globalresearch.ca

Qasem Soleimani was assassinated on January 2nd, 2020 in Baghdad by a drone strike ordered by Israel-first Trump. The Iranian Commander of the 'Quds Force' was murdered alongside the leader of the Iraqi 'Popular Mobilization Forces', Jamal Jaafar Ibrahimi, aka Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, in addition to at least 6 other persons.

It was a coward act by a coward President who's no better than a gangbanger on a drive-by shooting targeting unarmed individuals, who in this case were on a diplomatic mission .

Who was General Soleimani?

"It was through his leadership that the IRGC greatly assisted the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) in its destruction of Daesh (ISIS). He's played a larger role than any individual in defeating terrorism in Syria and Iraq, and he was widely respected as among one of the most brilliant unconventional warfare tacticians in recent memory. It was because of his success, however, that he became a most hated foe He was therefore marked for death," wrote Andrew Korybko. By Andrew Korybko Global Research, January 03, 2020 Region: Middle East & North Africa Theme: US NATO War Agenda In-depth Report: IRAN: THE NEXT WAR?

The US carried out a de-facto act of war against Iran after assassinating Major General Qasem Soleimani of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps' Quds Force in Baghdad last night, but despite the doomsday scenarios that many in Alt-Media are speculating that this will lead to, the commencement of World War III is extremely unlikely for several reasons.

***

The "Decapitation Strike" That Shook The World

Trump's approval of the US' assassination of Major General Qasem Soleimani of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps' (IRGC) Quds Force in Baghdad last night amounts to a de-facto act of war against Iran, but it wasn't the decision of a "madman" or someone whose permanent military, intelligence, and diplomatic bureaucracies ("deep state") didn't think this completely through. Rather, it was a premeditated "decapitation strike" carried out to prove the US' conventional "escalation dominance" in its regional proxy war with Iran, one which America surely knows will elicit a kinetic response of some sort from the Islamic Republic but which the Pentagon and its regional allies are prepared for. Contrary to the narrative bandied about in Alt-Media , the US didn't "surrender" the Mideast to Russia and Iran in recent years (who, to be clear, are not "allies", but anti-terrorist "partners of convenience" in Syria) despite some regional setbacks to its grand strategy, but merely adjusted the nature through which it intends to restore its influence there.

Background Context

Instead of continuing to waste hundreds of millions of dollars a day funding the counterproductive 100,000-strong occupation of Iraq and potentially exposing that many troops ("sitting ducks") to retaliatory attacks, it decided to scale down its conventional presence there and replace it with highly trained Marines and special forces that operate with the support of targeted missile strikes. It was one such strike earlier in the week against the Popular Mobilization Units' (PMU) Kataib Hezbollah, which is integrated into the Iraqi Armed Forces, that provoked the group's supporters (allegedly with the coordination of the IRGC according to the US) into besieging the American Embassy in Baghdad. Trump responded by immediately dispatching troops to the world's largest diplomatic facility and bragging on Twitter that this was his " anti-Benghazi " moment in a clear swipe at Obama's notorious failure to protect American diplomats back in 2012 when they were in similar circumstances.

Once the unrest died down following the organizers' decision to withdraw after they declared that their "message has been heard", US Secretary of Defense ominously warned that his country could take "preemptive action" if it detects any signals that Iran is supposedly planning more anti-American attacks in Iraq. The Islamic Republic denied that it played any role in the recent events unfolding in the neighboring country, but the US obviously didn't believe it. It therefore set out to assassinate Maj. Gen. Soleimani in order to send the message that it's serious about "deterring" any forthcoming allegedly Iranian-connected anti-American attacks seeing as how it blamed him for being involved in the latest ones. It also wanted to put additional pressure on Iran to withdraw from Iraq, but probably expected that it could exploit Tehran's response to this de-facto act of war as a pretext for further intensifying its pressure campaign through more "decapitation strikes". This attack therefore dangerously escalated tensions with Iran and made many observers fear the onset of World War III.

Some Words About Maj. Gen. Soleimani

What follows isn't an excuse for America's actions, but simply a cold, hard analysis explaining why Trump decided to assassinate Solemani and thus carry out a de-facto act of war against Iran, one which will not lead to World War III despite the fearmongering speculation that's taken social media by storm ever since. Simply put, Iran misjudged the US' resolve to regain its lost influence in the region and never thought that it would escalate the situation to this level, hence why Maj. Gen. Solemani had no fear of being killed in the heart of Baghdad despite the US' conventional air superiority and explicit warnings that it could take "preemptive action" against Iran if it believes that it played any role whatsoever in any forthcoming anti-American attacks. It doesn't matter whether or not the PMU's Kataib Hezbollah is justified in seeking the removal of US forces from the country through any means possible or if it coordinates those actions with the IRGC since all that's important is that the US was looking for a pretext to carry out its calculated "decapitation strike" against Maj. Gen. Soleimani.

A few words about him are appropriate at this point. It was through his leadership that the IRGC greatly assisted the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) in its destruction of Daesh. He's played a larger role than any individual in defeating terrorism in Syria and Iraq, and he was widely respected as among one of the most brilliant unconventional warfare tacticians in recent memory. It was because of his success, however, that he became one of the US' most hated foes since he contributed to the defeat of Washington's regional proxy forces and thus was partly responsible for the decline in American influence there lately. He was therefore marked for death by the US, but Trump knew that killing him without any pretext would be an unnecessary escalation so he wanted to save that "ace up his sleeve" for later. Iran knows that the US wants it to withdraw from Syria and Iraq but steadfastly refuses because it has the legal right to remain there at the request of those countries' internationally recognized governments, but nevertheless, the US thinks that "might makes right" and is trying to force it out.

The Islamic Republic Won't Commit Suicide

American and "Israeli" strikes against allegedly IRGC-allied PMU forces over the past month or so were intended to achieve that outcome, which naturally prompted those forces to kinetically react by targeting a US base earlier in the week that afterwards served as the pretext for America's latest attack against Kataib Hezbollah which in turn triggered the embassy siege. There's no doubt that the US is escalating the situation in contravention of international law and targeting anti-terrorist forces that contributed to the defeat of Daesh, but polemics -- while having their "perception management" purposes -- are pointless when it comes to analyzing situations as objectively as possible and forecasting what might come next. Therefore, they're being excluded from this piece going forward. Having gotten that out of the way, it's now time to turn the article's attention towards rebutting the fearmongering claims that World War III is about to start after Maj. Gen. Soleimani's assassination.

Iran has the international legal right to defend itself, and its Supreme Leader already vowed a " harsh revenge " to that end, but it's extremely unlikely to take the form of direct attacks against the US or its allies. As much as the next phrase is going to trigger many Alt-Media folks, the US military is capable of destroying Iran in minutes so long as it's willing to bear the regional costs of its actions, both short-term in the sense of casualties and long-term as it relates to the geopolitical future of the Mideast. After proving his commitment to overwhelmingly respond to any anti-American attacks that his government alleges (whether truthfully or not) are carried out with any degree of Iranian coordination, Trump certainly wouldn't hesitate to bomb Iran itself if missiles were launched from there against his or his allies' forces. The Islamic Republic knows that it would literally be suicide to do such a thing, and despite what neoconservatives, Zionists, and Wahhabis claim about the Iranian authorities, they aren't an "apocalyptic death cult" and thus aren't going to start World War III.

Several Scenarios

There's no doubt that Iran could inflict very serious damage to its regional foes if it chooses to "go out with a bang" (whether after being provoked to do so or at its own prerogative), but it's much more likely that its response to Maj. Gen. Soleimani's assassination will take the form of intensified Unconventional Warfare against their interests. The US and its allies must have clearly foreseen this and will likely blame Iran for anything that happens in the coming days no matter whether it's truly involved or not, using that as a pretext for more "decapitation strikes" and other similar measures intended to decimate it and its allies' forces. The nature of conflict between the two sides is therefore asymmetric since the US has conventional dominance whereas Iran has its unconventional counterpart, and both might be put to the test in the event of another US Embassy siege in Baghdad, which is very probable in the coming days seeing as how Iraqi society is seething with rage and can easily assemble a critical mass of protesters to besiege the compound once again.

For as big of a prize as seizing the world's largest diplomatic facility would be for whoever can take it (be it Iran, Iranian-allied, or otherwise), there's no way that Trump would let that happen. Just like the Berlin Airlift of the Old Cold War, the US would carry out a Baghdad Airlift if it need be, which could entail leveling entire neighborhoods in order to prevent its enemies from hiding anti-air missiles there for taking down its air assets. One can only speculate how such a scenario would unfold, but there shouldn't be any question in anyone's mind about the US backing down, especially not during an election year and definitely not after Trump proudly boasted that this is his "anti-Benghazi" moment. Another potential retaliatory scenario is disrupting energy transit through the Strait of Hormuz, but that would affect more than just the US and surely elicit universal condemnation from everyone except perhaps allied Syria, just like if Hezbollah or other IRGC-allied forces decide to bomb " Israel " (in which case it and the US would certainly respond through military means).

Don't Expect Russia Or China To Save Iran

It's "politically inconvenient" for many of Iran's supporters across the world to accept, but the country doesn't have any state-based military allies willing to go to war alongside it except perhaps Syria, but the SAA has been utterly devastated over the last 9 years and is now a shadow of its former self. There is also absolutely no way that Russia would allow Syria to actively participate in any state-based military hostilities alongside Iran because doing so would endanger the forces and substantial investments that it has in the Arab Republic nowadays. Speaking of which, Russia isn't Iran's ally, but "Israel's" , though it wouldn't go to war alongside the self-professed "Jewish State" but rather stay out of any potential conflict between the two (which wouldn't last long considering that the US' conventional dominance could crush the Islamic Republic within days if Trump authorized it to be unleashed to its fullest extent and he was willing to accept the previously mentioned costs).

Neither Russia nor China would go to war in support of Iran, though they could be expected to issue very strong statements of condemnation against the US and anyone else who might conventionally attack it (whether "preemptively" or as "retaliation"). This objectively existing and easily verifiable statement of fact will likely take many in Alt-Media by surprise who have been indoctrinated over the past couple of years with fake news "analyses" alleging that those two Eurasian Great Powers are "anti-American" and willing to fight the US in order to "save the world". That will never happen unless one of them is attacked first (though even in that case, neither would go to war for the other because they've made it clear that they're not "military allies" ), which probably won't happen because of the concept of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD), at least not unless the US is able to surmount that "obstacle" through the combination of its anti-missile technology and "Space Forces". In any case, nobody should expect Russia or China to rush to Iran's aid and defend it from the US.

Concluding Thoughts

The most likely outcome of Maj. Gen. Soleimani's assassination is an intensified period of proxy wars in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen which stays just below the conventional threshold given Iran's inability to survive an overwhelming US' "retaliatory" strike if Trump authorized one in response to the unlikely massive missile strike that some speculate Tehran might be preparing. The US might also carry out "surgical strikes" against places in Iran where it might claim other strikes were "organized", such as if Yemen's Ansarullah attempt to repeat their successful drone strike against Saudi Aramco from last September. "Decapitation strikes" might therefore become increasingly more frequent and nobody would be safe, not even Hezbollah's Nasrallah in the worst-case scenario, since the US just signaled that it has the political will to take out "high-value targets". As all of this unfolds, Russia and China will do their utmost to stay away from any regional fray and definitely wouldn't intervene to defend Iran. As such, Iran's expected responses will be purely asymmetrical and not conventional.

*

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This article was originally published on OneWorld .

Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China's One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

[Jan 09, 2020] Opposing War With Iran: Three Reasons by Anthony DiMaggio

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... War will allow Trump to claim the mantle of "national" wartime leader, while diverting attention away from his impeachment trial. And in light of the intensification of belligerent rhetoric from this administration, war appears to be increasingly likely. ..."
"... The American people have a moral responsibility to question not only Trump's motives, but to consider the humanitarian disaster that inevitably accompanies war. ..."
"... is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Lehigh University. He holds a PhD in political communication, and is the author of the newly released: The Politics of Persuasion: Economic Policy and Media Bias in the Modern Era (Paperback, 2018), and Selling War, Selling Hope: Presidential Rhetoric, the News Media , and U.S. Foreign Policy After 9/11 (Paperback: 2016). He can be reached at: [email protected] ..."
Jan 09, 2020 | www.counterpunch.org

The U.S. stands at the precipice of war. President Trump's rhetorical efforts to sell himself as the "anti-war" president have been exposed as a fraud via his assault on Iran. Most Orwellian of all is Trump's claim that the assassination of Iranian General Qassam Soleimani was necessary to avert war, following the New Year's Eve attack on the U.S. embassy in Baghdad. In reality the U.S. hit on Soleimani represents a criminal escalation of the conflict between these two countries. The general's assassination was rightly seen as an act of war , so the claim that the strike is a step toward peace is absurd on its face. We should be perfectly clear about the fundamental threat to peace posed by the Trump administration. Iran has already promised "harsh retaliation" following the assassination, and announced it is pulling out of the 2015 multi-national agreement prohibiting the nation from developing nuclear weapons. Trump's escalation has dramatically increased the threat of all-out war. Recognizing this threat, I sketch out an argument here based on my initial thoughts of this conflict, providing three reasons for why Americans need to oppose war.

#1: No Agreement about an Iranian Threat

Soleimani was the head of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps – the Quds Force – a clandestine military intelligence organization that specializes in paramilitary-style operations throughout the Middle East, and which is described as seeking to further Iranian political influence throughout the region. Trump celebrated the assassination as necessary to bringing Soleimani's "reign of terror" to an end. The strike, he claimed, was vital after the U.S. caught Iran "in the act" of planning "imminent and sinister attacks on American diplomats and military personnel."

But Trump's justification for war comes from a country with a long history of distorting and fabricating evidence of an Iranian threat. American leaders have disingenuously and propagandistically portrayed Iran as on the brink of developing nuclear weapons for decades. Presidents Bush and Obama were both rebuked, however, by domestic intelligence and international weapons inspectors , which failed to uncover evidence that Iran was developing these weapons, or that it was a threat to the U.S.

Outside of previous exaggerations, evidence is emerging that the Trump administration and the intelligence community are not of one mind regarding Iran's alleged threat. Shortly after Soleimani's assassination, the Department of Homeland Security declared there was "no specific, credible threat" from Iran within U.S. borders. And U.S. military officials disagree regarding Trump's military escalation. As the New York Times reports :

"In the chaotic days leading to the death of Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, Iran's most powerful commander, top American military officials put the option of killing him -- which they viewed as the most extreme response to recent Iranian-led violence in Iraq -- on the menu they presented to President Trump. They didn't think he would take it. In the wars waged since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Pentagon officials have often offered improbable options to presidents to make other possibilities appear more palatable."

"Top pentagon officials," the Times reports , "were stunned" by the President's order. Furthermore, the paper reported that "the intelligence" supposedly confirming Iranian plans to attack U.S. diplomats was "thin," in the words of at least one U.S. military official who was privy to the administration's deliberations. According to that source , there is no evidence of an "imminent" attack in the foreseeable future against American targets outside U.S. borders.

U.S. leaders have always obscured facts, distorted intelligence, and fabricated information to stoke public fears and build support for war. So it should come as no surprise that this president is politicizing intelligence. He certainly has reason to – in order to draw attention away from his Senate impeachment trial, and considering Trump's increasingly desperate efforts to demonstrate that he is a serious President, not a tin-pot authoritarian who ignores the rule of law, while shamelessly coercing and extorting foreign leaders in pursuit of domestic electoral advantage.

Independent of the corruption charges against Trump, it is unwise for Americans to take the President at his word, considering the blatant lies employed in the post-9/11 era to justify war in the Middle East. Not so long ago the American public was sold a bill of goods regarding Iraq's alleged WMDs and ties to terrorism. Neither of those claims was remotely true, and Americans were left footing the bill for a war that cost trillions , based on the lies of an opportunistic president who was dead-set on exploiting public fears of terrorism in a time of crisis. The Bush administration sold war based on intelligence they knew was fraudulent, manipulating the nation into on a decade-long war that led to the murder of more than 1 million Iraqis and more than 5,000 American servicemen, resulting in a failed Iraqi state, and paving the way for the rise of ISIS. All of this is to say that the risks of beginning another war in the Middle East are incredibly high, and Americans would do well to seriously consider the consequences of entering a war based (yet again) on questionable intelligence.

#2: The "War on Terrorism" as a Red Herring

U.S. leaders have long used the rhetoric of terrorism to justify war. But this strategy represents a serious distortion of reality, via the conflation of terrorism – understood as premeditated acts of violence to intimidate civilians – with acts of war. Trump fed into this misrepresentation when he described Soleimani's "reign of terror" as encompassing not only the alleged targeting of U.S. diplomats, but attacks on "U.S. military personnel." The effort to link the deaths of U.S. soldiers in wartime to terrorism echoes the State Department's 2019 statement , which designated Iran's Quds Force a "terrorist" organization, citing its responsibility "for the deaths of at least 603 American service members in Iraq" from "2003 to 2011" via its support for Iraqi militias that were engaging in attacks on U.S. forces.

As propaganda goes, the attempt to link these acts of war to "terrorism" is quite perverse. U.S. military personnel killed in Iraq were participating in a criminal, illegal occupation, which was widely condemned by the international community. The U.S. war in Iraq was a crime of aggression under the Nuremberg Charter, and it violated the United Nations Charter's prohibition on the use of force, which is only allowed via Security Council authorization (which the U.S. did not have), or in the case of military acts undertaken in self-defense against an ongoing attack (Iraq was not at war with the U.S. prior to the 2003 invasion). Contrary to Trump's and the State Department's propaganda, there are no grounds to classify the deaths of military personnel in an illegal war as terrorism. Instead, one could argue that domestic Iraqi political actors (of which Iraqi militias are included, regardless of their ties to Iran) were within their legal rights under international law to engage in acts of self-defense against American troops acting on behalf of a belligerent foreign power, which was conducting an illegal occupation.

#3: More War = Further Destabilization of the Middle East

The largest takeaway from recent events should be to recognize the tremendous danger that escalation of war poses to the U.S. and the region. The legacy of U.S. militarism in the Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia, is one of death, destruction, and instability. Every major war involving the U.S. has produced humanitarian devastation and mass destruction, while fueling instability and terrorism. With the 1979 Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan, U.S. support for Mujahedeen radicals led to the breakdown of social order, and the rise of the radical Taliban regime, which housed al Qaeda fundamentalists in the years prior to the September 11, 2001 terror attacks. The 2001 U.S. invasion of Afghanistan contributed to the further deterioration of Afghan society, and was accompanied by the return of the Taliban, ensuing in a civil war that has persisted over the last two decades.

With Iraq, the U.S. invasion produced a massive security vacuum following the collapse of the Iraqi government, which made possible the rise of al Qaeda in Iraq. The U.S. fueled numerous civil wars, in Iraq during the 2000s and Syria in the 2010s, creating mass instability, and giving rise to ISIS, which became a mini-state of its own operating across both countries. And then there was the 2011 U.S.-NATO supported rebellion against Muammar Gaddafi, which not only resulted in the dictator's overthrow, but in the rise of another ISIS affiliate within Libya's border. Even Obama, the biggest cheerleader for the war, subsequently admitted the intervention was his "worst mistake," due to the civil war that emerged after Gaddafi's overthrow, which opened the door for the rise of ISIS.

All of these conflicts have one thing in common. They brought tremendous devastation to the countries under assault, via scorched-earth military campaigns, which left death, misery, and destruction in their wake. The U.S. is adept at destroying countries, but shows little interest in, or ability to reconstruct them. These wars provided fertile ground for Islamist radicals, who took advantage of the resulting chaos and instability.

The primary lesson of the "War on Terror" should be clear to rationally minded observers: U.S. wars breed not only instability, but desperation, as the people victimized by war become increasingly tolerant of domestic extremist movements. Repressive states are widely reviled by the people they subjugate. But the only thing worse than a dictatorship is no order at all, when societies collapse into civil war, anarchy, and genocide. The story of ISIS's rise is one of citizens suffering under war and instability, and becoming increasingly tolerant of extremist political actors, so long as they are able to provide order in times of crisis. This point is consistently neglected in U.S. political and media discourse – a sign of how propagandistic "debates" over war have become, nearly 20 years into the U.S. "War on Terrorism."

Where Do We Go From Here?

Trump followed up the Soleimani assassination with a Twitter announcement that the U.S. has "targeted" 52 additional "Iranian sites," which will be attacked "if Iran strikes any Americans or American assets." There's no reason in light of recent events to chalk this announcement up to typical Trump-Twitter bluster. This President is desperate to begin a war with Iran, as Trump has courted confrontation with the Islamic republic since the early days of his presidency.

War will allow Trump to claim the mantle of "national" wartime leader, while diverting attention away from his impeachment trial. And in light of the intensification of belligerent rhetoric from this administration, war appears to be increasingly likely.

The American people have a moral responsibility to question not only Trump's motives, but to consider the humanitarian disaster that inevitably accompanies war. War with Iran will only make the Middle East more unstable, further fueling anti-American radicalism, and increasing the terror threat to the U.S. This conclusion isn't based on speculation, but on two decades of experience with a "War on Terror" that's done little but destroy nations and increase terror threats. The American people can reduce the dangers of war by protesting Trump's latest provocation, and by pressuring Congress to pass legislation condemning any future attack on Iran as a violation of national and international law.

To contact your Representative or Senator, use the following links:

Join the debate on Facebook

More articles by: Anthony DiMaggio

Anthony DiMaggio is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Lehigh University. He holds a PhD in political communication, and is the author of the newly released: The Politics of Persuasion: Economic Policy and Media Bias in the Modern Era (Paperback, 2018), and Selling War, Selling Hope: Presidential Rhetoric, the News Media , and U.S. Foreign Policy After 9/11 (Paperback: 2016). He can be reached at: [email protected]

[Jan 09, 2020] And for $5 trillion spent bombing unoffending MENA countries the US has gotten what?

Jan 09, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

Savvy , 1 hour ago link

Nordstream II cost $12 billion. Russia is selling 55 billion M3 of LNG to Europe. Add Nordstream I, another 55 billion, Power of Siberia to China and Turkstream just opened.

And for $5 trillion spent bombing unoffending MENA countries the US has gotten what? Moar war. That's it.

Russia is building infrastructure while the US destroys.

[Jan 08, 2020] Soleimani and Al-Muhandis are being mourned in Aleppo churches

Jan 08, 2020 | turcopolier.typepad.com

StSarkiscathedraltehran2016

(Tehran Armenian Cathedral)

Mike Pompeo was on the TeeVee today scoffing at those who do not agree with him and the Ziocon inspired "maximum pressure" campaign against Iran. It must be a terrible thing for intelligence analysts of integrity and actual Middle East knowledge and experience to have to try to brief him and Trump, people who KNOW, KNOW from some superior source of knowledge that Iran is the worst threat to the world since Nazi Germany, or was it Saddam's Iraq that was the worst threat since "beautiful Adolf?"

The "maximum pressure" campaign is born of Zionist terrors, terrors deeply felt. It is the same kind of campaign that has been waged by the Israelis against the Palestinians and all other enemies great and small. This approach does not seem to have done much for Israel. The terrors are still there.

Someone sent me the news tape linked below from Aleppo in NW Syria. I have watched it a number of times. You need some ability in Arabic to understand it. The tape was filmed in several Christian churches in Aleppo where these two men (Soleimani and al-Muhandis) are described from the pulpit and in the street as "heroic martyr victims of criminal American state terrorism." Pompeo likes to describe Soleimani as the instigator of "massacre" and "genocide" in Syria. Strangely (irony) the Syriac, Armenian Uniate and Presbyterian ministers of the Gospel in this tape do not see him and al-Muhandis that way. They see them as men who helped to defend Aleppo and its minority populations from the wrath of Sunni jihadi Salafists like ISIS and the AQ affiliates in Syria. They see them and Lebanese Hizbullah as having helped save these Christians by fighting alongside the Syrian Army, Russia and other allies like the Druze and Christian militias.

It should be remembered that the US was intent on and may still be intent on replacing the multi-confessional government of Syria with the forces of medieval tyranny. Everyone who really knows anything about the Syrian Civil War knows that the essential character of the New Syrian Army, so beloved by McCain, Graham and the other Ziocons was always jihadi and it was always fully supported by Wahhabi Saudi Arabia as a project in establishing Sunni triumphalism. They and the self proclaimed jihadis of HTS (AQ) are still supported in Idlib and western Aleppo provinces both by the Saudis and the present Islamist and neo-Ottoman government of Turkey.

Well pilgrims, there are Christmas trees in the newly re-built Christian churches of Aleppo and these, my brothers and sisters in Christ remember who stood by them in "the last ditch."

"Currently there are at least 600 churches and 500,000–1,000,000 Christians in Iran." wiki below. Are they dhimmis? Yes, but they are there. There are no churches in Saudi Arabia, not a single one and Christianity is a banned religion. These are our allies?

Mr. Jefferson wrote that "he feared for his country when he remembered that God is just." He meant Virginia but I fear in the same way for the United States. pl

https://twitter.com/i/status/1214223383635857409

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christianity_in_Iran

Posted at 02:13 PM in As The Borg Turns , Borg Wars , Current Affairs , Iran , Iraq , Israel , Middle East , Pakistan , Religion , Saudi Arabia , Syria , Yemen | Permalink

[Jan 08, 2020] As long as Neocons and Christian Zionists run our foreign policy we're screwed.

Jan 08, 2020 | www.unz.com

Z-man , says: Show Comment January 7, 2020 at 1:27 pm GMT

Yes, as long as Neoco hens and Christian Zionists run our foreign policy we're screwed.
BTW, Mike Pompeo or as I affectionately call him; Lard face, Plump'eo, crazed CZ-zealot fat boy, etc., is now a legitimate target of the Iranians. May Allah provide justice to the family of Soleimani. (Grin) And look, I'm wishing 'ill will' on a zealot 'goy' (gentile) instead of a typical Neo-cohen snake, how ironic. (Another grin)
A positve spin:
With the 'incorrect' memo leaked by the Pentagon about an orderly exit from Iraq this can be the silver lining in all this mess. This assassination might actually accelerate the exiting of US forces from Iraq and the surrounding quagmires. Who knows, Trump might be a genius.
Again, NO MORE WARS FOR ZION, BDS NOW, ONE STATE SOLUTION-PALESTINE.
And to really stick it to Neo cohens (My apologies to Prof. Steven Cohen ), Trump-Putin Axis Da!! Destroy the Deep State and the CABAL .

[Jan 08, 2020] Iraqi Journalist: Killing Soleimani "Ended An Era In Which Iran And The United States Coexisted In Iraq" by Tim Hains

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Now, he told "Democracy Now!", it will be hard for the Iraqi public to see the bases as anything but "a force that is driving them into a war between Iran and the United States." ..."
"... "Qassem Soleimani could travel openly in Iraq. I mean, remember, Qassem Soleimani arrived in Baghdad airport, where half of it is an American base. Qassem Soleimani could travel openly in Iraq. He took selfies. People took his pictures. That didn't happen in secret. Qassem Soleimani was not Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi hiding in a cave or moving stealthily through the country. He stayed in the Green Zone. So, all this happened because there was an understanding between the Americans and the Iranians. So, if the Americans wanted to keep their bases in Iraq, the Iranians would have the freedom to move. And with the killing of Soleimani, the rules of the game have totally changed," he said. ..."
Jan 06, 2020 | www.realclearpolitics.com

https://www.youtube.com/embed/TKvE-nIsj1Y?enablejsapi=1&origin=https:%2F%2Fwww.realclearpolitics.com

"The Guardian" journalist Ghaith Abdul-Ahad says that before the attack on Qassem Soleimani in Baghdad last week "there was an understanding between the Americans and the Iranians" that allowed officials from Iran and the U.S. to move freely within Iraq and maintained relative goodwill toward American bases.

"The killing of Qassem Soleimani ended an era in which both Iran and the United States coexisted in Iraq," he said.

Now, he told "Democracy Now!", it will be hard for the Iraqi public to see the bases as anything but "a force that is driving them into a war between Iran and the United States."

"Qassem Soleimani could travel openly in Iraq. I mean, remember, Qassem Soleimani arrived in Baghdad airport, where half of it is an American base. Qassem Soleimani could travel openly in Iraq. He took selfies. People took his pictures. That didn't happen in secret. Qassem Soleimani was not Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi hiding in a cave or moving stealthily through the country. He stayed in the Green Zone. So, all this happened because there was an understanding between the Americans and the Iranians. So, if the Americans wanted to keep their bases in Iraq, the Iranians would have the freedom to move. And with the killing of Soleimani, the rules of the game have totally changed," he said.

AMY GOODMAN: Ghaith, can you comment on this new information that's come to light about the timing of Soleimani's assassination Friday morning? Iraq's caretaker Prime Minister Adel Abdul-Mahdi has revealed he had plans to meet with Soleimani on the day he was killed to discuss a Saudi proposal to defuse tension in the region. Mahdi said, quote, "He came to deliver me a message from Iran responding to the message we delivered from Saudi Arabia to Iran" -- Saudi Arabia, obviously, a well-known enemy of Iran. Was he set up? Talk about the significance of this.

GHAITH ABDUL-AHAD: Well, it is very significant if it's actually General Qassem Soleimani came to Iraq to deliver this message, if it was actually there was a process of negotiations in the region. We know that Abdul-Mahdi and the Iraqi government, in general, over the last year had been trying to position Iraq as this middle power, as this power where both -- you know, as a country that has a relationship with both Iran and the United States. In that awkward place Iraq found itself in, Iraq has tried to maximize on this. So they started back in summer and fall, when there was an escalation between Iran and the United States, when Iran shot down an American drone. We've seen Adel Abdul-Mahdi fly to Iran, try to mediate. We've seen Adel Abdul-Mahdi open channels of communications with the Gulf, with Saudi Arabia.

So, if it actually, the killing of General Soleimani, ended that peace initiative, it will be kind of disastrous in the region, because, as Narges was saying earlier, it is -- you know, Pompeo is speaking about Iran being this ultimate evil in the region, as this crescent of Shias, as if they just arrived in the past 10 years in the region. The fact if we see Iran's reactions, it's always a reaction to an American provocation. You've seen the occupation of Iraq in 2003. You've seen Iran declared as an "axis of evil." So, if you see it from an Iranian perspective, it's always this existential threat coming from the United States. And I don't think there is a more existential threat than in past year. So, yes, I know -- I mean, I think Adel Abdul-Mahdi and the Iraqi government were trying to find this middle ground, which I think is totally lost, because even Adel Abdul-Mahdi, the person who was trying to find this middle ground, was the person who proposed this law yesterday in the Parliament to expel all American troops from the country.

And I would like to add like another thing. The killing of Qassem Soleimani ended an era in which both Iran and the United States coexisted in Iraq. So, from 2013, '14, we, as journalists, we've seen on the frontlines how the proxies of each power have been helping each other. So we've seen Iranian advisers helping the American-trained Iraqi Army unit or counterterrorism unit in the fight against ISIS. In the same sense, we've seen American airstrikes on threats to these -- kind of to ISIS when it was threatening these militias. That coexistence, it didn't only come from both having a -- sharing an enemy, which is ISIS, or Daesh, but also these were the rules of the game. These were the rules in which Qassem Soleimani could travel openly in Iraq. I mean, remember, Qassem Soleimani arrived in Baghdad airport, where half of it is an American base. Qassem Soleimani could travel openly in Iraq. He took selfies. People took his pictures. That didn't happen in secret. Qassem Soleimani was not Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi hiding in a cave or moving stealthily through the country. He stayed in the Green Zone. So, all this happened because there was an understanding between the Americans and the Iranians. So, if the Americans wanted to keep their bases in Iraq, the Iranians would have the freedom to move. And with the killing of Soleimani, I think the rules of the game have totally changed.

So now I think the first victim of the assassination will be the American bases in Iraq. I don't see any way where the Americans can keep their presence as they did before the assassination of Soleimani. And even the people in the streets, even the people who opposes Iran, who opposes the presence of Iranian militias in power and politics, the corruption of these pro-Iranian parties, even those people would look at these American bases now as not as a force that came to help them in the fight against ISIS, but a force that's dragging them into a war between Iran and the United States.

[Jan 08, 2020] Do you really want to be a one term president? Pompeo can talk big now and then go back to Kansas to run for senator. Where will you be able to take refuge?

Highly recommended!
Iran has incentives to increase the chance of a Democrat administration, bearing in mind the great deal they got from the last one and the lack of anything they can expect from Trump Term Two.
Notable quotes:
"... Reflection, self criticism or self restraint are not exactly the big strengths of Trump. He prefers solo acts (Emergency! Emergency!) and dislikes advice (especially if longer than 4 pages) and the advice of the sort " You're sure? If you do that the the shit will fly in your face in an hour, Sir ". ..."
"... Trump can order attacks and I don't expect much protest from Mark Esper and it depends on the military (which likely will obey). ..."
"... These so called grownups have been replaced by (then still) happy Bolton (likely, even after being fired, still war happy) and applauders like Pompeo and his buddy Esper. ..."
"... As a thank you to Trump calling the Israel occupied Golan a part of Israel Netanyahu called an (iirc also illegal) new Golan settlement "Ramat Trump" ..."
"... I disagree. Trump maybe the only person who could sell a war with Iran. What he has cultivated is a rabid base that consists of sycophants on one extreme end and desperate nationalists on the other. His base must stick with him...who else do they have? ..."
"... The Left is indifferent to another war. Further depleting the quality stock of our military will aid there agenda of international integration. A weaker US military will force us to collaborate with the world community and not lead it is their thinking. ..."
"... Göring: Why, of course, the people don't want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship. ..."
"... Göring: Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country. ..."
"... We have been so thoroughly indoctrinated with the idea that Iran and Russia are intrinsically and immutable evil and hostile that the thought of actual two sided diplomacy does not occur. IMO neither of these countries are what we collectively think them. So, we could actually give it a try rather than trying to beggar them and destroy their economies. If all fails than we have to be prepared to defend our forces. DOL ..."
Sep 18, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

Do you really want to be a one term president? Pompeo can talk big now and then go back to Kansas to run for senator. Where will you be able to take refuge? Don't let the neocons like Pompeo sell you on war.

Make the intelligence people show you the evidence in detail. Make your own judgments. pl

Vegetius , 17 September 2019 at 08:37 PM

Whatever else he knows, Trump knows that he can't sell a war to the American people.
confusedponderer -> Vegetius... , 18 September 2019 at 03:51 AM
Vegetius,

re " Trump knows that he can't sell a war to the American people "

Are you sure? I am not.

Reflection, self criticism or self restraint are not exactly the big strengths of Trump. He prefers solo acts (Emergency! Emergency!) and dislikes advice (especially if longer than 4 pages) and the advice of the sort " You're sure? If you do that the the shit will fly in your face in an hour, Sir ".

A good number of the so called grownups who gave such advice were (gameshow style) fired, sometimes by twitter.

Trump can order attacks and I don't expect much protest from Mark Esper and it depends on the military (which likely will obey).

These so called grownups have been replaced by (then still) happy Bolton (likely, even after being fired, still war happy) and applauders like Pompeo and his buddy Esper.

Israel could, if politically just a tad more insane, bomb Iran and thus invite the inevitable retaliation. When that happens they'll cry for US aid, weapons and money because they alone ~~~

(a) cannot defeat Iran (short of going nuclear) and ...
(b) Holocaust! We want weapons and money from Germany, too! ...
(c) they know that ...
(d) which does not lead in any way to Netanyahu showing signgs of self restraint or reason.

Netanyahu just - it is (tight) election time - announced, in his sldedge hammer style subtlety, that (he) Israel will annect the palestinian west jordan territory, making the Plaestines an object in his election campaign.

IMO that idea is simply insane and invites more "troubles". But then, I didn't hear anything like, say, Trump gvt protests against that (and why expect that from the dudes who moved the US embassy to Jerusalem).

confusedponderer -> Vegetius... , 18 September 2019 at 07:28 AM
Vegetius,

as for Trump and Netanyahu ... policy debate ... I had that here in mind, which pretty speaks for itself. And I thought Trumo is just running for office in the US. Alas, it is a Netanyaho campaign poster from the current election:

https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/a6e60efd3bde0befbcb8b0a95a42bf4c2624e017/57_296_5123_3074/master/5123.jpg?width=1920&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=1958b9e7cf24d7a3a7b024845de08f7e

As a thank you to Trump calling the Israel occupied Golan a part of Israel Netanyahu called an (iirc also illegal) new Golan settlement "Ramat Trump"

https://cdn.mdr.de/nachrichten/mdraktuell-golan-hoehen-trump-hights-100-resimage_v-variantSmall24x9_w-704.jpg?version=0964

I generously assume that things like that only happen because of the hard and hard ly work of Kushner on his somewhat elusive but of course GIGANTIC and INCREDIBLE Middle East peace plan.

Kushner is probably getting hard and hard ly supported by Ivanka who just said that she inherited her moral compass from her father. Well ... congatulations ... I assume.

Stueeeeeeee said in reply to Vegetius... , 18 September 2019 at 08:31 AM
I disagree. Trump maybe the only person who could sell a war with Iran. What he has cultivated is a rabid base that consists of sycophants on one extreme end and desperate nationalists on the other. His base must stick with him...who else do they have?

The Left is indifferent to another war. Further depleting the quality stock of our military will aid there agenda of international integration. A weaker US military will force us to collaborate with the world community and not lead it is their thinking.

The rest of the nation will follow.

prawnik said in reply to Vegetius... , 18 September 2019 at 10:36 AM
Need I trot out Goering's statement regarding selling a war once more?

Göring: Why, of course, the people don't want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship.

Gilbert: There is one difference. In a democracy, the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars.

Göring: Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.

turcopolier , 17 September 2019 at 09:31 PM
jonst

We have been so thoroughly indoctrinated with the idea that Iran and Russia are intrinsically and immutable evil and hostile that the thought of actual two sided diplomacy does not occur. IMO neither of these countries are what we collectively think them. So, we could actually give it a try rather than trying to beggar them and destroy their economies. If all fails than we have to be prepared to defend our forces. DOL

Matt said in reply to turcopolier ... , 18 September 2019 at 12:54 AM
I agree with your reply 100%

these phobias are so entrenched now they're a huge obstacle to overcome,

Mark Twain: "It's easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled."

William Casey: "We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false"

Christian Chuba , 18 September 2019 at 05:22 AM
The 'ivestigations are a formality. The Saudis (with U.S. backing) are already saying that the missiles were Iranian made and according to them, this proves that Iran fired them. The Saudis are using the more judicious phrase 'behind the attack' but Pompeo is running with the fired from Iran narrative.

How can we tell the difference between an actual Iranian manufactured missile vs one that was manufactured in Yemen based on Iranian designs? We only have a few pictures Iranian missiles unlike us, the Iranians don't toss them all over the place so we don't have any physical pieces to compare them to.

Perhaps honest investigators could make a determination but even if they do exist they will keep quiet while the bible thumping Pompeo brays and shamelessly lies as he is prone to do.

PRC90 said in reply to Christian Chuba... , 18 September 2019 at 10:36 AM
These kinds of munition will leave hundreds of bits scattered all over their targets. I'm waiting for the press conference with the best bits laid out on the tables.
I doubt that there will be any stencils saying 'Product of Iran', unless the paint smells fresh.
Nuff Sed , 18 September 2019 at 07:22 AM
1. I am still waiting to read some informed discussion concerning the *accuracy* of the projectiles hitting their targets with uncanny precision from hundreds of miles away. What does this say about the achievement of those pesky Eye-rainians? https://www.moonofalabama.org/images9/saudihit2.jpg

2. "The US Navy has many ships in the Gulf and the Arabian Sea. The Iranian Navy and the IRGC Navy will attack our naval vessels until the Iranian forces are utterly destroyed.: Ahem, Which forces are utterly destroyed? With respect colonel, you are not thinking straight. An army with supersonic land to sea missiles that are highly accurate will make minced meat of any fool's ship that dare attack it. The lesson of the last few months is that Iran is deadly serious about its position that if they cannot sell their oil, no one else will be able to either. And if the likes of the relatively broadminded colonel have not yet learned that lesson, then this can only mean that the escalation ladder will continue to be climbed, rung by rung. Next rung: deep sea port of Yanbu, or, less likely, Ra's Tanura. That's when the price of oil will really go through the roof and the Chinese (and possibly one or two of the Europoodles) will start crying Uncle Scam. Nuff Sed.

turcopolier , 18 September 2019 at 08:07 AM
nuff Sed

It sounds like you are getting a little "help" with this. You statement about the result of a naval confrontation in the Gulf reflects the 19th Century conception that "ships can't fight forts." that has been many times exploded. You have never seen the amount of firepower that would be unleashed on Iran from the air and sea. Would the US take casualties? Yes, but you will be destroyed.

Nuff Sed -> turcopolier ... , 18 September 2019 at 08:18 AM
We will have to agree to disagree. But unless I am quite mistaken, the majority view if not the consensus of informed up to date opinion holds that the surest sign that the US is getting ready to attack Iran is that it is withdrawing all of its naval power out of the Persian Gulf, where they would be sitting ducks.

Besides, I don't think it will ever come to that. Not to repeat myself, but taking out either deep sea ports of Ra's Tanura and/ or Yanbu (on the Red Sea side) will render Saudi oil exports null and void for the next six months. The havoc that will play with the price of oil and consequently on oil futures and derivatives will be enough for any president and army to have to worry about. But if the US would still be foolhardy enough to continue to want to wage war (i.e. continue its strangulation of Iran, which it has been doing more or less for the past 40 years), then the Yemeni siege would be broken and there would be a two-pronged attack from the south and the north, whereby al-Qatif, the Shi'a region of Saudi Arabia where all the oil and gas is located, will be liberated from their barbaric treatment at the hands of the takfiri Saudi scum, which of course is completely enabled and only made possible by the War Criminal Uncle Sam.

Go ahead, make my day: roll the dice.

scott s. said in reply to Nuff Sed ... , 18 September 2019 at 11:32 AM
AFAIK the only "US naval power" currently is the Abraham Lincoln CSG and I haven't seen any public info that it was in the Persian Gulf. Aside from the actual straits, I'm not sure of your "sitting ducks" assertion. First they wouldn't be sitting, and second you have the problem of a large volume of grey shipping that would complicate the targeting problem. Of course with a reduced time-of-flight, that also reduces target position uncertainty.
CK said in reply to turcopolier ... , 18 September 2019 at 09:55 AM
Forts are stationary.
Nothing I have read implies that Iran has a lot of investment in stationary forts.
Millennium Challenge 2002, only the game cannot be restarted once the enemy does not behave as one hopes. Unlike in scripted war simulations, Opfor can win.
I remember the amount of devastation that was unleashed on another "backwards nation" Linebackers 1 - 20, battleship salvos chemical defoliants, the Phoenix program, napalm for dessert.
And not to put to fine a point on it, but that benighted nation was oriental; Iran is a Caucasian nation full of Caucasian type peoples.
Nothing about this situation is of any benefit to the USA.
We do not need Saudi oil, we do not need Israel to come to the defense of the USA here in North America, we do not need to stick our dick into the hornet's nest and then wonder why they sting and it hurts. How many times does Dumb have to win?
Nuff Sed , 18 September 2019 at 08:07 AM
3. Also, I can't imagine this event as being a very welcome one for Israeli military observers, the significance of which is not lost on them, unlike their US counterparts. If Yemen/ Iran can put the Abqaiq processing plant out of commission for a few weeks, then obviusly Hezbollah can do the same for the giant petrochemical complex at Haifa, as well as Dimona, and the control tower at Ben Gurion Airport.
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/239251

https://www.timesofisrael.com/haifa-municipal-workers-block-refinery-access-for-2nd-day/

These are the kinds of issues which are germane: the game has changed. What are the implications?

turcopolier , 18 September 2019 at 08:08 AM
nuff sed

I have said repeatedly that Hizbullah can destroy Israel. Nothing about that has changed.

turcopolier , 18 September 2019 at 08:17 AM
Yeah, right

It was late at night when I wrote this. Yeah, Right. the Iranians could send their massive ground force into Syria where it would be chewed up by US and Israeli air. Alternatively they could invade Saudi arabia.

Yeah, Right said in reply to turcopolier ... , 18 September 2019 at 08:38 AM
Thank you for the reply but actually I was thinking that an invasion of Afghanistan would be the more sensible ploy.

To my mind if the Iranian Army sits on its backside then the USAF and IAF will ignore it to roam the length and breadth of Iran destroying whatever ground targets are on their long-planned target-list.

Or that Iranian Army can launch itself into Afghanistan, at which point all of the USA plans for a methodical aerial pummelling of Iran's infrastructure goes out the window as the USAF scrambles to save the American forces in Afghanistan from being overrun.

Isn't that correct?

So what incentive is there for that Iranian Army to sit around doing nothing?

Iran will do what the USAF isn't expecting it to do, if for no other reason that it upsets the USA's own game-plan.

johnf , 18 September 2019 at 08:41 AM
There seems to be a bit of a hiatus in proceedings - not in these columns but on the ground in the ME.

Everyone seems to be waiting for something.

Could this "something" be the decisive word fron our commander in chief Binyamin Netanyahu?

The thing is he has just pretty much lost an election. Likud might form part of the next government of Israel but most likely not with him at its head.

Does anyone have any ideas on what the future policy of Israel is likely to be under Gantz or whoever? Will it be the same, worse or better?

turcopolier , 18 September 2019 at 08:51 AM
Yeah Right

The correct US move would be to ignore an Iranian invasion of Afghanistan and continue leaving the place. The Iranian Shia can then fight the Sunni jihadi tribesmen.

Yeah, Right said in reply to turcopolier ... , 18 September 2019 at 09:29 AM
Oh, I completely agree that if the Iranians launch an invasion of Afghanistan then the only sensible strategy would be for the US troops to pack up and get out as fast as possible.

But that is "cut and run", which many in Washington would view as a humiliation.

Do you really see the beltway warriors agreeing to that?

turcopolier , 18 September 2019 at 08:53 AM
Stueee

A flaw in your otherwise sound argument is that the US military has not been seriously engaged for several years and has been reconstituting itself with the money Trump has given them.

turcopolier , 18 September 2019 at 08:57 AM
Nuff Sed

Re-positioning of forces does not indicate that a presidential decision for war has been made. The navy will not want to fight you in the narrow, shallow waters of the Gulf.

Lars , 18 September 2019 at 09:53 AM
I would think that Mr. Trump would have a hard time sell a war with Iran over an attack on Saudi Arabia. The good question about how would that war end will soon be raised and I doubt there are many good answers.

The US should have gotten out of that part of the world a long time ago, just as they should have paid more attention to the warnings in President Eisenhower's farewell address.

turcopolier , 18 September 2019 at 10:12 AM
CK

The point was about shore based firepower, not forts. don't be so literal.

CK said in reply to turcopolier ... , 18 September 2019 at 10:34 AM
The Perfumed Fops in the DOD restarted Millennium Challenge 2002,because Gen Van Riper had used 19th and early 20th century tactics and shore based firepower to sink the Blue Teams carrier forces. There was a script, Van Riper did some adlibbing. Does the US DOD think that Iran will follow the US script? In a unipolar world maybe the USA could enforce a script, that world was severely wounded in 1975, took a sucking chest wound during operation Cakewalk in 2003 and died in Syria in 2015. Too many poles too many powers not enough diplomacy. It will not end well.
turcopolier , 18 September 2019 at 10:16 AM
lars

We would crush Iran at some cost to ourselves but the political cost to the anti-globalist coalition would catastrophic. BTW Trump's "base" isn't big enough to elect him so he cannot afford to alienate independents.

prawnik , 18 September 2019 at 10:32 AM
Even if Rouhani and the Iranian Parliament personally designed, assembled, targeted and launched the missiles (scarier sounding version of "drones"), then they should be congratulated, for the Saudi tyrant deserves every bad thing that he gets.
turcopolier , 18 September 2019 at 10:49 AM
prawnik (Sid) in this particular situation goering's glittering generalization does not apply. Trump needs a lot of doubting suburbanites to win and a war will not incline them to vote for him.
Bill Wade , 18 September 2019 at 10:53 AM
Looks like President Trump is walking it back, tweet: I have just instructed the Secretary of the Treasury to substantially increase Sanctions on the country of Iran!
PRC90 , 18 September 2019 at 11:34 AM
I doubt there will be armed conflict of any kind.
Everything Trump does from now (including sacking the Bolton millstone) will be directed at winning 2020, and that will not be aided by entering into some inconclusive low intensity attrition war.
Iran, on the other hand, will be doing everything it can to increase the chance of a Democrat administration, bearing in mind the great deal they got from the last one and the lack of anything they can expect from Trump Term Two.
This may be a useful tool for determining their next move, but the limit of their actions would be when some Democrats begin making the electorally damaging mistake of critising Trump for not retaliating against Iranian provocations.
Terence Gore , 18 September 2019 at 11:35 AM
Pros and cons of many options considered against Iran

https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/06_iran_strategy.pdf

[Jan 08, 2020] Big, bad Putin attacked by slimy rat Browder.

Jan 08, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

Is there a chorus of politicians singing in there about how lazy they are, and how they never bothered to verify Browder' story? The story is indeed remarkable, but not in the way that first appears.

Stephen Fry / @stephenfry

You may or may not know the remarkable story of @Billbrowder and the #MagnitskyAct - find out the startling truth by listening to
#MagnitskytheMusical by the wondrous @JohnnyFlynnHQ & @roberthudson - @BBCRadio3 7.30 Sun 12th Jan

Magnitsky the Musical

Book and lyrics by Robert Hudson
Music and lyrics by Johnny Flynn

12 January 2020
О 1 hour, 34 minutes

Johnny Flynn and Robert Hudson bring us a musical based on the
incredible story of an American venture capitalist, a Russian tax
advisor, a crazy heist, the Trump Tower meeting and the very rule of
law.

Blending music and satire, the story explores the truths and fictions
surrounding the origins and aftershocks of the Magnitsky Act; global
legislation which allows governments to sanction those who they see
as offenders of human rights.

It tells the story of a tax adviser's struggle to uncover a huge tax
fraud, his imprisonment by the very authorities he is investigating,
and the American financier's crusade for justice.

Johnny Flynn, Paul Chahidi and members of the cast perform songs in
a epic story that explores democracy, corruption, and how we
undervalue the law at our peril.

Bill Paul Chahidi Sergei Johnny Flynn Jamie Fenella Woolgar Natalia Ellie Kendrick Kuznetsov Gus Brown Guard Clive Hayward Silchenko Ian Conningham Jared Will Kirk Fisherman Neil McCaul Judge Jessica Turner

Additional singing by Sinead Maclnnes, Laura Christy, Scarlett
Courtney and Lucy Reynolds.

The cellist is Joe Zeitlin. Sound is by Peter Ringrose. Directed by Sasha Yevtushenko.

[Jan 08, 2020] Trump real priorities: fuck healthcare, fuck our veterans, fuck our crumbling infrastructure, fuck the homelessTrump real priorities: MOMMY MILITARY INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX NEEDS MORE MONEY HELL YEAH

Jan 08, 2020 | twitter.com

Donald J. Trump ‏ 9:11 PM - 4 Jan 2020

The United States just spent Two Trillion Dollars on Military Equipment. We are the biggest and by far the BEST in the World! If Iran attacks an American Base, or any American, we will be sending some of that brand new beautiful equipment their way...and without hesitation!

shoe ‏ 9:18 PM - 4 Jan 2020

fuck healthcare, fuck our veterans, fuck our crumbling infrastructure, fuck the homless MOMMY MILITARY INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX NEEDS MORE MONEY HELL YEAH

[Jan 08, 2020] While 60^of Americans neven heard aboutSoleimani befor 43$ of the country approcved Trump-Pomeo assasination of this senior Iran commander

The unique, really exceptional feature of the USA is that it does not try to hide idiocy of its leaders and lack of education and interest in knowing the truth of the majority of population
Jan 08, 2020 | www.rt.com

RT :

A new poll has found that Americans doubt Donald Trump has a clear Iran policy, but nonetheless they support the decision to kill Qassem Soleimani – who, remarkably, had been an unknown entity for the majority of respondents.

Forty-three percent of Americans said they approved of the US drone strike that killed the Iranian commander last week in Baghdad, while 38% disapproved and 19% said they were unsure, according to the results of a HuffPost/YouGov survey.

And while almost half the country backs Soleimani's assassination, 60% of Americans conceded that they had never heard of the Quds Force commander before last week. An additional 14% said they weren't sure if they had known about him before the strike.

[Jan 08, 2020] While 60^of Americans neven heard aboutSoleimani befor 43$ of the country approcved Trump-Pomeo assasination of this senior Iran commander

The unique, really exceptional feature of the USA is that it does not try to hide idiocy of its leaders and lack of education and interest in knowing the truth of the majority of population
Jan 08, 2020 | www.rt.com

RT :

A new poll has found that Americans doubt Donald Trump has a clear Iran policy, but nonetheless they support the decision to kill Qassem Soleimani – who, remarkably, had been an unknown entity for the majority of respondents.

Forty-three percent of Americans said they approved of the US drone strike that killed the Iranian commander last week in Baghdad, while 38% disapproved and 19% said they were unsure, according to the results of a HuffPost/YouGov survey.

And while almost half the country backs Soleimani's assassination, 60% of Americans conceded that they had never heard of the Quds Force commander before last week. An additional 14% said they weren't sure if they had known about him before the strike.

[Jan 08, 2020] Big, bad Putin attacked by slimy rat Browder.

Jan 08, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

Is there a chorus of politicians singing in there about how lazy they are, and how they never bothered to verify Browder' story? The story is indeed remarkable, but not in the way that first appears.

Stephen Fry / @stephenfry

You may or may not know the remarkable story of @Billbrowder and the #MagnitskyAct - find out the startling truth by listening to
#MagnitskytheMusical by the wondrous @JohnnyFlynnHQ & @roberthudson - @BBCRadio3 7.30 Sun 12th Jan

Magnitsky the Musical

Book and lyrics by Robert Hudson
Music and lyrics by Johnny Flynn

12 January 2020
О 1 hour, 34 minutes

Johnny Flynn and Robert Hudson bring us a musical based on the
incredible story of an American venture capitalist, a Russian tax
advisor, a crazy heist, the Trump Tower meeting and the very rule of
law.

Blending music and satire, the story explores the truths and fictions
surrounding the origins and aftershocks of the Magnitsky Act; global
legislation which allows governments to sanction those who they see
as offenders of human rights.

It tells the story of a tax adviser's struggle to uncover a huge tax
fraud, his imprisonment by the very authorities he is investigating,
and the American financier's crusade for justice.

Johnny Flynn, Paul Chahidi and members of the cast perform songs in
a epic story that explores democracy, corruption, and how we
undervalue the law at our peril.

Bill Paul Chahidi Sergei Johnny Flynn Jamie Fenella Woolgar Natalia Ellie Kendrick Kuznetsov Gus Brown Guard Clive Hayward Silchenko Ian Conningham Jared Will Kirk Fisherman Neil McCaul Judge Jessica Turner

Additional singing by Sinead Maclnnes, Laura Christy, Scarlett
Courtney and Lucy Reynolds.

The cellist is Joe Zeitlin. Sound is by Peter Ringrose. Directed by Sasha Yevtushenko.

[Jan 08, 2020] Trump real priorities: fuck healthcare, fuck our veterans, fuck our crumbling infrastructure, fuck the homelessTrump real priorities: MOMMY MILITARY INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX NEEDS MORE MONEY HELL YEAH

Jan 08, 2020 | twitter.com

Donald J. Trump ‏ 9:11 PM - 4 Jan 2020

The United States just spent Two Trillion Dollars on Military Equipment. We are the biggest and by far the BEST in the World! If Iran attacks an American Base, or any American, we will be sending some of that brand new beautiful equipment their way...and without hesitation!

shoe ‏ 9:18 PM - 4 Jan 2020

fuck healthcare, fuck our veterans, fuck our crumbling infrastructure, fuck the homless MOMMY MILITARY INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX NEEDS MORE MONEY HELL YEAH

[Jan 08, 2020] Pompeo and his lies got us into this mess with Iran caucus99percent

Pompeo was and is despicable liar: If the threat was 'imminent', wouldn't that already be known?
Notable quotes:
"... @Not Henry Kissinger ..."
"... @Not Henry Kissinger ..."
Jan 08, 2020 | caucus99percent.com

gjohnsit on Mon, 01/06/2020 - 6:14pm Just a few days ago SoS Mike Pompeo said that we assassinated General Soleimani to stop an 'imminent attack' on Americans.
No evidence was presented to back up this claim. We are just supposed to believe it.

It turns out that Pompeo and VP Pence had pushed Trump hard to do this assassination.

gjohnsit on Mon, 01/06/2020 - 6:28pm
Netanyahu was obviously involved

@Not Henry Kissinger
But I can understand his efforts to distance himself.
It shows more smarts than what Trump has been doing.

The patient way the Iranians are preparing to respond is scaring them.

Not Henry Kissinger on Mon, 01/06/2020 - 6:37pm
Netanyahu should be scared.

@gjohnsit

Bibi for Soleimani is looking more and more like the appropriate 'proportional' response for all concerned.

gjohnsit on Mon, 01/06/2020 - 7:02pm
Meanwhile in Kenya/Somalia

@gjohnsit
normally this would be big news

"Seven aircraft and three military vehicles were destroyed in the attack," said the statement, which included photos of aircraft ablaze and an al Shabaab militant standing nearby. In a tweet, the US Africa Command confirmed an attack on the Manda Bay Airfield had occurred.

3 americans killed

One US military service member and two contractors were killed in an Islamist attack on a military base in Kenya.

Islamist militant group al-Shabab attacked the base, used by Kenyan and US forces, in the popular coastal region of Lamu on Sunday.
The US military said in a statement that two others from the Department of Defense were wounded.

"The wounded Americans are currently in stable condition and being evacuated," the US military's Africa Command said.

Raggedy Ann on Mon, 01/06/2020 - 6:34pm
Hilarious!

@Not Henry Kissinger
Here we go - a pissing contest about to begin!

But the response of Israel's prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu , was particularly striking, as he has been one of Trump's staunchest supporters on the world stage.

He told a meeting of his security cabinet on Monday: "The assassination of Suleimani isn't an Israeli event but an American event. We were not involved and should not be dragged into it."

Uh huh.

data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAAAAACH5BAEKAAEALAAAAAABAAEAAAICTAEAOw==

[Jan 08, 2020] Iraqi Journalist: Killing Soleimani "Ended An Era In Which Iran And The United States Coexisted In Iraq" by Tim Hains

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Now, he told "Democracy Now!", it will be hard for the Iraqi public to see the bases as anything but "a force that is driving them into a war between Iran and the United States." ..."
"... "Qassem Soleimani could travel openly in Iraq. I mean, remember, Qassem Soleimani arrived in Baghdad airport, where half of it is an American base. Qassem Soleimani could travel openly in Iraq. He took selfies. People took his pictures. That didn't happen in secret. Qassem Soleimani was not Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi hiding in a cave or moving stealthily through the country. He stayed in the Green Zone. So, all this happened because there was an understanding between the Americans and the Iranians. So, if the Americans wanted to keep their bases in Iraq, the Iranians would have the freedom to move. And with the killing of Soleimani, the rules of the game have totally changed," he said. ..."
Jan 06, 2020 | www.realclearpolitics.com

https://www.youtube.com/embed/TKvE-nIsj1Y?enablejsapi=1&origin=https:%2F%2Fwww.realclearpolitics.com

"The Guardian" journalist Ghaith Abdul-Ahad says that before the attack on Qassem Soleimani in Baghdad last week "there was an understanding between the Americans and the Iranians" that allowed officials from Iran and the U.S. to move freely within Iraq and maintained relative goodwill toward American bases.

"The killing of Qassem Soleimani ended an era in which both Iran and the United States coexisted in Iraq," he said.

Now, he told "Democracy Now!", it will be hard for the Iraqi public to see the bases as anything but "a force that is driving them into a war between Iran and the United States."

"Qassem Soleimani could travel openly in Iraq. I mean, remember, Qassem Soleimani arrived in Baghdad airport, where half of it is an American base. Qassem Soleimani could travel openly in Iraq. He took selfies. People took his pictures. That didn't happen in secret. Qassem Soleimani was not Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi hiding in a cave or moving stealthily through the country. He stayed in the Green Zone. So, all this happened because there was an understanding between the Americans and the Iranians. So, if the Americans wanted to keep their bases in Iraq, the Iranians would have the freedom to move. And with the killing of Soleimani, the rules of the game have totally changed," he said.

AMY GOODMAN: Ghaith, can you comment on this new information that's come to light about the timing of Soleimani's assassination Friday morning? Iraq's caretaker Prime Minister Adel Abdul-Mahdi has revealed he had plans to meet with Soleimani on the day he was killed to discuss a Saudi proposal to defuse tension in the region. Mahdi said, quote, "He came to deliver me a message from Iran responding to the message we delivered from Saudi Arabia to Iran" -- Saudi Arabia, obviously, a well-known enemy of Iran. Was he set up? Talk about the significance of this.

GHAITH ABDUL-AHAD: Well, it is very significant if it's actually General Qassem Soleimani came to Iraq to deliver this message, if it was actually there was a process of negotiations in the region. We know that Abdul-Mahdi and the Iraqi government, in general, over the last year had been trying to position Iraq as this middle power, as this power where both -- you know, as a country that has a relationship with both Iran and the United States. In that awkward place Iraq found itself in, Iraq has tried to maximize on this. So they started back in summer and fall, when there was an escalation between Iran and the United States, when Iran shot down an American drone. We've seen Adel Abdul-Mahdi fly to Iran, try to mediate. We've seen Adel Abdul-Mahdi open channels of communications with the Gulf, with Saudi Arabia.

So, if it actually, the killing of General Soleimani, ended that peace initiative, it will be kind of disastrous in the region, because, as Narges was saying earlier, it is -- you know, Pompeo is speaking about Iran being this ultimate evil in the region, as this crescent of Shias, as if they just arrived in the past 10 years in the region. The fact if we see Iran's reactions, it's always a reaction to an American provocation. You've seen the occupation of Iraq in 2003. You've seen Iran declared as an "axis of evil." So, if you see it from an Iranian perspective, it's always this existential threat coming from the United States. And I don't think there is a more existential threat than in past year. So, yes, I know -- I mean, I think Adel Abdul-Mahdi and the Iraqi government were trying to find this middle ground, which I think is totally lost, because even Adel Abdul-Mahdi, the person who was trying to find this middle ground, was the person who proposed this law yesterday in the Parliament to expel all American troops from the country.

And I would like to add like another thing. The killing of Qassem Soleimani ended an era in which both Iran and the United States coexisted in Iraq. So, from 2013, '14, we, as journalists, we've seen on the frontlines how the proxies of each power have been helping each other. So we've seen Iranian advisers helping the American-trained Iraqi Army unit or counterterrorism unit in the fight against ISIS. In the same sense, we've seen American airstrikes on threats to these -- kind of to ISIS when it was threatening these militias. That coexistence, it didn't only come from both having a -- sharing an enemy, which is ISIS, or Daesh, but also these were the rules of the game. These were the rules in which Qassem Soleimani could travel openly in Iraq. I mean, remember, Qassem Soleimani arrived in Baghdad airport, where half of it is an American base. Qassem Soleimani could travel openly in Iraq. He took selfies. People took his pictures. That didn't happen in secret. Qassem Soleimani was not Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi hiding in a cave or moving stealthily through the country. He stayed in the Green Zone. So, all this happened because there was an understanding between the Americans and the Iranians. So, if the Americans wanted to keep their bases in Iraq, the Iranians would have the freedom to move. And with the killing of Soleimani, I think the rules of the game have totally changed.

So now I think the first victim of the assassination will be the American bases in Iraq. I don't see any way where the Americans can keep their presence as they did before the assassination of Soleimani. And even the people in the streets, even the people who opposes Iran, who opposes the presence of Iranian militias in power and politics, the corruption of these pro-Iranian parties, even those people would look at these American bases now as not as a force that came to help them in the fight against ISIS, but a force that's dragging them into a war between Iran and the United States.

[Jan 08, 2020] As Michael Flynn relates in his interview with Mehdi Hassan, once kicked out, the Obama Administration took steps that they knew would lead to the creation of ISIS in the region, and fired him as the head of the DIA after he had written them a memo warning them about this.

Jan 08, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

masoud , Jan 7 2020 0:50 utc | 143

@Dan

Iran was definitely involved in organizing, supplying, and even to some extent arming(with small arms) various Iraqi militias. But the best way we know that it wasn't directly involved in attacking US patrols, was that so few soldiers died. Iran has no need to improvise explosive devices, it manufactures landmines on a mass scale which are much more reliable and orders of magnitude more deadly, and operationally easier to use.

Most of the resistance to the US occupation in the Shia regions of Iraq were in the form of non violent demonstrations spearheaded by Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani(who btw is also Iranian).

The nonviolent demonstrators were routinely massacred for their trouble, by both the takfiri resistance and the occupation troops, but eventually succeeded in their demands for a democratic vote wherein they elected a government that demanded the US leave.

And as Michael Flynn relates in his interview with Mehdi Hassan, once kicked out, the Obama Administration took steps that they knew would lead to the creation of ISIS in the region, and fired him as the head of the DIA after he had written them a memo warning them about this.

Michael Flynn, who btw is rabidly anti Iranian, then became the first victim of the Russiagaters when Trump was elected into office.

[Jan 08, 2020] Russia has Peaked , according to the Minister of Energy.

Jan 08, 2020 | peakoilbarrel.com

Ronny Patterson

Ignored says: 01/02/2020 AT 1:49 PM

Russia has Peaked , according to the Minister of Energy.

Russia's Interest In Oil Production Cuts Is Waning

Russia is planning level production for the next 4 years.

"As far as the production cuts are concerned, I repeat once again, this is not an indefinite process. A decision on the exit should be gradually taken in order to keep up market share and so that our companies would be able to provide and implement their future projects. I think that we will consider that this year."(2020)

Meanwhile, Russia's energy ministry is assuming that the country's total output is to average around and slightly above 11.2 million barrels per day until 2024. In other words, it is not building any cut into its plan.

Russia's peak month, so far, was December 2018 at 11,408,000 barrels per day. The average daily production for 2018 was 11,115,000 bpd. Average production for 2019 was 11,211,000 bpd. This is the level they hope to hold for the next 4 years.

Russia's production increased by an average of 96,000 barrels per day in 2019. They are not expecting any further increase at all. They just hope to hold at 2019 levels for another four years. I think they will be very lucky if they manage that.

Point is, the world's largest producer, the USA, will likely peak in a few months. The world's second-largest producer, Russia, is admitting they have peaked. The world's third-largest producer, Saudi Arabia, has very likely peaked though they do not admit it. OPEC likely peaked in 2016, *Iran and Venezuela notwithstanding.

*Iran peaked in 2005 at 3,938,000 bpd. My Venezuela records only go back to 2001 when they produced 2,961,000 bpd. However, they peaked several years before that. However, neither is producing at maximum capacity today due to political problems. However both are clearly in decline regardless of political problems keeping them from producing flat out.

If we are at peak oil right now we are damn close to it.

The Russian Chart below is C+C through December 2019.

REPLY

Ron Patterson Ignored says: 01/02/2020 AT 6:00 PM

Ovi, the data in my chart above is from the official Ministry of Energy web site, converting tons to barrels at 7.33 barrels per ton:
MINISTRY OF ENERGY OF RUSSIAN FEDERATION

The site has not updated the December numbers but the Minister has released them. They can be found here:

UPDATE 1-Russian oil, condensate output surges to record-high in 2019

In December, total oil and gas condensate stood at 11.262 million bpd, up from 11.244 million bpd in November, according to the data.

Those are the exact numbers I used in my chart above. And yes, 2019 was a new high, exactly as I stated in the post above. Its yearly average beat the 2018 yearly average by 90,000 bpd.

Concerning 2020 average, it could not be stated any clearer than this:

Russian Energy Minister Alexander Novak expects Russian oil and condensate production of between 555 million tonnes and 565 million tonnes in 2020, or 11.12-11.32 million bpd using a conversion rate of 7.33 barrels per tonne of oil.

Or this from the link:
Russia's Interest In Oil Production Cuts Is Waning Bold mine:

Russia did not comply with the cuts in 2019.

Got an exemption for condensates at the OPEC meeting, though this was not discussed in the press conference.

Achieving another cut of 70,000 b/d in first quarter appears to be beyond its capability, given past statements.

Russia is planning level production for next 4 years.

And is prepared for oil prices to drop to $25-30 per barrel.

You wrote: I found this statement interesting, in that if they can't increase production, and are at max, why are they worried about market share.

I really don't understand that question. If they plan on producing 11.2 million barrels per day for the next four years, then they should be worried about their market share. Whether they can or cannot produce more than that is beside the point.

[Jan 08, 2020] Do you really want to be a one term president? Pompeo can talk big now and then go back to Kansas to run for senator. Where will you be able to take refuge?

Highly recommended!
Iran has incentives to increase the chance of a Democrat administration, bearing in mind the great deal they got from the last one and the lack of anything they can expect from Trump Term Two.
Notable quotes:
"... Reflection, self criticism or self restraint are not exactly the big strengths of Trump. He prefers solo acts (Emergency! Emergency!) and dislikes advice (especially if longer than 4 pages) and the advice of the sort " You're sure? If you do that the the shit will fly in your face in an hour, Sir ". ..."
"... Trump can order attacks and I don't expect much protest from Mark Esper and it depends on the military (which likely will obey). ..."
"... These so called grownups have been replaced by (then still) happy Bolton (likely, even after being fired, still war happy) and applauders like Pompeo and his buddy Esper. ..."
"... As a thank you to Trump calling the Israel occupied Golan a part of Israel Netanyahu called an (iirc also illegal) new Golan settlement "Ramat Trump" ..."
"... I disagree. Trump maybe the only person who could sell a war with Iran. What he has cultivated is a rabid base that consists of sycophants on one extreme end and desperate nationalists on the other. His base must stick with him...who else do they have? ..."
"... The Left is indifferent to another war. Further depleting the quality stock of our military will aid there agenda of international integration. A weaker US military will force us to collaborate with the world community and not lead it is their thinking. ..."
"... Göring: Why, of course, the people don't want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship. ..."
"... Göring: Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country. ..."
"... We have been so thoroughly indoctrinated with the idea that Iran and Russia are intrinsically and immutable evil and hostile that the thought of actual two sided diplomacy does not occur. IMO neither of these countries are what we collectively think them. So, we could actually give it a try rather than trying to beggar them and destroy their economies. If all fails than we have to be prepared to defend our forces. DOL ..."
Sep 18, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

Do you really want to be a one term president? Pompeo can talk big now and then go back to Kansas to run for senator. Where will you be able to take refuge? Don't let the neocons like Pompeo sell you on war.

Make the intelligence people show you the evidence in detail. Make your own judgments. pl

Vegetius , 17 September 2019 at 08:37 PM

Whatever else he knows, Trump knows that he can't sell a war to the American people.
confusedponderer -> Vegetius... , 18 September 2019 at 03:51 AM
Vegetius,

re " Trump knows that he can't sell a war to the American people "

Are you sure? I am not.

Reflection, self criticism or self restraint are not exactly the big strengths of Trump. He prefers solo acts (Emergency! Emergency!) and dislikes advice (especially if longer than 4 pages) and the advice of the sort " You're sure? If you do that the the shit will fly in your face in an hour, Sir ".

A good number of the so called grownups who gave such advice were (gameshow style) fired, sometimes by twitter.

Trump can order attacks and I don't expect much protest from Mark Esper and it depends on the military (which likely will obey).

These so called grownups have been replaced by (then still) happy Bolton (likely, even after being fired, still war happy) and applauders like Pompeo and his buddy Esper.

Israel could, if politically just a tad more insane, bomb Iran and thus invite the inevitable retaliation. When that happens they'll cry for US aid, weapons and money because they alone ~~~

(a) cannot defeat Iran (short of going nuclear) and ...
(b) Holocaust! We want weapons and money from Germany, too! ...
(c) they know that ...
(d) which does not lead in any way to Netanyahu showing signgs of self restraint or reason.

Netanyahu just - it is (tight) election time - announced, in his sldedge hammer style subtlety, that (he) Israel will annect the palestinian west jordan territory, making the Plaestines an object in his election campaign.

IMO that idea is simply insane and invites more "troubles". But then, I didn't hear anything like, say, Trump gvt protests against that (and why expect that from the dudes who moved the US embassy to Jerusalem).

confusedponderer -> Vegetius... , 18 September 2019 at 07:28 AM
Vegetius,

as for Trump and Netanyahu ... policy debate ... I had that here in mind, which pretty speaks for itself. And I thought Trumo is just running for office in the US. Alas, it is a Netanyaho campaign poster from the current election:

https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/a6e60efd3bde0befbcb8b0a95a42bf4c2624e017/57_296_5123_3074/master/5123.jpg?width=1920&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=1958b9e7cf24d7a3a7b024845de08f7e

As a thank you to Trump calling the Israel occupied Golan a part of Israel Netanyahu called an (iirc also illegal) new Golan settlement "Ramat Trump"

https://cdn.mdr.de/nachrichten/mdraktuell-golan-hoehen-trump-hights-100-resimage_v-variantSmall24x9_w-704.jpg?version=0964

I generously assume that things like that only happen because of the hard and hard ly work of Kushner on his somewhat elusive but of course GIGANTIC and INCREDIBLE Middle East peace plan.

Kushner is probably getting hard and hard ly supported by Ivanka who just said that she inherited her moral compass from her father. Well ... congatulations ... I assume.

Stueeeeeeee said in reply to Vegetius... , 18 September 2019 at 08:31 AM
I disagree. Trump maybe the only person who could sell a war with Iran. What he has cultivated is a rabid base that consists of sycophants on one extreme end and desperate nationalists on the other. His base must stick with him...who else do they have?

The Left is indifferent to another war. Further depleting the quality stock of our military will aid there agenda of international integration. A weaker US military will force us to collaborate with the world community and not lead it is their thinking.

The rest of the nation will follow.

prawnik said in reply to Vegetius... , 18 September 2019 at 10:36 AM
Need I trot out Goering's statement regarding selling a war once more?

Göring: Why, of course, the people don't want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship.

Gilbert: There is one difference. In a democracy, the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars.

Göring: Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.

turcopolier , 17 September 2019 at 09:31 PM
jonst

We have been so thoroughly indoctrinated with the idea that Iran and Russia are intrinsically and immutable evil and hostile that the thought of actual two sided diplomacy does not occur. IMO neither of these countries are what we collectively think them. So, we could actually give it a try rather than trying to beggar them and destroy their economies. If all fails than we have to be prepared to defend our forces. DOL

Matt said in reply to turcopolier ... , 18 September 2019 at 12:54 AM
I agree with your reply 100%

these phobias are so entrenched now they're a huge obstacle to overcome,

Mark Twain: "It's easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled."

William Casey: "We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false"

Christian Chuba , 18 September 2019 at 05:22 AM
The 'ivestigations are a formality. The Saudis (with U.S. backing) are already saying that the missiles were Iranian made and according to them, this proves that Iran fired them. The Saudis are using the more judicious phrase 'behind the attack' but Pompeo is running with the fired from Iran narrative.

How can we tell the difference between an actual Iranian manufactured missile vs one that was manufactured in Yemen based on Iranian designs? We only have a few pictures Iranian missiles unlike us, the Iranians don't toss them all over the place so we don't have any physical pieces to compare them to.

Perhaps honest investigators could make a determination but even if they do exist they will keep quiet while the bible thumping Pompeo brays and shamelessly lies as he is prone to do.

PRC90 said in reply to Christian Chuba... , 18 September 2019 at 10:36 AM
These kinds of munition will leave hundreds of bits scattered all over their targets. I'm waiting for the press conference with the best bits laid out on the tables.
I doubt that there will be any stencils saying 'Product of Iran', unless the paint smells fresh.
Nuff Sed , 18 September 2019 at 07:22 AM
1. I am still waiting to read some informed discussion concerning the *accuracy* of the projectiles hitting their targets with uncanny precision from hundreds of miles away. What does this say about the achievement of those pesky Eye-rainians? https://www.moonofalabama.org/images9/saudihit2.jpg

2. "The US Navy has many ships in the Gulf and the Arabian Sea. The Iranian Navy and the IRGC Navy will attack our naval vessels until the Iranian forces are utterly destroyed.: Ahem, Which forces are utterly destroyed? With respect colonel, you are not thinking straight. An army with supersonic land to sea missiles that are highly accurate will make minced meat of any fool's ship that dare attack it. The lesson of the last few months is that Iran is deadly serious about its position that if they cannot sell their oil, no one else will be able to either. And if the likes of the relatively broadminded colonel have not yet learned that lesson, then this can only mean that the escalation ladder will continue to be climbed, rung by rung. Next rung: deep sea port of Yanbu, or, less likely, Ra's Tanura. That's when the price of oil will really go through the roof and the Chinese (and possibly one or two of the Europoodles) will start crying Uncle Scam. Nuff Sed.

turcopolier , 18 September 2019 at 08:07 AM
nuff Sed

It sounds like you are getting a little "help" with this. You statement about the result of a naval confrontation in the Gulf reflects the 19th Century conception that "ships can't fight forts." that has been many times exploded. You have never seen the amount of firepower that would be unleashed on Iran from the air and sea. Would the US take casualties? Yes, but you will be destroyed.

Nuff Sed -> turcopolier ... , 18 September 2019 at 08:18 AM
We will have to agree to disagree. But unless I am quite mistaken, the majority view if not the consensus of informed up to date opinion holds that the surest sign that the US is getting ready to attack Iran is that it is withdrawing all of its naval power out of the Persian Gulf, where they would be sitting ducks.

Besides, I don't think it will ever come to that. Not to repeat myself, but taking out either deep sea ports of Ra's Tanura and/ or Yanbu (on the Red Sea side) will render Saudi oil exports null and void for the next six months. The havoc that will play with the price of oil and consequently on oil futures and derivatives will be enough for any president and army to have to worry about. But if the US would still be foolhardy enough to continue to want to wage war (i.e. continue its strangulation of Iran, which it has been doing more or less for the past 40 years), then the Yemeni siege would be broken and there would be a two-pronged attack from the south and the north, whereby al-Qatif, the Shi'a region of Saudi Arabia where all the oil and gas is located, will be liberated from their barbaric treatment at the hands of the takfiri Saudi scum, which of course is completely enabled and only made possible by the War Criminal Uncle Sam.

Go ahead, make my day: roll the dice.

scott s. said in reply to Nuff Sed ... , 18 September 2019 at 11:32 AM
AFAIK the only "US naval power" currently is the Abraham Lincoln CSG and I haven't seen any public info that it was in the Persian Gulf. Aside from the actual straits, I'm not sure of your "sitting ducks" assertion. First they wouldn't be sitting, and second you have the problem of a large volume of grey shipping that would complicate the targeting problem. Of course with a reduced time-of-flight, that also reduces target position uncertainty.
CK said in reply to turcopolier ... , 18 September 2019 at 09:55 AM
Forts are stationary.
Nothing I have read implies that Iran has a lot of investment in stationary forts.
Millennium Challenge 2002, only the game cannot be restarted once the enemy does not behave as one hopes. Unlike in scripted war simulations, Opfor can win.
I remember the amount of devastation that was unleashed on another "backwards nation" Linebackers 1 - 20, battleship salvos chemical defoliants, the Phoenix program, napalm for dessert.
And not to put to fine a point on it, but that benighted nation was oriental; Iran is a Caucasian nation full of Caucasian type peoples.
Nothing about this situation is of any benefit to the USA.
We do not need Saudi oil, we do not need Israel to come to the defense of the USA here in North America, we do not need to stick our dick into the hornet's nest and then wonder why they sting and it hurts. How many times does Dumb have to win?
Nuff Sed , 18 September 2019 at 08:07 AM
3. Also, I can't imagine this event as being a very welcome one for Israeli military observers, the significance of which is not lost on them, unlike their US counterparts. If Yemen/ Iran can put the Abqaiq processing plant out of commission for a few weeks, then obviusly Hezbollah can do the same for the giant petrochemical complex at Haifa, as well as Dimona, and the control tower at Ben Gurion Airport.
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/239251

https://www.timesofisrael.com/haifa-municipal-workers-block-refinery-access-for-2nd-day/

These are the kinds of issues which are germane: the game has changed. What are the implications?

turcopolier , 18 September 2019 at 08:08 AM
nuff sed

I have said repeatedly that Hizbullah can destroy Israel. Nothing about that has changed.

turcopolier , 18 September 2019 at 08:17 AM
Yeah, right

It was late at night when I wrote this. Yeah, Right. the Iranians could send their massive ground force into Syria where it would be chewed up by US and Israeli air. Alternatively they could invade Saudi arabia.

Yeah, Right said in reply to turcopolier ... , 18 September 2019 at 08:38 AM
Thank you for the reply but actually I was thinking that an invasion of Afghanistan would be the more sensible ploy.

To my mind if the Iranian Army sits on its backside then the USAF and IAF will ignore it to roam the length and breadth of Iran destroying whatever ground targets are on their long-planned target-list.

Or that Iranian Army can launch itself into Afghanistan, at which point all of the USA plans for a methodical aerial pummelling of Iran's infrastructure goes out the window as the USAF scrambles to save the American forces in Afghanistan from being overrun.

Isn't that correct?

So what incentive is there for that Iranian Army to sit around doing nothing?

Iran will do what the USAF isn't expecting it to do, if for no other reason that it upsets the USA's own game-plan.

johnf , 18 September 2019 at 08:41 AM
There seems to be a bit of a hiatus in proceedings - not in these columns but on the ground in the ME.

Everyone seems to be waiting for something.

Could this "something" be the decisive word fron our commander in chief Binyamin Netanyahu?

The thing is he has just pretty much lost an election. Likud might form part of the next government of Israel but most likely not with him at its head.

Does anyone have any ideas on what the future policy of Israel is likely to be under Gantz or whoever? Will it be the same, worse or better?

turcopolier , 18 September 2019 at 08:51 AM
Yeah Right

The correct US move would be to ignore an Iranian invasion of Afghanistan and continue leaving the place. The Iranian Shia can then fight the Sunni jihadi tribesmen.

Yeah, Right said in reply to turcopolier ... , 18 September 2019 at 09:29 AM
Oh, I completely agree that if the Iranians launch an invasion of Afghanistan then the only sensible strategy would be for the US troops to pack up and get out as fast as possible.

But that is "cut and run", which many in Washington would view as a humiliation.

Do you really see the beltway warriors agreeing to that?

turcopolier , 18 September 2019 at 08:53 AM
Stueee

A flaw in your otherwise sound argument is that the US military has not been seriously engaged for several years and has been reconstituting itself with the money Trump has given them.

turcopolier , 18 September 2019 at 08:57 AM
Nuff Sed

Re-positioning of forces does not indicate that a presidential decision for war has been made. The navy will not want to fight you in the narrow, shallow waters of the Gulf.

Lars , 18 September 2019 at 09:53 AM
I would think that Mr. Trump would have a hard time sell a war with Iran over an attack on Saudi Arabia. The good question about how would that war end will soon be raised and I doubt there are many good answers.

The US should have gotten out of that part of the world a long time ago, just as they should have paid more attention to the warnings in President Eisenhower's farewell address.

turcopolier , 18 September 2019 at 10:12 AM
CK

The point was about shore based firepower, not forts. don't be so literal.

CK said in reply to turcopolier ... , 18 September 2019 at 10:34 AM
The Perfumed Fops in the DOD restarted Millennium Challenge 2002,because Gen Van Riper had used 19th and early 20th century tactics and shore based firepower to sink the Blue Teams carrier forces. There was a script, Van Riper did some adlibbing. Does the US DOD think that Iran will follow the US script? In a unipolar world maybe the USA could enforce a script, that world was severely wounded in 1975, took a sucking chest wound during operation Cakewalk in 2003 and died in Syria in 2015. Too many poles too many powers not enough diplomacy. It will not end well.
turcopolier , 18 September 2019 at 10:16 AM
lars

We would crush Iran at some cost to ourselves but the political cost to the anti-globalist coalition would catastrophic. BTW Trump's "base" isn't big enough to elect him so he cannot afford to alienate independents.

prawnik , 18 September 2019 at 10:32 AM
Even if Rouhani and the Iranian Parliament personally designed, assembled, targeted and launched the missiles (scarier sounding version of "drones"), then they should be congratulated, for the Saudi tyrant deserves every bad thing that he gets.
turcopolier , 18 September 2019 at 10:49 AM
prawnik (Sid) in this particular situation goering's glittering generalization does not apply. Trump needs a lot of doubting suburbanites to win and a war will not incline them to vote for him.
Bill Wade , 18 September 2019 at 10:53 AM
Looks like President Trump is walking it back, tweet: I have just instructed the Secretary of the Treasury to substantially increase Sanctions on the country of Iran!
PRC90 , 18 September 2019 at 11:34 AM
I doubt there will be armed conflict of any kind.
Everything Trump does from now (including sacking the Bolton millstone) will be directed at winning 2020, and that will not be aided by entering into some inconclusive low intensity attrition war.
Iran, on the other hand, will be doing everything it can to increase the chance of a Democrat administration, bearing in mind the great deal they got from the last one and the lack of anything they can expect from Trump Term Two.
This may be a useful tool for determining their next move, but the limit of their actions would be when some Democrats begin making the electorally damaging mistake of critising Trump for not retaliating against Iranian provocations.
Terence Gore , 18 September 2019 at 11:35 AM
Pros and cons of many options considered against Iran

https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/06_iran_strategy.pdf

[Jan 08, 2020] While 60^of Americans neven heard aboutSoleimani befor 43$ of the country approcved Trump-Pomeo assasination of this senior Iran commander

The unique, really exceptional feature of the USA is that it does not try to hide idiocy of its leaders and lack of education and interest in knowing the truth of the majority of population
Jan 08, 2020 | www.rt.com

RT :

A new poll has found that Americans doubt Donald Trump has a clear Iran policy, but nonetheless they support the decision to kill Qassem Soleimani – who, remarkably, had been an unknown entity for the majority of respondents.

Forty-three percent of Americans said they approved of the US drone strike that killed the Iranian commander last week in Baghdad, while 38% disapproved and 19% said they were unsure, according to the results of a HuffPost/YouGov survey.

And while almost half the country backs Soleimani's assassination, 60% of Americans conceded that they had never heard of the Quds Force commander before last week. An additional 14% said they weren't sure if they had known about him before the strike.

[Jan 08, 2020] Big, bad Putin attacked by slimy rat Browder.

Jan 08, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

Is there a chorus of politicians singing in there about how lazy they are, and how they never bothered to verify Browder' story? The story is indeed remarkable, but not in the way that first appears.

Stephen Fry / @stephenfry

You may or may not know the remarkable story of @Billbrowder and the #MagnitskyAct - find out the startling truth by listening to
#MagnitskytheMusical by the wondrous @JohnnyFlynnHQ & @roberthudson - @BBCRadio3 7.30 Sun 12th Jan

Magnitsky the Musical

Book and lyrics by Robert Hudson
Music and lyrics by Johnny Flynn

12 January 2020
О 1 hour, 34 minutes

Johnny Flynn and Robert Hudson bring us a musical based on the
incredible story of an American venture capitalist, a Russian tax
advisor, a crazy heist, the Trump Tower meeting and the very rule of
law.

Blending music and satire, the story explores the truths and fictions
surrounding the origins and aftershocks of the Magnitsky Act; global
legislation which allows governments to sanction those who they see
as offenders of human rights.

It tells the story of a tax adviser's struggle to uncover a huge tax
fraud, his imprisonment by the very authorities he is investigating,
and the American financier's crusade for justice.

Johnny Flynn, Paul Chahidi and members of the cast perform songs in
a epic story that explores democracy, corruption, and how we
undervalue the law at our peril.

Bill Paul Chahidi Sergei Johnny Flynn Jamie Fenella Woolgar Natalia Ellie Kendrick Kuznetsov Gus Brown Guard Clive Hayward Silchenko Ian Conningham Jared Will Kirk Fisherman Neil McCaul Judge Jessica Turner

Additional singing by Sinead Maclnnes, Laura Christy, Scarlett
Courtney and Lucy Reynolds.

The cellist is Joe Zeitlin. Sound is by Peter Ringrose. Directed by Sasha Yevtushenko.

[Jan 08, 2020] The New Kremlin Stooge

Jan 08, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

The United States of Amnesia, and Its Incredible Asbestos Pants

Wink
Uncle Volodya says, You must remember, my dear lady, the most important rule of any successful illusion: First, the people must want to believe in it"."

Liar, liar, pants on fire

Chidren's rhyme

In an era of stress and anxiety, when the present seems unstable and the future unlikely, the natural response is to retreat and withdraw from reality, taking recourse either in fantasies of the future or in modified visions of a half-imagined past.

Alan Moore, from "Watchmen"

Unless you were catatonic this past couple of weeks, dead drunk from Sunday to Saturday, suffered a debilitating brain injury or were living in Bognor Regis where the internet cannot reach, you heard about the west slapping a four-year Olympic ban on Russia. Because it could, it did. And not really for any other reason, despite the indignation and manufactured outrage. It's a pity – now that I come to think on it – that you can't use outrage to power a vehicle, fill a sandwich or knit into socks: because the west has a bottomless supply, and it's just about as renewable a resource as you could envision.

As I have reiterated elsewhere and often, the United States of America is the cheatingest nation on the planet where professional sports is concerned, because winning matters to Americans like nowhere else. Successful Olympic medal-winners and iconic sports figures in the USA are feted like victorious battlefield generals, because the sports arena is just another battlefield to the United States, and there's no it's-not-whether-you-win-or-lose-it's-how-you-play-the-game in wartime. Successful American sports figures foster an appreciation of American culture and lifestyle, and promote an image of America as a purposeful and powerful nation. Successful sports figures anywhere, really; not so very long ago Olympic gold medalists were merely given an appreciative parade by a grateful nation, and featured in lucrative advertising contracts if they were photogenic. More recently, some nations have simply paid athletes by the medal for winning. This includes most nations , with the notable exceptions of the UK, Norway and Sweden. So the pressure is on to win, win, win, by whatever means are necessary.

Since Russia is in second place only to Germany for all-time medal rankings in the Olympics, and since Russia eventually made it back up to Public Enemy Number One in the USA – after a brief hiatus during which it looked like a combination of Boris Yeltsyn and teams of Harvard economists were going to make a respectful pauper of it while it became a paradise for international investors – the USA spares no effort to beat Russia at everything. On occasions where it is not particularly successful, as it was not in the 2014 Winter Olympics at Sochi, it has turned to other methods – screaming that the Russians are all dopers who benefit from a state-sponsored doping scheme, and implementing bans to prevent as many Russian athletes as possible from competing.

And that's my principal objection. In media matters in the world of sports, just as in other political venues, the USA relies on a combination of lying and relentless repetition to drive its points home. Thus it is that the English-speaking world still believes Russia was convicted of having had a state-sponsored doping plan, found guilty and justly sentenced upon the discovery of mountains of evidence, its accusers vindicated and its dissident whistleblowers heroes to a grateful world. Huzzah!!

Examples abound – here's a random one from the BBC:

"Russia operated a state-sponsored doping programme for four years across the "vast majority" of summer and winter Olympic sports, claims a new report.

It was "planned and operated" from late 2011 – including the build-up to London 2012 – and continued through the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics until August 2015."

The BBC is Britain's state-funded broadcaster, financed by the British government, and the British government is second only to the United States in its virulent hatred of Russia and Russians. But that was back then, when the 'doping scheme' was newly 'discovered', and all the western reporters and government figures were nearly wetting their pants with excitement. What about now?

Essentially, nothing has changed. TIME Magazine :

"It's the latest twist in a long-running saga of investigations into widespread, state-sponsored doping by the Kremlin."

My soul, if it isn't the USA's star witness, Doctor Grigory Rodchenkov, in AFP ;

"Doped athletes do not work alone. There are medical doctors, coaches and managers who provided substances, advised and protected them. In Russia's state-sponsored doping scheme, there is also a state-sponsored defense of many cheaters including state officials, witnesses and apparatchiks who are lying under oath and have falsified evidence. These individuals are clearly criminals," he said.

More about him later; for now, suffice it to say the western media still finds him a credible and compelling witness.

The Canadian Globe & Mail :

"In 2016, independent investigations confirmed that Russian officials had run a massive state‑sponsored doping system during the 2014 Winter Olympics and Paralympics in Sochi, which fed illicit performance-enhancing drugs to hundreds of athletes and took outlandish measures to pervert national drug-testing mechanisms.

The evidence was incontrovertible."

I was going to go on, listing examples in the popular press from around the world, published since the latest ban was announced, all claiming investigation had proved the Russians had a massive state-sponsored doping scheme in place which let them cheat their way to the podium. But I think you get the picture, and that last lead-in was my cue; it was just too good to pass up.

Independent investigations confirmed. The evidence was incontrovertible.

Well, let's take a look at that. Incontrovertible evidence ought to be able to withstand a bit of prying, what? When the evidence of something being so is both massive and incontrovertible, beyond question and the result of proof beyond a doubt, then that thing IS. Therefore, the western press is proceeding on the assumption that western investigations proved the Russians had a doping program in which all or most Russian athletes took prohibited performance-enhancing drugs, at the instruction of sports-organization officials, who were in turn directed by state officials to use such methods to permit Russian athletes to win where they would otherwise likely not have been capable of a winning performance. And there were such allegations by western figures and officials, together with assurances that there was so much evidence that well, frankly, it was embarrassing. But the western media and western sports organizations and officials apparently do not understand what 'evidence' is.

The Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), established in 1984 by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and headquartered at Lausanne, Switzerland, is recognized by all Olympic international organizations as the highest authority for sports-related legal issues. An Investigative Commission consisting of Dr. Richard McLaren (Chair), Dick Pound and Gunter Younger was appointed to look into allegations of widespread and state-supported doping of athletes of the Russian Olympic team for the 2016 Winter Olympics at Sochi, Russia. The Commission's star witness was Dr. Grigory Rodchenkov, former head of the Moscow laboratory. According to what became known as the McLaren Report, more than 1000 Russian athletes across 30 sports were involved in or benefited from "an institutional conspiracy" of doping. The Investigative Commission settled on sanctioning 35 Olympic athletes with Anti-Doping Rules Violations (ARDV), and they were banned from further international sports competitions; those who had won medals had them confiscated. Nearly all the sanctioned athletes appealed their cases to the Court of Arbitration for Sport.

Sorry to keep hopping back and forth, but I'm trying to stay with two major themes at the same time for the moment – the accusations against the Russian Olympic athletes, which were entirely based on the revelations of the 'doping mastermind' , Dr. Grigory Rodchenkov, and Dr. Rodchenkov himself. Western organizations and media were bowled over by the affable Rodchenkov, and eager to accept his jaw-dropping revelations about widespread doping in Russian sport. Sites specializing in sports doping with steroids feted him as the brilliant mind behind not only doping Russian athletes, but devising a test for common steroids which increased their detection window from only days to in excess of months. This enabled the retesting of previously-stored samples from international athletes which had already passed as clean. I suspect not a lot of followers of the Russian doping scandal are aware of that, and any such results should be viewed with the utmost suspicion in light of what a colossal fraud he turned out to be. I'd like you to just keep that in mind as we go further. Dr. Rodchenkov also claimed to be behind the brilliant – everything he does is brilliant – formulation of the now-notorious and, at the time of its alleged widespread use, top-secret "Duchess Cocktail", a steroid-stacker mixed with alcohol which made the presence of the steroids undetectable. Remember that word; undetectable, because we'll come back to it. Additionally, please keep in mind that Dr. Rodchenkov's unique testing method was the one used to re-test stored samples from the 2008 Beijing Olympics and the 2012 London Olympics.

So, back to the Court of Arbitration for Sport. 39 Russian athletes who had been accused of doping in the McLaren Report appealed their sentences of lifetime Olympic bans and forfeiture of medals won.

Of those 39 appeals, 28 of the appeals were completely upheld , the judgments against the athletes reversed, and any medals forfeited were reinstated. A further 11 appeals were partially upheld, but the lifetime bans were reduced to have effect only for the upcoming Olympic Games at Peyongchang, Korea. That makes 39 of 39. Not a single athlete accused was found to have participated in a state-sponsored doping program administered by Russian sports officials acting under orders of the Russian government. The appeals of a further 3 Russian athletes were not heard by the date of release of the statement, and were stayed until a later date.

It is important to note, and was specifically addressed in the release, that the CAS did not examine the matter of whether there was or was not a state-sponsored or controlled doping program; that was not within the Court's mandate. So for evidence of evidence, I guess you might say, and for an overall feel for the credibility of the witness whose revelations underpinned the entirety of the McLaren Report, we turn to Dr. Rodchenkov's testimony before the CAS. https://southfront.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/1-13.png

As we examine his performance on that occasion, I'd like to point out that this likely represents the first time Rodchenkov was cross-examined by and on behalf of individuals who were not necessarily delighted to believe everything he said without questioning it further, as the McLaren Commission apparently was. Because his story fell apart, often in ways that would have been amusing in anything other than the serious setting which prevailed. That's Rodchenkov in the balaclava, which his handlers evidently thought necessary to conceal his appearance. Perhaps he's had extensive cosmetic surgery, because his face was all over the news before that – he is in the US Witness Protection Program, after all. In my opinion, it only lent to the overall sense of unreality, but to each his own. I'll also be jumping back and forth between what Rodchenkov or his backers confidently claimed prior to the hearing, and during testimony, when I think it is important to highlight manifest umm inconsistencies. Ready? Let's do it.

Pre-CAS hearing: "The latest WADA report suggests that Rodchenkov helped as many as 1,000 Russian athletes get away with doping. Hundreds of those athletes were able to get away with the use of the "Duchess steroid cocktail" while avoiding detection."

During testimony and under questioning by counsel for the defendants, Rodchenkov admitted (a) that he had never personally distributed the 'Duchess cocktail' to any Russian athlete, (b) that he had never personally seen any Russian athlete take the mixture known as the Duchess cocktail, (c) that he had never personally witnessed any Russian athlete being directed by a coach to take the Duchess cocktail, or any coach being directed by any Russian state official to distribute it to his athletes, and (d) that he had never personally seen any Russian athlete tamper with a doping sample.

Forgive me if I jump to the conclusion that the foregoing rules out a state-sponsored doping program insofar as it was ever witnessed by the McLaren Report's star and principal witness; McLaren did not interview any other Russian officials, he claimed he didn't have time.

But it gets better . Or worse, if you are Rodchenkov, or one of those who gleefully relied on his testimony to put those filthy Russians away forever.

Pre-CAS hearing: "In 2016, independent investigations confirmed that Russian officials had run a massive state‑sponsored doping system during the 2014 Winter Olympics and Paralympics in Sochi, which fed illicit performance-enhancing drugs to hundreds of athletes and took outlandish measures to pervert national drug-testing mechanisms The evidence was incontrovertible."

When examined on his statements that he had swapped samples of positive-test athletes urine after 1:00 AM, passing them through a 'mousehole' in the laboratory wall to FSB agents outside and exchanging them for clean samples, in light of the fact that his meticulously-maintained daily diary recorded him as being at home in bed by midnight, he claimed he had lied in his diary. What a clever intelligence asset, to have anticipated questioning years in advance, and added an extra layer of obfuscation! It was not specifically addressed in testimony to my knowledge, but I would like to highlight here that Dr. Rodchenkov was allegedly alone at the lab at these alleged times – except, of course, for the secret agents waiting outside the mousehole – and could have driven a gurney with a squeaky wheel loaded with conspiratorial piss samples out into the parking lot, and loaded it into the trunk of his car with nobody the wiser: why all the John le Carré espionagery through the wall? Comes to that, why would you contaminate a sample with salt, coffee granules and hilarious incompetence like accidentally getting male DNA in female samples, when the doping compound only you knew was in the samples was undetectable by anyone else, because you had specifically engineered it that way?

McLaren claimed in his report that he had seen a method demonstrated, which he presumed was the method used by the FSB to open the sealed sample bottles and replace the sample inside with clean urine. He further claimed that scratches found on the glass bottles were proof of tampering. Other analysts suggested the scratches were probably made when the sample bottle was sealed in accordance with the instructions for its proper use, and the manufacturer claimed the bottle had never successfully been opened, once sealed, without breaking the cap, which is by design an indication of potential tampering. The alleged secret method of successfully doing it was never demonstrated by McLaren or any of his operatives for independent verification. For Rodchenkov's part, he claimed it had been done by 'magicians', and offered no clue as to the alleged method, and it seems clear to me that McLaren simply proceeded with Rodchenkov's hearsay assurances that it had been accomplished.

The controversial and pivotal claim by McLaren that Russian Minister for Sport Vitaly Mutko, "directed, controlled and oversaw the manipulation of athlete's [ sic ] analytical results or sample swapping" was not supported by anything other than Rodchenkov's diary. You remember – the one he admitted to having embellished with lies so that stories he told years later would make sense. This is absolutely critical, because the claim to have proven the existence of a state-sponsored doping program rests only on this – Rodchenkov has admitted he never personally saw any Russian state official give orders to coaches or athletes to use performance-enhancing drugs. McLaren's bombshell allegation appears to have been extracted from the diary of a proven and admitted liar, and is supported by no other evidence. Yet the western press still maintains there was a Russian state-sponsored doping program, administered with the knowledge and facilitation of the state government, and that this was proven. Rodchenkov is still accorded the respect of a credible witness. Rodchenkov is still speaking authoritatively about the nature of cheating, and – astoundingly – describing those who have lied under oath and falsified evidence as criminals, just as if he had not done both himself. It is as if the CAS hearings which exonerated the majority of the accused Russian athletes, and sharply reduced the punishments of the rest, had never happened. For all the mainstream media coverage the event received, it might not have.

Before the CAS hearing, WADA and the IOC regularly dangled reinstatement of the Russian anti-doping agency (RUSADA) in exchange for the Russian government openly and completely accepting the conclusions of the McLaren Report, officially admitting to having cheated on a massive scale and with the full knowledge and support of serving government officials. It never did. The Russian state acknowledged it has a doping problem, and it has – some athletes were found guilty of having taken banned substances, and there are a few every Olympic competition. But Moscow has never accepted the conclusions of the McLaren Report. And after the CAS Appeals decision, RUSADA was reinstated anyway.

Which brings us to here; now. The entire focus of the McLaren Report and the bullying by the IOC was directed toward making Russia admit it was guilty of organized doping, with the drive for momentum seeking a ban on further competition. Since it never did, the alternative was to prove it without an admission, so that no doubt existed. Exonerating the few athletes ever charged among the thousand or so said to be guilty looks like a hell of a funny way of doing that. The McLaren Team's star and main witness fell apart on the stand and admitted he had either lied about everything or simply made it up. There is no reason at all – outside stubborn western prejudice – to imagine Russian athletes are doping any more than any other national teams.

But then, hackers – Russians, of course, it goes without saying – calling themselves "Fancy Bear" and "Cozy Bear" (hint to Russians, do not call yourself "anything Bear" – the Bear is synonymous with Russia. Call yourself "Elon Tesla" or "Mo Money") began to publish stolen medical data revealing the scope of western athletes who had been granted permission to use banned performance-enhancing drugs by their Olympic Associations, for perceived medical reasons, through the TUE – the Therapeutic Use Exemption. The western sports industry was outraged – that information was private , God damn it – and it was just grotesque that the cheating Russians would have the gall to allege western athletes were cheaters. But after it had time to calm down, and after some revelations proved hard to defend, the industry had to grudgingly admit the TUE was a problem .

Iconic American cyclist Lance Armstrong doped for years , but was revered by an entire generation of American kids and sports fans as the finest example of a stoic and selfless sportsman the human race could provide. Teammates and his sports doctor helped him avoid tests, and in one instance he dropped out of a race after receiving a text message from a teammate that testers were waiting for him. When he actually tested positive for corticosteroid use in the 1999 Tour de France, his doctors claimed he had received the steroid in a cream used to treat a saddle sore, and a back-dated prescription was provided.

Retroactive TUE's sound phony right out of the gate, and consequently their use is supposed to be very rare, since the immediate perception is that the exemption was issued to protect the athlete from the fallout of a positive test; what could be simpler? Just issue them a prescription to take a banned substance, because they really, really needed it. Most of the TUE's issued to tennis world champion Serena Williams were retroactive , in some cases going back two weeks or more. A TUE issued during a period that an athlete has withdrawn from competition sounds understandable, because they cannot be using it to enhance their career or win medals. A retroactive TUE issued during competition that allows an athlete to use a stimulant which increases drive, or a painkiller which lets them power through without the limb failing, is hard to see as anything other than a cheat issued to protect a national sports asset.

TUE's are the vehicle of choice in professional cycling, with both British cyclists who won the Tour de France – Scott Froome and Bradley Wiggins – revealed to have secured TUE's allowing them to take steroids during the competitions. They claimed to be suffering from 'sport-induced asthma', which is apparently a documented condition when you try to make your body process air faster or more efficiently than it is capable of handling. USADA head Travis Tygart, who is withering in his contempt of and hatred for Russia, loses no opportunity to defend the integrity of American athletes who are allowed to dope because they have a form that says they need to. I find it hard to believe Russian athletes who secured a TUE allowing them to take a performance-enhancer during competition would meet with such hearty approval from him. It's because Americans are inherently honest and are genetically incapable of cheating, while Russians are just natural-born cheats.

American gymnastics champion Simone Biles quickly became the national face of ADHD by proactively defending her need for a banned substance. Tygart and American Olympics officials were maudlin in her defense, like everyone is just picking on a little girl and trying to rob her of hard-earned success. What effect does her permitted drug have? It permits an enhanced level of concentration and focus, so that no energy is lost to distractions such a a shouting crowd, bright colours and rapid movements, and she sees nothing but the target of her efforts. Is that helpful? What do you think?

The jury seems to be out on whether corticosteroids would help Biles focus on her routines, although there seems to be a fairly well-established body of evidence that these are not anabolic steroids, and do not increase muscle mass – that's all her. But the zeal with which WADA went after meldonium – just because, apparently, eastern-European athletes used it extensively, although it has never been demonstrated to enhance performance – speaks volumes about the western bias in favour of therapeutic use of drugs by the Good Guys. They're just looking after their health. Russians are cheating. How did WADA find out about meldonium? I'm glad you asked – USADA received a 'confidential tip' that east-European athletes were using it to enhance performance. Despite expert advice that there is no evidence at all that it enhances performance , WADA banned it. Because, you know, east-European athletes might think it helps them, and if they think that, then it is.

Just like Simone Biles and her TUE. But that's not only allowed, she's a hero for being so open about her ADHD.

In the USA, cheating seems to be focused on Track and Field , because that's where the USA wins a lot of its medals. Hence the effort to minimize the Russian participation, and thus cut down the opposition.

"The United States in fact has a lengthy history of doping at the Olympic Games and other international events, and of turning a blind eye to its own cheating. That's especially true in track and field, the front porch of the U.S. Olympic program because of track's ability to drive American medal supremacy.

Nike's track-and-field training program, for example, has been dogged by doping allegations since at least the 1970s, when its top officials were allegedly aware that athletes used steroids and other performance enhancing drugs. Since the U.S. boycott of the 1980 Moscow Games, every single U.S. Summer Olympic team has included at least one sprinter who either had previously failed a drug test or would later do so. And that's to say nothing of athletes in the other disciplines.

American drug cheats include some of the country's most notable Olympians. Carl Lewis admitted in 2003 that he had failed three drug tests prior to the 1988 Seoul Olympics, but avoided a ban with the help of the U.S. Olympic Committee and won two golds and a silver instead. Justin Gatlin won the 100-meter dash at the 2004 Athens Games before later failing a drug test. Tyson Gay, the world's fastest man entering the 2008 Beijing Games, later failed a drug test too. Gay and Gatlin nevertheless formed half of the American men's 4×100 relay team in Rio de Janeiro in 2016. "

American athletes routinely fail drug tests, but are waved ahead to compete anyway. " Eighty-four American Olympians failed drug tests in the year prior to the 1984 Los Angeles Games but went on to compete anyway , according to author Mark Johnson . Carl Lewis claimed that "hundreds" of Americans failed tests while remaining eligible to compete, with the assistance of the U.S. Olympic Committee, in Seoul. The USOC faced allegations ahead the 2000 Sydney Games that it had withheld information on 15 positive tests from international officials; by 2003, it had been accused of covering up at least 114 positives between 1988 and 2000."

Curiously, the latest Russia ban is attributed to allegations that Russia fiddled with the athletes database it provided to WADA, covering up positive drug tests. But it appears the United States has a well-known history of fudging and obscuring positive drug-test results, refusing to reveal them to regulatory bodies, and pushing its doper athletes into international competition. Yet the United States has a loudly self-awarded reputation as the Defender Of Clean Sport.

Russia's position is that the ubiquitous Grigory Rodchenkov – a proven and self-confessed liar, remember, who claimed to have lied in his diary where he was supposedly only talking to himself – modified the database from abroad , after he fled to the United States and made such a Godsend of himself in America's drive to move up the medal rankings. He apparently retained administrator rights on the database, which was accessible online, even after fleeing from Russia. His lawyer's defense, curiously, is that he did not and, significantly, 'could not' access the database. To me, that sounds like he's going out a little bit on a limb – all the Russian side needs to do is prove that he could have to discredit Rodchenkov's story. It looks like it is headed back to the Court of Arbitration for Sport in the spring – the same venue which exonerated the Russian athletes after Rodchenkov's previous epic thundering-in on full afterburner. Will it happen again? We'll see. Until then the western press appears not to have noticed that Rodchenov lied his charming face off last time. And still is, through his shyster lawyer – "If WADA or any other agency needs Grigory to testify, Grigory will uphold his promise to co-operate fully to help atone for his role," Walden said. You know – the role he admitted he never played, in that he never saw any Russian athlete take the Duchess Cocktail he claimed to have devised to make doping undetectable, never heard any Russian sports official order his players to take it, and in fact could not remember exactly what was in it.

Stay tuned – this should be interesting. Count on the Americans to press to the end for a full and lasting ban, probably for life.

[Jan 08, 2020] US strategy and what the gas pipeline war is costing us by Manlio Dinucci

Jan 08, 2020 | www.voltairenet.org

After having forbidden the Chinese company Huawei to compete in the calls for tender for the 5G network, the United States are now forbidding the Europeans to increase their supplies of Russian gas. While the first decision was aimed at maintaining the coherence of NATO, the second is not a result of Russophobia, but of the 1992 " Wolfowitz doctrine " - preventing the EU from becoming a competitor of the " American Empire ". In both cases, the point is to infantilise the EU and keep it in a situation of dependence. Voltaire Network | Rome (Italy) | 30 December 2019 français italiano Español Português Türkçe română Deutsch norsk + -

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German chancellorAngela Merkel and her Minister of the Economy, Olaf Scholz, immediately denounced US interference.

Although they were locked in a convoluted struggle concerning the impeachment of President Trump, Republicans and Democrats in the Senate laid down their arms in order to vote, in quasi-unanimity, for the imposition of heavy sanctions on the companies participating in the construction of North Stream 2, the doubling of the gas pipeline which delivers Russian gas to Germany across the Baltic Sea. The main victims were the European companies which had helped finance the 11 billion dollar project with the Russian company Gazprom. The project is now 80 % finished. The Austrian company Omy, British/Dutch Royal Dutch Shell, French Engie, German companies Uniper and Wintershall, Italian Saipem and Swiss Allseas are also taking part in the laying of the pipeline.

The doubling of North Stream increases Europe's dependence on Russian gas, warn the United States. Above all, they are preoccupied by the fact that the gas pipeline – by crossing the Baltic in waters belonging to Russia, Finland, Sweden and Germany – thus avoids the Visegrad countries (Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland and Hungary), the Baltic States and Ukraine. In other words, the European countries which have the closest ties to Washington through NATO (to which we must add Italy).

Rather than being economic, the goal for the USA is strategic. This is confirmed by the fact that the sanctions on North Stream 2 are included in the National Defense Authorization Act , the legislative act which, for fiscal year 2020, hands the Pentagon the colossal sum of 738 billion dollars for new wars and new weapons (including space weapons), to which must be added other posts which bring the US military expenditure to approximately 1,000 billion dollars. The economic sanctions on North Stream 2 are part of a politico-military escalation against Russia.

An ulterior confirmation can be found in the fact that the US Congress has established sanctions not only against North Stream 2, but also against the Turk-Stream, which, in its final phase of realisation, will bring Russian gas across the Black Sea to Eastern Thrace,the small European area of Turkey. From there, by another pipeline, Russian gas should be delivered to Bulgaria, Serbia and other European countries. This is the Russian riposte to the US action which managed to block the South Stream pipeline in 2014. South Stream was intended to link Russia to Italy across the Black Sea and by land to Tarvisio (Udine). Italy would therefore have become a switch platform for gas in the EU, with notable economic advantages. The Obama administration was able to scuttle the project, with the collaboration of the European Union.

The company Saipem (Italian Eni Group), once again affected by the US sanctions against North Stream 2, was severely hit by the blockage of South Stream – in 2014, it lost contracts to the value of 2.4 billion Euros, to which other contracts would have been added if the project had continued. But at the time, no-one in Italy or in the EU protested against the burial of the project which was being organised by the USA. Now German interests are in play, and critical voices are being raised in Germany and in the EU against US sanctions against North Stream 2.

Nothing is being said about the fact that the European Union has agreed to import liquified natural gas (LNG) from the USA, an extract from bituminous shale by the destructive technique of hydraulic fracturation (fracking). In order to damage Russia, Washington is attempting to reduce its gas exports to the EU, obliging European consumers to foot the bill. Since President Donald Trump and the President of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, signed in Washington in July 2018 the Joint Statement of 25 July: European Union imports of U.S. Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) , the EU has doubled its importation of LNG from the USA, co-financing the infrastructures via an initial expenditure of 656 million Euros. However, this did not save European companies from US sanctions. Manlio Dinucci

Translation
Pete Kimberley

[Jan 08, 2020] Without a steady supply of gas and oil from the Saudis and Emirates it will very quickly get cold and dark in Europe this winter and they'll soon regret allowing Uncle Sammmy to put a kink in Nord Stream 2 and TurkStream.

Jan 08, 2020 | caucus99percent.com

CB on Wed, 01/08/2020 - 1:26am

Can you please explain further?

@Situational Lefty
...The world is not dependent on Iranian oil. But it is dependent on Gulf oil and gas. A few missiles fired into a Q-Max will cause a real problem - mainly in Europe. Without a steady supply of gas and oil from the Saudis and Emirates it will very quickly get cold and dark in Europe this winter and they'll soon regret allowing Uncle Sammmy to put a kink in Nord Stream 2 and TurkStream.

Speaking of TurkStream, Putin will be going to Turkey to attend the official launching with Erdogan right after his pleasant visit with Assad . I wonder what in the world Putin and Erdogan are going to do with those extra 31.5 billion cubic meters of natural gas?

Russia and China are relatively isolated. American actions in the last 2 decades have caused the two to elope and their love affair is going strong. Putin and Xi have already had 30 intimate dates discussing just this very scenario.

Of course, the extra transport costs to ship America's shoes, underwear and pots to piss in is going to be a bitch for the now burgeoning poor class.

[Jan 08, 2020] Jan 8, 2020 Boeing 737-800 crash in Tehran: The Ukraine wants to do the 737 accident investigation. Why? To delegate it to the Dutch, get Bellingcat involved and blame it on Russia?

Notable quotes:
"... Mike Pence will blame Iran for MH17 and Iraq will be sanctioned for it. Don't you just love the rule based order? ..."
Jan 08, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Symen Danziger , Jan 8 2020 17:11 utc | 124

The Ukraine wants to do the 737 accident investigation. Why? To delegate it to the Dutch, get Bellingcat involved and blame it on Russia?

I am sure Bellingcat will find some shitty video online of a Russian Buk that backed up all the way from Kursk to Tehran without nobody else noticing it. Putin's niece was driving it by direct order from the Kremlin!

Mike Pence will blame Iran for MH17 and Iraq will be sanctioned for it. Don't you just love the rule based order?

[Jan 08, 2020] Soleimani and Al-Muhandis are being mourned in Aleppo churches

Jan 08, 2020 | turcopolier.typepad.com

StSarkiscathedraltehran2016

(Tehran Armenian Cathedral)

Mike Pompeo was on the TeeVee today scoffing at those who do not agree with him and the Ziocon inspired "maximum pressure" campaign against Iran. It must be a terrible thing for intelligence analysts of integrity and actual Middle East knowledge and experience to have to try to brief him and Trump, people who KNOW, KNOW from some superior source of knowledge that Iran is the worst threat to the world since Nazi Germany, or was it Saddam's Iraq that was the worst threat since "beautiful Adolf?"

The "maximum pressure" campaign is born of Zionist terrors, terrors deeply felt. It is the same kind of campaign that has been waged by the Israelis against the Palestinians and all other enemies great and small. This approach does not seem to have done much for Israel. The terrors are still there.

Someone sent me the news tape linked below from Aleppo in NW Syria. I have watched it a number of times. You need some ability in Arabic to understand it. The tape was filmed in several Christian churches in Aleppo where these two men (Soleimani and al-Muhandis) are described from the pulpit and in the street as "heroic martyr victims of criminal American state terrorism." Pompeo likes to describe Soleimani as the instigator of "massacre" and "genocide" in Syria. Strangely (irony) the Syriac, Armenian Uniate and Presbyterian ministers of the Gospel in this tape do not see him and al-Muhandis that way. They see them as men who helped to defend Aleppo and its minority populations from the wrath of Sunni jihadi Salafists like ISIS and the AQ affiliates in Syria. They see them and Lebanese Hizbullah as having helped save these Christians by fighting alongside the Syrian Army, Russia and other allies like the Druze and Christian militias.

It should be remembered that the US was intent on and may still be intent on replacing the multi-confessional government of Syria with the forces of medieval tyranny. Everyone who really knows anything about the Syrian Civil War knows that the essential character of the New Syrian Army, so beloved by McCain, Graham and the other Ziocons was always jihadi and it was always fully supported by Wahhabi Saudi Arabia as a project in establishing Sunni triumphalism. They and the self proclaimed jihadis of HTS (AQ) are still supported in Idlib and western Aleppo provinces both by the Saudis and the present Islamist and neo-Ottoman government of Turkey.

Well pilgrims, there are Christmas trees in the newly re-built Christian churches of Aleppo and these, my brothers and sisters in Christ remember who stood by them in "the last ditch."

"Currently there are at least 600 churches and 500,000–1,000,000 Christians in Iran." wiki below. Are they dhimmis? Yes, but they are there. There are no churches in Saudi Arabia, not a single one and Christianity is a banned religion. These are our allies?

Mr. Jefferson wrote that "he feared for his country when he remembered that God is just." He meant Virginia but I fear in the same way for the United States. pl

https://twitter.com/i/status/1214223383635857409

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christianity_in_Iran

Posted at 02:13 PM in As The Borg Turns , Borg Wars , Current Affairs , Iran , Iraq , Israel , Middle East , Pakistan , Religion , Saudi Arabia , Syria , Yemen | Permalink

[Jan 08, 2020] As long as Neocons and Christian Zionists run our foreign policy we're screwed.

Jan 08, 2020 | www.unz.com

Z-man , says: Show Comment January 7, 2020 at 1:27 pm GMT

Yes, as long as Neoco hens and Christian Zionists run our foreign policy we're screwed.
BTW, Mike Pompeo or as I affectionately call him; Lard face, Plump'eo, crazed CZ-zealot fat boy, etc., is now a legitimate target of the Iranians. May Allah provide justice to the family of Soleimani. (Grin) And look, I'm wishing 'ill will' on a zealot 'goy' (gentile) instead of a typical Neo-cohen snake, how ironic. (Another grin)
A positve spin:
With the 'incorrect' memo leaked by the Pentagon about an orderly exit from Iraq this can be the silver lining in all this mess. This assassination might actually accelerate the exiting of US forces from Iraq and the surrounding quagmires. Who knows, Trump might be a genius.
Again, NO MORE WARS FOR ZION, BDS NOW, ONE STATE SOLUTION-PALESTINE.
And to really stick it to Neo cohens (My apologies to Prof. Steven Cohen ), Trump-Putin Axis Da!! Destroy the Deep State and the CABAL .

[Jan 08, 2020] Trump real priorities: fuck healthcare, fuck our veterans, fuck our crumbling infrastructure, fuck the homelessTrump real priorities: MOMMY MILITARY INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX NEEDS MORE MONEY HELL YEAH

Jan 08, 2020 | twitter.com

Donald J. Trump ‏ 9:11 PM - 4 Jan 2020

The United States just spent Two Trillion Dollars on Military Equipment. We are the biggest and by far the BEST in the World! If Iran attacks an American Base, or any American, we will be sending some of that brand new beautiful equipment their way...and without hesitation!

shoe ‏ 9:18 PM - 4 Jan 2020

fuck healthcare, fuck our veterans, fuck our crumbling infrastructure, fuck the homless MOMMY MILITARY INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX NEEDS MORE MONEY HELL YEAH

[Jan 08, 2020] A bit weird how Danes oscillate between obstructing and just harrassing. Both USA and Germany seem to have influence.

Jan 08, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Piotr Berman , Jan 8 2020 14:55 utc | 55

Today Tass (or Tacc) gave a big update on Nord Stream-2.

Number one, Academic Cherskiy will remain in the Far East, because it is essential in completion of far more important projects than Nord Stream. Pipes from Sakhalin (and through Amur river? I am not sure on that) together have to deliver 80 [huge units] per year, and they will be laid by Tschersky (Nord Stream 2 has capacity 55 HU)

Number two. Danes softened their requirements. Concerning the specs for a pipe laying vessel, they can be satisfied by Fortuna that is finishing some bits in the German sector. Danes added requirement that the sea has to be sufficiently calm during the work, seems like weather when swimming is forbidden on Baltic beaches, but on summer usually it is permitted. So Fortuna will finish the job on the Baltic.

A bit weird how Danes oscillate between obstructing and just harrassing. Both USA and Germany seem to have influence.

Piotr Berman , Jan 8 2020 15:31 utc | 70

mk | Jan 8 2020 15:23 utc

So new progressive Danish government issued the permission in November, after full three months. And now they still make a gesture as if the wanted to inflict huge extra cost. That said, they were perhaps a bit slow in correcting disinformation.

[Jan 07, 2020] Pompeo and his lies got us into this mess with Iran caucus99percent

Jan 07, 2020 | caucus99percent.com

gjohnsit on Mon, 01/06/2020 - 6:14pm Just a few days ago SoS Mike Pompeo said that we assassinated General Soleimani to stop an 'imminent attack' on Americans.
No evidence was presented to back up this claim. We are just supposed to believe it.

It turns out that Pompeo and VP Pence had pushed Trump hard to do this assassination.

[Jan 07, 2020] US strategy and what the gas pipeline war is costing us by Manlio Dinucci

Jan 07, 2020 | www.voltairenet.org

After having forbidden the Chinese company Huawei to compete in the calls for tender for the 5G network, the United States are now forbidding the Europeans to increase their supplies of Russian gas.

While the first decision was aimed at maintaining the coherence of NATO, the second is not a result of Russophobia, but of the 1992 " Wolfowitz doctrine " - preventing the EU from becoming a competitor of the " American Empire ". In both cases, the point is to infantilise the EU and keep it in a situation of dependence.

lthough they were locked in a convoluted struggle concerning the impeachment of President Trump, Republicans and Democrats in the Senate laid down their arms in order to vote, in quasi-unanimity, for the imposition of heavy sanctions on the companies participating in the construction of North Stream 2, the doubling of the gas pipeline which delivers Russian gas to Germany across the Baltic Sea. The main victims were the European companies which had helped finance the 11 billion dollar project with the Russian company Gazprom. The project is now 80 % finished. The Austrian company Omy, British/Dutch Royal Dutch Shell, French Engie, German companies Uniper and Wintershall, Italian Saipem and Swiss Allseas are also taking part in the laying of the pipeline.

The doubling of North Stream increases Europe's dependence on Russian gas, warn the United States. Above all, they are preoccupied by the fact that the gas pipeline – by crossing the Baltic in waters belonging to Russia, Finland, Sweden and Germany – thus avoids the Visegrad countries (Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland and Hungary), the Baltic States and Ukraine. In other words, the European countries which have the closest ties to Washington through NATO (to which we must add Italy).

Rather than being economic, the goal for the USA is strategic. This is confirmed by the fact that the sanctions on North Stream 2 are included in the National Defense Authorization Act , the legislative act which, for fiscal year 2020, hands the Pentagon the colossal sum of 738 billion dollars for new wars and new weapons (including space weapons), to which must be added other posts which bring the US military expenditure to approximately 1,000 billion dollars. The economic sanctions on North Stream 2 are part of a politico-military escalation against Russia.

An ulterior confirmation can be found in the fact that the US Congress has established sanctions not only against North Stream 2, but also against the Turk-Stream, which, in its final phase of realisation, will bring Russian gas across the Black Sea to Eastern Thrace,the small European area of Turkey. From there, by another pipeline, Russian gas should be delivered to Bulgaria, Serbia and other European countries. This is the Russian riposte to the US action which managed to block the South Stream pipeline in 2014. South Stream was intended to link Russia to Italy across the Black Sea and by land to Tarvisio (Udine). Italy would therefore have become a switch platform for gas in the EU, with notable economic advantages. The Obama administration was able to scuttle the project, with the collaboration of the European Union.

The company Saipem (Italian Eni Group), once again affected by the US sanctions against North Stream 2, was severely hit by the blockage of South Stream – in 2014, it lost contracts to the value of 2.4 billion Euros, to which other contracts would have been added if the project had continued. But at the time, no-one in Italy or in the EU protested against the burial of the project which was being organised by the USA. Now German interests are in play, and critical voices are being raised in Germany and in the EU against US sanctions against North Stream 2.

Nothing is being said about the fact that the European Union has agreed to import liquified natural gas (LNG) from the USA, an extract from bituminous shale by the destructive technique of hydraulic fracturation (fracking). In order to damage Russia, Washington is attempting to reduce its gas exports to the EU, obliging European consumers to foot the bill. Since President Donald Trump and the President of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, signed in Washington in July 2018 the Joint Statement of 25 July: European Union imports of U.S. Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) , the EU has doubled its importation of LNG from the USA, co-financing the infrastructures via an initial expenditure of 656 million Euros. However, this did not save European companies from US sanctions. Manlio Dinucci

[Jan 06, 2020] Diplomacy Trump-style. Al Capone probably would be allow himself to fall that low

Highly recommended!
Jan 06, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Fec , Jan 5 2020 15:23 utc | 3

"We have learned today from #Iraq Prime Minister AdilAbdl Mahdi how @realDonaldTrump uses diplomacy:
#US asked #Iraq to mediate with #Iran. Iraq PM asks #QassemSoleimani to come and talk to him and give him the answer of his mediation, Trump &co assassinate an envoy at the airport."

https://twitter.com/ejmalrai/status/1213833855754485762

[Jan 06, 2020] Neocon Pompeo pushed Trump to kill Soleimani; Looks like West Point educated military contactor mafia to which Pompeo and Esper belongs controls the President, although Trump malleability and recklessness are inexcusable

Highly recommended!
So Trump instead of draining the swamp brought swamp creatures like Pompeo into his Administration; now he can pay the price.
Notable quotes:
"... The greenlighting of the airstrike near Baghdad airport represents a bureaucratic victory for Pompeo ..."
"... "We took a bad guy off the battlefield. We made the right decision," Pompeo told CNN. "I'm proud of the effort that President Trump undertook." ..."
"... On Dec. 29, Pompeo, Esper and Milley traveled to the president's private club in Florida, where the two defense officials presented possible responses to Iranian aggression, including the option of killing Soleimani, senior U.S. officials said. ..."
"... One significant factor was the "lockstep" coordination for the operation between Pompeo and Esper, both graduates in the same class at the U.S. Military Academy, who deliberated ahead of the briefing with Trump, senior U.S. officials said. Pence also endorsed the decision, but he did not attend the meeting in Florida. ..."
"... Some defense officials said Pompeo's claims of an imminent and direct threat were overstated, and they would prefer that he make the case based on the killing of the American contractor and previous Iranian provocations. ..."
"... On Sunday, Iran announced that it was suspending all limits of the nuclear deal, including on uranium enrichment, research and development, and enlarging its stockpile of nuclear fuel. Britain, France and Germany, as well as Russia and China, were original signatories of that deal with the United States and Iran, and all opposed Trump's decision to withdraw from the pact. ..."
"... "No one trusts what Trump will do next, so it's hard to get behind this," said the European diplomat. ..."
"... Since his time as CIA director, Pompeo has forged a friendship with Yossi Cohen, the director of the Israeli intelligence service Mossad, said a person familiar with their meetings. The men have spoken about the threat posed by Iran to both Israel and the United States. In a prescient interview in October, Cohen said Soleimani "knows perfectly well that his elimination is not impossible." ..."
"... At every step of his government career, Pompeo has tried to stake out a maximalist position on Iran that has made him popular among two critical pro-Israel constituencies in Republican politics: conservative Jewish donors and Christian evangelicals. ..."
"... After Trump tapped Pompeo to lead the CIA, Pompeo quickly set up an Iran Mission Center at the agency to focus intelligence-gathering efforts and operations, elevating Iran's importance as an intelligence target. ..."
Jan 06, 2020 | www.washingtonpost.com

The secretary also spoke to President Trump multiple times every day last week, culminating in Trump's decision to approve the killing of Iran's top military commander, Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani, at the urging of Pompeo and Vice President Pence, the officials said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

Pompeo had lost a similar high-stakes deliberation last summer when Trump declined to retaliate militarily against Iran after it downed a U.S. surveillance drone, an outcome that left Pompeo "morose," according to one U.S. official. But recent changes to Trump's national security team and the whims of a president anxious about being viewed as hesitant in the face of Iranian aggression created an opening for Pompeo to press for the kind of action he had been advocating.

The greenlighting of the airstrike near Baghdad airport represents a bureaucratic victory for Pompeo, but it also carries multiple serious risks: another protracted regional war in the Middle East; retaliatory assassinations of U.S. personnel stationed around the world; an interruption in the battle against the Islamic State; the closure of diplomatic pathways to containing Iran's nuclear program; and a major backlash in Iraq, whose parliament voted on Sunday to expel all U.S. troops from the country.

For Pompeo, whose political ambitions are a source of constant speculation , the death of U.S. diplomats would be particularly damaging given his unyielding criticisms of former secretary of state Hillary Clinton following the killing of the U.S. ambassador to Libya and other American personnel in Benghazi in 2012.

But none of those considerations stopped Pompeo from pushing for the targeted strike, U.S. officials said, underscoring a fixation on Iran that spans 10 years of government service from Congress to the CIA to the State Department.

"We took a bad guy off the battlefield. We made the right decision," Pompeo told CNN. "I'm proud of the effort that President Trump undertook."

Pompeo first spoke with Trump about killing Soleimani months ago, said a senior U.S. official, but neither the president nor Pentagon officials were willing to countenance such an operation.

For more than a year, defense officials warned that the administration's campaign of economic sanctions against Iran had increased tensions with Tehran, requiring a bigger and bigger share of military resources in the Middle East when many at the Pentagon wanted to redeploy their firepower to East Asia.

How the siege of the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad unfolded On Jan. 1, the siege on the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad appeared to come to an end after supporters of the Iranian-backed Kataib Hezbollah militia retreated. (Liz Sly, Joyce Lee, Mustafa Salim/The Washington Post)

Trump, too, sought to draw down from the Middle East as he promised from the opening days of his presidential campaign. But that mind-set shifted on Dec. 27 when 30 rockets hit a joint U.S.-Iraqi base outside Kirkuk, killing an American civilian contractor and injuring service members.

On Dec. 29, Pompeo, Esper and Milley traveled to the president's private club in Florida, where the two defense officials presented possible responses to Iranian aggression, including the option of killing Soleimani, senior U.S. officials said.

Trump's decision to target Soleimani came as a surprise and a shock to some officials briefed on his decision, given the Pentagon's long-standing concerns about escalation and the president's aversion to using military force against Iran.

One significant factor was the "lockstep" coordination for the operation between Pompeo and Esper, both graduates in the same class at the U.S. Military Academy, who deliberated ahead of the briefing with Trump, senior U.S. officials said. Pence also endorsed the decision, but he did not attend the meeting in Florida.

"Taking out Soleimani would not have happened under [former secretary of defense Jim] Mattis," said a senior administration official who argued that the Mattis Pentagon was risk-averse. "Mattis was opposed to all of this. It's not a hit on Mattis, it's just his predisposition. Milley and Esper are different. Now you've got a cohesive national security team and you've got a secretary of state and defense secretary who've known each other their whole adult lives."

Mattis declined to comment.

In the days since the strike, Pompeo has become the voice of the administration on the matter, speaking to allies and making the public case for the operation. Trump chose Pompeo to appear on all of the Sunday news shows because he "sticks to the line" and "never gives an inch," an administration official said.

But critics inside and outside the administration have questioned Pompeo's justification for the strike based on his claims that "dozens if not hundreds" of American lives were at risk.

[ Trump faces Iran crisis with fewer experienced advisers and strained relations with allies ]

Lawmakers left classified briefings with U.S. intelligence officials on Friday saying they heard nothing to suggest that the threat posed by the proxy forces guided by Soleimani had changed substantially in recent months.

When repeatedly pressed on Sunday about the imminent nature of the threats, whether it was days or weeks away, or whether they had been foiled by the U.S. airstrike, Pompeo dismissed the questions.

"If you're an American in the region, days and weeks -- this is not something that's relevant," Pompeo told CNN.

Some defense officials said Pompeo's claims of an imminent and direct threat were overstated, and they would prefer that he make the case based on the killing of the American contractor and previous Iranian provocations.

Critics have also questioned how an imminent attack would be foiled by killing Soleimani, who would not have carried out the strike himself.

"If the attack was going to take place when Soleimani was alive, it is difficult to comprehend why it wouldn't take place now that he is dead," said Robert Malley, the president of the International Crisis Group and a former Obama administration official.

Following the strike, Pompeo has held back-to-back phone calls with his counterparts around the globe but has received a chilly reception from European allies, many of whom fear that the attack puts their embassies in Iran and Iraq in jeopardy and has now eliminated the chance to keep a lid on Iran's nuclear program.

"We have woken up to a more dangerous world," said France's Europe minister, Amelie de Montchalin.

Two European diplomats familiar with the calls said Pompeo expected European leaders to champion the U.S. strike publicly even though they were never consulted on the decision.

"The U.S. has not helped the Iran situation, and now they want everyone to cheerlead this," one diplomat said.

"Our position over the past few years has been about defending the JCPOA," said the diplomat, referring to the 2015 Iran nuclear deal.

On Sunday, Iran announced that it was suspending all limits of the nuclear deal, including on uranium enrichment, research and development, and enlarging its stockpile of nuclear fuel. Britain, France and Germany, as well as Russia and China, were original signatories of that deal with the United States and Iran, and all opposed Trump's decision to withdraw from the pact.

"No one trusts what Trump will do next, so it's hard to get behind this," said the European diplomat.

Pompeo has slapped back at U.S. allies, saying "the Brits, the French, the Germans all need to understand that what we did -- what the Americans did -- saved lives in Europe as well," he told Fox News.

Israel has stood out in emphatically cheering the Soleimani operation, with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu praising Trump for "acting swiftly, forcefully and decisively."

"Israel stands with the United States in its just struggle for peace, security and self-defense," he said.

Since his time as CIA director, Pompeo has forged a friendship with Yossi Cohen, the director of the Israeli intelligence service Mossad, said a person familiar with their meetings. The men have spoken about the threat posed by Iran to both Israel and the United States. In a prescient interview in October, Cohen said Soleimani "knows perfectly well that his elimination is not impossible."

Though Democrats have greeted the strike with skepticism, Republican leaders, who have long viewed Pompeo as a reassuring voice in the administration, uniformly praised the decision as the eradication of a terrorist who directed the killing of U.S. soldiers in Iraq after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion.

"Soleimani made it his life's work to take the Iranian revolutionary call for death to America and death to Israel and turn them into action," Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said.

A critical moment for Pompeo is nearing as he faces growing questions about a potential Senate run, though some GOP insiders say that decision seems to have stalled. Pompeo has kept in touch with Ward Baker, a political consultant who would probably lead the operation, and others in McConnell's orbit, about a bid. But Pompeo hasn't committed one way or the other, people familiar with the conversations said.

Some people close to the secretary say he has mixed feelings about becoming a relatively junior senator from Kansas after leading the State Department and CIA, but there is little doubt in Pompeo's home state that he could win.

At every step of his government career, Pompeo has tried to stake out a maximalist position on Iran that has made him popular among two critical pro-Israel constituencies in Republican politics: conservative Jewish donors and Christian evangelicals.

After Trump tapped Pompeo to lead the CIA, Pompeo quickly set up an Iran Mission Center at the agency to focus intelligence-gathering efforts and operations, elevating Iran's importance as an intelligence target.

At the State Department, he is a voracious consumer of diplomatic notes and reporting on Iran, and he places the country far above other geopolitical and economic hot spots in the world. "If it's about Iran, he will read it," said one diplomat, referring to the massive flow of paper that crosses Pompeo's desk. "If it's not, good luck."

[Jan 06, 2020] But they could always find an un-scorched Iranian passport in mint condition among the debris of the explosion.

Jan 06, 2020 | www.unz.com

Commentator Mike , says: Show Comment January 5, 2020 at 9:08 pm GMT

@Bookish1

Not only Mossad but probably many others would like to see a suicide bomber blow himself up somewhere in the US killing alot of people. That makes it difficult to figure out who did it and maybe impossible to figure it out. It would be a mess.

But they could always find an un-scorched Iranian passport in mint condition among the debris of the explosion.

[Jan 06, 2020] Klein Nancy Pelosi Celebrated Killing of Gaddafi, Slams Trump for Eliminating Soleimani Breitbart

Jan 06, 2020 | www.breitbart.com

Consistency is not the Speaker strong triat

Pelosi hailed the killing just after news broke of Gaddafi's October 2011 death.

She released the following statement on her Congressional website:

Today's news marks the next phase of Libya's march toward democracy. After decades of tyrannical rule in Libya, the world is hopeful that the next generation of Libyan leaders will bring their country out of this dark chapter. The strong action taken by the United States, led by President Obama, and NATO, the United Nations and the Arab League proves the power of the world community working together.

[Jan 06, 2020] Klein Nancy Pelosi Celebrated Killing of Gaddafi, Slams Trump for Eliminating Soleimani Breitbart

Jan 06, 2020 | www.breitbart.com

Consistency is not the Speaker strong triat

Pelosi hailed the killing just after news broke of Gaddafi's October 2011 death.

She released the following statement on her Congressional website:

Today's news marks the next phase of Libya's march toward democracy. After decades of tyrannical rule in Libya, the world is hopeful that the next generation of Libyan leaders will bring their country out of this dark chapter. The strong action taken by the United States, led by President Obama, and NATO, the United Nations and the Arab League proves the power of the world community working together.

[Jan 06, 2020] But they could always find an un-scorched Iranian passport in mint condition among the debris of the explosion.

Jan 06, 2020 | www.unz.com

Commentator Mike , says: Show Comment January 5, 2020 at 9:08 pm GMT

@Bookish1

Not only Mossad but probably many others would like to see a suicide bomber blow himself up somewhere in the US killing alot of people. That makes it difficult to figure out who did it and maybe impossible to figure it out. It would be a mess.

But they could always find an un-scorched Iranian passport in mint condition among the debris of the explosion.

[Jan 06, 2020] Adam Schiff Demands Public Hearings on Soleimani Strike and suggested Secretary of State Mike Pompeo misrepresented intelligence indicating that killing Soleimani saved American lives.

Jan 06, 2020 | www.breitbart.com

"I think there should be open hearings on this subject," Schiff told the Washington Post in an interview published Monday. "The president has put us on a path where we may be at war with Iran. That requires the Congress to fully engage."

Asked for his thoughts on President Trump warning Iran that the U.S. will hit 52 sites, including cultural sites, if Tehran retaliates the California Democrat said: "None of that could come out of the Pentagon. Absolutely no way."

... ... ...

Schiff 's comments to the Post come after he suggested Secretary of State Mike Pompeo misrepresented intelligence indicating that killing Soleimani saved American lives.

"It was a reckless decision that increased the risk to America all around the world, not decreased it. When Secretary Pompeo says that this decision to take out Qasem Soleimani saved American lives, saved European lives, he is expressing a personal opinion, not an intelligence conclusion," he told CNN State of the Union host Jake Tapper. "I think it will increase the risk to Americans around the world. I have not seen the intelligence that taking out Soleimani was going to either stop the plotting that is going on or decrease other risks to the United States."

[Jan 06, 2020] FNC's Geraldo Rivera to Brian Kilmeade Don't Cheer Iran Strike -- You 'Never Met a War You Didn't Like!' Breitbart

Jan 06, 2020 | www.breitbart.com

On Friday's broadcast of Fox News Channel's "Fox & Friends," network contributor Geraldo Rivera clashed with show co-host Brian Kilmeade over Quds Force Supreme Commander Qasem Soleimani being killed in an airstrike directed by President Donald Trump.

"I fear the worst," Rivera said. "You're going to see the U.S. markets go crazy today. You're going to see the price of oil spiking today. This is a very, very big deal."

Kilmeade said, "I don't know if you heard. This isn't about his resumé of blood and death. It is about what was next. We stopped the next attack. That's what I think you're missing."

Rivera replied, "By what credible source can you predict what the next Iranian move would be?"

Kilmeade said, "The Secretary of State and American intelligence provided that material."

Rivera added, "Don't for a minute start cheering this on. What you have done, what we have done, we have unleashed -- "

Kilmeade insisted, "I will cheer it on. I will cheer it on. I am elated."

Rivera said, "Then you, like Lindsey Graham, have never met a war you didn't like!"

Kilmeade said, "That is not true. And don't even say that!"

[Jan 06, 2020] US-NATO-backed Israeli think tank Don't destroy ISIS; it's a 'useful tool' against Iran, Hezbollah, Syria The Grayzone

Notable quotes:
"... Several days after Efraim Inbar's paper was published, David M. Weinberg, director of public affairs at the BESA Center, wrote a similarly-themed op-ed titled "Should ISIS be wiped out?" in Israel Hayom, a free and widely read right-wing newspaper funded by conservative billionaire Sheldon Adelson that strongly favors the agenda of Israel's right-wing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu . ..."
"... On his website, Weinberg includes BESA in a list of resources for " hasbara ," or pro-Israel propaganda. It is joined by the ostensible civil rights organization the Anti-Defamation League and other pro-Israel think tanks, such as the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) and the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP). ..."
"... In the war in Afghanistan in the 1980s, the CIA and U.S. allies Pakistan and Saudi Arabia armed, trained and funded Islamic fundamentalists in their fight against the Soviet Union and Afghanistan's Soviet-backed socialist government. These U.S.-backed rebels, known as the mujahideen, were the predecessors of al-Qaida and the Taliban. ..."
Jan 06, 2020 | thegrayzone.com

The director of an Israeli think tank backed by the US government and NATO, BESA, wrote that ISIS "can be a useful tool in undermining" Iran, Hezbollah, Syria, and Russia and should not be defeated. By Ben Norton / Salon

According to a US-backed think tank that does contract work for NATO and the Israeli government, the West should not destroy ISIS, the fascist Islamist extremist group that is committing genocide and ethnically cleansing minority groups in Syria and Iraq.

Why? The so-called Islamic State "can be a useful tool in undermining" Iran, Hezbollah, Syria and Russia, argues the think tank's director.

"The continuing existence of IS serves a strategic purpose," wrote Efraim Inbar in "The Destruction of Islamic State Is a Strategic Mistake," a paper published on Aug. 2.

By cooperating with Russia to fight the genocidal extremist group, the United States is committing a "strategic folly" that will "enhance the power of the Moscow-Tehran-Damascus axis," Inbar argued, implying that Russia, Iran and Syria are forming a strategic alliance to dominate the Middle East.

"The West should seek the further weakening of Islamic State, but not its destruction," he added. "A weak IS is, counterintuitively, preferable to a destroyed IS."

BESA Israeli think tank ISIS useful tool

US government and NATO support for ISIS-whitewashing Israeli think tank

Efraim Inbar, an influential Israeli scholar, is the director of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, a think tank that says its mission is to advance "a realist, conservative, and Zionist agenda in the search for security and peace for Israel."

The think tank, known by its acronym BESA, is affiliated with Israel's Bar Ilan University and has been supported by the U.S. embassy in Israel, the NATO Mediterranean Initiative, the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, and the Israeli government itself.

BESA also says it "conducts specialized research on contract to the Israeli foreign affairs and defense establishment, and for NATO."

In his paper, Inbar suggested that it would be a good idea to prolong the war in Syria, which has destroyed the country, killing hundreds of thousands of people and displacing more than half the population.

'Stability is not a value in and of itself. It is desirable only if it serves our interests.'

As for the argument that defeating ISIS would make the Middle East more stable, Efraim Inbar maintained: "Stability is not a value in and of itself. It is desirable only if it serves our interests."

"Instability and crises sometimes contain portents of positive change," he added.

Inbar stressed that the West's "main enemy" is not the self-declared Islamic State; it is Iran. He accused the Obama administration of "inflat[ing] the threat from IS in order to legitimize Iran as a 'responsible' actor that will, supposedly, fight IS in the Middle East."

Despite Inbar's claims, Iran is a mortal enemy of ISIS, particularly because the Iranian government is founded on Shia Islam, a branch that the Sunni extremists of ISIS consider a form of apostasy. ISIS and its affiliates have massacred and ethnically cleansed Shia Muslims in Syria, Iraq and elsewhere.

Inbar noted that ISIS threatens the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. If the Syrian government survives, Inbar argued, "Many radical Islamists in the opposition forces, i.e., Al Nusra and its offshoots, might find other arenas in which to operate closer to Paris and Berlin." Jabhat al-Nusra is Syria's al-Qaida affiliate, and one of the most powerful rebel groups in the country. (It recently changed its name to Jabhat Fatah al-Sham.)

Hezbollah, the Lebanese-based militia that receives weapons and support from Iran, is also "being seriously taxed by the fight against IS, a state of affairs that suits Western interests," Inbar wrote.

"Allowing bad guys to kill bad guys sounds very cynical, but it is useful and even moral to do so if it keeps the bad guys busy and less able to harm the good guys," Inbar explained.

More Israeli think tankers warn against defeating 'useful idiot' ISIS

Several days after Efraim Inbar's paper was published, David M. Weinberg, director of public affairs at the BESA Center, wrote a similarly-themed op-ed titled "Should ISIS be wiped out?" in Israel Hayom, a free and widely read right-wing newspaper funded by conservative billionaire Sheldon Adelson that strongly favors the agenda of Israel's right-wing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu .

In the piece, Weinberg defended his colleague's argument and referred to ISIS as a "useful idiot." He called the U.S. nuclear deal with Iran "rotten" and argued that Iran and Russia pose a "far greater threat than the terrorist nuisance of Islamic State."

Weinberg also described the BESA Center as "a place of intellectual ferment and policy creativity," without disclosing that he is that think tank's director of public affairs.

After citing responses from two other associates of his think tank who disagree with their colleague, Weinberg concluded by writing: "The only certain thing is that Ayatollah Khamenei is watching this quintessentially Western open debate with amusement."

On his website, Weinberg includes BESA in a list of resources for " hasbara ," or pro-Israel propaganda. It is joined by the ostensible civil rights organization the Anti-Defamation League and other pro-Israel think tanks, such as the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) and the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP).

Weinberg has worked extensively with the Israeli government and served as a spokesman for Bar Ilan University. He also identifies himself on his website as a "columnist and lobbyist who is a sharp critic of Israel's detractors and of post-Zionist trends in Israel."

'Stress the "holy war" aspect': Long history of the US and Israel supporting Islamist extremists

Efraim Inbar boasts an array of accolades. He was a member of the political strategic committee for Israel's National Planning Council, a member of the academic committee of the Israeli military's history department and the chair of the committee for the national security curriculum at the Ministry of Education.

He also has a prestigious academic record, having taught at Johns Hopkins and Georgetown and lectured at Harvard, MIT, Columbia, Oxford and Yale. Inbar served as a scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and was appointed as a Manfred Wörner NATO fellow.

The strategy Inbar and Weinberg have proposed, that of indirectly allowing a fascist Islamist group to continue fighting Western enemies, is not necessarily a new one in American and Israeli foreign policy circles. It is reminiscent of the U.S. Cold War policy of supporting far-right Islamist extremists in order to fight communists and left-wing nationalists.

In the war in Afghanistan in the 1980s, the CIA and U.S. allies Pakistan and Saudi Arabia armed, trained and funded Islamic fundamentalists in their fight against the Soviet Union and Afghanistan's Soviet-backed socialist government. These U.S.-backed rebels, known as the mujahideen, were the predecessors of al-Qaida and the Taliban.

In the 1980s, Israel adopted a similar policy. It supported right-wing Islamist groups like Hamas in order to undermine the Palestine Liberation Organization, or PLO, a coalition of various left-wing nationalist and communist political parties.

"Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel's creation," Avner Cohen, a retired Israeli official who worked in Gaza for more than 20 years, told The Wall Street Journal.

As far back as 1957, President Dwight Eisenhower insisted to the CIA that, in order to fight leftist movements in the Middle East, "We should do everything possible to stress the 'holy war' aspect."

Ben Norton Ben Norton is a journalist, writer, and filmmaker. He is the assistant editor of The Grayzone, and the producer of the Moderate Rebels podcast, which he co-hosts with editor Max Blumenthal. His website is BenNorton.com and he tweets at @ BenjaminNorton . bennorton.com Share Tweet Filed under: Bashar al-Assad , BESA , David M Weinberg , Efraim Inbar , hasbara , Hezbollah , Iran , ISIS , NATO , Russia , Syria

[Jan 06, 2020] Russia's Real Reasons for Partnering with Iran by Nadya Glebova

July 13, 2019 | nationalinterest.org

Moscow has a vested interest in the state of affairs in the Persian Gulf; it has tried its best to contain the impact that the U.S.-Iranian crisis could have on its own national security.

The third area of focus is connected with overlapping humanitarian and economic concerns that impact both Russia and Iran. These concerns have been footholds in the history of mutual relationships since the time of Russian and Persian empires. Nowadays both of the countries are trying to compensate for their failures by pursuing policies that promote their own and unique civilizations. In this situation the humanitarian sphere is one of the strategic ones allowing to pursue long-term aims. Of note, Russian-Iranian educational and cultural projects have doubled since the Trump administration announced its strategy for Iran. While the United States has been focused on "bringing Iran to its knees," Russia has been focused on the future. Economic ties between these two countries have been strengthening over the past few years, with bilateral trade reaching $2 billion in 2018.

Hopefully, Russia and Iran will maintain a positive relationship despite their differences and past difficulties. For example, in 2016 Russian forces were pushed off of a military base in Iran that it had used to conduct military operations in Syria. The strategic shift happened after the Iranians squabbled over whether foreign forces should be allowed to use an Iranian military base. Also, the two countries have had some disputes over the fate of Syria. Despite these issues, Russia maintains a positive relationship with Iran, which it further confirmed during a June 25 meeting between national security advisers John Bolton, Meir Ben-Shabbat and Nikolai Patrushev. During the meeting, Patrushev, the Secretary of the Russian Security Council, declared that Russia would continue to accommodate Iran's interests in the Middle East because it remains "the ally and partner" of choice in Syria. Both countries are focused on preventing further destabilization in the region, he said.

Nadya Glebova is a fellow at the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, a MENA researcher.

[Jan 06, 2020] Putin's Hour Is At Hand - PaulCraigRoberts.org

Notable quotes:
"... Putin's Hour Is At Hand was published in the Russian press Monday morning, January 6, 2020. ..."
Jan 06, 2020 | www.paulcraigroberts.org

Putin's Hour Is At Hand January 4, 2020 | Categories: Articles & Columns | Tags: | Print This Article Print This Article

Putin's Hour Is At Hand was published in the Russian press Monday morning, January 6, 2020.

Putin's Hour Is At Hand

Paul Craig Roberts

Vladimir Putin is the most impressive leader on the world stage. He survived and arose from a Russia corrupted by Washington and Israel during the Yeltsin years and reestablished Russia as a world power. He dealt successfully with American/Israeli aggression against South Ossetia and against Ukraine, incorporating at Crimea's request the Russian province back into Mother Russia. He has tolerated endless insults and provocations from Washington and its empire without responding in kind. He is conciliatory and a peacemaker from a position of strength.

He knows that the American empire based as it is on arrogance and lies is failing economically, socially, politically, and militarily. He understands that war serves no Russian interest.

Washington's murder of Qasem Soleimani, a great Iranian leader, indeed, one of the rare leaders in world history, has dimmed Trump's leadership and placed the limelight on Putin. The stage is set for Putin and Russia to assume the leadership of the world.

Washington's murder of Soleimani is a criminal act that could start World War 3 just as the Serbian murder of the Austrian Archduke set World War 1 in motion. Only Putin and Russia with China's help can stop this war that Washington has set in motion.

Putin understood that the Washington/Israeli intended destabilization of Syria was aimed at Russia. Without warning Russia intervened, defeated the Washington financed and armed proxy forces, and restored stability to Syria.

Defeated, Washington and Israel have decided to bypass Syria and take the attack on Russia directly to Iran. The destabilization of Iran serves both Washington and Israel. For Israel Iran's demise stops support for Hezbollah, the Lebanese militia that has twice defeated Israel's army and prevented Israel's occupation of southern Lebanon. For Washington Iran's demise allows CIA-supported jihadists to bring instability into the Russian Federation.

Unless Putin submits to American and Israeli will, he has no choice but to block any Washington/Israeli attack on Iran.

The easiest and cleanest way for Putin to do this is to announce that Iran is under Russia's protection. This protection should be formalized in a mutual defense treaty between Russia, China, and Iran, with perhaps India and Turkey as members. This is hard for Putin to do, because incompetent historians have convinced Putin that alliances are the cause of war. But an alliance such as this would prevent war. Not even the insane criminal Netanyahu and the crazed American neoconservatives would, even when completely drunk or deluded, declare war on Iran, Russia, China, and if included in the alliance India and Turkey. It would mean the death of America, Israel and any European country sufficiently stupid to participate.

If Putin is unable to free himself from the influence of incompetent historians, who in effect are serving Washington, not Russian, interests, he has other options. He can calm down Iran by giving Iran the best Russian air defense systems with Russian crews to train the Iranians and whose presence serve as a warning to Washington and Israel that an attack on Russian forces is an attack on Russia.

This done, Putin can then, not offer, but insist on mediating. This is Putin's role as there is no other with the power, influence and objectivity to mediate.

Putin's job is not so much to rescue Iran as to get Trump out of a losing war that would destroy Trump. Putin could set his own price. For example, Putin's price can be the revival of the INF/START treaty, the anti-ballistic missile treaty, the removal of NATO from Russian borders. In effect, Putin is positioned to demand whatever he wants.

Iranian missiles can sink any American vessels anywhere near Iran. Chinese missiles can sink any American fleets anywhere near China. Russian missiles can sink American fleets anywhere in the world. The ability of Washington to project power in the Middle East now that everyone, Shia and Sunni and Washington's former proxies such as ISIS, hates Americans with a passion is zero. The State Department has had to order Americans out of the Middle East. How does Washingon count as a force in the Middle East when no American is safe there?

Of course Washington is stupid in its arrogance, and Putin, China, and Iran must take this into consideration. A stupid government is capable of bringing ruin not only on itself but on others.

So there are risks for Putin. But there are also risks for Putin failing to take charge. If Washington and Israel attack Iran, which Israel will try to provoke by some false flag event as sinking an American warship and blaming Iran, Russia will be at war anyway. Better for the initiative to be in Putin's hands. And better for the world and life on Earth for Russia to be in charge.

[Jan 06, 2020] Neocon Pompeo pushed Trump to kill Soleimani; Looks like West Point educated military contactor mafia to which Pompeo and Esper belongs controls the President, although Trump malleability and recklessness are inexcusable

Highly recommended!
So Trump instead of draining the swamp brought swamp creatures like Pompeo into his Administration; now he can pay the price.
Notable quotes:
"... The greenlighting of the airstrike near Baghdad airport represents a bureaucratic victory for Pompeo ..."
"... "We took a bad guy off the battlefield. We made the right decision," Pompeo told CNN. "I'm proud of the effort that President Trump undertook." ..."
"... On Dec. 29, Pompeo, Esper and Milley traveled to the president's private club in Florida, where the two defense officials presented possible responses to Iranian aggression, including the option of killing Soleimani, senior U.S. officials said. ..."
"... One significant factor was the "lockstep" coordination for the operation between Pompeo and Esper, both graduates in the same class at the U.S. Military Academy, who deliberated ahead of the briefing with Trump, senior U.S. officials said. Pence also endorsed the decision, but he did not attend the meeting in Florida. ..."
"... Some defense officials said Pompeo's claims of an imminent and direct threat were overstated, and they would prefer that he make the case based on the killing of the American contractor and previous Iranian provocations. ..."
"... On Sunday, Iran announced that it was suspending all limits of the nuclear deal, including on uranium enrichment, research and development, and enlarging its stockpile of nuclear fuel. Britain, France and Germany, as well as Russia and China, were original signatories of that deal with the United States and Iran, and all opposed Trump's decision to withdraw from the pact. ..."
"... "No one trusts what Trump will do next, so it's hard to get behind this," said the European diplomat. ..."
"... Since his time as CIA director, Pompeo has forged a friendship with Yossi Cohen, the director of the Israeli intelligence service Mossad, said a person familiar with their meetings. The men have spoken about the threat posed by Iran to both Israel and the United States. In a prescient interview in October, Cohen said Soleimani "knows perfectly well that his elimination is not impossible." ..."
"... At every step of his government career, Pompeo has tried to stake out a maximalist position on Iran that has made him popular among two critical pro-Israel constituencies in Republican politics: conservative Jewish donors and Christian evangelicals. ..."
"... After Trump tapped Pompeo to lead the CIA, Pompeo quickly set up an Iran Mission Center at the agency to focus intelligence-gathering efforts and operations, elevating Iran's importance as an intelligence target. ..."
Jan 06, 2020 | www.washingtonpost.com

The secretary also spoke to President Trump multiple times every day last week, culminating in Trump's decision to approve the killing of Iran's top military commander, Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani, at the urging of Pompeo and Vice President Pence, the officials said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

Pompeo had lost a similar high-stakes deliberation last summer when Trump declined to retaliate militarily against Iran after it downed a U.S. surveillance drone, an outcome that left Pompeo "morose," according to one U.S. official. But recent changes to Trump's national security team and the whims of a president anxious about being viewed as hesitant in the face of Iranian aggression created an opening for Pompeo to press for the kind of action he had been advocating.

The greenlighting of the airstrike near Baghdad airport represents a bureaucratic victory for Pompeo, but it also carries multiple serious risks: another protracted regional war in the Middle East; retaliatory assassinations of U.S. personnel stationed around the world; an interruption in the battle against the Islamic State; the closure of diplomatic pathways to containing Iran's nuclear program; and a major backlash in Iraq, whose parliament voted on Sunday to expel all U.S. troops from the country.

For Pompeo, whose political ambitions are a source of constant speculation , the death of U.S. diplomats would be particularly damaging given his unyielding criticisms of former secretary of state Hillary Clinton following the killing of the U.S. ambassador to Libya and other American personnel in Benghazi in 2012.

But none of those considerations stopped Pompeo from pushing for the targeted strike, U.S. officials said, underscoring a fixation on Iran that spans 10 years of government service from Congress to the CIA to the State Department.

"We took a bad guy off the battlefield. We made the right decision," Pompeo told CNN. "I'm proud of the effort that President Trump undertook."

Pompeo first spoke with Trump about killing Soleimani months ago, said a senior U.S. official, but neither the president nor Pentagon officials were willing to countenance such an operation.

For more than a year, defense officials warned that the administration's campaign of economic sanctions against Iran had increased tensions with Tehran, requiring a bigger and bigger share of military resources in the Middle East when many at the Pentagon wanted to redeploy their firepower to East Asia.

How the siege of the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad unfolded On Jan. 1, the siege on the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad appeared to come to an end after supporters of the Iranian-backed Kataib Hezbollah militia retreated. (Liz Sly, Joyce Lee, Mustafa Salim/The Washington Post)

Trump, too, sought to draw down from the Middle East as he promised from the opening days of his presidential campaign. But that mind-set shifted on Dec. 27 when 30 rockets hit a joint U.S.-Iraqi base outside Kirkuk, killing an American civilian contractor and injuring service members.

On Dec. 29, Pompeo, Esper and Milley traveled to the president's private club in Florida, where the two defense officials presented possible responses to Iranian aggression, including the option of killing Soleimani, senior U.S. officials said.

Trump's decision to target Soleimani came as a surprise and a shock to some officials briefed on his decision, given the Pentagon's long-standing concerns about escalation and the president's aversion to using military force against Iran.

One significant factor was the "lockstep" coordination for the operation between Pompeo and Esper, both graduates in the same class at the U.S. Military Academy, who deliberated ahead of the briefing with Trump, senior U.S. officials said. Pence also endorsed the decision, but he did not attend the meeting in Florida.

"Taking out Soleimani would not have happened under [former secretary of defense Jim] Mattis," said a senior administration official who argued that the Mattis Pentagon was risk-averse. "Mattis was opposed to all of this. It's not a hit on Mattis, it's just his predisposition. Milley and Esper are different. Now you've got a cohesive national security team and you've got a secretary of state and defense secretary who've known each other their whole adult lives."

Mattis declined to comment.

In the days since the strike, Pompeo has become the voice of the administration on the matter, speaking to allies and making the public case for the operation. Trump chose Pompeo to appear on all of the Sunday news shows because he "sticks to the line" and "never gives an inch," an administration official said.

But critics inside and outside the administration have questioned Pompeo's justification for the strike based on his claims that "dozens if not hundreds" of American lives were at risk.

[ Trump faces Iran crisis with fewer experienced advisers and strained relations with allies ]

Lawmakers left classified briefings with U.S. intelligence officials on Friday saying they heard nothing to suggest that the threat posed by the proxy forces guided by Soleimani had changed substantially in recent months.

When repeatedly pressed on Sunday about the imminent nature of the threats, whether it was days or weeks away, or whether they had been foiled by the U.S. airstrike, Pompeo dismissed the questions.

"If you're an American in the region, days and weeks -- this is not something that's relevant," Pompeo told CNN.

Some defense officials said Pompeo's claims of an imminent and direct threat were overstated, and they would prefer that he make the case based on the killing of the American contractor and previous Iranian provocations.

Critics have also questioned how an imminent attack would be foiled by killing Soleimani, who would not have carried out the strike himself.

"If the attack was going to take place when Soleimani was alive, it is difficult to comprehend why it wouldn't take place now that he is dead," said Robert Malley, the president of the International Crisis Group and a former Obama administration official.

Following the strike, Pompeo has held back-to-back phone calls with his counterparts around the globe but has received a chilly reception from European allies, many of whom fear that the attack puts their embassies in Iran and Iraq in jeopardy and has now eliminated the chance to keep a lid on Iran's nuclear program.

"We have woken up to a more dangerous world," said France's Europe minister, Amelie de Montchalin.

Two European diplomats familiar with the calls said Pompeo expected European leaders to champion the U.S. strike publicly even though they were never consulted on the decision.

"The U.S. has not helped the Iran situation, and now they want everyone to cheerlead this," one diplomat said.

"Our position over the past few years has been about defending the JCPOA," said the diplomat, referring to the 2015 Iran nuclear deal.

On Sunday, Iran announced that it was suspending all limits of the nuclear deal, including on uranium enrichment, research and development, and enlarging its stockpile of nuclear fuel. Britain, France and Germany, as well as Russia and China, were original signatories of that deal with the United States and Iran, and all opposed Trump's decision to withdraw from the pact.

"No one trusts what Trump will do next, so it's hard to get behind this," said the European diplomat.

Pompeo has slapped back at U.S. allies, saying "the Brits, the French, the Germans all need to understand that what we did -- what the Americans did -- saved lives in Europe as well," he told Fox News.

Israel has stood out in emphatically cheering the Soleimani operation, with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu praising Trump for "acting swiftly, forcefully and decisively."

"Israel stands with the United States in its just struggle for peace, security and self-defense," he said.

Since his time as CIA director, Pompeo has forged a friendship with Yossi Cohen, the director of the Israeli intelligence service Mossad, said a person familiar with their meetings. The men have spoken about the threat posed by Iran to both Israel and the United States. In a prescient interview in October, Cohen said Soleimani "knows perfectly well that his elimination is not impossible."

Though Democrats have greeted the strike with skepticism, Republican leaders, who have long viewed Pompeo as a reassuring voice in the administration, uniformly praised the decision as the eradication of a terrorist who directed the killing of U.S. soldiers in Iraq after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion.

"Soleimani made it his life's work to take the Iranian revolutionary call for death to America and death to Israel and turn them into action," Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said.

A critical moment for Pompeo is nearing as he faces growing questions about a potential Senate run, though some GOP insiders say that decision seems to have stalled. Pompeo has kept in touch with Ward Baker, a political consultant who would probably lead the operation, and others in McConnell's orbit, about a bid. But Pompeo hasn't committed one way or the other, people familiar with the conversations said.

Some people close to the secretary say he has mixed feelings about becoming a relatively junior senator from Kansas after leading the State Department and CIA, but there is little doubt in Pompeo's home state that he could win.

At every step of his government career, Pompeo has tried to stake out a maximalist position on Iran that has made him popular among two critical pro-Israel constituencies in Republican politics: conservative Jewish donors and Christian evangelicals.

After Trump tapped Pompeo to lead the CIA, Pompeo quickly set up an Iran Mission Center at the agency to focus intelligence-gathering efforts and operations, elevating Iran's importance as an intelligence target.

At the State Department, he is a voracious consumer of diplomatic notes and reporting on Iran, and he places the country far above other geopolitical and economic hot spots in the world. "If it's about Iran, he will read it," said one diplomat, referring to the massive flow of paper that crosses Pompeo's desk. "If it's not, good luck."

[Jan 06, 2020] Iraqi parliament passes resolution asking government to cancel request for assistance from US-led coalition

Notable quotes:
"... Iraq's parliament passed a resolution, urged by its caretaker prime minister, calling for the removal of foreign troops from the country, after the US' assassination of a top Iranian general and a commander of an Iraqi militia. The non-binding resolution instructs the government to cancel a request for military assistance from the US-led coalition, which was issued in response to the rise of Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS). With IS supposedly defeated, Iraq will not need foreign troops to fight the jihadists and can close its airspace to coalition aircraft. ..."
"... Speaking at an emergency parliament session on Sunday, Iraq's caretaker PM Adil Abdul Mahdi said the American side notified the Iraqi military about the planned airstrike minutes before it was carried out. He stressed that his government denied Washington permission to continue with the operation. ..."
"... Influential Iraqi cleric Muqtada al-Sadr stated in a letter that Iraq should go further and shut down the US embassy. ..."
Jan 06, 2020 | www.rt.com

Iraq's parliament passed a resolution, urged by its caretaker prime minister, calling for the removal of foreign troops from the country, after the US' assassination of a top Iranian general and a commander of an Iraqi militia. The non-binding resolution instructs the government to cancel a request for military assistance from the US-led coalition, which was issued in response to the rise of Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS). With IS supposedly defeated, Iraq will not need foreign troops to fight the jihadists and can close its airspace to coalition aircraft.

The Iraqi government must work to end the presence of any foreign troops on Iraqi soil and prohibit them from using its land, airspace or water for any reason.

According to Press TV, some Western military presence may remain for training purposes. The resolution says Iraqi military leadership has to report the number of foreign instructors that are necessary for Iraqi national security.

At the same time, the Iraqi Foreign Ministry said that Baghdad had turned to the UN Security Council with complaints about US violations of its sovereignty.

Speaking at an emergency parliament session on Sunday, Iraq's caretaker PM Adil Abdul Mahdi said the American side notified the Iraqi military about the planned airstrike minutes before it was carried out. He stressed that his government denied Washington permission to continue with the operation.

... ... ...

Influential Iraqi cleric Muqtada al-Sadr stated in a letter that Iraq should go further and shut down the US embassy.

... ... ...

[Jan 06, 2020] Democrats demand answers on Soleimani killing - This is not a game

Most probably Pompeo was cheating and deceived Trump to get the approval of this asssasination. now with his head on the block he is trying to avoid the responsibility.
Notable quotes:
"... Speaking on "Fox News Sunday," Rep. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., said public assurances from the Trump administration that such a threat was "imminent" were simply not enough. ..."
"... Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg said on CNN's "State of the Union" that until the administration provides answers on "how this decision was reached ... then this move is questionable , to say the least." ..."
"... "I still worry about whether this president really understands that this is not a show, this is not a game," he said. "Lives are at stake right now." ..."
"... the administration has yet to make public its evidence that Soleimani was acting out of step in comparison with his years of similar planning as a leader in Iran's proxy wars and other covert operations, which have led to U.S. deaths . ..."
Jan 06, 2020 | www.nbcnews.com

Democrats on Sunday demanded answers about the killing of top Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani as tensions mounted with Iran and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo insisted that the United States had faced an imminent threat.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said on ABC's "This Week" that he worried that President Donald Trump's decision "will get us into what he calls another endless war in the Middle East ." He called for Congress to "assert" its authority and prevent Trump from "either bumbling or impulsively getting us into a major war."

Speaking on "Fox News Sunday," Rep. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., said public assurances from the Trump administration that such a threat was "imminent" were simply not enough.

"I think we learned the hard way ... in the Iraq War that administrations sometimes manipulate and cherry-pick intelligence to further their political goals," he said.

"That's what got us into the Iraq War. There was no WMD," or weapons of mass destruction, he said. "I'm saying that they have an obligation to present the evidence."

Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg said on CNN's "State of the Union" that until the administration provides answers on "how this decision was reached ... then this move is questionable , to say the least."

"I still worry about whether this president really understands that this is not a show, this is not a game," he said. "Lives are at stake right now."

Booker: 'All Americans should be concerned right now' JAN. 5, 2020 04:18

The fraught relationship with Iran has significantly deteriorated in the days since Soleimani's death, which came days after rioters sought to storm the U.S. Embassy compound in Baghdad and a U.S. contractor was killed in a rocket attack on an Iraqi military base in Kirkuk.

The Defense Department said Soleimani, the high-profile commander of Iran's secretive Quds Force, who was accused of controlling Iranian-linked proxy militias across the Middle East, orchestrated the attacks on bases in Iraq of the U.S.-led coalition fighting the Islamic State militant group, including the strike that killed the U.S. contractor. In addition, the Defense Department said Soleimani approved attacks on the embassy compound in Baghdad.

" We took action last night to stop a war ," Trump said Friday in a televised address, referring to the airstrike that killed Soleimani. "We did not take action to start a war."

But the administration has yet to make public its evidence that Soleimani was acting out of step in comparison with his years of similar planning as a leader in Iran's proxy wars and other covert operations, which have led to U.S. deaths .

Iran and its allies vowed to retaliate for the general's death, and Trump has since escalated his language in response.

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[Jan 06, 2020] Diplomacy Trump-style. Al Capone probably would be allow himself to fall that low

Highly recommended!
Jan 06, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Fec , Jan 5 2020 15:23 utc | 3

"We have learned today from #Iraq Prime Minister AdilAbdl Mahdi how @realDonaldTrump uses diplomacy:
#US asked #Iraq to mediate with #Iran. Iraq PM asks #QassemSoleimani to come and talk to him and give him the answer of his mediation, Trump &co assassinate an envoy at the airport."

https://twitter.com/ejmalrai/status/1213833855754485762

[Jan 06, 2020] But they could always find an un-scorched Iranian passport in mint condition among the debris of the explosion.

Jan 06, 2020 | www.unz.com

Commentator Mike , says: Show Comment January 5, 2020 at 9:08 pm GMT

@Bookish1

Not only Mossad but probably many others would like to see a suicide bomber blow himself up somewhere in the US killing alot of people. That makes it difficult to figure out who did it and maybe impossible to figure it out. It would be a mess.

But they could always find an un-scorched Iranian passport in mint condition among the debris of the explosion.

[Jan 05, 2020] The USA is now at war, de-facto and de-jure, with BOTH Iraq and Iran (UPDATED 6X) The Vineyard of the Saker

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... work to end the presence of any foreign troops on Iraqi soil and prohibit them from using its land, airspace or water for any reason ..."
"... Iraqi cleric Moqtada al-Sadr said the parliamentary resolution to end foreign troop presence in the country did not go far enough, calling on local and foreign militia groups to unite . I also have confirmation that the Mehdi Army is being re-mobilized . ..."
"... The United States just spent Two Trillion Dollars on Military Equipment. We are the biggest and by far the BEST in the World! If Iran attacks an American Base, or any American, we will be sending some of that brand new beautiful equipment their way…and without hesitation! ..."
Jan 05, 2020 | thesaker.is
The blowback has begun

First, let’s begin by a quick summary of what has taken place (note: this info is still coming in, so there might be corrections once the official sources make their official statements).

  1. Iraqi Prime Minister Adil Abdl Mahdi has now officially revealed that the US had asked him to mediate between the US and Iran and that General Qassem Soleimani to come and talk to him and give him the answer to his mediation efforts. Thus, Soleimani was on an OFFICIAL DIPLOMATIC MISSION as part of a diplomatic initiative INITIATED BY THE USA .
  2. The Iraqi Parliament has now voted on a resolution requiring the government to press Washington and its allies to withdraw their troops from Iraq.
  3. Iraq’s caretaker PM Adil Abdul Mahdi said the American side notified the Iraqi military about the planned airstrike minutes before it was carried out. He stressed that his government denied Washington permission to continue with the operation.
  4. The Iraqi Parliament has also demanded that the Iraqi government must “ work to end the presence of any foreign troops on Iraqi soil and prohibit them from using its land, airspace or water for any reason “
  5. The Iraqi Foreign Ministry said that Baghdad had turned to the UN Security Council with complaints about US violations of its sovereignty .
  6. Iraqi cleric Moqtada al-Sadr said the parliamentary resolution to end foreign troop presence in the country did not go far enough, calling on local and foreign militia groups to unite . I also have confirmation that the Mehdi Army is being re-mobilized .
  7. The Pentagon brass is now laying the responsibility for this monumental disaster on Trump (see here ). The are now slowly waking up to this immense clusterbleep and don’t want to be held responsible for what is coming next.
  8. For the first time in the history of Iran, a Red Flag was hoisted over the Holy Dome Of Jamkaran Mosque , Iran. This indicates that the blood of martyrs has been spilled and that a major battle will now happen . The text in the flag say s “ Oh Hussein we ask for your help ” (u nofficial translation 1) or “ Rise up and avenge al-Husayn ” (unofficial translation 2)
  9. The US has announced the deployment of 3’000 soldiers from the 82nd Airborne to Kuwait .
  10. Finally, the Idiot-in-Chief tweeted the following message , probably to try to reassure his freaked out supporters: “ The United States just spent Two Trillion Dollars on Military Equipment. We are the biggest and by far the BEST in the World! If Iran attacks an American Base, or any American, we will be sending some of that brand new beautiful equipment their way…and without hesitation! “. Apparently, he still thinks that criminally overspending for 2nd rate military hardware is going to yield victory…
Analysis

Well, my first though when reading these bullet points is that General Qasem Soleimani has already struck out at Uncle Shmuel from beyond his grave . What we see here is an immense political disaster unfolding like a slow motion train wreck. Make no mistake, this is not just a tactical "oopsie", but a major STRATEGIC disaster . Why?

For one thing, the US will now become an official and totally illegal military presence in Iraq. This means that whatever SOFA (Status Of Forces Agreement) the US and Iraq had until now is void.

Second, the US now has two options:

Fight and sink deep into a catastrophic quagmire or Withdraw from Iraq and lose any possibility to keep forces in Syria

Both of these are very bad because whatever option Uncle Shmuel chooses, he will lost whatever tiny level of credibility he has left, even amongst his putative "allies" (like the KSA which will now be left nose to nose with a much more powerful Iran than ever before).

The main problem with the current (and very provisional) outcome is that both the Israel Lobby and the Oil Lobby will now be absolutely outraged and will demand that the US try to use military power to regime change both Iraq and Iran.

Needless to say, that ain't happening (only ignorant and incurable flag-wavers believe the silly claptrap about the US armed forces being "THE BEST").

Furthermore, it is clear that by it's latest terrorist action the USA has now declared war on BOTH Iraq and Iran.

This is so important that I need to repeat it again:

The USA is now at war, de-facto and de-jure , with BOTH Iraq and Iran.

I hasten to add that the US is also at war with most of the Muslim world (and most definitely all Shias, including Hezbollah and the Yemeni Houthis).

Next, I want to mention the increase in US troop numbers in the Middle-East. An additional 3'000 soldiers from the 82nd AB is what would be needed to support evacuations and to provide a reserve force for the Marines already sent in. This is NOWHERE NEAR the kind of troop numbers the US would need to fight a war with either Iraq or Iran.

Finally, there are some who think that the US will try to invade Iran. Well, with a commander in chief as narcissistically delusional as Trump, I would never say "never" but, frankly, I don't think that anybody at the Pentagon would be willing to obey such an order. So no, a ground invasion is not in the cards and, if it ever becomes an realistic option we would first see a massive increase in the US troop levels, we are talking several tens of thousands, if not more (depending on the actual plan).

No, what the US will do if/when they attack Iran is what Israel did to Lebanon in 2006, but at a much larger scale. They will begin by a huge number of airstrikes (missiles and aircraft) to hit:

Iranian air defenses Iranian command posts and Iranian civilian and military leaders Symbolic targets (like nuclear installations and high visibility units like the IRGC) Iranian navy and coastal defenses Crucial civilian infrastructure (power plants, bridges, hospitals, radio/TV stations, food storage, pharmaceutical installations, schools, historical monuments and, let's not forget that one, foreign embassies of countries who support Iran). The way this will be justified will be the same as what was done to Serbia: a "destruction of critical regime infrastructure" (what else is new?!)

Then, within about 24-48 hours the US President will go on air an announce to the world that it is "mission accomplished" and that "THE BEST" military forces in the galaxy have taught a lesson to the "Mollahs". There will be dances in the streets of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem (right until the moment the Iranian missiles will start dropping from the sky. At which point the dances will be replaced by screams about a "2nd Hitler" and the "Holocaust").

Then all hell will break loose (I have discussed that so often in the past that I won't go into details here).

In conclusion, I want to mention something more personal about the people of the US.

Roughly speaking, there are two main groups which I observed during my many years of life in the USA.

Group one : is the TV-watching imbeciles who think that the talking heads on the idiot box actually share real knowledge and expertise. As a result, their thinking goes along the following lines: " yeah, yeah, say what you want, but if the mollahs make a wrong move, we will simply nuke them; a few neutron bombs will take care of these sand niggers ". And if asked about the ethics of this stance, the usual answer is a " f**k them! they messed with the wrong guys, now they will get their asses kicked ".

Group two : is a much quieter group. It includes both people who see themselves as liberals and conservatives. They are totally horrified and they feel a silent rage against the US political elites. Friends, there are A LOT of US Americans out there who are truly horrified by what is done in their name and who feel absolutely powerless to do anything about it. I don't know about the young soldiers who are now being sent to the Middle-East, but I know a lot of former servicemen who know the truth about war and about THE BEST military in the history of the galaxy and they are also absolutely horrified.

I can't say which group is bigger, but my gut feeling is that Group Two is much bigger than Group One. I might be wrong.

I am now signing off but I will try to update you here as soon as any important info comes in.

The Saker

UPDATE1 : according to the Russian website Colonel Cassad , Moqtada al-Sadr has officially made the following demands to the Iraqi government:

Immediately break the cooperation agreement with the United States. Close the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. Close all U.S. military bases in Iraq. Criminalize any cooperation with the United States. To ensure the protection of Iraqi embassies. Officially boycott American products.

Cassad (aka Boris Rozhin) also posted this excellent caricature:

UPDATE2: RT is reporting that " One US service member, two contractors killed in Al-Shabaab attack in Kenya, two DoD personnel injured ". Which just goes to prove my point that spontaneous attacks are what we will be seeing first and that the retaliation promised by Iran will only come later.

UPDATE3 : al-Manar reports that two rockets have landed near the US embassy in Baghdad.

UPDATE4 : Zerohedge is reporting that Iranian state TV broadcasted an appeal made during the funeral procession in which a speaker said that each Iranian ought to send one dollar per person (total 80'000'000 dollars) as a bounty for the killing of Donald Trump. I am trying to get a confirmation from Iran about this.

UPDATE5 : Russian sources claim that all Iranian rocket forces have been put on combat alert.

UPDATE6 : the Russian heavy rocket cruiser "Marshal Ustinov" has cross the Bosphorus and has entered the Mediterranean.

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63 Comments

Anonymous on January 05, 2020 , · at 2:39 pm EST/EDT

Iraqi Prime Minister Adil Abdl Mahdi has now officially revealed that the US had asked him to mediate between the US and Iran and that General Qassem Soleimani to come and talk to him and give him the answer to his mediation efforts. Thus, Soleimani was on an OFFICIAL DIPLOMATIC MISSION as part of a diplomatic initiative INITIATED BY THE USA.

If this is true, it makes America's murder of General Soleimani even more outrageous. This would be like the USA sending an American regime official to some other country for a negotiation only to have him/her drone striked in the process!

America reveals its malign character as even more sick that even its opponents have thought possible.

Perhaps, Iran should request that Mike Pompeo come to Baghdad for a negotiation about General Soleimani 's murder and then "bug splat" Pompeo's fat ass from a drone!

Anonymous on January 05, 2020 , · at 3:08 pm EST/EDT
"For one thing, the US will now become an official and totally illegal military presence in Iraq. This means that whatever SOFA (Status Of Forces Agreement) the US and Iraq had until now is void."

-I actually read somewhere that the Iraqi government is just a caretaker government and even thought it voted to remove foreign forces, it is not actually legally binding.

Anyone that can conform or deny?

Lysander on January 05, 2020 , · at 4:18 pm EST/EDT
I'm no lawyer. I don't see why that would matter. If a caretaker government is presented with a crisis, why would it not have the authority to act?

That said, It could be the line the US government chooses to use to insist its presence is still legal. If course the MSM will repeat and repeat and make it seem real.

Serbian girl on January 05, 2020 , · at 4:42 pm EST/EDT
Not the entire government. Only the PM Mahdi as far as I understand. He resigned after some protests. The parliament approved his resignation on Dec 2019. He is the caretaker until they appoint another PM.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/nov/29/iraq-pm-resign-protests-abdul-mahdi-al-sistani
Pamela on January 05, 2020 , · at 4:59 pm EST/EDT
Couldn't agree more. When I read that my jaw dropped and I'm sure my eyes went huge. I just couldn't believe they could be that stupid, or that immoral, that sunk in utter utter depravity. They truly are those who have not one shred of decency, and thus have no way of recognising or understanding what decency is. Pure psychopath – an inability to grasp the emotions, values, and world view of those who are normal. This truly is beyond the pale, and this above everything else will ensure the revenge the heartbroken people of Iran are seeking. May God bless them.
Mark on January 05, 2020 , · at 2:45 pm EST/EDT
Well, this is going to be interesting for sure. I for one cannot see any way out for the Yankees, so I expect them to do their usual doubling down .

Assassinate some more people, airstrikes etc.

Hans on January 05, 2020 , · at 2:51 pm EST/EDT
The US Armed Forces do not need to be 'THE BEST". All they need is mountains of second rate ordinance to re-bury Iraq bury Iran under rubble. They can then keep their forces in tightly fortified compounds and bomb the c**p out of any one who wants to 'steal their oil', or any one who wants to 'steal the land promised by God to the Chosen People'. The U.S. has always previously been limited in their avarice for destruction by their desire to be viewed as the 'good guy'. This limitation has now been stripped away. There is now nothing to stop the AngloZionist entity except naked force in return.

As the Saker says, 'all hell will break loose '.

Anonymous on January 05, 2020 , · at 3:09 pm EST/EDT
"realistic option we would first see a massive increase in the US troop levels, we are talking several tens of thousands, if not more (depending on the actual plan)."

-There is an interesting article on colonal cassad about this, USA actually has around 100k troops in ME spread out over various bases.
https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/5543349.html

Yes, but these are not part of a single force, many of these are more a target than a threat. Besides, they need to be concentrated into a a few single forces to actually participate in an invasion.
The Saker

Anonymouse on January 05, 2020 , · at 4:15 pm EST/EDT
To understand troop size and relevance think along these lines. For every US front line soldier there will be 5 others in support roles, logistics etc. So for every front line fighting Marine there will be 5 others who got him there and who support him in his work. 10,000 front line fighting troops means 50,000 troops shipping out to the borders of Iran. I think perhaps you would need 100,000 US front line troops for an invasion AND occupation (because we all know if they go in they aren't going to leave quickly) We're talking about half a million US troops, this simply isn't going to happen for multiple reasons, not least they need to amass at some form of base (probably Iraq – yeah right) maybe Kuwait? They'd just be a constant sitting target. Saker is correct in that if this goes down it's going to be an air campaign (will the Iranians use the S300s they have?) and possibly Navy supported. the Israelis will help out but in turn make themselves targets at home for rocket attacks. Again I can't see it happening, it would take too long to arrange plus from the moment it kicks off every US base, individual is just a target to the majority of anti US forces spread across the whole middle east. I expect back door diplomacy, probably to little effect, and a ham fisted token blitz of cruise missiles and drone bombs at Iranian infrastructure, sadly this will not work for the Americans, we will have a long running campaign on ME ground but also mass terrorist activity across the US and some of its allies. Its a best guess scenario but if that plays out whatever happens to Iran this war will be another long running death by a 1000 cuts for the US and will guarantee Trump does not get re-elected.
Whoever sold this to Trump (Bolton via Pompeo? Bibi?) has really lit the touch paper of ruin. Yes it stinks of Netanyahoo but it also reaks of full strength neocon, Bolton style. Trump is dumb enough to fall for it and obviously did.
Cosimo on January 05, 2020 , · at 5:38 pm EST/EDT
1. To read the Colonel Cassad website in English or any other language, just go to https://translate.yandex.com/ and then paste in the Cassad URL, which is given above but again, it's https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/ The really nice thing is that when you click on links, Yandex Translate automatically translates those links. Two problems, though. 1. For some unknown reason, Yandex always first translates Cassad as English-to-Russian, and then you have to click on a little window near the top left, to again request Russian-to-English and then it translates everything fine. I do not experience this problem when using Yandex on any other website. 2. Unlike what Benders-Lee intended when he invented the web browser, the "back button" almost doesn't work on Yandex Translate. So always right-click to open links in a new tab.

2. The US could probably carry out a large number of air attacks, but the Iranian response would be to destroy all the Gulf oil facilities AND everything worth bombing in Israel. This potential for offense is Iran's best defense, and, I think, the main reason why there hasn't been a war. Iran's air defense missiles are probably more effective than the lying MSM will admit, and might shoot down a large percentage of the humans and aluminum the US would throw at Iran, but it's a matter of attrition, and Iran would suffer grave damage. We can't rule out that that might be the plan since the Empire is run by psychopaths. A US Army elite training manual, from 2012 in Kansas, implied that by 2020, Europe would not be a major power. Perhaps they were thinking that Europe would go out of business from a lack of Persian Gulf oil.

3. As for a ground war against Iran, I don't think the US or even the US with the former NATO coalition, would have any hope and they know it. A real invasion force would require at least 250,000 troops, probably 500,000, maybe more. 80 million very determined and united Iranians, many of whom who don't fear martyrdom, would make the Vietnam War look like a bad picnic with fire ants . Yes, Vietnam had jungle for guerillas to hide behind, but South Vietnamese society was divided and many supported the Americans. Iran has no such division. Even the Arab province of Khuzestan would stand united, knowing how the Shiite Arabs are mistreated in the Eastern Province and in Kuwait.

Tom Welsh on January 05, 2020 , · at 5:31 pm EST/EDT
"They can then keep their forces in tightly fortified compounds "

eating and drinking what? When no Iraqi will even speak to them, let alone do anything for them.

Greifenburg on January 05, 2020 , · at 2:52 pm EST/EDT
Count me in as part of group two. As a former U.S. Army service member I can assure anyone reading this that this action is an historic strategic mistake. What the Saker has outlined above is very likely. There is most probably no way to walk back now. Who in the ME would negotiate with the U.S. Government? Their perfidy is well known. Many citizen in this country feel like they are held hostage by a government that doesn't represent their interests or feelings. I hope the people in the ME know this.
The Saker on January 05, 2020 , · at 2:57 pm EST/EDT
Since the folks in the ME know that the US is a "pretend democracy" they also realize that the people of the USA are just as oppressed by the AngloZionist regime as the people abroad. Frankly, I have traveled on a lot of countries and I have never come across anything like real hostility towards the US American people. The very same people who hate Uncle Shmuel very much enjoy US music, literature, movies, novel ideas, etc. I believe that the Empire is truly hated across the globe, but not the people of the USA.
Kind regards
The Saker
Melotte 22 on January 05, 2020 , · at 3:23 pm EST/EDT
As long as people of the USA tolerate their government criminal activities around the world, and this is happening for last 70 years, I don't agree with your comment. These crimes are commited in the name of people of the USA, who are doing nothing to prevent them. As for movies coming from US, most of them are propaganda about 'exceptional nation'. No thanks.
Auslander on January 05, 2020 , · at 4:09 pm EST/EDT
The United States of America is not a democracy, it is a constitutional republic. That being said, the fall elections are going to be of significant interest.

With kindest regards
Auslander

Nachtigall on January 05, 2020 , · at 4:18 pm EST/EDT
Couldn't agree with you less Saker. They share the spoils of war, generation after generation. From the killing of indigenous population to neocolonial resource extraction today, they get their cut. You cannot have it both ways, enjoying the spoils of war and hiding behind invalid rationalizations, pretending you have no-thingz to do with that.
The Saker on January 05, 2020 , · at 3:12 pm EST/EDT
Russian TV says that there were anti-war demonstrations in 80 (!) US cities.
I don't have the time to check whether this is true, but it sure sounds credible to me.
The Saker
Anonymous on January 05, 2020 , · at 3:24 pm EST/EDT
Greetings Mr. Saker,

This information is true. I personally took part in the march in Denver, Colorado. I would estimate we had about 500 people, which is a lot more than most anti-war protests have ever gotten in recent memory.

Do not count out the possibility of a sudden large and massive anti-war movement suddenly springing out of nowhere.

Unfortunately, I do not see how "peaceful" protests will accomplish anything on their own. Rioting may be necessary. The system needs to be shut down and commerce slow to a crawl so that nobody may ignore this.

The Saker on January 05, 2020 , · at 3:32 pm EST/EDT
Thank you for this precious confirmation!
And keep up the good fight!
Kind regards
The Saker
durlin on January 05, 2020 , · at 4:25 pm EST/EDT
anonymous, fellow Coloradoan here, would appreciate some info on where I need to look for the next one,. I will be there
Richard Sauder on January 05, 2020 , · at 2:55 pm EST/EDT
Yes. I am thinking about the Deagel.com numbers again. They're starting to come into better focus.

http://www.deagel.com/country/forecast.aspx

I agree that there will first be a period of violent confusion, followed by -- well, what sane person even wants to think about what possible horrors lie ahead?

The threat of one or more spectacular false flag attacks to further fan the flames would also appear to be a possibility.

Real evil has been unleashed, that is clear. The empire has decided to fight, and to fight very dirty.

Nikolai on January 05, 2020 , · at 3:08 pm EST/EDT
Wasn't the Saker working in the employ of the US or NATO when they attacked Srbija without cause? Because that was my understanding.

Actually, no. I was working at the UN Institute for Disarmament Research.
But thanks for showing everybody how ugly, petty and clueless ad hominem using trolls can be!
The Saker

Marko on January 05, 2020 , · at 4:20 pm EST/EDT
Looks like our Nikolai is a Canvas Otpor Belgrade troll.
Serbian girl on January 05, 2020 , · at 4:46 pm EST/EDT
Or perhaps not Serbian at all
Flabbergasted on January 05, 2020 , · at 3:11 pm EST/EDT
"I can't say which group is bigger, but my gut feeling is that Group Two is much bigger than Group One. I might be wrong."

My personal observation is unfortunately the opposite. I think the population that is over 40 is probably leans 80% toward the TV-watching imbecile category with zero critical thinking abilities and exposure to four plus decades of propaganda. The population under 40 is largely too apathetic to have an opinion and unwilling to engage in research.

History will most likely play out in disaster resulting from a corrupt ruling class, systemic institutional rot, and brain-washed public not realizing what's happened.

Nikolai on January 05, 2020 , · at 3:23 pm EST/EDT
I will hazard a guess and say there are far more men than women in Group 1, and many more draft-age young adults of both sexes in Group 2.

But by and large a disturbing number of people in America regard world events as being akin to a football game, with Team A and Team B and a score to be kept. If things don't appear to be going well for their "team," they speak and behave irrationally, with crass statements like "nuke the whole place and turn it into a glass parking lot." Impressive, isn't it? Grown adults, comporting themselves like overindulged little children, always accustomed to getting their way – and displaying a terrifying willingness to set the whole house on fire when they don't.

It is a spiritual illness which pollutes the USA. Terrible things will have to happen before the society can become well, again

Anonymous on January 05, 2020 , · at 3:26 pm EST/EDT
Even if only 20% of the population join us, that will be enough. Because guess what? The TV-watching imbeciles are fat, lazy, and they won't do anything to support the government either, and they definitely aren't brave enough to get in the way of an angry mob
JJ on January 05, 2020 , · at 5:08 pm EST/EDT
About 50% of UK people opposed the UK intervention into Iraq .1 m people held marches on London and cities ..made no difference.
cdvision on January 05, 2020 , · at 3:39 pm EST/EDT
Its not just the US that's braindead. This from a once reputable newspaper in the UK

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2020/01/05/boris-johnson-calls-de-escalation-iran-us-killing-ofgeneral/

Its behind a paywall so you only get the first few paragraphs – frankly all you need. BUT its the comments that tell the story!

Pamela on January 05, 2020 , · at 5:11 pm EST/EDT
It's interesting to me, this comment of Sakers'. I have been thinking, with these revelations of the utter depravity and total lack of what was once called "honour " and treating the enemy with respect, of a few instances which seemed to show me that not all of America was like this.

There is a scene in the much loved but short lived** TV series "Firefly" in which the rebel "outsider" spaceship Captain offers a doctor on the run a berth with them. The Doctor says "but you dont like me. You could kill me in my sleep" to which the Captain replies "Son, you dont know me yet, So let me tell you know, If i ever try to kill you, you will be awake, you will be facing me, and you will be armed"

Exactly I thought. There is a Code of Honour by which battles used to be fought. This latest by US has shown how low it's Ruling Regime is, that is doesn't not see that. But from examples like the above, I gathered that there are people in America who still hold to it closely – and that's good to know.

** Short lived because it showed as it's heroes a group of people who lived outside the Ruling Tyrannical Regime, who had fought for Independence and lost, and now lived "by their wits" and not always according to law. Not surprising that the rulers of US weren't going to allow that to go to air!!

Nikolai on January 05, 2020 , · at 3:13 pm EST/EDT
Wasn't the Saker working in the employ of the US and NATO when they attacked and bombed Srbija without cause? Because that was my understanding.

Thanks, now we all know how good your "understanding" is!
The Saker :-P

Rufus Palmer on January 05, 2020 , · at 3:32 pm EST/EDT
Unfortunately I believe the largest group in the USA is the "nuke 'em group". All of my friends watch Fox and none have an understanding of the empire.

Sake thank you as always for your excellent work. What do you think Iran will attack first?

teranam13 on January 05, 2020 , · at 3:19 pm EST/EDT
Thanks Saker for this discussion/information space you provide when nothing is very trustworthy and on what is a holiday week end for you.

Two points:
Never underestimate the perfidy of the Kurds. They held back on the censure/withdrawal vote in the Iraqi\
parliament and are probably offering withdrawal airport space for US military.

And Agreed, about most Americans being absolutely horrified and ashamed.Even Alex Jones had to put Syrian Girl on and to post her on video.banned. One of his callers demanded that Alex apologize to his listening audience on "bended knee" for his support of Trump's attack on Iran. When Alex tried to schmooze
the irate caller -- The man started yelling -- "Who cares, Alex, who cares about Iran my neighbors have no jobs
and are dying from drug overdoses. who cares about Israel? Let them take care of themselves."

Trump has sealed his own fate on many levels and ours her in looneylandia. It is said that a nation gets the leadership it deserves. We are about to become a nation of the yard-sale.

Craig Mouldey on January 05, 2020 , · at 3:27 pm EST/EDT
Whew, this is something to chew on and try to digest. That first point jumped right off the page. General Soleimani was on an official diplomatic mission, requested by the U.S.! They set him up and were waiting for him to get in his car at the airport and go onto the road.
The entire world will know there is no way to justify this. It is just as ugly as the public murder of JFK. They have zero credibility in all they say and do. It will be interesting to see who supports what is coming and who have gotten the message from this murder and have decided they cannot support this beast.
Clarence on January 05, 2020 , · at 3:33 pm EST/EDT
How many missiles does the us have in the middle east?
How many air defense missiles does have iran?
Does iran have the ability to destroy us airbases to prevent aircraft from attacking iranian territory? That would be my first move: destroying the ennemy s fighter jets while they are still on the ground.
How many missiles does iran can launch ? How far can they hit?
I think these are important questions if we want to make a good assessment of the situation
One Tribe on January 05, 2020 , · at 3:36 pm EST/EDT
Thank you for the continuing courageous, fact-based reporting.

All as-yet-unenslaved-minds of the oppressed people living under the auspices of the empire share the horror of what has happened, made worse so, for I personally, learning the evil duplicity of the 'fake' diplomacy of the masters of the U.S.A. administration.
If there had been any credibility whatsoever, left for the U.S.A. diplomatic integrity, it is now completely murdered.

I should like to point out, yet again, the perverse obviousness of the utter subordination of the utterly testiclesless america n ' leadership ' by the affiliates, dually loyal extra-nationals, aligned to the quasi-nation of pychopathic hatred against humanity.

In spite of, and now increasingly because of, the absurd perception management/propaganda agencies, completely controlled by this aforementioned affiliation, and their ongoing absurd efforts, people are becoming aware of the ultimate source of the hatred and agenda we re witnessing in the ME, and indeed, in ever country under the auspices of the empire.
It is becoming impossible to cover, even for the most timid followers of the citizens of empire-controlled nation states.
The war continues against the non-subliminated citizens, and will certainly escalate as the traction of the perception-management techniques have been pushed way over their best-before date.

Even not wanting to know this, people are becoming aware of it.

I urge all those self-identifying with this affiliation of secretive hatred against humanity to disavow either publicly, or privately, this collective of hatred.
The recusement of the fifth-column will undermine these machinations.

It is now the time to realize that no promise of superior upward mobility, in exchange for activities supporting the affiliation, is worth the stark prospect of complete destruction of the biosphere.

Paul23 on January 05, 2020 , · at 3:38 pm EST/EDT
Saker: what makes you think it will just be a couple of days of bombing? I would have thought they would set up a no fly zone then fly over that country permanently blowing the shit out of any military thing on the ground until the gov collapses.

Iran doesn't have the ability to prevent this & running a country under these conditions is impossible.

Randy Brady on January 05, 2020 , · at 4:10 pm EST/EDT
Set up a no-fly zone over Iran? Iran is well aware of American air-power. They have a multi-layer air defense. And I wouldn't be surprised that the Iranian's are capable of taking out U.S. satellites.

Iran knows their enemy. They have been preparing for conflict with the U.S. for 40 years. This is a sophisticated, and highly advanced nation, with brilliant leadership. They understand what their weaknesses are, and what their strengths are.

The wild cards are threefold: Russia. China. North Korea. If one wants to think about the possible asymmetrical capabilities of those three, let alone the pure power their militaries, it boggles the mind.

Prediction: The U.S. stands down on orders of their own military. People like John Bolton quietly pass away in their sleep.

Kilombo Zumbi on January 05, 2020 , · at 5:02 pm EST/EDT
The only no fly zone to be implemented will be on all american warplanes over Iran and Iraq. Do you remember the multimillion drone that went down? Multipliy it by hundreds of manned planes. God, how delusional can you be?!!!
You have a fighting force that is a disgrace composed by little girls that start screeming once they get bullets flying over their heads. You have aircraft battle groups that are sitting ducks waitng to go to the bottom of the sea. Wake up and get your pills, man!
Tom Welsh on January 05, 2020 , · at 5:39 pm EST/EDT
Paul23, from where will the aircraft take off to implement your "no-fly zone"? Any air base within 2,000 km would be destroyed by a shower of cruise missiles and possibly drones.

Any aircraft carrier within 2,000 km likewise.

Mike from Jersey on January 05, 2020 , · at 3:45 pm EST/EDT
File this next article under "Just when you thought that things couldn't get any crazier."

Pompeo is slamming Europe for not being supportive of the American murders in the Middle East.

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/europeans-havent-been-helpful-after-suleimani-killing-pompeo-slams-allies-not

Nussiminen on January 05, 2020 , · at 3:48 pm EST/EDT
It is Group 1 -- loud, reactionary, extremely vulgar, militant parasites -- which defines the US national character. Exceptional and indispensable simply mean "entitled to other peoples' natural resources and labour output". Trying to reason with these lowlives is a waste of time. Putin understands this; hence the new Russian weapons. The latter will be needed very soon.
Mike from Jersey on January 05, 2020 , · at 4:08 pm EST/EDT
I am an American and I am not sure that is true.

Americans are a good people but America is one of the most heavily propagandized nations in the world. The media is corrupt. The educational systems teach a sanitized version of history. But that is only a part of it.

Pro-Military propaganda is everywhere. Even before the Superbowl, jet bombers fly over the stadium – as if Militarism constituted a basic American value. At Airports, "Military Personnel" are given preferential boarding. At retail stores customers are asked to make donations to "military families." College football games are dedicated to "Military Appreciation Day." High Schools work in unison with Military Recruiters to steer students into the Military. Even playground facilities for children that have video displays display pro military messages. And that is just the tip of the iceberg.

Most of this propaganda is paid for out of the obscene military budget. The average citizen doesn't have a chance.

Americans are a good people, if they really knew what was being done in their name, they would put a stop to it.

Nussiminen on January 05, 2020 , · at 4:37 pm EST/EDT
Militant parasites do live in a world of total lies, deception, and delusion but never at the expense of their survival instincts. US imperial coercion, mayhem, and murder globally are absolutely crucial to the American way of life, and the 99% know it. Their living standards would drop enormously without the imperial loot. Thus, they dearly yearn for all the repression, war, and chauvinism they vote for and more.
Steki on January 05, 2020 , · at 3:53 pm EST/EDT
One thing is telling, at least for me. Who the f in the right state of mind kills other state's official and then admits of doing it?!? The common sense sense tells me that you do something and to avoid bigger consequences you stay quet and deny everything. Just like CIA is doing. Trump just put US military personnel in grave danger. We know how they accused Manning for showing the to the world US war crimes. They put him in the jail for what Trump just did. But, I cannot believe that they are that much stupid. If US does not want war, as Trump is saying, they could have done this and then blame someone else because now it has been shown that they wanted to "talk" to Iran, as Iraqis PM said. At least, US brought new meaning to the word "talk"
Rostislav_Velka_Morava on January 05, 2020 , · at 3:56 pm EST/EDT
Russia will not allow this, and will put their foot down.
Hussan Carim on January 05, 2020 , · at 4:00 pm EST/EDT
The most damaging, no most devestating, assymetrical attack on the US would be a 'non violent' attack.

Let me quickly explain.

It has been well known since the exposure of the man behind the curtain during the great financial crisis of 2007-08 that all Human operations – all Human life in fact – is financialised in some way.

Some ways being so sophisticated or 'subtle' that barely 1 person in 1000 is even aware, much less capable of understanding them, much less the financial control grid (and state / deepstate power base) which empoverishs them and enslaves them to an endless cycle of aquiring and spending 'money'.

Look deeply and the wise will see how 'Human resources' (as opposed to Human Beings) are herded like cattle to be worked on the farm, 'fleeced', or slaughtered as appropriate to the money masters.

We have been programmed, trained, and conditioned to call 'currency units' (dollar/euro/pound/yuan, etc) 'money', when they are actually nothing of the sort, they are state or bank issued money substitutes.

In the middle east and north africa some leaders recognised this determined how to escape slavery and subjegation. They attempted to field this knowledge like an economic-nuke, but without the massive protection required, and they were destroyed by the empire – Sadam Hussain with his oil for Gold (and oil for Euros) program, and Col. Gadaffi of Libya with his North African 'Gold Dinar' and 'Silver Durham' Islamic money program.

To cut a very long story short – the evil empire depends upon all nations and peoples excepting thier pieces of paper currency units as 'real' money – which the empire print / create in unlimited quantities to fund thier war machine and global progrram of domination.

All financial markets are either denominated or settled in US Dollars (or are at least convertable).

All Nations Central Banks (except Irans I believe) are linked via various US Dollar exchange / liquidity mechanisms, and all 'settle' in US Dollars.

Currently all nations use US controlled electronic banking communications / exchange / tranfer systems (swift being the most well known).

Would it therefore not make sence to go for the very beating heart of the Beast – the US financial system?

The most powerful attack against the empire would therefore be against this power base – the global reserve currency – the US dollar – and the US ability to print any quantity of it (or create digits on a screen and call them 'Dollar Units').

It would be pointless trying to fight an emnemy capable of printing for free enough currency to buy every resource (including peoples lives) – unless that super ability was destroyed or disrupted.

Example of a massive nuclear equivilent attack on the beast would be an internal and major disrruption of interbank electronic communications (at all levels from cash machine operation and card payment readers up to interbank transfers and federal banking operations).

Shut down the US banking system and you shut down the US war machine.

Not only that you shut down the US ability to buy resources and bribe powerful leaders – which means they wont be able to recover from such a blow quickly.

Shutting down banking and electronic payments of all kinds would cause the US people – particularly those currently enjoying bread and circus distraction and pacification – to tear appart thier own communities, and each other, as the spoiled and gready fight for the remaining resources, including food and fuel.

The 'grid' has been studied in great depth by both Russia and China (and Israel as part of thier neo-sampson option) and we can therefore deduce that Iran has some knowledge of how it works and where the weak links are (and not just the undersea optical cables and wireless nodes).

I, and a thousand other people have always said, the best, perhaps only way to defeat the US and end its reign of terror on this Earth is to take away its ability to create out of thin air the Worlds global reserve currency – the US Dollar.

Reducing the US to an empoverished 3rd world state by taking its check book away would be a worthy and lasting revenge and humiliation.

Amon Ra on January 05, 2020 , · at 4:09 pm EST/EDT
" I, and a thousand other people have always said, the best, perhaps only way to defeat the US and end its reign of terror on this Earth is to take away its ability to create out of thin air the Worlds global reserve currency – the US Dollar. "

No, the best way would be for each nation to ditch the intertwined, privately ( Rothschild ) controlled central banks, and to return to printing their own money. Anything, short of that will just perpetuate the same system from a different home base ( nation ), most likely China next. This virus can jump hosts and it will given a chance.

Auslander on January 05, 2020 , · at 4:03 pm EST/EDT
Who knows what will happen, but an actual boots on the ground invasion of Iran will not happen. Iran is not Irak and things have changed since that war.

US does not have 6 to 12 months to gather it's forces and logistics for an invasion (remember, the election is coming), plus US no longer has the heavy lift assets to do this. Toss in the fact that Iran is now on a war footing and has allies in the general AO, hired RoRo's and other logistics and supply assets will be targets before they get anywhere near the ports or beaches to off load. Plus, you can kiss oil goodbye, Iran will close the straights a nanosecond after the first bomb is in the air.

An air assault such as Serbia will be very expensive, Iran will fight back from the first bomb if not before, and Iran has a pretty viable air defense system and the missiles to make life miserable for any cluster of troops and logistics within roughly 300 kilometers of the borders if not longer. Look at a map. There is a long border between Iran and Irak, but as such and considering the terrain, any viable ground attack has to come from Irak territory. With millions of Iraki's seething at what Uncle Sugar just did and millions of Iranians seething at what Uncle Sugar just did, any invading troops will not be greeted with showers spring blossoms. To paraphrase a quote, 'You will be safe nowhere, our land will be your grave.'

Toss in the fact that an invasion of Irak, if even half successful, will put American troops on a war footing perilously close to Russian territory and possibly directly on the Russian Lake, aka Caspian Sea, and sovereign territory of Russia. Won't happen, VVP will not allow it.

Ergo, in spite of all the bluster and chest beating, at best all Foggy Bottom can do is bomb, bomb some more and bomb again. The cost in airframes and captured pilots will be a disaster and if RoRo's and other logistic heavy lift assets or bases are hit, the body bags coming back to Dover will be of numbers that can not be hidden as they are today with explanations that the dead are victims of training accidents or air accidents.

Foggy Bottom, and Five Points with Langley, have painted themselves in to a corner and unfortunately for them, (and it's within the realm of possibility that Five Points egged Trump on for this deal regardless of their protestations of innocence and surprise) they are now in a case of put up or shut up. As a point of honor they will continue down the spiral path of open warfare and war is like a cow voiding it's watery bowels, it splatters far beyond the intended target.

As my friend said a few years ago, damn you, damn your eyes, damn your souls, damn you back to Satan whose spawn you are. Go back to your fetid master and leave us in peace.

Auslander
Author http://rhauslander.com/

Never The Last One, paper back edition. https://www.amazon.com/dp/1521849056 A deep look in to Russia, her culture and her Armed Forces, in essence a look at the emergence of Russian Federation.

An Incident On Simonka. paperback edition. https://www.amazon.com/dp/1696160715 NATO Is Invited To Leave Sevastopol, One Way Or The Other.

Auslander on January 05, 2020 , · at 4:19 pm EST/EDT
"Toss in the fact that an invasion of Irak, if even half successful," should read:

"Toss in the fact that an invasion of Iran, if even half successful,"

It's late and this old man is tired. More tomorrow.

Auslander

Anonymous on January 05, 2020 , · at 4:04 pm EST/EDT
"UPDATE2: RT is reporting that "One US service member, two contractors killed in Al-Shabaab attack in Kenya, two DoD personnel injured". Which just goes to prove my point that spontaneous attacks are what we will be seeing first and that the retaliation promised by Iran will only come later."

-Al-Shabaab is a salafist terror group

Observer on January 05, 2020 , · at 4:17 pm EST/EDT
Saker, Some of us might be curious to know what your experience with the UN Institute for Disarmament Research informs you about the imminent Virginia gun bans and confiscations planned for this year and next. Can Empire afford to fight an actual shooting war on two fronts, one externally against Iraq/Iran and the second internally against its own people, some of whom will paradoxically be called away to fight on the first front? Perhaps the two conflicts could become conjoined as Uncle Shmuel mislabels every peaceful gun owner who just wants to be left alone as a foreign enemy-sympathizer and combatant by default, thereby turning brother against brother in a bloody prolonged hell in the regions immediately around Washington DC? Could the Empire *truly* be that suicidal?
Hajduk on January 05, 2020 , · at 4:20 pm EST/EDT
'Mr. Trump, the Gambler! Know that we are near you, in places that don't come to your mind. We are near you in places that you can't even imagine. We are a nation of martyrdom. We are the nation of Imam Hussein You are well aware of our power and capabilities in the region. You know how powerful we are in asymmetrical warfare You know that a war would mean the loss of all your capabilities. You may start the war, but we will be the ones to determine its end '
Gen. Soleimani (2018)
Bikkin on January 05, 2020 , · at 4:31 pm EST/EDT
Hello Saker,
I would like to ask you a question.
According to the Russian nuclear doctrine "The Russian Federation reserves the right to use nuclear weapons in response to the use of nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction against itself or its allies and also in response to large-scale aggression involving conventional weapons in situations that are critical for the national security of the Russian Federation and its allies."
In your opinion does Russia consider Iran such an ally? Will Russia shield Iran against USAn / Israeli nuclear strikes? In case of an imminent nuclear strike on Iran is Russia (and possibly others) going to issue a nuclear ultimatum to the would-be aggressor? And in case an actual nuclear attack on Iran happens is Russia going to retaliate / deter further attacks with its own nukes?
What is your opinion?
One thing: please do not start explaining why the above scenario is completely unthinkable, unrealistic and why it would never ever happen. I need your opinion on the possible events if such an attack does take place or it is about to happen. I do not need reasons why it would not happen; I need your opinion what might take place if it does happen. If you cannot answer my question, have no opinion or simply do not want to answer it please let me know it.
In case there is a formal commitment by Russia – one I know not of – when, where was it made?
Thanks in advance.
Nachtigall on January 05, 2020 , · at 5:27 pm EST/EDT
2nd that, but be polite to the Saker. Ask nicely next time, like someone who is civilized.

Thanks you for your indispensable work, dear Saker!

Marko on January 05, 2020 , · at 4:32 pm EST/EDT
I think USA still has nuclear option.
They will not hesitate to use it on Iran if Israel is in danger.
So, I think Iran shall be defeated anyway, as USA is much stronger.

Wrong. If the US uses nukes, then this will secure the total victory of Iran.
The Saker

Nachtigall on January 05, 2020 , · at 5:31 pm EST/EDT
How does this secure a total victory, dear Saker? Please help my to understand this: Nukes on every major city, industrial site, infrastructure with pos. millions dead – how is this a victory?
robert on January 05, 2020 , · at 4:41 pm EST/EDT
So, how many hostages for Iran are in Iraq now?
Petro-G on January 05, 2020 , · at 4:44 pm EST/EDT
I think that if Iran were to launch some devastating missiles into Israel, either a US ship/submarine or Israel will launch a nuclear bomb into Iran. The US knows there is nothing to be gained by a ground invasion. If we [the US] were to start launching missiles into Iran, Iran would rightfully be launching sophisticated arms back toward US ships and Israel and the US can't stand for that. We are good at dishing it out, but lousy at receiving it.

I can only believe we assassinated Solieman [apologies] because it is the writhing of a dying petrodollar. The US is desperate. But I don't understand how going to war is supposed to help?

Stand Easy on January 05, 2020 , · at 4:56 pm EST/EDT
Some short comments on the strategic blunder made by US.

Meantime, global ramifications are being felt. View from China, one of the biggest consumers of ME oil:

https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1175782.shtml

and some mind-reading from a HK based rag:

"Beijing's ties with Tehran are crucial to its energy and geopolitical strategies, and with Moscow also in the mix, a broader conflagration is a real possibility"

https://www.asiatimes.com/2020/01/article/could-china-take-irans-side-in-a-war-with-us/

Japan had planned to send some military hardware to the ME just before the new year but Gen Soleimani's murder may change the calculus.

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2020/01/03/national/japan-sdf-assassination-iran-qassem-soleimani/#.XhJYxfLmjN4

Last but not least, Happy Nativity to all Orthodox Christians (thanks for the beautifully illustrated Orthodox calendar, The Saker.)
Let us all pray for peace.

Kent on January 05, 2020 , · at 5:33 pm EST/EDT
"(thanks for the beautifully illustrated Orthodox calendar, The Saker.)"

Credits for the calendar(s) should go to one of our in house Artists and poets Ioan.

You obviously do not visit the Cafe' very often, do you?

Regards
Kent

Wendy on January 05, 2020 , · at 5:24 pm EST/EDT
Trump is the King of the South. Killing under a flag of parley is a rare thing these days and is the reason why Trump will end up going to war with no allies by his side just like the path mapped oit for him in Daniel.

Analysis sans eschatology is Onism.

Tom on January 05, 2020 , · at 5:32 pm EST/EDT
It's not a blunder.
Trump's goals pre-assassination:
1) withdraw US troops from the ME ("Fortress America") and
2) placate Israel
This is how it is done. Not a direct "hey guys, we have to bring the boys home." Trump tried that and got smashed by the Deep State and Israel. Instead, he is going to force the Islamic world to do the talking for him by refusing to host our pariah army (that's all they have to do, not destroy a major US base or two). Then even the Deep State will admit it's a lost cause. He can say he did all he could while achieving his goals.
As The Saker pointed out, the troops being sent now are to evacuate, not to conquer Tehran. Next time this year the US will have its troops home and Trump will be reelected

[Jan 05, 2020] Trump is wholly responsible for his own actions, but he -- just like the Ayatollah -- is being pushed in a direction where it's impossible to back down and still "save face". Neither men can afford to do so by Andrew Korybko

Highly recommended!
Looks like Trump administration buried the Treaty of non-proliferation once and for all. From now on only a country with nuclear weapons can be viewed as a sovereign country.
Notable quotes:
"... To remind the reader once more, however, none of this would be happening had Iran not abandoned its "nuclear ambiguity" by agreeing to the 2015 Rouhani-Obama deal, with that event in hindsight being the tripwire that provoked the American military into wantonly escalating tensions with Iran ..."
"... Because they realized that the maximum costs that the Islamic Republic could inflict on it in response to their actions could be "manageable". ..."
"... The lesson to be learned from all of this is that the possession of nuclear weapons safeguards a country's sovereignty by enabling it to inflict "unmanageable"/"unacceptable" costs on its foes and thus deter their aggression, failing which leaders on both sides can be manipulated into a serious crisis. ..."
Jan 05, 2020 | astutenews.com

Astute News

Trump is wholly responsible for his own actions, but he -- just like the Ayatollah -- is being pushed in a direction where it's impossible to back down and still "save face". Neither men can afford to do so, which makes it likely that a lot more people than just Maj. Gen. Soleimani might be about to die.

To remind the reader once more, however, none of this would be happening had Iran not abandoned its "nuclear ambiguity" by agreeing to the 2015 Rouhani-Obama deal, with that event in hindsight being the tripwire that provoked the American military into wantonly escalating tensions with Iran (despite believing that they're doing so in "self-defense)

Because they realized that the maximum costs that the Islamic Republic could inflict on it in response to their actions could be "manageable".

The lesson to be learned from all of this is that the possession of nuclear weapons safeguards a country's sovereignty by enabling it to inflict "unmanageable"/"unacceptable" costs on its foes and thus deter their aggression, failing which leaders on both sides can be manipulated into a serious crisis.

By Andrew Korybko
Source: One World

[Jan 05, 2020] The USA is now at war, de-facto and de-jure, with BOTH Iraq and Iran (UPDATED 6X) The Vineyard of the Saker

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... work to end the presence of any foreign troops on Iraqi soil and prohibit them from using its land, airspace or water for any reason ..."
"... Iraqi cleric Moqtada al-Sadr said the parliamentary resolution to end foreign troop presence in the country did not go far enough, calling on local and foreign militia groups to unite . I also have confirmation that the Mehdi Army is being re-mobilized . ..."
"... The United States just spent Two Trillion Dollars on Military Equipment. We are the biggest and by far the BEST in the World! If Iran attacks an American Base, or any American, we will be sending some of that brand new beautiful equipment their way…and without hesitation! ..."
Jan 05, 2020 | thesaker.is
The blowback has begun

First, let’s begin by a quick summary of what has taken place (note: this info is still coming in, so there might be corrections once the official sources make their official statements).

  1. Iraqi Prime Minister Adil Abdl Mahdi has now officially revealed that the US had asked him to mediate between the US and Iran and that General Qassem Soleimani to come and talk to him and give him the answer to his mediation efforts. Thus, Soleimani was on an OFFICIAL DIPLOMATIC MISSION as part of a diplomatic initiative INITIATED BY THE USA .
  2. The Iraqi Parliament has now voted on a resolution requiring the government to press Washington and its allies to withdraw their troops from Iraq.
  3. Iraq’s caretaker PM Adil Abdul Mahdi said the American side notified the Iraqi military about the planned airstrike minutes before it was carried out. He stressed that his government denied Washington permission to continue with the operation.
  4. The Iraqi Parliament has also demanded that the Iraqi government must “ work to end the presence of any foreign troops on Iraqi soil and prohibit them from using its land, airspace or water for any reason “
  5. The Iraqi Foreign Ministry said that Baghdad had turned to the UN Security Council with complaints about US violations of its sovereignty .
  6. Iraqi cleric Moqtada al-Sadr said the parliamentary resolution to end foreign troop presence in the country did not go far enough, calling on local and foreign militia groups to unite . I also have confirmation that the Mehdi Army is being re-mobilized .
  7. The Pentagon brass is now laying the responsibility for this monumental disaster on Trump (see here ). The are now slowly waking up to this immense clusterbleep and don’t want to be held responsible for what is coming next.
  8. For the first time in the history of Iran, a Red Flag was hoisted over the Holy Dome Of Jamkaran Mosque , Iran. This indicates that the blood of martyrs has been spilled and that a major battle will now happen . The text in the flag say s “ Oh Hussein we ask for your help ” (u nofficial translation 1) or “ Rise up and avenge al-Husayn ” (unofficial translation 2)
  9. The US has announced the deployment of 3’000 soldiers from the 82nd Airborne to Kuwait .
  10. Finally, the Idiot-in-Chief tweeted the following message , probably to try to reassure his freaked out supporters: “ The United States just spent Two Trillion Dollars on Military Equipment. We are the biggest and by far the BEST in the World! If Iran attacks an American Base, or any American, we will be sending some of that brand new beautiful equipment their way…and without hesitation! “. Apparently, he still thinks that criminally overspending for 2nd rate military hardware is going to yield victory…
Analysis

Well, my first though when reading these bullet points is that General Qasem Soleimani has already struck out at Uncle Shmuel from beyond his grave . What we see here is an immense political disaster unfolding like a slow motion train wreck. Make no mistake, this is not just a tactical "oopsie", but a major STRATEGIC disaster . Why?

For one thing, the US will now become an official and totally illegal military presence in Iraq. This means that whatever SOFA (Status Of Forces Agreement) the US and Iraq had until now is void.

Second, the US now has two options:

Fight and sink deep into a catastrophic quagmire or Withdraw from Iraq and lose any possibility to keep forces in Syria

Both of these are very bad because whatever option Uncle Shmuel chooses, he will lost whatever tiny level of credibility he has left, even amongst his putative "allies" (like the KSA which will now be left nose to nose with a much more powerful Iran than ever before).

The main problem with the current (and very provisional) outcome is that both the Israel Lobby and the Oil Lobby will now be absolutely outraged and will demand that the US try to use military power to regime change both Iraq and Iran.

Needless to say, that ain't happening (only ignorant and incurable flag-wavers believe the silly claptrap about the US armed forces being "THE BEST").

Furthermore, it is clear that by it's latest terrorist action the USA has now declared war on BOTH Iraq and Iran.

This is so important that I need to repeat it again:

The USA is now at war, de-facto and de-jure , with BOTH Iraq and Iran.

I hasten to add that the US is also at war with most of the Muslim world (and most definitely all Shias, including Hezbollah and the Yemeni Houthis).

Next, I want to mention the increase in US troop numbers in the Middle-East. An additional 3'000 soldiers from the 82nd AB is what would be needed to support evacuations and to provide a reserve force for the Marines already sent in. This is NOWHERE NEAR the kind of troop numbers the US would need to fight a war with either Iraq or Iran.

Finally, there are some who think that the US will try to invade Iran. Well, with a commander in chief as narcissistically delusional as Trump, I would never say "never" but, frankly, I don't think that anybody at the Pentagon would be willing to obey such an order. So no, a ground invasion is not in the cards and, if it ever becomes an realistic option we would first see a massive increase in the US troop levels, we are talking several tens of thousands, if not more (depending on the actual plan).

No, what the US will do if/when they attack Iran is what Israel did to Lebanon in 2006, but at a much larger scale. They will begin by a huge number of airstrikes (missiles and aircraft) to hit:

Iranian air defenses Iranian command posts and Iranian civilian and military leaders Symbolic targets (like nuclear installations and high visibility units like the IRGC) Iranian navy and coastal defenses Crucial civilian infrastructure (power plants, bridges, hospitals, radio/TV stations, food storage, pharmaceutical installations, schools, historical monuments and, let's not forget that one, foreign embassies of countries who support Iran). The way this will be justified will be the same as what was done to Serbia: a "destruction of critical regime infrastructure" (what else is new?!)

Then, within about 24-48 hours the US President will go on air an announce to the world that it is "mission accomplished" and that "THE BEST" military forces in the galaxy have taught a lesson to the "Mollahs". There will be dances in the streets of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem (right until the moment the Iranian missiles will start dropping from the sky. At which point the dances will be replaced by screams about a "2nd Hitler" and the "Holocaust").

Then all hell will break loose (I have discussed that so often in the past that I won't go into details here).

In conclusion, I want to mention something more personal about the people of the US.

Roughly speaking, there are two main groups which I observed during my many years of life in the USA.

Group one : is the TV-watching imbeciles who think that the talking heads on the idiot box actually share real knowledge and expertise. As a result, their thinking goes along the following lines: " yeah, yeah, say what you want, but if the mollahs make a wrong move, we will simply nuke them; a few neutron bombs will take care of these sand niggers ". And if asked about the ethics of this stance, the usual answer is a " f**k them! they messed with the wrong guys, now they will get their asses kicked ".

Group two : is a much quieter group. It includes both people who see themselves as liberals and conservatives. They are totally horrified and they feel a silent rage against the US political elites. Friends, there are A LOT of US Americans out there who are truly horrified by what is done in their name and who feel absolutely powerless to do anything about it. I don't know about the young soldiers who are now being sent to the Middle-East, but I know a lot of former servicemen who know the truth about war and about THE BEST military in the history of the galaxy and they are also absolutely horrified.

I can't say which group is bigger, but my gut feeling is that Group Two is much bigger than Group One. I might be wrong.

I am now signing off but I will try to update you here as soon as any important info comes in.

The Saker

UPDATE1 : according to the Russian website Colonel Cassad , Moqtada al-Sadr has officially made the following demands to the Iraqi government:

Immediately break the cooperation agreement with the United States. Close the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. Close all U.S. military bases in Iraq. Criminalize any cooperation with the United States. To ensure the protection of Iraqi embassies. Officially boycott American products.

Cassad (aka Boris Rozhin) also posted this excellent caricature:

UPDATE2: RT is reporting that " One US service member, two contractors killed in Al-Shabaab attack in Kenya, two DoD personnel injured ". Which just goes to prove my point that spontaneous attacks are what we will be seeing first and that the retaliation promised by Iran will only come later.

UPDATE3 : al-Manar reports that two rockets have landed near the US embassy in Baghdad.

UPDATE4 : Zerohedge is reporting that Iranian state TV broadcasted an appeal made during the funeral procession in which a speaker said that each Iranian ought to send one dollar per person (total 80'000'000 dollars) as a bounty for the killing of Donald Trump. I am trying to get a confirmation from Iran about this.

UPDATE5 : Russian sources claim that all Iranian rocket forces have been put on combat alert.

UPDATE6 : the Russian heavy rocket cruiser "Marshal Ustinov" has cross the Bosphorus and has entered the Mediterranean.

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63 Comments

Anonymous on January 05, 2020 , · at 2:39 pm EST/EDT

Iraqi Prime Minister Adil Abdl Mahdi has now officially revealed that the US had asked him to mediate between the US and Iran and that General Qassem Soleimani to come and talk to him and give him the answer to his mediation efforts. Thus, Soleimani was on an OFFICIAL DIPLOMATIC MISSION as part of a diplomatic initiative INITIATED BY THE USA.

If this is true, it makes America's murder of General Soleimani even more outrageous. This would be like the USA sending an American regime official to some other country for a negotiation only to have him/her drone striked in the process!

America reveals its malign character as even more sick that even its opponents have thought possible.

Perhaps, Iran should request that Mike Pompeo come to Baghdad for a negotiation about General Soleimani 's murder and then "bug splat" Pompeo's fat ass from a drone!

Anonymous on January 05, 2020 , · at 3:08 pm EST/EDT
"For one thing, the US will now become an official and totally illegal military presence in Iraq. This means that whatever SOFA (Status Of Forces Agreement) the US and Iraq had until now is void."

-I actually read somewhere that the Iraqi government is just a caretaker government and even thought it voted to remove foreign forces, it is not actually legally binding.

Anyone that can conform or deny?

Lysander on January 05, 2020 , · at 4:18 pm EST/EDT
I'm no lawyer. I don't see why that would matter. If a caretaker government is presented with a crisis, why would it not have the authority to act?

That said, It could be the line the US government chooses to use to insist its presence is still legal. If course the MSM will repeat and repeat and make it seem real.

Serbian girl on January 05, 2020 , · at 4:42 pm EST/EDT
Not the entire government. Only the PM Mahdi as far as I understand. He resigned after some protests. The parliament approved his resignation on Dec 2019. He is the caretaker until they appoint another PM.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/nov/29/iraq-pm-resign-protests-abdul-mahdi-al-sistani
Pamela on January 05, 2020 , · at 4:59 pm EST/EDT
Couldn't agree more. When I read that my jaw dropped and I'm sure my eyes went huge. I just couldn't believe they could be that stupid, or that immoral, that sunk in utter utter depravity. They truly are those who have not one shred of decency, and thus have no way of recognising or understanding what decency is. Pure psychopath – an inability to grasp the emotions, values, and world view of those who are normal. This truly is beyond the pale, and this above everything else will ensure the revenge the heartbroken people of Iran are seeking. May God bless them.
Mark on January 05, 2020 , · at 2:45 pm EST/EDT
Well, this is going to be interesting for sure. I for one cannot see any way out for the Yankees, so I expect them to do their usual doubling down .

Assassinate some more people, airstrikes etc.

Hans on January 05, 2020 , · at 2:51 pm EST/EDT
The US Armed Forces do not need to be 'THE BEST". All they need is mountains of second rate ordinance to re-bury Iraq bury Iran under rubble. They can then keep their forces in tightly fortified compounds and bomb the c**p out of any one who wants to 'steal their oil', or any one who wants to 'steal the land promised by God to the Chosen People'. The U.S. has always previously been limited in their avarice for destruction by their desire to be viewed as the 'good guy'. This limitation has now been stripped away. There is now nothing to stop the AngloZionist entity except naked force in return.

As the Saker says, 'all hell will break loose '.

Anonymous on January 05, 2020 , · at 3:09 pm EST/EDT
"realistic option we would first see a massive increase in the US troop levels, we are talking several tens of thousands, if not more (depending on the actual plan)."

-There is an interesting article on colonal cassad about this, USA actually has around 100k troops in ME spread out over various bases.
https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/5543349.html

Yes, but these are not part of a single force, many of these are more a target than a threat. Besides, they need to be concentrated into a a few single forces to actually participate in an invasion.
The Saker

Anonymouse on January 05, 2020 , · at 4:15 pm EST/EDT
To understand troop size and relevance think along these lines. For every US front line soldier there will be 5 others in support roles, logistics etc. So for every front line fighting Marine there will be 5 others who got him there and who support him in his work. 10,000 front line fighting troops means 50,000 troops shipping out to the borders of Iran. I think perhaps you would need 100,000 US front line troops for an invasion AND occupation (because we all know if they go in they aren't going to leave quickly) We're talking about half a million US troops, this simply isn't going to happen for multiple reasons, not least they need to amass at some form of base (probably Iraq – yeah right) maybe Kuwait? They'd just be a constant sitting target. Saker is correct in that if this goes down it's going to be an air campaign (will the Iranians use the S300s they have?) and possibly Navy supported. the Israelis will help out but in turn make themselves targets at home for rocket attacks. Again I can't see it happening, it would take too long to arrange plus from the moment it kicks off every US base, individual is just a target to the majority of anti US forces spread across the whole middle east. I expect back door diplomacy, probably to little effect, and a ham fisted token blitz of cruise missiles and drone bombs at Iranian infrastructure, sadly this will not work for the Americans, we will have a long running campaign on ME ground but also mass terrorist activity across the US and some of its allies. Its a best guess scenario but if that plays out whatever happens to Iran this war will be another long running death by a 1000 cuts for the US and will guarantee Trump does not get re-elected.
Whoever sold this to Trump (Bolton via Pompeo? Bibi?) has really lit the touch paper of ruin. Yes it stinks of Netanyahoo but it also reaks of full strength neocon, Bolton style. Trump is dumb enough to fall for it and obviously did.
Cosimo on January 05, 2020 , · at 5:38 pm EST/EDT
1. To read the Colonel Cassad website in English or any other language, just go to https://translate.yandex.com/ and then paste in the Cassad URL, which is given above but again, it's https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/ The really nice thing is that when you click on links, Yandex Translate automatically translates those links. Two problems, though. 1. For some unknown reason, Yandex always first translates Cassad as English-to-Russian, and then you have to click on a little window near the top left, to again request Russian-to-English and then it translates everything fine. I do not experience this problem when using Yandex on any other website. 2. Unlike what Benders-Lee intended when he invented the web browser, the "back button" almost doesn't work on Yandex Translate. So always right-click to open links in a new tab.

2. The US could probably carry out a large number of air attacks, but the Iranian response would be to destroy all the Gulf oil facilities AND everything worth bombing in Israel. This potential for offense is Iran's best defense, and, I think, the main reason why there hasn't been a war. Iran's air defense missiles are probably more effective than the lying MSM will admit, and might shoot down a large percentage of the humans and aluminum the US would throw at Iran, but it's a matter of attrition, and Iran would suffer grave damage. We can't rule out that that might be the plan since the Empire is run by psychopaths. A US Army elite training manual, from 2012 in Kansas, implied that by 2020, Europe would not be a major power. Perhaps they were thinking that Europe would go out of business from a lack of Persian Gulf oil.

3. As for a ground war against Iran, I don't think the US or even the US with the former NATO coalition, would have any hope and they know it. A real invasion force would require at least 250,000 troops, probably 500,000, maybe more. 80 million very determined and united Iranians, many of whom who don't fear martyrdom, would make the Vietnam War look like a bad picnic with fire ants . Yes, Vietnam had jungle for guerillas to hide behind, but South Vietnamese society was divided and many supported the Americans. Iran has no such division. Even the Arab province of Khuzestan would stand united, knowing how the Shiite Arabs are mistreated in the Eastern Province and in Kuwait.

Tom Welsh on January 05, 2020 , · at 5:31 pm EST/EDT
"They can then keep their forces in tightly fortified compounds "

eating and drinking what? When no Iraqi will even speak to them, let alone do anything for them.

Greifenburg on January 05, 2020 , · at 2:52 pm EST/EDT
Count me in as part of group two. As a former U.S. Army service member I can assure anyone reading this that this action is an historic strategic mistake. What the Saker has outlined above is very likely. There is most probably no way to walk back now. Who in the ME would negotiate with the U.S. Government? Their perfidy is well known. Many citizen in this country feel like they are held hostage by a government that doesn't represent their interests or feelings. I hope the people in the ME know this.
The Saker on January 05, 2020 , · at 2:57 pm EST/EDT
Since the folks in the ME know that the US is a "pretend democracy" they also realize that the people of the USA are just as oppressed by the AngloZionist regime as the people abroad. Frankly, I have traveled on a lot of countries and I have never come across anything like real hostility towards the US American people. The very same people who hate Uncle Shmuel very much enjoy US music, literature, movies, novel ideas, etc. I believe that the Empire is truly hated across the globe, but not the people of the USA.
Kind regards
The Saker
Melotte 22 on January 05, 2020 , · at 3:23 pm EST/EDT
As long as people of the USA tolerate their government criminal activities around the world, and this is happening for last 70 years, I don't agree with your comment. These crimes are commited in the name of people of the USA, who are doing nothing to prevent them. As for movies coming from US, most of them are propaganda about 'exceptional nation'. No thanks.
Auslander on January 05, 2020 , · at 4:09 pm EST/EDT
The United States of America is not a democracy, it is a constitutional republic. That being said, the fall elections are going to be of significant interest.

With kindest regards
Auslander

Nachtigall on January 05, 2020 , · at 4:18 pm EST/EDT
Couldn't agree with you less Saker. They share the spoils of war, generation after generation. From the killing of indigenous population to neocolonial resource extraction today, they get their cut. You cannot have it both ways, enjoying the spoils of war and hiding behind invalid rationalizations, pretending you have no-thingz to do with that.
The Saker on January 05, 2020 , · at 3:12 pm EST/EDT
Russian TV says that there were anti-war demonstrations in 80 (!) US cities.
I don't have the time to check whether this is true, but it sure sounds credible to me.
The Saker
Anonymous on January 05, 2020 , · at 3:24 pm EST/EDT
Greetings Mr. Saker,

This information is true. I personally took part in the march in Denver, Colorado. I would estimate we had about 500 people, which is a lot more than most anti-war protests have ever gotten in recent memory.

Do not count out the possibility of a sudden large and massive anti-war movement suddenly springing out of nowhere.

Unfortunately, I do not see how "peaceful" protests will accomplish anything on their own. Rioting may be necessary. The system needs to be shut down and commerce slow to a crawl so that nobody may ignore this.

The Saker on January 05, 2020 , · at 3:32 pm EST/EDT
Thank you for this precious confirmation!
And keep up the good fight!
Kind regards
The Saker
durlin on January 05, 2020 , · at 4:25 pm EST/EDT
anonymous, fellow Coloradoan here, would appreciate some info on where I need to look for the next one,. I will be there
Richard Sauder on January 05, 2020 , · at 2:55 pm EST/EDT
Yes. I am thinking about the Deagel.com numbers again. They're starting to come into better focus.

http://www.deagel.com/country/forecast.aspx

I agree that there will first be a period of violent confusion, followed by -- well, what sane person even wants to think about what possible horrors lie ahead?

The threat of one or more spectacular false flag attacks to further fan the flames would also appear to be a possibility.

Real evil has been unleashed, that is clear. The empire has decided to fight, and to fight very dirty.

Nikolai on January 05, 2020 , · at 3:08 pm EST/EDT
Wasn't the Saker working in the employ of the US or NATO when they attacked Srbija without cause? Because that was my understanding.

Actually, no. I was working at the UN Institute for Disarmament Research.
But thanks for showing everybody how ugly, petty and clueless ad hominem using trolls can be!
The Saker

Marko on January 05, 2020 , · at 4:20 pm EST/EDT
Looks like our Nikolai is a Canvas Otpor Belgrade troll.
Serbian girl on January 05, 2020 , · at 4:46 pm EST/EDT
Or perhaps not Serbian at all
Flabbergasted on January 05, 2020 , · at 3:11 pm EST/EDT
"I can't say which group is bigger, but my gut feeling is that Group Two is much bigger than Group One. I might be wrong."

My personal observation is unfortunately the opposite. I think the population that is over 40 is probably leans 80% toward the TV-watching imbecile category with zero critical thinking abilities and exposure to four plus decades of propaganda. The population under 40 is largely too apathetic to have an opinion and unwilling to engage in research.

History will most likely play out in disaster resulting from a corrupt ruling class, systemic institutional rot, and brain-washed public not realizing what's happened.

Nikolai on January 05, 2020 , · at 3:23 pm EST/EDT
I will hazard a guess and say there are far more men than women in Group 1, and many more draft-age young adults of both sexes in Group 2.

But by and large a disturbing number of people in America regard world events as being akin to a football game, with Team A and Team B and a score to be kept. If things don't appear to be going well for their "team," they speak and behave irrationally, with crass statements like "nuke the whole place and turn it into a glass parking lot." Impressive, isn't it? Grown adults, comporting themselves like overindulged little children, always accustomed to getting their way – and displaying a terrifying willingness to set the whole house on fire when they don't.

It is a spiritual illness which pollutes the USA. Terrible things will have to happen before the society can become well, again

Anonymous on January 05, 2020 , · at 3:26 pm EST/EDT
Even if only 20% of the population join us, that will be enough. Because guess what? The TV-watching imbeciles are fat, lazy, and they won't do anything to support the government either, and they definitely aren't brave enough to get in the way of an angry mob
JJ on January 05, 2020 , · at 5:08 pm EST/EDT
About 50% of UK people opposed the UK intervention into Iraq .1 m people held marches on London and cities ..made no difference.
cdvision on January 05, 2020 , · at 3:39 pm EST/EDT
Its not just the US that's braindead. This from a once reputable newspaper in the UK

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2020/01/05/boris-johnson-calls-de-escalation-iran-us-killing-ofgeneral/

Its behind a paywall so you only get the first few paragraphs – frankly all you need. BUT its the comments that tell the story!

Pamela on January 05, 2020 , · at 5:11 pm EST/EDT
It's interesting to me, this comment of Sakers'. I have been thinking, with these revelations of the utter depravity and total lack of what was once called "honour " and treating the enemy with respect, of a few instances which seemed to show me that not all of America was like this.

There is a scene in the much loved but short lived** TV series "Firefly" in which the rebel "outsider" spaceship Captain offers a doctor on the run a berth with them. The Doctor says "but you dont like me. You could kill me in my sleep" to which the Captain replies "Son, you dont know me yet, So let me tell you know, If i ever try to kill you, you will be awake, you will be facing me, and you will be armed"

Exactly I thought. There is a Code of Honour by which battles used to be fought. This latest by US has shown how low it's Ruling Regime is, that is doesn't not see that. But from examples like the above, I gathered that there are people in America who still hold to it closely – and that's good to know.

** Short lived because it showed as it's heroes a group of people who lived outside the Ruling Tyrannical Regime, who had fought for Independence and lost, and now lived "by their wits" and not always according to law. Not surprising that the rulers of US weren't going to allow that to go to air!!

Nikolai on January 05, 2020 , · at 3:13 pm EST/EDT
Wasn't the Saker working in the employ of the US and NATO when they attacked and bombed Srbija without cause? Because that was my understanding.

Thanks, now we all know how good your "understanding" is!
The Saker :-P

Rufus Palmer on January 05, 2020 , · at 3:32 pm EST/EDT
Unfortunately I believe the largest group in the USA is the "nuke 'em group". All of my friends watch Fox and none have an understanding of the empire.

Sake thank you as always for your excellent work. What do you think Iran will attack first?

teranam13 on January 05, 2020 , · at 3:19 pm EST/EDT
Thanks Saker for this discussion/information space you provide when nothing is very trustworthy and on what is a holiday week end for you.

Two points:
Never underestimate the perfidy of the Kurds. They held back on the censure/withdrawal vote in the Iraqi\
parliament and are probably offering withdrawal airport space for US military.

And Agreed, about most Americans being absolutely horrified and ashamed.Even Alex Jones had to put Syrian Girl on and to post her on video.banned. One of his callers demanded that Alex apologize to his listening audience on "bended knee" for his support of Trump's attack on Iran. When Alex tried to schmooze
the irate caller -- The man started yelling -- "Who cares, Alex, who cares about Iran my neighbors have no jobs
and are dying from drug overdoses. who cares about Israel? Let them take care of themselves."

Trump has sealed his own fate on many levels and ours her in looneylandia. It is said that a nation gets the leadership it deserves. We are about to become a nation of the yard-sale.

Craig Mouldey on January 05, 2020 , · at 3:27 pm EST/EDT
Whew, this is something to chew on and try to digest. That first point jumped right off the page. General Soleimani was on an official diplomatic mission, requested by the U.S.! They set him up and were waiting for him to get in his car at the airport and go onto the road.
The entire world will know there is no way to justify this. It is just as ugly as the public murder of JFK. They have zero credibility in all they say and do. It will be interesting to see who supports what is coming and who have gotten the message from this murder and have decided they cannot support this beast.
Clarence on January 05, 2020 , · at 3:33 pm EST/EDT
How many missiles does the us have in the middle east?
How many air defense missiles does have iran?
Does iran have the ability to destroy us airbases to prevent aircraft from attacking iranian territory? That would be my first move: destroying the ennemy s fighter jets while they are still on the ground.
How many missiles does iran can launch ? How far can they hit?
I think these are important questions if we want to make a good assessment of the situation
One Tribe on January 05, 2020 , · at 3:36 pm EST/EDT
Thank you for the continuing courageous, fact-based reporting.

All as-yet-unenslaved-minds of the oppressed people living under the auspices of the empire share the horror of what has happened, made worse so, for I personally, learning the evil duplicity of the 'fake' diplomacy of the masters of the U.S.A. administration.
If there had been any credibility whatsoever, left for the U.S.A. diplomatic integrity, it is now completely murdered.

I should like to point out, yet again, the perverse obviousness of the utter subordination of the utterly testiclesless america n ' leadership ' by the affiliates, dually loyal extra-nationals, aligned to the quasi-nation of pychopathic hatred against humanity.

In spite of, and now increasingly because of, the absurd perception management/propaganda agencies, completely controlled by this aforementioned affiliation, and their ongoing absurd efforts, people are becoming aware of the ultimate source of the hatred and agenda we re witnessing in the ME, and indeed, in ever country under the auspices of the empire.
It is becoming impossible to cover, even for the most timid followers of the citizens of empire-controlled nation states.
The war continues against the non-subliminated citizens, and will certainly escalate as the traction of the perception-management techniques have been pushed way over their best-before date.

Even not wanting to know this, people are becoming aware of it.

I urge all those self-identifying with this affiliation of secretive hatred against humanity to disavow either publicly, or privately, this collective of hatred.
The recusement of the fifth-column will undermine these machinations.

It is now the time to realize that no promise of superior upward mobility, in exchange for activities supporting the affiliation, is worth the stark prospect of complete destruction of the biosphere.

Paul23 on January 05, 2020 , · at 3:38 pm EST/EDT
Saker: what makes you think it will just be a couple of days of bombing? I would have thought they would set up a no fly zone then fly over that country permanently blowing the shit out of any military thing on the ground until the gov collapses.

Iran doesn't have the ability to prevent this & running a country under these conditions is impossible.

Randy Brady on January 05, 2020 , · at 4:10 pm EST/EDT
Set up a no-fly zone over Iran? Iran is well aware of American air-power. They have a multi-layer air defense. And I wouldn't be surprised that the Iranian's are capable of taking out U.S. satellites.

Iran knows their enemy. They have been preparing for conflict with the U.S. for 40 years. This is a sophisticated, and highly advanced nation, with brilliant leadership. They understand what their weaknesses are, and what their strengths are.

The wild cards are threefold: Russia. China. North Korea. If one wants to think about the possible asymmetrical capabilities of those three, let alone the pure power their militaries, it boggles the mind.

Prediction: The U.S. stands down on orders of their own military. People like John Bolton quietly pass away in their sleep.

Kilombo Zumbi on January 05, 2020 , · at 5:02 pm EST/EDT
The only no fly zone to be implemented will be on all american warplanes over Iran and Iraq. Do you remember the multimillion drone that went down? Multipliy it by hundreds of manned planes. God, how delusional can you be?!!!
You have a fighting force that is a disgrace composed by little girls that start screeming once they get bullets flying over their heads. You have aircraft battle groups that are sitting ducks waitng to go to the bottom of the sea. Wake up and get your pills, man!
Tom Welsh on January 05, 2020 , · at 5:39 pm EST/EDT
Paul23, from where will the aircraft take off to implement your "no-fly zone"? Any air base within 2,000 km would be destroyed by a shower of cruise missiles and possibly drones.

Any aircraft carrier within 2,000 km likewise.

Mike from Jersey on January 05, 2020 , · at 3:45 pm EST/EDT
File this next article under "Just when you thought that things couldn't get any crazier."

Pompeo is slamming Europe for not being supportive of the American murders in the Middle East.

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/europeans-havent-been-helpful-after-suleimani-killing-pompeo-slams-allies-not

Nussiminen on January 05, 2020 , · at 3:48 pm EST/EDT
It is Group 1 -- loud, reactionary, extremely vulgar, militant parasites -- which defines the US national character. Exceptional and indispensable simply mean "entitled to other peoples' natural resources and labour output". Trying to reason with these lowlives is a waste of time. Putin understands this; hence the new Russian weapons. The latter will be needed very soon.
Mike from Jersey on January 05, 2020 , · at 4:08 pm EST/EDT
I am an American and I am not sure that is true.

Americans are a good people but America is one of the most heavily propagandized nations in the world. The media is corrupt. The educational systems teach a sanitized version of history. But that is only a part of it.

Pro-Military propaganda is everywhere. Even before the Superbowl, jet bombers fly over the stadium – as if Militarism constituted a basic American value. At Airports, "Military Personnel" are given preferential boarding. At retail stores customers are asked to make donations to "military families." College football games are dedicated to "Military Appreciation Day." High Schools work in unison with Military Recruiters to steer students into the Military. Even playground facilities for children that have video displays display pro military messages. And that is just the tip of the iceberg.

Most of this propaganda is paid for out of the obscene military budget. The average citizen doesn't have a chance.

Americans are a good people, if they really knew what was being done in their name, they would put a stop to it.

Nussiminen on January 05, 2020 , · at 4:37 pm EST/EDT
Militant parasites do live in a world of total lies, deception, and delusion but never at the expense of their survival instincts. US imperial coercion, mayhem, and murder globally are absolutely crucial to the American way of life, and the 99% know it. Their living standards would drop enormously without the imperial loot. Thus, they dearly yearn for all the repression, war, and chauvinism they vote for and more.
Steki on January 05, 2020 , · at 3:53 pm EST/EDT
One thing is telling, at least for me. Who the f in the right state of mind kills other state's official and then admits of doing it?!? The common sense sense tells me that you do something and to avoid bigger consequences you stay quet and deny everything. Just like CIA is doing. Trump just put US military personnel in grave danger. We know how they accused Manning for showing the to the world US war crimes. They put him in the jail for what Trump just did. But, I cannot believe that they are that much stupid. If US does not want war, as Trump is saying, they could have done this and then blame someone else because now it has been shown that they wanted to "talk" to Iran, as Iraqis PM said. At least, US brought new meaning to the word "talk"
Rostislav_Velka_Morava on January 05, 2020 , · at 3:56 pm EST/EDT
Russia will not allow this, and will put their foot down.
Hussan Carim on January 05, 2020 , · at 4:00 pm EST/EDT
The most damaging, no most devestating, assymetrical attack on the US would be a 'non violent' attack.

Let me quickly explain.

It has been well known since the exposure of the man behind the curtain during the great financial crisis of 2007-08 that all Human operations – all Human life in fact – is financialised in some way.

Some ways being so sophisticated or 'subtle' that barely 1 person in 1000 is even aware, much less capable of understanding them, much less the financial control grid (and state / deepstate power base) which empoverishs them and enslaves them to an endless cycle of aquiring and spending 'money'.

Look deeply and the wise will see how 'Human resources' (as opposed to Human Beings) are herded like cattle to be worked on the farm, 'fleeced', or slaughtered as appropriate to the money masters.

We have been programmed, trained, and conditioned to call 'currency units' (dollar/euro/pound/yuan, etc) 'money', when they are actually nothing of the sort, they are state or bank issued money substitutes.

In the middle east and north africa some leaders recognised this determined how to escape slavery and subjegation. They attempted to field this knowledge like an economic-nuke, but without the massive protection required, and they were destroyed by the empire – Sadam Hussain with his oil for Gold (and oil for Euros) program, and Col. Gadaffi of Libya with his North African 'Gold Dinar' and 'Silver Durham' Islamic money program.

To cut a very long story short – the evil empire depends upon all nations and peoples excepting thier pieces of paper currency units as 'real' money – which the empire print / create in unlimited quantities to fund thier war machine and global progrram of domination.

All financial markets are either denominated or settled in US Dollars (or are at least convertable).

All Nations Central Banks (except Irans I believe) are linked via various US Dollar exchange / liquidity mechanisms, and all 'settle' in US Dollars.

Currently all nations use US controlled electronic banking communications / exchange / tranfer systems (swift being the most well known).

Would it therefore not make sence to go for the very beating heart of the Beast – the US financial system?

The most powerful attack against the empire would therefore be against this power base – the global reserve currency – the US dollar – and the US ability to print any quantity of it (or create digits on a screen and call them 'Dollar Units').

It would be pointless trying to fight an emnemy capable of printing for free enough currency to buy every resource (including peoples lives) – unless that super ability was destroyed or disrupted.

Example of a massive nuclear equivilent attack on the beast would be an internal and major disrruption of interbank electronic communications (at all levels from cash machine operation and card payment readers up to interbank transfers and federal banking operations).

Shut down the US banking system and you shut down the US war machine.

Not only that you shut down the US ability to buy resources and bribe powerful leaders – which means they wont be able to recover from such a blow quickly.

Shutting down banking and electronic payments of all kinds would cause the US people – particularly those currently enjoying bread and circus distraction and pacification – to tear appart thier own communities, and each other, as the spoiled and gready fight for the remaining resources, including food and fuel.

The 'grid' has been studied in great depth by both Russia and China (and Israel as part of thier neo-sampson option) and we can therefore deduce that Iran has some knowledge of how it works and where the weak links are (and not just the undersea optical cables and wireless nodes).

I, and a thousand other people have always said, the best, perhaps only way to defeat the US and end its reign of terror on this Earth is to take away its ability to create out of thin air the Worlds global reserve currency – the US Dollar.

Reducing the US to an empoverished 3rd world state by taking its check book away would be a worthy and lasting revenge and humiliation.

Amon Ra on January 05, 2020 , · at 4:09 pm EST/EDT
" I, and a thousand other people have always said, the best, perhaps only way to defeat the US and end its reign of terror on this Earth is to take away its ability to create out of thin air the Worlds global reserve currency – the US Dollar. "

No, the best way would be for each nation to ditch the intertwined, privately ( Rothschild ) controlled central banks, and to return to printing their own money. Anything, short of that will just perpetuate the same system from a different home base ( nation ), most likely China next. This virus can jump hosts and it will given a chance.

Auslander on January 05, 2020 , · at 4:03 pm EST/EDT
Who knows what will happen, but an actual boots on the ground invasion of Iran will not happen. Iran is not Irak and things have changed since that war.

US does not have 6 to 12 months to gather it's forces and logistics for an invasion (remember, the election is coming), plus US no longer has the heavy lift assets to do this. Toss in the fact that Iran is now on a war footing and has allies in the general AO, hired RoRo's and other logistics and supply assets will be targets before they get anywhere near the ports or beaches to off load. Plus, you can kiss oil goodbye, Iran will close the straights a nanosecond after the first bomb is in the air.

An air assault such as Serbia will be very expensive, Iran will fight back from the first bomb if not before, and Iran has a pretty viable air defense system and the missiles to make life miserable for any cluster of troops and logistics within roughly 300 kilometers of the borders if not longer. Look at a map. There is a long border between Iran and Irak, but as such and considering the terrain, any viable ground attack has to come from Irak territory. With millions of Iraki's seething at what Uncle Sugar just did and millions of Iranians seething at what Uncle Sugar just did, any invading troops will not be greeted with showers spring blossoms. To paraphrase a quote, 'You will be safe nowhere, our land will be your grave.'

Toss in the fact that an invasion of Irak, if even half successful, will put American troops on a war footing perilously close to Russian territory and possibly directly on the Russian Lake, aka Caspian Sea, and sovereign territory of Russia. Won't happen, VVP will not allow it.

Ergo, in spite of all the bluster and chest beating, at best all Foggy Bottom can do is bomb, bomb some more and bomb again. The cost in airframes and captured pilots will be a disaster and if RoRo's and other logistic heavy lift assets or bases are hit, the body bags coming back to Dover will be of numbers that can not be hidden as they are today with explanations that the dead are victims of training accidents or air accidents.

Foggy Bottom, and Five Points with Langley, have painted themselves in to a corner and unfortunately for them, (and it's within the realm of possibility that Five Points egged Trump on for this deal regardless of their protestations of innocence and surprise) they are now in a case of put up or shut up. As a point of honor they will continue down the spiral path of open warfare and war is like a cow voiding it's watery bowels, it splatters far beyond the intended target.

As my friend said a few years ago, damn you, damn your eyes, damn your souls, damn you back to Satan whose spawn you are. Go back to your fetid master and leave us in peace.

Auslander
Author http://rhauslander.com/

Never The Last One, paper back edition. https://www.amazon.com/dp/1521849056 A deep look in to Russia, her culture and her Armed Forces, in essence a look at the emergence of Russian Federation.

An Incident On Simonka. paperback edition. https://www.amazon.com/dp/1696160715 NATO Is Invited To Leave Sevastopol, One Way Or The Other.

Auslander on January 05, 2020 , · at 4:19 pm EST/EDT
"Toss in the fact that an invasion of Irak, if even half successful," should read:

"Toss in the fact that an invasion of Iran, if even half successful,"

It's late and this old man is tired. More tomorrow.

Auslander

Anonymous on January 05, 2020 , · at 4:04 pm EST/EDT
"UPDATE2: RT is reporting that "One US service member, two contractors killed in Al-Shabaab attack in Kenya, two DoD personnel injured". Which just goes to prove my point that spontaneous attacks are what we will be seeing first and that the retaliation promised by Iran will only come later."

-Al-Shabaab is a salafist terror group

Observer on January 05, 2020 , · at 4:17 pm EST/EDT
Saker, Some of us might be curious to know what your experience with the UN Institute for Disarmament Research informs you about the imminent Virginia gun bans and confiscations planned for this year and next. Can Empire afford to fight an actual shooting war on two fronts, one externally against Iraq/Iran and the second internally against its own people, some of whom will paradoxically be called away to fight on the first front? Perhaps the two conflicts could become conjoined as Uncle Shmuel mislabels every peaceful gun owner who just wants to be left alone as a foreign enemy-sympathizer and combatant by default, thereby turning brother against brother in a bloody prolonged hell in the regions immediately around Washington DC? Could the Empire *truly* be that suicidal?
Hajduk on January 05, 2020 , · at 4:20 pm EST/EDT
'Mr. Trump, the Gambler! Know that we are near you, in places that don't come to your mind. We are near you in places that you can't even imagine. We are a nation of martyrdom. We are the nation of Imam Hussein You are well aware of our power and capabilities in the region. You know how powerful we are in asymmetrical warfare You know that a war would mean the loss of all your capabilities. You may start the war, but we will be the ones to determine its end '
Gen. Soleimani (2018)
Bikkin on January 05, 2020 , · at 4:31 pm EST/EDT
Hello Saker,
I would like to ask you a question.
According to the Russian nuclear doctrine "The Russian Federation reserves the right to use nuclear weapons in response to the use of nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction against itself or its allies and also in response to large-scale aggression involving conventional weapons in situations that are critical for the national security of the Russian Federation and its allies."
In your opinion does Russia consider Iran such an ally? Will Russia shield Iran against USAn / Israeli nuclear strikes? In case of an imminent nuclear strike on Iran is Russia (and possibly others) going to issue a nuclear ultimatum to the would-be aggressor? And in case an actual nuclear attack on Iran happens is Russia going to retaliate / deter further attacks with its own nukes?
What is your opinion?
One thing: please do not start explaining why the above scenario is completely unthinkable, unrealistic and why it would never ever happen. I need your opinion on the possible events if such an attack does take place or it is about to happen. I do not need reasons why it would not happen; I need your opinion what might take place if it does happen. If you cannot answer my question, have no opinion or simply do not want to answer it please let me know it.
In case there is a formal commitment by Russia – one I know not of – when, where was it made?
Thanks in advance.
Nachtigall on January 05, 2020 , · at 5:27 pm EST/EDT
2nd that, but be polite to the Saker. Ask nicely next time, like someone who is civilized.

Thanks you for your indispensable work, dear Saker!

Marko on January 05, 2020 , · at 4:32 pm EST/EDT
I think USA still has nuclear option.
They will not hesitate to use it on Iran if Israel is in danger.
So, I think Iran shall be defeated anyway, as USA is much stronger.

Wrong. If the US uses nukes, then this will secure the total victory of Iran.
The Saker

Nachtigall on January 05, 2020 , · at 5:31 pm EST/EDT
How does this secure a total victory, dear Saker? Please help my to understand this: Nukes on every major city, industrial site, infrastructure with pos. millions dead – how is this a victory?
robert on January 05, 2020 , · at 4:41 pm EST/EDT
So, how many hostages for Iran are in Iraq now?
Petro-G on January 05, 2020 , · at 4:44 pm EST/EDT
I think that if Iran were to launch some devastating missiles into Israel, either a US ship/submarine or Israel will launch a nuclear bomb into Iran. The US knows there is nothing to be gained by a ground invasion. If we [the US] were to start launching missiles into Iran, Iran would rightfully be launching sophisticated arms back toward US ships and Israel and the US can't stand for that. We are good at dishing it out, but lousy at receiving it.

I can only believe we assassinated Solieman [apologies] because it is the writhing of a dying petrodollar. The US is desperate. But I don't understand how going to war is supposed to help?

Stand Easy on January 05, 2020 , · at 4:56 pm EST/EDT
Some short comments on the strategic blunder made by US.

Meantime, global ramifications are being felt. View from China, one of the biggest consumers of ME oil:

https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1175782.shtml

and some mind-reading from a HK based rag:

"Beijing's ties with Tehran are crucial to its energy and geopolitical strategies, and with Moscow also in the mix, a broader conflagration is a real possibility"

https://www.asiatimes.com/2020/01/article/could-china-take-irans-side-in-a-war-with-us/

Japan had planned to send some military hardware to the ME just before the new year but Gen Soleimani's murder may change the calculus.

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2020/01/03/national/japan-sdf-assassination-iran-qassem-soleimani/#.XhJYxfLmjN4

Last but not least, Happy Nativity to all Orthodox Christians (thanks for the beautifully illustrated Orthodox calendar, The Saker.)
Let us all pray for peace.

Kent on January 05, 2020 , · at 5:33 pm EST/EDT
"(thanks for the beautifully illustrated Orthodox calendar, The Saker.)"

Credits for the calendar(s) should go to one of our in house Artists and poets Ioan.

You obviously do not visit the Cafe' very often, do you?

Regards
Kent

Wendy on January 05, 2020 , · at 5:24 pm EST/EDT
Trump is the King of the South. Killing under a flag of parley is a rare thing these days and is the reason why Trump will end up going to war with no allies by his side just like the path mapped oit for him in Daniel.

Analysis sans eschatology is Onism.

Tom on January 05, 2020 , · at 5:32 pm EST/EDT
It's not a blunder.
Trump's goals pre-assassination:
1) withdraw US troops from the ME ("Fortress America") and
2) placate Israel
This is how it is done. Not a direct "hey guys, we have to bring the boys home." Trump tried that and got smashed by the Deep State and Israel. Instead, he is going to force the Islamic world to do the talking for him by refusing to host our pariah army (that's all they have to do, not destroy a major US base or two). Then even the Deep State will admit it's a lost cause. He can say he did all he could while achieving his goals.
As The Saker pointed out, the troops being sent now are to evacuate, not to conquer Tehran. Next time this year the US will have its troops home and Trump will be reelected

[Jan 05, 2020] Trump is wholly responsible for his own actions, but he -- just like the Ayatollah -- is being pushed in a direction where it's impossible to back down and still "save face". Neither men can afford to do so by Andrew Korybko

Highly recommended!
Looks like Trump administration buried the Treaty of non-proliferation once and for all. From now on only a country with nuclear weapons can be viewed as a sovereign country.
Notable quotes:
"... To remind the reader once more, however, none of this would be happening had Iran not abandoned its "nuclear ambiguity" by agreeing to the 2015 Rouhani-Obama deal, with that event in hindsight being the tripwire that provoked the American military into wantonly escalating tensions with Iran ..."
"... Because they realized that the maximum costs that the Islamic Republic could inflict on it in response to their actions could be "manageable". ..."
"... The lesson to be learned from all of this is that the possession of nuclear weapons safeguards a country's sovereignty by enabling it to inflict "unmanageable"/"unacceptable" costs on its foes and thus deter their aggression, failing which leaders on both sides can be manipulated into a serious crisis. ..."
Jan 05, 2020 | astutenews.com

Astute News

Trump is wholly responsible for his own actions, but he -- just like the Ayatollah -- is being pushed in a direction where it's impossible to back down and still "save face". Neither men can afford to do so, which makes it likely that a lot more people than just Maj. Gen. Soleimani might be about to die.

To remind the reader once more, however, none of this would be happening had Iran not abandoned its "nuclear ambiguity" by agreeing to the 2015 Rouhani-Obama deal, with that event in hindsight being the tripwire that provoked the American military into wantonly escalating tensions with Iran (despite believing that they're doing so in "self-defense)

Because they realized that the maximum costs that the Islamic Republic could inflict on it in response to their actions could be "manageable".

The lesson to be learned from all of this is that the possession of nuclear weapons safeguards a country's sovereignty by enabling it to inflict "unmanageable"/"unacceptable" costs on its foes and thus deter their aggression, failing which leaders on both sides can be manipulated into a serious crisis.

By Andrew Korybko
Source: One World

[Jan 04, 2020] The role of Germany in the Ukrainian disaster

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... I have the feeling , just the suspicion , that they contributed to the Ukrainian disaster out of their genetic Drang nach Osten Nordic greed , is that right ? ..."
"... Anyway since the Ukrainian disaster the cohesion of the EU is going going down . Germany which was gifted with the German reunification , is less and less trusted specially in south Europe , and even less in the EU far west , in England which is going out of the EU . ..."
"... As a curiosity in 1945 the Zionists asked Stalin to give Crimea to the jews , Stalin refused . https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/164673/crimea-as-jewish-homeland ..."
"... is 2019 and life in Ukraine is barely better than it was 25-50 years ago, population has actually dropped from its peak in early 1990's. Millions of Ukrainians live abroad (I know some of them) and have – to be polite – at best an ambivalent attitude towards their homeland. Almost all of them prefer to be somewhere else, even to become someone else. ..."
"... I don't agree with the facile name-calling that sees Nazis everywhere and exaggerates throw-away symbolism. But Ukraine has not been functioning and it can't go like this much longer. Not because it will collapse, it won't, but because during an era of general prosperity Ukraine can't be a unstable exception (oh, I get it, they are better than Moldova, good for them.) ..."
"... Rebellions against geography are doomed. Projecting one's personal frustrations on external enemies (Kremlin!) has never worked. Ukraine needs rationality – accepting that they will not be in EU, that attempting to join Nato would destroy Ukraine, and that they can't beat Russia in a war. And following advise of half-mad and half-ignorant well-wishers from Washington or Brussels is a road to ruin. Nulands, Bidens and Tusks will never live in Ukraine, they really deeply don't care about it. They have no skin in that game, it is just entertainment for them. ..."
"... During WWII, Germany actually established settlements in Crimea. Think about it: there is a massive war, you have like 1-2 years, short on transport and resources, and you start sending settlers to Crimea – that's how much drang-nach-osten types wanted it. And the Turks, etc This must be driving them absolutely nuts. ..."
"... The mexicans say : when God created Mexico He gave Mexico everything ; land , mountains , plains , tropical forests , deserts , two oceans , agriculture , gold , silver , oil . then God saw how beautiful and perfect Mexico was and He though that He should also give something bad to the country to prevent the sin of pride , and then he populated Mexico with pure pendejos ,( idiots ) . ..."
"... If you want a decent analysis of current events in the Ukraine, which is what The Saker provides, I guess you'll just have to put up with his terminology. ..."
"... My experience is that Ukrainians individually are far from being pendejos . But they are unable to act as a group or as a nation. (Well, they 'act', but it mostly somehow fails.) ..."
"... Maybe it is the relative shallow and heterogenous history of Ukraine. Or – and this is what I have observed – a fundamental inner disloyalty to the Ukraine as a homeland. When one observes the assorted Porkys, Timoshenkas, Yanuks, the oligarchs, but also the crowds on Maidan, I get a sense that they are all about to leave Ukraine or are thinking about leaving. Societies can't be built with one foot always at the airport, or in an old car in a 5-km column waiting on the border of Poland. Or Russia. ..."
Nov 21, 2019 | www.unz.com

Carlton Meyer says: Website November 17, 2019 at 6:31 am GMT How 98% of Americans feel about the Ukraine BS:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/Evj_qduJY7U?feature=oembed Read More

Antares , says: November 17, 2019 at 9:42 am GMT

@Alfred I had the same thoughts. Zelenskii should show a similar coffin with the text "This one is still empty" and then start rounding up the terrorists. He finally has a good excuse.
Anon [424] Disclaimer , says: November 17, 2019 at 9:58 am GMT
Thank you Saker and Unz for the very interesting article .

I wonder what has been the role of Germany in the Ukrainian disaster . ...I have the feeling , just the suspicion , that they contributed to the Ukrainian disaster out of their genetic Drang nach Osten Nordic greed , is that right ?

Anyway since the Ukrainian disaster the cohesion of the EU is going going down . Germany which was gifted with the German reunification , is less and less trusted specially in south Europe , and even less in the EU far west , in England which is going out of the EU .

Most of the people in the EU would like to keep collaborating with the US , of course , but also with Russia and with the rest of the world . Most of the people in the UE are scared of the dark forces operating in Ukraine trying to provoke a war with Russia .

As a curiosity in 1945 the Zionists asked Stalin to give Crimea to the jews , Stalin refused .
https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/164673/crimea-as-jewish-homeland

awry , says: November 17, 2019 at 10:41 am GMT
The stupid name-calling like the term "ukronazi" makes this article look like a rant like North Korean communiques or the ravings of some Arab despot's propagandist. It is not better than calling "The Saker" a "Moskal", "Sovok" or "Putler's stooge" etc. He should keep this lingo to directly "debating" "Ukronazis" on twitter or youtube commentst etc. not for an article that is supposed to be a serious analysis.

I understand that it is hard for a Russian nationalist to accept that the majority of Ukrainians don't want to belong to their dream Russkiy Mir, they were seduced by the West, which is more attractive with all its failings, because mostly of simple materialistic reasons.

Ukrainians happily go to EU countries that now allow them in as guest workers. The fact, like it or not that majority of them chose the West over Russkiy Mir despite being very close to Russians in culture, language, history etc. He is still in the first stage of grief it seems.

Beckow , says: November 17, 2019 at 12:38 pm GMT
@Mr. Hack Touching. (Really, no sarcasm implied.)

All in all, Ukrainians are probably way above average in most human characteristics. The area of Ukraine is by planetary standards one of the best available: arable land, great rivers, Black see, pleasant and liveable.

But it is 2019 and life in Ukraine is barely better than it was 25-50 years ago, population has actually dropped from its peak in early 1990's. Millions of Ukrainians live abroad (I know some of them) and have – to be polite – at best an ambivalent attitude towards their homeland. Almost all of them prefer to be somewhere else, even to become someone else.

Now why is that? A normal society would have enough introspection to discuss this, to look for answers. Throwing a temper-tantrum on a big square in Kiev every few years is not looking for a solution. That is escapism, Orange-this, Maidan-that, 'Russians bad', 'we are going West', 'golden toilets', and always 'Stalin did it'.

I don't agree with the facile name-calling that sees Nazis everywhere and exaggerates throw-away symbolism. But Ukraine has not been functioning and it can't go like this much longer. Not because it will collapse, it won't, but because during an era of general prosperity Ukraine can't be a unstable exception (oh, I get it, they are better than Moldova, good for them.)

Rebellions against geography are doomed. Projecting one's personal frustrations on external enemies (Kremlin!) has never worked. Ukraine needs rationality – accepting that they will not be in EU, that attempting to join Nato would destroy Ukraine, and that they can't beat Russia in a war. And following advise of half-mad and half-ignorant well-wishers from Washington or Brussels is a road to ruin. Nulands, Bidens and Tusks will never live in Ukraine, they really deeply don't care about it. They have no skin in that game, it is just entertainment for them.

Or alternatively you can pray that Russia collapses – good luck waiting for that.

Beckow , says: November 17, 2019 at 12:47 pm GMT
@Anon

.genetic drang nach osten nordic greed

There is not much 'drang' left in Germany, so I think this is mostly fingers on the map post dinner empty talk.

in 1945 the jewery asked Stalin to give Crimea to the jews , Stalin refused

Crimea is a jewel, but has one big problem: not enough water. But that's also true about Israel, maybe there is a deep genetic memory of coming out of a desert environment.

During WWII, Germany actually established settlements in Crimea. Think about it: there is a massive war, you have like 1-2 years, short on transport and resources, and you start sending settlers to Crimea – that's how much drang-nach-osten types wanted it. And the Turks, etc This must be driving them absolutely nuts.

Anon [424] Disclaimer , says: November 17, 2019 at 1:34 pm GMT
The mexicans are able to make fun of themselves , that`s a good thing . They have a joke which aplies also to Ukraina ( and other countries )

The mexicans say : when God created Mexico He gave Mexico everything ; land , mountains , plains , tropical forests , deserts , two oceans , agriculture , gold , silver , oil . then God saw how beautiful and perfect Mexico was and He though that He should also give something bad to the country to prevent the sin of pride , and then he populated Mexico with pure pendejos ,( idiots ) .

The same aplies to Ukraina . pure pendejos .

Skeptikal , says: November 17, 2019 at 1:49 pm GMT
@AWM "Is it not possible to have an article on Ukraine without all the N@ZI references?

If you want a decent analysis of current events in the Ukraine, which is what The Saker provides, I guess you'll just have to put up with his terminology.

The world won't miss a thing if Curmudgeon or AWM goes off in a huff, to sit on his toilet and read the "one joke per dump" volume lodged on the tank and stops reading The Saker's very thorough analysis as a protest action!

Beckow , says: November 17, 2019 at 1:55 pm GMT
@Anon My experience is that Ukrainians individually are far from being pendejos . But they are unable to act as a group or as a nation. (Well, they 'act', but it mostly somehow fails.)

Maybe it is the relative shallow and heterogenous history of Ukraine. Or – and this is what I have observed – a fundamental inner disloyalty to the Ukraine as a homeland. When one observes the assorted Porkys, Timoshenkas, Yanuks, the oligarchs, but also the crowds on Maidan, I get a sense that they are all about to leave Ukraine or are thinking about leaving. Societies can't be built with one foot always at the airport, or in an old car in a 5-km column waiting on the border of Poland. Or Russia.

GMC , says: November 17, 2019 at 1:56 pm GMT
Another good article – thanks – Yep, the US/EU NWO is not going to let their "West Ukraine Isis" battalions and intel gang lose their funding , arms trafficking ops, or terrorist reputation. This is a no win situation in Ukraine and the West knows it – Even if NovoRossiya gets some independence, the Ukraine Isis will/can reek havoc and murder for a long time along the border. The modern Cheka { Ukraine Isis } has been modified for the security of the new Farmland owners – Monsanto, Cargill, DuPont and the rest of the Globalist Corporations and their ports close to Odessa.
Hapalong Cassidy , says: November 17, 2019 at 2:01 pm GMT
One point of contention since it wasn't made clear in this article – Novorussia consists of Luhansk and Donetsk, but not Kharkov. While Kharkov has more Russians than most other provinces of Ukraine do, it does not have a plurality like Donetsk and Luhansk.
Epigon , says: November 17, 2019 at 2:06 pm GMT
@Mr. Hack

All of Ukraine's doomsayers have been crying about Ukraine's demise for the lat 25 years, yet the fact is that it' s getting stronger and stronger every year,

USA diaspora keeps on delivering.

Shoutout to quarter/half Poles USA citizens LARPing as Ukrainian patriots in the comments.

[Jan 04, 2020] American Meddling in the Ukraine by Publius Tacitus

Highly recommended!
Ukraine is now a pawn in a big geopolitical game against Russia. Which somehow survived 90th when everybody including myself has written it off.
That's why the USA, EU (Germany) and Russia pulling the country in different directions. But the victory of Ukrainian nationalists is not surprising and is not solely based on the US interferences (although the USA did lot in this direction) pursuit its geopolitical game against Russia. Distancing themselves from Russa is a universal trend in Post-Soviet space. And it often takes ugly forms.
So Ukraine in not an exception here. It is part of the "rule". Essentially the dissolution of the USSR revised the result on WWII. And while the author correctly calls Ukrainian leader US stooges, they moved in this direction because they feel that it is necessary for maintaining the independence. In other words anti-Russian stance is considered by the Ukrainian elite as a a pre-condition for mainlining independence. Otherwise people like Parubiy would be in jail very soon. They are tolerated and even promoted because they are useful.
It repeats the story of Baltic Republics, albeit with a significant time delay. There should be some social group that secure independence of the country and Ukrainian nationalists happen to be such a group. That's why Yanukovich supported them and Svoboda party (with predictable results).
Notable quotes:
"... The ideological fissures that are growing in the United States are beginning to resemble the warring camps that characterize the Ukrainian political world. The divide in Ukraine pits groups who are described as "right wing" and many are ideological descendants of real Nazis and Nazi sympathizers against groups with a strong affinity to Russia. This kind of gap cannot be bridged through conventional negotiations. ..."
"... Jump ahead now to the April 2014 "uprising" of anti-Russian forces in the Ukraine (Maidan 2). The US was firmly on the side of the protesters, who ultimately succeeded in ousting the elected President. And who were helping lead this effort? ..."
"... The US support, both overt and covert, for Ukrainian politicians is grounded in an anti-Soviet (now anti-Russian) ideology. We have convinced ourselves that Russia is hell bent on world domination. Therefore we must do whatever is necessary to stop Russia, which includes uncritical, blind support for elements in Ukraine that also detest the Russians. But in doing so we have closed our eyes to the filthy underbelly of the virulent anti-Semitism that lurks in western Ukraine. ..."
"... US meddling in the Ukraine is astonishing in its breadth. It ranges from the fact that the wife of former President Viktor Yuschenko was an American citizen and former senior official in the US State Department. Do you think there would be no complaints if Melania Trump was born in Russia and had served in the Russian Foreign Ministry? Yet, most Americans are happily ignorant of such facts. ..."
"... US interference was not confined to serendipitous relationships, such as the Yushchenko marriage. It also included the open and active funding of certain political groups and media outlets. The US State Department sent money through a variety of outlets. One of these was the Consortium for Elections and Political Process Strengthening aka CEPPS. ..."
"... This is : ..."
"... Count me as one of the people who is outraged by the hypocrisy and stupidity now on display in the United States. I am not talking about Trump. I am referring to the Republicans and Democrats and pundits and media mouthpieces who are fuming about Russian citizens writing on Facebook as one of the worst catastrophes since Pearl Harbor or 9-11. ..."
"... There clearly is meddling going on in America's political landscape. But it isn't the Russian Government. No. There are foreign and domestic forces aligned who are keen on portraying Russia as a threat to world order that must be opposed by more defense spending and tougher sanctions. That is the propaganda that dominates the media in the United States these days. And that is truly dangerous to our nation's safety and freedom. ..."
"... A CIA guy recently said the US only interferes to 'promote democracy' - tell that to Australia, Vietnam, Mexico, Chile, Congo, Russia, Ukraine...it's a long long list. ..."
"... An independent Ukraine was also a project of German foreign policy after the Brest-Litowsk Treaty (the equivalent of the Versailles Treaty, only aimed at Russia) SO I have o wonder how much of the enthusiasm for Vicky Nuland's Israel friendly Nazi state-let (oh what irony!) is a product of Germany wanting to reassert itself in the east, using NATO solidarity as a fig leaf. Maybe they will make Ukraine import a lot o Africans "refugees" so that Soros' project of creating a brown Europe will be advanced in the Slavic sphere as well as the west. ..."
"... The liberal party - who provides the prime-minister - EU leader Hans van Baalen and Belgian ex-prime minister Guy Verhostad held a controversial speech on the Maidan square in support of the protesters that the EU will support them. ..."
"... I wouldn't put to much stress on Bandera having been a bad guy. His enemies were no better. They just won the war and the victors write history. The deeper problem of Ukraine is the fact that in the East of the country (and maybe even the majority of the country) Bandera is indeed regarded as a villain. But in the West he is a hero to this day. Even in Soviet times people from Western Ukraine were regarded as "fascists" by much of the rest of the country. No wonder as there were anti soviet partisans until late in the fifties. ..."
"... "Prorussian" Kutshma turned into a Ukrainian "patriot" (such is the logic of statehood) and the same thing happened with Yanukovich. People forget that he would have signed an association agreement with Europe had Europe not refused because he was insufficiently "democratic". ..."
"... But the West wanted it all. They wanted Ukraine firmly in the "Western" camp. Thereby they ripped the country apart. As a good friend of mine who has studied in Kiev in Soviet times remarked: to ask Ukraine to choose between East and West is like asking a child in divorce proceedings who it liked more: daddy or mummy? ..."
"... A very interesting conversation between Victoria Nulland and ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt, caught at picking the future rulers of liberated Ukraine : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QxZ8t3V_bk This is not meddling. This is a defensive (preemptive?) action against Russian agression. ..."
"... I've never seen such an intense barrage of propaganda before in my life. America is fracturing apart like Ukraine. This is no coincidence. In both countries, oligarchs have seized power, the rule of law abandoned and there is a rush of corruption. ..."
"... What we did to Ukraine is shameful in every way. A remember a video of a pallet of money being unloaded from a USG place at Kiev during Maidan 2. That's in addition to Nuland's bag of cookies. I always thought that one of the objectives of our meddling in Ukraine was to make Sevastopol into a NATO naval base. ..."
"... Our leaders are the biggest hypocrites on the planet. The Ukraine was almost evenly divided between pro-Western and pro-Russian sides. Our government, rather than waiting for an election, assisted an armed rebellion against the elected pro-Russian government. Among the groups our government allied with in this endeavor were out and out Nazis. ..."
Feb 23, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

The ideological fissures that are growing in the United States are beginning to resemble the warring camps that characterize the Ukrainian political world. The divide in Ukraine pits groups who are described as "right wing" and many are ideological descendants of real Nazis and Nazi sympathizers against groups with a strong affinity to Russia. This kind of gap cannot be bridged through conventional negotiations.

Who is the United States government and media supporting? The Nazis . You think I'm joking. Here are the facts, but we must go back to World War II :

When World War II began a large part of western Ukraine welcomed the German soldiers as liberators from the recently enforced Soviet rule and openly collaborated with the Germans. The Soviet leader, Stalin, imposed policies that caused the deaths of almost 7 million Ukrainians in the 1930s--an era known as the Holomodor).

Ukrainian divisions, regiments and battalions were formed, such as SS Galizien, Nachtigal and Roland, and served under German leadership. In the first few weeks of the war, more than 80 thousand people from the Galizien region volunteered for the SS Galizien, which later known for its extreme cruelty towards Polish, Jewish and Russian people on the territory of Ukraine.

Members of these military groups came mostly from the organization of Ukrainian nationalists aka the OUN, which was founded in 1929. It's leader was Stepan Bandera, known then and today for his extreme anti-semitic and anti-communist views.

CIA documents just recently declassified show strong ties between US intelligence and Ukrainian nationalists since 1946.

Jump ahead now to the April 2014 "uprising" of anti-Russian forces in the Ukraine (Maidan 2). The US was firmly on the side of the protesters, who ultimately succeeded in ousting the elected President. And who were helping lead this effort?

Secretary of the Ukrainian National Security and Defence Council is Andriy Parubiy. Parubiy was the founder of the Social National Party of Ukraine, a fascist party styled on Hitler's Nazis, with membership restricted to ethnic Ukrainians.

The Social National Party would go on to become Svoboda, the far-right nationalist party whose leader, Oleh Tyahnybok was one of the three most high profile leaders of the Euromaidan protests. . . .

Overseeing the armed forces alongside Parubiy as the Deputy Secretary of National Security is Dmytro Yarosh , the leader of the Right Sector – a group of hardline nationalist streetfighters, who previously boasted they were ready for armed struggle to free Ukraine.

The US support, both overt and covert, for Ukrainian politicians is grounded in an anti-Soviet (now anti-Russian) ideology. We have convinced ourselves that Russia is hell bent on world domination. Therefore we must do whatever is necessary to stop Russia, which includes uncritical, blind support for elements in Ukraine that also detest the Russians. But in doing so we have closed our eyes to the filthy underbelly of the virulent anti-Semitism that lurks in western Ukraine.

US meddling in the Ukraine is astonishing in its breadth. It ranges from the fact that the wife of former President Viktor Yuschenko was an American citizen and former senior official in the US State Department. Do you think there would be no complaints if Melania Trump was born in Russia and had served in the Russian Foreign Ministry? Yet, most Americans are happily ignorant of such facts.

But Viktor Yushchenko is not an American who speaks a foreign language. He is very much a Ukrainian nationalist and steeped in the anti-Semitism that dominates the ideology of western Ukraine. During the final months of his Presidency, Yushchenko made the following declaration:

In conclusion I would like to say something that is long awaited by the Ukrainian patriots for many years I have signed a decree for the unbroken spirit and standing for the idea of fighting for independent Ukraine. I declare Stepan Bandera a national hero of Ukraine.

Without hesitation or shame, Yushchenko endorsed the legacy of Bandera, who had happily aligned with the Nazis in pursuit of his own nationalist goals. Those goals, however, did not include Jews. And here is the ultimate irony--Bandera was born in Austria, not the Ukraine. So much for ideological consistency.

US interference was not confined to serendipitous relationships, such as the Yushchenko marriage. It also included the open and active funding of certain political groups and media outlets. The US State Department sent money through a variety of outlets. One of these was the Consortium for Elections and Political Process Strengthening aka CEPPS.

This is : a USAID program with other National Endowment for Democracy-affiliated groups: the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, the International Republican Institute and the International Foundation for Electoral Systems. In 2010, the reported disbursement for CEPPS in Ukraine was nearly $5 million.

The program's efforts are described on the USAID website as providing "training for political party activists and locally elected officials to improve communication with civic groups and citizens, and the development of NGO-led advocacy campaigns on electoral and political process issues."

Anyone prepared to argue that it would be okay for Russia, through its Foreign Ministry, to contribute several million dollars for training party activists in the United States?

What we do not know is how much money was being spent on covert activities directed and managed by the CIA. During the political upheaval in April 2014 (Maidan 2), there was this news item:

Over the weekend, CIA director John Brennan travelled to Kiev, nobody knows exactly why, but some speculate that he intends to open US intelligence resources to Ukrainian leaders about real-time Russian military maneuvers. The US has, thus far, refrained from sharing such knowledge because Moscow is believed to have penetrated much of Ukraine's communications systems – and Washington isn't about to hand over its surveillance secrets to the Russians.

Do you think Americans would be outraged if the head of Russia's version of the CIA, the SVR or FSB, traveled quietly to the United States to meet with Donald Trump prior to his election? I think that would qualify as meddling.

Count me as one of the people who is outraged by the hypocrisy and stupidity now on display in the United States. I am not talking about Trump. I am referring to the Republicans and Democrats and pundits and media mouthpieces who are fuming about Russian citizens writing on Facebook as one of the worst catastrophes since Pearl Harbor or 9-11.

There clearly is meddling going on in America's political landscape. But it isn't the Russian Government. No. There are foreign and domestic forces aligned who are keen on portraying Russia as a threat to world order that must be opposed by more defense spending and tougher sanctions. That is the propaganda that dominates the media in the United States these days. And that is truly dangerous to our nation's safety and freedom.

Posted at 01:24 PM in Publius Tacitus , Russiagate | Permalink

james , 23 February 2018 at 02:11 PM

Good post pt.. thanks... i never knew ''the wife of former President Viktor Yushchenko was an American citizen and former senior official in the US State Department.'' That is informative.. i recall following this closely back in 2014.. the hypocrisy on display in the usa at present is truly amazing and frightening at the same time.. it appears that the public can be cowed very easily..
Generalfeldmarschall von Hindenburg , 23 February 2018 at 02:29 PM
good points well made.

On the twitters, you would be accused of "whatabouttism" - which is the crime of excusing Putin's diabolism by pointing out American interference with the internal politics an elections of other nations. A CIA guy recently said the US only interferes to 'promote democracy' - tell that to Australia, Vietnam, Mexico, Chile, Congo, Russia, Ukraine...it's a long long list.

An independent Ukraine was also a project of German foreign policy after the Brest-Litowsk Treaty (the equivalent of the Versailles Treaty, only aimed at Russia) SO I have o wonder how much of the enthusiasm for Vicky Nuland's Israel friendly Nazi state-let (oh what irony!) is a product of Germany wanting to reassert itself in the east, using NATO solidarity as a fig leaf. Maybe they will make Ukraine import a lot o Africans "refugees" so that Soros' project of creating a brown Europe will be advanced in the Slavic sphere as well as the west.

Adrestia , 23 February 2018 at 02:39 PM
It's not only the US. The EU borg are also meddling. In my country we had a referendum about Ukraine. The population voted "Against" on the question: "Are you for or against the Approval Act of the Association Agreement between the European Union and Ukraine?"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_Ukraine%E2%80%93European_Union_Association_Agreement_referendum,_2016

This was the only referendum that was done since it was implemented in 2015. A second one is being organized on the Intelligence and Security Services which has controversial parts with regard to access to internet traffic.

This referendum will take place on March 21, 2018 and will probably be voted against because of the controversial elements (in part because there is still living memory of our Eastern neighbors in the second world war)

https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet_op_de_inlichtingen-_en_veiligheidsdiensten_2017

These 2 will probably be the last. Our house of representatives have voted yesterday to end the referendum law (with a majority vote of 76 out of 150 representatives!)

So much for democracy. The reason stated that the referendum was controversial (probably because they voted against the EU borg). Interesting is that the proposal was done by the party that wanted the referendum as a principal point. This will almost certainly ensure that the little respect left for traditional parties is gone and they will not be able to get a majority next elections.

The liberal party - who provides the prime-minister - EU leader Hans van Baalen and Belgian ex-prime minister Guy Verhostad held a controversial speech on the Maidan square in support of the protesters that the EU will support them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIL1FWCIlu8

Tom , 23 February 2018 at 03:22 PM

I wouldn't put to much stress on Bandera having been a bad guy. His enemies were no better. They just won the war and the victors write history. The deeper problem of Ukraine is the fact that in the East of the country (and maybe even the majority of the country) Bandera is indeed regarded as a villain. But in the West he is a hero to this day. Even in Soviet times people from Western Ukraine were regarded as "fascists" by much of the rest of the country. No wonder as there were anti soviet partisans until late in the fifties.

Even in the nineties anybody who travelled in Ukraine could feel the tension between East and West. The Russians were certainly aware of it and mindful not to rip the country apart they cut the Ukrainians an enormous amount of slack. Of course they supported "their" candidates and shoveled money into their insatiable throats. Only to be disappointed time and again. "Prorussian" Kutshma turned into a Ukrainian "patriot" (such is the logic of statehood) and the same thing happened with Yanukovich. People forget that he would have signed an association agreement with Europe had Europe not refused because he was insufficiently "democratic". Really the West should have been content with things as they were.

But the West wanted it all. They wanted Ukraine firmly in the "Western" camp. Thereby they ripped the country apart. As a good friend of mine who has studied in Kiev in Soviet times remarked: to ask Ukraine to choose between East and West is like asking a child in divorce proceedings who it liked more: daddy or mummy?

Really the West (not only the US -the Eu is also guilty) is to blame. It is long past time to get down from the high horse and stop spreading chaos and mayhem in the name of democracy,

Jony Kanuck , 23 February 2018 at 03:27 PM
Publius,

An informative column. The coup & later developments soured me on the MSMedia. I'm an initiate into modern Russian history: NATO in the Ukraine = WW3!

Some additional history:

A Ukrainian nation did not exist until after WW1; one piece was Russian, another Polish and another Austrian. The Holodomor is exaggerated for political purposes; the actual number dead from famine appears to be 'only' 2M. It wasn't Soviet bloody mindedness, it was Soviet agricultural mismanagement; collectivizing agriculture drops production.

They did this right before the great drought of the 1930s - remember the dustbowl. There was a famine in Kazakestan at the same time; 1.5M died.

The Nazis raised 5 SS divisions out of the Ukraine. As the Germans were pushed back they ran night drops of ordnance into the Ukraine as long as they could. The Soviets had to carry on divisional level counter insurgency until 1956. After the war, Gehlen, Nazi intelligence czar, kept himself out of jail by turning over his files, routes & agents to the US. He also stoked anti Soviet paranoia.

The Brits ended up with a whole Ukr SS division that they didn't want, so they gave it to Canada. Which is why Canada has such cranky policy around the Ukraine!

bluetonga , 23 February 2018 at 03:28 PM
A very interesting conversation between Victoria Nulland and ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt, caught at picking the future rulers of liberated Ukraine : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QxZ8t3V_bk This is not meddling. This is a defensive (preemptive?) action against Russian agression.
Publius Tacitus -> Tom... , 23 February 2018 at 03:31 PM
Tom,

I'm sure you'd like us to ignore Bandera. I bet he liked children and dogs. Just like Hitler. Bandera was a genuine bad guy. There is no rehabilitating that scourge on society. Nice try though.

Publius Tacitus -> bluetonga... , 23 February 2018 at 03:36 PM
I am giving you the benefit of the doubt that your final comment is sarcasm. When you have two senior US Government officials who will and will not constitute a foreign government, you have gone beyond meddling. It is worse.
VietnamVet , 23 February 2018 at 03:57 PM
PT

The media is hysterical. Today, Putin's Facebook Bot Collaborator contacted the Kremlin before his mercenaries attacked Americans in Syria.

I've never seen such an intense barrage of propaganda before in my life. America is fracturing apart like Ukraine. This is no coincidence. In both countries, oligarchs have seized power, the rule of law abandoned and there is a rush of corruption.

A World War is near. The realists are gone. The Moguls are pushing Donald Trump pull the trigger. Either in Syria with an assault to destroy Hezbollah (Iran) for good or American trainers going over the top of trenches in Donbass in a centennial attack of the dead.

The Twisted Genius , 23 February 2018 at 03:59 PM
Publius Tacitus,

Hallelujah and jubilation! We're in full agreement on this subject. What we did to Ukraine is shameful in every way. A remember a video of a pallet of money being unloaded from a USG place at Kiev during Maidan 2. That's in addition to Nuland's bag of cookies. I always thought that one of the objectives of our meddling in Ukraine was to make Sevastopol into a NATO naval base.

I would definitely want to see a full account of what support we provided to the nazi thugs of Svoboda and Pravy Sektor. We have a long history of meddling, at least twice as long as the Soviet Union/Russia. But that does not mean we should stop investigating the Russian interference in our 2016 election. Just stop hyperventilating over it. It no more deserves risking a war than our continuing mutual espionage.

TimmyB , 23 February 2018 at 04:08 PM
Our leaders are the biggest hypocrites on the planet. The Ukraine was almost evenly divided between pro-Western and pro-Russian sides. Our government, rather than waiting for an election, assisted an armed rebellion against the elected pro-Russian government. Among the groups our government allied with in this endeavor were out and out Nazis.

As a result of this rebellion, the Russian majority in Crimea overwhelming voted to leave the Ukraine and rejoin Russia, which they had been part of for over 150-years. While our government continues to provide military aid to Israel, which used force of arms take over the West Bank, it imposed sanctions against Russia when the people of Crimea voted to join their former countrymen. Mind boggling.

[Jan 04, 2020] On Thucydides quote "the strong do what they will, the weak suffer what they must

Jan 04, 2020 | turcopolier.typepad.com

Andrei Martyanov (aka SmoothieX12) -> Ishmael Zechariah... ,03 January 2020 at 11:20 PM

The second are the immortal words of Thucydides: "the strong do what they will, the weak suffer what they must."

Yeah, I heard Thucydides had some issues with resolution of uncertainties for targeting, especially for stand-off precision guided weapons. Plus there were some issues with long range air-defense systems in Greece in times of Plato and Socrates. You know, GLONASS wasn't fully operational, plus EW was a little bit scratchy.

So, surely, it all fully applies today, especially in choke points. Plus those Athenians they were not exactly good with RPGs and anti-Armour operations. Other than that, Thucydides nailed it.

Something To Think About -> Ishmael Zechariah... , 04 January 2020 at 01:11 AM
Ah, yes, the Melian Dialogue.

Interesting to note that it was the party professing those words - Athens - who started the Peloponnesian War, driven in large part by that haughty attitude. It was Athens that also ended that war, of course. They did so when they surrendered to the Spartans.

[Jan 04, 2020] The USA only choice is a Sunni sandwich with Kurdish Bread and Shia Mayo

Jan 04, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Peeps like Sen Graham saying "the Iraqi's need to choose between us or Iran."

(That choice is a Sunni sandwich with Kurdish Bread and Shia Mayo)

[Jan 04, 2020] The USA only choice is a Sunni sandwich with Kurdish Bread and Shia Mayo

Jan 04, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Peeps like Sen Graham saying "the Iraqi's need to choose between us or Iran."

(That choice is a Sunni sandwich with Kurdish Bread and Shia Mayo)

[Jan 04, 2020] On Thucydides quote "the strong do what they will, the weak suffer what they must

Jan 04, 2020 | turcopolier.typepad.com

Andrei Martyanov (aka SmoothieX12) -> Ishmael Zechariah... ,03 January 2020 at 11:20 PM

The second are the immortal words of Thucydides: "the strong do what they will, the weak suffer what they must."

Yeah, I heard Thucydides had some issues with resolution of uncertainties for targeting, especially for stand-off precision guided weapons. Plus there were some issues with long range air-defense systems in Greece in times of Plato and Socrates. You know, GLONASS wasn't fully operational, plus EW was a little bit scratchy.

So, surely, it all fully applies today, especially in choke points. Plus those Athenians they were not exactly good with RPGs and anti-Armour operations. Other than that, Thucydides nailed it.

Something To Think About -> Ishmael Zechariah... , 04 January 2020 at 01:11 AM
Ah, yes, the Melian Dialogue.

Interesting to note that it was the party professing those words - Athens - who started the Peloponnesian War, driven in large part by that haughty attitude. It was Athens that also ended that war, of course. They did so when they surrendered to the Spartans.

[Jan 04, 2020] This stooge of MI6 and FBI Sir Craig Reedie was shyly silent when Americans were found to use illegal drag to enhance the results

Sir Craig Reedie signify the growing politization of sport and the arrivals on the scene of western intelligence agencies (McCabe, Steele, etc were involved in this dirty game) to the extent that was never possible before. It stated with FBI operation against FIFA. WARA was the second round. See also End of term message to stakeholders from WADA President, Sir Craig Reedie World Anti-Doping Agency
See also 'Williams sisters and Simone Biles allowed to take banned substances to Rio' Daily Mail Online, Joe Rogan claims Serena Williams on STEROIDS - YouTube and Serena Williams forced to withdraw from doubles - Wimbledon 2014 - YouTube
Jan 04, 2020 | www.sport-express.ru

Yuri Shalnov -> "van der sar 5 days ago

This prostitute Sir Craig Reedie is is up to ears in dirst connected with doping by the Americans and the Europeans? This stooge of MI6 and FBI was shyly silent when Americans were found to use illegal drag to enhance the results. Look at sisters Williams.

I despise corrupt Russian bureaucrats, but no less I despite Western Pro-American lackeys with faces spred with n shit to shuch an exptent that they neve can wash themselves clean!

[Jan 04, 2020] The role of Germany in the Ukrainian disaster

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... I have the feeling , just the suspicion , that they contributed to the Ukrainian disaster out of their genetic Drang nach Osten Nordic greed , is that right ? ..."
"... Anyway since the Ukrainian disaster the cohesion of the EU is going going down . Germany which was gifted with the German reunification , is less and less trusted specially in south Europe , and even less in the EU far west , in England which is going out of the EU . ..."
"... As a curiosity in 1945 the Zionists asked Stalin to give Crimea to the jews , Stalin refused . https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/164673/crimea-as-jewish-homeland ..."
"... is 2019 and life in Ukraine is barely better than it was 25-50 years ago, population has actually dropped from its peak in early 1990's. Millions of Ukrainians live abroad (I know some of them) and have – to be polite – at best an ambivalent attitude towards their homeland. Almost all of them prefer to be somewhere else, even to become someone else. ..."
"... I don't agree with the facile name-calling that sees Nazis everywhere and exaggerates throw-away symbolism. But Ukraine has not been functioning and it can't go like this much longer. Not because it will collapse, it won't, but because during an era of general prosperity Ukraine can't be a unstable exception (oh, I get it, they are better than Moldova, good for them.) ..."
"... Rebellions against geography are doomed. Projecting one's personal frustrations on external enemies (Kremlin!) has never worked. Ukraine needs rationality – accepting that they will not be in EU, that attempting to join Nato would destroy Ukraine, and that they can't beat Russia in a war. And following advise of half-mad and half-ignorant well-wishers from Washington or Brussels is a road to ruin. Nulands, Bidens and Tusks will never live in Ukraine, they really deeply don't care about it. They have no skin in that game, it is just entertainment for them. ..."
"... During WWII, Germany actually established settlements in Crimea. Think about it: there is a massive war, you have like 1-2 years, short on transport and resources, and you start sending settlers to Crimea – that's how much drang-nach-osten types wanted it. And the Turks, etc This must be driving them absolutely nuts. ..."
"... The mexicans say : when God created Mexico He gave Mexico everything ; land , mountains , plains , tropical forests , deserts , two oceans , agriculture , gold , silver , oil . then God saw how beautiful and perfect Mexico was and He though that He should also give something bad to the country to prevent the sin of pride , and then he populated Mexico with pure pendejos ,( idiots ) . ..."
"... If you want a decent analysis of current events in the Ukraine, which is what The Saker provides, I guess you'll just have to put up with his terminology. ..."
"... My experience is that Ukrainians individually are far from being pendejos . But they are unable to act as a group or as a nation. (Well, they 'act', but it mostly somehow fails.) ..."
"... Maybe it is the relative shallow and heterogenous history of Ukraine. Or – and this is what I have observed – a fundamental inner disloyalty to the Ukraine as a homeland. When one observes the assorted Porkys, Timoshenkas, Yanuks, the oligarchs, but also the crowds on Maidan, I get a sense that they are all about to leave Ukraine or are thinking about leaving. Societies can't be built with one foot always at the airport, or in an old car in a 5-km column waiting on the border of Poland. Or Russia. ..."
Nov 21, 2019 | www.unz.com

Carlton Meyer says: Website November 17, 2019 at 6:31 am GMT How 98% of Americans feel about the Ukraine BS:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/Evj_qduJY7U?feature=oembed Read More

Antares , says: November 17, 2019 at 9:42 am GMT

@Alfred I had the same thoughts. Zelenskii should show a similar coffin with the text "This one is still empty" and then start rounding up the terrorists. He finally has a good excuse.
Anon [424] Disclaimer , says: November 17, 2019 at 9:58 am GMT
Thank you Saker and Unz for the very interesting article .

I wonder what has been the role of Germany in the Ukrainian disaster . ...I have the feeling , just the suspicion , that they contributed to the Ukrainian disaster out of their genetic Drang nach Osten Nordic greed , is that right ?

Anyway since the Ukrainian disaster the cohesion of the EU is going going down . Germany which was gifted with the German reunification , is less and less trusted specially in south Europe , and even less in the EU far west , in England which is going out of the EU .

Most of the people in the EU would like to keep collaborating with the US , of course , but also with Russia and with the rest of the world . Most of the people in the UE are scared of the dark forces operating in Ukraine trying to provoke a war with Russia .

As a curiosity in 1945 the Zionists asked Stalin to give Crimea to the jews , Stalin refused .
https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/164673/crimea-as-jewish-homeland

awry , says: November 17, 2019 at 10:41 am GMT
The stupid name-calling like the term "ukronazi" makes this article look like a rant like North Korean communiques or the ravings of some Arab despot's propagandist. It is not better than calling "The Saker" a "Moskal", "Sovok" or "Putler's stooge" etc. He should keep this lingo to directly "debating" "Ukronazis" on twitter or youtube commentst etc. not for an article that is supposed to be a serious analysis.

I understand that it is hard for a Russian nationalist to accept that the majority of Ukrainians don't want to belong to their dream Russkiy Mir, they were seduced by the West, which is more attractive with all its failings, because mostly of simple materialistic reasons.

Ukrainians happily go to EU countries that now allow them in as guest workers. The fact, like it or not that majority of them chose the West over Russkiy Mir despite being very close to Russians in culture, language, history etc. He is still in the first stage of grief it seems.

Beckow , says: November 17, 2019 at 12:38 pm GMT
@Mr. Hack Touching. (Really, no sarcasm implied.)

All in all, Ukrainians are probably way above average in most human characteristics. The area of Ukraine is by planetary standards one of the best available: arable land, great rivers, Black see, pleasant and liveable.

But it is 2019 and life in Ukraine is barely better than it was 25-50 years ago, population has actually dropped from its peak in early 1990's. Millions of Ukrainians live abroad (I know some of them) and have – to be polite – at best an ambivalent attitude towards their homeland. Almost all of them prefer to be somewhere else, even to become someone else.

Now why is that? A normal society would have enough introspection to discuss this, to look for answers. Throwing a temper-tantrum on a big square in Kiev every few years is not looking for a solution. That is escapism, Orange-this, Maidan-that, 'Russians bad', 'we are going West', 'golden toilets', and always 'Stalin did it'.

I don't agree with the facile name-calling that sees Nazis everywhere and exaggerates throw-away symbolism. But Ukraine has not been functioning and it can't go like this much longer. Not because it will collapse, it won't, but because during an era of general prosperity Ukraine can't be a unstable exception (oh, I get it, they are better than Moldova, good for them.)

Rebellions against geography are doomed. Projecting one's personal frustrations on external enemies (Kremlin!) has never worked. Ukraine needs rationality – accepting that they will not be in EU, that attempting to join Nato would destroy Ukraine, and that they can't beat Russia in a war. And following advise of half-mad and half-ignorant well-wishers from Washington or Brussels is a road to ruin. Nulands, Bidens and Tusks will never live in Ukraine, they really deeply don't care about it. They have no skin in that game, it is just entertainment for them.

Or alternatively you can pray that Russia collapses – good luck waiting for that.

Beckow , says: November 17, 2019 at 12:47 pm GMT
@Anon

.genetic drang nach osten nordic greed

There is not much 'drang' left in Germany, so I think this is mostly fingers on the map post dinner empty talk.

in 1945 the jewery asked Stalin to give Crimea to the jews , Stalin refused

Crimea is a jewel, but has one big problem: not enough water. But that's also true about Israel, maybe there is a deep genetic memory of coming out of a desert environment.

During WWII, Germany actually established settlements in Crimea. Think about it: there is a massive war, you have like 1-2 years, short on transport and resources, and you start sending settlers to Crimea – that's how much drang-nach-osten types wanted it. And the Turks, etc This must be driving them absolutely nuts.

Anon [424] Disclaimer , says: November 17, 2019 at 1:34 pm GMT
The mexicans are able to make fun of themselves , that`s a good thing . They have a joke which aplies also to Ukraina ( and other countries )

The mexicans say : when God created Mexico He gave Mexico everything ; land , mountains , plains , tropical forests , deserts , two oceans , agriculture , gold , silver , oil . then God saw how beautiful and perfect Mexico was and He though that He should also give something bad to the country to prevent the sin of pride , and then he populated Mexico with pure pendejos ,( idiots ) .

The same aplies to Ukraina . pure pendejos .

Skeptikal , says: November 17, 2019 at 1:49 pm GMT
@AWM "Is it not possible to have an article on Ukraine without all the N@ZI references?

If you want a decent analysis of current events in the Ukraine, which is what The Saker provides, I guess you'll just have to put up with his terminology.

The world won't miss a thing if Curmudgeon or AWM goes off in a huff, to sit on his toilet and read the "one joke per dump" volume lodged on the tank and stops reading The Saker's very thorough analysis as a protest action!

Beckow , says: November 17, 2019 at 1:55 pm GMT
@Anon My experience is that Ukrainians individually are far from being pendejos . But they are unable to act as a group or as a nation. (Well, they 'act', but it mostly somehow fails.)

Maybe it is the relative shallow and heterogenous history of Ukraine. Or – and this is what I have observed – a fundamental inner disloyalty to the Ukraine as a homeland. When one observes the assorted Porkys, Timoshenkas, Yanuks, the oligarchs, but also the crowds on Maidan, I get a sense that they are all about to leave Ukraine or are thinking about leaving. Societies can't be built with one foot always at the airport, or in an old car in a 5-km column waiting on the border of Poland. Or Russia.

GMC , says: November 17, 2019 at 1:56 pm GMT
Another good article – thanks – Yep, the US/EU NWO is not going to let their "West Ukraine Isis" battalions and intel gang lose their funding , arms trafficking ops, or terrorist reputation. This is a no win situation in Ukraine and the West knows it – Even if NovoRossiya gets some independence, the Ukraine Isis will/can reek havoc and murder for a long time along the border. The modern Cheka { Ukraine Isis } has been modified for the security of the new Farmland owners – Monsanto, Cargill, DuPont and the rest of the Globalist Corporations and their ports close to Odessa.
Hapalong Cassidy , says: November 17, 2019 at 2:01 pm GMT
One point of contention since it wasn't made clear in this article – Novorussia consists of Luhansk and Donetsk, but not Kharkov. While Kharkov has more Russians than most other provinces of Ukraine do, it does not have a plurality like Donetsk and Luhansk.
Epigon , says: November 17, 2019 at 2:06 pm GMT
@Mr. Hack

All of Ukraine's doomsayers have been crying about Ukraine's demise for the lat 25 years, yet the fact is that it' s getting stronger and stronger every year,

USA diaspora keeps on delivering.

Shoutout to quarter/half Poles USA citizens LARPing as Ukrainian patriots in the comments.

[Jan 04, 2020] American Meddling in the Ukraine by Publius Tacitus

Highly recommended!
Ukraine is now a pawn in a big geopolitical game against Russia. Which somehow survived 90th when everybody including myself has written it off.
That's why the USA, EU (Germany) and Russia pulling the country in different directions. But the victory of Ukrainian nationalists is not surprising and is not solely based on the US interferences (although the USA did lot in this direction) pursuit its geopolitical game against Russia. Distancing themselves from Russa is a universal trend in Post-Soviet space. And it often takes ugly forms.
So Ukraine in not an exception here. It is part of the "rule". Essentially the dissolution of the USSR revised the result on WWII. And while the author correctly calls Ukrainian leader US stooges, they moved in this direction because they feel that it is necessary for maintaining the independence. In other words anti-Russian stance is considered by the Ukrainian elite as a a pre-condition for mainlining independence. Otherwise people like Parubiy would be in jail very soon. They are tolerated and even promoted because they are useful.
It repeats the story of Baltic Republics, albeit with a significant time delay. There should be some social group that secure independence of the country and Ukrainian nationalists happen to be such a group. That's why Yanukovich supported them and Svoboda party (with predictable results).
Notable quotes:
"... The ideological fissures that are growing in the United States are beginning to resemble the warring camps that characterize the Ukrainian political world. The divide in Ukraine pits groups who are described as "right wing" and many are ideological descendants of real Nazis and Nazi sympathizers against groups with a strong affinity to Russia. This kind of gap cannot be bridged through conventional negotiations. ..."
"... Jump ahead now to the April 2014 "uprising" of anti-Russian forces in the Ukraine (Maidan 2). The US was firmly on the side of the protesters, who ultimately succeeded in ousting the elected President. And who were helping lead this effort? ..."
"... The US support, both overt and covert, for Ukrainian politicians is grounded in an anti-Soviet (now anti-Russian) ideology. We have convinced ourselves that Russia is hell bent on world domination. Therefore we must do whatever is necessary to stop Russia, which includes uncritical, blind support for elements in Ukraine that also detest the Russians. But in doing so we have closed our eyes to the filthy underbelly of the virulent anti-Semitism that lurks in western Ukraine. ..."
"... US meddling in the Ukraine is astonishing in its breadth. It ranges from the fact that the wife of former President Viktor Yuschenko was an American citizen and former senior official in the US State Department. Do you think there would be no complaints if Melania Trump was born in Russia and had served in the Russian Foreign Ministry? Yet, most Americans are happily ignorant of such facts. ..."
"... US interference was not confined to serendipitous relationships, such as the Yushchenko marriage. It also included the open and active funding of certain political groups and media outlets. The US State Department sent money through a variety of outlets. One of these was the Consortium for Elections and Political Process Strengthening aka CEPPS. ..."
"... This is : ..."
"... Count me as one of the people who is outraged by the hypocrisy and stupidity now on display in the United States. I am not talking about Trump. I am referring to the Republicans and Democrats and pundits and media mouthpieces who are fuming about Russian citizens writing on Facebook as one of the worst catastrophes since Pearl Harbor or 9-11. ..."
"... There clearly is meddling going on in America's political landscape. But it isn't the Russian Government. No. There are foreign and domestic forces aligned who are keen on portraying Russia as a threat to world order that must be opposed by more defense spending and tougher sanctions. That is the propaganda that dominates the media in the United States these days. And that is truly dangerous to our nation's safety and freedom. ..."
"... A CIA guy recently said the US only interferes to 'promote democracy' - tell that to Australia, Vietnam, Mexico, Chile, Congo, Russia, Ukraine...it's a long long list. ..."
"... An independent Ukraine was also a project of German foreign policy after the Brest-Litowsk Treaty (the equivalent of the Versailles Treaty, only aimed at Russia) SO I have o wonder how much of the enthusiasm for Vicky Nuland's Israel friendly Nazi state-let (oh what irony!) is a product of Germany wanting to reassert itself in the east, using NATO solidarity as a fig leaf. Maybe they will make Ukraine import a lot o Africans "refugees" so that Soros' project of creating a brown Europe will be advanced in the Slavic sphere as well as the west. ..."
"... The liberal party - who provides the prime-minister - EU leader Hans van Baalen and Belgian ex-prime minister Guy Verhostad held a controversial speech on the Maidan square in support of the protesters that the EU will support them. ..."
"... I wouldn't put to much stress on Bandera having been a bad guy. His enemies were no better. They just won the war and the victors write history. The deeper problem of Ukraine is the fact that in the East of the country (and maybe even the majority of the country) Bandera is indeed regarded as a villain. But in the West he is a hero to this day. Even in Soviet times people from Western Ukraine were regarded as "fascists" by much of the rest of the country. No wonder as there were anti soviet partisans until late in the fifties. ..."
"... "Prorussian" Kutshma turned into a Ukrainian "patriot" (such is the logic of statehood) and the same thing happened with Yanukovich. People forget that he would have signed an association agreement with Europe had Europe not refused because he was insufficiently "democratic". ..."
"... But the West wanted it all. They wanted Ukraine firmly in the "Western" camp. Thereby they ripped the country apart. As a good friend of mine who has studied in Kiev in Soviet times remarked: to ask Ukraine to choose between East and West is like asking a child in divorce proceedings who it liked more: daddy or mummy? ..."
"... A very interesting conversation between Victoria Nulland and ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt, caught at picking the future rulers of liberated Ukraine : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QxZ8t3V_bk This is not meddling. This is a defensive (preemptive?) action against Russian agression. ..."
"... I've never seen such an intense barrage of propaganda before in my life. America is fracturing apart like Ukraine. This is no coincidence. In both countries, oligarchs have seized power, the rule of law abandoned and there is a rush of corruption. ..."
"... What we did to Ukraine is shameful in every way. A remember a video of a pallet of money being unloaded from a USG place at Kiev during Maidan 2. That's in addition to Nuland's bag of cookies. I always thought that one of the objectives of our meddling in Ukraine was to make Sevastopol into a NATO naval base. ..."
"... Our leaders are the biggest hypocrites on the planet. The Ukraine was almost evenly divided between pro-Western and pro-Russian sides. Our government, rather than waiting for an election, assisted an armed rebellion against the elected pro-Russian government. Among the groups our government allied with in this endeavor were out and out Nazis. ..."
Feb 23, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

The ideological fissures that are growing in the United States are beginning to resemble the warring camps that characterize the Ukrainian political world. The divide in Ukraine pits groups who are described as "right wing" and many are ideological descendants of real Nazis and Nazi sympathizers against groups with a strong affinity to Russia. This kind of gap cannot be bridged through conventional negotiations.

Who is the United States government and media supporting? The Nazis . You think I'm joking. Here are the facts, but we must go back to World War II :

When World War II began a large part of western Ukraine welcomed the German soldiers as liberators from the recently enforced Soviet rule and openly collaborated with the Germans. The Soviet leader, Stalin, imposed policies that caused the deaths of almost 7 million Ukrainians in the 1930s--an era known as the Holomodor).

Ukrainian divisions, regiments and battalions were formed, such as SS Galizien, Nachtigal and Roland, and served under German leadership. In the first few weeks of the war, more than 80 thousand people from the Galizien region volunteered for the SS Galizien, which later known for its extreme cruelty towards Polish, Jewish and Russian people on the territory of Ukraine.

Members of these military groups came mostly from the organization of Ukrainian nationalists aka the OUN, which was founded in 1929. It's leader was Stepan Bandera, known then and today for his extreme anti-semitic and anti-communist views.

CIA documents just recently declassified show strong ties between US intelligence and Ukrainian nationalists since 1946.

Jump ahead now to the April 2014 "uprising" of anti-Russian forces in the Ukraine (Maidan 2). The US was firmly on the side of the protesters, who ultimately succeeded in ousting the elected President. And who were helping lead this effort?

Secretary of the Ukrainian National Security and Defence Council is Andriy Parubiy. Parubiy was the founder of the Social National Party of Ukraine, a fascist party styled on Hitler's Nazis, with membership restricted to ethnic Ukrainians.

The Social National Party would go on to become Svoboda, the far-right nationalist party whose leader, Oleh Tyahnybok was one of the three most high profile leaders of the Euromaidan protests. . . .

Overseeing the armed forces alongside Parubiy as the Deputy Secretary of National Security is Dmytro Yarosh , the leader of the Right Sector – a group of hardline nationalist streetfighters, who previously boasted they were ready for armed struggle to free Ukraine.

The US support, both overt and covert, for Ukrainian politicians is grounded in an anti-Soviet (now anti-Russian) ideology. We have convinced ourselves that Russia is hell bent on world domination. Therefore we must do whatever is necessary to stop Russia, which includes uncritical, blind support for elements in Ukraine that also detest the Russians. But in doing so we have closed our eyes to the filthy underbelly of the virulent anti-Semitism that lurks in western Ukraine.

US meddling in the Ukraine is astonishing in its breadth. It ranges from the fact that the wife of former President Viktor Yuschenko was an American citizen and former senior official in the US State Department. Do you think there would be no complaints if Melania Trump was born in Russia and had served in the Russian Foreign Ministry? Yet, most Americans are happily ignorant of such facts.

But Viktor Yushchenko is not an American who speaks a foreign language. He is very much a Ukrainian nationalist and steeped in the anti-Semitism that dominates the ideology of western Ukraine. During the final months of his Presidency, Yushchenko made the following declaration:

In conclusion I would like to say something that is long awaited by the Ukrainian patriots for many years I have signed a decree for the unbroken spirit and standing for the idea of fighting for independent Ukraine. I declare Stepan Bandera a national hero of Ukraine.

Without hesitation or shame, Yushchenko endorsed the legacy of Bandera, who had happily aligned with the Nazis in pursuit of his own nationalist goals. Those goals, however, did not include Jews. And here is the ultimate irony--Bandera was born in Austria, not the Ukraine. So much for ideological consistency.

US interference was not confined to serendipitous relationships, such as the Yushchenko marriage. It also included the open and active funding of certain political groups and media outlets. The US State Department sent money through a variety of outlets. One of these was the Consortium for Elections and Political Process Strengthening aka CEPPS.

This is : a USAID program with other National Endowment for Democracy-affiliated groups: the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, the International Republican Institute and the International Foundation for Electoral Systems. In 2010, the reported disbursement for CEPPS in Ukraine was nearly $5 million.

The program's efforts are described on the USAID website as providing "training for political party activists and locally elected officials to improve communication with civic groups and citizens, and the development of NGO-led advocacy campaigns on electoral and political process issues."

Anyone prepared to argue that it would be okay for Russia, through its Foreign Ministry, to contribute several million dollars for training party activists in the United States?

What we do not know is how much money was being spent on covert activities directed and managed by the CIA. During the political upheaval in April 2014 (Maidan 2), there was this news item:

Over the weekend, CIA director John Brennan travelled to Kiev, nobody knows exactly why, but some speculate that he intends to open US intelligence resources to Ukrainian leaders about real-time Russian military maneuvers. The US has, thus far, refrained from sharing such knowledge because Moscow is believed to have penetrated much of Ukraine's communications systems – and Washington isn't about to hand over its surveillance secrets to the Russians.

Do you think Americans would be outraged if the head of Russia's version of the CIA, the SVR or FSB, traveled quietly to the United States to meet with Donald Trump prior to his election? I think that would qualify as meddling.

Count me as one of the people who is outraged by the hypocrisy and stupidity now on display in the United States. I am not talking about Trump. I am referring to the Republicans and Democrats and pundits and media mouthpieces who are fuming about Russian citizens writing on Facebook as one of the worst catastrophes since Pearl Harbor or 9-11.

There clearly is meddling going on in America's political landscape. But it isn't the Russian Government. No. There are foreign and domestic forces aligned who are keen on portraying Russia as a threat to world order that must be opposed by more defense spending and tougher sanctions. That is the propaganda that dominates the media in the United States these days. And that is truly dangerous to our nation's safety and freedom.

Posted at 01:24 PM in Publius Tacitus , Russiagate | Permalink

james , 23 February 2018 at 02:11 PM

Good post pt.. thanks... i never knew ''the wife of former President Viktor Yushchenko was an American citizen and former senior official in the US State Department.'' That is informative.. i recall following this closely back in 2014.. the hypocrisy on display in the usa at present is truly amazing and frightening at the same time.. it appears that the public can be cowed very easily..
Generalfeldmarschall von Hindenburg , 23 February 2018 at 02:29 PM
good points well made.

On the twitters, you would be accused of "whatabouttism" - which is the crime of excusing Putin's diabolism by pointing out American interference with the internal politics an elections of other nations. A CIA guy recently said the US only interferes to 'promote democracy' - tell that to Australia, Vietnam, Mexico, Chile, Congo, Russia, Ukraine...it's a long long list.

An independent Ukraine was also a project of German foreign policy after the Brest-Litowsk Treaty (the equivalent of the Versailles Treaty, only aimed at Russia) SO I have o wonder how much of the enthusiasm for Vicky Nuland's Israel friendly Nazi state-let (oh what irony!) is a product of Germany wanting to reassert itself in the east, using NATO solidarity as a fig leaf. Maybe they will make Ukraine import a lot o Africans "refugees" so that Soros' project of creating a brown Europe will be advanced in the Slavic sphere as well as the west.

Adrestia , 23 February 2018 at 02:39 PM
It's not only the US. The EU borg are also meddling. In my country we had a referendum about Ukraine. The population voted "Against" on the question: "Are you for or against the Approval Act of the Association Agreement between the European Union and Ukraine?"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_Ukraine%E2%80%93European_Union_Association_Agreement_referendum,_2016

This was the only referendum that was done since it was implemented in 2015. A second one is being organized on the Intelligence and Security Services which has controversial parts with regard to access to internet traffic.

This referendum will take place on March 21, 2018 and will probably be voted against because of the controversial elements (in part because there is still living memory of our Eastern neighbors in the second world war)

https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet_op_de_inlichtingen-_en_veiligheidsdiensten_2017

These 2 will probably be the last. Our house of representatives have voted yesterday to end the referendum law (with a majority vote of 76 out of 150 representatives!)

So much for democracy. The reason stated that the referendum was controversial (probably because they voted against the EU borg). Interesting is that the proposal was done by the party that wanted the referendum as a principal point. This will almost certainly ensure that the little respect left for traditional parties is gone and they will not be able to get a majority next elections.

The liberal party - who provides the prime-minister - EU leader Hans van Baalen and Belgian ex-prime minister Guy Verhostad held a controversial speech on the Maidan square in support of the protesters that the EU will support them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIL1FWCIlu8

Tom , 23 February 2018 at 03:22 PM

I wouldn't put to much stress on Bandera having been a bad guy. His enemies were no better. They just won the war and the victors write history. The deeper problem of Ukraine is the fact that in the East of the country (and maybe even the majority of the country) Bandera is indeed regarded as a villain. But in the West he is a hero to this day. Even in Soviet times people from Western Ukraine were regarded as "fascists" by much of the rest of the country. No wonder as there were anti soviet partisans until late in the fifties.

Even in the nineties anybody who travelled in Ukraine could feel the tension between East and West. The Russians were certainly aware of it and mindful not to rip the country apart they cut the Ukrainians an enormous amount of slack. Of course they supported "their" candidates and shoveled money into their insatiable throats. Only to be disappointed time and again. "Prorussian" Kutshma turned into a Ukrainian "patriot" (such is the logic of statehood) and the same thing happened with Yanukovich. People forget that he would have signed an association agreement with Europe had Europe not refused because he was insufficiently "democratic". Really the West should have been content with things as they were.

But the West wanted it all. They wanted Ukraine firmly in the "Western" camp. Thereby they ripped the country apart. As a good friend of mine who has studied in Kiev in Soviet times remarked: to ask Ukraine to choose between East and West is like asking a child in divorce proceedings who it liked more: daddy or mummy?

Really the West (not only the US -the Eu is also guilty) is to blame. It is long past time to get down from the high horse and stop spreading chaos and mayhem in the name of democracy,

Jony Kanuck , 23 February 2018 at 03:27 PM
Publius,

An informative column. The coup & later developments soured me on the MSMedia. I'm an initiate into modern Russian history: NATO in the Ukraine = WW3!

Some additional history:

A Ukrainian nation did not exist until after WW1; one piece was Russian, another Polish and another Austrian. The Holodomor is exaggerated for political purposes; the actual number dead from famine appears to be 'only' 2M. It wasn't Soviet bloody mindedness, it was Soviet agricultural mismanagement; collectivizing agriculture drops production.

They did this right before the great drought of the 1930s - remember the dustbowl. There was a famine in Kazakestan at the same time; 1.5M died.

The Nazis raised 5 SS divisions out of the Ukraine. As the Germans were pushed back they ran night drops of ordnance into the Ukraine as long as they could. The Soviets had to carry on divisional level counter insurgency until 1956. After the war, Gehlen, Nazi intelligence czar, kept himself out of jail by turning over his files, routes & agents to the US. He also stoked anti Soviet paranoia.

The Brits ended up with a whole Ukr SS division that they didn't want, so they gave it to Canada. Which is why Canada has such cranky policy around the Ukraine!

bluetonga , 23 February 2018 at 03:28 PM
A very interesting conversation between Victoria Nulland and ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt, caught at picking the future rulers of liberated Ukraine : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QxZ8t3V_bk This is not meddling. This is a defensive (preemptive?) action against Russian agression.
Publius Tacitus -> Tom... , 23 February 2018 at 03:31 PM
Tom,

I'm sure you'd like us to ignore Bandera. I bet he liked children and dogs. Just like Hitler. Bandera was a genuine bad guy. There is no rehabilitating that scourge on society. Nice try though.

Publius Tacitus -> bluetonga... , 23 February 2018 at 03:36 PM
I am giving you the benefit of the doubt that your final comment is sarcasm. When you have two senior US Government officials who will and will not constitute a foreign government, you have gone beyond meddling. It is worse.
VietnamVet , 23 February 2018 at 03:57 PM
PT

The media is hysterical. Today, Putin's Facebook Bot Collaborator contacted the Kremlin before his mercenaries attacked Americans in Syria.

I've never seen such an intense barrage of propaganda before in my life. America is fracturing apart like Ukraine. This is no coincidence. In both countries, oligarchs have seized power, the rule of law abandoned and there is a rush of corruption.

A World War is near. The realists are gone. The Moguls are pushing Donald Trump pull the trigger. Either in Syria with an assault to destroy Hezbollah (Iran) for good or American trainers going over the top of trenches in Donbass in a centennial attack of the dead.

The Twisted Genius , 23 February 2018 at 03:59 PM
Publius Tacitus,

Hallelujah and jubilation! We're in full agreement on this subject. What we did to Ukraine is shameful in every way. A remember a video of a pallet of money being unloaded from a USG place at Kiev during Maidan 2. That's in addition to Nuland's bag of cookies. I always thought that one of the objectives of our meddling in Ukraine was to make Sevastopol into a NATO naval base.

I would definitely want to see a full account of what support we provided to the nazi thugs of Svoboda and Pravy Sektor. We have a long history of meddling, at least twice as long as the Soviet Union/Russia. But that does not mean we should stop investigating the Russian interference in our 2016 election. Just stop hyperventilating over it. It no more deserves risking a war than our continuing mutual espionage.

TimmyB , 23 February 2018 at 04:08 PM
Our leaders are the biggest hypocrites on the planet. The Ukraine was almost evenly divided between pro-Western and pro-Russian sides. Our government, rather than waiting for an election, assisted an armed rebellion against the elected pro-Russian government. Among the groups our government allied with in this endeavor were out and out Nazis.

As a result of this rebellion, the Russian majority in Crimea overwhelming voted to leave the Ukraine and rejoin Russia, which they had been part of for over 150-years. While our government continues to provide military aid to Israel, which used force of arms take over the West Bank, it imposed sanctions against Russia when the people of Crimea voted to join their former countrymen. Mind boggling.

[Jan 04, 2020] Good point Afghanistan. The newly appointed General Ghaani was active in Afghanistan. As he is famimiar with the place, that may well be where he decides to retaliate.

Jan 04, 2020 | thesaker.is

Serbian girl on January 03, 2020 , · at 5:00 pm EST/EDT

Good point Afghanistan. The newly appointed General Ghaani was active in Afghanistan. As he is famimiar with the place, that may well be where he decides to retaliate.

In case the link does not work, Elijah magnier's and Roberto Neccia's tweet.
https://mobile.twitter.com/neccia1/status/1213045008204533760

Str8arrow62 on January 03, 2020 , · at 5:18 pm EST/EDT
The introduction of manpads would be no less significant an impact on the occupying force as it was when the Soviet's were there when the SEE EYE AYE showered the Afghani's with Stingers. It completely changed the modus of the Soviet army once they were introduced. Helicopters became dangerous to be in and could no longer fly near the ground. Good observations though, the assassination of Assad could prove to be magnitudes greater a spark than any of us could imagine. I hope for the sake of, among the many, the Christians he's been protecting from the foreign merc's. that he stays safe. He must keep a low profile and let's hope the S400's will take care of any Predator drones that try to fly the Damascus airspace. ­
C. Khosta y Alzamendi on January 03, 2020 , · at 6:43 pm EST/EDT
It seems US (or perhaps Israel) didn't give you time enough to think about what could be the next move (breaking news from Sputinik, 23:30 GMT): vehicle convoy carrying Iraqi PMF leaders hit by airstrike, 6 dead at least.

https://sputniknews.com/middleeast/202001041077936776-two-car-convoy-north-of-baghdad-under-aerial-attack -- reports/

Chad on January 03, 2020 , · at 3:34 pm EST/EDT
Thanks for posting this. I wonder if Soleimani consciously ( on many human and beyond human levels) wanted to offer the Yanks a "target" (a type of sacrifice, namely himself) that was just too big to ignore, knowing that the stupid enemy would take the bait, and having a secure knowledge that his death would set in motion a chain of events that will (underline will) result in the final terrible fall of the US, and Israel. Stupid American "leaders", right now, they are dancing in idiotic joy, saying foolish words for which we will pay, also knowing what the future holds: the death of countless people, throughout not only the Middle East, but here in the US as well. Yes, I do hate them for what they have unleashed.

Rest In Peace, Soleimani. You very well may achieve far more in death that you attained in your eventful life.

What do we know about Esmail Ghaani?

[Jan 04, 2020] Clapper's Credibility by Ray McGovern

Notable quotes:
"... What Clapper chokes on -- and avoids saying -- is that U.S. intelligence had no evidence of WMD either. Indeed, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had put him in charge of the agency responsible for analyzing imagery of all kinds -- photographic, radar, infrared, and multispectral -- precisely so that the absence of evidence from our multi-billion-dollar intelligence collection satellites could be hidden, in order not to impede the planned attack on Iraq. That's why, as Clapper now admits, he had to find "what wasn't really there." ..."
Jan 04, 2020 | consortiumnews.com

Former DNI James Clapper had his own words read back to him by Ray McGovern, exposing his role in justifying the Iraq invasion based on fraudulent intelligence.

... ... ...

Clapper was appointed Director of National Intelligence by President Barack Obama in June 2010, almost certainly at the prompting of Obama's intelligence confidant and Clapper friend John Brennan, later director of the CIA. Despite Clapper's performance on Iraq, he was confirmed unanimously by the Senate. Obama even allowed Clapper to keep his job for three and a half more years after he admitted that he had lied under oath to that same Senate about the extent of eavesdropping on Americans by the National Security Agency (NSA). He is now a security analyst for CNN.

In his book, Clapper finally places the blame for the consequential fraud (he calls it "the failure") to find the (non-existent) WMD "where it belongs -- squarely on the shoulders of the administration members who were pushing a narrative of a rogue WMD program in Iraq and on the intelligence officers, including me, who were so eager to help that we found what wasn't really there." ( emphasis added ) .

So at the event on Tuesday I stood up and asked him about that. It was easy, given the background Clapper himself provides in his book, such as:

"The White House aimed to justify why an invasion of and regime change in Iraq were necessary, with a public narrative that condemned its continued development of weapons of mass destruction [and] its support to al-Qaida (for which the Intelligence Community had no evidence)."

What Clapper chokes on -- and avoids saying -- is that U.S. intelligence had no evidence of WMD either. Indeed, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had put him in charge of the agency responsible for analyzing imagery of all kinds -- photographic, radar, infrared, and multispectral -- precisely so that the absence of evidence from our multi-billion-dollar intelligence collection satellites could be hidden, in order not to impede the planned attack on Iraq. That's why, as Clapper now admits, he had to find "what wasn't really there."

Members of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) who have employed Clapper under contract, or otherwise known his work, caution that he is not the sharpest knife in the drawer. So, to be fair, there is an outside chance that Rumsfeld persuaded him to be guided by the (in)famous Rumsfeld dictum: "The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence."

But the consequences are the same: a war of aggression with millions dead and wounded; continuing bedlam in the area; and no one -- high or low -- held accountable. Hold your breath and add Joe Biden awarding the "Liberty Medal" to George W. Bush on Veteran's Day.

' Shocked'

Protection Racquet , November 17, 2018 at 02:46

When did this perjurer before Congress have any credibility? The guys a professional liar.

Mild -ly Facetious , November 18, 2018 at 17:27

The guy is a professional liar,and

a member of The Establishment

"The Anglo-American Establishment"

Copyright 1981/ Books in Focus, Inc,

Vallejo D , November 19, 2018 at 21:15

No shit. I saw the video of Clapper perjuring himself to the US Congress on national television, bald-face lying about the NSA clocking our emails.

I wouldn't believe Clapper if he the sky is blue and grass is green. EPIC liar.

PS: Erstwhile national security state "friend" actually had the nerve to claim that "Clapper lied to protect you." As if. My bet is that ONLY people on the planet who didn't know about the NSA's grotesque criminal were the American taxpayers.

Mild -ly Facetious , November 20, 2018 at 12:38

RECALL THIS EXTRAORDINARY STATEMENT -- from the GW Bush administration

There was, however, one valuable insight. In a soon-to-be-infamous passage, the writer, Ron Suskind, recounted a conversation between himself and an unnamed senior adviser to the president:

The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernable reality."

I nodded and murmured something about Enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off.

"That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create reality. And while you are studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we'll act again creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

Anonymot , November 16, 2018 at 20:56

Mild -ly - Facetious , November 18, 2018 at 19:33

Anonymot , Yes!

Here Is A Sequence of books for those who reside in chosen darkness:

"The Lessons of History" by Will & Edith Durant – c. 1968

"The Anglo-American Establishment" by Carroll Quigley – c. 1981

"Understanding Special Operations" by David T. Ratcliffe – c. 1989 / 99

" The Secret War Against The Jews" by John Loftus and Mark Aarons c. 1994

Douglas Baker , November 16, 2018 at 19:42

Thanks Ray. The clap merry-go-round in Washington, D.C., with V.D. assaulting brain integrity has been long playing there with James Clapper another hand in, in favor of the continuation of those that direct the United States' war on world from Afghanistan to Syria, staying the course of firing up the world as though Northern California's Camp fire sooting up much of the state with air borne particulate matter and leaving death and destruction in its wake.

JRGJRG , November 16, 2018 at 19:29

All this is fine, except it dares not touch the still taboo subject among these "professionals" of how all of this started getting justified in the first place when America attacked itself on September 11, 2001 in New York City and Washington in the most sophisticated and flawed false flag attack in history, murdering thousands of its own citizens Operation Northwoods style, blaming it on 19 Saudi hijackers with box cutters, the most grandiose of all conspiracy theory, the official 911 story.
The incriminating evidence of what happened that day in 2001 is now absolutely overwhelming, but still too incredible and controversial for even these esteemed folks to come to grips with. If we're going to take a shower and clean all this excrement off ourselves, let's do it thoroughly.

JRGJRG , November 16, 2018 at 19:46

In fact, wait! Let's ask the really important question of Clapper.
What was he doing and where was he on 9/11, the "New Pearl Harbor," and what was his role in the coverup and transformation of the CIA in the ensuing years?
Why doesn't Ray ask him about that?

GKJames , November 16, 2018 at 06:46

(1) One needn't be a Clapper fan to say that he was merely a cog in a body politic that (a) lives and breathes using military force to "solve" geopolitical problems; and (b) has always been driven by the national myth of American exceptionalism and the American love of war. The only issue ever is the story Americans tell themselves as to why a particular assault on some benighted country that can't meaningfully shoot back is justified. But for that, there are countless clever people in the corridors of power and the Infotainment Complex always eager to spread mendacity for fun and profit. Sure, hang Clapper, but if justice is what you're after, you'd quickly run out of rope and wood.

(2) What doesn't compute: Clapper is quoted as saying that he and cohort "were so eager to help that [they] found what wasn't really there". That's followed by: "Rumsfeld put him in charge so that the absence of evidence could be hidden . Clapper now admits [that] he had to find 'what wasn't really there'". While Rumsfeld's intent was exactly that, i.e., to prevent a narrative that he and Cheney had contrived, that's not the same as Rumsfeld's explicitly instructing Clapper et al to do that. Further, it mischaracterizes Clapper's admission. He doesn't admit that "he had to find" what wasn't there (which would suggest prior intent). What he does admit is that the eagerness to please the chain of command resulted in "finding" what didn't exist. One is fraud, the other group-think; two very different propositions. The latter, of course, has been the hallmark of US foreign policy for decades, though the polite (but accurate) word for it is "consensus". Everybody's in on it: the public, Congress, the press, and even the judiciary. By and large, it's who Americans are.

(3) Does this really equate the WMD fiasco with the alleged "desperate [attempt] to blame Trump's victory on Russian interference"? Yes, Clapper was present in 2003 and 2016. But that's a thin reed. First, no reasonable person says that Russian interference was the only reason that Clinton lost. Second, to focus on what was said in January 2017 ignores the US government's notifying various state officials DURING THE CAMPAIGN in 2016, of Russian hacking attempts. If, as is commonly said, the Administration was convinced that Clinton would win, how could hacking alerts to the states have been part of an effort to explain away an election defeat that hadn't happened yet, and which wasn't ever expected to happen? And, third, as with WMDs, Clapper wasn't out there on his own. While there were, unsurprisingly, different views among intelligence officials as to the extent of the Russian role, there was broad agreement that there had been one. Once again, fraud vs. group-think.

Skip Scott , November 16, 2018 at 13:46

I think there is a big difference between "group think" and inventing and cherry picking intelligence to fit policy objectives. I believe there is ample evidence of fraud. The "dodgy dossier" and the yellow cake uranium that led to Plame being exposed as a CIA operative are two examples that come immediately to mind. "Sexed up" intelligence is beyond groupthink. It is the promoting of lies and the deliberate elimination of any counter narrative in order to justify an unjust war.

The same could be said of the "all 17 intelligence agencies" statement about RussiaGate that was completely debunked but remained the propaganda line. It was way more than "groupthink". It was a lie. It is part of "full spectrum dominance".

I do agree that "Clapper wasn't out there on his own". He is part of a team with an agenda, and in a just world they'd all be in prison.
It wasn't "mistaken" intelligence, or "groupthink". You are trying to put lipstick on a pig.

GKJames , November 17, 2018 at 07:21

Fraud is easy to allege, hard to prove. In the case of Iraq, it's important to accept that virtually everyone -- the Administration, the press, the public, security agencies in multiple countries, and even UN inspectors (before the inspections, obviously) -- ASSUMED that Saddam had WMDs. That assumption wasn't irrational; it was based on Saddam's prior behavior. No question, the Administration wanted to invade Iraq and the presumed-to-exist WMDs were the rationale. It was only when evidence appeared that the case for it wasn't rock-solid that Cheney et al went to work. (The open question is whether they began to have their own doubts or whether it never occurred to them, given their obsession.) But there is zero evidence that anyone was asked to conclude that Saddam had WMDs even though the Americans KNEW that there weren't any. That's where the group-think and weak-kneed obeisance to political brawlers like Cheney come in. All he had to do was bark, and everyone fell in line, not because they knew there were no WMDs, but because they weren't sure but the boss certainly was.

In that environment, what we saw from Clapper and his analysts wasn't fraud but weakness of character, not to mention poor-quality analysis. And maybe that gets to the bigger question to which there appears to be an allergy: Shouting Fraud! effectively shuts down the conversation. After all, once you've done that, there's not much else to say; these guys all lied and death and destruction followed. But what if the answer is just as likely that the national security state created by Truman has grown into something uncontrollable, beyond legitimate oversight by the people it's supposed to serve? What if the people in that business aren't all that clever, let alone principled? After all, the CIA is headed by a torture aficionada and we haven't heard peep from the employee base, let alone the Congress that confirmed her. That entire ecosystem has been permitted to flourish without adult supervision for decades. Whenever someone asks, "that's classified". What do you do when Americans as a whole are perfectly fine with that?

Sam F , November 18, 2018 at 08:17

But fraud from the top was shown very well by Bamford in his book Pretext For War. Where discredited evidence was retained by intel agencies, as in the Iraq War II case, traitors like the zionist Wolfowitz simply installed known zionist warmongers Perl, Feith, and Wurmser into "stovepipe" offices at CIA, DIA, NSA to send the known-bad "evidence" to Rumsfeld & Cheney.

Skip Scott , November 18, 2018 at 09:27

They seem to conveniently classify anything that could prove illegality such as fraud, or in the case of the JFK assassination, something much worse. They use tools such as redaction and classification not only to protect "national security", but to cover up their crimes.

"But what if the answer is just as likely that the national security state created by Truman has grown into something uncontrollable, beyond legitimate oversight by the people it's supposed to serve?"

I believe this is very much the case, but that doesn't preclude fraud as part of their toolkit. The people at the top of the illegalities are clever enough to use those less sharp (like Clapper) for their evil purposes, and if necessary, to play the fall guy. And although the Intelligence Agencies are supposed to serve "We the People", they are actually serving unfettered Global Capitalism and the .1% that are trying to rule the world. This has been the case from its onset.

Furthermore, I am an American, and I am definitely NOT FINE with the misuse of classification and redaction to cover up crimes. The way to fix the "entire ecosystem" is to start to demand it by prosecuting known liars like James Clapper, and to break up the MSM monopoly so people get REAL news again, and wake people up until they refuse to support the two party system.

GKJames , November 19, 2018 at 10:20

(1) Assuming you could find a DOJ willing to prosecute and a specific statute on which to bring charges, the chance of conviction is zero because the required fraudulent intent can't be proved beyond reasonable doubt. All the defendant would have to say is, We thought WMDs were there but it turned out we were wrong. Besides, the lawyers said it's all legal. And if you went after Clapper only, he'd argue (successfully) that it was a highly selective prosecution. (2) If you're going to create a whole new category of criminal liability for incompetence and/or toadyism and careerism, Langley corridors would quickly empty. It's certainly one way to reduce the federal workforce. (3) The intelligence agencies ARE serving "We the People". There isn't anything they do that doesn't have the blessing of duly elected representatives in Congress. (4) That you, yourself, are "NOT FINE" overlooks the reality that your perspective gets routinely outvoted, though not because of "evil" or "fraud". A Clapper behind bars would do zero to change that. Why? Because most Americans ARE fine with the status quo. That's not a function of news (fake or real); Americans are drowning in information. Like all good service providers, the media are giving their customers exactly what they want to hear.

Skip Scott , November 19, 2018 at 11:25

GK-

(1) It is you who is "assuming" that fraud could not be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. What if evidence was presented that showed that they didn't really think there were WMD's, but were consciously lying to justify an invasion. I agree that it would be nearly impossible to find a DOJ willing to prosecute within our corrupted government, but if we could get a 3rd party president to sign on to the ICC, we could ship a bunch of evil warmongers off to the Hague. (2) As already discussed, I don't buy the representation of their actions as mere "toadyism". (3) As shown by many studies, our duly elected representatives serve lobbyists and the .1%, not "We the People". Here's one from Princeton: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tu32CCA_Ig (4) From your earlier post: "What do you do when Americans as a whole are perfectly fine with that?" Since I am part of the "whole", your statement is obviously false. And Americans are drowning in MISinformation from our MSM, and that is a big part of the problem. And please provide evidence that most Americans are fine with the status quo. Stating that I get routinely outvoted when many Americans see their choice as between a lesser of two evils, and our MSM keeps exposure of third party viewpoints to a minimum, is an obvious obfuscation.

Sam F , November 16, 2018 at 21:01

I will second Skip on that.
The groupthink of careerists is not "who Americans are."
"Broad agreement" on an obvious fraud is a group lie.

Tom Hall , November 17, 2018 at 10:49

What Clapper did was fraud. What went on in his head was group-think. The two are by no means incompatible. The man admits to outright fabrication-
"my team also produced computer-generated images of trucks fitted out as 'mobile production facilities used to make biological agents.' Those images, possibly more than any other substantiation he presented, carried the day with the international community and Americans alike."
He knew exactly what he was doing.

wootendw , November 15, 2018 at 22:41

"Retired Air Force Lt. Gen. James Clapper, head of the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, said vehicle traffic photographed by U.S. spy satellites indicated that material and documents related to the arms programs were shipped to Syria "

Syria and Iraq became bitter enemies in 1982 when Syria backed Iran during the Iran-Iraq War. Syria even sent troops to fight AGAINST Saddam during the first Iraq War. Syria and Iraq did not restore diplomatic relations until after Saddam was captured. The idea that Saddam would send WMDs (if he had them) to Syria is ludicrous.

Zhu , November 15, 2018 at 20:54

Cheney wanted to steal the oil. Bush wanted to fulfill prophecy & make Jesus Rapture him away from his problems. Neither plan worked.

Zhu , November 15, 2018 at 20:50

Our big shots never suffer for their crimes against humanity. Occasionally a Lt. Calley will get a year in jail for a massacre, but that's it.

bostonblackie , November 16, 2018 at 13:54

Calley was placed under house arrest at Fort Benning, where he served three and a half years.

JRGJRG , November 16, 2018 at 19:16

That's like less than 2.5 days served per each defenseless My Lai villager slaughtered, massacred, in cold blood.
What kind of justice is that? Who gets away with murder that way?

Helen Marshall , November 15, 2018 at 17:41

While serving in an embassy in 2003, the junior officer in my office was chatting with the long-time local employee, after viewing the Powell Shuck and Jive. One said to the other, "the US calls North Korea part of the 'Axis of Evil' but doesn't attack it because there is clear evidence that it has WMD including nukes." And the other said "yes, and that's why the US is going to invade Iraq because we know they don't." QED

John Flanagan , November 16, 2018 at 22:25

Love this comment!

Taras 77 , November 15, 2018 at 16:36

Thanks, Ray, for an excellent article!

You are one of few who are calling out these treasonous bastards. I am still .waiting for at least some of them to do the perp walk, maybe in the presence of war widows, their children, and maimed war veterans.

Chris Fogarty , November 15, 2018 at 12:27

Clapper played the central role in deceiving America into abandoning the republic and becoming the genocidal empire now terrorizing Planet Earth. If it is too late; if the criminals have permanent control of our government, there won't be a cleansing Nuremberg Tribunal, and our once-great USA will continue along its course of death and destruction until it destroys itself.

Where are our patriots? If any exist, now is the time for a new Nuremberg.

Zhu , November 15, 2018 at 20:56

The genocidal empire goes back to 1950 the Korean War.

bostonblackie , November 16, 2018 at 13:58

How about 1945 and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

JRGJRG , November 16, 2018 at 19:08

Keep going. Further back than that.
How about the Spanish American War, justified by the false flag blowing up of the Maine in Havana Harbor, which led to the four-year genocidal war against Filipino rebels and the war against the Cubans?
How about the 19th Century genocide of Native Americans? What was that justified by, except for lust for conquest of territory and racism?
How about America's role with other western colonial powers in the 1900 Boxer Rebellion in China.
The list of American violations of international law is too long to restate here, in the hundreds.
The only way out of this moral dilemma is to turn a new page in history in a new administration, hold our war criminals in the dock, and make amends under international law, and keep them, somehow without sacrificing national jurisdiction or security. America has to be reformed as an honest broker of peace instead of the world's leading pariah terrorist state.

bostonblackie , November 17, 2018 at 16:29

How about slavery? America was founded on genocide and slavery!

Skip Scott , November 15, 2018 at 09:44

I think Ray is being a little overly optimistic about Clapper being travel restricted. Universal Jurisdiction is for the small fry. Even with Bush and Rumsfeld, their changing travel plans was probably more about possible "bad press" than actual prosecution. Maybe down the road, when the USA collapse is more obvious to our "vassals" and they start to go their own way, such a thing could happen. Even then, we've got tons of armaments, and a notoriously itchy trigger finger.

My hope is that the two party system collapses and a Green Party candidate gets elected president. He or she could then sign us on to the ICC, and let the prosecutions begin. I know it's delusional, but a guy's gotta dream.

Robert Emmett , November 15, 2018 at 08:52

It occurs to me that even given Cheney's infamous 1% doctrine, these no-goodniks couldn't even scratch together enough of a true story to pass that low bar. So they invented, to put it mildly, plausible scenarios, cranked-up the catapults of propaganda and flung them in our faces via the self-absorbed, self-induced, money grubbing fake patriots of mass media.

But, geez, Ray, it's not as if we didn't already know about fixing facts around the policy, resignations of career operatives because of politicizing intelligence, reports of Scott Ritter, plus the smarmy lying faces & voices of all the main actors in the Cheney-Rumsfeld generated mass hysteria. I doubt these types of reveals, though appreciatively confirming what we already know, will change very many minds now. After all, the most effective war this cabal has managed to wage has been against their own people.

Perhaps when these highfalutin traitors, treasonous to their oaths to protect the founding principles they swore to preserve, at last shuffle off their mortal coils, future generations will gain the necessary perspective to dismiss these infamous liars with the contempt they deserve. But that's just wishful thinking because by then the incidents that cranked-up this never-ending war likely will be the least of their worries.

In the meantime, the fact that this boiled egghead continues to spew his Claptrap on a major media channel tells you all you need to know about how deeply the poison of the Bush-Cheney era has seeped into the body politic and continues to eat away at what remains of the foundations while the military-media-government-corporate complex metastasizes.

Sam F , November 15, 2018 at 21:03

Ray knows that the well-informed know much of the story, and likely writes to bring us the Clapper memoir confession and summarize for the less informed.

JOHN CHUCKMAN , November 15, 2018 at 07:11

I am always glad to see confirmation in such matters, however, for people who work to inform themselves and think critically, there are no real surprises to be discovered about the invasion of Iraq.

It could be clearly seen as a fraud at the time because there were a number of experts, experts not working for the American government, who in effect told us then that it was a fraud.

What the whole experience with Iraq reveals is a couple of profound truths about imperial America, truths that are quite unpleasant and yet seem to remain lost to the general public.

One, lying and manipulation are virtually work-a-day activities in Washington. They go on at all levels of the government, from the President through all of the various experts and agency heads who in theory hold their jobs to inform the President and others of the truth in making decisions.

Indeed, these experts and agency heads actually work more like party members from George Orwell's Oceania in 1984, party members whose job it is to constantly rewrite history, making adjustments in the words and pictures of old periodicals and books to conform with the Big Brother's latest pronouncements and turns in policy.

America has an entire industry devoted to manufacturing truth, something the rather feeble term "fake news" weakly tries to capture.

The public's reaction to officials and agencies in Washington ought to be quite different than it generally is. It should be a presumption that they are not telling the truth, that they are tailoring a story to fit a policy. It sounds extreme to say so, but it truly is not in view of recent history.

We are all watching actors in a costly play used to support already-determined destructive policies.

Two, the press lies, and it lies almost constantly in support of government's decided policies. You simply cannot trust the American press on such matters, and the biggest names in the press – the New York Times or Washington Post or CBS or NBC – are the biggest liars because they put the weight of their general prestige into the balance to tip it.

Their fortunes and interests are too closely bound to government to be in the least trusted for objective journalism. Journalism just does not exist in America on the big stuff.

This support is not just done on special occasions like the run-up to the illegal invasion of Iraq but consistently in the affairs of state. We see it today in everything from "Russia-gate" to the Western-induced horrors of Syria. Russia-gate is almost laughable, although few Americans laugh, but a matter like Syria, with more than half a million dead and terrible privations, isn't laughable, yet no effort is made to explain the truth and bring this monstrous project – the work equally of Republicans and Democrats – to an end.

Three, while virtually all informed people know that Israel's influence in Washington is inordinate and inappropriate, many still do not realize that the entire horror of Iraq, just like the horror today of Syria, reflects the interests and demands of Israel.

George Bush made a rarely-noticed, when Ariel Sharon was lobbying him to attack other Middle Eastern countries following the Iraq invasion, along the lines of, "Geez, what does the guy want? I invaded Iraq for him, didn't I?"

Well, today, pretty much all of the countries that Sharon thought should be attacked have indeed been attacked by the United States and its associates in one fashion or another – covertly, as in Syria, or overtly, as in Libya. And we are all witnessing the ground being prepared for Iran.

It has been a genuinely terrifying period, the last decade and a half or so. War after war with huge numbers of innocents killed, vast damages inflicted, and armies of unfortunate refugees created. All of it completely unnecessary. All of it devoid of ethics or principles beyond the principle of "might makes right."

It simply cannot be distinguished, except by order of magnitude, from the grisly work of Europe's fascist governments of the 1930s and '40s.

All the discussions we read or see from America about truth in journalism, about truth in government, and about founding principles are pretty much distraction and noise, meaningless noise. The realities of what America is doing in the world make it so.

Sam F , November 15, 2018 at 20:56

Very true.

tpmco , November 16, 2018 at 02:48

Great comment.

john Wilson , November 15, 2018 at 04:47

It seems to me that showing up the blatant lies of the Iraq affair, while laudable, doesn't really get us anywhere. The guilty are never and will never be brought to account for their heinous crimes and some of the past villains are still lying, scheming, and brining about war, terror and horror today.

If the white helmets in Syria, the lies about Libya, the West engineered coupé in The Ukraine, Yemen, etc, aren't all tactics from the same play book used by the criminal cabals of the Iraq time, then we are blind. These days, the liars in the deep state, an expression which encapsulates everything from Intel to think tanks, don't even try to tell plausible lies, they just say anything and MSM cheers them on. Anyone challenging the MSM/government/deep state etc are just ridiculed and called conspiracy theorists, no matter how obvious and ludicrous the lies are.

Sam F , November 15, 2018 at 06:26

In fact "showing up the blatant lies of the Iraq affair" informs others, to whom the MSM can no longer cheer on liars, nor ridicule truth. Truth telling, like contemplation, is essential before the point of action.

Randal , November 15, 2018 at 02:38

I remember a woman reporter saying the reason we invaded Iraq was because Sadam Husien had put a bounty on the Bush family for running him out of qwait. This was a personal revenge to take out Husien before he had a chance at the Bush's. Any way the reporter was silenced very quickly. I personally believe the allegation.

Gary Weglarz , November 15, 2018 at 01:54

You have my complete and total respect Mr. McGovern. That was beautiful! Thank you.

F. G. Sanford , November 15, 2018 at 01:33

"We drew on all of NIMA's skill sets and it was all wrong."

Every time I hear the term, "skill sets", I recall a military colleague who observed, "We say skill sets so we don't have to say morons." They used to say, "The military doesn't pay you to think." Now they say, "We have skill sets." It's a euphemism for robotized automatons who perform specific standardized tasks based on idealized training requirements which evolve from whatever the latest abstract military doctrine happens to be. And, they come up with new ones all the time.

"The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." This is a phrase Rumsfeld borrowed directly – and I'm not making this up – from the UFO community. It was apparently first uttered by Carl Sagan, and then co-opted by people like Stanton Friedman. He's the guy who claims we recovered alien bodies from flying saucers at Roswell, New Mexico. The scientific antidote to the "absence of evidence" argument is, of course, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof." Simply put, absence of evidence really just means "no evidence". A hypothesis based on "no evidence" constitutes magical thinking.

It's probably worth going to Youtube and looking up a clip called "Stephen Gets a Straight Answer Out of Donald Rumsfeld". He admits to Colbert that, "If it was true, we wouldn't call it intelligence." Frankly, Clapper's gravest sin is heading up a science-based agency like NIMA, but failing to come to the same conclusion as General Albert Stubblebine. People who analyze reconnaissance imagery are supposed to be able to distinguish explosive ordnance damage from other factors. But, I guess Newtonian Physics is "old school" to this new generation of magical thinkers and avant-garde intelligence analysts.

Sam F , November 16, 2018 at 10:44

Part of the problem of "intelligence" is its reliance upon images that show a lot of detail but without any definite meaning, and upon guesses to keep managers and politicians happy. So "expert assessments" that milk trucks in aerial photos might be WMD labs became agency "confidence" and then politician certainties, never verified.

When suspect evidence was retained by intel agencies, as in the Iraq War II case, traitors like the zionist Wolfowitz simply installed known zionist warmongers Perl, Feith, and Wurmser into "stovepipe" offices at CIA, DIA, NSA to send the non-evidence to Rumsfeld. See Bamford's Pretext For War.

Gen Dau , November 14, 2018 at 22:20

Thank you, Ray, for a very good article that treats Clapper objectively and not as a demi-god, as most of the MSM and the Democratic establishment does. It is totally unacceptable for a government official, current or former, to answer "I don't know." That is the hideout of irresponsible scoundrels. Questioners should be allowed to ask follow-up questions such as, "If you didn't know, did you try to think about why the President's opinion on this very important question was different from yours? Is simply not knowing acceptable for an intel officer, especially one in a leadership position?" I look forward to your further reports and analyses.

Thanks also to the editors for returning at least the main text to a readable font. But why not go whole hog and make reading everything a pleasure again? Putting the headlines in a hard-to-read and distracting font is especially unfortunate, since some casual visitors to Consortium News may be turned off by the headlines and skip reading the very important articles attached to the headlines.

Daniel , November 15, 2018 at 03:13

You are right, my friend.

Mark A Goldman , November 14, 2018 at 22:17

According to my calculations (admittedly simplistic), the world has past the point of peak oil and in aggregate cannot produce enogh oil to meet present and future demand and that may very well be why the US is doing its best to destroy or damage as many economies in the world as it can even if it has to go to war to do it. Once it becomes well established that we are past peak oil no telling what our financial markets will look like. Would appreciate hearing from someone who has more expertise than I have. https://www.gpln.com

anon4d2s , November 14, 2018 at 22:23

Why are you trying to change the subject? Please desist.

Mark A. Goldman , November 15, 2018 at 13:01

I'm offering you the, or a, motive of why the deep state is pursuing the agendas we see unfolding, which is to say, the crimes, the lies, the treason that the likes of Clapper, Bush, Obama, Clinton and others are pursuing to cover up their reaction to their own fears. Of course 9/11, the false flag coup and smoking gun that proves my point is still the big elephant in the room and will eventually bring us down if the truth is never released from its chains.

Mark A. Goldman , November 15, 2018 at 14:43

I didn't change the subject. I'm offering you an answer as to the motive of why so many officials are willing to trash the Constitution in order to accomplish their insane agendas. It's all about money and power and the terrified Deep State fear of facing the blowback from the lies that have been propagated by the government and media regarding just about everything. Here's another place you might want to look in addition to my website: https://youtu.be/CDpE-30ilBY It's not just about oil. But this is where the rubber's going to meet the road. This is about what's going to hit the fan at any moment and in the absence of the Truth, we are all going to face this unprepared. 9/11 is still the smoking gun. It not just a few liars and cheats we're talking about.

Mark A. Goldman , November 15, 2018 at 23:58

I didn't change the subject. The purpose of the search for WMD was to misdirect the public's attention away from the real purpose of the invasion which was to gain control of Iraq's oil reserves primarily. Misdirection is primary skill used by those in power and very effectively.

Mark A Goldman , November 14, 2018 at 23:23

On my website you might want to review what I wrote here: "Why the Economy Can't Recover" https://www.gpln.com/audacityofhope.htm

Skip Edwards , November 14, 2018 at 22:10

Thanks, as always, go out to Ray for his continued bravery in speaking truth to power. I remember years ago when David McMichaels, Ex-CIA, gave a talk at Ft Lewis College in Durango, CO, about Ronnie Reagan's corruption in what the US was doing to the elected government in Nicaragua. Thanks to both of these men for trying to inform us all about the corruption so rampant in our government. This is further proof that Trump is only a small pimple on top of the infectous boil that is our government.

Sam F , November 14, 2018 at 21:52

Hurray for Ray McGovern! A beautiful and superbly-planned confrontation. We are lucky that Clapper admitted these things in his memoir, but we needed you to bring that out in public with full and well-selected information. You are truly a gem, whom I hope someday to meet.

Sam F , November 14, 2018 at 22:19

An astounding revelation of systematic delusion in secret agencies.

But until now my best source on the Iraq fake WMD has been Bamford's Pretext For War, in which he establishes that zionist DefSec Wolfowitz appointed three known zionist operatives Perl, Wurmser, and Feith to "stovepipe" known-bad info to Rumsfeld et al. Does the memoir shed any light there, and does your information agree?

mike k , November 14, 2018 at 19:58

Spies lie constantly, they have no respect for the truth. To trust a spy is a sign of dangerous gullibility. Spies are simply criminals for hire.

Gen Dau , November 14, 2018 at 22:30

Yes, I also hope our replies will be in a more civil and less reader-hostile font. The same font as the article text would be fine.

dfnslblty , November 15, 2018 at 09:59

I would offer that spies do not lie ~ they gather information.
Spy masters do lie ~ they prevaricate to fit the needs of their masters.

Tomonthebeach , November 15, 2018 at 23:48

To paraphrase in a way that emphasizes the deja vu. Trump lies constantly, he has no respect for the truth. To trust Trump is a sign of dangerous gullibility. Trump is simply a crook for hire, and it would seem that Putin writes the checks.

anon4d2s , November 16, 2018 at 10:48

Gosh, you fooled everyone so easily with standard Dem zionist drivel!
Why not admit that every US politician is bought, including Dems?
Don't forget to supply your unique evidence of Russian tampering.

Mild-ly - Facetious , November 18, 2018 at 16:44

"Clapper's Credibility Collapses"

as does Colin Powell's U.N.BULL Spit Yellow Cake propaganda/

all that's required is a Sales Pitch to everyday striving citizens into

how a brutal strain of aristocrat have come to rule america

and how you must delve into the Back-Stories of, for example,

GHW Bush CIA connection and his presents in Dallas, 1963

credibility collapses abound under weight of 'what really happened'

after Chaney convened summit of oil executives just PRIOR to 9/11?

[Jan 04, 2020] VIPS MEMO Doubling Down Into Yet Another 'March of Folly,' This Time on Iran by Ray McGovern

This was an act of war. Unilateral, unprovoked and illegal.
Notable quotes:
"... For the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity: ..."
Jan 04, 2020 | consortiumnews.com

T he drone assassination in Iraq of Iranian Quds Force commander General Qassem Soleimani evokes memory of the assassination of Austrian Archduke Ferdinand in June 1914, which led to World War I. Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was quick to warn of "severe revenge." That Iran will retaliate at a time and place of its choosing is a near certainty. And escalation into World War III is no longer just a remote possibility, particularly given the multitude of vulnerable targets offered by our large military footprint in the region and in nearby waters.

What your advisers may have avoided telling you is that Iran has not been isolated. Quite the contrary. One short week ago, for example, Iran launched its first joint naval exercises with Russia and China in the Gulf of Oman, in an unprecedented challenge to the U.S. in the region.

Cui Bono?

It is time to call a spade a spade. The country expecting to benefit most from hostilities between Iran and the U.S. is Israel (with Saudi Arabia in second place). As you no doubt are aware, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is fighting for his political life. He continues to await from you the kind of gift that keeps giving. Likewise, it appears that you, your son-in-law, and other myopic pro-Israel advisers are as susceptible to the influence of Israeli prime ministers as was former President George W. Bush. Some commentators are citing your taking personal responsibility for providing Iran with a casus belli as unfathomable. Looking back just a decade or so, we see a readily distinguishable pattern.

Former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon payed a huge role in getting George W. Bush to destroy Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Usually taciturn, Gen. Brent Scowcroft, national security adviser to Presidents Gerald Ford and George H.W. Bush, warned in August 2002 that "U.S. action against Iraq could turn the whole region into a cauldron." Bush paid no heed, prompting Scowcroft to explain in Oct. 2004 to The Financial Times that former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon had George W. Bush "mesmerized"; that Sharon has him "wrapped around his little finger." (Scowcroft was promptly relieved of his duties as chair of the prestigious President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board.)

In Sept. 2002, well before the attack on Iraq, Philip Zelikow, who was Executive Secretary of the 9/11 Commission, stated publicly in a moment of unusual candor, "The 'real threat' from Iraq was not a threat to the United States. The unstated threat was the threat against Israel." Zelikow did not explain how Iraq (or Iran), with zero nuclear weapons, would not be deterred from attacking Israel, which had a couple of hundred such weapons.

Zombie Generals

When a docile, Peter-principle, "we-are-still-winning-in-Afghanistan" U.S. military leadership sends more troops (mostly from a poverty draft) to be wounded and killed in hostilities with Iran, Americans are likely, this time, to look beneath the equally docile media for answers as to why. Was it for Netanyahu and the oppressive regime in Israel? Many Americans will wake up, and serious backlash is likely.

Events might bring a rise in the kind of anti-Semitism already responsible for domestic terrorist attacks. And when bodybags arrive from abroad, there may be for families and for thinking Americans, a limit to how much longer the pro-Israel mainstream media will be able to pull the wool over their eyes.

Those who may prefer to think that Gen. Scowcroft got up on the wrong side of the bed on Oct. 13, 2004, the day he gave the interview to The Financial Times may profit from words straight from Netanyahu's mouth. On Aug. 3, 2010, in a formal VIPS Memorandum for your predecessor, we provided some "Netanyahu in his own words." We include an excerpt here for historical context:

"Netanyahu's Calculations

Netanyahu believes he holds the high cards, largely because of the strong support he enjoys in our Congress and our strongly pro-Israel media. He reads your [Obama's] reluctance even to mention controversial bilateral issues publicly during his recent visit as affirmation that he is in the catbird seat in the relationship.

During election years in the U.S. (including mid-terms), Israeli leaders are particularly confident of the power they and the Likud Lobby enjoy on the American political scene.

Netanyahu's attitude comes through in a video taped nine years ago and shown on Israeli TV, in which he bragged about how he deceived President Clinton into believing he (Netanyahu) was helping implement the Oslo accords when he was actually destroying them.

The tape displays a contemptuous attitude toward -- and wonderment at -- an America so easily influenced by Israel. Netanyahu says:

" America is something that can be easily moved. Moved in the right direction. They won't get in our way Eighty percent of the Americans support us. It's absurd."

Israeli columnist Gideon Levy wrote that the video shows Netanyahu to be "a con artist who thinks that Washington is in his pocket and that he can pull the wool over its eyes," adding that such behavior "does not change over the years."

Recommendation

We ended VIPS' first Memorandum For the President (George W. Bush) with this critique of Secretary of State Colin Powell's address at the UN earlier that day:

"No one has a corner on the truth; nor do we harbor illusions that our analysis is "irrefutable or undeniable" [as Powell claimed his was]. But after watching Secretary Powell today, we are convinced that you would be well served if you widened the discussion beyond the circle of those advisers clearly bent on a war for which we see no compelling reason and from which we believe the unintended consequences are likely to be catastrophic."

We are all in a limina l moment. We write with a sense of urgency suggesting you avoid doubling down on catastrophe.

For the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity:

William Binney, former Technical Director, World Geopolitical & Military Analysis, NSA; co-founder, SIGINT Automation Research Center (ret.)

Marshall Carter-Tripp, Foreign Service Officer and Division Director, State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research (ret.)

Graham Fuller, former Chairman, National Intelligence Council (ret.)

Philip Giraldi, CIA, Operations Officer (ret.)

Mike Gravel, former Adjutant, top secret control officer, Communications Intelligence Service; special agent of the Counter Intelligence Corps and former United States Senator

Matthew Hoh, former Capt., USMC Iraq; Foreign Service Officer, Afghanistan (associate VIPS)

Michael S. Kearns, Captain, USAF (ret.); ex-Master SERE Instructor for Strategic Reconnaissance Operations (NSA/DIA) and Special Mission Units (JSOC)

John Kiriakou, former CIA Counterterrorism Officer and former Senior Investigator, Senate Foreign Relations Committee

Karen Kwiatkowski, Lt. Col., US Air Force (ret.), at Office of Secretary of Defense watching the manufacture of lies on Iraq, 2001-2003

Edward Loomis, NSA Cryptologic Computer Scientist and Technical Director (ret.)

Ray McGovern, former US Army infantry/intelligence officer & CIA presidential briefer (ret.)

Elizabeth Murray, former Deputy National Intelligence Officer for the Near East & CIA political analyst (ret.)

Todd E. Pierce, MAJ, US Army Judge Advocate (ret.)

Scott Ritter, former MAJ., USMC, former UN Weapon Inspector, Iraq

Coleen Rowley, FBI Special Agent and former Minneapolis Division Legal Counsel (ret.)

Sarah Wilton, Commander, U.S. Naval Reserve (ret.) and Defense Intelligence Agency (ret.)

Robert Wing, former U.S. Department of State Foreign Service Officer (Associate VIPS)

[Jan 04, 2020] Soleimani assassination by US 'an adventurous move' that will flare up tensions in Middle East Moscow -- RT World News

Jan 04, 2020 | www.rt.com

The US airstrike that killed a senior Iranian commander near Baghdad will exacerbate tensions throughout the Middle East, the Russian foreign ministry has warned. Qassem Soleimani, the commander of Iran's Quds Force, was killed in a US operation at Baghdad International Airport on Friday morning. Moscow considers the operation "an adventurous move that will lead to an escalation of tension throughout the region," the ministry said.

"Soleimani served devotedly the cause of defending the national interests of Iran. We express our sincere condolences to the Iranian people," the short statement said.

Also on rt.com US killing of Iranian commander on Iraqi soil violates terms of US stationing troops in the country – Iraqi PM

The Russian Defense Ministry slammed the US airstrike that targeted the Iranian general as "short-sighted," warning that it would lead to a "rapid escalation" of tensions in the Middle East and would be detrimental to international security in general.

The ministry also praised Soleimani's efforts in fighting international terrorist groups in Syria and Iraq by saying that his achievements in the fight against Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS) in Syria are "undeniable."

The targeted assassination has sparked anger in Iran and Iraq. Officials in Tehran pledged to avenge the death of the high-profile member of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) while Iran's caretaker prime minister called it an act of aggression against his country that violates the terms under which American troops are hosted on Iraqi soil.

Also on rt.com Killing of Quds commander is another sign of US frustration and weakness in the region – Iran's Rouhani

Washington considers the IRGC a terrorist organization and claims Soleimani was plotting attacks on American citizens. The killing comes days after Iran-backed Iraqi militias staged a riot at the US embassy in Baghdad, a response to US retaliatory airstrikes at militia forces.

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[Jan 04, 2020] US killing of Iranian commander on Iraqi soil violates terms of US stationing troops in the country Iraqi PM

Jan 04, 2020 | www.rt.com

The interim prime minister of Iraq has condemned the US assassination of a senior Iranian commander, calling it an act of aggression against his country. Qassem Soleimani was killed at Baghdad airport.

Soleimani, the commander of the elite Quds Force, was killed after his convoy was hit by US missiles. A deputy commander of the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), the Iraqi militia collective backed by Iran, was killed in the same airstrike.

In a statement on Friday, the caretaker leader of Iraq's protest-challenged government, Adil Abdul Mahdi, said the US assassination operation was a "flagrant violation of Iraqi sovereignty" and an insult to the dignity of his country.

Also on rt.com Iran Quds Force commander killed in US strike on convoy at Baghdad airport

He stressed that the US had violated the terms under which American troops are allowed to stay in Iraq with the purpose of training Iraqi troops and fighting the jihadist organization Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS). He added that the killing may trigger a major escalation of violence and result in "a devastating war in Iraq" that will spill out into the region.

The Iraqi government has called on the parliament to hold an emergency session to discuss an appropriate response, Mahdi said.

Also on rt.com Killing of Quds commander is another sign of US frustration and weakness in the region – Iran's Rouhani

The killing of Soleimani marks a significant escalation in US confrontation with Iran. Washington considers the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), to which Quds belongs, a terrorist organization and claimed the slain commander was plotting attacks on American citizens.

Tehran said the Quds commander was targeted for his personal contribution to defeating IS in Iraq and Syria. Soleimani drove Iran's support for militias in both countries that fought against the terrorist force.

[Jan 04, 2020] The USA only choice is a Sunni sandwich with Kurdish Bread and Shia Mayo

Jan 04, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Peeps like Sen Graham saying "the Iraqi's need to choose between us or Iran."

(That choice is a Sunni sandwich with Kurdish Bread and Shia Mayo)

[Jan 04, 2020] On Thucydides quote "the strong do what they will, the weak suffer what they must

Jan 04, 2020 | turcopolier.typepad.com

Andrei Martyanov (aka SmoothieX12) -> Ishmael Zechariah... ,03 January 2020 at 11:20 PM

The second are the immortal words of Thucydides: "the strong do what they will, the weak suffer what they must."

Yeah, I heard Thucydides had some issues with resolution of uncertainties for targeting, especially for stand-off precision guided weapons. Plus there were some issues with long range air-defense systems in Greece in times of Plato and Socrates. You know, GLONASS wasn't fully operational, plus EW was a little bit scratchy.

So, surely, it all fully applies today, especially in choke points. Plus those Athenians they were not exactly good with RPGs and anti-Armour operations. Other than that, Thucydides nailed it.

Something To Think About -> Ishmael Zechariah... , 04 January 2020 at 01:11 AM
Ah, yes, the Melian Dialogue.

Interesting to note that it was the party professing those words - Athens - who started the Peloponnesian War, driven in large part by that haughty attitude. It was Athens that also ended that war, of course. They did so when they surrendered to the Spartans.

[Jan 04, 2020] Why the US Seeks to Hem in Russia, China and Iran by Patrick Lawrence

Sep 13, 2018 | consortiumnews.com

America's three principal adversaries signify the shape of the world to come: a post-Western world of coexistence. But neoliberal and neocon ideology is unable to to accept global pluralism and multipolarity, argues Patrick Lawrence.


Special to Consortium News

The Trump administration has brought U.S. foreign policy to the brink of crisis, if it has not already tipped into one. There is little room to argue otherwise. In Asia, Europe, and the Middle East, and in Washington's ever-fraught relations with Russia, U.S. strategy, as reviewed in my previous column , amounts to little more than spoiling the efforts of others to negotiate peaceful solutions to war and dangerous standoffs in the interests of an orderly world.

The bitter reality is that U.S. foreign policy has no definable objective other than blocking the initiatives of others because they stand in the way of the further expansion of U.S. global interests. This impoverished strategy reflects Washington's refusal to accept the passing of its relatively brief post–Cold War moment of unipolar power.

There is an error all too common in American public opinion. Personalizing Washington's regression into the role of spoiler by assigning all blame to one man, now Donald Trump, deprives one of deeper understanding. This mistake was made during the steady attack on civil liberties after the Sept. 11 tragedies and then during the 2003 invasion of Iraq: namely that it was all George W. Bush's fault. It was not so simple then and is not now. The crisis of U.S. foreign policy -- a series of radical missteps -- are systemic. Having little to do with personalities, they pass from one administration to the next with little variance other than at the margins.

Let us bring some history to this question of America as spoiler. What is the origin of this undignified and isolating approach to global affairs?

It began with that hubristic triumphalism so evident in the decade after the Cold War's end. What ensued had various names.

There was the "end of history" thesis. American liberalism was humanity's highest achievement, and nothing would supersede it.

There was also the "Washington consensus." The world was in agreement that free-market capitalism and unfettered financial markets would see the entire planet to prosperity. The consensus never extended far beyond the Potomac, but this sort of detail mattered little at the time.

The neoliberal economic crusade accompanied by neoconservative politics had its intellectual ballast, and off went its true-believing warriors around the world.

Happier days with Russia. (Eric Draper)

Failures ensued. Iraq post–2003 is among the more obvious. Nobody ever planted democracy or built free markets in Baghdad. Then came the "color revolutions," which resulted in the destabilization of large swathes of the former Soviet Union's borderlands. The 2008 financial crash followed.

I was in Hong Kong at the time and recall thinking, "This is not just Lehman Brothers. An economic model is headed into Chapter 11." One would have thought a fundamental rethink in Washington might have followed these events. There has never been one.

The orthodoxy today remains what it was when it formed in the 1990s: The neoliberal crusade must proceed. Our market-driven, "rules-based" order is still advanced as the only way out of our planet's impasses.

A Strategic and Military Turn

Midway through the first Obama administration, a crucial turn began. What had been an assertion of financial and economic power, albeit coercive in many instances, particularly with the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, took on further strategic and military dimensions. The NATO bombing campaign in Libya, ostensibly a humanitarian mission, became a regime-change operation -- despite Washington's promises otherwise. Obama's "pivot to Asia" turned out to be a neo-containment policy toward China. The "reset" with Russia, declared after Obama appointed Hillary Clinton secretary of state, flopped and turned into the virulent animosity we now live with daily. The U.S.-cultivated coup in Kiev in 2014 was a major declaration of drastic turn in policy towards Moscow. So was the decision, taken in 2012 at the latest , to back the radical jihadists who were turning civil unrest in Syria into a campaign to topple the Assad government in favor of another Islamist regime.

Spoilage as a poor excuse for a foreign policy had made its first appearances.

I count 2013 to 2015 as key years. At the start of this period, China began developing what it now calls its Belt and Road Initiative -- its hugely ambitious plan to stitch together the Eurasian landmass, Shanghai to Lisbon. Moscow favored this undertaking, not least because of the key role Russia had to play and because it fit well with President Vladimir Putin's Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU), launched in 2014.

Belt and Road Initiative. (Lommes / CC BY-SA 4.0)

In 2015, the last of the three years I just noted, Russia intervened militarily and diplomatically in the Syria conflict, in part to protect its southwest from Islamist extremism and in part to pull the Middle East back from the near-anarchy then threatening it as well as Russia and the West.

Meanwhile, Washington had cast China as an adversary and committed itself -- as it apparently remains -- to regime change in Syria. Three months prior to the treaty that established the EAEU, the Americans helped turn another case of civil unrest into a regime change -- this time backing not jihadists in Syria but the crypto-Nazi militias in Ukraine on which the government now in power still depends.

That is how we got the U.S.-as-spoiler foreign policy we now have.

If there is a president to blame -- and again, I see little point in this line of argument -- it would have to be Barack Obama. To a certain extent, Obama was a creature of those around him, as he acknowledged in his interview with Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic toward the end of his second term. From that "Anonymous" opinion piece published in The New York Times on Sept. 5, we know Trump is too, to a greater extent than Obama may have feared in his worst moments.

The crucial question is why. Why do U.S. policy cliques find themselves bereft of imaginative thinking in the face of an evolving world order? Why has there been not a single original policy initiative since the years I single out, with the exception of the now-abandoned 2015 accord governing Iran's nuclear programs? "Right now, our job is to create quagmires until we get what we want," an administration official told The Washington Post 's David Ignatius in August.

Can you think of a blunter confession of intellectual bankruptcy? I can't.

Global 'Equals' Like Us?

There is a longstanding explanation for this paralysis. Seven decades of global hegemony, the Cold War notwithstanding, left the State Department with little to think about other than the simplicities of East-West tension. Those planning and executing American diplomacy lost all facility for imaginative thinking because there was no need of it. This holds true, in my view, but there is more to our specific moment than mere sclerosis within the policy cliques.

As I have argued numerous times elsewhere, parity between East and West is a 21st century imperative. From Woodrow Wilson to the post-World War II settlement, an equality among all nations was in theory what the U.S. considered essential to global order.

Now that this is upon us, however, Washington cannot accept it. It did not count on non-Western nations achieving a measure of prosperity and influence until they were "just like us," as the once famous phrase had it. And it has not turned out that way.

Can't we all just get along? (Carlos3653 / Wikimedia)

Think of Russia, China, and Iran, the three nations now designated America's principal adversaries. Each one is fated to become (if it is not already) a world or regional power and a key to stability -- Russia and China on a global scale, Iran in the Middle East. But each stands resolutely -- and this is not to say with hostile intent -- outside the Western-led order. They have different histories, traditions, cultures, and political cultures. And they are determined to preserve them.

They signify the shape of the world to come -- a post-Western world in which the Atlantic alliance must coexist with rising powers outside its orbit. Together, then, they signify precisely what the U.S. cannot countenance. And if there is one attribute of neoliberal and neoconservative ideology that stands out among all others, it is its complete inability to accept difference or deviation if it threatens its interests.

This is the logic of spoilage as a substitute for foreign policy. Among its many consequences are countless lost opportunities for global stability.

Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, author, and lecturer. His most recent book is Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century (Yale). Follow him @thefloutist. His web site is www.patricklawrence.us. Support his work via www.patreon.com/thefloutist .

If you valued this original article, please consider making a donation to Consortium News so we can bring you more stories like this one.

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Tags: Barack Obama China Donald Trump George W. Bush Iran Neoliberlism Patrick Lawrence Russia Spoiler United States Vladimir Putin

Post navigation ← Solving Italy's Immigration Crisis Consortium News Unveils New Logo → 78 comments for "Why the U.S. Seeks to Hem in Russia, China and Iran"

R Davis , September 20, 2018 at 04:21

adversary: – one's opponent in a contest, conflict or dispute.

& I ask this
"Is it really thus"
"Why must it be thus"

How can China be an adversary of the USA when all their manufactured goods come from China.
example:- a water distiller – manufactured in & purchased from China retails for AU$70 odd.
The very same item manufactured in China – but purchased from the USA retails for US$260 plus.
China should be a most welcome guest at the dinner table of the USA.

R Davis , September 20, 2018 at 04:28

While i'm here – where did China get all their surveillance equipment from – the place is locked down tighter than a chicken coop plagued by foxes.

relevant article – CRAZZ FILES – Bone Chilling Footage Shows the Horrific Tyranny Google is Now Secretly Fostering in China.

In my opinion Google is not trying to keep information out of China – BUT – preventing information from get out of China – to the world at large.
A lockdown as severe as this – tells us that there is something seriously bad happening inside China.
Maybe even a mass genocide

Bob Arnold , September 16, 2018 at 09:48

This analysis is correct as far as it goes. However, what is lacking is an analysis of the lunatic monetary ideology that has looted the physical economy of the U.S. by putting enormous fake profits of speculative instruments in the hands of our "elites." It is the post industrial, information age economy which must be transformed by very painful loss of control by these putative elites if the world is to survive their insane geopolitics. What the Chinese are doing by rapid build up of worldwide infrastructure needs to be replicated here. The only way of doing so is first by ending the Wall St./City of London derivatives nightmare and then by issuing trillions of credits needed for that very purpose.

Lee Anderson , September 16, 2018 at 15:16

Agreed, you speak wisely of the root of the problem. Those who create and distribute money make ALL the rules and dominate the political and media landscape.

Freedomlover , September 17, 2018 at 15:20

Hit the nail on the head.
Thanks

bevin , September 14, 2018 at 18:32

This really is an excellent analysis. I would highlight the following point:
"There is a longstanding explanation for this paralysis. Seven decades of global hegemony, the Cold War notwithstanding, left the State Department with little to think about other than the simplicities of East-West tension. Those planning and executing American diplomacy lost all facility for imaginative thinking because there was no need of it. This holds true, in my view, but there is more to our specific moment than mere sclerosis within the policy cliques "

Conformism and its consequences, probably derived in part from Puritanism and further cemented by the alternating racisms of anti-indigenous and anti black attitudes- the history of the lynch mob and various wars against the poor which ended up in the anti-communist frenzies of the day before yesterday constitute the backbone of American history- is the disease which afflicts Washington.

Don Bacon , September 14, 2018 at 18:03

You don't mention corruption and profiteering, which go hand-in-hand with American Exceptionalism and the National Security State (NSS) formed in 1947. The leader of the world which is also an NSS requires enemies, so the National Security Strategy designates enemies, a few of them in an Axis of Evil. Arming to fight them and dreaming up other reasons to go to war, including a war on terror of all things, bring the desired vast expenditures, trillions of dollars, which translate to vast profits to those involved.

This focus on war has its roots in the Christian bible and in a sense of manifest destiny that has occupied Americans since before they were Americans, and the real Americans had to be exterminated. It certainly (as stated) can't be blamed on certain individuals, it's predominate and nearly universal. How many Americans were against the assault by the Coalition of the Willing upon Iraq? Very few.

Homer Jay , September 14, 2018 at 22:09

"How many Americans were against the assault by the Coalition of the Willing upon Iraq? Very few."

Are you kidding me? Here is a list of polls of the American public regarding the Iraq War 2003-2007;

https://www.politifact.com/iraq-war-polls/

Even in the lead up the war when the public was force fed a diet comprised entirely of State Dept. lies about WMDs by a sycophantic media, there was still a significant 25-40 percent of the public who opposed the war. You clearly are not American or you would remember the vocal minority which filled the streets of big cities across this country. And again the consent was as Chomsky says "manufactured." And it took only 1 year of the war for the majority of the public to be against it. By 2007 60-70% of the public opposed the war.

Judging from your name you come from a country whose government was part of that coalition of the willing. So should we assume that "very few" of your fellow country men and women were against that absolute horror show that is the Iraq war?

Don Bacon , September 14, 2018 at 23:05

You failed to address my major point, and instead picked on something you're wrong on.

Iraq war poll –Pew Research
http://assets.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/12/old-assets/publications/770-1.gif

PS: bevin made approximately the same point later (w/o the financial factor).
"Conformism and its consequences, probably derived in part from Puritanism and further cemented by the alternating racisms of anti-indigenous and anti black attitudes- the history of the lynch mob and various wars against the poor which ended up in the anti-communist frenzies of the day before yesterday constitute the backbone of American history- is the disease which afflicts Washington."

Homer Jay , September 17, 2018 at 14:47

Respectfully, Your data backs up my comment/data. And to your larger point, again we must be careful when describing such attitudes as "American", a country with a wide range of attitudes/ beliefs. To suggest we are all just a war mongering mob is bigoted. You probably will say that's defensive but it's also right. And making the recklessly inaccurate claim that "very few" Americans opposed the war in Iraq, without taking into account the disinformation campaign that played into the initial consent, needs to corrected more than once.

Sari , September 14, 2018 at 15:15

I just encountered (via Voltairenet) "The Pentagon's New Map," a book written by Thomas Barnett, an assistant once to Admiral Arthur K. Cebrowski (now deceased). Barnett wrote an earlier article for the March 2003 Esquire entitled "Why the Pentagon Changes Its Map: And Why We'll Keep Going to War" ( https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a1546/thomas-barnett-iraq-war-primer/ ) describing their ideas which are introduced thusly:

"Since the end of the cold war, the United States has been trying to come up with an operating theory of the world -- and a military strategy to accompany it. Now there's a leading contender. It involves identifying the problem parts of the world and aggressively shrinking them. Since September 11, 2001, the author, a professor of warfare analysis at the U.S. Naval War College, has been advising the Office of the Secretary of Defense and giving this briefing continually at the Pentagon and in the intelligence community. Now, he gives it to you."

His basic premise: "Show me where globalization is thick with network connectivity, financial transactions, liberal media flows, and collective security, and I will show you regions featuring stable governments, rising standards of living, and more deaths by suicide than murder. These parts of the world I call the Functioning Core, or Core. But show me where globalization is thinning or just plain absent, and I will show you regions plagued by politically repressive regimes, widespread poverty and disease, routine mass murder, and -- most important -- the chronic conflicts that incubate the next generation of global terrorists. These parts of the world I call the Non-Integrating Gap, or Gap."

One more quote gives you the "Monarch Notes" edition: "Think about it: Bin Laden and Al Qaeda are pure products of the Gap -- in effect, its most violent feedback to the Core. They tell us how we are doing in exporting security to these lawless areas (not very well) and which states they would like to take "offline" from globalization and return to some seventh-century definition of the good life (any Gap state with a sizable Muslim population, especially Saudi Arabia).

If you take this message from Osama and combine it with our military-intervention record of the last decade, a simple security rule set emerges: A country's potential to warrant a U.S. military response is inversely related to its globalization connectivity."

Of course, we all recognize how much prevarication currently exists in "implementing" this strategy, but I would suggest that, very likely, the Pentagon is, indeed, following this "New Map." And, yes, this "map" shows us why the U.S. has been continually at war since 9/11 and subbornly refuses to leave Syria, Iraq, and the Middle East with their apparent justification being "Might Makes Right." Thierry Mayssen (Voltairenet) aptly describes the Gap states as "reservoirs of resources" driven into perpetual war, destabilization, and chaos by a preeminently overwhelming hegemonic U.S. military.

I had to laugh. One of Barnett's reasons in promulgating this new "map" involves the continued stability of the Core; however, what do we see today? Huge waves of immigration greatly destabilizing every aspect of Europe and chaos and destabilization flooding the U.S. via false/contrived polarization in every sphere of life. BUT! The military has "a Map!"

Psssstt!! Who's "creating" the Gap? Who has funded and armed Al Qaeda/DAESH/ISIS in the Middle East? We'll need GPS to keep up with the Pentagon's "new map!"

Archie1954 , September 14, 2018 at 14:39

I have often wondered why the US was unable to accept the position of first among equals. Why does it have to rule the World? I know it believes that its economic and political systems are the best on the planet, but surely all other nations should be able to decide for themselves, what systems they will accept and live under? Who gave the US the right to make those decisions for everyone else? The US was more than willing to kill 20 million people either directly or indirectly since the end of WWII to make its will sovereign in all nations of the World!

Bob Van Noy , September 14, 2018 at 21:54

Archie 1954, because 911 was never adequately investigated, our government was inappropriately allowed to act in the so-called public interest in completely inappropriate ways; so that in order for the Country to set things right, those decisions which were made quietly, with little public discussion, would have to be exposed and the illegalities addressed. But, as I'm sure you know, there are myriad other big government failures also left unexamined, so where to begin?

That is why I invariably raise JFK's Assassination as a logical starting point. If a truly independent commission would fix the blame, we could move on from there. Sam F., on this forum, has mentioned a formal legal undertaking many times on this site, but now is the time to begin the discussion for a formal Truth And Reconciliation Commission in America Let's figure out how to begin.

So,"Who gave the US the right to make those decisions for everyone else?", certainly not The People

Lee Anderson , September 16, 2018 at 15:28

Jill Stein said if elected she would boycott all countries guilty of human rights abuses and she included Saudi Arabia and Israel. She also said she would form a 9/11 commission comprised of those independent people and groups currently reporting on this travesty. Meanwhile we have the self-proclaimed "progressive" talk show hosts such as Thom Hartmann, defending the PNAC NEOCONS while making Stein persona non grata and throwing real progressive candidates under the bus.

The PNAC NEOCONS understood the importance of creating a galvanizing, catastrophic and catalyzing event but the alternative media is afraid to call a spade a spade, something about the truth being too risky to ones career, I assume.

See much more at youtopia.guru

Bob Van Noy , September 17, 2018 at 09:19

Lee Anderson thank you for your response, I agree and I appreciate the link suggestion, I'm impressed and will read more

didi , September 14, 2018 at 13:49

It is always the unintended consequences. Hence I disagree with some of your views. A president who takes actions which trigger unintended/unexpected consequences can be held accountable for such consequences even if he/she could not avert the consequences. It is also often true that corrections are possible when such consequences begin to appear. Given our system which makes only presidents powerful to act on war, peace, and foreign relationships there is no escaping that they must be blamed only.

Jessika , September 14, 2018 at 13:36

A very good article. Spoiler and bully describe US foreign policy, and foreign policy is in the driver's seat while domestic policy takes the pickings, hardly anything left for the hollowed-out society where people live paycheck to paycheck, homelessness and other assorted ills of a failing society continue to rise while oligarchs and the MIC rule the neofeudal/futile system. When are we going to make that connection of the wasteful expenditure on military adventurism and the problem of poverty in the US? The Pentagon consistently calls the shots, yet we consistently hear about unaccounted expenditures by the Pentagon, losing amounts in the trillions, and never do they get audited.

nondimenticare , September 14, 2018 at 12:18

I certainly agree that the policy is bereft, but not for all of the same reasons. There is the positing of a turnaround as a basis for the current spoiler role: "What had been an assertion of financial and economic power, albeit coercive in many instances, particularly with the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, took on further strategic and military dimensions."

To substantiate this "crucial turn," Lawrence makes the unwarranted assumption that the goal post Soviet Union was simply worldwide free-market capitalism, not global domination: "Failures ensued. Iraq post–2003 is among the more obvious. Nobody ever planted democracy or built free markets in Baghdad"; and the later statement that the US wanted the countries it invaded to be "Just like us."

Though he doesn't mention (ignores) US meddling in Russia after the collapse of the USSR, I presume from its absence that he attributes that, too, to the expansion of capital. Indeed, it was that, but with the more malevolent goal of control. "Just like us" is the usual "progressive" explanation for failures. "Controlled by us" was more like it, if we face the history of the country squarely.

That is the blindness of intent that has led to the spoiler role.

Unfettered Fire , September 14, 2018 at 11:15

Is it really so wise to be speaking in terms of nationhood after we've undergone 50 years of Kochian/libertarian dismantlement of the nation-state in favor of bank and transnational governance? Remember the words of Zbigniew Brzezinski:

"The "nation-state" as a fundamental unit of man's organized life has ceased to be the principal creative force: International banks and multinational corporations are acting and planning in terms that are far in advance of the political concepts of the nation-state." ~ Zbigniew Brzezinski, Between Two Ages, 1970

"Make no mistake, what we are seeing in geopolitics today is indeed a magic show. The false East/West paradigm is as powerful if not more powerful than the false Left/Right paradigm. For some reason, the human mind is more comfortable believing in the ideas of division and chaos, and it often turns its nose up indignantly at the notion of "conspiracy." But conspiracies and conspirators can be demonstrated as a fact of history. Organization among elitists is predictable.

Globalists themselves are drawn together by an ideology. They have no common nation, they have no common political orientation, they have no common cultural background or religion, they herald from the East just as they herald from the West. They have no true loyalty to any mainstream cause or social movement.

What do they have in common? They seem to exhibit many of the traits of high level narcissistic sociopaths, who make up a very small percentage of the human population. These people are predators, or to be more specific, they are parasites. They see themselves as naturally superior to others, but they often work together if there is the promise of mutual benefit."

http://www.alt-market.com/articles/3504-in-the-new-qmultipolar-worldq-the-globalists-still-control-all-the-players

Jeff Davis , September 14, 2018 at 11:46

Your comment is astute and valuable, and consequently deserves to be signed with your real name, so that you can be identified as someone worth listening to.

Don Bacon , September 14, 2018 at 17:44

Screen names don't matter, content does.

OlyaPola , September 15, 2018 at 11:34

"Screen names don't matter, content does."

Apparently not for some where attribution is sought and the illusion of trust the source trust the content is held, leading to curveballs mirroring expectations whilst serving the purposes of others.

JuanPZenter , September 17, 2018 at 07:31

Why? The better to dox him with?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doxing

OlyaPola , September 14, 2018 at 13:35

""The "nation-state" as a fundamental unit of man's organized life has ceased to be the principal creative force: International banks and multinational corporations are acting and planning in terms that are far in advance of the political concepts of the nation-state." ~ Zbigniew Brzezinski, Between Two Ages, 1970"

The date of publication is of significance as was Mr. Paul Craig Roberts' Alienation in the Soviet economy of 1971, as was Mr. Andrei Amalrik's "Can the Soviet Union last until 1984 published in 1969.

The period 1968 – 1973 was one significant trajectory in the half-life of "we the people hold these truths to be self-evident" which underpinned and maintained the "nation state" misrepresented/branded as the "United States of America" through a change in the assays of the amalga mutual benefit/hold these truths to be self-evident.

The last hurrah of the "red experts" – Mr. Brezhnev and associates – despite analyses/forecasts from various agencies agreed, detente based on spheres of influence facilitating through interaction/complicity various fiats including but not restricted to fiat currency, fiat economy, fiat politics all dependent on mutations of "we the people hold these truths to be self-evident".

This interaction also facilitated processes which accelerated the demise of the "Soviet Union" and its continuing transcendence by the Russian Federation – the choice of title being a notice of intent that some interpreted as the "End of History" whilst others interpreted as lateral opportunity facilitated by the hubris of the "End of History".

The "red experts" were not unique in their illusions; another pertinent example is the strategy of the PLO in maintaining the illusion of the two state solution/"Oslo accords" facilitating the continuing colonial project branded as "Israel".

Mr. Brzezinski was one of the others who interpreted the "End of History" as linear opportunity where the assay of amalga of form could be changed to maintain content/function which was/is to "still" control all the players.

However in any interactive system neither omniscience nor sole agency/control is possible, whilst by virtue of interaction the complicity of all can be encouraged in various ways to facilitate useful outcomes in furtherance of purpose, whilst illusions of the "End of History" and the search for the holy grail of "Full Spectrum Dominance" acted as both accelerators and multipliers in the process of encouragement, whilst obscuring this process in open sight through the opponents' amalga of reliance on "plausible belief based in part on projection", "exceptionalism" and associated hubris.

The "nation state" subsuming illusions of mutual benefit and mutual purpose has always been a function of the half-lives of components of its ideological facades and practices – sexual intercourse wasn't invented in 1963 and "The "nation-state" as a fundamental unit of man's organized life has ceased to be the principal creative force" wasn't initiated in 1970.

Unfettered Fire , September 14, 2018 at 13:43

"In our society, real power does not happen to lie in the political system, it lies in the private economy: that's where the decisions are made about what's produced, how much is produced, what's consumed, where investment takes place, who has jobs, who controls the resources, and so on and so forth. And as long as that remains the case, changes inside the political system can make some difference -- I don't want to say it's zero -- but the differences are going to be very slight." ~ Noam Chomsky

Giants: The Global Power Elite – A talk by Peter Phillips
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Np6td-wzDYQ

The Elite World Order in Jitters
Review of Peter Phillips' book Giants: The Global Power Elite
https://dissidentvoice.org/2018/09/the-elite-world-order-in-jitters/

backwardsevolution , September 14, 2018 at 17:14

Unfettered Fire – good posts. Thank you. Peter Phillips is definitely worth listening to.

Jon Dhoe , September 14, 2018 at 11:02

Israel, Israel, Israel.

When are we going to start facing facts?

Daniel Good , September 14, 2018 at 09:59

Yet there is a thread that leads through US foreign policy. It all started with NSC 68. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSC_68 . Already in the 1950's, leading bankers were afraid of economic depression which would follow from a "peace dividend" following the end of WWII. To avoid this, and to avoid "socialism", the only acceptable government spending was on defense. This mentality never ended. Today 50% of discretionary govenmenrt spending is on the military. http://www.unz.com/article/americas-militarized-economy/ . We live in a country of military socialism, in which military citizens have all types of benefits, on condition they join the military-industrial-complex. This being so, there is no need for real "intelligence", there is no need to "understand" what goes on is foreign countries, there no need to be right about what might happen or worry about consequences. What is important is stimulate the economy by spending on arms. From Korean war, when the US dropped more bombs than it had on Nazi Germany, through Viet Nam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya etc etc the US policy was a winning one not for those who got bombed (and could not fight back) but for the weapons industry and military contractors. Is the NYTimes ever going to discuss this aspect? Or any one in the MSM?

Lee Anderson , September 16, 2018 at 15:42

All that and we constantly have to endure the bankster/MIC-controlled media proclaiming everyone who joins the military as "heroes" defending our precious"freedoms." The media mafia is evil.

Walter , September 14, 2018 at 09:26

The "why" behind the US foreign policies was spoken with absolute honest clarity in the "Statement of A. Wess Mitchell
Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs" to the Senate on August 21 this year. The transcript is at :

https://www.foreign.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/082118_Mitchell_Testimony.pdf

Quoth the esteemed gentleman (inter alia)

"It continues to be among the foremost national security interests of the United States to prevent the domination of the Eurasian landmass by hostile powers. The central aim of the administration's foreign policy is to prepare our nation to confront this challenge by systematically strengthening the military, economic and political fundamentals of American power. "

Tellingly the "official" State Department copy is changed and omits the true spoken words

See yourself: https://www.state.gov/p/eur/rls/rm/2018/285247.htm

This is the essence of MacKinder's Thesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Geographical_Pivot_of_History and was the underlying reason for both world wars in the 20th century.

An essay on this observed truth https://journal-neo.org/2018/09/11/behind-the-anglo-american-war-on-russia/

A deeper essay on the same subject https://www.silkroadstudies.org/resources/pdf/Monographs/1006Rethinking-4.pdf

I would propose that the zionish aspect exists due to the perceived necessity of "Forward Operating Base Israel" lookit a map, Comrade The ISIS?Saudi?Zionist games divides the New Silk Road and the Eurasian land mass and exists to throttle said pathways.

Interestingly the latter essay is attributed to Eldar Ismailov and Vladimer Papava

Brother Comrade Putin knows the game. The US has to maintain the fiction for the public that it does not know the game, and is consequently obliged to maintain a vast public delusion, hence "fake news" and all the rest.

OlyaPola , September 14, 2018 at 13:49

"I would propose that the zionish aspect exists due to the perceived necessity of "Forward Operating Base Israel" lookit a map, Comrade"

Some have an attraction to book-ends.

Once upon a time the Eurasian book-ends were Germany and Japan, and the Western Asian book-ends Israel and Saudi Arabia.

This "strategy" is based upon the notion that bookend-ness is a state of inertia which in any interactive system is impossible except apparently to those embedded in "we the people hold these truths to be self-evident".

Consequently some have an attraction to book-ends.

Walter , September 15, 2018 at 12:31

If I understand you correctly, then yes, some imagine that a static situation can exist. This a natural but delusional way of seeing the world, of course – especially because Chin and Rus are able to liquidate any counter-forces that attempt to create or maintain "book-ends.

The actual spoken words to the Senate of Mr. Michell are very significant, as the removal of them from the ostensibly real, but actually false, State Department "Transcript" implies. Foolish Mr. Michell! He accidentally spoke the true objective of US foreign policy and also the domestic objective – total bamboozlement of the US population "prepare the country for " (Obvious, world war against the Heartland states that fail to "cooperate" (surrender).

People ought to read the pdf what Michell actually spoke all of it and consider the logical implications. Michell has a big mouth Good. He confirms the dark truths

The guilty according to circumstantial evidence has confessed his guilt so to say; confirming the crime

An Israeli-Saudi "Greater Israel" dividing Syria between Saud and zion is of course a goal that in effect would be a "book-end".

Too late now as it is clear that Syrian skies are probably going to soon be "no-fly-zone" for foreign invaders

Then will come the "pitch-forks", as Napoleon's retreat from Moscow illustrated

OlyaPola , September 16, 2018 at 04:25

"If I understand you correctly, then yes, some imagine that a static situation can exist. This a natural but delusional way of seeing the world"

Absolutes including stasis don't exist but the belief of others in book-ends including extensive foreign bases are lands of opportunities for others facilitating pitch forking without extensive travel.

Consequently some perceive that the opponents have hopes and wishes which they seek to represent as "strategies" and "tactics" and some opportunities of lateral challenge derived there-from.

Some would hold that the opponents' have a greater assay of the rubbing sticks school of thermo-dynamics in "their" amalga of perception, in some regards even less perceptive than Heraclitus although Heraclitus lived in his time/interactions as the interaction below suggests.

One of the consequences is the opponents tendency to bridge doubt by belief to attain comfort through iteration and subsequent projection, facilitating lateral opportunities for others with greater perception of fission/metamorphosis/transcendence including the "unintended consequences" -at least in the opponents' perception – without resort to Mr. Heisenberg's deliberations, leading to some of the opponents resorting to snake-oil sales techniques suggesting that their intent/purpose was always what they perceived to be the concept/construct "chaos".

A further illustration of this and how it was/is not limited to present opponents citing trajectories during the period 1968 – 1973 and some subsequent consequences was broadcast through this portal on the 14th of September 2018 but not "published" possibly in ignorance of Mr. Bulgakov's contention that manuscripts don't burn.

The examples used were detente on the bases of spheres of influence agreed by the Politburo despite contrary advice from many agencies, the strategy of the PLO and half-life of these beliefs in the strategies of Hamas.

Detente on the basis of sphere of influence facilitated fiat currency, fiat politics, and fiat re-branding – "neo-liberalism" -, colonial projects in Western Asia, and how opening Pandora's box was/is only perceived as wholly a disadvantage for those seeking to deny lateral process (Stop the Empires War on Russia slogan being a useful example) and those not so immersed helped facilitate the ongoing transcendence of the "Soviet Union" by the Russian Federation – the title being a notice of intent that opponents perceived as the "End of History" as functions of their framing and projection.

OlyaPola , September 16, 2018 at 07:51

Some hold that New York, New York was so good they named it twice, whilst some others wonder whether they named it twice to make it easier for the inhabitants to locate.

Following the precautionary principle I attach below a further illustration of :

" . the opponents have hopes and wishes which they seek to represent as "strategies" and "tactics" and some opportunities of lateral challenge derived there-from ..

"One of the consequences is the opponents tendency to bridge doubt by belief to attain comfort through iteration and subsequent projection, facilitating lateral opportunities for others with greater perception of fission/metamorphosis/transcendence including the "unintended consequences" -at least in the opponents' perception – without resort to Mr. Heisenberg's deliberations, leading to some of the opponents resorting to snake-oil sales techniques suggesting that their intent/purpose was always what they perceived to be the concept/construct "chaos".

which was alluded to in the "unpublished" broadcast which referenced

1. "The "nation-state" as a fundamental unit of man's organized life has ceased to be the principal creative force: International banks and multinational corporations are acting and planning in terms that are far in advance of the political concepts of the nation-state." ~ Zbigniew Brzezinski, Between Two Ages, 1970.

2. Mr. P.C. Roberts' Alienation in the USSR (1971)

3. Mr Andrei Amalrik's Can the Soviet Union last until 1984 (1969).

in illustration of interactive amalga which some call Russiagate, presumably because the water had flowed but apparently not under the bridge.

The recent US presidential election process including the "outcomes" were relatively easy to predict
and required no encouragement from outside – doing "nothing" being a trajectory of doing for those not trapped in the can do/must do conflation.

Some don't understand Russian very well and so instead of understanding Mr. Putin's remark that Mr. Trump was "colourful" which has connotations to some with facility in the Russian culture/language, some sought to bridge doubt by belief to attain expectation on the basis of "plausible belief".

An increasing sum of some are no longer so immersed as illustrated in

https://www.rt.com/shows/on-contact/438556-america-book-conversation-economy/

whilst perceptual frames often have significant half-lives.

exiled off mainstreet , September 14, 2018 at 00:42

This is a great series of articles and the comments, including those having reservations, are intelligent. Since those comments appearing not to appear later seem to have appeared, mechanical difficulties of some sort seem to have been what occurred. I hope Mr. Tedesky, one of the most valued commentators writing in the comments, continues his work.

Dennis Etler , September 13, 2018 at 21:05

Patrick Lawrence's essay makes perfect sense only when it is applied to US foreign policy since the end of WW2. It is conventional wisdom that the US is now engaged in Cold War 2.0. In fact, Cold War 2.0 is an extension of Cold War 1.0. There was merely a 20 year interregnum between 1990 and 2010. Most analysts think that Cold War 1.0 was an ideological war between "Communism" and "Democracy". The renewal of the Cold War against both Russia and China however shows that the ideological war between East and West was really a cover for the geopolitical war between the two. Russia, China and Iran are the main geopolitical enemies of the US as they stand in the way of the global, imperialist hegemony of the US. In order to control the global periphery, i.e. the developing world and their emerging economies, the US must contain and defeat the big three. This was as true in 1948 as it is in 2018. Thus, what's happening today under Trump is no different than what occurred under Truman in 1948. Whatever differences exist are mere window dressing.

Rob Roy , September 15, 2018 at 00:16

Mr. Etler,
I think you are mostly right except in the first Cold War, the Soviets and US Americans were both involved in this "war." What you call Cold War 2.0 is in the minds and policies of only the US. Russian is not in any way currently like the Soviet Union, yet the US acts in all aspects of foreign attitude and policy as though that (very unpleasant period in today's Russians' minds) still exists. It does not. You says there was "merely a 20 year interregnum" and things have picked up and continued as a Cold War. Only in the idiocy of the USA, certainly not in the minds of Russian leadership, particularly Putin's who now can be distinguished as the most logical, realistic and competent leader in the world.
Thanks to H. Clinton being unable to become president, we have a full blown Russiagate which the MSM propaganda continues to spread. There is no Cold War 2.0. It's a fallacy to create a false flag for regime change in Russia. Ms. Clinton, the Kagan family, the MIC, etc., figure if we can take out Yanukovich and replace him with Fascists/Nazis, what could stop us from doing the same to Russia. The good news: all empires fail.

Maxwell Quest , September 13, 2018 at 13:41

"This is the logic of spoilage as a substitute for foreign policy. Among its many consequences are countless lost opportunities for global stability."

Mr. Lawrence is much too accommodating with his analysis. Imagine, linking US "foreign policy" in the same thought as "global stability", as if the two were somehow related. On the contrary, "global instability" seems to be our foreign policy goal, especially for those regions that pose a threat to US hegemony. Why? Because it is difficult to extract a region's wealth when its population is united behind a stable government that can't be bought off.

Walter , September 13, 2018 at 13:30

US is attempting to stop a process, to prevent Change see https://www.fort-russ.com/2017/10/v-golstein-end-of-cold-war-and/

Conjuring up Heraclitus..Time is a River, constantly changing. And we face downstream, unable to see the Future and gazing upon the Past.

The attempt has an effect, many effects, but it cannot stop Time.

The Russian and the Chinese have clinched the unification of the Earth Island, "Heartland" This ended the ability to control global commerce by means of navies – the methods of the Sea Peoples over the last 500 years are now failed. The US has no way of even seeing this fact other than force and violence to restore the status quo ante .

Thus World War, as we see

Recollecting Heraclitus again, the universe is populated by opposites as we see, China and Russia represent a cathodic opposite to the US

OlyaPola , September 14, 2018 at 09:38

"Conjuring up Heraclitus "

"And we face downstream, unable to see the Future and gazing upon the Past."

Time is a synonym of interaction the perception of which and opportunities derived therefrom being functions of analysing interactions which require notions and analyses of upstream-perceived transition point (similar to the concept/construct zero)-downstream lateral processes, which Heraclitus perceived and practiced.

Heraclitus lived in a previous time/interaction and the perception and uses of thermodynamics have laterally changed since Heraclitus' time.

Omniscience can never exist in any lateral system, but time/interaction has facilitated the increase of perceptions and lateral opportunities to facilitate various futures and their encouragement through processes of fission – the process of strategy formulation, strategy implementation, strategy evaluation, and strategy modulation refers.

Framing including attempts to deny agency to others and hence interaction thereby denying time, leads to strategic myopia, and when outcomes vary from expectations/hopes/wishes lead the myopic to attempt to bridge doubt by belief to attain comfort.

Categorical imperatives are kant facilitating can't, best left to Kant, although apparently some are loathe to agree.

"The US has no way of even seeing this fact other than force and violence to restore the status quo ante ."

The temporary socio-economic arrangement misrepresented/branded as "The United States of America" has a vested interest in seeking to deny time/interaction including through "exceptionalism" and a history of flailings and consequences derived therefrom.

"Recollecting Heraclitus again, the universe is populated by opposites as we see, China and Russia represent a cathodic opposite to the US "

As above, Heraclitus lived in a previous time and the perception and uses of thermodynamics have laterally changed since Heraclitus' time although apparently not informing the perceptions and practices of some.

Understandably Heraclitus sometimes relied within his framing on notions of moments of stasis/absolutes (steady states) such as opposites, where as like in all areas of thermo-dynamics a more modern framework would include the notions of amalga with varying interactive half-lives.

It would appear that your contribution is also subject to such "paradox" as in "China and Russia represent a cathodic opposite to the US "

Perhaps a more illuminating but more complex formulation would be found in :

"In other parts of planet earth the assay of amalga and their varying interactive half-lives differ from those asserted to exist within the temporary socio-economic arrangements misrepresented/branded as "The United States of America" thereby facilitating opportunities to transcend coercive relationships such as those practiced by the temporary socio-economic arrangements misrepresented/branded as "The United States of America", by co-operative socio-economic relations conditioned by the half-lives of perceptions and practices derived therefrom.

In part that contributed and continues to contribute to the lateral process of transcendence of the "Soviet Union" by the Russian Federation previously leading to a limited debate whether to nominate Mr. Brezhinsky, Mr.Clinton, Mr. Fukuyama or Mr. Wolfowitz for the Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts facilitating the transcendence of the temporary socio-economic arrangements misrepresented/branded as "The United States of America".

Jeff Harrison , September 13, 2018 at 13:29

I guess I missed this one, Patrick. Great overview but let me put it in a slightly different context. You start with the end of the cold war but I don't. I could go all the way back to the early days of the country and our proclamation of manifest destiny. The US has long thought that it was the one ring to rule them all. But for most of that time the strength of individual members of the rest of the world constrained the US from running amok. That constraint began to be lifted after the ruling clique in Europe committed seppuku in WWI. It was completely lifted after WWII. But that was 75 years ago. This is now and most of the world has recovered from the world wide destruction of human and physical capital known as WWII. The US is going to have to learn how to live with constraints again but it will take a shock. The US is going to have to lose at something big time. Europe cancelling the sanctions? The sanctions on Russia don't mean squat to the US but it's costing Europe billions. This highlights the reality that the "Western Alliance" (read NATO) is not really an alliance of shared goals and objectives. It's an alliance of those terrified by fascism and what it can do. They all decided that they needed a "great father" to prevent their excesses again. One wonders if either the world or Europe would really like the US to come riding in like the cavalry to places like Germany, Poland, and Ukraine. Blindly following Washington's directions can be remarkably expensive for Europe and they get nothing but refugees they can't afford. Something will ultimately have to give.

The one thing I was surprised you didn't mention was the US's financial weakness. It's been a long time since the US was a creditor nation. We've been a debtor nation since at least the 80s. The world doesn't need debtor nations and the only reason they need us is the primacy of the US dollar. And there are numerous people hammering away at that.

Gerald Wadsworth , September 13, 2018 at 12:59

Why are we trying to hem in China, Russia and Iran? Petro-dollar hegemony, pure and simple. From our initial deal with Saudi Arabia to buy and sell oil in dollars only, to the chaos we have inflicted globally to retain the dollar's rule and role in energy trading, we are finding ourselves threatened – actually the position of the dollar as the sole trading medium is what is threatened – and we are determined to retain that global power over oil at all costs. With China and Russia making deals to buy and sell oil in their own currencies, we have turned both those counties into our enemies du jour, inventing every excuse to blame them for every "bad thing" that has and will happen, globally. Throw in Syria, Iran, Venezuela, and a host of other countries who want to get out from under our thumb, to those who tried and paid the price. Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, and more. Our failed foreign policy is dictated by controlling, as Donald Rumsfeld once opined, "our oil under their sand." Oil. Pure and simple.

Maxwell Quest , September 13, 2018 at 14:18

I agree, Gerald. Enforcing the petro-dollar system seems to be the mainspring for much of our recent foreign policy militarism. If it were to unravel, the dollar's value would tank, and then how could we afford our vast system of military bases. Death Star's aren't cheap, ya know.

Maxwell Quest , September 13, 2018 at 15:33

I agree, Gerald. Along with ensuring access to "our" off-shore oil fields, enforcing the petro-dollar system is equally significant, and seems to be the mainspring for much of our recent foreign policy militarism. If this system were to unravel, the dollar's value would tank, and then how could we afford our vast system of military bases which make the world safe for democracy? Death Star's aren't cheap, ya know.

Anonymous Coward , September 13, 2018 at 22:40

+1 Gerald Wadsworth. It's not necessarily "Oil pure and simple" but "Currency Pure and Simple." If the US dollar is no longer the world's currency, the US is toast. Also note that anyone trying to retain control of their currency and not letting "The Market" (private banks) totally control them is a Great Devil we need to fight, e.g. Libya and China. And note (2) that Wall Street is mostly an extension of The City; the UK still thinks it owns the entire world, and the UK has been owned by the banks ever since it went off tally sticks

MichaelWme , September 13, 2018 at 12:18

It's called the Thucydides trap. NATO (US/UK/France/Turkey) have said they will force regime change in Syria. Russia says it will not allow regime change in Syria. Fortunately, as a Frenchman and an Austrian explained many years ago, and NATO experts say is true today, regime change in Russia is a simple matter, about the same as Libya or Panamá. I forget the details, but I assume things worked out well for the Frenchman and the Austrian, and will work out about the same for NATO.

Jeff Davis , September 14, 2018 at 12:53

Very dry. Kudos.

Anastasia , September 13, 2018 at 12:04

Putin said years ago, and I cannot quote him, but remember most of it, that it doesn't matter who is the candidate for President, or what his campaign promises are, or how sincere he is in making them, whenever they get in office, it is always the same policy.

Truer words were never spoken, and it is the reason why I know, at least, that Russia did not interfere in the US elections. What would be the point, from his viewpoint, and it is not only just his opinion. You cannot help but see at this point that that he said is obviously true.

TJ , September 13, 2018 at 13:47

What an excellent point. Why bother influencing the elections when it doesn't matter who is elected -- the same policies will continue.

Bart Hansen , September 13, 2018 at 15:43

Anastasia, I saved it: From Putin interview with Le Figaro:

"I have already spoken to three US Presidents. They come and go, but politics stay the same at all times. Do you know why? Because of the powerful bureaucracy. When a person is elected, they may have some ideas. Then people with briefcases arrive, well dressed, wearing dark suits, just like mine, except for the red tie, since they wear black or dark blue ones. These people start explaining how things are done. And instantly, everything changes. This is what happens with every administration."

rosemerry , September 14, 2018 at 08:02

Pres. Putin explained this several times when he was asked about preferring Trump to Hillary Clinton, and he carefully said that he would accept whoever the US population chose, he was used to dealing with Hillary and he knew that very little changed between Administrations. This has been conveniently cast aside by the Dems, and Obama's disgraceful expulsion of Russian diplomats started the avalanche of Russiagate.

James , September 13, 2018 at 09:24

Great to see Patrick Lawrence writing for Consortium News.

He ends his article with: "This is the logic of spoilage as a substitute for foreign policy. Among its many consequences are countless lost opportunities for global stability. "

Speaking of consequences, how about the human toll this foreign policy has taken on so many people in this world. To me, the gravest sin of all.

Bob Van Noy , September 13, 2018 at 08:46

I agree with Patric Lawrence when he states "Personalizing Washington's regression into the role of spoiler by assigning all blame to one man, now Donald Trump, deprives one of deeper understanding." and I also agree that 'Seven decades of global hegemony have left the State Department, Cold War notwithstanding, left the State Department with little to think about other than the simplicities of East-West tension.' But I seriously disagree when he declares that: "The crisis of U.S. foreign policy -- a series of radical missteps -- are systemic. Having little to do with personalities, they pass from one administration to the next with little variance other than at the margins.'' Certainly the missteps are true, but I would argue that the "personalities" are crucial to America's crisis of Foreign Policy. After all it was likely that JFK's American University address was the public declaration of his intention to lead America in the direction of better understanding of Sovereign Rights that likely got him killed. It is precisely those "personalities" that we must understand and identify before we can move on

Skip Scott , September 13, 2018 at 09:35

Bob-

I see what you're saying, but I believe Patrick is also right. Many of the people involved in JFK's murder are now dead themselves, yet the "system" that demands confrontation rather than cooperation continues. These "personalities" are shills for that system, and if they are not so willingly, they are either bribed or blackmailed into compliance. Remember when "Dubya" ran on a "kinder and gentler nation" foreign policy? Obama's "hope and change" that became "more of the same"? And now Trump's views on both domestic and foreign policy seemingly also doing a 180? There are "personalities" behind this "system", and they are embedded in places like the Council on Foreign Relations. The people that run our banking system and the global corporate empire demand the whole pie, they would rather blow up the world than have to share.

Bob Van Noy , September 13, 2018 at 14:42

You're completely right Skip, that's what we all must recognize and ultimately react to, and against.
Thank you.

JWalters , September 13, 2018 at 18:46

I would add that human beings are the key components in this system. The system is built and shaped by them. Some are greedy, lying predators and some are honest and egalitarian. Bob Parry was one of the latter, thankfully.

JWalters , September 13, 2018 at 18:30

Skip, very good points. For those interested further, here's an excellent talk on the bankers behind the manufacutured wars, including the role of the Council on Foreign Relations as a front organization and control mechanism.
"The Shadows of Power; the CFR and decline of America"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=6124&v=wHa1r4nIaug

Joe Tedesky , September 13, 2018 at 09:42

Bob, you are right. I find it most interesting and sad at the same time that in Woodward's new book 'Fear' that he describes a pan 'almost tragic incident' whereas Trump wanted to sign a document removing our missiles and troops out of S Korea, but save for the steady hand of his 'anonymous' staffers who yanked the document off his presidential desk . wow, close one there we almost did something to enforce a peace. Can't have that though, we still have lots to kill in pursue of liberty and freedom and the hegemonic way.

Were these 'anonymous' staffers the grandchildren of the staffers and bureaucracy that undermined other presidents? Would their grandparents know who the Gunmen were on the grassy knoll? Did these interrupters of Executive administrations fudge other presidents dreams and hopes of a peaceful world? And in the end were these instigators rewarded by the war industries they protected?

The problem is, is that this bureaucracy of war has out balanced any other rival agency, as diversity of thought and mission is only to be dealt with if it's good for military purposes. Too much of any one thing can be overbearingly bad for a person, and likewise too much war means your country is doing something wrong.

Bob Van Noy , September 13, 2018 at 14:51

Many thanks Joe, I admire your persistence. Clearly Bob Woodward has been part of the problem rather than the solution. The swamp is deep and murky

JWalters , September 13, 2018 at 18:36

Bob and Joe, here's a solid review of Woodward's book Fear that points out his consistent service to the oligarchy, including giving Trump a pass for killing the Iran deal. Interesting background on Woodward in the comments as well.
https://mondoweiss.net/2018/09/woodward-national-security/

will , September 15, 2018 at 22:30

people have been pointing out that Woodward is the exact kind of guy the CIA would recruit since shortly after Watergate.

O Society , September 13, 2018 at 18:21

The document Gary Cohen removed off Trump's desk – which you can read here – states an intent to end a free trade agreement with South Korea.

"White House aides feared if Trump sent the letter, it could jeopardize a top-secret US program that can detect North Korean missile launches within seven seconds."

Sounds like Trump wanted to play the "I am such a great deal maker, the GREATEST deal maker of all times!" game with the South Koreans. Letter doesn't say anything about withdrawing troops or missiles.

Funny how ***TOP-SECRET US PROGRAMS*** find their way into books and newspapers these days, plentiful as acorns falling out of trees.

Joe Tedesky , September 13, 2018 at 19:59

Thanks for the clarification. Joe

O Society , September 14, 2018 at 13:38

You're welcome, Joe. These things get confusing. Who knows anymore what is real and what isn't?

Trump did indeed say something about ending military exercises and pulling troops out of South Korea. His staff did indeed contradict him on this. It just wasn't in relation to the letter Cohn "misplaced," AFAIK.

Nobody asked me, but if they did, I'd say the US interfered enough in Korean affairs by killing a whole bunch of 'em in the Korean War. Leave'em alone. Let North and South try to work it out. Tired of hearing about "regime change.'

Republicans buck Trump on Korea troop pullout talk

Joe Tedesky , September 13, 2018 at 10:17

Bob once again my comment disappeared I hope someone retrieves it. Joe

Joe Tedesky , September 13, 2018 at 12:24

Here's what I wrote:

Bob, you are right. I find it most interesting and sad at the same time that in Woodward's new book 'Fear' that he describes a pan 'almost tragic incident' whereas Trump wanted to sign a document removing our missiles and troops out of S Korea, but save for the steady hand of his 'anonymous' staffers who yanked the document off his presidential desk . wow, close one there we almost did something to enforce a peace. Can't have that though, we still have lots to kill in pursue of liberty and freedom and the hegemonic way.

Were these 'anonymous' staffers the grandchildren of the staffers and bureaucracy that undermined other presidents? Would their grandparents know who the Gunmen were on the grassy knoll? Did these interrupters of Executive administrations fudge other presidents dreams and hopes of a peaceful world? And in the end were these instigators rewarded by the war industries they protected?

The problem is, is that this bureaucracy of war has out balanced any other rival agency, as diversity of thought and mission is only to be dealt with if it's good for military purposes. Too much of any one thing can be overbearingly bad for a person, and likewise too much war means your country is doing something wrong.

Joe Tedesky , September 13, 2018 at 12:24

Again

Bob, you are right. I find it most interesting and sad at the same time that in Woodward's new book 'Fear' that he describes a pan 'almost tragic incident' whereas Trump wanted to sign a document removing our missiles and troops out of S Korea, but save for the steady hand of his 'anonymous' staffers who yanked the document off his presidential desk . wow, close one there we almost did something to enforce a peace. Can't have that though, we still have lots to kill in pursue of liberty and freedom and the hegemonic way.

Were these 'anonymous' staffers the grandchildren of the staffers and bureaucracy that undermined other presidents? Would their grandparents know who the Gunmen were on the grassy knoll? Did these interrupters of Executive administrations fudge other presidents dreams and hopes of a peaceful world? And in the end were these instigators rewarded by the war industries they protected?

The problem is, is that this bureaucracy of war has out balanced any other rival agency, as diversity of thought and mission is only to be dealt with if it's good for military purposes. Too much of any one thing can be overbearingly bad for a person, and likewise too much war means your country is doing something wrong.

Joe Tedesky , September 13, 2018 at 14:03

Thanks for retrieving my comments sorry for the triplicating of them. Joe

Joe Tedesky , September 13, 2018 at 12:25

3 of my comments disappeared boy does this comment board have issues. I'm beginning to think I'm being targeted.

Deniz , September 13, 2018 at 17:58

Dont take it personally, I see it more of a lawnmower than a scalpel.

rosemerry , September 14, 2018 at 08:36

My comment has disappeared too-it was a reply to anastasia.

Kiwiantz , September 13, 2018 at 08:20

Spoiler Nation of America! You got that dead right! China builds infrastructure in other Countries & doesn't interfere with the citizens & their Sovereignty. Contrast that with the United Spoiler States of America, they run roughshod over overs & just bomb the hell out of Countries & leaves devastation & death wherever they go! And there is something seriously wrong & demented with the US mindset concerning, the attacks on 9/11? In Syria the US has ended up arming & supporting the very same organisation of Al QaedaTerrorists, morphed into ISIS, that hijacked planes & flew them into American targets! During 2017 & now in 2018, it defies belief how warped this US mentality is when ISIS can so easily & on demand, fake a chemical attack to suck in the stupid American Military & it's Airforce & get them to attack Syria, like lackeys taking orders from Terrorist's! The US Airforce is the airforce of Al Qaeda & ISIS! Why? Because the US can't stomach Russia, Syria & Iran winning & defeating Terrorism thus ending this Proxy War they started! Russia can't be allowed to win at any cost because the humiliation & loss of prestige that the US would suffer as a Unipolar Empire would signal the decline & end of this Hegemonic Empire so they must continue to act as a spoiler to put off that inevitable decline! America can't face reality that it's time in the sun as the last Empire, is over!

Sally Snyder , September 13, 2018 at 07:57

Here is what Americans really think about the rabid anti-Russia hysteria coming from Washington:

https://viableopposition.blogspot.com/2018/08/americans-on-russia-will-of-people.html

Washington has completely lost touch with what Main Street America really believes.

Waynes World , September 13, 2018 at 07:37

Finally some words of truth about how we want our way not really democracy. A proper way to look at the world is what you said toward the end a desire to make people's lives better.

mike k , September 13, 2018 at 07:14

Simply put – the US is the world's biggest bully. This needs to stop. Fortunately the bully's intended victims are joining together to defeat it's crazy full spectrum dominance fantasies. Led by Russia and China, we can only hope for the success of the resistance to US aggression.

This political, economic, military struggle is not the only problem the world is facing now, but is has some priority due to the danger of nuclear war. Global pollution, climate disaster, ecological collapse and species extinction must also be urgently dealt with if we are to have a sustainable existence on Earth.

OlyaPola , September 13, 2018 at 04:39

Alpha : "America's three principal adversaries signify the shape of the world to come: a post-Western world of coexistence. But neoliberal and neocon ideology is unable to to accept global pluralism and multipolarity, argues Patrick Lawrence."

Omega: "Among its many consequences are countless lost opportunities for global stability."

Framing is always a limiter of perception.

Among the consequences of the lateral trajectories from Alpha to Omega referenced above, is the "unintended consequence" of the increase of the principal opponents, their resolve and opportunities to facilitate the transcendence of arrangements based on coercion by arrangements based on co-operation.

Opening Pandora's box was/is only perceived as wholly a disadvantage for those seeking to deny lateral process.

JOHN CHUCKMAN , September 13, 2018 at 04:32

Yes, I certainly agree with author's view.

https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2018/07/31/john-chuckman-comment-empire-corrupts-all-the-principles-of-economics-as-well-as-principles-of-ethics-and-good-government-there-is-nothing-good-to-say-about-empire-and-the-american-one-is-no-excep/

https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2018/07/22/john-chuckman-comment-how-american-politics-really-work-why-there-are-terrible-candidates-and-constant-wars-and-peoples-problems-are-ignored-why-heroes-like-julian-assange-are-persecuted-and-r/

HomoSapiensWannaBe , September 13, 2018 at 08:23

John Chuckman,
Wow. Thanks! I have just begun reading your commentaries this week and I am impressed with how clearly you analyze and summarize key points about many topics.

Thank you so much for writing what are often the equivalent of books, but condensed into easy to read and digest summaries.

I have ordered your book and look forward to reading that.

Cheers from Southeast USA!

[Jan 04, 2020] Russia would obviously provide Iran with military supplies, intelligence, and diplomatic support, making any invasion attempt very costly for the US.

Jan 04, 2020 | thesaker.is

Nate on January 03, 2020 , · at 8:32 pm EST/EDT

Regarding the talk of a hypothetical "Iran War", I do not think Washington will actually try invading Iran, for a couple of reasons.

1. The US does not currently have enough troops to occupy Iran. It would require a military draft. This would cause massive opposition inside the USA (easily the biggest internal US political turmoil since the Vietnam War). And the youngest American adults that would get drafted are the least religious US generation ever (i.e. they are not Evangelical fundamentalists who want to throw their lives away for "Israel" and the "End Times").

2. Where would Washington launch the invasion from? Iraq? The US will soon be asked to leave Iraq, and if Washington does not comply it will very quickly turn into another quagmire for the US just like it was in the 2000s. And if they tried invading from Afghanistan, Iran could always arm the Taliban. And besides, would Pakistan really allow the US military to pass through its territory to Afghanistan to invade Iran? I think not.

3. Russia would obviously provide Iran with military supplies, intelligence, and diplomatic support, making any invasion attempt very costly for the US.

Therefore, Washington's options are rather limited to missile strikes, CIA funded terrorist attacks, and other lesser forms of meddling.

[Jan 03, 2020] A new brilliant diplomatic strategy of Trump administration: Threatening Iran by killing Iraqis

"USA clusterfuck express hurtles headlong down the track for a rendezvous with disaster: War with a united Iraq and Iran, with the latter backed by the Russians and Chinese. https://www.checkpointasia.net/iraqi-pm-told-trump-gang-they-didnt-have-permission-to-bomb-iraqi-paramilitaries-they-did-it-anyway/ "
Jan 03, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

et Al January 2, 2020 at 10:32 am

Sic Semper tyrannis: Our Embassy in Baghdad – TTG
https://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/

For weeks, it was Iranian consulates and facilities that bore the brunt of Iraqi popular unrest. Iran reacted with restraint. With our lethal attacks on the Kata'ib Hezbollah, we changed that. Pompeo, Esper and Trump are keeping up the trash talking. Threatening Iran by killing Iraqis whose ass was that brilliant diplomatic strategy pulled from?
####

Plenty more at the link.

Have dick, will step on!

[Jan 03, 2020] If you previously have doubts that Trump is senile warmonger, not you have a definite proof

Bombing a civilian airport in another country in order to assassinate Iranian and Iraq leaders is a very bad diplomacy ;-)
It might well be that today this idiot blow up his chances fro reelection because revenge is dish that should be served cold and Iran can postpone it for 11 months or so.
What is interesting is that neoliberal MSM are glad and still talking about Zelensky and impeachment. What a country ! It looks like the decade of the twenties can be the decade of another World War. "In every war the first casualty is truth."
Jan 03, 2020 | www.theamericanconservative.com

Trump think that the war with Iran will be another cake walk, like in Afghanistan and Iraq. This is a proof that he is a senile idiot.

[Jan 03, 2020] I guess Trump decided had to make the 1914-vintage Hapsburgs look relatively competent

Bombing a civilian airport in another country in order to assassinate Iranian and Iraq leaders is a very bad diplomacy ;-)
It might well be that today this idiot blow up his chances fro reelection because revenge is dish that should be served cold and Iran can postpone it for 11 months or so.
What is interesting is that neoliberal MSM are glad and still talking about Zelensky and impeachment. What a country ! It looks like the decade of the twenties can be the decade of another World War. "In every war the first casualty is truth."
Jan 03, 2020 | www.theamericanconservative.com

I guess somebody had to make the 1914-vintage Hapsburgs look relatively competent,

Trump think that the war with Iran will be another cake walk, like in Afghanistan and Iraq. This is a proof that he is a senile idiot.

[Jan 03, 2020] Russian pranksters strike again Fake Greta Thunberg convinces eager US politician that she has dirt on Trump -- RT USA News

Jan 03, 2020 | www.rt.com

US Congresswoman Maxine Waters has allegedly fallen for a prank call in which she thought activist Greta Thunberg was offering her a tape of Donald Trump confessing to pressuring Ukraine into investigating his political rivals. YouTube pranksters Vladimir Kuznetsov and Alexey Stolyarov, who go by the names Vovan and Lexus, are claiming they tricked Waters (Dem-Calif.) into thinking she was speaking to teen climate change activist Greta Thunberg.

Vovan and Lexus made names for themselves by previously pranking Congressman Adam Schiff (Dem-Calif.) into thinking there were nude photos of US President Donald Trump that Schiff could get his hands on. They also claim to have pranked Waters two years ago, in a phone call where one posed as Ukraine's prime minister.

Though Waters herself has not responded to the new video, the woman at the other end of the phone identifies herself as the congresswoman and sounds an awful lot like her.

In the call, the pranksters pretend to be Thunberg and her father, with help from a female colleague, and claim to have proof that Trump pressured the Ukrainian government into investigating his political rivals, something Democrats have claimed, for months now, is true.

[Jan 03, 2020] Russian pranksters strike again Fake Greta Thunberg convinces eager US politician that she has dirt on Trump -- RT USA News

Jan 03, 2020 | www.rt.com

US Congresswoman Maxine Waters has allegedly fallen for a prank call in which she thought activist Greta Thunberg was offering her a tape of Donald Trump confessing to pressuring Ukraine into investigating his political rivals. YouTube pranksters Vladimir Kuznetsov and Alexey Stolyarov, who go by the names Vovan and Lexus, are claiming they tricked Waters (Dem-Calif.) into thinking she was speaking to teen climate change activist Greta Thunberg.

Vovan and Lexus made names for themselves by previously pranking Congressman Adam Schiff (Dem-Calif.) into thinking there were nude photos of US President Donald Trump that Schiff could get his hands on. They also claim to have pranked Waters two years ago, in a phone call where one posed as Ukraine's prime minister.

Though Waters herself has not responded to the new video, the woman at the other end of the phone identifies herself as the congresswoman and sounds an awful lot like her.

In the call, the pranksters pretend to be Thunberg and her father, with help from a female colleague, and claim to have proof that Trump pressured the Ukrainian government into investigating his political rivals, something Democrats have claimed, for months now, is true.

[Jan 03, 2020] I guess Trump decided had to make the 1914-vintage Hapsburgs look relatively competent

Bombing a civilian airport in another country in order to assassinate Iranian and Iraq leaders is a very bad diplomacy ;-)
It might well be that today this idiot blow up his chances fro reelection because revenge is dish that should be served cold and Iran can postpone it for 11 months or so.
What is interesting is that neoliberal MSM are glad and still talking about Zelensky and impeachment. What a country ! It looks like the decade of the twenties can be the decade of another World War. "In every war the first casualty is truth."
Jan 03, 2020 | www.theamericanconservative.com

I guess somebody had to make the 1914-vintage Hapsburgs look relatively competent,

Trump think that the war with Iran will be another cake walk, like in Afghanistan and Iraq. This is a proof that he is a senile idiot.

[Jan 03, 2020] If you previously have doubts that Trump is senile warmonger, not you have a definite proof

Bombing a civilian airport in another country in order to assassinate Iranian and Iraq leaders is a very bad diplomacy ;-)
It might well be that today this idiot blow up his chances fro reelection because revenge is dish that should be served cold and Iran can postpone it for 11 months or so.
What is interesting is that neoliberal MSM are glad and still talking about Zelensky and impeachment. What a country ! It looks like the decade of the twenties can be the decade of another World War. "In every war the first casualty is truth."
Jan 03, 2020 | www.theamericanconservative.com

Trump think that the war with Iran will be another cake walk, like in Afghanistan and Iraq. This is a proof that he is a senile idiot.

[Jan 03, 2020] A new brilliant diplomatic strategy of Trump administration: Threatening Iran by killing Iraqis

"USA clusterfuck express hurtles headlong down the track for a rendezvous with disaster: War with a united Iraq and Iran, with the latter backed by the Russians and Chinese. https://www.checkpointasia.net/iraqi-pm-told-trump-gang-they-didnt-have-permission-to-bomb-iraqi-paramilitaries-they-did-it-anyway/ "
Jan 03, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

et Al January 2, 2020 at 10:32 am

Sic Semper tyrannis: Our Embassy in Baghdad – TTG
https://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/

For weeks, it was Iranian consulates and facilities that bore the brunt of Iraqi popular unrest. Iran reacted with restraint. With our lethal attacks on the Kata'ib Hezbollah, we changed that. Pompeo, Esper and Trump are keeping up the trash talking. Threatening Iran by killing Iraqis whose ass was that brilliant diplomatic strategy pulled from?
####

Plenty more at the link.

Have dick, will step on!

[Jan 03, 2020] #MeTooBots that will scan your personal emails for 'harassment' are an Orwellian misuse of AI by Dr Norman Lewis Dr Norman Lewis

Jan 03, 2020 | www.rt.com

By Dr Norman Lewis, writer, speaker and consultant on innovation and technology, was most recently a Director at PriceWaterhouseCoopers, where he set up and led their crowdsourced innovation service. Prior to this he was the Director of Technology Research at Orange. The rise of so-called #MeTooBots, which can identify certain digital bullying and sexual harassment in the workplace, is a sinister threat to privacy and an attempt to harness science to further a political and cultural offensive. In what must be one of the most sinister developments of the new decade, #MeTooBots, developed by Chicago-based AI firm NextLP, which monitor and flag communications between employees, have been adopted by more than 50 corporations around the world, including law firms in London.

Capitalising on the high-profile movement that arose after allegations against Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein, #MeTooBots might make good opportunist business sense for an AI company. But this is not a development that should be welcomed or sanctioned by AI enthusiasts or society as a whole.

This is not a new and exciting scientific application of the capabilities of AI or algorithmic intelligence.

Instead, it is an attempt to harness science to support the Culture War, to transform it into an all-encompassing presence in constant need of monitoring and scrutiny. This doesn't just threaten privacy, but the legitimacy of AI.

#MeTooBots are based on the assumption that digital bullying and sexual harassment are the default states of workplace environments. What could be wrong with employers protecting their employees in this way? A good start might be an assumption that the people they employ are decent, hard-working, morally sound adults who know right from wrong. That aside, the idea that machine-learning represents a superior form of oversight than human judgment and behavior, turns the world on its head. It simply adds to the misanthropy underpinning the Culture War that assumes human beings (and men in particular) to be inherently flawed, animalistic and suspect.

But this attempt to apply science in this way is not a very intelligent application of artificial intelligence. This is a technology looking for problems to solve rather than the other way around.

Machine learning bots today can only be taught pattern recognition. Understanding or spotting sexual harassment can be a very subtle and difficult thing to do. Algorithms have little capacity to interpret broader cultural or interpersonal dynamics. The only outcome one can safely bet upon is that things will be missed or, more predictably, will lead to over-sensitive interpretations and thus more lawsuits, discrimination and the harassment of employees by their employers.

Also on rt.com Amazon's 'smart' doorbell allows customers to spy on 'minorities minding their own f**ng business'

Any risqué joke, comment on appearance, proposal to go out for drinks, or even the stray mention of a body part will probably be meticulously logged to be used against you at a future date.

#MeTooBots in the workplace will also institutionalize snooping and distrust. The use of AI in this way will transform workplaces into high-tech authoritarian social engineering environments.

For the culture warriors, this will be welcome – as long as they have the upper hand. But for workers it will be an Orwellian nightmare where interpretations of thoughts will now be part of 'normal' workplace interactions. Behaviors will necessarily change. Self-censorship will abound. Instrumental interactions will replace genuine authenticity. Mistrust will be the default.

The final danger is that employee suspicion of their employers will only hamper the further use of AI in the workplace – an innovation that has enormous potential for transforming the workplace of the 21st Century for the better. Just imagine what an office would be like if all the dull, boring and repetitive drudgery of so many jobs were performed by dumb machines rather than dumbed-down human beings. Perhaps we need #BadManagerialDecisionBots instead?

[Jan 03, 2020] Killing Soleimani Pushes the U.S. and Iran Towards War

Notable quotes:
"... Soleimani is a senior Iranian military commander, and he also happens to be one of the more popular public figures inside Iran. Killing him isn't just a major escalation that guarantees reprisals and further destabilizes the region, but it also strengthens hard-liners in Iran enormously. Trump claimed not to want war with Iran, but his actions have proven that he does. No one who wants to avoid war with Iran would order the assassination of a high-ranking Iranian officer. Trump has signaled his willingness to plunge the U.S. into a new war that will be disastrous for our country, Iran, and the entire region. American soldiers, diplomats, and citizens throughout the region are all in much greater danger tonight than they were this morning, and the president is responsible for that. ..."
Jan 03, 2020 | www.theamericanconservative.com

ran hawks have been agitating for open conflict with Iran for years. Tonight, the Trump administration obliged them by assassinating the top IRGC-Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani and the head of Kata'ib Hezbollah in a drone strike in Baghdad:

Hard to understate how big this is

• Qassem Suleimani is Iran's most powerful mil figure in Region
• He runs Iran's proxies in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq
• Both men designated by US as Terrorist
• Muhandis was at US embassy attack protest, calls himself "Suleimani soldier"

-- Joyce Karam (@Joyce_Karam) January 3, 2020

Source in #Iran tells me:
Senior Iranian diplomats are sharing Gen. Qasem Sulaimani's photo along w/death prayers for him. #Iraq

-- Farnaz Fassihi (@farnazfassihi) January 3, 2020

Confirmed officially on Iraq state TV. Both killed pic.twitter.com/toaBJyEcxe

-- Feras Kilani فراس كيلاني (@FerasKilaniBBC) January 3, 2020

U.S. officials tell Reuters that strikes have been carried in Baghdad on Friday out against two targets linked to Iran.

-- Idrees Ali (@idreesali114) January 3, 2020

Reuters reports that a spokesman for the Popular Mobilization Forces in Iraq also confirmed the deaths:

Iranian Major-General Qassem Soleimani, head of the elite Quds Force, and Iraqi militia commander Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis were killed late on Thursday in an air strike on their convoy in Baghdad airport, an Iraqi militia spokesman told Reuters.

Soleimani is a senior Iranian military commander, and he also happens to be one of the more popular public figures inside Iran. Killing him isn't just a major escalation that guarantees reprisals and further destabilizes the region, but it also strengthens hard-liners in Iran enormously. Trump claimed not to want war with Iran, but his actions have proven that he does. No one who wants to avoid war with Iran would order the assassination of a high-ranking Iranian officer. Trump has signaled his willingness to plunge the U.S. into a new war that will be disastrous for our country, Iran, and the entire region. American soldiers, diplomats, and citizens throughout the region are all in much greater danger tonight than they were this morning, and the president is responsible for that.

It is hard to convey how irrational and destructive this latest action is. The U.S. and Iran have been dangerously close to war for months, but the Trump administration has made no effort to deescalate tensions. All that it would take to push the two governments over the brink into open conflict is a reckless attack that the other side cannot ignore. Now the U.S. has launched just such an attack and dared Iran to respond. The response may not come immediately, but we have to assume that it is coming. Killing Soleimani means that the IRGC will presumably consider it open season on U.S. forces all across the region. The Iran obsession has led the U.S. into a senseless new war that it could have easily avoided, and Trump and the Iran hawks own the results.

Trump supporters have often tried to defend the president's poor foreign policy record by saying that he hadn't started any new wars. Well, now he has, and he will be responsible for the consequences to follow.

[Jan 03, 2020] Deconstructing Yearend Trump Regime Big Lies About Iran by Stephen Lendman

Jan 01, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org
Deconstructing Yearend Trump Regime Big Lies About Iran

by Stephen Lendman ( stephenlendman.org – Home – Stephen Lendman )

When US politicians comment about the country's adversaries, a an official narrative harangue of disinformation and Big Lies follows so often these figures likely no longer can distinguish between truth and fiction.

Washington's hostility toward Iran has gone on with nary a letup since its 1979 revolution ended a generation of US-installed tyranny, the country regaining its sovereignty, free from vassal state status.

On Monday, White House envoy for regime change in Iran Brian Hook stuck to the fabricated official narrative in discussing Iran at the State Department.

He falsely called Sunday's Pentagon terror-bombing strikes on Iraqi and Syrian sites "defensive."

They had nothing to do with "protect(ing) American forces and American citizens in Iraq" or Syria, nothing to do with "deterr(ing) Iranian aggression" that doesn't exist and never did throughout Islamic State history -- how the US and its imperial allies operate, not Iran, the region's leading proponent of peace and stability.

Hook lied saying Iraqi Kata'ib Hezbollah paramilitaries (connected to the country's Popular Mobilization Forces) don't serve "the interests of the Iraqi people."

That's precisely what they do, including their earlier involvement in combatting US-supported ISIS.

Hook turned truth on its head, accusing Iran of "run(ning) an expansionist foreign policy" -- what US aggression is all about, not how Tehran operates.

Like other Trump regime officials, he threatened Iran, a nation able to hit back hard against the US and its regional imperial partners if attacked -- why cool-headed Pentagon commanders want no part of war with the country.

Kata'ib Hezbollah, other Iraqi Popular Mobilization Forces, and the vast majority of Iraqi civilians want US occupation of their country ended.

For decades, US direct and proxy aggression, including sanctions war, ravaged the country, killing millions of its people, causing appalling human suffering.

Hook: "(T)he last thing the (US) is looking for is (war) in the Middle East "

Fact: It's raging in multiple theaters, notably Syria and Yemen, once again in Iraq after last Sunday's US aggression, more of the same virtually certain ahead.

State Department official David Schenker participated in Monday's anti-Iran propaganda exercise with Hook.

Claiming the US wants regional de-escalation, not escalation, is polar opposite reality on the ground in all its war theaters and in other countries where it conducts subversion against their governments and people.

The best way the US could protect its citizens worldwide is by ending aggressive wars, bringing home its troops, closing its empire of bases used as platforms for hostilities against other nations, and declaring a new era of peace and cooperative relations with other countries.

Based on its belligerent history throughout the 19th and 20th centuries to the present day, this change of policy, if adopted, would be un-American.

Hook: "Iran has been threatening the region for the last 40 years" -- what's true about US aggression, not how Tehran operates anywhere.

Hook: Iran "is facing its worst financial crisis and its worst political crisis in its 40-year history."

Fact: US war on the country by other means, economic terrorism, bears full responsibility for its economic hardships, intended to harm its people, including Trump regime efforts to block exports of food, drugs and medical equipment to Iran.

Fact: Hostile US actions toward Iran and countless other nations are flagrant international law breaches -- the world community doing nothing to counter its hot wars and by other means.

Fact: The Iranian "model" prioritizes peace and stability. Endless war on humanity is how the US operates globally -- at home and abroad.

Fact: Iran isn't an "outlaw regime," the description applying to the US, its key NATO allies, Israel, the Saudis, and their rogue partners in high crimes.

Hostile US actions are all about offense, unrelated to defense at a time when Washington's only enemies are invented as a pretext for endless wars of aggression.

The US under both right wings of its war party poses an unparalleled threat to everyone everywhere.

As long as its aggression goes unchallenged, the threat of humanity-destroying nuclear war exists.

It could start anywhere -- in the Middle East, the Indo-Pacific, or against Russia by accident or design.

On New Year's day 2020, I'd love to be optimistic about what lies ahead.

As long as Republican and Dem hardliners pursue dominance over other nations by brute force and other hostile means, hugely dangerous tinderbox conditions could ignite an uncontrollable firestorm anywhere.

VISIT MY WEBSITE: stephenlendman.org ( Home – Stephen Lendman ). Contact at [email protected] .

My newest book as editor and contributor is titled "Flashpoint in Ukraine: How the US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III."

www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html Stephen Lendman

Stephen Lendman
Stephen Lendman was born in 1934 in Boston, MA. In 1956, he received a BA from Harvard University. Two years of US Army service followed, then an MBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in 1960. After working seven years as a marketing research analyst, he joined the Lendman Group family business in 1967. He remained there until retiring at year end 1999. Writing on major world and national issues began in summer 2005. In early 2007, radio hosting followed. Lendman now hosts the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network three times weekly. Distinguished guests are featured. Listen live or archived. Major world and national issues are discussed. Lendman is a 2008 Project Censored winner and 2011 Mexican Journalists Club international journalism award recipient.

[Jan 03, 2020] Russian pranksters strike again Fake Greta Thunberg convinces eager US politician that she has dirt on Trump -- RT USA News

Jan 03, 2020 | www.rt.com

US Congresswoman Maxine Waters has allegedly fallen for a prank call in which she thought activist Greta Thunberg was offering her a tape of Donald Trump confessing to pressuring Ukraine into investigating his political rivals. YouTube pranksters Vladimir Kuznetsov and Alexey Stolyarov, who go by the names Vovan and Lexus, are claiming they tricked Waters (Dem-Calif.) into thinking she was speaking to teen climate change activist Greta Thunberg.

Vovan and Lexus made names for themselves by previously pranking Congressman Adam Schiff (Dem-Calif.) into thinking there were nude photos of US President Donald Trump that Schiff could get his hands on. They also claim to have pranked Waters two years ago, in a phone call where one posed as Ukraine's prime minister.

Though Waters herself has not responded to the new video, the woman at the other end of the phone identifies herself as the congresswoman and sounds an awful lot like her.

In the call, the pranksters pretend to be Thunberg and her father, with help from a female colleague, and claim to have proof that Trump pressured the Ukrainian government into investigating his political rivals, something Democrats have claimed, for months now, is true.

[Jan 03, 2020] I guess Trump decided had to make the 1914-vintage Hapsburgs look relatively competent

Bombing a civilian airport in another country in order to assassinate Iranian and Iraq leaders is a very bad diplomacy ;-)
It might well be that today this idiot blow up his chances fro reelection because revenge is dish that should be served cold and Iran can postpone it for 11 months or so.
What is interesting is that neoliberal MSM are glad and still talking about Zelensky and impeachment. What a country ! It looks like the decade of the twenties can be the decade of another World War. "In every war the first casualty is truth."
Jan 03, 2020 | www.theamericanconservative.com

I guess somebody had to make the 1914-vintage Hapsburgs look relatively competent,

Trump think that the war with Iran will be another cake walk, like in Afghanistan and Iraq. This is a proof that he is a senile idiot.

[Jan 03, 2020] The Russian Foreign Ministry recently opened and published all the archives, including to so-called "secret protocols". There is nothing in that to condemn Russia, even Stalin comes out smelling like a rose.

Jan 03, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

yalensis January 3, 2020 at 3:52 pm

What's not to defend?
"It contained secret protocols in which the two countries agreed to invade Poland jointly and to divide Poland and the Baltic states between them in a sharing of the spoils of aggressive war."
Totally untrue. Northern Star is just spouting Westie propaganda.
The Russian Foreign Ministry recently opened and published all the archives, including to so-called "secret protocols". There is nothing in that to condemn Russia, even Stalin comes out smelling like a rose.
I covered some of this in my blog post here .
By the time the Red Army marched throug the "corridor", there was no Polish government left to tell them no. The Poles did it to themselves, basically. They had an opportunity to ally with the Soviets against Germany. Instead they did their usual stubborn, stupid thing and brought it all upon themselves.

Like Like

Northern Star January 3, 2020 at 4:28 pm
I merely posted a link that' speaks for itself.
I don't propagate Western propaganda silly motherfucker
Never have never will.
Bye now!

Like Like

Patient Observer January 3, 2020 at 5:29 pm
You cock sucking piece of shit! Worthless scum bag of oozing puss! A moronic failure of single cell life unable to form a thought worth uttering yet that doesn't stop you!

Thought I would give your approach a try. Nope, not for me.

Like Like

Mark Chapman January 3, 2020 at 4:15 pm
Must Putin be 'defending the Nazi-Soviet pact'? Or could he be defending the USSR's having made an agreement after it approached all its erstwhile allies to stand with it against the Nazis, and got only silence? Is he defending the substance of the pact itself, or the fact that such an agreement had to be made after every attempt to avoid it through the building of an alliance to resist the Nazis?

Like Like

Northern Star January 3, 2020 at 5:35 pm
I dunno.Mark
Why don't we look at exactly WTF-step by step-Russia did between MR.snd Barbarossa.

Rhetoric defending VVP Is fine and well .but let's not get it It mixed up with historical FACTS

[Jan 03, 2020] In killing General Suleimani, Mr. Trump took an action that Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama had rejected, fearing it would lead to war between the United States and Iran.

Jan 03, 2020 | www.nytimes.com

Iran's foreign minister, Javad Zarif, called the killing of General Suleimani an act of "international terrorism" and warned it was "extremely dangerous & a foolish escalation."

"The US bears responsibility for all consequences of its rogue adventurism," Mr. Zarif tweeted.

... ... ...

"From Iran's perspective, it is hard to imagine a more deliberately provocative act," said Robert Malley, the president and chief executive of the International Crisis Group. "And it is hard to imagine that Iran will not retaliate in a highly aggressive manner."

"Whether President Trump intended it or not, it is, for all practical purposes, a declaration of war," added Mr. Malley, who served as White House coordinator for the Middle East, North Africa and the gulf region in the Obama administration.

Some United States officials and Trump administration advisers offered a less dire scenario, arguing that the show of force might convince Iran that its acts of aggression against American interests and allies have grown too dangerous, and that a president the Iranians may have come to see as risk-averse is in fact willing to escalate.

One senior administration official said the president's senior advisers had come to worry that Mr. Trump had sent too many signals -- including when he called off a planned missile strike in late June -- that he did not want a war with Iran.

Tracking Mr. Suleimani's location at any given time had long been a priority for the American and Israeli spy services and militaries. Current and former American commanders and intelligence officials said that Thursday night's attack, specifically, drew upon a combination of highly classified information from informants, electronic intercepts, reconnaissance aircraft and other surveillance.

The strike killed five people, including the pro-Iranian chief of an umbrella group for Iraqi militias, Iraqi television reported and militia officials confirmed. The militia chief, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, was a strongly pro-Iranian figure.

The public relations chief for the umbrella group, the Popular Mobilization Forces in Iraq, Mohammed Ridha Jabri, was also killed.

American officials said that multiple missiles hit the convoy in a strike carried out by the Joint Special Operations Command.

American military officials said they were aware of a potentially violent response from Iran and its proxies, and were taking steps they declined to specify to protect American personnel in the Middle East and elsewhere around the world.

Two other people were killed in the strike, according to a general at the Baghdad joint command, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the news media.

... ... ...

The United States and Iran have long been involved in a shadow war in battlegrounds across the Middle East -- including in Iraq, Yemen and Syria. The tactics have generally involved using proxies to carry out the fighting, providing a buffer from a direct confrontation between Washington and Tehran that could draw America into yet other ground conflict with no discernible endgame.

The potential for a regional conflagration was a basis of the Obama administration's push for a 2015 agreement that froze Iran's nuclear program in return for sanctions relief.

Mr. Trump withdrew from the deal in 2018, saying that Mr. Obama's agreement had emboldened Iran, giving it economic breathing room to plow hundreds of millions of dollars into a campaign of violence around the region. Mr. Trump responded with a campaign of "maximum pressure" that began with punishing new economic sanctions, which began a new era of brinkmanship and uncertainly, with neither side knowing just how far the other was willing to escalate violence and risk a wider war. In recent days, it has spilled into the military arena.

General Suleimani once described himself to a senior Iraqi intelligence official as the "sole authority for Iranian actions in Iraq," the official later told American officials in Baghdad.

In a speech denouncing Mr. Trump, General Suleimani was even less discreet -- and openly mocking.

"We are near you, where you can't even imagine," he said. "We are ready. We are the man of this arena."

[Jan 03, 2020] Sheldon Adelson the rest of neocons got their wish. Now they will face consequnces

Jan 03, 2020 | turcopolier.typepad.com

Qasem Suleimani, Assassinated In US Airstrike By Walrus. - Sic Semper Tyrannis

Multiple news sources are reporting the assassination, near Baghdad Airport, of Suliemani, the leader of Irans Quds force. Some commentators are saying that this is "bigger than killing Bin Laden". According to the Pentagon, the assassination was at the direct command of President Trump. I am afraid this event, allegedly taken to forestall further attacks on US forces in Iraq, may have unintended consequences.

To me, the logic of Trump in doing this is unfathomable. Did he intend to provoke Iran and the Russians? What did he expect to achieve? Clearly the stress on the Iraqi Government is going to be extreme. How has this assassination improved the security of U.S. forces in the region? What does the Committee think?

Posted at 02:12 AM | Permalink

Reblog (0) Comments

Dom , 03 January 2020 at 02:27 AM

Well, it look that Israel will have a war with Iran.
Garcia , 03 January 2020 at 02:31 AM
God Bless his Soul, Trump is a coward
blue peacock , 03 January 2020 at 02:59 AM
Walrus

I agree the stress on the Iraqi government will be intense. Will they force the US out? Did Trump order this expecting that to happen? Or did he order this at the behest of Bibi, MbS and the neocon contingent (Pompeo, Haspel, Esper, Kushner) he has surrounded himself with, not really thinking through the implications.

The one scenario that I speculate that took place is the low-level "warfare" between US forces and the various Iraqi/Iranian/Syrian militias got escalated. And Trump was being "briefed" that it was all Iranian "influenced". That would have fit his generally anti-Iran mindset and then he was presented with this "target of opportunity" and given seconds to decide and he went with the flow to pull the trigger.

My sense is that while Iran will heat up the rhetoric, they won't retaliate militarily in a direct and open manner. Instead they'll pile the pressure on the Iraqi government to expel US forces.

MisanthropicUSA , 03 January 2020 at 03:13 AM
The Mahdi Army is reportedly being reactivated, presumably they have some more combat experience now thanks to the ISIS war. We have some 5,000 troops in the country and God knows how many citizens there along with whatever we have in Syria. The Iranians are pissed and want their revenge. The Iraqis are pissed too as is Hezbollah I'd imagine. I fear that this is going to be bad.

What the hell was Trump thinking...

LondonBob , 03 January 2020 at 03:27 AM
Who is driving US policy in the region now, who is Trump listening to?

Once again the neocons have pulled off the seemingly impossible, imagine have the power and cunning to have a country use their own servicemen as bait and cannon fodder to serve the interests of a foreign country. Another nail in the American coffin, unfortunately.

Amir , 03 January 2020 at 03:29 AM
I guess all Col. Lang's effort for the past 2 decades have been undermined. There is no way that the assassination of a member of an Iranian equivalent of JCS will be tolerated. The Iranian government will consider a lack of response to be interpreted as an invitation for more adventurism by Trump admin. The whole talk about covert action is ignorant as the Iranian foreign minister has already stated that there will be consequences.
The dice has been cast and at this point it really doesn't matter which faction within Trump's entourage managed to start a conflict: the king-of-gamblers, Sheldon Adelson & the rest of NeoConLibs, got their wish.
Not happy about it but nothing to do to reverse course.
jonst , 03 January 2020 at 05:08 AM
I could it see it playing out in two general ways. Clearly, this could make things much worse, across the entire Middle East. That's a given. On the other hand.....

It MIGHT be so that there are a lot of people in Iraq, Iran (yes, Iran) silently (for now, if they know what is good for them in the short run) celebrating this hit. A lot of Iraqis and Iranians have been killed by this guy's forces in the last few months. Alone. Who do we think the people in Iraq and Iran have been protesting against? Al Quds. And there might even be a few people in the Iranian govt who think now is the time to reduce, dramatically, the influence of Al Quds. These facts should not be dismissed out of hand. But again, on the other hand....
it may be deemed unholy and unpatriotic to celebrate taking out this SOB...as the lament might go, 'he's an SOB but he;s our SOB!'.

I know this...I would be tempted to evacuate our embassy. Now. Like starting yesterday.

We'll see. But I shed no tears for this guy. Nor do I celebrate it. Because either way...it is grim. Now, if there was someone like the Col exploiting the vacuum and shock waves certain to come in the wake of this...I would see opportunities. I repeat, a lot of people in the Middle East did not like this guy or his organization...even if they don't like the US too. But that kind of thing requires a mind that plays chess. And can kill, too. And I don't see too many minds, and souls, like that in DC anymore.

[Jan 03, 2020] Skirpals, OPCW, and MH17, Assange, Russian athletic doping. Are there any believers still out there?

Jan 03, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Robert Fisk via The Independent,

In the very early spring of this year, I gave a lecture to European military personnel interested in the Middle East. It was scarcely a year since Bashar al-Assad's alleged use of chlorine gas against the civilian inhabitants of the Damascus suburb of Douma on 7 April 2018, in which 43 people were said to have been killed.

Few present had much doubt that the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), which represents 193 member states around the world, would soon confirm in a final report that Assad was guilty of a war crime which had been condemned by Donald Trump, Emmanuel Macron and Theresa May.

But at the end of my talk, a young Nato officer who specialises in chemical weapons – he was not British – sought me out for a private conversation.

"The OPCW are not going to admit all they know," he said. "They've already censored their own documents."

I could not extract any more from him. He smiled and walked away, leaving me to guess what he was talking about. If Nato had doubts about the OPCW, this was a very serious matter.

When it published its final report in March this year, the OPCW said that testimony, environmental and biomedical samples and toxicological and ballistic analyses provided "reasonable grounds" that "the use of a toxic chemical had taken place" in Douma which contained "reactive chlorine".

The US, Britain and France, which launched missile attacks on Syrian military sites in retaliation for Douma – before any investigation had taken place – thought themselves justified. The OPCW's report was splashed across headlines around the world – to the indignation of Russia, Assad's principal military ally, which denied the validity of the publication.

Then, in mid-May 2019, came news of a confidential report by OPCW South African ballistics inspector Ian Henderson – a document which the organisation excluded from its final report – which took issue with the organisation's conclusions. Canisters supposedly containing chlorine gas may not have been dropped by Syrian helicopters, it suggested, and could have been placed at the site of the attack by unknown hands.

Peter Hitchens of the Mail on Sunday reported in detail on the Henderson document. No other mainstream media followed up this story . The BBC, for example, had reported in full on the OPCW's final report on the use of chlorine gas, but never mentioned the subsequent Henderson story.

And here I might myself have abandoned the trail had I not received a call on my Beirut phone shortly after the Henderson paper, from the Nato officer who had tipped me off about the OPCW's apparent censorship of its own documents. "I wasn't talking about the Henderson report," he said abruptly. And immediately terminated our conversation. But now I understand what he must have been talking about.

For in the past few weeks, there has emerged deeply disturbing new evidence that the OPCW went far further than merely excluding one dissenting voice from its conclusions on the 2018 Douma attack.

The most recent information – published on WikiLeaks, in a report from Hitchens again and from Jonathan Steele, a former senior foreign correspondent for The Guardian – suggests that the OPCW suppressed or failed to publish, or simply preferred to ignore, the conclusions of up to 20 other members of its staff who became so upset at what they regarded as the misleading conclusions of the final report that they officially sought to have it changed in order to represent the truth . (The OPCW has said in a number of statements that it stands by its final report.)

At first, senior OPCW officials contented themselves by merely acknowledging the Henderson report's existence a few days after it appeared without making any comment on its contents. When the far more damaging later reports emerged in early November, Fernando Arias, the OPCW's director general, said that it was in "the nature of any thorough enquiry for individuals in a team to express subjective views. While some of the views continue to circulate in some public discussion forums, I would like to reiterate that I stand by the independent, professional conclusion [of the investigation]." The OPCW declined to respond to questions from Hitchens or Steele.

But the new details suggest that other evidence could have been left unpublished by the OPCW. These were not just from leaked emails, but given by an OPCW inspector – a colleague of Henderson – who was one of a team of eight to visit Douma and who appeared at a briefing in Brussels last month to explain his original findings to a group of disarmament, legal, medical and intelligence personnel.

As Steele reported afterwards, in a piece published by Counterpunch in mid-November 2019, the inspector – who gave his name to his audience, but asked to be called "Alex" – said he did not want to undermine the OPCW but stated that "most of the Douma team" felt the two reports on the incident (the OPCW had also published an interim report in 2018) were "scientifically impoverished, procedurally irregular and possibly fraudulent". Alex said he sought, in vain, to have a subsequent OPCW conference to address these concerns and "demonstrate transparency, impartiality and independence".

For example, Alex cited the OPCW report's claim that "various chlorinated organic chemicals (COCs) were found" in Douma, but said that there were "huge internal arguments" in the OPCW even before its 2018 interim report was published . Findings comparing chlorine gas normally present in the atmosphere with evidence from the Douma site were, according to Alex, kept by the head of the Douma mission and not passed to the inspector who was drafting the interim report. Alex said that he subsequently discovered that the COCs in Douma were "no higher than you would expect in any household environment", a point which he says was omitted from both OPCW reports. Alex told his Brussels audience that these omissions were "deliberate and irregular".

Alex also said that a British diplomat who was OPCW's chef de cabinet invited several members of the drafting team to his office, where they found three US officials who told them that the Syrian regime had conducted a gas attack and that two cylinders found in one building contained 170 kilograms of chlorine. The inspectors, Alex remarked, regarded this as unacceptable pressure and a violation of the OPCW's principles of "independence and impartiality".

Regarding the comments from Alex, the OPCW has pointed to the statement by Arias that the organisation stands by its final report.

Further emails continue to emerge from these discussions. This weekend, for example, WikiLeaks sent to The Independent an apparent account of a meeting held by OPCW toxicologists and pharmacists "all specialists in CW (Chemical Warfare)", according to the document. The meeting is dated 6 June 2018 and says that "the experts were conclusive in their statements that there is no correlation between symptoms [of the victims] and chlorine exposure."

In particular, they stated that "the onset of excessive frothing, as a result of pulmonary edema observed in photos and reported by witnesses would not occur in the short time period between the reported occurrence of the alleged incident and the time the videos were recorded". When I asked for a response to this document, a spokesman for the OPCW headquarters in Holland said that my request would be "considered". That was on Monday 23 December.

Any international organisation, of course, has a right to select the most quotable parts of its documentation on any investigation, or to set aside an individual's dissenting report – although, in ordinary legal enquiries, dissenting voices are quite often acknowledged. Chemical warfare is not an exact science – chlorine gas does not carry a maker's name or computer number in the same way that fragments of tank shells or bombs often do.

But the degree of unease within the OPCW's staff surely cannot be concealed much longer. To the delight of the Russians and the despair of its supporters, an organisation whose prestige alone should frighten any potential war criminals is scarcely bothering to confront its own detractors. Military commanders may conceal their tactics from an enemy in time of war, but this provides no excuse for an important international organisation dedicated to the prohibition of chemical weapons to allow its antagonists to claim that it has "cooked the books" by permitting political pressure to take precedence over the facts. And that is what is happening today.

The deep concerns among some of the OPCW staff and the deletion of their evidence does not mean that gas has not been used in Syria by the government or even by the Russians or by Isis and its fellow Islamists. All stand guilty of war crimes in the Syrian conflict. The OPCW's response to the evidence should not let war criminals off the hook. But it certainly helps them.

And what could be portrayed as acts of deceit by a supposedly authoritative body of international scientists can lead some to only one conclusion: that they must resort to those whom the west regards as "traitors" to security – WikiLeaks and others – if they wish to find out the story behind official reports . So far, the Russians and the Syrian regime have been the winners in the propaganda war. Such organisations as the OPCW need to work to make sure the truth can be revealed to everyone. Tags Politics

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[Jan 03, 2020] If you previously have doubts that Trump is senile warmonger, not you have a definite proof

Bombing a civilian airport in another country in order to assassinate Iranian and Iraq leaders is a very bad diplomacy ;-)
It might well be that today this idiot blow up his chances fro reelection because revenge is dish that should be served cold and Iran can postpone it for 11 months or so.
What is interesting is that neoliberal MSM are glad and still talking about Zelensky and impeachment. What a country ! It looks like the decade of the twenties can be the decade of another World War. "In every war the first casualty is truth."
Jan 03, 2020 | www.theamericanconservative.com

Trump think that the war with Iran will be another cake walk, like in Afghanistan and Iraq. This is a proof that he is a senile idiot.

[Jan 03, 2020] Power of propaganda and shooting down of the Malaysian "Boeing" by Alexander Petrakov

Jan 03, 2020 | www.rt.com

Original link went missing. Replaced with Solid facts 5 flaws that raise doubt over int'l MH17 criminal probe -- RT World News

Journalist Alexander Petrakov in his article he stated that the Russian Federation is a lot of evidence of innocence Russia and militias DND in the collapse of the Malaysian "Boeing".

"Your problem is that you have lived your whole life if there are rules. But there are no rules." Lorne Malvo (series "Fargo", 2014)

Intelligence agencies recruit pornographers to lead their disinformation operations, apparently because porn purveyors are so lacking in ethics they will tell public lies about anything

Optimists probably should not read any further, as well as those who think that the higher you sit the better you know. As well as pacifists, all those for thom "peace, friendship, and chewing gum" has the absolute value, some kind of religion. I can't convince those types for sure.

So I address this article to those who like me understand that it's time to start to think independently, be skeptical. And do not absorb blindly what TV talk heads are saying, no matter in what country you currently live and you nationality.

After the terrible catastrophe Malaysian liner we can see two major hypothesis, two points of views and two "truth": one is Russian position and the second version promoted by Ukraine and supported by the USA (or vice versa).

Which one you should believe more? The one that promoted by MSM of G7 countries or one that is promoted Russian MSM by and some other from the "the rest of the world". The answer, in fact, already evident. The "world-at-large" typically assumes that the "truth" is the view represented by CNN, Fox News and Euronews. The one that is written on the pages of The New York Times and republished by referring to "an unnamed source in the state Department" (or our very special Jen Psaki) Washington Post.

I personally am confident that most of as see that despite is growing evidence of innocence of rebels in the terrible tragedy the rest of the world these days and hours sees and hears another, "alternative" hypothesis only.

"Civilized world" talk about "persuasive evidence" of the guilt of the Russian Federation and the rebels of Donbass. Of evidence, however, is weak and contradictive. But it does not matter. If you repeat a lie clearly and firmly, with honest eyes on a brave face of various and sundry talking heads let's say one thousand times - people will say it's the fact; that it is the axiom based on which events need to interpreted. This isan all trick but it works. "Why, everybody knows about it", "all about this and they say".

This basic factor here is the power of PR. It is like artillery in was and as Napoleon noted God is firmly on the side of those with better artillery. Repetition lead to adoption of information and gradually a person begins to perceive it as his/her own point of view. Especially if the same information is provided by the whole spectrum of media outlets - TV, radio, Internet, and newspapers.

The average American, European, Japanese or Australian are brainwashed and belave that the rebels robbed the dead people on the aircraft and then cash credit card dead in Russia. While adding sure that this is "Russian rebels." As these "Russian rebels" learn or pick up in the open field access codes, passwords to the cards are for some reason forgotten. And why? In a democratic and free world video information rules and does not require any critical thinking: many of wisdom is much grief...

In each of the first CNN necessarily adds that "Russia is hampered the investigation", but it owes "effective and really help Ukraine," and that it "remained days or even hours, to show good will".

How can "interfere" investigation on foreign territory nobody elaborates. And why... everything is clear.

Then this phantasmagoria was added to the story of the companies Dutch and Malay over which bogumiles... and again refrain is "Russian".

From the first day of Maidan in the focus of the world media was not Ukraine, and Russia - all of us. Saying "Russia", "Russian" we have formed a new image in the eyes of the whole world". First it was the image of aggressor, now it is the image of criminal, terrorist. Not only conqueror, but the murderer.

And we are from the last bum up to the first person in the state did not understand, did not want to understand that our actions, words, "signals" nothing depends on it. Because no matter what he says and does Putin. It is important that will show and tell CNN.

Imagine that you are playing chess. On the table is a chess Board, the figures are placed in the proper order. You sit down and make a move, then another. All as it should be. And your opponent starts to move the pieces in random order. Then do sweeps them away from the Board and yells at the whole audience that he won, and you're a cheater and a crook, but when you open your mouth begins to beat you Board on the head.

So even if the Kremlin together wore embroidered shirts and jumped around the flag "right sector, the world would have seen more. That will show and tell him free and NeroLive media. That's why I did not believe and do not believe that our "restraint" someone and something to "keep" and anybody, and I will convince.

We talked about the inhumanity, the horrors of the moods of Nazism in Ukraine elites in the US and Europe. Told those who everyone knows and understands. And who simply don't care. This same "Russians" harness, hammer, rape, blow up, shoot... the "Russian barbarians", not "civilized people".

Maidan created the project "Banderovskiy-oligarachat" in Ukraine" and far right nationists were allowed to do this by the west and after the victory pumped hatred to Russia to the skies. To suspteinit they badly need a flase flag operation like MH17 to present Russians as the monsters.

Unfortunately Russia was caught by this false flag operation with hands down and initially tired to play by the rules of the normal world. But that faith that the West will dela tih Russia bases on common rules applicable in notmal world fell a few days ago from a height of 10 km and shattered into many tiny fragments.

Ukraine IMHO originally I wrote about this in March, April, may and not designed it as a trap. It might be an unfortunate incident due to decrepit state of Ukrainian air defense forces (but the question why they moved them to this area remain in this case unanswered). But as soon the shooing happened the plan emerge to blame it on Russia. To present it as an act of genocide by Russian mercenaries.

But most importantly, it was to become a stage on which the imagies of the wreckage were used to project the horror and disgust on Russia. They want to punish, to destroy us any cost and any methods from economic to military.

We tried to convince ourselves of the last already strength (and many still do)that any - even the most secret of our intervention, give a reason for the aggression against us. As if it were a "pretext" for example, you cannot create a virtual, on the computer and then show around the world. Or not to create artificially: blowing up the plane, the train, the city, nuclear will dance...

Remember, as Secretary Powell was shaking in the UN powder with Siberian ulcer" from Saddam. "The plague" was then washing powder. The country was bombed to the stage of democracy, and Powell... apologized sparingly in his memoirs.

Remember about the plots of terrible Serbian concentration camps in 1994, in Srebrenica. It's people came out in Europe on the streets and demanded to bomb, to punish, to stop. When the "bombed, punished, stopped, it became clear that terrible place belonged... to Bosnian Muslims of Izetbegovica, and dying people were just Serb prisoners. At that time anybody especially did not even apologize.

Finally, remember about the shocking footage of atrocities troops Gaddafi, killing women, children and the elderly. Already when Gaddafi was executed so that the footage was dashed against this background, and Libya drowned in real blood, it turned out that all the "atrocities" were shot in Qatar at a local Studio. Filmed venerable Hollywood Directors "at the request of the sheikhs".

Why the attack with "Boeing". No, this is not an excuse to enter NATO troops (it different enough to sign a bilateral agreement on military assistance, and then to show images of the "Russian occupation of Kyiv"). This is a PR-move, information technology.

In the history blown up with "Boeing" are three possible answers, but the whole world hears only one - it blew up "Russians" militias and the Russian Federation, we all are responsible for that. No matter what the investigation has just begun, which is not examined a "black boxes". Tube Powell is already lying on the table Obama, and the "free media" ready to show people the terrible Serbian concentration camp".

Russian experts have already talked about all the falsifications. Posted we have trumps, evidence. Only the world could see and hear more. About "Russian", nadrugalas over the dead and robbed them. And about the "Russian" the terrorists of Donbass.

The testimony of our experts, Ministers, diplomats referred to as "doubtful" and "require additional verification". Brad Avakov, screeching Poroshenko and all the hysteria over the possessed Yatseniuk called "serious" and "convincing" evidence. It's hard, it's really not want to believe we are living by the rules that don't exist. But it is a reality. And other reality and never will.

The verdict is still pending, but already discussed future sanctions and made the first proposal for "punishing Russia". Began policy - real and cynical, as usual.

What will be after the judgment has already announced the verdict?

Kiev junta now at the level of negotiations with heads of state and official requests of the international organization requires to recognize the militias and their educated patterns - terrorist network. As soon as the version on the guilt of the rebels is recognized by the Western countries, LNR and DND declared outside the law from the point of view of the international law.

Then Ukraine will likely together with one of the permanent members of the UN security Council (USA, France or the United Kingdom) requests to enter into the conflict zone "blue helmets of the United Nations, but not for peace, and for "police" transactions - by analogy with African countries, where the UN staff often help governments to disarm or destroy terrorist groups. No "cultivation and separation of the parties in such cases is not performed.

The composition of the police corps, representatives of Russia, as we all understanding, will not turn on. We now state - sponsor and accomplice of terrorists." As Iran, for example.

How many will vote for our country - I don't know and guess not want. If you support a resolution sadly, the South-East will be cleared by the Ukrainian guards and legalized under the UN flag armies of Western countries. Around the Crimea they will also be created land and then Maritime cordon.

If you use the right of veto, the world media will announce that we are "proved" his guilt and continue to cover terrorists and murderers".

Sanctions against Russia in any of these scenarios would multiply and they will be really ambitious, hard and long. States sponsoring terrorism "South stream" is not build and Mistral they do not sell. And we are so seriously to sanctions not prepared, more talked about it on TV. Of course, we will survive, but we have very hard and difficult.

Ukraine will begin to arm to the teeth as she bids to join NATO despite the fact that NATO Charter prohibits to NATO countries with unsolved territorial problems from joining. They will assign the status of associate member bloc.

But nothing is finished. Because first we were framed as aggressors. And the rest of the world believed. Now we were framed as terrorists. And as soon as the "civilized world" would believe it will become a logical last move: to put us beasts.

[Jan 03, 2020] "It remains to figure out how to save the current US administration, while avoiding a world war

Евгений Крутиков Последний шанс
Jul 30, 2014 | topwar.ru

"It remains to figure out how to save the current US administration, while avoiding a world war

"the Plane was shot down by Ukrainians, shot down by accident, there will be no investigation, no one needs it

in the blog print version

The expert debate about Boeing will now be about how many demons can fit on the tip of a needle. Everyone is already clear, it remains to figure out how to save the current US administration, while avoiding a world war.

All the latest news about the investigation of the disaster over the Donbass say only one thing: everything is clear, but the problems are still ahead.
The main theses are as follows: the plane was shot down by Ukrainians, shot down by accident, there will be no investigation, no one needs it. I'll explain in more detail.

A lot has been said about the information war: the Americans started it, and they are now out of it, sadly. There is no point in sorting through the array of objective evidence – we must give the American side the opportunity to get out of all this with honor, because if the United States does not succeed, we will all again face the threat of total war.

One

Never and under no circumstances will the Ukrainian side make public its means of objective control, if they exist at all. Most likely, they have already been destroyed. Recognition of the randomness of the shot – however it may be classified-is the last chance for the US to get out of the dirty Ukrainian swamp. Yes, an accident, it happens in war. But it needs to be explained to a Western audience.

And if it is impossible to understand, then you just have to remember: the Ukrainian army shoots where it wants and what it wants to objects. And sometimes nowhere at all.

Let me remind you that in old Yugoslavia for a long time hunted for the officers of the Serbian artillery, which with a rare drunk once (!) shot in the direction of Croatian Dubrovnik. They were found ten years later and sent to the Hague. Why? Because the Croatian side in time declared everywhere where reached, including UNESCO in which list the city-monument Dubrovnik is entered, about atrocities of the Serbian artillery.
Two
Yes, we are all here at the level of unfunny jokes know that the Ukrainian rocket, if you send it to the plane, will definitely fly to the tree. And vice versa. For those who were born and raised in the Soviet Union, this is a given. But the Westerner has to prove it and explain it. He, a Westerner, used to think that if a guy could speak APE English fluently, even if he had a strong accent, he was still our local guy. So it was with Saakashvili and Yushchenko. They were also married to Western ladies. And then with Yatsenyuk Turchynov, tied to both the American sect. They're twice their own.
The guy from the West used to think that if the missile system is put on combat duty, it is worth something. He can not explain that for twenty-three years, the Ukrainian army conducted only one air defense exercise – in 2001. And it ended up being shot down over the Black sea by a Russian plane. After that, no (!) and never (!) there were no exercises in Ukraine.
Three
References to the war in South Ossetia, in which it was the Ukrainian crews of "Buks" perfectly proved themselves by shooting down four Russian objects under the Georgian obscene hooting, also do not work. Georgians with great difficulty found across Ukraine two crews for all the same "Buks", whose commanders of calculations were Americans of Polish origin.
Most of these brave Ukrainian anti-aircraft gunners after the war 08.08.08 died under unclear circumstances, and the survivors were drunk (the city of Stryi, Lviv region, the former air defense base of the Carpathian military district of the USSR armed forces). And no one has tried to train the new crews as unnecessary.
Inventory of missiles, by the way, no one held, and it did not make sense, because the missiles were sold right and left, and that is especially sinful-it is to the left, that is, to countries that the same US declare "outcasts". Target capture guidance system-a complex thing, " Buk " is able to simultaneously conduct up to 24 goals, and it is not clear what exactly saw on the radar specific lad.
Four
The Boeing could give additional signals. It could be untried equipment, which will now be difficult to admit to the Malaysian airline.
Even if the "Boeing" shone an additional beacon-it could cause the launch of the rocket. And there were several objects on the radar that were moving towards the war zone – here a spontaneous launch of a missile is more than possible. During the cold war, passenger planes were very often used for reconnaissance purposes, loading them with photographic equipment. This, of course, is not our case, and the times are quite different – satellites fly with impunity, but still no one has yet shown how perfect was the plane itself, its crew and strange course.
Five
By the way, the base of American drones working for the Kiev government is located in Kanatovo near Dnepropetrovsk, just in the area of the flight of the "Boeing". This is an old abandoned Soviet air force base of those that grew sunflowers by the end of the 90's.
But recently there arrived Americans, all rebuilt, and now this former collective farm field is called the 66th separate brigade of the air force of Ukraine, although from the Ukrainian there are only signs and dogs. Live there American military, and are based only American drones, of which two have already been shot down. The first – in the spring on Perekop Russian fighter, the second-over Donetsk militia, and it almost entirely fell into their hands.
For the United States, the explanation of all that has happened is a kind of unintentional accident, or even better-the synergy of many accidents-almost the only way to calmly and technically get out of the game.
Technically, you just need to "chat" for a couple of weeks. And then the evidence from the "black boxes" will not be so relevant, and in General the whole story will be erased from memory, perhaps against the background of other circumstances.
Six
But it will not be possible to talk about the circumstances of what is happening in Novorossiya at all. Many found this place on the map. Many began to watch the news. And there, for example, the tone of CNN correspondents radically changed after they got access to Lugansk and Donetsk on the tail of Malaysian representatives.
No Western journalist had been in the combat zone for three months, and now they were impartially reporting live that civilians were being killed, that heavy artillery fire was being fired from Ukrainian positions on residential areas, and, most interestingly, the presenters in the Studio never interrupted them. And this on CNN and Foxnews do at times. But now the words are accompanied by a picture of the bodies of apparently civilians torn apart. And just like that, even Christian Amanpour won't interrupt anyone.
Seven
Most likely, it is the discussion of the set of accidents that led to the missile salvo that will soon become dominant. A half-trained or even never-learned APE with a grenade sat at the controls. She didn't identify the objects.
The fighter that accompanied (or whatever he was doing with this "Boeing", did not push out of the track?), seeing the rocket, was forced to make the same emergency evasion maneuver, which indicates the objective data of Russian surveillance-he abruptly went up to the limit and even beyond the height.
Something on several radars, presumably defined as a "small-sized, high-speed flying object", that is, a fighter, not a UFO, made a routine maneuver to evade a missile salvo from the ground. So taught in the Soviet flight schools. All Ukrainian pilots came out of the same greatcoat.
Scholastic dispute about whether it was exactly " Buk " or the old C-200, which is also the same 25 years of vodka brewed, does not make sense. Good people who are leading this highly professional dispute, come from some ideal circumstances, forgetting that all this-Ukraine.
The salvo was obviously spontaneous, and this-again-is the only thing that will save the West now.
* * *
But we will never hear or see this, because no one will drown Poroshenko now, he will drown himself in two or three months. The American security service is forced to "keep a face", because Barack Obama first said, and then there was objective tracking data, and how to get out of this – no one knows.
Further expert debate will be about how many demons can fit on the tip of the needle. Everyone is already clear, it remains to figure out how to save the current US administration, while avoiding a world war.
It is in the interest of world peace to ensure that the investigation into the deaths of nearly 300 people is delayed as long as possible. And then it was forgotten.
Is it possible? Yes, perhaps. We did not see the unfortunate relatives storming the building of Schiphol airport, although relatively recently the same crowd almost demolished the government of Malaysia because of the unknown where the disappeared similar "Boeing".
European governments can make sure that the relatives of the victims stop asking questions. Although they, those who lost loved ones, could be the driving force of the entire investigation. It's very cynical, Yes. But what other choice is there?."It remains to figure out how to save the current US administration, while avoiding a world war "the Plane was shot down by Ukrainians, shot down by accident, there will be no investigation, no one needs it

in the blog print version

The expert debate about Boeing will now be about how many demons can fit on the tip of a needle. Everyone is already clear, it remains to figure out how to save the current US administration, while avoiding a world war.
All the latest news about the investigation of the disaster over the Donbass say only one thing: everything is clear, but the problems are still ahead.
The main theses are as follows: the plane was shot down by Ukrainians, shot down by accident, there will be no investigation, no one needs it. I'll explain in more detail.
A lot has been said about the information war: the Americans started it, and they are now out of it, sadly. There is no point in sorting through the array of objective evidence – we must give the American side the opportunity to get out of all this with honor, because if the United States does not succeed, we will all again face the threat of total war.
One
Never and under no circumstances will the Ukrainian side make public its means of objective control, if they exist at all. Most likely, they have already been destroyed. Recognition of the randomness of the shot – however it may be classified-is the last chance for the US to get out of the dirty Ukrainian swamp. Yes, an accident, it happens in war. But it needs to be explained to a Western audience.
And if it is impossible to understand, then you just have to remember: the Ukrainian army shoots where it wants and what it wants to objects. And sometimes nowhere at all.
Let me remind you that in old Yugoslavia for a long time hunted for the officers of the Serbian artillery, which with a rare drunk once (!) shot in the direction of Croatian Dubrovnik. They were found ten years later and sent to the Hague. Why? Because the Croatian side in time declared everywhere where reached, including UNESCO in which list the city-monument Dubrovnik is entered, about atrocities of the Serbian artillery.
Two
Yes, we are all here at the level of unfunny jokes know that the Ukrainian rocket, if you send it to the plane, will definitely fly to the tree. And vice versa. For those who were born and raised in the Soviet Union, this is a given. But the Westerner has to prove it and explain it. He, a Westerner, used to think that if a guy could speak APE English fluently, even if he had a strong accent, he was still our local guy. So it was with Saakashvili and Yushchenko. They were also married to Western ladies. And then with Yatsenyuk Turchynov, tied to both the American sect. They're twice their own.
The guy from the West used to think that if the missile system is put on combat duty, it is worth something. He can not explain that for twenty-three years, the Ukrainian army conducted only one air defense exercise – in 2001. And it ended up being shot down over the Black sea by a Russian plane. After that, no (!) and never (!) there were no exercises in Ukraine.
Three
References to the war in South Ossetia, in which it was the Ukrainian crews of "Buks" perfectly proved themselves by shooting down four Russian objects under the Georgian obscene hooting, also do not work. Georgians with great difficulty found across Ukraine two crews for all the same "Buks", whose commanders of calculations were Americans of Polish origin.
Most of these brave Ukrainian anti-aircraft gunners after the war 08.08.08 died under unclear circumstances, and the survivors were drunk (the city of Stryi, Lviv region, the former air defense base of the Carpathian military district of the USSR armed forces). And no one has tried to train the new crews as unnecessary.
Inventory of missiles, by the way, no one held, and it did not make sense, because the missiles were sold right and left, and that is especially sinful-it is to the left, that is, to countries that the same US declare "outcasts". Target capture guidance system-a complex thing, " Buk " is able to simultaneously conduct up to 24 goals, and it is not clear what exactly saw on the radar specific lad.
Four
The Boeing could give additional signals. It could be untried equipment, which will now be difficult to admit to the Malaysian airline.
Even if the "Boeing" shone an additional beacon-it could cause the launch of the rocket. And there were several objects on the radar that were moving towards the war zone – here a spontaneous launch of a missile is more than possible. During the cold war, passenger planes were very often used for reconnaissance purposes, loading them with photographic equipment. This, of course, is not our case, and the times are quite different – satellites fly with impunity, but still no one has yet shown how perfect was the plane itself, its crew and strange course.
Five
By the way, the base of American drones working for the Kiev government is located in Kanatovo near Dnepropetrovsk, just in the area of the flight of the "Boeing". This is an old abandoned Soviet air force base of those that grew sunflowers by the end of the 90's.
But recently there arrived Americans, all rebuilt, and now this former collective farm field is called the 66th separate brigade of the air force of Ukraine, although from the Ukrainian there are only signs and dogs. Live there American military, and are based only American drones, of which two have already been shot down. The first – in the spring on Perekop Russian fighter, the second-over Donetsk militia, and it almost entirely fell into their hands.
For the United States, the explanation of all that has happened is a kind of unintentional accident, or even better-the synergy of many accidents-almost the only way to calmly and technically get out of the game.
Technically, you just need to "chat" for a couple of weeks. And then the evidence from the "black boxes" will not be so relevant, and in General the whole story will be erased from memory, perhaps against the background of other circumstances.
Six
But it will not be possible to talk about the circumstances of what is happening in Novorossiya at all. Many found this place on the map. Many began to watch the news. And there, for example, the tone of CNN correspondents radically changed after they got access to Lugansk and Donetsk on the tail of Malaysian representatives.
No Western journalist had been in the combat zone for three months, and now they were impartially reporting live that civilians were being killed, that heavy artillery fire was being fired from Ukrainian positions on residential areas, and, most interestingly, the presenters in the Studio never interrupted them. And this on CNN and Foxnews do at times. But now the words are accompanied by a picture of the bodies of apparently civilians torn apart. And just like that, even Christian Amanpour won't interrupt anyone.
Seven
Most likely, it is the discussion of the set of accidents that led to the missile salvo that will soon become dominant. A half-trained or even never-learned APE with a grenade sat at the controls. She didn't identify the objects.
The fighter that accompanied (or whatever he was doing with this "Boeing", did not push out of the track?), seeing the rocket, was forced to make the same emergency evasion maneuver, which indicates the objective data of Russian surveillance-he abruptly went up to the limit and even beyond the height.
Something on several radars, presumably defined as a "small-sized, high-speed flying object", that is, a fighter, not a UFO, made a routine maneuver to evade a missile salvo from the ground. So taught in the Soviet flight schools. All Ukrainian pilots came out of the same greatcoat.
Scholastic dispute about whether it was exactly " Buk " or the old C-200, which is also the same 25 years of vodka brewed, does not make sense. Good people who are leading this highly professional dispute, come from some ideal circumstances, forgetting that all this-Ukraine.
The salvo was obviously spontaneous, and this-again-is the only thing that will save the West now.
* * *
But we will never hear or see this, because no one will drown Poroshenko now, he will drown himself in two or three months. The American security service is forced to "keep a face", because Barack Obama first said, and then there was objective tracking data, and how to get out of this – no one knows.
Further expert debate will be about how many demons can fit on the tip of the needle. Everyone is already clear, it remains to figure out how to save the current US administration, while avoiding a world war.
It is in the interest of world peace to ensure that the investigation into the deaths of nearly 300 people is delayed as long as possible. And then it was forgotten.
Is it possible? Yes, perhaps. We did not see the unfortunate relatives storming the building of Schiphol airport, although relatively recently the same crowd almost demolished the government of Malaysia because of the unknown where the disappeared similar "Boeing".
European governments can make sure that the relatives of the victims stop asking questions. Although they, those who lost loved ones, could be the driving force of the entire investigation. It's very cynical, Yes. But what other choice is there?

[Jan 03, 2020] A new brilliant diplomatic strategy of Trump administration: Threatening Iran by killing Iraqis

"USA clusterfuck express hurtles headlong down the track for a rendezvous with disaster: War with a united Iraq and Iran, with the latter backed by the Russians and Chinese. https://www.checkpointasia.net/iraqi-pm-told-trump-gang-they-didnt-have-permission-to-bomb-iraqi-paramilitaries-they-did-it-anyway/ "
Jan 03, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

et Al January 2, 2020 at 10:32 am

Sic Semper tyrannis: Our Embassy in Baghdad – TTG
https://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/

For weeks, it was Iranian consulates and facilities that bore the brunt of Iraqi popular unrest. Iran reacted with restraint. With our lethal attacks on the Kata'ib Hezbollah, we changed that. Pompeo, Esper and Trump are keeping up the trash talking. Threatening Iran by killing Iraqis whose ass was that brilliant diplomatic strategy pulled from?
####

Plenty more at the link.

Have dick, will step on!

[Jan 03, 2020] Did Winston Churchill really say: "Poland is a greedy hyena of Europe."?

See also https://www.quora.com/Did-Winston-Churchill-really-say-Poland-is-a-greedy-hyena-of-Europe-In-what-context
Jan 03, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

Moscow Exile December 30, 2019 at 11:30 am

US Ambassador to Poland gets her 2 cents in as regards the comments of Vladimir Putin and others in the Empire of Evil concerning the Molotov – Ribbentrop Non-Aggression Pact and Polish pre-WWII connivings with Nazi Germany.

Russian politicians had earlier strongly condemned the position of Warsaw, which does not consider itself responsible for any of the events leading up to the outbreak of WWII in Europe. Thus, the speaker of the state Duma, Vyacheslav Volodin, urged Polish "colleagues" to apologize for the anti-Semitic remarks of Jozef Lipsky, former Polish Ambassador to Nazi Germany, who supported some ideas of Adolf Hitler and even suggested putting up a monument to him in honour of his plans to deport European Jews to Madagascar. Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova also criticized the attempt of Poland to rewrite history in favour of its political interests.

On Sunday, the Prime Minister of Poland, Mateusz Morawiecki, criticized the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and actually laid the blame on the USSR for starting WWII along with Nazi Germany.

Head of the scientific Department of the Russian Military Historical Society, Yuri Nikiforov, noted that the Warsaw version of events leading to WWII was a "totally ideologized interpretation of history by orderr" and had nothing to do with the historical truth, and was promoting its version of history in order to weaken Russian influence on the world stage.

Drogi Prezydencie Putin, to Hitler i Stalin zmówili się, aby rozpocząć II wojnę światową. To jest fakt. Polska była ofiarą tego okropnego konfliktu.

-- Georgette Mosbacher (@USAmbPoland) December 30, 2019

Dear President Putin, it was Hitler and Stalin who agreed to start World War II. This is a fact. Poland was a victim of this terrible conflict.

Dear American business executive, entrepreneur and untrained diplomat now acting as US Ambassador to Poland, try studying some history.

By the way, before your plum appointment as ambassador to Poland, wasn't it you who suggested that Poland was responsible for the re-emergence of anti-Semitism across the continent of Europe because of a law which criminalizes blaming Poland for the actions of Nazi Germany on its soil during the Holocaust?

And wasn't it headbanger of a Polish President Andrzej Duda who stated that if you were to be appointed as the new U.S. ambassador to Poland, then you would be accepted, despite having made "unnecessary and mistaken" comments about his country?

Can't you see that the truth as regards WWII matters is only that which is approved by the Poles?

source

yalensis December 31, 2019 at 4:19 am
The Poles are putting Germany in an awkward position.
The official position of the modern German government (based on Nurnberg, etc.) is that Germany, and Germany alone, is responsible for the outbreak of WWII. Not the Soviet Union. Just Germany, ma'am, just Germany.

So, in the face of this Polish revisionism, as Russian analysts are pointing out, Germany will either have to (a) bitch-slap Poland, or (b) renounce their entire official state policy and historical ideology since their defeat in WWII and start singing Horst Wessel Lied again.

What, oh what, will Germany do?

[Jan 03, 2020] Secondary sanctions are evil because they prevent minor transactions because banks don't think it is worth the severe penalties.

Jan 03, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

cartman January 2, 2020 at 4:54 pm

How Our Economic Warfare Brings the World to Heel

Nothing untrue in this article. Secondary sanctions are evil because they prevent minor transactions because banks don't think it is worth the severe penalties. So Iranian cancer patients aren't allowed to buy chemotherapy medications. Trump has gone overboard because he has learned that there is no political cost to doling these out.

I think this is how US dominance will end. No challengers will end it, although some may rise in the vacuum. The internal changes the US needs to make to come back are politically impossible. Sanctions are big government on steroids, and having the US Government sitting atop the global economy will cause it to seize up. The question is how long commerce will be able to continue under these conditions.

[Jan 03, 2020] The USA have an upper hand in the current scirmish of the gas war with Russia. But that does not guarantee the final victory as Ukraine might switch sides by victor Kaminenvv

With the USA help Ukraine got three billions from Russia. But that might mean that if Ukraine does not switch sides the Ukrainian transit will became minuscule and unable to help Ukraine to survive financially. Then what ?
Jan 02, 2020 | topwar.ru

The introduction of us sanctions against Nord stream 2, immediately signed by President trump, created a new situation in Europe at the request of the Congress.

The Stockholm verdict

Gazprom retreated from its positions and agreed to an agreement with Naftogaz on transit, including the payment of 2.9 billion dollars to Kiev according to the verdict of the Stockholm arbitration, this is a difficult compromise for Moscow and a consequence of American sanctions that actually suspended the construction of the SP-2 for at least six months.

I can't help remembering how President Yanukovych received three billion dollars of credit from Moscow, and now President Zelensky also received almost three billion, although on other grounds, according to the decision of the Stockholm arbitration.

But Moscow gave money, and immediately, although it could stretch these payments with gas supplies, which Naftogaz agreed to. Moscow seems to be banking on Zelensky in his projected clash with the nationalists behind Poroshenko. As a lesser evil.

Big European game

The Stockholm billions and Ukrainian transit are also a big European policy. For the first time, us sanctions hit Germany and Europe as a whole: all energy and construction companies related to the SP-2. Germany's energy supply was under threat.

In this situation, Russia is making compromises and concessions on Ukrainian transit, and Ukraine is also making compromises on its part, apparently under pressure from Germany and the European Union. As a result, Russia and Germany with their friends and the SP-2 are situationally in the same boat against US sanctions. This is an important episode in the unfolding Great European game for gas and its delivery routes.

Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov makes a sharp statement: "Russia will definitely respond to the sanctions against the SP-2." So as not to"shoot yourself in the foot." Almost simultaneously, the US intelligence agencies are giving Moscow information about the upcoming terrorist attacks in St. Petersburg -- an incredible fact, given the current relations between Washington and Moscow, unless President trump wants to soften Moscow's reaction to the sanctions against SP-2, hinting that he was forced to sign them.

By the sum of circumstances

Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Kozak called the payment of $ 2.9 billion to Kiev "a difficult decision, a choice between bad and very bad." What is the difference between " bad " and "very bad"?

Here are the congressional sanctions that really slowed down the construction of the SP-2, and the judicial burden in the international courts under the influence of the United States, and the situation in Ukraine. And soon there will be a trial in London on a three-billion-dollar loan from Russia to Ukraine during the time of President Yanukovych -- this seems to be another reason why we had to pay for the Stockholm gas verdict.

If Russia refused to pay the debt awarded in Stockholm, the London court could on this basis refuse to consider the claim of Russia. And so, too, Moscow paid 2.9 billion dollars to Kiev immediately in money. Of course, the London court may follow the Stockholm path, but then the West and its financial system will lose their reputation in the non-Western world, and Russia may declare the West a non-legal community.

Victory as treason (Peremoga as zrada)

In General the Ukrainian "Naftogaz" behaves very recklessly and boldly with "Gazprom", flooding it with lawsuits. His" victory " is undoubtedly Pyrrhic, since Gazprom, as an energy supplier, will be able to recoup its Stockholm losses.

"Naftogaz" as if Ukrainian, because it is really run by American managers, for them "Naftogaz – - only a tool to counter Russia, and what will happen then, it does not matter. What could it be? There may not be a discount of 25 percent, which was in the rejected package of "Gazprom". New agreements – new discounts.

On the other hand, Gazprom's concessions are due to the entire sum of the political and economic circumstances of the great European game: Moscow is still trying to create a Moscow-Berlin axis against us sanctions pressure.

[Jan 02, 2020] The EU's LNG imports jumped by 102 percent on the year, with Russia accounting for 19 percent of LNG imports, second only to Qatar with 30 percent, and ahead of the U.S. with 12 percent

Jan 02, 2020 | oilprice.com

In Q2 2019, thanks to the LNG supply glut and converging prices, the EU's LNG imports jumped by 102 percent on the year, with Russia accounting for 19 percent of LNG imports, second only to Qatar with 30 percent, and ahead of the U.S. with 12 percent, the European Commission's Quarterly Report on European Gas Markets shows .

Between January and November, LNG imports into Europe including Turkey hit a record high, beating the previous record from 2011, the EIA said in its latest natural gas update. The U.S., Russia, and Qatar boosted their LNG supplies to Europe this year, and the U.S. beat Russia in volumes supplied to Europe in the latter part of the year, EIA data shows.

While Russia and the U.S. compete for gas market share in Europe, the U.S. hit Russia's Nord Stream 2 project with sanctions this month, delaying the completion of the project with at least several months.

Following the announcement of the sanctions, Switzerland-based offshore pipelay and subsea construction company Allseas immediately suspended Nord Stream 2 pipelay activities.

Also

The agreement between Gazprom and Naftogaz provides for the rejection of new claims, withdrawal of claims, payment by the decision of the Stockholm arbitration-Miller

MOSCOW, Dec 21-RIA Novosti. Gas transit through Ukraine in 2020 will be 65 billion cubic meters, and 40 billion in 2021-2024, said the Head of "Gazprom" Alexey Miller.

In turn, the Minister of energy of Ukraine Oleksiy Orzhel noted that the tariff will increase due to a decrease in pumping volumes.

The agreement provides for the rejection of new claims, the withdrawal of claims and the payment of about 2.9 billion dollars on the decisions of the Stockholm arbitration court.

In addition, Gazprom and Naftogaz will sign an agreement to settle mutual claims under existing contracts. With Kiev, the Russian company will sign a settlement agreement to withdraw the claim of the Antimonopoly Committee of Ukraine.

The European Commission in the framework of the new agreement on gas cooperation guarantees the compliance of transit with EU standards, the Ukrainian side-the independence of the regulator, protection of the interests of the transit customer, predictability and economic feasibility of tariff formation.

MOSCOW, Dec 21-RIA Novosti. "Gazprom" and "Operator of GTS of Ukraine" on Saturday are preparing in Vienna inter-operator agreement signed on Friday between Russia and Ukraine Protocol of the contract on gas transit and settlement of mutual claims is already working, told reporters the representative of "Gazprom".

[Jan 02, 2020] The Art of Doublespeak Bellingcat and Mind Control by Edward Curtin

Notable quotes:
"... Bellingcat is an alleged group of amateur on-line researchers who have spent years shilling for the U.S. instigated war against the Syrian government, blaming the Douma chemical attack and others on the Assad government, and for the anti-Russian propaganda connected to, among other things, the Skripal poisoning case in England, and the downing of flight MH17 plane in Ukraine. ..."
"... The Intercept , along with its parent company First Look Media, recently hosted a workshop for pro-war, Google-funded organization Bellingcat in New York. The workshop, which cost $2,500 per person to attend and lasted five days, aimed to instruct participants in how to perform investigations using "open source" tools -- with Bellingcat's past, controversial investigations for use as case studies Thus, while The Intercept has long publicly promoted itself as an anti-interventionist and progressive media outlet, it is becoming clearer that – largely thanks to its ties to Omidyar – it is increasingly an organization that has more in common with Bellingcat, a group that launders NATO and U.S. propaganda and disguises it as "independent" and "investigative journalism." ..."
Dec 17, 2019 | countercurrents.org

In the 1920s, the influential American intellectual Walter Lippman argued that the average person was incapable of seeing or understanding the world clearly and needed to be guided by experts behind the social curtain. In a number of books he laid out the theoretical foundations for the practical work of Edward Bernays , who developed "public relations" (aka propaganda) to carry out this task for the ruling elites. Bernays had honed his skills while working as a propagandist for the United States during World War I, and after the war he set himself up as a public relations counselor in New York City.

There is a fascinating exchange at the beginning of Adam Curtis's documentary, The Century of Self , where Bernays, then nearly 100 years old but still very sharp, reveals his manipulative mindset and that of so many of those who have followed in his wake. He says the reason he couldn't call his new business "propaganda" was because the Germans had given propaganda a "bad name," and so he came up with the euphemism "public relations." He then adds that "if you could use it [i.e. propaganda] for war, you certainly could use it for peace." Of course, he never used PR for peace but just to manipulate public opinion (he helped engineer the CIA coup against the democratically elected Arbenz government in Guatemala in 1954 with fake news broadcasts). He says "the Germans gave propaganda a bad name," not Bernays and the United States with their vast campaign of lies, mainly aimed at the American people to get their support for going to a war they opposed (think weapons of mass destruction). He sounds proud of his war propaganda work that resounded to his credit since it led to support for the "war to end all wars" and subsequently to a hit movie about WWI , Yankee Doodle Dandy , made in 1942 to promote another war, since the first one somehow didn't achieve its lofty goal.

As Bernays has said in his book Propaganda ,

The American motion picture is the greatest unconscious carrier of propaganda in the world today.

He was a propagandist to the end. I suspect most viewers of the film are taken in by these softly spoken words of an old man sipping a glass of wine at a dinner table with a woman who is asking him questions. I have shown this film to hundreds of students and none has noticed his legerdemain. It is an example of the sort of hocus-pocus I will be getting to shortly, the sly insertion into seemingly liberal or matter-of-fact commentary of statements that imply a different story. The placement of convincing or confusing disingenuous ingredients into a truth sandwich – for Bernays knew that the bread of truth is essential to conceal untruth.

In the following years, Bernays, Lippman, and their ilk were joined by social "scientists," psychologists, and sundry others intent on making a sham out of the idea of democracy by developing strategies and techniques for the engineering of social consensus consonant with the wishes of the ruling classes. Their techniques of propaganda developed exponentially with the development of technology, the creation of the CIA, its infiltration of all the major media, and that agency's courting of what the CIA official Cord Meyer called in the 1950s "the compatible left," having already had the right in its pocket. Today most people are, as is said, "wired," and they get their information from the electronic media that is mostly controlled by giant corporations in cahoots with government propagandists. Ask yourself: Has the power of the oligarchic, permanent warfare state with its propaganda and spy networks increased or decreased over your lifetime. The answer is obvious: the average people that Lippman and Bernays trashed are losing and the ruling elites are winning.

This is not just because powerful propagandists are good at controlling so-called "average" people's thinking, but, perhaps more importantly, because they are also adept – probably more so – at confusing or directing the thinking of those who consider themselves above average, those who still might read a book or two or have the concentration to read multiple articles that offer different perspectives on a topic. This is what some call the professional and intellectual classes, perhaps 15-20 % of the population, most of whom are not the ruling elites but their employees and sometimes their mouthpieces. It is this segment of the population that considers itself "informed," but the information they imbibe is often sprinkled with bits of misdirection, both intentional and not, that beclouds their understanding of important public matters but leaves them with the false impression that they are in the know.

Recently I have noticed a group of interconnected examples of how this group of the population that exerts influence incommensurate with their numbers has contributed to the blurring of lines between fact and fiction. Within this group there are opinion makers who are often journalists, writers, and cultural producers of some sort or other, and then the larger number of the intellectual or schooled class who follow their opinions. This second group then passes on their received opinions to those who look up to them.

There is a notorious propaganda outfit called Bellingcat , started by an unemployed Englishman named Eliot Higgins, that has been funded by The Atlantic Council, a think-tank with deep ties to the U.S. government, NATO, war manufacturers, and their allies, and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), another infamous U.S. front organization heavily involved in so-called color revolution regime change operations all around the world, that has just won the International Emmy Award for best documentary. The film with the Orwellian title, Bellingcat: Truth in a Post-Truth World, received its Emmy at a recent ceremony in New York City.

Bellingcat is an alleged group of amateur on-line researchers who have spent years shilling for the U.S. instigated war against the Syrian government, blaming the Douma chemical attack and others on the Assad government, and for the anti-Russian propaganda connected to, among other things, the Skripal poisoning case in England, and the downing of flight MH17 plane in Ukraine.

It has been lauded by the corporate mainstream media in the west. Its support for the equally fraudulent White Helmets (also funded by the US and the UK) in Syria has also been praised by the western corporate media while being dissected as propaganda by many excellent independent journalists such as Eva Bartlett, Vanessa Beeley, Catte Black, among others. It's had its work skewered by the likes of Seymour Hersh and MIT professor Theodore Postol, and its US government connections pointed out by many others, including Ben Norton and Max Blumenthal at The Gray Zone. And now we have the mainstream media's wall of silence on the leaks from the Organization for the Prohibition on Chemical Weapons (OPCW) concerning the Douma chemical attack and the doctoring of their report that led to the illegal U.S. bombing of Syria in the spring of 2018. Bellingcat was at the forefront of providing justification for such bombing, and now the journalists Peter Hitchens, Tareq Harrad (who recently resigned from Newsweek after accusing the publication of suppressing his revelations about the OPCW scandal) and others are fighting an uphill battle to get the truth out.

Yet Bellingcat: Truth in a Post-Truth World won the Emmy , fulfilling Bernays' point about films being the greatest unconscious carriers of propaganda in the world today.

Who presented the Emmy Award to the film makers, but none other than the rebel journalist Chris Hedges . Why he did so, I don't know. But that he did so clearly sends a message to those who follow his work and trust him that it's okay to give a major cultural award to a propaganda outfit. But then, perhaps he doesn't consider Bellingcat to be that.

Nor, one presumes, does The Intercept , the billionaire Pierre Omidyar owned publication associated with Glen Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill, and also read by many progressive-minded people. The Intercept that earlier this year disbanded the small team that was tasked with reviewing and releasing more of the massive trove of documents they received from Edward Snowden six years ago, a minute number of which have ever been released or probably ever will be. As Whitney Webb pointed out , last year The Intercept hosted a workshop for Bellingcat. She wrote:

The Intercept , along with its parent company First Look Media, recently hosted a workshop for pro-war, Google-funded organization Bellingcat in New York. The workshop, which cost $2,500 per person to attend and lasted five days, aimed to instruct participants in how to perform investigations using "open source" tools -- with Bellingcat's past, controversial investigations for use as case studies Thus, while The Intercept has long publicly promoted itself as an anti-interventionist and progressive media outlet, it is becoming clearer that – largely thanks to its ties to Omidyar – it is increasingly an organization that has more in common with Bellingcat, a group that launders NATO and U.S. propaganda and disguises it as "independent" and "investigative journalism."

Then we have Jefferson Morley , the editor of The Deep State, former Washington Post journalist, and JFK assassination researcher, who has written a praiseworthy review of the Bellingcat film and who supports Bellingcat. "In my experience, Bellingcat is credible," he writes in an Alternet article, "Bellingcat documentary has the pace and plot of a thriller."

Morley has also just written an article for Counterpunch – "Why the Douma Chemical Attack Wasn't a 'Managed Massacre'" – in which he disputes the claim that the April 7, 2018 attack in the Damascus suburb was a false flag operation carried out by Assad's opponents. "I do not see any evidence proving that Douma was a false flag incident," he writes in this article that is written in a style that leaves one guessing as to what exactly he is saying. It sounds convincing unless one concentrates, and then his double messages emerge. Yet it is the kind of article that certain "sophisticated" left-wing readers might read and feel is insightful. But then Morley, who has written considerably about the CIA, edits a website that advertises itself as "the thinking person's portal to the world of secret government," and recently had an exchange with former CIA Director John Brennan where "Brennan put a friendly finger on my chest," said in February 2017, less than a month after Trump was sworn in as president, that:

With a docile Republican majority in Congress and a demoralized Democratic Party in opposition, the leaders of the Deep State are the most -- perhaps the only -- credible check in Washington on what Senator Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) calls Trump's " wrecking ball presidency ."

Is it any wonder that some people might be a bit confused?

"I know what you're thinking about," said Tweedledum; "but it isn't so, nohow."

"Contrariwise," continued Tweedledee, "if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic."

As a final case in point, there is a recent book by Stephen Kinzer , Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb And The CIA Search For Mind Control, t he story of the chemist known as Dr. Death who ran the CIA's MK-ULTRA mind control project, using LSD, torture, electric shock therapy, hypnosis, etc.; developed sadistic methods of torture still used in black sites around the world; and invented various ingenious techniques for assassination, many of which were aimed at Fidel Castro. Gottlieb was responsible for brutal prison and hospital experiments and untold death and suffering inflicted on all sorts of innocent people. His work was depraved in the deepest sense; he worked with Nazis who experimented on Jews despite being Jewish himself.

Kinzer writes in depth about this man who considered himself a patriot and a spiritual person – a humane torturer and killer. It is an eye-opening book for anyone who does not know about Gottlieb, who gave the CIA the essential tools they use in their "organized crime" activities around the world – in the words of Douglass Valentine, the author of The CIA as Organized Crime and The Phoenix Program . Kinzer's book is good history on Gottlieb; however, he doesn't venture into the present activities of the CIA and Gottlieb's patriotic followers, who no doubt exist and go about their business in secret.

After recounting in detail the sordid history of Gottlieb's secret work that is nauseating to read about, Kinzer leaves the reader with these strange words:

Gottlieb was not a sadist, but he might well have been . Above all he was an instrument of history. Understanding him is a deeply disturbing way of understanding ourselves.

What possibly could this mean? Not a sadist? An instrument of history? Understanding ourselves? These few sentences, dropped out of nowhere, pull the rug out from under what is generally an illuminating history and what seems like a moral indictment. This language is pure mystification.

Kinzer also concludes that because Gottlieb said so, the CIA failed in their efforts to develop methods of mind control and ended MK-ULTRA's experiments long ago. Why would he believe the word of a man who personified the agency he worked for: a secret liar? He writes,

When Sydney Gottlieb brough MK-ULTRA to its end in the early 1960s, he told his CIA superiors that he had found no reliable way to wipe away memory, make people abandon their consciences, or commit crimes and then forget them.

As for those who might think otherwise, Kinzer suggests they have vivid imaginations and are caught up in conspiracy thinking: "This [convincing others that the CIA had developed methods of mind control when they hadn't] is Sydney Gottlieb's most unexpected legacy," he asserts. He says this although Richard Helms, the CIA Director, destroyed all MK-Ultra records. He says that Allen Dulles, Gottlieb, and Helms themselves were caught up in a complete fantasy about mind control because they had seen too many movies and read too many books; mind control was impossible, a failure, a myth, he maintains. It is the stuff of popular culture, entertainment. In an interview with Chris Hedges, interestingly posted by Jefferson Morley at his website, The Deep State , Hedges agrees with Kinzer. Gottlieb, Dulles, et al. were all deluded. Mind control was impossible. You couldn't create a Manchurian Candidate; by implication, someone like Sirhan Sirhan could not have been programmed to be a fake Manchurian Candidate and to have no memory of what he did, as he claims. He could not have been mind-controlled by the CIA to perform his part as the seeming assassin of Senator Robert Kennedy while the real killer shot RFK from behind. People who think like this should get real.

Furthermore, as is so common in books such as Kinzer's, he repeats the canard that JFK and RFK knew about and pressured the CIA to assassinate Fidel Castro. This is demonstrably false, as shown by the Church Committee and the Assassinations Record Review Board, among many others. That Kinzer takes the word of notorious liars like Richard Helms and the top-level CIA operative Samuel Halpern is simple incredible, something that is hard to consider a mistake. Slipped into a truth sandwich, it is devoured and passed on. But it is false. Bullshit meant to deceive.

But this is how these games are played. If you look carefully, you will see them widely. Inform, enlighten, while throwing in doubletalk and untruths. The small number of people who read such books and articles will come away knowing some history that has no current relevance and being misinformed on other history that does. They will then be in the know, ready to pass their "wisdom" on to those who care to listen. They will not think they are average.

But they will be mind controlled, and the killer cat will roam freely without a bell, ready to devour the unsuspecting mice.

Edward Curtin is a writer whose work has appeared widely. He teaches sociology at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. His website is http://edwardcurtin.com/

[Jan 02, 2020] In his 2007 Munich speech wherein Putin made one very prescient observation: "It is a world in which there is one master, one sovereign. And at the end of the day this is pernicious not only for all those within this system, but also for the sovereign itself because it destroys itself from within."

Jan 02, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

karlof1 , Dec 31 2019 22:14 utc | 51

Patrick Armstrong recaps the past 20 years since Putin wrote "Russia at the turn of the millennium" , where Putin stressed the aspects of geoeconomics as most important while barely mentioning Russia's military.

What Armstrong fails to connect is the need for the first to be accomplished so that the second has a chance of complete success: Russia's political-economy needed resuscitating and strong-arming in the case of the kleptocrats for Russia's condition to be as bright as it is on the dawn of a new decade 1/5 of the way into the 21st Century.

Armstrong also tarries at length with Putin's 2007 Munich speech wherein Putin made one very prescient observation: "It is a world in which there is one master, one sovereign. And at the end of the day this is pernicious not only for all those within this system, but also for the sovereign itself because it destroys itself from within."

Armstrong uses Putin's observation made after the Outlaw US Empire's failed attempt to prolong its Unipolar Moment in Iraq after it attacked itself to cause that conlict to show the self-inflicted damage has yet to stop:

"Do we not see this today? The USA is tearing itself apart over imagined Russian collusion, imagined Russian electoral interference and real Ukrainian corruption. And, meanwhile, the forever wars go on and on."

In 2016, I thought there was an excellent chance the D-Party would splinter in a manner similar to 1860 that was generated by both bottom->up and top->down forces. And in light of the court decision allowing the DNC to name whomever it wants as its POTUS and VEEP candidates regardless of both primary and convention balloting, IMO that possibility is even greater as like 2016 the DNC will not--cannot--anoint Sanders as its POTUS candidate. But all that's the subject for another comment.

The dynamics of geopolitics has allowed the China/Russia team and its allies to usher the EU into Eurasian integration over the next decade while exposing the Outlaw US Empire as nothing but a Ponzi Scheme that will collapse upon itself at some point in time.

karlof1 , Dec 31 2019 23:28 utc | 54

Xi Jinping's New Years speech is motivational as one would expect. His closing exhortations:

"2020 will be a year of milestone significance. We will finish building a moderately prosperous society in all respects and realize the first centenary goal. 2020 will also be a year of decisive victory for the elimination of poverty....

"Human history, like a river, runs forever, witnessing both peaceful moments and great disturbances. We are not afraid of storms and dangers and barriers. China is determined to walk along the road of peaceful development and will resolutely safeguard world peace and promote common development. We are willing to join hands with people of all countries in the world to build together the Belt and Road Initiative, and push forward the building of a community with a shared future for mankind, and make unremitting efforts for the creation of a beautiful future for mankind ." [My Emphasis]

Clearly, China has grasped the leadership role abandoned by the Outlaw US Empire for promoting humanity, Trump and Pompeo's daily actions giving China's position a continual boost.

Putin's New Year speech is short but emphasizes his key points. Do note that for Russians the New Year celebration is akin to the West's Christmas (or perhaps was is the better verb):

"Friends, we always prepare for the New Year in advance and, despite being busy, we believe that the warmth of human relations and companionship are the most important thing. We strive to do something important and useful for other people and to help those who require our support, to make them happy by giving them presents and our attention.

"Such sincere impulses, pure thoughts and selfless generosity are the true magic of the New Year holiday. It brings out the best in people and transforms the world filling it with joy and smiles.

"Uplifting New Year's feelings and wonderful impressions have been living in us since childhood and come back every New Year, when we hug our loved ones, our parents, prepare surprises for our children and grandchildren, decorate the New Year tree with them and unpack once again paper cut-outs, baubles and glass garlands. These, sometimes ancient, but beloved family trinkets give their warmth to the younger generations."

His preamble is nationalist; his message paternalistic and humanist.

IMO, the Scrooges of the Outlaw US Empire's Current Oligarchy haven't a chance versus the likes of Putin, Xi and their likeminded allies.

I'll leave my fellow barflies with this 32 year-old music video that IMO well expresses the heart sets of Putin, Xi, and those of us who want to share the world they're trying to build instead of what the Outlaw US Empire's trying to pull down and destroy.

Happy New Year!

[Jan 02, 2020] The end of Ukranian gas rent, which is due to the fact that USSR lay piplenes via its terroty is near

Notable quotes:
"... With Nordstream II becoming operational, Russia can bypass Ukraine completely in supplying gas to EU countries and Ukraine will only receive enough gas for its own needs. Ukraine becomes a liability to the West as that country continues its slow and agonising collapse. Perhaps in 2020 the Donetsk and Lugansk oblasts may officially declare their independence and apply for inclusion into the Russian Federation, or combine into a new nation. Other adjoining oblasts (Kharkiv?) may follow suit. Transcarpathia oblast in the far west of Ukraine may declare independence and then apply to join Hungary. ..."
Jan 02, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Jen , Dec 31 2019 19:49 utc | 37

Dear B,

Nordstream II should be completed in 2020 in spite of the many handicaps and threats of sanctions the US has applied against Germany if the pipeline project continues. Its completion is bound to change the geopolitical landscape in central and eastern Europe considerably.

With Nordstream II becoming operational, Russia can bypass Ukraine completely in supplying gas to EU countries and Ukraine will only receive enough gas for its own needs. Ukraine becomes a liability to the West as that country continues its slow and agonising collapse. Perhaps in 2020 the Donetsk and Lugansk oblasts may officially declare their independence and apply for inclusion into the Russian Federation, or combine into a new nation. Other adjoining oblasts (Kharkiv?) may follow suit. Transcarpathia oblast in the far west of Ukraine may declare independence and then apply to join Hungary.

Volodymyr Zelensky may not last long as President and is likely to be turfed out in a coup. Civil war will come again to Ukraine but not in its Russian-speaking east.

Belarus should be monitoring its own southern borders. Maybe crunch-time is coming for President Lukashenko there as to whether he should align Belarus more closely with Russia or with the EU instead of trying to get the best of both worlds by playing one against the other.

My predictions for 2020 are that Ukraine's final collapse and fragmentation will start, that the use of threats and sanctions continues to isolate the US to its detriment, and that (maybe, just maybe) the collapse of Ukraine will lead to some of the truth of what actually happened to Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 becoming public with whistleblowers in the investigation finally coming forward.

Lydia , Dec 31 2019 19:57 utc | 39

To prevent the truth about MH17 becoming common knowledge, the powers that be will really crack down on the Internet.
Perimetr , Jan 1 2020 16:42 utc | 93
Re Jen @37 "With Nordstream II becoming operational, Russia can bypass Ukraine completely in supplying gas to EU countries and Ukraine will only receive enough gas for its own needs."

Zerohedge reports Ukraine & Russia Ink Landmark Gas Transit Deal Hammering European Gas Prices

I am hoping this is a bad joke, but perhaps not. I suppose, if true, it will prevent a lot of Ukrainians from freezing to death this winter. But considering the benefits it will provide to the Ukro-nazis who hate Russia, I have to wonder about the decision-making process in Moscow.

[Jan 01, 2020] In one poll 18% of the USA respondents are clearly suicidal

Jan 01, 2020 | twitter.com

Reply 1 Retweet 2 Retweeted 2 Like 5 Liked 5 Thanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. Undo Undo stefania maurizi Retweeted

David Santoro ‏ 4:29 PM - 28 Dec 2019

Should (and can) we re-confirm the Reagan-Gorbatchev statement that "A # nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought?" Plus say why

[Jan 01, 2020] "Freedom gas" named Worst Words of the Year

Jan 01, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Mao , Dec 30 2019 9:03 utc | 48

"Freedom gas" named Worst Words of the Year

Plain English Foundation has voted freedom gas as the worst word or phrase of 2019.

The term comes from the United States Department of Energy, which rebranded natural gas as "freedom gas" and boasted about bringing molecules of US freedom to the world.

"When a simple product like natural gas starts being named through partisan politics, we are entering dangerous terrain," said the Foundation's Executive Director, Dr Neil James. "Why can't natural gas just remain natural gas?"

Each year, Plain English Foundation gathers dozens of examples of the worst words to highlight the importance of clear and ethical public language.

The full list of 2019's worst words and phrases follows.

https://www.plainenglishfoundation.com/documents/10179/636280/2019_Worst_Words_media_release

[Jan 01, 2020] In one poll 18% of the USA respondents are clearly suicidal

Jan 01, 2020 | twitter.com

Reply 1 Retweet 2 Retweeted 2 Like 5 Liked 5 Thanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. Undo Undo stefania maurizi Retweeted

David Santoro ‏ 4:29 PM - 28 Dec 2019

Should (and can) we re-confirm the Reagan-Gorbatchev statement that "A # nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought?" Plus say why

[Jan 01, 2020] A uniformed militia fighter on the scene in Baghdad told Kurdish news service Rudaw that attacks were also planned against the U.S. consulates in Erbil and Basra, with the goal of destroying the consulates and killing everyone inside.

Jan 01, 2020 | www.rudaw.net

fersur 26 minutes ago remove Share link Copy Article is at best close, Clapper was in the triad as a go-a-long, Not as smart but just as Treasonus, their ( all Three ) play was the same play as my post below, just maybe differenty colluded !

BOOM !

Militia Leader Who Led Raid on U.S. Embassy was at White House 2011.

Unedited !

LUCAS NOLAN 31 Dec 2019

Iranian militia leader Hadi al-Amiri, one of several identified as leading an attack on the U.S. embassy in Baghdad on Tuesday, reportedly visited the White House in 2011 during the presidency of Barack Obama.

On Tuesday, a mob in Baghdad attacked the U.S. embassy in retaliation against last weekend's U.S. airstrikes against the Iran-backed Shiite militia Kataib Hezbollah (KH), responsible for killing an American civilian contractor. KH is one of a number of pro-Iran militias that make up the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF/PMU), which legally became a wing of the Iraqi military after fighting the Sunni Islamic State terrorist group.

President Donald Trump has since accused Iran of having "orchestrated" the embassy attack and stated that the government would be "held fully responsible."

Breitbart News reporter John Hayward described the attack on the embassy, writing:

The mob grew into thousands of people, led by openly identified KH supporters, some of them wearing uniforms and waving militia flags. The attack began after a funeral service for the 25 KH fighters killed by the U.S. airstrikes. Demonstrators marched through the streets of Baghdad carrying photos of the slain KH members and Iraq's top Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, who condemned the American airstrikes.

KH vowed to seek revenge for the airstrikes on Monday. Both KH and the Iranian military unit that supports it, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), have been designated as terrorist organizations by the U.S. government. The government of Saudi Arabia also described KH as one of several "terrorist militias supported by the Iranian establishment" in remarks on Tuesday condemning the assault on the U.S. embassy.

The attackers were able to smash open a gate and push into the embassy compound, lighting fires, smashing cameras, and painting messages such as "Closed in the name of resistance" on the walls. Gunshots were reportedly heard near the embassy, while tear gas and stun grenades were deployed by its defenders.

A uniformed militia fighter on the scene in Baghdad told Kurdish news service Rudaw that attacks were also planned against the U.S. consulates in Erbil and Basra, with the goal of destroying the consulates and killing everyone inside.

The Washington Post reported Tuesday that among those agitating protesters in Baghdad on Tuesday was Hadi al-Amiri, a former transportation minister with close ties to Iran who leads the Badr Corps, another PMF militia.

In 2011, both Fox News and the Washington Times noted that then-Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki brought his transportation minister, al-Amiri, to a meeting at the White House. The Times noted that the White House did not confirm his attendance, but the official was on Iraq's listed members of its delegation.

The al-Amiri accompanying al-Maliki, besides also being transportation minister, was identified at the time as a commander of the Badr organization, further indicating it was the same person. At the time, the outlets expressed concern that al-Amiri had ties to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), which the FBI has stated played a role in a 1996 terrorist attack that killed 19 U.S. servicemen. President Donald Trump designated the IRGC a foreign terrorist organization, the first time an official arm of a foreign state received the designation.

Fox News' Ed Henry questioned White House Press Secretary Jay Carney following the visit about the attendance of al-Amiri at the White House. Carney refused to answer and stating that he would need to investigate the issue. The full transcript from RealClearPolitics reads:

Ed Henry, FOX News: When Prime Minister Maliki was here this week there have been reports that a former commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, which U.S. officials say played a role in a 1996 terrorist attack that killed 19 U.S. servicemen.

He was here at the White House with Prime Minister Maliki because he's a transportation minister, yeah, transportation minister --

Jay Carney, WH: Who's [sic] report is that?

Henry: I believe the Washington Times has reported it. I think others have as well, but I think this is a Washington Times --

Carney: I have to take that question then, I'm not aware of it.

Henry: Can you just answer it later though, whether he was here and whether a background check had been done?

Carney: I'll check on it for you.

Henry: Okay, thanks.

In 2016, Obama secured a deal with Iran which included a payment of $1.7 billion in cash. Breitbart News reporter John Hayward reported in September of 2016:

On Tuesday, the Obama administration finally admitted something its critics had long suspected: The entire $1.7 billion tribute paid to Iran was tendered in cash -- not just the initial $400 million infamously shipped to the Iranians in a cargo plane -- at the same moment four American hostages were released.

"Treasury Department spokeswoman Dawn Selak said in a statement the cash payments were necessary because of the 'effectiveness of U.S. and international sanctions,' which isolated Iran from the international finance system," said ABC News, relating what might be one of history's strangest humblebrags. The sanctions Obama threw away were working so well that he had to satisfy Iran's demands with cold, hard cash!

By the way, those sanctions were not entirely related to Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons. As former prosecutor Andrew McCarthy pointed out at National Review last month, they date back to Iran's seizure of hostages at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, its support for "Hezbollah's killing sprees," and, most pertinently, Bill Clinton's 1995 invocation of "federal laws that deal with national emergencies caused by foreign aggression," by which he meant Iran's support for international terrorism.

Former white house staffer during the Obama administration, Ben Rhodes, blamed President Trump's policies for the Tuesday attack on the U.S. embassy.

Many have hit back at Rhodes for the accusations, including former CIA ops officer Bryan Dean Wright.

No further information has been given about al-Amiri's presence at the U.S. embassy raid on Tuesday. Read more about the attack on the U.S. embassy in Baghdad at Breitbart News here .

Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship.

[Jan 01, 2020] This Jewish Vulture Capitalism is the way our Jewish Oligarchs act all over the world. Russia was pillaged by them in the 1990s.

Jan 01, 2020 | www.unz.com

Robjil , says: December 21, 2019 at 6:06 pm GMT

This Jewish Vulture Capitalism is the way our Jewish Oligarchs act all over the world. Russia was pillaged by them in the 1990s. Putin ended their reign of terror. This is the main reason Putin is so demonized in the Zion Vulture ruled West.

https://russia-insider.com/en/todays-jewish-billionaires-are-much-worse-19th-c-robber-barons-dont-give-your-guns-just-yet/ri28078

A few enlightened industrialists, such as Henry Ford, even went so far as to make the improvement of the lives of workers a priority, and to warn the people against the growing financial power of the international Jew.

Ford's warnings were prophetic. We are living in the second great Gilded Age in America, but the new Jewish oligarchs of the 21st century differ from their predecessors in several important ways. For one, they mostly built their fortunes through parasitic–rather than productive–sources of wealth, such as usury or real estate speculation.

[Jan 01, 2020] Nationalism is transforming the politics of the British Isles its power as a vehicle for discontent grows ever stronger The

Dec 25, 2019 | independent.co.uk

The desire by people to see themselves as a national community – even if many of the bonds binding them together are fictional – is one of the most powerful forces in the world

Patrick Cockburn | @indyworld |

Nationalism in different shapes and forms is powerfully transforming the politics of the British Isles, a development that gathered pace over the last five years and culminated in the general election this month.

National identities and the relationship between England, Scotland and Ireland are changing more radically than at any time over the last century. It is worth looking at the British archipelago as a whole on this issue because of the closely-meshed political relationship of its constituent nations. Some of these developments are highly visible such as the rise of the Scottish Nationalist Party (SNP) to permanent political dominance in Scotland in the three general elections since the independence referendum in 2014.

Other changes are important but little commented on, such as the enhanced national independence and political influence of the Republic of Ireland over the British Isles as a continuing member of the EU as the UK leaves. Dublin's greater leverage when backed by the other 26 EU states was repeatedly demonstrated, often to the surprise and dismay of London, in the course of the negotiations in Brussels over the terms of the British withdrawal.

Northern Ireland saw more nationalist than unionist MPs elected in the general election for the first time since 1921. This is important because it is a further sign of the political impact of demographic change whereby Catholics/nationalists become the new majority and the Protestants/unionists the minority. The contemptuous ease with which Boris Johnson abandoned his ultra-unionist pledges to the DUP and accepted a customs border in the Irish Sea separating Northern Ireland from the rest of Britain shows how little loyalty the Conservatives feel towards the northern unionists and their distinct and abrasive brand of British nationalism.

These developments affecting four of the main national communities inhabiting the British Isles – Irish, nationalists and unionists in Northern Ireland, Scots – are easy to track. Welsh nationalism is a lesser force. Much more difficult to trace and explain is the rise of English nationalism because it is much more inchoate than these other types of nationalism, has no programme, and is directly represented by no political party – though the Conservative Party has moved in that direction.

The driving force behind Brexit was always a certain type of English nationalism which did not lose its power to persuade despite being incoherent and little understood by its critics and supporters alike. In some respects, it deployed the rhetoric of any national community seeking self-determination. The famous Brexiteer slogan "take back control" is not that different in its implications from Sinn Fein – "Ourselves Alone" – though neither movement would relish the analogy.

The great power of the pro-Brexit movement, never really taken on board by its opponents, was to blame the very real sense of disempowerment and social grievances felt by a large part of the English population on Brussels and the EU. This may have been scapegoating on a grandiose scale, but nationalist movements the world over have targeted some foreign body abroad or national minority at home as the source of their ills. I asked one former Leave councillor – one of the few people I met who changed their mind on the issue after the referendum in 2016 – why people living in her deprived ward held the EU responsible for their poverty. Her reply cut through many more sophisticated explanations: "I suppose that it is always easier to blame Johnny Foreigner."

Applying life lessons to the pursuit of national happiness The Tories won't get far once progressives join forces 22,000 EU nationals have left NHS since Brexit vote, figures show This crude summary of the motives of many Leave voters has truth in it, but it is a mistake to caricature English nationalism as simply a toxic blend of xenophobia, racism, imperial nostalgia and overheated war memories. In the three years since the referendum the very act of voting for Brexit became part of many people's national identity, a desire to break free, kicking back against an overmighty bureaucracy and repelling attempts by the beneficiaries of globalisation to reverse a democratic vote.

The political left in most countries is bad at dealing with nationalism and the pursuit of self-determination. It sees these as a diversion from identifying and attacking the real perpetrators of social and economic injustice. It views nationalists as mistakenly or malignly aiming at the wrong target – usually foreigners – and letting the domestic ones off the hook.

The desire by people to see themselves as a national community – even if many of the bonds binding them together are fictional – is one of the most powerful forces in the world. It can only be ignored at great political cost, as the Labour Party has just found out to its cost for the fifth time (two referendums and three elections). What Labour should have done was early on take over the slogan "take back control" and seek to show that they were better able to deliver this than the Conservatives or the Brexit Party. There is no compelling reason why achieving such national demands should be a monopoly of the right. But in 2016, 2017 and 2019 Labour made the same mistake of trying to wriggle around Brexit as the prime issue facing the English nation without taking a firm position, an evasion that discredited it with both Remainers and Leavers.

Curiously, the political establishment made much the same mistake as Labour in underestimating and misunderstanding the nature of English nationalism. Up to the financial crisis of 2008 globalisation had been sold as a beneficial and inevitable historic process. Nationalism was old hat and national loyalties were supposedly on the wane. To the British political class, the EU obviously enhanced the political and economic strength of its national members. As beneficiaries of the status quo, they were blind to the fact that much of the country had failed to gain from these good things and felt marginalised and forgotten.

The advocates of supra-national organisations since the mediaeval papacy have been making such arguments and have usually been perplexed why they fail to stick. They fail to understand the strength of nationalism or religion in providing a sense of communal solidarity, even if it is based on dreams and illusions, that provides a vehicle for deeply felt needs and grievances. Arguments based on simple profit and loss usually lose out against such rivals.

Minervo , 1 day ago

Bigger by far are two forces which really do have control over our country -- the international NATO warmongers but even more so, the international banksters of the finance industry.

Why no 'leftist' campaign to Take Back Control of our money? Gordon Brown baled out the banks when they should have gone bankrupt and been nationalised.

Blair is forever tainted with his ill-fated Attack on Iraq. Surely New Liberals or Democrats or Socialists would want to lock down on that fiasco?

The Nationalism of taking back control could be a leftist project too.

[Jan 01, 2020] Quran Chapter 30 The usury you practice, seeking thereby to multiply people's wealth, will not multiply with God

Jan 01, 2020 | www.unz.com

World Citizen says: December 19, 2019 at 4:37 pm GMT 400 Words

"Gentlemen! I too have been a close observer of the doings of the Bank of the United States. I have had men watching you for a long time, and am convinced that you have used the funds of the bank to speculate in the breadstuffs of the country. When you won, you divided the profits amongst you, and when you lost, you charged it to the bank. You tell me that if I take the deposits from the bank and annul its charter I shall ruin ten thousand families. That may be true, gentlemen, but that is your sin! Should I let you go on, you will ruin fifty thousand families, and that would be my sin! You are a den of vipers and thieves. I have determined to rout you out, and by the Eternal, (bringing his fist down on the table) I will rout you out!"




Islam stands in their way of usury-ripping of mankind of their resources and defrauding mankind via bank thefts.

Bring on the Shariah Law. I would much rather live under Shariah, God's Constitution than under Euoropean/Western diabolic, satanic, fraudulent monies, homosexual, thievery, false flag hoaxes, WMD's, bogus wars, Unprovoked oppression, tel-LIE-vision, Santa Claus lies, Disney hocus pocus , hollywood, illuminati, free mason, monarchy, oligarchy, millitary industrial complex, life time congressman/senators, upto the eye balls taxation, IRS thievery, Fraudulent federal reserve, Rothchild/Rockerfeller/Queens and Kings city of London satanic cabal, opec petro$$$ thievery, ISISraHELL's, al-CIA-da hoaxes, Communist, Atheist, Idol worshippers, Fear Monger's, Drugged and Drunken's oxy crystal coccaine meth psychopath, child pedeophilia, gambler's, Pathological and diabolical liars, Hypocrites, sodomites ..I can't think of any right now, because my mind is exploding with rage because of these troubling central banker's satanic hegemony!

Quran Chapter 30

39. The usury you practice, seeking thereby to multiply people's wealth, will not multiply with God. But what you give in charity, desiring God's approval -- these are the multipliers.
40. God is He who created you, then provides for you, then makes you die, then brings you back to life. Can any of your idols do any of that? Glorified is He, and Exalted above what they associate.
41. Corruption has appeared on land and sea, because of what people's hands have earned, in order to make them taste some of what they have done, so that they might return.

Agree: Agent76

[Jan 01, 2020] Will 2020 See the Emergence of a Nationalist Left? by Andrew Joyce

Notable quotes:
"... On the Suffering of the World ..."
"... Identity Politics and the Transgender Trend: Where is LGBT ideology taking us and Why does it matter? ..."
"... Biological differentiation between male and female is a real thing ..."
Dec 29, 2019 | www.unz.com

"The life of the individual is a constant struggle, and not merely a metaphorical one, against want or boredom, but also an actual struggle against other people. He discovers adversaries everywhere, lives in continual conflict and dies with sword in hand."
Arthur Schopenhauer, On the Suffering of the World

Although Nietzsche seems to be the philosopher of choice for many on the Dissident Right, I've always had a soft spot for Arthur Schopenhauer. His cantankerous philosophical pessimism has always struck a chord with my own temperament, and for many years I've found his quasi-Buddhist and highly compassionate conceptualisation of suffering to be strangely comforting. That life is a struggle involving endless adversaries and competitors also forms an aspect of Schopenhauer's philosophy, and this continues to be significant in shaping my political and philosophical outlook. Certainly, it goes without saying that adversaries have never been in short supply for members of the Dissident Right. They are arrayed before us now, emerging from all points of the political spectrum, and often even from within our own ranks. Dissident right political philosophies, more than any other, appear destined to be mired in continual conflict, and I often find it difficult to shake the dark impression that one day I will die, metaphorical sword in hand, with every battle raging but far from won. For this reason, I sometimes permit myself the relief of optimism (a form of cowardice to both Schopenhauer and Spengler), and part of this is the attempt to find allies where formerly one may have seen only foes. This brings me to the subject matter of this essay -- recent developments on the Left which appear to suggest the emergence of an anti-globalist, anti-immigration, and anti-Zionist/anti-Semitic politics.

Swedish Communists Wake Up

Just days ago, Sputnik reported on the fact that almost half of the members of the Communist Party in Malmö, Sweden, are resigning. They plan to establish a new workers' party that no longer features multiculturalism, LGBT interests, and climate change as key policy goals. Nils Littorin, one of the defectors, told a local newspaper that today's Left has become part of the elite and has come to "dismiss the views of the working class as alien and problematic." Littorin suggested that the Left "is going through a prolonged identity crisis" and that his group, instead, intends to stick to the original values, such as class politics. Littorin adds "[The Left] don't understand why so many workers don't think that multiculturalism, the LGBT movement and Greta Thunberg are something fantastic, but instead believe we are in the 1930s' Germany and that workers who vote [right-wing] Sweden Democrats have been infected by some Nazi sickness." In a piece of simple insight previously rare on the Left, he argues that the rise in right-wing votes for people like Donald Trump and Boris Johnson are in fact due to "widespread dissatisfaction with liberal economic migration that leads to low-wage competition and the ghettoisation of communities, a development that only benefits major companies." Rather than being beneficial to working class Whites, Littorin condemns a "chaotic" immigration policy that has led to "cultural clashes, segregation and exclusion due to an uncontrolled influx from parts of the world characterised by honour culture and clan mentalities."

Littorin continues to talk sense when it comes to the LGBT agenda. He explains that LGBT issues and the climate movement are merely "state ideologies" that are "rammed down people's throats". Littorin adds that phenomena like these happen at the expense of real issues, such as poverty, homelessness, and income equality: "Pride, for instance, has been reduced to dealing with sexual orientation. We believe that human dignity is primarily about having a job and having pension insurance that means that you are not forced to live on crumbs when you are old."

As well as prioritising jobs and pensions over the flamboyant celebration of buggery, Littorin and his colleagues have pledged to abandon the name and ethos of Communism, describing it as a

word drawn to the dirt, a nasty word today, and not entirely undeservedly. In communist parties, there is this risk of elitism, self-indulgence, and a belief that a certain avant-garde should lead a working class that does not know its own best interests, instead of asking people what they want. 20th-century Communism died with the Soviet Union, it has never been successfully updated for the 21st century but has been stuck in 100-year-old books.

Curiously, events in Malmö have been mirrored somewhat in broader Swedish Left politics, with Markus Allard, the leader of the left-wing Örebro Party, expressing similar thoughts in an op-ed titled "Socialists don't belong to the left," accusing the mainstream left of completely abandoning its base , switching from the working class to "parasitic grant-grabbing layers within the middle class."

British Socialists Reinvent Themselves

Almost simultaneously, an identical process is occurring in Britain with George Galloway 's announcement of a new Workers Party of Britain . At the time of its launch Galloway described the party as "hard Brexit and hard labour," and added: "If you're a liberal who thinks it's Left if you're still pining for the EU, if you think shouting "racist," "homophobic," "transphobic" at everybody who doesn't agree with you is the way forward, we're probably not for you." Galloway's pro-Brexit stance is rooted in his belief that the modern British Left "have no vision for an alternative to rampant neoliberalism and a deindustrialised, finance-led, low wage economy, they calculate the best way to make this work is within the EU." He argues that the cosmopolitan leadership of the Labour Party in particular "think we are some kind of uncivilised tribe, painting our faces blue, and only able to vote in a right-wing government," a view he finds "not only deeply insulting, but also self-defeating and overly optimistic about the EU." On immigration, Galloway argues that there is "nothing left-wing about unlimited mass immigration. It decapitates the countries from which the immigrants leave, and drives down wages in those where they arrive. The wealthy benefit from it, as they can afford cheap labor for their companies, or cheap au-pairs, cheap baristas, cheap plumbers. But the working class suffers."

Galloway has also stressed that his new party will strongly pursue anti-Israel politics, and is fully committed to opposing the IHRA definition of antisemitism.

Galloway and the Workers Party of Britain have also taken a stand against the more extreme forms of LGBT indoctrination, particularly the mass promotion of transgenderism. Galloway, who has previously been attacked by a self-styled "trans anarchist" while giving a speech, is here following the lead of the pro-Brexit Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist) which recently published Identity Politics and the Transgender Trend: Where is LGBT ideology taking us and Why does it matter? In this text, and other articles on the party's website, including this very interesting speech denouncing transgender ideology as anti-materialist and anti-scientific, the argument is made that

Biological differentiation between male and female is a real thing . It doesn't just exist in humanity, it exists in many species throughout the natural world. Sexual reproduction is a natural biological process that has persisted in nature due to the diversity it engenders; it is a phenomenon encountered in the natural world. And let's not forget how this debate impinged upon us. We've been following this ideological trend, and encountering identity politics (idpol) among supporters and candidates for membership of our party, and amongst people we've been working with for at least four or five years. Because idpol has become a fashion in that period. And it is a fashion; it is a trend. And it suddenly -- from being very marginal to certain academic institutions in the 1970s -- became mainstream globally worldwide; it was actively promoted. Not promoted by communists, not by socialists, but picked up on and accepted by many of them, because they are led by, and they blindly followed, bourgeoise society down this dead-end. There is a group of self-proclaimed 'socialists' who are not actually any longer fighting against our oppression, they're fighting against reality!

The Left in Crisis?

None of these developments are entirely surprising and, in fact, the argument could be made that they are the inevitable side effect of what Nils Littorin termed the Left's prolonged "identity crisis." The endorsement and promotion of multiculturalism and its sex-politics corollaries never did make much sense within the framework of rational critiques of capitalism, and the tension between the nominal desire for working class solidarity and divisive pseudo-Marxian doctrines (e.g. Whiteness Studies) designed to mobilise imported ethnic factions against the largest section of the working class (blue-collar Whites) was always destined to bring about significant stress fractures when Leftist fortunes began to decline.

And decline they have. Of course, we have to set aside rampant ideological and cultural success. Figures and cliques operating under the banner of social equality and eternal progress continue to hold the reins of power in government, academia, and the mass media. But the Left is without question currently subject to a period of political decline. It's losing votes, and more important, it's fast losing hearts and minds. I should also add that they aren't losing them to right-wing ideas, but to the hollow shells of right-wing ideas (Free Enterprise! Build the Wall!) and to the charismatic globalist play-actors who promote-these ideas like salesmen selling used cars or aftershave. White working-class people are voting for free enterprise without hesitation while Jewish vulture capitalism operates with impunity under that very banner, destroying their towns, exporting their jobs, and repossessing their homes. The same people vote for a wall they'll never get -- and would never really solve the problems resulting from capitalism or ensure a majority White future. And they do it not because of concern about identity or racial destiny, but in the same way one might decide to install CCTV in a grocery store -- the ever-elusive Wall will never be built so long as it represents nothing more than the aspiration to protect mere inventory. The hollow men of the pseudo-Right-wing offer flimsy placebos, and yet the political Left, supposedly the historical repository of hard materialism, can't seem to compete.

There's been a scramble to blame the situation on a lack of charismatic leaders , disunity, a lack of attractive policies, and even the idea that the European Left made the fatal mistake of trying to meet the Right on its own turf by "flirting with closed-border nationalism or neoliberalism." But the real reason is surely the fact the Left has consistently alienated and browbeat working class Whites, while slowly revealing itself to be an elite-run clique of cosmopolitans, who are living the high life while waxing lyrical about oppressions that are rarely real and often imaginary, and in any case never affect them personally. Added to this is the fact Leftist ideology has become so convoluted and contorted, with the square-peg doctrine of Marx endlessly forced into new and increasingly abstract circular and triangular holes, resulting in Marxist interpretations of such ephemera as graffiti, pop music, and drag queens, all of which strike the average blue-collar worker as a steaming pile of effeminate middle-class navel-gazing. All this plays out as young yet dithering social justice warriors, jobless and senseless, search for oppression like an old lady with dementia searches for a purse she hasn't owned in 20 years. As the pundits split hairs, I look on, and it occurs to me rather simply that right now the pseudo-Left-wing liars aren't quite as good as the pseudo-Right-wing liars.

Are These Rebels Potential Allies?

When I was around 11 years old, my mother made a new friend, a Scottish woman in her 30s, who always struck me as very strange. It was her eyes. I didn't know at first what schizophrenia was, though I would soon find out. One day she arrived at our house and, recognising her, I opened the door and welcomed her in. I called to my mother, who was upstairs, and made small talk with the Scottish woman, who, standing still and staring right at me, seemed perfectly cheerful and articulate. She asked about how I was doing at school, and we talked a little bit about science, which she seemed to know a lot about. It was only after a few minutes that I noticed the smell and deduced that the woman had fouled herself. By the time my mother arrived, the Scottish woman had descended into a stream-of-consciousness gibberish that culminated in her attempting unsuccessfully to retrieve a knife from the kitchen before running from the property. She'd simply stopped taking her medication. We later discovered she was found by police that night, dancing and weeping with bare, bloody feet in a nearby graveyard, wearing nothing but a nightgown and proclaiming to the dead that she was God, distraught at the death of the crucified son.

The episode has remained with me now for over two decades, shaping my perceptions of reality, relationships, and trust. Here it suffices only to remark that the insane talk sense at times, even as their psyche shatters. And if we dig deeply enough into the statements of these moderately "awakened" Leftists, do we yet see signs of madness? A look again at the statement from the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist), along with some reading between the lines, suggests something decidedly off . Yes, "biological differentiation between male and female is a real thing." Of course it is. But so is biological differentiation between races, and yet here our erstwhile British hardcore materialists, currently led by a full-blooded ethnic Indian named Harpal Brar , decide to fight against reality. On that note, we should add that Brar's daughter, Joti Brar, has been announced as George Galloway's deputy leader at the "hard Brexit and hard labour" Worker's Party of Britain. Galloway, it's worth adding, has been married four times, with three marriages to non-Whites (Palestinian Amineh Abu-Zayyad in 1994, Lebanese Rima Husseini in 2007, and ethnic Indonesian Putri Gayatri Pertiwi in 2012). So for all his protestations of being against mass migration, one gets the distinct impression that Galloway is a committed multiculturalist and that his party will be internationalist in every meaningful sense of the term.

If there is any hope for some sanity in this camp of frustrated Leftists it is for the simple reason that these small new pockets of reason are for the most part free of Jewish influence and all the intellectual distortions such influence entails. In a 2018 essay titled " On "Leftist Anti-Semitism": Past and Present ," I considered the gradual shift of Jews away from the hard Left due to growing anti-Zionism, and their growing confinement in centrist neoliberalism:

Jewish blindness to their privileges, genuine or feigned, is of course one major cause for the undeniable friction between Jews and the modern Left. It was perhaps inevitable that foolish but earnest egalitarians on the Left would come to the slow realization that their 'comrades of the Jewish faith' were in fact not only elitists, but an elite of a very special sort. The simultaneous preaching of open borders/common property and 'the land of the Jewish people' was always going to strike a discordant note among the wearers of sweaty Che Guevara t-shirts, especially when accompanied so very often by the cacophony of Israeli gunfire and the screams of bloodied Palestinian children. Mass migration, that well-crafted toxin coursing through the highways and rail lines of Europe, has proven just as difficult to manage. Great waves of human detritus wash upon Western shores, bringing raw and passionate grievances even from the frontiers of Israel. These are people whose eyes have seen behind the veil, and who sit only with great discomfort alongside the kin of the IDF in league with the Western political Left -- the only common ground being a shared desire to dispossess the hated White man. For these reasons, the Left could well become a cold house for Jews without becoming authentically, systematically, or traditionally anti-Semitic. One might therefore expect Jews to regroup away from the radical left, occupying a political space best described as staunchly centrist -- a centrism that leans left only to pursue multiculturalism and other destructive 'egalitarian' social policies, and leans right only in order to obtain elite protections and privileges [domestically for the Jewish community, internationally for Israel]. A centrism based, in that old familiar formula, on 'what is best for Jews.'

As seen in the recent clash between Jews and the UK's Labour Party, the political relocation of Jews to a kind of amorphous and opportunistic centrism will bring them into direct conflict with those on the hard Left who not only pursue anti-Zionist politics but also object to manifestations of raw Jewish power like the mass adoption of the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism and the economic abuses of politically ambiguous (neither Left nor Right, but Jewish) oligarchs like Paul Singer. As such, and together with their natural aversion to being part of the Right, Jews will increasingly find it difficult to define themselves politically as anything other than Jews, leading to the increased visibility of their activities and interests -- something witnessed in the unprecedented step of Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis openly calling for British Jews to move against Jeremy Corbyn. This increased visibility can only be a good thing for those concerned with Jewish influence, and who have been frustrated in previous periods by Jewish influence masquerading in various political guises.

A potential opportunity, imperfect but perhaps feasible, may therefore be arising whereby White interests could be subliminally or even publicly defended through savvy, nominally hard-Left activism against mass migration (on economic rather than racial grounds), against Israel and international Zionist influence, against some aspects of PC culture, and against the capitalist excesses of the Jewish vulture funds. It goes without saying that Leftist activists don't receive anywhere near the same level of social, professional, or legal punishment for their activism as those on the Right, especially the dissident Right. I don't think I'm too wide of the mark in suggesting that an anti-immigration agitator with "Workers Party of Britain" plastered over his social media is less likely to lose his job than someone with public National Front affiliations. It may therefore be worth serious consideration by young activists as to whether they might want to cultivate a kind of "Leftist" mask to defend White interests in much the same way as Jews in the past have adopted various convenient political masks while concealing deeper ethnic interests. I am suggesting a combination of infiltration and masquerade. What matters most is the private motivation and the potential benefits of the ultimate goal -- White interests and objectives serving them.

There are, of course, also dangers in supporting such movements. I am not suggesting the investment of serious time and money in these groups, since the risk is great that the majority of their members are committed to a politics that is ultimately antagonistic and destructive to our own ultimate goals. There is also huge potential for betrayal on many of the issues where we might have common ground -- immigration, LGBT madness, PC culture -- and I find it difficult to shake off the impression that these developments bear the mark of a temporary despair and are designed to dupe blue-collar Whites into voting Left once more.

Still, 2020 may open up a new front in the war, and as the New Year approaches, I'll silence my inner Schopenhauer and toast to that.

G. Poulin , says: Show Comment December 29, 2019 at 9:57 pm GMT

Gee, they're starting to sound like Mussolini.
Anonymous [341] Disclaimer , says: Show Comment December 30, 2019 at 1:28 am GMT
Boris Johnson seems to be a step in this direction, many of the policies he has openly stated would have been almost unthinkable for a Conservative PM previously, things like amnesty for illegal immigrants, vast amounts of public spending, he has even stated an intention to nationalise things like train operators.

Boris is seen as very much right wing by most people in the UK, but if you look at his policies he could easily be described as a sort of left wing nationalist, especially in terms of his social policies. In terms of actual policy there is increasingly little difference between the Conservatives and Labour, the differentiation has become about abstract things like self-proclaimed patriotism and the level of pandering to Zionism.

Ron Unz , says: Show Comment December 30, 2019 at 2:54 am GMT
WN-types such as the author of this article tend to focus so heavily on immigration as an issue. So here's a link to a long piece I published a couple of years ago proposing a solution to the American version of the problem, though I'm not sure how applicable it would be to Britain:

https://www.unz.com/runz/a-grand-bargain-on-immigration-reform-2/

Bolteric , says: Show Comment December 30, 2019 at 5:29 am GMT
@Ron Unz I think, Mr. Unz, you highlight peaceful coexistence, at the same time many still pine for a separate nation of exclusively white Christians. While it's a lost cause at this point, it doesn't stop the WN types – a set that is difficult to exclude myself from – from imagining a different reality and the National policies that would accompany that. Is a grand bargain possible? It gives me pause.
Priss Factor , says: Website Show Comment December 30, 2019 at 5:42 am GMT
We need the Left-Right, which is fascism.
Frankie P , says: Show Comment December 30, 2019 at 5:45 am GMT
It's extremely surprising to me that Andrew Joyce, in his analysis of left/right potential cooperation for the benefit of the nation and its legacy population, would fail to mention or bring up the French Equality and Reconciliation movement of Alain Soral. Here is a movement with meaty ideas, and more importantly, results. For what ideas drive the Yellow Vest protests if not the very concepts that Joyce points out in this article, expressed so well by Soral and so many of the white French protesters? Soral, originally a Marxist who subsequently joined the National Front (now the National Rally), has a number of useful and accurate slogans. He is a brilliant analyst and an articulate commentator; unfortunately, his videos and activism is limited to the French language. "The Left for the worker, The Right for morality." Isn't this similar to Joyce's argument that the Left is losing members who are rejecting the identity politics, gender bender, climate change distraction issue driven narrative that is driving the Left today? Of course in France Soral is labeled a Rightist Antisemite, as he is not shy about calling out the stranglehold that CRIF holds over French politics and how this has warped foreign policy in the interests of apartheid Israel. When I watch some of his videos and commentary, I wonder why we don't have a similar figure and movement in the US.

[Jan 01, 2020] In one poll 18% of the USA respondents are clearly suicidal

Jan 01, 2020 | twitter.com

Reply 1 Retweet 2 Retweeted 2 Like 5 Liked 5 Thanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. Undo Undo stefania maurizi Retweeted

David Santoro ‏ 4:29 PM - 28 Dec 2019

Should (and can) we re-confirm the Reagan-Gorbatchev statement that "A # nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought?" Plus say why

[Jan 01, 2020] The consequences of the collapse of the Soviet Union! (For its yearly anniversary - 26th of December 1991)

Jan 01, 2020 | www.reddit.com

Analysis/take

The consequences of the collapse of the Soviet Union!

26th of December is the anniversary of the collapse of the USSR.

Russia/Russian Soviet Socialist Republic

Kazakhstan(Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic)

Ukraine/Ukrainian SSR.

Ukraine seemed like it would become the next European power. It had 3 military districts left over from the USSR with the best weaponry in the world including 700,000 troops as well as a nuclear arsenal of 3000 that made it the 3rd strongest country in the whole world after the US and Russia. By the time of the war in the Donbass the number of military personnel dropped down to 168,000 while selling huge quantities of Soviet weaponry.

The destruction of democracy

Consequences for the Soviet people

According to the UN Human Development Index -- which measures levels of life expectancy. Commenting on the situation in the former Soviet Union after capitalist restoration, Fabre stated, "We have catastrophic falls in several countries, which often are republics of the former Soviet Union, where poverty is actually increasing. In fact poverty has tripled in the whole region".

To sum it up for the Soviet people - "98 Russian billionaires hold more wealth than Russians combined savings" or 200 Russian oligarchs have 485 billion USD most of which come from post Soviet factories that used to be owned by the workers but were sold off at extremely low prices.

Effects on the rest of the world

Civil wars within the USSR

Many love to say that "the USSR's collapse was bloodless".

This is a list of all the civil wars between Soviet countries and peoples:

Overall - roughly 270,000 Soviet citizens have died from direct causes of the war.

Millions and millions have been displaced and have been thrown into poverty.

Conclusion

The Soviet Union was once the leader in all aspects of life, guaranteeing a tomorrow for all of its citizens where they would not fear losing a job, being homeless, being hungry, unabling to afford medical care. The Soviet Union produced its own planes, cars, hydroelectric dams, nuclear power stations, rockets while the workers used to own the means of production. In 1991, they took away our freedom while selling off all that my people have worked for, the consequences of which will be felt around the world until Capitalism finally falls.

Comrade Odarin Vladimirov.

Sources:

http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZG

https://forbes.kz//process/expertise/pochemu_kazahstan_vse_silnee_zavisit_ot_importa_myasa/

https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2019/03/06/98-russian-billionaires-hold-more-wealth-than-russians-combined-savings-a64720

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WX1867UCsc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gn8JluzDmRw

https://4esnok.by/mneniya/promyshlennost-ukrainy-iz-topov-v-topku/

https://ria.ru/20160817/1474536897.html

https://rian.com.ua/columnist/20160818/1014892653.html

https://inosmi.ru/sngbaltia/20121205/202996017.html

zavtraprivet 12 points · 6 days ago

· edited 5 days ago

Small note from me, even after 28 years, Ukraine's GDP is at 59% of its 1991 level. level 1

PringlesEatingNPCs 9 points · 5 days ago
· edited 5 days ago

It's funny that the westerners/pro-westerns were always scared of a "Big Brother" scenario but they never realised there was 2 opposites in their time, one keeping another from becoming the "Big Brother" Now they're cheerful at the "Big Brother" - the USA level 1

zedsdead20 8 points · 6 days ago

Any comparisons of USSR to 2019? level 2

Soviet_Odarin Soviet Historian ☭ 6 points · 6 days ago

Most countries overtook the SSR's, but only after 30 years! level 3

tdzida26 2 points · 5 days ago

Which countries? Former Soviet ones or other European ones? level 4

Soviet_Odarin Soviet Historian ☭ 2 points · 5 days ago

SSR stands for Soviet Socialist Republic, thus its Former Soviet. level 1

Jaydoss12 5 points · 5 days ago

Thank you comrade level 2

Soviet_Odarin Soviet Historian ☭ 6 points · 5 days ago

No problem comrade! level 1

colossalwreckemail 4 points · 5 days ago

You absolute beast. This is amazing. Thank you. Please write more, start a blog if you want.

o7 level 2

Soviet_Odarin Soviet Historian ☭ 3 points · 5 days ago

Comrade, I already have 4 other posts. Just check my posts on my profile. Thank you for the kind words o7! level 1

Deutsche-Kaiserreich 3 points · 5 days ago

And people say that capitalism is better, love from a former Soviet ally India. level 1

Anti_socialSocialist 3 points · 5 days ago

The Soviet Union may've been a bit top-down for my liking, but its fall was undoubtedly a tragedy and one of the worst losses of life outside of war in the 20th century. level 1

DaddyStalinHimself 3 points · 5 days ago

The illegal dissolution of the USSR was the greatest tragedy of the past 50 years, perhaps of the last century. The movement for our liberation will recover, but it has cost us decades of progress and hundreds of thousands of lives. Rest in peace to our champion. level 1

nsag_1 3 points · 4 days ago

It is a well researched article, thank you for posting it. Looking forward to other analysis around international states' affairs and their link to current CIS countries level 2

Soviet_Odarin Soviet Historian ☭ 1 point · 4 days ago

Indeed! level 1

torukmato France 3 points · 2 days ago

Le Monde Diplomatique in several languages will make a statement of the consequences of the fall of the Berlin Wall. level 1

VanguardVolunteer 5 points · 5 days ago

Thank you, Comrade Odarin!! level 1

bolshevikshqiptar Albanian Marx 4 points · 6 days ago

o7 level 2

Soviet_Odarin Soviet Historian ☭ 4 points · 6 days ago

o7 level 1

May_One 2 points · 6 days ago

Saved. Thank you! level 2

Soviet_Odarin Soviet Historian ☭ 3 points · 6 days ago

np comrade !!! level 1 Comment deleted by user 5 days ago level 2

Nonbinary_Knight Spanish Engels 8 points · 5 days ago

Bourgeois scum has stolen the meaning of democracy, you seriously think that voting once every 4 year for one particular rich fuck and his coterie of rich fucks to be exalted is the sole measure and implementation of democracy? level 3

Soviet_Odarin Soviet Historian ☭ 6 points · 5 days ago

Its not just that, can you remove a manager from his position for example? Of course you can't, you will have to deal with him for years while you can lose your job with a snap of his finger. In the USSR, managers and everyone in the hierarchy was elected, thus you could remove your manager or whoever by popular vote. level 3 Comment deleted by user 5 days ago level 4

Soviet_Odarin Soviet Historian ☭ 5 points · 5 days ago

Rule number 3, u/bolshevikshqiptar already warned you. Proof or don't say anything. Im from the USSR and people voted in my country, my uncle was the ex mayor of his town elected by the people. level 4

Nonbinary_Knight Spanish Engels 5 points · 5 days ago

traitor level 2

Cecilia_Raven 6 points · 5 days ago

come on mate, guaranteeing employment is way different from forced labour lol level 2

Soviet_Odarin Soviet Historian ☭ 5 points · 5 days ago

Democracy ? Where is democracy in Russia? Kazakhstan? Belarus? Shooting the Parliament building is democracy isn't it? Go educate yourself and read my post about Soviet democracy, maybe it will change your mind. Forced labor? Now you complain that having a job is guaranteed? level 2

bolshevikshqiptar Albanian Marx 2 points · 5 days ago

Rule number 3 level 2

PringlesEatingNPCs 1 point · 5 days ago

true but the oligarchs still standing and the capitalist took advantage of it -> making it worser for the people imo. level 3 Comment deleted by user 5 days ago level 4

PringlesEatingNPCs 2 points · 5 days ago

And get a free award boosting your fame while the capitalists milking money from your fame ? Look at Greta Thunberg.

[Dec 21, 2019] Trump administration sanction companies involved in laying the remaining pipe, and also companies involved in the infrastructure around the arrival point.

Highly recommended!
Dec 21, 2019 | peakoilbarrel.com

Watcher x Ignored says: 12/13/2019 at 6:27 am

The new US defense bill, agreed on by both parties, includes sanctions on executives of companies involved in the completion of Nordstream 2. This is companies involved in laying the remaining pipe, and also companies involved in the infrastructure around the arrival point.

This could include arrest of the executives of those companies, who might travel to the United States. One of the companies is Royal Dutch Shell, who have 80,000 employees in the United States.

Hightrekker x Ignored says: 12/13/2019 at 12:28 pm
So much for the "Free Market".
Hickory x Ignored says: 12/12/2019 at 11:28 pm
Some people believe 'the market' for crude oil is a fair and effective arbiter of the industry supply and demand. But if we step back an inch or two, we all can see it has been a severely broken mechanism during this up phase in oil. For example, there has been long lags between market signals of shortage or surplus.

Disruptive policies and mechanisms such as tariffs, embargo's, and sanctions, trade bloc quotas, military coups and popular revolutions, socialist agendas, industry lobbying, multinational corporate McCarthyism, and massively obese debt financing, are all examples of forces that have trumped an efficient and transparent oil market.

And yet, the problems with the oil market during this time of upslope will look placid in retrospect, as we enter the time beyond peak.
I see no reason why it won't turn into a mad chaotic scramble.
We had a small hint of what this can look like in the last mid-century. The USA responded to military expansionism of Japan by enacting an oil embargo against them. The response was Pearl Harbor. This is just one example of many.
How long before Iran lashes out in response to their restricted access to the market?
People generally don't respond very calmly to involuntary restriction on food, or energy, or access to the markets for these things.

[Dec 21, 2019] Lessons of the past: all changed in 1999 with the war in Kosovo. For the first time I witnessed shocking images of civilian targets being bombed, TV stations, trains, bridges. The NATO spokesman boasted of hundreds of Serbian tanks being destroyed. There was something new and disturbing about his manner, language and tone, something I'd not encountered from coverage of previous conflicts. For the first time I found myself not believing one word of the narrative

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Every US military action and ultimatum to a foreign state has been aggressively pushed by the losing Democrats and particularly 'liberal' mainstream media, any dissent met with smears, censorship or worse. I would argue that today similarities with events leading up to previous global conflicts are too striking and numerous to ignore. ..."
"... Israel and its US relationship – I think Syria is where global conflict is still likely to start. As Syria has been winning, the involvement of Turkey and Saudi Arabia appears to receding. More recently Israel have taken their place and is relentless and unyielding and has its own wider, destructive plans for the Middle East. Israeli influence in the US is now so great that the US has more or less ceded its foreign policy in the Middle East to Israel. In 1914 Austro-Hungary pursued a series of impossible demands against Serbia managing to drag its close and more powerful ally Germany (led by someone equally as obstinate and militaristic as the US leadership) into World War I. Incidentally, some readers may have noticed the similarity between the 1914 diktats and modern-day US bullying towards Venezuala and other states – and perhaps most striking, by Saudi Arabia in its dispute with Qatar not long ago ..."
"... Ideology, paranoia and unstable leaders – history tells us that ideology, paranoia and power are not a good mix and this is in abundance in western elites and media. These establishments are rabidly hostile to Iran and Russia. ..."
"... Media deception and propaganda – The media have been responsible for getting us to where we are today. Without them, the public would have woken up long ago. Much of the deception has been about the presentation of the narrative and the leaders. And it's been a campaign of distraction on our news where the daily genocide in Yemen gives way to sensationalised non-events and celebrity trivia. ..."
"... Appeasement – because of its relative weakness and not wanting a war, Russia has to some extent appeased Western and Israeli aggression in Syria and beyond. To be fair, given the aggression it faces I don't think Russia has had much choice than playing for time. However at some point soon, with the West pushing more and more, something will have to give. Likewise, in the 1930s a militarily unprepared UK and France appeased Germany's expansion. The more they backed off the more Germany pushed until war was the only way. ..."
"... False flags – for those watching events in Syria know that the majority of the 'chemical attacks' have been carried out by Western supported opposition. The timing and nature of these suggest co-ordination at the highest levels. Intelligence Services of the UK and other agencies are believed to co-ordinate these fabrications to provoke a western response aimed at the Syrian Army. On more than one occasion these incidents have nearly escalated to a direct conflict with Russia showing the dangerous game being played by those involved and those pushing the false narrative in the media ..."
Apr 23, 2019 | off-guardian.org

As a history student years ago I remember our teacher explaining how past events are linked to what happens in the future. He told us human behaviour always dictates that events will repeat in a similar way as before. I remember we studied 20th century history and discussed World War I and the links to World War II. At this time, we were in the middle of the Cold War and in unchartered waters and I couldn't really link past events to what was likely to happen next. Back then I guess like many I considered US presidents more as statesman. They talked tough on the Soviet Union but they talked peace too. So, the threat to humanity was very different then to now. Dangerous but perhaps a stable kind of dangerous. After the break up of the Soviet Union we then went through a phase of disorderly change in the world. In the early 1990s the war in the Former Yugoslavia erupted and spread from republic to republic. Up until the mid-to-late nineties I didn't necessarily sense that NATO and the West were the new threat to humanity. While there was a clear bias to events in Yugoslavia there was still some even-handedness or fairness. Or so I thought. This all changed in 1999 with the war in Kosovo. For the first time I witnessed shocking images of civilian targets being bombed, TV stations, trains, bridges and so on. But my wake-up call was the daily NATO briefings on the war. The NATO spokesman boasted of hundreds of Serbian tanks being destroyed. There was something new and disturbing about his manner, language and tone, something I'd not encountered from coverage of previous conflicts. For the first time I found myself not believing one word of the narrative.

When the peace agreement was reached, out of 300 Serbian tanks which had entered Kosovo at the start of the conflict, over 285 were counted going back into Serbia proper which was confirmation he had been lying .

From this conflict onwards I started to see clear parallels with events of the past and some striking similarities with the lead up to previous world wars. This all hit home when observing events in Syria and more recently Venezuala. But looking around seeing people absorbed in their phones you wouldn't think the world is on the brink of war. For most of us with little time to watch world events there are distractions which have obscured the picture historians and geopolitical experts see more clearly.

Recent and current western leaders haven't been short people in military uniform shouting. That would be far too obvious. It's still military conflict and mass murder but in smart suits with liberal sound-bites and high-fives. Then the uncool, uncouth conservative Trump came along and muddied the waters.

Briefly it seemed there might be hope that these wars would stop. But there can be little doubt he's been put under pressure to comply with the regime change culture embedded in the Deep State. Today, through their incendiary language we see US leaders morphing into the open style dictators of the past. The only thing missing are the military uniforms and hats.

Every US military action and ultimatum to a foreign state has been aggressively pushed by the losing Democrats and particularly 'liberal' mainstream media, any dissent met with smears, censorship or worse. I would argue that today similarities with events leading up to previous global conflicts are too striking and numerous to ignore.

Let's look at some of these:

1) Military build up, alliances and proxy wars – for all the chaos and mass murder pursued by the Obama Administration he did achieve limited successes in signing agreements with Iran and Cuba. But rather than reverse the endless wars as promised Trump cancels the agreements leaving the grand sum of zilch foreign policy achievements. NATO has been around for 70 years, but in the last 20 or so has become obsessed with military build up. Nowadays it has hundreds of bases around the world but keeps destablising non-aligned states, partly to isolate Russia and China. And Syria sums up the dangers of the regime change model used today. With over a dozen states involved in the proxy war there is a still high risk of conflict breaking out between US and Russia. The motives for military build up are many. First there are powerful people in the arms industry and media who benefit financially from perpetual war. The US while powerful in military terms are a declining power which will continue, new powers emerging. The only return on their money they can see is through military build up. Also there are many in government, intelligence services and media who can see that if the current order continues to crumble they are likely to be prosecuted for various crimes. All this explains the threatening language and the doubling-down on those who challenge them. In 1914, Europe had two backward thinking military alliance blocks and Sarajevo showed how one event could trigger an unstoppable escalation dragging in many states. And empires such as Austro-Hungary were crumbling from within as they are now. So a similar mentality prevails today where the powerful in these empires under threat favour conflict to peace. For these individuals it's a last throw of the dice and a gamble with all our lives.

2) Israel and its US relationship – I think Syria is where global conflict is still likely to start. As Syria has been winning, the involvement of Turkey and Saudi Arabia appears to receding. More recently Israel have taken their place and is relentless and unyielding and has its own wider, destructive plans for the Middle East. Israeli influence in the US is now so great that the US has more or less ceded its foreign policy in the Middle East to Israel. In 1914 Austro-Hungary pursued a series of impossible demands against Serbia managing to drag its close and more powerful ally Germany (led by someone equally as obstinate and militaristic as the US leadership) into World War I. Incidentally, some readers may have noticed the similarity between the 1914 diktats and modern-day US bullying towards Venezuala and other states – and perhaps most striking, by Saudi Arabia in its dispute with Qatar not long ago .

3) Ideology, paranoia and unstable leaders – history tells us that ideology, paranoia and power are not a good mix and this is in abundance in western elites and media. These establishments are rabidly hostile to Iran and Russia. In addition we face a situation of highly unpredictable, ideological regional leaders in Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Israel. Most worrying of all, the language, threats and actions of Trump, Pompeo and Bolton suggests there are psychopathic tendencies in play. Behind this is a Deep State and Democrat Party pushing even harder for conflict. The level of paranoia is discouraging any notion of peace. 30 years ago Russia and US would sit down at a summit and reach a consensus. Today a US leader or diplomat seen talking to a Russian official is accused of collusion. When there are limited channels to talk in a crisis, you know we are in trouble. In Germany in the 1930s, ideology, propaganda and creating enemies were key in getting the population on side for war. The leaders within the Nazi clique, Hitler, Goring and Himmler look disturbingly similar to the Trump, Pompeo, Bolton line up.

4) Media deception and propaganda – The media have been responsible for getting us to where we are today. Without them, the public would have woken up long ago. Much of the deception has been about the presentation of the narrative and the leaders. And it's been a campaign of distraction on our news where the daily genocide in Yemen gives way to sensationalised non-events and celebrity trivia. The terms and words; regime change, mass murder and terrorist have all been substituted by the media with 'humanitarian intervention', 'limited airstrikes' and 'moderate rebels' to fool a distracted public that the victims of the aggression are the bad guys. Western funded 'fact checking' sites such as Bellingcat have appeared pushing the misdirections to a surreal new level. Obama was portayed in the media as a cool guy and a little 'soft' on foreign policy. This despite the carnage in Libya, Syria and his drones. Sentiments of equal rights and diversity fill the home affairs sections in the liberal press, while callous indifference and ethno-centrism towards the Middle East and Russia dominate foreign affairs pages. In the press generally, BREXIT, non-existent anti-Semitism and nonsense about the 'ISIS bride' continues unabated. This media circus seeks to distract from important matters, using these topics to create pointless divisions, causing hostility towards Muslims and Jews in the process. The majority of a distracted public have still not twigged largely because the propaganda is more subtle nowadays and presented under a false humanitarian cloak. A small but vocal group of experts and journalists challenging these narratives are regularly smeared as Putin or Assad "apologists" . UK journalists are regularly caught out lying and some long standing hoaxes such as Russiagate exposed. Following this and Iraq WMDs more people are starting to see a pattern here. Yet each time the media in the belief they've bamboozled enough move on to the next big lie. This a sign of a controlled media which has reached the point of being unaccountable and untouchable, deeply embedded within the establishment apparatus. In the lead up to World War II the Nazis ran an effective media propaganda campaign which indoctrinated the population. The media in Germany also reached the point their blindingly obvious lies were rarely questioned. The classic tactic was to blame others for the problems in Germany and the world and project their crimes on to their victims. There are some differences as things have evolved. The Nazis created the media and state apparatus to pursue war. Nowadays this is the opposite way around. Instead the state apparatus is already in place so whoever is leader whether they describe themself as liberal or conservative, is merely a figurehead required to continue the same pro-war policies. Put a fresh-looking president in a shiny suit and intoduce him to the Queen and you wouldn't think he's the biggest mass murderer since Hitler. Although there are some differences in the propaganda techniques, all the signs are that today's media are on a similar war-footing as Germany's was just prior to the outbreak of World War II.

5) Appeasement – because of its relative weakness and not wanting a war, Russia has to some extent appeased Western and Israeli aggression in Syria and beyond. To be fair, given the aggression it faces I don't think Russia has had much choice than playing for time. However at some point soon, with the West pushing more and more, something will have to give. Likewise, in the 1930s a militarily unprepared UK and France appeased Germany's expansion. The more they backed off the more Germany pushed until war was the only way.

6) False flags – for those watching events in Syria know that the majority of the 'chemical attacks' have been carried out by Western supported opposition. The timing and nature of these suggest co-ordination at the highest levels. Intelligence Services of the UK and other agencies are believed to co-ordinate these fabrications to provoke a western response aimed at the Syrian Army. On more than one occasion these incidents have nearly escalated to a direct conflict with Russia showing the dangerous game being played by those involved and those pushing the false narrative in the media. The next flashpoint in Syria is Idlib, where it's highly likely a new chemical fabrication will be attempted this Spring. In the 1930s the Nazis were believed to use false flags with increasing frequency to discredit and close down internal opposition. Summary – We now live in a society where exposing warmongering is a more serious crime than committing it. Prisons hold many people who have bravely exposed war crimes – yet most criminals continue to walk free and hold positions of power. And when the media is pushing for Julian Assange to be extradicted you know this is beyond simple envy of a man who has almost single-handedly done the job they've collectively failed to do. They are equally complicit in warmongering hence why they see Assange and others as a threat. For those not fooled by the smart suits, liberal platitudes and media distraction techniques, the parallels with Germany in the 1930s in particular are now fairly obvious. The blundering military alliances of 1914 and the pure evil of 1939 – with the ignorance, indifference and narcissism described above make for a destructive mix. Unless something changes soon our days on this planet are likely be numbered. Depressing but one encouraging thing is that the indisputable truth is now in plain sight for anyone with internet access to see and false narratives have collapsed before. It's still conceivable that something may create a whole chain of events which sweep these dangerous parasites from power. So anything can happen. In the meantime we should keep positive and continue to spread the message.

Kevin Smith is a British citizen living and working in London. He researches and writes down his thoughts on the foreign wars promoted by Western governments and media. In the highly controlled and dumbed down UK media environment, he's keen on exploring ways of discouraging ideology and tribalism in favour of free thinking.

comite espartaco says Apr, 24, 2019

2- 'Israel and its US relationship'. The 'hands off' policy of the Western powers, guarantees that Syria cannot even be a trigger to any 'global conflict', supposing that a 'global conflict' was on the cards, especially when Russia is just a crumbling shadow of the USSR and China a giant with feet of clay, heavily dependent on Western oligarchic goodwill, to maintain its economy and its technological progress.

In 1914, the Serbian crisis was just trigger of WWI and not a true cause. It is not even clear if it was Germany that dragged Austria-Hungary into the war or Russia. Although there was a possibility (only a possibility), that a swift and 'illegal' attack by Austria-Hungary (without an ultimatum), would have localised and contained the conflict.

There is no similarity whatsoever between the 1914 'diktats' and modern US policy, as the US is the sole Superpower and its acts are not opposed by a balancing and corresponding alliance. Save in the Chinese colony of North Korea, where the US is restrained by a tacit alliance of the North Eastern Asiatic powers: China, Russia, Japan and South Korea, that oppose any military action and so promote and protect North Korean bullying. Qatar, on the other hand, is one of the most radical supporters of the Syrian opposition and terrorist groups around the muslim world, even more than Saudi Arabia and there are powerful reasons for the confrontation of the Gulf rivals.

olavleivar says Apr, 24, 2019
You should go back in Time and STUDY what really happened .. that means going back to the Creation of the socalled British Empire ..the Bank of England , the British East Indian Company , the Opium Wars and the Opium Trafficing , the Boer Wars for Gold and Diamonds , the US Civil War and its aftermath , the manipulations of Gold and Silver by socalled british Financial Interests , The US Spanish Wars , the Japanese Russian War , the failed Coup against Czar Russia 1905 , the Young Turk Coup against the Ottoman Empire 1908, the Armenian Genocide , the Creation of the Federal Reserve 1913 , the Multitude of Assinations and other Terror Attacks in the period from 1900 and upwards , WHO were the perpetraders ? , , WW 1 and its originators , the Bolshevik Coup 1917 , the Treaty of Versailles and the Actors in that Treaty ,the Plunder of Germany , the dissolution of Austria Hungary , the Bolshevik Coup attempts all over Europe , and then the run up to WW 2 , the Actions of Poland agianst Germans and Czechs .. Hitler , Musolini and finally WW 2 .the post war period , the Nuernberg Trials , the Holocaust Mythology , the Creation of Israel , Gladio , the Fall of the Sovjet Empire and the Warshav Pact , the Wars in the Middle East , the endless Terror Actions , the murder of Kennedy and a mass of False Flag Terrorist Attacks since then , the destruction of the Balkans and the Middle east THERE IS PLENTY of EXCELLENT LITERATURE and ANALYSIS on all subjects .
comite espartaco says Apr, 23, 2019
1- Military buildup, alliances and proxy wars.

It was your Obama that 'persecuted' Mr Assange !!!

Syria demonstrates that there has NOT been a Western strategy for regime change (specially after the 'defeats' in Iraq and Afghanistan), let alone a proxy war, but, on the contrary, an effort to keep the tyranny of Assad in power, in a weaker state, to avoid any strong, 'revolutionary' rival near Israel. Russia has been given a free hand in Syria, otherwise, if the West had properly armed the resistance groups, it would have been a catastrophe for the Russian forces, like it was in Afghanistan during the Soviet intervention.

Trump's policy of 'equal' (proportional) contributions for all members of NATO and other allies, gives the lie to the US military return 'argument' and should be understood as part of his war on unfair competition by other powers.

The 'military' and diplomatic alliances of 1914 were FORWARD thinking, so much so that they 'repeated' themselves during WWII, with slight changes. But it is very doubtful that the Empires, like the Austro-Hungarian o the Russian ones, would have 'crumbled' without the outbreak of WWI. They were never under threat, as their military power during the war showed. Only a World War of cataclysmic character could destroy them. A war, triggered, but not created, by the 'conflict seeking mentality' of the powerful in the small countries of the Balkans.

Shardlake says Apr, 23, 2019
Generally attributed to Senator Hiram Warren Johnson in 1918 that 'when war comes the first casualty is truth' is as much a truism now as it was then.

I'm more inclined to support hauptmanngurski's proposition that the members of the armed forces, from both sides, who return from conflicts with life-changing injuries or even in flag-draped caskets defended only the freedom of multinational enterprises and conglomerates to make and continue to make vast profits for the privileged few at the population's expense.

As Kevin Smith makes abundantly clear we are all subject to the downright lies and truth-stretching from our government aided and abetted by a compliant main stream media as exemplified in the Skripal poisoning affair, which goes far beyond the counting of Serbian tanks supposedly destroyed during the Balkans conflict. The Skripals' are now God knows where either as willing participants or as detainees and our government shows no signs of clarifying the matter, so who would believe what it put out anyway in view of its track record of misinformation ? The nation doesn't know what to believe.

Sadly, I believe this has always been the way of things and I cannot even speculate on how long it will be before this nation will realise it is being deliberately mis-led.

[Dec 21, 2019] Trump comes clean from world s policeman to thug running a global protection racket by Finian Cunningham

Highly recommended!
In any case withdrawal from Syria was a surprising and bold move on the Part of the Trump. You can criticizes Trump for not doing more but before that he bahvaves as a typical neocon, or a typical Republican presidents (which are the same things). And he started on this path just two month after inauguration bombing Syria under false pretences. So this is something
I think the reason of change is that Trump intuitively realized the voters are abandoning him in droves and the sizable faction of his voters who voted for him because of his promises to end foreign wars iether already defected or is ready to defect. So this is a move designed to keep them.
Notable quotes:
"... "America shouldn't be doing the fighting for every nation on earth, not being reimbursed in many cases at all. If they want us to do the fighting, they also have to pay a price," Trump said. ..."
Dec 27, 2018 | www.rt.com

President Trump's big announcement to pull US troops out of Syria and Afghanistan is now emerging less as a peace move, and more a rationalization of American military power in the Middle East. In a surprise visit to US forces in Iraq this week, Trump said he had no intention of withdrawing the troops in that country, who have been there for nearly 15 years since GW Bush invaded back in 2003.

Hinting at private discussions with commanders in Iraq, Trump boasted that US forces would in the future launch attacks from there into Syria if and when needed. Presumably that rapid force deployment would apply to other countries in the region, including Afghanistan.

In other words, in typical business-style transactional thinking, Trump sees the pullout from Syria and Afghanistan as a cost-cutting exercise for US imperialism. Regarding Syria, he has bragged about Turkey being assigned, purportedly, to "finish off" terror groups. That's Trump subcontracting out US interests.

Critics and supporters of Trump are confounded. After his Syria and Afghanistan pullout call, domestic critics and NATO allies have accused him of walking from the alleged "fight against terrorism" and of ceding strategic ground to US adversaries Russia and Iran.

'We're no longer suckers of the world!' Trump says US is respected as nation AGAIN (VIDEO)

Meanwhile, Trump's supporters have viewed his decision in more benign light, cheering the president for "sticking it to" the deep state and military establishment, assuming he's delivering on electoral promises to end overseas wars.

However, neither view gets what is going on. Trump is not scaling back US military power; he is rationalizing it like a cost-benefit analysis, as perhaps only a real-estate-wheeler-dealer-turned president would appreciate. Trump is not snubbing US militarism or NATO allies, nor is he letting loose an inner peace spirit. He is as committed to projecting American military as ruthlessly and as recklessly as any other past occupant of the White House. The difference is Trump wants to do it on the cheap.

Here's what he said to reporters on Air Force One before touching down in Iraq:

"The United States cannot continue to be the policeman of the world. It's not fair when the burden is all on us, the United States We are spread out all over the world. We are in countries most people haven't even heard about. Frankly, it's ridiculous." He added: "We're no longer the suckers, folks."

Laughably, Trump's griping about US forces "spread all over the world" unwittingly demonstrates the insatiable, monstrous nature of American militarism. But Trump paints this vice as a virtue, which, he complains, Washington gets no thanks for from the 150-plus countries around the globe that its forces are present in.

As US troops greeted him in Iraq, the president made explicit how the new American militarism would henceforth operate.

"America shouldn't be doing the fighting for every nation on earth, not being reimbursed in many cases at all. If they want us to do the fighting, they also have to pay a price," Trump said.

'We give them $4.5bn a year': Israel will still be 'good' after US withdrawal from Syria – Trump

This reiterates a big bugbear for this president in which he views US allies and client regimes as "not pulling their weight" in terms of military deployment. Trump has been browbeating European NATO members to cough up more on military budgets, and he has berated the Saudis and other Gulf Arab regimes to pay more for American interventions.

Notably, however, Trump has never questioned the largesse that US taxpayers fork out every year to Israel in the form of nearly $4 billion in military aid. To be sure, that money is not a gift because much of it goes back to the Pentagon from sales of fighter jets and missile systems.

The long-held notion that the US has served as the "world's policeman" is, of course, a travesty.

Since WWII, all presidents and the Washington establishment have constantly harped on, with self-righteousness, about America's mythical role as guarantor of global security.

Dozens of illegal wars on almost every continent and millions of civilian deaths attest to the real, heinous conduct of American militarism as a weapon to secure US corporate capitalism.

But with US economic power in historic decline amid a national debt now over $22 trillion, Washington can no longer afford its imperialist conduct in the traditional mode of direct US military invasions and occupations.

Perhaps, it takes a cost-cutting, raw-toothed capitalist like Trump to best understand the historic predicament, even if only superficially.

This gives away the real calculation behind his troop pullout from Syria and Afghanistan. Iraq is going to serve as a new regional hub for force projection on a demand-and-supply basis. In addition, more of the dirty work can be contracted out to Washington's clients like Turkey, Israel and Saudi Arabia, who will be buying even more US weaponry to prop the military-industrial complex.

'With almost $22 trillion of debt, the US is in no position to attack Iran'

This would explain why Trump made his hurried, unexpected visit to Iraq this week. Significantly, he said : "A lot of people are going to come around to my way of thinking", regarding his decision on withdrawing forces from Syria and Afghanistan.

Since his troop pullout plan announced on December 19, there has been serious pushback from senior Pentagon figures, hawkish Republicans and Democrats, and the anti-Trump media. The atmosphere is almost seditious against the president. Trump flying off to Iraq on Christmas night was reportedly his first visit to troops in an overseas combat zone since becoming president two years ago.

What Trump seemed to be doing was reassuring the Pentagon and corporate America that he is not going all soft and dovish. Not at all. He is letting them know that he is aiming for a leaner, meaner US military power, which can save money on the number of foreign bases by using rapid reaction forces out of places like Iraq, as well as by subcontracting operations out to regional clients.

Thus, Trump is not coming clean out of any supposed principle when he cuts back US forces overseas. He is merely applying his knack for screwing down costs and doing things on the cheap as a capitalist tycoon overseeing US militarism.

During past decades when American capitalism was relatively robust, US politicians and media could indulge in the fantasy of their military forces going around the world in large-scale formations to selflessly "defend freedom and democracy."

Today, US capitalism is broke. It simply can't sustain its global military empire. Enter Donald Trump with his "business solutions."

But in doing so, this president, with his cheap utilitarianism and transactional exploitative mindset, lets the cat out of the bag. As he says, the US cannot be the world's policeman. Countries are henceforth going to have to pay for "our protection."

Inadvertently, Trump is showing up US power for what it really is: a global thug running a protection racket.

It's always been the case. Except now it's in your face. Trump is no Smedley Butler, the former Marine general who in the 1930s condemned US militarism as a Mafia operation. This president is stupidly revealing the racket, while still thinking it is something virtuous.

Finian Cunningham (born 1963) has written extensively on international affairs, with articles published in several languages. Originally from Belfast, Northern Ireland, he is a Master's graduate in Agricultural Chemistry and worked as a scientific editor for the Royal Society of Chemistry, Cambridge, England, before pursuing a career in newspaper journalism. For over 20 years he worked as an editor and writer in major news media organizations, including The Mirror, Irish Times and Independent. Now a freelance journalist based in East Africa, his columns appear on RT, Sputnik, Strategic Culture Foundation and Press TV.

dnm1136

Once again, Cunningham has hit the nail on the head. Trump mistakenly conflates fear with respect. In reality, around the world, the US is feared but generally not respected.

My guess is that the same was true about Trump as a businessman, i.e., he was not respected, only feared due to his willingness to pursue his "deals" by any means that "worked" for him, legal or illegal, moral or immoral, seemingly gracious or mean-spirited.

William Smith

Complaining how the US gets no thanks for its foreign intervention. Kind of like a rapist claiming he should be thanked for "pleasuring" his victim. Precisely the same sentiment expressed by those who believe the American Indians should thank the Whites for "civilising" them.

Phoebe S,

"Washington gets no thanks for from the 150-plus countries around the globe that its forces are present in."

That might mean they don't want you there. Just saying.

ProRussiaPole

None of these wars are working out for the US strategically. All they do is sow chaos. They seem to not be gaining anything, and are just preventing others from gaining anything as well.

Ernie For -> ProRussiaPole

i am a huge Putin fan, so is big Don. Please change your source of info Jerome, Trump is one man against Billions of people and dollars in corruption. He has achieved more in the USA in 2 years than all 5 previous parasites together.

Truthbetold69

It could be a change for a better direction. Time will tell. 'If you do what you've always been doing, you'll get what you've always been getting.'

[Dec 21, 2019] Time to Terminate Washington's Defense Welfare

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... While I admire America's democratic society, I hate how America brought wars and chaos to the world in guise of "freedom and liberation". ..."
"... Was it necessary to bomb civilians of Ossetia for Georgia to get rid of Russia? Was it necessary to provoke a coup d'état against fully legitimate and democratically elected government in Ukraine? Life isn't fair indeed : not only they will never enter in NATO (even less EU) and no one will protect them, but they can say farewell to the land they lost. People in Georgia and Ukraine are less and less gullible and Pro Russians sentiment is gaining ground btw. Ask yourself why ? ..."
"... Sphere of influence, the same reason why Cuba and Venezuela will pay for their insolence against the hegemon. The world is never a fair place. ..."
Sep 01, 2017 | nationalinterest.org

opaw , August 30, 2017 8:29 PM

While I admire America's democratic society, I hate how America brought wars and chaos to the world in guise of "freedom and liberation".

I hate how America exploit the weak. president moon should offer an olive branch to fatty Kim by sending back the thaad to America and pulling out American base and troops. he should convince fatty Kim that should he really like to proliferate his nuclear missile development as deterrence, aim it only to America and America only. there is no need for Koreans to kill fellow Koreans.

Try Harder , August 31, 2017 2:45 AM

Very good idea, after having pushed Ukraine and Georgia to a war lost in advance, lets hope US will abandon South Korea and Japan because they were helpless in demilitarizing one of the poorest countries in the world....

Try Harder Guest , August 31, 2017 4:16 PM

Was it necessary to bomb civilians of Ossetia for Georgia to get rid of Russia? Was it necessary to provoke a coup d'état against fully legitimate and democratically elected government in Ukraine? Life isn't fair indeed : not only they will never enter in NATO (even less EU) and no one will protect them, but they can say farewell to the land they lost. People in Georgia and Ukraine are less and less gullible and Pro Russians sentiment is gaining ground btw. Ask yourself why ?

Zsari Maxim Guest , August 31, 2017 11:50 AM

Sphere of influence, the same reason why Cuba and Venezuela will pay for their insolence against the hegemon. The world is never a fair place.

Thomas Fung , August 31, 2017 5:04 PM

In this person's opinion, the article raises a good point with regards to US defense subsidies. However, its examples are dissimilar. Japan spends approximately 1% of its GDP on defense; South Korea spends roughly 2.5% of its GDP defense.

In fact, it seems to this person that a better example of US Defense Welfare would be direct subsidies granted to the state of Israel.

[Dec 21, 2019] The Pentagon s New Map War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Barnett's main thesis in "The Pentagon's New Map" is that the world is composed of two types of states: those that are part of an integrated and connected "Core," which embrace globalization; and states of the "Gap," which are disconnected from the effects of globalization. Barnett proclaims that globalization will move the world into an era of peace and prosperity, but can only do so with the help of an indispensable United States. He writes that America is the lynchpin to the entire process and he believes that the United States should be midwife to a new world that will one day consist of peaceful democratic states and integrated economies. Barnett is proposing no less than a new grand strategy - the historical successor to the Cold War's strategy of containment. His approach to a future world defined by America's "exportation of security" is almost religious in its fervor and messianic in its language. ..."
"... At this point in his book, Barnett also makes bold statements that America is never leaving the Gap and that we are therefore never "bringing our boys home." He believes that there is no exiting the Gap, only shrinking it. These statements have incited some of Barnett's critics to accuse him of fostering and advocating a state of perpetual war. Barnett rebuts these attacks by claiming that, "America's task is not perpetual war, nor the extension of empire. It is merely to serve as globalization's bodyguard wherever and whenever needed throughout the Gap." Barnett claims that the strategy of preemptive war is a "boundable problem," yet his earlier claim that we are never leaving the Gap and that our boys are never coming home does not square with his assertion that there will not be perpetual war. He cannot have it both ways. ..."
"... Barnett therefore undermines his own globalization-based grand strategy by pointing out in detail at least ten things that can go wrong with globalization - the foundation upon which his theory is built. ..."
"... Globalization is likely here to stay, though it may be slowed down or even stopped in some regions of the planet. ..."
"... I would strongly recommend "The Pentagon's New Map" to students who are studying U.S. foreign policy. I would also recommend it to those who are studying the Bush administration as well as the Pentagon. The ideas in the book seem to be popular with the military and many of its ideas can be seen in the current thinking and policy of the Pentagon and State Department. ..."
"... I would only caution the reader that Barnett's theories are heavily dependent upon the continued advancement of globalization, which in turn is dependent upon the continued economic ability of the U.S. to sustain military operations around the world indefinitely. Neither is guaranteed. ..."
"... "Globalization" has turned out to be nothing but the polite PR term to disguise and avoid the truth of using the more accurate name, "Global Empire" --- and there is no doubt that Barnett is more than smart enough to see that this has inexorably happened. ..."
"... Liberty, democracy, justice, and equality Over Violent/'Vichy' Rel 2.0 Empire, ..."
"... We don't MERELY have; a gun/fear problem, or a 'Fiscal Cliff', 'Sequestration', and 'Debt Limit' problem, or an expanding wars problem, or a 'drone assassinations' problem, or a vast income & wealth inequality problem, or a Wall Street 'looting' problem, or a Global Warming and environmental death-spiral problem, or a domestic tyranny NDAA FISA spying problem, or, or, or, or .... ad nauseam --- we have a hidden EMPIRE cancerous tumor which is the prime CAUSE of all these 'symptom problems'. ..."
"... "If your country is treating you like ****, and bombing abroad, look carefully --- because it may not be your country, but a Global Empire only posing as your former country." ..."
Aug 26, 2017 | www.amazon.com

Azblue on July 31, 2006

Global cop

Barnett's main thesis in "The Pentagon's New Map" is that the world is composed of two types of states: those that are part of an integrated and connected "Core," which embrace globalization; and states of the "Gap," which are disconnected from the effects of globalization. Barnett proclaims that globalization will move the world into an era of peace and prosperity, but can only do so with the help of an indispensable United States. He writes that America is the lynchpin to the entire process and he believes that the United States should be midwife to a new world that will one day consist of peaceful democratic states and integrated economies. Barnett is proposing no less than a new grand strategy - the historical successor to the Cold War's strategy of containment. His approach to a future world defined by America's "exportation of security" is almost religious in its fervor and messianic in its language.

The foundation upon which Barnett builds his binary view of the world is heavily dependant upon the continued advancement of globalization - almost exclusively so. However, advancing globalization is not pre-ordained. Barnett himself makes the case that globalization is a fragile undertaking similar to an interconnected chain in which any broken link destroys the whole. Globalization could indeed be like the biblical statue whose feet are made of clay. Globalization, and therefore the integration of the Gap, may even stop or recede - just as the globalization of the early 20th century ended abruptly with the onset of WW I and a global depression. Moreover, Barnett's contention that the United States has an exceptional duty and moral responsibility for "remaking the world in America's image" might be seen by many as misguided and perhaps even dangerous.

The divide between the `Functioning Core' and the `Non-Integrating Gap' differs from the gulf between rich and poor in a subtle yet direct way. State governments make a conscious decision to become connected vs. disconnected to advancing globalization. States and their leaders can provide the infrastructure and the opening of large global markets to their citizens in ways that individuals cannot. An example can serve to illustrate the point: You can be rich and disconnected in Nigeria or poor and disconnected in North Korea. In each case the country you live in has decided to be disconnected. Citizens in this case have a limited likelihood of staying rich and unlimited prospects of staying poor. But by becoming part of the functioning Core, the enlightened state allows all citizens a running start at becoming part of a worldwide economic system and thus provide prospects for a better future because global jobs and markets are opened up to them. A connected economy such as India's, for example, enables citizens who once had no prospects for a better life to find well-paying jobs, such as computer-related employment. Prospects for a better Indian life are directly the result of the Indian government's conscious decision to become connected to the world economy, a.k.a. embracing globalization.

After placing his theory of the Core/Gap and preemptive war strategy firmly into the church of globalization, Barnett next places his theory squarely upon the alter of rule sets. Few would argue that the world is an anarchic place and Barnett tells us that rule sets are needed to define `good' and `evil' behavior of actors in this chaotic international system. An example of such a rule set is the desire of the Core to keep WMDs out of the hands of terrorist organizations. Other examples are the promulgation of human rights and the need to stop genocide. Barnett also uses rule sets to define `system' rules that govern and shape the actions, and even the psychology, of international actors. An example that Barnett gives of a system-wide rule set is the creation of the `rule' defined by the United States during the Cold War called Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD). Barnett claims that this rule set effectively ended the possibility of war for all time amongst nuclear-capable great powers. Barnett states that the U.S. now should export a brand new rule set called `preemptive war,' which aims to fight actors in the lawless Gap in order to end international terrorism for all time. Barnett makes it clear that the Core's enemy is neither a religion (Islam) nor a place (Middle East), but a condition (disconnectedness).

Next, Barnett points out that system-wide competition has moved into the economic arena and that military conflict, when it occurs, has moved away from the system-wide (Cold War), to inter-state war, ending up today with primarily state conflict vs. individuals (Core vs. bin Laden, Core vs. Kim, etc.). In other words, "we are moving progressively away from warfare against states or even blocs of states and toward a new era of warfare against individuals." Rephrased, we've moved from confrontations with evil empires, to evil states, to evil leaders. An example of this phenomenon is the fact that China dropped off the radar of many government hawks after 9/11 only to be replaced by terrorist groups and other dangerous NGOs "with global reach."

Barnett also points out that the idea of `connectivity' is central to the success of globalization. Without it, everything else fails. Connectivity is the glue that holds states together and helps prevent war between states. For example, the US is not likely to start a war with `connected' France, but America could more likely instigate a war with `disconnected' North Korea, Syria or Iran.

Barnett then examines the dangers associated with his definition of `disconnectedness.' He cleverly describes globalization as a condition defined by mutually assured dependence (MAD) and advises us that `Big Men', royal families, raw materials, theocracies and just bad luck can conspire to impede connectedness in the world. This is one of few places in his book that Barnett briefly discusses impediments to globalization - however, this short list looks at existing roadblocks to connectedness but not to future, system-wide dangers to globalization.

At this point in his book, Barnett also makes bold statements that America is never leaving the Gap and that we are therefore never "bringing our boys home." He believes that there is no exiting the Gap, only shrinking it. These statements have incited some of Barnett's critics to accuse him of fostering and advocating a state of perpetual war. Barnett rebuts these attacks by claiming that, "America's task is not perpetual war, nor the extension of empire. It is merely to serve as globalization's bodyguard wherever and whenever needed throughout the Gap." Barnett claims that the strategy of preemptive war is a "boundable problem," yet his earlier claim that we are never leaving the Gap and that our boys are never coming home does not square with his assertion that there will not be perpetual war. He cannot have it both ways.

Barnett then takes us on a pilgrimage to the Ten Commandments of globalization. Tellingly, this list is set up to be more like links in a chain than commandments. Each item in the list is connected to the next - meaning that each step is dependent upon its predecessor. If any of the links are broken or incomplete, the whole is destroyed. For example, Barnett warns us that if there is no security in the Gap, there can be no rules in the Gap. Barnett therefore undermines his own globalization-based grand strategy by pointing out in detail at least ten things that can go wrong with globalization - the foundation upon which his theory is built.

What else could kill globalization? Barnett himself tells us: "Labor, energy, money and security all need to flow as freely as possible from those places in the world where they are plentiful to those regions where they are scarce." Here he is implying that an interruption of any or all of these basic necessities can doom globalization. Barnett states clearly: "...(these are) the four massive flows I believe are essential to protect if Globalization III is going to advance." Simply put, any combination of American isolationism or closing of borders to immigration, a global energy crisis, a global financial crisis or rampant global insecurity could adversely affect "connectedness," a.k.a. globalization. These plausible future events, unnerving as they are, leave the inexorable advancement of globalization in doubt and we haven't yet explored other problems with Barnett's reliance on globalization to make the world peaceful, free and safe for democracy.

Barnett goes on to tell us that Operation Iraqi Freedom was an "overt attempt to create a "System Perturbation" centered in the Persian Gulf to trigger a Big Bang." His definition of a Big Bang in the Middle East is the democratization of the many totalitarian states in the region. He also claims that the Big Bang has targeted Iran's "sullen majority."

Barnett claims that our problem with shrinking the Gap is not our "motive or our means, but our inability to describe the enemies worth killing, the battles worth winning, and the future worth creating." Managing the global campaign to democratize the world is no easy task. Barnett admits that in a worst-case scenario we may be stuck in the "mother of all intifadas" in Iraq. Critics claim this is something that we should have planned for - that the insurgency should not have been a surprise, and that it should have been part of the "peacemaking" planning. Barnett blithely states that things will get better "...when America internationalizes the occupation." Barnett should not engage in wishful thinking here, as he also does when he predicted that Iraqis would be put in charge of their own country 18 months after the fall of Baghdad. It would be more accurate if he claimed this would happen 18 months after the cessation of hostilities. Some critics claim that Iraq is an example that we are an "empire in a hurry" (Michael Ignatieff), which then results in: 1) allocating insufficient resources to non-military aspects of the project and 2) attempting economic and political transformation in an unrealistically short time frame.

The final basic premise of Barnett's theory of the Core and the Gap is the concept of what he calls the "global transaction strategy." Barnett explains it best: "America's essential transaction with the outside world is one of our exporting security in return for the world's financing a lifestyle we could far more readily afford without all that defense spending." Barnett claims that America pays the most for global stability because we enjoy it the most. But what about the other 80 countries in the Core?

Why is America, like Atlas, bearing the weight of the world's security and stabilization on its shoulders?

Barnett claims that historical analogies are useless today and point us in the wrong direction. I disagree. James Madison cautioned us not to go abroad to seek monsters to destroy. We can learn from his simple and profound statement that there are simply too many state (and individual) monsters in today's world for the U.S. to destroy unilaterally or preemptively. We must also avoid overstretching our resources and power. Thucydides reminds us that the great democracy of Athens was brought to its knees by the ill-advised Sicilian expedition - which resulted in the destruction of everything the Athenians held dear. Do not ignore history as Barnett councils; heed it.

Globalization is likely here to stay, though it may be slowed down or even stopped in some regions of the planet. Therefore, America needs to stay engaged in the affairs of the world, but Barnett has not offered conclusive evidence that the U.S. needs to become the world's single Leviathan that must extinguish all global hot wars. Barnett also has not proved that America needs to be, as he writes, "the one willing to rush in when everyone else is running away." People like Barnett in academia and leaders in government may proclaim and ordain the U.S. to be a global Leviathan, but it is a conscious choice that should be thoroughly debated by the American people. After all, it is upon the backs of the American people that such a global Leviathan must ride. Where is the debate? The American people, upon reflection, may decide upon other courses of action.

I would strongly recommend "The Pentagon's New Map" to students who are studying U.S. foreign policy. I would also recommend it to those who are studying the Bush administration as well as the Pentagon. The ideas in the book seem to be popular with the military and many of its ideas can be seen in the current thinking and policy of the Pentagon and State Department.

It seems to be well researched - having 35 pages of notes. Many of Barnett's citations come from the Washington Post and the New York Times, which some may see as a liberal bias, but I see the sources as simply newspapers of record.

I would only caution the reader that Barnett's theories are heavily dependent upon the continued advancement of globalization, which in turn is dependent upon the continued economic ability of the U.S. to sustain military operations around the world indefinitely. Neither is guaranteed.

Alan H. Macdonald on April 1, 2013
A misused book waiting for redemption

I don't think poorly of Thomas Barnett himself. He's very bright and, I think, good hearted, BUT his well thought-out, well argued pride and joy (and positive intellectual pursuit) is being badly distorted ---- which happens to all 'tools' that Empire gets its hands on.

For those who like predictions, I would predict that Barnett will wind up going through an epiphany much like Francis Fukuyama (but a decade later) and for much the same reason, that his life's work gets misused and abused so greatly that he works to reverse and correct its misuse. Fukuyama, also brilliant, wrote "The End of History" in 1992 (which was misused by the neocons to engender war), and now he's working just as hard to reverse a misuse that he may feel some guilt of his work supporting, and is writing "The Future of History" as a force for good --- and I suspect (and hope) that Barnett will, in even less time, be counter-thinking and developing the strategy and book to reverse the misuse of his 2004 book before the Global Empire pulls down the curtain.

"Globalization" has turned out to be nothing but the polite PR term to disguise and avoid the truth of using the more accurate name, "Global Empire" --- and there is no doubt that Barnett is more than smart enough to see that this has inexorably happened.

Best luck and love to the fast expanding 'Occupy the Empire' educational and revolutionary movement against this deceitful, guileful, disguised EMPIRE, which can't so easily be identified as wearing Red Coats, Red Stars, nor funny looking Nazi helmets ---- quite yet!

Liberty, democracy, justice, and equality Over Violent/'Vichy' Rel 2.0 Empire,
Alan MacDonald
Sanford, Maine

We don't MERELY have; a gun/fear problem, or a 'Fiscal Cliff', 'Sequestration', and 'Debt Limit' problem, or an expanding wars problem, or a 'drone assassinations' problem, or a vast income & wealth inequality problem, or a Wall Street 'looting' problem, or a Global Warming and environmental death-spiral problem, or a domestic tyranny NDAA FISA spying problem, or, or, or, or .... ad nauseam --- we have a hidden EMPIRE cancerous tumor which is the prime CAUSE of all these 'symptom problems'.

"If your country is treating you like ****, and bombing abroad, look carefully --- because it may not be your country, but a Global Empire only posing as your former country."

[Dec 21, 2019] We are all Palestinians: possible connection between neocons and Pentagon

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Lt. Col. Karen U. Kwiatkowski has written extensively about the purges of the patriots in the Defense Department that happened in Washington during the lead up and after the commencement of the Iraq war in 2003. ..."
"... If anybody thinks what I have written is an exaggeration, research what the late Admiral Thomas Moorer had to say years ago about the total infiltration of the Defense Department by Israeli agents. ..."
Aug 25, 2017 | www.unz.com

schrub , August 25, 2017 at 7:18 pm GMT

People who seem to think that Trump's generals will somehow go along and support his original vision are sadly mistaken.

Since 2003, Israel has had an increasingly strong hand in the vetting who gets promoted to upper positions in the American armed forces. All of the generals Trump has at his side went through a vetting procedure which definitely involved a very close look at their opinions about Israel.

Lt. Col. Karen U. Kwiatkowski has written extensively about the purges of the patriots in the Defense Department that happened in Washington during the lead up and after the commencement of the Iraq war in 2003.

Officers who openly oppose the dictates of the Israel Lobby will see their prospects for advancement simply vanish like a whiff of smoke.. Those who support Israel's machinations are rewarded with promotions, the more fervent the support the more rapid the promotion especially if this knowledge is made known to their congressman or senator..

Generals who support Israel already know that this support will be heavily rewarded after their retirements by being given lucrative six figure positions on company boards of directors or positions in equally lucrative think tanks like the American Enterprise Institution or the Hoover Institute. They will receive hefty speaking fees. as well. They learned early that their retirements could be truly glorious if they only "went" along with The Lobby. They will be able to then live the good life in expensive places like Washington, New York or San Francisco, often invited to glitzy parties with unlimited amount of free prawns "the size of your hand".

On the other hand, upper officers who somehow get then get "bad" reputations for their negative views about Israel ( like Karen U. Kwiatkowski for instance) will end up, once retired, having to depend on just their often scanty pensions This requires getting an often demeaning second jobs to get by in some place where "their dollar goes further". No bright lights in big cities for them. No speaking fees, no college jobs. Once their fate becomes known, their still active duty contemporaries suddenly decide to "go along".

If anybody thinks what I have written is an exaggeration, research what the late Admiral Thomas Moorer had to say years ago about the total infiltration of the Defense Department by Israeli agents.

Face it, we live in a country under occupation by a hostile power that we willingly pay large amounts monetary tribute to. Our government does whatever benefits Israel regardless of how negatively this effects the USA. We are increasing troop strength in Afghanistan because, somehow, this benefits Israel. If our presence in Afghanistan (or the Mideast in general) didn't benefit Israel, our troops would simply not be there.

We are all Palestinians.

[Dec 21, 2019] The ruthless neo-colonialists of 21st century

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... The destruction of Syria and Libya created massive refugee flows which have proved that the European Union was totally unprepared to deal with such a major issue. On top of that, the latest years, we have witnessed a rapid rise of various terrorist attacks in Western soil, also as a result of the devastating wars in Syria and Libya. ..."
"... Whenever they wanted to blame someone for some serious terrorist attacks, they had a scapegoat ready for them, even if they had evidence that Libya was not behind these attacks. When Gaddafi falsely admitted that he had weapons of mass destruction in order to gain some relief from the Western sanctions, they presented him as a responsible leader who, was ready to cooperate. Of course, his last role was to play again the 'bad guy' who had to be removed. ..."
"... Despite the rise of Donald Trump in power, the neoliberal forces will push further for the expansion of the neoliberal doctrine in the rival field of the Sino-Russian alliance. ..."
"... We see, however, that the Western alliances are entering a period of severe crisis. The US has failed to control the situation in Middle East and Libya. The ruthless neo-colonialists will not hesitate to confront Russia and China directly, if they see that they continue to lose control in the global geopolitical arena. The accumulation of military presence of NATO next to the Russian borders, as well as, the accumulation of military presence of the US in Asia-Pacific, show that this is an undeniable fact. ..."
Apr 09, 2019 | failedevolution.blogspot.com

The start of current decade revealed the most ruthless face of a global neo-colonialism. From Syria and Libya to Europe and Latin America, the old colonial powers of the West tried to rebound against an oncoming rival bloc led by Russia and China, which starts to threaten their global domination.

Inside a multi-polar, complex terrain of geopolitical games, the big players start to abandon the old-fashioned, inefficient direct wars. They use today other, various methods like brutal proxy wars , economic wars, financial and constitutional coups, provocative operations, 'color revolutions', etc. In this highly complex and unstable situation, when even traditional allies turn against each other as the global balances change rapidly, the forces unleashed are absolutely destructive. Inevitably, the results are more than evident.

Proxy Wars - Syria/Libya

After the US invasion in Iraq, the gates of hell had opened in the Middle East. Obama continued the Bush legacy of US endless interventions, but he had to change tactics because a direct war would be inefficient, costly and extremely unpopular to the American people and the rest of the world.
The result, however, appeared to be equally (if not more) devastating with the failed US invasions in Iraq and Afghanistan. The US had lost total control of the armed groups directly linked with the ISIS terrorists, failed to topple Assad, and, moreover, instead of eliminating the Russian and Iranian influence in the region, actually managed to increase it. As a result, the US and its allies failed to secure their geopolitical interests around the various pipeline games.

In addition, the US sees Turkey, one of its most important ally, changing direction dangerously, away from the Western bloc. Probably the strongest indication for this, is that Turkey, Iran and Russia decided very recently to proceed in an agreement on Syria without the presence of the US.

Yet, the list of US failures does not end here. The destruction of Syria and Libya created massive refugee flows which have proved that the European Union was totally unprepared to deal with such a major issue. On top of that, the latest years, we have witnessed a rapid rise of various terrorist attacks in Western soil, also as a result of the devastating wars in Syria and Libya.

Evidence from WikiLeaks has shown that the old colonial powers have started a new round of ruthless competition on Libya's resources. The usual story propagated by the Western media, about another tyrant who had to be removed, has now completely collapsed. They don't care neither to topple an 'authoritarian' regime, nor to spread Democracy. All they care about is to secure each country's resources for their big companies.
The Gaddafi case is quite interesting because it shows that the Western hypocrites were using him according to their interests .

Whenever they wanted to blame someone for some serious terrorist attacks, they had a scapegoat ready for them, even if they had evidence that Libya was not behind these attacks. When Gaddafi falsely admitted that he had weapons of mass destruction in order to gain some relief from the Western sanctions, they presented him as a responsible leader who, was ready to cooperate. Of course, his last role was to play again the 'bad guy' who had to be removed.

Economic Wars, Financial Coups – Greece/Eurozone

It would be unthinkable for the neo-colonialists to conduct proxy wars inside European soil, especially against countries which belong to Western institutions like NATO, EU, eurozone, etc. The wave of the US-made major economic crisis hit Greece and Europe at the start of the decade, almost simultaneously with the eruption of the Arab Spring revolutionary wave and the subsequent disaster in Middle East and Libya.

Greece was the easy victim for the global neoliberal dictatorship to impose catastrophic measures in favor of the plutocracy. The Greek experiment enters its seventh year and the plan is to be used as a model for the whole eurozone. Greece has become also the model for the looting of public property, as happened in the past with the East Germany and the Treuhand Operation after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

While Greece was the major victim of an economic war, Germany used its economic power and control of the European Central Bank to impose unprecedented austerity, sado-monetarism and neoliberal destruction through silent financial coups in Ireland , Italy and Cyprus . The Greek political establishment collapsed with the rise of SYRIZA in power, and the ECB was forced to proceed in an open financial coup against Greece when the current PM, Alexis Tsipras, decided to conduct a referendum on the catastrophic measures imposed by the ECB, IMF and the European Commission, through which the Greek people clearly rejected these measures, despite the propaganda of terror inside and outside Greece. Due to the direct threat from Mario Draghi and the ECB, who actually threatened to cut liquidity sinking Greece into a financial chaos, Tsipras finally forced to retreat, signing another catastrophic memorandum.

Through similar financial and political pressure, the Brussels bureaufascists and the German sado-monetarists along with the IMF economic hitmen, imposed neoliberal disaster to other eurozone countries like Portugal, Spain etc. It is remarkable that even the second eurozone economy, France, rushed to impose anti-labor measures midst terrorist attacks, succumbing to a - pre-designed by the elites - neo-Feudalism, under the 'Socialist' François Hollande, despite the intense protests in many French cities.

Germany would never let the United States to lead the neo-colonization in Europe, as it tries (again) to become a major power with its own sphere of influence, expanding throughout eurozone and beyond. As the situation in Europe becomes more and more critical with the ongoing economic and refugee crisis and the rise of the Far-Right and the nationalists, the economic war mostly between the US and the German big capital, creates an even more complicated situation.

The decline of the US-German relations has been exposed initially with the NSA interceptions scandal , yet, progressively, the big picture came on surface, revealing a transatlantic economic war between banking and corporate giants. In times of huge multilevel crises, the big capital always intensifies its efforts to eliminate competitors too. As a consequence, the US has seen another key ally, Germany, trying to gain a certain degree of independence in order to form its own agenda, separate from the US interests.

Note that, both Germany and Turkey are medium powers that, historically, always trying to expand and create their own spheres of influence, seeking independence from the traditional big powers.

Economic Wars, Constitutional Coups, Provocative Operations – Argentina/Brazil/Venezuela

A wave of neoliberal onslaught shakes currently Latin America. While in Argentina, Mauricio Macri allegedly took the power normally, the constitutional coup against Dilma Rousseff in Brazil, as well as, the usual actions of the Right opposition in Venezuela against Nicolás Maduro with the help of the US finger, are far more obvious.
The special weight of these three countries in Latin America is extremely important for the US imperialism to regain ground in the global geopolitical arena. Especially the last ten to fifteen years, each of them developed increasingly autonomous policies away from the US close custody, under Leftist governments, and this was something that alarmed the US imperialism components.

Brazil appears to be the most important among the three, not only due to its size, but also as a member of the BRICS, the team of fast growing economies who threaten the US and generally the Western global dominance. The constitutional coup against Rousseff was rather a sloppy action and reveals the anxiety of the US establishment to regain control through puppet regimes. This is a well-known situation from the past through which the establishment attempts to secure absolute dominance in the US backyard.

The importance of Venezuela due to its oil reserves is also significant. When Maduro tried to approach Russia in order to strengthen the economic cooperation between the two countries, he must had set the alarm for the neocons in the US. Venezuela could find an alternative in Russia and BRICS, in order to breathe from the multiple economic war that was set off by the US. It is characteristic that the economic war against Russia by the US and the Saudis, by keeping the oil prices in historically low levels, had significant impact on the Venezuelan economy too. It is also known that the US organizations are funding the opposition since Chávez era, in order to proceed in provocative operations that could overthrow the Leftist governments.

The case of Venezuela is really interesting. The US imperialists were fiercely trying to overthrow the Leftist governments since Chávez administration. They found now a weaker president, Nicolás Maduro - who certainly does not have the strength and personality of Hugo Chávez - to achieve their goal.

The Western media mouthpieces are doing their job, which is propaganda as usual. The recipe is known. You present the half truth, with a big overdose of exaggeration. The establishment parrots are demonizing Socialism , but they won't ever tell you about the money that the US is spending, feeding the Right-Wing groups and opposition to proceed in provocative operations, in order to create instability. They won't tell you about the financial war conducted through the oil prices, manipulated by the Saudis, the close US ally.

Regarding Argentina, former president, Cristina Kirchner, had also made some important moves towards the stronger cooperation with Russia, which was something unacceptable for Washington's hawks. Not only for geopolitical reasons, but also because Argentina could escape from the vulture funds that sucking its blood since its default. This would give the country an alternative to the neoliberal monopoly of destruction. The US big banks and corporations would never accept such a perspective because the debt-enslaved Argentina is a golden opportunity for a new round of huge profits. It's happening right now in eurozone's debt colony, Greece.

'Color Revolutions' - Ukraine

The events in Ukraine have shown that, the big capital has no hesitation to ally even with the neo-nazis, in order to impose the new world order. This is not something new of course. The connection of Hitler with the German economic oligarchs, but also with other major Western companies, before and during the WWII, is well known.

The most terrifying of all however, is not that the West has silenced in front of the decrees of the new Ukrainian leadership, through which is targeting the minorities, but the fact that the West allied with the neo-nazis, while according to some information has also funded their actions as well as other extreme nationalist groups during the riots in Kiev.

Plenty of indications show that US organizations have 'put their finger' on Ukraine. A video , for example, concerning the situation in Ukraine has been directed by Ben Moses (creator of the movie "Good Morning, Vietnam"), who is connected with American government executives and organizations like National Endowment for Democracy, funded by the US Congress. This video shows a beautiful young female Ukrainian who characterizes the government of the country as "dictatorship" and praise some protesters with the neo-nazi symbols of the fascist Ukranian party Svoboda on them.

The same organizations are behind 'color revolutions' elsewhere, as well as, provocative operations against Leftist governments in Venezuela and other countries.

Ukraine is the perfect place to provoke Putin and tight the noose around Russia. Of course the huge hypocrisy of the West can also be identified in the case of Crimea. While in other cases, the Western officials were 'screaming' for the right of self-determination (like Kosovo, for example), after they destroyed Yugoslavia in a bloodbath, they can't recognize the will of the majority of Crimeans to join Russia.

The war will become wilder

The Western neo-colonial powers are trying to counterattack against the geopolitical upgrade of Russia and the Chinese economic expansionism.

Despite the rise of Donald Trump in power, the neoliberal forces will push further for the expansion of the neoliberal doctrine in the rival field of the Sino-Russian alliance. Besides, Trump has already shown his hostile feelings against China, despite his friendly approach to Russia and Putin.

We see, however, that the Western alliances are entering a period of severe crisis. The US has failed to control the situation in Middle East and Libya. The ruthless neo-colonialists will not hesitate to confront Russia and China directly, if they see that they continue to lose control in the global geopolitical arena. The accumulation of military presence of NATO next to the Russian borders, as well as, the accumulation of military presence of the US in Asia-Pacific, show that this is an undeniable fact.

[Dec 21, 2019] The goal of any war is the redistribution of taxpayer money into the bank accounts of MIC shareholders and executives

Highly recommended!
The USA state of continuous war has been a bipartisan phenomenon starting with Truman in Korea and proceeding with Vietnam, Lebanon,Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Libya and now Syria. It doesn't take a genius to realize that these limited, never ending wars are expensive was to enrich MIC and Wall Street banksters
Feb 17, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

KC February 15, 2019 at 11:16 pm

The one thing your accurate analysis leaves out is that the goal of US wars is never what the media spouts for its Wall Street masters. The goal of any war is the redistribution of taxpayer money into the bank accounts of MIC shareholders and executives, create more enemies to be fought in future wars, and to provide a rationalization for the continued primacy of the military class in US politics and culture.

Occasionally a country may be sitting on a bunch of oil, and also be threatening to move away from the petrodollar or talking about allowing an "adversary" to build a pipeline across their land.

Otherwise war is a racket unto itself. "Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. "
― George Orwell

Also we've always been at war with Oceania .or whatever that quote said.

[Dec 19, 2019] MIC lobbyism (which often is presented as patriotism) is the last refuge of scoundrels

Highly recommended!
Dec 19, 2019 | angrybearblog.com

likbez, December 19, 2019 6:58 pm

Afghan war demonstrated that the USA got into the trap, the Catch 22 situation: it can't stop following an expensive and self-destructive positive feedback loop of threat inflation and larger and large expenditures on MIC, because there is no countervailing force for the MIC since WWII ended. Financial oligarchy is aligned with MIC.

This is the same suicidal grip of MIC on the country that was one of the key factors in the collapse of the USSR means that in this key area the USA does not have two party system, It is a Uniparty: a singe War party with two superficially different factions.

Feeding and care MIC is No.1 task for both. Ordinary Americans wellbeing does matter much for either party. New generation of Americans is punished with crushing debt and low paying jobs. They do not care that people over 50 who lost their jobs are essentially thrown out like a garbage.

"41 Million people in the US suffer from hunger and lack of food security"–US Dept. of Agriculture. FDR addressed the needs of this faction of the population when he delivered his One-Third of a Nation speech for his 2nd Inaugural. About four years later, FDR expanded on that issue in his Four Freedoms speech: 1.Freedom of speech; 2.Freedom of worship; 3.Freedom from want; 4.Freedom from fear.

Items 3 and 4 are probably unachievable under neoliberalism. And fear is artificially instilled to unite the nation against the external scapegoat much like in Orwell 1984. Currently this is Russia, later probably will be China. With regular minutes of hate replaced by Rachel Maddow show ;-)

Derailing Tulsi had shown that in the USA any politician, who try to challenge MIC, will be instantly attacked by MIC lapdogs in MSM and neutered in no time.

One interesting tidbit from Fiona Hill testimony is that neocons who dominate the USA foreign policy establishment make their living off threat inflation. They literally are bought by MIC, which indirectly finance Brookings institution, Atlantic Council and similar think tanks. And this isn't cheap cynicism. It is simply a fact. Rephrasing Samuel Johnson's famous quote, we can say, "MIC lobbyism (which often is presented as patriotism) is the last refuge of scoundrels."

[Dec 19, 2019] A the core of color revolution against Trump is Full Spectrum Dominance doctrine

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Ukrainegate is preemptive political tactics. ..."
Dec 19, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

Lk , Dec 18 2019 22:19 utc | 26

The House impeachment is driven by several factors:
  1. After Russiagate, when Trump began to investigate its fraudulent origins, the Dems feared the exposure of Obama-era corruption if not high crimes. Hence Ukrainegate is preemptive political tactics.
  2. The investigation into Russiagate led right to Ukraine, and thus to Biden. In the context of Sanders' campaign, Ukrainegate became an imperative for the factions of the capitalist class that dominates the DNC. If Biden falls on Ukraine issues, then Sanders is inevitable; an anathema to Wall Street and Big Tech DNC donors.
  3. 3. While 1 and 2 dominate DNC machinations, foreign policy is also a factor. The foreign policy establishment is absolutely against any hesitation with respect to confronting Russia as part of a regional and global strategy for primacy. Trump's limited prevarications on Russia might threaten the long established strategy to expand Nato to Ukraine and thereby to encircle Russia and maintain US dominance over Europe. So, even though Trump names great power rivalry as the name of the game today, his inclination for making nice with Putin threatens to weaken the US hold over Europe, which Trump wants to label as an economic competitor.

    It is with these points that the strategic differences become apparent: Trump is raising a realist, neo-mercantalist strategy against ALL potential competitors; the DNC and the deep state hold a strategy of liberal hegemony: globalization and US primacy through dominating regional alliances, and impregnating US hegemony INSIDE the vassal States of the empire.

All of this, however, is bound to fail for the DNC, and down the road for Trump himself.

The contradictions of US empire and global capitalism cannot be mitigated by either more liberal strategies or realist ones.

[Dec 19, 2019] A joint French-Ukrainian journalistic investigation into a huge money laundering scheme using various shadow banking organizations in Austria and Switzerland, benefiting Clinton friendly Ukrainian oligarchs and of course the Clinton Foundation.

Highly recommended!
Dec 19, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

Lurker in the Dark , Dec 19 2019 1:49 utc | 56

My apologies if this has been posted before, but here is a news conference broadcast by Interfax a few days ago detailing a joint French-Ukrainian journalistic investigation into a huge money laundering scheme using various shadow banking organizations in Austria and Switzerland, benefiting Clinton friendly Ukrainian oligarchs and of course the Clinton Foundation.

The link is short enough to not require re-formatting:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4309z--JcGk&feature=

Lurker in the Dark , Dec 19 2019 2:00 utc | 59

Forgive me for the somewhat redundant post, and again I hope this is not a waste of anyone's time, but this is the source of the Interfax report I posted just above currently at #56. It is relevant to the Ukrainegate impeachment fiasco.

https://en.interfax.com.ua/news/press-conference/631034.html (again, link brief enough not to require re-format).

The U.S. and lapdog EU/UK media will not touch this with a 10 foot pole.

KYIV. Dec 17 (Interfax-Ukraine) – Ukraine and the United States should investigate the transfer of $29 million by businessman Victor Pinchuk from Ukraine to the Clinton Foundation, Ukrainian Member of Parliament (independent) Andriy Derkach has said. According to him, the investigation should check and establish how the Pinchuk Foundation's activities were funded; it, among other projects, made a contribution of $29 million to the Clinton Foundation. "Yesterday, Ukrainian law enforcement agencies registered criminal proceeding number 12019000000001138. As part of this proceeding, I provided facts that should be verified and established by the investigation. Establishing these facts will also help the American side to conduct its own investigation and establish the origin of the money received by [Hillary] Clinton," Derkach said at a press conferences at Interfax-Ukraine in Kyiv on Tuesday, December 17.

According to him, it was the independent French online publication Mediapart that first drew attention to the money withdrawal scheme from Ukraine and Pinchuk's financing of the Clinton Foundation.

"The general scheme is as follows. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) lent money to Ukraine in 2015. The same year, Victor Pinchuk's Credit Dnepr [Bank] received UAH 357 million in a National Bank stabilization loan from the IMF's disbursement. Delta Bank was given a total of UAH 5.110 billion in loans. The banks siphoned the money through Austria's Meinl Bank into offshore accounts, and further into [the accounts of] the Pinchuk Foundation. The money siphoning scam was confirmed by a May 2016 ruling by [Kyiv's] Pechersky court. The total damage from this scam involving other banks is estimated at $800 million. The Pinchuk Foundation transferred $29 million to the Foundation of Clinton, a future U.S. presidential candidate from the Democratic Party," Derkach said.

[Dec 17, 2019] Neocons like car salespeople have a stereotypical reputation for lacking credibility because ther profession is to lie in order to sell weapons to the publin, much like used car saleme lie to sell cars

Highly recommended!
Dec 17, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

karlof1 , Dec 16 2019 20:51 utc | 22

Neocons lie should properly be called "threat inflation"

The underlying critical point-at-issue is credibility as I noted in my comment on b's 2017 article. I've since linked to tweets and other items by that trio; the one major change seems to have been the epiphany by them that they needed to go to where the action is and report it from there to regain their credibility.

The fact remains that used car salespeople have a stereotypical reputation for lacking credibility sans a confession as to why they feel the need to lie to sell cars.

Their actions belie the guilt they feel for their choices, but a confession works much better at assuaging the soul while helping convince the audience that the change in heart's genuine. And that's the point as b notes--genuineness, whose first predicate is credibility.

[Dec 15, 2019] The infinity war - The Washington Post by Samuel Moyn, Stephen Wertheim

Highly recommended!
Dec 15, 2019 | www.washingtonpost.com
The infinity war We say we're a peaceful nation. Why do our leaders always keep us at war? The infinity war We say we're a peaceful nation. Why do our leaders always keep us at war? Sam Ward (For The Washington Post) By Samuel Moyn and Stephen Wertheim December 13, 2019 Add to list On my list

Now we know, thanks to The Afghanistan Papers published in The Washington Post this past week, that U.S. policymakers doubted almost from the start that the two-decade-long Afghanistan war could ever succeed. Officials didn't know who the enemy was and had little sense of what an achievable "victory" might look like. "We didn't have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking," said Douglas Lute, the Army three-star general who oversaw the conflict from the White House during the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

And yet the war ground on, as if on autopilot. Obama inherited a conflict of which Bush had grown weary, and victory drew no closer after Obama's troop "surge" than when Bush pursued a small-footprint conflict. But while the Pentagon Papers, published in 1971 during the Vietnam War, led a generation to appreciate the perils of warmaking, a new generation may squander this opportunity to set things right. There is a reason the quagmire in Afghanistan, despite costing thousands of lives and $2 trillion , has failed to shock Americans into action: The United States for decades has made peace look unimaginable or unobtainable. We have normalized war.

President Trump sometimes disrupts the pattern by vowing to end America's "endless wars." But he has extended and escalated them at every turn, offering nakedly punitive and exploitative rationales. In September, on the cusp of a peace deal with the Taliban, he discarded an agreement negotiated by his administration and pummeled Afghanistan harder than ever (now he's back to wanting to talk). In Syria, his promised military withdrawal has morphed into a grotesque redeployment to "secure" the country's oil .

It is clearer than ever that the problem of American military intervention goes well beyond the proclivities of the current president, or the previous one, or the next. The United States has slowly slid away from any plausible claim of standing for peace in the world. The ideal of peace was one that America long promoted, enshrining it in law and institutions, and the end of the Cold War offered an unparalleled opportunity to advance the cause. But U.S. leaders from both parties chose another path. War -- from drone strikes and Special Operations raids to protracted occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan -- has come to seem inevitable and eternal, in practice and even in aspiration.

Given World War II, Korea, Vietnam and many smaller conflicts throughout the Western Hemisphere, no one has ever mistaken the United States for Switzerland. Still, the pursuit of peace is an authentic American tradition that has shaped U.S. conduct and the international order. At its founding, the United States resolved to steer clear of the system of war in Europe and build a "new world" free of violent rivalry, as Alexander Hamilton put it .

Indeed, Americans shrank from playing a fully global role until 1941 in part because they saw themselves as emissaries of peace (even as the United States conquered Native American land, policed its hemisphere and took Pacific colonies). U.S. leaders sought either to remake international politics along peaceful lines -- as Woodrow Wilson proposed after World War I -- or to avoid getting entangled in the squabbles of a fallen world. And when America embraced global leadership after World War II, it felt compelled to establish the United Nations to halt the "scourge of war," as the U.N. Charter says right at the start. At America's urging, the organization outlawed the use of force, except where authorized by its Security Council or used in self-defense.

[ I owe my new life to my Marine husband's hideous death. I pay the price every day. ]

Even when the United States dishonored that ideal in the years that followed, peace remained potent as a guiding principle. Vietnam provoked a broad-based antiwar movement. Congress passed the War Powers Resolution (WPR) to tame the imperial presidency. Such opposition to war is scarcely to be found today. (The Iraq War inspired massive protests, but they are a distant memory.) Consider that the United States has undertaken more armed interventions since the end of the Cold War than during it. According to the Congressional Research Service, more than 80 percent of all of the country's adventures abroad since 1946 came after 1989. Congress, whether under Democratic or Republican control, has allowed commanders in chief to claim the right to begin wars and continue them in perpetuity.

Legal constraints on U.S. warmaking -- including international obligations, domestic statutes and constitutional duties -- ought to have returned to the fore after the Cold War, the rationale for America's vast mobilization in the second half of the 20th century. Instead, they have eroded to dust. At the outset of the 1990s, as President George H.W. Bush promised a "peace dividend" for Americans and a "peaceful international order" for all, the United States did rely more faithfully than before on Security Council approval for military operations. The Persian Gulf War, blessed by the United Nations to repel Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait, was legal under international law. But enthralled by its exorbitant primacy in world affairs, the United States turned away from international prohibitions on war, finding the rules too restricting.

The next two presidents, attracted to liberal internationalist and neoconservative creeds that embraced armed force, treated international law cavalierly. Bill Clinton abused U.N. resolutions meant to control Saddam Hussein's weaponry to justify new attacks, including the bombing of Iraq in December 1998. The next year, the U.S.-led NATO operations in Kosovo suggested that America would unleash its military for ostensibly noble causes -- in this case to prevent heart-rending atrocity -- even without the pretense of legality. Despite failing to obtain U.N. approval, the Clinton administration said the intervention should not be treated as a precedent (though it became one). Others excused it as "illegal but legitimate," with self-professed moral intentions permissibly trumping law. "For the purpose of stopping genocide," commented the New Republic's Leon Wieseltier, "the use of force is not a last resort; it is a first resort."

Once such arguments gained currency, their authors lost control of them. Conservative hawks found that a law-optional approach suited their agenda as well, and their liberal counterparts, if they disagreed at all, did so mostly as a matter of tactics, not principle. George W. Bush benefited from this permissive context when he launched the Iraq War, whose illegality was flagrant and catalytic, since it was unauthorized by the United Nations and relied on the administration's dangerous claim that "anticipatory self-defense" justifies invasion. The world took notice. Russia, in particular, seized on the new U.S. position as a spectacular excuse to make incursions of its own in Georgia in 2008 and in Ukraine in 2014.

Obama won election in part because he ran against the Iraq War. In office, however, he cemented more than reversed America's disregard of international constraints on warmaking. While failing to end the war in Afghanistan, his administration exceeded the Security Council's authorization by working to overthrow Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi, converting a permission slip to avert atrocity into a blank check for regime change. Then, to punish the Islamic State, Obama bombed Syria on a contrived rationale -- one that allowed attacks against nations unwilling or unable to control terrorists on their territory. When he nearly struck again in response to Bashar al-Assad's use of chemical weapons, Obama laid the legal foundation for Trump to strike the Syrian government, again without a U.N. sign-off. Once highly valued, then defied only with controversy, international law now scarcely figures in U.S. decisions of war and peace.

Like international law, U.S. domestic law enshrines an expectation of peace, setting a high bar for the resort to war. If war is to be waged, the Constitution requires Congress to declare it -- a purposeful grant of authority to the branch of government that best reflects the diverse interests of the people and therefore should be harder to rouse to conflict than one commander in chief. Yet the nation has drifted from that tradition, too. After defaulting on its constitutional obligation during the Cold War (partly on the grounds that the speed of a potential nuclear strike required a president who could respond quickly), Congress declined to reassert its authority after the Soviet threat passed.

[ How Veterans Affairs denies care to many of the people it's supposed to serve ]

In the 1990s, Congress might at least have kept faith with the WPR, which it passed in 1973 to rein in future presidents. The resolution calls for Congress to authorize "hostilities" within 60 days of their start; otherwise U.S. forces must withdraw. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, members of the House of Representatives brought presidents to court for taking military action in violation of the statute -- in El Salvador , the Persian Gulf War and Kosovo , for example. But advocates of the strategy all but gave up, and Congress itself increasingly deferred to presidential wars in the age of terrorism. By the time Obama intervened in Libya, the WPR lay in tatters. In a final indignity during the Libya operation, one administration lawyer explained that "hostilities" was an " ambiguous term of art " that might exclude aerial bombardment, so Congress did not need to approve a war that toppled a regime.

This deference has proved costly, allowing Trump to pose as an antiwar candidate against the mainstream of two political parties, a somnolent Congress and inactive courts. Once in power, this wildly unpredictable chief executive finally clarified the danger of entrusting the world's mightiest military to one man's whims. Congress has begun to stir. In voting this year to end U.S. involvement in Yemen's civil war, it invoked the WPR for the first time while forces were active in battle.


President Trump speaks to U.S. troops at Bagram air base in Afghanistan last month.
though he has pledged to end America's "endless wars,"
Trump, like past presidents, has instead extended them. (Tom Brenner/Reuters)

Ultimately, elevating peace as a priority will require not merely changing legal norms but overturning the militarized concept of America's world role that permeates Washington. Somehow, despite waging near-perpetual war, the leaders of the most powerful country on Earth have convinced themselves that America is always on the brink of turning "isolationist," a peril against which every president since Ronald Reagan has warned as their terms wound down. Trump is likely to deviate from that rhetorical tradition, but the rest of the establishment carries on and doubles down. Today, it is military withdrawals, not destructive deployments, that freak out pundits and spur Cabinet members to resign, as Jim Mattis did last year over Trump's vow to pull troops from Syria. Abandoning the Kurds there this fall was Trump's " great betrayal ," lamented Council on Foreign Relations President Richard Haass, who did not appear to lose sleep over our past military incursions.

Under Trump, who applies "maximum pressure" to all foes foreign and domestic, American militarism is more perilous than ever. It is also more undeniable. That is one reason the current moment is surprisingly hopeful. The call to end "endless war" continues to rise on the flanks of both parties, even as it is flouted by leaders of each. More and more Americans insist that, whatever interests are served by endless war, their own are not. More than twice as many Americans prefer to lower than raise military spending, according to a 2019 Eurasia Group Foundation survey. Veterans support Trump's pledge to bring Middle East wars to a close: A majority of vets deem the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria not to have been worth fighting. The Afghanistan Papers ought to strengthen the consensus. Americans deserve a president who will act accordingly.

The United States would find partners far and wide, in nations great and small, if it put peace first. It could make clear that while spreading democracy or human rights remains worthwhile, values cannot come at the point of a gun or serve as a pretext for war -- and that international peace is, in fact, a condition for human flourishing. Every time Washington searches for a monster to destroy, it shows the world's despots how to abuse the rules and hands demagogues a phantom to inflate. The alternative is not "isolationism" but something closer to the opposite: peaceful, lawful international cooperation against the major threats to humanity, including climate change, pandemic disease and widespread deprivation. Those are the enemies worth fighting, and bombs and bullets will not defeat them.

Samuel Moyn is Henry R. Luce professor of jurisprudence and professor of history at Yale University and a fellow of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, and Stephen Wertheim is deputy director of research and policy at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. He is also a research scholar at the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University Follow @samuelmoyn and @stephenwertheim

[Dec 14, 2019] A Determined Effort to Undermine Russia

Highly recommended!
The USA "Full Spectrum Dominance" doctrine requires weakening and, if possible, partitioning Russia.
Retired Australian diplomat Tony Kevin tells the audience that Skripals poisoning was a false flag operation. 7:00
He also point several weak points in Western politicians narrative about MH17
Notable quotes:
"... Cold War patterns of thinking about Russia show no sign of weakening in America ..."
"... Putin made it clear when he said the next war would not be fought inside Russia. The troglodytes in the West are unable to grasp not only what that means, but why he said it. ..."
"... The latest efforts at attacking Russia via smear, allegation and Doublespeak have been, are via that US supported supposed oversight committee, WADA which has done what the US-UK wanted: banned Russia for four years from international sporting events including the upcoming Tokyo Olympics and World Cup (Football – soccer to Americans). ..."
"... I am really sick of the smearing of Russia done by the US and UK. The Skripal as well as the MH17 case are plain ridiculus. Anybody can see through these silly plants. US and UK obviously don't feel obliged to respect any international rules any more. (The one person who is suffering most at the moment from the decline in respect is Julian Assange, an Australian citizen!) ..."
"... There is "cause." Russia was our latest vassal under Yeltsin. Putin stopped the looting, and worked to benefit average Russian citizens. Just watch "The Magnitsky Act, behind the scenes" to know the "cause". ..."
"... Much of the West (i.e. Germany) has been dragged by force into damage control mode. The Magnitsky Act monster, the election interference hysteria, are just 2 crying examples met with shock and disbelief across the pond. The Fiona Hill testimony was a very telling moment for the inner workings of a self perpetuating logic. ..."
"... "Russia is no lightweight by any means, and not always friendly. But it has regularly done the right thing in international conflicts which the Kremlin seems to understand better than all of "the Western" intelligence combined." ..."
Dec 08, 2019 | consortiumnews.com

Retired Australian diplomat Tony Kevin, in conversation with former Australian Foreign Minister Bob Carr, says the West is unnecessarily determined to undermine Russia.

A t an event last week in Sydney, Kevin and Carr discussed how the West, led by the United States, has been on an aggressive campaign to destabilize Russia, without cause.

When Kevin said he returned to Russia after more than 40 years in 2016 he realized he "had to take sides" in the U.S.-Russia standoff when all Nato countries boycotted the Moscow celebrations of the 70th anniversary of the end of the Second World War.

"I had to take a moral position that it is not right for the West to be ganging up on Russia," Kevin says in his conversation with the former Australian foreign minister.

The New Cold War can traced back to a broken promise made to Moscow on Nato expansion eastward. "London and Washington are orchestrating a disinformation" campaign today against Russia, as the New Cold War has heated up over Syria, Ukraine, NATO troops on Russia's borders and Russiagate.

Watch the hour-long in depth discussion which was filmed and produced by Consortium News' CN Live! Executive Producer Cathy Vogan.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/dJiS3nFzsWg?feature=oembed

Tags: Bob Carr Russia Russiagate Russophobia Tony Kevin Vladimir Putin

Tom Culpeper , December 11, 2019 at 16:03

Putin & the Russian citizenry play chess on this 3-dimensional world.! The Americas and their inane elites attempt checkers on their flat Earth . Pity, some such as Noam Chomsky are admirable world citizens..! Pity again.! WE will miss men of this honest calibre and down- to-earth intelligence. Bob Carr is of this cohort.

Eugenie Basile , December 10, 2019 at 03:36

The 'Russia did it' mantra is a gift for the powers in the Kremlin. It rallies most Russians behind their leaders because they are proud of their country and don't accept the West's moral hypocrite grandstanding.

Just recently the WADA proclaimed sporting ban against Russia is a perfect example. It excludes all Russian athletes because they happen to represent their country while U.S. athletes who have been caught cheating in the past are allowed to participate .

Jerry Alatalo , December 10, 2019 at 00:30

It is very encouraging to know there are good people like Mr. Tony Kevin and Mr. Bob Carr alive and sharing their powerful wisdom at this dangerous historical point on planet Earth. Mr. Kevin and Mr. Carr's immensely important and courageously honest discussion should become – immediately, and for many years to come – required study in university classrooms and government halls around this world.

Peace.

ElderD , December 9, 2019 at 15:03

Tony's (especially!) and Bob's sane and sensible view of this dangerous and destructive state of affairs deserve the widest possible distribution and attention.

George McGlynn , December 9, 2019 at 13:27

A quarter century has passed since the fall of the Soviet Union, and little has changed. Cold War patterns of thinking about Russia show no sign of weakening in America. The further we distance ourselves from the end of the Cold War, the closer we come to its revival. Hostility to Russia is the oldest continuous foreign policy tradition in the United States. It is now so much of a part of America's identity that it is unlikely to be ever cured.

peter mcloughlin , December 9, 2019 at 10:45

It is a dangerous miscalculation to think the "New Cold War" will end like the first. Russia (the USSR) had a buffer zone then, it doesn't today. For Moscow the coming war (world war) will be about survival. All that is left is the fall-back position of nuclear deterrence doctrine – annihilation. I don't think western capitals see how perilous the situation is.

Lois Gagnon , December 9, 2019 at 17:30

I agree. Putin made it clear when he said the next war would not be fought inside Russia. The troglodytes in the West are unable to grasp not only what that means, but why he said it.

AnneR , December 9, 2019 at 07:48

The latest efforts at attacking Russia via smear, allegation and Doublespeak have been, are via that US supported supposed oversight committee, WADA which has done what the US-UK wanted: banned Russia for four years from international sporting events including the upcoming Tokyo Olympics and World Cup (Football – soccer to Americans).

Then there were allegations – of those "highly likely" (therefore one knows to be untrue and unadulterated propaganda to increase Russophobia) sort – about Russian hackers (always giving the impression that the "Kremlin" is behind itl) being the Labour Party's source of the Tory party's US-UK trade deal which would/will deliberately and finally destroy the NHS and replace it with (of course) US "health" insurance company profiteering.

(Always the Tory intention from the NHS's initiation in May of 1948; only its popularity among many Tory party supporters among the working and lower middle classes prevented them from a full-frontal killing off the NHS; the Snatcher's government began the undermining, via installing a top-heavy bureaucratization, siphoning off a sizable proportion of the funds that would otherwise have gone to medical care, demanding that hospitals not "lose" money – a concept completely beyond the remit of the NHS as originally conceived and constructed and like exactions.)

Then there are snide remarks about the meeting today concerning the Ukrainian Azov (Neo-Nazi) attacks on the Donbass (NOT how either the BBC or NPR speaks of this of course) in France. This struggle, between the Russian-speaking Donbass peoples and the neo-Nazis of western Ukraine, has killed many thousands of people (most likely mostly those of the Donbass). The Donbass fighters are spoken of as "Russian-supported" in an attempt to deny them and the reasons for their struggle *any* legitimacy (meanwhile the support for the neo-Nazis goes unmentioned, leaving the listener with the impression that they are the Ukrainian military, thus legitimately fighting a foreign funded and manned insurgency).

Someone even suggested that President Putin needed to be diplomatic. Really? From what I've read the man is the most diplomatic and intelligent politician (not just political leader) along with Xi Jinping and the Iranian government that exist on the world stage. None of them are hubristic, solipsistic, eager beaver killers of peoples in other countries. Unlike their western "world" political counterparts.

Jeff Harrison , December 8, 2019 at 18:30

Mad Dog Mattis spoke the truth when he said that an opponent wasn't defeated until they agreed they were defeated. The US merely assumed that Russia agreed that they were defeated and are doubling down when they now suddenly realize that Russia never said any such thing.

St. Ronnie's whole thing back in the 80's was to outspend Russia militarily and it worked well. We're trying to do it again but Russia isn't playing the same game this time and now it is the US that has a mountain of debt and Russia that doesn't.

SIPIRI tags US military spending at $650B and Russian military spending at $62B. But we know that the $650B number is bogus because it doesn't include our in-violation-of-the-NNPT nuclear program which is in the energy department or our veteran's expenses which are in HHS. I don't know what's missing from Russia's $62B but I'll bet they can sustain that a whole lot better than we can sustain our $650B and rising bill.

Antonio Costa , December 9, 2019 at 13:17

Good point regarding Russia's downsizing the Soviet Union. From Gorbachev to Putin there was NEVER a surrender, intended in any way. The intent has been multilateral partnerships. For Russia the US/West won nothing at all except the opportunity to live and work in peace. (By the way this policy has a long Russian history.)

They gave up the Warsaw Pact and America with our worthless "word" expanded NATO.

The US foreign policy has lost even the semblance of sanity. Our naked aggression is clear as never before, a mad man throwing a global fit armed with megaton nuclear projectiles on trigger first strike alert. What could go wrong?

nondimenticare , December 8, 2019 at 15:56

If, magically, Consortium News/CN Live! were a mass-distribution network/magazine (hence universally consulted), allowing the light in for the mass of the viewing and listening public, it could change the world – both an exalting and despairing thought.

Lily , December 8, 2019 at 09:52

It is a great joy to listen to this conversation!

I am really sick of the smearing of Russia done by the US and UK. The Skripal as well as the MH17 case are plain ridiculus. Anybody can see through these silly plants. US and UK obviously don't feel obliged to respect any international rules any more. (The one person who is suffering most at the moment from the decline in respect is Julian Assange, an Australian citizen!)

I wish people would have the courage to break away from the group pressure originated by a nation which has been started by killing more than 90% of the indigenous people in their country and since then has turned the worl into a very insecure place.

Chapeau, Tony Kevin! Thanks to Bob Carr and Consortiums News.

Lily , December 9, 2019 at 01:18

It seems that some facts are beginning to be realized in the military department.

www(dot)zerohedge(dot)com/geopolitical/pentagon-alarmed-russia-gaining-sympathy-among-us-troops

JOHN CHUCKMAN , December 8, 2019 at 07:30

"At an event last week in Sydney, Kevin and Carr discussed how the West, led by the United States, has been on an aggressive campaign to destabilize Russia, without cause."

The American establishment's problem with Russia is simply that Russia is the only country on earth capable of obliterating the United States. Not even China has yet reached that capacity.

"Carthago delenda est"

Skip Scott , December 9, 2019 at 06:13

There is "cause." Russia was our latest vassal under Yeltsin. Putin stopped the looting, and worked to benefit average Russian citizens. Just watch "The Magnitsky Act, behind the scenes" to know the "cause".

Bruno DP , December 8, 2019 at 02:34

The West is ganging up on Russia? Replace "West" by "United States of America", and I will agree.

Much of the West (i.e. Germany) has been dragged by force into damage control mode. The Magnitsky Act monster, the election interference hysteria, are just 2 crying examples met with shock and disbelief across the pond. The Fiona Hill testimony was a very telling moment for the inner workings of a self perpetuating logic.

Russia is no lightweight by any means, and not always friendly.

But it has regularly done the right thing in international conflicts which the Kremlin seems to understand better than all of "the Western" intelligence combined.

Martin Schuchert , December 8, 2019 at 17:33

I'm German, living in the US, and I agree with your comment. I especially love the last two sentences:

"Russia is no lightweight by any means, and not always friendly. But it has regularly done the right thing in international conflicts which the Kremlin seems to understand better than all of "the Western" intelligence combined."

[Dec 07, 2019] Why the foreign policy establishment consensus is neocon by default.

Highly recommended!
Dec 07, 2019 | www.unz.com

Never in the history of America, probably never in the history of any country, had there been such open and direct control of governmental activities by the very rich. So long as a handful of men in Wall Street control the credit and industrial processes of the country, they will continue to control the press, the government, and, by deception, the people. They will not only compel the public to work for them in peace, but to fight for them in war. -- John Turner, 1922

[Dec 06, 2019] The USA is an occupied by neocon country

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Wellsir, I'm old enough to remember 2002, when the Bush administration and its allies built a case for the Iraq War, using the often-heard line, "We fight the terrorists over there so we don't have to fight them here." Seriously, young folks, look it up online. ..."
"... And now comes Prof. Karlan, using the same rhetoric to characterize the conflict between the US and Russia in Ukraine. She was there to talk about the legal aspects of impeachment, but she bizarrely tipped her hand by trashing Trump because he failed to play his part as a warmonger ..."
"... The American elites didn't learn a damn thing from Iraq ..."
"... On the contrary. They learned that, via deceptive rhetoric and on false pretenses, they could easily manoeuver the U.S. into fighting a war on behalf of another nation's interests rather than its own, and face no repercussions for committing such treason, no matter how many lives it costs and how much it impoverishes the U.S. (to say nothing of what bloodshed and chaos it will cause in the targeted nation -- because after all, destabilization is the point). ..."
"... Trump will never beat an actually decent candidate, he occupies the White House because Clinton was the worst candidate in American history. He's (probably) going to win again because his opponents are even more unpopular and incompetent than he is. ..."
"... No, they are only using the mendacious phrase "spreading democracy" as a cover for what they really want to spread: globalist neoliberalism. ..."
"... The left is shameless, duplicitous and disingenous in the extreme when it comes to Russia (and frankly anything else). To be honest it was my collegiate experiences in the 1980s, comparing the handwaving garbage with what my own eyes saw in the East Bloc, that made me a lifetime, permanent rightist. The left is bankrupt, full of liars and dissemblers and needs to be stopped at any cost. ..."
"... I'd highly recommend the films "Ukraine on Fire" and "Revealing Ukraine" (available on Amazon Prime w/o extra rental $) for a good basic primer on the Ukraine over the last 15 years, particularly of US interference and malfeasance in promoting the coup in 2014. And if anyone "interfered" in the 2016 election it wasn't Russia, but the Ukraine, particularly its very pro-Hilary President Poroshenko (illegitimate though he was and remains after the unconstitutional US-backed coup in against Yanukovich in 2014). ..."
"... NATO should have been moth-balled c. 1992. Instead it is hell-bent on aggressive expansion and antagonizing Russia, for no reason (other than to line the pockets of corrupt US and other officials, "business-men" i.e. oligarchs, etc.). ..."
"... The whole conflict was completely avoidable and is 100% due to America's and Western Europe's dumb actions since the fall of the USSR. ..."
Dec 06, 2019 | theamericanconservative.com

In the Year of Our Lord 2019, sixteen years after this nation launched the catastrophic Iraq War, the following words were spoken on Capitol Hill this week:

We have become the shining city on a hill. We have become the nation that leads the world in understanding what democracy is. And one of the things we understand most profoundly is it's not a real democracy, it's not a mature democracy, if the party in power uses the criminal process to go after its enemies. And I think you heard testimony - the Intelligence Committee heard testimony about how it isn't just our national interest in protecting our own elections. It's not just our national interest in making sure that the Ukraine remains strong and on the front line so they fight the Russians there and we don't have to fight them here, but it's also our national interest in promoting democracy worldwide.

This was not the second coming of the Wolfowitz-Cheney-Bolton brigade. This was Pamela Karlan, a Stanford law professor and Democrat called by her party to testify in this week's House Judiciary Committee impeachment hearing.

Wellsir, I'm old enough to remember 2002, when the Bush administration and its allies built a case for the Iraq War, using the often-heard line, "We fight the terrorists over there so we don't have to fight them here." Seriously, young folks, look it up online.

And I'm old enough to remember these lines from President Bush's second inaugural address, in 2005:

There is only one force of history that can break the reign of hatred and resentment, and expose the pretensions of tyrants, and reward the hopes of the decent and tolerant, and that is the force of human freedom.

We are led, by events and common sense, to one conclusion: The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.

America's vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one. From the day of our Founding, we have proclaimed that every man and woman on this earth has rights, and dignity, and matchless value, because they bear the image of the Maker of Heaven and earth. Across the generations we have proclaimed the imperative of self-government, because no one is fit to be a master, and no one deserves to be a slave. Advancing these ideals is the mission that created our Nation. It is the honorable achievement of our fathers. Now it is the urgent requirement of our nation's security, and the calling of our time.

So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.

That didn't work out too well for us, for Iraq, or for the Middle East.

And now comes Prof. Karlan, using the same rhetoric to characterize the conflict between the US and Russia in Ukraine. She was there to talk about the legal aspects of impeachment, but she bizarrely tipped her hand by trashing Trump because he failed to play his part as a warmonger.

Loetzen • 9 hours ago • edited ,
The American elites didn't learn a damn thing from Iraq

On the contrary. They learned that, via deceptive rhetoric and on false pretenses, they could easily manoeuver the U.S. into fighting a war on behalf of another nation's interests rather than its own, and face no repercussions for committing such treason, no matter how many lives it costs and how much it impoverishes the U.S. (to say nothing of what bloodshed and chaos it will cause in the targeted nation -- because after all, destabilization is the point).

The same thing will happen here. Lesson learned.

Fran Macadam Rod Dreher • 8 hours ago ,

There are, as Victoria Nuland put it, 5 billion reasons for backing the CIA-led coup that overthrew an elected government and replaced it with leaders that the she and the rest of the Obama/Clinton State Department chose. It was the Democrats, since the nineties under another Clinton, that decided to move the American military right up to Russia's borders, interfere in the 1996 election to keep the puppet Yeltsin in power, and with Wall Street leaders to pillage the Russian economy with the stated end to break up Russia into smaller satrapies with governments appointed by the IMF.

Did Joe Biden brag about a quid proof not releasing funds to the Ukraine until it ended the probe into Burisma, which was paying son Hunter millions, and dismiss the investigators altogether? Does it turn out Ukrainian power brokers favored under Obama then sought to influence the American elections against Trump, viewed as wanting to make peace with Russia? Yes, and yes.

Augustine • 9 hours ago ,

The US are not a democracy, since the people do not rule. Rather, it's an oligarchy, since a few influential groups do get their way all the time. Pamela is just shilling for one of these groups, the war party.

It does not matter who you vote for, you always get John McCain.

GoDawgs912 Rod Dreher • 6 hours ago ,

Agreed, I hope the Republicans agree to impeach him immediately after Election Day if he does win (which I think he will due to the opposition candidates). I'd much prefer Mike Pence to represent us than freaking Trump. I voted third party last time, but even as bad as Trump is, he's not nearly as bad as every democratic front runner.

Why the Democratic Party doesn't back Tulsi Gabard is insane, she's the only candidate who everyone could be somewhat happy with.

Taking a "Unity-Party" angle this election and nominating an anti-war military Veteran who's also a super patriotic minority women would absolutely destroy Trump. She's also a religious conservative while simultaneously being a sane social liberal, she satisfies some of the concerns of literally every part of the electorate. A Tulsi Gabard/ Joe Manchin ticket would be an 84 level blowout. A Joe Biden/ Kamala Harris ticket is literally the best thing that has ever happened to Trump. Trump will never beat an actually decent candidate, he occupies the White House because Clinton was the worst candidate in American history. He's (probably) going to win again because his opponents are even more unpopular and incompetent than he is.

ask zippy Rod Dreher • 5 hours ago ,

An article from someone I trust on that evidence which is not hearsay would be useful, any chance you would write one? I ask because impeachment is either political or legal. If it's political then it's just the normal noise from D.C., if it's legal then I want legal standards of evidence. The times I've paid attention the "evidence" has been at the level of someone told me they overhead a phone conversation or we all believed this, but Trump directly told me the opposite of what we all believed.

I'm looking for something like saying "I did not have sex with that woman" under oath as evidence of committing perjury.

TomD Rabiner • 7 hours ago • edited ,

...OTOH, Trump's move against Hunter Biden could possibly be a "high crime and misdemeanor" worthy of impeachment, but given the existence of Acts of Congress against foreign corrupt practices and the New York Times investigation of Hunter Biden, it becomes hard to untangle Trump's motives. It would seem to be difficult to prove that an impeachable "high crime and misdemeanor" occurred if probable cause for a Hunter Biden investigation existed. If we prove (NOT assume, as the Dems currently are doing) that probable cause did not exist then impeachment would be a slam dunk. If we don't prove that then Trump's impeachment will not be seen as legitimate by large segments of the public. We really are teetering on the edge of something deep here.

Mitch Young Rabiner • 6 hours ago ,

You think that finding out what the son of a sitting vice President, a VP who was also 'point man' for Ukraine, was doing getting millions from a corrupt Ukrainian entity is strictly 'personal gain'? You think that looking into Ukrainian influence into our election is 'personal gain'?

Max Rockatansky • 9 hours ago ,

Oh the spreading of democracy worldwide nonsense again! Democracies are earned not given, that lesson cost us trillions and in blood! This sycophant also brought up Pres. Trumps son Baron into the proceedings for no good reason but to score points at tea time back at Stanford. What a demagogue.

Loetzen Max Rockatansky • 7 hours ago • edited ,

It's always such a lie too, because it's never really about spreading "democracy" -- that is, they don't at all like the spread of true democracy when the people genuinely prefer and vote for Putin, Assad, Orban, etc., to say nothing of when democracy demonstrates the true will of the people in cases such as Brexit.

No, they are only using the mendacious phrase "spreading democracy" as a cover for what they really want to spread: globalist neoliberalism.

Seoulite Max Rockatansky • 6 hours ago ,

Democracies are earned not given, that lesson cost us trillions and in blood!

Yes please give us more democracy, so the uniparty can sell our jobs to global capital and our children's future to foreigners. Nations have survived tyranny, despots, and brutal civil wars. It is not at all clear whether the nations of the West will survive your beloved democracy.

Jerry • 8 hours ago ,

...Of course, anyone with a brain knows it's not about Ukraine, a country having no bearing at all on the vital interests of the United States. Rather, Ukraine is a handy pretext serving the interests of America's military-industrial complex and the enrichment of our Ruling Class.

... ... ...

sb • 8 hours ago ,

If Trump wanted to prove a really great president, he could forge a peace with Russia (which would entail getting a settlement with Ukraine). It is insane, and only to the benefit of woke liberal capitalists to frame Russia as a permanent enemy. Carving developed nations into 'us vs them', so the liberal elite can divide and rule us. They use this strategy on multiple fronts, to ensure success:

Pragmatically, we will need an alliance with Russia (and possibly with a post-communist China) to stave off the invading colonisers looking to grift a free lunch in the 'rich' west (its only the 1% wealthy in the west who are really rich, not the >90% peasant class), not to mention the ideologically/religiously motivated muslims planning to implement the global sharia subjugation of the pseudo-Christian west demanded in the Koran.

Sadly, Trump does seem to be proving he lacks the organisational skills to drain the swamp - a virtually impossible task for any one person. A 'friendship pact' with Russia (perhaps swapping trade access to US for human rights, democratic and media freedoms in Russia) would be a big step forward to building a united free west. Perhaps bring Poland and Hungary in to to reassure Russia, and strengthen the protections for Christians and traditional family life. But for this to happen Trump needs to have a Secretary of State he trusts heavily.

Fun times to look forward to anyway...

Stefan • 8 hours ago ,

... Signify... whatever, anything, but please not too much thinking. Same with Washington's foreign policy blob. What matters is that the world's is forced to take America's opinions into account, no matter how bone-headed they are. If they put the world on fire that's called collateral damage (Ledeen Doctrine).

jeremyjanson • 7 hours ago ,

What I find funniest about this whole "impeachment" shenanigan is how the Democrats honestly think anyone doesn't believe they're guilty of exactly what they're accusing Trump of. All Trump has to do is reveal seven such cases to the American people after this whole shenanigan is over and turn their own words against them and they are THROUGH! This might honestly be the biggest political mistake in the history of our Republic.

Brendan • 7 hours ago ,

The whole thing is nonsense. Democracy is particular to the West, and is frankly innately fragile and dying a proper death -- slowly, mind you, but dying it is, and thankfully so.

The whole Russia situation is hilarious and a thousand percent ideological. I sat next to these same assholes in college in the 1980s as they blithely handwaved "no true Scotsman" type arguments about the Soviet Union, and moral equivalency and so on, and then of course without their precious hearts skipping one single beat, they switched immediately to "Russia is evil and must be stopped at all costs" when Russia emerged with a nationalist/rightist government.

The left is shameless, duplicitous and disingenous in the extreme when it comes to Russia (and frankly anything else). To be honest it was my collegiate experiences in the 1980s, comparing the handwaving garbage with what my own eyes saw in the East Bloc, that made me a lifetime, permanent rightist. The left is bankrupt, full of liars and dissemblers and needs to be stopped at any cost.

Disqus10021 • 7 hours ago ,

My guess is that Russia has enough nuclear weapons and the capability to launch them at every major city in the US. Vladimir is no drunkard like Boris Yeltsin was. We should not provoke the Russian bear into lashing out at the US. The old Soviet Union lost some 20 million of its citizens in WWII and did the heavy lifting in defeating the Nazis. Hands up if you want to send your 19 year old son to fight the Russians in Sevastopol. Does the average American even know where Sevastopol is? More than likely, a war with Russia would result in the nuclear bombing of New York, Silicon Valley, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas and Houston for starters.

SatirevFlesti • 7 hours ago ,

I'd highly recommend the films "Ukraine on Fire" and "Revealing Ukraine" (available on Amazon Prime w/o extra rental $) for a good basic primer on the Ukraine over the last 15 years, particularly of US interference and malfeasance in promoting the coup in 2014. And if anyone "interfered" in the 2016 election it wasn't Russia, but the Ukraine, particularly its very pro-Hilary President Poroshenko (illegitimate though he was and remains after the unconstitutional US-backed coup in against Yanukovich in 2014).

NATO should have been moth-balled c. 1992. Instead it is hell-bent on aggressive expansion and antagonizing Russia, for no reason (other than to line the pockets of corrupt US and other officials, "business-men" i.e. oligarchs, etc.).

GoDawgs912 • 7 hours ago ,

I'm halfway cheering for Russia in their conflict with Ukraine. That's Russia's sphere of influence, Ukraine has no business in the EU or in NATO. Any sane American government would be courting Russia in the new Cold War that's obviously coming with The Chinese Communist Party. Instead we pulled all of the former European countries in the USSR into our sphere of influence. The whole conflict was completely avoidable and is 100% due to America's and Western Europe's dumb actions since the fall of the USSR.

[Dec 06, 2019] Who Is Making US Foreign Policy by Stephen F. Cohen

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... A more plausible explanation is that Trump thought that by appointing such anti-Russian hard-liners he could lay to rest the Russiagate allegations that had hung over him for three years and still did: that for some secret nefarious reason he was and remained a "Kremlin puppet." Despite the largely exculpatory Mueller report, Trump's political enemies, mostly Democrats but not only, have kept the allegations alive. ..."
"... The larger question is who should make American foreign policy: an elected president or Washington's permanent foreign policy establishment? (It is scarcely a "deep" or "secret" state, since its representatives appear on CNN and MSNBC almost daily.) Today, Democrats seem to think that it should be the foreign policy establishment, not President Trump. But having heard the cold-war views of much of that establishment, how will they feel when a Democrat occupies the White House? After all, eventually Trump will leave power, but Washington's foreign-policy "blob," as even an Obama aide termed it , will remain. ..."
"... Listen to the podcast here ..."
"... War With Russia? From Putin & Ukraine to Trump & Russiagate ..."
"... The John Batchelor Show ..."
"... Trump's anti-Iranian fever is every bit as ludicrous as the DNC's anti-Russian fever. There is absolutely nothing to support the anti-Iranian policy argument or the anti JCPOA argument. The only thing that is missing from all of this is Iranian hookers, and that would certainly be an explosive headline! ..."
"... You know why Rhodes called it the blob, right? Why he made it sound so formless and squishy? Ask yourself, how does a failed novelist with zilch for foreign-affairs credentials get the big job of Obama's ventriloquist? That's a CIA billet. It so happens that Rhodes' brother has a big job of his own with CBS News, the most servile of the Mockingbird media propaganda mills. ..."
"... It's not a blob, it's a precisely-articulated hierarchy. And the top of it is CIA. So please for once somebody answer this blindingly obvious question, Who is making US foreign policy? CIA, that's who. For the CIA show trial run by Iran/Contra nomenklatura Bill Barr and his blackmailed flunky Durham, Trump's high crime and misdemeanor is conducting diplomacy without CIA supervision. They come out and say so, pointing to the National Security Act's mousetrap bureaucracy. ..."
"... CIA runs your country. They've got impunity, they do what they want. We've got 400,000 academics paid to overthink it. ..."
"... We cannot trust that the people that destroyed the country will repair it. It is run by a Cult of Hedonistic Satanic Psychopaths. If they were limited to just the CIA, America would be in far better shape than its in. The CIA is not capable of thinking or intelligence, so we should stop paying them. ..."
"... Drumpf has been a tool of the Wall Street/Las Vegas Zionist billionaires for many, many years. so his selection of warmongering Zio neo-con advisors should be no surprise. ..."
"... Perhaps part of the reason that Trump often seems to be surrounded by people who don't support his policies or values is, as Paul Craig Roberts suggested in 2016, that Trump would have real problems simply because he was an outsider. An outsider to the Washington swamp, a swamp that Clinton had been swimming in for decades. In short he didn't know who to trust, who to keep "in the tent" & who to shut out. Thus, we have had this huge churn in Secretaries & on so on downwards. ..."
"... Sociopaths are the ones that do the worst because they lack any concern or "Empathy", like robots. So I read that the socio's are some of the brightest people who often are very successful in business etc. and can hide the fact that they would soon as kill as look at ya, but cool as ice, all they want is to get what the hell they want! They don't give a rats petoot who likes likes it or not, except as . ..."
"... Trump hasn't fired any of the neocons, but he proved that he CAN fire defense executives. He fired the Sec of Navy for disagreeing with some ridiculous personal thing that Trump wanted to do. Since Trump hasn't fired any neocons, we have to conclude that he's fully on board. ..."
"... There are so many security holes in the constitution of the USA including that it was ratified by those who invented it, not by a vote put to the people that would be made to suffer being governed by it. Basically the USA is useless as a defender of human rights (one of which is the right to self determination). The so called bill of rights (1st 10 amendments) are contractual promises, but like all clauses in contracts if there is no way to enforce them, then there is no use for the clause except maybe propaganda value. ..."
"... In a normally functioning world you simply can't simultaneously argue that in one case West can bomb a country to force self-determination as in Kosovo, and also denounce exactly the same thing in Crimea. On to Catalonia and more self-determination ..."
"... Trump, among his other occupations, used to engage with the professional wrestling circuit. In that well-staged entertainment there is always a bad guy – or a ' heel ' – who is used to stir up the crowds, the Evil Sheik or Rocky's hapless movie enemies. It makes it ' real '. The ' heel ' is sometimes allowed to win to better manage the audience. But the narrative never changes. Our rational judgments should focus on what happens, and on outcomes – not on talk, slogans, speeches, etc Based on that, Trump is a classical ' heel ' character. He might even be playing it consciously, or he has no choice. ..."
"... To answer the question who runs ' foreign policy ', let's ignore the stadium speeches, and simply look at what happens. In a world bereft of enough profitable consumer things to do, and enough justifiable careers for unemployable geo-political security 'experts' of all kinds, having enemies and maybe even a small war occasionally is not such an irrational thing to want. Plus there are the deep ethnic hatreds and traumas going back generations that were naively imported into the heart of the Western world. (Washington warned against that 200+ years ago.) ..."
"... or maybe trump was a lying neocon, war-loving, immigration-loving neoliberal all along, and you and the trumptards somehow continue to believe his campaign rhetoric? ..."
"... The fact is Trump is not an anti-neocon (Deep State) president he only talks that way. The fact that he surrounded himself with Deep State denizens gives lie to the thought that he is anti-Deep State no one can be that god damn stupid. ..."
"... "TRUMP SUPPORTERS WERE DUPED – Trump supporters are going to find out soon enough that they were duped by Donald Trump. Trump was given the script to run as the "Chaos Candidate" .He is just a pawn of the ruling elite .It is a tactic known as 'CONTROLLED OPPOSITION' ". Wasn't it FDR who said "Presidents are selected , they are not elected " ? ..."
"... Trump selected the Neocons he is surrounded with. And he's given away all kinds of property that he has absolutely no legal authority to give. He was seeking to please American Oligarchs the likes of Adelson. That's American politics. "Money is free speech." Of course, there is another connection with foreign policy beyond the truly total corruption of American domestic politics, and that's through America's brutal empire abroad. ..."
"... Obama or Trump, on the main matters of importance abroad – NATO, Russia, Israel/Palestine, China – there has been no difference, except Trump is more openly bellicose and given to saying really stupid things. ..."
Dec 06, 2019 | www.unz.com
President Trump campaigned and was elected on an anti-neocon platform: he promised to reduce direct US involvement in areas where, he believed, America had no vital strategic interest, including in Ukraine. He also promised a new détente ("cooperation") with Moscow.

And yet, as we have learned from their recent congressional testimony, key members of his own National Security Council did not share his views and indeed were opposed to them. Certainly, this was true of Fiona Hill and Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman. Both of them seemed prepared for a highly risky confrontation with Russia over Ukraine, though whether retroactively because of Moscow's 2014 annexation of Crimea or for more general reasons was not entirely clear.

Similarly, Trump was slow in withdrawing Marie Yovanovitch, a career foreign service officer appointed by President Obama as ambassador to Kiev, who had made clear, despite her official position in Kiev, that she did not share the new American president's thinking about Ukraine or Russia. In short, the president was surrounded in his own administration, even in the White House, by opponents of his foreign policy and presumably not only in regard to Ukraine.

How did this unusual and dysfunctional situation come about? One possibility is that it was the doing and legacy of the neocon John Bolton, briefly Trump's national security adviser. But this doesn't explain why the president would accept or long tolerate such appointees.

A more plausible explanation is that Trump thought that by appointing such anti-Russian hard-liners he could lay to rest the Russiagate allegations that had hung over him for three years and still did: that for some secret nefarious reason he was and remained a "Kremlin puppet." Despite the largely exculpatory Mueller report, Trump's political enemies, mostly Democrats but not only, have kept the allegations alive.

The larger question is who should make American foreign policy: an elected president or Washington's permanent foreign policy establishment? (It is scarcely a "deep" or "secret" state, since its representatives appear on CNN and MSNBC almost daily.) Today, Democrats seem to think that it should be the foreign policy establishment, not President Trump. But having heard the cold-war views of much of that establishment, how will they feel when a Democrat occupies the White House? After all, eventually Trump will leave power, but Washington's foreign-policy "blob," as even an Obama aide termed it , will remain.

Listen to the podcast here . Stephen F. Cohen Stephen F. Cohen is a professor emeritus of Russian studies and politics at New York University and Princeton University. A Nation contributing editor, his most recent book, War With Russia? From Putin & Ukraine to Trump & Russiagate , is available in paperback and in an ebook edition. His weekly conversations with the host of The John Batchelor Show , now in their sixth year, are available at www.thenation.com .

Curmudgeon , says: December 5, 2019 at 8:49 pm GMT

because of Moscow's 2014 annexation of Crimea or for more general reasons was not entirely clear.

In an otherwise decent overview, this sticks out like a sore thumb. It would be helpful to stop using the word annexation. While correct in a technical sense – that Crimea was added to the Russian Federation – the word comes with all kinds of connotations, that imply illegality and or force. Given Crimea was given special status when gifted to Ukraine for administration by the USSR, one could just as easily apply "annexation" of Crimea to Ukraine. After Ukraine voted to "leave" the USSR, Crimea voted to join Ukraine. Obviously the "Ukrainian" vote did not include Crimea. Even after voting to join Ukraine, Crimea had special status within Ukraine, and was semi autonomous. If you can vote to join, you can vote to leave. Either you have the right to self determination, or you don't.

Rebel0007 , says: December 5, 2019 at 10:38 pm GMT
This is what is so infuriating, Stephen! These silent coups of the executive branch have been taking place for my entire life! Both parties are guilty of refusing to appoint cabinet members that the elected presidents would have chosen for themselves, because both parties are more interested in making the president of the opposing party look bad, make him ineffective, and incapable of carrying out policies that he was elected to carry out. That is the very definition of treason!

Things are a disaster. The JCPOA is at the heart of the issue and Trump and his advisors stubborn refusal to capitulate on this issue very well may cause Trump to lose the 2020 election. Trump's anti-Iranian fever is every bit as ludicrous as the DNC's anti-Russian fever. There is absolutely nothing to support the anti-Iranian policy argument or the anti JCPOA argument. The only thing that is missing from all of this is Iranian hookers, and that would certainly be an explosive headline!

The anti-Iranian fever has created so much havoc not only with Iran, but with every country on earth other than Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE. Germany announced that it is seeking to unite with Russia, not only for Gazprom, but is now considering purchasing defense systems from Russia, and Germany is dictating EU policy, by and large. Germany has said that Europe must be able to defend itself independent of America and is requesting an EU military and Italy is on board with this idea, seeking to create jobs and weapons for its economy and defense.

The EU is fed up with the economic sanctions placed on countries that the U.S. has black-listed, particularly Russia and Iran, and China as well for Huwaei 5G.

Nobody in their right mind could ever claim this to be the free market capitalism that Larry Kudlow espouses!

National Institute for Study of the O... , says: December 5, 2019 at 11:00 pm GMT
You know why Rhodes called it the blob, right? Why he made it sound so formless and squishy? Ask yourself, how does a failed novelist with zilch for foreign-affairs credentials get the big job of Obama's ventriloquist? That's a CIA billet. It so happens that Rhodes' brother has a big job of his own with CBS News, the most servile of the Mockingbird media propaganda mills.

It's not a blob, it's a precisely-articulated hierarchy. And the top of it is CIA. So please for once somebody answer this blindingly obvious question, Who is making US foreign policy? CIA, that's who. For the CIA show trial run by Iran/Contra nomenklatura Bill Barr and his blackmailed flunky Durham, Trump's high crime and misdemeanor is conducting diplomacy without CIA supervision. They come out and say so, pointing to the National Security Act's mousetrap bureaucracy.

CIA runs your country. They've got impunity, they do what they want. We've got 400,000 academics paid to overthink it.

follyofwar , says: December 5, 2019 at 11:53 pm GMT
@Curmudgeon Pat Buchanan also uses the word "annexation" all the time.
Rebel0007 , says: December 6, 2019 at 4:31 am GMT
National Institute for the study of the obvious,

The CIA has no authority what so ever as defined by the supreme law of the land, the constitution. That would make them guilty of a coup which would be an act of treason, so if what you claim is true, why have they not been prosecuted.

It is a political game between to competing kleptocratic cults. The DNC and RNC are whores and will do what ever their donors tell them to do. That is also treason. This country is just a total wasteland.

Everyone has pledged allegiance to fraud.

Too big to fail, like the Titanic and the Hindenberg.

We cannot trust that the people that destroyed the country will repair it. It is run by a Cult of Hedonistic Satanic Psychopaths. If they were limited to just the CIA, America would be in far better shape than its in. The CIA is not capable of thinking or intelligence, so we should stop paying them.

Haxo Angmark , says: Website December 6, 2019 at 6:01 am GMT
Drumpf has been a tool of the Wall Street/Las Vegas Zionist billionaires for many, many years. so his selection of warmongering Zio neo-con advisors should be no surprise.
Monty Ahwazi , says: December 6, 2019 at 6:03 am GMT
What kind of stupid question is this? You mean you don't know or asking us for confirmation? If you really don't know then why are you writing an article about it? If you do know then why are you asking the UNZ readers?
animalogic , says: December 6, 2019 at 6:21 am GMT
Perhaps part of the reason that Trump often seems to be surrounded by people who don't support his policies or values is, as Paul Craig Roberts suggested in 2016, that Trump would have real problems simply because he was an outsider. An outsider to the Washington swamp, a swamp that Clinton had been swimming in for decades. In short he didn't know who to trust, who to keep "in the tent" & who to shut out. Thus, we have had this huge churn in Secretaries & on so on downwards.
EdNels , says: December 6, 2019 at 6:49 am GMT
@Rebel0007

It is run by a Cult of Hedonistic Satanic Psychopaths.

That's ok but it's a bit unfair to Hedonistic Satanic Psychopaths After all most of the country is Hedonistic as hell, it sells commercials or wtf. Satanic is philosophical and way over the heads of these clowns, though if the be a Satan, then they are in the plan for sure, and right on the mark. As for psychopaths, those are criminals who are insane, but they can have remorse and be their own worst enemies, often they just go off and go psycho and bad things happen, but can be unplanned off the wall stuff, not diabolic.

Sociopaths are the ones that do the worst because they lack any concern or "Empathy", like robots. So I read that the socio's are some of the brightest people who often are very successful in business etc. and can hide the fact that they would soon as kill as look at ya, but cool as ice, all they want is to get what the hell they want! They don't give a rats petoot who likes likes it or not, except as .

So, once upon a time, a people got so hedonistic and they didn't watch the game and theier leaders were low quality (especially religeous/morals ) and long story short Satan unleashed the Socio's , Things seem to be heading disastrously, so will bit coin save the day? Green nudeal?

Jon Baptist , says: December 6, 2019 at 6:54 am GMT
The simple questions that beg to be asked are who are the accusers and what media agencies are providing the amplification to transmit these accusations?
https://forward.com/news/national/434664/impeachment-trump-democrats-jewish/
https://www.jta.org/2019/11/15/politics/the-tell-the-jewish-players-in-impeachment

There is also this link courtesy of Haass' CFR – https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/russia-trump-and-2016-us-election

While massive attention is directed towards Russia and the Ukraine, the majority of the public are shown the slight of hand and their attention is never brought near to the real perpetrators of subverting American and British foreign policy.

https://electronicintifada.net/content/watch-film-israel-lobby-didnt-want-you-see/25876
http://joshdlindsay.com/2019/04/the-israel-lobby-in-the-u-s-al-jazeera-documentary/
The Truth Archive
2K subscribers
The Israeli Lobby in the United States of America (2017) – Full Documentary HD

polistra , says: December 6, 2019 at 7:49 am GMT
Doesn't matter if he's surrounded. A president CAN make foreign policy, and a president CAN fire people who disagree with his policy. Trump hasn't fired any of the neocons, but he proved that he CAN fire defense executives. He fired the Sec of Navy for disagreeing with some ridiculous personal thing that Trump wanted to do. Since Trump hasn't fired any neocons, we have to conclude that he's fully on board.
sally , says: December 6, 2019 at 8:51 am GMT
@Rebel0007

The CIA has no authority what so ever as defined by the supreme law of the land, the constitution. That would make them guilty of a coup which would be an act of treason, so if what you claim is true, why have they not been prosecuted.

--
first off the supreme law of the land maybe the Constitution and to oppose it may be Treason, but the Law that is supreme to the Law of the land is Human rights law.. it is far superior to, and it is the TLD of all laws of the land of all of the Nation States that mankind has allowed the greedy among its masses, to impose.

There are so many security holes in the constitution of the USA including that it was ratified by those who invented it, not by a vote put to the people that would be made to suffer being governed by it. Basically the USA is useless as a defender of human rights (one of which is the right to self determination). The so called bill of rights (1st 10 amendments) are contractual promises, but like all clauses in contracts if there is no way to enforce them, then there is no use for the clause except maybe propaganda value.

If you note the USA constitution has seven articles..

Article 1 is about 525 elected members of congress and their very limited powers to control
foreign activities. Each qualified to vote member of the governed (a citizen so to speak) is allowed to
vote for only 3 of the 525 persons. so basically there is no real national election anywhere .

Article II grants the electoral college the power to appoint two persons full control of the assets,
resources and manpower of America to conquer the entire world or to make peace in the entire world.
Either way: the governed are not allowed to vote for either; the EC vote determines the P or VP.

Article III allows the Article II person to appoint yes men to the judiciary

Where exist the power of the governed to deny USA governors the ability to the use the powers the constitution claims the governors are to have, against the governed? <==No where I can find? Theoretically, the governed are protected from abuse for as long as it takes to conduct due process?

One person, the Article II person, is basically the king when in comes to constitutional authority to establish, conduct, prosecute or defend USA involvement in foreign affairs.

No where does the constitution of the USA deny its President the use of American resources or USA military power, to make and use diplomat appointments, or to use the USA to use the wealth of America and the hegemonic powers of the USA to make a private or public profit in a foreign land. <= d/n matter if the profit is personal to the President or if it assigned by appointment (like the feudal powers granted by the feudal kings to the feudal lords) to corporate feudal lords or oligarch personal interest.

AFAICT, the president can USE the USA to conduct war, invade or otherwise infringe on, even destroy, the territory, or a private or public interest, within a foreign sovereign more or less at will. So if the President wants to command a private or secret Army like the CIA, he can as far as I can tell, obviously this president does, because he could with his pen alone shut it down.

Seems to me the "NO" from Wilson's four points

  1. no more secret diplomacy peace settlement must not lead the way to new wars
  2. no retribution, unjust claims, and huge fines <basically indemnities paid by the losers to the winners.
  3. no more war; includes controls on armaments and arming of nations.
  4. no more Trade Barriers so the nations of the world would become more interdependent.

have been made the essence of nation state operations world wide.

IMO, The CIA exists at the pleasure of the President.

Beckow , says: December 6, 2019 at 9:29 am GMT
@Curmudgeon all of that, plus the Kosovo precedent.

In a normally functioning world you simply can't simultaneously argue that in one case West can bomb a country to force self-determination as in Kosovo, and also denounce exactly the same thing in Crimea. On to Catalonia and more self-determination

Beckow , says: December 6, 2019 at 9:52 am GMT
Trump, among his other occupations, used to engage with the professional wrestling circuit. In that well-staged entertainment there is always a bad guy – or a ' heel ' – who is used to stir up the crowds, the Evil Sheik or Rocky's hapless movie enemies. It makes it ' real '. The 'heel ' is sometimes allowed to win to better manage the audience. But the narrative never changes. Our rational judgments should focus on what happens, and on outcomes – not on talk, slogans, speeches, etc Based on that, Trump is a classical ' heel ' character. He might even be playing it consciously, or he has no choice.

To answer the question who runs ' foreign policy ', let's ignore the stadium speeches, and simply look at what happens. In a world bereft of enough profitable consumer things to do, and enough justifiable careers for unemployable geo-political security 'experts' of all kinds, having enemies and maybe even a small war occasionally is not such an irrational thing to want. Plus there are the deep ethnic hatreds and traumas going back generations that were naively imported into the heart of the Western world. (Washington warned against that 200+ years ago.)

Anon [424] Disclaimer , says: December 6, 2019 at 10:47 am GMT
https://russia-insider.com/en/politics/majority-germans-wants-less-reliance-us-more-engagement-russia/ri27985

Macron said that NATO is " brain dead " :

https://www.economist.com/europe/2019/11/07/emmanuel-macron-warns-europe-nato-is-becoming-brain-dead

The more the US sanctions so many countries around the world , the more the US generate an anti US reaction around the world .

gotmituns , says: December 6, 2019 at 11:09 am GMT
Who Is Making US Foreign Policy?
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -
Could it be israel?
DrWatson , says: December 6, 2019 at 11:20 am GMT
Trump should have kept Steve Bannon as his advisor and should have fired instead his son-in-law. Perhaps "they" are blackmailing Trump with photos like here: https://www.pinterest.com/richarddesjarla/creepy/

That would explain why Trump is so ineffective at making a reality anything he campaigned for.

Marshall Lentini , says: December 6, 2019 at 11:28 am GMT
@melpol Betas in power -- an underappreciated dimension of this morass.
propagandist hacker , says: Website December 6, 2019 at 11:29 am GMT
or maybe trump was a lying neocon, war-loving, immigration-loving neoliberal all along, and you and the trumptards somehow continue to believe his campaign rhetoric?
Realist , says: December 6, 2019 at 11:52 am GMT

An anti-neocon president appears to have been surrounded by neocons in his own administration.

The fact is Trump is not an anti-neocon (Deep State) president he only talks that way. The fact that he surrounded himself with Deep State denizens gives lie to the thought that he is anti-Deep State no one can be that god damn stupid.

Realist , says: December 6, 2019 at 12:00 pm GMT
@sally

IMO, The CIA exists at the pleasure of the President.

The CIA sees it differently; and they are part of the Deep State.

Realist , says: December 6, 2019 at 12:03 pm GMT
@propagandist hacker

or maybe trump was a lying neocon, war-loving, immigration-loving neoliberal all along, and you and the trumptards somehow continue to believe his campaign rhetoric?

That is my contention.

Sean , says: December 6, 2019 at 12:11 pm GMT
MICHAEL CARPENTER Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Russia, Ukraine, and Eurasia from 2015 to 2017.

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/russia-fsu/2019-11-26/oligarchs-who-lost-ukraine-and-won-washington

Halfway around the world from Washington's halls of power, Ukraine sits along a civilizational and geopolitical fault line. To Ukraine's west are the liberal democracies of Europe, governed by rule of law and democratic principles. To its east are Russia and its client states in Eurasia, almost all of which are corrupt oligarchies. [ ] In this war on democratic movements and democratic principles, Russia's biggest prize and chief adversary has always been the United States. Until now, however, Russia has always had to contend with bipartisan resolve to counter

No mention of China, and this is the problem with the whole foreign policy establishment not just the neocons. Russia is more of an annoyance than anything, but they are still operating assumptions on what is the Geographical Pivot of History , so they want to talk about Russia. Like an Edwardian sea cadet we are supposed to care about Russia getting (back) a water port in Crimea. Mahan's definition of sea power included a strong commercial fleet. After tearing their own environment apart like a car in a wrecking yard and heating up the planet China has taken time out from deforestation and colonising Tibet, to send huge container vessels full of cheap goods through the melting Arctic round the top of Russia all the better to get to Europe and deindustrialise it.

Western elites have sold out to China, seen as the future, so we hear about Russia rather than the three million Uyghurs in concentration camps complete with constantly smoking crematoria, and harvesting of organs for rich foreigners.

Who poses a greater threat to the West: China or Russia?
By the time the West finds itself in open conflict with Beijing, we will have lost our relative advantage. Brendan Simms and K.C. Lin [ ] The concept of China being a threat is harder to comprehend. In what way? Yes, its hacking and intellectual property theft is a headache. But is it worse than what Russia is up to? And don't we need Chinese investment, so does it really matter if China builds our 5G mobile networks? In London, ministers agonise over these issues -- not knowing whether to pity China (we still send foreign aid there), beg for its money and contracts (with prime ministerial trade trips), or treat it as a potential antagonist.

Aid ! They sent robots to the far side of the Moon

Beijing has been the beneficiary of liberal revulsion at the Trump presidency: if the Donald is against the Chinese, who cannot be for them? As a result, Trump's efforts to address China's unfair trade practices have so far missed the mark with the domestic and international audience. As Trump declares war on free trade, China -- one of the most protectionist economies in the world -- is now celebrated at Davos as the avatar of free trade. Later this month, China's Vice-President is likely to be in attendance at Davos -- and there is even talk of him meeting with Trump. Similarly, the messiness of American politics has made China's one-party state an apparent poster boy of political stability and governability.

9/11 Inside job , says: December 6, 2019 at 12:14 pm GMT
911endofdays.blogspot.com : "Sackcloth&Ashes – The 16th Trump of Arcana " :

"TRUMP SUPPORTERS WERE DUPED – Trump supporters are going to find out soon enough that they were duped by Donald Trump. Trump was given the script to run as the "Chaos Candidate" .He is just a pawn of the ruling elite .It is a tactic known as 'CONTROLLED OPPOSITION' ".
Wasn't it FDR who said "Presidents are selected , they are not elected " ?

JOHN CHUCKMAN , says: Website December 6, 2019 at 12:25 pm GMT

Trump selected the Neocons he is surrounded with. And he's given away all kinds of property that he has absolutely no legal authority to give. He was seeking to please American Oligarchs the likes of Adelson. That's American politics. "Money is free speech." Of course, there is another connection with foreign policy beyond the truly total corruption of American domestic politics, and that's through America's brutal empire abroad.

The military/intelligence imperial establishment definitely see Israel as a kind of American colony in the Mideast, and they make sure that it's well provided for. That's what the Neocon Wars have been about. Paving over large parts of Israel's noisy neighborhood. And that includes matters like keeping Syria off-balance with occupation in its northeast. And constantly threatening Iran.

Obama or Trump, on the main matters of importance abroad – NATO, Russia, Israel/Palestine, China – there has been no difference, except Trump is more openly bellicose and given to saying really stupid things.

By the way, the last President who tried seriously to make foreign policy as the elected head of government left half of his head splattered on thec streets of Dallas.

Sick of Orcs , says: December 6, 2019 at 12:36 pm GMT
@propagandist hacker Or he was fooled, tricked, bribed, coerced by The HoloNose.

Don't get me wrong, the Orange Sellout is to blame regardless.

9/11 Inside job , says: December 6, 2019 at 12:37 pm GMT
@Jon Baptist We have all been brainwashed by the propaganda screened by the massmedia ,whether it be FOX , MSNBC , CBS ,etc.. SeptemberClues.info has a good article entitled "The central role of the news media on 9/11 " :

"The 9/11 psyop relied foremostly on that weakspot of ours .We all fell for the images we saw on TV at the time we can only wonder why so many never questioned the absurd TV coverage proposed by all the major networks The 9/11 TV imagery of the crucial morning events was just a computer-animated, pre-fabricated movie."

Was "The Harley Guy" a crisis actor ?

geokat62 , says: December 6, 2019 at 1:00 pm GMT
@National Institute for Study of the Obvious

So please for once somebody answer this blindingly obvious question, Who is making US foreign policy? CIA, that's who.

Close. You got 4 of the correct letters, AIPAC. You were just missing the P.

CIA runs your country.

No, Jewish Supremacist oligarchs run America.

Herald , says: December 6, 2019 at 1:05 pm GMT
@follyofwar Pat inhabits a strange Hollywood type world, where the US is always the good guy. He believes that, although the US may make foreign policy mistakes, its aims and ambitions are nevertheless noble and well intentioned.

In Pat's world it's still circa 1955, but even then, his take on US foreign policy would have been hopelessly unrealistic.

[Dec 04, 2019] Ukrainegaters claim that Trump Reduced the USA empire 'Global Commitments' was fraudulent from the very beginning. Trump is yet another imperial president who favours the "Full spectrum Dominance; The problem is that the time when the USA can have it are in the past. Europe finally recovered from WWII losses and that alone dooms the idea

Highly recommended!
Pelosi interference in elections might cost democrats a victory. She enraged Trump base and strengthened Trump, who before was floundering. Now election changed into "us vs them" question, which is very unfavorable to neoliberal Dems. as neolibelism as ideology is dead. She also brought back Trump some independents who othersie would stay home or vote for Dem candidate. No action of House of Representatives can changes this. Bringing Vindman and Fiona Hill to testify were huge blunders as they enhance the narrative that the Deep State, unaccountable Security Establishment, controls the government, to which Trump represents very weak, but still a challenge. As such they strengthened Trump
Essentially Dems had driven themselves into a trap. Moreover actions of the Senate can drag democrats in dirt till the elections, diminishing their chances further and firther. Can you image the effect if Schiff would be called testify under oath about his contacts with Ciaramella? Or Biden questioning about his dirty dealing with both Yanukovich administration and Provisional Government after the 2014 coup d'état (aka EuroMaydan, aka "the Revolution of dignity" ?
Notable quotes:
"... It is true that both Obama and Trump have been falsely accused of presiding over "withdrawal" and "retreat." In Obama's case, Republican hawks made this false claim so that they could attack a fantasy version of Obama's record instead of arguing against the real one. Members of the foreign policy establishment have been warning about Trump's supposed "isolationism" for four years and it still hasn't shown up. Both presidents have been criticized in such similar ways despite conducting significantly different foreign policies because these are the automatic, knee-jerk criticisms that pundits and analysts use to criticize a president. ..."
"... Because there is a strong bias in favor of "action" and "leadership," the only way most of these people know how to attack a president is to say that he is "failing" to "lead" and is guilty of "inaction." It doesn't matter if it makes sense or matches the facts. It is the safe, Blobby way to complain about a president's foreign policy without suggesting that you think there is something wrong with the underlying assumptions about the U.S. role in the world. Instead of challenging the presidents on their real records, it is easier to condemn non-existent "isolationism" and pretend that presidents that maintain or increase U.S. involvement overseas are reducing it. ..."
"... We should debate whether U.S. commitments overseas need to be reduced, but we really have to stop pretending that the U.S. has been reducing those commitments when it has actually been adding to them. ..."
Dec 04, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com
Originally from: The U.S. Has Not Reduced Its 'Global Commitments' The American Conservative by Daniel Larison

Gideon Rachman tries to find similarities between the foreign policies of Trump and Obama:

Both men would detest the thought. But, in crucial respects, the foreign policies of Donald Trump and Barack Obama are looking strikingly similar.

The wildly different styles of the two presidents have disguised the underlying continuities between their approaches to the world. But look at substance, rather than style, and the similarities are impressive.

There is usually considerable continuity in U.S. foreign policy from one president to another, but Rachman is making a stronger and somewhat different claim than that. He is arguing that their foreign policy agendas are very much alike in ways that put both presidents at odds with the foreign policy establishment, and he cites "disengagement from the Middle East" and a "pivot to Asia" as two examples of these similarities. This seems superficially plausible, but it is misleading. Despite talking a lot about disengagement, Obama and Trump chose to keep the U.S. involved in several conflicts, and Trump actually escalated the wars he inherited from Obama. To the extent that there is continuity between Obama and Trump, it has been that both of them have acceded to the conventional wisdom of "the Blob" and refused to disentangle the U.S. from Middle Eastern conflicts. Ongoing support for the war on Yemen is the ugliest and most destructive example of this continuity.

In reality, neither Obama nor Trump "focused" on Asia, and Trump's foray into pseudo-engagement with North Korea has little in common with Obama's would-be "pivot" or "rebalance." U.S. participation in the Trans-Pacific Partnership was a major part of Obama's policy in Asia. Trump pulled out of that agreement and waged destructive trade wars instead. Once we get past generalizations and look at details, the two presidents are often diametrically opposed to one another in practice. That is what one would expect when we remember that Trump has made dismantling Obama's foreign policy achievements one of his main priorities.

The significant differences between the two become much more apparent when we look at other issues. On arms control and nonproliferation, the two could not be more different. Obama negotiated a new arms reduction treaty with New START at the start of his presidency, and he wrapped up a major nonproliferation agreement with Iran and the other members of the P5+1 in 2015. Trump reneged on the latter and seems determined to kill the former. Obama touted the benefits of genuine diplomatic engagement, while Trump has made a point of reversing and undoing most of the results of Obama's engagement with Cuba and Iran. Trump's overall hostility to genuine diplomacy makes another one of Rachman claims quite baffling:

The result is that, after his warlike "fire and fury" phase, Mr Trump is now pursuing a diplomacy-first strategy that is strongly reminiscent of Mr Obama.

Calling Trump's clumsy pattern of making threats and ultimatums a "diplomacy-first strategy" is a mistake. This is akin to saying that he is adhering to foreign policy restraint because the U.S. hasn't invaded any new countries on Trump's watch. It takes something true (Trump hasn't started a new war yet) and misrepresents it as proof that the president is serious about diplomacy and that he wants to reduce U.S. military engagement overseas. Trump enjoys the spectacle of meeting with foreign leaders, but he isn't interested in doing the work or taking the risks that successful diplomacy requires. He has shown repeatedly through his own behavior, his policy preferences, and his proposed budgets that he has no use for diplomacy or diplomats, and instead he expects to be able to bully or flatter adversaries into submission.

So Rachman is simply wrong he reaches this conclusion:

Mr Trump's reluctance to attack Iran was significant. It underlines the fact that his tough-guy rhetoric disguises a strong preference for diplomacy over force.

Let's recall that the near-miss of starting a war with Iran came as a result of the downing of an unmanned drone. The fact that the U.S. was seriously considering an attack on another country over the loss of a drone is a worrisome sign that this administration is prepared to go to war at the drop of a hat. Calling off such an insane attack was the right thing to do, but there should never have been an attack to call off. That episode does not show a "strong preference for diplomacy over force." If Trump had a strong preference for diplomacy over force, his policy would not be one of relentless hostility towards Iran. Trump does not believe in diplomatic compromise, but expects the other side to capitulate under pressure. That actually makes conflict more likely and reduces the chances of meaningful negotiations.

It is true that both Obama and Trump have been falsely accused of presiding over "withdrawal" and "retreat." In Obama's case, Republican hawks made this false claim so that they could attack a fantasy version of Obama's record instead of arguing against the real one. Members of the foreign policy establishment have been warning about Trump's supposed "isolationism" for four years and it still hasn't shown up. Both presidents have been criticized in such similar ways despite conducting significantly different foreign policies because these are the automatic, knee-jerk criticisms that pundits and analysts use to criticize a president.

Because there is a strong bias in favor of "action" and "leadership," the only way most of these people know how to attack a president is to say that he is "failing" to "lead" and is guilty of "inaction." It doesn't matter if it makes sense or matches the facts. It is the safe, Blobby way to complain about a president's foreign policy without suggesting that you think there is something wrong with the underlying assumptions about the U.S. role in the world. Instead of challenging the presidents on their real records, it is easier to condemn non-existent "isolationism" and pretend that presidents that maintain or increase U.S. involvement overseas are reducing it.

Rachman ends his column with this assertion:

In their very different ways, both Mr Obama and Mr Trump have reduced America's global commitments -- and adjusted the US to a more modest international role.

The problem here is that there has been no meaningful reduction in America's "global commitments." Which commitments have been reduced or eliminated? It would be helpful if someone could be specific about this. The U.S. has more security dependents today than it did when Trump took office. NATO has been expanded to include two new countries in just the last three years. U.S. troops are engaged in hostilities in just as many countries as they were when Trump was elected. There are more troops deployed to the Middle East at the end of this year than there were at the beginning, and that is a direct consequence of Trump's bankrupt Iran policy.

We should debate whether U.S. commitments overseas need to be reduced, but we really have to stop pretending that the U.S. has been reducing those commitments when it has actually been adding to them.

[Dec 02, 2019] The cost of militarism cannot be measured only in lost opportunities, lives and money. There will be a long hangover of shame

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... "The cost cannot be measured only in lost opportunities, lives and money. There will be a long hangover of shame. Its essence was summed up by Col. Ted Westhusing, an Army scholar of military ethics who was an innocent witness to corruption, not a participant, when he died at age 44 of a gunshot wound to the head while working for Gen. David Petraeus training Iraqi security forces in Baghdad in 2005. He was at the time the highest-ranking officer to die in Iraq." ..."
"... " 'I cannot support a msn that leads to corruption, human rights abuse and liars,' Colonel Westhusing wrote, abbreviating the word mission. 'I am sullied.' " ..."
www.theamericanconservative.com

Michael N. Moore , says: at 12:13 pm

In my opinion the most under-reported event of the Iraq war was the suicide of military Ethicist Colonel Ted Westhusing. It was reported at the end of a Frank Rich column that appeared in the NY Times of 10-21-2007:

"The cost cannot be measured only in lost opportunities, lives and money. There will be a long hangover of shame. Its essence was summed up by Col. Ted Westhusing, an Army scholar of military ethics who was an innocent witness to corruption, not a participant, when he died at age 44 of a gunshot wound to the head while working for Gen. David Petraeus training Iraqi security forces in Baghdad in 2005. He was at the time the highest-ranking officer to die in Iraq."

"Colonel Westhusing's death was ruled a suicide, though some believe he was murdered by contractors fearing a whistle-blower, according to T. Christian Miller, the Los Angeles Times reporter who documents the case in his book "Blood Money."

Either way, the angry four-page letter the officer left behind for General Petraeus and his other commander, Gen. Joseph Fil, is as much an epitaph for America's engagement in Iraq as a suicide note."

" 'I cannot support a msn that leads to corruption, human rights abuse and liars,' Colonel Westhusing wrote, abbreviating the word mission. 'I am sullied.' "

Michael N. Moore , says: February 13, 2013 at 2:46 pm
As per the request of James Canning for more information on Col. Ted Westhusing, please see:

http://www.correntewire.com/a_disturbing_suicide_note_from_iraq

Or the book "Blood Money" by T. Christian Miller

thefatefullightning , says: June 4, 2013 at 1:09 pm
"The tiny pink candies at the bottom of the urinals are reserved for Field Grade and Above." --sign over the urinals in the "O" Club at Tan Son Nhut Airbase, 1965.

Now that sentiment, is Officer-on-Officer. The same dynamic tension exists throughout all Branches and ranks.

My background includes a Combat Infantry Badge and a record of having made Spec Four , two times. If you don't know what that means, stop reading here.

I feel that no one should be promoted E-5 or O-4, if they are to command men in battle, unless they have had that life experience themselves. It becomes virgins instructing on sexual etiquette.

Within the ranks, there exists a disdain for officers, in general. Some officers overcome this by their actions, but the vast majority cement that assessment the same way.
What makes the thing run is the few officers who are superior human beings, and the NCOs who are of that same tribe. And there is a love there, from top to bottom and bottom to top, a brotherhood of warriors which the civilian population will forever try to discern, parse and examine to their lasting frustration and ignorance.

It is the spirit of this nation [Liberty, e pluribus unum and In God We Trust ] that is the binding filament of it all. The civilians responsible for the welfare of the armed services need to be more fully aware of that spirit and they need to bring it into the air-conditioned offices they inhabit when they make decisions about men who know sacrifice.

Terrence Zehrer , says: July 15, 2013 at 12:48 pm
But the Pentagon is excellent at what it does – extort money from the US taxpayer. I call it treason.

"Massive military budgets erode the economic foundation on which true national security is dependent."

– Dwight Eisenhower

[Nov 29, 2019] Where s the Collusion

Highly recommended!
Now after her deposition Aaron should interview Fiona Hill. I would like to see how she would lose all the feathers of her cocky "I am Specialist in Russia" stance. She a regular MIC prostitute (intelligence agencies are a part of MIC) just like Luke Harding. And probably both have the same handlers.
Brilliant interview !
Harding is little more than an intelligence asset himself and his idea of speaking to "Russians" is London circle of Russian emigrants which are not objective source by any means.
He's peddling a his Russophobic line with no substantiation. In fact, the interview constitutes an overdue exposure of this pressitute.
Notable quotes:
"... He's little more than an intelligence asset himself if his idea of speaking to "Russians" is to go and speak to a bunch of people who most certainly have their own ties back to the western intelligence agencies. ..."
"... Also "well this is the kind of person Putin is" is a terrible argument. This isn't about either Putin or Trump really, its about the long history of US-Russia relations and all that has occurred. ..."
"... This interview is a wonderful illustration of everything that is horribly wrong with corporate media. I hope it goes viral. ..."
"... Very well put! Everything that is labeled as "conspiracy theory" when aimed towards the West, is "respectable journalism" when aimed at Russia. ..."
"... Navalny is a corrupt ex-politician just like his mentor that was caught red-handed taking a bribe from a German businessman "all on camera" at a restaurant. Most of corrupt politicians and businessmen that get caught by the Russian government always cry that they are politically repressed and the government is evil. ..."
"... Navalnys brother was the owner of a small transport company that Navalny helped secure contracts with government enterprises '' anywhere in the world that would be a conflict of interest" but that's not why he is in jail! His brother is in jail for swindling the postal service company for transportation costs. ..."
"... Aaron Mate is a brilliant interviewer. He keeps a calm demeanor, but does not let his guest get away with any untruths or non sequiturs. This one of the many reasons I love The Real News. I encourage anyone who appreciates solid journalism to donate to The Real News. ..."
"... GREAT follow up questions Aaron... Harding did not expect to get a real reporter... he obfuscates and diverts to other issues because he can not EVER provide any evidence... Going to Moscow will not tell you anything about whether or not the DNC server was hacked. ..."
"... Luke Harding is a complete and total idiot. He kept qualifying his arguments with "I've been to Moscow... I don't know if you know this, but I've been to Moscow..." and even at one point, "Some of my friends have been murdered." LOL, sure, whatever you say, Luke! Like you're so big time and such an all star journalist who isn't just trying to capitalize on the wild goose chase that is psychologically trapping leftists into delusions and wishful thinking. ..."
"... NSA monitors every communication over the internet. if the Russians hacked the DNC, there would be proof, and it would not take years to uncover. Look at the numbers: Clinton spent 2 billion, Russian "agents" spent 200k to "influence" the election. Great job Aaron for holding this opportunist's feet to the fire. Oh he's a story teller all right. You know a synonym of storyteller? LIAR!!!! ..."
"... Hes making so many factual wrong statements I don't know where to start here. ..."
"... His logic seems to be: Putin does things we don't like -> Trump getting elected is something we don't like -> Putin got Trump elected. ..."
Dec 28, 2017 | www.youtube.com

Our Hidden History , 4 days ago (edited)

That Harding tells Mate to meet Alexi Navalny, who is a far right nationalist and most certainly a tool of US intelligence (something like Russia's Richard Spencer) was all I needed to hear to understand where Luke is coming from.

He's little more than an intelligence asset himself if his idea of speaking to "Russians" is to go and speak to a bunch of people who most certainly have their own ties back to the western intelligence agencies. That's not how you're going to get the truth about Russia. He's all appeals to authority - Steele's most of all, even name dropping Kerry. To finally land on "oh well if you would read my whole book" is just getting to the silly season.

Also "well this is the kind of person Putin is" is a terrible argument. This isn't about either Putin or Trump really, its about the long history of US-Russia relations and all that has occurred. Also, the ubiquitous throwing around of accusations of the murder of journalists in Russia is a straw man argument, especially when it is just thrown in as some sort of moral shielding for a shabby argument.

Few in the US know about these cases or what occurred, or of the many forces inside of Russia that might be involved in murdering journalists just as in Mexico or Turkey. But these cases are not explained - blame is merely assigned to Putin himself. Of course if someone here discusses he death of Michael Hastings, they're a "conspiracy theorist", but if the crime involves a Russian were to assign the blame to Vladimir Putin and, no further explanation is required.

Elizabeth Ferrari , 4 days ago

This interview is a wonderful illustration of everything that is horribly wrong with corporate media. I hope it goes viral.

Esen B. , 3 days ago

He is far right, he is calling "cockroaches" Central Asian/ex-USSR workers coming to Moscow and in general his tone is quite ultra-nationalistic.

Lemmy Motorhead , 3 days ago

Very well put! Everything that is labeled as "conspiracy theory" when aimed towards the West, is "respectable journalism" when aimed at Russia.

Esen B. , 3 days ago

That is the video about fire arm legalization "cockroaches ", even if you are not Russian speaking it's pretty graphic to understand the idea https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8ILxqIEEMg

Esen B. , 3 days ago (edited)

And FYI - Central Asian workers do the low-wage jobs in Moscow, pretty like Mexicans or Puerto Ricans in US. Yet, that "future president" is trying to gain some popularity by labeling and demonizing them. Sounds familiar a bit?

trdi , 3 days ago (edited)

"definitelly ddissagree with that assertation about Alexei he's had nationalist views but he's definitely not far right and calling him a tool of US intelligence is pretty bs this is the exact same assertation that the Russian state media says about him."

I disagree that there is any evidence of Navalny being tool of US intelligence, but you are wrong for not recognizing that Navalny is ultranationalist. His public statements are indefensible. He is a Russian ultra nationalist, far right and a racist. Statements about cockroaches, worse than rats, bullets being too good etc - there is no way to misunderstand that.

Sendan , 3 days ago

Navalny is a corrupt ex-politician just like his mentor that was caught red-handed taking a bribe from a German businessman "all on camera" at a restaurant. Most of corrupt politicians and businessmen that get caught by the Russian government always cry that they are politically repressed and the government is evil.

Navalnys brother was the owner of a small transport company that Navalny helped secure contracts with government enterprises '' anywhere in the world that would be a conflict of interest" but that's not why he is in jail! His brother is in jail for swindling the postal service company for transportation costs.

MrChibiluffy , 3 days ago

I know he said that i agree he has those views but that was in 2010.

Yarrski , 3 days ago

@trdi I am a Russian. And I remember the early Navalny who made me sick to my stomach with absolutely disgusting, RACIST, anti-immigration commentaries. The guy is basically a NEO-NAZI who has toned down his nationalist diatribes in the past 10 or so years. Has he really reformed? I doubt it.

Mohamed Elmaazi , 2 days ago

This is a solid comment mate. Well thought out, with solid reasoning. How refreshing.

Nikita Gusarov , 2 days ago

MrChibiluffy, Navalny became relatively popular in Russia precisely at that time, especially during the White Ribbon protests in 2011/2012. I remember it very well myself.

I am Russian and I lived in Moscow at that time and he was the darling of the Russian opposition. He publicly defined his views and established himself back then and hasn't altered his position to this day.

What's more important is that around 2015 or so he made an alliance with the far-right and specifically Diomushkin who is a neo-nazi activist. I understand that people change their views, it's just that he hasn't.

MrChibiluffy , 2 days ago

Nikita Gusarov it still feels like the best chance for some form of populist opposition atm. Even though they just rejected him he has a movement. Would you rather vote for Sobchak?

annalivia1308 , 1 day ago

Yes. The US are looking to repeat Ukraine's regime change.

Ind Aus , 1 day ago

Lets not forget that one reason many voted for Trump was his rhetoric about improving the peace-threatening antagonism towards Russia, especially in order to help resolve the situation in Syria. It's not like it was secret he was trying to hide. He only moderated his views somewhat when the Democrat-engineered anti-Russian smear campaign took off and there was a concerted effort to tie him to Russia.

Is it crime surround yourself with people that will help you fullfill your pledges?

artemis12061966 , 1 day ago

Or the death of Gary Webb, prosecution of whistleblowers.....like Private Manning...

RipTheJackR , 9 hours ago

Our Hidden History... beautiful. Very well put mate :)

Gabriel Olsen , 3 hours ago

Yep, when he talked about murdering journalists, I paused the video and told my girlfriend about the murder of Michael Hastings. Oh an PS the USA puts journalists in Guantanamo. We play real baseball.

Luca Clemente , 4 days ago (edited)

Aaron Mate is a brilliant interviewer. He keeps a calm demeanor, but does not let his guest get away with any untruths or non sequiturs. This one of the many reasons I love The Real News. I encourage anyone who appreciates solid journalism to donate to The Real News.

TheJagjr4450 , 3 days ago

GREAT follow up questions Aaron... Harding did not expect to get a real reporter... he obfuscates and diverts to other issues because he can not EVER provide any evidence... Going to Moscow will not tell you anything about whether or not the DNC server was hacked.

dzedo53 , 4 days ago

Putin is a bad guy. Therefore he colluded with Trump back in 1987 to help Trump win the election in 2016. Why is that so hard to see?? LOL.

Noah , 14 hours ago

Luke Harding is a complete and total idiot. He kept qualifying his arguments with "I've been to Moscow... I don't know if you know this, but I've been to Moscow..." and even at one point, "Some of my friends have been murdered." LOL, sure, whatever you say, Luke! Like you're so big time and such an all star journalist who isn't just trying to capitalize on the wild goose chase that is psychologically trapping leftists into delusions and wishful thinking.

jodi houts , 4 days ago

Thank you Aaron Matč for calling out the bullshit. The dem party is dead until they take care of their own espionage and corruption.

KAREN Nichols , 4 days ago

Thank you for "holding his feet to the fire"...I wish more media was more skeptical as well. Good work!

david ackerman , 4 days ago

NSA monitors every communication over the internet. if the Russians hacked the DNC, there would be proof, and it would not take years to uncover. Look at the numbers: Clinton spent 2 billion, Russian "agents" spent 200k to "influence" the election. Great job Aaron for holding this opportunist's feet to the fire. Oh he's a story teller all right. You know a synonym of storyteller? LIAR!!!!

shadex08 , 4 days ago

Great job Aaron, your work here makes me feel even better about my contribution to the real news.

95percent air , 4 days ago

Wow Aaron Matte NICE JOB. I'm only half through, I hope you don't make him cry. Do u make him cry? Did I hear this guy say he's ultimately a storyteller? Lol.

Mal c.H , 4 days ago

It may seem like Trump has an alarming amount of associations with Russia, because he does.. that's how rich oligarchs work. But it's all just SPECULATION still. Why publish a book on this without a smoking gun to prove anything? Collusion isn't even a legal term, it's vague enough for people to make it mean whatever they want it to mean. People investigating and reporting on this are operating under confirmation bias. Aaron, you're always appropriately critical and you're always asking the right questions. You seem to be one of the few sane people left in media. Trump is a disgrace but there still is no smoking gun.

jodi houts , 4 days ago

As he gets deeper in the weeds of speculation he starts attacking Aaron's credibility.

Fixel Heimer , 4 days ago

Omg a bunch of unproven conspiracy crap.. Hes making so many factual wrong statements I don't know where to start here.. How would anyone in the years before his candidacy have thought Trump would gain any political relevance. I mean even the pro Hillary media thought until the end, their massive trump coverage would only help to get him NOT elected, but the opposite was the case. This guy is a complete joke as are his theses. Actually reminding me of the guardian's so called report about Russian Hacking in the Brexit referendum. Look here if you want to have a laugh http://www.moonofalabama.org/2017/12/how-097-changed-the-fate-of-britain-not.html

Hugh Mungus , 4 days ago

His logic seems to be: Putin does things we don't like -> Trump getting elected is something we don't like -> Putin got Trump elected.

Katie B , 4 days ago

Collusion Rejectionist! Ha Ha. Funniest interview ever. Well done Aaron. The Real News taking a stand for truth. So what's in the book if there's no evidence? Guardian journalism? Stop questioning the official narrative, oh and have you heard of Estonia. :)) ps that smiley face was not an admission of my working for the Kremlin.

Antman4656 , 4 days ago

Best interview ever. Aaron held him to his theories and asked what evidence or proof he had and he didn't come up with one spec of evidence only hearsay and disputed theories. What a sad indictment this is on America. 1 year on a sensationalized story and still nothing concrete. What a joke and proof of gullibility to anyone who believes this corporate media Narritive. I guess at least they don't have to cover policies like the tax theft or net neutrality. This is why we need The Real news.

maskedavenger777 , 4 days ago (edited)

I'd rather have American business making business deals with Russia for things like hotels, rather than business deals with the Pentagon to aim more weapons at the Russians. When haven't we been doing business with Russians? We might as well investigate Cargill, Pepsi, McDonald's, John Deere, Ford, and most of our wheat farmers.

[Nov 21, 2019] The deep state is individuals INSIDE the government that do the bidding of the banksters, the military-industrial complex, the globalists and other nefarious interests

Highly recommended!
Nov 21, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

Don Wills , Nov 14 2019 15:33 utc | 105

snake @95 argues "the deep state does not exist" with circular logic that is massively off target.

The deep state is individuals INSIDE the government that do the bidding of the banksters, the military-industrial complex, the globalists and other nefarious interests. None of those interests have the ability to make policy and implement regime changes without the deep state. Yes, outside interests drive the actions of the deep state, but no, those outside interests have no ability to accomplish anything without their deep state operatives.

If the US federal government bureaucracy was a) much less powerful, b) much more transparent, and c) more responsive to elected leaders, then none of the bad things would happen. A pipe dream? Yes - but it is erroneous to make a simple declaration "the deep state doesn't exist" without any rational arguments to refute my points in @72.

juliania , Nov 14 2019 16:06 utc | 106

Don Wills @ 72:

Thank you for your post. You say that there is a deep state, but you then go on to tell us it is not as deep as we imagine. So, I posit we should call it "the shallow state". It is the foam on the edge of the sea as it begins to recede from a high tide of corrupt practices, delicate and lacy at the edges and so mesmerizing and attractive to some. But it is receding. And out there as it departs the Deep People are waiting. They are the depths of an ocean that never disappears. At low tide they are still there, and they will feed the incoming tide. At the turn.

And I also say, you may not care what the future brings, but I do. I have a little granson, born on my birthday, gazing at me with twinkling eyes from his photograph across the room. Family is also something we can call Deep and be truthful about that. It runs in both directions, past and future. The Deep People have Deep Families.

And yes, I know, other grandsons have met untimely deaths this century and are counted as 'collateral damage' by the shallow state. Still they are with us as the past is always with us; they deepen our persons in unaccountable but irreversible ways. They strengthen our family commitments. They are always here, in our memories and in our strengths. They are not collateral; they are the fabric of our determinations, our life blood.

The Deep People do care what happens. The twinkle in their grandsons' eyes burns in their hearts. It is a fire, a consuming force. It never dies.

Don Wills , Nov 14 2019 17:06 utc | 108
"deep state", "deep people", "the swamp" .. a rose by any other name would smell just as rancid.

"deep people" implies a small, isolated group. IMO, it's more like an iceberg than seashore foam. 90% of it is hidden from view.

My point was that snake's blame of the oligarchs misses the target. I look at them the way I look at any other predator - if the opportunity exists, they will take it. The deep state is THE necessary ingredient for the evil that the US government does.

I too have grandchildren. I am convinced that their lives will be less free, less prosperous, with less opportunity than what the seven generations of Wills family before me have experienced in the US for the last 275 years. So what can I do about it? Typing on my keyboard certainly won't make one whit of difference...

[Nov 03, 2019] How Controlling Syria s Oil Serves Washington s Strategic Objectives by Nauman Sadiq

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Washington's basic purpose in deploying the US forces in oil and natural gas fields of Deir al-Zor governorate is to deny the valuable source of income to its other main rival in the region, Damascus. ..."
Nov 02, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Nauman Sadiq,

Before the evacuation of 1,000 American troops from northern Syria to western Iraq, the Pentagon had 2,000 US forces in Syria. After the drawdown of US troops at Erdogan's insistence in order for Ankara to mount a ground offensive in northern Syria, the US has still deployed 1,000 troops, mainly in oil-rich eastern Deir al-Zor province and at al-Tanf military base.

Al-Tanf military base is strategically located in southeastern Syria on the border between Syria, Iraq and Jordan, and it straddles on a critically important Damascus-Baghdad highway, which serves as a lifeline for Damascus. Washington has illegally occupied 55-kilometer area around al-Tanf since 2016, and several hundred US Marines have trained several Syrian militant groups there.

It's worth noting that rather than fighting the Islamic State, the purpose of continued presence of the US forces at al-Tanf military base is to address Israel's concerns regarding the expansion of Iran's influence in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon.

Regarding the oil- and natural gas-rich Deir al-Zor governorate, it's worth pointing out that Syria used to produce modest quantities of oil for domestic needs before the war – roughly 400,000 barrels per day, which isn't much compared to tens of millions barrels daily oil production in the Gulf states.

Although Donald Trump crowed in a characteristic blunt manner in a tweet after the withdrawal of 1,000 American troops from northern Syria that Washington had deployed forces in eastern Syria where there was oil, the purpose of exercising control over Syria's oil is neither to smuggle oil out of Syria nor to deny the valuable source of revenue to the Islamic State.

There is no denying the fact that the remnants of the Islamic State militants are still found in Syria and Iraq but its emirate has been completely dismantled in the region and its leadership is on the run. So much so that the fugitive caliph of the terrorist organization was killed in the bastion of a rival jihadist outfit, al-Nusra Front in Idlib, hundreds of kilometers away from the Islamic State strongholds in eastern Syria.

Much like the "scorched earth" battle strategy of medieval warlords – as in the case of the Islamic State which early in the year burned crops of local farmers while retreating from its former strongholds in eastern Syria – Washington's basic purpose in deploying the US forces in oil and natural gas fields of Deir al-Zor governorate is to deny the valuable source of income to its other main rival in the region, Damascus.

After the devastation caused by eight years of proxy war, the Syrian government is in dire need of tens of billions dollars international assistance to rebuild the country. Not only is Washington hampering efforts to provide international aid to the hapless country, it is in fact squatting over Syria's own resources with the help of its only ally in the region, the Kurds.

Although Donald Trump claimed credit for expropriating Syria's oil wealth, it bears mentioning that "scorched earth" policy is not a business strategy, it is the institutional logic of the deep state. President Trump is known to be a businessman and at least ostensibly follows a non-interventionist ideology; being a novice in the craft of international diplomacy, however, he has time and again been misled by the Pentagon and Washington's national security establishment.

Regarding Washington's interest in propping up the Gulf's autocrats and fighting their wars in regional conflicts, it bears mentioning that in April 2016, the Saudi foreign minister threatened that the Saudi kingdom would sell up to $750 billion in treasury securities and other assets if the US Congress passed a bill that would allow Americans to sue the Saudi government in the United States courts for its role in the September 11, 2001 terror attack – though the bill was eventually passed, Saudi authorities have not been held accountable; even though 15 out of 19 9/11 hijackers were Saudi nationals.

Moreover, $750 billion is only the Saudi investment in the United States, if we add its investment in Western Europe and the investments of UAE, Kuwait and Qatar in the Western economies, the sum total would amount to trillions of dollars of Gulf's investments in North America and Western Europe.

Furthermore, in order to bring home the significance of the Persian Gulf's oil in the energy-starved industrialized world, here are a few stats from the OPEC data: Saudi Arabia has the world's largest proven crude oil reserves of 265 billion barrels and its daily oil production exceeds 10 million barrels; Iran and Iraq, each, has 150 billion barrels reserves and has the capacity to produce 5 million barrels per day, each; while UAE and Kuwait, each, has 100 billion barrels reserves and produces 3 million barrels per day, each; thus, all the littoral states of the Persian Gulf, together, hold 788 billion barrels, more than half of world's 1477 billion barrels of proven oil reserves.

No wonder then, 36,000 United States troops have currently been deployed in their numerous military bases and aircraft carriers in the oil-rich Persian Gulf in accordance with the Carter Doctrine of 1980, which states: "Let our position be absolutely clear: an attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force."

Additionally, regarding the Western defense production industry's sales of arms to the Gulf Arab States, a report authored by William Hartung of the US-based Center for International Policy found that the Obama administration had offered Saudi Arabia more than $115 billion in weapons, military equipment and training during its eight-year tenure.

Similarly, the top items in Trump's agenda for his maiden visit to Saudi Arabia in May 2017 were: firstly, he threw his weight behind the idea of the Saudi-led "Arab NATO" to counter Iran's influence in the region; and secondly, he announced an unprecedented arms package for Saudi Arabia. The package included between $98 billion and $128 billion in arms sales.

Therefore, keeping the economic dependence of the Western countries on the Gulf Arab States in mind, during the times of global recession when most of manufacturing has been outsourced to China, it is not surprising that when the late King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia decided to provide training and arms to the Islamic jihadists in the border regions of Turkey and Jordan against the government of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, the Obama administration was left with no other choice but to toe the destructive policy of its regional Middle Eastern allies, despite the sectarian nature of the proxy war and its attendant consequences of breeding a new generation of Islamic jihadists who would become a long-term security risk not only to the Middle East but to the Western countries, as well.

Similarly, when King Abdullah's successor King Salman decided, on the whim of the Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, to invade Yemen in March 2015, once again the Obama administration had to yield to the dictates of Saudi Arabia and UAE by fully coordinating the Gulf-led military campaign in Yemen not only by providing intelligence, planning and logistical support but also by selling billions of dollars' worth of arms and ammunition to the Gulf Arab States during the conflict.

In this reciprocal relationship, the US provides security to the ruling families of the Gulf Arab states by providing weapons and troops; and in return, the Gulf's petro-sheikhs contribute substantial investments to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars to the Western economies.

Regarding the Pax Americana which is the reality of the contemporary neocolonial order, according to a January 2017 infographic by the New York Times, 210,000 US military personnel were stationed all over the world, including 79,000 in Europe, 45,000 in Japan, 28,500 in South Korea and 36,000 in the Middle East.

Although Donald Trump keeps complaining that NATO must share the cost of deployment of US troops, particularly in Europe where 47,000 American troops are stationed in Germany since the end of the Second World War, 15,000 in Italy and 8,000 in the United Kingdom, fact of the matter is that the cost is already shared between Washington and host countries.

Roughly, European countries pay one-third of the cost for maintaining US military bases in Europe whereas Washington chips in the remaining two-third. In the Far Eastern countries, 75% of the cost for the deployment of American troops is shared by Japan and the remaining 25% by Washington, and in South Korea, 40% cost is shared by the host country and the US contributes the remaining 60%.

Whereas the oil-rich Gulf Cooperation Countries (GCC) – Saudi Arabia, UAE, Kuwait and Qatar – pay two-third of the cost for maintaining 36,000 US troops in the Persian Gulf where more than half of world's proven oil reserves are located and Washington contributes the remaining one-third.

* * *

Nauman Sadiq is an Islamabad-based attorney, columnist and geopolitical analyst focused on the politics of Af-Pak and Middle East regions, neocolonialism and petro-imperialism.

ipsprez , 8 minutes ago link

I am always amazed (and amused) at how much smarter "journalists" are than POTUS. If ONLY Mr. Trump would read more and listen to those who OBVIOUSLY are sooo much smarter!!!! Maybe then he wouldn't be cowed and bullied by Erdogan, Xi, Jung-on, Trudeau (OK so maybe that one was too far fetched) to name a few. Please note the sarcasm. Do I really need to go in to the success after success Mr. Trump's foreign policy has enjoyed? Come on Man.

OLD-Pipe , 19 minutes ago link

What a load of BOLOCKS...The ONLY, I mean The Real and True Reason for American Armored presence is one thing,,,,,,,Ready for IT ? ? ? To Steal as much OIL as Possible, AND convert the Booty into Currency, Diamonds or some other intrinsically valuable commodity, Millions of Dollars at a Time......17 Years of Shadows and Ghost Trucks and Tankers Loading and Off-Loading the Black Gold...this is what its all about......M-O-N-E-Y....... Say It With Me.... Mon-nee, Money Money Mo_on_ne_e_ey, ......

Blue Steel 309 , 5 minutes ago link

This is about Israel, not oil.

ombon , 58 minutes ago link

From the sale of US oil in Syria receive 30 million. dollars per month. Image losses are immeasurably greater. The United States put the United States as a robbery bandit. This is American democracy. The longer the troops are in Syria, the more countries will switch to settlements in national currencies.

Pandelis , 28 minutes ago link

yeah well these are mafia guys...

uhland62 , 50 minutes ago link

"Our interests", "strategic interests" is always about money, just a euphemism so it doesn't look as greedy as it is. Another euphemism is "security' ,meaning war preparations.

BobEore , 1 hour ago link

...The military power of the USA put directly in the service of "the original TM" PIRATE STATE. U are the man Norm! But wait... now things get a little hazy... in the classic... 'alt0media fake storyline' fashion!

"President Trump is known to be a businessman and at least ostensibly follows a non-interventionist ideology; being a novice in the craft of international diplomacy, however, he has time and again been misled by the Pentagon and Washington's national security establishment."

Awww! Poor "DUmb as Rocks Donnie" done been fooled agin!

...In the USA... the military men are stirring at last... having been made all too aware that their putative 'boss' has been operating on behalf of foreign powers ever since being [s]elected, that the State Dept of the once Great Republic has been in active cahoots with the jihadis ...

and that those who were sent over there to fight against the headchoppers discovered that the only straight shooters in the whole mess turned out to be the Kurds who AGENT FRIMpf THREW UNDER THE BUS ON INSTRUCTIONS FROM JIHADI HQ!

... ... ...

[Oct 28, 2019] Expert Panel Finds Gaping Plot-Holes In OPCW Report On Alleged Syrian Chemical Attack by Caitlin Johnstone

Highly recommended!
This implicates State Department in the attempt to run a false flag operation. If we add that the State Department is the key organization behind for color revolution against Trump that picture becomes even more disturbing. This is really a neocon vipers nest.
Notable quotes:
"... This was because the public had already been shown that highly suspicious chemical attacks tended to happen when the Trump administration begins pushing for a reversal of standing US Syria policy, as I noted in April 2017 immediately following the alleged attack in Khan Shaykhun. ..."
"... "I was able to predict Douma in 2018 because it happened already almost exactly 1 year prior, at Khan Shaykhun, April 4, 2017," Cox told me on Twitter earlier today. ..."
"... And, like clockwork, on April 7 2018 dozens of civilians in Douma were killed in an incident which was quickly reported as a Syrian government chemical attack by all the usual establishment narrative managers on Syria , with everyone from the White Helmets to Charles Lister to Eliot Higgins to Julian Röpcke loudly flagging it on social media to draw the attention of mainstream news outlets who were slower to pick up the story. ..."
"... Long before any investigation into this suspicious incident could even be begun, much less completed, the US State Department declared it to have been a chemical weapons attack perpetrated by the Syrian government, saying "the Assad regime must be held accountable", and that Russia "ultimately bears responsibility" for the attack. Which was of course mighty convenient for US geostrategic interests. ..."
"... On the 14th of April 2018, the US, UK and France launched an airstrike on the Syrian government as punishment for using chemical weapons, citing secret "intelligence" which the US government claimed gave them "very high confidence that Syria was responsible." The public has to this day never been permitted to see this intelligence. This all happened before any formal international investigation could take place. ..."
"... The OPCW conducted their investigation, and in July 2018 published an interim report saying that "no organophosphorus nerve agents or their degradation products were detected, either in the environmental samples or in plasma samples from the alleged casualties." This ruled out sarin gas, invalidating earlier reports by Syria war pundits like Charles Lister who claimed that sarin had been used, but it didn't rule out chlorine gas. In March of this year the OPCW issued its final report saying forensics were consistent with chlorine gas use and advancing a ballistics report which strongly implicated the Assad government by implying it was an aerial drop (Syrian opposition militias have no air force). The official Twitter account for the UK Delegation to the OPCW tweeted at the time that the report "confirms chemical weapons used, demonstrating the vital importance of OPCW's work. This confirmed chlorine attack was only the latest example of Asad regime's CW attacks on its own population." ..."
"... In May of this year, a leaked internal document from the OPCW investigation was published by the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media which completely contradicts the findings of the official report published in March. The leaked Engineering Assessment said that "observations at the scene of the two locations, together with subsequent analysis, suggest there is a higher probability both cylinders were manually placed at those two locations rather than being delivered from aircraft," which would implicate the forces on the ground in the incident rather than the Assad government. ..."
"... The OPCW indirectly confirmed the document's authenticity by telling the press that its release had been "unauthorised". Climate Audit's Stephen McIntyre published an excellent thread breaking down how the document invalidates the OPCW's claims which you can read by clicking here . Establishment narrative managers had a very difficult time spinning the fact that the OPCW had taken it upon itself to hide findings from the public which dissented from its official report on an incident which preceded an international act of war upon a sovereign nation, and all the implications that necessarily has for the legitimacy of the organization's other work. ..."
"... "Based on the whistleblower's extensive presentation, including internal emails, text exchanges and suppressed draft reports, we are unanimous in expressing our alarm over unacceptable practices in the investigation of the alleged chemical attack in Douma, near the Syrian capital of Damascus on 7 April 2018. We became convinced by the testimony that key information about chemical analyses, toxicology consultations, ballistics studies, and witness testimonies was suppressed, ostensibly to favor a preordained conclusion ." ..."
"... "The convincing evidence of irregular behaviour in the OPCW investigation of the alleged Douma chemical attack confirms doubts and suspicions I already had. I could make no sense of what I was reading in the international press. Even official reports of investigations seemed incoherent at best. The picture is certainly clearer now, although very disturbing. " ..."
"... "The interpretation of the environmental analysis results is equally questionable. Many, if not all, of the so-called 'smoking gun' chlorinated organic chemicals claimed to be not naturally present in the environment' (para 2.6) are in fact ubiquitous in the background, either naturally or anthropogenically (wood preservatives, chlorinated water supplies etc). The report, in fact, acknowledges this in Annex 4 para 7, even stating the importance of gathering control samples to measure the background for such chlorinated organic derivatives. Yet, no analysis results for these same control samples (Annex 5), which inspectors on the ground would have gone to great lengths to gather, were reported." ..."
"... "One alternative ascribing the origin of the crater to an explosive device was considered briefly but, despite an almost identical crater (understood to have resulted from a mortar penetrating the roof) being observed on an adjacent rooftop, was dismissed because of ' the absence of primary and secondary fragmentation characteristics'. In contrast, explosive fragmentation characteristics were noted in the leaked study ." ..."
"... "Contrary to what has been publicly stated by the Director General of the OPCW it was evident to the panel that many of the inspectors in the Douma investigation were not involved or consulted in the post-deployment phase or had any contribution to, or knowledge of the content of the final report until it was made public . The panel is particularly troubled by organisational efforts to obfuscate and prevent inspectors from raising legitimate concerns about possible malpractices surrounding the Douma investigation." ..."
Oct 28, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via Medium.com,

The Courage Foundation , an international protection and advocacy group for whistleblowers, has published the findings of a panel it convened last week on the extremely suspicious behavior of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in its investigation of an alleged chemical attack in Douma, Syria last year. After hearing an extensive presentation from a member of the OPCW's Douma investigation team, the panel's members (including a world-renowned former OPCW Director General) report that they are "unanimous in expressing our alarm over unacceptable practices in the investigation of the alleged chemical attack in Douma, near the Syrian capital of Damascus on 7 April 2018."

I'll get to the panel and its findings in a moment, but first I should provide some historical background so that readers who aren't intimately familiar with this ongoing scandal can fully appreciate the significance of this new development.

In late March of last year, President Trump publicly stated that the US military would soon be withdrawing troops from Syria, causing some with an ear to the ground like independent US congressional candidate Steve Cox to predict that there would shortly be a false flag chemical weapons attack in that nation. This was because the public had already been shown that highly suspicious chemical attacks tended to happen when the Trump administration begins pushing for a reversal of standing US Syria policy, as I noted in April 2017 immediately following the alleged attack in Khan Shaykhun.

"I was able to predict Douma in 2018 because it happened already almost exactly 1 year prior, at Khan Shaykhun, April 4, 2017," Cox told me on Twitter earlier today.

"Khan Shaykhun also occurred within days of the Trump Admin saying we're leaving Syria."

And, like clockwork, on April 7 2018 dozens of civilians in Douma were killed in an incident which was quickly reported as a Syrian government chemical attack by all the usual establishment narrative managers on Syria , with everyone from the White Helmets to Charles Lister to Eliot Higgins to Julian Röpcke loudly flagging it on social media to draw the attention of mainstream news outlets who were slower to pick up the story.

There was immediate skepticism, partly because acclaimed journalists like Sy Hersh have been highlighting plot holes in the official story about chemical weapons in Syria since 2013, partly because Assad would stand nothing to gain and everything to lose by using a banned yet highly ineffective weapon in a battle he'd already essentially won in that region, and partly because the people controlling things on the ground in Douma were the Al Qaeda-linked extremist group Jaysh-al Islam and the incredibly shady narrative management operation known as the White Helmets. Those groups, unlike the Assad government, most certainly would stand everything to gain by staging a chemical attack in the desperate hope that it would draw NATO powers into attacking the Syrian government and perhaps saving their necks.

Long before any investigation into this suspicious incident could even be begun, much less completed, the US State Department declared it to have been a chemical weapons attack perpetrated by the Syrian government, saying "the Assad regime must be held accountable", and that Russia "ultimately bears responsibility" for the attack. Which was of course mighty convenient for US geostrategic interests.

On the 14th of April 2018, the US, UK and France launched an airstrike on the Syrian government as punishment for using chemical weapons, citing secret "intelligence" which the US government claimed gave them "very high confidence that Syria was responsible." The public has to this day never been permitted to see this intelligence. This all happened before any formal international investigation could take place.

The OPCW conducted their investigation, and in July 2018 published an interim report saying that "no organophosphorus nerve agents or their degradation products were detected, either in the environmental samples or in plasma samples from the alleged casualties." This ruled out sarin gas, invalidating earlier reports by Syria war pundits like Charles Lister who claimed that sarin had been used, but it didn't rule out chlorine gas. In March of this year the OPCW issued its final report saying forensics were consistent with chlorine gas use and advancing a ballistics report which strongly implicated the Assad government by implying it was an aerial drop (Syrian opposition militias have no air force). The official Twitter account for the UK Delegation to the OPCW tweeted at the time that the report "confirms chemical weapons used, demonstrating the vital importance of OPCW's work. This confirmed chlorine attack was only the latest example of Asad regime's CW attacks on its own population."

In May of this year, a leaked internal document from the OPCW investigation was published by the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media which completely contradicts the findings of the official report published in March. The leaked Engineering Assessment said that "observations at the scene of the two locations, together with subsequent analysis, suggest there is a higher probability both cylinders were manually placed at those two locations rather than being delivered from aircraft," which would implicate the forces on the ground in the incident rather than the Assad government.

The OPCW indirectly confirmed the document's authenticity by telling the press that its release had been "unauthorised". Climate Audit's Stephen McIntyre published an excellent thread breaking down how the document invalidates the OPCW's claims which you can read by clicking here . Establishment narrative managers had a very difficult time spinning the fact that the OPCW had taken it upon itself to hide findings from the public which dissented from its official report on an incident which preceded an international act of war upon a sovereign nation, and all the implications that necessarily has for the legitimacy of the organization's other work.

Throughout this time, critical thinkers like myself have been aggressively smeared as deranged conspiracy theorists, war crimes deniers and genocide deniers for expressing skepticism of the establishment-authorized narrative on Douma. Which takes us to today.

The Courage Foundation panel who met with the OPCW whistleblower consists of former OPCW Director General José Bustani (whose highly successful peacemongering once saw the lives of his children threatened by John Bolton during the lead-up to the Iraq invasion in an attempt to remove him from his position), WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Kristinn Hrafnsson , Professor of International Law Richard Falk , former British Army Major General John Holmes , Dr Helmut Lohrer of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, German professor Dr Guenter Meyer of the Centre for Research on the Arab World, and former Deputy National Intelligence Officer for the Near East Elizabeth Murray of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.

So these are not scrubs. These are not "conspiracy theorists" or "Russian propagandists". These are highly qualified and reputable professionals expressing deep concerns in the opaque and manipulative way the OPCW appears to have conducted its investigation into the Douma incident. Some highlights from their joint statement and analytical points are quoted below, with my own emphasis added in bold:

"Based on the whistleblower's extensive presentation, including internal emails, text exchanges and suppressed draft reports, we are unanimous in expressing our alarm over unacceptable practices in the investigation of the alleged chemical attack in Douma, near the Syrian capital of Damascus on 7 April 2018. We became convinced by the testimony that key information about chemical analyses, toxicology consultations, ballistics studies, and witness testimonies was suppressed, ostensibly to favor a preordained conclusion ."

"The convincing evidence of irregular behaviour in the OPCW investigation of the alleged Douma chemical attack confirms doubts and suspicions I already had. I could make no sense of what I was reading in the international press. Even official reports of investigations seemed incoherent at best. The picture is certainly clearer now, although very disturbing. "
~ Bustani

"A critical analysis of the final report of the Douma investigation left the panel in little doubt that conclusions drawn from each of the key evidentiary pillars of the investigation (chemical analysis, toxicology, ballistics and witness testimonies,) are flawed and bear little relation to the facts. "

From the section on Chemical Analysis:

"The interpretation of the environmental analysis results is equally questionable. Many, if not all, of the so-called 'smoking gun' chlorinated organic chemicals claimed to be not naturally present in the environment' (para 2.6) are in fact ubiquitous in the background, either naturally or anthropogenically (wood preservatives, chlorinated water supplies etc). The report, in fact, acknowledges this in Annex 4 para 7, even stating the importance of gathering control samples to measure the background for such chlorinated organic derivatives. Yet, no analysis results for these same control samples (Annex 5), which inspectors on the ground would have gone to great lengths to gather, were reported."

"Although the report stresses the 'levels' of the chlorinated organic chemicals as a basis for its conclusions (para 2.6), it never mentions what those levels were -- high, low, trace, sub-trace? Without providing data on the levels of these so-called 'smoking-gun' chemicals either for background or test samples, it is impossible to know if they were not simply due to background presence . In this regard, the panel is disturbed to learn that quantitative results for the levels of 'smoking gun' chemicals in specific samples were available to the investigators but this decisive information was withheld from the report ."

"The final report also acknowledges that the tell-tale chemicals supposedly indicating chlorine use, can also be generated by contact of samples with sodium hypochlorite, the principal ingredient of household bleaching agent (para 8.15). This game-changing hypothesis is, however, dismissed (and as it transpires, incorrectly) by stating no bleaching was observed at the site of investigation. (' At both locations, there were no visible signs of a bleach agent or discoloration due to contact with a bleach agent' ). The panel has been informed that no such observation was recorded during the on-site inspection and in any case dismissing the hypothesis simply by claiming the non -observation of discoloration in an already dusty and scorched environment seems tenuous and unscientific ."

From the section on Toxicology:

"The toxicological studies also reveal inconsistencies, incoherence and possible scientific irregularities. Consultations with toxicologists are reported to have taken place in September and October 2018 (para 8.87 and Annex 3), but no mention is made of what those same experts opined or concluded. Whilst the final toxicological assessment of the authors states ' it is not possible to precisely link the cause of the signs and symptoms to a specific chemical ' (para 9.6) the report nonetheless concludes there were reasonable grounds to believe chlorine gas was the chemical (used as a weapon)."

"More worrying is the fact that the panel viewed documented evidence that showed other toxicologists had been consulted in June 2018 prior to the release of the interim report. Expert opinions on that occasion were that the signs and symptoms observed in videos and from witness accounts were not consistent with exposure to molecular chlorine or any reactive-chlorine-containing chemical. Why no mention of this critical assessment, which contradicts that implied in the final report, was made is unclear and of concern. "

From the section on Ballistic Studies:

"One alternative ascribing the origin of the crater to an explosive device was considered briefly but, despite an almost identical crater (understood to have resulted from a mortar penetrating the roof) being observed on an adjacent rooftop, was dismissed because of ' the absence of primary and secondary fragmentation characteristics'. In contrast, explosive fragmentation characteristics were noted in the leaked study ."

From the section titled "Exclusion of inspectors and attempts to obfuscate":

"Contrary to what has been publicly stated by the Director General of the OPCW it was evident to the panel that many of the inspectors in the Douma investigation were not involved or consulted in the post-deployment phase or had any contribution to, or knowledge of the content of the final report until it was made public . The panel is particularly troubled by organisational efforts to obfuscate and prevent inspectors from raising legitimate concerns about possible malpractices surrounding the Douma investigation."

I'll leave it there for now.

* * *

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[Oct 26, 2019] The Plundering of Ukraine by Corrupt American Democrats by Israel Shamir

Highly recommended!
Money quote: “Top Dems are involved in the plundering of the Ukraine: new names, mind-boggling accounts."
Notable quotes:
"... Indeed, John Kerry, the Secretary of State in Obama's administration, was his partner-in-crime. But Joe Biden was number one. During the Obama presidency, Biden was the US proconsul for Ukraine, and he was involved in many corruption schemes. He authorised transfer of three billion dollars of the US taxpayers' money to the post-coup government of the Ukraine; the money was stolen, and Biden took a big share of the spoils. ..."
"... Two years ago, (that is already under President Trump) the United States began to investigate the allocation of 3 billion dollars; it was allocated in 2014, in 2015, in 2016; one billion dollars per year. The investigation showed that the documents were falsified, the money was transferred to Ukraine, and stolen. The investigators tracked each payment, discovered where the money went, where it was spent and how it was stolen. ..."
"... The money was allocated with the flagrant violation of American law. There was no risk assessment, no audit reports. Normally the USAID, when allocating cash, always prepares a substantial package of documents. But the billions were given to Ukraine completely without documents. The criminal case on the embezzlement of USAID funds had been signed personally by the US Attorney General, so these issues are very much alive. ..."
"... Poroshenko was aware of that; he gave orders to declare Sam Kislin persona non grata. Once the old man (he is over 80) flew into Kiev airport and he was not allowed to come in; he spent the night in detention and was flown back to the US next day. Poroshenko had been totally allied with Clinton camp. ..."
"... In all these scams, there are people of Clinton and spooks who are fully integrated in the Democratic Party. A former head of CIA, Robert James Woolsey, now sits on the Board of Directors of Velta , producing Ukrainian titanium. Woolsey is a neocon, a member of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), pro-Israel think-tank, and a man who relentlessly pushed for Iraq war. A typical Democrat spook, now he gets profits from Ukrainian ore deposits. ..."
"... The loss was of Ukrainian people, and of US taxpayers, while the beneficiaries were the Deep State, which is probably just another name for the deadly mix of spooks, media and politicians. ..."
"... The globalist criminal elites will not be held responsible for any of these crimes. They're bound together by ties of blackmail forged by guys like Epstein, mutually assured incrimination in serial swindles which cross Left and Right political boundaries and literal murder in the case of guys like Seth Rich. ..."
"... If they were only stealing money it would be bad enough, but the fact that these same grifters are our "diplomats" and warmakers is positively Orwellian. Watching these petty hoodlums play nuclear chicken with Russia so they can squeeze more shekels from the supine Ukraine would be laughable if I could get the first-strike nightmares of my Cold War childhood out of my head long enough to laugh. ..."
Oct 26, 2019 | www.unz.com

A talk with Oleg Tsarev reveals the alleged identity of the "Trump/Ukraine Whistleblower" Israel Shamir October 25, 2019 2,400 Words 6 Comments Reply

Top Dems are involved in the plundering of the Ukraine: new names, mind-boggling accounts. The mysterious 'whistleblower' whose report had unleashed the impeachment is named in the exclusive interview given to the Unz Review by a prominent Ukrainian politician, an ex-Member of Parliament of four terms, a candidate for Ukraine's presidency, Oleg Tsarev.

Mr Tsarev, a tall, agile and graceful man, a good speaker and a prolific writer, had been a leading and popular Ukrainian politician before the 2014 putsch; he stayed in the Ukraine after President Yanukovych's flight; ran for the Presidency against Mr Poroshenko, and eventually had to go to exile due to multiple threats to his life. During the failed attempt to secede, he was elected the speaker of the Parliament of Novorossia (South-Eastern Ukraine). I spoke to him in Crimea, where he lives in the pleasant seaside town of Yalta. Tsarev still has many supporters in the Ukraine, and is a leader of the opposition to the Kiev regime.

Oleg, you followed Biden story from its very inception. Biden is not the only Dem politician involved in the Ukrainian corruption schemes, is he?

Indeed, John Kerry, the Secretary of State in Obama's administration, was his partner-in-crime. But Joe Biden was number one. During the Obama presidency, Biden was the US proconsul for Ukraine, and he was involved in many corruption schemes. He authorised transfer of three billion dollars of the US taxpayers' money to the post-coup government of the Ukraine; the money was stolen, and Biden took a big share of the spoils.

It is a story of ripping the US taxpayer and the Ukrainian customer off for the benefit of a few corruptioners, American and Ukrainian. And it is a story of Kiev regime and its dependence on the US and IMF. The Ukraine has a few midsize deposits of natural gas, sufficient for domestic household consumption. The cost of its production was quite low; and the Ukrainians got used to pay pennies for their gas. Actually, it was so cheap to produce that the Ukraine could provide all its households with free gas for heating and cooking, just like Libya did. Despite low consumer price, the gas companies (like Burisma) had very high profits and very little expenditure.

After the 2014 coup, IMF demanded to raise the price of gas for the domestic consumer to European levels, and the new president Petro Poroshenko obliged them. The prices went sky-high. The Ukrainians were forced to pay many times more for their cooking and heating; and huge profits went to coffers of the gas companies. Instead of raising taxes or lowering prices, President Poroshenko demanded the gas companies to pay him or subsidise his projects. He said that he arranged the price hike; it means he should be considered a partner.

Burisma Gas company had to pay extortion money to the president Poroshenko. Eventually its founder and owner Mr Nicolai Zlochevsky decided to invite some important Westerners into the company's board of directors hoping it would moderate Poroshenko's appetites. He had brought in Biden's son Hunter, John Kerry, Polish ex-President Kwasniewski; but it didn't help him.

Poroshenko became furious that the fattened calf may escape him, and asked the Attorney General Shokin to investigate Burisma trusting some irregularities would emerge. AG Shokin immediately discovered that Burisma had paid these 'stars' between 50 and 150 thousand dollar per month each just for being on the list of directors. This is illegal by the Ukrainian tax code; it can't be recognised as legitimate expenditure.

At that time Biden the father entered the fray. He called Poroshenko and gave him six hours to close the case against his son. Otherwise, one billion dollars of the US taxpayers' funds won't pass to the Ukrainian corruptioners. Zlochevsky, the Burisma owner, paid Biden well for this conversation: he received between three and ten million dollars, according to different sources.

AG Shokin said he can't close the case within six hours; Poroshenko sacked him and installed Mr Lutsenko in his stead. Lutsenko was willing to dismiss the case of Burisma, but he also could not do it in a day, or even in a week. Biden, as we know, could not keep his trap shut: by talking about the pressure he put on Poroshenko, he incriminated himself. Meanwhile Mr Shokin gave evidence that Biden put pressure on Poroshenko to fire him, and now it was confirmed. The evidence was given to the US lawyers in connection with another case, Firtash case.

What is Firtash Case?

The Democrats wanted to get another Ukrainian oligarch, Mr Firtash, to the US and make him to confess that he illegally supported Trump's campaign for the sake of Russia. Firtash had been arrested in Vienna, Austria; there he fought extradition to the US. His lawyers claimed it is purely political case, and they used Mr Shokin's deposition to substantiate their claim. For this reason, the evidence supplied by Shokin is not easily reversible, even if Shokin were willing, and he is not. He also stated under oath that the Democrats pressurised him to help and extradite Firtash to the US, though he had no standing in this purely American issue. It seems that Mrs Clinton believes that Firtash's funds helped Trump to win elections, an extremely unlikely thing [says Mr Tsarev].

Talking about Burisma and Biden; what is this billion dollars of aid that Biden could give or withhold?

It is USAID money, the main channel of the US aid for "support of democracy". First billion dollars of USAID came to the Ukraine in 2014. This was authorised by Joe Biden, while for Ukraine, the papers were signed by Mr Turchinov, the "acting President". The Ukrainian constitution does not know of such a position, and Turchinov, "the acting President" had no right to sign neither a legal nor financial document. Thus, all the documents that were signed by him, in fact, had no legal force. However, Biden countersigned the papers signed by Turchynov and allocated money for Ukraine. And the money was stolen – by the Democrats and their Ukrainian counterparts.

Two years ago, (that is already under President Trump) the United States began to investigate the allocation of 3 billion dollars; it was allocated in 2014, in 2015, in 2016; one billion dollars per year. The investigation showed that the documents were falsified, the money was transferred to Ukraine, and stolen. The investigators tracked each payment, discovered where the money went, where it was spent and how it was stolen.

As a result, in October 2018, the U.S. Department of Justice opened a criminal case for "Abuse of power and embezzlement of American taxpayers' money". Among the accused there are two consecutive Finance Ministers of the Ukraine, Mrs Natalie Ann Jaresko who served 2014-2016 and Mr Alexander Daniluk who served 2016-2018, and three US banks. The investigation caused the USAID to cease issuing grants since August 2019. As Trump said, now the US does not give away money and does not impose democracy.

The money was allocated with the flagrant violation of American law. There was no risk assessment, no audit reports. Normally the USAID, when allocating cash, always prepares a substantial package of documents. But the billions were given to Ukraine completely without documents. The criminal case on the embezzlement of USAID funds had been signed personally by the US Attorney General, so these issues are very much alive.

Sam Kislin was involved in this investigation. He is a good friend and associate of Giuliani, Trump's lawyer and an ex-mayor of New York. Kislin is well known in Kiev, and I have many friends who are Sam's friends [said Tsarev]. I learned of his progress, because some of my friends were detained in the United States, or interrogated in Ukraine. They briefed me about this. It appears that Burisma is just the tip of the scandal, the tip of the iceberg. If Trump will carry on, and use what was already initiated and investigated, the whole headquarters of the Democratic party will come down. They will not be able to hold elections. I have no right to name names, but believe me, leading functionaries of the Democratic party are involved.

Poroshenko was aware of that; he gave orders to declare Sam Kislin persona non grata. Once the old man (he is over 80) flew into Kiev airport and he was not allowed to come in; he spent the night in detention and was flown back to the US next day. Poroshenko had been totally allied with Clinton camp.

And President Zelensky? Is he free from Clintonite Democrats' influence?

If he were, there would not be the scandal of Trump phone call. How the Democrats learned of this call and its alleged content? The official version says there was a CIA man, a whistle-blower, who reported to the Democrats. What the version does not clarify, where this whistle-blower was located during the call. I tell you, he was located in Kiev, and he was present at the conversation, at the Ukrainian President Zelensky's side. This man was (perhaps) a CIA asset, but he also was a close associate of George Soros, and a Ukrainian high-ranking official. His name is Mr Alexander Daniluk . He is also the man the investigation of Sam Kislin and of the DoJ had led to, the Finance Minister of Ukraine at the time, the man who was responsible for the embezzlement of three billion US taxpayer's best dollars. The DoJ issued an order for his arrest. Naturally he is devoted to Biden personally, and to the Dems in general. I would not trust his version of the phone call at all.

Daniluk was supposed to accompany President Zelensky on his visit to Washington; but he was informed that there is an order for his arrest. He remained in Kiev. And soon afterwards, the hell of the alleged leaked phone call broke out. Zelensky administration investigated and concluded that the leak was done by Mr Alexander Daniluk, who is known for his close relations with George Soros and with Mr Biden. Alexander Daniluk had been fired. (However, he did not admit his guilt and said the leak was done by his sworn enemy, the head of president's administration office, Mr Andrey Bogdan , who allegedly framed Daniluk.)

This is not the only case of US-connected corruption in Ukraine. There is Amos J. Hochstein , a protege of former VP Joe Biden, who has served in the Barack Obama administration as the Assistant Secretary of State for Energy Resources. He still hangs on the Ukraine. Together with an American citizen Andrew Favorov , the Deputy Director of Naftogas he organised very expensive "reverse gas import" into Ukraine. In this scheme, the Russian gas is bought by Europeans and afterwards sold to Ukraine with a wonderful margin. In reality, gas comes from Russia directly, but payments go via Hochstein. It is much more costly than to buy directly from Russia; Ukrainian people pay, while the margin is collected by Hochstein and Favorov. Now they plan to import liquefied gas from the United States, at even higher price. Again, the price will be paid by the Ukrainians, while profits will go to Hochstein and Favorov.

In all these scams, there are people of Clinton and spooks who are fully integrated in the Democratic Party. A former head of CIA, Robert James Woolsey, now sits on the Board of Directors of Velta , producing Ukrainian titanium. Woolsey is a neocon, a member of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), pro-Israel think-tank, and a man who relentlessly pushed for Iraq war. A typical Democrat spook, now he gets profits from Ukrainian ore deposits.

One of the best Ukrainian corruption stories is connected with Audrius Butkevicius , the former Minister of Defence (1996 to 2000) and a Member of the Seimas (Parliament) of post-Soviet Lithuania. Mr AB is supposedly working for MI6, and now is a member of the notorious Institute for Statecraft , a UK deep state propaganda outfit involved in disinformation operations, subversion of the democratic process and promoting Russophobia and the idea of a new cold war. In 1991 he commanded snipers that shoot Lithuanian protesters. The kills were ascribed to the Soviet armed forces, and the last Soviet President Mr Gorbachev ordered speedy withdrawal of his troops from Lithuania. Mr AB became the Minister of Defence of his independent nation. In 1997 the Honourable Minister of Defence "had requested 300,000 USD from a senior executive of a troubled oil company for his assistance in obtaining the discontinuance of criminal proceedings concerning the company's vast debts", in the language of the court judgement. He was arrested on receipt of the bribe, had been sentenced to five years of jail, but a man with such qualifications was not left to rot in a prison.

In 2005 he commanded the snipers who killed protesters in Kyrgyzstan, in Georgia he repeated the feat in 2003 during the Rose Revolution. In 2014 he did it again in Kiev, where his snipers killed around a hundred men, protesters and police. He was brought to Kiev by Mr Turchinov, who called himself the "acting President" and who countersigned Joe Biden's billion dollars' grant.

In October 2018 the name of Mr AB came up again. Military warehouses of Chernigov had caught fire; allegedly thousands of shells stored for fighting the separatists had been destroyed by fire. And it was not the first fire of this kind: the previous one, equally huge, torched Ukrainian army warehouses in Vinnitsa in 2017. Altogether, there were 12 huge army arsenal fires for the last few years. Just for 2018, the damage was over $2 billion.

When Chief Military Prosecutor of Ukraine Anatoly Matios investigated the fires, he discovered that 80% of weapons and shells in the warehouses were missing. They weren't destroyed by fire, they weren't there in the first place. Instead of being used to kill the Russian-speaking Ukrainians of Donetsk, the hardware had been shipped from the port of Nikolaev to Syria, to the Islamic rebels and to ISIS. And the man who organised this enormous operation was our Mr AB, the old fighter for democracy on behalf of MI6, acting in cahoots with the Minister of Defence Poltorak and Mr Turchinov, the friend of Mr Biden. (They say Mr Matios was given $10 million for his silence).

The loss was of Ukrainian people, and of US taxpayers, while the beneficiaries were the Deep State, which is probably just another name for the deadly mix of spooks, media and politicians.

Exile , says: October 25, 2019 at 6:42 pm GMT

The globalist criminal elites will not be held responsible for any of these crimes. They're bound together by ties of blackmail forged by guys like Epstein, mutually assured incrimination in serial swindles which cross Left and Right political boundaries and literal murder in the case of guys like Seth Rich. The cozy proximity of recently-murdered Epstein himself to crypto-converso AG Barr's family only makes me more certain that they will get away with this heist like they've done with dozens of other billion-dollar swindles.

If they were only stealing money it would be bad enough, but the fact that these same grifters are our "diplomats" and warmakers is positively Orwellian. Watching these petty hoodlums play nuclear chicken with Russia so they can squeeze more shekels from the supine Ukraine would be laughable if I could get the first-strike nightmares of my Cold War childhood out of my head long enough to laugh.

romar , says: October 25, 2019 at 8:17 pm GMT
Who will hold then responsible? The country appears to have been entirely taken over by crookish spooks and politicians.
The US is now confirmed as a cleptocracy.
Si1ver1ock , says: October 25, 2019 at 9:28 pm GMT
Kind of makes me wish I owned a national newspaper. This would be a great front page story.
Walt , says: October 26, 2019 at 12:22 am GMT
Ukraine is corrupted by outsiders (those who are not Ukrainian/Russian). In past centuries there was a simple but effective answer to foreigners corrupting their country. The Cossacks would sharpen up their sabres. saddle up their horses and have a slaughter. It was effective then and would be effective today. Get rid of those who are not Slavic.
Erebus , says: October 26, 2019 at 3:37 am GMT
The last act of an Imperial elite is to loot the Empire.

[Oct 24, 2019] Joltin' Jack Keane wants your kids to fight Russia and Syria over Syrian oil by Colonel Patrick Lang

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Whilst the are absorbing that part of their country the battle of Iblib will restart. After that they can move their attention south and southeast, al-Tanf and the oilfields. I can't see how the US will be able to stop them but at least they will have time to plan their exit. ..."
"... At the moment the Syrian Government has enough oil, it is getting it from Iran via a steady stream of SUEZMAX tankers. The cost, either in terms of money or quid pro quo, is unknown. ..."
"... For those who have wondered as to why the DC FedRegime would fight over the tiny relative-to-FUKUS's-needs amount of oil in the Syrian oilfields. It is clearly to keep the SAR hobbled, crippled and too impoverished to retake all its territory or even to restore social, civic and economic functionality to the parts it retains. FUKUS is still committed to the policy of FUKUSing Syria. ..."
"... This President appears at times to recognize the reality of nation states and the meaning of national sovereignty. He needs to understand that on principle, not merely on gut instinct. President Trump's press conference today focused in one section on a simple fact -- saving the lives of Americans. Gen. Jack Keane, Sen. Lindsay Graham, and other gamers who think they are running an imperial chessboard where they can use living soldiers as American pawns, are a menace. Thanks Col. Lang for calling out these lunatics. ..."
"... During the 2016 election, Jack Keane and John Bolton were the two people Trump mentioned when asked who he listens to on foreign affairs/military policy. ..."
"... The crumbling apart is apparent. I don't know in what delusional world can conceive that 200 soldiers in the middle of the desert can deny Syria possession of their oil fields or keep the road between Bagdad and Damascus cut. All the West's Decision Makers can do is threaten to blow up the world. ..."
"... Corporate Overlords imposed austerity, outsourced industry and cut taxes to get richer, but the one thing for certain is that they can't keep their wealth without laws, the police and the military to protect them. ..."
"... Latin America is burning too - although the elites here have plundered and imposed structural plunder for too long. No matter where you are it .. Chile poster of the right, or Ecuador, Peru, etc ..."
"... Did you notice the Middle East Monitor article on October 21 reporting that the UAE has released to Iran $700 million in previously frozen funds? ..."
"... Yet in early September, Sigal Mandelker, a senior US Treasury official, was in the UAE pressing CEOs there to tighten the financial screws on Iran. The visit was deemed a success. During this visit she was quoted as saying that the Treasury has issued over 30 rounds of curbs targeting Iran-related entities. That would include targeting shipping companies and banks. ..."
"... It depends on who will be the democratic ticket .. will it mobilize the basis? I think the compromise candidate is Warren, but she looks to me a lot like John Kerry, Al Gore.. representing the professional, college educated segment of society, and that doesn't cut it. ..."
"... Trump is far from consistent. This is the man who attacked Syria twice on the basis of lies so transparent that my youngest housecat would have seen through them, and who tried and failed to leave Syria twice, then said he was "100%" for the continued occupation of Syria. ..."
"... He could have given the order to leave Syria this month, but Trump did not. Instead, he simply ordered withdrawal to a smaller zone of occupation, and that under duress. ..."
"... The Great Trumpian Mystery. I don't pretend to understand but I'm intrigued by his inconsistent inconsistencies. https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2019/03/17/trump-mysteries-inconsistent-inconsistencies/ ..."
"... It probably should come as no surprise to us that Trump is having small, but not no, success in getting the ship to alter course - too many deeply entrenched interests with no incentive to recognize their failures and every incentive to stay the course by removing, or at least handicapping the President who was elected on a platform of change. ..."
"... Whether the country elected the right man for the job remains to be seen. At times he appears to be his own worst enemy and his appointments are frequently topsy-- turvy to the platform he ran on but he does have his moments of success. He called off the dumb plan to go to war with Iran, albeit at 20 minutes to mid night and he is trying hard against the full might of the Borg to withdraw from Syria in accord with our actual interests. Trumps, alas, assumed office with no political friends, only enemies with varying degrees of Trump hate depending on how they define their political interests. ..."
"... Keane manipulated Trump by aggravating his animosity towards Iran, more specifically, his animosity towards Obama's JCPOA. I doubt Trump can see beyond his personal animus towards Obama and his legacy. He doesn't care about Iran, the Shia Crescent, the oil or even the jihadis any more than he cares about ditching the Kurds. This administration doesn't need a national security advisor, it needs a psychiatrist. ..."
"... IMO Trump cares about what Sheldon Adelson wants and Adelson wants to destroy Iran: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6sCW4IasWXc Note the audience applause ..."
"... The difference between the reality that we perceive and the way it is portrayed in the media is so stark that sometimes I am not sure whether it is me who is insane or the world - the MSM and the cool-aid drinking libtards whose animosity against Trump won't let them distinguish black from white. Not that they were ever able to understand the real state of affairs. Discussions with them have always been about them regurgitating the MSM talking points without understanding any of it. ..."
"... "This administration doesn't need a national security advisor, it needs a psychiatrist." I think TTG speaks the truth. ..."
"... On Monday, 21 October, president Trump "authorized $4.5 million in direct support to the Syria Civil Defense (SCD)", a/k/a the White Helmets, who have been discussed here on SST before-- https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/statement-press-secretary-89/ ..."
"... TTG IMO you and the other NEVER Trumpers are confused about the presence in both the permanent and appointed government of people who while they are not loyal to him nevertheless covet access to power. A lot of neocons and Zionists are among them. ..."
"... ANDREW BACEVICH: First of all, I think we should avoid taking anything that he says at any particular moment too seriously. Clearly, he is all over the map on almost any issue that you can name. I found his comment about taking the oil in that part of Syria, as if we are going to decide how to dispose of it, to be striking. And yet of course it sort of harkens back to his campaign statement about the Iraq war, that we ought to have taken Iraq's oil is a way of paying for that war. So I just caution against taking anything he says that seriously. ..."
"... That said, clearly a recurring theme to which he returns over and over and over again, is his determination to end what he calls endless wars. He clearly has no particular strategy or plan for how to do that, but he does seem to be insistent on pursuing that objective. And here I think we begin to get to the real significance of the controversy over Syria in our abandonment of the Kurds ..."
"... the controversy has gotten as big as it is in part because members of the foreign policy establishment in both parties are concerned about what an effort to end endless wars would mean for the larger architecture of U.S. national security policy, which has been based on keeping U.S. troops in hundreds of bases around the world, maintaining the huge military budget, a pattern of interventionism. Trump seems to think that that has been a mistake, particularly in the Middle East. I happen to agree with that critique. And I think that it is a fear that he could somehow engineer a fundamental change in U.S. policy is what really has the foreign policy establishment nervous. ..."
"... we created the problems that exist today through our reckless use of American military power. ..."
"... He let them roll him, just like Obama and so many others. Just a different set of rollers. ..."
Oct 24, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

"Joltin" Jack Keane, General (ret.), Fox Business Senior Strategery Analyst, Chairman of the Board of the Kagan run neocon "Institute for the Study of War" (ISW) and Graduate Extraordinaire of Fordham University, was on with Lou Dobbs last night. Dobbs appears to have developed a deep suspicion of this paladin. He stood up to Keane remarkably well. This was refreshing in light of the fawning deference paid to Keane by all the rest of the Fox crew.

In the course of this dialogue Keane let slip the slightly disguised truth that he and the other warmongers want to keep something like 200 US soldiers and airmen in Syria east of the Euphrates so that they can keep Iran or any other "Iranian proxy forces" from crossing the Euphrates from SAG controlled territory to take control of Syrian sovereign territory and the oil and gas deposits that are rightly the property of the Syrian people and their government owned oil company. The map above shows how many of these resources are east of the Euphrates. Pilgrims! It is not a lot of oil and gas judged by global needs and markets, but to Syria and its prospects for reconstruction it is a hell of a lot!

Keane was clear that what he means by "Iranian proxy forces" is the Syrian Arab Army, the national army of that country. If they dare cross the river, to rest in the shade of their own palm trees, then in his opinion the air forces of FUKUS should attack them and any 3rd party air forces (Russia) who support them

This morning, on said Fox Business News with Charles Payne, Keane was even clearer and stated specifically that if "Syria" tries to cross the river they must be fought.

IMO he and Lindsey Graham are raving lunatics brainwashed for years with the Iran obsession and they are a danger to us all. pl

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/military/graham-fox-news-star-showed-trump-map-change-his-mind-n1069901

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum_industry_in_Syria

Fred , 23 October 2019 at 04:54 PM

If only General Keane was as willing to defend America and America's oil on the Texas-Mexico border. Or hasn't anyone noticed that Mexico just a lost a battle with the Sinaloa drug cartel?
Harlan Easley , 23 October 2019 at 05:35 PM
I view them as selling their Soul for a dollar. Keane comes across as dense enough to believe his bile but Graham comes across as an opportunist without any real ideology except power.
JohninMK , 23 October 2019 at 05:43 PM
Its probably one step at a time for the Syrians, although the sudden move over the past couple of weeks must have been a bit of a God given opportunity for them.

Whilst the are absorbing that part of their country the battle of Iblib will restart. After that they can move their attention south and southeast, al-Tanf and the oilfields. I can't see how the US will be able to stop them but at least they will have time to plan their exit.

As I posted in the other thread, the Syrian Government is the only real customer for their oil and the Kurds already have a profit share agreement in place, so the US, if they allow any oil out, will effectively be protecting the fields on behalf of Assad. Surely not what Congress wants?

At the moment the Syrian Government has enough oil, it is getting it from Iran via a steady stream of SUEZMAX tankers. The cost, either in terms of money or quid pro quo, is unknown.

walrus , 23 October 2019 at 06:42 PM
I think this might be President Putin's next problem to solve. As far as I know, there is no legal reason for us to be there, not humanitarian, not strategic not even tactical. We simply are playing dog-in-the-manger.

My guess is that we will receive an offer to good to refuse from Putin.

different clue , 23 October 2019 at 06:54 PM
For those who have wondered as to why the DC FedRegime would fight over the tiny relative-to-FUKUS's-needs amount of oil in the Syrian oilfields. It is clearly to keep the SAR hobbled, crippled and too impoverished to retake all its territory or even to restore social, civic and economic functionality to the parts it retains. FUKUS is still committed to the policy of FUKUSing Syria.

Why is the Champs Elise' Regime still committed to putting the F in UKUS?
(I can understand why UKUS would want to keep France involved. Without France, certain nasty people might re-brand UKUS as USUK. And that would be very not nice.)

prawnik said in reply to different clue... , 24 October 2019 at 11:25 AM
Because France wants to be on the good side of the United States, and as you indicate, the United States is in Syria to turn that country into a failed state and for no other reason.
Decameron , 23 October 2019 at 07:03 PM
A good antidote for Joltin' Jack Keane's madness would be for Lou Dobbs and other mainstream media (MSM) to have Col Pat Lang as the commentator for analysis of the Syrian situation. Readers of this blog are undoubtedly aware that Col. Lang's knowledge of the peoples of the region and their customs is a national treasure.

This President appears at times to recognize the reality of nation states and the meaning of national sovereignty. He needs to understand that on principle, not merely on gut instinct. President Trump's press conference today focused in one section on a simple fact -- saving the lives of Americans. Gen. Jack Keane,
Sen. Lindsay Graham, and other gamers who think they are running an imperial chessboard where they can use living soldiers as American pawns, are a menace. Thanks Col. Lang for calling out these lunatics.

Stephanie , 23 October 2019 at 07:06 PM
In WWI millions of soldiers died fighting for imperial designs. They did not know it. They thought they were fighting for democracy, or to stop the spread of evil, or save their country. They were not. Secret treaties signed before the war started stated explicitly what the war was about.

Now "representatives" of the military, up to and including the Commander in Chief say it's about conquest, oil. The cards of the elite are on the table. How do you account for this?

Babak Makkinejad -> Stephanie... , 23 October 2019 at 08:48 PM
Men are quite evidently are in a state of total complete and irretrievable Fall, all the while living that particular Age of Belief.
Jackrabbit , 23 October 2019 at 07:39 PM
During the 2016 election, Jack Keane and John Bolton were the two people Trump mentioned when asked who he listens to on foreign affairs/military policy.
VietnamVet , 23 October 2019 at 07:47 PM
Colonel,

The crumbling apart is apparent. I don't know in what delusional world can conceive that 200 soldiers in the middle of the desert can deny Syria possession of their oil fields or keep the road between Bagdad and Damascus cut. All the West's Decision Makers can do is threaten to blow up the world.

Justin Trudeau was elected Monday in Canada with a minority in Parliament joining the United Kingdom and Israel with governments without a majority's mandate. Donald Trump's impeachment escalates. MbS is nearing a meat hook in Saudi Arabia. This is not a coincidence. The Elites' flushing government down the drain succeeded.

Corporate Overlords imposed austerity, outsourced industry and cut taxes to get richer, but the one thing for certain is that they can't keep their wealth without laws, the police and the military to protect them. Already California electricity is being cut off for a second time due to wildfires and PG&E's corporate looting. The Sinaloa shootout reminds me of the firefight in the first season of "True Detectives" when the outgunned LA cops tried to go after the Cartel. The writing is on the wall, California is next. Who will the lawmen serve and protect? Their people or the rich? Without the law, justice and order, there is chaos.

Mk-ec said in reply to VietnamVet... , 24 October 2019 at 07:40 PM
Latin America is burning too - although the elites here have plundered and imposed structural plunder for too long. No matter where you are it .. Chile poster of the right, or Ecuador, Peru, etc
Harper , 23 October 2019 at 07:49 PM
No doubt that Keane and his ilk want endless war and view Trump as a growing obstacle. Trump is consistent: He wanted out of JCPOA, and after being stalled by his national security advisors, he finally reached the boiling point and left. The advisors who counseled against this are all gone. With Pompeo, Enders and O'Brien as the new key security advisors, I doubt Trump got as much push back. He wanted out of Syria in December 2018 and was slow-walked. Didn't anyone think he'd come back at some point and revive the order to pull out? The talk with Erdogan, the continuing Trump view that Russia, Turkey, Syria, Iran and Saudi Arabia should bear the burden of sorting out what is left of the Syria war, so long as ISIS does not see a revival, all have been clear for a long time.

My concern is with Lindsey Graham, who is smarter and nastier than Jack Keane. He is also Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee and may hold some blackmail leverage over the President. If the House votes up impeachment articles, Graham will be overseeing the Senate trial. A break from Trump by Graham could lead to a GOP Senate stampede for conviction. No one will say this openly, as I am, but it cannot be ignored as a factor for "controlling" Trump and keeping as much of the permanent war machine running as possible.

Thoughts?

Babak Makkinejad -> Harper... , 23 October 2019 at 08:52 PM
Trump has committed the United States to a long war against the Shia Crescent. He has ceded to Turkey on Syrian Kurds, but has continued with his operations against SAR. US needs Turkey, Erdogan knows that. Likewise in regards to Russia, EU, and Iran. Turkey, as is said in Persian, has grown a tail.
Tidewater said in reply to Babak Makkinejad... , 24 October 2019 at 01:14 PM
Did you notice the Middle East Monitor article on October 21 reporting that the UAE has released to Iran $700 million in previously frozen funds?

Yet in early September, Sigal Mandelker, a senior US Treasury official, was in the UAE pressing CEOs there to tighten the financial screws on Iran. The visit was deemed a success. During this visit she was quoted as saying that the Treasury has issued over 30 rounds of curbs targeting Iran-related entities. That would include targeting shipping companies and banks.

It was also reported in September that in Dubai that recent US Treasury sanctions were beginning to have a devastating effect. Iranian businessmen were being squeezed out. Even leaving the Emirates. Yet only a few days ago--a month later-- there are now reports that Iranian exchange bureaus have suddenly reopened in Dubai after a long period of closure.

Also, billions of dollars in contracts were signed between Russia, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE during Putin's recent visit to the region. It seems to me that this is real news. Something big seems to be happening. It looks to me as if there could be a serious confrontation between the Trump administration and MBZ in the offing.

Do you have an opinion on the Iranian situation in Dubai at the moment?

Lars said in reply to Harper... , 23 October 2019 at 09:10 PM
I have my doubt that Sen. Graham will lead any revolt, but if it starts to look like Trump will lose big next year, there will be a stampede looking like the Nile getting through a cataract.

They will not want to go down the tube with Trump. I still maintain that there is a good reason for him to resign before he loses an election or an impeachment. It will come down to the price.

Jack said in reply to Lars... , 24 October 2019 at 09:30 AM
Lars,

Lose big to whom in the next election? Biden got 300 people to show up for his rally in his hometown of Scranton and he is supposedly the front runner. Bernie got 20,000 to show up at his rally in NY when he was endorsed by The Squad and Michael Moore. Do you think the Dem establishment will allow him to be the nominee?

Trump in contrast routinely can fill up stadiums with 30,000 people. That was the indicator in the last election, not the polls. Recall the NY Times forecasting Hillary with a 95% probability of winning the day before the election.

As Rep. Al Green noted , the only way the Democrats can stop him is for the Senate to convict him in an impeachment trial. Who do you believe are the 20 Republican senators that will vote to convict?

Lars said in reply to Jack... , 24 October 2019 at 02:05 PM
Trump barely won the last time and while he currently has wide support in the GOP, it is not nearly as deep as his cultists believe. When half the country, and growing, want him removed, there is trouble ahead. Republicans are largely herd animals and if spooked, will create a stampede.

You can tell that there are problems when his congressional enablers are not defending him on facts and just using gripes about processes that they themselves have used in the past. In addition to circus acts.

I realize that many do not want to admit that they made a mistake by voting for him. I am not so sure they want to repeat that mistake.

Mk-ec said in reply to Lars... , 24 October 2019 at 08:20 PM
It depends on who will be the democratic ticket .. will it mobilize the basis? I think the compromise candidate is Warren, but she looks to me a lot like John Kerry, Al Gore.. representing the professional, college educated segment of society, and that doesn't cut it.
Jack said in reply to Lars... , 24 October 2019 at 09:29 PM
Lars,

It's not a question if he barely won. The fact is he competed with many other Republican candidates including governors and senators and even one with the name Bush. He was 1% in the polls in the summer of 2016 and went on to win the Republican nomination despite the intense opposition of the Republican establishment. He then goes on to win the general election defeating a well funded Hillary with all her credentials and the full backing of the vast majority of the media. That is an amazing achievement for someone running for public office for the first time. Like him or hate him, you have to give credit where it's due. Winning an election for the presidency is no small feat.

There only two ways to defeat him. First, the Senate convicts him in an impeachment trial which will require at least 20 Republican senators. Who are they? Second, a Democrat in the general election. Who? I can see Bernie with a possibility since he has enthusiastic supporters. But will the Democrat establishment allow him to win the nomination?

Diana C said in reply to Harper... , 24 October 2019 at 08:37 AM
We're no longer having to listen to Yosemite Sam Bolton. His BFF Graham is left to fight on his own. I don't think Trump feels the need to pay that much attention to Graham. He didn't worry about him during the primary when Graham always seemed to be on the verge of crying when he was asked questions.
prawnik said in reply to Harper... , 24 October 2019 at 11:28 AM
Trump is far from consistent. This is the man who attacked Syria twice on the basis of lies so transparent that my youngest housecat would have seen through them, and who tried and failed to leave Syria twice, then said he was "100%" for the continued occupation of Syria.

He could have given the order to leave Syria this month, but Trump did not. Instead, he simply ordered withdrawal to a smaller zone of occupation, and that under duress.

Congratulations are hardly in order here.

Patrick Armstrong -> prawnik... , 24 October 2019 at 05:06 PM
The Great Trumpian Mystery. I don't pretend to understand but I'm intrigued by his inconsistent inconsistencies. https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2019/03/17/trump-mysteries-inconsistent-inconsistencies/
Flavius said in reply to Harper... , 24 October 2019 at 01:21 PM
What the Colonel calls the Borg is akin to an aircraft carrier that has been steaming at near flank speed for many years too long, gathering mass and momentum since the end of Cold War I.

With the exception of Gulf War I, none of our interventions have gone well, and even the putative peace at the end of GUlf War I wasn't managed well because it eventuated in Gulf War Ii which has been worst than a disaster because the disaster taught the Borg nothing and became midwife to additional disasters.

It probably should come as no surprise to us that Trump is having small, but not no, success in getting the ship to alter course - too many deeply entrenched interests with no incentive to recognize their failures and every incentive to stay the course by removing, or at least handicapping the President who was elected on a platform of change.

Whether the country elected the right man for the job remains to be seen. At times he appears to be his own worst enemy and his appointments are frequently topsy-- turvy to the platform he ran on but he does have his moments of success. He called off the dumb plan to go to war with Iran, albeit at 20 minutes to mid night and he is trying hard against the full might of the Borg to withdraw from Syria in accord with our actual interests. Trumps, alas, assumed office with no political friends, only enemies with varying degrees of Trump hate depending on how they define their political interests.

With that said, I doubt very much whether the Republicans in the Senate will abandon Trump in an impeachment trial. Trump's argument that the process is a political coup is arguably completely true, or certainly true enough that his political base in the electorate will not tolerate his abandonment by Republican politicians inside the Beltway. I think there is even some chance that Trump, were he to be removed from office by what could be credibly portrayed as a political coup, would consider running in 2020 as an independent. The damage that would cause to the Republican Party would be severe, pervasive, and possibly fatal to the Party as such. I doubt Beltway pols would be willing to take that chance.

The Twisted Genius , 23 October 2019 at 11:33 PM
I don't think Keane or Trump are focused on the oil. Keane just used that as a lens to focus Trump on Iran. That's the true sickness. Keane manipulated Trump by aggravating his animosity towards Iran, more specifically, his animosity towards Obama's JCPOA. I doubt Trump can see beyond his personal animus towards Obama and his legacy. He doesn't care about Iran, the Shia Crescent, the oil or even the jihadis any more than he cares about ditching the Kurds. This administration doesn't need a national security advisor, it needs a psychiatrist.
Fourth and Long -> The Twisted Genius ... , 24 October 2019 at 12:01 PM
In case you missed this piece in Newsweek: https://www.newsweek.com/exclusive-us-has-plan-send-tanks-troops-secure-syria-oil-fields-amid-withdrawal-1467350

No idea here who the un-named pentagon "official" might be, but sounds as thought Gen Keane may not be all alone in his soup.

Artemesia said in reply to The Twisted Genius ... , 24 October 2019 at 04:17 PM
IMO Trump cares about what Sheldon Adelson wants and Adelson wants to destroy Iran: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6sCW4IasWXc Note the audience applause
Decepiton , 24 October 2019 at 04:40 AM
We massacred two hundred ruskies in the battle of khasham. What can they do.
MSB said in reply to Decepiton... , 24 October 2019 at 03:21 PM
And in response, Russia killed and captured hundreds of US Special forces and PMC's alongside SAS in East Ghouta . It is said that the abrupt russian op on East Ghouta was a response to the Battle of Khasham.

http://freewestmedia.com/2018/04/11/skripal-affair-real-reason-is-capture-of-200-sas-soldiers-in-ghouta/
https://sputniknews.com/analysis/201805211064652345-syrian-army-foreign-military-presence/
http://www.newsilkstrategies.com/news--analysis/a-real-h-o-t-war-with-russia-is-underway-right-now

http://www.newsilkstrategies.com/news--analysis/confirmation-that-us-uk-special-ops-are-in-syria-some-captured

ancientarcher , 24 October 2019 at 11:19 AM
Colonel, thanks for spelling it out so clearly.

The difference between the reality that we perceive and the way it is portrayed in the media is so stark that sometimes I am not sure whether it is me who is insane or the world - the MSM and the cool-aid drinking libtards whose animosity against Trump won't let them distinguish black from white. Not that they were ever able to understand the real state of affairs. Discussions with them have always been about them regurgitating the MSM talking points without understanding any of it.

While it will always be mystifying to me why so many people on the street blindly support America fighting and dying in the middle east, the support of the MSM and the paid hacks for eternal war is no surprise. I hope they get to send their children and grandchildren to these wars. More than that, I hope we get out of these wars. Trump might be able to put an end to it, and not just in Syria, if he wins a second term, which he will if he is allowed to contest the next election. There is however a chance that the borg will pull the rug from under him and bar him from the elections. Hope that doesn't come to pass.

Larry Kart , 24 October 2019 at 11:39 AM
"This administration doesn't need a national security advisor, it needs a psychiatrist." I think TTG speaks the truth.
David said in reply to Linda... , 24 October 2019 at 04:39 PM
No, they just have to sit there and be an excuse to fly Coalition CAPs that would effectively prevent SAA from crossing the Euphrates in strength. Feasible until the SAA finishes with Idlib and moves some of its new Russian anti-aircraft toys down to Deir Ezzor.
robt willmann , 24 October 2019 at 12:46 PM
On Monday, 21 October, president Trump "authorized $4.5 million in direct support to the Syria Civil Defense (SCD)", a/k/a the White Helmets, who have been discussed here on SST before-- https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/statement-press-secretary-89/
turcopolier , 24 October 2019 at 01:34 PM
TTG IMO you and the other NEVER Trumpers are confused about the presence in both the permanent and appointed government of people who while they are not loyal to him nevertheless covet access to power. A lot of neocons and Zionists are among them.
The Twisted Genius -> turcopolier ... , 24 October 2019 at 02:54 PM
Colonel Lang, I am well aware of the power seekers who gravitate towards Trump or whoever holds power not out of loyalty, but because they covet access to power. The neocons and Zionists flock to Trump because they can manipulate him to do their bidding. That fact certainly doesn't make me feel any better about Trump as President. The man needs help.
turcopolier -> The Twisted Genius ... , 24 October 2019 at 05:15 PM
TTG

you are an experienced clan case officer. You do not know that most people are more than a little mad? Hillary is more than a little nuts. Obama was so desperately neurotically in need of White approval that he let the WP COIN generals talk him into a COIN war in Afghanistan. I was part of that discussion. All that mattered to him was their approval. FDR could not be trusted with SIGINT product and so Marshall never gave him any, etc., George Bush 41 told me that he deliberately mis-pronounced Saddam's name to hurt his feelings. Georgie Junior let the lunatic neocons invade a country that had not attacked us. Trump is no worse than many of our politicians, or politicians anywhere. Britain? The Brexit disaster speaks for itself, And then there is the British monarchy in which a princeling devastated by the sure DNA proof that he is illegitimate is acting like a fool. The list is endless.

The Twisted Genius -> CK... , 24 October 2019 at 05:21 PM
CK, the people surrounding Trump are largely appointees. Keane doesn't have to be let into the WH. His problem is that those who would appeal to his non-neocon tendencies are not people he wants to have around him. Gabbard, for instance, would be perfect for helping Trump get ourselves out of the ME, is a progressive. Non-interventionists are hard to come by. Those who he does surround himself with are using him for their own ideologies, mostly neocon and Zionist.
oldman22 , 24 October 2019 at 01:49 PM
Bacevich interview:
> Andrew Bacevich, can you respond to President Trump pulling the U.S. troops away from this area of northern Syria, though saying he will keep them to guard oil fields?

> ANDREW BACEVICH: First of all, I think we should avoid taking anything that he says at any particular moment too seriously. Clearly, he is all over the map on almost any issue that you can name. I found his comment about taking the oil in that part of Syria, as if we are going to decide how to dispose of it, to be striking. And yet of course it sort of harkens back to his campaign statement about the Iraq war, that we ought to have taken Iraq's oil is a way of paying for that war. So I just caution against taking anything he says that seriously.

> That said, clearly a recurring theme to which he returns over and over and over again, is his determination to end what he calls endless wars. He clearly has no particular strategy or plan for how to do that, but he does seem to be insistent on pursuing that objective. And here I think we begin to get to the real significance of the controversy over Syria in our abandonment of the Kurds.

> Let's stipulate. U.S. abandonment of the Kurds was wrong, it was callous, it was immoral. It was not the first betrayal by the United States in our history, but the fact that there were others certainly doesn't excuse this one. But apart from those concerned about the humanitarian aspect of this crisis -- and not for a second do I question the sincerity of people who are worried about the Kurds -- it seems to me that the controversy has gotten as big as it is in part because members of the foreign policy establishment in both parties are concerned about what an effort to end endless wars would mean for the larger architecture of U.S. national security policy, which has been based on keeping U.S. troops in hundreds of bases around the world, maintaining the huge military budget, a pattern of interventionism. Trump seems to think that that has been a mistake, particularly in the Middle East. I happen to agree with that critique. And I think that it is a fear that he could somehow engineer a fundamental change in U.S. policy is what really has the foreign policy establishment nervous.

> NERMEEN SHAIKH: As you mentioned, Professor Bacevich, Trump has come under bipartisan criticism for this decision to withdraw troops from northern Syria. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was one of the many Republicans to criticize Trump for his decision. In an opinion piece in The Washington Post McConnell writes, quote, "We saw humanitarian disaster and a terrorist free-for-all after we abandoned Afghanistan in the 1990s, laying the groundwork for 9/11. We saw the Islamic State flourish in Iraq after President Barack Obama's retreat. We will see these things anew in Syria and Afghanistan if we abandon our partners and retreat from these conflicts before they are won." He also writes, quote, "As neo-isolationism rears its head on both the left and the right, we can expect to hear more talk of 'endless wars.' But rhetoric cannot change the fact that wars do not just end; wars are won or lost." So Professor Bacevich, could you respond to that, and how accurate you think an assessment of that is? Both what he says about Afghanistan and what is likely to happen now with U.S. withdrawal.

> ANDREW BACEVICH: I think in any discussion of our wars, ongoing wars, it is important to set them in some broader historical context than Senator McConnell will probably entertain. I mean, to a very great extent -- not entirely, but to a very great extent -- we created the problems that exist today through our reckless use of American military power.

> People like McConnell, and I think other members of the political establishment, even members of the mainstream media -- _The New York Times_, The Washington Post -- have yet to reckon with the catastrophic consequences of the U.S. invasion of Iraq back in 2003. And if you focus your attention at that start point -- you could choose another start point, but if you focus your attention at that start point, then it seems to me that leads you to a different conclusion about the crisis that we are dealing with right now. That is to say, people like McConnell want to stay the course. They want to maintain the U.S. presence in Syria. U.S. military presence. But if we look at what the U.S. military presence in that region, not simply Syria, has produced over the course of almost two decades, then you have to ask yourself, how is it that we think that simply staying the course is going to produce any more positive results?

> It is appalling what Turkey has done to Syrian Kurds and the casualties they have inflicted and the number of people that have been displaced. But guess what? The casualties that we inflicted and the number of people that we displaced far outnumbers what Turkey has done over the last week or so. So I think that we need to push back against this tendency to oversimplify the circumstance, because oversimplifying the circumstance doesn't help us fully appreciate the causes of this mess that we're in.

more here, about Tulsi, about Afghanistan, about Trump:
https://www.democracynow.org/2019/10/24/trump_lifts_turkey_sanctions_syrian_kurds

Leith , 24 October 2019 at 01:50 PM
In addition to oil from Iran, Assad also gets oil from the SDF and the Kurds. Supposedly a profit sharing arrangement as commented on by JohninMK in a previous post.

This oil sharing deal was also mentioned by Global Research and Southfront back in June of 2018:

https://www.globalresearch.ca/video-syrian-government-sdf-reach-agreement-on-omar-oil-field/5643086

The Twisted Genius -> turcopolier ... , 24 October 2019 at 05:49 PM
Colonel Lang, the only way to "overthrow" Trump is through impeachment in the House and conviction in the Senate. That is a Constitutional process, not a coup. The process is intentionally difficult. Was the impeachment of Clinton an attempted coup?
Stephanie said in reply to turcopolier ... , 24 October 2019 at 09:59 PM
Two things.

In the first place isn't the dissolution of Ukraine and Syria and Iraq and Libya and Yemen exactly what we have wished to achieve, and wouldn't an intelligent observer, such as Vladimir Putin, want to do exactly the same thing to us, and hasn't he come very close to witnessing the achievement of this aim whether he is personally involved or not? What goes around comes around?

But that is relatively unimportant compared to the question whether dissolution of the Union is a bad thing or a good thing. Preserving it cost 600,000 lives the first time. One additional life would be one additional life too many. Ukraine is an excellent example. Western Ukraine has a long history support for Nazi's. Eastern Ukraine is Russian. Must a war be fought to bring them together? Or should they be permitted to go their separate ways?

As Hector said of Helen of Troy, "She is not worth what she doth cost the keeping."

Jane , 24 October 2019 at 05:48 PM
After hanging up from a call to Putin, thanking him for Russia's help with the Turks, YPG leader Mazloum Kobane returned to the Senate hearings in which he alternately reminded his flecless American allies of their failure, not only to protect Rojava from the Turks, but didn't even give them a heads up about what was about to happen and begged an already angry [at Trump] Senate about their urgent need for a continued American presence in the territory.

It seems that some in the USG do not understand that all the land on the east bank of the Euphrates is "Rojava" or somehow is the mandate of the Kurds to continue to control. For a long time, now, the mainly Arab population of that region have been chafing under what is actually Kurdish rule. This could be a a trigger for ISIS or some other jihadis to launch another insurgency, or at the least, low level attacks, especially in Rojava to the north.

To remind, the USG is not using military personnel, but also contracts, about 200 troops in one field and 400 contractors in the other.

There is video of the SAA escorting the Americans to the Iraqi border. PM Abdel Hadi has reiterated that the US cannot keep these troops in Iraq, as they go beyond the agreed upon number. It is quite likely that the anti-Iranian aspect of the border region is NOT something they wish to see.

"Iranian proxies" refers to Hezbollah, the various Shia militia groups from Pakistan and Afghanistan, and of course, others, not the SAA.

oldman22 , 24 October 2019 at 08:29 PM
The US is reportedly planning to deploy tanks and other heavy military hardware to protect oil fields in eastern Syria, in a reversal of Donald Trump's earlier order to withdraw all troops from the country. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/oct/24/us-military-syria-tanks-oil-fields
turcopolier , 24 October 2019 at 09:46 PM
oldman22

He let them roll him, just like Obama and so many others. Just a different set of rollers.

[Oct 23, 2019] The treason of the intellectuals The Undoing of Thought by Roger Kimball

Highly recommended!
Supporting neoliberalism is the key treason of contemporary intellectuals eeho were instrumental in decimating the New Deal capitalism, to say nothing about neocon, who downgraded themselves into intellectual prostitutes of MIC mad try to destroy post WWII order.
Notable quotes:
"... More and more, intellectuals were abandoning their attachment to the traditional panoply of philosophical and scholarly ideals. One clear sign of the change was the attack on the Enlightenment ideal of universal humanity and the concomitant glorification of various particularisms. ..."
"... "Our age is indeed the age of the intellectual organization of political hatreds ," he wrote near the beginning of the book. "It will be one of its chief claims to notice in the moral history of humanity." There was no need to add that its place in moral history would be as a cautionary tale. In little more than a decade, Benda's prediction that, because of the "great betrayal" of the intellectuals, humanity was "heading for the greatest and most perfect war ever seen in the world," would achieve a terrifying corroboration. ..."
"... In Plato's Gorgias , for instance, the sophist Callicles expresses his contempt for Socrates' devotion to philosophy: "I feel toward philosophers very much as I do toward those who lisp and play the child." Callicles taunts Socrates with the idea that "the more powerful, the better, and the stronger" are simply different words for the same thing. Successfully pursued, he insists, "luxury and intemperance are virtue and happiness, and all the rest is tinsel." How contemporary Callicles sounds! ..."
"... In Benda's formula, this boils down to the conviction that "politics decides morality." To be sure, the cynicism that Callicles espoused is perennial: like the poor, it will be always with us. What Benda found novel was the accreditation of such cynicism by intellectuals. "It is true indeed that these new 'clerks' declare that they do not know what is meant by justice, truth, and other 'metaphysical fogs,' that for them the true is determined by the useful, the just by circumstances," he noted. "All these things were taught by Callicles, but with this difference; he revolted all the important thinkers of his time." ..."
"... In other words, the real treason of the intellectuals was not that they countenanced Callicles but that they championed him. ..."
"... His doctrine of "the will to power," his contempt for the "slave morality" of Christianity, his plea for an ethic "beyond good and evil," his infatuation with violence -- all epitomize the disastrous "pragmatism" that marks the intellectual's "treason." The real problem was not the unattainability but the disintegration of ideals, an event that Nietzsche hailed as the "transvaluation of all values." "Formerly," Benda observed, "leaders of States practiced realism, but did not honor it; With them morality was violated but moral notions remained intact, and that is why, in spite of all their violence, they did not disturb civilization ." ..."
"... From the savage flowering of ethnic hatreds in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union to the mendacious demands for political correctness and multiculturalism on college campuses across America and Europe, the treason of the intellectuals continues to play out its unedifying drama. Benda spoke of "a cataclysm in the moral notions of those who educate the world." That cataclysm is erupting in every corner of cultural life today. ..."
"... Finkielkraut catalogues several prominent strategies that contemporary intellectuals have employed to retreat from the universal. A frequent point of reference is the eighteenth-century German Romantic philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder. "From the beginning, or to be more precise, from the time of Plato until that of Voltaire," he writes, "human diversity had come before the tribunal of universal values; with Herder the eternal values were condemned by the court of diversity." ..."
"... Finkielkraut focuses especially on Herder's definitively anti-Enlightenment idea of the Volksgeist or "national spirit." ..."
"... Nevertheless, the multiculturalists' obsession with "diversity" and ethnic origins is in many ways a contemporary redaction of Herder's elevation of racial particularism over the universalizing mandate of reason ..."
"... In Goethe's words, "A generalized tolerance will be best achieved if we leave undisturbed whatever it is which constitutes the special character of particular individuals and peoples, whilst at the same time we retain the conviction that the distinctive worth of anything with true merit lies in its belonging to all humanity." ..."
"... The geography of intellectual betrayal has changed dramatically in the last sixty-odd years. In 1927, intellectuals still had something definite to betray. In today's "postmodernist" world, the terrain is far mushier: the claims of tradition are much attenuated and betrayal is often only a matter of acquiescence. ..."
"... In the broadest terms, The Undoing of Thought is a brief for the principles of the Enlightenment. Among other things, this means that it is a brief for the idea that mankind is united by a common humanity that transcends ethnic, racial, and sexual divisions ..."
"... Granted, the belief that there is "Jewish thinking" or "Soviet science" or "Aryan art" is no longer as widespread as it once was. But the dispersal of these particular chimeras has provided no inoculation against kindred fabrications: "African knowledge," "female language," "Eurocentric science": these are among today's talismanic fetishes. ..."
"... Then, too, one finds a stunning array of anti-Enlightenment phantasmagoria congregated under the banner of "anti-positivism." The idea that history is a "myth," that the truths of science are merely "fictions" dressed up in forbidding clothes, that reason and language are powerless to discover the truth -- more, that truth itself is a deceitful ideological construct: these and other absurdities are now part of the standard intellectual diet of Western intellectuals. The Frankfurt School Marxists Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno gave an exemplary but by no means uncharacteristic demonstration of one strain of this brand of anti-rational animus in the mid-1940s. ..."
"... Historically, the Enlightenment arose as a deeply anti-clerical and, perforce, anti-traditional movement. Its goal, in Kant's famous phrase, was to release man from his "self-imposed immaturity." ..."
"... The process of disintegration has lately become an explicit attack on culture. This is not simply to say that there are many anti-intellectual elements in society: that has always been the case. "Non-thought," in Finkielkraut's phrase, has always co-existed with the life of the mind. The innovation of contemporary culture is to have obliterated the distinction between the two. ..."
"... There are many sides to this phenomenon. What Finkielkraut has given us is not a systematic dissection but a kind of pathologist's scrapbook. He reminds us, for example, that the multiculturalists' demand for "diversity" requires the eclipse of the individual in favor of the group ..."
"... To a large extent, the abdication of reason demanded by multiculturalism has been the result of what we might call the subjection of culture to anthropology. ..."
"... In describing this process of leveling, Finkielkraut distinguishes between those who wish to obliterate distinctions in the name of politics and those who do so out of a kind of narcissism. The multiculturalists wave the standard of radical politics and say (in the words of a nineteenth-century Russian populist slogan that Finkielkraut quotes): "A pair of boots is worth more than Shakespeare." ..."
"... The upshot is not only that Shakespeare is downgraded, but also that the bootmaker is elevated. "It is not just that high culture must be demystified; sport, fashion and leisure now lay claim to high cultural status." A grotesque fantasy? ..."
"... . Finkielkraut notes that the rhetoric of postmodernism is in some ways similar to the rhetoric of Enlightenment. Both look forward to releasing man from his "self-imposed immaturity." But there is this difference: Enlightenment looks to culture as a repository of values that transcend the self, postmodernism looks to the fleeting desires of the isolated self as the only legitimate source of value ..."
"... The products of culture are valuable only as a source of amusement or distraction. In order to realize the freedom that postmodernism promises, culture must be transformed into a field of arbitrary "options." "The post-modern individual," Finkielkraut writes, "is a free and easy bundle of fleeting and contingent appetites. He has forgotten that liberty involves more than the ability to change one's chains, and that culture itself is more than a satiated whim." ..."
"... "'All cultures are equally legitimate and everything is cultural,' is the common cry of affluent society's spoiled children and of the detractors of the West. ..."
"... There is another, perhaps even darker, result of the undoing of thought. The disintegration of faith in reason and common humanity leads not only to a destruction of standards, but also involves a crisis of courage. ..."
"... As the impassioned proponents of "diversity" meet the postmodern apostles of acquiescence, fanaticism mixes with apathy to challenge the commitment required to preserve freedom. ..."
"... Communism may have been effectively discredited. But "what is dying along with it is not the totalitarian cast of mind, but the idea of a world common to all men." ..."
Dec 01, 1992 | www.moonofalabama.org

On the abandonment of Enlightenment intellectualism, and the emergence of a new form of Volksgeist.

When hatred of culture becomes itself a part of culture, the life of the mind loses all meaning. -- Alain Finkielkraut, The Undoing of Thought

Today we are trying to spread knowledge everywhere. Who knows if in centuries to come there will not be universities for re-establishing our former ignorance? -- Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742-1799)

I n 1927, the French essayist Julien Benda published his famous attack on the intellectual corruption of the age, La Trahison des clercs. I said "famous," but perhaps "once famous" would have been more accurate. For today, in the United States anyway, only the title of the book, not its argument, enjoys much currency. "La trahison des clercs": it is one of those memorable phrases that bristles with hints and associations without stating anything definite. Benda tells us that he uses the term "clerc" in "the medieval sense," i.e., to mean "scribe," someone we would now call a member of the intelligentsia. Academics and journalists, pundits, moralists, and pontificators of all varieties are in this sense clercs . The English translation, The Treason of the Intellectuals , 1 sums it up neatly.

The "treason" in question was the betrayal by the "clerks" of their vocation as intellectuals. From the time of the pre-Socratics, intellectuals, considered in their role as intellectuals, had been a breed apart. In Benda's terms, they were understood to be "all those whose activity essentially is not the pursuit of practical aims, all those who seek their joy in the practice of an art or a science or a metaphysical speculation, in short in the possession of non-material advantages." Thanks to such men, Benda wrote, "humanity did evil for two thousand years, but honored good. This contradiction was an honor to the human species, and formed the rift whereby civilization slipped into the world."

According to Benda, however, this situation was changing. More and more, intellectuals were abandoning their attachment to the traditional panoply of philosophical and scholarly ideals. One clear sign of the change was the attack on the Enlightenment ideal of universal humanity and the concomitant glorification of various particularisms. The attack on the universal went forward in social and political life as well as in the refined precincts of epistemology and metaphysics: "Those who for centuries had exhorted men, at least theoretically, to deaden the feeling of their differences have now come to praise them, according to where the sermon is given, for their 'fidelity to the French soul,' 'the immutability of their German consciousness,' for the 'fervor of their Italian hearts.'" In short, intellectuals began to immerse themselves in the unsettlingly practical and material world of political passions: precisely those passions, Benda observed, "owing to which men rise up against other men, the chief of which are racial passions, class passions and national passions." The "rift" into which civilization had been wont to slip narrowed and threatened to close altogether.

Writing at a moment when ethnic and nationalistic hatreds were beginning to tear Europe asunder, Benda's diagnosis assumed the lineaments of a prophecy -- a prophecy that continues to have deep resonance today. "Our age is indeed the age of the intellectual organization of political hatreds ," he wrote near the beginning of the book. "It will be one of its chief claims to notice in the moral history of humanity." There was no need to add that its place in moral history would be as a cautionary tale. In little more than a decade, Benda's prediction that, because of the "great betrayal" of the intellectuals, humanity was "heading for the greatest and most perfect war ever seen in the world," would achieve a terrifying corroboration.

J ulien Benda was not so naïve as to believe that intellectuals as a class had ever entirely abstained from political involvement, or, indeed, from involvement in the realm of practical affairs. Nor did he believe that intellectuals, as citizens, necessarily should abstain from political commitment or practical affairs. The "treason" or betrayal he sought to publish concerned the way that intellectuals had lately allowed political commitment to insinuate itself into their understanding of the intellectual vocation as such. Increasingly, Benda claimed, politics was "mingled with their work as artists, as men of learning, as philosophers." The ideal of disinterestedness, the universality of truth: such guiding principles were contemptuously deployed as masks when they were not jettisoned altogether. It was in this sense that he castigated the " desire to abase the values of knowledge before the values of action ."

In its crassest but perhaps also most powerful form, this desire led to that familiar phenomenon Benda dubbed "the cult of success." It is summed up, he writes, in "the teaching that says that when a will is successful that fact alone gives it a moral value, whereas the will which fails is for that reason alone deserving of contempt." In itself, this idea is hardly novel, as history from the Greek sophists on down reminds us. In Plato's Gorgias , for instance, the sophist Callicles expresses his contempt for Socrates' devotion to philosophy: "I feel toward philosophers very much as I do toward those who lisp and play the child." Callicles taunts Socrates with the idea that "the more powerful, the better, and the stronger" are simply different words for the same thing. Successfully pursued, he insists, "luxury and intemperance are virtue and happiness, and all the rest is tinsel." How contemporary Callicles sounds!

In Benda's formula, this boils down to the conviction that "politics decides morality." To be sure, the cynicism that Callicles espoused is perennial: like the poor, it will be always with us. What Benda found novel was the accreditation of such cynicism by intellectuals. "It is true indeed that these new 'clerks' declare that they do not know what is meant by justice, truth, and other 'metaphysical fogs,' that for them the true is determined by the useful, the just by circumstances," he noted. "All these things were taught by Callicles, but with this difference; he revolted all the important thinkers of his time."

In other words, the real treason of the intellectuals was not that they countenanced Callicles but that they championed him. To appreciate the force of Benda's thesis one need only think of that most influential modern Callicles, Friedrich Nietzsche. His doctrine of "the will to power," his contempt for the "slave morality" of Christianity, his plea for an ethic "beyond good and evil," his infatuation with violence -- all epitomize the disastrous "pragmatism" that marks the intellectual's "treason." The real problem was not the unattainability but the disintegration of ideals, an event that Nietzsche hailed as the "transvaluation of all values." "Formerly," Benda observed, "leaders of States practiced realism, but did not honor it; With them morality was violated but moral notions remained intact, and that is why, in spite of all their violence, they did not disturb civilization ."

Benda understood that the stakes were high: the treason of the intellectuals signaled not simply the corruption of a bunch of scribblers but a fundamental betrayal of culture. By embracing the ethic of Callicles, intellectuals had, Benda reckoned, precipitated "one of the most remarkable turning points in the moral history of the human species. It is impossible," he continued,

to exaggerate the importance of a movement whereby those who for twenty centuries taught Man that the criterion of the morality of an act is its disinterestedness, that good is a decree of his reason insofar as it is universal, that his will is only moral if it seeks its law outside its objects, should begin to teach him that the moral act is the act whereby he secures his existence against an environment which disputes it, that his will is moral insofar as it is a will "to power," that the part of his soul which determines what is good is its "will to live" wherein it is most "hostile to all reason," that the morality of an act is measured by its adaptation to its end, and that the only morality is the morality of circumstances. The educators of the human mind now take sides with Callicles against Socrates, a revolution which I dare to say seems to me more important than all political upheavals.

T he Treason of the Intellectuals is an energetic hodgepodge of a book. The philosopher Jean-François Revel recently described it as "one of the fussiest pleas on behalf of the necessary independence of intellectuals." Certainly it is rich, quirky, erudite, digressive, and polemical: more an exclamation than an analysis. Partisan in its claims for disinterestedness, it is ruthless in its defense of intellectual high-mindedness. Yet given the horrific events that unfolded in the decades following its publication, Benda's unremitting attack on the politicization of the intellect and ethnic separatism cannot but strike us as prescient. And given the continuing echo in our own time of the problems he anatomized, the relevance of his observations to our situation can hardly be doubted. From the savage flowering of ethnic hatreds in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union to the mendacious demands for political correctness and multiculturalism on college campuses across America and Europe, the treason of the intellectuals continues to play out its unedifying drama. Benda spoke of "a cataclysm in the moral notions of those who educate the world." That cataclysm is erupting in every corner of cultural life today.

In 1988, the young French philosopher and cultural critic Alain Finkielkraut took up where Benda left off, producing a brief but searching inventory of our contemporary cataclysms. Entitled La Défaite de la pensée 2 ("The 'Defeat' or 'Undoing' of Thought"), his essay is in part an updated taxonomy of intellectual betrayals. In this sense, the book is a trahison des clercs for the post-Communist world, a world dominated as much by the leveling imperatives of pop culture as by resurgent nationalism and ethnic separatism. Beginning with Benda, Finkielkraut catalogues several prominent strategies that contemporary intellectuals have employed to retreat from the universal. A frequent point of reference is the eighteenth-century German Romantic philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder. "From the beginning, or to be more precise, from the time of Plato until that of Voltaire," he writes, "human diversity had come before the tribunal of universal values; with Herder the eternal values were condemned by the court of diversity."

Finkielkraut focuses especially on Herder's definitively anti-Enlightenment idea of the Volksgeist or "national spirit." Quoting the French historian Joseph Renan, he describes the idea as "the most dangerous explosive of modern times." "Nothing," he writes, "can stop a state that has become prey to the Volksgeist ." It is one of Finkielkraut's leitmotifs that today's multiculturalists are in many respects Herder's (generally unwitting) heirs.

True, Herder's emphasis on history and language did much to temper the tendency to abstraction that one finds in some expressions of the Enlightenment. Ernst Cassirer even remarked that "Herder's achievement is one of the greatest intellectual triumphs of the philosophy of the Enlightenment."

Nevertheless, the multiculturalists' obsession with "diversity" and ethnic origins is in many ways a contemporary redaction of Herder's elevation of racial particularism over the universalizing mandate of reason. Finkielkraut opposes this just as the mature Goethe once took issue with Herder's adoration of the Volksgeist. Finkielkraut concedes that we all "relate to a particular tradition" and are "shaped by our national identity." But, unlike the multiculturalists, he soberly insists that "this reality merit[s] some recognition, not idolatry."

In Goethe's words, "A generalized tolerance will be best achieved if we leave undisturbed whatever it is which constitutes the special character of particular individuals and peoples, whilst at the same time we retain the conviction that the distinctive worth of anything with true merit lies in its belonging to all humanity."

The Undoing of Thought resembles The Treason of the Intellectuals stylistically as well as thematically. Both books are sometimes breathless congeries of sources and aperçus. And Finkielkraut, like Benda (and, indeed, like Montaigne), tends to proceed more by collage than by demonstration. But he does not simply recapitulate Benda's argument.

The geography of intellectual betrayal has changed dramatically in the last sixty-odd years. In 1927, intellectuals still had something definite to betray. In today's "postmodernist" world, the terrain is far mushier: the claims of tradition are much attenuated and betrayal is often only a matter of acquiescence. Finkielkraut's distinctive contribution is to have taken the measure of the cultural swamp that surrounds us, to have delineated the links joining the politicization of the intellect and its current forms of debasement.

In the broadest terms, The Undoing of Thought is a brief for the principles of the Enlightenment. Among other things, this means that it is a brief for the idea that mankind is united by a common humanity that transcends ethnic, racial, and sexual divisions.

The humanizing "reason" that Enlightenment champions is a universal reason, sharable, in principle, by all. Such ideals have not fared well in the twentieth century: Herder's progeny have labored hard to discredit them. Granted, the belief that there is "Jewish thinking" or "Soviet science" or "Aryan art" is no longer as widespread as it once was. But the dispersal of these particular chimeras has provided no inoculation against kindred fabrications: "African knowledge," "female language," "Eurocentric science": these are among today's talismanic fetishes.

Then, too, one finds a stunning array of anti-Enlightenment phantasmagoria congregated under the banner of "anti-positivism." The idea that history is a "myth," that the truths of science are merely "fictions" dressed up in forbidding clothes, that reason and language are powerless to discover the truth -- more, that truth itself is a deceitful ideological construct: these and other absurdities are now part of the standard intellectual diet of Western intellectuals. The Frankfurt School Marxists Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno gave an exemplary but by no means uncharacteristic demonstration of one strain of this brand of anti-rational animus in the mid-1940s.

Safely ensconced in Los Angeles, these refugees from Hitler's Reich published an influential essay on the concept of Enlightenment. Among much else, they assured readers that "Enlightenment is totalitarian." Never mind that at that very moment the Nazi war machine -- what one might be forgiven for calling real totalitarianism -- was busy liquidating millions of people in order to fulfill another set of anti-Enlightenment fantasies inspired by devotion to the Volksgeist .

The diatribe that Horkheimer and Adorno mounted against the concept of Enlightenment reminds us of an important peculiarity about the history of Enlightenment: namely, that it is a movement of thought that began as a reaction against tradition and has now emerged as one of tradition's most important safeguards. Historically, the Enlightenment arose as a deeply anti-clerical and, perforce, anti-traditional movement. Its goal, in Kant's famous phrase, was to release man from his "self-imposed immaturity."

The chief enemy of Enlightenment was "superstition," an omnibus term that included all manner of religious, philosophical, and moral ideas. But as the sociologist Edward Shils has noted, although the Enlightenment was in important respects "antithetical to tradition" in its origins, its success was due in large part "to the fact that it was promulgated and pursued in a society in which substantive traditions were rather strong." "It was successful against its enemies," Shils notes in his book Tradition (1981),

because the enemies were strong enough to resist its complete victory over them. Living on a soil of substantive traditionality, the ideas of the Enlightenment advanced without undoing themselves. As long as respect for authority on the one side and self-confidence in those exercising authority on the other persisted, the Enlightenment's ideal of emancipation through the exercise of reason went forward. It did not ravage society as it would have done had society lost all legitimacy.

It is this mature form of Enlightenment, championing reason but respectful of tradition, that Finkielkraut holds up as an ideal.

W hat Finkielkraut calls "the undoing of thought" flows from the widespread disintegration of a faith. At the center of that faith is the assumption that the life of thought is "the higher life" and that culture -- what the Germans call Bildung -- is its end or goal.

The process of disintegration has lately become an explicit attack on culture. This is not simply to say that there are many anti-intellectual elements in society: that has always been the case. "Non-thought," in Finkielkraut's phrase, has always co-existed with the life of the mind. The innovation of contemporary culture is to have obliterated the distinction between the two. "It is," he writes, "the first time in European history that non-thought has donned the same label and enjoyed the same status as thought itself, and the first time that those who, in the name of 'high culture,' dare to call this non-thought by its name, are dismissed as racists and reactionaries." The attack is perpetrated not from outside, by uncomprehending barbarians, but chiefly from inside, by a new class of barbarians, the self-made barbarians of the intelligentsia. This is the undoing of thought. This is the new "treason of the intellectuals."

There are many sides to this phenomenon. What Finkielkraut has given us is not a systematic dissection but a kind of pathologist's scrapbook. He reminds us, for example, that the multiculturalists' demand for "diversity" requires the eclipse of the individual in favor of the group . "Their most extraordinary feat," he observes, "is to have put forward as the ultimate individual liberty the unconditional primacy of the collective." Western rationalism and individualism are rejected in the name of a more "authentic" cult.

One example: Finkielkraut quotes a champion of multiculturalism who maintains that "to help immigrants means first of all respecting them for what they are, respecting whatever they aspire to in their national life, in their distinctive culture and in their attachment to their spiritual and religious roots." Would this, Finkielkraut asks, include "respecting" those religious codes which demanded that the barren woman be cast out and the adulteress be punished with death?

What about those cultures in which the testimony of one man counts for that of two women? In which female circumcision is practiced? In which slavery flourishes? In which mixed marriages are forbidden and polygamy encouraged? Multiculturalism, as Finkielkraut points out, requires that we respect such practices. To criticize them is to be dismissed as "racist" and "ethnocentric." In this secular age, "cultural identity" steps in where the transcendent once was: "Fanaticism is indefensible when it appeals to heaven, but beyond reproach when it is grounded in antiquity and cultural distinctiveness."

To a large extent, the abdication of reason demanded by multiculturalism has been the result of what we might call the subjection of culture to anthropology. Finkielkraut speaks in this context of a "cheerful confusion which raises everyday anthropological practices to the pinnacle of the human race's greatest achievements." This process began in the nineteenth century, but it has been greatly accelerated in our own age. One thinks, for example, of the tireless campaigning of that great anthropological leveler, Claude Lévi-Strauss. Lévi-Strauss is assuredly a brilliant writer, but he has also been an extraordinarily baneful influence. Already in the early 1950s, when he was pontificating for UNESCO , he was urging all and sundry to "fight against ranking cultural differences hierarchically." In La Pensée sauvage (1961), he warned against the "false antinomy between logical and prelogical mentality" and was careful in his descriptions of natives to refer to "so-called primitive thought." "So-called" indeed. In a famous article on race and history, Lévi-Strauss maintained that the barbarian was not the opposite of the civilized man but "first of all the man who believes there is such a thing as barbarism." That of course is good to know. It helps one to appreciate Lévi-Strauss's claim, in Tristes Tropiques (1955), that the "true purpose of civilization" is to produce "inertia." As one ruminates on the proposition that cultures should not be ranked hierarchically, it is also well to consider what Lévi-Strauss coyly refers to as "the positive forms of cannibalism." For Lévi-Strauss, cannibalism has been unfairly stigmatized in the "so-called" civilized West. In fact, he explains, cannibalism was "often observed with great discretion, the vital mouthful being made up of a small quantity of organic matter mixed, on occasion, with other forms of food." What, merely a "vital mouthful"? Not to worry! Only an ignoramus who believed that there were important distinctions, qualitative distinctions, between the barbarian and the civilized man could possibly think of objecting.

Of course, the attack on distinctions that Finkielkraut castigates takes place not only among cultures but also within a given culture. Here again, the anthropological imperative has played a major role. "Under the equalizing eye of social science," he writes,

hierarchies are abolished, and all the criteria of taste are exposed as arbitrary. From now on no rigid division separates masterpieces from run-of-the mill works. The same fundamental structure, the same general and elemental traits are common to the "great" novels (whose excellence will henceforth be demystified by the accompanying quotation marks) and plebian types of narrative activity.

F or confirmation of this, one need only glance at the pronouncements of our critics. Whether working in the academy or other cultural institutions, they bring us the same news: there is "no such thing" as intrinsic merit, "quality" is an only ideological construction, aesthetic value is a distillation of social power, etc., etc.

In describing this process of leveling, Finkielkraut distinguishes between those who wish to obliterate distinctions in the name of politics and those who do so out of a kind of narcissism. The multiculturalists wave the standard of radical politics and say (in the words of a nineteenth-century Russian populist slogan that Finkielkraut quotes): "A pair of boots is worth more than Shakespeare."

Those whom Finkielkraut calls "postmodernists," waving the standard of radical chic, declare that Shakespeare is no better than the latest fashion -- no better, say, than the newest item offered by Calvin Klein. The litany that Finkielkraut recites is familiar:

A comic which combines exciting intrigue and some pretty pictures is just as good as a Nabokov novel. What little Lolitas read is as good as Lolita . An effective publicity slogan counts for as much as a poem by Apollinaire or Francis Ponge . The footballer and the choreographer, the painter and the couturier, the writer and the ad-man, the musician and the rock-and-roller, are all the same: creators. We must scrap the prejudice which restricts that title to certain people and regards others as sub-cultural.

The upshot is not only that Shakespeare is downgraded, but also that the bootmaker is elevated. "It is not just that high culture must be demystified; sport, fashion and leisure now lay claim to high cultural status." A grotesque fantasy? Anyone who thinks so should take a moment to recall the major exhibition called "High & Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture" that the Museum of Modern Art mounted a few years ago: it might have been called "Krazy Kat Meets Picasso." Few events can have so consummately summed up the corrosive trivialization of culture now perpetrated by those entrusted with preserving it. Among other things, that exhibition demonstrated the extent to which the apotheosis of popular culture undermines the very possibility of appreciating high art on its own terms.

When the distinction between culture and entertainment is obliterated, high art is orphaned, exiled from the only context in which its distinctive meaning can manifest itself: Picasso becomes a kind of cartoon. This, more than any elitism or obscurity, is the real threat to culture today. As Hannah Arendt once observed, "there are many great authors of the past who have survived centuries of oblivion and neglect, but it is still an open question whether they will be able to survive an entertaining version of what they have to say."

And this brings us to the question of freedom. Finkielkraut notes that the rhetoric of postmodernism is in some ways similar to the rhetoric of Enlightenment. Both look forward to releasing man from his "self-imposed immaturity." But there is this difference: Enlightenment looks to culture as a repository of values that transcend the self, postmodernism looks to the fleeting desires of the isolated self as the only legitimate source of value.

For the postmodernist, then, "culture is no longer seen as a means of emancipation, but as one of the élitist obstacles to this." The products of culture are valuable only as a source of amusement or distraction. In order to realize the freedom that postmodernism promises, culture must be transformed into a field of arbitrary "options." "The post-modern individual," Finkielkraut writes, "is a free and easy bundle of fleeting and contingent appetites. He has forgotten that liberty involves more than the ability to change one's chains, and that culture itself is more than a satiated whim."

What Finkielkraut has understood with admirable clarity is that modern attacks on elitism represent not the extension but the destruction of culture. "Democracy," he writes, "once implied access to culture for everybody. From now on it is going to mean everyone's right to the culture of his choice." This may sound marvelous -- it is after all the slogan one hears shouted in academic and cultural institutions across the country -- but the result is precisely the opposite of what was intended.

"'All cultures are equally legitimate and everything is cultural,' is the common cry of affluent society's spoiled children and of the detractors of the West." The irony, alas, is that by removing standards and declaring that "anything goes," one does not get more culture, one gets more and more debased imitations of culture. This fraud is the dirty secret that our cultural commissars refuse to acknowledge.

There is another, perhaps even darker, result of the undoing of thought. The disintegration of faith in reason and common humanity leads not only to a destruction of standards, but also involves a crisis of courage. "A careless indifference to grand causes," Finkielkraut warns, "has its counterpart in abdication in the face of force." As the impassioned proponents of "diversity" meet the postmodern apostles of acquiescence, fanaticism mixes with apathy to challenge the commitment required to preserve freedom.

Communism may have been effectively discredited. But "what is dying along with it is not the totalitarian cast of mind, but the idea of a world common to all men."

Julien Benda took his epigraph for La Trahison des clercs from the nineteenth-century French philosopher Charles Renouvier: Le monde souffre du manque de foi en une vérité transcendante : "The world suffers from lack of faith in a transcendent truth." Without some such faith, we are powerless against the depredations of intellectuals who have embraced the nihilism of Callicles as their truth.

1 The Treason of the Intellectuals, by Julien Benda, translated by Richard Aldington, was first published in 1928. This translation is still in print from Norton.

2 La Défaite de la pensée , by Alain Finkielkraut; Gallimard, 162 pages, 72 FF . It is available in English, in a translation by Dennis O'Keeffe, as The Undoing of Thought (The Claridge Press [London], 133 pages, £6.95 paper).

Roger Kimball is Editor and Publisher of The New Criterion and President and Publisher of Encounter Books. His latest book is The Fortunes of Permanence: Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia (St. Augustine's Press)

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[Oct 23, 2019] Neoconservatism Is An Omnicidal Death Cult, And It Must Be Stopped by Caitlin Johnstone

Highly recommended!
Neocons are lobbyists for MIC, the it is MIC that is the center of this this cult. People like Kriston, Kagan and Max Boot are just well paid prostituttes on MIC, which includes intelligence agencies as a very important part -- the bridge to Wall Street so to speak.
Being a neoconservative should receive at least as much vitriolic societal rejection as being a Ku Klux Klan member or a child molester, but neocon pundits are routinely invited on mainstream television outlets to share their depraved perspectives.
Notable quotes:
"... Washington Post ..."
"... Neoconservatism is a psychopathic death cult whose relentless hyper-hawkishness is a greater threat to the survival of our species than anything else in the world right now. These people are traitors to humanity, and their ideology needs to be purged from the face of the earth forever. I'm not advocating violence of any kind here, but let's stop pretending that this is okay. Let's start calling these people the murderous psychopaths that they are whenever they rear their evil heads and stop respecting and legitimizing them. There should be a massive, massive social stigma around what these people do, so we need to create one. They should be marginalized, not leading us. ..."
Jul 18, 2017 | medium.com

Glenn Greenwald has just published a very important article in The Intercept that I would have everyone in America read if I could. Titled "With New D.C. Policy Group, Dems Continue to Rehabilitate and Unify With Bush-Era Neocons", Greenwald's excellent piece details the frustratingly under-reported way that the leaders of the neoconservative death cult have been realigning with the Democratic party.

This pivot back to the party of neoconservatism's origin is one of the most significant political events of the new millennium, but aside from a handful of sharp political analysts like Greenwald it's been going largely undiscussed. This is weird, and we need to start talking about it. A lot. Their willful alignment with neoconservatism should be the very first thing anyone ever talks about when discussing the Democratic party.

When you hear someone complaining that the Democratic party has no platform besides being anti-Trump, your response should be, "Yeah it does. Their platform is the omnicidal death cult of neoconservatism."

It's absolutely insane that neoconservatism is still a thing, let alone still a thing that mainstream America tends to regard as a perfectly legitimate set of opinions for a human being to have. As what Dr. Paul Craig Roberts rightly calls "the most dangerous ideology that has ever existed," neoconservatism has used its nonpartisan bloodlust to work with the Democratic party for the purpose of escalating tensions with Russia on multiple fronts, bringing our species to the brink of what could very well end up being a world war with a nuclear superpower and its allies.

This is not okay. Being a neoconservative should receive at least as much vitriolic societal rejection as being a Ku Klux Klan member or a child molester, but neocon pundits are routinely invited on mainstream television outlets to share their depraved perspectives. Check out leading neoconservative Bill Kristol's response to the aforementioned Intercept article:

... ... ...

Okay, leaving aside the fact that this bloodthirsty psychopath is saying neocons "won" a Cold War that neocons have deliberately reignited by fanning the flames of the Russia hysteria and pushing for more escalations , how insane is it that we live in a society where a public figure can just be like, "Yeah, I'm a neocon, I advocate for using military aggression to maintain US hegemony and I think it's great," and have that be okay? These people kill children. Neoconservatism means piles upon piles of child corpses. It means devoting the resources of a nation that won't even provide its citizens with a real healthcare system to widespread warfare and all the death, destruction, chaos, terrorism, rape and suffering that necessarily comes with war. The only way that you can possibly regard neoconservatism as just one more set of political opinions is if you completely compartmentalize away from the reality of everything that it is.

This should not happen. The tensions with Russia that these monsters have worked so hard to escalate could blow up at any moment; there are too many moving parts, too many things that could go wrong. The last Cold War brought our species within a hair's breadth of total annihilation due to our inability to foresee all possible complications which can arise from such a contest, and these depraved death cultists are trying to drag us back into another one. Nothing is worth that. Nothing is worth risking the life of every organism on earth, but they're risking it all for geopolitical influence.

... ... ...

I've had a very interesting last 24 hours. My article about Senator John McCain (which I titled "Please Just Fucking Die Already" because the title I really wanted to use seemed a bit crass) has received an amount of attention that I'm not accustomed to, from CNN to USA Today to the Washington Post . I watched Whoopi Goldberg and Joy Behar talking about me on The View . They called me a "Bernie Sanders person." It was a trip. Apparently some very low-level Republican with a few hundred Twitter followers went and retweeted my article with an approving caption, and that sort of thing is worthy of coast-to-coast mainstream coverage in today's America.

This has of course brought in a deluge of angry comments, mostly from people whose social media pages are full of Russiagate nonsense , showing where McCain's current support base comes from. Some call him a war hero, some talk about him like he's a perfectly fine politician, some defend him as just a normal person whose politics I happen to disagree with.

This is insane. This man has actively and enthusiastically pushed for every single act of military aggression that America has engaged in, and some that it hasn't , throughout his entire career. He makes Hillary "We came, we saw, he died" Clinton look like a dove. When you look at John McCain, the very first thing you see should not be a former presidential candidate, a former POW or an Arizona Senator; the first thing you see should be the piles of human corpses that he has helped to create. This is not a normal kind of person, and I still do sincerely hope that he dies of natural causes before he can do any more harm.

Can we change this about ourselves, please? None of us should have to live in a world where pushing for more bombing campaigns at every opportunity is an acceptable agenda for a public figure to have. Neoconservatism is a psychopathic death cult whose relentless hyper-hawkishness is a greater threat to the survival of our species than anything else in the world right now. These people are traitors to humanity, and their ideology needs to be purged from the face of the earth forever. I'm not advocating violence of any kind here, but let's stop pretending that this is okay. Let's start calling these people the murderous psychopaths that they are whenever they rear their evil heads and stop respecting and legitimizing them. There should be a massive, massive social stigma around what these people do, so we need to create one. They should be marginalized, not leading us.

-- -- --

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[Oct 20, 2019] Putin sarcastic remark on Western neoliberal multiculturalism

Highly recommended!
Oct 17, 2019 | www.unz.com

"If minorities prefer Sharia Law, then we advise them to go to those places where that's the state law.

Russia does not need minorities. Minorities need Russia, and we will not grant them special privileges, or try to change our laws to fit their desires, no matter how loud they yell "discrimination"

-Vladimir Putin

[Oct 20, 2019] How did the United States become so involved in Ukraine's torturous and famously corrupt politics? The short answer is NATO expansion

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... How did the United States become so involved in Ukraine's torturous and famously corrupt politics? The short answer is NATO expansion <= maybe something different? I like pocketbook expansion.. NATO Expansion provides cover and legalizes the private use of Presidential directed USA resources to enable a few to make massively big profits at the expense of the governed in the target area. ..."
"... Hypothesis 1: NATO supporters are more corrupt than Ukraine officials. ..."
"... Hypothesis 2: NATO expansion is a euphemism for USA/EU/ backed private party plunder to follow invade and destroy regime change activities designed to dispossess local Oligarchs of the wealth in NATO targeted nations? Private use of public force for private gain comes to mind. ..."
"... A lot of intelligence agency manipulation and private pocketbook expanding corruption can be hidden behind NATO expansion.. Please prove to me that Biden and the hundreds of other plunders became so deeply involved in Ukraine because of NATO expansion? ..."
"... As it is right now, the most likely outcome of the Western initiative in Ukraine will be substantially lower living standards than there would be otherwise for most Ukrainians. ..."
"... The US actions in Ukraine are typical, not exceptional. Acting as an Empire, the US always installs the worst possible scum in power in its vassals, particularly in newly acquired ones. ..."
"... Has he forgotten the historical conversation of Nuland and Payatt picking the next president of Ukraine "Yats is our guy" and "Yats" actually emerging as the president a week later ? None of these facts are in any way remotely compatible with passive role professor Cohen ascribes to the US. ..."
"... We don't know what happens next, but we know the following: Ukraine will not be in EU, or Nato. It will not be a unified, prosperous country. It will continue losing a large part of its population. And oligarchy and 'corruption' is going to stay. ..."
"... Another Maidan would most likely make things even worse and trigger a complete disintegration. Those are the wages of stupidity and desperation – one can see an individual example with AP, but they all seem like that. ..."
Oct 20, 2019 | www.unz.com

Dan Hayes says: October 4, 2019 at 4:46 am GMT • 100 Words @Ron Unz Proprietor Ron,

Thanks for your sharing you views about Prof Cohen, a most interesting and principled man.

Only after reading the article did I realize that the UR (that's you) also provided the Batchelor Show podcast. Thanks.

I've been listening to these broadcasts over their entirety, now going on for six or so years. What's always struck me is Cohen's level-headeness and equanimity. I've also detected affection for Kentucky, his native state. Not something to be expected from a Princeton / NYU academic nor an Upper West Side resident.

And once again expressing appreciation for the UR!

sally , says: October 4, 2019 at 4:47 am GMT

How did the United States become so involved in Ukraine's torturous and famously corrupt politics? The short answer is NATO expansion <= maybe something different? I like pocketbook expansion.. NATO Expansion provides cover and legalizes the private use of Presidential directed USA resources to enable a few to make massively big profits at the expense of the governed in the target area.

Behind NATO lies the reason for Bexit, the Yellow Jackets, the unrest in Iraq and Egypt, Yemen etc.

Hypothesis 1: NATO supporters are more corrupt than Ukraine officials.
Hypothesis 2: NATO expansion is a euphemism for USA/EU/ backed private party plunder to follow invade and destroy regime change activities designed to dispossess local Oligarchs of the wealth in NATO targeted nations? Private use of public force for private gain comes to mind.

I think [private use of public force for private gain] is what Trump meant when Trump said to impeach Trump for investigating the Ukraine matter amounts to Treason.. but it is the exactly the activity type that Hallmarks CIA instigated regime change.

A lot of intelligence agency manipulation and private pocketbook expanding corruption can be hidden behind NATO expansion.. Please prove to me that Biden and the hundreds of other plunders became so deeply involved in Ukraine because of NATO expansion?

Beckow , says: October 4, 2019 at 8:16 am GMT

The key question is what is the gain in separating Ukraine from Russia, adding it to NATO, and turning Russia and Ukraine into enemies. And what are the most likely results, e.g. can it ever work without risking a catastrophic event?

There are the usual empire-building and weapons business reasons, but those should function within a rational framework. As it is right now, the most likely outcome of the Western initiative in Ukraine will be substantially lower living standards than there would be otherwise for most Ukrainians. And an increase in tensions in the region with inevitable impact on the business there. So what exactly is the gain and for whom?

eah , says: October 4, 2019 at 11:55 am GMT
The Washington-led attempt to fast-track Ukraine into NATO in 2013–14 resulted in the Maidan crisis, the overthrow of the country's constitutionally elected president Viktor Yanukovych, and to the still ongoing proxy civil war in Donbass.

Which exemplifies the stupidity and arrogance of the American military/industrial/political Establishment -- none of that had anything to do with US national security (least of all antagonizing Russia) -- how fucking hypocritical is it to presume the Monroe Doctrine, and then try to get the Ukraine into NATO? -- none of it would have been of any benefit whatsoever to the average American.

Roberto Masioni , says: October 4, 2019 at 12:09 pm GMT
According to a recent govt study, only 12% of Americans can read above a 9th grade level. This effectively mean (((whoever))) controls the MSM controls the world. NOTHING will change for the better while the (((enemy))) owns our money supply.
Pamela , says: October 4, 2019 at 3:41 pm GMT
There was NO "annexation" of Crimea by Russia. Crimea WAS annexed, but by Ukraine.
Russia and Crimea re-unified. Crimea has been part of Russia for long than America has existed – since it was taken from the Ottoman Empire over 350 yrs ago. The vast majority of the people identify as Russian, and speak only Russian.

To annex, the verb, means to use armed force to seize sovereign territory and put it under the control of the invading forces government. Pretty much as the early Americans did to Northern Mexico, Hawaii, etc. Russia used no force, the Governors of Crimea applied for re-unification with Russia, Russia advised a referendum, which was held, and with a 96% turnout, 97% voted for re-unification. This was done formally and legally, conforming with all the international mandates.

It is very damaging for anyone to say that Russia "annexed" Crimea, because when people read, quickly moving past the world, they subliminally match the word to their held perception of the concept and move on. Thus they match the word "annex" to their conception of the use of Armed Force against a resistant population, without checking.

All Cohen is doing here is reinforcing the pushed, lying Empire narrative, that Russia invaded and used force, when the exact opposite is true!!

follyofwar , says: October 4, 2019 at 3:56 pm GMT
@Carlton Meyer One wonders if Mr. Putin, as he puts his head on the pillow at night, fancies that he should have rolled the Russian tanks into Kiev, right after the 2014 US-financed coup of Ukraine's elected president, which was accomplished while he was pre-occupied with the Sochi Olympics, and been done with it. He had every justification to do so, but perhaps feared Western blowback. Well, the blowback happened anyway, so maybe Putin was too cautious.

The new Trump Admin threw him under the bus when it installed the idiot Nikki Haley as UN Ambassador, whose first words were that Russia must give Crimea back. With its only major warm water port located at Sevastopol, that wasn't about to happen, and the US Deep State knew it.

Given how he has been so unfairly treated by the media, and never given a chance to enact his Russian agenda, anyone who thinks that Trump was 'selected' by the deep state has rocks for brains. The other night, on Rick Sanchez's RT America show, former US diplomat, and frequent guest Jim Jatras said that he would not be too surprised if 20 GOP Senators flipped and voted to convict Trump if the House votes to impeach.

The deep state can't abide four more years of the bombastic, Twitter-obsessed Trump, hence this Special Ops Ukraine false flag, designed to fool a majority of the people. The smooth talking, more warlike Pence is one of them. The night of the long knives is approaching.

AnonFromTN , says: October 4, 2019 at 4:02 pm GMT
The US actions in Ukraine are typical, not exceptional. Acting as an Empire, the US always installs the worst possible scum in power in its vassals, particularly in newly acquired ones.

The "logic" of the Dem party is remarkable. Dems don't even deny that Biden is corrupt, that he blatantly abused the office of Vice-President for personal gain. What's more, he was dumb enough to boast about it publicly. Therefore, let's impeach Trump.

These people don't give a hoot about the interests of the US as a country, or even as an Empire. Their insatiable greed for money and power blinds them to everything. By rights, those who orchestrated totally fake Russiagate and now push for impeachment, when Russiagate flopped miserably, should be hanged on lampposts for high treason. Unfortunately, justice won't be served. So, we have to be satisfied with an almost assured prospect of this impeachment thing to flop, just like Russiagate before it. But in the process incalculable damage will be done to our country and its institutions.

AnonFromTN , says: October 4, 2019 at 4:07 pm GMT
@Pamela In fact, several Western sources reluctantly confirmed the results of Crimean referendum of 2014:
German polling company GFK
http://www.gfk.com/ua/Documents/Presentations/GFK_report_FreeCrimea.pdf
Gallup
http://www.bbg.gov/wp-content/media/2014/06/Ukraine-slide-deck.pdf

Those who support the separation of Kosovo from Serbia without Serbian consent cannot argue against separation of Crimea from Ukraine without the consent of Kiev regime.

On the other hand, those who believe that post-WWII borders are sacrosanct have to acknowledge that Crimea belongs to Russia (illegally even by loose Soviet standards transferred to Ukraine by Khrushchev in 1956), Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Soviet Union should be restored, and Germany should be re-divided.

Alden , says: October 4, 2019 at 5:35 pm GMT
At least now I know why Ukraine is so essential to American national security. It's so even more of my and my families' taxes can pay for a massive expansion of Nato, which means American military bases in Ukraine. Greenland to the borders of China.

We're encircling the earth, like those old cartoons about bankers.

chris , says: October 4, 2019 at 9:11 pm GMT
@Ron Unz I had to stop listening after the 10th min. where the good professor (without any push-back from the interviewer) says:

Victor Yanukovich was overthrown by a street coup . at that moment, the United States and not only the United States but the Western European Governments had to make a decision would they acknowledge the overthrow of Yannukovic as having been legitimate, and therefore accept whatever government emerged, and that was a fateful moment within 24hours, the governments, including the government of president Obama endorsed what was essentially a coup d'etat against Yanukovich.

Has the good Professor so quickly forgotten about Victoria Nuland distributing cookies with John McCain in the Maidan as the coup was still unfolding? Her claim at the think tank in DC where she discusses having spent $30million (if I remember correctly) for foisting the Ukraine coup ?

Has he forgotten the historical conversation of Nuland and Payatt picking the next president of Ukraine "Yats is our guy" and "Yats" actually emerging as the president a week later ? None of these facts are in any way remotely compatible with passive role professor Cohen ascribes to the US.

These are not simple omissions but willful acts of misleading of fools. The good professor's little discussed career as a resource for the secret services has reemerged after seemingly having been left out in the cold during the 1st attempted coup against Trump.

No, the real story is more than just a little NATO expansion as the professor does suggest, but more directly, the attempted coup that the US is still trying to stage in Russia itself, in order to regain control of Russia's vast energy resources which Putin forced the oligarchs to disgorge. The US desperately wants to achieve this in order to be able to ultimately also control China's access to those resources as well.

In the way that Iraq was supposed to be a staging post for an attack on Iran, Ukraine is the staging post for an attack on Russia.

The great Russian expert stirred miles very clear of even hinting at such scenarios, even though anyone who's thought about US world policies will easily arrive at this logical conclusion.

Anonymous [855] • Disclaimer , says: October 4, 2019 at 10:11 pm GMT
What about the theft of Ukraine's farmland and the enserfing of its rural population? Isn't this theft and enserfing of Ukrainians at least one major reason the US government got involved, overseeing the transfer of this land into the hands of the transnational banking crime syndicate? The Ukraine, with its rich, black soil, used to be called the breadbasket of Europe.

Consider the fanatical intervention on the part of Victoria Nuland and the Kagans under the guise of working for the State Dept to facilitate the theft. In a similar fashion, according to Wayne Madsen, the State Dept. has a Dept of Foreign Asset Management, or some similar name, that exists to protect the Chabad stranglehold on the world diamond trade, and, according to Madsen, the language spoken and posters around the offices are in Hebrew, which as a practical matter might as well be the case at the State Dept itself.

According to an article a few years ago at Oakland Institute, George Rohr's NCH Capital, which latter organization has funded over 100 Chabad Houses on US campuses, owns over 1 million acres of Ukraine farmland. Other ownership interests of similarly vast tracts of Ukraine farmland show a similar pattern of predation. At one point, it was suggested that the Yinon Plan should be understood to include the Ukraine as the newly acquired breadbasket of Eretz Israel. It may also be worth pointing out that now kosher Ivy League schools' endowments are among the worst pillagers of native farmland and enserfers of the indigenous populations they claim to protect.

AnonFromTN , says: October 5, 2019 at 3:04 pm GMT
@Mikhail Well, if we really go into it, things become complicated. What Khmelnitsky united with Russia was maybe 1/6th or 1/8th of current Ukraine. Huge (4-5 times greater) areas in the North and West were added by Russian Tsars, almost as great areas in the South and East taken by Tsars from Turkey and affiliated Crimean Khanate were added by Lenin, a big chunk in the West was added by Stalin, and then in 1956 moron Khrushchev "gifted" Crimea (which he had no right to do even by Soviet law). So, about 4/6th of "Ukraine" is Southern Russia, 1/6th is Eastern Poland, some chunks are Hungary and Romania, and the remaining little stub is Ukraine proper.
AnonFromTN , says: October 6, 2019 at 3:27 pm GMT
@anon American view always was: "yes, he is a son of a bitch, but he is our son of a bitch". That historically applied to many obnoxious regimes, now fully applies to Ukraine. In that Dems and Reps always were essentially identical, revealing that they are two different puppets run by the same puppet master.

Trump is hardly very intelligent, but he has some street smarts that degenerate elites have lost. Hence their hatred of him. It is particularly galling for the elites that Trump won in 2016, and has every chance of winning again in 2020 (unless they decide to murder him, like JFK; but that would be a real giveaway, even the dumbest sheeple would smell the rat).

Skeptikal , says: October 6, 2019 at 7:10 pm GMT
@follyofwar The only reason I can imagine that Putin/Russia would want to "take over" Ukraine and have this political problem child back in the family might be because of Ukraine's black soil.

But it is probably not worth the aggravation.

Russia is building up its agricultural sector via major greenhouse installations and other innovations.

Beckow , says: October 6, 2019 at 7:21 pm GMT
@AP Well, you are a true simpleton who repeats shallow conventional views. You don't ever seem to think deeper about what you write, e.g. if Yanukovitch could beat anyone in a 1-on-1 election than he obviously wasn't that unpopular and that makes Maidan illegal by any standard. You say he could beat Tiahnybok, who was one of the leaders of Maidan, how was then Maidan democratic? Or you don't care for democracy if people vote against your preferences?

Trade with Russia is way down and it is not coming back. That is my point – there was definitely a way to do this better. It wasn't a choice of 'one or the other' – actually EU was under the impression that Ukraine would help open up the Russian market. Your either-or wasn't the plan, so did Kiev lie to EU? No wonder Ukraine has a snowball chance in hell of joining EU.

AnonFromTN , says: October 6, 2019 at 8:09 pm GMT
@Skeptikal Russia moved to the first place in the world in wheat exports, while greatly increasing its production of meat, fowl, and fish. Those who supplied these commodities lost Russian market for good. In fact, with sanctions, food in Russia got a lot better, and food in Moscow got immeasurably better: now it's local staff instead of crap shipped from half-a-world away. Funny thing is, Russian production of really good fancy cheeses has soared (partially with the help of French and Italian producers who moved in to avoid any stupid sanctions).

So, there is no reason for Russia to take Ukraine on any conditions, especially considering Ukraine's exorbitant external debt. If one calculates European demand for transplantation kidneys and prostitutes, two of the most successful Ukrainian exports, Ukraine will pay off its debt – never. Besides, the majority of Russians learned to despise Ukraine due to its subservient vassalage to the US (confirmed yet again by the transcript of the conversation between Trump and Ze), so the emotional factor is also virtually gone. Now the EU and the US face the standard rule of retail: you broke it, you own it. That infuriates Americans and EU bureaucrats more than anything.

annamaria , says: October 6, 2019 at 8:10 pm GMT
@Sergey Krieger "Demography statistic won't support fairy tales by solzhenicin and his kind."

-- What's your point? Your post reads like an attempt at saying that Kaganovitch was white like snow and that it does not matter what crimes were committed in the Soviet Union because of the "demography statistic" and because you, Sergey Krieger, are a grander person next to Solzhenitsyn and "his kind." By the way, had not A. I. S. returned to Russia, away from the coziness of western life?

S.K.: "You should start research onto mass dying of population after 1991 and subsequent and ongoing demographic catastroph in Russia under current not as "brutal " as soviet regime."

-- If you wish: "The Rape of Russia: Testimony of Anne Williamson Before the Committee on Banking and Financial Services of the United States House of Representatives, September 21, 1999:" http://www.softpanorama.org/Skeptics/Pseudoscience/Harvard_mafia/testimony_of_anne_williamson_before_the_house_banking_committee.shtml

"Economic rape of post-USSR economic space was by design not by accident:"
http://www.softpanorama.org/Skeptics/Pseudoscience/harvard_mafia.shtml#Economic_rape_of_post_USSR_economic_space_was_by_design_not_by_accident

"MI6 role in economic rape of Russia, Ukraine, and other post-Soviet republics:" http://www.softpanorama.org/Skeptics/Pseudoscience/harvard_mafia.shtml#MI6_role_

AnonFromTN , says: October 6, 2019 at 11:39 pm GMT
@AP Maidan was an illegal coup that violated Ukrainian constitution (I should say all of them, there were too many) and lots of other laws. And that's not the worst part of it. But it already happened, there is no going back for Ukraine. It's a "yes or no" thing, you can't be a little bit pregnant. We can either commiserate with Ukraine or gloat, but it committed suicide. Some say this project was doomed from the start. I think Ukraine had a chance and blew it.
AP , says: October 7, 2019 at 4:39 am GMT
@AnonFromTN

Maidan was an illegal coup that violated Ukrainian constitution (I should say all of them, there were too many) a

Illegal revolution (are there any legal ones? – was American one legal?) rather than coup. Violations of Constitution began under Yanukovich.

We can either commiserate with Ukraine or gloat, but it committed suicide.

LOL. Were you the one comparing it to Somalia?

Here is "dead" Ukraine:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/DDWAobR8U0c?start=3017&feature=oembed

What a nightmare.

Compare Ukraine 2019 to Ukraine 2013 (before revolution):

GDP per capita PPP:

$9233 (2018) vs. $8648 (2013)

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.PP.CD?locations=UA-AM-GE-MN-AL&name_desc=false

GDP per capita nominal:

$3110 (2018) vs. $3160 (2013)

Given 3% growth in 2019, it will be higher.

Forex reserves:

$20 billion end of 2013, $23 billion currently

Debt to GDP ratio:

40% in 2013, 61% in 2018. Okay, this is worse. But it is a decline from 2016 when it was 81%.

Compare Ukraine's current 61% to Greece's 150%.

Military: from ~15,000 usable troops to 200,000.

Overall, not exactly a "suicide."

Beckow , says: October 7, 2019 at 7:49 am GMT
@AnonFromTN I usually refrain from labelling off-cycle changes in government as revolutions or coups – it clearly depends on one's views and can't be determined.

In general, when violence or military is involved, it is more likely it was a coup. If a country has a reasonably open election process, violently overthrowing the current government would also seem like a coup, since it is unnecessary. Ukraine had both violence and a coming election that was democratic. If Yanukovitch would prevent or manipulate the elections, one could make a case that at that point – after the election – the population could stage a ' revolution '.

AP is a simpleton who repeats badly thought out slogans and desperately tries to save some face for the Maidan fiasco – so we will not change his mind, his mind is done with changes, it is all about avoiding regrets even if it means living in a lie. One can almost feel sorry for him, if he wasn't so obnoxious.

Ukraine has destroyed its own future gradually after 1991, all the elites there failed, Yanukovitch was just the last in a long line of failures, the guy before him (Yushenko?) left office with a 5% approval. Why wasn't there a revolution against him? Maidan put a cherry on that rotting cake – a desperate scream of pain by people who had lost all hope and so blindly fell for cheap promises by the new-old hustlers.

We don't know what happens next, but we know the following: Ukraine will not be in EU, or Nato. It will not be a unified, prosperous country. It will continue losing a large part of its population. And oligarchy and 'corruption' is going to stay.

Another Maidan would most likely make things even worse and trigger a complete disintegration. Those are the wages of stupidity and desperation – one can see an individual example with AP, but they all seem like that.

Beckow , says: October 7, 2019 at 1:31 pm GMT
@AP You intentionally omitted the second part of what I wrote: 'a reasonably democratic elections', neither 18th century American colonies, nor Russia in 1917 or Romania in 1989, had them. Ukraine in 2014 did.

So all your belly-aching is for nothing. The talk about 'subverting' and doing a preventive 'revolution' on Maidan to prevent 'subversion' has a very Stalinist ring to it. If you start revolutionary violence because you claim to anticipate that something bad might happen, well, the sky is the limit and you have no rules.

You are desperately trying to justify a stupid and unworkable act. As we watch the unfolding disaster and millions leaving Ukraine, this "Maidan was great!!!" mantra will sound even more silly. But enjoy it, it is not Somalia, wow, I guess as long as a country is not Somalia it is ok. Ukraine is by far the poorest large country in Europe. How is that a success?

AnonFromTN , says: October 7, 2019 at 3:11 pm GMT
@Beckow True believers are called that because they willfully ignore facts and logic. AP is a true believer Ukie. Ukie faith is their main undoing. Unfortunately, they are ruining the country with their insane dreams. But that cannot be helped now. The position of a large fraction of Ukrainian population is best described by a cruel American saying: fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.
Beckow , says: October 7, 2019 at 4:07 pm GMT
@AnonFromTN You are right, it can't be helped. Another saying is that it takes two to lie: one who lies, and one to lie to. The receiver of lies is also responsible.

What happened in Ukraine was: Nuland&Co. went to Ukraine and lied to them about ' EU, 'Marshall plan', aid, 'you will be Western ', etc,,,'. Maidanistas swallowed it because they wanted to believe – it is easy to lie to desperate people. Making promises is very easy. US soft power is all based on making promises.

What Nuland&Co. really wanted was to create a deep Ukraine-Russia hostility and to grab Crimea, so they could get Russian Navy out and move Nato in. It didn't work very well, all we have is useless hostility, and a dysfunctional state. But as long as they serve espresso in Lviv, AP will scream that it was all worth it, 'no Somalia', it is 'all normal', almost as good as 2013 . Right.

Robjil , says: October 5, 2019 at 5:11 pm GMT
Ukraine is an overseas US territory.

It is not a foreign nation at all.

Trump dealt with one of our overseas territories.

Nuland said that US invested 5 billion dollars to get Ukraine.

She got Ukraine without balls that is Crimea. Russia took back the balls.

US cried, cried a Crimea river about this. They are still crying over this.

DESERT FOX , says: October 5, 2019 at 6:53 pm GMT
@Robjil Agree, and like Israel the Ukraine will be a welfare drain on the America taxpayers as long as Israel and the Ukraine exist.
Beckow , says: October 5, 2019 at 6:54 pm GMT
@AP I don't disagree with what you said, but my point was different:

lower living standards than there would be otherwise for most Ukrainians

Without the unnecessary hostility and the break in business relations with Russia the living standards in Ukraine would be higher. That, I think, noone would dispute. One can trace that directly to the so-far failed attempt to get Ukraine into Nato and Russia out of its Crimea bases. There has been a high cost for that policy, so it is appropriate to ask: why? did the authors of that policy think it through?

Beckow , says: October 5, 2019 at 10:11 pm GMT
@AP I don't give a flying f k about Yanukovitch and your projections about what 'would be growth' under him. He was history by 2014 in any case.

One simple point that you don't seem to grasp: it was Yanuk who negotiated the association treaty with EU that inevitably meant Ukraine in Nato and Russia bases out of Crimea (after a decent interval). For anyone to call Yanuk a 'pro-Russian' is idiotic – what we see today are the results of Yanukovitch's policies. By the way, the first custom restrictions on Ukraine's exports to Russia happened in summer 2013 under Y.

If you still think that Yanukovitch was in spite of all of that somehow a 'Russian puppet', you must have a very low opinion of Kremlin skills in puppetry. He was not, he was fully onboard with the EU-Nato-Crimea policy – he implemented it until he got outflanked by even more radical forces on Maidan.

AnonFromTN , says: October 6, 2019 at 1:42 am GMT
@Beckow Well, exactly like all Ukrainian presidents before and after him, Yanuk was a thief. He might have been a more intelligent and/or more cautious thief that Porky, but a thief he was.

Anyway, there is no point in crying over spilled milk: history has no subjunctive mood. Ukraine has dug a hole for itself, and it still keeps digging, albeit slower, after a clown in whole socks replaced a clown in socks with holes. By now this new clown is also a murderer, as he did not stop shelling Donbass, although so far he has committed fewer crimes than Porky.

There is no turning back. Regardless of Ukrainian policies, many things it used to sell Russia won't be bought any more: Russia developed its own shipbuilding (subcontracted some to South Korea), is making its own helicopter and ship engines, all stages of space rockets, etc. Russia won't return any military or high-tech production to Ukraine, ever. What's more, most Russians are now disgusted with Ukraine, which would impede improving relations even if Ukraine gets a sane government (which is extremely unlikely in the next 5 years).

Ukraine's situation is best described by Russian black humor saying: "what we fought for has befallen us". End of story.

Sergey Krieger , says: October 6, 2019 at 4:15 am GMT
@Peter Akuleyev How many millions? It is same story. Ukraine claims more and more millions dead from so called Hilodomor when in Russia liberals have been screaming about 100 million deaths in russia from bolsheviks. Both are fairy tales. Now you better answer what is current population of ukraine. The last soviet time 1992 level was 52 million. I doubt you got even 40 million now. Under soviet power both ukraine and russia population were steadily growing. Now, under whose music you are dancing along with those in Russia that share your views when die off very real one is going right under your nose.
anon [113] • Disclaimer , says: October 6, 2019 at 7:03 am GMT
@AnonFromTN

By now this new clown is also a murderer, as he did not stop shelling Donbass, although so far he has committed fewer crimes than Porky.

Have you noticed that the Republicans, while seeming to defend Trump, never challenge the specious assertion that delaying arms to Ukraine was a threat to US security? At first I thought this was oversight. Silly me. Keeping the New Cold War smoldering is more important to those hawks.

Tulsi Gabbard flipping to support the impeachment enquiry was especially disappointing. I'm guessing she was under lots of pressure, because she can't possibly believe that arming the Ukies is good for our security. If I could get to one of her events, I'd ask her direct, what's up with that. Obama didn't give them arms at all, even made some remarks about not inflaming the situation. (A small token, after his people managed the coup, spent 8 years demonizing Putin, and presided over origins of Russiagate to make Trump's [stated] goal of better relations impossible.)

AnonFromTN , says: October 7, 2019 at 5:11 pm GMT
@Per/Norway

The ukrops are pureblooded nazis

Not really. Ukies are wonnabe Nazis, but they fall way short of their ideal. The original German Nazis were organized, capable, brave, sober, and mostly honest. Ukie scum is disorganized, ham-handed, cowardly, drunk (or under drugs), and corrupt to the core. They are heroes only against unarmed civilians, good only for theft, torture, and rape. When it comes to the real fight with armed opponents, they run away under various pretexts or surrender. Nazis should sue these impostors for defamation.

Mikhail , says: • Website October 7, 2019 at 6:28 pm GMT
@AP

So uprising by American colonists was a coup?

How about what happened in Russia in 1917?

Or Romania when Communism fell?

Talk about false equivalencies.

Yanukovych signed an internationally brokered power sharing agreement with his main rivals, who then violated it. Yanukovych up to that point was the democratically elected president of Ukraine.

Since his being violently overthrown, people have been unjustly jailed, beaten and killed for politically motivated reasons having to do with a stated opposition to the Euromaidan.

Yanukovych refrained from using from using considerably greater force, when compared to others if put in the same situation, against a mob element that included property damage and the deaths of law enforcement personnel.

In the technical legal sense, there was a legit basis to jail the likes of Tymoshenko. If I correctly recall Yushchenko offered testimony against Tymoshenko. Rather laughable that Poroshenko appointed the non-lawyer Lutsenko into a key legal position.

Mikhail , says: • Website October 7, 2019 at 6:35 pm GMT
@Beckow The undemocratic aspect involving Yanukovych's overthrow included the disproportionate number of Svoboda members appointed to key cabinet positions. At the time, Svoboda was on record for favoring the dissolution of Crimea's autonomous status
anon [113] • Disclaimer , says: October 8, 2019 at 2:17 am GMT
@AP Grest comment #159 by Beckow. Really, I'm more concerned with the coup against POTUS that's happening right now, since before he took office. The Ukraine is pivotal, from the Kiev putschists collaborating with the DNC, to the CIA [pretend] whistleblowers who now subvert Trump's investigation of those crimes.

Tragic and pitiful, the Ukrainians jumped from a rock to a hard place. Used and abandoned by the Clinton-Soros gang, they appeal to the next abusive Sugar-Daddy. Isn't this FRANCE 24 report fairly objective?

Revisited: Five years on, what has Ukraine's Maidan Revolution achieved?

https://www.youtube.com/embed/RtUrPKK73rE?feature=oembed

anon [113] • Disclaimer , says: October 8, 2019 at 2:24 am GMT
@AP This from BBC is less current. (That magnificent bridge -the one the Ukies tried to sabotage- is now in operation, of course.) I'm just trying to use sources that might not trigger you.

Crimea: Three years after annexation – BBC News

anon [113] • Disclaimer , says: October 8, 2019 at 3:55 am GMT
@AP Ukrainian efforts to sabotage Trump backfire
Kiev officials are scrambling to make amends with the president-elect after quietly working to boost Clinton.
https://www.politico.com/story/2017/01/ukraine-sabotage-trump-backfire-233446
anon [113] • Disclaimer , says: October 8, 2019 at 4:57 am GMT
@AP "Whenever people ask me how to figure out the truth about Ukraine, I always recommend they watch the film Ukraine on Fire by director @lopatonok and executive produced by @TheOliverStone. The sequel Revealing Ukraine will be out soon proud to be in it."
– Lee Sranahan (Follow @stranahan for Ukrainegate in depth.)
" .what has really changed in the life of Ukrainians?"

REVEALING UKRAINE OFFICIAL TEASER TRAILER #1 (2019)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=Nj_bdtO0SI0

Robjil , says: October 15, 2019 at 12:16 am GMT
@Malacaay Baltics, Ukrainians and Poles were part of the Polish Kingdom from 1025-1569 and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth 1569-1764.

This probably explains their differences with Russia.

Russia had this area in the Russian Empire from 1764-1917. Russia called this area the Pale of Settlement. Why? This Polish Kingdom since 1025 welcomed 25000 Jews in, who later grew to millions by the 19th century. They are the Ashkenazis who are all over the world these days. The name Pale was for Ashkenazis to stay in that area and not immigrate to the rest of Russia.

The reasoning for this was not religious prejudice but the way the Ashkenazis treated the peasants of the Pale. It was to protect the Russian peasants. This did not help after 1917. A huge invasion of Ashkenazis descended all over Russia to take up positions all over the Soviet Union.

Ukraine US is like the Pale again. It has a Jewish President and a Jewish Prime Minister.

Ukraine and Poland were both controlled by Tartars too. Ukraine longer than Russia. Russia ended the Tartar rule of Crimea in 1783. The Crimean Tartars lived off raiding Ukraine, Poland, and parts of Russia for Slav slaves. Russia ended this Slav slave trade in 1783.

[Oct 10, 2019] There is no reason that anyone should treat George Bush with respect: he is a war criminal, who escaped justice

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... George W. Bush's presidency wasn't just morally bankrupt. In a superior reality, the Hague would be sorting out whether he is guilty of war crimes. Since our international institutions have failed to punish, or even censure him, surely the only moral response from civil society should be to shun him. But here is Ellen DeGeneres hanging out with him at a Cowboys game: ..."
"... This is what we say to children who don't want to sit next to the class misfit at lunch. It is not -- or at least it should not -- be the way we talk about a man who used his immense power to illegally invade another country where we still have troops 16 years later. His feet should bleed wherever he walks and Iraqis should get to throw shoes at him until the end of his days. ..."
"... DeGeneres isn't a role model for civility. Her friendship with Bush simply embodies the grossest form of class solidarity. From a lofty enough vantage point, perhaps Bush's misdeeds really look like minor partisan differences. Perhaps Iraq seems very far away, and so do the poor of New Orleans, when the stage of your show is the closest you get to anyone without power." ..."
"... There is no reason that anyone should treat George Bush with respect. ..."
Oct 09, 2019 | economistsview.typepad.com

EMichael , October 09, 2019 at 04:05 PM

Despicable. She is actually saying Bush's actions were just a difference of opinion, as opposed to causing hundreds of thousands of deaths.

I have never watched anything she has ever done without thinking about it. Now I will never watch anything she does because of her imbecility.

Nobody Should Be Friends With George W. Bush by Sarah Jones

"Comedian Ellen DeGeneres loves to tell everyone to be kind. It's a loose word, kindness; on her show, DeGeneres customarily uses it to mean a generic sort of niceness. Don't bully. Befriend people! It's a charming thought, though it has its limits as a moral ethic. There are people in the world, after all, whom it is better not to befriend. Consider, for example, the person of George W. Bush. Tens of thousands of people are dead because his administration lied to the American public about the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and then, based on that lie, launched a war that's now in its 16th year. After Hurricane Katrina struck and hundreds of people drowned in New Orleans, Bush twiddled his thumbs for days. Rather than fire the officials responsible for the government's life-threateningly lackluster response to the crisis, he praised them, before flying over the scene in Air Force One. He opposed basic human rights for LGBT people, and reproductive rights for women, and did more to empower the American Christian right than any president since Reagan.

George W. Bush's presidency wasn't just morally bankrupt. In a superior reality, the Hague would be sorting out whether he is guilty of war crimes. Since our international institutions have failed to punish, or even censure him, surely the only moral response from civil society should be to shun him. But here is Ellen DeGeneres hanging out with him at a Cowboys game:

And here is Ellen DeGeneres explaining why it's good and normal to share laughs, small talk, and nachos with a man who has many deaths on his conscience:

Here's the money quote from her apologia:

"We're all different. And I think that we've forgotten that that's okay that we're all different," she told her studio audience. "When I say be kind to one another, I don't mean be kind to the people who think the same way you do. I mean be kind to everyone."

This is what we say to children who don't want to sit next to the class misfit at lunch. It is not -- or at least it should not -- be the way we talk about a man who used his immense power to illegally invade another country where we still have troops 16 years later. His feet should bleed wherever he walks and Iraqis should get to throw shoes at him until the end of his days.

Nevertheless, many celebrities and politicians have hailed DeGeneres for her radical civility:

There's almost no point to rebutting anything that Chris Cillizza writes. Whatever he says is inevitably dumb and wrong, and then I get angry while I think about how much money he gets to be dumb and wrong on a professional basis. But on this occasion, I'll make an exception. The notion that DeGeneres's friendship with Bush is antithetical to Trumpism fundamentally misconstrues the force that makes Trump possible. Trump isn't a simple playground bully, he's the president. Americans grant our commanders-in-chief extraordinary deference once they leave office. They become celebrities, members of an apolitical royal class. This tendency to separate former presidents from the actions of their office, as if they were merely actors in a stage play, or retired athletes from a rival team, contributes to the atmosphere of impunity that enabled Trump. If Trump's critics want to make sure that his cruelties are sins the public and political class alike never tolerate again, our reflexive reverence for the presidency has to die.

DeGeneres isn't a role model for civility. Her friendship with Bush simply embodies the grossest form of class solidarity. From a lofty enough vantage point, perhaps Bush's misdeeds really look like minor partisan differences. Perhaps Iraq seems very far away, and so do the poor of New Orleans, when the stage of your show is the closest you get to anyone without power."

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/10/ellen-degeneres-is-wrong-about-george-w-bush.html

... ... ...

...I am all in favor of Tulsi Gabbard's anti-war stance, but this comment shows me she is too childish to hold any power.

Tulsi Gabbard
‏Verified account @TulsiGabbard
22h22 hours ago

.@TheEllenShow msg of being kind to ALL is so needed right now. Enough with the divisiveness. We can't let politics tear us apart. There are things we will disagree on strongly, and things we agree on -- let's treat each other with respect, aloha, & work together for the people.

There is no reason that anyone should treat George Bush with respect.

[Sep 22, 2019] US reconnaissance plane operated drones that attacked Hmeymim

Highly recommended!
Oct 01, 2025 | tass.com

Thirteen drones moved according to common combat battle deployment, operated by a single crew Russian Deputy Defense Minister Alexander Fomin © Vadim Grishankin/Russian Defense Ministry's press service/TASS BEIJING, October 25. /TASS/. The drones that attacked Russia's Hmeymim airbase in Syria were operated from the US Poseidon-8 reconnaissance plane, Russian Deputy Defense Minister Colonel General Alexander Fomin said at a plenary session of the Beijing Xiangshan Forum on security on Thursday.

"Thirteen drones moved according to common combat battle deployment, operated by a single crew. During all this time the American Poseidon-8 reconnaissance plane patrolled the Mediterranean Sea area for eight hours," he noted. Read also Three layers of Russian air defense at Hmeymim air base in Syria When the drones met with the electronic countermeasures of the Russian systems, they switched to a manual guidance mode, he said. "Manual guidance is carried out not by some villagers, but by the Poseidon-8, which has modern equipment. It undertook manual control," the deputy defense minister noted.

"When these 13 drones faced our electronic warfare screen, they moved away to some distance, received the corresponding orders and began to be operated out of space and receiving help in finding the so-called holes through which they started penetrating. Then they were destroyed," Fomin reported.

"This should be stopped as well: in order to avoid fighting with the high-technology weapons of terrorists and highly-equipped terrorists it is necessary to stop supplying them with equipment," the deputy defense minister concluded.

The Russian Defense Ministry earlier said that on January 6 militants in Syria first massively used drones in the attack on the Russian Hmeymim airbase and the Russian naval base in Tartus. The attack was successfully repelled: seven drones were downed, and control over six drones was gained through electronic warfare systems. The Russian Defense Ministry stressed that the solutions used by the militants could be received only from a technologically advanced country and warned about the danger of repeating such attacks in any country of the world.

The forum

The eighth Beijing Xiangshan Forum on security will run until October 26 in Beijing. It was organized by the Chinese Ministry of Defense, China Association for Military Science (CAMS) and China Institute for International Strategic Studies (CIISS). Representatives for defense ministries, armed forces and international organizations, as well as former military officials, politicians and scientists from 79 countries are taking part in the forum.

[Sep 22, 2019] It was neoliberalism that won the cold war

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... As for the USSR, the Soviet elite changed sides. I think Putin once said that Soviet system was "unviable" to begin with. And that's pretty precise diagnosis: as soon as the theocratic elite degenerates, it defects; and the state and the majority of the population eventually fall on their own sword. ..."
"... And the USSR clearly was a variation of a theocratic state. That explain also a very high, damaging the economy, level of centralization (the country as a single corporation) and the high level of ideology/religion-based repression (compare with Iran and Islamic state jihadists.) ..."
"... So after the WWII the ideology of Bolshevism was dead as it became clear that Soviet style theocratic state is unable to produce standard of living which Western social democracies were able to produce for their citizens. Rapid degeneration of the theocratic Bolshevik elite (aka Nomenklatura) also played an important role. ..."
"... It is important to understand that the Soviet elite changed sides completely voluntarily. Paradoxically it was high level of KGB functionaries who were instrumental in conversion to neoliberalism, starting with Andropov. It was Andropov, who created the plan of transition of the USSR to neoliberalism, the plan that Gorbachov tried to implement and miserably failed. ..."
"... So the system exploded from within because the Party elite became infected with neoliberalism (which was stupid, but reflects the level of degeneration of the Soviet elite). ..."
"... The major USA contribution other then supplying the new ideology for the Soviet elite was via CIA injecting God know how much money to bribe top officials. ..."
"... As Gorbachov was a second rate (if not the third rate) politician, he allowed the situation to run out of control. And the efforts to "rock" the system were fueled internally by emerging (as the result of Perestroika; which was a reincarnation of Lenin's idea of NEP) class of neoliberal Nouveau riche (which run the USSR "shadow economy" which emerged under Brezhnev) and by nationalist sentiments (those element were clearly supported by the USA and other Western countries money as well as via subversive efforts of national diaspora residing in the USA and Canada) and certain national minorities within the USSR. ..."
"... The brutal economic rape of the xUSSR space and generally of the whole former Soviet block by the "collective neoliberal West" naturally followed. Which had shown everybody that the vanguard of Perestroika were simply filthy compradors, who can't care less about regular citizens and their sufferings. ..."
"... BTW this huge amount of loot postponed the internal crisis of neoliberalism which happened in the USA in 2008 probably by ten years. And it (along with a couple of other factors such as telecommunication revolution) explain relative prosperity of Clinton presidency. Criminal Clinton presidency I should say. ..."
"... BTW few republics in former USSR space managed to achieve the standard of living equal to the best years of the USSR (early 80th I think) See https://web.williams.edu/Economics/brainerd/papers/ussr_july08.pdf ..."
"... Generally when the particular ideology collapses, far right nationalism fills the void. We see this now with the slow collapse of neoliberalism in the USA and Western Europe. ..."
"... Chinese learned a lot from Gorbachov's fatal mistakes and have better economic results as the result of the conversion to the neoliberalism ("from the above"), although at the end Chinese elite is not that different from Soviet elite and also is corruptible and can eventually change sides. ..."
"... But they managed to survive the "triumphal march of neoliberalism" (1980-2000) and now the danger is less as neoliberalism is clearly the good with expired "use by" date: after 2008 the neoliberal ideology was completely discredited and entered "zombie" state. ..."
Sep 08, 2019 | economistsview.typepad.com

likbez -> ilsm... , September 08, 2019 at 08:20 PM

This is a very complex issue. And I do not pretend that I am right, but I think Brad is way too superficial to be taken seriously.

IMHO it was neoliberalism that won the cold war. That means that the key neoliberal "scholars" like Friedman and Hayek and other intellectual prostitutes of financial oligarchy who helped to restore their power. Certain democratic politicians like Carter also were the major figures. Carter actually started neoliberalization of the USA, continued by Reagan,

Former Trotskyites starting from Burnham which later became known as neoconservatives also deserve to be mentioned.

It is also questionable that the USA explicitly won the cold war. Paradoxically the other victim of the global neoliberal revolution was the USA, the lower 90% of the USA population to be exact.
So there was no winners other the financial oligarchy (the transnational class.)

As for the USSR, the Soviet elite changed sides. I think Putin once said that Soviet system was "unviable" to begin with. And that's pretty precise diagnosis: as soon as the theocratic elite degenerates, it defects; and the state and the majority of the population eventually fall on their own sword.

And the USSR clearly was a variation of a theocratic state. That explain also a very high, damaging the economy, level of centralization (the country as a single corporation) and the high level of ideology/religion-based repression (compare with Iran and Islamic state jihadists.)

The degeneration started with the death of the last charismatic leader (Stalin) and the passing of the generation which remembers that actual warts of capitalism and could relate them to the "Soviet socialism" solutions.

So after the WWII the ideology of Bolshevism was dead as it became clear that Soviet style theocratic state is unable to produce standard of living which Western social democracies were able to produce for their citizens. Rapid degeneration of the theocratic Bolshevik elite (aka Nomenklatura) also played an important role.

With bolshevism as the official religion, which can't be questioned, the society was way too rigid and suppressed "entrepreneurial initiative" (which leads to enrichment of particular individuals, but also to the benefits to the society as whole), to the extent that was counterproductive. The level of dogmatism in this area was probably as close to the medieval position of Roman Catholic Church as we can get; in this sense it was only national that Cardinal Karol Wojtyla became a pope John Paul II -- he was very well prepared indeed ;-).

It is important to understand that the Soviet elite changed sides completely voluntarily. Paradoxically it was high level of KGB functionaries who were instrumental in conversion to neoliberalism, starting with Andropov. It was Andropov, who created the plan of transition of the USSR to neoliberalism, the plan that Gorbachov tried to implement and miserably failed.

So the system exploded from within because the Party elite became infected with neoliberalism (which was stupid, but reflects the level of degeneration of the Soviet elite).

The major USA contribution other then supplying the new ideology for the Soviet elite was via CIA injecting God know how much money to bribe top officials.

As Gorbachov was a second rate (if not the third rate) politician, he allowed the situation to run out of control. And the efforts to "rock" the system were fueled internally by emerging (as the result of Perestroika; which was a reincarnation of Lenin's idea of NEP) class of neoliberal Nouveau riche (which run the USSR "shadow economy" which emerged under Brezhnev) and by nationalist sentiments (those element were clearly supported by the USA and other Western countries money as well as via subversive efforts of national diaspora residing in the USA and Canada) and certain national minorities within the USSR.

Explosion of far right nationalist sentiments without "Countervailing ideology" as Bolshevism was not taken seriously anymore was the key factor that led to the dissolution of the USSR.

Essentially national movements allied with Germany that were defeated during WWII became the winners.

The brutal economic rape of the xUSSR space and generally of the whole former Soviet block by the "collective neoliberal West" naturally followed. Which had shown everybody that the vanguard of Perestroika were simply filthy compradors, who can't care less about regular citizens and their sufferings.

And the backlash created conditions for Putin coming to power.

BTW this huge amount of loot postponed the internal crisis of neoliberalism which happened in the USA in 2008 probably by ten years. And it (along with a couple of other factors such as telecommunication revolution) explain relative prosperity of Clinton presidency. Criminal Clinton presidency I should say.

BTW few republics in former USSR space managed to achieve the standard of living equal to the best years of the USSR (early 80th I think) See https://web.williams.edu/Economics/brainerd/papers/ussr_july08.pdf

The majority of the xUSSR space countries have now dismal standard of living and slided into Latin American level of inequality and corruption (not without help of the USA).

Several have civil wars in the period since getting independence, which further depressed the standard living. Most deindustrialize.

Generally when the particular ideology collapses, far right nationalism fills the void. We see this now with the slow collapse of neoliberalism in the USA and Western Europe.

Chinese learned a lot from Gorbachov's fatal mistakes and have better economic results as the result of the conversion to the neoliberalism ("from the above"), although at the end Chinese elite is not that different from Soviet elite and also is corruptible and can eventually change sides.

But they managed to survive the "triumphal march of neoliberalism" (1980-2000) and now the danger is less as neoliberalism is clearly the good with expired "use by" date: after 2008 the neoliberal ideology was completely discredited and entered "zombie" state.

So in the worst case it is the USA which might follow the path of the USSR and eventually disintegrate under the pressure of internal nationalist sentiments. Such a victor...

Even now there are some visible difference between former Confederacy states and other states on the issues such as immigration and federal redistributive programs.

[Sep 20, 2019] Trump Whistleblower Drama Puts Biden In The Hot Seat Over Ukraine

Highly recommended!
If this not of the Biden run, I do not know what can be. He now has an albatross abound his neck in the form of interference in Ukrainian criminal investigation to save his corrupt to the core narcoaddict son. Only the raw power of neoliberal MSM to suppress any information that does not fit their agenda is keeping him in the race.
But a more important fact that he was criminally involved in EuroMaydan (at the cost to the USA taxpayers around five billions) is swiped under the carpet. And will never be discussed along with criminality of Obama and Nuland.
As somebody put it "with considerable forethought [neoliberal MSM] are attempting to create a nation of morons who will faithfully go out and buy this or that product, vote for this or that candidate and faithfully work for their employers for as low a wage as possible."
Sep 20, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

For days we've been treated to MSM insinuations that President Trump may have betrayed the United States after a whistleblower lodged an 'urgent' complaint about something Trump promised another world leader - the details of which the White House has refused to share.

Then, we learned it was a phone call.

Then, we learned it was several phone calls.

Now, we learn it wasn't Russia or North Korea - it was Ukraine!

Here's the scandal; It appears that Trump, may have made promises to newly minted Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky - very likely involving an effort to convince Ukraine to reopen its investigation into Joe Biden and his son Hunter, after Biden strongarmed Ukraine's prior government into firing its top prosecutor - something Trump and his attorney Rudy Giuliani have pursued for months . There are also unsupported rumors that Trump threatened to withhold $250 million in aid to help Ukraine fight Russian-backed separatists.

And while the MSM and Congressional Democrats are starting to focus on the sitting US president having a political opponent investigated, The New York Times admits that nothing Trump did would have been illegal , as "while Mr. Trump may have discussed intelligence activities with the foreign leader, he enjoys broad power as president to declassify intelligence secrets, order the intelligence community to act and otherwise direct the conduct of foreign policy as he sees fit."

Moreover, here's why Trump and Giuliani are going to dig their heels in; last year Biden openly bragged about threatening to hurl Ukraine into bankruptcy as Vice President if they didn't fire their top prosecutor , Viktor Shokin - who was leading a wide-ranging corruption investigation into a natural gas firm whose board Hunter Biden sat on.

In his own words, with video cameras rolling, Biden described how he threatened Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko in March 2016 that the Obama administration would pull $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees , sending the former Soviet republic toward insolvency, if it didn't immediately fire Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin. - The Hill

"I said, ' You're not getting the billion .' I'm going to be leaving here in, I think it was about six hours. I looked at them and said: ' I'm leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you're not getting the money, '" bragged Biden, recalling the conversation with Poroshenko.

" Well, son of a bitch, he got fired . And they put in place someone who was solid at the time," Biden said at the Council on Foreign Relations event - while insisting that former president Obama was complicit in the threat.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/Q0_AqpdwqK4?start=3128

In short, there's both smoke and fire here - and what's left of Biden's 2020 bid for president may be the largest casualty of the entire whistleblower scandal.

And by the transitive properties of the Obama administration 'vetting' Trump by sending spies into his campaign, Trump can simply say he was protecting America from someone who may have used his position of power to directly benefit his own family at the expense of justice.

Congressional Democrats, meanwhile, are acting as if they've found the holy grail of taking Trump down. On Thursday, the House Intelligence Committee chaired by Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) interviewed inspector general Michael Atkinson, with whom the whistleblower lodged their complaint - however despite three hours of testimony, he repeatedly declined to discuss the content of the complaint .

Following the session, Schiff gave an angry speech - demanding that acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire share the complaint , and calling the decision to withhold it "unprecedented."

"We cannot get an answer to the question about whether the White House is also involved in preventing this information from coming to Congress," said Schiff, adding "We're determined to do everything we can to determine what this urgent concern is to make sure that the national security is protected."

According to Schiff, someone "is trying to manipulate the system to keep information about an urgent matter from the Congress There certainly are a lot of indications that it was someone at a higher pay grade than the director of national intelligence," according to the Washington Post .

me title=

On thursday, Trump denied doing anything improper - tweeting " Virtually anytime I speak on the phone to a foreign leader, I understand that there may be many people listening from various U.S. agencies, not to mention those from the other country itself. "

"Knowing all of this, is anybody dumb enough to believe that I would say something inappropriate with a foreign leader while on such a potentially 'heavily populated' call. "

me title=

Giuliani, meanwhile, went on CNN with Chris Cuomo Thursday to defend his discussions with Ukraine about investigating alleged election interference in the 2016 election to the benefit of Hillary Clinton conducted by Ukraine's previous government. According to Giuliani, Biden's dealings in Ukraine were 'tangential' to the 2016 election interference question - in which a Ukrainian court ruled that government officials meddled for Hillary in 2016 by releasing details of Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort's 'Black Book' to Clinton campaign staffer Alexandra Chalupa.

me title=

And so - what the MSM doesn't appear to understand is that President Trump asking Ukraine to investigate Biden over something with legitimate underpinnings.

Which - of course, may lead to the Bidens' adventures in China , which Giuliani referred to in his CNN interview. And just like his Ukraine scandal , it involves actions which may have helped his son Hunter - who was making hand over fist in both countries.

Journalist Peter Schweizer, the author of Clinton Cash and now Secret Empires discovered that in 2013, then-Vice President Biden and his son Hunter flew together to China on Air Force Two - and two weeks later, Hunter's Journalist Peter Schweizer, the author of Clinton Cash and now Secret Empires discovered that in 2013, then-Vice President Biden and his son Hunter flew together to China on Air Force Two - and two weeks later, Hunter's firm inked a private equity deal for $1 billion with a subsidiary of the Chinese government's Bank of China , which expanded to $1.5 billion

Meanwhile, speculation is rampant over what this hornet's nest means for all involved...

Dan Bongino ✔ @dbongino

The latest intell hit on Trump tells me that the deep-state swamp rats are in a panic over the Ukrainian/Obama admin collusion about to be outed in the IG report. They're also freaked out over Biden's shady Ukrainian deals with his kid.

blindfaith , 18 seconds ago link

Hunter's firm inked a private equity deal for $1 billion with a subsidiary of the Chinese government's Bank of China , which expanded to $1.5 billion

Lets clarify this a bit. The 1 billion came from the RED CHINESE ARMY, lets call spade a spade here. And why? To buy into (invest in ) DARPA related contractors. The RED CHINESE NAVY was so impressed with little sonny's performance (meaning daddy's help), that they handed over an additions 500,000.

Without daddy's influence as VICE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, and that FREE PLANE RIDE on Air Force TWO with daddy holding sonny's little hand, little sonny never would have gotten past the ticket booth.

n0vocaine , 24 seconds ago link

"House Democrats are also looking into whether Giuliani flew to Ukraine to 'encourage' them to investigate Hunter Biden and his involvement with Burisma."

LOL looking into someone looking into a crime that may have been committed by a Democrat... they're some big brained individuals these dummycrats.

Tom Angle , 1 minute ago link

Putting him in the hot seat would be to ask why he sponsored a coup and backed a neo Nazi party. When he starts to lie, put up images of the party he back wearing inverted Das Reich arm bands and flying flags. Now that would be real journalism.

TahoeBilly2012 , 2 minutes ago link

"Blame your enemies for your crimes"

Everybodys All American , 12 minutes ago link

It's awfully clear that the US department of justice is not going to do a damn thing about the Biden family's corruption.

NotGonnaTakeItAnymore , 13 minutes ago link

The Bidens show precisely that power corrupts. They both need to be investigated and then jailed. To the countries of the world that depend on the USA for any kind of help, they had to deal with Joe 'what's in-it-for-me' Biden? What a disgrace for America.

I think every sitting President, Vice President, senator, and representative needs a yearly lie-detector test that asks but one question: "did you do anything in your official duties that personally benefited you or your family?"

Didn't you ever wonder how so many senators and representatives end up multi-millionaires after a couple terms in office?

The EveryThing Bubble , 14 minutes ago link

Why the fuuk do we have have to put up with this jackass. All the talk on cable, etc, is all ********. Trump is a fuuking crook, and Barr is his bag man,. He has surrounded hinmself with toadies, cowards , incompetents and a trash family. Rise up, call your representatives, March on DC get this crook out of office.
Call anyone you can think of, challenge them to overcome their cowardice, including members of congress, cabinet, your governor

And finally Vote this bastard out in 2020

RozKo , 11 minutes ago link

Same could be said for the Democrats and all their Russian collusion lies and Beto wants to FORCE people to sell their weapons to the government, right.......

RabbitOne , 14 minutes ago link

" ...The complaint <against the president> involved communications with a foreign leader and a "promise" that Trump made, which was so alarming that a U.S. intelligence official <who monitored Trumps call> who had worked at the White House went to the inspector general of the intelligence community, two former U.S. officials said. ..."

What this tells:

1. If president Trump is monitored this way our spooks know the number of hairs in our crotches...

2. If we convicted on promises most in congress would be hung by the neck til dead for treason for not following the constitution...

turbojarhead , 58 seconds ago link

Anybody that thinks that Trump, having had Roy Cohn as his mentor, and working in cut-throat NY real estate for years, AND having dealt with political snakes for many years..would allow himself to be taped saying something on a call that he KNOWS the Intel Community is listening in, is not paying attention.

This will backfire on the Dems and the media. Trump set them all up again..

My guess is the Dems will be hounding the IC for the complaint, will call Barr and the DNI in an investigation ran live on CNN and MSNBC..that will show how corrupt Biden was. Everytime you hear Alexandra Chalupa's name come up, look for the MSM to go ballistic..she is the tell in this one also. It cannot be allowed for the plebes to find out how Manafort was setup, Ukraine assisted the DNC in the fake Russian election interference farce..hey, guess what, guess who is an ardent Ukraininan nationalist? The head of Crowdstrike. Chalupa and Alparovich, the names that will bring down more dirty Dems than anyone in history.

Gold Banit , 15 minutes ago link

I have a trick question for for all of the DemoRats posters here!

Who is your President and will be for the next 6 years?

Hint

It is not your Hillary or your Putin......Fact......LMFAO

schroedingersrat , 21 minutes ago link

For days we've been treated to MSM insinuations that President Trump may have betrayed the United States

Trump is a traitor, but he does not work for either Ukraine nor Russia but instead he works for Israel first and foremost! He even admits it himself. Lol he doesn't even give a shite when Israel taps his phone :)

blindfaith , 27 minutes ago link

House Democrats are also looking into whether Giuliani flew to Ukraine to 'encourage' them to investigate Hunter Biden and his involvement with Burisma.

This bunch of filthy swine should be looking up each others asses for answers. Actually the Ukrainians have been screaming for over a year at the DOJ and FBI to take the evidence they have. But the rotten to the core Democrat socialist lefties wanted to block it.

otschelnik , 25 minutes ago link

Six ways to Sunday. This is another **** bomb that'll blow up in the dimocrat's faces, it will take Biden down.

Warren = Trump 2020.

Ex-Kalifornian , 27 minutes ago link

This does nothing to Biden because he gets a free pass on corruption like every other dem.....

vasilievich , 27 minutes ago link

This is all beginning to read like one those Roman histories of the decay of the Empire.

[Sep 18, 2019] To End Endless Wars, We Must Give Up Hegemony by Daniel Larison

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... American war-making will persist so long as the United States continues to seek military dominance across the globe. ..."
"... A government that imagines that it has both the right and responsibility to police the entire planet will find an excuse to mire itself in one or more conflicts on a regular basis, and if there isn't one available to join it will start some ..."
"... U.S. military dominance should have at least guaranteed that we remained at peace once our major adversary had collapsed at the end of the Cold War, but the dissolution of the USSR encouraged the U.S. to become much more aggressive and much more eager to use force whenever and wherever it wanted. Wertheim provides an answer for why this is: ..."
"... Why have interventions proliferated as challengers have shrunk? The basic cause is America's infatuation with military force. Its political class imagines that force will advance any aim, limiting debate to what that aim should be. ..."
"... Using force appeals to many American leaders and policymakers because they imagine that frequent military action cows and intimidates adversaries, but in practice it creates more enemies and wastes American lives and resources on fruitless conflicts. ..."
"... The constant warfare of the last two decades in particular has corroded our political system and inured the public to the idea that it is normal that American soldiers and Marines are always fighting and dying in some foreign country in pursuit of nebulous goals, but nothing could be more abnormal and wrong than this. ..."
"... Our establishment would rather give up their skin. They don't call it hegemony, they call it the post ww2 order, leadership, resisting isolationism or some other such nonsense. ..."
"... any country that attempts to gain enough power to assert its own sovereignty is considered a threat that must be crushed and we roll out all of the tools at our disposal to do it. ..."
"... Al Qaeda's attack on us was due to us using them as a tool to stop Russia's push into Afghanistan. ..."
"... Good luck with that. We are ruled by people who are functionally indistinguishable from sociopaths, and sociopaths learn only from reward and punishment. ..."
"... I do not see a politically feasible way to end our global empire without destabilizing that same globe that has come to rely on our military power. ..."
"... Empires have a sort of inertia, and few in history voluntarily give up dominion. ..."
"... What is unsustainable is the current rate of government spending. The current rate of military spending is driving up our debt and making it impossible to reinvest in desperately needed infrastructure. ..."
"... We have been coasting on the infrastructure investments of the 50's and 60's but if we don't start cutting military spending and redirecting that money elsewhere we are going to be bankrupt. ..."
"... I agree that it is almost impossible to conceive of any scenario whereby this "ideology" of so-called world order and/ hegemony would change in the US and in its puppets. ..."
"... The deck is so totally stacked in favor of this ideology, the totally controlled MSM, the MIC, the corrupt and controlled congress, and the presidential admin structure itself, would never allow this mantra to be challenged. ..."
"... It is all about greed and power-the psychopaths pursuing and defending this 'ideology' would never ever go quietly. The money and power is too corrupting. ..."
"... I'm not sure that most of the citizens in those European countries we occupy actually support our permanent military presence in their countries. ..."
"... The new paradigm is that private militarism dominates government, turning it to its preferred priorities of moneymaking warmaking. ..."
Sep 16, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com
Stephen Wertheim explains what is required to bring an end to unnecessary and open-ended U.S. wars overseas:

American war-making will persist so long as the United States continues to seek military dominance across the globe. Dominance, assumed to ensure peace, in fact guarantees war. To get serious about stopping endless war, American leaders must do what they most resist: end America's commitment to armed supremacy and embrace a world of pluralism and peace.

Any government that presumes to be the world's hegemon will be fighting somewhere almost all of the time, because its political leaders will see everything around the world as their business and it will see every manageable threat as a challenge to their "leadership." A government that imagines that it has both the right and responsibility to police the entire planet will find an excuse to mire itself in one or more conflicts on a regular basis, and if there isn't one available to join it will start some.

U.S. military dominance should have at least guaranteed that we remained at peace once our major adversary had collapsed at the end of the Cold War, but the dissolution of the USSR encouraged the U.S. to become much more aggressive and much more eager to use force whenever and wherever it wanted. Wertheim provides an answer for why this is:

Why have interventions proliferated as challengers have shrunk? The basic cause is America's infatuation with military force. Its political class imagines that force will advance any aim, limiting debate to what that aim should be.

Using force appeals to many American leaders and policymakers because they imagine that frequent military action cows and intimidates adversaries, but in practice it creates more enemies and wastes American lives and resources on fruitless conflicts. Our government's frenetic interventionism and meddling for the last thirty years hasn't made our country the slightest bit more secure, but it has sown chaos and instability across at least two continents. Wertheim continues:

Continued gains by the Taliban, 18 years after the United States initially toppled it, suggest a different principle: The profligate deployment of force creates new and unnecessary objectives more than it realizes existing and worthy ones.

The constant warfare of the last two decades in particular has corroded our political system and inured the public to the idea that it is normal that American soldiers and Marines are always fighting and dying in some foreign country in pursuit of nebulous goals, but nothing could be more abnormal and wrong than this. Constant warfare achieves nothing except to provide an excuse for more of the same. The longer that a war drags on, one would think that it should become easier to bring it to an end, but we have seen that it becomes harder for both political and military leaders to give up on an unwinnable conflict when it has become an almost permanent part of our foreign policy. For many policymakers and pundits, what matters is that the U.S. not be perceived as losing, and so our military keeps fighting without an end in sight for the sake of this "not losing."

Wertheim adds:

Despite Mr. Trump's rhetoric about ending endless wars, the president insists that "our military dominance must be unquestioned" -- even though no one believes he has a strategy to use power or a theory to bring peace. Armed domination has become an end in itself.

Seeking to maintain this dominance is ultimately unsustainable, and as it becomes more expensive and less popular it will also become increasingly dangerous as we find ourselves confronted with even more capable adversaries. For the last thirty years, the U.S. has been fortunate to be secure and prosperous enough that it could indulge in decades of fruitless militarism, but that luck won't hold forever. It is far better if the U.S. give up on hegemony and the militarism that goes with it on our terms.

chris chuba • 2 days ago

Our establishment would rather give up their skin. They don't call it hegemony, they call it the post ww2 order, leadership, resisting isolationism or some other such nonsense.

Truth be told, as your article states, any country that attempts to gain enough power to assert its own sovereignty is considered a threat that must be crushed and we roll out all of the tools at our disposal to do it.

It makes us less safe. Isolationism did not cause 9/11. In the 90's when we were being attacked by Al Qaeda we were too distracted dancing on Russia's bones to pay any attention to them. While Al Qaeda was attacking our troops and blowing up our buildings we were bombing Serbia, expanding NATO and reelecting Yeltsin and sticking it to Iran.

IanDakar chris chuba • 16 hours ago
It goes beyond that. Al Qaeda's attack on us was due to us using them as a tool to stop Russia's push into Afghanistan. We later abandoned them when the job was done: a pack hound we trained, pushed to fight, then left in the forest abandoned and starved. Then we wonder why it came back growling.

Isolationism may not be the most effective solution to things, but I'll admit a LOT of pain, on ourselves and others, would've never happened if we took that policy.

Sid Finster • 2 days ago
Good luck with that. We are ruled by people who are functionally indistinguishable from sociopaths, and sociopaths learn only from reward and punishment.

So far, they only have been rewarded for their crimes.

Clyde Schechter • 2 days ago
While I think the economic basis of the Soviet Union was faulty, and it had lost the popular support it might have had in early days, the USSR's military aggression, particularly in Afghanistan, was a major precipitating factor in its downfall. It would have eventually crumbled, I believe, anyway, but had they taken a less aggressive stance I think they would have lasted several decades longer.
Sceptical Gorilla • 2 days ago
Is it really in our hands to actually disengage though? Is this politically feasible?

How does this work? The US gets up one day and says "We're pulling all of our troops out of Saudi and SK. No more funding for Israel! No bolstering the pencil-thin government of Afghanistan. All naval bases abroad will be shut down. Longstanding alliances and interests be damned!"

I sympathize very strongly with the notion that we must use military force wisely and with restraint, and perhaps even that the post-WW2 expansion abroad was a mistake, but I do not see a politically feasible way to end our global empire without destabilizing that same globe that has come to rely on our military power.

This is the world we live in, whether we like it or not, and barring some military or economic disaster that forces a strategic realignment or retreat (like WW2 did for the old European powers) I don't know how you practically pull back. Empires have a sort of inertia, and few in history voluntarily give up dominion.

Stumble Sceptical Gorilla • 2 days ago
What is unsustainable is the current rate of government spending. The current rate of military spending is driving up our debt and making it impossible to reinvest in desperately needed infrastructure.

We have been coasting on the infrastructure investments of the 50's and 60's but if we don't start cutting military spending and redirecting that money elsewhere we are going to be bankrupt.

Sid Finster Sceptical Gorilla • 2 days ago
The USA are the source of a lot of the world's instability.
Sceptical Gorilla Sid Finster • 2 days ago
Sure. That doesn't mean American withdrawal would create less instability in toto. Maybe it would. Who knows? We mortals can only take counterfactuals so far.
Mojrim ibn Harb Sceptical Gorilla • 2 days ago
Lovely strawman you have there...
Taras77 • 2 days ago
Excellent article, excellent skeptical comments below.

I agree that it is almost impossible to conceive of any scenario whereby this "ideology" of so-called world order and/ hegemony would change in the US and in its puppets.

The deck is so totally stacked in favor of this ideology, the totally controlled MSM, the MIC, the corrupt and controlled congress, and the presidential admin structure itself, would never allow this mantra to be challenged.

It is all about greed and power-the psychopaths pursuing and defending this 'ideology' would never ever go quietly. The money and power is too corrupting.

Maybe, just maybe, however, as we are at $22 trillion in debt and counting (just saw a total tab for F-35 of $1.5 trillion) that the money will run out, and zero interest rate financing is not all that awesome, this unsustainable mindlessness will be curtailed or even better, changed.

polistra24 • 2 days ago • edited
It's not really hegemony. Old-fashioned empires took over territory in order to gain resources and labor. We haven't done that since 1920. Especially since 1990 we've been making war purely to destroy and obliterate. When our war is done there's nothing left to dominate or own.

Domestically we've been using politics and media and controlled culture to do the same thing. Create "terrorists" and "extremists" on "two" "sides", set them loose, enjoy the resulting chaos. Chaos is the declared goal, and it's been working beautifully for 70 years.

China is expanding empire in Africa and Asia the old-fashioned way, improving farms and factories in order to have exclusive purchase of their output.

Mojrim ibn Harb polistra24 • 2 days ago
Join the liberal order or we'll wreck your country. That's hegemony.
Mark B. • 2 days ago
Could not have said it better. "On our terms" would mean that Europe is forced to take matters of military security in it's own hands, I hope. But chanches are slim, history shows empires must fall hard and break a leg or so first before anything changes. Iran, Saudi-arabia, the greater ME, China, the trade wars and the world economy are coming together for a perfect storm it seems.
James_R Mark B. • 2 days ago
"On our terms" would mean that Europe is forced to take matters of military security in it's own hands, I hope.".................

I'm not sure that most of the citizens in those European countries we occupy actually support our permanent military presence in their countries.

AllenQ • 2 days ago
The problem with US hegemony is Israel. Look around the world. Neither Japan nor South Korea nor Vietnam nor Philippines nor India nor Indonesia nor Australia (the same can be said for South and Central America, Mexico, Canada and Europe) require a significant US presence.

None of them are asking for a greater presence in their country (except Poland) while being perfectly happy with our alliance, joint defense, trade, intelligence and technology sharing.

It is only Israel and Saudi Arabia which are constantly pushing the US into middle eastern wars and quagmires that we have no national interest. Trump sees the plain truth that the US is in jeopardy of losing its manufacturing and its technological lead to China. If we (US) dont start to rebuild our infrastructure, our defense, our cities, our communities, our manufacturing, our educational system then our nation is going to follow California into a 3rd world totalitarian state dominated by democratic voting immigrants whose only affiliation to our country and our constitutional republic is a welfare check, free govt programs and incestuous govt contracts which funnel govt dollars into the re-election PACs of democratic / liberal elected officials.

Fran Macadam • 2 days ago
The new paradigm is that private militarism dominates government, turning it to its preferred priorities of moneymaking warmaking. Defeat is now when war's income streams end. The only wars that are lost, are those that end, defeating the winning of war profits. War, as a financial success story, has become an end in itself, and an empire that looks for more to wage means some mighty big wages with more profit opportunities. Victory is to be avoided - red ink being spilled through peace detestable - and blood spilled profitably to be encouraged.
Doom Incarnate • a day ago
Fighting is good for business, so the fighting will continue.

[Sep 17, 2019] The Devolution of US-Russia Relations by Tony Kevin

Highly recommended!
Sep 17, 2019 | consortiumnews.com

A retired Australian diplomat who served in Moscow dissects the emergence of the new Cold War and its dire consequences.

I n 2014, we saw violent U.S.-supported regime change and civil war in Ukraine. In February, after months of increasing tension from the anti-Russian protest movement's sitdown strike in Kiev's Maidan Square, there was a murderous clash between protesters and Ukrainian police, sparked off by hidden shooters (we now know that were expert Georgian snipers) , aiming at police. The elected government collapsed and President Yanukevich fled to Russia, pursued by murder squads.

The new Poroshenko government pledged harsh anti-Russian language laws. Rebels in two Russophone regions in Eastern Ukraine took local control, and appealed for Russian military help. In March, a referendum took place in Russian-speaking Crimea on leaving Ukraine, under Russian military protection. Crimeans voted overwhelmingly to join Russia, a request promptly granted by the Russian Parliament and President. Crimea's border with Ukraine was secured against saboteurs. Crimea is prospering under its pro-Russian government, with the economy kick-started by Russian transport infrastructure investment.

In April, Poroshenko ordered full military attack on the separatist provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk in Eastern Ukraine. A brutal civil war ensued, with aerial and artillery bombardment bringing massive civilian death and destruction to the separatist region. There was major refugee outflow into Russia and other parts of Ukraine. The shootdown of MH17 took place in July 2014.

Poroshenko: Ordered military attack.

By August 2015, according to UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs estimates, 13,000 people had been killed and 30,000 wounded. 1.4 million Ukrainians had been internally displaced, and 925,000 had fled to neighbouring countries, mostly Russia and to a lesser extent Poland.

There is now a military stalemate, under the stalled Minsk peace process. But random fatal clashes continue, with the Ukrainian Army mostly blamed by UN observers. The UN reported last month that the ongoing war has affected 5.2 million people, leaving 3.5 million of them in need of relief, including 500,000 children. Most Russians blame the West for fomenting Ukrainian enmity towards Russia. This war brings back for older Russians horrible memories of the Nazi invasion in 1941. The Russia-Ukraine border is only 550 kilometres from Moscow.

Flashpoint Syria

Russian forces joined the civil war in Syria in September 2015, at the request of the Syrian Government, faltering under the attacks of Islamist extremist rebel forces reinforced by foreign fighters and advanced weapons. With Russian air and ground support, the tide of war turned. Palmyra and Aleppo were recaptured in 2016. An alleged Syrian Government chemical attack at Khan Shaykhun in April 2017 resulted in a token U.S. missile attack on a Syrian Government airbase: an early decision by President Trump.

NATO, Strategic Balance, Sanctions

An F-15C Eagle from the 493rd Fighter Squadron takes off from Royal Air Force Lakenheath, England, March 6, 2014. The 48th Fighter Wing sent an additional six aircraft and more than 50 personnel to support NATO's air policing mission in Lithuania, at the request of U.S. allies in the Baltics. (U.S. Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. Emerson Nunez/Released)

Tensions have risen in the Baltic as NATO moves ground forces and battlefield missiles up to the Baltic states' borders with Russia. Both sides' naval and air forces play dangerous brinksmanship games in the Baltic. U.S. short-range, non-nuclear-armed anti-ballistic missiles were stationed in Poland and Romania, allegedly against threat of Iranian attack. They are easily convertible to nuclear-armed missiles aimed at nearby Russia.

Nuclear arms control talks have stalled. The INF intermediate nuclear forces treaty expired in 2019, after both sides accused the other of cheating. In March 2018, Putin announced that Russia has developed new types of intercontinental nuclear missiles using technologies that render U.S. defence systems useless. The West has pretended to ignore this announcement, but we can be sure Western defence ministries have noted it. Nuclear second-strike deterrence has returned, though most people in the West have forgotten what this means. Russians know exactly what it means.

Western economic sanctions against Russia continue to tighten after the 2014 events in Ukraine. The U.S. is still trying to block the nearly completed Nordstream Baltic Sea underwater gas pipeline from Russia to Germany. Sanctions are accelerating the division of the world into two trade and payments systems: the old NATO-led world, and the rest of the world led by China, with full Russian support and increasing interest from India, Japan, ROK and ASEAN.

Return to Moscow

In 2013, my children gave me an Ipad. I began to spend several hours a day reading well beyond traditional mainstream Western sources: British and American dissident sites, writers like Craig Murray in UK and in the U.S. Stephen Cohen, and some Russian sites – rt.com, Sputnik, TASS, and the official Foreign Ministry site mid.ru. in English.

In late 2015 I decided to visit Russia independently to write Return to Moscow , a literary travel memoir. I planned to compare my impressions of the Soviet Union, where I had lived and worked as an Australian diplomat in 1969-71, with Russia today. I knew there had been huge changes. I wanted to experience 'Putin's Russia' for myself, to see how it felt to be there as an anonymous visitor in the quiet winter season. I wanted to break out of the familiar one-dimensional hostile political view of Russia that Western mainstream media offer: to take my readers with me on a cultural pilgrimage through the tragedy and grandeur and inspiration of Russian history. As with my earlier book on Spain 'Walking the Camino' , this was not intended to be a political book, and yet somehow it became one.

I was still uncommitted on contemporary Russian politics before going to Russia in January 2016. Using the metaphor of a seesaw, I was still sitting somewhere around the middle.

My book was written in late 2015 – early 2016, expertly edited by UWA Publishing. It was launched in March 2017. By this time my political opinions had moved decisively to the Russian end of the seesaw, on the basis of what I had seen in Russia, and what I had read and thought during the year.

I have been back again twice, in winter 2018 and 2019. My 2018 visit included Crimea, and I happened to see a Navalny-led Sunday demonstration in Moscow. I thoroughly enjoyed all three independent visits: in my opinion, they give my judgements on Russia some depth and authenticity.

Russophobia Becomes Entrenched

Russia was a big talking point in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. As the initially unlikely Republican candidate Donald Trump's chances improved, anti-Putin and anti-Russian positions hardened in the outgoing Obama administration and in the Democratic Party establishment which backed candidate Hillary Clinton.

Russia and Putin became caught up in the Democratic Party's increasingly obsessive rage and hatred against the victorious Trump. Russophobia became entrenched in Washington and London U.S. and UK political and strategic elites, especially in intelligence circles: think of Pompeo, Brennan, Comey and Clapper. All sense of international protocol and diplomatic propriety towards Russia and its President was abandoned, as this appalling Economist cover from October 2016 shows.

My experience of undeclared political censorship in Australia since four months after publication of 'Return to Moscow' supports the thesis that:

We are now in the thick of a ruthless but mostly covert Anglo-American alliance information war against Russia. In this war, individuals who speak up publicly in the cause of detente with Russia will be discouraged from public discourse.

In the Thick of Information War

When I spoke to you two years ago, I had no idea how far-reaching and ruthless this information war is becoming. I knew that a false negative image of Russia was taking hold in the West, even as Russia was becoming a more admirable and self-confident civil society, moving forward towards greater democracy and higher living standards, while maintaining essential national security. I did not then know why, or how.

I had just had time to add a few final paragraphs in my book about the possible consequences for Russia-West relations of Trump's surprise election victory in November 2016. I was right to be cautious, because since Trump's inauguration we have seen the step-by-step elimination of any serious pro-detente voices in Washington, and the reassertion of control over this haphazard president by the bipartisan imperial U.S. deep state, as personified from April 2018 by Secretary of State Pompeo and National Security Adviser Bolton. Bolton has now been thrown from the sleigh as decoy for the wolves: under the smooth-talking Pompeo, the imperial policies remain.

Truth, Trust and False Narratives

Let me now turn to some theory about political reality and perception, and how national communities are persuaded to accept false narratives. Let me acknowledge my debt to the fearless and brilliant Australian independent online journalist, Caitlin Johnstone.

Behavioural scientists have worked in the field of what used to be called propaganda since WW1. England has always excelled in this field. Modern wars are won or lost not just on the battlefield, but in people's minds. Propaganda, or as we now call it information warfare, is as much about influencing people's beliefs within your own national community as it is about trying to demoralise and subvert the enemy population.

The IT revolution of the past few years has exponentially magnified the effectiveness of information warfare. Already in the 1940s, George Orwell understood how easily governments are able to control and shape public perceptions of reality and to suppress dissent. His brilliant books 1984 and Animal Farm are still instruction manuals in principles of information warfare. Their plots tell of the creation by the state of false narratives, with which to control their gullible populations.

The disillusioned Orwell wrote from his experience of real politics. As a volunteer fighter in the Spanish Civil War, he saw how both Spanish sides used false news and propaganda narratives to demonise the enemy. He also saw how the Nazi and Stalinist systems in Germany and Russia used propaganda to support show trials and purges, the concentration camps and the Gulag, anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, German master race and Stalinist class enemy ideologies; and hows dissident thought was suppressed in these controlled societies. Orwell tried to warn his readers: all this could happen here too, in our familiar old England. But because the good guys won the war against fascism, his warnings were ignored.

We are now in Britain, U.S. and Australia actually living in an information warfare world that has disturbing echoes of the world that Orwell wrote about. The essence of information control is the effective state management of two elements, trust and fear , to generate and uphold a particular view of truth. Truth, trust and fear : these are the three key elements, now as 100 years ago in WWI Britain.

People who work or have worked close to government – in departments, politics, the armed forces, or top universities – mostly accept whatever they understand at the time to be 'the government view' of truth. Whether for reasons of organisational loyalty, career prudence or intellectual inertia, it is usually this way around governments. It is why moral issues like the Vietnam War and the U.S.-led 2003 invasion of Iraq were so distressing for people of conscience working in or close to government and military jobs in Canberra. They were expected to engage in 'doublethink' as Orwell had described it:

Even in Winston's nightmare world, there were still choices – to retreat into the non-political world of the proles, or to think forbidden thoughts and read forbidden books. These choices involved large risks and punishments. It was easier and safer for most people to acquiesce in the fake news they were fed by state-controlled media.

'Trust, Truth and False Narratives'

Fairfax journalist Andrew Clark, in the Australian Financial Review , in an essay optimistically titled "Not fake news: Why truth and trust are still in good shape in Australia", (AFR Dec. 22, 2018), cited Professor William Davies thus:

"Most of the time, the edifice that we refer to as "truth" is really an investment of trust in our structures of politics and public life' 'When trust sinks below a certain point, many people come to view the entire spectacle of politics and public life as a sham."

Here is my main point: Effective information warfare requires the creation of enough public trust to make the public believe that state-supported lies are true.

The key tools are repetition of messages, and diversification of trusted voices. Once a critical mass is created of people believing a false narrative, the lie locks in: its dissemination becomes self-sustaining.

Caitlin Johnstone a few days ago put it this way:

" Power is being able to control what happens. Absolute power is being able to control what people think about what happens. If you can control what happens, you can have power until the public gets sick of your BS and tosses you out on your ass. If you can control what people think about what happens, you can have power forever. As long as you can control how people are interpreting circumstances and events, there's no limit to the evils you can get away with."

The Internet has made propaganda campaigns that used to take weeks or months a matter of hours or even minutes to accomplish. It is about getting in quickly, using large enough clusters of trusted and diverse sources, in order to cement lies in place, to make the lies seem true, to magnify them through social messaging: in other words, to create credible false narratives that will quickly get into the public's bloodstream.

Over the past two years, I have seen this work many times: on issues like framing Russia for the MH17 tragedy; with false allegations of Assad mounting poison gas attacks in Syria; with false allegations of Russian agents using lethal Novichok to try to kill the Skripals in Salisbury; and with the multiple lies of Russiagate.

It is the mind-numbing effect of constant repetition of disinformation by many eminent people and agencies, in hitherto trusted channels like the BBC or ABC or liberal Anglophone print media that gives the system its power to persuade the credulous. For if so many diverse and reputable people repeatedly report such negative news and express such negative judgements about Russia or China or Iran or Syria, surely they must be right?

We have become used to reading in our quality newspapers and hearing on the BBC and ABC and SBS gross assaults on truth, calmly presented as accepted facts. There is no real public debate on important facts in contention any more. There are no venues for dissent outside contrarian social media sites.

Sometimes, false narratives inter-connect. Often a disinformation narrative in one area is used to influence perceptions in other areas. For example, the false Skripals poisoning story was launched by British intelligence in March 2018, just in time to frame Syrian President Assad as the guilty party in a faked chemical weapons attack in Douma the following month.

The Skripals Gambit

The Skripals gambit was also a failed British attempt to blight the Russia –hosted Football World Cup in June 2018. In the event, hundreds of thousands of Western sports fans returned home with the warmest memories of Russian good sportsmanship and hospitality.

How do I know the British Skripals narrative is false? For a start, it is illogical, incoherent, and constantly changes. Allegedly, two visiting Russian FSB agents in March 2018 sprayed or smeared Novichok, a deadly toxin instantly lethal in the most microscopic quantities, on the Skripals' house front doorknob. There is no video footage of the Skripals at their front door on the day. We are told they were found slumped on a park bench, and that is maybe where they had been sprayed with nerve gas? Shortly afterwards, Britain's Head of Army Nursing who happened to be passing by found them, and supervised their hospitalisation and emergency treatment.

Allegedly, much of Salisbury was contaminated by Novichok, and one unfortunate woman mysteriously died weeks later, yet the Skripals somehow did not die, as we are told. But where are they now? We saw a healthy Yulia in a carefully scripted video interview released in May 2018, after an alleged 'one in a million' recovery. We were assured her father had recovered too, but nobody has seen him at all. The Skripals have simply disappeared from sight since 16 months ago. Are they now alive or dead? Are they in voluntary or involuntary British custody?

A month after the poisoning, the UK Government sent biological samples from the Skripals to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons , for testing. The OPCW sent the samples to a trusted OPCW laboratory in Spiez, Switzerland.

Lavrov Spiez BZ claims, April 2018

A few days later, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov dramatically announced in Moscow that the Spiez lab had found in the samples a temporary-effect nerve agent BZ, used by U.S. and UK but not by Russia, that would have disabled the Skripals for a few days without killing them. He also revealed the Spiez lab had found that the Skripal samples had been twice tampered with while still in UK custody: first soon after the poisoning, and again shortly before passing them to the OPCW. He said the Spiez lab had found a high concentration of Novichok, which he called A- 234, in its original form. This was extremely suspicious as A-234 has high volatility and could not have retained its purity over a two weeks period. The dosage the Spiez lab found in the samples would have surely killed the Skripals. The OPCW under British pressure rejected Lavrov's claim, and suppressed the Spiez lab report.

Let's look finally at the alleged assassins.

'Boshirov and Petrov'

These two FSB operatives who visited Salisbury under the false identities of 'Boshirov' and 'Petrov' did not look or behave like credible assassins. It is more likely that they were sent to negotiate with Sergey Skripal about his rumoured interest in returning to Russia. They needed to apply for UK visas a month in advance of travel: ample time for the British agencies to identify them as FSB operatives, and to construct a false attempted assassination narrative around their visit. This false narrative repeatedly trips over its own lies and contradictions. British social media are full of alternative theories and rebuttals. Russians find the whole British Government Skripal narrative laughable. They have invented comedy skits and video games based on it. Yet it had major impact on Russia-West relations.

The Douma False Narrative

I turn now to the claimed Assad chemical weapons attack in Douma in April 2018.This falsely alleged attack triggered a major NATO air attack on Syrian targets, ordered by Trump. We came close to WWIII in these dangerous days. Thanks to the restraint of the then Secretary of Defence James Mattis and his Russian counterparts, the risk was contained.

The allegation that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad had used outlawed chemical weapons against his own people was based solely on the evidence of faked video images of child victims, made by the discredited White Helmets, a UK-sponsored rebel-linked 'humanitarian' propaganda organisation with much blood on its hands. Founded in 2013 by a British private security specialist of intelligence background, James Le Mesurier, the White Helmets specialised in making fake videos of alleged Assad regime war crimes against Syrian civilians. It is by now a thoroughly discredited organisation that was prepared to kill its prisoners and then film their bodies as alleged victims of government chemical attacks.

White Helmets

As the town of Douma was about to fall to advancing Syrian Government forces, the White Helmets filled a room with stacked corpses of murdered prisoners, and photographed them as alleged victims of aerial gas attack. They also made a video alleging child victims of this attack being hosed down by White Helmets. A video of a child named Hassan Diab went viral all over the Western world.

Hassan Diab later testified publicly in The Hague that he had been dragged terrified from his family by force, smeared with some sort of grease, and hosed down with water as part of a fake video. He went from hero to zero overnight, as Western governments and media rejected his testimony as Russian and Syrian propaganda.

In a late development, there is proof that the OPCW suppressed its own engineers' report from Douma that the alleged poison gas cylinders could not have possibly been dropped from the air through the roof of the house where one was found, resting on a bed under a convenient hole in the roof.

I could go on discussing the detail of such false narratives all day. No matter how often they are exposed by critics, our politicians and mainstream media go on referencing them as if they are true. Once people have come to believe false narratives, it is hard to refute them.

So it is with the false narrative that Russian internet interference enabled Trump to win the 2016 U.S. presidential elections: a thesis for which no evidence was found by [Special Counsel Robert] Mueller, yet continues to be cited by many U.S. liberal Democratic media as if it were true. So, even, with MH17.

Managing Mass Opinion

This mounting climate of Western Russophobia is not accidental: it is strategically directed, and it is nourished with regular maintenance doses of fresh lies. Each round of lies provides a credible platform for the next round somewhere else. The common thread is a claimed malign Russian origin for whatever goes wrong.

So where is all this disinformation originating? Information technology firms in Washington and London that are closely networked into government elites, often through attending the same establishment schools or colleges like Eton and Yale, have closely studied and tested the science of influencing crowd opinions through mainstream media and online. They know, in a way that Orwell or Goebbels could hardly have dreamt, how to put out and repeat desired media messages. They know what sizes of 'internet attraction nodes' need to be established online, in order to create diverse critical masses of credible Russophobic messaging, which then attracts enough credulous and loyal followers to become self-propagating.

Firms like the SCL Group (formerly Strategic Communication Laboratories) and the now defunct Cambridge Analytica pioneered such work in the UK. There are many similar firms in Washington, all in the business of monitoring, generating and managing mass opinion. It is big business, and it works closely with the national security state.

Starting in November 2018, an enterprising group of unknown hackers in the UK , who go by the name 'Anonymous', opened a remarkable window into this secret world. Over a few weeks, they hacked and dumped online a huge volume of original documents issued by and detailing the activities of the Institute for Statecraft (IfS) and the Integrity initiative (II). Here is the first page of one of their dumps, exposing propaganda against Jeremy Corbyn.

We know from this material that the IfS and II are two secret British disinformation networks operating at arms' length from but funded by the UK security services and broader UK government establishment. They bring together high-ranking military and intelligence personnel, often nominally retired, journalists and academics, to produce and disseminate propaganda that serves the agendas of the UK and its allies.

Stung by these massive leaks, Chris Donnelly, a key figure in IfS and II and a former British Army intelligence officer, made a now famous seven-minute YouTube video in December 2018, artfully filmed in a London kitchen, defending their work.

He argued – quite unconvincingly in my opinion – that IfS and II are simply defending Western societies against disinformation and malign influence, primarily from Russia. He boasted how they have set up in numerous targeted European countries, claimed to be under attack from Russian disinformation, what he called 'clusters of influence' , to 'educate' public opinion and decision-makers in pro-NATO and anti-Russian directions.

Donnelly spoke frankly on how the West is already at war with Russia, a 'new kind of warfare', in which he said 'everything becomes a weapon'. He said that 'disinformation is the issue which unites all the other weapons in this conflict and gives them a third dimension'.

He said the West has to fight back, if it is to defend itself and to prevail.

We can confirm from the Anonymous leaked files the names of many people in Europe being recruited into these clusters of influence. They tend to be significant people in journalism, publishing, universities and foreign policy think-tanks: opinion-shapers. The leaked documents suggest how ideologically suitable candidates are identified: approached for initial screening interviews; and, if invited to join a cluster of influence, sworn to secrecy.

Remarkably, neither the Anonymous disclosures nor the Donnelly response have ever been reported in Australian media. Even in Britain – where evidence that the Integrity Initiative was mounting a campaign against [Labour leader] Jeremy Corbyn provoked brief media interest. The story quickly disappeared from mainstream media and the BBC. A British under-foreign secretary admitted in Parliamentary Estimates that the UK Foreign Office subsidises the Institute of Statecraft to the tune of nearly 3 million pounds per year. It also gives various other kinds of non-monetary assistance, e.g. providing personnel and office support in Britain's overseas embassies.

This is not about traditional spying or seeking agents of influence close to governments. It is about generating mass disinformation, in order to create mass climates of belief.

In my opinion, such British and American disinformation efforts, using undeclared clusters of influence, through Five Eyes intelligence-sharing, and possibly with the help of British and American diplomatic missions, may have been in operation in Australia for many years.

Such networks may have been used against me since around mid-2017, to limit the commercial outreach of my book and the impact of its dangerous ideas on the need for East-West detente; and efficiently to suppress my voice in Australian public discourse about Russia and the West. Do I have evidence for this? Yes.

It is not coincidence that the Melbourne Writers Festival in August 2017 somehow lost all my sign-and-sell books from my sold-out scheduled speaking event; that a major debate with [Australian writer and foreign policy analyst] Bobo Lo at the Wheeler Centre in Melbourne was cancelled by his Australian sponsor, the Lowy institute, two weeks before the advertised date; that my last invitation to any writers festival was 15 months ago, in May 2018; that Return to Moscow was not shortlisted for any Australian book prize, though I entered it in all of them ; that since my book's early promotion ended around August 2017, I have not been invited to join any ABC discussion panels, or to give any talks on Russia in any universities or institutes, apart from the admirable Australian Institute of International Affairs and the ISAA.

My articles and shorter opinion commentaries on Russia and the West have not been published in mainstream media or in reputable online journals like Eureka Street, The Conversation, Inside Story or Australian Book Review . Despite being an ANU Emeritus Fellow, I have not been invited to give a public talk or join any panel in ANU (Australian National University) or any Canberra think tank. In early 2018, I was invited to give a private briefing to a group of senior students travelling on an immersion course to Russia. I was not invited back in 2019, after high-level private advice within ANU that I was regarded as too pro-Putin.

In all these ways – none overt or acknowledged – my voice as an open-minded writer and speaker on Russia-West relations seems to have been quietly but effectively suppressed in Australia. I would like to be proved wrong on this, but the evidence is there.

This may be about "velvet-glove deterrence" of my Russia-sympathetic voice and pen, in order to discourage others, especially those working in or close to government. Nobody is going to put me in jail, unless I am stupid enough to violate Australia's now strict foreign influence laws. This deterrence is about generating fear of consequences for people still in their careers, paying their mortgages, putting kids through school. Nobody wants to miss their next promotion.

There are other indications that Australian national security elite opinion has been indoctrinated prudently to fear and avoid any kind of public discussion of positive engagement with Russia (or indeed, with China).

There are only two kinds of news about Russia now permitted in our mainstream media, including the ABC and SBS: negative news and comment, or silence. Unless a story can be given an anti-Russian sting, it will not be carried at all. Important stories are simply spiked, like last week's Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivistok, chaired by President Putin and attended by Prime Ministers Abe, Mahathir and Modi, among 8500 participants from 65 countries.

The ABC idea of a balanced panel to discuss any Russian political topic was exemplified in an ABC Sunday Extra Roundtable panel chaired by Eleanor Hall on July, 22 2018, soon after the Trump-Putin Summit in Helsinki. The panel – a former ONA Russia analyst, a professor of Soviet and Russian History at Melbourne University, and a Russian émigré dissident journalist introduced as the 'Washington correspondent for Echo of Moscow radio' spent most of their time sneering at Putin and Trump. There were no other views.

A powerful anti-Russian news narrative is now firmly in place in Australia, on every topic in contention: Ukraine, MH17, Crimea, Syria, the Skripals, Navalny and public protest in Russia. There is ill-informed criticism of Russia, or silence, on the crucial issues of arms control and Russia-China strategic and economic relations as they affect Australia's national security or economy. There is no analysis of the negative impact on Australia of economic sanctions against Russia. There is almost no discussion of how improved relations with China and Russia might contribute to Australia's national security and economic welfare, as American influence in the world and our region declines, and as American reliability as an ally comes more into question. Silence on inconvenient truths is an important part of the disinformation tool kit.

I see two overall conflicting narratives – the prevailing Anglo-American false narrative; and valiant efforts by small groups of dissenters, drawing on sources outside the Anglo-American official narrative, to present another narrative much closer to truth. And this is how most Russians now see it too.

The Trump-Putin summit in Helsinki in July 2018 was damaged by the Skripal and Syria fabrications. Trump left that summit friendless, frightened and humiliated. He soon surrendered to the power of the U.S. imperial state as then represented by [Mike] Pompeo and [John] Bolton, who had both been appointed as Secretary of State and National Security Adviser in April 2018 and who really got into their stride after the Helsinki Summit. Pompeo now smoothly dominates Trump's foreign policy.

Self-Inflicted Wounds

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo (Gage Skidmore)

Finally, let me review the American political casualties over the past two years – self-inflicted wounds – arising from this secret information war against Russia. Let me list them without prejudging guilt or innocence. Slide 20 – Self-inflicted wounds: casualties of anti-Russian information warfare.

Trump's first National Security Adviser, the highly decorated Michael Flynn lost his job after only three weeks, and soon went to jail. His successor H R McMaster lasted 13 months until replaced by John Bolton. Trump's first Secretary of State Rex Tillerson lasted just 14 months until his replacement by Trump's appointed CIA chief (in January 2017) Mike Pompeo. Trump's chief strategist Steve Bannon lasted only seven months. Trump's former campaign chairman Paul Manafort is now in jail.

Defence Secretary James Mattis lasted nearly two years as Secretary of Defence, and was an invaluable source of strategic stability. He resigned in December 2018. The highly capable Ambassador to Russia Jon Huntsman lasted just two years: he is resigning next month. John Kelly lasted 18 months as White House Chief of Staff. Less senior figures like George Papadopoulos and Trump's former lawyer Michael Cohen both served jail time. The pattern I see here is that people who may have been trying responsibly as senior U.S. officials to advance Trump's initial wish to explore possibilities for detente with Russia – policies that he had advocated as a candidate – were progressively purged, one after another . The anti-Russian U.S. bipartisan imperial state is now firmly back in control. Trump is safely contained as far as Russia is concerned .

Russians do not believe that any serious detente or arms control negotiations can get under way while cold warriors like Pompeo continue effectively to control Trump. There have been other casualties over the past two years of tightening American Russophobia. Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning come to mind. The naive Maria Butina is a pathetic victim of American judicial rigidity and deep state vindictiveness.

False anti-Russian Government narratives emanating from London and Washington may be laughed at in Moscow , but they are unquestioningly accepted in Canberra. We are the most gullible of audiences. There is no critical review. Important contrary factual information and analysis from and about Russia just does not reach Australian news reporting and commentary, nor – I fear – Australian intelligence assessment. We are prisoners of the false narratives fed to us by our senior Five Eyes partners U.S. and UK.

To conclude: Some people may find what I am saying today difficult to accept. I understand this. I now work off open-source information about Russia with which many people here are unfamiliar, because they prefer not to read the diverse online information sources that I choose to read. The seesaw has tilted for me: I have clearly moved a long way from mainstream Western perceptions on Russia-West relations.

Under Trump and Pompeo, as the Syria and Iran crises show, the present risk of global nuclear war by accident or incompetent Western decision-making is as high as it ever was in the Cold War. The West needs to learn again how to dialogue usefully and in mutually respectful ways with Russia and China. This expert knowledge is dying with our older and wiser former public servants and ex-military chiefs.

These remarks were delivered by Tony Kevin at the Independent Scholars Association of Australia in Canberra, Australia on Wednesday.

Watch Tony Kevin interviewed Friday night on CN Live!

Tony Kevin is a retired Australian diplomat who was posted to Moscow from 1969 to 1971, and was later Australia's ambassador to Poland and Cambodia. His latest book is Return to Moscow, published by UWA Publishing.

Bruce , September 17, 2019 at 08:58

Excellent article. It's very interesting to see how the state and its media lackey set the narrative.

Most of this comment relates to the Skripals but also applies to other matters (the Skripals writing was some of Craig Murray's finest work in my opinion). One of the hallmarks of a hoax is a constantly evolving storyline. I think governments have learned from past "mistakes" with their hoaxes/deception where they've given a description of events and then scientists/engineers/chemists etc have come in and criticised their version of events with details and scientific arguments. Nowadays, governments are very reluctant to commit to a version of events, and instead rely on the media (their propaganda assets) to provide a scattergun set of information to muddy the waters and thoroughly confuse the population. The government is then insulated from some of the more bizarre allegations (the headlines of which are absorbed nonetheless), and can blame it on the media (who would use an anonymous government source naturally). Together with classifying just about everything on national security grounds, they can stonewall for as long as they want.

The British are masters of propaganda. They maintained a global empire for a very long time, and the prevailing view (in the west at least) was probably one of tea-drinking cricket playing colonials/gentlemen. But you don't maintain an empire without being absolutely ruthless and brutal. They've been doing this for a very long time.

When we hear something from the BBC or ABC, we should think "State Media".
That's probably why its got a nice folksy nickname of "aunty" .build up the trust.

Leslie Louis , September 17, 2019 at 04:00

Society is suffering the extreme paradox; there is the potential for everyone to have a voice, but the last vestiges of free speech have been whittled away. Fake news is universal, assisted by the fake "left". It is impossible to get published any challenge to even the most outlandish versions of identity politics. As the experience of Tony Kevin exemplifies, all avenues for dissent against hegemonic orthodoxies are closed off.
Disinformation is now an essential weapon in waging hot and cold wars. Cold War historians are well informed on false flags, "black ops", and other organised dirty tactics. I do not know what happened to the Skripals, and while it is legitimate to bear in mind KGB assassinations, despite the enormous resources at its disposal, the English security state has been unable to construct a credible case. Surely scepticism is provoked by the leading role being played by the notorious Bellingcat outfit.

Zenobia van Dongen , September 17, 2019 at 00:29

Here is part of an eyewitness account:
"After the Orange Revolution which began in Kiev, the country was divided literally into two parts -- the supporters of integration with Russia and the supporters of an independent Ukraine. For almost 100 years belonging to the Soviet Union, the propaganda about the assistance and care from our "big brother" Russia, in Ukraine as a whole and the Donbass in particular has borne fruit. At the end of February 2014, some cities of the Southeast part were boiling with mass social and political protest against the new Ukrainian government in defense of the status of the Russian language, voicing separatist and pro-Russian slogans. The division took place in our city of Sloviansk too. Some people stood for separation from Ukraine, while Ukrainian patriots stood for the unity of our country.
On April 12, 2014 our city of Sloviansk in the Donetsk region was seized by Russian mercenaries and local volunteers. From that moment onward, armed assaults on state institutions began. The city police department, the Sloviansk City Hall, the building of the Ukraine Security Service was occupied. Armed militants seized state institutions and confiscated private property. They threatened and beat people, and those who refused to obey were taken away to an unknown destination and people started disappearing. The persecution and abduction of patriotic citizens began."

Michael McNulty , September 16, 2019 at 11:36

Watching Vietnam news coverage as a kid in the '60s I noticed the planes carpet-bombing South East Asia were American, not Russian. And as I only watched the footage and never listened to the commentary (I was waiting for the kids programs that followed) the BS they came out with to explain it all never reached me. I saw with my own eyes what the US really was and is, and always believed growing up they were the belligerent side not Russia. Once the USSR fell it was clear there were no longer any constraints on US excesses.

dean 1000 , September 15, 2019 at 18:17

Doublethink, not to mention doublespeak, is so apt to describe what is happening. If Orwell was writing today it would have to be classified as non-fiction.

Free speech is impossible unless every election district has a radio/TV station where candidates, constituents, and others can debate, discuss and speak to the issues without bending a knee to large campaign contributors or the controllers of corporate or government media. It may start with low-power pirate radio/TV broadcasts. No, the pirate speakers will not have to climb a cell tower to broadcast an opinion to the neighborhood or precinct.
If genuine free speech is going to exist it will start as something unauthorized and unlawful. If it sticks to the facts it will quickly prove its value.

Download a free pdf copy of '1984.' https://www.planetebook.com/free-ebooks/1984.pdf

Njegos , September 15, 2019 at 03:39

Excellent article. The only exhibit missing was reference to Bill Browder's lies. Browder's rubbish has been exposed by intrepid journalists and documentary makers such as Andrei Nekrasov, Sasha Krainer and Lucy Komisar but to read or listen to our media, you'd think BB was some sort of human rights hero. That's because BB's fairy tale fits nicely into the MSM's hatred of Putin and Russia. Debunk Browder and a major pillar of anti-Russia prejudice collapses. Therefore, Browder will never face any serious questions by the MSM.

John A , September 16, 2019 at 09:18

judges of the European Court of Human Rights published a judgement a fortnight ago which utterly exploded the version of events promulgated by Western governments and media in the case of the late Mr Magnitskiy. Yet I can find no truthful report of the judgement in the mainstream media at all.
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2019/09/the-magnitskiy-myth-exploded/

MSM propaganda by omission. Anything that doesn't fit the government narrative gets zero publicity.

Jim Ingram , September 14, 2019 at 21:12

Well said and needing to be said Tony.

Mr. Dan , September 14, 2019 at 19:41

I have stopped following australian mainstream media including the darlings of the 'left' ABC/SBS over a decade ago, completely. My disgust with their 'coverage' of the 2008 GFC was more than enough. Since 2008-9 things have deteriorated drastically into conspiracy theory propaganda by omission la-la land *it seems*, given I don't tune in at all.

The author has a well supported view. I find it a little naive in him thinking that the MSM has that much power over shaping public opinion in australia.

People who want to be informed do so. The half intelligent conformists on hamster wheel of lifetime mortgage debt have 'careers' to hold onto, so parroting the group think or living in ignorance is much easier. The massive portion of australian racists, inbred bogans and idiots that make up the large LNP, One Nation etc. voting block are completely beyond salvation or ability to process, and critically evaluate any information. The smarter ones drool on about the 'UN Agenda 21' conspiracy at best. Utterly hopeless.

I don't expect things to change as the australian economy is slowly hollowed out by the rich, and the education system (that has always been about conforming, wearing school uniform and regurgitating what the teacher/lecturer says at best) is gutted completely. Welcome to australistan.

Fran Macadam , September 14, 2019 at 19:21

Note that the prohibition against false propaganda to indoctrinate the domestic population by the American government was lifted by President Obama at the tail end of his administration. The Executive Order legalizes all the deceptive behavior Tony itemizes in his article.

Josep , September 17, 2019 at 04:10

I thought it was Reagan who did that by abolishing the Fairness Doctrine in 1987. At least in terms of television and radio (?) broadcasts.

Stephen Morrell , September 14, 2019 at 19:02

Thank you Tony for your thoughtful talk (and interview on CN Live! too).

What's encouraging is this cohort of what might be called 'millennial journalists' coming through willing to do 'shoe-leather' journalism and stand up to smears and flack for revealing uncomfortable facts and truth. They're the online 5th estate holding the 4th to account (to steal Ray McGovern's apt view), and they're congealing against the onslaught.

Some include Max Blumenthal and Rania Kahlek (both now being pilloried by MSM and others for visiting Syrian government held areas and reporting that life isn't hellish as MSM would have everyone believe heaven forbid); Vanessa Bealey who's exposed a lot of White Helmet horrors and false-flag attacks in Syria (and being attacked by all and sundry for exposing the White Helmets in particular); Abby Martin whose Empire Files are excellent and always edifying; Dan Cohen who has written the best expose of the actors behind the Hong Kong rioting and co-authored the best expose of the background of Guaido et al.; Whitney Webb of Mint Press whose series on Epstein is overwhelming and likely a ticking timebomb; Caitlin Johnstone of course; and Aaron 'Buzzsaw' Mate who made his first mark with a wonderful takedown interview of Russiaphobe MI6 shill Luke Harding. Others too of course, with most appearing or having written pieces on CN. John Pilger, Robert Fisk, Greg Palast, et al. won't drop off their twigs disappointed.

This, along with the fact that MSM -- that cowed and compromised fourth estate -- increasingly is held in such laughable contempt by most people under about 50 yr, is highly encouraging indeed. Truth is the new black.

nwwoods , September 15, 2019 at 11:49

The Blogmire is an excellent resource for detailed analysis of the Skripal hoax. The author happens to be a long-time resident of Salisbury, and is intimately familiar with the topography, public services, etc., and a very thorough investigator.

John Wright , September 14, 2019 at 18:35

I'm not surprised that Mr. Kevin is being isolated and shunned by the Australian establishment. Truth and truth tellers are always the first casualties of war. I do hope that his experience will encourage him to increase his resistance to the corrosiveness of mendacious propaganda and those who promulgate it.

Truth is the single best weapon when fighting for a peaceful future.

If Australia is to flourish in the 21st century, it really needs to understand Russia and China, how they relate to each other, and how this key alliance will interface with the rest of the world. Australia and Australians simply cannot afford to get sucked down further by facilitating the machinations of the collapsing Anglo-American Empire. They have served the empire ably and faithfully, but now need to take a cold hard look at reality and realign their long-term interests with the coming global power shift. If not, they could literally find themselves in the middle of an unwinnable and devastating war.

* * *

The first Anglo-American Russian cold war began with the Russian revolution and was only briefly suspended when the West needed the Soviet people to throw themselves in front of the Nazi blitzkrieg in order to save Western Europe. Following their catastrophically costly contribution to the victory on the Continent, the Russians were greeted with an American nuclear salute on their eastern periphery, signalling their return to the diplomatic and economic deep freeze.

While the Anglo-American Empire solidified and extended its hold on the globe, the enlarged but war-ravaged and isolated Soviet Union hunkered down and survived on scraps and sheer will until its collapse in 1989. Declaring the cold war over, and with promises to help their new Russian friends build a prosperous future, the duplicitous West then ransacked their neighbors resources and sold them into debt peonage. The Russians cried foul, the West shrugged and Putin pushed back. Unable to declaw the bear, the west closed the cage door again and the second cold war commenced.

* * *

The first cold war was essentially an offensive war disguised as a defensive war. It enabled the Anglo-American Empire to leverage its post-war advantage and establish near total dominance around the globe through naked violence and monetary hegemony.

Today, with its dominance rapidly slipping away, the Anglo-American Empire is waging a truly defensive cold war. On the home front, they fight to convince their subjects of their eternal exceptionalism with ever more absurd and vile propaganda denigrating their adversaries . Abroad, they disrupt and defraud in a desperate attempt to delay the demise of the PetroDollar ponzi.

The Russians and the Chinese, having both been brutally burned by the Western elites, will not be fooled into abandoning their natural geographic partnership. They are no longer content to sit quietly at the kids' table taking notes. While they may not demand to sit at the head of the table, it is clear that they will insist on a round table, and one that is large enough to include their growing list of friends.

If the Americans don't smash the table, it could be the first of many peaceful pot lucks.

John Read , September 15, 2019 at 02:11

Well said. Great comments. Thanks to Tony Kevin.

Mia , September 14, 2019 at 18:33

Thank you Tony for continuing to shine light on the pathetic propaganda information bubble Australians have been immersed in .. you demonstrate great courage and you are not alone ??

Peter Loeb , September 14, 2019 at 12:58

WITH THANKS TO TONY KEVIN

An excellent article.

There is a lack of comments from some of the common writers upon whose views I often rely.

Personally, I often avoid the very individual responses from websites as I have no way
of checking out previous ideas of theirs. Who funds them? With which organizations are they
affiliated? And so forth and so on.

Peter Loeb, Boston, Massachusetts

Peter Sapo , September 14, 2019 at 10:24

As a fellow Australian, everything Tony Kevin said makes perfect sense. Our mainstream media landscape is designed to distribute propaganda to folk accross the political spectrum. Have you noticed that the ABC regurgitates stories from the BBC? The BBC has a long history (at least since WW2) of supporting government propaganda initiatives. Based on this fact, it is hard to see how ABC and SBS don't do the same when called upon by their minders.

Francis Lee , September 14, 2019 at 09:48

I just wonder where the Anglo-Zionist empire thinks it is going. It should be obvious that any NATO war against Russia involving a nuclear exchange is unwinnable. It seems equally likely the even a conventional war will not necessarily bring the result expected by the assorted 'experts' – nincompoops living in their own fantasy world. The idea that the US can fight a war without the US homeland becoming very much involved basically ended when Putin announced the creation of Russia's set of advanced hypersonic missile system. But this was apparently ignored by the 'defence' establishment. It was not true, it could not possibly be true, or so we were told.

Moreover the cost of such wars involving hundreds of thousands of troops and military hardware are massively expensive and would occasion a massive resistance from the populations affected. It was the wests wars in Korea, and Indo-China that bankrupted the US and led to the US$ being removed from the gold standard. The American military is rapidly consuming the American economy, or at least what is left of it. From a realist foreign policy perspective this is simply madness. Great powers end wars, they don't start them. Great powers are creditor nations, not debtor nations. Such is the realist foreign policy view. But foreign policy realists are few and far between in the Washington Beltway and MIC/NSA Pentagon and US/UK/AUSTRALIAN MSM.

Thus the neo-hubris of the English speaking world is such that if it is followed to its logical conclusion then total annihilation would be the logical outcome. A sad example of not very bright people who face no domestic opposition, believing in their own bullshit:

"American elites proved themselves to be master manipulators of propaganda constructs But the real danger from such manipulations arises not when those manipulations are done out of knowledge of reality, which is distorted for propaganda purposes, but when those who manipulation begin to sincerely believe in their own falsifications and when they buy into their own narrative. They stop being manipulators and they become believers in a narrative. They become manipulated themselves." (Losing Military Supremacy – Andrei, Martyanov)

Or maybe just the whole thing is a bluff. Those policy elites maybe just want to loot the US Treasury for more cash to be put their way.

John Wright , September 15, 2019 at 19:15

The self-serving Israeli Zionists know that the American cow is running dry and their days of freely milking it are coming to an end. They have an historic relationship with Russia and, leveraging their nuclear arsenal, know they can make a deal with the emerging China-Russia-centric global paradigm to extort enough protection to maintain their armed enclave for the foreseeable future. Their no so hidden alliance with the equally sociopathic Saudis will become even more obvious for all to see.

Israel, like China and Russia, knows how to play a long game. Thus, Israel will consolidate its land grab with the just announced expansion into the Jordan Valley and quietly continue as much ethnic cleansing as possible while the rest of the world is preoccupied with the incipient global power shift (True victims of history, the Palestinians have no real friends). While they will bemoan the loss of their muscular American stooge, Israel enjoyed a very lucrative 70 year run and will part with a pile of useful and deadly toys. They're also fully aware that no one else will ever let them take advantage to the degree they've been able to with the U.S.A. (Unlimited Stupidity of Arrogance?)

Eventually, the social schizophrenia that is the state of Israel will catch up with them and they will implode. Let's hope that breakdown doesn't involve the use of their nuclear arsenal.

Yes, the U.S. Treasury will continue to be looted until the last teller turns the lights out or the electricity is shut off, whichever comes first.

The Western transnational financial elites will accept their losses, regroup and make deals with the new bosses where they can; but their days of running the game unopposed are over.

Today is a good day to learn Mandarin (or Russian, if you prefer to live in Europe).

Bill , September 16, 2019 at 03:36

Very well said and I agree with a lot of what you say.

Tiu , September 14, 2019 at 06:01

Won't be too long before writing articles like this will get you busted for "hate-speech" (e.g. anything that is contrary to the official version prescribed by the "democratically elected" government)
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/uk-tony-blair-think-tank-proposes-end-free-speech
Personally I always encourage people to read George Orwell, especially 1984. We're there, and have been for a long time.

geeyp , September 14, 2019 at 01:15

Tony Kevin – Nice rundown of what ails society. You have a fine writing style that gets the point across to the reader. Kudos and cheers.

Michael , September 13, 2019 at 22:34

The 'modernization' of the Smith Mundt Act in 2013 "to authorize the domestic dissemination of information and material [PROPAGANDA] about the United States intended primarily for foreign audiences" was a major nail in the Democracy coffin, consolidating the blatant ruling of the US Police State by our 17 Intelligence Agencies (our betters). The Telecommunications Act of 1996 lead to ownership of (>80%) of our media (the MSM by a handful of owners, all disseminating the same narratives from above (CIA, State Department, FBI etc) and squelching any dissenting views, particularly related to foreign policies.
Tony's article sadly just confirms the depth and breadth of our Global Stasi, with improved, innovative and (mostly) subtle surveillance, and the controlling constant interference with alternate viewpoints and discussions, the real basis for free societies. It is bad enough to be ruled by neoliberal psychopathic hyenas and jackals, soon we won't be able to even bitch about what they are doing.

Tom Kath , September 13, 2019 at 21:42

The most impressive article I have read in a very long time. I congratulate and thank Tony.
I have myself recently addressed the issue of whether it is a virtue to have an "open mind". – The ability to be converted or have your mind changed, or is it the ability to change your own mind ?
Tony Kevin clearly illustrates the difference.

Litchfield , September 13, 2019 at 16:11

Great article.
Please keep writing.
Do start a website, a la Craig Murray.
There are people who are proactively looking for alternative viewpoints and informed analysis.
How about starting a website and publishing some excerpts of your book there?

Or, sell chapters separately by download from your website?
You could also have a discussion blog/forum there.

John Zimmermann , September 13, 2019 at 16:02

Excellent essay. Thanks Mr. Kevin.

rosemerry , September 13, 2019 at 15:37

At least Tony Kevin was an Australian ambassador, not like Mike Morrell and the chosen russop?obes the USA assumes are needed as diplomats!! Now he is treated as Stephen Cohen is- a true expert called "controversial" as he dares to go by real facts and evidence, not prejudice.

If instead of enemies, the West could consider getting to understand those they are wary of, and give them a chance to explain their point of view and actually listen and reflect on it.
(Dmitri Peskov valiantly explained the Russian official response as soon as the "Skripal poisoning" story broke, but it was fully ignored by UK/US media, while all of Theresa May's fanciful imaginings were respectfully relayed to the public).

geeyp , September 14, 2019 at 23:26

As you usually are with your comments, you are spot on again, rosemerry.

Martin - Swedish citizen , September 13, 2019 at 14:46

Excellent article!
I find the mechanics of how the propaganda is spread and the illusion upheld the most important part of this article, since this knowledge is required to counter it.
When (not if) the fraud becomes more common knowledge, our societies are likely to tumble.

Pablo Diablo , September 13, 2019 at 14:45

Whoever controls the media, controls the dialogue.
Whoever controls the dialogue, controls the agenda.

peter mcloughlin , September 13, 2019 at 13:40

' The present risk of global nuclear war is as high as it ever was in the Cold War.' And possibly higher. The Cold War, though dangerous, was the peace. The world has experienced periods of peace (or relative peace) throughout history. The Thirty Years Peace between the two Peloponnesian Wars, Pax Romana, Europe in the 19th century after the Congress of Vienna, to name a few. The Congress System finally collapsed in 1914 with the start of World War One. That conflict was followed by the League of Nations. It did not stop World War Two. That was followed by the United Nations and other post-war institutions. But all the indications are they will not prevent a third world war. The powers that are leading us towards conflagration see this as a re-run of the first Cold War. They are dangerously mistaken.
https://www.ghostsofhistory.wordpress.com/

Guy , September 13, 2019 at 13:21

With so many believing the lies ,how will this mess ever come to light . I don't reside in Australia but anywhere in the Western world the shakedown is the same .In my own house ,the discussion on world politics descends into absolute stupidity . As one can't get past the constant programming that has settled in the minds of the comfortable with the status quo of lies by our media. There are intelligent sources of news sources but none get past the absolutely complete control of MSM.So the bottom line is ,for now ,the lies and liars are winning the propaganda war.

Anton Antonovich , September 13, 2019 at 13:16

He speaks the truth. Liars and dissemblers have won over the minds and hearts of so many lazy shameful citizens who will not accept the truth Tony Kevin wants to share with the world.

junaid , September 13, 2019 at 13:08

Washington resumes military assistance to Kyiv. According to American lawmakers, Ukraine is fighting one of the main enemies. "Contain Russia": what the US pays for Ukraine

"Contain Russia": what the US pays for Ukraine

Lily , September 13, 2019 at 23:42

The Pentagon is using the Ukrainian territory for experiments on chemical weapons.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3T9ktfz_FfA

John A , September 14, 2019 at 06:55

Anyone or article who spells Kiev as Kyiv can be safely ignored as western anti-Russia propaganda. It's a true tell.

Robert Edwards , September 13, 2019 at 12:53

The Cold war is totally manufacture to keep the dollars flowing into the MIC – what a sham . and a disgrace to humanity.

Cavaleiro Marginal , September 13, 2019 at 12:52

"The key tools are repetition of messages, and diversification of trusted voices. Once a critical mass is created of people believing a false narrative, the lie locks in: its dissemination becomes self-sustaining."

This had occurred in Brazil since the very first day of Lula's presidency. Eleven years late, 2013, a color revolution began. Nobody (and I mean REALLY nobody) could realize a color revolution was happening at that time. In 2016, Dilma Rousseff was kicked from power throughout a ridiculous and illegal coup perpetrated by the parliament. In 2018 Lula was imprisoned in an Orwellian process; illegal, unconstitutional, with nothing (REALLY nothing) proved against him. Then a liar clown was elected to suppress democracy

I knew on the news that in Canada and Australia the police politely (how civilized ) went to some journalist's homes to have a chat this year. Canadians and Aussies, be aware. The fascism's dog is a policial state very well informed by the propaganda they call news.

Robert Fearn , September 13, 2019 at 12:48

As a Canadian author who wrote a book about various tragic American government actions, like Vietnam, I can relate to the difficulties Tony has had with his book. I would mail my book, Amoral America, from Canada to other countries, like the US, and it would never arrive. Book stores would not handle it, etc. etc.

Josep , September 17, 2019 at 05:21

Not to disagree, but some years ago I read about anecdotes of anti-Americanism in Canada, coming from both USians and Canadians, whether it be playful banter or legitimate criticism. I believe it is more concentrated among the people than among the governmental elites (with the exception of the Iraq War era when both the people and the government were against it). And considering what you describe in your book and the difficulty you've faced in distributing it abroad, maybe the said people are on to something.

Stephen , September 13, 2019 at 11:44

This interview by Abby Martin with Mark Ames is a little dated but is a fairly accurate history. I post it to try and counter the nonsense.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7HwvFyMg7A

All the empire wants is to do it all again.

Jeremy Kuzmarov , September 13, 2019 at 10:33

Outstanding article and analysis. Thank you Sir! Jeremy Kuzmarov

Jeff Harrison , September 13, 2019 at 10:17

Thank you, sir. A far better peroration than I could have produced but what I have concluded nonetheless.

Skip Scott , September 13, 2019 at 10:10

Fantastic article. Left unmentioned is the origin of the west's anti-Russia narrative. Russia was being pillaged by the west under Yeltsin, and Russia was to become our newest vassal. Life expectancy dropped a full decade for the average Russian under Yeltsin. The average standard of living dropped dramatically as well. Putin reversed all that, and enjoys massive popular support as a result. The Empire will never tolerate a national leader who works for the benefit of the average citizen. It must be full-on rape, pillage and plunder- OR ELSE. Keep that in mind as we watch the latest theatrical performances by our DNC controlled "Commander in Chief" wannabes.

Realist , September 17, 2019 at 05:48

?The ongoing success of the "Great Lie" (that Washington is protecting the entire world from
anarchy perpetrated by a few bad actors on the global stage) and all of its false narrative subtexts
(including but far from limited to the Maidan, Crimea, Donbass, MH-17, the Skripals, gassing
"one's own people," piracy on the high Mediterranean, etc) just underscores how successful was
the false flag operation known as 9-11, even as the truth of that travesty is slowly being
unraveled by relentless truth-seekers applying logic and the scientific method to the problem.
Most Americans today would gladly concur, if queried, that Osama bin Laden was most certainly
a perfidious tool of Russia and its diabolical leader, Mr. Putin (be sure to call him "Vlad," to
conjure up images of Dracula for effect). The Winston Smith's are rare birds in America or in
any of its reliable vassal states. Never mind that the spooks from Langley (and the late
"chessmaster") concocted and orchestrated all these tales from the crypt.

Lily , September 13, 2019 at 07:54

Great summary of the developement of a new cold war. The narrative of the Mainstream Media is dangerous as well as laughable. I am glad to hear the Russian reaction to this bullshit propaganda. As often the people are so much wiser than their government – at least in the West.

During the Football WM a famous broadcaster of the German State TV channel ARD, who is a giftet propagandist, regrettet publicly the difficulty to convince the stubborn Germans to look at Russia as an enemy because they have started to look at Russia as a friend long ago.

Contrary to the people and the big firms who are completely against the sanctions against Russia and 100 % pro Northstream the German government with Chancelor Merkel is one of the top US vassalles. Even the Green Party which started as an environmental and peace party are now against North Stream and in favour of the filthy US fracking gas thanks to NATO propaganda although Russia has never let them down. Most of "Die Grünen" party have been turned into fervent friends of our American occupants which is very sad.

Thank you Tony Kevin. It has been great to read your article. I cant wait to read your book 'Return to Moscow' and to watch your interview on CN Live.

Godfree Roberts , September 13, 2019 at 07:37

Good summary of the status quo. From my experience of writing similarly about China, precisely the same policies and forces are at work.

The good news is that they are failing.

junaid , September 13, 2019 at 07:15

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov announced the end of the war in Syria and the country's return to a state of peace. "Syria is returning to normal life": Lavrov announced the end of the war

"Syria is returning to normal life": Lavrov announced the end of the war

Gezzah Potts , September 13, 2019 at 05:47

You hit several nails squarely on the head with your excellent article Tony. Thank you for the truth of how the media is in Australia. It is indeed chilling where all this is leading. The blatant lies just spewed out as fact by both ABC and SBS. They, in my opinion are nothing but stenographers for the Empire, of which Australia is a fully subservient vassal state, with no independence.
I try to boycott all Australian presstitutes . Oops, I mean 'media' now. Occasionally, I do slip up and watch SBS or The Drum or News on ABC.
Virtually all my news comes from independent news sites like this one.
I have been accused of being a 'Putin lover', a Russian troll, a conspiracy theorist, while people I know have claimed that "Putin is a monster whose murdered millions of people".
On and on this crap goes. And the end result? Ask Stephen Cohen. Things are very surreal now. Sadly, you've been made an Unperson Tony.

Robyn , September 13, 2019 at 04:08

Bravo, Tony, great article. I enjoyed your book and recommend it to CN readers who haven't yet read it.

The world looks entirely different when one stops reading/watching the MSM and turns to CN, Caitlin Johnstone and many others who are doing a sterling job.

Cascadian , September 13, 2019 at 03:52

I don't know which is worse, to not know what you are (reliably uninformed) and be happy, or to become what you've always wanted to be (reliably informed) and feel alone.

Realist , September 14, 2019 at 00:19

Knowing the truth has always seemed paramount to me, even if it means realising that the entire world and all in it are damned, and deliberately by our own actions. Hope is always the last part of our essence to die, or so they say: maybe we will somehow be redeemed through our own self-immolation as a species.

Deb , September 13, 2019 at 02:54

As an Australian I have no difficulty accepting what Tony Kevin has said here. He should do what Craig Murray has done start a website.

[Sep 12, 2019] The Brain-Dead Maximalism of [neocon] Hard-liners by Daniel Larison

Highly recommended!
Iran sanction and the threat of war has nothing to do with its nuclear program. It is about the USA and by extension Israel dominance in the region. and defencing interesting of MIC, against the interest of general public. Which is the main task of neocons, as lobbyists for MIC (please understand that MIC includes intelligence agencies and large part of Wall Street) .
That's why Israel lobby ( and Bloomberg is a part of it ) supports strangulation Iran economy, Iran war and pushes Trump administration into it. the demand " Rather than push for an extended sunset, Trump should hold out for a complete termination of Iran's nuclear activities and an end to its other threatening behavior -- such as its ballistic-missile program and its support for terrorist groups across the Middle East -- in exchange for readmission into the world economy" is as close to Netanyahu position as we can get.
Notable quotes:
"... The Bloomberg editors urge Trump not to give up on brain-dead maximalism with Iran ..."
"... As always, hard-liners ignore the agency and interests of the other government, and they assume that it is simply a matter of willpower to force them to yield. ..."
"... They have not left the Non-Proliferation Treaty. On the contrary, they have agreed to abide by the Additional Protocol that has even stricter standards. They are not enriching uranium to levels needed to make nuclear weapons. They certainly haven't built or tested any weapons. ..."
"... Iran has jumped through numerous hoops to demonstrate that their nuclear program is and will continue to be peaceful, and their compliance has been verified more than a dozen times, but fanatics here and in Israel refuse to take yes for an answer. That is because hard-liners aren't really concerned about proliferation risk, but seek to use the nuclear issue as fodder to justify punitive measures against Iran without end ..."
Sep 12, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com
The Bloomberg editors urge Trump not to give up on brain-dead maximalism with Iran:

Rather than push for an extended sunset, Trump should hold out for a complete termination of Iran's nuclear activities and an end to its other threatening behavior -- such as its ballistic-missile program and its support for terrorist groups across the Middle East -- in exchange for readmission into the world economy.

This chance may never come again.

Bloomberg's latest advice to Trump on Iran is terrible as usual, but it is a useful window into how anti-Iran hard-liners see things. They see the next year as their best chance to push for their maximalist demands, and they fear the possibility that Trump might settle for something short of their absurd wish list. If Trump does what they want and "holds out" until Iran capitulates, he will be waiting a long time. He has nothing to show for his policy except increased tensions and impoverished and dying Iranians, and this would guarantee more of the same. The funny thing is that the "extended sunset" they deride is already an unrealistic goal, and they insist that the president pursue a much more ambitious set of goals that have absolutely no chance of being reached. As always, hard-liners ignore the agency and interests of the other government, and they assume that it is simply a matter of willpower to force them to yield.

The Bloomberg editorial is ridiculous in many ways, but just one more example will suffice. At one point it says, "Nor is there any doubt that Iran wants nuclear weapons." Perhaps ideologues and fanatics have no doubt about this, but it isn't true. If Iran wanted nuclear weapons, they could have pursued and acquired them by now. They gave up that pursuit and agreed to the most stringent nonproliferation agreement ever negotiated to prove that they wouldn't seek these weapons, but the Trump administration chose to punish them for their cooperation. Iran has not done any of the things that actual rogue nuclear weapons states have done. They have not left the Non-Proliferation Treaty. On the contrary, they have agreed to abide by the Additional Protocol that has even stricter standards. They are not enriching uranium to levels needed to make nuclear weapons. They certainly haven't built or tested any weapons.

Iran has jumped through numerous hoops to demonstrate that their nuclear program is and will continue to be peaceful, and their compliance has been verified more than a dozen times, but fanatics here and in Israel refuse to take yes for an answer. That is because hard-liners aren't really concerned about proliferation risk, but seek to use the nuclear issue as fodder to justify punitive measures against Iran without end.

They don't want to resolve the crisis with Iran, but rather hope to make it permanent by setting goals that can't possibly be reached and insisting that sanctions remain in place forever.

[Sep 10, 2019] The idea tha the USA won the Cold War is questionable

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... As early as the late 1940's, some of us living in Russia saw that the regime was becoming dangerously remote from the concerns and hopes of the Russian people. The original ideological and emotional motivation of Russian Communism had worn itself out and become lost in the exertions of the great war. And there was already apparent a growing generational gap in the regime. ..."
"... By the time Stalin died, in 1953, even many Communist Party members had come to see his dictatorship as grotesque, dangerous and unnecessary, and there was a general impression that far-reaching changes were in order. ..."
"... Nikita Khrushchev took the leadership in the resulting liberalizing tendencies. He was in his crude way a firm Communist, but he was not wholly unopen to reasonable argument. His personality offered the greatest hope for internal political liberalization and relaxation of international tensions. ..."
"... The more America's political leaders were seen in Moscow as committed to an ultimate military rather than political resolution of Soviet-American tensions, the greater was the tendency in Moscow to tighten the controls by both party and police, and the greater the braking effect on all liberalizing tendencies in the regime. Thus the general effect of cold war extremism was to delay rather than hasten the great change that overtook the Soviet Union at the end of the 1980's.... ..."
"... In the competition between major powers and/or alliances there are several somewhat complementary aspects of power: economic or physical aspect to create things of "value" (added by the commerce and industry of the entity), the military power, and moral aspects of the entity in terms of political and cultural resolve and unity. ..."
Sep 07, 2019 | economistsview.typepad.com

anne , September 07, 2019 at 07:23 AM

https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/09/note-to-self-_the-ten-americans-who-did-the-most-to-win-the-cold-war-hoisted-from-the-archiveshttpswwwbradford-de.html

September 5, 2019

Note to Self: The Ten Americans Who Did the Most to Win the Cold War *

Harry Dexter White... George Kennan... George Marshall... Arthur Vandenberg... Paul Hoffman... Dean Acheson... Harry S Truman... Dwight D. Eisenhower... Gerald Ford... George Shultz

* https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/02/note-the-ten-americans-who-did-the-most-to-win-the-cold-war-archive-entry-from-brad-delongs-webjournal.html

-- Brad DeLong

anne -> anne... , September 07, 2019 at 07:24 AM
https://www.nytimes.com/1992/10/28/opinion/the-gop-won-the-cold-war-ridiculous.html

October 28, 1992

The G.O.P. Won the Cold War? Ridiculous.
By George F. Kennan

The claim heard in campaign rhetoric that the United States under Republican Party leadership "won the cold war" is intrinsically silly.

The suggestion that any Administration had the power to influence decisively the course of a tremendous domestic political upheaval in another great country on another side of the globe is simply childish. No great country has that sort of influence on the internal developments of any other one.

As early as the late 1940's, some of us living in Russia saw that the regime was becoming dangerously remote from the concerns and hopes of the Russian people. The original ideological and emotional motivation of Russian Communism had worn itself out and become lost in the exertions of the great war. And there was already apparent a growing generational gap in the regime.

These thoughts found a place in my so-called X article in Foreign Affairs in 1947, from which the policy of containment is widely seen to have originated. This perception was even more clearly expressed in a letter from Moscow written in 1952, when I was Ambassador there, to H. Freeman Matthews, a senior State Department official, excerpts from which also have been widely published. There were some of us to whom it was clear, even at that early date, that the regime as we had known it would not last for all time. We could not know when or how it would be changed; we knew only that change was inevitable and impending.

By the time Stalin died, in 1953, even many Communist Party members had come to see his dictatorship as grotesque, dangerous and unnecessary, and there was a general impression that far-reaching changes were in order.

Nikita Khrushchev took the leadership in the resulting liberalizing tendencies. He was in his crude way a firm Communist, but he was not wholly unopen to reasonable argument. His personality offered the greatest hope for internal political liberalization and relaxation of international tensions.

The downing of the U-2 spy plane in 1960, more than anything else, put an end to this hope. The episode humiliated Khrushchev and discredited his relatively moderate policies. It forced him to fall back, for the defense of his own political position, on a more strongly belligerent anti-American tone of public utterance.

The U-2 episode was the clearest example of that primacy of military over political policy that soon was to become an outstanding feature of American cold war policy. The extreme militarization of American discussion and policy, as promoted by hard-line circles over the ensuing 25 years, consistently strengthened comparable hard-liners in the Soviet Union.

The more America's political leaders were seen in Moscow as committed to an ultimate military rather than political resolution of Soviet-American tensions, the greater was the tendency in Moscow to tighten the controls by both party and police, and the greater the braking effect on all liberalizing tendencies in the regime. Thus the general effect of cold war extremism was to delay rather than hasten the great change that overtook the Soviet Union at the end of the 1980's....

ilsm -> anne... , September 07, 2019 at 08:28 AM
Very interesting observation.

In the competition between major powers and/or alliances there are several somewhat complementary aspects of power: economic or physical aspect to create things of "value" (added by the commerce and industry of the entity), the military power, and moral aspects of the entity in terms of political and cultural resolve and unity.

Early in my time in the service, when I had time to think being at a remote station I decided the west had the marked economic advantage, particularly as the green revolution permitted some higher level of nutrition security.

Later on I recall discussions where the collapse of the Soviet Union was assured but would take in to the 21st century to occur. The big question then was "would a nuclear exchange occur in the way of a peaceful collapse".....

The presence of the A Bomb in some ways prevented war in other encouraged intrigue and small scrapes in to each other's spheres.

There was a bit of the Divine in the world getting through the Cold War.

The Berlin wall came down as hoped but 25 years earlier than I expected.

Plp -> ilsm... , September 07, 2019 at 08:58 AM
Stalin built the party military complex that ran Russia from 1932 to 1989

Cold war liberals built uncle's post was military industrial complex as a counterpart to Stalin's

alas thanx to guys from wasp firms on Wall Street like Dean Acheson that knew the planet was ours to pluck post 1946

anne -> Plp... , September 07, 2019 at 09:14 AM
These are important comments, and deserve to be saved and gradually expanded on. I appreciate this.
ilsm -> Plp... , September 07, 2019 at 09:35 AM
As an aside the Ukraine farmers whom Stalin "collectivized" were seen as impediment to industrializing.......

interesting too, how LBJ kept guns and butter and went pedal to the metal in Vietnam......

politics has always (since June 1950, anyway) "ended when the pentagon appropriations bills were up for enacting".

Which may be synonymous with the proscription about politics kept out of diplomacy?

anne -> ilsm... , September 07, 2019 at 09:15 AM
Do save and develop this interesting thinking further over time.
Plp -> anne... , September 07, 2019 at 08:46 AM
KENNAN Was a lucky guy. He hit the right notes at the right time and then as he got second thoughts and better vision. Like yugoslaving peoples China in 1949
He was side tracked and then sent out to ivy pastures
Plp -> Plp... , September 07, 2019 at 08:53 AM
U 2

Nonsense. The moment to engage was 1953 -54 and yes a goo regime blocked it

But it was Truman that crossed the parallel in 1950 and tried to liberate north Korea

It was Kennedy that preferred brinksmanship to real engagement. Brush wars and regime change to accommodation. Missile racing to sensible unilateralism

Yes LBJ was an ignorant oaf on foreign policy. But it was Nixon that finally used PRC as Yugo twenty years too late of course

The cold war was invented by democrats and exploited by republicans for domestic shindiggery. Tragicomedy cinescope scaled

EMichael -> Plp... , September 07, 2019 at 09:18 AM
Yes, very clever how democrats coerced Stalin into annexing eastern Europe and placing millions of people under total control in every way of life.

Your ideology trumps facts when needed.

ilsm -> EMichael... , September 07, 2019 at 09:39 AM
democrats + Truman and Churchill......

Had FDR survived the 3 western sectors of Germany would have been demilitarized, and agrarian.

Churchill conned Truman to use Potsdam as a replay of Munich!

Keenan's angst was the "militarized" usurped "containment".

Stalin may not have been replaying 1938........

Plp -> anne... , September 07, 2019 at 08:37 AM
Pompous banality worthy of a tenured entitled utterly secure mind

I don't like or respect Brad but I do enjoy him ss a punching bag

Plp -> anne... , September 07, 2019 at 08:39 AM
Nixon and Kissinger won the cold war For God sake. Everyone knows that

George Schultz and KENNAN?

Where's Joe McCarthy? And Paul Nitze

ilsm -> Plp... , September 07, 2019 at 08:51 AM
Where is Luce?

Truman and Acheson.... were there when Keenan went off to teach instead of be ignored.

Marshall aside from his plan, he and his Army staffers just off beating Hitler knew Chiang was not worth propping.

The Luce empire went all cold warrior over "who lost China" which gave Joe McCarthy a drum.

ilsm -> Plp... , September 07, 2019 at 09:27 AM
:<)

You could have no Cold War without the agitprop. As with the GWOT today.

The one no loser in the demise of the commies: the MIC!

ilsm -> Plp... , September 07, 2019 at 09:41 AM
As Vinegar Joe Stillwell observed.......

eventually Stillwell went.

anne -> anne... , September 07, 2019 at 09:31 AM
Obviously since there is a determined American Cold War effort being waged right now, American historians were mistaken at the end of the 1980s. There had been no winning of the Cold War, nor even a clear and shared understanding of what the Cold War was about. If the Cold War was only about balancing the Soviet Union and developing economically far beyond the Soviet Union and Soviet ideas faltering, that happened. However, there was obviously more or with no Soviet Union to counter we would not now be taking policy steps to carry on the Cold War.

[Sep 10, 2019] It s all about Gene Sharp and seeping neoliberal regime change using Western logistical support, money, NGO and intelligence agencies and MSM as the leverage

Highly recommended!
What democracy they are talking about? Democracy for whom? This Harvard political prostitutes are talking about democracy for oligarchs which was the nest result of EuroMaydan and the ability of Western companies to buy assets for pennies on the dollar without the control of national government like happen in xUSSR space after dissolution of the USSR, which in retrospect can be classified as a color revolution too, supported by financial injection, logistical support and propaganda campaign in major Western MSM.
What Harvard honchos probably does not understand or does not wish to understand is that neoliberalism as a social system lost its attraction and is in irreversible decline. The ideology of neoliberalism collapsed much like Bolsheviks' ideology. As Politician like Joe Boden which still preach neoliberalism are widely viewed as corrupt or senile (or both) hypocrites.
The "Collective West" still demonstrates formidable intelligence agencies skills (especially the USA and GB), but the key question is: "What they are fighting for?"
They are fighting for neoliberalism which is a lost case. Which looks like KGB successes after WWIII. They won many battles and lost the Cold war.
Not that Bolsheviks in the USSR was healthy or vibrant. Economics was a deep stagnation, alcoholism among working class was rampant, the standard of living of the majority of population slides each year, much like is the case with neoliberalism after, say, 1991. Hidden unemployment in the USSR was high -- at least in high teens if not higher. Like in the USA now good jobs were almost impossible to obtain without "extra help". Medical services while free were dismal, especially dental -- which were horrible. Hospitals were poor as church rats as most money went to MIC. Actually, like in the USA now, MIC helped to strangulate the economy and contributed to the collapse. It was co a corrupt and decaying , led by completely degenerated leadership. To put the person of the level of Gorbachov level of political talent lead such a huge and complex country was an obvious suicide.
But the facts speak for themselves: what people usually get as the result of any color revolution is the typical for any county which lost the war: dramatic drop of the standard of living due to economic rape of the country.
While far form being perfect the Chinese regime at least managed to lift the standard of living of the majority of the population and provide employment. After regime change China will experience the same economic rape as the USSR under Yeltsin regime. So in no way Hong Cong revolution can be viewed a progressive phenomenon despite all the warts of neoliberalism with Chenese characteristics in mainland China (actually this is a variant of NEP that Gorbachov tried to implement in the USSR, but was to politically incompetent to succeed)
Aug 31, 2019 | Chris Fraser @ChrisFraser_HKU • Aug 27 \z

Replying to @edennnnnn_ @AMFChina @lihkg_forum

A related resource that deserves wide circulation:

Why nonviolent resistance beats violent force in effecting social, political change – Harvard Gazette

CHENOWETH: I think it really boils down to four different things. The first is a large and diverse participation that's sustained.

The second thing is that [the movement] needs to elicit loyalty shifts among security forces in particular, but also other elites. Security forces are important because they ultimately are the agents of repression, and their actions largely decide how violent the confrontation with -- and reaction to -- the nonviolent campaign is going to be in the end. But there are other security elites, economic and business elites, state media. There are lots of different pillars that support the status quo, and if they can be disrupted or coerced into noncooperation, then that's a decisive factor.

The third thing is that the campaigns need to be able to have more than just protests; there needs to be a lot of variation in the methods they use.

The fourth thing is that when campaigns are repressed -- which is basically inevitable for those calling for major changes -- they don't either descend into chaos or opt for using violence themselves. If campaigns allow their repression to throw the movement into total disarray or they use it as a pretext to militarize their campaign, then they're essentially co-signing what the regime wants -- for the resisters to play on its own playing field. And they're probably going to get totally crushed.

Wai Sing-Rin @waisingrin • Aug 27

Replying to @ChrisFraser_HKU @edennnnnn_ and 2 others

Anyone who watched the lone frontliner (w translator) sees the frontliners are headed for disaster. They're fighting just to fight with no plans nor objectives.
They see themselves as heroes protecting the HK they love. No doubt their sincerity, but there are 300 of them left.

[Aug 27, 2019] House Niggers Mutiny by Israel Shamir

Highly recommended!
Aug 27, 2019 | www.unz.com

Slavery had some good aspects for those chaps who had it rather good. A colonial setup is the next best thing to slavery, and it also holds its attraction for people who knew how to place themselves just below the sahibs and above the run-of-the-mill natives. The Hong Kong revolt is the mutiny of wannabe house niggers who feel that the gap between them and the natives is rapidly vanishing. Once, a HK resident was head and shoulders above the miserable mainland coolies; he spoke English, he had smart devices, he had his place in the tentacle sucking wealth out of the mainland, and some of that wealth stuck to his sweaty hands. But now he has no advantage compared to the people of Shanghai or Beijing. There is huge swelling of wealth in the big cities of Red China. The Chinese dress well, travel abroad, and they do not need HK mediation for dealing with the West. Beijing had offered HK a fair deal of [relative] equality; nothing would be taken from them, but the shrinking gap is not only unavoidable, but desirable, too.

However, HK had been the imperial bridgehead in China for too long. Its people were complicit, nay, willing partners in every Western crime against China, beginning with dumping opium and sucking out Chinese wealth. Millions of opium addicts, of ruined families and households nearly destroyed the Middle Kingdom, and each of them added to HK prosperity. The blood, sweat and labour of all China abundantly supplied the island. HK was the first of the Treaty Ports, and the last to return home. Its populace was not thoroughly detoxed; they weren't ideologically prepared for a new life as equals.

Chairman Mao harboured hard suspicions against comprador cities, the cities and the people who prospered due to their collaboration with the imperialist enemy. He cleansed them with communist and patriotic re-education; recalcitrant compradors were sent to help peasants in far-away villages in order to reconnect with the people. Mao's successors had a strong if misplaced belief in Chinese nationalism as a universal remedy; they thought the Chinese of HK, Macau and Taiwan would join them the moment the colonial yoke failed. This was an over-optimistic assessment. The imperialist forces didn't give up on their former house slaves, and the moment they needed to activate them against independent China they knew where to look.

Their time came as the trade conflict between the US and China warmed up. The secret government of the West aka Deep State came to the conclusion that China is getting way too big for its boots. It is not satisfied with making cheap gadgets for Walmart customers. It is producing state-of-art devices that compete with American goods and, what's worse, their devices are not accessible for NSA surveillance. The Chinese company Huawei came under attack; sanctions and custom duties followed in train. When the Yuan eased under the strain, the Chinese were accused of manipulating their currency. It is a strong charge: when Japan was attacked by the West in the 1990s and the Yen had eased as expected, this claim forced Tokyo to keep the Yen high and take Japan into a twenty-year-long slump. But China did not retreat.

Then the supreme power unleashed its well-practiced weapon: they turned to foment unrest in China and gave it a lot of space in the media. At first, they played up the fate of the Uygur Islamists, but it had little success. The Uygur are not numerous, they are not even a majority in their traditional area; their influence in China is limited. Despite headlines in the liberal Western media proclaiming that millions of Uygur are locked up in concentration camps, the impact was nil. No important Muslim state took up this cause.

The anniversary of Tiananmen came (in beginning of June) and went without a hitch. For good reason: the alleged 'massacre' is a myth, as the Chinese always knew and we know now for certain thanks to publication of a relevant US Embassy cable by Wikileaks. There were no thousands of students flattened by tanks. A very few died fighting the army, but China had evaded the bitter fate of the USSR. In China proper the event had been almost forgotten. A few participants retell of their experiences to Western audiences, but the desired turmoil did not materialise.

And then came the time for HK. It is an autonomous part of China; it had not been re-educated; there are enough people who remember the good days of colonial slavery. The actual spark for the mutiny, the planned extradition treaty, was exceedingly weak. For the last decade, HK became the chosen place of refuge for mainland criminals, for HK had extradition treaties with the US and Britain, but not with the mainland. This had to be remedied.

[The extradition treaty had played an important role in the Snowden case. An ex-CIA spy Edward Snowden decided to reveal to the world the extent of the NSA surveillance we all are subjects of. He chose the Guardian newspaper for his revelations, probably because of the Wikileaks precedent. When he gave an extended interview to the Guardian in HK, his identity had been revealed. The arrival of the US extradition request was imminent. The Chinese authorities told Snowden that they would have to send him to a US jail, to torture and death; that the extradition treaty left them no option in his case. Only the fast footwork of Julian Assange's brave assistant Sarah Harrison prevented this grim finale and delivered Snowden to safe Moscow.]

ORDER IT NOW

While HK authorities were obliged to extradite Snowden, they weren't and couldn't extradite numerous criminals from the mainland. This was an obvious wrong that had to be urgently corrected, in the face of rising tension. And then the sleeping agents of the West woke up and activated their networks. They had practically unlimited funds, not only from the West, but also from the criminals who weren't particularly impecunious and were afraid of extradition. After the demonstrations started, the Western media gave them maximum coverage, magnifying and encouraging the mutineers.

Hundreds of articles, leading stories and editorials in important newspapers cheered and encouraged the HK rebels. The People's War Is Coming in Hong Kong , editorialised the New York Times today. An amazing fact (that is if you are a fresh arrival from Mars): the same newspaper and its numerous sisters paid no attention to the real People's War raging in France, where the Gilets Jaunes have continued to fight for forty weeks against the austerity-imposing Macron regime. 11 people were killed and 2,500 injured in France, but the Western media just mumbled about the GJ antisemitism. Nothing new, indeed. The same media did not notice the one-million-strong demonstration against the US war on Iraq, paid little attention to Occupy Wall Street, disregarded protests against US wars and interventions. One hundred thousand people marching in New York would get no coverage if their purpose did not agree with the desires of the Real Government; and alternatively, three thousand protesters in Moscow with its 12 million population would be presented as the voice of the people challenging Vlad the Tyrant.

In its peculiar way, the media fulfills its purpose of keeping us informed. If mainstream media reports on something, it usually lies; but if media keeps mum, you can bet it is important and you are not encouraged to learn of it. It is especially true in case of popular protests. How do you know they are lying? – Their lips are moving.

The biggest lie is calling the HK rebels marching under the Union Jack, "pro-democracy". These guys wish to restore colonial rule, to be governed by their strict but fair round-eyed overlords. It could be a bad or a good idea, but democracy it ain't. The second biggest lie is the slogan Make Hong Kong Great Britain Again.

Hong Kong was never a part of Great Britain. This was never on offer, so it can't become that again. Even the most adventure- and diversity-prone British politician won't make seven million Chinese in a far-away territory British citizens with full rights, members of an imperfect but real British democracy. HK was a colony; this is what the marchers aspire to, to make HK colony again.

With all these differences taken into account, this is as true for Moscow demos as well. Moscow protesters dream of a Russia occupied by NATO forces, not of democracy. They believe that they, pro-Western, educated, entrepreneurial, would form the comprador class and prosper at the expense of hoi polloi. Mercifully, they aren't plentiful: the Russians already tried to live under benign Western occupation between 1991 and 2000, when the IMF directed their finances and American advisers from Harvard ran the state machinery. Smart and ruthless Jews like Bill Browder , Boris Berezovsky, Roman Abramovich made their fortunes, but Russia was ruined and its people were reduced to poverty.

Not many Russians would like to return to the Roaring Nineties, but some would. It is a matter for the majority to prevent this aspiring minority to achieve its aspirations. Those who can't take it will flee to Israel, as young Mr Yablonsky who discovered his Jewish roots after two nights of police detention. He landed in jail for violently fighting erection of a church in his town.

The Chinese will likewise sort out their HK affliction. It can be done if the government does not promise to restrict its counteractions to painless and bloodless measures. Only the real and imminent threat of painful and bloody suppression can make such measures unnecessary. Likewise, only the imminent threat of no-deal Brexit could bring some sense into the stubborn heads of the EU leaders. A state that is not ready to use force will necessarily fail, as did the Ukrainian state under Mr Yanukowych in 2014. Blood will be shed and the state will be ruined, if its rulers are too squeamish to stop the rebellion.

We can distinguish a real people's rising and foreign-inspired interventions on behalf of the compradors. The first one will be silenced while the second will be glorified by the New York Times. It is that simple.

I would not worry overmuch for China. The Chinese leaders knew how to deal with Tiananmen, they knew how to deal with minority unrest, without unnecessary cruelty and without hesitation and prevarication. They weren't dilly-dallying when the US tried to send to HK its warships , but flatly denied them the pleasure. They will overcome.

You may read Israel Shamir on China here http://www.unz.com/ishamir/yeti-riots/

Priss Factor , says: Website August 22, 2019 at 4:39 pm GMT

China should do a 'Kashmir' on Hong Kong. Open it fully to all the Chinese. Let Chinese go there and march against Hong Kong snobs and wanna-be-whites.

That said, let's cut the Anglos some slack. Brit empire did lots of bad things but also lots of good things. While HK was set up as colonial outpost and cooperated in terrible opium trade, it was also a center of innovation and change that introduced all of China to new ideas. Also, the trajectory of Chinese history since the 80s shows that it had much to learn from Hong Kong and Singapore. Maoism was a disaster, and it also spawned Khmer Rouge that was worse than French imperialism(that wasn't so bad). Also, back then, it was obvious that the West was indeed far freer and saner than communist China. HK and Singapore set the template for big China to follow.

But that was then, this is now. West is free? UK imprisons people for tweets. The West is sane? France and UK welcome African invaders while banning people like Jared Taylor who stand for survival of the West. Also, the West, under Jewish power, has moved into neo-imperialist mode against Russia, Iran, and Middle East. And US media are not free. It is controlled by Zionist oligarchs who impose a certain narrative, even utterly bogus ones like Russia Collusion while working with other monopoly capitalists to shut down alternative news sites.
And when globo-homo-mania is the highest 'spiritual' expression of the current West, it is now crazy land.

This is why China must now crush Hong Kong. Don't send in the tanks. Just open the gates and send 10 million mainlanders to march down the streets accusing HK snobs of being comprador a-holes. That will do the trick. Turn Hong Kong into No-Bull House.

And what happened to Taiwan under globo-homo regime? It has 'gay marriage'. Chinese need to go there and use maximum force to wipe out the decadent scum.

Some in the West complain about China's social credit system, and I agree it's bad, but we got the same shit here. Ask Laura Loomer and Jared Taylor. 1/4 of corporations will not hire people based on their support of Trump. Also, Chinese term for people with bad social credit is mild compared to what Jewish elites call dissident Americans: 'deplorables', 'white supremacist scum', 'white trash', 'neo nazi', etc. It's all very ironic since globalist Jews are the new nazis who spread wars for Israel to destroy millions of lives.

Ronnie , says: August 22, 2019 at 7:07 pm GMT
I saw Bannon on TV recently around the time of the Tiananmen anniversary. He said that 75,000 people were killed in the Tiananmen incident. This tells you something about his lack of sophistication or credibility. I was a Visiting Professor at the Peking Union Medical College in 1989 and I always assumed that the numbers of dead and injured were greatly exaggerated. I asked many fellow Professors and students in Beijing for their opinions over the years. Many of these were working in the local hospitals at the time. On average the response to me was between 300-500 dead and injured. I have never had any reason to question this estimate. The Wikileaks memo confirms this.
Ron Unz , says: August 22, 2019 at 7:50 pm GMT
@Ronnie

I saw Bannon on TV recently around the time of the Tiananmen anniversary. He said that 75,000 people were killed in the Tiananmen incident. This tells you something about his lack of sophistication or credibility.

Actually, the dishonesty or incompetence of our MSM is *vastly* greater than you're making it out to be.

Over twenty years ago, the Beijing bureau chief of the Washington Post published a long piece in the Columbia Journalism Review publicly admitted that the supposed "Tiananmen Square Massacre" was just a media hoax/error, and that the claims of the PRC government were probably correct:

https://archives.cjr.org/behind_the_news/the_myth_of_tiananmen.php

Under the circumstances, it's difficult to believe that most MSM journalists interested in the subject aren't well aware of the truth, and I've noticed that they usually choose their words very carefully to avoid outright lies, but still implying something that is totally incorrect. I'd assume that these implied falsehoods are then wildly exaggerated by ignorant demagogues such as Bannon.

It's really astonishing that our MSM still continues to promote this "Big Lie" more than two decades after the CJR admission ran.

Everyone knows that large numbers of people, including some PRC soldiers, were killed or injured in the violent urban riots elsewhere in Beijing. I think the official death toll claimed by the PRC government at the time was something like 300 killed, which seems pretty plausible to me.

Carlton Meyer , says: Website August 22, 2019 at 7:59 pm GMT
Few Americans are aware of the history of American imperialism in China, with the Yangtze patrols, opium trading, and treaty ports.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/sKgrb0oggfE?feature=oembed

getaclue , says: August 22, 2019 at 11:15 pm GMT
So if I'm reading this article right–Communist China so gooooood– how about those 65,000,000 Mao and his "Leaders" er, basically sort of er, murdered? Lets hear what they have to say about the great China "leaders"? Oh yeah, we can't they killed them . Is this the take away quote from Mr. Shamir?: "I would not worry overmuch for China. The Chinese leaders knew how to deal with Tiananmen, they knew how to deal with minority unrest, without unnecessary cruelty and without hesitation and prevarication." Yes, they do know "how to deal with minority unrest" historically–65,000, 000 corpses is some real "dealing" -- no "unnecessary cruelty"? (I also read recently of the sexual torture of Falun Gong practitioners–brutal gang rapes and with instruments of torture–this is recent and well, happening now I read– Is this also how to deal with "minority unrest"–Do we cheer on China for this too? No "unnecessary cruelty" at work here either? I mean you could point out that yes, there is definitely some of the Colonial backlash he cites as to Hong Kong at work without praising how great China is at "dealing with minorites" I think, that would have played a bit better, to me anyway . https://www.heritage.org/asia/commentary/the-legacy-mao-zedong-mass-murder
https://www.theepochtimes.com/sexual-torture-of-detained-falun-dafa-adherents-rampant-rights-lawyer_2807772.html
Daemon , says: August 23, 2019 at 1:46 am GMT
@peterAUS China doesn't have to be good. It just doesnt have to be evil like your side.
That's all there is to it.
Dutch Boy , says: August 23, 2019 at 3:23 am GMT
Interviews of actual Hong Kongers suggest that their principal objection to extradition is that residents of HK would then be subject to People's Courts rather than to the British style courts of HK with all the legal trappings of the Foreign Devils (presumption of innocence, rules of evidence, no hearsay, no secret trials, no anonymous accusers – all that folderol).
Corvinus , says: August 23, 2019 at 5:02 am GMT
@Hippopotamusdrome "Slavery had some good aspects for those chaps "

No. They lost their freedom.

"a HK resident was head and shoulders above the miserable mainland coolies"

According to Who/Whom?

"the cities and the people who prospered due to their collaboration with the imperialist"

It was the imperialist who prospered.

"These guys wish to restore colonial rule"

No, they want to restore home rule.

"this is what the marchers aspire to, to make HK colony again"

No, they want to be free from the shackles of China.

Jason Liu , says: August 23, 2019 at 6:04 am GMT
@getaclue China's not a communist country except in name. The Epoch Times is a Falun Gong mouthpiece that makes stuff up. I don't support Mao but he is irrelevant today.
Jason Liu , says: August 23, 2019 at 6:14 am GMT
The reasons you list might motivate some of the protesters, but it can't be responsible for this many of them. There IS a homegrown problem here and China would be foolish to ignore it.

The protester's motivations and their implications, as I see it:

1. Loss of prestige – Irrelevant, they'll get used to it

2. Colonial nostalgia – Dead end, open to mockery

3. Housing/economic issues – Manageable with subsidies and regulations, but HK will have to give up some autonomy

4. Regional tribalism/xenophobia – Manageable, not unique to HK

5. US intervention – Dangerous but manageable with better PR & soft power

6. Genuine belief in liberal democracy – Very dangerous, will cause national decline similar to the West

Half-Jap , says: August 23, 2019 at 6:49 am GMT
@Brabantian They are the ideal rat traps.
Even if Wikileaks wasn't a set-up, undoubtably they would be under close surveillance and/or be infiltrated and compromised.
Snowden has been suspect in my mind when he purportedly left so much info to just one journalist belonging to a sketchy outfit, and only a trickle of info came forth, while he's celebrated all over. Many of us already knew about such program from good people like William Binney.
As you say, there are real whisleblowers, and they are ignored, jailed or dead.
Vedic Hyperborean , says: August 23, 2019 at 7:36 am GMT
Goddamn Israel, this is an excellent piece of writing. You hit every nail on the head when it comes to explaining why the troublemakers in Hong Kong are a bunch of useful idiots being used by imperialist powers. These bastards really are house niggers, the kind of people who would side with a distant foreign power over their own countrymen. Hats off to you good sir, thank you for your clarity of thought.
Digital Samizdat , says: August 23, 2019 at 9:21 am GMT
@Commentator Mike Exactly. The Chinese use the deep state to keep order and suppress crime; Washington uses it to spread disorder (Antifa) and protect crime (BLM). There is a difference, you see!
Realist , says: August 23, 2019 at 9:28 am GMT
@Jason Liu

Genuine belief in liberal democracy – Very dangerous, will cause national decline similar to the West

That is for sure.

xvart , says: August 23, 2019 at 9:58 am GMT
I see no real difference between the English colonies and the previous Chinese colonies in Asia this would be "the pot calling the kettle black", just the usual hypocrisy of state actors.

The local HK people who live on the edge of these power structures are not the seeming profiteers of any of this they exist in frameworks they can neither control nor escape escape from so blaming them for being in a place not of their choosing is being disingenuous.

All I read is someone blaming children for the sins of the father.

The Alarmist , says: August 23, 2019 at 12:53 pm GMT
@Ron Unz

It's really astonishing that our MSM still continues to promote this "Big Lie" more than two decades after the CJR admission ran.

No, it is not astonishing. Your homework for tonight is to re-read chapter five of The Iron Curtain Over America

Anon [367] Disclaimer , says: August 25, 2019 at 11:00 am GMT
On HK riots, there are some interesting writers giving some insight into US gov, CIA, UK gov, MI6, Canada, Germany involvement in collabration with treason HKies.

https://www.quora.com/profile/Robin-Daverman

https://www.quora.com/profile/Jamie-Wang-45

https://www.quora.com/profile/Roy-Tong-10

Our China expert, Godfree Roberts.
https://www.quora.com/profile/Godfree-Roberts

The ZUS has started to purge & shut down pro-China-Russia Truth teller in FB, tweeters, Google,

Those can read HKies Cantonese writing, here's one site where these HK rioters recruit, organize & discuss where to meet, how to attack police, activities, and payment.
https://lihkg.com/category/1?order=now

This is the truth of white shirt(local residents West called mobsters) vs black shirt(rioters West called peaceful protestors). The residents of Yuan Lan district demanded the rioters not to mess up their place. The black shirt challenge white shirt for fight by spraying fire host and hurling vulgarity, ended get beaten up.

But West never show the whole video.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/uxNowgZ9a1I?feature=oembed

Any way, I was permanent banned from Quora, FB, even I am not related to China, just because I exposed some of ZUS-India axis evils & lies with evidences in other topics. Censorship is fully in placed.

Bardon Kaldian , says: August 25, 2019 at 1:07 pm GMT

HK was a colony; this is what the marchers aspire to, to make HK colony again.

I haven't followed this closely, but – why? Why would so many Chinese want that? I understand a couple of tycoons, but why would ethnic Chinese want a foreign rule?

Perhaps they- just speculating – don't care about full democracy, but are scared of China's Big Brother policy of complete surveillance & a zombie slavery society. No one with a functioning mind- and the Chinese, whatever one thinks of their hyper-nationalism & a streak of robotic- groupthink- conformist culture – wants to live in a chaos; but also, no one wants to live in a dystopian nightmare which is the fundamental social project of the new China.

peterAUS , says: August 25, 2019 at 8:57 pm GMT
The latest, apaprently, from The Mouth (Sauron .):

.Four police officers were filmed drawing their guns after demonstrators were seen chasing them with metal pipes .

.senior police officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said this week that officers had been targeted and exposed online even while there was temporary peace on the streets. The police said officers' personal data, contact information, home addresses, and more had been shared online, and accused protesters of threatening officers' families .

Is anyone there thinking that as soon as they "neutralize" the LOCAL police force SOMETHING else will come into the fray?
Probably not. Feels good.

This time it won't be Communist era conscripts of the regular Army.

I'd say good luck to those protesters but really can't. Wouldn't make any sense.

Chinaman , says: August 25, 2019 at 10:31 pm GMT

A state that is not ready to use force will necessarily fail, as did the Ukrainian state under Mr Yanukowych in 2014. Blood will be shed and the state will be ruined, if its rulers are too squeamish to stop the rebellion.

Thank you, Me Shamir.

Your analogy of the house nigger is spot on and a accurate portrayal of the slave mentality held by these protestors. It is the epitome of shamelessness and insanity to beg to be enslaved. As a Hker, I am happy to say none of the people I associate with support the protestors and these British house niggers are the filth of HK society.

You are absolutely right to point out a state that is not ready to use force will fail and I think the situation have reached a critical point where some blood must be shed and some examples to be made. There is a Chinese saying " People don't cry until they see the coffin." Time to bring it on.

I never understood Mao and why he had to kill all those millions of people, I do now

Wally , says: August 26, 2019 at 5:13 am GMT
@Corvinus said:
"No, they want to be free from the shackles of China."

HK was taken from China, China has the right to take it back.

Richard B , says: August 26, 2019 at 6:25 am GMT
@The Alarmist "No, it is not astonishing. Your homework for tonight is to re-read chapter five of The Iron Curtain Over America"

One of the must reads in The TUR library.

Richard B , says: August 26, 2019 at 6:30 am GMT
@Brabantian Spot on!

You know who the hostile elite really fears?

People they frame and jail, or kill.

Like Schaeffer Cox and LaVoy.

TKK , says: August 26, 2019 at 7:21 am GMT
The protests are also driven by personal autonomy desires.

Look at the micro level. My sister teaches English in Chengdu. Google, Gmail, You Tube, What's App and Facebook are all blocked in China.

You have to download a VPN before you land to use any of these sites.

Everything online in China is done by WeChat. *Everything* . From video calls to pay your utilities to banking. It's an open joke that WeChat is heavily monitored by the Party. It's the meat of your social credit score- WeChat data.

However, in HK, there are servers where you can hop on FB, Google products and the like.

HK has a more laisse faire vibe that huge enormous China. If you have never been, that point can't be overstated. To make blanket statements about anything in China is misleading.

Because China is another planet. HK was/ is a cosmopolitan outpost that had its own identity- It does not want to be swallowed up by clodhopper spitting burping mainlanders completely.

Bardon Kaldian , says: August 26, 2019 at 8:29 am GMT
Most comments are idiotic (as is the article). True, Western players certainly have fomented much of this; true, many (most?) protesters are violent & obnoxius; true, Chinese national identity planners want to unify, step by step, all mainland (and not only them) Han Chinese under one rule, fearing of some disintegration in the future.

But, having in mind what kind of society mainland China was & has become, Wittfogel's remark on oriental despotism becomes pertinent .

The good citizens of classical Greece drew strength from the determination of two of their countrymen, Sperthias and Bulis, to resist the lure of total power. On their way to Suza, the Spartan envoys were met by Hydarnes, a high Persian official, who offered to make them mighty in their homeland, if only they would attach themselves to the Great King, his despotic master. To the benefit of Greece-and to the benefit of all free men-Herodotus has preserved their answer. "Hydarnes," they said, "thou art a one-sided counselor. Thou hast experience of half the matter; but the other half is beyond thy knowledge. A slave's life thou understandest; but, never having tasted liberty, thou canst not tell whether it be sweet or no. Ah! hadst thou known what freedom is, thou wouldst have bidden us fight for it, not with the spear only. but with the battle-axe."

George , says: August 26, 2019 at 11:09 am GMT
"Once, a HK resident was head and shoulders above the miserable mainland coolies; he spoke English, he had smart devices, he had his place in the tentacle sucking wealth out of the mainland, and some of that wealth stuck to his sweaty hands."

HK is having trouble competing with it's closest peer competitor Singapore. Some of the reason for that is a legal framework that disadvantages HK. The basis of HK real estate market attractiveness over other locations in China and the world is a legal framework separate from China. While the extraction treaty seems reasonable at first, remember HK's extradition treaties have to compete with Singaporean, Taiwanese, and Australian extradition treaties. A curiosity of the extradition treaty is HK is already in China, so why the need to extradite people to somewhere else in China?

China might or might not be able to industrialize its economy through central planning. But one industry they have not been able to centrally plan is movies and entertainment. How is it that in the past with nothing HK had a top tier movie industry, Bruce Lee, but now seems to have nothing.

IMO, mainland Chinese authorities just don't understand the HK economy and are mostly chosing policies they consider convenient.

Jake , says: August 26, 2019 at 11:41 am GMT
"Smart and ruthless Jews like Bill Browder, Boris Berezovsky, Roman Abramovich made their fortunes, but Russia was ruined and its people were reduced to poverty."

That is the way the WASP Empire, the Anglo-Zionist Empire, provides freedom.

Send your money to VDARE so it can call for more WASP Empire – which the WASP and Jewish Elites will fill with as many non-whites as they can entice in order to smash the white trash down forever, so that even more Jews become multi-billionaires. And we all can delight in speaking English, the language of international Jewry since WW2.

onebornfree , says: Website August 26, 2019 at 11:46 am GMT
@Wally "HK was taken from China, China has the right to take it back."

Yes, but not until 2047, apparently:

"One country, two systems" is a constitutional principle formulated by Deng Xiaoping, the Paramount Leader of the People's Republic of China (PRC), for the reunification of China during the early 1980s. He suggested that there would be only one China, but distinct Chinese regions such as Hong Kong and Macau could retain their own economic and administrative systems, while the rest of the PRC (or "Mainland China") uses the socialism with Chinese characteristics system. Under the principle, each of the two regions could continue to have its own governmental system, legal, economic and financial affairs, including trade relations with foreign countries, all of which are independent from those of the Mainland ."

" .Hong Kong was a colony of the United Kingdom, ruled by a governor appointed by the monarchy of the United Kingdom, for 156 years from 1841 (except for four years of Japanese occupation during WWII) until 1997, when it was returned to Chinese sovereignty. China agreed to accept some conditions, as is stipulated in the Sino-British Joint Declaration, such as the drafting and adoption of Hong Kong's "mini-constitution" Basic Law before its return. The Hong Kong Basic Law ensured that Hong Kong will retain its capitalist economic system and own currency (the Hong Kong Dollar), legal system, legislative system, and people's rights and freedom for fifty years, as a special administrative region (SAR) of China for 50 years. Set to expire in 2047, the current arrangement has permitted Hong Kong to function as its own entity under the name "Hong Kong, China" in many international settings ."

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_country,_two_systems

Its, "interesting" that[ unless I somehow missed it], this important detail was completely omitted from this very poorly written article, and from [at least] the first 56 comments in the thread.

Regards, onebornfree

Ghan-buri-Ghan , says: August 26, 2019 at 12:57 pm GMT
From the comments so far, I notice that the usual Zionist, pro-Jewish, pro-Israeli crew around here (PeterAUS, Corvinus, Bardon Kaldian, TKK) also all happen to be virulently anti-China.

Quite an interesting correlation. It seems to suggest something

Rurik , says: August 26, 2019 at 2:04 pm GMT

We can distinguish a real people's rising and foreign-inspired interventions on behalf of the compradors. The first one will be silenced while the second will be glorified by the New York Times. It is that simple.

Well put Sir.

And spot on true.

It is really the perfect metric for understanding the underlying motivations and relative merit, (or lack there of) for any geopolitical event or movement.

Should the people of Crimea be able to determine their own destiny?

Just look to the NYT to understand the nuances of that region and conflict. If they say Crimea is foundering under Russian tyranny, then you can be 100% certain the opposite is the truth.

Did the US foment democracy in (Yats is the guy) Ukraine? Read the NYT, and it all gets spelled out. Assad's chemical attacks, moderate rebels.. From MH17 to 'Russian aggression', you can find 'all the truth that's fit to print'. Only inversed.

Hong Kong, Donbas, Iran, Syria, Yemen, Charlottesville, Yellow Vests, Gaza, Russian hacking and collusion.. and on and on and on. It's an invaluable tool for understanding our times and the motivations and principles (or lack there of) being brought to bear.

And as you mention, for the really salient things, (like serial aggressive wars based on lies, treasonous atrocities writ large, and assorted war crimes, DNC corruption, GOP corruption, et al ad nauseam), one must listen to the crickets, who speak thunderously of these things, with their telling silence.

Rampant white supremacists shooting people right and left, are bull-horned by the screeching -silence over every POC who's a mass-shooter'.

By carefully not reporting some things, and outright lies and distortions with others, the NYT has become an invaluable tool for glimmering the ((moral abomination)) of our times.

We should all be very grateful for their solid and predictable efforts.

Wally , says: August 26, 2019 at 2:08 pm GMT
@onebornfree So what?

– That agreement does not give complete independence & sovereignty to HK.
– That agreement does not allow rioters to engage in destructive, disruptive, violent actions.
– That agreement mandates that the HK administration maintain order, which heretofore they have not.
– Therefore that agreement has been violated, invalidated by the HK administration.

China has the right & responsibility to maintain order in HK. HK is theirs, they are rightfully taking it back.

[Aug 24, 2019] Peace plan for eastern Ukraine As divisive as the causes of the war by Fred Weir

Highly recommended!
The net result on Ukrainian independence was the dramatic rise of political influence of western Ukraine which was suppressed in the USSR. under Yutchenko they came to power and they regained it after Yanukovich demise. And their interests and their desire to colonize Eastern Ukraine do not correlate will with the desires of the Eastern Ukrainian population. So Ukraine remains a divided country with the differences being patched by continuing war in Donbass. So in way continuation of the war is in the best political interests of Western Ukrainian nationalists. Kind of insurance which simplify for them to stay in power. While politically they lost in recent Presidential elections the presence of paramilitary formations ensure that they still have considerable political power including the power of veto.
Whether hardship inflicted on population after EuroMaydan will eventually help to restore the balance and raise political influence of Eastern Ukraine because Western Ukrainian nationalists are now completely politically discredited due to the dramatic drop in the standard of living after EuroMaydan is difficult to say. In any case Ukraine now is a debt slave and vassal of the USA with the USA embassy controlling way to much to consider Ukraine to be an independent country. Few countries manage to dig themselves out of this hole.
For such countries rise of anti-colonial movement is a possibility, but paradoxically Western Ukrainian nationalists side with colonial power representing in a way fifth column (and they did played the role of fifth column during EuroMaydan giving power to rabid neoliberals like Yatsenyuk, who was essentially an agent of the USA, who wanted to privatize everything for cents on the dollar as long as he and his circle get cramps from it, ordinary Ukrainians be damned ). Understanding that the USA is the most dangerous partner to have, in many ways no less dangerous then Russia is still pending for the Ukrainian neoliberal elite, part of which ( Kushma, Victor Pinchuk) clearly are plain-vanilla compradors.
Notable quotes:
"... Three decades of Ukrainian independence have brought little in the way of economic development or other strong reasons to embrace a Ukrainian identity. At the same time, Russia has become a far more prosperous, orderly place that exudes confidence and power since Vladimir Putin came to power. Millions of eastern Ukrainians have gone to Russia as guest workers – and more recently as war refugees . Today, the Ukrainian diaspora in Russia is by far the world's largest. ..."
"... The western regions of Ukraine, on the other hand, were part of European states like Austria-Hungary and Poland until World War II, when they were annexed by the Soviet Union. Now, people overwhelmingly speak Ukrainian as their first language, take a suspicious (and historically grounded) view of Russia, and tend to look west for their inspiration ..."
"... Millions of Ukrainians go to Poland and beyond as guest workers, and their impressions help to fuel the certainty that Ukraine needs to seek a European future. ..."
"... Not coincidentally, the enthusiasm and conviction of western Ukrainians have disproportionately driven two pro-Western revolutions on the Maidan in Kyiv in the past 15 years, with little visible support from populations in the country's east. ..."
"... "People in the western Ukraine are different from us. It's not just language, or anything simple like that. They took power away from a president our votes elected, and they want to rip us out of our ways, abandon our values, and become part of their agenda," says Maxim Tkach, regional head of the Party of Life, the pro-Russian group that was the front-runner in parliamentary elections here in Mariupol. ..."
"... "When they started that Maidan revolution, they said it was about things we could support, like fighting corruption and ending oligarchic rule. But none of that happened. They betrayed every single principle they had shouted about. Instead, they want us to change the names of our streets and schools, honor 'heroes' like Stepan Bandera that our ancestors fought against. These are things we can't accept. ... ..."
"... "If there had been no Maidan, we would still have Crimea. There would have been no war. There would be no pressure on us to change our customs, our language, or our church . It was this aggressive revolution, by just part of the country, that caused these problems," he says. "Russia is Russia. It is acting in its own interests, but why do we need to antagonize it?" ..."
"... But while the two nearby separatist statelets, the Donetsk People's Republic and the Lugansk People's Republic, may be backed by Russia, they emerged from deep local roots. That is a clear observation from one of the most exhaustive studies of the war to date, Rebels Without a Cause , published last month by the International Crisis Group. ..."
"... The war has done great and possibly irreparable damage to Ukraine's economy , and the longer it continues, the harder it may be to ever reintegrate the former industrial heartland of Donbass with the rest of the country. ..."
"... Mr. Tkach, the regional party head, says the idea of victory is a dangerous chimera, and what most people around here want is peace and restoration of normal relations with Russia. ..."
"... "Of course we need to negotiate directly with" the rebel republics, he says. "These are our people. We understand them. Perhaps we need a step-by-step process, in which they are granted some special status. What would be wrong with that? They have also suffered, had their homes shelled by Ukrainian forces, lost their loved ones. Trust needs to be restored, and that might take some time." ..."
"... But he is adamant that those territories need to be recovered for Ukraine. "The task before us is to bring them back to Ukraine, and Ukraine to them. It must be accomplished through compromise and negotiation, because everyone is tired of war. Once we have done this, and have peace, then we can talk about Crimea." ..."
"... Mr. Tkach says so too. "We wish Zelenskiy well, but we really doubt that he can make peace happen. Our party has the connections and the right approach, and we think it will be necessary to bring us into the process." He's talking about dealing with the Russia that exists just across the Sea of Azov and a few miles down the road ..."
Aug 24, 2019 | www.csmonitor.com

... ... ...

Almost every conversation in Ukraine these days will touch upon the grinding, seemingly endless war in the eastern region of Donbass. People speak of overwhelming feelings of pain and weariness. And they express near-universal hopes that the new president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, will finally do something to end it.

Here in Mariupol, where the front line is a 10-minute drive from downtown, those conversations tend to be intense.

But depending on whom you talk to, the path to peace can look very different.

Much of the population around here speaks Russian, is used to having close relations with nearby Russia, and can't imagine any peace that would impose permanent separation. Many people have family, friends, and former business associates living just a few miles away on the other side of the border. More than half of voters in the Ukrainian-controlled part of Donetsk Region, of which Mariupol is the largest city, expressed those instincts in July 21 parliamentary elections by voting for two "pro-Russian" political parties. Both of them would like to forge a peace on Moscow's terms and return at least this part of Ukraine to its historical place as part of the Russian sphere of influence.

But there are also many who espouse an emerging Ukrainian identity, who see the 2014 Maidan "Revolution of Dignity" as a breaking point that gave Ukraine the chance to escape the grasp of autocratic Russia and embrace a European future. They want nothing to do with Russian-authored peace plans, say there is no alternative to fighting on to victory in the Donbass war, and want to quarantine Ukraine from its giant neighbor – at least until Russia changes its fundamental nature.

Despite the two groups' shared desire for peace, their starkly different visions for what that peace would entail could prove a major obstacle for ending the war in eastern Ukraine.

Looking east, looking west

These divisions are rooted in Ukrainian history. The country's eastern regions have been part of Russian-run states for over 300 years. Three decades of Ukrainian independence have brought little in the way of economic development or other strong reasons to embrace a Ukrainian identity. At the same time, Russia has become a far more prosperous, orderly place that exudes confidence and power since Vladimir Putin came to power. Millions of eastern Ukrainians have gone to Russia as guest workers – and more recently as war refugees . Today, the Ukrainian diaspora in Russia is by far the world's largest.

The western regions of Ukraine, on the other hand, were part of European states like Austria-Hungary and Poland until World War II, when they were annexed by the Soviet Union. Now, people overwhelmingly speak Ukrainian as their first language, take a suspicious (and historically grounded) view of Russia, and tend to look west for their inspiration. In 1990, living standards in Ukraine and Poland were about equal. Since Poland joined the European Union in 2004, its living standards have doubled and it has become a vibrant European state. Millions of Ukrainians go to Poland and beyond as guest workers, and their impressions help to fuel the certainty that Ukraine needs to seek a European future.

The Party of Life, of which local businessman Maxim Tkach is a regional head, argues that peace can be achieved in eastern Ukraine only by following a Russia-favored plan for the region.

Not coincidentally, the enthusiasm and conviction of western Ukrainians have disproportionately driven two pro-Western revolutions on the Maidan in Kyiv in the past 15 years, with little visible support from populations in the country's east.

"People in the western Ukraine are different from us. It's not just language, or anything simple like that. They took power away from a president our votes elected, and they want to rip us out of our ways, abandon our values, and become part of their agenda," says Maxim Tkach, regional head of the Party of Life, the pro-Russian group that was the front-runner in parliamentary elections here in Mariupol.

"When they started that Maidan revolution, they said it was about things we could support, like fighting corruption and ending oligarchic rule. But none of that happened. They betrayed every single principle they had shouted about. Instead, they want us to change the names of our streets and schools, honor 'heroes' like Stepan Bandera that our ancestors fought against. These are things we can't accept. ...

"If there had been no Maidan, we would still have Crimea. There would have been no war. There would be no pressure on us to change our customs, our language, or our church . It was this aggressive revolution, by just part of the country, that caused these problems," he says. "Russia is Russia. It is acting in its own interests, but why do we need to antagonize it?"

"The majority who want to be Ukrainian"

Maria Podibailo, a political scientist at Mariupol State University and head of New Mariupol, a civil society group founded to support the Ukrainian army, offers a completely different narrative. She originally came from Ternopil in western Ukraine and has made Mariupol her home since 1991.

She says there were no separatist feelings in Mariupol, or the Donbass, until after the Maidan revolution when Russian agitators started traveling around eastern Ukraine, spreading lies and stirring up moods that had never existed before. Local pro-Russian oligarchs wielded their economic power to support separatist groups, while passive police and security forces allowed Russian-led separatists to seize public buildings and hold anti-Ukrainian protests in Mariupol. It wasn't until the arrival of the Ukrainian army – first in the form of the volunteer Azov Battalion – that the separatists were driven out and the front line was pushed back from the city limits in 2014, she says.

"That is why we support the army, and only trust the army," she says.

Ms. Podibailo's university-sponsored opinion surveys in 2014, after the rebellion began, found that a three-quarters majority of local people supported a future as part of Ukraine, not Russia. That majority was subdivided into several visions of what kind of Ukraine it should be, but only 12% wanted to join Russia, and 8% wanted Donbass to be an independent republic – a point often overlooked in the simplistic pro-Russian versus pro-Western scheme in which these events are frequently portrayed.

"That's when we knew we were on the right track," she says. "We were not a beleaguered minority at all. We were part of the majority who want to be Ukrainian."

But while the two nearby separatist statelets, the Donetsk People's Republic and the Lugansk People's Republic, may be backed by Russia, they emerged from deep local roots. That is a clear observation from one of the most exhaustive studies of the war to date, Rebels Without a Cause , published last month by the International Crisis Group.

The war has done great and possibly irreparable damage to Ukraine's economy , and the longer it continues, the harder it may be to ever reintegrate the former industrial heartland of Donbass with the rest of the country.

"We cannot talk to the leaders of these so-called republics. How could we possibly trust them?" says Ms. Podibailo. Her view is that, after victory, the population of the republics should be sorted out into those who collaborated with the enemy and those who were innocent victims, as happened after World War II.

"There is no way for this war to end other than in Ukrainian victory. I have never heard of a war that ends leaving things the same way, or just through some talks. People say it might take a long time, and the threat will last forever because we have such a neighbor.

"But we have the United States behind us, we have the West behind us, and they are attacking Russia from the other side with sanctions. We will win," she says.

"These are our people"

Mr. Tkach, the regional party head, says the idea of victory is a dangerous chimera, and what most people around here want is peace and restoration of normal relations with Russia.

"Of course we need to negotiate directly with" the rebel republics, he says. "These are our people. We understand them. Perhaps we need a step-by-step process, in which they are granted some special status. What would be wrong with that? They have also suffered, had their homes shelled by Ukrainian forces, lost their loved ones. Trust needs to be restored, and that might take some time."

But he is adamant that those territories need to be recovered for Ukraine. "The task before us is to bring them back to Ukraine, and Ukraine to them. It must be accomplished through compromise and negotiation, because everyone is tired of war. Once we have done this, and have peace, then we can talk about Crimea."

One of the leaders of the Party of Life – which came in a distant second in the national parliamentary elections – is Ukrainian oligarch Viktor Medvedchuk, who has strong connections to the Kremlin and whose daughter has Mr. Putin as her godfather. Attending the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum along with Mr. Putin this spring, Mr. Medvedchuk was introduced as "a representative of the Ukraine that can make a deal."

Mr. Tkach says so too. "We wish Zelenskiy well, but we really doubt that he can make peace happen. Our party has the connections and the right approach, and we think it will be necessary to bring us into the process." He's talking about dealing with the Russia that exists just across the Sea of Azov and a few miles down the road.

[Aug 17, 2019] Putin-Trump Derangement Syndrome (PTDS)

Highly recommended!
Aug 17, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

ewmayer , July 31, 2018 at 6:05 pm

"Somebody called it Trump derangement syndrome."

I believe that the full and proper name of the psychiatric disorder in question is Putin-Trump Derangement Syndrome [PTDS].

Symptoms include:

[Aug 17, 2019] The Unraveling of the Failed Trump Coup by Larry C Johnson

Highly recommended!
Former Ukrainian presidential candidate Yulia Tymoshenko trace to Steele dossier is a real shocker.
Notable quotes:
"... On December 5, 2016, Bruce Ohr emailed himself an Excel spreadsheet, seemingly from his wife Nellie Ohr, titled " WhosWho19Sept2016 ." The spreadsheet purports to show relationship descriptions and "linkages" between Donald Trump, his family and criminal figures, many of whom were Russians. ..."
"... If you want to have more fun, search the pdf using the term "BAYROCK." You will discover that Nellie Ohr, like a female Don Quixote, is searching desperately to link Trump and Sater to dirty Russian money. What she does not suspect is that Sater was being used, via his company Bayrock, to try to gain access to Russians who were potential targets of the FBI. ..."
"... What is not emphasized in the piece, and it is something I want to direct you to, is that the idea or impetus to launch the investigation of Butina came courtesy of Christopher Steele, who was relaying rumor and conjecture to Bruce Ohr. ..."
"... FBI Director Christopher Wray reminds me of one of the workers in the bowels of the Titanic who was furiously shoveling coal into the doomed boilers of the sinking ship. The FBI, like the Titanic, is in trouble. ..."
"... It also gave immunity to all of the people on Hillary's team that participated in obstruction of justice. On that same day, Jim Comey signed off on a separate memo that decided not to prosecute Hillary Clinton. ..."
"... Larry..Fusion GPS has always refused to Reveal who where its Financial support came from... ..."
"... So..the Timeline Indicates Fusion GPS was hired by The "Washington Free Beacon" around October 2015 to background checks and Profiles of The Republican Candidates for President.and that Fusion GPS continued to do so until May 2016..when it became clear that Donald Trump clinched the Nomination.. ..."
"... I wonder why AG Barr isn't forcing the FBI to comply sooner with Judge Boasberg's ruling to hand over unredacted Comey Memos and Archey Declarations? ..."
"... So what did Barack Obama know, and when did he know it? ..."
"... Nellie Ohr was working for a privately-owned firm that had employed her to make false accusations about Trump's alleged connections to Russians in order to sabotage his presidency and lay the groundwork for his impeachment. ..."
"... They also hired foreign agent, Chris Steele to concoct a thoroughly-debunked dossier for the same purpose. ..."
"... Can these people be charged with a crime or have we entered a new world of 'dirty tricks'??? ..."
"... Examination of the Nellie Ohr documents given to the FBI shows some of her source material also came from former Ukrainian presidential candidate Yulia Tymoshenko and a lawsuit she filed against Manafort. ..."
"... So, Bruce Ohr became a conduit of information not only for intelligence from Clinton's British opposition-researcher but also from his wife's curation of evidence from a Clinton foreign ally and Manafort enemy inside Ukraine. Talk about foreign influence in a U.S. election! ..."
"... The lines between government officials and informants, unverified political dirt and real intelligence, personal interest and law enforcement, became too blurred for the Justice Department's own good. ..."
Aug 17, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

There are many moving pieces in the drama surrounding the Deep State attempt to kill the Trump Presidency. God Bless Judicial Watch. I think most of the key evidence that has surfaced came courtesy of Tom Fitton, Chris Farrell and their team of tireless workers.

I want to bring you back to Mr. Felix Sater . He was part of Bayrock, which worked closely with Donald Trump's organization and, most importantly of all, was an FBI Confidential Human Source since December of 1998.

Thanks to Judicial Watch we have a new dump of Bruce Ohr emails, which include several from his wife, Nellie. There are 330 pages to wade thru (you can see them here ). There is one item in particular I encourage you to look at:

On December 5, 2016, Bruce Ohr emailed himself an Excel spreadsheet, seemingly from his wife Nellie Ohr, titled " WhosWho19Sept2016 ." The spreadsheet purports to show relationship descriptions and "linkages" between Donald Trump, his family and criminal figures, many of whom were Russians. This list of individuals allegedly "linked to Trump" include: a Russian involved in a "gangland killing;" an Uzbek mafia don; a former KGB officer suspected in the murder of Paul Tatum; a Russian who reportedly "buys up banks and pumps them dry"; a Russian money launderer for Sergei Magnitsky; a Turk accused of shipping oil for ISIS; a couple who lent their name to the Trump Institute, promoting its "get-rich-quick schemes"; a man who poured him a drink; and others.

The spreadsheet starts on page 301. If you search the document for the name Felix Sater, he will pop up. Now here is the curious and, I suppose, reassuring thing about this document--Nellie Ohr did not have a clue that Felix Sater was an active FBI informant. We can at least give the FBI credit for protecting Sater's identity from Nellie Ohr and, more importantly, her husband, DOJ official Bruce Ohr.

If you want to have more fun, search the pdf using the term "BAYROCK." You will discover that Nellie Ohr, like a female Don Quixote, is searching desperately to link Trump and Sater to dirty Russian money. What she does not suspect is that Sater was being used, via his company Bayrock, to try to gain access to Russians who were potential targets of the FBI.

One point is clear--she uncovered no evidence implicating Trump working with the Russians, either thru Felix Sater or one of the other "suspects" she exhaustively listed.

Shifting gears, there are two very important pieces recently posted at The Conservative Tree House that I encourage you to read:

https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2019/08/12/quirky-angle-overstock-ceo-patrick-byrne-2016-fbi-activity-was-political-espionage/#more-168122 https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2019/08/12/federal-judge-completely-rejects-doj-argument-orders-archey-declarations-descriptions-of-comey-memosreleased/ The first piece focuses on CEO Patrick Byrne and the role he played in trying to entrap and portray Marina Butina as a Russian agent.

What is not emphasized in the piece, and it is something I want to direct you to, is that the idea or impetus to launch the investigation of Butina came courtesy of Christopher Steele, who was relaying rumor and conjecture to Bruce Ohr.

You can find this information in the Bruce Ohr 302s that Judicial Watch also secured. Marina Butina was unfairly and unjustly portrayed and prosecuted as a Russian intelligence agent. It was a damn lie.

I do not ever want to hear another American complaining about an American State Department or CIA employee who is entrapped and unfairly prosecuted in Russia.

We have done the same damn thing that we have accused the Soviets of doing. The same thing. It is shameful.

The second piece is the ultimate feel good piece. Kudos to its author, Sundance.

He details how a Federal Judge, infuriated by the FBIs stupidity and mendacity, tells the Bureau to go pound sand. The FBI is frantically trying to prevent the Archey Declarations from being revealed thanks to a lawsuit brought by CNN (finally, CNN did something right).

The Archey Declarations provide a detailed description of the memos written and illegally removed from FBI Headquarters by that sanctimonious twit, Jim Comey. More shoes will be dropping in the coming days.

It appears that Inspector General Horowitz is going to present at least one report on Jim Comey and one report on the FISA abuse by the FBI.

FBI Director Christopher Wray reminds me of one of the workers in the bowels of the Titanic who was furiously shoveling coal into the doomed boilers of the sinking ship. The FBI, like the Titanic, is in trouble.

Finally, Gateway Pundit's Joe Hoft put up an important piece today ( see here ). Here is the bottomline, and keep this in mind as you read the piece, on June 20, 2016 the FBI signed off on a deal with Hillary Clinton's attorney's that gave Hillary's team the right to destroy computers and emails.

It also gave immunity to all of the people on Hillary's team that participated in obstruction of justice. On that same day, Jim Comey signed off on a separate memo that decided not to prosecute Hillary Clinton.

The fix was in more than a month before Jim Comey appeared on camera to try to explain why he was not recommending prosecution of Hillary for putting Top Secret information on her unclassified server.

Jim Comey lied when he declared that could not prove "intent."

I am sure that those of you who have never held a clearance and handled Top Secret material probably believed that lie.

But anyone who knows how the TS system is set up knows that the ONLY WAY, I repeat, the ONLY WAY to put TS material on an unclassified server is to do so intentionally. There is no way to do this mistakenly.

Jim Ticehurst said in reply to Jim Ticehurst... ,

Larry..Fusion GPS has always refused to Reveal who where its Financial support came from...

So..the Timeline Indicates Fusion GPS was hired by The "Washington Free Beacon" around October 2015 to background checks and Profiles of The Republican Candidates for President.and that Fusion GPS continued to do so until May 2016..when it became clear that Donald Trump clinched the Nomination..

creating Phase 2..Operations..

"The Washington Free Beacon ".Has an Editor in Chief ..who is William Kristols Son In Law..And William Kristols ..Father....Irving Kristol..is Called..."the God Father of Neo Conservatism". William Kristol..was a John McCain supporter..

Thus Fusion GPS..retained Nellie Ohr..(strangly..NO Wiki Profile) who apparently had to Use her husbnd Bruce Ohrs Clearances,,to continue Her Collaberation with Fusion GPS..

By June 2016 the Strategy was to bring in Christopher Steele..who was know to Bruce Ohr back to 2006.. Strange.. NO early life BIOS for Bruce or Nellie Ohr..

Jack , 16 August 2019 at 01:38 AM
Larry

Do you believe the current DOJ under Barr will really investigate and convene a grand jury to hear testimony from Comey, Brennan and Clapper?

And what do you make of the fact that Epstein who was on suicide watch either was murdered or killed himself while in custody?

akaPatience , 16 August 2019 at 01:38 AM
I wonder why AG Barr isn't forcing the FBI to comply sooner with Judge Boasberg's ruling to hand over unredacted Comey Memos and Archey Declarations?

The Gateway Pundit item about the ridiculously unfair and unethical deals made in Hillary Clinton's email scandal investigation is just further proof of how the Clinton taint infected the FBI. "Crooked" is a very apt epithet, that's for sure. I'd love to know how much Bill and Hill raked in during her Sec'y. of State racketeering.

Fred , 16 August 2019 at 01:38 AM
So what did Barack Obama know, and when did he know it?
plantman , 16 August 2019 at 01:38 AM
You say: "One point is clear--she uncovered no evidence implicating Trump working with the Russians, either thru Felix Sater or one of the other "suspects" she exhaustively listed."

This is true, but it is also true that Nellie Ohr was working for a privately-owned firm that had employed her to make false accusations about Trump's alleged connections to Russians in order to sabotage his presidency and lay the groundwork for his impeachment.

They also hired foreign agent, Chris Steele to concoct a thoroughly-debunked dossier for the same purpose.

Can these people be charged with a crime or have we entered a new world of 'dirty tricks'???

Keith Harbaugh , 16 August 2019 at 01:38 AM
Let me just add this piece by John Solomon: "New evidence shows why Steele, the Ohrs and TSA workers never should have become DOJ sources" by John Solomon, 2019-08-15
...
Examination of the Nellie Ohr documents given to the FBI shows some of her source material also came from former Ukrainian presidential candidate Yulia Tymoshenko and a lawsuit she filed against Manafort.

Why is that significant? Tymoshenko and Hillary Clinton had a simpatico relationship after the former secretary of State went out of her way in January 2013 to advocate for Tymoshenko's release from prison on corruption charges.

So, Bruce Ohr became a conduit of information not only for intelligence from Clinton's British opposition-researcher but also from his wife's curation of evidence from a Clinton foreign ally and Manafort enemy inside Ukraine. Talk about foreign influence in a U.S. election!
...
The tales of Bruce and Nellie Ohr, Christopher Steele, Yulia Tymoshenko, and those DEA and TSA agents raise a stark warning:

The lines between government officials and informants, unverified political dirt and real intelligence, personal interest and law enforcement,
became too blurred for the Justice Department's own good.

That's a problem sorely in need of fixing.

oldman22 said in reply to Keith Harbaugh... 17 August 2019 at 01:16 AM

The person responsible for securing the release of Yulia Tymoshenko was Chancellor Merkel. Further, that USA opposed Tymoshenko.

quote
As for one of the leaders of the war party in Kiev, Merkel has privately and publicly endorsed every claim of Yulia Tymoshenko, promoting her release from prison and protecting her campaigns for war against Russia, even though – according to the high-level German source – “they [Chancellery, Foreign Ministry] have known for years that [Tymoshenko] was a crook.”
endquote

There is a lot more detail Tymoshenko's corruption and Merkel's rescue here:

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2015/02/john-helmer-the-political-motivation-of-chancellor-merkels-embrace-of-yulia-tymoshenko-and-war.html

(republished from John Helmer's website, includes a great cartoon worth viewing)

If you want more sources for this story,google
"Merkel, Tymoshenko, prison"

[Aug 17, 2019] Debunking the Putin Panic by Stephen F. Cohen

Highly recommended!
Aug 17, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

STEPHEN COHEN: I'm not aware that Russia attacked Georgia. The European Commission, if you're talking about the 2008 war, the European Commission, investigating what happened, found that Georgia, which was backed by the United States, fighting with an American-built army under the control of the, shall we say, slightly unpredictable Georgian president then, Saakashvili, that he began the war by firing on Russian enclaves. And the Kremlin, which by the way was not occupied by Putin, but by Michael McFaul and Obama's best friend and reset partner then-president Dmitry Medvedev, did what any Kremlin leader, what any leader in any country would have had to do: it reacted. It sent troops across the border through the tunnel, and drove the Georgian forces out of what essentially were kind of Russian protectorate areas of Georgia.

So that- Russia didn't begin that war. And it didn't begin the one in Ukraine, either. We did that by [continents], the overthrow of the Ukrainian president in [20]14 after President Obama told Putin that he would not permit that to happen. And I think it happened within 36 hours. The Russians, like them or not, feel that they have been lied to and betrayed. They use this word, predatl'stvo, betrayal, about American policy toward Russia ever since 1991, when it wasn't just President George Bush, all the documents have been published by the National Security Archive in Washington, all the leaders of the main Western powers promised the Soviet Union that under Gorbachev, if Gorbachev would allow a reunited Germany to be NATO, NATO would not, in the famous expression, move two inches to the east.

Now NATO is sitting on Russia's borders from the Baltic to Ukraine. So Russians aren't fools, and they're good-hearted, but they become resentful. They're worried about being attacked by the United States. In fact, you read and hear in the Russian media daily, we are under attack by the United States. And this is a lot more real and meaningful than this crap that is being put out that Russia somehow attacked us in 2016. I must have been sleeping. I didn't see Pearl Harbor or 9/11 and 2016. This is reckless, dangerous, warmongering talk. It needs to stop. Russia has a better case for saying they've been attacked by us since 1991. We put our military alliance on the front door. Maybe it's not an attack, but it looks like one, feels like one. Could be one.

Disturbed Voter , July 30, 2018 at 6:32 am

Real politik. Don't bring a knife to a gun fight. Don't start fights in the first place. The idea that American leadership is any better than mid-Victorian imperialism, is laughable.

Jerri-Lynn Scofield , July 30, 2018 at 8:15 am

Here's the RNN link to part one: The Russia "National Security Crisis" is a U.S. Creation .

integer , July 30, 2018 at 7:12 am

AARON MATE: We hear, often, talk of Putin possibly being the richest person in the world as a result of his entanglement with the very corruption of Russia you're speaking about

Few appear to be aware that Bill Browder is single-handedly responsible for starting, and spreading, the rumor that Putin's net worth is $200 billion (for those who are unfamiliar with Browder, I highly recommend watching Andrei Nekrasov's documentary titled " The Magnitsky Act – Behind the Scenes "). Browder appears to have first started this rumor early in 2015 , and has repeated it ad nauseam since then, including in his testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2017 . While Browder has always framed the $200 billion figure as his own estimate, that subtle qualifier has had little effect on the media's willingness to accept it as fact.

Interestingly, during the press conference at the Helsinki Summit, Putin claimed Browder sent $400 million of ill-gotten gains to the Clinton campaign. Putin retracted the statement and claimed to have misspoke a week or so later, however by that time the $400 million figure had been cited by numerous media outlets around the world. I think it is at least possible that Putin purposely exaggerated the amount of money in question as a kind of tit-for-tat response to Browder having started the rumor about his net worth being $200 billion.

Blue Pilgrim , July 30, 2018 at 11:39 am

The stories I saw said there was a mistranslation -- but that the figure should have $400 thousand and not $400 million. Maybe Putin misspoke, but the $400,000 number is still significant, albeit far more reasonable.

Putin never was on the Forbes list of billionaires, btw, and his campaign finance statement comes to far less. It never seems to occur to rabid capitalists or crooks that not everyone is like them, placing such importance on vast fortunes, or want to be dishonest, greedy, or power hungry. Putin is only 'well off' and that seems to satisfy him just fine as he gets on with other interests, values, and goals.

integer , July 30, 2018 at 12:03 pm

Yes, $400,000 is the revised/correct figure. My having written that "Putin retracted the statement" was not the best choice of phrase. Also, the figure was corrected the day after it was made, not "a week or so later" as I wrote in my previous comment. From the Russia Insider link:

Browder's criminal group used many tax evasion methods, including offshore companies. They siphoned shares and funds from Russia worth over 1.5 billion dollars. By the way, $400,000 was transferred to the US Democratic Party's accounts from these funds. The Russian president asked us to correct his statement from yesterday. During the briefing, he said it was $400,000,000, not $400,000. Either way, it's still a significant amount of money.

JohnnyGL , July 30, 2018 at 2:54 pm

I hadn't heard about the revision/edit to the $400M, thanks!

Seems crazy to think how much Russo-phobia seems to have been ginned up by one tax-dodging hedgie with an axe to grind.

Procopius , July 31, 2018 at 1:11 am

There's something weird about the anti-Putin hysteria. Somehow, many, many people have come to believe they must demonstrate their membership in the tribe by accepting completely unsupported assertions that go against common sense.

Eureka Springs , July 30, 2018 at 7:58 am

In a sane world we the people would be furious with the Clinton campaign, especially the D party but the R's as well, our media (again), and our intel/police State (again). Holding them all accountable while making sure this tsunami of deception and lies never happens again.

It's amazing even in time of the internetz those of us who really dig can only come up with a few sane voices. It's much worse now in terms of the numbers of sane voices than it was in the run up to Iraq 2.

CenterOfGravity , July 30, 2018 at 12:52 pm

Regardless of broad access to far more information in the digital age, never under estimate the self-preservation instinct of American exceptionalist mythology. There is an inverse relationship between the decline of US global primacy and increasingly desperate quest for adventurism. Like any case of addiction, looking outward for blame/salvation is imperative in order to prevent the mirror of self-reflection/realization from turning back onto ourselves.

integer , July 30, 2018 at 9:28 am

we're not to believe we're not supposed to believe we're supposed to believe

Believe whatever you want, however your comment gives the impression that you came to this article because you felt the need to push back against anything that does not conform to the liberal international order's narrative on Putin and Russia, rather than "with an eagerness to counterbalance the media's portrayal of Putin". WRT to whataboutism, I like Greenwald's definition of the term :

"Whataboutism": the term used to bar inquiry into whether someone adheres to the moral and behavioral standards they seek to impose on everyone else. That's its functional definition.

Rojo , July 30, 2018 at 12:25 pm

Invoking "whataboutism" is a liberal team-Dem tell.

Amfortas the Hippie , July 30, 2018 at 2:20 pm

aye. I've never seen it used by anyone aside from the worst Hill Trolls.
Indeed, when it was first thrown at me, I endeavored to look it up, and found that all references to it were from Hillaryites attempting to diss apostates and heretics.

Jonathan Holland Becnel , July 30, 2018 at 8:22 pm

Eh, probably

John Oliver, whos been completely sucking lately with TDS, did a semi decent segment on Whataboutism.

Eureka Springs , July 30, 2018 at 9:52 am

The degree of consistency and or lack of hypocrisy based on words and actions separates US from Russia to an astonishing level. That is Russia's largest threat to US, our deceivers. The propaganda tables have turned and we are deceiving ourselves to points of collective insanity and warmongering with a great nuclear power while we are at it. Warmongering is who we are and what we do.

Does Russia have a GITMO, torture Chelsea Manning, openly say they want to kill Snowden and Assange? Is Russia building up arsenals on our borders while maintaining hundreds of foreign bases and conducting several wars at any given moment while constantly threatening to foment more wars? Is Russia dropping another trillion on nuclear arsenals? Is Russia forcing us to maintain such an anti democratic system and an even worse, an entirely hackable electronic voting system?

You ready to destroy the world, including your own, rather than look in the mirror?

rkka , July 30, 2018 at 9:52 am

You're talking about extending Russian military power into Europe when the military spending of NATO Europe alone exceeds Russia's by almost 5-1 (more like 12-1 when one includes the US and Canada), have about triple the number of soldiers than Russia has, and when the Russian ground forces are numerically smaller than they have been in at least 200 years?

" to put their self-interests above those of their constituents and employees, why can't we apply this same lens to Putin and his oligarchs?"

The oligarchs got their start under Yeltsin and his FreeMarketDemocraticReformers, whose policies were so catastrophic that deaths were exceeding births by almost a million a year by the late '90s, with no end in sight. Central to Yeltsin's governance was the corrupt privatization, by which means the Seven Bankers came to control the Russian economy and Russian politics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semibankirschina

Central to Putin's popularity are the measures he took to curb oligarchic predation in 2003-2005. Because of this, Russia's debt:GDP ratio went from 1.0 to about 0.2, and Russia's demographic recovery began while Western analysis were still predicting the death of Russia.

So Putin is the anti-oligarch in Russian domestic politics.

Blue Pilgrim , July 30, 2018 at 12:17 pm

"While it's true that power corrupts"

I know of many people who sacrifice their own interests for those of their children (over whom they have virtually absolute power), family member and friends. I know of others who dedicate their lives to justice, peace, the well being of their nation, the world, and other people -- people who find far greater meaning and satisfaction in this than in accumulating power or money. Other people have their own goals, such as producing art, inventing interesting things, reading and learning, and don't care two hoots about power or money as long as their immediate needs are met.

I'm cynical enough about humans without thinking the worst of everyone and every group or culture. Not everyone thinks only of nails and wants to be hammers, or are sociopaths. There are times when people are more or less forced into taking power, or getting more money, even if they don't want it, because they want to change things for the better or need to defend themselves.
There are people who get guns and learn how to use them only because they feel a need for defending themselves and family but who don't like guns and don't want to shoot anyone or anything.

There are many people who do not want to be controlled and bossed around, but neither want to boss around anyone else. The world is full of such people. If they are threatened and attacked, however, expect defensive reactions. Same as for most animals which are not predators, and even predators will generally not attack other animals if they are not hungry or threatened -- but that does not mean they are not competent or can be dangerous.

Capitalism is not only inherently predatory, but is inherently expansive without limits, with unlimited ambition for profits and control. It's intrinsically very competitive and imperialist. Capitalism is also a thing which was exported to Russia, starting soon after the Russian Revolution, which was immediately attacked and invaded by the West, and especially after the fall of the Soviet Union. Soviet Russia had it's own problems, which it met with varying degrees of success, but were quite different from the aggressive capitalism and imperialism of the US and Europe.

Not every culture and person are the same.

BenX , July 30, 2018 at 3:28 pm

The pro-Putin propaganda is pretty interesting to witness, and of course not everything Cohen says is skewed pro-Putin – that's what provides credibility. But "Putin kills everybody" is something NOBODY says (except Cohen, twice in one interview) – Putin is actually pretty selective of those he decides to have killed. But of course, he doesn't kill anyone, personally – therefore he's an innocent lamb, accidentally running Russia as a dictator.

rkka , July 31, 2018 at 9:11 am

The most recent dictator in Russian history was Boris Yeltsin, who turned tanks on his legislature while it was in the legal and constitutional process of impeaching him, and whose policies were so catastrophic for Russians (who were dying off at the rate of 900k/yr) that he had to steal his re-election because he had a 5% approval rating.

But he did as the US gvt told him, so I guess that makes him a Democrat.

Under Putin Russia recovered from being helpless, bankrupt & dying, but Russia has an independent foreign policy, so that makes Putin a dictator.

Plenue , July 30, 2018 at 3:54 pm

"Does any sane person believe that there will ever be a Putin-signed contract provided as evidence? Does any sane person believe that Putin actually needs to "approve" a contract rather than signaling to his oligarch/mafia hierarchy that he's unhappy about a newspaper or journalist's reporting?"

Why do you think Putin even needs, or feels a need, to have journalists killed in the first place? I see no evidence to support this basic assumption.

The idea of Russia poised to attack Europe is interesting, in light of the fact that they've cut their military spending by 20%. And even before that the budgets of France, Germany, and the UK combined well exceeded that of Russia, to say nothing of the rest of NATO or the US.

Putin's record speaks for itself. This again points to the absurdity of claiming he's had reporters killed: he doesn't need to. He has a vast amount of genuine public support because he's salvaged the country and pieced it back together after the pillaging of the Yeltsin years. That he himself is a corrupt oligarch I have no particular doubt of. But if he just wanted to enrich himself, he's had a very funny way of going about it. Pray tell, what are these 'other interpretations'?

"The US foreign policy has been disastrous for millions of people since world war 2. But Cohen's arguments that Russia isn't as bad as the US is just a bunch of whattaboutism."

What countries has the Russian Federation destroyed?

witters , July 31, 2018 at 1:30 am

Here is a fascinating essay ["Are We Reading Russia Right?"] by Nicolai N. Petro who currently holds the Silvia-Chandley Professorship of Peace Studies and Nonviolence at the University of Rhode Island. His books include, Ukraine
in Crisis (Routledge, 2017), Crafting Democracy (Cornell, 2004), The Rebirth of Russian Democracy (Harvard, 1995), and Russian Foreign Policy, co-authored with Alvin Z. Rubinstein (Longman, 1997). A graduate of the University of Virginia, he is the recipient of Fulbright awards to Russia and to Ukraine, as well as fellowships from the Foreign Policy Research Institute, the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research, the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies in Washington,
D.C., and the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. As a Council on Foreign Relations Fellow, he served as special assistant for policy toward the Soviet Union in the U.S. Department of State from 1989 to 1990. In addition to scholarly publications
on Russia and Ukraine, he has written for Asia Times, American Interest, Boston Globe, Christian Science Monitor, The Guardian (UK), The Nation, New York Times, and Wilson Quarterly. His writings have appeared frequently on the web sites of the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs and The National Interest.

I warn you – it is terrifying!

http://npetro.net/resources/Petro-FF+Spring+2018.pdf

Carolinian , July 30, 2018 at 8:55 am

Thanks for so much for this. Great stuff. Cohen says the emperor has no clothes so naturally the empire doesn't want him on television. I believe he has been on CNN one or two times and I saw him once on the PBS Newshour where the interviewer asked skeptical questions with a pained and skeptical look. He seems to be the only prominent person willing to stand up and call bs on the Russia hate. There are plenty of pundits and commentators who do that but not many Princeton professors.

Thye Rev Kev , July 30, 2018 at 9:04 am

It has been said in recent years that the greatest failure of American foreign policy was the invasion of Iraq. I think that they are wrong. The greatest failure, in my opinion, is to push both China and Russia together into a semi-official pact against American ambitions. In the same way that the US was able to split China from the USSR back in the seventies, the best option was for America to split Russia from China and help incorporate them into the western system. The waters for that idea have been so fouled by the Russia hysteria, if not dementia, that that is no longer a possibility. I just wish that the US would stop sowing dragon's teeth – it never ends well.

NotTimothyGeithner , July 30, 2018 at 9:45 am

The best option, but the "American exceptionalists" went nuts. Also, the usual play book of stoking fears of the "yellow menace" would have been too on the nose. Americans might not buy it, and there was a whole cottage industry of "the rising China threat" except the potential consumer market place and slave labor factories stopped that from happening.

Bringing Russia into the West effectively means Europe, and I think that creates a similar dynamic to a Russian/Chinese pact. The basic problem with the EU is its led by a relatively weak but very German power which makes the EU relatively weak or controllable as long as the German electorate is relatively sedate. I think they still need the international structures run by the U.S. to maintain their dominance. What Russia and the pre-Erdogan Turkey (which was never going to be admitted to the EU) presented was significant upsets to the existing EU order with major balances to Germany which I always believed would make the EU potentially more dynamic. Every decision wouldn't require a pilgrimage to Berlin. The British were always disinterested. The French had made arrangements with Germany, and Italy is still Italy. Putting Russia or Turkey (pre-Erdogan) would have disrupted this arrangement.

John Wright , July 30, 2018 at 11:11 am

>which is oddly not easy to locate on its site

It appeared to me that Aaron Mate knew he was dealing with a weak hand by the end of the interview.

When Mate stated "it's widely held that Putin is responsible for the killing of journalists and opposition activists who oppose him."

There are many widely held beliefs in the world, and that does not make them true.

For example, It was widely held, and still may be believed by some, that Saddam Hussein was involved in the events of 9/11.

It is widely believed that humans are not responsible, in any part, for climate change.

Mate may have been embarrassed when he saw the final version and as a courtesy to him, the interview was made more difficult to find.

pretzelattack , July 30, 2018 at 11:35 am

iirc he didn't say it was true.

Elizabeth Burton , July 30, 2018 at 7:18 pm

The Crimea voted to be annexed by Russia by a clear majority. The US overran Hawaii with total disregard for the wishes of the native population. Your comparison is invalid.

vato , July 31, 2018 at 3:37 am

"Putin's finger prints are all over the Balkan fiasco".How is that with Putin only becoming president in 2000 and the Nato bombing started way beforehand. It's ridiculous to think that Putin had any major influence at that time as govenor or director of the domestic intelligence service on what was going during the bombing of NATO on Belgrad. Even Gerhard Schroeder, then chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany, admitted in an interview in 2014 with a major German Newspaper (Die Zeit) that this invasion of Nato was a fault and against international law!

Can you concrete what you mean by "fingerprints" or is this just another platitudes?

ewmayer , July 31, 2018 at 6:05 pm

"Somebody called it Trump derangement syndrome."

I believe that the full and proper name of the psychiatric disorder in question is Putin-Trump Derangement Syndrome [PTDS].

Symptoms include:

o Eager and uncritical ingestion and social-media regurgitation of even the most patently absurd MSM propaganda. For example, the meme that releasing factual information about actual election-meddling (as Wikileaks did about the Dem-establishment's rigging of its own nomination process in 2016) is a grave threat to American Democracy™;

o Recent-onset veneration of the intelligence agencies, whose stock in trade is spying on and lying to the American people, spreading disinformation, election rigging, torture and assassination and its agents, such as liar and perjurer Clapper and torturer Brennan;

o Rehabilitation of horrid unindicted GOP war criminals like G.W. Bush as alleged examples of "norms-respecting Republican patriots";

o Smearing of anyone who dares question the MSM-stoked hysteria as an America-hating Russian stooge.

[Jul 29, 2019] Peace in Ukraine by Stephen F. Cohen

Highly recommended!
Ukraine became a geopolitical pawn. In signing up with the US and EU, there is one guaranteed loser – the Ukrainian people.
Notable quotes:
"... His electorally repudiated predecessor, Petro Poroshenko, backed by supporters in Washington, thwarted almost every preceding opportunity for negotiations both with the Donbass rebels and with Moscow, ..."
"... But the struggle for peace has just begun, with powerful forces arrayed against it in Ukraine, Moscow, and Washington. In Ukraine, well-armed ultra-nationalist -- some would say quasi-fascist -- detachments are terrorizing supporters of Zelensky's initiative, including a Kiev television station that proposed broadcasting a dialogue between Russian and Ukrainian citizens. ..."
"... Which brings us to Washington and in particular to President Donald Trump and his would-be opponent in 2020, former vice president Joseph Biden. Kiev's government, thus now Zelensky, is heavily dependent on billions of dollars of aid from the International Monetary Fund, which Washington largely controls. Former president Barack Obama and Biden, his "point man" for Ukraine, used this financial leverage to exercise semi-colonial influence over Poroshenko, generally making things worse, including the incipient Ukrainian civil war. Their hope was, of course, to sever Ukraine's centuries-long ties to Russia and even bring it eventually into the US-led NATO sphere of influence. ..."
"... Biden, however, has a special problem -- and obligation. As an implementer, and presumably architect, of Obama's disastrous policy in Ukraine, and currently the leading candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, Biden should be asked about his past and present thinking regarding Ukraine. The much-ballyhooed ongoing "debates" are an opportunity to ask the question -- and of other candidates as well. Presidential debates are supposed to elicit and clarify the views of candidates on domestic and foreign policy. And among the latter, few, if any, are more important than Ukraine, which remains the epicenter of this new and more dangerous Cold War. ..."
"... This commentary is based on Stephen F. Cohen's most recent weekly discussion with the host of The John Batchelor Show . Now in their sixth year, previous installments are at TheNation.com . ..."
Jul 29, 2019 | www.thenation.com

The election of Ukraine's new president, Volodymyr Zelensky, who won decisively throughout most of the country, represents the possibility of peace with Russia, if it -- and he -- are given a chance. His electorally repudiated predecessor, Petro Poroshenko, backed by supporters in Washington, thwarted almost every preceding opportunity for negotiations both with the Donbass rebels and with Moscow, notably provisions associated with the European-sponsored Minsk Accords. Zelensky, on the other hand, has made peace (along with corruption) his top priority and indeed spoke directly with Russian President Vladimir Putin, on July 11. The nearly six-year war having become a political, diplomatic, and financial drain on his leadership, Putin welcomed the overture.

But the struggle for peace has just begun, with powerful forces arrayed against it in Ukraine, Moscow, and Washington. In Ukraine, well-armed ultra-nationalist -- some would say quasi-fascist -- detachments are terrorizing supporters of Zelensky's initiative, including a Kiev television station that proposed broadcasting a dialogue between Russian and Ukrainian citizens. (Washington has previously had some shameful episodes of collusion with these Ukrainian neo-Nazis .) As for Putin, who does not fully control the Donbass rebels or its leaders, he "can never be seen at home," as I pointed out more than two years ago , "as 'selling out' Russia's 'brethren' anywhere in southeast Ukraine." Indeed, his own implacable nationalists have made this a litmus test of his leadership.

Which brings us to Washington and in particular to President Donald Trump and his would-be opponent in 2020, former vice president Joseph Biden. Kiev's government, thus now Zelensky, is heavily dependent on billions of dollars of aid from the International Monetary Fund, which Washington largely controls. Former president Barack Obama and Biden, his "point man" for Ukraine, used this financial leverage to exercise semi-colonial influence over Poroshenko, generally making things worse, including the incipient Ukrainian civil war. Their hope was, of course, to sever Ukraine's centuries-long ties to Russia and even bring it eventually into the US-led NATO sphere of influence.

Our hope should be that Trump breaks with that long-standing bipartisan policy, as he did with policy toward North Korea, and puts America squarely on the side of peace in Ukraine. (For now, Zelensky has set aside Moscow's professed irreversible "reunification" with Crimea, as should Washington.) A new US policy must include recognition, previously lacking, that the citizens of war-ravaged Donbass are not primarily "Putin's stooges" but people with their own legitimate interests and preferences, even if they favor Russia. Here too Zelensky is embarking on a new course. Poroshenko waged an "anti-terrorist" war against Donbass: the new president is reaching out to its citizens even though most of them were unable to vote in the election.

Biden, however, has a special problem -- and obligation. As an implementer, and presumably architect, of Obama's disastrous policy in Ukraine, and currently the leading candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, Biden should be asked about his past and present thinking regarding Ukraine. The much-ballyhooed ongoing "debates" are an opportunity to ask the question -- and of other candidates as well. Presidential debates are supposed to elicit and clarify the views of candidates on domestic and foreign policy. And among the latter, few, if any, are more important than Ukraine, which remains the epicenter of this new and more dangerous Cold War.

This commentary is based on Stephen F. Cohen's most recent weekly discussion with the host of The John Batchelor Show . Now in their sixth year, previous installments are at TheNation.com .

[Jul 28, 2019] Antisemitism prejudices projection on Russians

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... "You have no evidence for the so-called Russian IO. It is a fabrication." In fact, Putin rejects the claim many times publicly saying that Russia does not meddle in foreign elections as a matter of policy. Maybe I'm gullible, but I find his disclaimer pretty convincing.... ..."
"... Is there an unseen connection between the Democrat leadership and the Intel agencies??? And --if there is-- does that mean we are headed for a one-party system??? ..."
"... The Russians trying to rig the elections meme was a fallback for the failure of the “trump is a russianstooge" meme. ..."
Jul 28, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com
Andrei Martyanov (aka SmoothieX12) -> catherine... , 27 July 2019 at 11:30 PM
Here are some insights into the minds of many movers and shakers in Russiagate:

Key US officials behind the Russia investigation have made no secret of their animus towards Russia.

"I do always hate the Russians," Lisa Page, a senior FBI lawyer on the Russia probe, testified to Congress in July 2018. "It is my opinion that with respect to Western ideals and who it is and what it is we stand for as Americans, Russia poses the most dangerous threat to that way of life."

As he opened the FBI's probe of the Trump campaign's ties to Russians in July 2016, FBI agent Peter Strzok texted Page: "fuck the cheating motherfucking Russians Bastards. I hate them I think they're probably the worst. Fucking conniving cheating savages."

Speaking to NBC News in May 2017, former director of national intelligence James Clapper explained why US officials saw interactions between the Trump camp and Russian nationals as a cause for alarm: "The Russians," Clapper said, "almost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor, whatever, which is a typical Russian technique. So we were concerned."

In a May interview with Lawfare, former FBI general counsel Jim Baker, who helped oversee the Russia probe, explained the origins of the investigation as follows: "It was about Russia, period, full stop. When the [George] Papadopoulos information comes across our radar screen, it's coming across in the sense that we were always looking at Russia. we've been thinking about Russia as a threat actor for decades and decades."

https://www.thenation.com/article/questions-mueller-russiagate/

It was always about Russians no matter what they do or don't do. Large strata of US so called "elite" is obsessed with Russia. Not even China.

plantman , 27 July 2019 at 12:55 PM

I believe Larry Johnson is right when he says:

"You have no evidence for the so-called Russian IO. It is a fabrication." In fact, Putin rejects the claim many times publicly saying that Russia does not meddle in foreign elections as a matter of policy. Maybe I'm gullible, but I find his disclaimer pretty convincing....

My question for Larry Johnson requires some speculation on his part: How did the claims of "Russia meddling" which began with the DNC and Hillary campaign, take root at the FBI, CIA and NSA???

Is there an unseen connection between the Democrat leadership and the Intel agencies??? And --if there is-- does that mean we are headed for a one-party system???

Walrus , 27 July 2019 at 12:55 PM
The Russians trying to rig the elections meme was a fallback for the failure of the “trump is a russianstooge" meme.

[Jul 23, 2019] John Helmer MH17 Evidence Tampering Revealed by Malaysia – FBI Attempt To Seize Black Boxes; Dutch Cover-Up of Forged Telephon

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... For Malaysia, starting with Prime Minister Mahathir, to stand up and say the US tried to cook the record to pin the crash on Russia is remarkable. ..."
"... A new documentary from Max van der Werff, the leading independent investigator of the Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 disaster, has revealed breakthrough evidence of tampering and forging of prosecution materials; suppression of Ukrainian Air Force radar tapes; and lying by the Dutch, Ukrainian, US and Australian governments. An attempt by agents of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to take possession of the black boxes of the downed aircraft is also revealed by a Malaysian National Security Council official for the first time. ..."
"... Malaysia's exclusion from the JIT at the outset, and Belgium's inclusion (4 Belgian nationals were listed on the MH17 passenger manifest), have never been explained. ..."
"... The film reveals the Malaysian Government's evidence for judging the JIT's witness testimony, photographs, video clips, and telephone tapes to have been manipulated by the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU), and to be inadmissible in a criminal prosecution in a Malaysian or other national or international court. ..."
"... The new film reveals that a secret Malaysian military operation took custody of the MH17 black boxes on July 22, preventing the US and Ukraine from seizing them. The Malaysian operation, revealed in the film by the Malaysian Army colonel who led it, eliminated the evidence for the camouflage story, reinforcing the German Government's opposition to the armed attack, and forcing the Dutch to call off the invasion on July 27. ..."
"... Although German opposition to military intervention forced its cancellation, the Australians sent a 200-man special forces unit to The Netherlands and then Kiev. The European Union and the US followed with economic sanctions against Russia on July 29. ..."
"... In Kiev on July 24, 2014, left to right: Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop; Dutch Foreign Minister Frans Timmermans, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin. Source: https://www.alamy.com/ The NATO intervention plan was still under discussion, but the black boxes were already under Malaysian control. ..."
"... Subsequent releases from the Kiev government to substantiate the allegation of Russian involvement in the shoot-down have included telephone tape recordings. These were presented last month by the JIT as their evidence for indictment of four Russians; for details, read this . ..."
"... Left: Dutch police chief Paulissen grins as he acknowledged during the June 19, 2019 , press conference of JIT that the telephone tape evidence on which the charges against the four accused Russians came from the Ukrainian SBU. ..."
"... Dubinsky testifies that he had no orders for and took no part in the shoot-down. As for the telephone tape-recording evidence against him, Dubinsky says the calls were made days before July 17, and edited by the SBU. ..."
"... She did not see a launch nor a plume from there. Notice the JIT 'launch site' is less than two kilometers from her house and garden. The BBC omitted this crucial part of her testimony." ..."
"... According to Kovalenko in the new documentary, at the firing location she has now identified precisely, "at that moment the Ukrainian Army were there." ..."
"... Volkov explained that on July 17 there were three radar units at Chuguev on "full alert" because "fighter jets were taking off from there;" Chuguev is 200 kilometres northwest of the crash site. He disputed that the repairs to one unit meant none of the three was operating. Ukrainian radar records of the location and time of the MH17 attack were made and kept, Volkov said. "There [they] have it. In Ukraine they have it." ..."
"... Last month, at the JIT press conference in The Netherlands on June 19, the Malaysian representative present, Mohammed Hanafiah Bin Al Zakaria, one of three Solicitors-General of the Malaysian Attorney General's ministry, refused to endorse for the Malaysian Governnment the JIT evidence or its charges against Russia. "Malaysia would like to reiterate our commitment to the JIT seeking justice for the victims," Zakaria said . "The objective of the JIT is to complete the investigations and gathering of evidence of all witnesses for the purpose of prosecuting the wrongdoers and Malaysia stands by the rule of law and the due process." [Question: do you support the conclusions?] "Part of the conclusions [inaudible] – do not change our positions." ..."
"... Why is the transcript of the Cockpit Voice Recorder kept a secret (see e.g. here for others)? ..."
"... Why is no journalist raising these questions? ..."
"... Bellingcat? The fellow using the pseudonym is called Eliot Higgins and hails from the Midlands, not far from the Jihadist masquerading as the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights above a take away shop. He was a regular BTL commentator at the Grauniad before being paid to spout BS. Nice work if one can get it, eh? ..."
"... That territory where the missile was fired from was in Ukrainian hands at the time, not rebels, and those launchers were seen speeding rapidly west after the shooting down. ..."
"... Now that we have the crime and the five-year cover-up, the simplest explanation is actually the one of a likely false flag operation. Asking 'cui bono,' how would Russia or the rebels benefit from shooting down a plane with bunch of Dutch people on board? (Russia historically has had good relations with Holland, Malaysia, too.) ..."
"... Lots of terrible stuff happened in Ukraine after the govt changed (courtesy of the west). Have we forgotten about the burning of more than 40 people in Odessa? Or the murders of politicians and journalists? ..."
"... And let's not forget the appearance of (coordinated) magazine covers of VVP as the devil incarnate – almost in unison, right after the shooting of the plane. ..."
"... "Why are you so late", [Borodai] said I think [that was] very funny." That sounds like what happened at the Pan Am 103 site. For some reason yet to be explained over thirty years later, the Royal Air Force air accident investigation team, based at RAF Halton in Buckinghamshire, found an American military team on site when they landed by helicopter a bit before midnight. ..."
"... I was following this story very closely at the time and you could see that something was "off" within days. The Russians came out with a press conference and released radar tracks and full & total information. We in the west got – a YouTube link. Seriously. This was just the beginning. There was one clip that came out showing moving trucks that proved that the Russians did it – until someone woke up to the fact that the trees in the background were in the winter season whereas that jet was shot down in high summer. And so it went on. ..."
"... Another time an official visit had to be cancelled as the area was being shelled – by the Ukrainians. You don't have to be Sherlock Holmes to realize that there was a whole pack of dogs that were seriously not barking. ..."
"... That story about Australia wanting to send 3,000 troops was weird. That is a very large force for Australia and it would have taken weeks to put together a joint US/Dutch/Australian Task Force to go into the rebel area but you would have been talking about heavy casualties and risks of severe escalation with a nuclear Russia. ..."
"... Yeah, I remember watching those films. I saw this big, bearded rebel pick up a child's doll, showed it to the camera as in "Do you see this s***?", put it reverently back where he found it, and then crossed himself in a Orthodox blessing. So the western media took a screen shot of that rebel holding that child's doll and put a caption underneath that the rebel was boasting of the plane being shot down. As for that footage, I live in Oz and I am here to state that I would sooner trust CNN or Fox News before would I put any trust in News Corp Australia, especially their propaganda unit "60 Minutes Australia". ..."
"... If memory serves the late Robert Parry of Consortium News claimed to have USG sources who said the missile was a Buk fired by Ukrainian, not separatist troops. And I believe that Russia has said the rocket engine serial number from the investigation's evidence is for a Buk sold long ago to the Ukrainians. ..."
"... The good news is that the criminal coup regime in Kiev seems to have been decisively defeated with Sunday's election according to MOA in Links. Perhaps this particular branch of the New Cold War–which the Obama regime was so very much responsible for–will begin to find peace. ..."
Jul 23, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

Yves here. Hoo boy. The idea that eastern Ukrainian insurgents or Russia would target a passenger plane never made any sense (unless the plane had high-priority targets or cargo), although it's always been possible that the downing of MH17 was an accident, and some efforts to explain what happened are based on that idea. For Malaysia, starting with Prime Minister Mahathir, to stand up and say the US tried to cook the record to pin the crash on Russia is remarkable.

A new documentary from Max van der Werff, the leading independent investigator of the Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 disaster, has revealed breakthrough evidence of tampering and forging of prosecution materials; suppression of Ukrainian Air Force radar tapes; and lying by the Dutch, Ukrainian, US and Australian governments. An attempt by agents of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to take possession of the black boxes of the downed aircraft is also revealed by a Malaysian National Security Council official for the first time.

The sources of the breakthrough are Malaysian -- Prime Minister of Malaysia Mohamad Mahathir; Colonel Mohamad Sakri, the officer in charge of the MH17 investigation for the Prime Minister's Department and Malaysia's National Security Council following the crash on July 17, 2014; and a forensic analysis by Malaysia's OG IT Forensic Services of Ukrainian Secret Service (SBU) telephone tapes which Dutch prosecutors have announced as genuine.

The 298 casualties of MH17 included 192 Dutch; 44 Malaysians; 27 Australians; 15 Indonesians. The nationality counts vary because the airline manifest does not identify dual nationals of Australia, the UK, and the US.

The new film throws the full weight of the Malaysian Government, one of the five members of the Joint Investigation Team (JIT), against the published findings and the recent indictment of Russian suspects reported by the Dutch officials in charge of the JIT; in addition to Malaysia and The Netherlands, the members of the JIT are Australia, Ukraine and Belgium. Malaysia's exclusion from the JIT at the outset, and Belgium's inclusion (4 Belgian nationals were listed on the MH17 passenger manifest), have never been explained.

The film reveals the Malaysian Government's evidence for judging the JIT's witness testimony, photographs, video clips, and telephone tapes to have been manipulated by the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU), and to be inadmissible in a criminal prosecution in a Malaysian or other national or international court.

For the first time also, the Malaysian Government reveals how it got in the way of attempts the US was organizing during the first week after the crash to launch a NATO military attack on eastern Ukraine. The cover story for that was to rescue the plane, passenger bodies, and evidence of what had caused the crash. In fact, the operation was aimed at defeating the separatist movements in the Donbass, and to move against Russian-held Crimea.

The new film reveals that a secret Malaysian military operation took custody of the MH17 black boxes on July 22, preventing the US and Ukraine from seizing them. The Malaysian operation, revealed in the film by the Malaysian Army colonel who led it, eliminated the evidence for the camouflage story, reinforcing the German Government's opposition to the armed attack, and forcing the Dutch to call off the invasion on July 27.

The 28-minute documentary by Max van der Werff and Yana Yerlashova has just been released. Yerlashova was the film director and co-producer with van der Werff and Ahmed Rifazal. Vitaly Biryaukov directed the photography. Watch it in full here .

The full interview with Prime Minister Mahathir was released in advance; it can be viewed and read here .

Mahathir reveals why the US, Dutch and Australian governments attempted to exclude Malaysia from membership of the JIT in the first months of the investigation. During that period, US, Dutch, Australian and NATO officials initiated a plan for 9,000 troops to enter eastern Ukraine, ostensibly to secure the crash scene, the aircraft and passenger remains, and in response to the alleged Russian role in the destruction of MH17 on July 17; for details of that scheme, read this .

Although German opposition to military intervention forced its cancellation, the Australians sent a 200-man special forces unit to The Netherlands and then Kiev. The European Union and the US followed with economic sanctions against Russia on July 29.

Malaysian resistance to the US attempts to blame Moscow for the aircraft shoot-down was made clear in the first hours after the incident to then-President Barack Obama by Malaysia's Prime Minister at the time, Najib Razak. That story can be followed here and here .

In an unusual decision to speak in the new documentary, Najib's successor Prime Minister Mahathir announced: "They never allowed us to be involved from the very beginning. This is unfair and unusual. So we can see they are not really looking at the causes of the crash and who was responsible. But already they have decided it must be Russia. So we cannot accept that kind of attitude. We are interested in the rule of law, in justice for everyone irrespective of who is involved. We have to know who actually fired the missile, and only then can we accept the report as the complete truth."

On July 18, in the first Malaysian Government press conference after the shoot-down, Najib (right) announced agreements he had already reached by telephone with Obama and Petro Poroshenko, the Ukrainian President. " 'Obama and I agreed that the investigation will not be hidden and the international teams have to be given access to the crash scene.' [Najib] said the Ukrainian president ‎has pledged that there would be a full, thorough and independent investigation and Malaysian officials would be invited to take part. 'He also confirmed that his government will negotiate with rebels in the east of the country in order to establish a humanitarian corridor to the crash site,' said Najib. He also said that no one should remove any debris or the black box from the scene. The Government of Malaysia is dispatching a special flight to Kiev, carrying a Special Malaysia Disaster Assistance and Rescue Team, as well as a medical team. But we must – and we will – find out precisely what happened to this flight. No stone can be left unturned."

The new film reveals in an interview with Colonel Mohamad Sakri, the head of the Malaysian team, what happened next. Sakri's evidence, filmed in his office at Putrajaya, is the first to be reported by the press outside Malaysia in five years. A year ago, Sakri gave a partial account of his mission to a Malaysian newspaper .

Source: https://www.youtube.com/

"I talked to my prime minister [Najib]," Colonel Sakri says. "He directed me to go to the crash site immediately." At the time Sakri was a senior security official at the Disaster Management Division of the Prime Minister's Department. Sakri says that after arriving in Kiev, Poroshenko's officials blocked the Malaysians. "We were not allowed to go there so I took a small team to leave Kiev going to Donetsk secretly." There Sakri toured the crash site, and met with officials of the Donetsk separatist administration headed by Alexander Borodai .

With eleven men, including two medical specialists, a signalman, and Malaysian Army commandos, Sakri had raced to the site ahead of an armed convoy of Australian, Dutch and Ukrainian government men. The latter were blocked by Donetsk separatist units. The Australian state press agency ABC reported their military convoy, prodded from Kiev by the appearance of Australian and Dutch foreign ministers Julie Bishop and Frans Timmermans, had been forced to abandon their mission. That was after Colonel Sakri had taken custody of the MH17 black boxes in a handover ceremony filmed at Borodai's office in Donetsk on July 22.

US sources told the Wall Street Journal at the time "the [Sakri] mission's success delivered a political victory for Mr. Najib's government it also handed a gift to the rebels in the form of an accord, signed by the top Malaysian official present in Donetsk, calling the crash site 'the territory of the Donetsk People's Republic.' That recognition could antagonize Kiev and Washington, which have striven not to give any credibility to the rebels, whose main leaders are Russian citizens with few ties to the area. State Department deputy spokeswoman Marie Harf said in a briefing Monday that the negotiation 'in no way legitimizes' separatists."

The Australian state radio then reported the Ukrainian government as claiming the black box evidence showed "the reason for the destruction and crash of the plane was massive explosive decompression arising from multiple shrapnel perforations from a rocket explosion." This was a fabrication – the evidence of the black boxes, the cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder, first reported six weeks later in September by the Dutch Safety Board, showed nothing of the kind; read what their evidence revealed .

Foreign Minister Bishop, in Kiev on July 24, claimed she was negotiating with the Ukrainians for the Australian team in the country to carry arms. "I don't envisage that we will ever resort to [arms]," she told her state news agency, "but it is a contingency planning, and you would be reckless not to include it in this kind of agreement. But I stress our mission is unarmed because it is [a] humanitarian mission."

In Kiev on July 24, 2014, left to right: Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop; Dutch Foreign Minister Frans Timmermans, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin. Source: https://www.alamy.com/ The NATO intervention plan was still under discussion, but the black boxes were already under Malaysian control.

By the time she spoke to her state radio, Bishop was concealing that the plan for armed intervention, including 3,000 Australian troops, had been called off. She was also concealing that the black boxes were already in Colonel Sakri's possession.

The document signed by Sakri for the handover of the black boxes is visible in the new documentary. Sakri signed himself and added the stamp of the National Security Council of Malaysia.

Col. Sakri says on film the Donetsk leaders expressed surprise at the delay of the Malaysians in arriving at the crash site to recover the black boxes. "Why are you so late", [Borodai] said I think [that was] very funny." Source: https://www.youtube.com/ Min. 05:47.

Sakri goes on to say he was asked by the OSCE's special monitoring mission for Ukraine to hand over the black boxes; he refused. He was then met by agents of the FBI (Min 6:56). "They approached me to show them the black box. I said no." He also reports that in Kiev the Ukrainian Government tried "forcing me to leave the black boxes with them. We said no. We cannot. We cannot allow."

The handover ceremony in Donetsk, July 22, 2014: on far left, the two black boxes from MH17; in the centre, shaking hands, Alexander Borodai and Mohamad Sakri.

Permission for Colonel Sakri to speak to the press has been authorized by his superiors at the prime ministry in Putrajaya, and his disclosures agreed with them in advance.

Subsequent releases from the Kiev government to substantiate the allegation of Russian involvement in the shoot-down have included telephone tape recordings. These were presented last month by the JIT as their evidence for indictment of four Russians; for details, read this .

Van der Werff and Yerlashova contracted with OG IT Forensic Services , a Malaysian firm specializing in forensic analysis of audio, video and digital materials for court proceedings, to examine the telephone tapes. The Kuala Lumpur firm has been endorsed by the Malaysian Bar . The full 143-page technical report can be read here .

The findings reported by Akash Rosen and illustrated on camera are that the telephone recordings have been cut, edited and fabricated. The source of the tapes, according to the JIT press conference on June 19 by Dutch police officer Paulissen, head of the National Criminal Investigation Service of The Netherlands, was the Ukrainian SBU. Similar findings of tape fabrication and evidence tampering are reported on camera in the van der Werff film by a German analyst, Norman Ritter.

Left: Dutch police chief Paulissen grins as he acknowledged during the June 19, 2019 , press conference of JIT that the telephone tape evidence on which the charges against the four accused Russians came from the Ukrainian SBU.

Minute 16:02 Right: Norman Ritter presented his analysis to interviewer Billy Sixt to show the telephone tape evidence has been forged in nine separate "manipulations". One of the four accused by the JIT last month, Sergei Dubinsky, testifies from Min. 17 of the documentary. He says his men recovered the black boxes from the crash site and delivered them to Borodai at 23:00 hours on July 17; the destruction of the aircraft occurred at 1320.

Dubinsky testifies that he had no orders for and took no part in the shoot-down. As for the telephone tape-recording evidence against him, Dubinsky says the calls were made days before July 17, and edited by the SBU. "I dare them to publish the uncut conversations, and then you will get a real picture of what was discussed." (Min. 17:59).

Van der Werff and Yerlashova filmed at the crash site in eastern Ukraine. Several local witnesses were interviewed, including a man named Alexander from Torez town, and Valentina Kovalenko, a woman from the farming village of Red October. The man said the missile equipment alleged by the JIT to have been transported from across the Russian border on July 17 was in Torez at least one, possibly two days before the shoot-down on July 17; he did not confirm details the JIT has identified as a Buk system.

Kovalenko, first portrayed in a BBC documentary three years ago (starting at Min.26:50) as a "unique" eye-witness to the missile launch, clarifies more precisely than the BBC reported where the missile she saw had been fired from.

BBC documentary, " The Conspiracy Files. Who Shot Down MH17 " -- Min. 27:00. The BBC broadcast its claims over three episodes in April-May 2016. For a published summary, read this .

This was not the location identified in press statements by JIT. Van der Werff explains: "we specifically asked [Kovalenko] to point exactly in the direction the missile came from. I then asked twice if maybe it was from the direction of the JIT launch site. She did not see a launch nor a plume from there. Notice the JIT 'launch site' is less than two kilometers from her house and garden. The BBC omitted this crucial part of her testimony."

According to Kovalenko in the new documentary, at the firing location she has now identified precisely, "at that moment the Ukrainian Army were there."

Kovalenko also remembers that on the days preceding the July 17 missile firing she witnessed, there had been Ukrainian military aircraft operating in the sky above her village. She says they used evasion techniques including flying in the shadow of civilian aircraft she also saw at the same time.

On July 17, three other villagers told van der Werff they had seen a Ukrainian military jet in the vicinity and at the time of the MH17 crash.

Concluding the documentary, van der Werff and Yerlashova present an earlier interview filmed in Donetsk by independent Dutch journalist Stefan Beck, whom JIT officials had tried to warn off visiting the area. Beck interviewed Yevgeny Volkov, who was an air controller for the Ukrainian Air Force in July 2014. Volkov was asked to comment on Ukrainian Government statements, endorsed by the Dutch Safety Board report into the crash and in subsequent reports by the JIT, that there were no radar records of the airspace at the time of the shoot-down because Ukrainian military radars were not operational.

Volkov explained that on July 17 there were three radar units at Chuguev on "full alert" because "fighter jets were taking off from there;" Chuguev is 200 kilometres northwest of the crash site. He disputed that the repairs to one unit meant none of the three was operating. Ukrainian radar records of the location and time of the MH17 attack were made and kept, Volkov said. "There [they] have it. In Ukraine they have it."

Last month, at the JIT press conference in The Netherlands on June 19, the Malaysian representative present, Mohammed Hanafiah Bin Al Zakaria, one of three Solicitors-General of the Malaysian Attorney General's ministry, refused to endorse for the Malaysian Governnment the JIT evidence or its charges against Russia. "Malaysia would like to reiterate our commitment to the JIT seeking justice for the victims," Zakaria said . "The objective of the JIT is to complete the investigations and gathering of evidence of all witnesses for the purpose of prosecuting the wrongdoers and Malaysia stands by the rule of law and the due process." [Question: do you support the conclusions?] "Part of the conclusions [inaudible] – do not change our positions."

By John Helmer , the longest continuously serving foreign correspondent in Russia, and the only western journalist to direct his own bureau independent of single national or commercial ties. Helmer has also been a professor of political science, and an advisor to government heads in Greece, the United States, and Asia. He is the first and only member of a US presidential administration (Jimmy Carter) to establish himself in Russia. Originally published at Dances with Bears

Jeff , July 23, 2019 at 2:54 am

I always come back to the same three questions:
1. If all civilian and military radars were out of order, why was the flight not redirected out of the Ukrainian airspace and into some territory with radar?
2. Why is the transcript of the Cockpit Voice Recorder kept a secret (see e.g. here for others)?
3. Why is no journalist raising these questions?

(I got a partial answer to 3. "because only Kremlin trolls and conspiracy specialists doubt the official/Bellingcat version")

vlade , July 23, 2019 at 4:13 am

Re 1) active radar is not used that much in civilian flight control anymore, it's basically a back-up for passive transponder pick up. Dnipro Control was monitoring the flight using passive (that's for example how they knew they were off their approved airway L980 and asked them to get back, which, if there was no radar, they could not do). Passive (civilian) radar is no use in tracking missiles or military planes with no transporder on.

So the question 1) is irrelevant.

Colonel Smithers , July 23, 2019 at 4:50 am

Thank you, Gentlemen.

Bellingcat? The fellow using the pseudonym is called Eliot Higgins and hails from the Midlands, not far from the Jihadist masquerading as the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights above a take away shop. He was a regular BTL commentator at the Grauniad before being paid to spout BS. Nice work if one can get it, eh?

Having grown up in a military family and knowing what precautions are taken, I am staggered at how Bell End Cat can track down Russian secret servicemen with such ease and in their homeland.

Olga , July 23, 2019 at 8:55 am

If you watch the film, you'd learn that there were back-ups so not all were out of order. And if we knew the answer to your questions, we'd likely know 'who done it.'

JerryDenim , July 23, 2019 at 4:28 am

Undoubtedly there's something quite rotten afoot here, and I'll be sure to give this film a watch, but honestly the Malaysians have zero credibility when it comes to airplane crashes involving their national airline, especially after they deliberately fed false information to rescue and recovery teams concerning MH 370's flight path. Whatever they knew or didn't know they had no interest in helping anyone find that airplane or discover what took place onboard before it vanished. They should spare us all any sanctimony about 'justice for victims, truth, rule of law, etc.'

It seems the world has a real credibility crisis today, not many state actors I trust to tell the truth or not politicize tragedy. These revelations certainly make it seem more likely Ukrainian forces were to blame for downing MH17, but at this point the mystery will never be conclusively solved. Two warring factions with the exact same equipment/weaponry in close proximity, compromised crash sites, tons of propaganda, lots of interested parties seeking to maximize the tragedy for political gain, corrupt authorities all around.

Not an ideal situation for objective fact finding to say the least. With the 1MBD scandal and investigation still ongoing I have no doubts the Malaysians are probably looking for leverage and bargaining chips where ever they can find them, further eroding their objectivity and authority in my opinion. Getting to the bottom of the Kennedy assassination will be easier than MH17, but if the truth does come out it will not be owed to the virtues of the Malaysian government. They've already shown the world how much they care about airplane crash investigations.

Yves Smith Post author , July 23, 2019 at 4:49 am

I have to tell you, this is an ad hominem argument, which is a violation of our site Policies. You need to deal with the evidence and not attack the source. With MH370, you had a crash of a plane under the control of the carrier, not as a result of an air strike.

Ian Perkins , July 23, 2019 at 11:19 am

Quite apart from the ad hominem nature of JerryDenim's comment (and I disagree with Yves Smith; I think the credibility of sources is relevant), what motive would Malaysia have for siding with Russia/east Ukraine against the west/west Ukraine? Does JerryDenim know of one, or have any suggestions?

vlade , July 23, 2019 at 4:31 am

TBH, I have dire doubts on anything Malaysian government says, due to their handling of MH370 where they continue lying in face of hard facts (that doesn't mean I believe any governments on this).

I believe that the most likely cause is an accidental shooting down, where an inexperienced and untrained separatist crew messed up (this is what you get when even a semi-sophisticated equipment gets to untrained people who are keen to use it).

For me it fits Occam's razor the most, and is the only theory which explains the (documented) boasting of the separatists of a large military plane being shot down immediately after the catastrophe.

Joe Well , July 23, 2019 at 9:23 am

>>I have dire doubts on anything Malaysian government says

But on the other side of the scale is the credibility of the US, Dutch and Ukranian security services.

>>the (documented) boasting of the separatists of a large military plane being shot down immediately after the catastrophe.

Isn't that what the Malaysians are trying to debunk by saying the recordings were falsified? (or were they talking about something else?)

RalphR , July 23, 2019 at 4:43 am

How is "Russia did it" logical? That part of Ukraine was in the hands of separatists, not "Russia". "Russia" was not directing their activities. Russia does not want to control the eastern part of Ukraine, which is an economic basket case. But it doesn't want hostile forces parked on its border.

RalphR , July 23, 2019 at 6:52 am

Sorry, that's irrelevant even if true. Even if "Russia" was formally providing troops, as opposed to engaged in a massive wink and nod (a LOT of Russians had relatives in eastern Ukraine, a point you forget re motives and numbers), that's way way way short of any evidence they were in charge.

Plus I was wrong on the key point, and it renders your argument moot. From Rev Kev below:

That territory where the missile was fired from was in Ukrainian hands at the time, not rebels, and those launchers were seen speeding rapidly west after the shooting down.

Olga , July 23, 2019 at 9:18 am

This response is non-sensical. Have you been to the cemeteries you mention? Any picture can be posted and a caption written – that is no proof of anything. Besides the point being irrelevant to the question of who shot down the plane.

Now that we have the crime and the five-year cover-up, the simplest explanation is actually the one of a likely false flag operation. Asking 'cui bono,' how would Russia or the rebels benefit from shooting down a plane with bunch of Dutch people on board? (Russia historically has had good relations with Holland, Malaysia, too.)

Lots of terrible stuff happened in Ukraine after the govt changed (courtesy of the west). Have we forgotten about the burning of more than 40 people in Odessa? Or the murders of politicians and journalists?

Eustache de Saint Pierre , July 23, 2019 at 1:33 pm

I suppose if one believes the West's preferred version of Putin as some Bond type villain who takes great delight in shooting down planes full of civilians, presumably while stroking a large white cat then I suppose the he dunnit version is the one for you.

Personally I believe that Putin is not an idiot & would likely have been more interested in putting out that fire than throwing more fuel onto it. As for who has any credibility – the Ukrainians under Porkyschenko with their Neo-Nazi element, would I think be at the bottom of my list & that is without mentioning Neo-Cons with their Noble Lie BS.

Olga , July 23, 2019 at 2:03 pm

And let's not forget the appearance of (coordinated) magazine covers of VVP as the devil incarnate – almost in unison, right after the shooting of the plane.

Colonel Smithers , July 23, 2019 at 5:07 am

Thank you, Yves.

"Why are you so late", [Borodai] said I think [that was] very funny." That sounds like what happened at the Pan Am 103 site. For some reason yet to be explained over thirty years later, the Royal Air Force air accident investigation team, based at RAF Halton in Buckinghamshire, found an American military team on site when they landed by helicopter a bit before midnight.

The US team took charge even though they were on foreign soil.

The Rev Kev , July 23, 2019 at 5:57 am

That was a pretty gutsy move on the Malaysians to send in their own retrieval team for those recorders. I bet that those Malaysian commandos would have a story to tell or two. The danger wasn't from the rebels however but from the west and their allied Ukrainians. The rebels were more than glad to hand over the records that they found at first opportunity but the information, once in the hands of the west, has been seeping out with all the speed of the translations of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

I was following this story very closely at the time and you could see that something was "off" within days. The Russians came out with a press conference and released radar tracks and full & total information. We in the west got – a YouTube link. Seriously. This was just the beginning. There was one clip that came out showing moving trucks that proved that the Russians did it – until someone woke up to the fact that the trees in the background were in the winter season whereas that jet was shot down in high summer. And so it went on.

There was a very slow walk to stop people going to the crash site. One Australian couple who lost someone went there in spite of the efforts of our government to stop them. Another time an official visit had to be cancelled as the area was being shelled – by the Ukrainians. You don't have to be Sherlock Holmes to realize that there was a whole pack of dogs that were seriously not barking. A link from this page talks about how there is a silence when MH17 got hit. I have heard recordings of aircraft that went down and there is usually something – a bang, crumpling, warning calls, shouts – but here there was nothing.

That story about Australia wanting to send 3,000 troops was weird. That is a very large force for Australia and it would have taken weeks to put together a joint US/Dutch/Australian Task Force to go into the rebel area but you would have been talking about heavy casualties and risks of severe escalation with a nuclear Russia. Having said that, Tony Abbott was Prime Minister of the time and Julie Bishop was his Foreign minister and they are both hard right politicians (now both thankfully gone) and may have been entertaining such thoughts.

My belief is that this was an operation to try and retrieve the situation in the Ukraine for the west. The US alone spent over $5 billion on this coup but Russia grabbed the crown jewels of Crimea (with its naval bases & off-shore gas fields) and eastern Ukraine which has a border with Russia. That territory where the missile was fired from was in Ukrainian hands at the time, not rebels, and those launchers were seen speeding rapidly west after the shooting down. Ask yourself – who benefited from this tragedy and that will tell you where to go looking for answers. Maybe, like happened with the Meuller investigation, Russian legal representations should show up in a court of law and start demanding the discovery process of all the evidence. Now that could get interesting.

Camp Lo , July 23, 2019 at 9:07 am

Rebels were the first to respond to the crash scene, recording themselves with a camcorder. The rebels were convinced they had shot down a Ukrainian fighter jet and were searching for a pilot that would have ejected. The rebels then thought a fighter downed the airliner and they downed the fighter. Their commander speaking in both Russian and Ukrainian tells the rebels to stop filming and clear the area of civilians. The footage was aired by News Corp Australia.

Olga , July 23, 2019 at 9:21 am

If you watch this film, there is a large segment about how the audio recordings were manipulated.

The Rev Kev , July 23, 2019 at 10:08 am

Yeah, I remember watching those films. I saw this big, bearded rebel pick up a child's doll, showed it to the camera as in "Do you see this s***?", put it reverently back where he found it, and then crossed himself in a Orthodox blessing. So the western media took a screen shot of that rebel holding that child's doll and put a caption underneath that the rebel was boasting of the plane being shot down. As for that footage, I live in Oz and I am here to state that I would sooner trust CNN or Fox News before would I put any trust in News Corp Australia, especially their propaganda unit "60 Minutes Australia".

Carolinian , July 23, 2019 at 9:37 am

If memory serves the late Robert Parry of Consortium News claimed to have USG sources who said the missile was a Buk fired by Ukrainian, not separatist troops. And I believe that Russia has said the rocket engine serial number from the investigation's evidence is for a Buk sold long ago to the Ukrainians.

Of course Western sources will say the Russians have no credibility but then they don't either–the fog of propaganda war.

The good news is that the criminal coup regime in Kiev seems to have been decisively defeated with Sunday's election according to MOA in Links. Perhaps this particular branch of the New Cold War–which the Obama regime was so very much responsible for–will begin to find peace.

Olga , July 23, 2019 at 2:00 pm

No, it would not. Watch the film if you want to get some sense of how complicated the whole thing is.

[Jul 23, 2019] Ukraine Election - Voters Defeat Second Color Revolution

Highly recommended!
Ukrainian nation is a separate nation with a distinct and rich culture. You can call them Southern Russians but still they are distinct. That does not mean that Russian language should be suppressed and eliminated from schools, the policy advocated and implemented by Western Ukrainian nationalists. a better policy would to introduce English language from the first grade. Attempt to eliminate Russian is viewed by Eastern Ukrainians as the attempt of colonization (which it is) and in a long run can have the opposite effect like any colonization project.
Two languages can coexist. Ireland and Canada does not stop being distinct countries because they use English language. And very few people in Canada would support switching to French. Many prominent Russian writers have Ukrainian origin (Nikolai Gogol, Mikhail Bulgakov). Elimination of Russian destroy common cultural space (which enriches all participating nations not only Russia) establishing during the USSR years and shrink this common the cultural space.which for Ukraine mean complete domination in Ukrainian cultural space of US culture and Hollywood with all its excesses and warts.
The break of economic cooperation with Russia after EuroMaydan was Washington policy with willing implementers in the face of comprador column (Yatsenyuk, Poroshenko) and Western Ukrainian nationalists, which run the government after EuroMaydan. Among other thing this implies the attempt of colonization of Eastern Ukraine (via forceful Ukrainization) which backfired with the election of Zelensky.
Notable quotes:
"... Zelensky is of Jewish heritage and from the east Ukraine. He speaks Russian, not Ukrainian. ..."
"... I doubt that Trump cares about Ukraine so the main supporter of the coup is not interested ..."
"... But Zelensky is a new guy without any tail moving into a poisonous and dangerous area without allies (other than the voters of course, but how many guns do they have?) ..."
"... Zelensky didn't 'accidentally' become president. He is a front for Kolomoisky who, amongst other things, wants revenge on Poroshenko. Kolomoisky had vaste swathes of property confiscated under Poroshenko. These were all returned a short while back. Kolomoisky probably wants to dump all post-Maidan stuff on Poroshenko, especially MH17 (which Kolomoisky stated to be 'a trifle' and 'the wrong plane was hit'). Lawsuits against Poroshenko have been started. What happens depends on how much loyalty Poroshenko can buy versus that bought by Kolomoisky. ..."
"... Helmer on Kolomoisky and the vast money stolen with collaboration of Lagarde and Clintons, and the resulting suit, which appears to be aimed at keeping Zelensky on the reservation... ..."
"... "A new Delaware state court filing a month ago, triggering new US media reports, appears to signal a shift in US Government policy towards Kolomoisky. Or else, as some Ukrainian policy experts believe, it is a move by US officials to put pressure on the new Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, whom Kolomoisky supported in his successful election campaign to replace Poroshenko." ..."
"... It is interesting to read commenters not understanding the concept of colonial outposts like HK, SK, Japan and the attempts to make the Ukraine such. To empire they represent outposts to challenge the adjoining countries that are not part of empire. look at Puerto Rico. Empire favored it and even paid for citizens to go to college free.....until it didn't work to help make Cuba look bad....and so now it is being discarded like a dirty rag. ..."
"... The Gordian knot in Ukraine is that, after Maidan, the Ukrainian Armed Forces essentially dissolved. The neonazi militias then became the only enforcing power for whatever was left of the Ukrainian government -- that's why Poroshenko, albeit elected, could do nothing to stop those militias from doing whatever they pleased (even though he not being a neonazi himself). ..."
"... Ukraine's economy is in absolute tatters. The Ukrainian government just didn't completely dissolve after Maidan because the USA is using the IMF to artificially keep it afloat (which goes completely against the IMF chart, as was the case with Macri's Argentina, where even the legal borrowing limits were extrapolated by a more than 100% margin). ..."
"... Irrespective of evidence, this is Ukraine, and Kolomoisky's influence on Zelensky can safely be assumed. ..."
"... The issue with the association agreement offered by the EU was not just that it offered little. As I recall it meant access for all EU products to the post-Soviet trading block. There would be nothing to prevent EU exporting anything through Ukraine into Russia. ..."
"... Needless to say, Yanukovych's real options have never been discussed much, and Russia has been blamed for the EU's Economic trap. ..."
"... what does Ukraine have to offer Russia? Aside from putting some space between Russia and NATO, what is left of Ukraine after all of this that they can offer? ..."
"... The Soviet Union built up a large amount of high tech and high value industry in Ukraine, but most of that has rusted away since 1991. Russia has found or developed new sources for most of what they previously bought from Ukraine, and those sources are domestic so Russia is unlikely to trade them in for products made from neglected and mostly defunct Ukrainian industries. ..."
"... That Ukraine has to be considered as both a bridge and a no alliance's land between the West and Russia has always been a no-brainer to me ..."
"... As for Zelensky, he has the backing of the people, such a backing that a 3rd colour revolution would be immediately opposed by a bigger counter-manifestation. Besides, he should seek the backing of the rank and file of the Ukrainian army, just in case things go very badly with the fascists; considering his vast support among the people, the upper echelons of the military might not like or follow him, but if he gives orders, the core troopers would. ..."
"... "Revealing Ukraine" documentary aka "В борьбе за Украину" (which includes the interview in Kremlin released 19 July, minus the Skirpal comments) was released in Ukrainian and Russian, 17, 19 July. The version in those languages is eg here, https://my.mail.ru/mail/stelskov/video/235/5800.html ..."
"... "One hopes that Zelensky is smart enough to foresee a "third Maidan". He should kick out all of them from the police and other forces. He should also raise the police pay. He will need their loyalty sooner than he might think." ..."
"... For newcomers, here is the TC-18-01, the American manual for Unconventional Warfare (published in 2010; leaked in 2012): Training">https://nsnbc.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/special-forces-uw-tc-18-01.pdf">Training Circular No. 18-01: Special Forces Unconventional Warfare, For the color revolution manual, see Gene Sharp's famous book (From Dictatorship to Democracy, 1994). ..."
"... The Holodomor was real, but then again, so were Stalin's purges in that same era (a little later) and Stalin's ethnic forced migrations from 1930 to 1949. ..."
"... While this doesn't excuse these acts, people should keep in mind that the Soviet Union was under tremendous external and internal pressure at the time. Acts of economic warfare tend to be poorly documented in history - for example, China's famines in the 1960s were exacerbated by a US embargo on wheat imports to China. ..."
"... Ultimately, however, the main reason the Western Ukrainians don't like Russia is because they've always believed Ukraine should be a nation in its own right. The large contingent of Ukrainians in Canada, for example and including its present foreign minister, were fighting for the Germans against Russia in World War 2 under the SS , no less. ..."
"... Pre 2014 the Chinese were attracted by the opportunity of a deep water port in Crimea, the sea is too shallow into Ukraine proper. ..."
"... Is it a feature of the "rules based international order" that unelected NGOs can establish "red-lines" on policy and expect adherence? ..."
"... What Ukraine has to offer, William Gruff, if the Biden clan has not stolen it, is some of the best agricultural land in the temperate world. ..."
"... there is the matter of saving those lands from the scourges of American agriculture-GMOs, Roundup et al. ..."
"... This is certainly true: the survivors of the 14th Waffen SS Galicia Division and their dependents, hangers on and sundry war criminals on the lam certainly came to Canada where they sold their votes en bloc to the Federal Liberal Party. In Alberta they came to control inter alia the University of Alberta. ..."
"... But long before these people came over immigration from Ukraine, including Mennonites, brought their traditional skills and agricultural knowledge to, most notably the Prairies. They knew about growing wheat in the climatic conditions here. They also brought traditions of collective organisation -- they tended to be very left wing, co-operators and were among the founders of the Communist Party and the CCF. ..."
"... "Jewish population of Ukraine is 0.2% of the whole! Why are they running the country?" They aren't, Jackrabbit. Grow up, for Christ's sake, and put these cheap racist cracks behind you. Ukraine is being run by the US and NATO, the Empire. God willing that is now going to change. ..."
"... The main reason, but never disclosed by our corporate press in the West, was the total unacceptable ( hence fullty understandable) of an either/or demand choosing between EU and Russia cooperation btw the lines, as well as an article about military cooperation. Which of course would also exclude Russian partnership. ... that set the stage the humble and charming Mrs "Fuck EU" Nudelman and her cookies at Maidan square. ..."
"... The very fundamental principles of peace, understanding and cooperation of EU was betrayed by their President Baroso. When you add that to the financial rape of Greece by Goldman Sachs & co on his watch, one should think he deserved being executed for high treason! Civil war in Ukraine & and looting of the people of Greece... But guess what... He went directly from EU to .. GOLDMAN SACHS! ..."
"... I appreciate that good concise timeline and explanation of what has happened in Ukraine. I remember finding online a live 24/7 camera feed from Kiev during the Maidan coup, and the fascination but horror of watching the western backed Right Sector thugs wearing neo-nazi Wolfsangel insignias carry out atrocities in real time. ..."
"... Watching what happened live and then following western media disinformation and outright lies was the final slap in the face for me that the corporate media had finally given up any pretenses of journalistic standards. Winter 2013/2014 it finally gasped its last breath and the last nails were hammered into the coffin. From then on we've had non-stop blatantly false narratives presented, with the nutty bogus Russiagate fiction now consuming three years(!) of coverage. ..."
"... Zelensky himself had to brush up on his Ukrainian to be able to run a campaign, which he managed to do with his talents and scripts. ..."
"... Ukraine is being run by the US and NATO, the Empire. No. Ukraine is being run by it's West-leaning leadership and US/NATO is partnered with that leadership. I'm suggesting that Jews are among the most reliably pro-Western people in Ukraine. After all, the "Empire" that you refer to is known as the "Anglo-Zionist Empire". ..."
"... I recall watching the 2014 crisis and civil war in real time. Felt WW-III was upon us. Couldn't believe the outright lies of all Western media and was the straw that broke the back of any remaining faith I had in NYT, The Guardian, BBC, ABC (Australian) etc. The Odessa Massacre was biggest turning point for me. http://stormcloudsgathering.com/the-odessa-massacre-what-really-happened/ ..."
"... In 2014, if I presented evidence against the official Western Ministry of Truth (yeah see the typo but seems worth leaving) on Ukraine I'd get a righteous backlash and called a Putin apologist etc. These days there's blank inward stare of cognitive dissonance, subtle agreement and desire to change topic. Such is the nature of Stockholm Syndrome. ..."
"... My understanding is that of Paora and bevin; there were famines in the Soviet Union, including in Ukraine. The Holodomor myth, if not started there, was massively promoted in the 30s by ... drumroll ... the Hearst empire. ..."
"... Note to snake: not 32 million, but around 5-7 million, probably laughable in itself. (A reference I found for the Ukraine SSR in the 1930s indicates that the population grew during the 1930-33 period, but that should probably be read with great care. It would probably require a study in itself.) ..."
"... On another, but not entirely irrelevant matter, I've always found this wikipedia entry to be vastly entertaining. It gives me a good chuckle to think of Ukrainization -- the promotion of Ukrainian language and culture -- as a communist plot. (It's not a perfect analogy, but it's close enough for a laugh, considering the present.) (And yes, I know it's Wikipedia, but their prejudices lean generally in the other direction.) ..."
"... The extreme right-wing politicians, who gained notoriety after the Maidan coup, prohibited the use of the Russian language which more than 50% of the Ukrainians speak ..."
"... Russian is still spoken in large parts of Ukraine, including Odessa. The main tourist attraction in Odessa, a beach community known as Arcadia, still uses the Russian word at its entrance. Street signs are still in Russian. People speak Russian. ..."
"... The only thing is they made Ukrainian the official language. Everyone must learn it. It is the same in Russia - everyone must learn Russian, even in Chechnya. It is in the nature of a country to have a universal language whereby everyone in the country may communicate. There is nothing whatsoever radical or even unusual about this. ..."
"... As to Yanukovych, he was widely hated by everyone for his total corruption. Even Russians. I lived in Ukraine at that time - mostly in Sevastopol, which was then 90+% Russian (and of course now is part of Russia). Everybody hated him and thought he was utterly corrupt and stole from the people. His thugs would literally walk into a private business with guns and tell the owner "I am buying half your business for $50, here are the papers, sign them now". That is how he operated. Of course they did not want the L'viv folks staging a coup, but the hatred for the corrupt Yanukovych was truly national. ..."
"... All those who say that Zelenski is a puppet or front for Kolomoiski should remember that a certain VV Putin came to power as a puppet or front for Boris Berezovski. And we all know how that (BB) ended. So let's hope for the best - can't get much worse anyway. And Zelenski seems to have acted very smartly so far. Good luck to him - he'll need it! ..."
"... It's my understanding that those Ukrainians who most fervently believe in the Holodomor (that the Soviet govt under Joseph Stalin deliberately targeted ethnic Ukrainians with famine and starvation) live in that part of the modern Ukraine that was under fascist Polish rule in the 1930s. ..."
"... From my own reading, the famines of the early 1930s affected large parts of eastern Ukraine across southen European Russia into Kazakhstan. ..."
"... There's plenty of sources documenting the Ukrainian laws passed since 2014 prohibiting or restricting Russian language in various sectors, including official use, public education, even in films. b was correct in his assessment, and I have no idea where the "hate" accusation came from. I would normally not link to the awful Telegraph of UK, but I assume this story from just three months ago isn't fake news. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/04/25/ukraine-passes-law-against-russian-language-official-settings/ ..."
"... Most probably, Mariupol 2014-05-09. People wanted to celebrate V-Day, but "democratic" Oleg Lyashko and his "men in black" drove in at attacked demonstration. Local police tried to protect citizens and was ambushed in their own HQ (that very burning house), making last stand. ..."
"... Famines were common in the pre-industrial world. They occured often in the ancient world -- where cities and villages literally disappeared in a matter of decades because of one bad crop and/or one plague (plagues are a side-effect of sedentarism) ..."
"... Wheatcroft uses the 1920s demographic tendency in order to infer "excess deaths" in the USSR in 1932, but he misses the bigger picture: you have to take into account Russian demographic movements in the long term, taking into consideration the cyclic famines. Just to crop a short period from 1926-1932 is scientifically dishonest. ..."
"... It is very unlikely the 1932 famine was an extraordinary famine. The 1937 census registered a population growth in relation to 1926. This alone discards genocide, because, even though excess deaths ocurred (as is the rule in famines), that meant women still had time and resources to biologically reproduce above the population replacement levels. ..."
"... To understand the most important fact of what happened to Ukraine and why, you need to know about the yank neocon PNAC, which trumps (excuse the pun) all: The Project for the New American Century, and the original neocon (jew) wolfowitz doctrine, as revealed in the NYT in 1992: www.nytimes.com/1992/03/08/world/us-strategy-plan-calls-for-insuring-no-rivals-develop.html ..."
"... Russia at the moment is correctly perceived as the main opponent to the usa, china too as upcoming, in line with the above, & PNAC is part of trying to keep Russia in its place: 'part of the American mission will be "convincing potential competitors that they need not aspire to a greater role or pursue a more aggressive posture to protect their legitimate interests."' And 'to deter any nation or group of nations from challenging American primacy'. And 'a world in which there is one dominant military power whose leaders "must maintain the mechanisms for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role."' Note 'regional' insofar as it concerns Russia wrt ukraine. ..."
"... Also this is why the USG used Maidan (with at least $5 bn - said nuland/jewland, married to the co-founder of PNAC kagan, another jew) against Russia, to cause it problems and to be a thorn in the flesh. ..."
"... Recall the posters in previous threads defending the empire's color revolution attempts in Hong Kong and match the names up with posters here. Are they trying to offer defense of the empire's color revolutions in Ukraine, or do you think they are off-duty now and posting with the sincere intention of initiating open discussion? Do you honestly think you can change their minds by engaging with them and pointing out the flaws in their facts and their logic when it is their job to defend the actions of the empire? ..."
"... Too complex? Let's try the Maidan snipers: We are expected to believe that the killers were police or Berkut snipers. What was their motive? Presumably to stop the protests. If that was their motive, then why did the snipers stop sniping before dispersing the protests? If the snipers were trying to end the protests, then why did they shoot just enough to inflame further protests, but not enough to discourage the protests? ..."
"... The answer is simple: The police and/or Berkut were not the Maidan snipers in Kiev. The snipers were provocateurs who intended to amplify the protests. ..."
Jul 23, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

Ukraine Election - Voters Defeat Second Color Revolution VanWoland , Jul 22 2019 18:55 utc | 1

The Ukraine, translated as 'the borderlands, lies between core Russia and the Europe's western states. It is a split country. Half the population speaks Russian as its first language. The industrialized center, east and south are culturally orthodox Russians. Some of its rural western parts were attached to the Ukraine only after World War II. They have historically a different culture.

The U.S., supported by the EU, used this split - twice - to instigate 'revolutions' that were supposed to bring the Ukraine onto a 'western' course. Both attempts were defeated when the Ukrainians had the chance of a free vote.

The 2004 run-off election for the president of the Ukraine was won by Viktor Yanukovych. The U.S. disliked the result. Its proxies in Ukraine alleged alleged fraud and instigated a color revolution. As a result of the 'Orange Revolution' the vote was re-run and the other candidate, Viktor Yushchenko, was declared the winner. But five years later another vote defeated the U.S. camp. Yanukovych was declared the winner and became president.

In 2014 the European Union made an attempt to bind the Ukraine to its side through an association agreement. But what the EU offered to Ukraine was paltry and Russia countered it. Unlike the Ukraine, which continues to get robbed by its oligarchs ever since its 1991 independence, Russia was economically back and in a much better position. It offered billions in investments and long term loans. Much of Ukraine's industry depends on Russia and Russian gas was offered to the Ukraine for less than the international market price. Yanukovych, who originally wanted to sign the EU association, had no choice but to refuse it, and to take the much better deal Russia offered.

The U.S. and the EU intervened. They again launched a color revolution, but this time it was one that would use force. Militarily trained youth from Galicia in the west Ukraine was bused into Kiev to occupy the central Maidan place and to violently fight the police. Snipers from Georgia were brought in to fire on both sides. It was then falsely alleged that government forces were killing the 'peaceful protesters'.

Yanukovych lost his nerves and fled to Russia. After some illegal political maneuvers new elections were called up and the oligarch Petro Poroshenko, bought off by the 'west', was declared the winner. The unreconstructed fascists from Galicia took over. The population in the industrial heartland in east Ukraine, next to Russia's border, revolted against the new rulers. A civil war, not a 'Russian invasion' , ensued which the Ukrainian government largely lost. Lugansk and Donbas became rebel controlled statelets which depend of Russia. Russia took back Crimea, which in 1954 had been illegally gifted to Ukraine by then Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, himself a Ukrainian.

To end the war in the east Ukraine, the French, German and Russian leaders pressed Poroshenko to sign a peace agreement with the eastern leaders. But the Minsk agreement was seen as a political defeat and Poroshenko never implemented it. The war in the east simmered on ever since. The extreme right-wing politicians, who gained notoriety after the Maidan coup, prohibited the use of the Russian language which more than 50% of the Ukrainians speak. All opposition was harshly suppressed.

The oligarchs continue their plunder. Everything of value gets sold off to EU countries. The U.S. is allowed to build bases. Corruption, already endemic, further increased. The people came to despise Poroshenko.

In an attempt to regain support, Poroshenko launched a military provocation in the Kerch Strait which is under Russian control. The stunt was too obvious . Russia nabbed the sailors Poroshenko had send and confiscated their boats. No one came to Poroshenko's help.

One can watch the full story of the above in UKRAINE ON FIRE - The Real Story (vid), a just released 90 minutes long Oliver Stone documentary. An updated version of the documentary was supposed to run on the Ukraine TV station of pro-Russian oligarch Viktor Medvedchuk. The TV stations was forced to cancel it after right-wing groups mortared its its building in Kiev.

On March 31 new elections were held. Volodymyr Zelensky, a TV comedian who played a teacher who accidentally became president, won the first round. Zelensky is of Jewish heritage and from the east Ukraine. He speaks Russian, not Ukrainian.

Cont. reading: Ukraine Election - Voters Defeat Second Color Revolution Just wanted to point out - the documentary I believe you are referring to is "Revealing Ukraine."

It's a sequel of sorts to "Ukraine on Fire," which is three years old.

Patrick Armstrong , Jul 22 2019 19:01 utc | 2

An admirable summary.
What's next? There are three causes for cautious optimism
1. The elections were actually allowed to happen without Washington's interference; see 2
2. I doubt that Trump cares about Ukraine so the main supporter of the coup is not interested
3. EU has its own problems.

But Zelensky is a new guy without any tail moving into a poisonous and dangerous area without allies (other than the voters of course, but how many guns do they have?)

But you're absolutely correct to see this as the voters gain rejecting a "colour revolution"imposed from outside

bevin , Jul 22 2019 19:02 utc | 3
Fine work here, Bernhard. Analysis as clear and cool as a mountain stream. And now for the march of the Fascists led by the Iron Maidan of Galicia, Chrystia Freeland employing all Canada's power and credibility to restore the Galician Nazis from whose loins she came.
karlof1 , Jul 22 2019 19:09 utc | 4
Excellent review b, thanks! With the political sea change, Ukraine has an opportunity to progress, but somehow those pushing and believing their false narrative will need to be neutralized. It appears the best way forward is to implement the Minsk2 agreements and go forward from there.
Zanon , Jul 22 2019 19:16 utc | 6
Zelensky seems in some some cases to be fresh air

Zelensky's plan to purge Ukraine officials draws criticism
https://www.ft.com/content/f1f40060-a4ab-11e9-974c-ad1c6ab5efd1

But in the end, it is the same type of oligarchs, deep state that really have the final say in Ukraine.

Yonatan , Jul 22 2019 19:17 utc | 7
Zelensky didn't 'accidentally' become president. He is a front for Kolomoisky who, amongst other things, wants revenge on Poroshenko. Kolomoisky had vaste swathes of property confiscated under Poroshenko. These were all returned a short while back. Kolomoisky probably wants to dump all post-Maidan stuff on Poroshenko, especially MH17 (which Kolomoisky stated to be 'a trifle' and 'the wrong plane was hit'). Lawsuits against Poroshenko have been started. What happens depends on how much loyalty Poroshenko can buy versus that bought by Kolomoisky.

Kolomoisky will be looking for alternative sources of loot (eg reconstruction funds) which will only happen if the Donbass situation is wound down. Zelensky has unexpectedly announced that there will be a political solution to the issue of Russian sailors captured before the Kerch incident (and one factor in Russia's response to it) in exchange for those held in Russia. For all this to happen, the neo-Nazis will have to be defused, which may not be as difficult as it would appear as they are funded and orchestrated by the Ukraine oligarchs.

casey , Jul 22 2019 19:20 utc | 8
Helmer on Kolomoisky and the vast money stolen with collaboration of Lagarde and Clintons, and the resulting suit, which appears to be aimed at keeping Zelensky on the reservation...

"A new Delaware state court filing a month ago, triggering new US media reports, appears to signal a shift in US Government policy towards Kolomoisky. Or else, as some Ukrainian policy experts believe, it is a move by US officials to put pressure on the new Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, whom Kolomoisky supported in his successful election campaign to replace Poroshenko."

https://russia-insider.com/en/how-christine-lagarde-clinton-and-nuland-funded-massive-ukrainian-ponzi-scheme/ri27390

psychohistorian , Jul 22 2019 19:28 utc | 9
Thanks for the posting b

It is interesting to read commenters not understanding the concept of colonial outposts like HK, SK, Japan and the attempts to make the Ukraine such. To empire they represent outposts to challenge the adjoining countries that are not part of empire. look at Puerto Rico. Empire favored it and even paid for citizens to go to college free.....until it didn't work to help make Cuba look bad....and so now it is being discarded like a dirty rag.

gzon , Jul 22 2019 19:34 utc | 10
Ukraine needed to get out of the rut it has been in and look forward somehow, even if there are no great changes that happen in the country, much of the previous political heaviness seem gone, for now at least. It should be a good difference. Thanks for the report.
vk , Jul 22 2019 19:51 utc | 11
The Gordian knot in Ukraine is that, after Maidan, the Ukrainian Armed Forces essentially dissolved. The neonazi militias then became the only enforcing power for whatever was left of the Ukrainian government -- that's why Poroshenko, albeit elected, could do nothing to stop those militias from doing whatever they pleased (even though he not being a neonazi himself).

Zelensky will have the same problem: he can pass how much bills he wants -- only those who the neonazi militias want to be implemented will be enforced. He needs to assemble a brand new Armed Forces -- with amateur volunteers if necessary -- if he wants to survive: his Jewish origin alone is already a death certificate for him in the eyes of the neonazis.

The other ace Zelensky has in his hand is the Donbass (Lughansk + Donestk). Those happen to be the most pro-Russian provinces and also, by far, the two most rich and industrialized ones. To make things even better, they also happen to be the two provinces that border with Russia. This peculiar geopolitic configuration is a gift of destiny that, for example, Brazil, didn't have.

Ukraine's economy is in absolute tatters. The Ukrainian government just didn't completely dissolve after Maidan because the USA is using the IMF to artificially keep it afloat (which goes completely against the IMF chart, as was the case with Macri's Argentina, where even the legal borrowing limits were extrapolated by a more than 100% margin). Russia just needs to wait.

Note: as for the toppled Lenin statues. Please, continue: in one of his birthdays, the Soviet population made a mass homage to him, gathering in the Red Square and writing him poems. He was very embarrassed and hated it -- his rationalization was that the Revolution's main actor was the poeple, not him, and that personality cult was the wrong way to perceive reality of the times.

Michael Droy , Jul 22 2019 20:03 utc | 12
Good stuff.

2 quibbles. Irrespective of evidence, this is Ukraine, and Kolomoisky's influence on Zelensky can safely be assumed.

The issue with the association agreement offered by the EU was not just that it offered little. As I recall it meant access for all EU products to the post-Soviet trading block. There would be nothing to prevent EU exporting anything through Ukraine into Russia. This is why the Russians expected to be part of a negotiating group, and why eventually Yanukovych belatedly realised that EU association would lead direct to dissociation with ex-Soviet trading partners and an economic catastrophe for Ukraine. Not so much Russia dissuading Kiev as Kiev taking an inordinate length of time to realise the blatantly obvious.

Needless to say, Yanukovych's real options have never been discussed much, and Russia has been blamed for the EU's Economic trap.

DontBelieveEitherPr. , Jul 22 2019 20:13 utc | 13
Thing is, in Ukraine as much as in the US, EU, India, or wherever: For a Politician to make a campaign for a high political position, let alone the highest, one NEEDS Money. And where is a someone financing a politician, they make themselves vurnable. Thats the nature of it: No one will give you even a penny, let alone dozens of millions of dollars, if not for something in return. So someone HAS to put the money into him, and Kolomoisky is reported not only by NATO, but by Russian sources too.

Why do i say this? Because i want to have my point that everyone is corrupt, and the world is dystopia. No, not today: It is because those "civil organisations" already hinted, that they use Kolomoisky's financing as the attack vector, should the Ukraine dare to stray off from NATO course.

They said something of the likes of: "We heard of the allegations that Kolomoisky is having him in his pocket, and we always want to ensure that politics are not corrupted, so we will watch it". They said that AFAIK some days before the recent threath, so maybe there has been some signs he does not want to play ball with NATO.

But we will see.. With the US you never know, even more with Donald and his best buddy neocons.

William Gruff , Jul 22 2019 20:19 utc | 14
b says: "The Ukraine can not economically survive without good relations with Russia."

That is true, but what does Ukraine have to offer Russia? Aside from putting some space between Russia and NATO, what is left of Ukraine after all of this that they can offer?

The Soviet Union built up a large amount of high tech and high value industry in Ukraine, but most of that has rusted away since 1991. Russia has found or developed new sources for most of what they previously bought from Ukraine, and those sources are domestic so Russia is unlikely to trade them in for products made from neglected and mostly defunct Ukrainian industries.

Ukraine can go crawling back home to Russia (home being the place where they take you back in even after you've been a total jerk), but there will be no massive bailout and magical recovery. Eastern Ukraine will benefit from a peace dividend, but western Ukraine will have to be satisfied with European sex tourism, with Lvov remaining the gay prostitute capital of the continent.

DontBelieveEitherPr. , Jul 22 2019 20:20 utc | 15
@B: One Correction if i see it right: I think linked Documentary "Ukraine on fire" is NOT the new one, he already made a doc about Ukraine some time ago, and this is it.

The new one is Not released yet, i mean the one with the Interview you posted few days ago.

Here Ukraine on fire from 2016: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5724358/

The new one will be named Revealing Ukraine, and is just released. Search your torrent search engine or tracker of choice for it for a HD release. Not on youtube yet AFAIK.

DontBelieveEitherPr. , Jul 22 2019 20:28 utc | 17

Sorry, last post: Please barflies, for those you want to support those documentarys, vote for them on IMDB and write reviews if you saw them. They are being attacked from NATO bots and voted down to C-Movie level. If you dont want BS like Fast & Furious have better ranking as those anti-mainstream docs, please take your time and support them!
They are pretty much the only documentarys in mainstream US media that tell the other side!
Clueless Joe , Jul 22 2019 21:01 utc | 19
That Ukraine has to be considered as both a bridge and a no alliance's land between the West and Russia has always been a no-brainer to me. One that should be imposed from outside if necessary, if some Ukrainians are foolish enough to pick a side - and, considering its geographical position, specially if some Ukrainians people want to move "West" full speed ahead, because the border with Russia will always be there.

As for Zelensky, he has the backing of the people, such a backing that a 3rd colour revolution would be immediately opposed by a bigger counter-manifestation. Besides, he should seek the backing of the rank and file of the Ukrainian army, just in case things go very badly with the fascists; considering his vast support among the people, the upper echelons of the military might not like or follow him, but if he gives orders, the core troopers would.

flankerbandit , Jul 22 2019 21:07 utc | 20
@ William Gruff
Ukraine can go crawling back home to Russia (home being the place where they take you back in even after you've been a total jerk)...

Well said! There is a transcript of the Putin Interview by Oliver Stone on The Saker blog.

For example, I believe that Russians and Ukrainians are actually one people.

Putin adds that it's inevitable that Ukraine will eventually return to good relations with Russia.

Look, when these lands that are now the core of Ukraine, joined Russia, there were just three regions – Kiev, the Kiev region, northern and southern regions – nobody thought themselves to be anything but Russians, because it was all based on religious affiliation. They were all Orthodox and they considered themselves Russians. They did not want to be part of the Catholic world, where Poland was dragging them.

Putin is correct, as usual. He is playing the Long Game, just as China has done with Hong Kong and continues to do with Taiwan. The empire always uses divide and rule. But in the end, empires always bite the dust.

David Park , Jul 22 2019 21:09 utc | 21
In Ukrainian politics my preferences are with the present Russian viewpoint and not at all with the Ukrainian Nazis. Nevertheless, in these discussions there is never a mention of the Ukrainian Holodomor of 1932-1933 that caused the deaths of millions of Ukrainians.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor#Soviet_and_Western_denial

Is this all now forgiven, denied or forgotten or is it still the genesis of much of the anti-Russian feeling?

Don Karlos , Jul 22 2019 21:10 utc | 22
"Revealing Ukraine" documentary aka "В борьбе за Украину" (which includes the interview in Kremlin released 19 July, minus the Skirpal comments) was released in Ukrainian and Russian, 17, 19 July. The version in those languages is eg here, https://my.mail.ru/mail/stelskov/video/235/5800.html
ben , Jul 22 2019 21:11 utc | 23
b said; "One hopes that Zelensky is smart enough to foresee a "third Maidan". He should kick out all of them from the police and other forces. He should also raise the police pay. He will need their loyalty sooner than he might think."

We'll all hope for the Zelensky people to salvage some sanity from another round of the empire's attacks. They'll never relent.

One would hope the Stone documentary would be seen here, in the U$A, but that's a distant dream. Should at least be on PBS, but, I doubt it.

As always b, thanks for the therapy, and historical background...

vk , Jul 22 2019 21:29 utc | 24
For newcomers, here is the TC-18-01, the American manual for Unconventional Warfare (published in 2010; leaked in 2012): Training">https://nsnbc.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/special-forces-uw-tc-18-01.pdf">Training Circular No. 18-01: Special Forces Unconventional Warfare, For the color revolution manual, see Gene Sharp's famous book (From Dictatorship to Democracy, 1994).

When used at the same time in the same place, they form what Korybko calls Hybrid Warfare (see his book).

c1ue , Jul 22 2019 21:55 utc | 26
@David Park #21

The Holodomor was real, but then again, so were Stalin's purges in that same era (a little later) and Stalin's ethnic forced migrations from 1930 to 1949.

While this doesn't excuse these acts, people should keep in mind that the Soviet Union was under tremendous external and internal pressure at the time. Acts of economic warfare tend to be poorly documented in history - for example, China's famines in the 1960s were exacerbated by a US embargo on wheat imports to China.

Ultimately, however, the main reason the Western Ukrainians don't like Russia is because they've always believed Ukraine should be a nation in its own right. The large contingent of Ukrainians in Canada, for example and including its present foreign minister, were fighting for the Germans against Russia in World War 2 under the SS , no less.

Jackrabbit , Jul 22 2019 22:19 utc | 29
b:
Some allege that Zelensky is under influence of the oligarch Igor Kolomoisky. But so far there is little evidence to provide that.... Zelensky will likely try to move the country back to a balanced positions between the 'west' and Russia.
There's reason to be skeptical. Nuland (Jewish) picks Yats (rumored to be Jewish). Yats is succeeded by Groysman (Jewish). President Poroschenko (Jewish) is succeeded by Zelinski (Jewish). Jewish population of Ukraine is 0.2% of the whole! Why are they running the country? I'll bet it's because Jewish support for integration with the West is very strong.

"Yats is the guy" ... until he isn't but will the new guy bring real change or just pretend to?

JohninMK , Jul 22 2019 22:25 utc | 30
Curtis # 27

Not just a bridge between Russia and the EU, the natural partnership that the US really fears, but, look at the geography, it is the natural entry point into Europe for the new Silk Road from China. Pre 2014 the Chinese were attracted by the opportunity of a deep water port in Crimea, the sea is too shallow into Ukraine proper.

jayc , Jul 22 2019 22:32 utc | 31
Is it a feature of the "rules based international order" that unelected NGOs can establish "red-lines" on policy and expect adherence?
bevin , Jul 22 2019 22:33 utc | 32
"Nevertheless, in these discussions there is never a mention of the Ukrainian Holodomor of 1932-1933 that caused the deaths of millions of Ukrainians..."
The 'Holodomor' was not real. No such event occurred. There was no intention of starving Ukrainians, on the part of the CPSU. In fact most of the Soviet Union suffered from famines in these years, some regions much more than Ukraine. The causes of the famine were largely economic sanctions.

It is quite true that the Collectivisation campaigns were, in many ways disastrous, and carried out with great violence. But the Holodomor myth, invented by Nazi collaborators after 1945 and based on Goebbels's propaganda is Cold War anti-communist hate propaganda of the worst kind.
Wikipedia is extremely unreliable on matters such as this.

2.As to comedians running governments Hoarsewhisperer, don't forget Italy.

3. What Ukraine has to offer, William Gruff, if the Biden clan has not stolen it, is some of the best agricultural land in the temperate world. At a time in which the USA's ability to dump grain on the world market is being employed to conduct terrorist economic warfare against disobedient countries, the surpluses Ukraine could make available are of cardinal importance. Then there is the matter of saving those lands from the scourges of American agriculture-GMOs, Roundup et al.

bevin , Jul 22 2019 22:43 utc | 33
" The large contingent of Ukrainians in Canada, for example and including its present foreign minister, were fighting for the Germans against Russia in World War 2 under the SS, no less."

c1ue@26

This is certainly true: the survivors of the 14th Waffen SS Galicia Division and their dependents, hangers on and sundry war criminals on the lam certainly came to Canada where they sold their votes en bloc to the Federal Liberal Party. In Alberta they came to control inter alia the University of Alberta.

But long before these people came over immigration from Ukraine, including Mennonites, brought their traditional skills and agricultural knowledge to, most notably the Prairies. They knew about growing wheat in the climatic conditions here. They also brought traditions of collective organisation -- they tended to be very left wing, co-operators and were among the founders of the Communist Party and the CCF. It was with great relish that the Liberal Party used the former (and lifelong) Nazis to saplit the community post 1945.

bevin , Jul 22 2019 22:46 utc | 35
"Jewish population of Ukraine is 0.2% of the whole! Why are they running the country?" They aren't, Jackrabbit. Grow up, for Christ's sake, and put these cheap racist cracks behind you. Ukraine is being run by the US and NATO, the Empire. God willing that is now going to change.
Evelyn , Jul 22 2019 23:25 utc | 37
bevin #35

re
"Jewish population of Ukraine is 0.2% of the whole! Why are they running the country?"

(a) Is it true that the population of Ukraine is .2% Jewish?
(b) Is it true that the .2% segment runs the country?
(c) Is it considered racist to ask why you find the two subject sentences indications of racism?

Piero , Jul 22 2019 23:29 utc | 38
Thanks for a great site!

However, for sake of good order, the EU association agreement proposal to Ukraine of Mr Baroso, was presented and rejected by Janukovitch beginning of November 2013. ( not 2014). The main reason, but never disclosed by our corporate press in the West, was the total unacceptable ( hence fullty understandable) of an either/or demand choosing between EU and Russia cooperation btw the lines, as well as an article about military cooperation. Which of course would also exclude Russian partnership. ... that set the stage the humble and charming Mrs "Fuck EU" Nudelman and her cookies at Maidan square.

The very fundamental principles of peace, understanding and cooperation of EU was betrayed by their President Baroso. When you add that to the financial rape of Greece by Goldman Sachs & co on his watch, one should think he deserved being executed for high treason! Civil war in Ukraine & and looting of the people of Greece... But guess what... He went directly from EU to .. GOLDMAN SACHS!

kabobyak , Jul 22 2019 23:46 utc | 39
I appreciate that good concise timeline and explanation of what has happened in Ukraine. I remember finding online a live 24/7 camera feed from Kiev during the Maidan coup, and the fascination but horror of watching the western backed Right Sector thugs wearing neo-nazi Wolfsangel insignias carry out atrocities in real time. I searched in vain a couple years later to find the archives of these films. Does anyone know if they still exist? I suspect if the filming was done by a coup-friendly Kiev TV station they will be kept under wraps unless some viewer recorded them, as there is a lot of incriminating evidence which could be exposed.

Watching what happened live and then following western media disinformation and outright lies was the final slap in the face for me that the corporate media had finally given up any pretenses of journalistic standards. Winter 2013/2014 it finally gasped its last breath and the last nails were hammered into the coffin. From then on we've had non-stop blatantly false narratives presented, with the nutty bogus Russiagate fiction now consuming three years(!) of coverage.

Here's hoping the pendulum has swung and we'll reclaim some sanity. Current trends don't favor this, however, and the US may go for the Samson option before conceding to a more multi-polar world. A smart lady (my wife) says we need 10% of people to accept a new idea or narrative before a critical mass can occur and it become the dominant narrative. The more people who understand the issues MOA and others educate about gives us a chance of countering the Empire's narrative control. Thanks to all for spreading the message and keep sharing with your friends.

Acar Burak , Jul 23 2019 0:13 utc | 40
@35 bevin
"Jewish population of Ukraine is 0.2% of the whole! Why are they running the country?"
They aren't, Jackrabbit. Grow up, for Christ's sake, and put these cheap racist cracks behind you. Ukraine is being run by the US and NATO, the Empire. God willing that is now going to change.

No, he does not just say "Jewish population of Ukraine is 0.2% of the whole! Why are they running the country?". He says:

Nuland (Jewish) picks Yats (rumored to be Jewish). Yats is succeeded by Groysman (Jewish). President Poroschenko (Jewish) is succeeded by Zelinski (Jewish).

Jewish population of Ukraine is 0.2% of the whole! Why are they running the country? I'll bet it's because Jewish support for integration with the West is very strong.

You can't ignore this "interesting" "fact" if it's the fact.

karlof1 , Jul 23 2019 0:32 utc | 41
TASS reports on election results. Zelensky's "Servant of the People party gets 42.45% of votes after 50% of ballots counted."

It seems reporting on ballot counting has ceased with no updates published today, all new reports I've read are from Sunday the 21st.

roza shanina , Jul 23 2019 0:35 utc | 42
@21 and @26 - regarding the Holodomor, It is true. Millions of people did die, but from what I can tell, it was a lot more complicated than how it is presented. Here's an article I found on Counterpunch Holodomor

I am no specialist or anything, but I think the collectivization was a disaster and the war on the kulaks didn't help anything, and that lead to the Holodomor which is more genocide-porn used for the same purposes as a few other large scale killings I have heard about - to make sure we never forget, and more importantly, we never really find out what really happened, because it is S A C R E D.

I just finished an excellent book on the Ukraine crisis. Flight MH17, Ukraine and the New Cold War by Kees Van Der Pijl. In the book he says that the Holodomor was used by the Reagan administration in the second phase of the Cold War as a tool to demonize the Soviet Union. Sound Familiar? The author says the second phase of the Cold War was launched when detente was broken with the Soviet Union, any concessions made to domestic labor in the west was to be dismantled and the goal was regime change in Moscow which happened in 1991. The author really lays it out and explained the new, third phase of the Cold War which really kicked into gear in Kiev in the winter or 2014. I found that to be very interesting. I had never heard it put that way before. I can't recommend the book enough.

I just started Frontline Ukraine by Sakwa. Thank you, B and everyone in the MoA community. Please forgive any mistakes I may have made in describing my interpretation of van Der Pijl's book.

Indrid Cold , Jul 23 2019 0:39 utc | 43

Ukraine is such a unique disaster of a nation precisely because it is not really a nation at all, just a cobbled together mishmash of people with no history. There is no such thing as a Ukrainian ethnicity. Ukrainians are ethnic Russians, remnants of the poor souls conquered by the Poles after the Mongol invasion and treated like dirt for centuries. All through that horrid time they preserved their identity as Russian, but when the Polish state was removed from the map, bitter Polish academics pushed the tale that these people were somehow separate from Russians, i.e. Russia had no right to it's retaken territory. This new foreign composed identity was forced on them by both carrot and stick in the Austrian Empire, that occupied Galicia...leading to concentration camps for those who resisted it in WWI. And the saddest part of the tragedy was when the Soviets founded a Ukrainian republic, lending undeserved credence to this farce. There is no wonder the country is such a schizophrenic failure. They have no clear identity and their recent history is nothing but sniveling shame. What is really the difference between groveling before Nazi invaders or groveling before Nato invaders? Not much, and the end is the same.
roza shanina , Jul 23 2019 0:55 utc | 44
Holodomor link that works
Piotr Berman , Jul 23 2019 1:38 utc | 46
I think over 20% of Ukraine's population is "not Ukrainian".

Posted by: c1ue | Jul 22 2019 21:59 utc | 28

It is quite complicated. For example, Zelensky himself had to brush up on his Ukrainian to be able to run a campaign, which he managed to do with his talents and scripts. His first language is Russian, and ancestry... Khazarian? If I recall, he shares first language, hometown and ancestry with Kolomoysky who was also his employer. What I am trying to say is that national identification is fluid in this region. You may have Russian nationalists who speak Ukrainian dialect at home, Ukrainian nationalists with rather incomplete knowledge of "their language" and many other combinations. That said, Ukrainian is a separate language that may be hard to understand by someone who knows only Polish or only Russian (but rather intelligible if you know both).

Occasionally I follow news on RusNext.ru, a news site that seems to be run by Donbass supporters who fluently translate from Ukrainian and, I guess, use Ukrainian words here and there.

BTW, the history of Ukraine is quite complicated, including "Polish Conquest" that in actuality happened as very complex cleaving and coalescing of fragmented states with key dynasties leaving no descendants BOTH in Poland and the Kingdom of Halich thus leaving both to the rule of a Hungarian king, to be later partitioned between his two daughters, while the less populated part of Ukraine was taken over by Lithuanians who had hard time defending their holdings from Tatars etc. After that, the polity of Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth adopted Polish as the common language of nobility, so most of the "cruel Polish lords" that Ukrainians fought with in 17th century were of Ruthenian (Russian?) origin, some claiming descent from Rurik (i.e. from the common dynasty of Rus lands). Compare with Irish and Scottish nobility adopting a Saxon-French mix as their vernacular (now known as English).

juliania , Jul 23 2019 1:44 utc | 47
I was just discovering the importance of internet world news information when the Maidan crisis unfolded, and many Ukrainians were putting photos and videos on various blogs about the horrible events leading up to and following the coup. Russia has made huge strides since - but we cannot forget that ordinary people who had the ability to send out information as it happened were to be highly praised for doing so. It wasn't sophisticated, I remember in one city in Donbass it was simply someone filming as he walked along the street, showing bodies on the street corner, the official Ukraine military speeding through the streets - vivid shots of buildings on fire, a protest by a woman with a toddler at a speechgiving occasion. Unforgettable.

Ukraine should be proud of being the historic heart of Russia itself, the place where the State began. That's what Putin is talking about, and even more than Crimea Kiev is the historical homeland capital city for all Russians; it's part of their heritage. It's as if separatists in the US got themselves embedded in New York City and declared their independence of the rest of the country, being more aligned with Canada. (Oh, and everyone in that northern area now had to speak French.)

Anything can happen, I guess.

Jackrabbit , Jul 23 2019 1:51 utc | 48
bevin

cheap racist cracks

Wikipedia tells us that Jews are 0.2% of the population in Ukraine.

'Jewish' is not a race. It's a religion. Do you think that Israel is a country for semetic people ? LOL. No, it's a theocracy.

Ukraine is being run by the US and NATO, the Empire. No. Ukraine is being run by it's West-leaning leadership and US/NATO is partnered with that leadership. I'm suggesting that Jews are among the most reliably pro-Western people in Ukraine. After all, the "Empire" that you refer to is known as the "Anglo-Zionist Empire".

<> <> <> <> <> <>

Leads me to wonder if the State Department's recent global antisemitism efforts are mostly aimed at Ukraine.

If Ukraine itself made such efforts/expenditures it might would draw a backlash from the Ukrainian people. So the US does it and slyly declares it to be global so no one notices that it's directed at certain countries (mostly Ukraine?) that have Jewish leadership that's backed by US/NATO.

As part of the effort to take over Ukraine, US/NATO forged an anti-Russian alliance that included the anti-Jewish extreme-right in Ukraine as described by Ukraine and the "Politics of Anti-Semitism" (2014) :

The US and the EU are supporting the formation of a coalition government integrated by Neo-Nazis which are directly involved in the repression of the Ukrainian Jewish community.
. . .
Within the Western media, news coverage of the Neo-Nazi threat to the Jewish community in Ukraine is a taboo. There is a complete media blackout: confirmed by Google News search ... What is not mentioned is that these "radical elements" supported and financed by the West are Neo-Nazis who are waging a hate campaign against Ukraine's Jewish community.
. . .
According to the JP [Jerusalem Post] , the issue is one of "transition", which will be resolved once a new government is installed .
"Despite his [Likhashov's] optimism fear pervades the local Jewish community, as it does the entire Ukraine, during the transition period."
No doubt Jews would not feel safe with rightists leading the government so arrangements were made (Democracy Works! LOL). We can surmise that the US State Dept has now formalized this with funding for a propaganda campaign that seeks to change their views and/or political slush fund to ensure election of Jewish candidates to high office?

Welcome to the rabbit hole.

Lozion , Jul 23 2019 2:10 utc | 50
Acar@39 The Globalists/Zionists Good 'Ole Pale of (re)Settlement included Crimea, home of the Karaites, hence manipulation of the Rusyns, and Neo-fascist Galicians & Podolians. A strange ethnic Divide et Impera nexus for sure..
Lozion , Jul 23 2019 2:12 utc | 51
..not to mention a revenge of Turkic Khazars on the Slavs of Rus, circa '900..
Lozion , Jul 23 2019 2:36 utc | 52
..revenge unmade by the various Orthodoxies, pneumatically inspired ;)
Acar Burak , Jul 23 2019 2:58 utc | 53
Pneumatically?!!
Lozi9n , Jul 23 2019 3:38 utc | 54
@51

"The pneumatics ("spiritual", from Greek πνεῦμα, "spirit") were, in Gnosticism, the highest order of humans, the other two orders being psychics and hylics ("matter"). A pneumatic saw itself as escaping the doom of the material world via the transcendent knowledge of Sophia's Divine Spark within the soul."

Crux of the matter at hand..

Acar Burak , Jul 23 2019 3:47 utc | 55
I understand it as wind, but your definition is surely much more eloquent.
Paora , Jul 23 2019 4:20 utc | 56
@41 Roza Shanina

No one is disputing that famines occurred in Soviet Ukraine. These famines also occurred in Belarus and Russia. The extent to which the harsh form of collectivisation institutioned under Stalin contributed as opposed to climatic and other factors (Western sanctions, crop destroying pests etc) is a matter for debate. Grover Furr argues the latter forcefully in 'Blood Lies' (2014). The term "Holodomor" refers to an intentional policy of genocide against the "Ukrainian Nation" by evil Russians/Commies/Jews via intentional starvation. As bevin @32 points out, this concept originated in Nazi ideology. So yes, famine(s) occurred, but the "Holodomor" did not.

As for the author of the Counterpunch piece, Louis Proyect, he is an imperial apologist of the worst sort who delights in trolling any forum where anti-imperialists gather. If this appears to be an Ad Hominum attack, I think you have to be human to be a victim of one of those.

I also can't recommend the Van der Pijl book enough. Usually if I see a book recommended by someone who also links to a Louis Proyect article I would avoid it like the plague, but barflies please don't be discouraged! Van der Pijl is one of the premier exponents of (non-sectarian) Marxist International Relations, if you've been put off reading Marxist authors thanks to the likes of Proyect he is the perfect antidote. His "Global Rivalries - From The Cold War to Iraq" (2007) is also excellent, I would recommend you track that down if Sakwa has nothing much to add.

Global Research has an extract from "Flight MH17, Ukraine and the New Cold War" here:

https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-downing-of-malaysian-airlines-flight-mh17-and-the-new-cold-war-with-russia/5638505


Jackrabbit , Jul 23 2019 4:52 utc | 57
Adding to my comments @29 and @46

TheGuardian: Who exactly is governing Ukraine? (2014)

Arseniy Yatsenyuk, Prime minister
. . .
He has played down his Jewish-Ukrainian origins , possibly because of the prevalence of antisemitism in his party's western Ukraine heartland.

<> <> <> <> <> <>

SputnikNews (2017):

Yatsenyuk resigned in disgrace in April 2016 amid a massive corruption scandal that first broke in February, when economy minister Aivaras Abromavicius stepped down, complaining that the Yatsenyuk government was not genuinely committed to fighting corruption .

One of the many corrupt projects was Yats' border wall, which critics have said "wouldn't even stop a rabbit." LOL.
Joost , Jul 23 2019 7:03 utc | 58
The new one will be named Revealing Ukraine, and is just released. Search your torrent search engine or tracker of choice for it for a HD release. Not on youtube yet AFAIK.

Posted by: DontBelieveEitherPr. | Jul 22 2019 20:20 utc | 15


I just downloaded but got the Russian version without subtitles. I am unable to find the English version. For those that understand Russian, the magnet link for the download is:
magnet:?xt=urn:btih:cbfd33adbd1d2bf3d48aade83a60507fe9f74241
If anyone can find the English version, please post the magnet link or infohash value, but I guess it has not yet been released.
uncle tungsten , Jul 23 2019 7:06 utc | 59
jackrabbit #all

Touche sir jackrabbit, well fielded.

snake , Jul 23 2019 7:30 utc | 60
by: bevin @ 32 < i am particularly interested to know the source of that 1932-1933 Holodomor propaganda.. .. claiming, not merely alleging, the genocidal deaths of 32 million Ukrainians.. Seems to me these fake claims that appear everywhere, have generally the same general sources, but are leaked at different places, in different formats, by different faces.. .. ?

I would like to see if it is possible to prove the source to be a coordinated amalgam of persons, and more particularly I am looking for the individual names that produce fake propaganda for a living, where did they study, who trained them, who hired them and so on.. Seems to me preparing, engineering or delivering fake anything that causes, or leads to war and death and destruction is a crime against humanity (CAH) with universal application because CAHs infringe inalienable human rights. There is a great need to make functional, on a world wide basis, the ICC.. Additionally the ICC cases have the potential to deliver the truth to History.

Iran, Russian, North Korea and China are positioned to impose ICC court jurisdiction, Nuclear Non Weapon Proliferation, and 3 vetos required to overrule the findings and mandates of a majority determination of the UN Security Council on all leaders and all nations and ruling bodies in the world. War, and in fact the decimation and destruction of the universe, is possible because these holes in the enforceable rule by law system exist. Fixing these three holes could have a massive long term effect on the peace and income distribution throughout the entire globe.

A forth such thing would be to internationalize all resources in the world, and to allocate ownership to them based on population and finally, the most important change of all, would be to internationalize education.. to grant one degree for all undergraduate education based on international subject matter examinations ( does not matter where or how the knowledge to pass is obtained, so universities and tutors can still play a massive part in instructing the masses), and one professional degree in law, one in medicine and one in engineering.. everyone would have to pass examinations and prove fluency in at least three culturally different, geographically different languages, and prove competency in mathematics at the differential and integral calculus level to be eligible to sit for an undergraduate degree and lawyers, doctors, scientist and engineers would be eligible to practice anywhere in the world, subject only to credential free, local regulation imposed because of local experience. Local regulation <= not supported by local experience would be overturned. None of this requires, demands, or needs a king or a president, it just needs to be a part of the human experience in the earth environment.

PJB , Jul 23 2019 8:20 utc | 62
Great summary b.
Needed somebody to just spell it out.

I recall watching the 2014 crisis and civil war in real time. Felt WW-III was upon us. Couldn't believe the outright lies of all Western media and was the straw that broke the back of any remaining faith I had in NYT, The Guardian, BBC, ABC (Australian) etc. The Odessa Massacre was biggest turning point for me.http://stormcloudsgathering.com/the-odessa-massacre-what-really-happened/

There's far more evidence Ukraine shot down MH17 than the Donbas rebels did. Go to www.consortiumnews.com and search 'MH17'

https://consortiumnews.com/?s=MH17

Talking with friends something has shifted for the average Joe and Jane. In 2014, if I presented evidence against the official Western Ministry of Truth (yeah see the typo but seems worth leaving) on Ukraine I'd get a righteous backlash and called a Putin apologist etc. These days there's blank inward stare of cognitive dissonance, subtle agreement and desire to change topic. Such is the nature of Stockholm Syndrome.

therobin , Jul 23 2019 8:59 utc | 63
@21 David Park, @26 c1ue, @32 bevin, @34 Ghost Ship, @41 roza shanina, @54 Paora, @58 snake

My understanding is that of Paora and bevin; there were famines in the Soviet Union, including in Ukraine. The Holodomor myth, if not started there, was massively promoted in the 30s by ... drumroll ... the Hearst empire. That alone should tell you something of its reliability. Proyect's piece is interesting, but it doesn't touch on the Western creation of the "Holodomor," the myth itself of the Soviet genocide aimed at Ukrainians.

Unfortunately, I'm unable right now to put my hands/keyboard on a good reference for this. If I'm able to locate one, I'll put it in a comment in an open thread.

Note to snake: not 32 million, but around 5-7 million, probably laughable in itself. (A reference I found for the Ukraine SSR in the 1930s indicates that the population grew during the 1930-33 period, but that should probably be read with great care. It would probably require a study in itself.)

* * * *

On another, but not entirely irrelevant matter, I've always found this wikipedia entry to be vastly entertaining. It gives me a good chuckle to think of Ukrainization -- the promotion of Ukrainian language and culture -- as a communist plot. (It's not a perfect analogy, but it's close enough for a laugh, considering the present.) (And yes, I know it's Wikipedia, but their prejudices lean generally in the other direction.)

Mykola Skrypnyk , and Ukrainization in the Soviet Union

CalDre , Jul 23 2019 9:48 utc | 64
The extreme right-wing politicians, who gained notoriety after the Maidan coup, prohibited the use of the Russian language which more than 50% of the Ukrainians speak.
That's a bald-faced lie. Russian is still spoken in large parts of Ukraine, including Odessa. The main tourist attraction in Odessa, a beach community known as Arcadia, still uses the Russian word at its entrance. Street signs are still in Russian. People speak Russian.

The only thing is they made Ukrainian the official language. Everyone must learn it. It is the same in Russia - everyone must learn Russian, even in Chechnya. It is in the nature of a country to have a universal language whereby everyone in the country may communicate. There is nothing whatsoever radical or even unusual about this.

Stop spreading hate and lies. This is utter nonsense.

As to Yanukovych, he was widely hated by everyone for his total corruption. Even Russians. I lived in Ukraine at that time - mostly in Sevastopol, which was then 90+% Russian (and of course now is part of Russia). Everybody hated him and thought he was utterly corrupt and stole from the people. His thugs would literally walk into a private business with guns and tell the owner "I am buying half your business for $50, here are the papers, sign them now". That is how he operated. Of course they did not want the L'viv folks staging a coup, but the hatred for the corrupt Yanukovych was truly national.

You don't do anyone any favors by publishing lies.

CE , Jul 23 2019 9:56 utc | 65
All those who say that Zelenski is a puppet or front for Kolomoiski should remember that a certain VV Putin came to power as a puppet or front for Boris Berezovski. And we all know how that (BB) ended. So let's hope for the best - can't get much worse anyway. And Zelenski seems to have acted very smartly so far. Good luck to him - he'll need it!
Jen , Jul 23 2019 10:10 utc | 66
It's my understanding that those Ukrainians who most fervently believe in the Holodomor (that the Soviet govt under Joseph Stalin deliberately targeted ethnic Ukrainians with famine and starvation) live in that part of the modern Ukraine that was under fascist Polish rule in the 1930s.

From my own reading, the famines of the early 1930s affected large parts of eastern Ukraine across southen European Russia into Kazakhstan.

The issue though is not so much the details of what actually occurred then as in the creation of a lie that deliberately equates Nazis with Soviets and thus Nazism with Communism, and ultimately socialism. If Nazism led to the Holocaust, then Communism and socialism must be demonstrated to have resulted in equally great horrors such as mass famines, starvation or incarcerating people in concentration camps on the basis of their religion. The current demonization of the Chinese govt over its supposed treatment of Falun Gong followers or Uyghurs follows this pattern.

Arioch , Jul 23 2019 10:50 utc | 69
> Half the population speaks Russian as its first language.

83% according to US research in 2008 chart by Gallups

article

kabobyak , Jul 23 2019 11:26 utc | 70
CalDre @ 64

Accusing b of "spreading hate and lies"? There's plenty of sources documenting the Ukrainian laws passed since 2014 prohibiting or restricting Russian language in various sectors, including official use, public education, even in films. b was correct in his assessment, and I have no idea where the "hate" accusation came from. I would normally not link to the awful Telegraph of UK, but I assume this story from just three months ago isn't fake news. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/04/25/ukraine-passes-law-against-russian-language-official-settings/

Arioch , Jul 23 2019 11:40 utc | 71
> The only thing is they made Ukrainian the official language.

...and the ONLY one. ...and the language undeveloped, that lacked words for many modern realities, from helicopter to condom, so they all had to be invented rashly.

> It is the same in Russia - everyone must learn Russian, even in Chechnya.

In Russia, Crimean Turks can teach their children, in beginner's school, in k'yrymchi language. It is one of three official languages of Crimean region. In Ukraine it was impossible then and it is impossible still.

> It is in the nature of a country to have a universal language

...that is only native to less than 20% of the population? Well, it is indeed a nature - of OCCUPIED countries. Like, Norman invasion into England, when elites had one language and serfs - another. And serf's language was slowly suffocated and replaced by foreign language of occupying elites. "If to live in comfort you have to rename every major city and tear down every ,ajor monument - you cam to live on someone's else land".

> whereby everyone in the country may communicate.

If that was the intention - then the language native to population's 83% would become official, like it is in Ireland. But not in Ukraine.

> As to Yanukovych, he was widely hated by everyone for his total corruption.

He was. So you say this makes illegal coup less illegal and bandit Poroshenko less bandit. How exactly? Or you just throw in irrelevant emotional hitpiece to accuse of "spreading lies" by which you mean "not spreading your favorite grievances" ?

Arioch , Jul 23 2019 11:49 utc | 73
> Yanukovych.... had no choice but to refuse [Deep and Comprehensive EuroAssociation]

But he did not. He asked to amend it, to re-negotiate it. He asked to add there compensation clause from EU to Ukrainian industries. Russia also asked for it to be re-negotiated, but Russia wanted re-negotiation from scratch into a trilateral treaty. Yanukovich only wanted money to support Ukrainian economic until his re-election.

Bad for him, but money he asked for "coincidently" were the same, as money Europe promised to Ukraine for removing of Nuclear weapon and Chernobyl nuclear power. When Ukraine delivered and asked for money - the 2nd maidan (2004) happened and both Kuchma and his heir Yanukovich flew down the drain. When Yanukovich was allowed to the throne in 2009 he conveniently forgot about that story. But the moment he asked EU for money, albeit under pretext of Association and markets, the 3rd maidan unleashed and Yanukovich went down the drain again. Guess, he had to learn his lesson without repeats?..

Arioch , Jul 23 2019 11:54 utc | 74
> Not so much Russia dissuading Kiev as Kiev taking an inordinate length of time to realise the blatantly obvious.

Posted by: Michael Droy | Jul 22 2019 20:03 utc | 12

Well, it took Russia to really START implementing trade inhibition, there were few rather vibrant "scandals" in spring and summer 2014 with Russia banning this or that food/alcohol form Ukraine, quoting safety hazards, to make Yanukovich understand this time it is for real.

Most probably Yanukovich was like Saakashvili in 2008, totally programmed that "Russia would not date" because "Russia is secretly ruled by Jews/NeoLibs/Washington/whatever". Russia dared. And then Yanukovich understood he was not selected to be a hero bringing Ukraine to Europe, but a scapegoat to absorb the fallout.

gzon , Jul 23 2019 12:22 utc | 75
So

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainian_language

is biased also ? It isn't my argument at all, but I do understand that language is very important in terms of identity. There is quite a lot of history in that article to take into account, or argue over I suppose. As it is probably the "go to" reference for people outside of the region wanting to understand the question of languages in Ukraine, its content is relevant.

Arioch , Jul 23 2019 12:24 utc | 76
> I remember in one city in Donbass it was simply someone filming as he walked along the street, showing bodies on the street corner, the official Ukraine military speeding through the streets - vivid shots of buildings on fire

Posted by: juliania | Jul 23 2019 1:44 utc | 47

Most probably, Mariupol 2014-05-09. People wanted to celebrate V-Day, but "democratic" Oleg Lyashko and his "men in black" drove in at attacked demonstration. Local police tried to protect citizens and was ambushed in their own HQ (that very burning house), making last stand.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FtT0bRDN6E
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1JZSfHri-wc
http://acloserlookonsyria.shoutwiki.com/wiki/Victory_Day,_2014#Mariupol

"In the 2014 Ukrainian parliamentary election he led his party to win 22 seats."
"In the 2019 Ukrainian parliamentary election Lyashko lost his parliamentary seat"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oleh_Lyashko

----------

One may also look for Olena Bilozerka, 2013 German "best international blogger." She is open and vocal part of Right Sector, though allegations were she is inflating political issues to hide marauding issues. She blogged back in 2014-02-16 about "next day" meeting of Right Sector representatives with Merkel "to report about implementation of our part of agreement and to be informed by Merkel about implementing her part" and regardless of "checking the watches" about armed assault upon government on 18.02, which indeed happened and was success.

Being open and vocal Nazi she then published many photo and video that were "omitted" by free world's free media.

Albeit as of now her English blog has much less content than her Ukrainian blog https://bilozerska-eng.livejournal.com/2014/
https://bilozerska.livejournal.com/2014/

vk , Jul 23 2019 12:30 utc | 77
This "how many people did Communism killed" question is tiresome. As I've already commented here in previous posts, there are essentially three methods an historian can determine if a genocide happened:

1) mass graves (this requires archaeology);
2) written contemporary accounts, and
3) census

In the "Holodomor" case, we only have "2", the most popular one in the West being that Welsh journalist who travelled to the USSR that time and, based on anecdotal evidence, "covered" the famine.

Wikipedia's article about the "Holodomor" only mentions one source mentioning concrete numbers: Wheatcroft, a rather obscure Australian academic who, to his merit, at least made up the effort to talk with people who had access to the Soviet archives.

The quoted list of his article clearly indicates Wheatcroft bases his numbers on indirect data. He uses the 1937 census in relation to 1926; in another article, he uses the quantity of grain stock in 1932. I could go on, but the important thing here is that this guy doesn't use any extraordinary sources. He certainly didn't go to the Ukraine to do archaeology. The Ukrainians themselves probably didn't do it either, because, so far, we have no accounts of mass graves in the region.

Famines were common in the pre-industrial world. They occured often in the ancient world -- where cities and villages literally disappeared in a matter of decades because of one bad crop and/or one plague (plagues are a side-effect of sedentarism). The often occured in the feudal world. They specially happened in tsarist Russia, which has a very peculiar and hostile climate and land composition for agriculture (only 15% of the USSR's territory was viable for agriculture even in the industrial era). They certainly are not a communist invention. We must avoid the "Belle Époque syndrome", that is, adopt the illusion late tsarist Russia was a paradise that was destroyed by evil Bolsheviks. Tsarist Russia was a very brutal world, were peasants died like flies every day: Gogol (who lived in Ukrainian territory) wrote a very funny and politically charged novel about it ("Dead Souls").

Wheatcroft uses the 1920s demographic tendency in order to infer "excess deaths" in the USSR in 1932, but he misses the bigger picture: you have to take into account Russian demographic movements in the long term, taking into consideration the cyclic famines. Just to crop a short period from 1926-1932 is scientifically dishonest.

Yes, forced collectivization probably caused excess deaths in 1932 -- but it's impossible to calculate how much more it caused in relation to a "normal" famine. Just because a famine happened during the Soviet era doesn't mean it was caused 100% because of socialism. Constant excess food production is a very recent phenomenon in human History, to state famines are the exception and not the rule is contemporary bias.

It is very unlikely the 1932 famine was an extraordinary famine. The 1937 census registered a population growth in relation to 1926. This alone discards genocide, because, even though excess deaths ocurred (as is the rule in famines), that meant women still had time and resources to biologically reproduce above the population replacement levels. Worst case scenario, this growth happened because birth rates were excessive in the urban areas at the expense of the rural areas -- an unlikely scenario, since in this case, we would register mass migration from the rural area to the urban area (because the hypothesis is that the famine was artificial, so the grains would be in the cities): they would either mass migrate or die trying, in which case we would have mass graves.

Mass graves are the decisive evidence for a genocide, indeed any mass extermination, because that would mean death was sudden. When the death process is slow and not synchronized, people have the time to bury/cremate their dead. That is the case even with some plagues (e.g. Antonine Plague). Mass graves are an indication people were killed more or less at the same time, in an artificial way, and in large quantities (since proper burials are expensive). In a deprived economy like the USSR, it is very unlikely all those bodies would be properly buried, let alone cremated, was a mass extermination taken place.

The holy grail of evidence for a genocide/mass extermination for any historian is when a witness points the place of the event and then archaeology finds out a mass grave. This evidently didn't happen in the case of "Holodomor".

Note: Gorbachev is a Russian who was born and raised in a village that borders modern Ukraine. His grandparents and parents were victims of the 1932 famine (they all survived). They continued committed with the Revolution and, according to Gorbachev's own accounts, he's was not raised believing the 1932 famine was exceptional.

vk , Jul 23 2019 12:40 utc | 78
About the "Stalin is a genocidal psychopath" question: it's funny, because forced collectivization was one of the few points where he and Trotsky agreed.

Whatever happened in macroeconomic reforms after Stalin consolidated power was a collective work, not the designs of only one man. And, although we can argue against the means, the fact was that they were successful: the USSR rose from the ruins of a second tier imperial power (late tsarist Russia) to a global superpower.

Ralph , Jul 23 2019 12:43 utc | 79
To understand the most important fact of what happened to Ukraine and why, you need to know about the yank neocon PNAC, which trumps (excuse the pun) all: The Project for the New American Century, and the original neocon (jew) wolfowitz doctrine, as revealed in the NYT in 1992: www.nytimes.com/1992/03/08/world/us-strategy-plan-calls-for-insuring-no-rivals-develop.html

Russia at the moment is correctly perceived as the main opponent to the usa, china too as upcoming, in line with the above, & PNAC is part of trying to keep Russia in its place: 'part of the American mission will be "convincing potential competitors that they need not aspire to a greater role or pursue a more aggressive posture to protect their legitimate interests."' And 'to deter any nation or group of nations from challenging American primacy'. And 'a world in which there is one dominant military power whose leaders "must maintain the mechanisms for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role."' Note 'regional' insofar as it concerns Russia wrt ukraine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_Century - still in play.

Also this is why the USG used Maidan (with at least $5 bn - said nuland/jewland, married to the co-founder of PNAC kagan, another jew) against Russia, to cause it problems and to be a thorn in the flesh.

Another important fact is the roman catholic church attack on Russia through ukraine & the split of the church in ukraine from the Russian Orthodox Church.

Arioch , Jul 23 2019 12:44 utc | 80
> there are essentially three methods an historian can determine if a genocide happened

Four.

There can be comparison of available data in adjacent regions. In this specific case - in Poland-occupied Western Ukraine. Just "across the line".

Anecdotal evidence states it also had famine, so the famine was not anchored in USSR specific way of governing. Some rare online archives of then Poland newspapers photos report some UK delegations raising concerns, etc.

However, in USSR the famine was a state-acknowledge emergency. USSR prohibited moving foods out of Ukrainian SSR (and wheat was not the only food! everyone talks about grains, forgetting potato, fish, mushrooms, etc), broken many Western contracts to repay debts in grains (West was denying being paid in other assets and was decrying USSR savageness of refusing to export all the contracted grain with the same zeal it today decry USSR savageness of exporting at least some of grain), started importing grain from Persia (now Iran). This emergency let a lot of paper trail, which now is used to "prove" how evil Soviet government was (and, specifically, not Ukrainian SSR government but central government in Kremlin; and somehow this is stretched even further to "prove" murderous hatred being part of "Russian character").

In Poland, well, a dull matter of fact. Bad lack to be peasant, yet worst to be Ukrainian peasant. S-t happens. No paper trail - no "historic event" - no accusations. Don't try to fix famines - and you will not be accused of being part of it.

aspnaz , Jul 23 2019 13:01 utc | 81
Election apparatus is so easy to corrupt, yet people still vote! Crazy! And, so many elections have been rigged this way: People are so dumb! Why does nobody insist on independent, improved equipment? Conditioning makes people ignore the cheat under their noses.
William Gruff , Jul 23 2019 13:17 utc | 82
Recall the posters in previous threads defending the empire's color revolution attempts in Hong Kong and match the names up with posters here. Are they trying to offer defense of the empire's color revolutions in Ukraine, or do you think they are off-duty now and posting with the sincere intention of initiating open discussion? Do you honestly think you can change their minds by engaging with them and pointing out the flaws in their facts and their logic when it is their job to defend the actions of the empire?

By the way, do expect and don't be surprised when the same posters referred to above defend the empire's lawfare coup in Brazil, the attempted lawfare coup in South Africa, and the attempts to regime change Venezuela when b posts any articles on these issues.

As for holodomor, or the Maidan snipers, or the famine in China, one doesn't need details to identify fictions. One simply needs to use logic and reason. We need only question simple points if we suspect that the famine in Ukraine was a deliberate attempt to exterminate Ukrainians: Was it successfully completed, and if not then why not?

There are obviously still Ukrainians, so it wasn't successful. If we assume the famine was a deliberate attempt at extermination, then we must ask why was it stopped before it finished? Did some external factor force Stalin to call off the extermination before it was completed?

No, the famine was stopped by dramatically improved agricultural practices instituted by the Soviet Union. This cannot be reconciled with the claim that the famine was a deliberate attempt by the Soviet Union at extermination, so no matter how much we may cherish the myth of holodomor, to remain rational individuals we must let that myth go.

Too complex? Let's try the Maidan snipers: We are expected to believe that the killers were police or Berkut snipers. What was their motive? Presumably to stop the protests. If that was their motive, then why did the snipers stop sniping before dispersing the protests? If the snipers were trying to end the protests, then why did they shoot just enough to inflame further protests, but not enough to discourage the protests?

The answer is simple: The police and/or Berkut were not the Maidan snipers in Kiev. The snipers were provocateurs who intended to amplify the protests.

It is good to dig deeper into the details of all of these false narratives that we in the West have been fed, but those details are not absolutely necessary to know that the narratives are false.

Arioch , Jul 23 2019 13:19 utc | 83
> I am no specialist or anything, but I think the collectivization was a disaster and the war on the kulaks didn't help anything,

> and that lead to the Holodomor

Posted by: roza shanina | Jul 23 2019 0:35 utc | 42

1. If forced collectivization would lead to famine, there would had be no famines in 1920-s and in 1890-s, before the said collectivization but there were.

2. Before forced collectivization there were many years of attempts at unforced one. They failed for at least two reasons.

a) many of poor peasants "saw themselves temporarily embarrassed millionaires". While being target of debt sharks (kulaks, public-devourers (мироеды)) they still only imagined the life as being sole owner of their however tiny patch of soil.

b) government attempts they saw as unwarranted advantages from aliens, city-dwellers, trade partners of hated kulaks, that to be took advantage of using any loopholes. Government tried to foster grassroots kolkhoz movements by offering bound credits - seeds, fertilizers, agriculture tools. Peasants started organizing "ten men" kolkhozes in springs, taking those credits, and then dissolving kolkhozes before gathering crops. "Faked bankruptcy" in modern parley. If you can have good sides without having bad sides - why opt for bad sides too?


Specifically in Ukraine it could also be boosted by the "national character" formed as dwellers of centuries-long battle ground between Poland, Russia and Turkey. No positive long-term planning, everything for instant profits disregarding any consequences. Any government are occupants and bandits, co-operating with them is futile and silly. We can see it today marching over once most rich and developed Soviet Republic. Why couldn't the same happen in 1930-s ?


3. However forced collectivization did achieved a lot. Remember the UK, where "sheep ate people", for example. Remember latifundists in Latin America. It is largely the same!

a) hugely increased labor efficiency in "village to city" trade metrics. "товарное зерно"
b) hugely increased labor efficiency in "men / area" ratio. Use of mechanic tractors and harvesters, etc. Unemployment among "just my hands" peasantry.
c) increased "capital concentration" provided for use of fertilizer, poisons, etc. Which contributed to the prior point.
d) now unemployed peasants moved to cities, populating newly built factories. This process was already going in 1900-s but much slower then. Emergent industrialization in the wake of WW2 - and a very successful one.
e) end of rural famines. One of the reason 1931 famine is so hyped - it was the last in the row. Would there be a comparable famine for example in 1970-s - and for political purposes it would had been much more useful against USSR. But there were none. "Golodomor" was the last famine, so it became the focal point.
e) end of city famines. Where atomized peasant families could not sustain even a horse or a cow, one of famines reasons, joint companies (kolkhozes) just like huge private agri-companies in UK or Argentina, relied upon chemistry and mechanizations, thus needed to trade with cities, thus were supplying cities with food. All the champions of Golodomor somehow overlook city famines that were cruel in early USSR in winters.

And one more quirk is almost total lack of photo-evidence behind "Golodomor".
When articles/books are illustrated, it is with photos from 1920-s famine in USSR or in USA, misattributed.
Allegedly, it is because in Soviet cruel diktatura even NKVD death squads could not make those photos even for secret important reports.
Reportedly it is because victims of "Goldomor" were dying "fatties", making less convincing images. The theories were made explaining why it was so, however there seems to be no any other famine known where those theories worked and people dying of hunger were abnormally thick.

Arioch , Jul 23 2019 13:26 utc | 84
> Do you honestly think you can change their minds by engaging with them....?

Posted by: William Gruff | Jul 23 2019 13:17 utc | 83

Public debates are not for opponents, they are for public.

Internet debates are not only for participants, they are also for those who would google this page many years later

William Gruff , Jul 23 2019 13:40 utc | 85
To Arioch @84, I apologize. You are absolutely correct. Leaving trolls' posts unchallenged gives the casual reader the impression that those posts are unassailable; nevertheless, I have been attempting to limit my engagement with the trolls to simply pointing them out. Posters such as yourself, vk, karlof1, etc who provide detailed and historically accurate corrections to the false narratives are necessary for the edification of lurkers and casual readers. I just hope that you don't measure the effectiveness of your posts by whether or not you change the trolls' minds.
Arioch , Jul 23 2019 14:00 utc | 86
> I have been attempting to limit my engagement with the trolls to simply pointing them out

This can really work well with people sincerely lost by massive propaganda, people who succumbed to illusion they know, why they do not.

Wikipedia: The Socratic method, also known as method of Elenchus, elenctic method, or Socratic debate, is a form of cooperative argumentative dialogue between individuals, based on asking and answering questions to stimulate critical thinking and to draw out ideas and underlying presuppositions. It is a dialectical method, involving a discussion in which the defense of one point of view is questioned; one participant may lead another to contradict themselves in some way, thus weakening the defender's point. This method is named after the Classical Greek philosopher Socrates and is introduced by him in Plato's Theaetetus as midwifery (maieutics) because it is employed to bring out definitions implicit in the interlocutors' beliefs, or to help them further their understanding.

Sincere person, being guided by questions, would start researching and analyzing. And would not feel coerced.

But you know, trolls just ignore the questions and keeps hammering talking points by infinitely going back and repeating them "from starting point".

Avoiding positive argumentation, avoiding claiming something and limiting ourselves to questioning their weak points, we help them to create another impression: they have a bad theory when we have no theory at all. They are content with it.

So, putting out competing interpretation is no less important than showing their own unhonesty.

t people were able to look past the mistake and not overlook the van der pijl book. Thank you for letting me know of Mr. Proyect's reputation.

pantaraxia , Jul 23 2019 15:13 utc | 90
Missing from the comments regarding Ukrainian/Russian dynamics is recognition of the numerous attempts (dating back to the 17th century) of the Russification of the Ukraine, first by the Russian Empire and then by the Soviets.

Russification of Ukraine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russification_of_Ukraine

ex:

( a reason for so many Russian-speaking Ukrainians??)

and from: Ukrainization: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainization#Early_1930s_(reversal_of_Ukrainization_policies)

In the regions of southern Russian SFSR (North Caucasus and eastern part of Sloboda Ukraine included into RSFSR) Ukrainization was effectively outlawed in 1932.[18] Specifically, the December 14, 1932 decree "On Grain Collection in Ukraine, North Caucasus and the Western Oblasts" by the VKP(b) Central Committee and USSR Sovnarkom stated that Ukrainization in certain areas was carried out formally, in a "non-Bolshevik" way, which provided the "bourgeois-nationalist elements" with a legal cover for organizing their anti-Soviet resistance. In order to stop this, the decree ordered in these areas, among other things, to switch to Russian all newspapers and magazines, and all Soviet and cooperative paperwork. By the autumn of 1932 (beginning of a school year), all schools were ordered to switch to Russian. In addition the decree ordered a massive population swap: all "disloyal" population from a major Cossack settlement, stanitsa Poltavskaya was banished to Northern Russia, with their property given to loyal kolkhozniks moved from poorer areas of Russia.[19] in the 1937 Soviet Census compared to the 1926 First All-Union Census of the Soviet Union.[18]

This perhaps explains the predominance of Russian in eastern Ukraine.

[Jul 13, 2019] Mueller Does Not Have Evidence That The IRA Was Part of Russian Government Meddling by Larry C Johnson

Highly recommended!
Looks like Mueller and his team were extremely sloppy and just milked the US government and try to feed rumors to the media.
Mueller emerged as a stooge of Clinton mafia.
Notable quotes:
"... In short, the US Government cannot come out and declare that Concord Management, for example, was acting on behalf or or in collaboration with the Russian Government without presenting actual evidence. A prosecutor cannot simply claim that Concord is a Putin Stooge. ..."
"... The lawyers for Concord Management read the Mueller report and noted significant discrepancies between what was alleged in the original complaint and what was asserted as "fact" in the Mueller report. ..."
"... On April 25, 2019, Concord filed the instant motion in which it argues that the Attorney General and Special Counsel violated Local Rule 57.7 by releasing information to the public that was not contained in the indictment. Concord's main contention is that the Special Counsel's Report, as released to the public, and the Attorney General's related public statements improperly suggested a link between the defendants and the Russian government and expressed an opinion about the defendants' guilt and the evidence against them. ..."
"... Concord's lawyers wanted Judge Friedrich to find Robert Mueller and Attorney General Barr in contempt for violating rule 57.7. ..."
"... the Court has entered an order limiting public statements about this case moving forward and cautions the government that any future violations of that order will trigger a range of potential sanctions. ..."
"... But the Judge did not stop there. She pointed out some glaring discrepancies between the Mueller Report and the actual indictment: ..."
"... By attributing IRA's conduct to "Russia" -- as opposed to Russian individuals or entities -- the Report suggests that the activities alleged in the indictment were undertaken on behalf of, if not at the direction of, the Russian government. ..."
"... But the activities of the IRA and Concord Management are not established. In fact, Mueller's own report undermines his claims, as noted in a recent article by Nation's Aaron Mate. ..."
"... Mate's article, as I mentioned in a previous piece, does an excellent job of showing that the Mueller Report is based on heartfelt beliefs but devoid of corroborating evidence. ..."
"... I think Mueller, Weissman, et al did not expect Concord to contest their indictment. They believed they could continue their PR effort that Russia changed the outcome of the election by sending out tweets and Facebook posts without anyone calling them out. ..."
"... The national security surveillance state is only going to get bigger and more powerful. I suppose that is the real competition between the CCP & the USA who can get more totalitarian sooner. ..."
"... a very valuable recent piece in the 'Epoch Times' about the questions that need to be put to Mueller, Jeff Carlson discusses some of the problems relating both to Christopher Steele's involvement with Oleg Deripaska, and the involvement of Fusion GPS with Natalia Veseltnitskaya which led to the Trump Tower meeting. (See https://www.theepochtimes.com/33-key-questions-for-robert-mueller_2988876.html .) ..."
"... Andrew McCarthy, in the 'National Review', picks up one of the most interesting, and puzzling, moments in the fascinating notes by Kathy Kavalec of the conversation she had with Steele when Jonathan Winer brought him to see on her in October 2016. (See https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/07/oleg-deripaska-fbi-russia-collusion-theory/ ) ..."
"... 'Moreover, by January 2017, F.B.I. agents had tracked down and interviewed one of Mr. Steele's main sources, a Russian speaker from a former Soviet republic who had spent time in the West, according to a Justice Department document obtained by The New York Times and three people familiar with the events. After questioning him, F.B.I. officials came to suspect that the man might have added his own interpretations to reports from his own sources that he passed on to Mr. Steele, calling into question the reliability of the information.' ..."
"... Without wanting to prejudge things, it seems to me quite likely that what Horowitz has been contemplating is a kind of 'limited hangout'. So, the idea could be to suggest that Steele did have sources, that however these were not as reliable as he thought they were, but everything was done in good faith etc etc. In the light of information coming out, including that in the Friedrich ruling, he may however have decided to 'hold his horses.' ..."
"... It is important that the general pattern of assuming that Putin is some kind of omnipotent Sauron-figure, which has clearly left Mueller open to a counter-attack by Concord, was given a classic expression in the testimony which Glenn Simpson gave to the House Intelligence Committee in November 2017. ..."
"... Litvinenko himself, as well as having been a key member of the late Boris Berezovsky's 'information operations team', was an agent, as distinct from an informant, of MI6: accounts differ as to whether Steele was his personal 'handler' (John Sipher), or had never met him (Luke Harding). ..."
"... Also relevant is the fact that Shvets, a fanatical Ukrainian nationalist, and an important figure in the original 'Orange Revolution', was also a key member of Berezovsky's 'information operations' team. ..."
"... The account of his career by the 'New York Times' journalist Barry Meier in his 2016 study 'Missing Man' is a tissue of sleazy evasions, not least in relation to the role of Levinson in 'investigating' the notorious mobster Semion Mogilevich, a key figure in 'information operations' against both Putin and Trump, and also the opponents of Yulia Tymoshenko. ..."
"... A large question involved is how co-operation between not simply elements in MI6 and the CIA, but also in the FBI, with the oligarchs who refused to accept Putin's terms goes back a very long way. ..."
Jul 13, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

Mueller Does Not Have Evidence That The IRA Was Part of Russian Government Meddling by Larry C Johnson

In the criminal case against alleged Russian operatives--Internet Research Agency and Concord Management and Consulting LLC--a Federal judge has declared that Robert Mueller has not offered one piece of solid evidence that these defendants were involved in any way with the Government of Russia. I think this is a potential game changer.

The world of law as opposed to the world of intelligence is as different as Mercury and Mars. The intelligence community aka IC can traffic in rumor and speculation. IC "solid" intelligence may be nothing more than the strident assertion of a source who lacks actual first hand knowledge of an event. The legal world does not enjoy that kind of sloppiness. If a prosecutor makes a claim, i.e., Jack shot Jill, then said prosecutor must show that Jack owned a firearm that matches the bullets recovered from Jill's body. Then the prosecutor needs to show that Jack was with Jill when the shooting took place and that forensic evidence recovered from Jack showed he had fired a firearm. Keep this distinction in mind as you consider what has transpired in the case against the Internet Research Agency and Concord Management and Consulting.

To understand why Judge Friedrich ruled as she did you must understand Local Rule 57.7. That rule: restricts public dissemination of information by attorneys involved in criminal cases where

"there is a reasonable likelihood that such dissemination will interfere with a fair trial or otherwise prejudice the administration of justice." It also authorizes the court "[i]n a widely publicized or sensational criminal case" to issue a special order governing extrajudicial statements and other matters designed to limit publicity that might interfere with the conduct of a fair trial. . . .

The rule prohibits lawyers associated with the prosecution or defense from publishing, between the time of the indictment and the commencement of trial, "[a]ny opinion as to the accused's guilt or innocence or as to the merits of the case or the evidence in the case."

In short, the US Government cannot come out and declare that Concord Management, for example, was acting on behalf or or in collaboration with the Russian Government without presenting actual evidence. A prosecutor cannot simply claim that Concord is a Putin Stooge.

The lawyers for Concord Management read the Mueller report and noted significant discrepancies between what was alleged in the original complaint and what was asserted as "fact" in the Mueller report.

On April 25, 2019, Concord filed the instant motion in which it argues that the Attorney General and Special Counsel violated Local Rule 57.7 by releasing information to the public that was not contained in the indictment. Concord's main contention is that the Special Counsel's Report, as released to the public, and the Attorney General's related public statements improperly suggested a link between the defendants and the Russian government and expressed an opinion about the defendants' guilt and the evidence against them.

Concord's lawyers wanted Judge Friedrich to find Robert Mueller and Attorney General Barr in contempt for violating rule 57.7.

Judge Friedrich gave Concord a partial victory:

Although the Court agrees that the government violated Rule 57.7 , it disagrees that contempt proceedings are an appropriate response to that violation. Instead, the Court has entered an order limiting public statements about this case moving forward and cautions the government that any future violations of that order will trigger a range of potential sanctions.

But the Judge did not stop there. She pointed out some glaring discrepancies between the Mueller Report and the actual indictment:

The Special Counsel Report describes efforts by the Russian government to interfere with the 2016 presidential election. . . . But the indictment . . . does not link the defendants to the Russian government. Save for a single allegation that Concord and Concord Catering had several "government contracts" (with no further elaboration), id. ¶ 11, the indictment alleges only private conduct by private actors.

. . . the concluding paragraph of the section of the [Mueller] Report related to Concord states that the Special Counsel's "investigation established that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election through the 'active measures' social media campaign carried out by" Concord's co-defendant, the Internet Research Agency (IRA). By attributing IRA's conduct to "Russia" -- as opposed to Russian individuals or entities -- the Report suggests that the activities alleged in the indictment were undertaken on behalf of, if not at the direction of, the Russian government.

Similarly, the Attorney General drew a link between the Russian government and this case during a press conference in which he stated that "[t]he Special Counsel's report outlines two main efforts by the Russian government to influence the 2016 election." . . . The "[f]irst" involved "efforts by the Internet Research Agency, a Russian company with close ties to the Russian government, to sow social discord among American voters through disinformation and social media operations." Id. The "[s]econd" involved "efforts by Russian military officials associated with the GRU," a Russian intelligence agency, to hack and leak private documents and emails from the Democratic Party and the Clinton Campaign.

The Report explains that it used the term "established" whenever "substantial, credible evidence enabled the Office to reach a conclusion with confidence." . . . It then states in its conclusion that the Special Counsel's "investigation established that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election through the 'active measures' social media campaign carried out by the IRA." In context, this statement characterizes the evidence against the defendants as "substantial" and "credible," and it provides the Special Counsel's Office's "conclusion" about what actually occurred.

But the activities of the IRA and Concord Management are not established. In fact, Mueller's own report undermines his claims, as noted in a recent article by Nation's Aaron Mate. Although Mueller claims that it was "established that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election through the 'active measures' social media campaign carried out by" Concord's co-defendant, the Internet Research Agency (IRA), he provided no such evidence.

According to Mate :

After two years and $35 million, Mueller apparently failed to uncover any direct evidence linking the Prigozhin-controlled IRA's activities to the Kremlin. His best evidence is that "[n]umerous media sources have reported on Prigozhin's ties to Putin, and the two have appeared together in public photographs."

Mate's article, as I mentioned in a previous piece, does an excellent job of showing that the Mueller Report is based on heartfelt beliefs but devoid of corroborating evidence.

Some readers will insist that Mueller and his team have actual intelligence but cannot put that in an indictment. Well boys and girls, here is a simple truth--if you cannot produce evidence that can be presented in court then you do not have a case. There is that part of the Constitution that allows those accused of a crime to confront their accusers.

Posted at 11:09 PM in Larry Johnson , Russiagate | Permalink

Sonal Chawhan , 12 July 2019 at 05:38 AM

Impressive！Thanks for the post
SAS Base and Advance

Peter VE , 12 July 2019 at 09:14 AM

Minor quibble: Judge Friedrich is a woman. I expect that this will get no play from the MSM, since Judge Friedrich was appointed by Trump, and "everyone" knows she's just covering up for him.

Larry Johnson -> Peter VE... , 12 July 2019 at 11:37 AM

Thanks. Never heard of a chick named, "Dabney." I was thinking Dabney Coleman. Dating myself.

Peter VE -> Larry Johnson ... , 12 July 2019 at 02:17 PM

Maybe her name is misspelled reference to Dagney Taggart...

Flavius , 12 July 2019 at 10:33 AM

Under the conditions and in the environment that it was returned, this indictment was Mueller and his partisan team throwing raw meat fo the media so as to prolong their mission, nothing more. Once filed, no one involved ever expected to appear in a courtroom to prosecute anyone, or defend any part of it. It was an abuse of process, pure and simple.

Consider it as a count against Mueller, his competence or his integrity, maybe both. He let himself become a tool.

pretzelattack -> Flavius... , 12 July 2019 at 07:27 PM

Johnson refers to "heartfelt beliefs" but i doubt Mueller believes his own bs. in this i guess he distinguishes himself from earlier witch-hunters, who apparently sincerely believed their targets were minions of satan.

blue peacock , 12 July 2019 at 11:33 AM

I think Mueller, Weissman, et al did not expect Concord to contest their indictment. They believed they could continue their PR effort that Russia changed the outcome of the election by sending out tweets and Facebook posts without anyone calling them out.

It seems on the current trajectory both the Trump colluded with Russia and our law enforcement & IC attempted a soft-coup will die on the vine. The latter because Trump is unwilling to declassify. It seems for him it was all just another reality TV show and him tweeting "witch hunt" constantly was what the script called for.

The next time the IC & law enforcement who now must believe that they are the real power behind the throne decide to exercise that power it will be a doozie.

The national security surveillance state is only going to get bigger and more powerful. I suppose that is the real competition between the CCP & the USA who can get more totalitarian sooner.

https://theintercept.com/2019/07/11/china-surveillance-google-ibm-semptian/

David Habakkuk , 12 July 2019 at 12:39 PM

Larry,

A fine piece.

I think a large question is raised as to how far the kind of sloppiness in the handling of evidence which Judge Friedrich identified in the Mueller report may have characterised a great deal of the treatment of matters to do with the post-Soviet space by the FBI and others – including almost all MSM journalists – for a very long time.

Unfortunately, one also finds this among some of the most useful critics of 'Russiagate'. So, for example, in a very valuable recent piece in the 'Epoch Times' about the questions that need to be put to Mueller, Jeff Carlson discusses some of the problems relating both to Christopher Steele's involvement with Oleg Deripaska, and the involvement of Fusion GPS with Natalia Veseltnitskaya which led to the Trump Tower meeting. (See https://www.theepochtimes.com/33-key-questions-for-robert-mueller_2988876.html .)

He then however goes on to write: 'In other words, not only was the firm that hired Steele, Fusion GPS, hired by the Russians, but Steele himself was hired directly by the Russians.'

And Andrew McCarthy, in the 'National Review', picks up one of the most interesting, and puzzling, moments in the fascinating notes by Kathy Kavalec of the conversation she had with Steele when Jonathan Winer brought him to see on her in October 2016. (See https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/07/oleg-deripaska-fbi-russia-collusion-theory/ )

Commenting on the fact that, in her scribbled notes, beside the names of Vladislav Surkov and Vyacheslav Trubnikov, who are indeed a top Putin adviser and a former SVR chief respectively, Kavalec writes 'source', McCarthy simply concludes that she meant that he had said that these were his – indirect – sources, and that this was accurate. And he goes on to write:

'Deripaska, Surkov, and Trubnikov were not informing on the Kremlin. These are Putin's guys. They were peddling what the Kremlin wanted the world to believe, and what the Kremlin shrewdly calculated would sow division in the American body politic. So, the question is: Did they find the perfect patsy in Christopher Steele?'

If you look at Kavalec's typing up of the notes, among a good deal of what looks to me like pure 'horse manure' – including the claim that 'Manafort has been the go-between with the campaign' – the single reference to Surkov and Trubnikov is that they are said to be 'also involved.'

As it happens, Surkov is a very complex figure indeed. His talents as a 'political technologist' were first identified by Khodorkovsky, before he subsequently played that role for Putin. It would obviously be possible that he and Steele still had common contacts.

The suggestion in Kavalec's notes that Sergei Millian 'may be involved in some way,' and also that, 'Per Steele, Millian is connected Simon Kukes (who took over management of Yukos when Khodorkovsky was arrested)' is interesting, but would seem to suggest that he would not have been cited to Kavalec as an intermediary.

All this is obviously worth putting together with claims made in the 'New York Times' follow-up on 9 July to the Reuters report on the same day breaking the story of the interviews carried out with Steele by the Inspector General's team in early June.

(See https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/09/us/politics/ig-russia-investigation-steele.html?module=inline .)

According to this:

'Moreover, by January 2017, F.B.I. agents had tracked down and interviewed one of Mr. Steele's main sources, a Russian speaker from a former Soviet republic who had spent time in the West, according to a Justice Department document obtained by The New York Times and three people familiar with the events. After questioning him, F.B.I. officials came to suspect that the man might have added his own interpretations to reports from his own sources that he passed on to Mr. Steele, calling into question the reliability of the information.'

Some observations prompted by all this.

Without wanting to prejudge things, it seems to me quite likely that what Horowitz has been contemplating is a kind of 'limited hangout'. So, the idea could be to suggest that Steele did have sources, that however these were not as reliable as he thought they were, but everything was done in good faith etc etc. In the light of information coming out, including that in the Friedrich ruling, he may however have decided to 'hold his horses.'

In trying to put together the accumulating evidence, it is necessary to realise, as so many people seem to find it difficult to do, that in matters like these people commonly play double games – often for very good reasons.

To say as Carlson does that Fusion and Steele were hired by 'the Russians' implies that these are some kind of collective entity – and then, one is one step away from the assumption that Veselnitskaya and Deripaska, as well as 'Putin's Cook', are simply puppets controlled by the master manipulator in the Kremlin. (The fact that Friedrich applies serious standards for assessing evidence to Mueller's version of this is one of the reasons why her judgement is so important.)

As regards what McCarthy says, to lump Surkov and Deripaska together as 'Putin's guys' is unhelpful. Actually, it seems to me very unlikely, although perhaps not absolutely impossible, that, had he been implicated in any conspiracy to intervene in an American election, Surkov would have been talking candidly about his role to anyone liable to relay the information to Steele.

Likewise, however, the notion of a Machiachiavellian Surkov, feeding disinformation about a non-existent plot through an intermediary to Steele, who swallows it hook, line and sinker, does not seem particularly plausible.

A rather more obvious possibility is that the intermediaries who were supposed to have conveyed a whole lot of 'smoking gun' evidence to Steele were either 1. fabrications, 2. people whom without their knowledge he cast in this role, or 3. co-conspirators. It would, obviously, be possible that Millian, although one can say no more than that at this stage, was involved in either or both of roles 2. and 3.

It is important that the general pattern of assuming that Putin is some kind of omnipotent Sauron-figure, which has clearly left Mueller open to a counter-attack by Concord, was given a classic expression in the testimony which Glenn Simpson gave to the House Intelligence Committee in November 2017.

(See https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/House_Intelligence_Committee_Interview_of_Glenn_Simpson )

Providing his version of what was going on following his move from the Washington office of the 'Wall Street Journal' to its European headquarters in January 2005, Simpson told the Committee:

'And the oligarchs, during this period of consolidation of power by Vladimir Putin, when I was living in Brussels and doing all this work, was about him essentially taking control over both the oligarchs and the mafia groups. And so basically everyone in Russia works for Putin now. And that's true of the diaspora as well. So the Russian mafia in the United States is believed bylaw enforcement criminologists to have – to be under the influence of the Russian security services. And this is convenient for the security services because it gives them a level of deniability.'

A bit less than two years after Simpson's move to Brussels, a similar account featured in what appears to have been the first attempt by Christopher Steele and his confederates to provide a 'narrative' in terms of which could situate the supposed assassination by polonium poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko.

This came in a BBC Radio 4 programme, entitled 'The Litvinenko Mystery', in which a veteran presenter with the Corporation, Tom Mangold, produced an account by the former KGB Major Yuri Shvets, supported by the former FBI Agent Robert Levinson, and an 'Unidentified Informer', who is told by Mangold that he cannot be identified 'reasons of your own personal security'.

(A full transcript is on the 'Evidence' archived website of the Litvinenko Inquiry – one needs to search for the reference HMG000513 – at https://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090333/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/evidence ">https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/evidence">https://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090333/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/evidence .)

This figure, whose credentials we have no means of assessing, explains:

'Well it's not well known to Western leaders or Western people but it is pretty well known in Russia. Because essentially it is common knowledge in Russia that by the end of Nineties the so called Russian organised crime had been destroyed by the Government and then the Russian security agencies, primarily the law enforcement and primarily the FSB, essentially assumes the functions and methods of Russian organised crime. And they became one of the most dangerous organised crime group because they are protected by law. They're protected by all power of the State. They have essentially the free hand in the country and this shadow establishment essentially includes the entire structure of the FSB from the very top people in Moscow going down to the low offices.'

The story Mangold told was a pathetic tale of how Litvinenko and Shvets, trying to turn an honest penny from 'due diligence' work, identified damning evidence about the links of a figure close to Putin to organised crime, who in return sent Andrei Lugovoi to poison the former with polonium.

A few problems with this version have, however, subsequently, emerged. Among them is the fact that, at the time, Litvinenko himself, as well as having been a key member of the late Boris Berezovsky's 'information operations team', was an agent, as distinct from an informant, of MI6: accounts differ as to whether Steele was his personal 'handler' (John Sipher), or had never met him (Luke Harding).

Also relevant is the fact that Shvets, a fanatical Ukrainian nationalist, and an important figure in the original 'Orange Revolution', was also a key member of Berezovsky's 'information operations' team.

Perhaps most interesting is the fact that the disappearance of Levinson, on the Iranian island of Kish, the following March, was not as was claimed for years related to his private sector work. His entrapment and imprisonment – from which we now know Deripaska was later involved in attempting to rescue him – related to an undercover mission on behalf of elements in the CIA.

The account of his career by the 'New York Times' journalist Barry Meier in his 2016 study 'Missing Man' is a tissue of sleazy evasions, not least in relation to the role of Levinson in 'investigating' the notorious mobster Semion Mogilevich, a key figure in 'information operations' against both Putin and Trump, and also the opponents of Yulia Tymoshenko.

A large question involved is how co-operation between not simply elements in MI6 and the CIA, but also in the FBI, with the oligarchs who refused to accept Putin's terms goes back a very long way.

And, among other things, that raises a whole range of questions about Mueller.

Dan -> David Habakkuk ... , 12 July 2019 at 04:36 PM

Great info, thanks. I admittedly don't watch the skeptics' comments closely enough, and can be susceptible to twisted observations from guys like Carlson and Solomon.

[Jul 09, 2019] Epstein and the conversion of politicians into "corrupt and vulnerable" brand

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... The Epstein case has all the earmarks of CIA protection of an asset. ..."
"... Successful entry into politics requires candidates to first "tag themselves" with a "corrupted and venerable" "CAV" badge? ..."
"... Is the CAV Badge the weapon that has corrupted the intelligence services and stable of politicians in nearly every nation in the world? Did Colin Powell flash a CAV badge as he spoke to UN focus about the most likely presence of non existent WMDs that led to w__ in Iraq? ..."
Jul 09, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

lysias , Jul 9 2019 0:53 utc | 91

The Epstein case has all the earmarks of CIA protection of an asset.

snake , Jul 9 2019 4:03 utc | 99

https://www.veteranstoday.com/2019/07/08/trumpsteingate-the-coverup-of-donalds-little-girl-fetish-hits-high-gear/

Journalism. =>has disclosed the tunnel, and a few of its investigators are exploring its contents, expecting to find at the end of this tunnel Successful entry into politics requires candidates to first "tag themselves" with a "corrupted and venerable" "CAV" badge?

Wonder if this has traction in the persons involved in Grace I, the failure of JCPOA.

Is the CAV badge the weapon that has corrupted nearly every nation state in the western world?

Politicians make promises, and then within hours for unexplained reasons, reverse them..Hmmm?

Is the CAV Badge the weapon that has corrupted the intelligence services and stable of politicians in nearly every nation in the world? Did Colin Powell flash a CAV badge as he spoke to UN focus about the most likely presence of non existent WMDs that led to w__ in Iraq?

How can CAV badge victims be identified and isolated from politics?
The CAV badge could explain so many USA positive, American negative events?

[Jul 06, 2019] Why is Iran such a high priority for US elite? Because Iran successfully booted out the CIA and CIA-imposed regime out of their country and successfully remained independent since then

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... There is at present no other powerful leadership group that is so adamantly unwilling to compromise with the U.S. The potential loss of U.S. control over Middle East oil being at the root of it. ..."
"... The Saudis et al have it, and Israel is a forward operating base for protecting it. The Saudi royal family rightly fear an Iran-inspired popular uprising against them and Israel fears the loss of lands granted to them by their invisible friend as related in a popular fairy tale. ..."
"... Iran is a relatively large country with a semi independent foreign policy and banking,/ financial system, and they want to control their own resources independent of western dictates about opening up their system to the neo liberal system. ..."
"... Because Iran successfully booted out the CIA and CIA-imposed regime out of their country and successfully remained independent since then. ..."
"... Iran was after WW2 a client state of both the US and the UK, the latter installing the Shah as a ruler. Iran was important for the US and the UK through its oil resources and its border with the USSR. ..."
"... Iran is still a major player when it comes to oil, but contrary to the Shah years quite hostile to the aspirations of Israel to become the “western” power in the middle east. ..."
"... The enmity clearest showed up when Israel and the USA supplied Saddam Hussein with intelligence and Germany and France with the capability to produce chemical weapons during the Iraq/Iran war. ..."
"... America essentially followed the old British approach towards Iran: keep it semi-alive so that it can put up enough resistance to the USSR until America’s more important and intrinsic interests, such as those in the Persian Gulf, were safeguarded. But Washington never wanted to turn Iran into a strong ally that one day might be capable of challenging America. ..."
"... By changing the international balance of power and removing the risk of Soviet penetration, the USSR’s fall eliminated Iran’s value to the United States even as a buffer state. In fact, the fundamental shift to a US approach based on the principle of no compromise, can be traced to 1987, when Gorbachev’s reforms began. ..."
"... Since then, the United States has refused to accept any solution to the Iran problem that has not involved the country’s absolute capitulation. ..."
"... For instance, in 2003, Iran offered to put all the outstanding issues between the two countries on the table for negotiations, but the US refused. ..."
"... Because Iran refuses to be a second-class citizen in its own neighborhood. Theirs is an ancient culture whose legacy to the world is enormous, their history is the stuff of legend, and they are the geopolitical power player in the region, not to mention the most powerful Shia Muslim nation. ..."
Jul 06, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

Joe Well, July 5, 2019 at 11:47 am

>>US President Donald Trump’s ruthless use of the centrality of his country’s financial system and the dollar to force economic partners to abide by his unilateral sanctions on Iran has forced the world to recognise the political price of asymmetric economic interdependence.

Why is Iran such a high priority for so many US elites?

Lee, July 5, 2019 at 12:28 pm

Just spit-balling here: The Iranian leadership, with good cause, wants to diminish or eliminate the U.S. grip on the region and this subversive, potentially destabilizing sentiment resonates among the citizenry of various Middle Eastern countries.

There is at present no other powerful leadership group that is so adamantly unwilling to compromise with the U.S. The potential loss of U.S. control over Middle East oil being at the root of it.

The Saudis et al have it, and Israel is a forward operating base for protecting it. The Saudi royal family rightly fear an Iran-inspired popular uprising against them and Israel fears the loss of lands granted to them by their invisible friend as related in a popular fairy tale.

This is hardly definitive and I’m sure others could elaborate.

workingclasshero, July 5, 2019 at 12:53 pm

Iran is a relatively large country with a semi independent foreign policy and banking,/ financial system, and they want to control their own resources independent of western dictates about opening up their system to the neo liberal system.

I’m sure this is obvious to most people at this kind of web site and is overly simplistic but i sense sometimes some people are shocked about the conflict with Iran and don’t get that basic dynamic of this conflict.

Underdog Revolutions, July 5, 2019 at 1:34 pm

Because Iran successfully booted out the CIA and CIA-imposed regime out of their country and successfully remained independent since then.

US elites never forgave them for it. Same reason they hate and punish Cuba, another country that poses no threat to anyone but its own citizens.

Peter Moritz, July 5, 2019 at 1:46 pm

Why is Iran such a high priority for so many US elites?

Iran was after WW2 a client state of both the US and the UK, the latter installing the Shah as a ruler. Iran was important for the US and the UK through its oil resources and its border with the USSR.

Mossadegh, by nationalising the oil supply until, played against the status and he was overthrown in a MI/CIA sponsored coup in 1953, leaving the Shah as the sole ruler in Iran till the revolution of 1979 when Iran came under theocratic rule and basically diminished the power the US had throughout the years of the Shah’s rule.

The US was also shown to be quite powerless -- short of an invasion -- to deal with the hostage crisis in the US embassy, which was finally after more than a year resolved with the help of Canada.

Iran is still a major player when it comes to oil, but contrary to the Shah years quite hostile to the aspirations of Israel to become the “western” power in the middle east.

The enmity clearest showed up when Israel and the USA supplied Saddam Hussein with intelligence and Germany and France with the capability to produce chemical weapons during the Iraq/Iran war.

Here is a more in-depth look:

https://lobelog.com/the-real-causes-of-americas-troubled-relations-with-iran/

This U.S. approach towards Iran has been the result of its lack of an intrinsic interest in the country. The same was true of Britain. The late Sir Denis Right, the UK’s ambassador to Iran in the 1960s, put it best by writing that Britain never considered Iran of sufficient value to colonize it. But it found Iran useful as a buffer against the competing great power, the Russian Empire. Thus, British policy towards Iran was to keep it moribund but not dead, at least not as long as the Russian threat persisted.

America essentially followed the old British approach towards Iran: keep it semi-alive so that it can put up enough resistance to the USSR until America’s more important and intrinsic interests, such as those in the Persian Gulf, were safeguarded. But Washington never wanted to turn Iran into a strong ally that one day might be capable of challenging America.

By changing the international balance of power and removing the risk of Soviet penetration, the USSR’s fall eliminated Iran’s value to the United States even as a buffer state. In fact, the fundamental shift to a US approach based on the principle of no compromise, can be traced to 1987, when Gorbachev’s reforms began.

Since then, the United States has refused to accept any solution to the Iran problem that has not involved the country’s absolute capitulation.

For instance, in 2003, Iran offered to put all the outstanding issues between the two countries on the table for negotiations, but the US refused.

ChiGal in Carolina, July 5, 2019 at 6:38 pm

Because Iran refuses to be a second-class citizen in its own neighborhood. Theirs is an ancient culture whose legacy to the world is enormous, their history is the stuff of legend, and they are the geopolitical power player in the region, not to mention the most powerful Shia Muslim nation.

[Jul 06, 2019] In practice, the USSR behaved exactly like a brutal totalitarian theocracy

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Maher was right. I've been saying for decades -- since Brezhnev was still alive -- that the Soviet Union was a functional theocracy. ..."
"... In practice, the USSR behaved exactly like a brutal totalitarian theocracy would. They had an impersonal god (the theory of history that would lead inevitably to heaven on Earth) which the government treated as the source of their authority and their justification for everything they did in the name of the Revolution. ..."
"... They had a state church (the Communist Party -- no rivals allowed) that you needed to join to get anywhere in society. They had prophets (look what they did with Lenin after his death), saints (heroes of the Revolution), idols, sacred texts that could not be challenged, brutal suppression of other religions, witch hunts for heretics (anyone who opposed the Revolution). ..."
"... So yes: the USSR turned "communism" into their de facto state religion. ..."
Jul 03, 2019 | theamericanconservative.com

Douglas K • 3 days ago • edited

To this day, Maher's response still leaves me dumbfounded: "I would say that's a secular religion." Before Douthat could ask what the hell a secular religion is, Maher changed the subject. The meaning of Maher's nonsensical statement was clear: everything Maher doesn't like is religion.

Maher was right. I've been saying for decades -- since Brezhnev was still alive -- that the Soviet Union was a functional theocracy. Sure, they didn't use God or angels or miracles in their rhetoric, but that's just surface trappings.

In practice, the USSR behaved exactly like a brutal totalitarian theocracy would. They had an impersonal god (the theory of history that would lead inevitably to heaven on Earth) which the government treated as the source of their authority and their justification for everything they did in the name of the Revolution.

They had a state church (the Communist Party -- no rivals allowed) that you needed to join to get anywhere in society. They had prophets (look what they did with Lenin after his death), saints (heroes of the Revolution), idols, sacred texts that could not be challenged, brutal suppression of other religions, witch hunts for heretics (anyone who opposed the Revolution).

So yes: the USSR turned "communism" into their de facto state religion. No, they didn't include personified invisible spirits in their ideology. But if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck ....

[Jul 05, 2019] Globalisation- the rise and fall of an idea that swept the world - World news by Nikil Saval

Highly recommended!
Globalization was simply the politically correct term for neocolonialism.
Jul 14, 2017 | www.theguardian.com

... ... ...

Over the last two years, a different, in some ways unrecognizable Larry Summers has been appearing in newspaper editorial pages. More circumspect in tone, this humbler Summers has been arguing that economic opportunities in the developing world are slowing, and that the already rich economies are finding it hard to get out of the crisis. Barring some kind of breakthrough, Summers says, an era of slow growth is here to stay.

In Summers's recent writings, this sombre conclusion has often been paired with a surprising political goal: advocating for a "responsible nationalism". Now he argues that politicians must recognise that "the basic responsibility of government is to maximise the welfare of citizens, not to pursue some abstract concept of the global good".

One curious thing about the pro-globalisation consensus of the 1990s and 2000s, and its collapse in recent years, is how closely the cycle resembles a previous era. Pursuing free trade has always produced displacement and inequality – and political chaos, populism and retrenchment to go with it. Every time the social consequences of free trade are overlooked, political backlash follows. But free trade is only one of many forms that economic integration can take. History seems to suggest, however, that it might be the most destabilising one.

... ... ...

The international systems that chastened figures such as Keynes helped produce in the next few years – especially the Bretton Woods agreement and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (Gatt) – set the terms under which the new wave of globalisation would take place.

The key to the system's viability, in Rodrik's view, was its flexibility – something absent from contemporary globalisation, with its one-size-fits-all model of capitalism. Bretton Woods stabilised exchange rates by pegging the dollar loosely to gold, and other currencies to the dollar. Gatt consisted of rules governing free trade – negotiated by participating countries in a series of multinational "rounds" – that left many areas of the world economy, such as agriculture, untouched or unaddressed. "Gatt's purpose was never to maximise free trade," Rodrik writes. "It was to achieve the maximum amount of trade compatible with different nations doing their own thing. In that respect, the institution proved spectacularly successful."

Partly because Gatt was not always dogmatic about free trade, it allowed most countries to figure out their own economic objectives, within a somewhat international ambit. When nations contravened the agreement's terms on specific areas of national interest, they found that it "contained loopholes wide enough for an elephant to pass", in Rodrik's words. If a nation wanted to protect its steel industry, for example, it could claim "injury" under the rules of Gatt and raise tariffs to discourage steel imports: "an abomination from the standpoint of free trade". These were useful for countries that were recovering from the war and needed to build up their own industries via tariffs – duties imposed on particular imports. Meanwhile, from 1948 to 1990, world trade grew at an annual average of nearly 7% – faster than the post-communist years, which we think of as the high point of globalisation. "If there was a golden era of globalisation," Rodrik has written, "this was it."

Gatt, however, failed to cover many of the countries in the developing world. These countries eventually created their own system, the United Nations conference on trade and development (UNCTAD). Under this rubric, many countries – especially in Latin America, the Middle East, Africa and Asia – adopted a policy of protecting homegrown industries by replacing imports with domestically produced goods. It worked poorly in some places – India and Argentina, for example, where the trade barriers were too high, resulting in factories that cost more to set up than the value of the goods they produced – but remarkably well in others, such as east Asia, much of Latin America and parts of sub-Saharan Africa, where homegrown industries did spring up. Though many later economists and commentators would dismiss the achievements of this model, it theoretically fit Larry Summers's recent rubric on globalisation: "the basic responsibility of government is to maximise the welfare of citizens, not to pursue some abstract concept of the global good."

The critical turning point – away from this system of trade balanced against national protections – came in the 1980s. Flagging growth and high inflation in the west, along with growing competition from Japan, opened the way for a political transformation. The elections of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were seminal, putting free-market radicals in charge of two of the world's five biggest economies and ushering in an era of "hyperglobalisation". In the new political climate, economies with large public sectors and strong governments within the global capitalist system were no longer seen as aids to the system's functioning, but impediments to it.

Not only did these ideologies take hold in the US and the UK; they seized international institutions as well. Gatt renamed itself as the World Trade Organization (WTO), and the new rules the body negotiated began to cut more deeply into national policies. Its international trade rules sometimes undermined national legislation. The WTO's appellate court intervened relentlessly in member nations' tax, environmental and regulatory policies, including those of the United States: the US's fuel emissions standards were judged to discriminate against imported gasoline, and its ban on imported shrimp caught without turtle-excluding devices was overturned. If national health and safety regulations were stricter than WTO rules necessitated, they could only remain in place if they were shown to have "scientific justification".

The purest version of hyperglobalisation was tried out in Latin America in the 1980s. Known as the "Washington consensus", this model usually involved loans from the IMF that were contingent on those countries lowering trade barriers and privatising many of their nationally held industries. Well into the 1990s, economists were proclaiming the indisputable benefits of openness. In an influential 1995 paper, Jeffrey Sachs and Andrew Warner wrote: "We find no cases to support the frequent worry that a country might open and yet fail to grow."

But the Washington consensus was bad for business: most countries did worse than before. Growth faltered, and citizens across Latin America revolted against attempted privatisations of water and gas. In Argentina, which followed the Washington consensus to the letter, a grave crisis resulted in 2002 , precipitating an economic collapse and massive street protests that forced out the government that had pursued privatising reforms. Argentina's revolt presaged a left-populist upsurge across the continent: from 1999 to 2007, leftwing leaders and parties took power in Brazil, Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador, all of them campaigning against the Washington consensus on globalisation. These revolts were a preview of the backlash of today.

Rodrik – perhaps the contemporary economist whose views have been most amply vindicated by recent events – was himself a beneficiary of protectionism in Turkey. His father's ballpoint pen company was sheltered under tariffs, and achieved enough success to allow Rodrik to attend Harvard in the 1970s as an undergraduate. This personal understanding of the mixed nature of economic success may be one of the reasons why his work runs against the broad consensus of mainstream economics writing on globalisation.

"I never felt that my ideas were out of the mainstream," Rodrik told me recently. Instead, it was that the mainstream had lost touch with the diversity of opinions and methods that already existed within economics. "The economics profession is strange in that the more you move away from the seminar room to the public domain, the more the nuances get lost, especially on issues of trade." He lamented the fact that while, in the classroom, the models of trade discuss losers and winners, and, as a result, the necessity of policies of redistribution, in practice, an "arrogance and hubris" had led many economists to ignore these implications. "Rather than speaking truth to power, so to speak, many economists became cheerleaders for globalisation."

In his 2011 book The Globalization Paradox , Rodrik concluded that "we cannot simultaneously pursue democracy, national determination, and economic globalisation." The results of the 2016 elections and referendums provide ample testimony of the justness of the thesis, with millions voting to push back, for better or for worse, against the campaigns and institutions that promised more globalisation. "I'm not at all surprised by the backlash," Rodrik told me. "Really, nobody should have been surprised."

But what, in any case, would "more globalisation" look like? For the same economists and writers who have started to rethink their commitments to greater integration, it doesn't mean quite what it did in the early 2000s. It's not only the discourse that's changed: globalisation itself has changed, developing into a more chaotic and unequal system than many economists predicted. The benefits of globalisation have been largely concentrated in a handful of Asian countries. And even in those countries, the good times may be running out.

Statistics from Global Inequality , a 2016 book by the development economist Branko Milanović, indicate that in relative terms the greatest benefits of globalisation have accrued to a rising "emerging middle class", based preponderantly in China. But the cons are there, too: in absolute terms, the largest gains have gone to what is commonly called "the 1%" – half of whom are based in the US. Economist Richard Baldwin has shown in his recent book, The Great Convergence, that nearly all of the gains from globalisation have been concentrated in six countries.

Barring some political catastrophe, in which rightwing populism continued to gain, and in which globalisation would be the least of our problems – Wolf admitted that he was "not at all sure" that this could be ruled out – globalisation was always going to slow; in fact, it already has. One reason, says Wolf, was that "a very, very large proportion of the gains from globalisation – by no means all – have been exploited. We have a more open world economy to trade than we've ever had before." Citing The Great Convergence, Wolf noted that supply chains have already expanded, and that future developments, such as automation and the use of robots, looked to undermine the promise of a growing industrial workforce. Today, the political priorities were less about trade and more about the challenge of retraining workers , as technology renders old jobs obsolete and transforms the world of work.

Rodrik, too, believes that globalisation, whether reduced or increased, is unlikely to produce the kind of economic effects it once did. For him, this slowdown has something to do with what he calls "premature deindustrialisation". In the past, the simplest model of globalisation suggested that rich countries would gradually become "service economies", while emerging economies picked up the industrial burden. Yet recent statistics show the world as a whole is deindustrialising. Countries that one would have expected to have more industrial potential are going through the stages of automation more quickly than previously developed countries did, and thereby failing to develop the broad industrial workforce seen as a key to shared prosperity.

For both Rodrik and Wolf, the political reaction to globalisation bore possibilities of deep uncertainty. "I really have found it very difficult to decide whether what we're living through is a blip, or a fundamental and profound transformation of the world – at least as significant as the one that brought about the first world war and the Russian revolution," Wolf told me. He cited his agreement with economists such as Summers that shifting away from the earlier emphasis on globalisation had now become a political priority; that to pursue still greater liberalisation was like showing "a red rag to a bull" in terms of what it might do to the already compromised political stability of the western world.

Rodrik pointed to a belated emphasis, both among political figures and economists, on the necessity of compensating those displaced by globalisation with retraining and more robust welfare states. But pro-free-traders had a history of cutting compensation: Bill Clinton passed Nafta, but failed to expand safety nets. "The issue is that the people are rightly not trusting the centrists who are now promising compensation," Rodrik said. "One reason that Hillary Clinton didn't get any traction with those people is that she didn't have any credibility."

Rodrik felt that economics commentary failed to register the gravity of the situation: that there were increasingly few avenues for global growth, and that much of the damage done by globalisation – economic and political – is irreversible. "There is a sense that we're at a turning point," he said. "There's a lot more thinking about what can be done. There's a renewed emphasis on compensation – which, you know, I think has come rather late."

[Jul 05, 2019] The World Bank and IMF 2019 by Michael Hudson and Bonnie Faulkner

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... The purpose of a military conquest is to take control of foreign economies, to take control of their land and impose tribute. The genius of the World Bank was to recognize that it's not necessary to occupy a country in order to impose tribute, or to take over its industry, agriculture and land. Instead of bullets, it uses financial maneuvering. As long as other countries play an artificial economic game that U.S. diplomacy can control, finance is able to achieve today what used to require bombing and loss of life by soldiers ..."
"... It was set up basically by the United States in 1944, along with its sister institution, the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Their purpose was to create an international order like a funnel to make other countries economically dependent on the United States ..."
"... American diplomats insisted on the ability to veto any action by the World Bank or IMF. The aim of this veto power was to make sure that any policy was, in Donald Trump's words, to put America first. "We've got to win and they've got to lose." ..."
"... The World Bank was set up from the outset as a branch of the military, of the Defense Department. John J. McCloy (Assistant Secretary of War, 1941-45), was the first full-time president ..."
"... Many countries had two rates: one for goods and services, which was set normally by the market, and then a different exchange rate that was managed for capital movements. That was because countries were trying to prevent capital flight. They didn't want their wealthy classes or foreign investors to make a run on their own currency – an ever-present threat in Latin America. ..."
"... The IMF and the World Bank backed the cosmopolitan classes, the wealthy. Instead of letting countries control their capital outflows and prevent capital flight, the IMF's job is to protect the richest One Percent and foreign investors from balance-of-payments problems ..."
"... The IMF enables its wealthy constituency to move their money out of the country without taking a foreign-exchange loss ..."
"... Wall Street speculators have sold the local currency short to make a killing, George-Soros style. ..."
"... When the debtor-country currency collapses, the debts that these Latin American countries owe are in dollars, and now have to pay much more in their own currency to carry and pay off these debts. ..."
"... Local currency is thrown onto the foreign-exchange market for dollars, lowering the exchange rate. That increases import prices, raising a price umbrella for domestic products. ..."
"... Instead, the IMF says just the opposite: It acts to prevent any move by other countries to bring the debt volume within the ability to be paid. It uses debt leverage as a way to control the monetary lifeline of financially defeated debtor countries. ..."
"... This control by the U.S. financial system and its diplomacy has been built into the world system by the IMF and the World Bank claiming to be international instead of an expression of specifically U.S. New Cold War nationalism. ..."
"... The same thing happened in Greece a few years ago, when almost all of Greece's foreign debt was owed to Greek millionaires holding their money in Switzerland ..."
"... The IMF could have seized this money to pay off the bondholders. Instead, it made the Greek economy pay. It found that it was worth wrecking the Greek economy, forcing emigration and wiping out Greek industry so that French and German bondholding banks would not have to take a loss. That is what makes the IMF so vicious an institution. ..."
"... America was able to grab all of Iran's foreign exchange just by the banks interfering. The CIA has bragged that it can do the same thing with Russia. If Russia does something that U.S. diplomats don't like, the U.S. can use the SWIFT bank payment system to exclude Russia from it, so the Russian banks and the Russian people and industry won't be able to make payments to each other. ..."
"... You can't create the money, especially if you're running a balance of payments deficit and if U.S. foreign policy forces you into deficit by having someone like George Soros make a run on your currency. Look at the Asia crisis in 1997. Wall Street funds bet against foreign currencies, driving them way down, and then used the money to pick up industry cheap in Korea and other Asian countries. ..."
"... This was also done to Russia's ruble. The only country that avoided this was Malaysia, under Mohamed Mahathir, by using capital controls. Malaysia is an object lesson in how to prevent a currency flight. ..."
"... Client kleptocracies take their money and run, moving it abroad to hard currency areas such as the United States, or at least keeping it in dollars in offshore banking centers instead of reinvesting it to help the country catch up by becoming independent agriculturally, in energy, finance and other sectors. ..."
"... But in shaping the World Trade Organization's rules, the United States said that all countries had to promote free trade and could not have government support, except for countries that already had it. We're the only country that had it. That's what's called "grandfathering". ..."
Jul 05, 2019 | www.unz.com

"The purpose of a military conquest is to take control of foreign economies, to take control of their land and impose tribute. The genius of the World Bank was to recognize that it's not necessary to occupy a country in order to impose tribute, or to take over its industry, agriculture and land. Instead of bullets, it uses financial maneuvering. As long as other countries play an artificial economic game that U.S. diplomacy can control, finance is able to achieve today what used to require bombing and loss of life by soldiers."

I'm Bonnie Faulkner. Today on Guns and Butter: Dr. Michael Hudson. Today's show: The IMF and World Bank: Partners In Backwardness . Dr. Hudson is a financial economist and historian. He is President of the Institute for the Study of Long-Term Economic Trend, a Wall Street Financial Analyst, and Distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City.

His most recent books include " and Forgive them Their Debts: Lending, Foreclosure and Redemption from Bronze Age Finance to the Jubilee Year "; Killing the Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Destroy the Global Economy , and J Is for Junk Economics: A Guide to Reality in an Age of Deception . He is also author of Trade, Development and Foreign Debt , among many other books.

We return today to a discussion of Dr. Hudson's seminal 1972 book, Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire , a critique of how the United States exploited foreign economies through the IMF and World Bank, with a special emphasis on food imperialism.

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Bonnie Faulkner : In your seminal work form 1972, Super-Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire , you write: "The development lending of the World Bank has been dysfunctional from the outset." When was the World Bank set up and by whom?

Michael Hudson : It was set up basically by the United States in 1944, along with its sister institution, the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Their purpose was to create an international order like a funnel to make other countries economically dependent on the United States. To make sure that no other country or group of countries – even all the rest of the world – could not dictate U.S. policy. American diplomats insisted on the ability to veto any action by the World Bank or IMF. The aim of this veto power was to make sure that any policy was, in Donald Trump's words, to put America first. "We've got to win and they've got to lose."

The World Bank was set up from the outset as a branch of the military, of the Defense Department. John J. McCloy (Assistant Secretary of War, 1941-45), was the first full-time president. He later became Chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank (1953-60). McNamara was Secretary of Defense (1961-68), Paul Wolfowitz was Deputy and Under Secretary of Defense (1989-2005), and Robert Zoellick was Deputy Secretary of State. So I think you can look at the World Bank as the soft shoe of American diplomacy.

Bonnie Faulkner : What is the difference between the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, the IMF? Is there a difference?

Michael Hudson : Yes, there is. The World Bank was supposed to make loans for what they call international development. "Development" was their euphemism for dependency on U.S. exports and finance. This dependency entailed agricultural backwardness – opposing land reform, family farming to produce domestic food crops, and also monetary backwardness in basing their monetary system on the dollar.

The World Bank was supposed to provide infrastructure loans that other countries would go into debt to pay American engineering firms, to build up their export sectors and their plantation sectors by public investment roads and port development for imports and exports. Essentially, the Bank financed long- investments in the foreign trade sector, in a way that was a natural continuation of European colonialism.

In 1941, for example, C. L. R. James wrote an article on "Imperialism in Africa" pointing out the fiasco of European railroad investment in Africa: "Railways must serve flourishing industrial areas, or densely populated agricult5ural regions, or they must open up new land along which a thriving population develops and provides the railways with traffic. Except in the mining regions of South Africa, all these conditions are absent. Yet railways were needed, for the benefit of European investors and heavy industry." That is why, James explained "only governments can afford to operate them," while being burdened with heavy interest obligations. [1] What was "developed" was Africa's mining and plantation export sector, not its domestic economies. The World Bank followed this pattern of "development" lending without apology.

The IMF was in charge of short-term foreign currency loans. Its aim was to prevent countries from imposing capital controls to protect their balance of payments. Many countries had a dual exchange rate: one for trade in goods and services, the other rate for capital movements. The function of the IMF and World Bank was essentially to make other countries borrow in dollars, not in their own currencies, and to make sure that if they could not pay their dollar-denominated debts, they had to impose austerity on the domestic economy – while subsidizing their import and export sectors and protecting foreign investors, creditors and client oligarchies from loss.

The IMF developed a junk-economics model pretending that any country can pay any amount of debt to the creditors if it just impoverishes its labor enough. So when countries were unable to pay their debt service, the IMF tells them to raise their interest rates to bring on a depression – austerity – and break up the labor unions. That is euphemized as "rationalizing labor markets." The rationalizing is essentially to disable labor unions and the public sector. The aim – and effect – is to prevent countries from essentially following the line of development that had made the United States rich – by public subsidy and protection of domestic agriculture, public subsidy and protection of industry and an active government sector promoting a New Deal democracy. The IMF was essentially promoting and forcing other countries to balance their trade deficits by letting American and other investors buy control of their commanding heights, mainly their infrastructure monopolies, and to subsidize their capital flight.

BONNIE FAULKNER : Now, Michael, when you began speaking about the IMF and monetary controls, you mentioned that there were two exchange rates of currency in countries. What were you referring to?

MICHAEL HUDSON : When I went to work on Wall Street in the '60s, I was balance-of-payments economist for Chase Manhattan, and we used the IMF's monthly International Financial Statistics every month. At the top of each country's statistics would be the exchange-rate figures. Many countries had two rates: one for goods and services, which was set normally by the market, and then a different exchange rate that was managed for capital movements. That was because countries were trying to prevent capital flight. They didn't want their wealthy classes or foreign investors to make a run on their own currency – an ever-present threat in Latin America.

The IMF and the World Bank backed the cosmopolitan classes, the wealthy. Instead of letting countries control their capital outflows and prevent capital flight, the IMF's job is to protect the richest One Percent and foreign investors from balance-of-payments problems.

The World Bank and American diplomacy have steered them into a chronic currency crisis. The IMF enables its wealthy constituency to move their money out of the country without taking a foreign-exchange loss. It makes loans to support capital flight out of domestic currencies into the dollar or other hard currencies. The IMF calls this a "stabilization" program. It is never effective in helping the debtor economy pay foreign debts out of growth. Instead, the IMF uses currency depreciation and sell-offs of public infrastructure and other assets to foreign investors after the flight capital has left and currency collapses. Wall Street speculators have sold the local currency short to make a killing, George-Soros style.

When the debtor-country currency collapses, the debts that these Latin American countries owe are in dollars, and now have to pay much more in their own currency to carry and pay off these debts. We're talking about enormous penalty rates in domestic currency for these countries to pay foreign-currency debts – basically taking on to finance a non-development policy and to subsidize capital flight when that policy "fails" to achieve its pretended objective of growth.

All hyperinflations of Latin America – Chile early on, like Germany after World War I – come from trying to pay foreign debts beyond the ability to be paid. Local currency is thrown onto the foreign-exchange market for dollars, lowering the exchange rate. That increases import prices, raising a price umbrella for domestic products.

A really functional and progressive international monetary fund that would try to help countries develop would say: "Okay, banks and we (the IMF) have made bad loans that the country can't pay. And the World Bank has given it bad advice, distorting its domestic development to serve foreign customers rather than its own growth. So we're going to write down the loans to the ability to be paid." That's what happened in 1931, when the world finally stopped German reparations payments and Inter-Ally debts to the United States stemming from World War I.

Instead, the IMF says just the opposite: It acts to prevent any move by other countries to bring the debt volume within the ability to be paid. It uses debt leverage as a way to control the monetary lifeline of financially defeated debtor countries. So if they do something that U.S. diplomats don't approve of, it can pull the plug financially, encouraging a run on their currency if they act independently of the United States instead of falling in line. This control by the U.S. financial system and its diplomacy has been built into the world system by the IMF and the World Bank claiming to be international instead of an expression of specifically U.S. New Cold War nationalism.

BONNIE FAULKNER : How do exchange rates contribute to capital flight?

MICHAEL HUDSON : It's not the exchange rate that contributes. Suppose that you're a millionaire, and you see that your country is unable to balance its trade under existing production patterns. The money that the government has under control is pesos, escudos, cruzeiros or some other currency, not dollars or euros. You see that your currency is going to go down relative to the dollar, so you want to get our money out of the country to preserve your purchasing power.

This has long been institutionalized. By 1990, for instance, Latin American countries had defaulted so much in the wake of the Mexico defaults in 1982 that I was hired by Scudder Stevens, to help start a Third World Bond Fund (called a "sovereign high-yield fund"). At the time, Argentina and Brazil were running such serious balance-of-payments deficits that they were having to pay 45 percent per year interest, in dollars, on their dollar debt. Mexico, was paying 22.5 percent on its tesobonos .

Scudders' salesmen went around to the United States and tried to sell shares in the proposed fund, but no Americans would buy it, despite the enormous yields. They sent their salesmen to Europe and got a similar reaction. They had lost their shirts on Third World bonds and couldn't see how these countries could pay.

Merrill Lynch was the fund's underwriter. Its office in Brazil and in Argentina proved much more successful in selling investments in Scudder's these offshore fund established in the Dutch West Indies. It was an offshore fund, so Americans were not able to buy it. But Brazilian and Argentinian rich families close to the central bank and the president became the major buyers. We realized that they were buying these funds because they knew that their government was indeed going to pay their stipulated interest charges. In effect, the bonds were owed ultimately to themselves. So these Yankee dollar bonds were being bought by Brazilians and other Latin Americans as a vehicle to move their money out of their soft local currency (which was going down), to buy bonds denominated in hard dollars.

BONNIE FAULKNER : If wealthy families from these countries bought these bonds denominated in dollars, knowing that they were going to be paid off, who was going to pay them off? The country that was going broke?

MICHAEL HUDSON : Well, countries don't pay; the taxpayers pay, and in the end, labor pays. The IMF certainly doesn't want to make its wealthy client oligarchies pay. It wants to squeeze ore economic surplus out of the labor force. So countries are told that the way they can afford to pay their enormously growing dollar-denominated debt is to lower wages even more.

Currency depreciation is an effective way to do this, because what is devalued is basically labor's wages. Other elements of exports have a common world price: energy, raw materials, capital goods, and credit under the dollar-centered international monetary system that the IMF seeks to maintain as a financial strait jacket.

According to the IMF's ideological models, there's no limit to how far you can lower wages by enough to make labor competitive in producing exports. The IMF and World Bank thus use junk economics to pretend that the way to pay debts owed to the wealthiest creditors and investors is to lower wages and impose regressive excise taxes, to impose special taxes on necessities that labor needs, from food to energy and basic services supplied by public infrastructure.

BONNIE FAULKNER: So you're saying that labor ultimately has to pay off these junk bonds?

MICHAEL HUDSON: That is the basic aim of IMF. I discuss its fallacies in my Trade Development and Foreign Debt , which is the academic sister volume to Super Imperialism . These two books show that the World Bank and IMF were viciously anti-labor from the very outset, working with domestic elites whose fortunes are tied to and loyal to the United States.

BONNIE FAULKNER : With regard to these junk bonds, who was it or what entity

MICHAEL HUDSON : They weren't junk bonds. They were called that because they were high-interest bonds, but they weren't really junk because they actually were paid. Everybody thought they were junk because no American would have paid 45 percent interest. Any country that really was self-reliant and was promoting its own economic interest would have said, "You banks and the IMF have made bad loans, and you've made them under false pretenses – a trade theory that imposes austerity instead of leading to prosperity. We're not going to pay." They would have seized the capital flight of their comprador elites and said that these dollar bonds were a rip-off by the corrupt ruling class.

The same thing happened in Greece a few years ago, when almost all of Greece's foreign debt was owed to Greek millionaires holding their money in Switzerland. The details were published in the "Legarde List." But the IMF said, in effect that its loyalty was to the Greek millionaires who ha their money in Switzerland. The IMF could have seized this money to pay off the bondholders. Instead, it made the Greek economy pay. It found that it was worth wrecking the Greek economy, forcing emigration and wiping out Greek industry so that French and German bondholding banks would not have to take a loss. That is what makes the IMF so vicious an institution.

BONNIE FAULKNER : So these loans to foreign countries that were regarded as junk bonds really weren't junk, because they were going to be paid. What group was it that jacked up these interest rates to 45 percent?

MICHAEL HUDSON : The market did. American banks, stock brokers and other investors looked at the balance of payments of these countries and could not see any reasonable way that they could pay their debts, so they were not going to buy their bonds. No country subject to democratic politics would have paid debts under these conditions. But the IMF, U.S. and Eurozone diplomacy overrode democratic choice.

Investors didn't believe that the IMF and the World Bank had such a strangle hold over Latin American, Asian, and African countries that they could make the countries act in the interest of the United States and the cosmopolitan finance capital, instead of in their own national interest. They didn't believe that countries would commit financial suicide just to pay their wealthy One Percent.

They were wrong, of course. Countries were quite willing to commit economic suicide if their governments were dictatorships propped up by the United States. That's why the CIA has assassination teams and actively supports these countries to prevent any party coming to power that would act in their national interest instead of in the interest of a world division of labor and production along the lines that the U.S. planners want for the world. Under the banner of what they call a free market, you have the World Bank and the IMF engage in central planning of a distinctly anti-labor policy. Instead of calling them Third World bonds or junk bonds, you should call them anti-labor bonds, because they have become a lever to impose austerity throughout the world.

BONNIE FAULKNER : Well, that makes a lot of sense, Michael, and answers a lot of the questions I've put together to ask you. What about Puerto Rico writing down debt? I thought such debts couldn't be written down.

MICHAEL HUDSON : That's what they all said, but the bonds were trading at about 45 cents on the dollar, the risk of their not being paid. The Wall Street Journal on June 17, reported that unsecured suppliers and creditors of Puerto Rico, would only get nine cents on the dollar. The secured bond holders would get maybe 65 cents on the dollar.

The terms are being written down because it's obvious that Puerto Rico can't pay, and that trying to do so is driving the population to move out of Puerto Rico to the United States. If you don't want Puerto Ricans to act the same way Greeks did and leave Greece when their industry and economy was shut down, then you're going to have to provide stability or else you're going to have half of Puerto Rico living in Florida.

BONNIE FAULKNER : Who wrote down the Puerto Rican debt?

MICHAEL HUDSON : A committee was appointed, and it calculated how much Puerto Rico can afford to pay out of its taxes. Puerto Rico is a U.S. dependency, that is, an economic colony of the United States. It does not have domestic self-reliance. It's the antithesis of democracy, so it's never been in charge of its own economic policy and essentially has to do whatever the United States tells it to do. There was a reaction after the hurricane and insufficient U.S. support to protect the island and the enormous waste and corruption involved in the U.S. aid. The U.S. response was simply: "We won you fair and square in the Spanish-American war and you're an occupied country, and we're going to keep you that way." Obviously this is causing a political resentment.

BONNIE FAULKNER : You've already touched on this, but why has the World Bank traditionally been headed by a U.S. secretary of defense?

MICHAEL HUDSON : Its job is to do in the financial sphere what, in the past, was done by military force. The purpose of a military conquest is to take control of foreign economies, to take control of their land and impose tribute. The genius of the World Bank was to recognize that it's not necessary to occupy a country in order to impose tribute, or to take over its industry, agriculture and land. Instead of bullets, it uses financial maneuvering. As long as other countries play an artificial economic game that U.S. diplomacy can control, finance is able to achieve today what used to require bombing and loss of life by soldiers.

In this case the loss of life occurs in the debtor countries. Population growth shrinks, suicides go up. The World Bank engages in economic warfare that is just as destructive as military warfare. At the end of the Yeltsin period Russia's President Putin said that American neoliberalism destroyed more of Russia's population than did World War II. Such neoliberalism, which basically is the doctrine of American supremacy and foreign dependency, is the policy of the World Bank and IMF.

BONNIE FAULKNER : Why has World Bank policy since its inception been to provide loans for countries to devote their land to export crops instead of giving priority to feeding themselves? And if this is the case, why do countries want these loans?

MICHAEL HUDSON : One constant of American foreign policy is to make other countries dependent on American grain exports and food exports. The aim is to buttress America's agricultural trade surplus. So the first thing that the World Bank has done is not to make any domestic currency loans to help food producers. Its lending has steered client countries to produce tropical export crops, mainly plantation crops that cannot be grown in the United States. Focusing on export crops leads client countries to become dependent on American farmers – and political sanctions.

In the 1950s, right after the Chinese revolution, the United States tried to prevent China from succeeding by imposing grain export controls to starve China into submission by putting sanctions on exports. Canada was the country that broke these export controls and helped feed China.

The idea is that if you can make other countries export plantation crops, the oversupply will drive down prices for cocoa and other tropical products, and they won't feed themselves. So instead of backing family farms like the American agricultural policy does, the World Bank backed plantation agriculture. In Chile, which has the highest natural supply of fertilizer in the world from its guano deposits, exports guano instead of using it domestically. It also has the most unequal land distribution, blocking it from growing its own grain or food crops. It's completely dependent on the United States for this, and it pays by exporting copper, guano and other natural resources.

The idea is to create interdependency – one-sided dependency on the U.S. economy. The United States has always aimed at being self-sufficient in its own essentials, so that no other country can pull the plug on our economy and say, "We're going to starve you by not feeding you." Americans can feed themselves. Other countries can't say, "We're going to let you freeze in the dark by not sending you oil," because America's independent in energy. But America can use the oil control to make other countries freeze in the dark, and it can starve other countries by food-export sanctions.

So the idea is to give the United States control of the key interconnections of other economies, without letting any country control something that is vital to the working of the American economy.

There's a double standard here. The United States tells other countries: "Don't do as we do. Do as we say." The only way it can enforce this is by interfering in the politics of these countries, as it has interfered in Latin America, always pushing the right wing. For instance, when Hillary's State Department overthrew the Honduras reformer who wanted to undertake land reform and feed the Hondurans, she said: "This person has to go." That's why there are so many Hondurans trying to get into the United States now, because they can't live in their own country.

The effect of American coups is the same in Syria and Iraq. They force an exodus of people who no longer can make a living under the brutal dictatorships supported by the United States to enforce this international dependency system.

BONNIE FAULKNER : So when I asked you why countries would want these loans, I guess you're saying that they wouldn't, and that's why the U.S. finds it necessary to control them politically.

MICHAEL HUDSON : That's a concise way of putting it Bonnie.

BONNIE FAULKNER : Why are World Bank loans only in foreign currency, not in the domestic currency of the country to which it is lending?

MICHAEL HUDSON : That's a good point. A basic principle should be to avoid borrowing in a foreign currency. A country can always pay the loans in its own currency, but there's no way that it can print dollars or euros to pay loans denominated in these foreign currencies.

Making the dollar central forces other countries to interface with the U.S. banking system. So if a country decides to go its own way, as Iran did in 1953 when it wanted to take over its oil from British Petroleum (or Anglo Iranian Oil, as it was called back then), the United States can interfere and overthrow it. The idea is to be able to use the banking system's interconnections to stop payments from being made.

After America installed the Shah's dictatorship, they were overthrown by Khomeini, and Iran had run up a U.S. dollar debt under the Shah. It had plenty of dollars. I think Chase Manhattan was its paying agent. So when its quarterly or annual debt payment came due, Iran told Chase to draw on its accounts and pay the bondholders. But Chase took orders from the State Department or the Defense Department, I don't know which, and refused to pay. When the payment was not made, America and its allies claimed that Iran was in default. They demanded the entire debt to be paid, as per the agreement that the Shah's puppet government had signed. America simply grabbed the deposits that Iran had in the United States. This is the money that was finally returned to Iran without interest under the agreement of 2016.

America was able to grab all of Iran's foreign exchange just by the banks interfering. The CIA has bragged that it can do the same thing with Russia. If Russia does something that U.S. diplomats don't like, the U.S. can use the SWIFT bank payment system to exclude Russia from it, so the Russian banks and the Russian people and industry won't be able to make payments to each other.

This prompted Russia to create its own bank-transfer system, and is leading China, Russia, India and Pakistan to draft plans to de-dollarize.

BONNIE FAULKNER : I was going to ask you, why would loans in a country's domestic currency be preferable to the country taking out a loan in a foreign currency? I guess you've explained that if they took out a loan in a domestic currency, they would be able to repay it.

MICHAEL HUDSON : Yes.

BONNIE FAULKNER : Whereas a loan in a foreign currency would cripple them.

MICHAEL HUDSON : Yes. You can't create the money, especially if you're running a balance of payments deficit and if U.S. foreign policy forces you into deficit by having someone like George Soros make a run on your currency. Look at the Asia crisis in 1997. Wall Street funds bet against foreign currencies, driving them way down, and then used the money to pick up industry cheap in Korea and other Asian countries.

This was also done to Russia's ruble. The only country that avoided this was Malaysia, under Mohamed Mahathir, by using capital controls. Malaysia is an object lesson in how to prevent a currency flight.

But for Latin America and other countries, much of their foreign debt is held by their own ruling class. Even though it's denominated in dollars, Americans don't own most of this debt. It's their own ruling class. The IMF and World Bank dictate tax policy to Latin America – to un-tax wealth and shift the burden onto labor. Client kleptocracies take their money and run, moving it abroad to hard currency areas such as the United States, or at least keeping it in dollars in offshore banking centers instead of reinvesting it to help the country catch up by becoming independent agriculturally, in energy, finance and other sectors.

BONNIE FAULKNER : You say that: "While U.S. agricultural protectionism has been built into the postwar global system at its inception, foreign protectionism is to be nipped in the bud." How has U.S. agricultural protectionism been built into the postwar global system?

MICHAEL HUDSON : Under Franklin Roosevelt the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933 called for price supports for crops so that farmers could earn enough to invest in equipment and seeds. The Agriculture Department was a wonderful department in spurring new seed varieties, agricultural extension services, marketing and banking services. It provided public support so that productivity in American agriculture from the 1930s to '50s was higher over a prolonged period than that of any other sector in history.

But in shaping the World Trade Organization's rules, the United States said that all countries had to promote free trade and could not have government support, except for countries that already had it. We're the only country that had it. That's what's called "grandfathering". The Americans said: "We already have this program on the books, so we can keep it. But no other country can succeed in agriculture in the way that we have done. You must keep your agriculture backward, except for the plantation crops and growing crops that we can't grow in the United States." That's what's so evil about the World Bank's development plan.

BONNIE FAULKNER : According to your book: "Domestic currency is needed to provide price supports and agricultural extension services such as have made U.S. agriculture so productive." Why can't infrastructure costs be subsidized to keep down the economy's overall cost structure if IMF loans are made in foreign currency?

MICHAEL HUDSON : If you're a farmer in Brazil, Argentina or Chile, you're doing business in domestic currency. It doesn't help if somebody gives you dollars, because your expenses are in domestic currency. So if the World Bank and the IMF can prevent countries from providing domestic currency support, that means they're not able to give price supports or provide government marketing services for their agriculture.

America is a mixed economy. Our government has always subsidized capital formation in agriculture and industry, but it insists that other countries are socialist or communist if they do what the United States is doing and use their government to support the economy. So it's a double standard. Nobody calls America a socialist country for supporting its farmers, but other countries are called socialist and are overthrown if they attempt land reform or attempt to feed themselves.

This is what the Catholic Church's Liberation Theology was all about. They backed land reform and agricultural self-sufficiency in food, realizing that if you're going to support population growth, you have to support the means to feed it. That's why the United States focused its assassination teams on priests and nuns in Guatemala and Central America for trying to promote domestic self-sufficiency.

BONNIE FAULKNER : If a country takes out an IMF loan, they're obviously going to take it out in dollars. Why can't they take the dollars and convert them into domestic currency to support local infrastructure costs?

MICHAEL HUDSON : You don't need a dollar loan to do that. Now were getting in to MMT. Any country can create its own currency. There's no reason to borrow in dollars to create your own currency. You can print it yourself or create it on your computers.

BONNIE FAULKNER: Well, exactly. So why don't these countries simply print up their own domestic currency?

MICHAEL HUDSON : Their leaders don't want to be assassinated. More immediately, if you look at the people in charge of foreign central banks, almost all have been educated in the United States and essentially brainwashed. It's the mentality of foreign central bankers. The people who are promoted are those who feel personally loyal to the United States, because they that that's how to get ahead. Essentially, they're opportunists working against the interests of their own country. You won't have socialist central bankers as long as central banks are dominated by the International Monetary Fund and the Bank for International Settlements.

BONNIE FAULKNER : So we're back to the main point: The control is by political means, and they control the politics and the power structure in these countries so that they don't rebel.

MICHAEL HUDSON : That's right. When you have a dysfunctional economic theory that is destructive instead of productive, this is never an accident. It is always a result of junk economics and dependency economics being sponsored. I've talked to people at the U.S. Treasury and asked why they all end up following the United States. Treasury officials have told me: "We simply buy them off. They do it for the money." So you don't need to kill them. All you need to do is find people corrupt enough and opportunist enough to see where the money is, and you buy them off.

BONNIE FAULKNER : You write that "by following U.S. advice, countries have left themselves open to food blackmail." What is food blackmail?

MICHAEL HUDSON : If you pursue a foreign policy that we don't like -- for instance, if you trade with Iran, which we're trying to smash up to grab its oil -- we'll impose financial sanctions against you. We won't sell you food, and you can starve. And because you've followed World Bank advice and not grown your own food, you will starve, because you're dependent on us, the United States and our Free World Ó allies. Canada will no longer follow its own policy independently of the United States, as it did with China in the 1950s when it sold it grain. Europe also is falling in line with U.S. policy.

BONNIE FAULKNER : You write that: "World Bank administrators demand that loan recipients pursue a policy of economic dependency above all on the United States as food supplier." Was this done to support U.S. agriculture? Obviously it is, but were there other reasons as well?

MICHAEL HUDSON : Certainly the agricultural lobby was critical in all of this, and I'm not sure at what point this became thoroughly conscious. I knew some of the World Bank planners, and they had no anticipation that this dependency would be the result. They believed the free-trade junk economics that's taught in the schools' economics departments and for which Nobel prizes are awarded.

When we're dealing with economic planners, we're dealing with tunnel-visioned people. They stayed in the discipline despite its unreality because they sort of think that abstractly it makes sense. There's something autistic about most economists, which is why the French had their non-autistic economic site for many years. The mentality at work is that every country should produce what it's best at – not realizing that nations also need to be self-sufficient in essentials, because we're in a real world of economic and military warfare.

BONNIE FAULKNER : Why does the World Bank prefer to perpetrate world poverty instead of adequate overseas capacity to feed the peoples of developing countries?

MICHAEL HUDSON : World poverty is viewed as solution , not a problem. The World Bank thinks of poverty as low-priced labor, creating a competitive advantage for countries that produce labor-intensive goods. So poverty and austerity for the World Bank and IMF is an economic solution that's built into their models. I discuss these in my Trade, Development and Foreign Debt book. Poverty is to them the solution, because it means low-priced labor, and that means higher profits for the companies bought out by U.S., British, and European investors. So poverty is part of the class war: profits versus poverty.

BONNIE FAULKNER : In general, what is U.S. food imperialism? How would you characterize it?

MICHAEL HUDSON : Its aim is to make America the producer of essential foods and other countries producing inessential plantation crops, while remaining dependent on the United States for grain, soy beans and basic food crops.

BONNIE FAULKNER : Does World Bank lending encourage land reform in former colonies?

MICHAEL HUDSON : No. If there is land reform, the CIA sends its assassination teams in and you have mass murder, as you had in Guatemala, Ecuador, Central America and Columbia. The World Bank is absolutely committed against land reform. When the Forgash Plan for a World Bank for Economic Acceleration was proposed in the 1950s to emphasize land reform and local-currency loans, a Chase Manhattan economist to whom the plan was submitted warned that every country that had land reform turned out to be anti-American. That killed any alternative to the World Bank.

BONNIE FAULKNER : Does the World Bank insist on client governments privatizing their public domain? If so, why, and what is the effect?

MICHAEL HUDSON : It does indeed insist on privatization, pretending that this is efficient. But what it privatizes are natural monopolies – the electrical system, the water system and other basic needs. Foreigners take over, essentially finance them with foreign debt, build the foreign debt that they build into the cost structure, and raise the cost of living and doing business in these countries, thereby crippling them economically. The effect is to prevent them from competing with the United States and its European allies.

BONNIE FAULKNER : Would you say then that it is mainly America that has been aided, not foreign economies that borrow from the World Bank?

MICHAEL HUDSON : That's why the United States is the only country with veto power in the IMF and World Bank – to make sure that what you just described is exactly what happens.

BONNIE FAULKNER : Why do World Bank programs accelerate the exploitation of mineral deposits for use by other nations?

MICHAEL HUDSON : Most World Bank loans are for transportation, roads, harbor development and other infrastructure needed to export minerals and plantation crops. The World Bank doesn't make loans for projects that help the country develop in its own currency. By making only foreign currency loans, in dollars or maybe euros now, the World Bank says that its clients have to repay by generating foreign currency. The only way they can repay the dollars spent on American engineering firms that have built their infrastructure is to export – to earn enough dollars to pay back for the money that the World Bank or IMF have lent.

This is what John Perkins' book about being an economic hit man for the World Bank is all about. He realized that his job was to get countries to borrow dollars to build huge projects that could only be paid for by the country exporting more – which required breaking its labor unions and lowering wages so that it could be competitive in the race to the bottom that the World Bank and IMF encourage.

BONNIE FAULKNER : You also point out in Super Imperialism that mineral resources represent diminishing assets, so these countries that are exporting mineral resources are being depleted while the importing countries aren't.

MICHAEL HUDSON : That's right. They'll end up like Canada. The end result is going to be a big hole in the ground. You've dug up all your minerals, and in the end you have a hole in the ground and a lot of the refuse and pollution – the mining slag and what Marx called the excrements of production.

This is not a sustainable development. The World Bank only promotes the U.S. pursuit of sustainable development. So naturally, they call their "Development," but their focus is on the United States, not the World Bank's client countries.

BONNIE FAULKNER : When Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire was originally published in 1972, how was it received?

MICHAEL HUDSON : Very positively. It enabled my career to take off. I received a phone call a month later by someone from the Bank of Montreal saying they had just made $240 million on the last paragraph of my book. They asked what it would cost to have me come up and give a lecture. I began lecturing once a month at $3,500 a day, moving up to $6,500 a day, and became the highest-paid per diem economist on Wall Street for a few years.

I was immediately hired by the Hudson Institute to explain Super Imperialism to the Defense Department. Herman Kahn said I showed how U.S. imperialism ran rings around European imperialism. They gave the Institute an $85,000 grant to have me go to the White House in Washington to explain how American imperialism worked. The Americans used it as a how-to-do-it book.

The socialists, whom I expected to have a response, decided to talk about other than economic topics. So, much to my surprise, it became a how-to-do-it book for imperialists. It was translated by, I think, the nephew of the Emperor of Japan into Japanese. He then wrote me that the United States opposed the book being translated into Japanese. It later was translated. It was received very positively in China, where I think it has sold more copies than in any other country. It was translated into Spanish, and most recently it was translated into German, and German officials have asked me to come and discuss it with them. So the book has been accepted all over the world as an explanation of how the system works.

BONNIE FAULKNER : In closing, do you really think that the U.S. government officials and others didn't understand how their own system worked?

MICHAEL HUDSON : Many might not have understood in 1944 that this would be the consequence. But by the time 50 years went by, you had an organization called "Fifty Years Is Enough." And by that time everybody should have understood. By the time Joe Stiglitz became the World Bank's chief economist, there was no excuse for not understanding how the system worked. He was amazed to find that indeed it didn't work as advertised, and resigned. But he should have known at the very beginning what it was all about. If he didn't understand how it was until he actually went to work there, you can understand how hard it is for most academics to get through the vocabulary of junk economics, the patter-talk of free trade and free markets to understand how exploitative and destructive the system is.

BONNIE FAULKNER : Michael Hudson, thank you very much.

MICHAEL HUDSON : It's always good to be here, Bonnie. I'm glad you ask questions like these.

I've been speaking with Dr. Michael Hudson. Today's show has been: The IMF and World Bank: Partners in Backwardness. Dr. Hudson is a financial economist and historian. He is president of the Institute for the Study of Long-Term Economic Trend, a Wall Street financial analyst and Distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. His 1972 book, Super Imperialism : The Economic Strategy of American Empire , a critique of how the United States exploited foreign economies through the IMF and World Bank, the subject of today's broadcast, is posted in PDF format on his website at michael-hudson.com. He is also author of Trade, Development and Foreign Debt , which is the academic sister volume to Super Imperialism. Dr. Hudson acts as an economic advisor to governments worldwide on finance and tax law. Visit his website at michael-hudson.com.

Guns and Butter is produced by Bonnie Faulkner, Yarrow Mahko and Tony Rango. Visit us at gunsandbutter.org to listen to past programs, comment on shows, or join our email list to receive our newsletter that includes recent shows and updates. Email us at [email protected] . Follow us on Twitter at #gandbradio.

[Jun 29, 2019] Latest Weapon Of US Imperialism Liquified Natural Gas

Highly recommended!
See better discussion at platts.com "But US LNG could face problems of its own – the current low prices are forcing ever growing numbers of US producers into bankruptcy. According to a recent report by Haynes and Boone, 90 gas and oil producers in the US and Canada have filed for bankruptcy between January 2015 and the start of August 2016." So $2 price at Henry Hub should rise to at least $4 for companies to stay in business.
Notable quotes:
"... Less than half of the gas necessary for Europe is produced domestically, the rest being imported from Russia (39%), Norway (30%) and Algeria (13%). In 2017, gas imports from outside of the EU reached 14%. Spain led with imports of 31%, followed by France with 20% and Italy with 15%. ..."
"... The South Stream project, led by Eni, Gazprom, EDF and Wintershall, should have increased the capacity of the Russian Federation to supply Europe with 63 billion cubic meters annually, positively impacting the economy with cheap supplies of gas to Bulgaria, Greece, Italy, Serbia, Hungary, Austria and Slovenia. Due to the restrictions imposed by the European Union on Russian companies like Gazprom, and the continuing pressure from Washington to abandon the project and embrace imports from the US, the construction of the pipeline have slowed down and generated tensions between Europe and the US. Washington is piling on pressure on Germany to derail Nord Stream 2 and stop the construction of this important energy linkage. ..."
"... Further tension has been added since ENI, an Italian company that is a leader in the LNG sector, recently discovered off-shore in Egypt one of the largest gas fields in the world, with an estimated total capacity of 850 billion cubic meters. To put this in perspective, all EU countries demand is about 470 billion cubic meters of gas in 2017. ..."
"... s mentioned, LNG imported to Europe from the US costs about 20% more than gas traditionally received through pipelines. This is without including all the investment necessary to build regasification plants in countries destined to receive this ship-borne gas. Europe currently does not have the necessary facilities on its Atlantic coast to receive LNG from the US, introduce it into its energy networks, and simultaneously decrease demand from traditional sources. ..."
"... This situation could change in the future, with LNG from the US seeing a sharp increase recently. In 2010, American LNG exports to Europe were at 10%; the following year they rose to 11%; and in the first few months of 2019, they jumped to 35%. A significant decrease in LNG exports to Asian countries, which are less profitable, offers an explanation for this corresponding increase in Europe. ..."
"... Washington, with its LNG ships, has no capacity to compete in Asia against Qatar and Australia, who have the lion's share of the market, with Moscow's pipelines taking up the rest. The only large remaining market lies in Europe, so it is therefore not surprising that Donald Trump has decided to weaponize LNG, a bit as he has the US dollar . This has only driven EU countries to seek energy diversification in the interests of security. ..."
"... The European countries do not appear to be dragging their feet at the prospect of swapping to US LNG, even though there is no economic advantage to doing so. As has been evident of late, whenever Washington says, "Jump!", European allies respond, "How high?" ..."
"... The generalized hysteria against the Russian Federation, together with the cutting off of Iranian oil imports at Washington's behest, limit the room for maneuver of European countries, in addition to costing European taxpayers a lot. ..."
Jun 29, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com
Authored by Federico Pieraccini via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

One of the most important energy battles of the future will be fought in the field of liquid natural gas (LNG). Suggested as one of the main solutions to pollution , LNG offers the possibility of still managing to meet a country's industrial needs while ameliorating environmental concerns caused by other energy sources. At the same time, a little like the US dollar, LNG is becoming a tool Washington intends to use against Moscow at the expense of Washington's European allies.

To understand the rise of LNG in global strategies, it is wise to look at a graph (page 7) produced by the International Gas Union (IGU) where the following four key indicators are highlighted: global regasification capacities; total volumes of LNG exchanged; exporting countries; and importing countries.

From 1990 to today, the world has grown from 220 million tons per annum (MTPA) to around 850 MTPA of regasification capacity. The volume of trade increased from 20-30 MTPA to around 300 MTPA. Likewise, the number of LNG-importing countries has increased from just over a dozen to almost 40 over the course of 15 years, while the number of producers has remained almost unchanged, except for a few exceptions like the US entering the LNG market in 2016.

There are two methods used to transport gas.

The first is through pipelines, which reduce costs and facilitate interconnection between countries, an important example of this being seen in Europe's importation of gas. The four main pipelines for Europe come from four distinct geographical regions: the Middle East, Africa, Northern Europe and Russia.

The second method of transporting gas is by sea in the form of LNG, which in the short term is more expensive, complex and difficult to implement on a large scale. Gas transported by sea is processed to be cooled so as to reduce its volume, and then liquified again to allow storage and transport by ship. This process adds 20% to costs when compared to gas transported through pipelines.

Less than half of the gas necessary for Europe is produced domestically, the rest being imported from Russia (39%), Norway (30%) and Algeria (13%). In 2017, gas imports from outside of the EU reached 14%. Spain led with imports of 31%, followed by France with 20% and Italy with 15%.

The construction of infrastructure to accommodate LNG ships is ongoing in Europe, and some European countries already have a limited capacity to accommodate LNG and direct it to the national and European network or act as an energy hub to ship LNG to other ports using smaller ships.

According to King & Spalding :

"All of Europe's LNG terminals are import facilities, with the exception of (non-EU) Norway and Russia which export LNG. There are currently 28 large-scale LNG import terminals in Europe (including non-EU Turkey). There are also 8 small-scale LNG facilities in Europe (in Finland, Sweden, Germany, Norway and Gibraltar). Of the 28 large-scale LNG import terminals, 24 are in EU countries (and therefore subject to EU regulation) and 4 are in Turkey, 23 are land-based import terminals, and 4 are floating storage and regasification units (FSRUs), and the one import facility in Malta comprises a Floating Storage Unit (FSU) and onshore regasification facilities."

The countries currently most involved in the export of LNG are Qatar (24.9%), Australia (21.7%), Malaysia (7.7%), the US (6.7%), Nigeria (6.5%) and Russia (6%).

Europe is one of the main markets for gas, given its strong demand for clean energy for domestic and industrial needs. For this reason, Germany has for years been engaged in the Nord Stream 2 project, which aims to double the transport capacity of gas from Russia to Germany. Currently the flow of the Nord Stream is 55 billion cubic meters of gas. With the new Nord Stream 2, the capacity will double to 110 billion cubic meters per year.

The South Stream project, led by Eni, Gazprom, EDF and Wintershall, should have increased the capacity of the Russian Federation to supply Europe with 63 billion cubic meters annually, positively impacting the economy with cheap supplies of gas to Bulgaria, Greece, Italy, Serbia, Hungary, Austria and Slovenia. Due to the restrictions imposed by the European Union on Russian companies like Gazprom, and the continuing pressure from Washington to abandon the project and embrace imports from the US, the construction of the pipeline have slowed down and generated tensions between Europe and the US. Washington is piling on pressure on Germany to derail Nord Stream 2 and stop the construction of this important energy linkage.

Further tension has been added since ENI, an Italian company that is a leader in the LNG sector, recently discovered off-shore in Egypt one of the largest gas fields in the world, with an estimated total capacity of 850 billion cubic meters. To put this in perspective, all EU countries demand is about 470 billion cubic meters of gas in 2017.

ENI's discovery has generated important planning for the future of LNG in Europe and in Italy.

Problems have arisen ever since Donald Trump sought to oblige Europeans to purchase LNG from the US in order to reduce the trade deficit and benefit US companies at the expense of other gas-exporting countries like Algeria, Russia and Norway. As mentioned, LNG imported to Europe from the US costs about 20% more than gas traditionally received through pipelines. This is without including all the investment necessary to build regasification plants in countries destined to receive this ship-borne gas. Europe currently does not have the necessary facilities on its Atlantic coast to receive LNG from the US, introduce it into its energy networks, and simultaneously decrease demand from traditional sources.

This situation could change in the future, with LNG from the US seeing a sharp increase recently. In 2010, American LNG exports to Europe were at 10%; the following year they rose to 11%; and in the first few months of 2019, they jumped to 35%. A significant decrease in LNG exports to Asian countries, which are less profitable, offers an explanation for this corresponding increase in Europe.

But Europe finds itself in a decidedly uncomfortable situation that cannot be easily resolved. The anti-Russia hysteria drummed up by the Euro-Atlantic globalist establishment aides Donald Trump's efforts to economically squeeze as much as possible out of European allies, hurting European citizens in the process who will have to pay more for American LNG, which costs about a fifth more than gas from Russian, Norwegian or Algerian sources.

Projects to build offshore regasifiers in Europe appear to have begun and seem unlikely to be affected by future political vagaries, given the investment committed and planning times involved:

"There are currently in the region of 22 large-scale LNG import terminals considered as planned in Europe, except for the planned terminals in Ukraine (Odessa FSRU LNG), Russia (Kaliningrad LNG), Albania (Eagle LNG) – Albania being a candidate for EU membership – and Turkey (FSRU Iskenderun and FSRU Gulf of Saros).

Many ofthese planned terminals, including Greece (where one additional import terminal is planned – Alexandroupolis), Italy (which is considering or planning two additional terminals – Porto Empedocle in Sicily and Gioia Tauro LNG in Calabria) , Poland (FSRU Polish Baltic Sea Coast), Turkey (two FSRUs) and the UK (which is planning the Port Meridian FSRU LNG project and UK Trafigura Teesside LNG). LNG import terminal for Albania (Eagle LNG), Croatia (Krk Island), Cyprus (Vassiliko FSRU), Estonia (Muuga (Tallinn) LNG and Padalski LNG), Germany ( Brunsbüttel LNG), Ireland (Shannon LNG and Cork LNG), Latvia (Riga LNG), Romania (Constanta LNG), Russia (Kaliningrad LNG) and Ukraine (Odessa).

Nine of the planned terminals are FSRUs: Albania, Croatia, Cyprus, Greece, Ireland, Poland, Russia, Ukraine and the UK. "In addition, there are numerous plans for expansion of existing terminals, including in Belgium, France, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Turkey and the UK."

Washington, with its LNG ships, has no capacity to compete in Asia against Qatar and Australia, who have the lion's share of the market, with Moscow's pipelines taking up the rest. The only large remaining market lies in Europe, so it is therefore not surprising that Donald Trump has decided to weaponize LNG, a bit as he has the US dollar . This has only driven EU countries to seek energy diversification in the interests of security.

The European countries do not appear to be dragging their feet at the prospect of swapping to US LNG, even though there is no economic advantage to doing so. As has been evident of late, whenever Washington says, "Jump!", European allies respond, "How high?" This, however, is not the case with all allies. Germany is not economically able to interrupt Nord Stream 2. And even though the project has many high-level sponsors, including former chancellor Gerhard Schröder, the project constantly seems to be on the verge of being stopped – at least in Washington's delusions.

Even Eni's discovery of the gas field in Egypt has annoyed the US, which wants less competition (even when illegal, as in the case of Huawei) and wants to be able to force its exports onto Europeans while maintaining the price of the LNG in dollars, thereby further supporting the US dollar as the world's reserve currency in the same manner as the petrodollar .

The generalized hysteria against the Russian Federation, together with the cutting off of Iranian oil imports at Washington's behest, limit the room for maneuver of European countries, in addition to costing European taxpayers a lot. The Europeans appear prepared to set whatever course the US has charted them, one away from cheaper gas sources to the more expensive LNG supplied from across the Atlantic. Given the investments already committed to receive this LNG, it seems unlikely that the course set for the Europeans will be changed.

Sputternik , 1 hour ago link

I live in Europe. I can honestly say that the people I know here prefer Russian gas. People are very ticked off about how the US meddled in their gas supply and the structuring of the pipelines. Most feel that even if US LNG WAS competitive with Russian gas price for now, that the US would in some way either increase prices or use it in some other way to control or manipulate the EU. And sentiment towards USA tends toward resentment and distrust. That's not to say they are necessarily pro-Russia, but definitely a wave of anti US is present.

phaedrus1952 , 46 minutes ago link

US LNG pricing is based on Henry Hub which today is under $2.30/mmbtu.

Even adding in liquefaction and shipping costs, the price to the end user is extremely low.

Henry hub is projected to be sub $3 for DECADES!

Combine the low price with spot deliveries (pipe usually demands long term contracting commitments), and US LNG actually has strong rationale for being accepted.

The statement above that US LNG cannot compete against Australia in Asia is preposterously false due to the VERY high buildout costs of the Aussie LNG infrastructure.

Next year, Oz's first LNG IMPORT terminal at Port Kembla may well be supplied with US LNG.

jaxville , 44 minutes ago link

The US has shown itself to be unreliable as a supplier of anything. Political posturing will always take precedence over any international transaction.

Anonymous IX , 2 hours ago link

Oh, for pity's sake, Laugher. Everything...absolutely everything you attribute to Russia in your post can be said of the U.S. I'm not much of a Wiki fan, but for expediency, here's their view on military bases.

The establishment of military bases abroad enables a country to project power , e.g. to conduct expeditionary warfare , and thereby influence events abroad. Depending on their size and infrastructure, they can be used as staging areas or for logistical, communications and intelligence support. Many conflicts throughout modern history have resulted in overseas military bases being established in large numbers by world powers and the existence of bases abroad has served countries having them in achieving political and military goals.

And this link will provide you with countries worldwide and their bases.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_with_overseas_military_bases

Note that Russia, in this particular list, has eight bases all contiguous to Russia. The U.S. has 36 listed here with none of them contiguous to the U.S.' borders.

FormerTurbineGuy , 2 hours ago link

Whilst the left wants to go full throttle towards Wind and Solar, no one knows that the natural gas lobby is behind these sources because both sources need a backup. While everyone talks "carbon footprint" they never discusses plant efficiency ( or in the terms of engines brake specific fuel consumption and turbine specific fuel consumption ) in terms of thermal efficiency. You know the boring stuff that plant operators stress over to make sure when your wife wakes up @ 3 in the morning to feed the baby, the lights do go on, and they are creating that wattage in an cost affective manner. With that said, the king of thermal efficiency i.e. burning a fuel to create electricity, is the Combined Cycle Natural Gas Power Plant. These plants combines a stationary gas turbine buring natural gas to spin a generator and a boiler on the back side capture the waste heat to create steam to spin a turbine to again add an input to the generator for a current state of the art of 61% efficiency . That means only 39% going up the stack or for steam cooling to get your "Delta T" for the steam cycle to work. This 61% is vs maybe in the mid 40's for a coal, oil plant or in the case of Nuclear just waste heat with nothing going out a stack. The greater wattage per fuel burned, and the modularization of these Combined Cycle Plants aka have a series of 100mw turbines and bring them on line as needed, make this a win-win IMHO for a massive refurbishing of our Utility base, with a host of benefits, before Gen 3 & Gen 4 Nuclear truly take off again. These plants could be a great stop gap before Gen 3 & 4 are a reality. All the macinations towards wind and solar and their disavantages aka being bird vegamatics, vistas being spoiled and huge swaths of land being used for panels make no sense vs energy density of efficient plants. We are the Natural Gas King, lets not flare it anymore, and really, really leverage it here, help allies, and use it for bringing bad behaving children of the world to the table ifyou will, if you want the candy, behave....

Anonymous IX , 1 hour ago link

Why do we have to treat other countries like we're the parent? We aren't. They are equal and fully functioning countries quite capable of determining their own political and economic future...which may involve not trading or interacting with the U.S. Particularly if we demand of them conditions we ourselves would never accede.

JeanTrejean , 3 hours ago link

To get cheap energy, is an advantage for the European Industry.

Why should we use expensiver energy ?

And, as I read ZH, the future of the US shale gas is far to be assured.

SoDamnMad , 3 hours ago link

The Lithuanian FSRU "Independence" which was delivered from Hyundai Heavy Industries in 2014 to the port of Klaipeda drove energy costs for heating through the roof and perhaps is one of the reasons the Prime Minister at the time only came in third in the latest presidential elections. You can stay reasonably warm, eat or have money for medicine and other necessities. Pick 2 ONLY. Thank you USSA

tuetenueggel , 3 hours ago link

Brainsick as Pompeo the US Pork without character.

As Long as Russia dlivery theier gas constantly and for a much better price then Us-Shale idiots, the ziocons only can lose. We Europeans are not very impressed.

Arising , 3 hours ago link

The biggest Capitalist economy on the planet needs to use mob tactics to push its over priced wares- seems 'long term' is not part of their hit-and-run operation.

Call me Al , 3 hours ago link

LNG = Liquefied natural gas, not liquid.

Now as for the article; apart from a few Eastern European Countries (The Ukraine, Poland etc.), I have seen no proof whatsoever, that Europe is shifting to US LNG.

As for "As has been evident of late, whenever Washington says, "Jump!", European allies respond, "How high?""; I am sorry, but I think those days are over..... this can be seen in our Iranian stance, the 2 Russian pipelines - 1 being Nordstream II and the other Turk-stream, increased trade with Russia, joining the the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) and so on and so on......

Kirk2NCC1701 , 3 hours ago link

Call me AI, both terms are acceptable.

Liquified refers to the processing.

Liquid refers to the state of the gas after processing.

earleflorida , 2 hours ago link

thankyou :)

tuetenueggel , 3 hours ago link

yeah, vasalls are not jumping any longer.

libfrog88 , 3 hours ago link

Slowly but surely the anti-Russia propaganda is dying. You can fool all the people some of the time, you can fool some people all of the time (libtards), but you can't fool all the people all of the time. Europeans (the citizens) will question why they should pay 20-30% more for their natural gas just to please America. Politicians better have an answer or change of policy if they want to be reelected.

[Jun 28, 2019] Tulsi Gabbard vs Bolton

Highly recommended!
Jun 28, 2019 | www.unz.com

Chris Mallory , says: June 28, 2019 at 2:04 am GMT

Miss Gabbard just served two tours in the ME, one as enlisted in the HI National Guard.

Brave Mr. Bolton kept the dirty communists from endangering the US supply of Chesapeake crab while serving in the Maryland Guard. Rumor also has it that he helped Tompall Glaser write the song Streets of Baltimore. Some say they saw Mr. Bolton single handily defending Memorial Stadium from a combined VC/NVA attack during an Orioles game. The Cubans would have conquered the Pimlico Race Course if not for the combat skill of PFC Bolton.

[Jun 27, 2019] The Ongoing Restructuring of the Greater Middle East by C.J. Hopkins

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... If I were a particularly cynical analyst, it might look to me like global capitalism, starting right around 1990, freed by the collapse of the U.S.S.R. to do whatever the hell it wanted, more or less immediately started dismantling uncooperative power structures throughout the Greater Middle East. My cynical theory would kind of make sense of the "catastrophic policy blunders" that the United States has supposedly made in Iraq, Libya, and throughout the region, not to mention the whole "Global War on Terror," and what it is currently doing to Syria, and Iran. ..."
"... Take a look at that map again. What you're looking at is global capitalism cleaning up after winning the Cold War. And yes, I do mean global capitalism, not the United States of America (i.e., the "nation" most Americans think they live in, despite all evidence to the contrary). I know it hurts to accept the fact that "America" is nothing but a simulation projected onto an enormous marketplace but seriously, do you honestly believe that the U.S. government and its military serve the interests of the American people? If so, go ahead, review the history of their activities since the Second World War, and explain to me how they have benefited Americans not the corporatist ruling classes, regular working class Americans, many of whom can't afford to see a doctor, or buy a house, or educate their kids, not without assuming a lifetime of debt to some global financial institution. ..."
"... OK, so I digressed a little. The point is, "America" is not at war with Iran. Global capitalism is at war with Iran. The supranational corporatist empire. Yes, it wears an American face, and waves a big American flag, but it is no more "American" than the corporations it comprises, or the governments those corporations own, or the military forces those governments control, or the transnational banks that keep the whole show running. ..."
Jun 27, 2019 | www.unz.com

... ... ...

If I were a particularly cynical analyst, it might look to me like global capitalism, starting right around 1990, freed by the collapse of the U.S.S.R. to do whatever the hell it wanted, more or less immediately started dismantling uncooperative power structures throughout the Greater Middle East. My cynical theory would kind of make sense of the "catastrophic policy blunders" that the United States has supposedly made in Iraq, Libya, and throughout the region, not to mention the whole "Global War on Terror," and what it is currently doing to Syria, and Iran.

Take a good look at this Smithsonian map of where the U.S.A. is "combating terrorism." Note how the U.S. military (i.e., global capitalism's unofficial "enforcer") has catastrophically blundered its way into more or less every nation depicted. Or ask our "allies" in Saudi Arabia, Israel, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, and so on. OK, you might have to reach them in New York or London, or in the South of France this time of year, but, go ahead, ask them about the horrors they've been suffering on account of our "catastrophic blunders."

See, according to this crackpot conspiracy theory that I would put forth if I were a geopolitical analyst instead of just a political satirist, there have been no "catastrophic policy blunders," not for global capitalism. The Restructuring of the Greater Middle East is proceeding exactly according to plan. The regional ruling classes are playing ball, and those who wouldn't have been regime-changed, or are being regime-changed, or are scheduled for regime change.

Sure, for the actual people of the region, and for regular Americans, the last thirty years of wars, "strategic" bombings, sanctions, fomented coups, and other such shenanigans have been a pointless waste of lives and money but global capitalism doesn't care about people or the "sovereign nations" they believe they live in, except to the extent they are useful. Global capitalism has no nations. All it has are market territories, which are either open for business or not.

Take a look at that map again. What you're looking at is global capitalism cleaning up after winning the Cold War. And yes, I do mean global capitalism, not the United States of America (i.e., the "nation" most Americans think they live in, despite all evidence to the contrary). I know it hurts to accept the fact that "America" is nothing but a simulation projected onto an enormous marketplace but seriously, do you honestly believe that the U.S. government and its military serve the interests of the American people? If so, go ahead, review the history of their activities since the Second World War, and explain to me how they have benefited Americans not the corporatist ruling classes, regular working class Americans, many of whom can't afford to see a doctor, or buy a house, or educate their kids, not without assuming a lifetime of debt to some global financial institution.

OK, so I digressed a little. The point is, "America" is not at war with Iran. Global capitalism is at war with Iran. The supranational corporatist empire. Yes, it wears an American face, and waves a big American flag, but it is no more "American" than the corporations it comprises, or the governments those corporations own, or the military forces those governments control, or the transnational banks that keep the whole show running.

This is what Iran and Syria are up against. This is what Russia is up against. Global capitalism doesn't want to nuke them, or occupy them. It wants to privatize them, like it is privatizing the rest of the world, like it has already privatized America according to my crackpot theory, of course.

peterAUS , says: June 25, 2019 at 10:08 pm GMT

if I were a geopolitical analyst, I might be able to discern a pattern there, and possibly even some sort of strategy.

Sounds good.
Some other people did it before, wrote it down etc. but it's always good to see that stuff.

it might look to me like global capitalism, starting right around 1990, freed by the collapse of the U.S.S.R. to do whatever the hell it wanted, more or less immediately started dismantling uncooperative power structures throughout the Greater Middle East.
.there have been no "catastrophic policy blunders," not for global capitalism. The Restructuring of the Greater Middle East is proceeding exactly according to plan. The regional ruling classes are playing ball, and those who wouldn't have been regime-changed, or are being regime-changed, or are scheduled for regime change.
Sure, for the actual people of the region, and for regular Americans, the last thirty years of wars, "strategic" bombings, sanctions, fomented coups, and other such shenanigans have been a pointless waste of lives and money but global capitalism doesn't care about people or the "sovereign nations" they believe they live in, except to the extent they are useful. Global capitalism has no nations. All it has are market territories, which are either open for business or not.

Spot on.

Now .there IS a bit of oversight in the article re competing groups of people on top of that "Global capitalist" bunch.
It's a bit more complicated than "Global capitalism".

Jewish heavily influenced, perhaps even controlled, Anglo-Saxon "setup" .. or Russian "setup" or Chinese "setup".
Only one of them can be on the top, and they don't like each other much.
And they all have nuclear weapons.

"Global capitalism" idea is optimistic. The global overwhelming force against little players. No chance of MAD there so not that bad.NOPE IMHO.
There is a chance of MAD.

That is the problem . Well, at least for some people.

WorkingClass , says: June 26, 2019 at 12:46 am GMT
Globalists are not Capitalists. There is no competition. Just a hand full of monopolies. These stateless corporate monopolists are better understood as Feudalists. They would have everything. We would have nothing. That's what privatization is. It's the Lords ripping off the proles.

I was a union man in my youth. We liked Capitalism. We just wanted our fair share of the loot. The working class today knows nothing about organizing. They don't even know they are working class. They think they are black or white. Woke or Deplorable.

ALL OF US non billionaires are coming up on serious hard times. Serious enough that we might have to put aside our differences. The government is corrupt. It will not save us. Instead it will continue to work to divide us.

Reparations anyone?

animalogic , says: June 26, 2019 at 10:06 am GMT
Another great article by C J Hopkins.
Hopkins (correctly) posits that behind US actions, wars etc lies the global capitalist class.
"Global capitalism has no nations. All it has are market territories, which are either open for business or not"
This is correct -- but requires an important caveat.
Intrinsic to capitalism is imperialism. They are the head & tail of the same coin.
Global capitalists may unite in their rapacious attacks on average citizens the world over. However, they will disunite when it comes to beating a competitor to a market.
The "West" has no (real) ideological differences with China, Russia & Iran. This is a fight between an existing hegemon & it's allies & a rising hegemon (China) & it's allies.
In many ways it's similar to the WW I situation: an established imperial country, the UK, & it's allies against a country with imperial pretensions -- Germany (& it's allies)
To put it in a nice little homily: the Capitalist wolves prefer to eat sheep (us) -- but, will happily eat each other should they perceive a sufficient interest in doing so.
Digital Samizdat , says: June 26, 2019 at 11:49 am GMT
@WorkingClass

Globalists are not Capitalists. There is no competition. Just a hand full of monopolies.

In most key sectors, competition ends up producing monopolies or their near-equivalent, oligopolies. The many are weeded out (or swallowed up) by the few . The situation is roughly the same with democracy, which historically has always resulted in oligarchy, as occurred in ancient Rome and Athens.

Parfois1 , says: June 27, 2019 at 11:01 am GMT
@WorkingClass

Globalists are not Capitalists. There is no competition. Just a hand full of monopolies. These stateless corporate monopolists are better understood as Feudalists. They would have everything. We would have nothing. That's what privatization is. It's the Lords ripping off the proles.

You are right in expecting that in Capitalism there would be competition – the traditional view that prices would remain low because of competition, the less competitive removed from the field, and so on. But that was primitive laisser-faire Capitalism on a fair playing field that hardly existed but in theory. Occasionally there were some "good" capitalists – say the mill-owner in a Lancashire town who gave employment to the locals, built houses, donated to charity and went to the Sunday church service with his workers. But even that "good" capitalist was in it for the profit, which comes from taking possession for himself of the value added by his workers to a commodity.

But modern Capitalism does not function that way. There are no mill-owners, just absentee investor playing in, usually rigged, stock market casinos. Industrial capitalism has been changed into financial Capitalism without borders and loyalty to worker or country. In fact, it has gone global to play country against country for more profit.

Anyway, the USA has evolved into a Fascist state (an advanced state of capitalism, a.k.a. corporatocracy) as Chomsky stated many years ago. Seen from abroad here's a view from the horse's mouth ( The Guardian is official organ of Globalist Fascism).

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/apr/24/usa.comment

[Jun 22, 2019] Bolton Calls For Forceful Iranian Response To Continuing US Aggression

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... "Iran cannot sit idly by as the American imperialist machine encroaches on their territory, threatens their sovereignty, and endangers their very way of life," said Bolton, warning that America's fanatical leadership, steadfast devotion to flexing their muscles in the region, and alleged access to nuclear weapons necessitated that Iran strike back with a vigorous show of force as soon -- and as hard -- as possible. ..."
"... "The only thing these Westerners understand is violence, so it's imperative that Iran sends a clear message that they won't be walked over. Let's not forget, the U.S. defied a diplomatically negotiated treaty for seemingly no reason at all -- these are dangerous radicals that cannot be reasoned with. ..."
Jun 22, 2019 | politics.theonion.com

Demanding that the Middle Eastern nation retaliate immediately in self-defense against the existential threat posed by America's military operations, National Security Adviser John Bolton called for a forceful Iranian response Friday to continuing United States aggression.

"Iran cannot sit idly by as the American imperialist machine encroaches on their territory, threatens their sovereignty, and endangers their very way of life," said Bolton, warning that America's fanatical leadership, steadfast devotion to flexing their muscles in the region, and alleged access to nuclear weapons necessitated that Iran strike back with a vigorous show of force as soon -- and as hard -- as possible.

"The only thing these Westerners understand is violence, so it's imperative that Iran sends a clear message that they won't be walked over. Let's not forget, the U.S. defied a diplomatically negotiated treaty for seemingly no reason at all -- these are dangerous radicals that cannot be reasoned with.

They've been given every opportunity to back down, but their goal is total domination of the region, and Iran won't stand for that."

At press time, Bolton said that the only option left on the table was for Iran to launch a full-fledged military strike against the Great Satan.

[Jun 21, 2019] America's Confrontation With Iran Goes Deeper Than Trump by Trita Parsi

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... The real goal is domination of the Middle East -- and that's been a bipartisan US strategy for decades. ..."
"... By striking a compromise with a defiant non-democracy like Iran, which for the past 40 years has defined itself as the foremost opponent of American hegemony (liberal or otherwise), while signaling a desire to slowly dismantle American hegemony in the Middle East (in order to pivot to Asia), Obama introduced an unsustainable contradiction to US foreign policy. ..."
"... Excellent article, because it clearly exposes the central isssue - US hegemony. And that goes has implications way beyond Iran, particularly with respect to relations with China and Russia. Very similar geopolitical games are playing out in the South China Sea, around the Ukraine, and in Syria. ..."
"... This is not 1950 when the world economy was in collapse and the US was overwhelmingly the top dog. Other countries are nearly equal to the US. Hegemony is unsustainable in today's environment and one solution is a cooperative balance of power employing diplomacy, and unprecedented cooperation on questions of energy and security in order to solve global problems like climate change and the elimination of nuclear weapons. ..."
"... The new world order - as this 'confrontation' suggests, the USA, supported by the Saudis, their compatriots, and Israel. All renowned 'friends' of the USA. With friends like these who needs enemies. ..."
"... The "confrontation" goes way back to 1953, when the CIA overthrew Mohammed Mossadegh (for his "sin" of nationalizing Iranian oil) and labelled him a Communist. Everything that is adversarial in US-Iranian relations goes back to that criminal act. ..."
Jun 21, 2019 | www.thenation.com

The real goal is domination of the Middle East -- and that's been a bipartisan US strategy for decades.

... ... ...

...if war is the endgame of their escalation, what is the endgame of their war? Dominance -- perpetual dominance of the Middle East (and the globe as a whole) by the United States. That is and has been Washington's grand strategy, regardless of whether a Republican, a Democrat, or a reality-TV star has occupied the White House. America has, of course, often ensured this domination by supporting friendly dictatorships.

But there is also a liberal version of the strategy. Liberal hegemony, or primacy, dictates that the United States has the moral obligation and the strategic imperative to transform anti–status quo non-democracies into liberal (pliant) democracies. According to this grand strategy, the existence of such non-democracies is a threat to the United States and its hegemony.

America cannot coexist with them but must ultimately transform them. Military force is instrumental to this endeavor. As Max Boot wrote back in 2003, the pillars of liberal hegemony must be spread and sustained " at gunpoint if need be ."

While some advocates of liberal hegemony object to the more militaristic interpretation preferred by neoconservatives, the difference between liberal interventionism and neoconservatism is more a matter of nuance than core belief.

Neither can provide a solution to Washington's endless wars, because both operate within the paradigm of primacy, which itself is a root cause of the country's perpetual conflicts. As long as that paradigm remains the guiding principle of foreign policy, hawks like John Bolton, Tom Cotton, and Lindsey Graham -- and their Democratic fellow travelers, too -- will continue to steer America's engagement with the world, as it is their outlook that is compatible with primacy, not that of those on the progressive left or the libertarian right, who have advocated non-interventionism or negotiated settlements with those who challenge Pax Americana.

This is why the cards were stacked against the survival of the Iran nuclear deal even if Trump had not been elected. By striking a compromise with a defiant non-democracy like Iran, which for the past 40 years has defined itself as the foremost opponent of American hegemony (liberal or otherwise), while signaling a desire to slowly dismantle American hegemony in the Middle East (in order to pivot to Asia), Obama introduced an unsustainable contradiction to US foreign policy.

This contradiction has been particularly visible among Democrats who oppose Trump's Iran policy but who still cannot bring themselves to break with our seemingly endless confrontation with Iran. As long as such Democrats allow the debate to be defined by the diktat of US primacy, they will always be on the defensive, and their long-term impact on US-Iran relations will be marginal.

After all, the strategy of US primacy in the Middle East demands Iran's defeat...

<img height="1" width="1" src="https://www.facebook.com/tr?id=233793277040432&ev=PageView&noscript=1"/> <img height="1" width="1" src="https://api.pymx5.com/v1/sites/track?event_type=PAGE_VIEW&noscript=1"/> <style>.woocommerce-product-gallery{ opacity: 1 !important; }</style>

https://cdn.districtm.io/ids/index.html

Peter Unterweger says: June 21, 2019 at 9:15 pm

Excellent article, because it clearly exposes the central isssue - US hegemony. And that goes has implications way beyond Iran, particularly with respect to relations with China and Russia. Very similar geopolitical games are playing out in the South China Sea, around the Ukraine, and in Syria.

Liberals have to stop talking about "bad actors" (whenever they are linked with competing powers, e.g. Iran, N.Korea, etc.) but welcome them as "allies" when they are our faithful vassals (e.g. Israel, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, etc.). Unfortunately, Obama appeared to understand this with respect to Iran, but totally ignored it with respect to the rest of the world.

Victor Sciamarelli says: June 21, 2019 at 1:57 pm

I completely agree with Trita Parsi's succinct description of the problem as, "Dominance -- perpetual dominance of the Middle East (and the globe as a whole) by the United States. That is and has been Washington's grand strategy, regardless of whether a Republican, a Democrat, or a reality-TV star has occupied the White House." However, why not offer alternative policies for debate?

Consider, for example, the idea of a "balance of power." It was for the same reason that the British fought Napoleon, the Crimean War, entered the first world war, and also why they were constantly engaged in diplomatic agreements in Europe. British policy demanded that they prevent the rise of a hegemon on the continent.

Napoleon was never a threat to the English mainland and neither were the Germans in 1914. Yet, they fought both because preventing a hegemon and maintaining a balance of power pre-empted other considerations.

I would suggest that regardless of events since 1918 such as: the decline of the British empire, Versailles, the world wide economic depression, the rise of fascism, the reaction to communism, or the rise of a non-European super power like the US, thinking about a modern, up to date form of the balance of power is useful.

Furthermore, we need an alternative policy because hegemony fails the world and the American people, and the world faces two existential threats: climate change and nuclear war.

Moreover, the US has been a superpower for so long that nobody remembers what it is like not to be a superpower. In addition, American elites seem unwilling or unable to grasp the real limits of military power.

In a world where the five permanent members of the UN security council are nuclear powers, and nuclear weapons are held by smaller nations, the major power centers of the world: Europe, Russia, China, and the US, have no choice but to cooperate with each other and with the countries of the ME.

The ME is a focal point for establishing cooperation because the world needs energy and the ME needs stability and development, but it requires leadership and motive.

This is not 1950 when the world economy was in collapse and the US was overwhelmingly the top dog. Other countries are nearly equal to the US. Hegemony is unsustainable in today's environment and one solution is a cooperative balance of power employing diplomacy, and unprecedented cooperation on questions of energy and security in order to solve global problems like climate change and the elimination of nuclear weapons.

Pauline Hartwig says: June 21, 2019 at 1:38 pm

The new world order - as this 'confrontation' suggests, the USA, supported by the Saudis, their compatriots, and Israel. All renowned 'friends' of the USA. With friends like these who needs enemies.

Gene Bell-Villada says: June 21, 2019 at 12:40 pm

The "confrontation" goes way back to 1953, when the CIA overthrew Mohammed Mossadegh (for his "sin" of nationalizing Iranian oil) and labelled him a Communist. Everything that is adversarial in US-Iranian relations goes back to that criminal act.

[Jun 21, 2019] Russia accuses U.S. of pushing Iran situation to brink of war RIA - Reuters

Highly recommended!
Did Putin called Trump about the attack ?
Full scale war might also complicate Trump chances for re-election.
Jun 21, 2019 | www.reuters.com

Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov called on Washington to weigh the possible consequences of conflict with Iran and said a report in the New York Times showed the situation was extremely dangerous.

U.S. President Donald Trump approved military strikes against Iran in retaliation for the downing of a U.S. surveillance drone, but called off the attacks at the last minute, the report said.

[Jun 20, 2019] Chuck Schumer 'The American People Deserve A President Who Can More Credibly Justify War With Iran'

Highly recommended!
Jun 20, 2019 | politics.theonion.com

In a pointed critique of President Trump's foreign policy leadership, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer stated to members of the press Thursday that "the American people deserve a president who can more credibly justify war with Iran."

"What the American people need is a president who can make a much more convincing case for going to war with Iran," said Schumer (D-NY), adding that the Trump administration's corruption and dishonesty have "proven time and time again" that it lacks the conviction necessary to act as an effective cheerleader for the conflict.

"Donald Trump is completely unfit to assume the mantle of telling the American people what they need to hear in order to convince them a war with Iran is a good idea.

One of the key duties of the president is to gain the trust of the people so that they feel comfortable going along with whatever he says. President Trump's failure to serve as a credible advocate for this war is yet another instance in which he has disappointed not only his colleagues in Washington, but also the entire nation."

Schumer later concluded his statement with a vow that he and his fellow Democrats will continue working toward a more palatable case in favor of bombing Iran.

[Jun 09, 2019] The looming 100-year US-China conflict by Martin Wolf

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Across-the-board rivalry with China is becoming an organising principle of US economic, foreign and security policies. ..."
"... An effort to halt China's economic and technological rise is almost certain to fail. Worse, it will foment deep hostility in the Chinese people. In the long run, the demands of an increasingly prosperous and well-educated people for control over their lives might still win out. But that is far less likely if China's natural rise is threatened. ..."
"... The tragedy in what is now happening is that the administration is simultaneously launching a conflict between the two powers, attacking its allies and destroying the institutions of the postwar US-led order. ..."
Jun 04, 2019 | archive.fo
The disappearance of the Soviet Union left a big hole. The "war on terror" was an inadequate replacement. But China ticks all boxes. For the US, it can be the ideological, military and economic enemy many need. Here at last is a worthwhile opponent. That was the main conclusion I drew from this year's Bilderberg meetings.

Across-the-board rivalry with China is becoming an organising principle of US economic, foreign and security policies.

Whether it is Donald Trump's organizing principle is less important. The US president has the gut instincts of a nationalist and protectionist. Others provide both framework and details. The aim is US domination. The means is control over China, or separation from China.

Anybody who believes a rules-based multilateral order, our globalised economy, or even harmonious international relations, are likely to survive this conflict is deluded. The astonishing white paper on the trade conflict , published on Sunday by China, is proof. The -- to me, depressing -- fact is that on many points Chinese positions are right.

The US focus on bilateral imbalances is economically illiterate. The view that theft of intellectual property has caused huge damage to the US is questionable . The proposition that China has grossly violated its commitments under its 2001 accession agreement to the World Trade Organization is hugely exaggerated.

Martin Wolf chart on US/China

Accusing China of cheating is hypocritical when almost all trade policy actions taken by the Trump administration are in breach of WTO rules, a fact implicitly conceded by its determination to destroy the dispute settlement system .

The US negotiating position vis-ŕ-vis China is that "might makes right". This is particularly true of insisting that the Chinese accept the US role as judge, jury and executioner of the agreement .

A dispute over the terms of market opening or protection of intellectual property might be settled with careful negotiation. Such a settlement might even help China, since it would lighten the heavy hand of the state and promote market-oriented reform.

But the issues are now too vexed for such a resolution. This is partly because of the bitter breakdown in negotiation. It is still more because the US debate is increasingly over whether integration with China's state-led economy is desirable. The fear over Huawei focuses on national security and technological autonomy.

[Neo]liberal commerce is increasingly seen as "trading with the enemy".

Martin Wolf chart on US/China

A framing of relations with China as one of zero-sum conflict is emerging. Recent remarks by Kiron Skinner, the US state department's policy planning director (a job once held by cold war strategist George Kennan) are revealing. Rivalry with Beijing, she suggested at a forum organised by New America , is "a fight with a really different civilisation and a different ideology, and the United States hasn't had that before".

She added that this would be "the first time that we will have a great power competitor that is not Caucasian". The war with Japan is forgotten.

But the big point is her framing of this as a civilizational and racial war and so as an insoluble conflict. This cannot be accidental. She is also still in her job. Others present the conflict as one over ideology and power.

Those emphasising the former point to President Xi Jinping's Marxist rhetoric and the reinforced role of the Communist party . Those emphasising the latter point to China's rising economic might. Both perspectives suggest perpetual conflict.

Martin Wolf chart on US/China

This is the most important geopolitical development of our era. Not least, it will increasingly force everybody else to take sides or fight hard for neutrality. But it is not only important. It is dangerous. It risks turning a manageable, albeit vexed, relationship into all-embracing conflict, for no good reason. China's ideology is not a threat to liberal democracy in the way the Soviet Union's was. Rightwing demagogues are far more dangerous.

An effort to halt China's economic and technological rise is almost certain to fail. Worse, it will foment deep hostility in the Chinese people. In the long run, the demands of an increasingly prosperous and well-educated people for control over their lives might still win out. But that is far less likely if China's natural rise is threatened.

Moreover, the rise of China is not an important cause of western malaise. That reflects far more the indifference and incompetence of domestic elites. What is seen as theft of intellectual property reflects, in large part, the inevitable attempt of a rising economy to master the technologies of the day. Above all, an attempt to preserve the domination of 4 per cent of humanity over the rest is illegitimate.

Martin Wolf chart on US/China

This certainly does not mean accepting everything China does or says. On the contrary, the best way for the west to deal with China is to insist on the abiding values of freedom, democracy, rules-based multilateralism and global co-operation. These ideas made many around the globe supporters of the US in the past.

They still captivate many Chinese people today. It is quite possible to uphold these ideas, indeed insist upon them far more strongly, while co-operating with a rising China where that is essential, as over protecting the natural environment, commerce and peace.

Martin Wolf chart on US/China

A blend of competition with co-operation is the right way forward. Such an approach to managing China's rise must include co-operating closely with like-minded allies and treating China with respect.

The tragedy in what is now happening is that the administration is simultaneously launching a conflict between the two powers, attacking its allies and destroying the institutions of the postwar US-led order.

Today's attack on China is the wrong war, fought in the wrong way, on the wrong terrain. Alas, this is where we now are.

[email protected]

[May 31, 2019] Mahathir bin Mohamad, Prime Minister of Malaysia, in an interview with FCCJ (Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan) stated that he did not believe in Russia's involvement in the crash of the Boeing MH17

Highly recommended!
May 31, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

alaff , May 30, 2019 9:08:42 PM | 37

Interesting.

Mahathir bin Mohamad, Prime Minister of Malaysia, in an interview with FCCJ (Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan) stated that he did not believe in Russia's involvement in the crash of the Boeing MH17. The politician, in fact, directly accused the so-called JIT of being biased and not transparent. Video at 40:56.

Just a few excerpts:

We should be involved in examining the black box. We may not have the expertise, but we can buy expertise. But for some reason or other Malaysia was not allowed in to check on the black box to see what happened.

<...>

They are accusing Russians of firing the missile but what is the evidence? We need strong evidence to show that it was fired by the Russians, but it could have been the rebels in Ukraine, it could even be the Ukrainian government because they too have the same missile.

<...>

We don't know why we are excluded from the examination, but from the very beginning we see too much politics in it. The idea was not to find out how this happened and all that, but they seemed to be concentrated on trying to pin it on Russia . This is not a neutral kind of examination.

<...>

Here we have parties who have some political interest in the matter and they examine.

<...>

People from Russia - they are military people. Military people would know that it is a passenger plane. <...> I don't think [that] discipline, very highly discipline party would be responsible for launching the missile.

By the way, a year ago Malaysian Minister of Transport Anthony Loke spoke about this. The JIT obviously found this "not very important". Who would doubt. The task of covering up the Ukrainian regime that shot down the plane is still relevant. Just wondering how many more years they will play this farce with an "investigation".

John Smith , May 30, 2019 9:19:14 PM | 40

Posted by: alaff | May 30, 2019 9:08:42 PM | 39

Mahathir bin Mohamad, Prime Minister of Malaysia, in an interview with FCCJ (Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan) stated that he did not believe in Russia's involvement in the crash of the Boeing MH17. The politician, in fact, directly accused the so-called JIT of being biased and not transparent.
------------------------

MH17 - 5 years on:

"How BBC faked an MH17 story" now available on YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cAZaloocFXs

Our official copyright dispute filed 30 days ago was not challenged. #MH17 #BBC

[May 28, 2019] Any time you read an article (or a comment) on Russia, substitute the word Jew for Russian and International Jewry for Russia and re-read.

Highly recommended!
May 28, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

Sid Finster says: May 23, 2019 at 11:06 am

Any time you read an article (or a comment) on Russia, substitute the word "Jew" for "Russian" and "International Jewry" for "Russia" and re-read.

If the revised article would not look out of place in Der Stuermer, that should tell you something.

[May 22, 2019] NATO has pushed eastward right up to its borders and threatened to incorporate regions that have been part of Russia's sphere of influence -- and its defense perimeter -- for centuries

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... The Economist and Stephens are correct. The trade dispute is merely a small part of a much larger and even more intense geopolitical rivalry that could ignite what Stephens describes as "an altogether hotter war." ..."
"... From the mid-1940s onward, the primacy of the United States was assumed as a given. History had rendered a verdict: we -- not the Brits and certainly not the Germans, French, or Russians -- were number one, and, more importantly, were meant to be. That history's verdict might be subject to revision was literally unimaginable, especially to anyone making a living in or near Washington, D.C. ..."
"... Choose your own favorite post-Cold War paean to American power and privilege. Mine remains Madeleine Albright's justification for some now-forgotten episode of armed intervention, uttered 20 years ago when American wars were merely occasional (and therefore required some nominal justification) rather then perpetual (and therefore requiring no justification whatsoever). ..."
"... Like some idiot savant, Donald Trump understood this. He grasped that the establishment's formula for militarized global leadership applied to actually existing post-Cold War circumstances was spurring American decline. Certainly other observers, including contributors to this publication, had for years been making the same argument, but in the halls of power their dissent counted for nothing. ..."
"... Yet in 2016, Trump's critique of U.S. policy resonated with many ordinary Americans and formed the basis of his successful run for the presidency. Unfortunately, once Trump assumed office, that critique did not translate into anything even remotely approximating a coherent strategy. President Trump's half-baked formula for Making America Great Again -- building "the wall," provoking trade wars, and elevating Iran to the status of existential threat -- is, to put it mildly, flawed, if not altogether irrelevant. His own manifest incompetence and limited attention span don't help ..."
"... There is no countervailing force within the USA that is able to tame MIC appetites, which are constantly growing. In a sense the nation is taken hostage with no root for escape via internal political mechanisms (for all practical purposes I would consider neocons that dominate the USA foreign policy to be highly paid lobbyists of MIC.) ..."
"... In this sense the alliance of China, Iran, Russia and Turkey might serve as an external countervailing force which allows some level of return to sanity, like was the case when the USSR existed. ..."
"... I agree with Bacevich that the dissolution of the USSR corrupted the US elite to the extent that it became reckless and somewhat suicidal in seeking "Full Spectrum Dominance" (which is an illusive goal in any case taking into account existing arsenals in China and Russia and the growing distance between EU and the USA) ..."
May 21, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

The Great Power Game is On and China is Winning If America wants to maintain any influence in Asia, it needs to wake up. By Robert W. Merry • May 22, 2019

President Donald J. Trump participates in a bilateral meeting with President Xi Jinping at the Great Hall of the People, Thursday, November 9, 2017, in Beijing, People's Republic of China. ( Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead) From across the pond come two geopolitical analyses in two top-quality British publications that lay out in stark terms the looming struggle between the United States and China. It isn't just a trade war, says The Economist in a major cover package. "Trade is not the half of it," declares the magazine. "The United States and China are contesting every domain, from semiconductors to submarines and from blockbuster films to lunar exploration." The days when the two superpowers sought a win-win world are gone.

For its own cover, The Financial Times ' Philip Stephens produced a piece entitled, "Trade is just an opening shot in a wider US-China conflict." The subhead: "The current standoff is part of a struggle for global pre-eminence." Writes Stephens: "The trade narrative is now being subsumed into a much more alarming one. Economics has merged with geopolitics. China, you can hear on almost every corner in sight of the White House and Congress, is not just a dangerous economic competitor but a looming existential threat."

Stephens quotes from the so-called National Defense Strategy, entitled "Sharpening the American Military's Competitive Edge," released last year by President Donald Trump's Pentagon. In the South China Sea, for example, says the strategic paper, "China has mounted a rapid military modernization campaign designed to limit U.S. access to the region and provide China a freer hand there." The broader Chinese goal, warns the Pentagon, is "Indo-Pacific regional hegemony in the near-term and displacement of the United States to achieve global pre-eminence in the future."

The Economist and Stephens are correct. The trade dispute is merely a small part of a much larger and even more intense geopolitical rivalry that could ignite what Stephens describes as "an altogether hotter war."

... ... ..

Russia: Of all the developments percolating in the world today, none is more ominous than the growing prospect of an anti-American alliance involving Russia, China, Turkey, and Iran. Yet such an alliance is in the works, largely as a result of America's inability to forge a foreign policy that recognizes the legitimate geopolitical interests of other nations. If the United States is to maintain its position in Asia, this trend must be reversed.

The key is Russia, largely by dint of its geopolitical position in the Eurasian heartland. If China's global rise is to be thwarted, it must be prevented from gaining dominance over Eurasia. Only Russia can do that. But Russia has no incentive to act because it feels threatened by the West. NATO has pushed eastward right up to its borders and threatened to incorporate regions that have been part of Russia's sphere of influence -- and its defense perimeter -- for centuries.

Given the trends that are plainly discernible in the Far East, the West must normalize relations with Russia. That means providing assurances that NATO expansion is over for good. It means the West recognizing that Georgia, Belarus, and, yes, Ukraine are within Russia's natural zone of influence. They will never be invited into NATO, and any solution to the Ukraine conundrum will have to accommodate Russian interests. Further, the West must get over Russia's annexation of the Crimean peninsula. It is a fait accompli -- and one that any other nation, including America, would have executed in similar circumstances.

Would Russian President Vladimir Putin spurn these overtures and maintain a posture of bellicosity toward the West? We can't be sure, but that certainly wouldn't be in his interest. And how will we ever know when it's never been tried? We now understand that allegations of Trump's campaign colluding with Russia were meritless, so it's time to determine the true nature and extent of Putin's strategic aims. That's impossible so long as America maintains its sanctions and general bellicosity.

NATO: Trump was right during the 2016 presidential campaign when he said that NATO was obsolete. He later dialed back on that, but any neutral observer can see that the circumstances that spawned NATO as an imperative of Western survival no longer exist. The Soviet Union is gone, and the 1.3 million Russian and client state troops it placed on Western Europe's doorstep are gone as well.

So what kind of threat could Russia pose to Europe and the West? The European Union's GDP is more than 12 times that of Russia's, while Russia's per capita GDP is only a fourth of Europe's. The Russian population is 144.5 million to Europe's 512 million. Does anyone seriously think that Russia poses a serious threat to Europe or that Europe needs the American big brother for survival, as in the immediate postwar years? Of course not. This is just a ruse for the maintenance of the status quo -- Europe as subservient to America, the Russian bear as menacing grizzly, America as protective slayer in the event of an attack.

This is all ridiculous. NATO shouldn't be abolished. It should be reconfigured for the realities of today. It should be European-led, not American-led. It should pay for its own defense entirely, whatever that might be (and Europe's calculation of that will inform us as to its true assessment of the Russian threat). America should be its primary ally, but not committed to intervene whenever a tiny European nation feels threatened. NATO's Article 5, committing all alliance nations to the defense of any other when attacked, should be scrapped in favor of language that calls for U.S. intervention only in the event of a true threat to Western Civilization itself.

And while a European-led NATO would find it difficult to pull back from its forward eastern positions after adding so many nations in the post-Cold War era, it should extend assurances to Russia that it has no intention of acting provocatively -- absent, of course, any Russian provocations.

... ... ...

Robert W. Merry, longtime Washington journalist and publishing executive, is the author most recently of President McKinley: Architect of the American Century .

likbez, May 22, 2019

Great article. Thank you very much!

Pragmatic isolationalism is a better deal then the current neocon foreign policy. Which Trump is pursuing with the zeal similar to Obama (who continued all Bush II wars and started two new in Libya and Syria.) Probably this partially can be explained by his dependence of Adelson and pro-Israeli lobby.

But the problem is deeper then Trump: it is the power of MIC and American exeptionalism ( which can be viewed as a form of far right nationalism ) about which Andrew Bacevich have written a lot:

From the mid-1940s onward, the primacy of the United States was assumed as a given. History had rendered a verdict: we -- not the Brits and certainly not the Germans, French, or Russians -- were number one, and, more importantly, were meant to be. That history's verdict might be subject to revision was literally unimaginable, especially to anyone making a living in or near Washington, D.C.

If doubts remained on that score, the end of the Cold War removed them. With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism, politicians, journalists, and policy intellectuals threw themselves headlong into a competition over who could explain best just how unprecedented, how complete, and how wondrous was the global preeminence of the United States.

Choose your own favorite post-Cold War paean to American power and privilege. Mine remains Madeleine Albright's justification for some now-forgotten episode of armed intervention, uttered 20 years ago when American wars were merely occasional (and therefore required some nominal justification) rather then perpetual (and therefore requiring no justification whatsoever).

"If we have to use force," Secretary of State Albright announced on morning television in February 1998, "it is because we are America. We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see further into the future."

Back then, it was Albright's claim to American indispensability that stuck in my craw. Yet as a testimony to ruling class hubris, the assertion of indispensability pales in comparison to Albright's insistence that "we see further into the future."

In fact, from February 1998 down to the present, events have time and again caught Albright's "we" napping. The 9/11 terrorist attacks and the several unsuccessful wars of choice that followed offer prime examples. But so too did Washington's belated and inadequate recognition of the developments that actually endanger the wellbeing of 21st-century Americans, namely climate change, cyber threats, and the ongoing reallocation of global power prompted by the rise of China. Rather than seeing far into the future, American elites have struggled to discern what might happen next week. More often than not, they get even that wrong.

Like some idiot savant, Donald Trump understood this. He grasped that the establishment's formula for militarized global leadership applied to actually existing post-Cold War circumstances was spurring American decline. Certainly other observers, including contributors to this publication, had for years been making the same argument, but in the halls of power their dissent counted for nothing.

Yet in 2016, Trump's critique of U.S. policy resonated with many ordinary Americans and formed the basis of his successful run for the presidency. Unfortunately, once Trump assumed office, that critique did not translate into anything even remotely approximating a coherent strategy. President Trump's half-baked formula for Making America Great Again -- building "the wall," provoking trade wars, and elevating Iran to the status of existential threat -- is, to put it mildly, flawed, if not altogether irrelevant. His own manifest incompetence and limited attention span don't help.

There is no countervailing force within the USA that is able to tame MIC appetites, which are constantly growing. In a sense the nation is taken hostage with no root for escape via internal political mechanisms (for all practical purposes I would consider neocons that dominate the USA foreign policy to be highly paid lobbyists of MIC.)

In this sense the alliance of China, Iran, Russia and Turkey might serve as an external countervailing force which allows some level of return to sanity, like was the case when the USSR existed.

I agree with Bacevich that the dissolution of the USSR corrupted the US elite to the extent that it became reckless and somewhat suicidal in seeking "Full Spectrum Dominance" (which is an illusive goal in any case taking into account existing arsenals in China and Russia and the growing distance between EU and the USA)

[May 20, 2019] "Us" Versus "Them"

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... There are differences between the parties, but they are mainly centered around social issues and disputes with little or no consequence to the long-term path of the country. The real ruling oligarchs essentially allow controlled opposition within each party to make it appear you have a legitimate choice at the ballot box. Nothing could be further from the truth. ..."
"... There has been an unwritten agreement between the parties for decades where the Democrats pretend to be against war and the Republicans pretend to be against welfare. Meanwhile, spending on war and welfare relentlessly grows into the trillions, with no effort whatsoever from either party to even slow the rate of growth, let alone cut spending. The proliferation of the military industrial complex like a poisonous weed has been inexorable, as the corporate arms dealers place their facilities of death in the congressional districts of Democrats and Republicans. In addition, these corporate manufacturers of murder dole out "legal" payoffs to corrupt politicians of both parties in the form of political contributions. The Deep State knows bribes and well-paying jobs ensure no spineless congressman will ever vote against a defense spending increase. ..."
"... Of course, the warfare/welfare state couldn't grow to its immense size without financing from the Wall Street cabal and their feckless academic puppets at the Federal Reserve. The Too Big to Trust Wall Street banks, whose willful control fraud nearly wrecked the global economy in 2008, were rewarded by their Deep State patrons by getting bigger and more powerful as people on Main Street and senior citizen savers were thrown under the bus. ..."
"... When these criminal bankers have their reckless bets blow up in their faces they are bailed out by the American taxpayers, but when the Fed rigs the system so they are guaranteed billions in risk free profits, they reward themselves with massive bonuses and lobby for a huge tax cut used to buy back their stock. With bank branches in every congressional district in every state, and bankers spreading protection money to greedy politicians across the land, no legislation damaging to the banking cartel is ever passed. ..."
"... I voted for Trump because he wasn't Hillary. ..."
"... If the Chinese refuse to yield for fear of losing face, and the tariff war accelerates, a global recession is a certainty. ..."
"... These sociopaths are not liberal or conservative. They are not Democrats or Republicans. They are not beholden to a country or community. They care not for their fellow man. They don't care about future generations. They care about their own power, wealth and control over others. They have no conscience. They have no empathy. Right and wrong are meaningless in their unquenchable thirst for more. They will lie, steal and kill to achieve their goal of controlling everything and everyone in this world. This precisely describes virtually every politician in Washington DC, Wall Street banker, mega-corporation CEO, government agency head, MSM talking head, church leader, billionaire activist, and blood sucking advisor to the president. ..."
"... The problem is we have gone too far. The "American Dream" has become a grotesque nightmare because people by the millions sit around and dream about being a Kardashian. Makes me want to puke. ..."
May 20, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Jim Quinn via The Burning Platform blog,

"I'll show you politics in America. Here it is, right here. "I think the puppet on the right shares my beliefs." "I think the puppet on the left is more to my liking." "Hey, wait a minute, there's one guy holding out both puppets!"" – Bill Hicks

Anyone who frequents Twitter, Facebook, political blogs, economic blogs, or fake-news mainstream media channels knows our world is driven by the "Us versus Them" narrative. It's almost as if "they" are forcing us to choose sides and believe the other side is evil. Bill Hicks died in 1994, but his above quote is truer today then it was then. As the American Empire continues its long-term decline, the proles are manipulated through Bernaysian propaganda techniques, honed over the course of decades by the ruling oligarchs, to root for their assigned puppets.

Most people can't discern they are being manipulated and duped by the Deep State controllers. The most terrifying outcome for these Deep State controllers would be for the masses to realize it is us versus them. But they don't believe there is a chance in hell of this happening. Their arrogance is palatable.

Their hubris has reached astronomical levels as they blew up the world economy in 2008 and successfully managed to have the innocent victims bail them out to the tune of $700 billion, pillaged the wealth of the nation through their capture of the Federal Reserve (QE, ZIRP), rigged the financial markets in their favor through collusion, used the hundreds of billions in corporate tax cuts to buy back their stock and further pump the stock market, all while their corporate media mouthpieces mislead and misinform the proles.

There are differences between the parties, but they are mainly centered around social issues and disputes with little or no consequence to the long-term path of the country. The real ruling oligarchs essentially allow controlled opposition within each party to make it appear you have a legitimate choice at the ballot box. Nothing could be further from the truth.

There has been an unwritten agreement between the parties for decades where the Democrats pretend to be against war and the Republicans pretend to be against welfare. Meanwhile, spending on war and welfare relentlessly grows into the trillions, with no effort whatsoever from either party to even slow the rate of growth, let alone cut spending. The proliferation of the military industrial complex like a poisonous weed has been inexorable, as the corporate arms dealers place their facilities of death in the congressional districts of Democrats and Republicans. In addition, these corporate manufacturers of murder dole out "legal" payoffs to corrupt politicians of both parties in the form of political contributions. The Deep State knows bribes and well-paying jobs ensure no spineless congressman will ever vote against a defense spending increase.

Of course, the warfare/welfare state couldn't grow to its immense size without financing from the Wall Street cabal and their feckless academic puppets at the Federal Reserve. The Too Big to Trust Wall Street banks, whose willful control fraud nearly wrecked the global economy in 2008, were rewarded by their Deep State patrons by getting bigger and more powerful as people on Main Street and senior citizen savers were thrown under the bus.

When these criminal bankers have their reckless bets blow up in their faces they are bailed out by the American taxpayers, but when the Fed rigs the system so they are guaranteed billions in risk free profits, they reward themselves with massive bonuses and lobby for a huge tax cut used to buy back their stock. With bank branches in every congressional district in every state, and bankers spreading protection money to greedy politicians across the land, no legislation damaging to the banking cartel is ever passed.

I've never been big on joining a group. I tend to believe Groucho Marx and his cynical line, "I don't care to belong to any club that will have me as a member". The "Us vs. Them" narrative doesn't connect with my view of the world. As a realistic libertarian I know libertarian ideals will never proliferate in a society of government dependency, willful ignorance of the masses, thousands of laws, and a weak-kneed populace afraid of freedom and liberty. The only true libertarian politician, Ron Paul, was only able to connect with about 5% of the voting public. There is no chance a candidate with a libertarian platform will ever win a national election. This country cannot be fixed through the ballot box. Bill Hicks somewhat foreshadowed the last election by referencing another famous cynic.

"I ascribe to Mark Twain's theory that the last person who should be President is the one who wants it the most. The one who should be picked is the one who should be dragged kicking and screaming into the White House." ― Bill Hicks

Hillary Clinton wanted to be president so badly, she colluded with Barack Obama, Jim Comey, John Brennan, James Clapper, Loretta Lynch and numerous other Deep State sycophants to ensure her victory, by attempting to entrap Donald Trump in a concocted Russian collusion plot and subsequent post-election coup to cover for their traitorous plot. I wouldn't say Donald Trump was dragged kicking and screaming into the White House, but when he ascended on the escalator at Trump Tower in June of 2015, I'm not convinced he believed he could win the presidency.

As the greatest self-promoter of our time, I think he believed a presidential run would be good for his brand, more revenue for his properties and more interest in his reality TV ventures. He was despised by the establishment within the Republican and Democrat parties. The vested interests controlling the media and levers of power in society scorned and ridiculed this brash uncouth outsider. In an upset for the ages, Trump tapped into a vein of rage and disgruntlement in flyover country and pockets within swing states, to win the presidency over Crooked Hillary and her Deep State backers.

I voted for Trump because he wasn't Hillary. I hadn't voted for a Republican since 2000, casting protest votes for Libertarian and Constitutional Party candidates along the way. I despise the establishment, so their hatred of Trump made me vote for him. His campaign stances against foreign wars and Federal Reserve reckless bubble blowing appealed to me. I don't worship at the altar of the cult of personality. I judge men by their actions and not their words.

Trump's first two years have been endlessly entertaining as he waged war against fake news CNN, establishment Republicans, the Deep State coup attempt, and Obama loving globalists. The Twitter in Chief has bypassed the fake news media and tweets relentlessly to his followers. He provokes outrage in his enemies and enthralls his worshipers. With millions in each camp it is difficult to find an unbiased assessment of narrative versus real accomplishments.

I'm happy he has been able to stop the relentless leftward progression of our Federal judiciary. Cutting regulations and rolling back environmental mandates has been a positive. Exiting the Paris Climate Agreement and TPP, forcing NATO members to pay their fair share, and renegotiating NAFTA were all needed. Ending the war on coal and approving pipelines will keep energy costs lower. His attempts to vet Muslims entering the country have been the right thing to do. Building a wall on our southern border is the right thing to do, but he should have gotten it done when he controlled both houses.

The use of tariffs to force China to renegotiate one sided trade deals as a negotiating tactic is a high-risk, high reward gamble. If his game of chicken is successful and he gets better terms from the Chicoms, while reversing the tariffs, it would be a huge win. If the Chinese refuse to yield for fear of losing face, and the tariff war accelerates, a global recession is a certainty. Who has the upper hand? Xi is essentially a dictator for life and doesn't have to worry about elections or popularity polls. Dissent is crushed. A global recession and stock market crash would make Trump's re-election in 2020 problematic.

I'm a big supporter of lower taxes. The Trump tax cuts were sold as beneficial to the middle class. That is a false narrative. The vast majority of the tax cut benefits went to mega-corporations and rich people. Middle class home owning families with children received little or no tax relief, as exemptions were eliminated and tax deductions capped. In many cases, taxes rose for working class Americans.

With corporate profits at all time highs, massive tax cuts put billions more into their coffers. They didn't repatriate their overseas profits to a great extent. They didn't go on a massive hiring spree. They didn't invest in new facilities. They did buy back their own stock to help drive the stock market to stratospheric heights. So corporate executives gave themselves billions in bonuses, which were taxed at a much lower rate. This is considered winning in present day America.

The "Us vs. Them" issue rears its ugly head whenever Trump is held accountable for promises unkept, blatant failures, and his own version of fake news. Holding Trump to the same standards as Obama is considered traitorous by those who only root for their home team. Their standard response is that you are a Hillary sycophant or a turncoat to the home team. If you agree with a particular viewpoint or position of a liberal then you are a bad person and accused of being a lefty by Trump fanboys. Facts don't matter to cheerleaders. Competing narratives rule the day. Truthfulness not required.

The refusal to distinguish between positive actions and negative actions when assessing the performance of what passes for our political leadership by the masses is why cynicism has become my standard response to everything I see, hear or he read. The incessant level of lies permeating our society and its acceptance as the norm has led to moral decay and rampant criminality from the White House, to the halls of Congress, to corporate boardrooms, to corporate newsrooms, to government run classrooms, to the Vatican, and to households across the land. It's interesting that one of our founding fathers reflected upon this detestable human trait over two hundred years ago.

"It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that mental lying has produced in society. When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime." – Thomas Paine

Thomas Paine's description of how moral mischief can ruin a society was written when less than 3 million people inhabited America. Consider his accurate assessment of humanity when over 300 million occupy these lands. The staggering number of corrupt prostituted sociopaths occupying positions of power within the government, corporations, media, military, churches, and academia has created a morally bankrupt empire of debt.

These sociopaths are not liberal or conservative. They are not Democrats or Republicans. They are not beholden to a country or community. They care not for their fellow man. They don't care about future generations. They care about their own power, wealth and control over others. They have no conscience. They have no empathy. Right and wrong are meaningless in their unquenchable thirst for more. They will lie, steal and kill to achieve their goal of controlling everything and everyone in this world. This precisely describes virtually every politician in Washington DC, Wall Street banker, mega-corporation CEO, government agency head, MSM talking head, church leader, billionaire activist, and blood sucking advisor to the president.

The question pondered every day on blogs, social media, news channels, and in households around the country is whether Trump is one of Us or one of Them. The answer to that question will strongly impact the direction and intensity of the climactic years of this Fourth Turning. What I've noticed is the shunning of those who don't take an all or nothing position regarding Trump. If you disagree with a decision, policy, or hiring decision by the man, you are accused by the pro-Trump team of being one of them (aka liberals, lefties, Hillary lovers).

If you don't agree with everything Trump does or says, you are dead to the Trumpeteers. I don't want to be Us or Them. I just want to be me. I will judge everyone by their actions and their results. I can agree with Trump on many issues, while also agreeing with Tulsi Gabbard, Rand Paul, Glenn Greenwald or Matt Taibbi on other issues. I don't prescribe to the cult of personality school of thought. I didn't believe the false narratives during the Bush or Obama years, and I won't worship at the altar of the Trump narrative now.

In Part II of this article I'll assess Trump's progress thus far and try to determine whether he can defeat the Deep State.

TerryThomas , 32 minutes ago link

"The scientific and industrial revolution of modern times represents the next giant step in the mastery over nature; and here, too, an enormous increase in man's power over nature is followed by an apocalyptic drive to subjugate man and reduce human nature to the status of nature. Even where enslavement is employed in a mighty effort to tame nature, one has the feeling that the effort is but a tactic to legitimize total subjugation. Thus, despite its spectacular achievements in science and technology, the twentieth century will probably be seen in retrospect as a century mainly preoccupied with the mastery and manipulation of men. Nationalism, socialism, communism, fascism, and militarism, cartelization and unionization, propaganda and advertising are all aspects of a general relentless drive to manipulate men and neutralize the unpredictability of human nature. Here, too, the atmosphere is heavy-laden with coercion and magic." --Eric Hoffer

666D Chess , 11 minutes ago link

Divide and conquer, not a very novel idea... but very effective.

Kafir Goyim , 32 minutes ago link

If you don't agree with everything Trump does or says, you are dead to the Trumpeteers

That's not true. When Trump kisses Israeli ***, most "Trumpeteers" are outraged. That does not mean they're going to vote for Joe "I'm a Zionist" Biden, or Honest Hillary because of it, but they're still pissed.

Rich Monk , 33 minutes ago link

These predators (((them))) need to fear the Victims, us! That is what the 2ND Amendment is for. It's coming, slowly for now, but eventually it speeds up.

yellowsub , 42 minutes ago link

Ya'll a dumb fool if you think gov't as your best interests first.

legalize , 46 minutes ago link

Citation needed.

Any piece like this better be littered with footnotes and cited sources before I'm swallowing it.

I'll say it again: this is the internet, people. There's no "shortage of column space" to include links back to primary sources for your assertions. Otherwise, how am I supposed to distinguish you from another "psy op" or "paid opposition hit piece"?

bshirley1968 , 51 minutes ago link

"The question pondered every day on blogs, social media, news channels, and in households around the country is whether Trump is one of Us or one of Them."

If you still ponder this question, then you are pretty frickin' thick. It is obvious at this point, that he betrayed everything he campaigned on. You don't do that and call yourself one of "us".......damn sure aren't one of "me".

If I couldn't keep my word and wouldn't do what it takes to do what is right.....then I would resign. But I would not go on playing politics in a world that needs some real leadership and not another political hack.

The real battle is between Truth and Lie. No matter the name of your "team" or the "side" you support. Truth is truth and lies are lies. We don't stand for political parties, we stand for truth. We don't stand for national pride, we take pride in a nation that is truthful and trustworthy. The minute a "side" or "team" starts lying.....and justifying it.....that is the minute they become them and not one of us.

Any thinking person in this country today knows we are being lied to by the entire complex. Until someone starts telling the truth.....we are on our own. But I be damned before I am going to support any of these lying sons of bitches......and that includes Trump.

Fish Gone Bad , 37 minutes ago link

Dark comedy. All the elections have been **** choices until the last one. Take a look at Arkancide.com and start counting the bodies.

Anyone remember the news telling us how North Korea promised to turn the US into a sea of fire?? Trump absolutely went to bat for every single American to de-escalate that situation.

bshirley1968 , 31 minutes ago link

Don't tell me about Arkancide or the Clintons. I grew up in Arkansas with that sack of **** as my governor for 12 years.

NK was never a real threat to anyone. Trump didn't do ****. NK is back to building and shooting off missiles and will be teaming up with the Russians and Chinese. You are a duped bafoon.

Kafir Goyim , 28 minutes ago link

I don't think anybody thought NK was an existential threat to the US. It has still been nice making progress on bringing them back into the world and making them less of a threat to Japan and S. Korea. Trump did that.

Giant Meteor , 9 minutes ago link

Dennis Rodman did that, or that is to say, Trump an extension thereof ..

Great theater..

Look, i thought it was great that Trump went Kim Unning. I mean after all, i had talked with a few elderly folks that get their news directly from the mainstream of mainstream, vanilla news reportage. Propaganda central casting. I remember them being extremely concerned, outright petrified about that evil menace, kim gonna launch nukes any minute now. If the news would have been announced a major troop mobilization, bombing campaigns, to begin immediately they would have been completely onboard, waving the flag.

Frankly, it is only a matter of time, and folks can speculate on the country of interest, but it is coming soon to a theater near you. So many being in the crosshairs. Iran i suspect .. that's the big prize, that makes these sociopaths cream in their panties.

Probably. In the second term .. and so far, if ones honestly evaluates the "brain trust" / current crop of dimwit opposition, and in light of their past 2 plus years of moronic posturing with their hair on fire, trump will get his second term ..

666D Chess , 15 minutes ago link

Until the last one? You are retarded, the last election was a masterpiece of Rothschilds Productions. The Illuminati was watching you at their private cinema when you were voting for Trump and they were laughing their asses off.

HoodRatKing , 55 minutes ago link

The author does not realize that everyone in America, except Native American Indians, were immigrants drawn towards the false promise of hope that is the American Dream, turned nightmare..

Owning your own home, car, & raising a family in this country is so damn expensive & risky, that you'd have be on drugs or an idiot to even fall for the lies.

I don't see an us vs them, I see the #FakeMoney printers monetized every facet of life, own everything, & it truly is RENT-A-LIFE USSA, complete with bills galore, taxes galore, laws galore, jails & prisons galore, & the worst fkn country anyone would want to live in poverty & homelessness in.

At least in many 3rd world nations there is land to live off of & joblessness does not = a financial death sentence.

bshirley1968 , 39 minutes ago link

Sure. Lets all go back to living in huts.....off the land....no cars.....no electricity.....no running water......no roads....

There is a price to pay for things and it is not always in the form of money. We have given up some of our freedom for the ease and conveniences we want.

The problem is we have gone too far. The "American Dream" has become a grotesque nightmare because people by the millions sit around and dream about being a Kardashian. Makes me want to puke.

There is a balance. Don't take the other extreme or we never find balance.

911bodysnatchers322 , 56 minutes ago link

This article is moronic. One can easily prove that Trump is not like all the others in the poster. Has this author been living under a rock for the last 2.5 yrs? The past 5 presidents represent a group that has been literally trying to assassinate Trump, ruin his family, his reputation, his buisness and his future, for the audacity to be an ousider to the power network and steal (win) the presidency from under their noses. He's kept us OUT of war. He's dissolved the treachery that was keeping us in the middle east through gaslighitng and a proxy fake war that is ISIS, the globalists' / nato / fiveys / uk's fake mercenary army

Giant Meteor , 25 minutes ago link

And yet, I'll never forget all the smiling faces at the gala wedding affair.

Happier times ..

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/30/us/politics/ex-ally-donald-trump-now-heaps-scorn-on-bill-clinton.html

And yes, thanks in advance for noting the link is from New York slime, but i believe the picture in this case anyway, was not photo shopped.

She is, (hillary) after all, good people, a real fighter ..

**** .. mission accomplished ..

ExPat2018 , 1 hour ago link

The greatest threat to the USA is its own dumbed down drugged up citizens who cannot compete with anyone. America is a big military powerhouse but that doens't make successful countries

You must have intelligent people

America doesn't have that anymore.

JuliaS , 1 hour ago link

Notice how modern narrative is getting manipulated. What is being reported and referenced is completely different from how things are. And knowing that we can assume that the entire history is a fabricated lie, written by the ruling class to support its status in the minds of obedient citizens.

911bodysnatchers322 , 54 minutes ago link

This article is garbage propaganda that proves that they think we aren't keeping score or paying attention. The gaslighting won't work when it relies on so much counterthink, willful ignorance, counterfacts and weaponized omissions

istt , 1 hour ago link

The reality is the de-escalation of wars, the stability of our currency and our economy, and the moral re-grounding of our culture does not occur until we do what over 100 countries have done over the centuries, beginning in Carthage in 250AD.

fersur , 1 hour ago link

There's an old saying; "Congress does 2 things well Nothing and Protest" said by Pence Live-Streamed 4 hours ago at USMCA America First speech !

Good, Bad and Ugly

The Good is President Trump works extreme daily hours trying his best !

The Bad is Haters miss every bit of whatever their President Trump does that is good !

The Ugly is Hater Reporters ignoring World events, scared of possibly shining President Trump fairly !

SHsparx , 1 hour ago link

You really are making it a bit too obvious, bro.

911bodysnatchers322 , 52 minutes ago link

The congress are statusquotarians. If they solved the problems they say they would,they'd be out of a job. and that job is sitting there acting like a naddler or toxic post turtle leprechaun with a charisma and skill level of zero. Their staff do all the work, half of them barely read, though they probably can

SHsparx , 1 hour ago link

I still think 1st and 2nd ammedment is predicated on which party rules the house. If a Dem gets into the WH, we're fucked. Kiss those Iast two dying amendments goodbye for good.

Zeusky Babarusky , 1 hour ago link

If we rely on any party to preserve the 1st or 2nd Amendments, we are already fucked. What should preserve the 1st and 2nd Amendments is the absolute fear of anyone in government even mentioning suppressing or removing them. When the very thought of doing anything to lessen the rights advocated in these two amendments, causes a politician to piss in their pants, liberty will be preserved. As it is now citizens fear the government, and as a result tyranny continues to grow and fester as a cancer.

Zoomorph , 1 hour ago link

In other words, those amendments are already lost... we're just waiting for the final dictate to come down.

Zeusky Babarusky , 1 hour ago link

You may very well be right. I still hold out hope, but upon seeing what our society is quickly morphing into, that hope seems to fade more each and every day.

SHsparx , 49 minutes ago link

@ Zeusky Babarusky

I couldn't agree with you more.

Unfortunately, it is what it is, which is why I used the word "dying."

Those two amendments are on their deathbed, and if a Dem gets in the house, that'll be the nail in the coffin.

bshirley1968 , 1 hour ago link

If you think the 1st and 2nd amendments are reliant on who is in office, then you are already done. Why don't you try growing a pair and being an American for once in your life.

I will always have a 1st and 2nd "amendment" for as long as I live. Life is meaningless without them.....as far as I am concerned. Good thing the founders didn't wait for king George to give them what they "felt" was theirs.....by the laws of Nature and Nature's God.

I hope the democrats get the power......and I hope they come for the guns......maybe then pussies like you will finally have to **** or get off the pot......for once in your life. There are worse things than dying.

Nephilim , 1 hour ago link

THEHAZELFLOCKOFCRANES

BRINDLED FOOT,

AUSTRALIAN.

caveofgoldcaveofold

Zoomorph , 1 hour ago link

"Why do we have wars?"

"Because life is war: fighting for survival, resources, and what is best in the world."

"Why do people say war is bad?"

"Because they are useful idiots who have been tricked by religion and/or weak degenerates who are too weary to participate."

delta0ne , 1 hour ago link

This country cannot be fixed through the ballot box. Unless we get rid of *** influencing from abroad and domestically. Getting rid of English King few hundred years ago was a joke! this would be a challenge because dual-citizens masquerading as locals.

blind_understanding , 1 hour ago link

Last revolution (1776) we targeted the WRONG ENEMY.

We targeted King George III instead of the private bankers who owned of the Bank of England and the issued of the British-pound currency.

George III was himself up to his ears in debt to them by 1776, when the bankers installed George Washington to replace George III as their middleman in the American colonies, by way of the phony revolution.

Phony because ownership of the central bank and currency (Federal-Reserve Banks, Federal-Reserve notes) we use, remains in the same banking families' hands to this day. The same parasite remains within our government.

djrichard , 1 hour ago link

https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2013/05/16/the-gervais-principle-vi-children-of-an-absent-god/

It is this strangely incomplete calculus that creates the shifting Loser world of rifts and alliances. By operating with a more complete calculus, Sociopaths are able to manipulate this world through the divide-and-conquer mechanisms. The result is that the Losers end up blaming each other for their losses, seek collective emotional resolution, and fail to adequately address the balance sheet of material rewards and losses.

To succeed, this strategy requires that Losers not look too closely at the non-emotional books. This is why, as we saw last time, divide-and-conquer is the most effective means for dealing with them, since it naturally creates emotional drama that keeps them busy while they are being manipulated.

[May 19, 2019] Intel agencies of the UK and US are guilty of fabricating evidence, breaking the laws (certainly of the targeted countries, but also of the UK and US), providing fake analysis and operating as evil actors on the dark side of humanity

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... what is true is that May was judge, jury and executioner in convicting Russia of the poisoning and refused to follow an evidence based discovery process that lies at the heart of the UK justice system - by hiding behind those powers that the UK intelligence community "needs" in order to protect british (not russian, british) citizens from the sinister influences of foreign powers. ..."
"... the criminal activities of howler monkeys, like Strzok, Page, Brennan, McCabe, SUSAN RICE, Comey, Ohr, BIDEN, OBAMA, etc in the USA are bad enough (whilst hardly impacting civilian life in the US - BUT - the tactics used have been deployed to starve, cause disease, "dumb down", reduce life chances all over the middle east and elsewhere for countless millions of people. ..."
May 19, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Couple of factors not mentioned. one is Israel and the other is more sinister still and tied to the conclusions to be drawn from the Mueller report.

it may be true that Skripal helped Steele with some elements of the dossier compiled by Steele, via SKripals handler Pablo Miller. It may be true that Skripal went "stir crazy" and an attempt was made to silence him and his daughter - permanently, because they simply cold not be trusted. a similar motivation could be drawn up against Russia - with the two Russians visiting Salisbury used as diversionary "stool pigeons". It may be true that the "poisoning" was self inflicted and was in fact a murder/suicide attempt as a result of depression along the ines "what's the point of it all".

what is true is that May was judge, jury and executioner in convicting Russia of the poisoning and refused to follow an evidence based discovery process that lies at the heart of the UK justice system - by hiding behind those powers that the UK intelligence community "needs" in order to protect british (not russian, british) citizens from the sinister influences of foreign powers.

what ought to be apparent is

- the same tactics used by the special prosecutor to investigate the "Russia collusion" smoke screen erected by the howler monkeys in the US intel agencies (aided and abetter by howler monkeys in UK intel agencies) to stymie the US executive branch (Trump) are likely to be used by the the UK government and some more as well - in true Le Carre fashion, but with much dumber and less principled actors than Smiley's people.

these tactics prevented (and continue to prevent) investigation and prosecution of heinous corruption within the obama administration of the previous 8 years - these howler monkey intelligence agency tactics include(d) entrapment, honeypots, racketeering, blackmail, de facto kidnapping (in the case of Skripals), bribery, wire fraud, unauthorized wire-tapping, breach of authorized intel agency activities (like the FBI operating overseas and the CIA operating domestically in the US, false and unverified claims in FISA warrants, NSA providing unauthorized information to the CIA and FBI etc)

- given the howler monkey activities of the alphabet soup, it is not beyond the imagination to draw parallels with the CIA's reporting and analysis of situations on the ground wherever they operate to provide intel ahead of military activity. the DOD has already proved complicit by hiring Halper (for hundreds of thousands of dollars) to assist with the entrapment of Trump operative Papadopoulos. Mifsud is likely a CIA, not a Russian, asset.

- given that we have ample evidence of the howler monkeys in the alphabet soup seeking to facilitate a coup against a sitting US president, it is certainly plausible that - as with the US goverment sponsoring the mujaheedin, isis and al qaeda in afghanistan to fight the russians in late 80's early 90's, Iraq yellow cake and WMD - that the howler monkeys paid the white helmets to ovethrow assad and foment civil war in Syria - thus causing the migration of some 5 million syrians into europe, iraq, turkey, jordan, turkey and lebanon.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Helmets_(Syrian_Civil_War)

so , the case is that howler monkey activity in intel agencies of the UK and US (add (F)rance to get FUKUS) are guilty of the manufacture of human conflict by fabricating evidence, breaking the laws (certainly of the targeted countries, but also of the UK and US), providing shitty analysis (howler monkeys are only good at swinging in trees and flinging ****) and generally operating as evil actors on the dark side of humanity.

this can only be brought into sharp relief if howler monkey activities were instead shown to be powers for good rather than the geo-political risks that persist in Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, Yemen, Libya and so on and so forth.

Never mind how much past conflicts in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan and so on relied on evidence and analysis thrown at us by the howler monkeys in the tree tops, how much of what we we are doing now is a fabrication causing needless suffering by civilian (not politicians or military engaged in conflict) populations?

the criminal activities of howler monkeys, like Strzok, Page, Brennan, McCabe, SUSAN RICE, Comey, Ohr, BIDEN, OBAMA, etc in the USA are bad enough (whilst hardly impacting civilian life in the US - BUT - the tactics used have been deployed to starve, cause disease, "dumb down", reduce life chances all over the middle east and elsewhere for countless millions of people.

there are equivalents of strzok, page, ohr right throughout the US and UK government "machines" operating overseas. think about that. crimes exposed by Barr et al in the US - against a sitting president - are replicated wherever howler monkeys operate overseas as well.

[May 14, 2019] iJews and the Left-i by Philip Mendes A Review, by Brenton Sanderson - The Unz Review

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... While promoting pluralism and diversity and encouraging the dissolution of the racial and ethnic identification of Europeans, Jews have simultaneously endeavored to maintain precisely the kind of intense group solidarity they decry as immoral in others and the great majority support an ethno-nationalist Israel. They have initiated and led movements that have discredited the traditional foundations of Western society: patriotism, the Christian basis for morality, social homogeneity, and sexual restraint. At the same time, within their own communities, they have supported the very institutions they have attacked in Western societies. This is ruthless, uncompromising Darwinian group competition played out in the human cultural arena. ..."
"... Jewish writer David Cole recently questioned the wisdom of this strategy of using non-Whites as “golem” to protect the Jews from a recrudescence of National Socialism. He notes that many of the Jews’ non-White pets (like Ilhan Omar) have a disconcerting tendency to turn on their Jewish masters ..."
"... In the minds of Jewish leaders and activists nurtured since birth on the cult of “the Holocaust,” White nationalism is still the most ominous threat to Jewish survival. This is reflected in the unquestioning commitment of the vast majority of Jewish activists and intellectuals (Cole excepted) to mass non-White immigration and multiculturalism in all historically White nations. ..."
May 14, 2019 | www.unz.com

Despite the Jewish domination of the American Left in the post-War period, Mendes notes that "most Americans do not appear to have adhered to the same anti-Semitic assumptions about Jewish links with communism that dominated public opinion in parts of Europe." [80] Ibid ., 229.
(Philip Mendes, Jews and the Left: The Rise and Fall of a Political Alliance (Melbourne, Victoria; Palgrave MacMillian, 2014), 250.) As evidence of this, Mendes cites the decidedly muted public response to the conviction and execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for selling atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. Despite the recognizably Jewish identity of the couple (given their name) and of all of their co-conspirators (David Greenglass, Ruth Greenglass, and Morton Sobell), and the fact the Rosenberg spy network consisted almost exclusively of Jews from the Lower East Side of Manhattan, the case "provoked remarkably little overt anti-Semitism." [81] Ibid ., 230.
Nor, he observes, did the "significant number of Jews -- including teachers and Hollywood actors -- who were victims of anti-communist purges" and the prominence of Jews amongst those subpoenaed by the House Committee on Un-American Activities, lead to a significant reaction. All public opinion polls conducted during this period showed a consistent decline in "anti-Semitism," and only a small minority of those surveyed (about 5 percent) identified Jews with communism. [82] Ibid .

The lack of any real backlash to Jewish prominence in the New Left is ascribed to various factors: that many members of the public were not aware of the Jewish background of many of the radical leaders; that these Jewish radicals were ostensibly "not campaigning about any specifically Jewish issues that would have focused attention on Jews per se;" and to the "general decline in anti-Semitism since World War Two." [83] Ibid ., 257. This latter shift in public opinion (unsurprisingly) coincided with the Jewish seizure of the commanding heights of American (and Western) culture in the 1960s, and the growing emergence of the culture of "the Holocaust." The combined effect was to banish overt critical discussion of Jewish power to the margins of public discourse. While Americans rejected communist activities during the Cold War, unlike in Europe, they did not widely equate communism with Jews (at least publicly), or view Jewish participation in leftist politics with particular concern.

Neoconservatism

Neoconservative leaders were among those who feared that the Jewish prominence in the New Left of the late 1960s and early 1970s would fuel a conservative backlash against Jewish radicalism. For example, Norman Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary magazine, attacked leading Jewish leftists as alleged self-hating Jews and completely unrepresentative of the Jewish community. [84] Ibid ., 22.

Mendes ascribes the defection of many Jews from the radical left to neoconservatism in the 1970s to a growing misalignment between modern Leftist politics and Jewish ethnic interests: the key factor being "the creation of the State of Israel which transformed Jewish dependence from international to national forces." [85] Ibid ., viii.
With the advent of the state of Israel, Jewish interests were no longer exclusively represented by the universalistic agendas of the Left. According to Mendes: "Most Jews have lost their faith in universalistic causes because they do not perceive the Left as supportive of Jewish interests, and have turned instead to nationalist solutions." [86] Ibid ., 235.

The creation of a Jewish national entity featuring (thanks to US taxpayers) a strong and powerful army meant that Jews all over the world could look to the Zionist state to safeguard their interests, rather than depending on internationalist movements and ideologies (i.e. communism and the Soviet Union) which had often proven to be unreliable allies. Even many left-wing Jews, who might have been anti-Zionist prior to World War Two, shifted their position after the birth of Israel. For example, the long-time Austrian Jewish leftist Jean Amery commented in 1976:

There is a very deep tie and existential bond between every Jew and the State of Israel Jews feel bound to the fortunes and misfortunes of Israel, whether they are religious Jews or not, whether they adhere to Zionism or reject it, whether they are newly arrived in their host countries or deeply rooted there The Jewish State has taught all the Jews of the world to walk with their head high once more Israel is the virtual shelter for all of the insulted and injured Jews of the earth. [87] Ibid ., 236-37

The perceived anti-Zionism of the New Left from the 1967 onwards served to alienate many Jews and confirm their commitment to nationalist, rather than internationalist solutions. An additional factor was the 1967 Six Day War in the Middle East, which provoked fears of "another Holocaust," and galvanized even non-Zionist Jews in support of Israel. There were rallies in support of Israel throughout the Western world accompanied by large donations. American Jews held massive fundraising campaigns and reportedly raised 180 million dollars. Numerous volunteers travelled to Israel to support the Jewish State. In Australia, more than 20 per cent of a total Jewish population of 34,000 in Melbourne -- attended a public rally to express their support for Israel, and 2500 attended a youth rally. 750 young Jews volunteered to go to Israel. According to Taft,

there was a widespread, almost universal, absorption in the Middle East Crisis of June among the Jews of Melbourne. This absorption took the form of extreme concern about the safety of Israel, emotional upsets, obsessive seeking of news, constant discussion of events and taking spontaneous actions to support Israel's cause. [88] Ibid ., 238.

The rise of left-wing anti-Zionism after the Six Day War furthered alienated sections of Western Jewry from the social democratic Left. Another factor that pushed American Jews in a neoconservative direction, identified by Mendes, was the decline in Black–Jewish relations. The emergence of the Black Power movement in the mid-1960s led to the removal of Jews from the leadership of organizations like the NAACP. Black hostility was viewed by some Jews as evidence of the failure of the strategy of courting non-White groups to advance Jewish interests. This ostensible failure prompted many Jews to concentrate on a narrower ethnic self-interest in the future. [89] Ibid ., 243.

This, in turn, contributed to the creation of "pragmatic alliances" with conservative political parties such as the Republicans and evangelical groups such as Christians United for Israel which "have been consistent supporters of Israel in the USA." An associated factor was that pro-Israel perspectives within Western countries increasingly emanated from mainstream conservatives, rather than from the moderate or radical Left. This occurred despite "many in these groups hold socially conservative views on issues such as abortion, homosexuality, the environment, multiculturalism, state support for the poor and disadvantaged, and refugees, which are anathema to many Jews." [90] Ibid ., 287.

Mendes makes the point that "These alliances were based solely on the latter's position of support for Israel, irrespective of their conservative views on social issues such as abortion, homosexuality and the welfare state, which were often sharply at odds with the more liberal opinions of most Jews." [91] Ibid ., 239.

Despite the defection on many Jews from the radical left to neoconservatism, the great majority of American Jews still see their ethnic interests as basically aligning with the Democratic Party. Their willingness to prioritize their ethnic interests over their personal economic interests is reflected in the fact that "high numbers of affluent Jews compared to others of the same socioeconomic status still vote for moderate left parties that do not seem to favor their economic interests." Today, the structural factors which historically drew many Jews to the Left no longer exist. Most Jews sit comfortably in middle- or even higher-income categories. This "middle-classing" of Jews throughout the West has meant that the "Jewish proletariat that motivated Jewish identification with left-wing beliefs no longer exists." [92] Ibid ., 239. Consequently, "the specific link between Jewish experience of class oppression and adherence to left-wing ideology has ended." [93] Ibid ., 241.

Most Western Jews still support parties on the Left

Despite the widespread break with the radical Left over support for Israel, Jews nevertheless remain a “massively significant presence” in the Left in terms of their numbers and fundraising, their organizational capacity, and their impact on popular culture.[94]Ibid., 287. It was estimated that about a quarter of the world’s leading Marxist and radical intellectuals in the 1980s were still Jews, including Ernest Mandel, Nathan Weinstock, Maxime Rodinson, Noam Chomsky, Marcel Liebman, Ralph Miliband, and the founder of deconstructionism, Jacques Derrida. Despite continuing to comprise much of the intellectual and financial backbone of the Left, today’s Jews, “an influential and sometimes powerful group, with substantial access to politics, academia and the media,” no longer must “rely on the Left to defend their interests and wellbeing.”[95]Ibid., 286.

The primary reason most Western Jews still vote overwhelmingly for parties on the left is the perceived threat posed by the “social conservatism” of parties further to the right of the political spectrum in nations whose majorities are European-derived and nominally at least Christian:

With the possible exception of ultra-orthodox groups, Jews seem to prefer social liberal positions on issues such as religious pluralism, abortion, feminism, illicit drugs, same-sex marriage, the science of climate change and euthanasia. Another significant factor is the long history of Christian anti-Semitism has led Jews to remain suspicious of any attempts by Christian religious groups to undermine the separation of church and state. This fear of organized religion [and of the White people who practice it] seems to explain the continued strong support of American Jews for the Democratic Party in presidential elections. A further complicating factor is the growing universalization of Jewish teachings and values, including the lessons of the Holocaust, in support of social liberal perspectives. … For example, Berman (2006) presents evidence that the younger Jewish generation in Australia have been influenced by the experience of the Holocaust into taking a strong stand against any forms of racial or religious discrimination. Many are active in campaigns for indigenous rights, and to support refugees from Afghanistan, Sudan, and Middle Eastern countries seeking asylum in Australia.[96]Ibid., 288-89.

This advocacy is, of course, entirely hypocritical and cynical. While promoting pluralism and diversity and encouraging the dissolution of the racial and ethnic identification of Europeans, Jews have simultaneously endeavored to maintain precisely the kind of intense group solidarity they decry as immoral in others and the great majority support an ethno-nationalist Israel. They have initiated and led movements that have discredited the traditional foundations of Western society: patriotism, the Christian basis for morality, social homogeneity, and sexual restraint. At the same time, within their own communities, they have supported the very institutions they have attacked in Western societies. This is ruthless, uncompromising Darwinian group competition played out in the human cultural arena.

The ideological preoccupations of organized Jewry today are reflected in comments by Boston Globe writer, S.I. Rosenbaum, who insisted the main lesson of “the Holocaust” is “that white supremacy could turn on us at any moment,” and the strategy of appealing to the White majority “has never worked for us. It didn’t protect us in Spain, or England, or France, or Germany. There’s no reason to think it will work now.” The central question of Jewish political engagement in Western societies, she insists, is “how we survive as a minority population,” where the one great advantage American Jewry enjoys is that “unlike other places where ethno-nationalism has flourished, the U.S. is fast approaching a plurality of minorities.” Presiding over a coalition of non-Whites groups to actively oppose White interests is the Jewish ethno-political imperative: “If Jews are going to survive in the future, we will have to stand with people of color for our mutual benefit.”

Jewish writer David Cole recently questioned the wisdom of this strategy of using non-Whites as “golem” to protect the Jews from a recrudescence of National Socialism. He notes that many of the Jews’ non-White pets (like Ilhan Omar) have a disconcerting tendency to turn on their Jewish masters:

For decades, leftist Jews have been flooding the West with Third World immigrants, “Hey here’s a plan—lets dump a hundred thousand Somalis in the whitest parts of the U.S. That’ll save us from Fargo Hitler!” Inundating the West with non-White immigrants is seen by Jews as an insurance policy against “white supremacy.” The idea is that these immigrants will act as a wedge, diluting “white power” while remaining small enough to be manageable.

Jews have done this everywhere—playing two groups against each other as a way of assuring Jewish security. Let’s play Hamas against the Palestinian authority. Let’s play ISIS against Assad. … But today we live in a world in which even the lowliest bark-eater in the Kalahari can have internet access. It’s not as easy to fool entire groups anymore (individuals, sure, but not an entire race, ethnicity or faction). …

And now we Jews, so worried that Minnesota might become the Frozen Fourth Reich if left in the hands of evil whites, have created for ourselves a good old-fashioned golem in Ilhan Omar (and a bunch of the other Third World freshman congressthingies). Yeah, Omar hates whites. Yeah, she thinks white supremacy lurks behind every glass of milk and “OK” finger sign. But she hates Jews a hell of a lot more…

In a perfect world, the Rabbinical Rain Men would finally get the fuck over the Holocaust and end their war of hostility against the West. They’d see that whites are no longer the enemy, but indeed the opposite. They’d see that importing foreign mud to mold golem in traditionally white regions of the U.S is bad strategy.

Here Cole vividly restates Kevin MacDonald’s point in Culture of Critique that: “Although multiculturalist ideology was invented by Jewish intellectuals to rationalize the continuation of separatism and minority-group ethnocentrism in a modern Western state, several of the recent instantiations of multiculturalism may eventually produce a monster with negative consequences for Judaism.”[97]Kevin MacDonald, The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth‑Century Intellectual and Political Movements, (Westport, CT: Praeger, Revised Paperback edition, 2001), 313. The creation of this “monster” is ostensibly regarded by Jewish leaders and activists as a risk worth taking to demographically, politically and culturally weaken threatening White populations.

In the minds of Jewish leaders and activists nurtured since birth on the cult of “the Holocaust,” White nationalism is still the most ominous threat to Jewish survival. This is reflected in the unquestioning commitment of the vast majority of Jewish activists and intellectuals (Cole excepted) to mass non-White immigration and multiculturalism in all historically White nations.

Conclusion

While Jews and the Left offers a useful catalogue of Jewish involvement in radical political movements throughout the world over the last two centuries, it recycles many of the same apologetic tropes that permeate the work of other Jewish historians and intellectuals. Mendes mischaracterizes the Jewish identity and affiliations of important Jewish communist leaders (like Lazar Kaganovich), and offers no examination of their often-murderous actions. He provides feeble apologies for the Jewish practices that engendered hostility among the native peasantry in the Pale of Settlement. The inherent weakness of his position necessitates specious argumentation and desperate resort to that evergreen of Jewish apologetic historiography: the innate irrationality and malevolence of the European mind and character. This is the invariable fallback position in any quest to exculpate Jews from responsibility for the crimes of communism in the Soviet Union and throughout Eastern Europe. Though less inclined than Brossat and Klingberg in Revolutionary Yiddishland to glorify Jewish communist militants, Mendes is equally keen to evade, whitewash and excuse disproportionate Jewish involvement in some of the worst crimes of the twentieth century.

[May 14, 2019] Despite a $ 22 Trillion National Debt, America Is on a Military Spending Spree. 800 Overseas US Military Bases by Masud Wadan

Highly recommended!
Trump provided to be another Obama -- master of "bait and switch". His promise to disengage from foreign wars remains an unfulfilled promise. Due to thefact that he is owned by pro-Israel lobby he broung into his administrations such rabid neocons as chickenhawk Bolton and smug ruthless careerist masquerading as far-right zealot as Pompeo (and before them Haley). His promises to raise the standard of living of middles class (which is impossible without cutting the military budget) remains fake. He is a fake. The second fake after obama -- Republican Obama.
Notable quotes:
"... While the national debt of the United States was recorded at 22.03 trillion as of April 2019, Washington's going ahead with its hawkish policies worldwide with recent NATO summit pushing for further unity against China, Russia and Iran. NATO's annual overall military budget was US$ 957 billion in 2017 where the US's share was US$ 686 billion, accounting for 72 percent of the total. This number is pressed by the US to rise in the years to come. ..."
"... According to The Guardian, Trump takes more than $1tn in taxpayer money and allocates $750bn to the military. In other words, out of every taxpayer dollar, 62 cents go to the military and Department of Homeland Security and seven cents to Veterans affairs. It leaves just 31 cents for all the rest: education, job training, community economic development, housing, safe drinking water and clear air, health and science research and the prevention of war through diplomacy and humanitarian aid. ..."
"... In 2017, US spent US$ 685,957 billion with 3.6 of its GDP on military spending while the UK stood second at US$ 55,237 billion with 2.1 per cent of GDP. France and Germany allocated US$ 45,927 billion and 45,472 billion respectively with 1.8 and 1.2 percent of their GDPs. The NATO member states are pressured for raising their defense spending to 2 percent and gradually up to 4 percent in five years. ..."
Apr 10, 2019 | www.globalresearch.ca

While the national debt of the United States was recorded at 22.03 trillion as of April 2019, Washington's going ahead with its hawkish policies worldwide with recent NATO summit pushing for further unity against China, Russia and Iran. NATO's annual overall military budget was US$ 957 billion in 2017 where the US's share was US$ 686 billion, accounting for 72 percent of the total. This number is pressed by the US to rise in the years to come.

According to The Guardian, Trump takes more than $1tn in taxpayer money and allocates $750bn to the military. In other words, out of every taxpayer dollar, 62 cents go to the military and Department of Homeland Security and seven cents to Veterans affairs. It leaves just 31 cents for all the rest: education, job training, community economic development, housing, safe drinking water and clear air, health and science research and the prevention of war through diplomacy and humanitarian aid.

The Trump budget finds vast billions for militarization, while it cuts "smaller" poverty alleviation projects and other programs, claiming the goal is to save money.

Rutherford Institute's founder and director John W. WhiteHead writes in his institute's website that the American nation is being preyed upon by a military industrial complex that is propped up by war profiteers, corrupt politicians and foreign governments. He remarks:

"Don't be fooled into thinking that your hard-earned tax dollars are being used for national security and urgent military needs".

He writes "you know what happens to tax dollars that are left over at the end of the government's fiscal year? Government agencies – including the Department of Defense – go on a 'use it or lose it' spending spree so they can justify asking for money in the next fiscal year".

"We are talking about $97 billion worth of wasteful spending"

He maintains that the nation's educational system is pathetic, the infrastructure is antiquated and growing more outdated by the day and the health system is overpriced and inaccessible to those who need it most.

The tax cuts on super-rich, outflow of huge sums in interest payment for debt and more spending are plunging the US economy into a new crisis, according to many authors. The US economy faces a deficit which means the spending especially on military and defence is far exceeding the tax revenues.

In 2017, US spent US$ 685,957 billion with 3.6 of its GDP on military spending while the UK stood second at US$ 55,237 billion with 2.1 per cent of GDP. France and Germany allocated US$ 45,927 billion and 45,472 billion respectively with 1.8 and 1.2 percent of their GDPs. The NATO member states are pressured for raising their defense spending to 2 percent and gradually up to 4 percent in five years.

According to a study regarding world powers' overseas military bases

In other words, the US possesses up to 95 per cent of the world's military bases . The Department of Defense says that its locations include 164 countries. Put another way, it has a military presence of some sort in approximately 84 percent of the nations on this planet.

The US Military Bases Abroad Are Disrupting the World Order

The annual cost of deploying US military personnel overseas, as well as maintaining and running those foreign bases, tops out at an estimated US$ 150 billion annually. The US bases abroad cost upwards of US$ 50 billion only for building and maintenance, which is enough to address pressing needs at home in education, health care, housing and infrastructure.

In 2017 and 2018, the world's largest military spenders were the United States, China, Saudi Arabia, Russia and India. The UK took over France as sixth largest spender in 2018 while Japan and Germany stood at eighth and ninth positions.

In early 2018, Pentagon released a report saying that Afghan war costs US$ 45 billion to taxpayers in the preceding year. Of this amount, US$ 5 billion has been spent on Afghan forces, US$ 13 billion towards US forces in Afghanistan and the rest on economic aid.

But these costs are far lower than the time when the US military was highly engaged in Afghanistan. With nearly 100,000 soldiers in the country from 2010 to 2012, the price for American taxpayers surpassed US$ 100 billion each year. For now, there are around 16,000 US troops in Afghanistan. Despite hundreds of billions of dollars have gone into Afghanistan, the US admits it failed in war against militants in Afghanistan.

In November 2018, another study published by CNBC reported that America has spent US$ 5.9 trillion on wars in the Middle East and Asia since 2001 including in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. The study also reveals that more than 500,000 people have been killed in the wars and nearly 10 million people have been displaced due to violence.

The US has reportedly spent US$ 1.07 trillion in Afghanistan since 2001 which include Overseas Contingency Operations funds dedicated to Afghanistan, costs on the base budget of the Department of Defense and increase to the budget of the Department of Veteran Affairs.

In Afghanistan, the US costs of war in 2001 commenced with US$ 37.3 billion that soared to US$ 57.3 billion in 2007 and US$ 100 billion in 2009. The year with record spending was 2010 with US$ 112.7 billion that slightly plummeted to US$ 110.4 billion in 2011 but took downwards trend in the later years.

Due to skyrocketing military costs on the US government, Trump Administration recently decided to pack up some of its military bases in Afghanistan and Middle East to diminish expenditures, though it doesn't mean the wars would end at all.

According to Afghanistan Analysts Network, the US Congress has appropriated more than US$ 126 billion in aid for Afghanistan since financial year 2002, with almost 63 percent for security and 28 percent for development and the remainder for civilian operations, mostly budgetary assistance and humanitarian aid. Alongside the US aid, many world countries have pumped millions of dollars in development aids, but what is evident for insiders and outsiders is that a trickle of those funds has actually gone into Afghanistan's reconstruction.

With eighteen years into Afghan war, the security is deteriorating; Afghan air force is ill-equipped; poppy cultivation is on the rise; roads and highways are dilapidated or unconstructed; no mediocre hospital and health care has been established; weekly conflict causalities hit 150-250; electricity is still imported from Central Asian countries; economy remains dependent upon imports; unemployment rate is at its peak; more than three quarters of population live under poverty line and many, many more miseries persist or aggravate.

The US boasts of being the largest multi-billion dollar donor for Afghanistan, but if one takes a deeper look at the living standards of majority and the overall conditions, it can be immediately grasped that less than half of that exaggerated fund has been consumed. The US-made government of Afghanistan has deliberately been left behind to rank as the first corrupt country in the world. Thanks to the same unaddressed pervasive corruption, a hefty amount of that fund has been either directed back to the US hands or embezzled by senior Afghan officials.

Afghanistan's new Living Conditions Survey shows that poverty is more widespread today than it was immediately after the fall of Taliban regime, or in other words, in the early days of US invasion.

Next month, Kabul will host a Consultative Loya Jirga attended by around 2,000 representatives from Afghanistan which will cost the Afghan Ministry of Finance AF 369 million (equivalent to five million US$). Even as the past has proved that these events are only symbolic and further complicating the achievement of peace, a country with great majority under poverty line doesn't deserve to organize such costly gatherings.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Masud Wadan is a geopolitical analyst based in Kabul. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from Salon.com

The original source of this article is Global Research Copyright © Masud Wadan , Global Research, 2019

[May 13, 2019] US Foreign Policy as Bellicose as Ever by Serge Halimi

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Historians will study this period when there was a convergence in the objectives of the US intelligence agencies, the leaders of the Hillary Clinton wing of the Democratic Party, the majority of Republican politicians and the anti-Trump media. That common objective was stopping any entente between Moscow and Washington. ..."
"... Each group had its own motive. The intelligence community and elements in the Pentagon feared a rapprochement between Trump and Putin would deprive them of a 'presentable' enemy once ISIS's military power was destroyed. The Clinton camp was keen to ascribe an unexpected defeat to a cause other than the candidate and her inept campaign; Moscow's alleged hacking of Democratic Party emails fitted the bill. And the neocons, who 'promoted the Iraq war, detest Putin and consider Israel's security non-negotiable' ( 8 ), hated Trump's neo-isolationist instincts. ..."
"... This is why the Democratic Party data hack, which the US intelligence services allege is the work of the Russians, obsesses the party, and the press. It strikes two targets: delegitimising Trump's election and stopping his promotion of a thaw with Russia. Has Washington's aggrieved reaction to a foreign power's interference in a state's domestic affairs, and its elections, struck no one as odd? Why do just a handful of people point out that, not long ago, Angela Merkel's phone was tapped not by the Kremlin but by the Obama administration? ..."
"... Now the Times is in the vanguard of those preparing psychologically for conflict with Russia. There is almost no remaining resistance to its line. On the right, as the Wall Street Journal called for the US to arm Ukraine on 3 August, Vice-President Mike Pence spoke on a visit to Estonia about 'the spectre of [Russian] aggression', encouraged Georgia to join NATO, and paid tribute to Montenegro, NATO's newest member. ..."
"... At this stage, it doesn't matter any more what Trump thinks. He is no longer able to get his way on the issue. Moscow has noted this and is drawing its own conclusions. ..."
May 10, 2019 | www.counterpunch.org

... ... ...

Trump was after a good deal from Russia. A new partnership would have reversed deteriorating relations between the powers by encouraging their alliance against ISIS and recognising the importance of Ukraine to Russia's security. Current US paranoia about everything Kremlin-related has encouraged amnesia about what President Barack Obama said in 2016, after the annexation of the Crimea and Russia's direct intervention in Syria. He too put the danger posed by President Vladimir Putin into perspective: the interventions in Ukraine and the Middle East were, Obama said, improvised 'in response to a client state that was about to slip out of his grasp' ( 5 ).

Obama went on: 'The Russians can't change us or significantly weaken us. They are a smaller country, they are a weaker country, their economy doesn't produce anything that anybody wants to buy, except oil and gas and arms.' What he feared most about Putin was the sympathy he inspired in Trump and his supporters: '37% of Republican voters approve of Putin, the former head of the KGB. Ronald Reagan would roll over in his grave' ( 6 ).

By January 2017, Reagan's eternal rest was no longer threatened. 'Presidents come and go but the policy never changes,' Putin concluded ( 7 ). Historians will study this period when there was a convergence in the objectives of the US intelligence agencies, the leaders of the Hillary Clinton wing of the Democratic Party, the majority of Republican politicians and the anti-Trump media. That common objective was stopping any entente between Moscow and Washington.

Each group had its own motive. The intelligence community and elements in the Pentagon feared a rapprochement between Trump and Putin would deprive them of a 'presentable' enemy once ISIS's military power was destroyed. The Clinton camp was keen to ascribe an unexpected defeat to a cause other than the candidate and her inept campaign; Moscow's alleged hacking of Democratic Party emails fitted the bill. And the neocons, who 'promoted the Iraq war, detest Putin and consider Israel's security non-negotiable' ( 8 ), hated Trump's neo-isolationist instincts.

The media, especially the New York Times and Washington Post, eagerly sought a new Watergate scandal and knew their middle-class, urban, educated readers loathe Trump for his vulgarity, affection for the far right, violence and lack of culture ( 9 ). So they were searching for any information or rumour that could cause his removal or force a resignation. As in Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express, everyone had his particular motive for striking the same victim.

The intrigue developed quickly as these four areas have fairly porous boundaries. The understanding between Republican hawks such as John McCain, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and the military-industrial complex was a given. The architects of recent US imperial adventures, especially Iraq, had not enjoyed the 2016 campaign or Trump's jibes about their expertise. During the campaign, some 50 intellectuals and officials announced that, despite being Republicans, they would not support Trump because he 'would put at risk our country's national security and wellbeing.' Some went so far as to vote for Clinton ( 10 ).

Ambitions of a 'deep state'?

The press feared that Trump's incompetence would threaten the US-dominated international order. It had no problem with military crusades, especially when emblazoned with grand humanitarian, internationalist or progressive principles. According to the press criteria, Putin and his predilection for rightwing nationalists were obvious culprits. But so were Saudi Arabia or Israel, though that did not prevent the Saudis being able to count on the ferociously anti-Russian Wall Street Journal, or Israel enjoying the support of almost all US media, despite having a far-right element in its government.

Just over a week before Trump took office, journalist Glenn Greenwald, who broke the Edward Snowden story that revealed the mass surveillance programmes run by the National Security Agency, warned of the direction of travel. He observed that the US media had become the intelligence services' 'most valuable instrument, much of which reflexively reveres, serves, believes, and sides with hidden intelligence officials.' This at a time when 'Democrats, still reeling from their unexpected and traumatic election loss as well as a systemic collapse of their party, seemingly divorced further and further from reason with each passing day, are willing -- eager -- to embrace any claim, cheer any tactic, align with any villain, regardless of how unsupported, tawdry and damaging those behaviours might be' ( 11 ).

The anti-Russian coalition hadn't then achieved all its objectives, but Greenwald already discerned the ambitions of a 'deep state'. 'There really is, at this point,' he said 'obvious open warfare between this unelected but very powerful faction that resides in Washington and sees presidents come and go, on the one hand, and the person that the American democracy elected to be the president on the other.' One suspicion, fed by the intelligence services, galvanised all Trump's enemies: Moscow had compromising secrets about Trump -- financial, electoral, sexual -- capable of paralysing him should a crisis between the two countries occur ( 12 ).

Covert opposition to Trump

The suspicion of such a murky understanding, summed up by the pro-Clinton economist Paul Krugman as a 'Trump-Putin ticket', has transformed the anti-Russian activity into a domestic political weapon against a president increasingly hated outside the ultraconservative bloc. It is no longer unusual to hear leftwing activists turn FBI or CIA apologists, since these agencies became a home for a covert opposition to Trump and the source of many leaks.

This is why the Democratic Party data hack, which the US intelligence services allege is the work of the Russians, obsesses the party, and the press. It strikes two targets: delegitimising Trump's election and stopping his promotion of a thaw with Russia. Has Washington's aggrieved reaction to a foreign power's interference in a state's domestic affairs, and its elections, struck no one as odd? Why do just a handful of people point out that, not long ago, Angela Merkel's phone was tapped not by the Kremlin but by the Obama administration?

The silence was once broken when the Republican representative for North Carolina, Tom Tillis, questioned former CIA director James Clapper in January: 'The United States has been involved in one way or another in 81 different elections since World War II. That doesn't include coups or the regime changes, some tangible evidence where we have tried to affect an outcome to our purpose. Russia has done it some 36 times.' This perspective rarely disturbs the New York Times 's fulminations against Moscow's trickery.

The Times also failed to inform younger readers that Russia's president Boris Yeltsin, who picked Putin as his successor in 1999, had been re-elected in 1996, though seriously ill and often drunk, in a fraudulent election conducted with the assistance of US advisers and the overt support of President Bill Clinton. The Times hailed the result as 'a victory for Russian democracy' and declared that 'the forces of democracy and reform won a vital but not definitive victory in Russia yesterday For the first time in history, a free Russia has freely chosen its leader.'

Now the Times is in the vanguard of those preparing psychologically for conflict with Russia. There is almost no remaining resistance to its line. On the right, as the Wall Street Journal called for the US to arm Ukraine on 3 August, Vice-President Mike Pence spoke on a visit to Estonia about 'the spectre of [Russian] aggression', encouraged Georgia to join NATO, and paid tribute to Montenegro, NATO's newest member.

No longer getting his way

But the Times, far from worrying about these provocative gestures coinciding with heightened tensions between great powers (trade sanctions against Russia, Moscow's expulsion of US diplomats), poured oil on the fire. On 2 August it praised the reaffirmation of 'America's commitment to defend democratic nations against those countries that would undermine them' and regretted that Mike Pence's views 'aren't as eagerly embraced and celebrated by the man he works for back in the White House.'

At this stage, it doesn't matter any more what Trump thinks. He is no longer able to get his way on the issue. Moscow has noted this and is drawing its own conclusions.

... ... ...

[May 12, 2019] Charting a Progressive Foreign Policy for the Trump Era and Beyond

Highly recommended!
A really interesting discussion. the problem with discussion on new direction of the USA foreign policy is that forces that control the current forign policy will not allow any changes. Russiagate was in part a paranoid reaction of the Deep State to the possibility of detente with Russia and also questioning "neoliberal sacred truth" like who did 9/11 (to suggest that Bush is guilty was a clear "Red Flag") and critical attribute to forrign wars which feed so many Imperial servants.
BTW Trump completely disappointed his supporters in the foreign policy is continuing to accelerate that direction
May 10, 2019 | www.youtube.com

darren alevi 2 months ago

Here is how you chart a Progressive foreign policy stop treating the US intelligence agencies of the CIA and FBI as orgs of integrity. Ban all foreign lobbying so no foreign government can influence foreign policy.

Disband the Veto powers that the US holds over the UN security council. Prosecute former Presidents and Government officials for the illegal regime change wars.

Connect with other progressive politicians around the world such as Jeremy Corbyn, Jean Luc Melenchon and Moon Jae In. End the arms race and begin a peaceful space race to colonize the moon diverting funds from the military industrial complex into something fulfilling.

Peter Knopfler 2 months ago

What BULL while world under the fog of Berlin wall down, USA VP Bush attacks Panama 8000 Marines kills 3500 panamanians , gives the banks to CIA, therefore Panama papers. Another coup in Latin America. When V.P. Bush "we had to get over the Vietnam Syndrome". So Killing 3500 people , to get over the loser spirit, suicidal influence from Vietnam. SHAME USA more hate for Americans. And Now Venezuela, more Shame and Hate for Americans. Yankee go home, Gringo stay home is chanted once more.

Ron Widelec 2 months ago

We need an Anti-imperialist league like 100 ago. And an anti-war caucus in congress!

Michael 26CD 2 months ago

The audio is a little off especially for a couple speakers but this discussion is great. Trump ran on a non-interventionist platform, but in his typical dishonest fashion, he appointed people who are developing usable nukes like characters out of Dr. Strangelove. Nuclear weapons and climate change are both existential threats that all the world needs to act together to address.

asbeautifulasasunset 2 months ago

17 plus years later some people are finally starting to talk about the $6 trillion wars and the $750 billion annual Defense Department Budget.... Please consider giving Tulsi Gabbard at least a $1 contribution so she can be part of the debate between Democratic presidential candidates. She has made ending the wars on terrorism and regime change the primary issue of her candidacy. She is an Iraq vet and currently in the National Guard. Her rank is Colonel. She needs $62,500 and contributions from 200 people in each of 20 states. Thanks for anything you can do.

Jim R2 months ago

President Eisenhower's farewell address warned us of the very thing that is happening today with the industrial military complex and the power and influence that that entity weilds.

chickendinner2012, 2 months ago

End the wars, no more imperialism, instead have fair trade prioritizing countries that have a living wage and aren't waging war etc. No more supporting massive human rights abusers like Saudi Arabia, Israel, UAE etc. and we need to get three of the most aggressive countries the F UK US coalition that constantly invades and bombs everyone they want to steal from to stop doing war, stop coups, stop covert sabotage, stop sanctions.

asbeautifulasasunset, 2 months ago

17 plus years later some people are finally starting to talk about the $6 trillion wars and the $750 billion annual Defense Department Budget.... Please consider giving Tulsi Gabbard at least a $1 contribution so she can be part of the debate between Democratic presidential candidates. She has made ending the wars on terrorism and regime change the primary issue of her candidacy. She is an Iraq vet and currently in the National Guard. Her rank is Colonel. She needs $62,500 and contributions from 200 people in each of 20 states. Thanks for anything you can do.

carol wagner sudol2 months ago

Israel today has become a nazi like state. period. That says it all. This is heart-breaking. Gaza is simply a concentration camp.

Tom Hall, 2 months ago

All our post WWII foreign policy has been about securing maintaining and enhancing corporate commercial interests. What would seem to progressives as catastrophic failures are in fact monumental achievements of wealth creation and concentration. The billions spent on think tanks to develop policy are mostly about how to develop grand narratives that conceal the true beneficiaries of US foreign policy and create fear, uncertainty and insecurity at home and abroad.

[May 11, 2019] Why Crowdstrike's Russian Hacking Story Fell Apart -- Say Hello to Fancy Bear

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Ukraine has been screaming for the US to start a war with Russia for the past 2 1/2 years. ..."
"... Is Ukrainian Intelligence trying to invent a reason for the US to take a hard-line stance against Russia? Are they using Crowdstrike to carry this out? ..."
"... Meet the real Fancy Bear and Cozy Bear, part of the groups that are targeting Ukrainian positions for the Donetsk and Lugansk People's Republics. These people were so tech savvy they didn't know the Ukrainian SBU (Ukrainian CIA/internal security) records every phone call and most internet use in Ukraine and Donbass. Donbass still uses Ukrainian phone and internet services. ..."
"... This is a civil war and people supporting either side are on both sides of the contact line. The SBU is awestruck because there are hundreds if not thousands of people helping to target the private volunteer armies supported by Ukrainian-Americans. ..."
"... If she was that close to the investigation Crowdstrike did how credible is she? Her sister Alexandra was named one of 16 people that shaped the election by Yahoo news. The DNC hacking investigation done by Crowdstrike concluded hacking was done by Russian actors based on the work done by Alexandra Chalupa? That is the conclusion of her sister Andrea Chalupa and obviously enough for Crowdstrike to make the Russian government connection. These words mirror Dimitri Alperovitch's identification process in his interview with PBS Judy Woodruff. ..."
"... How close is Dimitri Alperovitch to DNC officials? Close enough professionally he should have stepped down from an investigation that had the chance of throwing a presidential election in a new direction. ..."
"... According to Esquire.com , Alperovitch has vetted speeches for Hillary Clinton about cyber security issues in the past. Because of his work on the Sony hack, President Barrack Obama personally called and said the measures taken were directly because of his work. ..."
"... Still, this is not enough to show a conflict of interest. Alperovitch's relationships with the Chalupas, radical groups, think tanks, Ukrainian propagandists, and Ukrainian state supported hackers do. When it all adds up and you see it together, we have found a Russian that tried hard to influence the outcome of the US presidential election in 2016. ..."
"... According to Robert Parry's article At the forefront of people that would have taken senior positions in a Clinton administration and especially in foreign policy are the Atlantic Council. Their main goal is still a major confrontation with nuclear-armed Russia. ..."
"... The Atlantic Council is the think tank associated and supported by the CEEC (Central and Eastern European Coalition). The CEEC has only one goal which is war with Russia. Their question to candidates looking for their support in the election was "Are you willing to go to war with Russia?" Hillary Clinton has received their unqualified support throughout the campaign. ..."
"... What does any of this have to do with Dimitri Alperovitch and Crowdstrike? Since the Atlantic Council would have taken senior cabinet and policy positions, his own fellowship status at the Atlantic Council and relationship with Irene Chalupa creates a definite conflict of interest for Crowdstrike's investigation. Trump's campaign was gaining ground and Clinton needed a boost. Had she won, would he have been in charge of the CIA, NSA, or Homeland Security? ..."
"... Alperovitch's relationship with Andrea Chalupa's efforts and Ukrainian intelligence groups is where things really heat up. Noted above she works with Euromaidanpress.com and Informnapalm.org which is the outlet for Ukrainian state-sponsored hackers. ..."
"... When you look at Dimitri Alperovitch's twitter relationships, you have to ask why the CEO of a $150 million dollar company like Crowdstrike follows Ukrainian InformNapalm and its hackers individually . There is a mutual relationship. When you add up his work for the OUNb, Ukraine, support for Ukraine's Intelligence, and to the hackers it needs to be investigated to see if Ukraine is conspiring against the US government. ..."
"... Alperovitch and Fancy Bear tweet each other? ..."
"... Crowdstrike is part of Ukrainian nationalist hacker network ..."
"... In an interview with Euromaidanpress these hackers say they have no need for the CIA. They consider the CIA amateurish. They also say they are not part of the Ukrainian military Cyberalliance is a quasi-organization with the participation of several groups – RUH8, Trinity, Falcon Flames, Cyberhunta. There are structures affiliated to the hackers – the Myrotvorets site, Informnapalm analytical agency." ..."
"... Although OSINT Academy sounds fairly innocuous, it's the official twitter account for Ukraine's Ministry of Information head Dimitri Zolotukin. It is also Ukrainian Intelligence. The Ministry of Information started the Peacekeeper or Myrotvorets website that geolocates journalists and other people for assassination. If you disagree with OUNb politics, you could be on the list. ..."
"... This single tweet on a network chart shows that out of all the Ukrainian Ministry of Information Minister's following, he only wanted the 3 hacking groups associated with both him and Alperovitch to get the tweet. Alperovitch's story was received and not retweeted or shared. If this was just Alperovitch's victory, it was a victory for Ukraine. It would be shared heavily. If it was a victory for the hacking squad, it would be smart to keep it to themselves and not draw unwanted attention. ..."
"... Pravy Sektor Hackers and Crowdstrike? ..."
"... What sharp movements in international politics have been made lately? Let me spell it out for the 17 US Intelligence Agencies so there is no confusion. These state sponsored, Russian language hackers in Eastern European time zones have shown with the Surkov hack they have the tools and experience to hack states that are looking out for it. They are also laughing at US intel efforts. ..."
"... The hackers also made it clear that they will do anything to serve Ukraine. Starting a war between Russia and the USA is the one way they could serve Ukraine best, and hurt Russia worst. Given those facts, if the DNC hack was according to the criteria given by Alperovitch, both he and these hackers need to be investigated. ..."
"... According to the Esquire interview "Alperovitch was deeply frustrated: He thought the government should tell the world what it knew. There is, of course, an element of the personal in his battle cry. "A lot of people who are born here don't appreciate the freedoms we have, the opportunities we have, because they've never had it any other way," he told me. "I have." ..."
"... While I agree patriotism is a great thing, confusing it with this kind of nationalism is not. Alperovitch seems to think by serving OUNb Ukraine's interests and delivering a conflict with Russia that is against American interests, he's a patriot. He isn't serving US interests. He's definitely a Ukrainian patriot. Maybe he should move to Ukraine. ..."
Dec 29, 2017 | www.washingtonsblog.com

In the wake of the JAR-16-20296 dated December 29, 2016 about hacking and influencing the 2016 election, the need for real evidence is clear. The joint report adds nothing substantial to the October 7th report. It relies on proofs provided by the cyber security firm Crowdstrike that is clearly not on par with intelligence findings or evidence. At the top of the report is an "as is" statement showing this.

The difference between Dmitri Alperovitch's claims which are reflected in JAR-1620296 and this article is that enough evidence is provided to warrant an investigation of specific parties for the DNC hacks. The real story involves specific anti-American actors that need to be investigated for real crimes.

For instance, the malware used was an out-dated version just waiting to be found. The one other interesting point is that the Russian malware called Grizzly Steppe is from Ukraine . How did Crowdstrike miss this when it is their business to know?

Later in this article you'll meet and know a little more about the real "Fancy Bear and Cozy Bear." The bar for identification set by Crowdstrike has never been able to get beyond words like probably, maybe, could be, or should be, in their attribution.

The article is lengthy because the facts need to be in one place. The bar Dimitri Alperovitch set for identifying the hackers involved is that low. Other than asking America to trust them, how many solid facts has Alperovitch provided to back his claim of Russian involvement?

The December 29th JAR adds a flowchart that shows how a basic phishing hack is performed. It doesn't add anything significant beyond that. Noticeably, they use both their designation APT 28 and APT 29 as well as the Crowdstrike labels of Fancy Bear and Cozy Bear separately.

This is important because information from outside intelligence agencies has the value of rumor or unsubstantiated information at best according to policy. Usable intelligence needs to be free from partisan politics and verifiable. Intel agencies noted back in the early 90's that every private actor in the information game was radically political.

The Hill.com article about Russia hacking the electric grid is a perfect example of why this intelligence is political and not taken seriously. If any proof of Russian involvement existed, the US would be at war. Under current laws of war, there would be no difference between an attack on the power grid or a missile strike.

According to the Hill "Private security firms provided more detailed forensic analysis, which the FBI and DHS said Thursday correlated with the IC's findings.

"The Joint Analysis Report recognizes the excellent work undertaken by
security companies and private sector network owners and operators, and provides new indicators of compromise and malicious infrastructure
identified during the course of investigations and incident response," read a statement. The report identities two Russian intelligence groups already named by CrowdStrike and other private security firms."

In an interview with Washingtonsblog , William Binney, the creator of the NSA global surveillance system said "I expected to see the IP's or other signatures of APT's 28/29 [the entities which the U.S. claims hacked the Democratic emails] and where they were located and how/when the data got transferred to them from DNC/HRC [i.e. Hillary Rodham Clinton]/etc. They seem to have been following APT 28/29 since at least 2015, so, where are they?"

According to the latest Washington Post story, Crowdstrike's CEO tied a group his company dubbed "Fancy Bear" to targeting Ukrainian artillery positions in Debaltsevo as well as across the Ukrainian civil war front for the past 2 years.

Alperovitch states in many articles the Ukrainians were using an Android app to target the self-proclaimed Republics positions and that hacking this app was what gave targeting data to the armies in Donbass instead.

Alperovitch first gained notice when he was the VP in charge of threat research with McAfee. Asked to comment on Alperovitch's discovery of Russian hacks on Larry King, John McAfee had this to say. "Based on all of his experience, McAfee does not believe that Russians were behind the hacks on the Democratic National Committee (DNC), John Podesta's emails, and the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign. As he told RT, "if it looks like the Russians did it, then I can guarantee you it was not the Russians."

How does Crowdstrike's story part with reality? First is the admission that it is probably, maybe, could be Russia hacking the DNC. " Intelligence agencies do not have specific intelligence showing officials in the Kremlin 'directing' the identified individuals to pass the Democratic emails to Wiki Leaks."

The public evidence never goes beyond the word possibility. While never going beyond that or using facts, Crowdstrike insists that it's Russia behind both Clinton's and the Ukrainian losses. NBC carried the story because one of the partners in Crowdstrike is also a consultant for NBC.

According to NBC the story reads like this." The company, Crowdstrike, was hired by the DNC to investigate the hack and issued a report publicly attributing it to Russian intelligence. One of Crowdstrike's senior executives is Shawn Henry, a former senior FBI official who consults for NBC News.

"But the Russians used the app to turn the tables on their foes, Crowdstrike says. Once a Ukrainian soldier downloaded it on his Android phone, the Russians were able to eavesdrop on his communications and determine his position through geo-location.

In June, Crowdstrike went public with its findings that two separate Russian intelligence agencies had hacked the DNC. One, which Crowdstrike and other researchers call Cozy Bear, is believed to be linked to Russia's CIA, known as the FSB. The other, known as Fancy Bear, is believed to be tied to the military intelligence agency, called the GRU."

The information is so certain the level of proof never rises above "believed to be." According to the December 12th Intercept article "Most importantly, the Post adds that "intelligence agencies do not have specific intelligence showing officials in the Kremlin 'directing' the identified individuals to pass the Democratic emails to WikiLeaks."

Because Ukrainian soldiers are using a smartphone app they activate their geolocation to use it. Targeting is from location to location. The app would need the current user location to make it work.

In 2015 I wrote an article that showed many of the available open source tools that geolocate, and track people. They even show street view. This means that using simple means, someone with freeware or an online website, and not a military budget can look at what you are seeing at any given moment.

Where Crowdstrike fails is insisting people believe that the code they see is (a) an advanced way to geolocate and (b) it was how a state with large resources would do it. Would you leave a calling card where you would get caught and fined through sanctions or worse? If you use an anonymous online resource at least Crowdstrike won't believe you are Russian and possibly up to something.

" Using open source tools this has been going on for years in the private sector. For geolocation purposes, your smartphone is one of the greatest tools to use. Finding and following you has never been easier . Let's face it if you are going to stalk someone, "street view" on a map is the next best thing to being there. In the following video, the software hacks your modem. It's only one step from your phone or computer."

If you read that article and watch the video you'll see that using "geo-stalker" is a better choice if you are on a low budget or no budget. Should someone tell the Russians they overpaid?

According to Alperovitch, the smartphone app plotted targets in about 15 seconds . This means that there is only a small window to get information this way.

Using the open source tools I wrote about previously, you could track your targets all-day. In 2014, most Ukrainian forces were using social media regularly. It would be easy to maintain a map of their locations and track them individually.

From my research into those tools, someone using Python scripts would find it easy to take photos, listen to conversations, turn on GPS, or even turn the phone on when they chose to. Going a step further than Alperovitch, without the help of the Russian government, GRU, or FSB, anyone could take control of the drones Ukraine is fond of flying and land them. Or they could download the footage the drones are taking. It's copy and paste at that point. Would you bother the FSB, GRU, or Vladimir Putin with the details or just do it?

In the WaPo article Alperovitch states "The Fancy Bear crew evidently hacked the app, allowing the GRU to use the phone's GPS coordinates to track the Ukrainian troops' position.

In that way, the Russian military could then target the Ukrainian army with artillery and other weaponry. Ukrainian brigades operating in eastern Ukraine were on the front lines of the conflict with Russian-backed separatist forces during the early stages of the conflict in late 2014, CrowdStrike noted. By late 2014, Russian forces in the region numbered about 10,000. The Android app was useful in helping the Russian troops locate Ukrainian artillery positions."

In late 2014, I personally did the only invasive passport and weapons checks that I know of during the Ukrainian civil war. I spent days looking for the Russian army every major publication said were attacking Ukraine. The keyword Cyber Security industry leader Alperovitch used is "evidently." Crowdstrike noted that in late 2014, there were 10,000 Russian forces in the region.

When I did the passport and weapons check, it was under the condition there would be no telephone calls. We went where I wanted to go. We stopped when I said to stop. I checked the documents and the weapons with no obstacles. The weapons check was important because Ukraine was stating that Russia was giving Donbass modern weapons at the time. Each weapon is stamped with a manufacture date. The results are in the articles above.

The government in Kiev agreed with my findings throughout 2014 and 2015. There were and are no Russian troops fighting in Donbass regardless of what Mr. Alperovitch asserts. There are some Russian volunteers which I have covered in detail.

Based on my findings which the CIA would call hard evidence, almost all the fighters had Ukrainian passports. There are volunteers from other countries. In Debaltsevo today, I would question Alperovitch's assertion of Russian troops based on the fact the passports will be Ukrainian and reflect my earlier findings. There is no possibly, could be, might be, about it.

The SBU, Olexander Turchinov, and the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense all agree that Crowdstrike is dead wrong in this assessment . Although subtitles aren't on it, the former Commandant of Ukrainian Army Headquarters thanks God Russia never invaded or Ukraine would have been in deep trouble.

How could Dimitri Alperovitch and Crowdstrike be this wrong on easily checked detail and still get this much media attention? Could the investment made by Google and some very large players have anything to do with the media Crowdstrike is causing?

In an interview with PBS newshour on December 22nd 2016, Dmitri Alperovitch finally produced the hard evidence he has for Russian involvement clearly. To be fair, he did state it several times before. It just didn't resonate or the media and US intelligence agencies weren't listening.

According to Alperovitch, the CEO of a $150 million dollar cyber security company "And when you think about, well, who would be interested in targeting Ukraine artillerymen in eastern Ukraine who has interest in hacking the Democratic Party, Russia government comes to mind, but specifically, Russian military that would have operational over forces in the Ukraine and would target these artillerymen."

That statement is most of the proof of Russian involvement he has. That's it, that's all the CIA, FBI have to go on. It's why they can't certify the intelligence. It's why they can't get beyond the threshold of maybe.

Woodruff then asked two important questions. She asked if Crowdstrike was still working for the DNC. Alperovitch responded "We're protecting them going forward. The investigation is closed in terms of what happened there. But certainly, we've seen the campaigns, political organizations are continued to be targeted, and they continue to hire us and use our technology to protect themselves."

Based on the evidence he presented Woodruff, there is no need to investigate further? Obviously, there is no need, the money is rolling in.

Second and most important Judy Woodruff asked if there were any questions about conflicts of interest, how he would answer? This is where Dmitri Alperovitch's story starts to unwind.

His response was "Well, this report was not about the DNC. This report was about information we uncovered about what these Russian actors were doing in eastern Ukraine in terms of locating these artillery units of the Ukrainian army and then targeting them. So, what we just did is said that it looks exactly as the same to the evidence we've already uncovered from the DNC, linking the two together."

Why is this reasonable statement going to take his story off the rails? First, let's look at the facts surrounding his evidence and then look at the real conflicts of interest involved. While carefully evading the question, he neglects to state his conflicts of interest are worthy of a DOJ investigation. Can you mislead the federal government about national security issues and not get investigated yourself?

If Alperovitch's evidence is all there is, then the US government owes some large apologies to Russia.

After showing who is targeting Ukrainian artillerymen, we'll look at what might be a criminal conspiracy.

Crowdstrike CEO Dmitri Alperovitch story about Russian hacks that cost Hillary Clinton the election was broadsided by the SBU (Ukrainian Intelligence and Security) in Ukraine. If Dimitri Alperovitch is working for Ukrainian Intelligence and is providing intelligence to 17 US Intelligence Agencies is it a conflict of interest?

Ukraine has been screaming for the US to start a war with Russia for the past 2 1/2 years. Using facts accepted by leaders on both sides of the conflict, the main proof Crowdstrike shows for evidence doesn't just unravel, it falls apart. Is Ukrainian Intelligence trying to invent a reason for the US to take a hard-line stance against Russia? Are they using Crowdstrike to carry this out?

Real Fancy Bear?

Real Fancy Bear?

Meet the real Fancy Bear and Cozy Bear, part of the groups that are targeting Ukrainian positions for the Donetsk and Lugansk People's Republics. These people were so tech savvy they didn't know the Ukrainian SBU (Ukrainian CIA/internal security) records every phone call and most internet use in Ukraine and Donbass. Donbass still uses Ukrainian phone and internet services.

These are normal people fighting back against private volunteer armies that target their homes, schools, and hospitals. The private volunteer armies like Pravy Sektor, Donbas Battalion, Azov, and Aidar have been cited for atrocities like child rape, torture, murder, and kidnapping. That just gets the ball rolling. These are a large swath of the Ukrainian servicemen Crowdstrike hopes to protect.

This story which just aired on Ukrainian news channel TCN shows the SBU questioning and arresting some of what they call an army of people in the Ukrainian-controlled areas. This news video shows people in Toretsk that provided targeting information to Donbass and people probably caught up in the net accidentally.

This is a civil war and people supporting either side are on both sides of the contact line. The SBU is awestruck because there are hundreds if not thousands of people helping to target the private volunteer armies supported by Ukrainian-Americans.

The first person they show on the video is a woman named Olga Lubochka. On the video her voice is heard from a recorded call saying " In the field, on the left about 130 degrees. Aim and you'll get it." and then " Oh, you hit it so hard you leveled it to the ground.""Am I going to get a medal for this?"

Other people caught up in the raid claim and probably were only calling friends they know. It's common for people to call and tell their family about what is going on around them. This has been a staple in the war especially in outlying villages for people aligned with both sides of the conflict. A neighbor calls his friend and says "you won't believe what I just saw."

Another "fancy bear," Alexander Schevchenko was caught calling friends and telling them that armored personnel carriers had just driven by.

Anatoli Prima, father of a DNR(Donetsk People's Republic) soldier was asked to find out what unit was there and how many artillery pieces.

One woman providing information about fuel and incoming equipment has a husband fighting on the opposite side in Gorlovka. Gorlovka is a major city that's been under artillery attack since 2014. For the past 2 1/2 years, she has remained in their home in Toretsk. According to the video, he's vowed to take no prisoners when they rescue the area.

When asked why they hate Ukraine so much, one responded that they just wanted things to go back to what they were like before the coup in February 2014.

Another said they were born in the Soviet Union and didn't like what was going on in Kiev. At the heart of this statement is the anti- OUN, antinationalist sentiment that most people living in Ukraine feel. The OUNb Bandera killed millions of people in Ukraine, including starving 3 million Soviet soldiers to death. The new Ukraine was founded in 1991 by OUN nationalists outside the fledgling country.

Is giving misleading or false information to 17 US Intelligence Agencies a crime? If it's done by a cyber security industry leader like Crowdstrike should that be investigated? If unwinding the story from the "targeting of Ukrainian volunteers" side isn't enough, we should look at this from the American perspective. How did the Russia influencing the election and DNC hack story evolve? Who's involved? Does this pose conflicts of interest for Dmitri Alperovitch and Crowdstrike? And let's face it, a hacking story isn't complete until real hackers with the skills, motivation, and reason are exposed.

In the last article exploring the DNC hacks the focus was on the Chalupas . The article focused on Alexandra, Andrea, and Irene Chalupa. Their participation in the DNC hack story is what brought it to international attention in the first place.

According to journalist and DNC activist Andrea Chalupa on her Facebook page " After Chalupa sent the email to Miranda (which mentions that she had invited this reporter to a meeting with Ukrainian journalists in Washington), it triggered high-level concerns within the DNC, given the sensitive nature of her work. "That's when we knew it was the Russians," said a Democratic Party source who has been directly involved in the internal probe into the hacked emails. In order to stem the damage, the source said, "we told her to stop her research."" July 25, 2016

If she was that close to the investigation Crowdstrike did how credible is she? Her sister Alexandra was named one of 16 people that shaped the election by Yahoo news. The DNC hacking investigation done by Crowdstrike concluded hacking was done by Russian actors based on the work done by Alexandra Chalupa? That is the conclusion of her sister Andrea Chalupa and obviously enough for Crowdstrike to make the Russian government connection. These words mirror Dimitri Alperovitch's identification process in his interview with PBS Judy Woodruff.

How close is Dimitri Alperovitch to DNC officials? Close enough professionally he should have stepped down from an investigation that had the chance of throwing a presidential election in a new direction.

According to Esquire.com , Alperovitch has vetted speeches for Hillary Clinton about cyber security issues in the past. Because of his work on the Sony hack, President Barrack Obama personally called and said the measures taken were directly because of his work.

Still, this is not enough to show a conflict of interest. Alperovitch's relationships with the Chalupas, radical groups, think tanks, Ukrainian propagandists, and Ukrainian state supported hackers do. When it all adds up and you see it together, we have found a Russian that tried hard to influence the outcome of the US presidential election in 2016.

In my previous article I showed in detail how the Chalupas fit into this. A brief bullet point review looks like this.

In January, 2014 when he showed up at the Maidan protests he was 17 years old. He became the foreign language media representative for Vitali Klitschko, Arseni Yatsenyuk, and Oleh Tyahnybok. All press enquiries went through Yurash. To meet Dimitri Yurash you had to go through Sviatoslav Yurash as a Macleans reporter found out.

At 18 years old, Sviatoslav Yurash became the spokesman for Ministry of Defense of Ukraine under Andrei Paruby. He was Dimitri Yarosh's spokesman and can be seen either behind Yarosh on videos at press conferences or speaking ahead of him to reporters. From January 2014 onward, to speak to Dimitri Yarosh, you set up an appointment with Yurash.

Andrea Chalupa has worked with Yurash's Euromaidan Press which is associated with Informnapalm.org and supplies the state level hackers for Ukraine.

According to Robert Parry's article At the forefront of people that would have taken senior positions in a Clinton administration and especially in foreign policy are the Atlantic Council. Their main goal is still a major confrontation with nuclear-armed Russia.

The Atlantic Council is the think tank associated and supported by the CEEC (Central and Eastern European Coalition). The CEEC has only one goal which is war with Russia. Their question to candidates looking for their support in the election was "Are you willing to go to war with Russia?" Hillary Clinton has received their unqualified support throughout the campaign.

What does any of this have to do with Dimitri Alperovitch and Crowdstrike? Since the Atlantic Council would have taken senior cabinet and policy positions, his own fellowship status at the Atlantic Council and relationship with Irene Chalupa creates a definite conflict of interest for Crowdstrike's investigation. Trump's campaign was gaining ground and Clinton needed a boost. Had she won, would he have been in charge of the CIA, NSA, or Homeland Security?

When you put someone that has so much to gain in charge of an investigation that could change an election, that is a conflict of interest. If the think tank is linked heavily to groups that want war with Russia like the Atlantic Council and the CEEC, it opens up criminal conspiracy.

If the person in charge of the investigation is a fellow at the think tank that wants a major conflict with Russia it is a definite conflict of interest. Both the Atlantic Council and clients stood to gain Cabinet and Policy positions based on how the result of his work affects the election. It clouds the results of the investigation. In Dmitri Alperovitch's case, he found the perpetrator before he was positive there was a crime.

Alperovitch's relationship with Andrea Chalupa's efforts and Ukrainian intelligence groups is where things really heat up. Noted above she works with Euromaidanpress.com and Informnapalm.org which is the outlet for Ukrainian state-sponsored hackers.

When you look at Dimitri Alperovitch's twitter relationships, you have to ask why the CEO of a $150 million dollar company like Crowdstrike follows Ukrainian InformNapalm and its hackers individually . There is a mutual relationship. When you add up his work for the OUNb, Ukraine, support for Ukraine's Intelligence, and to the hackers it needs to be investigated to see if Ukraine is conspiring against the US government.

Alperovitch and Fancy Bear tweet each other?

Alperovitch and Fancy Bear tweet each other?

Crowdstrike is also following their hack of a Russian government official after the DNC hack. It closely resembles the same method used with the DNC because it was an email hack.

ff-twitter-com-2016-12-30-02-24-54

Crowdstrike's product line includes Falcon Host, Falcon Intelligence, Falcon Overwatch and Falcon DNS. Is it possible the hackers in Falcons Flame are another service Crowdstrike offers? Although this profile says Virginia, tweets are from the Sofia, Bulgaria time zone and he writes in Russian. Another curiosity considering the Fancy Bear source code is in Russian. This image shows Crowdstrike in their network.

Crowdstrike is part of Ukrainian nationalist hacker network

In an interview with Euromaidanpress these hackers say they have no need for the CIA. They consider the CIA amateurish. They also say they are not part of the Ukrainian military Cyberalliance is a quasi-organization with the participation of several groups – RUH8, Trinity, Falcon Flames, Cyberhunta. There are structures affiliated to the hackers – the Myrotvorets site, Informnapalm analytical agency."

In the image it shows a network diagram of Crowdstrike following the Surkov leaks. The network communication goes through a secondary source. This is something you do when you don't want to be too obvious. Here is another example of that.

Ukrainian Intelligence and the real Fancy Bear?

Ukrainian Intelligence and the real Fancy Bear?

Although OSINT Academy sounds fairly innocuous, it's the official twitter account for Ukraine's Ministry of Information head Dimitri Zolotukin. It is also Ukrainian Intelligence. The Ministry of Information started the Peacekeeper or Myrotvorets website that geolocates journalists and other people for assassination. If you disagree with OUNb politics, you could be on the list.

Should someone tell Dimitri Alperovitch that Gerashchenko, who is now in charge of Peacekeeper recently threatened president-elect Donald Trump that he would put him on his "Peacemaker" site as a target? The same has been done with Silvio Berscaloni in the past.

Trying not to be obvious, the Head of Ukraine's Information Ministry (UA Intelligence) tweeted something interesting that ties Alperovitch and Crowdstrike to the Ukrainian Intelligence hackers and the Information Ministry even tighter.

Trying to keep it hush hush?

Trying to keep it hush hush?

This single tweet on a network chart shows that out of all the Ukrainian Ministry of Information Minister's following, he only wanted the 3 hacking groups associated with both him and Alperovitch to get the tweet. Alperovitch's story was received and not retweeted or shared. If this was just Alperovitch's victory, it was a victory for Ukraine. It would be shared heavily. If it was a victory for the hacking squad, it would be smart to keep it to themselves and not draw unwanted attention.

These same hackers are associated with Alexandra, Andrea, and Irene Chalupa through the portals and organizations they work with through their OUNb. The hackers are funded and directed by or through the same OUNb channels that Alperovitch is working for and with to promote the story of Russian hacking.

Pravy Sektor Hackers and Crowdstrike?

Pravy Sektor Hackers and Crowdstrike?

When you look at the image for the hacking group in the euromaidanpress article, one of the hackers identifies themselves as one of Dimitri Yarosh's Pravy Sektor members by the Pravy Sektor sweatshirt they have on. Noted above, Pravy Sektor admitted to killing the people at the Maidan protest and sparked the coup.

Going further with the linked Euromaidanpress article the hackers say" Let's understand that Ukrainian hackers and Russian hackers once constituted a single very powerful group. Ukrainian hackers have a rather high level of work. So the help of the USA I don't know, why would we need it? We have all the talent and special means for this. And I don't think that the USA or any NATO country would make such sharp movements in international politics."

What sharp movements in international politics have been made lately? Let me spell it out for the 17 US Intelligence Agencies so there is no confusion. These state sponsored, Russian language hackers in Eastern European time zones have shown with the Surkov hack they have the tools and experience to hack states that are looking out for it. They are also laughing at US intel efforts.

The hackers also made it clear that they will do anything to serve Ukraine. Starting a war between Russia and the USA is the one way they could serve Ukraine best, and hurt Russia worst. Given those facts, if the DNC hack was according to the criteria given by Alperovitch, both he and these hackers need to be investigated.

According to the Esquire interview "Alperovitch was deeply frustrated: He thought the government should tell the world what it knew. There is, of course, an element of the personal in his battle cry. "A lot of people who are born here don't appreciate the freedoms we have, the opportunities we have, because they've never had it any other way," he told me. "I have."

While I agree patriotism is a great thing, confusing it with this kind of nationalism is not. Alperovitch seems to think by serving OUNb Ukraine's interests and delivering a conflict with Russia that is against American interests, he's a patriot. He isn't serving US interests. He's definitely a Ukrainian patriot. Maybe he should move to Ukraine.

The evidence presented deserves investigation because it looks like the case for conflict of interest is the least Dimitri Alperovitch should look forward to. If these hackers are the real Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear, they really did make sharp movements in international politics.

By pawning it off on Russia, they made a worldwide embarrassment of an outgoing President of the United States and made the President Elect the suspect of rumor.

From the Observer.com , " Andrea Chalupa -- the sister of DNC research staffer Alexandra Chalupa -- claimed on social media, without any evidence, that despite Clinton conceding the election to Trump, the voting results need to be audited to because Clinton couldn't have lost -- it must have been Russia. Chalupa hysterically tweeted to every politician on Twitter to audit the vote because of Russia and claimed the TV show The Americans , about two KGB spies living in America, is real."

Quite possibly now the former UK Ambassador Craig Murry's admission of being the involved party to "leaks" should be looked at. " Now both Julian Assange and I have stated definitively the leak does not come from Russia . Do we credibly have access? Yes, very obviously. Very, very few people can be said to definitely have access to the source of the leak. The people saying it is not Russia are those who do have access. After access, you consider truthfulness. Do Julian Assange and I have a reputation for truthfulness? Well in 10 years not one of the tens of thousands of documents WikiLeaks has released has had its authenticity successfully challenged. As for me, I have a reputation for inconvenient truth telling."

[May 11, 2019] Christopher Steele, FBI s Confidential Human Source by Publius Tacitus

Highly recommended!
A foreign intelligence asset was used to justify surveillance of Trump[ and some of his associates
Notable quotes:
"... What is clear from the new records is that Christopher Steele, a foreign intelligence officer, had frequent and extensive contacts with the FBI. Who was his FBI Case Agent? ..."
"... The main thing I want to know is WHEN was the decision made to tar Trump with Russia - both at the FBI (and likely CIA) and at the DNC (over the leak) - and WHO was the deciding entity - Comey, Brennan, Clinton, Obama or someone else? And perhaps who came up with the idea in the first place (at the DNC, it was very likely Alexandra Chalupa, the Ukrainian-American DNC "consultant"). ..."
"... The bad thing is that our MSM is so reverent of our Intel agencies that I see them encouraged to increasingly put their hand on the scale. ..."
"... Recently, I saw arm flailing by a Congressman, Dan Coats, and Mueller about how the Russians are still at it. They are trying to disrupt or influence the 2018. Really, then I demand to get a list of the pro-Kremlin candidates. How long before the mere threat of being outed as a Kremlin agent is used to punish elected officials if they are not sufficiently hawkish or don't support certain programs. Unchallenged claims by Intel agencies gives them a lot of political power. ..."
"... I am skeptical. Russia has a lot of fish to fry, why would they expend resources on midterm elections. Now everyone in the U.S. hates them, both traditional hawk Republicans and born again uber-hawk Democrats. There is a tiger behind both doors. ..."
"... if Steele had been a CHS since at least February of 2016, what was the purpose of passing the Dossier to the FBI through Fusion GPS? Why not just going to his FBI handler? Was Steele collaboration with Fusion even in compliance with FBI regulations? Did the FBI know? ..."
"... Because part of the plan was to leak the information in order to damage Trump. FBI could not do that. Would have exposed them to some real legal jeopardy. This was a dual track strategy. Diabolical almost. ..."
"... Don't forget the Nellie Ohr (Fusion GPS) -> Bruce Ohr (DOJ) back channel. The husband & wife tag team. Yes, the same Nellie that was investigating using ham radio to communicate to avoid NSA mass surveillance. ..."
"... From the very beginning that information about all this was slowly leaking from the Congressional investigation, this whole thing smelled very fishy. Then add intense effort at DOJ & FBI to obstruct and obfuscate. And the unhinged tweets and interviews by Brennan, Clapper & Comey. ..."
"... He was working with FBI and GPS at the same time. GPS was in the dark supposedly about his work with the FBI and Steele got their approval to hand over what he had delivered to GPS to the FBI as a cover for his work with the FBI. ..."
"... its also likely FBI had some input into the content of what was delivered to GPS, and more importantly what was not delivered. ..."
"... Re the 'standing agreement to not recruit each other's intelligence personnel for clandestine activities.' As Steele was not by this time a current employee of MI6, was the FBI in technical violation of this? ..."
"... A central question in regard to Steele, as with quite a number of former intelligence/law enforcement/military people who have started at least ostensibly private sector operations, is how far these are being used as 'cover' for activities conducted on behalf of either the state agencies for which they used to work, or other state agencies. ..."
"... It is at least possible that one advantage of such arrangements may be that they make it possible to evade the letter of agreements between intelligence agencies in different countries ..."
"... If, as seems likely, both current and former top FBI and DOJ people – very likely Mueller as well as Comey, Strzok and many others – were intimately involved in the conspiracy to subvert the constitution, then a means of making it possible for Steele to combine feeding information to the FBI while also engaging in 'StratCom' via the MSM could have been necessary. ..."
"... An obvious means of 'squaring the circle' would have been to issue a formal 'termination' to Steele, while creating 'back channels' to those who were officially supposed not to be talking to him ..."
"... A report yesterday by John Solomon in 'The Hill' quotes from messages exchanged between Steele and Bruce Ohr after the supposed termination ..."
"... 'In all, Ohr's notes, emails and texts identify more than 60 contacts with Steele and/or Simpson, some dating to 2002 in London. But the vast majority occurred during the 2016-2017 timeframe that gave birth to one of the most controversial counterintelligence probes in American history.' ..."
"... I have just finished taking a fresh look at Sir Robert Owen's travesty of a report into the death of Litvinenko. In large measure, this develops claims originally made in Christopher Steele's first attempt to provide a convincing account of why figures close to Putin might have thought it made sense to assassinate that figure, and to do so with polonium. The sheer volume of fabrication which has been deployed in an attempt to defend the patently indefensible almost beggars belief. ..."
"... Just as a question arises as to whether Steele is essentially acting on behalf of MI6, a question also arises as to whether the FBI leadership were knowledgeable about, and possibly involved with, the various shenanigans in which Shvets and Levinson were involved. Given that claims about Mogilevich have turned out to be central to 'Russiagate', that seems a rather important issue, and I am curious as to whether Ohr's communications with Steele may cast any light on it. ..."
"... Apparently the FBI got Deripaksa to fund the rescue of Levinson from Iran. Furthermore apparently FBI personnel maybe including McCabe visited with Deripaksa and showed him the Steele dossier. He supposedly had a nice guffaw and dismissed it as nonsense. So on the one hand while they make Russia out to be the most evil they play footsie with Russian oligarchs. ..."
"... Thinking about "Christopher Steele was terminated as a Confidential Human Source for cause.", something that doesn't seem to have gotten as much attention is that Peter Strzok failed his poly: ..."
"... Steele's relationship with the FBI extends far further back than February 2016. Shortly after he left MI6, he contracted with the Football Association to investigate possible FIFA corruption. Once he realized the massiveness of this corruption he contacted his old friends at the FBI Eurasian Crimes Task Force in 2011. Thus began his association with the FBI as a CHS. That investigation culminated in the 2015 FIFA corruption indictments and convictions. ..."
"... One thing I don't understand...we have the anti-Trumpers saying that Donald Junior meeting with a Russian national to get 'dirt' on Hillary is illegal...due to some law about candidates collaborating with foreigners or something like that...[obviously I'm foggy on the technical details]... Yet we know that the Hillary campaign worked with a foreign national, Steele, to get dirt on Trump...how is this not the same...? ..."
"... What role did Stefan Halper and Mifsud play as Confidential Human Sources in all this? ..."
"... Why was British Intelligence allegedly collecting and passing along info about Donald Trump in the first place? Or could this have been a pretext created to give cover and/or support to the agenda here in the US to insure his defeat? Could a foreign intelligence source such as this trigger/facilitate/justify the US counterintelligence investigation of Trump, or give cover to a covert investigation that may have already begun? ..."
"... British intelligence was collecting / passing on info about Trump because of his campaign stance on NATO (he said it was obsolete), his desire to end regime change wars (he castigated the fiasco in Iraq, took Bush to task over it etc.), and his often stated desire to get along with Russia (and China). Trump also talked of ending certain economic policies (NAFTA, TPP, etc.) and reenacting others (Glass-Steagall, the American System of Economics i.e. Hamilton, Carey, Clay), If Trump had acted on those, which he has not so far, he would changed the entire world system, a system in place since the end of WW II, or earlier. That was a risk too big to take without some kind of insurance policy - I believe Christopher Steele was that insurance policy. ..."
"... British Intelligence is verifiably the foreign source with the most extensive and effective meddling in the 2016 election. Perfidious Albion. ..."
"... Or, GSHQ was hovering up signint on Trump campaign early-on (using domestics US resources and databases via their 5-Eyes "sharing agreement" with NSA) cuz Brennan asked them to do it? ..."
"... Trump announced his run for President in 2015. I'm pretty sure that every intel service on the planet was watching him, they would be derelict not to. GCHQ may have been collecting intel on all the candidates, ..."
"... Trump announced his run for President in 2015. I'm pretty sure that every intel service on the planet was watching him, they would be derelict not to. GCHQ may have been collecting intel on all the candidates, ..."
"... I've heard that the Echelon system is used by the Five Eyes IC to do something similar. The Brits spy on US, and give the NSA the data so the NSA can evade US laws prohibiting spying on us, and we return the favor to help them evade what (few) laws they have that prohibits spying on their people. ..."
"... still wonder why the US would need to rely so much on British intelligence sources ..."
"... I've read that Steele's cover was blown 20 years ago and he hasn't even been to Russia since, so I wonder why he was considered such a reliable source by both the US and UK? In my opinion as an absolute naif about such things, Steele seems like he may be a has-been when it comes to Russia. ..."
"... Here is a simple explanation from someone who knows almost nothing about how any of the people in power work: Most of them are not as clever and smart as they think they are. And most of the regular people who are just citizens are smarter than these people think they are. ..."
"... It's simply that their arrogant assessment of their own superiority caused them to do really stupid things ..."
Aug 08, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

The revelations from US Government records about the FBI/Intel Community plot to take out Donald Trump continue to flow thanks to the dogged efforts of Judicial Watch. The latest nugget came last Friday with the release of FBI records detailing their recruitment and management of Britain's ostensibly retired Intelligence Officer, Christopher Steele. He was an officially recruited FBI source and received at least 11 payments during the 9 month period that he was signed up as a Confidential Human Source.

You may find it strange that we can glean so much information from a document dump that is almost entirely redacted . The key is to look at the report forms; there are three types--FD-1023 (Source Reports), FD-209a (Contact Reports) and FD-794b (Payment Requests). There are 15 different 1023s, 13 209a reports and 11 794b payment requests covering the period from 2 February 2016 thru 1 November 2016. That is a total of nine months.

These reports totally destroy the existing meme that Steele only came into contact with the FBI sometime in July 2016. It is important for you to understand that a 1023 Source Report is filled out each time that the FBI source handler has contact with the source. This can be an in person meeting or a phone call. Each report lists the name of the Case Agent; the date, time and location of the meeting; any other people attending the meeting; and a summary of what was discussed.

What is clear from the new records is that Christopher Steele, a foreign intelligence officer, had frequent and extensive contacts with the FBI. Who was his FBI Case Agent?

richardstevenhack , a day ago

Indeed we do need more information.

The main thing I want to know is WHEN was the decision made to tar Trump with Russia - both at the FBI (and likely CIA) and at the DNC (over the leak) - and WHO was the deciding entity - Comey, Brennan, Clinton, Obama or someone else? And perhaps who came up with the idea in the first place (at the DNC, it was very likely Alexandra Chalupa, the Ukrainian-American DNC "consultant").

We can be pretty sure this predates any alleged Russian "hacking" (unless it occurred as a result of alleged Russian hacking of the DNC in 2015).

This needs to be pinned down if anyone is to be successfully prosecuted for creating this treasonous hoax.

chris chuba , 5 hours ago
A very closely related topic, Victor Davis Hanson is onto something but it is darker than he suggests, https://www.nationalreview.... Paraphrasing, he gives the typical, rally around the flag we must stop the Russians intro but then documents how govt flaks abused their power to influence our elections and then makes the point, 'this is why the public is skeptical of their claims'.

The bad thing is that our MSM is so reverent of our Intel agencies that I see them encouraged to increasingly put their hand on the scale.

Recently, I saw arm flailing by a Congressman, Dan Coats, and Mueller about how the Russians are still at it. They are trying to disrupt or influence the 2018. Really, then I demand to get a list of the pro-Kremlin candidates. How long before the mere threat of being outed as a Kremlin agent is used to punish elected officials if they are not sufficiently hawkish or don't support certain programs. Unchallenged claims by Intel agencies gives them a lot of political power.

I am skeptical. Russia has a lot of fish to fry, why would they expend resources on midterm elections. Now everyone in the U.S. hates them, both traditional hawk Republicans and born again uber-hawk Democrats. There is a tiger behind both doors.

Leonardo Facchin , 20 hours ago
Thanks for the explanation.

What I can't figure out is: if Steele had been a CHS since at least February of 2016, what was the purpose of passing the Dossier to the FBI through Fusion GPS? Why not just going to his FBI handler? Was Steele collaboration with Fusion even in compliance with FBI regulations? Did the FBI know?

Publius Tacitus -> Leonardo Facchin , 17 hours ago
Because part of the plan was to leak the information in order to damage Trump. FBI could not do that. Would have exposed them to some real legal jeopardy. This was a dual track strategy. Diabolical almost.
blue peacock -> Leonardo Facchin , 13 hours ago
Don't forget the Nellie Ohr (Fusion GPS) -> Bruce Ohr (DOJ) back channel. The husband & wife tag team. Yes, the same Nellie that was investigating using ham radio to communicate to avoid NSA mass surveillance.

From the very beginning that information about all this was slowly leaking from the Congressional investigation, this whole thing smelled very fishy. Then add intense effort at DOJ & FBI to obstruct and obfuscate. And the unhinged tweets and interviews by Brennan, Clapper & Comey. And of course the media narrative that Rep. Nunes, Goodlatte and others were endangering "national security" by casting aspersions on the "patriotic" law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

Paul M -> Leonardo Facchin , 16 hours ago
He was working with FBI and GPS at the same time. GPS was in the dark supposedly about his work with the FBI and Steele got their approval to hand over what he had delivered to GPS to the FBI as a cover for his work with the FBI.

Of course, he had most likely already done so and its also likely FBI had some input into the content of what was delivered to GPS, and more importantly what was not delivered.

David Habakkuk , 4 hours ago
PT,

Fascinating.

Re the 'standing agreement to not recruit each other's intelligence personnel for clandestine activities.' As Steele was not by this time a current employee of MI6, was the FBI in technical violation of this?

The point is not merely a quibble. A central question in regard to Steele, as with quite a number of former intelligence/law enforcement/military people who have started at least ostensibly private sector operations, is how far these are being used as 'cover' for activities conducted on behalf of either the state agencies for which they used to work, or other state agencies.

It is at least possible that one advantage of such arrangements may be that they make it possible to evade the letter of agreements between intelligence agencies in different countries.

Another related matter has to do with the termination of Steele as a 'Confidential Human Source.'

It has long seemed to me that it was more than possible that this was not to be taken at face value. If, as seems likely, both current and former top FBI and DOJ people – very likely Mueller as well as Comey, Strzok and many others – were intimately involved in the conspiracy to subvert the constitution, then a means of making it possible for Steele to combine feeding information to the FBI while also engaging in 'StratCom' via the MSM could have been necessary.

An obvious means of 'squaring the circle' would have been to issue a formal 'termination' to Steele, while creating 'back channels' to those who were officially supposed not to be talking to him.

A report yesterday by John Solomon in 'The Hill' quotes from messages exchanged between Steele and Bruce Ohr after the supposed termination.

(See http://thehill.com/person/d... .)

When on 31 January 2017 – well after the publication of the dossier by BuzzFeed – Ohr provided reassurance that he could continue to help feed information to the FBI, Steele texted back:

"If you end up out though, I really need another (bureau?) contact point/number who is briefed. We can't allow our guy to be forced to go back home. It would be disastrous."

At that point, Solomon tells us that 'Investigators are trying to determine who Steele was referring to.' This seems to me a rather important question. It would seem likely, although not certain, that he is talking about another Brit. If he is, would it have been someone else employed by Orbis? Or someone currently working for British intelligence? What is the precise significance of 'forced to go back home', and why would this have been 'disastrous'?

Another crucial paragraph:

'In all, Ohr's notes, emails and texts identify more than 60 contacts with Steele and/or Simpson, some dating to 2002 in London. But the vast majority occurred during the 2016-2017 timeframe that gave birth to one of the most controversial counterintelligence probes in American history.'

The earlier contacts may be of little interest, but there again they may not be.

As it happens, it was following Berezovsky's arrival in London in October 2001 that the 'information operations' network he created began to move into high gear. It is moreover clear that this was always a transatlantic operation, and also fragments of evidence suggest that the FBI may have had some involvement from early on.

I have just finished taking a fresh look at Sir Robert Owen's travesty of a report into the death of Litvinenko. In large measure, this develops claims originally made in Christopher Steele's first attempt to provide a convincing account of why figures close to Putin might have thought it made sense to assassinate that figure, and to do so with polonium. The sheer volume of fabrication which has been deployed in an attempt to defend the patently indefensible almost beggars belief.

The original attempt came in a radio programme broadcast by the BBC – which was to become known to some of us as the 'Berezovsky Broadcasting Corporation' – on 16 December 2006, presented by Tom Mangold, a familiar 'trusty' for the intelligence services.

(A transcript sent out from the Cabinet Office at the time is available on the archived 'Evidence' page for the Inquiry, at http://webarchive.nationala... , as HMG000513. There is an interesting and rather important question as to whether those who sent it out, and those who received it, knew that it was more or less BS from start to finish.)

The programme was wholly devoted to claims made by the former KGB operative Yuri Shvets, who was presented as an independent 'due diligence' expert, without any mention of the rather major role he had played in the original 'Orange Revolution.'

Back-up was provided by his supposed collaborator in 'due diligence', the former FBI operative Robert 'Bobby' Levinson. No mention was made of the fact that he had been, in the 'Nineties, a, if not the lead FBI investigator into the notorious Ukrainian Jewish mobster Semyon Mogilevich.

The following March Levinson would disappear on the Iranian island of Kish, on what we now know was a covert mission on behalf of elements in the CIA.

Just as a question arises as to whether Steele is essentially acting on behalf of MI6, a question also arises as to whether the FBI leadership were knowledgeable about, and possibly involved with, the various shenanigans in which Shvets and Levinson were involved. Given that claims about Mogilevich have turned out to be central to 'Russiagate', that seems a rather important issue, and I am curious as to whether Ohr's communications with Steele may cast any light on it.

Jack -> David Habakkuk , 2 hours ago
David

Apparently the FBI got Deripaksa to fund the rescue of Levinson from Iran. Furthermore apparently FBI personnel maybe including McCabe visited with Deripaksa and showed him the Steele dossier. He supposedly had a nice guffaw and dismissed it as nonsense. So on the one hand while they make Russia out to be the most evil they play footsie with Russian oligarchs.

Keith Harbaugh , 19 hours ago
Thanks for this informative article.

Thinking about "Christopher Steele was terminated as a Confidential Human Source for cause.", something that doesn't seem to have gotten as much attention is that Peter Strzok failed his poly:

Seems rather surprising to me. Anyone have any comment on this?

TTG , an hour ago
Steele's relationship with the FBI extends far further back than February 2016. Shortly after he left MI6, he contracted with the Football Association to investigate possible FIFA corruption. Once he realized the massiveness of this corruption he contacted his old friends at the FBI Eurasian Crimes Task Force in 2011. Thus began his association with the FBI as a CHS. That investigation culminated in the 2015 FIFA corruption indictments and convictions. His initial contact with old friends at the FBI Eurasian Crime Task Force is awfully similar to his contacting these same friends in 2016 after deciding his initial Trump research was potentially bigger than mere opposition research.
FB , 3 hours ago
One thing I don't understand...we have the anti-Trumpers saying that Donald Junior meeting with a Russian national to get 'dirt' on Hillary is illegal...due to some law about candidates collaborating with foreigners or something like that...[obviously I'm foggy on the technical details]... Yet we know that the Hillary campaign worked with a foreign national, Steele, to get dirt on Trump...how is this not the same...?

Even worse is that the FBI was using this same foreign agent that a presidential candidate had hired to get dirt on an opponent... Even knowing nothing about legalities this just doesn't look very good...

Wally Courie , 4 hours ago
Stupid question? As the Col. has explained, the President can declassify any document he pleases. So, why doesn't Donaldo unredact the redacted portions of these bullcrap docs? What is he afraid of? That the Intel community will get mad and be out to get him? Isn't time for him to show some cojones?
blue peacock , 16 hours ago
What role did Stefan Halper and Mifsud play as Confidential Human Sources in all this?
akaPatience , 19 hours ago
Why was British Intelligence allegedly collecting and passing along info about Donald Trump in the first place? Or could this have been a pretext created to give cover and/or support to the agenda here in the US to insure his defeat? Could a foreign intelligence source such as this trigger/facilitate/justify the US counterintelligence investigation of Trump, or give cover to a covert investigation that may have already begun?
Navstéva يزور 🐐 -> akaPatience , 17 hours ago
British intelligence was collecting / passing on info about Trump because of his campaign stance on NATO (he said it was obsolete), his desire to end regime change wars (he castigated the fiasco in Iraq, took Bush to task over it etc.), and his often stated desire to get along with Russia (and China). Trump also talked of ending certain economic policies (NAFTA, TPP, etc.) and reenacting others (Glass-Steagall, the American System of Economics i.e. Hamilton, Carey, Clay), If Trump had acted on those, which he has not so far, he would changed the entire world system, a system in place since the end of WW II, or earlier. That was a risk too big to take without some kind of insurance policy - I believe Christopher Steele was that insurance policy.
unmitigatedaudacity -> Navstéva يزور 🐐 , 16 hours ago
British Intelligence is verifiably the foreign source with the most extensive and effective meddling in the 2016 election. Perfidious Albion.
Bryn Nykrson -> Navstéva يزور 🐐 , 14 hours ago
Or, GSHQ was hovering up signint on Trump campaign early-on (using domestics US resources and databases via their 5-Eyes "sharing agreement" with NSA) cuz Brennan asked them to do it? And therefore without having to mess about with any formal FISA warrant thingy's ... But, then use what might be found (or plausibly alleged) to try to get a proper FISA warrant later on (July 2016)? 'Parallel Discovery' of sorts; with Fusion GPS also a leaky cut-out: channelling media reports to be used as confirmation of Steele's "raw intelligence" in the formal FISA application(s)?
Biggee Mikeee -> akaPatience , 17 hours ago
Trump announced his run for President in 2015. I'm pretty sure that every intel service on the planet was watching him, they would be derelict not to. GCHQ may have been collecting intel on all the candidates,

" Trump announced his run for President in 2015. I'm pretty sure that every intel service on the planet was watching him, they would be derelict not to. GCHQ may have been collecting intel on all the candidates, "

That's a good question, could it legally enable an end run around the FISC until enough evidence was gathered for a FISC surveillance authorization?.

richardstevenhack -> Biggee Mikeee , 13 hours ago
I've heard that the Echelon system is used by the Five Eyes IC to do something similar. The Brits spy on US, and give the NSA the data so the NSA can evade US laws prohibiting spying on us, and we return the favor to help them evade what (few) laws they have that prohibits spying on their people.

Only a matter of time until someone figured out the same method could be used to "meddle" in national affairs.

akaPatience -> Biggee Mikeee , 15 hours ago
I understand, but still wonder why the US would need to rely so much on British intelligence sources such as Steele about a very high profile American citizen and businessman -- aren't our intelligence services competent enough to have known and discovered as much if not more about Trump than other countries' intelligence services? I've read that Steele's cover was blown 20 years ago and he hasn't even been to Russia since, so I wonder why he was considered such a reliable source by both the US and UK? In my opinion as an absolute naif about such things, Steele seems like he may be a has-been when it comes to Russia.
DianaLC -> akaPatience , 4 hours ago
Here is a simple explanation from someone who knows almost nothing about how any of the people in power work: Most of them are not as clever and smart as they think they are. And most of the regular people who are just citizens are smarter than these people think they are.

It's simply that their arrogant assessment of their own superiority caused them to do really stupid things.

[May 11, 2019] CIA Paid $100,000 To Shadowy Russian For Dirt on Trump, Including Sex Video by Chuck Ross

Highly recommended!
This "shadowy Russian" might well be Sergey Skripal. This suggests that Steele dossier was CIA operation with British MI6 as transfer mechanism and Steele as a cover. And implicates Brennan. So this is next level of leaks after "Stormy Daniel"...
Another NYT leak out of a set of well coordinated leans from anonymous intelligence officials ;-) Poor Melania...
Notable quotes:
"... But U.S. intelligence officials have reason to doubt the veracity of the video and other information about Trump associates provided by the Russian, according to a fascinating report from The New York Times. ..."
"... If there was ANYTHING on Trump, it would have oversaturated the airwaves 24/7 during his candidacy, and he would have never made it out of the primaries. ..."
"... More than you know, whenever Russian is stated, replace with Ukrainian. TPTB cannot help themselves but push forward on another agenda as the current one falls apart. The Russophobia is still being stoked no matter what. ..."
"... Steele was a double agent, maybe triple. British,Ukrainian and probably American. Does that start to make a little more sense ? Those huuuge donations to the CF from Ukraine, McStains involvement, Steele's early retirement from MI6, Brennan's frequent trips to Ukraine, State Dept.s role. Investigate the Chalupa sisters to find out who the rest of the rats are.Lee Stranahan started before he was shut down. ..."
"... the CIA has to turn America into a criminal totalitarian regime in order to make the world safe for democracy ..."
"... How much you wanna bet that Brennan, Obama's CIA Director, was behind ..."
"... You mean the same Brennan who is the godfather of ISIS? ..."
"... "U.S. intelligence officials told The Times" Sounds like the Donald is finally learning to cooperate better with his masters. They can call off the hounds. ..."
"... Ok - so we have yet another (likely factual) story here of overt, in-your-face abuse of power and agency aimed directly at American citizens for political gain. And tomorrow? Probably another. And then another. Until: 'Bimbo Fatigue' Remember that phrase. If real justice isn't thrown down soon, you can forget it. Looks to me like (possibly) Trump imploring for public support - i.e., he can't do this himself, or it's too dangerous and he knows it... ..."
"... Why is the CIA trying to purchase dirt on a sitting President in 2017! Because they have nothing on him! And they are desperate to not all hang by the neck. The times are trying to portray this as Russian intelligence sowing discord between the US intelligence agencies and Trump...Wrong! The US Intel agencies are sowing that discord all on their fucking own. They weren't fooled at all, they created this fucking mess for their own treasonous reasons and now want us to believe that hey...if we fucked up its because the big bad russkies tricked us. ..."
"... 'The Russian, who has ties to organized criminals and money launderers' wtf! So far the Russians are playing our CIA like a bunch of amateurs. And the deep state/dem's bought it hook, line and sinker. Trump was right again. Dem's and Russia are colluding against a duly elected Presidential candidate. I guess it's safe to say we need another order for more Rope. Dem's and deepshit state just can't get enough of hanging themselves. This ain't over by a long shot. ..."
"... i call bullshit. you dont 'buy back' a software program that can be copied in 30 seconds. this whole story is a fabrication just like the dossier. made up to inflect bad info on to trump. ..."
"... Yeah, I loved that one. "Here. I'm giving you back that software I ripped off from you. I copied it to this CD and then deleted it from my computer... You know: wiped it with a cloth." ..."
"... And I love that the CIA thinks they can get away with a tale like that when everyone but my 90-year-old mother-in-law knows how a digital file works ..."
"... So were these "patriotic" CIA superheroes interested in Bill Clinton's rapes, rapes and more rapes? Were they concerned that he was snorting coke and using Arkansas state troopers for procurers of hosebags for him to screw? ..."
Feb 10, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

by Chuck Ross of Daily Caller

When they said "Russian collusion", few expected it to be between the CIA and a "shadowy Russian operative." And yet, according to a blockbuster NYT report, that's precisely what happened.

* * *

The CIA paid $100,000 last year to a Russian operative who claimed to have derogatory information about President Trump, including a video tape of the Republican engaged with prostitutes in a Moscow hotel room. If the video showed Trump, it would support claims made in the infamous Steele dossier, the salacious opposition research report financed by the Clinton campaign and DNC.

But U.S. intelligence officials have reason to doubt the veracity of the video and other information about Trump associates provided by the Russian, according to a fascinating report from The New York Times.

American spies made contact with the Russia early in 2017 after he offered to sell the Trump material along with cyber hacking tools that were stolen from the NSA that year, according to The Times. U.S. intelligence officials told The Times they were so desperate to retrieve those tools that they negotiated with the operative for months despite several red flags, including indications that he was working in concert with Russian intelligence.

Another red flag was the Russian's financial request. He initially sought $10 million for the information but dropped the asking price to $1 million.

After months of negotiations, American spies handed over $100,000 in cash in a brief case to the Russian during a meeting in Berlin in September.

The operative also offered documents and emails that purported to implicate other Trump associates, including former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. But The Times viewed the documents and reported that they were mostly information that is already in the public domain.

The Russian, who has ties to organized criminals and money launderers, showed the video purported to be Trump to a Berlin-based American businessman who served as his intermediary to the CIA. But according to the Times, the footage and the location of the viewing raised questions about its authenticity.

The 15-second clip showed two women speaking with a man. It is not clear if the man was Trump, and there was no audio. The Russian also showed the video to his American partner at the Russian embassy in Berlin, a sign that the operative had ties to Russian intelligence.

The Russian stonewalled the production of the cyber tools, and U.S. officials eventually cut ties, according to The Times. After the payout in Berlin, the man provided information about Trump and his associates of questionable veracity.

The Americans gave him an ultimatum earlier in 2018 to either play ball, leave Western Europe, or face criminal charges. He left, according to The Times, which interviewed U.S. officials, the American intermediary and the Russian for its article.

The Times' U.S. sources -- who appear to paint the American side in a positive light -- said that they were reluctant to purchase information because they did not want to be seen buying dirt on the president.

The officials also expressed concern that the Russian operative was planting disinformation on behalf of the Russian government. U.S. officials were worried that the Russian government has sought to sow discord between U.S. intelligence agencies and Trump. The revelation that the CIA purchased dirt on him would likely do the trick.

The Times report also has other new details.

Four other Russians with ties to the spy world have surfaced over the past year offering to sell dirt on Trump that closely mirrors allegations made in the dossier, according to the article. But officials have reason to believe that some of sellers have ties to Russian intelligence agencies.

The Times also provides new details on Cody Shearer, a notorious operative close to the Clintons. Shearer was recently revealed to have shopped around a so-called "second dossier" prior to the campaign which mirrored the sex allegations of the Steele report.

According to The Times, he has criss-crossed Europe over the past six months in an attempt to find video footage of Trump from the Moscow hotel room. Shearer claimed to have information from the FSB, Russia's spy service, that a video existed of Trump with prostitutes in a Moscow hotel room.

He shared a memo making the allegations with his friend and fellow Clinton fixer, Sidney Blumenthal. Blumenthal in turn passed the memo to his friend, Jonathan Winer, a Department of State official. Winer then gave the information to Steele who provided it to the FBI in October 2016.

Steele also provided information to Winer, who wrote up a two-page memo that was circulated within the State Department.

Trump has denied allegations that he used prostitutes in Moscow. He has called the dossier a "hoax" and "crap."

* * *

On Saturday morning, Trump tweeted that "according to the @nytimes, a Russian sold phony secrets on "Trump" to the U.S. Asking price was $10 million, brought down to $1 million to be paid over time. I hope people are now seeing & understanding what is going on here. It is all now starting to come out - DRAIN THE SWAMP!

Of course, if Trump really wants to "drain the swamp", any such decision would have originate with him. Tags Politics Commercial Banks

InjectTheVenom -> Global Hunter Feb 10, 2018 11:47 AM Permalink

DRAIN. THE. SWAMP.

Billy the Poet -> InjectTheVenom Feb 10, 2018 12:04 PM Permalink

Release the pee pee video now! No one pee peed in the $100,000 video in question. The 15-second clip showed two women speaking with a man. It is not clear if the man was Trump, and there was no audio. And how can anyone be more fascinated by the prospect of pee pee than by the fact that US intelligence agencies were buying bad information from extremely shady foreigners in an attempt to overthrow the President of the United States?

caconhma -> Billy the Poet Feb 10, 2018 12:42 PM Permalink

Trump is the swamp. If zio-Banking Mafia did not have enough dirt of Trump, he would not be elected.

gatorengineer -> caconhma Feb 10, 2018 1:05 PM Permalink

Trump is starting to assume that the people are dumber than Obowel did. Earth to Don, you sir have the drain pump, you sir have surrounded yourself with Swamp creatures.... You sir are.............

Arrowflinger -> InjectTheVenom Feb 10, 2018 12:18 PM Permalink

According to this, the Russians stole the hacking tools needed to cut through the Swamp levee, which were developed by the NSA, and now the CIA cannot buy them back. Now, since the USA wanted its Swamp, the Russians are more than happy to let the USA drown in its swamp.

What a country!

gatorengineer -> Arrowflinger Feb 10, 2018 1:06 PM Permalink

Anyone have a link for the Qanon posts. I haven't seen them in a couple of weeks since he left 8chan where he was posting. I don't want the Youtube BS, I just want the link... anyone got one. Its strangely not googleable... LOLZ.

El Oregonian -> Global Hunter Feb 10, 2018 11:53 AM Permalink

If you think that the CIA is a U.S. intelligence agency working on the best interests of the United States, you better wake up and smell the treason. They only work for the best interests of themselves.

Bula_Vinaka -> El Oregonian Feb 10, 2018 12:10 PM Permalink

They are parasites and nothing more.

BurningFuld -> Bula_Vinaka Feb 10, 2018 12:40 PM Permalink

Here is a question. Why does the CIA not come out and clear the air re: Trump?

I mean they were even paying people to come up with dirt. He is now your president and the country is a fucking mess. Should the CIA not come out and say we tried but we got nothing? They do have the ability to fix all this Trump shit and yet crickets.

Ahmeexnal -> caconhma Feb 10, 2018 1:03 PM Permalink

CIA is the covert dirty dealing arm of the VATICAN.

MarshalJimDuncan -> El Oregonian Feb 10, 2018 12:12 PM Permalink

ooohh... they release this questionable information for all to hear and paid a lot of money for it too. this fucking government is a joke

Posa -> El Oregonian Feb 10, 2018 12:56 PM Permalink

And the best interests of clients. The CIA started out is the muscle for the Dulles Brothers clients who were being booted out of various countries they were super-exploiting. The Agency hasn't looked back since.

Alfred -> El Oregonian Feb 10, 2018 12:59 PM Permalink

Seems wrong to call them 'intelligence' agencies. There must be a more descriptive name we can use... Anyone?

Guitarilla -> Global Hunter Feb 10, 2018 12:35 PM Permalink

Nobody got whizzed on. That lurid fantasy came soley out of the head of Hillary Clinton, given to Blumenthal, passed around and made to look like it came from Russia.

DownWithYogaPants -> Dr. Acula Feb 10, 2018 11:47 AM Permalink

CIA killed Kennedy. This pretty much removes all doubt. They are willing to do anything.

Killtruck -> shimmy Feb 10, 2018 12:51 PM Permalink

"Oswald killed Kennedy. That's it."

It IS remarkable the stuff people believe when all logic goes against it. Like Oswald firing magic bullets from an old Italian Carcano...and jet fuel melting steel beams...and a building collapsing through the path of greatest resistance into its own footprint after NOT being hit by an airplane...and Kennedy being shot from behind, but his head snapping backwards from the impact...and Oswald picking the worst possible shooting location, but in front of Kennedy were two intersecting highways going in any direction...and terrorist passports floating gently down from the sky.

It sure is remarkable.
#letsroll

possible band name
OswaldandtheMagicBullets

Able Ape -> shimmy Feb 10, 2018 12:57 PM Permalink

What was Oswald's reason to kill JFK? And yeah, he picked the very building he worked at to commit the crime. He wasn't THAT stupid!...

Posa -> shimmy Feb 10, 2018 1:05 PM Permalink

RFK and Nixon knew immediately the assassination of JFK was a CIA hit job because they had CHAIRED those hit squad operations themselves for Cuban Operations. They saw the CIA- Cuban hit squad fingerprints all over the kill. RFK had personally fired Wm Harvey, Dulles' chief of assassinations. However, RFK was silenced because he and Jack had been tag-teaming Marilyn Monroe.

The reason JFK was killed was a) his openly stated determination to shatter the CIA into a thousand pieces so they could no longer operate as a dangerous, renegade private army; and b) in the Spring of '63 JFK delivered his famous American U address calling for the end of the Cold War...

Oswald was always a patsie... the WC documents how his rifle was inoperable... scope needed parts just to be be sited and take aim... even after parts installed the rifle attributed to Oswald remained highly inaccurate... Military sharpshooters couldn't even hit stationary targets reliably.

mobius8curve -> Dr. Acula Feb 10, 2018 11:49 AM Permalink

If there is a video you can be sure it was manufactured using these tools:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_Nx404VLzw

Lawlessness is arising exponentially:

https://sumofthyword.com/2017/01/18/the-mystery-of-lawlessness/

oDumbo -> Dr. Acula Feb 10, 2018 12:19 PM Permalink

Drain the swamp! Townsquare justice for Odumbo and Hitlery! George Soros to bathe in the Amazon River with 1 million Piranha Fish until it completely disappears. Drain the evil Dumorat swamp. Drain the banana republic CIA and FBI. Our tax dollars and constitution did not pay for this shit.

Kelley -> Dr. Acula Feb 10, 2018 12:34 PM Permalink

With today's technology, the CIA is most likely working on a fake video for you right now. They might release it on Vimeo or Netflix to cover the costs and give themselves plausible deniability. To add a finishing touch they will make a fake video of Julian Assange claiming he is releasing it. You'll be in hog heaven. Which is where folks like you go just before being slaughtered by your owners and turned into spam.

shovelhead -> Dr. Acula Feb 10, 2018 12:55 PM Permalink

10 Million...

1 million...

Ok, How about $9.99

algol_dog Feb 10, 2018 11:38 AM Permalink

Move along. Nothing to see here ...

DosZap -> algol_dog Feb 10, 2018 11:40 AM Permalink

What a load of camel dung, if there was a sex tape of Trump w/Russian hookers, it would have been out while he was RUNNING for the job, FAKE NEWS.

SRV -> DosZap Feb 10, 2018 11:54 AM Permalink

Of course the story is a plant to introduce the hacking tools to cover the payment to Russians for dirt on a sitting POTUS by his own Intel Agency...

And CNN, MSNBC, etc are still wall to wall Trump impeachment... they no longer even pretend. Brain dead Erin Burnett opened with "the Republicans are at it again" to night (in my regular 30 secs of checking in for a laugh)!

vulcanraven -> DosZap Feb 10, 2018 12:08 PM Permalink

No shit, this is what I tell every Libtard when they cry the tired "Trump is corrupt and evil" meme. If there was ANYTHING on Trump, it would have oversaturated the airwaves 24/7 during his candidacy, and he would have never made it out of the primaries.

So which is it? Is he the world's greatest evil retard idiot, or a 9000+ IQ genius that is so slick and underhanded that he was able to collude with Putin, hide all evidence, and pull off the biggest caper in the history of the United States by sneaking into the Presidency? You can't have it both ways.

We must also give credit to the army of Russian bots that tell us how to think and act all day, where would we be without them?

silvermail -> algol_dog Feb 10, 2018 11:55 AM Permalink

I propose impeachment to any US president for eating, drinking and visiting toilets!

TheWholeYearInn Feb 10, 2018 11:38 AM Permalink

What's the difference between prostitutes in a Moscow hotel room, or prostitutes in the FBI/DOJ?

Global Hunter -> DosZap Feb 10, 2018 11:47 AM Permalink

I can't confirm price, so I will go with hotter (can't really confirm that either but Slavic chicks usually seem hot to me).

SRV -> DosZap Feb 10, 2018 11:54 AM Permalink

Of course the story is a plant to introduce the hacking tools to cover the payment to Russians for dirt on a sitting POTUS by his own Intel Agency...

And CNN, MSNBC, etc are still wall to wall Trump impeachment... they no longer even pretend. Brain dead Erin Burnett opened with "the Republicans are at it again" to night (in my regular 30 secs of checking in for a laugh)!

turkey george palmer -> SRV Feb 10, 2018 1:09 PM Permalink

Fuckin eh right. That's probably the closest thing .

A Sentinel -> SRV Feb 10, 2018 1:21 PM Permalink

Damn good point. And the dates are off too. A 6+/- month zh article about the dark web had the nsa software downloadable long before 2017.

Gee. Why would someone date that hack into 2017? What was different between 2016 and 2017?

SMH Trying to figure that out.

vulcanraven -> DosZap Feb 10, 2018 12:08 PM Permalink

No shit, this is what I tell every Libtard when they cry the tired "Trump is corrupt and evil" meme. If there was ANYTHING on Trump, it would have oversaturated the airwaves 24/7 during his candidacy, and he would have never made it out of the primaries.

So which is it? Is he the world's greatest evil retard idiot, or a 9000+ IQ genius that is so slick and underhanded that he was able to collude with Putin, hide all evidence, and pull off the biggest caper in the history of the United States by sneaking into the Presidency? You can't have it both ways.

We must also give credit to the army of Russian bots that tell us how to think and act all day, where would we be without them?

Winston Churchill -> buzzsaw99 Feb 10, 2018 12:02 PM Permalink

More than you know, whenever Russian is stated, replace with Ukrainian. TPTB cannot help themselves but push forward on another agenda as the current one falls apart. The Russophobia is still being stoked no matter what.

Steele was a double agent, maybe triple. British,Ukrainian and probably American. Does that start to make a little more sense ? Those huuuge donations to the CF from Ukraine, McStains involvement, Steele's early retirement from MI6, Brennan's frequent trips to Ukraine, State Dept.s role. Investigate the Chalupa sisters to find out who the rest of the rats are.Lee Stranahan started before he was shut down.

H-O-W Feb 10, 2018 11:46 AM Permalink

The more we learn,

The more it looks like the Russians set this up perfectly.

They know these scumbags better than we do!

buzzsaw99 Feb 10, 2018 11:48 AM Permalink

the CIA has to turn America into a criminal totalitarian regime in order to make the world safe for democracy.

Give Me Some Truth Feb 10, 2018 11:49 AM Permalink

Good point in the last sentence. If someone is going to "drain the swamp" it is going to have to be the president of the United States. I think I'm correct that he can fire anyone that works in the executive department for cause. He can also order investigations or hire people who will launch real investigations.

Mr. President, if you want to "drain the swamp," drain it.

P.S. You can start with an audit of The Fed.

desertboy -> Give Me Some Truth Feb 10, 2018 12:16 PM Permalink

That last sentence assumes a rather critical fantasy.

Anunnaki -> Thordoom Feb 10, 2018 12:24 PM Permalink

The Tripod of Evil

  1. Deep State
  2. Presstitutes
  3. Corporate Democrats
Dre4dwolf Feb 10, 2018 12:11 PM Permalink

If there was a video it would of been leaked during the election, they have nothing that sticks on the guy.

All the evidence thus far states

Obama Hillary the FBI, DNC, CIA all spied on Trump and colluded with foreign governments (U.K. , Ukraine , Russia) to try and dig up dirt to use against Trump (and they more or less failed).

They turned over every rock they could, look at that stupid hot-mic video in the bus, how many hours of video did they have to go through to dig up that crumb? they went back searching through 30+ years of content and thats all they could come up with.... some locker room talk lol

People have to just face it.

Your government was and still is corrupt and its a weaponized system of control, Your government colluded with the enemy in a desperate attempt to stop Trump from becoming president. Your government started a sham "Russia investigation" to cover up its own crimes. Your government applied a different standard of justice to the clintons than it would have to you or anyone else.

To date ZERO evidence has been brought forward that Trump or anyone in his campaign did anything wrong, and the only people that have done anything wrong so far were picked by "the swamp" to fill positions..... all the others fell into petty perjury Traps on meaningless topics and insignificant factoids.

Lord Raglan Feb 10, 2018 12:12 PM Permalink

How much you wanna bet that Brennan, Obama's CIA Director, was behind buying this and thus, Obama and Hillary?

navy62802 -> Lord Raglan Feb 10, 2018 12:16 PM Permalink

You mean the same Brennan who is the godfather of ISIS?

Kelley Feb 10, 2018 12:16 PM Permalink

Isn't it lovely to find out that your money and mine is being used by government agents to give us the government they want?

It's sort of like a thug robbing you and using part of your money to pay another thug to rough you up from time time to time if you ask any questions with the thugs believing it's for our own good.

Thanks, Hillary, for looking out for us. You and your best buds are the best. Such bighearted givers! Meanwhile, give our regards to your partner in slime Obama, although it must pain you to have been bested by 'Beavis' who thinks so much of himself to balance out how little he impresses anyone who knows him.

desertboy Feb 10, 2018 12:20 PM Permalink

"U.S. intelligence officials told The Times" Sounds like the Donald is finally learning to cooperate better with his masters. They can call off the hounds.

Consuelo Feb 10, 2018 12:22 PM Permalink

Ok - so we have yet another (likely factual) story here of overt, in-your-face abuse of power and agency aimed directly at American citizens for political gain. And tomorrow? Probably another. And then another. Until: 'Bimbo Fatigue' Remember that phrase. If real justice isn't thrown down soon, you can forget it. Looks to me like (possibly) Trump imploring for public support - i.e., he can't do this himself, or it's too dangerous and he knows it...

Kelley Feb 10, 2018 1:05 PM Permalink

As taxpayers can we sue the CIA for misusing our funds? Pretty sure that buying sex videos for commercial release isn't part of the CIA's lawful mandate even at bargain prices.

indaknow Feb 10, 2018 1:13 PM Permalink

Why is the CIA trying to purchase dirt on a sitting President in 2017! Because they have nothing on him! And they are desperate to not all hang by the neck. The times are trying to portray this as Russian intelligence sowing discord between the US intelligence agencies and Trump...Wrong! The US Intel agencies are sowing that discord all on their fucking own. They weren't fooled at all, they created this fucking mess for their own treasonous reasons and now want us to believe that hey...if we fucked up its because the big bad russkies tricked us.

It's not going to work.

hooligan2009 Feb 10, 2018 11:49 AM Permalink

my sauces tell me that pink pussyhat wearing hollywood types have been called in because they have a doppelganger for trump and access to 30,000 sexually abused victims that can act as Russian prostitutes for just ten bucks each. snapchat has a trump emoji that can be transplanted onto any porn video star - male or female - thus confirming that trump is a serial (serious?) user of ladies of the night

my sauces also tell me that the CIA offers a reward of 100,000 bucks (or 10 BTC) for every photo-shopped (snap-shopped or porn-shopped) material.

of course, the CIA already owns many many porn movie studios and films, but it would prefer third "party" movies - not from epstein's island where its operatives choose to rela with a pizza.

the CIA "pink" budget for such movies is limited to just 5,000 clips or 5 billion of taxpayers funds, whichever is the higher.

awesome sauce hey?

MusicIsYou Feb 10, 2018 1:14 PM Permalink

For only $100,000 that's all? Now I know it's probably not true.

Robert A. Heinlein Feb 10, 2018 1:17 PM Permalink

'The Russian, who has ties to organized criminals and money launderers' wtf! So far the Russians are playing our CIA like a bunch of amateurs. And the deep state/dem's bought it hook, line and sinker. Trump was right again. Dem's and Russia are colluding against a duly elected Presidential candidate. I guess it's safe to say we need another order for more Rope. Dem's and deepshit state just can't get enough of hanging themselves. This ain't over by a long shot.

hannah Feb 10, 2018 1:33 PM Permalink

i call bullshit. you dont 'buy back' a software program that can be copied in 30 seconds. this whole story is a fabrication just like the dossier. made up to inflect bad info on to trump.

i call bullshit.

RKae -> hannah Feb 10, 2018 1:47 PM Permalink

Yeah, I loved that one. "Here. I'm giving you back that software I ripped off from you. I copied it to this CD and then deleted it from my computer... You know: wiped it with a cloth."

And I love that the CIA thinks they can get away with a tale like that when everyone but my 90-year-old mother-in-law knows how a digital file works.

Quantify Feb 10, 2018 1:38 PM Permalink

The CIA is at the head of the shadow government.

RKae Feb 10, 2018 1:39 PM Permalink

So were these "patriotic" CIA superheroes interested in Bill Clinton's rapes, rapes and more rapes? Were they concerned that he was snorting coke and using Arkansas state troopers for procurers of hosebags for him to screw?

I mean if they're so concerned about Trump and a couple of hookers... Better put some ice on that, CIA.

vofreason Feb 10, 2018 1:39 PM Permalink

You all are so ridiculous and fooled with your "drain the swamp" bs. It's a great idea but Trump doing it is a joke, I mean just look at who he has hired, what's wrong with you all are you blind?!!

He can't even fill 1/3 of the government positions he's supposed to and the ones he has have no business holding the positions given to them and are so incompetent, downright criminal or just personally horrendous humans that they can't stay in office more than a few months. All their blatant and moronically concocted lies are backing them into corners every day that they just try and lie out of again. America is over if we really have gotten to the point that a group like Trump's has support, it's just astonishing.

[May 08, 2019] Obama Spied on Other Republicans and Democrats As Well by Larry C Johnson

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... The CIA, with the knowledge of the Director of National Intelligence, worked with British counterparts starting in the summer of 2015 to collect intelligence on Republican and at least one Democrat candidate. John Brennan was probably hoping that his proactive steps to help the Hillary Clinton campaign would ensure him taking over as DNI in the new Clinton Administration. Regardless of motives, the CIA enlisted the British intelligence community to start gathering intelligence on most major Republican candidates and on Bernie Sanders. This initial phase of intelligence gathering goes beyond opposition research. The information being gathered identified the key personnel in each campaign and identified the people outside the United States receiving their calls, texts and emails. This information was turned into intelligence reports that then were passed back to the United States intel community as "liaison reporting." This was not put into normal classified channels. This intelligence was put into a SAP, i.e. a Special Access Program. ..."
"... One person who needs to be called on the carpet and asked some hard questions is current CIA Director Gina Haspel. She was CIA Chief of Station in London at the time and was a regular attendee at the meeting of the Brit's Joint Intelligence Committee aka the JIC. I suppose it is possible she was cut out of the process, but I believe that is unlikely. ..."
"... I am confident that a survey of NSA and CIA liaison reporting will show that George Papadopoulos was identified as a possible target by the fall of 2015. Initially, his name was "masked." But we now know that many people on the Trump campaign had their names "unmasked." You cannot unmask someone unless their name is in an intelligence report. ..."
"... Sater's communication with Rozov were intercepted by western intelligence agencies -- GCHQ and NSA. I do not know which agency put it into an intel report, but it was put into the system. The Sater FD-1023 will tell us whether or not Sater did this at the direction of the FBI or acted on his own initiative. The key point is that the "bait" to do something with the Russians came from a registered FBI informant. ..."
"... That's good, sooner it's clarified the better, and the stronger the better, ..."
"... Best approach is to slaughter Donald for his bromance with Putin , but not go too far betting on Putin re Syria ..."
"... Hakluyt is described by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism's Henry Williams as " one of the more secretive firms within the corporate investigations world " and as "a retirement home for ex-MI6 [British foreign intelligence] officers, but it now also recruits from the worlds of management consultancy and banking " ..."
"... I do not believe that it is a mere coincidence that Australian diplomat, Alexander Downer, was the one credited by the FBI for launching the investigation into George Papadopolous : It was Downer who told the FBI of Papodopoulos' comments, which became one of the "driving factors that led the FBI to open an investigation in July 2016 into Russia's attempts to disrupt the election and whether any of President Trump's associates conspired," The Times reported. ..."
"... Downer, a long-time Aussie chum of Bill and Hillary Clinton, had been on Hakluyt's advisory board since 2008. Officially, he had to resign his Hakluyt role in 2014, but his informal connections continued uninterrupted, the News Corp. Australian Network reported in a January 2016 exclusive: ..."
"... I'm curious why they went after minor characters in the Trump campaign and not Jared or one of Trump's sons? From what I've read of Hoover, it seems he was constantly building "dossiers" of the powerful and those he considered "subversives" so that he would remain preeminent. Then there was the Church Committee investigation. Is this qualitatively different? Can we ever expect that law enforcement & intelligence with so much secretive power are not the 4th branch of government? ..."
"... Also involved - and I think Judge Ellis was very well aware of this - is a fundamental distinction relating to what law enforcement authorities are trying to achieve. If Mueller was honestly - even of perhaps misguidedly - trying to get witnesses to 'sing', that is hardly a mortal sin. If he was trying to get them to 'compose', then the question becomes whether he should be under indictment for subversion of the Constitution. ..."
"... Why aren't the MSM having a hissy fit about the real, documented election interference by the British Commonwealth/5 Eyes spooks in the 2016 campaign (and before)? The hoax of projecting onto Putin what they themselves have done must be exposed before the country move forward on any front. ..."
"... So, was Skripal one of Steele's so-called Kremlin insiders? I see Pablo Miller is connected to both Porton Down and Steele via the ironically titled II's media pods. And Miller is certainly connected to Skripal. ..."
May 08, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

Do not focus on July 2016 as the so-called start of the counter intelligence investigation of Donald Trump. That is a lie. We know, thanks to the work of Judicial Watch, that the FBI had signed up Christopher Steele as a Confidential Human Source (aka CHS) by February of 2016. It is incumbent on Attorney General Barr to examine the contact reports filed by Steele's FBI handler (those reports are known as FD-1023s). He also, as I have noted in a previous post, needs to look at the FD-1023s for Felix Sater and Henry Greenberg. But these will only tell a small part of the story. There is a massive intelligence side to this story.

The CIA, with the knowledge of the Director of National Intelligence, worked with British counterparts starting in the summer of 2015 to collect intelligence on Republican and at least one Democrat candidate. John Brennan was probably hoping that his proactive steps to help the Hillary Clinton campaign would ensure him taking over as DNI in the new Clinton Administration. Regardless of motives, the CIA enlisted the British intelligence community to start gathering intelligence on most major Republican candidates and on Bernie Sanders. This initial phase of intelligence gathering goes beyond opposition research. The information being gathered identified the key personnel in each campaign and identified the people outside the United States receiving their calls, texts and emails. This information was turned into intelligence reports that then were passed back to the United States intel community as "liaison reporting." This was not put into normal classified channels. This intelligence was put into a SAP, i.e. a Special Access Program.

One person who needs to be called on the carpet and asked some hard questions is current CIA Director Gina Haspel. She was CIA Chief of Station in London at the time and was a regular attendee at the meeting of the Brit's Joint Intelligence Committee aka the JIC. I suppose it is possible she was cut out of the process, but I believe that is unlikely.

This initial phase of intelligence collection produced a great volume of intelligence that allowed analysts to identify key personnel and the people they were communicating with overseas. You don't have to have access to intelligence information to understand this. For example, you simply have to ask the question, "how did George Papadopoulos get on the radar." I am confident that a survey of NSA and CIA liaison reporting will show that George Papadopoulos was identified as a possible target by the fall of 2015. Initially, his name was "masked." But we now know that many people on the Trump campaign had their names "unmasked." You cannot unmask someone unless their name is in an intelligence report. We also know that Felix Sater, a longtime business associate of Donald Trump and an FBI informant since December 1998 (he was signed up by Andrew Weismann), initiated the proposal to do a Trump Tower in Moscow. Don't take my word for it, that's what Robert Mueller reported:

In the late summer of 2015, the Trump Organization received a new inquiry about pursuing a Trump Tower project in Moscow. In approximately September 2015, Felix Sater . . . contacted Cohen (i.e., Michael Cohen) on behalf of I.C. Expert Investment Company (I.C. Expert), a Russian real-estate development corporation controlled by Andrei Vladimirovich Rozov. Sater had known Rozov since approximately 2007 and, in 2014, had served as an agent on behalf of Rozov during Rozov's purchase of a building in New York City. Sater later contacted Rozov and proposed that I.C. Expert pursue a Trump Tower Moscow project in which I.C. Expert would license the name and brand from the Trump Organization but construct the building on its own. Sater worked on the deal with Rozov and another employee of I.C. Expert. (see page 69 of the Mueller Report).

Sater's communication with Rozov were intercepted by western intelligence agencies -- GCHQ and NSA. I do not know which agency put it into an intel report, but it was put into the system. The Sater FD-1023 will tell us whether or not Sater did this at the direction of the FBI or acted on his own initiative. The key point is that the "bait" to do something with the Russians came from a registered FBI informant.

By December of 2015, the Hillary Campaign decided to use the Russian angle on Donald Trump. Thanks to Wikileaks we have Campaign Manager John Podesta's email exchange in December 2015 with Democratic operative Brent Budowsky:

" That's good, sooner it's clarified the better, and the stronger the better, " Budowski replies, later adding: " Best approach is to slaughter Donald for his bromance with Putin , but not go too far betting on Putin re Syria ."

The program to slaughter Donald Trump using Russia as the hatchet was already underway. This was more the opposition research. This was the weaponization of law enforcement and intelligence assets to attack political opponents. Hillary had covered the opposition research angle in London by hiring a firm comprised of former MI6 assets-- Hakluyt: there was a second, even more powerful and mysterious opposition research and intelligence firm lurking about with significant political and financial links to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her 2016 campaign for president against Donald Trump.

Meet London-based Hakluyt & Co. , founded by three former British intelligence operatives in 1995 to provide the kind of otherwise inaccessible research for which select governments and Fortune 500 corporations pay huge sums. . . .

Hakluyt is described by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism's Henry Williams as " one of the more secretive firms within the corporate investigations world " and as "a retirement home for ex-MI6 [British foreign intelligence] officers, but it now also recruits from the worlds of management consultancy and banking "

I do not believe that it is a mere coincidence that Australian diplomat, Alexander Downer, was the one credited by the FBI for launching the investigation into George Papadopolous : It was Downer who told the FBI of Papodopoulos' comments, which became one of the "driving factors that led the FBI to open an investigation in July 2016 into Russia's attempts to disrupt the election and whether any of President Trump's associates conspired," The Times reported.

Downer, a long-time Aussie chum of Bill and Hillary Clinton, had been on Hakluyt's advisory board since 2008. Officially, he had to resign his Hakluyt role in 2014, but his informal connections continued uninterrupted, the News Corp. Australian Network reported in a January 2016 exclusive:

But it can be revealed Mr. Downer has still been attending client conferences and gatherings of the group, including a client cocktail soirée at the Orangery at Kensington Palace a few months ago.

His attendance at that event is understood to have come days after he also attended a two-day country retreat at the invitation of the group, which has been involved in a number of corporate spy scandals in recent times.

Much remains to be uncovered in this plot. But this much is certain--there is an extensive documentary record, including TOP SECRET intelligence reports (SIGINT and HUMINT) and emails and phone calls that will show there was a concerted covert action operation mounted against Donald Trump and his campaign. Those documents will tell the story. This cannot be allowed to happen again.

Posted at 05:33 AM in Larry Johnson , Russiagate | Permalink | Comments (9)

turcopolier , 07 May 2019 at 09:53 AM

Having watched interviews of Papadopoulos on TeeVee I would say that this creature would be easy to manipulate. His ego is so enormous that a minimal effort would be required.
blue peacock said in reply to turcopolier ... , 07 May 2019 at 11:19 AM
Col. Lang

I'm curious why they went after minor characters in the Trump campaign and not Jared or one of Trump's sons? From what I've read of Hoover, it seems he was constantly building "dossiers" of the powerful and those he considered "subversives" so that he would remain preeminent. Then there was the Church Committee investigation. Is this qualitatively different? Can we ever expect that law enforcement & intelligence with so much secretive power are not the 4th branch of government?

David Habakkuk -> blue peacock... , 07 May 2019 at 01:31 PM
bp,

The guts of the matter was well expressed by Judge T.S. Ellis when he made the distinction between different results which can be expected from exerting pressures on witnesses: they may 'sing' - which is, commonly, in the interests of justice - but, there again, they may 'compose', which is not.

Also involved - and I think Judge Ellis was very well aware of this - is a fundamental distinction relating to what law enforcement authorities are trying to achieve. If Mueller was honestly - even of perhaps misguidedly - trying to get witnesses to 'sing', that is hardly a mortal sin. If he was trying to get them to 'compose', then the question becomes whether he should be under indictment for subversion of the Constitution.

Alcatraz, perhaps?

blue peacock said in reply to David Habakkuk ... , 08 May 2019 at 12:17 AM
David,

Yes, indeed, many a composition have been elicited by prosecutors in criminal cases. The issue is there is no penalty for prosecutorial misconduct while the advancement points ratchet up with each conviction. The incentives are aligned perfectly for the "institution" to run rough shod on ordinary Americans. Only those wealthy enough to fight the unlimited funds of the government have a chance. But of course in matters relating to national security there is the added twist of state secrets that protects government malfeasance.

I don't know how the national security state we continue to build ever gets rolled back. A small victory would be for Trump to declassify all documents and communications relating to the multifaceted spying on his campaign and as Larry so eloquently writes to frame him as a Manchurian Candidate. At least the public will learn about what their grandchildren are paying for. But it seems that Trump prefers tweeting to taking any kind of action. Not that it would matter much as half the country will still believe that Trump deserves it until the tables are turned on their team. While most Americans will say to use Ben Hunt's phrasing Yay! Constitution. Yay! Liberty. they sure don't care as the state oligarchy tighten their chokehold.

https://www.epsilontheory.com/things-fall-apart-pt-1/

akaPatience -> turcopolier ... , 07 May 2019 at 05:27 PM
Yes, he seems young and ambitious enough to be easy (and willing) prey. Having been involved in some local political campaigns though, I've observed that more and more than before, young people like him are hyper-concerned with networking. Papadopoulos' ego aside, of course he and many people who sign on hope to make self-serving connections. Not only that, it's also been my observation that casual sexual hook-ups go with the territory, and not only among young, single guys like him. I have to say I've been shocked a few times by how risky and cavalier some liaisons have been that've come to my attention, considering "public figures" are involved. No doubt that's why a "honeypot" was dispatched to try to help entrap Papadopoulos.
Rick Merlotti , 07 May 2019 at 12:14 PM
Why aren't the MSM having a hissy fit about the real, documented election interference by the British Commonwealth/5 Eyes spooks in the 2016 campaign (and before)? The hoax of projecting onto Putin what they themselves have done must be exposed before the country move forward on any front.
O'Shawnessey , 07 May 2019 at 02:44 PM
So, was Skripal one of Steele's so-called Kremlin insiders? I see Pablo Miller is connected to both Porton Down and Steele via the ironically titled II's media pods. And Miller is certainly connected to Skripal.
sandra adie , 07 May 2019 at 03:01 PM
Papadopolos was very young hence the nativity getting sucked in. The ego helped for sure. Probably exciting to be part of something important probably for the first time since he started working for Trump campaign
akaPatience , 07 May 2019 at 03:01 PM
One thing that's always concerned me about Larry's informative and insightful essays on these matters is how can we be assured that the IC documentation mentioned has been filled out honestly and accurately -- or that the forms even still exist and haven't been conveniently "lost" or surreptitiously destroyed?

[May 07, 2019] Chris Hedges: The Demonization of Russia is Driven by Defense Contractors

Highly recommended!
Apr 05, 2019 | dandelionsalad.wordpress.com

RT America on Apr 3, 2019

Chris Hedges, host of "On Contact," joins Rick Sanchez to discuss the role of the Democratic establishment in the "Russiagate" media frenzy. He argues that it was an unsustainable narrative given the actions of the White House but that the Democratic elite are unable to face their own role in the economic and social crises for which they are in large part to blame. They also discuss NATO's expansionary tendencies and how profitable it is for US defense contractors.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/VkoH3l7c5cI

From the archives:

Barbara Mullin | April 7, 2019 at 10:29 AM

Years ago I kept hearing from the newsmedia that Russia was the "enemy".

Frontline had a show about "Putin's Brain". Even Free Speech TV shows like Bill Press and "The Nation" authors like Eric Alterman push the Hillary style warmongering and do nothing to expose the outright lies out there.

These are supposed to be thought outside of the corporate mainstream newsmedia. The emphasis only on Trump and Fox News is totally hypocritical.

[May 02, 2019] Neoliberalism and the Globalization of War. America s Hegemonic Project by Prof Michel Chossudovsky

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Neoliberalism is an integral part of this foreign policy agenda. It constitutes an all encompassing mechanism of economic destabilization. Since the 1997 Asian crisis, the IMF-World Bank structural adjustment program (SAP) has evolved towards a broader framework which consists in ultimately undermining national governments' ability to formulate and implement national economic and social policies. ..."
Jun 16, 2016 | www.globalresearch.ca

Originally appeared at Globalresearch

The world is at a dangerous crossroads. The United States and its allies have launched a military adventure which threatens the future of humanity. Major military and covert intelligence operations are being undertaken simultaneously in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia and the Far East. The US-NATO military agenda combines both major theater operations as well as covert actions geared towards destabilizing sovereign states.

America's hegemonic project is to destabilize and destroy countries through acts of war, covert operations in support of terrorist organizations, regime change and economic warfare. The latter includes the imposition of deadly macro-economic reforms on indebted countries as well the manipulation of financial markets, the engineered collapse of national currencies, the privatization of State property, the imposition of economic sanctions, the triggering of inflation and black markets.

The economic dimensions of this military agenda must be clearly understood. War and Globalization are intimately related. These military and intelligence operations are implemented alongside a process of economic and political destabilization targeting specific countries in all major regions of World.

Neoliberalism is an integral part of this foreign policy agenda. It constitutes an all encompassing mechanism of economic destabilization. Since the 1997 Asian crisis, the IMF-World Bank structural adjustment program (SAP) has evolved towards a broader framework which consists in ultimately undermining national governments' ability to formulate and implement national economic and social policies.

In turn, the demise of national sovereignty was also facilitated by the instatement of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1995, evolving towards the global trading agreements (TTIP and TPP) which (if adopted) would essentially transfer state policy entirely into the hands of corporations. In recent years, neoliberalism has extend its grip from the so-called developing countries to the developed countries of both Eastern and Western Europe. Bankruptcy programs have been set in motion. Island, Portugal, Greece, Ireland, etc, have been the target of sweeping austerity measures coupled with the privatization of key sectors of the national economy.

The global economic crisis is intimately related to America's hegemonic agenda. In the US and the EU, a spiralling defense budget backlashes on the civilian sectors of economic activity. "War is Good for Business": the powerful financial groups which routinely manipulate stock markets, currency and commodity markets, are also promoting the continuation and escalation of the Middle East war. A worldwide process of impoverishment is an integral part of the New World Order agenda.

Beyond the Globalization of Poverty

Historically, impoverishment of large sectors of the World population has been engineered through the imposition of IMF-style macro-economic reforms. Yet, in the course of the last 15 years, a new destructive phase has been set in motion. The World has moved beyond the "globalization of poverty": countries are transformed in open territories,

State institutions collapse, schools and hospitals are closed down, the legal system disintegrates, borders are redefined, broad sectors of economic activity including agriculture and manufacturing are precipitated into bankruptcy, all of which ultimately leads to a process of social collapse, exclusion and destruction of human life including the outbreak of famines, the displacement of entire populations (refugee crisis).

This "second stage" goes beyond the process of impoverishment instigated in the early 1980s by creditors and international financial institutions. In this regard, mass poverty resulting from macro-economic reform sets the stage of a process of outright destruction of human life.

In turn, under conditions of widespread unemployment, the costs of labor in developing countries has plummeted. The driving force of the global economy is luxury consumption and the weapons industry.

The New World Order

Broadly speaking, the main corporate actors of the New World Order are

There is of course overlap, between Big Pharma and the Weapons industry, the oil conglomerates and Wall Street, etc.

These various corporate entities interact with government bodies, international financial institutions, US intelligence. The state structure has evolved towards what Peter Dale Scott calls the "Deep State", integrated by covert intelligence bodies, think tanks, secret councils and consultative bodies, where important New World Order decisions are ultimately reached on behalf of powerful corporate interests.

In turn, intelligence operatives increasingly permeate the United Nations including its specialized agencies, nongovernmental organizations, trade unions, political parties.

What this means is that the executive and legislature constitute a smokescreen, a mechanism for providing political legitimacy to decisions taken by the corporate establishment behind closed doors.

Media Propaganda

The corporate media, which constitutes the propaganda arm of the New World Order, has a long history whereby intelligence ops oversee the news chain. In turn, the corporate media serves the useful purpose of obfuscating war crimes, of presenting a humanitarian narrative which upholds the legitimacy of politicians in high office.

Acts of war and economic destabilization are granted legitimacy. War is presented as a peace-keeping undertaking.

Both the global economy as well as the political fabric of Western capitalism have become criminalized. The judicial apparatus at a national level as well the various international human rights tribunals and criminal courts serve the useful function of upholding the legitimacy of US-NATO led wars and human rights violations.

Destabilizing Competing Poles of Capitalist Development

There are of course significant divisions and capitalist rivalry within the corporate establishment. In the post Cold War era, the US hegemonic project consists in destabilizing competing poles of capitalist development including China, Russia and Iran as well as countries such as India, Brazil and Argentina.

In recent developments, the US has also exerted pressure on the capitalist structures of the member states of the European Union. Washington exerts influence in the election of heads of State including Germany and France, which are increasingly aligned with Washington.

The monetary dimensions are crucial. The international financial system established under Bretton Woods prevails. The global financial apparatus is dollarized. The powers of money creation are used as a mechanism to appropriate real economy assets. Speculative financial trade has become an instrument of enrichment at the expense of the real economy. Excess corporate profits and multibillion dollar speculative earnings (deposited in tax free corporate charities) are also recycled towards the corporate control of politicians, civil society organizations, not to mention scientists and intellectuals. It's called corruption, co-optation, fraud.

Latin America: The Transition towards a "Democratic Dictatorship"

In Latin America, the military dictatorships of the 1960s and 1970s have in large part been replaced by US proxy regimes, i.e. a democratic dictatorship has been installed which ensures continuity. At the same time the ruling elites in Latin America have remoulded. They have become increasingly integrated into the logic of global capitalism, requiring an acceptance of the US hegemonic project.

Macro-economic reform has been conducive to the impoverishment of the entire Latin America region.

In the course of the last 40 years, impoverishment has been triggered by hyperinflation, starting with the 1973 military coup in Chile and the devastating reforms of the 1980s and early 1990s.

The implementation of these deadly economic reforms including sweeping privatization, trade deregulation, etc. is coordinated in liaison with US intelligence ops, including the "Dirty war" and Operation Condor, the Contra insurrection in Nicaragua, etc.

The development of a new and privileged elite integrated into the structures of Western investment and consumerism has emerged. Regime change has been launched against a number of Latin American countries.

Any attempt to introduce reforms which departs from the neoliberal consensus is the object of "dirty tricks" including acts of infiltration, smear campaigns, political assassinations, interference in national elections and covert operations to foment social divisions. This process inevitably requires corruption and cooptation at the highest levels of government as well as within the corporate and financial establishment. In some countries of the region it hinges on the criminalization of the state, the legitimacy of money laundering and the protection of the drug trade.

The above text is an English summary of Prof. Michel Chossudovsky's Presentation, National Autonomous University of Nicaragua, May 17, 2016. This presentation took place following the granting of a Doctor Honoris Causa in Humanities to Professor Chossudovsky by the National Autonomous University of Nicaragua (UNAN)

[May 02, 2019] Russian and Eurasian Politics by Gordon M. Hahn

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... If Zelenskii sees himself as the spark or leader of a wave of color revolutions in the former USSR, he will find the going with Russia tough, regardless of who the Russian president is ..."
"... Another black swan is that Ukraine now has a Jewish president. This is not evidence of the absence of anti-Semitism, which is robust among Ukraine's substantial number of ultranationalists and neofascists. Anti-semitism has been overshadowed by such radicals' laser-like focus of their xenophobia on ethnic Russians. ..."
"... The fact of a Jewish president -- in addition to the present PM being Jewish -- poses the risk of an uptick in anti-Semitism and in the appeal of the ultranationalist/neofascist message if Zelenskii fails to improve the economy, cut corruption, and/or appears to be 'caving in' to Russian or Western demands to the detriment of Ukraine's interests. ..."
"... The Jewish president will be a prime scapegoat in the case of such failure. These two dynamics – the inexperienced Zelenskii's possible failure and the potential political repercussions of his Jewish roots -- could tip the scales in favor of the ultranationalist wing of the Maidan-in-opposition and shape its calculus as to whether or not to undertake a coup, repeating what worked once in February 2014. ..."
May 02, 2019 | gordonhahn.com

... Zelenskii himself is likely to fight corruption, to be sure, but he is unlikely to challenge the ultranationalists, neofascists, and their militarized combat organizations. ... Zelenskii is unlikely to offer concessions that the DNR, LNR or Moscow will find acceptable for resolving the Donbass civil war.

Zelenskii's Victory and the Presidential Elections

Zelenskii's victory signified some decline in the acceptability overall in Ukraine of the Galician/Western line backed by Poroshenko countrywide' fueled largely by a full rejection in the east and south. Zelenskii made it a central point of his campaign to bring the ostracized south and east back in to Ukraine and end the discrimination against the Russian language fostered by Poroshenko legislation. Thus, Zelenskii won more than 80 percent of the vote in each of the 11 more Russian-speaking regions in eastern and southern Ukraine and nearly 90 percent in several of them. Poroshenko took only nationalistic Lviv. In the rest of western Ukraine won, in many of these regions only by a slim majority, but he won nevertheless. He even took some 60 percent in Poroshenko's native Volhyn region ( https://elections.dekoder.org/ukraine/en?fbclid=IwAR36OdD3lrXL3EKKy9Zfdhk8k36Azgr6nNWLeYH3sYiYX9Ci51O86GVDhow ). To the extent Zelenskii received great support in the east, his election represents a desire for an end of the slow-burning civil war in Donbass, of the east-west polarization inside the country, and of alienation of Russian speakers and ethnic Russians as well as for a normalization of Kiev's relations with Russia. Poroshenko's narrow but nevertheless defeat in almost all the western regions reflects the Galicians disenchantment with corruption far more than any significant rejection of Galician Ukrainian nationalism, ultrnationalism and neofascism in the west.

... ... ...

The Nature of Maidan Ukraine's Hybrid Regime

However, the problem in Ukraine has often been less with its elections being unfree or unfair ( https://gordonhahn.com/2015/06/21/one-day-in-the-life-of-ukrainian-democracy/ ). Most often the problem has been with the rule of law, massive corruption, the theft of the state by various powerful oligarchs, the lack of a cohesive national identity, and a deeply polarized society. It is these aspects of Ukraine's authoritarian side, its 'stateness problem' and political polarization and instability which are rarely understood in the West [see Gordon M. Hahn, Ukraine Over the Edge: Russia, the West, and the 'New Cold War' (Jefferson: McFarland, 2018)].

The absence of the rule of law in Maidan Ukraine was in full display on the eve of the election as the siloviki chose sides in the vote. The SBU supported Poroshenko by trumping up the noted fake news of hacked emails never shown but allegedly showing that Zelenskii was Putin's Manchurian candidate ala 'Trump's collusion with the Kremln.' Doing the bidding of Yiliya Tymoshenko's campaign, the MVD, headed by ultranationalist Arsenii Avakov, uncovered Poroshenko vote buying schemes.

Similarly, the present and former Ukrainian general prosecutors' charges of interference in corruption investigations by US Vice President Joseph Biden and the present US ambassador to Ukraine underscored the point.

Also, the release of former Maidan war hero Nadia Savchenko also demonstrated this quite clearly. Either her arrest a little over a year ago for allegedly planning a massive terrorist attack that would have left many Maidan Rada deputies and civilians dead was based on wholly trumped up charges or some among the authorities are protecting an ultranationalist terrorist. Ironically, three days after the presidential vote, a Kievan was arrested on the basis of charges reminiscent of Russian law as many Maidan regime laws remind one of. Thus, the arrestee was charged with spreading on the Internet calls for 'separatism' and the overthrow of the Maidan regime that was established by an illegal and violent seizure of power ( https://vesti-ukr.com/kiev/334060-zhitelju-kievskoj-oblasti-hrozit-10-let-tjurmy-za-posty-v-sotssetjakh ).

A shocking level of official corruption has been characteristic of the Maidan regime's oligarchical side and was demonstrated even more forcefully during the presidential campaign. Poroshenko's failure to divest himself or 'trustify' his businesses established a fundamentally corrupt oligarch-presidency...

... ... ...

Historically speaking, some in the west -- Stepan Bandera's OUN and UPA fascists -- were allied with the Nazis in World War II; while the grandparents of many in the east fought for the Red Army against Hitler's forces and after the war repressed the OUN and UPA Banderites. This translates into a deep societal polarization with the west displaying considerable support for and tolerance of Galician-Ukrainian ultra-nationalism and neofascism in domestic politics a pro-Western foreign policy stance and the east supporting a more leftist, quasi-Soviet domestic order and pro-Russian foreign orientation. This divided has been repeatedly reflected in presidential and parliamentary elections throughout the history of post-Soviet Ukraine; hence the political upheavals often surrounding national elections, in particular in the 2004 'Orange revolution,' precursor to the 2013-14 Maidan revolt. This polarization has helped drive some of the lack of rule of law, corruption, and stealing of the state as oligarchs scramble to protect and expand their holdings on the background of deep political polarization between western Ukraine's Galicia and southeastern Ukraine and regime shifts from western Ukrainian-dominated governments to southeastern Ukrainian-dominated governments. All this explains and/or is explained by the Maidan regime's birth event – its original sin -- the 20 February 2014 snipers' terrorist false flag massacre.

Contrary to the West's false narrative that reads deposed Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych ordered snipers to kill Maidan demonstrators, the Maidan's ultranationalist-neofascist wing, with support from former Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, deployed snipers on the Maidan to fire on both police and demonstrators in the false flag terrorist operation of the century (Ivan Katchanovski, http://www.academia.edu/38171919/Witness_Testimonies_for_the_Maidan_Massacre_Trial_and_Investigation_about_Snipers_in_Maidan-Controlled_Buildings_Video_Appendix_E?auto=bookmark&campaign=weekly_digest ; Ivan Katchanovski, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2658245 ; and my own article at https://gordonhahn.com/2016/03/09/the-real-snipers-massacre-ukraine-february-2014-updatedrevised-working-paper/ ).

As one Ukrainian presidential candidate, former Orange regime Defense Minister Anatoliy Hrytsenko, noted: "I propose that one of the reasons that (the snipers massacre) has not been investigated to the end is that someone has feathers on their snout among those who are now in power" ( https://gordonua.com/news/politics/gricenko-odna-iz-prichin-pochemu-rasstrel-nebesnoy-sotni-ne-rassledovan-do-konca-u-kogo-to-rylo-v-puhu-iz-teh-kto-seychas-pri-vlasti-705668.html?fbclid=iwar1c9xxnp6k48rqnxrz2c6ki18lrnf7k2fhilbk9t2o0cfkx70ceff4egdw )."

Weeks later, Zelenskii commented: "People whom came to power on blood are profiting on blood" (www.pravda.com.ua/news/2019/02/26/7207718/). It appears he understands the essence of the Maidan regime's original sin. This poses a grave threat to some of the most powerful men in the regime including the likely organizer of the snipers' plot, Rada Chairman Andriy Parubiy, and perhaps Poroshenko himself, who appears to have played a role in helping smuggle the snipers out of Maidan Square, though he appears to have opposed the shooting as a video from the Maidan headquarters demonstrates.

This issue has the potential to bring the whole Western-backed house of cards tumbling down.

Maidan v. the People

The magnitude and centrality of the terrorist snipers' attack coverup for both the Maidan regime and the West's 'new cold war' narrative portend a bitter and brutal battle to prevent an objective investigation. Thus, the election of the politically unknown Zelenskii and the prospects of his inauguration and rule as president have sparked a cold civil war in Kiev. The Maidan regime's forces about to be relegated to the opposition, particularly after the victory of Zelenskii's new political party (Servant of the People in September's Rada elections, are poised and are already moving to do almost everything and perhaps everything to prevent his assuming the powers in Ukraine's semi-presidential system. Poroshenko and his allies and temporary allies in the Rada have undertaken several first steps against Zelenskii and his presidency. The most important may be the a draft law that would institute changes in the balance of power in the political system in favor of the prime minister and Rada against the president's office. Many of the proposed changes would empower the prime minister to a level nearly equal to that of the president. Thus, Article 35 of the new law would require the president to nominate a candidate for the post of prime minister indicated by a coalition of factions in the Rada. In other words, the Rada would nominate prime ministerial candidates, and the president would simply submit the same name much like the king or queen of England plays a purely formal role in the formation of the UK cabinet [https://samopomich.ua/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/project.pdf?fbclid=IwAR2QSRvRtMsWcWY-eR4ys0O6x0n_Doy21398U0VenM6J9jw21Hhy1E8sias (from here on cited as 'Draft Law'), p. 16].

Similarly, the president would be deprived by Article 36 in the new law of the power to independently submit to the Rada candidates for nomination to the posts of defense minister and foreign minister, the candidate nomination of which would have to be agreed upon before submission to the Rada again by a coalition of deputies' factions ( Draft law, pp. 16-17) . These clauses in the new law appear to be a direct violation of the Ukrainian Constitution's Article 106, which gives the President the unrestricted power to make such nominations.

The Rada is also boosted by the draft law's Article 85.1, which stipulates that in the event of the president's removal from office under an impeachment process the Rada's chair will execute the office of the presidency (Draft law, p. 42). This violates the Ukrainian Constitution's Article 112, which gives the role of acting president in such a case to the PM. At the same time, the PM would receive a series of new powers in the draft law. Article 39.3 of the draft law stipulates that the president "shall hold mandatory consultations with the Prime Minister regarding the formation of the personnel of the National Security and Defense Council" (SNBO), and Article 39.4 allows the Prime Minister to "initiate a decision before the President on formation of the personnel" of the SNBO and make changes to it (Draft law, p. 18).

Acting or temporary holders of the offices of Defense Minister, Foreign Minister, SBU chairman, and National Bank head are to be nominated by the PM under certain circumstances (Articles 30.4, 30.5, 40.6, and 42.5, respectively, Draft law, pp. 16-17, 19, and 20, respectively). Also, under the draft law the PM would also receive the new right to be consulted by the president in cases where two-thirds of a regional parliament has voted 'no confidence' in the region's administration head, which allows the president to dismiss him (Article 49. 3, Draft law, p. 24).

Although the President would retain the power to submit nominations to the posts of Prosecutor General and SBU chair, there is no mention of his power to appoint and dismiss regional prosecutors and SBU chiefs. The new law also appears to deprive the Ukrainian President of his present power to appoint the membership of the National Commission for Implementation of Regulation of Energy and Housing Services (NKREKU), the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU), and other regulators. Also, the president would be barred from creating any state administrative bodies such as a presidential apparatus or chancellery with powers anything more than advisory.

Thus under the new law the office of the president is deprived of its most important power -- appointment of the PM -- which now belongs to the majority in the Rada.

Thus, this new law on the presidency if adopted by the Rada and signed by Poroshenko as he leaves office would effectively transform Ukraine's semi-presidential system into a parliamentary republic with a powerful PM, whose authority rivals that of the President.

In and of itself this is not problematic and could even be regarded as a step in the direction of greater democracy in the sense of strong republican rule by a legislature of elected representatives of the people, it becomes anti-democratic and a violation of the rule of law by dint of the facts that several of the law's statutes violate the constitution. More importantly perhaps, the law violates the spirit of election by abrogating the recently expressed will of the people who elected a candidate to a particular office of the president of Ukraine as it existed on the day of the election, with all the powers the constitution vests in that office.

The imminent 'Maidan-in-opposition' has undertaken a series of other highly questionable measures to prepare to block or hamper his presidency. When presidential candidate Hrytsenko criticized the draft law on the presidency days after its posting on the site of the Galicia-based nationalist party 'Self-Help', led by the mayor of Lviv (Lvov) Andriy Sadoviy, the Lviv branch of the SBU opened an investigation against his wife's opinion polling company (www.pravda.com.ua/rus/news/2019/04/24/7213427/ and http://www.pravda.com.ua/rus/news/2019/04/24/7213432/ ).

Hrytsenko was the only first round presidential election candidate to meet with Zelenskii during the campaign for the second round, rousing suspicions he may have cut a deal for a place in any Zelenskii administration, perhaps his return to the post of Defense Minister. A move directly against Zelenskii has been the delay in announcing the final results of the presidential election (www.reuters.com/article/us-ukraine-election-zelenskiy/ukraines-president-elect-says-being-blocked-from-calling-snap-poll-idUSKCN1S129Z?fbclid=IwAR0W0Rl_e-XHjwUza7U2h8vA0di4csdWGmITrRFQ0MTxbhkx5aNkSiCmqpg).

This move has been combined with an attempt to delay Zelenskii's inauguration by removing the chairman of the constitutional court who deliberates in the president-elect's taking of the oath of office ( https://strana.ua/news/198120-v-konstitutsionnom-sude-sobirajut-holosa-za-otstavku-hlavy-vedomstva-dlja-sryva-inauhuratsii-zelenskoho.html?fbclid=IwAR3flvIbho_Iq3Zn9fGW5am1xV2y8GkLK_SRs77PRk2507YYawFcxtRrULI and https://vesti-ukr.com/politika/334088-zhurnalisty-rasskazali-kak-u-poroshenko-provodjat-sryv-inauhuratsii-zelenskoho ).

Although the delay is not prohibitive yet it risks preventing Zelenskii from calling new Rada elections as soon as he assumes office as he has reportedly planned to do. Mid-term elections cannot be called less than six months before the end of a Rada's convocation. The present Rada's term ends in early November. The delay of the inauguration may also provide time for investigative processes against Zelenskii to be completed and used to block his assumption of office. Thus, three days after the election, the corrupt anti-corruption body, NABU, opened an investigation int Zelenskii production company ( https://strana.ua/news/198188-nabu-nachalo-rassledovanie-po-kompanii-zelenskoho-iz-za-vozmozhnoj-rastraty-sredstv-hoskino-sytnik.html ).

The new draconian language law adopted by the Rada four days after the voting excludes from civil service those not fluent in Ukrainian. Zelenskii is not fluent in Ukrainian, and Poroshenko has vowed to sigh the law; one he himself helped draft and then submitted to the Rada before the election. Tentative Conclusions and Some Black Swans The Ukraine is on the edge of a constitutional crisis.

The country remains badly divided between the newly elected and at present popular president and his support base in the east and south, on the one hand, and Maidan's outgoing president, government and Rada with its support base largely in the west. As at the beginning of the Maidan protests in fall 2013, there are many Ukrainians who want positive democratic change. Unfortunately, they are countered by a powerful oligachic-ultranationalist coalition that has been stealing the state, dividing Ukrainians along regional, ethnic, linguistic, and religious lines in order to stay in power, and is about to be relegated to the position of the Maidan-in-opposition.

For now, Zelenskii is the new Yanukovych minus the corruption and pro-Russian inclinations. His positive image with the voters can be destroyed with new framing that can come with the ravaging of time in office as the elan of the victory in the presidential election fades and by effective Maidan-in-opposition propaganda. With Rada elections set for September, the first five-six months of Zelenskii's presidency -- should Poroshenko and the Rada radicals allow it to commence -- will be bogged down in a bitter power struggle that can easily spin out of control.

There is good reason to believe that the Rada leadership, the siloviki , and the ultranationalists and neofascists in Ukraine's frequently uncivil society will be willing to repeat a use of violence of February 2014 in order to preserve their power and avoid the risk of Zelenskii investigations into their corruption and the Maidan's original sin of that February 2014 snipers' terrorist attack. Zelenskii may very well forego a serious investigation of the Maidan terrorist attack and a crackdown on the illegal armed formations and activity of ultranationalists and neofascists like the National Corps and C14. A bridge too far for any Ukrainian leader, given the weak state and powerful extremist element on the streets.

There are black swans on the horizon. One is Vladimir Putin. He 'welcomed' Zelenskii by issuing a decree easing requirements for immigration to Russia and the receipt of Russian passports and pension payments for residents in civil war-torn region of the separatist DNR and LNR. In this way, he seemed to remind Zelenskii of Russia's now limited, albeit, direct military presence in the war zone. He further signaled his intent to run a hard bargain by refusing to congratulate Zelenskii on his presidential election victory unlike in 2014 when Putin congratulated Poroshenko.

But Zelenskii may have walked into this slap. He threw down the gauntlet to Putin when declared after his election victory (and before these moves by Putin): "To all post-Soviet countries: Look at us, anything is possible" ( www.rferl.org/a/poroshenko-concedes-after-exit-polling-shows-zelenskiy-taking-ukraine-presidency/29894814.html ). He reiterated the point several days later specifically when responding to Putin's decision to ease Donbass access to Russian passports and immigration ( https://vesti-ukr.com/strana/334477-zelenskij-sdelal-zajavlenie-ob-idee-putina-vydavat-ukraintsam-pasporta-rf ).

If Zelenskii sees himself as the spark or leader of a wave of color revolutions in the former USSR, he will find the going with Russia tough, regardless of who the Russian president is. Russians fear both revolution and foreign interference far more than they do Putin. More importantly for Ukraine, such a stance will make a resolution of the Donbass conflict impossible.

Another black swan is that Ukraine now has a Jewish president. This is not evidence of the absence of anti-Semitism, which is robust among Ukraine's substantial number of ultranationalists and neofascists. Anti-semitism has been overshadowed by such radicals' laser-like focus of their xenophobia on ethnic Russians.

The fact of a Jewish president -- in addition to the present PM being Jewish -- poses the risk of an uptick in anti-Semitism and in the appeal of the ultranationalist/neofascist message if Zelenskii fails to improve the economy, cut corruption, and/or appears to be 'caving in' to Russian or Western demands to the detriment of Ukraine's interests.

The Jewish president will be a prime scapegoat in the case of such failure. These two dynamics – the inexperienced Zelenskii's possible failure and the potential political repercussions of his Jewish roots -- could tip the scales in favor of the ultranationalist wing of the Maidan-in-opposition and shape its calculus as to whether or not to undertake a coup, repeating what worked once in February 2014.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

About the Author – Gordon M. Hahn, Ph.D., is a Senior Researcher at the Center for Terrorism and Intelligence Studies (CETIS), Akribis Group, San Jose, California, www.cetisresearch.org ; an expert analyst at Corr Analytics, http://www.canalyt.com ; and an analyst at Geostrategic Forecasting Corporation (Chicago), www.geostrategicforecasting.com .

Dr. Hahn is the author of the four books, most recently Ukraine Over the Edge: Russia, the West, and the 'New Cold War . Previously, he has authored three well-received books: The Caucasus Emirate Mujahedin: Global Jihadism in Russia's North Caucasus and Beyond (McFarland Publishers, 2014), Russia's Islamic Threat (Yale University Press, 2007), and Russia's Revolution From Above: Reform, Transition and Revolution in the Fall of the Soviet Communist Regime, 1985-2000 (Transaction Publishers, 2002). He also has published numerous think tank reports, academic articles, analyses, and commentaries in both English and Russian language media.

Dr. Hahn also has taught at Boston, American, Stanford, San Jose State, and San Francisco State Universities and as a Fulbright Scholar at Saint Petersburg State University, Russia and has been a senior associate and visiting fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Kennan Institute in Washington DC, and the Hoover Institution.

[Apr 29, 2019] The Mueller Report Indicts the Trump-Russia Conspiracy Theory by Aaron Maté

Highly recommended!
"Russiagate without Russia" actually means "Isrealgate". This individual points that he mentions below does not matter. Russiagate was a carefully planned and brilliantly executed false flag operation run by intelligences agencies (with GB agencies playing an important in some episodes decisive role) and headed probably by Obama himself via Brennan. There were two goals: (1) to exclude any possibility of detente with Russia and (2) to block any Trump attempts to change the USA foreign policy including running foreign war that enrich Pentagon contractors and justify supersized budget for intelligence agencies. As such is was a great success.
The fact that no American was indicted and that Mueller attempt to prosecute Russian marketing agneces failed does not matter. The atmosphere is now posoned for a generation. Americans are brainwashed and residue of Russiagate will stay for a long, long time. Neocons Bolton and Pompeo now run Trump administration foreign policy with Trump performing most ceremonial role in foreign policy domain.
In this sense Skripals poisoning was another false flag operation, which was the logical continuation of Russiagate. And Magnitsky killing (with Browder now a primary suspect) was a precursor to it. Both were run from Great Britain.
It is actually interesting how Mueller report swiped under the carpet the role of Great Britain in unleashing the Russiagate hysteria.
Two important foreign forces in the 2016 US Presidential elections was the Israel lobby and Great Britain. Trump proved to be a marionette not of Russia but of Israeli lobby. so sad...
Notable quotes:
"... Mueller's report does answer that question: There were effectively no "Kremlin intermediaries." The report contains no evidence that anyone from the Trump campaign spoke to a Kremlin representative during the election, aside from conversations with the Russian ambassador and a press-office assistant, both of whom were ruled out as having participated in a conspiracy (more on them later). ..."
Mar 26, 2019 | outline.com

For more than two years, leading US political and media voices promoted a narrative that Donald Trump conspired with or was compromised by the Kremlin, and that Special Counsel Robert Mueller would prove it. In the process, they overlooked countervailing evidence and diverted anti-Trump energies into fervent speculation and prolonged anticipation. So long as Mueller was on the case, it was possible to believe that " The Walls Are Closing In " on the traitor / puppet / asset in the White House .

The long-awaited completion of Mueller's probe, and the release of his redacted report, reveals this narrative -- and the expectations it fueled -- to be unfounded. No American was indicted for conspiring with Russia to influence the 2016 election. Mueller's report does lay out extensive evidence that Trump sought to impede the investigation, but it declines to issue a verdict on obstruction. It presents no evidence that the Trump campaign conspired with an alleged effort by the Russian government to defeat Hillary Clinton, and instead renders this conclusion: "Ultimately, the investigation did not establish that the [Trump] Campaign coordinated or conspired with the Russian government in its election-interference activities." As a result, Mueller's report provides the opposite of what Russiagate promoters led their audiences to expect: Rather than detailing a sinister collusion plot with Russia, it presents what amounts to an extended indictment of the conspiracy theory itself.

1. Russiagate Without Russia

The most fundamental element of a conspiracy is contact between the two parties doing the conspiring. Hence, on the eve of the report's release, The New York Times noted that among the "outstanding questions" that Mueller would answer were the nature of "contacts between Kremlin intermediaries and the Trump campaign."

Mueller's report does answer that question: There were effectively no "Kremlin intermediaries." The report contains no evidence that anyone from the Trump campaign spoke to a Kremlin representative during the election, aside from conversations with the Russian ambassador and a press-office assistant, both of whom were ruled out as having participated in a conspiracy (more on them later).

It should be no surprise, then, to learn from Mueller that, when "Russian government officials and prominent Russian businessmen began trying to make inroads into the new administration" after Trump's election victory, they did not know whom to call. These powerful Russians, Mueller noted, "appeared not to have preexisting contacts and struggled to connect with senior officials around the President-Elect." If top Russians did not have "preexisting contacts and struggled to connect with" the people that they supposedly conspired with, perhaps that is because they did not actually conspire.

To borrow a phrase from Nation contributing editor Stephen F. Cohen, when it comes to the core question of contacts between Trump and the Russian government, we are left with a "Russiagate without Russia." Instead we have a series of interactions where Trump associates speak with Russian nationals, people with ties to Russian nationals, or people who claim to have ties to the Russian government. But none of these "links," "ties," or associations ever entail a member of the Trump campaign interacting with a Kremlin intermediary. Russiagate promoters have nonetheless fueled a dogged media effort to track every known instance in which someone in Trump's orbit interacted with " the Russians ," or someone who can be linked to them . There is nothing illegal or inherently suspect about speaking to a Russian national -- but there is something xenophobic about implying as much.

2. Russiagate's Predicate Led Nowhere

The most glaring absence of a Kremlin intermediary comes in the case that ostensibly prompted the entire Trump-Russia investigation. During an April 2016 meeting in Rome, a London-based professor named Joseph Mifsud reportedly informed Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos that "the Russians" had obtained "thousands of emails" containing "dirt" on Hillary Clinton. That information made its way to the FBI, which used it as a pretext to open the "Crossfire Hurricane" probe on July 31, 2016. Papadopoulos was later indicted for lying to FBI agents about the timing of his contacts with Mifsud. The case stoked speculation that Papadopoulos acted as an intermediary between Trump and Russia .

But Papadopoulos played no such role. And while the Mueller report says that Papadopoulos "understood Mifsud to have substantial connections to high-level Russian government officials," it never asserts that Mifsud actuall y had those connections. Since Mifsud's suspected Russian connections were the purported predicate for the FBI's initial Trump-Russia investigation, that is a conspicuous non-call. Another is the revelation from Mueller that Mifsud made false statements to FBI investigators when they interviewed him in February 2017 -- but yet, unlike Papadopoulos, Mifsud was not indicted. Thus, even the interaction that sparked the Russia-collusion probe did not reveal collusion.

3. Sergey Kislyak Had "Brief and Non-Substantive" Interactions With the Trump Camp

Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak's conversations with Trump campaign officials and associates during and after the 2016 election were the focus of intense controversy and speculation, leading to the recusal of Jeff Sessions, then attorney general, and to the indictment of National Security Adviser Michael Flynn.

After an exhaustive review, Mueller concluded that Kislyak's interactions with Trump campaign officials at public events "were brief, public, and non-substantive." As for Kislyak's much – ballyhooed meeting which Sessions in September 2016, Mueller saw no reason to dispute that it "included any more than a passing mention of the presidential campaign." When Kislyak spoke with other Trump aides after the August 2016 Republican National Convention, Mueller "did not identify evidence in those interactions of coordination between the Campaign and the Russian government."

The same goes for Kislyak's post-election conversations with Flynn. Mueller indicted Flynn for making "false statements and omissions" in an interview with the FBI about his contacts with Kislyak during the transition in December 2016. The prevailing supposition was that Flynn lied in order to hide from the FBI an election-related payoff or " quid pro quo " with the Kremlin. The report punctures that thesis by reaffirming the facts in Flynn's indictment: What Flynn hid from agents was that he had "called Kislyak to request Russian restraint" in response to sanctions imposed by the outgoing Obama administration, and that Kislyak had agreed. Mueller ruled out the possibility that Flynn could have implicated Trump in anything criminal by noting the absence of evidence that Flynn "possessed information damaging to the President that would give the President a personal incentive to end the FBI's inquiry into Flynn's conduct."

4. Trump Tower Moscow Had No Help From Moscow

The November 2018 indictment of Trump's former lawyer, Michael Cohen, was widely seen as damning, possibly impeachment-worthy, for Trump. Cohen admitted to giving false written answers to Congress in a bid to downplay Trump's personal knowledge of his company's failed effort to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. To proponents of the collusion theory, Cohen's admitted lies were proof that " Trump is compromised by Russia ," " full stop ."

But the Mueller report does not show any such compromise, and, in fact, shows there to be no Trump-Kremlin relationship. Cohen, the report notes, "requested [Kremlin] assistance in moving the project forward, both in securing land to build the project and with financing." The request was evidently rejected. Elena Poliakova, the personal assistant to Kremlin Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov, spoke with Cohen by phone after he e-mailed her office for help. After their 20-minute call, the report says, "Cohen could not recall any direct follow-up from Poliakova or from any other representative of the Russian government, nor did the [Special Counsel's] Office identify any evidence of direct follow-up."

5. and Trump Didn't Ask Cohen to Lie About It

The Mueller report not only dispels the notion that Trump had secret dealings with the Kremlin over Trump Tower Moscow; it also rejects a related impeachment-level "bombshell." In January, BuzzFeed News reported that Mueller had evidence that Trump "directed" Cohen to lie to Congress about the Moscow project. But according to Mueller, "the evidence available to us does not establish that the President directed or aided Cohen's false testimony," and that Cohen himself testified "that he and the President did not explicitly discuss whether Cohen's testimony about the Trump Tower Moscow project would be or was false." In a de-facto retraction, BuzzFeed updated its story with an acknowledgment of Mueller's conclusion .

6. The Trump Tower Meeting Really Was Just a "Waste of Time"

The June 2016 meeting in Trump Tower was widely dubbed the " Smoking Gun ." An e-mail chain showed that Donald Trump Jr. welcomed an offer to accept compromising information about Clinton as "part of Russia and its government's support for Mr. Trump." But the pitch did not come from the meeting's Russian participants, but instead from Rob Goldstone, a British music publicist acting on their behalf. Goldstone said that he invented "publicist puff" to secure the meeting, because in reality, as he told NPR , "I had no idea what I was talking about."

Mueller noted that Trump Jr.'s response "showed that the Campaign anticipated receiving information from Russia that could assist candidate Trump's electoral prospects, but the Russian lawyer's presentation did not provide such information [emphasis mine]." The report further recounts that during the meeting Jared Kushner texted then-Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort that it was a "waste of time," and requested that his assistants "call him to give him an excuse to leave." Accordingly, when "Veselnitskaya made additional efforts to follow up on the meeting," after the election, "the Trump Transition Team did not engage."

7. Manafort Did Not Share Polling Data to Meddle in the US Election

In January, Mueller accused Manafort of lying to investigators about several matters, including sharing Trump polling data and discussing a Ukraine peace plan with a Ukrainian-Russian colleague, Konstantin Kilimnik, during the 2016 campaign. According to Mueller, the FBI "assesses" that Kilimnik has unspecified "ties to Russian intelligence." To collusion proponents, the revelation was dubbed " the closest we've seen yet to real, live, actual collusion " and even the " Russian collusion smoking gun ."

Mueller, of course, reached a different conclusion: He "did not identify evidence of a connection between Manafort's sharing polling data and Russia's interference in the election," and, moreover, "did not establish that Manafort otherwise coordinated with the Russian government on its election-interference efforts." Mueller noted that he "could not reliably determine Manafort's purpose in sharing" the polling data, but also acknowledged (and bolstered) the explanation of his star witness, Rick Gates, that Manafort was motivated by proving his financial value to former and future clients.

Mueller also gave us new reasons to doubt the assertions that Kilimnik himself is a Russian intelligence asset or spy. First, Mueller did not join media pundits in asserting such about Kilimnik. Second, to support his vague contention that Kilimnik has, according to the FBI, "ties to Russian intelligence," Mueller offered up a list of " pieces of the Office's Evidence" that contains no direct evidence. For his part, Kilimnik has repeatedly stated that he has no such ties, and recently told The Washington Post that Mueller never attempted to interview him.

8. The Steele Dossier Was Fiction

The Steele dossier -- a collection of Democratic National Committee-funded opposition research alleging a high-level Trump-Russia criminal relationship -- played a critical role in the Russiagate saga. The FBI relied on it for leads and evidentiary material in its investigation of the Trump campaign ties to Russia, and prominent politicians , pundits , and media outlets promoted it as credible .

The Mueller report, The New York Times noted last week , has "underscored what had grown clearer for months some of the most sensational claims in the dossier appeared to be false, and others were impossible to prove." Steele reported that low-level Trump aide Carter Page was offered a 19 percent stake in the state-owned Russian oil company Rosneft if he could get Trump to lift Western sanctions. In October 2016 the FBI, citing the Steele dossier, told the FISA court that it "believes that [Russia's] efforts are being coordinated with Page and perhaps other individuals associated with" the Trump campaign. The Mueller report, however, could "not establish that Page coordinated with the Russian government in its efforts to interfere with the 2016 presidential election."

The Steele dossier claimed that Michael Cohen visited Prague to meet Russian agents in the summer of 2016. In April 2018, McClatchy reported to much fanfare that Mueller's team "has evidence" that placed Cohen in Prague during the period in question. Cohen later denied the claim under oath, and Mueller agreed, noting that Cohen "never traveled to Prague."

After reports emerged in August 2016 that the Trump campaign had rejected an amendment to the Republican National Committee platform that called for arming Ukraine, Steele claimed that it was the result of a quid pro quo. The Mueller report "did not establish that" the rejection of the Ukraine amendment was "undertaken at the behest of candidate Trump or Russia."

9. The Trump Campaign Had No Secret Channel to WikiLeaks

In January, veteran Republican operative and conspiracy theorist Roger Stone caused a stir when he was indicted for lying to Congress about his efforts to make contact with WikiLeaks. But Mueller's indictment actually showed that Stone had no communications with WikiLeaks before the election and no privileged information about its releases . Most significantly, it revealed that Trump officials were trying to learn about the WikiLeaks releases through Stone -- a fact that underscored that the Trump campaign neither worked with WikiLeaks nor had advance knowledge of its e-mail dumps.

Mueller's final report does nothing to alter that picture. Its sections on Stone are heavily redacted, owing to Stone's pending trial. But they do make clear that Mueller conducted an extensive search to establish a tie between WikiLeaks, the Trump campaign, and Stone -- and came up empty. New reporting from The Washington Post underscores just how far their farcical efforts went. The Mueller team devoted time and energy to determine whether far-right conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi, best known for promoting the false claim that Barack Obama was born outside the United States, served as a link between Stone and WikiLeaks. Mueller's prosecutors "spent weeks coaxing, cajoling and admonishing the conspiracy theorist, as they pressed him to stick to facts and not reconstruct stories," the Post reports. "At times, they had debated the nature of memory itself." It is unsurprising that this led Mueller's prosecutors to ultimately declare, according to Corsi's attorney, "We can't use any of this."

10. There Was No Cover-Up

The Mueller report does not just dispel the conspiracy theories that have engulfed political and media circles for two years; it puts to rest the most popular, recent one: that Attorney General William Barr engaged in a cover-up . According to the dominant narrative, Barr was somehow concealing Mueller's damning evidence , while Mueller, even more improbably, stayed silent.

One could argue that Barr's summary downplays the obstruction findings, though it accurately relays that Mueller's report does "not exonerate" Trump. It was Mueller's decision to leave the verdict on obstruction to Barr and make clear that if Congress disagrees, it has the power to indict Trump on its own. Mueller's office assisted with Barr's redactions, which proved to be, as Barr had pledged, extremely limited. Despite containing numerous embarrassing details about Trump, no executive privilege was invoked to censor the report's contents.

In the end, Mueller's report shows that the Trump-Russia collusion narrative embraced and evangelized by the US political and media establishments to be a work of fiction . The American public was presented with a far different picture from what was expected, because leading pundits, outlets, and politicians ignored the countervailing facts and promoted maximalist interpretations of others. Anonymous officials also leaked explosive yet uncorroborated claims, leaving behind many stories that were subsequently discredited, retracted, or remain unconfirmed to this day.

It is too early to assess the damage that influential Russiagate promoters have done to their own reputations; to public confidence in our democratic system and media; and to the prospects of defeating Trump, who always stood to benefit if the all-consuming conspiracy theory ultimately collapsed. The scale of the wreckage, confirmed by Mueller's report, may prove to be the ultimate Russiagate scandal.

[Apr 28, 2019] The British Role in Russiagate Is About to Be Fully Exposed

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... The truth is, that a foreign government did indeed meddle in the American Presidential election, in a failed attempt to fix the outcome, but it was not Russia. It was the City of London, and the Five Eyes imperial intelligence services of the British Commonwealth, along with treasonous, "Tory" American elements. If that admission is forced to the surface, through the vigorous actions of all that oppose the presently dominant Big Lie tyranny, that revelation will shock and liberate people all over the world. The mental stranglehold of "fake news" media outlets can be permanently broken. That is the task of the next days and weeks. ..."
"... Apart from documenting the presence of "former" British intelligence agent Christopher Steele, former MI6 head Sir Richard Dearlove, and former GCHQ head Robert Hannigan at the center of the Russiagate campaign against President Trump for the past several years, we must, in order to expose this successfully, identify not only what was actually done and who was doing it, but the deeper policy motivation: why it was done. ..."
"... President Donald Trump has no vested interest in protecting the British "special relationship." From his second day in office, Trump declared that he would clean out the intelligence agencies. If Trump were to do that, however, the real, tragic history of America's last 50 years would be exhumed from that swamp. Shining a light into that darkness would illuminate the world. The American people would stop playing Othello to the City of London's Iago. They would denounce the British "special relationship," never again to fight imperial wars for the greater glory of the British Empire. They would learn the true story of Vietnam, of Iraq 1991 and Iraq 2003, of Libya 2011, and many other conflicts, special operations, and assassinations. The American people would know the truth, and the truth would set them free. ..."
"... The current insurrection against the United States Presidency is part of a global strategic battle: will a conspiracy of republican forces overcome the modern day British imperial system, centered in the hot money centers of the City of London and Wall Street, or will the oligarchical system once again triumph, immiserating all but the very wealthy? That is the real issue of the insurrection against the maverick American president being conducted by the London and NATO-centered enforcers of the old world. To paraphrase the American Declaration of Independence, ..."
"... According to CIA Director John Brennan's Congressional testimony, the British began complaining loudly about candidate Trump and Russia in late 2015. Brennan's statements were echoed in articles in The Guardian . According to Brennan, intelligence leads about Trump and Russia had been forwarded to Brennan from both British intelligence and from Estonia. ..."
"... This task force targeted Trump campaign volunteers Carter Page and George Papadopoulos in entrapment operations on British soil, using British agents, during the spring and summer of 2016. ..."
"... Hannigan abruptly resigned from GCHQ shortly after the election, sparking widespread speculation that the British were making an attempt at damage control. ..."
"... In 2016, the Manafort investigation migrated to the Democratic National Committee with direct assistance provided by Ukrainian state intelligence. This effort was led by Alexandra Chalupa, an admirer of Stepan Bandera and other heroes of Nazi history in Ukraine. Chalupa also had deep connections to British-oriented networks at the U.S. State Department. ..."
"... The final nail in this case has been provided by The Hill 's John Solomon. He says that Steele told former Associate Attorney General Bruce Ohr about the sources for the dirty dossier. According to Solomon, Ohr's notes reveal one main source, a former senior Russian intelligence official living in the United States. But, as anyone familiar with the territory would know, there is no such retired senior Russian intelligence official living in the United States whose entire life is not controlled by the CIA. ..."
"... As a result of Congressional investigations of Russiagate, it has become abundantly clear that the British operation against Trump was aided and abetted by the Obama White House, the State Department, the CIA, the FBI, and personalities associated with the National Endowment for Democracy. ..."
"... Out of the Ukraine coup, an entire military-centered propaganda apparatus arose, first through NATO, and then out from there to military units and diplomatic centers in the U.S., Europe, and Britain, to run low intensity operations, and black propaganda, against Russia. ..."
"... The British end of the operation includes the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, and NATO's Strategic Communications Center. In the United States, the Integrity Initiative has been integrated into the Global Engagement Center at the U.S. State Department. Most certainly, this operation is poised again to intervene in the U.S. elections; the British House of Lords have stated explicitly, in their December 2018 report, British Foreign Policy in a Shifting World Order, that Donald Trump must not be re-elected. ..."
"... This is why the British are yelping that under no circumstances can the classified documents concerning their role in the attempted coup against Donald Trump be declassified. It would end their leverage over the United States and much of Europe. That is why these documents must indeed be declassified, and parallel investigations by citizens and government officials concerned with ending the imperial system, otherwise known as the current "war party," must begin in earnest. ..."
"... Why did the DNC not allow the FBI to investigate the so-called" Russian hacked" emails? Rather, they hire CrowdStrike did you know: ..."
"... War with Afghanistan was Obama's payoff to the MIC, just as Russia is now Trump's payoff. ..."
"... The important truth about the emails is in their authenticity and in the contents. No one has even attempted to claim that they are not authentic or that the contents we've seen are other than the actual contents of the authentic messages. ..."
"... That is what i think. People should not concentrate on how, who and where. This is just a smokescreen to avoid talking about the content of the emails and Hillary Clinton's disgusting actions. She is a criminal and a murderess just like Obama and Tony Blair are lyers and mass murderers. ..."
Apr 22, 2019 | consortiumnews.com

The British Role in 'Russiagate' Is About to Be Fully Exposed April 8, 2019 20190408-russiagate-exposed-brits.pdf The "fake news" media has now dropped its pretense of having ever had any intention of allowing the truth -- as documented in U.S. Attorney General Barr's summary of Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller's report, exonerating President Donald Trump of having "conspired or coordinated with the Russian government" -- to thoroughly refute the Russiagate "Big Lie." Soon, however, it is certain that the deliberate, British Intelligence-originated, military-grade disinformation campaign carried out against the United States, including to this day, will be exposed.

The truth is, that a foreign government did indeed meddle in the American Presidential election, in a failed attempt to fix the outcome, but it was not Russia. It was the City of London, and the Five Eyes imperial intelligence services of the British Commonwealth, along with treasonous, "Tory" American elements. If that admission is forced to the surface, through the vigorous actions of all that oppose the presently dominant Big Lie tyranny, that revelation will shock and liberate people all over the world. The mental stranglehold of "fake news" media outlets can be permanently broken. That is the task of the next days and weeks.

"It's hard to find a black cat in a dark room, especially if there is no cat," says the Chinese proverb. Yet, although the Mueller report was called a "nothing burger," it was not: it still presented the potentially lethal lie that twelve Russian gremlins, code-named Guccifer 2.0, hacked the DNC. Sundry media meatheads thus continue to blog and broadcast about "what else is really there."

The false Russian hack story, still being repeated, marches on, undeterred, like the emperor without any clothes. One lame-brained variation, promoted in order to cover up the British role, states that Hillary Clinton, rather than Trump, colluded with the Russians. It is being repeated by Republicans and Democrats alike, some of them malicious, some of them confused, and all of them completely wrong. The media, such as the failed New York Times and various electronic media, must be forced to either admit the truth, or be even more thoroughly discredited than they already have been. They must stop their constant repetition of this Joseph Goebbels-like Big Lie. There must be a vigorous dissemination of the truth by all those journalists, politicians, activists and citizens that love truth more than their own assumptions, including about President Trump, or other dearly-held systems of false belief.

Apart from documenting the presence of "former" British intelligence agent Christopher Steele, former MI6 head Sir Richard Dearlove, and former GCHQ head Robert Hannigan at the center of the Russiagate campaign against President Trump for the past several years, we must, in order to expose this successfully, identify not only what was actually done and who was doing it, but the deeper policy motivation: why it was done.

A New Cultural Paradigm

The world is actually on the verge of ending the military conflicts among the major world powers, such as Russia, China, the United States, and India. These four powers, and not the City of London, are the key fulcrum around which a new era in humanity's future will be decided. A new monetary and credit system brought into being through these four powers would foster the greatest physical economic growth in the history of humanity. In addition, discussions involving Italy working with China on the industrialization of the African continent (discussions which could soon also involve the United States) show that sections of Europe want to join China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and leave the dying trans-Atlantic financial empire behind.

The recent announcement of a United States commitment to return to the Moon by 2024 can, in particular, become the basis for a proposal to other nations -- for example, China, Russia, and India, all of whom are space powers of demonstrated capability -- to resolve their differences on Earth in a higher, joint mission. As Russia's Roscosmos Director Dmitry Rogozin said in a recent interview:

"I am a fierce proponent of international cooperation, including with Americans, because their country is big and technologically advanced, and they can make good partners Especially since personal and professional relations between Roscosmos and NASA at the working level are great."

There is also the possibility of ending the danger of thermonuclear war. President Trump, speaking on April 4 of the prospects for world peace, stated:

"Between Russia, China, and us, we're all making hundreds of billions of dollars worth of weapons, including nuclear, which is ridiculous. I think it's much better if we all got together and didn't make these weapons those three countries I think can come together and stop the spending and spend on things that are more productive toward long-term peace."

This is a statement of real importance. Such an outlook is a rejection of the "perpetual crisis/perpetual war" outlook of the Bush-Obama Administration, a four-term "war presidency" which was abruptly, unexpectedly ended in 2016. The British were not amused.

It is to stop this new cultural paradigm, pivoted on the Pacific and the potential Four Powers alliance, that British imperial forces have deployed. The 2016 election of President Trump, and his personal friendship with President Xi Jinping and desire to work with President Putin, are an intolerable strategic threat to the eighteenth-century geopolitics of the British empire. They have repeatedly used Russiagate to disrupt the process of deliberation among Presidents Xi, Trump, and Putin, thus increasing the danger of war. Russiagate, in the interest of international security, must be ended by exposing it for the utter fraud that it is.

The Truth Set Free

President Donald Trump has no vested interest in protecting the British "special relationship." From his second day in office, Trump declared that he would clean out the intelligence agencies. If Trump were to do that, however, the real, tragic history of America's last 50 years would be exhumed from that swamp. Shining a light into that darkness would illuminate the world. The American people would stop playing Othello to the City of London's Iago. They would denounce the British "special relationship," never again to fight imperial wars for the greater glory of the British Empire. They would learn the true story of Vietnam, of Iraq 1991 and Iraq 2003, of Libya 2011, and many other conflicts, special operations, and assassinations. The American people would know the truth, and the truth would set them free.

The current insurrection against the United States Presidency is part of a global strategic battle: will a conspiracy of republican forces overcome the modern day British imperial system, centered in the hot money centers of the City of London and Wall Street, or will the oligarchical system once again triumph, immiserating all but the very wealthy? That is the real issue of the insurrection against the maverick American president being conducted by the London and NATO-centered enforcers of the old world. To paraphrase the American Declaration of Independence,

"The history of the present Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the undermining of the United States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world."

DOCUMENTATION

While Robert Mueller found that there was "no collusion" between Donald Trump or the Trump Campaign and Russia, he also filed two indictments regarding alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election. The first alleges that 12 members of Russian Military Intelligence hacked the DNC and John Podesta and delivered the purloined files to WikiLeaks for strategic publication before the July 2016 Democratic National Convention and in October 2016, one month before the election. The second indictment charges the Internet Research Agency, a Russian internet merchandising and marketing firm, with running social media campaigns in the U.S. in 2016 designed to impact the election. When the fuller version of the Mueller report becomes public, it is certain to recharge the claims of Russian interference based on the so-called background "evidence" supporting these indictments.

The good news, however, is that investigations in the United States and Britain, have unearthed significant contrary evidence exposing British Intelligence, NATO, and, to a lesser extent, Ukraine, as the actual foreign actors in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. We provide a short summary of the main aspects of that evidence to spark further investigations of the British intelligence networks, entities, and methods at issue, internationally. More detailed accounts concerning specific aspects of what we recite here can be found on our website.

The Russian Hack That Wasn't

The Veterans Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, an association of former U.S. intelligence officials, have demonstrated that the Russian hack of the DNC alleged by Robert Mueller, was more likely an internal leak, rather than a hack conducted over the internet. William Binney, who conducted the main investigations for the VIPS, spent 30 years at the National Security Agency, becoming Technical Director. He designed the sorts of NSA programs that would detect a Russian hack if one occurred. Binney conducted an actual forensic examination of the DNC files released by WikiLeaks, and the related files circulated by the persona Guccifer 2.0, who Robert Mueller claims is a GRU creation. Binney has demonstrated that the calculated transfer speeds and metadata characteristics of these files are consistent with downloading to a thumb drive or storage device rather than an internet-based hack. This supports the account by WikiLeaks of how it obtained the files. According to WikiLeaks and former Ambassador Craig Murray, they were obtained from a person who was not a Russian state actor of any kind, in Washington, D.C. WikiLeaks offered to tell the Justice Department all about this, and actual negotiations to this effect were proceeding in early 2017, when Senator Mark Warner and FBI Director James Comey acted to sabotage and end the negotiations.

Further, as opposed to the hyperbole in the media and in Robert Mueller's indictment, analysis of the Internet Research Agency's alleged "weaponization" of Facebook in 2016 involved a paltry total of $46,000 in Facebook ads and $4,700 spent on Google platforms . In an election in which the major campaigns spend tens of thousands of dollars every day on these platforms, whatever the IRA thought it was doing in its amateurish and juvenile memes and tropes was like throwing a stone in the ocean. Most of these activities occurred after the election and never mentioned either candidate. The interpretation that these ads were designed to draw clicks and website traffic, rather than influence the election, must be considered.

The "evidence" for Mueller's GRU hacking indictment was provided, in part, by CrowdStrike, the DNC vendor that originated the claims that the Russians had hacked that entity. CrowdStrike is closely associated with the Atlantic Council's Digital Research Lab (DRL), an operation jointly funded by NATO's Strategic Communications Center and the U.S. State Department, to counter Russian "hybrid warfare." CrowdStrike has been caught more than once falsely attributing hacks to the Russians and the Atlantic Council's DRL is a font of anti-Russian intelligence operations.

The British Target Trump

According to CIA Director John Brennan's Congressional testimony, the British began complaining loudly about candidate Trump and Russia in late 2015. Brennan's statements were echoed in articles in The Guardian . According to Brennan, intelligence leads about Trump and Russia had been forwarded to Brennan from both British intelligence and from Estonia. The former head of the Russia Desk for MI6 and protégé of Sir Richard Dearlove, Christopher Steele, fresh from working for British Intelligence, the FBI, and U.S. State Department in the 2014 Ukraine coup, assembled in 2016 a phony dossier called Operation Charlemagne, claiming widespread Russian interference in European elections, including in the Brexit vote. By the spring of 2016, Steele was contributing to a British/U.S. intelligence task force on the Trump Campaign which had been convened at CIA headquarters under John Brennan's direction.

This task force targeted Trump campaign volunteers Carter Page and George Papadopoulos in entrapment operations on British soil, using British agents, during the spring and summer of 2016. The personnel employed in these operations all had multiple connections to the British firm Hakluyt, to Steele's firm Orbis, and to the British military's Integrity Initiative. Sometime in the summer of 2016, Robert Hannigan, then head of GCHQ, flew to Washington to brief John Brennan personally. Hannigan abruptly resigned from GCHQ shortly after the election, sparking widespread speculation that the British were making an attempt at damage control.

Michael Flynn and Paul Manafort were already on the radar and under investigation by the same British, Dearlove-centered intelligence network and by Christopher Steele specifically. Flynn had been defamed by Dearlove and Stefan Halper, as a possible Russian agent way back in 2014 because he spoke to Russian researcher Svetlana Lokhova at a dinner sponsored by Dearlove's Cambridge Security Forum. Or, at least that was the pretext for the targeting of Flynn, who otherwise defied British intelligence by exposing Western support for terrorist operations in Syria and sought a collaborative relationship with Russia to counter ISIS. Manafort was under FBI investigation throughout 2014 and 2015, largely in retaliation for his role in steering the Party of the Regions to political power in Ukraine.

In 2016, the Manafort investigation migrated to the Democratic National Committee with direct assistance provided by Ukrainian state intelligence. This effort was led by Alexandra Chalupa, an admirer of Stepan Bandera and other heroes of Nazi history in Ukraine. Chalupa also had deep connections to British-oriented networks at the U.S. State Department.

In or around June 2016, Christopher Steele began writing his dirty and bogus dossier about Trump and Russia. This is the dossier which claimed that Trump was compromised by Putin and that Putin was coordinating with Trump in the 2016 election. The main "legend" of this full-spectrum information warfare operation run from Britain, was that Donald Trump was receiving "dirt" on Hillary Clinton from Russia. The operations targeting Page and Papadopoulos consisted of multiple attempts to plant fabricated evidence on them which would reflect what Steele himself was fabricating in the dirty dossier. At the very same time, the infamous June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower was being set up. That meeting involved the Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, who, it was alleged in a series of bizarre emails written by British publicist Ron Goldstone to set up the meeting, could deliver "dirt" on Hillary Clinton direct from the Russian government. Veselnitskaya didn't deliver any such dirt. But the entire operation was being monitored by State Department intelligence agent Kyle Parker, an expert on Russia. Parker's emails reveal deep ties to the highest levels of British intelligence and much chatter between them about Trump and Russia.

A now-changed version of the website for Christopher Steele's firm, Orbis, trumpeted an expertise in information warfare operations, and the networks in which Steele runs are deeply integrated into the British military's Integrity Initiative. The Integrity Initiative is a rapid response propaganda operation using major journalists in the United States and Europe to carry out targeted defamation campaigns. Its central charge, according to documents posted by the hacking group Anonymous, is selling the United States and Western Europe on the immediate need for regime change in Russia, even if that involves war.

Much has been made by Republicans and other lunkheads in the U.S. Congress of Steele's contacts with Russians for his dossier. They claim that such contacts resulted in a Russian disinformation operation being run through the duped Christopher Steele. Nothing could be further from the truth.

MI6's Dirty Dossier on Donald Trump: Full-Spectrum Information Warfare

On its face, Steele's dossier would immediately be recognized as a complete fabrication by any competent intelligence analyst. He cites some 32 sources inside the Russian government for his fabricated claims about Trump. What they allegedly told him is specific enough in time and content to identify them. To believe that the dossier is true or that actual Russians contributed to it, you must also believe that that the British government was willing to roll up this entire network, exposing them, since the intention was for the dossier's wild claims to be published as widely as possible. By all accounts, Britain and the United States together do not have 32 highly placed sources inside the Russian government, nor would they ever make them public in this way or with this very sloppy tradecraft. Steele's fabrication also uses aspects of readily available public information, such as the sale of 19% of the energy company Rosneft, (the alleged bribe offered to Carter Page for lifting sanctions) to concoct a fictional narrative of high crimes and misdemeanors.

Other claims in the dossier were published, publicly, in various Ukrainian publications. The famous claim that Trump directed prostitutes to urinate on a bed once slept upon by Barack Obama seems to be plagiarized from similarly fake 2009 British propaganda stories about Silvio Berlusconi spending the night with a prostitute in a hotel room in Rome, "defiling" Putin's bed. According to various sources in the United States, this outrageous claim was made by Sergei Millian. George Papadopoulos has stated that he believes Millian is an FBI informant, recounting in his book how a friend of Millian's blurted this out when Millian, Papadopoulos and the friend were having coffee.

The final nail in this case has been provided by The Hill 's John Solomon. He says that Steele told former Associate Attorney General Bruce Ohr about the sources for the dirty dossier. According to Solomon, Ohr's notes reveal one main source, a former senior Russian intelligence official living in the United States. But, as anyone familiar with the territory would know, there is no such retired senior Russian intelligence official living in the United States whose entire life is not controlled by the CIA.

Despite its obvious fake pedigree, Steele's dossier was laundered into the Justice Department repeatedly, by the CIA and State Department and the Obama White House. It was used to obtain FISA surveillance warrants turning key members of the Trump Campaign into walking microphones. It was circulated endlessly by the Clinton Campaign to a network of reporters in the U.S. known to serve as scribes for the intelligence community. John Brennan used it to conduct a special emergency briefing of the leading members of the U.S. Congress charged with intelligence responsibilities in August of 2016 and to brief Harry Reid, who was Senate Majority Leader at the time. All of this activity meant that the salacious accusation that Trump was a Putin pawn and the FBI was investigating the matter, leaked out and was used by the Clinton Campaign to defame Trump for its electoral advantage. When Trump won, Steele's nonsense received the stamp of the U.S. intelligence community and official currency in the campaign to take out the President.

As a result of Congressional investigations of Russiagate, it has become abundantly clear that the British operation against Trump was aided and abetted by the Obama White House, the State Department, the CIA, the FBI, and personalities associated with the National Endowment for Democracy. The individuals involved might be named Veterans of the 2014 Ukrainian Coup, since all of them also worked on this operation. It is no accident that Victoria Nuland, the case agent for the Ukraine coup, played a major role in bolstering Steele's credentials for the purpose of selling his dirty dossier to the media and to the Justice Department. This went so far as Steele giving a full scale briefing on his fabricated dossier at the State Department in October 2016.

Out of the Ukraine coup, an entire military-centered propaganda apparatus arose, first through NATO, and then out from there to military units and diplomatic centers in the U.S., Europe, and Britain, to run low intensity operations, and black propaganda, against Russia.

The British end of the operation includes the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, and NATO's Strategic Communications Center. In the United States, the Integrity Initiative has been integrated into the Global Engagement Center at the U.S. State Department. Most certainly, this operation is poised again to intervene in the U.S. elections; the British House of Lords have stated explicitly, in their December 2018 report, British Foreign Policy in a Shifting World Order, that Donald Trump must not be re-elected.

This is why the British are yelping that under no circumstances can the classified documents concerning their role in the attempted coup against Donald Trump be declassified. It would end their leverage over the United States and much of Europe. That is why these documents must indeed be declassified, and parallel investigations by citizens and government officials concerned with ending the imperial system, otherwise known as the current "war party," must begin in earnest.

Sign the Petition: President Trump, Declassify the Docs on the British Role in Russiagate

Robert , April 24, 2019 at 14:35

"in a post-Iraq invasion world, only herd-minded human livestock believe"

Perhaps add mainstream media to the list of such sincere believers, they will fire their own real journalists.

David Walters , April 24, 2019 at 13:14

"This doesn't mean that Russia would never use hackers to interfere in world political affairs or that Vladimir Putin is some sort of virtuous girl scout, it just means that in a post-Iraq invasion world, only herd-minded human livestock believe the unsubstantiated assertions of opaque and unaccountable government agencies about governments who are oppositional to those same agencies."

Absolutely correct.

Anyone who still believes what the IC says if a moron. As Pompeo recently said to the student body of Texas A&M University, my alma matta, the CIA's job is to lie, cheat and steel. He went on the explain that the CIA has courses to teach their agent that dark "art".

Eileen Kuch , April 24, 2019 at 18:13

Right, David Walters, and see Pompous Pompeo now. The only truths he's told was to a student body of Texas A&M University – his own alma mater – the CIA's job is to lie, cheat and steal.
Even though he's left his post as CIA Director and assumed his current post of Secretary of State. Pompous Pompeo continues his CIA traits of lying, cheating, and stealing. It's in a way similar to a phrase, "A leopard never changes its spots". This is why the DPRK govt issued a Persona Non Grata on Pompous Pompeo – that he isn't a bona fide diplomat, but a CIA official.

CWG , April 22, 2019 at 17:15

Here's my take on the 'Russian Collusion Deep State LIE.

There was NO Russian Collusion at all to get Trump in the White House. Most probably, Putin would have favored Clinton, since she could be bought. Trump can't.

What did happen was illegal spying on the Trump campaign. That started late 2015, WITHOUT a FISA warrant. They only obtained that in 2016, through lying to the FISA Court. The basis for that first warrant was the Fusion GPS Steele Dossier.

Ever since Trump won the election, they real conspirators knew they had a problem. That was apparent ever after Devin Nunes did the right thing by informing Trump they were spying on him.

Since they obtained those FISA warrant through lying to the FISA Court (which is treason) they needed to cover that up as quickly as possible.

So what did they do? Instead of admitting they lied to the FISA Court they kept on lying till this very day. The same lie through which they obtained the FISA warrants to spy on the Trump campaign was being pushed openly.

The lie is and was 'Trump colluded with the Russians in order to win the Presidential Election'.

They knew from day one Trump didn't do anything wrong. They did know they spied on Trump through lying to the FISA Court, which again, is treason. According to the Constitution, lying to the FISA court= Treason.

In order to avoid being indicted and prosecuted, they somehow needed to 'take down' the Attorney General. At all costs, they needed to try and hide what really happened.

So there they went. 'Trump colluded with the Russians. Not just Trump, but the entire Trump campaign!'.

'Sessions should recuse himself', the propaganda MSM said in unison. 'Recuse, recuse'.

Sessions, naively recused himself. Back then, even he probably didn't know the entire story. It was only later on that Sarah Carter and Jon Solomon found out it had been Hillary who ordered and paid the Steele Dossier.

The real conspirators hoped that through the Special Counsel rat Mueller they might be able to achieve three main objectives.

1: Convince the American people Russia indeed was meddling in the Presidential Election.

2: Find any sort of dirt on Trump and/or people who helped him win the Election in order to 'take them down'.

Many people were indicted, some were prosecuted. Yet NONE of them were convicted for a crime that had ANYTHING to with with the elections. NONE.

They stretched it out as long as possible. 'The longer you repeat a lie, the more people are willing to believe the lie'.

So that is what they did. They still do it. Mueller took TWO years to brainwash as many people as possible. 'Russian Collusion, Russian Collusion. Russia. Russia. Russia. Russia. Rusiaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhh ..

Why did they want to make sure they could keep telling that lie as long as possible?

Because they FEAR people will learn the truth. There was NEVER any Russian Collusion with the Trump campaign.

There was spying on the Trump campaign by Obama in order to try and make Hillary win the Presidential Election.

That is the actual COLLUSION between the Clinton Campaign and a weaponized Obama regime!!

So what did 'Herr Mueller' do?

He took YEARS to come up with the conclusion that the Trump campaign did NOT collude with Russia.

The MSM tried to make us all believe it was about that. Yet it was NOT.

His conclusive report is all about the question 'did or didn't the Trump campaign collude with the Russians'.

Trump exonerated, and the MSM only talks about that. Trump, Trump, Trump.

They still want us all to believe that was what the Mueller 'investigation' was all about. Yet it was not.

The most important objective of the Mueller 'investigation' was not to 'investigate'.

It was to 'instigate' that HUGE lie.

The same lie which they used to obtain the FISA warrant on the Trump campaign.

"Russia'.

So what has 'Herr Mueller' done?

A: He finds ZERO evidence at all which proves the Trump campaign colluded with ANY Russians.

And now the huge lie, which after all was the main objective right from the get go. (A was only a distraction)

B: Russians hacked the DNC.

That is what they wants us all to believe. That Russia somehow did bad stuff.

Now it was not Russia who did bad stuff.

It was Obama working together with the Clinton campaign. Obama weaponized his entire regime in order to let Clinton win the Presidency.

That is the REAL collusion. The real CRIME. Treason!

In order to create a 'cover up' Mueller NEEDED to instigate that Russia somehow did bad things.

That's what the Mueller Dossier is ALL about. They now have 'black on white' 'evidence' that Russia somehow did bad things.

Because if Russia didn't do anything like that, it would make us all ask the fair question 'why did Obama spy on the Trump Campaign'.

Let's go a bit deeper still.

Here's a trap Mueller created. What if Trump would openly doubt the LIE they still push? The HUGE lie that Russia did bad things?

After all, they NEED that LIE in order to COVER UP their own crime.

If Trump would say 'I do not believe Russia did anything to influence the elections, I think Mueller wrote that to COVER UP the real crime', what would happen?

They would say 'GOTCHA now, see Trump is colluding with Russia? He even refuses to accept Russia hacked the DNC, this ultimately proofs Trump indeed is a Russian asset'.

They believe that trap will work. They needed that trap, since if Russia wasn't doing anything wrong, it would show us all THEY were the criminals.

They NEED that lie, in order to COVER UP.

That is the 'Insurance Policy' Stzrok and Page texted about. Even Sarah Carter and Jon Solomon still don't seem to see all that.

They should have attacked the HUGE lie that Russia was somehow hacking the DNC. That is simply not true. It's a Mueller created LIE.

That LIE = the Insurance Policy.

What did they need an Insurance Policy for? They want us all to believe that was about preventing Trump from being elected.

Although true, that is only A.

They NEEDED an Insurance Policy in the unlikely case Trump would become President and would find out they were illegally spying on him!

The REAL crime is Obama weaponized the American Government to spy on even a duly elected President.

What's the punishment for Treason?

About Assange and Seth Rich.

Days after Mueller finishes his 'mission' (Establish the LIE Russia did bad things) which seems to be succesfull, the Deep State arrest the ONLY source who could undermine that lie.

Assange Since he knows who is (Seth Rich?) and who isn't (Russia) the source.

If Assange could testify under oath the emails did not come from Russia, the LIE would be exposed.

No coincidences here. I fear Assange will never testify under oath. I actually fear for his life.

Deniz , April 23, 2019 at 13:48

While I wholeheartedly agree with you that Obama and Clinton are criminals, the far less convincing part of your argument is that Trump is not now beholden to the same MIC interests. Bolton, Abrahams, Pompeo, Pence his relationship with Netanyahu, the overthrow of Madura are all glaring examples that contradict the Rights narrative that he is some type of hero. Trump may not have colluded with Russia, but he does seem to be colluding with Saudia Arabia, Israel, Big Oil and the MIC.

Whether one is on the Right or Left, the house is still made of glass.

boxerwars , April 22, 2019 at 17:13

RE: "A Russian Agent Smear"
:::

Was Pat Tillman Murdered?
JUL 30, 2007

I don't know, but it seems increasingly conceivable. Just absorb these facts:

O'Neal said Tillman, a corporal, threw a smoke grenade to identify themselves to fellow soldiers who were firing at them. Tillman was waving his arms shouting "Cease fire, friendlies, I am Pat [expletive] Tillman, damn it!" again and again when he was killed, O'Neal said

In the same testimony, medical examiners said the bullet holes in Tillman's head were so close together that it appeared the Army Ranger was cut down by an M-16 fired from a mere 10 yards or so away.
The motive? I don't know. It's still likeliest it was an accident. But there's some mysterious testimony in the SI report about nameless snipers. A reader suggests the following interpretation:

News this weekend said that there were "snipers" present and the witnesses didn't remember their names. I believe that's code in the Army–these guys were Delta. In the Tillman incident, these snipers weren't part of the unit and they were never mentioned publicly before. That's a key indicator that they weren't supposed to be acknowledged.

If you've ever read Blackhawk Down, Mark Bowden explains how he grew frustrated because interviewed Rangers kept referring to "soldiers from another unit" while claiming they didn't know the unit ID or the soldiers' names. It took him months to crack the unit ID and find people from Delta who were present at the fight.

Randy Shugart and Gary Gordon, the Delta operators who earned Medals of Honor in Mogadishu, have always been identified as snipers, too.

If my theory is correct, the Delta guys could have fired the shots – a three-round burst to the forehead from 50 yards is impossible for normal soldiers and Rangers, but is probably an easy shot for those guys. But because Delta doesn't officially exist and Tillman was a hero, nobody in the Army would want to have to explain exactly how the event went down. Easier just to claim hostile fire until the family forced them to do otherwise.
This makes some sense to me, although we shouldn't dismiss the chance he was murdered. Tillman was a star and might have aroused jealousy or resentment. He also opposed the Iraq war and was a proud atheist. In Bush's increasingly sectarian military, that might have stirred hostility. I don't know. But I know enough to want a deeper investigation. My atheist readers will no doubt admire the way Tillman left this world, according to the man who was with him:

As bullets flew above their heads, the young soldier at Pat Tillman's side started praying. "I thought I was praying to myself, but I guess he heard me," Sgt. Bryan O'Neal recalled in an interview Saturday with The Associated Press. "He said something like, 'Hey, O'Neal, why are you praying? God can't help us now."'

(Maybe the Congress can )

////// The USA is aghast with "smears" and "internal investigations" and promised but never produced "White Papers" 'as the world turns' and circles continents Dominated by American Military Power / Predominantly Barbarous / Uncivilized Use of Force / and Arrogantly Effective in it's use of Dominating Military Power.

\\\\ The Poorer Peoples of the World accept their lots-in-life with some acceptance of reality vis-a-vis the "lot-in-life" they've been alleged/assigned.

/// But How Do We Accept The Fact that our Self-Sacrificiing Hero,Pat Tillman, was slaughtered in Afghanistan,
(WITH POSITIVE PROOF) – by his own Fellow American soldiers – ???

!!!! What i'm say'n is, if Tillman represents the Life Surrendering "American Hero"
WHY DID HIS FELLOW "AMERICAN SOLDIERS" ASSASSINATE & MURDER HIM ???????

AND WHY IS THIS STORY BURIED ALONG WITH MANY OTHER SMEAR Stories
that provide prophylactic protection for all the Trump pianist prophylaxis cover

Up for the Right Wing theft of American Democracy under FDR
In favor of Ayn Rand's prevalent OBJECTIVISM under Trump.

"Capitalism and Altruism
are incompatible
capitalism and altruism
cannot coexist in man,
or in the same society".

President Trump represents
Stark & Total Capitalism
Just as "Conservative Party"
Core is in The Confederacy
AKA; The RIGHT WING

The Right Wing of US Gov't
Is All About PRESERVING
Confederate States' Laws
Written by Thomas Jefferson

Prior to The Constitution, which
became the Received/Judicial
Constitutional Law of the Land in
The Republic of the "United States"

Elizabeth K. Burton , April 23, 2019 at 12:50

It's not enough that Trump is clearly a classic narcissist whose behavior will continue to deteriorate the more his actions and statements are attacked and countered? You know what happens when narcissists are driven into a corner by people tearing them down? They get weapons and start killing people.

There is already more than ample evidence to remove Donald Trump from office, not the least being he's clearly mentally unfit. Yet the Democrats, some of whom ran for office on a promise to impeach, are suddenly reticent to act without "more investigation". Nancy Pelosi stated on the record prior to release of the Mueller report impeachment wasn't on the agenda "for now". She's now making noises in the opposite direction, but that's all they are: noise.

The bottom line is the Clintonite New Democrats currently running the party have only one issue to run on next year: getting rid of Donald Trump. They still operate under the delusion they will be able to use him to draw off moderate Republican voters, the same ones they were positive would come out for Hillary Clinton in '16. Their multitude of candidates pay lip service to progressive policy then carefully walk back to the standard centrist positions once the donations start coming, but the common underlying theme was and continues to be "Donald Trump is evil, and we need to elect a Democrat."

In short, without Donald Trump in the Oval Office, the Democrat Party has no platform. They need him there as a target, because Mike Pence would be impossible for them to beat. They are under orders, according to various writers who've addressed the Clinton campaign, to block Bernie Sanders and his platform at all costs; and they will allow the country to crash and burn before they disobey those orders. That means keeping Donald Trump right where he is through next November.

Eddie S , April 24, 2019 at 21:14

Exactly right, EKB -- - you can't ballroom dance without a partner! Also reminds me of the couples you occasionally run into where one partner repeatedly runs-down the other, and you get the feeling that the critical partner doesn't have much going on in his/her life so they deflect that by focusing on the other partner

Johnny Ryan S , April 22, 2019 at 13:38

Why did the DNC not allow the FBI to investigate the so-called" Russian hacked" emails? Rather, they hire CrowdStrike did you know:
1)Obama Appoints CrowdStrike Officer To Admin Post Two Months Before June 2016 Report On Russia Hacking DNC
2) CrowdStrike Co-Founder Is Fellow On Russia Hawk Group, Has Connections To George Soros, Ukrainian Billionaire
3) DNC stayed that the FBI never asked to investigate the servers – that is a lie.
4) CrowdStrike received $100 million in investments led by Google Capital (since re-branded as CapitalG) in 2015. CapitalG is owned by Alphabet, and Eric Schmidt, Alphabet's chairman, was a supporter of Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election. More than just supporting Clinton, leaked emails from Wikileaks in November 2016 showed that in 2014 he wanted to have an active role in the campaign.

-daily caller and dan bongino have been bringing these points up since 2016.

Deniz , April 22, 2019 at 12:36

The Right is currently salivating over the tough law enforcement rhetoric coming out of Barr and Trump.

It reminds me of when Obama was running for office in 2008 when everyone, including myself, was in awe of him. What kept slipping into his soaring anti-intervention speeches, was a commitment to the good war in Afghanistan, which seemed totally out of place with the rest of his rhetoric. The fine print was far more reflective of his administration actions as the rest of it his communications turned out to be just telling people what they wanted to hear.

War with Afghanistan was Obama's payoff to the MIC, just as Russia is now Trump's payoff.

Herman , April 22, 2019 at 11:09

The argument about not inserting Rich and the download is a good one as a defense strategy but doesn't help with finding the truth about the emails. We can only hope that pursuing the truth and producing it will have a cumulative effect and the illusory truth effect will include this truth.

Red Douglas , April 22, 2019 at 16:00

>>> ". . . doesn't help with finding the truth about the emails."

The important truth about the emails is in their authenticity and in the contents. No one has even attempted to claim that they are not authentic or that the contents we've seen are other than the actual contents of the authentic messages.

Why should we much care how they were acquired and provided to the publisher?

Lily , April 22, 2019 at 17:55

That is what i think. People should not concentrate on how, who and where. This is just a smokescreen to avoid talking about the content of the emails and Hillary Clinton's disgusting actions. She is a criminal and a murderess just like Obama and Tony Blair are lyers and mass murderers.

All three of them are free, earning millions with their publicity whereas two brave persons who were telling the truth have been tortured and are still in jail. Reality has become like the most horrible nightmare. Everything simply seems to have turned upside down. No writer would invent such a primitive plot. And yet it is the unbelievable reality.

Dump Pelousy , April 23, 2019 at 13:21

I totally agree with you, and in fact believe that this whole 22month expensive and mind numbing circus has been played out JUST to keep the public from knowing what the emails actually said. Can you imagine Madcow focusing with such ferocity on John Pedesta as she has on Putin, by discussing what he wrote during a presidential campaign to "influence the election" ? We'd be a different country now, not fighting our way thru the McCarthite Swamp she helped create.

[Apr 26, 2019] Jared Kushner, Not Maria Butina, Is America's Real Foreign Agent by Philip Giraldi

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... FARA requires all individuals and organizations acting on behalf of foreign governments to registered with the Department of Justice and to report their sources of income and contacts. Federal prosecutors have claimed that Butina was reporting back to a Russian official while deliberating cultivating influential figures in the United States as potential resources to advance Russian interests, a process that is described in intelligence circles as "spotting and assessing." ..."
"... Selective enforcement of FARA was, ironically, revealed through evidence collected and included in the Mueller Report relating to the only foreign country that actually sought to obtain favors from the incoming Trump Administration. That country was Israel and the individual who drove the process and should have been fined and required to register with FARA was President Donald Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner. As Kushner also had considerable "flight risk" to Israel, which has no extradition treaty with the United States, he should also have been imprisoned. ..."
"... Kushner reportedly aggressively pressured members of the Trump transition team to contact foreign ambassadors at the United Nations to convince them to vote against or abstain from voting on the December 2016 United Nations Security Council Resolution 2334 condemning Israeli settlements. The resolution passed when the US, acting under direction of President Barack Obama, abstained, but incoming National Security Adviser Michael Flynn did indeed contact the Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak twice and asked for Moscow's cooperation, which was refused. Kushner, who is so close to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that the latter has slept at the Kushner apartment in New York City, was clearly acting in response to direction coming from the Israeli government. ..."
"... Another interesting tidbit revealed by Mueller relates to Trump foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos's ties to Israel over an oil development scheme. Mueller "ultimately determined that the evidence was not sufficient to obtain or sustain a conviction" that Papadopoulos "committed a crime or crimes by acting as an unregistered agent of the Israeli government." Mueller went looking for a Russian connection but found only Israel and decided to do nothing about it. ..."
Apr 25, 2019 | ronpaulinstitute.org
The Mueller Special Counsel inquiry is far from over even though a final report on its findings has been issued. Although the investigation had a mandate to explore all aspects of the alleged Russian interference in the 2016 US election, from the start the focus was on the possibility that some members of the Trump campaign had colluded with the Kremlin to influence the outcome of the election to favor the GOP candidate. Even though that could not be demonstrated, many prominent Trump critics, to include Laurence Tribe of the Harvard Law School, are demanding that the investigation continue until Congress has discovered "the full facts of Russia's interference [to include] the ways in which that interference is continuing in anticipation of 2020, and the full story of how the president and his team welcomed, benefited from, repaid, and obstructed lawful investigation into that interference and the president's cooperation with it."

Tribe should perhaps read the report more carefully. While it does indeed confirm some Russian meddling, it does not demonstrate that anyone in the Trump circle benefited from it or cooperated with it. The objective currently being promoted by dedicated Trump critics like Tribe is to make a case to impeach the president based on the alleged enormity of the Russian activity, which is not borne out by the facts: the Russian role was intermittent, small scale and basically ineffective.

One interesting aspect of the Mueller inquiry and the ongoing Russophobia that it has generated is the essential hypocrisy of the Washington Establishment. It is generally agreed that whatever Russia actually did, it did not affect the outcome of the election. That the Kremlin was using intelligence resources to act against Hillary Clinton should surprise no one as she described Russian President Vladimir Putin as Hitler and also made clear that she would be taking a very hard line against Moscow.

The anti-Russia frenzy in Washington generated by the vengeful Democrats and an Establishment fearful of a loss of privilege and entitlement claimed a number of victims. Among them was Russian citizen Maria Butina, who has a court date and will very likely be sentenced tomorrow .

Regarding Butina, the United States Department of Justice would apparently have you believe that the Kremlin sought to subvert the five-million-member strong National Rifle Association (NRA) by having a Russian citizen take out a life membership in the organization with the intention of corrupting it and turning it into an instrument for subverting American democracy. Maria Butina has, by the way, a long and well documented history as an advocate for gun ownership and was a co-founder in Russia of Right to Bear Arms, which is not an intelligence front organization of some kind. It is rather a genuine lobbying group with an active membership and agenda. Contrary to what has been reported in the mainstream media, Russians can own guns but the licensing and registration procedures are long and complicated, which Right to Bear Arms, modeling itself on the NRA, is seeking to change.

Butina, a graduate student at American University, is now in a federal prison, having been charged with collusion and failure to register as an agent of the Russian Federation. She was arrested on July 15, 2018. It is decidedly unusual to arrest and confine someone who has failed to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938 (FARA) , but she has not been granted bail because, as a Russian citizen, she is considered to be a "flight risk," likely to try to flee the US and return home.

FARA requires all individuals and organizations acting on behalf of foreign governments to registered with the Department of Justice and to report their sources of income and contacts. Federal prosecutors have claimed that Butina was reporting back to a Russian official while deliberating cultivating influential figures in the United States as potential resources to advance Russian interests, a process that is described in intelligence circles as "spotting and assessing."

Maria eventually pleaded guilty of not registering under FARA to mitigate any punishment, hoping that she would be allowed to return to Russia after a few months in prison on top of the nine months she has already served. She has reportedly fully cooperated the US authorities, turning over documents, answering questions and undergoing hours of interrogation by federal investigators before and after her guilty plea.

Maria Butina basically did nothing that damaged US security and it is difficult to see where her behavior was even criminal, but the prosecution is asking for 18 months in prison for her in addition to the time served. She would be, in fact, one of only a handful of individuals ever to be imprisoned over FARA, and they all come from countries that Washington considers to be unfriendly, to include Cuba, Saddam's Iraq and Russia. Normally the failure to comply with FARA is handled with a fine and compulsory registration.

Butina was essentially convicted of the crime of being Russian at the wrong time and in the wrong place and she is paying for it with prison. Selective enforcement of FARA was, ironically, revealed through evidence collected and included in the Mueller Report relating to the only foreign country that actually sought to obtain favors from the incoming Trump Administration. That country was Israel and the individual who drove the process and should have been fined and required to register with FARA was President Donald Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner. As Kushner also had considerable "flight risk" to Israel, which has no extradition treaty with the United States, he should also have been imprisoned.

Kushner reportedly aggressively pressured members of the Trump transition team to contact foreign ambassadors at the United Nations to convince them to vote against or abstain from voting on the December 2016 United Nations Security Council Resolution 2334 condemning Israeli settlements. The resolution passed when the US, acting under direction of President Barack Obama, abstained, but incoming National Security Adviser Michael Flynn did indeed contact the Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak twice and asked for Moscow's cooperation, which was refused. Kushner, who is so close to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that the latter has slept at the Kushner apartment in New York City, was clearly acting in response to direction coming from the Israeli government.

Another interesting tidbit revealed by Mueller relates to Trump foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos's ties to Israel over an oil development scheme. Mueller "ultimately determined that the evidence was not sufficient to obtain or sustain a conviction" that Papadopoulos "committed a crime or crimes by acting as an unregistered agent of the Israeli government." Mueller went looking for a Russian connection but found only Israel and decided to do nothing about it.

As so often is the case, inquiries that begin by looking for foreign interference in American politics start by focusing on Washington's adversaries but then comes up with Israel. Noam Chomsky described it best "First of all, if you're interested in foreign interference in our elections, whatever the Russians may have done barely counts or weighs in the balance as compared with what another state does, openly, brazenly and with enormous support. Netanyahu goes directly to Congress, without even informing the president, and speaks to Congress, with overwhelming applause, to try to undermine the president's policies -- what happened with Obama and Netanyahu in 2015. Did Putin come to give an address to the joint sessions of Congress trying to -- calling on them to reverse US policy, without even informing the president? And that's just a tiny bit of this overwhelming influence."

Maria Butina is in jail for doing nothing while Jared Kushner, who needed a godfathered security clearance due to his close Israeli ties, struts through the White House as senior advisor to the president in spite of the fact that he used his nepotistically obtained access to openly promote the interests of a foreign government. Mueller knows all about it but recommended nothing, as if it didn't happen. The media is silent. Congress will do nothing. As Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi put it "We in Congress stand by Israel. In Congress, we speak with one voice on the subject of Israel." Indeed.

Reprinted with permission from Strategic Culture Foundation .

[Apr 22, 2019] FBI top brass have been colluding with top brass of CIA and MI6 to pursue ambitious anti-Russian agenda

Highly recommended!
"Carnage needs to destroyed" mentality is dominant among the USA neoliberal elite and drives the policy toward Russia.
They all supported neoconservative extremely ambitious foreign policy agenda directed on weakening Russian and establishing of world dominance. It also seems clear that influential journalists, such as Glenn Simpson was before founding Fusion GPS, along with his wife Mary Jacoby, have been strongly involved in this
Notable quotes:
"... There is reason to suspect that some former and very likely current employees of the FBI have been colluding with elements in other American and British intelligence agencies, in particular the CIA and MI6, in support of an extremely ambitious foreign policy agenda for a very long time. It also seems clear that influential journalists, such as Glenn Simpson was before founding Fusion GPS, along with his wife Mary Jacoby, have been strongly involved in this. ..."
"... This agenda has involved hopes for 'régime change' in Russia, whether as the result of an oligarchic coup, a popular revolt, or some combination of both. Also central have been hopes for a further 'rollback' of Russia influence in the post-Soviet space, both in areas now independent, such as Ukraine, and also ones still part of the Russian Federation, notably Chechnya. ..."
"... And, crucially, it involved exploiting the retreat of Russian power from the Middle East for 'régime change' projects which it was hoped would provide a definitive solution to the – inherently intractable – security problems of a Jewish settler state in the area. ..."
"... Important support for these strategies was provided by the 'StratCom' network centred around the late Boris Berezovsky, which clearly collaborated closely with MI6. As was apparent from the witness list at Sir Robert Owen's Inquiry into the death of Alexander Litvinenko, which produced a report based essentially on a recycling of claims made by the network's members, key players were on your side of the Atlantic – notably Alex Goldfarb, Yuri Shvets, and Yuri Felshtinsky. ..."
"... it seems to me the usa and uk have been tied at the hip for a very long time... when it comes to foreign affairs policy and wars - the one will always vouch for the other without hesitation... it tells me the relationship is really deep.. ..."
"... I and my friends consider it a given that most, if not all, anglo-zionist moves in the ME are to "provide a definitive solution to the – inherently intractable – security problems of a Jewish settler state in the area. " It is an open secret that the izzies are the reason why a few Russians, some Turks, lots of Kurds and countless Arabs are dying in the Syrian battlefields. Another open secret: the takfiris and kurds have been, and are, supported by the West. That the "masters of the universe™" have been conceiving and doubling down on such disastrous policies give lie to their much-vaunted "intelligence". ..."
"... It is the very FACT of Trump even getting elected at ALL which outrages and terrifies them so much. They are used to seeing themselves as successful manipulators and engineers of every major event. They were engineering the whole electoral battlespace to get Clinton elected. The mere fact of Trump's victory in the teeth of their Electoral Engineering for Clinton is an act of defiance which they will not tolerate. ..."
"... And if they fail to bring Trump down at all, they will stand revealed as being defeatable. And this is their big fear. That if people see they have defeated the Borg once on keeping Trump in the teeth of Borg's efforts, that people might try to defeat and smash down the Borg on another issue. And then another. And then another after that. ..."
"... Because it is not possible to do on fundamental level yet, especially with US foreign policy establishment and so called consensus being built almost entirely, in ideological and, most importantly, cadres senses, on the ultimate exceptionalist agenda in which Russia is the ultimate obstacle and enemy. Establishment in saturated with neocons and likes. They are the swamp. ..."
"... They act and believe that they are Olympians. You have to wait for them to age and die before any substantive change in Fortress West's posture; say 2040 ..."
"... In 1977 Zbigniew Brzezinski, as President Carter's National Security Adviser, forms the Nationalities Working Group (NWG) dedicated to the idea of weakening the Soviet Union by inflaming its ethnic tensions. ..."
"... State Department official Henry Precht will later recall that Brzezinski had the idea "that Islamic forces could be used against the Soviet Union. The theory was, there was an arc of crisis, and so an arc of Islam could be mobilized to contain the Soviets." [Scott, 2007, pp. 67] In November 1978, President Carter appointed George Ball head of a special White House Iran task force under Brzezinski. Ball recommends the US should drop support for the Shah of Iran and support the radical Islamist opposition of Ayatollah Khomeini. This idea is based on ideas from British Islamic expert Dr. Bernard Lewis, who advocates the balkanization of the entire Muslim Near East along tribal and religious lines. The chaos would spread in what he also calls an "arc of crisis" and ultimately destabilize the Muslim regions of the Soviet Union ..."
"... About relation Steele-MI6, well, you never leave your IS. Or to put it in another way, you are never out of the scope of your past IS ..."
"... No, three years at tops and could be much sooner if dimes starting dropping by exposed people that don't want to take the fall for their superiors whom they always detested. One possible thing to get the process started sooner is if the recent Russian Intelligence delegation to DC that Smoothie mentions on another thread gave the current administration, as a diplomatic courtesy of course, the audio recordings of Madame Sectary Nuland's infamous mental meltdown at Kaliningrad. No telling what beans were spilled in her moment of panic, but I am willing to bet key names were dropped. Either way the time is coming. ..."
"... Especially, once American policy-makers who saw and experienced war (Ike, George Marshall's generation) departed things started to roll down hill with Reagan bringing on board a whole collection of neocons. ..."
"... Unawareness is always dangerous, a complete blackout in relations between two nuclear powers is more than dangerous--it is completely reckless. Again, the way CW 1.0 is perceived in the current US "elites" it becomes extremely tempting to repeat it. Electing Hillary was another step in unleashing CW 2.0 by people who have no understanding of what they were doing. ..."
"... Obama started crushing US-Russian relations before any campaigns were launched and before Trump was even seriously considered a GOP nominee, let alone a real contender. New confrontation hinged on HRC being elected. In fact, she was one of the major driving forces behind a serious of geopolitical anti-Russian moves. Visceral Russo-phobia became a feature in HRC campaign long before any Steele's Dossier. This was a program. ..."
"... IMO, the bigger problem for American not shying away from wars, or being silent about them , is when your home, your mom and dad' home, the town you grew up in, are immune and away from the war. ..."
"... The security and safety of the two oceans, encourages or at least, in an all volunteer military makes it a secondary problem for regular people, to worry about. ..."
"... A particular interesting feature of those on the British side – in which we now know Christopher Steele must have played a leading role – were the bizarre gyrations those responsible were going through trying to explain away the extraordinary fact that when he had broken the story of his poisoning, Litvinenko had pointed the finger of suspicion at his Italian associate Mario Scaramella. ..."
"... Of course later reports in the Steele Dossier go hand in hand with a larger public relations campaign. Creating reality? Irony alert: as informer/source I would by then know what the other side wants to hear. ..."
Mar 10, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

Steele, Shvets, Levinson, Litvinenko and the 'Billion Dollar Don.'

In the light of the suggestion in the Nunes memo that Steele was 'a longtime FBI source' it seems worth sketching out some background, which may also make it easier to see some possible reasons why he 'was desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being president.'

There is reason to suspect that some former and very likely current employees of the FBI have been colluding with elements in other American and British intelligence agencies, in particular the CIA and MI6, in support of an extremely ambitious foreign policy agenda for a very long time. It also seems clear that influential journalists, such as Glenn Simpson was before founding Fusion GPS, along with his wife Mary Jacoby, have been strongly involved in this.

This agenda has involved hopes for 'régime change' in Russia, whether as the result of an oligarchic coup, a popular revolt, or some combination of both. Also central have been hopes for a further 'rollback' of Russia influence in the post-Soviet space, both in areas now independent, such as Ukraine, and also ones still part of the Russian Federation, notably Chechnya.

And, crucially, it involved exploiting the retreat of Russian power from the Middle East for 'régime change' projects which it was hoped would provide a definitive solution to the – inherently intractable – security problems of a Jewish settler state in the area.

Important support for these strategies was provided by the 'StratCom' network centred around the late Boris Berezovsky, which clearly collaborated closely with MI6. As was apparent from the witness list at Sir Robert Owen's Inquiry into the death of Alexander Litvinenko, which produced a report based essentially on a recycling of claims made by the network's members, key players were on your side of the Atlantic – notably Alex Goldfarb, Yuri Shvets, and Yuri Felshtinsky.

The question of what links these had, or did not have, with elements in U.S. intelligence agencies is thus a critical one.

In making some sense of it, the fact that one key figure we know to have been involved in this network was missing at the Inquiry – the former FBI agent Robert Levinson, who disappeared on the Iranian island of Kish in March 2007 – is important.

Unfortunately, I only recently came across a book on Levinson published in 2016 by the 'New York Times' journalist Barry Meier, which is now hopefully winging its way across the Atlantic. From the accounts of the book I have seen, such as one by Jeff Stein in 'Newsweek', it seems likely that its author did not look at any of the evidence presented at Owen's Inquiry.

(See http://www.newsweek.com/2016/05/20/what-really-happened-robert-levinson-cia-iran-454803.html .)

Had he done so, Meier might have discovered that his subject had been, as it were, 'top supporting actor' in the first fumbling attempt by Christopher Steele et al to produce a plausible-sounding scenario as to the background to Litvinenko's death. A Radio 4 programme on 16 December 2006, presented by the veteran BBC presenter Tom Mangold, had been wholly devoted to an account by Shvets, backed up by Levinson. Both of these were, like Litvinenko, supposed to be impartial 'due diligence' operatives.

The notion that any of them might have connections with Western intelligence agencies was not considered. The – publicly available – evidence of the involvement of Shvets, whose surname means 'cobbler' or 'shoemaker' in Ukrainian, in the processing of the tapes of conversations involving the former Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma supposedly recorded by Major Melnychenko, which had played a crucial role in the 2004-5 'Orange Revolution' was not mentioned.

Still less was it mentioned that claims that the – very dangerous – late Soviet Kolchuga system, which made it possible the kind of identification of incoming aircraft which radar had traditionally done, without sending out signals which made the destruction of the facilities doing it possible, had been sold by Kuchma to Iraq had proven spurious.

What Shvets had done had been to take – genuine – audio in which Kuchma had discussed a possible sale, and edit it to suggest a sale had been completed.

(See http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090333/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/evidence .)

As a former television current affairs producer, I can talk to you of the marvels which London audio editors can produce, very happily. Unfortunately, the days when not all BBC and 'Guardian' journalists were corrupt stenographers for corrupt and incompetent spooks, as Mangold and his like have been for Steele and Levinson, are long gone.

All this has become particularly relevant now, given that Simpson has placed the notorious Jewish Ukrainian mobster Semyon Mogilevich and the 'Solntsevskaya Bratva' mafia group centre stage in his accounts not simply of Trump and Manafort, but also of William Browder. For most of the 'Nineties, Levinson had been a, if not the, lead FBI investigator on Mogilevich.

(On this, see the 1999 BBC 'Panorama' programme 'The Billion Dollar Don', also presented by Tom Mangold, which has extensive interviews both with Mogilevich and Levinson at

http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/events/panorama/transcripts/transcript_06_12_99.txt )

In the months leading up to Levinson's disappearance, a key priority for the advocates of the strategy I have described was to prevent it being totally derailed by the patently catastrophic outcome of the Iraqi adventure.

Compounding the problem was the fact that this had created the 'Shia Crescent', which in turn exacerbated the potential 'existential threat' to Israel posed by the steadily increasing range, accuracy and numbers of missiles available to Hizbullah in hardened positions north of the Litani.

These, obviously, provided both a 'deterrent' for that organisation and Iran, and also a radical threat to the whole notion that somehow Israel could ever be a 'safe haven' for Jews, against the supposedly ineradicable disposition of the 'goyim' sooner or later to, as it were, revert to type. The dreadful thought that Israel might not be necessary had to be resisted at all costs.

What followed from the disaster unleashed by the – Anglo-American – 'own goal' in toppling Saddam was, ironically, a need on the part of key players to 'double down.' Above all, it was necessary for many of those involved to counter suggestions from the Russian side that going around smashing up 'régimes' that one might not like sometimes blew up in one's face.

Even more threatening were suggestions from the Russian side that it was foolish to think one could use jihadists without risking 'blowback', and that there might be an overwhelming common interest in combating Islamic extremism.

Another priority was to counter the pushback in the American 'intelligence community' and military, which was to produce the drastic downgrading of the threat posed by the Iranian nuclear programme in the November 2007 NIE and then the resignation of Admiral William Fallon as head of 'Centcom' the following March.

So in 2005 Shvets came to London. He and his audio editors had another 'bite at the cherry' of the Melnychenko tapes, so that material that did in fact establish that both the SBU and FSB had collaborated with Mogilevich could be employed to make it seem that Putin had a close personal relationship with the mobster.

All kinds of supposedly respectable American and British academics, like Professors Karen Dawisha and Robert Service, have fallen for this, hook, line and sinker. It gives a new meaning to the term 'useful idiot.'

(See http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090333/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/evidence .)

In a letter sent in December that year by Litvinenko to the 'Mitrokhin Commission', for which his Italian associate Mario Scaramella was a consultant, this was used in an attempt to demonstrate that Mogilevich, while acting as an agent for the FSB and under Putin's personal 'krysha', had attempted to supply a 'mini atomic bomb' – aka 'suitcase nuke' – to Al Qaeda. Shortly after the letter was sent Scaramella departed on a trip to Washington, where he appears to have got access to Aldrich Ames.

(See http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090333/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/evidence .)

At precisely this time, as Meier explains, Levinson was in the process of being recruited by a lady called Anne Jablonski who then worked as a CIA analyst. It appears that she was furious at the failure of the operational side at the Agency to produce evidence which would have established that Iran did indeed have an ongoing nuclear programme, and she may well have hoped would implicate Russia in supplying materials.

There are grounds to suspect that one of the things that Berezovsky and Shvets were doing was fabricating such 'evidence.' Whether Levinson was involved in such attempts, or genuinely looking for evidence he was convinced must be there, I cannot say. It appears that he fell for a rather elementary entrapment operation – which could well have been organised with the collaboration of Russian intelligence. (People do get fed up with being framed, particular if 'régime change' is the goal.)

It also seems likely that, quite possibly in a different but related entrapment operation, related to propaganda wars in which claims and counter claims about a polonium-beryllium 'initiator' as the crucial missing part which might make a 'suitcase nuke' functional, Litvinenko accidentally ingested fatal quantities of polonium. A good deal of evidence suggests that this may have been at Berezovsky's offices on the night before he was supposedly assassinated.

It was, obviously, important for Steele et al to ensure that nobody looked at the 'StratCom' wars about 'suitcase nukes.' Here, a figure who has played a key role in such wars in relation to Syria plays an interesting minor one in the story.

Some time following the destruction of the case for an immediate war by the November 2007 NIE, a chemical weapons specialist called Dan Kaszeta, who had worked in the White House for twelve years, moved to London.

In 2011, in addition to founding a consultancy called 'Strongpoint Security', he began a writing career with articles in 'CBRNe World.' Later, he would become the conduit through which the notorious 'hexamine hypothesis', supposedly clinching proof that the Syrian government was responsible for the sarin incidents at Khan Sheikhoun, Ghouta, Saraqeb, and Khan Al-Asal, was disseminated.

Having been forced by the threat of a case being opened against them under human rights law into resuming the inquest into Litvinenko's death, in August 2012 the British authorities appointed Sir Robert Owen to conduct it. (There are many honest judges in Britain, but obviously, if one sets out to find someone who will 'cover up' for the incompetence and corruption of people like Steele, as Lord Hutton did before him, you can find them.)

That same month, a piece appeared in 'CBRNe World' with the the strapline: 'Dan Kaszeta looks into the ultimate press story: Suitcase nukes', and the main title 'Carry on or checked bags?' Among the grounds he gives for playing down the scare:

'Some components rely on materials with shelf life. Tritium, for example, is used in many nuclear weapon designs and has a twelve year half-life. Polonium, used in neutron initiators in some earlier types of weapon designs, has a very short halflife. US documents state that every nuclear weapon has "limited life components" that require periodic replacement (do an internet search for nuclear limited life components and you can read for weeks).'

(For this and other articles by Kaszeta, as also his bio, see http://strongpointsecurity.co.uk ')

What Kaszeta has actually described are the reasons why polonium is a perfect 'StratCom' instrument. In terms of scientific plausibility, in fact there were no 'suitcase nukes', and in any case 'initiators' using polonium had been abandoned very early on, in favour of ones which lasted longer.

For 'StratCom' scenarios, as experience with the 'hexamine hypothesis' has proved, scientific plausibility can be irrelevant.

What polonium provides is a means of suggesting that Al Qaeda have in fact got hold of a nuclear device which they could easily smuggle into, say, Rome or New York, or indeed Moscow, but there is a crucial missing component which the FSB is trying to provide to them. By the same token, of course, that missing component could be depicted as one that Berezovsky and Litvinenko are conspiring to suppl to the Chechen insurgents.

In addition, the sole known source of global supply is the Avangard plant at Sarov in Russia, so the substance is naturally suited for 'StratCom' directed against that country, which its intelligence services would – rather naturally – try to make 'boomerang.'

According to Glenn Simpson, Christopher Steele is a 'boy scout.' This seems to me quite wrong – but, even if it were true, would you want to unleash a 'boy scout' into these kinds of intrigue?

As it is not clear why Kaszeta introduced his – accurate but irrelevant – point about polonium into an article which was concerned with scientific plausibility, one is left with an interesting question as to whether he cut his teeth on 'StratCom' attempting to ensure that nobody seriously interested in CBRN science followed an obvious lead.

In relation to the question of whether current FBI personnel had been involved in the kind of 'StratCom' exercises, I have been describing, a critical issue is the involvement of Shvets and Levinson in the Alexander Khonanykhine affair back in the 'Nineties, and the latter's use of claims about the Solntsevskaya to prevent the key figure's extradition. But that is a matter for another day.

A corollary of all this is that we cannot – yet at least – be absolutely confident that the account in the Nunes memo, according to which Steele was suspended and then dismissed as an FBI source for what the organisation is reported to define as 'the most serious of violations' – the unauthorised disclosure of a relationship with the organisation – is necessarily wholly accurate.

Who did and did not authorise which disclosures to the media, up to and including the extraordinary decision to have the full dossier, including claims about Aleksej Gubarev and the Alfa oligarchs, in flagrant disregard of the obvious risks of defamation suits, and who may be trying to pass the buck to others, remains I think less than totally clear.

Posted at 03:42 PM in As The Borg Turns , Habakkuk , Russia , Russiagate | Permalink

james , 03 February 2018 at 04:33 PM

thanks david... fascinating overview and conjecture..

it seems to me the usa and uk have been tied at the hip for a very long time... when it comes to foreign affairs policy and wars - the one will always vouch for the other without hesitation... it tells me the relationship is really deep..

JohnB , 03 February 2018 at 05:17 PM
David,

Thank you very. As ever you have illuminated a few more things for me. Kaszeta's involvement is interesting. He is someone I am in the middle of researching in relation to Higgins and Bellingcat.

turcopolier , 03 February 2018 at 06:02 PM
james

It is the closest of all international intelligence relationships. It started in WW2. Before that the Brits were though of as a potential enemy. pl

Babak Makkinejad -> turcopolier ... , 03 February 2018 at 06:10 PM
I think the English are using you, they are unsentimental empirical people that only do these that benefit the Number One.
The chief beneficiary of the Coup in Iran was England and not US.
catherine , 03 February 2018 at 06:22 PM
That Newsweek piece about Levinson is very superficial to me.

Re: Levinson

# Who suggested to who 'first' the Iran caper...Anne Jablonski to Levinson or Levinson to Jablonski? It was reported earlier by Meier that in December 2005, when Levinson was pitching Jablonski on projects he might take on when his CIA contract was approved he sent her a lengthy memo about Dawud's potential as an informant.

# Ira Silverman, the Iran hating NBC guy, pitched a Iraq caper to Levinson with Dawud Salahuddin, as his Iran contact and Levinson went to Jablonski with it.

# And what was with Boris Birshstein, a Russian organized crime figure who had fled to Israel and Oleg Deripaska, the "aluminum czar" of Russia whose organized crime contacts have kept him from entering the United States jumping in to help find Levinson? The FBI allowed Deripaska in for two visits in 2009 in exchange for his alleged help in locating Levinson but obviously nothing came of it.

I think there were more little agents/agendas in this than Levinson and Jablonski and US CIA.

Ishmael Zechariah , 03 February 2018 at 06:54 PM
DH,

As usual a wonderful analysis. I admire your insight, integrity and courage. I wish you could write more on why the Borg is so much against Trump, even though they have Kushner, Adelson and Co. running interference for them.

I and my friends consider it a given that most, if not all, anglo-zionist moves in the ME are to "provide a definitive solution to the – inherently intractable – security problems of a Jewish settler state in the area. " It is an open secret that the izzies are the reason why a few Russians, some Turks, lots of Kurds and countless Arabs are dying in the Syrian battlefields. Another open secret: the takfiris and kurds have been, and are, supported by the West. That the "masters of the universe™" have been conceiving and doubling down on such disastrous policies give lie to their much-vaunted "intelligence".

Be safe.

Ishmael Zechariah

Rd , 03 February 2018 at 07:31 PM
Babak Makkinejad said in reply to turcopolier...

The chief beneficiary of the Coup in Iran was England and not US.
..and US is the one who has been paying for it since 1979!!!

kooshy said in reply to Ishmael Zechariah... , 03 February 2018 at 08:21 PM
IZ
My guess is, that he is unpredictable, instantaneous and therefore can't be consistent and reliable, useful idiot needs to be predictable.
kooshy , 03 February 2018 at 08:43 PM
"There is reason to suspect that some former and very likely current employees of the FBI have been colluding with elements in other American and British intelligence agencies, in particular the CIA and MI6, in support of an extremely ambitious foreign policy agenda for a very long time. "

David as usual fascinating work connecting the dots. One question that comes to my mind is about the above point you are making. Is it your understanding or believe that these IC individuals on both side of Atlantic, are pursuing/forcing their (on behalf of the Borg) foreign policy agenda outside of their respected seating governments? If not, why is it that incoming administration cannot stop them? So far I can't see any strategic changes on US foreign policy toward ME or Russia, at tactical level yes but not fundamentally.

different clue , 03 February 2018 at 08:49 PM
Ishmael Zechariah,

( reply to comment 6),

I am not David Habakkuk, obviously. But I will venture a little opinion anyway. It is not enough that the Borgists get their policy preferences. If it were, then Kushner, Adelson and Co. running interference would be enough for them.

It is the very FACT of Trump even getting elected at ALL which outrages and terrifies them so much. They are used to seeing themselves as successful manipulators and engineers of every major event. They were engineering the whole electoral battlespace to get Clinton elected. The mere fact of Trump's victory in the teeth of their Electoral Engineering for Clinton is an act of defiance which they will not tolerate.

And if they fail to bring Trump down at all, they will stand revealed as being defeatable. And this is their big fear. That if people see they have defeated the Borg once on keeping Trump in the teeth of Borg's efforts, that people might try to defeat and smash down the Borg on another issue. And then another. And then another after that.

So that is why the Borg cares so much. They view the Trump election as an insurgency, and they view themselves as waging a counterinsurgency, which they dare not lose.

Jack , 03 February 2018 at 08:54 PM
David,

Thanks for your analysis. I always enjoy and learn from your posts. I wish you would post more often.

In my non-expert opinion, the Borg and the media were all in for Hillary. They were convinced that she was gonna win. To curry favor with the Empress who would be certainly crowned after the election they were eager and convinced that their lawlessness would become a badge for promotion and plum positions in her administration. In their conceit, they believed they could kill two birds with one stroke. They could vilify Putin and create the mass hysteria to checkmate him, while at the same time disparage and frame Trump as The Manchurian Candidate to seal their certain electoral victory.

Unfortunately for them voters in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin didn't buy their sales pitch despite the overwhelming media barrage from all corners. Even news publications who have only endorsed Republican candidates for President for over a century endorsed her.

Trump's election win caused panic among the political establishment, the media and the Deep State. They were already all-in. Their only choice was to double down and get Trump impeached. Now their conspiracy is beginning to unravel. They are doing everything possible to forestall their Armageddon. Of course they have many allies. This battle is gonna be interesting to watch. Trump is clearly getting many Congressional Republicans on side as his base of Deplorables remains solidly behind him. That is what's befuddling the Borg pundits.

SmoothieX12 -> kooshy... , 03 February 2018 at 09:51 PM
So far I can't see any strategic changes on US foreign policy toward ME or Russia, at tactical level yes but not fundamentally.

Because it is not possible to do on fundamental level yet, especially with US foreign policy establishment and so called consensus being built almost entirely, in ideological and, most importantly, cadres senses, on the ultimate exceptionalist agenda in which Russia is the ultimate obstacle and enemy. Establishment in saturated with neocons and likes. They are the swamp. This swamp (Borg, deep state, etc.) still thinks that it can use Cold War 1.0 Playbook and address very real and dangerous American economic issues. They are wrong, since most of them didn't read the playbook correctly to start with.

Babak Makkinejad -> SmoothieX12 ... , 03 February 2018 at 10:10 PM
They act and believe that they are Olympians. You have to wait for them to age and die before any substantive change in Fortress West's posture; say 2040.
kooshy said in reply to SmoothieX12 ... , 03 February 2018 at 10:24 PM
You are right CWII is very much desired and on agenda, but i am not sure of setup, the setup/board has been changed tremendously and IMO benefits the Asian side of Bosphorus, for one thing technology is no longer exclusive, and financial burden is heavier on atlantic side.
catherine said in reply to SmoothieX12 ... , 04 February 2018 at 12:21 AM
''Establishment in saturated with neocons and likes. They are the swamp. ''

The locust keep trying and trying, destruction is their life's work.

'1977-1981: Nationalities Working Group Advocates Using Militant Islam Against Soviet Union'

In 1977 Zbigniew Brzezinski, as President Carter's National Security Adviser, forms the Nationalities Working Group (NWG) dedicated to the idea of weakening the Soviet Union by inflaming its ethnic tensions. The Islamic populations are regarded as prime targets. Richard Pipes, the father of Daniel Pipes, takes over the leadership of the NWG in 1981. Pipes predicts that with the right encouragement Soviet Muslims will "explode into genocidal fury" against Moscow. According to Richard Cottam, a former CIA official who advised the Carter administration at the time, after the fall of the Shah of Iran in 1978, Brzezinski favored a "de facto alliance with the forces of Islamic resurgence, and with the Republic of Iran." [Dreyfuss, 2005, pp. 241, 251 - 256]

'November 1978-February 1979: Some US Officials Want to Support Radical Muslims to Contain Soviet Union'

State Department official Henry Precht will later recall that Brzezinski had the idea "that Islamic forces could be used against the Soviet Union. The theory was, there was an arc of crisis, and so an arc of Islam could be mobilized to contain the Soviets." [Scott, 2007, pp. 67] In November 1978, President Carter appointed George Ball head of a special White House Iran task force under Brzezinski. Ball recommends the US should drop support for the Shah of Iran and support the radical Islamist opposition of Ayatollah Khomeini. This idea is based on ideas from British Islamic expert Dr. Bernard Lewis, who advocates the balkanization of the entire Muslim Near East along tribal and religious lines. The chaos would spread in what he also calls an "arc of crisis" and ultimately destabilize the Muslim regions of the Soviet Union

aleksandar , 04 February 2018 at 04:41 AM
David,

About relation Steele-MI6, well, you never leave your IS. Or to put it in another way, you are never out of the scope of your past IS.

Fred said in reply to Babak Makkinejad... , 04 February 2018 at 08:40 AM
Babak,

"they got US to bail them out during WWII" And how would things have worked out had we not done so?

Fred , 04 February 2018 at 08:46 AM
David,

"There is reason to suspect that some former and very likely current employees of the FBI have been colluding with elements in other American and British intelligence agencies, in particular the CIA and MI6, in support of an extremely ambitious foreign policy agenda for a very long time."

Yes, that is what appears to be just what is coming to light. I wonder just what position Trey Gowdy is going to have since he won't be running for re-election. The rage from the left is palpable. I'm sure the next outraged guy on the left will know how to shoot straighter than the ones who shot up Congressman Scalise or the concert goers at Mandalay Bay.

Anna said in reply to SmoothieX12 ... , 04 February 2018 at 08:48 AM
"They are wrong, since most of them didn't read the playbook correctly to start with."
-- If they have read the important books at all... The ongoing scandal has been revealing a stunning incompetence of the "deciders." Too often they look comical, ridiculous, undignified. This is dangerous, considering their power.
turcopolier , 04 February 2018 at 08:54 AM
Anna

The powerful are often remarkably ignorant. pl

Babak Makkinejad -> Fred... , 04 February 2018 at 10:08 AM
England preferred NAZI Germany to USSR, this is well known. As to what would have happened, the outcome of the war, in my opinion, did not depend on US participation in the European Theatre. All of Europe would have become USSR satellite or joined USSR.
jonst said in reply to Babak Makkinejad... , 04 February 2018 at 11:53 AM
"unsentimental empirical people"? Absolutely disagree with you. Now the Iranians, they strike me as a singularity unsentimental people. Just general impressions, mind you.
Kooshy said in reply to catherine... , 04 February 2018 at 12:06 PM
Yes, US was the first country to proudly deliver Manpads to be used by "rebels" (Mojahadin later Taleban) against USSR in Afghanistan back in 80s. And, as per the architect of support for the rebels (Zbigniew Brzezinski) very proud of it with no regret. With that in mind, I don't see how western politicians, the western governments and their related proxy war planers, will be regretting, even sadden, once god forbid we see passenger planes with loved ones are shot down taking off or landing at various western airports and other places around the word. Just like how superficialy with crocodile tears in their eyes they acted in aftermath of the terrorist events in various western cities in this past 16 years. Gods knows what will happens to us if the opposite side start to supply his own proxies with lethal anti air weapons. "Proudly", I don't think anybody in west cares or will regret of such an escalation.
Phodges said in reply to turcopolier ... , 04 February 2018 at 12:23 PM
Sir

It seems we are being defeated by Cicero's enemy within. Zion is achieving what no one could hope to achieve by force of arms.

David Habakkuk -> catherine... , 04 February 2018 at 01:17 PM
catherine,

In response to comment 5.

I think it likely that what Meier produces is only a 'limited hangout', and am hoping that when the book arrives it will contain more pointers.

It is important to be clear that one is often dealing with people playing very complicated double games.

An interesting document is the 'Petition for Writ of Habeus Corpus' made on behalf of Khodorkovsky's close associate Alexander Konanykhin back in 1997,when the Immigration and Naturalization Service were – apparently at least – cooperating with Russian attempts to get hold of him. An extract:

'During the immigration hearing FBI SA Robert Levinson, an INS witness, confirmed that in 1992 Petitioner was kidnapped and afterwards pursued by assassins of the Solntsevskaya organized criminal group. This organized criminal group is reportedly the largest and the most influential organized criminal group in Russia, and operates internationally.'

(See http://defiancethebook.com/legal/habeas/petition.htm .)

Note the similarities between the 'StratCom' that Khonanykin and his associates were producing in the 'Nineties, and that which Simpson and his associates have been producing two decades later.

Another useful example is provided by a 2004 item in the 'New American Magazine', reproduced on Konanykhin's website:

'One of those who testified on behalf of Konanykhine was KGB defector Yuri Shvets, who declared: "I have a firsthand knowledge on similar operations conducted by the KGB." Konanykhine had brought trouble on himself, Shvets continued, when he "started bringing charges against people who were involved with him in setting up and running commercial enterprises. They were KGB people secretly smuggling from Russia hundreds of millions of dollars . This is [a] serious case, and I know that KGB ... desperately wants to win this case, and everybody who won't step to their side would face problems."'

(See http://konanykhin.com/news/the-konanykhine-case.html .)

So – 'first hand knowledge', from a Ukrainian nationalist – look at what the Chalupas have been doing, it seems not much has changed.

For a rather different perspective on what Konanykhin had actually been up to, from someone in whose honesty – if not always judgement – I have complete confidence, see the testimony of Karon von Gerhke-Thompson to the House Committee on Banking and Financial Services hearings on Russian Money Laundering. In this, she described how she had been approached by him in 1993:

'"Konanykhine alleged that Menatep Bank controlled $1.7bn [Ł1bn] in assets and investment portfolios of Russia's most prominent political and social elite," she recalled. She said he wanted to move the bank's assets off shore and asked her to help buy foreign passports for its "very, very special clients".

'In her testimony to the committee Ms Von Gerhke-Thompson said she informed the CIA of the deal, and the agency told her that it believed Mr Konanykhine and Mr Khodorkovsky "were engaged in an elaborate money laundering scheme to launder billions of dollars stolen by members of the KGB and high-level government officials".

(For a 'Guardian report, see https://www.theguardian.com/world/1999/sep/23/julianborger ; for the actual testimony, see http://archives-financialservices.house.gov/banking/92299ger.pdf .)

Coming back to Steele's 'StratCom', in July 2008, an item appeared on the 'Newnight' programme of the BBC – which some of us think should by then have been rechristened the 'Berezovsky Broadcasting Corporation' – in which the introduction by the presenter, Jeremy Paxman, read as follows:

'Good evening. The New Russian President, Dmitri Medvedev, was all smiles and warm words when he met Gordon Brown today. He said he was keen to resolve all outstanding difficulties between the two countries. Yada yada yada. Gordon Brown smiled, but he must know what Newsnight can now reveal: that MI5 believes the Russian state was involved in the murder of Alexander Litvinenko by radioactive poisoning. They also believe that without their intervention another London-based Russian, Boris Berezovsky, would have been murdered. Our diplomatic editor, Mark Urban, has this exclusive report.'

(For the transcript presented in evidence to Owen's Inquiry, see http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090333/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/ ">https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/">http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090333/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/ )

When Urban repeated the claims on his blog, there was a positive eruption from someone using the name 'timelythoughts', about the activities of someone she referred to as 'Berezovsky's disinformation specialist' – when I came across this later, it was immediately clear to me that she was Karon von Gerhke, and he was Shvets.

(For the first part of the exchanges of comments, the second apparently having become unavailable, see http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/newsnight/markurban/2008/07/litvinenko_killing_had_state_i.html )

She then described a visit by Scaramella to Washington, details of which had already been unearthed by my Italian collaborator, David Loepp. Her claim to have e-mails from Shvets, from the time immediately prior to Litvinenko's death, directly contradicting the testimony he had given, fitted with other evidence I had already unearthed.

Later, we exchanged e-mails over a quite protracted period, and a large amount of material that came into my possession as a result was submitted by me to the Inquest team, with some of it being used in posts on the 'European Tribune' site.

What I never used publicly, because I could only partially corroborate it from the material she provided, was an extraordinary claim about Shvets:

'He was responsible for bringing in a Kremlin initiative that was walked Vice President Cheney's office on a US government quid pro quo with the Kremlin FSB SVR involving the arrest of Mikhail Khodorkovsky – a cease and desist on allegations of a politically motivated arrest of Khodorkovsky, violations of rules of law and calls from Russia's expulsion from the G 8 in exchange for favorable posturing of U.S. oil companies on Gazprom's Shtokman project and intelligence on weapon sales during the Yeltsin era to Iraq, Iran and Syria, all documented in reports I submitted to the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and MI6.

'Berezovsky's DS could not be on both sides on that isle. His Kremlin FSB SVR sources had been vetted by the CIA and by the National Security Council. They proved to be as represented. As we would later learn, however, he was on Berezovsky's payroll at same time. The FSB SVR general he was coordinating the Kremlin initiative through was S. R. Subbotin, the same FSB SVR general who was investigating Berezovsky's money laundering operations in Switzerland during the same timeframe. His FSB SVR sources surrounding Putin were higher than any Lugovoy could have ever hoped to affiliate with.

'R. James Woolsey (former CIA DCI), Marshall Miller (former law partner of the late CIA DCI William Colby), who I coordinated the Kremlin initiative through that Berezovsky's DS had brought in were shocked to learn that he was affiliated with Berezovsky and Litvinenko. He was in Berezovsky's inner circle and engaged in vetting Russian business with Litvinenko. He operated Berezovsky's Ukraine website, editing and dubbing the now infamous Kuchma tapes throughout the lead up to the elections in the Ukraine. Berezovsky contributed $41 million to Viktor Yushchenko's campaign, which he used in an attempt to force Yushchenko to reunite with Julia Tymoschenko. It failed but would succeed later after Berezovsky orchestrated a public relations initiative through Alan Goldfarb in the U.S. on behalf of Tymoschenko.'

Having got to know Karon von Gerhke quite well, and also been able to corroborate a great deal of what she told me about many things, and discussed these matters with her, it is absolutely clear to me that she was neither fabricating nor fantasising. What later became apparent, both to her and to me, was that in the 'double game' that Shvets was playing, he had succeeded in fooling her as to the side for which he was working.

It seems likely however that the reason Shvets could do what he did was that quite precisely that many high-up people in the Kremlin and elsewhere were playing a 'double game.' In this, Karon von Gerhke's propensity for indiscretion – of which I, like others, was both beneficiary and victim – could be useful.

An exercise in 'positioning', which could be used to disguise the fact that Shvets was indeed 'Berezovsky's disinformation specialist', could be used to make it appear that 'intelligence on weapon sales during the Yeltsin era to Iraq, Iran and Syria' was actually credible.

This could have been used to try to rescue Cheney, Bush and their associates from the mess they had got into as a result of the failure of the invasion to provide any evidence whatsoever supporting the case which had been made for it. It could also have been used to provide the kind of materials justifying military action against Iran for which Levinson and Jablonski were looking, and for similar action against Syria.

Among reasons for bringing this up now is that we need to make sense of the paradox that Simpson – clearly in collusion with Steele – was using Mogilevich and the 'Solnsetskaya Bratva' both against Manafort and Trump and against Browder.

There are various possible explanations for this. I do not want to succumb to my instinctive prejudice that this may have been another piece of 'positioning', similar to what I think was being done with Shvets, but the hypothesis needs to be considered.

A more general point is that people in Washington and London need to 'wise up' to the kind of world with which they are dealing. This could be done quite enjoyably: reading some of Dashiell Hammett's fictions of the United States in the Prohibition era, or indeed buying DVDs of some of the classics of 'film noir', like 'Out of the Past' (in its British release, 'Build My Gallows High') might be a start.

Very much of the coverage of affairs in the post-Soviet space since 1991 has read rather as though a Dashiell Hammett story had been rewritten by someone specialising in sentimental children's, or romantic, fiction (although, come to think of it, that is really what Brigid O'Shaughnessy does in 'The Maltese Falcon.')

The testimony of Glenn Simpson seems a case in point. The sickly sentimentality of these people does, rather often, make one feel as though one wanted to throw up.

Thomas , 04 February 2018 at 01:24 PM
"They act and believe that they are Olympians. You have to wait for them to age and die before any substantive change in Fortress West's posture; say 2040.}

No, three years at tops and could be much sooner if dimes starting dropping by exposed people that don't want to take the fall for their superiors whom they always detested. One possible thing to get the process started sooner is if the recent Russian Intelligence delegation to DC that Smoothie mentions on another thread gave the current administration, as a diplomatic courtesy of course, the audio recordings of Madame Sectary Nuland's infamous mental meltdown at Kaliningrad. No telling what beans were spilled in her moment of panic, but I am willing to bet key names were dropped. Either way the time is coming.

SmoothieX12 -> Anna... , 04 February 2018 at 01:39 PM
- If they have read the important books at all... The ongoing scandal has been revealing a stunning incompetence of the "deciders." Too often they look comical, ridiculous, undignified. This is dangerous, considering their power.

My coming book is precisely about that. Especially, once American policy-makers who saw and experienced war (Ike, George Marshall's generation) departed things started to roll down hill with Reagan bringing on board a whole collection of neocons.

Unawareness is always dangerous, a complete blackout in relations between two nuclear powers is more than dangerous--it is completely reckless. Again, the way CW 1.0 is perceived in the current US "elites" it becomes extremely tempting to repeat it. Electing Hillary was another step in unleashing CW 2.0 by people who have no understanding of what they were doing.

Obama started crushing US-Russian relations before any campaigns were launched and before Trump was even seriously considered a GOP nominee, let alone a real contender. New confrontation hinged on HRC being elected. In fact, she was one of the major driving forces behind a serious of geopolitical anti-Russian moves. Visceral Russo-phobia became a feature in HRC campaign long before any Steele's Dossier. This was a program.

james said in reply to David Habakkuk ... , 04 February 2018 at 03:01 PM
there seems to be no shortage of money for these blatant propaganda exercises..
Babak Makkinejad -> SmoothieX12 ... , 04 February 2018 at 04:14 PM
I think the failure of Deciders is nothing new - Fath Ali Shah attacking Russia, or the abject failure of the Deciders in 1914. Europe is still not where she was in 1890.
begob , 04 February 2018 at 05:20 PM
I read the post and responses early on, so forgive me if this point has been addressed in the meantime. If the memo information on non-disclosure of material evidence to the warrant issuing court is accurate, as soon as that information came to the attention of the authorities (clearly some time ago) there was a duty on them (including the judge(s) who issued the warrants) to have the matter brought back before the court toot sweet. If that had happened it would surely be in the public domain, so on the assumption the prosecutors and maybe even the judge didn't see the need to review the matter, even purely on a contempt/ethics basis, the memo information only seems convincing if the FISA system is a total sham. I really doubt that.
kooshy said in reply to SmoothieX12 ... , 04 February 2018 at 06:20 PM
IMO, the bigger problem for American not shying away from wars, or being silent about them , is when your home, your mom and dad' home, the town you grew up in, are immune and away from the war.

The security and safety of the two oceans, encourages or at least, in an all volunteer military makes it a secondary problem for regular people, to worry about. As I remember that wasn't the case at the end of VN war when i first landed here. At that time even though the war was on the other side of the planet and away from homeland, still people, especially young ones in colleges were paying more attention to the cost of war.

spy killer , 04 February 2018 at 06:55 PM
Diana West has uncovered some interesting "Red Threads" (6 part article at dianawest-dot-net) on all the Fusion GPS folks. Seems ole Russian speaking Nellie Ohr got herself a ham radio license recently. Wonder why she would suddenly need one of those? They are all Marxists with potential connections back to Russia.
English Outsider -> Fatima Manoubia... , 05 February 2018 at 07:23 AM
Been there. I am also a latecomer to SST. You have to read the back numbers. How? My IT expertise dates from the dawn of the internet and was lamentable then but I find Wayback sometimes allows easier searches than the SST search engine. A straight search on google also allows searches with more than one term. This link -

https://twitter.com/pat_lang

- gets you to a chronological list and for recent material is sometimes quicker than fiddling around with search engines. "Categories" on the RH side is useful but then you don't get some very informative comments that cross-refer.

If those sadly elementary procedures fail resort to the nearest infant. There's a blur of fingers on the keyboard and what you want then usually appears. Never ask them how they did it. They get so fed up when you ask them to explain it again.

"Who is David Habakkuk?" That's a quantum computer sited, from internal evidence you pick up from time to time, somewhere in the Greater London area. Cross references like you wouldn't believe and over several fields, so maybe he's two quantum computers.

The "Borg"?. Try Wittgenstein. Likely a prog but you can't be choosy these days. Early on in "Philosophical Investigations" (hope I get this right) he discusses the problem of how you can view as an entity something that has ill-defined or overlapping boundaries. The "Borg" is that "you know it when you see it" sort of thing. A great merit of this site is that the owner and many of the contributors know it from inside.

In general you may regard your new found site as a microcosm of the great battle that is raging in the West. It's a battle between the (probably apocryphal but adequately stated) Roveian view of reality that regards truth as an adjunct to or as a by-product of ideology and Realpolitik and the objective view of reality as something that is damned difficult to get at, and sometimes impossible, but that has a truth in it somewhere that is independent of the views and convictions of the observer. It's a battle that's never going to be won but unless it tilts back closer to common sense it can certainly be lost and the West with it.

jonst said in reply to Babak Makkinejad... , 05 February 2018 at 08:11 AM
Clearly the Labor Party in the UK preferred the USSR to Nazi Germany. (cepting that short interlude where the Soviets signed the Agreement with Hitler, and the Left Organized Leadership all across Europe, for the most part, lined up with Hitler). But for the most part, Labor was Left.
Elements (the ones that won out in the end) of the Conservative Party loathed both Hitler and Stalin. An element of the Conservative Party was sympathetic, but only up to a certain point, with the Nazis. This ended in 1939, sept.

So I don't think it fair, or accurate, to say 'England prefered the Nazis....and even if it not those things, it certainly not "well known", except to the people who have used the false premise to butter their wounds from supporting Stalin in his Pact with Hitler. Or are inclined to bash the British in general.

Babak Makkinejad -> jonst... , 05 February 2018 at 08:29 AM
All right, perhaps I should have said "The English Government". Google "Litvinov", you may discover how the English Government pushed Stalin to make a deal with Hitler to buy USSR time.
Sid Finster said in reply to Jack... , 05 February 2018 at 10:26 AM
Witness the infamous State Department protest memo calling for more war on Syria.

The State Department employees that signed that memo were sure that HRC would win and that their diligent work in pushing the Deep State agenda would sure be rewarded.

Since entering office, Trump appears to have taken the line that if he gives the Deep State everything it demands, he will be allowed to remain in office, even if he is not allowed to remain in power.

Sid Finster said in reply to David Habakkuk ... , 05 February 2018 at 10:31 AM
Explain Marshall Miller's role in this, please. He is someone I know quite well. I also know one of the Chalupas.
begob said in reply to jonst... , 05 February 2018 at 10:56 AM
jonst That's broadly accurate, but specifically Attlee brought the motion of no confidence in Chamberlain, which the conservative appeasers won but which led to Churchill's opportunity. Attlee was essential in cabinet to Churchill's resistance after the retreat of the BEF.
turcopolier , 05 February 2018 at 11:18 AM
FM
What are you doing here? You said you dislike the military. Are you really in the Spanish Basque country? Bilbao maybe? break - David Habakkuk is a private scholar of the Litvinenko murder and Soviet/Russian politics and intelligence affairs. His surname comes from Wales where in the 18th (?) Century the ancestral village were all "chapel" and changed their surnames to Old Testament names. His father was master of one of the Cambridge colleges and David is himself a graduate of Cambridge. pl
Babak Makkinejad -> Fatima Manoubia... , 05 February 2018 at 11:19 AM
Yes, I am Iranian. All "Babak"s are Iranians - except some obscure ones that are Rus - Babakov.
Anna , 05 February 2018 at 02:07 PM
The hard, blinding truth: https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2018/02/05/will-conspiracy-trump-american-democracy-go-unpunished/
"In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations." – Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
Thomas said in reply to turcopolier ... , 05 February 2018 at 02:08 PM
Colonel,

This troll showed up recently at b's place doing the same accusations. There is group that is running sacred and pulling out all the stops in "info ops" side of the spectrum. The damn fools don't or, most probably, won't get thru their thick heads and even thicker hearts that it is a failed strategy that turns bystanders into their opponents.

Richardstevenhack , 05 February 2018 at 02:36 PM
Here for your edification is the definitive analysis of the GOP memo by Alexander Mercouris over at The Duran.

And it is a masterpriece - and quite long, possibly his longest analysis of anything so far. He buries the counterarguments being passed around by the Democratic opposition and the anti-Trump media.

Mercouris writes on legal affairs alongside his foreign policy stuff and he writes with a lawyer's precision. And in this article he points out that the GOP memo is writter as a legal document - probably by Trey Gowdy - with additional political insertions by Nunes. So it should properly be referred to as the "GOP memo" or the "Gowdy memo", not the Nunes memo."

Why this is important is that the GOP memo is basically written as a defense lawyer would in contesting a case -- this case being the FISA warrant application. Which means its orientation is proving failure to disclose relevant and material information to the FISA court and in some cases rising to the point of contempt of court.

Seriously, read this! The whole thing!

Rampant abuse and possible contempt of Court: what you need to know about the GOP memo
http://theduran.com/rampant-abuse-contempt-court-analysis-gop-memorandum/

blue peacock , 05 February 2018 at 03:25 PM
Sen Grassley releases memo heavily redacted by DOJ/FBI.

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-02-05/grassley-graham-blast-fbi-censoring-memo-calling-criminal-probe-trump-dossier

"Seeking transparency and cooperation should not be this challenging," Grassley said in a statement after posting a heavily redacted version of the criminal referral that he and GOP Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina sent to the Justice Department last month. " The government should not be blotting out information that it admits isn't secret. "

I suppose DOJ/FBI believe that by obstructing, stalling and obfuscating they can buy time and that the Republicans in Congress will get tired of the games and go home. This seems like a pretty straightforward memo, highlighting the discrepancy between Steele's court filings and the FBI's version of Steele's discussions with them. Grassley is pointing out that either Steele or the FBI is lying.

What is interesting is the difference in process and ability between the House & Senate. The House can release their memos on its own, even if not declassified by the Executive, whereas the Senate requires the Executive to declassify it's memos that are based on classified documents.

turcopolier , 05 February 2018 at 04:38 PM
FM

We have not had a self declared communist on SST before although LeaNder in her youth may have come close to that exalted status. You might want to read the wiki on me and the CV I have posted on the blog to avoid tedious accusations of this or that. I am thought by some to have some knowledge of the ME so please do not try to lecture me about how much you love the Arabs. I speak their language and have lived with them for a long time. There are people who write to SST who are pro-Trump and some who are anti-Trump. I seek a mixture of views so long as personal insult and invective are eschewed. Personally, I do not belong to a political party and would describe myself as an original intent, strict constructionist.

Trump is the constitutionally and legally elected president of the United States. Your descriptors with regard to him are, in my opinion, only plausible if seen from the point of view of various kinds of leftist including Marxist-Leninists like you. You sound very smug and self-satisfied but we will see if you can have an open mind at all. pl

Kooshy said in reply to Babak Makkinejad... , 05 February 2018 at 04:46 PM
Found him, Ali Babacan XVPM, XFM and M of finance. Yes god forbid, if he is a decendent of Ardisher Babakan and another claimant to Iranian throne, which CIA and Soros can jump on.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ali_Babacan MBA from Northeestern
blue peacock , 05 February 2018 at 04:55 PM
...would describe myself as an original intent, strict constructionist.

Aye. Aye. Sir!

+1

That is why some of us believe the Patriot Act and FISA are both unpatriotic and unconstitutional. SCOTUS disagrees with the few of us.

Babak Makkinejad -> Fatima Manoubia... , 05 February 2018 at 05:03 PM
I do not believe Trump is a misogynists - he stated publicly that he likes beautiful women. I also do not think he is a racist. I think he is the first US leader in many decades who has been willing to publicly talk about US problems. For most other US politicians - they largely live in "the best of all possible worlds".
English Outsider , 05 February 2018 at 06:31 PM
Colonel - sincere apologies if my comment above disrupted the discussion on a fascinating article.

David Habakkuk - I should say that "Quantum Computer" referred solely to the ability to gather and collate great amounts of material. It's an ability I admire. On Steele, you are among other things setting out something that is unfamiliar to me though not to most others here, I imagine, and that is the milieu in which he is or was working as a UK Intelligence operative. That you have also done in previous articles; it doesn't seem to be a particularly savoury milieu. As far as Steele's US activities are concerned, from you I'm not getting the picture of a lone operative, all ties with MI6 neatly severed, working solo in the States on some chance assignment in 2016. I'm getting the picture of someone still very much in the swim and selected because of that.

The only problem with that second picture is the dossier, or the 30% or so of it - what Comey, I think it was, described as "salacious and unverified". Surely that's got to be amateur night. Not something that a practised professional working with other professionals would put his hand to. Does that not support the picture of an ex-operative who's gone off the rails and is fumbling around unsupervised?

The Steele affair touched a nerve. One is always I suppose aware that IC professionals are getting up to all sorts and it doesn't seem improbable that "all sorts" includes political stuff and smear campaigns. But it's not heaps of corpses in Syria or farm boys being sent to certain death in the Ukraine. And even within the UK Intelligence Community and their contractors or whatever they're called, compared with what our IC people have done in the ME or compared with what one fears Hamish de Bretton Gordon might have got himself involved in, Christopher Steele's just a choirboy. Nevertheless there's something deeply repellent about what he did. Whatever your view of Trump there he was, newly elected, obviously wanting to make a go of it, and already faced with difficulties. Then some chancer throws "Golden Showers" in his face and makes his position, not maybe for the insiders but for the general public, that bit more untenable.

So from a UK perspective the question of whether Steele was acting in concert with others in the UK becomes important. If he was truly working solo then that from a UK point of view is regrettable but one of those things. In that case MI6 would just have to tighten up its controls on what ex-operatives get up to, put out the appropriate disclaimers, and that's the end of it as far as the UK is concerned. But if Golden Showers and the rest of it was a "Welcome Mr President" from UK IC professionals as a group then those professionals should be hung drawn and quartered together with whoever set them on.

I've read your article several times now and apart from the fact that much of what you pull together isn't material I'm up on, it doesn't seem to me that you're definitely coming to one conclusion or the other. There are many more facts to come out so perhaps this question is premature, but do you think Steele was acting in concert with others in the UK or was he, at least as far as the UK is concerned, working solo?

kooshy , 05 February 2018 at 07:49 PM
Most Iranian females Named Fatima/ Fatimah after prophet' daughter, call themselves Fati, and if they are of aristocrat type, they are called Bibi Fati Khanam, which is honorable lady Fati and if they are westernized they become Fay or Fifi.
turcopolier , 05 February 2018 at 07:59 PM
EO

Much of your commentary seems directed to David Habakkuk and PT rather than I. I don't think the FBI would have started to pay him until he left UK service. pl

English Outsider , 06 February 2018 at 05:10 AM
Colonel - Further apologies - I should have submitted comment 79 as two items.

Yes, the question about Steele was in response to DH's article. The UK side of the affair is I suppose only a small part of the question you and your Committee are examining but it's a dubious part however one looks at it. Although it's early days yet I was hoping DH, with his encyclopaedic knowledge of the UK intelligence scene, might feel able to cast more light on that UK side.

English Outsider -> Cortes... , 06 February 2018 at 05:53 AM
Cortes - " ... where, exactly, do you expect the great public to look beyond the initial scabrously defamatory storytelling about the "golden showers"? "

I don't think one can expect the public, at least in the UK, to look very far beyond the initial scandal. The investigations and enquiries presently under way in the US are complex and are taking place in a different system. This member of the UK public wouldn't be able to give you a coherent account of those enquiries and I doubt many of my fellows could.

So we have to take on trust, most of us, what we're told. As far as I can tell the underlying theme from the BBC and the media is generally that Trump is subverting the American Justice system in order to ensure his own misdemeanours aren't investigated.

Some of us take that as gospel. Others of us assume that the politicians and the media are untrustworthy and ignore them. I doubt many of us go into much more detail than that. Therefore the original story will stick in our minds.

But for some in the UK there are questions in there as well. How come the UK got mixed up in all this? How much did the UK get mixed up in it?

David Habakkuk -> Sid Finster... , 06 February 2018 at 06:19 AM
Sid Finster,

In response to comment 53.

When I belatedly started looking at the Litvinenko mystery, as a result of a strange email provoked by comments of mine on SST which arrived in my inbox in March 2007 from someone who turned out to be a key protagonist, it was rather obvious that improvised and chaotic 'StratCom' operations had been put into place on both the Russian and British sides to cover up what had happened.

A particular interesting feature of those on the British side – in which we now know Christopher Steele must have played a leading role – were the bizarre gyrations those responsible were going through trying to explain away the extraordinary fact that when he had broken the story of his poisoning, Litvinenko had pointed the finger of suspicion at his Italian associate Mario Scaramella.

When I started delving, I came across some very interesting pieces on Scaramella and related matters posted on the 'European Tribune' website by a Rome-based blogger using the name 'de Gondi' in the period after the story broke.

His actual name is David Loepp, by profession he is an artisan jeweller specialising in ancient and traditional goldsmith techniques, and I already knew and respected his work from his contributions to the transnational internet investigation into the Niger uranium forgeries – an earlier MI6 clusterf**ck.

So in May 2008 I posted a longish piece on that site, setting out the problems with the evidence about the Litvinenko case as I saw them, in the hope of reactivating his interest. This paid off in spades, when he linked to, and translated a key extract from, the request from Italian prosecutors to use wiretaps of conversations with Senator Paolo Guzzanti in connection with their prosecution of Scaramella for 'aggravated calumny.'

The request, which up to not so long ago was freely available on the website of the Italian Senate, was denied, but the extensive summaries of the transcripts provided a lot of material.

(This initial post by me, and later posts by me on that site, are at http://www.eurotrib.com/user/uid:1857/diary. Three posts David Loepp and I produced jointly in December 2012, which have a lot on Scaramella and Shvets, are on his page there, at http://www.eurotrib.com/user/de%20Gondi/diary .)

The extract from the wiretap request which David Loepp posted, which like Litvinenko's letter containing the claims he and Yuri Shvets had concocted about Putin using Mogilevich to attempt to supply Al Qaeda with a 'mini nuclear bomb' is dated 1 December 2005, contains key pointers to the conspiracy. It concludes:

'A passage on Simon Moghilevic and an agreement between the camorra to search for nuclear weapons lost during the Cold War to be consigned to Bin Laden, a revelation made by the Israeli. According to Scaramella the circle closes: camorra, Moghilevic- Russian mafia- services- nuclear bombs in Naples.'

Subsequent conversations make clear that Scaramella left on 6 December 2005 for Washington, on a trip where he was to meet Shvets. The summary of a report on this to Guzzanti reads:

'12) conversation that took place on number [omissis] on December 18, 2005, at 9:41:51 n. 1426, containing explicit references to the authenticity of the declarations of Alexander Litvinenko acquired by Scaramella, to the trustworthiness of the affirmations made by Scaramella in his reports to the commission and to the meetings Scaramella had with Talik after having denounced them [presumably Talik and his alleged accomplices]. (They can talk with HEIMS thanks to the help of MILLER. SHVEZ says that he had been a companion of CARLOS at the academy; SHVEZ has already made declarations and is willing to continue collaboration. Guzzanti warns that a document in Russian arrived in commission in which the name of SCARAMELLA appears several times, these [sic] say that directives to the contrary had been given to Litvinenko. Scaramella says that he went to the meeting with TALIK in the company of two treasury [police] and a cop, Talik spoke of a person from the Ukrainian GRU who would be willing to talk and a strange Chechen ring in Naples. Assassination attempt against the pope, CASAROLI was a Soviet agent.)'

The summary of a later conversation also refers to 'MILLER':

'conversation that took place on number [omissis] on January 13, 2006, at 11:22:11 n. 2287, containing references to Scaramella's sources in relation to facts referred in the Commission, the means by which they were obtained by Scaramella from declarations made abroad, the role of Litvinenko, also on the occasion of declarations made by third parties and the credibility of the news and theses given by Scaramella to the commission (Scaramella reads a text in English on the relation between the KGB and PRODI. Guzzanti asks if its credibility can be confirmed and if the taped declarations can be backed up; Scaramella answers that there were two testimonies, Lou Palumbo and Alexander (Litvinenko), and that the registration made in London at the beginning of the assignment [Scaramella's?] had been authenticated by a certain BAKER of the FBI. As he translates the text from English, Scaramella notes that the person testifying does not say he knows Prodi but only that he thinks that Prodi ...; all those who worked for the person testifying in Scandinavia said that Prodi was "theirs." The affair in Rimini, Bielli is preparing the battle in Rimini. Meetings with MILLER for the three things that are needed. Polemic about Pollari over the pressure exerted on Gordievski.)'

In the exchanges on my May 2008 post, I mentioned and linked to some extraordinary comments on a crucial article by Edward Jay Epstein, in which Karon von Gerhke claimed that his sceptical account fitted with what her contacts in the British investigation had told her. When that July I came across her equally extraordinary claims in response to the BBC's Mark Urban piece of stenography – which Steele may also have had a hand in organising – I found she was referring to precisely that visit to Washington by Scaramella which had been described in the wiretap request.

As you can perhaps imagine, the fact that 'Miller' had featured in the conversations with Guzzanti both as a key contact, who could introduce Scaramella to Aldrich Ames (which is who 'Heims' clearly is), and with whom there had been meetings about 'the three things that are needed' made me inclined to take seriously what Karon von Gerhke said about his role.

In December 2008, I put up another post on 'European Tribune', putting together the material from David Loepp and that from Karon von Gerhke – but not discussing the references to 'Miller.' As I had hoped, this led to her getting in touch.

Among the material with which she supplied me, which I in turn supplied to the Solicitor to the Inquest, were covers of faxes to John Rizzo, then Acting General Counsel of the CIA. From a fax dated 23 October 2005.

'John: See attached email to Chuck Patrizia. Berezovsky alleges he is in possession of a copy of a classified file given to the CIA by Russia's FSB, which he further alleges the CIA disseminated to British, French, Italian and Israeli intelligence agencies implicating him in business associations with the Mafia and to ties with terrorist organizations. Yuri Shvets was authorised/directed by Berezovsky to raise the issue with Bud McFarlane scheduled for Thursday. McFarlane is unaware the issue will be raised with him.'

From a fax dated 7 November 2005:

'John: I am attaching an email exchange between Yuri Shvets and me re: 1) article he published on his Ukraine website on alleged sale of nuclear choke to Iran, which I reproached him on as having been planted by Berezovsky and 2 the alleged FSB/CIA document file that Berezovsky obtained from Scaramella, which Yuri acknowledges in his e-mail to me. Like extracting wisdom teeth to get him to put anything on paper, especially in an e-mail! [NAME REDACTED BY ME – DH] is the source McFarlane referred Yuri to re: Berezovsky's visa issue. She proposed meeting Berezovsky in London. Alleged it would take a year to clear up USG issues and even then could not guarantee him a visa. She too has access to USG intelligence on Berezovsky. Open book.'

From a fax dated 5 December 2005:

'John. From Mario Scaramella to Yuri Shvets to my ears, the DOJ has authorised Mario Scaramella to interview Aldrich Ames with regard to members of the Italian Intelligence Service agent recruited by Ames for the KGB. Scaramella, as you may recall, is who gave Boris Berezovsky's aide, a former FSB Colonel [LITVINENKO – DH], that alleged document number to the FSB file that the CIA disseminated on Berezovsky – a file that Bud McFarlane's "Madam Visa" [NAME REDACTED BY ME – DH] is alleged is totting off to London for a meeting with Berezovsky, who has agreed to retain her re: his visa issue. Quid pro quo's with Berezovsky and Scaramella on the CIA agent currently facing kidnapping charges for the rendition of the Muslim cleric? Scott Armstrong has a most telling file on Scaramella. Not a single redeeming quality.'

In the course of very extensive exchanges with Karon von Gerhke subsequently, we had some rather acute disagreements. It was unfortunate that her filing was a shambles – a crucial hard disk failed without a backup, and the 'hard copies' appeared to be in a chaotic state.

However, the only occasion when I can recall having reason to believe that was deliberately lying to me was when David Loepp unearthed a cache of documentation including the full Italian text of the letter from Litvinenko containing the 'StratCom' designed to suggest that Putin had attempted to supply a 'mini nuclear bomb' to Al Qaeda. Having been asked to keep this between ourselves for the time being, Karon insisted on immediately sending it to her contacts in Counter Terrorism Command, and then produced bogus justifications.

Time and again, moreover, I found that I could confirm statements that she made – see for example the two posts I put up on the legal battles following the death in February 2008 of Berezovsky's long-term partner Arkadi 'Badri' Patarkatsishvili in June and July 2009, which were based on careful corroboration of what she told me.

(I should also say that I acquired the greatest respect for her courage.)

And while Owen and his team suppressed all the evidence from her, and almost all of that from David Loepp, which I had I provided to them, the dossier about Berezovsky is described in a statement made by Litvinenko in Tel Aviv in April 2006, presented in evidence in the Inquiry.

(See http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090333/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/evidence ">https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/evidence">http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090333/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/evidence .)

Other evidence, moreover, strongly inclines me to believe that there were overtures for a 'quid pro quo', purporting to come from Putin, but that this was a ruse orchestrated by Berezovsky.

Part of the purpose of this would almost certainly have been to supply probably bogus 'evidence' about arms sales in the Yeltsin years to Iraq, Iran and Syria. Moreover, I think there was an article on the second 'Fifth Element' site run by Shvets about the supposed sale of a nuclear 'choke' – whatever that is – to Iran.

The likelihood of the involvement of elements in the FBI in these shenanigans seems to quite high, given what has already emerged about the activities of Levinson. Also relevant may be the fact that the 'declaration' which was part of the attempt to frame Romano Prodi was authenticated, in London, by 'a certain BAKER of the FBI.')

Babak Makkinejad -> David Habakkuk ... , 06 February 2018 at 09:40 AM
Thank you David Habakkuk. Truly sordid and deplorable. WWIII to be initiated on basis of lies.
Jack , 06 February 2018 at 12:06 PM
David

You may already know this but Steele was a no show in a UK court for a deposition on the libel suit.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2018/02/05/christopher-steele-is-no-show-in-london-court-in-civil-case-over-dossier.amp.html

Babak Makkinejad -> David Habakkuk ... , 06 February 2018 at 01:18 PM
I know something of spectroscopy. The critical issue here is the provenance of the samples and not the sophistication of the techniques used in the analysis itself or its instrumentation. The paragraph that you have quoted:

"To figure out signatures based on various synthetic routes and conditions, Chipuk says that the synthetic chemists on his team will make the same chemical threat agent as many as 2,000 times in an ..." reeks of intellectual intimidation - trying to brow-beat any skeptic by the size of one's instrument - as it were."

And then there is a little matter of confidence level in any of the analysis - such things are normally based on prior statistics - which did not and could not exist in this situation.

LeaNder , 07 February 2018 at 09:16 AM
David, it's no doubt interesting to watch how attention on Victor Ivanov in another deficient inquiry on the British Isles, was managed in that inquiry. If I may, since he pops up again in the Steele dossier. You take what's available? Is that all there is to know?

I know its hard to communicate basics if you are deeply into matters. Usually people prefer to opt out. It's getting way too complicated for them to follow. You made me understand this experience. But isn't this (fake) intelligence continuity "via" Yuri Svets what connects your, no harm meant I do understand your obsession with the case, with what we deal with now in the Steele Dossier? Again, one of the most central figures is Ivanov.

Of course later reports in the Steele Dossier go hand in hand with a larger public relations campaign. Creating reality? Irony alert: as informer/source I would by then know what the other side wants to hear.

By the way, babbling mode, I found your Tom Mangold transcription. It felt it wasn't there on the link you gave. I used the date, and other search terms. Maybe I am wrong. Haven't looked at what the judge ruled out of the collection. Yes, cozy session/setting.

According to Google search there are no other links then your articles here:
http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613093555/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/files/2015/04/HMG000513wb.pdf ">https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/files/2015/04/HMG000513wb.pdf">http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613093555/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/files/2015/04/HMG000513wb.pdf

**********

JAN RICHARD BĆRUG
The Collapsing Wall. Hybrid Journalism. A Comparative Study of Newspapers and Magazines in Eight Countries in Europe

Available online. Haven't read it yet, but journalism as hidden public relations transfer belt would be one of my minor obsessions. ...

Babak Makkinejad -> turcopolier ... , 07 February 2018 at 11:23 AM
I wonder too; their command of the English idiom is very au currant - noticed "opt in/opt out" reference? Too American.

They clearly are not native speakers of German.

LeaNder said in reply to kooshy... , 07 February 2018 at 12:30 PM
why California, Kooshy #18? California among other things left this verbal trace, since I once upon time thought a luggage storage in SF might be free/available now: this is my home, lady.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kish_Island#Economy

Tourists from many -- but not all -- foreign nations wishing to enter Kish Free Zone from legal ports are not required to obtain any visa prior to travel. For those travelers, upon-arrival travel permits are stamped valid for 14 days by Kish officials.

Who are the not all? Can we assume Britain is not one of those? The German link is different. How about the Iranian? or isn't this the Kish we are talking about?

LeaNder said in reply to LeaNder... , 07 February 2018 at 01:14 PM
correcting myself #94:

another Ivanov. I struggled with names (...) in Russian crime novels, admittedly. But that's long ago from times Russian crime and Russian money flows and rogues getting hold of its nuclear material surfaced more often in Europe. 90s

I see Sergei seems to share my interest in the literary genre: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Ivanov#Personal

[Apr 22, 2019] Current Neo-McCarthyism hysteria as a smoke screen of the UK and the USA intent to dominate European geopolitics and weaken Russia and Germany

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... North Stream is a problem as the goal is to economically weaken Russia, tie the EU to the USA via energy supplies and support our new client state -- Ukraine. ..."
"... But this is also related to attempts to prevent/weaken the alliance of Russia and China. As geopolitical consequences of this alliance for the USA-led neoliberal empire are very bad ..."
Jul 24, 2018 | angrybearblog.com

likbez , July 24, 2018 12:23 am

@run75441 July 23, 2018 2:02 pm

Best bet is for Russia to want to trade with the US and Europe. The gas pipeline will not be enough leverage on Germany as it provides 9% of their needs.

Yes. And that's against the USA interests (or more correctly the US-led neoliberal empire interests). North Stream is a problem as the goal is to economically weaken Russia, tie the EU to the USA via energy supplies and support our new client state -- Ukraine.

As you know, nothing was proven yet in Russiagate (and DNC hacks looks more and more like a false flag operation, especially this Guccifer 2.0 personality ), but sanctions were already imposed. And when the US government speaks "Russia" in most cases they mean "China+Russia" ;-). Russia is just a weaker link in this alliance and, as such, it is attacked first. Russiagate is just yet another pretext after MH17, Magnitsky and such.

To me the current Anti-Russian hysteria is mainly a smokescreen to hide attempt to cement cracks in the façade of the USA neoliberal society that Trump election revealed (including apparent legitimization of ruling neoliberal elite represented by Hillary).

And a desperate attempt to unite the society using (false) war propaganda which requires demonization of the "enemy of the people" and neo-McCarthyism.

But this is also related to attempts to prevent/weaken the alliance of Russia and China. As geopolitical consequences of this alliance for the USA-led neoliberal empire are very bad (for example, military alliance means the end of the USA global military domination; energy alliance means that is now impossible to impose a blockade on China energy supplies from Middle East even if Iran is occupied)

In this sense the recent descent into a prolonged fit of vintage Cold War jingoistic paranoia is quite understandable. While, at the same time, totally abhorrent. My feeling is that unless Russia folds, which is unlikely, the side effects/externalities of this posture can be very bad for the USA. In any case, the alliance of Russia and China which Obama administration policies forged spells troubles to the global neoliberal empire dominated by the USA.

Trump rejection of existing forms of neoliberal globalization is one sign that this process already started and some politicians already are trying to catch the wind and adapt to a "new brave world" by using preemptive adjustments.

Which is why all this Trump-Putin summit hysteria is about.

Neither hard, nor soft neoliberals want any adjustments. They are ready to fight for the US-led neoliberal empire till the last American (excluding, of course, themselves and their families)

[Apr 21, 2019] Psywar: Propaganda during Iraq war and beyond

Highly recommended!
Powerful video about US propaganda machine. Based on Iraq War propaganda efforts. This is a formidable machine.
Shows quite vividly that most US politicians of Bush era were war criminal by Nuremberg Tribunal standards. Starting with Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld. They planned the war of aggression against Iraq long before 9/11.
Apr 21, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org
Desolation Row , Apr 20, 2019 10:21:11 PM | link

Desolation Row | Apr 20, 2019 10:09:06 PM | 41

Psywar

Source: https://vimeo.com/14772678 @ 48:15

[Apr 21, 2019] John Brennan's Police State USA

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Sadly, Brennan's propaganda coup only works on what the Bell Curve crowd up there would call the dumbest and most technologically helpless 1.2σ. Here is how people with half a brain interpret the latest CIA whoppers. ..."
"... Convincing Americans in Russia's influence or Russia collusion with Trump was only a tool that would create pressure on Trump that together with the fear of paralysis of his administration and impeachment would push Trump into the corner from which the only thing he could do was to worsen relations with Russia. What American people believe or not is really secondary. With firing of Gen. Flynn Trump acted exactly as they wanted him to act. This was the beginning of downward slope. ..."
"... Anyway, the mission was accomplished and the relations with Russia are worse now than during Obama administration. Trump can concentrate on Iran in which he will be supported by all sides and factions including the media. Even Larry David will approve not only the zionist harpies like Pam Geller, Rita Katz and Ilana Mercer. ..."
"... The only part that is absurd is that Russia posed a bona fide threat to the US. I'm fine with the idea that he ruined Brennen's plans in Syria. But thats just ego we shouldn't have been there anyway. ..."
"... No one really cares about Ukraine. And the European/Russian trade zone? No one cares. The Eurozone has its hands full with Greece and the rest of the old EU. I have a feeling they have already gone way too far and are more likely to shrink than expand in any meaningful way ..."
"... " ..factions within the state whose interests do not coincide with those of the American people." ..."
"... All the more powerfully put because of its recognisably comical. understatement. Thank you Mr Whitney. Brilliant article that would be all over the mainstream media were the US MSM an instrument of American rather than globalist interests. ..."
"... A sad story, how the USA always was a police state, where the two percent rich manipulated the 98% poor, to stay rich. When there were insurrections federal troops restored order. Also FDR put down strikes with troops. ..."
"... The elephant in the room is Israel and the neocons , this is the force that controls America and Americas foreign policy , Brennan and the 17 intel agencies are puppets of the mossad and Israel, that is the brutal fact of the matter. ..."
"... "The absence of evidence suggests that Russia hacking narrative is a sloppy and unprofessional disinformation campaign that was hastily slapped together by over confident Intelligence officials who believed that saturating the public airwaves with one absurd story after another would achieve the desired result " ..."
"... But it DID achieve the desired result! Trump folded under the pressure, and went full out neoliberal. Starting with his missile attack on Syria, he is now OK with spending trillions fighting pointless endless foreign wars on the other side of the world. ..."
"... I think maybe half the US population does believe the Russian hacking thing, but that's not really the issue. I think that the pre-Syrian attack media blitz was more a statement of brute power to Trump: WE are in charge here, and WE can take you down and impeach you, and facts don't matter! ..."
"... Sometimes propaganda is about persuading people. And sometimes, I think, it is about intimidating them. ..."
"... The Brit secret service, in effect, created and trained not merely the CIA but also the Mossad and Saudi Arabia's General Intelligence Presidency. All four are defined by endless lies, endless acts of utterly amoral savagery. All 4 are at least as bad as the KGB ever was, and that means as bad as Hell itself. ..."
"... Traditional triumphalist American narrative history, as taught in schools up through the 60s or so, portrayed America as "wart-free." Since then, with Zinn's book playing a major role, it has increasingly been portrayed as "warts-only," which is of course at least equally flawed. I would say more so. ..."
"... Anyway, the mission was accomplished and the relations with Russia are worse now than during Obama administration. ..."
"... That pre-9/11 "cooperation" nearly destroyed Russia. Nobody in Russia (except, perhaps, for Pussy Riot) wants a return to the Yeltsin era. ..."
"... The CIA is the world largest criminal and terrorist organization. With Brennan the worst has come to the worst. The whole Russian meddling affair was initiated by the Obama/Clinton gang in cooperation with 95 percent of the media. Nothing will come out of it. ..."
"... [The key figures who had primary influence on both Trump's and Bush's Iran policies held views close to those of Israel's right-wing Likud Party. The main conduit for the Likudist line in the Trump White House is Jared Kushner, the president's son-in-law, primary foreign policy advisor, and longtime friend and supporter of Netanyahu. Kushner's parents are also long-time supporters of Israeli settlements on the occupied West Bank. ..."
"... Another figure to whom the Trump White House has turned is John Bolton, undersecretary of state and a key policymaker on Iran in the Bush administration. Although Bolton was not appointed Trump's secretary of state, as he'd hoped, he suddenly reemerged as a player on Iran policy thanks to his relationship with Kushner. Politico reports that Bolton met with Kushner a few days before the final policy statement was released and urged a complete withdrawal from the deal in favor of his own plan for containing Iran. ..."
"... Putin's dream of Greater Europe is the death knell for the unipolar world order. It means the economic center of the world will shift to Central Asia where abundant resources and cheap labor of the east will be linked to the technological advances and the Capital the of the west eliminating the need to trade in dollars or recycle profits into US debt. The US economy will slip into irreversible decline, and the global hegemon will steadily lose its grip on power. That's why it is imperative for the US prevail in Ukraine– a critical land bridge connecting the two continents– and to topple Assad in Syria in order to control vital resources and pipeline corridors. Washington must be in a position where it can continue to force its trading partners to denominate their resources in dollars and recycle the proceeds into US Treasuries if it is to maintain its global primacy. The main problem is that Russia is blocking Uncle Sam's path to success which is roiling the political establishment in Washington. ..."
"... Second, Zakharova confirms that the western media is not an independent news gathering organization, but a propaganda organ for the foreign policy establishment who dictates what they can and can't say. ..."
"... Such a truthful portrait of reality ! The ruling elite is indeed massively corrupt, compromised, and controlled by dark forces. And the police state is already here. For most people, so far, in the form of massive collection of personal data and increasing number of mandatory regulations. But just one or two big false-flags away from progressing into something much worse. ..."
"... Clearly the CIA was making war on Syria. Is secret coercive covert action against sovereign nations Ok? Is it legal? When was the CIA designated a war making entity – what part of the constitution OK's that? Isn't the congress obliged by constitutional law to declare war? (These are NOT six month actions – they go on and on.) ..."
"... Syria is only one of many nations that the CIA is attacking – how many countries are we attacking with drones? Where is congress? ..."
"... Close the CIA – give the spying to the 16 other agencies. ..."
Oct 22, 2017 | www.unz.com

Fran Macadam , October 20, 2017 at 3:08 pm GMT

A credible reading of the diverse facts, Mike.
Kirk Elarbee , October 20, 2017 at 8:27 pm GMT
Sadly, Brennan's propaganda coup only works on what the Bell Curve crowd up there would call the dumbest and most technologically helpless 1.2σ. Here is how people with half a brain interpret the latest CIA whoppers.

http://www.moonofalabama.org/2017/10/everyone-hacked-everyone-hacked-everyone-spy-spin-fuels-anti-kaspersky-campaign.html

utu , Next New Comment October 21, 2017 at 5:18 am GMT
Again Mike Whitney does not get it. Though in the first part of the article I thought he would. He was almost getting there. The objective was to push new administration into the corner from which it could not improve relations with Russia as Trump indicated that he wanted to during the campaign.

Convincing Americans in Russia's influence or Russia collusion with Trump was only a tool that would create pressure on Trump that together with the fear of paralysis of his administration and impeachment would push Trump into the corner from which the only thing he could do was to worsen relations with Russia. What American people believe or not is really secondary. With firing of Gen. Flynn Trump acted exactly as they wanted him to act. This was the beginning of downward slope.

Anyway, the mission was accomplished and the relations with Russia are worse now than during Obama administration. Trump can concentrate on Iran in which he will be supported by all sides and factions including the media. Even Larry David will approve not only the zionist harpies like Pam Geller, Rita Katz and Ilana Mercer.

Pamela Geller: Thank You, Larry David

http://www.breitbart.com/big-hollywood/2017/10/19/pamela-geller-thank-larry-david/

anon , Disclaimer Next New Comment October 21, 2017 at 5:54 am GMT
OK.

The only part that is absurd is that Russia posed a bona fide threat to the US. I'm fine with the idea that he ruined Brennen's plans in Syria. But thats just ego we shouldn't have been there anyway.

No one really cares about Ukraine. And the European/Russian trade zone? No one cares. The Eurozone has its hands full with Greece and the rest of the old EU. I have a feeling they have already gone way too far and are more likely to shrink than expand in any meaningful way

The one thing I am not positive about. If the elite really believe that Russia is a threat, then Americans have done psych ops on themselves.

The US was only interested in Ukraine because it was there. Next in line on a map. The rather shocking disinterest in investing money -- on both sides -- is inexplicable if it was really important. Most of it would be a waste -- but still. The US stupidly spent $5 billion on something -- getting duped by politicians and got theoretical regime change, but it was hell to pry even $1 billion for real economic aid.

ThereisaGod , Next New Comment October 21, 2017 at 6:37 am GMT
" ..factions within the state whose interests do not coincide with those of the American people."

All the more powerfully put because of its recognisably comical. understatement. Thank you Mr Whitney. Brilliant article that would be all over the mainstream media were the US MSM an instrument of American rather than globalist interests.

jilles dykstra , Next New Comment October 21, 2017 at 6:46 am GMT
I am reading Howard Zinn, A Peoples History of the USA, 1492 to the Present. A sad story, how the USA always was a police state, where the two percent rich manipulated the 98% poor, to stay rich. When there were insurrections federal troops restored order. Also FDR put down strikes with troops.
Logan , Next New Comment October 21, 2017 at 11:16 am GMT
@jilles dykstra

You should be aware that Zinn's book is not, IMO, an honest attempt at writing history. It is conscious propaganda intended to make Americans believe exactly what you are taking from it.

DESERT FOX , Next New Comment October 21, 2017 at 1:30 pm GMT
The elephant in the room is Israel and the neocons , this is the force that controls America and Americas foreign policy , Brennan and the 17 intel agencies are puppets of the mossad and Israel, that is the brutal fact of the matter.

Until that fact changes Americans will continue to fight and die for Israel.

TG , Next New Comment October 21, 2017 at 2:03 pm GMT
"The absence of evidence suggests that Russia hacking narrative is a sloppy and unprofessional disinformation campaign that was hastily slapped together by over confident Intelligence officials who believed that saturating the public airwaves with one absurd story after another would achieve the desired result "

But it DID achieve the desired result! Trump folded under the pressure, and went full out neoliberal. Starting with his missile attack on Syria, he is now OK with spending trillions fighting pointless endless foreign wars on the other side of the world.

I think maybe half the US population does believe the Russian hacking thing, but that's not really the issue. I think that the pre-Syrian attack media blitz was more a statement of brute power to Trump: WE are in charge here, and WE can take you down and impeach you, and facts don't matter!

Sometimes propaganda is about persuading people. And sometimes, I think, it is about intimidating them.

Anonymous , Disclaimer Next New Comment October 21, 2017 at 2:05 pm GMT
Whitney is another author who declares the "Russians did it" narrative a psyop. He then devotes entire columns to the psyop, "naww Russia didn't do it". There could be plenty to write about – recent laws that do undercut liberty, but no, the Washington Post needs fake opposition to its fake news so you have guys like Whitney in the less-mainstream fake news media.

So Brennan wanted revenge? Well that's simple enough to understand, without being too stupid. But Whitney's whopper of a lie is what you're supposed to unquestionably believe. The US has "rival political parties". Did you miss it?

Jake , Next New Comment October 21, 2017 at 2:32 pm GMT
The US is doing nothing more than acting as the British Empire 2.0. WASP culture was born of a Judaizing heresy: Anglo-Saxon Puritanism. That meant that the WASP Elites of every are pro-Jewish, especially in order to wage war, physical and/or cultural, against the vast majority of white Christians they rule.

By the early 19th century, The Brit Empire's Elites also had a strong, and growing, dose of pro-Arabic/pro-Islamic philoSemitism. Most of that group became ardently pro-Sunni, and most of the pro-Sunni ones eventually coalescing around promotion of the House of Saud, which means being pro-Wahhabi and permanently desirous of killing or enslaving virtually all Shiite Mohammedans.

So, by the time of Victoria's high reign, the Brit WASP Elites were a strange brew of hardcoree pro-Jewish and hardcore pro-Arabic/islamic. The US foreign policy of today is an attempt to put those two together and force it on everyone and make it work.

The Brit secret service, in effect, created and trained not merely the CIA but also the Mossad and Saudi Arabia's General Intelligence Presidency. All four are defined by endless lies, endless acts of utterly amoral savagery. All 4 are at least as bad as the KGB ever was, and that means as bad as Hell itself.

Logan , Next New Comment October 21, 2017 at 3:04 pm GMT
@Grandpa Charlie

Fair enough. I didn't know that about the foreword. If accurate, that's a reasonable approach for a book.

Here's the problem.

Back when O. Cromwell was the dictator of England, he retained an artist to paint him. The custom of the time was for artists to "clean up" their subjects, in a primitive form of photoshopping.

OC being a religious fanatic, he informed the artist he wished to be portrayed as God had made him, "warts and all." (Ollie had a bunch of unattractive facial warts.) Or the artist wouldn't be paid.

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2013/nov/08/cromwell-portraitist-samuel-cooper-exhibition

Traditional triumphalist American narrative history, as taught in schools up through the 60s or so, portrayed America as "wart-free." Since then, with Zinn's book playing a major role, it has increasingly been portrayed as "warts-only," which is of course at least equally flawed. I would say more so.

All I am asking is that American (and other) history be written "warts and all." The triumphalist version is true, largely, and so is the Zinn version. Gone With the Wind and Roots both portray certain aspects of the pre-war south fairly accurately..

America has been, and is, both evil and good. As is/was true of every human institution and government in history. Personally, I believe America, net/net, has been one of the greatest forces for human good ever. But nobody will realize that if only the negative side of American history is taught.

Wally , Next New Comment October 21, 2017 at 3:16 pm GMT
@Michael Kenny

Hasbarist 'Kenny', you said:

"There must be something really dirty in Russigate that hasn't yet come out to generate this level of panic."

You continue to claim what you cannot prove.

But then you are a Jews First Zionist.

Russia-Gate Jumps the Shark
Russia-gate has jumped the shark with laughable new claims about a tiny number of "Russia-linked" social media ads, but the US mainstream media is determined to keep a straight face

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2017/10/robert-parry/jumping-the-shark/

Yet Another Major Russia Story Falls Apart. Is Skepticism Permissible Yet?

https://theintercept.com/2017/09/28/yet-another-major-russia-story-falls-apart-is-skepticism-permissible-yet/

+ review of other frauds

Logan , Next New Comment October 21, 2017 at 3:20 pm GMT
@Jake

Most of that group became ardently pro-Sunni, and most of the pro-Sunni ones eventually coalescing around promotion of the House of Saud, which means being pro-Wahhabi and permanently desirous of killing or enslaving virtually all Shiite Mohammedans.

Thanks for the laugh. During the 19th century, the Sauds were toothless, dirt-poor hicks from the deep desert of zero importance on the world stage.

The Brits were not Saudi proponents, in fact promoting the Husseins of Hejaz, the guys Lawrence of Arabia worked with. The Husseins, the Sharifs of Mecca and rulers of Hejaz, were the hereditary enemies of the Sauds of Nejd.

After WWI, the Brits installed Husseins as rulers of both Transjordan and Iraq, which with the Hejaz meant the Sauds were pretty much surrounded. The Sauds conquered the Hejaz in 1924, despite lukewarm British support for the Hejaz.

Nobody in the world cared much about the Saudis one way or another until massive oil fields were discovered, by Americans not Brits, starting in 1938. There was no reason they should. Prior to that Saudi prominence in world affairs was about equal to that of Chad today, and for much the same reason. Chad (and Saudi Arabia) had nothing anybody else wanted.

Grandpa Charlie , Next New Comment October 21, 2017 at 3:25 pm GMT
@Michael Kenny

'Putin stopped talking about the "Lisbon to Vladivostok" free trade area long ago" -- Michael Kenney

Putin was simply trying to sell Russia's application for EU membership with the catch-phrase "Lisbon to Vladivostok". He continued that until the issue was triply mooted (1) by implosion of EU growth and boosterism, (2) by NATO's aggressive stance, in effect taken by NATO in Ukraine events and in the Baltics, and, (3) Russia's alliance with China.

It is surely still true that Russians think of themselves, categorically, as Europeans. OTOH, we can easily imagine that Russians in Vladivostok look at things differently than do Russians in St. Petersburg. Then again, Vladivostok only goes back about a century and a half.

Seamus Padraig , Next New Comment October 21, 2017 at 3:39 pm GMT
@utu

Anyway, the mission was accomplished and the relations with Russia are worse now than during Obama administration.

I generally agree with your comment, but that part strikes me as a bit of an exaggeration. While relations with Russia certainly haven't improved, how have they really worsened? The second round of sanctions that Trump reluctantly approved have yet to be implemented by Europe, which was the goal. And apart from that, what of substance has changed?

Seamus Padraig , Next New Comment October 21, 2017 at 3:45 pm GMT
@Grandpa Charlie

That pre-9/11 "cooperation" nearly destroyed Russia. Nobody in Russia (except, perhaps, for Pussy Riot) wants a return to the Yeltsin era.

Ludwig Watzal , Website Next New Comment October 21, 2017 at 3:46 pm GMT
It's not surprising that 57 percent of the American people believe in Russian meddling. Didn't two-thirds of the same crowd believe that Saddam was behind 9/11, too? The American public is being brainwashed 24 hours a day all year long.

The CIA is the world largest criminal and terrorist organization. With Brennan the worst has come to the worst. The whole Russian meddling affair was initiated by the Obama/Clinton gang in cooperation with 95 percent of the media. Nothing will come out of it.

This disinformation campaign might be the prelude to an upcoming war.
Right now, the US is run by jerks and idiots. Watch the video.

anonymous , Disclaimer Next New Comment October 21, 2017 at 3:50 pm GMT
Only dumb people does not know that TRUMP IS NETANYAHU'S PUPPET.

The fifth column zionist jews are running the albino stooge and foreign policy in the Middle East to expand Israel's interest against American interest that is TREASON. One of these FIFTH COLUMNISTS is Jared Kushner. He should be arrested.

https://www.globalresearch.ca/donald-trumps-likudist-campaign-against-iran/5614264

[The key figures who had primary influence on both Trump's and Bush's Iran policies held views close to those of Israel's right-wing Likud Party. The main conduit for the Likudist line in the Trump White House is Jared Kushner, the president's son-in-law, primary foreign policy advisor, and longtime friend and supporter of Netanyahu. Kushner's parents are also long-time supporters of Israeli settlements on the occupied West Bank.

Another figure to whom the Trump White House has turned is John Bolton, undersecretary of state and a key policymaker on Iran in the Bush administration. Although Bolton was not appointed Trump's secretary of state, as he'd hoped, he suddenly reemerged as a player on Iran policy thanks to his relationship with Kushner. Politico reports that Bolton met with Kushner a few days before the final policy statement was released and urged a complete withdrawal from the deal in favor of his own plan for containing Iran.

Bolton spoke with Trump by phone on Thursday about the paragraph in the deal that vowed it would be "terminated" if there was any renegotiation, according to Politico. He was calling Trump from Las Vegas, where he'd been meeting with casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, the third major figure behind Trump's shift towards Israeli issues. Adelson is a Likud supporter who has long been a close friend of Netanyahu's and has used his Israeli tabloid newspaper Israel Hayomto support Netanyahu's campaigns. He was Trump's main campaign contributor in 2016, donating $100 million. Adelson's real interest has been in supporting Israel's interests in Washington -- especially with regard to Iran.]

Miro23 , Next New Comment October 21, 2017 at 4:56 pm GMT
A great article with some excellent points:

Putin's dream of Greater Europe is the death knell for the unipolar world order. It means the economic center of the world will shift to Central Asia where abundant resources and cheap labor of the east will be linked to the technological advances and the Capital the of the west eliminating the need to trade in dollars or recycle profits into US debt. The US economy will slip into irreversible decline, and the global hegemon will steadily lose its grip on power. That's why it is imperative for the US prevail in Ukraine– a critical land bridge connecting the two continents– and to topple Assad in Syria in order to control vital resources and pipeline corridors. Washington must be in a position where it can continue to force its trading partners to denominate their resources in dollars and recycle the proceeds into US Treasuries if it is to maintain its global primacy. The main problem is that Russia is blocking Uncle Sam's path to success which is roiling the political establishment in Washington.

American dominance is very much tied to the dollar's role as the world's reserve currency, and the rest of the world no longer want to fund this bankrupt, warlike state – particularly the Chinese.

First, it confirms that the US did not want to see the jihadist extremists defeated by Russia. These mainly-Sunni militias served as Washington's proxy-army conducting an ambitious regime change operation which coincided with US strategic ambitions.

The CIA run US/Israeli/ISIS alliance.

Second, Zakharova confirms that the western media is not an independent news gathering organization, but a propaganda organ for the foreign policy establishment who dictates what they can and can't say.

They are given the political line and they broadcast it.

The loosening of rules governing the dissemination of domestic propaganda coupled with the extraordinary advances in surveillance technology, create the perfect conditions for the full implementation of an American police state. But what is more concerning, is that the primary levers of state power are no longer controlled by elected officials but by factions within the state whose interests do not coincide with those of the American people. That can only lead to trouble.

At some point Americans are going to get a "War on Domestic Terror" cheered along by the media. More or less the arrest and incarceration of any opposition following the Soviet Bolshevik model.

CanSpeccy , Website Next New Comment October 21, 2017 at 5:11 pm GMT
@utu

On the plus side, everyone now knows that the Anglo-US media from the NY Times to the Economist, from WaPo to the Gruniard, and from the BBC to CNN, the CBC and Weinstein's Hollywood are a worthless bunch of depraved lying bastards.

Thales the Milesian , Next New Comment October 21, 2017 at 5:53 pm GMT
Brennan did this, CIA did that .

So what are you going to do about all this?

Continue to whine?

Continue to keep your head stuck in your ass?

So then continue with your blah, blah, blah, and eat sh*t.

You, disgusting self-elected democratic people/institutions!!!

AB_Anonymous , Next New Comment October 21, 2017 at 5:59 pm GMT
Such a truthful portrait of reality ! The ruling elite is indeed massively corrupt, compromised, and controlled by dark forces. And the police state is already here. For most people, so far, in the form of massive collection of personal data and increasing number of mandatory regulations. But just one or two big false-flags away from progressing into something much worse.

The thing is, no matter how thick the mental cages are, and how carefully they are maintained by the daily massive injections of "certified" truth (via MSM), along with neutralizing or compromising of "troublemakers", the presence of multiple alternative sources in the age of Internet makes people to slip out of these cages one by one, and as the last events show – with acceleration.

It means that there's a fast approaching tipping point after which it'd be impossible for those in power both to keep a nice "civilized" face and to control the "cage-free" population. So, no matter how the next war will be called, it will be the war against the free Internet and free people. That's probably why N. Korean leader has no fear to start one.

Art , Next New Comment October 21, 2017 at 6:18 pm GMT
An aside:

All government secrecy is a curse on mankind. Trump is releasing the JFK murder files to the public. Kudos! Let us hope he will follow up with a full 9/11 investigation.

Think Peace -- Art

Mr. Anon , Next New Comment October 21, 2017 at 7:07 pm GMT
@utu

The objective was to push new administration into the corner from which it could not improve relations with Russia as Trump indicated that he wanted to during the campaign.

Good point. That was probably one of the objectives (and from the point of view of the deep-state, perhaps the most important objective) of the "Russia hacked our democracy" narrative, in addition to the general deligitimization of the Trump administration.

Art , Next New Comment October 21, 2017 at 7:11 pm GMT
And, keep in mind, Washington's Sunni proxies were not a division of the Pentagon; they were entirely a CIA confection: CIA recruited, CIA-armed, CIA-funded and CIA-trained.

Clearly the CIA was making war on Syria. Is secret coercive covert action against sovereign nations Ok? Is it legal? When was the CIA designated a war making entity – what part of the constitution OK's that? Isn't the congress obliged by constitutional law to declare war? (These are NOT six month actions – they go on and on.)

Are committees of six congressman and six senators, who meet in secret, just avoiding the grave constitutional questions of war? We the People cannot even interrogate these politicians. (These politicians make big money in the secrecy swamp when they leave office.)

Syria is only one of many nations that the CIA is attacking – how many countries are we attacking with drones? Where is congress?

Spying is one thing – covert action is another – covert is wrong – it goes against world order. Every year after 9/11 they say things are worse – give them more money more power and they will make things safe. That is BS!

9/11 has opened the flood gates to the US government attacking at will, the various peoples of this Earth. That is NOT our prerogative.

We are being exceptionally arrogant.

Close the CIA – give the spying to the 16 other agencies.

Think Peace -- Art

Rurik , Next New Comment October 21, 2017 at 7:12 pm GMT
@Ben10

right at 1:47

when he says 'we can't move on as a country'

his butt hurt is so ruefully obvious, that I couldn't help notice a wry smile on my face

that bitch spent millions on the war sow, and now all that mullah won't even wipe his butt hurt

when I see ((guys)) like this raging their inner crybaby angst, I feel really, really good about President Trump

MAGA bitches!

Mr. Anon , Next New Comment October 21, 2017 at 7:15 pm GMT
@jilles dykstra

I am reading Howard Zinn, A Peoples History of the USA

A Peoples History of the USA? Which Peoples?

Tradecraft46 , Next New Comment October 21, 2017 at 8:04 pm GMT
I am SAIS 70 so know the drill and the article is on point.

Here is the dealio. Most reporters are dim and have no experience, and it is real easy to lead them by the nose with promises of better in the future.

[Apr 21, 2019] Deciphering Trumps Foreign Policy by Oscar Silva-Valladares

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Donald Trump's presidency, like preceding ones, is trapped by the interests of the power elite that has ruled America since World War II. The constraints imposed on domestic policy by this elite inevitably have a direct impact on America's foreign policy. ..."
"... The growing misalignment between government policies and people's yearnings coincides with the ascent of the military establishment within the power elite that rules America. Despite the country's aggressive expansionism, America's power elite was initially driven mainly by political and economic forces and much less by its growing military strength. It is fair to say that the military establishment, as an influential component of the American power elite, only appeared in the context of World War II. Nowadays, it is a dominant player. ..."
"... Today's power elite in America is fundamentally the same as the one that emerged after World War II and which was accurately described by C. Wright Mills in the 1950s. Consequently, the main forces shaping US domestic and foreign policies have not changed since then. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War did not make irrelevant the existing power elite at that time. The elite only became more vocal in its efforts to justify itself and this explains today's existence of NATO, for instance. ..."
"... Despite its economic and entrepreneurial might, the US distilled version of capitalism is unable to attain the needs of a growing number of its population, as the Great Recession of 2008 has shown. Within the OECD, arguably the club with the highest levels of economic and social development in the world, US rankings are abysmal, for instance concerning education and health, as it lays at the bottom in learning metrics and on critical health measures such as obesity. The wealth gap has widened and the social fabric is broken. American economic decline is evident and growing social conflict across economic, social and geographic lines is just a reaction to this decline. ..."
"... Concerning China, Trump is learning about the limits of his ability to successfully challenge it economically. It seems virtually impossible to reverse China's momentum which, if it continues, will consolidate its economic domination. ..."
"... A fundamental weakness of American foreign policy is its inability to understand war in all its different dimensions ..."
"... Despite the need to see through Trump's true intentions beyond his pomp and circumstance, there is an important warning to be made. Trump's eventual inability to fulfill his promises, combined with his bravado and America's incapacity to take a more sobering approach to world events is a dangerous combination. ..."
Oct 28, 2017 | ronpaulinstitute.org

Donald Trump's presidency, like preceding ones, is trapped by the interests of the power elite that has ruled America since World War II. The constraints imposed on domestic policy by this elite inevitably have a direct impact on America's foreign policy. Alternative social forces, like the ones behind Trump's presidential triumph, only have a limited impact on domestic and ultimately on foreign policy. A conceptual detour and a brief on history and on Trump's domestic setting when he was elected will help clarifying these theses.

Beyond the different costumes that it wears (dealing with ideology, international law, and even religion), foreign policy follows domestic policy. The domestic policy actors are the social forces at work at a given point of time, mainly the economic agents and their ambitions (in their multiple expressions), including the ruling power elite. Society's aspirations not only relate to material welfare, but also to ideological priorities that population segments may have at a given point of time.

From America's initial days until the mid 1800s, there seems to have been a broad alignment of US foreign policy with the wishes of its power elite and other social forces. America's expansionism, a fundamental bulwark of its foreign policy from early days, reflected the need to fulfill its growing population's ambitions for land and, later on, the need to find foreign markets for its excess production, initially agricultural and later on manufacturing. It can be said that American foreign policy was broadly populist at that time. The power elite was more or less aligned in achieving these expansionist goals and was able to provide convenient ideological justification through the writings of Jefferson and Madison, among others.

As the country expanded, diverging interests became stronger and ultimately differing social forces caused a significant fracture in society. The American Civil War was the climax of the conflicted interests between agricultural and manufacturing led societies. Fifty years later, a revealing manifestation of this divergence (which survived the Civil War), as it relates to foreign policy, is found during the early days of the Russian Revolution when, beyond the ideological revulsion of Bolshevism, the US was paralyzed between the agricultural and farming businesses seeking exports to Russia and the domestic extractive industries interested in stopping exports of natural resources from this country.

The growing misalignment between government policies and people's yearnings coincides with the ascent of the military establishment within the power elite that rules America. Despite the country's aggressive expansionism, America's power elite was initially driven mainly by political and economic forces and much less by its growing military strength. It is fair to say that the military establishment, as an influential component of the American power elite, only appeared in the context of World War II. Nowadays, it is a dominant player.

Today's power elite in America is fundamentally the same as the one that emerged after World War II and which was accurately described by C. Wright Mills in the 1950s. Consequently, the main forces shaping US domestic and foreign policies have not changed since then. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War did not make irrelevant the existing power elite at that time. The elite only became more vocal in its efforts to justify itself and this explains today's existence of NATO, for instance.

Despite its economic and entrepreneurial might, the US distilled version of capitalism is unable to attain the needs of a growing number of its population, as the Great Recession of 2008 has shown. Within the OECD, arguably the club with the highest levels of economic and social development in the world, US rankings are abysmal, for instance concerning education and health, as it lays at the bottom in learning metrics and on critical health measures such as obesity. The wealth gap has widened and the social fabric is broken. American economic decline is evident and growing social conflict across economic, social and geographic lines is just a reaction to this decline.

Trump won his presidency because he was able to get support from the country's growing frustrated white population. His main social themes (bringing jobs to America by stopping the decline of its manufacturing industry, preventing further US consumer dependence on foreign imports and halting immigration) fitted well with the electors' anger. Traditional populist themes linked to foreign policy (like Russophobia) did not play a big role in the last election. But whether or not the Trump administration can align with the ruling power elite in a manner that addresses the key social and economic needs of the American people is still to be seen.

Back to foreign policy, we need to distinguish between Trump's style of government and his administration's actions. At least until now, focusing excessively on Trump's style has dangerously distracted from his true intentions. One example is the confusion about his initial stance on NATO which was simplistically seen as highly critical to the very existence of this organization. On NATO, all that Trump really cared was to achieve a "fair" sharing of expenditures with other members and to press them to honor their funding commitments.

From immigration to defense spending, there is nothing irrational about Trump's foreign policy initiatives, as they just reflect a different reading on the American people's aspirations and, consequently, they attempt to rely on supporting points within the power elite which are different from the ones used in the past.

Concerning China, Trump is learning about the limits of his ability to successfully challenge it economically. It seems virtually impossible to reverse China's momentum which, if it continues, will consolidate its economic domination. A far-reaching lesson, although still being ignored, is that China's economic might is showing that capitalism as understood in the West is not winning, much less in its American format. It also shows that democracy may not be that relevant, as it is not necessarily a corollary or a condition for economic development. Perhaps it even shows the superiority of China's economic model, but this is a different matter.

As Trump becomes more aware about his limitations, he has naturally reversed to the basic imprints of America's traditional foreign policy, particularly concerning defense. His emphasis on a further increase in defense spending is not done for prestigious or national security reasons, but as an attempt to preserve a job generating infrastructure without considering the catastrophic consequences that it may cause.

On Iran, Obama's initiative to seek normalization was an attempt to walk a fine line (and to find a less conflictive path) between supporting the US traditional Middle East allies (mainly the odd combination of Israel, Saudi Arabia and Turkey) and recognizing Iran's growing aspirations. Deep down, Obama was trying to acknowledge Iran's historical viability as a country and a society that will not disappear from the map, while Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, may not be around in a few years. Trump's Iran policy until now only represents a different weighing of priorities, although it is having far reaching consequences on America's credibility as a reliable contractual party in international affairs.

In the case of Afghanistan, Trump's decision to increase boots on the ground does not break the inertia of US past administrations. Aside from temporary containment, an increasing military presence or a change in tactics will not alter fundamentally this reality.

Concerning Russia, and regardless of what Trump has said, actions speak more than words. A continuous deterioration of relations seems inevitable.

Trump will also learn, if he has not done so already, about the growth of multipolar forces in world's events. Russia has mastered this reality for several years and is quite skillful at using it as a basic tool of its own foreign goals. Our multipolar world will expand, and Trump may even inadvertently exacerbate it through its actions (for instance in connection with the different stands taken by the US and its European allies concerning Iran).

While fulfilling the aspirations of the American people seems more difficult within the existing capitalist framework, there are also growing apprehensions coming from America's power elite as it becomes more frustrated due to its incapacity of being more effective at the world level. America's relative adolescence in world's history will become more and more apparent in the coming years.

A fundamental weakness of American foreign policy is its inability to understand war in all its different dimensions. The US has never suffered the consequences of an international conflict in its own backyard. The American Civil War, despite all the suffering that it caused, was primarily a domestic event with no foreign intervention (contrary to the wishes of the Confederation). The deep social and psychological damage caused by war is not part of America's consciousness as it is, for instance in Germany, Russia or Japan. America is insensitive to the lessons of history because it has a very short history itself.

Despite the need to see through Trump's true intentions beyond his pomp and circumstance, there is an important warning to be made. Trump's eventual inability to fulfill his promises, combined with his bravado and America's incapacity to take a more sobering approach to world events is a dangerous combination.

Oscar Silva-Valladares is a former investment banker that has lived and worked in North and Latin America, Western & Eastern Europe, Saudi Arabia, Japan, the Philippines and Western Africa. He currently chairs Davos International Advisory, an advisory firm focused on strategic consulting across emerging markets.

Related

[Apr 21, 2019] Whenever someone inconveniences the neoliberal oligarchy, the entire neoliberal MSM mafia tells us 24 x7 how evil and disgusting that person is. It's true of the leader of every nation which rejects neoliberal globalization as well as for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange

Highly recommended!
Apr 21, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Have you ever noticed how whenever someone inconveniences the dominant western power structure, the entire political/media class rapidly becomes very, very interested in letting us know how evil and disgusting that person is? It's true of the leader of every nation which refuses to allow itself to be absorbed into the blob of the US-centralized power alliance, it's true of anti-establishment political candidates, and it's true of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

Corrupt and unaccountable power uses its political and media influence to smear Assange because, as far as the interests of corrupt and unaccountable power are concerned, killing his reputation is as good as killing him. If everyone can be paced into viewing him with hatred and revulsion, they'll be far less likely to take WikiLeaks publications seriously, and they'll be far more likely to consent to Assange's imprisonment, thereby establishing a precedent for the future prosecution of leak-publishing journalists around the world. Someone can be speaking 100 percent truth to you, but if you're suspicious of him you won't believe anything he's saying. If they can manufacture that suspicion with total or near-total credence, then as far as our rulers are concerned it's as good as putting a bullet in his head.

Those of us who value truth and light need to fight this smear campaign in order to keep our fellow man from signing off on a major leap in the direction of Orwellian dystopia, and a big part of that means being able to argue against those smears and disinformation wherever they appear. Unfortunately I haven't been able to find any kind of centralized source of information which comprehensively debunks all the smears in a thorough and engaging way, so with the help of hundreds of tips from my readers and social media followers I'm going to attempt to make one here. What follows is my attempt at creating a tool kit people can use to fight against Assange smears wherever they encounter them, by refuting the disinformation with truth and solid argumentation.

This article is an ongoing project which will be updated regularly where it appears on Medium and caitlinjohnstone.com as new information comes in and new smears spring up in need of refutation.

[Apr 16, 2019] The incompetent, the corrupt, the treacherous -- not just walking free, but with reputations intact, fat bank balances, and flourishing careers. Now they re angling for war with Iran.

Highly recommended!
Apr 15, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

Return of the Just April 14, 2019 at 10:46 am

You're right. I see people like Robert Kagan's opinions being respectfully asked on foreign affairs, John Bolton and Elliott Abrams being hired to direct our foreign policy.

The incompetent, the corrupt, the treacherous -- not just walking free, but with reputations intact, fat bank balances, and flourishing careers. Now they're angling for war with Iran.

It's preposterous and sickening. And it can't be allowed to stand, so you can't just stand off and say you're "wrecked". Keep fighting, as you're doing. I will fight it until I can't fight anymore.

Ken Zaretzke , says: April 14, 2019 at 3:38 pm
Fact-bedeviled JohnT: “McCain was a problem for this nation? Sweet Jesus! There quite simply is no rational adult on the planet who buys that nonsense.”

McCain had close ties to the military-industrial complex. He was a backer of post-Cold War NATO. He was a neoconservative darling. He never heard of a dictator that he didn’t want to depose with boots on the ground, with the possible exception of various Saudi dictators (the oil-weaponry-torture nexus). He promoted pseudo-accountability of government in campaign finance but blocked accountability for the Pentagon and State Department when he co-chaired the United States Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs with John Kerry.

And, perhaps partly because of the head trauma and/or emotional wounds he suffered at the hands of Chinese-backed Commies, it’s plausible to think he was regarded by the willy-nilly plotters of the deep state as a manipulable, and thus useful, conduit of domestic subversion via the bogus Steele dossier.

Unfortunately, the episode that most defines McCain’s life is the very last one–his being a pawn of M-16 in the the deep state’s years-long attempt to derail the presidency of Donald Trump.

Joe Dokes , says: April 14, 2019 at 11:55 pm
Measuring success means determining goals. The goals of most wars is to enrich the people in charge. So, by this metric, the war was a success. The rest of it is just props and propaganda.
Andrew Stergiou , says: April 15, 2019 at 5:11 am
“Pyrrhic Victory” look it up the Roman Empire Won but lost if the US is invaded and the government does not defend it I would like to start my own defense: But the knee jerk politics that stirs America’s cannon fodder citizens is a painful reminder of a history of jingoist lies where at times some left and right agree at least for a short moment before the rich and powerful push their weight to have their way.

If All politics is relative Right wingers are the the left of what? Nuclear destruction? or Slavery?

Peter Smith , says: April 15, 2019 at 5:13 am
My goodness! I am also a veteran, but of the Vietnam war, and my father was a career officer from 1939-1961 as a paratrooper first, and later as an intelligence officer. He argued vigorously against our Vietnam involvement, and was cashiered for his intellectual honesty. A combat veteran’s views are meaningless when the political winds are blowing.

Simply put, we have killed thousands of our kids in service of the colonial empires left to us by the British and the French after WWII. More practice at incompetent strategies and tactics does not make us more competent–it merely extends the blunders and pain; viz the French for two CENTURIES against the Britsh during the battles over Normandy while the Planagenet kings worked to hold their viking-won inheritance.

At least then, kings risked their own lives. Generals fight because the LIKE it…a lot. Prior failures are only practice to the, regardless of the cost in lives of the kids we tried to raise well, and who were slaughtered for no gain.

We don’t need the empire, and we certainly shouldn’t fight for the corrupt businessmen who have profited from the never-ending conflicts. Let’s spend those trillions at home, so long as we also police our government to keep both Democrat and Republican politicians from feathering their own nests. Term limits and prosecutions will help us, but only if we are vigilant. Wars distract our attention while corruption is rampant at home.

Fayez Abedaziz , says: April 12, 2019 at 12:25 am
Thanks, I appreciate this article.
I’ll make two points, my own opinion:
it’s the same story as Vietnam, the bull about how the politicians or anti-war demonstrators tied the military ‘hand,’ blah, blah.
Nonsense. Invading a nation and slaughtering people in their towns, houses…gee…what’s wrong with that, eh?
The average American has a primitive mind when it comes to such matters.
Second point I have, is that both Bushes, Clinton, Obama, Hillary and Trump should be dragged to a world court, given a fair trial and locked up for life with hard labor… oh, and Cheney too,for all those families, in half a dozen nations, especially the children overseas that suffered/died from these creeps.
And, the families of dead or maimed American troops should be apologized to and compensation paid by several million dollars to each.
The people I named above make me sick, because I have feelings and a conscience. Can you dig?
kingdomofgodflag.info , says: April 12, 2019 at 8:19 am
Though there is a worldly justification for killing to obtain or maintain freedoms, there is no Christian justification for it. Which suggests that Christians who die while doing it, die in vain.

America’s wars are prosecuted by a military that includes Christians. They seldom question the killing their country orders them to do, as though the will of the government is that of the will of God. Is that a safe assumption for them to make? German Christian soldiers made that assumption regarding their government in 1939. Who was there to tell them otherwise? The Church failed, including the chaplains. (The Southern Baptist Convention declared the invasion of Iraq a just war in 2003.) These wars need to be assessed by Just War criteria. Christian soldiers need to know when to exercise selective conscientious objection, for it is better to go to prison than to kill without God’s approval. If Just War theory is irrelevant, the default response is Christian Pacifism.

Mark Thomason , says: April 12, 2019 at 10:43 am
“has gone un-investigated, unheard of, or unpunished.”

The one guy who did tell us has just been arrested for doing exactly that.

The arrest is cheered by those who fantasize about Russiagate, but it is expressly FOR telling us about these things.

Stephen J. , says: April 12, 2019 at 10:51 am
“Iraq Wrecked” a lot of innocent people. Millions are dead, cities reduced to rubble, homes and businesses destroyed and it was all a damned lie. And the perpetrators are Free.
Now there is sectarian violence too, where once there was a semblance of harmony amongst various denominations. See article link below.

“Are The Christians Slaughtered in The Middle East Victims of the Actions of Western War Criminals and Their Terrorist Supporting NATO ‘Allies’”?

http://graysinfo.blogspot.com/2017/04/are-christians-slaughtered-in-middle.html

the the , says: April 12, 2019 at 11:53 am
We are a globalist open borders and mass immigration nation. We stand for nothing. To serve in this nation’s military is very stupid. You aren’t defending anything. You are just a tool of globalism. Again, we don’t secure our borders. That’s a very big give away to what’s going on.
the the , says: April 12, 2019 at 11:57 am
If our nation’s military really was an American military concerned with our security we would have secured our border after 9/11, reduced all immigration, deported ALL muslims, and that’s it. Just secure the borders and expel Muslims! That’s all we needed to do.

Instead we killed so many people and imported many many more Muslims! And we call this compassion. Its insane.

Kouros , says: April 12, 2019 at 12:02 pm
Maybe if Talibans get back in power they will destroy the opium. You know, like they did when they were first in power…. It seems that wherever Americans get involved, drugs follow…
JohnT , says: April 12, 2019 at 2:03 pm
“Yet, we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources, and livelihood are all involved. So is the very structure of our society. In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.” In Eisenhower’s televised farewell address January 17, 1961.
Rational thought would lead one to believe such words from a fellow with his credentials would have had a useful effect. But it didn’t. In point of fact, in the likes of Eric Prince and his supporters the notion of war as a profit center is quite literally a family affair.
Ken Zaretzke , says: April 12, 2019 at 2:10 pm
The military-industrial complex couldn’t accomplish this all by its lonesome self. The deep state was doing its thing. The two things overlap but aren’t the same. The deep state is not only or mainly about business profits, but about power. Power in the world means empire, which requires a military-industrial complex but is not reducible to it.

We now have a rare opportunity to unveil the workings of the deep state, but it will require a special counsel, and a lengthy written report, on the doings in the 2016 election of the FBI (Comey, Strzok, et. al.), and collaterally the CIA and DIA (Brennan and Clapper). Also the British government (M-16), John McCain, and maybe Bush and Obama judges on the FISA courts.

[Apr 16, 2019] CIA Director Used Fake Skripal Incident Photos To Manipulate Trump

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... The U.S. alone expelled 60 Russian officials. Trump was furious when he learned that EU countries expelled less than 60 in total. A year ago the Washington Post described the scene: ..."
"... Today the New York Times portraits Gina Haspel's relation with Trump. The writers seem sympathetic to her and the CIA's position. They include an anecdote of the Skripal expulsion decision that is supposed to let her shine in a good light. But it only proves that the CIA manipulated the president for its own purpose: ..."
"... Ms. Haspel showed pictures the British government had supplied her of young children hospitalized after being sickened by the Novichok nerve agent that poisoned the Skripals. She then showed a photograph of ducks that British officials said were inadvertently killed by the sloppy work of the Russian operatives. ..."
"... Ms Haspel was not the first to use emotional images to appeal to the president, but pairing it with her hard-nosed realism proved effective: Mr. Trump fixated on the pictures of the sickened children and the dead ducks. At the end of the briefing, he embraced the strong option. ..."
"... If the NYT piece is correct, the CIA director, in cooperation with the British government, lied to Trump about the incident. Their aim was to sabotage Trump's announced policy of better relations with Russia. The ruse worked. ..."
"... The NYT piece does not mention that the pictures Gina Haspel showed Trump were fake. It pretends that her lies were "new information" and that she was not out to manipulate him: ..."
"... The job of the CIA director is to serve the president, not to protect the agencies own policies. ..."
"... The 1970s movie 3 Days of The Condor is about the evils of the See Eye A. Also they create trial balloon in the movie about taking middle east oil. This later happens in real life with NeoCon See Eye A stooges - Poppy Bush then later GW Bush-Cheney, Clintons and Oboma all agency owned men. ..."
"... The head of the See Eye A is to serve the elites-Central banksters not the President. They did not serve JFK. Any President who crosses the central bankers aka roth-schilds ends up dead. ..."
"... It is interesting to see that nations that have traditionally been pro-American feel that the threat posed by American power is growing. ..."
"... Haspel was CIA station chief in London in 2016, when U.S. and Brit intel agencies conspired to stop Trump's candidacy. In her position, Haspel had to know about the plotting, more likely she participated in it. That Brennan supported her argues for the latter. ..."
"... Photos of fake dead ducks and fake sickened children confirm the Skripal story is, in turn, completely fake. It says a lot that the NY Times either does not know this or that its contempt for its readership matches the contempt by which the intelligence agencies hold for their putative boss. ..."
"... Thanks for bringing this Skripal segment to light, b, as most of us don't read the NY Times in any form. Haspel likely had a hand in the planning of the overall scheme of which the Skripal saga and Russiagate are interconnected episodes. Clearly, the Money Power sees the challenge raised by Russia/China/Eurasia as existential and is trying to counter hybridly as it knows its wealth won't save it from Nuclear War. ..."
"... after integrity initiative, we know the uk is full of shite on most everything... thus, the msm will not be talking about integrity initiative.. ..."
"... once Teresa May has spoken in Parliament, and Trump committed to expelling embassy staff, there is no way any alternative version of the truth is possible. ..."
"... Skripal of course was a colleague of Steele, and possibly the only person he asked to get info for the dossier beyond what Nellie Ohr had already given him. His evidence might have been crucial. The CIA and others have a strong motive to kill Skripal and a stronger one to blame the Russians. ..."
"... The fact that the 'Dirty Dossier' and the 'Skripal "story"' both originate in one and the same small town in the UK, tells you all you need to know about both. ..."
"... Haspel will not be fired. ..."
"... It is clear the USA, France, Israel and UK are fasting approaching ungovernable .. no one in government can keep the lies of the other hidden, and none of the governed believes anyone in government, the MSM, the MIC or the AIG (ATT, Intel and Google). .. ..."
"... The actors in government, their lawyers, playmates and corporations have become the laughing stock of the rest of the world. ..."
Apr 16, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

An ass kissing portrait of Gina Haspel, torture queen and director of the CIA, reveals that she lied to Trump to push for more aggression against Russia.

In March 2018 the British government asserted, without providing any evidence, that the alleged 'Novichok' poisoning of Sergej and Yulia Skripal was the fault of Russia. It urged its allies to expel Russian officials from their countries.

The U.S. alone expelled 60 Russian officials. Trump was furious when he learned that EU countries expelled less than 60 in total. A year ago the Washington Post described the scene:
President Trump seemed distracted in March as his aides briefed him at his Mar-a-Lago resort on the administration's plan to expel 60 Russian diplomats and suspected spies.

The United States, they explained, would be ousting roughly the same number of Russians as its European allies -- part of a coordinated move to punish Moscow for the poisoning of a former Russian spy and his daughter on British soil.

"We'll match their numbers," Trump instructed, according to a senior administration official. "We're not taking the lead. We're matching."

The next day, when the expulsions were announced publicly, Trump erupted, officials said. To his shock and dismay, France and Germany were each expelling only four Russian officials -- far fewer than the 60 his administration had decided on.

The president, who seemed to believe that other individual countries would largely equal the United States, was furious that his administration was being portrayed in the media as taking by far the toughest stance on Russia.

The expulsion marked a turn in the Trump administration's relation with Russia:

The incident reflects a tension at the core of the Trump administration's increasingly hard-nosed stance on Russia: The president instinctually opposes many of the punitive measures pushed by his Cabinet that have crippled his ability to forge a close relationship with Russian President Vladi­mir Putin.

The past month, in particular, has marked a major turning point in the administration's stance, according to senior administration officials. There have been mass expulsions of Russian diplomats, sanctions on oligarchs that have bled billions of dollars from Russia's already weak economy and, for the first time, a presidential tweet that criticized Putin by name for backing Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad.

Today the New York Times portraits Gina Haspel's relation with Trump. The writers seem sympathetic to her and the CIA's position. They include an anecdote of the Skripal expulsion decision that is supposed to let her shine in a good light. But it only proves that the CIA manipulated the president for its own purpose:

Last March, top national security officials gathered inside the White House to discuss with Mr. Trump how to respond to the nerve agent attack in Britain on Sergei V. Skripal, the former Russian intelligence agent.

London was pushing for the White House to expel dozens of suspected Russian operatives, but Mr. Trump was skeptical.
...
During the discussion, Ms. Haspel, then deputy C.I.A. director, turned toward Mr. Trump. She outlined possible responses in a quiet but firm voice, then leaned forward and told the president that the "strong option" was to expel 60 diplomats.

To persuade Mr. Trump, according to people briefed on the conversation, officials including Ms. Haspel also tried to show him that Mr. Skripal and his daughter were not the only victims of Russia's attack.

Ms. Haspel showed pictures the British government had supplied her of young children hospitalized after being sickened by the Novichok nerve agent that poisoned the Skripals. She then showed a photograph of ducks that British officials said were inadvertently killed by the sloppy work of the Russian operatives.

Ms Haspel was not the first to use emotional images to appeal to the president, but pairing it with her hard-nosed realism proved effective: Mr. Trump fixated on the pictures of the sickened children and the dead ducks. At the end of the briefing, he embraced the strong option.

The Skripal case was widely covered and we followed it diligently (scroll down). There were no reports of any children affected by 'Novichok' nor were their any reports of dead ducks. In the official storyline the Skripals, before visiting a restaurant, fed bread to ducks at a pond in the Queen Elizabeth Gardens in Salisbury.

They also gave duck-bread to three children to do the same. The children were examined and their blood was tested. No poison was found and none of them fell ill . No duck died. (The duck feeding episode also disproves the claim that the Skripals were poisoned by touching a door handle.)

If the NYT piece is correct, the CIA director, in cooperation with the British government, lied to Trump about the incident. Their aim was to sabotage Trump's announced policy of better relations with Russia. The ruse worked.

The NYT piece does not mention that the pictures Gina Haspel showed Trump were fake. It pretends that her lies were "new information" and that she was not out to manipulate him:

The outcome was an example, officials said, of how Ms. Haspel is one of the few people who can get Mr. Trump to shift position based on new information.

Co-workers and friends of Ms. Haspel push back on any notion that she is manipulating the president. She is instead trying to get him to listen and to protect the agency, according to former intelligence officials who know her.

The job of the CIA director is to serve the president, not to protect the agencies own policies. Hopefully Trump will hear about the anecdote, recognize how he was had, and fire Haspel. He should not stop there but also get rid of her protector who likely had a role in the game:

Ms. Haspel won the trust of Mr. Pompeo, however, and has stayed loyal to him. As a result, Mr. Trump sees Ms. Haspel as an extension of Mr. Pompeo, a view that has helped protect her, current and former intelligence officials said.

Posted by b on April 16, 2019 at 08:37 AM | Permalink

Russ , Apr 16, 2019 9:02:41 AM | link

I don't see how it's possible to manipulate someone (and especially the US president) into doing something they don't want to do with lies like the ones described here. On the contrary presidents, CEOs etc. favor the staffers who tell them the kind of lies they want to hear in order to reinforce what they wanted to do in the first place.

I've never seen any reason to alter my first position on Trump, that like any other president he does what he wants to do.

Jerry , Apr 16, 2019 9:14:30 AM | link
The 1970s movie 3 Days of The Condor is about the evils of the See Eye A. Also they create trial balloon in the movie about taking middle east oil. This later happens in real life with NeoCon See Eye A stooges - Poppy Bush then later GW Bush-Cheney, Clintons and Oboma all agency owned men.

The joke 7in the final scene Robert Redford tells See Eye A man Cliff Robertson that he gave all the evidence to the NY Times. What a joke. The NY Times and the Wash Post are the mouthpieces for the SEE Eye A. The AP news sources most of their stories from those two papers and other lackey See Eye A newspapers.

One final criticism in moon's story. The head of the See Eye A is to serve the elites-Central banksters not the President. They did not serve JFK. Any President who crosses the central bankers aka roth-schilds ends up dead.

manny , Apr 16, 2019 9:15:16 AM | link
Ms. Haspel, then deputy C.I.A. director

After this, she got the top job, so what is the real lesson here? Sociopathic liars get promoted....or you can tell the truth, try to be honorable and fade into obscurity.. In a nest of psychos, you have to really be depraved to become the top psycho...

Nuke it for orbit, it's the only way to be sure...

Sally Snyder , Apr 16, 2019 9:35:40 AM | link
Here is an article that looks at whether nations around the world regard the United States or Russia as the greater threat to their nation:

https://viableopposition.blogspot.com/2019/03/which-is-greater-threat-russia-or.html

It is interesting to see that nations that have traditionally been pro-American feel that the threat posed by American power is growing.

donkeytale , Apr 16, 2019 9:40:06 AM | link
b

Backing up Russ's point, when will you realise the "buck stops" on Trump's desk for any and all departments he oversees, which are run by his appointees? Trump is dedicated to creating a neoconservative foreign policy melded to a neoliberal economic policy favouring his corporate fascist sponsors. Recently, you've been all over the Assange indictment, Trump's relationship with Nuttyahoo and the related rollback of JCPOA. Is this what you want to see continued into a second term?

There is much evidence to show Trump and the GOP working steadily towards a "democracy" where Congress is castrated (one might say the system castrates Congress anyway), opposing candidates are jailed, opposition votes are suppressed and the media is weakened to the point where no one can tell the difference.

They haven't got there quite yet but once the judiciary is controlled by GOP ideologues it's game over. And McConnell is dedicating his life to make that the reality ASAP.

Meanwhile back at the ranch we are dedicated to knocking down any and all potential opposition to this GOP hostile takeover for some reason I've yet to fathom.

BM , Apr 16, 2019 9:42:46 AM | link
Hopefully Trump will hear about the anecdote, recognize how he was had, and fire Haspel. He should not stop there but also get rid of her protector who likely had a role in the game[Pompeo]

Hopefully yes to all four propositions. Why am I sceptical though (except conceivably the first)?

Mataman , Apr 16, 2019 9:45:30 AM | link
The story veers into complete fiction when it claims that pictures of dead ducks had any effect on Trump. He doesn't like, nor care about animals. He's the first POTUS in decades I believe to not even pretend to like dogs by having an official White House dog and every policy his Administration can take against animals, they have taken. I'm not even sure I buy the spin that he cared about dead kids either. And NYT readers know this about him, so I don't understand what the point of peddling this fiction is other than to paint Torture Queen in some kind of good light (and we KNOW that she certainly doesn't care about dead anything).
the pair , Apr 16, 2019 10:08:18 AM | link
another example of trump's stupidity and pathological inability to think for himself. he gets his views from fox and his policy from bolton. his equally vapid daughter and kushner whine to him about sooper sad syria pictures they saw in a sponsored link while googling for new tmz gossip.

even worse that this is the twat in charge of one of russiagate's main instigating "deep state" agencies. he spent the entirety of his presidency railing against their various lies then takes this wankery at face value. it's just like the "chinese soldiers in venezuela"; if those pictures were legit they'd have been splattered over every front page and permanently attached to screeching cnn and msnbc segments demanding trump "finally get tough" on "putin's russia".

my only surprise is that she didn't tell him about british babies ripped from incubators and dipped in anthrax powder.
the nyt shilling for a soCIopAth? not that surprising.

Twiki , Apr 16, 2019 10:43:11 AM | link

The consultant in emergency medicine at Salisbury hospital wrote to The Times, shortly after the Skripal incident. His choice of words was odd, and some have said they indicate no novichok poisoning occurred. Leaving that to one side, his letter certainly puts paid to the idea that more than three people (the Skripals and the policeman, DCI Bailey) were poisoned. https://www.onaquietday.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/DocSaysNoNerveAgentInSalisbury.jpg
bjd , Apr 16, 2019 10:43:51 AM | link
" the nerve agent attack in Britain on Sergei V. Skripal, "

There was no attack on the Skripals. or on anyone else. The Russophobia in whose context it falls, is of a higher order, in which a fabricated narrative of a Skripal-like attack had an important function. The Skripals were perfectly happy to lend their name to the fabrication, and are living happily, probably in New Zealand.

Jackrabbit , Apr 16, 2019 10:59:48 AM | link
The Daily Beast article that b linked to describes how many serious, well-informed people felt that Haspel was unsuitable to lead the CIA. Even more strange and troubling was that Haspel was supported by Trump's nemesis, John Brennan.

Despite all that, MAGA Trump still nominated her. Any notion that Trump is at odds with, or "manipulated" by, Haspel, Bolton, or Pompeo is just propaganda. We've seen such reporting before (esp. wrt Bolton) and Trump has taken no action.

Babyl-on , Apr 16, 2019 11:04:28 AM | link
I see that Trump derangement is alive and well here at MoA. Commenters talk as if Trump is the first president stupid enough to be manipulated by the security agencies and shadow government sometimes referred to as a "deep state". People don't have to be historians or look back to Rome, just read the books about how the great general who "won WWII" was used by the oligarchy which had full control of US foreign policy throughout Eisenhower's term in office.

Works produced after WWII, C. Wright Mills, The Power elite was written in 1956,The Brothers and The Divil's Chessboard each about the Dulles Brothers and how they operated US foreign policy for the interests of the oligarchy, and the work Peter Phillips, GIANTS: The Global Power Elite and the work of David Rothkopf which thoroughly describes the feudal system under which the Western cultures are ruled.
The US government is a pantomime it is a show it has no power.

How many here can honestly say they understand that the US dollar itself and the ENTIRE GLOBAL FINANCIAL SYSTEM is privately owned. Why do you think the "banks were bailed out"? because the banks were in power not the government. The US is 22 trillion in debt - the oligarchy is the creditor - take over the US gov. and you have a powerless pile of debt.

Around 6,000 people control 85% of global assets until that changes nothing will change. The oligarchy won virtually all the mines and control the price of all basic commodities necessary for modern life, the internet, oil of course and more.

What is failing and what has failed over and over for 500 years is Western Civilization and its three "great religions" which preach obedience, oppression, domination by a one god suffocating mythology.

But the oligarchy doesn't own just the basic commodities, it owns the religions and it owns the drugs and all illegal trade as well.

Western "civilization" is really nothing more than one vast feudal kingdom, with royal courts in DC, Tel Aviv and Ryiadh. Wheather there is a god or not, religion is made of flesh and blood not miracles. No Rabbi or Priest or Imam claims visitations by god to instruct them on doctrine - they are flesh and blood and they want power so they behave like sycophants to the money they need to expand their power...all for the good souls under their care.

Jackrabbit , Apr 16, 2019 11:16:08 AM | link
Correction @13 Trump's supposed nemesis. Trump has brought several friends and associates of his enemies into his Administration:
  • VP Pence: John McCain's buddy
  • Bolton: a neocon (neocons were "Never Trump", remember?)
  • Wm Barr: close with Mueller
  • Haspel: Brennan's gal at CIA
And Trump himself was close to the Clintons.
lysias , Apr 16, 2019 12:00:59 PM | link
Haspel was CIA station chief in London in 2016, when U.S. and Brit intel agencies conspired to stop Trump's candidacy. In her position, Haspel had to know about the plotting, more likely she participated in it. That Brennan supported her argues for the latter.
Jose Garcia , Apr 16, 2019 12:08:01 PM | link
What can we expect from a tv personality who became a US president? A man who ran with an advertisement worthy of a business man like him, "Make America Great Again." How does he go about doing it? Giving more money to the military industrial-Congressional complex, even though we are really flat broke. Using aggressive tactics used by Wall Street in hostile company takeovers to really intimidate other nations. And hire and place those he really agrees with in important positions who really reflect his true feelings. I'm sure when he spoke with Haspel before offering her the job, he brought up the topic of torture and agreed with her on its use on terrorists.
Jackrabbit , Apr 16, 2019 12:24:11 PM | link
lysias @18: conspired to stop Trump's candidacy

I think there's a reasonable case to be made that they conspired not to stop Trump but to further speculation of Trump's "collusion" with Russia (what would later be known as Russiagate). The "collusion" and "Russia meddled" accusations are what fueled the new McCarthyism.

juliania , Apr 16, 2019 12:28:54 PM | link
I'll just add to Jerry's comment at #3 that the final line in the movie "Day of the Condor" is something like "But will they print it?" which really spoke to the message of the film in its entirety. The condor being an endangered bird for whom the hero is named, and the beginning outrage being the brutal murder of book lovers researching useable plot details for the 'company'makes this message current and applicable to what we see in the Skripal case. And instead of librarians, we now have online commenters, a doughty breed, and we have Assange.

Instead of 'Will they print it?' I am wondering 'Will they make another movie about it?'

"Day of the Condor: Part Two." Some Day.

Ross , Apr 16, 2019 12:41:17 PM | link
Remind me, where is Yulia Skripal these days? Well and truly 'disappeared' it seems. The mask is off. the snarling face of the beast is there for all to see.
Kiza , Apr 16, 2019 12:49:37 PM | link
What a total waste of an article discussing a story published in NYT or WaPo.

b, the World has divided itself into those who consume alternative media such as this and stupidos who consume MSM. There is nothing in-between that you are attempting to discuss and dissect here. NYT = cognitive value zero.

Fake News not worth one millisecond of our time, not even to decode what the regime wants us to know, we know all that already. Personally, I am only interested in the new methods of domestic repression, what is next after the warning of Assange arrest, future rendition and torture. The Deep Stare appears to be coming out into open, will it soon get rid of the whole faux democracy construct and just use iron fist to rule? It already impose its will as the rule of law. All of the Western block is heading in this direction.

jayc , Apr 16, 2019 1:00:38 PM | link
Photos of fake dead ducks and fake sickened children confirm the Skripal story is, in turn, completely fake. It says a lot that the NY Times either does not know this or that its contempt for its readership matches the contempt by which the intelligence agencies hold for their putative boss.
Piotr Berman , Apr 16, 2019 1:11:24 PM | link
The story veers into complete fiction when it claims that pictures of dead ducks had any effect on Trump. He doesn't like, nor care about animals. Mataman | Apr 16, 2019 9:45:30 AM

This assumes that Trump would primarily care about the ducks (and children) when he approved a massive expulsion, rather that his image and "ah, in that case it would look bad if we do not do something really decisive".

In any case, I was thinking why NYT would disclose something like that. The point is that readers of Craig Murray (not so few, but mostly Scottish nationalists who are also leftist and have scant possibilities and/or inclination to vote in USA) and MoonOfAlabama would quickly catch a dead fish here, but 99.9% of the public is blissfully unaware of any incongruences in the "established" Skripal narrative.

Piotr Berman , Apr 16, 2019 1:22:03 PM | link
BTW, it is possible that the journalist who scribbled fresh yarn obtained from CIA did it earnestly. Journalists do not necessarily follow stories that they cover -- scribbling from given notes does not require overtaxing the precious attention span that can be devoted to more vital cognitive challenges. I am lazy to find the link, but while checking for news on Venezuela, I stumbled on a piece from Express, a British tabloid, where Guaido was named a "figurehead of the oposition" supported by "450 Western countries". My interpretation was that more literate journalists were moved for to more compelling stories as Venezuela went to the back burner.
JOHN CHUCKMAN , Apr 16, 2019 1:28:11 PM | link
Yes, indeed, the Skripal Affair is one of the obviously contrived stunts we've seen. Just outrageous in its execution. On a par with the US having a man who didn't even run for president of Venezuela swear himself in and then pressure everyone to accept him as president.

Interesting, I had no idea Gina Haspel - aka, The Queen of Blood - played a role. I thought it was all original dirty work by Britain's Theresa May. Boy, I hope people are through with the false notion that if women just get into leadership, the world will become a better gentler place.

Here's some interesting background:

Noirette , Apr 16, 2019 1:28:44 PM | link
Macron was (afaik?) the only EU 'leader' who was quoted in the MSM as bruiting re. the Skripal affair a message like:

.. no culpability in the part of Russia has been evidenced .. for now...

I suppose he was enjoined to shut his gob right quick (have been reading about brexit so brit eng) as nothing more in that line was heard.

Hooo, the EU expelled a lot of Russ. diplomats, obeying the USuk, which certainly created some major upsets on the ground.

Some were expelled, went into other jobs, other places, but then others arrived, etc. The MSM has not made any counts - lists - of names numbers - etc. of R diplos on the job - anywhere. As some left and then others arrived.

Once more, this was mostly a symbolic move, if extremely nasty, insulting, and disruptive.

Theresa May's speech re. Novichok, Independent 14 March 2018:

.. on Monday I set out that Mr Skripal and his daughter were poisoned with a Novichok: a military grade nerve agent developed by Russia. Based on this capability, combined with their record of conducting state sponsored assassinations – including against former intelligence officers whom they regard as legitimate targets – the UK Government concluded it was highly likely that Russia was responsible for this reckless and despicable act. ..

https://ind.pn/2XcAIk4

Cost her a consequent amount of political capital. - Everyone knows the Skripal story is BS.

semiconscious , Apr 16, 2019 1:31:34 PM | link
@25 & @26:

imo, the media has, once again, simply taken its lead from trump himself, & started making things up completely. & you're absolutely correct in pointing out that, much like trump's true believers, the msm's targeted audience never even notices...

karlof1 , Apr 16, 2019 1:53:44 PM | link
Thanks for bringing this Skripal segment to light, b, as most of us don't read the NY Times in any form. Haspel likely had a hand in the planning of the overall scheme of which the Skripal saga and Russiagate are interconnected episodes. Clearly, the Money Power sees the challenge raised by Russia/China/Eurasia as existential and is trying to counter hybridly as it knows its wealth won't save it from Nuclear War.
james , Apr 16, 2019 2:03:20 PM | link
after integrity initiative, we know the uk is full of shite on most everything... thus, the msm will not be talking about integrity initiative..

what i didn't know is what @18 lysias pointed out.."Haspel was CIA station chief in London in 2016, when U.S. and Brit intel agencies conspired to stop Trump's candidacy. In her position, Haspel had to know about the plotting, more likely she participated in it. That Brennan supported her argues for the latter." ditto jr's speculation @20 too...

so gaspel shows trump some cheap propaganda that she got from who??

my main problem with b's post - i tend to see it like kiza @23) is maintaining the idea trump isn't in on all of this.. the thought trump is being duped by his underlings.. if he was and it mattered, he would get rid of them.. the fact he doesn't says to me, he is in on it - get russia, being the 24/7 game plan of the west here still..

c1ue , Apr 16, 2019 2:03:56 PM | link
Please stop listening to idiot libertarians and their "US is flat broke" meme. The reality is that: so long as Americans transact in dollars, the United States government can tax anytime it feels like by issuing new dollars via the Fed.

Equally, so long as 60% of the world's trade is conducted in dollars, this is tens to hundreds of billions of dollars of additional taxation surface area. The MMT people - I don't agree 100% with everything they say, but they do understand the actual operation of fiat currency.

The people who want a hard currency are either wealthy (and understand that conversion to hard currency cements their wealth) or are useful idiots who don't understand that currency devaluation is the single easiest way to tax in a democracy.

Michael Droy , Apr 16, 2019 2:12:37 PM | link
Well this could be Syria, not Salisbury!

I doubt Haspel knew the ducks were fake - she was probably just given stuff to pass up the chain. It is a lot like John Kerry who was shown convincing satellite data of the BUK launch that hit MH17 - but no one could be bothered to pass on even the launch site coordinates to the JIT. I'm sure this stuff goes on all the time, and of course, once Teresa May has spoken in Parliament, and Trump committed to expelling embassy staff, there is no way any alternative version of the truth is possible.

Skripal of course was a colleague of Steele, and possibly the only person he asked to get info for the dossier beyond what Nellie Ohr had already given him. His evidence might have been crucial. The CIA and others have a strong motive to kill Skripal and a stronger one to blame the Russians.

bjd , Apr 16, 2019 2:25:23 PM | link
The fact that the 'Dirty Dossier' and the 'Skripal "story"' both originate in one and the same small town in the UK, tells you all you need to know about both.
fastfreddy , Apr 16, 2019 2:48:31 PM | link
Haspel will not be fired.
Russ , Apr 16, 2019 3:02:51 PM | link
@c1ue | Apr 16, 2019 2:03:56 PM | 32

"The people who want a hard currency are either wealthy (and understand that conversion to hard currency cements their wealth) or are useful idiots who don't understand that currency devaluation is the single easiest way to tax in a democracy."

The useful idiocy is most surprising among US farmers. In the 19th century they broadly understood that fiat money was good for chronic low-wealth debtors like themselves, while hard money was bad and a gold standard lethal. This was the basis of the Populist movement. Nothing has changed financially, but today's farmers, and the low-wealth debtor class in general, seem more likely to be goldbuggers than to have any knowledge of economics or of their own political history.

karlof1 36

Once a faction becomes submerged in the Mammon theocracy and becomes nothing but mercenary nihilists, thinking is no longer necessary or desirable, except to come up with attractive, pseudo-plausible lies.

This certainly characterizes "the right" (including liberals), but they have no monopoly on it. By now "the left" is nearly as thoughtless and instrumental on behalf of Mammon, except to the extent that a few people are starting to really grapple with what it means to have an intrinsically ecocidal and therefore suicidal civilization. That's really the only thought frontier left, all else has been engulfed in Mammon, productionism, scientism and technocracy.

snake , Apr 16, 2019 3:29:24 PM | link
@7 ..Trump and the GOP working steadily towards a "democracy" where Congress is castrated (one might say the system castrates Congress anyway), opposing candidates are jailed, opposition votes are suppressed and the media is weakened to the point where no one can tell the difference. https://www.presstv.com/Detail/2019/04/15/593529/Ecuadoran-president-sold-off-Assangeto-America-Ron-Paul

I remind that Mussolini wasted his legislature.. 1 balmy after noon @ a roadside spot. it made his government stronger.?

It is clear the USA, France, Israel and UK are fasting approaching ungovernable .. no one in government can keep the lies of the other hidden, and none of the governed believes anyone in government, the MSM, the MIC or the AIG (ATT, Intel and Google). ..

The actors in government, their lawyers, playmates and corporations have become the laughing stock of the rest of the world. Everyone in the government is covering for the behaviors of someone else in government, the MSM has raised the price of a pencil to just under a million, stock markets are bags of hot thin air, and everyone in side and outside of the centers of power at all levels of government have lied thru their teeth so much that their teeth are melting from the continuous flow of hot deceitful air.

Corrupt is now the only qualification for political office, trigger happy screwball the only qualification for the police and the military and . making progress is like trying to conduct a panty raid at a female nudist camp.

John Anthony La Pietra , Apr 16, 2019 3:47:03 PM | link
https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0073802/quotes?ref_=m_tt_trv_qu

Higgins: Hey, Turner! How do you know they'll print it? You can take a walk, but how far if they don't print it?

Joe Turner: They'll print it.

Higgins: How do you know?

[Apr 15, 2019] War is the force that gives America its meaning.

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... For Christ's sake! The "Deep State"!?! With a well documented pathological liar and a seemingly endless supply of professional sycophants in our government selling our nation to the highest bidder in plain sight why in the world do you folks continue to need grand delusions of demons in the woodwork??? ..."
"... I have no reason to believe Comey, Clapper and Brennen have served this nation with honor and integrity in dealing with more responsibility than that required to sit safely at home and blabber about as the victim of some grand conspiracy ..."
"... To the extent that McCain comes out looking bad in a special counsel's report, Trump haters like you will no longer be able to talk about Trump's supposed terrible character in dissing noble John McCain, and holding it up as Exhibit A of why Trump shouldn't be president. ..."
"... Our failures of statecraft are quite analogous to the ongoing errors in my field (medicine), well described in "To Err is Human." We've made a lot of progress in medicine in addressing them, mostly though systems engineering. That's because the tendency toward these errors is a result of how human brains are wired, and if you have a human brain, no matter how smart or well educated you are, you have those tendencies. The key is to create systems that catch the errors. ..."
"... Now we have to figure out how to create systems to constrain politicians, and especially the military-industrial-Congressional complex (Eisenhower's actual original term), from making those errors. ..."
"... "Iraq wrecked me, even though I somehow didn't expect it to. I was foolish to think that traveling to the other side of the world and spending a year seeing death and poverty, bearing witness to a war, learning how to be mortared at night and deciding it didn't matter that I might die before breakfast, wasn't going to change me. Of the military units I was embedded in, three soldiers did not come home; all died at their own hands." ..."
"... Here is a thought; the unprovoked American aggression in Iraq wrecked Iraq! There is no comparison between the millions of dead, dispossessed, displaced, terrorized and radicalized Iraqis and a few thousand PTSD cases with the richest government in the world on their side. ..."
"... It's like a pimp complaining about bruised knuckles on account of hitting a woman too many times! ..."
"... The title of your book sounds like "Invading Iraq was a Good Idea but the Implementation was Bad and I Couldn't Fix It". Did you really think we could invade a sovereign country based on lies and win "hearts and minds" if we just did it the right way? Not possible. ..."
Apr 15, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

John, says: April 13, 2019 at 3:18 am

With all due respect, Iraq didn't wreck you. The US wrecked Iraq, and the US wrecked you.
Uncle Billy , says: April 13, 2019 at 8:00 am
The invasion of Iraq was a mistake of historic dimensions. The "weapons of mass destruction" excuse was a lie. When I see George W. Bush smiling on TV, I want to puke. Likewise, I cannot view an image of Lyndon Johnson without revulsion. They are both responsible for much death and suffering. I have heard people try to excuse both of them, with the statement that "they meant well." The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.
JohnT , says: April 13, 2019 at 8:06 am
@Ken Zaretzke.

For Christ's sake! The "Deep State"!?! With a well documented pathological liar and a seemingly endless supply of professional sycophants in our government selling our nation to the highest bidder in plain sight why in the world do you folks continue to need grand delusions of demons in the woodwork???

I have no reason to believe Comey, Clapper and Brennen have served this nation with honor and integrity in dealing with more responsibility than that required to sit safely at home and blabber about as the victim of some grand conspiracy.

Bob , says: April 13, 2019 at 9:57 am
The war In Afghanistan would have ended 15 years ago if the sons of members of Congress were being drafted. "It's easy to send someone else's sons to war."
Ken Zaretzke , says: April 13, 2019 at 4:43 pm
@JohnT,

You left out the phrase "anything other than" following the phrase "have served this nation with" in your last sentence.

You forgot to express your confidence in John McCain. Good luck with that. McCain's top aide flew to a foreign city to receive the Steele dossier, gave it to the senator, who then gave it to the FBI–as per Steele's script, I assume. It's another reason why we need a special counsel to look into the FBI's role. A special counsel can hardly omit the McCain piece of the puzzle, whereas a regular prosecutor can easily ignore it and cover McCain's keister.

To the extent that McCain comes out looking bad in a special counsel's report, Trump haters like you will no longer be able to talk about Trump's supposed terrible character in dissing noble John McCain, and holding it up as Exhibit A of why Trump shouldn't be president.

More than anything else concerning the FBI's election shenanigans, the McCain-Steele nexus–specifically the report written about it by a special counsel–could expose the deep state's modus operandi. Not even an inspector general's report can do that as well as a special counsel's report.

Sarto , says: April 13, 2019 at 5:02 pm
Remember, 75% of Americans wanted Bush to invade Iraq. War is the force that gives America its meaning.
Lee Green , says: April 13, 2019 at 8:11 pm
Your book will go out of print. In 10 to 20 years it will be reprinted and sell well. It takes that long for people to remove their heads from their nether regions and be willing to contemplate the errors made.

The real irony is that we know better. There is a vast body of literature on major cognitive errors, and the whole catalog is on display in the debacle described. Our failures of statecraft are quite analogous to the ongoing errors in my field (medicine), well described in "To Err is Human." We've made a lot of progress in medicine in addressing them, mostly though systems engineering. That's because the tendency toward these errors is a result of how human brains are wired, and if you have a human brain, no matter how smart or well educated you are, you have those tendencies. The key is to create systems that catch the errors.

Now we have to figure out how to create systems to constrain politicians, and especially the military-industrial-Congressional complex (Eisenhower's actual original term), from making those errors.

George Hoffman , says: April 13, 2019 at 10:09 pm
I commiserate with your disillusioning journey because I went through a similar odyssey into self-awareness like yours many decades ago. I served as a medical corpsman in Vietnam (31 May 1967 – 31 May 1968). It's all been downhill from there. A gradual slide down the slippy slope of history in our decline as a nation. There's not much one can really do. But at my age, I will be long gone when our country hits burns and crashes as it hits bottom.
Talltale , says: April 13, 2019 at 10:11 pm
"Iraq wrecked me, even though I somehow didn't expect it to. I was foolish to think that traveling to the other side of the world and spending a year seeing death and poverty, bearing witness to a war, learning how to be mortared at night and deciding it didn't matter that I might die before breakfast, wasn't going to change me. Of the military units I was embedded in, three soldiers did not come home; all died at their own hands."

Enough books and movies about those poor damaged American boys yet?

The navel gazing never stops.

Here is a thought; the unprovoked American aggression in Iraq wrecked Iraq! There is no comparison between the millions of dead, dispossessed, displaced, terrorized and radicalized Iraqis and a few thousand PTSD cases with the richest government in the world on their side.

Get over yourselves! Honestly! It's like a pimp complaining about bruised knuckles on account of hitting a woman too many times!

Craig Morris , says: April 14, 2019 at 1:59 am
The title of your book sounds like "Invading Iraq was a Good Idea but the Implementation was Bad and I Couldn't Fix It". Did you really think we could invade a sovereign country based on lies and win "hearts and minds" if we just did it the right way? Not possible.

[Apr 15, 2019] I wonder if the Middle East is nothing more than a live-fire laboratory for the military

Highly recommended!
Apr 15, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

Adam E, says: April 14, 2019 at 8:50 am

Just a cynical take, but implying that there are lessons to be learned from previous or present wars that should keep us from engaging in future wars presumes that the goal is to, where possible, actually avoid war.

It also suggests a convenient, simplistic narrative that the military/DOD is incompetent and stupid, and unable to learn from previous engagements.

I wonder if the Middle East is nothing more than a live-fire laboratory for the military; if it seems as though there is no plan, no objective, no victory for these engagements, maybe that is because the only objectives and victory are to provide practical war training for our troops, test equipment and tactics, keep defense contractors employed and the Pentagon's budget inflated, and to project power and provide a convenient excuse for proximity to our 'real' enemies.

Draping these actions under a pretense of spreading 'peace and democracy' is just a pretense and, as we can see by our track record, has nothing to do with actual victory. "Victory", depending on who you ask, is measured in years of engagement and dollars spent, period.

And because it is primarily taking place in the far away and poorly understood Middle East, it is never going to be enough of an issue with voters for politicians to have to seriously contend with.

WJ , says: April 14, 2019 at 9:13 am
This person is a crybaby. At 49 he went to a war that most rational people knew already, was an immoral, illegal waste of people, time and money. But now he wants to whine about PTSD. I have the same opinion about most soldiers who fought there also. Nobody made them volunteer for that junk war so quit whining when things get a little hard

[Apr 13, 2019] America as a Myth of good life is a powerful tool of color revolutions

Highly recommended!
This is a pretty accurate description of "Myth about the USA" which is very common in xUSSR area too.
Notable quotes:
"... The farther you are from the US, the more mythical it becomes. Here in Ea Kly, most people have never been to Saigon, much less California, New York or Las Vegas, so their faith in the US can become childishly fanatical. This week, I met three brothers who still regret not jumping on a boat to escape, forty years ago. Every Vietnamese they know who ended up in the US had become fabulously rich, they insisted, and they cited a man who returned to build a road for his village as a typical example. ..."
"... A man in his 40's asked me if wife swapping is common in the US. As evidenced by every movie and music video, America is this insanely sexed up place where everybody is always jumping into everybody else's bed, not the land of widespread porn addiction, compulsive masturbators, bitter divorcees, smart phone exhibitionism, paid cuddlers and the never married growing old alone. ..."
"... A woman told me that she had a friend in the US who was making "only" $2,400 a month, "How can you live on so little?" "Many Americans make less than that," I answered. "I sure did most of my time there." ..."
"... She looked amused. She had no idea most Americans have to pay around 20% of their incomes on taxes, and that housing and transportation costs eat up half of their paychecks. ..."
"... As New York, Chicago, Miami, Houston, Denver, Seattle, San Francisco and Los Angeles become covered with feces from homeless Americans, American colonies will be set up not just on Mars, but Venus, Mercury, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, in whatever order, for they're all as near as Hollywood, or your computer, assuming you'll still have one. ..."
Apr 13, 2019 | www.unz.com

Originally from: America as Religion, by Linh Dinh - The Unz Review by Linh Dinh

America's most enduring export has been its image. Self-infatuated, it seduces everyone into worshipping its self-portrait. In 1855, Walt Whitman wrote, "The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem," then set out to define this "greatest poem" to the rest of the world, a monumental achievement. In 2005, Harold Pinter said, "I put to you that the United States is without doubt the greatest show on the road. Brutal, indifferent, scornful and ruthless it may be but it is also very clever. As a salesman it is out on its own and its most saleable commodity is self-love. It's a winner."

The farther you are from the US, the more mythical it becomes. Here in Ea Kly, most people have never been to Saigon, much less California, New York or Las Vegas, so their faith in the US can become childishly fanatical. This week, I met three brothers who still regret not jumping on a boat to escape, forty years ago. Every Vietnamese they know who ended up in the US had become fabulously rich, they insisted, and they cited a man who returned to build a road for his village as a typical example.

These aborted boat people looked at me with scorn when I told them there are plenty of poor Americans, with many in such despair they drug themselves to death, and life in the US is often a very lonely experience, even for the native-born, with roots going back generations. I was besmirching these naïfs' religion.

A man in his 40's asked me if wife swapping is common in the US. As evidenced by every movie and music video, America is this insanely sexed up place where everybody is always jumping into everybody else's bed, not the land of widespread porn addiction, compulsive masturbators, bitter divorcees, smart phone exhibitionism, paid cuddlers and the never married growing old alone.

A woman told me that she had a friend in the US who was making "only" $2,400 a month, "How can you live on so little?" "Many Americans make less than that," I answered. "I sure did most of my time there."

She looked amused. She had no idea most Americans have to pay around 20% of their incomes on taxes, and that housing and transportation costs eat up half of their paychecks.

Most people in Ea Kly have never even seen an American. In the next town, Krong Buk, there's a white resident, the only one in a 30 mile radius. Most of his neighbors know him as simply ông Tây, Mr. Westerner, though some do call by his first name, Peter.

A man said to Peter, "Merci, madame," the only Western phrase he knew.

Most have no idea that Peter is actually Swiss , and not American, but he's rich enough, by local standards, so he's more or less an American.

White people are rich, live in fabulous countries, travel all over and can suddenly show up even in Krong Buk to buy a nice piece of land by the lake, build an elegant house, with a guest bungalow next to it. Whereas the locals only fish in this lake , the white man swims daily, for he knows how to enjoy life.

The apex of whiteness, though, is the United States of America, a country that didn't just drop seven million tons of bombs on Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, as well as 20 million gallons of herbicides, mostly Agent Orange, but sent twelve tall, clean cut and good intentioned white men to the moon, a transcendental feat that's still unequaled after half a century, and it's a safe bet that neither the Russians, Chinese nor anyone else will be able to accomplish this for a while, maybe ever. Of course, Americans can return to the moon tomorrow if they want to, but they're already looking way beyond it.

As New York, Chicago, Miami, Houston, Denver, Seattle, San Francisco and Los Angeles become covered with feces from homeless Americans, American colonies will be set up not just on Mars, but Venus, Mercury, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, in whatever order, for they're all as near as Hollywood, or your computer, assuming you'll still have one.

[Apr 13, 2019] Russophobia, A WMD (Weapon Of Mass Deception) by Jean Ranc

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... My search for the roots of this particularly vicious and extremely dangerous hate campaign began in a Dartmouth College Russian Foreign Policy course, which led me to the book, "Russophobia: Anti-Russian Lobby and American Foreign Policy" by San Francisco State University Professor Andrei P. Tsygankov (2009). ..."
"... Then in Italy the following winter, I discovered the work of the Swiss journalist, Guy Mettan, in the Italian geopolitical journal, LiMes: an excerpt from his book, "Creating Russophobia: From the Great Religious Schism to Anti-Putin Hysteria" (2017). ..."
"... "More than merely dominate, the American superpower now seeks to control history. Such cosmic ambition is accompanied by an equally vast sense of entitlement, of special dispensation to pursue its aims." (p.3) ..."
"... Never-the-less, Mearsheimer is backed up by Richard Sakwa, Professor of Russian and European Politics at the University of Kent. In Sakwa's book, "Russia Against the Rest: The Post-Cold War Crisis of World Order", 2017, we turn to the section on "Reality Wars and American Power" on p. 217 to read: "It does indeed seem that Russia and Western elites live in totally different worlds, divided by different epistemological understandings of the nature of contemporary reality. The Ukraine crisis crystallized the profound differences between Russian and Atlanticist understandings of the breakdown and its causes." And he continues on p. 218: "Elite and policy-maker perceptions and attitudes forged in the Cold War years sustain these legacies and frame the discussions of such crucial issues as NATO enlargement, democracy promotion in the post-Soviet area, and strategic arms talks." Adding that these "are no longer so much legacies as self-regenerating narratives and modes of discourse that preclude a more open-ended understanding of the dynamics and concerns of Russia today." ..."
"... From another perspective: Mettan's chapter on "German Russophobia" set me thinking that this "Western Supremacy" political-cultural pathology known as Russophobia is like the racism which I knew growing up in totally segregated Oklahoma. ..."
"... So, here's a Swiss journalist punching a hole in this wall of Russophobic Western Supremacy and through that gaping hole, we are reminded that the Russians are Europe's neighbors who sacrificed more than 26 million of their own lives to save Europe, America and Russia from the Nazis. ..."
"... And the week following the August 7, 2018 Trump-Putin Helsinki summit, will surely go down in psychiatric circles as another case of mass media-political delusions led by cheer-leader-in-chief, Rachel Maddow of MSNBC. ..."
"... Never-the-less, after a very long run of American "regime change" abroad leaving a bloody trail of destruction, dictatorships and chaos from Iran in 1953, when we joined with the British to overthrow the democratically-elected President Mohammad Mossadegh to maintain the Brit-US control of its oil on through Guatemala, Vietnam and Chile to name a few of our interventions we were back for a second round with "coalitions of the willing" or not? ..."
"... So how is it that we now have contemporary Inquisitors persecuting so many truth tellers ..."
Apr 13, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Jean Ranc via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

Russophobia, as psycho-social-political pathology, is diagnosed as a disorder in The West since before the 1000-year-old Roman-Orthodox religious schism and most recently manifested with a vengeance in the course of the 2013-14 with Edward Snowden's revelations of mass surveillance by the US and its covert activities leading to the Ukraine coup with Russophobia used thereafter as a weapon of mass deception to inflame this latent pathology in the public.

After more than a year since we first heard the BBC "breaking news" about the "Russians Poisoning the Skipals", all we have are allegations, but there is still no real evidence to present before a judge and jury for a just trial, only media propaganda which has provoked even more fear and hysteria meant to distract people from the government's bungling and high level of anxiety over Brexit by once again blaming Russia . Never-the-less, it prompted politicians to administer instant sanctions against Russia as punishment. That first day, the "evidence", presented in the usual clipped, "authoritative" British accents, included interviews with a conservative British MP, then the former US Ambassador to Russia, Alexander Vershbow (2001-05), now with the notoriously hawkish US-based think tank, the Atlantic Council. Thus, the three of them: the BBC "journalist" and the two "experts", colluded to transform false allegations into "facts"... fueled, as always, by their perpetual prejudice, RUSSOPHOBIA, in the course of their propaganda war to force Russia to surrender to American-led Western Domination or else: have their economy destroyed & their people suffer. Indeed, it is a threat to the whole world played to the discord of rattling nuclear swords with a chorus of vindictive Russian oligarchs, whom Putin expelled for robbing the Russian people. So, now living in London as expats, they would seem to be the more likely culprits. All the while elsewhere in London, thanks to our "special US-UK relationship", Julian Assange has been excommunicated and imprisoned in a tiny "cell" at the Ecuador embassy for revealing embarrassing American secrets via Wikileaks.

There we have it: the poisoning of our minds by the media and politicians which are owned and controlled by the US-UK-EU 1%, who benefit from Western Hegemony. So, these deluded few are now desperately defending it from the rising powers led by Russia and China with India not far behind demanding a multi-polar, democratic world order.

My search for the roots of this particularly vicious and extremely dangerous hate campaign began in a Dartmouth College Russian Foreign Policy course, which led me to the book, "Russophobia: Anti-Russian Lobby and American Foreign Policy" by San Francisco State University Professor Andrei P. Tsygankov (2009). And there, the detoxification of my mind began as I studied his deft, well-documented deconstruction of the political propaganda disseminated "by various think tanks, congressional testimonials, activities of NGOs and the media" (preface p. XIII)

Then in Italy the following winter, I discovered the work of the Swiss journalist, Guy Mettan, in the Italian geopolitical journal, LiMes: an excerpt from his book, "Creating Russophobia: From the Great Religious Schism to Anti-Putin Hysteria" (2017).

There, Mettan informs us that this psycho-social pathology in Western Civilization" goes back more than 1000 years: to the division of Christendom between the Orthodox and Roman churches. Indeed, his research into the depths of history confirms the diagnosis by our renowned American psychiatrist, Robert Jay Lifton, in his 2003 book, "Superpower Syndrome: America's Apocalyptic Confrontation with the World".

Therein, Lifton states: "More than merely dominate, the American superpower now seeks to control history. Such cosmic ambition is accompanied by an equally vast sense of entitlement, of special dispensation to pursue its aims." (p.3) And Mettan's analysis of Russophobia also underscores the work of University of Chicago Professor John J. Mearsheimer, our leading international relations "realist" in his three Henry L. Stimson lectures at Yale University November 2017: "The Roots of Liberal Hegemony", "The False Promises of Liberal Hegemony" and "The Case for Restraint": with his book , "The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams, International Realities" published in 2018.

But what about "Russian Aggression" in Ukraine & Crimea?

In the first place, it was the astute Mearsheimer, who, in the Sept-Oct 2014 Foreign Affairs, informed us "Why the Ukraine Crisis is the West's Fault: The Liberal Delusions That Provoked Putin" (pp 77-89), but the American foreign policy establishment, together with ambitious politicians and the me-too media, paid no heed and continues to repeat its fabricated "facts".

Never-the-less, Mearsheimer is backed up by Richard Sakwa, Professor of Russian and European Politics at the University of Kent. In Sakwa's book, "Russia Against the Rest: The Post-Cold War Crisis of World Order", 2017, we turn to the section on "Reality Wars and American Power" on p. 217 to read: "It does indeed seem that Russia and Western elites live in totally different worlds, divided by different epistemological understandings of the nature of contemporary reality. The Ukraine crisis crystallized the profound differences between Russian and Atlanticist understandings of the breakdown and its causes." And he continues on p. 218: "Elite and policy-maker perceptions and attitudes forged in the Cold War years sustain these legacies and frame the discussions of such crucial issues as NATO enlargement, democracy promotion in the post-Soviet area, and strategic arms talks." Adding that these "are no longer so much legacies as self-regenerating narratives and modes of discourse that preclude a more open-ended understanding of the dynamics and concerns of Russia today."

Karl Rove: "We're an empire now; we create our own reality."

[In 2004, journalist Ron Suskind wrote in The New York Times magazine that a top White House strategist for President George W. Bush -- identified later as Karl Rove, Bush's Deputy White House Chief of Staff -- told him, "We're an empire now, we create our own reality."]

Thus, we've become trapped in a contrived "reality" promulgated by neo-conservative warriors under cover of neo-liberal "democracy-spreading-humanitarian-interventionists" to justify an American Empire promoting itself as the indispensable "Liberal World Order". However, under that global order, as Sakwa points out on p. 219: "If a foreign power is considered to have violated 'international order', then it can be overthrown" as a rationale for American "regime change" anywhere around the world: whether to control the supply of copper in Chile or oil in Iran. And, with its eye on Russia's vast oil, gas and other natural resources, America claims the right to threaten Russia by ringing it with weapons which we would not abide were the Russians to place missiles in Mexico as the Soviets did in Cuba to defend it after our "Bay of Pigs" invasion that brought humanity to the brink of nuclear war. Thus, Russia was defending itself in Ukraine against further NATO expansion while Crimean citizens, by majority vote in a democratic referendum, chose to rejoin Russia as they had been one country ever since Catherine the Great except for an interval in the '50s when Crimea was" gifted" to Ukraine while they were all members of the Soviet Union.

"Ditching Solzhenitsyn, Defender of Russia"

And not to forget that in 1974, after being expelled from the Soviet Union, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn and his family fled first to Zurich then to Vermont in 1976 and lived on a farm near Cavendish, where he continued to write and publish his work. Meanwhile, Mettan, as a journalist covering events related to Russia, became quite distressed over "the widespread prejudices, cartloads of clichés and systematic anti-Russian biases of most western media." And he went on to say that "the more I traveled, discussed and read, the wider I perceived, the more the gap of incomprehension and ignorance between Western Europe and Russia became evident.

"That was why, during the 1990s, I was shocked by the way the West treated Solzhenitsyn. For decades, we had published, celebrated, and acclaimed the great writer as bearing the torch of anti-Soviet dissidence. We had praised Solzhenitsyn to the skies as long as he criticized his native country, communist Russia. But as soon as he emigrated, realizing that he preferred to isolate himself in his Vermont retreat to work rather than attending anticommunist conferences, western media and academics began to distance themselves from the great writer.

"The idol no longer matched the image they had built and was becoming a hindrance to their academic and journalistic career plans. And once Solzhenitsyn had left the United States to go back to Russia and defend his humiliated, demoralized motherland that was being sold at auction, raising his voice against the Russian 'Westernizers' and pluralist liberals who denied the interests of Russia to better revel in the troughs of capitalism, he became a marked man, an outdated, senile writer, even though he himself had not changed in the least, denouncing with the same vigor the defects of market totalitarianism as those of communist totalitarianism.

"He was booed, despised, his name was dragged through the mud for his choices, often by the very people who had praised his first fights. Despite that, against all odds, against the most powerful powers that were trying to dissuade him, Solzhenitsyn defended his one and only cause, that of Russia. He was not forgiven for having turned his pen against that West that had welcomed him and felt it was owed eternal gratitude. A dissident today, a dissident wherever truth compelled, such was his motto. This deserves to be remembered." Mettan, pp. 15-16 in "Creating Russophobia".

Russophobia: akin to Racism

From another perspective: Mettan's chapter on "German Russophobia" set me thinking that this "Western Supremacy" political-cultural pathology known as Russophobia is like the racism which I knew growing up in totally segregated Oklahoma.

Until in high school, I became so perplexed and appalled by the curtain of hate and "justifications" in which we were smothered: the Negro schools on the other side of town? and why were there separate waiting rooms, drinking fountains & restrooms in bus and train stations?...that I began poking holes in the curtain to see what was outside...and found a book in the library: "South of Freedom" by Carl Rowan, an African-American Minneapolis Star Tribune journalist, describing his journey from South to North. So, thanks to what I learned from Rowan, I began to tear the whole damned curtain down...at least in my mind.

Whom the Gods would destroy, they first drive mad?

So, here's a Swiss journalist punching a hole in this wall of Russophobic Western Supremacy and through that gaping hole, we are reminded that the Russians are Europe's neighbors who sacrificed more than 26 million of their own lives to save Europe, America and Russia from the Nazis.

These are not poor "niggers" from the Eurasian ghetto we've been trying to club into submission as second-class citizens of "The Liberal World Order" dominated by US; they're nuclear-armed and no longer willing to sit at a separate, inferior table with no vote and no voice over who makes the rules...nor are China, India and Brazil. And last year, while the wave of Russophobic hysteria over alleged "Russian poisoning" was rolling out of the UK and engulfing the Western world in the latest siege of mass madness with only Jeremy Corbyn, leader of the British Labor party, having the courage to stand up in Parliament on the Ides of March and demand Evidence! only to be pilloried by the mindless politicians and media led by the once esteemed BBC.

And the week following the August 7, 2018 Trump-Putin Helsinki summit, will surely go down in psychiatric circles as another case of mass media-political delusions led by cheer-leader-in-chief, Rachel Maddow of MSNBC.

Meanwhile, not to forget that it was Hearst newspaper propaganda that whipped the American public into a war frenzy to support our first step in empire-building: our 1898 intervention in Cuba's war for independence from the Spanish Empire which had dominated all of Latin America for 500 years. As the former NYTimes journalist/bureau chief in Istanbul, Berlin & Central America, Stephen Kinzer reminds us in his latest book "The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American Empire", Twain, Booker T. Washington and even Andrew Carnegie leading a handful of other anti-imperialists...were not able to prevail against Roosevelt with his Rough Riders and the Hearst newspapers' war propaganda.

Regime Change Comes Home

Never-the-less, after a very long run of American "regime change" abroad leaving a bloody trail of destruction, dictatorships and chaos from Iran in 1953, when we joined with the British to overthrow the democratically-elected President Mohammad Mossadegh to maintain the Brit-US control of its oil on through Guatemala, Vietnam and Chile to name a few of our interventions we were back for a second round with "coalitions of the willing" or not?

In the Middle East where our regime-change machine managed to plow its way through Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya before breaking down in Syria. Until now it's been brought home again, renovated and renamed "RussiaGate" for another attempt at removing a President for trying to mend US relations with Russia. Though even after more than a year of Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller's investigations accompanied by such cinematic support as the movie, "Felt", another "Watergate" re-run. Did anyone else notice the resemblance between "Felt" and Mueller? And despite the media's commemoration of its 44-year-old "moment of courage" with the movie "The Post" to promote Trump's ouster, our democratically-elected President, as of this writing, remains in power. However, in this rush to "regime change", didn't the our "ruling elite" read Jane Mayer's "The Danger of President Pence" in the 10/23/17 New Yorker? At least the 70s' "ruling class" was smart enough to remove an unqualified Vice President Spiro (who?) Agnew before "regime changing" Nixon and replacing him with the more or less benign Gerald Ford.

A Florentine Epiphany

But back to last January in Florence, Italy, when I was hiking in the hills beyond the Piazzale Michelangelo, with its spectacular view of that Renaissance city and its centerpiece, the Duomo, I came across the Villa Galileo, which had been his last home after his trial as a "heretic", during which to save himself from torture and execution, he was forced to deny his helio-centric vision and henceforth lived under "villa arrest", from 1631 until his natural death in 1642. While pondering his fate, I continued walking along the gently rising, ever-narrowing road between ancient stone walls overlooking villas and olive groves until I reached the peak, where I felt as if I were standing on top of the world as I contemplated both the Arno and Ema river valleys far below and where I swear I heard Galileo declare: "The world does not turn on an American axis!"

The 21st Century Inquisition

So how is it that we now have contemporary Inquisitors persecuting so many truth tellers such as Edward Snowden, our electronic age "Solzhenitsyn?" in Russian exile; Chelsea Manning, imprisoned some 7 years for revealing US brutality in Iraq; Julian Assange confined to his Ecuadorian Embassy exile in London since August 2012; Katharine Gun, a whistleblower attempting to stop the Iraq invasion, who faced 2 years of British imprisonment before her case was dropped; James Risen, former New York Times journalist who was persecuted by our "justice" system for revealing our government's surveillance of US!

Any Good Sense Left?

So, do we the people have enough good sense & independent thinking left to follow the advice of Henry David Thoreau?

"Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe, through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and Concord, through church and state, through poetry and philosophy and religion, till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality."

"Walden" 1854

If not, the Doctor prescribes Shock Therapy:

For a week, a month, or however long it takes to cleanse and open the mind, one must adhere to strict abstinence from Mainstream Media propaganda, junk news, pseudo analysis, fake photos, TV & videos including absolutely NO phony "for, by & of the people" NPR, PBS, BBC or other Government-funded Neo or LibCon Imperial tranquilizer.

[Apr 12, 2019] Putin was KGB agent crowd forgets that Bush Sr was long time senior CIA operative and the director of CIA

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Michael Ledeen has been an influential activist of the US politics. Ledeen is known as a "key player" in the operation Gladio (the holy Graal of holo-biz). ..."
"... It is true that Putin is different from the silver-spooned Trump and the rabid war-mongers Pompeo and Bolton. ..."
Apr 12, 2019 | www.unz.com

annamaria , says: April 12, 2019 at 5:32 pm GMT

@Anonymous

What planet are you from? https://www.rt.com/news/456363-victory-trump-icc-atrocities/

annamaria , says: April 12, 2019 at 5:47 pm GMT
@Dmitry " because Putin was a KGB officer during the Cold War."

How interesting And what was the position of the pres. Bush Sr.? You have never knew? Here is a surprise for "Dmitri:" https://www.cia.gov/news-information/featured-story-archive/2016-featured-story-archive/bush-as-director-of-central-intelligence.html

Michael Ledeen has been an influential activist of the US politics. Ledeen is known as a "key player" in the operation Gladio (the holy Graal of holo-biz).

Ledeen is "a former consultant to the United States National Security Council, the United States Department of State, and the United States Department of Defense. He held the Freedom Scholar chair at the American Enterprise Institute where he was a scholar for twenty years and now holds the similarly named chair at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

Ledeen is considered an "agent of influence" for a foreign government: Israel.

http://www.historycommons.org/entity.jsp?entity=michael_ledeen

https://off-guardian.org/2019/04/06/operation-gladio-the-unholy-alliance/

It is true that Putin is different from the silver-spooned Trump and the rabid war-mongers Pompeo and Bolton.

[Apr 10, 2019] Habakkuk on cockroaches and the New York Times

Highly recommended!
Money quote: "The Russian collusion investigation was based solely on the dodgy Steele Dossier that was discredited here from the get-go. This was a product of British Intelligence Community. The intent was to keep and then to get Donald Trump out of the White House. It failed but they did succeed in turning him into a neo-lib-con fellow traveler. There are clear parallels between the end stages of the Soviet Union and the American Empire. My take since the Iraq Invasion is that they are insane. The ruling elite is detached from reality, incompetent and arrogant. Sooner or later someone with their facilities still intact will lead a middle-class revolt against the global plutocracy to restore democracy and reverse the rising inequality. We were lucky that the fall of the Soviet Union did not lead to a nuclear war. The next time a nuclear armed Empire crashes we may not be so fortunate."
Notable quotes:
"... Among interesting dates, it appears that Stefan Halper was already trying to reach out to Lokhova in January-February 2016 – a lot earlier than his approaches to Papadopoulo s and Page. This was done through Professor Christopher Andrew, co-convenor with Halper and the former MI6 had Sir Richard Dearlove of the ‘Cambridge Intelligence Seminar.’ ..."
"... Meanwhile, Lokhova has set up a blog on which she has posted a some interesting relevant material, with perhaps more to come. It is very well worth a look.(See https://www.russiagate.co.uk .) ..."
"... Of particular interest, to my mind, is the full text of her – unpublished – May 2017 interview with the ‘New York Times.’ This points us back to is the fact – of which Lokhova shows no signs of awareness – that the idea that the Western powers and the Russians might have a common interest in fighting jihadist terrorism has been absolute anathema to many key figures on both sides of the Atlantic, with Dearlove certainly among them. ..."
"... ‘AN APOLOGY: Yesterday, I compared @nytimes journalists, who smeared @GenFlynn and accused me of being a Russian spy, to cockroaches. In good conscience, I must apologize to the cockroaches for the distress caused to them for being compared to @nytimes #Russiagate hoaxers. Sorry!’ ..."
"... The centerpiece of this is a proposal submitted to the FCO in August last year by what seems to be essentially the same consortium whose existence as a government contractor has now been made public. The ‘Institute for Statecraft’ has vanished, and one consortium member, ‘Aktis Strategy’, has gone into liquidation. But other key members are the same. ..."
"... A central underlying premise is that if anyone has any doubts as to whether the ‘White Helmets’ are a benevolent humanitarian organisation, or the Russians were responsible for the poisoning of the Skripals or the shooting down of MH17, the only possible explanation is that their minds have been poisoned by disinformation. ..."
"... In fact, what is at issue an ambitious project to co-ordinate and strengthen a very large number of organisations in different countries which are committed to a relentlessly Russophobic line on everything. (The possibility that it might not be very bright to push Russia into the arms of China, the obviously rising power, does not seem to have occurred to these people – perhaps they need less ons from Sir Halford Mackinder, or indeed Niccolò Machiavelli, on ‘statecraft.’) ..."
"... The clear close integration of other cyber people from the ‘Atlantic Council’ into Orwellian ‘information operations’ sponsored by the British Government simply puts these facts into sharp relief. ..."
"... There has to be a strong possible ‘prima facie’ case that anyone in authority prepared to accept the ‘digital forensics’ from ‘CrowdStrike’ is complicit in the conspiracy against the constitution, and/or the conspiracy to cover-up that conspiracy. This certainly goes for Comey, and I think it also goes for Mueller." ..."
"... I'd recommend for reading Alexei Yurchak's "Everything Was Forever, Until It was No More: The Last Soviet Generation." Its about a class of apparatchiks and bureaucrats and hangers on who spoke this arcane, abstract dogmatic language that anyone normal had long since given up trying to understand. It had long ceased to have any relevance or attachment to the lives lived by ordinary, increasingly suffering people, who started talking to each other in practical and direct language. ..."
"... The Russian collusion investigation was based solely on the dodgy Steele Dossier that was discredited here from the get-go. This was a product of British Intelligence Community. The intent was to keep and then to get Donald Trump out of the White House. It failed but they did succeed in turning him into a neo-lib-con fellow traveler. ..."
"... There are clear parallels between the end stages of the Soviet Union and the American Empire. My take since the Iraq Invasion is that they are insane. The ruling elite is detached from reality, incompetent and arrogant. Sooner or later someone with their facilities still intact will lead a middle-class revolt against the global plutocracy to restore democracy and reverse the rising inequality. We were lucky that the fall of the Soviet Union did not lead to a nuclear war. The next time a nuclear armed Empire crashes we may not be so fortunate. ..."
Apr 08, 2019 | www.wsws.org

Habakkuk on cockroaches and the New York Times

"Dan, Thanks for the reference, which I will follow up. Unfortunately, although Bongino has produced a lot of extremely valuable material, a lot of it is buried in the 'postcasts', searching through which is harder than with printed materials. It would greatly help if there were transcripts, but of course those cost money.

I am still trying to fit the exploding mass of information which has been coming out into a coherent timeline. Part of the problem is that there is so much appearing in so many different places. In addition to trying to think through the implications of the information in this post and the subsequent exchanges of comments, I have been trying to make sense of evidence coming out about the British end of the conspiracy.

An important development here has been rather well covered by Chuck Ross, in a recent ‘Daily Caller’ piece headlined ‘Cambridge Academic Reflects On Interactions With 'Spygate’ Figure’ and one on ‘Fox’ by Catherine Herridge and Cyd Upson, entitled ‘Russian academic linked to Flynn denies being spy, says her past contact was “used” to smear him.’ However, the evidence involved has ramifications which they cannot be expected to understand, as yet at least.

(See https://dailycaller.com/201... ; https://www.foxnews.com/pol... .)

At issue is the attempt to use the – apparently casual – encounter between Lieutenant-General Flynn and Svetlana Lokhova at a dinner in Cambridge (U.K.) in February 2016 to smear him by, among other things, portraying her as some kind of ‘Mata Hari’ figure.

Among interesting dates, it appears that Stefan Halper was already trying to reach out to Lokhova in January-February 2016 – a lot earlier than his approaches to Papadopoulo s and Page. This was done through Professor Christopher Andrew, co-convenor with Halper and the former MI6 had Sir Richard Dearlove of the ‘Cambridge Intelligence Seminar.’

This suggests that this was not simply a case Halper acting on his own. It also I think brings us back to the central importance of Flynn’s visit to Moscow in December 2015.

Meanwhile, Lokhova has set up a blog on which she has posted a some interesting relevant material, with perhaps more to come. It is very well worth a look.(See https://www.russiagate.co.uk .)

Of particular interest, to my mind, is the full text of her – unpublished – May 2017 interview with the ‘New York Times.’ This points us back to is the fact – of which Lokhova shows no signs of awareness – that the idea that the Western powers and the Russians might have a common interest in fighting jihadist terrorism has been absolute anathema to many key figures on both sides of the Atlantic, with Dearlove certainly among them.

Some of Lokhova’s comments on ‘twitter’ are extremely entertaining. An example, with which I have much sympathy:

‘AN APOLOGY: Yesterday, I compared @nytimes journalists, who smeared @GenFlynn and accused me of being a Russian spy, to cockroaches. In good conscience, I must apologize to the cockroaches for the distress caused to them for being compared to @nytimes #Russiagate hoaxers. Sorry!’

(See https://twitter.com/RealSLo... .)

Meanwhile, another interesting recent ‘tweet’ comes from Eliot Higgins, of ‘Bellingcat’ fame. He is known to some skeptics as ‘the couch potato’ – perhaps he should be rechristened ‘king cockroach.’ It reads:

‘Looking forward to gettin g things rolling with the Open Information Partnership, with @bellingcat, @MDI_UK, @DFRLab, and @This_Is_Zinc https://www.openinformation...’

(See https://twitter.com/EliotHi... )

There is an interesting ‘backstory’ to this. The announcement of an FCO-supported ‘Open Information Partnership of European Non-Governmental Organisations, charities, academics, think-tanks and journalists’, supposedly to counter ‘disinformation’ from Russia, came in a written answer from the Minister of State, Sir Alan Duncan, on 3 April.

(See https://www.theyworkforyou.... )

In turn this followed the latest in a series of releases of material either leaked or hacked from the organisations calling themselves ‘Institute for Statecraft’ and ‘Integrity Initiative’ by the group calling themselves ‘Anonymous’ on 25 March.

(See https://www.cyberguerrilla .... )

The centerpiece of this is a proposal submitted to the FCO in August last year by what seems to be essentially the same consortium whose existence as a government contractor has now been made public. The ‘Institute for Statecraft’ has vanished, and one consortium member, ‘Aktis Strategy’, has gone into liquidation. But other key members are the same.

A central underlying premise is that if anyone has any doubts as to whether the ‘White Helmets’ are a benevolent humanitarian organisation, or the Russians were responsible for the poisoning of the Skripals or the shooting down of MH17, the only possible explanation is that their minds have been poisoned by disinformation.

An interesting paragraph reads as follows:

‘An expanded research component could generate better understanding of the drivers (psychological, sociopolitical, cultural and environmental) of those who are susceptible to disinformation. This will allow us to map vulnerable audiences, and build scenario planning models to test the efficiency of different activities to build resilience of those populations over time.’

They have not yet got to the point of recommending psychiatic treatment for ‘dissidents’, but these are still early days. The ‘Sovietisation’ of Western life proceeds apace.

In fact, what is at issue an ambitious project to co-ordinate and strengthen a very large number of organisations in different countries which are committed to a relentlessly Russophobic line on everything. (The possibility that it might not be very bright to push Russia into the arms of China, the obviously rising power, does not seem to have occurred to these people – perhaps they need less ons from Sir Halford Mackinder, or indeed Niccolò Machiavelli, on ‘statecraft.’)

Study of the proposal hacked/leaked by ‘Anonymous’ bring out both the ‘boondoggle’ element – there is a lot of state funding available for people happy to play these games – and also the strong transatlantic links.

A particularly significant presence, here, is the ‘DFRLab’. This is the ‘Digital Forensic Research Lab’ at the ‘Atlantic Council’, where Eliot Higgins is a ‘nonresident senior fellow.’ The same organisation has a ‘Cyber Statecraft Initiative’ where Dmitri Alperovitch is a ‘nonresident senior fellow.’

It cannot be repeated often enough that it is difficult to see any conceivable excuse for the FBI to fail to secure access to the DNC servers. One would normally moreover expect that, on an issue of this sensitivity, they would have the ‘digital forensics’ done by their own people.

There can be no conceivable excuse for relying on a contractor selected by the organisation which is claiming that there has been a hack, when an alternative possibility is a leak: and the implications of the alternative possibility could be devastating for that organisation.

To rely on a contractor linked to the notoriously Russophobic ‘Atlantic Council’ is even more preposterous.

The clear close integration of other cyber people from the ‘Atlantic Council’ into Orwellian ‘information operations’ sponsored by the British Government simply puts these facts into sharp relief.

There has to be a strong possible ‘prima facie’ case that anyone in authority prepared to accept the ‘digital forensics’ from ‘CrowdStrike’ is complicit in the conspiracy against the constitution, and/or the conspiracy to cover-up that conspiracy. This certainly goes for Comey, and I think it also goes for Mueller."

chris chuba , a day ago

OT but related, just watched a former naval Intelligence officer, now working for the Hoover Institute interviewed on FOX about the Rooshins in Venezuela. Said, the 100 Russians are there to protect Maduro because he cannot trust his own army. Maduro's days are numbered because he is toxically unpopular.

Got me thinking, our Intelligence services are good at psy-ops and keeping our gullible MSM in line but God help us if we ever actually needed real Intelligence about a country. I remember about a month ago how all of these 'Think Tank Guys' were predicting how the only people loyal to Maduro were a few of his crony Generals, that the rank and file military hated him and there were going to be mass defections.

It didn't happen and we are all just supposed to forget that.
[not a socialist, don't have any love for Maduro, I just know that I will never learn anything of about Venezuela from these think tank dudes, we are just getting groomed]

Karl Kolchak -> chris chuba , a day ago
Venezuela isn't about "socialism," or even Maduro--it's about the oil. They have the largest proven reserves in the world, though much of it is non-conventional and would need a ton of investment to exploit. But it's their oil, not ours, and we have no right to meddle in their internal affairs.
Jack -> Karl Kolchak , 15 hours ago
Venezuela is neither about socialism nor oil in my opinion. It is everything to do with the neocons. And Trump buying into their hegemonic dreams. Notice the resurrection of Elliott Abrams of Iran-Contra fame as the man spearheading this in a triumvirate with Bolton & Pompeo. IMO, a perfect foil for Putin & Xi to embroil the US in another regime change quagmire that further weakens the US.
Mad_Max22 , 17 hours ago
"There can be no conceivable excuse for relying on a contractor selected by the organisation which is claiming that there has been a hack, when an alternative possibility is a leak: and the implications of the alternative possibility could be devastating for that organisation.
To rely on a contractor linked to the notoriously Russophobic 'Atlantic Council' is even more preposterous."

True; and true. It is also true that the Clinton e-mail investigation was faux, a limp caricature of what an investigation would look like when it is designed to uncover the truth. Allowing a subject's law firm to review the subject's e-mails from when she was in government for relevancy is beyond preposterous. An investigation conducted in the normal way by apolitical Agents in a field office would not walk away from a trove of evidence empty handed.
The inter-relatedness and overlapping of DoJ, CIA, and FBI personnel assigned to the Clinton e-mail case, the Russophobic nightmare of a 'case' targeting Carter Page, and by extension, the Trump presidential campaign, and yes, the Mueller political op, all reek of political bias and ineptitude followed by more political bias; and then culmination in a scorched earth investigation more characteristic of something the STASI might have undertaken than American justice.
Early morning raids, gag orders, solitary confinements, show indictments that will never see adjudication in a court room - truly unbelievable.

Jack , 15 hours ago
David

In your opinion was this surveillance, criminal & counter-intelligence investigation as well as information operations against Trump centrally orchestrated or was it more reactive & decentralized?

There are so many facets. Fusion GPS & Nellie Ohr with her previous CIA connection. Her husband Bruce at the DOJ stovepiping the dossier to the FBI. Brennan and his EC. Clapper and his intelligence assessment. Halper, Mifsud, Steele along with Hannigan and the MI6 + GCHQ connection. Downer and the Aussies. FISA warrants on Page & Papadopolous. The whole Strzok & Page texting. Comey, Lynch & the Hillary exoneration. McCabe. Then all the Russians. And the media leaks to generate hysteria.

john fletcher , a day ago

I'd recommend for reading Alexei Yurchak's "Everything Was Forever, Until It was No More: The Last Soviet Generation." Its about a class of apparatchiks and bureaucrats and hangers on who spoke this arcane, abstract dogmatic language that anyone normal had long since given up trying to understand. It had long ceased to have any relevance or attachment to the lives lived by ordinary, increasingly suffering people, who started talking to each other in practical and direct language.

And yet the chatterati continued to chatter and invent ludicrously unreal worlds and analyses of the actual world they lived in until... bang... it was no more.

I'd skip the first few chapters which are full of impenetrable marxist jargon.

VietnamVet , 12 hours ago
The Russian collusion investigation was based solely on the dodgy Steele Dossier that was discredited here from the get-go. This was a product of British Intelligence Community. The intent was to keep and then to get Donald Trump out of the White House. It failed but they did succeed in turning him into a neo-lib-con fellow traveler.

There are clear parallels between the end stages of the Soviet Union and the American Empire. My take since the Iraq Invasion is that they are insane. The ruling elite is detached from reality, incompetent and arrogant. Sooner or later someone with their facilities still intact will lead a middle-class revolt against the global plutocracy to restore democracy and reverse the rising inequality. We were lucky that the fall of the Soviet Union did not lead to a nuclear war. The next time a nuclear armed Empire crashes we may not be so fortunate.

[Apr 09, 2019] NYT: It Is, in Fact, All About the Benjamins by Philip Weiss

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... The article is a thorough-going rebuke of every journalist and former official (Daniel Shapiro, former ambassador under Obama, for instance, as well as the Forward and the Times opinion writers) who says that money is not at the root, or very near the root, of Democratic Party support. So let's follow the money, and review the money quotes ..."
"... there is little willingness among Democrats to argue publicly for substantially changing longstanding policy toward Israel. ..."
"... In part, some Hill staff members and former White House officials say, this is because of the influence of megadonors: Of the dozens of personal checks greater than $500,000 made out to the largest PAC for Democrats in 2018, the Senate Majority PAC, around three-fourths were written by Jewish donors. ..."
"... Though the number of Jewish donors known to prioritize pro-Israel policies above all other issues is small, there are few if any pushing in the opposite direction ..."
"... The Obama administration didn't just support the occupation, it kept supporting it right up till the November 2016 election so that Hillary Clinton wouldn't lose donors. ..."
"... concerns about donors among Democrats dominated not just "what was done but what was not done, and what was not even contemplated." Even the timing of the administration's policies toward Israel was dictated by domestic politics. ..."
"... Everyone knows this math. And the Democrats fear they'll lose all their money. ..."
"... Joel Rubin, a deputy assistant secretary of state for legislative affairs in the Obama administration, former political director at J Street and a founding board member of the centrist Jewish Democratic Council of America, agreed: "The fight over Israel used to be about voters. It's more about donors now." ..."
"... Thrall says the Democratic Party leadership is perfectly happy with AIPAC, but he leaves out what we reported here: the extent of the reliance on Jewish donors is "gigantic" and "shocking," according to insiders JJ Goldberg and the head of Emily's List, and AIPAC gets to script congressional campaigns on their middle east positions before the candidates can raise money from the Jewish community. ..."
"... Sadly the Jewish community is largely supportive of Israel, as Thrall shows. By and large, American Jews are Zionists. Trump's horrors in the Middle East are OK by them. ..."
"... any declension in US support is seen as alienating the donor class. ..."
"... Joel Rubin said: "The problem for center-left groups that are more critical of Israel is that the Jewish donor class is comfortable with current U.S. policies. They just don't like Trump on other issues." ..."
"... Thrall shows that fear of losing donors played a role when the University of Michigan student body passed a narrow divestment measure last fall– to divest only from companies doing business in the occupation -- and still the administration said No way. ..."
"... Lara Friedman of Foundation for Middle East Peace and formerly of Peace Now continues to blaze a trail by honestly describing the intolerance in the Jewish community for debate of Israel. That community has pushed the anti-BDS legislation. ..."
"... I asked [Zionist Organization of America's Morton] Klein why he believed it was "utterly racist and despicable," as he put it, for [Richard] Spencer to promote a state for only one ethnic group but not racist for Israel to do so. "Israel is a unique situation," he said. "This is really a Jewish state given to us by God." He added, "God did not create a state for white people or for black people." ..."
"... Thrall says Israel is Jim Crow society thru and thru. ..."
"... Israeli law forbids citizens to obtain citizenship or permanent residency for Palestinian spouses from the West Bank and Gaza. ..."
"... First, of course there was the famous 'Benjamins' tweet in which Omar noted that members of Congress were obedient to the Lobby because of the hundreds of millions it raises and distributes to loyal pro-Israel candidates. ..."
"... The way this happened was instructive: there is, of course, an ancient anti-Semitic trope that Jews are rich and use their wealth to control the finance, banking, entertainment, and the media sectors, etc. That of course, has nothing to do with the true statement that the Lobby raises and distributes massive lucre to its favored candidates. A reasonable person can see the difference between these two concepts. ..."
"... anyone who believes that the interests of one of the greatest powers on earth is the same as that of a small Middle Eastern theocratic state is either terribly naďve or worse ..."
"... "Pro-Israel Jews like Engel are particularly exercised by the implication of dual loyalty. That is, that pro-Israel Jews are more loyal to Israel than America. An especially apt historical phrase connoting dual loyalty is the term 'Israel Firster.' It was not invented by an anti-Semite or white supremacist. But rather by the dean of American Jewish historians, Abe Sachar, the first president of Brandeis University. ..."
"... "American Jews continued to object to Israel's claim that a genuine Jewish life was possible only in Israel. Abram L. Sachar, president of Brandeis University, at the biennial convention of JWB [Jewish Welfare Board], declared on April 2, 1960 that among Jews there is no room 'for Israel Firsters whose chauvinism and arrogance find nothing relevant or viable in any area outside of Israel.'" ..."
"... Israel is no longer a democracy. Instead it has become a theocracy, run by fundamentalist extremists bent on holy war with the Muslim world. Israel's interests are diverging from those of the democratic west more than ever. And this fissure can only continue to widen as Israel sinks ever deeper into mass murder, Occupation and oppression. Israel's interests and America's are no longer the same. Not even close. That little sliver of daylight which presidents used to boast about not existing when it came to Israel and U.S. interests: it's now a wide-open expanse of sky. ..."
"... The smell of greenbacks remains too enticing to resist. ..."
"... Phil likes to downplay the role of Christian Zionists, while others who feel uncomfortable talking about Jewish donors ( fearing the antisemitism charge) like to emphasize them. The truth is that they are both important in why the US supports Israel. ..."
"... on the secular level American rightwingers sometimes see Israel as a bastion of "Western civilization" surrounded by the heathens. Of course some of that last part overlaps with what Israel supporters in the Democratic Party think. ..."
"... The truth is the GOP's courting of the donor class comes from the same motivation – the counting of the donor Benjamins. The difference is they can better hide their support (of Zionism) under banners of defense, business, and righteousness. ..."
"... Trump plays to this crowd with his actions in Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. Finally, this "donor class" could hardly match the daily U.S. gift of $10 million, so the pitch they make is to American taxpayers, although nobody ever talks about that. ..."
"... 'Senator Charles Schumer, the Democratic minority leader, similarly told the Aipac conference in 2018: "Of course, we say it's our land, the Torah says it, but they don't believe in the Torah. So that's the reason there is not peace."' Damn, and I thought that the reason there was no peace was because of the oppressive, prison-like conditions of the Palestinian people under Occupation. ..."
"... Of course it is "all about the Benjamins". Contending to the contrary is simply silly. One might well add that BDS can be viewed as a good thing for Israel, and in that country's true best interests. ..."
"... A collection of primitive Bronze Age fictional gibberish can confer land titles over bits of the Middle East, to its adherents – even to adherents with absolutely no ancestral connection to the land. ..."
Mar 28, 2019 | mondoweiss.ne

'New York Times' reports that Jewish donors shape Democrats' regressive position on Israel US Politics Philip Weiss on 15 Comments

This weekend the New York Times breaks one of the biggest taboos , describing the responsibility of Jewish donors for the Democratic Party's slavish support for Israel. Nathan Thrall's groundbreaking piece repeats a lot of data we've reported here and says in essence that it really is about the Benjamins, as Rep. Ilhan Omar said so famously. The donor class of the party is overwhelmingly Jewish, and Jews are still largely wed to Zionism– that's the nut. Though that party is breaking up. Thrall's labors are minimized by the New York Times with the headline "The Battle Over B.D.S.," but his message is that the progressive base has a highly-critical view of Israel that the leadership has refused to reflect, and that's about to change. We're inside the tent. The party is going to have to reflect pro-Palestinian positions. Ben Rhodes tells Thrall that the moment of overcoming the fear of the pro-Israel lobby (as the Cuba fear was overcome) is about to happen.

The article is a thorough-going rebuke of every journalist and former official (Daniel Shapiro, former ambassador under Obama, for instance, as well as the Forward and the Times opinion writers) who says that money is not at the root, or very near the root, of Democratic Party support. So let's follow the money, and review the money quotes. Deep into his piece, Thrall explains why progressives aren't being heard. Megadonors.

For all the recent tumult over Israel in Washington, the policy debate remains extremely narrow Despite pointed critiques of American support for Israel by representatives like Betty McCollum of Minnesota, [Rashida] Tlaib and Omar, there is little willingness among Democrats to argue publicly for substantially changing longstanding policy toward Israel.

In part, some Hill staff members and former White House officials say, this is because of the influence of megadonors: Of the dozens of personal checks greater than $500,000 made out to the largest PAC for Democrats in 2018, the Senate Majority PAC, around three-fourths were written by Jewish donors. This provides fodder for anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, and for some, it is the elephant in the room. Though the number of Jewish donors known to prioritize pro-Israel policies above all other issues is small, there are few if any pushing in the opposite direction

As we reported from Ben Rhodes's book, Rhodes tells Thrall that donors forced Obama to hew to the Netanyahu line.
According to Ben Rhodes, a former deputy national-security adviser and one of Obama's closest confidants, several members of the Obama administration wanted to adopt a more assertive policy toward Israel but felt that their hands were tied. "The Washington view of Israel-Palestine is still shaped by the donor class The donor class is profoundly to the right of where the activists are, and frankly, where the majority of the Jewish community is." Peter Joseph, an emeritus chairman of the center-left Israel Policy Forum, told me that the views of major Democratic Jewish donors could act as a check on the leftward pull by progressive voters who are strongly critical of Israel: "I can't imagine that mainstream Democratic Jewish donors are going to be happy about any Democratic Party that is moving in that direction."
Off the record, people go further. The Obama administration didn't just support the occupation, it kept supporting it right up till the November 2016 election so that Hillary Clinton wouldn't lose donors. We reported as much at the time.
Another former member of the Obama White House, who asked not to be named, fearing professional retaliation, said that concerns about donors among Democrats dominated not just "what was done but what was not done, and what was not even contemplated." Even the timing of the administration's policies toward Israel was dictated by domestic politics. Faced with a 2016 United Nations Security Council resolution condemning settlements, the Obama administration abstained (effectively supporting the resolution), but only after having signaled it would not consider backing any resolution before November. "There is a reason the U.N. vote did not come up before the election in November," the former official said. "Was it because you were going to lose voters to Donald Trump? No. It was because you were going to have skittish donors. That, and the fact that we didn't want Clinton to face pressure to condemn the resolution or be damaged by having to defend it."
Everyone knows this math. And the Democrats fear they'll lose all their money.
What worries establishment Democrats, the former official added, is that the partisan divide over Israel will concretize -- with Republicans defined as pro-Israel, Democrats defined as anti-Israel -- and that the party coffers will empty. Joel Rubin, a deputy assistant secretary of state for legislative affairs in the Obama administration, former political director at J Street and a founding board member of the centrist Jewish Democratic Council of America, agreed: "The fight over Israel used to be about voters. It's more about donors now."
Thrall says the Democratic Party leadership is perfectly happy with AIPAC, but he leaves out what we reported here: the extent of the reliance on Jewish donors is "gigantic" and "shocking," according to insiders JJ Goldberg and the head of Emily's List, and AIPAC gets to script congressional campaigns on their middle east positions before the candidates can raise money from the Jewish community. We always said Sanders could be better on Palestine because he avoided the donor class of the Democratic party. Rhodes agrees.
"If you don't rely on a traditional fund-raising model, then you have more freedom on these types of issues," Rhodes said. "You're not worried about the one-hour phone call that you're going to have to do after the presidential debate with a really angry donor."
The key element here is, older Jewish donors are conservative about Israel. A former Clinton campaign official:
"There's no major donor that I can think of who is looking for someone to take a Bernie-like approach." And whereas none of the most liberal Jewish donors have threatened to withdraw support because a candidate was too pro-Israel, pro-Israel donors and PACs have a history of financing opposition to candidates deemed unfriendly. Haim Saban, one of Hillary Clinton's top five donors in 2016, has financed opponents of Democratic candidates critical of Israel
Sadly the Jewish community is largely supportive of Israel, as Thrall shows. By and large, American Jews are Zionists. Trump's horrors in the Middle East are OK by them.
In the same [Mellman] poll -- conducted after the United States closed the Palestinian diplomatic mission in Washington, moved the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, appointed a fund-raiser for the settlements as U.S. ambassador and cut humanitarian aid to Palestinians -- roughly half of American Jews said they approved of President Trump's handling of relations with Israel. On what is considered the most divisive issue in U.S.-Israel relations, the establishment of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, a November 2018 post-midterm election poll of more than 1,000 American Jews that was commissioned by J Street, the pro-Israel lobby aligned with Democrats, found that roughly half said the expansion of settlements had no impact on how they felt about Israel.
Those Jews are conservative compared to the base, which is increasingly people of color and real progressives.
Members of the Democratic Party's progressive activist base, by contrast, find themselves light years from their representatives in Washington.
And any declension in US support is seen as alienating the donor class.
Joel Rubin said: "The problem for center-left groups that are more critical of Israel is that the Jewish donor class is comfortable with current U.S. policies. They just don't like Trump on other issues." In October, just weeks before the 2018 midterm election, as the Democratic leadership was working to take back the House, a Democratic staff member, who asked not to be named for fear of professional retaliation, told me that it was important to retain the support of all major donors, not just the most liberal ones.

Referring to two of the largest Jewish donors to Democrats, on opposite ends of the political spectrum, the staff member said: "Our members need George Soros and Haim Saban. And they need everything in between."

Thrall shows that fear of losing donors played a role when the University of Michigan student body passed a narrow divestment measure last fall– to divest only from companies doing business in the occupation -- and still the administration said No way.
Michigan's administration quickly issued a statement that it would not appoint a committee to investigate divestment. A month later, the board of regents released a letter backing the decision. (The two regents who didn't sign it were the only people of color on the board.) Like many large American universities, the University of Michigan has extensive research partnerships with Israeli universities. And many of its institutes and buildings are named after alumni donors who have contributed large sums to Israel or pro-Israel groups.

Lara Friedman of Foundation for Middle East Peace and formerly of Peace Now continues to blaze a trail by honestly describing the intolerance in the Jewish community for debate of Israel. That community has pushed the anti-BDS legislation.

"The American Jewish community, which is broadly speaking liberal, has allowed itself in the name of defending Israel and fighting B.D.S. to become the leading edge of illiberalism by pushing legislation to curb free speech."
OK now let's get to some of the good news here. Thrall's overall point is that the battle is breaking out, thanks to those women of color in the House and the progressive base.
As the Democratic Party is pulled toward a more progressive base and a future when a majority of the party will most likely be people of color, tensions over Israel have erupted. In the past several months, a fierce debate over American support for Israel has periodically dominated the news cycle and overshadowed the Democrats' policymaking agenda.
BDS is gaining ground. Israel knows it.
Emmanuel Nahshon, a spokesman for Israel's foreign ministry, told me, "Despite the overwhelming support for Israel in the U.S., we see that the attempt to delegitimize Israel is gaining ground, especially among extreme left-wing marginal groups."
When have you ever seen such a fair assessment of BDS in the Times?
Instead of tying itself to a specific outcome, the B.D.S. movement insisted on these three principles, which could be fulfilled any number of ways: two states, one state with equal individual rights, a confederation with equal collective rights.
This is a simple turn by Thrall on why Zionism is racist at its core.
Following the 1948 war, which erupted after the United Nations announced its plan to partition Palestine into two states, the Jews who fled could return; Palestinians could not.
Here's another great moment, brilliant reporting.
I asked [Zionist Organization of America's Morton] Klein why he believed it was "utterly racist and despicable," as he put it, for [Richard] Spencer to promote a state for only one ethnic group but not racist for Israel to do so. "Israel is a unique situation," he said. "This is really a Jewish state given to us by God." He added, "God did not create a state for white people or for black people."

Senator Charles Schumer, the Democratic minority leader, similarly told the Aipac conference in 2018: "Of course, we say it's our land, the Torah says it, but they don't believe in the Torah. So that's the reason there is not peace."

Thrall says Israel is Jim Crow society thru and thru.
Currently, hundreds of Israeli towns have admissions committees that can bar Palestinian citizens from living in them based on "social suitability." (It's illegal for people to be excluded on the basis of race, religion or nationality, but the rubric of "social suitability" permits the rejection of applicants who are not Zionist, haven't served in the army or don't intend to send their children to Hebrew-language schools.)

More than 900 towns in Israel contain no Arab families, according to Yosef Jabareen, a professor at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa. Palestinian schools can lose government funding if they commemorate the Nakba, the displacement of Palestinians in 1948. Israeli law forbids citizens to obtain citizenship or permanent residency for Palestinian spouses from the West Bank and Gaza.

And that's why MD Rep. Donna Edwards and two white congressional colleagues locked arms and sang We Shall Overcome in apartheid Hebron:
Edwards and her colleagues looked up to see garbage-filled nets hanging above their heads, put up to catch trash thrown by Israeli settlers. "We had never seen anything like that," she told me recently. "Hebron is the place where I think you can see in the most frightening way what the injustice is, where you have people on one side of the street who live one way and people on another side of the street living another way. And streets that some people can cross and walk on, but other people cannot. To me, it looked like the stories that my mother and my grandmother told me about living in the South."
The great news at the end of the article. Edwards et al are taking over the party. Thrall cites Electronic Intifada's influence, and Jewish Voice for Peace, and IfNotNow too.
Politicians speaking on Israel-Palestine used to worry primarily about attacks from pro-Israel media and activist groups; now progressives are starting to feel some heat from the pro-Palestinian side.
But it's over. All the anti-Omar stuff of recent weeks is just the froth on the wave. Jim Zogby got slamdunked on the platform in 2016 by the Clintonites. But that wont' happen again.
James Zogby says that standing for Palestinian rights is guaranteed to be a major topic in the 2020 election: "It's a smell-test issue. If you go to young people, they know you stink if you don't talk about it right." A senior Democratic staff member on Capitol Hill told me: "People like Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib and Bernie Sanders have opened the floodgates on this issue. It may be painful for the party as we move in a more progressive direction. But we'll come out in a better place -- a more moral and evenhanded place -- in the end."
This piece is going to resonate for weeks. It's going to come under fierce attack. Because it's huge, and it's calm and factual. It doesn't say a word about Christian Zionists because they don't have influence in the Democratic Party. And Thrall did the shrewd thing of avoiding the word "lobby." I guess it's been anathematized, but that's what this article is about. That and race. People of color are driving this change. They are going to be punished. Betty McCollum doesn't get taken to the woodshed for calling it apartheid, but one county west, Ilhan Omar is going to be primaried next year.

About Philip Weiss

Philip Weiss is Founder and Co-Editor of Mondoweiss.net.

Donald March 28, 2019, 5:03 pm
" This piece is going to resonate for weeks. It's going to come under fierce attack. Because it's huge, and it's calm and factual. It doesn't say a word about Christian Zionists because they don't have influence in the Democratic Party. "

Wrong. Read it again. He focuses mostly on the struggle within the Democratic Party so he doesn't say much about them, but he does say that they are among the most pro-Israel groups, but are also mostly Republican voters.

bcg March 28, 2019, 6:25 pm

I just read it again and I think your characterization of the piece as "mostly on the struggle within the Democratic Party" is flat out wrong – it covers that but a lot else as well. It's a big sprawling piece that covers campus politics, the human rights situation is Israel, the political temperature in the American Jewish community, the whole anti-semitism debate in the U.S. and so on. I take the last paragraph as support for Phil's assertion that the piece will have an impact:

During his introduction of Sanders, King spoke of the Vermont senator's family members murdered in the Holocaust, and how coming of age in these circumstances "gave Bernie a deep sense of right and wrong." King said: "He has always rejected the status quo. He spoke out against apartheid in South Africa, when -- crazily -- that was an unpopular thing to do. And even today," King added, "he speaks out against apartheid like conditions in Palestine, even though it's not popular." The crowd erupted in cheers.

Misterioso, March 29, 2019, 8:54 am @beg, et al

Where it really counts, in the minds and hearts of young Americans, Palestinians have the momentum and support for "Israel" is in free fall.

https://www.richardsilverstein.com/2019/03/08/israel-lobby-and-pro-israel-house-democrats-tried-to-excommunicate-ilhan-omar-they-failed/

Tikun Olam, March 8/19

"Israel Lobby and Pro-Israel House Democrats Tried to Excommunicate Ilhan Omar, They Failed"

By Richard Silverstein

EXCERPT:

... ... ...

"The 2018 Congressional election marked a watershed, sweeping a new progressive class into office. Most prominent among them were Reps. Rashid Tlaib, Ilhan Omar and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, women who challenged the system, incumbents, and the Democratic machine to win sweeping victories on truly progressive platforms. Their Middle East agenda was particularly forthright, and therefore shocking: they opposed U.S. aid to Israel, supported BDS and a one state solution (AOC has not expressed herself as explicitly on these issues, but presumably shares many of her colleagues' views).

"Anyone who knows the Israel Lobby knew that the other shoe was bound to drop. They just didn't know when. And it didn't take long. Both Tlaib and especially Omar have been outspoken on Israel-Palestine since their elections. And their markedly pro-Palestine views have rapidly become grist for the anti-Semitism mill churned by the Lobby and its water-carriers in Congress.

"First, of course there was the famous 'Benjamins' tweet in which Omar noted that members of Congress were obedient to the Lobby because of the hundreds of millions it raises and distributes to loyal pro-Israel candidates. But somehow, noting that the Lobby derived its power from money morphed into outright anti-Semitism. The way this happened was instructive: there is, of course, an ancient anti-Semitic trope that Jews are rich and use their wealth to control the finance, banking, entertainment, and the media sectors, etc. That of course, has nothing to do with the true statement that the Lobby raises and distributes massive lucre to its favored candidates. A reasonable person can see the difference between these two concepts.

"But the Lobby plays a game of smoke and mirrors. It sees a clear statement attacking it and manages through a bit of hocus-pocus to transform it into a classic anti-Semitic charge, when in actuality there is absolutely no connection.

"Now, the Lobby has done it again after Omar gave a talk at a Washington DC bookstore in which she criticized those in Congress and the Lobby who had a foreign allegiance: 'I want to talk about the political influence in this country that says it is O.K. for people to push for allegiance to a foreign country.'

"By this, of course she meant that groups like Aipac and their Congressional sponsors who take their marching orders either from Israel directly, or who conceive their agenda totally with Israel and its interests in mind. They may believe that the interests of the U.S. and Israel are the same; and that therefore they are not betraying U.S. interests. But anyone who believes that the interests of one of the greatest powers on earth is the same as that of a small Middle Eastern theocratic state is either terribly naďve or worse.

"After Omar's statement, the Lobby went into Defcon mode. The attack was launched by Eliot Engel, a veteran of the New York Democratic machine, who attacked the Somali-American Congresswoman:

"Pro-Israel Jews like Engel are particularly exercised by the implication of dual loyalty. That is, that pro-Israel Jews are more loyal to Israel than America. An especially apt historical phrase connoting dual loyalty is the term 'Israel Firster.' It was not invented by an anti-Semite or white supremacist. But rather by the dean of American Jewish historians, Abe Sachar, the first president of Brandeis University.

And he used the term to deride precisely the figures Omar is now attacking: a powerful Lobby and its apologists who put Israel before all else. This is a passage from the 1961 American Jewish Yearbook:

"American Jews continued to object to Israel's claim that a genuine Jewish life was possible only in Israel. Abram L. Sachar, president of Brandeis University, at the biennial convention of JWB [Jewish Welfare Board], declared on April 2, 1960 that among Jews there is no room 'for Israel Firsters whose chauvinism and arrogance find nothing relevant or viable in any area outside of Israel.'"

"The NY Times headline about the speech said Sachar derided the 'dogma of Israel.' If American Jews can quarrel over the meaning and primacy of Israel in Jewish life, why would we deny Arab American the same right, considering that their Palestinian sisters and brothers are under the boot heel of Israeli Occupation?

"It would not be so bad if Israel was a democratic, secular nation like the U.S. and most western democracies. Then at least there would be a confluence of interests and values. But Israel is no longer a democracy. Instead it has become a theocracy, run by fundamentalist extremists bent on holy war with the Muslim world. Israel's interests are diverging from those of the democratic west more than ever. And this fissure can only continue to widen as Israel sinks ever deeper into mass murder, Occupation and oppression. Israel's interests and America's are no longer the same. Not even close. That little sliver of daylight which presidents used to boast about not existing when it came to Israel and U.S. interests: it's now a wide-open expanse of sky.

"Apparently, Congress has not yet read the memo. It is sunk in old ways and habits. The smell of greenbacks remains too enticing to resist. But the old ways are dying. The election victories I referenced above testify to that more strongly than a $100-million Sheldon Adelson donation.

"That's why the anti-Semitism fire-drill convened by the Democratic Congressional leadership was initially so infuriating. It decided to take Omar to the woodshed and whip her by passing a resolution denouncing anti-Semitism by its members. This represented the Democratic Party eating its young. Nancy Pelosi, at the goading of Engel, Nita Lowey and other pro-Israel members, tabled a pointless resolution. It would have forced members to swear allegiance on pain of getting a public spanking like Omar. The final wording never ended up referring directly to Omar. But the message was clear: shut up on the subject or the Party caucus will exact a toll."

Donald, March 29, 2019, 2:53 pm

"think your characterization of the piece as "mostly on the struggle within the Democratic Party" is flat out wrong – it covers that but a lot else as well. "

That's true. It is one of the best pieces I have ever seen in this subject. I am not knocking the piece -- I am correcting Phil. Thrall doesn't write much about why Republicans support Israel, where Christian Zionists are a major factor. Phil claimed he didn't say anything about Christian Zionists when he actually did. Phil didn't notice that because to the extent the piece was about political parties in the US, it focused on the Democrats where Christian Zionists are not very important. Also, Phil likes to downplay the role of Christian Zionists, while others who feel uncomfortable talking about Jewish donors ( fearing the antisemitism charge) like to emphasize them. The truth is that they are both important in why the US supports Israel.

Liberal Christian guilt about anti-Semitism also plays a role.

If Thrall were writing about the political right he would have to say a lot about how many on the Christian Right see Israel as a central element in their belief on how the world was going to end. He would be writing about Hal Lindsay's books and later the "Left Behind" series and how on the secular level American rightwingers sometimes see Israel as a bastion of "Western civilization" surrounded by the heathens. Of course some of that last part overlaps with what Israel supporters in the Democratic Party think.

Kratoklastes , March 30, 2019, 8:19 pm

That included both Jews and Muslims who were tortured on the rack, also known as the auto-da-fe

I realize this is a bit of a nitpick, but the auto-da-fé was the final public confession prior to execution – it had nothing whatsoever to do with any specific instrument of torture.

The fact that nobody in the entire editorial process noticed this obvious screwup, speaks volumes about the lack of standards (and the lack of knowledge of European history) in the modern print media.

Given that the author was using the Inquisition as a rhetorical device, it would have been nice if he didn't come away from the attempt looking like an ignoramus.

TerryHeaton March 29, 2019, 10:56 am
The truth is the GOP's courting of the donor class comes from the same motivation – the counting of the donor Benjamins. The difference is they can better hide their support (of Zionism) under banners of defense, business, and righteousness.

My one beef with Mondoweiss is that you regularly downplay the role of American Evangelical Christianity in the oppression of the Palestinians.

I think it's at the very top of the list, for Jewish Zionists simply don't have the numbers to win what is essentially a public relations war for control of the Middle East. Right-wing Christianity – especially those who espouse Dominionist beliefs – will tolerate ANY form of behavior that fits their views of Biblical prophecy. Absent these believers, who honestly don't give a crap about Israel's behavior, the hue and cry of anti-semitism is the only weapon the Zionists have.

Trump plays to this crowd with his actions in Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. Finally, this "donor class" could hardly match the daily U.S. gift of $10 million, so the pitch they make is to American taxpayers, although nobody ever talks about that.

Keith , March 29, 2019, 6:21 pm

TERRYHEATON- ". I think it's at the very top of the list, for Jewish Zionists simply don't have the numbers to win what is essentially a public relations war for control of the Middle East."

Well, you would say that wouldn't you? Miss the 700 club do you? The reality is that Evangelical Christian support for Israel and Zionism didn't really take off until the late 1970s as a consequence of Israeli PM Menachem Begin's recruitment of their support. This was well after Israel and Zionism had firmly established itself following the 1967 six day war. Zionism and Israel is an overwhelmingly Jewish project, Christian Zionists little more than opportunistic camp followers. The Christian Zionist leadership has taken advantage of the opportunity to jump on the bandwagon of Jewish Zionist power. While these Christian Zionists may be numerous, they lack the access to the corridors of power comparable to the Jewish Zionists, although their alliance with Jewish Zionism has improved their status.

Phil is correct to downplay the power of the Christian Zionists. They have negligible effect upon the policies of either Israel or the American Jewish Zionists, pats on the head notwithstanding. Their power lies more in supporting the rightward drift in American politics.

TerryHeaton, March 30, 2019, 10:01 am

Keith, thanks for the input. If you've read my book, then you already know my feelings about The 700 Club and Pat Robertson. Sadly, Christian Zionists are not at all merely clinging to right-wing beliefs. They started many of them. In fact, that's what we did at The 700 Club. Rather, they're waiting and hoping for the return of Jesus Christ, who will then, the thinking goes, elevate them and bring peace for 1,000 years. So their support of Israel is from their interpretation of scripture, and that's a powerful force that permits them to look the other way whenever Israel's behavior is questioned. They don't care, because they have their eyes on what they view as a bigger prize. Pro-Israel forces in the U.S. would never get their way without the blind support of this massive group of citizens.

genesto, March 29, 2019, 12:28 pm

'Senator Charles Schumer, the Democratic minority leader, similarly told the Aipac conference in 2018: "Of course, we say it's our land, the Torah says it, but they don't believe in the Torah. So that's the reason there is not peace."' Damn, and I thought that the reason there was no peace was because of the oppressive, prison-like conditions of the Palestinian people under Occupation.

Thanks, Chuck, for the enlightenment! Boy, do I feel dumb now!!

eljay, March 29, 2019, 1:22 pm

@ genesto: 'Senator Charles Schumer, the Democratic minority leader, similarly told the Aipac conference in 2018: "Of course, we say it's our land, the Torah says it, but they don't believe in the Torah. So that's the reason there is not peace."' ||

So according to Mr. Schumer's "logic" any lack of peace with Muslims isn't the fault of Muslims – it's the fault of non-Muslims (including Jews) who do not believe in the Qur'an.

genesto, March 29, 2019, 5:17 pm

Very good! Unfortunately, logic was never a strong point among the Zionists.

Schumer, the self-proclaimed shomer (guardian) of the state of Israel in the Congress (Did someone say dual loyalty???), somehow manages to be both humorous and frightening at the same time. Nice trick, if you can do it.

eljay , March 29, 2019, 5:41 pm

@genesto:

Very good! Unfortunately, logic was never a strong point among the Zionists.

I agree. They are, however, very good at redefining perfectly good English words.

Schumer, the self-proclaimed shomer (guardian) of the state of Israel in the Congress (Did someone say dual loyalty???)

Ms. Omar didn't; nevertheless, he seems to be doing his best to earn the accusation.

James Canning, March 29, 2019, 5:24 pm

Of course it is "all about the Benjamins". Contending to the contrary is simply silly. One might well add that BDS can be viewed as a good thing for Israel, and in that country's true best interests.

Kratoklastes, March 30, 2019, 8:53 pm

There's little point analysing this nonsense in terms of what is or isn't silly. After all, the entire shebang is predicated on an idea that is breathtaking in its silliness: in a nutshell it's this –

A collection of primitive Bronze Age fictional gibberish can confer land titles over bits of the Middle East, to its adherents – even to adherents with absolutely no ancestral connection to the land.

It's absolutely no coincidence that Herzl and his mob could not get any rabbi west of Lviv to endorse their nonsense: the rabbis of all genuine centres of scholarship repudiated the Zionist project as an abomination.

So Herzl etc just kept going further East until they found someone theologically illiterate enough to give a rabbinical imprimatur, and hence a veneer of intellectual respectability, to their project.

It's an indictment on the Polish rabbinate that they signed off on such an obvious apostasy it would have been nice if Herzl etc had really had to go full retard and end up relying on a Chinaman (a Kaifeng) – but if that's what it would have taken at the time, they would have done so.

(I'm an atheist, so I reject the idea that a project is validated if some religio-dipshit whackball waves some magic words at it but Herzl's project wanted a religious imprimatur).

[Apr 06, 2019] The Magnitsky Act-Behind the Scenes ASEEES

Highly recommended!
Money quote: "Instead of protecting people, the Magnitsky case helps the "bad guys" to demonstrate to their Russian compatriots that the West is rotten to the core, its policies are created by compliant stooges (lying thieves and useful idiots), and more rockets should be built to confront America's injustice towards Russia and others. A lie can never really protect anyone, in my humble opinion. But the problem is worse. It turns human rights into a hypocritical ideology to protect the interests of the powers that be, a bit like the slogans about brotherhood and justice in the Soviet Union. "
Notable quotes:
"... Taught in tandem with William Browder's book Red Notice , this film can provide students with a real-life experience in the practice of critical thinking. The film also allows us to revive a discussion of Hayden White's penetrating analysis of the ways in which the structure of the form necessarily influences the content of any artistic or historical narrative. The vehicle of the docudrama that Nekrasov uses in his film, and the competing narratives about the circumstances leading to Magnitsky's death, merit literary and intellectual analysis, along with geopolitical commentary. ..."
"... The Magnitsky Act – Behind the Scenes is about the ways in which the notion of human rights is sometimes used as a fake alibi for white-collar crimes. Though I explore just one case, I think that I have managed to show that those ways are exceptionally sophisticated and efficient, and enlist all the major media, civil society, NGOs, governments, parliaments, and major international organizations. ..."
"... The Magnitsky Act, in my view, is not a weapon that can protect people. The Magnitsky Act was designed to punish those deemed murderers and torturers of Magnitsky. Well, if my film demonstrates that Magnitsky was not murdered (by the people Browder claims he was murdered by), nor was he tortured, the Magnitsky Act is nonsensical. You cannot punish someone for something that did not happen. Can you then say, never mind, human rights violations happen, and it's good to have a mechanism to punish violators even if there's no evidence that people named as violators are guilty? I don't think one can say "never mind". Neither legally, nor, morally. ..."
"... There is no evidence whatsoever that the government of the United States conducted independent investigations of the policemen and the judges who were supposedly involved in the death of Magnitsky. And no one seems to be concerned of course about the rights of those on the Magnitsky list, who can't even reply to the accusations, let alone have the accusations verified by an independent investigator or judge. ..."
Apr 06, 2019 | www.aseees.org

In 2016, Andrei Lvovich Nekrasov, a well-known Russian film-maker, playwright, theater director, and actor, released a docudrama entitled, The Magnitsky Act -- Behind the Scenes . Although the film won many artistic accolades, including a special commendation from the Prix Europa Award for a Television Documentary, public screenings were abruptly canceled in both Europe and the United States. Political pressure from various constituents and the threat of lawsuits from William Browder, the American-British billionaire and human-rights activist, ensured the limitation of the film to a single website. To the knowledge of this author, there has been only one public screening of The Magnitsky Act -- Behind the Scenes in the United States. In June 2016, Seymour Hersch, a renowned investigative journalist, presided over a showing of the film at the Newseum in Washington, DC, that generated much controversy. The American press has not been kind to either the film or the director, Andrei Nekrasov. The Washington Post, The New York Times, The New Yorker, and The Daily Beast all seem to agree that the film is an overt work of Russian propaganda that aims to introduce confusion about the circumstances leading to the death of tax accountant, Sergei Magnitsky, in the minds of the viewers. The Putin administration, which has been the prime target of both the 2012 Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Accountability Act and the 2016 Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act, has good reason to promote a film that questions the circumstances surrounding Magnitsky's untimely death in Moscow's Butyrka Prison in 2009.

Despite a flood of persuasive articles and editorials by well-known journalists suggesting that this inconvenient film deserves no more than a quick burial, I was drawn to reconsider both the film and the political controversy that it continues to create for two main reasons. First, as the collapse of the Soviet Union and our own recent presidential campaigns show, we can never entirely prohibit the intrusion of propaganda or politically slanted content into the public sphere. Instead, as a historian and faculty member who serves at a public university, I believe that it is my job to teach our students how to diagnose an issue, and how to consider the many sides that a story necessarily involves. As an intellectual process this has immense value both in and of itself. Source criticism is a time tested and reliable means through which we can make sense of an event or a phenomenon. Our students need to learn both the mechanics and the intellectual value of analyzing a source and should be able to evaluate the nature of political content whether it is embedded in a Facebook post, a scholarly article, or a documentary.

The Magnitsky Act -- Behind the Scenes can serve as an important vehicle to introduce the contested nature of historical truth, and as a prism, it allows us to view the multiple modes through which various versions of the truth are disseminated in the twenty-first century. Taught in tandem with William Browder's book Red Notice , this film can provide students with a real-life experience in the practice of critical thinking. The film also allows us to revive a discussion of Hayden White's penetrating analysis of the ways in which the structure of the form necessarily influences the content of any artistic or historical narrative. The vehicle of the docudrama that Nekrasov uses in his film, and the competing narratives about the circumstances leading to Magnitsky's death, merit literary and intellectual analysis, along with geopolitical commentary.

Second, I am concerned by the fact that both critics and supporters have turned the debate about the film into a referendum on William Browder, his business dealings as well as his global human rights activism, and the Putin administration. In this interview with Andrei Nekrasov, I turn the spotlight back on the film-maker, his motivations for making the film, and on his political experiences since the release of the film. It is important to remember that in the past Nekrasov has made several politically charged films including Disbelief (2004), and Poisoned by Polonium: The Litvinenko File (2007) -- films that are extremely critical of the Putin administration. Nekrasov, a student of philosophy and literature, is in the unique position of having experienced censorship in the Soviet Union, Putin's Russia, and in the democratic countries of Western Europe and the United States.

1) Why did you want to make a film about the Magnitsky Act? What drew you to this project?

Andrei Nekrasov : I felt that the story of Magnitsky, in its accepted version, was very powerful and important. I thought that Sergei Magnitsky was a hero, and I wanted to tell the story of the modern hero, my compatriot. His case seemed very special because Magnitsky, a tax lawyer (in reality, an accountant) had come from the world of capitalism, to symbolize all that is good and moral in modern Russia. I believed that Magnitsky did not surrender under torture and sacrificed his life fighting corruption.

2) Who has funded the making of this film and what motivated them to invest in this production?

AN : The film was produced by Piraya Film, a Norwegian company. There is a long list of funders, and none are from Russia. (Please visit www.magnitskyact.com for further information). And they are all very "mainstream." I believe in the United States and Russia it is easier to construe the specific reasons that motivate funders, who are mostly private, to support a project. In Europe, where more public money is available for the arts, the state is more or less obliged to fund the cultural process. So I submit an idea to a producer, and if they like it, they introduce it into a complex system of funding that is supposed to be politically neutral. Only quality matters, in theory. In practice "quality" has political aspects, and its interpretation is open to prejudices.

But it would be a simplification to say the film was funded because I had set out to tell Browder's version of the Magnitsky case. Those funders who were (through their commissioning editors) monitoring the editing process, ZDF/ARTE, for example, became aware of the inconsistencies in Browder's version and supported my investigation into the truth. What they did not realize was who, and what, we were all dealing with. They did not realize that Browder was supported by the entire political system of North America and Western Europe. They realized that only when they were told by politicians to stop the film. And they obeyed, contrary to what I thought was their principles.

3) How has the role of censorship, both in Russia and the West, affected your artistic career?

AN : Censorship has had a very strong and damaging impact on my career. But while censorship in Russia had never been something surprising to me, the way that the film T he Magnitsky Act – Behind the Scenes was treated by western politicians was totally unanticipated and shocking. Yet, intellectually, the experience was very illuminating. The pro-Western intelligentsia of Russia, a class to which I have belonged, idolizes the West and believes that the freedom of expression is an essential and even intrinsic part of Western culture. The notion that the interests of economically powerful groups can set a geopolitical agenda and that easily overrides democratic freedom of expression is considered to be a remnant of Soviet era thinking. So I had to have a direct and personal experience of Western censorship to realize that that notion is rooted in reality.

The issue of censorship in Russia is, on the other hand, often misunderstood in the West. There is no direct political censorship of the kind that existed in the Soviet Union, and that possibly exists in countries like China today. Many popular Russian news outlets are critical of the government, and of Putin personally as evidenced by the content in media outlets such as Ekho Moskvy, Novaya Gazeta, Dozhd TV, New Times, Vedomosti, Colta. ru, and others. The internet is full of mockery of Putin, his ministers and of his party's representatives. There is neither a system nor the kind of wellresourced deep state structures that control the flow of information. Many Russian media outlets, for example, repeat Browder's story of Magnitsky killed by the corrupt police with the state covering it up. All that is perfectly "allowed" while Putin angrily condemns Browder as a criminal and Browder calls himself Putin's number one enemy. In reality, it is not allowed but simply happens because of the lack of consistent political censorship.

However, you will hardly ever hear a proper analysis and criticism in the Russian media of the big corporations, and of the oligarchs that make up the state. It is also true that such acute crises as military operations, such as Russian-Georgian war of 2008 produce intolerance to the voices of the opposition. My film Russian Lessons (2008) about the suffering of the Georgians during that short war and its aftermath wasbanned in Russia. But nationalism is not only a government policy. It's the prevailing mood. The supposedly democratic leader of the opposition, that the West seems to praise and support, Alexei Navalny, was on the record insulting Georgians in jingo-nationalistic posts during the war. The film industry is, of course, easier to steer in the "right direction" as films, unlike articles and essays, are very expensive to produce. But Russia is a complex society, deeply troubled, but also misunderstood by the West. If my films, such as Poisoned by Polonium: The Litvinenko File , and Russian Lessons (2010) were attacked by pro-government media, then some of my articles were censored by the independent, "opposition" outlets, such as Ekho Moskvy .

4) Did you actually begin filming the movie with an outcome of supporting Browder's story in mind, as you represent in the film, or did you plan from the start of the filming process to end the film as it now stands?

AN : I started filming the story. I totally believed in the story that Browder had told me, and all the mainstream media repeated after him.

5) You know that there are many more "disappeared" journalists and others listed in the formal US Congress Magnitsky Act who have suffered from the effects of corrupt power in Russia. Why did you not address the fates of some of those others as well in your film?

AN : I may be misunderstanding this question, but I do not see how addressing the fates of "disappeared" journalists and others' would be relevant to the topic of my film in its final version. I obviously condemn the "disappearance" of journalists and others. In Russia journalists disappear usually by being "simply" shot (not in "sophisticated" Saudi ways), and as far as I remember only one is referred to in The Magnitsky Act , Paul Khlebnikov. He was the editor of Forbes, Russia , and was shot in 2004 when Bill Browder was a great fan of Vladimir Putin and continued to be for some time. I have not seen any evidence or even claim, that Putin may have been behind that murder. I was a friend of Anna Politkovskaya, perhaps the most famous of all Russian journalists who was assassinated in the recent past. She is featured in my film, Poisoned by Polonium .

The Magnitsky Act – Behind the Scenes is about the ways in which the notion of human rights is sometimes used as a fake alibi for white-collar crimes. Though I explore just one case, I think that I have managed to show that those ways are exceptionally sophisticated and efficient, and enlist all the major media, civil society, NGOs, governments, parliaments, and major international organizations.

6) Does William Browder's role in the formulation of the Magnitsky Act invalidate its value and that of the Global Magnitsky Act, in seeking to provide protection for those suffering from the effects of deadly and corrupt power such as the recently deceased Saudi Arabian journalist, Jamal Khashoggi?

AN : Let me, for the argument's sake, pose myself what would seem like a version of your question: "Would Browder's role in creating a weapon that could protect someone like Khashoggi from deadly and corrupt power invalidate that weapon?" My answer would be, no, it would not invalidate that weapon. However, we are dealing with a fallacy here, in my humble opinion. The Magnitsky Act, in my view, is not a weapon that can protect people. The Magnitsky Act was designed to punish those deemed murderers and torturers of Magnitsky. Well, if my film demonstrates that Magnitsky was not murdered (by the people Browder claims he was murdered by), nor was he tortured, the Magnitsky Act is nonsensical. You cannot punish someone for something that did not happen. Can you then say, never mind, human rights violations happen, and it's good to have a mechanism to punish violators even if there's no evidence that people named as violators are guilty? I don't think one can say "never mind". Neither legally, nor, morally.

There is no evidence whatsoever that the government of the United States conducted independent investigations of the policemen and the judges who were supposedly involved in the death of Magnitsky. And no one seems to be concerned of course about the rights of those on the Magnitsky list, who can't even reply to the accusations, let alone have the accusations verified by an independent investigator or judge.

Instead of protecting people, the Magnitsky case helps the "bad guys" to demonstrate to their Russian compatriots that the West is rotten to the core, its policies are created by compliant stooges (lying thieves and useful idiots), and more rockets should be built to confront America's injustice towards Russia and others. A lie can never really protect anyone, in my humble opinion. But the problem is worse. It turns human rights into a hypocritical ideology to protect the interests of the powers that be, a bit like the slogans about brotherhood and justice in the Soviet Union.

Choi Chatterjee is a Professor of History at California State University, Los Angeles. Chatterjee, along with Steven Marks, Mary Neuberger, and Steve Sabol, edited The Wider Arc of Revolution in three volumes (Slavica Publishers).

[Apr 06, 2019] Trump is for socialism but only when it comes to funding US military industry Tulsi Gabbard

Highly recommended!
Tulsi is a really great polemist with a very sharp mind and ability to find weak points in the opponent platform/argumentation and withstand pressure. In the debate she will probably will wipe the floor with Trump. IMHO he stands no chances against her in the open debate
Notable quotes:
"... Trump is for socialism when it comes to taxpayers underwriting military contractors and arms manufacturers. The same money would create more jobs used for rebuilding our country's infrastructure and green economy, and it would be better for humanity. ..."
"... While the paper hailed the fact that the Pentagon's budget increase allowed local workers to keep their jobs and encouraged a skilled workforce to move to a small town in rural Ohio, Gabbard apparently hinted that the whole story in fact described what amounted to re-distribution of money from taxpayers to a de-facto depressed area to save some jobs – a social-democratic if not outright socialist move indeed. ..."
"... In her post, Gabbard also added that the US might have had a better use for a $160 billion boost in defense spending over two years. “The same money would create more jobs used for rebuilding our country’s infrastructure and green economy, and it would be better for humanity,” she wrote. ..."
Apr 05, 2019 | www.rt.com

US President Donald Trump, who has been relentlessly bashing everything linked to what he sees as 'socialism,' is himself no stranger to using socialist principles to support the US arms industry, Tulsi Gabbard has claimed. One could hardly suspect Trump of being a socialist in disguise.

After all, the US president has emerged as one of the most ardent critics of the leftist ideological platform. Just recently, he announced he would "go into the war with some socialists," while apparently referring to his political opponents from the Democratic Party.

But the president also seems to be quite keen on borrowing some socialist ideas when it fits his agenda, at least, according to the congresswoman from Hawaii and Democratic presidential candidate, Tulsi Gabbard, who recently wrote in a tweet that "Trump is for socialism when it comes to taxpayers underwriting military contractors and arms manufacturers."

Trump is for socialism when it comes to taxpayers underwriting military contractors and arms manufacturers. The same money would create more jobs used for rebuilding our country's infrastructure and green economy, and it would be better for humanity. https://t.co/tcNqsNQVbN

-- Tulsi Gabbard (@TulsiGabbard) April 5, 2019

She was referring to a piece in The Los Angeles Times, which cheerfully reported that Trump's whopping military budget helps to breathe some new life into a Pentagon-owned tank manufacturing plant somewhere in northwestern Ohio that was once on the verge of a shutdown.

While the paper hailed the fact that the Pentagon's budget increase allowed local workers to keep their jobs and encouraged a skilled workforce to move to a small town in rural Ohio, Gabbard apparently hinted that the whole story in fact described what amounted to re-distribution of money from taxpayers to a de-facto depressed area to save some jobs – a social-democratic if not outright socialist move indeed.

It is very much unclear if Trump had this Ohio plant or any other factories like it in mind when he supported the record Pentagon budget. After all, redistributing large sums of public money in favor of the booming US military industrial complex does not look very much like socialism.

In her post, Gabbard also added that the US might have had a better use for a $160 billion boost in defense spending over two years. “The same money would create more jobs used for rebuilding our country’s infrastructure and green economy, and it would be better for humanity,” she wrote.

Trump, meanwhile, seems to be pretty confident that his policies indeed “make America great again” while it is those pesky socialists that threaten to ruin everything he has achieved. “I love the idea of 'Keep America Great' because you know what it says is we've made it great now we're going to keep it great because the socialists will destroy it,” he told an audience of Republican congress members this week, while talking about the forthcoming presidential campaign.

[Apr 04, 2019] How Brzezinski's Chessboard degenerated into Brennan's Russophobia by Mike Whitney

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... This entire article fleshes out one central truth – capitalism as practiced by the US Government inevitably involves war by any and all means, seeking total domination of every human being on the planet, foriegn or native to the US Hegemon. It seeks total rule of the rich and powerful over everyone else. ..."
Apr 04, 2019 | www.unz.com

"Russia is an inalienable and organic part of Greater Europe and European civilization. Our citizens think of themselves as European. That's why Russia proposes moving towards the creation of a common economic space from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean, a community referred to by Russian experts as 'the Union of Europe' which will strengthen Russia's potential in its economic pivot toward the 'New Asia.'" Vladimir Putin, President of the Russian Federation, February 2012

The allegations of 'Russian meddling' only make sense if they're put into a broader geopolitical context. Once we realize that Washington is implementing an aggressive "containment" strategy to militarily encircle Russia and China in order to spread its tentacles across Central Asian, then we begin to understand that Russia is not the perpetrator of the hostilities and propaganda, but the victim. The Russia hacking allegations are part of a larger asymmetrical-information war that has been joined by the entire Washington political establishment. The objective is to methodically weaken an emerging rival while reinforcing US global hegemony.

Try to imagine for a minute, that the hacking claims were not part of a sinister plan by Vladimir Putin "to sow discord and division" in the United States, but were conjured up to create an external threat that would justify an aggressive response from Washington. That's what Russiagate is really all about.

US policymakers and their allies in the military and Intelligence agencies, know that relations with Russia are bound to get increasingly confrontational, mainly because Washington is determined to pursue its ambitious "pivot" to Asia plan. This new regional strategy focuses on "strengthening bilateral security alliances, expanding trade and investment, and forging a broad-based military presence." In short, the US is determined to maintain its global supremacy by establishing military outposts across Eurasia, continuing to tighten the noose around Russia and China, and reinforcing its position as the dominant player in the most populous and prosperous region in the world. The plan was first presented in its skeletal form by the architect of Washington's plan to rule the world, Zbigniew Brzezinski. Here's how Jimmy Carter's former national security advisor summed it up in his 1997 magnum opus, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy And Its Geostrategic Imperatives:

"For America, the chief geopolitical prize is Eurasia (p.30) .. Eurasia is the globe's largest continent and is geopolitically axial. A power that dominates Eurasia would control two of the world's three most advanced and economically productive regions. . About 75 per cent of the world's people live in Eurasia, and most of the world's physical wealth is there as well, both in its enterprises and underneath its soil. Eurasia accounts for 60 per cent of the world's GNP and about three-fourths of the world's known energy resources." ("The Grand Chessboard:American Primacy And Its Geostrategic Imperatives", Zbigniew Brzezinski, Basic Books, page 31, 1997)

14 years after those words were written, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton took up the banner of imperial expansion and demanded a dramatic shift in US foreign policy that would focus primarily on increasing America's military footprint in Asia. It was Clinton who first coined the term "pivot" in a speech she delivered in 2010 titled "America's Pacific Century". Here's an excerpt from the speech:

"As the war in Iraq winds down and America begins to withdraw its forces from Afghanistan, the United States stands at a pivot point. Over the last 10 years, we have allocated immense resources to those two theaters. In the next 10 years, we need to be smart and systematic about where we invest time and energy, so that we put ourselves in the best position to sustain our leadership, secure our interests, and advance our values. One of the most important tasks of American statecraft over the next decade will therefore be to lock in a substantially increased investment -- diplomatic, economic, strategic, and otherwise -- in the Asia-Pacific region

Open markets in Asia provide the United States with unprecedented opportunities for investment, trade, and access to cutting-edge technology ..American firms (need) to tap into the vast and growing consumer base of Asia The region already generates more than half of global output and nearly half of global trade. As we strive to meet President Obama's goal of doubling exports by 2015, we are looking for opportunities to do even more business in Asia and our investment opportunities in Asia's dynamic markets."

("America's Pacific Century", Secretary of State Hillary Clinton", Foreign Policy Magazine, 2011)

The pivot strategy is not some trifling rehash of the 19th century "Great Game" promoted by think-tank fantasists and conspiracy theorists. It is Washington's premier foreign policy doctrine, a 'rebalancing' theory that focuses on increasing US military and diplomatic presence across the Asian landmass. Naturally, NATO's ominous troop movements on Russia's western flank and Washington's provocative naval operations in the South China Sea have sent up red flags in Moscow and Beijing. Former Chinese President Hu Jintao summed it up like this:

"The United States has strengthened its military deployments in the Asia-Pacific region, strengthened the US-Japan military alliance, strengthened strategic cooperation with India, improved relations with Vietnam, inveigled Pakistan, established a pro-American government in Afghanistan, increased arms sales to Taiwan, and so on. They have extended outposts and placed pressure points on us from the east, south, and west."

Russian President Vladimir Putin has been equally critical of Washington's erratic behavior. NATO's eastward expansion has convinced Putin that the US will continue to be a disruptive force on the continent for the foreseeable future. Both leaders worry that Washington's relentless provocations will lead to an unexpected clash that will end in war.

Even so, the political class has fully embraced the pivot strategy as a last-gasp attempt to roll back the clock to the post war era when the world's industrial centers were in ruins and America was the only game in town. Now the center of gravity has shifted from west to east, leaving Washington with just two options: Allow the emerging giants in Asia to connect their high-speed rail and gas pipelines to Europe creating the world's biggest free trade zone, or try to overturn the applecart by bullying allies and threatening rivals, by implementing sanctions that slow growth and send currencies plunging, and by arming jihadist proxies to fuel ethnic hatred and foment political unrest. Clearly, the choice has already been made. Uncle Sam has decided to fight til the bitter end.

Washington has many ways of dealing with its enemies, but none of these strategies have dampened the growth of its competitors in the east. China is poised to overtake the US as the world's biggest economy sometime in the next 2 decades while Russia's intervention in Syria has rolled back Washington's plan to topple Bashar al Assad and consolidate its grip on the resource-rich Middle East. That plan has now collapsed forcing US policymakers to scrap the War on Terror altogether and switch to a "great power competition" which acknowledges that the US can no longer unilaterally impose its will wherever it goes. Challenges to America's dominance are emerging everywhere particularly in the region where the US hopes to reign supreme, Asia.

This is why the entire national security state now stands foursquare behind the improbable pivot plan. It's a desperate "Hail Mary" attempt to preserve the decaying unipolar world order.

What does that mean in practical terms?

It means that the White House (the National Security Strategy) the Pentagon (National Defense Strategy) and the Intelligence Community (The Worldwide Threat Assessment) have all drawn up their own respective analyses of the biggest threats the US currently faces. Naturally, Russia is at the very top of those lists. Russia has derailed Washington's proxy war in Syria, frustrated US attempts to establish itself across Central Asia, and strengthened ties with the EU hoping to "create a harmonious community of economies from Lisbon to Vladivostok." (Putin)

Keep in mind, the US does not feel threatened by the possibility of a Russian attack, but by Russia's ability to thwart Washington's grandiose imperial ambitions in Asia.

As we noted, the National Security Strategy (NSS) is a statutorily mandated document produced by the White House that explains how the President intends to implement his national security vision. Not surprisingly, the document's main focus is Russia and China. Here's an excerpt:

"China and Russia challenge American power, influence, and interests, attempting to erode American security and prosperity. They are determined to make economies less free and less fair, to grow their militaries, and to control information and data to repress their societies and expand their influence." (Neither Russia nor China are attempting to erode American security and prosperity." They are merely growing their economies and expanding their markets. If US corporations reinvested their capital into factories, employee training and R and D instead of stock buybacks and executive compensation, then they would be better able to complete globally.)

Here's more: "Through modernized forms of subversive tactics, Russia interferes in the domestic political affairs of countries around the world." (This is a case of the 'pot calling the kettle black.')

"Today, actors such as Russia are using information tools in an attempt to undermine the legitimacy of democracies. Adversaries target media, political processes, financial networks, and personal data." (The western media behemoth is the biggest disinformation bullhorn the world has ever seen. RT and Sputnik don't hold a candle to the ginormous MSM 'Wurlitzer' that controls the cable news stations, the newspapers and most of the print media. The Mueller Report proves beyond a doubt that the politically-motivated nonsense one reads in the media is neither reliably sourced nor trustworthy.)

The Worldwide Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community is even more explicit in its attacks on Russia. Check it out:

"Threats to US national security will expand and diversify in the coming year, driven in part by China and Russia as they respectively compete more intensely with the United States and its traditional allies and partners . We assess that Moscow will continue pursuing a range of objectives to expand its reach, including undermining the US-led liberal international order, dividing Western political and security institutions, demonstrating Russia's ability to shape global issues, and bolstering Putin's domestic legitimacy.

We assess that Moscow has heightened confidence, based on its success in helping restore the Asad regime's territorial control in Syria, ·Russia seeks to boost its military presence and political influence in the Mediterranean and Red Seas mediate conflicts, including engaging in the Middle East Peace Process and Afghanistan reconciliation .

Russia will continue pressing Central Asia's leaders to support Russian-led economic and security initiatives and reduce engagement with Washington. Russia and China are likely to intensify efforts to build influence in Europe at the expense of US interests " ("The Worldwide Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community", USG )

Notice how the Intelligence Community summary does not suggest that Russia poses an imminent military threat to the US, only that Russia has restored order in Syria, strengthened ties with China, emerged as an "honest broker" among countries in the Middle East, and used the free market system to improve relations with its trading partners and grow its economy. The IC appears to find fault with Russia because it is using the system the US created to better advantage than the US. This is entirely understandable given Putin's determination to draw Europe and Asia closer together through a region-wide economic integration plan. Here's Putin:

"We must consider more extensive cooperation in the energy sphere, up to and including the formation of a common European energy complex. The Nord Stream gas pipeline under the Baltic Sea and the South Stream pipeline under the Black Sea are important steps in that direction. These projects have the support of many governments and involve major European energy companies. Once the pipelines start operating at full capacity, Europe will have a reliable and flexible gas-supply system that does not depend on the political whims of any nation. This will strengthen the continent's energy security not only in form but in substance. This is particularly relevant in the light of the decision of some European states to reduce or renounce nuclear energy."

The gas pipelines and high-speed rail are the arteries that will bind the continents together and strengthen the new EU-Asia superstate. This is Washington's greatest nightmare, a massive, thriving free trade zone beyond its reach and not subject to its rules. In 2012, Hillary Clinton acknowledged this new threat and promised to do everything in her power to destroy it. Check out this excerpt:

"U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton described efforts to promote greater economic integration in Eurasia as "a move to re-Sovietize the region." . "We know what the goal is and we are trying to figure out effective ways to slow down or prevent it," she said at an international conference in Dublin on December 6, 2012, Radio Free Europe."

"Slow down or prevent it"?

Why? Because EU-Asia growth and prosperity will put pressure on US debt markets, US corporate interests, US (ballooning) national debt, and the US Dollar? Is that why Hillary is so committed to sabotaging Putin's economic integration plan?

Indeed, it is. Washington wants to block progress and prosperity in the east in order to extend the lifespan of a doddering and thoroughly-bankrupt state that is presently $22 trillion in the red but continues to write checks on an overdrawn account.

But Russia shouldn't be blamed for Washington's profligate behavior, that's not Putin's fault. Moscow is merely using the free market system more effectively that the US.

Now consider the Pentagon's 2018 National Defense Strategy (NDS) which reiterates many of the same themes as the other two documents.

"Today, we are emerging from a period of strategic atrophy, aware that our competitive military advantage has been eroding. We are facing increased global disorder, characterized by decline in the long-standing rules-based international order -- creating a security environment more complex and volatile than any we have experienced in recent memory. Inter-state strategic competition, not terrorism, is now the primary concern in U.S. national security."

(Naturally, the "security environment" is going to be more challenging when 'regime change' is the cornerstone of one's foreign policy. Of course, the NDS glosses over that sad fact. Here's more:)

"Russia has violated the borders of nearby nations and pursues veto power over the economic, diplomatic, and security decisions of its neighbors ..(Baloney. Russia has been a force for stability in Syria and Ukraine. If Obama had his way, Syria would have wound up like Iraq, a hellish wastelands occupied by foreign mercenaries. Is that how the Pentagon measures success?) Here's more:

"China and Russia want to shape a world consistent with their authoritarian model

"China and Russia are now undermining the international order from within the system .

"China and Russia are the principal priorities for the Department because of the magnitude of the threats they pose to U.S. security." ( National Defense Strategy of the United States of America )

Get the picture? China and Russia, China and Russia, China and Russia. Bad, bad, bad.

Why? Because they are successfully implementing their own development model which is NOT programed to favor US financial institutions and corporations. That's the whole thing in a nutshell. The only reason Russia and China are a threat to the "rules-based system", is because Washington insists on being the only one who makes the rules. That's why foreign leaders are no longer falling in line, because it's not a fair system.

These assessments represent the prevailing opinion of senior-level policymakers across the spectrum. (The White House, the Pentagon and the Intelligence Community) The USG is unanimous in its judgement that a harsher more combative approach is needed to deal with Russia and China. Foreign policy elites want to put the nation on the path to more confrontation, more conflict and more war. At the same time, none of these three documents suggest that Russia has any intention of launching an attack on the United States. The greatest concern is the effect that emerging competitors will have on Washington's provocative plan for military and economic expansion, the threat that Russia and China pose to America's tenuous grip on global power. It is that fear that drives US foreign policy.

And this is broader context into which we must fit the Russia investigation. The reason the Russia hacking furor has been allowed to flourish and spread despite the obvious lack of any supporting evidence, is because the vilifying of Russia segues perfectly with the geopolitical interests of elites in the government. The USG now works collaboratively with the media to influence public attitudes on issues that are important to the powerful foreign policy establishment. The ostensible goal of these psychological operations (PSYOP) is to selectively use information on "audiences to influence their emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately the behavior of organizations, groups, and individuals."

The USG now sees the minds of ordinary Americans as a legitimate target for their influence campaigns. They regard attitudes and perceptions as "the cognitive domain of the

Beckow , says: April 4, 2019 at 1:02 am GMT

The emerging Euro-Asian power block is very heterogeneous. Russia, China, and the smaller affiliated players like Central Asia, Iran, Syria, Turkey don't agree on almost anything. They have different cultures, religions, economies, demographic profiles, even writing systems. The most rational strategy to prevent the Euro-Asian block from consolidating would be to get them to fight each other. Alternatively, find the weakest link and attack it in an area where its reluctant allies don't share its interests.

Exactly the opposite has happened in the last 5-10 years: US has seemingly worked overtime to get China-Russia alliance of the ground. They used to distrust each other, today, after Ukraine, South China See, etc they have become close allies. Same with Iran and Syria: instead of letting them stew in their own internal problems – mostly religious and having a nepotistic elite – US has managed to turn the fight into an external geo-political struggle, literally invited Russia to join in, and ended up losing.

Bush turned Iraq from a fanatically anti-Iran bastion to a reliable ally of Iran and started an un-winnable land war in Afghanistan (incredible!). Obama turned Libya, the richest and most stable African country that threatened no-one and kept African migrants far away, into a chaotic hellhole where slave trade flourishes and millions of Sub-Saharan Africans can use it to move on to Europe.

Then Obama tried to coup-de-etat Erdogan in Turkey, and – even worse – failed miserably. This gang can't shoot straight – whatever they put in their position papers is meaningless drivel because they are too stupid to think. They have no patience to wait for the right time to move, no ability to manage on the ground allies, and an aversion to casualties that makes winning a war impossible. Today Trump threatens Germany over its energy security (pipelines), further antagonises Turkey and Erdogan, watches helplessly as EU becomes the next UN (lame and irrelevant), and bets everything on a few small allies like Saudi Arabia and Izrael that are of almost no use in Euro-Asia.

A guy who says about the Russia-gate collusion fiasco that ' maybe I had bad information ' is no master of the universe. And he run the joint under Obama. Complaining about Russia saying bad stuff about you – or ' information warfare ' – is a pathetic sign of weakness. Maybe the testosterone levels have dropped more than we have been told.

anon [338] Disclaimer , says: April 4, 2019 at 4:07 am GMT
the russophobia is just drama to keep the MIC spending at $700+ billion per year

there is no way to justify that level of spending and pretend they don't have $25 billion one time to actually help solve the real problem for the U.S.

Krollchem , says: April 4, 2019 at 5:38 am GMT
"The USG now sees the minds of ordinary Americans as a legitimate target for their influence campaigns. They regard attitudes and perceptions as "the cognitive domain of the battlespace" which they must exploit in order to build public support for their vastly unpopular wars and interventions. "

Here is a short guide on how to detect subversion of the mind by the media and their handlers by a former military intelligence officer.

JR , says: April 4, 2019 at 6:00 am GMT
If one recognizes that Brzezinski's "The Grand Chessboard, American Primacy & Its Geostrategic Imperatives (1997)" in replacing "Lebensraum" with "control over Eurasia", "Tausendjähriges Reich" with "American Primacy" and providing our 'elite' with an "realist" and "amoral" excuse to act completely and consistently immoral one has to recognize too that this "Grand Chessboard" is an amalgamation of 'Mein Kampf' and 'Il Principe".

Reluctant to use that Hitler comparison one ought to read the Introduction of the "Grand Chessboard" in which Brzezinki himself proudly refers to both Hitler and Stalin sharing his ideas about control over Eurasia as a prerequisite for that "American Primacy".

Recognizing this however one can't escape the conclusion that this "Grand Chessboard" with its consistent 'amoral realist imperatives' is serving up inherently immoral 'imperatives' as inescapable options dressed up in academic language and with absolutely abhorrent arrogance.

Stating that Brennan's Russophobia is somehow a degeneration of Brzezinki's "Grand Chessboard" is completely overlooking how difficult it would be to outdo Brzezinki's own total moral degeneration.

One has to recognize that by now the only bipartisan aspect of US policy can be found in sharing these despicable and immoral 'imperatives' to maintain that "American Primacy" at all cost (of course to the rest of the world).

Jake , says: April 4, 2019 at 12:01 pm GMT
"The allegations of 'Russian meddling' only make sense if they're put into a broader geopolitical context. Once we realize that Washington is implementing an aggressive "containment" strategy to militarily encircle Russia and China in order to spread its tentacles across Central Asian, then we begin to understand that Russia is not the perpetrator of the hostilities and propaganda, but the victim. The Russia hacking allegations are part of a larger asymmetrical-information war that has been joined by the entire Washington political establishment. The objective is to methodically weaken an emerging rival while reinforcing US global hegemony."

TRUE!

I would suggest that the initials 'US' in the final sentence be changed to: Anglo-Zionist Empire.

Jake , says: April 4, 2019 at 12:12 pm GMT
"Now the center of gravity has shifted from west to east, leaving Washington with just two options: Allow the emerging giants in Asia to connect their high-speed rail and gas pipelines to Europe creating the world's biggest free trade zone, or try to overturn the applecart by bullying allies and threatening rivals, by implementing sanctions that slow growth and send currencies plunging, and by arming jihadist proxies to fuel ethnic hatred and foment political unrest. Clearly, the choice has already been made. Uncle Sam has decided to fight til the bitter end."

Just like the Brit Empire – of which the Yank Empire is merely Part 2, the part where it becomes obvious that it is the Anglo-Zionist Empire, which, like a band of screeching Pharisees standing on the walls of Jerusalem hurling curses at the Romans they inform that Jehovah will soon wipe out all Romans to save His Chosen Race, would choose utter destruction for all over any common sense backing down to prevent mass slaughter.

Ilyana_Rozumova , says: April 4, 2019 at 12:43 pm GMT
Nothing harmed US more than Brzezinski's ideology. US did build up far east with their investments, while neglecting their own backyard. US should have build up rather North and South America and make it the envy of the world. Neglecting particularly South America now created Desperate south American people, who have no jobs and no future and these people are now invading US.
Andrei Martyanov , says: Website April 4, 2019 at 12:44 pm GMT
@Beckow

A guy who says about the Russia-gate collusion fiasco that 'maybe I had bad information' is no master of the universe. And he run the joint under Obama. Complaining about Russia saying bad stuff about you – or 'information warfare' – is a pathetic sign of weakness. Maybe the testosterone levels have dropped more than we have been told.

Testosterone plus steady, unrelenting decline and corruption of American "elites" most of who have no background in any fields related to actual effective governance especially in national security (military) and diplomatic fields. Zbig's book is also nothing more than doctrine-mongering based on complete lack of understanding of Russian history.

Andrei Martyanov , says: Website April 4, 2019 at 12:52 pm GMT
@JR

Reluctant to use that Hitler comparison one ought to read the Introduction of the "Grand Chessboard" in which Brzezinki himself proudly refers to both Hitler and Stalin sharing his ideas about control over Eurasia as a prerequisite for that "American Primacy".

Zbig was a political "scientist" (which is not a science) by education, fact aggravated by his Russophobia, and thus inability to grasp fundamentals of military power and warfare–a defining characteristic of American "elites". He, obviously, missed on the military-technological development of 1970s through 1990s, to arrive to the inevitable conclusion that classic "geopolitics" doesn't apply anymore. Today we all can observe how it doesn't apply and is made obsolete.

Agent76 , says: April 4, 2019 at 2:45 pm GMT
(Jan.1998) US history – "How Jimmy Carter I Started the Mujahideen" – Zbigniew Brzezinski, National Security Advisor 1977-1981

"Q: The former director of the CIA, Robert Gates, stated in his memoirs ["From the Shadows"], that American intelligence services began to aid the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan 6 months before the Soviet intervention. In this period you were the national security adviser to President Carter.

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=a13_1240427874

Zbigniew Brzezinski Taliban Pakistan Afghanistan pep talk 1979

In 1979 Carters National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski went into Pakistans border regions with Afghanistan to give a little pep talk to some prospective majehadeen (Holy Warriors). In a 1997 interview for CNN's Cold War Series, Brzezinski hinted about the Carter Administration's proactive Afghanistan policy before the Soviet invasion in 1979, that he had conceived.

flashlight joe , says: April 4, 2019 at 2:55 pm GMT
@Jake @Jake

"Just like the Brit Empire – of which the Yank Empire is merely Part 2,"

I call it the Western British Empire.

Jake , says: April 4, 2019 at 3:14 pm GMT
@DESERT FOX Why was it that the Brit Empire kept acting throughout the later 18th, the 19th and early 20th centuries to harm Russia, even when it technically was allied with Russia? Why the Crimean War, for example?

Why, for example, was Brit secret service all over the assassination of Rasputin and tied in multiple ways to most non-Marxist revolutionary groups?

mike k , says: April 4, 2019 at 3:18 pm GMT
This entire article fleshes out one central truth – capitalism as practiced by the US Government inevitably involves war by any and all means, seeking total domination of every human being on the planet, foriegn or native to the US Hegemon. It seeks total rule of the rich and powerful over everyone else.
Jake , says: April 4, 2019 at 3:26 pm GMT
@anon Like the Ukranians, the 'Balts' virtually always are controlled by somebody else. When Russia does not control the Baltic states, they are controlled by either Poles or Germans. Russians know what that means: the Baltic states are then used as weapons to attack Russia.

The region is much calmer when Russia controls the Baltic states, and that is before taking into consideration how the Polish-Lithuanian Empire turned its Jews lose to terrorize all Orthodox Christians and how Germanic states later used Lutheranism as a force in the Baltics to ignite war with Russia and, under the queer Frederick the Great also used Jewish bankers to finance wars against Russia.

[Apr 03, 2019] Suspected of Corruption at Home, Powerful Foreigners Find Refuge in the US

Highly recommended!
Apr 03, 2019 | www.propublica.org

Wealthy politicians and businessmen suspected of corruption in their native lands are fleeing to a safe haven where their wealth and influence shields them from arrest.

They have entered this country on a variety of visas, including one designed to encourage investment. Some have applied for asylum, which is intended to protect people fleeing oppression and political persecution.

The increasingly popular destination for people avoiding criminal charges is no pariah nation.

It's the United States.

An investigation by ProPublica, in conjunction with the Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism at Columbia University, has found that officials fleeing prosecution in Colombia, China, South Korea, Bolivia and Panama have found refuge for themselves and their wealth in this country, taking advantage of lax enforcement of U.S. laws and gaps in immigration and financial regulations. Many have concealed their assets and real-estate purchases by creating trusts and limited liability companies in the names of lawyers and relatives.

American authorities are supposed to vet visa applicants to make sure they are not under active investigation on criminal charges. But the ProPublica examination shows that this requirement has been routinely ignored.

One of the most prominent cases involves a former president of Panama, who was allowed to enter the United States just days after his country's Supreme Court opened an investigation into charges that he had helped embezzle $45 million from a government school lunch program.

Ricardo Martinelli, a billionaire supermarket magnate, had been on the State Department's radar since he was elected in 2009. That year, the U.S. ambassador to Panama began sending diplomatic cables warning about the president's "dark side," including his links to corruption and his request for U.S. support for wiretapping his opponents.

Soon after Martinelli left office in 2014, Panamanian prosecutors conducted a widely publicized investigation of corruption in the school lunch program, and in mid-January 2015, forwarded their findings to the country's Supreme Court.

On Jan. 28, 2015, just hours before the Supreme Court announced a formal probe into the charges, Martinelli boarded a private plane, flew to Guatemala City for a meeting and then entered the United States on a visitor visa. Within weeks, he was living comfortably in the Atlantis, a luxury condominium on Miami's swanky Brickell Avenue. He is still here.

The State Department declined to comment on Martinelli's case, saying visa records are confidential and it is the U.S. Customs and Border Protection that decides who is allowed to enter the country. CBP said privacy regulations prevent the agency from commenting on Martinelli.

Efforts to reach Martinelli, including a registered letter sent to his Miami address, were unsuccessful.

In September this year, Panama asked to extradite Martinelli, but the former president is fighting that request, arguing there are no legal grounds to bring him back to his home country where the investigation has broadened to include insider trading, corruption and abuse of authority. Last December, Panama's high court issued a warrant for his arrest on charges that he used public funds to spy on over 150 political opponents. If found guilty, he could face up to 21 years in jail.

Rogelio Cruz, who is defending Martinelli in Panama's Supreme Court, said that the former president "will return to Panama once adequate conditions exist with respect to due process, where there are independent judges -- which there aren't."

The United States has explicit policies that bar issuing visas to foreign officials facing criminal charges in their homelands. In 2004, President George W. Bush issued a proclamation designed to keep the United States from becoming a haven for corrupt officials. Proclamation 7750, which has the force and effect of law, directed the State Department to ban officials who have accepted bribes or misappropriated public funds when their actions have "serious adverse effects on the national interests of the United States."

Under the rules implementing Bush's order, consular officers do not need a conviction or even formal charges to justify denying a visa. They can stamp "denied" based on information from unofficial, or informal sources, including newspaper articles, according to diplomats and State Department officials interviewed for this report.

The State Department declined to provide the number of times Proclamation 7750 has been invoked, but insisted that it has been used "robustly."

Over the years, some allegedly corrupt officials have been banned from entering the United States, including former Panamanian President Ernesto Perez Balladares , former Nicaraguan President Arnoldo Aleman, former Cameroonian Defense Minister Remy Ze Meka, and retired Philippine Gen. Carlos Garcia , according to cables published by WikiLeaks. In 2014, the U.S. banned visas for 10 members of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban's inner circle because of corruption allegations.

But numerous other foreign government officials, including former presidents and cabinet ministers, have slipped through the cracks, according to court documents, diplomatic cables and interviews with prosecutors and defense attorneys in the United States and abroad. The charges involved a wide range of misconduct, from stealing public funds to accepting bribes.

Six months before Martinelli entered the United States, a former Colombian agriculture minister and onetime presidential candidate, Andres Felipe Arias, fled to Miami three weeks before he was convicted of funneling $12.5 million to wealthy political supporters from a subsidy program that was intended to reduce inequality in rural areas and protect farmers from the effects of globalization.

The U.S. embassy in Bogota had been following Arias' trial closely and reporting on the scandal in cables to Washington. The trial featured documents and witnesses saying that under Arias' watch, the agriculture ministry had doled out millions in subsidies to affluent families, some of whom, according to media reports, had donated to Arias' political allies or his presidential campaign.

Subsidies went to relatives of congressmen, companies owned by the richest man in Colombia, and a former beauty queen. One powerful family and its associates received over $2.5 million, according to records released by prosecutors. Another family, which included relatives of a former senator, received $1.3 million. Both families had supported Arias' chief political ally, former Colombian President Alvaro Uribe, with campaign contributions.

The law that established the program did not ban wealthy landowners from getting grants, but some elite families had received multiple subsidies for the same farm. They gamed the system by submitting multiple proposals in the names of different family members and by subdividing their land so they could apply for grants for each parcel, court records indicate.

Yet, in November 2013, while the trial was going on, the U.S. embassy in Bogota renewed Arias' visitor visa. The State Department refused to discuss the case, saying that visa records are confidential. But a recent filing in federal court showed that the U.S. embassy had flagged Arias' application, and asked him to provide documents to support his request to leave the country while charges were pending. Arias submitted documents from the Colombian court, including a judicial order that allowed him to travel. In the end, the embassy issued a visa because he had not yet been convicted.

Andres Felipe Arias, a former Colombian agriculture minister, who fled to the United States before he could be convicted of funneling money from a subsidy program (GDA via AP Images)

On the night of June 13, 2014, three weeks before the judges convicted him of embezzlement by appropriation, a Colombian law that penalizes the unauthorized use of public funds to benefit private entities, Arias packed his bags and boarded a plane. The following month, the U.S. embassy in Bogota revoked the visa. But Arias hired an immigration attorney and applied for asylum.

"If you looked up 'politically motivated charges' in the dictionary, there would be a picture of Andres Arias next to it," said David Oscar Markus, Arias' lead attorney. "The case [against him] is absurd and not even one that is recognized in the United States."

Over the next two years, Arias built a new life in South Florida with his wife and two children, opening a small consulting company and renting a house in Weston.

On August 24, he was arrested by U.S. authorities in response to an extradition request from Colombia. He spent several months in a detention facility until his release on bail in mid-November. Arias argues that the United States cannot extradite him because it has no active extradition treaty with Colombia, but the U.S. Attorney's Office disagrees. A plea for asylum does not shield defendants from extradition if they are charged in Colombia with a crime covered by the treaty between the two countries.

Congress established the EB-5 immigrant investor program in 1990 as a way of creating jobs for Americans and encouraging investment by foreigners.

The agency that administers the program, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, has adopted regulations designed to prevent fraud, including requiring foreign investors to submit evidence, such as tax returns and bank statements, to prove they obtained their money legally.

But these safeguards did not stop the daughter-in-law and grandsons of former South Korean dictator Chun Doo-hwan from using Chun's ill-gotten gains to get U.S. permanent residency.

In 1996, a Korean court convicted Chun of receiving more than $200 million in bribes while in office in the 1980s, from companies such as Samsung and Hyundai. He was ordered to return the bribes, but refused.

Part of Chun's fortune was funneled into the United States through his son, who purchased a $2.2 million house in Newport Beach, California, according to South Korean prosecutors and real-estate records.

Millions of dollars from Chun's bribery proceeds were hidden in bearer bonds, which are notoriously difficult to trace. Unlike regular bonds, which belong to registered owners, there is no record kept about the ownership or transfer of bearer bonds. The bonds can be cashed out by whoever has them.

Former South Korean President Chun Doo-hwan addresses the press at the White House in 1985. Chun's relatives later gained permanent residency in the United States by using money Chun obtained through bribes. (Bettmann via Getty Images)

In 2008, Chun's daughter-in-law, a South Korean actress named Park Sang-ah, applied for an immigrant investor visa. Park listed her husband's bearer bonds as the source of her funds without mentioning that the money had been initially provided to him by Chun. Eight months later, Park and her children received their conditional U.S. permanent residency cards in the mail.

In 2013, at the request of South Korean prosecutors, the U.S. Justice Department launched an investigation into the Chun family's wealth in the United States and subsequently seized $1.2 million of the family's U.S. assets in the United States. The money was returned to South Korea. Despite that, Chun's family members have retained their residency status.

Chun's relatives obtained their permanent residency by investing in an EB-5 project managed by the Philadelphia Industrial Development Corporation, a nonprofit company. The PIDC pooled Chun's $500,000 with money from 200 other foreign investors to finance an expansion of the Pennsylvania Convention Center in downtown Philadelphia.

The same project in Philadelphia also helped to secure permanent residency for Qiao Jianjun, a Chinese government official accused of embezzling more than $40 million from a state-owned grain storehouse, according to reports in the People's Daily, the Chinese Communist Party's newspaper. Qiao had divorced his wife, Shilan Zhao, in China in 2001, a fact he did not disclose to U.S. immigration authorities. When Zhao applied for an EB-5 visa, Qiao qualified for U.S. permanent residency as an applicant's spouse.

The Justice Department launched an investigation only when it was tipped off by Chinese authorities. In January 2014, a federal grand jury indicted Zhao and her ex-husband, Qiao, for immigration fraud, money laundering and internationally transporting stolen funds. Zhao was arrested and released on bail. Federal authorities are pursuing Qiao, whose whereabouts remain unknown.

A trial has been set for February 2017. U.S. government attorneys have filed asset forfeiture cases to recover real estate linked to Qiao and Zhao in Flushing, New York, and Monterey Park, California.

In April 2015, Qiao appeared on the Chinese government's list of 100 "most wanted" officials who fled abroad after being accused of crimes such as bribery and corruption. He and 39 other government officials and state-owned enterprise leaders on the list allegedly fled to the United States.

The list, called "Operation Skynet," is part of Chinese President Xi Jinping's anti-corruption campaign, which has vowed to take down what Chinese officials describe as corrupt "tigers" and "flies" within the country's ruling Communist Party.

Fengxian Hu was another fugitive on China's list. A former army singer and radio broadcaster, Hu headed the state-owned broadcasting company that had a joint venture with Pepsi to distribute soft drinks in Sichuan province. In 2002, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal reported that Pepsi had accused Hu of looting the joint venture and using company funds to buy fancy cars and go on European tours.

The same year, in a widely publicized move, Pepsi filed a case with international arbitrators in Stockholm, asking that the joint venture be dissolved. Despite this, Hu was given a visa that allowed him to fly regularly to Las Vegas, where he was a VIP client at the MGM casino.

In January 2010, Chinese authorities investigated Hu for corruption. But the month before, Hu had entered the United States on a B1 visitor visa, joining his wife, a U.S. citizen living in New York.

Hu tried to obtain a green card through his wife, but the petition was rejected by U.S. immigration authorities. He applied for asylum instead.

Meanwhile, he had gotten into trouble in the United States for losing millions in a Las Vegas casino and failing to pay a $12 million gambling debt. In 2012, he was indicted in a Nevada court on two counts of theft and one count of intentionally passing a check without sufficient funds.

Hu pled not guilty to the charges; his lawyers claimed that his checks bounced because his bank account had been closed by Chinese authorities. The charges against him in the U.S. were considered an aggravated felony, which is a common basis for deportation. Hu, however, had a pending asylum case and so could not be deported.

In August 2015, a New York immigration judge denied the asylum claim. But Hu's lawyers argued that he would be tortured if he returned to China and invoked the United Nations Convention Against Torture , which says that an alien may not be sent to a country where he is likely to be tortured. In the end, the immigration court suspended Hu's removal order, allowing him to remain in the United States and work here indefinitely. He will not, however, be given permanent residency or be allowed to travel outside the country.

The absence of an extradition treaty -- coupled with a high standard of living -- makes the United States a favored destination for Chinese officials and businessmen fleeing corruption charges.

In April 2015, Jeh Johnson, the Secretary for the Department of Homeland Security , made a 48-hour trip to Beijing. The visit was intended to pave the way for Chinese President Xi Jinping's U.S. visit in September 2015, according to a memorandum Johnson wrote, which was obtained through a request under the Freedom of Information Act.

In the memo, Johnson said the Chinese government is seeking 132 people it said have fled to the United States to avoid prosecution. This represents a greater number of fugitives than Chinese authorities have publicly acknowledged.

"I'm told that in prior discussions, the Chinese have been frustrated by the lack of any information from us about the 132 fugitives," Johnson wrote.

The Chinese request for assistance posed a dilemma for the United States. American officials are concerned about a lack of fairness in China's criminal justice system. Human rights groups say that China continues to use torture to extract false confessions from suspected criminals. Torture has also been documented to be part of shuanggui -- a secretive discipline process reserved for members of the Chinese Communist Party.

Some analysts see the crackdown on corrupt officials as part of a purge aimed at the current regime's political rivals and ideological enemies. U.S. officials say this makes returning corrupt officials to China a delicate issue for the United States.

In 2003, headlines around the world reported widespread street protests in Bolivia that led to security forces killing 58 people, most of them members of indigenous groups. Not long afterward, as protesters massed up on the streets of La Paz demanding his resignation, Bolivian President Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada resigned and fled his country along with his defense minister, Jose Carlos Sanchez Berzain.

The two men flew to the United States, where they continue to reside. In 2006, Berzain applied for political asylum, which he was granted in 2007. On his application, when the form asked, "Have you or your family members ever been accused, charged, arrested, detained, interrogated, convicted and sentenced, or imprisoned in any country other than the United States?" Berzain checked the box "no," even though by then he and de Lozada had been formally accused of genocide by Bolivia's attorney general. The indictment was approved by Bolivia's Supreme Court in 2007. Berzain also stated on his application that the State Department had arranged for his travel to the United States.

The de Lozada administration was vocally pro-American. Before it was ousted, officials had announced they would facilitate gas exports to the United States.

After their departure, Bolivia's attorney general publicly stated that the administration had embezzled millions from government coffers, but did not formally file charges. He said de Lozada had taken some $22 million from the country's reserve funds before fleeing.

De Lozada and members of his administration have dismissed the allegations as part of a politically motivated smear campaign, but there is evidence to suggest irregularities may have occurred in the handling of the reserve funds. The former president signed a decree shortly before leaving office authorizing the interior and finance ministers to withdraw money from Bolivia's reserve funds without going through the normal approval process. De Lozada's former interior minister pleaded guilty in 2004 to embezzlement after $270,000 in cash was found in an associate's home.

De Lozada, a mining mogul before he became president, moved to Chevy Chase, Maryland, an upscale suburb of Washington, D.C. He now lives in a two-story brick house bought for $1.4 million by Macalester Limited, a limited liability company that was formed in the British Virgin Islands and lists a post office box in the Bahamas as its principal address.

De Lozada's immigration status is unclear. He said in a sworn deposition in 2015 that he was not a U.S. citizen. His son-in-law, who spoke to ProPublica on his behalf, would not say whether de Lozada had applied for asylum.

Berzain, meanwhile, settled in South Florida. Records show that he and his brother-in-law personally own or are listed as officers or members of business entities that together control around $9 million worth of Miami real estate.

Some of the purchases were made in the names of entities that appear to list different variations of Berzain's name in business records.

In addition, in the purchase of two properties, Berzain's name was added to business records only after the deal had gone through. Berzain's brother-in-law incorporated a company called Warren USA Corp in October 2010, for example, and the company purchased a $1.4 million residential property the following month. Three weeks after Warren USA Corp became the owner of an elegant Spanish-style villa in Key Biscayne, Berzain was added as the company's secretary.

The following year, in May 2011, Berzain's brother-in-law created Galen KB Corp and registered as the company's president. A month later, Galen KB Corp purchased a $250,000 condo. In August, Berzain replaced his brother-in-law as the company's president, according to business records. Berzain is no longer listed as a company officer in either company.

During an interview in January, Berzain told ProPublica "I don't have any companies." When asked about several of the companies associated with his name or address in public records, the former defense minister said he had a consulting firm that helped clients set up companies and that he was sometimes added to the board of directors. Efforts to reach Berzain's brother-in-law, a wealthy businessman and the owner of a bus company in Bolivia, were unsuccessful. Berzain's brother-in-law has not been accused of any wrongdoing.

The practice of purchasing real estate in the name of a business entity like a limited liability company, or LLC, is a common and legal practice in high-end real-estate markets, and one that enables celebrities and other wealthy individuals to protect their privacy.

But the practice also allows foreign officials to hide ill-gotten gains. U.S. regulations allow individuals to form business entities like LLCs without disclosing the beneficial owner. The LLCs can be registered in the names of lawyers, accountants or other associates -- or even anonymously in some states -- and used to purchase real estate, making it nearly impossible to determine the actual owner of a property.

Government investigators and lawmakers have pointed out persistent gaps in U.S. policy that have enabled corrupt officials to evade justice and hide their assets in this country. But little has changed.

Last year, a U.S. Government Accountability Office investigation said it can be "difficult" for immigration officials to identify the true source of an immigrant investor's funds. Immigration officials told the government auditors that EB-5 applicants with ties to corruption, the drug trade, human trafficking and other criminal activities have a strong incentive to omit key details about their financial histories or lie on their applications.

"It's very easy to get lost in the noise if you're a bad person," said Seto Bagdoyan, the accountability office's director of forensic audits, who co-authored the GAO report.

Immigration officials, he added, have an "almost nonexistent" ability to thoroughly evaluate investors' backgrounds and trace their assets.

Despite such weaknesses, Congress has continually extended the EB-5 program with minor changes. The program is backed by real-estate lobbyists who argue that it is a crucial source of financing for luxury condos and hotels. The program is expected to thrive in a Trump presidency because the president-elect is a developer and his son-in-law Jared Kushner received $50 million in EB-5 funds to build a Trump-branded tower in New Jersey.

In 2010, a Senate report described how powerful foreign officials and their relatives moved millions of dollars in suspect funds into the United States. The report said investors bypassed anti-money laundering regulations with help from U.S. lawyers, real-estate agents, and banking institutions. Last year, ABC News reported that lobbyists for real estate and other business groups spent $30 million in 2015 in an effort to protect the EB-5 program.

Senate investigators proposed legislation that would require companies to disclose their beneficial owners and make it easier for authorities to restrict entry, deny visas and deport corrupt foreign officials.

A few of the proposals have been adopted, but they have not made much difference. Banks have stepped up their efforts to identify corrupt officials and monitor their accounts. Professional groups such as the American Bar Association have issued non-binding guidelines for their members on compliance with anti-money-laundering controls. The U.S. government has also worked with the Financial Action Task Force , an international body set up to fight money laundering, to bring its anti-corruption controls in accordance with the body's guidelines.

In May, the Treasury Department enacted a new rule that will take full effect in 2018 and will require financial institutions to identify the beneficial owners of shell companies. Some advocates see the rule as a step backward. The new rule allows shell companies to designate the manager of the account as the beneficial owner, concealing the identity of the person ultimately exercising control.

The State Department declined to say what progress, if any, it has made on the Senate subcommittee's recommendation to more aggressively deny visas through Proclamation 7750. "The Department takes seriously congressional recommendations and devotes resources to addressing corruption worldwide," a State Department official wrote in response to questions.

In 2010, then-Attorney General Eric Holder launched the Kleptocracy Asset Recovery Initiative. The small unit, which has grown to include 16 attorneys, aims to recover assets in the United States that are tied to foreign corruption and return the money to the looted countries.

Over the past six years, the unit has filed around two dozen civil asset forfeiture cases in an attempt to seize money, real estate and other assets tied to government officials from 16 countries. Assets have ranged from a lone diamond-encrusted glove worn by Michael Jackson that was purchased by Equatorial Guinea's Vice President, Teodoro Obiang, to a $1 billion fund tied to Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak.

Yet most of the money the Department of Justice has pursued remains in limbo. The case involving Chun, the former president of South Korea, is one of only two instances in which corrupt gains have been returned to the home country through the Justice Department's efforts. The other arose when Justice Department officials returned $1.5 million to Taiwan from property bought with bribes paid to the family of Chun Shui Bian, the former president of Taiwan.

The agency faces myriad challenges when attempting to seize and return assets acquired by corrupt foreign officials, including a lack of witnesses, said Kendall Day, head of the Department of Justice's Asset Forfeiture and Money Laundering Section. These officials often shield their transactions through shell companies, offshore companies or a network of associates.

"The mission of the Kleptocracy Initiative is really to target what we call grand foreign corruption that impacts the U.S. financial system," Day said, citing the Chun case as an example.

The 2012 Magnitsky Act gives the government power to deny visas and freeze the assets of Russian nationals accused of corruption or human rights violations. The Global Magnitsky Act would extend the same sanctions to the rest of the world, but it has yet to be passed by Congress. Unlike Proclamation 7750, the Magnitsky laws require the government to publish a list of foreign government officials who are barred from the United States.

In addition, the Treasury Department imposed regulations this year that aim to crack down on the use of shell companies to purchase real estate in places like Miami and Manhattan. Title insurance companies are now required to identify the real owners of companies purchasing high-end real estate without a mortgage. These regulations, however, are temporary.

[Apr 02, 2019] 'Yats' Is No Longer the Guy by Robert Parry

Highly recommended!
This article by late Robert Parry is from 2016 but is still relevant in context of the current Ukrainian elections and the color revolution is Venezuela. The power of neoliberal propaganda is simply tremendous. For foreign events it is able to distort the story to such an extent that the most famous quote of CIA director William Casey "We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false" looks like constatation of already accomplished goal.
Apr 11, 2016 | consortiumnews.com

Exclusive: Several weeks before Ukraine's 2014 coup, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Nuland had already picked Arseniy Yatsenyuk to be the future leader, but now "Yats" is no longer the guy, writes Robert Parry.

In reporting on the resignation of Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, the major U.S. newspapers either ignored or distorted Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland's infamous intercepted phone call before the 2014 coup in which she declared "Yats is the guy!"

Though Nuland's phone call introduced many Americans to the previously obscure Yatsenyuk, its timing – a few weeks before the ouster of elected Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych – was never helpful to Washington's desired narrative of the Ukrainian people rising up on their own to oust a corrupt leader.

Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland, who pushed for the Ukraine coup and helped pick the post-coup leaders.

Instead, the conversation between Nuland and U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt sounded like two proconsuls picking which Ukrainian politicians would lead the new government. Nuland also disparaged the less aggressive approach of the European Union with the pithy put-down: "Fuck the E.U.!"

More importantly, the intercepted call, released onto YouTube in early February 2014, represented powerful evidence that these senior U.S. officials were plotting – or at least collaborating in – a coup d'etat against Ukraine's democratically elected president. So, the U.S. government and the mainstream U.S. media have since consigned this revealing discussion to the Great Memory Hole.

On Monday, in reporting on Yatsenyuk's Sunday speech in which he announced that he is stepping down, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal didn't mention the Nuland-Pyatt conversation at all. The New York Times did mention the call but misled its readers regarding its timing, making it appear as if the call followed rather than preceded the coup. That way the call sounded like two American officials routinely appraising Ukraine's future leaders, not plotting to oust one government and install another.

The Times article by Andrew E. Kramer said: "Before Mr. Yatsenyuk's appointment as prime minister in 2014, a leaked recording of a telephone conversation between Victoria J. Nuland, a United States assistant secretary of state, and the American ambassador in Ukraine, Geoffrey R. Pyatt, seemed to underscore the West's support for his candidacy. 'Yats is the guy,' Ms. Nuland had said."

Notice, however, that if you didn't know that the conversation occurred in late January or early February 2014, you wouldn't know that it preceded the Feb. 22, 2014 coup. You might have thought that it was just a supportive chat before Yatsenyuk got his new job.

You also wouldn't know that much of the Nuland-Pyatt conversation focused on how they were going to "glue this thing" or "midwife this thing," comments sounding like prima facie evidence that the U.S. government was engaged in "regime change" in Ukraine, on Russia's border.

The 'No Coup' Conclusion

But Kramer's lack of specificity about the timing and substance of the call fits with a long pattern of New York Times' bias in its coverage of the Ukraine crisis. On Jan. 4, 2015, nearly a year after the U.S.-backed coup, the Times published an "investigation" article declaring that there never had been a coup. It was just a case of President Yanukovych deciding to leave and not coming back.

That article reached its conclusion, in part, by ignoring the evidence of a coup, including the Nuland-Pyatt phone call. The story was co-written by Kramer and so it is interesting to know that he was at least aware of the "Yats is the guy" reference although it was ignored in last year's long-form article.

Instead, Kramer and his co-author Andrew Higgins took pains to mock anyone who actually looked at the evidence and dared reach the disfavored conclusion about a coup. If you did, you were some rube deluded by Russian propaganda.

"Russia has attributed Mr. Yanukovych's ouster to what it portrays as a violent, 'neo-fascist' coup supported and even choreographed by the West and dressed up as a popular uprising," Higgins and Kramer wrote . "Few outside the Russian propaganda bubble ever seriously entertained the Kremlin's line. But almost a year after the fall of Mr. Yanukovych's government, questions remain about how and why it collapsed so quickly and completely."

The Times' article concluded that Yanukovych "was not so much overthrown as cast adrift by his own allies, and that Western officials were just as surprised by the meltdown as anyone else. The allies' desertion, fueled in large part by fear, was accelerated by the seizing by protesters of a large stock of weapons in the west of the country. But just as important, the review of the final hours shows, was the panic in government ranks created by Mr. Yanukovych's own efforts to make peace."

Yet, one might wonder what the Times thinks a coup looks like. Indeed, the Ukrainian coup had many of the same earmarks as such classics as the CIA-engineered regime changes in Iran in 1953 and in Guatemala in 1954.

The way those coups played out is now historically well known. Secret U.S. government operatives planted nasty propaganda about the targeted leader, stirred up political and economic chaos, conspired with rival political leaders, spread rumors of worse violence to come and then – as political institutions collapsed – watched as the scared but duly elected leader made a hasty departure.

In Iran, the coup reinstalled the autocratic Shah who then ruled with a heavy hand for the next quarter century; in Guatemala, the coup led to more than three decades of brutal military regimes and the killing of some 200,000 Guatemalans.

Coups don't have to involve army tanks occupying the public squares, although that is an alternative model which follows many of the same initial steps except that the military is brought in at the end. The military coup was a common approach especially in Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s.

' Color Revolutions'

But the preferred method in more recent years has been the "color revolution," which operates behind the façade of a "peaceful" popular uprising and international pressure on the targeted leader to show restraint until it's too late to stop the coup. Despite the restraint, the leader is still accused of gross human rights violations, all the better to justify his removal.

Later, the ousted leader may get an image makeover; instead of a cruel bully, he is ridiculed for not showing sufficient resolve and letting his base of support melt away, as happened with Mohammad Mossadegh in Iran and Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala.

But the reality of what happened in Ukraine was never hard to figure out. Nor did you have to be inside "the Russian propaganda bubble" to recognize it. George Friedman, the founder of the global intelligence firm Stratfor, called Yanukovych's overthrow "the most blatant coup in history."

Which is what it appears if you consider the evidence. The first step in the process was to create tensions around the issue of pulling Ukraine out of Russia's economic orbit and capturing it in the European Union's gravity, a plan defined by influential American neocons in 2013.

On Sept. 26, 2013, National Endowment for Democracy President Carl Gershman, who has been a major neocon paymaster for decades, took to the op-ed page of the neocon Washington Post and called Ukraine "the biggest prize" and an important interim step toward toppling Russian President Vladimir Putin.

At the time, Gershman, whose NED is funded by the U.S. Congress to the tune of about $100 million a year, was financing scores of projects inside Ukraine training activists, paying for journalists and organizing business groups.

As for the even bigger prize -- Putin -- Gershman wrote: "Ukraine's choice to join Europe will accelerate the demise of the ideology of Russian imperialism that Putin represents. Russians, too, face a choice, and Putin may find himself on the losing end not just in the near abroad but within Russia itself."

At that time, in early fall 2013, Ukraine's President Yanukovych was exploring the idea of reaching out to Europe with an association agreement. But he got cold feet in November 2013 when economic experts in Kiev advised him that the Ukrainian economy would suffer a $160 billion hit if it separated from Russia, its eastern neighbor and major trading partner. There was also the West's demand that Ukraine accept a harsh austerity plan from the International Monetary Fund.

Yanukovych wanted more time for the E.U. negotiations, but his decision angered many western Ukrainians who saw their future more attached to Europe than Russia. Tens of thousands of protesters began camping out at Maidan Square in Kiev, with Yanukovych ordering the police to show restraint.

Meanwhile, with Yanukovych shifting back toward Russia, which was offering a more generous $15 billion loan and discounted natural gas, he soon became the target of American neocons and the U.S. media, which portrayed Ukraine's political unrest as a black-and-white case of a brutal and corrupt Yanukovych opposed by a saintly "pro-democracy" movement.

Cheering an Uprising

The Maidan uprising was urged on by American neocons, including Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Nuland, who passed out cookies at the Maidan and reminded Ukrainian business leaders that the United States had invested $5 billion in their "European aspirations."

A screen shot of U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland speaking to U.S. and Ukrainian business leaders on Dec. 13, 2013, at an event sponsored by Chevron, with its logo to Nuland's left.

Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, also showed up, standing on stage with right-wing extremists from the Svoboda Party and telling the crowd that the United States was with them in their challenge to the Ukrainian government.

As the winter progressed, the protests grew more violent. Neo-Nazi and other extremist elements from Lviv and other western Ukrainian cities began arriving in well-organized brigades or "sotins" of 100 trained street fighters. Police were attacked with firebombs and other weapons as the violent protesters began seizing government buildings and unfurling Nazi banners and even a Confederate flag.

Though Yanukovych continued to order his police to show restraint, he was still depicted in the major U.S. news media as a brutal thug who was callously murdering his own people. The chaos reached a climax on Feb. 20 when mysterious snipers opened fire, killing both police and protesters. As the police retreated, the militants advanced brandishing firearms and other weapons. The confrontation led to significant loss of life, pushing the death toll to around 80 including more than a dozen police.

U.S. diplomats and the mainstream U.S. press immediately blamed Yanukovych for the sniper attack, though the circumstances remain murky to this day and some investigations have suggested that the lethal sniper fire came from buildings controlled by Right Sektor extremists.

To tamp down the worsening violence, a shaken Yanukovych signed a European-brokered deal on Feb. 21, in which he accepted reduced powers and an early election so he could be voted out of office. He also agreed to requests from Vice President Joe Biden to pull back the police.

The precipitous police withdrawal opened the path for the neo-Nazis and other street fighters to seize presidential offices and force Yanukovych and his officials to flee for their lives. The new coup regime was immediately declared "legitimate" by the U.S. State Department with Yanukovych sought on murder charges. Nuland's favorite, Yatsenyuk, became the new prime minister.

Throughout the crisis, the mainstream U.S. press hammered home the theme of white-hatted protesters versus a black-hatted president. The police were portrayed as brutal killers who fired on unarmed supporters of "democracy." The good-guy/bad-guy narrative was all the American people heard from the major media.

The New York Times went so far as to delete the slain policemen from the narrative and simply report that the police had killed all those who died in the Maidan. A typical Times report on March 5, 2014, summed up the storyline: "More than 80 protesters were shot to death by the police as an uprising spiraled out of control in mid-February."

The mainstream U.S. media also sought to discredit anyone who observed the obvious fact that an unconstitutional coup had just occurred. A new theme emerged that portrayed Yanukovych as simply deciding to abandon his government because of the moral pressure from the noble and peaceful Maidan protests.

Any reference to a "coup" was dismissed as "Russian propaganda." There was a parallel determination in the U.S. media to discredit or ignore evidence that neo-Nazi militias had played an important role in ousting Yanukovych and in the subsequent suppression of anti-coup resistance in eastern and southern Ukraine. That opposition among ethnic-Russian Ukrainians simply became "Russian aggression."

Nazi symbols on helmets worn by members of Ukraine's Azov battalion. (As filmed by a Norwegian film crew and shown on German TV)

This refusal to notice what was actually a remarkable story – the willful unleashing of Nazi storm troopers on a European population for the first time since World War II – reached absurd levels as The New York Times and The Washington Post buried references to the neo-Nazis at the end of stories, almost as afterthoughts.

The Washington Post went to the extreme of rationalizing Swastikas and other Nazi symbols by quoting one militia commander as calling them "romantic" gestures by impressionable young men. [See Consortiumnews.com's " Ukraine's 'Romantic' Neo-Nazi Storm Troopers ."]

But today – more than two years after what U.S. and Ukrainian officials like to call "the Revolution of Dignity" – the U.S.-backed Ukrainian government is sinking into dysfunction, reliant on handouts from the IMF and Western governments.

And, in a move perhaps now more symbolic than substantive, Prime Minister Yatsenyuk is stepping down. Yats is no longer the guy.

Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America's Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com ).

Khalid Talaat , April 16, 2016 at 20:39

Is it too far fetched to think that all these color revolutions are a perfection of the process to unleash another fake color revolution, only this time it is a Red, White and Blue revolution here at home? Those that continue to booze and snooze while watching the tube will not know the difference until it is too late.

The freedom and tranquility of our country depends on finding and implementing a counterweight to the presstitutes and their propaganda. The alternative is too destructive in its natural development.

Abe , April 15, 2016 at 18:49

Yats and Porko are the guys who broke Ukraine. By the end of December 2015, Ukraine's gross domestic product had shrunk around 19 percent in comparison with 2013. Its decimated industrial sector needs less fuel. Yatsie did a heck of a job.

Abe , April 15, 2016 at 18:35

Carl Gershman: "Ukraine is the biggest prize" -- Paragraph 6 of https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/former-soviet-states-stand-up-to-russia-will-the-us/2013/09/26/b5ad2be4-246a-11e3-b75d-5b7f66349852_story.html

David Smith , April 12, 2016 at 13:51

The timing of "Yats" departure is ominous. Mid-April, six weeks from now would be the first chance to renew the invasion of DPR Donesk/Lugansk."Yats" failed in 2014, and didn't try in 2015. Who is "the new guy"? Will the new Prime Minister begin raving about renewing the holy war to recover the lost oblasts? 2016 is really Ukraine's last chance. Ukraine refuses to implement Minsk2, and they have been receiving lots of new weapons. I believe President Putin put the Syrian operation on " standby" not only to avoid approaching the border, provoking a Turkish intervention, but also so he can give undistracted attention to DPR Donesk/Lugansk.

Bill Rood , April 12, 2016 at 11:50

I guess I must be inside the Russian propaganda bubble. It was obvious to me when I looked at the YouTube videos of policemen burning after being hit with Molotov cocktails.

We played the same game of encouraging government "restraint" in Syria, where we demanded Assad free "political prisoners," but we now accuse him of deliberately encouraging ISIS by freeing those people, so that he can point to ISIS and ask, "Do you want that?" Targeted leaders are damned if they do and damned if they don't.

Andrei , April 12, 2016 at 10:26

"the Ukrainian coup had many of the same earmarks as such classics as the CIA-engineered regime changes in Iran in 1953 and in Guatemala in 1954", Romania 1989 Shots were fired by snipers in order to stirr the crowds (sounds familiar?) and also by the army after Ceasescu ran away, which resulted in civilians getting murdered. Could it possibly be that it was said : "Iliescu (next elected president) is the guy!" ?

Joe L. , April 12, 2016 at 11:00

Check out the attempted coup against Hugo Chavez in Venezuela 2002, that is very similar with protesters, snipers on rooftops, IMF immediately offering loans to the new coup government, new government positions for the coup plotters, complacency with the media – propaganda, funding by USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy etc. John Pilger documents how the coup occurred in his documentary "War on Democracy" – https://vimeo.com/16724719 .

archaos , April 12, 2016 at 09:45

It was noted in the minutes of Verkhovna Rada almost 2 years before Maidan 2 , that Geoffrey Pyatt was fomenting and funding destabilisation of Ukraine.
All of Svoboda Nazis in parliament (and other fascisti) then booed the MP who stated this.

Mark Thomason , April 12, 2016 at 06:57

Also, the Dutch voted "no" on the economic agreement the coup was meant to force through instead of the Russian agreement accepted by the President it overthrew. Now both "Yats" and the economic agreement are gone. All that is left is the war. Neocons are still happen. They wanted the war. They really want to overthrow Putin, and Ukraine was just a tool in that.

Realist , April 12, 2016 at 05:51

You're right, it doesn't have to be the military that carries out a coup by deploying tanks on the National Mall. In 2000, it was the United States Supreme Court that exceeded its constitutional authority and installed George W. Bush as president, though in reality he had lost that election. I wonder when that move will rightfully be characterized as a coup by the historians.

Bryan Hemming , April 12, 2016 at 04:00

"On Sept. 26, 2013, National Endowment for Democracy President Carl Gershman, who has been a major neocon paymaster for decades, took to the op-ed page of the neocon Washington Post and called Ukraine "the biggest prize" and an important interim step toward toppling Russian President Vladimir Putin."

It should be remembered that Victoria Nuland took up the post of Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs in Washington on September 18, 2013.

Coincidentally, two other women closely connected to events in Ukraine were also in Washington during September 2013.

Friend of Nuland and boss of the IMF, which has its own HQ in Washington, Christine Lagarde was swift to respond to a Ukraine request for IMF loans on February 27th 2014, just five days after the removal of Yanukovych on February 22nd. Lagarde is pictured with Baronness Catherine Ashton in Washington in a Facebook entry dated September 30th 2013. Ashton was High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy at the time.

Though visiting Kiev at the same time as Nuland in February 2014 Catherine Ashton never appeared in public with her, which seems a little odd considering the women were on the same mission, and talking to the same people. Nevertheless, despite appearing shy of being photographed with each other the two women weren't quite so shy of being pictured with leaders of the coup, including the right wing extremist, Oleh Tyahnybok.

Ashton refused to be drawn into commenting on Nuland's "Fuck the E.U.!" outburst, describing Nuland as "a friend of mine." The two women certainly weren't strangers, they had worked closely together before. September 2012 saw them involved in discussions with Iran negotiator Saeed Jalili over the country's supposed nuclear arms ambitions.

The question is not so much whether the three women talked about Ukraine's future – it would be ridiculous to think they did not – but how closely they worked together, and exactly how closely they might have been involved in events leading up to the overthrow of the legitimate government in Kiev. More on this here:

https://bryanhemming.wordpress.com/2015/04/01/double-double-toil-and-trouble-the-cauldron-of-kiev/

Pablo Diablo , April 11, 2016 at 22:56

Another failed "regime change". Aren't these guys (Neoconservatives) great. They fail, piss off/kill millions, yet seem to keep making money and retaining power. Time to WAKE UP AMERICA.

Skip Edwards , April 11, 2016 at 20:06

Read "The Devil'Chessboard" by David Talbot to understand what has been occurring as a result of America's Dark, Shadow government, an un-elected bunch of vicious psychopaths controlling our destiny; unless stopped. Get a clue and realize that "Yats is our guy" Victoria Nuland was Hillary Clinton's "gal." Hillary Clinton is Robert Kagen's "gal." Time to flush all these rats out of the hold and get on with our lives.

Joe L. , April 11, 2016 at 18:40

Mr. Parry thank you for delving into the proven history of coups and the parallels with Ukraine. It amazes me how anyone can outright deny this was a coup especially if they know anything about US coups going back to WW2 (Iran 1953, Guatemala 1954, Chile 1973, attempt in Venezuela 2002 etc. – and there are a whole slew more). I read before, as you have rightly pointed out, that in 1953 the CIA led a propaganda campaign in Iran against Mossadegh as well as financing opposition protesters and opposition government officials. Another angle, as well, is looking historically back to what papers such as the New York Times were reporting around the time of the coup in Iran – especially when we know that the US/Britain overthrew the democratically elected Mossadegh for their own oil interests (British Petroleum):

New York Times: "Mossadegh Plays with Fire" (August 15, 1953):

The world has so many trouble spots these days that one is apt to pass over the odd one here and there to preserve a little peace of mind. It would be well, however, to keep an eye on Iran, where matters are going from bad to worse, thanks to the machinations of Premier Mossadegh.

Some of us used to ascribe our inability to persuade Dr. Mossadegh of the validity of our ideas to the impossibility of making him understand or see things our way. We thought of him as a sincere, well-meaning, patriotic Iranian, who had a different point of view and made different deductions from the same set of facts. We now know that he is a power-hungry, personally ambitious, ruthless demagogue who is trampling upon the liberties of his own people. We have seen this onetime champion of liberty maintain martial law, curb freedom of the press, radio, speech and assembly, resort to illegal arrests and torture, dismiss the Senate, destroy the power of the Shah, take over control of the army, and now he is about to destroy the Majlis, which is the lower house of Parliament.

His power would seem to be complete, but he has alienated the traditional ruling classes -the aristocrats, landlords, financiers and tribal leaders. These elements are anti-Communist. So is the Shah and so are the army leaders and the urban middle classes. There is a traditional, historic fear, suspicion and dislike of Russia and the Russians. The peasants, who make up the overwhelming mass of the population, are illiterate and nonpolitical. Finally, there is still no evidence that the Tudeh (Communist) party is strong enough or well enough organized, financed and led to take power.

All this simply means that there is no immediate danger of a Communist coup or Russian intervention. On the other hand, Dr. Mossadegh is encouraging the Tudeh and is following policies which will make the Communists more and more dangerous. He is a sorcerer's apprentice, calling up forces he will not be able to control.

Iran is a weak, divided, poverty-stricken country which possesses an immense latent wealth in oil and a crucial strategic position. This is very different from neighboring Turkey, a strong, united, determined and advanced nation, which can afford to deal with the Russians because she has nothing to fear -and therefore the West has nothing to fear. Thanks largely to Dr. Mossadegh, there is much to fear in Iran.

http://www.mohammadmossadegh.com/news/new-york-times/august-15-1953/

My feeling is that the biggest sin that our society has is forgetting history. If we remembered history I would think that it would be very difficult to pull off coups but most media does not revisit history which proves US coups even against democracies. I actually think that the coup that occurred in Ukraine was similar to the attempted coup in Venezuela in 2002 with snipers on rooftops, immediate blame for the deaths on Hugo Chavez where media manipulated the footage, immediate acceptance of the temporary coup government by the US Government, immediately offering IMF loans for the new coup government, government positions for many of the coup plotters, and let us not leave out the funding for the coup coming from USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy. I also remember seeing the New York Times immediately blaming Chavez and praising the coup but when the coup was overturned and US fingerprints started to become revealed (with many of the coup plotters fleeing to the US) then the New York Times wrote a limited retraction buried in their paper. Shameless.

SFOMARCO , April 11, 2016 at 15:16

How was NED able to finance "scores of projects inside Ukraine training activists, paying for journalists and organizing business groups", not to mention to host such dignitaries as Cookie Nuland, Loser McCain and assorted Bidens? Seems like a recipe for a coup "hidden in plain sight".

Bob Van Noy , April 11, 2016 at 14:36

Ukraine, one would hope, represents the "Bridge Too Far" moment for the proponents of regime change. Surely Americans must be catching on to what we do for selected nations in the name of "giving them their freedoms". The Kagan Family, empowered by their newly endorsed candidate for President, Hillary Clinton, will feel justified in carrying on a new cold war, this time world wide. Of course they will not be doing the fighting, they, like Dick Cheney are the self appointed intellects of geopolitical chess, much like The Georgetown Set of the Kennedy era, they perceive themselves as the only ones smart enough to plan America's future.

Helen Marshall , April 11, 2016 at 17:11

I wish. How many Americans know ANYTHNG about what has happened in Ukraine, about Crimea and its history, and/or could even locate them on a map?

Pastor Agnostic , April 12, 2016 at 04:11

Nuland is merely the inhouse, PNAC female version of Sidney Blumenthal. Which raises the scary question. Who would she pick to be SecState?

[Apr 01, 2019] Amazon.com War with Russia From Putin Ukraine to Trump Russiagate (9781510745810) Stephen F. Cohen Books

Highly recommended!
Important book. Kindle sample
Notable quotes:
"... Washington has made many policies strongly influenced by' the demonizing of Putin -- a personal vilification far exceeding any ever applied to Soviet Russia's latter-day Communist leaders. ..."
"... As with all institutions, the demonization of Putin has its own history'. When he first appeared on the world scene as Boris Yeltsin's anointed successor, in 1999-2000, Putin was welcomed by' leading representatives of the US political-media establishment. The New York Times ' chief Moscow correspondent and other verifiers reported that Russia's new leader had an "emotional commitment to building a strong democracy." Two years later, President George W. Bush lauded his summit with Putin and "the beginning of a very' constructive relationship."' ..."
"... But the Putin-friendly narrative soon gave away to unrelenting Putin-bashing. In 2004, Times columnist Nicholas Kristof inadvertently explained why, at least partially. Kristof complained bitterly' of having been "suckered by' Mr. Putin. He is not a sober version of Boris Yeltsin." By 2006, a Wall Street Journal editor, expressing the establishment's revised opinion, declared it "time we start thinking of Vladimir Putin's Russia as an enemy of the United States." 10 , 11 The rest, as they' say, is history'. ..."
"... In America and elsewhere in the West, however, only purported "minuses" reckon in the extreme vilifying, or anti-cult, of Putin. Many are substantially uninformed, based on highly selective or unverified sources, and motivated by political grievances, including those of several Yeltsin-era oligarchs and their agents in the West. ..."
"... Putin is not the man who, after coming to power in 2000, "de-democratized" a Russian democracy established by President Boris Yeltsin in the 1990s and restored a system akin to Soviet "totalitarianism." ..."
"... Nor did Putim then make himself a tsar or Soviet-like autocrat, which means a despot with absolute power to turn his will into policy, the last Kremlin leader with that kind of power was Stalin, who died in 1953, and with him his 20-year mass terror. ..."
"... Putin is not a Kremlin leader who "reveres Stalin" and whose "Russia is a gangster shadow of Stalin's Soviet Union." 13 , 14 These assertions are so far-fetched and uninfoimed about Stalin's terror-ridden regime, Putin, and Russia today, they barely warrant comment. ..."
"... Nor did Putin create post-Soviet Russia's "kleptocratic economic system," with its oligarchic and other widespread corruption. This too took shape under Yeltsin during the Kremlin's shock-therapy "privatization" schemes of the 1990s, when the "swindlers and thieves" still denounced by today's opposition actually emerged. ..."
"... Which brings us to the most sinister allegation against him: Putin, trained as "a KGB thug," regularly orders the killing of inconvenient journalists and personal enemies, like a "mafia state boss." ..."
"... More recently, there is yet another allegation: Putin is a fascist and white supremacist. The accusation is made mostly, it seems, by people wishing to deflect attention from the role being played by neo-Nazis in US-backed Ukraine. ..."
"... Finally, at least for now. there is the ramifying demonization allegation that, as a foreign-policy leader. Putin has been exceedingly "aggressive" abroad and his behavior has been the sole cause of the new cold war. ..."
"... Embedded in the "aggressive Putin" axiom are two others. One is that Putin is a neo-Soviet leader who seeks to restore the Soviet Union at the expense of Russia's neighbors. Fie is obsessively misquoted as having said, in 2005, "The collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century," apparently ranking it above two World Wars. What he actually said was "a major geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century," as it was for most Russians. ..."
"... The other fallacious sub-axiom is that Putin has always been "anti-Western," specifically "anti-American," has "always viewed the United States" with "smoldering suspicions." -- so much that eventually he set into motion a "Plot Against America." ..."
"... Or, until he finally concluded that Russia would never be treated as an equal and that NATO had encroached too close, Putin was a full partner in the US-European clubs of major world leaders? Indeed, as late as May 2018, contrary to Russiagate allegations, he still hoped, as he had from the beginning, to rebuild Russia partly through economic partnerships with the West: "To attract capital from friendly companies and countries, we need good relations with Europe and with the whole world, including the United States." 3 " ..."
"... A few years earlier, Putin remarkably admitted that initially he had "illusions" about foreign policy, without specifying which. Perhaps he meant this, spoken at the end of 2017: "Our most serious mistake in relations with the West is that we trusted you too much. And your mistake is that you took that trust as weakness and abused it." 34 ..."
"... <img src="https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/S/amazon-avatars-global/default._CR0,0,1024,1024_SX48_.png"> P. Philips ..."
"... "In a Time of Universal Deceit -- Telling the Truth Is a Revolutionary Act" ..."
"... Professor Cohen is indeed a patriot of the highest order. The American and "Globalists" elites, particularly the dysfunctional United Kingdom, are engaging in a war of nerves with Russia. This war, which could turn nuclear for reasons discussed in this important book, is of no benefit to any person or nation. ..."
"... If you are a viewer of one of the legacy media outlets, be it Cable Television networks, with the exception of Tucker Carlson on Fox who has Professor Cohen as a frequent guest, or newspapers such as The New York Times, you have been exposed to falsehoods by remarkably ignorant individuals; ignorant of history, of the true nature of Russia (which defeated the Nazis in Europe at a loss of millions of lives) and most important, of actual military experience. America is neither an invincible or exceptional nation. And for those familiar with terminology of ancient history, it appears the so-called elites are suffering from hubris. ..."
Apr 01, 2019 | www.amazon.com

THE SPECTER OF AN EVIL-DOING VLADIMIR PUTIN HAS loomed over and undermined US thinking about Russia for at least a decade. Inescapably, it is therefore a theme that runs through this book. Henry' Kissinger deserves credit for having warned, perhaps alone among prominent American political figures, against this badly distorted image of Russia's leader since 2000: "The demonization of Vladimir Putin is not a policy. It is an alibi for not having one." 4

But Kissinger was also wrong. Washington has made many policies strongly influenced by' the demonizing of Putin -- a personal vilification far exceeding any ever applied to Soviet Russia's latter-day Communist leaders. Those policies spread from growing complaints in the early 2000s to US- Russian proxy wars in Georgia, Ukraine, Syria, and eventually even at home, in Russiagate allegations. Indeed, policy-makers adopted an earlier formulation by the late Senator .Tolm McCain as an integral part of a new and more dangerous Cold War: "Putin [is] an unreconstructed Russian imperialist and K.G.B. apparatchik.... His world is a brutish, cynical place.... We must prevent the darkness of Mr. Putin's world from befalling more of humanity'." 3

Mainstream media outlets have play'ed a major prosecutorial role in the demonization. Far from aty'pically', the Washington Post's editorial page editor wrote, "Putin likes to make the bodies bounce.... The rule-by-fear is Soviet, but this time there is no ideology -- only a noxious mixture of personal aggrandizement, xenophobia, homophobia and primitive anti-Americanism." 6 Esteemed publications and writers now routinely degrade themselves by competing to denigrate "the flabbily muscled form" of the "small gray ghoul named Vladimir Putin." 7 , 8 There are hundreds of such examples, if not more, over many years. Vilifying Russia's leader has become a canon in the orthodox US narrative of the new Cold War.

As with all institutions, the demonization of Putin has its own history'. When he first appeared on the world scene as Boris Yeltsin's anointed successor, in 1999-2000, Putin was welcomed by' leading representatives of the US political-media establishment. The New York Times ' chief Moscow correspondent and other verifiers reported that Russia's new leader had an "emotional commitment to building a strong democracy." Two years later, President George W. Bush lauded his summit with Putin and "the beginning of a very' constructive relationship."'

But the Putin-friendly narrative soon gave away to unrelenting Putin-bashing. In 2004, Times columnist Nicholas Kristof inadvertently explained why, at least partially. Kristof complained bitterly' of having been "suckered by' Mr. Putin. He is not a sober version of Boris Yeltsin." By 2006, a Wall Street Journal editor, expressing the establishment's revised opinion, declared it "time we start thinking of Vladimir Putin's Russia as an enemy of the United States." 10 , 11 The rest, as they' say, is history'.

Who has Putin really been during his many years in power? We may' have to leave this large, complex question to future historians, when materials for full biographical study -- memoirs, archive documents, and others -- are available. Even so, it may surprise readers to know that Russia's own historians, policy intellectuals, and journalists already argue publicly and differ considerably as to the "pluses and minuses" of Putin's leadership. (My own evaluation is somewhere in the middle.)

In America and elsewhere in the West, however, only purported "minuses" reckon in the extreme vilifying, or anti-cult, of Putin. Many are substantially uninformed, based on highly selective or unverified sources, and motivated by political grievances, including those of several Yeltsin-era oligarchs and their agents in the West.

By identifying and examining, however briefly, the primary "minuses" that underpin the demonization of Putin, we can understand at least who he is not:

Embedded in the "aggressive Putin" axiom are two others. One is that Putin is a neo-Soviet leader who seeks to restore the Soviet Union at the expense of Russia's neighbors. Fie is obsessively misquoted as having said, in 2005, "The collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century," apparently ranking it above two World Wars. What he actually said was "a major geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century," as it was for most Russians.

Though often critical of the Soviet system and its two formative leaders, Lenin and Stalin, Putin, like most of his generation, naturally remains in part a Soviet person. But what he said in 2010 reflects his real perspective and that of very many other Russians: "Anyone who does not regret the break-up of the Soviet Union has no heart. Anyone who wants its rebirth in its previous form has no head." 28 , 29

The other fallacious sub-axiom is that Putin has always been "anti-Western," specifically "anti-American," has "always viewed the United States" with "smoldering suspicions." -- so much that eventually he set into motion a "Plot Against America." 30 , 31 A simple reading of his years in power tells us otherwise. A Westernized Russian, Putin came to the presidency in 2000 in the still prevailing tradition of Gorbachev and Yeltsin -- in hope of a "strategic friendship and partnership" with the United States.

How else to explain Putin's abundant assistant to US forces fighting in Afghanistan after 9/1 1 and continued facilitation of supplying American and NATO troops there? Or his backing of harsh sanctions against Iran's nuclear ambitions and refusal to sell Tehran a highly effective air-defense system? Or the information his intelligence services shared with Washington that if heeded could have prevented the Boston Marathon bombings in April 2012?

Or, until he finally concluded that Russia would never be treated as an equal and that NATO had encroached too close, Putin was a full partner in the US-European clubs of major world leaders? Indeed, as late as May 2018, contrary to Russiagate allegations, he still hoped, as he had from the beginning, to rebuild Russia partly through economic partnerships with the West: "To attract capital from friendly companies and countries, we need good relations with Europe and with the whole world, including the United States." 3 "

Given all that has happened during the past nearly two decades -- particularly what Putin and other Russian leaders perceive to have happened -- it would be remarkable if his views of the W^est, especially America, had not changed. As he remarked in 2018, "We all change." 33

A few years earlier, Putin remarkably admitted that initially he had "illusions" about foreign policy, without specifying which. Perhaps he meant this, spoken at the end of 2017: "Our most serious mistake in relations with the West is that we trusted you too much. And your mistake is that you took that trust as weakness and abused it." 34

P. Philips , December 6, 2018

"In a Time of Universal Deceit -- Telling the Truth Is a Revolutionary Act"

"In a Time of Universal Deceit -- Telling the Truth Is a Revolutionary Act" is a well known quotation (but probably not of George Orwell). And in telling the truth about Russia and that the current "war of nerves" is not in the interests of either the American People or national security, Professor Cohen in this book has in fact done a revolutionary act.

Like a denizen of Plato's cave, or being in the film the Matrix, most people have no idea what the truth is. And the questions raised by Professor Cohen are a great service in the cause of the truth. As Professor Cohen writes in his introduction To His Readers:

"My scholarly work -- my biography of Nikolai Bukharin and essays collected in Rethinking the Soviet Experience and Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives, for example -- has always been controversial because it has been what scholars term "revisionist" -- reconsiderations, based on new research and perspectives, of prevailing interpretations of Soviet and post-Soviet Russian history. But the "controversy" surrounding me since 2014, mostly in reaction to the contents of this book, has been different -- inspired by usually vacuous, defamatory assaults on me as "Putin's No. 1 American Apologist," "Best Friend," and the like. I never respond specifically to these slurs because they offer no truly substantive criticism of my arguments, only ad hominem attacks. Instead, I argue, as readers will see in the first section, that I am a patriot of American national security, that the orthodox policies my assailants promote are gravely endangering our security, and that therefore we -- I and others they assail -- are patriotic heretics. Here too readers can judge."

Cohen, Stephen F.. War with Russia (Kindle Locations 131-139). Hot Books. Kindle Edition.

Professor Cohen is indeed a patriot of the highest order. The American and "Globalists" elites, particularly the dysfunctional United Kingdom, are engaging in a war of nerves with Russia. This war, which could turn nuclear for reasons discussed in this important book, is of no benefit to any person or nation.

Indeed, with the hysteria on "climate change" isn't it odd that other than Professor Cohen's voice, there are no prominent figures warning of the devastation that nuclear war would bring?

If you are a viewer of one of the legacy media outlets, be it Cable Television networks, with the exception of Tucker Carlson on Fox who has Professor Cohen as a frequent guest, or newspapers such as The New York Times, you have been exposed to falsehoods by remarkably ignorant individuals; ignorant of history, of the true nature of Russia (which defeated the Nazis in Europe at a loss of millions of lives) and most important, of actual military experience. America is neither an invincible or exceptional nation. And for those familiar with terminology of ancient history, it appears the so-called elites are suffering from hubris.

I cannot recommend Professor Cohen's work with sufficient superlatives; his arguments are erudite, clearly stated, supported by the facts and ultimately irrefutable. If enough people find Professor Cohen's work and raise their voices to their oblivious politicians and profiteers from war to stop further confrontation between Russia and America, then this book has served a noble purpose.

If nothing else, educate yourself by reading this work to discover what the *truth* is. And the truth is something sacred.

America and the world owe Professor Cohen a great debt. "Blessed are the peace makers..."

[Mar 31, 2019] What is the purpose of Russiagate hysteria?

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... The purpose is very simple: to create the perception that the government of Russia still somehow controls or manipulates the US government and thus gains some undeserved improvements in relations with the U.S. Once such perception is created, people will demand that relations with Russia are worsened to return them to a "fair" level. While in reality these relations have been systematically destroyed by the Western establishment (CFR) for many years. ..."
"... It's a typical inversion to hide the hybrid war of the Western establishment against Russian people. Yes, Russian people. Not Putin, not Russian Army, not Russian intelligence services, but Russian people. Russians are not to be allowed to have any kind of industries, nor should they be allowed to know their true history, nor should they possess so much land. ..."
"... Russians should work in coal mines for a dollar a day, while their wives work as prostitutes in Europe. That's the maximum level of development that the Western establishment would allow Russians to have (see Ukraine for a demo version). Why? Because Russians are subhumans. ..."
"... The end goal of the Western establishment is a complete military, economic, psychological, and spiritual destruction of Russia, secession of national republics (even though in some of them up to 50% of population are Russians, but this will be ignored, as it has been in former Soviet republics), then, finally, dismemberment of what remains of Russia into separate states warring with each other. ..."
"... The very concept of Russian nation should disappear. Siberians will call their language "Siberian", Muscovites will call their language "Moscovian", Pomorians will call their language "Pomorian", etc. The U.S. Department of State will, of course, endorse such terminology, just like they endorse the term "Montenegrian language", even though it's the same Serbo-Croatian language with the same Cyrillic writing system. ..."
Mar 31, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

S , Mar 30, 2019 8:51:37 PM | link

@b:
What is the purpose of making that claim?

The purpose is very simple: to create the perception that the government of Russia still somehow controls or manipulates the US government and thus gains some undeserved improvements in relations with the U.S. Once such perception is created, people will demand that relations with Russia are worsened to return them to a "fair" level. While in reality these relations have been systematically destroyed by the Western establishment (CFR) for many years.

It's a typical inversion to hide the hybrid war of the Western establishment against Russian people. Yes, Russian people. Not Putin, not Russian Army, not Russian intelligence services, but Russian people. Russians are not to be allowed to have any kind of industries, nor should they be allowed to know their true history, nor should they possess so much land.

Russians should work in coal mines for a dollar a day, while their wives work as prostitutes in Europe. That's the maximum level of development that the Western establishment would allow Russians to have (see Ukraine for a demo version). Why? Because Russians are subhumans.

Whatever they do, it's always wrong, bad, oppressive, etc. Russians are bad because they're bad. They must be "taught a lesson", "put into their place". It would, of course, be beneficial and highly profitable for Europeans to break with Anglo-Saxons and to live in peace and harmony with Russia, but Europeans simply can not overcome their racism towards Russians. The young Europeans are just as racist, with their incessant memes about "squatting Russians in tracksuits", "drunken Russians", etc., as if there's nothing else that is notable about a country of 147 million people.

The end goal of the Western establishment is a complete military, economic, psychological, and spiritual destruction of Russia, secession of national republics (even though in some of them up to 50% of population are Russians, but this will be ignored, as it has been in former Soviet republics), then, finally, dismemberment of what remains of Russia into separate states warring with each other.

The very concept of Russian nation should disappear. Siberians will call their language "Siberian", Muscovites will call their language "Moscovian", Pomorians will call their language "Pomorian", etc. The U.S. Department of State will, of course, endorse such terminology, just like they endorse the term "Montenegrian language", even though it's the same Serbo-Croatian language with the same Cyrillic writing system.

[Mar 30, 2019] The US desperately needs Venezuelan oil

Highly recommended!
Mar 30, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

dh-mtl , Mar 30, 2019 5:00:04 PM | link

The U.S. desperately needs Venezuelan oil.

They lost control of Saudi Arabia, after trying to take down MBS and then betraying him by unexpectedly allowing waivers on Iranian oil in November.

The U.S. cannot take down Iran without Venezuelan oil. What is worse, right now they don't have access to enough heavy oil to meet their own needs.

Controlling the world oil trade is central to Trump's strategy for the U.S. to continue its empire. Without Venezuelan oil, the U.S. is a bit player in the energy markets, and will remain so.

Having Russia block the U.S. in Venezuela adds insult to injury. After Crimea and Syria, now Venezuela, Russia exposes the U.S. as a loud mouthed-bully without the capacity to back up its threats, a 'toothless tiger', an 'emperor without clothes'.

If the U.S. cannot dislodge Russia from Venezuela, its days as 'global hegemon' are finished. For this reason the U.S. will continue escalating the situation with ever-riskier actions, until it succeeds or breaks.

In the same manor, if Russia backs off, its resistance to the U.S. is finished. And the U.S. will eventually move to destroy Russia, like it has been actively trying to do for the past 30 years. Russia cannot and will not back off.

Venezuela thus becomes the stage where the final act in the clash of empires plays out. Will the world become a multi-polar world, in which the U.S. becomes a relatively isolated and insignificant pole? Or will the world become more fully dominated by a brutal, erratic hegemon?

All options are on the table. For both sides!

[Mar 30, 2019] The Real Costs of Russiagate

Highly recommended!
So Russiagate smoothly transferred in Neo-McCarthyism and it will poison the US political atmosphere for a decade or two.
Notable quotes:
"... But as I foresaw well before the summary of Mueller's "Russia investigation" appeared, there is unlikely to be much, if any. Too many personal and organizational interests are too deeply invested in Russiagate. Not surprisingly, leading perpetrators instead immediately met the summary with a torrent of denials, goal-post shifts, obfuscations, and calls for more Russiagate "investigations." ..."
"... Clamorous allegations that the Kremlin "attacked our elections" and thereby put Trump in the White House, despite the lack of any evidence, cast doubt on the legitimacy of American elections ..."
"... Persistent demands to "secure our elections from hostile powers" -- a politically and financially profitable mania, it seems -- can only further abet and perpetuate declining confidence in the entire electoral process ..."
"... Still more, if some crude Russian social-media outputs could so dupe voters, what does this tell us about what US elites, which originated these allegations, really think of those voters, of the American people? ..."
"... Mainstream media are, of course, a foundational institution of American democracy, especially national ones, newspapers and television, with immense influence inside the Beltway and, in ramifying synergic ways, throughout the country. Their Russiagate media malpractice, as I have termed it, may have been the worst such episode in modern American history. ..."
"... Almost equally remarkable and lamentable, we learn that even now, after Mueller's finding is known, top executives of the Times and other leading Russiagate media outlets, including The Washington Post and CNN, " have no regrets ." ..."
"... Leading members of the party initiated, inflated, and prolonged it. They did nothing to prevent inquisitors like Representatives Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell from becoming the cable-news face of the party. Or to rein in or disassociate the party from the outlandish excesses of "The Resistance." With very few exceptions, elected and other leading Democrats did nothing to stop -- and therefore further abetted -- the institutional damage being done by Russiagate allegations. ..."
"... Rachel Maddow continues to hype "the underlying reality that Russia did in fact attack us." By any reasonable definition of "attack," no, it did not, and scarcely any allegation could be more recklessly warmongering, a perception the Democratic Party will for this and other Russiagate commissions have to endure, or not. (When Mueller's full report is published, we will see if he too indulged in this dangerous absurdity. A few passages in the summary suggest he might have done so.) ..."
"... Finally, but potentially not least, the new Cold War with Russia has itself become an institution pervading American political, economic, media, and cultural life. Russiagate has made it more dangerous, more fraught with actual war, than the Cold War we survived, as I explain in War with Russia? Recall only that Russiagate allegations further demonized "Putin's Russia," thwarted Trump's necessary attempts to "cooperate with Russia" as somehow "treasonous," criminalized détente thinking and "inappropriate contacts with Russia" -- in short, policies and practices that previously helped to avert nuclear war. Meanwhile, the Russiagate spectacle has caused many ordinary Russians who once admired America to now be " derisive and scornful " toward our political life. ..."
Mar 30, 2019 | www.thenation.com

But as I foresaw well before the summary of Mueller's "Russia investigation" appeared, there is unlikely to be much, if any. Too many personal and organizational interests are too deeply invested in Russiagate. Not surprisingly, leading perpetrators instead immediately met the summary with a torrent of denials, goal-post shifts, obfuscations, and calls for more Russiagate "investigations." Joy Reid of MSNBC, which has been a citadel of Russiagate allegations along with CNN, even suggested that Mueller and Attorney General William Barr were themselves engaged in " a cover-up ."

Contrary to a number of major media outlets, from Bloomberg News to The Wall Street Journal , nor does Mueller's exculpatory finding actually mean that " Russiagate is dead " and indeed that " it expired in an instant ." Such conclusions reveal a lack of historical and political understanding. Nearly three years of Russiagate's toxic allegations have entered the American political-media elite bloodstream, and they almost certainly will reappear again and again in one form or another.

This is an exceedingly grave danger, because the real costs of Russiagate are not the estimated $25–40 million spent on the Mueller investigation but the corrosive damage it has already done to the institutions of American democracy -- damage done not by an alleged "Trump-Putin axis" but by Russsigate's perpetrators themselves. Having examined this collateral damage in my recently published book War with Russia? From Putin and Ukraine to Trump and Russiagate , I will only note them here.

§ Clamorous allegations that the Kremlin "attacked our elections" and thereby put Trump in the White House, despite the lack of any evidence, cast doubt on the legitimacy of American elections everywhere -- national, state, and local. If true, or even suspected, how can voters have confidence in the electoral foundations of American democracy? Persistent demands to "secure our elections from hostile powers" -- a politically and financially profitable mania, it seems -- can only further abet and perpetuate declining confidence in the entire electoral process.

Still more, if some crude Russian social-media outputs could so dupe voters, what does this tell us about what US elites, which originated these allegations, really think of those voters, of the American people?

§ Defamatory Russsiagate allegations that Trump was a "Kremlin puppet" and thus "illegitimate" were aimed at the president but hit the presidency itself, degrading the institution, bringing it under suspicion, casting doubt on its legitimacy. And if an "agent of a hostile foreign power" could occupy the White House once, a "Manchurian candidate," why not again? Will Republicans be able to resist making such allegations against a future Democratic president? In any event, Hillary Clinton's failed campaign manager, Robby Mook, has already told us that there will be a " next time ."

§ Mainstream media are, of course, a foundational institution of American democracy, especially national ones, newspapers and television, with immense influence inside the Beltway and, in ramifying synergic ways, throughout the country. Their Russiagate media malpractice, as I have termed it, may have been the worst such episode in modern American history. No mainstream media did anything to expose, for example, two crucial and fraudulent Russiagate documents -- the so-called Steele Dossier and the January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment -- but instead relied heavily on them for their own narratives. Little more need be said here about this institutional self-degradation. Glenn Greenwald and a few others followed and exposed it throughout, and now Matt Taibbi has given us a meticulously documented account of that systematic malpractice , concluding that Mueller's failure to confirm the media's Russiagate allegations "is a death-blow for the reputation of the American news media."

Nor, it must be added, was this entirely inadvertent or accidental. On August 8, 2016, the trend-setting New York Times published on its front page an astonishing editorial manifesto by its media critic. Asking whether "normal standards" should apply to candidate Trump, he explained that they should not: "You have to throw out the textbook American journalism has been using for the better part of the past half-century." Let others decide whether this Times proclamation unleashed the highly selective, unbalanced, questionably factual "journalism" that has so degraded Russiagate media or instead the publication sought to justify what was already underway. In either case, this remarkable -- and ramifying -- Times rejection of its own professed standards should not be forgotten. Almost equally remarkable and lamentable, we learn that even now, after Mueller's finding is known, top executives of the Times and other leading Russiagate media outlets, including The Washington Post and CNN, " have no regrets ."

§ For better or worse, America has a two-party political system, which means that the Democratic Party is also a foundational institution. Little more also need be pointed out regarding its self-degrading role in the Russiagate fraud. Leading members of the party initiated, inflated, and prolonged it. They did nothing to prevent inquisitors like Representatives Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell from becoming the cable-news face of the party. Or to rein in or disassociate the party from the outlandish excesses of "The Resistance." With very few exceptions, elected and other leading Democrats did nothing to stop -- and therefore further abetted -- the institutional damage being done by Russiagate allegations.

As for Mueller's finding, the party's virtual network, MSNBC, remains undeterred.

Rachel Maddow continues to hype "the underlying reality that Russia did in fact attack us." By any reasonable definition of "attack," no, it did not, and scarcely any allegation could be more recklessly warmongering, a perception the Democratic Party will for this and other Russiagate commissions have to endure, or not. (When Mueller's full report is published, we will see if he too indulged in this dangerous absurdity. A few passages in the summary suggest he might have done so.)

§ Finally, but potentially not least, the new Cold War with Russia has itself become an institution pervading American political, economic, media, and cultural life. Russiagate has made it more dangerous, more fraught with actual war, than the Cold War we survived, as I explain in War with Russia? Recall only that Russiagate allegations further demonized "Putin's Russia," thwarted Trump's necessary attempts to "cooperate with Russia" as somehow "treasonous," criminalized détente thinking and "inappropriate contacts with Russia" -- in short, policies and practices that previously helped to avert nuclear war. Meanwhile, the Russiagate spectacle has caused many ordinary Russians who once admired America to now be " derisive and scornful " toward our political life.

[Mar 24, 2019] The accountability that must follow Mueller's report

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... The bent cops at the FBI and the madmen like Brennan, Clapper and Comey, who treacherously used the government's forces against the Constitution, must be punished so severely as to make an example that will dissuade other midgets on horseback from making similar attempts to overturn the results of elections. ..."
"... At the bottom of the cauldron overflowing with political misdeeds shines the face of Hillary Clinton and the army of clever people who ran her 2016 campaign. They devised the clever, clever idea of creating the Steele Dossier in cahoots with Washington co-conspirators and the even more clever idea of marketing it back into the US political bloodstream through British intelligence channels by feeding it to the erratic and spiteful senator from Arizona whose staff peddled it all over Washington and New York. There must be retribution for this. ..."
"... I would be most interested if one of the legally competent members of this Committee – Robert Willman perhaps? – could give us us an idea of what charges could be leveled against Christopher Steele under U.S. law in relation to his clearly central role in this conspiracy. ..."
"... It also seems reasonably clear that he was not acting in isolation, and that there is a strong 'prima facie' case that senior figures in the British 'intelligence community' – notably Robert Hannigan and probably Sir Richard Dearlove – were involved, in which case the complicity is likely to have gone very much further. ..."
"... They devised the clever, clever idea of creating the Steele Dossier in cahoots with Washington co-conspirators and the even more clever of marketing it back into the US political bloodstream through British intelligence channels, by feeding it to the erratic and spiteful senator from Arizona whose staff peddled it all over Washington and New York. ..."
"... Both sides were furiously engaged in throwing mud at each other. Situation normal. Then an odd thing happens. A particularly foolish piece of mud comes along. All that Golden Showers nonsense. Regard that as normal if we please. I expect worse comes along sometimes. Then it turns out that that piece of mud comes from an Intelligence source. Situation no longer normal. ..."
"... The coup may be over, but the witch hunt will continue; ..."
"... Col. Lang is absolutely correct that those involved in attempting to reverse the results of the 2016 election, de-legitimize an elected president, and remove him should be thoroughly pursued through all avenues and procedures of the civil and criminal law. ..."
"... It's a dirty business. If half this stuff is true, and not just layers of increasingly unbelievable cover stories (I mean, a tangential example, is the whole Skripal thing a weirdly, too obviously fake cover show for what was in reality a "witness protection" operation? A witness who could and would reveal much? On this matter even, perhaps. Such obvious deceptions are harmful to respect for authority and the law.) ..."
Mar 24, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com
  1. President Trump was not indicted, nor did Mueller recommend an indictment against him for collusion or obstruction.
  2. There were no major disagreements between Mueller and his managers at the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ).
  3. The Russians who tried to interfere in the 2016 election were exposed and charged -- but no American was charged with any effort to conspire with Moscow and hijack the election.
  4. While nearly three dozen people were charged , including a few close to the president or who worked for his campaign, no one in proximity to the president was formally charged with colluding with Russia. Most, such as former national security adviser Michael Flynn or campaign adviser George Papadopoulos , were charged with process crimes or felonies unrelated to the main case, as in Paul Manafort 's secretive, multimillion-dollar foreign lobbying spree through Ukraine.

*********

Such omissions are so glaring as to constitute defrauding a federal court. And each and every participant to those omissions needs to be brought to justice.

An upcoming DOJ inspector general's report should trigger the beginning of that accountability in a court of law, and President Trump can assist the effort by declassifying all evidence of wrongdoing by FBI, CIA and DOJ officials. " The Hill

------------

Pilgrims, the seditious conspiracy to depose the elected president of the United States for conspiracy to commit treason with the Government of the Russian Federation has been defeated.

The bent cops at the FBI and the madmen like Brennan, Clapper and Comey, who treacherously used the government's forces against the Constitution, must be punished so severely as to make an example that will dissuade other midgets on horseback from making similar attempts to overturn the results of elections.

At the bottom of the cauldron overflowing with political misdeeds shines the face of Hillary Clinton and the army of clever people who ran her 2016 campaign. They devised the clever, clever idea of creating the Steele Dossier in cahoots with Washington co-conspirators and the even more clever idea of marketing it back into the US political bloodstream through British intelligence channels by feeding it to the erratic and spiteful senator from Arizona whose staff peddled it all over Washington and New York. There must be retribution for this.

The leftist press is already discounting the results of Mueller's investigation while gloating over how long the Democratic held House of Representatives can continue to search through Trump's life trying to find criminality.

AG Barr should stand Mueller up next to him at a press conference to make clear the results of his report and to answer questions about it. After that the prosecutions should begin. pl

https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/435394-the-wisdom-of-trumps-lawyers-and-the-accountability-that-must-follow

Posted at 09:00 AM in government , Justice , Politics | Permalink | 20 Comments

David Habakkuk , 14 hours ago

I would be most interested if one of the legally competent members of this Committee – Robert Willman perhaps? – could give us us an idea of what charges could be leveled against Christopher Steele under U.S. law in relation to his clearly central role in this conspiracy.

It also seems reasonably clear that he was not acting in isolation, and that there is a strong 'prima facie' case that senior figures in the British 'intelligence community' – notably Robert Hannigan and probably Sir Richard Dearlove – were involved, in which case the complicity is likely to have gone very much further.

The argument that declassification of relevant documentation would harm the intelligence relationship between the U.S. and U.K. has clearly been made with great emphasis from this side.

In fact, it is pure bollocks. A serious investigation on your side, which could lead to the kind of clean-out which should have happened when the scale of the corruption of intelligence in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq became clear, might pave the way for us to reconstruct reasonably functional intelligence services.

Doing this on both sides of the Atlantic might pave the way for a reconstruction of an intelligence relationship which was actually beneficial to both countries, as in recent years it patently has not been.

Whether there is a realistic prospect of people on your side opening the cans of worms on ours, as well as your own, of course remains a moot point.

English Outsider -> David Habakkuk , 12 hours ago
Mr Habakkuk,

I'm glad the Steele affair has been examined at the American end -

"They devised the clever, clever idea of creating the Steele Dossier in cahoots with Washington co-conspirators and the even more clever of marketing it back into the US political bloodstream through British intelligence channels, by feeding it to the erratic and spiteful senator from Arizona whose staff peddled it all over Washington and New York. "

What about the UK end? We're fussing over some little local difficulties in the UK at the moment and at our end the questions still remain - Who in the UK authorised it and how high did it go?

Mark Logan -> David Habakkuk , 9 hours ago

The problem with criminal prosecution is one must cite a Brit or US law which was violated. The only ones in US law that I am aware of stipulate that the plotting must be by means of violence, "by force". All this appears to me to be only the propagation of rumors.
English Outsider -> Mark Logan , 6 hours ago
I think it might be more the investigation of the propagation of rumours. Think back to that election campaign, and to the period before the inauguration.

Both sides were furiously engaged in throwing mud at each other. Situation normal. Then an odd thing happens. A particularly foolish piece of mud comes along. All that Golden Showers nonsense. Regard that as normal if we please. I expect worse comes along sometimes. Then it turns out that that piece of mud comes from an Intelligence source. Situation no longer normal.

With respect it is not propagating rumours to ask how that happened. As for my own interest in the affair, it is not propagating rumours to ask how a senior UK ex-Intelligence Officer comes to be mixed up in it all. I suppose I started to look on it as rather more than a prank or a few cogs slipping when that senior UK ex-Intelligence Officer got whisked away to a safe house. We're a penny pinching lot over here and we don't run to that sort of thing for nothing.

Pat Lang Mod -> English Outsider , 6 hours ago
Ex?
Mad_Max22 , 11 hours ago
An investigation could certainly be predicated on the reasonable suspicion that Steele, et al, conspired to defraud the United States, in this case a purposeful and knowing smear of a candidate for office; also, another potential violation could be lying to the FBI, T 18 USC 1001.

The problem, as I see it, is sorting out the malignant from the merely incompetent. As I've argued many times, the dossier should have been dismissed from the outset as a pile of garbage, empty of actionable content, because the ultimate sources could not be vetted: the information could not be said to be either credible or reliable. The information was acted on by screening it behind the reliabilty and credibility, so called, of Steele. So it would be necessary to show that Steele knew that the information, point by point, was false. This could be difficult. Steele's first line of defense would be that he threw everything that he heard from anyone at all into the mix in the expectation that the "professionals" would figure it out.

Yes, they were all partisan, Steele, his sources, his bosses, the so called professionals, and their partisanship would be easy to prove; and yes, almost assuredly their partisanship contributed, perhaps even explained, their defective judgement as to how to handle the scurrilous information, especially on the part of the so called professionals, but proving they actually knew the materials to be false would be difficult.

They couldn't know that it was false because they had no ability to run down the sources. The professionals would defend themselves by saying they had no ability to vet the sources but the information represented such a serious security threat that they had no alternative but to try to vet the information by launching the investigation against the targets. This puts the cart before the horse, represents an astonishing lack of judgement, especially considering the "exalted" positions in the Intel Community the people exercising the bad judgement occupied, but there it is - "we thought we were doing the right thing."

Perhaps this defense could be overcome by demonstrating that people at such high and important heights of government could not possible be so stupid... maybe.

And of course we have the orchestrated leaks to various media, the orchestrated unmaskings, all of which kept the media frenzy fired up. All in all, it was the greatest political dirty trick ever attempted in American Politics, and did devastating damage to both domestic tranquility and national security. Trump survived, but the damage done is incalculable.

So It pains me greatly to think that the reckoning will likely have to be political rather than criminal because the malice that can be demonstrated is so admixed and even overshadowed by incompetence and judgement flaws; and even a political reckoning given the state of the country is so uncertain.

I hope that I am wrong and that some kind of prosecution can be fashioned because of the sheer enormity of violence that was done to our electoral system, surpassing by far the chickenshit case Mueller brought against the Russian troll farm; but I fear that I am right. It hurts to think that so much damage can be caused by scheming little political weasels and that they all may well walk away scot free; and even be lionized by their political confreres as having tried to do the right thing. This is the state of American politics today!!!

Eric Newhill , 12 hours ago
I see that some of the midgets on horseback are saying that they will bring Mueller before congress to explain himself. Their knight in shining armor has failed to return with the holy grail. A couple even suggested that perhaps Mueller has been influenced by the Russians or somehow intimated by Trump.

The coup may be over, but the witch hunt will continue;

and that + all the crazy Marxism (social and economic), bad immigration policy and Green New Deal is going to doom the Democrats in 2020. They look like they are jumping off a final sake fueled banzai charge. Maybe they think the best defense is a good offense re; the prosecutions that should happen. What is the chance that Mueller will pass *all* he has learned to help get the criminal cases under way?

robt willmann , 3 hours ago
seesee2468,

On 13 July 2018, when announcing the indictment of 12 Russian military officers by the Mueller group for "conspiring to interfere" in the 2016 presidential election, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein admitted that no "interference" actually happened. In this video of his announcement, starting at 5 minutes, 52 seconds into it and ending at the 6 minute, 5 second mark, he says--

"There is no allegation in this indictment that any American citizen committed a crime. There is no allegation that the conspiracy changed the vote count or affected any election result."

https://www.c-span.org/vide...

Col. Lang is absolutely correct that those involved in attempting to reverse the results of the 2016 election, de-legitimize an elected president, and remove him should be thoroughly pursued through all avenues and procedures of the civil and criminal law.

However, I am concerned that the new attorney general, William Barr, will not do so based on his past associations and work. I hope I am wrong about that, but I am not optimistic.

Divadab Newton , 10 hours ago
It's a dirty business. If half this stuff is true, and not just layers of increasingly unbelievable cover stories (I mean, a tangential example, is the whole Skripal thing a weirdly, too obviously fake cover show for what was in reality a "witness protection" operation? A witness who could and would reveal much? On this matter even, perhaps. Such obvious deceptions are harmful to respect for authority and the law.)

I'm wrestling with the idea that 'twas ever thus and now with the internet its workings are revealed to a "lay" audience with no connection to the dark arts of the spy business. But I am curious, with the good Colonel's indulgence, if the new tools of the trade have made things which should be secret not possible to be kept secret?

Walrus , 13 hours ago
Amen to the prosecutions. If there is seen to be no accountability for this fraud then we are seriously damaging what's left of democracy. Who, in their right mind, is going to publicly support and assist a political candidate who is not "Swamp approved" if they face the threat of thereby triggering their own, and their family's destruction by the judicial system?

I suggest that even a pardon is not enough for those entrapped in this mess. There needs to be restitution.

To put that another way, in my opinion, "birther" allegations could be passed off as political tactics. Nobody got hurt. It is just good luck that Russiagate hasn't resulted in suicide or worse - so far.

ugluk2 , 3 hours ago
Matt Taibbi on how the press has destroyed its credibility.

https://taibbi.substack.com...

Taras77 , 8 hours ago
I certainly agree that consequences must be brought to bear: lying politicians without a shred of evidence, nor did they offer any for their lies; press for their utter and complete malfeasance and corruption without a shred of evidence, the doj/fbi corrupted and coup plotting officials,and finally the shame to all who shrieked about "evil" putin, russia the aggressor, etc. It has set our discourse back decades, forced any critics of this insanity into the shadows, and completely killed any attempt at normal diplomacy between nations.

I noted one astute writer as equating this russiagate insanity to the lies surrounding wmd and the destruction of iraq. Close. The damage from this criminality is incalculable!

Will the shrillest of all in the press lose their jobs? Nah, not a chance. Prob get raise or promotion.Will the brennans, clintons, clappers, et al do the perp walk. Nah, not a chance. High paid lawyers will tie the courts up for years if not decades.

And america has the institutional memory of a gnat. And of course, the question is as to high up did this criminality go? I personally do not believe it is a question-it is obvious to me. The major question for me is how high up the prosecution, if any, will go.

MP98 , 12 hours ago
Problem is...who's going to do the prosecuting? The DOJ - protector of the swamp - has become thoroughly corrupted as an arm of the Democrat-media party. Should (can) Trump appoint a special prosecutor as far as possible from the DOJ?
Greco , 12 hours ago
The president might use this and any Republican-led prosecutions as leverage to work out deals that will allow him to achieve his agenda. I think he'll need to given how the Democrats intend to use their house majority to launch investigations and hearings to find something, anything to howl about and impede his agenda.
Fred W , 12 hours ago
Still need to see the full report. I hope it is releasable. Otherwise the conspiracy theories or leaks will never let up. The article cited is a partisan opinion piece, not a news report. It accepts the fallback stance that yes, crimes were committed but collusion by Trump was not among them. This actually seems possible if only in light of the chaotic condition of the campaign.

That said, I would not be surprised to find collusion discounted. Not that the Russians didn't interfere. That would be entirely in character. But I don't know any reason for supposing that they would have a better understanding of American political dynamics than the Americans who make good livings being the best in that arena. The Russians seem to have been doing the same things as numerous other players. They shouldn't have been in that game, but there is no strong reason for according them Superman status. Their strongest feature seems to have been sheer quantity. Outrage over their actions often seems to flow from a poor grasp of the real nature of normal political process.

Fred -> Fred W , 4 hours ago
"The Russians seem to have been doing the same things..."

Multiple members of the FBI and DOJ seem to have been interfering in the 2016 Presidential election. How many other federal and state elections did they interfere with?

seesee2468 -> Fred W , 6 hours ago
Can you cite a single piece of hard evidence, not simply allegation, that proves the Russians interfered in the 2016 election? If so, please cite it, since I know of none. Thank you.
Pat Lang Mod -> seesee2468 , 6 hours ago
I cannot.
peter hodges , 12 hours ago
Nothing will happen. In fact, the way things have been going, Trump will make Mueller the next AG.

[Mar 20, 2019] In a remarkable report by British Channel 4, former CIA officials and a Reuters correspondent spoke candidly about the systematic dissemination of propaganda and misinformation in reporting on geopolitical conflicts

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... A study of the Syria war coverage by nine leading European newspapers clearly illustrates these issues: 78% of all articles are based in whole or in part on agency reports, yet 0% on investigative research. Moreover, 82% of all opinion pieces and interviews are in favor of the US and NATO intervention, while propaganda is attributed exclusively to the opposite side... ..."
Mar 07, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

ex-SA , Mar 5, 2019 3:55:53 PM | 13

Thank you! This may well be the most important link I've encountered in my years of lurking here @ MoA and elsewhere.

There is a video linked in the article which may be more important than the article itself. Easily overlooked, so here: https://swprs.org/video-the-cia-and-the-media/

It appears in the article here:

"In a remarkable report by British Channel 4, former CIA officials and a Reuters correspondent spoke candidly about the systematic dissemination of propaganda and misinformation in reporting on geopolitical conflicts:"

Many thanks, and much respect to you Sir for bringing this important piece to my attention.

May I humbly offer in return, https://archive.org/details/publicenemyno1 (don't neglect the 2nd reel)

Desolation Row , Mar 5, 2019 6:41:25 PM | link
I apologize for another somewhat off topic posting, but I have not seen it posted here earlier, and I think that this should be seen by as many eyes as possible.

The Propaganda Multiplier:How Global News Agencies and Western Media Report on Geopolitics

By Swiss Propaganda Research

It is one of the most important aspects of our media system -- and yet hardly known to the public: most of the international news coverage in Western media is provided by only three global news agencies based in New York, London and Paris.

The key role played by these agencies means that Western media often report on the same topics, even using the same wording. In addition, governments, military and intelligence services use these global news agencies as multipliers to spread their messages around the world.

A study of the Syria war coverage by nine leading European newspapers clearly illustrates these issues: 78% of all articles are based in whole or in part on agency reports, yet 0% on investigative research. Moreover, 82% of all opinion pieces and interviews are in favor of the US and NATO intervention, while propaganda is attributed exclusively to the opposite side...

[Mar 18, 2019] Journalists who are spies

Highly recommended!
Can you trust the BBC news? How many journalists are working for the security services?
Notable quotes:
"... Can you trust the BBC news? How many journalists are working for the security services? ..."
"... "Most tabloid newspapers - or even newspapers in general - are playthings of MI5." ..."
"... Bloch and Fitzgerald, in their examination of covert UK warfare, report the editor of "one of Britain's most distinguished journals" as believing that more than half its foreign correspondents were on the MI6 payroll. ..."
"... The heart of the secret state they identified as the security services, the cabinet office and upper echelons of the Home and Commonwealth Offices, the armed forces and Ministry of Defence, the nuclear power industry and its satellite ministries together a network of senior civil servants. ..."
"... As "satellites" of the secret state, their list included "agents of influence in the media, ranging from actual agents of the security services, conduits of official leaks, to senior journalists merely lusting after official praise and, perhaps, a knighthood at the end of their career". ..."
"... Stephen Dorril, in his seminal history of MI6, reports that Orwell attended a meeting in Paris of resistance fighters on behalf of David Astor, his editor at the Observer and leader of the intelligence service's unit liasing with the French resistance. ..."
Mar 03, 2006 | www.nytimes.com

Can you trust the BBC news? How many journalists are working for the security services? The following extracts are from an article at the excellent Medialens

http://www.medialens.org/alerts/06/060303_hacks_and_spooks.php

HACKS AND SPOOKS

By Professor Richard Keeble

And so to Nottingham University (on Sunday 26 February) for a well-attended conference...

I focus in my talk on the links between journalists and the intelligence services: While it might be difficult to identify precisely the impact of the spooks (variously represented in the press as "intelligence", "security", "Whitehall" or "Home Office" sources) on mainstream politics and media, from the limited evidence it looks to be enormous.

As Roy Greenslade, media specialist at the Telegraph (formerly the Guardian), commented:

"Most tabloid newspapers - or even newspapers in general - are playthings of MI5."

Bloch and Fitzgerald, in their examination of covert UK warfare, report the editor of "one of Britain's most distinguished journals" as believing that more than half its foreign correspondents were on the MI6 payroll.

And in 1991, Richard Norton-Taylor revealed in the Guardian that 500 prominent Britons paid by the CIA and the now defunct Bank of Commerce and Credit International, included 90 journalists.

In their analysis of the contemporary secret state, Dorril and Ramsay gave the media a crucial role. The heart of the secret state they identified as the security services, the cabinet office and upper echelons of the Home and Commonwealth Offices, the armed forces and Ministry of Defence, the nuclear power industry and its satellite ministries together a network of senior civil servants.

As "satellites" of the secret state, their list included "agents of influence in the media, ranging from actual agents of the security services, conduits of official leaks, to senior journalists merely lusting after official praise and, perhaps, a knighthood at the end of their career".

Phillip Knightley, author of a seminal history of the intelligence services, has even claimed that at least one intelligence agent is working on every Fleet Street newspaper.

A brief history

Going as far back as 1945, George Orwell no less became a war correspondent for the Observer - probably as a cover for intelligence work. Significantly most of the men he met in Paris on his assignment, Freddie Ayer, Malcolm Muggeridge, Ernest Hemingway were either working for the intelligence services or had close links to them.

Stephen Dorril, in his seminal history of MI6, reports that Orwell attended a meeting in Paris of resistance fighters on behalf of David Astor, his editor at the Observer and leader of the intelligence service's unit liasing with the French resistance.

The release of Public Record Office documents in 1995 about some of the operations of the MI6-financed propaganda unit, the Information Research Department of the Foreign Office, threw light on this secret body - which even Orwell aided by sending them a list of "crypto-communists". Set up by the Labour government in 1948, it "ran" dozens of Fleet Street journalists and a vast array of news agencies across the globe until it was closed down by Foreign Secretary David Owen in 1977.

According to John Pilger in the anti-colonial struggles in Kenya, Malaya and Cyprus, IRD was so successful that the journalism served up as a record of those episodes was a cocktail of the distorted and false in which the real aims and often atrocious behaviour of the British intelligence agencies was hidden.

And spy novelist John le Carré, who worked for MI6 between 1960 and 1964, has made the amazing statement that the British secret service then controlled large parts of the press – just as they may do today.

In 1975, following Senate hearings on the CIA, the reports of the Senate's Church Committee and the House of Representatives' Pike Committee highlighted the extent of agency recruitment of both British and US journalists.

And sources revealed that half the foreign staff of a British daily were on the MI6 payroll.

David Leigh, in The Wilson Plot, his seminal study of the way in which the secret service smeared through the mainstream media and destabilised the Government of Harold Wilson before his sudden resignation in 1976, quotes an MI5 officer: "We have somebody in every office in Fleet Street"

Leaker King

And the most famous whistleblower of all, Peter (Spycatcher) Wright, revealed that MI5 had agents in newspapers and publishing companies whose main role was to warn them of any forthcoming "embarrassing publications".

Wright also disclosed that the Daily Mirror tycoon, Cecil King, "was a longstanding agent of ours" who "made it clear he would publish anything MI5 might care to leak in his direction".

Selective details about Wilson and his secretary, Marcia Falkender, were leaked by the intelligence services to sympathetic Fleet Street journalists. Wright comments: "No wonder Wilson was later to claim that he was the victim of a plot". King was also closely involved in a scheme in 1968 to oust Prime Minister Harold Wilson and replace him with a coalition headed by Lord Mountbatten.

Hugh Cudlipp, editorial director of the Mirror from 1952 to 1974, was also closely linked to intelligence, according to Chris Horrie, in his recently published history of the newspaper.

David Walker, the Mirror's foreign correspondent in the 1950s, was named as an MI6 agent following a security scandal while another Mirror journalist, Stanley Bonnet, admitted working for MI5 in the 1980s investigating the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

Maxwell and Mossad

According to Stephen Dorril, intelligence gathering during the miners' strike of 1984-85 was helped by the fact that during the 1970s MI5's F Branch had made a special effort to recruit industrial correspondents – with great success.

In 1991, just before his mysterious death, Mirror proprietor Robert Maxwell was accused by the US investigative journalist Seymour Hersh of acting for Mossad, the Israeli secret service, though Dorril suggests his links with MI6 were equally as strong.

Following the resignation from the Guardian of Richard Gott, its literary editor in December 1994 in the wake of allegations that he was a paid agent of the KGB, the role of journalists as spies suddenly came under the media spotlight – and many of the leaks were fascinating.

For instance, according to The Times editorial of 16 December 1994: "Many British journalists benefited from CIA or MI6 largesse during the Cold War."

The intimate links between journalists and the secret services were highlighted in the autobiography of the eminent newscaster Sandy Gall. He reports without any qualms how, after returning from one of his reporting assignments to Afghanistan, he was asked to lunch by the head of MI6. "It was very informal, the cook was off so we had cold meat and salad with plenty of wine. He wanted to hear what I had to say about the war in Afghanistan. I was flattered, of course, and anxious to pass on what I could in terms of first-hand knowledge."

And in January 2001, the renegade MI6 officer, Richard Tomlinson, claimed Dominic Lawson, the editor of the Sunday Telegraph and son of the former Tory chancellor, Nigel Lawson, provided journalistic cover for an MI6 officer on a mission to the Baltic to handle and debrief a young Russian diplomat who was spying for Britain.

Lawson strongly denied the allegations.

Similarly in the reporting of Northern Ireland, there have been longstanding concerns over security service disinformation. Susan McKay, Northern editor of the Dublin-based Sunday Tribune, has criticised the reckless reporting of material from "dodgy security services". She told a conference in Belfast in January 2003 organised by the National Union of Journalists and the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission: "We need to be suspicious when people are so ready to provide information and that we are, in fact, not being used." (www.nuj.org.uk/inner.php?docid=635)

Growing power of secret state

Thus from this evidence alone it is clear there has been a long history of links between hacks and spooks in both the UK and US.

But as the secret state grows in power, through massive resourcing, through a whole raft of legislation – such as the Official Secrets Act, the anti-terrorism legislation, the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act and so on – and as intelligence moves into the heart of Blair's ruling clique so these links are even more significant.

Since September 11 all of Fleet Street has been awash in warnings by anonymous intelligence sources of terrorist threats.

According to former Labour minister Michael Meacher, much of this disinformation was spread via sympathetic journalists by the Rockingham cell within the MoD.

A parallel exercise, through the office of Special Plans, was set up by Donald Rumsfeld in the US. Thus there have been constant attempts to scare people – and justify still greater powers for the national security apparatus.

Similarly the disinformation about Iraq's WMD was spread by dodgy intelligence sources via gullible journalists.

Thus, to take just one example, Michael Evans, The Times defence correspondent, reported on 29 November 2002: "Saddam Hussein has ordered hundred of his officials to conceal weapons of mass destruction components in their homes to evade the prying eyes of the United Nations inspectors." The source of these "revelations" was said to be "intelligence picked up from within Iraq". Early in 2004, as the battle for control of Iraq continued with mounting casualties on both sides, it was revealed that many of the lies about Saddam Hussein's supposed WMD had been fed to sympathetic journalists in the US, Britain and Australia by the exile group, the Iraqi National Congress.

Sexed up – and missed out

During the controversy that erupted following the end of the "war" and the death of the arms inspector Dr David Kelly (and the ensuing Hutton inquiry) the spotlight fell on BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan and the claim by one of his sources that the government (in collusion with the intelligence services) had "sexed up" a dossier justifying an attack on Iraq.

The Hutton inquiry, its every twist and turn massively covered in the mainstream media, was the archetypal media spectacle that drew attention from the real issue: why did the Bush and Blair governments invade Iraq in the face of massive global opposition? But those facts will be forever secret.

Significantly, too, the broader and more significant issue of mainstream journalists' links with the intelligence services was ignored by the inquiry.

Significantly, on 26 May 2004, the New York Times carried a 1,200-word editorial admitting it had been duped in its coverage of WMD in the lead-up to the invasion by dubious Iraqi defectors, informants and exiles (though it failed to lay any blame on the US President: see Greenslade 2004). Chief among The Times' dodgy informants was Ahmad Chalabi, leader of the Iraqi National Congress and Pentagon favourite before his Baghdad house was raided by US forces on 20 May.

Then, in the Observer of 30 May 2004, David Rose admitted he had been the victim of a "calculated set-up" devised to foster the propaganda case for war. "In the 18 months before the invasion of March 2003, I dealt regularly with Chalabi and the INC and published stories based on interviews with men they said were defectors from Saddam's regime." And he concluded: "The information fog is thicker than in any previous war, as I know now from bitter personal experience. To any journalist being offered apparently sensational disclosures, especially from an anonymous intelligence source, I offer two words of advice: caveat emptor."

Let's not forget no British newspaper has followed the example of the NYT and apologised for being so easily duped by the intelligence services in the run up to the illegal invasion of Iraq.

~

Richard Keeble's publications include Secret State, Silent Press: New Militarism, the Gulf and the Modern Image of Warfare (John Libbey 1997) and The Newspapers Handbook (Routledge, fourth edition, 2005). He is also the editor of Ethical Space: The International Journal of Communication Ethics. Richard is also a member of the War and Media Network.

[Mar 18, 2019] FULL CNN TOWN HALL WITH TULSI GABBARD 3-10-19

Highly recommended!
amazing, simply amazing. You need to watch this Town Hall in full to appreciate the skills she demonstrated in defense of her principles. What a fearless young lady.
And this CNN warmonger, a prostitute of MIC was/is pretty devious. Question were selected with malice to hurt Tulsi and people who ask them were definitely pre-selected with an obvious intent to smear Tulsi. In no way those were spontaneous question. This was a session of Neocon//Neolib inquisition. Tulsi behaves like a modern Joan of Arc
From comments: "People need to donate to Tulsi Gabbard for president so she is allowed on the DNC sponsored debate stages. 65000 unique donors required to be in the debates. Donation can be as small as $1 if you can't afford $25"(mrfuzztone)
Notable quotes:
"... Braver then 99.9% of all men in power. They just enjoy watching the blood sports they create for profit. Looks like people are starting to get fed up with the show. About time ..."
"... WE CURRENTLY HAVE A CRONY CAPITALIST PYRAMID SCHEME AND CNN PLAYS IT'S PART TO KEEP THAT SYSTEM IN PLACE ..."
"... I'm 66, a Progressive formerly from Boston where we eat and breathe politics and I'll tell you... never in my life have I seen a Democratic candidate like this fearless young woman who will simultaneously attract veterans AND anti-war folks AND moderate Republicans AND youth. NO OTHER CANDIDATE CAN DO THIS. My absolute belief is that if Tulsi's not on the ticket... Trump wins. Sorry Bernie, this time I'm going with Tulsi. ..."
Mar 18, 2019 | www.youtube.com
lalamimix , 1 week ago

Braver then 99.9% of all men in power. They just enjoy watching the blood sports they create for profit. Looks like people are starting to get fed up with the show. About time✌️ 😉

FMA Bincarim , 1 week ago

CNN has the nerve to claim that Cloudbootjar Copmala Cory and Creepy Joe are polling higher than her.

softminimal1 , 1 week ago (edited)

WE CURRENTLY HAVE A CRONY CAPITALIST PYRAMID SCHEME AND CNN PLAYS IT'S PART TO KEEP THAT SYSTEM IN PLACE.

softminimal1 , 1 week ago

CNN LOVES WARS.

edfou5 , 1 week ago

I'm 66, a Progressive formerly from Boston where we eat and breathe politics and I'll tell you... never in my life have I seen a Democratic candidate like this fearless young woman who will simultaneously attract veterans AND anti-war folks AND moderate Republicans AND youth. NO OTHER CANDIDATE CAN DO THIS. My absolute belief is that if Tulsi's not on the ticket... Trump wins. Sorry Bernie, this time I'm going with Tulsi.

mb1968nz , 1 week ago (edited)

Tulsi handled these hacks like a pro LOOL Are you a capitalist? LOL What s stupid question.....CCN usually stacks there town halls with corporate cronies. I bet Bernie picks her for a high position in his government.

mrfuzztone , 1 week ago

People need to donate to Tulsi Gabbard for president so she is allowed on the DNC sponsored debate stages. 65000 unique donors required to be in the debates. Donation can be as small as $1 if you can't afford $25.

[Mar 18, 2019] The Why are the media playing lapdog and not watchdog – again – on war in Iraq?

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... General Electric, the world's largest military contractor, still controls the message over at the so-called "liberal" MSNBC. MSNBC's other owner is Comcast, the right wing media conglomerate that controls the radio waves in every major American Market. Over at CNN, Mossad Asset Wolf Blitzer, who rose from being an obscure little correspondent for an Israeli Newspaper to being CNN's Chief "Pentagon Correspondent" and then was elevated to supreme anchorman nearly as quickly, ensures that the pro-Israeli Message is always in the forefront, even as the Israeli's commit one murderous act after another upon helpless Palestinian Women and Children. ..."
"... Every single "terrorism expert", General or former Government Official that is brought out to discuss the next great war is connected to a military contractor that stands to benefit from that war. Not surprisingly, the military option is the only option discussed and we are assured that, if only we do this or bomb that, then it will all be over and we can bring our kids home to a big victory parade. I'm 63 and it has never happened in my lifetime--with the exception of the phony parade that Bush Senior put on after his murderous little "First Gulf War". ..."
"... The Generals in the Pentagon always want war. It is how they make rank. All of those young kids that just graduated from our various academies know that war experience is the only thing that will get them the advancement that they seek in the career that they have chosen. They are champing at the bit for more war. ..."
"... the same PR campaign that started with Bush and Cheney continues-the exact same campaign. Obviously, they have to come back at the apple with variations, but any notion that the "media will get it someday" is willfully ignorant of the obvious fact that there is an agenda, and that agenda just won't stop until it's achieved-or revolution supplants the influence of these dark forces. ..."
"... The US media are indeed working overtime to get this war happening ..."
"... In media universe there is no alternative to endless war and an endless stream of hyped reasons for new killing. ..."
"... The media machine is a wholly owned subsidiary of the United States of Corporations. ..."
"... Oh, the greatest propaganda arm the US government has right now, bar none, is the American media. It's disgraceful. we no longer have journalists speaking truth to power in my country, we have people practicing stenography, straight from the State Department to your favorite media outlet. ..."
"... But all that research from MIT, from the UN, and others, has been buried by the American media, and every single story on Syria and Assad that is written still refers to "Assad gassing his own people". It's true, it's despicable, and it's just one example of how our media lies and distorts and misrepresents the news every day. ..."
Oct 10, 2014 | The Guardian
BradBenson, 10 October 2014 6:14pm
The American Public has gotten exactly what it deserved. They have been dumbed-down in our poor-by-intention school systems. The moronic nonsense that passes for news in this country gets more sensational with each passing day. Over on Fox, they are making the claim that ISIS fighters are bringing Ebola over the Mexican Border, which prompted a reply by the Mexican Embassy that won't be reported on Fox.

We continue to hear and it was even reported in this very fine article by Ms. Benjamin that the American People now support this new war. Really? I'm sorry, but I haven't seen that support anywhere but on the news and I just don't believe it any more.

There is also the little problem of infiltration into key media slots by paid CIA Assets (Scarborough and brainless Mika are two of these double dippers). Others are intermarried. Right-wing Neocon War Criminal Dan Senor is married to "respected" newsperson Campbell Brown who is now involved in privatizing our school system. Victoria Nuland, the slimey State Department Official who was overheard appointing the members of the future Ukrainian Government prior to the Maidan Coup is married to another Neo-Con--Larry Kagan. Even sweet little Andrea Mitchell is actually Mrs. Alan Greenspan.

General Electric, the world's largest military contractor, still controls the message over at the so-called "liberal" MSNBC. MSNBC's other owner is Comcast, the right wing media conglomerate that controls the radio waves in every major American Market. Over at CNN, Mossad Asset Wolf Blitzer, who rose from being an obscure little correspondent for an Israeli Newspaper to being CNN's Chief "Pentagon Correspondent" and then was elevated to supreme anchorman nearly as quickly, ensures that the pro-Israeli Message is always in the forefront, even as the Israeli's commit one murderous act after another upon helpless Palestinian Women and Children.

Every single "terrorism expert", General or former Government Official that is brought out to discuss the next great war is connected to a military contractor that stands to benefit from that war. Not surprisingly, the military option is the only option discussed and we are assured that, if only we do this or bomb that, then it will all be over and we can bring our kids home to a big victory parade. I'm 63 and it has never happened in my lifetime--with the exception of the phony parade that Bush Senior put on after his murderous little "First Gulf War".

Yesterday there was a coordinated action by all of the networks, which was clearly designed to support the idea that the generals want Obama to act and he just won't. The not-so-subtle message was that the generals were right and that the President's "inaction" was somehow out of line-since, after all, the generals have recommended more war. It was as if these people don't remember that the President, sleazy War Criminal that he is, is still the Commander in Chief.

The Generals in the Pentagon always want war. It is how they make rank. All of those young kids that just graduated from our various academies know that war experience is the only thing that will get them the advancement that they seek in the career that they have chosen. They are champing at the bit for more war.

Finally, this Sunday every NFL Game will begin with some Patriotic "Honor America" Display, which will include a missing man flyover, flags and fireworks, plenty of uniforms, wounded Vets and soon-to-be-wounded Vets. A giant American Flag will, once again, cover the fields and hundreds of stupid young kids will rush down to their "Military Career Center" right after the game. These are the ones that I pity most.

BaronVonAmericano , 10 October 2014 6:26pm
Let's be frank: powerful interests want war and subsequent puppet regimes in the half dozen nations that the neo-cons have been eyeing (Iraq, Iran, Libya, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan). These interests surely include industries like banking, arms and oil-all of whom make a killing on any war, and would stand to do well with friendly governments who could finance more arms purchases and will never nationalize the oil.

So, the same PR campaign that started with Bush and Cheney continues-the exact same campaign. Obviously, they have to come back at the apple with variations, but any notion that the "media will get it someday" is willfully ignorant of the obvious fact that there is an agenda, and that agenda just won't stop until it's achieved-or revolution supplants the influence of these dark forces.

IanB52, 10 October 2014 6:57pm

The US media are indeed working overtime to get this war happening. When I'm down at the gym they always have CNN on (I can only imagine what FOX is like) which is a pretty much dyed in the wool yellow jingoist station at this point. With all the segments they dedicate to ISIS, a new war, the "imminent" terrorist threat, they seem to favor talking heads who support a full ground war and I have never, not once, heard anyone even speak about the mere possibility of peace. Not ever.

In media universe there is no alternative to endless war and an endless stream of hyped reasons for new killing.

I'd imagine that these media companies have a lot stock in and a cozy relationship with the defense contractors.

Damiano Iocovozzi, 10 October 2014 7:04pm

The media machine is a wholly owned subsidiary of the United States of Corporations. The media doesn't report on anything but relies on repeating manufactured crises, creating manufactured consent & discussing manufactured solutions. Follow the oil, the pipelines & the money. Both R's & D's are left & right cheeks of the same buttock. Thanks to Citizens United & even Hobby Lobby, a compliant Supreme Court, also owned by United States of Corporations, it's a done deal.

ID5868758 , 10 October 2014 10:20pm
Oh, the greatest propaganda arm the US government has right now, bar none, is the American media. It's disgraceful. we no longer have journalists speaking truth to power in my country, we have people practicing stenography, straight from the State Department to your favorite media outlet.

Let me give you one clear example. A year ago Barack Obama came very close to bombing Syria to kingdom come, the justification used was "Assad gassed his own people", referring to a sarin gas attack near Damascus. Well, it turns out that Assad did not initiate that attack, discovered by research from many sources including the prestigious MIT, it was a false flag attack planned by Turkey and carried out by some of Obama's own "moderate rebels".

But all that research from MIT, from the UN, and others, has been buried by the American media, and every single story on Syria and Assad that is written still refers to "Assad gassing his own people". It's true, it's despicable, and it's just one example of how our media lies and distorts and misrepresents the news every day.

[Mar 06, 2019] Disinformation destroys reality

Highly recommended!
Yes, in a slightly modified form this is a very true statement: "Disinformation destroys reality. The USA is master of this -- they have built a parallel reality."
But the real issues here is the neoliberalism is in decline, and to compensate for loss of power of neoliberal propaganda Western MSM now use neo-McCarthyism. That is a very sad but pretty understandable story.
Mar 02, 2018 | www.nytimes.com

Just as disturbing is an analysis of Russia's worldwide fake news campaign , which spreads contradictory reports and Kremlin-friendly propaganda.

"The Russians understand Western media far better than the Western media understands itself," one interviewee says. "And they play to the Western media's short attention span."

Another says: "Disinformation destroys reality. The Russians are masters of this -- they have built a parallel reality."

[Feb 21, 2019] The Empire Now or Never by Fred Reed

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... When the Soviet Empire collapsed, America appeared poised to establish the first truly world empire. The developed countries were American vassals in effect if not in name, many of them occupied by American troops: Among others, Europe, Canada, Japan, South Korea, Latin America, Saudi Arabia, and Australia. The US had by far the dominant economy and the biggest military, controlled the IMF, NATO, the dollar, SWIFT, and enjoyed technological superiority.. Russia was in chaos, China a distant smudge on the horizon. ..."
"... Current foreign policy openly focuses on dominating the planet. The astonishing thing is that some people don't notice. ..."
"... A major purpose of the destruction of Iraq was to get control of its oil and put American forces on the border of Iran, another oil power. The current attempt to starve the Iranians aims at installing a American puppet government. The ongoing coup in Venezuela seeks control of another vast oil reserve. It will also serve to intimidate the rest of Latin America by showing what can happen to any country that defies Washington. Why are American troops in Nigeria? Guess what Nigeria has. ..."
"... America cannot compete with China commercially ..."
"... Beijing's advantages are too great: A huge and growing domestic market, a far larger population of very bright people, a for-profit economy that allows heavy investment both internally and abroad, a stable government that can plan well into the future. ..."
"... Increasingly America's commercial power is as a consumer, not a producer. Washington tells other countries, "If you don't do as we say, we won't buy your stuff." ..."
"... As America's competitiveness declines, Washington resorts to strong-arm tactics. It has no choice. A prime example is the 5G internet, a Very Big Deal, in which Huawei holds the lead. Unable to provide a better product at a better price, Washington forbids the vassals to deal with Huawei–on pain of not buying their stuff. In what appears to be desperation, the Exceptional Nation has actually made a servile Canada arrest the daughter of Huawei's founder. ..."
Feb 21, 2019 | www.unz.com

... ... ...

When the Soviet Empire collapsed, America appeared poised to establish the first truly world empire. The developed countries were American vassals in effect if not in name, many of them occupied by American troops: Among others, Europe, Canada, Japan, South Korea, Latin America, Saudi Arabia, and Australia. The US had by far the dominant economy and the biggest military, controlled the IMF, NATO, the dollar, SWIFT, and enjoyed technological superiority.. Russia was in chaos, China a distant smudge on the horizon.

Powerful groups in Washington, such as PNAC, began angling towed aggrandizement, but the real lunge came with the attack on Iraq. Current foreign policy openly focuses on dominating the planet. The astonishing thing is that some people don't notice.

The world runs on oil. Controlling the supply conveys almost absolute power over those countries that do not have their own. (For example, the Japanese would soon be eating each other if their oil were cut off.) Saudi Arabia is an American protectorate,and, having seen what happened to Iraq, knows that it can be conquered in short order if it gets out of line. The U. S. Navy could easily block tanker traffic from Hormuz to any or all countries.

A major purpose of the destruction of Iraq was to get control of its oil and put American forces on the border of Iran, another oil power. The current attempt to starve the Iranians aims at installing a American puppet government. The ongoing coup in Venezuela seeks control of another vast oil reserve. It will also serve to intimidate the rest of Latin America by showing what can happen to any country that defies Washington. Why are American troops in Nigeria? Guess what Nigeria has.

Note that Iraq and Iran, in addition to their oil, are geostrategically vital to a world empire. Further, the immensely powerful Jewish presence in the US supports the Mid-East wars for its own purposes. So, of course, does the arms industry. All God's chillun love the Empire.

For the Greater Empire to prevail, Russia and China, the latter a surprise contender, must be neutralized. Thus the campaign to crush Russia by economic sanctions. At the same time Washington pushes NATO, its sepoy militia, ever eastward, wants to station US forces in Poland, plans a Space Command whose only purpose is to intimidate or bankrupt Russia, drops out of the INF Treaty for the same reasons, and seeks to prevent commercial relations between Russia and the European vassals (e.g., Nordstream II).

China of course is the key obstacle to expanding the Empire. Ergo the trade war. America has to stop China's economic and technological progress, and stop it now, as it will not get another chance.

The present moment is an Imperial crunch point. America cannot compete with China commercially or, increasingly, in technology. Washington knows it. Beijing's advantages are too great: A huge and growing domestic market, a far larger population of very bright people, a for-profit economy that allows heavy investment both internally and abroad, a stable government that can plan well into the future.

America? It's power is more fragile than it may seem. The United States once dominated economically by making better products at better prices, ran a large trade surplus, and barely had competitors. Today it has deindustrialized, runs a trade deficit with almost everybody, carries an astronomical and uncontrolled national debt, and makes few things that the world can't get elsewhere, often at lower cost.

Increasingly America's commercial power is as a consumer, not a producer. Washington tells other countries, "If you don't do as we say, we won't buy your stuff." The indispensable country is an indispensable market. With few and diminishing (though important) exceptions, if it stopped selling things to China, China would barely notice, but if it stopped buying, the Chinese economy would wither. Tariffs, note, are just a way of not buying China's stuff.

Since the profligate American market is vital to other countries, they often do as ordered. But Asian markets grow. So do Asian industries.

As America's competitiveness declines, Washington resorts to strong-arm tactics. It has no choice. A prime example is the 5G internet, a Very Big Deal, in which Huawei holds the lead. Unable to provide a better product at a better price, Washington forbids the vassals to deal with Huawei–on pain of not buying their stuff. In what appears to be desperation, the Exceptional Nation has actually made a servile Canada arrest the daughter of Huawei's founder.

The tide runs against the Empire. A couple of decades ago, the idea that China could compete technologically with America would have seemed preposterous. Today China advances at startling speed. It is neck and neck with the US in supercomputers, launches moonlanders, leads in 5G internet, does leading work in genetics, designs world-class chipsets (e.g., the Kirin 980 and 920) and smartphones. Another decade or two of this and America will be at the trailing edge.

The American decline is largely self-inflicted. The US chooses its government by popularity contests among provincial lawyers rather than by competence. American education deteriorates under assault by social-justice faddists. Washington spends on the military instead of infrastructure and the economy. It is politically chaotic, its policies changing with every new administration.

The first rule of empire is, "Don't let your enemies unite." Instead, Washington has pushed Russia, China, and Iran into a coalition against the Empire. It might have been brighter to have integrated Iran tightly into the Euro-American econosphere, but Israel would not have let America do this. The same approach would have worked with Russia, racially closer to Europe than China and acutely aware of having vast empty Siberia bordering an overpopulated China. By imposing sanctions of adversaries and allies alike, Washington promotes dedollarization and recognition that America is not an ally but a master.

It is now or never. If America's great but declining power does not subjugate the rest of the world quickly, the rising powers of Asia will swamp it. Even India grows. Either sanctions subdue the world, or Washington starts a world war. Or America becomes just another country.

To paraphrase a great political thinker, "It's the Empire, Stupid."

WorkingClass , says: February 20, 2019 at 7:56 pm GMT

The U.S. is broke. And stupid. Soon she will be forced to repatriate her legions.
Carlton Meyer , says: Website February 20, 2019 at 8:04 pm GMT
Great summary!

"Washington has pushed Russia, China, and Iran into a coalition against the Empire."

Turkey may soon join them, then Iraq might revolt. South Korea has tired of the warmongering and may join too, which is why Washington is giving them the lead in dealing with North Korea. But a united Korea identifes more with China than the USA, so the USA wants to block that idea. The Germans are unhappy too, with all the warmongering, immigration, and American arrogance.

Isabella , says: February 20, 2019 at 8:05 pm GMT
Sorry Fred, but you're too late. It's all over. Just that your maniacal rulers, i.e. Pompeo, Bolton et al can't see it. Or, Cognitive Dissonance being painful, refuse to.

Warsaw recently was a case in point. The two biggest European countries, Germany and France refused to even send a senior representative. All people did was listen in an embarrassed silence while Pompeo tried to make like a latter day Julius Cesear. At the same time, Russia, Turkey and Iran met in Sochi, and worked out how they were going to take the next solving the mess in Syria, the way they want it.

Incidentally, you could also go onto YouTube and watch RT's subtitled [also horrible voice over, but you can't have everything I guess] of President Putin's "Address to Parliament and the Nation". It runs for close to 1.5 hours. You will hear the problems Russia has, how Putin addresses the concerns of the people, their complaints re poor access in country areas to medicine, and his orders on how this is to be fixed.

But you will also hear the moves forward, that Russia now has a trade surplus [remember those?] and can afford all the programs it needs. It's the world leading exporter of Wheat, and other commodities are catching up.

Then he will tell you and show videos of the latest 2 defense weapons – and they are things America cannot defend against. He also in light of the US withdrawing from the INF treaty made a very clear statement, should the US be so stupid as to think it can use Europe as it's war ground, and have Europeans get killed instead of Americans. "Put Intermediate sites in Europe and use just one, and not only will we fire on the European site that sent it, but we will also take out the "decision making centre", wherever this is".

Ponder that for a while. There is nothing US can do. The dollar is slowly being rejected and dumped. The heartland is reamed out after billions took the productive facilities and put them in China [so kind]. The homeless and desperate are growing in numbers.

It's all over, Fred. Time to start planning what to do when the mud really hits the fan.

foolisholdman , says: February 20, 2019 at 8:56 pm GMT
Can't argue with that! Usually, I read Fred for amusement, but this is all spot on. I particularly liked:

The American decline is largely self-inflicted. The US chooses its government by popularity contests among provincial lawyers rather than by competence. American education deteriorates under assault by social-justice faddists. Washington spends on the military instead of infrastructure and the economy.

Asagirian , says: Website February 20, 2019 at 9:15 pm GMT
Incredible. US government cooks up lies to invade and wreck Iraq, destroy Libya, and subvert Syria. It pulled off a coup in Ukraine with Neo-Nazis. US and its allies Saudis and Israel gave aid, direct and indirect, to ISIS and Al-Qaida to bring down Assad or turn Syria upside down.

But, scum like Pompeo puts forth hard-line stance against terrorists. What a bunch of vile phonies and hypocrites.

Andrei Martyanov , says: Website February 20, 2019 at 9:41 pm GMT

It might have been brighter to have integrated Iran tightly into the Euro-American econosphere, but Israel would not have let America do this. The same approach would have worked with Russia, racially closer to Europe than China and acutely aware of having vast empty Siberia bordering an overpopulated China.

Russia is more than racially closer, Russia is culturally much closer and by culturally I don't mean this cesspool of new "culture". But, as you brilliantly noted:

The US chooses its government by popularity contests among provincial lawyers rather than by competence.

Philip Owen , says: February 20, 2019 at 10:22 pm GMT
Britain's time of full spectrum dominance (well trade, industry and navy really) did not emerge fully formed from isolation as did America. England and the UK played balance of power politics. The US can still do that for a very long time, given some basic diplomatic sense.

India, China & Pakistan present an interesting triangle. Indonesia and Vietnam are no friends of China. Nigeria is heading for 400m people and will want to exert its own power, not take instructions from Peking, etc, etc. Balance of power requires more fluidity than the US has shown to date. Seeing Russia as an hereditary enemy illustrates this failure.

Can the US make the changes necessary to play balance of power politics?

Si1ver1ock , says: February 20, 2019 at 10:24 pm GMT
I for one do not wish the Chinese any ill. They have worked hard to get where they are, whereas our leaders have betrayed us.

https://www.c-span.org/video/?103023-1/the-great-betrayal

Philip Owen , says: February 21, 2019 at 12:46 am GMT
@Godfree Roberts Something wrong here. Government spending in either country is far more than 2%.
atlantis_dweller , says: February 21, 2019 at 2:19 am GMT

The astonishing thing is that some people don't notice.

.

Not to notice (or rather, not to notice one's own noticing) what the majority doesn't notice (OK: they don't notice that they notice, actually) is part of humankind's cerebral package too.
You once called it the law of the pack. It can be given innumerable names -- just it doesn't change.

The American decline is largely self-inflicted.

.
It's what follows ripe democracy, invariably -- meanjng that it can arguably not be helped.

Achmed E. Newman , says: Website February 21, 2019 at 2:23 am GMT
@Godfree Roberts Finally a bright spot in an otherwise depressingly-fairly-truthful article. Less Government spending is a GOOD thing, I mean, unless you are a flat-out Communist, of course ohhhhh .

And yes, the scale is WAY off. How could those 0.8 to 2.05% numbers seem even close to reality to anyone who has a clue. I can't vouch for China, but the US number is off by a factor of 20 to 25 . Come on, Godfree, you're (a tad bit) better than that!

Achmed E. Newman , says: Website February 21, 2019 at 2:36 am GMT
That's not a bad article in general, but, as usual, Mr. Reed doesn't really have that analytical mind to know what's really been, and is, going on.

1) There were PLENTY of Americans, many of them even politicians who wanted a "peace dividend" after the Cold War was won. G.H.W Bush and the neocons put the kibosh on that. The current version of empire-building didn't have to be. The Israeli-influenced neocons are most of the reason for the post-Cold-War empire building.

2) It's not ALL about oil anymore – it seems to be a diminishing factor, what with the US producing more oil than it imports, at this point. Mr. Reed could use a dose of Zerohedge.com, as, along with their gloom-and-doom, they have opened my eyes to the American meddling around the world to keep support of the Reserve Currency, the US dollar. Lots of the countries in which the US causes trouble were trying to get out of the dollar world with their trade.

3) Related to (2) here, China and Russia both want to eliminate the use of the dollar in trade, including with each other. That bothers a lot of people who understand how bad the outlook for the US economy really is, and what it would mean for the dollar to no longer be used around the world for trade.

4) American government has handed China a completely one-sided deal (FOR China) in trade since the mid-1990's and Bill Clinton. It's time to end that, which is what the trade war is about. I don't dispute that American could be in a whole lot more pain over it than the Chinese, but it's like medicine – take it now, or suffer even more later.

America? It's power is more fragile than it may seem. The United States once dominated economically by making better products at better prices, ran a large trade surplus, and barely had competitors. Today it has deindustrialized, runs a trade deficit with almost everybody, carries an astronomical and uncontrolled national debt, and makes few things that the world can't get elsewhere, often at lower cost.

AGREED wholeheartedly!

Bruce County , says: February 21, 2019 at 3:33 am GMT
@peterAUS I agree .. Canada is "not" under America's boot. As a Canadian I respect the security America provides Canada on the world stage but it would be a cold day in hell when i would submit to an America with a gun in his hand. And im pretty sure our best buddies in jolly ol England might have something to say. This isnt a pissing match. Empire is a fickle bitch.
peterAUS , says: February 21, 2019 at 4:16 am GMT
@Bruce County Pretty much.
As far as Australia and New Zealand are concerned it's crystal clear. Somebody has to provide security for our way of life here; before it was United Kingdom, now it's USA.
Hehe definitely preferable to China.
Or Japan.
Or anyone here in Pacific.

If Americans want to deploy a full corps, whatever, no prob. Again, as far as "fair skinned" English speaking citizens here are concerned. I'd even say it applies to Polynesians around.
Now, can't say it applies to our Mohammedan citizens, and definitely not to Chinese.

It's amusing to see Westerners around here keen on replacing USA empire with Chinese. Hehe talking about self-hate.
Granted, there are people among them who really believe in all that propaganda coming from Beijing. Well better than taking Prozac or similar, I guess, so all good.

swamped , says: February 21, 2019 at 5:09 am GMT
"Current foreign policy openly focuses on dominating the planet. The astonishing thing is that some people don't notice." That is pretty astonishing, given that most of the columns on sites like this & even in more MSM-style publications rehash this theme ad infinitum. It may, in fact, be more a matter of people simply getting tired of hearing it over and over that leads them to shrug and turn to something different. It's not news anymore. How many columns can anyone squeeze out of the same threadbare topic. Many years ago, during first Cold War, it was still somewhat daring to expose this partially hidden truth; but now it's old hat on both the left & right.No one really needs someone to tell them again what everyone already knows, that's easy – but what to do about it, that's the hard part!
Godfree Roberts , says: February 21, 2019 at 5:25 am GMT
@Simply Simon I'm not an economist either, but it looks like the Chinese have outspent us 2:1 in R&D since 2012.

That, plus their better educated youngsters, gives them an awesome advantage going forward.

Godfree Roberts , says: February 21, 2019 at 5:27 am GMT
@Philip Owen This is a subset of government spending and only covers R&D.

It doesn't cover corporate R&D spending, though I'm guessing that in that regard, the two countries are even. If anyone has the numbers I'd be grateful if they'd share them.

Godfree Roberts , says: February 21, 2019 at 5:29 am GMT
@Achmed E. Newman Can you provide sources and figures for your claim that the US number is off by a factor of 20 to 25?

That would imply that the USG is spending $9 trillion–50% of GDP–on R&D alone.

chris , says: February 21, 2019 at 5:35 am GMT
@Isabella Excellent comment, Isabella!
Stevelancs , says: February 21, 2019 at 5:47 am GMT
@Simply Simon Godfrees graph should be entitled "USA v China in Gov't R&D Spending".
It's here..

https://www.quora.com/There-are-predictions-about-Chinas-economy-surpassing-the-USs-economy-in-the-future-but-are-there-predictions-of-China-surpassing-the-US-in-science-and-innovation-in-the-future

[Feb 19, 2019] Tulsi Gabbard kills New World Order bloodbath in thirty seconds

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Tulsi Gabbard has recently launched a new attack on New World Order agents and ethnic cleansers in the Middle East, and one can see why they would be upset with her ..."
"... Gabbard is smart enough to realize that the Neocon path leads to death, chaos, and destruction. She knows that virtually nothing good has come out of the Israeli narrative in the Middle East -- a narrative which has brought America on the brink of collapse in the Middle East. Therefore, she is asking for a U-turn. ..."
"... The first step for change, she says, is to "stand up against powerful politicians from both parties" who take their orders from the Neocons and war machine. These people don't care about you, me, the average American, the people in the Middle East, or the American economy for that matter. They only care about fulfilling a diabolical ideology in the Middle East and much of the world. These people ought to stop once and for all. Regardless of your political views, you should all agree with Gabbard here. ..."
Feb 19, 2019 | www.veteranstoday.com

Tulsi Gabbard has recently launched a new attack on New World Order agents and ethnic cleansers in the Middle East, and one can see why they would be upset with her. She said:

" We must stand up against powerful politicians from both parties who sit in their ivory towers thinking up new wars to wage, new places for people to die, wasting trillions of our taxpayer dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives and undermining our economy, our security, and destroying our middle class."

It is too early to formulate a complete opinion on Gabbard, but she has said the right thing so far. In fact, her record is better than numerous presidents, both past and present.

As we have documented in the past, Gabbard is an Iraq war veteran, and she knew what happened to her fellow soldiers who died for Israel, the Neocon war machine, and the military industrial complex. She also seems to be aware that the war in Iraq alone will cost American taxpayers at least six trillion dollars. [1] She is almost certainly aware of the fact that at least "360,000 Iraq and Afghanistan veterans may have suffered brain injuries." [2]

Gabbard is smart enough to realize that the Neocon path leads to death, chaos, and destruction. She knows that virtually nothing good has come out of the Israeli narrative in the Middle East -- a narrative which has brought America on the brink of collapse in the Middle East. Therefore, she is asking for a U-turn.

The first step for change, she says, is to "stand up against powerful politicians from both parties" who take their orders from the Neocons and war machine. These people don't care about you, me, the average American, the people in the Middle East, or the American economy for that matter. They only care about fulfilling a diabolical ideology in the Middle East and much of the world. These people ought to stop once and for all. Regardless of your political views, you should all agree with Gabbard here.

[Feb 19, 2019] Warmongers in their ivory towers - YouTube

Highly recommended!
This is a powerful political statement... Someaht similar to Tucker Carlson stance...
Feb 19, 2019 | www.youtube.com

"We must stand up against powerful politicians from both parties who sit in their ivory towers thinking up new wars to wage, new places for people to die, wasting trillions of our taxpayer dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives and undermining our economy, our security, and destroying our middle class."

[Feb 17, 2019] The goal of any war is the redistribution of taxpayer money into the bank accounts of MIC shareholders and executives

Highly recommended!
The USA state of continuous war has been a bipartisan phenomenon starting with Truman in Korea and proceeding with Vietnam, Lebanon, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Libya and now Syria. It doesn't take a genius to realize that these limited, never ending wars are expensive was to enrich MIC and Wall Street banksters
Notable quotes:
"... Yes the neocons have a poor track record but they've succeeded at turning our republic into an empire. The mainstream media and elites of practically all western nations are unanimously pro-war. Neither political party has defined a comprehensive platform to rebuild our republic. ..."
Feb 17, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

KC February 15, 2019 at 11:16 pm

The one thing your accurate analysis leaves out is that the goal of US wars is never what the media spouts for its Wall Street masters. The goal of any war is the redistribution of taxpayer money into the bank accounts of MIC shareholders and executives, create more enemies to be fought in future wars, and to provide a rationalization for the continued primacy of the military class in US politics and culture.

Occasionally a country may be sitting on a bunch of oil, and also be threatening to move away from the petrodollar or talking about allowing an "adversary" to build a pipeline across their land.

Otherwise war is a racket unto itself. "Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. "
― George Orwell

Also we've always been at war with Oceania .or whatever that quote said.

Barry F Keane , says: February 15, 2019 at 7:11 pm
Yes the neocons have a poor track record but they've succeeded at turning our republic into an empire. The mainstream media and elites of practically all western nations are unanimously pro-war. Neither political party has defined a comprehensive platform to rebuild our republic.

Even you, Tucker Carlson, mock the efforts of Ilhan Omar for criticizing AIPAC and Elliott Abrams.

I don't personally care for many of her opinions but that's not what matters: if we elect another neocon government we won't last another generation. Like the lady asked Ben Franklin "What kind of government have you bequeathed us?", and Franklin answered "A republic, madam, if you can keep it."

[Feb 13, 2019] MoA - Russiagate Is Finished

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... You can take this to the bank. Hardcore Russiagaters will never give up their belief in collusion and Russian influence in the 2016 campaign -- never. Congress and Mueller will be accused of engaging in a coverup. ..."
"... Thus, even if the Mueller report is underwhelming, I think that the Democrats and TDS-saturated Trump opponents will attempt to rehabilitate it by pretending that it contains important loose ends that need to be pursued. In other words, to perpetuate the Mueller-driven political Russophobia by all other available means. ..."
"... Russiagate has exposed the great degree of corruption within the Justice Department bureaucracy, particularly within FBI, and within the entire Democrat Party. ..."
"... Since this is obviously not going to be allowed to happen, and since these people get away with everything, expect this to never end, despite all evidence to the contrary. It doesn't matter if they've been exposed as CIA propagandists or Integrity Initiative stooges, the game goes on...and on.... the job security of these disgraced columnists is the greatest in the Western world. ..."
"... Stephen Cohen discusses how rational viewpoints are banned from the mainstream media, and how several features of US life today resemble some of the worst features of the Soviet system. https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/02/12/stephen-cohen-on-war-with-russia-and-soviet-style-censorship-in-the-us/ ..."
"... The US needs an enemy, how else can they ask NATO members to cough up 2% of GDP [just for one example Germany's GDP is nearly 4 Trillion dollars [2017] for defence spending, what a crazy sum all NATO members must fork out to please the US, but then most of that money must be spent on the US MIC 'interoperability' of course. ..."
"... Another great damage of Russiagate was the instigating of a nuclear arms race directed primarily at Russia, and ideologically justified by its diabolical policies. ..."
"... Russiagate was very successful. You just have to understand the objectives. It was a great distraction. Diverting peoples attention from the continued fleecing of the "real people" which are the bottom 90% by the "Corporate People" and their Government Lackeys. ..."
"... It provided an excuse for the acting CEO (a figurehead) of the Corporate Empire to go back on many of the promises made that got him elected, and to fill the swamp with Neocon and Koch Brother creatures with the excuse the Deep State made him do it. More proof that there is no deception that is too ridiculous to be believed so long as you have enough pundits claiming it to be so ..."
"... If you've done just a cursory look into Seth Rich, you'd be very suspicious about the story of his life and death. IMO Assange/Wikilleaks were set up. And Flynn was set up too. What they are doing is Orwellian: White Helmets, election manipulation, propaganda, McCarthism, etc. If you're not angry, you're not paying attention. ..."
"... See also this primer on Mueller's MO. ..."
"... The button pushers behind the Trump collusion and Russia election hacking false narratives got what they wanted: to walk the democrats and republicans straight into Cold War v2; to start their campaign to suppress alternative voices on the internet; to increase military spending; and more, more, more war. ..."
"... Russiagate was very successful <=pls read, re-read Pft @ 46.. he listed many things. divide and conquer accomplished. a nation state is defined as an armed rule making structure, designed by those who control a territory, and constructed by the lawyers, military, and wealthy and run by the persons the designers appoint, for the appointed are called politicians. ..."
"... At the beginnng of Russiagate, I wrote on Robert Parry's Consirtium News that Russiagate is Idiocracy piggy-backing on decades and literally billions of dollars of anti-Soviet and anti-Russian propaganda. How hard would it be to brainwash an already brainwashed population? ..."
"... The purveyors of Russiagate will re-compose themselves, brush off all reports and continue on. One just cannot get away from one's nature, even when that nature is pure idiocy. ..."
"... Russiagate will not go away unfortunately because it has evolved in the "Russiagate Industry". As mentioned by others, the Russiagate Industry has been very profitable for many industries and people. Russiagate has generated an entire cottage industry of companies around censorship and "find us a Russian". Dow Jones should have an index on the Russiagate Industry. ..."
Feb 12, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

For more than two years U.S. politicians, the media and some bloggers hyped a conspiracy theory. They claimed that Russia had somehow colluded with the Trump campaign to get him elected.

An obviously fake 'Dirty Dossier' about Trump, commissioned by the Clinton campaign, was presented as evidence. Regular business contacts between Trump flunkies and people in Ukraine or Russia were claimed to be proof for nefarious deals. A Russian click-bait company was accused of manipulating the U.S. electorate by posting puppy pictures and crazy memes on social media. Huge investigations were launched. Every rumor or irrelevant detail coming from them was declared to be - finally - the evidence that would put Trump into the slammer. Every month the walls were closing in on Trump.

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/qjUvfZj-Fm0

At the same time the very real Trump actions that hurt Russia were ignored.

Finally the conspiracy theory has run out of steam. Russiagate is finished :

After two years and 200 interviews, the Senate Intelligence Committee is approaching the end of its investigation into the 2016 election, having uncovered no direct evidence of a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia, according to both Democrats and Republicans on the committee.
...
Democrats and other Trump opponents have long believed that special counsel Robert Mueller and Congressional investigators would unearth new and more explosive evidence of Trump campaign coordination with Russians. Mueller may yet do so, although Justice Department and Congressional sources say they believe that he, too, is close to wrapping up his investigation.

Nothing, zero, nada was found to support the conspiracy theory. The Trump campaign did not collude with Russia. A few flunkies were indicted for unrelated tax issues and for lying to the investigators about some minor details. But nothing at all supports the dramatic claims of collusion made since the beginning of the affair.

In a recent statement House leader Nancy Pelosi was reduced to accuse Trump campaign officials of doing their job:

"The indictment of Roger Stone makes clear that there was a deliberate, coordinated attempt by top Trump campaign officials to influence the 2016 election and subvert the will of the American people. ...

No one called her out for spouting such nonsense.

Russiagate created a lot of damage.

The alleged Russian influence campaign that never happened was used to install censorship on social media. It was used to undermine the election of progressive Democrats. The weapon salesmen used it to push for more NATO aggression against Russia. Maria Butina, an innocent Russian woman interested in good relation with the United States, was held in solitary confinement (recommended) until she signed a paper which claims that she was involved in a conspiracy.

In a just world the people who for more then two years hyped the conspiracy theory and caused so much damage would be pushed out of their public positions. Unfortunately that is not going to happen. They will jump onto the next conspiracy train continue from there.

Posted by b on February 12, 2019 at 01:38 PM | Permalink

Comments next page " Legally, Maria Butina was suborned into signing a false declaration. If there were the rule of law, such party or parties that suborned her would be in gaol. Considering Mueller's involvement with Lockerbie, I am not holding my breath. FWIW the Swiss company that made the timers allegedly involved in Lockerbie have some comments of its own .

james , Feb 12, 2019 2:00:14 PM | link

thanks b..

I will be really glad when this 'get Russia' craziness is over, but I suspect even if the Mueller investigation has nothing, all the same creeps will be pulling out the stops to generate something... Skripal, Integrity Initiative, and etc. etc. stuff like this just doesn't go away overnight or with the end of this 'investigation'... folks are looking for red meat i tell ya!

as for Maria Butina - i look forward to reading the article.. that was a travesty of justice but the machine moves on, mowing down anyone in it's way... she was on the receiving end of all the paranoia that i have come to associate with the western msm at this point...

Zanon , Feb 12, 2019 2:03:26 PM | link
Considering Mueller hasn't produced its report nor the House dito, its way to early to say Russia gate is "finished".
Jackrabbit , Feb 12, 2019 2:11:44 PM | link
And Russiagate was used ...
... by Hillary to justify her loss to Trump

Hillary's loss is actually best explained as her throwing the election to Trump . The Deep State wanted a nationalist to win as that would best help meet the challenge from Russia and China - a challenge that they had been slow to recognize.

=
... to smear Wikileaks as a Russian agent

The DNC leak is best explained as a CIA false flag.

=
... to remove and smear Michael Flynn

Trump said that he fired Flynn for lying to VP Pence but Flynn's conversations with the Russian Ambassador after Obama threw them out for "meddling" in the US election was an embarrassment to the Administration as Putin's Putin's decision not to respond was portrayed as favoritism toward the Trump Administration.

Rob , Feb 12, 2019 2:28:50 PM | link
You can take this to the bank. Hardcore Russiagaters will never give up their belief in collusion and Russian influence in the 2016 campaign -- never. Congress and Mueller will be accused of engaging in a coverup. This is typical behavior for conspiracy theorists.
bj , Feb 12, 2019 2:30:41 PM | link
Jimmy Dore on same: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgBxfHdb4OU Enjoy!
Ort , Feb 12, 2019 2:34:14 PM | link
I hope that Russiagate is indeed "finished", but I think it needs to be draped with garlic-clove necklaces, shot up with silver bullets, sprinkled with holy water, and a wooden stake driven through its black heart just to make sure.

I don't dispute the logical argument B. presents, but it may be too dispassionately rational. I know that the Russiagate proponents and enthralled supporters of the concept are too invested psychologically in this surrealistic fantasy to let go, even if the official outcome reluctantly admits that there's no "there" there.

The Democratic Party, one of the major partners mounting the Russophobic psy-op, has already resolved to turn Democratic committee chairmen loose to dog the Trump administration with hearings aggressively flogging any and all matters that discredit and undermine Trump-- his business connections, social liaisons, etc.

They may hope to find the Holy Grail: the elusive "bombshell" that "demands" impeachment, i.e., some crime or illicit conduct so heinous that the public will stand for another farcical impeachment proceeding. But I reckon that the Dems prefer the "soft" impeachment of harassing Trump with hostile hearings in hopes of destroying his 2020 electability with the death of a thousand innuendoes and guilt-by-association.

Thus, even if the Mueller report is underwhelming, I think that the Democrats and TDS-saturated Trump opponents will attempt to rehabilitate it by pretending that it contains important loose ends that need to be pursued. In other words, to perpetuate the Mueller-driven political Russophobia by all other available means.

Put more succinctly, I fear that Russiagate won't be finished until Rachel Maddow says it's finished. ;)

worldblee , Feb 12, 2019 2:38:17 PM | link
Once a hypothesis is fixed in people's minds, whether true or not, it's hard to get them to let go of it. And let's not forget how many times the narrative changed (and this is true in the Skripal case as well), with all past facts vanishing to accommodate a new narrative.

So I, like others, expect the fake scandal to continue while many, many other real crimes (the US attempted coup in Venezuela and the genocidal war in Yemen, for instance) continue unabated.

karlof1 , Feb 12, 2019 2:43:34 PM | link
Putin solicits public input for essential national policy goals . If ever there was a template to follow for an actual MAGAgenda, Putin's Russia provides one. While US politicos argue over what is essentially Bantha Pudu, Russians are hard at work improving their nation which includes restructuring their economy.

Russiagate has exposed the great degree of corruption within the Justice Department bureaucracy, particularly within FBI, and within the entire Democrat Party.

BlunderOn , Feb 12, 2019 2:48:51 PM | link
mmm...

I very much doubt it it is over. Trump is corrupt and has links to corrupt Russians. Collusion, maybe not, but several stinking individuals are in the frame for, guess what - ...bring it on... The fact that Hilary was arguably even worse (a point made ad-nauseum on here) is frankly irrelevant. The vilification of Trump will not affect the warmongers efforts. He is a useful idiot

james , Feb 12, 2019 2:52:33 PM | link
for a take on the alternative reality some are living in emptywheel has an article up on the nbc link b provides and the article on butina is discussed in the comments section... as i said - they are looking for red meat and will not be happy until they get some... they are completely zonkers...
Blooming Barricade , Feb 12, 2019 2:55:18 PM | link
Now that this racket has been admitted as such, I expect all of the media outlets that devoted banner headlines, hundreds of thousands of hours of cable TV time, thousands of trees, and free speech online to immediately fire all of their journalists and appoint Glenn Greenwald as the publisher of the New York Times, Michael Tracey at the Post, Aaron Matte at the Guardian, and Max Blumenthal at the Daily Beast.

Since this is obviously not going to be allowed to happen, and since these people get away with everything, expect this to never end, despite all evidence to the contrary. It doesn't matter if they've been exposed as CIA propagandists or Integrity Initiative stooges, the game goes on...and on.... the job security of these disgraced columnists is the greatest in the Western world.

jayc , Feb 12, 2019 3:03:51 PM | link
Stephen Cohen discusses how rational viewpoints are banned from the mainstream media, and how several features of US life today resemble some of the worst features of the Soviet system. https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/02/12/stephen-cohen-on-war-with-russia-and-soviet-style-censorship-in-the-us/
Heath , Feb 12, 2019 3:18:29 PM | link
It turned out getting rid of the Clintons has been a long term project.
Harry Law , Feb 12, 2019 3:21:58 PM | link
The US needs an enemy, how else can they ask NATO members to cough up 2% of GDP [just for one example Germany's GDP is nearly 4 Trillion dollars [2017] for defence spending, what a crazy sum all NATO members must fork out to please the US, but then most of that money must be spent on the US MIC 'interoperability' of course.

Then of course Russia has to be surrounded by NATO should they try and take over Europe by surging through the Fulda gap./s

Then of course there are the professional pundits who have built careers on anti Russian propaganda, Rachel Maddow for instance who earns 30,000$ per day to spew anti Russian nonsense.

folktruther , Feb 12, 2019 3:27:32 PM | link
Another great damage of Russiagate was the instigating of a nuclear arms race directed primarily at Russia, and ideologically justified by its diabolical policies.

I'm sorry b is so down on Conspiracy Theories, since they reveal quite real staged homicidal false flag operations of US power. Feeding into the stigmatizing of the truth about reality is not in the interests of the earth's people.

frances , Feb 12, 2019 3:31:11 PM | link
somehow I see this "revelation: tied to Barr's approaching tenure. I think they (FBI/DOJ) didn't want his involvement in their noodle soup of an investigation and the best way to accomplish that was to end it themselves. I also suspect that a deal has been made with Trump, possibly in exchange for leaving his family alone.

So we will see no investigation of Hillary, her 650,000 emails or the many crimes they detailed (according to NYPD investigation of Weiner's laptop) and the US will continue to be at war all day, every day. Team Swamp rules.

Ash , Feb 12, 2019 3:35:06 PM | link
Meanwhile, MSM is prepping its readers for the possibility that the Mueller report will never be released to us proles. If that's the case, I'm sure nobody will try to use innuendo to suggest it actually contains explosive revelations after all...
Heath , Feb 12, 2019 3:38:37 PM | link
@16

Harry, its vitally important as the US desperately wants to keep Europe under its thumb and to stop this European army which means Europe lead by Paris and Berlin becomes a world power. Trump's attempts to make nice with Russia is to keep it out of the EU bloc.

Anne Jaclard , Feb 12, 2019 3:54:47 PM | link
Well, the liberal conspiracy car crash ensured downmarket Mussolini a second term, it appears...Hard Brexit Tories also look likely to win thanks to centrist sabatoge of the left. You reap what you sow, corporate presstitutes!
wagelaborer , Feb 12, 2019 4:05:25 PM | link
Sane people have predicted the end of Russiagate almost as many times as insane people have predicted that the "smoking gun that will get rid of Trump" has been found. And yet the Mighty Wurlitzer grinds on, while social media is more and more censored.

I expect it all to continue until the 2020 election circus winds up into full-throated mode, and no one talks about anything but the next puppet to be appointed. Oops, I mean "elected".

Jen , Feb 12, 2019 4:15:57 PM | link
Ort @ 7:

You also need to behead the corpse, stuff the mouth with a lemon and then place the head down in the coffin with the body in supine (facing up) position. Weight the coffin with stones and wild roses and toss it into a fast-flowing river.

Russiagate won't be finished until a wall is built around Capitol Hill and all its inhabitants and worker bees declared insane by a properly functioning court of law.

Jackrabbit , Feb 12, 2019 4:16:59 PM | link
frances @18:
I also suspect that a deal has been made with Trump, possibly in exchange for leaving his family alone. So we will see no investigation of Hillary ...
Underlying your perspective is the assumption that USA is a democracy where a populist "outsider" could be elected President, Yet you also believe that Hillary and the Deep State have the power to manipulate government and the intelligence agencies and propose a "conspiracy theory" based on that power.

Isn't it more likely that Trump made it clear (behind closed doors, of course) that he was amenable to the goals of the Deep State and that the bogus investigation was merely done to: 1) cover their own election meddling; 2) eliminate threats like Flynn and Assange/Wikileaks; 3) anti-Russian propaganda?

Jackrabbit , Feb 12, 2019 4:33:16 PM | link
Jen

Steven Cohen once lamented that there were no "wise men" left in foreign policy. All the independent realists were shut out.

Michael McNulty , Feb 12, 2019 4:49:32 PM | link
US anti-Russian hysteria is moving into that grey area beyond McCarthyism approaching Nazism.
Circe , Feb 12, 2019 4:58:40 PM | link
Dowd, Trump's former lawyer on Russiagate stated there may not even be a report. If this is the case then the Zionist rulers have gotten to Mueller who no doubt figured out that the election collusion breadcrumbs don't lead to Putin, they lead to Netanyahu and Zionist billionaire friends! So Mueller may have to come up with a nothing burger to hide the truth.
Danny , Feb 12, 2019 5:02:34 PM | link
B is the only alternative media blogger I've followed for a significant amount of time without becoming disenfranchised. Not because he has no blind spot - his is just one I can deal with... optimism.

hopehely , Feb 12, 2019 5:14:49 PM | link

I will believe Russiagate is finished when expelled Russian staff gets back, when the US returns the seized Russian properties, when the consulate is Seattle reopens and when USA issues formal apology to Russia.

Posted by: hopehely | Feb 12, 2019 5:14:49 PM | link

bevin , Feb 12, 2019 5:16:18 PM | link
Nobody has ever advanced the tiniest shred of credible evidence that 'Russia' or its government at any level was in any way implicated either in Wikileaks' acquisition of the DNC and Podesta emails or in any form of interference with the Presidential election.

This has been going on for three years and not once has anything like evidence surfaced.

On the other hand there has been an abundance of evidence that those alleging Russian involvement consistently refused to listen to explore the facts.

Incredibly, the DNC computers were never examined by the FBI or any other agency resembling an official police agency. Instead the notorious Crowdstrike professionally russophobic and caught red handed faking data for the Ukrainians against Russia were commissioned to produce a 'report.'

Nobody with any sense would have credited anything about Russiagate after that happened.

Thgen there was the proof, from VIPS and Bill Binney (?) that the computers were not hacked at all but that the information was taken by thumbdrive. A theory which not only Wikileaks but several witnesses have offered to prove.

Not one of them has been contacted by the FBI, Mueller or anyone else "investigating."

In reality the charges from the first were ludicrous on their face. There is, as b has proved and every new day's news attests, not the slightest reason why anyone in the Russian government should have preferred Trump over Clinton. And that is saying something because they are pretty well indistinguishable. And neither has the morals or brains of an adolescent groundhog.

Russiagate is over, alright, The Nothingburger is empty. But that means nothing in this 'civilisation': it will be recorded in the history books, still to be written, by historians still in diapers, that "The 2016 Presidential election, which ended in the controversial defeat of Hillary Clinton, was heavily influenced by Russian agents who hacked ..etc etc"

What will not be remembered is that every single email released was authentic. And that within those troves of correspondence there was enough evidence of criminality by Clinton and her campaign to fill a prison camp.

Another thing that will not be recalled is that there was once a young enthusiastic man, working for the DNC, who was mugged one evening after work and killed.

Baron , Feb 12, 2019 5:16:49 PM | link
The 'no collusion' result will only spur the 'beginning of the end' baboons to shout even more, they'll never stop until they die in their beds or the plebs of the Republic made them adore the street lamp posts, you'll see. The former is by far more likely, the unwashed of American have never had a penchant for foreign affairs except for the few spasms like Vietnam.
Circe , Feb 12, 2019 5:20:11 PM | link
There was collusion alright but the only Russians who helped Trump get elected and were in on the collusion are citizens of ISRAEL FIRST, likewise for the American billionaires who put Trump in the power perch. ISRAEL FIRST.

That's why Trump is on giant billboards in Israel shaking hands with the Yahoo. Trump is higher in the polls in Israel than in the U.S. If it weren't that the Zionist upper crust need Trump doing their dirty work in America, like trying today get rid of Rep. Omar Ilhan, then Trump would win the elections in Ziolandia or Ziostan by a landslide cause he's been better for the Joowish state than all preceding Presidents put together. Mazel tov to them bullshet for the rest of us servile mass in the vassal West and Palestinians the most shafted class ever. Down with Venezuela and Iran, up with oil and gas. The billionare shysters' and Trump's payola is getting closer. Onward AZ Empire!

Les , Feb 12, 2019 5:24:36 PM | link
He proved himself so easy to troll during the election. It wouldn't surprise me if aim of the domestic intelligence agencies all along was to get him elected and have a candidate they could manipulate.
Zachary Smith , Feb 12, 2019 5:38:03 PM | link
@ Harry Law #16

At least Germany has the good sense not to throw taxpayer money at the F-35. German F-35 decision sacrifices NATO capability for Franco-German industrial cooperation I don't know what they have in mind with a proposed airplane purchase. If they need fighters, buy or lease Sweden's Gripen. If attack airplanes are what they're after, go to Boeing and get some brand new F-15X models. If the prickly French are agreeable to build a 6th generation aircraft, that would be worth a try.

Regarding Rachel Maddow, I recently had an encounter with a relative who told me 1) I visited too many oddball sites and 2) he considered Rachel M. to be the most reliable news person in existence. I think we're talking "true believer" here. :)

Zachary Smith , Feb 12, 2019 5:43:19 PM | link
@ Les @42
It wouldn't surprise me if aim of the domestic intelligence agencies all along was to get him elected and have a candidate they could manipulate.

Considering how those "intelligence agencies" are hard pressed to find their own tails, even if you allow them to use both hands, it would surprise me.

That Trump would turn out to be a tub of jello in more than just a physical way has been a surprise to an awful lot of us.

Pft , Feb 12, 2019 5:44:54 PM | link

Russiagate was very successful. You just have to understand the objectives. It was a great distraction. Diverting peoples attention from the continued fleecing of the "real people" which are the bottom 90% by the "Corporate People" and their Government Lackeys.

It provided an excuse for the acting CEO (a figurehead) of the Corporate Empire to go back on many of the promises made that got him elected, and to fill the swamp with Neocon and Koch Brother creatures with the excuse the Deep State made him do it. More proof that there is no deception that is too ridiculous to be believed so long as you have enough pundits claiming it to be so

Allowed the bipartisan support for the clamp down on alt media with censorship by social media (Deep State Tools) and funded by the Ministry of Truth set up by Obama in his last days in office to under the false pretense of protecting us from foreign governments interference in elections (except Israel of course) . Similar agencies have been set up or planned to be in other countries followig the US example such as UK, France, Russia, etc.

Did anyone really expect Mr "Cover It Up " Mueller to find anything? Mueller is Deep State all the way and Trump is as well, not withstanding the "Fake Wrestling " drama that they are bitter enemies. All the surveillance done over the past 2-3 decades would have so much dirt on the Trumpet they could silence him forever . Trump knew that going in and I sometimes wonder if he was pressured to run as a condition to avoid prosecution. Pretty sure every President since Carter has been "Kompromat"

Jackrabbit , Feb 12, 2019 6:29:51 PM | link
james, bevin

If you've done just a cursory look into Seth Rich, you'd be very suspicious about the story of his life and death. IMO Assange/Wikilleaks were set up. And Flynn was set up too. What they are doing is Orwellian: White Helmets, election manipulation, propaganda, McCarthism, etc. If you're not angry, you're not paying attention.

stevelaudig , Feb 12, 2019 6:34:12 PM | link
Russians and likely at the behest of the Russian state interfered and it was fair payback for Yeltsin's election. It is time to move on but not in feigned ignorance of what was done. Was it "outcome" affecting, possibly, but not clearly and if the US electoral college and electoral system generally is so decrepit that a second level power in the world can influence then its the US's fault.

It's not like the 2000 election wasn't a warning shot about the rottenness of system and a system that doesn't understand a warning shot deserves pretty much what it gets. But there's enough non-hype evidence of acts and intent to say yes, the Russians tried and may have succeeded. They certainly are acting guilty enough. but still close the book move and move on to Trump's 'real' crimes which were done without a Russian assist.

spudski , Feb 12, 2019 6:52:50 PM | link
@38 bevin @47 james

I seem to recall former UK Ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray saying that it was not a hack and that he had been handed a thumb drive in a field near American University by a disgruntled Democrat whistleblower. Further, I seem to recall William Binney, former NSA Technical Leader for intelligence, conducting an experiment to show that internet speeds at the time would not allow the information to be hacked - they knew the size of the files and the period over which they were downloaded. Plus, Seth Rich. So why does anyone even believe it was a hack, @32 THN?

Johan Meyer , Feb 12, 2019 6:55:54 PM | link
Just another comment re Mueller. There is a great documentary by (Dutch, not Israeli---different person) Gideon Levy, Lockerbie Revisited. The narration is in Dutch, but the interviews are in English, and there is a small segment of a German broadcast. The documentary ends abruptly where one set of FBI personnel contradict statements by another set of FBI personnel. See also this primer on Mueller's MO.
frances , Feb 12, 2019 7:11:07 PM | link
reply to Les 42
"It wouldn't surprise me if aim of the domestic intelligence agencies all along was to get him elected and have a candidate they could manipulate."

Not the intelligence agencies, the Military IMO. They knew HC for what she was; horrifically corrupt and,again IMO,they know she is insane.

They saw and I think still see Trump as someone they could work with, remember Rogers (Navy) of the NSA going to him immediately once he was elected? That was the Military protecting him as best they could.

They IMO have kept him alive and as long as he doesn't send any troops into "real" wars, they will keep on keeping him alive.
This doesn't mean Trump hasn't gone over to the Dark Side, just that no military action will take place that the military command doesn't fully support.

Again, I could be wrong, he could be backed by fiends from Patagonia for all I really know:)

AriusArmenian , Feb 12, 2019 8:44:27 PM | link
The button pushers behind the Trump collusion and Russia election hacking false narratives got what they wanted: to walk the democrats and republicans straight into Cold War v2; to start their campaign to suppress alternative voices on the internet; to increase military spending; and more, more, more war.
james , Feb 12, 2019 9:34:59 PM | link
ot - further to @65 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kK5YFos56ZU and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kK5YFos56ZU

as jr says - welcome to the rabbit hole..

ben , Feb 12, 2019 10:11:05 PM | link
Hope you're right b. Maybe now we can get on with some real truths.
  1. That there is really only one party with real influence, the party of $.
  2. That most of the Dems belong to that club, and virtually all the Repubs.
  3. That the U$A is not a real democracy, but an Oligarchy.
  4. That the corporate empire is the greatest purveyor of evil the world has ever known.

And these are just a few truths. Thanks for the therapy b, hope you feel better...

Circe , Feb 12, 2019 10:52:22 PM | link
Boy, I hope Jackrabbit sees this. Everyone knows I believe Trump is the anointed chosen of the Zionist 1%. There was no Russia collusion; it was Zionist collusion with a Russian twist...
Circe , Feb 12, 2019 11:11:17 PM | link
Oh yeah! Forgot to mention the latest. Trump is asking Kim to provide a list of his nuclear scientists! Before Kim acts on this request, he should call up the Iranian government for advise 'cause they have lots of experience and can warn Kim of what will happen to each of those scientists. They'll be put on a kill-list and will be extrajudicially wacked as in executed. Can you believe the chutzpah? Trump must think Kim is really stupid to fall for that one!

Aye! The thought of six more years of Zionist pandering Trump. Barf-inducing prospect is too tame.

PHC , Feb 13, 2019 2:25:44 AM | link

Russiagate is finished. So, now is the time to create Chinagate. But how ??

V , Feb 13, 2019 2:25:48 AM | link
The view from the hermitage is, we are in the age of distractions. Russiagate will be replaced with one of a litany of distractions, purely designed to keep us off target. The target being, corruption, vote rigging, illegal wars, war crimes, overthrowing sovereign governments, and political assasinations, both at home and abroad. Those so distracted, will focus on sillyness; not the genuine danger afoot around the planet. Get used to it; it's become the new normal.
Circe , Feb 13, 2019 3:53:19 AM | link
@76Hw
I have yet to read anything more delusional, nay, utterly preposterous. Methinks you over-project too much. Even Trump would have a belly-ache laugh reading that sheeple spiel. You're the type that sees the giant billboard of Zionist Trump and Yahoo shaking hands and drones on and on that our lying eyes deceive us and it's really Trump playing 4-D chess. I suppose when he tried to pressure Omar Ilhan into resigning her seat in Congress yesterday, that too was reverse psychology?

Trump instagramed the billboard pic, he tweeted it, he probably pasted it on his wall; maybe with your kind of wacky, Trump infatuation, you should too!

Starring role

Circe , Feb 13, 2019 4:15:37 AM | link
Russiagate is finished because Mueller discovered an embarrassing fact: The collusion was and always will be with Israel. Here's Trump professing his endless love for Zionism: Trump Resign
snake , Feb 13, 2019 5:13:14 AM | link

Russiagate was very successful <=pls read, re-read Pft @ 46.. he listed many things. divide and conquer accomplished.
a nation state is defined as an armed rule making structure, designed by those who control a territory, and constructed by the lawyers, military, and wealthy and run by the persons the designers appoint, for the appointed are called politicians.

Most designs of armed nation states provide the designers with information feedback and the designers use that information to appoint more obedient politicians and generals to run things, and to improve the design to better serve the designers. The armed rule making structure is designed to give the designers complete control over those targeted to be the governed. Why so stupid the governed? ; always they allow themselves to be manipulated like sheep.

When 10 angry folks approach you with two pieces of ropes: one to throw over the tree branch under which your horse will be supporting you while they tie the noose around your neck and the other shorter piece of rope to tie your hands behind ..your back you need at that point to make your words count , if five of the people are black and five are white. all you need do is say how smart the blacks are, and how stupid the whites are, as the two groups fight each other you manage your escape. democrat vs republican= divide to conquer. gun, no gun = divide to conquer, HRC vs DJT = divide to conquer, abortion, no abortion = divide to conquer, Trump is a Russian planted in a high level USA position of power = divide to conquer, They were all in on it together,, Muller was in the white house to keep the media supplied with XXX, to keep the law enforcement agencies in the loop, and to advise trump so things would not get out of hand ( its called Manipulation and the adherents to the economic system called Zionism
For the record, Zionism is not related to race, religion or intelligence. Zionism is a system of economics that take's no captives, its adherents must own everything, must destroy and decimate all actual or imaginary competition, for Zionist are the owners and masters of everything? Zionism is about power, absolute power, monopoly ownership and using governments everywhere to abuse the governed. Zionism has many adherents, whites, blacks, browns, Christians, Jews, Islamist, Indians, you name it among each class of person and walk of life can be found persons who subscribe to the idea that they, and only they, should own everything, and when those of us, that are content to be the governed let them, before the kill and murder us, they usually end up owning everything.

snake , Feb 13, 2019 6:08:16 AM | link
Here might the subject matter that Russia Gate sought to camouflage https://www.presstv.com/Detail/2019/02/13/588433/US-Saudi-Arabia-nuclear-deal-nuclear-weapons 'This comes as US Energy Secretary Rick Perry has been holding secret talks with Saudi officials on sharing US nuclear technology.'

Finally, a hypothesis to explain

1. why the Joint non nuclear agreement with Iran and the other nuclear power nations, that prevented Iran from developing nuclear weapons, was trashed? Someone needs to be able to say Iran is developing ..., at the right time.

2. Why Netanyohu made public a video that claimed Iran was developing nuclear stuff in violation of the Iran non nuclear agreement, and everybody laughed,

3. Why the nuclear non proliferation agreement with Russia, that terminated the costly useless arms race a decade ago, has been recently terminated, to reestablish the nuclear arms race, no apparent reason was given the implication might be Russia could be a target, but

4. why it might make sense to give nukes to Saudi Arabia or some other rogue nation, and

5. why no one is allowed to have nuclear weapons except the Zionist owned and controlled nation states.

Statement: Zionism is an economic system that requires the elimination of all competition of whatever kind. It is a winner get's all, takes no prisoners, targets all who would threaten or be a challenge or a threat; does not matter if the threat is in in oil and gas, technology or weapons as soon as a possibility exist, the principles of Zionism would require that it be taken out, decimated, and destroyed and made where never again it could even remotely be a threat to the Empire, that Zionism demands..

Hypothesis: A claim that another is developing nuclear weapon capabilities is sufficient to take that other out?

Kiza , Feb 13, 2019 8:26:29 AM | link
I am glad that most commenters understand that Russiagate will not go away. But the majority appear to miss the real reason. Russiagate is not an accusation, it is the state of mind.

At the beginnng of Russiagate, I wrote on Robert Parry's Consirtium News that Russiagate is Idiocracy piggy-backing on decades and literally billions of dollars of anti-Soviet and anti-Russian propaganda. How hard would it be to brainwash an already brainwashed population?

The purveyors of Russiagate will re-compose themselves, brush off all reports and continue on. One just cannot get away from one's nature, even when that nature is pure idiocy. Of course, the most ironic in the affair is that it is the so called US "intellectuals", academics and other assorted cretins who are the most fervent proponents. If you were wondering how Russia can make such amazing defensive weapons that US can only deny exist and wet dream of having, there is your answer. It is the state of mind. The whole of US establishment are legends in their on lunch time and totally delusional about the reality surrounding them - both Russiagate and MAGA cretins, no report can help the Russiagate nation.

Finally, I am thinking of that crazy and ugly professor bitch from the British Cambridge University who gives her lectures naked to protest something or other. I am so lucky that I do not have to go to a Western university ever again. What a catastrophic decline! No Brexit can help the Skripal nation.

NemesisCalling , Feb 13, 2019 8:46:48 AM | link
Russiagate is finished, but is DJT also among the rubble?

Hardly any money for the border wall and still lingering in the ME?

If Hoarsewhisperer proves to be correct above re: DJT, he will really have to knock our socks off before election 2020. To do this he will have to unequivocally and unceremoniously withdraw from the MENA and Afghanistan and possibly declare a National Emergency for more money for the wall.

The problem is, when he does this, he will look impulsively dangerous and this may harm his mystique to the lemmings who need a president to be more "presidential."

My money is on status quo all the way to 2020 and the rethugz hoping the Dems will eat their own in an orgy of warring identities.

I would love to be proven wrong.

morongobill , Feb 13, 2019 9:52:25 AM | link
Rush Limbaugh has been on a roll with his analysis of Russiagate, in fact, his analysis is in line with the writer/editor here at MOA.
Bart Hansen , Feb 13, 2019 10:52:12 AM | link
The collusion story may be faltering, but the blame for Russia poisoning the Skripals lives on. The other night on The News Hour, "Judy" led off the program with this: "It has been almost a year since Kremlin intelligence officers attempted to kill a Russian defector in the British city of Salisbury by poisoning him with a nerve agent. That attack, and the subsequent death of a British woman, scared away tourists and shoppers, but authorities and residents are working to get the town's economy back on track. Special correspondent Malcolm Brabant reports."
Erelis , Feb 13, 2019 12:15:48 PM | link

Russiagate will not go away unfortunately because it has evolved in the "Russiagate Industry". As mentioned by others, the Russiagate Industry has been very profitable for many industries and people. Russiagate has generated an entire cottage industry of companies around censorship and "find us a Russian". Dow Jones should have an index on the Russiagate Industry.

Here is one recent example. You know the measles outbreak in the US Pacific Northwest. Yup, the Russians. How do we know. A government funded research grant. The study found that 899 tweets caused people to doubt vaccines. Looks like money is to be had even by academics for the right results.

Measles outbreak: Anti-vaccination misinformation fueled by Russian propagandists, study finds
https://www.oregonlive.com/clark-county/2019/02/measles-outbreak-anti-vaccination-misinformation-fueled-by-russian-propagandists-study-finds.html

[Feb 13, 2019] Stephen Cohen on War with Russia and Soviet-style Censorship in the US by Russell Mokhiber

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... War with Russia. ..."
"... Cohen said the censorship that he has faced in recent years is similar to the censorship imposed on dissidents in the Soviet Union. ..."
"... Washington Post ..."
"... "Katrina and I had a joint signed op-ed piece in the New York Times ..."
"... Washington Post ..."
"... "The alternatives have been excluded from both. I would welcome an opportunity to debate these issues in the mainstream media, where you can reach more people. And remember, being in these pages, for better or for worse, makes you Kosher. This is the way it works. If you have been on these pages, you are cited approvingly. You are legitimate. You are within the parameters of the debate." ..."
"... "When I lived off and on in the Soviet Union, I saw how Soviet media treated dissident voices. And they didn't have to arrest them. They just wouldn't ever mention them. Sometimes they did that (arrest them). But they just wouldn't ever mention them in the media." ..."
"... "And something like that has descended here. And it's really alarming, along with some other Soviet-style practices in this country that nobody seems to care about – like keeping people in prison until they break, that is plea, without right to bail, even though they haven't been convicted of anything." ..."
"... "That's what they did in the Soviet Union. They kept people in prison until people said – I want to go home. Tell me what to say – and I'll go home. That's what we are doing here. And we shouldn't be doing that." ..."
"... Russell Mokhiber is the editor of the Corporate Crime Reporter.. ..."
Feb 12, 2019 | www.counterpunch.org

On stage at Busboys and Poets in Washington, D.C. this past week was Princeton University Professor Emeritus Stephen Cohen, author of the new book, War with Russia: From Putin & Ukraine to Trump & Russiagate.

Cohen has largely been banished from mainstream media.

"I had been arguing for years -- very much against the American political media grain -- that a new US/Russian Cold War was unfolding -- driven primarily by politics in Washington, not Moscow," Cohen writes in War with Russia. "For this perspective, I had been largely excluded from influential print, broadcast and cable outlets where I had been previously welcomed."

On the stage at Busboys and Poets with Cohen was Katrina vanden Heuvel, the editor of The Nation magazine, and Robert Borosage, co-founder of the Campaign for America's Future.

During question time, Cohen was asked about the extent of the censorship in the context of other Americans who had been banished from mainstream American media, including Ralph Nader, whom the liberal Democratic establishment, including Borosage and Vanden Heuvel, stiff armed when he crashed the corporate political parties in the electoral arena in 2004 and 2008.

Cohen said the censorship that he has faced in recent years is similar to the censorship imposed on dissidents in the Soviet Union.

"Until some period of time before Trump, on the question of what America's policy toward Putin's Kremlin should be, there was a reasonable facsimile of a debate on those venues that had these discussions," Cohen said. "Are we allowed to mention the former Charlie Rose for example? On the long interview form, Charlie would have on a person who would argue for a very hard policy toward Putin. And then somebody like myself who thought it wasn't a good idea."

"Occasionally that got on CNN too. MSNBC not so much. And you could get an op-ed piece published, with effort, in the New York Times or Washington Post ."

"Katrina and I had a joint signed op-ed piece in the New York Times six or seven years ago. But then it stopped. And to me, that's the fundamental difference between this Cold War and the preceding Cold War."

"I will tell you off the record – no, I'm not going to do it," Cohen said. "Two exceedingly imminent Americans, who most op-ed pages would die to get a piece by, just to say they were on the page, submitted such articles to the New York Times , and they were rejected the same day. They didn't even debate it. They didn't even come back and say – could you tone it down? They just didn't want it."

"Now is that censorship? In Italy, where each political party has its own newspaper, you would say – okay fair enough. I will go to a newspaper that wants me. But here, we are used to these newspapers."

"Remember how it works. I was in TV for 18 years being paid by CBS. So, I know how these things work. TV doesn't generate its own news anymore. Their actual reporting has been de-budgeted. They do video versions of what is in the newspapers."

"Look at the cable talk shows. You see it in the New York Times and Washington Post in the morning, you turn on the TV at night and there is the video version. That's just the way the news business works now."

"The alternatives have been excluded from both. I would welcome an opportunity to debate these issues in the mainstream media, where you can reach more people. And remember, being in these pages, for better or for worse, makes you Kosher. This is the way it works. If you have been on these pages, you are cited approvingly. You are legitimate. You are within the parameters of the debate."

"If you are not, then you struggle to create your own alternative media. It's new in my lifetime. I know these imminent Americans I mentioned were shocked when they were just told no. It's a lockdown. And it is a form of censorship."

"When I lived off and on in the Soviet Union, I saw how Soviet media treated dissident voices. And they didn't have to arrest them. They just wouldn't ever mention them. Sometimes they did that (arrest them). But they just wouldn't ever mention them in the media."

"Dissidents created what is known as samizdat – that's typescript that you circulate by hand. Gorbachev, before he came to power, did read some samizdat. But it's no match for newspapers published with five, six, seven million copies a day. Or the three television networks which were the only television networks Soviet citizens had access to."

"And something like that has descended here. And it's really alarming, along with some other Soviet-style practices in this country that nobody seems to care about – like keeping people in prison until they break, that is plea, without right to bail, even though they haven't been convicted of anything."

"That's what they did in the Soviet Union. They kept people in prison until people said – I want to go home. Tell me what to say – and I'll go home. That's what we are doing here. And we shouldn't be doing that."

Cohen appears periodically on Tucker Carlson's show on Fox News. And that rankled one person in the audience at Busboys and Poets, who said he worried that Cohen's perspective on Russia can be "appropriated by the right."

"Trump can take that and run on a nationalistic platform – to hell with NATO, to hell with fighting these endless wars, to do what he did in 2016 and get the votes of people who are very concerned about the deteriorating relations between the U.S. and Russia," the man said.

Cohen says that on a personal level, he likes Tucker Carlson "and I don't find him to be a racist or a nationalist."

"Nationalism is on the rise around the world everywhere," Cohen said. "There are different kinds of nationalism. We always called it patriotism in this country, but we have always been a nationalistic country."

"Fox has about three to four million viewers at that hour," Cohen said. "If I am not permitted to give my take on American/Russian relations on any other mass media, and by the way, possibly talk directly to Trump, who seems to like his show, and say – Trump is making a mistake, he should do this or do that instead -- I don't get many opportunities – and I can't see why I shouldn't do it."

"I get three and a half to four minutes," Cohen said. "I don't see it as consistent with my mission, if that's the right word, to say no. These articles I write for The Nation , which ended up in my book, are posted on some of the most God awful websites in the world. I had to look them up to find out how bad they really are. But what can I do about it?"

Join the debate on Facebook More articles by: Russell Mokhiber

Russell Mokhiber is the editor of the Corporate Crime Reporter..

[Feb 10, 2019] Pussy John Bolton and His Codpiece Mustache by Fred Reed

Highly recommended!
We have until recently never had government as aggressive, reckless, or psychiatrically fascinating as now.
Appointment on Bolton essentially confirms Fred Reed diagnose of Trump: "profoundly ignorant, narcissistic, a real-estate con man who danced just out of reach of the law.
Notable quotes:
"... Until Bush II, those governing were never lunatics. Eisenhower, Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Obama, Clinton had their defects, were sometimes corrupt, and could be disagreed with on many grounds. They weren't crazy. ..."
"... The problem with the current occupants of the White House is not that they are conservatives, if they are. It is that they are nuts. ..."
"... Start with the head cheese, Donald Trump, profoundly ignorant, narcissistic, a real-estate con man who danced just out of reach of the law ..."
"... A particularly loathsome sort of politician is one who dodges his country's wars when of military age, and then wants to send others to die in later wars. This is Pussy John, arch hawk, coward, amoral, bully, willing to kill any number while he prances martially in Washington. Speaking as one who carried a rifle in Viet Nam, I would like to confine this fierce darling for life in the bottom of a public latrine in Uganda. ..."
"... I remarked how it seemed so strange that many of these hawks never fought in a war even when they had ample opportunity in their youth ..."
"... The crazy irresponsibility of Trump's foreign policy is entirely counter productive & inexcusable, however it's symptomatic of a slowly swelling sense of unconscious desperation. The reality, the feeling of unconstrained power the US experienced in the 90's & naughties has gone. The US has slowly woken to the nightmare possibility of real peer competitors. ..."
Feb 10, 2019 | www.unz.com

American government has become a collection of sordid and dangerous clowns. It was not always thus. Until Bush II, those governing were never lunatics. Eisenhower, Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Obama, Clinton had their defects, were sometimes corrupt, and could be disagreed with on many grounds. They weren't crazy. Today's administration would seem unwholesome in a New York bus station at three in the morning. They are not normal American politicians.

In particular they seem to be pushing for war with Iran, China, Russia, and Venezuela. And -- this is important -- their behavior is not a matter of liberals catfighting with conservatives. All former presidents carefully avoided war with the Soviet Union, which carefully avoided war with America.

It was Reagan, a conservative and responsible president, who negotiated the INF treaty, to eliminate short-fuse nuclear weapons from Europe. By contrast, Trump is scrapping it. Pat Buchanan, the most conservative man I have met, strongly opposes aggression against Russia. The problem with the current occupants of the White House is not that they are conservatives, if they are. It is that they are nuts.

Donald the Cockatoo

Start with the head cheese, Donald Trump, profoundly ignorant, narcissistic, a real-estate con man who danced just out of reach of the law. His supporters will explode in fury at this. All politics being herd politics, the population has coalesced into herds fanatically pro-Trump and fanatically anti-Trump. Yet Trump's past is not a secret. Well-documented biographies describe his behavior in detail, but his supporters don't read them. The following is a bit long, but worth reading.

From The Making of Donald Trump , Johnston, David Cay. (p. 23). Melville House. Kindle Edition.

"I always get even," Trump writes in the opening line of that chapter. He then launches into an attack on the same woman he had denounced in Colorado. Trump recruited the unnamed woman "from her government job where she was making peanuts," her career going nowhere. "I decided to make her somebody. I gave her a great job at the Trump Organization, and over time she became powerful in real estate. She bought a beautiful home.

"When Trump was in financial trouble in the early nineties .."I asked her to make a phone call to an extremely close friend of hers who held a powerful position at a big bank and would have done what she asked. She said, "Donald, I can't do that." Instead of accepting that the woman felt that such a call would be inappropriate, Trump fired her. She started her own business. Trump writes that her business failed. "I was really happy when I found that out," he says.

"She had turned on me after I did so much to help her. I had asked her to do me a favor in return, and she turned me down flat. She ended up losing her home. Her husband, who was only in it for the money, walked out on her and I was glad. Over the years many people have called me asking for a recommendation for her. I always gave her bad recommendation. I can't stomach disloyalty. ..and now I go out of my way to make her life miserable."

All that because (if she exists) she declined to engage in corruption for the Donald. That is your President. A draft dodger, a pampered rich kid, and Ivy brat (Penn, Wharton). This increasingly is a pattern at the top: Ivy, money, no military service.

Pussy John Bolton

A particularly loathsome sort of politician is one who dodges his country's wars when of military age, and then wants to send others to die in later wars. This is Pussy John, arch hawk, coward, amoral, bully, willing to kill any number while he prances martially in Washington. Speaking as one who carried a rifle in Viet Nam, I would like to confine this fierce darling for life in the bottom of a public latrine in Uganda.

Pussy John, an Ivy flower (Yale) wrote in a reunion books that, during the 1969 Vietnam War draft lottery, "I confess I had no desire to die in a Southeast Asian rice paddy. I considered the war in Vietnam already lost." In an interview, Bolton explained that he decided to avoid service in Vietnam because "by the time I was about to graduate in 1970, it was clear to me that opponents of the Vietnam War had made it certain we could not prevail, and that I had no great interest in going there to have Teddy Kennedy give it back to the people I might die to take it away from."

This same Pussy John, unwilling to risk his valuable being in a war he could have attended, now wants war with Iran, Venezuela, Russia, Syria, and Afghanistan. In these wars millions would die while he waggled his silly lip broom in the West Wing. His truculence is pathological and dangerous.

Here is PJ on Iran: which has not harmed and does not threaten America: "We think the government is under real pressure and it's our intention to squeeze them very hard," Bolton said Tuesday in Singapore. "As the British say, 'squeeze them until the pips squeak'."

How very brave of him. He apparently feels sadistic delight at starving Venezuelans, inciting civil war, and ruining the lives of millions who have done nothing wrong. Whence the weird hostility of this empty jockstrap, the lack of humanity? Forgot his Midiol? Venezuela of course has done nothing to the US and couldn't if it wanted to. America under the Freak Show is destroying another country simply because it doesn't meekly obey. While PJ gloats.

Bush II

Another rich kid and Yalie, none too bright, amoral as the rest, another draft dodger, (he hid in the Air National Guard.) who got to the White House on daddy's name recognition. Not having the balls to fight in his own war, he presided over the destruction of Iraq and the killing of hundreds of thousands, for no reason. (Except oil, Israel, and Empire. Collectively, these amount to no reason.) He then had the effrontery to pose on the deck of an aircraft carrier and say, "Mission accomplished." You know, just like Alexander the Great. Amoral. No empathy. What a man.

The striking pattern of the Ivy League avoiding the war confirmed then, as it does now, that our present rulers regard the rest of America as beings of a lower order. These armchair John Waynes might have called them "deplorables," though Hillary, another Yalie bowwow hawk, had not yet made the contempt explicit. This was the attitude of Pussy John, Bushy-Bushy Two, and Cockatoo Don. Compare this with the Falklands War in which Prince Andrew did what a country's leadership should do, but ours doesn't..

Wikipedia: "He (Prince Andrew) holds the rank of commander and the honorary rank of Vice Admiral (as of February 2015) in the Royal Navy, in which he served as an active-duty helicopter pilot and instructor and as the captain of a warship. He saw active service during the Falklands War, flying on multiple missions including anti-surface warfare, Exocet missile decoy, and casualty evacuation"

The Brits still have class. Compare Andrew with the contents of the Great Double-Wide on Pennsylvania Avernus.

Gina

A measure of the moral degradation of America: It is the only country that openly and proudly engages in torture. Many countries do it, of course. We admit it, and maintain torture prisons around the globe. Now we have a major government official, Gina Haspel, head of the CIA, a known sadist. "Bloody Gina." Is this who represents us? Would any other country in the civilized world put a sadist publicly in office?

Think of Gina waterboarding some guy, or standing around and getting off on it. You don't torture people unless you like it. The guy is tied down, coughing, choking, screaming, begging, desperate, drowning, and Gina pours more water. The poor bastard vomits, chokes. Gina adds a little more water .

What kind of woman would do this? Well, Gina's kind obviously. Does she then run off to her office and lock the door for half an hour? Maybe it starts early. One imagines her as a little girl, playing with her dolls. Cheerleader Barbie, Nurse Barbie, Klaus Barbie .

Michael Pompeo

Another pathologically aggressive chickenhawk. In a piece in Foreign Affairs he describes Iran as a "rogue state that America must eliminate for the sake of all that is good. Note that Pompeo presides over a foreign policy seeking to destroy Venezuela's economy and threatens military invasion, though Venezuela is no danger to the US and is not America's business; embargoes Cuba, which in no danger to the US and is not America's business; seeks to destroy Iran's economy, though Iran is no danger to the US and none of Americas business; sanctions Europe and meddles in its politics; sanctions Russia, which is not a danger to the United States, in an attempt to destroy its economy, pushes NATO up to Russia's borders, abandons the INF arms-control treaty and establishes a Space Command which will mean nuclear weapons on hair trigger in orbit, starts another nuclear arms race; wages a trade war against China intended to prevent its economic progress; sanctions North Korea; continues a seventeen-year policy of killing Afghans for no discernible purpose; wages a war against Syria; bombs Somalis; maintains unwanted occupation forces in Iraq; increasingly puts military forces in Africa; supports regimes with ghastly human-rights records such as Saudi Arabia and Israel; and looks for a war with China in the South China Sea, which is no more America's business than the Gulf of Mexico is China's.

But Pompeo is not a loon, oh no, and America is not a rogue state. Perish forfend.

Nikki Haley

A negligible twit -- I choose my vowel carefully -- but characterized, like Trump, PJ, and Pompeo Mattis

"After being promoted to lieutenant general, Mattis took command of Marine Corps Combat Development Command. On February 1, 2005, speaking at a forum in San Diego, he said "You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn't wear a veil. You know, guys like that ain't got no manhood left anyway. So it's a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them. Actually, it's a lot of fun to fight. You know, it's a hell of a hoot. It's fun to shoot some people. I'll be right upfront with you, I like brawling."

Perhaps in air-to-air combat you want someone who regards killing as fun, or in an amphibious assault. But in a position to make policy? Can you image Dwight Eisenhower talking about the fun of squaring a man's brains across the ground?

The Upshot

We have until recently never had government as aggressive, reckless, or psychiatrically fascinating as now. Again, it is not a matter of Republicans and Democrats. No administration of any party, stripe, or ideology has ever pushed to aggressively toward war with so many countries. These people are not right in the head.

Gene Su , says: February 8, 2019 at 3:07 am GMT

I remember in high school one of my teachers stating how weird it seems that it would be the leadership of the US military who would call for the American government to intervene less in the affairs of other countries and to not be so quick to use military force. This was, of course, decades ago.

A few years ago, I had a conversation with one of my colleages. He remarked how scary it was that so many American politicians were calling for war with Russia (with Hillary Clinton leading the pack?). I remarked how it seemed so strange that many of these hawks never fought in a war even when they had ample opportunity in their youth (Vietnam).

animalogic , says: February 8, 2019 at 8:05 am GMT
Fred is absolutely correct: the current administration is pathological & insane.

However, it's worth remembering that their insane behavior is based on the same Imperial goals that have been in play since at least 1945.

The crazy irresponsibility of Trump's foreign policy is entirely counter productive & inexcusable, however it's symptomatic of a slowly swelling sense of unconscious desperation. The reality, the feeling of unconstrained power the US experienced in the 90's & naughties has gone. The US has slowly woken to the nightmare possibility of real peer competitors.

China & Russia are real novelties -- & as such, damn scary. Taken together, they are near equal military & economic rivals of the US.

To US elites this is almost incomprehensible. How ? How did China suddenly become leaders in cutting edge tech? How did Russia suddenly appear with hypersonsic missiles ?

It's impossible ! Given the already existing moral & psychological inadequacies of individual Trump team members, insanity & juvenile behavior are fairly predictable responses .

MikeatMikedotMike , says: February 8, 2019 at 7:20 pm GMT
The fact that you left Bill Clinton off this list (you know, the president that fired Tomahawk missiles into the country of Sudan to take attention away from the Lewinsky hearings, sexually assaulted subordinate women for decades, and spent time banging underage sex slaves via the Lolita Express, pardons a bunch of Puerto Rican terrorists in 2000 to help swing PR votes to his bag of shit wife in the New York Senate race and was, oh yeah, a draft dodger) is pathetic even for you , Kiko. I guess NAFTA makes up for all that rapey shit, huh?

And when can we expect a detailed critique of the Mexican political climate, Kiko? Is it still never? A little too worried about that knock on the door if you bring up all the inconvenient murder going on down there, and all of the gutless politicians and law enforcement that turn a blind eye to it, you insufferable hypocrite?

Reactionary Utopian , says: February 8, 2019 at 10:31 pm GMT

No administration of any party, stripe, or ideology has ever pushed to aggressively toward war with so many countries. These people are not right in the head.

Now there, I will certainly agree with Mr. Reed, but in a qualified way. The Trump administration is somewhat more warlike and interventionist in its talk than previous ones have been. But, so far, all talk (except for its repudiation of the Iran nuclear deal, which is ominous).

Also, even in terms of the bellicose hot air, the current regime's increase over its predecessors is a matter of degree, not of kind. Even the increase itself I'd call incremental.

Also, I wrote, "So far, all talk." That doesn't mean I'm not concerned. As the man who jumped off a skyscraper said, when passing the 2nd floor, "All right so far!"

Truth , says: February 9, 2019 at 1:28 am GMT
@NoseytheDuke My friend, I understand what you are saying, but at some point the wise man stops playing checkers on the chessboard.

There is, functionally, no difference between The Donna and Cackles.

riversedge , says: February 9, 2019 at 1:43 am GMT
So what's the difference between Trump's neocons and the neocons who would have run Hillary? Nothing. There is no one more chicken hawkish, and slavish to Israel than Hillary.
Asagirian , says: February 9, 2019 at 2:11 am GMT
Until Bush II, those governing were never lunatics. Eisenhower, Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Obama, Clinton had their defects,

Obama came AFTER Bush II and continued his Zionist-supremacist policies.

Asagirian , says: February 9, 2019 at 2:14 am GMT
Give Trump some credit. He tried to ease ties with Russia and end war in Syria. But look how the Jewish supremacists in media and Deep State goons all jumped on him. And almost no one in the Establishment came to his side.

Obama and his goons pushed the Russia Collusion Hoax. Obama and Bush II have more in common.

Trump tried but he's seen turned pussy.

ThreeCranes , says: February 9, 2019 at 3:15 pm GMT
@Sean wages a trade war against China intended to prevent its economic progress

"About time too. Nixon deciding the US would getting pally with China was a hostile act as far as Russia was concerned."

Exactly right. Glad someone else remembers things as they were. Getting pally with China will turn out to be the most disastrous mistake the USA has ever made in foreign policy.

Arrogantly thinking that we could make them our junior partners we have given or sold them everything which made us great. Our industries, technology, patents, education at premier research institutions etc. Now, utilizing everything we provided them, they will surpass and then suppress us. Meanwhile our ignorant politicians, blinded by traitorous, dual-citizen economists and bankers who promised a new economy based upon finance and "information", plod along, single file, to oblivion.

KenH , says: February 9, 2019 at 9:50 pm GMT

Start with the head cheese, Donald Trump, profoundly ignorant, narcissistic, a real-estate con man who danced just out of reach of the law. His supporters will explode in fury at this.

Most of us knew that Trump is a flawed man but were willing to overlook that because he was the only one talking sense on immigration and offering solutions that would benefit white America. Of course, after two years Trump has been all tweet and little action on immigration and appears poised to sell out out to Javanka, Sheldon Adelson, the Koch brothers and the Business Roundtable.

He's narcissistic and a bit of a con man but not profoundly ignorant. Profoundly ignorant people don't become billionaires and will themselves to the presidency.

Trump has done a 180 on his campaign foreign policy and filled his administration with Israel first neocon retreads from the George W. Bush era instead of America firsters. People like Bolton deserve all the hate and condemnation heaped upon them by Fredrico.

Fredrico just hates Trump because he doesn't worship Mexico and Mexicans like Fredrico does and spoke the truth about many Mexican illegals being predisposed to violent crime. Fredrico and his hispandering Bobbsey twin Ron Unz get easily triggered at the slightest criticism of hispanics, even if based in fact, and fly into a foaming at the mouth rage.

Carroll Price , says: February 10, 2019 at 1:29 am GMT
@KenH The first priority of any president is staying alive, which probably explains why every US president, including Donald Trump ends up doing the exact opposite of what they promise on the campaign trail. As to Trump's neocon advisors, I suspect they were appointed by the deep state, with him having no say in the matter.

[Feb 04, 2019] Trump s Revised and Rereleased Foreign Policy: The World Policeman is Back

Highly recommended!
This article from 2017 looks like it was written yesterday. Trump betrayal of his elctorate on multiple levels, essentially on all key poin of his election program mkes him "Republican Obama".
What is interesting about Trump foreign policy is his version of neoliberal "gangster capitalism" on foreign arena: might is right principle applied like universal opener. Previous administrations tried to put a lipstick on the pig. Trump does not even bother.
In terms of foreign policy, and even during the transition before Trump's inauguration, there were other, more disturbing signs of where Trump would be heading soon. When Fidel Castro died on November 25, 2016, Trump seemed jubilant as if he had somehow been vindicated, and took the opportunity to slander Castro as a "brutal dictator" who "oppressed his own people" and turned Cuba into a "totalitarian island".
Notable quotes:
"... However, when he delivered his inaugural address on January 20, 2017, Trump appeared to reaffirm his campaign themes of anti-interventionism. In particular he seemed to turn the government's back on a long-standing policy of cultural imperialism , stating: "We do not seek to impose our way of life on anyone". In addition he said his government would "seek friendship and goodwill with the nations of the world," and he understood the importance of national sovereignty when he added, "it is the right of all nations to put their own interests first". ..."
"... Yet when it came to Russia, Trump could have instantly removed sanctions that were imposed by Obama in his last weeks in office -- an irresponsible and dangerous act by Obama, where foreign policy was used as a partisan tool in the service of shoring up a crummy conspiracy theory about "Russian hacking" in order to deny the Democrats any culpability in their much deserved defeat. ..."
"... The entire conflict with Russia that has developed in recent years, on the US side, was totally unnecessary, illogical, and quite preventable. ..."
"... Just two weeks after violating his promise to end the US role as the world's policeman and his vow to extricate the US from wars for regime change, Trump sold out again. "I love WikiLeaks -- " -- this is what Trump exclaimed in a speech on October 10, 2016. Trump's about-face on WikiLeaks is thus truly astounding. ..."
"... AP: If I could fit a couple of more topics. Jeff Sessions, your attorney general, is taking a tougher line suddenly on Julian Assange, saying that arresting him is a priority. You were supportive of what WikiLeaks was doing during the campaign with the release of the Clinton emails. Do you think that arresting Assange is a priority for the United States? ..."
"... AP: But that didn't mean that you supported what Assange is doing? ..."
"... AP: Can I just ask you, though -- do you believe it is a priority for the United States, or it should be a priority, to arrest Julian Assange? ..."
"... While there is no denying the extensive data about the severe impacts of NAFTA on select states and industries in the US, witnessed by the closure of tens of thousands of factories and the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs, there is little support for the claim that Canada and Mexico, as wholes, have instead fared well and that the US as a whole has been the loser thanks to them. ..."
"... Since NAFTA was implemented, migration from Mexico to the US skyrocketed dramatically. US agricultural industries sent millions of Mexican farmers into food poverty, and ultimately drove them away from agriculture ..."
"... As for per capita GDP, so treasured by economists, NAFTA had no positive impact on Mexico -- in fact, per capita GDP is nearly a flat line for the entire period since 1994. Finally, Trump does not mention that in terms of the number of actual protectionist measures that have been implemented, the US leads the world . ..."
"... To put Trump's position on NAFTA in bold relief, it is not that he is decidedly against free trade. In fact, he often claims he supports free trade, as long as it is "fair". However, his notion of fairness is very lopsided -- a trade agreement is fair only when the US reaps the greater share of benefits. ..."
"... As argued in the previous section, if Trump is to be the newfound champion of this imperialism -- empire's prodigal son -- then what an abysmally poor choice he is ..."
"... On the one hand, he helped to unleash US anti-interventionism (usually called "isolationism" not to call it anti-imperialism, which would then admit to imperialism which is still denied by most of the dominant elites). On the other hand, in trying to now contain such popular sentiment, he loses credibility -- after having lost credibility with the groups his campaign displaced. ..."
"... As for Trump's domestic opposition, what should be most pertinent are issues of conflict of interest and nepotism . Here members of Trump's base are more on target yet again, when they reject the presence of Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner in the White House ("we didn't elect Ivanka or Jared"), than are those distracted by identity politics. ..."
"... As Trump leverages the presidency to upgrade the Trump family to the transnational capitalist class, and reinforces the power of US imperialism which that class has purchased, conflict of interest and nepotism will be the main political signposts of the transformation of the Trump presidency, but they could also be the targets for a refined strategy of opposition. ..."
Aug 09, 2017 | zeroanthropology.net

Trump could have kept quiet, and lost nothing. Instead what he was attacking -- and the irony was missed on his fervently right wing supporters -- was someone who was a leader in the anti-globalist movement, from long before it was ever called that. Fidel Castro was a radical pioneer of independence, self-reliance, and self-determination.

Castro turned Cuba from an American-owned sugar plantation and brothel, a lurid backwater in the Caribbean, into a serious international actor opposed to globalizing capitalism. There was no sign of any acknowledgment of this by Trump, who instead chose to parrot the same people who would vilify him using similar terms (evil, authoritarian, etc.). Of course, Trump respects only corporate executives and billionaires, not what he would see as some rag-tag Third World revolutionary. Here Trump's supporters generally failed, using Castro's death as an opportunity for tribal partisanship, another opportunity to attack "weak liberals" like Obama who made minor overtures to Cuba (too little, too late).

Their distrust of "the establishment" was nowhere to be found this time: their ignorance of Cuba and their resort to stock clichés and slogans had all been furnished to them by the same establishment they otherwise claimed to oppose.

Just to be clear, the above is not meant to indicate any reversal on Trump's part regarding Cuba. He has been consistently anti-communist, and fairly consistent in his denunciations of Fidel Castro. What is significant is that -- far from overcoming the left-right divide -- Trump shores up the barriers, even at the cost of denouncing others who have a proven track record of fighting against neoliberal globalization and US interventionism. In these regards, Trump has no track record. Even among his rivals in the Republican primaries, senators Ted Cruz and Rand Paul had more of an anti-interventionist track record.

However, when he delivered his inaugural address on January 20, 2017, Trump appeared to reaffirm his campaign themes of anti-interventionism. In particular he seemed to turn the government's back on a long-standing policy of cultural imperialism , stating: "We do not seek to impose our way of life on anyone". In addition he said his government would "seek friendship and goodwill with the nations of the world," and he understood the importance of national sovereignty when he added, "it is the right of all nations to put their own interests first".

Russia

Yet when it came to Russia, Trump could have instantly removed sanctions that were imposed by Obama in his last weeks in office -- an irresponsible and dangerous act by Obama, where foreign policy was used as a partisan tool in the service of shoring up a crummy conspiracy theory about "Russian hacking" in order to deny the Democrats any culpability in their much deserved defeat.

Instead, Trump continued the sanctions, as if out of meek deference to Obama's policy, one founded on lies and antagonism toward Trump himself. Rather than repair the foul attempt to sabotage the US-Russian relationship in preparation for his presidency, Trump simply abided and thus became an accomplice. To be clear, Trump has done precisely nothing to dampen the near mass hysteria that has been manufactured in the US about alleged -- indeed imaginary -- "Russian intervention".

His comments, both during the electoral campaign and even early into his presidency, about wanting good relations with Russia, have been replaced by Trump's admissions that US relations with Russia are at a low point (Putin agreed: "I would say the level of trust [between Russia and the US] is at a workable level, especially in the military dimension, but it hasn't improved. On the contrary, it has degraded " and his spokesman called the relations " deplorable ".)

Rather than use the power of his office to calm fears, to build better ties with Russia, and to make meeting with Vladimir Putin a top priority, Trump has again done nothing , except escalating tensions. The entire conflict with Russia that has developed in recent years, on the US side, was totally unnecessary, illogical, and quite preventable. Russia had actively facilitated the US' war in Afghanistan for over a decade, and was a consistent collaborator on numerous levels. It is up to thinking American officials to honestly explain what motivated them to tilt relations with Russia, because it is certainly not Russia's doing. The only explanation that makes any sense is that the US leadership grew concerned that Russia was no longer teetering on the edge of total socio-economic breakdown, as it was under the neoliberal Boris Yeltsin, but has instead resurfaced as a major actor in international affairs, and one that champions anti-neoliberal objectives of enhanced state sovereignty and self-determination.

WikiLeaks

Just two weeks after violating his promise to end the US role as the world's policeman and his vow to extricate the US from wars for regime change, Trump sold out again. "I love WikiLeaks -- " -- this is what Trump exclaimed in a speech on October 10, 2016. Trump's about-face on WikiLeaks is thus truly astounding.

After finding so much use for WikiLeaks' publication of the Podesta emails, which became incorporated into his campaign speeches, and which fuelled the writing and speaking of journalists and bloggers sympathetic to Trump -- he was now effectively declaring WikiLeaks to be both an enemy and a likely target of US government action, in even more blunt terms than we heard during the past eight years under Obama. This is not mere continuity with the past, but a dramatic escalation. Rather than praise Julian Assange for his work, call for an end to the illegal impediments to his seeking asylum, swear off any US calls for extraditing and prosecuting Assange, and perhaps meeting with him in person, Trump has done all of the opposite. Instead we learn that Trump's administration may file arrest charges against Assange . Mike Pompeo , chosen by Trump to head the CIA, who had himself cited WikiLeaks as a reliable source of proof about how the Democratic National Committee had rigged its campaign, now declared WikiLeaks to be a " non-state hostile intelligence service ," along with vicious personal slander against Assange.

Trump's about-face on WikiLeaks was one that he defended in terms that were not just a deceptive rewriting of history, but one that was also fearful -- "I don't support or unsupport" WikiLeaks, was what Trump was now saying in his dash for the nearest exit. The backtracking is so obvious in this interview Trump gave to the AP , that his shoes must have left skid marks on the floor:

AP: If I could fit a couple of more topics. Jeff Sessions, your attorney general, is taking a tougher line suddenly on Julian Assange, saying that arresting him is a priority. You were supportive of what WikiLeaks was doing during the campaign with the release of the Clinton emails. Do you think that arresting Assange is a priority for the United States?

TRUMP: When Wikileaks came out never heard of Wikileaks, never heard of it. When Wikileaks came out, all I was just saying is, "Well, look at all this information here, this is pretty good stuff." You know, they tried to hack the Republican, the RNC, but we had good defenses. They didn't have defenses, which is pretty bad management. But we had good defenses, they tried to hack both of them. They weren't able to get through to Republicans. No, I found it very interesting when I read this stuff and I said, "Wow." It was just a figure of speech. I said, "Well, look at this. It's good reading."

AP: But that didn't mean that you supported what Assange is doing?

TRUMP: No, I don't support or unsupport. It was just information .

AP: Can I just ask you, though -- do you believe it is a priority for the United States, or it should be a priority, to arrest Julian Assange?

TRUMP: I am not involved in that decision, but if Jeff Sessions wants to do it, it's OK with me. I didn't know about that decision, but if they want to do it, it's OK with me.

First, Trump invents the fictitious claim that WikiLeaks was responsible for hacking the DNC, and that WikiLeaks also tried to hack the Republicans. Second, he pretends to be an innocent bystander, a spectator, in his own administration -- whatever others decide, is "OK" with him, not that he knows about their decisions, but it's all up to others. He has no power, all of a sudden.

Again, what Trump is displaying in this episode is his ultimate attachment to his class, with all of its anxieties and its contempt for rebellious, marginal upstarts. Trump shuns any sort of "loyalty" to WikiLeaks (not that they ever had a working relationship) or any form of gratitude, because then that would imply a debt and therefore a transfer of value -- whereas Trump's core ethics are those of expedience and greed (he admits that much). This move has come with a cost , with members of Trump's support base openly denouncing the betrayal. 6

NAFTA

On NAFTA , Trump claims he has not changed his position -- yet, from openly denouncing the free trade agreement and promising to terminate it, he now vows only to seek modifications and amendments, which means supporting NAFTA. He appeared to be awfully quick to obey the diplomatic pressure of Canada's Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, and Mexico's President, Enrique Peńa Nieto. Trump's entire position on NAFTA now comes into question.

While there is no denying the extensive data about the severe impacts of NAFTA on select states and industries in the US, witnessed by the closure of tens of thousands of factories and the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs, there is little support for the claim that Canada and Mexico, as wholes, have instead fared well and that the US as a whole has been the loser thanks to them.

This really deserves to be treated at length, separately from this article. However, for now, let's keep in mind that when Trump complains about Canadian softwood lumber and dairy exports to the US, his argument about NAFTA is without merit. Neither commodity is part of the NAFTA agreement.

Moreover, where dairy is concerned, the problem is US overproduction. Wisconsin alone has more dairy cows than all of Canada . There is a net surplus , in the US' favour, with respect to US dairy exports to Canada. Overall, the US has a net surplus in the trade in goods and services with Canada. Regarding Mexico, the irony of Trump's denunciations of imaginary Mexican victories is that he weakens his own criticisms of immigration.

Since NAFTA was implemented, migration from Mexico to the US skyrocketed dramatically. US agricultural industries sent millions of Mexican farmers into food poverty, and ultimately drove them away from agriculture.

As for per capita GDP, so treasured by economists, NAFTA had no positive impact on Mexico -- in fact, per capita GDP is nearly a flat line for the entire period since 1994. Finally, Trump does not mention that in terms of the number of actual protectionist measures that have been implemented, the US leads the world .

To put Trump's position on NAFTA in bold relief, it is not that he is decidedly against free trade. In fact, he often claims he supports free trade, as long as it is "fair". However, his notion of fairness is very lopsided -- a trade agreement is fair only when the US reaps the greater share of benefits.

His arguments with respect to Canada are akin to those of a looter or raider. He wants to block lumber imports from Canada, at the same time as he wants to break the Canadian dairy market wide open to absorb US excess production. That approach is at the core of what defined the US as a "new empire" in the 1800s. In addition, while Trump was quick to tear up the TPP, he has said nothing about TISA and TTIP.

Mexico

Trump's argument with Mexico is also disturbing for what it implies. It would seem that any evidence of production in Mexico causes Trump concern. Mexico should not only keep its people -- however many are displaced by US imports -- but it should also be as dependent as possible on the US for everything except oil. Since Trump has consistently declared his antagonism to OPEC, ideally Mexico's oil would be sold for a few dollars per barrel.

China

Trump's turn on China almost provoked laughter from his many domestic critics. Absurdly, what figures prominently in most renditions of the story of Trump's change on China (including his own), is a big piece of chocolate cake. The missile strike on Syria was, according to Wilbur Ross, the " after-dinner entertainment ". Here, Trump's loud condemnations of China on trade issues were suddenly quelled -- and it is not because chocolate has magical properties. Instead it seems Trump has been willing to settle on selling out citizens' interests , and particularly those who voted for him, in return for China's assistance on North Korea. Let's be clear: countering and dominating North Korea is an established favourite among neoconservatives. Trump's priority here is fully "neocon," and the submergence of trade issues in favour of militaristic preferences is the one case where neoconservatives might be distinguished from the otherwise identical neoliberals.

North Korea

Where North Korea is concerned, Trump chose to manufacture a " crisis ". North Korea has actually done nothing to warrant a sudden outbreak of panic over it being supposedly aggressive and threatening. North Korea is no more aggressive than any person defending their survival can be called belligerent. The constant series of US military exercises in South Korea, or near North Korean waters, is instead a deliberate provocation to a state whose existence the US nearly extinguished. Even last year the US Air Force publicly boasted of having "nearly destroyed" North Korea -- language one would have expected from the Luftwaffe in WWII. The US continues to maintain roughly 60,000 troops on the border between North and South Korea, and continues to refuse to formally declare an end to the Korean War and sign a peace treaty . Trump then announced he was sending an "armada" to the Korean peninsula, and boasted of how "very powerful" it was. This was in addition to the US deploying the THAAD missile system in South Korea. Several of his messages in Twitter were written using highly provocative and threatening language. When asked if he would start a war, Trump glibly replied: " I don't know. I mean, we'll see ". On another occasion Trump stated, "There is a chance that we could end up having a major, major conflict with North Korea. Absolutely". When the world's leading military superpower declares its intention to destroy you, then there is nothing you can do in your defense which anyone could justly label as "over the top". Otherwise, once again Trump posed as a parental figure, the world's chief babysitter -- picture Trump, surrounded by children taking part in the "Easter egg roll" at the White House, being asked about North Korea and responding "they gotta behave". Trump would presume to teach manners to North Korea, using the only tools of instruction that seem to be the first and last resort of US foreign policy (and the "defense" industry): bombs.

Syria

Attacking Syria , on purportedly humanitarian grounds, is for many (including vocal supporters) one of the most glaring contradictions of Trump's campaign statements about not embroiling the US in failed wars of regime change and world policing. During the campaign, he was in favour of Russia's collaboration with Syria in the fight against ISIS. For years he had condemned Obama for involving the US in Syria, and consistently opposed military intervention there. All that was consigned to the archive of positions Trump declared to now be worthless. That there had been a change in Trump's position is not a matter of dispute -- Trump made the point himself :

"I like to think of myself as a very flexible person. I don't have to have one specific way, and if the world changes, I go the same way, I don't change. Well, I do change and I am flexible, and I'm proud of that flexibility. And I will tell you, that attack on children yesterday had a big impact on me -- big impact. That was a horrible, horrible thing. And I've been watching it and seeing it, and it doesn't get any worse than that. And I have that flexibility, and it's very, very possible -- and I will tell you, it's already happened that my attitude toward Syria and Assad has changed very much. And if you look back over the last few weeks, there were other attacks using gas. You're now talking about a whole different level".

Bending to the will of the prevailing Cold War and neo-McCarthyist atmosphere in the US, rife with anti-Russian conspiracy theories, Trump found an easy opportunity to score points with the hostile media, ever so mindful as he is about approval ratings, polls, and media coverage. Some explain Trump's reversals as arising from his pursuit of public adulation -- and while the media play the key role in purveying celebrity status, they are also a stiff bastion of imperialist culture. Given his many years as a the host of a popular TV show, and as the owner of the Miss Universe Pageant, there is some logical merit to the argument. But I think even more is at work, as explained in paragraphs above. According to Eric Trump it was at the urging of Ivanka that Donald Trump decided to strike a humanitarian-militarist pose. He would play the part of the Victorian parent, only he would use missiles to teach unruly children lessons about violence. Using language typically used against him by the mainstream media, Trump now felt entitled to pontificate that Assad is "evil," an " animal ," who would have to go . When did he supposedly come to this realization? Did Assad become evil at the same time Trump was inaugurated? Why would Trump have kept so silent about "evil" on the campaign trail? Trump of course is wrong: it's not that the world changed and he changed with it; rather, he invented a new fiction to suit his masked intentions. Trump's supposed opponents and critics, like the Soros-funded organizer of the women's march Linda Sarsour, showed her approval of even more drastic action by endorsing messages by what sounded like a stern school mistress who thought that 59 cruise missiles were just a mere "slap on the wrist". Virtually every neocon who is publicly active applauded Trump, as did most senior Democrats. The loudest opposition , however, came from Trump's own base , with a number of articles featuring criticism from Trump's supporters , and one conservative publication calling him outright a " weakling and a political ingrate ".

Members of the Trump administration have played various word games with the public on intervention in Syria. From unnamed officials saying the missile strike was a "one off," to named officials promising more if there were any other suspected chemical attacks (or use of barrel bombs -- and this while the US dropped the biggest non-nuclear bomb in existence on Afghanistan); some said that regime change was not the goal, and then others made it clear that was the ultimate goal ; and then Trump saying, "Our policy is the same, it hasn't changed. We're not going into Syria " -- even though Trump himself greatly increased the number of US troops he deployed to Syria , illegally, in an escalation of the least protested invasion in recent history. Now we should know enough not to count this as mere ambiguity, but as deliberate obfuscation that offers momentary (thinly veiled) cover for a renewal of neocon policy .

We can draw an outline of Trump's liberal imperialism when it comes to Syria, which is likely to be applied elsewhere. First, Trump's interventionist policy regarding Syria is one that continues to treat that country as if it were terra nullius , a mere playground for superpower politics. Second, Trump is clearly continuing with the neoconservative agenda and its hit list of states to be terminated by US military action, as famously confirmed by Gen. Wesley Clark. Even Trump's strategy for justifying the attack on Syria echoed the two prior Bush presidential administrations -- selling war with the infamous "incubator babies" myth and the myth of "weapons of mass destruction" (WMDs). In many ways, Trump's presidency is thus shaping up to be either the seventh term of the George H.W. Bush regime, or the fifth straight term of the George W. Bush regime. Third, Trump is taking ownership of an extremely dangerous conflict, with costs that could surpass anything witnessed by the war on Iraq (which also continues). Fourth, by highlighting the importance of photographs in allegedly changing his mind, Trump has placed a high market value on propaganda featuring dead babies. His actions in Syria will now create an effective demand for the pornographic trade in pictures of atrocities. These are matters of great importance to the transnational capitalist class, which demands full global penetrability, diminished state power (unless in the service of this class' goals), a uniformity of expectations and conformity in behaviour, and an emphasis on individual civil liberties which are the basis for defending private property and consumerism.

Venezuela

It is very disturbing to see how Venezuela is being framed as ripe for US intervention, in ways that distinctly echo the lead up to the US war on Libya. Just as disturbing is that Trump's Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, has a clear conflict of interest regarding Venezuela, from his recent role as CEO of Exxon and its conflict with the government of Venezuela over its nationalization of oil. Tillerson is, by any definition, a clear-cut member of the transnational capitalist class. The Twitter account of the State Department has a battery of messages sternly lecturing Venezuela about the treatment of protesters, while also pontificating on the Venezuelan Constitution as if the US State Department had become a global supreme court. What is impressive is the seamless continuity in the nature of the messages on Venezuela from that account, as if no change of government happened between Obama's time and Trump's. Nikki Haley, Trump's neocon ambassador to the UN, issued a statement that read like it had been written by her predecessors, Samantha Power and Susan Rice, a statement which in itself is an unacceptable intervention in Venezuelan internal affairs. For Trump's part, from just days before the election, to a couple of weeks after his inauguration, he has sent explicit messages of support for anti-government forces in Venezuela. In February, Trump imposed sanctions on Venezuela's Vice President. After Syria and North Korea, Venezuela is seeming the likely focus of US interventionism under Trump.

NATO

Rounding out the picture, at least for now (this was just the first hundred days of Trump's presidency), was Trump's outstanding reversal on NATO -- in fact, once again he stated the reversal himself, and without explanation either: " I said it was obsolete. It's no longer obsolete ". This came just days after the US missile strike against Syria, and just as Ivanka Trump was about to represent his government at a meeting of globalist women, the W20 . NATO has served as the transnational military alliance at the service of the transnational capitalist class, and particularly the military and political members of the TCC. 7

Saving Neoliberalism?

Has Trump saved neoliberal capitalism from its ongoing demise? Has he sustained popular faith in liberal political ideals? Are we still in the dying days of liberalism ? If there had been a centrally coordinated plan to plant an operative among the ranks of populist conservatives and independents, to channel their support for nationalism into support for the persona of the plant, and to then have that plant steer a course straight back to shoring up neoliberal globalism -- then we might have had a wonderful story of a masterful conspiracy, the biggest heist in the history of elections anywhere. A truly "rigged system" could be expected to behave that way. Was Trump designated to take the fall in a rigged game, only his huge ego got in the way when he realized he could realistically win the election and he decided to really tilt hard against his partner, Hillary Clinton? It could be the basis for a novel, or a Hollywood political comedy. I have no way of knowing if it could be true.

Framed within the terms of what we do know, there was relief by the ousted group of political elites and the liberal globalist media at the sight of Trump's reversals, and a sense that their vision had been vindicated. However, if they are hoping that the likes of Trump will serve as a reliable flag bearer, then theirs is a misguided wishful thinking. If someone so demonized and ridiculed, tarnished as an evil thug and racist fascist, the subject of mass demonstrations in the US and abroad, is the latest champion of (neo)liberalism, then we are certainly witnessing its dying days.

Is Trump Beneficial for Anti-Imperialism?

Once one is informed enough and thus prepared to understand that anti-imperialism is not the exclusive preserve of the left (a left which anyway has mostly shunned it over the last two decades), that it did not originate with the left , and that it has a long and distinguished history in the US itself , then we can move toward some interesting realizations. The facts, borne out by surveys and my own online immersion among pro-Trump social media users, is that one of the significant reasons why Trump won is due to the growth in popularity of basic anti-imperialist principles (even if not recognized under that name): for example, no more world policing, no transnational militarization, no more interventions abroad, no more regime change, no war, and no globalism. Nationalists in Europe, as in Russia, have also pushed forward a basic anti-imperialist vision. Whereas in Latin America anti-imperialism is largely still leftist, in Europe and North America the left-right divide has become blurred, but the crucial thing is that at least now we can speak of anti-imperialism gaining strength in these three major continents. Resistance against globalization has been the primary objective, along with strengthening national sovereignty, protecting local cultural identity, and opposing free trade and transnational capital. Unfortunately, some anti-imperialist writers (on the left in fact) have tended to restrict their field of vision to military matters primarily, while almost completely neglecting the economic and cultural, and especially domestic dimensions of imperialism. (I am grossly generalizing of course, but I think it is largely accurate.) Where structures such as NAFTA are concerned, many of these same leftist anti-imperialists, few as they are, have had virtually nothing to say. It could be that they have yet to fully recognize that the transnational capitalist class has, gradually over the last seven decades, essentially purchased the power of US imperialism. Therefore the TCC's imperialism includes NAFTA, just as it includes open borders, neoliberal identity politics, and drone strikes. They are all different parts of the same whole.

As argued in the previous section, if Trump is to be the newfound champion of this imperialism -- empire's prodigal son -- then what an abysmally poor choice he is. 8

On the one hand, he helped to unleash US anti-interventionism (usually called "isolationism" not to call it anti-imperialism, which would then admit to imperialism which is still denied by most of the dominant elites). On the other hand, in trying to now contain such popular sentiment, he loses credibility -- after having lost credibility with the groups his campaign displaced. In addition to that, given that his candidacy aggravated internal divisions in the US, which have not subsided with his assumption of office, these domestic social and cultural conflicts cause a serious deficit of legitimacy, a loss of political capital. A declining economy will also deprive him of capital in the strict sense. Moreover, given the kind of persona the media have crafted, the daily caricaturing of Trump will significantly spur anti-Americanism around the world. If suddenly even Canadian academics are talking about boycotting the US, then the worm has truly turned. Trump can only rely on "hard power" (military violence), because "soft power" is almost out of the question now that Trump has been constructed as a barbarian. Incompetent and/or undermined governance will also render Trump a deficient upholder of the status quo. The fact that nationalist movements around the world are not centrally coordinated, and their fortunes are not pinned to those of Trump, establishes a well-defined limit to his influence. Trump's antagonism toward various countries -- as wholes -- has already helped to stir up a deep sediment of anti-Americanism. If Americanism is at the heart of Trump's nationalist globalism, then it is doing all the things that are needed to induce a major heart attack.

As for Trump's domestic opposition, what should be most pertinent are issues of conflict of interest and nepotism . Here members of Trump's base are more on target yet again, when they reject the presence of Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner in the White House ("we didn't elect Ivanka or Jared"), than are those distracted by identity politics.

As Trump leverages the presidency to upgrade the Trump family to the transnational capitalist class, and reinforces the power of US imperialism which that class has purchased, conflict of interest and nepotism will be the main political signposts of the transformation of the Trump presidency, but they could also be the targets for a refined strategy of opposition.

[Feb 02, 2019] According to the recipes devised by Reagan: why the methods which successfully destroyed the USSR do not work with modern Russia? by Alexey Makurin

Highly recommended!
Slightly edited Goggle translation...
Dominance in technology still represent pretty powerful lever used to damage and possibly subdue Russia. King of technological imperialism.
Notable quotes:
"... As a result, the Soviet and post-Soviet elites adopted the rules established by Washington: they became intermediaries between Western corporations and the wealth of their countries. Russia paid for this deal with the destruction of its industry and the emergence of oligarchs, enriched by mediation. But there were wins. The country has developed large national corporations that have become prominent players on the global map. The same "Gazprom". Over time, Russia has its own ambitions to expand the volume and list of exported goods. ..."
"... In response, 5 years ago, the US led an attack on it, declaring sanctions. ..."
"... - Full and unconditional surrender of Russia in the economy. The West wants through its representatives to manage Russian companies, without intermediaries to enter the Russian domestic market and get the fattest pieces. ..."
"... In addition, in the eighties the USSR lost to the West ideologically. Our society has accumulated a great fatigue from ascetic "socialism" and international expansion with ideological background. The Western model of life and economy began to seem more attractive. ..."
"... -- In the late eighties the Soviet Union accumulated external debts, in full working printing press in order to Supplement the budget and ensure the salary of the people. The planned economy was unable to provide the country with basic goods. And today, private business is able to buy anything and anywhere. Agriculture not only feeds the country on its own, but also has become a major exporter of grain, poultry and pork. The financial system is arranged very rationally: the state debt is minimized and plays a purely technical role, budget revenues exceed expenditures. ..."
"... And from this point of view, the country is again at a crossroads. In 2019, we can see a new wave of the global economic crisis. The first signs of this were already evident at the end of last year, when commodity prices fell sharply and the shares of American companies fell in price. If these trends continue, Russia will not receive easing of sanctions. So, we need to act and strongly non-trivial. ..."
"... It is already clear with whom we can develop further: with the leading Asian countries. At the same time, expanding commodity expansion in foreign markets, it is important to move to a new mercantilism: sell excess, buy only the most necessary, and produce everything else within the country. ..."
www.aif.ru

Article from the newspaper: weekly "Arguments and Facts" № 1-2 09/01/2019

Is the scenario of suffocation of the USSR, carried out by the US 30 years ago, similar to the events that are happening now, and what Russia needs to fear most? "AiF" asked these questions to the Director of the Institute of new society, economist Vasily Koltashov.

How the world has changed

Alexey Makurin," AIF": Looking at the events taking place in recent years, you catch yourself thinking that all this has already happened. The current strategy of suffocation of Russia by America one in one copies the same strategy of times of Reagan. In the eighties, the United States also hampered the construction of a gas pipeline from Siberia to Europe. The fall in oil prices also drained our budget, and defense spending grew. And the army was involved in the conflict in the southern country: Afghanistan. The West deliberately repeats the plan that brought him victory in the cold war?

Vasily Koltashov: it's more of a coincidence. But even if there is some scenario, the game this time is some stupid. In the days of Reagan and Bush senior Americans were more rational, thinner. And now, in everything they do, there is an element of hysteria caused by the need to respond to the complex state of their own Affairs. Compared with the eighties in the us huge public debt and huge bubbles in the stock market, threatening investors ruin. The imbalances that have accumulated in the economy are blocking the development of industrial production. Much other than agriculture and raw material extraction is often expensive and uncompetitive. These problems provoke a conflict not only with Russia, but also with China, with other Eurasian centers of capitalism, which took shape in recent decades.

30 years ago, Western countries revived and developed after the crisis of the seventies. The orbit of influence of the USA included Pakistan, Turkey, China. Now Trump has stopped financing Pakistan. In Turkey, there was an attempt of a coup d'état in which Ankara accused Washington. The Americans are waging a trade war against the Chinese. These and other countries that do not find a common language with the United States, are increasingly trading among themselves. The American press writes about the" Eastern Entente", implying the Eurasian powers.

Increasingly, there are disputes and conflicts between Americans and their European allies, which was unthinkable before. In such a situation, a plan to weaken Russia, similar to the scenario of Reagan advisors, can no longer work.

-- What did the West want, putting pressure on the USSR in the eighties?

- I think the West did not seek to destroy the Soviet Union, but just tried to solved a more utilitarian problem: acquiring new markets for their products. At that time, neoliberal globalization became the main mechanism of economic growth, it was important for the West to draw countries into its orbit, which were previously somehow isolated from the world market. They bought the Russian nomenklatura like they buy local elites in Latin America and tried to concert Russia into Latin American country. They almost succeeded.

How did Ronald Reagan scare the USSR by joking on August 11, 1984?

-- What about Reagan's "evil Empire"statement?

-- It was preparation for the beginning of negotiations from a position of strength. Behind this ideological rhetoric was another meaning: if you continue to maintain its planned economy, closed to free trade, we will begin to destroy it, and if you agree to our terms, we will offer you a deal.

As a result, the Soviet and post-Soviet elites adopted the rules established by Washington: they became intermediaries between Western corporations and the wealth of their countries. Russia paid for this deal with the destruction of its industry and the emergence of oligarchs, enriched by mediation. But there were wins. The country has developed large national corporations that have become prominent players on the global map. The same "Gazprom". Over time, Russia has its own ambitions to expand the volume and list of exported goods.

In response, 5 years ago, the US led an attack on it, declaring sanctions.

- What is their purpose in the current situation?

- Full and unconditional surrender of Russia in the economy. The West wants through its representatives to manage Russian companies, without intermediaries to enter the Russian domestic market and get the fattest pieces.

How Russia has changed

- This time Russia does not give up and attacks itself, as is happening in the same Syria. What changed?

- The country and enterprises are now run by people with a market view of the world who know the value of the wealth they dispose of. It was for Gorbachev that Soviet factories were an abstraction, he did not understand their true value. His concessions to the US and Europe were completely irrational from a commercial point of view. It's impossible now.

In addition, in the eighties the USSR lost to the West ideologically. Our society has accumulated a great fatigue from ascetic "socialism" and international expansion with ideological background. The Western model of life and economy began to seem more attractive. The war in Afghanistan was declared meaningless. And now the Syrian conflict, Russia does not solve a particular ideological goals. The military plays the role of guards of its economic interests. Without any doubt, it would be more difficult for our government to agree with OPEC on limiting oil production, if not for the successes in Syria. This agreement in 2017-2018 allowed to raise oil prices and helped to resume economic growth in Russia.

-- Was it possible for the Soviet leadership to influence world oil prices?

- The USSR, too, nothing prevented to sit down at the negotiating table with OPEC. But that wouldn't change the situation. Saudi Arabia and other oil exporters were then loyal allies of the United States. The West then concentrated all the world's capital, he put the OPEC countries conditions: create comfortable prices for us, and we will invest in your economy.

And today, Saudi capital seeks to play an independent role, Riyadh's relations with Washington have become cooler, and with Moscow, on the contrary, warmer. And the US itself is increasingly supplying hydrocarbons for export: it is predicted that in 2019 they will come out on top in the world for oil production. But this leadership is provided to Americans by expensive shale oil, the extraction of which becomes unprofitable at prices below $ 40 per barrel. So, for the US, very low oil prices are now also unprofitable.

On the other hand, the dependence of the Russian budget on oil and gas today is also higher than 30-35 years ago, when the country had a more powerful industry. This is an additional risk.

-- What new qualities acquired by the Russian economy allow it to successfully withstand Western pressure?

-- In the late eighties the Soviet Union accumulated external debts, in full working printing press in order to Supplement the budget and ensure the salary of the people. The planned economy was unable to provide the country with basic goods. And today, private business is able to buy anything and anywhere. Agriculture not only feeds the country on its own, but also has become a major exporter of grain, poultry and pork. The financial system is arranged very rationally: the state debt is minimized and plays a purely technical role, budget revenues exceed expenditures.

Where the main threats

-- But aren't the military expenditures, which have to be made in the conditions of confrontation with the United States, too high? Will it not be possible that the new arms race will be too much for the country?

- Financing of the defense industry to the detriment of consumer and other civil industries usually occurs in the planned mobilization system, where all the resources of the country are concentrated by the state. And in a market economy, such imbalances appear only during the war, when budget distortions arise and private companies begin to focus more on military orders than on grass-roots demand. There is no such thing in Russia now, although the government's attention to defense capability is growing along with the pressure of the US and its allies.

- Where does the main danger come from in such a situation?

-- Not exactly from the USA. The main threat to Russia is low effective demand within the country. The weakness of the ruble, the low rate of economic growth -- all this is a consequence of the poverty of the mass buyer.

And from this point of view, the country is again at a crossroads. In 2019, we can see a new wave of the global economic crisis. The first signs of this were already evident at the end of last year, when commodity prices fell sharply and the shares of American companies fell in price. If these trends continue, Russia will not receive easing of sanctions. So, we need to act and strongly non-trivial.

With whom will trade? Expert on how Russia can live under sanctions

It is already clear with whom we can develop further: with the leading Asian countries. At the same time, expanding commodity expansion in foreign markets, it is important to move to a new mercantilism: sell excess, buy only the most necessary, and produce everything else within the country. This is a traditional trade on the "method of cat Matroskin", which existed for thousands of years: "To buy something you need, you must first sell something unnecessary." All need to produce themselves.

And it is important to support the Russian buyer. This may be a preferential mortgage loan at 3-5% per annum, which will stimulate demand for housing and the sectors of the economy that are associated with construction. This may be an increase in the number of school teachers, doctors and kindergarten workers. We need an hourly wage to let people know what their time is worth. It is extremely important to have a tax-free minimum income (at least 50 thousand rubles per month). It is necessary to interest migrant workers to live in Russia and leave money in our country, which will help to create new jobs. We need to directly give people money and encourage all kinds of entrepreneurship, release the economic energy of society.

[Jan 29, 2019] These 2020 hopefuls are courting Wall Street. Don t be fooled by their progressive veneer by Bhaskar Sunkara

Highly recommended!
Taming of financial oligarchy and restoration of the job market at the expense of outsourcing and offshoring is required in the USA and gradually getting support. At least a return to key elements of the New Deal should be in the cards. But Clinton wing of Dems is beong redemption. They are Wall Street puddles. all of the them.
Issues like Medicare for All, Free College, Restoring Glass Steagall, Ending Citizen's United/Campaign finance reform, federal jobs guarantee, criminal justice reform, all poll extremely well among the american populace
If even such a neoliberal pro globalization, corporations controlled media source as Guardian views centrist neoliberal Democrats like Booker unelectable, the situation in the next elections might be interesting.
Notable quotes:
"... Bhaskar Sunkara is a Guardian US columnist and the founding editor of Jacobin ..."
"... 2016 has shown that the Democratic party is beyond redemption. When it comes down to the choice of either win with a platform that may impact the wealth and power of their owners, or losing, they will always choose the latter, and continue as useful (and well paid) idiots in the charade presented as US democracy. ..."
Jan 15, 2019 | www.theguardian.com

In their rhetoric and policy advocacy, this trio has been steadily moving to the left to keep pace with a leftward-moving Democratic party. Booker , Harris and Gillibrand know that voters demand action and are more supportive than ever of Medicare for All and universal childcare.
Gillibrand, long considered a moderate, has even gone as far as to endorse abolishing US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) and, along with Cory Booker, Bernie Sanders' single-payer healthcare bill. Harris has also backed universal healthcare and free college tuition for most Americans.

But outward appearances aren't everything. Booker, Harris and Gillibrand have been making a very different pitch of late -- on Wall Street. According to CNBC , all three potential candidates have been reaching out to financial executives lately, including Blackstone's Jonathan Gray, Robert Wolf from 32 Advisors and the Centerbridge Partners founder Mark Gallogly.

Wall Street, after all, played an important role getting the senators where they are today. During his 2014 Senate run, in which just 7% of his contributions came from small donors, Booker raised $2.2m from the securities and investment industry. Harris and Gillibrand weren't far behind in 2018, and even the progressive Democrat Sherrod Brown has solicited donations from Gallogly and other powerful executives.

When CNBC's story about Gillibrand personally working the phones to woo Wall Street executives came out, her team responded defensively, noting her support for financial regulation and promising that if she did run she would take "no corporate Pac money". But what's most telling isn't that Gillibrand and others want Wall Street's money, it's that they want the blessings of financial CEOs. Even if she doesn't take their contributions, she's signaling that she's just playing politics with populist rhetoric. That will allow capitalists to focus their attention on candidates such as Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, who have shown a real willingness to abandon the traditional coziness of the Democratic party with the finance, insurance and real estate industries.

Gillibrand and others are behaving perfectly rationally. The last presidential election cost $6.6bn -- advertising, staff and conventions are expensive. But even more important than that, they know that while leftwing stances might help win Democratic primaries, the path of least resistance in the general election is capitulation to the big forces of capital that run this country. Those elites might allow some progressive tinkering on the margins, but nothing that challenges the inequities that keep them wealthy and their victims weak.

Big business is likely to bet heavily on the Democratic party in 2020, maybe even more so than it did in 2016. In normal circumstances, the Democratic party is the second-favorite party of capital; with an erratic Trump around, it is often the first.

The American ruling class has a nice hustle going with elections. We don't have a labor-backed social democratic party that could create barriers to avoid capture by monied interests. It's telling that when asked about the former Colorado governor John Hickenlooper's recent chats with Wall Street political financiers, a staff member told CNBC: "We meet with a wide range of donors with shared values across sectors."

Plenty of Democratic leaders believe in the neoliberal growth model. Many have gotten personally wealthy off of it. Others think there is no alternative to allying with finance and then trying to create progressive social policy on the margins. But with sentiments like that, it doesn't take fake news to convince working-class Americans that Democrats don't really have their interests at heart.

Of course, the Democratic party isn't a monolith. But the insurgency waged by newly elected representatives such as the democratic socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Ro Khanna and others is still in its infancy. At this stage, it isn't going to scare capital away from the Democratic party, it's going to make Wall Street invest more heavily to maintain its stake in it.

Men like Mark Gallogly know who their real enemy is: more than anyone else, the establishment is wary of Bernie Sanders . It seems likely that he will run for president, but he's been dismissed as a 2020 frontrunner despite his high favorability rates, name recognition, small-donor fundraising ability, appeal to independent voters, and his team's experience running a competitive national campaign. As 2019 goes on, that dismissal will morph into all-out war.

Wall Street isn't afraid of corporate Democrats gaining power. It's afraid of the Democrats who will take them on -- and those, unfortunately, are few and far between.

Bhaskar Sunkara is a Guardian US columnist and the founding editor of Jacobin

memo10 -> Karen Maddening , 15 Jan 2019 14:05

Just like universal health care, let's give up, it's too hard, we're not winners, we're not number one or problem solvers and besides, someone at some time for some reason might get something that someone else might not get regardless if that someone else needs it. Let's go with the Berners who seem to believe there will never be none so pure enough to become president.

The corporate state does not cast the votes. The public does.

Leaning farther to the left on issues like universal healthcare and foreign wars would be agreeing with the public. Not only the progressive public, but the GENERAL public. The big money donors are the ONLY force against the Democrats resisting these things.

mp66 , 15 Jan 2019 13:38
2016 has shown that the Democratic party is beyond redemption. When it comes down to the choice of either win with a platform that may impact the wealth and power of their owners, or losing, they will always choose the latter, and continue as useful (and well paid) idiots in the charade presented as US democracy.
Pete Healey , 15 Jan 2019 13:31
Bernie's challenge will "morph into all-out war". "Wall Street isn't afraid of corporate Democrats", blah, blah, blah. But we're going to continue to play along? Why? Oh yeah, Bhaskar Sunkara will have us believe "There is no alternative". Remember TINA? Give it up, man, just give it up.
yayUSA , 15 Jan 2019 13:17
Tulsi entering is big news.
Danexmachina , 15 Jan 2019 12:31
One dollar, one vote.
If you want Change, keep it in your pocket.
We can't turn this sinking ship around unless we know what direction it's going. So far, that direction is just delivering money to private islands.
Democrats have a lot of talk, but they still want to drive the nice cars and sell the same crapft that the Republicans are.
Taxing the rich only works when you worship the rich in the first place.
Tim Cahill , 15 Jan 2019 12:00
Election financing is the single root cause for our democracy's failure. Period.

I really don't care too much about the mouthing of progressive platitudes from any 2020 Dem Prez candidate. The only ones that will be worth voting for are the ones that sign onto Sanders' (or similar) legislation that calls for a Constitutional amendment that allows federal and state governments to limit campaign contributions.

And past committee votes to prevent amendment legislation from getting to a floor vote - as well as missed co-sponsorship opportunities - should be interesting history for all the candidates to explain.

Campaign financing is what keeps scum entrenched (because primary challengers can't overcome the streams of bribes from those wonderful people exercising their 'free speech' "rights" to keep their puppet in govt) and prevents any challenges to the corporate establishment who serve the same rich masters.

Lenny Dirges -> Vintage59 , 15 Jan 2019 11:55
Lol, Social Security, Medicare, unemployement protections, so many of the things you mentioned, and so much more, were from the PROGRESSIVE New Deal, which managed to implement this slew of changes in 5 years! 5 years! You can't criticize "progressives" in one sentence and then use their accomplishments to support your argument. Today, the New Deal would be considered too far left by most so called "pragmatic liberals." I assume you are getting fully behind the proposed "Green New Deal" then, right?
memo10 -> L C , 15 Jan 2019 11:54

Vintage59 pointed out lots of things people have changed. Here's an exhaustive list of the legislation passed by people who didn't get elected but were more progressive than the people who did:

There is also a steadily growing list of Democrats who did worse in elections than a hypothetical Democratic candidate had been projected to do.

The party can either continue being GOP-Lite or it can start winning elections. It can't do both.

memo10 -> 2miners , 15 Jan 2019 11:49

Forget it Bernie and Co. -with the women haters in his ranks and his apparent tepid support from African Americans he's way off the pace

Way off the pace compared to who? Trump?

memo10 -> IamDolf , 15 Jan 2019 11:44

Nobody is going to get elected on a far left platform. Not in the USA and not anywhere. That's just a fact. And everybody is going to need $$$ in the campaign. Of course candidates are going to suck up to Wall street and business in general.
And we would have been a thousand percent better off with HRC in the white house than we are now with the Trumpostor.

We don't need a candidate with far-left platform, we need one that is left-leaning at all. HRC and her next generation of clones are mild Republicans.

memo10 -> xxxaaaxxx , 15 Jan 2019 11:40

Those who want to push the Democrats to the left in order to win perhaps need to stop talking to each other and talk to people who live outside of LA and NY. If you stay within your bubble it seems the whole world thinks like you.
How old will Sanders be in 2020?

The people (outside the coasts) lean to the left some big issues. Medicare for all. Foreign wars. etc.

A sane person might ask why in the hell the left-side party is leaning farther to the right than the general public.

memo10 -> Peter Krall , 15 Jan 2019 11:17

Sanders is a dinosaur. If there is a reason for Wall Street to be wary of him then it is that the mentally challenged orange guy may win another term if the Democrats run with Sanders.

Hopefully, Sanders will understand what many of his supporters do not want to see: At some time age becomes a problem. If the Democrats decide to move to the left rather than pursuing a pragmatic centrist approach, Ocasio-Cortez might be an option. If they opt for the centrist alternative, it might be Harris or Gillibrand. Or, in both cases, a surprise candidate. But Sanders' time is over, just as Biden's Bloomberg's.

It's true, but Trump is such a clusterfuck that an 80yo president is still be a better situation. Many countries have had rulers in their 80s at one time or another.

Trump is clearly showing early-stage dementia now. Compare footage of him 10+ years ago to anything within the last 6-12 months and it's obvious. The stress levels of being the POTUS + blackmailed by Putin + investigations bearing down on him . . . it's wearing him down fast.

L C -> HobbesianWorlds , 15 Jan 2019 11:15
Anti-trust would be a very good place to start with.

Universal healthcare is a lot harder than you seem to think. I'd love it, but getting there means putting so many people out of work, it'll be a massive political challenge, even if corporations have no influence. Progressives might be better off focusing on how to ensure the existing system works better and Medicaid can slowly expand to fill the universal roll in the future.

Vintage59 -> BaronVonAmericano , 15 Jan 2019 11:05
Wall Street is a casino. The House never loses.
Vintage59 -> Lenny Dirges , 15 Jan 2019 11:02
Everything changes constantly.

Where has offering candidates who actually have a chance to win gotten us? Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, the ADA, Title 9, Social Security, and more. None of these exist without constant changes. All took years to pass against heavy opposition. None went far enough. All were improvements.

The list of wrongheaded things that were also passed is longer but thinking nothing changes because it takes time is faulty logic.

ytram -> ChesBay , 15 Jan 2019 10:30
Our capitalist predators are still alive and well. The finance, insurance, and real estate
organizations are the worst predators in the USA.
They will eat your babies if you let them.

[Jan 29, 2019] Guardian became Deep State Guardian

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... The Guardian has lost all sense of proportion – mention Tommy Robinson and the entire staff through themselves to floor and roll round like dying flies – yet for when it comes to US neocons they go all misty eyed, redolent of a broody couple when they come across a particularly adorable baby. ..."
"... I would wager a medium sum that Tisdall is on a payroll other than the Grauniad's, or he's an actual asset per Ulfkötte's books and media appearances. ..."
"... George Bush spent his adult life organizing operations and wars that killed a few million people. Anyone who has spiritual beliefs must wonder how it is to die with so much killing on your record or conscience (if you have one). ..."
"... That's something I've wondered about many times. If you review John McCain's actions and comments before he died, it seems these people don't have a conscience. ..."
"... Reagan was primarily a mantle piece for the banking, oil and defense sectors to run wild. Is it really so hard to believe GHW Bush was running the National Security Council? It was a CIA wet dream come true (especially after the alligator-armed "investigations" of the 70's. ..."
"... The Deep State Guardian. Why don't they just change their name to 'The Daily Thatcherite' and have done with it. ..."
"... They should just show it's full title: The Guardian Of The Establishment ..."
"... well, yeah. but for us mad people it goes deeper even than that: https://geopolitics.co/2018/12/02/in-memoriam-george-h-scherff-jr-aka-george-hw-bush-sr/ ..."
Dec 22, 2018 | off-guardian.org

Oslo - Norway, Dec 4, 2018

Let's never forget George H W Bush's love for incubator babies. He loved fake incubator babies.

The incubator baby actress wasn't just any 15 year old, she was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to Canada –

https://www.youtube.com/embed/cqiq8P8dRtY?version=3&rel=1&fs=1&autohide=2&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&wmode=transparent

Philpot, Dec 4, 2018
British and most western media are either in the direct or indirect pay of their governments. What journalist can expose this for us? Any of you willing to make the biggest scoop of the 21st century? Tom Bradbury at ITN must be on the spook payroll, for starters? MI6 had foreign correspondents for years, but domestic mouthpieces must now be on the take too? All paid to demonise Russia and Putin.
harry stotle, Dec 4, 2018

The Guardian has lost all sense of proportion – mention Tommy Robinson and the entire staff through themselves to floor and roll round like dying flies – yet for when it comes to US neocons they go all misty eyed, redolent of a broody couple when they come across a particularly adorable baby.

Simon 'white helmets' Tisdall is especially egregious – one can imagine him throwing darts at a picture of Putin while producing his latest homily to the murderous actions of gangsters like Bush and his crime family.

Its hard not to despair now this has become the official face of Britains so-called liberal media.

Yarkob, Dec 4, 2018
I would wager a medium sum that Tisdall is on a payroll other than the Grauniad's, or he's an actual asset per Ulfkötte's books and media appearances. As with Michael White, with whom I had a very illuminating argument via email a few years back. He *is* an asset, not a journalist (and a massive dick, to boot)
George cornell, Dec 4, 2018
I thought the attitude of the Bush family to their fellow Americans was best illustrated by Barbara's response to the plight of the homeless victims of Katrina who had been transported to the Houston domed stadium. They spent their nights there sleeping on hard benches and when good ole Babs heard of it, she opined that they probably had never had it so good so why were they complaining. Could Mother Theresa have had greater generosity of spirit?
Gekaufte Journalisten (bought journalism), Dec 4, 2018
Not just one article, the awful Guardian is full of contents eulogising [yet another] mongrel of a president.

But look at conservative media. The crazy Infowars.com described this Bush as an Anti-American Globalist and Traitor!! .. and zerohedge.com is celebrating: "The Evil Has Died" and "In 2016 he voted for Hillary Clinton, because the Deep State Swamp sticks together". https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-12-02/exploring-dark-side-bush-41

Just tell me, who is the rabid neo-con right-wing rag that is glorifying wars and mass murderers?

Norcal, Dec 4, 2018
Speaking of neighbors you might appreciate this excellent Journalism by Robert Parry: https://consortiumnews.com/2018/12/03/bush-41s-october-surprise-denials-2/
DunGroanin, Dec 4, 2018
The late Robert Parry, sad to say. Maybe that now both the 'MacBeths' are stains on the tarmac – Parry's notes of the bloodstained legacy of that dynasty can finally be displayed? That Barbara was one cold blooded mother! Would have happily pulled a trigger on JFK, MLK herself (some think).

Just about the whole century from the setup of the Fed, the two world wars, the depression, Hitler, Korea, Cuba all of it, had a a Bush hand in it. He was the self crowned Caesar having publicly executed the whole of Camelot and left us with a poison toad, reminds us how low the Bush's took the USA.

David Eire, Dec 3, 2018
George Bush spent his adult life organizing operations and wars that killed a few million people. Anyone who has spiritual beliefs must wonder how it is to die with so much killing on your record or conscience (if you have one).
Loverat, Dec 4, 2018
That's something I've wondered about many times. If you review John McCain's actions and comments before he died, it seems these people don't have a conscience. If you surround yourself with people of similar mindset and in a climate where war is considered obligatory for US Presidents, you go into self denial. Wars are probably like an addiction for these people and once you get to that stage you no longer have a conscience.

During John McCain's funeral where all living ex-presidents were in attendance, someone remarked on Twitter, 'Quick, lock the church doors and hold the war crimes trial in the church!'. This was a far more realistic observation than the sickening McCain apologist BBC coverage we were subjected to.

At the weekend I went to the place where Oliver Cromwell lived. There was an American tourist who told us she was shocked about Oliver Cromwell being dug up from his grave and his head stuck on a pike. She said it was gruesome. I was tempted to say that at least that was 350 years ago, and similar things are happening today in Iraq, Syria and Libya – all places where the US has instigated the chaos and supports the perpretators. I resisted the temptation.

I note that Cromwell thought he was chosen by God to do what he did. But again that was in different times and there were some redeeming factors in what he did, Probably on par with Obama – who wreaked havoc on the Middle East but reached agreements on Iran and Cuba. Plus Obama looked cool while killing and droning.

But what goes around comes around. I sense the pure evil involved in the current regime change wars, government, media etc will pay a heavy price – whether in this life or the next.

mark, Dec 4, 2018
The state controlled BBC has just done another puff piece on McCain saying what a splendid chap and great statesman and all round good egg he was.

The MSM likes to slag off Vlad The Bad by droning on about how he was in the KGB. But Bush wasn't just IN the CIA, he was the BOSS of the CIA, at a time when hundreds of thousands of Central American peasant farmers and Indians were being killed by CIA trained and orchestrated death squads.

Gezzah Potts, Dec 4, 2018
Mark: jayzus Mark, don't you just want to projectile vomit when you see all this absolute bullshit, just straight out revising of history, just the lies, on and on . I was involved in a Central American solidarity group in the 1980s – early 90s here in Aussie, found out then all about U.S style 'democracatic values' and 'human rights concerns' and death squads and various fascists fully supported by the United States, and places like Guatemala and Nicaragua. Its all an illusion for 'polite society' and the gullible to believe in. Sigh
mark, Dec 5, 2018
I can't remember the exact figures but I think it was over 200,000 murdered in Guatemala out of a population of 4 million. It was the same story in El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua and Colombia. And of course the CIA satrap Noriega was hauled off in chains when that country was invaded. But Uncle Sam is finally paying a price for his antics south of the border. Those societies were wrecked and brutalised beyond repair. There is now an unbelievably high murder rate of women in Guatemala. Millions of those people have sought some kind of refuge in the belly of the beast, causing an immigration crisis, with an illegal immigrant population that may be as high as 30 million. Hence all the uproar over Trump's wall. The immigration crisis was a factor in Trump's election, just as the tidal wave of migrants from the destroyed countries of the Middle East was a factor in Brexit. Cameron, Sarko and Clinton thought it was a spiffing idea and quite a wizard wheeze to bomb Libya back to the Stone Age. So we now have a Mad Max failed state complete with warlords and slave markets just across the Med. What goes around, comes around. You can't expect to export violence and mayhem abroad and remain immune to it at home.
Gezzah Potts, Dec 5, 2018
Mark: after Efrain Rios Montt seized power in a coup in Guatemala in 1982, US Ambassador Frederick Chapin declared that thanks to the coup of Rios Montt "the Guatemalan Govt has come out of the darkness into the light". That sums it up in one sentence, and you're probably aware of the mass killing and disappearances under his genocidal tyranny. Reagan kindly submitted that Rios Montt was 'getting a bum rap on human rights, the same Reagan who declared the Contra's were 'The moral equal of our founding fathers'. In El Salvador, the same mass slaughter, the same mass upheaval, and even murdering Archbishop Romero. You only need to look at what happened in Central & South America to understand what the United States really represents.
Jen, Dec 4, 2018
I would have bypassed the war crimes trial, locked the church and then built a moat stocked with crocodiles and piranhas around it.
mark, Dec 4, 2018
That's entirely right. People understandably despise and revile people like Brady and Hindley, Sutcliffe, Dahmer, Bundy and the like. But they killed a handful of people and were often very damaged individuals to begin with. And at least they did their own dirty work. Subhuman scum sucking filth like Bush, Bush 2, Obama, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Rice, Blair, Straw and Campbell are a thousand times worse. They kill millions without getting their hands dirty, and preen and posture as great statesmen and public servants, expecting deference and state funerals and puff piece obituaries from nauseating, loathsome, lickspittle media hacks like Tisdall.
Caitlin Ni Chonaill, Dec 6, 2018
You left out Kissinger and Albright.
Gezzah Potts, Dec 3, 2018
Nailed it Kit. The attempt at revionism and rewriting history by these craven creatures, these sycophantic slimebag shills for Imperialism and War and the Anglo Zionist Empire. They don't speak truth to power, they protect and grovel to the powerful. The eulogising and fawning of Bush was stomach churning, as it was for the arch Imperialist McCain when he croaked. Thank God for alternative news sites, and yeah Caitlin Johnston @ medium nailed it as well, as Fair Dinkum mentioned. Where's John Pilger when you need him?
Badger Down, Dec 3, 2018
GBH Bush's Highway of Death deserves mention. I'll spare you the pictures.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=highway+of+death+desert+storm&t=h_&atb=v92-2_f&ia=web
systemicfraud, Dec 3, 2018
What no one seems to realize is that the VP often takes charge of the US National Security Council when POTUS is not able to attend meetings, which are held weekly. Under Eisenhower it was Richard Nixon who often took charge of the meetings -- Tim Weiner's book "Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA" gives some details on this. Reagan was primarily a mantle piece for the banking, oil and defense sectors to run wild. Is it really so hard to believe GHW Bush was running the National Security Council? It was a CIA wet dream come true (especially after the alligator-armed "investigations" of the 70's.
Fair dinkum, Dec 3, 2018
Caitlin sums it up: https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2018/12/01/if-you-murdered-a-bunch-of-people-mass-murder-is-your-single-defining-legacy/
Simon Hodges, Dec 3, 2018
The Deep State Guardian. Why don't they just change their name to 'The Daily Thatcherite' and have done with it.
Frankly Speaking, Dec 4, 2018
They should just show it's full title: The Guardian Of The Establishment
kevin morris, Dec 3, 2018
'Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America's Invisible Government, and the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years' by Russ Baker -- a fascinating account of the Bush family's involvement in a great deal of nefarious activity. Bush senior is one of the few people who didn't remember where he was when Kennedy was shot. Baker puts him in Dallas.
lysias, Dec 4, 2018
Now that G.H.W. Bush hss died, is there anybody suspected of involvement in the JFK assassination still alive?
kevin morris, Dec 4, 2018
I don't know but as a fairly apolitical individual, I never much bothered with the Kennedy Assasination. All that changed when during the fiftieth anniversary, BBC Radio Four ran a program which included an interview with the Dallas police officer who was handcuffed to Lee Harvey Oswald when he was shot by Jack Ruby. The consensus of that program was that the case was open shut and Oswald did it. Around that time, several newspapers in the UK featured articles claiming that Oswald acted alone.

Whether or not anyone actively involved still lives, their descendants still do and the probable organising body too. There still appears to be determination in some quarters to spread disinformation about the case. Given that as long ago as the late seventies the House of Representatives Assassination Committee concluded that JFK's death was probably the consequence of a conspiracy, determination amongst the mainstream media to lay Kennedy's death at the hands of Oswald alone suggests that there is still determination that the truth never becomes public.

Frankly Speaking, Dec 3, 2018
Exactly what i was thinking!

I'm sickened by the Guardian's and BBC's obedience to the US neocon project to seek, or create, and destroy "enemies" and whilst ignoring all the disgusting atrocities that arise as a consequence.

The Guardian is not even worth the paper it's printed on. It's become The Guardian Of The Establishment rather than of the Truth which it used to proclaim.

George cornell, Dec 4, 2018
It is in danger of losing its budgie-cage-liner status. If budgies can talk they may refuse to evacuate on it. What kind of person maintains ties to such a a poor excuse for cage toiletry. The moral crunch time for their journalists (actually their opinionists) came and went a long time ago.
Brutally Remastered, Dec 3, 2018
What a great piece. My parents knew them in New York and they came over once and left behind an embossed packet of White House cigs. I asked my father (before he died) what he thought of them and all he ever said was he thought that Barbara was the intellect in the family.
Bloody annoying, thanks Pater.
Marianne Birkby, Dec 3, 2018
From 2004

"The induction of DU weapons in 1991 in Iraq broke a 46-year taboo. This Trojan Horse of nuclear war continues to be used more and more. DU remains radioactive longer than the age of the earth (estimated at 4.5 billion years). The long-term effects from over a decade of DU exposures are devastating. The increased quantities of radioactive material used in Afghanistan are 3 to 5 times greater than Iraq, 1991. In Iraq, 2003, they are already estimated to be 6 to 10 times 1991, and will travel through a larger area and affect many more people, babies and unborn. Countries within a 1000-mile radius of Baghdad and Kabul are being affected by radiation poisoning

Badger Down, Dec 3, 2018
"DU remains radioactive longer than [ ] 4.5 billion years." It's worse than that. It loses half of its radioactivity in that time. The good news is that that slow release means "D"U doesn't zap you much. The bad news is it's chemically toxic, like a heavy metal (which it is).
nwwoods, Dec 3, 2018
Also no mention of the body of circumstantial evidence linking Bush to JFK's murder, though Bush repeatedly insisted that he couldn't recall his whereabouts that day (I can precisely recall where I was, and I was 9 years old in 1963), in spite of the fact that solid documentary evidence exists that puts him in Dallas on Nov 22, 1963.
Norcal, Dec 4, 2018
The very first Google Search I did was this, (George H.W. Bush+November 22, 1963) and it yielded a page like the following link, which began my research into the JFK Assassination.

http://www.lookingglassnews.org/viewstory.php?storyid=5420

nomad, Dec 3, 2018

well, yeah. but for us mad people it goes deeper even than that: https://geopolitics.co/2018/12/02/in-memoriam-george-h-scherff-jr-aka-george-hw-bush-sr/

Bush Sr. : Crypto-Nazi patriarch and his disciples
https://eclinik.files.wordpress.com/2018/12/barbara-bush-funeral-four-presidents-four-first-ladies.jpg?w=672&h=372&crop=1

[Jan 26, 2019] Can the current US neoliberal/neoconservative elite be considered suicidal?

Highly recommended!
Can the elite be afflicted by some mass disease. Is Neoconservatism a deadly infection ?
Theoretically Democracy depends on information freely available and responsibility of the citizenry to make decisions based on that information. The political elites have made certain precious little of reliable, unclouded and relevant information ever gets broadcast even while popularizing, promoting and rewarding every form of misrepresentation, ignorance and irresponsibility. In other words they spearheaded a dangerous disease to stay in power. And eventually got infected themselves.
Notable quotes:
"... "But what if the elites get things wrong? What if the policies they promulgate produce grotesque inequality or lead to permanent war? Who then has the authority to disregard the guardians, if not the people themselves? How else will the elites come to recognize their folly and change course?" ..."
"... That is how they maintain control and manipulate government to facilitate their own interests to the detriment of the rest of society. Bretix and President Trump have upset their apple cart, which they felt certain was invulnerable and immune to challenge. ..."
"... The elites aren't interested in polls showing Americans want out of Syria and Afghanistan, are they? Can't have mere citizens having influencing decisions like that. ..."
"... An excellent piece. I would add only that the so-called elites mentioned by Mr Bacevich are largely the products of the uppermost stratum of colleges and universities, at least in the USA, and that for a generation or more now, those institutions have indoctrinated rather than educated. ..."
"... As their more recent alumni move into government, media and cultural production, the primitiveness of their views and their inability to think - to say nothing of their fundamental ignorance about our civilization other than that it is bad and evil - begin to have real effect. ..."
Jan 20, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

Kent January 18, 2019 at 11:30 am

"But what if the elites get things wrong? What if the policies they promulgate produce grotesque inequality or lead to permanent war? Who then has the authority to disregard the guardians, if not the people themselves? How else will the elites come to recognize their folly and change course?"

What if, on election day, you only have a choice between 2 candidates. Both favoring all the wrong choices, but one tends to talk up Christianity and family and the other talks up diversity.

And both get their funding from the very wealthy and corporations. And any 3rd choices would be "throwing your vote away". How would you ever get to vote for someone who might change course?

Democracy has little to actually do with choice or power.

mlopez, January 18, 2019 at 6:22 pm

GB may not have been any utopia in 1914, but it was certainly geo-politically dominant. It's common people's social, economic and cultural living standards most assuredly was vastly improved over Russian, or European peasants. There can be no serious comparison with third world countries and regions.

As for the US, there can be absolutely no debate about its own dominance, or material standard of living after 1945 as compared to any where else in the world. More importantly, even uneducated and very contemporary observers were capable of recognizing how our elites had sold out their interests in favor of the furtherance of their own.

If we are on about democratic government, then it's been generations since either country and their peoples have had any real democracy. Democracy depends on information freely available and responsibility of the citizenry to make decisions based on that information. The political elites have made certain precious little of reliable, unclouded and relevant information ever gets broadcast even while popularizing, promoting and rewarding every form of misrepresentation, ignorance and irresponsibility.

That is how they maintain control and manipulate government to facilitate their own interests to the detriment of the rest of society. Bretix and President Trump have upset their apple cart, which they felt certain was invulnerable and immune to challenge.

Hello / Goodbye, January 19, 2019 at 11:40 am

The elites aren't interested in polls showing Americans want out of Syria and Afghanistan, are they? Can't have mere citizens having influencing decisions like that.

Patzinak, January 19, 2019 at 5:07 pm

What ineffable flummadiddle!

Prominent Brexiteers include Boris Johnson (dual UK/US citizenship, educated in Brussels and at Eton and Oxford, of mixed ancestry, including a link - by illegitimate descent - to the royal houses of Prussia and the UK); Jacob Rees-Mogg (son of a baron, educated at Eton and Oxford, amassed a solid fortune via hedge fund management); Arron Banks (millionaire, bankroller of UKIP, made to the Brexit campaign the largest ever political donation in UK politics).

So much for "the elite" being against Brexit!

But the main problem with Brexit is this. Having voted by a slim margin in favour of Brexit, the Great British Public then, in the general election, denied a majority to the government that had undertaken to implement it, and elected a Parliament of whom, by a rough estimate, two thirds oppose Brexit.

It ain't that "the elite" got "things wrong". It's that bloody Joe Public can't make his mind what to do - and go through with it.

Rossbach, January 20, 2019 at 2:14 pm

"Whether the imagined utopia of a dominant Great Britain prior to 1914 or a dominant America after 1945 ever actually existed is beside the point."

It wasn't to restore any defunct utopia that led people to vote for Brexit or Donald Trump; it was to check the descent of the Anglosphere into the totalitarian dystopia of forced multi-cultural globalism that caused voters to reject the EU in Britain and Hillary Clinton in the US. It is because they believed that only with the preservation of their national independence was there any chance or hope for a restoration of individual liberty that our people voted as they did.

Ratings System, January 17, 2019 at 1:27 pm

It's why they won't enjoy their privileges much longer. That stale charade can't and won't last.

We don't have a meritocracy. We have a pseudo-meritocracy with an unduly large contingent of aliens, liars, cheats, frauds, and incompetents. They give each other top marks, speak each other's PC language, and hire each other's kids. And they don't understand why things are falling apart, and why they are increasingly hated by real Americans.

A very nasty decade or two is coming our way, but after we've swept out the filth there will be a good chance that Americans will be Americans again.

Paul Reidinger, January 17, 2019 at 2:03 pm

An excellent piece. I would add only that the so-called elites mentioned by Mr Bacevich are largely the products of the uppermost stratum of colleges and universities, at least in the USA, and that for a generation or more now, those institutions have indoctrinated rather than educated.

As their more recent alumni move into government, media and cultural production, the primitiveness of their views and their inability to think - to say nothing of their fundamental ignorance about our civilization other than that it is bad and evil - begin to have real effect. The new dark age is no longer imminent. It is here, and it is them. I see no way to rectify the damage. When minds are ruined young, they remain ruined.

[Jan 22, 2019] War with Russia From Putin Ukraine to Trump Russiagate

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Professor Cohen is indeed a patriot of the highest order. The American and "Globalists" elites, particularly the dysfunctional United Kingdom, are engaging in a war of nerves with Russia. This war, which could turn nuclear for reasons discussed in this important book, is of no benefit to any person or nation. ..."
Jan 22, 2019 | www.amazon.com

P. Philips 5.0 out of 5 stars December 6, 2018

"In a Time of Universal Deceit -- Telling the Truth Is a Revolutionary Act"

"In a Time of Universal Deceit -- Telling the Truth Is a Revolutionary Act" is a well known quotation (but probably not of George Orwell). And in telling the truth about Russia and that the current "war of nerves" is not in the interests of either the American People or national security, Professor Cohen in this book has in fact done a revolutionary act.

Like a denizen of Plato's cave, or being in the film the Matrix, most people have no idea what the truth is. And the questions raised by Professor Cohen are a great service in the cause of the truth. As Professor Cohen writes in his introduction To His Readers:

"My scholarly work -- my biography of Nikolai Bukharin and essays collected in Rethinking the Soviet Experience and Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives, for example -- has always been controversial because it has been what scholars term "revisionist" -- reconsiderations, based on new research and perspectives, of prevailing interpretations of Soviet and post-Soviet Russian history. But the "controversy" surrounding me since 2014, mostly in reaction to the contents of this book, has been different -- inspired by usually vacuous, defamatory assaults on me as "Putin's No. 1 American Apologist," "Best Friend," and the like. I never respond specifically to these slurs because they offer no truly substantive criticism of my arguments, only ad hominem attacks. Instead, I argue, as readers will see in the first section, that I am a patriot of American national security, that the orthodox policies my assailants promote are gravely endangering our security, and that therefore we -- I and others they assail -- are patriotic heretics. Here too readers can judge."

Cohen, Stephen F.. War with Russia (Kindle Locations 131-139). Hot Books. Kindle Edition.

Professor Cohen is indeed a patriot of the highest order. The American and "Globalists" elites, particularly the dysfunctional United Kingdom, are engaging in a war of nerves with Russia. This war, which could turn nuclear for reasons discussed in this important book, is of no benefit to any person or nation.

Indeed, with the hysteria on "climate change" isn't it odd that other than Professor Cohen's voice, there are no prominent figures warning of the devastation that nuclear war would bring?

If you are a viewer of one of the legacy media outlets, be it Cable Television networks, with the exception of Tucker Carlson on Fox who has Professor Cohen as a frequent guest, or newspapers such as The New York Times, you have been exposed to falsehoods by remarkably ignorant individuals; ignorant of history, of the true nature of Russia (which defeated the Nazis in Europe at a loss of millions of lives) and most important, of actual military experience. America is neither an invincible or exceptional nation. And for those familiar with terminology of ancient history, it appears the so-called elites are suffering from hubris.

I cannot recommend Professor Cohen's work with sufficient superlatives; his arguments are erudite, clearly stated, supported by the facts and ultimately irrefutable. If enough people find Professor Cohen's work and raise their voices to their oblivious politicians and profiteers from war to stop further confrontation between Russia and America, then this book has served a noble purpose.

If nothing else, educate yourself by reading this work to discover what the *truth* is. And the truth is something sacred.

America and the world owe Professor Cohen a great debt. "Blessed are the peace makers..."

jn 5.0 out of 5 stars January 18, 2019

This book examines the senseless and dangerous demonizing of Russia and Putin

This is a compelling book that documents and examines the senseless and dangerous demonizing of Russia and Putin. Unfortunately, the elites in Washington and mass media are not likely to read this book. Their minds are closed. I read this book because I was hoping for an explanation about the cause of the new cold war with Russia. Although the root cause of the new cold war is beyond the scope of this book, the book documents baseless accusations that grew in frequency and intensity until all opposition was silenced. The book documents the dangerous triumph of group think.

skeptic

"On my planet, the evidence linking Putin to the assassination of Litvinecko, Nemtsov, and Politkovskaya and the attempt on the Skripals is strong and consistent with spending his formative years in the KGB. The naive view from Cohen's planet is presented on p 6 and 170."

Ukrainian history. That's evident to any attentive reader. I just want to state that Ukrainian EuroMaydan was a color revolution which exploited the anger of population against the corrupt neoliberal government of Yanukovich (with Biden as the best friend, and Paul Manafort as the election advisor) to install even more neoliberal and more corrupt government of Poroshenko and cut Ukraine from Russia. The process that was probably inevitable in the long run (so called Baltic path), but that was forcefully accelerated. Everything was taken from the Gene Sharp textbook. And Ukrainians suffered greatly as a result, with the standard of living dropping to around $2 a day level -- essentially Central Africa level.

The fact is that the EU acted as a predator trying to get into Ukraine markets and displace Russia. While the USA neocons (Nuland and Co) staged the coup using Ukrainian nationalists as a ram, ignoring the fact that Yanukovich would be voted out in six months anyway (his popularity was in single digits, like popularity of Poroshenko those days ;-). The fact that Obama administration desperately wanted to weaken Russia at the expense of Ukrainians eludes you. I would blame Nuland for the loss of Crimea and the civil war in Donbass.

Poor Ukrainians again became the victim of geopolitical games by big powers. No that they are completely blameless, but still...

It looks like you inhabit a very cold populated exclusively with neocons planet called "Russiagate." So Professor Cohen really lives on another planet. And probably you should drink less American exceptionalism Kool-Aid.

[Jan 21, 2019] Beyond BuzzFeed The 10 Worst, Most Embarrassing US Media Failures On The Trump-Russia Story by Glenn Greenwald

Highly recommended!
Jan 21, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Glenn Greenwald via The Intercept,

Buzzfeed was once notorious for traffic-generating "listicles" , but has since become an impressive outlet for deep investigative journalism under editor-in-chief Ben Smith. That outlet was prominently in the news this week thanks to its "bombshell" story about President Trump and Michael Cohen: a story that, like so many others of its kind, blew up in its face , this time when the typically mute Robert Mueller's office took the extremely rare step to label its key claims "inaccurate."

But in homage to BuzzFeed's past viral glory, following are the top ten worst media failures in two-plus-years of Trump/Russia reporting. They are listed in reverse order, as measured by the magnitude of the embarrassment, the hysteria they generated on social media and cable news, the level of journalistic recklessness that produced them, and the amount of damage and danger they caused. This list was extremely difficult to compile in part because news outlets (particularly CNN and MSNBC) often delete from the internet the video segments of their most embarrassing moments. Even more challenging was the fact that the number of worthy nominees is so large that highly meritorious entrees had to be excluded, but are acknowledged at the end with (dis)honorable mention status.

Note that all of these "errors" go only in one direction: namely, exaggerating the grave threat posed by Moscow and the Trump circle's connection to it. It's inevitable that media outlets will make mistakes on complex stories. If that's being done in good faith, one would expect the errors would be roughly 50/50 in terms of the agenda served by the false stories. That is most definitely not the case here. Just as was true in 2002 and 2003, when the media clearly wanted to exaggerate the threat posed by Saddam Hussein and thus all of its "errors" went in that direction, virtually all of its major "errors" in this story are devoted to the same agenda and script:

10. RT Hacked Into and Took Over C-SPAN (Fortune)

On June 12, 2017, Fortune claimed that RT had hacked into and taken over C-SPAN and that C-SPAN "confirmed" it had been hacked. The whole story was false :

9. Russian Hackers Invaded the U.S. Electricity Grid to Deny Vermonters Heat During the Winter (WashPost)

On December 30, 2016, the Washington Post reported that "Russian hackers penetrated the U.S. electricity grid through a utility in Vermont," causing predictable outrage and panic, along with threats from U.S. political leaders. But then they kept diluting the story with editor's notes – to admit that the malware was found on a laptop not connected to the U.S. electric grid at all – until finally acknowledging, days later, that the whole story was false, since the malware had nothing to do with Russia or with the U.S. electric grid:

8. A New, Deranged, Anonymous Group Declares Mainstream Political Sites on the Left and Right to be Russian Propaganda Outlets and WashPost Touts its Report to Claim Massive Kremlin Infiltration of the Internet (WashPost)

On November 24, 2016, the Washington Post published one of the most inflammatory, sensationalistic stories to date about Russian infiltration into U.S. politics using social media, accusing "more than 200 websites" of being "routine peddlers of Russian propaganda during the election season, with combined audiences of at least 15 million Americans." It added: "stories planted or promoted by the disinformation campaign [on Facebook] were viewed more than 213 million times."

Unfortunately for the paper, those statistics were provided by a new, anonymous group that reached these conclusions by classifying long-time, well-known sites – from the Drudge Report to Clinton-critical left-wing websites such as Truthout, Black Agenda Report, Truthdig, and Naked Capitalism, as well as libertarian venues such as Antiwar.com and the Ron Paul Institute. – as "Russian propaganda outlets," producing one of the longest Editor's Note in memory appended to the top of the article (but not until two weeks later , long after the story was mindlessly spread all throughout the media ecosystem):

7. Trump Aide Anthony Scaramucci is Involved in a Russian Hedge Fund Under Senate Investigation (CNN)

On June 22, 2017, CNN reported that Trump aide Anthony Scaramucci was involved with the Russian Direct Investment Fund, under Senate investigation. He was not. CNN retracted the story and forced the three reporters who published it to leave the network.

6. Russia Attacked U.S. "Diplomats" (i.e. Spies) at the Cuban Embassy Using a Super-Sophisticated Sonic Microwave Weapon (NBC/MSNBC/CIA)

On September 11, 2017, NBC News and MSNBC spread all over its airwaves a claim from its notorious CIA puppet Ken Dilanian that Russia was behind a series of dastardly attacks on U.S. personnel at the Embassy in Cuba using a sonic or microwave weapon so sophisticated and cunning that Pentagon and CIA scientists had no idea what to make of it.

But then teams of neurologists began calling into doubt that these personnel had suffered any brain injuries at all – that instead they appear to have experienced collective psychosomatic symptoms – and then biologists published findings that the "strange sounds" the U.S. "diplomats" reported hearing were identical to those emitted by a common Caribbean male cricket during mating season.

5. Trump Created a Secret Internet Server to Covertly Communicate with a Russian Bank (Slate)

4. Paul Manafort Visited Julian Assange Three Times in the Ecuadorian Embassy and Nobody Noticed (Guardian/Luke Harding)

On November 27, 2018, the Guardian published a major "bombshell" that Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort had somehow managed to sneak inside one of the world's most surveilled buildings, the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, and visit Julian Assange on three different occasions. Cable and online commentators exploded.

Seven weeks later, no other media outlet has confirmed this ; no video or photographic evidence has emerged; the Guardian refuses to answer any questions; its leading editors have virtually gone into hiding; other media outlets have expressed serious doubts about its veracity; and an Ecuadorian official who worked at the embassy has called the story a complete fake:

3. CNN Explicitly Lied About Lanny Davis Being Its Source – For a Story Whose Substance Was Also False: Cohen Would Testify that Trump Knew in Advance About the Trump Tower Meeting (CNN)

On July 27, 2018, CNN published a blockbuster story : that Michael Cohen was prepared to tell Robert Mueller that President Trump knew in advanced about the Trump Tower meeting. There were, however, two problems with this story: first, CNN got caught blatantly lying when its reporters claimed that "contacted by CNN, one of Cohen's attorneys, Lanny Davis, declined to comment" (in fact, Davis was one of CNN's key sources, if not its only source, for this story), and second, numerous other outlets retracted the story after the source, Davis, admitted it was a lie. CNN, however, to this date has refused to do either:

2. Robert Mueller Possesses Internal Emails and Witness Interviews Proving Trump Directed Cohen to Lie to Congress (BuzzFeed)

1. Donald Trump Jr. Was Offered Advanced Access to the WikiLeaks Email Archive (CNN/MSNBC)

The morning of December 9, 2017, launched one of the most humiliating spectacles in the history of the U.S. media. With a tone so grave and bombastic that it is impossible to overstate, CNN went on the air and announced a major exclusive: Donald Trump, Jr. was offered by email advanced access to the trove of DNC and Podesta emails published by WikiLeaks – meaning before those emails were made public. Within an hour, MSNBC's Ken Dilanian, using a tone somehow even more unhinged, purported to have "independently confirmed" this mammoth, blockbuster scoop, which, they said, would have been the smoking gun showing collusion between the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks over the hacked emails (while the YouTube clips have been removed, you can still watch one of the amazing MSNBC videos here ).

There was, alas, just one small problem with this massive, blockbuster story: it was totally and completely false. The email which Trump, Jr. received that directed him to the WikiLeaks archive was sent after WikiLeaks published it online for the whole world to see, not before. Rather than some super secretive operative giving Trump, Jr. advanced access, as both CNN and MSNBC told the public for hours they had confirmed, it was instead just some totally pedestrian message from a random member of the public suggesting Trump, Jr. review documents the whole world was already talking about. All of the anonymous sources CNN and MSNBC cited somehow all got the date of the email wrong.

To date, when asked how they both could have gotten such a massive story so completely wrong in the same way, both CNN and MSNBC have adopted the posture of the CIA by maintaining complete silence and refusing to explain how it could possibly be that all of their "multiple, independent sources" got the date wrong on the email in the same way, to be as incriminating – and false – as possible. Nor, needless to say, will they identify their sources who, in concert, fed them such inflammatory and utterly false information.

Sadly, CNN and MSNBC have deleted most traces of the most humiliating videos from the internet, including demanding that YouTube remove copies. But enough survives to document just what a monumental, horrifying, and utterly inexcusable debacle this was. Particularly amazing is the clip of the CNN reporter (see below) having to admit the error for the first time, as he awkwardly struggles to pretend that it's not the massive, horrific debacle that it so obviously is:

Dishonorable Mention:

Special mention:

As I've said many times, the U.S. media has become quite adept at expressing extreme indignation when people criticize them; when politicians conclude that it is advantageous to turn the U.S. media into their main adversary; and when people turn to "fake news" sites.

If, however, they were willing to devote just a small fraction of that energy to examining their own conduct, perhaps they would develop the tools necessary to combat those problems instead of just denouncing their critics and angrily demanding that politicians and news consumers accord them the respect to which they believe they are entitled.

[Jan 20, 2019] Doctor, nurse, Chief Nursing Officer of the Army, whatever.

Highly recommended!
Now it looks like all this scene was staged by British government and is connected to the Integrity initiative... Poor cat and guinea pigs ...
See also The desperate efforts of the Western neoliberal establishment to build a new propaganda machine by globinfo freexchange
Jan 20, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org
PavewayIV , Jan 20, 2019 11:15:51 AM | 1 ">link

And, one last bit from the BBC report on March 8, 2018:

"...Meanwhile, a doctor who was one of the first people at the scene has described how she found Ms Skripal slumped unconscious on a bench, vomiting and fitting. She had also lost control of her bodily functions.

The woman, who asked not to be named, told the BBC she moved Ms Skripal into the recovery position and opened her airway, as others tended to her father.

She said she treated her for almost 30 minutes, saying there was no sign of any chemical agent on Ms Skripal's face or body.

The doctor said she had been worried she would be affected by the nerve agent, but added that she "feels fine"

Doctor, nurse, Chief Nursing Officer of the Army, whatever...

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-43326734

[Jan 19, 2019] Coincidence - Chief Nurse Of British Army Was First Person To Arrive At Novichoked Skripal Scene

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... But Abby's mum now feels the time is right for her daughter to be recognised for the "incredible" way she dealt with the scenario. Alison nominated her for the Lifesaver Award at Spire FM's Local Hero Awards, and the judges were unanimous in their decision that Abigail was a very worthy winner. ..."
"... Colonel McCourt was appointed Chief Nursing Officer on February 1 2018, just one month before the Skripal incident happened. Colonel McCourt lives in Larkhill, a garrison town some 11 miles from Salisbury. She is known to visit elsewhere. ..."
"... That is such a great article b. I have had a great wry chuckle at the folly of human hubris. Fancy setting up your own daughter for an award. Certainly looks less and less like novichok and more like novifraud with every passing day. ..."
"... Not only is the military mother Britain's most senior soldier on the virulent battlefield against ebola , she is also the last line of defence for the Army medics and other healthcare workers fighting the deadly disease ..."
"... what a stroke of luck Britain's most senior soldier on the virulent battlefield against ebola was there, arguably the most qualified person in all of Britain to attend to the Skripals. ..."
"... The story of the heroic Abigail McCourt in helping to save the Skripals must be too good for the likes of The Fraudian and other so-called "progressive" MSM outlets to resist. Strange that such a narrative was not brought up until now, coming close to the anniversary of the poisoning and the deadline for Britain's exit from the EU. ..."
"... Curious that Abigail McCourt received basic first aid training at school (in which she would have been taught CPR) yet when Spire FM hosts spoke to her, she says that her training was not needed. In almost the same sentence, she says Julia Skripal was not breathing. ..."
"... Off-Guardian on Twitter wonders if Alison McCourt had been involved in Exercise Toxic Dagger (chemical weapons training exercise) staged by The Defence Science and Technology Laboratory and the Royal Marines in February 2018: ..."
"... The main area for shoppers to park in Salisbury is just north of the Maltings (site of the alleged attack) so it's not surprising that someone shopping in Salisbury would pass the bench the Skripals were found on. What is surprising it that none of the family seems to have suffered any effects from the Novichok. ..."
"... The Skirpal case, the Maidan coup and the related MH17 downing, the various gas attacks in Syria, the most recent bombing incident also in Syria, the Mueller investigation in its entirety - the sheer incompetence shown by the US and British deep states is simply staggering, and in sharp contrast to the investigative ability of this and other sites. ..."
"... It all adds up to stasi state bullshit. They are so arrogant and cocksure of the controlled media that they can even draw attention to the provocation by seeking an award for a family member despite the prominence of the mother and her role in the power structure. Knowledge, of course, will remain limited to those who are canny enough not to believe the received propaganda wisdom of the five eyes spy state. ..."
"... So in all the police press briefings and all of the political posturing it was not deemed to be important to mention that the Skripals-on-the-park-bench were attended to by the Chief Nurse Of the British Army? ..."
"... Even though this could have gone a long, long way to explaining the biggest discrepancy in the government narrative (i.e. Novicock is way, way deadly only, err, umm, they didn't die). How odd. How very, very odd. You'd almost think that the government considered that acknowledging that fact would open up more questions than it would answer. Hard to see why..... ..."
"... Recall that it was recently established and published that the Steele Dossier was compiled to act as an Insurance Policy in the event Trump won the election. See here . I posted this news as a comment and b picked up on it too, but that aspect of the Dossier is omitted from his essay above. We can see that the Dossier--like Blair's Dodgy Dossier to sell the illegal war on Iraq--has had a massive impact on Trump's presidency, which, whether you like Trump or not, is a matter of grave concern for the institutions of governance of the USA, and IMO is very close to treason. ..."
"... Sure, the nurse revelation is curious to say the least, but I'm far more interested in the entire disinformation network built by the British along with previous and current versions operated by CIA here in USA. Think back to what Bill Casey said, "We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false," then Rove's boast: "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do." ..."
"... Add those to all the 100% evidence free accusations made against Russia, China, Venezuela, Syria, other nations and private individuals--the "universal sports doping" by Russian athletes was a massive smear proven to be 100% false--and you can understand why I call it BigLie Media. Clearly, the Skripal story's utter fantasy. But the Brits will kill their own to insure the story isn't compromised--Dr. David Kelly, Dawn Sturgess, and quite likely Sergei Skripal, and likely others from incidents in the further past. ..."
"... The Integrity Initiative was also heavily involved in promoting an anti-Russian agenda such as the Skripal affair. ..."
"... reminds me of the kuwaiti ambassador's daughter in the runup to the first gulf war. ..."
"... 'So in all the police press briefings and all of the political posturing it was not deemed to be important to mention that the Skripals-on-the-park-bench were attended to by the Chief Nurse Of the British Army?' And how embarrassing for our 'fearless' journalists and tabloid truth seekers! Let the crowd cry out 'shame'! ..."
Jan 19, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

On March 4 2018 the British/Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were found incapacitated on a bench in Salisbury. The British government asserts that they were affected by a chemical poison of the so called Novichok group. The case led to a diplomatic conflict as Britain accused Russia of an attempt to kill the Skripals. No evidence was provided by the British government to support those accusations. The Skripals have since been vanished.

Today an intriguing new detail of the case came to light. Spire FM , a local radio station in Salisbury, reports of a young woman, Abigail McCourt, who was given a 'Lifesaver Award' for her involvement in the Skripal case:

The 16 year old, from Larkhill, was the first to spot two people collapsed on a bench in the Maltings on March 4th and didn't hesitate to help. Abigail quickly alerted her mum, a qualified nurse, who was nearby and together they gave first aid to the victims until paramedics arrived.

It soon became clear this was no ordinary medical incident, but the poisoning of a former Russian spy Sergei Skripal, and his daughter Yulia, with Novichok.

...

Immediately following the incident and with the world's media focused on Salisbury, the pair didn't want any want press attention and kept their involvement quiet.

But Abby's mum now feels the time is right for her daughter to be recognised for the "incredible" way she dealt with the scenario. Alison nominated her for the Lifesaver Award at Spire FM's Local Hero Awards, and the judges were unanimous in their decision that Abigail was a very worthy winner.

Earlier reports mentioned that a 'military nurse' had attended to the Skripals. Following the above report Elena Evdokimova checked the name of the young women's mothers and found a curiosity:

Elena Evdokimova @elenaevdokimov7 - 10:50 utc - 19 Jan 2019

We were right, it was Alison McCourt who was that"unknown military nurse" who, absolutely randomly, happened to be near the bench where #Skripals collapsed . Spire FM alleges that it was her daughter Abigail alerted her, but no one mentioned her before ...

Here is the thing. Alison McCourt is not just one random 'military nurse'. She is the Chief Nursing Officer for the British Army in the rank of Colonel:

Colonel A L McCourt OBE ARRC QHN - Assistant Head Health Strategy / Chief Nursing Officer (Army) - Senior Health Advisor (Army) Department.

Colonel McCourt was appointed Chief Nursing Officer on February 1 2018, just one month before the Skripal incident happened. Colonel McCourt lives in Larkhill, a garrison town some 11 miles from Salisbury. She is known to visit elsewhere.

Petri Krohn , Jan 19, 2019 3:12:45 PM | link

Dig deep enough and you will find that Alison McCourt is married to Pablo Miller

c1ue , Jan 19, 2019 3:16:12 PM | link

Lark Hill - as in "V for Vendetta" Lark Hill? Hrmph.
Zachary Smith , Jan 19, 2019 3:17:00 PM | link
As I read this I had two thoughts. The first one is that the Brits have lost the competence they once had with this stuff. "Operation Mincemeat" was, according to all accounts, a marvel in planning, execution, and getting the desired reactions from the German High Command. The "Double-Cross System" turned the extremely risky invasion at Normandy into a success. The recent stuff is a comedy by comparison.

... ... ...

Jetpack , Jan 19, 2019 3:39:34 PM | link
Here's one way she could have made it on time:
https://mobile.twitter.com/RoyalNavy/status/1086623282831523840?s=09
snake , Jan 19, 2019 3:39:49 PM | link
excellent reporting.. still we have little written collaborative evidence.. just as in 9/11 just top dogs saying improbable things.

What seems to me important now is to develop as you have done a set of hypotheses. and to hack at them until we hit the ones which all evidence cannot dispute. Using your summary I rewrite in hypothesis form,

uncle tungsten , Jan 19, 2019 3:44:37 PM | link
Too good. That is such a great article b. I have had a great wry chuckle at the folly of human hubris. Fancy setting up your own daughter for an award. Certainly looks less and less like novichok and more like novifraud with every passing day.
annie , Jan 19, 2019 4:06:54 PM | link
from the Daily Mail:
Not only is the military mother Britain's most senior soldier on the virulent battlefield against ebola , she is also the last line of defence for the Army medics and other healthcare workers fighting the deadly disease.

what a stroke of luck Britain's most senior soldier on the virulent battlefield against ebola was there, arguably the most qualified person in all of Britain to attend to the Skripals.

brook trout , Jan 19, 2019 4:10:57 PM | link
Coincidence? Probably like most here, I think not. But isn't this something of an own goal? If indeed things are as we suspect, why would you put the daughter up for an award? Wouldn't you want the can of worms this presents to remain unopened? Can they be this incompetent? Well, looking at the Brexit process, I guess we know the answer to that last by now rhetorical question.
Jen , Jan 19, 2019 4:22:07 PM | link
The story of the heroic Abigail McCourt in helping to save the Skripals must be too good for the likes of The Fraudian and other so-called "progressive" MSM outlets to resist. Strange that such a narrative was not brought up until now, coming close to the anniversary of the poisoning and the deadline for Britain's exit from the EU.

Curious that Abigail McCourt received basic first aid training at school (in which she would have been taught CPR) yet when Spire FM hosts spoke to her, she says that her training was not needed. In almost the same sentence, she says Julia Skripal was not breathing.
https://www.spirefm.co.uk/news/local-news/2782928/exclusive-teenage-girl-describes-moment-she-found-collapsed-skripals/

Off-Guardian on Twitter wonders if Alison McCourt had been involved in Exercise Toxic Dagger (chemical weapons training exercise) staged by The Defence Science and Technology Laboratory and the Royal Marines in February 2018:
https://twitter.com/OffGuardian0
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/exercise-toxic-dagger-the-sharp-end-of-chemical-warfare

Bobby Peru , Jan 19, 2019 4:29:53 PM | link
Say cheese https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9MGsqbRXuRc
Bobby Peru , Jan 19, 2019 4:40:30 PM | link
My dog barks some https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9SrbPkpQHA
Robert Snefjella , Jan 19, 2019 5:10:41 PM | link
b, you are too suspicious. Nothing to see here. Clearly way beyond a serious matter, this dastardly attack on Skripals by the Soviets, er, the Russians, er, Putin.

In Canada our eloquent foreign Minister, in a barrage of outraged talking the talk that was accompanied by making four Russian diplomats walk the walk home, said in words that will surely take their high place in the history of inspired speeches, along with Churchill's 'Never have so many done so much for so few', and MLK's 'I have a nightmare':

Robert Snefjella , Jan 19, 2019 5:11:39 PM | link
And her words re the March 4 nerve agent attack on a close ally and partner of Canada "a despicable, heinous and reckless act" that potentially endangered the lives of hundreds"
Ghost Ship , Jan 19, 2019 5:26:11 PM | link
Strange - no military hospital in Salisbury but then there aren't military hospitals in Britain anymore. Instead the military use civilian hospitals with a Ministry of Defence Hospital Unit attached but none near Salisbury. The Ministry of Defence Hospital Units do not treat operational casualties who are treated at the Royal Centre for Defence Medicine at Queen Elizabeth Hospital (QEH) in Birmingham. You'd think the Chief Nursing Officer for the British Army, Colonel McCourt would work out off the most important site for defence medicine in the UK (QEH in Birmingham) but instead she's based at Larkhill which from memory is where the Royal Artillery is located.

Not so strange - The area inhabited by the British Army north of Salisbury (more specifically north of the A303 road was classified as deprived because of the lack of shopping facilities, so most residents of this area do their shopping in Salisbury which has the best shopping in the area. There are now a Tesco superstore and a branch of Lidl in Tidworth so perhaps it's not so deprived anymore.

The main area for shoppers to park in Salisbury is just north of the Maltings (site of the alleged attack) so it's not surprising that someone shopping in Salisbury would pass the bench the Skripals were found on. What is surprising it that none of the family seems to have suffered any effects from the Novichok.

Hal Duell , Jan 19, 2019 5:39:14 PM | link
The Skirpal case, the Maidan coup and the related MH17 downing, the various gas attacks in Syria, the most recent bombing incident also in Syria, the Mueller investigation in its entirety - the sheer incompetence shown by the US and British deep states is simply staggering, and in sharp contrast to the investigative ability of this and other sites.

The US is fracturing, the EU is fracturing, and therein lies the greatest danger. With the overplayed sanctions only making the sanctioned effect work arounds to the point that the primacy of the US dollar is threatened, with the contain China train having left the station and recently pulling into a station purpose built on the dark side of the moon, their only options look to be to either go nuclear or go away.

2019 looks to be a most interesting year!

exiled off mainstreet , Jan 19, 2019 6:05:32 PM | link
It all adds up to stasi state bullshit. They are so arrogant and cocksure of the controlled media that they can even draw attention to the provocation by seeking an award for a family member despite the prominence of the mother and her role in the power structure. Knowledge, of course, will remain limited to those who are canny enough not to believe the received propaganda wisdom of the five eyes spy state.
Yeah, Right , Jan 19, 2019 6:12:12 PM | link
So in all the police press briefings and all of the political posturing it was not deemed to be important to mention that the Skripals-on-the-park-bench were attended to by the Chief Nurse Of the British Army?

Even though this could have gone a long, long way to explaining the biggest discrepancy in the government narrative (i.e. Novicock is way, way deadly only, err, umm, they didn't die). How odd. How very, very odd. You'd almost think that the government considered that acknowledging that fact would open up more questions than it would answer. Hard to see why.....

somebody , Jan 19, 2019 6:17:21 PM | link
Posted by: Ghost Ship | Jan 19, 2019 5:26:11 PM | 20

She lives in Aldershot like Sergeant Bailey. There is a field hospital based there, she is the chief officer

somebody , Jan 19, 2019 6:37:39 PM | link
Posted by: somebody | Jan 19, 2019 6:17:21 PM | 26

Bailey lives in Alderholt. Aldershot is an hour by car from Salisbury.

Tom Welsh , Jan 19, 2019 6:38:44 PM | link
I am beginning to wonder if Sir Humphrey Appleby and some of his colleagues are conducting a deliberate hoax, piling impossibility upon impossibility and contradiction upon contradiction, just to see how long it takes the unbelievably gullible British public to get the joke and start throwing cabbages and rotten fruit. Not so funny for the poor woman who died - but then, as Sir Humphrey has often been heard to remark, one cannot make an omelette without breaking eggs.
karlof1 , Jan 19, 2019 6:57:19 PM | link
Recall that it was recently established and published that the Steele Dossier was compiled to act as an Insurance Policy in the event Trump won the election. See here . I posted this news as a comment and b picked up on it too, but that aspect of the Dossier is omitted from his essay above. We can see that the Dossier--like Blair's Dodgy Dossier to sell the illegal war on Iraq--has had a massive impact on Trump's presidency, which, whether you like Trump or not, is a matter of grave concern for the institutions of governance of the USA, and IMO is very close to treason.

Sure, the nurse revelation is curious to say the least, but I'm far more interested in the entire disinformation network built by the British along with previous and current versions operated by CIA here in USA. Think back to what Bill Casey said, "We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false," then Rove's boast: "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

Add those to all the 100% evidence free accusations made against Russia, China, Venezuela, Syria, other nations and private individuals--the "universal sports doping" by Russian athletes was a massive smear proven to be 100% false--and you can understand why I call it BigLie Media. Clearly, the Skripal story's utter fantasy. But the Brits will kill their own to insure the story isn't compromised--Dr. David Kelly, Dawn Sturgess, and quite likely Sergei Skripal, and likely others from incidents in the further past.

So, while it seems comical, this is all deadly serious.

Krollchem , Jan 19, 2019 7:03:58 PM | link
The Integrity Initiative was also heavily involved in promoting an anti-Russian agenda such as the Skripal affair.

Either Chris Donnelly of the Institute for Statecraft (IoS), (formally of the British Army's Soviet Studies Research Centre at Sandhurst), or UK General Sir Richard Barrons reportedly stated that "if no catastrophe happens to wake people up and demand a response, then we need to find a way to get the core of government to realise the problem and take it out of the political space."

UK: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/01/07/inte-j07.html

james , Jan 19, 2019 7:51:44 PM | link
great coverage b.. thank you... it's either a coincidence theory, or a conspiracy theory... no other choices, until the uk gets down to doing an open investigation on integrity initiative...the investigators investigating the investigators.. ain't going to happen... similar deal in the usa now.. basically this will be when hell freezes over - a very long time if ever.. meanwhile the skripals are persona non grata... it would be very interesting to find out where they are kept... it looks like their is no chance for any type of normal life for them here on out... even if the novihoax didn't kill them, the uk has done the equivalent.. it is hard not to tie operation toxic dagger into all of this... the coincidences are just too great..

@ petri.. thanks for the that.. how did you manage to figure that one out? does that mean that allison mccourt is the daughter of pablo miller, or was allison from another relationship/marriage? of course m16 and some folks know the answer to this amazing coincidences and probably are unable to openly say..

psychohistorian , Jan 19, 2019 7:58:50 PM | link
@ Glen Brown and bevin with their correction to my comment.....thanks

I was not in my best of mind and along with misspelling his name I projected my desire for more movement by the UK opposition in light of having the government paying folks to work against them.....my bad idealism........

If it is true that Alison McCourt is married to Pablo Miller as Petri Kohn asserts in comment #1 then it looks like the daughter is being groomed for big things in the UK government.....16 years old and already an award for criminal complicity.

pretzelattack , Jan 19, 2019 8:02:08 PM | link
reminds me of the kuwaiti ambassador's daughter in the runup to the first gulf war.
PavewayIV , Jan 19, 2019 8:10:51 PM | link
Petri Krohn@1 - ? Only thing I could find is a reference to her husband Hugh - a prison officer - and her two kids, Abagail (now 16) and Cameron (now 14). That was from a DailyMail article (I know...) from Dec. 20, 2014. She was spending time away from them during Christmas when she was sent to Sierra Leone for the Ebola outbreak. The article also mentions time away from Hugh and Abagail in 2003 when she was deployed to Iraq. Couldn't find anything about Pablo Miller being married or having kids, but many mentions of his home in Salisbury.
karlof1 , Jan 19, 2019 8:11:20 PM | link
bevin @32--

Nice conjecture, except that those who devised the Dossier specifically said it was to be used as insurance in case Trump won. Please see article I linked to in my comment.

Bart Hansen , Jan 19, 2019 8:30:25 PM | link
The daughter is what's know as a "cutout". You can't have the "nurse of all nurses" be the first on the scene. But, they didn't even bother with the daughter having to call mama at home. She was luckily "nearby", presumably lurking behind a tree.
Ghost Ship , Jan 19, 2019 8:43:51 PM | link
>>>>: somebody | Jan 19, 2019 6:17:21 PM | 26

She might have been the commanding officer of 22 Field Hospital but now she's moved on.

From the QARANC website:

Following promotion to Lieutenant Colonel in 2011, Alison attended the Advanced Command and Staff Course. Her initial SO1 appointment was as Chief of Staff, Headquarters 2nd Medical Brigade in York in Aug 2012. Alison assumed Command of 22 Field Hospital in July 2013 and deployed the Unit to Sierra Leone on Op GRITROCK in Oct 14. She was awarded an OBE for her leadership of 22 Field during Op GRITROCK.

On promotion to Colonel in Dec 2015 she assumed an appointment in the newly established Senior Health Advisors department and has been the lead for Assurance and now Health Strategy in that area.

Alison assumed the appointment of Chief Nursing Officer for the Army on 1 Feb 18.

james , Jan 19, 2019 8:57:41 PM | link
@1 petri... unless they hooked up after 2014, your theory doesn't look very likely...

further to @36 paveways comment from the daily mail dec 20 2014 article - Even though Lieut Col McCourt is a veteran of campaigns in Iraq and the Balkans, she admits this tour of duty has taken a toll, and that she has depended on the support of her husband Hugh, a prison officer, to help her through it. While this is her first Christmas apart from her children, she is accustomed to leaving them and her husband behind. In 2003, she left Abigail, then aged just eight months, in Hugh's arms while she went to Iraq to treat British soldiers wounded in the Gulf War. She returned there in 2008 for a second tour of duty.

Lieut Col McCourt said: 'I have a very supportive husband. On both occasions I went to Iraq he took sabbaticals from his job to ensure that our family life was maintained. Yes, it was hard to say goodbye so soon after having my first child but you immerse yourself in your work, and on an operational tour everyone is missing someone. This Christmas he'll be with the children and my mum will join them at the family home in Aldershot. Of course I miss them all but our focus has to be saving lives here.'

ADKC , Jan 19, 2019 8:58:24 PM | link
brook trout @11

Suppose you were Russian and believed that the west would not attack because of the checks and controls that exist in western democracy. Suppose a deadly incident occurred and Russia was blamed and an attack became more likely. Suppose that (as a Russian) you knew Russia wasn't involved and that the evidence was very sketchy and didn't make sense. Suppose this was was all in the public domain but instead of the incident being questioned it was just accepted and Russia was sanctioned and other western and allied countries (despite knowing it was nonsense) joined in.

You might as a Russian come to believe that evidence didn't matter, that the west could manipulate their populations at will and the idea that there was some "restraint" on western attacks would be shown to be fanciful. You might, as a Russian, become very concerned that you might be attacked and there was a lack of restraint on the west.

The west are blaming Russia for something they didn't do but, also, showing that they know that Russia didn't do it and, more, letting Russia know they framed them, and showing Russia that the evidence doesn't matter. Perhaps, not UK incompetence, maybe, it's all psyops.

...

Ric G , Jan 19, 2019 9:23:12 PM | link
Mr Moon, you have excelled yourself! A brilliant article, worthy of a standing ovation!

'So in all the police press briefings and all of the political posturing it was not deemed to be important to mention that the Skripals-on-the-park-bench were attended to by the Chief Nurse Of the British Army?' And how embarrassing for our 'fearless' journalists and tabloid truth seekers! Let the crowd cry out 'shame'!

Tom , Jan 19, 2019 9:50:14 PM | link
John Helmer raises an important question, why does the roof of Sergei's house need to be removed? Tongue firmly planted in cheek. The air leakage through the front door of Sergei's house must be through the roof! How else does the fumes from novichok get from the front door handle to the roof? Sure hope they do a proper energy efficient rebuild. Can't go wasting that soon to be arriving at Perfidious Albion's shores horror of horrors, Russian gas. North Sea gas wont last much longer.

http://johnhelmer.net/british-government-demolishes-skripal-house-because-sergei-skripal-poisoned-himself-roof-falls-in-on-theresa-may/

Roy G , Jan 19, 2019 10:53:35 PM | link
So, where are the Skirpals these days? Inquiring minds want to know!

[Jan 11, 2019] New Documents Reveal a Covert British Military-Intelligence Smear Machine Meddling In American Politics by Mark Ames

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... By Mark Ames, co-host of the Radio War Nerd podcast , author of Going Posta l and publisher of The eXile, and Max Blumenthal, an award-winning journalist and the author of books including best-selling Republican Gomorrah , Goliath , The Fifty One Day War , and The Management of Savagery , which will be published in March 2019 by Verso. He has also produced numerous print articles for an array of publications, many video reports and several documentaries including Killing Gaza and Je Ne Suis Pas Charlie . Originally published at the Greyzone Project ..."
"... The Integrity Initiative has mobilized an international disinformation campaign across Europe. Now, with government and right-wing foundation money, this massive "political smear unit" is infiltrating the US. ..."
Jan 11, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

By Mark Ames, co-host of the Radio War Nerd podcast , author of Going Posta l and publisher of The eXile, and Max Blumenthal, an award-winning journalist and the author of books including best-selling Republican Gomorrah , Goliath , The Fifty One Day War , and The Management of Savagery , which will be published in March 2019 by Verso. He has also produced numerous print articles for an array of publications, many video reports and several documentaries including Killing Gaza and Je Ne Suis Pas Charlie . Originally published at the Greyzone Project

The Integrity Initiative has mobilized an international disinformation campaign across Europe. Now, with government and right-wing foundation money, this massive "political smear unit" is infiltrating the US.

A bombshell domestic spy scandal has been unfolding in Britain, after hacked internal communications exposed a covert UK state military-intelligence psychological warfare operation targeting its own citizens and political figures in allied NATO countries under the cover of fighting "Russian disinformation."

The leaked documents revealed a secret network of spies, prominent journalists and think-tanks colluding under the umbrella of a group called "Integrity Initiative" to shape domestic opinion -- and to smear political opponents of the right-wing Tory government, including the leader of the opposition Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn.

Until now, this Integrity Initiative domestic spy scandal has been ignored in the American media, perhaps because it has mostly involved British names. But it is clear that the influence operation has already been activated in the US. Hacked documents reveal that the Integrity Initiative is cultivating powerful allies inside the State Department, top DC think tanks, the FBI and the DHS, where it has gained access to Katharine Gorka and her husband, the fascist-linked cable news pundit Sebastian Gorka .

The Integrity Initiative has spelled out plans to expand its network across the US, meddling in American politics and recruiting "a new generation of Russia watchers" behind the false guise of a non-partisan charity. Moreover, the group has hired one of the most notorious American "perception management" specialists, John Rendon, to train its clusters of pundits and cultivate relationships with the media.

Back in the UK, Member of Parliament Chris Williamson has clamored for an investigation into the Integrity Initiative's abuse of public money.

In a recent editorial , Williamson drew a direct parallel between the group's collaboration with journalists and surreptitious payments the CIA made to reporters during the Cold War.

"These tactics resemble those deployed by the CIA in Operation Mockingbird that was launched at the height of the cold war in the early 1950s. Its aims included using the mainstream news media as a propaganda tool," Williamson wrote.

"They manipulated the news agenda by recruiting leading journalists to write stories with the express purpose of influencing public opinion in a particular way," the Labour parliamentarian continued. "Now it seems the British Establishment have dusted off the CIA's old playbook and is intent on giving it another outing on this side of the Atlantic."

Unmasking a British Military-Intelligence Smear Machine

The existence of the Integrity Initiative was virtually unknown until this November, when the email servers of a previously obscure British think tank called the Institute for Statecraft were hacked, prompting allegations of Russian intrusion. When the group's internal documents appeared at a website hosted by Anonymous Europe, the public learned of a covert propaganda network seed-funded to the tune of over $2 million dollars by the Tory-controlled UK Foreign Office, and run largely by military-intelligence officers.

Through a series of cash inducements, off the record briefings and all-day conferences, the Integrity Initiative has sought to organize journalists across the West into an international echo chamber hyping up the supposed threat of Russian disinformation -- and to defame politicians and journalists critical of this new Cold War campaign.

A bid for funding submitted by the Integrity Initiative in 2017 to the British Ministry of Defense promised to deliver a "tougher stance on Russia" by arranging for "more information published in the media on the threat of Russian active measures."

The Integrity Initiative has also worked through its fronts in the media to smear political figures perceived as a threat to its militaristic agenda. Its targets have included a Spanish Department of Homeland Security appointee, Pedro Banos, whose nomination was scuttled thanks a media blitz it secretly orchestrated; Jeremy Corbyn, whom the outfit and its media cutouts painted as a useful idiot of Russia; and a Scottish member of parliament, Neil Findlay, whom one of its closest media allies accused of adopting "Kremlin messaging" for daring to protest the official visit of the far-right Ukrainian politician Andriy Parubiy -- the founder of two neo-Nazi parties and author of a white nationalist memoir, "View From The Right."

These smear campaigns and many more surreptitiously orchestrated by the Integrity Initiative offer a disturbing preview of the reactionary politics it plans to inject into an already toxic American political environment.

Lessons from "The Man Who Sold the War"

A newly released Integrity Initiative document reveals that the outfit plans an aggressive expansion across the US.

The Integrity Initiative claims to have already established a "simple office" in Washington DC, though it does not say where. It also boasts of partnerships with top DC think tanks like the Atlantic Council, the Center for European Policy Analysis, CNA, and close relationships with US officials.

A major hub of Integrity Initiative influence is the State Department's Global Engagement Center, a de facto US government propaganda operation that was established by President Barack Obama to battle online ISIS recruitment, but which was rapidly repurposed to counter Russian disinformation following the election of Trump.

The Integrity Initiative has also recruited one of the most infamous American PR men to organize its clusters of journalists and political figures.

He is John Rendon, best known as "The Man Who Sold The War" -- several wars, in fact, but most notoriously the Iraq invasion. Rendon was the self-described "information warrior" who planted fake news in the major US-UK media about non-existent WMD threats. With deep ties to the CIA and other military-intelligence agencies, his PR firm was paid $100 million to organize and sell Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress. In 2002, the New York Times exposed a Pentagon program using Rendon to plant "disinformation" -- including "false stories" and "the blackest of black PR" -- in media outlets around the world, in order to shape public opinion and sell the Iraq invasion.

John Rendon (left) with Maj. Gen. Michael Snodgrass, US Africa Command Chief of Staff (photo by US Africom Public Affairs)

Journalist James Bamford outlined a catalogue of disinformation feats Rendon performed for the Pentagon, such as identifying "the biases of specific journalists and potentially obtain an understanding of their allegiances, including the possibility of specific relationships and sponsorships." Bamford also found proposals and programs Rendon was involved in that aimed to "'coerce' foreign journalists and plant false information overseas [and] find ways to 'punish' those who convey the 'wrong message.'"

These tactics seem particularly relevant to his work with the Integrity Initiative, especially considering the internal documents that reveal further Rendon-style plans to produce reports and studies to be "fed anonymously into local media." (Among the outlets listed as friendly hosts in Integrity Initiative internal memos are Buzzfeed and El Pais, the center-left Spanish daily.)

Keeping Up with the Gorkas

Internal documents also refer to interactions between Integrity Initiative Director Chris Donnelly and top Trump officials like Katharine Gorka , a vehemently anti-Muslim Department of Homeland Security official, as well as her husband, Sebastian, who earned right-wing fame during his brief tenure in Trump's White House.

The latter Gorka is an open supporter of the Hungarian Vitezi Rend, a proto-fascist order that collaborated with Nazi Germany during its occupation of Hungary. Following Trump's election victory in 2016, Gorka appeared for televised interviews in a black Vitezi Rend uniform.

Sebastian Gorka, in Vitezi Rend garb, with his wife, Katharine, on Election Night

Gorka was among the first figures listed on an itinerary for Donnelly to Washington this September 18 to 22. The itinerary indicates that the two had breakfast before Donnelly delivered a presentation on "Mapping Russian Influence Activities" at the federally funded military research center, CNA .

According to the itinerary, Donnelly was granted access to Pentagon officials like Mara Karlin , an up-and-coming neoconservative cadre , and John McCain Institute executive director Kurt Volker , another neoconservative operative who also serves as the US Special Representative for Ukraine. Numerous meetings with staffers inside the State Department's Office of Global Engagement were also detailed.

A Foreign Agent in the State Department?

Of all the State Department officials named in Integrity Initiative documents, the one who appeared most frequently was Todd Leventhal. Leventhal has been a staffer at the State Department's Global Engagement Center, boasting of "20 years of countering disinformation, misinformation, conspiracy theories, and urban legends." In an April 2018 Integrity Initiative memo, he is listed as a current team member:

Funded to the tune of $160 million this year to beat back Russian disinformation with "counter-propaganda," the State Department's Global Engagement Center has refused to deny targeting American citizens with information warfare of its own. "My old job at the State Department was as chief propagandist," confessed former Global Engagement Center Director Richard Stengel. "I'm not against propaganda. Every country does it and they have to do it to their own population and I don't necessarily think it's that awful."

Like so many of the media and political figures involved in the Integrity Initiative's international network, the Global Engagement Center's Leventhal has a penchant for deploying smear tactics against prominent voices that defy the foreign policy consensus. Leventhal appeared in an outtake of a recent NBC documentary on Russian disinformation smugly explaining how he would take down a 15-year-old book critical of American imperialism in the developing world. Rather than challenge the book's substance and allegations, Leventhal boasted how he would marshall his resources to wage an ad hominem smear campaign to destroy the author's reputation. His strategic vision was clear: when confronting a critic, ignore the message and destroy the messenger.

Integrity Initiative documents reveal that Leventhal has been paid $76,608 dollars (60,000 British pounds) for a 50% contract.

While those same documents claim he has retired from the State Department, Leventhal's own Linkedin page lists him as a current "Senior Disinformation Advisor" to the State Department. If that were true, it would mean that the State Department was employing a de facto foreign agent.

As a cut-out of the British Foreign Office and Defense Ministry, the Integrity Initiative's work with current and former US officials and members of the media raises certain legal questions. For one, there is no indication that the group has registered under the Justice Department's Foreign Agent Registration Act, as most foreign agents of influence are required to do.

Grants from the Neocons' Favorite Foundation

An Integrity Initiative memo states that the right-wing Smith Richardson Foundation has also committed to ponying up funding for its US network as soon as the group receives 501 c-3 non-profit status. The foundation has already provided it with about $56,000 for covert propaganda activities across Europe.

The Smith Richardson Foundation has old ties to the US intelligence community and controversial cold war influence operations. According to reporter Russ Bellant , the foundation was secretly bankrolling radical right-wing "indoctrination campaigns for the American public on cold war and foreign policy issues" -- programs that got the attention of Senator William Fulbright, who warned then-President Kennedy of their dangers. At one of these indoctrination seminars, a Smith Richardson Foundation director "told attendees that 'it is within the capacity of the people in this room to literally turn the State of Georgia into a civil war college,' in order to overcome their opponents."

Smith Richardson has funded a who's who of the neoconservative movement, from hyper-militaristic think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute and the Institute for the Study of War. "To say the [Smith Richardson] foundation was involved at every level in the lobbying for and crafting of the so-called global war on terror after 9/11 would be an understatement," wrote journalist Kelley Vlahos.

Besides Smith Richardson, the Integrity Initiative has stated its intention to apply for grants from the State Department "to expand the Integrity Initiative activities both within and outside of the USA." This is yet another indicator that the US government is paying for propaganda targeting its own citizens.

The "Main Event" in Seattle

An Integrity Initiative internal document argues that because "DC is well served by existing US institutions, such as those with which the Institute [for Statecraft] already collaborates," the organization should "concentrate on extending the work of the Integrity Initiative into major cities and key State capitals [sic] across the USA."

This December 10, the Integrity Initiative organized what it called its "main event" in the US. It was a conference on disinformation held in Seattle, Washington under the auspices of a data firm called Adventium Labs. Together with the Technical Leadership Institute at the University of Minnesota, the Integrity Initiative listed Adventium Labs as one of its "first partners outside DC."

Adventium is Minneapolis-based research and development firm that has reaped contracts from the US military, including a recent $5.4 million cyber-security grant from the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA.

Inside a modest-sized hotel conference room, the Adventium/Integrity event began with a speech by the Integrity Initiative's Simon Bracey-Lane. Two years prior, Bracey-Lane appeared on the American political scene as a field worker for Bernie Sanders' 2016 presidential primary run, earning media write-ups as the "Brit for Bernie." Now, the young operator was back in the US as the advance man for a military-intelligence cut-out that specialized in smearing left-wing political figures like Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader widely regarded as the British version of Sanders.

Bracey-Lane opened his address by explaining that Integrity Initiative director Chris Donnelly had been unable to appear at the event, possibly because he was bogged down in the scandal back home. He proceeded to read remarks prepared by Donnelly that offered a window into the frighteningly militaristic mindset the Integrity Initiative aims to impose on the public through their media and political allies.

According to Donnelly's comments, the West was no longer in a "peace time, rules based environment." From the halls of government to corporate boardrooms to even the UK's National Health System, "the conclusion is that we have to look for people who suit a wartime environment rather than peacetime."

During Q&A, Bracey-Lane remarked that "we have to change the definition of war to encompass everything that war now encompasses," referring vaguely to various forms of "hybrid warfare."

"There is a great deal to be done in communicating that to young people," he continued. "When we mean being at war we don't mean sending our boys off to fight. It's right here in our homes."

The emphasis on restructuring society along martial lines mirrored the disturbing thinking also on display in notes of a private meeting between Donnelly and Gen. Richard Barrons in 2016. During that chat, the two officers decided that the British military should be removed from democratic supervision and be able to operate as "an independent body outside politics."

While Bracey-Lane's presentation perfectly captured the military mindset of the Integrity Initiative, the speakers that followed him offered a diverse array of perspectives on the concept of disinformation, some more nuanced than others. But one talk stood out from the rest -- not because of its quality, but because of its complete lack thereof.

Reanimating the "Red-Brown" Grifter

Alexander Reid Ross (left) and Emmi Bevensee at the Integrity Initiative's "main event" in Seattle

The presentation was delivered by Alexander Reid Ross, a half-baked political researcher who peddles computer-generated spiderweb relationship charts to prove the existence of a vast hidden network of "red-brown" alliances and "syncretic media" conspiracies controlled by puppeteers in Moscow.

Ross is a lecturer on geography at Portland State University with no scholarly or journalistic credentials on Russia. His students have given him dismal marks at Rate My Professors, complaining about his "terrible monotone lectures" and his penchant for "insert[ing] his own ideologies into our class." But with a book, "Against the Fascist Creep," distributed by the well-known anarchist publishing house, AK Press, the middling academic has tried to make his name as a maverick analyst.

Before the Integrity Initiative was exposed as a military-intelligence front operation, Ross was among a small coterie of pundits and self-styled disinformation experts that followed the group's Twitter account. The Integrity Initiative even retweeted his smear of War Nerd podcast co-host John Dolan.

In a series of articles for the Southern Poverty Law Center last year, Ross attempted to bring his warmed-over Cold War theories to the broader public. He wound up trashing everyone from the co-author of this piece, Max Blumenthal, to Nation magazine publisher Katrina Vanden Heuvel to Harvard University professor of international relations Stephen Walt as hidden shadow-fascists secretly controlled by the Kremlin.

The articles ultimately generated an embarrassing scandal and a series of public retractions by the editor-in-chief of the Southern Poverty Law Center, Richard Cohen. And then, like some Dr. Frankenstein for discredited and buried journalism careers, the British Ministry of Defense-backed Integrity Initiative moved in to reanimate Ross as a sought-after public intellectual.

Before the Integrity Initiative-organized crowd, Ross offered a rambling recitation of his theory of a syncretic fascist alliance puppeteered by Russians: "The alt right takes from both this 'red-brown,' it's called, or like left-right syncretic highly international national of nationalisms, and from the United States' own paleoconservative movement, and it's sort of percolated down through college organizing, um, and anti-interventionism meets anti-imperialism. Right?"

In a strange twist, Ross appeared on stage at the Integrity Initiative's Seattle event alongside Emmi Bevensee , a contributor to the left-libertarian Center for a Stateless Society (C4SS) think tank, whose tagline, "a left market anarchist think-tank" expresses its core aim of uniting far-left anarchists with free-market right-libertarians.

Bevensee , a PhD candidate at the University of Arizona and self-described "Borderlands anarcho into tech and crypto," concluded her presentation by asserting a linkage between the alternative news site, Zero Hedge, and the "physical militarized presence in the borderlands" of anti-immigrant vigilantes. Like Bevensee, Ross has written for C4SS in the past.

The irony of contributors to an anarchist group called the "Center for a Stateless Society" auditioning before The State – the most jackbooted element of it, in fact – for more opportunities to attack anti-war politicians and journalists, can hardly be overstated.

But closer examination of the history of C4SS veers from irony into something much darker and more unsettling.

Pedophile Co-Founder, White Nationalist Associates

C4SS was co-founded in 2006 by a confessed child rapist and libertarian activist, Brad Spangler, who set the group up to promote "Market anarchism" to "replace Marxism on the left."

When Spangler's child rape confessions emerged in 2015, the Center for Stateless Society founder was finally drummed out by his colleagues.

There's more: Spangler's understudy and deputy in the C4SS, Kevin Carson -- currently listed as the group's "Karl Hess Chair in Social Theory" -- turned out to be a longtime friend and defender of white nationalist Keith Preston. Preston's name is prominently plastered on the back of Kevin Carson's book, hailing the C4SS man as "the Proudhon of our time" -- a loaded compliment, given Proudhon's unhinged anti-Semitism . Carson only disowned Preston in 2009, shortly before Preston helped white nationalist leader Richard Spencer launch his alt-right webzine, Alternative Right.

The C4SS group currently participates in the annual Koch-backed International Students For Liberty conference in Washington DC, LibertyCon, a who's who of libertarian think-tank hacks and Republican Party semi-celebrities like Steve Forbes, FCC chairman Ajit Pai, and Alan Dershowitz.

In 2013, C4SS's Kevin Carson tweeted out his dream fantasy that four Jewish leftists -- Mark Ames, Yasha Levine, Corey Robin, and Mark Potok -- would die in a plane crash while struggling over a single parachute. Potok was an executive editor at the Southern Poverty Law Center, which last year retracted every one of the crank articles that Alexander Reid Ross published with them and formally apologized for having run them.

For some reason, the super-sleuth Ross conveniently failed to investigate the libertarian group, C4SS, that he has chosen to partner with and publish in. That ability to shamelessly smear and denounce leftists over the most crudely manufactured links to the far-right -- while cozying up to groups as sleazy as C4SS and authoritarian as the Integrity Initiative -- is the sort of adaptive trait that MI6 spies and the Rendon Group would find useful in a covert domestic influence operation.

Ross did not respond to our request for comment on his involvement with the Integrity Initiative and C4SS.

Disinformation for Democracy

As it spans out across the US, the Integrity Initiative has stated its desire to "build a younger generation of Russia watchers." Toward this goal, it is supplementing its coterie of elite journalists, think tank hacks, spooks and State Department info-warriors with certifiable cranks like Ross.

Less than 24 hours after Ross's appearance at the Integrity Initiative event in Seattle, he sent a menacing email to the co-author of this article, Ames, announcing his intention to recycle an old and discredited smear against him and publish it in the Daily Beast -- a publication that appears to enjoy a special relationship with Integrity Initiative personnel.

Despite the threat of investigation in the UK, the Integrity Initiative's "network of networks" appears to be escalating its covert, government-funded influence operation, trashing the political left and assailing anyone that gets in its way -- all in the name of fighting foreign disinformation.

"We have to win this one," Integrity Initiative founder Col. Chris Donnelly said , "because if we don't, democracy will be undermined."

Disturbed Voter , January 10, 2019 at 4:26 am

This is why you don't put spooks in charge. They are paid to be paranoid.

pretzelattack , January 10, 2019 at 5:18 am

making up lies to get paid. james angleton was paranoid (not that it seemed to make him more effective in counterintelligence)–these people are just con artists, paid to be con artists.
i'm just waiting for "we have to undermine democracy in order to save it".

Pym of Nantucket , January 10, 2019 at 5:46 pm

Agreed. Not only are they paid to make things up, but they have an ingenious scheme for paying themselves from narcotics and arms dealing.

The most amazing feat of confidence artistry (apart from maybe the TARP bailout (c.f. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troubled_Asset_Relief_Program ) is their remarkable ability to convince the population they are needed and working on our behalf instead of being in jail where they belong.

nobody , January 10, 2019 at 6:06 am

I first heard about this enterprise/outfit from 21st Century Wire .

Peter , January 10, 2019 at 6:40 am

hat story has been around since at least December 17. https://grayzoneproject.com/2018/12/17/inside-the-temple-of-covert-propaganda-the-integrity-initiative-and-the-uks-scandalous-information-war/
maybe you should change your sources

Richard H Caldwell , January 10, 2019 at 6:52 am

Gotta love Mark Ames

jsn , January 10, 2019 at 6:55 am

b at Moon of Alabama posted on this on the 4th.

David , January 10, 2019 at 7:01 am

I submitted a long comment on this about an hour ago, which seems to have been eaten by the system. I won't repost it now, but I'll do so later if it doesn't surface.

PlutoniumKun , January 10, 2019 at 7:58 am

This is something that has repeatedly happened to me too recently – it often takes 2 or more hours for most of my recent posting to surface on the site. It rarely disappears altogether, so I would assume your post will eventually arrive.

hemeantwell , January 10, 2019 at 9:25 am

Same here on the delays. Keep a copy.
But anyway, very glad you posted this piece. Whatever we make of Patreon, it's one way to support Mark Ames' work.

flora , January 10, 2019 at 9:13 pm

Me, too. Though not on this post. Me thinks much sp@m and tr0llery happening behind the scenes that the mods have to wade through comment by comment.

jCandlish , January 10, 2019 at 7:50 am

Sir Alan Duncan, responding on behalf of the Government to Emily Thornberry's urgent question (Dec 12) on recent allegations that the Foreign Office funded a company which carried out a smear campaign against the official Opposition.

Chilling indeed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBOwO-MAPKI

RBHoughton , January 10, 2019 at 10:06 pm

What a frightful fellow that Alan Duncan is eh? Talks like a Mafia lawyer and he's supposed to be a national leader. He reminds that other MP, the POS who interrogated David Kelly on TV, they both use the same style. Is it a qualification for legislator?

The Rev Kev , January 10, 2019 at 8:23 am

Just a minor note to start off. That image of "Sebastian Gorka, in Vitezi Rend garb". I think that Vitezi Rend actually refers to the medal he wears on the left. The jacket itself more resembles the patrol jacket that British officers wore in the 19th century. Moving on! Notice how the same players keep on coming up again and again in all these stories of skulduggery? John Rendon, the Atlantic Council, Ajit Pai and Alan Dershowitz – the same scum-bags with a few new wannabe players. As an example.
The penchant that Brad Spangler, C4SS co-founder, has for under-age girls is disgusting of course but you have to put it into the context of the people that you are talking about. If Spengler was more rich or more powerful, you might see his name on a manifest for the "Lolita Express" but his activities would not be splashed about in an article like this one. That sort of activity is given a level of protection if you are in the right group. And it is a good thing that that British General Richard Barrons is retired as his comments are deserving of being cashiered.
Funny how a group that claims to be about protecting democracy wants to push it aside and install propaganda on a "1984" level in the pursuit of their aims. I cannot decide if their target of Russia is a means or an end. If it is a means, that means using the boogy-man of Russia to radically restructure western society to their tastes. If it is an end, well, it is true that Russia has about $75 trillion in resources, mostly in Siberia and the east, so if it was broken up eventually, that would be a bonanza of wealth appropriation.
I was thinking about the activities of this group and how they go about their activities, especially the smearing of anybody that talks truth to power. I wonder if anybody here made the connection with this story and the PropOrNot website that came out of nowhere about two years ago and that had the stamp of approval of the Washington Post. I would not be surprised if it turns out to be that PropOrNot was a trial balloon in the United States for the Integrity Initiative to establish what it was capable of. Just a thought.

Martin Finnucane , January 10, 2019 at 9:39 am

Vitezi Rend garb

He looks like an extra from Star Wars – one of those nazi guys working the bridge of the Death Star. The "look and feel" of a lot of pre-war fascism strikes us as silly in retrospect, though it really wasn't at the time.

EoH , January 10, 2019 at 10:35 am

That tailored black jacket Sebastian wears looks like something Winston Churchill would have changed out of before that last cavalry charge at Omdurman. It seems intentionally designed to mimic 19th century great power imperial army officer garb. Nostalgia for the good times, apparently. Goes with his fascist priorities.

bob , January 10, 2019 at 11:36 am

" my father was Moonraker and that is part of my origin story "

NSFW

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QbQx0NTV4TU

Tomonthebeach , January 10, 2019 at 9:25 pm

Let us not get carried away with the exuberance of discovering skulduggery among fascist elements of the media and politics. This does not mean that the conspiracy means Russia is thereby a Goodie Twoshoes. It also does not mean that Russia is any less a pain in the ass than it has heretorfore be characterized.

It does mean that there is less reason (any?) than ever to put much faith in FoxNews (already a mere propaganda machine) or other orgs. I am uncomfortable hearing CNA is caught up in this as they are a pseudo government thinktank with some Pentagon influence.

If true, the story should be used to clear out some journalists and analyst riffraff. However, this story is surely not going to restore, much less create, any integrity among the Beltway Punditry.

Off The Street , January 10, 2019 at 8:56 am

The article and related matters may also shed more light on the abrupt resignation of Robert Hannigan from the leadership of GCHQ in January 2017 a few days after Trump's inauguration. Given previous revelations about GCHQ and NSA spying on each other's citizens, what else is next in the UK and in the US and elsewhere?

After reading about that Carson character and others I am ready for a shower to try to wash off the disgust.

DJG , January 10, 2019 at 9:01 am

Yves Smith: Thanks for this. I am wondering about two stories that have been flapping around here for a few days: That odd New Knowledge company that produced the report about Russian influence on the elections as well as the story about the case before the Supreme Court of the US in which a company is invoking claims of sovereign immunity.

I have a feeling that New Knowledge definitely fits into the framework outlined by Ames above. A contractor that appears out of nowhere with a "distinguished" board of concerned semi-liberals (at the trough)?

But what do I know? Some guy named Volodya showed up at my house and bought my vote in 2016 for two bottles of pickled mushrooms

diptherio , January 10, 2019 at 9:32 am

Kevin Carson is always showing up in my twitter feed. I knew there was something I didn't like about that guy, anarchist or no.

jfleni , January 10, 2019 at 9:38 am

Perfideus Albion is not just a neat saying, but a truth that the Irish, French and
Germans (etc.) have known forever, the people don't deserve it, but the
jumped up Tories do in spades.

pjay , January 10, 2019 at 9:48 am

Thank you for highlighting this article! It names names and connects some dots, including some connections reaching into the U.S. It also describes propaganda mechanisms that have been around forever but have become pervasive today. A few protruding tips of a massive iceberg, in my view. I'm sure *this* "bombshell" story will get the massive coverage it deserves in the MSM -- not!

diptherio , January 10, 2019 at 10:43 am

Here's the response from C4SS, if anyone is interested:
https://c4ss.org/content/51563

jsn , January 10, 2019 at 1:11 pm

That was interesting. Well argued all the way through I thought, but they could take a closer look at the unwinding of Yugoslavia; what Serbia and Syria have in common is having been targeted by outside state powers for dissolution, responses did vary.

pjay , January 10, 2019 at 2:27 pm

Thank you diptherio for posting the C4SS response. Such responses are helpful in evaluating issues like this, and we should always be open to the other side when they take the time to reply. However, I can't agree that the response was "well argued." The author does make some valid points, but mainly she resorts to ad hominem attacks on Ames (based on some juvenile antics at eXile that are often used to smear him), or on both authors because they may have agreed with "Assadists" like Ambassador Peter Ford or "9/11 Truthers" like Piers Robinson, whose claims about Syria or the White Helmets are, of course, Kremlin propaganda. Which brings up why Blumenthal would have changed his position on Syria; it was not because of his gradual understanding of what was really happening there. Rather, while he had once grasp the truth of the "revolution," he made the mistake of going to a Kremlin gala and the Rooskies (and RT) got to him. Now he is just another propagandist. Nowhere that I can see does the author discuss the major claims made in Ames and Blumenthal's article, or the evidence cited (except to say that if it was in RT or Sputnik, we can ignore it anyway as propaganda). Nor does she address the actual defamation made by Alexander Ross-Reid through the SPLC that pissed off Blumenthal in the first place. There are other problems (don't get me started on the "red-brown" smear), but that's enough.

Having said all that, I do think that in their criticism of C4SS, Ames and Blumenthal perhaps did some unnecessary punching down. They could have made clearer the distinction between organizations like the Integrity Initiative, that are pretty clearly intelligence operatives or cut-outs, versus groups like C4SS that function more like "useful idiots" because of their ideological position (e.g. equating U.S. and Russian imperialism in this case in their "anarchist" appeal). The latter are in no way as evil as the former, in my mind.

jsn , January 10, 2019 at 3:18 pm

You are clearly much more engaged with the related debates than I. I read the piece as a response to the punching down you mention in your last paragraph and felt like I got a respectable read on someone still developing their arguments. I'm not informed enough to argue with much of it, but having read Diana Johnstone's "Fools Crusade", the Syria/Serbia bit stuck in my craw.

I had thought about commenting on the ad hominems directed at Ames, but didn't want to get into the whole identity argument embedded in much of the language of the post. While I disagree with many of her positions and attitudes on the state actions she criticizes without, in my opinion, adequate grounding, I judged it a mostly good faith effort trying to find solid footing in a world increasingly thick with distorted narratives.

It's hard to argue now, from anywhere with out power, without being someone's "useful idiot": trust has decayed to the point where language impedes communication in the political sphere.

pjay , January 10, 2019 at 5:01 pm

It's funny you should mention Johnstone's book. I normally would not use the derogatory term "useful idiot" for the very reason you imply; most such people are acting in good faith. I admit that her comments on Syria irritated me. But the reason I sometimes overreact to that sort of narrative is because of my own experiences as a useful idiot, starting with Yugoslavia. I fell for the liberal "humanitarian" argument hook, line, and sinker in the 1990s, even though I considered myself a knowledgeable progressive at the time. It wouldn't be the last time I was duped, but I'd like to think I'm a little wiser today.

I appreciate your comment. We definitely need to distinguish empire propagandists from the beliefs of people honestly trying to find their way.

rojo , January 10, 2019 at 6:41 pm

I thought the later part of Ames' piece was unnecessary. It's kind of the same sort of guilt-by-attending-same-conference thing that I find annoying about the Russophobes.

Keep focused on government malfeasance, not basement brown-shirts.

Ignacio , January 10, 2019 at 11:00 am

Oh well, there would be a lot to argue here. In one side it is nice to see that the "Initiative" is being exposed although it doesn't appear yet to trigger any significant response from supposedly democratic institutions like, let's say the english parliament (at ransom by brexit).

Just to demonstrate how this article is well focused and pointed I wanted to comment on this bit:

(Among the outlets listed as friendly hosts in Integrity Initiative internal memos are Buzzfeed and El Pais, the center-left Spanish daily .)

YES! iIt is so true that the former "center-left" –if you wish– daily that years ago was a must read but has been degraded to levels that I wouldn't have imagined, in a case that makes the Guardian as the "guardian of reporting-as-it should-be". One has to bear in mind that the current most important shareholder of Grupo Prisa (owner of El Pais) is an english hedge fund Amber Capital whose CEO, Joseph Oughorlian is chairman at Grupo Prisa and probably responsible for the Russia!Russia!Russia! campaign observed in this medium that surprised me so much. You don't find nothing similar in Spain even in rigth and rigth of the rigth news outlets.

I believe this UK-based shareholder is clearly associated with the peculiar Russia!Russia!Russia! stance of the supposedly centre-left daily.

juliania , January 10, 2019 at 12:24 pm

For those of us from way back way back, these kooks relate to offshoots of the Watergate scandal, the original one, where people working on those burglaries of psychiatrist's offices and Democratic headquarters got their start organizing small gangs of crooks to infiltrate what was then a porous but trustable system of government – on they went to propose surveillance and collection of data that was at first publicly laughed about but on they went. On they went. Technology with all its pluses has these minuses we at first were able to counter (Church hearings) but the rats have scurried into all the back alleys and secretive pathways that need a thorough cleanup. It can be done, but it needs to be done periodically. Hopefully this is finally the year when that will happen.

Thank you, Yves. I believe these folk don't end up in a good place, but meanwhile they are wreaking havoc. The place to start, after the brooms and mops, is to get money OUT of politics and restore a verifiable voting system that happens methodically and is trustworthy. The citizenry will be behind this. We the people don't care how long it takes to vote or to find out who won. We don't! Haste makes waste in more ways than we know.

Let's do this. And please, judges, do your duty or go to jail yourselves.

Andrew Watts , January 10, 2019 at 1:37 pm

It's obvious that neither Ames or Blumenthal read the actual documents they're quoting from. Which is a shame considering the relevant one involving the CIA's Operation Mockingbird comparison was only seven pages long. The CIA were merely imitating British intelligence during the war and it is clearly stated as such when one of the replies involving General Sir Richard Barrons states that they've done this before during the 1930s. The US didn't possess a foreign intelligence agency at the time and I'd fervently argue that we still don't to this day.

but I've already commented about British Security Coordination in the aftermath of PropOrNot though and I'm reluctant to beat a dead horse.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/12/links-12312016.html#comment-2736471
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2017/01/100755.html#comment-2737564
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2017/01/links-11217.html#comment-2742827
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2018/05/links-5-21-18.html#comment-2971759

It's hard to be modest when you're this good.

Roady , January 10, 2019 at 4:02 pm

I wish I could be like Andrew Watts

Chauncey Gardiner , January 10, 2019 at 3:27 pm

Ah, the smell (or should we say stench) of domestic propaganda in the morning, ironically by some of the same individuals who brought us Iraq WMDs. While First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and other civil rights must be protected, it seems to me that a careful balance can be drawn under new legislation that insulates us from such government-sponsored propaganda. We should be able to rely on our government's representations. Instead, as with a former president who openly acknowledged, "My job is to catapult the propaganda," the reverse, together with a related loss of trust, unfortunately seems to be increasingly the case. Stop lying! What part of "of the People, by the People, for the People," is difficult to understand?

[Jan 11, 2019] How President Trump Normalized Neoconservatism by Ilana Mercer

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... As it happens, neocons are in luck. Most Americans know little of the ideas that animated their country's founding. They're more likely to hold ideas in opposition to the classical-liberal philosophy of the Founders, and, hence, wish to see the aggrandizement of the coercive, colossal, Warfare State. That's just the way things are. ..."
"... If past is prologue, Ron Paul is probably right when he says the CIA is likely meddling in Iranian politics. ..."
"... Then US ambassador to the UN, Samantha Power, a woman as dumb and dangerous as Nikki Haley, was cool with the carnage. (One almost misses Henry Kissinger's realpolitik . At least the man was highly educated and deeply knowledgeable about history and world affairs. Second only to Jared Kushner, of course.) ..."
"... No one would deny the largely neoconservative nature of Trump's National Security Strategy . Tucked in there somewhere is the Trumpian theme of "sovereignty," but in watered-down words. The promised Wall has given way to "multilayered technology"; to the "deployment of additional personnel," and to the tried-and-tested (not!) "vetting of prospective immigrants, refugees, and other foreign visitors." ..."
"... These are mouthfuls Barack Obama and Genghis Bush would hardly oppose. ..."
"... "It's often said that the Trump administration is 'isolationist,'" wrote historian Andrew J. Bacevich, in the UK Spectator. Untrue. "In fact, we are now witnessing a dramatic escalation in the militarization of US foreign policy in the Middle East, Africa and Afghanistan. This has not been announced, but it is happening, and much of it without any debate in Congress or the media." ..."
"... To some, the normalizing of neoconservatism by a president who ran against it is a stroke of genius; of a piece with Bill Clinton's triangulation tactics. To others, it's a cynical sleight of hand. ..."
"... So Trump did morph into Hillary. Actually, it was something I was afraid of once I got the good news of Hillary losing, but expected, considering that I view presidents as empty suits, and the National Security State calling the shots. ..."
"... The Trump holdouts that maintain his turncoat buffoonery is actually 5d chess are the 2018 equivalent of the 2009 hopey changey Obots and can't accept their big daddy is a liar and a spineless turncoat. The system is broken and cannot be fixed from within. ..."
"... The signs were already there before the election, too many people were hoping that this time it will be different (it never is) and ignored them. He has jewish children and did say how he was anti Iran, he was always a neo cohen servative. ..."
"... I'm a little more sanguine about a Zionist President who approaches problems from a business and deal-making position than from one who comes a neocon political position (e.g., Hillary, every other GOP candidate except Rand Paul). The former are pragmatic and will avoid conflict, especially stupid conflict, at all costs. While the latter believe they are virtuous in going to war and/or attacking countries. Did you hear Hillary threaten to shoot down Russian planes in Syria during the campaign (WTF??!). ..."
Jan 11, 2019 | www.unz.com

It's fact: Neoconservatives are pleased with President Trump's foreign policy.

A couple of months back, Bloomberg's Eli Lake let it know he was in neoconservative nirvana:

" for Venezuela, [Donald Trump] came very close to calling for regime change. 'The United States has taken important steps to hold the regime accountable,' Trump said. 'We are prepared to take further action if the government of Venezuela persists on its path to impose authoritarian rule on the Venezuelan people.'"

"For a moment," swooned Lake , "I closed my eyes and thought I was listening to a Weekly Standard editorial meeting."

Onward to Venezuela! Mr. Lake, a neoconservative, was loving every moment. In error, he and his kind confuse an expansionist foreign policy with "American exceptionalism." It's not.

As it happens, neocons are in luck. Most Americans know little of the ideas that animated their country's founding. They're more likely to hold ideas in opposition to the classical-liberal philosophy of the Founders, and, hence, wish to see the aggrandizement of the coercive, colossal, Warfare State. That's just the way things are.

So, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have enlisted the West in "a proxy Sunni-Shia religious war," Riyadh's ultimate aim. Donald Trump has been perfectly willing to partake. After a campaign of "America First," the president sided with Sunni Islam while demonizing Iran. Iranians have killed zero Americans in terrorist attacks in the US between 1975-2015; Saudi Arabians murdered 2369 !

Iranians recently reelected a reformer. Pray tell who elected the Gulf petrostate sheiks?

Moderates danced in the streets of Tehran when President Hassan Rouhani was reelected. Curiously, they're currently rioting.

If past is prologue, Ron Paul is probably right when he says the CIA is likely meddling in Iranian politics. For the Left and the pseudo-Right, this is a look-away issue. As the left-liberal establishment lectures daily, to question the Central Intelligence Agency -- its spooks are also agitating against all vestiges of President Trump's original "America First" plank -- is to "undermine American democracy."

Besides, "good" Americans know that only the Russians "meddle."

In Saudi Arabia, a new, more-dangerous regime is consolidating regional power. Almost overnight has the kingdom shifted from rule by family dynasty (like that of the Clintons and the Bushes), to a more authoritarian style of one-man rule .

When it comes to the Saudi-Israeli-American-Axis-of-Angels, the Kushner-Trump Administration -- is that another bloodline in-the-making? -- has not broken with America's ruling dynastic families (the Clintons and the Bushes, aforementioned).

It's comforting to know Saudi Arabia plays a crucial role in the UN's human rights affairs. In January of last year, the Kingdom executed 47 people in one day, including a rather benign Shiite cleric. Fear not, they went quickly, beheaded with a sword .

Then US ambassador to the UN, Samantha Power, a woman as dumb and dangerous as Nikki Haley, was cool with the carnage. (One almost misses Henry Kissinger's realpolitik . At least the man was highly educated and deeply knowledgeable about history and world affairs. Second only to Jared Kushner, of course.)

Our bosom buddies, the Saudi's, are currently barricading Yemeni ports. No aid gets through her hermetically sealed ports. Yemenis are dying. Some Twitter followers twittered with joy at the sight of starving Yemeni babies, like this one . Oh well, Yemeni babies can be sinister.

No one would deny the largely neoconservative nature of Trump's National Security Strategy . Tucked in there somewhere is the Trumpian theme of "sovereignty," but in watered-down words. The promised Wall has given way to "multilayered technology"; to the "deployment of additional personnel," and to the tried-and-tested (not!) "vetting of prospective immigrants, refugees, and other foreign visitors."

These are mouthfuls Barack Obama and Genghis Bush would hardly oppose.

"It's often said that the Trump administration is 'isolationist,'" wrote historian Andrew J. Bacevich, in the UK Spectator. Untrue. "In fact, we are now witnessing a dramatic escalation in the militarization of US foreign policy in the Middle East, Africa and Afghanistan. This has not been announced, but it is happening, and much of it without any debate in Congress or the media."

Indeed, while outlining his "new" Afghanistan plan, POTUS had conceded that "the American people are weary of war without victory." (Make that war, full-stop.) Depressingly, the president went on to promise an increase in American presence in Afghanistan. By sending 4000 additional soldiers there, President Trump alleged he was fighting terrorism, yet not undertaking nation building.

This is tantamount to talking out of both sides of one's mouth.

Teasing apart these two elements is near-impossible. Send "4,000 additional soldiers to add to the 8,400 now deployed in Afghanistan," and you've done what Obama and Bush before you did in that blighted and benighted region: muddle along; kill some civilians mixed in with some bad guys; break bread with tribal leaders (who hate your guts); mediate and bribe.

Above all, spend billions not your own to perfect the credo of a global fighting force that doesn't know Shiite from Shinola .

The upshot? It's quite acceptable, on the Left and the pseudo-Right, to casually quip about troops in Niger and Norway . "We have soldiers in Niger and Norway? Of course we do. We need them."

With neoconservatism normalized, there is no debate, disagreement or daylight between our dangerously united political factions.

This is the gift President Trump has given mainstream neoconservatives -- who now comfortably include neoliberals and all Conservatism Inc., with the exceptions of Pat Buchanan, Ann Coulter and Tucker Carlson.

How exactly did the president normalize neoconservatism: In 2016, liberals accused candidate Trump of isolationism. Neoconservatives -- aka Conservatism Inc. -- did the same.

Having consistently complained of his isolationism , the Left and the phony Right cannot but sanction President Trump's interventionism . The other option is to admit that we of the callused Old Right, who rejoiced at the prospects and promise of non-interventionism, were always right.

Not going to happen.

To some, the normalizing of neoconservatism by a president who ran against it is a stroke of genius; of a piece with Bill Clinton's triangulation tactics. To others, it's a cynical sleight of hand.

Ilana Mercer has been writing a paleolibertarian column since 1999, and is the author of " The Trump Revolution: The Donald's Creative Destruction Deconstructed " (June, 2016) & " Into the Cannibal's Pot: Lessons for America From Post-Apartheid South Africa " (2011). Follow her on Twitter , Facebook , Gab & YouTube . How President Trump Normalized Neoconservatism, by Ilana Mercer - The Unz Review

utu , says: January 5, 2018 at 5:57 am GMT

You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.

But you can fool the whole country all the time in American bi-partisan system. Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump each were brought to power by fooling their electorate.

Biff , says: January 5, 2018 at 9:02 am GMT
So Trump did morph into Hillary. Actually, it was something I was afraid of once I got the good news of Hillary losing, but expected, considering that I view presidents as empty suits, and the National Security State calling the shots.

I'm waiting for another one of those "Trump's Truth in Action" moments when describes the real political atmosphere in Washington. Trump was asked about something he said in a previous interview: "When you give, they do whatever the hell you want them to do." "You'd better believe it," Trump said. "If I ask them, if I need them, you know, most of the people on this stage I've given to, just so you understand, a lot of money."

EliteCommInc. , says: January 5, 2018 at 9:11 am GMT
I think its time to dump the label "neoconservative". The appropriate term is "interventionists without a cause" (IWAC or IWC) or some other descriptor.

The real problem that Pres Trump has and I remain a Pres Trump supporter is two fold:

1. He seems to have forgotten he won the election.

2. He seems to have forgotten what he was elected to do.

And nearly everyone of these issues on foreign policy the answer rests in respecting sovereignty – that of others and our own.

I didn't need to read,"Adios, America" to comprehend the deep state damage our careless immigration policy has on the country. I don't need to reread, "Adios, America" to grasp that our policies of intervening in the affairs of other states undermines our own ability to make the same case at home.

If I weren't already trying to plow my way through several other books, documentaries and relapsing to old school programming such as The Twilight Zone, Star Trek, and now the Dick Van Dyke show, i would reread,

"Adios , America."

In Col. Bacevich's book,

Washington Rules, he posits a distressing scenario that the foreign policy web is so tangled and entrenched, the executive branch is simply out his league. The expectation was that Pres trump had the will to turn the matter. I hold out hope, but maybe not. There's time.

I agree, at least build the darn wall.

Lincoln Blockface Squarebeard III , says: January 5, 2018 at 10:01 am GMT
@J.Ross The Trump holdouts that maintain his turncoat buffoonery is actually 5d chess are the 2018 equivalent of the 2009 hopey changey Obots and can't accept their big daddy is a liar and a spineless turncoat. The system is broken and cannot be fixed from within.
anonymous Disclaimer , says: January 5, 2018 at 11:03 am GMT
Told you so. Cf., "The Winning Trump Ticket & Cabinet (Part I)," published here February 6, 2016. (Ms. Mercer never got to Part II.)

Elections at the USG level allow the ruled to harmlessly let off steam.

The Alarmist , says: January 5, 2018 at 11:39 am GMT
It's life imitating art: Trump reprises the role of Professor/Führer John Gill in Star Trek episode 50, Patterns of Force.
neutral , says: January 5, 2018 at 11:56 am GMT
The signs were already there before the election, too many people were hoping that this time it will be different (it never is) and ignored them. He has jewish children and did say how he was anti Iran, he was always a neo cohen servative.

I have a question for all the Trump supporters still in denial, what will it take to break your delusions? He is not going to build a wall, mass immigration is up, the left wing are mass censoring and essentially running everything now, his foreign policy is now endorsed by the all the never Trumpers – so what is your limit, is there anything he must do to lose your support?

Anonymous Disclaimer , says: January 5, 2018 at 1:17 pm GMT
@Anonymous

Jews and the Jewish Media normalized Jewish NeoCons by guaranteeing that they always have a voice and airtime in American culture and media. Never called out by the WashingtonPost and NY Times for their previous blunders, they continue to shape American foreign policy. And, of course, the end game here is Israel and the Israeli agenda at all costs, you Jews are one issue folk. And You definitely do your part, with the subtle subterfuge at work in the articles that you write.

No one should be surprised by Trump promoting Israeli interests über alles. For decades he was so involved in Israel events in New York I debated whether he was actually Jewish or not. Bannon said the embassy move to Jerusalem was at the behest of Adelson, Trump's old casino buddy. In the campaign Trump got a lot of support from NY Jewish billionaires (Icahn, Feinberg, Paulson, et al.). They know him and how he operates.

But being pro-Israel doesn't necessarily equate to neocon. The neocons are the dumb Jews with serious inadequacy issues who could never make it in business and instead went into politics and journalism. The latter are still staunchly opposed to Trump even after a lot of pro-Israel moves. They might warm up to Trump's bellicosity towards a lot of Israel's enemies (a long list with degrees of separation), but so far they've simply moved left.

I'm a little more sanguine about a Zionist President who approaches problems from a business and deal-making position than from one who comes a neocon political position (e.g., Hillary, every other GOP candidate except Rand Paul). The former are pragmatic and will avoid conflict, especially stupid conflict, at all costs. While the latter believe they are virtuous in going to war and/or attacking countries. Did you hear Hillary threaten to shoot down Russian planes in Syria during the campaign (WTF??!).

Lastly, I like to think Trump surrounded himself with neocons (McMaster, Haley, et al.) to placate the GOP establishment because he knows he has to play the game.

anonymous Disclaimer , says: January 5, 2018 at 1:42 pm GMT
@Lincoln Blockface Squarebeard III Very well put.

People are inclined to believe that any activity -- in this instance, voting for the red/blue puppets in Washington -- in which their participation is patronized must be legitimate and effectual. Many duped in November 2016, even those who now feel betrayed by that farce, were still around here a few weeks ago acting like a Senator Moore in Alabama would be pivotal to reform, his defeat devastating.

That's how Ms. Mercer and her pundit ilk (Buchanan, Napolitano, etc.) thrive -- supporting the Empire by never questioning its legitimacy, just taking sides within the Establishment. And they'll be buying into the 2018 congressional contests, ad nauseum.

Of course, what is done to us, and to others in our name and with our money, never changes to any meaningful degree. Americans might realize this if they thought critically about it, so they don't. Instead, they lap up the BS and vote for who tells them the lie they like to hear. When there are identity politics involved, the delusion seems even deeper. There are self-styled "progressives" who used to advocate single-payer, nationalized health care who are elated over the retention of so-called "Obamacare," the legislation for which was written by and for the insurance and pharmaceutical industries.

Me? I cope by boycotting national elections and mass media, participating in forums like this, and hoping that when the tottering tower of debt and gore tips over, as few innocents and as many guilty as practicable are among those crushed.

DESERT FOX , says: January 5, 2018 at 1:49 pm GMT
The Zionist neocons and Israel did 911 and got away with it and everyone in the U.S. gov knows it and they tried to sink the USS LIBERTY and got away with it and so normal is an Orwellian society where Zionists can kill Americans and destroy the Mideast and nobody does jack shit about it.

The neocons are Satanists warmongers and will destroy America.

WorkingClass , says: Website January 5, 2018 at 1:51 pm GMT
Neocons are Zionists. Trump, Bannon and Kushner are Zionists. Israel continues to wag the dog.
Jake , says: January 5, 2018 at 2:48 pm GMT
Neocons are about as evil as proudly proclaimed Leftists, and they are obviously more duplicitous.

Either Neocons will be refuted and publicly rebuked and rejected, or Neocons will eventually destroy the country. Their long term fruits are destruction of that which they have used to destroy so many others.

Jake , says: January 5, 2018 at 2:56 pm GMT
@anonymous Far from all Neocons are Jews. However, virtually all Neocons are militantly pro-Israel to the point of making Israel's foreign policy desires central to their assessment of what America needs in foreign policy.

And the source is Anglo-Saxon Puritanism, which was a Judaizing heresy. Judaizing heresy necessarily produces pro-Jewish culture. WASP culture is inherently pro-Jewish, as much as it is anti-Catholic and anti-French and and anti-Spanish and anti-Irish, etc.

And all that means that WASP is opposed to the nest interests of the vast majority of white Christians while being pro-Jewish.

Jews did not cause any of that. Anglo-Saxon Puritan heretics did.

ElitecommInc. , says: January 5, 2018 at 4:22 pm GMT
@neutral Pres Trump is a situational leader. It's a rare style, for good reason. However, he is openly situational. That was clear during the campaign season. however,

I thought his positions were sincere. I don't think that this was any kind of slight of hand, "watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat". His positions on Israel, same sex behavior, marijuana, healthcare remain what they were going in. His foreign policy and immigration positions have been buffered and he seems incapable of standing where he came in.

It was no secret he intended an assertive military. However, he seems easily convinced that strong means aggressive, and that needlessly aggressive policy is a substitute for a strong US -- that is a mistake. Syria cruise strike was the first sign that he was giving in to the men whom he chose as advisers. As it it turns out winning the election has been easier than governing. I assumed he had a much stronger backbone, than he has been willing to exhibit in office.

Alden , says: January 5, 2018 at 7:09 pm GMT
@Jake The Israeli/AIPAC bribery of American bible thumper preachers, especially in the fundamentalist southern American states has more to do with it than the reformation.

The preachers get huge donations to pay for their churches and TV shows. They get free trips to Israel for themselves and their families all the time.

On their Israel trips they pay more attention to the OT Jewish and holocaust sites than the Christian ones

It's true that the reformation was a return to Judaism and a rejection of Christianity, but that was 500 years ago.

What's important now is the vast amounts of money the Israeli government and the lobby funnels into those fundamentalist churches.

If the southern fundamentalists only knew what Jews think of them. I really got an earful of Jewish scorn and hate for southerners and fundamentalists during the recent Roy Moore election.

Read Jewish publications if you want to learn what they think of southern fundamentalists

renfro , says: January 6, 2018 at 2:13 am GMT
@Twodees Partain Trump appointed Haley because Sheldon Adelson told him to.
And contrary to the myth of trump funding his own campaign he did not the only money he put in his campaign was a 1o million loan to it. Adelson was his biggest contributor just like Saban was Hillary's.

Nikki Haley: Neocon Heartthrob

Not coincidentally, however, neocon hopes may lie as well with the generous political funding provided to Haley by Sheldon Adelson, the GOP's and Trump's single biggest donor.

Between May and June, 2016, Sheldon Adelson contributed $250,000 to Haley's 527 political organization, A Great Day, funds that she used to target four Republican state senate rivals in primaries. (Only one was successfully defeated.) Adelson was the largest contributor to her group,
which raised a total of $915,000.

This powerful Adelson-funded Israel lobby could soon rival AIPAC's
https://www.haaretz.com › U.S. News
Oct 31, 2017 – Sheldon Adelson(L), The 3rd annual IAC National Conference, in September, 2016, and Nikki Haley. . will feature, for the first time ever, a prominent speaker from the ranks of the U.S. government: U.S. ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley, who is a favorite among the right-leaning "pro-Israel" crowd.

The Jews have bought this government and trump and Haley are nothing but junk yard dogs.
Not that there are good alternatives but anyone who stills supports trump is as crazy as he is.

renfro , says: January 6, 2018 at 2:18 am GMT
@Alden

What's important now is the vast amounts of money the Israeli government and the lobby funnels into those fundamentalist churches.

You have it completely backwards .the evangelicals, particularly Roberson donate money for Israeli settlements.

Grandpa Charlie , says: January 6, 2018 at 3:58 am GMT
@Alden

The title is ridiculous. Neo conservatives have been normal for decades.

The neocon movement was normalized in 2001 by the PATRIOT Act. The domestic side of the neocon worldview -- or world-system -- was joined with the international or interventionist side, just as anti-Palestinian actions by Israel were joined by way of repression of free speech with the Charlottesville protest by conservatives of the desecration of monuments.

Alden , says: January 6, 2018 at 4:45 am GMT
@renfro I'm sure the evangelical preachers con their followers into donating money to Israel. I've seen those late night ads begging for donations to feed ancient old holocaust survivors in Israel.

But the Israelis pay for all those luxury trips to Israel And a lot of the money to start those TV shows and for the big salaries come from Israel and AIPAC so does the money to set up those big churches that just appear from nowhere

polskijoe , says: January 6, 2018 at 3:15 pm GMT
@Grandpa Charlie I have always wondered why its okay to say WASP but not Jew in public.
One is more pc, the other is not allowed.
I have seen some articles about Jews replacing wasp, even from Jewish authors.

As for Neoconservatives. It depends how we define it.
I see it as a case of American imperialism fused with pro Israel sentiment. Large overlap, but not always.
From what I know modern Neoconservativism started somewhere around the 70s,80s? Became dominant around the Bush years. (during Reagan years they got rid of many Paleocons).

TT , says: January 6, 2018 at 7:08 pm GMT
@Twodees Partain Not only Nikki is a prank, she is also a godsend. Now the world get to see USG naked without usual pretension.

Trumps is probably the most honest Potus with highest integrity & bravery in American history(stupid aside). He means what he said without mind boggling hypocrite lies, he tried fulfilling all his election promises, fighting bravely with his only little weapon tweeter besiege by entire states organs, CIA/FBI, both parties, MSM, world allies,

He put US Embassy in Jerusalem that all other Potus promised but never keep, he tried to revise immigration policy that people blocked, building prototype wall now, try befriend Russia become a treason act, reneged nuclear agreement with Iran, make US military great(of course need hyper tension like nuclear NK), scraped Obacare, TTP, Climate deal, try to grab Killary, bring back jobs with tax heaven .

Mann, this is really a man of his word. Didn't these are what you people voted him for, to drain the swamp? He gotta shock the entire MSM brainwashed nation up to see the deeply corrupted USG, collapse it quickly for a new one to move in(by whoever after his prank). As Trumps had asked:"what you got to lose to vote me?"

TT , says: January 6, 2018 at 10:26 pm GMT
@Twodees Partain Yes..ues i admit, don't shoot. Im just been sarcastic, USG is in such a laughing stock to the world now, many americans probably are exasperated if not yet numb. I am not judging he is good, DT is just less evil typical business man..imo

But frankly, i do see why people are voting DT now. He is at least more entertaining and blunt to screw up WH deep states show. Per msm (fake news), he is honouring all his campaign promises rt? So that make him above hypocrite liar Obama who speak on peace(Nobel prize), but drenched in Libyan and Syrians blood.

US msm brainwashed people need lot of shock & awe to wake up to reality, then they might have hope to drain the swamp in unity or just await to implode and suck down whole world.

Erebus , says: January 7, 2018 at 9:51 am GMT

No one would deny the largely neoconservative nature of Trump's National Security Strategy.

Well, some better minds than mine do deny that very thing. Three of them follow below.

Gilbert Doctorow at: http://usforeignpolicy.blogs.lalibre.be/archive/2017/12/20/kissinger-s-fingerprints-on-the-trump-security-doctrine-2017-1161961.html

What we see in the NSS is prioritization and true strategic vision as opposed to ideological cant and ad hoc responses to global developments

Patrick Armstrong at: https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2018/01/02/trump-cuts-gordian-knot-foreign-entanglements.html

Trump has little interest in the obsessions of the neocon and humanitarian intervention crowd.

Finally, Andrew Korybko puts it all together at: https://orientalreview.org/2017/12/27/trump-agent-chaos-k-kraken/

Believing that the current world system no longer sufficiently advances American interests ever since Washington lost control of its institutional tools, and that the eventual outcome of this increasingly multipolar state of affairs is that the US will in turn lose its global empire, Trump has decided to become the Agent of Chaos in bringing about its destruction.

Steve Gittelson , says: January 8, 2018 at 6:32 pm GMT
@Ilyana_Rozumova

I know with certainty that Hillary is a beast from depth of hell.

Meh, hyperbole.

Hillary is no different from most politicians. She's in it for the wealth and power. She got herself a real smart, duplicitous, pussy-chasing beast of a husband, and made the most of the opportunity.

People -- the American people -- should be able to see this rather-evident characteristic of politicians. They should be adequately educated, at least to the extent of being able to detect the base chicanery and corruption that radiates from political personalities.

But, they don't. They don't see the evil. The media deftly conceals it, because the beasts of the media, like jackals, feed on the morsels of wealth that fall to the ground as the politicians devour the carcass of well, hell, freedom and democracy is as useful a metaphor as any.

ILANA MERCER , says: Website January 9, 2018 at 6:15 am GMT
@anonymous Thank you for the opportunity to share, once again, a magnificent column, published on the Unz Review and elsewhere.

"The Curious Case Of WND's Vanishing, Veteran Paleolibertarian" ( http://www.unz.com/imercer/the-curious-case-of-wnds-vanishing-veteran-paleolibertarian/ ) addressed, for once and for all, a small, shrinking community's stunning and consistent displays of intellectual dishonesty, over the years.

In this context, I am reminded of British comedian Alexei Sayle. When asked what he does when he watches a really talented satirist performing, Sayle replied: "I go back stage and tell him he'll never make it."

Indeed, the attitude to my work over 20 years has been the best proof of its quality.

If the Comments threads about "ilana mercer," on the Unz Review, prove anything (other than that anti-Semitism lives), it is that mediocre "men" (for the most) hate a woman who can out-think them. As a defender of men, this saddens me, but it is, nevertheless, true.

So here is the link to "The Curious Case Of WND's Vanishing, Veteran Paleolibertarian," which the venomous mediocrity commenting here so rudely derided, but refrained from linking, for obvious reasons: http://www.unz.com/imercer/the-curious-case-of-wnds-vanishing-veteran-paleolibertarian/

Ron Unz, our wonderful editor, chose the image appended to the column. (The brilliant Mr. Unz is one of the few intellectually honest individuals I know in this biz. He, columnist Jack Kerwick, and a handful of others.)

In reply to kunckle-dragger's sniveling: I'll continue to refrain from interacting with his ilk ("fanboys") on my column's thread. But this particular dreadful cur (with apologies to dogs, which I love) further embarrasses himself when he offers up the non sequitur that engaging him is the litmus test for being a "good writer."

dfordoom , says: Website January 10, 2018 at 12:07 am GMT
@polskijoe

I see it as a case of American imperialism fused with pro Israel sentiment. Large overlap, but not always.

Agreed. American imperialism has a long long history (going back to at least the mid-19th century). That's why the neocons were able to gain so much influence. They were appealing to a pre-existing imperialist sentiment.

dfordoom , says: Website January 10, 2018 at 12:11 am GMT
@Ilyana_Rozumova

There is a large group of US politician non Jews
who also are pushing this policies. So these two groups together would be called Neocons.
There is a large group in US population, that find this idea very appealing.

That's why Make America Great Again was such a popular slogan. It appeals to mindless American jingoism and imperialism.

dfordoom , says: Website January 10, 2018 at 12:14 am GMT
@Twodees Partain

There are people who claim to have high IQs who are totally stupid in practical matters.

I'd almost go so far as to suggest that there's a direct correlation between high IQ and stupidity in practical matters.

Talha , says: January 10, 2018 at 4:18 am GMT
@dfordoom Edward Dutton stated that it was a trade-off between intelligence on one side and instinct on another – both are necessary for survival. For me, intelligence does not seem to correlate directly to wisdom.

Peace.

renfro , says: January 10, 2018 at 6:13 pm GMT
@Twodees Partain

If so, that reinforces my view that Trump doesn't know anybody in the Swamp

You are exactly right.

Trump really knew no one to hire or appoint to anything except his NY cronies , mainly his Jewish lawyers and Kushner contacts.
So he appointed anyone they and his biggest donors recommended to him.
His ego and insecurity demanded he surround himself with his NY cohorts and close family.

dfordoom , says: Website January 11, 2018 at 1:59 am GMT
@Authenticjazzman

" It appeals to mindless American jingoism and imperialism" = "Make America great again"

So you would prefer : "Make America powerless and insignificant again"

How about "Make America a normal nation that respects other nations' sovereignty, that doesn't plant military bases on foreign soil, that doesn't bomb other people's countries, doesn't try to impose its views and its culture on the rest of the world, doesn't undermine the governments of other countries and doesn't threaten any country that dares to disagree with it." Would that be too much to ask?

I would have thought that someone "Mensa" qualified since 1973 could understand that greatness should not be equated with behaving like a thug or a schoolyard bully. America's aggression does tend to look like the manifestation of a massive inferiority complex.

HogHappenin , says: January 11, 2018 at 4:32 am GMT
I commend Ms. Mercer for publishing this which will no doubt bring to light an ugly truth about many of her own tribesmen since there many of her other views which I wholly or partially disagree with

And as was said sometime before, the thought process of earlier elites (the banking, Hollywood and the neo-con, neo-lib crowd which was almost exclusively Zio-Jewish and is disproportionately still is) has creeped into the very being of what constitutes to be an "elite" in the west these days. Unlimited warfare and welfare using fraudulent money, disturbing the social and sexual fabric of a society! Satan would be quite proud of this scum bunch

So the zionist cabal still calls the shots and the slavish goyim second tier elites now willingly go along and in fact share the same mentality

[Jan 11, 2019] Facts does not matter in the current propoganda environment, the narrative is everything

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Look at Russiagate. An excellent recent article by Ray McGovern for Consortium News titled "A Look Back at Clapper's Jan. 2017 'Assessment' on Russia-gate" reminds us on the two-year anniversary of the infamous ODNI assessment that the entire establishment Russia narrative is built upon nothing but the say-so of a couple dozen intelligence analysts hand-picked and guided by a man who helped deceive the world into Iraq, a man who is so virulently Russophobic that he's said on more than one occasion that Russians are genetically predisposed to subversive behavior. ..."
"... That January 2017 intelligence assessment has formed the foundation underlying every breathless, conspiratorial Russia story you see in western news media to this very day, and it's completely empty. The idea that Russia interfered in the US election in any meaningful way is based on an assessment crafted by a known liar , from which countless relevant analysts were excluded, which makes no claims of certainty, and contains no publicly available evidence. It's pure narrative from top to bottom, and therefore the "collusion" story is as well since Trump could only have colluded with an actual thing that actually happened, and there's no evidence that it did. ..."
"... So now you've got Trump being painted as a Putin lackey based on a completely fabricated election interference story, despite the fact that Trump has actually been far more hawkish towards Russia than any administration since the fall of the Soviet Union. ..."
"... The narrative matrix of America's political/media landscape is a confusing labyrinth of smoke and funhouse mirrors distorting and manipulating the public consciousness at every turn. It's psychologically torturous, which is largely why people who are deeply immersed in politics are so on-edge all the time regardless of where they're at on the political spectrum. The only potentially good thing I can see about this forceful brutalization of the public psyche is that it might push people over the edge and shatter the illusion altogether. ..."
"... Trust in the mass media is already at an all-time low while our ability to network and share information that casts doubt on official narratives is at an all-time high, which is why the establishment propaganda machine is acting so weird as it scrambles to control the narrative, and why efforts to censor the internet are getting more and more severe. ..."
Jan 11, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via Medium.com,

Earlier this week, President Donald Trump tweeted the following:

"Endless Wars, especially those which are fought out of judgement mistakes that were made many years ago, & those where we are getting little financial or military help from the rich countries that so greatly benefit from what we are doing, will eventually come to a glorious end!"

The tweet was warmly received and celebrated by Trump's supporters, despite the fact that it says essentially nothing since "eventually" could mean anything.

Indeed, it's looking increasingly possible that nothing will come of the president's stated agenda to withdraw troops from Syria other than a bunch of words which allow his anti-interventionist base to feel nice feelings inside. Yet everyone laps it up, on both ends of the political aisle, just like they always do:

How are such wildly different pictures being painted about the same non-event? By the fact that both sides of the Trump-Syria debate have thus far been reacting solely to narrative.

This has consistently been the story throughout Trump's presidency: a heavy emphasis on words and narratives and a disinterest in facts and actions. A rude tweet can dominate headlines for days, while the actual behaviors of this administration can go almost completely ignored. Trump continues to more or less advance the same warmongering Orwellian globalist policies and agendas as his predecessors along more or less the same trajectory, but frantic mass media narratives are churned out every day painting him as some unprecedented deviation from the norm. Trump himself, seemingly aware that he's interacting entirely with perceptions and narratives instead of facts and reality, routinely makes things up whole cloth and often claims he's "never said" things he most certainly has said. And why not? Facts don't matter in this media environment, only narrative does.

Look at Russiagate. An excellent recent article by Ray McGovern for Consortium News titled "A Look Back at Clapper's Jan. 2017 'Assessment' on Russia-gate" reminds us on the two-year anniversary of the infamous ODNI assessment that the entire establishment Russia narrative is built upon nothing but the say-so of a couple dozen intelligence analysts hand-picked and guided by a man who helped deceive the world into Iraq, a man who is so virulently Russophobic that he's said on more than one occasion that Russians are genetically predisposed to subversive behavior.

That January 2017 intelligence assessment has formed the foundation underlying every breathless, conspiratorial Russia story you see in western news media to this very day, and it's completely empty. The idea that Russia interfered in the US election in any meaningful way is based on an assessment crafted by a known liar , from which countless relevant analysts were excluded, which makes no claims of certainty, and contains no publicly available evidence. It's pure narrative from top to bottom, and therefore the "collusion" story is as well since Trump could only have colluded with an actual thing that actually happened, and there's no evidence that it did.

So now you've got Trump being painted as a Putin lackey based on a completely fabricated election interference story, despite the fact that Trump has actually been far more hawkish towards Russia than any administration since the fall of the Soviet Union. With the nuclear brinkmanship this administration has been playing with its only nuclear rival on the planet, it would be so incredibly easy for Trump's opposition to attack him on his insanely hawkish escalation of a conflict which could easily end all life on earth if any little thing goes wrong, but they don't. Because this is all about narrative and not facts, Democrats have been paced into supporting even more sanctioning, proxy conflicts and nuclear posturing while loudly objecting to any sign of communication between the two nuclear superpowers, while Republicans are happy to see Trump increase tensions with Moscow because it combats the collusion narrative. Now both parties are supporting an anti-Russia agenda which existed in secretive US government agencies long before the 2016 election .

And this to me is the most significant thing about Trump's presidency. Not any of the things people tell me I'm supposed to care about, but the fact that the age of Trump has been highlighting in a very clear way how we're all being manipulated by manufactured narratives all the time.

Humanity lives in a world of mental narrative . We have a deeply conditioned societal habit of heaping a massive overlay of mental labels and stories on top of the raw data we take in through our senses, and those labels and stories tend to consume far more interest and attention than the actual data itself. We use labels and stories for a reason: without them it would be impossible to share abstract ideas and information with each other about what's going on in our world. But those labels and stories get imbued with an intense amount of belief and identification; we form tight, rigid belief structures about our world, our society, and our very selves that can generate a lot of fear, hatred and suffering. Which is why it feels so nice to go out into nature and relax in an environment that isn't shaped by human mental narrative.

This problem is exponentially exacerbated by the fact that these stories and labels are wildly subjective and very easily manipulated. Powerful people have learned that they can control the way everyone else thinks, acts and votes by controlling the stories they tell themselves about what's going on in the world using mass media control and financial political influence, allowing ostensible democracies to be conducted in a way which serves power far more efficiently than any dictatorship.

So now America has a president who is escalating a dangerous cold war against Russia , who is working to prosecute Julian Assange and shut down WikiLeaks , who is expanding the same war on whistleblowers and Orwellian surveillance network that was expanded by Bush and Obama before him, who has expanded existing wars and made no tangible move as yet to scale them back, who is advancing the longstanding neocon agenda of regime change in Iran with starvation sanctions and CIA covert ops , and yet the two prevailing narratives about him are that he's either (A) a swamp-draining, establishment-fighting hero of peace or that he's (B) a treasonous Putin lackey who isn't nearly hawkish enough toward Russia.

See how both A and B herd the public away from opposing the dangerous pro-establishment agendas being advanced by this administration? The dominant narratives could not possibly be more different from what's actually going on, and the only reason they're the dominant narratives is because an alliance of plutocrats and secretive government agencies exerts an immense amount of influence over the stories that are told by the political/media class.

The narrative matrix of America's political/media landscape is a confusing labyrinth of smoke and funhouse mirrors distorting and manipulating the public consciousness at every turn. It's psychologically torturous, which is largely why people who are deeply immersed in politics are so on-edge all the time regardless of where they're at on the political spectrum. The only potentially good thing I can see about this forceful brutalization of the public psyche is that it might push people over the edge and shatter the illusion altogether.

Trust in the mass media is already at an all-time low while our ability to network and share information that casts doubt on official narratives is at an all-time high, which is why the establishment propaganda machine is acting so weird as it scrambles to control the narrative, and why efforts to censor the internet are getting more and more severe. It is possible that this is what it looks like when a thinking species evolves into a sane and healthy relationship with thought. Perhaps the cracks that are appearing all over official narratives today are like the first cracks appearing in an eggshell as a bird begins to hatch into the world.

* * *

The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for my website , which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My articles are entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook , following my antics on Twitter , throwing some money into my hat on Patreon or Paypal , purchasing some of my sweet new merchandise , buying my new book Rogue Nation: Psychonautical Adventures With Caitlin Johnstone , or my previous book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers .

[Jan 08, 2019] Shock Files- What Role Did Integrity Initiative Play in Sergei Skripal Affair- - Sputnik International

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... How could Novichok have poisoned people four months after the Skripal attack? -- ..."
"... The Skripal Files ..."
Jan 08, 2019 | sputniknews.com

Hacking syndicate Anonymous has just released its fourth tranche of documents hacked from the internal servers of the Institute for Statecraft and its subsidiary, the Integrity Initiative. Several explosive files raise serious questions about the shadowy British state and NATO-funded 'think tank' and its connections with the Skripal affair.

The files were released just after 2:30pm GMT on January 4 -- I've barely scratched the surface of the content, but what I've seen so far contains a panoply of bombshell revelations -- to say the least, the organization(s) now have serious questions to answer about what role they played in the poisoning of Sergei Skripal in March, and its aftermath both nationally and internationally.

Sinister Timeline

One file apparently dating to "early 2015" -- "Russian Federation Sanctions" -- written by the Institute's Victor Madeira outlines "potential levers" to achieve Russian "behaviour change", "peace with Ukraine", "return [of] Crimea", "regime change" or "other?". The suggested "levers" span almost every conceivable area, including "civil society", "sports", "finance" and "technology".

In the section marked "intelligence", Madeira suggests simultaneously expelling "every RF [Russian Federation] intelligence officer and air/defense/naval attache from as many countries as possible". In parentheses, it references 'Operation Foot' , the expulsion of over 1000 Soviet officials from the UK in September 1971, the largest expulsion of intelligence officials by any government in history.

The section on sports also suggests "advocating the view [Russia] is unworthy of hosting [sporting] events" -- and the section marked "information" recommends the sanctioning of 'Russian' media "in West for not complying with regulators' standards".

2015 File Written By Victor Madeira on Possible Anti-Russian Actions 2015 File Written By Victor Madeira on Possible Anti-Russian Actions

In April that year, Institute for Statecraft chief Chris Donnelly was promoted to Honorary Colonel of SGMI (Specialist Group Military Intelligence), and in October he met with General Sir Richard Barrons. Notes from the meeting don't make clear who said what, but one despaired that "if no catastrophe happens to wake people up and demand a response, then we need to find a way to get the core of government to realise the problem and take it out of the political space."

"We will need to impose changes over the heads of vested interests. We did this in the 1930s. My conclusion is it is we who must either generate the debate or wait for something dreadful to happen to shock us into action. We must generate an independent debate outside government. We need to ask when and how do we start to put all this right? Do we have the national capabilities [and/or] capacities to fix it? If so, how do we improve our harnessing of resources to do it? We need this debate now. There is not a moment to be lost," they said.

Operation IRIS Begins

On 4 March 2018, former Russian military officer and double agent for MI6 Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were poisoned in Salisbury, England.

Within days, the Institute had submitted a proposal to the Foreign & Commonwealth Office, "to study social media activity in respect of the events that took place, how news spread and evaluate how the incident is being perceived" in a number of countries.

The bid was accepted, and the Initiative's 'Operation Iris' was launched. Under its auspices, the Institute employed 'global investigative solutions' firm Harod Associates to analyze social media activity related to Skripal the world over.

It also conducted media monitoring of its own, with Institute 'research fellow' Simon Bracey-Lane producing regular 'roundups' of media coverage overseas, based on insights submitted by individuals connected to the Initiative living in several countries. One submission, from an unnamed source in Moldova, says they "cannot firmly say" whether the country's media had its "own point of view" on the issue, or whether news organizations had taken "an obvious pro-Russian or pro-Western position", strongly suggesting these were key questions for the Initiative.

Integrity Initiative Seeks Intelligence On How Overseas Media Reported Skripal Incident Integrity Initiative Seeks Intelligence On How Overseas Media Reported Skripal Incident

Moreover though, there are clear indications the Institute sought to shape the news narrative on the attack -- and indeed the UK government's response. One file dated March 11 appears to be a briefing document on the affair to date, with key messages bolded throughout.

It opens by setting out "The Narrative" of the incident -- namely "Russia has carried out yet another brutal attack, this time with a deadly nerve agent, on someone living in Britain".

"Use of the nerve agent posed a threat to innocent British subjects, affecting 21 people and seriously affecting a police officer. This is not the first time such an attack has been carried out in the UK 14 deaths are believed to be attributable to the Kremlin Russia has poisoned its enemies abroad on other occasions, most notably then-candidate for the Presidency of Ukraine, Viktor Yushchenko, in 2004. Russian political activist Vladimir Kara-Murza has been poisoned twice; and the journalist Anna Politkovskaya was also poisoned and later shot dead. Since Putin has been running Russia, the Kremlin has a history of poisoning its opponents in a gruesome way," the "narrative" reads.

The file goes on to declare the British response has been "far too weak it's essential the government makes a much stronger response this time" -- and then lists "possible, realistic, first actions", including banning RT and Sputnik from operating in the UK, boycotting the 2018 World Cup, withdrawing the UK ambassador from Moscow and expelling the Russian ambassador to the UK, and refusing/revoking visas to leading Russians within Vladimir Putin's "circle", and their families.

Post-Skripal Incident Anti-Russian Actions Recommended by Integrity Initiative Post-Skripal Incident Anti-Russian Actions Recommended by Integrity Initiative

It's not clear who the document was distributed to -- but it may have been given to journalists within the Initiative's UK 'cluster', if not others. This may explain why the Institute's "narrative", and its various recommended "responses" utterly dominated mainstream media reporting of the affair for months afterwards, despite the glaring lack of evidence of Russian state involvement in the attack.

It's extremely curious so many of the briefing document's recommendations almost exactly -- if not exactly -- echo several of the suggested "levers" outlined in the 2015 document. It's also somewhat troubling the "Global Operation Foot" spoken of in that file duly came to pass on March 28 2018, with over 20 countries expelling over 100 Russian diplomats.

Likewise, it's striking Victor Madeira, the Institute staffer who made the recommendations in 2015, made many media appearances discussing the poisoning following the incident routinely documented by the Institute. Security consultant Dan Kaszeta also wrote a number of articles for the Integrity Initiative website about chemical weapons following the attack -- including a July 14 article, How could Novichok have poisoned people four months after the Skripal attack? -- receiving 40 pence per word .

Invoice submitted to Integrity Initiative by Dan Kaszeta Invoice submitted to Integrity Initiative by Dan Kaszeta Strange Connections

The Institute's bizarrely intimate connections with the incident don't end there. Another document apparently dating to July 2018 contains the contact details of Pablo Miller, Skripal's MI6 recruiter, handler and -- unbelievably -- neighbor in Salisbury. Anonymous claims the document is an invitee list for a meeting the Institute convened between a number of individuals and Syria's highly controversial White Helmets group, but this is yet to be verified.

Whatever the truth of the matter, the latest document dump raises yet further questions about how and why it was BBC Diplomatic and Defense Editor Mark Urban -- who was in the same tank regiment as Miller after leaving University -- came to meet with Skripal in the year before his poisoning. When I attended the launch of his book on the affair in October -- The Skripal Files -- he was evasive on whether he played a role in connecting him with Skripal, and denied Miller was Skripal's recruiter.

The latest trove also raises yet further questions about the activities of the Institute for Statecraft and Integrity Initiative. In light of these revelations, reading the record of Donnelly's meeting with General Barrons takes on an acutely chilling quality. It may be that purely serendipitously the pair got their "catastrophe", their "something dreadful", which "[woke] people up" and made the government "realise the problem" posed by Russia -- or it could be they one way or another played a facilitative role of some kind.

After months of refusing to answer the vast number of questions I and thousands of others have submitted to the paired organizations, it's high time for them to break cover, and be honest with the public.

[Jan 08, 2019] Skripal spin doctors- Documents link UK govt-funded Integrity Initiative to anti-Russia narrative

Highly recommended!
Images removed. Please brose the original to view them.
Notable quotes:
"... "Russian disinformation." ..."
"... "network of networks" ..."
"... It's notable that many of the draconian anti-Russia measures that the group advocated as far back as 2015 were swiftly implemented following the Skripal affair – even as London refused to back up its finger-pointing with evidence. ..."
"... "study social media activity in respect of the events that took place, how news spread, and evaluate how the incident is being perceived" ..."
"... "global investigative solutions" ..."
"... What role did # IntegrityInitiative play in the # Skripal affair? I looked for answers from a brief look at the newly released files. More very much to follow.... ..."
"... "pro-Russia troll accounts" ..."
"... "bombarding the audience with pro-Kremlin propaganda and disinformation relevant to the Skripal case." ..."
"... Another document , dated March 11, 2018 – and titled "Sergei Skripal Affair: What if Russia is Responsible?" – contains a "narrative" ..."
"... These included boycotting the 2018 World Cup, starting campaigns to boycott the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline from Russia to Germany, blocking Russian access to the SWIFT international banking system, and banning "RT TV and Sputnik from operating in the UK." ..."
"... "to publicize what has been happening with their Muslim brethren in Crimea since the Russian invasion [sic]" ..."
"... "threat Russia poses." ..."
"... This would certainly explain the evidence-deficient echo chamber that emerged in the aftermath of Skripal's poisoning ..."
"... One of the more intriguing revelations from the fresh leaks is a document from 2015, in which Victor Madeira of the Institute for Statecraft proposes a series of measures targeting Russia, including mass expulsion of diplomats along the lines of 1971's Operation Foot. ..."
"... "the largest collective expulsion of Russian intelligence officers in history." ..."
"... "Makes you think " ..."
"... The new trove of hacked documents also revealed an unexplained link between the II and Skripal himself – a connection made all the more noteworthy by the group's central role in coordinating an evidence-free campaign to blame and punish Moscow for the alleged nerve-agent attack. A document from July 2018 contains contact details for Pablo Miller, Skripal's MI6 recruiter, handler and (conveniently) neighbor in Salisbury. Miller, it seems, had been invited to a function hosted by the Institute. ..."
"... It was already known that Pablo Miller, the MI6 handler of Sergej Skripal, attended # IntegrityInitiative meetings. There is now more material to draw a connection. It is indeed possible that IfS/II initiated the affair. ..."
"... Ł2,276.80 in July 2018 during the # Skripal # Novichok affair for writing articles on the subjects of poison gas; nerve agents; treatment; nerve agent persistency & # PortonDown @ RTUKproducer 160 1:24 PM - Jan 4, 2019 ..."
"... It's not clear to what degree Miller is or was involved with the group, but his appearance on an Integrity Initiative guest list adds another layer of mystery to a coordinated campaign which sought to impose punishments on Moscow that were drawn up years in advance. ..."
Jan 05, 2019 | www.defenddemocracy.press

The Integrity Initiative, a UK-funded group exposed in leaked files as psyop network, played a key role in monitoring and molding media narratives after the poisoning of double agent Sergei Skripal, newly-dumped documents reveal. Created by the NATO-affiliated, UK-funded Institute for Statecraft in 2015, the Integrity Initiative was unmasked in November after hackers released documents detailing a web of politicians, journalists, military personnel, scientists and academics involved in purportedly fighting "Russian disinformation."

The secretive, government-bankrolled "network of networks" has found itself under scrutiny for smearing UK Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn as a Kremlin stooge – ostensibly as part of its noble crusade against anti-Russian disinformation. Now, new leaks show that the organization played a central role in shaping media narratives after Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were mysteriously poisoned in Salisbury last March.

It's notable that many of the draconian anti-Russia measures that the group advocated as far back as 2015 were swiftly implemented following the Skripal affair – even as London refused to back up its finger-pointing with evidence.

Operation Iris

Days after the Skripals were poisoned, the Institute solicited its services to the Foreign & Commonwealth Office, offering to "study social media activity in respect of the events that took place, how news spread, and evaluate how the incident is being perceived" in a number of countries.

After receiving the government's blessing, the Integrity Initiative (II) launched 'Operation Iris,' enlisting "global investigative solutions" firm Harod Associates to analyze social media activity related to Skripal.

Kit Klarenberg @KitKlarenberg

What role did # IntegrityInitiative play in the # Skripal affair? I looked for answers from a brief look at the newly released files. More very much to follow....

264 people are talking about this Twitter Ads info and privacy

However, Harod's confidential report did more than just parse social media reactions to the Skripal affair: It compiled a list of alleged "pro-Russia troll accounts" accused of "bombarding the audience with pro-Kremlin propaganda and disinformation relevant to the Skripal case."

Among those who found themselves listed as nefarious thought-criminals were Ukrainian-born pianist Valentina Lisitsa, and a gentleman from Kent who goes by Ian56 on Twitter.

Ian56 @Ian56789 · Jan 4, 2019 # IntegrityInitiative "

Top Kremlin Trolls" aka Truth Tellers. Congratulations if you made the list.

https://www. pdf-archive.com/2018/12/28/app endix-o---russian-propaganda-troll-sites-for-monitoring/appendix-o---russian-propaganda-troll-sites-for-monitoring.pdf

Neocon Fascist, al-Qaeda Supporting Treasonous Scumbag @ Benimmo is having a laugh with Ł2m of Taxpayers money. Nimmo should be IN JAIL for Fraud & Treason

Ian56 @Ian56789 # IntegrityInitiative

examples of Logical, Critical Thinking & Objective Analysis by yours truly Ian56.

https://www. pdf-archive.com/2018/12/28/app endix-r---ian56789-example-tweets/appendix-r---ian56789-example-tweets.pdf

They didn't even include my best ones and they didn't show the pic that went with each tweet. I wonder why?

# Skripal # Novichok # FalseFlag pic.twitter.com/Zq8W9iJshk 41 1:39 PM - Jan 4, 2019 Twitter Ads info and privacy

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Moon of Alabama @MoonofA · Jan 4, 2019 @ Ian56789 @ MarkSleboda1 @ Malinka1102 @ ValLisitsa @ NinaByzantina

Folks, you are all noted as "trolls" in some of the files of the new # IntegrityInitiative release

https://www. cyberguerrilla.org/blog/operation -integrity-initiative-british-informational-war-against-all-part-4/ https://www. pdf-archive.com/2018/12/28/app endix-o---russian-propaganda-troll-sites-for-monitoring/appendix-o---russian-propaganda-troll-sites-for-monitoring.pdf https://www. pdf-archive.com/2018/12/28/app endix-p---troll-accounts-mutual-connections-graph/appendix-p---troll-accounts-mutual-connections-graph.pdf https://www. pdf-archive.com/2018/12/28/app endix-q---troll-geolocation-graph/appendix-q---troll-geolocation-graph.pdf

Operation 'Integrity Initiative': British informational war against all. Part 4

Greetings! We are Anonymous.We have warned the UK government that it must conduct an honest and transparent investigation into the activity of the Integrity Initiative and the Institute for Statec cyberguerrilla.org

Ruslana Boshirova @ValLisitsa

Wanna see something funny?

"The Insider" - the same "Insider", that was credited by Bellingcat with "outing Boshirov and Petrovas GRU agents" - has investigated and found me guilty of passing Putin orders to French yellow jackets. I kid you not.

https:// twitter.com/Antifake_Russi a/status/1073112488072437760?s=19 Antifake @Antifake_Russia СМИ выдали за манифест "желтых жилетов" твиты украинской пианистки с ником "Руслана Боширова" https:// theins.ru/antifake/131804 116 3:21 PM - Jan 4, 2019 Twitter Ads info and privacy

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Pushing a narrative

Another document , dated March 11, 2018 – and titled "Sergei Skripal Affair: What if Russia is Responsible?" – contains a "narrative" of the Skripal incident, which blames Russia and President Vladimir Putin personally, as well as containing a number of recommended actions.

These included boycotting the 2018 World Cup, starting campaigns to boycott the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline from Russia to Germany, blocking Russian access to the SWIFT international banking system, and banning "RT TV and Sputnik from operating in the UK."

Other suggestions included propaganda directed at British Muslims "to publicize what has been happening with their Muslim brethren in Crimea since the Russian invasion [sic]" and getting members of parliament to publicize the "threat Russia poses." It's not clear who the document was drawn up for, but it may have been provided to II-affiliated journalists in the UK and other countries.

This would certainly explain the evidence-deficient echo chamber that emerged in the aftermath of Skripal's poisoning – which the UK and its allies unanimously blamed on Moscow.

Ahead of its time?

One of the more intriguing revelations from the fresh leaks is a document from 2015, in which Victor Madeira of the Institute for Statecraft proposes a series of measures targeting Russia, including mass expulsion of diplomats along the lines of 1971's Operation Foot.

Coincidentally, more than 100 Russian diplomats were expelled from 20 Western countries in an apparently show of solidarity with the UK following the Skripal attack. At the time, UK Prime Minister Theresa May welcomed what she said was "the largest collective expulsion of Russian intelligence officers in history."

Former MP George Galloway noted that the documents, written long before the Salisbury events, also call for the arrest of RT and Sputnik contributors (such as himself), adding: "Makes you think "

George Galloway ✔ @georgegalloway

So: # IntegrityInitiative funded by the British Govt called for the arrest of people like me like @ afshinrattansi @ JohnWight1 @ NeilClark66 et al in the event of an "incident" like the # Skripal affair.

Written incidentally before the # Salisbury events. Makes you think...

@ RT_com 688 12:53 PM - Jan 4, 2019 Twitter Ads info and privacy

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A curious connection

The new trove of hacked documents also revealed an unexplained link between the II and Skripal himself – a connection made all the more noteworthy by the group's central role in coordinating an evidence-free campaign to blame and punish Moscow for the alleged nerve-agent attack. A document from July 2018 contains contact details for Pablo Miller, Skripal's MI6 recruiter, handler and (conveniently) neighbor in Salisbury. Miller, it seems, had been invited to a function hosted by the Institute.

Moon of Alabama @MoonofA

It was already known that Pablo Miller, the MI6 handler of Sergej Skripal, attended # IntegrityInitiative meetings. There is now more material to draw a connection. It is indeed possible that IfS/II initiated the affair.

# SergeiSkripal # Disinformation # Propaganda # InformationWar 283 2:38 PM - Jan 4, 2019 Twitter Ads info and privacy

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Fvnk @WhatTheFvnk

EXPLOSIVE: @ DanKaszeta of @ Strongpoint_UK invoiced @ InitIntegrity # IntegrityInitiative

Ł2,276.80 in July 2018 during the # Skripal # Novichok affair for writing articles on the subjects of poison gas; nerve agents; treatment; nerve agent persistency & # PortonDown @ RTUKproducer 160 1:24 PM - Jan 4, 2019

188 people are talking about this Twitter Ads info and privacy

It's not clear to what degree Miller is or was involved with the group, but his appearance on an Integrity Initiative guest list adds another layer of mystery to a coordinated campaign which sought to impose punishments on Moscow that were drawn up years in advance.

Read also:

[Jan 08, 2019] No, wealth isn t created at the top. It is merely devoured there by Rutger Bregman

Highly recommended!
Financialization is a new type of racket...
Notable quotes:
"... Bankers, pharmaceutical giants, Google, Facebook ... a new breed of rentiers are at the very top of the pyramid and they're sucking the rest of us dry @rcbregman ..."
"... 'A big part of the modern banking sector is essentially a giant tapeworm gorging on a sick body' ..."
"... This piece is about one of the biggest taboos of our times. About a truth that is seldom acknowledged, and yet – on reflection – cannot be denied. The truth that we are living in an inverse welfare state. These days, politicians from the left to the right assume that most wealth is created at the top. By the visionaries, by the job creators, and by the people who have "made it". By the go-getters oozing talent and entrepreneurialism that are helping to advance the whole world. ..."
"... To understand why, we need to recognise that there are two ways of making money. The first is what most of us do: work. That means tapping into our knowledge and know-how (our "human capital" in economic terms) to create something new, whether that's a takeout app, a wedding cake, a stylish updo, or a perfectly poured pint. To work is to create. Ergo, to work is to create new wealth. ..."
"... But there is also a second way to make money. That's the rentier way : by leveraging control over something that already exists, such as land, knowledge, or money, to increase your wealth. You produce nothing, yet profit nonetheless. By definition, the rentier makes his living at others' expense, using his power to claim economic benefit. ..."
"... For those who know their history, the term "rentier" conjures associations with heirs to estates, such as the 19th century's large class of useless rentiers, well-described by the French economist Thomas Piketty . These days, that class is making a comeback. (Ironically, however, conservative politicians adamantly defend the rentier's right to lounge around, deeming inheritance tax to be the height of unfairness.) But there are also other ways of rent-seeking. From Wall Street to Silicon Valley , from big pharma to the lobby machines in Washington and Westminster, zoom in and you'll see rentiers everywhere. ..."
"... It may take quite a mental leap to see our economy as a system that shows solidarity with the rich rather than the poor. So I'll start with the clearest illustration of modern freeloaders at the top: bankers. Studies conducted by the International Monetary Fund and the Bank for International Settlements – not exactly leftist thinktanks – have revealed that much of the financial sector has become downright parasitic. How instead of creating wealth, they gobble it up whole. ..."
"... In other words, a big part of the modern banking sector is essentially a giant tapeworm gorging on a sick body. It's not creating anything new, merely sucking others dry. Bankers have found a hundred and one ways to accomplish this. The basic mechanism, however, is always the same: offer loans like it's going out of style, which in turn inflates the price of things like houses and shares, then earn a tidy percentage off those overblown prices (in the form of interest, commissions, brokerage fees, or what have you), and if the shit hits the fan, let Uncle Sam mop it up. ..."
"... Bankers are the most obvious class of closet freeloaders, but they are certainly not alone. Many a lawyer and an accountant wields a similar revenue model. Take tax evasion . Untold hardworking, academically degreed professionals make a good living at the expense of the populations of other countries. Or take the tide of privatisations over the past three decades, which have been all but a carte blanche for rentiers. One of the richest people in the world, Carlos Slim , earned his millions by obtaining a monopoly of the Mexican telecom market and then hiking prices sky high. The same goes for the Russian oligarchs who rose after the Berlin Wall fell , who bought up valuable state-owned assets for song to live off the rent. ..."
"... Even paragons of modern progress like Apple, Amazon, Google , Facebook, Uber and Airbnb are woven from the fabric of rentierism. Firstly, because they owe their existence to government discoveries and inventions (every sliver of fundamental technology in the iPhone, from the internet to batteries and from touchscreens to voice recognition, was invented by researchers on the government payroll). And second, because they tie themselves into knots to avoid paying taxes, retaining countless bankers, lawyers, and lobbyists for this very purpose. ..."
"... Even more important, many of these companies function as "natural monopolies", operating in a positive feedback loop of increasing growth and value as more and more people contribute free content to their platforms. Companies like this are incredibly difficult to compete with, because as they grow bigger, they only get stronger. ..."
"... Most of Mark Zuckerberg's income is just rent collected off the millions of picture and video posts that we give away daily for free. And sure, we have fun doing it. But we also have no alternative – after all, everybody is on Facebook these days. Zuckerberg has a website that advertisers are clamouring to get onto, and that doesn't come cheap. Don't be fooled by endearing pilots with free internet in Zambia. Stripped down to essentials, it's an ordinary ad agency. In fact, in 2015 Google and Facebook pocketed an astounding 64% of all online ad revenue in the US. ..."
"... Rentierism is, in essence, a question of power. That the Sun King Louis XIV was able to exploit millions was purely because he had the biggest army in Europe. It's no different for the modern rentier. He's got the law, politicians and journalists squarely in his court. That's why bankers get fined peanuts for preposterous fraud, while a mother on government assistance gets penalised within an inch of her life if she checks the wrong box. ..."
"... The biggest tragedy of all, however, is that the rentier economy is gobbling up society's best and brightest. Where once upon a time Ivy League graduates chose careers in science, public service or education, these days they are more likely to opt for banks, law firms, or trumped up ad agencies like Google and Facebook. When you think about it, it's insane. We are forking over billions in taxes to help our brightest minds on and up the corporate ladder so they can learn how to score ever more outrageous handouts. ..."
"... One thing is certain: countries where rentiers gain the upper hand gradually fall into decline. Just look at the Roman Empire. Or Venice in the 15th century. Look at the Dutch Republic in the 18th century. Like a parasite stunts a child's growth, so the rentier drains a country of its vitality. ..."
Mar 30, 2017 | www.theguardian.com

Rutger Bregman

Bankers, pharmaceutical giants, Google, Facebook ... a new breed of rentiers are at the very top of the pyramid and they're sucking the rest of us dry @rcbregman

Comments 890

'A big part of the modern banking sector is essentially a giant tapeworm gorging on a sick body'.

This piece is about one of the biggest taboos of our times. About a truth that is seldom acknowledged, and yet – on reflection – cannot be denied. The truth that we are living in an inverse welfare state. These days, politicians from the left to the right assume that most wealth is created at the top. By the visionaries, by the job creators, and by the people who have "made it". By the go-getters oozing talent and entrepreneurialism that are helping to advance the whole world.

Now, we may disagree about the extent to which success deserves to be rewarded – the philosophy of the left is that the strongest shoulders should bear the heaviest burden, while the right fears high taxes will blunt enterprise – but across the spectrum virtually all agree that wealth is created primarily at the top.

So entrenched is this assumption that it's even embedded in our language. When economists talk about "productivity", what they really mean is the size of your paycheck. And when we use terms like " welfare state ", "redistribution" and "solidarity", we're implicitly subscribing to the view that there are two strata: the makers and the takers, the producers and the couch potatoes, the hardworking citizens – and everybody else.

In reality, it is precisely the other way around. In reality, it is the waste collectors, the nurses, and the cleaners whose shoulders are supporting the apex of the pyramid. They are the true mechanism of social solidarity. Meanwhile, a growing share of those we hail as "successful" and "innovative" are earning their wealth at the expense of others. The people getting the biggest handouts are not down around the bottom, but at the very top. Yet their perilous dependence on others goes unseen. Almost no one talks about it. Even for politicians on the left, it's a non-issue.

To understand why, we need to recognise that there are two ways of making money. The first is what most of us do: work. That means tapping into our knowledge and know-how (our "human capital" in economic terms) to create something new, whether that's a takeout app, a wedding cake, a stylish updo, or a perfectly poured pint. To work is to create. Ergo, to work is to create new wealth.

But there is also a second way to make money. That's the rentier way : by leveraging control over something that already exists, such as land, knowledge, or money, to increase your wealth. You produce nothing, yet profit nonetheless. By definition, the rentier makes his living at others' expense, using his power to claim economic benefit.

'From Wall Street to Silicon Valley, zoom in and you'll see rentiers everywhere.'

For those who know their history, the term "rentier" conjures associations with heirs to estates, such as the 19th century's large class of useless rentiers, well-described by the French economist Thomas Piketty . These days, that class is making a comeback. (Ironically, however, conservative politicians adamantly defend the rentier's right to lounge around, deeming inheritance tax to be the height of unfairness.) But there are also other ways of rent-seeking. From Wall Street to Silicon Valley , from big pharma to the lobby machines in Washington and Westminster, zoom in and you'll see rentiers everywhere.

There is no longer a sharp dividing line between working and rentiering. In fact, the modern-day rentier often works damn hard. Countless people in the financial sector, for example, apply great ingenuity and effort to amass "rent" on their wealth. Even the big innovations of our age – businesses like Facebook and Uber – are interested mainly in expanding the rentier economy. The problem with most rich people therefore is not that they are coach potatoes. Many a CEO toils 80 hours a week to multiply his allowance. It's hardly surprising, then, that they feel wholly entitled to their wealth.

It may take quite a mental leap to see our economy as a system that shows solidarity with the rich rather than the poor. So I'll start with the clearest illustration of modern freeloaders at the top: bankers. Studies conducted by the International Monetary Fund and the Bank for International Settlements – not exactly leftist thinktanks – have revealed that much of the financial sector has become downright parasitic. How instead of creating wealth, they gobble it up whole.

Don't get me wrong. Banks can help to gauge risks and get money where it is needed, both of which are vital to a well-functioning economy. But consider this: economists tell us that the optimum level of total private-sector debt is 100% of GDP. Based on this equation, if the financial sector only grows, it won't equal more wealth, but less. So here's the bad news. In the United Kingdom, private-sector debt is now at 157.5% . In the United States, the figure is 188.8% .

In other words, a big part of the modern banking sector is essentially a giant tapeworm gorging on a sick body. It's not creating anything new, merely sucking others dry. Bankers have found a hundred and one ways to accomplish this. The basic mechanism, however, is always the same: offer loans like it's going out of style, which in turn inflates the price of things like houses and shares, then earn a tidy percentage off those overblown prices (in the form of interest, commissions, brokerage fees, or what have you), and if the shit hits the fan, let Uncle Sam mop it up.

The financial innovation concocted by all the math whizzes working in modern banking (instead of at universities or companies that contribute to real prosperity) basically boils down to maximizing the total amount of debt. And debt, of course, is a means of earning rent. So for those who believe that pay ought to be proportionate to the value of work, the conclusion we have to draw is that many bankers should be earning a negative salary; a fine, if you will, for destroying more wealth than they create.

Bankers are the most obvious class of closet freeloaders, but they are certainly not alone. Many a lawyer and an accountant wields a similar revenue model. Take tax evasion . Untold hardworking, academically degreed professionals make a good living at the expense of the populations of other countries. Or take the tide of privatisations over the past three decades, which have been all but a carte blanche for rentiers. One of the richest people in the world, Carlos Slim , earned his millions by obtaining a monopoly of the Mexican telecom market and then hiking prices sky high. The same goes for the Russian oligarchs who rose after the Berlin Wall fell , who bought up valuable state-owned assets for song to live off the rent.

But here comes the rub. Most rentiers are not as easily identified as the greedy banker or manager. Many are disguised. On the face of it, they look like industrious folks, because for part of the time they really are doing something worthwhile. Precisely that makes us overlook their massive rent-seeking.

Take the pharmaceutical industry. Companies like GlaxoSmithKline and Pfizer regularly unveil new drugs, yet most real medical breakthroughs are made quietly at government-subsidised labs. Private companies mostly manufacture medications that resemble what we've already got. They get it patented and, with a hefty dose of marketing, a legion of lawyers, and a strong lobby, can live off the profits for years. In other words, the vast revenues of the pharmaceutical industry are the result of a tiny pinch of innovation and fistfuls of rent.

Even paragons of modern progress like Apple, Amazon, Google , Facebook, Uber and Airbnb are woven from the fabric of rentierism. Firstly, because they owe their existence to government discoveries and inventions (every sliver of fundamental technology in the iPhone, from the internet to batteries and from touchscreens to voice recognition, was invented by researchers on the government payroll). And second, because they tie themselves into knots to avoid paying taxes, retaining countless bankers, lawyers, and lobbyists for this very purpose.

Even more important, many of these companies function as "natural monopolies", operating in a positive feedback loop of increasing growth and value as more and more people contribute free content to their platforms. Companies like this are incredibly difficult to compete with, because as they grow bigger, they only get stronger.

Aptly characterising this "platform capitalism" in an article, Tom Goodwin writes : "Uber, the world's largest taxi company, owns no vehicles. Facebook, the world's most popular media owner, creates no content. Alibaba, the most valuable retailer, has no inventory. And Airbnb, the world's largest accommodation provider, owns no real estate."

Facebook Twitter Pinterest 'Every sliver of fundamental technology in the iPhone, from the internet to batteries and from touchscreens to voice recognition, was invented by researchers on the government payroll.' Photograph: Regis Duvignau/Reuters

So what do these companies own? A platform. A platform that lots and lots of people want to use. Why? First and foremost, because they're cool and they're fun – and in that respect, they do offer something of value. However, the main reason why we're all happy to hand over free content to Facebook is because all of our friends are on Facebook too, because their friends are on Facebook because their friends are on Facebook.

Most of Mark Zuckerberg's income is just rent collected off the millions of picture and video posts that we give away daily for free. And sure, we have fun doing it. But we also have no alternative – after all, everybody is on Facebook these days. Zuckerberg has a website that advertisers are clamouring to get onto, and that doesn't come cheap. Don't be fooled by endearing pilots with free internet in Zambia. Stripped down to essentials, it's an ordinary ad agency. In fact, in 2015 Google and Facebook pocketed an astounding 64% of all online ad revenue in the US.

But don't Google and Facebook make anything useful at all? Sure they do. The irony, however, is that their best innovations only make the rentier economy even bigger. They employ scores of programmers to create new algorithms so that we'll all click on more and more ads. Uber has usurped the whole taxi sector just as Airbnb has upended the hotel industry and Amazon has overrun the book trade. The bigger such platforms grow the more powerful they become, enabling the lords of these digital feudalities to demand more and more rent.

Think back a minute to the definition of a rentier: someone who uses their control over something that already exists in order to increase their own wealth. The feudal lord of medieval times did that by building a tollgate along a road and making everybody who passed by pay. Today's tech giants are doing basically the same thing, but transposed to the digital highway. Using technology funded by taxpayers, they build tollgates between you and other people's free content and all the while pay almost no tax on their earnings.

This is the so-called innovation that has Silicon Valley gurus in raptures: ever bigger platforms that claim ever bigger handouts. So why do we accept this? Why does most of the population work itself to the bone to support these rentiers?

I think there are two answers. Firstly, the modern rentier knows to keep a low profile. There was a time when everybody knew who was freeloading. The king, the church, and the aristocrats controlled almost all the land and made peasants pay dearly to farm it. But in the modern economy, making rentierism work is a great deal more complicated. How many people can explain a credit default swap , or a collateralised debt obligation ? Or the revenue model behind those cute Google Doodles? And don't the folks on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley work themselves to the bone, too? Well then, they must be doing something useful, right?

Maybe not. The typical workday of Goldman Sachs' CEO may be worlds away from that of King Louis XIV, but their revenue models both essentially revolve around obtaining the biggest possible handouts. "The world's most powerful investment bank," wrote the journalist Matt Taibbi about Goldman Sachs , "is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money."

But far from squids and vampires, the average rich freeloader manages to masquerade quite successfully as a decent hard worker. He goes to great lengths to present himself as a "job creator" and an "investor" who "earns" his income by virtue of his high "productivity". Most economists, journalists, and politicians from left to right are quite happy to swallow this story. Time and again language is twisted around to cloak funneling and exploitation as creation and generation.

However, it would be wrong to think that all this is part of some ingenious conspiracy. Many modern rentiers have convinced even themselves that they are bona fide value creators. When current Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein was asked about the purpose of his job, his straight-faced answer was that he is " doing God's work ". The Sun King would have approved.

The second thing that keeps rentiers safe is even more insidious. We're all wannabe rentiers. They have made millions of people complicit in their revenue model. Consider this: What are our financial sector's two biggest cash cows? Answer: the housing market and pensions. Both are markets in which many of us are deeply invested.

Recent decades have seen more and more people contract debts to buy a home, and naturally it's in their interest if house prices continue to scale new heights (read: burst bubble upon bubble). The same goes for pensions. Over the past few decades we've all scrimped and saved up a mountainous pension piggy bank. Now pension funds are under immense pressure to ally with the biggest exploiters in order to ensure they pay out enough to please their investors.

The fact of the matter is that feudalism has been democratised. To a lesser or greater extent, we are all depending on handouts. En masse, we have been made complicit in this exploitation by the rentier elite, resulting in a political covenant between the rich rent-seekers and the homeowners and retirees.

Don't get me wrong, most homeowners and retirees are not benefiting from this situation. On the contrary, the banks are bleeding them far beyond the extent to which they themselves profit from their houses and pensions. Still, it's hard to point fingers at a kleptomaniac when you have sticky fingers too.

So why is this happening? The answer can be summed up in three little words: Because it can.

Rentierism is, in essence, a question of power. That the Sun King Louis XIV was able to exploit millions was purely because he had the biggest army in Europe. It's no different for the modern rentier. He's got the law, politicians and journalists squarely in his court. That's why bankers get fined peanuts for preposterous fraud, while a mother on government assistance gets penalised within an inch of her life if she checks the wrong box.

The biggest tragedy of all, however, is that the rentier economy is gobbling up society's best and brightest. Where once upon a time Ivy League graduates chose careers in science, public service or education, these days they are more likely to opt for banks, law firms, or trumped up ad agencies like Google and Facebook. When you think about it, it's insane. We are forking over billions in taxes to help our brightest minds on and up the corporate ladder so they can learn how to score ever more outrageous handouts.

One thing is certain: countries where rentiers gain the upper hand gradually fall into decline. Just look at the Roman Empire. Or Venice in the 15th century. Look at the Dutch Republic in the 18th century. Like a parasite stunts a child's growth, so the rentier drains a country of its vitality.

What innovation remains in a rentier economy is mostly just concerned with further bolstering that very same economy. This may explain why the big dreams of the 1970s, like flying cars, curing cancer, and colonising Mars, have yet to be realised, while bankers and ad-makers have at their fingertips technologies a thousand times more powerful.

Yet it doesn't have to be this way. Tollgates can be torn down, financial products can be banned, tax havens dismantled, lobbies tamed, and patents rejected. Higher taxes on the ultra-rich can make rentierism less attractive, precisely because society's biggest freeloaders are at the very top of the pyramid. And we can more fairly distribute our earnings on land, oil, and innovation through a system of, say, employee shares, or a universal basic income .

But such a revolution will require a wholly different narrative about the origins of our wealth. It will require ditching the old-fashioned faith in "solidarity" with a miserable underclass that deserves to be borne aloft on the market-level salaried shoulders of society's strongest. All we need to do is to give real hard-working people what they deserve.

And, yes, by that I mean the waste collectors, the nurses, the cleaners – theirs are the shoulders that carry us all.

• Pre-order Utopia for Realists and How Can We Get There by Rutger Bregman

• Translated from the original Dutch by Elizabeth Manton

See also:

[Jan 06, 2019] British elite fantasy of again ruling the world (with American and Zionist aid) has led to a series of catastrophic blunders and overreaches in both foreign and domestic policies.

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... If I had the talent and energy, I might write a sequel to the 'Quiet American', to be entitled 'The Noisy Englishmen.' It would feature a series of inept conspiracies, involving ludicrous means used in support of preposterous ends, necessitating one ham-fisted cover-up after another. ..."
"... The central characters might be loosely based on Christopher Steele, Matt Tait, Eliot Higgins, and our former UN Ambassador Matthew Rycroft, author of the July 2002 Downing Street memorandum, in which Sir Richard Dearlove was quoted explaining how, in Washington, 'the intelligence and the facts were being fixed around the policy.' ..."
"... There is a 1990's British historian (whose name I've been trying to rediscover without success) who wrote a sunny book saying Britain should return to its imperialist ways to bring light to the dark and repressive world we live in. It was a great hit with Blair and his henchmen. Blair used its arguments in his notorious 1999 Chicago neo-conservative/liberal interventionist speech. ..."
"... I'd draw attention to "The Brideshead Revisited" generation especially at Oxford in the early 80's. Unashamedly celebrating their wealth and upper middle class privately-educated backgrounds, they viewed themselves as a gilded, golden generation, preened in narcissism, adept at networking and self-promotion. They are the generation now in power - politically, financially, in the deep state. Their fantasy of again ruling the world (with American and Zionist aid) has led to a series of catastrophic blunders and overreaches in both foreign and domestic policies. ..."
"... Our economic power - the base of any imperial power - is shrinking daily. All the Oxfordites (chief amongst them Theresa May, Boris Johnson and Michael Gove) are still playing Oxford Union/PPE games and stabbing each other joyously in the back as though there's no tomorrow. It most ressembles the halluciogenic decadence of the court of late Imperial Rome. ..."
Jan 06, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

Pat Lang Mod -> David Habakkuk , 2 months ago

After contemplating the likely intelligence and propaganda efforts of HMG over the last 15 years or so I am puzzled as to motivation. Why? Why? The UK is now a regional power for which events in places like Syria would seem to have little to do with the welfare of Britain. Why? I suppose that the same question can be asked for the US and I have.

In re "Our man in Havana" I think there are many issues raised in the work that apply directly to the trade of espionage.

David Habakkuk -> Pat Lang , 2 months ago
Colonel Lang,

The question why? is a very interesting but also very dispiriting one, but also one which it is quite hard to get one's head round. I hope to have something more coherent to say about it.

Among many reasons, however, there has been a kind of intellectual disintegration.

If I had the talent and energy, I might write a sequel to the 'Quiet American', to be entitled 'The Noisy Englishmen.' It would feature a series of inept conspiracies, involving ludicrous means used in support of preposterous ends, necessitating one ham-fisted cover-up after another.

The central characters might be loosely based on Christopher Steele, Matt Tait, Eliot Higgins, and our former UN Ambassador Matthew Rycroft, author of the July 2002 Downing Street memorandum, in which Sir Richard Dearlove was quoted explaining how, in Washington, 'the intelligence and the facts were being fixed around the policy.'

Subsequently, of course, he set about colluding in the process. And, sixteen years later, Dearlove is still at it, with 'Russiagate' -- and the product being actually accepted much more uncritically by the MSM than it was then.

And that is one of the problems -- nobody any longer pays any penalty for failure, or indeed feels any sense of shame about it..

johnf -> David Habakkuk , 2 months ago
DH

I agree with this.

There is a 1990's British historian (whose name I've been trying to rediscover without success) who wrote a sunny book saying Britain should return to its imperialist ways to bring light to the dark and repressive world we live in. It was a great hit with Blair and his henchmen. Blair used its arguments in his notorious 1999 Chicago neo-conservative/liberal interventionist speech.

As the Colonel eloquently asks:

"I am puzzled as to motivation. Why? Why? The UK is now a regional power for which events in places like Syria would seem to have little todo with the welfare of Britain. Why?"

I'd draw attention to "The Brideshead Revisited" generation especially at Oxford in the early 80's. Unashamedly celebrating their wealth and upper middle class privately-educated backgrounds, they viewed themselves as a gilded, golden generation, preened in narcissism, adept at networking and self-promotion. They are the generation now in power - politically, financially, in the deep state. Their fantasy of again ruling the world (with American and Zionist aid) has led to a series of catastrophic blunders and overreaches in both foreign and domestic policies.

Our economic power - the base of any imperial power - is shrinking daily. All the Oxfordites (chief amongst them Theresa May, Boris Johnson and Michael Gove) are still playing Oxford Union/PPE games and stabbing each other joyously in the back as though there's no tomorrow. It most ressembles the halluciogenic decadence of the court of late Imperial Rome.

(I don't include the Maurice Cowling-ites in this fandango because they strike me as more Little Englanders. Though Peterhouse is of course, shamefully, the HQ of the Henry Jackson Society).

[Jan 02, 2019] Russian bots - How An Anti-Russian Lobby Creates Fake News

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Atlantic Council ..."
"... Alliance for Securing Democracy. ..."
"... Alliance for Securing Democracy ..."
"... That's pretty rich, coming from a country and from people who actually genuinely, and in proven ways, have subverted democracy in Europe since the late 1940s - Italy being one of the clearest cases. ..."
"... For the life of me I cannot figure why Americans want a war/conflict with Russia. I can't believe it has to do with the economy. There's got to be a far better nefarious reason. Even during the real cold war we tried to avoid conflict. Absolute insanity. ..."
"... American media has graduated from simply repeating the lies of "unnamed government sources" to repeating the lies of any organization unofficially blessed by the powers that be. ..."
"... In that The Narrative is tightly controlled in the corporate media, not matter how strong the proofs or arguments about the falsity of these propaganda campaigns are, little or no circulation of those proofs or arguments wlll reach the general public. ..."
"... The thing that bothers me, is the fact that the MIC Globalists don't care what we think or how poor their deceptions are. ..."
"... The cleverest trick used in propaganda against a specific country is to accuse it of what the accuser itself is doing. ..."
"... I've always put it down to the Washington Establishment having a severe case of psychological projection. ..."
"... The warmongering is not intended to make any sense - not many people are trained in critical thinking and logic, and even when they are, they can be swamped by their own emotions or other people's emotions. ..."
"... Propaganda is intended to appeal to people's emotions and fears. You can try reading works by Edward Bernays - "Crystallizing Public Opinion" (1923) and "Propaganda" (1928) - to see how he uses his uncle Sigmund Freud's theories of the mind to create strategies for manipulating public opinion. ..."
"... The American Security State needs enemies to exist, otherwise there's no need for the "security" which translates into big bucks for the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Media Complex. They can't agree on the ranking of the enemies: North Korea is a threat to the world! Iran is....! Russia is...! China is....! But the threats are there, and they are pure evil (TPTB contend). ..."
"... Sad but definitely correct. The first casualty of war is the truth. It's dead in the USA and allies. Therefore, they're at war with Russia and China. If Russia is down, China will be dealt with. ..."
"... Some years ago, I noticed the American media and politicians were sort of going soft (actually mushy) in the brain department, but I was told not to be so judgemental. As the months went by, I saw more and more people saying "they have gone nuts". So, it turns out I am not alone after all. ..."
"... That madness comes from having no behavioural limits, no references outside of your own opinion but groupthink, and manipulating the language to suit your ambitions (the Orwellism of the US media has been repeatedly pointed at). Simply put, you don't know anymore what's what outside of the narrative your group pushes, you go nuts. The manipulators ends up caught in their lies. All the more when they makes money out of it, which would be the case of all those think tanks and media. ..."
"... Honestly, the story of democracy (by capitalist/liberal class) is a grand BS, to be modest. The only thing what was truthful, paradoxically, is who is "lesser evil" of two. Or the Bigger one in unrestrained capitalism, savage and monopoly, predatory and a fascists one. ..."
"... War or the threat of war is needed to distract attention from rapidly devolving societal bonds and immense economic inequality. ..."
"... The US is progressing toward a fascist police state; therefore, Russia is said to be a horrible dictatorship run by Putin. The US traditionally meddles in elections around the world, including Russia; therefore, the Russians are said to meddle in US elections. The US is the most aggressive country on the planet, occupying and bombing dozens of countries; therefore, the Russians are accused of "aggression." And so on ..."
"... The US actually spends $75 billion per year---more than Russia's entire $69 billion defense budget---spying on and meddling in the politics of virtually every nation on earth. An outfit within NSA called Tailored Access Operations (TAO) has a multi-billion annual budget and does nothing put troll the global internet and does so with highly educated, highly paid professionals, not $4 per hour keyboard jockeys." ..."
"... Zbignew Brzezenski explained in his 1997 book "The Grand Chessboard" why global hegemony required taking control over Russia (and how to do it, which boils down to taking the other chess pieces off the board (Iraq/Ukraine/etc. and then pulling off a "color revolution," coup or military conquest). ..."
"... Msm, bellingcat and other think tanks - they push their anti Russian racism too far making a large section of westerners just tired of their hysteria. Exposing their own racism and paranoia. ..."
"... Globalization . . . is a program to create private corporate rights to trade, invest, lend or borrow money and buy and own property anywhere in the world without much hindrance by national governments. It would bar governments from most of the common methods of helping or protecting their national industries and employment. It is a winners' program promoted chiefly by some business interests, governments and neoclassical economists in Europe and the United States. ..."
"... One of its purposes is to intensify international competition for jobs. Together with other Right policies it is likely to maintain some unemployment in the rich countries and reduce the wage rates of their lower-paid workers, and reduce the proportion of secure employment. Hugh Stretton, Economics: A New Introduction ..."
"... The anti-russian think tanks, msm, bellingcat etc push this too much, making them look stupid. ..."
"... Assange: "Regardless of whether IRA's activities were audience building through pandering to communities or whether a hare-brained Russian government plan to "heighten the differences" existed, its activities are clearly strategically insignificant compared to the other forces at play." ..."
Feb 20, 2018J | www.moonofalabama.org

The U.S. mainstream media are going nuts. They now make up and report stories based on the uncritical acceptance of an algorithm they do not want to understand and which is known to produce fake results.

See for example these three stories:

From the last link:

SAN FRANCISCO -- One hour after news broke about the school shooting in Florida last week, Twitter accounts suspected of having links to Russia released hundreds of posts taking up the gun control debate.

The accounts addressed the news with the speed of a cable news network. Some adopted the hashtag #guncontrolnow. Others used #gunreformnow and #Parklandshooting. Earlier on Wednesday, before the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., many of those accounts had been focused on the investigation by the special counsel Robert S. Mueller III into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election.

In other words - the "Twitter accounts suspected of having links to Russia" were following the current news just as cable news networks do. When a new sensational event happened they immediately jumped onto it. But the NYT authors go to length to claim that there is some nefarious Russian scheme behind this that uses automated accounts to spread divisive issues.

Those claims are based on this propaganda project:

Last year, the Alliance for Securing Democracy, in conjunction with the German Marshall Fund, a public policy research group in Washington, created a website that tracks hundreds of Twitter accounts of human users and suspected bots that they have linked to a Russian influence campaign.

The "Alliance for Securing Democracy" is run by military lobbyists, CIA minions and neo-conservative propagandists. Its claimed task is:

... to publicly document and expose Vladimir Putin's ongoing efforts to subvert democracy in the United States and Europe.

There is no evidence that Vladimir Putin ever made or makes such efforts.

The ASD "Hamilton 68" website shows graphics with rankings of "top items" and "trending items" allegedly used by Russian bots or influence agents. There is nothing complicate behind it. It simply tracks the tweets of 600 Twitter users and aggregates the hashtags they use. It does not say which Twitter accounts its algorithms follows. It claims that the 600 were selected by one of three criteria: 1. People who often tweet news that also appears on RT (Russia Today) and Sputnik News, two general news sites sponsored by the Russian government; 2. People who "openly profess to be pro-Russian"; 3. accounts that "appear to use automation" to boost the same themes that people in group 1 and 2 tweet about.

Nowhere does the group say how many of the 600 accounts it claims to track belong to which group. Are their 10 assumed bots or 590 in the surveyed 600 accounts? And how please does one "openly profess" to be pro-Russian? We don't know and the ASD won't say.

On December 25 2017 the "Russian influence" agents or bots who - according to NYT - want to sow divisiveness and subvert democracy, wished everyone a #MerryChristmas.


bigger

The real method the Hamilton 68 group used to select the 600 accounts it tracks is unknown. The group does not say or show how it made it up. Despite that the NYT reporters, Sheera Frenkel and Daisuke Wakabayashi, continue with the false assumptions that most or all of these accounts are automated, have something to do with Russia and are presumably nefarious:

Russian-linked bots have rallied around other divisive issues, often ones that President Trump has tweeted about. They promoted Twitter hashtags like #boycottnfl, #standforouranthem and #takeaknee after some National Football League players started kneeling during the national anthem to protest racial injustice.

The automated Twitter accounts helped popularize the #releasethememo hashtag , ...

The Daily Beast reported earlier that the last claim is definitely false :

Twitter's internal analysis has thus far found that authentic American accounts, and not Russian imposters or automated bots, are driving #ReleaseTheMemo . There are no preliminary indications that the Twitter activity either driving the hashtag or engaging with it is either predominantly Russian.

The same is presumably true for the other hashtags.

The Dutch IT expert and blogger Marcel van den Berg was wondering how Dutch keywords and hashtags showed up on the Hamilton 68 "Russian bots" dashboard. He found ( Dutch , English auto translation) that the dashboard is a total fraud:

In recent weeks, I have been keeping a close eye on Hamilton 68. Every time a Dutch hashtag was shown on the website, I made a screenshot. Then I noted what was playing at that moment and I watched the Tweets with this hashtag. Again I could not find any Tweet that seemed to be from a Russian troll.

In all cases, the hash tags that Hamilton 68 reported were trending topics in the Netherlands . In all cases there was much to do around the subject of the hashtag in the Netherlands. Many people were angry or shared their opinion on the subject on Twitter. And even if there were a few tweets with Russian connections between them, the effect is zero. Because they do not stand out among the many other, authentic Tweets.

Van den Berg lists a dozen examples he analyzed in depth.

The anti-Russian Bellingcat group around couch blogger Eliot Higgins is sponsored by the NATO propaganda shop Atlantic Council . It sniffs through open source stuff to blame Russia or Syria wherever possible. Bellingcat was recently a victim of the "Russian bots" - or rather of the ASD website. On February 10 the hashtag #bellingcat trended to rank 2 of the dashboard.


bigger

Bellingcat was thus, according to the Hamilton 68 claims, under assault by hordes of nefarious Russian government sponsored bots.

The Bellingcat folks looked into the issue and found that only six people on Twitter, none of them an automated account , had used the #bellingcat hashtag in the last 48 hours. Some of the six may have opinions that may be "pro-Russian", but as Higgins himself says :

[I]n my opinion, it's extremely unlikely the people listed are Russian agents

The pro-NATO propaganda shop Bellingcat thus debunked the pro-NATO propaganda shop Alliance for Securing Democracy.

The fraudsters who created the Hamilton 68 crap seem to have filled their database with rather normal people from all over the world who's opinions they personally dislike. Those then are the "Russian bots" who spread "Russian influence" and divisiveness.

Moreover - what is the value of its information when six normal people out of millions of active Twitter users can push a hashtag with a handful of tweets to the top of the dashboard?

But the U.S. media writes long gushing stories about the dashboard and how it somehow shows automated Russian propaganda. They go to length to explain that this shows "Russian influence" and a "Russian" attempt to sow "divisiveness" into people's minds.

This is nuts.

Last August, when the Hamilton 68 project was first released, the Nation was the only site critical of it. It predicted :

The import of GMF's project is clear: Reporting on anything that might put the US in a bad light is now tantamount to spreading Russian propaganda.

It is now even worse than that. The top ranking of the #merrychristmas hashtag shows that the algorithm does not even care about good or bad news. The tracked twitter accounts are normal people.

The whole project is just a means to push fake stories about alleged "Russian influence" into U.S. media. Whenever some issue creeps up on its dashboard that somehow fits its false "Russian bots" and "divisiveness" narrative the Alliance for Securing Democracy contacts the media to spread its poison. The U.S. media, - CNN, Wired, the New York Times - are by now obviously devoid of thinking journalists and fact checkers. They simple re-package the venom and spread it to the public.

How long will it take until people die from it?

Posted by b on February 20, 2018 at 03:15 PM | Permalink

Comments next page " It's all too reminiscent of Duck Soup:

Clueless Joe , Feb 20, 2018 3:45:14 PM | link

"to publicly document and expose Vladimir Putin's ongoing efforts to subvert democracy in the United States and Europe."

That's pretty rich, coming from a country and from people who actually genuinely, and in proven ways, have subverted democracy in Europe since the late 1940s - Italy being one of the clearest cases.

ken , Feb 20, 2018 3:46:05 PM | link
For the life of me I cannot figure why Americans want a war/conflict with Russia. I can't believe it has to do with the economy. There's got to be a far better nefarious reason. Even during the real cold war we tried to avoid conflict. Absolute insanity.
xor , Feb 20, 2018 4:11:10 PM | link
The cleverest trick used in propaganda against a specific country is to accuse it of what the accuser itself is doing.
karlof1 , Feb 20, 2018 4:30:11 PM | link
Gee, what could go wrong formulating policy founded upon a series of Big Lies? Kim Dotcom says he has important info the FBI refuses to hear. At the Munich Security Conference , neocon Nicholas Burns, former US Ambassador to NATO, details my assertion's factual basis that current policy is being formed on a series of Big Lies: "Will NATO strengthen itself to contain Russian power in Eastern Europe giving what Russian [sic] has done illegally in Crimea, in the Donbass, and in Georgia ?" [Bolded text are the Big Lies.]

Clearly, this entire psyop was premeditated and its design was hastily done contemporaneously with Russia's Syria intervention. NSA/CIA/FBI knew of HRC's security breeches and rightly assumed their contents would find their way into the election, so the general plan was ready to go prior to WikiLeaks publications. b has uncovered much, and I hope he's planning to publish a book about the entire affair.

Jen , Feb 20, 2018 4:54:59 PM | link
Ken @ 4: There doesn't necessarily need to be One Major Reason for going to war. There may be several reasons all feeding and reinforcing one another and creating a psychological climate in which Going To War is seen as the only solution and is inevitable. The reasons are not just economic and political but cultural and historical.

In some countries allied with the US, the politicians in power are the ideological descendants of those who collaborated with Nazi Germany - so in a sense they are committed to "correcting" what they see as wrong. In the case of current Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, he is the grandson of a former prime minister who once served in General Tojo's World War II cabinet.
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2012/12/26/national/formed-in-childhood-roots-of-abes-conservatism-go-deep/#.WoyZCG9uaUk

That's why pinning down the reason for wanting a war against Russia is so difficult.

Partisan , Feb 20, 2018 5:06:58 PM | link
The whole piece is just hilarious and I laughed out loud all time while reading it.

https://consortiumnews.com/2018/02/16/nyts-really-weird-russiagate-story/

Since the FBI never inspected the DNC's computers first-hand, the only evidence comes from an Irvine, California, cyber-security firm known as CrowdStrike whose chief technical officer, Dmitri Alperovitch, a well-known Putin-phobe, is a fellow at the Atlantic Council, a Washington think tank that is also vehemently anti-Russian as well as a close Hillary Clinton ally.

Thus, Putin-basher Clinton hired Putin-basher Alperovitch to investigate an alleged electronic heist, and to absolutely no one's surprise, his company concluded that guilty party was Vladimir Putin. Amazing! Since then, a small army of internet critics has chipped away at CrowdStrike for praising the hackers as among the best in the business yet declaring in the same breath that they gave themselves away by uploading a document in the name of "Felix Edmundovich," i.e. Felix E. Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Soviet secret police.

As noted cyber-security expert Jeffrey Carr observed with regard to Russia's two main intelligence agencies: "Raise your hand if you think that a GRU or FSB officer would add Iron Felix's name to the metadata of a stolen document before he released it to the world while pretending to be a Romanian hacker. Someone clearly had a wicked sense of humor."

james , Feb 20, 2018 5:17:19 PM | link
thanks b!

muddy waters.. paid for propaganda.... look at all the russian bots, lol... cold war 2 / mccarthyism 2 is in effect... the historic parallels are marked. thank you neo cons! it's working... the ordinary person in the usa can't be this stupid can they?

when does ww3 kick in? is that really what these idiots want? or is it just to prolong the huge defense budget?

Mike Maloney , Feb 20, 2018 5:24:03 PM | link
This is about conditioning voters in Europe and the United States for a long war with Russia and China. In other words, a return to the 1950s. It is not working and becoming increasingly hysterical because societies are not nearly as cohesive as they once were, and the mainstream political parties, while better funded and more top-down organized, are basically hollow. The collapse is coming. Four years or ten, take your pick.
dh , Feb 20, 2018 5:32:10 PM | link
@4 "For the life of me I cannot figure why Americans want a war/conflict with Russia."

Most Americans probably don't. Just the chosen few with the deepest fall-out shelters. The idea is to keep piling the pressure on to countries like Iran and Russia in the hope that their populations will rise up and demand the freedoms that we enjoy in the West....things like uncensored wardrobe malfunctions and transgender washrooms.

Partisan , Feb 20, 2018 6:02:58 PM | link
"Most Americans probably don't."

not true.

let's imagine that we have the pyramid of evilness, by which we measure bestiality of one regime and its constituency. my firm belief is that us would be on the top of that pyramid. Only dilemma would be between Zionist entity and the US.

"How could the masses be made to desire their own repression?" was the question Wilhelm Reich famously asked in the wake of the Reichstagsbrandverordnung (Reichstag Fire Decree, February 28, 1933), which suspended the civil rights protections afforded by the Weimar Republic's democratic constitution.

Hitler had been appointed chancellor on January 30, 1933 and Reich was trying to grapple with the fact that the German people had apparently chosen the authoritarian politics promoted by National Socialism against their own political interests.

Ever since, the question of fascism, or rather the question of why might people vote for their own oppression, has never ceased to haunt political philosophy.2 With Trump openly campaigning for less democracy in America -- and with the continued electoral success of far-right antiliberal movements across Europe -- this question has again become a pressing one.

An American people is in perfect harmony with its regime.

CarlD , Feb 20, 2018 6:06:06 PM | link
Remember the "USS MAINE"! Media have long agitated for War in US History. Nothing sells newspapers like a good ole war! Demonizing is a way to achieve it. What is sure is that this is a one way street. Once over the cliff, there is no turning back.

How do you tell people that, at the flick of your magic switch, Putin is in fact a swell guy and wonderful human being? Once love is gone who goes back to the filthy, abhorrent and estranged spouse?

Surely the US establishment is playing with fire thinking they will successfully ride out any conflict and come out on top secure in their newly reestablished hegemony on the smoldering ruins of Humanity.

Make no mistake, we are all on the road to hell. Better enjoy todays peace as tomorrow word will be filled with the sweet music of cemeteries.

"Freedom of speech"...

dh , Feb 20, 2018 6:14:14 PM | link
@15 "An American people is in perfect harmony with its regime."

I'm not so sure. I think there are many Americans who deeply distrust their government. But of course they don't want to appear unpatriotic. There are also many who are apathetic and many simply don't know how to change things.

SteveK9 , Feb 20, 2018 6:35:58 PM | link
It's horrible I know to quote a Nazi, but Goring had this right:

Göring: Why, of course, the people don't want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship.

Gilbert: There is one difference. In a democracy, the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars.

Göring: Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.

WorldBLee , Feb 20, 2018 6:36:51 PM | link
American media has graduated from simply repeating the lies of "unnamed government sources" to repeating the lies of any organization unofficially blessed by the powers that be. The skills required to repeat the text verbatim serve them well in both cases. Skepticism is only reserved to anyone who tries to introduce logic or facts into the equation--such as when Jill Stein was interviewed on MSNBC recently. How dare Ms. Stein try to bring FACTS into the discussion!
chet380 , Feb 20, 2018 6:41:04 PM | link
In that The Narrative is tightly controlled in the corporate media, not matter how strong the proofs or arguments about the falsity of these propaganda campaigns are, little or no circulation of those proofs or arguments wlll reach the general public.
Sinc , Feb 20, 2018 6:41:57 PM | link
See info on US 'Twitter' manipulation campaign
Sinc , Feb 20, 2018 6:44:16 PM | link
Sorry, link here
ken , Feb 20, 2018 6:59:01 PM | link
Thanks Jen. It still makes no sense. As a veteran of the Vietnam fiasco, I was pretty much government oriented until McNamara outed the whole thing whining about haw sorry he was. 59,000 dead and he's sorry. They were able to hide the Gulf of Tonkin BS until then. After that I researched the reasons for each war/conflict the USA started and could find no logical reasons except hunger for power. But the little sandbox wars won't destroy the world like a major war/conflict with Russia and it goes nuclear. Almost every politician, and major news organizations are pushing for a war/conflict with Russia. This is insanity as no one will win a war like this and I am sure they know that,,, but they keep the war drums beating anyhow. It simply doesn't make sense. But Thanks again.

Same for dh, #14. Things are soooo stupid, your joking may be closer to the truth than you know. :-)

Skip , Feb 20, 2018 6:59:35 PM | link
@SteveK9 #19

Thank you for the post. I will save it and use it liberally, with proper attributions. When one challenges the tribe on places like Twitter, it is hard to tell who is a real idiot and who is a bot. How do you know? Maybe that the bots go away fairly quickly and the idiots hang around to argue ad infinitum.

oldenyoung , Feb 20, 2018 7:06:23 PM | link
The thing that bothers me, is the fact that the MIC Globalists don't care what we think or how poor their deceptions are. The public perception that "russia did it!!" continues to rise. I wonder what the public acceptance level needs to be for them to execute a MAJOR false flag event. They seem to think they are still on target, and its just a short matter or time...

They are going to do this when the perception management is complete... We really do not need another one of their disasters

Grieved , Feb 20, 2018 7:37:47 PM | link
The bully pushes and pushes until stopped by the first serious push back. The dynamic of the west and the neocon/Zionists at the core is essentially that of the bully. Nations like Venezuela and the Philippines have started to push back, and I hope and feel fairly confident that they will both survive the rage of the US. In some part, they have begun to show the actual powerlessness of the bully.

But the really killer nations - Russia and China - are holding their water as they strengthen their force. I believe that one very serious push back from either of them in the right circumstances will stop the bully. And yet, as they bide their time, we see a curious phenomenon wherein the US is destroying itself from the inside.

It's as if all of the forces that exist to control the country - the lockstep media, the fully rigged markets, the hysterical military, the bought legislature and the crooked courts - are all acting far more strongly than should be necessary. The entire system is over-reacting, over-reaching, over-boiling. And in the course of this, the US is actually shedding power, and at an amazing rate. But not from the action of Russia but from its non-action, the empty space that that allows the bully's dynamic to over-reach, all the way to complete failure.

Is it possible that deep in the security states of Russia and China there's even a study and a model for this? Is the collapse of the US actually being gamed by Russia and China - and through the totally counter-intuitive action of non-action?

Just a thought.

Ghost Ship , Feb 20, 2018 7:51:03 PM | link
>>>> xor | Feb 20, 2018 4:11:10 PM | 6
The cleverest trick used in propaganda against a specific country is to accuse it of what the accuser itself is doing.

I've always put it down to the Washington Establishment having a severe case of psychological projection.

WG , Feb 20, 2018 7:52:38 PM | link
Hey b,
Just wanted to let you know that Joe Lauria mentioned your blog and the article you wrote on the indictment of the 13 Russians. He was on Loud and Clear (Sputnik Radio, Washington DC) today and brought you up at the start of the program.
Glad to see you get some recognition for all the great work you've been doing :)
Mike , Feb 20, 2018 7:53:24 PM | link
Meanwhile, back in 2010:
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2010/11/when-campaigns-manipulate-social-media/66351/
Jen , Feb 20, 2018 7:53:43 PM | link
Ken @ 24: The warmongering is not intended to make any sense - not many people are trained in critical thinking and logic, and even when they are, they can be swamped by their own emotions or other people's emotions.

Propaganda is intended to appeal to people's emotions and fears. You can try reading works by Edward Bernays - "Crystallizing Public Opinion" (1923) and "Propaganda" (1928) - to see how he uses his uncle Sigmund Freud's theories of the mind to create strategies for manipulating public opinion. https://archive.org/details/EdwardL.BernaysPropaganda

Bernays' books influenced Nazi and Soviet propaganda and Bernays himself was hired by the US government to justify in the public mind the 1954 US invasion of Guatemala.

You may be aware that Rupert Murdoch, head of News Corporation which owns the Wall Street Journal, FOX News and 20th Century Fox studios, is also on the Board of Directors of Genie Energy which owns a subsidiary firm that was granted a licence by an Israeli court to explore and drill for oil and natural gas in Syria's (and Israeli-occupied) Golan Heights.

simjam , Feb 20, 2018 7:59:21 PM | link
The national media speaks as one -with one consistent melody day after day. Who is the conductor? When will one representative of the mainstream media sing solo? There must be a Ray McGovern somewhere among the flock.
V. Arnold , Feb 20, 2018 8:05:33 PM | link
Grieved | Feb 20, 2018 7:37:47 PM | 27

Many of my thoughts as well. The U.S.'s greatest fault is its tacit misunderstanding of just what russia is in fact. They utterly fail to understand the Russian character; forged over 800 years culminating with the defeat of Nazi Germany, absorbing horrific losses; the U.S. fails to understand the effect upon the then Soviets, become todays Russians. Even the god's have abandoned the west...

Debsisdead , Feb 20, 2018 8:53:42 PM | link
I watched bbc news this am in the hope that I would get to see the most awful creature at the 2018 olympics cry her croc tears (long story - a speed skater who cuts off the opposition but has been found out so now when she swoops in front of the others they either skate over her leading to tearful whines from perp about having been 'pushed', or gets disqualified for barging. Last night she got disqualified so as part of my study on whether types like this believe their own bullshit I thought I'd tune in but didn't get that far into the beebs lies)

The bulk of the bulletin was devoted to a 'lets hate Russia' session which featured a quisling who works for the russian arm of BBC (prolly just like cold war days staffed exclusively by MI6/SIS types). This chap, using almost unintelligible english, claimed he had proof at least 50 Russian Mercenaries (question - why are amerikan guns for hire called contractors [remember the Fallujah massacre of 100,000 civilians because amerikan contractors were stupid] yet Russian contractors are called mercenaries by the media?) had been killed in Syria last week. The bloke had evidence of one contractor's death not 50 - the proof was a letter from the Russian government to the guy's mother telling her he didn't qualify for any honours because he wasn't in the Russian military.

The quisling (likely a Ukranian I would say) went on to rabbit about the bloke having also fought in Donbass under contract - to which the 'interviewer (don't ya love it when media 'interview' their own journos - a sure sign that a snippet of toxic nonsense is being delivered) led about how the deceitful Russians had claimed the only Russians fighting in Donbass were contractors - yeah well this bloke was a contractor surely that proves the Russians were telling the truth.

It's not what these propagandists say; they adopt a tone and the audience is meant to hate based on that even when the facts as stated conflict with the media outlet's point of view. Remember the childhood trick of saying "bad dog" ter yer mutt in loving tones - the dog comes to ya tail wagging & licks yer hand. This is that.

The next item was more Syria lies - white helmets footage (altho the beeb is now mostly giving them an alternative name to dodge the facts about white helmets) of bandaged children with flour tipped on their heads.

The evil Syrians and Russians are bombarding Gouta - nary a word about the continuous artillery barrage Gouta has subjected the citizens of Damascus to for the past 4 years, or that the Syrians have repeatedly offered truces and safe passage for civilians. Any injured children need to ask their parents why they weren't allowed to take advantage of the frequent offers of transport out. Maybe the parents are worried 'the resistance' will do its usual and blow up the busloads of children after luring them over with candy.

Anyway I switched off after that so never did learn if little miss cheat had a cry.

ben , Feb 20, 2018 9:17:54 PM | link
Reposting from TRNN: http://therealnews.com/t2/story:21178:Why-is-a-Russian-Troll-Farm-Being-Compared-to-911%3F
integer , Feb 20, 2018 9:23:42 PM | link
Thank you for reporting on this. The people behind the so-called Alliance for Securing Democracy need to be exposed for the warmongering frauds that they are. Regardless of what one thinks of him, Trump was correct when he said that NATO is obsolete.
Don Bacon , Feb 20, 2018 10:12:52 PM | link
The American Security State needs enemies to exist, otherwise there's no need for the "security" which translates into big bucks for the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Media Complex. They can't agree on the ranking of the enemies: North Korea is a threat to the world! Iran is....! Russia is...! China is....! But the threats are there, and they are pure evil (TPTB contend).

So the whole scenario makes perfect sense from that standpoint.

Petri Krohn , Feb 20, 2018 10:17:36 PM | link
The news stories become far easier to understand if you replace the word " Russia " with the word " truth ".
bevin , Feb 20, 2018 11:45:45 PM | link
re Felix E. Dzerzhinsky: Ukrainian fascists have a particular hatred of Felix because he was both a Bolshevik and a Pole.

I hate to do this but I just posted this elsewhere, at Off Guardian, where the Guardian is back into its highest gears promoting war.

"The wardrums are beating in a way not heard since 1914-there is no reason for war except the best reason of all: an imperial ruling class sees its grip slipping and will chance everything rather than endure the humiliation of adjusting to reality.

"China is in the position that the US was in 1914-it can prevent the war or wait until the combatants are too exhausted to defend their paltry gains.

Given the realities of nuclear warfare-which seem not to have sunk in among the Americans, perhaps because they mistake a bubble for a bomb shelter- the wise option is to prevent war by publicly warning against it. In the hope that brought face to face with reality the masses will besiege their governments, as we can easily do, and prevent war.'

See also http://www.greanvillepost.com/2018/02/20/the-coming-wars-to-end-all-wars/

V. Arnold , Feb 21, 2018 12:32:43 AM | link
Debsisdead | Feb 20, 2018 8:53:42 PM | 35

I have no idea who you are talking about; care to say?

Jeff Kaye , Feb 21, 2018 12:36:59 AM | link
Great analysis! Can't imagine how you continue to put out quality work day after day! Your question at the close speaks to stakes involved in this.
foo , Feb 21, 2018 1:53:45 AM | link
@ 10 - 4

Resources boils down to money. Of course. I don't think any power would lose from tapping a source of resource.

DidierF , Feb 21, 2018 2:03:08 AM | link
Sad but definitely correct. The first casualty of war is the truth. It's dead in the USA and allies. Therefore, they're at war with Russia and China. If Russia is down, China will be dealt with.

The horrible thing with the US attitude is that you do a white thing, you're attacking them and if you do a black thing, you're attacking them too. This attitude is building hostility against Russia. It's like programming a pet to be afraid of something. The western people are being programmed into hating Russia, dehumanizing her people, cutting every tie with Russia and transforming any information from Russia into life threatening propaganda. A war for our hearts is running. The US population is being coerced into believing that war against Russia is a vital necessity.

It will be a war of choice from the US "elites". Clinton announced it and the population had chosen Trump for that reason.

You're wondering why they're doing it. I suppose that their narrative is losing its grip on the western populations. They're also conscious of it. If they lose it, they'll have to face very angry mobs and face the void of their lives. Everything they did was either useless or poisonous. It means to be in a very bad spot. They're are therefore under an existential threat.

Russia proved time and again that it's possible to get out of their narrative. Remember their situation when Eltsin was reelected with the western help.

The Chicago boys were telling the Russian authorities how to run the economy and they made out of the word democrat a synonym of thief. They were in the narrative and the result was a disaster. Then, they woke up and started to clean the house. I remember the "hero" of democracy whose name was "Khodorovsky (?)". In the west he was a freedom fighter and in Russia he stole something like Rosneft. This guy and others of the same sort were described in the west as heroes, pionniers and so on. They were put back into submission to the law. The western silence about their stealings, lies and cheating is still deafening me.

It was the first Russian crime. The second one was to survive the first batch of sanctions against them (I forgot the reason of the sanctions). They not only survived they thrived. It was against the western leading economic ideology. A third crime was to push back Saakachvili and his troops with success.

The fourth was to put back into order the Tchechen. Russia was back into the world politics and history. They were not following the script written for them in Washington and Brussels. They were having a political system putting limits to the big companies. And, worst of it, it works.
Everybody in the west who can read and listen would have noticed that they are making it.

More, with RT and Sputnik giving info outside the allowed ones or asking annoying questions (western journalists lost that habit with their new formation in the schools of journalism - remember the revolution in their education was criticised and I missed why - very curious to discover why), they were exposing weaknesses of the western narrative. On the other side their narrative became so poor and so limited that any regular reader would feel bored reading the same things time and again and being asked to pay for it at a time his salary was decreased in the name of competitivity. The threat to their narrative was ready. They had to fight it.

It's becoming a crime to think outside their marks. It's becoming a crime to read outside their marks. I don't even talk about any act outside their marks. Now, it's going to be a crime of treason to them in war time.

I do feel sadness because many will die from their fear of losing their grip on our minds. I do feel sadness because they have lost and are in denial about it. I do feel sadness because those death aren't necessary. I do feel sadness because those people can't face the consequences of their actions. They don't have the necessary spine. Their lives were useless and even toxic. They could start repairing or mitigating their damages but it would need a very different worldview, a complete conversion to another meaning of life outside the immediate and maximal profit.

V. Arnold , Feb 21, 2018 2:13:54 AM | link
DidierF | Feb 21, 2018 2:03:08 AM | 46

You have aptly described the most dangerous country on this planet. That country must not be appeased, at any cost, because it would surely end us forever...

Fran , Feb 21, 2018 2:53:24 AM | link
I wonder if this is true: STUNNING: Mueller Patched Together Much of His Indictment from 2015 Radio Free Europe Article I wouldn't be surprised if it is true. It would give the entire story a whole new touch. I wanted to write a new smell, but it would be rather stink.
Partisan , Feb 21, 2018 3:38:27 AM | link
https://www.wordfence.com/blog/2016/12/russia-malware-ip-hack/

Conclusion regarding IP address data: What we're seeing in this IP data is a wide range of countries and hosting providers. 15% of the IP addresses are Tor exit nodes. These exit nodes are used by anyone who wants to be anonymous online, including malicious actors.

Overall Conclusion: The IP addresses that DHS provided may have been used for an attack by a state actor like Russia. But they don't appear to provide any association with Russia. They are probably used by a wide range of other malicious actors, especially the 15% of IP addresses that are Tor exit nodes.

The malware sample is old, widely used and appears to be Ukrainian. It has no apparent relationship with Russian intelligence and it would be an indicator of compromise for any website.

fairleft , Feb 21, 2018 5:28:09 AM | link
Partisan @15: "With Trump openly campaigning for less democracy in America -- and with the continued electoral success of far-right antiliberal movements across Europe -- this question has again become a pressing one."

The above is entirely backwards. The bottom 2/3rds is frustrated by the LACK of democracy in the US and that's a major reason many voted against the (in fact anti-democratic) elite's desired candidate, Hillary.

70% of the voting age public was dissatisfied or very dissatisfied with both candidates, and 40% of Americans didn't vote, so that means whichever of Clinton/Trump won, she/he would win with approval of only 10% of the electorate. That's the best example possible of our anti-democratic reality (it's not a worry or a threat, it's already here).

In the case of both Europe and the US, many people are generally very dissatisfied with the anti-democratic response by the elite to 'the will of the people' that there be much less immigration into countries with high unemployment and 'race to the bottom' labor conditions. That's nearly the entire basis of what the corporate media calls 'the move right'... When in fact restricting immigration is a pro-labor and therefore 'left' policy ... Except in the confused and deliberately stupid political discourse the elite media pushes so hard.

Lea , Feb 21, 2018 6:16:53 AM | link
Some years ago, I noticed the American media and politicians were sort of going soft (actually mushy) in the brain department, but I was told not to be so judgemental. As the months went by, I saw more and more people saying "they have gone nuts". So, it turns out I am not alone after all.

That madness comes from having no behavioural limits, no references outside of your own opinion but groupthink, and manipulating the language to suit your ambitions (the Orwellism of the US media has been repeatedly pointed at). Simply put, you don't know anymore what's what outside of the narrative your group pushes, you go nuts. The manipulators ends up caught in their lies. All the more when they makes money out of it, which would be the case of all those think tanks and media.

One could argue that they are not going mad, that they know full well they are lying, but I beg to differ: they don't see anymore how ridiculous or how dumb or smart their arguments are. That would be congruent with a real loss of touch with reality. One wonders what they see when they look at themselves in a mirror, a garden variety propagandist or a fearless anti-Putin crusader?

Another example of the narrative gone mad: they are sending CNN journos to meet pro-Trump folks who "have been influenced by Russian trolls on social media". https://twitter.com/yashalevine/status/966177091875168256

Partisan , Feb 21, 2018 6:20:19 AM | link
"The above is entirely backwards."

Well, it is not...if you are believer in "democracy". Honestly, the story of democracy (by capitalist/liberal class) is a grand BS, to be modest. The only thing what was truthful, paradoxically, is who is "lesser evil" of two. Or the Bigger one in unrestrained capitalism, savage and monopoly, predatory and a fascists one.

One way or other result is the same, it is: Barbarism.

ralphieboy , Feb 21, 2018 6:27:23 AM | link
When "trending on Twitter" became a news item in and of itself, I began to despair for the future of reporting, political discourse and ultimately, democracy in America. Twitter and FB are at best a source of information for news reporting, but not a source of news in themselves.

We made ourselves vulnerable to any and every sort of pernicious manipulation and in the end, we just about deserve everything we get.

WJ , Feb 21, 2018 6:38:11 AM | link
War or the threat of war is needed to distract attention from rapidly devolving societal bonds and immense economic inequality.
Partisan , Feb 21, 2018 6:41:09 AM | link
there is something illogical in your comment.

but one should never forget:

The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships.

Karl Marx

Ger , Feb 21, 2018 7:52:44 AM | link
Dan @ 4

It is partially tied direct to the economy of the warmongers as trillions of dollars of new cold war slop is laying on the ground awaiting the MICC hogs. American hegemony is primarily about stealing the natural resources of helpless countries. Now in control of all the weak ones, it is time to move to the really big prize: The massive resources of Russia. They (US and their European Lackeys) thought this was a slam dunk when Yeltsin, in his drunken stupors, was literally giving Russia to invading capitalist. Enter Putin, stopped the looting .........connect the dots.

Anon , Feb 21, 2018 8:08:35 AM | link
Media and its politicians have lost it completely, and if you criticize them, well then of course you are a... "russian bot". Unfortunately 90% of westerners buy this western MSM influence propaganda campaign, WW3 with Russia will come easy.
Florin , Feb 21, 2018 9:00:03 AM | link
News "Meet The Cabal That Are Framing Domestic American Activism As "Russian Influence" and "Fake News"
https://disobedientmedia.com/2018/01/meet-the-cabal-that-are-framing-domestic-american-activism-as-russian-influence-and-fake-news/

At risk of being censored and/or convicted of Thought Crime - it is *remarkable* how very highly disproportionate the number of Jewish Zionists is who are in the media and in Congress and in ThinkTankistan and shouting about Russian meddling, 'aggression,' and the like.

It's too bad it is forbidden to examine this phenomena as one part of the matrix of power and lies leading the US into conflict with Russia, no?

I don't think Bill Kristol and David Frum and Jeff Goldberg are either honest nor primarily concerned with American national security, nor the lives of MENA civilians. I think they care only about using American blood and treasure to facilitate Israeli lebensraum, however bloody and expensive.

Trump survives only if he dances for the Deep State *and* Likud.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2015/10/12/us-caught-faking-it-in-syria/

ex-SA , Feb 21, 2018 9:17:53 AM | link
Chris Hedges has an article on the similar situation in Germany almost 100 years ago. "In 1923 the radical socialist and feminist Clara Zetkin gave a report at the Communist International about the emergence of a political movement called fascism. ...." https://www.truthdig.com/articles/how-we-fight-fascism/
fairleft , Feb 21, 2018 10:26:45 AM | link
Partisan @54: The facts contradict the statement in the quote that Trump was "openly campaigning for less democracy." He wasn't. He in fact campaigned in part as a populist who would oust (or at least repeatedly ridicule) an anti-democratic elite. If you've overlooked that and believe more or less the opposite, you can't understand the 2016 election or the elite's virulently anti-democratic reaction to it.
Oui , Feb 21, 2018 11:18:34 AM | link
NEW CENSORSHIP - HAMILTON68 DASHBOARD

From the website of Hamilton68 :: Tracking Russian influence operations on Twitter

So easy to signal this group as a fraud, I wrote an article recently

○ G W F and McCarthyism In A Digital Age - Part 2

[G W F – German Marshall Fund]

Earlier I wrote about the following relationship: Khodorkovsky - The Interpreter - Henry Jackson Society (UK) .

With Bush and the Iraq War, Dutch PM Balkenende and FM de Hoop Scheffer were seen as the poodle of the White House. In recent years PM Mark Rutte [of MH-17 crash fame] can be considered its puppy. Perhaps a parrot would suit better.

I noticed a former journalist Hubert Smeets hs partnered with some people to found a "knowledge center" Window on Russia [Raam op Rusland]. Laughable, funded by the Dutch Foreign Ministry and a Dutch-Russia cultural exchange Fund. Preposturous in its simplicity and harm for honest reporting.

Noirette , Feb 21, 2018 11:38:52 AM | link
US media has gone bonkers. The original claim was Russian meddling and Russian interference in the election. Then, a sort of bridging meme showed up (see also b above), undermining democracy or subverting it. This in turn then morphed into promoting divisive issues which is new (circa 2018, not before?)

Imho. US pols make it their business to create divisive issues, diviusses (neologism), to the point of inventing rubbish ones. Part of the US public embraces that sh*t as well, > tribalism and religious economics in lieu of policy politics. So such actions should be viewed as gloriously democratic, ;) - ok easy to make fun.

The emphasis on 'divisive' is curious, it signals that some managers are calling for 'union' - 'cohesion' - 'group soldering' facing the outside enemy, threat.

Russia has really become the all-purpose épouvantail scarecrow, specter of doom, etc. An awareness of the high costs of divisiveness if uncontrolled -> massive social unrest, at extreme, civil war -- and that these are to be avoided, is evidenced.

Heh, or the whole storm is just fluff that distracts, occupies the pixels, airwaves, a jamboree of knee-jerk reactions irrelevant to the present World Situation, with practically no important body - faction of the PTB, Trump, the MIC, lame outsiders like the EU, etc. having any clue.

james , Feb 21, 2018 1:03:45 PM | link
i got a kick out of cluborlov's post from yesterday.. -
http://cluborlov.blogspot.ca/2018/02/make-russia-great-again-through.html

The accusation is a lot like accusing somebody of despoiling an outhouse by crapping in it, along with everyone else, but the outhouse in question had a sign on its door that read "No Russians!" and the 13 Russians just ignored it and crapped in it anyway.

The reason the Outhouse of American Democracy is posted "No Russians!" is because Russia is the enemy. There aren't any compelling reasons why it should be the enemy, and treating it as such is incredibly foolish and dangerous, but that's beside the point. Painting Russia as the enemy serves a psychological need rather than a rational one: Americans desperately need some entity onto which they can project their own faults.

The US is progressing toward a fascist police state; therefore, Russia is said to be a horrible dictatorship run by Putin. The US traditionally meddles in elections around the world, including Russia; therefore, the Russians are said to meddle in US elections. The US is the most aggressive country on the planet, occupying and bombing dozens of countries; therefore, the Russians are accused of "aggression." And so on

Don Bacon , Feb 21, 2018 6:35:10 PM | link
@Noirette 70
Yes, claiming that Russians are promoting polical division is silly -- the divisions were already there.
gizmodo , Jun 12, 2014:
It's Been 150 Years Since the U.S. Was This Politically Polarized

Nevertheless, now in WIRED magazine: Their [Agency] goal was to enflame "political intensity through supporting radical groups, users dissatisfied with [the] social and economic situation, and oppositional social movements."

OJS , Feb 21, 2018 8:27:10 PM | link

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-02-21/they-had-more-information-us-sanders-blames-clinton-not-exposing-russian-meddling

"They Had More Information Than Us" - Sanders Blames Clinton For Not Exposing Russian Meddling

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=WRnBPKFcAKo

Bernie Sanders said he on Wednesday, "felt compelled to address Russian interference during the US election. Sunday.... he was not aware and believes Russian bot promoting him and went as far to said WikiLeaks published Hillary's email stolen by the Russia....."

Can you really trust that lying basted? I'm probably one of the few MoA refused to believe and trust Bernie Sanders and the fuckup Democrats .

ben , Feb 21, 2018 9:24:01 PM | link
Anti-Russia Think Tanks in US: Who Funds Them? By Bryan MacDonald http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/48755.htm
daffyDuct , Feb 21, 2018 9:46:49 PM | link
Excellent article summarizing much of what B has posted and more.

"Finally, and as long was we are on the topic, here is what a real troll farm looks like. [Picture of NSA] Yet this vast suite of offices in Fort Meade, Maryland, where 20,000 SIGINT spies and technicians work for the NSA, is only the tip of the iceberg.

The US actually spends $75 billion per year---more than Russia's entire $69 billion defense budget---spying on and meddling in the politics of virtually every nation on earth. An outfit within NSA called Tailored Access Operations (TAO) has a multi-billion annual budget and does nothing put troll the global internet and does so with highly educated, highly paid professionals, not $4 per hour keyboard jockeys."

http://davidstockmanscontracorner.com/muellers-comic-book-indictment-how-to-prosecute-a-great-big-nothingburger/

Daniel , Feb 22, 2018 12:47:29 AM | link
Great article. Great comments. I LOVE MoA! And it's great to see b getting recognition.

james wrote: "There aren't any compelling reasons why it should be the enemy"

You know the following; I think you're just too decent a human being to understand how psychopaths operate. Russia is a huge area with enormous natural resources as well as a large, educated populace. Zbignew Brzezenski explained in his 1997 book "The Grand Chessboard" why global hegemony required taking control over Russia (and how to do it, which boils down to taking the other chess pieces off the board (Iraq/Ukraine/etc. and then pulling off a "color revolution," coup or military conquest).

Ziggy also noted that once Russia was incorporated, China is the next, and largely last target.

Jen: NICE JOB putting together a big picture, from Bernays' control of the masses all the way to Genie Energy. Add in Oded Yinon and PNAC and the "foreign policy blunders" that led to the present situation in MENA look like a carefully-constructed, long-game being played "by the book."

Fairleft. Any leftist/socialist movement which is not global is doomed to failure. This has always been true, but with "offshoring" of manufacturing jobs and the internet untethering many "white collar" jobs from any given geological location(s), workers must see ourselves as a global entity rather than national or regional players - because that is certainly how the 0.01% see us (and themselves).

"Workers of the world UNITE" is more true today than a century and a half ago.

Ghost Ship , Feb 22, 2018 5:28:36 AM | link
Did the Titanic just sink Bild ?
Partisan , Feb 22, 2018 6:20:18 AM | link
https://youtu.be/GN-tf3HM9ao New Yorker Reporter Debunks Russia Twitter Panic
ralphieboy , Feb 22, 2018 7:31:36 AM | link
@fairleft 85

nations that do not have to face costs arising from environmental, health or safety legislation will almost always prevail in the world market over those that have some concern for the environment and the workers.

That is the main issue I have with globalization.

Competing on wages is one thing; that can be a great impetus to become more efficient and productive, but if we do nothing to force other countries to clean up their act, they will have no impetus to do so and we will continue to lose jobs to the international competition, no matter how efficiently we work.

test , Feb 22, 2018 7:32:53 AM | link
Msm, bellingcat and other think tanks - they push their anti Russian racism too far making a large section of westerners just tired of their hysteria. Exposing their own racism and paranoia.
Partisan , Feb 22, 2018 9:02:22 AM | link
"....borderless globalization has been a catastrophe for most of the underdeveloped world's businesses and workers."

it is always annoying when I see the 'globalization" argument is used whether from the right or left. The globalization has started by the moment when us humans begin to roaming on this planet. there are millions of examples yet somehow globalization is of recent phenomenon. Lapis Lazuli mineral used in making blue color and paint is found on clay pottery in Mesopotamia's ancient city of Ur. That city is also place where many legend originated which were taken by major religion and can be found in their holy books. See even the myth are globalizied from very early on.

Most of the people do not even know what it is, not those who are writing about it.

Globalization . . . is a program to create private corporate rights to trade, invest, lend or borrow money and buy and own property anywhere in the world without much hindrance by national governments. It would bar governments from most of the common methods of helping or protecting their national industries and employment. It is a winners' program promoted chiefly by some business interests, governments and neoclassical economists in Europe and the United States.

One of its purposes is to intensify international competition for jobs. Together with other Right policies it is likely to maintain some unemployment in the rich countries and reduce the wage rates of their lower-paid workers, and reduce the proportion of secure employment.

Hugh Stretton, Economics: A New Introduction

test , Feb 22, 2018 10:02:35 AM | link
The anti-russian think tanks, msm, bellingcat etc push this too much, making them look stupid.
john , Feb 22, 2018 10:30:32 AM | link
Tannenhouser

the observable and demonstrable attempts are clearly futile, and have been pretty much reduced to spasms and tantrums, largely devoid of cognizance, not to mention legality, but certainly dangerous nonetheless.

no sir ree bob, we get our multipolar world or we scavenge a dead landscape of Alamogordo glass .

Tannenhouser , Feb 22, 2018 11:23:44 AM | link
John@96. We are on the same page then. I see it more like this. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1991370.The_Cool_War
karlof1 , Feb 22, 2018 4:18:56 PM | link
Really enjoyed Julian Assange's explanation of Mueller's nothingburger.

Assange: "Regardless of whether IRA's activities were audience building through pandering to communities or whether a hare-brained Russian government plan to "heighten the differences" existed, its activities are clearly strategically insignificant compared to the other forces at play."

[Jan 02, 2019] The Only Meddling "Russian Bots" Were Actually Democrat-Led "Experts" by Mac Slavo

Highly recommended!
Jan 02, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Mac Slavo via SHTFplan.com,

Cybersecurity "experts" in the United States have long alleged that "Russian bots" were used to meddle in the 2016 elections.

But, as it turns out, the authors of a Senate report on "Russian election meddling" actually ran the false flag meddling operation themselves.

A week before Christmas, the Senate Intelligence Committee released a report accusing Russia of depressing Democrat voter turnout by targeting African-Americans on social media. Its authors , New Knowledge , quickly became a household name. Described by the New York Times as a group of "tech specialists who lean Democratic," New Knowledge has ties to both the U.S. military and the intelligence agencies.

The CEO and co-founder of New Knowledge, Jonathon Morgan, had previously worked for DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) , the U.S. military's advanced research agency known for horrific ideas on how to control humanity . Morgan's partner, Ryan Fox, is a 15-year veteran of the NSA (National Security Agency) who also worked as a computer analyst for the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC). Their unique skill sets have managed to attract the eye of authoritarian investors, who pumped $11 million into the company in 2018 alone, according to a report by RT .

Morgan and Fox have both struck gold in the " Russiagate " scheme, which sprung into being after Hillary Clinton blamed Moscow for Donald Trump's presidential victory in 2016. Morgan, for example, is one of the developers of the Hamilton 68 Dashboard, the online tool that purports to monitor and expose narratives being pushed by the Kremlin on Twitter. And also worth mentioning, that dashboard is bankrolled by the German Marshall Fund's Alliance for Securing Democracy – a collection of Democrats and neoconservatives funded in part by NATO (North AtTreaty Tready Organization) and USAID (United States Agency for International Development).

It is worth noting that the 600 " Russia-linked " Twitter accounts monitored by the dashboard is not disclosed to the public either, making it impossible to verify these claims. This inconvenience has not stopped Hamilton 68 from becoming a go-to source for hysteria-hungry journalists, however. Yet on December 19, a New York Times story revealed that Morgan and his crew had created the fake army of Russian bots, as well as several fake Facebook groups, in order to discredit Republican candidate Roy Moore in Alabama's 2017 special election for the U.S. Senate.

Working on behalf of the Democrats, Morgan and his crew created an estimated 1,000 fake Twitter accounts with Russian names, and had them follow Moore. They also operated several Facebook pages where they posed as Alabama conservatives who wanted like-minded voters to support a write-in candidate instead . In an internal memo, New Knowledge boasted that it had " orchestrated an elaborate 'false flag' operation that planted the idea that the Moore campaign was amplified on social media by a Russian botnet ." – RT

This scandal is being perpetrated by the United States media and has so far deceived millions, if not more. The botnet claim made a splash on social media and was further amplified by Mother Jones , which based its story on "expert opinion" from Morgan's dubious creation, Hamilton 68.

Things got even weirder when it turned out that Scott Shane, the author of the Tim es piece, had known about the meddling for months because he spoke at an event where the organizers boasted about it!

Shane was one of the speakers at a meeting in September, organized by American Engagement Technologies, a group run by Mikey Dickerson, President Barack Obama's former tech czar. Dickerson explained how AET spent $100,000 on New Knowledge's campaign to suppress Republican votes, "enrage " Democrats to boost turnout, and execute a " false flag " to hurt Moore. He dubbed it " Project Birmingham ." -RT

There really was meddling in American democracy by " Russian bots. " Except those bots weren't run from Moscow or St. Petersburg but from the offices of Democrat operatives chiefly responsible for creating and amplifying the " Russiagate " hysteria over the past two years in a textbook case of psychological projection , brainwashing, and Nazi-style propaganda campaigns.

[Jan 02, 2019] Did Mueller Patched Together Much of His Indictment from 2015 Radio Free Europe Article ?

Highly recommended!
Jan 02, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

Fran , Feb 21, 2018 2:53:24 AM | link

I wonder if this is true: STUNNING: Mueller Patched Together Much of His Indictment from 2015 Radio Free Europe Article I wouldn't be surprised if it is true.

It would give the entire story a whole new touch. I wanted to write a new smell, but it would be rather stink.

[Jan 02, 2019] That madness of the US neocons comes from having no behavioural limits, no references outside of groupthink, and manipulating the language. Simply put, you don't know anymore what's what outside of the narrative your group pushes. The manipulators ends up caught in their lies.

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Some years ago, I noticed the American media and politicians were sort of going soft (actually mushy) in the brain department, but I was told not to be so judgemental. As the months went by, I saw more and more people saying "they have gone nuts". So, it turns out I am not alone after all. ..."
"... That madness comes from having no behavioural limits, no references outside of your own opinion but groupthink, and manipulating the language to suit your ambitions (the Orwellism of the US media has been repeatedly pointed at). Simply put, you don't know anymore what's what outside of the narrative your group pushes, you go nuts. The manipulators ends up caught in their lies. All the more when they makes money out of it, which would be the case of all those think tanks and media. ..."
"... War or the threat of war is needed to distract attention from rapidly devolving societal bonds and immense economic inequality. ..."
Jan 02, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

Lea , Feb 21, 2018 6:16:53 AM | link

Some years ago, I noticed the American media and politicians were sort of going soft (actually mushy) in the brain department, but I was told not to be so judgemental. As the months went by, I saw more and more people saying "they have gone nuts". So, it turns out I am not alone after all.

That madness comes from having no behavioural limits, no references outside of your own opinion but groupthink, and manipulating the language to suit your ambitions (the Orwellism of the US media has been repeatedly pointed at). Simply put, you don't know anymore what's what outside of the narrative your group pushes, you go nuts. The manipulators ends up caught in their lies. All the more when they makes money out of it, which would be the case of all those think tanks and media.

One could argue that they are not going mad, that they know full well they are lying, but I beg to differ: they don't see anymore how ridiculous or how dumb or smart their arguments are. That would be congruent with a real loss of touch with reality.

One wonders what they see when they look at themselves in a mirror, a garden variety propagandist or a fearless anti-Putin crusader?

Another example of the narrative gone mad: they are sending CNN journos to meet pro-Trump folks who "have been influenced by Russian trolls on social media". https://twitter.com/yashalevine/status/966177091875168256

WJ , Feb 21, 2018 6:38:11 AM | link
War or the threat of war is needed to distract attention from rapidly devolving societal bonds and immense economic inequality.
Ger , Feb 21, 2018 7:52:44 AM | link
Dan @ 4

It is partially tied direct to the economy of the warmongers as trillions of dollars of new cold war slop is laying on the ground awaiting the MICC hogs. American hegemony is primarily about stealing the natural resources of helpless countries. Now in control of all the weak ones, it is time to move to the really big prize: The massive resources of Russia. They (US and their European Lackeys) thought this was a slam dunk when Yeltsin, in his drunken stupors, was literally giving Russia to invading capitalist. Enter Putin, stopped the looting .........connect the dots.

Guy Thornton , Feb 21, 2018 9:10:47 AM | link
Watching the USA these days is like watching a loved one with progressive dementia. I've reached the stage where I think the sooner it's over the better for everyone.

[Dec 30, 2018] RussiaGate In Review with Aaron Mate - Unreasoned Fear is Neoliberalism's Response to the Credibility Gap

Highly recommended!
Dec 30, 2018 | jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.com

At the inception of this entire RussiaGate spectacle I suggested that it was a political distraction to take the attention away from the rejection by the people of neoliberalism which has been embraced by the establishments of both political parties.

And that the result of the investigation would be indictments for perjury in the covering up of illicit business deals and money laundering. But that 'collusion to sway the election' was without substance, if not a joke.

Everything that has been revealed to date tends to support that.

One thing that Aaron overlooks is the evidence compiled by William Binney and associates that strongly suggests the DNC hack was no hack at all, but a leak by an insider who was appalled by the lies and double dealing at the DNC.

In general, RussiaGate is a farcical distraction from other issues as they say in the video. And this highlights the utterly Machiavellian streak in the corporate Democrats and the Liberal establishment under the Clintons and their ilk who care more about money and power than the basic principles that historically sustained their party. I have lost all respect for them.

But unfortunately this does open the door for those who use this to approve of the Republican establishment, which is 'at least honest' about being substantially corrupt servants to Big Money who care nothing about democracy, the Constitution, or the public. The best of them are leaving or have already left, and their party is ruined beyond repair.

This all underscores the paucity of the Red v. Blue, monopoly of two parties, 'lesser of two evils' model of political thought which has come to dominate the discussion in the US.

We are heavily propagandized by the owners of the corporate media and influencers of the narrative, and a professional class that has sold its soul for economic advantage and access to money and power.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/2HBA3Zm3dGM

And here is a bit more from Nate Silver --

https://www.youtube.com/embed/SETw5GLF8mU

[Dec 29, 2018] -Election Meddling- Enters Bizarro World As MSM Ignores Democrat-Linked -Russian Bot- Scheme -

Highly recommended!
Is this shadow of Integrity Initiative in the USA ? This false flag open the possibility that other similar events like DNC (with very questionable investigation by Crowdstrike, which was a perfect venue to implement a false flag; cybersecurity area is the perfect environment for planting false flags), MH17 (might be an incident but later it definitely was played as a false flag), Skripals (Was Skripals poisoning a false flag decided to hide the fact that Sergey Skripal was involved in writing Steele dossier?) and Litvinenko (probably connected with lack of safety measures in the process of smuggling of Plutonium by Litvinenko himself, but later played a a false flag). All of those now should be re-assessed from the their potential of being yet another flag flag operation against Russia. While Browder was a MI6 operation from the very beginning (and that explains why he abdicated the US citizenship more convincingly that the desire to avoid taxes) .
Notable quotes:
"... Democratic operative Jonathon Morgan - bankrolled by LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, pulled a Russian bot "false flag" operation against GOP candidate Roy Moore in the Alabama special election last year - creating thousands of fake social media accounts designed to influence voters . Hoffman has since apologized, while Morgan was suspended by Facebook for "coordinated inauthentic" behavior. ..."
"... Really the bigger story is here is that these guys convincingly pretended to be Russian Bots in order to influence an election (not with the message being put forth by the bots, but by their sheer existence as apparent supporters of the Moore campaign). ..."
"... By all appearances, they were Russian bots trying to influence the election. Now we know it was DNC operatives. Yet we are supposed to believe without any proof that the "Russian bots" that supposedly influenced the 2016 Presidential election were, actually, Russian bots, and worthy of a two year long probe about "Russian collusion" and "Russian meddling." ..."
"... The whole thing is probably a farce, not only in the sense that there is no evidence that Russia had any influence at all on a single voter, but also in the sense that there is no evidence that Russia even tried (just claims and allegations by people who have a vested interest in convincing us its true). ..."
Dec 29, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

For over two years now, the concepts of "Russian collusion" and "Russian election meddling" have been shoved down our throats by the mainstream media (MSM) under the guise of legitimate concern that the Kremlin may have installed a puppet president in Donald Trump.

Having no evidence of collusion aside from a largely unverified opposition-research dossier fabricated by a former British spy, the focus shifted from "collusion" to "meddling" and "influence." In other words, maybe Trump didn't actually collude with Putin, but the Kremlin used Russian tricks to influence the election in Trump's favor. To some, this looked like nothing more than an establishment scheme to cast a permanent spectre of doubt over the legitimacy of President Donald J. Trump.

Election meddling "Russian bots" and "troll farms" became the central focus - as claims were levied of social media operations conducted by Kremlin-linked organizations which sought to influence and divide certain segments of America.

And while scant evidence of a Russian influence operation exists outside of a handful of indictments connected to a St. Petersburg "Troll farm" (which a liberal journalist cast serious doubt ov er), the MSM - with all of their proselytizing over the "threat to democracy" that election meddling poses, has largely decided to ignore actual evidence of "Russian bots" created by Democrat IT experts, used against a GOP candidate in the Alabama special election, and amplified through the Russian bot-detecting "Hamilton 68" dashboard developed by the same IT experts.

Jonathon Morgan ✔ @jonathonmorgan

Russian trolls tracked by # Hamilton68 are taking an interest in the AL Senate race. What a surprise.

298 4:02 PM - Nov 10, 2017

Democratic operative Jonathon Morgan - bankrolled by LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, pulled a Russian bot "false flag" operation against GOP candidate Roy Moore in the Alabama special election last year - creating thousands of fake social media accounts designed to influence voters . Hoffman has since apologized, while Morgan was suspended by Facebook for "coordinated inauthentic" behavior.

As Russian state-owned RT puts it - and who could blame them for being a bit pissed over the whole thing, "it turns out there really was meddling in American democracy by "Russian bots." Except they weren't run from Moscow or St. Petersburg, but from the offices of Democrat operatives chiefly responsible for creating and amplifying the "Russiagate" hysteria over the past two years in a textbook case of psychological projection. "

A week before Christmas, the Senate Intelligence Committee released a report accusing Russia of depressing Democrat voter turnout by targeting African-Americans on social media. Its authors, New Knowledge, quickly became a household name.

Described by the New York Times as a group of "tech specialists who lean Democratic," New Knowledge has ties to both the US military and intelligence agencies. Its CEO and co-founder Jonathon Morgan previously worked for DARPA, the US military's advanced research agenc y. His partner, Ryan Fox, is a 15-year veteran of the National Security Agency who also worked as a computer analyst for the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC). Their unique skill sets have managed to attract the eye of investors, who pumped $11 million into the company in 2018 alone.

...

On December 19, a New York Times story revealed that Morgan and his crew had created a fake army of Russian bots, as well as fake Facebook groups, in order to discredit Republican candidate Roy Moore in Alabama's 2017 special election for the US Senate.

Working on behalf of the Democrats, Morgan and his crew created an estimated 1,000 fake Twitter accounts with Russian names, and had them follow Moore. They also operated several Facebook pages where they posed as Alabama conservatives who wanted like-minded voters to support a write-in candidate instead.

In an internal memo, New Knowledge boasted that it had "orchestrated an elaborate 'false flag' operation that planted the idea that the Moore campaign was amplified on social media by a Russian botnet."

It worked. The botnet claim made a splash on social media and was further amplified by Mother Jones, which based its story on expert opinion from Morgan's other dubious creation, Hamilton 68. - RT

Moore ended up losing the Alabama special election by a slim margin of just

In other words: In November 2017 – when Moore and his Democratic opponent were in a bitter fight to win over voters – Morgan openly promoted the theory that Russian bots were supporting Moore's campaign . A year later – after being caught red-handed orchestrating a self-described "false flag" operation – Morgan now says that his team never thought that the bots were Russian and have no idea what their purpose was . Did he think no one would notice? - RT

Dan Cohen ✔ @dancohen3000 Replying to @dancohen3000

Disinformation warrior @ jonathonmorgan attempts to control damage by lying. He now claims the "false flag operation" never took place and the botnet he promoted as Russian-linked (based on phony Hamilton68 Russian troll tracker he developed) wasn't Russian https://www. newknowledge.com/blog/about-ala bama

89 2:23 AM - Dec 29, 2018

Even more strange is that Scott Shane - the journalist who wrote the New York Times piece exposing the Alabama "Russian bot" scheme, knew about it for months after speaking at an event where the organizers bragged about the false flag on Moore .

Shane was one of the speakers at a meeting in September, organized by American Engagement Technologies, a group run by Mikey Dickerson, President Barack Obama's former tech czar. Dickerson explained how AET spent $100,000 on New Knowledge's campaign to suppress Republican votes, " enrage" Democrats to boost turnout, and execute a "false flag" to hrt Moore. He dubbed it "Project Birmingham." - RT

Dan Cohen ✔ @dancohen3000 · Dec 28, 2018 Replying to @dancohen3000

This gets even weirder: NYT reporter @ ScottShaneNYT , who broke the Alabama disinfo op story, learned of it in early September when he spoke at an off-the-record event organized by one of the firms that perpetrated the deception https://www. buzzfeednews.com/article/craigs ilverman/alabama-dirty-tricksters-invited-a-new-york-times-reporter

NY Times Reporter Briefed Alabama Special Election Dirty Tricksters

New York Times reporter Scott Shane spoke at an event organized by the group who ran a disinformation op aimed at helping defeat Roy Moore in Alabama.

A lightly-redacted copy of the internal @ NewKnowledgeAI report has been leaked and claims at least partial credit for Doug Jones' victory. Details follow https:// medium.com/@jeffgiesea/br eaking-heres-the-after-action-report-from-the-alabama-senate-disinformation

10 12:09 PM - Dec 28, 2018 Twitter Ads info and privacy

Shane told BuzzFeed that he was "shocked" by the revelations, though hid behind a nondisclosure agreement at the request of American Engagement Technologies (AET). He instead chose to spin the New Knowledge "false flag" operation on Moore as "limited Russian tactics" which were part of an "experiment" that had a budget of "only" $100,000 - and which had no effect on the election.

New Knowledge suggested that the false flag operation was simply a "research project," which Morgan suggested was designed "to better understand and report on the tactics and effects of social media disinformation."

View image on Twitter
Jonathon Morgan ✔ @jonathonmorgan

My statement on this evening's NYT article.

94 9:17 PM - Dec 19, 2018
465 people are talking about this Twitter Ads info and privacy

While the New York Times seemed satisfied with his explanation, others pointed out that Morgan had used the Hamilton 68 dashboard to give his "false flag" more credibility – misleading the public about a "Russian" influence campaign that he knew was fake.

New Knowledge's protestations apparently didn't convince Facebook, which announced last week that five accounts linked to New Knowledge – including Morgan's – had been suspended for engaging in "coordinated inauthentic behavior." - RT

They knew exactly what they were doing

While Morgan and New Knowledge sought to frame the "Project Birmingham" as a simple research project, a leaked copy of the operation's after-action report reveals that they knew exactly what they were doing .

"We targeted 650,000 like AL voters, with a combination of persona accounts, astroturfing, automated social media amplification and targeted advertising," reads the report published by entrepreneur and executive coach Jeff Giesea.

Jeff Giesea ✔ @jeffgiesea

BREAKING: Here's the after-action report from the AL Senate disinfo campaign.

**an exclusive release by @ JeffGiesea https:// medium.com/@jeffgiesea/br eaking-heres-the-after-action-report-from-the-alabama-senate-disinformation-campaign-e3edd854f17d

1,658 8:49 PM - Dec 27, 2018 Twitter Ads info and privacy BREAKING: Here's The After-Action Report From the Alabama Senate Disinformation Campaign

EXCLUSIVE RELEASE FROM JEFF GIESEA

medium.com
1,381 people are talking about this Twitter Ads info and privacy

The rhetorical question remains, why did the MSM drop this election meddling story like a hot rock after the initial headlines faded away?

criminal election meddling, but then who the **** is going to click on some morons tactic and switch votes?

anyone basing any funding, whether it is number of facebook hits or attempted mind games by egotistical cuck soyboys needs a serious psychological examination. fake news is fake BECAUSE IT ISNT REAL AND DOES NOT MATTER TO ANYONE but those living in the excited misery of their tiny bubble world safe spaces. SOCIAL MEDIA IS A CON AND IS NOT IMPORTANT OR RELEVANT TO ANYONE.

far more serious is destroying ballots, writing in ballots without consent, bussing voters around to vote multiple times in different districts, registering dead voters and imperosnating the corpses, withholding votes until deadlines pass - making them invalid.

Herdee , 10 minutes ago

NATO on behalf of the Washington politicians uses the same bullsh*t propaganda for continual war.

Mugabe , 20 minutes ago

Yup "PROJECTION"...

Yippie21 , 21 minutes ago

None of this even touches on the 501c3 or whatever that was set up , concerned Alabama voters or somesuch, and was funneled a **** load of money to be found to be in violation of the law AFTER the election and then it all just disappeared. Nothing to see here folks, Democrat won, let's move on. There was a LOT of " tests " for the smart-set in that election and it all worked. We saw a bunch of it used in 2018, especially in Texas with Beto and down-ballot races. Democrats cleaned up like crazy in Texas, especially in Houston.

2020 is going to be a hot mess. And the press is in on it, and even if illegal or unseemly things are done, as long as Democrats win, all good... let's move on. Crazy.

LetThemEatRand , 21 minutes ago

The fact that MSM is not covering this story -- which is so big it truly raises major questions about the entire Russiagate conspiracy including why Mueller was appointed in the first place -- is proof that they have no interest in journalism or the truth and that they are 100% agenda driven liars. Not that we needed more proof, but there it is anyway.

Oldguy05 , 19 minutes ago

Dimz corruption is a nogo. Now if it were conservatives.......

CosineCosineCosine , 23 minutes ago

I'm not a huge fan, but Jimmy Dore has a cathartic and entertaining 30 minutes on this farce. Well worth the watch:

h https://youtu.be/hqLIJznUNVw

LetThemEatRand , 27 minutes ago

Really the bigger story is here is that these guys convincingly pretended to be Russian Bots in order to influence an election (not with the message being put forth by the bots, but by their sheer existence as apparent supporters of the Moore campaign).

By all appearances, they were Russian bots trying to influence the election. Now we know it was DNC operatives. Yet we are supposed to believe without any proof that the "Russian bots" that supposedly influenced the 2016 Presidential election were, actually, Russian bots, and worthy of a two year long probe about "Russian collusion" and "Russian meddling."

The whole thing is probably a farce, not only in the sense that there is no evidence that Russia had any influence at all on a single voter, but also in the sense that there is no evidence that Russia even tried (just claims and allegations by people who have a vested interest in convincing us its true).

dead hobo , 30 minutes ago

I've been watching Scandal on Netflix. Still only in season 2. Amazing how nothing changes.They nailed it and memorialized it. The MSM are useful idiots who are happy to make money publicizing what will sell the best.

chunga , 30 minutes ago

The media is biased and sucks, yup.

The reason the reds lost the house is because they went along with this nonsense and did nothing about it, like frightened baby chipmunks.

JRobby , 33 minutes ago

Only when "the opposition" does it is it illegal. Total totalitarian state wannabe stuff.

divingengineer , 22 minutes ago

Amazing how people can contort reality to justify their own righteous cause, but decry their opposition for the EXACT same thing. See trump visit to troops signing hats as most recent proof. If DJT takes a piss and sprinkles the seat, it's a crime.

DarkPurpleHaze , 33 minutes ago

They're afraid to expose themselves...unlike Kevin Spacey. Trump or Whitaker will expose this with one signature. It's coming.

divingengineer , 20 minutes ago

Spacey has totally lost it. See his latest video, it will be a powerful piece of evidence for an insanity plea.

CosineCosineCosine , 10 minutes ago

Disagree strongly. I think it was excellent - perhaps you misunderstood the point? 6 minutes Diana Davidson look at it clarifies

https://youtu.be/_il_NBq0Ec8

[Dec 24, 2018] Jewish neocons and the romance of nationalist armageddon

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... The Pity of It All : A Portrait of the German-Jewish Epoch, 1743-1933 ..."
"... Perhaps you are making too much of the so called decline of the neocons. At the strategic level, there is little difference between the neocon "Project for a the New American Century" and Brzezinski's "The Grand Chessboard," both of which are consistent with US policy and actions in the Ukraine. ..."
"... The most significant difference seems to me to be the neocon emphasis on American unilateral militarism versus Obama's emphasis on multilateralism, covert operations and financial warfare to achieve the desired results. ..."
"... Perhaps another significant difference is the neocon emphasis on the primacy of the American nation-state versus the neoliberal emphasis on an American dominated global empire. ..."
"... Interesting to juxtapose Brzezinski and the neocons. In a Venn diagram they would over-lap 90%. ..."
"... Right now, their interests have diverged over the Ukraine crisis. Though many of the American neocons do support subverting Ukraine as does Brzezinski it looks like Israel itself is leaning towards supporting Russia. ..."
"... Right Sector militias are the fighting force that led the coup against the legally elected Yanukovich government and were almost certainly involved in the recent massacre in Odessa. And you support them for their fight for freedom? You should be ashamed. Zionism is sinking to new lows that they feel the need to identify with open neo-Nazis. ..."
"... Well, the point is that Zionists in Israel do not identify with that particular set of open neo-Nazis. I suspect that this is simply a matter of the headcount of Jewish business tycoons that are politically aligned with (western) Ukraine and Russia. Or you can count their billions. ..."
"... The problem with your reasoning, Yonah, is that you are espousing the Neocon line while not apparently recognizing that embarrassing fact. You lament that the US is no longer playing the role of the world's superpower, and acting as the world's cop, confronting militarily Russia, China, Iran and anyone else. It is precisely that mentality that got us into Iraq, could yet have us in a war with Iran, would like to see us defending Ukraine, and thinks we should confront China militarily over bits of rock it and its neighbors are quibbling over. That is a neocon, American supremacy mentality. ..."
"... Zionism under Likud has played a major role in promoting the neocon approach to foreign policy in the US. It was heavily involved in the birth of that approach, and has helped fund and promote the policy and its supporters and advocates in this country. They (Likud Zionists and Neocons) played a major role in getting us into the Iraq war and are playing a major role in trying to get us involved in a war with Iran, a war in Syria, and even potential wars in Eastern Europe. That is a very dangerous trend and one folks as intelligent as you are, should be focusing on. ..."
"... "nationalist Armageddon that is nowhere found in the article by Sleeper" ..."
"... "The misadventure in Iraq has cost the US and the world a lot. The US a loss in humans and money and willingness to play the role of superpower, and the world has lost its cop. " ..."
"... Tough. Meanwhile hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi lives don't rate a mention. ..."
"... " (let the Russians have their sphere of influence, let the Iranians have their bomb, let the Chinese do whatever they want to do in their part of the world, for after all they hold a trillion dollars in US government debt and so let them act like the boss, for in fact they have been put in that role by feckless and destructive and wasteful US policy). But Sleeper does not say that." ..."
"... But even if we do focus on neocons, neocons don't have opinions about foreign policy and USA dominance that are much distinct from what most Republican interventionists have. How much difference is there between David Frum and Mitt Romney or between Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld? ..."
"... Don't look to the US to get any justice in the ME, nor to regain US good reputation in the world. This will situation will not change because US political campaign fiancé system won't change–it just gets worse, enhanced by SCOTUS. ..."
"... But neoocns have the confidence that if they could impose the neocon's theology on the rest of the world, they can do it here as well on American street . They call it education, motivation, duty, responsibility, moral burden, and above all the essence of the manifest destiny. ..."
May 06, 2014 | mondoweiss.net

At the Huffington Post, Jim Sleeper addresses "A Foreign-Policy Problem No One Speaks About," and it turns out to Jewish identity, the need to belong to the powerful nation on the part of Jewish neoconservatives. Sleeper says this is an insecurity born of European exclusion that he understands as a Jew, even if he's not a warmongering neocon himself. The Yale lecturer's jumping-off point are recent statements by Leon Wieseltier and David Brooks lamenting the decline of American power.

In addition to Wieseltier and Brooks, the "blame the feckless liberals" chorus has included Donald Kagan, Robert Kagan, David Frum, William Kristol, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, and many other American neoconservatives. Some of them have been chastened, or at least been made more cautious, by their grand-strategic blunders of a few years ago ..

I'm saying that they've been fatuous as warmongers again and again and that there's something pathetic in their attempts to emulate Winston Churchill, who warned darkly of Hitler's intentions in the 1930s. Their blind spot is their willful ignorance of their own complicity in American deterioration and their over-compensatory, almost pre-adolescent faith in the benevolence of a statist and militarist power they still hope to mobilize against the seductions and terrors rising all around them.

At bottom, the chorus members' recurrent nightmares of 1938 doom them to reenact other nightmares, prompted by very similar writers in 1914, on the eve of World War I. Those writers are depicted chillingly, unforgettably, in Chapter 9, "War Fever," of Amos Elon's The Pity of It All: A Portrait of the German-Jewish Epoch, 1743-1933. Elon's account of Germany's stampede into World War I chronicles painfully the warmongering hysterics of some Jewish would-be patriots of the Kaiserreich who exerted themselves blindly, romantically, to maneuver their state into the Armageddon that would produce Hitler himself.

This is the place to emphasize that few of Wilhelmine German's warmongers were Jews and that few Jews were or are warmongers. (Me, for example, although my extended-family history isn't much different from Brooks' or Wieseltier's.) My point is simply that, driven by what I recognize as understandable if almost preternatural insecurities and cravings for full liberal-nationalist belonging that was denied to Jews for centuries in Europe, some of today's American super-patriotic neo-conservatives hurled themselves into the Iraq War, and they have continued, again and again, to employ modes of public discourse and politics that echo with eerie fidelity that of the people described in Elon's book. The Americans lionized George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and many others as their predecessors lionized Kaiser Wilhelm, von Bethmann-Hollweg, and far-right nationalist associates who hated the neo-cons of that time but let them play their roles .

Instead of acknowledging their deepest feelings openly, or even to themselves, the writers I've mentioned who've brought so much folly and destruction upon their republic, are doubling down, more nervous and desperate than ever, looking for someone else to blame. Hence their whirling columns and rhythmic incantations. After Germany lost World War I, many Germans unfairly blamed their national folly on Jews, many of whom had served in it loyally but only a few of whom had been provocateurs and cheerleaders like the signatories of [Project for New American Century's] letter to Bush. Now neo-cons, from Wieseltier and Brooks to [Charles] Hill, are blaming Obama and all other feckless liberals. Some of them really need to take a look in Amos Elon's mirror.

Interesting. Though I think Sleeper diminishes Jewish agency here (Sheldon Adelson and Haim Saban are no one's proxy) and can't touch the Israel angle. The motivation is not simply romantic identification with power, it's an ideology of religious nationalism in the Middle East, attachment to the needs of a militarist Sparta in the Arab world. That's another foreign policy problem no one speaks about.

Krauss, May 6, 2014, 2:11 pm

"Democracy in in the Middle East" was always just a weasel-word saying of "let's try to improve Israel's strategic position by changing their neighbours".

The neocons basically took a hardline position on foreign interventionism based out of dual loyalty. This is the honest truth. For anti-Semites, a handful of neocons will always represent "The Jews" as a collective. For many Jews, the refusal to come to grips with the rise of the neocons and how the Jewish community (and really by "community" I mean the establishment) failed to prevent them in their own midst, is also a blemish.

Of course, Jim Sleeper is doing these things now. He should have done them 15-20 years ago or so. But better late than never, I guess.

Krauss, May 6, 2014, 2:16 pm

P.S. While we talk a lot about neocons as a Jewish issue, it's also important to put them in perspective. The only war that I can truly think of that they influenced was the Iraq war, which was a disaster, but it also couldn't have happened without 9/11, which was a very rare event in the history of America. You have to go back to Pearl Harbor to find something similar, and that wasn't technically a terrorist attack but rather a military attack by Japan.

Leading up to the early 2000s, they were mostly ignored during the 1990s. They did take over the GOP media in the early 90s, using the same tactics used against Hagel, use social norms as a cover but in actuality the real reason is Israel.

Before the 90s, in the 70s and 80s, the cold war took up all the oxygen.
So yeah, the neocons need to be talked about. But comparing what they are trying to do with a World War is a bit of a stretch.

Finally, talking about Israel – which Sleeper ignored – and the hardline positions that the political class in America have adopted, if you want to look who have ensured the greatest slavishness to Israel, liberal/centrist groups like ADL, AJC and AIPAC(yes, they are mostly democrats!) have played a far greater role than the neocons.

But I guess, Sleeper wasn't dealing with that, because it would ruin his view of the neocons as the bogeymen.

Just like "liberal" Zionists want to blame Likud for everything, overlooking the fact that Labor/Mapai has had a far greater role in settling/colonizing the Palestinian land than the right has, and not to speak about the ethnic cleansing campaigns of '48 and '67 which was only done by the "left", so too the neocons often pose as a convenient catch-all target for the collective Jewish failure leading up to Iraq.

And I'm using the words "collective Jewish failure" because I actually don't believe, unlike Mearsheimer/Walt, that the war would not have gone ahead unless there was massive support by the Israel/Jewish lobby. If Jews had decided no, it would still have gone ahead. This is also contrary to Tom Friedman's famous saying of "50 people in DC are responsible for this war".
I also think that's an oversimplification.

But I focus more on the Jewish side because that's my side. And I want my community to do better, and just blaming the neocons is something I'm tired of hearing in Jewish circles. The inability to look at liberal Jewish journalists and their role in promoting the war to either gentile or Jewish audiences.

Kathleen, May 6, 2014, 6:53 pm

There was talk about this last night (Monday/5th) on Chris Matthew's Hardball segment on Condi "mushroom cloud" Rice pulling out of the graduation ceremonies at Rutger's. David Corn did not say much but Eugene Robinson and Chris Matthews were basically talking about Israel and the neocons desires to rearrange the middle east "the road to Jerusalem runs through Baghdad" conversation.

Bumblebye, May 6, 2014, 2:33 pm

"some of today's American super-patriotic neo-conservatives hurled themselves into the Iraq War"

Have to take issue with that – the neo-cons hurled young American (and foreign) servicemen and women into that war, many to their deaths, along with throwing as much taxpayer money as possible. They stayed ultra safe and grew richer for their efforts.

Citizen, May 7, 2014, 9:03 am

@ Bumblebye

Good point. During WW1, as I read the history, the Jewish Germans provided their fair share of combat troops. If memory serves, despite Weimar Germany's later "stab in the back" theory, e.g., Hitler himself was given a combat medal thanks to his Jewish senior officer. In comparison to the build-up to Shrub Jr's war on Iraq, the Jewish neocons provided very few Jewish American combat troops.

It's hard to get reliable stats on Jewish American participation in the US combat arms during the Iraq war. For all I've been able to ascertain, more have joined the IDF over the years. At any rate, it's common knowledge that Shrub's war on Iraq was instigated and supported by chicken hawks (Jew or Gentile) at a time bereft of conscription. They built their sale by ignoring key facts, and embellishing misleading and fake facts, as illustrated by the Downing Street memo.

Keith, May 6, 2014, 7:47 pm

PHIL- Perhaps you are making too much of the so called decline of the neocons. At the strategic level, there is little difference between the neocon "Project for a the New American Century" and Brzezinski's "The Grand Chessboard," both of which are consistent with US policy and actions in the Ukraine.

The most significant difference seems to me to be the neocon emphasis on American unilateral militarism versus Obama's emphasis on multilateralism, covert operations and financial warfare to achieve the desired results.

Perhaps another significant difference is the neocon emphasis on the primacy of the American nation-state versus the neoliberal emphasis on an American dominated global empire.

So yes, the nationalistic emphasis is an anachronism, however, the decline of the US in conjunction with the extension of a system of globalized domination should hardly be of concern to elite power-seekers who will benefit. In fact, the new system of corporate/financial control will be beyond the political control of any nation, even the US. If they can pull it off. An interesting topic no doubt, but one which I doubt is suitable for extended discussion on Mondoweiss. As for power-seeking as a consequence of a uniquely Jewish experience, perhaps the less said the better.

ToivoS, May 7, 2014, 8:10 pm
Interesting to juxtapose Brzezinski and the neocons. In a Venn diagram they would over-lap 90%. The Ukraine crisis exposes that 10% difference. Brzezinski I very much doubt has any emotional attachment to Israel though he is happy to work in coalition with them to further his one true goal which is to isolate and defeat Russian influence in the world. In the 1980s both were on the same page in the "let my people go" campaign against the Soviet Union. Brzezinski saw it as a propaganda opportunity to attack Russia and the neocons saw it has a source of more Jews to settle Palestine.

Right now, their interests have diverged over the Ukraine crisis. Though many of the American neocons do support subverting Ukraine as does Brzezinski it looks like Israel itself is leaning towards supporting Russia. When it comes down to it it is hard for many Jews, right wing or not, to support the political movement inside Ukraine that identifies with Bandera. Now that was one nasty antisemite whose followers killed many thousands of Ukrainian Jews during the holocaust. My wife's family immigrated from Galicia and the Odessa region and those left behind perished during the holocaust. The extended family includes anti-zionists and WB settlers. There is no way that any of them would identify with Ukrainian fascist movements now active there.

In any case, there does seem to be a potential split among the neocons over Ukraine. It would be the ultimate in hypocrisy for all of those eastern European Jews who became successful in the US in the last few generations to enter into coalition with the Bandera brigades.

RudyM, May 7, 2014, 9:36 pm
Interesting, meaty analysis here of the various players in Ukraine. This is unequivocally from a Russian perspective, incidentally:

link to wikispooks.com

(I know I'm always grabbing OT threads of discussion, but when it comes down to it, I know much less about Zionism and Israel/Palestine than many, if not most of the regular commenters here.)

I also am going to drift further off-topic by saying there is strong evidence that the slaughter in Odessa last Friday was highly orchestrated and not solely the result of spontaneous mob violence. Very graphic and disturbing images in all of these links:

I have only glanced at these:

American, May 6, 2014, 9:23 pm
" and it turns out to Jewish identity, the need to belong to the powerful nation on the part of Jewish neoconservatives. Sleeper says this is an insecurity born of European exclusion that he understands as a Jew, ..>>

Stop it Sleeper. Do not continue to use the victim card ' to explain' the trauma, the insecurities, the nightmares, the angst, the feelings, the sensitivities, blah blah, blah of Zionist or Israel.

That is not what they are about. These are power mad psychos like most neocons, period.

And even if it were, and even if all the Jews in the world felt the same way, the bottom line would still be they do not have the right to make others pay in treasure and blood for their nightmares and mental sickness.

Citizen May 7, 2014, 9:46 am
@ yonah fredman

"The freedom of Ukraine is a worthy goal."

As near as I can tell (correct me if I'm wrong), the Ukrainians themselves are about half and half pro Russia and Pro NATO. Your glance at the history of the region as to why this is so, and your text on historical Ukranian suffering and POTV on MW commentary on this –did not help your analysis and its conclusion.

There's a difference between isolationism and defensive intervention, and even more so, re isolationism v. pro-active interventionism "in the name of pursuing the democratic ideal". See Ron Paul v. PNAC-style neocons and liberal Zionists.

Also, if you were Putin, how would you see the push of NATO & US force posts ever creeping towards Russia and its local environment? Look at the US military postings nearing Russia per se & those surrounding Iran. Compare Russia's.

And note the intent to wean EU from Russian oil, and as well, the draconian sanctions on Iran, and Obama's latest partnering sanctions on Russia.

Imagine yourself in Putin's shoes, and Iran's.

Don't abuse your imagination only by imagining yourself in Netanyahu's shoes, which is the preoccupation of AIPAC and its whores in the US Congress.

ToivoS, May 7, 2014, 8:49 pm

Interesting to juxtapose Brzezinski and the neocons. In a Venn diagram they would over-lap 90%. The Ukraine crisis exposes that 10% difference. Brzezinski I very much doubt has any emotional attachment to Israel though he is happy to work in coalition with them to further his one true goal which is to isolate and defeat Russian influence in the world. In the 1980s both were on the same page in the "let my people go" campaign against the Soviet Union. Brzezinski saw it as a propaganda opportunity to attack Russia and the neocons saw it has a source of more Jews to settle Palestine.

Right now, their interests have diverged over the Ukraine crisis. Though many of the American neocons do support subverting Ukraine as does Brzezinski it looks like Israel itself is leaning towards supporting Russia. When it comes down to it it is hard for many Jews, right wing or not, to support the political movement inside Ukraine that identifies with Bandera. Now that was one nasty anti-Semite whose followers killed many thousands of Ukrainian Jews during the holocaust. My wife's family immigrated from Galicia and the Odessa region and those left behind perished during the holocaust. The extended family includes anti-Zionists and WB settlers. There is no way that any of them would identify with Ukrainian fascist movements now active there.

In any case, there does seem to be a potential split among the neocons over Ukraine. It would be the ultimate in hypocrisy for all of those eastern European Jews who became successful in the US in the last few generations to enter into coalition with the Bandera brigades.

ToivoSMay 7, 2014, 9:39 pm
Yonah writes The freedom of Ukraine is a worthy goal. If the US is not able to back up our attempt to help them gain their freedom it is not something to celebrate, but something to lament.

What are you saying? Ukraine has been an independent nation for 22 years. What freedom is this? What we have witnessed is that one half of Ukraine has gotten tired that the other half keeps on electing candidates that represent those Ukrainians that identify with Russian culture. They (the western half) successfully staged a coup and purged the other (eastern half) from the government. You call that "freedom". Doesn't it embarrass you, Yonah, that the armed militias that conducted that coup are descendants of the Bandera organization.

Does that ring a bell? These are the Ukrainians that were involved in the holocaust. Does Babi Yar stir any memories Yohan? It was a massacre of 40,000 Jews just outside of Kiev in 1942. It was the single largest massacre of Jews during WWII. The massacre was led by the Germans ( Einsatzgruppe C officers) but was carried out with the aid of 400 Ukrainian Auxillary Police. These were later incorporated into the 14th SS-Volunteer Division "Galician" made up mostly Ukrainians. The division flags are to this day displayed at Right Sector rallies in western Ukraine.

Right Sector militias are the fighting force that led the coup against the legally elected Yanukovich government and were almost certainly involved in the recent massacre in Odessa. And you support them for their fight for freedom? You should be ashamed. Zionism is sinking to new lows that they feel the need to identify with open neo-Nazis.

piotrMay 7, 2014, 10:18 pm
Well, the point is that Zionists in Israel do not identify with that particular set of open neo-Nazis. I suspect that this is simply a matter of the headcount of Jewish business tycoons that are politically aligned with (western) Ukraine and Russia. Or you can count their billions. In any case, the neutral posture is sensible for Israel here. Which is highly uncharacteristic for that government.

yonah fredman, May 7, 2014, 10:38 pm

Toivo S- The history of Jew hatred by certain anti Russian elements in the Ukraine is not encouraging and nothing that I celebrate. Maybe I have been swayed by headlines and a superficial reading of the situation.

If indeed I am wrong regarding the will of the Ukrainian people, I can only be glad that my opinion is just that, my opinion and not US or Israel or anyone's policy but my own. I assume that a majority of Ukrainians want to maintain independence of Russia and that the expressions of rebellion are in that vein.

My people were murdered by the einsatzgruppen in that part of the world and so maybe I have overcompensated by trying not to allow my personal history to interfere with what I think would be the will of the majority of the Ukraine.

But Toivo S. please skip the "doesn't it embarrass you" line of thought. Just put a sock in it and skip it.

ToivoSMay 8, 2014, 12:51 am

Well thanks for that Yonah. My wife's family descended from Jewish communities in Odessa and Galicia. They emigrated to the US between 1900 and 1940. After WWII none of their relatives left behind were ever heard from again. Perhaps you have family that experienced similar stories. What caused me to react to your post above is that you are describing the current situation in Ukraine as a "freedom" movement by the Ukrainians when the political forces there descended from the same people that killed my inlaws family (and apparently yours to). Why do you support them?

yonah fredmanMay 8, 2014, 1:30 am

ToivoS- I support them because I trust/don't trust Putin. I trust him to impose his brand of leadership on Ukraine, I don't trust him to care a whit about freedom. It is natural that the nationalist elements of Ukraine would descend from the elements that expressed themselves the last time they had freedom from the Soviet Union, that is those forces that were willing to join with the Nazis to express their hatred for the communist Soviet Union's rule over their freedom. That's how history works. The nationalists today descend from the nationalists of yesterday.

But it's been 70 years since WWII and the Ukrainians ought to be able to have freedom even if the parties that advocate for freedom are descended from those that supported the Nazis. (I know once i include the Nazi part of history any analogies are toxic, but if I am willing to grant Hamas its rights as an expression of the Palestinian desire for freedom, why would I deny the Ukrainian foul nationalist parties their rights to express their people's desire for freedom.)

Political parties are not made in a sterile laboratory, they evolve over history and most specifically they emerge from the past. I accept that Ukrainian nationalism has not evolved much, but nonetheless not having read any polls I assume that the nationalists are the representatives of the people's desire for freedom. And because Putin strikes me as something primitive, I accept the Ukrainian desire for freedom.

CitizenMay 8, 2014, 9:18 am

@ yonah f

What are you supporting? Let me refresh your historic memory: Black's Transfer Agreement. Now apply analogy, responding to ToivoS. Might help us all to understand, explore more skillfully, Israel's current stance on the Putin-Ukranian matter .?

(I think Nuland's intervention caught on tape, combined with who she is married to, already explores with great clarification what the US is doing.

irishmosesMay 8, 2014, 12:32 pm

Yonah said:

"The misadventure in Iraq has cost the US and the world a lot. The US a loss in humans and money and willingness to play the role of superpower, and the world has lost its cop. Most people here would probably disagree with Sleeper, because he does not deny that the world needs a cop, nor that the US would play a positive role, if it only had the means and the desire to do so. People here (overwhelmingly) see the US role as a negative one (let the Russians have their sphere of influence, let the Iranians have their bomb, let the Chinese do whatever they want to do in their part of the world,"

The problem with your reasoning, Yonah, is that you are espousing the Neocon line while not apparently recognizing that embarrassing fact. You lament that the US is no longer playing the role of the world's superpower, and acting as the world's cop, confronting militarily Russia, China, Iran and anyone else. It is precisely that mentality that got us into Iraq, could yet have us in a war with Iran, would like to see us defending Ukraine, and thinks we should confront China militarily over bits of rock it and its neighbors are quibbling over. That is a neocon, American supremacy mentality.

Contrast that with the realist or realism approach recommended by George Kennan, and followed by this country successfully through the end of the Cold War. That approach is conservative and contends we should stay out of wars unless the vital national security interests of the US are at stake, like protecting WESTERN Europe, Japan, Australia, and the Western Hemisphere. This meant we could sympathize with the plight of all the eastern Europeans oppressed by the Soviets, but would not defend militarily the Hungarians (1956) or the Czechs (1968). It also meant we wouldn't send US troops into North Vietnam because we didn't want to go to war with the Chinese over a country that was at best tangential to US interests. When we varied from that policy (Vietnam and Iraq wars, Somalia) we paid a very heavy price while doing nothing to advance or protect our vital national security interests.

The sooner this country can return to our traditional realism-based foreign policy the better. Part of that policy would be to disassociate the US from its entangling alliance with Likud Israel and its US Jewish supporters that espouse the Likud Greater Israel line.

Zionism under Likud has played a major role in promoting the neocon approach to foreign policy in the US. It was heavily involved in the birth of that approach, and has helped fund and promote the policy and its supporters and advocates in this country. They (Likud Zionists and Neocons) played a major role in getting us into the Iraq war and are playing a major role in trying to get us involved in a war with Iran, a war in Syria, and even potential wars in Eastern Europe. That is a very dangerous trend and one folks as intelligent as you are, should be focusing on.

Please note, my criticism is directed neither at all Jews in general, Jews in the US, nor or all Israeli Jews. It is directed at a particular subset of Zionists who support Likud policies, and their supporters, many of whom are not Jews. It is also directed at Neoconservative foreign policy advocates, comprised of Jews and non-Jews, and overlap between the two groups. Please also note my use of the term "major role", and that I am not saying the Neocons and their supporters (Jewish or non) were solely responsible for our involvement in the Iraq war. I am offering these caveats in the hope that the usual changes of antisemitism can be avoided in your or anyone else's response to my arguments.

The influence of Neocons on US foreign policy has been very harmful to this country and poses a grave danger to its future. It would be wise for you to reflect on that harm and those dangers and decide whether you belong in the realist camp or want to continue running with the Neocons.

seanmcbride, May 8, 2014, 1:01 pm

irishmoses,

Please note, my criticism is directed neither at all Jews in general, Jews in the US, nor or all Israeli Jews. It is directed at a particular subset of Zionists who support Likud policies, and their supporters, many of whom are not Jews.

What about the role of *liberal Zionists*, like Hillary Clinton, in supporting and promoting the Iraq War? Clinton still hasn't offered an apology for helping to drive the United States in a multi-trillion dollar foreign policy disaster - and she has threatened to "totally obliterate" Iran.

What about Harry Reid's lavish praise of Sheldon Adelson?

"Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has for some time billed the Koch brothers as public enemy No.1 .

But billionaire Republican donor Sheldon Adelson? He's just fine, Reid says.

"I know Sheldon Adelson. He's not in this for money," the Nevada Democrat said of Adelson, the Vegas casino magnate who reportedly spent close to $150 million to support Republicans in the 2012 presidential election."

link to politico.com

Are there really any meaningful distinctions between neoconservatives in the Republican Party and liberal Zionists in the Democratic Party?

talknic, May 7, 2014, 3:24 am

@ yonah fredman "nationalist Armageddon that is nowhere found in the article by Sleeper"

Strange

"state into the Armageddon .. "

"The misadventure in Iraq has cost the US and the world a lot. The US a loss in humans and money and willingness to play the role of superpower, and the world has lost its cop. "

Tough. Meanwhile hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi lives don't rate a mention.

" (let the Russians have their sphere of influence, let the Iranians have their bomb, let the Chinese do whatever they want to do in their part of the world, for after all they hold a trillion dollars in US government debt and so let them act like the boss, for in fact they have been put in that role by feckless and destructive and wasteful US policy). But Sleeper does not say that."

You do tho, without quoting anyone "here".

BTW Pajero, strawmen no matter how lengthy and seemingly erudite, rarely walk anywhere

JeffB, May 7, 2014, 9:06 am

I'm going to put this down as Jewish navel gazing.

Jews are disproportionately liberal. Jews make up a huge chunk of the peace movement. Jews are relative to their numbers on the left of most foreign policy positions.

Iraq was unusual in that Jews were not overwhelming opposed to the invasion, but it is worth noting the invasion at the time was overwhelming popular. Frankly given the fact that Jews are now considered white people and the fact that Jews are almost all middle class they should be biased conservative. There certainly is no reason they should be more liberal than Catholics. Yet they are. It is the degree of Jewish liberalism not the degree of Jewish conservatism that is striking.

But even if we do focus on neocons, neocons don't have opinions about foreign policy and USA dominance that are much distinct from what most Republican interventionists have. How much difference is there between David Frum and Mitt Romney or between Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld?

lysias, May 7, 2014, 10:55 am

The neocons lost one last night: Antiwar Rep. Walter Jones Beats Neocon-Backed GOP Rival:

Strongly antiwar incumbent Rep. Walter Jones (R – NC) has won a hotly contested primary tonight, defeating a challenge from hawkish challenger and former Treasury Dept. official Taylor Griffin 51% to 45%.

American, May 7, 2014, 11:24 am

Yep.

Voter turn out was light .. tea party types did a lot of lobbying for Griffin here .but Jones prevailed. Considering the onslaught of organized activity against him by ECI and the tea partiers for the past month he did well.

Citizen, May 8, 2014, 9:24 am

@ lysias
Let's refresh our look at what Ron Paul had to say about foreign policy and foreign aid. Then, let's compare what his son has said, and take a look of his latest bill in congress to cut off aid to Palestine. Yes, you read that right; it's not a bill to cut off any aid to Israel.

Don't look to the US to get any justice in the ME, nor to regain US good reputation in the world. This will situation will not change because US political campaign fiancé system won't change–it just gets worse, enhanced by SCOTUS.

traintosiberia, May 8, 2014, 9:12 am

Stockman's Corner

Bravo, Rep. Walter Jones -- Primary Win Sends Neocons Packing

by David Stockman • May 7, 2014 link to davidstockmanscontracorner.com

The heavy artillery included the detestable Karl Rove, former Governor and RNC Chair Haley Barber and the War Party's highly paid chief PR flack, Ari Fleischer.

But it was Neocon central that hauled out the big guns. Bill Kristol was so desperate to thwart the slowly rising anti-interventionist tide within the GOP that he even trotted out Sarah Palin to endorse Jones's opponent"

But neoocns have the confidence that if they could impose the neocon's theology on the rest of the world, they can do it here as well on American street . They call it education, motivation, duty, responsibility, moral burden, and above all the essence of the manifest destiny.

[Dec 24, 2018] Income inequality happens by design. We cant fix it by tweaking capitalism

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Stocks have always been "a legal form of gambling". What is happening now however, is that a pair of treys can beat out your straight flush. Companies that have never turned a profit fetch huge prices on the stock market. ..."
"... The stock market suckered millions in before 2008 and then prices plummeted. Where did the money from grandpa's pension fund go? ..."
"... Abraham Lincoln said that the purpose of government is to do for people what they cannot do for themselves. Government also should serve to keep people from hurting themselves and to restrain man's greed, which otherwise cannot be self-controlled. Anyone who seeks to own productive power that they cannot or won't use for consumption are beggaring their neighbor––the equivalency of mass murder––the impact of concentrated capital ownership. ..."
"... family wealth" predicts outcomes for 10 to 15 generations. Those with extreme wealth owe it to events going back "300 to 450" years ago, according to research published by the New Republic – an era when it wasn't unusual for white Americans to benefit from an economy dependent upon widespread, unpaid black labor in the form of slavery. ..."
"... Correction: The average person in poverty in the U.S. does not live in the same abject, third world poverty as you might find in Honduras, Central African Republic, Cambodia, or the barrios of Sao Paulo. ..."
"... Since our poor don't live in abject poverty, I invite you to live as a family of four on less than $11,000 a year anywhere in the United States. If you qualify and can obtain subsidized housing you may have some of the accoutrements in your home that you seem to equate with living the high life. You know, running water, a fridge, a toilet, a stove. You would also likely have a phone (subsidized at that) so you might be able to participate (or attempt to participate) in the job market in an honest attempt to better your family's economic prospects and as is required to qualify for most assistance programs. ..."
"... So many dutiful neoliberals on here rushing to the defense of poor Capitalism. Clearly, these commentators are among those who are in the privileged position of reaping the true benefits of Capitalism - And, of course, there are many benefits to reap if you are lucky enough to be born into the right racial-socioeconomic context. ..."
"... Please walk us through how non-capitalist systems create wealth and allow their lowest class people propel themselves to the top in one generation. You will note that most socialist systems derive their technology and advancements from the more capitalistic systems. Pharmaceuticals, software, and robotics are a great example of this. I shutter to think of what the welfare of the average citizen of the world would be like without the advancements made via the capitalist countries. ..."
Dec 05, 2015 | The Guardian

The poorest Americans have no realistic hope of achieving anything that approaches income equality. They still struggle for access to the basics

... ... ...

The disparities in wealth that we term "income inequality" are no accident, and they can't be fixed by fiddling at the edges of our current economic system. These disparities happened by design, and the system structurally disadvantages those at the bottom. The poorest Americans have no realistic hope of achieving anything that approaches income equality; even their very chances for access to the most basic tools of life are almost nil.

... ... ...

Too often, the answer by those who have hoarded everything is they will choose to "give back" in a manner of their choosing – just look at Mark Zuckerberg and his much-derided plan to "give away" 99% of his Facebook stock. He is unlikely to help change inequality or poverty any more than "giving away" of $100m helped children in Newark schools.

Allowing any of the 100 richest Americans to choose how they fix "income inequality" will not make the country more equal or even guarantee more access to life. You can't take down the master's house with the master's tools, even when you're the master; but more to the point, who would tear down his own house to distribute the bricks among so very many others?

mkenney63 5 Dec 2015 20:37

Excellent article. The problems we face are structural and can only be solved by making fundamental changes. We must bring an end to "Citizens United", modern day "Jim Crow" and the military industrial complex in order to restore our democracy. Then maybe, just maybe, we can have an economic system that will treat all with fairness and respect. Crony capitalism has had its day, it has mutated into criminality.

Kencathedrus -> Marcedward 5 Dec 2015 20:23

In the pre-capitalist system people learnt crafts to keep themselves afloat. The Industrial Revolution changed all that. Now we have the church of Education promising a better life if we get into debt to buy (sorry, earn) degrees.

The whole system is messed up and now we have millions of people on this planet who can't function even those with degrees. Barbarians are howling at the gates of Europe. The USA is rotting from within. As Marx predicted the Capitalists are merely paying their own grave diggers.

mkenney63 -> Bobishere 5 Dec 2015 20:17

I would suggest you read the economic and political history of the past 30 years. To help you in your study let me recommend a couple of recent books: "Winner Take all Politics" by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson and "The Age of Acquiescence" by Steve Fraser. It always amazes me that one can be so blind the facts of recent American history; it's not just "a statistical inequality", it's been a well thought-out strategy over time to rig the system, a strategy engaged in by politicians and capitalists. Shine some light on this issue by acquainting yourself with the facts.


Maharaja Brovinda -> Singh Jill Harrison 5 Dec 2015 19:42

We play out the prisoner's dilemma in life, in general, over and over in different circumstances, every day. And we always choose the dominant - rational - solution. But the best solution is not based on rationality, but rather on trust and faith in each other - rather ironically for our current, evidence based society!


Steven Palmer 5 Dec 2015 19:19

Like crack addicts the philanthropricks only seek to extend their individual glory, social image their primary goal, and yet given the context they will burn in history. Philanthroptits should at least offset the immeasurable damage they have done through their medieval wealth accumulation. Collaborative philanthropy for basic income is a good idea, but ye, masters tools.


BlairM -> Iconoclastick 5 Dec 2015 19:10

Well, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, capitalism is the worst possible economic system, except for all those other economic systems that have been tried from time to time.

I'd rather just have the freedom to earn money as I please, and if that means inequality, it's a small price to pay for not having some feudal lord or some party bureaucrat stomping on my humanity.

brusuz 5 Dec 2015 18:52

As long as wealth can be created by shuffling money from one place to another in the giant crap shoot we call our economy, nothing will change. Until something takes place to make it advantageous for the investor capitalists to put that money to work doing something that actually produces some benefit to the society as a whole, they will continue their extractive machinations. I see nothing on the horizon that is going to change any of that, and to cast this as some sort of a racial issue is quite superficial. We have all gotten the shaft, since there is no upward mobility available to anyone. Since the Bush crowd of neocons took power, we have all been shackled with "individual solutions to societal created problems."

Jimi Del Duca 5 Dec 2015 18:31

Friends, Capitalism is structural exploitation of ALL WORKERS. Thinking about it as solely a race issue is divisive. What we need is CLASS SOLIDARITY and ORGANIZATION. See iww.org We are the fighting union with no use for capitalists!

slightlynumb -> AmyInNH 5 Dec 2015 18:04

You'd be better off reading Marx if you want to understand capitalism. I think you are ascribing the word to what you think it should be rather than what it is.

It is essentially a class structure rather than any defined economic system. Neoliberal is essentially laissez faire capitalism. It is designed to suborn nation states to corporate benefit.

AmyInNH -> tommydog

They make $40 a month. Working 7 days a week. At least 12 hour days. Who's fed you that "we're doing them a favor" BS?

And I've news for you regarding "Those whose skills are less adaptable to doing so are seeing their earnings decline." We have many people who have 3 masters degrees making less than minimum wage. We have top notch STEM students shunned so corporations can hire captive/cheaper foreign labor, called H1-Bs, who then wait 10 years working for them waiting for their employment based green card. Or "visiting" students here on J1 visas, so the employers can get out of paying: social security, federal unemployment insurance, etc.

Wake up and smell the coffee tommydog. They've more than a thumb on the scale.

seamanbodine,
I am a socialist. I decided to read this piece to see if Mr. Thrasher could write about market savagery without propounding the fiction that whites are somehow exempt from the effects of it.

No, he could not. I clicked on the link accompanying his assertion that whites who are high school dropouts earn more than blacks with college degrees, and I read the linked piece in full. The linked piece does not in fact compare income (i.e., yearly earnings) of white high school dropouts with those of black college graduates, but it does compare family wealth across racial cohorts (though not educational ones), and the gap there is indeed stark, with average white family wealth in the six figures (full disclosure, I am white, and my personal wealth is below zero, as I owe more in student loans than I own, so perhaps I am not really white, or I do not fully partake of "whiteness," or whatever), and average black family wealth in the four figures.

The reason for this likely has a lot to do with home ownership disparities, which in turn are linked in significant part to racist redlining practices. So white dropouts often live in homes their parents or grandparents bought, while many black college graduates whose parents were locked out of home ownership by institutional racism and, possibly, the withering of manufacturing jobs just as the northward migration was beginning to bear some economic fruit for black families, are still struggling to become homeowners. Thus, the higher average wealth for the dropout who lives in a family owned home.

But this is not what Mr. Thrasher wrote. He specifically used the words "earn more," creating the impression that some white ignoramus is simply going to stumble his way into a higher salary than a cultivated, college educated black person. That is simply not the case, and the difference does matter.

Why does it matter? Because I regularly see middle aged whites who are broken and homeless on the streets of the town where I live, and I know they are simply the tip of a growing mountain of privation. Yeah, go ahead, call it white tears if you want, but if you cannot see that millions (including, of course, not simply folks who are out and out homeless, but folks who are struggling to get enough to eat and routinely go without needed medication and medical care) of people who have "white privilege" are indeed oppressed by global capitalism then I would say that you are, at the end of the day, NO BETTER THAN THE WHITES YOU DISDAIN.

If you have read this far, then you realize that I am in no way denying the reality of structural racism. But an account of economic savagery that entirely subsumes it into non-economic categories (race, gender, age), that refuses to acknowledge that blacks can be exploiters and whites can be exploited, is simply conservatism by other means. One gets the sense that if we have enough black millionaires and enough whites dying of things like a lack of medical care, then this might bring just a little bit of warmth to the hearts of people like Mr. Thrasher.

Call it what you want, but don't call it progressive. Maybe it is historical karma. Which is understandable, as there is no reason why globally privileged blacks in places like the U.S. or Great Britain should bear the burden of being any more selfless or humane than globally privileged whites are or have been. The Steven Thrashers of humanity are certainly no worse than many of the whites they cannot seem to recognize as fully human are.

But nor are they any better.
JohnLG 5 Dec 2015 17:23

I agree that the term "income inequality" is so vague that falls between useless and diversionary, but so too is most use of the word "capitalism", or so it seems to me. Typically missing is a penetrating analysis of where the problem lies, a comprehensibly supported remedy, or large-scale examples of anything except what's not working. "Income inequality" is pretty abstract until we look specifically at the consequences for individuals and society, and take a comprehensive look at all that is unequal. What does "capitalism" mean? Is capitalism the root of all this? Is capitalism any activity undertaken for profit, or substantial monopolization of markets and power?

Power tends to corrupt. Money is a form of power, but there are others. The use of power to essentially cheat, oppress or kill others is corrupt, whether that power is in the form of a weapon, wealth, the powers of the state, or all of the above. Power is seductive and addictive. Even those with good intensions can be corrupted by an excess of power and insufficient accountability, while predators are drawn to power like sharks to blood. Democracy involves dispersion of power, ideally throughout a whole society. A constitutional democracy may offer protection even to minorities against a "tyranny of the majority" so long as a love of justice prevails. Selective "liberty and justice" is not liberty and justice at all, but rather a tyranny of the many against the few, as in racism, or of the few against the many, as by despots. Both forms reinforce each other in the same society, both are corrupt, and any "ism" can be corrupted by narcissism. To what degree is any society a shining example of government of, for, and by the people, and to what degree can one discover empirical evidence of corruption? What do we do about it?

AmyInNH -> CaptainGrey 5 Dec 2015 17:15

You're too funny. It's not "lifting billions out of poverty". It's moving malicious manufacturing practices to the other side of the planet. To the lands of no labor laws. To hide it from consumers. To hide profits.

And it is dying. Legislatively they choke off their natural competition, which is an essential element of capitalism. Monopoly isn't capitalism. And when they bribe legislators, we don't have democracy any more either.

Jeremiah2000 -> Teresa Trujillo 5 Dec 2015 16:53

Stocks have always been "a legal form of gambling". What is happening now however, is that a pair of treys can beat out your straight flush. Companies that have never turned a profit fetch huge prices on the stock market.

The stock market suckered millions in before 2008 and then prices plummeted. Where did the money from grandpa's pension fund go?

Gary Reber 5 Dec 2015 16:45

Abraham Lincoln said that the purpose of government is to do for people what they cannot do for themselves. Government also should serve to keep people from hurting themselves and to restrain man's greed, which otherwise cannot be self-controlled. Anyone who seeks to own productive power that they cannot or won't use for consumption are beggaring their neighbor––the equivalency of mass murder––the impact of concentrated capital ownership.

The words "OWN" and "ASSETS" are the key descriptors of the definition of wealth. But these words are not well understood by the vast majority of Americans or for that matter, global citizens. They are limited to the vocabulary used by the wealthy ownership class and financial publications, which are not widely read, and not even taught in our colleges and universities.

The wealthy ownership class did not become wealthy because they are "three times as smart." Still there is a valid argument that the vast majority of Americans do not pay particular attention to the financial world and educate themselves on wealth building within the current system's limited past-savings paradigm. Significantly, the wealthy OWNERSHIP class use their political power (power always follows property OWNERSHIP) to write the system rules to benefit and enhance their wealth. As such they have benefited from forging trade policy agreements which further concentrate OWNERSHIP on a global scale, military-industrial complex subsidies and government contracts, tax code provisions and loopholes and collective-bargaining rules – policy changes they've used their wealth to champion.

Gary Reber 5 Dec 2015 16:44

Unfortunately, when it comes to recommendations for solutions to economic inequality, virtually every commentator, politician and economist is stuck in viewing the world in one factor terms – human labor, in spite of their implied understanding that the rich are rich because they OWN the non-human means of production – physical capital. The proposed variety of wealth-building programs, like "universal savings accounts that might be subsidized for low-income savers," are not practical solutions because they rely on savings (a denial of consumption which lessens demand in the economy), which the vast majority of Americans do not have, and for those who can save their savings are modest and insignificant. Though, millions of Americans own diluted stock value through the "stock market exchanges," purchased with their earnings as labor workers (savings), their stock holdings are relatively minuscule, as are their dividend payments compared to the top 10 percent of capital owners. Pew Research found that 53 percent of Americans own no stock at all, and out of the 47 percent who do, the richest 5 percent own two-thirds of that stock. And only 10 percent of Americans have pensions, so stock market gains or losses don't affect the incomes of most retirees.

As for taxpayer-supported saving subsidies or other wage-boosting measures, those who have only their labor power and its precarious value held up by coercive rigging and who desperately need capital ownership to enable them to be capital workers (their productive assets applied in the economy) as well as labor workers to have a way to earn more income, cannot satisfy their unsatisfied needs and wants and sufficiently provide for themselves and their families. With only access to labor wages, the 99 percenters will continue, in desperation, to demand more and more pay for the same or less work, as their input is exponentially replaced by productive capital.

As such, the vast majority of American consumers will continue to be strapped to mounting consumer debt bills, stagnant wages and inflationary price pressures. As their ONLY source of income is through wage employment, economic insecurity for the 99 percent majority of people means they cannot survive more than a week or two without a paycheck. Thus, the production side of the economy is under-nourished and hobbled as a result, because there are fewer and fewer "customers with money." We thus need to free economic growth from the slavery of past savings.

I mentioned that political power follows property OWNERSHIP because with concentrated capital asset OWNERSHIP our elected representatives are far too often bought with the expectation that they protect and enhance the interests of the wealthiest Americans, the OWNERSHIP class they too overwhelmingly belong to.

Many, including the author of this article, have concluded that with such a concentrated OWNERSHIP stronghold the wealthy have on our politics, "it's hard to see where this cycle ends." The ONLY way to reverse this cycle and broaden capital asset OWNERSHIP universally is a political revolution. (Bernie Sanders, are you listening?)

The political revolution must address the problem of lack of demand. To create demand, the FUTURE economy must be financed in ways that create new capital OWNERS, who will benefit from the full earnings of the FUTURE productive capability of the American economy, and without taking from those who already OWN. This means significantly slowing the further concentration of capital asset wealth among those who are already wealthy and ensuring that the system is reformed to promote inclusive prosperity, inclusive opportunity, and inclusive economic justice.

yamialwaysright 5 Dec 2015 16:13

I was interested and in agreement until I read about structured racism. Many black kidsin the US grow up without a father in the house. They turn to anti-social behaviour and crime. Once you are poor it is hard to get out of being poor but Journalists are not doing justice to a critique of US Society if they ignore the fact that some people behave in a self-destructive way. I would imagine that if some black men in the US and the UK stuck with one woman and played a positive role in the life of their kids, those kids would have a better chance at life. People of different racial and ethnic origin do this also but there does seem to be a disproportionate problem with some black US men and some black UK men. Poverty is one problem but growing up in poverty and without a father figure adds to the problem.

What the author writes applies to other countries not just the US in relation to the super wealthy being a small proportion of the population yet having the same wealth as a high percentage of the population. This in not a black or latino issue but a wealth distribution issue that affects everyone irrespective of race or ethnic origin. The top 1%, 5% or 10% having most of the wealth is well-known in many countries.

nuthermerican4u 5 Dec 2015 15:59

Capitalism, especially the current vulture capitalism, is dog eat dog. Always was, always will be. My advice is that if you are a capitalist that values your heirs, invest in getting off this soon-to-be slag heap and find other planets to pillage and rape. Either go all out for capitalism or reign in this beast before it kills all of us.

soundofthesuburbs 5 Dec 2015 15:32

Our antiquated class structure demonstrates the trickle up of Capitalism and the need to counterbalance it with progressive taxation.

In the 1960s/1970s we used high taxes on the wealthy to counter balance the trickle up of Capitalism and achieved much greater equality.

Today we have low taxes on the wealthy and Capitalism's trickle up is widening the inequality gap.

We are cutting benefits for the disabled, poor and elderly so inequality can get wider and the idle rich can remain idle.

They have issued enough propaganda to make people think it's those at the bottom that don't work.

Every society since the dawn of civilization has had a Leisure Class at the top, in the UK we call them the Aristocracy and they have been doing nothing for centuries.

The UK's aristocracy has seen social systems come and go, but they all provide a life of luxury and leisure and with someone else doing all the work.

Feudalism - exploit the masses through land ownership
Capitalism - exploit the masses through wealth (Capital)

Today this is done through the parasitic, rentier trickle up of Capitalism:

a) Those with excess capital invest it and collect interest, dividends and rent.
b) Those with insufficient capital borrow money and pay interest and rent.

The system itself provides for the idle rich and always has done from the first civilisations right up to the 21st Century.

The rich taking from the poor is always built into the system, taxes and benefits are the counterbalance that needs to be applied externally.

Iconoclastick 5 Dec 2015 15:31

I often chuckle when I read some of the right wing comments on articles such as this. Firstly, I question if readers actually read the article references I've highlighted, before rushing to comment.

Secondly, the comments are generated by cifers who probably haven't set the world alight, haven't made a difference in their local community, they'll have never created thousands of jobs in order to reward themselves with huge dividends having and as a consequence enjoy spectacular asset/investment growth, at best they'll be chugging along, just about keeping their shit together and yet they support a system that's broken, other than for the one percent, of the one percent.

A new report from the Institute for Policy Studies issued this week analyzed the Forbes list of the 400 richest Americans and found that "the wealthiest 100 households now own about as much wealth as the entire African American population in the United States". That means that 100 families – most of whom are white – have as much wealth as the 41,000,000 black folks walking around the country (and the million or so locked up) combined.

Similarly, the report also stated that "the wealthiest 186 members of the Forbes 400 own as much wealth as the entire Latino population" of the nation. Here again, the breakdown in actual humans is broke down: 186 overwhelmingly white folks have more money than that an astounding 55,000,000 Latino people.

family wealth" predicts outcomes for 10 to 15 generations. Those with extreme wealth owe it to events going back "300 to 450" years ago, according to research published by the New Republic – an era when it wasn't unusual for white Americans to benefit from an economy dependent upon widespread, unpaid black labor in the form of slavery.

soundofthesuburbs -> soundofthesuburbs 5 Dec 2015 15:26

It is the 21st Century and most of the land in the UK is still owned by the descendants of feudal warlords that killed people and stole their land and wealth.

When there is no land to build houses for generation rent, land ownership becomes an issue.

David Cameron is married into the aristocracy and George Osborne is a member of the aristocracy, they must both be well acquainted with the Leisure Class.

I can't find any hard work going on looking at the Wikipedia page for David Cameron's father-in-law. His family have been on their estate since the sixteenth century and judging by today's thinking, expect to be on it until the end of time.

George Osborne's aristocratic pedigree goes back to the Tudor era:

"he is an aristocrat with a pedigree stretching back to early in the Tudor era. His father, Sir Peter Osborne, is the 17th holder of a hereditary baronetcy that has been passed from father to son for 10 generations, and of which George is next in line."

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/george-osborne-a-silver-spoon-for-the-golden-boy-2004814.html

soundofthesuburbs 5 Dec 2015 15:24

The working and middle classes toil to keep the upper class in luxury and leisure.

In the UK nothing has changed.

We call our Leisure Class the Aristocracy.

For the first time in five millennia of human civilisation some people at the bottom of society aren't working.

We can't have that; idleness is only for the rich.

It's the way it's always been and the way it must be again.

Did you think the upper; leisure class, social calendar disappeared in the 19th Century?
No it's alive and kicking in the 21st Century ....

Peer into the lives of today's Leisure Class with Tatler. http://www.tatler.com/the-season

If we have people at the bottom who are not working the whole of civilisation will be turned on its head.

"The modern industrial society developed from the barbarian tribal society, which featured a leisure class supported by subordinated working classes employed in economically productive occupations. The leisure class is composed of people exempted from manual work and from practicing economically productive occupations, because they belong to the leisure class."

The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions, by Thorstein Veblen. It was written a long time ago but much of it is as true today as it was then. The Wikipedia entry gives a good insight.

DBChas 5 Dec 2015 15:13
"income inequality" is best viewed as structural capitalism. It's not as if, did black and brown people and female people somehow (miraculously) attain the economic status of the lower-paid, white, male person, the problem would be solved--simply by adjusting pay scales. The problem is inherent to capitalism, which doesn't mean certain "types" of people aren't more disadvantaged for their "type." No one is saying that. For capitalists, it's easier to rationalize the obscene unfairness (only rich people say, "life's not fair") when their "type" is regarded as superior to a different "type," whether that be with respect to color or gender or both.

Over time--a long time--the dominant party (white males since the Dark Ages, also the life-span of capitalism coincidentally enough) came to dominance by various means, too many to try to list, or even know of. Why white males? BTW, just because most in power and in money are white males does not mean ALL white males are in positions of power and wealth. Most are not, and these facts help to fog the issue.

Indeed, "income inequality," is not an accident, nor can it be fixed, as the author notes, by tweaking (presumably he means capitalism). And he's quite right too in saying, "You can't take down the master's house with the master's tools..." I take that ALSO to mean, the problem can't be fixed by way of what Hedges has called a collapsing liberal establishment with its various institutions, officially speaking. That is, it's not institutional racism that's collapsing, but that institution is not officially recognized as such.

HOWEVER, it IS possible, even when burdened with an economics that is capitalism, to redistribute wealth, and I don't just mean Mark Zuckerberg's. I mean all wealth in whatever form can be redistributed if/when government decides it can. And THIS TIME, unlike the 1950s-60s, not only would taxes on the wealthy be the same as then but the wealth redistributed would be redistributed to ALL, not just to white families, and perhaps in particular to red families, the oft forgotten ones.

This is a matter of political will. But, of course, if that means whites as the largest voting block insist on electing to office those without the political will, nothing will change. In that case, other means have to be considered, and just a reminder: If the government fails to serve the people, the Constitution gives to the people the right to depose that government. But again, if whites as the largest voting block AND as the largest sub-group in the nation (and women are the largest part of that block, often voting as their men vote--just the facts, please, however unpleasant) have little interest in seeing to making necessary changes at least in voting booths, then...what? Bolshevism or what? No one seems to know and it's practically taboo even to talk about possibilities. Americans did it once, but not inclusively and not even paid in many instances. When it happens again, it has to happen with and for the participation of ALL. And it's worth noting that it will have to happen again, because capitalism by its very nature cannot survive itself. That is, as Marx rightly noted, capitalism will eventually collapse by dint of its internal contradictions.


mbidding Jeremiah2000 5 Dec 2015 15:08

Correction: The average person in poverty in the U.S. does not live in the same abject, third world poverty as you might find in Honduras, Central African Republic, Cambodia, or the barrios of Sao Paulo.

Since our poor don't live in abject poverty, I invite you to live as a family of four on less than $11,000 a year anywhere in the United States. If you qualify and can obtain subsidized housing you may have some of the accoutrements in your home that you seem to equate with living the high life. You know, running water, a fridge, a toilet, a stove. You would also likely have a phone (subsidized at that) so you might be able to participate (or attempt to participate) in the job market in an honest attempt to better your family's economic prospects and as is required to qualify for most assistance programs.

Consider as well that you don't have transportation to get a job that would improve your circumstances. You earn too much to qualify for meaningful levels of food support programs and fall into the insurance gap for subsidies because you live in a state that for ideological reasons refuses to expand Medicaid coverage. Your local schools are a disgrace but you can't take advantage of so-called school choice programs (vouchers, charters, and the like) as you don't have transportation or the time (given your employer's refusal to set fixed working hours for minimum wage part time work) to get your kids to that fine choice school.

You may have a fridge and a stove, but you have no food to cook. You may have access to running water and electricity, but you can't afford to pay the bills for such on account of having to choose between putting food in that fridge or flushing that toilet. You can't be there reliably for your kids to help with school, etc, because you work constantly shifting hours for crap pay.

Get back to me after six months to a year after living in such circumstances and then tell me again how Americans don't really live in poverty simply because they have access to appliances.


Earl Shelton 5 Dec 2015 15:08

The Earned Income Tax Credit seems to me a good starting point for reform. It has been around since the 70s -- conceived by Nixon/Moynihan -- and signed by socialist (kidding) Gerald Ford -- it already *redistributes* income (don't choke on the term, O'Reilly) directly from tax revenue (which is still largely progressive) to the working poor, with kids.

That program should be massively expanded to tax the 1% -- and especially the top 1/10 of 1% (including a wealth tax) -- and distribute the money to the bottom half of society, mostly in the form of work training, child care and other things that help put them in and keep them in the middle class. It is a mechanism already in existence to correct the worst ravages of Capitalism. Use it to build shared prosperity.


oKWJNRo 5 Dec 2015 14:40

So many dutiful neoliberals on here rushing to the defense of poor Capitalism. Clearly, these commentators are among those who are in the privileged position of reaping the true benefits of Capitalism - And, of course, there are many benefits to reap if you are lucky enough to be born into the right racial-socioeconomic context.

We can probably all agree that Capitalism has brought about widespread improvements in healthcare, education, living conditions, for example, compared to the feudal system that preceded it... But it also disproportionately benefits the upper echelons of Capitalist societies and is wholly unequal by design.

Capitalism depends upon the existence of a large underclass that can be exploited. This is part of the process of how surplus value is created and wealth is extracted from labour. This much is indisputable. It is therefore obvious that capitalism isn't an ideal system for most of us living on this planet.

As for the improvements in healthcare, education, living conditions etc that Capitalism has fostered... Most of these were won through long struggles against the Capitalist hegemony by the masses. We would have certainly chosen to make these improvements to our landscape sooner if Capitalism hadn't made every effort to stop us. The problem today is that Capitalism and its powerful beneficiaries have successfully convinced us that there is no possible alternative. It won't give us the chance to try or even permit us to believe there could be another, better way.

Martin Joseph -> realdoge 5 Dec 2015 14:33

Please walk us through how non-capitalist systems create wealth and allow their lowest class people propel themselves to the top in one generation. You will note that most socialist systems derive their technology and advancements from the more capitalistic systems. Pharmaceuticals, software, and robotics are a great example of this.

I shutter to think of what the welfare of the average citizen of the world would be like without the advancements made via the capitalist countries.

VWFeature 5 Dec 2015 14:29

Markets, economies and tax systems are created by people, and based on rules they agree on. Those rules can favor general prosperity or concentration of wealth. Destruction and predation are easier than creation and cooperation, so our rules have to favor cooperation if we want to avoid predation and destructive conflicts.

In the 1930's the US changed many of those rules to favor general prosperity. Since then they've been gradually changed to favor wealth concentration and predation. They can be changed back.

The trick is creating a system that encourages innovation while putting a safety net under the population so failure doesn't end in starvation.

A large part of our current problems is the natural tendency for large companies to get larger and larger until their failure would adversely affect too many others, so they're not allowed to fail. Tax law, not antitrust law, has to work against this. If a company can reduce its tax rate by breaking into 20 smaller (still huge) companies, then competition is preserved and no one company can dominate and control markets.

Robert Goldschmidt -> Jake321 5 Dec 2015 14:27

Bernie Sanders has it right on -- we can only heal our system by first having millions rise up and demand an end to the corruption of the corporations controlling our elected representatives. Corporations are not people and money is not speech.

moonwrap02 5 Dec 2015 14:26

The effects of wealth distribution has far reaching consequences. It is not just about money, but creating a fair society - one that is co-operative and cohesive. The present system has allowed an ever divide between the rich and poor, creating a two tier society where neither the twain shall meet. The rich and poor are almost different species on the planet and no longer belong to the same community. Commonality of interest is lost and so it's difficult to form community and to have good, friendly relationships across class differences that are that large.

"If capitalism is to be seen to be fair, the same rules are to apply to the big guy as to the little guy,"

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/2-charts-that-show-what-the-world-really-thinks-about-capitalism-a6719851.html


Jeremiah2000 -> bifess 5 Dec 2015 14:17

Sorry. I get it now. You actually think that because the Washington elite has repealed Glass-Steagel that we live in a unregulated capitalistic system.

This is so far from the truth that I wasn't comprehending that anyone could think that. You can see the graph of pages published in the Federal Register here. Unregulated capitalism? Wow.

Dodd Frank was passed in 2010 (without a single Republican vote). Originally it was 2,300 pages. It is STILL being written by nameless bureaucrats and is over 20,000 pages. Unregulated capitalism? Really?

But the reality is that Goliath is conspiring with the government to regulate what size sling David can use and how many stones and how many ounces.

So we need more government regulations? They will disallow David from anything but spitwads and only two of those.


neuronmaker -> AmyInNH 5 Dec 2015 14:16

Do you understand the concept of corporations which are products of capitalism?

The legal institutions within each capitalist corporations and nations are just that, they are capitalist and all about making profits.

The law is made by the rich capitalists and for the rich capitalists. Each Legislation is a link in the chain of economic slavery by capitalists.

Capitalism and the concept of money is a construction of the human mind, as it does not exist in the natural world. This construction is all about using other human beings like blood suckers to sustain a cruel and evil life style - with blood and brutality as the core ideology.


Marcedward -> MarjaE 5 Dec 2015 14:12

I would agree that our system of help for the less-well-off could be more accessible and more generous, but that doesn't negate that point that there is a lot of help out there - the most important help being that totally free educational system. Think about it, a free education, and to get the most out of it a student merely has to show up, obey the rules, do the homework and study for tests. It's all laid out there for the kids like a helicopter mom laying out her kids clothes. How much easier can we make it? If people can't be bothered to show up and put in effort, how is their failure based on racism


tommydog -> martinusher 5 Dec 2015 14:12

As you are referring to Carlos Slim, interestingly while he is Mexican by birth his parents were both Lebanese.

slightlynumb -> AmyInNH 5 Dec 2015 14:12

Why isn't that capitalism? It's raw capitalism on steroids.

Zara Von Fritz -> Toughspike 5 Dec 2015 14:12

It's an equal opportunity plantation now.

Robert Goldschmidt 5 Dec 2015 14:11

The key to repairing the system is to identify the causes of our problems.

Here is my list:

The information technology revolution which continues to destroy wages by enabling automation and outsourcing.

The reformation of monopolies which price gouge and block innovation.

Hitting ecological limits such as climate change, water shortages, unsustainable farming.

Then we can make meaningful changes such as regulation of the portion of corporate profit that are pay, enforcement of national and regional antitrust laws and an escalating carbon tax.

Zara Von Fritz -> PostCorbyn 5 Dec 2015 14:11

If you can believe these quality of life or happiness indexes they put out so often, the winners tend to be places that have nice environments and a higher socialist mix in their economy. Of course there are examples of poor countries that practice the same but its not clear that their choice is causal rather than reactive.

We created this mess and we can fix it.

Zara Von Fritz -> dig4victory 5 Dec 2015 14:03

Yes Basic Income is possibly the mythical third way. It socialises wealth to a point but at the same time frees markets from their obligation to perpetually grow and create jobs for the sake of jobs and also hereford reduces the subsequent need for governments to attempt to control them beyond maintaining their health.

Zara Von Fritz 5 Dec 2015 13:48

As I understand it, you don't just fiddle with capitalism, you counteract it, or counterweight it. A level of capitalism, or credit accumulation, and a level of socialism has always existed, including democracy which is a manifestation of socialism (1 vote each). So the project of capital accumulation seems to be out of control because larger accumulations become more powerful and meanwhile the power of labour in the marketplace has become less so due to forces driving unemployment. The danger is that capital's power to control the democratic system reaches a point of no return.


Jeremiah2000 -> bifess 5 Dec 2015 13:42

"I do not have the economic freedom to grow my own food because i do not have access to enough land to grow it and i do not have the economic clout to buy a piece of land."

Economic freedom does NOT mean you get money for free. It means that means that if you grow food for personal use, the federal government doesn't trash the Constitution by using the insterstate commerce clause to say that it can regulate how much you grow on your own personal land.

Economic freedom means that if you have a widget, you can choose to set the price for $10 or $100 and that a buyer is free to buy it from you or not buy it from you. It does NOT mean that you are entitled to "free" widgets.

"If capitalism has not managed to eradicate poverty in rich first world countries then just what chance if there of capitalism eradicating poverty on a global scale?"

The average person in poverty in the U.S. doesn't live in poverty:

In fact, 80.9 percent of households below the poverty level have cell phones, and a healthy majority-58.2 percent-have computers.

Fully 96.1 percent of American households in "poverty" have a television to watch, and 83.2 percent of them have a video-recording device in case they cannot get home in time to watch the football game or their favorite television show and they want to record it for watching later.

Refrigerators (97.8 percent), gas or electric stoves (96.6 percent) and microwaves (93.2 percent) are standard equipment in the homes of Americans in "poverty."

More than 83 percent have air-conditioning.

Interestingly, the appliances surveyed by the Census Bureau that households in poverty are least likely to own are dish washers (44.9 percent) and food freezers (26.2 percent).

However, most Americans in "poverty" do not need to go to a laundromat. According to the Census Bureau, 68.7 percent of households in poverty have a clothes washer and 65.3 percent have a clothes dryer.

(Data from the U.S. census.)

[Dec 22, 2018] British Security Service Infiltration, the Integrity Initiative and the Institute for Statecraft by Craig Murray

Highly recommended!
Craig Murray is right that "As the Establishment feels its grip slipping, as people wake up to the appalling economic exploitation by the few that underlies the very foundations of modern western society, expect the methods used by the security services to become even dirtier." Collapse of neoliberal ideology and rise of tentions in neoliberal sociarties resulted in unprecedented increase of covert and false flag operations by British intelligence services, especially against Russia, which had been chosen as a convenient scapegoat. With Steele dossier and Skripal affair as two most well known.
New Lady Macbeth (Theresa May) Russophobia is so extreme that her cabinet derailed the election of a Russian to head Interpol.
Looks like neoliberalism cannot be defeated by and faction of the existing elite. Only when shepp oil end mant people will have a chance. The US , GB and EU are part of the wider hegemonic neoliberal system. In fact rejection of neoliberal globalization probably will lead to "national neoliberals" regime which would be a flavor of neo-fascism, no more no less.
Notable quotes:
"... The British state can maintain its spies' cover stories for centuries. ..."
"... I learnt how highly improbable left wing firebrand Simon Bracey-Lane just happened to be on holiday in the United States with available cash to fund himself, when he stumbled into the Bernie Sanders campaign. ..."
"... It is, to say the least, very interesting indeed that just a year later the left wing, "Corbyn and Sanders supporting" Bracey-Lane is hosting a very right wing event, "Cold War Then and Now", for the shadowy neo-con Institute for Statecraft, at which an entirely unbalanced panel of British military, NATO and Ukrainian nationalists extolled the virtues of re-arming against Russia. ..."
"... the MOD-sponsored Institute for Statecraft has been given millions of pounds of taxpayers' money by the FCO to spread covert disinformation and propaganda, particularly against Russia and the anti-war movement. Activities include twitter and facebook trolling and secretly paying journalists in "clusters of influence" around Europe. Anonymous helpfully leaked the Institute's internal documents. Some of the Integrity Initiative's thus exposed alleged covert agents, like David Aaronovitch, have denied any involvement despite their appearance in the documents, and others like Dan Kaszeta the US "novichok expert", have cheerfully admitted it. ..."
"... By sleuthing the company records of this "Scottish charity", and a couple of phone calls, I discovered that the actual location of the Institute for Statecraft is the basement of 2 Temple Place, London. This is not just any basement – it is the basement of the former London mansion of William Waldorf Astor, an astonishing building . It is, in short, possibly the most expensive basement in London. ..."
"... Which is interesting because the accounts of the Institute for Statecraft claim it has no permanent staff and show nothing for rent, utilities or office expenses. In fact, I understand the rent is paid by the Ministry of Defence. ..."
"... I have a great deal more to tell you about Mr Edney and his organisation next week, and the extraordinary covert disinformation war the British government wages online, attacking British citizens using British taxpayers' money. Please note in the interim I am not even a smidgeon suicidal, and going to be very, very careful crossing the road and am not intending any walks in the hills. ..."
"... I am not alleging Mr Bracey-Lane is an intelligence service operative who previously infiltrated the Labour Party and the Sanders campaign. He may just be a young man of unusually heterodox and vacillating political opinions. He may be an undercover reporter for the Canary infiltrating the Institute for Statecraft. All these things are possible, and I have no firm information. ..."
"... one of the activities the Integrity Initiative sponsors happens to be the use of online trolls to ridicule the idea that the British security services ever carry out any kind of infiltration, false flag or agent provocateur operations, despite the fact that we even have repeated court judgements against undercover infiltration officers getting female activists pregnant. The Integrity Initiative offers us a glimpse into the very dirty world of surveillance and official disinformation. If we actually had a free media, it would be the biggest story of the day ..."
"... As the Establishment feels its grip slipping, as people wake up to the appalling economic exploitation by the few that underlies the very foundations of modern western society, expect the methods used by the security services to become even dirtier. ..."
"... You can bank on continued ramping up of Russophobia to supply "the enemy". ..."
Dec 13, 2018 | craigmurray.org.uk

in Uncategorized by craig

The British state can maintain its spies' cover stories for centuries. Look up Eldred Pottinger, who for 180 years appears in scores of British history books – right up to and including William Dalrymple's Return of the King – as a British officer who chanced to be passing Herat on holiday when it came under siege from a partly Russian-officered Persian army, and helped to organise the defences. In researching Sikunder Burnes, I discovered and published from the British Library incontrovertible and detailed documentary evidence that Pottinger's entire journey was under the direct instructions of, and reporting to, British spymaster Alexander Burnes. The first historian to publish the untrue "holiday" cover story, Sir John Kaye, knew both Burnes and Pottinger and undoubtedly knew he was publishing lying propaganda. Every other British historian of the First Afghan War (except me and latterly Farrukh Husain) has just followed Kaye's official propaganda.

Some things don't change. I was irresistibly reminded of Eldred Pottinger just passing Herat on holiday, when I learnt how highly improbable left wing firebrand Simon Bracey-Lane just happened to be on holiday in the United States with available cash to fund himself, when he stumbled into the Bernie Sanders campaign.

Recent university graduate Simon Bracey-Lane took it even further. Originally from Wimbledon in London, he was inspired to rejoin the Labour party in September when Corbyn was elected leader. But by that point, he was already in the US on holiday. So he joined the Sanders campaign, and never left.
"I had two weeks left and some money left, so I thought, Fuck it, I'll make some calls for Bernie Sanders," he explains. "I just sort of knew Des Moines was the place, so I just turned up at their HQ, started making phone calls, and then became a fully fledged field organiser."

It is, to say the least, very interesting indeed that just a year later the left wing, "Corbyn and Sanders supporting" Bracey-Lane is hosting a very right wing event, "Cold War Then and Now", for the shadowy neo-con Institute for Statecraft, at which an entirely unbalanced panel of British military, NATO and Ukrainian nationalists extolled the virtues of re-arming against Russia.

Nor would it seem likely that Bracey-Lane would be involved with the Integrity Initiative. Even the mainstream media has been forced to give a few paragraphs to the outrageous Integrity Initiative, under which the MOD-sponsored Institute for Statecraft has been given millions of pounds of taxpayers' money by the FCO to spread covert disinformation and propaganda, particularly against Russia and the anti-war movement. Activities include twitter and facebook trolling and secretly paying journalists in "clusters of influence" around Europe. Anonymous helpfully leaked the Institute's internal documents. Some of the Integrity Initiative's thus exposed alleged covert agents, like David Aaronovitch, have denied any involvement despite their appearance in the documents, and others like Dan Kaszeta the US "novichok expert", have cheerfully admitted it.

The mainstream media have tracked down the HQ of the "Institute for Statecraft" to a derelict mill near Auchtermuchty. It is owned by one of the company directors, Daniel Lafayeedney, formerly of D Squadron 23rd SAS Regiment and later of Military Intelligence (and incidentally born the rather more prosaic Daniel Edney).

By sleuthing the company records of this "Scottish charity", and a couple of phone calls, I discovered that the actual location of the Institute for Statecraft is the basement of 2 Temple Place, London. This is not just any basement – it is the basement of the former London mansion of William Waldorf Astor, an astonishing building. It is, in short, possibly the most expensive basement in London.

Which is interesting because the accounts of the Institute for Statecraft claim it has no permanent staff and show nothing for rent, utilities or office expenses. In fact, I understand the rent is paid by the Ministry of Defence.

Having been told where the Institute for Statecraft skulk, I tipped off journalist Kit Klarenberg of Sputnik Radio to go and physically check it out. Kit did so and was aggressively ejected by that well-known Corbyn and Sanders supporter, Simon Bracey-Lane. It does seem somewhat strange that our left wing hero is deeply embedded in an organisation that launches troll attacks on Jeremy Corbyn.

I have a great deal more to tell you about Mr Edney and his organisation next week, and the extraordinary covert disinformation war the British government wages online, attacking British citizens using British taxpayers' money. Please note in the interim I am not even a smidgeon suicidal, and going to be very, very careful crossing the road and am not intending any walks in the hills.

I am not alleging Mr Bracey-Lane is an intelligence service operative who previously infiltrated the Labour Party and the Sanders campaign. He may just be a young man of unusually heterodox and vacillating political opinions. He may be an undercover reporter for the Canary infiltrating the Institute for Statecraft. All these things are possible, and I have no firm information.

But one of the activities the Integrity Initiative sponsors happens to be the use of online trolls to ridicule the idea that the British security services ever carry out any kind of infiltration, false flag or agent provocateur operations, despite the fact that we even have repeated court judgements against undercover infiltration officers getting female activists pregnant. The Integrity Initiative offers us a glimpse into the very dirty world of surveillance and official disinformation. If we actually had a free media, it would be the biggest story of the day.

As the Establishment feels its grip slipping, as people wake up to the appalling economic exploitation by the few that underlies the very foundations of modern western society, expect the methods used by the security services to become even dirtier.

You can bank on continued ramping up of Russophobia to supply "the enemy".

As both Scottish Independence and Jeremy Corbyn are viewed as real threats by the British Establishment, you can anticipate every possible kind of dirty trick in the next couple of years, with increasing frequency and audacity

[Dec 22, 2018] If Truth Cannot Prevail Over Material Agendas We Are Doomed by Paul Craig Roberts

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... In his just published book, War With Russia? ..."
"... To paraphrase Putin: "You are making Russia a threat by declaring us to be one, by discarding facts and substituting orchestrated opinions that your propagandistic media establish as fact via endless repetition." ..."
"... Cohen is correct that during the Cold War every US president worked to defuse tensions, especially Republican ones. Since the Clinton regime every US president has worked to create tensions. What explains this dangerous change in approach? The end of the Cold War was disadvantageous to the military/security complex whose budget and power had waxed from decades of cold war. Suddenly the enemy that had bestowed such wealth and prestige on the military/security complex disappeared. ..."
"... The New Cold War is the result of the military/security complex's resurrection of the enemy. In a democracy with independent media and scholars, this would not have been possible. But the Clinton regime permitted in violation of anti-trust laws 90% of the US media to be concentrated in the hands of six mega-corporations, thus destroying an independence already undermined by the CIA's successful use of the CIA's media assets to control explanations. Many books have been written about the CIA's use of the media, including Udo Ulfkotte's "Bought Journalism," the English edition of which was quickly withdrawn and burned. ..."
www.theamericanconservative.com
Dec 22, 2018 |

Throughout the long Cold War Stephen Cohen, professor of Russian studies at Princeton University and New York University was a voice of reason. He refused to allow his patriotism to blind him to Washington's contribution to the conflict and to criticize only the Soviet contribution. Cohen's interest was not to blame the enemy but to work toward a mutual understanding that would remove the threat of nuclear war. Although a Democrat and left-leaning, Cohen would have been at home in the Reagan administration, as Reagan's first priority was to end the Cold War. I know this because I was part of the effort. Pat Buchanan will tell you the same thing.

In 1974 a notorious cold warrior, Albert Wohlstetter, absurdly accused the CIA of underestimating the Soviet threat. As the CIA had every incentive for reasons of budget and power to overestimate the Soviet threat, and today the "Russian threat," Wohlstetter's accusation made no sense on its face. However he succeeded in stirring up enough concern that CIA director George H.W. Bush, later Vice President and President, agreed to a Team B to investigate the CIA's assessment, headed by the Russiaphobic Harvard professor Richard Pipes. Team B concluded that the Soviets thought they could win a nuclear war and were building the forces with which to attack the US.

The report was mainly nonsense, and it must have have troubled Stephen Cohen to experience the setback to negotiations that Team B caused.

Today Cohen is stressed that it is the United States that thinks it can win a nuclear war. Washington speaks openly of using "low yield" nuclear weapons, and intentionally forecloses any peace negotiations with Russia with a propaganda campaign against Russia of demonization, vilification, and transparent lies, while installing missile bases on Russia's borders and while talking of incorporating former parts of Russia into NATO. In his just published book, War With Russia? , which I highly recommend, Cohen makes a convincing case that Washington is asking for war.

I agree with Cohen that if Russia is a threat it is only because the US is threatening Russia. The stupidity of the policy toward Russia is creating a Russian threat. Putin keeps emphasizing this. To paraphrase Putin: "You are making Russia a threat by declaring us to be one, by discarding facts and substituting orchestrated opinions that your propagandistic media establish as fact via endless repetition."

Cohen is correct that during the Cold War every US president worked to defuse tensions, especially Republican ones. Since the Clinton regime every US president has worked to create tensions. What explains this dangerous change in approach? The end of the Cold War was disadvantageous to the military/security complex whose budget and power had waxed from decades of cold war. Suddenly the enemy that had bestowed such wealth and prestige on the military/security complex disappeared.

The New Cold War is the result of the military/security complex's resurrection of the enemy. In a democracy with independent media and scholars, this would not have been possible. But the Clinton regime permitted in violation of anti-trust laws 90% of the US media to be concentrated in the hands of six mega-corporations, thus destroying an independence already undermined by the CIA's successful use of the CIA's media assets to control explanations. Many books have been written about the CIA's use of the media, including Udo Ulfkotte's "Bought Journalism," the English edition of which was quickly withdrawn and burned.

The demonization of Russia is also aided and abetted by the Democrats' hatred of Trump and anger from Hillary's loss of the presidential election to the "Trump deplorables." The Democrats purport to believe that Trump was installed by Putin's interference in the presidential election. This false belief is emotionally important to Democrats, and they can't let go of it.

Although Cohen as a professor at Princeton and NYU never lacked research opportunities, in the US Russian studies, strategic studies, and the like are funded by the military/security complex whose agenda Cohen's scholarship does not serve. At the Center for Strategic and International Studies, where I held an independently financed chair for a dozen years, most of my colleagues were dependent on grants from the military/security complex. At the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, where I was a Senior Fellow for three decades, the anti-Soviet stance of the Institution reflected the agenda of those who funded the institution.

I am not saying that my colleagues were whores on a payroll. I am saying that the people who got the appointments were people who were inclined to see the Soviet Union the way the military/security complex thought it should be seen.

As Stephen Cohen is aware, in the original Cold War there was some balance as all explanations were not controlled. There were independent scholars who could point out that the Soviets, decimated by World War 2, had an interest in peace, and that accommodation could be achieved, thus avoiding the possibility of nuclear war.

Stephen Cohen must have been in the younger ranks of those sensible people, as he and President Reagan's ambassador to the Soviet Union, Jack Matloff, seem to be the remaining voices of expert reason on the American scene.

If you care to understand the dire threat under which you live, a threat that only a few people, such as Stephen Cohen, are trying to lift, read his book.

If you want to understand the dire threat that a bought-and-paid-for American media poses to your existence, read Cohen's accounts of their despicable lies. America has a media that is synonymous with lies.

If you want to understand how corrupt American universities are as organizations on the take for money, organizations to whom truth is inconsequential, read Cohen's book.

If you want to understand why you could be dead before Global Warming can get you, read Cohen's book.

Enough said.

[Dec 16, 2018] The 'Integrity Initiative' - A Military Intelligence Operation, Disguised As Charity, To Create The Russian Threat

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Sounds to me like that Integrity initiative dude needs to go on a 'de-radicalisation program !!! ..."
"... the powerbrokers have always been in London and now its hypercentralized endgame in Brussels. You can say that it is the US through and through, but ask yourself who has more to gain from US FP abroad: average Americans or the global elites? ..."
"... Those former-Eastern Bloc countries, i.e. Poland and Ukraine, do not count as power brokers. They have and will always be pawns in the game. So what if they still worship Icons of Americanism which is a remnant culture of their F*ed up narrative where they still believe they are fighting the commies. ..."
"... Integrity Initiative ..."
"... From his curriculum vitae (pdf) we learn that Donnelly was a long time soldier in the British Army Intelligence Corps where he established and led the Soviet Studies Research Centre at RMA Sandhurst. He later was involved in creating the US Army's Foreign Military Studies Office (FMSO) at Ft. Leavenworth. ..."
"... He worked at the British Ministry of Defence and as an advisor to several Secretaries General of NATO. He is a director of the Statecraft Institute since 2010. Donnelly also advises the Foreign Minister of Lithuania. He is a "Security and Justice Senior Mentor" of the UK's Stabilisation Unit which is tasked with destabilizing various countries. He serves as a Honorary Colonel of the Specialist Group Military Intelligence (SGMI). ..."
"... This was an order from the core of the British thinking to Donnelly to get even deeper into the inner-British influence business. Hype Russia as a threat so more money can be taken from the 'vested interests' of the people and dumped into the military machine. ..."
"... That particular advise of General Barrons was accepted. In 2017 the Integrity Initiative bid for funding from the Ministry of Defence (pdf) for various projects to influence the public, the parliament and the government as well as foreign forces. The bid lists "performance indicators" that are supposed to measure the success of its activities. The top indicator for the Initiative's proposed work is a "Tougher stance in government policy towards Russia" ..."
"... In March 2014, shortly after Crimea split from the Ukraine, Donnelly suggested Military measures (pdf) to be taken by the Ukraine with regards to Crimea: ..."
"... Think for a moment how Russia would have responded to a mining of Sevastopol harbor, the frying of its satellites or the destruction of its fighter jets in Crimea. Those "guestures" would have been illegal acts of war against the forces of a nuclear power which were legally stationed in Crimea. And how was the west to immediately supply gas to Ukraine and Ukraine's pipeline network is designed to unidirectionally receive gas from Russia? ..."
"... Yes, Putin really believes his own propaganda ..."
"... Putin's paranoia is driving his foreign adventures ..."
"... Russian information warfare - airbrushing reality ..."
"... Distract, deceive, destroy: Putin at war in Syria ..."
"... Russian penetration in Germany ..."
"... Russian conspiracy theory and foreign policy ..."
"... Mapping Russia's whole influence machine ..."
"... Military Review ..."
"... BBC Newsnight ..."
"... The most recent release of Integrity Initiative documents includes lots of in-depth reports (pdf) about foreign media reactions to the Skripal affair. One wonders why the Initiative commissioned such research (pdf) and paid for it. ..."
"... Here is an interesting look at how little the Russia-linked entities spent on advertising on Google during the 2016 election: https://viableopposition.blogspot.com/2018/12/google-russia-and-4700-in-advertising.html Slowly but surely, the Russian meddling narrative is falling apart. ..."
"... McCarthyesque smear campaigns to discredit opponents and squash dissent has become normal practice. Integrity Initiative tweets against Corbyn is a stark example, but there have been MANY other people and groups that have been tarred with claims of being sponsored/led/influenced by Russia, including Catalonian independence activists and Yellow vest protesters. ..."
"... Dear god, what has gotten into the minds of the military and political "elite" within the UK! Mining Sevastopol would have been an obvious act of war against Russia and Russia would have responded with force. ..."
"... It looks like one of the decision was to get closer to France (after getting very close friends in Homs and Aleppo?) See the list of people in the French II cluster dumped yesterday by Anonymous: half the names work at the fr Min of F Affairs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancaster_House_Treaties and http://www.gmfus.org/publications/frances-defense-partnerships-and-dilemmas-brexit ..."
"... This group may have officially formed in 2015, but its work is no different from the British propaganda that swamped the MSM when MH17 was downed. Tied into the Steel dossier and Russian collusion in the US. This is the anglosphere or five eyes permanent state. ..."
"... it is apparent that this "Integrity Initiative" was engaged in to ensure that the regime was in the safe hands of the harpy. ..."
"... It is interesting that Trudeau, the Canadian figurehead, clothes his country's kidnapping of the Chinese business figure as "in defence of the rule of law." All in all, it is now apparent we would be far better off if the Kaiserreich, with all of its militaristic and bombastic flaws, had triumphed in the Great War. No Hitler, no Stalin, no five eyes fascism. ..."
"... Rules of the game are made up as the game is played to suit the players. There you have it real life imitates art. ..."
"... Better yet, can anyone name an NGO, any NGO ever, that's not closely if not directly linked to "a secret military intelligence operation." Anyone? Mueller? ..."
"... Thank you very much for this terrific analysis. Donnelly: "... it is we who must either generate the debate or wait for something dreadful to happen to shock us into action. " Numerous American publications featured very similar language in the years ahead of 9/11, with "Islamic terrorist threat" substituted for the Russians. ..."
"... Vesti News has published an excellent documentary on how "clusters" work....not only to spread Russophobia...but also on continuous intends to overthrown Russian legitimate government... https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=7&v=E8-Stfrl5aM ..."
"... The last two periods of the US FP could be understood thusly: (1) Pre-Soviet collapse which was marked by a horrifically tragic and misplaced ideal of defending against communism (Good guys v. Bad Guys); and (2) Post-Soviet collapse which has been a period of coup d'etats where our hijacked military has been used for a Globalist Agenda for increasingly opaque (less defensible) reasons and missions. ..."
"... right after 2016 US elections there was a facade of split between military and intelligence differentiation. Seems that veil has been dispensed with ..."
"... Yeah, they hijacked a few other countries too, including Russia. Or if not hijacking, setting the mood right for some shenanigans in the near future... I think you're quite right about the cheif host of the globalist neolib parasite. Hijacked near fully. Being bled dry. That unaccounted for 21 Trillion at the pentagon is a bit of a giveaway. All under the guise of free markets and democracy. ..."
"... 'Integrity Initiative' - A Military Intelligence Operation Designed To Create A New Enemy ..."
Dec 15, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org
uncle tungsten , Dec 15, 2018 6:28:07 PM | 41

Labour is not "silent". Apart from Thornberry's questioning already mentioned in another post here, the party's newspaper published a news about it:

Government admits that Institute of Statecraft was funded through CSSF , by Lamiat Sabin, 14th December 2018.

Mark2 , Dec 15, 2018 7:12:28 PM | link
Sounds to me like that Integrity initiative dude needs to go on a 'de-radicalisation program !!! How many billions is that guna save us all ! not to mention lives saved.
NemesisCalling , Dec 15, 2018 7:42:22 PM | link
@45 jr

Wrong JR. It seems quite the obvious that the big boy in the west, the US, would seem to be the one spearheading the whole globalist agenda.

But this is a retarded proposition.

The US is nothing more than a Golem. It has been reduced to somnambulism and hijacked, utilized for the ends of these Non-National elites. Sure, like many posters here, it feels good to blame the US for everything. But the powerbrokers have always been in London and now its hypercentralized endgame in Brussels. You can say that it is the US through and through, but ask yourself who has more to gain from US FP abroad: average Americans or the global elites?

Or are we just arguing semantics?

NemesisCalling , Dec 15, 2018 7:44:57 PM | link
Those former-Eastern Bloc countries, i.e. Poland and Ukraine, do not count as power brokers. They have and will always be pawns in the game. So what if they still worship Icons of Americanism which is a remnant culture of their F*ed up narrative where they still believe they are fighting the commies.
Uncle $cam , Dec 15, 2018 8:06:15 PM | link
Yesterday marked the 10th anniversary of the decider aka Bush Jr. having had a shoe thrown at him.

'For the sake of Iraq': Bush shoe-thrower running for parliament refuses to exploit 'hero image'

Muntadhar al-Zaidi was arrested and tortured for it...

"They broke my teeth, my nose, my leg, they electrocuted me, lashed me, they would beat me, they even broke a table or a chair over my back. I don't know, they had my eyes covered," al-Zaidi recalled. "This was one thing I never experienced before. Torture by the authorities, by the rule of law."

I wish it had been a hand grenade.

The British government financed Integrity Initiative is tasked with spreading anti-Russian propaganda and with influencing the public, military and governments of a number of countries. What follows is an incomplete analysis of the third batch of the Initiative's papers which was dumped yesterday.

Christopher Nigel Donnelly (CND) is the co-director of The Institute for Statecraft and founder of its offshoot Integrity Initiative . The Initiative claims to "Defend Democracy Against Disinformation".

The Integrity Initiative does this by planting disinformation about alleged Russian influence through journalists 'clusters' throughout Europe and the United States.

Both, the Institute as well as the Initiative, claim to be independent Non-Government Organizations. Both are financed by the British government, NATO and other state donors.

Among the documents lifted by some anonymous person from the servers of the Institute we find several papers about Donnelly as well as some memos written by him. They show a russophobe mind with a lack of realistic strategic thought.

There is also a file (pdf) with a copy of his passport:


bigger

From his curriculum vitae (pdf) we learn that Donnelly was a long time soldier in the British Army Intelligence Corps where he established and led the Soviet Studies Research Centre at RMA Sandhurst. He later was involved in creating the US Army's Foreign Military Studies Office (FMSO) at Ft. Leavenworth.

He worked at the British Ministry of Defence and as an advisor to several Secretaries General of NATO. He is a director of the Statecraft Institute since 2010. Donnelly also advises the Foreign Minister of Lithuania. He is a "Security and Justice Senior Mentor" of the UK's Stabilisation Unit which is tasked with destabilizing various countries. He serves as a Honorary Colonel of the Specialist Group Military Intelligence (SGMI).

During his time as military intelligence analyst in the 1980s Donnelly wrote several books and papers about the Soviet Union and its military.

Donnelly seems to be obsessed with the 'Russian threat' and is determined to fight it by all means. His paranoia is obvious in a "private - confidential" report by the Statecraft Institute on The Challenge of Brexit to the UK: Case study – The Foreign and Commonwealth Offices (pdf):

Our problem is that, for the last 70 years or so, we in the UK and Europe have been living in a safe, secure rules-based system which has allowed us to enjoy a holiday from history.

... ... ...

Unfortunately, this state of affairs is now being challenged. A new paradigm of conflict is replacing the 19th & 20th Century paradigm.

... ... ...

In this new paradigm, the clear distinction which most people have been able to draw between war and peace, their expectation of stability and a degree of predictability in life, are being replaced by a volatile unpredictability, a permanent state of instability in which war and peace become ever more difficult to disentangle . The "classic" understanding of conflict being between two distinct players or groups of players is giving way to a world of Darwinian competition where all the players – nation states, sub-state actors, big corporations, ethnic or religious groups, and so on – are constantly striving with each other in a "war of all against all". The Western rules-based system, which most westerners take for granted and have come to believe is "normal", is under attack from countries and organisations which wish to replace our system with theirs. This is not a crisis which faces us; it is a strategic challenge, and from several directions simultaneously.

In reality the "Western rules-based system", fully implemented after the demise of the Soviet Union, is a concept under which 'the west' arbitrarily makes up rules and threatens to kill anyone who does not follow them. Witness the wars against Serbia, the war on Iraq, the destruction of Libya, the western led coup in Ukraine and the war by Jihadi proxies against the people of Syria and Iraq. None of these actions were legal under international law. Demanding a return to strict adherence to the rule of international law, as Russia, China and others now do, it is not an attempt to replace "our system with theirs". It is a return to the normal state of global diplomacy. It is certainly not a "Darwinian competition".

In October 2016 Donnelly had a Private Discussion with Gen Sir Richard Barrons (pdf), marked as personal and confidential. Barrons is a former commander of the British Joint Forces Command. The nonsensical top line is: "The UK defence model is failing. UK is at real risk."

Some interesting nuggets again reveal a paranoid mindset. The talk also includes some realistic truthiness about the British military posture Barrons and others created:

There has been a progressive, systemic demobilisation of NATO militarily capability and a run down of all its members' defences
...
We are seeing new / reinvented ways of warfare – hybrid , plus the reassertion of hard power in warfare
...
Aircraft Carriers can be useful for lots of things, but not for war v China or Russia, so we should equip them accordingly. ...
The West no longer has a military edge on Russia. ...
Our Nuclear programme drains resources from conventional forces and hollows them out. ...
The UK Brigade in Germany is no good as a deterrent against Russia. ...
Our battalion in Estonia are hostages, not a deterrent. ...

The general laments the lack of influence the military has on the British government and its people. He argues for more government financed think tank research that can be fed back into the government:

So, if no catastrophe happens to wake people up and demand a response, then we need to find a way to get the core of government to realise the problem and take it out of the political space. We will need to impose changes over the heads of vested interests. NB We did this in the 1930s

My conclusion is that it is we who must either generate the debate or wait for something dreadful to happen to shock us into action. We must generate an independent debate outside government .

...

We need to ask when and how do we start to put all this right? Do we have the national capabilities / capacities to fix it? If so, how do we improve our harnessing of resources to do it? We need this debate NOW. There is not a moment to be lost.

This was an order from the core of the British thinking to Donnelly to get even deeper into the inner-British influence business. Hype Russia as a threat so more money can be taken from the 'vested interests' of the people and dumped into the military machine.

That particular advise of General Barrons was accepted. In 2017 the Integrity Initiative bid for funding from the Ministry of Defence (pdf) for various projects to influence the public, the parliament and the government as well as foreign forces. The bid lists "performance indicators" that are supposed to measure the success of its activities. The top indicator for the Initiative's proposed work is a "Tougher stance in government policy towards Russia" .


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Asking for government finance to influence the government to take a "tougher stand towards Russia" seems a bit circular. But this is consistent with the operation of other Anglo-American think tanks and policy initiatives in which one part of the government, usually the hawkish one, secretly uses NGO's and think-tanks to lobby other parts of the government to support their specific hobbyhorse and budget.

Here is how it is done. The 'experts' of the 'charity' Institute for Statecraft and Integrity Initiative testified in the British parliament. While they were effectively paid by the government they lobbied parliament under the cover of their NGO. This circularity also allows to use international intermediates. Members of the Spanish cluster (pdf) of the Initiative testified in the British Parliament about the Catalan referendum and related allegations against Wikileaks publisher Julian Assange. (It is likely that this testimony led to the change in the position of the Ecuadorian government towards Assange.)


Unfortunately, or luckily, such lobbying operations are mostly run by people who are incompetent in the specific field they are lobbying for. Chris Donnelly, despite a life long experience in military intelligence, has obviously zero competence as a military strategist or planner.

In March 2014, shortly after Crimea split from the Ukraine, Donnelly suggested Military measures (pdf) to be taken by the Ukraine with regards to Crimea:

If I were in charge I would get the following implemented asp
  1. Set up a cordon sanitaire across the Crimean Isthmus and on the coast N. of Crimea with troops and mines
  2. Mine Sevastopol harbour/bay. Can be done easily using a car ferry if they have no minelayers. Doesn't need a lot of mines to be effective. They could easily buy some mines.
  3. Get their air force into the air and activate all their air defences. If they can't fly the Migs on the airfield in Crimea those should be destroyed as a gesture that they are serious. Going "live" electronically will worry the Russians as the Ukrainians have the same electronic kit. If the Russians jam it they jam their own kit as well.
  4. Ukraine used to have some seriously important weapons, such as a big microwave anti-satellite weapon. If they still have this, they should use it.
  5. The government needs a Strategic communication campaign-so far everything is coming from Moscow. They need to articulate a long-term vision that will inspire the people, however hard that is to do. Without it, what have people to fight for?
  6. They should ask the west now to start supplying Oil and gas. There is plenty available due to the mild winter.

I am trying to get this message across

Think for a moment how Russia would have responded to a mining of Sevastopol harbor, the frying of its satellites or the destruction of its fighter jets in Crimea. Those "guestures" would have been illegal acts of war against the forces of a nuclear power which were legally stationed in Crimea. And how was the west to immediately supply gas to Ukraine and Ukraine's pipeline network is designed to unidirectionally receive gas from Russia?

Such half-assed thinking is typical for the Institute and its creation of propaganda. One of its employees/contractors is Hugh Benedict Nimmo who the Initiative paid to produce anti-Russian propaganda that was then disseminated through various western publications.

According to the (still very incomplete) Initiative files Ben Nimmo received a monthly consultancy fee of £2.500 between December 2015 and March 2016. In August 2016 he sent an invoice (pdf) of £5,000 for his "August work on Integrity Initiative". A Production Timetable (pdf) for March to June 2016 lists the following Nimmo outputs and activities:

One wonders how often Ben Nimmo double billed his various sponsors for these copy-paste fantasy pamphlets.

In late 2017 Ben Nimmo and Guardian 'journalist' Carole Cadwalladr disseminated allegations that Russia used Facebook ads to influence the Brexit decision. Cadwalladr even received a price for her work. Unfortunately the price was not revoked when Facebook revealed that "Russia linked" accounts had spend a total of 97 cents on Brexit ads. It is unexplained how that was enough to achieve their alleged aim.

Cadwalladr is listed as a speaker (pdf) at a "skill sharing" conference the Institute organized for November 1-2 under the headline: "Tackling Tools of Malign Influence - Supporting 21st Century Journalism".

This year Ben Nimmo became notorious for claiming that several real persons with individual opinions were "Russian trolls". As we noted :

Nimmo, and several other dimwits quoted in the piece, came to the conclusion that Ian56 is a Kremlin paid troll, not a real person. Next to Ian56 Nimmo 'identified' other 'Russian troll' accounts:

Ben Nimmo @benimmo - 10:50 UTC - 24 Mar 2018

One particularly influential retweeter (judging by the number of accounts which then retweeted it) was @ValLisitsa, which posts in English and Russian. Last year, this account joined the troll-factory #StopMorganLie campaign.

Had Nimmo, a former NATO spokesperson, had some decent education he would have know that @ValLisitsa, aka Valentina Lisitsa , is a famous American- Ukrainian pianist. Yes, she sometimes tweets in Russian language to her many fans in Russia and the Ukraine. Is that now a crime? The videos of her world wide performances on Youtube have more than 170 million views. It is absurd to claim that she is a 'Russian troll' and to insinuate that she is taking Kremlin money to push 'Russian troll' opinions.

The Institute for Statecraft Expert Team (pdf) list several people with military intelligence backgrounds as well as many 'journalists'. One of them is:

Mark Galeotti
Specialist in Russian strategic thinking; the application of Russian disinformation and hybrid warfare; the use of organised crime as a weapon of hybrid warfare. Educational and mentoring skills, including in a US and E European environment, and the corporate world.
Russian linguist

Galeotti is the infamous inventor of the 'Gerasimov doctrine' and of the propaganda about Russia's alleged 'hybrid' warfare. In February 2013 the Russian General Valery Gerasimov, then Russia's chief of the General Staff, published a paper that analysed the way the 'west' is waging a new type of war by mixing propaganda, proxy armies and military force into one unified operation.

Galeotti claimed that Gerasimov's analysis of 'western' operations was a new Russian doctrine of 'hybrid war'. He invented the term 'Gerasimov doctrine' which then took off in the propaganda realm. In February 2016 the U.S. Army Military Review published a longer analysis of Gerasimov's paper that debunked the nonsense (pdf). It concluded:

Gerasimov's article is not proposing a new Russian way of warfare or a hybrid war, as has been stated in the West.

But anti-Russian propagandist repeated Galeotti's nonsense over and over. Only in March 2018, five years after Galeotti invented the 'Germasimov doctrine' and two years after he was thoroughly debunked, he finally recanted :

Everywhere, you'll find scholars, pundits, and policymakers talking about the threat the "Gerasimov doctrine" -- named after Russia's chief of the general staff -- poses to the West. It's a new way of war, "an expanded theory of modern warfare," or even "a vision of total warfare."

There's one small problem. It doesn't exist. And the longer we pretend it does, the longer we misunderstand the -- real, but different -- challenge Russia poses.

I feel I can say that because, to my immense chagrin, I created this term, which has since acquired a destructive life of its own, lumbering clumsily into the world to spread fear and loathing in its wake.

The Institute for Statecraft's "Specialist in Russian strategic thinking", an expert of disinformation and hybrid warfare, created a non-existing Russian doctrine out of hot air and used it to press for anti-Russian measures. Like Ben Nimmo he is an aptly example of the quality of the Institute's experts and work.


One of the newly released documents headlined CND Gen list 2 (pdf) (CND= Chris Nigel Donnelly) includes the names and email addresses of a number of military, government and think tank people. The anonymous releaser of the documents claims that the list is "of employees who attended a closed-door meeting with the white helmets". (No document has been published yet that confirms this.) One name on the list is of special interest:


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Pablo Miller was the handler and friend of Sergej Skripal, the British double agent who was "novichoked" in Salisbury. When Miller's name was mentioned in the press the British government issued a D-Notice to suppress its further publishing,


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As we wrote in April:

Pablo Miller, a British MI6 agent, had recruited Sergej Skripal. The former MI6 agent in Moscow, Christopher Steele, was also involved in the case. Skripal was caught by the Russian security services and went to jail. Pablo Miller, the MI6 recruiter, was also the handler of Sergej Skripal after he was released by Russia in a spy swap. He reportedly also lives in Salisbury. Both Christopher Steele and Pablo Miller work for Orbis Business Intelligence which created the "Dirty Dossier" about Donald Trump.

In 1979, before becoming a spy, Pablo Miller served at the 4th Royal Tank Regiment . ( BBC Newsnight 'journalist' Mark Urban, who later published a book based on interviews with Skripal , served together with Miller in the same regiment.) The 4th regiment's motto was "Fear Naught". Pablo Miller's email address given in the Chris Donnelly list is [email protected].

At the very beginning of the Skripal affair, before there was any talk of 'Novichok', we asked if Skripal was involved in creating the now debunked "Dirty Dossier" and if that was a reason for certain British insiders to move him out of the way:

Here are some question: If there is a connection between the dossier and Skripal, which seems very likely to me, then there are a number of people and organizations with potential motives to kill him. Lots of shady folks and officials on both sides of the Atlantic were involved in creating and running the anti-Trump/anti-Russia campaign. There are several investigations and some very dirty laundry might one day come to light. Removing Skripal while putting the blame on Russia looks like a convenient way to get rid of a potential witness.

The most recent release of Integrity Initiative documents includes lots of in-depth reports (pdf) about foreign media reactions to the Skripal affair. One wonders why the Initiative commissioned such research (pdf) and paid for it.

After two years the Muller investigation found zero evidence for the 'collusion' between Russia and the Trump campaign that the fake Steele dossier suggested. The whole collusion claim is a creation by 'former' British intelligence operatives who likely acted on request of U.S. intelligence leaders Clapper and Brennan. How deep was the Russia specialist Chris Donnelly and his Institute for Statecraft involved in this endeavor?


Checking through all the released Initiative papers and lists one gets the impression of a secret military intelligence operation, disguised as a public NGO. Financed by millions of government money the Institute for Statecraft and the Integrity Initiative work under a charity label to create and disseminate disinformation to the global public and back into the government and military itself.

The paranoia about Russia, which does way less harm than the 'western' "rules based system" constantly creates, is illogical and not based on factual analysis. It creates Russia as an "enemy" when it is none. It hypes a "threat" out of hot air. The only people who profit from this are the propagandists and the companies and people who back them.

The Initiatives motto "Defend Democracy Against Disinformation" is a truly Orwellian construct. By disseminating propaganda and using it to influence the public, parliament, the military and governments, the Institute actively undermines the democratic process that depends on the free availability of truthful information.

It should be shut down immediately.

---
Note: There have already been attempts to delete the released files from the Internet. A complete archive of all Integrity Initiative files published so far is here . Should the public links cease to work, you can contact the author of this blog for access to private backups.

flayer , Dec 15, 2018 11:49:39 AM | link

Aside from the fact that the government itself funds this organization, the creepiest thing about it is that the "non-governmental individuals" that help fund it are the same people that run the think tanks: a bunch of Rhodesians.

Russ , Dec 15, 2018 11:59:03 AM | link

"Such half-assed thinking...Think for a moment how Russia would have responded to a mining of Sevastopol harbor, the frying of its satellites or the destruction of its fighter jets in Crimea. Those "gestures" would have been illegal acts of war against the forces of a nuclear power which were legally stationed in Crimea."

It sure seems like this half-assed thinking isn't just the domain of a fringe element, but is increasingly mainstream among the elites. Doesn't bode well.

Roy G , Dec 15, 2018 12:10:11 PM | link
Thank you B. It is truly amazing to watch the UK elites unravel as they have become truly unhinged by their own connivances. It is a bad joke at the commoner's expense that they propagandize and demonize in the name of the 'Western rules based system' even as they are busy shooting themselves in both feet by committing Brexit. Although there are legitimate grievances with the EU, it is clear that Brexit is a Tory power play that is all politics and zero governance. Alas, Perfidious Albion has succumbed to Mad Cow disease.
Sally Snyder , Dec 15, 2018 12:10:23 PM | link
Here is an interesting look at how little the Russia-linked entities spent on advertising on Google during the 2016 election: https://viableopposition.blogspot.com/2018/12/google-russia-and-4700-in-advertising.html Slowly but surely, the Russian meddling narrative is falling apart.
bjd , Dec 15, 2018 12:46:08 PM | link
Thanks, b.

What remains mysterious (not really) is why --if these initiatives are truly meant to save and strengthen democracy-- they aren't proudly proclaimed and advertised, in the open, transparent, for everyone one to see and judge, like an adult democracy that they claim to stand for might want to debate and form an opinion on.

The fact that it isn't, is testimony to the nefarious anti-democratic, authoritarian and totalitarian streak that runs in between every two lines that they put on paper.

Jackrabbit , Dec 15, 2018 12:58:35 PM | link
McCarthyesque smear campaigns to discredit opponents and squash dissent has become normal practice. Integrity Initiative tweets against Corbyn is a stark example, but there have been MANY other people and groups that have been tarred with claims of being sponsored/led/influenced by Russia, including Catalonian independence activists and Yellow vest protesters.

Every time one scratches the surface of such smears, it seems there is a connection to US/British MIC, Ukraine, or Israel - essentially, those who benefit (financially or otherwise) from greater tensions with Russia.

At what point does neocon doubling-down on failed foreign policy become more than just picking our pockets and warping our minds? At what point do they start killing our kids in another unnecessary war?

Clueless Joe , Dec 15, 2018 1:01:40 PM | link
Cold War has been over for nearly 30 years. It's time enough for Western countries to send into real retirement every single cold-warrior, their time is over, their mindset is quaint and useless, if not downright dangerous and counter-productive.
Mark2 , Dec 15, 2018 1:11:36 PM | link
Thank you 'b'
I'll just say -- - there is safety in numbers ! Already valuable information, important to the public good and democracy has been spread wide enough to be certain, this gene won't go back in the bottle ! D notice or no ! And by doing that, has made the fearless journalists and investigators lives all the safer ! Safety in numbers, spread this wide everyone?

Are these people above the law ? ...

psychohistorian , Dec 15, 2018 1:12:59 PM | link
Thanks for the continued exposition of this story b.....may it go viral

I want to comment on some of the wording you quote Donnelly as writing

" .....is giving way to a world of Darwinian competition where all the players – nation states, sub-state actors, big corporations, ethnic or religious groups, and so on – are constantly striving with each other in a "war of all against all". "

This is Donnelly's characterization of a world in which finance is a public utility instead of the private jackboot that it currently is. This is the delusion these people have been led to believe.

So instead of his "war of all against all" that some might call human cooperation on the basis of merit we have a mythical God of Mammon religion that continues to instantiate the private finance led world of the West with it parasitic elite and fawning acolytes.

Kadath , Dec 15, 2018 1:34:30 PM | link
Dear god, what has gotten into the minds of the military and political "elite" within the UK! Mining Sevastopol would have been an obvious act of war against Russia and Russia would have responded with force.

Thankfully it wasn't done but the fact this was even discussed by senior figures confirms that there was at least a sizable minority pushing for it. 30 years after the fall of the Soviet Union, the Western elite have truly abandoned all sense of reality and embraced a consequence free view of the use of force. After Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya they haven't learned a thing! I'm becoming more and more certain that a peaceful transition to the multipolar world is impossible and that it will only happen after the US or one of its' vassal states blunder into a proxy war and get utterly and comprehensively defeated, forcing a radical world realignment, but with nuts like John Bolton and the neocons in the Whitehouse it could easily lead to a nuclear war

Mina , Dec 15, 2018 1:45:39 PM | link
It looks like one of the decision was to get closer to France (after getting very close friends in Homs and Aleppo?) See the list of people in the French II cluster dumped yesterday by Anonymous: half the names work at the fr Min of F Affairs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancaster_House_Treaties and http://www.gmfus.org/publications/frances-defense-partnerships-and-dilemmas-brexit

The grumpy general at Turcopolier has skept the II topic entirely.

TJ , Dec 15, 2018 1:53:44 PM | link
@13 psychohistorian

" we have a mythical God of Mammon religion" I hope you're not here in dear old Blighty, as you'll probably get arrested for antisemitism

Peter AU 1 , Dec 15, 2018 2:13:14 PM | link
This group may have officially formed in 2015, but its work is no different from the British propaganda that swamped the MSM when MH17 was downed. Tied into the Steel dossier and Russian collusion in the US. This is the anglosphere or five eyes permanent state.
exiled off mainstreet , Dec 15, 2018 2:22:39 PM | link
As an aside this happens to be "Bill of Rights Day", the anniversary of the passage of the Bill of Rights as amendments to the yankee constitution. This reveals again how far from the rule of law the yankee imperium, now the key element of the British Empire they supposedly seceded from, has strayed, since it is apparent that this "Integrity Initiative" was engaged in to ensure that the regime was in the safe hands of the harpy.

It has also ensured that the victorious candidate has been neutered and faithfully follows the world control line put forward by the five eyes spy-masters making up the empire in its present iteration. This also shows what a farce the regime, based on the rule of law, now presents.

It is interesting that Trudeau, the Canadian figurehead, clothes his country's kidnapping of the Chinese business figure as "in defence of the rule of law." All in all, it is now apparent we would be far better off if the Kaiserreich, with all of its militaristic and bombastic flaws, had triumphed in the Great War. No Hitler, no Stalin, no five eyes fascism.

GeorgeV , Dec 15, 2018 2:27:49 PM | link
The "Western-based rules system" described in this article reminds me of a game called "Calvin Ball" which appeared in the former comic strip "Calvin and Hobbes." In the strip Calvin a wildly imaginative adolescent boy who plays a free-form of football with his imaginary pet toy tiger (Hobbes). Rules of the game are made up as the game is played to suit the players. There you have it real life imitates art.
bjd , Dec 15, 2018 2:38:50 PM | link
b, I downloaded the zip file, and had also downloaded all the PDF's from pdf-archive yesterday. There are more files in the zip, but the following were on pdf-archive and are NOT in the zip:
sejomoje , Dec 15, 2018 3:06:48 PM | link
Better yet, can anyone name an NGO, any NGO ever, that's not closely if not directly linked to "a secret military intelligence operation." Anyone? Mueller?
jayc , Dec 15, 2018 4:05:08 PM | link
Thank you very much for this terrific analysis. Donnelly: "... it is we who must either generate the debate or wait for something dreadful to happen to shock us into action. " Numerous American publications featured very similar language in the years ahead of 9/11, with "Islamic terrorist threat" substituted for the Russians.
Emmanuel Goldstein , Dec 15, 2018 4:21:51 PM | link
The transcript of his conversation with the general shows very starkly that we would last about two minutes in a nuclear exchange, but about half a day in a conventional one. No reserves, no equipment stockpiles, a navy consisting of two fat targets, neither of which has any aircraft and some destroyers which have propulsion problems, a smallish air force and very small numbers of troops. The tripwire force in Estonia is wholly sacrificial. In fact he lays bare the whole fallacy of biting the bear. With the armed forces in the state he describes, and with the recruitment and retention problems, wouldn't it be better, as one defense minister said, 'to go away and shut up'...
uncle tungsten , Dec 15, 2018 4:27:59 PM | link
Thanks b and especially the link to Valentina Lisitsa who I had tinkling in the background as I read your grand expose. These people are seditious morons, parasites infesting the state apparatus. Shut these fools down. Nice touch publishing the passport image. I can just imagine the frenzied aftermath of Kit's visit to the basement. Big thanks to anonymous and Craig Murray too. Their IT personel are probably visiting Devil's Island or Diego Garcia as we read.
Sasha , Dec 15, 2018 5:00:51 PM | link
Vesti News has published an excellent documentary on how "clusters" work....not only to spread Russophobia...but also on continuous intends to overthrown Russian legitimate government... https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=7&v=E8-Stfrl5aM

The British and US connections to loot and evade Russian riches and funds are exposed, as well as the origin of sanctions, supposed "alt-media" "truth-seakers" like Meduza...or supposed "pro-Russian" US intelligence operatives married to Russian women....

Sasha , Dec 15, 2018 5:32:32 PM | link
@Posted by: Mina | Dec 15, 2018 1:45:39 PM | 18

Amongst the many issues he usually passes over trying to make himself the fool, while at the same time trying to convince us of the oustanding intellectual capacities, honesty and classy stance of him and his "comittee"...

https://www.stalkerzone.org/an-american-military-attache-held-a-closed-meeting-with-uaf-commanders-in-mariupol/

For that travel, to end bluntly and in such public view siding with the nazis of the "Azov Regiment" and other criminals of war, there was no need of so many saddlebags, so as pretending that the people who supported Trump as if there was no tomorrow, were enlightened people who only wanted to rescue "America" for the "Americans", as if there would not be a sign of blatant exceptionalism in appropriating of the term "Americans" for themselves in such a huge continent....

NemesisCalling , Dec 15, 2018 5:44:31 PM | link
In my view, the USA's FP has been undermined by EURO elites which is forcing a game of chicken with Russia.

The FP pre-Soviet collapse consisted of one MO: GET THE COMMIES!

Since then, Neocons and Neolibs which are frontmen for this Non-National Globalized Elite, have hijacked our country's military and have steered it to a Global agenda where dominance in the ME means either superiority for these EURO elites or Vassal-hood.

The last two periods of the US FP could be understood thusly: (1) Pre-Soviet collapse which was marked by a horrifically tragic and misplaced ideal of defending against communism (Good guys v. Bad Guys); and (2) Post-Soviet collapse which has been a period of coup d'etats where our hijacked military has been used for a Globalist Agenda for increasingly opaque (less defensible) reasons and missions.

The average American could care less about the ME and the US would be 1000x better-off reverting to an isolationist stance.

But this will not happen so long as Nationalism in the US and UK is repeatedly put-down. It seems as though there is going to be another Brexit vote. Does anyone doubt that miraculously the people by then will have second-guessed their will to Brexit and so will vote against it given another crack at a vote?

Sickening.

slit , Dec 15, 2018 6:04:29 PM | link
"Unfortunately, or luckily, such lobbying operations are mostly run by people who are incompetent in the specific field they are lobbying for. "

Incompetence in general and IT and data analysis, physics 101, etc.:

Cry boo hoo hoo to wake up with indigenous capacity decades behind world players like Russia, China, India, etc who operate on fractional budgets...

But this drama also exposes ashura/emigods intra necine warfare: right after 2016 US elections there was a facade of split between military and intelligence differentiation. Seems that veil has been dispensed with , but it invites other questions, insofar as UK is Her Majesty's Service, so are we to read this with Prince Harry or Philip's culture, or a "consent by silence") in mind? Defending crown or EU "Saturnus Sattelitus"?

MadMax2 , Dec 15, 2018 6:28:58 PM | link
@Nemisis

Yeah, they hijacked a few other countries too, including Russia. Or if not hijacking, setting the mood right for some shenanigans in the near future... I think you're quite right about the cheif host of the globalist neolib parasite. Hijacked near fully. Being bled dry. That unaccounted for 21 Trillion at the pentagon is a bit of a giveaway. All under the guise of free markets and democracy.

Good to see Trump finally give it a face... 'you need freedom and security now pay up bitches'

Jackrabbit , Dec 15, 2018 6:38:00 PM | link
NemesisCalling | Dec 15, 2018 5:44:31 PM | 37
In my view, the USA's FP has been undermined by EURO elites which is forcing a game of chicken with Russia.... Globalist Agenda
I think the opposite is true.

The US-led Empire and their globalist sycophants seek to weaken Europe so that it can not act independently in its own best interests. They will do what ever they can to ensure that the vassals never join with Russia/China and the SCO.

Russian scare-mongering and immigration have been effective in furthering this agenda. Also note: what USA has termed "new Europe" - eastern European states like Poland and Ukraine - are solidly pro-American.

John2o2o , Dec 15, 2018 6:56:17 PM | link
'Integrity Initiative' - A Military Intelligence Operation Designed To Create A New Enemy

Perfect description.

Why has this ageing nutjob been allowed to secretly dictate British foreign policy? He's clearly insane.

vk , Dec 15, 2018 6:58:49 PM | link
@

[Dec 16, 2018] Neoliberalism has had its day. So what happens next (The death of neoliberalism and the crisis in western politics) by Martin Jacques

Highly recommended!
It is very interesting and educational to read this pre-election article two years later and see where the author is right and where he is wrong. The death of neoliberalism was greatly exaggerated. It simply mutated in the USA into "national neoliberalism" under Trump. As no clear alternative exists it remain the dominant ideology and universities still brainwash students with neoclassical economics. And in way catchy slogan "Make America great again" under Trump means "Make American working and lower middle class great again"
It is also clear that Trump betrayed or was forced to betray most of his election promises. Standrd of living of common americans did not improve under his watch. most of hi benefits of his tax cuts went to large corporations and financial oligarch. He continued the policy of financial deregulation, which is tantamount of playing with open fire trying to warm up the house
What we see under Trump is tremendous growth of political role of intelligence agencies which now are real kingmakers and can sink any candidate which does not support their agenda. And USA intelligence agencies operated in 2016 in close cooperation with the UK intelligence agencies to the extent that it is not clear who has the lead in creating Steele dossier. They are definitely out of control of executive branch and play their own game. We also see a rise of CIA democrats as a desperate attempt to preserve the power of Clinton wing of the Democratic Party ('soft neoliberals" turned under Hillary into into warmongers and neocons) . Hillary and Bill themselves clearly belong to CIA democrats too, not only to Wall Street democrats, despite the fact that they sold Democratic Party to Wall Street in the past. New Labor in UK did the same.
But if it is more or less clear now what happened in the USa in 2016-2018, it is completely unclear what will happen next. I think in no way neoliberalism will start to be dismantled. there is no social forces powerful enough to start this job, We probably need another financial crisi of the scale of 2008 for this work to be reluctantly started by ruling elite. And we better not to have this repetition of 2008 as it will be really devastating for common people.
Notable quotes:
"... the causes of this political crisis, glaringly evident on both sides of the Atlantic, are much deeper than simply the financial crisis and the virtually stillborn recovery of the last decade. They go to the heart of the neoliberal project that dates from the late 70s and the political rise of Reagan and Thatcher, and embraced at its core the idea of a global free market in goods, services and capital. The depression-era system of bank regulation was dismantled, in the US in the 1990s and in Britain in 1986, thereby creating the conditions for the 2008 crisis. Equality was scorned, the idea of trickle-down economics lauded, government condemned as a fetter on the market and duly downsized, immigration encouraged, regulation cut to a minimum, taxes reduced and a blind eye turned to corporate evasion. ..."
"... It should be noted that, by historical standards, the neoliberal era has not had a particularly good track record. The most dynamic period of postwar western growth was that between the end of the war and the early 70s, the era of welfare capitalism and Keynesianism, when the growth rate was double that of the neoliberal period from 1980 to the present. ..."
"... In the period 1948-1972, every section of the American population experienced very similar and sizable increases in their standard of living; between 1972-2013, the bottom 10% experienced falling real income while the top 10% did far better than everyone else. In the US, the median real income for full-time male workers is now lower than it was four decades ago: the income of the bottom 90% of the population has stagnated for over 30 years . ..."
"... On average, between 65-70% of households in 25 high-income economies experienced stagnant or falling real incomes between 2005 and 2014. ..."
"... As Thomas Piketty has shown, in the absence of countervailing pressures, capitalism naturally gravitates towards increasing inequality. In the period between 1945 and the late 70s, Cold War competition was arguably the biggest such constraint. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, there have been none. As the popular backlash grows increasingly irresistible, however, such a winner-takes-all regime becomes politically unsustainable. ..."
"... Foreign Affairs ..."
"... "'Populism' is the label that political elites attach to policies supported by ordinary citizens that they don't like." Populism is a movement against the status quo. It represents the beginnings of something new, though it is generally much clearer about what it is against than what it is for. It can be progressive or reactionary, but more usually both. ..."
"... According to a Gallup poll, in 2000 only 33% of Americans called themselves working class; by 2015 the figure was 48%, almost half the population. ..."
"... The re-emergence of the working class as a political voice in Britain, most notably in the Brexit vote, can best be described as an inchoate expression of resentment and protest, with only a very weak sense of belonging to the labour movement. ..."
"... Economists such as Larry Summers believe that the prospect for the future is most likely one of secular stagnation . ..."
"... those who have lost out in the neoliberal era are no longer prepared to acquiesce in their fate – they are increasingly in open revolt. We are witnessing the end of the neoliberal era. It is not dead, but it is in its early death throes, just as the social-democratic era was during the 1970s. ..."
"... Capital in the Twenty-First Century ..."
"... Financial Times ..."
Aug 21, 2016 | www.theguardian.com

In the early 1980s the author was one of the first to herald the emerging dominance of neoliberalism in the west. Here he argues that this doctrine is now faltering. But what happens next?

The western financial crisis of 2007-8 was the worst since 1931, yet its immediate repercussions were surprisingly modest. The crisis challenged the foundation stones of the long-dominant neoliberal ideology but it seemed to emerge largely unscathed. The banks were bailed out; hardly any bankers on either side of the Atlantic were prosecuted for their crimes; and the price of their behaviour was duly paid by the taxpayer. Subsequent economic policy, especially in the Anglo-Saxon world, has relied overwhelmingly on monetary policy, especially quantitative easing. It has failed. The western economy has stagnated and is now approaching its lost decade, with no end in sight.

After almost nine years, we are finally beginning to reap the political whirlwind of the financial crisis. But how did neoliberalism manage to survive virtually unscathed for so long? Although it failed the test of the real world, bequeathing the worst economic disaster for seven decades, politically and intellectually it remained the only show in town. Parties of the right, centre and left had all bought into its philosophy, New Labour a classic in point. They knew no other way of thinking or doing: it had become the common sense. It was, as Antonio Gramsci put it, hegemonic. But that hegemony cannot and will not survive the test of the real world.

The first inkling of the wider political consequences was evident in the turn in public opinion against the banks, bankers and business leaders. For decades, they could do no wrong: they were feted as the role models of our age, the default troubleshooters of choice in education, health and seemingly everything else. Now, though, their star was in steep descent, along with that of the political class. The effect of the financial crisis was to undermine faith and trust in the competence of the governing elites. It marked the beginnings of a wider political crisis.

But the causes of this political crisis, glaringly evident on both sides of the Atlantic, are much deeper than simply the financial crisis and the virtually stillborn recovery of the last decade. They go to the heart of the neoliberal project that dates from the late 70s and the political rise of Reagan and Thatcher, and embraced at its core the idea of a global free market in goods, services and capital. The depression-era system of bank regulation was dismantled, in the US in the 1990s and in Britain in 1986, thereby creating the conditions for the 2008 crisis. Equality was scorned, the idea of trickle-down economics lauded, government condemned as a fetter on the market and duly downsized, immigration encouraged, regulation cut to a minimum, taxes reduced and a blind eye turned to corporate evasion.

It should be noted that, by historical standards, the neoliberal era has not had a particularly good track record. The most dynamic period of postwar western growth was that between the end of the war and the early 70s, the era of welfare capitalism and Keynesianism, when the growth rate was double that of the neoliberal period from 1980 to the present.

But by far the most disastrous feature of the neoliberal period has been the huge growth in inequality. Until very recently, this had been virtually ignored. With extraordinary speed, however, it has emerged as one of, if not the most important political issue on both sides of the Atlantic, most dramatically in the US. It is, bar none, the issue that is driving the political discontent that is now engulfing the west. Given the statistical evidence, it is puzzling, shocking even, that it has been disregarded for so long; the explanation can only lie in the sheer extent of the hegemony of neoliberalism and its values.

But now reality has upset the doctrinal apple cart. In the period 1948-1972, every section of the American population experienced very similar and sizable increases in their standard of living; between 1972-2013, the bottom 10% experienced falling real income while the top 10% did far better than everyone else. In the US, the median real income for full-time male workers is now lower than it was four decades ago: the income of the bottom 90% of the population has stagnated for over 30 years .

A not so dissimilar picture is true of the UK. And the problem has grown more serious since the financial crisis. On average, between 65-70% of households in 25 high-income economies experienced stagnant or falling real incomes between 2005 and 2014.

Large sections of the population in both the US and the UK are now in revolt against their lot

The reasons are not difficult to explain. The hyper-globalisation era has been systematically stacked in favour of capital against labour: international trading agreements, drawn up in great secrecy, with business on the inside and the unions and citizens excluded, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) being but the latest examples; the politico-legal attack on the unions; the encouragement of large-scale immigration in both the US and Europe that helped to undermine the bargaining power of the domestic workforce; and the failure to retrain displaced workers in any meaningful way.

As Thomas Piketty has shown, in the absence of countervailing pressures, capitalism naturally gravitates towards increasing inequality. In the period between 1945 and the late 70s, Cold War competition was arguably the biggest such constraint. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, there have been none. As the popular backlash grows increasingly irresistible, however, such a winner-takes-all regime becomes politically unsustainable.

Large sections of the population in both the US and the UK are now in revolt against their lot, as graphically illustrated by the support for Trump and Sanders in the US and the Brexit vote in the UK. This popular revolt is often described, in a somewhat denigratory and dismissive fashion, as populism. Or, as Francis Fukuyama writes in a recent excellent essay in Foreign Affairs : "'Populism' is the label that political elites attach to policies supported by ordinary citizens that they don't like." Populism is a movement against the status quo. It represents the beginnings of something new, though it is generally much clearer about what it is against than what it is for. It can be progressive or reactionary, but more usually both.

Brexit is a classic example of such populism. It has overturned a fundamental cornerstone of UK policy since the early 1970s. Though ostensibly about Europe, it was in fact about much more: a cri de coeur from those who feel they have lost out and been left behind, whose living standards have stagnated or worse since the 1980s, who feel dislocated by large-scale immigration over which they have no control and who face an increasingly insecure and casualised labour market. Their revolt has paralysed the governing elite, already claimed one prime minister, and left the latest one fumbling around in the dark looking for divine inspiration.

The wave of populism marks the return of class as a central agency in politics, both in the UK and the US. This is particularly remarkable in the US. For many decades, the idea of the "working class" was marginal to American political discourse. Most Americans described themselves as middle class, a reflection of the aspirational pulse at the heart of American society. According to a Gallup poll, in 2000 only 33% of Americans called themselves working class; by 2015 the figure was 48%, almost half the population.

Brexit, too, was primarily a working-class revolt. Hitherto, on both sides of the Atlantic, the agency of class has been in retreat in the face of the emergence of a new range of identities and issues from gender and race to sexual orientation and the environment. The return of class, because of its sheer reach, has the potential, like no other issue, to redefine the political landscape.

The working class belongs to no one: its orientation, far from predetermined, is a function of politics

The re-emergence of class should not be confused with the labor movement. They are not synonymous: this is obvious in the US and increasingly the case in the UK. Indeed, over the last half-century, there has been a growing separation between the two in Britain. The re-emergence of the working class as a political voice in Britain, most notably in the Brexit vote, can best be described as an inchoate expression of resentment and protest, with only a very weak sense of belonging to the labour movement.

Indeed, Ukip has been as important – in the form of immigration and Europe – in shaping its current attitudes as the Labour party. In the United States, both Trump and Sanders have given expression to the working-class revolt, the latter almost as much as the former. The working class belongs to no one: its orientation, far from predetermined, as the left liked to think, is a function of politics.

The neoliberal era is being undermined from two directions. First, if its record of economic growth has never been particularly strong, it is now dismal. Europe is barely larger than it was on the eve of the financial crisis in 2007; the United States has done better but even its growth has been anaemic. Economists such as Larry Summers believe that the prospect for the future is most likely one of secular stagnation .

Worse, because the recovery has been so weak and fragile, there is a widespread belief that another financial crisis may well beckon. In other words, the neoliberal era has delivered the west back into the kind of crisis-ridden world that we last experienced in the 1930s. With this background, it is hardly surprising that a majority in the west now believe their children will be worse off than they were. Second, those who have lost out in the neoliberal era are no longer prepared to acquiesce in their fate – they are increasingly in open revolt. We are witnessing the end of the neoliberal era. It is not dead, but it is in its early death throes, just as the social-democratic era was during the 1970s.

A sure sign of the declining influence of neoliberalism is the rising chorus of intellectual voices raised against it. From the mid-70s through the 80s, the economic debate was increasingly dominated by monetarists and free marketeers. But since the western financial crisis, the centre of gravity of the intellectual debate has shifted profoundly. This is most obvious in the United States, with economists such as Joseph Stiglitz, Paul Krugman, Dani Rodrik and Jeffrey Sachs becoming increasingly influential. Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century has been a massive seller. His work and that of Tony Atkinson and Angus Deaton have pushed the question of the inequality to the top of the political agenda. In the UK, Ha-Joon Chang , for long isolated within the economics profession, has gained a following far greater than those who think economics is a branch of mathematics.

Meanwhile, some of those who were previously strong advocates of a neoliberal approach, such as Larry Summers and the Financial Times 's Martin Wolf, have become extremely critical. The wind is in the sails of the critics of neoliberalism; the neoliberals and monetarists are in retreat. In the UK, the media and political worlds are well behind the curve. Few recognize that we are at the end of an era. Old attitudes and assumptions still predominate, whether on the BBC's Today programme, in the rightwing press or the parliamentary Labor party.

Following Ed Miliband's resignation as Labour leader, virtually no one foresaw the triumph of Jeremy Corbyn in the subsequent leadership election. The assumption had been more of the same, a Blairite or a halfway house like Miliband, certainly not anyone like Corbyn. But the zeitgeist had changed. The membership, especially the young who had joined the party on an unprecedented scale, wanted a complete break with New Labour. One of the reasons why the left has failed to emerge as the leader of the new mood of working-class disillusionment is that most social democratic parties became, in varying degrees, disciples of neoliberalism and uber-globalisation. The most extreme forms of this phenomenon were New Labour and the Democrats, who in the late 90s and 00s became its advance guard, personified by Tony Blair and Bill Clinton, triangulation and the third way.

But as David Marquand observed in a review for the New Statesman , what is the point of a social democratic party if it doesn't represent the less fortunate, the underprivileged and the losers? New Labour deserted those who needed them, who historically they were supposed to represent. Is it surprising that large sections have now deserted the party who deserted them? Blair, in his reincarnation as a money-obsessed consultant to a shady bunch of presidents and dictators, is a fitting testament to the demise of New Labour.

The rival contenders – Burnham, Cooper and Kendall – represented continuity. They were swept away by Corbyn, who won nearly 60% of the votes. New Labour was over, as dead as Monty Python's parrot. Few grasped the meaning of what had happened. A Guardian leader welcomed the surge in membership and then, lo and behold, urged support for Yvette Cooper, the very antithesis of the reason for the enthusiasm. The PLP refused to accept the result and ever since has tried with might and main to remove Corbyn.

Just as the Labour party took far too long to come to terms with the rise of Thatcherism and the birth of a new era at the end of the 70s, now it could not grasp that the Thatcherite paradigm, which they eventually came to embrace in the form of New Labour, had finally run its course. Labour, like everyone else, is obliged to think anew. The membership in their antipathy to New Labour turned to someone who had never accepted the latter, who was the polar opposite in almost every respect of Blair, and embodying an authenticity and decency which Blair patently did not.

Labour may be in intensive care, but the condition of the Conservatives is not a great deal better

Corbyn is not a product of the new times, he is a throwback to the late 70s and early 80s. That is both his strength and also his weakness. He is uncontaminated by the New Labour legacy because he has never accepted it. But nor, it would seem, does he understand the nature of the new era. The danger is that he is possessed of feet of clay in what is a highly fluid and unpredictable political environment, devoid of any certainties of almost any kind, in which Labour finds itself dangerously divided and weakened.

Labour may be in intensive care, but the condition of the Conservatives is not a great deal better. David Cameron was guilty of a huge and irresponsible miscalculation over Brexit. He was forced to resign in the most ignominious of circumstances. The party is hopelessly divided. It has no idea in which direction to move after Brexit. The Brexiters painted an optimistic picture of turning away from the declining European market and embracing the expanding markets of the world, albeit barely mentioning by name which countries it had in mind. It looks as if the new prime minister may have an anachronistic hostility towards China and a willingness to undo the good work of George Osborne. If the government turns its back on China, by far the fastest growing market in the world, where are they going to turn?

Brexit has left the country fragmented and deeply divided, with the very real prospect that Scotland might choose independence. Meanwhile, the Conservatives seem to have little understanding that the neoliberal era is in its death throes.

Dramatic as events have been in the UK, they cannot compare with those in the United States. Almost from nowhere, Donald Trump rose to capture the Republican nomination and confound virtually all the pundits and not least his own party. His message was straightforwardly anti-globalisation. He believes that the interests of the working class have been sacrificed in favour of the big corporations that have been encouraged to invest around the world and thereby deprive American workers of their jobs. Further, he argues that large-scale immigration has weakened the bargaining power of American workers and served to lower their wages.

He proposes that US corporations should be required to invest their cash reserves in the US. He believes that the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta) has had the effect of exporting American jobs to Mexico. On similar grounds, he is opposed to the TPP and the TTIP. And he also accuses China of stealing American jobs, threatening to impose a 45% tariff on Chinese imports.

To globalisation Trump counterposes economic nationalism: "Put America first". His appeal, above all, is to the white working class who, until Trump's (and Bernie Sander's) arrival on the political scene, had been ignored and largely unrepresented since the 1980s. Given that their wages have been falling for most of the last 40 years, it is extraordinary how their interests have been neglected by the political class. Increasingly, they have voted Republican, but the Republicans have long been captured by the super-rich and Wall Street, whose interests, as hyper-globalisers, have run directly counter to those of the white working class. With the arrival of Trump they finally found a representative: they won Trump the Republican nomination.

Trump believes that America's pursuit of great power status has squandered the nation's resources

The economic nationalist argument has also been vigorously pursued by Bernie Sanders , who ran Hillary Clinton extremely close for the Democratic nomination and would probably have won but for more than 700 so-called super-delegates, who were effectively chosen by the Democratic machine and overwhelmingly supported Clinton. As in the case of the Republicans, the Democrats have long supported a neoliberal, pro-globalisation strategy, notwithstanding the concerns of its trade union base. Both the Republicans and the Democrats now find themselves deeply polarised between the pro- and anti-globalisers, an entirely new development not witnessed since the shift towards neoliberalism under Reagan almost 40 years ago.

Another plank of Trump's nationalist appeal – "Make America great again" – is his position on foreign policy. He believes that America's pursuit of great power status has squandered the nation's resources. He argues that the country's alliance system is unfair, with America bearing most of the cost and its allies contributing far too little. He points to Japan and South Korea, and NATO's European members as prime examples. He seeks to rebalance these relationships and, failing that, to exit from them.

As a country in decline, he argues that America can no longer afford to carry this kind of financial burden. Rather than putting the world to rights, he believes the money should be invested at home, pointing to the dilapidated state of America's infrastructure. Trump's position represents a major critique of America as the world's hegemon. His arguments mark a radical break with the neoliberal, hyper-globalisation ideology that has reigned since the early 1980s and with the foreign policy orthodoxy of most of the postwar period. These arguments must be taken seriously. They should not be lightly dismissed just because of their authorship. But Trump is no man of the left. He is a populist of the right. He has launched a racist and xenophobic attack on Muslims and on Mexicans. Trump's appeal is to a white working class that feels it has been cheated by the big corporations, undermined by Hispanic immigration, and often resentful towards African-Americans who for long too many have viewed as their inferior.

A Trump America would mark a descent into authoritarianism characterised by abuse, scapegoating, discrimination, racism, arbitrariness and violence; America would become a deeply polarised and divided society. His threat to impose 45% tariffs on China , if implemented, would certainly provoke retaliation by the Chinese and herald the beginnings of a new era of protectionism.

Trump may well lose the presidential election just as Sanders failed in his bid for the Democrat nomination. But this does not mean that the forces opposed to hyper-globalisation – unrestricted immigration, TPP and TTIP, the free movement of capital and much else – will have lost the argument and are set to decline. In little more than 12 months, Trump and Sanders have transformed the nature and terms of the argument. Far from being on the wane, the arguments of the critics of hyper-globalisation are steadily gaining ground. Roughly two-thirds of Americans agree that "we should not think so much in international terms but concentrate more on our own national problems". And, above all else, what will continue to drive opposition to the hyper-globalisers is inequality.

[Dec 14, 2018] Neoliberalism has spawned a financial elite who hold governments to ransom by Deborah Orr

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... The crash was a write-off, not a repair job. The response should be a wholesale reevaluation of the way in which wealth is created and distributed around the globe ..."
"... The IMF also admits that it "underestimated" the effect austerity would have on Greece. Obviously, the rest of the Troika takes no issue with that. Even those who substitute "kick up the arse to all the lazy scroungers" whenever they encounter the word "austerity", have cottoned on to the fact that the word can only be intoned with facial features locked into a suitably tragic mask. ..."
"... Yet, mealy-mouthed and hotly contested as this minor mea culpa is, it's still a sign that financial institutions may slowly be coming round to the idea that they are the problem. ..."
"... Markets cannot be free. Markets have to be nurtured. They have to be invested in. Markets have to be grown. Google, Amazon and Apple haven't taught anyone in this country to read. But even though an illiterate market wouldn't be so great for them, they avoid their taxes, because they can, because they are more powerful than governments. ..."
"... The neoliberalism that the IMF still preaches pays no account to any of this. It insists that the provision of work alone is enough of an invisible hand to sustain a market. Yet even Adam Smith, the economist who came up with that theory , did not agree that economic activity alone was enough to keep humans decent and civilised. ..."
"... Governments are left with the bill when neoliberals demand access to markets that they refuse to invest in making. Their refusal allows them to rail against the Big State while producing the conditions that make it necessary. ..."
Jun 08, 2013 | www.theguardian.com

The crash was a write-off, not a repair job. The response should be a wholesale reevaluation of the way in which wealth is created and distributed around the globe

Sat 8 Jun 2013 02.59 EDT First published on Sat 8 Jun 2013 02.59 EDT

The IMF's limited admission of guilt over the Greek bailout is a start, but they still can't see the global financial system's fundamental flaws, writes Deborah Orr. Photograph: Boris Roessler/DPA FILE T he International Monetary Fund has admitted that some of the decisions it made in the wake of the 2007-2008 financial crisis were wrong, and that the €130bn first bailout of Greece was "bungled". Well, yes. If it hadn't been a mistake, then it would have been the only bailout and everyone in Greece would have lived happily ever after.

Actually, the IMF hasn't quite admitted that it messed things up. It has said instead that it went along with its partners in "the Troika" – the European Commission and the European Central Bank – when it shouldn't have. The EC and the ECB, says the IMF, put the interests of the eurozone before the interests of Greece. The EC and the ECB, in turn, clutch their pearls and splutter with horror that they could be accused of something so petty as self-preservation.

The IMF also admits that it "underestimated" the effect austerity would have on Greece. Obviously, the rest of the Troika takes no issue with that. Even those who substitute "kick up the arse to all the lazy scroungers" whenever they encounter the word "austerity", have cottoned on to the fact that the word can only be intoned with facial features locked into a suitably tragic mask.

Yet, mealy-mouthed and hotly contested as this minor mea culpa is, it's still a sign that financial institutions may slowly be coming round to the idea that they are the problem. They know the crash was a debt-bubble that burst. What they don't seem to acknowledge is that the merry days of reckless lending are never going to return; even if they do, the same thing will happen again, but more quickly and more savagely. The thing is this: the crash was a write-off, not a repair job. The response from the start should have been a wholesale reevaluation of the way in which wealth is created and distributed around the globe, a "structural adjustment", as the philosopher John Gray has said all along.

The IMF exists to lend money to governments, so it's comic that it wags its finger at governments that run up debt. And, of course, its loans famously come with strings attached: adopt a free-market economy, or strengthen the one you have, kissing goodbye to the Big State. Yet, the irony is painful. Neoliberal ideology insists that states are too big and cumbersome, too centralised and faceless, to be efficient and responsive. I agree. The problem is that the ruthless sentimentalists of neoliberalism like to tell themselves – and anyone else who will listen – that removing the dead hand of state control frees the individual citizen to be entrepreneurial and productive. Instead, it places the financially powerful beyond any state, in an international elite that makes its own rules, and holds governments to ransom. That's what the financial crisis was all about. The ransom was paid, and as a result, governments have been obliged to limit their activities yet further – some setting about the task with greater relish than others. Now the task, supposedly, is to get the free market up and running again.

But the basic problem is this: it costs a lot of money to cultivate a market – a group of consumers – and the more sophisticated the market is, the more expensive it is to cultivate them. A developed market needs to be populated with educated, healthy, cultured, law-abiding and financially secure people – people who expect to be well paid themselves, having been brought up believing in material aspiration, as consumers need to be.

So why, exactly, given the huge amount of investment needed to create such a market, should access to it then be "free"? The neoliberal idea is that the cultivation itself should be conducted privately as well. They see "austerity" as a way of forcing that agenda. But how can the privatisation of societal welfare possibly happen when unemployment is already high, working people are turning to food banks to survive and the debt industry, far from being sorry that it brought the global economy to its knees, is snapping up bargains in the form of busted high-street businesses to establish shops with nothing to sell but high-interest debt? Why, you have to ask yourself, is this vast implausibility, this sheer unsustainability, not blindingly obvious to all?

Markets cannot be free. Markets have to be nurtured. They have to be invested in. Markets have to be grown. Google, Amazon and Apple haven't taught anyone in this country to read. But even though an illiterate market wouldn't be so great for them, they avoid their taxes, because they can, because they are more powerful than governments.

And further, those who invest in these companies, and insist that taxes should be low to encourage private profit and shareholder value, then lend governments the money they need to create these populations of sophisticated producers and consumers, berating them for their profligacy as they do so. It's all utterly, completely, crazy.

The other day a health minister, Anna Soubry , suggested that female GPs who worked part-time so that they could bring up families were putting the NHS under strain. The compartmentalised thinking is quite breathtaking. What on earth does she imagine? That it would be better for the economy if they all left school at 16? On the contrary, the more people who are earning good money while working part-time – thus having the leisure to consume – the better. No doubt these female GPs are sustaining both the pharmaceutical industry and the arts and media, both sectors that Britain does well in.

As for their prioritising of family life over career – that's just another of the myriad ways in which Conservative neoliberalism is entirely without logic. Its prophets and its disciples will happily – ecstatically – tell you that there's nothing more important than family, unless you're a family doctor spending some of your time caring for your own. You couldn't make these characters up. It is certainly true that women with children find it more easy to find part-time employment in the public sector. But that's a prima facie example of how unresponsive the private sector is to human and societal need, not – as it is so often presented – evidence that the public sector is congenitally disabled.

Much of the healthy economic growth – as opposed to the smoke and mirrors of many aspects of financial services – that Britain enjoyed during the second half of the 20th century was due to women swelling the educated workforce. Soubry and her ilk, above all else, forget that people have multiple roles, as consumers, as producers, as citizens and as family members. All of those things have to be nurtured and invested in to make a market.

The neoliberalism that the IMF still preaches pays no account to any of this. It insists that the provision of work alone is enough of an invisible hand to sustain a market. Yet even Adam Smith, the economist who came up with that theory , did not agree that economic activity alone was enough to keep humans decent and civilised.

Governments are left with the bill when neoliberals demand access to markets that they refuse to invest in making. Their refusal allows them to rail against the Big State while producing the conditions that make it necessary. And even as the results of their folly become ever more plain to see, they are grudging in their admittance of the slightest blame, bickering with their allies instead of waking up, smelling the coffee and realizing that far too much of it is sold through Starbucks.

[Dec 09, 2018] Neoliberalism is more like modern feudalism - an authoritarian system where the lords (bankers, energy companies and their large and inefficient attendant bureaucracies), keep us peasants in thrall through life long debt-slavery simply to buy a house or exploit us as a captured market in the case of the energy sector.

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... I don't like using the term "neo-liberalism" that much because there is nothing "new" or "liberal" about it, the term itself just helps hide the fact that it's a political project more about power than profit and the end result is more like modern feudalism - an authoritarian system where the lords (bankers, energy companies and their large and inefficient attendant bureaucracies), keep us peasants in thrall through life long debt-slavery simply to buy a house or exploit us as a captured market in the case of the energy sector. ..."
"... Since the word "privatisation" is clearly no longer popular, the latest buzzword from this project is "outsourcing". ..."
"... As far as I can see "neo-liberalism", or what I prefer to call managerial and financialised feudalism is not dead, it's still out and about looking around for the next rent-seeking opportunity. ..."
"... In the political arena, is enabling porkies facilitate each other in every lunatic pronouncement about "Budget repair" and "on track for a surplus". And its spotty, textbook-spouting clones ("all debt is debt! Shriek, gasp, hyperventilate!") fall off the conveyor belts of tertiary education Australia-wide, then turn up on The Drum as IPA 'Research Fellows' to spout their evidence-free assertions. ..."
"... And don't forget the handmaiden of neoliberalism is their macroeconomic mythology about government "debt and borrowing" which will condemn our grandchildren to poverty - inter-generational theft! It also allows them to continue dismantling government social programs by giving tax-cuts to reduce "revenue" and then claiming there is no money to fund those programs. ..."
"... "Competition" as the cornerstone of neoliberal economics was always a lie. Corporations do their best to get rid of competitors by unfair pricing tactics or by takeovers. And even where some competitors hang in there by some means (banks, petrol companies) the competition that occurs is not for price but for profit. ..."
"... We find a shift away from democratic processes and the rise of the "all new adulation of the so-called tough leader" factor, aka Nazism/Fascism. From Trump to Turkey, Netanyahu to Putin, Brazil to China, the rise of the "right" in Europe, the South Americas, where the leader is "our great and "good" Teacher", knows best, and thus infantalises the knowledge and awareness of the rest of the population. Who needs scientists, when the "leader" knows everything? ..."
"... There are indeed alternatives to neoliberalism, most of which have been shown to lead back to neoliberalism. Appeals for fiscal and monetary relief/stimulus can only ever paper over the worst aspects of it's relentless 'progress', between wars, it seems. ..."
"... Neoliberalism seems vastly, catastrophically misunderstood. Widely perceived as the latest abomination to spring from the eternal battle 'twixt Labour and Capital, it's actual origins are somewhat more recent. Neoliberalism really, really is not just "Capitalism gone wrong". It goes much deeper, to a fundamental flaw buried( more accurately 'planted') deep in the heart of economics. ..."
"... In 1879 an obscure journalist from then-remote San Francisco, Henry George, took the world by storm with his extraordinary bestseller Progress and Poverty . Still the only published work to outsell the Bible in a single year, it did so for over twenty years, yet few social justice advocates have heard of it. ..."
"... George gravely threatened privileged global power-elites , so they erased him from academic history. A mind compared, in his time with Plato, Copernicus and Adam Smith wiped from living memory, by the modern aristocracy. ..."
"... In the process of doing so, they emasculated the discipline of economics, stripped dignity from labour, and set in motion a world-destroying doctrine. Neo-Classical Economics(aka neoliberalism) was born , to the detriment of the working-citizen and the living world on which s/he depends. ..."
Dec 09, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com

ElectricJolt , 31 Oct 2018 04:38

I don't like using the term "neo-liberalism" that much because there is nothing "new" or "liberal" about it, the term itself just helps hide the fact that it's a political project more about power than profit and the end result is more like modern feudalism - an authoritarian system where the lords (bankers, energy companies and their large and inefficient attendant bureaucracies), keep us peasants in thrall through life long debt-slavery simply to buy a house or exploit us as a captured market in the case of the energy sector.

Since the word "privatisation" is clearly no longer popular, the latest buzzword from this project is "outsourcing". If you've had a look at The Canberra Times over the last couple of weeks there have been quite a few articles about outsourcing parts of Medicare and Centrelink, using labour hire companies and so on – is this part of a current LNP plan to "sell off" parts of the government before Labour takes the reins in May?

As far as I can see "neo-liberalism", or what I prefer to call managerial and financialised feudalism is not dead, it's still out and about looking around for the next rent-seeking opportunity.

Friarbird , 31 Oct 2018 04:02
Neoliberalism "dead"? I think not. It is riveted on the country like a straitjacket.

Which is exactly what it was always intended to be, a system gamed and rigged to ensure the wage-earning scum obtain progressively less and less of the country's productive wealth, however much they contributed to it. The wage theft and exploitation Neoliberalism fosters has become the new norm. Neoliberal idealogues thickly infest Federal and State Treasuries.

In the political arena, is enabling porkies facilitate each other in every lunatic pronouncement about "Budget repair" and "on track for a surplus". And its spotty, textbook-spouting clones ("all debt is debt! Shriek, gasp, hyperventilate!") fall off the conveyor belts of tertiary education Australia-wide, then turn up on The Drum as IPA 'Research Fellows' to spout their evidence-free assertions.

The IPA itself has moles in govt at every level--even in your local Council. Certainly in ours.

Neoliberalism is "dead"? Correction. Neoliberalism is alive, thriving---and quick to ensure its glaring deficiencies and inequities are solely attributable to its opponents. Now THERE'S a surprise.....

totaram -> JohnArmour , 31 Oct 2018 03:01
Agree! And don't forget the handmaiden of neoliberalism is their macroeconomic mythology about government "debt and borrowing" which will condemn our grandchildren to poverty - inter-generational theft! It also allows them to continue dismantling government social programs by giving tax-cuts to reduce "revenue" and then claiming there is no money to fund those programs.
exTen , 31 Oct 2018 02:30
Neoliberalism will not be dead until the underpinning of neoliberalism is abandoned by ALP and Greens. That underpinning is their mindless attachment to "budget repair" and "return to surplus". The federal government's "budget" is nothing like a currency user's budget. Currency users collect in order to spend whereas every dollar spent by the federal government is a new dollar and every dollar taxed by the federal government is an ex-dollar. A currency cannot sensibly have "debt" in the currency that it issues and no amount of surplus or deficit now will enhance or impair its capacity to spend in future. A currency issuer does not need an electronic piggybank, or a Future Fund, or a Drought Relief Fund. It can't max out an imaginary credit card. It's "borrowing" is just an exchange of its termless no-coupon liabilities (currency) for term-limited coupon-bearing liabilities (bonds). The federal budget balance is no rational indicator of any need for austerity or for stimulus. The rational indicators are unemployment (too small a "deficit"/too large a surplus) and inflation (too large a "deficit"/too small a "surplus"). Federal taxation is where dollars go to die. It doesn't "fund" a currency issuer's spending - it is there to stop the dollars it issues from piling up and causing inflation and to make room for spending by democratically elected federal parliament. The name of the game is to balance the economy, not the entirely notional and fundamentally irrelevant "budget".
Copperfield , 31 Oct 2018 01:51
"Competition" as the cornerstone of neoliberal economics was always a lie. Corporations do their best to get rid of competitors by unfair pricing tactics or by takeovers. And even where some competitors hang in there by some means (banks, petrol companies) the competition that occurs is not for price but for profit.

And changing the electoral system? Yes indeed. After years of observation it seems to me that the problem with our politics is not individual politicians (although there are notable exceptions) but political parties. Rigid control of policies and voting on party instruction (even by the Greens) makes the proceedings of parliament a complete waste of time. If every policy had to run the gauntlet of 150 people all voting by their conscience we would have better policy. The executive functions could be carried out by a cabinet also elected from those members. But not going to happen - too many vested interests in the parties and their corporate sponsors.

gidrys , 31 Oct 2018 01:34
With the election of Bolsonaro in Brazil (even though nearly 30% of electors refused to vote) it may be a little presumptuous to dissect the dead corpse of neoliberalism, as Richard Denniss' hopes that we can.

What is absolutely gob-smacking is that Brazilians voted for him; a man that Glenn Greenwald describes as "far more dangerous than Trump" , that Bolsonaro envisages military dictatorships as "being a far more superior form of government" advocating a civil war in order to dispose of the left.

Furthermore, the election of this far-right neoliberal extremist also threatens the Amazon forest and its indigenous people; with a global impact that will render combatting climate change even more difficult.

Locally, recent Liberal Party battles over leadership have included the neolib factor, as the lunatic right in that party - who I suspect would all love to be a Bolsonaro themselves - aggressively activate their grumblings and dissension.

Oh, Richard how I wish you were right; but in the Victorian election campaign - currently underway - I have seen Socialist candidates behaving in a manner that doesn't garner hope in a different way of doing politics.

The fact that 'our' democracy is based on an adversarial, partisan system leaves me with little hope. Alain Badiou wrote that "ours is not a world of democracy but a world of imperial conservatism using democratic phraseology" ; and until that imposition is discarded 'our' democracy will remain whatever we are told it is, and neolibs will continue to shove their bullshit down our throats as much as they can.

beeden , 31 Oct 2018 01:33
There is no abatement to the wealthiest in the global communities seeking greater wealth and thus increasing inequality.

Taking a local example,

We find a shift away from democratic processes and the rise of the "all new adulation of the so-called tough leader" factor, aka Nazism/Fascism. From Trump to Turkey, Netanyahu to Putin, Brazil to China, the rise of the "right" in Europe, the South Americas, where the leader is "our great and "good" Teacher", knows best, and thus infantalises the knowledge and awareness of the rest of the population. Who needs scientists, when the "leader" knows everything?

Have the people of the world abrogated their democratic responsibility?

Or is it the gerrymandering chicanery of US Republican backers/politicians( so long as you control the voting machines ) that have sent the ugly message to the world, Power is yours for the making and taking by any means that ignores the public's rights in the decision making process. Has the "neo-liberal" world delivered a corrupted system of democracy that has deliberately alienated the world's population from actively participating fully in the full awareness that their vote counts and will be counted?

Do we need to take back the controls of democracy to ensure that it is the will of the people and not a manipulation by vested interest groups/individuals? You're darn tootin'!!!

Matt Quinn , 31 Oct 2018 01:32
A thoughtful piece. Thanks. There are indeed alternatives to neoliberalism, most of which have been shown to lead back to neoliberalism. Appeals for fiscal and monetary relief/stimulus can only ever paper over the worst aspects of it's relentless 'progress', between wars, it seems.

Neoliberalism seems vastly, catastrophically misunderstood. Widely perceived as the latest abomination to spring from the eternal battle 'twixt Labour and Capital, it's actual origins are somewhat more recent. Neoliberalism really, really is not just "Capitalism gone wrong". It goes much deeper, to a fundamental flaw buried( more accurately 'planted') deep in the heart of economics.

Instead of trying to understand Neo-Classical Economics it is perhaps more instructive to understand what it was built, layer by layer, to obscure. First the Land system, then the Wealth system, and finally the Money system (hived off into a compartment - 'macroeconomics'). Importantly, three entirely different categories of "thing" .

In 1879 an obscure journalist from then-remote San Francisco, Henry George, took the world by storm with his extraordinary bestseller Progress and Poverty . Still the only published work to outsell the Bible in a single year, it did so for over twenty years, yet few social justice advocates have heard of it.

George set out to discover why the worst poverty always seemed to accompany the most progress. By chasing down the production process to its ends, and tracing where the proceeds were going, he succeeded spectacularly. From Progress and Poverty , Chapter 17 - "The Problem Explained" :

Three things unite in production: land, labor, and capital. Three parties divide the output: landowner, laborer, and capitalist. If the laborer and capitalist get no more as production increases, it is a necessary inference that the landowner takes the gain.

George gravely threatened privileged global power-elites , so they erased him from academic history. A mind compared, in his time with Plato, Copernicus and Adam Smith wiped from living memory, by the modern aristocracy.

In the process of doing so, they emasculated the discipline of economics, stripped dignity from labour, and set in motion a world-destroying doctrine. Neo-Classical Economics(aka neoliberalism) was born , to the detriment of the working-citizen and the living world on which s/he depends.

Einstein was a fan of George, and used his methods of thought-experiment and powerful inductive reasoning to discover Relativity, twenty years later. Henry Georges brilliant insights into Land (aka nature), Wealth (what you want, need), and Money (sharing mechanism) are as relevant as ever, and until they are rediscovered, we are likely to re-run the 1900's over and over, with fewer and fewer resources.

~ How Land Barons, Industrialists and Bankers Corrupted Economics .

[Dec 08, 2018] Postmodern Imperialism: Geopolitics and the Great Games

Highly recommended!
You can read online at epdf.tips
Dec 08, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

Richard , Dec 7, 2018 2:50:07 PM | link

Came across this book which gives some excellent background to where we're at today:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Postmodern-Imperialism-Geopolitics-Great-Games/dp/098335393X

There may be a pdf available if you search.

"The game motif is useful as a metaphor for the broader rivalry between nations and economic systems with the rise of imperialism and the pursuit of world power. This game has gone through two major transformations since the days of Russian-British rivalry, with the rise first of Communism and then of Islam as world forces opposing imperialism. The main themes of Postmodern Imperialism: Geopolitics and the Great Games include:

This work brings these elements together in historical perspective with an understanding from the Arab/ Muslim world's point of view, as it is the main focus of all the "Great Games"."

Jay Dyer discusses the book here, its strengths and weaknesses:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcmrBD4Ez2c

[Dec 05, 2018] Beleaguered British Prime Minister Theresa May is wailing loudly against a Trump threat to reveal classified documents relating to Russiagate by Philip Giraldi

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Rather, they seem to appear to reveal a plot by the British intelligence and security services working in collusion with then CIA Director John Brennan to subvert the course of the 2016 election in favor of the Deep State and Establishment favorite Hillary Clinton. How did that one work out? ..."
Dec 05, 2018 | www.unz.com
121 Comments Reply

And there are other friends in unlikely places. Beleaguered British Prime Minister Theresa May is wailing loudly against a Trump threat to reveal classified documents relating to Russiagate. The real problem is that the documents apparently don't expose anything done by the Russians.

Rather, they seem to appear to reveal a plot by the British intelligence and security services working in collusion with then CIA Director John Brennan to subvert the course of the 2016 election in favor of the Deep State and Establishment favorite Hillary Clinton. How did that one work out?

So how about it? Teenagers who get in trouble often have to ditch their bad friends to turn their lives around. There is still a chance for the United States if we keep our distance from the bad friends we have been nurturing all around the world, friends who have been convincing us to make poor choices. Get rid of the ties the bind to the Saudis, Israelis, Ukrainians, Poles, and yes, even the British. Deal fairly with all nations and treat everyone the same, but bear in mind that there are only two relationships that really matter – Russia and China. Make a serious effort to avoid a war by learning how to get along with those two nations and America might actually survive to celebrate a tricentennial in 2076.

The Alarmist , says: December 4, 2018 at 10:39 am GMT
You don't say; British Collusion to influence the 2016 US Presidential elections. Why, if the beneficiary was anyone other than a Democrat, much less one named Clinton, someone might actually appoint a Special Counsel to look into it, not to mention the misdeeds of the various agencies and departments who aided and abetted it.
anon [178] Disclaimer , says: December 4, 2018 at 11:43 am GMT
"You don't say; British Collusion to influence the 2016 US Presidential elections."

MI6, along with elements of the CIA, was behind the Steele Dossier. Representatives of John Brennan met in London to discus before the go ahead was given. They later put Michael Steele onto the project; he was a guy with credible Russian contacts. Basically, the scam worked like this:

They funneled an MI6 intelligence file to Michael Steele (governments routinely keep such files on influential foreigners and what they are up to) so he could use his contacts to launder the information and make it appear that it came from sources within Russia; they then funneled the report back to elements of the FBI so they could use it to justify to the FISA court a spying campaign on Trump (the FBI illegally withheld the source of the document); they found nothing proving any Russian connection but they kept the spy program going; they tried justifying the spy program with a fake story involving a reliable asset that once passed information from Jimmy Carter's campaign to George H.W. Bush in an effort to help Reagan win the 1980 election; they later paid the asset nearly a quarter million dollars for his efforts using a fake "India-China" grant despite the grant running to 2018, the asset attempted to get a job in the Trump administration so he could act as a mole ; the Obama regime purposely mishandled information in regards to the spying program (ex: Michael Steele leaked his document to various news sources before the election and later lied to congress about it), ensuring it would leak to the press; the Obama regime illegally unmasked elements of Trump's personal contacts so they could clandestinely leak suggested targets off the record to the right people

They lost the election anyway, so they then planted dirt and negative press to make the document look legit – lies about Manafort meeting Assange (Guardian is funded by the British government to police the left), WaPo lies claiming a vast Russian conspiracy just as Trump came into office (it was an effort to delegitimize him and create calls for Hillary to take his place), leaking bank records, the special counsel .and leaking information on Trump policies to the media using a secret security clearance credentials program enacted by Obama. They also ran interference through CIA guys like Mark Warner in an effort to cover up the mole they planted; they falsely asserted this was a national security issue when the man's identity was well-known to the press and he was never an undercover spy like Jarret was, at least not in recent history.

To put this all into perspective, imagine the following scenario:

The government takes cctv footage of you at a grocery store; in the background there is an attractive woman. The woman then goes missing. The government illegally reads your emails and finds that you like sexual jokes. The government then interviews a friend of yours who claims that you once made a risque rape joke back in college. They also plant a mole in your workplace who befriends you and reports back all of your politically incorrect humor. Then the cops find the woman's body and the government claims that you killed her because you were in the area at the time and you make bad jokes, which has been confirmed by multiple credible people. You look guilty, don't you? The government 1) took information out of context 2) laundered circumstantial evidence through a credible witness when they originally obtained it elsewhere using nefarious sources. That's what they did to Trump, but much much much worse.

Johnny Walker Read , says: December 4, 2018 at 1:38 pm GMT
Like a friends divorce lawyer told him: You go to bed with a nasty bitch, you wake up with a nasty bitch.
Johnny Rottenborough , says: Website December 4, 2018 at 1:46 pm GMT
a plot by the British intelligence and security services to subvert the course of the 2016 election in favor of the Deep State and Establishment favorite Hillary Clinton. How did that one work out?

Deep State and Establishment stooge Donald Trump.

There is still a chance for the United States if we

declare independence from the Jewish Empire.

[Dec 05, 2018] Who are the Neocons by Guyenot

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... The American Neocons are Zionists (Their goal is expanding political / military power. Initially this is focused on the state of Israel.) ..."
"... Obviously , if Zionism is synonymous with patriotism in Israel, it cannot be an acceptable label in American politics, where it would mean loyalty to a foreign power. This is why the neoconservatives do not represent themselves as Zionists on the American scene. Yet they do not hide it all together either. ..."
"... American Jewish Committee ..."
"... Contemporary Jewish Record ..."
"... If there is an intellectual movement in America to whose invention Jews can lay sole claim, neoconservatism is it. It's a thought one imagines most American Jews, overwhelmingly liberal, will find horrifying . And yet it is a fact that as a political philosophy, neoconservatism was born among the children of Jewish immigrants and is now largely the intellectual domain of those immigrants' grandchildren ..."
"... Goyenot traces the Neocon's origins through its influential writers and thinkers. Highest on the list is Leo Strauss. (Neocons are sometimes called "the Straussians.") Leo Strauss is a great admirer of Machiavelli with his utter contempt for restraining moral principles making him "uniquely effective," and, "the ideal patriot." He gushes over Machiavelli praising the intrepidity of his thought, the grandeur of his vision, and the graceful subtlety of his speech. ..."
"... believes that Truth is harmful to the common man and the social order and should be reserved for superior minds. ..."
"... nations derive their strength from their myths , which are necessary for government and governance. ..."
"... national myths have no necessary relationship with historical reality: they are socio-cultural constructions that the State has a duty to disseminate . ..."
"... to be effective, any national myth must be based on a clear distinction between good and evil ; it derives its cohesive strength from the hatred of an enemy nation. ..."
"... deception is the norm in political life ..."
"... Office of Special Plans ..."
"... The Zionist/Neocons are piggy-backing onto, or utilizing, the religious myths of both the Jewish and Christian world to consolidate power. This is brilliant Machiavellian strategy. ..."
"... the "chosen people" myth (God likes us best, we are better than you) ..."
"... the Holy Land myth (one area of real estate is more holy than another) ..."
"... General Wesley Clark testified on numerous occasions before the cameras, that one month after September 11th, 2001 a general from the Pentagon showed him a memo from neoconservative strategists "that describes how we're gonna take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia and Sudan and finishing off with Iran". ..."
"... Among them are brilliant strategists ..."
"... They operate unrestrained by the most basic moral principles upon which civilization is founded. They are undisturbed by compassion for the suffering of others. ..."
"... They use consciously and skillfully use deception and "myth-making" to shape policy ..."
"... They have infiltrated the highest levels of banking, US military, NATO and US government. ..."
Dec 11, 2015 | Peak Prosperity

Mememonkey pointed my to a 2013 essay by Laurent Guyenot, a French historian and writer on the deep state, that addresses the question of "Who Are The Neoconservatives." If you would like to know about that group that sends the US military into battle and tortures prisoners of war in out name, you need to know about these guys.

First, if you are Jewish, or are a GREEN Meme, please stop and take a deep breath. Please put on your thinking cap and don't react. We are NOT disrespecting a religion, spiritual practice or a culture. We are talking about a radical and very destructive group hidden within a culture and using that culture. Christianity has similar groups and movements--the Crusades, the KKK, the Spanish Inquisition, the Salem witch trials, etc.

My personal investment: This question has been a subject of intense interest for me since I became convinced that 9/11 was an inside job, that the Iraq war was waged for reasons entirely different from those publically stated. I have been horrified to see such a shadowy, powerful group operating from a profoundly "pre-moral" developmental level-i.e., not based in even the most rudimentary principles of morality foundational to civilization.

Who the hell are these people?!

Goyenot's main points (with a touch of personal editorializing):

1. The American Neocons are Zionists (Their goal is expanding political / military power. Initially this is focused on the state of Israel.)

Neoconservativism is essentially a modern right wing Jewish version of Machiavelli's political strategy. What characterizes the neoconservative movement is therefore not as much Judaism as a religious tradition, but rather Judiasm as a political project, i.e. Zionism, by Machiavellian means.

This is not a religious movement though it may use religions words and vocabulary. It is a political and military movement. They are not concerned with being close to God. This is a movement to expand political and military power. Some are Christian and Mormon, culturally.

Obviously , if Zionism is synonymous with patriotism in Israel, it cannot be an acceptable label in American politics, where it would mean loyalty to a foreign power. This is why the neoconservatives do not represent themselves as Zionists on the American scene. Yet they do not hide it all together either.

He points out dual-citizen (Israel / USA) members and self proclaimed Zionists throughout cabinet level positions in the US government, international banking and controlling the US military. In private writings and occasionally in public, Neocons admit that America's war policies are actually Israel's war goals. (Examples provided.)

2. Most American Jews are overwhelmingly liberal and do NOT share the perspective of the radical Zionists.

The neoconservative movement, which is generally perceived as a radical (rather than "conservative") Republican right, is, in reality, an intellectual movement born in the late 1960s in the pages of the monthly magazine Commentary, a media arm of the American Jewish Committee, which had replaced the Contemporary Jewish Record in 1945. The Forward, the oldest American Jewish weekly, wrote in a January 6th, 2006 article signed Gal Beckerman: "If there is an intellectual movement in America to whose invention Jews can lay sole claim, neoconservatism is it. It's a thought one imagines most American Jews, overwhelmingly liberal, will find horrifying. And yet it is a fact that as a political philosophy, neoconservatism was born among the children of Jewish immigrants and is now largely the intellectual domain of those immigrants' grandchildren".

3. Intellectual Basis and Moral developmental level

Goyenot traces the Neocon's origins through its influential writers and thinkers. Highest on the list is Leo Strauss. (Neocons are sometimes called "the Straussians.") Leo Strauss is a great admirer of Machiavelli with his utter contempt for restraining moral principles making him "uniquely effective," and, "the ideal patriot." He gushes over Machiavelli praising the intrepidity of his thought, the grandeur of his vision, and the graceful subtlety of his speech.

Other major points:

4. The Zionist/Neocons are piggy-backing onto, or utilizing, the religious myths of both the Jewish and Christian world to consolidate power. This is brilliant Machiavellian strategy.

[The]Pax Judaica will come only when "all the nations shall flow" to the Jerusalem temple, from where "shall go forth the law" (Isaiah 2:1-3). This vision of a new world order with Jerusalem at its center resonates within the Likudnik and neoconservative circles. At the Jerusalem Summit, held from October 12th to 14th, 2003 in the symbolically significant King David Hotel, an alliance was forged between Zionist Jews and Evangelical Christians around a "theopolitical" project, one that would consider Israel "the key to the harmony of civilizations", replacing the United Nations that's become a "a tribalized confederation hijacked by Third World dictatorships": "Jerusalem's spiritual and historical importance endows it with a special authority to become a center of world's unity. [...] We believe that one of the objectives of Israel's divinely-inspired rebirth is to make it the center of the new unity of the nations, which will lead to an era of peace and prosperity, foretold by the Prophets". Three acting Israeli ministers spoke at the summit, including Benjamin Netanyahu, and Richard Perle.

Jerusalem's dream empire is expected to come through the nightmare of world war. The prophet Zechariah, often cited on Zionist forums, predicted that the Lord will fight "all nations" allied against Israel. In a single day, the whole earth will become a desert, with the exception of Jerusalem, who "shall remain aloft upon its site" (14:10).

With more than 50 millions members, Christians United for Israel is a major political force in the U.S.. Its Chairman, pastor John Haggee, declared: "The United States must join Israel in a pre-emptive military strike against Iran to fulfill God's plan for both Israel and the West, [...] a biblically prophesied end-time confrontation with Iran, which will lead to the Rapture, Tribulation, and Second Coming of Christ".

And Guyenot concludes:

Is it possible that this biblical dream, mixed with the neo-Machiavellianism of Leo Strauss and the militarism of Likud, is what is quietly animating an exceptionally determined and organized ultra-Zionist clan? General Wesley Clark testified on numerous occasions before the cameras, that one month after September 11th, 2001 a general from the Pentagon showed him a memo from neoconservative strategists "that describes how we're gonna take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia and Sudan and finishing off with Iran".

Is it just a coincidence that the "seven nations" doomed to be destroyed by Israel form part of the biblical myths? [W]hen Yahweh will deliver Israel "seven nations greater and mightier than yourself [ ] you must utterly destroy them; you shall make no covenant with them, and show no mercy to them."

My summary:

[Dec 03, 2018] Neoliberalism is a modern curse. Everything about it is bad and until we're free of it, it will only ever keep trying to turn us into indentured labourers. It's acolytes are required to blind themselves to logic and reason to such a degree they resemble Scientologists or Jehovah's Witnesses more than people with any sort of coherent political ideology, because that's what neoliberalism actually is... a cult of the rich, for the rich, by the rich... and it's followers in the general population are nothing but moron familiars hoping one day to be made a fully fledged bastard.

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... What sticks in the neoliberalism craw is that the state provides these services instead of private businesses, and as such "rob" them of juicy profits! The state, the last easy cash cow! ..."
"... Who could look at the way markets function and conclude there's any freedom? Only a neoliberal cult member. They cannot be reasoned with. They cannot be dissuaded. They cannot be persuaded. Only the market knows best, and the fact that the market is a corrupt, self serving whore is completely ignored by the ideology of their Church. ..."
"... when Thatcher and Reagan deregulated the financial markets in the 80s, that's when the trouble began which in turn led to the immense crash in 2008. ..."
"... Neo-liberalism is just another symptom of liberal democracy which is government by oligarchs with a veneer of democracy ..."
"... The state has merged with the corporations so that what is good for the corporations is good for the state and visa versa. The larger and richer the state/corporations are, the more shyster lawyers they hire to disguise misdeeds and unethical behavior. ..."
"... If you support a big government, you are supporting big corporations as well. The government uses the taxpayer as an eternal fount of fresh money and calls it their own to spend as they please. Small businesses suffer unfairly because they cannot afford the shyster lawyers and accountants that protect the government and the corporations, but nobody cares about them. ..."
"... Deborah's point about the illogical demands of neoliberalism are indeed correct, which is somewhat ironic as neoliberalism puts objective rationality at the heart of its philosophy, but I digress... ..."
"... There would not be NHS, free education etc. without socialism; in fact they are socialism. It took the Soviet-style socialism ("statism") 70 years to collapse. The neoliberalistic capitalism has already started to collapse after 30 years. ..."
"... I'm always amused that neoliberal - indeed, capitalist - apologists cannot see the hypocrisy of their demands for market access. Communities create and sustain markets, fund and maintain infrastructure, produce and maintain new consumers. Yet the neolibs decry and destroy. Hypocrites or destructive numpties - never quite decided between Pickles and Gove ..."
"... 97% of all OUR money has been handed over to these scheming crooks. Stop bailing out the banks with QE. Take back what is ours -- state control over the creation of money. Then let the banks revert to their modest market-based function of financial intermediaries. ..."
"... The State can't be trusted to create our money? Well they could hardly do a worse job than the banks! Best solution would be to distribute state-created money as a Citizen's Income. ..."
"... To promote the indecent obsession for global growth Australia, burdened with debt of around 250 billion dollars, is to borrow and pay interest on a further 7 billion dollars to lend to the International Monetary Fund so as it can lend it to poorer nations to burden them with debt. ..."
Dec 03, 2018 | www.theguardian.com
szwalby , 8 Jun 2013 06:03
This private good, public bad is a stupid idea, and a totally artificial divide. After all, what are "public spends"? It is the money from private individuals, and companies, clubbing together to get services they can't individually afford.

What sticks in the neoliberalism craw is that the state provides these services instead of private businesses, and as such "rob" them of juicy profits! The state, the last easy cash cow!

TedSmithAndSon , 8 Jun 2013 06:01
Neoliberalism is a modern curse. Everything about it is bad and until we're free of it, it will only ever keep trying to turn us into indentured labourers. It's acolytes are required to blind themselves to logic and reason to such a degree they resemble Scientologists or Jehovah's Witnesses more than people with any sort of coherent political ideology, because that's what neoliberalism actually is... a cult of the rich, for the rich, by the rich... and it's followers in the general population are nothing but moron familiars hoping one day to be made a fully fledged bastard.

Who could look at the way markets function and conclude there's any freedom? Only a neoliberal cult member. They cannot be reasoned with. They cannot be dissuaded. They cannot be persuaded. Only the market knows best, and the fact that the market is a corrupt, self serving whore is completely ignored by the ideology of their Church.

It's subsumed the entire planet, and waiting for them to see sense is a hopeless cause. In the end it'll probably take violence to rid us of the Neoliberal parasite... the turn of the century plague.

fr0mn0where -> CaptainGrey , 8 Jun 2013 05:51
@CaptainGrey -

"Capitalism, especially the beneficial capitalism of the NHS, free education etc. has won and countless people have gained as a result."

I agree with you and it was this beneficial version of capitalism that brought down the Iron Curtain. Working people in the former Communist countries were comparing themselves with working people in the west and wanted a piece of that action. Cuba has hung on because people there compare themselves with their nearest capitalist neighbor Haiti and they don't want a piece of that action. North Korea well North Korea is North Korea.

Isn't it this beneficial capitalism that is being threatened now though? When the wall came down it was assumed that Eastern European countries would become more like us. Some have but who would have thought that British working people would now be told, by the likes of Kwasi Kwarteng and his Britannia Unchained chums, that we have to learn to accept working conditions that are more like those in the Eastern European countries that got left behind and that we are now told that our version of Capitalism is inferior to the version adopted by the Communist Party of China?

jazzdrum -> bullwinkle , 8 Jun 2013 05:51
@bullwinkle - No , when Thatcher and Reagan deregulated the financial markets in the 80s, that's when the trouble began which in turn led to the immense crash in 2008.
Eddiel899 , 8 Jun 2013 05:51
Neo-liberalism is just another symptom of liberal democracy which is government by oligarchs with a veneer of democracy.

This type of government began in America about 150 years ago with the Rockefellers, Carnegie, J.P. Morgan, Ford etc who took advantage of new inventions, cheap immigrant labour and financial deregulation in finance and social mores to amass wealth for themselves and chaos and austerity for workers.

All this looks familiar again today with new and old oligarchs hiding behind large corporations taking advantage of the invention of the €uro, mass immigration into western Europe and deregulation of the financial "markets" and social mores to amass wealth for a super-wealthy elite and chaos and austerity for workers.

So if we want to see where things went wrong we need only go back 150 years to what happened to America. There we can also see our future?

WilliamAshbless -> CaptainGrey , 8 Jun 2013 05:49
@CaptainGrey

The beneficial capitalism of the NHS, free education etc. has won

Free education and the NHS are state institutions. As Debbie said, Amazon never taught anyone to read. Beneficial capitalism is an oxymoron resulting from your lack of understanding.

cpp4ever -> CaptainGrey , 8 Jun 2013 05:41
@CaptainGrey -

especially the beneficial capitalism of the NHS, free education etc. has won and countless people have gained as a result.

At one and the same time being privatized and having their funding squeezed, a direct result of the neoliberal dogma capitalism of austerity. Free access is being eroded by the likes of ever larger student loans and prescription costs for a start.

ATrueFinn -> SpinningHugo , 8 Jun 2013 05:41
@ SpinningHugo 08 June 2013 10:02am .

Nah. They achieved this by copying the west.

I would not go that far. The Western Capitalist Party is only now getting to be as powerful as CCP and China started the "reforms" in the late 1970s.

succulentpork , 8 Jun 2013 05:36

they avoid their taxes, because they can, because they are more powerful than governments

Let's not get carried away here. Let's consider some of the things governments can do, subject only to a 5 yearly check and challenge:

  1. force people upon pain of imprisonment to pay taxes to them
  2. pay out that tax money to whomever they like
  3. spend money they don't have by borrowing against obligations imposed on future taxpayers without their agreement
  4. kill people in wars, often from the comfort of a computer screen thousands of miles away
  5. print money and give it to whomever they like,
  6. get rid of nation state currencies and replace them with a single, centrally controlled currency
  7. make laws and punish people who break them, including the ability to track them down in most places in the world if they try and run away.
  8. use laws to create monopolies and favour special interests

Let's now consider what power apple have...

- they can make iPhones and try to sell them for a profit by responding to the demands of the mass consumer market. That's it. In fact, they are forced to do this by their owners who only want them to do this, and nothing else. If they don't do this they will cease to exist.

generalelection , 8 Jun 2013 05:26
The state has merged with the corporations so that what is good for the corporations is good for the state and visa versa. The larger and richer the state/corporations are, the more shyster lawyers they hire to disguise misdeeds and unethical behavior.

If you support a big government, you are supporting big corporations as well. The government uses the taxpayer as an eternal fount of fresh money and calls it their own to spend as they please. Small businesses suffer unfairly because they cannot afford the shyster lawyers and accountants that protect the government and the corporations, but nobody cares about them. Remember, that Green Energy is big business, just like Big Pharma and Big Oil. Most government shills have personally invested in Green Energy not because they care about the environment, only because they know that it is a safe investment protected by government for government. The same goes for large corporations who befriend government and visa versa.

... ... ...

finnkn -> NeilThompson , 8 Jun 2013 05:20
@NeilThompson - It's all very well for Deborah to recommend that the well paid share work. Journalists, consultants and other assorted professionals can afford to do so. As a self-employed tradesman, I'd be homeless within a month.
finnkn -> SpinningHugo , 8 Jun 2013 05:17
@SpinningHugo - Interesting that those who are apparently concerned with prosperity for all and international solidarity are happy to ignore the rest of the world when it's going well, preferring to prophesy apocalypse when faced with government spending being slightly reduced at home.
sedan2 -> Fachan , 8 Jun 2013 05:11
@Fachan -

Dont see a lot of solutions in this article - as long as our sentiments revolve around envy of the rich, we wont get very far

Yeah, there actually wasn't anything in this article which even smelled of "envy of the rich". Read it again.

KingOfNothing -> 1nn1t , 8 Jun 2013 05:03
@1nn1t - That is a point which just isn't made enough. This is the first group of politicians for whom a global conflict seems like a distant event.

As a result we have people like Blair who see nothing wrong with invading countries at a whim, or conservatives and UKIP who fail to understand the whole point of the European Court of Human Rights.

They seem to act without thought of our true place in the world, without regard for the truly terrible capacity humanity has for self destruction.

REDLAN1 , 8 Jun 2013 05:03
Deborah's point about the illogical demands of neoliberalism are indeed correct, which is somewhat ironic as neoliberalism puts objective rationality at the heart of its philosophy, but I digress...

The main problem with replacing neoliberalism with a more rational, and fairer system, entails that people like Deborah accept that they will be less wealthy. And that my friends is the main problem. People like Deborah, while they are more than happy to point the fingers at others, are less than happy to accept that they are also part of the problem.

(Generalisation Caveat: I don't know in actuality if Deborah would be unhappy to be less wealthy in exchange for a fairer system, she doesn't say)

Herbolzheim , 8 Jun 2013 04:49
Good critique of conservative-neoliberalism, unless you subscribe to it and subordinate any morals or other values to it. She mentions an internal tension and I think that's because conservatism and neoliberal market ideology are different beasts.
NotAgainAgain -> CaptainGrey , 8 Jun 2013 04:47
@CaptainGrey -

There are different models of capitalism quite clearly the social democratic version in Scandinavia or the "Bismarkian" German version have worked a lot better than the UKs.

DavidPavett , 8 Jun 2013 04:45

Yet, mealy-mouthed and hotly contested as this minor mea culpa is, it's still a sign that financial institutions may slowly be coming round to the idea that they are the problem.

How is it a sign of that? We are offered no clues.

What they don't seem to acknowledge is that the merry days of reckless lending are never going to return;

Try reading a history of financial crashes to dislodge this idea.

... even if they do, the same thing will happen again, but more quickly and more savagely.

This may or may not be true but here it is mere assertion.

The IMF exists to lend money to governments, so it's comic that it wags its finger at governments that run up debt.

At this point I start to have real doubts as to whether Deborah Orr has actually read even the Executive Summary of the Report this article is ostensibly a response to.

All the comments that follow about the need for public infrastructure, education, regulated markets and so on are made as if they were a criticism of the IMF and yet the IMF says many of those same things itself. The IMF position may, of course, be contradictory - but then that is something that would need to be demonstrated. It seems that Deborah has not got beyond reading a couple of Guardian articles on the issues she discusses and therefore is in no position to do this.

Thus, for example in its review of world problems of Feb 2013 the IMF comments favorably that in Bangladesh in order to boost competitiveness

Efforts are being made to narrow the skills gap with other countries in the region, as the authorities look to take full advantage of Bangladesh's favorable demographics and help create conditions for more labor-intensive led growth. The government is also scaling up spending on education, science and technology, and information and communication technology.

Which seems to be the sort of thing Deborah Orr is calling for. She should spend a little time on the IMF website before criticising the institution. It is certainly one that merits much criticism - but it needs to be informed.

And the solution to the problems? For Deborah Orr the response

... from the start should have been a wholesale reevaluation of the way in which wealth is created and distributed around the globe, a "structural adjustment", as the philosopher John Gray has said all along.

Does anyone have any idea what this is supposed to mean? There are certainly no leads on this in the link given to "the philosopher" John Gray. And what a strange reference that is. John Gray, in his usual cynical mode, dismisses the idea of progress being achieved by the EU. But then I suppose that is consistent from a man who dismisses the idea of progress itself.

... Conservative neoliberalism is entirely without logic.

The first step in serious political analysis is to understand that the people one opposes are not crazy and are not devoid of logic. If that is not clearly understood then all that is left is the confrontation of assertion and contrary assertion. Of course Conservative neoliberalism has a logic. It is one I do not agree with but it is a logic all the same.

The neoliberalism that the IMF still preaches pays no account to any of this [the need for public investment and a recognition of the multiple roles that individuals have].

Wrong again.

It insists that the provision of work alone is enough of an invisible hand to sustain a market.

And again.

This stuff can't be made up as you go along on the basis of reading a couple of newspaper articles. You actually have to do some hard reading to get to grip with the issues. I can see no signs of that in this piece.

EllisWyatt -> NotAgainAgain , 8 Jun 2013 04:43
@NotAgainAgain - We are going off topic and that is in no small part down to my own fault, so apologies. Just to pick up the point, I guess my unease with the likes of Buffet, Cooper-Hohn or even the wealthy Guardian columnists is that they are criticizing the system from a position of power and wealth.

So its easy to advocate change if you feel that you are in the vanguard of defining that change i.e. the reforms you advocate may leave you worse off, but at a level you feel comfortable with (the prime example always being Polly's deeply relaxed attitude to swingeing income tax increases when her own lifestyle will be protected through wealth).

I guess I am a little skeptical because I either see it as managed decline, a smokescreen or at worst mean spiritedness of people prepared to accept a reasonable degree of personal pain if it means other people whom dislike suffer much greater pain.

Again off topic so sorry about that

NotAgainAgain -> mountman , 8 Jun 2013 04:43
@mountman -

The critical bit is this

"There is a clear legal basis in Germany for the workplace representation of employees in all but the very smallest companies. Under the Works Constitution Act, first passed in 1952 and subsequently amended, most recently in 2001, a works council can be set up in all private sector workplaces with at least five employees."

http://www.worker-participation.eu/National-Industrial-Relations/Countries/Germany/Workplace-Representation

The UK needs to wake up to the fact that managers are sometimes inept or corrupt and will destroy the companies they work for, unless their are adequate mechanisms to hold poor management to account.

ATrueFinn -> SpinningHugo , 8 Jun 2013 04:42
@ SpinningHugo 08 June 2013 9:26am

More people lifted out of poverty in China over the last 25 years than the entire population of South America.

Maybe we need the Chinese Communist Party to take over the world?

ATrueFinn -> CaptainGrey , 8 Jun 2013 04:40
@ CaptainGrey 08 June 2013 8:43am

Capitalism, especially the beneficial capitalism of the NHS, free education etc. has won

There would not be NHS, free education etc. without socialism; in fact they are socialism. It took the Soviet-style socialism ("statism") 70 years to collapse. The neoliberalistic capitalism has already started to collapse after 30 years.

irishaxeman , 8 Jun 2013 04:40
I'm always amused that neoliberal - indeed, capitalist - apologists cannot see the hypocrisy of their demands for market access. Communities create and sustain markets, fund and maintain infrastructure, produce and maintain new consumers. Yet the neolibs decry and destroy. Hypocrites or destructive numpties - never quite decided between Pickles and Gove, y'see.
EllisWyatt -> JamesValencia , 8 Jun 2013 04:38
@JamesValencia - Actually on reflection you are correct and I was wrong in my attack on the author above. Having re-read the article its a critique of institutions rather than people so my points were wide of the mark.

I still think that well heeled Guardian writers aren't really in a position to attack the wealthy and politically connected, but I'll save that for a thread when they explicitly do so, rather than the catch all genie of neoliberalism.

bullwinkle -> bluebirds , 8 Jun 2013 04:38
@bluebirds -

@CaptainGrey - deregulated capitalism has failed. That is the product of the last 20 years. The pure market is a fantasy just as communism is or any other ideology. In a pure capitalist economy all the banks of the western world would have bust and indeed the false value "earned" in the preceding 20 years would have been destroyed.

If the pure market is a fantasy, how can deregulated capitalism have failed? Does one not require the other? Surely it is regulated capitalism that has failed?

snodgrass , 8 Jun 2013 04:36
97% of all OUR money has been handed over to these scheming crooks. Stop bailing out the banks with QE. Take back what is ours -- state control over the creation of money. Then let the banks revert to their modest market-based function of financial intermediaries.

The State can't be trusted to create our money? Well they could hardly do a worse job than the banks! Best solution would be to distribute state-created money as a Citizen's Income.

EllisWyatt -> 1nn1t , 8 Jun 2013 04:35
@1nn1t - Some good points, there is a whole swathe of low earners that should not be in the tax system at all, simply letting them keep the money in their pocket would be a start.

Second the minimum wage (especially in the SE) is too low and should be increased. Obviously the devil is in the detail as to the precise rate, the other issue is non compliance as there will be any number of businesses that try and get around this, through employing people too ignorant or scared to know any better or for family businesses - do we have the stomach to enforce this?

Thirdly there is a widespread reluctance to separate people from the largesse of the state, even at absurd levels of income such as higher rate payers (witness child tax credits). On the right they see themselves as having paid in and so are "entitled" to have something back and on the left it ensures that everyone has a vested interest in a big state dipping it hands into your pockets one day and giving you something back the next.

Broken system

1nn1t -> Uncertainty , 8 Jun 2013 04:34

@Uncertainty - Which is why the people of the planet need to join hands.

The only group of people in he UK to see that need were the generation that faced WW2 together. It's no accident that, joining up at 18 in 1939, they had almost all retired by 1984.
BruceMullinger , 8 Jun 2013 04:31
To promote the indecent obsession for global growth Australia, burdened with debt of around 250 billion dollars, is to borrow and pay interest on a further 7 billion dollars to lend to the International Monetary Fund so as it can lend it to poorer nations to burden them with debt.

It is entrapment which impoverishes nations into the surrender of sovereignty, democracy and national pride. In no way should we contribute to such economic immorality and the entire economic system based on perpetual growth fuelled by consumerism and debt needs top be denounced and dismantled. The adverse social and environmental consequence of perpetual growth defies all sensible logic and in time, in a more responsible and enlightened era, growth will be condemned.

[Nov 27, 2018] 'Highly likely' that Magnitsky was poisoned by toxic chemicals on Bill Browder's orders

Highly recommended!
Skripal events probably helped to advance this line of investigation. So in a way UK intelligence services put their own stooge on the line of fire.
Notable quotes:
"... Russian prosecutors on Monday claimed that Magnitsky and several other people familiar with Browder's illicit activities in Russia may have been killed on his order. They said a new criminal case has been opened against Browder in Russia, and that Moscow will seek his extradition as an alleged ringleader of an international criminal enterprise involved in money laundering ..."
"... The prosecutors identified four people who were suspects in the Browder case, all of whom died over the course of less than two years as the investigation against him unfolded. Oktay Gasanov was the first of the four, dying in October 2007; while Magnitsky's death in November 2009 was the last. By the time of his death, Magnitsky had spent almost a year in pre-trial detention. The two others were Valery Kurochkin and Sergey Korobeinikov, who died in April 2008 and September 2008, respectively. ..."
"... Considering that the three individuals, with the exception of Magnitsky, died within months of each other while being investigated as part of Browder's case, "it is highly likely that they were killed to get rid of accomplices who could give an incriminating testimony against Browder," a senior official with the Russian General Prosecutor's office told journalists. The same may be true for Magnitsky, he said. The prosecutor stressed that Russia didn't conduct detailed studies into how the suspected poison affects living organisms, but several research institutions based in the US, France and Italy did. ..."
"... The prosecutors claim that Browder was the party who benefited most from the death of Magnitsky. They cited journalist Oleg Lurie, who shared a prison cell with Magnitsky before the latter's death. Speaking under oath during a court hearing in New York, Lurie said that his cellmate had complained to him that Browder's lawyers were pressuring him into signing a false statement. Magnitsky's testimony claimed that he had uncovered a conspiracy to embezzle taxpayers' money involving Russian officials. ..."
"... The Russian prosecutors said Browder allegedly wanted to silence his employee after obtaining the false claim. The statement itself was used to blame Russian officials for Magnitsky's death and accuse the Russian government of a cover-up. ..."
"... Described by critics as a 'vulture capitalist,' Browder seemed quite comfortable earning millions of dollars in the financial wild west. In 2005, as fallen oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky was standing trial for tax evasion, Browder scolded him on the BBC for using personal wealth to grasp at political power, and for leaving "in his wake aggrieved investors too numerous to count." He was also a staunch public supporter of the policies of Russian President Vladimir Putin. ..."
"... The investor then reinvented himself as an anti-Putin figure, using the death of Magnitsky to lobby various countries to impose sanctions on the Russian officials he blamed for his employee's death. The US Magnitsky Act was passed in 2012, allowing people accused by Washington of human rights violations to be targeted. However, it is perceived by the Kremlin as just a tool to restrain Russia for the sake of global political and economic competition. ..."
"... Among Browder's latest exploits is playing a role in the 'Russiagate' story. A key part of the elusive search for collusion between US President Donald Trump and the Russian government is a meeting between Donald Trump Jr. and a Russian lawyer. The meeting was apparently organized with a view to lobbying for the repeal of the Magnitsky Act. Its architect, Browder, has therefore been eager to lend his expertise on 'Russian machinations' to US lawmakers and media outlets. ..."
"... If you like this story, share it with a friend! ..."
Nov 19, 2018 | www.rt.com
Kremlin critic Bill Browder may have given the order for his employee Sergei Magnitsky to be poisoned with a rare toxin in a Russian prison cell, along with other suspects in a tax-evasion probe against him, prosecutors have said. British financier Browder was once a well-connected investor in post-Soviet Russia, but he became a fugitive from the law in the country after being accused of financial crimes. In the West, however, he is best known as the employer of Sergei Magnitsky, a Russian accountant who died in police custody while being investigated in connection to the Browder case. Magnitsky's death became an international scandal, with Browder accusing Russian officials of killing him.

Russian prosecutors on Monday claimed that Magnitsky and several other people familiar with Browder's illicit activities in Russia may have been killed on his order. They said a new criminal case has been opened against Browder in Russia, and that Moscow will seek his extradition as an alleged ringleader of an international criminal enterprise involved in money laundering.

The prosecutors identified four people who were suspects in the Browder case, all of whom died over the course of less than two years as the investigation against him unfolded. Oktay Gasanov was the first of the four, dying in October 2007; while Magnitsky's death in November 2009 was the last. By the time of his death, Magnitsky had spent almost a year in pre-trial detention. The two others were Valery Kurochkin and Sergey Korobeinikov, who died in April 2008 and September 2008, respectively.

Korobeinikov died after falling off a high-rise building, while the others had health complications. The Russian prosecutors believe all four of them may have been killed with a rare water-soluble compound of aluminum. Each of the men showed symptoms consistent with being poisoned by the toxin prior to their deaths, while Korobeinikov had traces of it in his liver, according to a post mortem. An investigation into four possible murders has been opened.

Read more
UK 'fraudster' Browder briefly detained in Spain on Russian warrant, tweets from police car

Considering that the three individuals, with the exception of Magnitsky, died within months of each other while being investigated as part of Browder's case, "it is highly likely that they were killed to get rid of accomplices who could give an incriminating testimony against Browder," a senior official with the Russian General Prosecutor's office told journalists. The same may be true for Magnitsky, he said. The prosecutor stressed that Russia didn't conduct detailed studies into how the suspected poison affects living organisms, but several research institutions based in the US, France and Italy did.

The prosecutors claim that Browder was the party who benefited most from the death of Magnitsky. They cited journalist Oleg Lurie, who shared a prison cell with Magnitsky before the latter's death. Speaking under oath during a court hearing in New York, Lurie said that his cellmate had complained to him that Browder's lawyers were pressuring him into signing a false statement. Magnitsky's testimony claimed that he had uncovered a conspiracy to embezzle taxpayers' money involving Russian officials.

The Russian prosecutors said Browder allegedly wanted to silence his employee after obtaining the false claim. The statement itself was used to blame Russian officials for Magnitsky's death and accuse the Russian government of a cover-up.

Last year, Browder was sentenced by a Russian court to nine years in prison for tax evasion. The trial was held in absentia and Moscow failed to have him extradited to serve the term. The prosecutors said that they will renew attempts to get custody of Browder as part of the new criminal case, using a UN convention on fighting transnational crime to have him arrested.

Browder is a US-born British financier, whose change of citizenship had the benefit of allowing him to avoid paying tax on foreign earnings. However, he claimed the switch was prompted by his family being persecuted in the US during the McCarthyism witch hunt, while the UK seemed like the land of law and order.

Read more

Magnitsky Act mastermind seeks to stop Cyprus from revealing his offshore assets to Russia

He made a fortune in Russia during the country's chaotic transition to a market economy, having invested before there was a stock exchange in Moscow. His Hermitage Capital Management fund was a leading foreign investment entity in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Described by critics as a 'vulture capitalist,' Browder seemed quite comfortable earning millions of dollars in the financial wild west. In 2005, as fallen oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky was standing trial for tax evasion, Browder scolded him on the BBC for using personal wealth to grasp at political power, and for leaving "in his wake aggrieved investors too numerous to count." He was also a staunch public supporter of the policies of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The transformation of his public image from a financial shark into a human rights crusader started when Browder himself entered the spotlight of Russian law enforcement. In 2007, the foundation he ran was targeted by a probe into possible large-scale embezzlement of Russian taxpayers' money. Magnitsky, who worked for Browder and had knowledge of his firms' finances, was arrested and held in pre-trial detention until his death in November 2009. The British businessman insisted that the entire case was fabricated and that Magnitsky had been assassinated for exposing a criminal scheme involving several Russian tax officials.

The investor then reinvented himself as an anti-Putin figure, using the death of Magnitsky to lobby various countries to impose sanctions on the Russian officials he blamed for his employee's death. The US Magnitsky Act was passed in 2012, allowing people accused by Washington of human rights violations to be targeted. However, it is perceived by the Kremlin as just a tool to restrain Russia for the sake of global political and economic competition.

Browder's new-found status as a rights advocate and self-proclaimed worst enemy of Putin helps him deflect Russia's attempts to prosecute him. On several occasions, Russia filed international arrest warrants against him with Interpol, which even led to his brief detention in Spain last May.

Among Browder's latest exploits is playing a role in the 'Russiagate' story. A key part of the elusive search for collusion between US President Donald Trump and the Russian government is a meeting between Donald Trump Jr. and a Russian lawyer. The meeting was apparently organized with a view to lobbying for the repeal of the Magnitsky Act. Its architect, Browder, has therefore been eager to lend his expertise on 'Russian machinations' to US lawmakers and media outlets.

If you like this story, share it with a friend!

[Nov 27, 2018] US Foreign Policy Has No Policy by Philip Giraldi

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Trump's memo on the Saudis begins with the headline "The world is a very dangerous place!" Indeed, it is and behavior by the three occupants of the White House since 2000 is largely to blame. ..."
"... Indeed, a national security policy that sees competitors and adversaries as enemies in a military sense has made nuclear war, unthinkable since the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991, thinkable once again. ..."
"... George Washington's dictum in his Farewell Address , counseling his countrymen to "observe good faith and justice towards all nations; cultivate peace and harmony with all." And Washington might have somehow foreseen the poisonous relationships with Israel and the Saudis when he warned that " a passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate inducement or justification." ..."
"... Cautious optimism may be better than none, but futile nonetheless. Bullying, dispossession, slavery and genocide constitute the very bedrock, the essence and soul of the founding of our country. ..."
"... Truth be told we simply know of no other kinder, gentler alternatives to perpetual war and destruction as the cornerstone of our foreign policy. Normality? Not in my lifetime. ..."
"... Your CNI and 'If Americans Knew' informed me about Rand Paul's courageous move. I plan to call his office today to give him encouragement and call my Senators and Representative to urge them to support him (fat chance of that but I have to stick it in their face). ..."
"... America doesn't have a policy because America is no longer a real nation. It's an empire filled with diverse groups of peoples who all hate each other and want to use the power of the government for the benefit of their overseas co-ethnics. ..."
Nov 27, 2018 | www.unz.com

President Donald Trump's recent statement on the Jamal Khashoggi killing by Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince might well be considered a metaphor for his foreign policy. Several commentators have suggested that the text appears to be something that Trump wrote himself without any adult supervision, similar to the poorly expressed random arguments presented in his tweeting only longer. That might be the case, but it would not be wise to dismiss the document as merely frivolous or misguided as it does in reality express the kind of thinking that has produced a foreign policy that seems to drift randomly to no real end, a kind of leaderless creative destruction of the United States as a world power.

Lord Palmerston, Prime Minister of Britain in the mid nineteenth century, famously said that "Nations have no permanent friends or allies, they only have permanent interests."The United States currently has neither real friends nor any clearly defined interests. It is, however, infested with parasites that have convinced an at-drift America that their causes are identical to the interests of the United States. Leading the charge to reduce the U.S. to "bitch" status, as Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard has artfully put it , are Israel and Saudi Arabia, but there are many other countries, alliances and advocacy groups that have learned how to subvert and direct the "leader of the free world."

Trump's memo on the Saudis begins with the headline "The world is a very dangerous place!" Indeed, it is and behavior by the three occupants of the White House since 2000 is largely to blame. It is difficult to find a part of the world where an actual American interest is being served by Washington's foreign and global security policies. Indeed, a national security policy that sees competitors and adversaries as enemies in a military sense has made nuclear war, unthinkable since the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991, thinkable once again. The fact that no one is the media or in political circles is even talking about that terrible danger suggests that war has again become mainstreamed, tacitly benefiting from bipartisan acceptance of it as a viable foreign policy tool by the media, in the U.S. Congress and also in the White House.

The part of the world where American meddling coupled with ignorance has produced the worst result is inevitably the Middle East...

... ... ...

All of the White House's actions have one thing in common and that is that they do not benefit Americans in any way unless one works for a weapons manufacturer, and that is not even taking into consideration the dead soldiers and civilians and the massive debt that has been incurred to intervene all over the world. One might also add that most of America's interventions are built on deliberate lies by the government and its associated media, intended to increase tension and create a casus belli where none exists.

So what is to be done as it often seems that the best thing Trump has going for him is that he is not Hillary Clinton? First of all, a comprehensive rethink of what the real interests of the United States are in the world arena is past due. America is less safe now than it was in 2001 as it continues to make enemies with its blundering everywhere it goes. There are now four times as many designated terrorists as there were in 2001, active in 70 countries. One would quite plausibly soon arrive at George Washington's dictum in his Farewell Address , counseling his countrymen to "observe good faith and justice towards all nations; cultivate peace and harmony with all." And Washington might have somehow foreseen the poisonous relationships with Israel and the Saudis when he warned that " a passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate inducement or justification."

George Washington or any of the other Founders would be appalled to see an America with 800 military bases overseas, allegedly for self-defense. The transfer of wealth from taxpayers to the military industrial complex and related entities like Wall Street has been catastrophic. The United States does not need to protect Israel and Saudi Arabia, two countries that are armed to the teeth and well able to defend themselves. Nor does it have to be in Syria and Afghanistan. And

If the United States were to withdraw its military from the Middle East and the rest of Asia tomorrow, it would be to nearly everyone's benefit. If the armed forces were to be subsequently reduced to a level sufficient to defend the United States it would put money back in the pockets of Americans and end the continuous fearmongering through surfacing of "threats" by career militarists justifying the bloated budgets.

... ... ...

Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation that seeks a more interests [email protected] .

anon [355] Disclaimer , says: November 27, 2018 at 5:38 am GMT

US foreign policy is controlled by a few key ethnic groups and (to a lesser degree) the military-industrial complex.
Justsaying , says: November 27, 2018 at 6:04 am GMT

but even small steps in the right direction could initiate a gradual process of turning the United States into a more normal country in its relationships with the rest of the world rather than a universal predator and bully.

Cautious optimism may be better than none, but futile nonetheless. Bullying, dispossession, slavery and genocide constitute the very bedrock, the essence and soul of the founding of our country.

To expect mutations -- no matter how slow or fast in a trait that appears deeply embedded in our DNA is to be naive. Add to that the intractable stranglehold Zionists and organized world Jewry has on our nuts and decision making. A more congruent convergence of histories and DNAs would be hard to come by among other nations. Truth be told we simply know of no other kinder, gentler alternatives to perpetual war and destruction as the cornerstone of our foreign policy. Normality? Not in my lifetime.

Z-man , says: November 27, 2018 at 9:11 am GMT
Great article and I will spread it around.

Your CNI and 'If Americans Knew' informed me about Rand Paul's courageous move. I plan to call his office today to give him encouragement and call my Senators and Representative to urge them to support him (fat chance of that but I have to stick it in their face).

Hey, how about a Rand Paul-Tulsi Gabbard fusion ticket in 2024, not a bad idea, IMHO.

Going back to the Administration you can see the slimy Zionist hands of Steven Miller on all of those foreign policy statements. Trump is allowing this because he has to protect his flanks from Zionists, Christian or otherwise. He might be just giving Miller just enough rope to jettison him (wishful thinking on my part). Or he doesn't care or is unaware of the texts, a possibility.

anon [336] Disclaimer , says: November 27, 2018 at 9:26 am GMT
1. Because that defies human nature. See all of history if you disagree.

2. America doesn't have a policy because America is no longer a real nation. It's an empire filled with diverse groups of peoples who all hate each other and want to use the power of the government for the benefit of their overseas co-ethnics.

jilles dykstra , says: November 27, 2018 at 9:30 am GMT
The beginning of USA foreign policy for me is the 1820 or 1830 Monroe Declaration: south America is our backyard, keep out. Few people know that at the time European countries considered war on the USA because of this beginning of world domination. When I told this to a USA correspondent the reply was 'but this declaration still is taught here in glowing terms'.

What we saw then was the case until Obama, USA foreign policy was for internal political reasons. As Hollings stated in 2004 'Bush promising AIPAC the war on Iraq, that is politics'. No empire ever, as far as I know, ever was in the comfortable position to be able to let foreign policy to be decided (almost) completely by internal politics.

This changed during the Obama reign, the two war standard had to be lowered to one and a half. All of a sudden the USA had to develop a foreign policy, a policy that had to take into consideration the world outside the USA. Not the whole USA understands this, the die hards of Deep State in the lead.

What a half war accomplishes we see, my opinion, in Syria, a half war does not bring victory on an enemy who wages a whole war.
Assad is still there, Russia has airforce and naval bases in Syria.

Normally, as any history book explains, foreign policy of a country is decided on in secret by a few people. British preparations for both WWI and WWII included detailed technical talks with both the USA and France, not even all cabinet members knew about it. One of Trump's difficulties is that Deep State does not at all has the intention of letting the president decide on foreign policy, at the time of FDR he did what he liked, though, if one reads for example Baruch's memoirs, in close cooperation with the Deep State that then existed.

The question 'why do we not leave the rest of the world alone', hardly ever asked. The USA is nearly autarcic, foreign trade, from memory, some five percent of national income, a very luxurious position. But of course, leaving the rest of the world alone, huge internal consequences, as Hinckley explains with an example, politically impossible to stop the development of a bomber judged to be superfluous.

Barbara Hinckley Sheldon Goldman, American Politics and Government, Glenview Ill.,1990

Jim Christian , says: November 27, 2018 at 9:43 am GMT
Good luck. A fight over resources with the biggest consumer of resources, the People That Kill People and all their little buddies in the Alphabet Soup of Law Enforcement and Intelligence Depravity..

That could get a fella hurt. Ask Jack and Bob Kennedy.

Michael Kenny , says: November 27, 2018 at 10:10 am GMT
"The bilateral relationship between the U.S. and Russia is now worse than it was towards the end of the Cold War". Classic American cold warrior mentality. The present-day Russian Federation is assimilated to the former Soviet Union.
Johnny Rottenborough , says: Website November 27, 2018 at 11:31 am GMT
Tragically for America, and the West in general, President Trump is unrecognizable from candidate Trump :

'This is a crossroads in the history of our civilization that will determine whether or not we the people reclaim control over our government. The political establishment that is trying to stop us is the same group responsible for our disastrous trade deals, massive illegal immigration and economic and foreign policies that have bled our country dry Their financial resources are virtually unlimited, their political resources are unlimited, their media resources are unmatched, and most importantly, the depths of their immorality is absolutely unlimited.'

[Nov 27, 2018] terms that carry with them implicit moral connotations. Investment implies an action, even a sacrifice, undertaken for a better future. It evokes a future positive outcome. Another words that reinforces neoliberal rationality is "growth", Modernization and

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... And that bloody word...'modernisation' (Moderni- z -ation - for the management speak geeks). Why is it every time I come across that word in meetings, it means some worker is either losing money or losing their job? ..."
"... the monetisation of everything and the use of language to make the neo-liberal nightmare through which we are living seem, not only the norm, but the only way. ..."
"... Social security becomes welfare and suddenly masses of society (the majority of benefit claimants being in work) are not drawing on an insurance policy but are in receipt of 'welfare' subject to the largesse and judgements of an ever more cruel and avaricious 'elite'. ..."
"... I'm a big fan of Steven Poole's Unspeak , which looks at the way in which terms and terminology have been engineered precisely to hollow out meaning and present an argument instead. A kind of Neoliberal Emperor's New Clothes, the problem is that, obviously, if your vocabulary and your meanings become circumscribed, it limits what can be said, and even how people think about what's being said. ..."
Nov 27, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com

restructuring

Sidfishes , 11 Jun 2013 04:26

And that bloody word...'modernisation' (Moderni- z -ation - for the management speak geeks). Why is it every time I come across that word in meetings, it means some worker is either losing money or losing their job? Or some manager is about to award themselves a bonus?
thesingingdetective -> gyges1 , 11 Jun 2013 04:22
@gyges1 - No, she is surely railing against the monetisation of everything and the use of language to make the neo-liberal nightmare through which we are living seem, not only the norm, but the only way.

Social security becomes welfare and suddenly masses of society (the majority of benefit claimants being in work) are not drawing on an insurance policy but are in receipt of 'welfare' subject to the largesse and judgements of an ever more cruel and avaricious 'elite'.

Language matters and its distortion is a political act.

michaelsylvain , 11 Jun 2013 04:17
But without these Exciting New Word Uprating Initiatives, we can never win The Global Race... or something.

I'm a big fan of Steven Poole's Unspeak , which looks at the way in which terms and terminology have been engineered precisely to hollow out meaning and present an argument instead. A kind of Neoliberal Emperor's New Clothes, the problem is that, obviously, if your vocabulary and your meanings become circumscribed, it limits what can be said, and even how people think about what's being said.

(By the way, the link's to Amazon, but, obviously, you may find you have a better "Customer Experience" if you get from somewhere less tax-dodgy.)

[Nov 27, 2018] The Argentinian military coup, like those in Guatemala, Honduras, Brazil, Paraguay, Bolivia and Nicaragua, was sponsored by the US to protect and further its interests during the Cold War. By the 1970s neoliberalism was very much part of the menu; paramilitary governments were actively encouraged to practice neoliberal politics; neoliberalism was at this stage, what communism was to the Soviet Union

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... I was, of course, referring to the families of the disappeared in Chile. They are, of course, relevant and should not be excluded from any arguments about neoliberalism and its effects. Nor should the families of the disappeared in Argentina, though it is less well known, the junta was entrusted with the introduction of neoliberal policies in Argentina. ..."
"... The Argentinian military coup, like those in Guatemala, Honduras, Brazil, Paraguay, Bolivia and Nicaragua, was sponsored by the US to protect and further its interests during the Cold War. By the 1970s neoliberalism was very much part of the menu; paramilitary governments were actively encouraged to practice neoliberal politics; neoliberalism was at this stage, what communism was to the Soviet Union; the ideological wing of the Cold War. You may be familiar with Operation Condor? ..."
"... It has been pretty firmly established that the Allende regime was victim of US sponsored military coup and that said coup was sponsored to protect US interests. The Chicago boys then flew into Chile to use the nation as a laboratory for the more outlandish (at the time) neoliberal policies they were unable to practice at home. ..."
"... The political class, with the aid of their subservient corporate media quislings, have taken our language apart and used it against us. We have been backed into a corner, we are told, by both Labour and Tories, that there is no choice, either rabid profiteering or penury and we have, to our everlasting shame, lapped up every word of it. ..."
"... We have become so embedded in the language of individuals, choice, contracts and competition that we cannot see any alternative. Even Adam Smith understood the difference between "economy" and "society" when he argued that labor is directly connected to public interest while business is connected to self-interest. If business took over the public sphere, Smith argued, this would be quite destructive. ..."
Nov 27, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
maxfisher -> finnkn , 11 Jun 2013 07:45
@finnkn - Apologies. I was, of course, referring to the families of the disappeared in Chile. They are, of course, relevant and should not be excluded from any arguments about neoliberalism and its effects. Nor should the families of the disappeared in Argentina, though it is less well known, the junta was entrusted with the introduction of neoliberal policies in Argentina.

The Argentinian military coup, like those in Guatemala, Honduras, Brazil, Paraguay, Bolivia and Nicaragua, was sponsored by the US to protect and further its interests during the Cold War. By the 1970s neoliberalism was very much part of the menu; paramilitary governments were actively encouraged to practice neoliberal politics; neoliberalism was at this stage, what communism was to the Soviet Union; the ideological wing of the Cold War. You may be familiar with Operation Condor?

To be clear: I am arguing that the direct effects of 'actually existing neoliberalism' are very far from benign. I do not argue that the militarisation of Central and South America are the direct consequence neoliberal theory.

maxfisher -> finnkn , 11 Jun 2013 07:04
@finnkn - Well I think many would. It has been pretty firmly established that the Allende regime was victim of US sponsored military coup and that said coup was sponsored to protect US interests. The Chicago boys then flew into Chile to use the nation as a laboratory for the more outlandish (at the time) neoliberal policies they were unable to practice at home.

Neoliberalism was first practiced in authoritarian states; the states in which neoliberalism is most deeply embedded are (surprise, surprise) increasingly authoritarian, and neoliberalism solutions are regularly imposed on client/vulnerable states by suprastructures such as the IMF, the EU, and the World Bank. Friedrich Hayek and Adam Smith were very clear that the potential for degeneracy existed. We have now reached that potential; increasingly centralised authority, states within states, the denuding of democratic institutions and crony capitalism. Neoliberalism in practice is very different to neoliberalism in practice. Rather like 'really existing socialism' and Marxism.

works best in authoritarian states because (in practice, if not in theory

finnkn -> BaronessHawHaw , 11 Jun 2013 07:41

@BaronessHawHaw - Simply untrue.

http://www.pewglobal.org/2009/11/02/end-of-communism-cheered-but-now-with-more-reservations/

As the statistics on that link show, there are certain countries (notably Russia and the Ukraine) where the +65 age group disapprove of the change to democracy and capitalism. In the majority, however, people of all ages remain in favour.

retro77 -> anonid , 11 Jun 2013 07:10
@anonid -

For 'job' read 'bribe' (keep your mouth shut or lose it), for 'management' read 'take most of the interest out of the job for everybody else and put them on a lower scale', etc. I guess you get my drift.

It's sad that you have such a negative, self-hating attitude towards your work.

BobJanova , 11 Jun 2013 07:09

Work is usually – and certainly should be – a central source of meaning and fulfilment in human lives. And it has – or could have – moral and creative (or aesthetic) values at its core

Spoken like a true champagne socialist in a creative industry. How do you find meaning and fulfillment, or creative values, in emptying bins, cleaning offices, sweeping the streets and a whole load of other work which needs doing but which is repetitive, menial and not particularly pleasant?

There are two ways to get people to do work that needs doing but wouldn't be done voluntarily: coercion or payment. I think the second is a more healthy way to run a society.

retarius , 11 Jun 2013 07:07
I've thought pretty much the same myself. Democracies can be good or bad (as the Greeks knew well)...but in our politic-speak it is used to denounce and make good; as in "Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East"...it is intended to make us feel something good about Israel, as it humiliates the Palestinians and steals their land.

In ancient Greece....'tyrant' simply meant 'usurper' without any neccessary negative association....simply someone who had usurped political power...they recognized that tyrannies could be good, bad or indifferent.

In Rome, dictator simply meant the cahp that took over fpr periods of six months at a time, during times of crisis.

I used to vacation in Yugoslavia in Marshall Tito's time....it was a wonderful place, beautiful, inexpensive and safe...very very safe. What came into the power vacuum after he died in 1980...what happened to the country? I'd argue that his was a good dictatorship or tyranny....

I'm also not too sure what the 90% of people unaffected by and uninterested in power politics in any given country feel about the 'liberation' of Libya and Iraq from their prior dictatorships...I'm sure that plenty of people whose previously steady lives have been wrecked, are all that thrilled.

Antiquarian , 11 Jun 2013 07:06
I have recently been exercised by the right's adoption of "Social Justice". In the past it was the left and churches who talked of social justice as a phenomenon to empower the poor and dispossessed, whether in this country or the developing world. Social Justice was a touchstone of Faith in the City, for example, but it seems now to be the smoke screen behind which benefits are stipped from the "undeserving poor".
BaronessHawHaw , 11 Jun 2013 06:59
Most of this crap comes from America. Crappy middle-management bureaucrats spouting "free-market" bollocks.
The efficiency of the private sector - some nob with a name badge timing how long you've been on the toilet.
Freedommm!!!!
BlankReg -> joseph1832 , 11 Jun 2013 06:56
@ joseph1832 11 June 2013 9:24am . Get cifFix for Firefox .

It is not just neoliberalism. Everyone is at it - sucking the meaning out of words. Corporate bullshit, public sector bullshit. Being customers of your own government is a crime that everyone is guilty of. This is what Orwell railed against decades ago, and it has got worse.

Case in point; just look at the way in which the Cameron set about co-opting words and phrases justifiably applied to his own regime and repurposed them against his detractors.

For example, people who took a stand against the stealth privatisation of the NHS were branded as "vested interests", quite unlike the wholesome MPs who voted for the NHS bill who, despite the huge sums of money they received from the private healthcare lobby, we are encouraged to believe were acting in our best interests by selling our health service to their corporate paymasters. Or the farcical attempt to rebrand female Tory MPs as "feminists" despite their anti-social mobility, anti-equality, anti-human rights and anti-abortion views.

The political class, with the aid of their subservient corporate media quislings, have taken our language apart and used it against us. We have been backed into a corner, we are told, by both Labour and Tories, that there is no choice, either rabid profiteering or penury and we have, to our everlasting shame, lapped up every word of it.

Arabica Robusta -> Obelisk1 , 11 Jun 2013 06:55
@Obelisk1 - You have single-handedly proven Massey's argument. We have become so embedded in the language of individuals, choice, contracts and competition that we cannot see any alternative. Even Adam Smith understood the difference between "economy" and "society" when he argued that labor is directly connected to public interest while business is connected to self-interest. If business took over the public sphere, Smith argued, this would be quite destructive.
Snapshackle , 11 Jun 2013 06:50

Our whole conversation seemed somehow reduced, my experience of it belittled into one of commercial transaction. My relation to the gallery and to this engaging person had become one of instrumental market exchange.

But in the eyes of the economic right, that is precisely the case. Adjectives like altruistic, caring, selfless, empathy and sympathy are simply not in their vocabulary. They are only ever any of those things provided they can see some sort of beneficial payback at the end.

maxfisher -> Venebles 11 Jun 2013 06:20

@Venebles - I was simply joining many commentators in the mire. Those that dispute the neoliberal worldview are routinely dismissed as marxists. I thought I'd save you all the energy, duck.

I'm not sure that the families of the disappeared of Chile and Argentina would concur with you benign view of neoliberalism and its effects.

Liquidity Jones, 11 Jun 2013 06:04
Might as well define it.

Neoliberalism framework vs Full employment framework

Full employment. The 3 pillars

Redistributive pillar

Collective pillar

Neo-liberalism. The 3 pillars

Economic pillar

Redistributive pillar

Individuality pillar

[Nov 24, 2018] Anonymous Exposes UK-Led Psyop To Battle Russian Propaganda

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Operating on a budget of Ł1.9 million (US$2.4 million), the secretive Integrity Initiative consists of "clusters" of local politicians, journalists, military personnel, scientists and academics. The team is dedicated to searching for and publishing "evidence" of Russian interference in European affairs , while themselves influencing leadership behind the scenes, the documents claim. ..."
"... The Integrity Initiative "clusters" currently operate out of Spain, France, Germany, Italy, Greece, Montenegro, Serbia, Norway, Lithuania and the netherlands. According to the leak by Anonymous, the Integrity Initiative is working to aggressively expand its sphere of influence throughout eastern Europe, as well as the US, Canada and the MENA region ..."
"... The work done by the Initiative - which claims it is not a government body, is done under "absolute secrecy via concealed contacts embedded throughout British embassies," according to the leak. It does, however, admit to working with unnamed British "government agencies." ..."
Nov 23, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

The hacking collective known as "Anonymous" published a trove of documents on November 5 which it claims exposes a UK-based psyop to create a " large-scale information secret service " in Europe in order to combat "Russian propaganda" - which has been blamed for everything from Brexit to US President Trump winning the 2016 US election.

The primary objective of the " Integrity Initiative " - established in 2015 by the Institute for Statecraft - is "to provide a coordinated Western response to Russian disinformation and other elements of hybrid warfare."

And while the notion of Russian disinformation has become the West's favorite new bogeyman to excuse things such as Hillary Clinton's historic loss to Donald Trump, we note that "Anonymous" was called out by WikiLeaks in October 2016 as an FBI cutout, while the report on the Integrity Initiative that Anonymous exposed comes from Russian state-owned network RT - so it's anyone's guess whose 400lb hackers are at work here.

Operating on a budget of Ł1.9 million (US$2.4 million), the secretive Integrity Initiative consists of "clusters" of local politicians, journalists, military personnel, scientists and academics. The team is dedicated to searching for and publishing "evidence" of Russian interference in European affairs , while themselves influencing leadership behind the scenes, the documents claim.

The UK establishment appears to be conducting the very activities of which it and its allies have long-accused the Kremlin, with little or no corroborating evidence. The program also aims to "change attitudes in Russia itself" as well as influencing Russian speakers in the EU and North America, one of the leaked documents states. - RT

The Integrity Initiative "clusters" currently operate out of Spain, France, Germany, Italy, Greece, Montenegro, Serbia, Norway, Lithuania and the netherlands. According to the leak by Anonymous, the Integrity Initiative is working to aggressively expand its sphere of influence throughout eastern Europe, as well as the US, Canada and the MENA region .

The work done by the Initiative - which claims it is not a government body, is done under "absolute secrecy via concealed contacts embedded throughout British embassies," according to the leak. It does, however, admit to working with unnamed British "government agencies."

The initiative has received Ł168,000 in funding from HQ NATO Public Diplomacy and Ł250,000 from the US State Department , the documents allege.

Some of its purported members include British MPs and high-profile " independent" journalists with a penchant for anti-Russian sentiment in their collective online oeuvre, as showcased by a brief glance at their Twitter feeds. - RT

Noted examples of "inedependent" anti-Russia journalists:

Spanish "Op"

In one example of the group's activities, a "Moncloa Campaign" was successfully conducted by the group's Spanish cluster to block the appointment of Colonel Pedro Banos as the director of Spain's Department of Homeland Security. It took just seven-and-a-half hours to accomplish, brags the group in the documents .

"The [Spanish] government is preparing to appoint Colonel Banos, known for his pro-Russian and pro-Putin positions in the Syrian and Ukrainian conflicts, as Director of the Department of Homeland Security, a key body located at the Moncloa," begins Nacho Torreblanca in a seven-part tweetstorm describing what happened.

Others joined in. Among them – according to the leaks – academic Miguel Ángel Quintana Paz, who wrote that "Mr. Banos is to geopolitics as a homeopath is to medicine." Appointing such a figure would be "a shame." - RT

The operation was reported in Spanish media, while Banos was labeled "pro-Putin" by UK MP Bob Seely.

In short, expect anything counter to predominant "open-border" narratives to be the Kremlin's fault - and not a natural populist reflex to the destruction of borders, language and culture.

[Nov 24, 2018] British Government Runs Secret Anti-Russian Smear Campaigns

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... It lists Bellingcat and the Atlantic Council as "partner organisations" ..."
"... "The UK's Secret Intelligence Service, otherwise known as MI6, has been scrambling to prevent President Trump from publishing classified materials linked to the Russian election meddling investigation. ... much of the espionage performed on the Trump campaign was conducted on UK soil throughout 2016." ..."
"... "Gregory R. Copley, editor and publisher of Defense & Foreign Affairs, posited that Sergei Skripal is the unnamed Russian intelligence source in the Steele dossier. ... In Skripal's pseudo-country-gentleman retirement, the ex-GRU-MI6 double agent was selling custom-made "Russian intelligence"; he had fabricated "material" that went into the Steele dossier..." ..."
"... this movement in the west by gov'ts to pay for generating lies, hate and propaganda towards russia is really sick... it is perfect for the military industrial complex corporations though and they seem to be calling the shots in the west, much more so then the voice of the ordinary person who is not interested in war ..."
"... Seems to me that this shows the primacy of the City of London, with its offshore network of illicit capital accumulation, within Britain. It is a state within a state or even a financial empire within a state, which, for deep historical reasons isn't subject to the same laws as the rest of the UK. ..."
"... The UK's pathological obsession with Russia only makes sense to me as the city's insistence on continued 90s style appropriation of Russia's wealth ..."
"... British hypocrisy publicly called out. How this all unravels is one to watch. Extra large popcorn and soda for me ..."
"... It seems to me that the UK has far more to lose from doxxing than Russia does. The interference in sovereign allied states to 'manage' who the UK thinks they should appoint does not bode well for such relations ..."
"... A separate subcluster of so-called journalists names Deborah Haynes, David Aaronovitch of the London Times and Neil Buckley from the FT." Subcluster. Love it. Just how crap do you have to be to fail to make it to membership of a full cluster of smear merchants? ..."
"... I doubt very seriously that the British launched this operation without the CIA's implicit and explicit support. This has all the markings of a John Brennan operation that has been launched stealthily to prevent anyone from knowing its real origins. ..."
"... The Brits don't act alone, and a project of this magnitude did not begin without Langley's explicit approval. ..."
"... Now check out the wording in the above document: "Funding from institutional and national governmental sources in the US has been delayed by internal disputes within the US government, but w.e.f. March 2018 that deadlock seems to have been resolved and funding should now flow." Think about that. What would have blocked the flow of USG support for this project?? Why, the allegations of collusion against Trump, of course. Naturally, the Republicans are not going to provide money to an operation that threatens to destroy the head of their own party. So, there has been no bipartisan agreement on funding for anti-Russia propaganda ..."
"... This mob was created in the autumn of 2015, according to their site. That would have been about the time -- probably just after -- the Russians intervened in Syria. The Brits had plans for an invasion of Syria in 2009, according to their fave Guardian fish wrap. ..."
"... Pat Lang posted a report that strongly implies that charges of Russian influence on Trump are a deliberate falsification ..."
"... It seems quite possible that what is alleged as "Russian meddling" is actually CIA-MI6 meddling ..."
"... As I have said before, MAGA is a POLICY RESPONSE to the challenge from Russia and China. The election of a Republican faux populist was necessary and Trump, despite his many flaws, was the best candidate for the job. ..."
"... The Integrity Initiative's goal is to defend democracy against the truth about Russia. All this is so Orwellian. When will we get the Ministry of Love? ..."
"... They shot at an elephant and failed to kill it. So yes, out of the combo of frustration, resentment, and fear they hate the resurgent Russia and prefer Cold War II, and if necessary WWIII, to peaceful co-existence. Of course the usual corporate imperative (in this case weapons profiteering) reinforces the mass psychological pathology among the elites. ..."
"... The ironic thing is that Putin doesn't prefer to challenge the neoliberal globalist "order" at all, but would happily see Russia take a prominent place within it. It's the US and its UK poodle who are insisting on confrontation. ..."
"... Great article! It reminded me of what I read in George Orwell's novella "1984." He summed it all up brilliantly in nine words: "War is Peace"; "Freedom is Slavery"; "Ignorance is Strength." The three pillars of political power. ..."
"... Since UK has always blocked the "European Intelligence" initiative, on the basis of his pertenence to the "Five Eyes", and as UK is leaving the European Union, where it has always been the Troyan Horse of the US, one would think that all these people belonging to the so called "clusters" should register themselves as "foreign agents" working for UK government. ..."
"... William Browder ..."
Nov 24, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

British Government Runs Secret Anti-Russian Smear Campaigns Steveg , Nov 24, 2018 11:43:44 AM | link

In 2015 the government of Britain launched a secret operation to insert anti-Russia propaganda into the western media stream.

We have already seen many consequences of this and similar programs which are designed to smear anyone who does not follow the anti-Russian government lines. The 'Russian collusion' smear campaign against Donald Trump based on the Steele dossier was also a largely British operation but seems to be part of a different project.

The ' Integrity Initiative ' builds 'cluster' or contact groups of trusted journalists, military personal, academics and lobbyists within foreign countries. These people get alerts via social media to take action when the British center perceives a need.

On June 7 it took the the Spanish cluster only a few hours to derail the appointment of Perto Banos as the Director of the National Security Department in Spain. The cluster determined that he had a too positive view of Russia and launched a coordinated social media smear campaign (pdf) against him.


bigger

The Initiative and its operations were unveiled when someone liberated some of its documents, including its budget applications to the British Foreign Office, and posted them under the 'Anonymous' label at cyberguerrilla.org .

The Initiative is nominally run under the (government financed) non-government-organisation The Institute For Statecraft . Its internal handbook (pdf) describes its purpose:

The Integrity Initiative was set up in autumn 2015 by The Institute for Statecraft in cooperation with the Free University of Brussels (VUB) to bring to the attention of politicians, policy-makers, opinion leaders and other interested parties the threat posed by Russia to democratic institutions in the United Kingdom, across Europe and North America.

It lists Bellingcat and the Atlantic Council as "partner organisations" and promises that:

Cluster members will be sent to educational sessions abroad to improve the technical competence of the cluster to deal with disinformation and strengthen bonds in the cluster community. [...] (Events with DFR Digital Sherlocks, Bellingcat, EuVsDisinfo, Buzzfeed, Irex, Detector Media, Stopfake, LT MOD Stratcom – add more names and propose cluster participants as you desire).

The Initiatives Orwellian slogan is 'Defending Democracy Against Disinformation'. It covers European countries, the UK, the U.S. and Canada and seems to want to expand to the Middle East.

On its About page it claims: "We are not a government body but we do work with government departments and agencies who share our aims." The now published budget plans show that more than 95% of the Initiative's funding is coming directly from the British government, NATO and the U.S. State Department. All the 'contact persons' for creating 'clusters' in foreign countries are British embassy officers. It amounts to a foreign influence campaign by the British government that hides behind a 'civil society' NGO.

The organisation is led by one Chris N. Donnelly who receives (pdf) £8,100 per month for creating the smear campaign network.


Chris Donnelly - Pic via Euromaidanpress

From its 2017/18 budget application (pdf) we learn how the Initiative works:

To counter Russian disinformation and malign influence in Europe by: expanding the knowledge base; harnessing existing expertise, and; establishing a network of networks of experts, opinion formers and policy makers, to educate national audiences in the threat and to help build national capacities to counter it .

The Initiative has a black and white view that is based on a "we are the good ones" illusion. When "we" 'educate the public' it is legitimate work. When others do similar, it its disinformation. That is of course not the reality. The Initiative's existence itself, created to secretly manipulate the public, is proof that such a view is wrong.

If its work were as legit as it wants to be seen, why would the Foreign Office run it from behind the curtain as an NGO? The Initiative is not the only such operation. It's applications seek funding from a larger "Russian Language Strategic Communication Programme" run by the Foreign Office.

The 2017/18 budget application sought FCO funding of £480,635. It received £102,000 in co-funding from NATO and the Lithuanian Ministry of Defense. The 2018/19 budget application shows a planned spending (pdf) of £1,961,000.00. The co-sponsors this year are again NATO and the Lithuanian MoD, but also include (pdf) the U.S. State Department with £250,000 and Facebook with £100,000. The budget lays out a strong cooperation with the local military of each country. It notes that NATO is also generous in financing the local clusters.

One of the liberated papers of the Initiative is a talking points memo labeled Top 3 Deliverable for FCO (pdf):

  • Developing and proving the cluster concept and methodology, setting up clusters in a range of countries with different circumstances
  • Making people (in Government, think tanks, military, journalists) see the big picture, making people acknowledge that we are under concerted, deliberate hybrid attack by Russia
  • Increasing the speed of response, mobilising the network to activism in pursuit of the "golden minute"

Under top 1, setting up clusters, a subitem reads:

- Connects media with academia with policy makers with practitioners in a country to impact on policy and society: ( Jelena Milic silencing pro-kremlin voices on Serbian TV )

Defending Democracy by silencing certain voices on public TV seems to be a self-contradicting concept.

Another subitem notes how the Initiative secretly influences foreign governments:

We engage only very discreetly with governments, based entirely on trusted personal contacts, specifically to ensure that they do not come to see our work as a problem, and to try to influence them gently, as befits an independent NGO operation like ours, viz;
- Germany, via the Zentrum Liberale Moderne to the Chancellor's Office and MOD
- Netherlands, via the HCSS to the MOD
- Poland and Romania, at desk level into their MFAs via their NATO Reps
- Spain, via special advisers, into the MOD and PM's office (NB this may change very soon with the new Government)
- Norway, via personal contacts into the MOD
- HQ NATO, via the Policy Planning Unit into the Sec Gen's office.
We have latent contacts into other governments which we will activate as needs be as the clusters develop.

A look at the 'clusters' set up in U.S. and UK shows some prominent names.


bigger

Members of the Atlantic Council, which has a contract to censor Facebook posts , appear on several cluster lists. The UK core cluster also includes some prominent names like tax fraudster William Browder , the daft Atlantic Council shill Ben Nimmo and the neo-conservative Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum. One person of interest is Andrew Wood who handed the Steele 'dirty dossier' to Senator John McCain to smear Donald Trump over alleged relations with Russia. A separate subcluster of so-called journalists names Deborah Haynes, David Aaronovitch of the London Times, Neil Buckley from the FT and Jonathan Marcus of the BBC.


bigger - bigger

A ' Cluster Roundup ' (pdf) from July 2018 details its activities in at least 35 countries. Another file reveals (pdf) the local partnering institutions and individuals involved in the programs.

The Initiatives Guide to Countering Russian Information (pdf) is a rather funny read. It lists the downing of flight MH 17 by a Ukranian BUK missile, the fake chemical incident in Khan Sheikhoun and the Skripal Affair as examples for "Russian disinformation". But at least two of these events, Khan Sheikun via the UK run White Helmets and the Skripal affair, are evidently products of British intelligence disinformation operations.

The probably most interesting papers of the whole stash is the 'Project Plan' laid out at pages 7-40 of the 2018 budget application v2 (pdf). Under 'Sustainability' it notes:

The programme is proposed to run until at least March 2019, to ensure that the clusters established in each country have sufficient time to take root, find funding, and demonstrate their effectiveness. FCO funding for Phase 2 will enable the activities to be expanded in scale, reach and scope. As clusters have established themselves, they have begun to access local sources of funding. But this is a slow process and harder in some countries than others. HQ NATO PDD [Public Diplomacy Division] has proved a reliable source of funding for national clusters. The ATA [Atlantic Treaty Association] promises to be the same, giving access to other pots of money within NATO and member nations. Funding from institutional and national governmental sources in the US has been delayed by internal disputes within the US government, but w.e.f. March 2018 that deadlock seems to have been resolved and funding should now flow.

The programme has begun to create a critical mass of individuals from a cross society (think tanks, academia, politics, the media, government and the military) whose work is proving to be mutually reinforcing . Creating the network of networks has given each national group local coherence, credibility and reach, as well as good international access. Together, these conditions, plus the growing awareness within governments of the need for this work, should guarantee the continuity of the work under various auspices and in various forms.

The third part of the budget application (pdf) list the various activities, their output and outcome. The budget plan includes a section that describes 'Risks' to the initiative. These include hacking of the Initiatives IT as well as:

Adverse publicity generated by Russia or by supporters of Russia in target countries, or by political and interest groups affected by the work of the programme, aimed at discrediting the programme or its participants, or to create political embarrassment.

We hope that this piece contributes to such embarrassment.

Posted by b on November 24, 2018 at 11:24 AM | Permalink

Comments Perfidious ALbion!

When will we learn?

pretzelattack , Nov 24, 2018 11:44:00 AM | link

Coincidentally, or not, i just saw this article at the guardian; https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/nov/23/robert-mueller-profile-donald-trump-russia-investigation.
Anya , Nov 24, 2018 11:57:00 AM | link
The British government has been running a serious meddling into the US affairs:
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-11-23/mi6-scrambling-stop-trump-releasing-classified-docs-russia-probe

"The UK's Secret Intelligence Service, otherwise known as MI6, has been scrambling to prevent President Trump from publishing classified materials linked to the Russian election meddling investigation. ... much of the espionage performed on the Trump campaign was conducted on UK soil throughout 2016."

A Steele & Skrupal's anti-Russian / anti-Trump saga: https://spectator.org/big-dots-do-they-connect/

"Gregory R. Copley, editor and publisher of Defense & Foreign Affairs, posited that Sergei Skripal is the unnamed Russian intelligence source in the Steele dossier. ... In Skripal's pseudo-country-gentleman retirement, the ex-GRU-MI6 double agent was selling custom-made "Russian intelligence"; he had fabricated "material" that went into the Steele dossier..."

For M16 to expose this level of stupidity is stunning.

james , Nov 24, 2018 11:58:02 AM | link
thanks b....

this movement in the west by gov'ts to pay for generating lies, hate and propaganda towards russia is really sick... it is perfect for the military industrial complex corporations though and they seem to be calling the shots in the west, much more so then the voice of the ordinary person who is not interested in war.. i guess the idea is to get the ordinary people to think in terms of hating another country based on lies and that this would be a good thing... it is very sad what uk / usa leadership in the past century has come down to here.... i can only hope that info releases like this will hasten it's demise...

Ingrian , Nov 24, 2018 12:03:55 PM | link
Seems to me that this shows the primacy of the City of London, with its offshore network of illicit capital accumulation, within Britain. It is a state within a state or even a financial empire within a state, which, for deep historical reasons isn't subject to the same laws as the rest of the UK.

The UK's pathological obsession with Russia only makes sense to me as the city's insistence on continued 90s style appropriation of Russia's wealth

james , Nov 24, 2018 12:15:31 PM | link
@6 ingrian... things didn't go as planned for the expropriation of Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union.. it seems the west is still hurting from not being able to exploit Russia fully, as they'd intended...
et Al , Nov 24, 2018 12:20:09 PM | link

Let the Doxx wars begin! Sure, Anonymous is not Russian but it will surely now be targeted and smeared as such which would show that it has hit a nerve. British hypocrisy publicly called out. How this all unravels is one to watch. Extra large popcorn and soda for me.

I think we've all noticed the euro-asslantic press (and friends) on behalf of, willingly and in cooperation with the British intelligence et al 'calling out' numerous Russians as G(R)U/spies/whatever for a while now yet providing less than a shred of credible evidence.

It seems to me that the UK has far more to lose from doxxing than Russia does. The interference in sovereign allied states to 'manage' who the UK thinks they should appoint does not bode well for such relations.

Meanwhile in Brussels they are having their cake and eating it, i.e. bemoaning Europe's 'weak response' to Russian propaganda:

https://www.euractiv.com/section/global-europe/news/experts-lament-underfunding-of-eu-task-force-countering-russian-disinformation/

BTW, did anyone read Wired UK's current advertorial (nov 14) by Carl Miller for Brigade 77?

Forthestate , Nov 24, 2018 12:26:09 PM | link
"A separate subcluster of so-called journalists names Deborah Haynes, David Aaronovitch of the London Times and Neil Buckley from the FT." Subcluster. Love it. Just how crap do you have to be to fail to make it to membership of a full cluster of smear merchants?
worldblee , Nov 24, 2018 12:33:05 PM | link
Yet another example of the pot calling the kettle black when in fact the kettle may not be black at all; it's just the pot making up things. "These Russian criminals are using propaganda to show (truths) like the fact the DNC and Clinton campaigns colluded to prevent Sanders from being nominated, so we need to establish a clandestine propaganda network to establish that the Russians are running propaganda!"
psychohistorian , Nov 24, 2018 12:34:32 PM | link

....full cluster of smear merchants". May all the clusters of smear merchants be exposed to the public as the acolytes of evil they are.

plantman , Nov 24, 2018 12:36:48 PM | link
"In 2015 the government of Britain launched a secret operation to insert anti-Russia propaganda into the western media stream."

I doubt very seriously that the British launched this operation without the CIA's implicit and explicit support. This has all the markings of a John Brennan operation that has been launched stealthily to prevent anyone from knowing its real origins.

The Brits don't act alone, and a project of this magnitude did not begin without Langley's explicit approval.

Now check out the wording in the above document: "Funding from institutional and national governmental sources in the US has been delayed by internal disputes within the US government, but w.e.f. March 2018 that deadlock seems to have been resolved and funding should now flow." Think about that. What would have blocked the flow of USG support for this project?? Why, the allegations of collusion against Trump, of course. Naturally, the Republicans are not going to provide money to an operation that threatens to destroy the head of their own party. So, there has been no bipartisan agreement on funding for anti-Russia propaganda

BUT...the author assures us that the "deadlock seems to have been resolved and funding should now flow" Huh?? In other words, the fix is in. Mueller will pardon Trump on collusion charges but the propaganda campaign against Russia will continue...with the full support of both parties. I could be wrong, but that's how I see it...

m , Nov 24, 2018 12:40:07 PM | link
This mob was created in the autumn of 2015, according to their site. That would have been about the time -- probably just after -- the Russians intervened in Syria. The Brits had plans for an invasion of Syria in 2009, according to their fave Guardian fish wrap.

A lot of sour grapes with this so-called 'integrity initiative', IMO. BP was behind a lot of this, I would also think. When Assad pulled the plug on the pipeline through the Levant in 2009, the Brits hacked up a fur ball. It's gone downhill for them ever since. Couldn't happen to a nicer lot. If you can't invade or beat them with proxies, you can at least call them names.

Jackrabbit , Nov 24, 2018 12:40:58 PM | link
Anya

Pat Lang posted a report that strongly implies that charges of Russian influence on Trump are a deliberate falsification: THE CHIMERA OF DONALD TRUMP, RUSSIAN MONEY LAUNDERER :

If Trump was taking dirty money or engaged in criminal activity with Russians then he was doing it with Felix Sater, who was under the control of the FBI... And who was in charge of the FBI during all of the time that Sater was a signed up FBI snitch? You got it -- Robert Mueller (2001 thru 2013) ...

It seems quite possible that what is alleged as "Russian meddling" is actually CIA-MI6 meddling, including:

Steele dossier: To create suspicion in government, media, and later the public

Leaking of DNC emails to Wikileaks (but calling it a "hack"): To help with election of Trump and link Wikileaks (as agent) to Russian election meddling

Cambridge Analytica: To provide necessary reasoning for Trump's (certain) win of the electoral college.

Note: We later found that dozens of firms had undue access to Facebook data. Why did the campaign turn to a British firm instead of an American firm? Well, it had to be a British firm if MI6 was running the (supposed) Facebook targeting for CIA.

As I have said before, MAGA is a POLICY RESPONSE to the challenge from Russia and China. The election of a Republican faux populist was necessary and Trump, despite his many flaws, was the best candidate for the job.
Cyril , Nov 24, 2018 1:10:13 PM | link
The Integrity Initiative's goal is to defend democracy against the truth about Russia. All this is so Orwellian. When will we get the Ministry of Love?
Russ , Nov 24, 2018 1:16:21 PM | link
Posted by: james | Nov 24, 2018 12:15:31 PM | 7

"things didn't go as planned for the expropriation of russia after the fall of the soviet union.. it seems the west is still hurting from not being able to exploit russia fully, as they'd intended..."

They shot at an elephant and failed to kill it. So yes, out of the combo of frustration, resentment, and fear they hate the resurgent Russia and prefer Cold War II, and if necessary WWIII, to peaceful co-existence. Of course the usual corporate imperative (in this case weapons profiteering) reinforces the mass psychological pathology among the elites.

The ironic thing is that Putin doesn't prefer to challenge the neoliberal globalist "order" at all, but would happily see Russia take a prominent place within it. It's the US and its UK poodle who are insisting on confrontation.

GeorgeV , Nov 24, 2018 1:34:08 PM | link
Great article! It reminded me of what I read in George Orwell's novella "1984." He summed it all up brilliantly in nine words: "War is Peace"; "Freedom is Slavery"; "Ignorance is Strength." The three pillars of political power.
Sasha , Nov 24, 2018 1:38:39 PM | link
Since UK has always blocked the "European Intelligence" initiative, on the basis of his pertenence to the "Five Eyes", and as UK is leaving the European Union, where it has always been the Troyan Horse of the US, one would think that all these people belonging to the so called "clusters" should register themselves as "foreign agents" working for UK government...and in this context, new empowerished sovereign governemts into the EU should consider the possibility expelling these traitors as spies of the UK....

http://www.voltairenet.org/article204051.html

Some of the "clusters" unmasked here....some, like Ignacio Torreblanca in Spain, are related to the CFR....

https://www.rt.com/news/444737-uk-funded-campaign-russia-leaks/

Zanon , Nov 24, 2018 2:12:45 PM | link
Country list of agents of influence according to the leak:
Zanon , Nov 24, 2018 2:13:28 PM | link
cresty , Nov 24, 2018 2:18:30 PM | link
Thank you very much for going through all the files, b. Will share far and wide

[Nov 24, 2018] Now we know created MH17 smear campaign, who financial Steele dossier and created Skripal affair ;-)

Highly recommended!
Nov 24, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

Perfidious Albion: or yet another example of the pot calling the kettle black when in fact the kettle may not be black at all; it's just the pot making up things

In 2015 the government of Britain launched a secret operation to insert anti-Russia propaganda into the western media stream.

We have already seen many consequences of this and similar programs which are designed to smear anyone who does not follow the anti-Russian government lines. The 'Russian collusion' smear campaign against Donald Trump based on the Steele dossier was also a largely British operation but seems to be part of a different project.

The ' Integrity Initiative ' builds 'cluster' or contact groups of trusted journalists, military personal, academics and lobbyists within foreign countries. These people get alerts via social media to take action when the British center perceives a need.

[Nov 24, 2018] When you are paid a lot of money to come up with plots psyops, you tend to come up with plots for psyops . The word entrapment comes to mind. Probably self-serving also.

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... When you are paid a lot of money to come up with plots "psyops", you tend to come up with plots for "psyops". The word "entrapment" comes to mind. Probably "self-serving" also. ..."
"... Anti-Russian is just a code word for Globalist, Internationalist. ..."
"... This is such BS. Since when does Russia have the resources to pull all this off? They have such a complex program that they need the coordinated efforts of all the resources of the WEST? This is nuts. ..."
Nov 24, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

HowdyDoody , 7 hours ago link

One of the documents lists a series of propaganda weapons to be used against Russia. One is use of the church as a weapon. That has already been started in Ukraine with Poroshenko buying off regligious leader to split Ukraine Orthodoxy from Russian Orthodoxy. It also explicitly states that the Skripal incident is a 'Dirty Trick' against Russia.

activisor , 10 hours ago link

The British political system is on the verge of collapse. BREXIT has finally demonstrated that the Government/ Opposition parties are clearly aligned against the interests of the people. The EU is nothing more than an arm of the Globalist agenda of world domination.

The US has shown its true colours - sanctioning every country that stands for independent sovereignty is not a good foreign policy, and is destined to turn the tide of public opinion firmly against global hegemony, endless wars, and wealth inequity.

The old Empire is in its death throes. A new paradigm awaits which will exclude all those who have exploited the many, in order to sit at the top of the pyramid. They cannot escape Karma.

smacker , 11 hours ago link

The Western world needs to come to terms with the collapse of the Soviet Union and its aftermath. Today, Russia is led by Putin and he obviously has objectives as any national leader has.

Western "leaders" need to decide whether Putin:

  1. Is trying to create Soviet Union 2.0, to have a 2nd attempt at ruling the world thru communism and to do this by holding the world to ransom over oil/gas supplies. OR
  2. Is wanting Russia to become a member of the family of nations and of a multi-polar world to improve the lives of Russian people, but is being blocked at every twist and turn by manufactured events like Russia-gate and the Skripal affair and now this latest revelation of anti-Russian propaganda campaigns being coordinated and run out of London.

Both of the above cannot be true because there are too many contradictions. Which is it??

Lokiban , 13 hours ago link

Yes because imagine that that we lived in 1940 without any means to inform ourselves and that media was still in control over the information that reaches us. We would already be in a fullblown war with Russia because of it but now with the Internet and information going around freely only a whimpy 10% of we the people stand behind their desperately wanted war. Imagine that, an informed sheople.
Can't have that, they cannot do their usual stuff anymore.... good riddance.

LOL123 , 14 hours ago link

"250,000 from the US State Department , the documents allege."....... Interesting.

"During the third Democratic debate on Saturday night, Hillary Clinton called for a "Manhattan-like project" to break encrypted terrorist communications. The project would "bring the government and the tech communities together" to find a way to give law enforcement access to encrypted messages, she said. It's something that some politicians and intelligence officials have wanted for awhile,"........

***wasn't the Manhatten project a secret venture?????? Hummmmm"

Hillary Clinton has all of our encryption keys, including the FBI's . "Encryption keys" is a general reference to several encryption functions hijacked by Hillary and her surrogate ENTRUST. They include hash functions (used to indicate whether the contents have been altered in transit), PKI public/private key infrastructure, SSL (secure socket layer), TLS (transport layer security), the Dual_EC_DRBG NSA algorithm and certificate authorities.

The convoluted structure managed by the "Federal Common Policy" group has ceded to companies like ENTRUST INC the ability to sublicense their authority to third parties who in turn manage entire other networks in a Gordian knot of relationships clearly designed to fool the public to hide their devilish criminality. All roads lead back to Hillary and the Rose Law Firm."- patriots4truth

artistant , 14 hours ago link

But, but some people keep getting away with it.

hooligan2009 , 15 hours ago link

When you are paid a lot of money to come up with plots "psyops", you tend to come up with plots for "psyops". The word "entrapment" comes to mind. Probably "self-serving" also.

larryriedel , 15 hours ago link

FBI/Anonymous can use this story to support a narrative that social media bots posting memes is a problem for everybody, and it's not a partisan issue. The idea is that fake news and unrestricted social media are inherently dangerous, and both the West and Russia are exploiting that, so governments need to agree to restrict the ability to use those platforms for political speech, especially without using True Names.

Baron Samedi , 15 hours ago link

Oilygawkies in the UK and USSA seem to be letting their spooks have a good-humored (rating here on the absurd transparency of these ops) contest to see who can come up with the most surreal propaganda psy-ops.

But they probably also serve as LHO distractions from something genuinely sleazy.

headless blogger , 15 hours ago link

Anti-Russian is just a code word for Globalist, Internationalist. Anything that is remotely like Nationalism is the true enemy of these Globalist/Internationalists, which is what the Top-Ape Bolshevik promoted: see Vladimir Lenin and his quotes on how he believed fully in "internationalism" for a world without borders. Ironic how they Love the butchers of the Soviet Union but hate Russia. It is ALL ABOUT IDEOLOGY to these people and "the means justify the ends".

They are frightening people.

Push , 15 hours ago link

Basically, if one acquires factual information from an internet source, which leads to overturning the propaganda to which we're all subjected, then it MUST have come from Putin. This is the direction they're headed. Anyone speaking out against the official story is obviously a Russian spy.

Xena fobe , 15 hours ago link

"Instutute for Statecraft"? Seriously?

OverTheHedge , 11 hours ago link

"Substitute for Statecraft"

Fify ;-)

koan , 16 hours ago link

The UK is waging psyop against their own people using the Russians as an excuse to further oppress the population, especially the white population.

FIFY.

East Indian , 16 hours ago link

Never thought Putin would be the symbol of free speech! The totalitarian EU and Deep State can come out of closet and denounce their predecessors.

brewing_it , 17 hours ago link

If you call ******** on the whole Russia cyberscare, you will be labeled a puppet of Putin.

The establishment is afraid of free thinking men and women that can call ******** when they see and hear it.

AriusArmenian , 17 hours ago link

Better to call it the Anti-Integrity Initiative. UK cretins up to their usual dirty tricks - let them choke on their poison. The judgement of history will eventually catch up with them.

Mike Rotsch , 17 hours ago link

A good 'ole economic collapse will give western countries a chance to purge their crazy leaders before they involve us all in a thermonuclear war. Short everything with your entire accounts.

RealistDuJour , 17 hours ago link

This is such BS. Since when does Russia have the resources to pull all this off? They have such a complex program that they need the coordinated efforts of all the resources of the WEST? This is nuts.

Isn't it just as likely someone in the WEST planted this cache, intending Anonymous to find it?

HRClinton , 18 hours ago link

When two sides fight - especially white v white - the hidden 3rd party (((instigator))) wins.

How dumb and mallaleable can these goys be? Pretty dumb and mallaleable, it seems.

J S Bach , 18 hours ago link

Any propaganda coming from the UK or US is strictly zionist. EVERYTHING they put out is to the benefit of Israel and the "lobby". Russia isn't perfect, but if they're an enemy of the latter, then they should NOT be considered a foe to all thinking and conscientious people.

OverTheHedge , 11 hours ago link

Yesterday, the BBC had a thing on Thai workers in Israel, and how they keep dying of accidents, their general level of slavery etc. Very odd to have a negative Israel story, so I wonder who upset whom, and what the ongoing status will be.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-middle-east-46311922/thai-labourers-in-israel-tell-of-harrowing-conditions

Thai labourers in Israel tell of harrowing conditions

A year-long BBC investigation has discovered widespread abuse of Thai nationals living and working in Israel - under a scheme organized by the two governments.

Many are subjected to unsafe working practices and squalid, unsanitary living conditions. Some are overworked, others underpaid and there are dozens of unexplained deaths.

Herdee , 18 hours ago link

England and the U.S. don't like their very poor and rotten social conditions put out for the public to see. Both countries have severely deteriorating problems on their streets because of bankrupt governments printing money for foreign wars.

Quadruple_Rainbow , 18 hours ago link

More of the same fraudulent duality while alleged so called but not money etc continues to flow (everything is criminal) and the cesspool of a hierarchy pretends it's business as usual.

This isn't about maintaining balance in a lie this is about disclosing the truth and agendas (Agenda 21 now Agenda 2030 = The New Age Religion is Never Going To Be Saturnism). The layers of the hierarchy are a lie so unless the alleged so called leaders of those layers are publicly providing testimony and confession then everything that is being spoon fed to the pablum puking public through all sources is a lie.

Herdee , 18 hours ago link

They're afraid of stories like this: https://www.rt.com/news/444737-uk-funded-campaign-russia-leaks/

HRClinton , 17 hours ago link

Operating on a budget of £1.9 million (US$2.4 million), the secretive Integrity Initiative consists of "clusters" of (((local politicians, journalists, military personnel, scientists and academics))).

The (((team))) is dedicated to searching for and publishing "evidence" of Russian interference in European affairs, while themselves influencing leadership behind the scenes, the documents claim.

gatorengineer , 18 hours ago link

Do Neocons get time and half for Overtime, they sure have been putting in a bunch lately.

[Nov 22, 2018] Facing Up to the Gradual Demise of Jewish Political Power

Highly recommended!
Nov 22, 2018 | www.unz.com

geokat62 , says: November 21, 2018 at 3:27 am GMT

@jilles dykstra

How long jews can maintain their political power, not just in the USA, but in the whole west, I have no idea, there is not much that points to an important change soon.

This, of course, is the $64,000 question. Rather than us Dumb Goyim speculating about it, why not listen to what a political insider had to say about this issue back in 2001?

His name is Dr. Stephen Steinlight. And although Ron Unz has characterized him as "some totally obscure Jewish activist" he was was for more than five years Director of National Affairs (domestic policy) at the American Jewish Committee. If that doesn't qualify him as an "insider," I don't know what does.

Excerpts from The Jewish Stake in America's Changing Demography: Reconsidering a Misguided Immigration Policy :

Facing Up to the Gradual Demise of Jewish Political Power

Not that it is the case that our disproportionate political power (pound for pound the greatest of any ethnic/cultural group in America) will erode all at once, or even quickly. We will be able to hang on to it for perhaps a decade or two longer. Unless and until the triumph of campaign finance reform is complete , an extremely unlikely scenario, the great material wealth of the Jewish community will continue to give it significant advantages. We will continue to court and be courted by key figures in Congress. That power is exerted within the political system from the local to national levels through soft money, and especially the provision of out-of-state funds to candidates sympathetic to Israel , a high wall of church/state separation, and social liberalism combined with selective conservatism on criminal justice and welfare issues.

Jewish voter participation also remains legendary; it is among the highest in the nation. Incredible as it sounds, in the recent presidential election more Jews voted in Los Angeles than Latinos. But should the naturalization of resident aliens begin to move more quickly in the next few years, a virtual certainty -- and it should -- then it is only a matter of time before the electoral power of Latinos, as well as that of others, overwhelms us.

All of this notwithstanding, in the short term, a number of factors will continue to play into our hands, even amid the unprecedented wave of continuous immigration. The very scale of the current immigration and its great diversity paradoxically constitutes at least a temporary political asset. While we remain comparatively coherent as a voting bloc, the new mostly non-European immigrants are fractured into a great many distinct, often competing groups, many with no love for each other. This is also true of the many new immigrants from rival sides in the ongoing Balkan wars, as it is for the growing south Asian population from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. They have miles and miles to go before they overcome historical hatreds, put aside current enmities and forgive recent enormities, especially Pakistani brutality in the nascent Bangladesh. Queens is no melting pot!

For perhaps another generation, an optimistic forecast, the Jewish community is thus in a position where it will be able to divide and conquer and enter into selective coalitions that support our agendas. But the day will surely come when an effective Asian-American alliance will actually bring Chinese Americans, Japanese Americans, Koreans, Vietnamese, and the rest closer together. And the enormously complex and as yet significantly divided Latinos will also eventually achieve a more effective political federation. The fact is that the term "Asian American" has only recently come into common parlance among younger Asians (it is still rejected by older folks), while "Latinos" or "Hispanics" often do not think of themselves as part of a multinational ethnic bloc but primarily as Mexicans, Cubans, or Puerto Ricans.

Even with these caveats, an era of astoundingly disproportionate Jewish legislative representation may already have peaked. It is unlikely we will ever see many more U.S. Senates with 10 Jewish members. And although had Al Gore been allowed by the Supreme Court to assume office, a Jew would have been one heartbeat away from the presidency, it may be we'll never get that close again. With the changes in view, how long do we actually believe that nearly 80 percent of the entire foreign aid budget of the United States will go to Israel?

https://cis.org/Report/Jewish-Stake-Americas-Changing-Demography

[Nov 22, 2018] Facing Up to the Gradual Demise of Zionist Political Power

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... What struck me in one of his articles is how he sees the holocaust story as essential to Zionist power in the USA. ..."
Nov 21, 2018 | www.unz.com

geokat62 , says: November 21, 2018 at 3:27 am GMT

@jilles dykstra

How long jews can maintain their political power, not just in the USA, but in the whole west, I have no idea, there is not much that points to an important change soon.

This, of course, is the $64,000 question. Rather than us Dumb Goyim speculating about it, why not listen to what a political insider had to say about this issue back in 2001?

His name is Dr. Stephen Steinlight. And although Ron Unz has characterized him as "some totally obscure Zionist activist" he was was for more than five years Director of National Affairs (domestic policy) at the American Zionist Committee. If that doesn't qualify him as an "insider," I don't know what does.

Excerpts from The Zionist Stake in America's Changing Demography: Reconsidering a Misguided Immigration Policy :

Facing Up to the Gradual Demise of Zionist Political Power

Not that it is the case that our disproportionate political power (pound for pound the greatest of any ethnic/cultural group in America) will erode all at once, or even quickly. We will be able to hang on to it for perhaps a decade or two longer. Unless and until the triumph of campaign finance reform is complete , an extremely unlikely scenario, the great material wealth of the Zionist community will continue to give it significant advantages. We will continue to court and be courted by key figures in Congress. That power is exerted within the political system from the local to national levels through soft money, and especially the provision of out-of-state funds to candidates sympathetic to Israel , a high wall of church/state separation, and social liberalism combined with selective conservatism on criminal justice and welfare issues.

Zionist voter participation also remains legendary; it is among the highest in the nation. Incredible as it sounds, in the recent presidential election more Jews voted in Los Angeles than Latinos. But should the naturalization of resident aliens begin to move more quickly in the next few years, a virtual certainty -- and it should -- then it is only a matter of time before the electoral power of Latinos, as well as that of others, overwhelms us.

All of this notwithstanding, in the short term, a number of factors will continue to play into our hands, even amid the unprecedented wave of continuous immigration. The very scale of the current immigration and its great diversity paradoxically constitutes at least a temporary political asset. While we remain comparatively coherent as a voting bloc, the new mostly non-European immigrants are fractured into a great many distinct, often competing groups, many with no love for each other. This is also true of the many new immigrants from rival sides in the ongoing Balkan wars, as it is for the growing south Asian population from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. They have miles and miles to go before they overcome historical hatreds, put aside current enmities and forgive recent enormities, especially Pakistani brutality in the nascent Bangladesh. Queens is no melting pot!

For perhaps another generation, an optimistic forecast, the Zionist community is thus in a position where it will be able to divide and conquer and enter into selective coalitions that support our agendas. But the day will surely come when an effective Asian-American alliance will actually bring Chinese Americans, Japanese Americans, Koreans, Vietnamese, and the rest closer together. And the enormously complex and as yet significantly divided Latinos will also eventually achieve a more effective political federation. The fact is that the term "Asian American" has only recently come into common parlance among younger Asians (it is still rejected by older folks), while "Latinos" or "Hispanics" often do not think of themselves as part of a multinational ethnic bloc but primarily as Mexicans, Cubans, or Puerto Ricans.

Even with these caveats, an era of astoundingly disproportionate Zionist legislative representation may already have peaked. It is unlikely we will ever see many more U.S. Senates with 10 Zionist members. And although had Al Gore been allowed by the Supreme Court to assume office, a Jew would have been one heartbeat away from the presidency, it may be we'll never get that close again. With the changes in view, how long do we actually believe that nearly 80 percent of the entire foreign aid budget of the United States will go to Israel?

https://cis.org/Report/ Zionist-Stake-Americas-Changing-Demography

jilles dykstra , says: November 21, 2018 at 10:49 am GMT

@geokat62

If Steinlight was obscure or not, I do not know. What struck me in one of his articles is how he sees the holocaust story as essential to Zionist power in the USA.

Also in that article he wondered if at some point in time Jews might be driven out of the USA, 'but, there is always the life boat Israel'. That Israel will collapse the minute Zionist power in the USA [eventually] ends, he seems unable to see this. About your quote, it seems to have been written before it became clear to the world that western power is diminishing.

So even if Zionist power over the West remains, Zionist power in the world is diminishing too. NATO, EU, Pentagon, neocons, whatever, may still want war with Russia, my idea is that on the other hand that more and more people see this intention, and are absolutely against.

While western influence is receding, Assad still is there, Russia has bases in Syria, Erdogan, on what side is he ?; and so on and so forth.

The battle cry 'no more war for Israel' exists for a long time in the USA. And I interpret discussions on this side of the Atlantic about increasing anti-Semitism as the acknowledgement of the fact that more and more people on this side begin to criticize Zionists, especially with regard to Palestinians.

[Nov 14, 2018] Nationalism vs partiotism

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Look, mostly this whole patriotism/nationalism word game is just sadly funny. You are a patriot if you think like me. You are a nationalist if you don't. Patriotism is good, nationalism is bad. If I am a patriot, I am good, if you are a nationalist, you must be bad. ..."
Nov 14, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

Degringolade , 13 hours ago

... Look, mostly this whole patriotism/nationalism word game is just sadly funny. You are a patriot if you think like me. You are a nationalist if you don't. Patriotism is good, nationalism is bad. If I am a patriot, I am good, if you are a nationalist, you must be bad.

I think that the wisdom of Humpty Dumpty when speaking to Alice fits here:

"When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less."

"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."

"The question is which is to be master -- that's all."

[Nov 12, 2018] The Best Way To Honor War Veterans Is To Stop Creating Them by Caitlin Johnstone

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Veterans Day is not a holiday to honor the men and women who have dutifully protected their country. The youngest Americans who arguably defended their nation from a real threat to its shores are in their nineties, and soon there won't be any of them left. ..."
"... Every single person who has served in the US military since the end of the second World War has protected nothing other than the agendas of global hegemony, resource control and war profiteering. They have not been fighting and dying for freedom and democracy, they have been fighting and dying for imperialism, Raytheon profit margins, and crude oil. ..."
"... Veterans Day, like so very, very much in American culture, is a propaganda construct designed to lubricate the funneling of human lives into the chamber of a gigantic gun. It glorifies evil, stupid, meaningless acts of mass murder to ensure that there will always be recruits who are willing to continue perpetrating it, and to ensure that the US public doesn't wake up to the fact that its government's insanely bloated military budget is being used to unleash unspeakable horrors upon the earth. ..."
"... Your rulers have never feared the Koreans, the Vietnamese, the Iraqis, the terrorists, the Iranians, the Chinese or the Russians. They fear you. They fear the American public suddenly waking up to the evil things that are being done in your name and using your vast numbers to shrug off the existing power structures without firing a shot, as easily as removing a heavy coat on a warm day. If enough of you loudly withdraw your consent for their insatiable warmongering, that fear will be enough to keep them in check. ..."
Nov 12, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via Medium.com,

The US will be celebrating Veterans Day, and many a striped flag shall be waved. The social currency of esteem will be used to elevate those who have served in the US military, thereby ensuring future generations of recruits to be thrown into the gears of the globe-spanning war machine

Veterans Day is not a holiday to honor the men and women who have dutifully protected their country. The youngest Americans who arguably defended their nation from a real threat to its shores are in their nineties, and soon there won't be any of them left.

Every single person who has served in the US military since the end of the second World War has protected nothing other than the agendas of global hegemony, resource control and war profiteering. They have not been fighting and dying for freedom and democracy, they have been fighting and dying for imperialism, Raytheon profit margins, and crude oil.

I just said something you're not supposed to say. People have dedicated many years of their lives to the service of the US military; they've given their limbs to it, they've suffered horrific brain damage for it, they've given their very lives to it. Families have been ripped apart by the violence that has been inflicted upon members of the US Armed Forces; you're not supposed to let them hear you say that their loved one was destroyed because some sociopathic nerds somewhere in Washington decided that it would give America an advantage over potential economic rivals to control a particular stretch of Middle Eastern dirt. But it is true, and if we don't start acknowledging that truth lives are going to keep getting thrown into the gears of the machine for the power and profit of a few depraved oligarchs. So I'm going to keep saying it.

Last week I saw the hashtag #SaluteToService trending on Twitter. Apparently the NFL had a deal going where every time someone tweeted that hashtag they'd throw a few bucks at some veteran's charity. Which sounds sweet, until you consider three things:

1. The NFL's ten wealthiest team owners are worth a combined $61 billion .

2. The NFL has taken millions of dollars from the Pentagon for displays of patriotism on the field, including for the policy of bringing all players out for the national anthem every game starting in 2009 (which led to Colin Kaepernick's demonstrations and the obscene backlash against him).

3. VETERANS SHOULD NOT HAVE TO RELY ON FUCKING CHARITY.

Seriously, how is "charity for veterans" a thing, and how are people not extremely weirded out by it? How is it that you can go out and get your limbs blown off for slave wages after watching your friends die and innocent civilians perish, come home, and have to rely on charity to get by? How is it that you can risk life and limb killing and suffering irreparable psychological trauma for some plutocrat's agendas, plunge into poverty when you come home, and then see the same plutocrat labeled a "philanthropist" because he threw a few tax-deductible dollars at a charity that gave you a decent prosthetic leg?

Taking care of veterans should be factored into the budget of every act of military aggression . If a government can't make sure its veterans are housed, healthy and happy in a dignified way for the rest of their lives, it has no business marching human beings into harm's way. The fact that you see veterans on the street of any large US city and people who fought in wars having to beg "charities" for a quality mechanical wheelchair shows you just how much of a pathetic joke this Veterans Day song and dance has always been.

They'll send you to mainline violence and trauma into your mind and body for the power and profit of the oligarchic rulers of the US-centralized empire, but it's okay because everyone gets a long weekend where they're told to thank you for your service. Bullshit.

Veterans Day, like so very, very much in American culture, is a propaganda construct designed to lubricate the funneling of human lives into the chamber of a gigantic gun. It glorifies evil, stupid, meaningless acts of mass murder to ensure that there will always be recruits who are willing to continue perpetrating it, and to ensure that the US public doesn't wake up to the fact that its government's insanely bloated military budget is being used to unleash unspeakable horrors upon the earth.

The only way to honor veterans, really, truly honor them, is to help end war and make sure no more lives are put into a position where they are on the giving or receiving end of evil, stupid, meaningless violence. The way to do that is to publicly, loudly and repeatedly make it clear that you do not consent to the global terrorism being perpetrated in your name. These bastards work so hard conducting propaganda to manufacture your consent for endless warmongering because they need that consent . So don't give it to them.

Your rulers have never feared the Koreans, the Vietnamese, the Iraqis, the terrorists, the Iranians, the Chinese or the Russians. They fear you. They fear the American public suddenly waking up to the evil things that are being done in your name and using your vast numbers to shrug off the existing power structures without firing a shot, as easily as removing a heavy coat on a warm day. If enough of you loudly withdraw your consent for their insatiable warmongering, that fear will be enough to keep them in check.

This Veterans Day, don't honor those who have served by giving reverence and legitimacy to a war machine which is exclusively used for inflicting great evil. Honor them by disassembling that machine.

* * *

Thanks for reading! The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for my website , which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My articles are entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook , following my antics on Twitter , checking out my podcast , throwing some money into my hat on Patreon or Paypal , buying my new book Rogue Nation: Psychonautical Adventures With Caitlin Johnstone , or my previous book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers .

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[Nov 12, 2018] Protecting Americans from foreign influence, smells with COINTELPRO. Structural witch-hunt effect like during the McCarthy era is designed to supress decent to neoliberal oligarcy by Andre Damon and Joseph Kishore

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... There is something very, very COINTELPRO about the idea of "protecting" Americans from "foreign influence", and that should give liberals the heebie-jeebies. There is also an ongoing structural witch-hunt effect, unchanged from the McCarthy era, when internet firm heads are called to testify before congress. ..."
"... Bottom line - the Russians may have had no more effect on the election than the loose change in your house has on your salary. ..."
"... "Even more extreme measures are being planned and implemented, motivated by the basic principle that the greater the lie, the more aggressive the methods required to enforce it." ..."
"... "While the extortionate salaries commanded by the BBC's biggest stars are justified by "market rates," this underlying premise is never challenged by the women who are leading the gender pay fight. They don't oppose the capitalist market; they just want a bigger slice of the pie, with the working class footing the bill via contributions to the Ł4 billion annual license fee." - BBC gender pay row: Selective outrage of wealthy women ..."
"... The greater the inequality, the greater the lie to enforce it. ..."
"... While WSWS was uniquely correct in exposing Bush, Powell, and the ruling-elite structure of the U.S. as using deceit and lies to start an 'aggressive war' (the ultimate war crime), your description of this corrupt system of global power headquartered in the U.S. did not fully diagnose and expose it for what it was; a disguised global capitalist EMPIRE. ..."
"... Your description could have more effectively warned American citizen/'subjects' and the world that "Rather, it is a war of colonial (Empire) conquest, driven by a series of economic and geo-political aims that center on the seizure of Iraq's oil resources and the assertion of US global (Empire, not merely) hegemony." ..."
"... In any case, Andre and Joseph, thanks for reminding readers of this dark and deceitful moment of U.S. history in starting another 'aggressive war' almost two decades ago --- which wars will unfortunately continue until Americans themselves expose and ignite an essential Second America "Revolution Against Empire" [Justin duRivage] ..."
"... The Anglo-American-Israelite Empire is globally entrenched and enjoying expansion since 1945 ..."
"... I must admit myself I am disturbed by the sheer volume of unchallenged propaganda regarding these claims in the past few months. The media talking heads and various analysts don't ever really say what the implication of what their claims really mean-war. We are in an age of new mccarthyism ..."
"... What was amazing about Powell's charade was that even if Old Bad Ass as I call Saddam had had some Wombars of Mass Destruction they posed no danger whatsoever! It was obvious 9/11 had put the masses into a tizzy and they would have attacked Mars if told to! ..."
"... Yes, the "New Pearl Harbour" called for and carried out by the authors of the "Project for a New American Century" worked as planned. ..."
"... Quite right. My late father was a structural design engineer, specializing in large steel structures like the WTC and he called it as soon as the buildings imploded! ..."
"... Yes, Michael, the 'media/propaganda-sector' of this seven-sectored Disguised Global Capitalist EMPIRE is currently the most effective sector --- but the other six; corporate, financial, militarist, extra-legal, CFR 'Plot-Tanks', and of course the dual-party Vichy-political facade of the 'rougher-talking' neocon 'R' Vichy Party and the 'smoother-lying' neoliberal-con 'D' Vichy Party are all helping to keep the Empire sound, hidden, and empowered over the only American citizen/'subjects' who could possibly form a "Political Revolution against Empire" ..."
"... While it is true that D.C. is run by delusional psychotics that does not mean they are irrational as far as their greed is concerned. ..."
"... As R. Luxemburg pleaded that WWI was not "our" war but war of bunch of aristocrats wanting to divide colonies and bunch of bankers wanted their bad speculative loans repaid, using working class flesh and blood. ..."
Feb 20, 2018 | www.wsws.org

Wnt1 • a month ago

This is one of the most sensible editorials on the Russia issue I've seen, and it is true, insofar as it goes. There is something very, very COINTELPRO about the idea of "protecting" Americans from "foreign influence", and that should give liberals the heebie-jeebies. There is also an ongoing structural witch-hunt effect, unchanged from the McCarthy era, when internet firm heads are called to testify before congress.

That said, I wouldn't dismiss the effect of the Russian involvement, or the relevance of the charges against Trump and his people. Bear in mind that the Party of McCarthy has been all about spying on its opponents from the days of HUAC. Nixon's break-in at the Watergate Hotel didn't singlehandedly decide the election ... but who would believe that was the only underhanded tactic he used? Republicans believe that if you're not cheating, you're not trying -- holding out for any ethical standard makes you inherently disloyal and unworthy of support. Something like Kavanaugh's involvement in the hacking of Democrats in 2003 ( http://www.foxnews.com/poli... ) should be no surprise; neither should the "Guccifer" hack that put the Democrats' data in the hands of Wikileaks. (Their subsequent attempts to demand Wikileaks not publish such a newsworthy leak, of course, is the sort of thing that undermines their position with me!)

Bottom line - the Russians may have had no more effect on the election than the loose change in your house has on your salary.

But if you go back in your house after the Republicans were minding it, don't be surprised if together with the missing couch change you notice some missing silverware, your kitchen tap has been sawed off, and the laptop is short half its RAM. By the time you've catalogued everything missing, the stolen brass part from the gas main downstairs might have blown you to smithereens.

Greg • 8 months ago
"Even more extreme measures are being planned and implemented, motivated by the basic principle that the greater the lie, the more aggressive the methods required to enforce it."

There are many reasons the bourgeoisie is unfit to rule. Each one of them is bound up with the lies required to enforce its rule. The greater its unfitness, "the greater the lie, the more aggressive the methods required to enforce it.

"While the extortionate salaries commanded by the BBC's biggest stars are justified by "market rates," this underlying premise is never challenged by the women who are leading the gender pay fight. They don't oppose the capitalist market; they just want a bigger slice of the pie, with the working class footing the bill via contributions to the Ł4 billion annual license fee." - BBC gender pay row: Selective outrage of wealthy women

The greater the inequality, the greater the lie to enforce it.

Alan MacDonald • 8 months ago
While WSWS was uniquely correct in exposing Bush, Powell, and the ruling-elite structure of the U.S. as using deceit and lies to start an 'aggressive war' (the ultimate war crime), your description of this corrupt system of global power headquartered in the U.S. did not fully diagnose and expose it for what it was; a disguised global capitalist EMPIRE.

Your description could have more effectively warned American citizen/'subjects' and the world that "Rather, it is a war of colonial (Empire) conquest, driven by a series of economic and geo-political aims that center on the seizure of Iraq's oil resources and the assertion of US global (Empire, not merely) hegemony."

In any case, Andre and Joseph, thanks for reminding readers of this dark and deceitful moment of U.S. history in starting another 'aggressive war' almost two decades ago --- which wars will unfortunately continue until Americans themselves expose and ignite an essential Second America "Revolution Against Empire" [Justin duRivage]

Ambricourt -> Alan MacDonald • 8 months ago
The Anglo-American-Israelite Empire is globally entrenched and enjoying expansion since 1945. It is time radical critiques of its values, power and methods should call it by its right name.
Bob Marley • 8 months ago
I must admit myself I am disturbed by the sheer volume of unchallenged propaganda regarding these claims in the past few months. The media talking heads and various analysts don't ever really say what the implication of what their claims really mean-war. We are in an age of new mccarthyism
michaelroloff • 8 months ago
What was amazing about Powell's charade was that even if Old Bad Ass as I call Saddam had had some Wombars of Mass Destruction they posed no danger whatsoever! It was obvious 9/11 had put the masses into a tizzy and they would have attacked Mars if told to!
Terry Lawrence -> michaelroloff • 8 months ago
Yes, the "New Pearl Harbour" called for and carried out by the authors of the "Project for a New American Century" worked as planned.
michaelroloff -> Terry Lawrence • 8 months ago
don't tell me that you think that the blow-back that was 9/11 is a conspiracy - if you do, be so kind as to mention specific conspirators!
Terry Lawrence -> michaelroloff • 8 months ago
Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Rice, are a few obvious ones, . . . and that famous CIA asset, Bin Laden, to recruit the expendable hijackers.
michaelroloff -> Terry Lawrence • 8 months ago
just because it was a convenient act for them to do what they wanted in conquering iraq is not reason that idiots like that are capable of planning and concealing the numerous co-conspirators to arrange something like 9..11. imperialism can always count on blowback to have occasion for further crimes. there is the slim chance that they knew what was being planned and that they let it happen - except that none of those folks is evil enough for that. not even dick cheney. what i love about all conspiracy theories of the american kind is that they never nam or show an actual conspirator conspiring. look at one of the truly great failed conspiracy, that of the 20th july 1944 in germany that was meant to kill hitler and how many people were arrested in no time at all and executed..
Terry Lawrence michaelroloff • 8 months ago
A "conspiracy" is just any two or more people getting together to discuss something affecting one or more other people without them being party to the discussion. Like a surprise birthday party, for instance. Obviously the "official" version of the 9/11 events is also a "conspiracy theory" that 19 mostly Saudi Arabians led by a guy hiding in a cave in Afghanistan conspired to carry out co-ordinated attacks that just happened to coincide with most of the USAF being conveniently off in Alaska and northern Canada on an exercise that day, and another "coinciding exercise" simulating a multiple hijacking being carried out in the northeast US thereby confusing the Air Traffic Controllers as to whether the hijackings were "real world or exercise", significantly delaying the response, among other things.

Do you really believe that WTC 7, a steel frame building which was not adjacent to WTC 1 & 2, and was NOT hit by any airplanes, coincidentally collapsed due to low temperature paper and furniture office fires? Something that has never happened before or since? Or that such low temperature fires would cause the massive heavily reinforced concrete central core/elevator shaft to collapse first, pulling the rest of the building inward onto it in classic controlled demolition technique?

It is getting more difficult to find the videos showing that now as Google, as with WSWS articles, is pushing them off the front pages of results, while Snopes has put out a some very misleading reports that set up false "straw man" claims and then "disprove" them. Even the "disproofs" are false.

For instance, a Snopes report on the WTC 7 collapse states: "relied heavily on discredited claims, none of which were new, including:

Jet fuel cannot melt steel beams (This claim is misleading, as steel beams do to not need to melt completely to be compromised structurally).

A sprinkler system would have prevented temperatures from rising high enough to cause to cause structural damage. (This claim ignores the fact that a crash from a 767 jet would likely destroy such a system.)

The structural system would have been protected by fireproofing material (similarly, such a system would have been damaged in a 767 crash). "

Jet fuel, which is Kerosene, burns at around 575ş in open air, which was the case in WTC buildings 1 & 2. Most of it was vaporized by the impact with the buildings and burned of within minutes. At any rate, 575ş is far below the point at which structural steel specifically designed to withstand high temperature fires like that used in the World Trade Centre buildings is weakened.

All of which is irrelevant, as are the other "points" made by Snopes, because Building 7 was not hit by an airplane and there was no jet fuel involved. Something conveniently "overlooked" by Snopes and other similar misleading "disproofs". Not to mention that the Intelligence establishment is busy putting out false trails constantly which use, for instance, obviously faked photos or videos of the three WTC buildings collapsing to discredit the real videos and photos by setting up "straw men" they can then "disprove" and point to as "evidence" that people who don't believe the official version are "creating fake news".

liz_imp Terry Lawrence • 8 months ago
Brilliant points!! :)
Carolyn Zaremba Terry Lawrence • 8 months ago
Quite right. My late father was a structural design engineer, specializing in large steel structures like the WTC and he called it as soon as the buildings imploded!
Terry Lawrence michaelroloff • 8 months ago
"The perpetrators and their conspiracy is not a theory since it has been proved."

By "proved" I assume you are referring to "proofs" such as the fantastical claim that Mohammed Atta's passport was allegedly and fortuitously "found" when it supposedly survived the 600 mph impact of the 767 he was supposedly piloting with a huge steel and concrete building, survived the huge fireball it was supposedly in the middle of unscorched, and conveniently fluttered to the ground intact to land at the feet of an FBI agent who immediately realized it must have belonged to one of the hijackers!

Even Hans Christian Andersen couldn't invent Fairy Tales like that.

Carolyn Zaremba michaelroloff • 8 months ago
See my comment above. It is the "official" explanation that is a fantasy.
michaelroloff Carolyn Zaremba • 8 months ago
the best that conspiracy theorist can do is, invariably, to call proven facts "just another theory " which only proves that they are actually aware that they are full of hot air! zarembas father as a structural engineer unless a fantasy is certainly better off among the dead than among the living and perpetrating his ignorance of steel and weight and fire onto the world!
clubmarkgirard michaelroloff • 8 months ago
Just because all the details aren't known as to who conspired and why there's enough holes in the "official conspiracy theory" of 19 hijackers to conclude that this could not have been pulled off without some conspiring on the American side. Certainly the the neocons benefited greatly from these attacks. So motive is there for sure.
Alan MacDonald michaelroloff • 8 months ago
Yes, Michael, the 'media/propaganda-sector' of this seven-sectored Disguised Global Capitalist EMPIRE is currently the most effective sector --- but the other six; corporate, financial, militarist, extra-legal, CFR 'Plot-Tanks', and of course the dual-party Vichy-political facade of the 'rougher-talking' neocon 'R' Vichy Party and the 'smoother-lying' neoliberal-con 'D' Vichy Party are all helping to keep the Empire sound, hidden, and empowered over the only American citizen/'subjects' who could possibly form a "Political Revolution against Empire"
Kalen • 8 months ago
While it is true that D.C. is run by delusional psychotics that does not mean they are irrational as far as their greed is concerned.

There is nothing to win in global nuke war, all know it while the outcome would be surely the current global oligarchy loosing grip on population destroying the system that works for them so well giving chance to what they dread socialist revolution they would have been much weaker to counter.

Regional conflicts are just positioning of oligarchy for management of global oligarchic country club while strict class morality is maintained.

What I do not we are conditions for war (split of global ruling elites) while what I see is broad propaganda of war as a excuse to clamp down on fake enemy in order to control respective populations while there is factual unity among world oligarchy.

As R. Luxemburg pleaded that WWI was not "our" war but war of bunch of aristocrats wanting to divide colonies and bunch of bankers wanted their bad speculative loans repaid, using working class flesh and blood.

She died abandoned by those on the left who embraced the war for their political aspirations, she was murdered for her true internationalism i.e. No war fought between working people of one country and working people of another country.

Alan MacDonald Kalen • 8 months ago
Kalen, it's only effective to use the correct and understandable term 'Empire' in exposing, warning, and motivating average Americans --- since very few even know what words like; oligarchy, plutocracy, fascism, authoritarianism, corporate-state, or Wolin's 'inverted totalitarianism' mean --- let alone could ever serve as rallying cries for the coming essential Second American Revolution against EMPIRE.

As Pat would have shouted if Tom had taken the Paine to edit his call, "Give me Liberty over EMPIRE, or Give me Death!"

Carolyn Zaremba Alan MacDonald • 8 months ago
Do you really believe that average Americans are that stupid? Shame on you!
Alan MacDonald Carolyn Zaremba • 8 months ago
"Sweet Carolyn" OH OH OH --- Yes, only a very small percentage of Americans understand that our former country, the U.S. of America, is categorically, provably, and absolutely a new form of Empire, and is inexorably the first in world history an; 'effectively-disguised', 'truly-global', 'dual-party Vichy', and 'capitalist-fueled' EMPIRE --- an EMPIRE, really just an EMPIRE!

Just do an honest survey, "Sweet Carolyn", yourself, and if you're not a "Sweet Liarlyn", you will have to admit that essentially ZERO of the first 1000 people you ask, will say --- "Oh ya, Carolyn, of course I know that this whole effin 'system' that others less informed may still be so stupid that they think they live in a real country, when I (enter their name) do solemnly swear is just an effin EMPIRE, which is so well disguised, that these few idiots who don't understand that they are just citizen/'subjects' of this monsterous EMPIRE."

Do the survey, "Sweet Carolyn" and if you don't lie to yourself --- which maybe you do, because HELL, your job is to lie to others (so it's quite likely that you'll lie about anything) --- you'll find that exactly zero average Americans have the effin slightest idea in the world that their great 'country' is actually an effin EMPIRE.

HELL, Carolyn, almost half the Americans repeatedly yell, "We're number ONE", "We're number ONE", that their brains would rather rattle themselves to death than even let logic, history, knowledge, or anything into their addled and propaganda filled heads!

liz_imp Alan MacDonald • 8 months ago
Personal attacks are not allowed on this site.
Alan MacDonald liz_imp • 8 months ago
Sorry, Liz-imp, are you a friend of "Sweet Carolyn" --- or some other relation? Perhaps working together?
dmorista • 8 months ago
Excellent article, and it did a particularly good job of tying together the foreign policy and domestic policy stratagems of a major faction of the U.S. ruling class. I, for one, do not doubt that the Russians conduct some sort of cyber warfare against the U.S.; but that must be understood by considering the fact that every major governmental, political, military, and business organization on the face of the Earth must now operate in this manner. A friend of mine's son, who was in the Army, pointed out that the big players, by a wide margin, in spying on and to some degree interfering in the U.S. domestic scene are China and Israel. Kevin Barrett has written and said on various radio shows that much of what is attributed to the "Russians" are actually the actions of Russian/Israeli dual citizens, many of whom move freely between the U.S., Russia, and Israel. And, of course, the U.S. runs major spy and manipulation operations in more countries than any other nation of Earth, and U.S. based corporations are busy both inside the U.S. and in foreign places in similar activities.

It is clearly a desire of significant sectors, of the Capitalist rulers of the U.S., to repress dissent and political activities that oppose their agendas. It took them a few years to realize that their old methods using TV, hate radio, magazines, direct mail, and newspapers were losing their effectiveness. They have been increasing their attacks on leftist websites, hacking into websites, closing websites using phonied-up "national security" justifications, employing numerous trolls, and establishing and funding more far right websites, such as Breitbart and Infowars. These efforts are most effective when they are not overpowering and heavy handed.

The classic book on this was the 1988 book "Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media" by Noam Chomsky and Edward Hermann. Rob Williams has updated the concept for the internet age in
<http: www.vermontindependent.org ="" the-post-truth-world-reviving-the-propaganda-model-of-news-for-our-digital-age=""/>.

The strategy is nothing new, the methods are merely updated and use the latest technologies.

Maxwell dmorista • 8 months ago
Superb post.

I guess the lesson to be learned here is that rigging elections through byzantine electoral laws and billion dollar corporate slush funds is a thing of the past. All you need now is 13 amateur IT goomba's with a marketing scheme and twitter accounts. Well, sure is a fragile "World's Sole Superpower" we got here. Go Team?

[Nov 10, 2018] US Wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan Killed 500,000 by Jason Ditz

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Over 60,000 US troops either killed or wounded in conflicts ..."
"... The study estimates between 480,000 and 507,000 people were killed in the course of the three conflicts. ..."
"... Civilians make up over half of the roughly 500,000 killed, with both opposition fighters and US-backed foreign military forces each sustaining in excess of 100,000 deaths as well. ..."
"... This is admittedly a dramatic under-report of people killed in the wars, as it only attempts to calculate those killed directly in war violence, and not the massive number of others civilians who died from infrastructure damage or other indirect results of the wars. The list also excludes the US war in Syria, which itself stakes claims to another 500,000 killed since 2011. ..."
Nov 10, 2018 | news.antiwar.com

Over 60,000 US troops either killed or wounded in conflicts

Brown University has released a new study on the cost in lives of America's Post-9/11 Wars, in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. The study estimates between 480,000 and 507,000 people were killed in the course of the three conflicts.

This includes combatant deaths and civilian deaths in fighting and war violence. Civilians make up over half of the roughly 500,000 killed, with both opposition fighters and US-backed foreign military forces each sustaining in excess of 100,000 deaths as well.

This is admittedly a dramatic under-report of people killed in the wars, as it only attempts to calculate those killed directly in war violence, and not the massive number of others civilians who died from infrastructure damage or other indirect results of the wars. The list also excludes the US war in Syria, which itself stakes claims to another 500,000 killed since 2011.

The report also notes that over 60,000 US troops were either killed or wounded in the course of the wars. This includes 6,951 US military personnel killed in Iraq and Afghanistan since 9/11.

The Brown study also faults the US for having done very little in the last 17 years to provide transparency to the country about the scope of the conflicts, concluding that they are "inhibited by governments determined to paint a rosy picture of perfect execution and progress."

Those wishing to read the full Brown University study can find a PDF version here .

[Nov 09, 2018] Globalism Vs Nationalism in Trump's America by Joe Quinn

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... You know something is fundamentally wrong when the average high school drop-out MAGA-hat-wearing Texan or Alabaman working a blue collar job has more sense, can SEE much more clearly, than the average university-educated, ideology-soaked, East Coast liberal. ..."
"... Trump is a "nationalist". More or less every administration previous to his, going back at least 100 years, was "globalist". For much of its history, the USA has been known around the world as a very patriotic (i.e., nationalist) country. Americans in general had a reputation for spontaneous chants of "USA! USA! USA!", flying the Stars And Stripes outside their houses and being very proud of their country. Sure, from time to time, that pissed off people a little in other countries but, by and large, Americans' patriotism was seen as endearing, if a little naive, by most foreigners. ..."
"... Globalism, on the other hand, as it relates to the USA, is the ideology that saturates the Washington establishment think-tanks, career politicians and bureaucrats, who are infected with the toxic belief that America can and should dominate the world . This is presented to the public as so much American largess and magnanimity, but it is, in reality, a means to increasing the power and wealth of the Washington elite. ..."
"... Consider Obama's two terms, during which he continued the massively wasteful (of taxpayer's money) and destructive (of foreigners' lives and land) "War on Terror". Consider that he appointed Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State, who proceeded to joyfully bomb Libya back to the stone age and murder its leader. Consider that, under Obama, US-Russia relations reached an all-time low, with repeated attacks (of various sorts) on the Russian president, government and people, and the attempted trashing of Russia's international reputation in the eyes of the American people. Consider the Obama regime's hugely destructive war waged (mostly by proxy) on the Syrian people. Consider the Obama era coup in Ukraine that, in a few short months, set that country's prospects and development back several decades and further soured relations with Russia. ..."
"... The problem however, is that the Washington elite want - no, NEED - the American people to support such military adventurism, and what better way to do that than by concocting false "Russian collusion" allegations against Trump and having the media program the popular mind with exactly the opposite of the truth - that Trump was a "traitor" to the American people. ..."
"... The only thing Trump is a traitor to is the self-serving globally expansionist interests of a cabal of Washington insiders . This little maneuver amounted to a '2 for 1' for the Washington establishment. They simultaneously demonized Trump (impeding his 'nationalist' agenda) while advancing their own globalist mission - in this case aimed at pushing back Russia. ..."
"... The US 'Deep State' did this in response to the election of Trump the "nationalist" and their fears that their globalist, exceptionalist vision for the USA - a vision that is singularly focused on their own narrow interests at the expense of the American people and many others around the world - would be derailed by Trump attempting to put the interests of the American people first . ..."
Nov 08, 2018 | www.sott.net
Billed as a 'referendum on Trump's presidency', the US Midterm Elections drew an unusually high number of Americans to the polls yesterday. The minor loss, from Trump's perspective, of majority Republican control of the lower House of Representatives, suggests, if anything, the opposite of what the media and establishment want you to believe it means.

An important clue to why the American media has declared permanent open season on this man transpired during a sometimes heated post-elections press conference at the White House yesterday. First, CNN's obnoxious Jim Acosta insisted on bringing up the patently absurd allegations of 'Russia collusion' and refused to shut up and sit down. Soon after, PBS reporter Yamiche Alcindor joined her colleagues in asking Trump another loaded question , this time on the 'white nationalism' canard:

Alcindor : On the campaign trail you called yourself a nationalist. Some people saw that as emboldening white nationalists...

Trump : I don't know why you'd say this. It's such a racist question.

Alcindor : There are some people who say that now the Republican Party is seen as supporting white nationalists because of your rhetoric. What do you make of that?

Trump : Why do I have among the highest poll numbers with African Americans? That's such a racist question. I love our country. You have nationalists, and you have globalists . I also love the world, and I don't mind helping the world, but we have to straighten out our country first. We have a lot of problems ...

The US media is still "not even wrong" on Trump and why he won the 2016 election. You know something is fundamentally wrong when the average high school drop-out MAGA-hat-wearing Texan or Alabaman working a blue collar job has more sense, can SEE much more clearly, than the average university-educated, ideology-soaked, East Coast liberal.

Trump is a "nationalist". More or less every administration previous to his, going back at least 100 years, was "globalist". For much of its history, the USA has been known around the world as a very patriotic (i.e., nationalist) country. Americans in general had a reputation for spontaneous chants of "USA! USA! USA!", flying the Stars And Stripes outside their houses and being very proud of their country. Sure, from time to time, that pissed off people a little in other countries but, by and large, Americans' patriotism was seen as endearing, if a little naive, by most foreigners.

Globalism, on the other hand, as it relates to the USA, is the ideology that saturates the Washington establishment think-tanks, career politicians and bureaucrats, who are infected with the toxic belief that America can and should dominate the world . This is presented to the public as so much American largess and magnanimity, but it is, in reality, a means to increasing the power and wealth of the Washington elite.

Consider Obama's two terms, during which he continued the massively wasteful (of taxpayer's money) and destructive (of foreigners' lives and land) "War on Terror". Consider that he appointed Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State, who proceeded to joyfully bomb Libya back to the stone age and murder its leader. Consider that, under Obama, US-Russia relations reached an all-time low, with repeated attacks (of various sorts) on the Russian president, government and people, and the attempted trashing of Russia's international reputation in the eyes of the American people. Consider the Obama regime's hugely destructive war waged (mostly by proxy) on the Syrian people. Consider the Obama era coup in Ukraine that, in a few short months, set that country's prospects and development back several decades and further soured relations with Russia.

These are but a few examples of the "globalism" that drives the Washington establishment. Who, in their right mind, would support it? (I won't get into what constitutes a 'right mind', but we can all agree it does not involve destroying other nations for profit). The problem however, is that the Washington elite want - no, NEED - the American people to support such military adventurism, and what better way to do that than by concocting false "Russian collusion" allegations against Trump and having the media program the popular mind with exactly the opposite of the truth - that Trump was a "traitor" to the American people.

The only thing Trump is a traitor to is the self-serving globally expansionist interests of a cabal of Washington insiders . This little maneuver amounted to a '2 for 1' for the Washington establishment. They simultaneously demonized Trump (impeding his 'nationalist' agenda) while advancing their own globalist mission - in this case aimed at pushing back Russia.

Words and their exact meanings matter . To be able to see through the lies of powerful vested interests and get to the truth, we need to know when those same powerful vested interests are exploiting our all-too-human proclivity to be coerced and manipulated by appeals to emotion.

So the words "nationalist" and "nationalism", as they relate to the USA, have never been "dirty" words until they were made that way by the "globalist" element of the Washington establishment (i.e., most of it) by associating it with fringe Nazi and "white supremacist" elements in US society that pose no risk to anyone, (except to the extent that the mainstream media can convince the general population otherwise). The US 'Deep State' did this in response to the election of Trump the "nationalist" and their fears that their globalist, exceptionalist vision for the USA - a vision that is singularly focused on their own narrow interests at the expense of the American people and many others around the world - would be derailed by Trump attempting to put the interests of the American people first .

[Oct 25, 2018] Putin jokes with Bolton: Did the eagle eaten all the olives

Highly recommended!
John Bolton suffers a crippling shortage of olives.
Notable quotes:
"... "As far as I remember, the US coat of arms features a bald eagle that holds 13 arrows in one talon and an olive branch in another, which is a symbol of a peace-loving policy," ..."
"... "Looks like your eagle has already eaten all the olives; are the arrows all that is left?" ..."
Oct 25, 2018 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

Meeting with US national security adviser John Bolton in Moscow, Russian President Vladimir Putin made a comment about Washington's hostility that went right over the hawkish diplomat's head. "As far as I remember, the US coat of arms features a bald eagle that holds 13 arrows in one talon and an olive branch in another, which is a symbol of a peace-loving policy," Putin said in a meeting with Bolton in Moscow on Tuesday.

"I have a question," the Russian president added. "Looks like your eagle has already eaten all the olives; are the arrows all that is left?"

boz , October 23, 2018 at 3:49 pm

The Saker has the transcript of Putin's comments at a recent plenary in Sochi, small snippets of which have already appeared in the media.

http://thesaker.is/president-putin-meeting-of-the-valdai-international-discussion-club-2/

About 15-20 minutes to get through (the facilitator seems like a bit of a wet blanket), but fascinating to read, if like me, most of what you hear about Putin has been filtered through the MSM.

A couple of reflections:

Putin does detail. He is courteous and patient. He is highly pragmatic and appears to be widely (and, for my money, effectively) briefed.

Olga , October 23, 2018 at 5:33 pm

For those of us lucky enough to follow VVP in his native language – it is indeed a delight. (And – mind you – it was only after I took the time to follow him in his native language that I was able to appreciate this person and his leadership abilities. If one follows him through NYT – no chance that would give one an accurate picture.)
He is erudite, informed, and has a wicked sense of humour, as shown in this clip:
https://www.rt.com/news/442068-putin-olives-eagle-bolton/

[Oct 20, 2018] Cloak and Dagger by Israel Shamir

Highly recommended!
UK politicians in Skripal story behaved by cheap clowns. Their story with door knob was pathetic. They tried to invent the legend with poisoning on the fly and that shows. There is definitely something else brewing here and Shamir proposed his version with Skripal double dealings or something along those line is quite plausible.
We will never know, but I think British discredited themselves for the whole world in this story. Trump was not better will using this tory to impose additional sanctions on Russia. This is just another proof that he is another neocon who during election campaign like Obama played the role of isolationalist and then appointed Haley to UN and hired Pompeo as his Secretary of state and Bolton as his security advisor -- a typical "bat and switch" operation in US politics.
Notable quotes:
"... Vrublevsky thinks that British intelligence convinced the GRU (probably we should say that GRU is not called GRU anymore but GU, the Chief Directorate of the General Staff, but it hardly matters) that Mr Skripal wanted to return home to Russia. Probably they were told that Mr Skripal intended to bring some valuable dowry with him, including Porton Down data and the secrets of the Golden Rain dossier. It is possible that Skripal had been played, too; perhaps he indeed wanted to go back to Russia, the country he missed badly. ..."
"... As we had learned from videos and stills published by the Brits, the two men had been carefully followed from the beginning to the end. Meanwhile, British intelligence staged a 'poisoning' of Skripal and his daughter, and the two agents quickly returned home. ..."
"... There is not a single man close to Russian intelligence who thinks that Skripal had actually been poisoned by the Russians. First, there was absolutely no reason to do it, and second, if the Russians would poison him, he would stay poisoned, like the Ukrainian Quisling Stepan Bandera was. ..."
"... However, by playing this card, the British secret service convinced the Foreign Office to expel all diplomats who had contacts and connection to the exposed GRU agents. The massive expulsion of 150 diplomats caused serious damage to the Russian secret services. ..."
"... Such a massive operation against Russian agents and their contacts could signal forthcoming war. In normal circumstances, states do not reveal their full knowledge of enemy agents. ..."
"... I do not know what is the truth. At this point I no longer care because we will never know but it will be the British version that will be the most popular. I like most people like good stories. Unfortunately for Russia the Brits have better script writers, director and actors. ..."
Oct 20, 2018 | www.unz.com

... ... ...

Vrublevsky thinks that British intelligence convinced the GRU (probably we should say that GRU is not called GRU anymore but GU, the Chief Directorate of the General Staff, but it hardly matters) that Mr Skripal wanted to return home to Russia. Probably they were told that Mr Skripal intended to bring some valuable dowry with him, including Porton Down data and the secrets of the Golden Rain dossier. It is possible that Skripal had been played, too; perhaps he indeed wanted to go back to Russia, the country he missed badly.

Two GRU agents, supposedly experts on extraction (they allegedly sneaked the Ukrainian president Yanukovych from Ukraine after the coup and saved him from lynching mob) were sent to Salisbury to test the ground and make preparations for Skripal's return. As we had learned from videos and stills published by the Brits, the two men had been carefully followed from the beginning to the end. Meanwhile, British intelligence staged a 'poisoning' of Skripal and his daughter, and the two agents quickly returned home.

There is not a single man close to Russian intelligence who thinks that Skripal had actually been poisoned by the Russians. First, there was absolutely no reason to do it, and second, if the Russians would poison him, he would stay poisoned, like the Ukrainian Quisling Stepan Bandera was.

However, by playing this card, the British secret service convinced the Foreign Office to expel all diplomats who had contacts and connection to the exposed GRU agents. The massive expulsion of 150 diplomats caused serious damage to the Russian secret services.

Still, the Russians had no clue how the West had learned identities of so many diplomats connected to GRU. They suspected that there was a mole, and a turncoat who delivered the stuff to the enemy.

That is why Vladimir Putin decided to dare them. As he knew that the two men identified by the British service had no connection to the alleged poisoning, he asked them to appear on the RT in an interview with Ms Simonyan. By acting as village hicks, they were supposed to provoke the enemy to disclose its source. The result was unexpected: instead of revealing the name of a turncoat, the Belling Cat, a site used by the Western Secret Services for intentional leaks, explained how the men were traced by using the stolen databases. Putin's plan misfired.

The Russian secret service is not dead. Intelligence services do suffer from enemy action from time to time: the Cambridge Five infiltrated the upper reaches of the MI-5 and delivered state secrets to Moscow for a long time, but the Intelligence Service survived. Le Carre's novels were based on such a defeat of the intelligence. However they have a way to recover. Identity of their top agents remain secret, and they are concealed from the enemy's eyes.

But in order to function properly, the Russians will have to clean their stables, remove their databases from the market place and keep its citizenry reasonably safe. Lax, and not-up-to-date agents do not apparently understand the degree the internet is being watched. Considering it should have been done twenty years ago, and meanwhile a new generation of Russians has came of age, perfectly prepared to sell whatever they can for cash, it is a formidable task.

There is an additional reason to worry. Such a massive operation against Russian agents and their contacts could signal forthcoming war. In normal circumstances, states do not reveal their full knowledge of enemy agents. It made president Putin worry; and he said this week: we'll go to heaven as martyrs, the attackers will die as sinners. In face of multiple and recent threats, this end of the world is quite possible.

utu , says: October 20, 2018 at 4:23 am GMT

Great story. If told many people would believe it. But now it is kind of late. So why it wasn't told within few days or weeks of Skripal affair? Why it is the British media that has initiative and Russian media is reactive and defensive? The story that Skripal wanted to return and that two agents were lured in there should have been told right away and that it turned out be MI5 provocation should have been insinuated. And the two agents should have been interviewed on Russian media. Instead we get defensive inept and indolent Russian reactions.

I do not know what is the truth. At this point I no longer care because we will never know but it will be the British version that will be the most popular. I like most people like good stories. Unfortunately for Russia the Brits have better script writers, director and actors.

jilles dykstra , says: October 20, 2018 at 7:25 am GMT
@utu " Instead we get defensive inept and indolent Russian reactions."
The reaction 'if we want to kill somebody that somebody does not survive' I cannot see as inept and indolent.
Malaysian Truther , says: October 20, 2018 at 8:24 am GMT
Excellent piece by Israel Shamir which I think gives the correct explanation of the Skripal poisoning. This was a classic fishing, 'click bait' operation which produced a very valuable haul for Western Intelligence. The only question is whether Skripal cooperated with it – which I think he did – not knowing that both he and his daughter were meant to die. Hence Putin's rage against Skripal a few weeks ago ( calling him a scumbag traitor etc, etc) after the Russian operatives were identified because retired agents are supposed to stay retired.

Russia made a very serious mistake with the RT interview with the 2 operatives. Better not to say anything if you can't give the whole story. The GU weren't happy to show their incompetence, but compounded the original mistake with obvious lying. That was a propaganda gift to the Western media and has helped convince original disbelievers of Russian perfidy.

Russia needs to step up its game especially in the media dept.

Tom Welsh , says: October 20, 2018 at 9:38 am GMT
"Unfortunately for Russia the Brits have better script writers, director and actors".

Maybe, if your taste runs to "Dr Who" or "Carry On Spying". That's about the level of the Skripal nonsense.

If it was meant for public consumption, the British government's opinion of the British people is much lower than mine.

jilles dykstra , says: October 20, 2018 at 10:33 am GMT
@Anatoly Karlin " British or American human capital, but there are certainly consummate professionals relative to what passes for today's Russian intelligence services. "

On what this 'certainly' is based, I see no argument whatsoever.
Already a long time ago, I must admit, the CIA director had to admit to senator Moynihan that he had lied about the CIA not laying mines in Havana harbour.
A professional in espionage does not get caught.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, 'Secrecy', New Haven 1998
Anyone acquinted with Sept 11 understands that the USA's secret army, the CIA, was involved.
Another blunder.
As far as I know British secret services never get caught.
How clever the Russians are, suppose quite clever, I for one do not think that the stupid stories about for example Skripal have any truth in them.
Until now the asserted Russian meddling in USA elections have not been proved.
Do not know of anything credible that Russian intelligence people are said to have done.
But of course Russian intelligence does exist.

Fatima Manoubia , says: October 20, 2018 at 11:18 am GMT
@Anatoly Karlin

"A related problem is that since there is now a free market economy, with many more attractive career options for talented people, the high quality people go to work in other spheres, leaving the intelligence agencies with the dregs;" .

A direct result of erasing ideology so as to erase personality cult towards highly respected people in former USSR .When you have no ideology ( or worst, share ideology with your opponent, i.e free market .) all what you have, from values to secrets, from scientific human capital to secret service officials, are out there in the global market for possible selling to the best postor .this is the principle of capitalism .. after all, it is said, almost everybody has a price .The challenge is finding out where that little bunch who have not are ..Obviously, in this scenario, the one who has the printing machine has a "little" advantage How to overcome this would be part of "what is to be done" ..

Ilyana_Rozumova , says: October 20, 2018 at 12:07 pm GMT
If the Russians wanted to kill them they would be dead. Period. It is all FN hoax.
The latest English came up with was that poison was smeared on the door handle and that both touched the door handle. Give me a break. Such a idiocy. Just imagine the exit procedure where both are touching the door knob.
And than both Russians went to garbage dump carrying the little bottle and thru it there.
What an exemplary citizen neat behavior by Russians,
All English story is such a stupid idiocy that it turns my stomach.
All we like sheep , says: October 20, 2018 at 12:14 pm GMT

However, the presence of Russian spies in Salisbury can be explained by its nearness to Porton Down, the secret British chemical lab and factory for manufacturing chemical weapons applied by the White Helmets in Syria in their false-flag operation in Douma and other places. It is possible that a resident of Salisbury (Mr Skripal?) had delivered samples from Porton Down to the Russian intelligence agents. This makes much more sense than the dubious story of Russians trying to poison an old ex-spy who did his stretch in a Russian jail.

If Mr. Skripal has been poisoned by the stuff of which he himself took samples in Porton Down, this would run completely parallel to the earlier poisoning of Mr. Alexander Valterovich Litvinenko, who also became ill because of carrying poison (polonium) around.

Eagle Eye , says: October 20, 2018 at 12:54 pm GMT

If [Yulia Skripal] had not had the courage to make this call while slipping the observance of British intelligence, she would probably be dead by now.

Both Skripals are most likely DEAD, murdered by British "intelligence" services.

The formulaic and curiously uninterested treatment of the matter in the British media seems inconsistent with the Skripals still being alive.

The article above suggests that the Skripals were unwitting or witting participants in a sting to expose Russian intelligence agents. More importantly, Sergey Skripal appears to have had a role in the creation of the DNC's "dossier" to undermine the Trump presidencey.

Whatever the background, Sergey Skripal became privy to important secrets that the Brits and their seditious allies in the U.S. Deep State do not want exposed.

macilrae , says: October 20, 2018 at 2:38 pm GMT
In the Skripal case the British have not explained why, after claiming to have found the closest approach to a smoking gun in the form of traces of novichok in that hotel room, the hotel was not then immediately quarantined.

And assuredly, with Putin's name on the line, the Russians have to do a better job if they are to refute the standing accusations – the RT interview was something of a PR disaster.

The Belloncat data, although superficially convincing, could so easily have been faked by anybody with reasonable knowledge of Russian internet infrastructure and some proficiency in Photoshop.

CalDre , says: October 20, 2018 at 3:21 pm GMT
@utu

But now it is kind of late. So why it wasn't told within few days or weeks of Skripal affair?

It's still not being told – believe it or not, Israel Shamir is not Sergei Lavrov. I hypothesized to the same state of affairs in early September re: Skripals.

But I did not know about these massive intelligence security breaches in Russia. Wow, that's huge. Even though it's not clear to me how this indicates Putin's plan misfired. If anything he got exactly what he wanted: confirmation that the "West" had access to the entire passport database. Knowing what your enemy has in intelligence is a huge win, now they can work on correcting it (hard as it may be, it would be impossible without knowing).

CalDre , says: October 20, 2018 at 3:24 pm GMT
@macilrae You are right, it could have been faked, anything can be faked today, even a video of Putin speaking (search for "deep fakes" and watch the video at https://www.wsj.com/articles/deepfake-videos-are-ruining-lives-is-democracy-next-1539595787 ).

But the fact is Russia has not really disputed the results so I am fairly confident that not only was Belling Cat right, but Israel is right, and now we have the situation where Russia knows that Western intelligence has full access to Russia's passport database.

wayfarer , says: October 20, 2018 at 3:55 pm GMT
@Tyrion 2 Had some experiences with Chinese and Mossad spies, not to mention Russian Jewish hard-drug dealers.

Here are a few examples.

There was an AMES postdoc at UCSD, a Chinese applied-math brain who had a 10-plus female handler. She'd stop by occasionally to check up on him. He always get extremely anxious when she was around. Couldn't figure out if it was fear, sexual excitement, or a combination of both.

There was an old Chinese man and his foxy young female protege, who enjoyed filming U.S. military maneuvers along the San Diego coast. I observed their operation for days.

There was a swing-shift cleaning crew in a Southern California high-tech mfg facility that was all Chinese, in an area that typically employed Latin American crews. Its head honcho was a beautiful Chinese lady. They made it their job to sort through trash bins and save papers. The feds busted them.

As far as the Mossad, I spent two years on a rental property in SD county, which was occupied by them as well. Mostly Israeli kids using the property and a local Israeli-owned vegetarian restaurant as their "scorpion den." Got fairly familiar with some of their espionage work and methods.

I don't go looking for this stuff. I'm just able to recognize it. As an empath I can read people, quite well. It's a natural gift.

Can't stomach Israel's insensitive nature. That's why you'll typically find me pointing out their self-serving bullshit.

source: https://themindunleashed.com/2013/10/30-traits-of-empath.html

FB , says: October 20, 2018 at 4:13 pm GMT
This is a pretty good article but also falls on its face at the end

Mr Shamir's 'inside' information confirms my own take on Petrov and Boshirov which I published a few days after that RT interview with Ms Simonyan I wrote this on Col Lang's blog on Sept 14

'Yeah those two 'tourists' do look the part don't they I would say they are probably GRU or something similar but nobody 'poisoned' the Skripals that's total kabuki theater another Potemkin village production from the reality masters

Something is afoot here though perhaps these two were lured to Salisbury as part of a frame up plot, perhaps by Skripal himself or perhaps the Brits caught wind of their plans to visit [on some standard spying mission, certainly not assassination] and put in motion the elaborate hoax

Everybody there protested loudly including Andrey Martyanov [Smoothie] I also added this

' I disagree with everyone here it seems these guys aren't tourists but they also didn't try to kill anyone that's stupid

It's some sort of spy game

Here's one scenario double agent Skripal makes convincing noises about flipping back someone at GRU [or some similar outfit] sends these two to Salisbury to check it out a very stupid move which is why Putin is now miffed enough to display these guys publicly and their field career surely over also a slap in the face to the silly Limeys for playing dirty pool even in the cloak and dagger game there are unwritten rules '

This is now exactly the story that Mr Shamir is presenting here but he is a day late and a dollar short

I also don't agree with his take that this is all somehow a big loss for Russian intel the Brits are the ones who have painted themselves in a corner their Skripal story is a wet paper bag waiting to fall apart the fact that they lured the Russians to Salisbury, under whatever pretext, be it Skripal or Porton Down/white helmets etc was their only small tactical victory because they could then later expose those two after months of Russian denials in order to show the Russians were in fact somehow involved

But that exposure came months later all that time the Russians would have known that Boshirov and Petrov had been captured on candid camera and would have had time to work on their countermove

Mr Shamir writes this like the game is over that is ridiculous the Brits have no way out of the Skripal hoax there was never any poisoning the original diagnosis of the Skripals in the Salisbury hospital was opioid overdose that came out in the first BBC interview with the hospital staff months after the 'poisoning'

It was not until 48 hours after the Skripals were admitted to hospital and the convenient intervention of Porton Down that the medical diagnosis was 'changed' to nerve agent poisoning

BUT this is an unsustainable story that WILL FALL APART the simple reason is medical and chemical fact both nerve agents and agricultural pesticides are based on the exact same chemical compound organophosphates

It just so happens that organophsphate poisoning is 'one of the most common causes of poisoning worldwide '

'There are nearly 3 million poisonings per year resulting in two hundred thousand deaths.'

That is the simple reason why emergency doctors EVERYWHERE are trained to recognize and treat this kind of poisoning especially in rural, agricultural areas like Salisbury

That is why it took months for media to gain access to the medical staff at that hospital the British spooks needed to do a lot of 'persuading' with medical professionals that would have wanted no part in such trickery and fakery

But this is a ticking time bomb that is bound to blow up in the faces of the very stupid Brits

So yes they pulled off a minor coup in luring those two to Salisbury but the game is very very far from over

As for Skripal he is in on it for sure as I speculated in my original comment on the matter..the Russian intel services are perfectly aware of this, yet Mr Shamir's supposedly well connected source has zero knowledge of this which tells me this source is actually a useless clown who 'knows' exactly what an internet commenter [myself] already knew two months ago

PS the fact that the Brits supposedly have all kinds of database info on the Russian intel apparatus and personnel files etc doesn't mean anything the author is a making a big deal out of this, but his story lacks meat on its bones most 'intel' is open source material anyway

As for sensitive stuff that may have been 'sold' by 'corrupt' bureaucrats one must ask if such 'info' is actually real or a clever plant providing fake info is the oldest spy trick in the book and this article simply takes for granted that such a trick would not have been employed why not ?

CalDre , says: October 20, 2018 at 5:30 pm GMT
@FB How would a fake database leak include the real data on the two GRU agents that just happened to be sent to UK? Maybe it was to make the data leak seem real?

In spycraft it is always impossible to know how deep the deception goes. That's why the very article to which you are responding started with:

It is hard to evaluate the exact measure of things in the murky world of spies and counter-spies, but it appears that the Western spies have had extraordinary success in the subterranean battle.

An acknowledgement you stubbornly ignore.

M Edward , says: October 20, 2018 at 6:01 pm GMT
None of this matters.

All governments are corrupt and have no interest in the welfare of the native populations.

All this he said she said crap is irrelevant, in the end we all will end up under a totalitarian police state run out of Tel-Aviv and Jerusalem.

Cyrano , says: October 20, 2018 at 6:06 pm GMT
I think that a clear strategy by the western "intelligence" services is starting to emerge vis-a-vis the Russians. By accusing any Russian that they can get their hands on, of being a spy, they want to scare the ordinary Russians from visiting the west, so afterwards any Russian actually caught traveling to the west can be safely assumed to be a spy – since by the calculations of the clever western intelligence – only someone who is actually a spy while at the same time being Russian, would dare to travel to the west. How smart is that?

Joking aside, it really is becoming unsafe for Russian nationals to travel to the west. Even though the west reserves the generosity of calling somebody equal only for those that are from the 3rd world – Russians clearly don't deserve such generosity.

Despite this, exceptions can be made and some unfortunate Russian soul could be accused of being equal with those highly evolved westerners and against their will can be offered protection from Mother Russia.

Pretty much like it happened to Yulia Skripal. She was only visiting her gastarbeiter father in GB, who apparently expressed desire to return to Russia, against pretty much everybody's wishes, and all of a sudden Yulia Skripal found herself bestowed with the western generosity of being declared equal, and was disappeared from public eye in order to protect her from those with whom she is clearly not equal – the Russians.

Thank God at least MI-6 proved equal to the task and discovered her equalness in a nick of time and saved her. The moral of the story: Only democracy has the power to recognize who is equal and who is not. Then, on the other hand, capitalism can keep acquiring new monikers such as "democracy" – all they want, Russia still has better quality of equality, despite ditching socialism.

FB , says: October 20, 2018 at 6:24 pm GMT
@CalDre Yes I 'stubbornly' refuse to take at face value this silly statement

it appears that the Western spies have had extraordinary success in the subterranean battle.'

Because it's not backed up by anything other than hot air as for that supposed 'data' about Petrov and Boshirov that was put out by Bellingcat

Ie mickey mouse stuff as with everything these clowns do, it is meant only to bamboozle the most utterly stupid bipeds

A very nice clue is the fact that a Russian website called 'The Insider' is Bellingcat's acknowledged partner here

If you read the article in English they claim to have 'dug' up a lot of info from various sources such the central Russian resident database and passenger check in data for their flight to the UK

Big deal that Shamir is building a mountain out of a molehill is more than clear

In fact this entire Shamir tale appears to have one subtle purpose to publicize and glorify the Bellingcat outfit

which irredeemably lost any credibility a few weeks back when illiterate poofter Eliott Higgins refused a debate challenge by the distinguished MIT physicist and former presidential advisor Ted Postol actually calling Postol an 'idiot' a move that astounded even those willing to entertain Higgins on a semi-credible level

peterAUS , says: October 20, 2018 at 6:39 pm GMT
@Anatoly Karlin Be that as it may, the "Western side" had (publicly known) Aldrich, Hanssen and Benghazi fiasco.

Boils down to, from the comment below:

When you have no ideology ( or worst, share ideology with your opponent, i.e free market .) all what you have, from values to secrets, from scientific human capital to secret service officials, are out there in the global market for possible selling to the best postor .this is the principle of capitalism .. after all, it is said, almost everybody has a price..

and

Obviously, in this scenario, the one who has the printing machine has a "little" advantage.

And, on top of it, in West, since the fall of The Wall, we've been having "Cooking the Intelligence to Fit the Political Agenda".

Incompetence vs blatant lying?
What a choice.

Kubarking , says: October 20, 2018 at 6:43 pm GMT
This commenter begs to differ with M. Karlin's assessment (8) of the relative competence of Russian sovok and CIA. "consummate professionals relative to what passes for today's Russian intelligence services"? Mais non.

CIA always gets caught. All they do is step on their crank, again and again. They depend not on professionalism but on what Russ Baker describes as a strange mix of ruthlessness and ineptitude. Both stem from impunity in municipal law.

For example: CIA torture and coercive interference got comprehensively exposed, worldwide, in the '70s. What happened? Don Gregg gave the Church and Pike committees an ultimatum: Back off or it's martial law. CIA got busted again in the '80s for the criminal enterprises under the Iran/Contra rubric. By then CIA had installed Tom Polgar, Former Saigon Station Chief, as chief investigator for the cognizant Senate Select committee, and Polgar assured Gregg that his hearings would not be a repeat of the abortive Pike and Church flaps.

So CIA are clowns. They can afford to be clowns because they know they can get away with it. Getting away with it is their only skill, and the only skill they need.

The persistent category error at this site is failing to realize that CIA is the state. They rule the USA.

[Oct 09, 2018] The Skripals Are an MI6 Hoax - 'Not Worthy of Ladies' Detective Novels' - Israeli Expert Demolishes UK Case

Highly recommended!
Oct 09, 2018 | russia-insider.com

Very convincing. This Israeli expert blows up the UK's narrative in a few well-chosen one-liners.

"If the GRU acted, both the killers and the other participants in the operation would come to the UK on the passports of other countries that have visa-free relations with it. Here, two alleged GRU officers go to the embassy, ​​leave their fingerprints there, get a visa, stop at the hotel, pass under all the cells. This you will not find even in ladies' detective novels."

An Israeli expert on international terrorism, writer Alexander Brass, shared his view on the case of the Skripals poisoning in Salisbury. Brass draws parallels between the work of the special services of Israel and Russia – he believes that if to compare the British version with the practice of the special agents, then the absurdity becomes obvious.

"Alexander, so what, in your opinion, happened in Salisbury?"

-There was a rough provocation by the British special services. In my opinion, this is obvious.

"There's a lot of stupidity on stupidity." The story with Petrov and Boshirov does not hold up any professional peer review. According to the Brits, the Skripals were poisoned by GRU agents (this is what the department is called, although this is now the Main Directorate of the RF General Staff).

I want to explain how the special services work. If you need someone to eliminate, then this is a very serious operation, which is being prepared for a long time. A very significant material and human resource is allocated. We are talking about dozens of employees. On the territory of this state, an "advanced command post" is being created.

In the operation, a technical support group, a logistic group, a cover group, an external surveillance group and a group of performers are involved.

The performers themselves appear at the very last moment. They do not go anywhere, lighting up on cameras, do not use public transport, but move on rented cars, which they do not rent themselves. And the more they will not stop in hotels, but will live on safe houses provided by the logistics group.

Such groups do not come under the passport of their country, do not go to the embassy for obtaining a visa, leaving fingerprints. This is complete nonsense. Professionals do not work that way.

If the GRU acted, both the killers and the other participants in the operation would come to the UK on the passports of other countries that have visa-free relations with it. Here, two alleged GRU officers go to the embassy, ​​leave their fingerprints there, get a visa, stop at the hotel, pass under all the cells. This you will not find even in ladies' detective novels.

[Oct 08, 2018] British intelligence now officially is a by-word for organized crime by John Wight

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... And what about the possibility of MI5's involvement in, dare we use the term, false flag operations? ..."
"... As someone who abhors the premise of conspiracy theory on principle, the fact that more and more are turning to its warm embrace as an intellectual reflex against what is politely described as the 'official narrative' of events, well this is no surprise when we learn of the egregious machinations of Western intelligence agencies such as Britain's MI5. ..."
"... If any such investigation is to be taken seriously, however, it must include in its remit the power to investigate all possible links between Britain's intelligence community and organisations such as, let's see, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group ? ..."
"... The deafening UK mainstream media and political class silence over the trail connecting 2017 Manchester Arena suicide bomber Salman Abedi and MI6, Britain's foreign intelligence agency, leaves a lingering stench of intrigue that will not out. The work of investigative journalist Mark Curtis on this sordid relationship is unsurpassed. ..."
"... "The evidence suggests that the barbaric Manchester bombing, which killed 22 innocent people on May 22nd, is a case of blowback on British citizens arising at least partly from the overt and covert actions of British governments." ..."
"... "The evidence points to the LIFG being seen by the UK as a proxy militia to promote its foreign policy objectives. Whitehall also saw Qatar as a proxy to provide boots on the ground in Libya in 2011, even as it empowered hardline Islamist groups." ..."
"... "Both David Cameron, then Prime Minister, and Theresa May – who was Home Secretary in 2011 when Libyan radicals were encouraged to fight Qadafi [Muammar Gaddafi] – clearly have serious questions to answer. We believe an independent public enquiry is urgently needed." ..."
"... In words that echo down to us from ancient Rome, the poet Juvenal taunts our complacency with a question most simple and pertinent: "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" Who will guard the guards themselves? ..."
Oct 08, 2018 | www.rt.com

An intelligence service given free rein to commit 'serious crimes' in its own country is an intelligence service that is the enemy of its people. The quite astounding revelation that Britain's domestic intelligence service, MI5, has enjoyed this very freedom for decades has only just been made public at a special tribunal in London, set up to investigate the country's intelligence services at the behest of a coalition of human rights groups, alleging a pattern of illegality up to and including collusion in murder.

The hitherto MI5 covert policy sanctioning its agents to commit and/or solicit serious crimes, as and when adjudged provident, is known as the Third Direction. This codename has been crafted, it would appear, by someone with a penchant for all things James Bond within an agency whose average operative is more likely to be 5'6" and balding with a paunch and bad teeth than any kind of lantern-jawed 007.

The Pat Finucane Centre , one of the aforementioned human rights groups involved in bringing about this tribunal investigation (Investigatory Powers Tribunal, to give it its Sunday name) into the nefarious activities of Britain's domestic intelligence agency, issued a damning statement in response to the further revelation that former Prime Minister David Cameron introduced oversight guidelines with regard to the MI5 covert third direction policy back in 2012.

Cameron's decision to do so, the group claims, was far from nobly taken:

"It can be no coincidence that Prime Minister David Cameron issued new guidelines, however flawed, on oversight of MI5 just two weeks before publication of the De Silva report into the murder of Pat Finucane. The PM was clearly alive to the alarming evidence which was about to emerge of the involvement of the Security Service in the murder. To date no-one within a state agency has been held accountable. The latest revelations make the case for an independent inquiry all the more compelling."

Pat Finucane, a Belfast Catholic, plied his trade as a human rights lawyer at a time when the right to be fully human was denied the minority Catholic community of the small and enduring outpost of British colonialism in the north east corner of Ireland, otherwise known as Northern Ireland. He was murdered by loyalist paramilitaries in 1989, back when the decades-long conflict euphemistically referred to as the Troubles still raged, claiming victims both innocent and not on all sides.

Unlike the vast majority of those killed and murdered in the course of this brutal conflict, Finucane's murder sparked a long and hard fought struggle for justice by surviving family members, friends and campaigners. They allege – rather convincingly, it should be said – that it was carried out with the active collusion of MI5.

Stepping back and casting a wider view over this terrain, the criminal activities of Britain's intelligence services constitute more than enough material for a book of considerable heft. How fortunate then that just such a book has already been written.

In his 'Dead Men Talking: Collusion, Cover Up and Murder in Northern Ireland's Dirty War', author Nicholas Davies "provides information on a number of the killings [during the Troubles], which were authorized at the highest level of MI5 and the British government."

But over and above the crimes of MI5 in Ireland, what else have those doughty defenders of the realm been up to over the years? After all, what is the use of having a license to engage in serious criminal activity, including murder and, presumably, torture, if you're not prepared to use (abuse) it? It begs the question of how many high profile deaths attributed to suicide, natural causes, and accident down through the years have been the fruits of MI5 at work?

And what about the possibility of MI5's involvement in, dare we use the term, false flag operations?

As someone who abhors the premise of conspiracy theory on principle, the fact that more and more are turning to its warm embrace as an intellectual reflex against what is politely described as the 'official narrative' of events, well this is no surprise when we learn of the egregious machinations of Western intelligence agencies such as Britain's MI5.

What we are bound to state, doing so without fear of contradiction, is this particular revelation opens up a veritable Pandora's Box of grim possibilities when it comes to the potential crimes committed by Britain's domestic intelligence agency, ensuring that a full and vigorous investigation and public inquiry is now both necessary and urgent.

If any such investigation is to be taken seriously, however, it must include in its remit the power to investigate all possible links between Britain's intelligence community and organisations such as, let's see, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group ?

The deafening UK mainstream media and political class silence over the trail connecting 2017 Manchester Arena suicide bomber Salman Abedi and MI6, Britain's foreign intelligence agency, leaves a lingering stench of intrigue that will not out. The work of investigative journalist Mark Curtis on this sordid relationship is unsurpassed.

As Curtis writes,

"The evidence suggests that the barbaric Manchester bombing, which killed 22 innocent people on May 22nd, is a case of blowback on British citizens arising at least partly from the overt and covert actions of British governments."

In the same report he arrives at a conclusion both damning and chilling:

"The evidence points to the LIFG being seen by the UK as a proxy militia to promote its foreign policy objectives. Whitehall also saw Qatar as a proxy to provide boots on the ground in Libya in 2011, even as it empowered hardline Islamist groups."

Finally: "Both David Cameron, then Prime Minister, and Theresa May – who was Home Secretary in 2011 when Libyan radicals were encouraged to fight Qadafi [Muammar Gaddafi] – clearly have serious questions to answer. We believe an independent public enquiry is urgently needed."

In words that echo down to us from ancient Rome, the poet Juvenal taunts our complacency with a question most simple and pertinent: "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" Who will guard the guards themselves?

Edward R Murrow puts it rather more bluntly: "A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves."

Sooner or later, people in Britain are going to have to wake up to who the real enemy is.

Read more

John Wight has written for a variety of newspapers and websites, including the Independent, Morning Star, Huffington Post, Counterpunch, London Progressive Journal, and Foreign Policy Journal.

[Oct 08, 2018] Hacking and Propaganda by Marcus Ranum

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... There has been an ongoing campaign on the part of the US, to get out the idea that China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran have massive armies of hackers that are constantly looking to steal American secrets. The absurdity of the US' claims is pretty obvious. As I pointed out in my book The Myth of Homeland Security ..."
"... "The Great US/China Cyberwar of 2010" is one cyberwar that didn't happen, but was presaged with a run-up of lots of claims that the Chinese were hacking all over the place. I'm perfectly willing to accept the possibility that there was Chinese hacking activity, but in the industry there was no indication of an additional level of attack or significance. ..."
"... One thing that did ..."
"... US ideology is that "we don't start wars" -- it's always looking for an excuse to go to war under the rubric of self-defense, so I see these sorts of claims as justification in advance for unilateral action. I also see it as a sign of weakness; if the US were truly the superpower it claims it is, it would simply accept its imperial mantle and stop bothering to try to justify anything. I'm afraid we may be getting close to that point. ..."
"... My assumption has always been that the US is projecting its own actions on other nations. At the time when the US was talking the loudest about Chinese cyberwar, the US and Israel had launched STUXNET against the Iranian enrichment plant at Natanz, and the breeder reactor at Bushehr (which happens to be just outside of a large city; the attack took some of its control systems and backup generators offline). Attacks on nuclear power facilities are a war crime under international humanitarian law, which framework the US is signatory to but has not committed to actually follow. This sort of activity happens at the same time that the US distributes talking-points to the media about the danger of Russian hackers crashing the US power grid. I don't think we can psychoanalyze an entire government and I think psychoanalysis is mostly nonsense -- but it's tempting to accuse the US of "projection." ..."
"... All of this stuff happens against the backdrop of Klein, Binney, Snowden, and the Vault 7 revelations, as well as solid attribution identifying the NSA as "equation group" and linking the code-tree of NSA-developed malware to STUXNET, FLAME, and DUQU. ..."
"... the US has even admitted to deploying STUXNET -- Obama bragged about it. When Snowden's revelations outlined how the NSA had eavesdropped on Angela Merkel's cellphone, the Germans expressed shock and Barack Obama remarkably truthfully said "that's how these things are done" and blew the whole thing off by saying that the NSA wasn't eavesdropping on Merkel any more. [ bbc ] ..."
"... It's hard to keep score because everything is pretty vague, but it sounds like the US has been dramatically out-spending and out-acting the other nations that it accuses of being prepared for cyberwar. ..."
"... it's hard not to see the US is prepared for cyberwar, when both the NSA and the CIA leak massive collections of advanced tools. ..."
"... My observation is that the NSA and CIA have been horribly sloppy and have clearly spent a gigantic amount of money preparing to compromise both foreign and domestic systems -- that's bad enough. With friends like the NSA and CIA, who needs Russians and Chinese? ..."
"... The Russian and Chinese efforts are relatively tiny compared to the massive efforts the US expends tens of billions of dollars on. The US spends about $50bn on its intelligence agencies, while the entire Russian Department of Defense budget is about $90bn (China is around $139bn) -- maybe the Russians and Chinese have such a small footprint because they are much smaller operations? ..."
"... That brings us to the recent kerfuffle about taps on the Supermicro motherboards. That's not unbelievable at all -- not in a world where we discover that Intel has built a parallel management CPU into every CPU since 2008, and that there is solid indications that other processors have similar backdoors. ..."
"... There are probably so many backdoors in our systems that it's a miracle it works at all. ..."
"... So, with respect to "propaganda" I would say that the US intelligence community has been consistently pushing a propaganda agenda against the US government, and the citizens in order to justify its actions and defend its budget. ..."
"... What little I've been able to find out the new Trump™ cybersecurity plan is that it doesn't involve any defense, just massive retribution against (perceived) foes. ..."
"... Funny how those obsessed with "false flag" operations work so hard to invite more of same. ..."
Oct 07, 2018 | freethoughtblogs.com

Bob Moore asks me to comment on an article about propaganda and security/intelligence. [ article ] This is going to be a mixture of opinion and references to facts; I'll try to be clear which is which.

Yesterday several NATO countries ran a concerted propaganda campaign against Russia. The context for it was a NATO summit in which the U.S. presses for an intensified cyberwar against NATO's preferred enemy.

On the same day another coordinated campaign targeted China. It is aimed against China's development of computer chip manufacturing further up the value chain. Related to this is U.S. pressure on Taiwan, a leading chip manufacturer, to cut its ties with its big motherland.

It is true that the US periodically makes a big push regarding "messaging" about hacking. Whether or not it constitutes a "propaganda campaign" depends on how we choose to interpret things and the labels we attach to them -- "propaganda campaign" has a lot of negative connotations and one person's "outreach effort" is an other's "propaganda." An ultra-nationalist or an authoritarian submissive who takes the government's word for anything would call it "outreach."

There has been an ongoing campaign on the part of the US, to get out the idea that China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran have massive armies of hackers that are constantly looking to steal American secrets. The absurdity of the US' claims is pretty obvious. As I pointed out in my book The Myth of Homeland Security (2004) [ wc ] claims such as that the Chinese had "40,000 highly trained hackers" are flat-out absurd and ignore the reality of hacking; that's four army corps. Hackers don't engage in "human wave" attacks.

"The Great US/China Cyberwar of 2010" is one cyberwar that didn't happen, but was presaged with a run-up of lots of claims that the Chinese were hacking all over the place. I'm perfectly willing to accept the possibility that there was Chinese hacking activity, but in the industry there was no indication of an additional level of attack or significance.

One thing that did happen in 2010 around the same time as the nonexistent cyberwar was China and Russia proposed trilateral talks with the US to attempt to define appropriate limits on state-sponsored hacking. The US flatly rejected the proposal, but there was virtually no coverage of that in the US media at the time. The UN also called for a cyberwar treaty framework, and the effort was killed by the US. [ wired ] What's fascinating and incomprehensible to me is that, whenever the US feels that its ability to claim pre-emptive cyberwar is challenged, it responds with a wave of claims about Chinese (or Russian or North Korean) cyberwar aggression.

John Negroponte, former director of US intelligence, said intelligence agencies in the major powers would be the first to "express reservations" about such an accord.

US ideology is that "we don't start wars" -- it's always looking for an excuse to go to war under the rubric of self-defense, so I see these sorts of claims as justification in advance for unilateral action. I also see it as a sign of weakness; if the US were truly the superpower it claims it is, it would simply accept its imperial mantle and stop bothering to try to justify anything. I'm afraid we may be getting close to that point.

My assumption has always been that the US is projecting its own actions on other nations. At the time when the US was talking the loudest about Chinese cyberwar, the US and Israel had launched STUXNET against the Iranian enrichment plant at Natanz, and the breeder reactor at Bushehr (which happens to be just outside of a large city; the attack took some of its control systems and backup generators offline). Attacks on nuclear power facilities are a war crime under international humanitarian law, which framework the US is signatory to but has not committed to actually follow. This sort of activity happens at the same time that the US distributes talking-points to the media about the danger of Russian hackers crashing the US power grid. I don't think we can psychoanalyze an entire government and I think psychoanalysis is mostly nonsense -- but it's tempting to accuse the US of "projection."

The anti-Russian campaign is about alleged Russian spying, hacking and influence operations. Britain and the Netherland took the lead. Britain accused Russia's military intelligence service (GRU) of spying attempts against the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in The Hague and Switzerland, of spying attempts against the British Foreign Office, of influence campaigns related to European and the U.S. elections, and of hacking the international doping agency WADA. British media willingly helped to exaggerate the claims: [ ]

The Netherland [sic] for its part released a flurry of information about the alleged spying attempts against the OPCW in The Hague. It claims that four GRU agents traveled to The Hague on official Russian diplomatic passports to sniff out the WiFi network of the OPCW. (WiFi networks are notoriously easy to hack. If the OPCW is indeed using such it should not be trusted with any security relevant issues.) The Russian officials were allegedly very secretive, even cleaning out their own hotel trash, while they, at the same, time carried laptops with private data and even taxi receipts showing their travel from a GRU headquarter in Moscow to the airport. Like in the Skripal/Novichok saga the Russian spies are, at the same time, portrayed as supervillains and hapless amateurs. Real spies are neither.

The U.S. Justice Department added to the onslaught by issuing new indictments (pdf) against alleged GRU agents dubiously connected to several alleged hacking incidents . As none of those Russians will ever stand in front of a U.S. court the broad allegations will never be tested.

There's a lot there, and I think the interpretation is a bit over-wrought, but it's mostly accurate. The US and the UK (and other NATO allies, as necessary) clearly coordinate when it comes to talking points. Claims of Chinese cyberwar in the US press will be followed by claims in the UK and Australian press, as well. My suspicion is that this is not the US Government and UK Government coordinating a story -- it's the intelligence agencies doing it. My opinion is that the intelligence services are fairly close to a "deep state" -- the CIA and NSA are completely out of control and the CIA has gone far toward building its own military, while the NSA has implemented completely unrestricted surveillance worldwide.

All of this stuff happens against the backdrop of Klein, Binney, Snowden, and the Vault 7 revelations, as well as solid attribution identifying the NSA as "equation group" and linking the code-tree of NSA-developed malware to STUXNET, FLAME, and DUQU. While the attribution that "Fancy Bear is the GRU" has been made and is probably fairly solid, the attribution of NSA malware and CIA malware is rock solid; the US has even admitted to deploying STUXNET -- Obama bragged about it. When Snowden's revelations outlined how the NSA had eavesdropped on Angela Merkel's cellphone, the Germans expressed shock and Barack Obama remarkably truthfully said "that's how these things are done" and blew the whole thing off by saying that the NSA wasn't eavesdropping on Merkel any more. [ bbc ]

It's hard to keep score because everything is pretty vague, but it sounds like the US has been dramatically out-spending and out-acting the other nations that it accuses of being prepared for cyberwar. I tend to be extremely skeptical of US claims because: bomber gap, missile gap, gulf of Tonkin, Iraq WMD, Afghanistan, Libya and every other aggressive attack by the US which was blamed on its target. The reason I assume the US is the most aggressive actor in cyberspace is because the US has done a terrible job of protecting its tool-sets and operational security: it's hard not to see the US is prepared for cyberwar, when both the NSA and the CIA leak massive collections of advanced tools.

Meanwhile, where are the leaks of Russian and Chinese tools? They have been few and far between, if there have been any at all. Does this mean that the Russians and Chinese have amazingly superior tradecraft, if not tools? I don't know. My observation is that the NSA and CIA have been horribly sloppy and have clearly spent a gigantic amount of money preparing to compromise both foreign and domestic systems -- that's bad enough. With friends like the NSA and CIA, who needs Russians and Chinese?

The article does not have great depth to its understanding of the situation, I'm afraid. So it comes off as a bit heavy on the recent news while ignoring the long-term trends. For example:

The allegations of Chinese supply chain attacks are of course just as hypocritical as the allegations against Russia. The very first know case of computer related supply chain manipulation goes back to 1982 :

A CIA operation to sabotage Soviet industry by duping Moscow into stealing booby-trapped software was spectacularly successful when it triggered a huge explosion in a Siberian gas pipeline, it emerged yesterday.

I wrote a piece about the "Farewell Dossier" in 2004. [ mjr ] Re-reading it, it comes off as skeptical but waffly. I think that it's self-promotion by the CIA and exaggerates considerably ("look how clever we are!") at a time when the CIA was suffering an attention and credibility deficit after its shitshow performance under George Tenet. But the first known cases of computer related supply chain manipulation go back to the 70s and 80s -- the NSA even compromised Crypto AG's Hagelin M-209 system (a mechanical ciphering machine) in order to read global communications encrypted with that product. You can imagine Crypto AG's surprise when the Iranian secret police arrested one of their sales reps for selling backdoor'd crypto -- the NSA had never told them about the backdoor, naturally. The CIA was also on record for producing Xerox machines destined for the USSR, which had recorders built into them So, while the article is portraying the historical sweep of NSA dirty tricks, they're only looking at the recent ones. Remember: the NSA also weakened the elliptic curve crypto library in RSA's Bsafe implementation, paying RSADSI $13 million to accept their tweaked code.

Why haven't we been hearing about the Chinese and Russians doing that sort of thing? There are four options:

  1. The Russians and Chinese are doing it, they're just so darned good nobody has caught them until just recently.
  2. The Russians and Chinese simply resort to using existing tools developed by the hacking/cybercrime community and rely on great operational security rather than fancy tools.
  3. The Russian and Chinese efforts are relatively tiny compared to the massive efforts the US expends tens of billions of dollars on. The US spends about $50bn on its intelligence agencies, while the entire Russian Department of Defense budget is about $90bn (China is around $139bn) -- maybe the Russians and Chinese have such a small footprint because they are much smaller operations?
  4. Something else.

That brings us to the recent kerfuffle about taps on the Supermicro motherboards. That's not unbelievable at all -- not in a world where we discover that Intel has built a parallel management CPU into every CPU since 2008, and that there is solid indications that other processors have similar backdoors.

Was the Intel IME a "backdoor" or just "a bad idea"? Well, that's tricky. Let me put my tinfoil hat on: making a backdoor look like a sloppily developed product feature would be the competent way to write a backdoor. Making it as sneaky as the backdoor in the Via is unnecessary -- incompetence is eminently believable.

&

(kaspersky)

I believe all of these stories (including the Supermicro) are the tip of a great big, ugly iceberg. The intelligence community has long known that software-only solutions are too mutable, and are easy to decompile and figure out. They have wanted to be in the BIOS of systems -- on the motherboard -- for a long time. If you go back to 2014, we have disclosures about the NSA malware that hides in hard drive BIOS: [ vice ] [ vice ] That appears to have been in progress around 2000/2001.

Of note, the group recovered two modules belonging to EquationDrug and GrayFish that were used to reprogram hard drives to give the attackers persistent control over a target machine. These modules can target practically every hard drive manufacturer and brand on the market, including Seagate, Western Digital, Samsung, Toshiba, Corsair, Hitachi and more. Such attacks have traditionally been difficult to pull off, given the risk in modifying hard drive software, which may explain why Kaspersky could only identify a handful of very specific targets against which the attack was used, where the risk was worth the reward.

But Equation Group's malware platforms have other tricks, too. GrayFish, for example, also has the ability to install itself into computer's boot record -- software that loads even before the operating system itself -- and stores all of its data inside a portion of the operating system called the registry, where configuration data is normally stored.

EquationDrug was designed for use on older Windows operating systems, and "some of the plugins were designed originally for use on Windows 95/98/ME" -- versions of Windows so old that they offer a good indication of the Equation Group's age.

This is not a very good example of how to establish a "malware gap" since it just makes the NSA look like they are incapable of keeping a secret. If you want an idea how bad it is, Kaspersky labs' analysis of the NSA's toolchain is a good example of how to do attribution correctly. Unfortunately for the US agenda, that solid attribution points toward Fort Meade in Maryland. [kaspersky]

Let me be clear: I think we are fucked every which way from the start. With backdoors in the BIOS, backdoors on the CPU, and wireless cellular-spectrum backdoors, there are probably backdoors in the GPUs and the physical network controllers, as well. Maybe the backdoors in the GPU come from the GRU and maybe the backdoors in the hard drives come from NSA, but who cares? The upshot is that all of our systems are so heinously compromised that they can only be considered marginally reliable. It is, literally, not your computer: it's theirs. They'll let you use it so long as your information is interesting to them.

Do I believe the Chinese are capable of doing such a thing? Of course. Is the GRU? Probably. Mossad? Sure. NSA? Well-documented attribution points toward NSA. Your computer is a free-fire zone. It has been since the mid 1990s, when the NSA was told "no" on the Clipper chip and decided to come up with its own Plan B, C, D, and E. Then, the CIA came up with theirs. Etc. There are probably so many backdoors in our systems that it's a miracle it works at all.

From my 2012 RSA conference lecture "Cyberwar, you're doing it wrong."

The problem is that playing in this space is the purview of governments. Nobody in the cybercrime or hacking world need tools like these. The intelligence operatives have huge budgets, compared to a typical company's security budget, and it's unreasonable to expect any business to invest such a level of effort on defending itself. So what should companies do? They should do exactly what they are doing: expect the government to deal with it; that's what governments are for. The problem with that strategy is that their government isn't on their side, either! It's Hobbes' playground.

In case you think I am engaging in hyperbole, I assure you I am not. If you want another example of the lengths (and willingness to bypass the law) "they" are willing to go, consider 'stingrays' that are in operation in every major US city and outside of every interesting hotel and high tech park. Those devices are not passive -- they actively inject themselves into the call set-up between your phone and your carrier -- your data goes through the stingray, or it doesn't go at all. If there are multiple stingrays, then your latency goes through the roof. "They" don't care. Are the stingrays NSA, FBI, CIA, Mossad, GRU, or PLA? Probably a bit of all of the above depending on where and when.

Whenever the US gets caught with its pants down around its ankles, it blames the Chinese or the Russians because they have done a good job of building the idea that the most serious hackers on the planet at the Chinese. I don't believe that we're seeing complex propaganda campaigns that are tied to specific incidents -- I think we see ongoing organic propaganda campaigns that all serve the same end: protect the agencies, protect their budgets, justify their existence, and downplay their incompetence.

So, with respect to "propaganda" I would say that the US intelligence community has been consistently pushing a propaganda agenda against the US government, and the citizens in order to justify its actions and defend its budget.

The government also engages in propaganda, and is influenced by the intelligence community's propaganda as well. And the propaganda campaigns work because everyone involved assumes, "well, given what the NSA has been able to do, I should assume the Chinese can do likewise." That's a perfectly reasonable assumption and I think it's probably true that the Chinese have capabilities. The situation is what Chuck Spinney calls "A self-licking ice cream cone" -- it's a justifying structure that makes participation in endless aggression seem like a sensible thing to do. And, when there's inevitably a disaster, it's going to be like a cyber-9/11 and will serve as a justification for even more unrestrained aggression.

Want to see what it looks like? A thousand thanks to Commentariat member [redacted] for this link. If you don't like video, there's an article here. [ toms ]

https://www.youtube.com/embed/_eSAF_qT_FY

Is this an NSA backdoor, or normal incompetence? Is Intel Management Engine an NSA-inspired backdoor, or did some system engineers at Intel think that was a good idea? There are other scary indications of embedded compromise: the CIA's Vault7 archive included code that appeared to be intended to embed in the firmware of "smart" flatscreen TVs. That would make every LG flat panel in every hotel room, a listening device just waiting to be turned on.

We know the Chinese didn't do that particular bug but why wouldn't they do something similar, in something else? China is the world's oldest mature culture -- they literally wrote the book on strategy -- Americans acting as though it's a great surprise to learn that the Chinese are not stupid, it's just the parochialism of a 250 year-old culture looking at a 3,000 year-old culture and saying "wow, you guys haven't been asleep at the switch after all!"

WIRED on cyberspace treaties [ wired ]

Comments

  1. Pierce R. Butler says

    October 6, 2018 at 1:31 pm

    What little I've been able to find out the new Trump™ cybersecurity plan is that it doesn't involve any defense, just massive retribution against (perceived) foes.

    Funny how those obsessed with "false flag" operations work so hard to invite more of same.

  2. Marcus Ranum says

    October 6, 2018 at 2:28 pm

    Pierce R. Butler@#1:
    What little I've been able to find out the new Trump™ cybersecurity plan is that it doesn't involve any defense, just massive retribution against (perceived) foes.

    Yes. Since 2001, as far as most of us can tell, federal cybersecurity spend has been 80% offense, 20% defense. And a lot of the offensive spend has been aimed at We, The People.

  3. Cat Mara says

    October 6, 2018 at 5:20 pm

    Your mention of Operation Sundevil and Kevin Mitnick in a previous post made me think that maybe the reason we haven't seen the kind of leaks from the Russian and Chinese hacking operations that we've seem from the NSA is that they're running a "Kevin Mitnick style" operation; that is, relying less on technical solutions and using instead old-fashioned "social engineering" and other low-tech forms of espionage (like running troll farms on social media). I mean, I've seen interviews with retired US intelligence people since the 90s complain that since the late 1980s, the intelligence agencies have been crippled by management in love with hi-tech "SIGINT" solutions to problems that never deliver and neglecting old-fashioned "HUMINT" intelligence-gathering.

    The thing is, Kevin Mitnick got away with a lot of what he did because people didn't take security seriously then, and still don't. On a similar nostalgia vibe, I remember reading an article by Keith Bostic (one of the researchers who helped in the analysis of the Morris worm that took down a significant chunk of the Internet back in 1988) where he did a follow-up a year or so afterwards and some depressing number of organisations that had been hit by it still hadn't patched the holes that had let the worm infect them in the first place.

  4. Marcus Ranum says

    October 6, 2018 at 9:20 pm

    Cat Mara@#3:
    Your mention of Operation Sundevil and Kevin Mitnick in a previous post made me think that maybe the reason we haven't seen the kind of leaks from the Russian and Chinese hacking operations that we've seem from the NSA is that they're running a "Kevin Mitnick style" operation; that is, relying less on technical solutions and using instead old-fashioned "social engineering" and other low-tech forms of espionage (like running troll farms on social media).

    I think that's right, to a high degree. What if Edward Snowden was an agent provocateur instead of a well-meaning naive kid? A tremendous amount of damage could be done, as well as stealing the US' expensive toys. The Russians have been very good at doing exactly that sort of operation, since WWII. The Chinese are, if anything, more subtle than the Russians.

    The Chinese attitude, as expressed to me by someone who might be a credible source is, "why are you picking a fight with us? We don't care, you're too far away for us to threaten you, we both have loads of our own fish to fry. To them, the US is young, hyperactive, and stupid.

    The FBI is not competent, at all, against old-school humint intelligence-gathering. Compared to the US' cyber-toys, the old ways are probably more efficient and cost effective. China's intelligence community is also much more team-oriented than the CIA/NSA; they're actually a disciplined operation under the strategic control of policy-makers. That, by the way, is why Russians and Chinese stare in amazement when Americans ask things like "Do you think Putin knew about this?" What a stupid question! It's an autocracy; they don't have intelligence operatives just going an deciding "it's a nice day to go to England with some Novichok." The entire American attitude toward espionage lacks maturity.

    On a similar nostalgia vibe, I remember reading an article by Keith Bostic (one of the researchers who helped in the analysis of the Morris worm that took down a significant chunk of the Internet back in 1988) where he did a follow-up a year or so afterwards and some depressing number of organisations that had been hit by it still hadn't patched the holes that had let the worm infect them in the first place.

    That as an exciting time. We were downstream from University of Maryland, which got hit pretty badly. Pete Cottrel and Chris Torek from UMD were also in on Bostic's dissection. We were doing uucp over TCP for our email (that changed pretty soon after the worm) and our uucp queue blew up. I cured the worm with a reboot into single-user mode and a quick 'rm -f' in the uucp queue.

  5. Bob Moore says

    October 7, 2018 at 9:18 am

    Thanks. I appreciate your measured analysis and the making explicit of the bottom line: " agencies, protect their budgets, justify their existence, and downplay their incompetence."

[Sep 23, 2018] UK Begged Trump Not To Declassify Russia Docs; Cited Grave Concerns Over Steele Involvement

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Steele also had extensive contacts with DOJ official Bruce Ohr and his wife Nellie, who - along with Steele - was paid by opposition research firm Fusion GPS in the anti-Trump campaign. Trump called for the declassification of FBI notes of interviews with Ohr, which would ostensibly reveal more about his relationship with Steele. Ohr was demoted twice within the Department of Justice for lying about his contacts with Fusion GPS. ..."
"... Perhaps the Brits are also concerned since much of the espionage performed on the Trump campaign was conducted on UK soil throughout 2016 . Recall that Trump aid George Papadopoulos was lured to London in March, 2016, where Maltese professor Joseph Mifsud fed him the rumor that Russia had dirt on Hillary Clinton. It was later at a London bar that Papadopoulos would drunkenly pass the rumor to Australian diplomat Alexander Downer (who Strzok flew to London to meet with). ..."
"... Papadopoulos accepted a flight to London and a $3,000 honorarium. He claims that during a meeting in London, Halper asked him whether he knew anything about Russian hacking of Democrats' emails. ..."
"... Papadopoulos had other contacts on British soil that he now believes were part of a government-sanctioned surveillance operation. - Daily Caller ..."
"... In total, Halper received over $1 million from the Obama Pentagon for "research," over $400,000 of which was granted before and during the 2016 election season. ..."
"... In short, it's understandable that the UK would prefer to hide their involvement in the "witch hunt" of Donald Trump since much of the counterintelligence investigation was conducted on UK soil. And if the Brits had knowledge of the operation, it will bolster claims that they meddled in the 2016 US election by assisting what appears to have been a set-up from the start . ..."
"... Steele's ham-handed dossier is a mere embarrassment, as virtually none of the claims asserted by the former MI6 agent have been proven true. ..."
"... Steele, a former MI6 agent, is the author of the infamous and unverified anti-Trump dossier. He worked as a confidential human source for the FBI for years before the relationship was severed just before the election because of Steele's unauthorized contacts with the press. ..."
"... That said, Steele hasn't worked for the British government since 2009, so for their excuse focusing on the former MI6 agent while ignoring the multitude of events which occurred on UK soil, is curious. ..."
"... I find it interesting that the Theresa May Govt in UK has the temerity to interfere with US politics (until they got caught out!), yet can't find the spine to stand up to the EU. ..."
"... THE UNITED KINGDOM along with ISRAEL & SAUDI ARABIA have always been the ones behind US Politics making, pulling the strings behind the curtains since the Petrodollar Inception, The Greater Israel project & the NWO initiative - only this time around Trump was not the UK's pick... ..."
"... England dominates the offshore money laundering havens where the super rich hide their money and evade taxes. They need to be brought down. No more African dictators looting their nation's resources and hiding the money first in offshore banks and then in JP Morgan and Brit banks. ..."
"... It is a test. If Trump doesn't go ahead with declassification, we know for sure he is no better than the globalists and neocons whose goal has always been to destroy and depopulate America. ..."
"... 'focusing on the former MI6 agent while ignoring the multitude of events which occurred on UK soil, is curious' ..."
"... Not at all. It's obvious - the problem ISN'T Steele. They're living in fear, as are many in DC and elsewhere, that Trump is going to pry the lid open and reveal at least some of their activities. If killing him would fix the problem, they would. It's too late, considering what Trump is threatening to do. I wonder if he'll back down, at least some? ..."
"... U.K. does not want the jurisdiction. U.S. spies lure you overseas then...compromise you. ..."
"... Duh. This Started In London! Britain is the "foreign country" involved in our elections. Wake up everyone. It's LONDONGATE ..."
"... May gonna owe Vlad an apology when Skripal is revealed to be Steele's source. Steele himself hadn't been to Russian in 15 years. Will he get life in prison for attempted murder? ..."
"... "t's hard to tell who's telling the truth and who isn't in this whole Russia narrative. Fact is, NOBODY is telling the truth. That is what I've determined after doing my own research.": https://youtu.be/2AA5BIfGj3g ..."
"... Trump made promises before being elected, then lied and sold America out, just like every other corrupted assklown politician. he is no different than clinton bush obama, just as arrogant, just as corrupt, and just as much a traitor. ..."
Sep 23, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

UK Begged Trump Not To Declassify Russia Docs; Cited "Grave Concerns" Over Steele Involvement

by Tyler Durden Sun, 09/23/2018 - 11:15 4.6K SHARES

The British government "expressed grave concerns" to the US government over the declassification and release of material related to the Trump-Russia investigation, according to the New York Times . President Trump ordered a wide swath of materials "immediately" declassified "without redaction" on Monday, only to change his mind later in the week by allowing the DOJ Inspector General to review the materials first.

The Times reports that the UK's concern was over material which "includes direct references to conversations between American law enforcement officials and Christopher Steele," the former MI6 agent who compiled the infamous "Steele Dossier." The UK's objection, according to former US and British officials, was over revealing Steele's identity in an official document, "regardless of whether he had been named in press reports."

We would note, however, that Steele's name was contained within the Nunes Memo - the House Intelligence Committee's majority opinion in the Trump-Russia case.

Steele also had extensive contacts with DOJ official Bruce Ohr and his wife Nellie, who - along with Steele - was paid by opposition research firm Fusion GPS in the anti-Trump campaign. Trump called for the declassification of FBI notes of interviews with Ohr, which would ostensibly reveal more about his relationship with Steele. Ohr was demoted twice within the Department of Justice for lying about his contacts with Fusion GPS.

Perhaps the Brits are also concerned since much of the espionage performed on the Trump campaign was conducted on UK soil throughout 2016 . Recall that Trump aid George Papadopoulos was lured to London in March, 2016, where Maltese professor Joseph Mifsud fed him the rumor that Russia had dirt on Hillary Clinton. It was later at a London bar that Papadopoulos would drunkenly pass the rumor to Australian diplomat Alexander Downer (who Strzok flew to London to meet with).

Also recall that CIA/FBI "informant" (spy) Stefan Halper met with both Carter Page and Papadopoulos in London.

Halper, a veteran of four Republican administrations, reached out to Trump aide George Papadopoulos in September 2016 with an offer to fly to London to write an academic paper on energy exploration in the Mediterranean Sea.

Papadopoulos accepted a flight to London and a $3,000 honorarium. He claims that during a meeting in London, Halper asked him whether he knew anything about Russian hacking of Democrats' emails.

Papadopoulos had other contacts on British soil that he now believes were part of a government-sanctioned surveillance operation. - Daily Caller

In total, Halper received over $1 million from the Obama Pentagon for "research," over $400,000 of which was granted before and during the 2016 election season.

In short, it's understandable that the UK would prefer to hide their involvement in the "witch hunt" of Donald Trump since much of the counterintelligence investigation was conducted on UK soil. And if the Brits had knowledge of the operation, it will bolster claims that they meddled in the 2016 US election by assisting what appears to have been a set-up from the start .

Steele's ham-handed dossier is a mere embarrassment, as virtually none of the claims asserted by the former MI6 agent have been proven true.

Steele, a former MI6 agent, is the author of the infamous and unverified anti-Trump dossier. He worked as a confidential human source for the FBI for years before the relationship was severed just before the election because of Steele's unauthorized contacts with the press.

He shared results of his investigation into Trump's links to Russia with the FBI beginning in early July 2016.

The FBI relied heavily on the unverified Steele dossier to fill out applications for four FISA warrants against Page. Page has denied the dossier's claims, which include that he was the Trump campaign's back channel to the Kremlin. - Daily Caller

That said, Steele hasn't worked for the British government since 2009, so for their excuse focusing on the former MI6 agent while ignoring the multitude of events which occurred on UK soil, is curious.

StychoKiller , 54 minutes ago

I find it interesting that the Theresa May Govt in UK has the temerity to interfere with US politics (until they got caught out!), yet can't find the spine to stand up to the EU. If I were Trump, not only would the shoe be dropping re: UK Govt involvement in US politics, but said shoe would be making an imprint across her face! (stoopid twat!)

texantim , 1 hour ago

I say release the docs and put sanctions on UK.

BitchesBetterRecognize , 1 hour ago

So the Motherland ******* up with the ex-colony yet again, huh?

THE UNITED KINGDOM along with ISRAEL & SAUDI ARABIA have always been the ones behind US Politics making, pulling the strings behind the curtains since the Petrodollar Inception, The Greater Israel project & the NWO initiative - only this time around Trump was not the UK's pick...

Oh, but those "civilized" Allies backstabbing each other for more power grip on the USA....

Baron von Bud , 2 hours ago

England dominates the offshore money laundering havens where the super rich hide their money and evade taxes. They need to be brought down. No more African dictators looting their nation's resources and hiding the money first in offshore banks and then in JP Morgan and Brit banks.

Many hedge funds are deep into this game. I'd wager on Carlyle Group and the Bush clan. Billions of people can't get ahead because the super rich are ******* crooks running the banks and governments. They don't pay taxes but force a small dry cleaner to pay 45% in fed/state taxes. These criminals include Hillary Clinton and many members of congress. Feinstein, Pelosi, Maxine and many more of both parties need to be investigated. How do they get so rich on a congressman's salary. Deep into tax evasion and payoffs? Release the documents and let MI6 hang.

Malvern Joe , 3 hours ago

It is a test. If Trump doesn't go ahead with declassification, we know for sure he is no better than the globalists and neocons whose goal has always been to destroy and depopulate America. It would represent the biggest sellout of this country since the creation of the Fed in 1913, He will go down as the biggest fraud ever and his base will deport his *** to the sums of India where he can defecate in public.

Bricker , 3 hours ago

You dont get to supply a rogue agent, that was probably told to do it in the first place, and then tell Trump not to do it out of harm, harm is all you BRIT DEEP STATES deserve

Moving and Grooving , 3 hours ago

'focusing on the former MI6 agent while ignoring the multitude of events which occurred on UK soil, is curious'

Not at all. It's obvious - the problem ISN'T Steele. They're living in fear, as are many in DC and elsewhere, that Trump is going to pry the lid open and reveal at least some of their activities. If killing him would fix the problem, they would. It's too late, considering what Trump is threatening to do. I wonder if he'll back down, at least some?

The sheer corruption of the Global Government is on display here, revealing itself, if you watch for it. Whether planned or not, the last 6 months or so have been astonishing to watch. The entire media has been shown to be liars, academia is shown to be an expensive provider of unprepared students, the corporate world is furiously rent-seeking and finding new ways to destroy humanity, and government is too busy selling Americans out to write a budget. In all countries around the world, adjusting for national status. Lawsuits in the west, machetes in the third world.

Ban KKiller , 4 hours ago

U.K. does not want the jurisdiction. U.S. spies lure you overseas then...compromise you.

John C Durham , 4 hours ago

Duh. This Started In London! Britain is the "foreign country" involved in our elections. Wake up everyone. It's LONDONGATE .

Anunnaki , 4 hours ago

May gonna owe Vlad an apology when Skripal is revealed to be Steele's source. Steele himself hadn't been to Russian in 15 years. Will he get life in prison for attempted murder?

PeaceForWorld , 4 hours ago

"t's hard to tell who's telling the truth and who isn't in this whole Russia narrative. Fact is, NOBODY is telling the truth. That is what I've determined after doing my own research.": https://youtu.be/2AA5BIfGj3g

I really like this woman "Shut the **** up!". She is a former Bernie supporter just like me. She has turned against Democrats just like me. She doesn't trust any of the Establishment parties.

Buddha71 , 4 hours ago

Trump made promises before being elected, then lied and sold America out, just like every other corrupted assklown politician. he is no different than clinton bush obama, just as arrogant, just as corrupt, and just as much a traitor. he has broken the promises upon which he was elected, just like all the other fkn liars before him. no different. just a pos. he has not made america great again, just more of the same, unemployment is a lie, it is closer to 17%.

[Sep 21, 2018] One party state: Trump's 'Opposition' Supports All His Evil Agendas While Attacking Fake Nonsence by Caitlin Johnstone

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... If the so-called "Resistance" to Trump was ever actually interested in opposing this administration in any meaningful way, this would be the top trending news story in America for days, like how "bombshell" revelations pertaining to the made-up Russiagate narrative trend for days. Spoiler alert: it isn't, and it won't be. ..."
"... The US Senate has just passed Trump's mammoth military spending increase by a landslide 92–8 vote . The eight senators who voted "nay"? Seven Republicans, and Independent Bernie Sanders. Every single Democrat supported the most bloated war budget since the height of the Iraq war . Rather than doing everything they can to weaken the potential damage that can be done by a president they've been assuring us is a dangerous hybrid of equal parts Benedict Arnold and Adolf Hitler, they've been actively increasing his power as Commander-in-Chief of the most powerful military force the world has ever seen. ..."
"... They're on the same team, wearing different uniforms. ..."
"... US politics is pretty much the same; two mainstream parties owned by the same political class, engaged in a staged bidding war for votes to give the illusion of competition. ..."
"... In reality, the US political system is like the unplugged video game remote that kids give their baby brother so he stops whining that he wants a turn to play. No matter who they vote for they get an Orwellian warmongering government which exists solely to advance the agendas of a plutocratic class which has no loyalties to any nation; the only difference is sometimes that government is pretending to care about women and minorities and sometimes it's pretending to care about white men. In reality, all the jewelers work for the same plutocrat, and that video game remote won't impact the outcome of the game no matter how many buttons you push. ..."
"... The only way to effect real change is to stop playing along with the rigged system and start waking people up to the lies. As long as Americans believe that the mass media are telling them the truth about their country and their partisan votes are going somewhere useful, the populace whose numbers should give it immense influence is nullified and sedated into a passive ride toward war, ecocide and oppression. ..."
"... Reprinted with author's permission from Medium.com . ..."
"... Support Ms. Johnstone's work on Patreon or Paypal ..."
Sep 21, 2018 | ronpaulinstitute.org

A new article from the Wall Street Journal reports that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo lied to congress about the measures Saudi Arabia is taking to minimize the civilian casualties in its catastrophic war on Yemen, and that he did so in order to secure two billion dollars for war profiteers.

This is about as depraved as anything you could possibly imagine. US-made bombs have been conclusively tied to civilian deaths in a war which has caused the single worst humanitarian crisis on earth, a crisis which sees scores of Yemeni children dying every single day and has placed five million children at risk of death by starvation in a nation where families are now eating leaves to survive . CIA veteran Bruce Riedel once said that "if the United States of America and the United Kingdom tonight told King Salman that this war has to end, it would end tomorrow, because the Royal Saudi Airforce cannot operate without American and British support." Nobody other than war plutocrats benefits from the US assisting Saudi Arabia in its monstrous crimes against humanity, and yet Pompeo chose to override his own expert advisors on the matter for fear of hurting the income of those very war plutocrats.

If the so-called "Resistance" to Trump was ever actually interested in opposing this administration in any meaningful way, this would be the top trending news story in America for days, like how "bombshell" revelations pertaining to the made-up Russiagate narrative trend for days. Spoiler alert: it isn't, and it won't be.

It would be so very, very easy for Democratic party leaders and Democrat-aligned media to hurt this administration at the highest level and cause irreparable political damage based on this story. All they'd have to do is give it the same blanket coverage they've given the stories about Michael Flynn, George Papadopoulos and Paul Manafort which end up leading nowhere remotely near impeachment or proof of collusion with the Russian government. The footage of the starving children is right there, ready to be aired to pluck at the heart strings of rank-and-file Americans day after day until Republicans have lost all hope of victory in the midterms and in 2020; all they'd have to do is use it. But they don't. And they won't.

The US Senate has just passed Trump's mammoth military spending increase by a landslide 92–8 vote . The eight senators who voted "nay"? Seven Republicans, and Independent Bernie Sanders. Every single Democrat supported the most bloated war budget since the height of the Iraq war . Rather than doing everything they can to weaken the potential damage that can be done by a president they've been assuring us is a dangerous hybrid of equal parts Benedict Arnold and Adolf Hitler, they've been actively increasing his power as Commander-in-Chief of the most powerful military force the world has ever seen.

The reason for this is very simple: President Trump's ostensible political opposition does not oppose President Trump. They're on the same team, wearing different uniforms. This is the reason they attack him on Russian collusion accusations which the brighter bulbs among them know full well will never be proven and have no basis in reality. They don't stand up to Trump because, as Julian Assange once said , they are Trump.

In John Steinbeck's The Pearl, there are jewelry buyers set up around a fishing community which are all owned by the same plutocrat, but they all pretend to be in competition with one another. When the story's protagonist discovers an enormous and valuable pearl and goes to sell it, they all gather round and individually bid far less than it is worth in order to trick him into giving it away for almost nothing. US politics is pretty much the same; two mainstream parties owned by the same political class, engaged in a staged bidding war for votes to give the illusion of competition.

In reality, the US political system is like the unplugged video game remote that kids give their baby brother so he stops whining that he wants a turn to play. No matter who they vote for they get an Orwellian warmongering government which exists solely to advance the agendas of a plutocratic class which has no loyalties to any nation; the only difference is sometimes that government is pretending to care about women and minorities and sometimes it's pretending to care about white men. In reality, all the jewelers work for the same plutocrat, and that video game remote won't impact the outcome of the game no matter how many buttons you push.

The only way to effect real change is to stop playing along with the rigged system and start waking people up to the lies. As long as Americans believe that the mass media are telling them the truth about their country and their partisan votes are going somewhere useful, the populace whose numbers should give it immense influence is nullified and sedated into a passive ride toward war, ecocide and oppression.

If enough of us keep throwing sand in the gears of the lie factory, we can wake the masses up from the oligarchic lullaby they're being sung. And then maybe we'll be big enough to have a shot at grabbing one of the real video game controllers.

Reprinted with author's permission from Medium.com .

Support Ms. Johnstone's work on Patreon or Paypal

[Sep 16, 2018] Perils of Ineptitude by Andrew Levin

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... There is less shame in being undone by a "master of deceit." When J. Edgar Hoover coined that description, he had Communists in mind. Back then, though, "Ruskies" and "Commies" – it was all the same. Americans were conditioned to live in fear that the Russians were coming. ..."
"... That nonsense should have ended when Communism more or less officially expired in 1989, followed two years later by the demise of the Soviet Union itself. For a long time, it seemed that it had. At first, the reaction in Western, especially American, political and media circles was triumphalist. The war was over and our side won. Beneath the surface, however, there was mourning in America. ..."
"... With the Cold War, the death merchants, the masters of war, the neocons, and a host of others had had a good thing going. Having been born into it, the political class was comfortable with the status quo too; and generations of Americans had grown up imbibing Russophobia in their mother's milk (or infant formula). ..."
"... Before long, it became clear that our economic and political masters had nothing to worry about, that Cold War anti-Communism was more robust than Communism itself. ..."
"... That suited Bill Clinton and his First Lady, the former Goldwater Girl. Boris Yeltsin, Russia's leader, was their man. He was a godsend, a Trump-like cartoon character and a drunkard to boot – with an economy in tatters, and no rightwing base egging him on. ..."
"... The time was therefore right for a return of the repressed -- for full-blooded, fifties-style, anti-Communist (= anti-Russian) hysteria, or, since that still seemed far-fetched, for anti-Communist (= anti-Chinese) hysteria. ..."
"... Exactly what "Putin," the shorthand name for all that is Russian and nefarious, did, or is still doing, remains unclear. But this does not seem to bother purveyors of the conventional wisdom. Neither is ostensibly informed public opinion fazed by the fact that the evidence supporting the consensus view comes mainly from American intelligence services and from their counterparts in the UK and other allied nations. ..."
"... How ironic therefore that nowadays it is mainly bamboozled Trump supporters in the Fox News demographic -- people who could care less about peace or, for that matter, about truth -- who are wary of the CIA and skeptical of the FBI's claims! ..."
"... They do not even seem to notice that what they allege, vague as it is, is trifling compared to the massive and very open meddling of American plutocrats, Republican vote suppressers and gerrymanderers, and the governments of supposedly friendly nations – like Saudi Arabia, the Gulf monarchies, and Israel ..."
"... Cold War revivalists can therefore rest easy, confident that their propagandists will have at least a few facts with which they can work to restore the perils of their vanished youth. ..."
"... Even so, the level of their hypocrisy is appalling. Russia, along with former Soviet republics and former members of the Warsaw Pact, has been bearing the brunt of far worse American meddling for far longer than anything sanctimonious defenders of so-called American "democracy" can plausibly allege. ..."
"... Hypocrisy reigns here too. It was the Obama administration – run through with neocons, liberal imperialists, and other holdovers from Hillary Clinton's tenure as Secretary of State – that did all it could to exacerbate longstanding tensions between that country's Ukrainian and Russian speaking populations, the better to complete NATO's encirclement of the Russian federation. And it was American meddling that led to the empowerment of virulently anti-Russian, fascisant Ukrainian politicians, much to the detriment of Russian speaking Ukrainians in the east. ..."
"... The Cold War that began after World War II involved a clash of rival political economic systems. The Cold War that reignited a few years ago involves a clash of rival imperialist centers. Its world more nearly resembles the one that existed before World War I than the one that emerged after World War II. ..."
"... However, the difference may be more superficial than it seems. The ease with which Cold War revivalists have been able to get the Cold War up and running again, even without Communism, suggests what a few observers have long maintained -- that the Cold War, on Russia's part, had little, if anything, to do with spreading Communism around the world, and everything to do with maintaining a cordon sanitaire around Russia's borders in order to protect against a demonstrably aggressive "free world." ..."
"... That part of Brzezinski's plan was at least a partial success. But inasmuch as Bush's "they" are still there, still spreading murder and mayhem throughout the Greater Middle East, America and the world has been paying a high price for the benefits, such as they were, that ensued. ..."
"... The never-ending wars set in motion by the "pivot" towards radical Islamism decades ago never quite succeeded in producing an enemy as serviceable as the USSR. But now that Putin's Russia has been pressed into service, that problem is potentially "solved." ..."
"... Efforts to recycle Bush's "they hate our freedom" nonsense ought to be non-starters. But this is the best Cold War revivalists have come up with so far. The Russians, they say, simply cannot deal with the fact that we Americans are so damned free. ..."
"... From a geopolitical point of view, Russia does have an interest in doing all it can to ward off Western aggression. It also has an interest in undermining strategic alliances aimed at blocking anything and everything that challenges American supremacy. And, until sanity prevails in Washington and other Western capitals, it arguably also has an interest in aiding and abetting rightwing nationalists in order to exacerbate tensions within Western societies. ..."
"... Clinton is bad, but Trump is worse -- not just by most measures but by all. Her fondness for war and preparations for war was alarming; she was bellicosity personified. But it was plain even before the election that Trump, a mentally unhinged narcissist, would be even more likely than she to bring on massive devastation. A vote for Trump was and still is a vote for catastrophe. ..."
"... For now, though, the hard and very relevant fact is that Trump has done nothing to help, and quite a few things to harm, Russia. ..."
"... It isn't just ordinary Russians who have been made worse off. Trump has been at least as hard on oligarchs close to Putin as Clinton would have been. ..."
"... If those damned Russians were half as smart as they are made out to be, they would have realized long ago that, for getting anything done that bucks the tide, Trump is too inept to be of any use at all; and that anything he sets out to do is likely to turn out badly not just for America and its allies but for Russia too. ..."
Aug 03, 2018 | www.counterpunch.org

There is less shame in being undone by a "master of deceit." When J. Edgar Hoover coined that description, he had Communists in mind. Back then, though, "Ruskies" and "Commies" – it was all the same. Americans were conditioned to live in fear that the Russians were coming.

That nonsense should have ended when Communism more or less officially expired in 1989, followed two years later by the demise of the Soviet Union itself. For a long time, it seemed that it had. At first, the reaction in Western, especially American, political and media circles was triumphalist. The war was over and our side won. Beneath the surface, however, there was mourning in America.

With the Cold War, the death merchants, the masters of war, the neocons, and a host of others had had a good thing going. Having been born into it, the political class was comfortable with the status quo too; and generations of Americans had grown up imbibing Russophobia in their mother's milk (or infant formula).

It turned out, though, that American triumphalism was only a phase. Before long, it became clear that our economic and political masters had nothing to worry about, that Cold War anti-Communism was more robust than Communism itself.

However, in the final days of Bush 41 and then at the dawn of the Clinton era, nobody knew that. Nobody gave America's propaganda system the credit it deserved.

Also, nobody quite realized how devastating Russia's regression to capitalism would be, and nobody quite grasped the savagery of the kleptocrats who had taken charge of what remained of the Russian state.

For more than a decade, the situation in that late great superpower was too dire to sustain the old fears and animosities. Capitalism had made Russia wretched again.

That suited Bill Clinton and his First Lady, the former Goldwater Girl. Boris Yeltsin, Russia's leader, was their man. He was a godsend, a Trump-like cartoon character and a drunkard to boot – with an economy in tatters, and no rightwing base egging him on.

But anti-Communism (without Communism) and its close cousin, Russophobia, could not remain in remission forever. The need for them was too great.

In the Age of Obama, the Global War on Terror, with or without that ludicrous Bush 43-era name, wasn't cutting it anymore. It was, and still is, good for keeping America's perpetual war regime going and for undoing civil liberties, but there had never been much glory in it, only endless misery for all. Also it was getting old and increasingly easy to see through.

The time was therefore right for a return of the repressed -- for full-blooded, fifties-style, anti-Communist (= anti-Russian) hysteria, or, since that still seemed far-fetched, for anti-Communist (= anti-Chinese) hysteria.

This was not the only factor behind the Obama administration's "pivot towards Asia," its largely failed attempt to take China down a notch or two, but it was an important part of the story.

However, by the time Obama and his team decided to pivot, China had become too important to the United States economically to make a good Cold War enemy. Worse still, it had for too long been an object of pity and contempt, not fear.

When the Soviet Union was an enemy, China was an enemy too, most glaringly during the Korean War. It remained an enemy even after the Sino-Soviet split became too obvious to deny. However, unlike post-1917 Russia, it had never quite become an historical foe.

Moreover, as Russia began to recover from the Yeltsin era, the Russian political class, and many of the oligarchs behind them, sensing the popular mood, decided that the time was ripe "to make Russia great again." Putin is not so much a cause as he is a symptom – and symbol – of this aspiration.

And so, there it was: the longed for new Cold War would be much like the one that seemed over a quarter century ago.

***

As everyone who has seen, heard or read anything about the 2016 election "knows," Russian intelligence services (= Putin) meddled. Everyone also "knows" that, with midterm elections looming, they are at it again.

This, according to the mainstream consensus view, is a bona fide casus belli , a justification for war. To be sure, what they want is a war that remains cold; ending life on earth, as we know it, is not on their agenda.

But inasmuch as cold wars can easily turn hot, this hardly mitigates the recklessness of their machinations. Humankind was extraordinarily lucky last time; there is no guarantee that all that luck will hold.

Exactly what "Putin," the shorthand name for all that is Russian and nefarious, did, or is still doing, remains unclear. But this does not seem to bother purveyors of the conventional wisdom. Neither is ostensibly informed public opinion fazed by the fact that the evidence supporting the consensus view comes mainly from American intelligence services and from their counterparts in the UK and other allied nations.

Time was when anyone with any sense understood that these intelligence services, the American ones especially, are second to none in meddling in the affairs of other nations, and that the American national security state – essentially our political police -- is comprised, by design, of liars and deceivers.

How ironic therefore that nowadays it is mainly bamboozled Trump supporters in the Fox News demographic -- people who could care less about peace or, for that matter, about truth -- who are wary of the CIA and skeptical of the FBI's claims!

Try as they might, the manufacturers and guardians of conventional wisdom have so far been unable to concoct a plausible story in which Russian meddling affected the outcome of the 2016 election in any serious way. The idea that the Russians defeated Hillary, not Hillary herself, is, to borrow a phrase from Jeremy Bentham, "nonsense on stilts." Leading Democrats and their media flacks don't seem to mind that either.

They do not even seem to notice that what they allege, vague as it is, is trifling compared to the massive and very open meddling of American plutocrats, Republican vote suppressers and gerrymanderers, and the governments of supposedly friendly nations – like Saudi Arabia, the Gulf monarchies, and Israel.

Nevertheless, it probably is true that the Russians meddled. Cold War revivalists can therefore rest easy, confident that their propagandists will have at least a few facts with which they can work to restore the perils of their vanished youth.

Even so, the level of their hypocrisy is appalling. Russia, along with former Soviet republics and former members of the Warsaw Pact, has been bearing the brunt of far worse American meddling for far longer than anything sanctimonious defenders of so-called American "democracy" can plausibly allege.

Moreover, it should go without saying that the democracy they purport to care so much about has almost nothing to do with "the rule of the demos." It doesn't even have much to do with free and fair competitive elections – unless "free and fair" means that anything goes, so long as the principals and perpetrators are homegrown or citizens of favored nations.

Self-righteous posturing aside, Putin's real sin in the eyes of the American power elite is that, in his own small way, he has been defying America's "right" to run the world as it sees fit.

When Clinton was president, Serbia did that, and lived to regret it. Cuba has been suffering for nearly six decades for the same reason, and now Venezuela is paying its dues. The empire is merciless towards nations that rebel.

With Soviet support and then with sheer determination and grit, Cuba has been able to withstand the onslaught to some extent from Day One. Venezuela may not be so lucky – especially now that Republicans and Democrats feel threatened by the growing number of "democratic socialists" in their midst. Already, the propaganda system is targeting Venezuelan "socialism," blaming it for that country's woes, and warning that if our newly minted, homegrown socialists prevail, a similar fate will be in store for us.

This is ludicrous, of course – American hostility and the vagaries of the global oil market deserve the lion's share of the blame. But the on-going propaganda blitz could nevertheless pave the way for horrors ahead, should Trump decide to start a war America could actually win.

Inconsequential Russian meddling is a big deal on the "liberal" cable networks, on NPR, and in the "quality" press. Democrats and a few Republicans love to bleat on about it. But it is Ukraine that made Russia our "adversary" and its president Public Enemy Number One.

Hypocrisy reigns here too. It was the Obama administration – run through with neocons, liberal imperialists, and other holdovers from Hillary Clinton's tenure as Secretary of State – that did all it could to exacerbate longstanding tensions between that country's Ukrainian and Russian speaking populations, the better to complete NATO's encirclement of the Russian federation. And it was American meddling that led to the empowerment of virulently anti-Russian, fascisant Ukrainian politicians, much to the detriment of Russian speaking Ukrainians in the east.

But never mind: Putin – that is, the Russia government – violated international law by sending troops briefly into beleaguered Russian-speaking parts of the country. That they were generally welcomed by the people living there is of no importance.

Worst of all, Russia annexed Crimea – a territory integral to the Russian empire since the eighteenth century. Since long before the Russian Revolution, Crimea has been home to a huge naval base vital to Russia's strategic defense.

The story line back in the day was that anything that could be described as Russian aggression outside the Soviet Union's agreed upon sphere of influence had to do with spreading Communism. In fact, the Soviets did everything they could to keep Communist and other insurgencies from upending the status quo. The mainstream narrative was wrong.

Now Communism is gone and nothing has taken its place. Even so, the idea that Russia has designs on its neighbors for ideological reasons is hard to shake – in part because it is actively promoted by propagandists who have suddenly and uncharacteristically become defenders of international law.

Meanwhile, of course, the hypocrisies keep piling on. It is practically a tenet of the American civil religion that international law applies to others, not to the United States. This is why, when it suits some perceived purpose, America flaunts its violations shamelessly.

Thus nothing the Russians did or are ever likely to do comes close to the shenanigans Bill Clinton displayed – successfully, for the most part – in his efforts to tear Kosovo away from Serbia. Clinton even went so far as to bomb Belgrade; Putin never bombed Kiev.

The Cold War that began after World War II involved a clash of rival political economic systems. The Cold War that reignited a few years ago involves a clash of rival imperialist centers. Its world more nearly resembles the one that existed before World War I than the one that emerged after World War II.

However, the difference may be more superficial than it seems. The ease with which Cold War revivalists have been able to get the Cold War up and running again, even without Communism, suggests what a few observers have long maintained -- that the Cold War, on Russia's part, had little, if anything, to do with spreading Communism around the world, and everything to do with maintaining a cordon sanitaire around Russia's borders in order to protect against a demonstrably aggressive "free world."

George W. Bush claimed that 9/11 happened because "they hate our freedom." "They" would be radical Islamists of the kind stirred into action in Afghanistan by Zbigniew Brzezinski and his co-thinkers in the Carter administration. Their objective was to undermine the Soviet Union by getting it bogged down in a quagmire like the one that did so much harm to the United States in Vietnam.

That part of Brzezinski's plan was at least a partial success. But inasmuch as Bush's "they" are still there, still spreading murder and mayhem throughout the Greater Middle East, America and the world has been paying a high price for the benefits, such as they were, that ensued.

The never-ending wars set in motion by the "pivot" towards radical Islamism decades ago never quite succeeded in producing an enemy as serviceable as the USSR. But now that Putin's Russia has been pressed into service, that problem is potentially "solved."

However, the American public is not as naïve as it used to be, and it is impossible to say, at this point, how well this new story line will work.

Efforts to recycle Bush's "they hate our freedom" nonsense ought to be non-starters. But this is the best Cold War revivalists have come up with so far. The Russians, they say, simply cannot deal with the fact that we Americans are so damned free.

It is hard to believe, but there are people who are actually buying this but, with a lot of corporate media assistance, there are. No matter how clear it is that they are not worth being taken seriously, Cold War mythologies just won't die.

However, it is worth pondering why today's Russia would do what it is alleged to have done; and why, as is also alleged, it is still doing it.

From a geopolitical point of view, Russia does have an interest in doing all it can to ward off Western aggression. It also has an interest in undermining strategic alliances aimed at blocking anything and everything that challenges American supremacy. And, until sanity prevails in Washington and other Western capitals, it arguably also has an interest in aiding and abetting rightwing nationalists in order to exacerbate tensions within Western societies.

However, in view of prevailing power relations, these are interests it cannot do much to advance. Acting as if this were not the case only puts Russia in a bad light -- not for meddling, but for meddling stupidly.

No doubt, for reasons both fair and foul, Putin wanted Hillary to lose the election two years ago. So, but for one little problem, would anyone whose head is screwed on right. That problem's name is Donald Trump.

Clinton is bad, but Trump is worse -- not just by most measures but by all. Her fondness for war and preparations for war was alarming; she was bellicosity personified. But it was plain even before the election that Trump, a mentally unhinged narcissist, would be even more likely than she to bring on massive devastation. A vote for Trump was and still is a vote for catastrophe.

Putin's enemy was Trump's enemy, and it is axiomatic that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" -- except sometimes it isn't. Sometimes, my enemy's enemy is an enemy far worse.

For reasons that remain obscure, Putin and Trump seem to have a "thing" going on between them. Some day perhaps we will know what that is all about. For now, though, the hard and very relevant fact is that Trump has done nothing to help, and quite a few things to harm, Russia.

It isn't just ordinary Russians who have been made worse off. Trump has been at least as hard on oligarchs close to Putin as Clinton would have been.

If those damned Russians were half as smart as they are made out to be, they would have realized long ago that, for getting anything done that bucks the tide, Trump is too inept to be of any use at all; and that anything he sets out to do is likely to turn out badly not just for America and its allies but for Russia too.

Therefore, if there really was Russian meddling, as there probably was, Putin should be ashamed – not so much for the DNC reasons laid out 24/7 on MSNBC and CNN, but for overestimating Trump's abilities and for underestimating the extent to which what started out as a maneuver of Hillary Clinton's, concocted to excuse her incompetence, would take a perilously "viral" turn, becoming a major threat to peace in a political culture that never quite got beyond the lunacy of the First Cold War.

Andrew Levine is the author most recently of THE AMERICAN IDEOLOGY (Routledge) and POLITICAL KEY WORDS (Blackwell) as well as of many other books and articles in political philosophy. His most recent book is In Bad Faith: What's Wrong With the Opium of the People . He was a Professor (philosophy) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Research Professor (philosophy) at the University of Maryland-College Park. He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press).

[Sep 16, 2018] I m delighted we can see the true face of American exceptionalism on display everyday. The last thing I want to see is back to normal.

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Most here voted for or supported Obama whose record of incarcerating and persecuting journalists, punishing whistle-blowers, extra-judicial executions including citizens of the United States, placing children in cages, violent regime change abroad, spying on citizens, and expanding the security state was as bad or worse as that of Bush and Trump, in some cases by some margin. ..."
"... The current heroes of the 'resistance' lied America into Iraq or Libya, hacked into the computers of the elected representatives/lied about it, and support torture/enhanced interrogations, all under Obama. 'Liberals' lionize these clown criminals along with 'responsible' republicans whilst embracing open bigots such as Farrakhan. And, yes, if one is willing to share the podium with Farrakhan that's tacit support of his views. ..."
Sep 16, 2018 | crookedtimber.org

Thomas Beale 09.13.18 at 9:58 am ( 16 )

I'd suggest that the two strains of 'conservatism' that matter are:

a) maintaining oppression/rule over subordinate classes to prevent them up-ending the status quo (the Robin view) and

b) maintaining philosophical +/- cultural values fundamental to a civilised society, typically so-called enlightenment values, freedom of mind, body and property etc. These are understood in a wide spectrum of concrete interpretations, from free-market purists to social democrats, and don't therefore correspond to one kind of on-the-ground politics.

Progressives tend attack a) (a non-philosophical form of conservatism – it's just about preserving a power structure), and usually claim that b) (the one that matters) doesn't exist or isn't 'conservative', or else ignore it.

We have the basic problem of same term, variable referents

Lobsterman 09.13.18 at 10:27 pm ( 40 )

(b) doesn't exist. Conservatives are, as a group, in eager favor of concentration camps for toddlers, the drug war, unrestrained surveillance, American empire, civil forfeiture, mass incarceration, extrajudicial police execution, etc. etc. They have internal disagreements on how much to do those things, but the consensus is for all of them without meaningful constraint. And they are always justified in terms of (a).

ph 09.14.18 at 11:50 am ( 58 )

@40

Most here voted for or supported Obama whose record of incarcerating and persecuting journalists, punishing whistle-blowers, extra-judicial executions including citizens of the United States, placing children in cages, violent regime change abroad, spying on citizens, and expanding the security state was as bad or worse as that of Bush and Trump, in some cases by some margin.

The current heroes of the 'resistance' lied America into Iraq or Libya, hacked into the computers of the elected representatives/lied about it, and support torture/enhanced interrogations, all under Obama. 'Liberals' lionize these clown criminals along with 'responsible' republicans whilst embracing open bigots such as Farrakhan. And, yes, if one is willing to share the podium with Farrakhan that's tacit support of his views.

Conservative as a political category post 1750 works and the basic argument of the OP holds. The comments not so much.

[Sep 15, 2018] Why the US Seeks to Hem in Russia, China and Iran by Patrick Lawrence

Highly recommended!
The root of the current aggressive policy is the desire to preserve global neoliberal empire the US role as the metropolia with the rest of the world as vassals.
Notable quotes:
"... The crisis of U.S. foreign policy -- a series of radical missteps -- are systemic. Having little to do with personalities, they pass from one administration to the next with little variance other than at the margins. ..."
"... It began with that hubristic triumphalism so evident in the decade after the Cold War's end ..."
"... There was also the "Washington consensus." The world was in agreement that free-market capitalism and unfettered financial markets would see the entire planet to prosperity. ..."
"... The neoliberal economic crusade accompanied by neoconservative politics had its intellectual ballast, and off went its true-believing warriors around the world. ..."
"... Failures ensued. Iraq post–2003 is among the more obvious. Nobody ever planted democracy or built free markets in Baghdad. Then came the "color revolutions," which resulted in the destabilization of large swathes of the former Soviet Union's borderlands. The 2008 financial crash followed. I was in Hong Kong at the time and recall thinking, "This is not just Lehman Brothers. An economic model is headed into Chapter 11." One would have thought a fundamental rethink in Washington might have followed these events. There has never been one. ..."
"... Midway through the first Obama administration, a crucial turn began. What had been an assertion of financial and economic power, albeit coercive in many instances, particularly with the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, took on further strategic and military dimensions. ..."
"... The NATO bombing campaign in Libya, ostensibly a humanitarian mission, became a regime-change operation -- despite Washington's promises otherwise. Obama's "pivot to Asia" turned out to be a neo-containment policy toward China. The "reset" with Russia, declared after Obama appointed Hillary Clinton secretary of state, flopped and turned into the virulent animosity we now live with daily ..."
"... The U.S.-cultivated coup in Kiev in 2014 was a major declaration of drastic turn in policy towards Moscow. So was the decision, taken in 2012 at the latest , to back the radical jihadists who were turning civil unrest in Syria into a campaign to topple the Assad government in favor of another Islamist regime. ..."
"... In 2015, the last of the three years I just noted, Russia intervened militarily and diplomatically in the Syria conflict, in part to protect its southwest from Islamist extremism and in part to pull the Middle East back from the near-anarchy then threatening it as well as Russia and the West. ..."
"... Meanwhile, Washington had cast China as an adversary and committed itself -- as it apparently remains -- to regime change in Syria. Three months prior to the treaty that established the EAEU, the Americans helped turn another case of civil unrest into a regime change -- this time backing not jihadists in Syria but the crypto-Nazi militias in Ukraine on which the government now in power still depends. ..."
"... If there is a president to blame -- and again, I see little point in this line of argument -- it would have to be Barack Obama. To a certain extent, Obama was a creature of those around him, as he acknowledged in his interview with Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic ..."
"... The New York Times ..."
"... The Washington Post ..."
"... Think of Russia, China, and Iran, the three nations now designated America's principal adversaries. Each one is fated to become (if it is not already) a world or regional power and a key to stability -- Russia and China on a global scale, Iran in the Middle East. But each stands resolutely -- and this is not to say with hostile intent -- outside the Western-led order. They have different histories, traditions, cultures, and political cultures. And they are determined to preserve them. ..."
"... If you valued this original article, please consider making a donation to Consortium News so we can bring you more stories like this one. ..."
"... You don't mention corruption and profiteering, which go hand-in-hand with American Exceptionalism and the National Security State (NSS) formed in 1947. The leader of the world which is also an NSS requires enemies, so the National Security Strategy designates enemies, a few of them in an Axis of Evil. Arming to fight them and dreaming up other reasons to go to war, including a war on terror of all things, bring the desired vast expenditures, trillions of dollars, which translate to vast profits to those involved. ..."
"... How many Americans were against the assault by the Coalition of the Willing upon Iraq? Very few. ..."
"... Even in the lead up the war when the public was force fed a diet comprised entirely of State Dept. lies about WMDs by a sycophantic media, there was still a significant 25-40 percent of the public who opposed the war. ..."
"... "Conformism and its consequences, probably derived in part from Puritanism and further cemented by the alternating racisms of anti-indigenous and anti black attitudes- the history of the lynch mob and various wars against the poor which ended up in the anti-communist frenzies of the day before yesterday constitute the backbone of American history- is the disease which afflicts Washington." ..."
"... I have often wondered why the US was unable to accept the position of first among equals. Why does it have to rule the World? I know it believes that its economic and political systems are the best on the planet, but surely all other nations should be able to decide for themselves, what systems they will accept and live under? Who gave the US the right to make those decisions for everyone else? The US was more than willing to kill 20 million people either directly or indirectly since the end of WWII to make its will sovereign in all nations of the World! ..."
"... That is why I invariably raise JFK's Assassination as a logical starting point. If a truly independent commission would fix the blame, we could move on from there. Sam F., on this forum, has mentioned a formal legal undertaking many times on this site, but now is the time to begin the discussion for a formal Truth And Reconciliation Commission in America Let's figure out how to begin. ..."
"... A very good article. Spoiler and bully describe US foreign policy, and foreign policy is in the driver's seat while domestic policy takes the pickings, hardly anything left for the hollowed-out society where people live paycheck to paycheck, homelessness and other assorted ills of a failing society continue to rise while oligarchs and the MIC rule the neofeudal/futile system. ..."
"... When are we going to make that connection of the wasteful expenditure on military adventurism and the problem of poverty in the US? ..."
"... To substantiate this "crucial turn," Lawrence makes the unwarranted assumption that the goal post Soviet Union was simply worldwide free-market capitalism, not global domination: "Failures ensued. Iraq post–2003 is among the more obvious. Nobody ever planted democracy or built free markets in Baghdad"; and the later statement that the US wanted the countries it invaded to be "Just like us." ..."
"... Though he doesn't mention (ignores) US meddling in Russia after the collapse of the USSR, I presume from its absence that he attributes that, too, to the expansion of capital. Indeed, it was that, but with the more malevolent goal of control. "Just like us" is the usual "progressive" explanation for failures. "Controlled by us" was more like it, if we face the history of the country squarely. ..."
"... Is it really so wise to be speaking in terms of nationhood after we've undergone 50 years of Kochian/libertarian dismantlement of the nation-state in favor of bank and transnational governance? Remember the words of Zbigniew Brzezinski: ..."
"... "The "nation-state" as a fundamental unit of man's organized life has ceased to be the principal creative force: International banks and multinational corporations are acting and planning in terms that are far in advance of the political concepts of the nation-state." ~ Zbigniew Brzezinski, Between Two Ages, 1970 ..."
"... Globalists themselves are drawn together by an ideology. They have no common nation, they have no common political orientation, they have no common cultural background or religion, they herald from the East just as they herald from the West. They have no true loyalty to any mainstream cause or social movement. ..."
"... What do they have in common? They seem to exhibit many of the traits of high level narcissistic sociopaths, who make up a very small percentage of the human population. These people are predators, or to be more specific, they are parasites. They see themselves as naturally superior to others, but they often work together if there is the promise of mutual benefit." ..."
"... Yet there is a thread that leads through US foreign policy. It all started with NSC 68. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSC_68 . Already in the 1950's, leading bankers were afraid of economic depression which would follow from a "peace dividend" following the end of WWII. ..."
"... To avoid this, and to avoid "socialism", the only acceptable government spending was on defense. This mentality never ended. Today 50% of discretionary govenmenrt spending is on the military. http://www.unz.com/article/americas-militarized-economy/ . ..."
"... The "why" behind the US foreign policies was spoken with absolute honest clarity in the "Statement of A. Wess Mitchell Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs" to the Senate on August 21 this year. The transcript is at : https://www.foreign.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/082118_Mitchell_Testimony.pdf ..."
"... Quote the esteemed gentleman (inter alia): "It continues to be among the foremost national security interests of the United States to prevent the domination of the Eurasian landmass by hostile powers. The central aim of the administration's foreign policy is to prepare our nation to confront this challenge by systematically strengthening the military, economic and political fundamentals of American power. " ..."
"... Patrick Lawrence's essay makes perfect sense only when it is applied to US foreign policy since the end of WW2. It is conventional wisdom that the US is now engaged in Cold War 2.0. In fact, Cold War 2.0 is an extension of Cold War 1.0. There was merely a 20 year interregnum between 1990 and 2010. ..."
"... Most analysts think that Cold War 1.0 was an ideological war between "Communism" and "Democracy". The renewal of the Cold War against both Russia and China however shows that the ideological war between East and West was really a cover for the geopolitical war between the two. ..."
"... Russia, China and Iran are the main geopolitical enemies of the US as they stand in the way of the global, imperialist hegemony of the US. In order to control the global periphery, i.e. the developing world and their emerging economies, the US must contain and defeat the big three. This was as true in 1948 as it is in 2018. Thus, what's happening today under Trump is no different than what occurred under Truman in 1948. Whatever differences exist are mere window dressing. ..."
"... There is no Cold War 2.0. It's a fallacy to create a false flag for regime change in Russia. Ms. Clinton, the Kagan family, the MIC, etc., figure if we can take out Yanukovich and replace him with Fascists/Nazis, what could stop us from doing the same to Russia. The good news: all empires fail. ..."
"... Mr. Lawrence is much too accommodating with his analysis. Imagine, linking US "foreign policy" in the same thought as "global stability", as if the two were somehow related. On the contrary, "global instability" seems to be our foreign policy goal, especially for those regions that pose a threat to US hegemony. Why? Because it is difficult to extract a region's wealth when its population is united behind a stable government that can't be bought off. ..."
"... I agree, Gerald. Enforcing the petro-dollar system seems to be the mainspring for much of our recent foreign policy militarism. If it were to unravel, the dollar's value would tank, and then how could we afford our vast system of military bases. Death Star's aren't cheap, ya know. ..."
"... +1 Gerald Wadsworth. It's not necessarily "Oil pure and simple" but "Currency Pure and Simple." If the US dollar is no longer the world's currency, the US is toast. ..."
"... And note (2) that Wall Street is mostly an extension of The City; the UK still thinks it owns the entire world, and the UK has been owned by the banks ever since it went off tally sticks ..."
"... Putin said years ago, and I cannot quote him, but remember most of it, that it doesn't matter who is the candidate for President, or what his campaign promises are, or how sincere he is in making them, whenever they get in office, it is always the same policy. ..."
"... Anastasia, I saved it: From Putin interview with Le Figaro: "I have already spoken to three US Presidents. They come and go, but politics stay the same at all times. Do you know why? Because of the powerful bureaucracy. When a person is elected, they may have some ideas. Then people with briefcases arrive, well dressed, wearing dark suits, just like mine, except for the red tie, since they wear black or dark blue ones. These people start explaining how things are done. And instantly, everything changes. This is what happens with every administration." ..."
"... Pres. Putin explained this several times when he was asked about preferring Trump to Hillary Clinton, and he carefully said that he would accept whoever the US population chose, he was used to dealing with Hillary and he knew that very little changed between Administrations. This has been conveniently cast aside by the Dems, and Obama's disgraceful expulsion of Russian diplomats started the avalanche of Russiagate. ..."
"... Many of the people involved in JFK's murder are now dead themselves, yet the "system" that demands confrontation rather than cooperation continues. These "personalities" are shills for that system, and if they are not so willingly, they are either bribed or blackmailed into compliance. ..."
"... Remember when "Dubya" ran on a "kinder and gentler nation" foreign policy? Obama's "hope and change" that became "more of the same"? And now Trump's views on both domestic and foreign policy seemingly also doing a 180? There are "personalities" behind this "system", and they are embedded in places like the Council on Foreign Relations. The people that run our banking system and the global corporate empire demand the whole pie, they would rather blow up the world than have to share. ..."
"... Bob and Joe, here's a solid review of Woodward's book Fear that points out his consistent service to the oligarchy, including giving Trump a pass for killing the Iran deal. Interesting background on Woodward in the comments as well. https://mondoweiss.net/2018/09/woodward-national-security/ ..."
"... "America's three principal adversaries signify the shape of the world to come: a post-Western world of coexistence. But neoliberal and neocon ideology is unable to to accept global pluralism and multipolarity, argues Patrick Lawrence." ..."
Sep 15, 2018 | consortiumnews.com

... ... ..

The bitter reality is that U.S. foreign policy has no definable objective other than blocking the initiatives of others because they stand in the way of the further expansion of U.S. global interests. This impoverished strategy reflects Washington's refusal to accept the passing of its relatively brief post–Cold War moment of unipolar power.

There is an error all too common in American public opinion. Personalizing Washington's regression into the role of spoiler by assigning all blame to one man, now Donald Trump, deprives one of deeper understanding. This mistake was made during the steady attack on civil liberties after the Sept. 11 tragedies and then during the 2003 invasion of Iraq: namely that it was all George W. Bush's fault. It was not so simple then and is not now.

The crisis of U.S. foreign policy -- a series of radical missteps -- are systemic. Having little to do with personalities, they pass from one administration to the next with little variance other than at the margins.

Let us bring some history to this question of America as spoiler. What is the origin of this undignified and isolating approach to global affairs?

The neoliberal economic crusade accompanied by neoconservative politics had its intellectual ballast, and off went its true-believing warriors around the world.

Failures ensued. Iraq post–2003 is among the more obvious. Nobody ever planted democracy or built free markets in Baghdad. Then came the "color revolutions," which resulted in the destabilization of large swathes of the former Soviet Union's borderlands. The 2008 financial crash followed. I was in Hong Kong at the time and recall thinking, "This is not just Lehman Brothers. An economic model is headed into Chapter 11." One would have thought a fundamental rethink in Washington might have followed these events. There has never been one.

The orthodoxy today remains what it was when it formed in the 1990s: The neoliberal crusade must proceed. Our market-driven, "rules-based" order is still advanced as the only way out of our planet's impasses.

A Strategic and Military Turn

Midway through the first Obama administration, a crucial turn began. What had been an assertion of financial and economic power, albeit coercive in many instances, particularly with the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, took on further strategic and military dimensions.

The NATO bombing campaign in Libya, ostensibly a humanitarian mission, became a regime-change operation -- despite Washington's promises otherwise. Obama's "pivot to Asia" turned out to be a neo-containment policy toward China. The "reset" with Russia, declared after Obama appointed Hillary Clinton secretary of state, flopped and turned into the virulent animosity we now live with daily.

The U.S.-cultivated coup in Kiev in 2014 was a major declaration of drastic turn in policy towards Moscow. So was the decision, taken in 2012 at the latest , to back the radical jihadists who were turning civil unrest in Syria into a campaign to topple the Assad government in favor of another Islamist regime.

Spoilage as a poor excuse for a foreign policy had made its first appearances.

I count 2013 to 2015 as key years. At the start of this period, China began developing what it now calls its Belt and Road Initiative -- its hugely ambitious plan to stitch together the Eurasian landmass, Shanghai to Lisbon. Moscow favored this undertaking, not least because of the key role Russia had to play and because it fit well with President Vladimir Putin's Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU), launched in 2014.

In 2015, the last of the three years I just noted, Russia intervened militarily and diplomatically in the Syria conflict, in part to protect its southwest from Islamist extremism and in part to pull the Middle East back from the near-anarchy then threatening it as well as Russia and the West.

Meanwhile, Washington had cast China as an adversary and committed itself -- as it apparently remains -- to regime change in Syria. Three months prior to the treaty that established the EAEU, the Americans helped turn another case of civil unrest into a regime change -- this time backing not jihadists in Syria but the crypto-Nazi militias in Ukraine on which the government now in power still depends.

That is how we got the U.S.-as-spoiler foreign policy we now have.

If there is a president to blame -- and again, I see little point in this line of argument -- it would have to be Barack Obama. To a certain extent, Obama was a creature of those around him, as he acknowledged in his interview with Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic toward the end of his second term. From that "Anonymous" opinion piece published in The New York Times on Sept. 5, we know Trump is too, to a greater extent than Obama may have feared in his worst moments.

The crucial question is why. Why do U.S. policy cliques find themselves bereft of imaginative thinking in the face of an evolving world order? Why has there been not a single original policy initiative since the years I single out, with the exception of the now-abandoned 2015 accord governing Iran's nuclear programs? "Right now, our job is to create quagmires until we get what we want," an administration official told The Washington Post 's David Ignatius in August.

Can you think of a blunter confession of intellectual bankruptcy? I can't.

Global 'Equals' Like Us?

There is a longstanding explanation for this paralysis. Seven decades of global hegemony, the Cold War notwithstanding, left the State Department with little to think about other than the simplicities of East-West tension. Those planning and executing American diplomacy lost all facility for imaginative thinking because there was no need of it. This holds true, in my view, but there is more to our specific moment than mere sclerosis within the policy cliques.

As I have argued numerous times elsewhere, parity between East and West is a 21st century imperative. From Woodrow Wilson to the post-World War II settlement, an equality among all nations was in theory what the U.S. considered essential to global order.

Now that this is upon us, however, Washington cannot accept it. It did not count on non-Western nations achieving a measure of prosperity and influence until they were "just like us," as the once famous phrase had it. And it has not turned out that way.

Think of Russia, China, and Iran, the three nations now designated America's principal adversaries. Each one is fated to become (if it is not already) a world or regional power and a key to stability -- Russia and China on a global scale, Iran in the Middle East. But each stands resolutely -- and this is not to say with hostile intent -- outside the Western-led order. They have different histories, traditions, cultures, and political cultures. And they are determined to preserve them.

They signify the shape of the world to come -- a post-Western world in which the Atlantic alliance must coexist with rising powers outside its orbit. Together, then, they signify precisely what the U.S. cannot countenance. And if there is one attribute of neoliberal and neoconservative ideology that stands out among all others, it is its complete inability to accept difference or deviation if it threatens its interests.

This is the logic of spoilage as a substitute for foreign policy. Among its many consequences are countless lost opportunities for global stability.

Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, author, and lecturer. His most recent book is Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century (Yale). Follow him @thefloutist. His web site is www.patricklawrence.us. Support his work via www.patreon.com/thefloutist .

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bevin , September 14, 2018 at 6:32 pm

This really is an excellent analysis. I would highlight the following point:
"There is a longstanding explanation for this paralysis. Seven decades of global hegemony, the Cold War notwithstanding, left the State Department with little to think about other than the simplicities of East-West tension. Those planning and executing American diplomacy lost all facility for imaginative thinking because there was no need of it. This holds true, in my view, but there is more to our specific moment than mere sclerosis within the policy cliques "

Conformism and its consequences, probably derived in part from Puritanism and further cemented by the alternating racisms of anti-indigenous and anti black attitudes- the history of the lynch mob and various wars against the poor which ended up in the anti-communist frenzies of the day before yesterday constitute the backbone of American history- is the disease which afflicts Washington.

Don Bacon , September 14, 2018 at 6:03 pm

You don't mention corruption and profiteering, which go hand-in-hand with American Exceptionalism and the National Security State (NSS) formed in 1947. The leader of the world which is also an NSS requires enemies, so the National Security Strategy designates enemies, a few of them in an Axis of Evil. Arming to fight them and dreaming up other reasons to go to war, including a war on terror of all things, bring the desired vast expenditures, trillions of dollars, which translate to vast profits to those involved.

This focus on war has its roots in the Christian bible and in a sense of manifest destiny that has occupied Americans since before they were Americans, and the real Americans had to be exterminated. It certainly (as stated) can't be blamed on certain individuals, it's predominate and nearly universal. How many Americans were against the assault by the Coalition of the Willing upon Iraq? Very few.

Homer Jay , September 14, 2018 at 10:09 pm

"How many Americans were against the assault by the Coalition of the Willing upon Iraq? Very few."

Are you kidding me? Here is a list of polls of the American public regarding the Iraq War 2003-2007;

https://www.politifact.com/iraq-war-polls/

Even in the lead up the war when the public was force fed a diet comprised entirely of State Dept. lies about WMDs by a sycophantic media, there was still a significant 25-40 percent of the public who opposed the war. You clearly are not American or you would remember the vocal minority which filled the streets of big cities across this country. And again the consent was as Chomsky says "manufactured." And it took only 1 year of the war for the majority of the public to be against it. By 2007 60-70% of the public opposed the war.

Judging from your name you come from a country whose government was part of that coalition of the willing. So should we assume that "very few" of your fellow country men and women were against that absolute horror show that is the Iraq war?

Don Bacon , September 14, 2018 at 11:05 pm

You failed to address my major point, and instead picked on something you're wrong on.

Iraq war poll –Pew Research: http://assets.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/12/old-assets/publications/770-1.gif

PS: bevin made approximately the same point later (w/o the financial factor).

"Conformism and its consequences, probably derived in part from Puritanism and further cemented by the alternating racisms of anti-indigenous and anti black attitudes- the history of the lynch mob and various wars against the poor which ended up in the anti-communist frenzies of the day before yesterday constitute the backbone of American history- is the disease which afflicts Washington."

Archie1954 , September 14, 2018 at 2:39 pm

I have often wondered why the US was unable to accept the position of first among equals. Why does it have to rule the World? I know it believes that its economic and political systems are the best on the planet, but surely all other nations should be able to decide for themselves, what systems they will accept and live under? Who gave the US the right to make those decisions for everyone else? The US was more than willing to kill 20 million people either directly or indirectly since the end of WWII to make its will sovereign in all nations of the World!

Bob Van Noy , September 14, 2018 at 9:54 pm

Archie 1954, because 911 was never adequately investigated, our government was inappropriately allowed to act in the so-called public interest in completely inappropriate ways; so that in order for the Country to set things right, those decisions which were made quietly, with little public discussion, would have to be exposed and the illegalities addressed. But, as I'm sure you know, there are myriad other big government failures also left unexamined, so where to begin?

That is why I invariably raise JFK's Assassination as a logical starting point. If a truly independent commission would fix the blame, we could move on from there. Sam F., on this forum, has mentioned a formal legal undertaking many times on this site, but now is the time to begin the discussion for a formal Truth And Reconciliation Commission in America Let's figure out how to begin.

So,"Who gave the US the right to make those decisions for everyone else?", certainly not The People

Jessika , September 14, 2018 at 1:36 pm

A very good article. Spoiler and bully describe US foreign policy, and foreign policy is in the driver's seat while domestic policy takes the pickings, hardly anything left for the hollowed-out society where people live paycheck to paycheck, homelessness and other assorted ills of a failing society continue to rise while oligarchs and the MIC rule the neofeudal/futile system.

When are we going to make that connection of the wasteful expenditure on military adventurism and the problem of poverty in the US? The Pentagon consistently calls the shots, yet we consistently hear about unaccounted expenditures by the Pentagon, losing amounts in the trillions, and never do they get audited.

nondimenticare , September 14, 2018 at 12:18 pm

I certainly agree that the policy is bereft, but not for all of the same reasons. There is the positing of a turnaround as a basis for the current spoiler role: "What had been an assertion of financial and economic power, albeit coercive in many instances, particularly with the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, took on further strategic and military dimensions."

To substantiate this "crucial turn," Lawrence makes the unwarranted assumption that the goal post Soviet Union was simply worldwide free-market capitalism, not global domination: "Failures ensued. Iraq post–2003 is among the more obvious. Nobody ever planted democracy or built free markets in Baghdad"; and the later statement that the US wanted the countries it invaded to be "Just like us."

Though he doesn't mention (ignores) US meddling in Russia after the collapse of the USSR, I presume from its absence that he attributes that, too, to the expansion of capital. Indeed, it was that, but with the more malevolent goal of control. "Just like us" is the usual "progressive" explanation for failures. "Controlled by us" was more like it, if we face the history of the country squarely.

That is the blindness of intent that has led to the spoiler role.

Unfettered Fire , September 14, 2018 at 11:15 am

Is it really so wise to be speaking in terms of nationhood after we've undergone 50 years of Kochian/libertarian dismantlement of the nation-state in favor of bank and transnational governance? Remember the words of Zbigniew Brzezinski:

"The "nation-state" as a fundamental unit of man's organized life has ceased to be the principal creative force: International banks and multinational corporations are acting and planning in terms that are far in advance of the political concepts of the nation-state." ~ Zbigniew Brzezinski, Between Two Ages, 1970

"Make no mistake, what we are seeing in geopolitics today is indeed a magic show. The false East/West paradigm is as powerful if not more powerful than the false Left/Right paradigm. For some reason, the human mind is more comfortable believing in the ideas of division and chaos, and it often turns its nose up indignantly at the notion of "conspiracy." But conspiracies and conspirators can be demonstrated as a fact of history. Organization among elitists is predictable.

Globalists themselves are drawn together by an ideology. They have no common nation, they have no common political orientation, they have no common cultural background or religion, they herald from the East just as they herald from the West. They have no true loyalty to any mainstream cause or social movement.

What do they have in common? They seem to exhibit many of the traits of high level narcissistic sociopaths, who make up a very small percentage of the human population. These people are predators, or to be more specific, they are parasites. They see themselves as naturally superior to others, but they often work together if there is the promise of mutual benefit."

http://www.alt-market.com/articles/3504-in-the-new-qmultipolar-worldq-the-globalists-still-control-all-the-players

Unfettered Fire , September 14, 2018 at 1:43 pm

"In our society, real power does not happen to lie in the political system, it lies in the private economy: that's where the decisions are made about what's produced, how much is produced, what's consumed, where investment takes place, who has jobs, who controls the resources, and so on and so forth. And as long as that remains the case, changes inside the political system can make some difference -- I don't want to say it's zero -- but the differences are going to be very slight." ~ Noam Chomsky

Giants: The Global Power Elite – A talk by Peter Phillips: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Np6td-wzDYQ

The Elite World Order in Jitters Review of Peter Phillips' book Giants: The Global Power Elite: https://dissidentvoice.org/2018/09/the-elite-world-order-in-jitters/

backwardsevolution , September 14, 2018 at 5:14 pm

Unfettered Fire – good posts. Thank you. Peter Phillips is definitely worth listening to.

Jon Dhoe , September 14, 2018 at 11:02 am

Israel, Israel, Israel. When are we going to start facing facts?

Daniel Good , September 14, 2018 at 9:59 am

Yet there is a thread that leads through US foreign policy. It all started with NSC 68. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSC_68 . Already in the 1950's, leading bankers were afraid of economic depression which would follow from a "peace dividend" following the end of WWII.

To avoid this, and to avoid "socialism", the only acceptable government spending was on defense. This mentality never ended. Today 50% of discretionary govenmenrt spending is on the military. http://www.unz.com/article/americas-militarized-economy/ .

We live in a country of military socialism, in which military citizens have all types of benefits, on condition they join the military-industrial-complex. This being so, there is no need for real "intelligence", there is no need to "understand" what goes on is foreign countries, there no need to be right about what might happen or worry about consequences. What is important is stimulate the economy by spending on arms. From Korean war, when the US dropped more bombs than it had on Nazi Germany, through Viet Nam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya etc etc the US policy was a winning one not for those who got bombed (and could not fight back) but for the weapons industry and military contractors. Is the NYTimes ever going to discuss this aspect? Or any one in the MSM?

Walter , September 14, 2018 at 9:26 am

The "why" behind the US foreign policies was spoken with absolute honest clarity in the "Statement of A. Wess Mitchell Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs" to the Senate on August 21 this year. The transcript is at : https://www.foreign.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/082118_Mitchell_Testimony.pdf

Quote the esteemed gentleman (inter alia): "It continues to be among the foremost national security interests of the United States to prevent the domination of the Eurasian landmass by hostile powers. The central aim of the administration's foreign policy is to prepare our nation to confront this challenge by systematically strengthening the military, economic and political fundamentals of American power. "

Tellingly the "official" State Department copy is changed and omits the true spoken words

See yourself: https://www.state.gov/p/eur/rls/rm/2018/285247.htm

This is the essence of MacKinder's Thesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Geographical_Pivot_of_History and was the underlying reason for both world wars in the 20th century.

An essay on this observed truth https://journal-neo.org/2018/09/11/behind-the-anglo-american-war-on-russia/

A deeper essay on the same subject https://www.silkroadstudies.org/resources/pdf/Monographs/1006Rethinking-4.pdf

I would propose that the Zionism aspect exists due to the perceived necessity of "Forward Operating Base Israel" look it a map, Comrade The ISIS?Saudi?Zionist games divides the New Silk Road and the Eurasian land mass and exists to throttle said pathways.

Interestingly the latter essay is attributed to Eldar Ismailov and Vladimir Papava

Brother Comrade Putin knows the game. The US has to maintain the fiction for the public that it does not know the game, and is consequently obliged to maintain a vast public delusion, hence "fake news" and all the rest.

OlyaPola , September 14, 2018 at 1:49 pm

"I would propose that the Zionism aspect exists due to the perceived necessity of "Forward Operating Base Israel" lookit a map, Comrade"

Some have an attraction to book-ends. Once upon a time the Eurasian book-ends were Germany and Japan, and the Western Asian book-ends Israel and Saudi Arabia. This "strategy" is based upon the notion that bookend-ness is a state of inertia which in any interactive system is impossible except apparently to those embedded in "we the people hold these truths to be self-evident".

Consequently some have an attraction to book-ends.

Dennis Etler , September 13, 2018 at 9:05 pm

Patrick Lawrence's essay makes perfect sense only when it is applied to US foreign policy since the end of WW2. It is conventional wisdom that the US is now engaged in Cold War 2.0. In fact, Cold War 2.0 is an extension of Cold War 1.0. There was merely a 20 year interregnum between 1990 and 2010.

Most analysts think that Cold War 1.0 was an ideological war between "Communism" and "Democracy". The renewal of the Cold War against both Russia and China however shows that the ideological war between East and West was really a cover for the geopolitical war between the two.

Russia, China and Iran are the main geopolitical enemies of the US as they stand in the way of the global, imperialist hegemony of the US. In order to control the global periphery, i.e. the developing world and their emerging economies, the US must contain and defeat the big three. This was as true in 1948 as it is in 2018. Thus, what's happening today under Trump is no different than what occurred under Truman in 1948. Whatever differences exist are mere window dressing.

Rob Roy , September 15, 2018 at 12:16 am

Mr. Etler,

I think you are mostly right except in the first Cold War, the Soviets and US Americans were both involved in this "war." What you call Cold War 2.0 is in the minds and policies of only the US. Russian is not in any way currently like the Soviet Union, yet the US acts in all aspects of foreign attitude and policy as though that (very unpleasant period in today's Russians' minds) still exists. It does not. You says there was "merely a 20 year interregnum" and things have picked up and continued as a Cold War. Only in the idiocy of the USA, certainly not in the minds of Russian leadership, particularly Putin's who now can be distinguished as the most logical, realistic and competent leader in the world.

Thanks to H. Clinton being unable to become president, we have a full blown Russiagate which the MSM propaganda continues to spread.

There is no Cold War 2.0. It's a fallacy to create a false flag for regime change in Russia. Ms. Clinton, the Kagan family, the MIC, etc., figure if we can take out Yanukovich and replace him with Fascists/Nazis, what could stop us from doing the same to Russia. The good news: all empires fail.

Maxwell Quest , September 13, 2018 at 1:41 pm

"This is the logic of spoilage as a substitute for foreign policy. Among its many consequences are countless lost opportunities for global stability."

Mr. Lawrence is much too accommodating with his analysis. Imagine, linking US "foreign policy" in the same thought as "global stability", as if the two were somehow related. On the contrary, "global instability" seems to be our foreign policy goal, especially for those regions that pose a threat to US hegemony. Why? Because it is difficult to extract a region's wealth when its population is united behind a stable government that can't be bought off.

Walter , September 13, 2018 at 1:30 pm

US is attempting to stop a process, to prevent Change see https://www.fort-russ.com/2017/10/v-golstein-end-of-cold-war-and/

Conjuring up Heraclitus..Time is a River, constantly changing. And we face downstream, unable to see the Future and gazing upon the Past.

The attempt has an effect, many effects, but it cannot stop Time.

The Russian and the Chinese have clinched the unification of the Earth Island, "Heartland" This ended the ability to control global commerce by means of navies – the methods of the Sea Peoples over the last 500 years are now failed. The US has no way of even seeing this fact other than force and violence to restore the status quo ante .

Thus World War, as we see

Recollecting Heraclitus again, the universe is populated by opposites as we see, China and Russia represent a cathodic opposite to the US

Jeff Harrison , September 13, 2018 at 1:29 pm

I guess I missed this one, Patrick. Great overview but let me put it in a slightly different context. You start with the end of the cold war but I don't. I could go all the way back to the early days of the country and our proclamation of manifest destiny. The US has long thought that it was the one ring to rule them all. But for most of that time the strength of individual members of the rest of the world constrained the US from running amok. That constraint began to be lifted after the ruling clique in Europe committed seppuku in WWI. It was completely lifted after WWII. But that was 75 years ago. This is now and most of the world has recovered from the world wide destruction of human and physical capital known as WWII. The US is going to have to learn how to live with constraints again but it will take a shock. The US is going to have to lose at something big time. Europe cancelling the sanctions? The sanctions on Russia don't mean squat to the US but it's costing Europe billions. This highlights the reality that the "Western Alliance" (read NATO) is not really an alliance of shared goals and objectives. It's an alliance of those terrified by fascism and what it can do. They all decided that they needed a "great father" to prevent their excesses again. One wonders if either the world or Europe would really like the US to come riding in like the cavalry to places like Germany, Poland, and Ukraine. Blindly following Washington's directions can be remarkably expensive for Europe and they get nothing but refugees they can't afford. Something will ultimately have to give.

The one thing I was surprised you didn't mention was the US's financial weakness. It's been a long time since the US was a creditor nation. We've been a debtor nation since at least the 80s. The world doesn't need debtor nations and the only reason they need us is the primacy of the US dollar. And there are numerous people hammering away at that.

Gerald Wadsworth , September 13, 2018 at 12:59 pm

Why are we trying to hem in China, Russia and Iran? Petro-dollar hegemony, pure and simple. From our initial deal with Saudi Arabia to buy and sell oil in dollars only, to the chaos we have inflicted globally to retain the dollar's rule and role in energy trading, we are finding ourselves threatened – actually the position of the dollar as the sole trading medium is what is threatened – and we are determined to retain that global power over oil at all costs. With China and Russia making deals to buy and sell oil in their own currencies, we have turned both those counties into our enemies du jour, inventing every excuse to blame them for every "bad thing" that has and will happen, globally. Throw in Syria, Iran, Venezuela, and a host of other countries who want to get out from under our thumb, to those who tried and paid the price. Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, and more. Our failed foreign policy is dictated by controlling, as Donald Rumsfeld once opined, "our oil under their sand." Oil. Pure and simple.

Maxwell Quest , September 13, 2018 at 2:18 pm

I agree, Gerald. Enforcing the petro-dollar system seems to be the mainspring for much of our recent foreign policy militarism. If it were to unravel, the dollar's value would tank, and then how could we afford our vast system of military bases. Death Star's aren't cheap, ya know.

Maxwell Quest , September 13, 2018 at 3:33 pm

I agree, Gerald. Along with ensuring access to "our" off-shore oil fields, enforcing the petro-dollar system is equally significant, and seems to be the mainspring for much of our recent foreign policy militarism. If this system were to unravel, the dollar's value would tank, and then how could we afford our vast system of military bases which make the world safe for democracy? Death Star's aren't cheap, ya know.

Anonymous Coward , September 13, 2018 at 10:40 pm

+1 Gerald Wadsworth. It's not necessarily "Oil pure and simple" but "Currency Pure and Simple." If the US dollar is no longer the world's currency, the US is toast. Also note that anyone trying to retain control of their currency and not letting "The Market" (private banks) totally control them is a Great Devil we need to fight, e.g. Libya and China.

And note (2) that Wall Street is mostly an extension of The City; the UK still thinks it owns the entire world, and the UK has been owned by the banks ever since it went off tally sticks

MichaelWme , September 13, 2018 at 12:18 pm

It's called the Thucydides trap. NATO (US/UK/France/Turkey) have said they will force regime change in Syria. Russia says it will not allow regime change in Syria. Fortunately, as a Frenchman and an Austrian explained many years ago, and NATO experts say is true today, regime change in Russia is a simple matter, about the same as Libya or Panamá. I forget the details, but I assume things worked out well for the Frenchman and the Austrian, and will work out about the same for NATO.

Anastasia , September 13, 2018 at 12:04 pm

Putin said years ago, and I cannot quote him, but remember most of it, that it doesn't matter who is the candidate for President, or what his campaign promises are, or how sincere he is in making them, whenever they get in office, it is always the same policy.

Truer words were never spoken, and it is the reason why I know, at least, that Russia did not interfere in the US elections. What would be the point, from his viewpoint, and it is not only just his opinion. You cannot help but see at this point that that he said is obviously true.

TJ , September 13, 2018 at 1:47 pm

What an excellent point. Why bother influencing the elections when it doesn't matter who is elected -- the same policies will continue.

Bart Hansen , September 13, 2018 at 3:43 pm

Anastasia, I saved it: From Putin interview with Le Figaro: "I have already spoken to three US Presidents. They come and go, but politics stay the same at all times. Do you know why? Because of the powerful bureaucracy. When a person is elected, they may have some ideas. Then people with briefcases arrive, well dressed, wearing dark suits, just like mine, except for the red tie, since they wear black or dark blue ones. These people start explaining how things are done. And instantly, everything changes. This is what happens with every administration."

rosemerry , September 14, 2018 at 8:02 am

Pres. Putin explained this several times when he was asked about preferring Trump to Hillary Clinton, and he carefully said that he would accept whoever the US population chose, he was used to dealing with Hillary and he knew that very little changed between Administrations. This has been conveniently cast aside by the Dems, and Obama's disgraceful expulsion of Russian diplomats started the avalanche of Russiagate.

James , September 13, 2018 at 9:24 am

Great to see Patrick Lawrence writing for Consortium News.

He ends his article with: "This is the logic of spoilage as a substitute for foreign policy. Among its many consequences are countless lost opportunities for global stability. "

Speaking of consequences, how about the human toll this foreign policy has taken on so many people in this world. To me, the gravest sin of all.

Bob Van Noy , September 13, 2018 at 8:46 am

I agree with Patric Lawrence when he states "Personalizing Washington's regression into the role of spoiler by assigning all blame to one man, now Donald Trump, deprives one of deeper understanding." and I also agree that 'Seven decades of global hegemony have left the State Department, Cold War notwithstanding, left the State Department with little to think about other than the simplicities of East-West tension.' But I seriously disagree when he declares that: "The crisis of U.S. foreign policy -- a series of radical missteps -- are systemic. Having little to do with personalities, they pass from one administration to the next with little variance other than at the margins.'' Certainly the missteps are true, but I would argue that the "personalities" are crucial to America's crisis of Foreign Policy. After all it was likely that JFK's American University address was the public declaration of his intention to lead America in the direction of better understanding of Sovereign Rights that likely got him killed. It is precisely those "personalities" that we must understand and identify before we can move on

Skip Scott , September 13, 2018 at 9:35 am

Bob-

I see what you're saying, but I believe Patrick is also right.

Many of the people involved in JFK's murder are now dead themselves, yet the "system" that demands confrontation rather than cooperation continues. These "personalities" are shills for that system, and if they are not so willingly, they are either bribed or blackmailed into compliance.

Remember when "Dubya" ran on a "kinder and gentler nation" foreign policy? Obama's "hope and change" that became "more of the same"? And now Trump's views on both domestic and foreign policy seemingly also doing a 180? There are "personalities" behind this "system", and they are embedded in places like the Council on Foreign Relations. The people that run our banking system and the global corporate empire demand the whole pie, they would rather blow up the world than have to share.

Bob Van Noy , September 13, 2018 at 2:42 pm

You're completely right Skip, that's what we all must recognize and ultimately react to, and against.
Thank you.

JWalters , September 13, 2018 at 6:46 pm

I would add that human beings are the key components in this system. The system is built and shaped by them. Some are greedy, lying predators and some are honest and egalitarian. Bob Parry was one of the latter, thankfully.

JWalters , September 13, 2018 at 6:30 pm

Skip, very good points. For those interested further, here's an excellent talk on the bankers behind the manufacutured wars, including the role of the Council on Foreign Relations as a front organization and control mechanism.
"The Shadows of Power; the CFR and decline of America"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=6124&v=wHa1r4nIaug

Joe Tedesky , September 13, 2018 at 9:42 am

Bob, you are right. I find it most interesting and sad at the same time that in Woodward's new book 'Fear' that he describes a pan 'almost tragic incident' whereas Trump wanted to sign a document removing our missiles and troops out of S Korea, but save for the steady hand of his 'anonymous' staffers who yanked the document off his presidential desk . wow, close one there we almost did something to enforce a peace. Can't have that though, we still have lots to kill in pursue of liberty and freedom and the hegemonic way.

Were these 'anonymous' staffers the grandchildren of the staffers and bureaucracy that undermined other presidents? Would their grandparents know who the Gunmen were on the grassy knoll? Did these interrupters of Executive administrations fudge other presidents dreams and hopes of a peaceful world? And in the end were these instigators rewarded by the war industries they protected?

The problem is, is that this bureaucracy of war has out balanced any other rival agency, as diversity of thought and mission is only to be dealt with if it's good for military purposes. Too much of any one thing can be overbearingly bad for a person, and likewise too much war means your country is doing something wrong.

Bob Van Noy , September 13, 2018 at 2:51 pm

Many thanks Joe, I admire your persistence. Clearly Bob Woodward has been part of the problem rather than the solution. The swamp is deep and murky

JWalters , September 13, 2018 at 6:36 pm

Bob and Joe, here's a solid review of Woodward's book Fear that points out his consistent service to the oligarchy, including giving Trump a pass for killing the Iran deal. Interesting background on Woodward in the comments as well. https://mondoweiss.net/2018/09/woodward-national-security/

O Society , September 13, 2018 at 6:21 pm

The document Gary Cohen removed off Trump's desk – which you can read here – states an intent to end a free trade agreement with South Korea.

"White House aides feared if Trump sent the letter, it could jeopardize a top-secret US program that can detect North Korean missile launches within seven seconds."

Sounds like Trump wanted to play the "I am such a great deal maker, the GREATEST deal maker of all times!" game with the South Koreans. Letter doesn't say anything about withdrawing troops or missiles.

Funny how ***TOP-SECRET US PROGRAMS*** find their way into books and newspapers these days, plentiful as acorns falling out of trees.

O Society , September 14, 2018 at 1:38 pm

You're welcome, Joe. These things get confusing. Who knows anymore what is real and what isn't?

Trump did indeed say something about ending military exercises and pulling troops out of South Korea. His staff did indeed contradict him on this. It just wasn't in relation to the letter Cohn "misplaced," AFAIK.

Nobody asked me, but if they did, I'd say the US interfered enough in Korean affairs by killing a whole bunch of 'em in the Korean War. Leave'em alone. Let North and South try to work it out. Tired of hearing about "regime change.'

Republicans buck Trump on Korea troop pullout talk

Joe Tedesky , September 13, 2018 at 12:24 pm

Here's what I wrote:

Bob, you are right. I find it most interesting and sad at the same time that in Woodward's new book 'Fear' that he describes a pan 'almost tragic incident' whereas Trump wanted to sign a document removing our missiles and troops out of S Korea, but save for the steady hand of his 'anonymous' staffers who yanked the document off his presidential desk . wow, close one there we almost did something to enforce a peace. Can't have that though, we still have lots to kill in pursue of liberty and freedom and the hegemonic way.

Were these 'anonymous' staffers the grandchildren of the staffers and bureaucracy that undermined other presidents? Would their grandparents know who the Gunmen were on the grassy knoll? Did these interrupters of Executive administrations fudge other presidents dreams and hopes of a peaceful world? And in the end were these instigators rewarded by the war industries they protected?

The problem is, is that this bureaucracy of war has out balanced any other rival agency, as diversity of thought and mission is only to be dealt with if it's good for military purposes. Too much of any one thing can be overbearingly bad for a person, and likewise too much war means your country is doing something wrong.

Kiwiantz , September 13, 2018 at 8:20 am

Spoiler Nation of America! You got that dead right! China builds infrastructure in other Countries & doesn't interfere with the citizens & their Sovereignty. Contrast that with the United Spoiler States of America, they run roughshod over overs & just bomb the hell out of Countries & leaves devastation & death wherever they go! And there is something seriously wrong & demented with the US mindset concerning, the attacks on 9/11? In Syria the US has ended up arming & supporting the very same organisation of Al QaedaTerrorists, morphed into ISIS, that hijacked planes & flew them into American targets! During 2017 & now in 2018, it defies belief how warped this US mentality is when ISIS can so easily & on demand, fake a chemical attack to suck in the stupid American Military & it's Airforce & get them to attack Syria, like lackeys taking orders from Terrorist's! The US Airforce is the airforce of Al Qaeda & ISIS! Why? Because the US can't stomach Russia, Syria & Iran winning & defeating Terrorism thus ending this Proxy War they started! Russia can't be allowed to win at any cost because the humiliation & loss of prestige that the US would suffer as a Unipolar Empire would signal the decline & end of this Hegemonic Empire so they must continue to act as a spoiler to put off that inevitable decline! America can't face reality that it's time in the sun as the last Empire, is over!

Sally Snyder , September 13, 2018 at 7:57 am

Here is what Americans really think about the rabid anti-Russia hysteria coming from Washington:

https://viableopposition.blogspot.com/2018/08/americans-on-russia-will-of-people.html

Washington has completely lost touch with what Main Street America really believes.

Waynes World , September 13, 2018 at 7:37 am

Finally some words of truth about how we want our way not really democracy. A proper way to look at the world is what you said toward the end a desire to make people's lives better.

mike k , September 13, 2018 at 7:14 am

Simply put – the US is the world's biggest bully. This needs to stop. Fortunately the bully's intended victims are joining together to defeat it's crazy full spectrum dominance fantasies. Led by Russia and China, we can only hope for the success of the resistance to US aggression.

This political, economic, military struggle is not the only problem the world is facing now, but is has some priority due to the danger of nuclear war. Global pollution, climate disaster, ecological collapse and species extinction must also be urgently dealt with if we are to have a sustainable existence on Earth.

OlyaPola , September 13, 2018 at 4:39 am

Alpha : "America's three principal adversaries signify the shape of the world to come: a post-Western world of coexistence. But neoliberal and neocon ideology is unable to to accept global pluralism and multipolarity, argues Patrick Lawrence."

Omega: "Among its many consequences are countless lost opportunities for global stability."

Framing is always a limiter of perception.

Among the consequences of the lateral trajectories from Alpha to Omega referenced above, is the "unintended consequence" of the increase of the principal opponents, their resolve and opportunities to facilitate the transcendence of arrangements based on coercion by arrangements based on co-operation.

Opening Pandora's box was/is only perceived as wholly a disadvantage for those seeking to deny lateral process.

JOHN CHUCKMAN , September 13, 2018 at 4:32 am

Yes, I certainly agree with author's view.

https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2018/07/31/john-chuckman-comment-empire-corrupts-all-the-principles-of-economics-as-well-as-principles-of-ethics-and-good-government-there-is-nothing-good-to-say-about-empire-and-the-american-one-is-no-excep/

https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2018/07/22/john-chuckman-comment-how-american-politics-really-work-why-there-are-terrible-candidates-and-constant-wars-and-peoples-problems-are-ignored-why-heroes-like-julian-assange-are-persecuted-and-r/

HomoSapiensWannaBe , September 13, 2018 at 8:23 am

John Chuckman,

Wow. Thanks! I have just begun reading your commentaries this week and I am impressed with how clearly you analyze and summarize key points about many topics.

Thank you so much for writing what are often the equivalent of books, but condensed into easy to read and digest summaries.

I have ordered your book and look forward to reading that.

Cheers from Southeast USA!

[Sep 15, 2018] BBC is skanky state propaganda

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... The myth of BBC being some standard for news reporting died with the advent of the availability of international and independent news in Western countries ..."
"... Ironic when the BBC has been ceaselessly pushing fake news for at least 15 years, with disastrous results. (Iraq; Libya; what caused the deficit and who should be forced to pay it down; Russia/Syria false flags; Corbyn A/S.) ..."
"... I find it impossible to watch BBC News, primarily because most of the editorial staff and senior correspondents seem to be working for MI5/6 and are more interested in disseminating Geo-political propaganda than upholding their journalistic responsibilities as defined in the BBC charter. ..."
"... The book is obviously part of a propaganda campaign. It seems hugely fortuitous that Mark Urban should have had "hours" of interviews with Skripal before the poisoning incident. ..."
"... Isn't it much more likely that the Urban "interviews" would have happened after the event? But Urban can't say that because that would lead to demands from other journalists or news bodies to have access to Skripal. ..."
"... I'm open to alternative hypotheses but right now I think the most likely explanation for Urban's pre-poisoning contact with Sergei Skripal is that, at the time, it was assumed the Orbis dossier would be a key component of the successful takedown of Trump and Urban was putting together a mutually flattering account by interviewing the main players. ..."
"... With regard to your tongue-in-cheek point. Urban could have interviewed Skripal anytime after Trump was gone, unless he believed Skripal might be unavailable (for some reason). The fact he interviewed Skripal before does indicate foresight. If Urban really did interview Skripal before the event then he would be wiser to pull the book and burn every copy in existence (as well as all his notes). ..."
"... Urban pretends to research a book exposing Russia and part of his research is to interview Skripal. His objective is to find dirt on Putin in order to swing the war in Syria in favour of USUKIS bombing Assad to smithereens, bayonets bums etc. ..."
"... Interestingly Mark Urbans' book on Sergei Skripal was available to purchase on Amazon in July. I added it to my Amazon wishlist on 28/7/18. I've just looked at my wishlist and was rather surprised to find it is no longer available. It has been pulled. ..."
"... Can't help thinking that the answer to all this lies in Estonia. Sergei went to Estonia in June 2016, Pablo was in Estonia, the Estonians passed on sigint about Trump-Russian collusion in the summer of 2016. A Guardian article of 13 April 2017 said: ..."
"... No doubt in my mind that the Skripal affair is a planned operation carried out by US/UK intelligence. What has actually taken place is still to be determined, but the propaganda operation itself is clear. ..."
"... I know about Ireland, and I agree, it was NOT a nerve agent. That said, I don't believe anyone was 'attacked', including the Skripals. ..."
"... All foreign correspondents of major newspapers too work with MI6. Nobody who is close to them has any kind of doubt about this. ..."
"... I despise everyone who says that free markets are the solution for the problems of the third world. What they mean is mass starvation and an enormous population cull. There are international "foundations" that pay academics and politicians large amounts of money to spout this obscene line. One of them is called the John Templeton Foundation. They have had their fangs in to British universities for a long time. ..."
"... When the Tories talk about 'free markets', they are talking about markets free from democracy. ..."
Aug 30, 2018 | craigmurray.org.uk

Dave , August 28, 2018 at 17:41

BBC is skanky state propaganda. The myth of BBC being some standard for news reporting died with the advent of the availability of international and independent news in Western countries. The main thing that BBC used to have which propped up the illusion of it being a respectable news source is that there was no competition or alternative to compare its narratives against. Since that time is over, so is BBC's masquerading as an impartial or accurate news source.

Xavi , August 28, 2018 at 18:40

Agree, Dave. That's what's informing the push to rubbish dissenting sites as fake news and eventually have them removed.

Ironic when the BBC has been ceaselessly pushing fake news for at least 15 years, with disastrous results. (Iraq; Libya; what caused the deficit and who should be forced to pay it down; Russia/Syria false flags; Corbyn A/S.)

Ken Kenn , August 28, 2018 at 21:49

Well I was convinced of fake BBC news during 9/11 and not for the reasons of building 7 coming down too early but the fact that the female journalist was facing a camera standing in front of a glass window and there was no reflection of her or the camera person from the glass. Not even a faint shadow.

That's when I knew the BBC were employing vampires and have been ever since.

Green Screen technology I discovered later. All the On the spot reporters are at it apparently. Or repeating Reuters or PA.

Deb O'Nair , August 28, 2018 at 00:52

I find it impossible to watch BBC News, primarily because most of the editorial staff and senior correspondents seem to be working for MI5/6 and are more interested in disseminating Geo-political propaganda than upholding their journalistic responsibilities as defined in the BBC charter. People should not only boycott the BBC but refuse to pay the license fee on the grounds that it's a compulsory political subscription.

frankywiggles , August 28, 2018 at 09:48

Careful, Craig

BBC world affairs editor 'fed up' with complaints directed at the corporation's news output

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2018/aug/28/bbc-news-is-not-biased-in-brexit-reporting-says-john-simpson

D_Majestic , August 28, 2018 at 14:35

Of course BBC News is not biased. Most of the time it is not even factual.

Brendan , August 28, 2018 at 10:34

Dear Mark,
In a BBC article on 4 July 2018, you wrote: "I have not felt ready until now to acknowledge explicitly that we had met, but do now that the book is nearing completion."

Could you please explain that comment? I do not see why your acknowledgement of your meetings with Sergei Skripal should be delayed until your book is nearing completion.

If you felt that it was right to reveal those meetings in July, then why was it not right to do so in March, soon after the poisoning occurred? What difference would it have made if you had done so four months earlier?

I cannot think of any negative consequences of an earlier acknowledgement of the meetings. In fact, disclosures of any possible conflict of interest are generally considered to be desirable in journalism, regardless of whether the conflict of interest is real.

ADHD , August 28, 2018 at 11:00

The book is obviously part of a propaganda campaign. It seems hugely fortuitous that Mark Urban should have had "hours" of interviews with Skripal before the poisoning incident.

Isn't it much more likely that the Urban "interviews" would have happened after the event? But Urban can't say that because that would lead to demands from other journalists or news bodies to have access to Skripal.

And that can't happen because either Skripal would be asked about what happened on the day of the poisoning, or can't be guaranteed to stick to the script, or is no longer alive. And that leads to a suspicion that whatever Skripal is supposed to have said in his interviews with Urban has really just been made up by the British security services.

Kay , August 28, 2018 at 14:42

I'm open to alternative hypotheses but right now I think the most likely explanation for Urban's pre-poisoning contact with Sergei Skripal is that, at the time, it was assumed the Orbis dossier would be a key component of the successful takedown of Trump and Urban was putting together a mutually flattering account by interviewing the main players.

Tongue in cheek, it'd be worth asking Urban if his decision to cover the Skripal poisoning in his new book was made before or after the Skripals were actually poisoned.

ADHD , August 28, 2018 at 15:59

The consensus seems to be that it was an anti-Russia book, but that doesn't conflict with what you say (there is overlap, your view is just more specific). But, I just find it hard to believe that Urban and the conspirators would waste their time "counting their chickens ". Not least because such a book would form a handy list of traitors (together with confessions) if Trump were to prevail and it fell into the right hands. This is "101 – How to Organise a Revolution" (secrecy / don't put anything in writing); surely British security services know that?

With regard to your tongue-in-cheek point. Urban could have interviewed Skripal anytime after Trump was gone, unless he believed Skripal might be unavailable (for some reason). The fact he interviewed Skripal before does indicate foresight. If Urban really did interview Skripal before the event then he would be wiser to pull the book and burn every copy in existence (as well as all his notes).

Regardless, it looks like the master of the universe are losing their ability to create reality.

Brendan , August 28, 2018 at 10:37

Last month, Mark Urban was promoting the reports that the Russian assassins had been identified from CCTV footage:

"There are now subjects of interest in the police Salisbury investigation. ( ) analytic and cyber techniques are now being exploited against the Salisbury suspects by people with a wealth of experience in complex investigations."
https://twitter.com/MarkUrban01/status/1020366761848385536

That story originated with a report by PA, which Security Minister Ben Wallace called "ill informed and wild speculation". https://mobile.twitter.com/BWallaceMP/status/1019906962786484225

Or as Craig Murray put it, "Unnamed source close to unnamed British police officers tells unnamed Press Association journalist Britain knows the unnamed Russian agents ".
https://twitter.com/CraigMurrayOrg/status/1019854966327005184

Even Urban's colleagues had to admit that "The BBC has not been able to independently confirm the story."
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-44883803

Still, that didn't stop Mark Urban from reporting the story almost as fact.

Tom , August 28, 2018 at 10:38

The BBC relies on it's interpretation of the Act because it is held for the purposes of 'journalism, art or literature.' but this relies on a usually unrelated precedent and the opinions of a number of Judges which contradict this view. I'm in the process of challenging this with ICO but don't expect anything will change until another supreme court ruling:

https://medium.com/@tomcoady/bbc-foi-exemption-for-the-purposes-of-art-journalism-or-literature-c39e4fa3e36

Ian Fantom , August 28, 2018 at 10:41

I've put in a Freedom of Information request regarding meetings with Skripal other than any that were for the purpose of BBC news journalism. (https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/mark_urbans_non_journalistic_mee )

Made By Dom , August 28, 2018 at 11:04

Can I play Devil's Advocate ?

I can see the value in asking writers, journalists and artists to pose exactly the same questions as Eccles' original letter but I'm not convinced about Craig's email.

A quick google shows me that a man named Mark Urban has written a book on the Skripals. Isn't it likely that Urban was keeping the interviews to himself in order to keep his book alive?

It wouldn't surprise me if Urban cares far more about his writing career than his job at the BBC. I'm sure most journalists would rather be authors. He's written a number of books on war and military intelligence. If his sources have nothing to do with the BBC then why should he answer to an on line mob?

craig Post author , August 28, 2018 at 11:18

" Isn't it likely that Urban was keeping the interviews to himself in order to keep his book alive?"
No, entirely unlikely. a chance to plug his forthcoming book and his Skripal contacts to a massive worldwide televion audience was eschewed.
The book is now about the Skripal attack. Presumably that was not the original subject he was researching, as it hadn't happened yet. The book will just be a rehash of the "noble defector – Putin revenge" line and none of the questions I asked about the genesis of his involvement will be answered in it.

SA , August 28, 2018 at 11:29

"Presumably that was not the original subject he was researching, as it hadn't happened yet." Or it was prescience ie that it was part of the planning for the incident?

Chris Hemmings , August 28, 2018 at 14:41

@BBC, Summer 2017, in an executive office:
"Hey Mark, why don't you go down to have a chat with this guy in Salisbury. I have a hunch that a story might be going to happen involving him, you know, as an ex-Soviet spy. Spend time with him, get to know him, be able to write in depth about him. Say it's for a book ."

giyane , August 28, 2018 at 11:46

Urban is never one-sided in his BBC reports on the Middle East. I would rather have him as Foreign Secretary than a bumbling idiot like Hubris Johnson or a Tory racketeer Hunt, because however clunky the formula of BBC balance Urban is at least pretending to be governed by normal rules. After Thatcher went anyone with half a brain left the Conservative party, leaving dolts like Johnson and nasties like May and Cameron to pick up the pieces after Blair and Brown.

There's money to be made from Russian billionaires and tory shit will follow the money like flies on d**t**d.

Urban pretends to research a book exposing Russia and part of his research is to interview Skripal. His objective is to find dirt on Putin in order to swing the war in Syria in favour of USUKIS bombing Assad to smithereens, bayonets bums etc.

Tory shit Hubris Johnson finds this political research floating around the Foreign Office and decides to twist it into Russia murders Skripal by Novichok. Unfortunately Johnson is already known to be a liar and gravy-trainer Tory and nobody believes him at all. Mrs May , realising that Johnson, Fox, Rees-Mogg and Hunt are completely bonkers, does Chequers her own way.

ZigZag Wanderer , August 28, 2018 at 12:26

Interestingly Mark Urbans' book on Sergei Skripal was available to purchase on Amazon in July. I added it to my Amazon wishlist on 28/7/18. I've just looked at my wishlist and was rather surprised to find it is no longer available. It has been pulled.

From memory the books description said that Mark had interviewed Skripal 'extensively' during 2017 and also mentioned the 'new' spying war now happening between Britain and Russia.

A quick search revealed a new version of the book ( with an altered title ) will be available in early October .. details here. https://www.panmacmillan.com/authors/mark-urban/the-skripal-files

Oh dear . panic stations !

Sharp Ears , August 28, 2018 at 11:16

Salisbury poisoning: Skripals 'were under Russian surveillance'
Mark Urban Diplomatic and defence editor, Newsnight

4 July 2018

'My meetings with Sergei Skripal

I met Sergei on a few occasions last summer and found him to be a private character who did not, even under the circumstances then prevailing, wish to draw attention to himself.

He agreed to see me as a writer of history books rather than as a news journalist, since I was researching one on the post-Cold War espionage battle between Russia and the West.

Information gained in these interviews was fed into my Newsnight coverage during the early days after the poisoning. I have not felt ready until now to acknowledge explicitly that we had met, but do now that the book is nearing completion.

As a man, Sergei is proud of his achievements, both before and after joining his country's intelligence service.

He has a deadpan wit and is remarkably stoical given the reverses he's suffered in his life; from his imprisonment following conviction in 2006 on charges of spying for Britain, to the loss of his wife Liudmila to cancer in 2012, and the untimely death of his son Alexander (or Sasha) last summer.'

...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-44717835

Agent Green , August 28, 2018 at 12:27

Laughable given that the whole world and virtually all heads of State were under US surveillance by the NSA – at least until Edward Snowden made all his revelations.

KEVIN GLENNIE , August 28, 2018 at 11:18

I have pasted and copied your Email regarding the above with a few slight alterations, it will be interesting to see the response I receive if any being just a concerned citizen of the U.

Niki Henry , August 28, 2018 at 11:21

Is this not a matter for the Police? (Even if you're not too sure if they'd do anything about it) These would be files that are to do with an attempted murder case. And definitely not Journalism if the story is fabricated.

Paul Baker , August 28, 2018 at 11:28

It feels as if you are moving in the right direction in linking Sergei to Steele. I'm intrigued by the very early media references to Sergei wanting to return home to see his elderly mother for perhaps the last time. He had apparently written to Putin making his request but again according to newspapers hadn't received a reply.

I would suggest Julia was bringing the answer via her own secret services contacts, her boyfriend and his mother, apparently Senior in the Russian Intelligence Agency. Perhaps a sentimental man Sergei was aware his mother couldn't travel so the plea to Putin was his best bet.

Such a request must have disturbed MI6 if Sergei had anything at all to do with the Steele dossier because inevitably if he returned to Russia he'd be debriefed by his old colleagues. But how can you rely on a mercenary double agent? If he decided he might want to stay in Russia with his family that might well have been attractive, away from the lonely existence in a Salisbury cul de sac with only spies for company. But the Steele dossier has great potential to turn sour on the British.

It's author was a Senior spy and Head of the Russian Desk for some years. It is – perhaps you'd agree? – inconceivable that he didn't require permission to prepare it, especially as much of it was based on his experience as a spy in Russia. Yet it's equally inconceivable that the Agency bosses didn't know the identity of the commissioners or the use to which it would be put in the US election – to boost Clinton's bid. If she'd won everything would have been fine but as it is any discussion of foreign interference in that election would have to include MI6 leading the list (they probably didn't tell any politician?) To have Sergei supporting and highlighting that embarrassment would be problematic for US-UK relations. Of course Sergei may have had other nuggets to expose as well as Steele.

Soon after Julia's arrival the pair fell ill. They both survived but are now locked away, presumably for life and never able to explain their side of the story.

It was a bodged job with a poor cover story from the start and could only be carried because of D Notices and media complicity. Is his mother still alive? Would he still like to see her before she dies? Would Russia allow it? Would MI6 allow it? I think that's 3 yeses and a resounding No.

Sharp Ears , August 28, 2018 at 11:39

Following the deaths of 55 Palestinians on the Gaza 'border' and the wounding of thousands, in this video, Urban asks the questions but the Israeli government spokesman, David Keyes, is allowed to spout all the usual propaganda against Hamas.

Gaza deaths: Who's to blame? – BBC Newsnight
Published on 15 May 2018
Subscribe 256K
Fresh protests against Israel are expected in the Palestinian territories, a day after Israeli troops killed 58 people in the Gaza Strip.
David Keyes is the spokesman for the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Mark Urban asked him whether it was appropriate for the US to open their embassy on the 70th anniversary of Israel's creation, a day that is hugely controversial for the Palestinian people.

Newsnight is the BBC's flagship news and current affairs TV programme – with analysis, debate, exclusives, and robust interviews.
Website: https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsnight
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1dec5XO53k

Mr Keyes' pronounced American accent was heard. The Occupation was not mentioned. A Palestinian voice was not heard.

This is another of his videos. On the same subject and on the opening of the Israeli Embassy in Jerusalem. This time, Jonathan Conricus spoke for the IDF.

Israel says. Same old. Same old. BBC. ZBC.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-WdqoPKKkD8

Charles Bostock , August 28, 2018 at 15:58

"Urban asks the questions but the Israeli government spokesman, David Keyes, is allowed to spout all the usual propaganda against Hamas."

Yes indeed : Urban asked the questions and allowed the interviewee to answer. Perhaps you would have preferred him to interrupt the interviewee continually 'a la Today programme, or to have shouted at him similarly to the way I understand some people shout at customers inside or outside supermarkets?

Peter , August 28, 2018 at 11:39

This may or may not be relevant regarding Russia, chemical weapons and BBC/MSM bovine effluent:

"US Poised to Hit Syria Harder: The Russian Defense Ministry issued a statement on Aug. 25 stating that the Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham militants had brought eight containers of chlorine to Idlib in order to stage a false-flag attack with the help of UK intelligence agencies. A group of Tahrir al-Sham fighters trained to handle chemical warfare agents by the UK private military company Olive arrived in the suburbs of the city of Jisr ash-Shugur, Idlib, 20 km. from the Turkish border."

https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2018/08/27/us-poised-to-hit-syria-harder.html

Jeremn , August 28, 2018 at 11:42

Can't help thinking that the answer to all this lies in Estonia. Sergei went to Estonia in June 2016, Pablo was in Estonia, the Estonians passed on sigint about Trump-Russian collusion in the summer of 2016. A Guardian article of 13 April 2017 said:

"Over the next six months, until summer 2016, a number of western agencies shared further information on contacts between Trump's inner circle and Russians, sources said. The European countries that passed on electronic intelligence – known as sigint – included Germany, Estonia and Poland."

Perhaps not the Dossier, as such, but some material on collusion?

Paul Greenwood , August 28, 2018 at 12:00

John Paul Jones also fought for the Russians and was a Rear-Admiral. He was buried in Paris 1792 and disinterred 1905 and relocated to USA

wonky , August 29, 2018 at 10:29

..then he met Jimmy Page in the 1960s and the rest is history..

Agent Green , August 28, 2018 at 12:11

No doubt in my mind that the Skripal affair is a planned operation carried out by US/UK intelligence. What has actually taken place is still to be determined, but the propaganda operation itself is clear.

Paul Carrom , August 28, 2018 at 12:12

Definitely done by the UK.

Doodlebug , August 28, 2018 at 14:53

What did the UK have against Dawn and Charlie? (Please don't say you subscribe to all that bottle-finding bullshit).

mark golding , August 28, 2018 at 17:40

Catch my last post Doodlebug, sadly MI6 diabolical elements can be traced back to Ireland in the 70's early 80's assassinations theRealTerror (theRealElvis) understands.

Doodlebug , August 28, 2018 at 18:06

I know about Ireland, and I agree, it was NOT a nerve agent. That said, I don't believe anyone was 'attacked', including the Skripals.

Jo , August 29, 2018 at 11:59

Being used as practice and to establish more "evidence"

N_ , August 28, 2018 at 12:24

Often it's been open. There was the BBC monitoring station at Caversham Park. The BBC's Foreign Broadcast Information Service split the world into two parts with the CIA.

All foreign correspondents of major newspapers too work with MI6. Nobody who is close to them has any kind of doubt about this.

N_ , August 28, 2018 at 12:20

Theresa May says a no deal Brexit "wouldn't be the end of the world".

  1. This is not a negotiating strategy. This is not a pantomime where one giant on the stage can wink to his supporters (using the British media) without his opponent (EU27) noticing.
  2. The subconscious doesn't work well with negation. Whatever you do, please DON'T imagine an elephant at this time.
  3. I would love to know what the preparations are at Trinity College, Cambridge, for food shortages. They own the port of Felixstowe, which handles more than 40% of Britain's containerised trade. They also own a 50% stake in a portfolio of Tesco stores. Soon food distribution will be what everyone is talking about. I am never going to stop making the point that the god of the Tory party is Thomas Malthus.
N_ , August 28, 2018 at 12:38

Oh dear.. Theresa May in Africa:

" As a Prime Minister who believes both in free markets and in nations and businesses acting in line with well-established rules and principles of conduct, I want to demonstrate to young Africans that their brightest future lies in a free and thriving private sector. "

I despise everyone who says that free markets are the solution for the problems of the third world. What they mean is mass starvation and an enormous population cull. There are international "foundations" that pay academics and politicians large amounts of money to spout this obscene line. One of them is called the John Templeton Foundation. They have had their fangs in to British universities for a long time.

They are keen on Prince Philip, the guy who said he wanted to come back as a virus so he could kill a large part of the population. Never trust anyone who has received a Templeton scholarship or prize or who has anything to do with these people or with the message that free markets and the private sector are the key to "development"

Nuno Strybes , August 28, 2018 at 12:43

When the Tories talk about 'free markets', they are talking about markets free from democracy.

May's rhetoric is laughable .basically all her speeches read : 'the sky is green, the snow is black etc etc' -- totally detached from reality and a spent political force, as their recent membership numbers showed, with more revenues from legacies left in wills than from actual living members.

Ros Thorpe , August 28, 2018 at 12:30

I agree with the Skripal relatives that Sergei is dead. He hasn't been seen or heard of and would have called his mother. Mind boggling deception at all levels and I struggle to believe any of it.

N_ , August 28, 2018 at 12:47

Sergei Skripal could be in US custody, either in the US itself or in a US facility somewhere.

If he is dead, then the rehospitalisation of Charlie Rowley may be to assist with the narrative. "Once you've had a drop of Novvy Chockk, you may recover but you can fall down ill at any time, and here's an Expert with a serious voice to confirm it."

Nuno Strybes , August 28, 2018 at 12:38

I follow this blog closely, particularly in relation to the Skripal case, but this is my first comment. I just watched Sky News piece on 'super recognisers' and couldn't help but wonder why, in an age of powerful facial recognition technology, the police and security services seem to have drawn such a blank. The surveillance state in the UK is known to be one of the most advanced in the world but when it comes to this highly important geopolitical crisis our technological infrastructure seems to be redundant to the point where 'human eyes' are deemed to be more accurate than the most powerful supercomputers available. Psychologically, all humans have an inherent facial recognition ability from a very young age, but the idea that some police officers have this ability developed to such an extent that they supercede computer recognition is, i feel, laughable. To me this announcement through the ever subservient Sky News reeks of desperation on the part of the ;official story'. Are we about to be shown suspects who, although facial recognition technology fails to identify them, a 'super recogniser' can testify that it actually is person A or person B and we are all supposed to accept that? Seems either a damning indictment of the judicial process, or a damning indictment of the ŁŁŁŁŁ's of taxpayers money that is spent on places like GCHQ etc whose technology is now apparently no better than a highly perceptive human brain. Give me a break !

Trowbridge H. Ford , August 28, 2018 at 13:08

Why no interest in how the Coopers died in Egypt? We will soon be told by HMG that the Russians somehow dd it too., thanks to Urban's research?

giyane , August 28, 2018 at 13:49

People do die Trowbridge. I know you haven't, but you have the motivation of outliving your persecutors. With Muckin about with Isis gone and covert operations isn't social work Kissinger looking as though he's on daily blood transfusions, you have rejected Trump for some reason. But Trump has undone much of John McCain's worst mischief in one year. If McCain was an example of a politician, we don't need politicians.

Trowbridge H. Ford , August 28, 2018 at 14:16

Give me an example, other than the Coopers. of a healthy couple one day that is found dying the next day like the Skripals.

And while i tried on another site to be generous about McCain. he got Navy Secretary John Lehman, Jr. to scare the Soviets for prevailing in the Vietnam War so much about what NATO was up to in the fallout from shooting Swedish PM Olof Palme that Moscow gave up the competition for fear that it would blow up the world, helping bring on the crappy one we have.

McCain was a continuing Cold Warrior who we don't need since we still have Trump who is just trying to do it another way.

Trowbridge H. Ford , August 28, 2018 at 15:03

Oh, I forget that couple in Amesbury. Looks like the Porton Down Plague is spread overseas.

Posting on this site in like playing bridge online – the cards are stacked against you.

Doodlebug , August 28, 2018 at 15:26

"Give me an example, other than the Coopers. of a healthy couple one day that is found dying the next day like the Skripals."

Will a 17 year old and his step-father do?

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/6918378/brit-lad-17-in-a-coma-on-family-holiday-in-spain-may-have-been-poisoned-by-cockroach-pesticide/

They both survived, but one or other (quite possibly both) would have died without medical intervention.

[Sep 14, 2018] English Translation of Udo Ulfkotte s Bought Journalists Suppressed

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... My guess is that this book is just too dangerous to allow it to become part of the debate on "fake news" and "Russiagate." Of course now the CIA doesn't even have to exclusively – "own"- journalists as fronts when ex-CIA heads are being hired outright by MSM as pundits. I just wish someone with access would post an English language PDF version online. It would be a real contribution to free thought and free speech to do so. ..."
"... Western elites realize what they could have, what they could do and what they could get away with, but only if they reinvent the political system Hitler created. If they defeat every enemy abroad who might stop them, next they'll do to their own people what the Nazis did to those they didn't want alive ..."
"... Journos have long been pliant enablers for Intel agencies. It's strange how Dr. Ulfkotte's revelations have been taken as some signifier of further Western moral decay/decadence. ..."
"... The real story here, which the media pretends not to notice, is that if Intelligence services and corporations did not finance newspapers they would cease to exist. The old business model whereby newspapers covered their costs by selling advertising and paid circulation is finished. Under that model there were, to an extent, incentives for the publisher to preserve a modicum of credibility in order to keep readership, as well as reasons to publish sensational stories to beat competition. ..."
"... The days that Ulfkotte recalled were times when it took lots of money and careful preparation to put spooks into the newsroom, nowadays the papers are only too happy to publish the CIA's PR and very grateful if the government pays their journalists' salaries. ..."
"... To understand how journalism is bought, go analyze the output of the Uk's Daily Telegraph. They literally sell space to lobbyists and for several years outraged BTL comment would tear the articles to shreds. The whole UK Press prostitutes itself whenever there is a US war on i.e. all the time. It really is about time the CIA were unmasked – they do not serve our interests, they serve only their own . ..."
Sep 14, 2018 | off-guardian.org

intergenerationaltrauma says February 11, 2018

The rather obvious suppression of the English version of what was a "best seller" in Germany suggests that the Western system of thought manipulation and consent manufacture sees itself as weaker and more vulnerable than one might at first imagine.

We can see from a year+ of "Russiagate" that Western media is a clown-show, much of so called "alternative media" included.

My guess is that this book is just too dangerous to allow it to become part of the debate on "fake news" and "Russiagate." Of course now the CIA doesn't even have to exclusively – "own"- journalists as fronts when ex-CIA heads are being hired outright by MSM as pundits. I just wish someone with access would post an English language PDF version online. It would be a real contribution to free thought and free speech to do so.

Google Talpiot Program says January 30, 2018
Just like "200 years together" by Solzhenitsyn which was never officially published in English despite Andrei having authored many works which were big sellers. Just an example of other private business and corporations are often fully responsible for pro-establishment censorship.
Harry Stotle says January 15, 2018
The treatment of the book aroused suspicion because of its content – ie supine news outlets forever dancing to the tune of western military imperatives.

Ongoing support for illegal wars tell us that the MSM has hardly been at the forefront of informing readers why war criminals like Hilary and Obama keep getting away with it. In fact Obama, just like Kissinger was awarded a peace prize – so obviously something has gone very wrong somewhere.

It may be, although it seems unlikely that the mis-handling of an important theme like this is simply due to oversight by the publisher (as Matt claims) but neither is it beyond the realms of possibility that somebody has had a word with someone in the publishing world, perhaps because they are not overly keen on the fact Udo Ulfkotte has deviated from the media's mono-narrative about why it is necessary for the US to destabilise countries and kill so many of their citizens.

Lets face it – it would be harder for the pattern to be maintained if the MSM was not so afraid of telling the truth, or at least be more willing to hold to account politicians as the consequences of their disastrous policies unfold for all to see.

Maybe you want to have a go at answering the obvious question begged by such self evident truths – why are the MSM usually lying?

Marcus says January 20, 2018
The book was never published in English. It was advertised, and then withdrawn. That is suppression...
Michael McNulty says January 14, 2018
Somebody said banning books is the modern form of book burning, and like Heinrich Heine said two centuries ago, "Where they burn books, in the end, they start burning people."

Western elites realize what they could have, what they could do and what they could get away with, but only if they reinvent the political system Hitler created. If they defeat every enemy abroad who might stop them, next they'll do to their own people what the Nazis did to those they didn't want alive. If enough water sources are lost to fracking, and enough food sources lost through poisoned seas and forest fires, many people will go to their camps as refuge but few will survive them. This ecological destruction is for future population reduction.

In the US they use newspeak to say what the Nazis described with more honesty. Their master race became the indispensable nation, their world domination became full spectrum dominance, and Totalerkrieg became the global war on terror. There will be others.

jones says January 12, 2018
Farzad Basoft anyone ? Journos have long been pliant enablers for Intel agencies. It's strange how Dr. Ulfkotte's revelations have been taken as some signifier of further Western moral decay/decadence.
summitflyer says January 15, 2018
Maybe I am taking what you wrote out of context but I don't find it strange at all .It is just that someone, Udo, on the inside has become a whistle blower , and confirmed what most suspected .The establishment can't have that.

See John Swinton on the independence of the press at http://constitution.org/pub/swinton_press.htm

Connect says January 12, 2018
As the economy growth has this so-called invisible hand, journalism also has an 'invisible pen'. One of the questions that need an answer: how come feminists are so anti-Putin and anti-Russia? Easy to connect to dots?
bevin says January 11, 2018
The real story here, which the media pretends not to notice, is that if Intelligence services and corporations did not finance newspapers they would cease to exist. The old business model whereby newspapers covered their costs by selling advertising and paid circulation is finished. Under that model there were, to an extent, incentives for the publisher to preserve a modicum of credibility in order to keep readership, as well as reasons to publish sensational stories to beat competition.

Those days are gone: none of the newspapers make financial profits, they now exist because they have patrons. They always did, of course, but now they have nothing else- the advertisers have left and circulation is diminishing rapidly.

The days that Ulfkotte recalled were times when it took lots of money and careful preparation to put spooks into the newsroom, nowadays the papers are only too happy to publish the CIA's PR and very grateful if the government pays their journalists' salaries.

As to competition that is restricted to publishers competing to demonstrate their loyalty to the government and their ingenuity in candy coating its propaganda.

Anyone doubt that Luke Harding will be in the running for a Pulitzer? Or perhaps even the Nobel Prize for Literature?

Serge Lubomudrov says January 11, 2018
For those whose German is not good enough (like me, unfortunately), but know Russian, there's a Russian translation: https://www.litres.ru/udo-ulfkotte/prodazhnye-zhurnalisty-lubaya-pravda-za-vashi-dengi/
vexarb says January 9, 2018
For what it's worth, I skimmed through this very long link by Matt, and could find no mention of poison gas -- certainly no denunciation -- just horrific conventional arms : Der Spiegel 1984: http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-13508659.html

Also for what it's worth, the German publisher's blurb which I got Google to translate above, says there is much more to the book than old Soddem: the author names names and points to organizations.

Now, without any evidence, based only on my faulty memory and highly biased interpretation of events strung together on a timeline, here is my conspiracy story about a very nice country called Iraq and a very nasty Iraqi called Saddam who came to a very nasty end at the hands of his much more nasty friends, who first gave him a boost and then put in the boot.

George Cornell says January 9, 2018
That is more than plausible. Unfortunately. Hard not to sympathize with the Iraqis and feel shame for what has been done in the name of the US and UK. Rotten to the core, and sanctimonious to boot.
rtj1211 says January 9, 2018
To understand how journalism is bought, go analyze the output of the Uk's Daily Telegraph. They literally sell space to lobbyists and for several years outraged BTL comment would tear the articles to shreds. The whole UK Press prostitutes itself whenever there is a US war on i.e. all the time. It really is about time the CIA were unmasked – they do not serve our interests, they serve only their own .
Carrie says January 9, 2018
The Guardian sells space to lobbyists too. Not ad space – article space. It's literally hiring itself out to whomever wants to buy the right to publish an article under its name.
Brian Steere says January 8, 2018
Well one things stands out in bold and that is the fear that such a revelation is associated with. 'Broad spectrum dominance' of a central intelligent agency is a reversal of the wholeness of being expressing through all its parts.

Fake intelligence is basically made up to serve a believed goal. The terrorism of fear generates the goal of a self-protection that sells true relationship to 'save itself'.

This goes deep into what we take to be our mind. The mind that thinks it is in control by controlling what it thinks.

If I can observe this in myself at will, is it any surprise I can see it in our world?

What is the fear that most deeply motivates or drives the human agenda?
I do not ask this of our superficial thinking, but of a core self-honesty that cannot be 'killed' but only covered over with a thinking-complex.

And is it insane or unreal to be moved by love?

We are creatures of choice and beneath all masking, we are also the creator of choice.
But the true creative is not framed into a choosing between, but feeling one call as the movement of it.

When the 'intelligence' of a masking narrative no longer serves, be the willingness for what you no longer claim to have, and open to being moved from within.

candideschmyles says January 8, 2018
I am so tired of the simmering fury that lives inside me. This bubbling cauldron brim full of egregious truths, images and accounts accumulated over nearly 40 years of looking behind the headlines. I disagree that the usurpation of journalists and media organisations is in any way a recent phenomena. It certainly predates my emergent mind. And even the most lauded of anti-establishment hacks and film makers self-censored to some degree. True, the blatant in your face propaganda and thought control agenda has accelerated, but it was always there. I do not believe Chomsky, Oliver Stone, Pilger and their like could have done much more than they have, that is to guide us in a direction counter to the official narrative. And to insinuate they are gatekeepers, when our heads never stretch above the parapet, is really just a reflection of our own frustration that despite their work the only change remains for the worse.
Yet I fear worse is to come. Our safe bitching in glorious anonymity has been all that we have had as solace to the angst that pervades us, the other 1%. But the the thumbscrew is tightening. We may be as little as months away from any dissent being entirely removed from the internet by AI algorithms. I have already been receiving warnings on several sites anyone here would call legitimate that have had their security certificates removed and the statement that the site may contain malicious code etc. How prepared are we for blackout?
Serge Lubomudrov says January 8, 2018
The publisher even removed the 2 year old news announcement about the book! Though the twit is still there. Probably, overlooked.

https://twitter.com/saumacus/status/950468330086858757

summitflyer says January 8, 2018
A foundation should be set up in remembrance of Udo and sponsored by all true journalists and truth seekers. Maybe some day there will be a Udo Ulfkotte award to the bravest journalist of the year .Wouldn't that be something .Udo's work would not have been in vain . That would throw a monkey wrench into orgs like the Guardian and their ilk .Just dreaming out loud maybe , but with good intentions.
Alun Thomas says January 8, 2018
Original German version can be found here: http://gen.lib.rus.ec/book/index.php?md5=ABA05365ABE35FD446D6F83B149A32A2
Unfortunately no english version, but other controversial texts have sometimes been crowd-translated, maybe something like this may happen
Chris G says January 8, 2018
Thank you Alun for the link to the German edition, which I have managed to download (naughty me!) I think the suggestion of retranslating important sections and dressing these in some commentary for (presumably legitimate) publication on e.g. Off-G would be a good idea. I'm quite fluent in German and would be glad to help.
Mods: do you see any legal pitfalls?
Admin says January 8, 2018
That depends on who holds the rights to the English language version and the original and whether they would want to take issue. If it's Ulfkotte's family they may be happy to see his work get some sort of airing in English. If it's his publishers we can imagine they will see things differently – as indeed would whoever it is that seems to want the book buried.
Martin Read says January 8, 2018
Tried to get to that site and was told that I couldn't via my Virgin provider because of a High Court order. Somebody moved a bit quickly.
Carrie says January 8, 2018
Me too! My Broadband provider is blocking access due to a High Court injunction.

@ChrisG & @Alun Thomas – can you guys still get there? It might be a country or region thing.

Alun Thomas says January 8, 2018
I heard it is blocked in many western countries, as the site is well known for its disregard for copyright. Fortunately not the case where I am (NZ). If you're technically inclined, a VPN or anonymising application may help, although a VPN that 'exits' in a western area won't get you any further ahead.
George Cornell says January 8, 2018
I had no problem, but provider in Canada
Arrby says January 11, 2018
One hopes. I also hold out hope for F. William Engdahl's "Geheimakte NGOs." Here's a Dissident Voice article in which Engdahl discusses the role of NGOs in aiding and abetting the US regime change program:

https://dissidentvoice.org/2017/07/the-us-empire-the-cia-and-the-ngos/

I also recommend, highly, Stephen Gowans's article about social networking in the service of the US regime change program:

"Overthrow Inc.: Peter Ackerman's quest to do what the CIA used to do, and make it seem progressive" by Stephen Gowans
https://gowans.wordpress.com/2009/08/06/overthrow-inc-peter-ackerman%E2%80%99s-quest-to-do-what-the-cia-used-to-so-and-make-it-seem-progressive/

Frank says January 8, 2018
Yes, it has also been interesting to note that in 2015 the Guardian published a review of Richard Sakwa's book 'Frontline Ukraine' in which the author was critical of both NATO and the EU, in fomenting this crisis. The 2014 'coup' which was carried out in February 2014 was, according to the independent geopolitical publication, Strator, 'the most blatant in history.' The appraisal which was carried out by Guardian journalist Jonathon Steele was generally favourably disposed to Sakwa's record of events; however, Mr Steele now rarely publishes anything in the Guardian. Read into this what you like.

As to Sakwa's latest book,'' Russia Against the Rest'', – nothing, not a peep, it doesn't exist, it never existed, it never will exist. It would appear to be the case that the Guardian is now fully integrated into the military/surveillance/media-propaganda apparatus. The liberal gatekeeper as to what is and what isn't acceptable. Its function is pure to serve the interests of the powerful, in much the same way as the church did in the middle ages. The media doesn't just serve the interests power it is also part of the same structure of dominance, albeit the liberal wing of the ruling coalition.

During the British war against the Boers in South Africa, at the turn of the 19/20 century, the then Manchester Guardian took a brave and critical stand against the UK government. This lead to its offices in Manchester being attacked by jingoistic mobs, as was the home of the then editor C.P.Scott, whose family needed police protection. In those days 'Facts were Sacred', unlike the present where opposing views are increasingly ignored or suppressed.

Hugh O'Neill says January 8, 2018
Having just watched the documentary film tribute to I.F. Stone, "All Governments Lie", I was struck by the fact that no-one mentioned Michael Hastings, the Rolling Stone journalist (who outed General McChrystal, but whose Mercedes went mysteriously out of control, hit a tree and exploded, throwing the engine 200 yards clear of the wreck ). Here was a film about control and self-censorship, yet no-one even breathed the acronyms C.I.A. or FBI. Matt Taibbi referred to a silent coup, but none dared to mention the assassinations of JFK, MLK and RFK. These doyens of Truth included the thoroughly dodgy Noam Chomsky. Finally, the Spartacus website suggests that the saintly I.F. Stone was in the pay of the CIA. Other terms unspoken were CIA Operation Mockingbird or Operation Northwoods. There was a clip of 9/11, but zero attempt to join up all the dots.
RIP Udo Ulfkotte. CIA long ago developed a dart to induce all the signs of a heart attack, so one is naturally somewhat suspicious. Lies and assassinations are two sides of the same coin.
Harry Stotle says January 8, 2018
The only thing harder to find than Udo Ulfkotte's book is a Guardian review of it.

I daresay any mention of this book, BTL, would immediately be moderated (i.e censored) followed by a yellow or red card for the cheeky commentator.
The level of pretence on this forum has now reached epic proportions, and seems to cuts both ways, ie. commentators pretending that there are not several subjects which are virtually impossible to discuss in any depth (such as media censorship), and moderators pretending that 'community standards' is not simply a crude device to control conversational discourse, especially when a commentators point of view stray beyond narrow, Guardian approved borders.

Books, such as 'Bought Journalists' (which expose the corruption at the heart of western media) are especially inconvenient for the risible 'fake news' agenda currently being rammed down the readerships throat – some of these people at the Guardian have either absolutely no insight, or no shame.

Harry Stotle says January 8, 2018
This piece put me in mind of Daniele Gansers seminal book, 'NATOs secret armies' Of course Off-G picked up on it but I can't find any commentary from the Guardian
https://off-guardian.org/2015/07/17/natos-secret-armies-gladio-in-western-europe/

Ulfkotte and Ganser in their ways are both telling a similar story – NATO, i.e an arm of the US military industrial complex are mass murderers and sufficiently intimidating to have most western journalists singing from the same hymn sheet.

Since the Guardian follows the party line it is only possible to send coded or cryptic messages (BTL) should commentators wish to deviate from the approved narrative.
For example, I was 'pre-moderated' for having doubts about the veracity of the so called 'Parsons Green tube bomb', especially the nature of the injuries inflicted on a young model who looked like she was suffering from toothache.
https://www.thenational.ae/image/policy:1.628812:1505494262/wo16-web-parsons-green.JPG?f=16×9&w=1024&$p$f$w=e135eda

My guess is NATO's secret army are still in full swing but there is no chance the Guardian will pick up on it – they're too busy whipping up antipathy towards Iran.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jan/05/west-ignores-iranian-people-power-peril#comments

George Cornell says January 8, 2018
Been there, done that. What ordinarily happens if the submission is proper and cannot be censored on the basis of impropriety or foulmouthedness or any other good reason, but exposes a Guardian sacred cow in an embarrassing light, is that it is said to be off topic. Now this is really unaccountable, and truly subjective.

The community in community standards is "them" and has close ties to the 1%, if I hazard a guess.

[Sep 07, 2018] New York Times Undermining Peace Efforts by Sowing Suspicion by Diana Johnstone

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... The letter by Mister or Ms Anonymous is very well written. By someone like, say, Thomas Friedman. That is, someone on the NYT staff. It is very cleverly composed to achieve quite obvious calculated aims. It is a masterpiece of treacherous deception. ..."
"... This anonymous enemy of amorality claims to approve of all the most extreme right-wing measures of the Trump administration as "bright spots": deregulation, tax reform, a more robust military, "and more" – cleverly omitting mention of Trump's immigration policy which could unduly shock the New York Times' liberal readers. The late Senator John McCain, the model of bipartisan bellicosity, is cited as the example to follow. ..."
"... The "resistance" proclaimed is solely against the facets of Trump's foreign policy which White House insiders are said to be working diligently to undermine: peaceful relations with Russian and North Korea. ..."
"... Trump's desire to avoid war is transformed into "a preference for autocrats and dictators". (Trump gets no credit for his warlike rhetoric against Iran and close relations with Netanyahu, even though they must please Anonymous.) ..."
"... The purpose of this is stunningly obvious. The New York Times has already done yeoman service in rounding up liberal Democrats and left-leaning independents in the anti-Trump lynch mob. But now the ploy is to rally conservative Republicans to the same cause of overthrowing the elected President. The letter amounts to an endorsement of future President Pence. ..."
"... This is the Iago ploy. Shakespeare's villain destroyed Othello by causing him to distrust those closest to him, his wife and closest associates. Like Trump in Washington, Othello, the "Moor" of Venice, was an outsider, that much easier to deceive and betray. ..."
"... The New York Times is playing Iago, whispering that Putin in the Kremlin is surrounded by secret "informants", and that Trump in the White House is surrounded by people systematically undermining his presidency. Putin is not likely to be impressed, but the trick might work with Trump, who is truly the target of open and covert enemies and whose position is much more insecure. There is certainly some undermining going on. ..."
"... Was the New York Times oped written by the paper's own writers or by the CIA? It hardly matters since they are so closely entwined. ..."
"... The military-industrial-congressional-deep state-media complex is holding its breath to breathe that great sigh of relief. The intruder is gone. Hurrah! Now we can go right on teaching the public to hate and fear the Russian enemy, so that arms contracts continue to blossom and NATO builds up its aggressive forces around Russia in hopes that this may frighten the Russians into dumping Putin in favor of a new Boris Yeltsin, ready to let the United States pursue the Clintonian plan of breaking up the Russian Federation into pieces, like the former Yugoslavia, in order to take them over one by one, with all their great natural resources. ..."
"... When dialogue is impossible, all that is left is force and violence. That is what is being promoted by the most influential media in the United States. ..."
Sep 07, 2018 | ronpaulinstitute.org

The New York Times continues to outdo itself in the production of fake news. There is no more reliable source of fake news than the intelligence services, which regularly provide their pet outlets (NYT and WaPo) with sensational stories that are as unverifiable as their sources are anonymous. A prize example was the August 24 report that US intelligence agencies don't know anything about Russia's plans to mess up our November elections because "informants close to Putin and in the Kremlin" aren't saying anything. Not knowing anything about something for which there is no evidence is a rare scoop.

A story like that is not designed to "inform the public" since there is no information in it. It has other purposes: to keep the "Russia is undermining our democracy" story on front pages, with the extra twist in this case of trying to make Putin distrustful of his entourage. The Russian president is supposed to wonder, who are those informants in my entourage?

But that was nothing compared to the whopper produced by the "newpaper of record" on September 5. (By the way, the "record" is stuck in the same groove: Trump bad, Putin bad – bad bad bad.) This was the sensational oped headlined "I am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration", signed by nobody.

The letter by Mister or Ms Anonymous is very well written. By someone like, say, Thomas Friedman. That is, someone on the NYT staff. It is very cleverly composed to achieve quite obvious calculated aims. It is a masterpiece of treacherous deception.

The fictional author presents itself as a right-wing conservative shocked by Trump's "amorality" – a category that outside the Washington swamp might include betraying the trust of one's superior.

This anonymous enemy of amorality claims to approve of all the most extreme right-wing measures of the Trump administration as "bright spots": deregulation, tax reform, a more robust military, "and more" – cleverly omitting mention of Trump's immigration policy which could unduly shock the New York Times' liberal readers. The late Senator John McCain, the model of bipartisan bellicosity, is cited as the example to follow.

The "resistance" proclaimed is solely against the facets of Trump's foreign policy which White House insiders are said to be working diligently to undermine: peaceful relations with Russian and North Korea.

Trump's desire to avoid war is transformed into "a preference for autocrats and dictators". (Trump gets no credit for his warlike rhetoric against Iran and close relations with Netanyahu, even though they must please Anonymous.)

The purpose of this is stunningly obvious. The New York Times has already done yeoman service in rounding up liberal Democrats and left-leaning independents in the anti-Trump lynch mob. But now the ploy is to rally conservative Republicans to the same cause of overthrowing the elected President. The letter amounts to an endorsement of future President Pence. Just get rid of Trump and you'll have a nice, neat, ultra-right-wing Republican as President.

The Democrats may not like Pence, but they are so demented by hatred of Trump that they are visibly ready to accept the Devil himself to get rid of the sinister clown who dared defeat Hillary Clinton. Down with democracy; the votes of deplorables shouldn't count.

That is treacherous enough, but even more despicable is the insidious design to destabilize the presidency by sowing distrust. Speaking of Trump, Mr and/or Ms Anonymous declare: "The dilemma – which he does not fully grasp – is that many of the senior officials in his own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations" (meaning peace with Russia).

This is the Iago ploy. Shakespeare's villain destroyed Othello by causing him to distrust those closest to him, his wife and closest associates. Like Trump in Washington, Othello, the "Moor" of Venice, was an outsider, that much easier to deceive and betray.

The New York Times is playing Iago, whispering that Putin in the Kremlin is surrounded by secret "informants", and that Trump in the White House is surrounded by people systematically undermining his presidency. Putin is not likely to be impressed, but the trick might work with Trump, who is truly the target of open and covert enemies and whose position is much more insecure. There is certainly some undermining going on.

Was the New York Times oped written by the paper's own writers or by the CIA? It hardly matters since they are so closely entwined.

No trick is too low for those who consider Trump an intolerable intruder on THEIR power territory. The New York Times "news" that Trump is surrounded by traitors is taken up by other media who indirectly confirm the story by speculating on "who is it?" The Boston Globe (among others) eagerly rushed in, asking:

"So who's the author of the op-ed? It's a question that has many people poking through the text, looking for clues. Meanwhile, the denials have come thick and fast. Here's a brief look at some of the highest-level officials in the administration who might have a motive to write the letter."

Isn't it obvious that all this is designed to make Trump distrust everyone around him? Isn't that a way to drive him toward that "crazy" where they say he already is, and which is fallback grounds for impeachment when the Mueller investigation fails to come up with nothing more serious than the fact that Russian intelligent agents are intelligent agents?

The White House insider (or insiders, or whatever) use terms like "erratic behavior" and "instability" to contribute to the "Trump is insane" narrative. Insanity is the alternative pretext to the Mueller wild goose chase for divesting Trump of the powers of the presidency. If Trump responds by accusing the traitors of being traitors, that will be final proof of his mental instability. The oped claims to provide evidence that Trump is being betrayed, but if he says so, that will be taken as a sign of mental derangement. To save our exemplary democracy from itself, the elected president must be thrown out.

The military-industrial-congressional-deep state-media complex is holding its breath to breathe that great sigh of relief. The intruder is gone. Hurrah! Now we can go right on teaching the public to hate and fear the Russian enemy, so that arms contracts continue to blossom and NATO builds up its aggressive forces around Russia in hopes that this may frighten the Russians into dumping Putin in favor of a new Boris Yeltsin, ready to let the United States pursue the Clintonian plan of breaking up the Russian Federation into pieces, like the former Yugoslavia, in order to take them over one by one, with all their great natural resources.

And when this fails, as it has been failing, and will continue to fail, the United States has all those brand new first strike nuclear weapons being stationed in European NATO countries, aimed at the Kremlin. And the Russian military are not just sitting there with their own nuclear weapons, waiting to be wiped out. When nobody, not even the President of the United States, has the right to meet and talk with Russian leaders, there is only one remaining form of exchange. When dialogue is impossible, all that is left is force and violence. That is what is being promoted by the most influential media in the United States.

[Sep 02, 2018] Open letter to President Trump concerning the consequences of 11 September 2001 by Thierry Meyssan

Highly recommended!
Aug 30, 2018 | www.voltairenet.org

Mister President,

The crimes of 11 September 2001 have never been judged in your country. I am writing to you as a French citizen, the first person to denounce the inconsistencies of the official version and to open the world to the debate and the search for the real perpetrators.

In a criminal court, as the jury, we have to determine whether the suspect presented to us is guilty or not, and eventually, to decide what punishment he should receive. When we suffered the events of 9/11, the Bush Junior administration told us that the guilty party was Al-Qaďda, and the punishment they should receive was the overthrow of those who had helped them – the Afghan Taliban, then the Iraqi régime of Saddam Hussein.

However, there is a weight of evidence which attests to the impossibility of this thesis. If we were members of a jury, we would have to declare objectively that the Taliban and the régime of Saddam Hussein were innocent of this crime. Of course, this alone would not enable us to name the real culprits, and we would thus be frustrated. But we could not conceive of condemning parties innocent of such a crime simply because we have not known how, or not been able, to find the guilty parties.

We all understood that certain senior personalities were lying when the Secretary of State for Justice and Director of the FBI, Robert Mueller, revealed the names of the 19 presumed hijackers, because we already had in front of us the lists disclosed by the airline companies of all of the passengers embarked - lists on which none of the suspects were mentioned.

From there, we became suspicious of the " Continuity of Government ", the instance tasked with taking over from the elected authorities if they should be killed during a nuclear confrontation. We advanced the hypothesis that these attacks masked a coup d'état, in conformity with Edward Luttwak's method of maintaining the appearance of the Executive, but imposing a different policy.

In the days following 9/11, the Bush administration made several decisions:

- the creation of the Office of Homeland Security and the vote for a voluminous anti-terrorist Code which had been drawn up long beforehand, the USA Patriot Act. For affairs which the administration itself qualifies as " terrorist ", this text suspends the Bill of Rights which was the glory of your country. It unbalances your institutions. Two centuries later, it validates the triumph of the great landowners who wrote the Constitution, and the defeat of the heroes of the War of Independence who demanded that the Bill of Rights must be added.

- The Secretary for Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, created the Office of Force Transformation, under the command of Admiral Arthur Cebrowski, who immediately presented a programme, conceived a long time earlier, planning for the control of access to the natural resources of the countries of the geopolitical South. He demanded the destruction of State and social structures in the half of the world which was not yet globalised. Simultaneously, the Director of the CIA launched the " Worldwide Attack Matrix ", a package of secret operations in 85 countries where Rumsfeld and Cebrowski intended to destroy the State structures. Considering that only those countries whose economies were globalised would remain stable, and that the others would be destroyed, the men from 9/11 placed US armed forces in the service of transnational financial interests. They betrayed your country and transformed it into the armed wing of these predators.

For the last 17 years, we have witnessed what is being given to your compatriots by the government of the successors of those who drew up the Constitution and opposed at that time - without success – the Bill of Rights. These rich men have become the super-rich, while the middle class has been reduced by a fifth and poverty has increased.

We have also seen the implementation of the Rumsfeld-Cebrowski strategy – phoney " civil wars " have devastated almost all of the Greater Middle East. Entire cities have been wiped from the map, from Afghanistan to Libya, via Saudi Arabia and Turkey, who were not themselves at war.

In 2001, only two US citizens denounced the incoherence of the Bush version, two real estate promoters – the Democrat Jimmy Walter, who was forced into exile, and yourself, who entered into politics and was elected President.

In 2011, we saw the commander of AfriCom relieved of his mission and replaced by NATO for having refused to support Al-Qaďda in the liquidation of the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya. Then we saw NATO's LandCom organise Western support for jihadists in general and Al-Qaďda in particular in their attempt to overthrow the Syrian Arab Republic.

So the jihadists, who were considered as " freedom fighters " against the Soviets, then as " terrorists " after 9/11, once again became the allies of the deep state, which, in fact, they have always been.

So, with an immense upsurge of hope, we have watched your actions to suppress, one by one, all support for the jihadists. It is with the same hope that we see today that you are talking with your Russian counterpart in order to bring back life to the devastated Middle East. And it is with equal anxiety that we see Robert Mueller, now a special prosecutor, pursuing the destruction of your homeland by attacking your position.

Mister President, not only are you and your compatriots suffering from the diarchy which has sneaked into power in your country since the coup d'état of 11 September 2001, but the whole world is a victim.

Mister President, 9/11 is not ancient history. It is the triumph of transnational interests which are crushing not only your people, but all of humanity which aspires to freedom.

Thierry Meyssan brought to the world stage the debate on the real perpetrators of 11 September 2001. He has worked as a political analyst alongside Hugo Chavez, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Mouamar Kadhafi. He is today a political refugee in Syria.

Thierry Meyssan

See : Memoranda for the President on 9/11: Time for the Truth -- False Flag Deep State Truth! , by : Kevin Barrett; Scott Bennett; Christopher Bollyn; Fred Burks; Steve De'ak; A. K. Dewdney; Gordon Duff; Aero Engineer; Greg Felton; James Fetzer; Richard Gage; Tom-Scott Gordon; David Ray Griffin; Sander Hicks; T. Mark Hightower; Barbara Honegger; Eric Hufschmid; Ed Jewett; Nicholas Kollerstrom; John Lear; Susan Lindauer; Joe Olson; Peter Dale Scott; Robert David Steele; and indirectly, Victor Thorn and Judy Wood.

Thierry Meyssan Political consultant, President-founder of the Réseau Voltaire ( Voltaire Network ). Latest work in French – Sous nos Yeux. Du 11-Septembre ŕ Donald Trump (Right Before our Eyes. From 9/11 to Donald Trump).

[Sep 02, 2018] Bill Browder (of Magnitsky fame) broke all these rules while pillaging Russia.

Highly recommended!
Browder was able to breqak those rule only becuase he was supported by MI6, CIA or both. Pillaging of Russia was the plan.
Notable quotes:
"... @Alligator Ed ..."
Sep 02, 2018 | caucus99percent.com

CB on Sun, 09/02/2018 - 11:12pm

Putin demanded several more caveats

@Alligator Ed
in addition to staying out of politics:

1) You pay your taxes
2) You pay your employees
3) There will be no asset stripping

Bill Browder (of Magnitsky fame) broke all these rules while pillaging Russia. From 1995–2006 his company, Hermitage Capital Management, siphoned untold billions of dollars out of Russia into offshore accounts while paying no taxes and cheating workers of wages and pensions.

Putin put an end to US and UK backed shysters stealing Russia blind. Is it any wonder the western oligarchs hate him with such a passion?

[Aug 22, 2018] The CIA Owns the US and European Media by Paul Craig Roberts

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... The mind of the mass media: Email exchange between myself and a leading Washington Post foreign policy reporter: ..."
"... For the record, I think RT is much less biased than the Post on international affairs. And, yes, it's bias, not "fake news" that's the main problem – Cold-War/anti-Communist/anti-Russian bias that Americans have been raised with for a full century. RT defends Russia against the countless mindless attacks from the West. Who else is there to do that? Should not the Western media be held accountable for what they broadcast? Americans are so unaccustomed to hearing the Russian side defended, or hearing it at all, that when they do it can seem rather weird. ..."
"... Regard these indictments in proper perspective and we find that election interference is only listed as a supposed objective, with charges actually being for unlawful cyber operations, identity theft, and conspiracy to launder money by American individuals unconnected to the Russian government. So we're still waiting for some evidence of actual Russian interference in the election aimed at determining the winner. ..."
"... However, I have no doubt that the great majority of Americans who follow the news each day believe the official stories about the Russians. They're particularly impressed with the fact that every US intelligence agency supports the official stories. They would not be impressed at all if told that a dozen Russian intelligence agencies all disputed the charges. Group-think is alive and well all over the world. As is Cold War II ..."
"... And here is Tom Malinowski, former Assistant Secretary of State for democracy, human rights and labor (2014-2017) – last year he reported that Putin had "charged that the U.S. government had interfered 'aggressively' in Russia's 2012 presidential vote," claiming that Washington had "gathered opposition forces and financed them." Putin, wrote Malinowski, "apparently got President Trump to agree to a mutual commitment that neither country would interfere in the other's elections." ..."
"... We also have the case of the US government agency, National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which has interfered in more elections than the CIA or God. Indeed, the man who helped draft the legislation establishing NED, Allen Weinstein, declared in 1991: "A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA." On April 12, 2018 the presidents of two of NED's wings wrote: "A specious narrative has come back into circulation: that Moscow's campaign of political warfare is no different from U.S.-supported democracy assistance." ..."
"... "Democracy assistance", you see, is what they call NED's election-interferences and government-overthrows ..."
Aug 18, 2018 | www.unz.com

William Blum shares with us his correspondence with Washington Post presstitute Michael Birnbaum. As you can tell from Birnbaum's replies, he comes across as either very stupid or as a CIA asset.

When I received my briefing as staff associate, House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, which required top secret clearance, I was told by senior members of the staff that the Washington Post was a CIA asset. Watching the Washington Post's takedown of President Richard Nixon with the orchestrated Watergate story, that became obvious. President Nixon had made too many overtures to the Soviets and too many arms limitations agreements, and he opened to China. Watching President Nixon's peace initiatives water down the threat level from the Soviet Union and Maoist China, the military/security complex saw a threat to its budget and power and decided that Nixon had to go. The assassination of President John F. Kennedy had resulted in far too much skepticism about the Warren Commission Report, so the CIA decided to use the Washington Post to get rid of Nixon. To keep the clueless American left hating Nixon, the CIA used its assets in the leftwing to keep Nixon blamed for the Vietnam war, a war that Nixon inherited and did not want.

The CIA knew that Nixon's problem was that he could not exit the war without losing his conservative base, which was convinced of the nonsensical "Domino Theory." I have always wondered if the CIA concocted the "Domino Theory," as it so well served them. Unable to get rid of the war "with honor," Nixon was driven to brutal methods to force the North Vietnamese to accept a situation that he could depart without defeat and soiling America's "honor" and losing his conservative support base. The North Vietnamese wouldn't bend, but the US Congress did, and so the CIA succeeded in discrediting among both the leftwing and righwing Nixon's war management. With no one to defend him, Nixon was an easy target for the CIA.

Here is Blum's exchange with Birnbaum. It is possible that Birnbaum is neither stupid nor a CIA asset, but just a person wanting to hold on to a job. The last thing he can afford to do is to disabuse readers of the "Russian Threat" when Bezos' Amazon and Washington Post properties are dependent on the CIA's annual subsidy of $600 million disquised as a "contract." https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-12-20/cia-washington-post-and-russia-what-youre-not-being-told

The Anti-Empire Report # 159
Willian Blum

The mind of the mass media: Email exchange between myself and a leading Washington Post foreign policy reporter:
July 18, 2018

Dear Mr. Birnbaum,

You write Trump "made no mention of Russia's adventures in Ukraine". Well, neither he nor Putin nor you made any mention of America's adventures in the Ukraine, which resulted in the overthrow of the Ukrainian government in 2014, which led to the justified Russian adventure. Therefore ?

If Russia overthrew the Mexican government would you blame the US for taking some action in Mexico?
William Blum

Dear Mr. Blum,

Thanks for your note. "America's adventures in the Ukraine": what are you talking about? Last time I checked, it was Ukrainians in the streets of Kiev who caused Yanukovych to turn tail and run. Whether or not that was a good thing, we can leave aside, but it wasn't the Americans who did it.

It is, however, Russian special forces who fanned out across Crimea in February and March 2014, according to Putin, and Russians who came down from Moscow who stoked conflict in eastern Ukraine in the months after, according to their own accounts.
Best, Michael Birnbaum

To MB,

I can scarcely believe your reply. Do you read nothing but the Post? Do you not know of high State Dept official Victoria Nuland and the US Ambassador in Ukraine in Maidan Square to encourage the protesters? She spoke of 5 billion (sic) dollars given to aid the protesters who were soon to overthrow the govt. She and the US Amb. spoke openly of who to choose as the next president. And he's the one who became president. This is all on tape. I guess you never watch Russia Today (RT). God forbid! I read the Post every day. You should watch RT once in a while.
William Blum

To WB,

I was the Moscow bureau chief of the newspaper; I reported extensively in Ukraine in the months and years following the protests. My observations are not based on reading. RT is not a credible news outlet, but I certainly do read far beyond our own pages, and of course I talk to the actual actors on the ground myself – that's my job.

And: yes, of course Nuland was in the Maidan – but encouraging the protests, as she clearly did, is not the same as sparking them or directing them, nor is playing favorites with potential successors, as she clearly did, the same as being directly responsible for overthrowing the government. I'm not saying the United States wasn't involved in trying to shape events. So were Russia and the European Union. But Ukrainians were in the driver's seat the whole way through. I know the guy who posted the first Facebook call to protest Yanukovych in November 2013; he's not an American agent. RT, meanwhile, reports fabrications and terrible falsehoods all the time. By all means consume a healthy and varied media diet – don't stop at the US mainstream media. But ask yourself how often RT reports critically on the Russian government, and consider how that lacuna shapes the rest of their reporting. You will find plenty of reporting in the Washington Post that is critical of the US government and US foreign policy in general, and decisions in Ukraine and the Ukrainian government in specific. Our aim is to be fair, without picking sides.
Best, Michael Birnbaum

======================= end of exchange =======================

Right, the United States doesn't play indispensable roles in changes of foreign governments; never has, never will; even when they offer billions of dollars; even when they pick the new president, which, apparently, is not the same as picking sides. It should be noticed that Mr Birnbaum offers not a single example to back up his extremist claim that RT "reports fabrications and terrible falsehoods all the time." "All the time", no less! That should make it easy to give some examples.

For the record, I think RT is much less biased than the Post on international affairs. And, yes, it's bias, not "fake news" that's the main problem – Cold-War/anti-Communist/anti-Russian bias that Americans have been raised with for a full century. RT defends Russia against the countless mindless attacks from the West. Who else is there to do that? Should not the Western media be held accountable for what they broadcast? Americans are so unaccustomed to hearing the Russian side defended, or hearing it at all, that when they do it can seem rather weird.

To the casual observer, THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA indictments of July 14 of Russian intelligence agents (GRU) reinforced the argument that the Soviet government interfered in the US 2016 presidential election. Regard these indictments in proper perspective and we find that election interference is only listed as a supposed objective, with charges actually being for unlawful cyber operations, identity theft, and conspiracy to launder money by American individuals unconnected to the Russian government. So we're still waiting for some evidence of actual Russian interference in the election aimed at determining the winner.

The Russians did it (cont.)
Each day I spend about three hours reading the Washington Post. Amongst other things I'm looking for evidence – real, legal, courtroom-quality evidence, or at least something logical and rational – to pin down those awful Russkis for their many recent crimes, from influencing the outcome of the 2016 US presidential election to use of a nerve agent in the UK. But I do not find such evidence.

Each day brings headlines like these:

These are all from the same day, August 9, which led me to thinking of doing this article, but similar stories can be found any day in the Post and in major newspapers anywhere in America. None of the articles begins to explain how Russia did these things, or even WHY. Motivation appears to have become a lost pursuit in the American mass media. The one thing sometimes mentioned, which I think may have some credibility, is Russia's preference of Trump over Hillary Clinton in 2016. But this doesn't begin to explain how Russia could pull off any of the electoral magic it's accused of, which would be feasible only if the United States were a backward, Third World, Banana Republic.

There's the Facebook ads, as well as all the other ads The people who are influenced by this story – have they read many of the actual ads? Many are pro-Clinton or anti-Trump; many are both; many are neither. It's one big mess, the only rational explanation of this which I've read is that they come from money-making websites, "click-bait" sites as they're known, which earn money simply by attracting visitors.

As to the nerve agents, it makes more sense if the UK or the CIA did it to make the Russians look bad, because the anti-Russian scandal which followed was totally predictable. Why would Russia choose the time of the World Cup in Moscow – of which all of Russia was immensely proud – to bring such notoriety down upon their head? But that would have been an ideal time for their enemies to want to embarrass them.

However, I have no doubt that the great majority of Americans who follow the news each day believe the official stories about the Russians. They're particularly impressed with the fact that every US intelligence agency supports the official stories. They would not be impressed at all if told that a dozen Russian intelligence agencies all disputed the charges. Group-think is alive and well all over the world. As is Cold War II.

But we're the Good Guys, ain't we?

For a defender of US foreign policy there's very little that causes extreme heartburn more than someone implying a "moral equivalence" between American behavior and that of Russia. That was the case during Cold War I and it's the same now in Cold War II. It just drives them up the wall.

After the United States passed a law last year requiring TV station RT (Russia Today) to register as a "foreign agent", the Russians passed their own law allowing authorities to require foreign media to register as a "foreign agent". Senator John McCain denounced the new Russian law, saying there is "no equivalence" between RT and networks such as Voice of America, CNN and the BBC, whose journalists "seek the truth, debunk lies, and hold governments accountable." By contrast, he said, "RT's propagandists debunk the truth, spread lies, and seek to undermine democratic governments in order to further Vladimir Putin's agenda."

And here is Tom Malinowski, former Assistant Secretary of State for democracy, human rights and labor (2014-2017) – last year he reported that Putin had "charged that the U.S. government had interfered 'aggressively' in Russia's 2012 presidential vote," claiming that Washington had "gathered opposition forces and financed them." Putin, wrote Malinowski, "apparently got President Trump to agree to a mutual commitment that neither country would interfere in the other's elections."

"Is this moral equivalence fair?" Malinowski asked and answered: "In short, no. Russia's interference in the United States' 2016 election could not have been more different from what the United States does to promote democracy in other countries."

How do you satirize such officials and such high-school beliefs?

We also have the case of the US government agency, National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which has interfered in more elections than the CIA or God. Indeed, the man who helped draft the legislation establishing NED, Allen Weinstein, declared in 1991: "A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA." On April 12, 2018 the presidents of two of NED's wings wrote: "A specious narrative has come back into circulation: that Moscow's campaign of political warfare is no different from U.S.-supported democracy assistance."

"Democracy assistance", you see, is what they call NED's election-interferences and government-overthrows. The authors continue: "This narrative is churned out by propaganda outlets such as RT and Sputnik [radio station]. it is deployed by isolationists who propound a U.S. retreat from global leadership."

"Isolationists" is what [neo]conservatives call critics of US foreign policy whose arguments they can't easily dismiss, so they imply that such people just don't want the US to be involved in anything abroad.

And "global leadership" is what they call being first in election-interferences and government-overthrows.

https://williamblum.org/aer/read/159

[Aug 14, 2018] US Intelligence Community is Tearing the Country Apart from the Inside by Dmitry Orlov

Highly recommended!
This is an interesting analysis shedding some light on how the US intelligence services have gone rogue...
Notable quotes:
"... Most recently, British "special services," which are a sort of Mini-Me to the to the Dr. Evil that is the US intelligence apparatus, saw it fit to interfere with one of their own spies, Sergei Skripal, a double agent whom they sprung from a Russian jail in a spy swap. They poisoned him using an exotic chemical and then tried to pin the blame on Russia based on no evidence. ..."
"... the Americans are doing their best to break the unwritten rule against dragging spies through the courts, but their best is nowhere near good enough. ..."
"... That said, there is no reason to believe that the Russian spies couldn't have hacked into the DNC mail server. It was probably running Microsoft Windows, and that operating system has more holes in it than a building in downtown Raqqa, Syria after the Americans got done bombing that city to rubble, lots of civilians included. When questioned about this alleged hacking by Fox News, Putin (who had worked as a spy in his previous career) had trouble keeping a straight face and clearly enjoyed the moment. ..."
"... He pointed out that the hacked/leaked emails showed a clear pattern of wrongdoing: DNC officials conspired to steal the electoral victory in the Democratic Primary from Bernie Sanders, and after this information had been leaked they were forced to resign. If the Russian hack did happen, then it was the Russians working to save American democracy from itself. So, where's the gratitude? Where's the love? Oh, and why are the DNC perps not in jail? ..."
"... The logic of US officials may be hard to follow, but only if we adhere to the traditional definitions of espionage and counterespionage -- "intelligence" in US parlance -- which is to provide validated information for the purpose of making informed decisions on best ways of defending the country. But it all makes perfect sense if we disabuse ourselves of such quaint notions and accept the reality of what we can actually observe: the purpose of US "intelligence" is not to come up with or to work with facts but to simply "make shit up." ..."
"... The objective of US intelligence is to suck all remaining wealth out of the US and its allies and pocket as much of it as possible while pretending to defend it from phantom aggressors by squandering nonexistent (borrowed) financial resources on ineffective and overpriced military operations and weapons systems. Where the aggressors are not phantom, they are specially organized for the purpose of having someone to fight: "moderate" terrorists and so on. ..."
"... "What sort of idiot are you to ask me such a stupid question? Of course they are lying! They were caught lying more than once, and therefore they can never be trusted again. In order to claim that they are not currently lying, you have to determine when it was that they stopped lying, and that they haven't lied since. And that, based on the information that is available, is an impossible task." ..."
"... "The US intelligence agencies made an outrageous claim: that I colluded with Russia to rig the outcome of the 2016 presidential election. The burden of proof is on them. They are yet to prove their case in a court of law, which is the only place where the matter can legitimately be settled, if it can be settled at all. Until that happens, we must treat their claim as conspiracy theory, not as fact." ..."
"... But no such reality-based, down-to-earth dialogue seems possible. All that we hear are fake answers to fake questions, and the outcome is a series of faulty decisions. Based on fake intelligence, the US has spent almost all of this century embroiled in very expensive and ultimately futile conflicts. ..."
"... Thanks to their efforts, Iran, Iraq and Syria have now formed a continuous crescent of religiously and geopolitically aligned states friendly toward Russia while in Afghanistan the Taliban is resurgent and battling ISIS -- an organization that came together thanks to American efforts in Iraq and Syria. ..."
"... Another hypothesis, and a far more plausible one, is that the US intelligence community has been doing a wonderful job of bankrupting the country and driving it toward financial, economic and political collapse by forcing it to engage in an endless series of expensive and futile conflicts -- the largest single continuous act of grand larceny the world has ever known. How that can possibly be an intelligent thing to do to your own country, for any conceivable definition of "intelligence," I will leave for you to work out for yourself. While you are at it, you might also want to come up with an improved definition of "treason": something better than "a skeptical attitude toward preposterous, unproven claims made by those known to be perpetual liars. ..."
Jul 28, 2018 | russia-insider.com
In today's United States, the term "espionage" doesn't get too much use outside of some specific contexts. There is still sporadic talk of industrial espionage, but with regard to Americans' own efforts to understand the world beyond their borders, they prefer the term "intelligence." This may be an intelligent choice, or not, depending on how you look at things.

First of all, US "intelligence" is only vaguely related to the game of espionage as it has been traditionally played, and as it is still being played by countries such as Russia and China. Espionage involves collecting and validating strategically vital information and conveying it to just the pertinent decision-makers on your side while keeping the fact that you are collecting and validating it hidden from everyone else.

In eras past, a spy, if discovered, would try to bite down on a cyanide capsule; these days torture is considered ungentlemanly, and spies that get caught patiently wait to be exchanged in a spy swap. An unwritten, commonsense rule about spy swaps is that they are done quietly and that those released are never interfered with again because doing so would complicate negotiating future spy swaps.

In recent years, the US intelligence agencies have decided that torturing prisoners is a good idea, but they have mostly been torturing innocent bystanders, not professional spies, sometimes forcing them to invent things, such as "Al Qaeda." There was no such thing before US intelligence popularized it as a brand among Islamic terrorists.

Most recently, British "special services," which are a sort of Mini-Me to the to the Dr. Evil that is the US intelligence apparatus, saw it fit to interfere with one of their own spies, Sergei Skripal, a double agent whom they sprung from a Russian jail in a spy swap. They poisoned him using an exotic chemical and then tried to pin the blame on Russia based on no evidence.

There are unlikely to be any more British spy swaps with Russia, and British spies working in Russia should probably be issued good old-fashioned cyanide capsules (since that supposedly super-powerful Novichok stuff the British keep at their "secret" lab in Porton Down doesn't work right and is only fatal 20% of the time).

There is another unwritten, commonsense rule about spying in general: whatever happens, it needs to be kept out of the courts, because the discovery process of any trial would force the prosecution to divulge sources and methods, making them part of the public record. An alternative is to hold secret tribunals, but since these cannot be independently verified to be following due process and rules of evidence, they don't add much value.

A different standard applies to traitors; here, sending them through the courts is acceptable and serves a high moral purpose, since here the source is the person on trial and the method -- treason -- can be divulged without harm. But this logic does not apply to proper, professional spies who are simply doing their jobs, even if they turn out to be double agents. In fact, when counterintelligence discovers a spy, the professional thing to do is to try to recruit him as a double agent or, failing that, to try to use the spy as a channel for injecting disinformation.

Americans have been doing their best to break this rule. Recently, special counsel Robert Mueller indicted a dozen Russian operatives working in Russia for hacking into the DNC mail server and sending the emails to Wikileaks. Meanwhile, said server is nowhere to be found (it's been misplaced) while the time stamps on the files that were published on Wikileaks show that they were obtained by copying to a thumb drive rather than sending them over the internet. Thus, this was a leak, not a hack, and couldn't have been done by anyone working remotely from Russia.

Furthermore, it is an exercise in futility for a US official to indict Russian citizens in Russia. They will never stand trial in a US court because of the following clause in the Russian Constitution: "61.1 A citizen of the Russian Federation may not be deported out of Russia or extradited to another state."

Mueller may summon a panel of constitutional scholars to interpret this sentence, or he can just read it and weep. Yes, the Americans are doing their best to break the unwritten rule against dragging spies through the courts, but their best is nowhere near good enough.

That said, there is no reason to believe that the Russian spies couldn't have hacked into the DNC mail server. It was probably running Microsoft Windows, and that operating system has more holes in it than a building in downtown Raqqa, Syria after the Americans got done bombing that city to rubble, lots of civilians included. When questioned about this alleged hacking by Fox News, Putin (who had worked as a spy in his previous career) had trouble keeping a straight face and clearly enjoyed the moment.

He pointed out that the hacked/leaked emails showed a clear pattern of wrongdoing: DNC officials conspired to steal the electoral victory in the Democratic Primary from Bernie Sanders, and after this information had been leaked they were forced to resign. If the Russian hack did happen, then it was the Russians working to save American democracy from itself. So, where's the gratitude? Where's the love? Oh, and why are the DNC perps not in jail?

Since there exists an agreement between the US and Russia to cooperate on criminal investigations, Putin offered to question the spies indicted by Mueller. He even offered to have Mueller sit in on the proceedings. But in return he wanted to question US officials who may have aided and abetted a convicted felon by the name of William Browder, who is due to begin serving a nine-year sentence in Russia any time now and who, by the way, donated copious amounts of his ill-gotten money to the Hillary Clinton election campaign.

In response, the US Senate passed a resolution to forbid Russians from questioning US officials. And instead of issuing a valid request to have the twelve Russian spies interviewed, at least one US official made the startlingly inane request to have them come to the US instead. Again, which part of 61.1 don't they understand?

The logic of US officials may be hard to follow, but only if we adhere to the traditional definitions of espionage and counterespionage -- "intelligence" in US parlance -- which is to provide validated information for the purpose of making informed decisions on best ways of defending the country. But it all makes perfect sense if we disabuse ourselves of such quaint notions and accept the reality of what we can actually observe: the purpose of US "intelligence" is not to come up with or to work with facts but to simply "make shit up."

The "intelligence" the US intelligence agencies provide can be anything but; in fact, the stupider it is the better, because its purpose is allow unintelligent people to make unintelligent decisions. In fact, they consider facts harmful -- be they about Syrian chemical weapons, or conspiring to steal the primary from Bernie Sanders, or Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, or the whereabouts of Osama Bin Laden -- because facts require accuracy and rigor while they prefer to dwell in the realm of pure fantasy and whimsy. In this, their actual objective is easily discernible.

The objective of US intelligence is to suck all remaining wealth out of the US and its allies and pocket as much of it as possible while pretending to defend it from phantom aggressors by squandering nonexistent (borrowed) financial resources on ineffective and overpriced military operations and weapons systems. Where the aggressors are not phantom, they are specially organized for the purpose of having someone to fight: "moderate" terrorists and so on.

One major advancement in their state of the art has been in moving from real false flag operations, à la 9/11, to fake false flag operations, à la fake East Gouta chemical attack in Syria (since fully discredited). The Russian election meddling story is perhaps the final step in this evolution: no New York skyscrapers or Syrian children were harmed in the process of concocting this fake narrative, and it can be kept alive seemingly forever purely through the furious effort of numerous flapping lips. It is now a pure confidence scam. If you are less then impressed with their invented narratives, then you are a conspiracy theorist or, in the latest revision, a traitor.

Trump was recently questioned as to whether he trusted US intelligence. He waffled. A light-hearted answer would have been:

"What sort of idiot are you to ask me such a stupid question? Of course they are lying! They were caught lying more than once, and therefore they can never be trusted again. In order to claim that they are not currently lying, you have to determine when it was that they stopped lying, and that they haven't lied since. And that, based on the information that is available, is an impossible task."

A more serious, matter-of-fact answer would have been:

"The US intelligence agencies made an outrageous claim: that I colluded with Russia to rig the outcome of the 2016 presidential election. The burden of proof is on them. They are yet to prove their case in a court of law, which is the only place where the matter can legitimately be settled, if it can be settled at all. Until that happens, we must treat their claim as conspiracy theory, not as fact."

And a hardcore, deadpan answer would have been:

"The US intelligence services swore an oath to uphold the US Constitution, according to which I am their Commander in Chief. They report to me, not I to them. They must be loyal to me, not I to them. If they are disloyal to me, then that is sufficient reason for their dismissal."

But no such reality-based, down-to-earth dialogue seems possible. All that we hear are fake answers to fake questions, and the outcome is a series of faulty decisions. Based on fake intelligence, the US has spent almost all of this century embroiled in very expensive and ultimately futile conflicts.

Thanks to their efforts, Iran, Iraq and Syria have now formed a continuous crescent of religiously and geopolitically aligned states friendly toward Russia while in Afghanistan the Taliban is resurgent and battling ISIS -- an organization that came together thanks to American efforts in Iraq and Syria.

The total cost of wars so far this century for the US is reported to be $4,575,610,429,593. Divided by the 138,313,155 Americans who file tax returns (whether they actually pay any tax is too subtle a question), it works out to just over $33,000 per taxpayer. If you pay taxes in the US, that's your bill so far for the various US intelligence "oopsies."

The 16 US intelligence agencies have a combined budget of $66.8 billion, and that seems like a lot until you realize how supremely efficient they are: their "mistakes" have cost the country close to 70 times their budget. At a staffing level of over 200,000 employees, each of them has cost the US taxpayer close to $23 million, on average. That number is totally out of the ballpark! The energy sector has the highest earnings per employee, at around $1.8 million per. Valero Energy stands out at $7.6 million per. At $23 million per, the US intelligence community has been doing three times better than Valero. Hats off! This makes the US intelligence community by far the best, most efficient collapse driver imaginable.

There are two possible hypotheses for why this is so.

First, we might venture to guess that these 200,000 people are grossly incompetent and that the fiascos they precipitate are accidental. But it is hard to imagine a situation where grossly incompetent people nevertheless manage to funnel $23 million apiece, on average, toward an assortment of futile undertakings of their choosing. It is even harder to imagine that such incompetents would be allowed to blunder along decade after decade without being called out for their mistakes.

Another hypothesis, and a far more plausible one, is that the US intelligence community has been doing a wonderful job of bankrupting the country and driving it toward financial, economic and political collapse by forcing it to engage in an endless series of expensive and futile conflicts -- the largest single continuous act of grand larceny the world has ever known. How that can possibly be an intelligent thing to do to your own country, for any conceivable definition of "intelligence," I will leave for you to work out for yourself. While you are at it, you might also want to come up with an improved definition of "treason": something better than "a skeptical attitude toward preposterous, unproven claims made by those known to be perpetual liars."

[Aug 13, 2018] Imperialism Is Alive and Kicking A Marxist Analysis of Neoliberal Capitalism by C.J. Polychroniou

Highly recommended!
Marxism provides one of the best analysis of capitalism; problems start when Marxists propose alternatives.
Notable quotes:
"... Such demand-compression occurs above all through the imposition of an income deflation on the petty producers, and on the working population in general, in the Third World. This was done in the colonial period through two means: one, "deindustrialization" or the displacement of local craft production by imports of manufactures from the capitalist sector; and two, the "drain of surplus" where a part of the taxes extracted from petty producers was simply taken away in the form of exported goods without any quid pro quo ..."
"... I mean by the term "imperialism" the arrangement that the capitalist system sets up for imposing income deflation on the working population of the Third World for countering the threat of inflation that would otherwise erode the value of money in the metropolis and make the system unviable. "Imperialism" in this sense characterizes both the colonial and the contemporary periods. ..."
"... The fact that the diffusion of capitalism to the Third World has proceeded by leaps and bounds of late, with its domestic corporate-financial oligarchy getting integrated into globalized finance capital, and the fact that workers in the metropolis have also been facing an income squeeze under globalization, are important new developments; but they do not negate the basic tendency of the system to impose income deflation upon the working population of the Third World, a tendency that remains at the very core of the system. ..."
"... any state activism, other than for promoting its own exclusive and direct interest, is anathema for finance capital, which is why, not surprisingly, "sound finance" and "fiscal responsibility" are back in vogue today, when finance capital, now globalized, is in ascendancy. Imperialism is thus a specifically capitalist way of obtaining the commodities it requires for itself, but which are produced outside its own domain. ..."
"... dirigiste regimes ..."
"... With the reassertion of the dominance of finance, in the guise now of an international ..."
"... Contemporary imperialism therefore is the imperialism of international finance capital which is served by nation-states (for any nation-state that defies the will of international finance capital runs the risk of capital flight from, and hence the insolvency of, its economy). The US, being the leading capitalist state, plays the leading role in promoting and protecting the interests of international finance capital. But talking about a specific US imperialism, or a German or British or French imperialism obscures this basic fact. ..."
"... Indeed, a good deal of discussion about whether the world is heading toward multi-polarity or the persistence of US dominance misses the point that the chief actor in today's world is international or globalized finance capital, and not US or German or British finance capital. ..."
"... US military intervention all over the world, in order to acquire a proper meaning has to be located within the broader setting of the imperialism of international finance capital. ..."
"... absolute immiserization ..."
Aug 13, 2018 | truthout.org

C.J. Polychroniou: How do you define imperialism and what imperialist tendencies do you detect as inherent in the brutal expansion of the logic of capitalism in the neoliberal global era?

Prabhat Patnaik: The capitalist sector of the world, which began by being located, and continues largely to be located, in the temperate region, requires as its raw materials and means of consumption a whole range of primary commodities which are not available or producible, either at all or in adequate quantities, within its own borders. These commodities have to be obtained from the tropical and sub-tropical region within which almost the whole of the Third World is located; and the bulk of them (leaving aside minerals) are produced by a set of petty producers (peasants). What is more, they are subject to "increasing supply price," in the sense that as demand for them increases in the capitalist sector, larger quantities of them can be obtained, if at all, only at higher prices, thanks to the fixed size of the tropical land mass.

This means an ex ante tendency toward accelerating inflation as capital accumulation proceeds, undermining the value of money under capitalism and hence the viability of the system as a whole. To prevent this, the system requires that with an increase in demand from the capitalist sector, as capital accumulation proceeds, there must be a compression of demand elsewhere for these commodities, so that the net demand does not increase, and increasing supply price does not get a chance to manifest itself at all.

Such demand-compression occurs above all through the imposition of an income deflation on the petty producers, and on the working population in general, in the Third World. This was done in the colonial period through two means: one, "deindustrialization" or the displacement of local craft production by imports of manufactures from the capitalist sector; and two, the "drain of surplus" where a part of the taxes extracted from petty producers was simply taken away in the form of exported goods without any quid pro quo . The income of the working population of the Third World, and hence its demand, was thus kept down; and metropolitan capitalism's demand for such commodities was met without any inflationary threat to the value of money. Exactly a similar process of income deflation is imposed now upon the working population of the Third World by the neoliberal policies of globalization.

I mean by the term "imperialism" the arrangement that the capitalist system sets up for imposing income deflation on the working population of the Third World for countering the threat of inflation that would otherwise erode the value of money in the metropolis and make the system unviable. "Imperialism" in this sense characterizes both the colonial and the contemporary periods.

We recognize the need for a reserve army of labor to ward off the threat to the value of money arising from wage demands of workers. Ironically, however, we do not recognize the parallel and even more pressing need of the system (owing to increasing supply price) for the imposition of income deflation on the working population of the Third World for warding off a similar threat.

The fact that the diffusion of capitalism to the Third World has proceeded by leaps and bounds of late, with its domestic corporate-financial oligarchy getting integrated into globalized finance capital, and the fact that workers in the metropolis have also been facing an income squeeze under globalization, are important new developments; but they do not negate the basic tendency of the system to impose income deflation upon the working population of the Third World, a tendency that remains at the very core of the system.

Those who argue that imperialism is no longer a relevant analytic construct point to the multifaceted aspects of today's global economic exchanges and to a highly complex process involved in the distribution of value which, simply put, cannot be reduced to imperialism. How do you respond to this line of thinking?

Capitalism today is of course much more complex, with an enormous financial superstructure. But that paradoxically makes inflation even more threatening. The value of this vast array of financial assets would collapse in the event of inflation, bringing down this superstructure, which incidentally is the reason for the current policy obsession with "inflation targeting." This makes the imperialist arrangement even more essential. The more complex capitalism becomes, the more it needs its basic simple props.

I should clarify here that if "land-augmenting" measures [such as irrigation, high-yielding seeds and better production practices] could be introduced in the Third World, then, notwithstanding the physical fixity of the tropical land mass, the threat of increasing supply price -- and with it, [the threat] of inflation -- could be warded off without any income deflation. Indeed, on the contrary, the working population of the Third World would be better off through such measures. But these measures require state support and state expenditure, a fact that Marx had recognized long ago. But any state activism, other than for promoting its own exclusive and direct interest, is anathema for finance capital, which is why, not surprisingly, "sound finance" and "fiscal responsibility" are back in vogue today, when finance capital, now globalized, is in ascendancy. Imperialism is thus a specifically capitalist way of obtaining the commodities it requires for itself, but which are produced outside its own domain.

The post-decolonization dirigiste regimes [regimes directed by a central authority] in the Third World had actually undertaken land-augmentation measures. Because of this, even as exports of commodities to the metropolis had risen to sustain the biggest boom ever witnessed in the history of capitalism, per capita food grain availability had also increased in those countries. But I see that period as a period of retreat of metropolitan capitalism, enforced by the wound inflicted upon it by the Second World War. With the reassertion of the dominance of finance, in the guise now of an international finance capital, the Third World states have withdrawn from supporting petty producers, a process of income deflation is in full swing, and the imperialist arrangement is back in place, because of which we can see once more a tendency toward a secular decline in per capita food grain availability in the Third World as in the colonial period.

There is a third way -- apart from a greater obsession with inflation aversion and a yoking of Third World states to promoting the interests of globalized finance rather than defending domestic petty producers -- in which contemporary capitalism strengthens the imperialist arrangement. It may be thought that the value of imports of Third World commodities into the capitalist metropolis is so small that we are exaggerating the inflation threat from that source to metropolitan currencies. This smallness itself, of course, is an expression of an acutely exploitative relationship. In addition, however, the threat to the Third World currencies themselves from a rise in the prices of these commodities becomes acute in a regime of free cross-border financial flows as now, which threatens the entire world trade and payments system and hence makes income deflation particularly urgent. Hence the need for the imperialist arrangement becomes even more acute.

Not long ago, even liberals like Thomas Friedman of the New York Times were arguing that "McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas" (that is, the US Air Force). Surely, this is a crude version of imperialism, but what about today's US imperialism? Isn't it still alive and kicking?

The world that Lenin had written about consisted of nation-based, nation-state-supported financial oligarchies engaged in intense inter-imperialist rivalry for repartitioning the world through wars. When [Marxist theorist] Karl Kautsky had suggested the possibility of a truce among rival powers for a peaceful division of the world, Lenin had pointed to the fact that the phenomenon of uneven development under capitalism would necessarily subvert any such specific truce. The world we have today is characterized by the hegemony of international finance capital which is interested in preventing any partitioning of the world, so that it can move around freely across the globe.

Contemporary imperialism therefore is the imperialism of international finance capital which is served by nation-states (for any nation-state that defies the will of international finance capital runs the risk of capital flight from, and hence the insolvency of, its economy). The US, being the leading capitalist state, plays the leading role in promoting and protecting the interests of international finance capital. But talking about a specific US imperialism, or a German or British or French imperialism obscures this basic fact.

Indeed, a good deal of discussion about whether the world is heading toward multi-polarity or the persistence of US dominance misses the point that the chief actor in today's world is international or globalized finance capital, and not US or German or British finance capital. So, the concept of imperialism that [Utsa Patnaik and I] are talking about belongs to a different terrain of discourse from the concept of US imperialism per se . The latter, though it is, of course, empirically visible because of US military intervention all over the world, in order to acquire a proper meaning has to be located within the broader setting of the imperialism of international finance capital.

Some incidentally have seen the muting of inter-imperialist rivalry in today's world as a vindication of Kautsky's position over that of Lenin. This, however, is incorrect, since both of them were talking about a world of national finance capitals which contemporary capitalism has gone beyond.

... ... ...

One final question: How should radical movements and organizations, in both the core and the periphery of the world capitalist economy, be organizing to combat today's imperialism?

Obviously, the issue of imperialism is important not for scholastic reasons, but because of the praxis that a recognition of its role engenders. From what I have been arguing, it is clear that since globalization involves income deflation for the peasantry and petty producers, and since their absorption into the ranks of the active army of labor under capitalism does not occur because of the paucity of jobs that are created even when rates of output growth are high, there is a tendency toward an absolute immiserization of the working population. For the petty producers, this tendency operates directly; and for others, it operates through the driving down of the "reservation wage" owing to the impoverishment of petty producers.

Such immiserization is manifest above all in the decline in per capita food grain absorption, both directly and indirectly (the latter via processed foods and feed grains). An improvement in the conditions of living of the working population of the Third World then requires a delinking from globalization (mainly through capital controls, and also trade controls to the requisite extent) by an alternative state, based on a worker-peasant alliance, that pursues a different trajectory of development. Such a trajectory would emphasize peasant-agriculture-led growth, land redistribution (so as to limit the extent of differentiation within the peasantry) and the formation of voluntary cooperatives and collectives for carrying forward land-augmentation measures, and even undertaking value-addition activities, including industrialization.

Small Third World countries would no doubt find it difficult to adopt such a program because of their limited resource base and narrow home market. But they will have to come together with other small countries to constitute larger, more viable units. But the basic point is that the question of "making globalization work" or "having globalization with a human face" simply does not arise.

The problem with this praxis is that it is not only the bourgeoisie in the Third World countries, but even sections of the middle-class professionals who have been beneficiaries of globalization, who would oppose any such delinking. But the world capitalist crisis, which is a consequence of this finance-capital-led globalization itself, is causing disaffection among these middle-class beneficiaries. They, too, would now be more willing to support an alternative trajectory of development that breaks out of the straitjacket imposed by imperialism.

[Aug 11, 2018] President Trump the most important achivement

Highly recommended!
The FAKE NEWS media (failing @ nytimes , @ NBCNews , @ ABC , @ CBS , @ CNN ) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People! ~ Donald Trump
On Thursday, Mr. Trump expressed his distaste for journalists in more populist terms, saying, "much of the media in Washington, D.C., along with New York, Los Angeles in particular, speaks not for the people, but for the special interests."
"The public doesn't believe you people anymore," Mr. Trump added. "Now, maybe I had something to do with that. I don't know. But they don't believe you."
Notable quotes:
"... Washington Post ..."
"... Financial Times, NBC, CNN, ABC ..."
Aug 11, 2018 | www.unz.com

President Trump has denounced and exposed the repeated deceits and ongoing fabrications of the mass media. Never before has a President so forcefully identified the lies of the leading print and TV outlets. The NY Times , Washington Post , the Financial Times, NBC, CNN, ABC and CBS have been thoroughly discredited in the eyes of the larger public. They have lost legitimacy and trust. Where progressives have failed, a war monger billionaire has accomplished, speaking a truth to serve many injustices.

[Aug 08, 2018] Sergei Skripal was linked to a consultant with former UK spy Christopher Steele's Orbis Business Intelligence

Highly recommended!
"Door handle" theory is dead on arrival. the main theory now is that UK government gave Skripals different agent BX (similar to LSD and which caused hallucinations) and they voluntarily took it in order to start preplanned Skripal false flag provocation. That's why military nurse accidentally appeared near Skripals soon after poisoning.
Notable quotes:
"... Following the attack on the Skripals, European and US allies took Britain's side on the attack, ordering the largest expulsion of Russian diplomats since the height of the Cold War, reports Reuters . In response, Russia retaliated by expelling Western diplomats, while the Kremlin has repeatedly denied involvement in the attacks - while accusing the UK intelligence agencies of staging the attack in order to inflame anti-Russia tensions. ..."
"... Prior to the investigation's focus on the door handle, for a period of almost three weeks there were at least nine other theories proposed by the authorities as to where the Skripals came into contact with the poison. These included the restaurant, the pub, the bench, the cemetery, the car, the flowers, the luggage, the porridge and even a drone. During that time, police officers and investigators were entering and leaving the house, by the door, since it was not known to be the place where the poison was located. ..."
"... Once the door handle theory was established, those who had been in and out of the property during the previous three weeks would naturally have been concerned about the possibility that they had been contaminated. ..."
"... Every officer who entered the house after 4th March, and before the door handle became an object of interest, should have been given a medical examination to check for signs of poisoning. ..."
"... Initial reports about Detective Sergeant Nick Bailey stated that he was poisoned at the bench, after coming to the aid of Mr Skripal and Yulia. However, on 9th March, Lord Ian Blair stated that D.S. Bailey had actually become poisoned after visiting Mr Skripal's house. Since he was thought to have been poisoned with a military grade nerve agent, and since it was thought that this had occurred at Mr Skripal's house, the immediate next step should have been to seal off the house and set up a mobile decontamination unit outside. However, numerous photographs show officers in normal uniforms standing close to the door long after Lord Blair's claim ..."
"... Can the authorities explain how these decisions did not put the health and even the lives of those officers in jeopardy? ..."
"... Before the door handle theory was settled on, the majority of competing theories put out by the authorities tended to assume that Mr Skripal was poisoned long before he went to Zizzis. For example, the flowers, the cemetery, the luggage, the porridge and the car explanations all assume this to be the case. What this means is that according to the assumptions of police at that time, when Mr Skripal fed the ducks near the Avon Playground with a few local boys, at around 1:45pm, he was already contaminated. Yet although this event was caught on CCTV camera, it was more than two weeks before the police contacted the parents of these boys. ..."
"... Can the authorities comment on why they did not air the CCTV footage on national television, in an effort to appeal to the boys or their parents to come forward, and whether the delay in tracking them down might have put them in danger? ..."
"... If the door handle was the place of poisoning, it is extremely likely that the bread handed by Mr Skripal to the boys would have been contaminated. Certainly, areas that he visited after this incident were deemed to be so much at risk that they were either closed down (for example, The Mill and Zizzis, which are both still closed), or destroyed (for instance, the restaurant table, the bench and – almost certainly – the red bag near the bench have all been destroyed). ..."
"... It has been said that one of the reasons the Government is/was so sure that the ultimate culprit behind the poisoning was the Russian state, is the apparent existence of an "FSB handbook" which, amongst other things, allegedly features descriptions of how to apply nerve agent to a door handle. Given that the Prime Minister first made a formal accusation of culpability on 12th March in her speech to the House of Commons, the Government must therefore have been in possession of this manual prior to that day. However, claims about the door handle being the location of the poison did not appear until late March (the first media reports of it were on 28th March). What this means is there was a delay of several weeks between the Government making its accusation, based partly on the apparent existence of the "door handle manual", and the door handle of Mr Skripal's house being a subject of interest to investigators. ..."
"... "We are learning more about Sergei and Yulia's movements but we need to be clearer around their exact movements on the morning of the incident. We believe that at around 9.15am on Sunday, 4 March, Sergei's car may have been in the areas of London Road, Churchill Way North and Wilton Road. Then at around 1.30pm it was seen being driven down Devizes Road, towards the town centre. We need to establish Sergei and Yulia's movements during the morning, before they headed to the town centre. Did you see this car, or what you believe was this car, on the day of the incident? We are particularly keen to hear from you if you saw the car before 1.30pm. If you have information, please call the police on 101." ..."
"... Now that Sergei and Yulia Skripal have been awake and able to communicate for around four months, these details are presumably now all known to investigators. In the normal course of such a high profile investigation, details such as these would be relayed to the public in the hope of jogging memories to prompt more information. And in fact, many such details have been released to the public in this case. Yet, confirmation of Mr Skripal's and Yulia's movements that day remain conspicuous by their absence. ..."
"... These questions have nothing to do with any conspiracy theory. On the contrary, they are all based on the assumption that the two central claims made by the authorities regarding the mode and the method used in this incident are correct. They are, however, very serious and perfectly legitimate questions about the way the authorities have dealt with this incident, on their own terms and on the basis of their own claims . ..."
"... "Reports that the United Kingdom is planning to ask Russia to extradite suspects in a Salisbury poisoning incident are nothing more than a "speculation," a spokesperson for the UK Foreign Office told Sputnik on Monday. ..."
Aug 06, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

The British government has prepared an extradition request to Moscow for two Russians they claim carried out the Salisbury nerve agent attack, according to The Guardian , citing Whitehall and security sources.

Former Russian double-agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were found unconscious on a public bench in Salisbury in early March - which UK authorities believe was due to a nerve agent called Novichok.

Months later on June 30, nearby residents Charlie Rowley and Dawn Sturgess, a 44-year-old mother of three, were subsequently treated for exposure to the nerve agent. Rowley recovered while Sturgess died.

Authorities are operating on the assumption that the Skripals were poisoned using a novichok-laced perfume bottle or a door handle smeared with the nerve agent, while Rowley may have picked up said bottle and given to Sturgess, who applied it to her wrists.

Sturgess received a much higher dose than the other three after apparently smearing the substance on her wrists, having sprayed it from the bottle. Rowley's recovery was helped, according to a source, by one of the first responders being familiar with the nerve agent, having been involved in helping the Skripals.

The Porton Down military defence laboratory near Salisbury has examined the novichok found on the Skripals' doorknob and the perfume bottle, but police have not yet said whether they are from the same batch. - The Guardian

UK authorities believe they have pieced together the movements of the two Russians, from their entry into the UK to their departure after the alleged assassination attempt.

Following the attack on the Skripals, European and US allies took Britain's side on the attack, ordering the largest expulsion of Russian diplomats since the height of the Cold War, reports Reuters . In response, Russia retaliated by expelling Western diplomats, while the Kremlin has repeatedly denied involvement in the attacks - while accusing the UK intelligence agencies of staging the attack in order to inflame anti-Russia tensions.

Oddly, Sergei Skripal was linked by The Telegraph to a consultant with former UK spy Christopher Steele's Orbis Business Intelligence, who he reportedly had repeated contacts with.

The motive for trying to assassinate the 66-year-old skripal is unknown. Skripal moved to the UK in a Kremlin-approved "spy swap" in 2010, causing many to question why they would suddenly try to take him out a decade later.

In July, journalist Rob Slane compiled 10 questions for the UK authorities on the ever-confusing Skripal case:

***

The two most basic claims made by the Government and investigators regarding the method and the mode in the Salisbury poisoning are these:

  1. That military grade nerve agent was used to poison Mr Skripal
  2. That it was applied to the door handle of his house

These claims raise a number of very obvious questions. For example, how did the assassin(s) apply such a powerful chemical without wearing protective clothing? How did the people who are said to have come into contact with the substance not die immediately, or at the very least suffer irreparable damage to their Central Nervous Systems? How did this military grade nerve agent manage not only to have a delayed onset, but also managed to affect a large 66-year-old man and his slim 33-year-old daughter, both of whom would have vastly different metabolic rates, at exactly the same time?

These are perfectly reasonable questions that deserve reasonable answers. I am aware, however, that no matter how obvious and rational such questions might be, doing so places one – at least in the eyes of the authorities – in the camp of the conspiracy theorist. This is disingenuous. One of the marks of a true conspiracy theorist is that he is someone who refuses to accept an explanation for an event, even after being presented with facts which fit and explain it coherently . But when the "facts" presented in a case do not fit the event they are supposed to explain, and are neither rational nor coherent -- as in the Salisbury case -- then calling the person who raises legitimate questions a "conspiracy theorist" is a bit rich, is it not?

Nevertheless, for the purposes of this piece, what I'd like to do is work on the assumption that the "Military Grade Nerve Agent on the Door Handle" claim is correct. And working from this assumption, I want to ask some questions about how the authorities have handled the case. The point is this: These questions are not really intended to challenge the official claims; rather the intention is to ask whether the authorities have handled the case correctly on their own terms .

1. Prior to the investigation's focus on the door handle, for a period of almost three weeks there were at least nine other theories proposed by the authorities as to where the Skripals came into contact with the poison. These included the restaurant, the pub, the bench, the cemetery, the car, the flowers, the luggage, the porridge and even a drone. During that time, police officers and investigators were entering and leaving the house, by the door, since it was not known to be the place where the poison was located.

Can the authorities explain how these officers and investigators were not poisoned?

2. Once the door handle theory was established, those who had been in and out of the property during the previous three weeks would naturally have been concerned about the possibility that they had been contaminated.

Can the authorities tell us what steps were taken to reassure these officers?

3. Every officer who entered the house after 4th March, and before the door handle became an object of interest, should have been given a medical examination to check for signs of poisoning.

Can the authorities confirm that this took place for every officer?

4. Initial reports about Detective Sergeant Nick Bailey stated that he was poisoned at the bench, after coming to the aid of Mr Skripal and Yulia. However, on 9th March, Lord Ian Blair stated that D.S. Bailey had actually become poisoned after visiting Mr Skripal's house. Since he was thought to have been poisoned with a military grade nerve agent, and since it was thought that this had occurred at Mr Skripal's house, the immediate next step should have been to seal off the house and set up a mobile decontamination unit outside. However, numerous photographs show officers in normal uniforms standing close to the door long after Lord Blair's claim.

Can the authorities confirm why the house was not sealed off and a decontamination unit set up immediately after it became known that D.S. Bailey had been there, and why officers with no protective clothing on were allowed to continue standing guard outside the house for the next few weeks?

5. Can the authorities explain how these decisions did not put the health and even the lives of those officers in jeopardy?

6. Before the door handle theory was settled on, the majority of competing theories put out by the authorities tended to assume that Mr Skripal was poisoned long before he went to Zizzis. For example, the flowers, the cemetery, the luggage, the porridge and the car explanations all assume this to be the case. What this means is that according to the assumptions of police at that time, when Mr Skripal fed the ducks near the Avon Playground with a few local boys, at around 1:45pm, he was already contaminated. Yet although this event was caught on CCTV camera, it was more than two weeks before the police contacted the parents of these boys.

Can the authorities explain why it took more than two weeks to track down the boys, who – as the CCTV apparently shows – were given bread by Mr Skripal?

7. Can the authorities comment on why they did not air the CCTV footage on national television, in an effort to appeal to the boys or their parents to come forward, and whether the delay in tracking them down might have put them in danger?

8. If the door handle was the place of poisoning, it is extremely likely that the bread handed by Mr Skripal to the boys would have been contaminated. Certainly, areas that he visited after this incident were deemed to be so much at risk that they were either closed down (for example, The Mill and Zizzis, which are both still closed), or destroyed (for instance, the restaurant table, the bench and – almost certainly – the red bag near the bench have all been destroyed).

Can the authorities comment on how the boys, who were handed bread by Mr Skripal, managed to avoid contamination?

9. It has been said that one of the reasons the Government is/was so sure that the ultimate culprit behind the poisoning was the Russian state, is the apparent existence of an "FSB handbook" which, amongst other things, allegedly features descriptions of how to apply nerve agent to a door handle. Given that the Prime Minister first made a formal accusation of culpability on 12th March in her speech to the House of Commons, the Government must therefore have been in possession of this manual prior to that day. However, claims about the door handle being the location of the poison did not appear until late March (the first media reports of it were on 28th March). What this means is there was a delay of several weeks between the Government making its accusation, based partly on the apparent existence of the "door handle manual", and the door handle of Mr Skripal's house being a subject of interest to investigators.

Can the authorities therefore tell us whether the Government's failure to pass on details of the "door handle manual" put the lives of the officers going in and out of Mr Skripal's house from 5th March to 27th March in jeopardy?

10. On 17th March, Metropolitan Police Assistant Commissioner Neil Basu said:

"We are learning more about Sergei and Yulia's movements but we need to be clearer around their exact movements on the morning of the incident. We believe that at around 9.15am on Sunday, 4 March, Sergei's car may have been in the areas of London Road, Churchill Way North and Wilton Road. Then at around 1.30pm it was seen being driven down Devizes Road, towards the town centre. We need to establish Sergei and Yulia's movements during the morning, before they headed to the town centre. Did you see this car, or what you believe was this car, on the day of the incident? We are particularly keen to hear from you if you saw the car before 1.30pm. If you have information, please call the police on 101."

Now that Sergei and Yulia Skripal have been awake and able to communicate for around four months, these details are presumably now all known to investigators. In the normal course of such a high profile investigation, details such as these would be relayed to the public in the hope of jogging memories to prompt more information. And in fact, many such details have been released to the public in this case. Yet, confirmation of Mr Skripal's and Yulia's movements that day remain conspicuous by their absence.

Can the authorities confirm that the movements of the Skripals that day are now understood, and that they will be made known shortly, in order that more information from the public might then be forthcoming?

These questions have nothing to do with any conspiracy theory. On the contrary, they are all based on the assumption that the two central claims made by the authorities regarding the mode and the method used in this incident are correct. They are, however, very serious and perfectly legitimate questions about the way the authorities have dealt with this incident, on their own terms and on the basis of their own claims .

We await their explanations.

besnook Mon, 08/06/2018 - 14:22 Permalink

the brits want to embarrass themselves.

EuroPox -> besnook Mon, 08/06/2018 - 14:25 Permalink

They already have - that was just more lies:

"Reports that the United Kingdom is planning to ask Russia to extradite suspects in a Salisbury poisoning incident are nothing more than a "speculation," a spokesperson for the UK Foreign Office told Sputnik on Monday.

"This is just more speculation. The police investigation is ongoing and anything on the record will need to come from the Police," the spokesperson said."

https://sputniknews.com/europe/201808061067000089-uk-no-request-salisbu

[Aug 08, 2018] Ten Bombshell Revelations From Seymour Hersh's New Autobiography

Highly recommended!
Aug 08, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

Here are ten bombshell revelations and fascinating new details to lately come out of both Sy Hersh's new book, Reporter , as well as interviews he's given since publication...

1) On a leaked Bush-era intelligence memo outlining the neocon plan to remake the Middle East

(Note: though previously alluded to only anecdotally by General Wesley Clark in his memoir and in a 2007 speech , the below passage from Seymour Hersh is to our knowledge the first time this highly classified memo has been quoted . Hersh's account appears to corroborate now retired Gen. Clark's assertion that days after 9/11 a classified memo outlining plans to foster regime change in "7 countries in 5 years" was being circulated among intelligence officials.)

From Reporter: A Memoir pg. 306 -- A few months after the invasion of Iraq, during an interview overseas with a general who was director of a foreign intelligence service, I was provided with a copy of a Republican neocon plan for American dominance in the Middle East. The general was an American ally, but one who was very rattled by the Bush/Cheney aggression. I was told that the document leaked to me initially had been obtained by someone in the local CIA station. There was reason to be rattled: The document declared that the war to reshape the Middle East had to begin "with the assault on Iraq. The fundamental reason for this... is that the war will start making the U.S. the hegemon of the Middle East. The correlative reason is to make the region feel in its bones, as it were, the seriousness of American intent and determination." Victory in Iraq would lead to an ultimatum to Damascus, the "defanging" of Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, and Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization, and other anti-Israeli groups. America's enemies must understand that "they are fighting for their life: Pax Americana is on its way, which implies their annihilation." I and the foreign general agreed that America's neocons were a menace to civilization.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/nUCwCgthp_E

* * *

2) On early regime change plans in Syria

From Reporter: A Memoir pages 306-307 -- Donald Rumsfeld was also infected with neocon fantasy. Turkey had refused to permit America's Fourth Division to join the attack of Iraq from its territory, and the division, with its twenty-five thousand men and women, did not arrive in force inside Iraq until mid-April, when the initial fighting was essentially over. I learned then that Rumsfeld had asked the American military command in Stuttgart, Germany, which had responsibility for monitoring Europe, including Syria and Lebanon, to begin drawing up an operational plan for an invasion of Syria. A young general assigned to the task refused to do so, thereby winning applause from my friends on the inside and risking his career. The plan was seen by those I knew as especially bizarre because Bashar Assad, the ruler of secular Syria, had responded to 9/11 by sharing with the CIA hundreds of his country's most sensitive intelligence files on the Muslim Brotherhood in Hamburg, where much of the planning for 9/11 was carried out... Rumsfeld eventually came to his senses and back down, I was told...

3) On the Neocon deep state which seized power after 9/11

From Reporter: A Memoir pages 305-306 -- I began to comprehend that eight or nine neoconservatives who were political outsiders in the Clinton years had essentially overthrown the government of the United States -- with ease . It was stunning to realize how fragile our Constitution was. The intellectual leaders of that group -- Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, and Richard Perle -- had not hidden their ideology and their belief in the power of the executive but depicted themselves in public with a great calmness and a self-assurance that masked their radicalism . I had spent many hours after 9/11 in conversations with Perle that, luckily for me, helped me understand what was coming. (Perle and I had been chatting about policy since the early 1980s, but he broke off relations in 1993 over an article I did for The New Yorker linking him, a fervent supporter of Israel, to a series of meetings with Saudi businessmen in an attempt to land a multibillion-dollar contract from Saudi Arabia . Perle responded by publicly threatening to sue me and characterizing me as a newspaper terrorist. He did not sue.

Meanwhile, Cheney had emerged as a leader of the neocon pack. From 9/11 on he did all he could to undermine congressional oversight. I learned a great deal from the inside about his primacy in the White House , but once again I was limited in what I would write for fear of betraying my sources...

I came to understand that Cheney's goal was to run his most important military and intelligence operations with as little congressional knowledge, and interference, as possible. I was fascinating and important to learn what I did about Cheney's constant accumulation of power and authority as vice president , but it was impossible to even begin to verify the information without running the risk that Cheney would learn of my questioning and have a good idea from whom I was getting the information.

4) On Russian meddling in the US election

From the recent Independent interview based on his autobiography -- Hersh has vociferously strong opinions on the subject and smells a rat. He states that there is "a great deal of animosity towards Russia. All of that stuff about Russia hacking the election appears to be preposterous." He has been researching the subject but is not ready to go public yet.

Hersh quips that the last time he heard the US defense establishment have high confidence, it was regarding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. He points out that the NSA only has moderate confidence in Russian hacking. It is a point that has been made before; there has been no national intelligence estimate in which all 17 US intelligence agencies would have to sign off. "When the intel community wants to say something they say it High confidence effectively means that they don't know."

5) On the Novichok poisoning

From the recent Independent interview -- Hersh is also on the record as stating that the official version of the Skripal poisoning does not stand up to scrutiny. He tells me: "The story of novichok poisoning has not held up very well. He [Skripal] was most likely talking to British intelligence services about Russian organised crime." The unfortunate turn of events with the contamination of other victims is suggestive, according to Hersh, of organised crime elements rather than state-sponsored actions –though this files in the face of the UK government's position.

Hersh modestly points out that these are just his opinions. Opinions or not, he is scathing on Obama – "a trimmer articulate [but] far from a radical a middleman". During his Goldsmiths talk, he remarks that liberal critics underestimate Trump at their peril.

He ends the Goldsmiths talk with an anecdote about having lunch with his sources in the wake of 9/11 . He vents his anger at the agencies for not sharing information. One of his CIA sources fires back: "Sy you still don't get it after all these years – the FBI catches bank robbers, the CIA robs banks." It is a delicious, if cryptic aphorism.

* * *

6) On the Bush-era 'Redirection' policy of arming Sunni radicals to counter Shia Iran, which in a 2007 New Yorker article Hersh accurately predicted would set off war in Syria

From the Independent interview : [Hersh] tells me it is "amazing how many times that story has been reprinted" . I ask about his argument that US policy was designed to neutralize the Shia sphere extending from Iran to Syria to Hezbollah in Lebanon and hence redraw the Sykes-Picot boundaries for the 21st century.

He goes on to say that Bush and Cheney "had it in for Iran", although he denies the idea that Iran was heavily involved in Iraq: "They were providing intel, collecting intel The US did many cross-border hunts to kill ops [with] much more aggression than Iran"...

He believes that the Trump administration has no memory of this approach. I'm sure though that the military-industrial complex has a longer memory...

I press him on the RAND and Stratfor reports including one authored by Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz in which they envisage deliberate ethno-sectarian partitioning of Iraq . Hersh ruefully states that: "The day after 9/11 we should have gone to Russia. We did the one thing that George Kennan warned us never to do – to expand NATO too far."

* * *

7) On the official 9/11 narrative

From the Independent interview : We end up ruminating about 9/11, perhaps because it is another narrative ripe for deconstruction by sceptics. Polling shows that a significant proportion of the American public believes there is more to the truth. These doubts have been reinforced by the declassification of the suppressed 28 pages of the 9/11 commission report last year undermining the version that a group of terrorists acting independently managed to pull off the attacks. The implication is that they may well have been state-sponsored with the Saudis potentially involved.

Hersh tells me: "I don't necessarily buy the story that Bin Laden was responsible for 9/11. We really don't have an ending to the story. I've known people in the [intelligence] community. We don't know anything empirical about who did what" . He continues: "The guy was living in a cave. He really didn't know much English. He was pretty bright and he had a lot of hatred for the US. We respond by attacking the Taliban. Eighteen years later How's it going guys?"

8) On the media and the morality of the powerful

From a recent The Intercept interview and book review -- If Hersh were a superhero, this would be his origin story. Two hundred and seventy-four pages after the Chicago anecdote, he describes his coverage of a massive slaughter of Iraqi troops and civilians by the U.S. in 1991 after a ceasefire had ended the Persian Gulf War. America's indifference to this massacre was, Hersh writes, "a reminder of the Vietnam War's MGR, for Mere Gook Rule: If it's a murdered or raped gook, there is no crime." It was also, he adds, a reminder of something else: "I had learned a domestic version of that rule decades earlier" in Chicago. "Reporter" demonstrates that Hersh has derived three simple lessons from that rule:

  1. The powerful prey mercilessly upon the powerless, up to and including mass murder.
  2. The powerful lie constantly about their predations.
  3. The natural instinct of the media is to let the powerful get away with it.

* * *

... ... ...

[Aug 05, 2018] Cooper was equally as unhinged as Boot: Neoliberal MSM is a real 1984 remake.

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... I'm somewhat puzzled why Trump and his people, when referring to the "fake news" and answering questions from hostile journalists, especially about the idea that the media are "enemies of the American people", fail to bring up the fact that the "fake news" and the "enemies of the people" are not the journalists themselves, but rather the management and ownership of the media. ..."
Aug 05, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com
paul malfara , a day ago
I posted this one to my facebook page three or four days ago. It's brilliant. I have a few comments. First, I disagree with the analysis given by the fellow from the Duran in the introduction, something along the lines of "even Anderson Cooper was smirking because Cohen was demolishing Boot so badly".

If you pay attention to the questions and statements, you find that Cooper is equally as unhinged as Boot is, first hammering on the point that nobody knows what was discussed in the meeting, then after Cohen rattles off a list, Cooper shifts to the "you're believing Vladimir Putin on this" tactic, a nail that Cohen wisely smashes with a hammering statement, "I don't want to shock you, but I believe Vladimir Putin on several things."

Cooper continues to insist that the content of the meeting is unknown and unconfirmed, regardless of what Putin and Trump say. The sheer hubris of journalists today is unprecedented and outrageous.

I do admit that Cooper shuts up after being schooled by Cohen a second and third time and after Boot makes the mistake of calling Cohen an apologist for Putin and Russia. This leads me to a second point.

I'm somewhat puzzled why Trump and his people, when referring to the "fake news" and answering questions from hostile journalists, especially about the idea that the media are "enemies of the American people", fail to bring up the fact that the "fake news" and the "enemies of the people" are not the journalists themselves, but rather the management and ownership of the media.

\This would accomplish two important things, both necessary, in my opinion. First, it would put the front line journalists into their correct place, telling them that they are really nothing but mouthpieces, and we know that the real decisions on content are not made by them.

What a blow to their narcisstic self-esteem that would be!

Second, it would give the American people more information on how their consent is engineered, how the media has owners who have an agenda, and that agenda is not related to improving the lives of the American people, or even keeping them informed with accurate information.

[Jul 31, 2018] Is not the Awan affair a grave insult to the US "Intelligence Community?

Highly recommended!
Jul 31, 2018 | consortiumnews.com

Nik , July 28, 2018 at 9:22 am

Is not the Awan affair a grave insult to the US "Intelligence Community?" http://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2017/07/what-are-the-democrats-hiding-by-publius-tacitus.html

For several years, a family of foreign nationals (and not only Wassermannn-Schultz) has been surfing the congressional computers while having no security clearance.

Then there was a criminal negligence by H. Clinton who made her emails, filled with the highest-level classified information, available to Chinese (not the Russians). http://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2018/07/httpstruepunditcomfbi-lisa-page-dimes-out-top-fbi-officials-during-classified-house-testimony-bureau-bos.html

Both Debbie and Hillary should be in federal prison already. Clinton used to be fond of droning Assange for divulging the criminal and illegal activities of the state. What Debbie and Hillary did has been much more dangerous to the US national security.

[Jul 20, 2018] What exactly is fake news caucus99percent

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... @The Voice In the Wilderness ..."
"... @Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal ..."
"... By creating an extremely anti-communist state, the elite will never have to worry about losing control over society because their wealth and power remains safe and sound. ..."
Jul 20, 2018 | caucus99percent.com

k9disc on Wed, 07/18/2018 - 11:12pm

Fake News = 21st Century Conspiracy Theory Fake News is the 21st century version of Conspiracy Theory.

It is an evolution of conspiracy theory, not requiring any kind of convoluted logic or story telling that used to be required for conspiracy theory to stick. Fake News allows for simple, truthful, and logical information to be dismissed out of hand, without examination.

divineorder on Thu, 07/19/2018 - 5:58am
Yes, and then...

@edg @k9disc

Fake News allows for simple, truthful, and logical information to be dismissed out of hand, without examination.

and then they use that as justification for MIC actions.

The 'outrage' is fake. The focus on 'fake news' is fake news.

It's actually about defending the corporate media's monopoly on producing fake news serving elite state-corporate interests. https://t.co/uunJF9lj5r

-- Media Lens (@medialens) July 19, 2018

Here's an ad about COCs (PDF) from 1942. They're used for tanning leather, in soaps and perfumes, as insect repellents, for dying cloth, as antiseptics, and for many, many other commercial and industrial purposes.

Damn those Syrian butchers for dropping perfume on civilians!

Fake News is the 21st century version of Conspiracy Theory.

It is an evolution of conspiracy theory, not requiring any kind of convoluted logic or story telling that used to be required for conspiracy theory to stick. Fake News allows for simple, truthful, and logical information to be dismissed out of hand, without examination.

Cant Stop the M... on Thu, 07/19/2018 - 11:10am
@The Voice In the Wilderness In the dim reaches of

@The Voice In the Wilderness In the dim reaches of pre-history, when Walter Cronkite was reporting, a real journalist wouldn't report that someone launched a chemical weapons attack unless the journalist had at least two credible, independent sources providing solid evidence that the story was true. Newspaper editors and television producers knew their reputations were on the line and that their competitors would make sure the egg on their face stuck if they reported something blatantly wrong.

Nowadays, there are no competitors, because journalists and news outlets are mostly hanging out together in one big cheery cartel, every member of which will defend every other member to protect the reputation of the whole. The goal is not to outdo competitors and gain more eyeballs or a greater distribution or greater authority over public opinion. The goal is to defend the status quo by any means necessary, while somehow maintaining the credibility of the press.

But no, they shouldn't have published a story that Assad had launched a chemical weapons attack unless they had a significant amount of solid evidence that it was true.

I have a hard time understanding how people can even begin to credit this crap, given how close it is to what they told us about Saddam Hussein. But it's actually even worse, because at least Hussein did, at one time, use chemical weapons on the Kurds. I mean, at least he did it once, even if he didn't have weapons of mass destruction ready to aim at Israel, or the Saudis, or the U.S.

#7
It was big news. But failure to report it as false with just as much (or more) attention and timing was journalistic malpractice. They should have been outraged to have been conned into spreading false propaganda. IF they were legitimate journalists.

The Voice In th... on Thu, 07/19/2018 - 6:00pm
That was then, this is now.

@Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal
I don't know that anyone waits for confirmation anymore. And the two sources could be the CIA and VOA or one of their tame journalists.
Credibility is in the eye of the beholder. After they all jumped on Saddam's WMD one can hardly compare them with Cronkite.

I do remember web blogs asking to please wait for the UN inspectors report. When that report did come out, anyone with integrity, even if not a professional journalist, would have highlighted that report and retracted the original and not figuratively bury it on page 56.

But we are substantially together on this. They reported is as fact not as an unsubstantiated claim.

fakenews on Thu, 07/19/2018 - 7:02am
I know FakeNews when I see it.

Chomsky's Five News Filters: A little dated but a good starting point.

Peace
FN

lotlizard on Thu, 07/19/2018 - 8:15am
Regrettably fails to name a huge part of Flak and the Enforcers

@fakenews
namely big, opinion-policing non-profits and their lobbyists and followers, ranging from religious denominations, to AIPAC and the NRA, to the ADL and SPLC.

[Jul 20, 2018] Is President Trump A Traitor Because He Wants Peace With Russia by Paul Craig Roberts

Highly recommended!
Looks like MIC is a cancel of the society for which there is no cure....
While this jeremiad raises several valid point the key to understanding the situation should be understanding of the split of the Us elite into two camp with Democratic party (representing interests of Wall Street) and large part of intelligence communality fighting to neoliberal status quo and Pentagon, some part of old money, part of trade unions (especially rank and file members) and a pert of Republican Party (representing interests of the military) realizing that neoliberalism came to the natural end and it is time for change which includes downsizing of the American empire.
This bitter internal struggle in which neoliberals so far have an upper hand over Trump administration and forced him into retreat.
Notable quotes:
"... Trump is a traitor because he wants peace with Russia. ..."
"... The Russians, the Chinese, the Iranians, and the North Koreans, as well as the rest of the world, desperately need to notice the extremely hostile reaction to peace on the part of the US Democratic Party, many members of the Republican Party, including the despicable US Republican Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, and the Western Presstitute Media, a collection of people on the CIA payroll according to the German newspaper editor, Udo Ulfkotte, and the CIA itself. ..."
"... Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and the rest of the corrupt filth that rules over us are all in the pay of the military/security complex. Just go and investigate the donations to their re-election campaigns. The 1,000 billion dollar budget of the military/security complex, amplified by the CIA's front corporations and narcotics business, provides enormous sums with which to purchase the senators and representatives that the insouciant American voters think that they elect. ..."
"... Therefore, the American public gets not representation, but lies that justify war and conflict. The military/security complex, about which President Eisenhower warned the American people to no effect, is in desperate need of an enemy. In obedience to the military/security complex, the Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama regimes have made Russia that enemy. If Trump and Putin do not understand this, they will easily be made irrelevant. ..."
"... They both can be assassinated, and that is what the statements from Pelosi, Schumer, McCain, Lindsey Graham, et. al., repeated endlessly in the propaganda ministry that is the Western press, encourages. ..."
"... The Supply-Side Revolution ..."
"... When the combination of tax cuts with defense budget cuts came up for a vote, the legendary senator Strom Thurmond, a 48-year member of the US Senate from South Carolina, tapped me on the shoulder. He said: "son, never set your senator up against the military/security complex. He will not be re-elected, and you will be out of a job." I replied that we were just establishing for the record that under no conditions would the Democrats, who wanted more government, vote for a tax rate reduction even if there was a case that it would cure stagflation. He replied: "son, the military/security complex doesn't care." ..."
"... Later as a member of a secret presidential committee, I saw how the CIA attempted to prevent President Reagan from ending the Cold War. ..."
"... Today, right now, at this moment, we are faced with a massive effort of the military/security complex, the neoconservatives, the Democratic Party, and the presstitute media to discredit the elected President of the United States and to overthrow him in order that the utterly corrupt elite that rule American can continue to hold on to power and to protect the massive budget of the military/security complex that, along with the Israel Lobby, funds the elections of those who rule us. ..."
"... There is no institution in America, government or private, that can be trusted. Any government or person who trusts America or any Western country is stupid beyond belief. ..."
"... The entire Russiagate hoax is an orchestration by the military/security complex, led by John Brennen, Comey, and Rosenstein. The purpose is to discredit President trump for two reasons. One is to prevent any normalization of relations with Russia. The other is to remove Trump's agenda as an alternative to the agenda of the Democratic Party. ..."
"... President Trump is almost powerless. Putin, the Chinese, the Iranians, and the North Koreans should recognize this before it is too late for them. President Trump cannot fire and arrest for high treason Mueller and Rosenstein. ..."
"... Reckless and irresponsible comments about treason from former CIA director Brennan, and other ranking public figures, echo similar inflammatory rhetoric from far-right-wing rabble rouser Gen. Edwin Walker, and other members of the John Birch Society, in the days before Pres. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. ..."
"... What's going on in the United States of America beats the band what happened under Joe McCarthy. The witch hunt against a sitting President by 95 percent of the media, major government institutions such as the criminal CIA, FBI, DOJ and the rest of the crooked Intel community plus the rascals in the US Congress can only happen in a totalitarian society, which the US is. ..."
"... The Brennan, Clappers, Obamas, Clintons, Comeys, Rosenstein and their many subordinate political Mafiosi should be put behind bars instead of running from one TV station to the next and lay the ground for a possibly Trump assassination. ..."
"... As Mr. Rogers correctly states, President Trump is almost powerless. These US fools even try to breed discord between the so-called nationalists and the globalists in Russia for which Medvedev stays. He once served US interests more than Russian ones when he was Prime Minister and got flattered by the ineffable Bill Clinton. ..."
"... So what do we see now ? Putin aiding Trump in steering the USA away from trying to control the whole world, an effort that is destroying the USA, but Deep State does not mind. In this way Russia indeed meddles in USA politics. Trump now invited Putin to come to Washington, the MH17 statement is withheld, the hysteria at CNN is such that MH17 is not even mentioned. In stead: Trump must be mentally deranged. ..."
"... Gore Vidal said there's only one party in America, it's the Money Party and it has two branches. It is even more true today than when he said it. There is no Left or Right anymore, only the question, is it good for Israel? And the American people be damned. ..."
"... Trump is completely powerless to do anything about these two. And this has gone on for a year and a half. ..."
"... It's clear though that Trump believes he has forced his opponents to play a bad hand in their outlandish craze the past week. It's why he doubled down and invited Putin to Washington near the 2018 election time. He perceives this as a chance to re-enact the 2016 election and coast to victory. The establishment is insane, and if he brings their insanity out it plays to his favor. ..."
Jul 20, 2018 | www.unz.com

The US Democratic Party is determined to take the world to thermo-nuclear war rather than to admit that Hillary Clinton lost the presidential election fair and square. The Democratic Party was totally corrupted by the Clinton Regime, and now it is totally insane. Leaders of the Democratic Party, such as Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, my former co-author in the New York Times, have responded in a non-Democratic way to the first step President Trump has taken to reduce the extremely dangerous tensions with Russia that the Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama regimes created between the two superpowers.

Yes, Russia is a superpower. Russian weapons are so superior to the junk produced by the waste-filled US military/security complex that lives high off the hog on the insouciant American taxpayer that it is questionable if the US is even a second class military power. If the insane neoconservatives, such as Max Boot, William Kristol, and the rest of the neocon scum get their way, the US, the UK, and Europe will be a radioactive ruin for thousands of years.

House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi (CA), Minority Leader of the US House of Representatives, declared that out of fear of some undefined retribution from Putin, a dossier on Trump perhaps, the President of the United States sold out the American people to Russia because he wants to make peace: "It begs the question, what does Vladimir Putin, what do the Russians have on Donald Trump -- personally, politically and financially that he should behave in such a manner?" The "such a manner" Pelosi is speaking about is making peace instead of war.

To be clear, the Democratic Minority Leader of the US House of Representatives has accused Donald Trump of high treason against the United States. There is no outcry against this blatantly false accusation, totally devoid of evidence. The presstitute media instead of protesting this attempt at a coup against the President of the United States, trumpet the accusation as self-evident truth. Trump is a traitor because he wants peace with Russia.

Here is Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer (NY) repeating Pelosi's false accusation: "Millions of Americans will continue to wonder if the only possible explanation for this dangerous behavior is the possibility that President Putin holds damaging information over President Trump." If you don't believe that this is orchestrated between Pelosi and Schumer, you are stupid beyond belief.

Here is disgraced Obama CIA director John Brennan, a leader of the fake Russiagate campaign against President Trump in order to prevent Trump from making peace with Russia and, thus, by making the world safer, threatening the massive, unjustified budget of the military/security complex: "Donald Trump's press conference performance in Helsinki rises to and exceeds the threshold of high crimes and misdemeanors. It was nothing short of treasonous. Not only were Trump's comments imbecilic, he is wholly in the pocket of Putin. Republican Patriots: Where are you???"

Here are many more: https://www.infowars.com/meltdown-left-seething-over-trump-putin-summit/

And here is more from the CIA bought-and-paid-for BBC: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-44852812

NOTICE THAT NOT ONE WESTERN MEDIA SOURCE IS CELEBRATING AND THANKING TRUMP AND PUTIN FOR EASING THE ARTIFICIALLY CREATED TENSIONS THAT WERE LEADING TO NUCLEAR WAR. HOW CAN THIS BE? HOW CAN IT BE THAT THE WESTERN MEDIA IS SO OPPOSED TO PEACE? WHAT IS THE EXPLANATION?

The Russians, the Chinese, the Iranians, and the North Koreans, as well as the rest of the world, desperately need to notice the extremely hostile reaction to peace on the part of the US Democratic Party, many members of the Republican Party, including the despicable US Republican Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, and the Western Presstitute Media, a collection of people on the CIA payroll according to the German newspaper editor, Udo Ulfkotte, and the CIA itself.

Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and the rest of the corrupt filth that rules over us are all in the pay of the military/security complex. Just go and investigate the donations to their re-election campaigns. The 1,000 billion dollar budget of the military/security complex, amplified by the CIA's front corporations and narcotics business, provides enormous sums with which to purchase the senators and representatives that the insouciant American voters think that they elect.

Do you know how large 1,000 billion is? You would have to live for thousands of years and do nothing for 24/7 except count to reach that figure. It is a sum that nurtures the recipients, and the recipients regard it as worth protecting.

Therefore, the American public gets not representation, but lies that justify war and conflict. The military/security complex, about which President Eisenhower warned the American people to no effect, is in desperate need of an enemy. In obedience to the military/security complex, the Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama regimes have made Russia that enemy. If Trump and Putin do not understand this, they will easily be made irrelevant.

They both can be assassinated, and that is what the statements from Pelosi, Schumer, McCain, Lindsey Graham, et. al., repeated endlessly in the propaganda ministry that is the Western press, encourages. Trump can be assassinated or overthrown in a political coup for selling out America to Russia, as members of both political parties claim and as the media trumpets endlessly. Putin can be easily assassinated by the CIA operatives that the Russian government stupidly permits to operate throughout Russia in NGOs and Western/US owned media and among the Atlanticist Integrationists, Washington's Firth Column inside Russia serving Washington's purposes. These Russian traitors serve in Putin's own government!

ORDER IT NOW

Americans are so unaware that they have no idea of the risk that President Trump is taking by challenging the US military security complex. For example, during the last half of the 1970s I was a member of the US Senate staff. I was working together with a staffer of the US Republican Senator from California, S. I. Hayakawa, to advance understanding of a supply-side economic policy cure to the stagflation that threatened the US budget's ability to meet its obligations. Republican Senators Hatch, Roth, and Hayakawa were trying to introduce a supply-side economic policy as a cure for the stagflation that was threatening the US economy with failure. The Democrats, who later in the Senate led the way to a supply-side policy, were, at this time, opposed (see Paul Craig Roberts, The Supply-Side Revolution , Harvard University Press, 1984). The Democrats claimed that the policy would worsen the budget deficit, the only time in those days Democrats cared about the budget deficit. The Democrats said that they would support the tax rate reductions if the Republicans would support offsetting cuts in the budget to support a balanced budget. This was a ploy to put Republicans on the spot for taking away some groups' handouts in order "to cut tax rates for the rich."

The supply-side policy did not require budget cuts, but in order to demonstrate the Democrats lack of sincerety, Hayakawa's aid and I had our senators introduce a series of budget cuts together with tax cuts that, on a static revenue basis (not counting tax revenue feedbacks from the incentives of the lower tax rates) kept the budget even, and the Democrats voted against them every time.

When the combination of tax cuts with defense budget cuts came up for a vote, the legendary senator Strom Thurmond, a 48-year member of the US Senate from South Carolina, tapped me on the shoulder. He said: "son, never set your senator up against the military/security complex. He will not be re-elected, and you will be out of a job." I replied that we were just establishing for the record that under no conditions would the Democrats, who wanted more government, vote for a tax rate reduction even if there was a case that it would cure stagflation. He replied: "son, the military/security complex doesn't care."

My emergence from The Matrix began with Thurmond's pat on my shoulder. It grew with my time at the Wall Street Journal when I learned that some truthful things simply could not be said. In the Treasury I experienced how those outside interests opposed to a president's policy marshall their forces and the media that they own to block it. Later as a member of a secret presidential committee, I saw how the CIA attempted to prevent President Reagan from ending the Cold War.

Today, right now, at this moment, we are faced with a massive effort of the military/security complex, the neoconservatives, the Democratic Party, and the presstitute media to discredit the elected President of the United States and to overthrow him in order that the utterly corrupt elite that rule American can continue to hold on to power and to protect the massive budget of the military/security complex that, along with the Israel Lobby, funds the elections of those who rule us. Trump, like Reagan, was an exception, and it is the exceptions that accumulate the ire of the corrupt leftwing, bought off with money, and the ire of the media, concentrated into small tight ownership groups indebted to those who permitted the illegal concentration of a once independent and diverse American media that once served, on occasion, as a watchdog over government. The rightwing, wrapped in the flag, dismisses all truth as "anti-American."

If Putin, Lavrov, the Russian government, the traitorous Russian Fifth Column -- the Atlanticist Integrationists -- the Chinese, the Iranians, the North Koreans think that any peace or consideration can come out of America, they are insane. Their delusions are setting themselves up for destruction. There is no institution in America, government or private, that can be trusted. Any government or person who trusts America or any Western country is stupid beyond belief.

The entire Russiagate hoax is an orchestration by the military/security complex, led by John Brennen, Comey, and Rosenstein. The purpose is to discredit President trump for two reasons. One is to prevent any normalization of relations with Russia. The other is to remove Trump's agenda as an alternative to the agenda of the Democratic Party.

President Trump is almost powerless. Putin, the Chinese, the Iranians, and the North Koreans should recognize this before it is too late for them. President Trump cannot fire and arrest for high treason Mueller and Rosenstein. And Trump cannot indict Hillary for her numerous unquestionable crimes in plain view of everyone, or Comey or Brennan, who declares Trump "to be wholly in the pocket of Putin," for trying to overthrow the elected president of the United States. Trump cannot have the Secret Service question the likes of Pelosi and Schumer and McCain and Lindsey Graham for false accusations that encourage assassination of the President of the United States.

Trump cannot even trust the Secret Service, which accumulated evidence suggests was complicit in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy.

If Putin and Lavrov, so anxious to be friends of Washington, let their guards down, they are history.

As I said above, Russiagate is an orchestratration to prevent peace between the US and Russia. Leading military/security complex experts, including the person who provided the CIA's daily briefing of the President of the United States for many years, and the person who devised the spy program for the National Security Agency, have proven conclusively that Russiagate is a hoax designed for the purpose of preventing President Trump from normalizing relations between the US and Russia, which has the power to destroy the entirety of the Western World at will.

Here is the report from the retired security professionals who, unlike those still in office, cannot be fired and deprived of a careet for telling the truth: https://original.antiwar.com/mcgovern/2018/07/15/memo-to-the-president-ahead-of-mondays-summit/

Here is what the clued-in Russian Defense Minister Shoigu has to say about the aggressive actions of the West against the Russian homeland: https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2018/07/13/defense-minister-shoigu-on-moscow-vision-security-problems.html

If Putin doesn't listen to him, Russia is in the trash can of history.

Keep in mind that no media informs you better than my website. If my website goes down, you will be left in darkness. No valid information comes from the US government or the Western presstitutes. If you sit in front of the TV screen watching the Western media, you are brainwashed beyond all hope. Not even I can rescue you. Nor God himself.

Americans, and indeed the Russians themselves, are incapable of realizing it, but there is a chance that Trump will be overthrown and a Western assault will be launched against the handful of countries that insist on sovereignty.

I doubt that few of the Americans who elected Trump will be taken in by the anti-Trump propagana, but they are not organized and have no armed power. The police, militarized by George W. Bush and Obama, will be set against them. The rebellions will be local and suppressed by every violation of the US Constitution by the private powers that rule Washington, as always has been the case with rebellions in America.

In the West, which the Russians are so anxious to join, all freedoms are dead -- freedom of assembly, freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of inquiry, freedom of privacy, freedom from arbitrary search, freedom from arbitrary arrest, along with the Constitutional protections of due process and habeas corpus. Today there are no countries less free than the United States of America.

Why do the Russian Atlanticist Integrationists want to join an unfree Western world? Are they that brainwashed by Western Propaganda?

If Putin listens to these deluded fools, Putin will destroy Russia.

There is something wrong with Russian perception of Washington. Apparently the Russian elite, with the exception of Shoigu and a few others are incapable of comprehending the neoconservative drive for US world hegemony and the neoconservative determination to destroy Russia as a constraint on US unilateralism. The Russian government somehow, despite all evidence to the contrary, believes that Washington's hegemony is negotiable. (Republished from PaulCraigRoberts.org by permission of author or representative)

nagra , July 20, 2018 at 4:46 am GMT
is big question even if Trump wants peace at all. Trump has shown his real face on the very beginning when he said that they are going to talk about "his friend" Xi, making Putin very uncomfortable and throwing some worms in Russia~China relationship in front of cameras for all to see

Trump came to the meeting in hope to impress Putin with his cowboy arrogance, He now says that he'll be Putin's worst enemy ( if he don't bow to him I guess : ). all Trump cares about is his ego, nothing else too sweat mouthed sleazy person

Sparkon , July 20, 2018 at 4:57 am GMT
Reckless and irresponsible comments about treason from former CIA director Brennan, and other ranking public figures, echo similar inflammatory rhetoric from far-right-wing rabble rouser Gen. Edwin Walker, and other members of the John Birch Society, in the days before Pres. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas.
RobinG , July 20, 2018 at 5:10 am GMT
@geokat62

Okay then! Cue the real story of [lying filth] Bill Browder, a film by Andrei Nekrasov. Watch and share before it disappears!

https://www.bitchute.com/embed/lQ3qEwX66pIL/

The Magnitsky Act – Behind the Scenes

Ludwig Watzal , Website July 20, 2018 at 5:41 am GMT
What's going on in the United States of America beats the band what happened under Joe McCarthy. The witch hunt against a sitting President by 95 percent of the media, major government institutions such as the criminal CIA, FBI, DOJ and the rest of the crooked Intel community plus the rascals in the US Congress can only happen in a totalitarian society, which the US is.

The Brennan, Clappers, Obamas, Clintons, Comeys, Rosenstein and their many subordinate political Mafiosi should be put behind bars instead of running from one TV station to the next and lay the ground for a possibly Trump assassination. Trump is portrayed by these crooks as a "traitor." In the US, traitors usefully deserve death. If these political Mafiosi don't bring down Trump "legally," they will hire a kind of Lee Harvey Oswald who "shot" JFK.

As Mr. Rogers correctly states, President Trump is almost powerless. These US fools even try to breed discord between the so-called nationalists and the globalists in Russia for which Medvedev stays. He once served US interests more than Russian ones when he was Prime Minister and got flattered by the ineffable Bill Clinton.

Let's wait and see what happens in the upcoming mid-term elections. If the Dems win both Houses of Congress, Trump is done. The obstructionists will have the upper hand. If they can't remove him from office "legally," there will be a hitman out there somewhere.

RealAmericanValuesCirca1776Not1965 , July 20, 2018 at 6:49 am GMT
President smugly making peace with the Russian nation that was supposed to be the evil enemy in a 3rd and final brother war to devastate the white race beyond recovery.

Little upstart in the Democrat party making left wing politics less palatable to the masses with her heavy handed socialist rhetoric. All while preaching BDS and anti-Israel sentiment too, representing Frankenstein's CultMarx monster turning on it's creator.

And fewer and fewer people on all sides buying what the American Pravda is selling with each passing day. The resulting hysteria is both par for the course and downright delectable.

jilles dykstra , July 20, 2018 at 7:24 am GMT
" Apparently the Russian elite, with the exception of Shoigu and a few others are incapable of comprehending the neoconservative drive for US world hegemony and the neoconservative determination to destroy Russia as a constraint on US unilateralism. " My idea is that many in Russia understand quite well, this is why they demonstrate Russia's military capabilities frequently. Why does Putin support Assad and Syria ? Not because he likes these countries, but because he understands that if these countries also get the USA yoke the position of Russia and China deteriorate.

Putin is careful not to give USA public opinion more 'reason' to fear Russia. Already a few years ago something fell into the E part of the Mediterranean. It was asserted that Russia had intercepted a USA missile fired from Spain to Syria. USA and Israel declared that an excercise had been held. Putin said nothing.

Despite all that NATO does at Russia's borders Putin does not let himself be provoked. MH17, I suppose Putin knows quite well what happened, Russia has radar and satelites, yet Putin never gave the Russian view.

So what do we see now ? Putin aiding Trump in steering the USA away from trying to control the whole world, an effort that is destroying the USA, but Deep State does not mind. In this way Russia indeed meddles in USA politics. Trump now invited Putin to come to Washington, the MH17 statement is withheld, the hysteria at CNN is such that MH17 is not even mentioned. In stead: Trump must be mentally deranged.

Tsar Nicholas , July 20, 2018 at 7:48 am GMT
Another fine piece from PCR. It is a shame that trolls have caused him to avoid comments.
NoseytheDuke , July 20, 2018 at 8:03 am GMT
Good to see PCR accepting comments again. It's not just the Dumbocruds, it's the Rupuglicunts too. Follow the money, it's coming from the same sources. Gore Vidal said there's only one party in America, it's the Money Party and it has two branches. It is even more true today than when he said it. There is no Left or Right anymore, only the question, is it good for Israel? And the American people be damned.
Anonymous [337] Disclaimer , July 20, 2018 at 8:20 am GMT

Is President Trump A Traitor Because He Wants Peace with Russia?
The Democrats say he is

The Democrats -- and their wholly-owned MSM -- will call Trump any name that'll stick. It means little. Even if Trump got everything he wanted on immigration, that particular toothpaste is already out of the tube and unless we send back some of the millions of illegal third-world squatters we've no hope of recovering the United States of America.

If you want to talk treason, you need look no further than the Hart-Celler Act of 1965, whereby the plan was laid to replace the population of this nation with third-world refuse, which guaranteed cheap labor for GOP capitalists and endless political support for Democrat traitors.

Oh yeah, it's going swimmingly.

Robert Magill , July 20, 2018 at 9:36 am GMT
Fact 1: Russia's Defense Dept. IS a defense dept. Our alleged Defense Dept. is a War Dept. Nuff said.
Fact 2: Don't invade Russia.
Fact 3: Don't invade Russia.
RobertMagill.wordpress.com
Biff , July 20, 2018 at 9:47 am GMT

HOW CAN THIS BE? HOW CAN IT BE THAT THE WESTERN MEDIA IS SO OPPOSED TO PEACE? WHAT IS THE EXPLANATION?

Money

Moi , July 20, 2018 at 11:08 am GMT
@Tsar Nicholas

For a country that cares little about morality, it really does not matter whether Trump, Hillary, Obama or anyone else is the leader.

geokat62 , July 20, 2018 at 11:13 am GMT
@RobinG

As the saying goes "timing is everything." I have to admit I was incredulous that you were somehow able to link to a functioning version of the Nekrosov film. I've been trying to get my hands on that documentary for the last few years, but to no avail. I finally managed to read a comment on another blog that recommended that people who were interested in viewing the film could do so by reaching out to the producer to request a personalized link, after which you had to request a password from another individual affiliated with the film.

I managed to do all of that a few weeks ago and was able to watch the video on Vimeo for the full 2 hours. It was riveting, to say the least. After viewing it again, I thought about making it available to others. Due to the pressures by Browder and his lawyers, however, Nekrosov was prevented from making his film available to a wider audience. He got around this limitation by making it available for private viewing only. And to prevent a private viewer from uploading it onto the internet he cleverly placed a watermark on each film, indicating the owner of each copy of the video by displaying a number on the screen. I was surprised to see the version you linked to indeed has this watermark shown on the screen. Somehow, this did not deter the individual tied to that number from uploading it and being the one identified as doing so. That said, I'm glad the film is more widely available as it should be viewed by as many people as possible so that they can realize what a despicable liar Browder really is and how the passage of The Magnitsky Act was a travesty of justice which must be reversed.

Reactionary Utopian , July 20, 2018 at 11:35 am GMT
"Do you know how large 1,000 billion is? You would have to live for thousands of years and do nothing for 24/7 except count to reach that figure. It is a sum that nurtures the recipients, and the recipients regard it as worth protecting."

Tens of thousands of years. At one count per second, 31,687 years and a few months.

Sally Snyder , July 20, 2018 at 11:39 am GMT
Here is an interesting look at how the anti-Russian narrative began in the United States and who really rigged the 2016 U.S. election:

https://viableopposition.blogspot.com/2018/07/the-genesis-of-russian-interference.html

Main Street America is being manipulated into believing that Russia is the enemy, giving Washington a complete...

Jake , July 20, 2018 at 11:49 am GMT
"In the West, which the Russians are so anxious to join, all freedoms are dead -- freedom of assembly, freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of inquiry, freedom of privacy, freedom from arbitrary search, freedom from arbitrary arrest, along with the Constitutional protections of due process and habeas corpus."

True. That is the Anglo-Zionist Empire. That is what the WASP Empire delivers, and it does so to destroy more conservative national and local cultures so their peoples are tossed into the melting pot and reduced into a goop easy to rule.

Oliver Cromwell taking Jewish money, allying with Jews so he would have the funds to wage permanent war against the vast, vast majority of non-WASP whites within his reach: that is the definition of WASP culture; that picture tells you what it always will do.

nagra , July 20, 2018 at 12:14 pm GMT
@RobinG

to everyone who make such movies

make something serious about Obama and Hillary destroying whole African country of Libya killing Colonel Gaddafi on the street, which is greatest war crime in the 21st century so far or, Bill Clinton bombing Bosnian Serbs '95 opening the door to jihadis to continue behead people in the middle of the Europe or, Bill Clinton and Nato bombing Serbia '99 to give "Kosovo" independence killing many civilian and destroying infrastructure on purpose or Madeline Albright confessing killing half of million Iraqi kids on the camera or, Bush and or Bushes or those such Bill Browder are just small dirty fish who in comparison is almost not worth filming I appreciate the effort but get seriously real if you are about to get truth to people

annamaria , July 20, 2018 at 12:22 pm GMT
@Ludwig Watzal

"The Brennan, Clappers, Obamas, Clintons, Comeys, Rosenstein and their many subordinate political Mafiosi "

What is going on in the US is systematic. Assange, an investigative journalist who became the light of truth worldwide, is under a grave danger from US' and UK' Intelligence Communities of the non-intelligent opportunists and real traitors: https://www.rt.com/news/433783-wikileaks-assange-ecuador-uk/

Meanwhile, Mrs. Clinton, who was criminally negligent with regard to the most important classified information, has been protected by the politicking Brennan, Clapper, and Mueller: " it was over 30,000 emails , emails that were sent through to Hillary Clinton through the unauthorized server and unsecured server and every email she sent out.

There were highly classified -- beyond classified -- top secret-type stuff that had gone through that server. an instruction embedded, compartmentalized data embedded in the email server telling the server to send a copy of every email that came to Hillary Clinton through that unauthorized server and every email that she sent out through that server, to send it to this foreign entity that is not Russia." http://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2018/07/congressional-record-transcript-on-chinagate.html

The Awan Affair, the most serious ever violation of national cybersecurity, has demonstrated the spectacular incompetence of the CIA and FBI, which had allowed a family of Pakistani nationals to surf congressional computers of various committees, including Intelligence Committee, for years. None of the scoundrels had a security clearance! Their ardent protector, Wasserman-Schultz (who threatened the DC Marschall) belongs to the untouchables, unlike Assange: https://www.theepochtimes.com/awan-congressional-scandal-in-spotlight-as-president-suggests-data-could-be-part-of-court-case_2500703.html

Ilyana_Rozumova , July 20, 2018 at 12:27 pm GMT
Trump and Putin made a mistake. I do not understand how it could have happened. They should have issued communiqué that they have agreed to work toward peace and relieve tensions and suppress conflicts around the world. (I do not have a time for now to write more.) (sorry)
Carroll Price , July 20, 2018 at 12:30 pm GMT
@Eagle Eye

Don't give FDR too much credit. He didn't approve the Normandy invasion until well after Russia had destroyed the German army.

Zogby , July 20, 2018 at 12:36 pm GMT
If Rosenstein & Mueller had done what they did with the publication of the indictments a few days before the summit -- and were North Koreans -- they'd be in front of a firing squad within 24 hours. Trump is completely powerless to do anything about these two. And this has gone on for a year and a half. This is not a strength of democracy.

The US today is like Venezuela was shortly after Maduro was elected (by a narrow margin) -- after Chavez's death -- and before violence eventually broke out. The losing opposition refused to accept the result and tensions simmered for a long time.

Or after Morsi was elected in Egypt and before the military coup. The victory was narrow, the opposition refused the to accept the result and tensions simmered for a long time.

Or maybe like Bush vs Gore. Bush was kinda saved by 9/11 which completely changed the atmosphere.

Who knows what will happen. It's clear though that Trump believes he has forced his opponents to play a bad hand in their outlandish craze the past week. It's why he doubled down and invited Putin to Washington near the 2018 election time. He perceives this as a chance to re-enact the 2016 election and coast to victory. The establishment is insane, and if he brings their insanity out it plays to his favor.

Russ , July 20, 2018 at 1:04 pm GMT
@Sparkon

https://remnantnewspaper.com/web/index.php/articles/item/3975-deep-state-delirium

Brennan, the Communist. The linked article begins with that and proceeds from there in a first-rate deep-state summary.

Den Lille Abe , July 20, 2018 at 1:04 pm GMT
The reception of the Trump- Putin meeting is breathtaking. I have in my 61 years never witnessed such a hate and slander in the MSM. I have after this begun to actually dismiss that Americans are sensible people! They have completely forgotten the cost of the Civil War. We in Europe have not forgotten the cost of war and are not going there again. Ever.

The US has become a lunatic asylum with nuclear weapons, never mind Kim Jong Un, look a squirrel! But the US is a threat to humanity, included it's protegé Israel, the new Apartheid state.

Harold Smith , July 20, 2018 at 1:43 pm GMT
"Is President Trump A Traitor Because He Wants Peace with Russia?"

Wait; what?

From badmouthing Russia to appointing Russophobes to high office, to imposing sanctions, to illegally seizing Russian diplomatic property, to committing war crimes in Syria, to a provocative military buildup in Europe, to arming the illegitimate Ukrainian "government," etc., presidential poseur Orange Clown has spent 99% of his "presidency" so far antagonizing Russia; apparently trying to provoke some kind of Russian military response.

If it was anyone else other than Vladimir Putin calling the shots in Russia, WW3 probably would've happened already. Yet PCR claims Orange Clown wants peace with Russia?

Note to PCR: It is Vladimir Putin who wants peace, not presidential poseur Orange Clown. If Orange Clown has had some kind of spiritual epiphany/change of heart, he's going to have to show good faith by taking some kind of unambiguous action; posturing won't suffice.

Mike P , July 20, 2018 at 1:48 pm GMT
@NoseytheDuke

There is a lot of truth in what you say, but it does not account for the fight we are currently witnessing. Two factions in the Money Party are at war with each other. Neither one is willing to level with the public as to its true aims and motives -- they are fighting viciously but under the bed sheets, which is why the spectacle looks so unhinged and silly.

AnonFromTN , July 20, 2018 at 2:28 pm GMT
It appears that he is trying to save the US from financial collapse. Hence, he is a traitor to MIC, particularly to the obscenely greedy Pentagon contractors. The US presidents and Congress always pandered to MIC first and foremost. He broke (or at least tried to break) the pattern.
Anonymous [166] Disclaimer , July 20, 2018 at 4:48 pm GMT
@Den Lille Abe

Don't blame all Americans. Forty-eight percent of us voted for Trump; it is very likely that more than half of the rest voted for Hellary only with great reluctance, owing largely to the unprecedented campaign of vilification directed at Trump. The point is: a very large majority of people in this country are nowhere near as insane as the media and elites are -- in fact, we're still nowhere near insane enough for their taste!

[Jul 17, 2018] I think there is much more to the comment made by Putin regarding Bill Browder and his money flows into the DNC and Clinton campaign. That would explain why the DNC didn t hand the servers over to the FBI after being hacked.

Highly recommended!
Jul 17, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

NumNutt -> 847328_3527 Tue, 07/17/2018 - 11:41 Permalink

I think there is much more to the comment made by Putin regarding Bill Browder and his money flows into the DNC and Clinton campaign. That would explain why the DNC didn't hand the servers over to the FBI after being hacked. If you follow the money a lot of what happened during the election and afterwards in regards to Russia and Trump start to make sense. Could it be that we are finally witnessing the removal the last layers of the center of the onion?

[Jul 16, 2018] Putin Claims U.S. Intelligence Agents Funneled $400K To Clinton Campaign Zero Hedge

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... For instance, we can bring up Mr. Browder, in this particular case. Business associates of Mr. Browder have earned over $1.5 billion in Russia and never paid any taxes neither in Russia or the United States and yet the money escaped the country. They were transferred to the United States. They sent [a] huge amount of money, $400,000,000, as a contribution to the campaign of Hillary Clinton. Well that's their personal case. ..."
"... we have solid reason to believe that some [US] intelligence officers accompanied and guided these transactions. So we have an interest in questioning them. ..."
"... Browder is notoriously the man behind the 2012 Magnitsky Act, which exploited Congressional willingness to demonize Russia and has done so much to poison relations between Washington and Moscow. ..."
"... Browder, a media favorite who self-promotes as "Putin's enemy #1," portrays himself as a selfless human rights advocate, but is he? He has used his fortune to threaten lawsuits for anyone who challenges his version of events, effectively silencing many critics. He claims that his accountant Sergei Magnitsky was a crusading "lawyer" who discovered a $230 million tax-fraud scheme that involved the Browder business interest Hermitage Capital but was, in fact, engineered by corrupt Russian police officers who arrested Magnitsky and enabled his death in a Russian jail. ..."
"... William Browder is again in the news recently in connection with testimony related to Russiagate. On December 16th Senator Diane Feinstein of the Senate Judiciary Committee released the transcript of the testimony provided by Glenn Simpson, founder of Fusion GPS. According to James Carden, Browder was mentioned 50 times, but the repeated citations apparently did not merit inclusion in media coverage of the story by the New York Times, Washington Post and Politico. ..."
Jul 16, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

07/16/2018

Vladimir Putin made a bombshell claim during Monday's joint press conference with President Trump in Helsinki, Finland, when the Russian President said some $400 million )should be $400K) in illegally earned profits was funneled to the Clinton campaign by associates of American-born British financier Bill Browder - at one time the largest foreign portfolio investors in Russia. The scheme involved members of the U.S. intelligence community, said Putin, who he said "accompanied and guided these transactions."

Browder made billions in Russia during the 90's. In December, a Moscow court sentenced Browder in absentia to nine years in prison for tax fraud, while he was also found guilty of tax evasion in a separate 2013 case. Putin accused Browder's associates of illegally earning over than $1.5 billion without paying Russian taxes, before sending $400 million to Clinton. After offering to allow special counsel Robert Mueller's team to come to Russia for their investigation - as long as there was a reciprocal arrangement for Russian intelligence to investigate in the U.S., Putin said this:

For instance, we can bring up Mr. Browder, in this particular case. Business associates of Mr. Browder have earned over $1.5 billion in Russia and never paid any taxes neither in Russia or the United States and yet the money escaped the country. They were transferred to the United States. They sent [a] huge amount of money, $400,000,000, as a contribution to the campaign of Hillary Clinton. Well that's their personal case.

It might have been legal, the contribution itself but the way the money was earned was illegal. So we have solid reason to believe that some [US] intelligence officers accompanied and guided these transactions. So we have an interest in questioning them.

From a report we noted in February by Philip Giraldi of The Strategic Culture Foundation :

Israel Shamir, a keen observer of the American-Russian relationship, and celebrated American journalist Robert Parry both think that one man deserves much of the credit for the new Cold War and that man is William Browder, a hedge fund operator who made his fortune in the corrupt 1990s world of Russian commodities trading.

Browder is also symptomatic of why the United States government is so poorly informed about international developments as he is the source of much of the Congressional "expert testimony" contributing to the current impasse. He has somehow emerged as a trusted source in spite of the fact that he has self-interest in cultivating a certain outcome. Also ignored is his renunciation of American citizenship in 1998, reportedly to avoid taxes. He is now a British citizen.

Browder is notoriously the man behind the 2012 Magnitsky Act, which exploited Congressional willingness to demonize Russia and has done so much to poison relations between Washington and Moscow. The Act sanctioned individual Russian officials, which Moscow has rightly seen as unwarranted interference in the operation of its judicial system.

Browder, a media favorite who self-promotes as "Putin's enemy #1," portrays himself as a selfless human rights advocate, but is he? He has used his fortune to threaten lawsuits for anyone who challenges his version of events, effectively silencing many critics. He claims that his accountant Sergei Magnitsky was a crusading "lawyer" who discovered a $230 million tax-fraud scheme that involved the Browder business interest Hermitage Capital but was, in fact, engineered by corrupt Russian police officers who arrested Magnitsky and enabled his death in a Russian jail.

Many have been skeptical of the Browder narrative, suspecting that the fraud was in fact concocted by Browder and his accountant Magnitsky. A Russian court recently supported that alternative narrative, ruling in late December that Browder had deliberately bankrupted his company and engaged in tax evasion. He was sentenced to nine years prison in absentia.

William Browder is again in the news recently in connection with testimony related to Russiagate. On December 16th Senator Diane Feinstein of the Senate Judiciary Committee released the transcript of the testimony provided by Glenn Simpson, founder of Fusion GPS. According to James Carden, Browder was mentioned 50 times, but the repeated citations apparently did not merit inclusion in media coverage of the story by the New York Times, Washington Post and Politico.

Fusion GPS, which was involved in the research producing the Steele Dossier used to discredit Donald Trump, was also retained to provide investigative services relating to a lawsuit in New York City involving a Russian company called Prevezon. As information provided by Browder was the basis of the lawsuit, his company and business practices while in Russia became part of the investigation. Simmons maintained that Browder proved to be somewhat evasive and his accounts of his activities were inconsistent. He claimed never to visit the United States and not own property or do business there, all of which were untrue, to include his ownership through a shell company of a $10 million house in Aspen Colorado. He repeatedly ran away , literally, from attempts to subpoena him so he would have to testify under oath.

Per Simmons, in Russia, Browder used shell companies locally and also worldwide to avoid taxes and conceal ownership, suggesting that he was likely one of many corrupt businessmen operating in what was a wild west business environment.

My question is, "Why was such a man granted credibility and allowed a free run to poison the vitally important US-Russia relationship?" The answer might be follow the money. Israel Shamir reports that Browder was a major contributor to Senator Ben Cardin of Maryland, who was the major force behind the Magnitsky Act.

[Jul 03, 2018] When you see some really successful financial speculator like Soros or (or much smaller scale) Browder, search for links with intelligence services to explain the success or at least a part of it related to xUSSR space , LA and similar regions

Highly recommended!
Jul 03, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

Recently came across the following article written by F. William Engdahl in 1996 which might be of interest to some here:

The secret financial network behind "wizard" George Soros

The last page of the above article can be found here:

Soros's looting of Ibero-America

Posted by: integer | Jul 2, 2018 4:49:45 AM | 35

[May 04, 2018] Media Use Disinformation To Accuse Russia Of Spreading Such by b

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... A McClatchy journalist investigated further and came to the same conclusion as I did. The 'leak' to the New York Times was disinformation. ..."
"... Russia has not pinned the Novichok to Sweden or the Czech Republic. It said, correctly, that several countries produced Novichok. Russia did not blame the UK for the 'nerve gas attack' in Syria. Russia says that there was no gas attack in Douma. ..."
"... The claims of Russian disinformation these authors make to not hold up to scrutiny. Meanwhile there pieces themselves are full of lies, distortions and, yes, disinformation. ..."
"... Wait for an outbreak of hostilities on the Ukraine-Donbass front shortly before the beginning of the World Cup competition which is as internationally important as the Olympic Games -- as they did in 2014 with Maidan and 2016 with the Sochi Winter Olympics drug uproar, the CIA will create chaos that will take the emphasis off any Russian success, since as to them, anything negative regarding Russia is a positive for them. ..."
"... No traces of chemical weapons have been found in Douma. This means that not only the US/UK/French airstrikes were illegal under international law but even their political justification was inherently flawed. Similarly, in the Salisbury affair, no evidence of Russian involvement has been presented, while the two myths on which the British case was built (the Russian origin of the chemical substance used and the existence of proof of Russian responsibility) have been shattered. ..."
"... Given the lack of facts, the Tory leadership seems to be adopting a truly Orwellian logic: that the main proof of Russian responsibility are the Russian denials! It is hard to see how they will be able to sell this to their international partners. Self-respecting countries of G20 would not be willing to risk their reputation. ..."
"... The detail of b's analysis that stands out to me as especially significant and brilliant is his demolition of the Guardian's reuse of the Merkel "quote." ..."
"... Related to the above, consider the nature of the recently christened thought-crime, "whataboutism." The crime may be defined as follows: "Whataboutism" is the attempt to understand a truth asserted by propaganda by way of relation to other truths it has asserted contemporaneous with or prior to this one. It is to ask, "What about this *other* truth? Does this *other* truth affect our understanding of *this* truth? And if so, how does it?" ..."
"... Whataboutism seems to deny that each asserted truth stands on its own, and has no essential relation to any other past, present, or future asserted truth. ..."
"... 1984, anyone? ..."
"... The absurd story that the OPCW says there was a 100gm/100mg who knows which on the door and other sites is just so stupid its painful. ..."
"... Presumably the Skripals touch the cutlery, plates and wine glasses in the restaurant, so why weren't the staff there infected as they must have had to pick up the plates etc after the meal. Even the door to the entrance of the restaurant should be affected as they would have to push it open, thus leaving the chemical for other people to touch. Nope, nothing in this stupid story adds up and the OPCW can't even get the amounts of the chemical right. ..."
"... Biggest problem with the world today is lazy insouciant citizens. ..."
"... One very important point Lavrov made was the anti-Russian group consists of a very small number of nations representing a small fraction of humanity; ..."
"... while they have some economic and military clout, it's possible for the rest of the world's nations to sideline them and get on with the important business of forming a genuine Multipolar World Order, which is what the UN and its Charter envisioned. ..."
"... Anything that may not confirm to the 'truth' as prescribed from above must be overwhelmed with an onslaught of more lies or, if that does not work, be discredited as 'enemy' disinformation. ..."
"... Yes, exactly. The Western hegemony, i.e. the true "Axis of Evil" led by the US, and including the EU and non-Western allies, have invented the Perpetual Big Lie™. ..."
"... Witnesses? They're either confederates, dupes, or terrified by coercion. Evidence and/or technical analysis? All faked! A nominally reliable party, e.g. the president of the Czech Republic, makes statements that undermine the Big Lie Nexus? Again-- he's either been bought off or frightened into making such inconvenient claims. Or he's just a mischievous liar. ..."
"... And, as I seemingly never get tired of pointing out, the Perpetual Big Lie™ strategy arose, and succeeds, because the "natural enemies" of authoritarian government overreach have been coerced or co-opted to a fare-thee-well. So mass-media venues, and even supposedly independent technical and scientific organizations, are part of the Perpetual Big Lie™ apparatus. ..."
"... Putting Kudrin -- an opponent of de-dollarization and an upholder of the Washington Consensus -- in charge of Russia's international outreach would be equal to putting Bill Clinton in charge of a girls' school. ..."
"... In the Guardian I only read the comments, never the article. Here, I read both. That is the difference between propaganda and good reporting. ..."
May 04, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

The Grauniad is slipping deeper into the disinformation business: Revealed: UK's push to strengthen anti-Russia alliance is the headline of a page one piece which reveals exactly nothing. There is no secret lifted and no one was discomforted by a questioning journalist.

Like other such pieces it uses disinformation to accuse Russia of spreading such.

The main 'revelation' is stenographed from a British government official. Some quotes from the usual anti-Russian propagandists were added. Dubious or false 'western' government claims are held up as truth. That Russia does not endorse them is proof for Russian mischievousness and its 'disinformation'.

The opener:

The UK will use a series of international summits this year to call for a comprehensive strategy to combat Russian disinformation and urge a rethink over traditional diplomatic dialogue with Moscow, following the Kremlin's aggressive campaign of denials over the use of chemical weapons in the UK and Syria.
...
"The foreign secretary regards Russia's response to Douma and Salisbury as a turning point and thinks there is international support to do more," a Whitehall official said. "The areas the UK are most likely to pursue are countering Russian disinformation and finding a mechanism to enforce accountability for the use of chemical weapons."

There is a mechanism to enforce accountability for the use of chemical weapons. It is the Chemical Weapon Convention and the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW). It was the British government which at first rejected the use of these instruments during the Skripal incident:

Early involvement of the OPCW, as demanded by Russia, was resisted by the British government. Only on March 14, ten days after the incident happened and two days after Prime Minister Theresa may had made accusations against Russia, did the British government invite the OPCW. Only on March 19, 15 days after the incident happen did the OPCW technical team arrive and took blood samples.

Now back to the Guardian disinformation:

In making its case to foreign ministries, the UK is arguing that Russian denials over Salisbury and Douma reveal a state uninterested in cooperating to reach a common understanding of the truth , but instead using both episodes to try systematically to divide western electorates and sow doubt.

A 'common understanding of the truth' is an interesting term. What is the truth? Whatever the British government claims? It accused Russia of the Skripal incident a mere eight days after it happened. Now, two month later, it admits that it does not know who poisoned the Skripals:

Police and intelligence agencies have failed so far to identify the individual or individuals who carried out the nerve agent attack in Salisbury, the UK's national security adviser has disclosed.

Do the Brits know where the alleged Novichok poison came from? Unless they produced it themselves they likely have no idea. The Czech Republic just admitted that it made small doses of a Novichok nerve agent for testing purposes. Others did too.

Back to the Guardian :

British politicians are not alone in claiming Russia's record of mendacity is not a personal trait of Putin's, but a government-wide strategy that makes traditional diplomacy ineffective.

Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, famously came off one lengthy phone call with Putin – she had more than 40 in a year – to say he lived in a different world.

No, Merkel never said that. An Obama administration flunky planted that in the New York Times :

Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany told Mr. Obama by telephone on Sunday that after speaking with Mr. Putin she was not sure he was in touch with reality, people briefed on the call said. "In another world," she said.

When that claim was made in March 2014 we were immediately suspicious of it:

This does not sound like typically Merkel but rather strange for her. I doubt that she said that the way the "people briefed on the call" told it to the Times stenographer. It is rather an attempt to discredit Merkel and to make it more difficult for her to find a solution with Russia outside of U.S. control.

A day later the German government denied (ger) that Merkel ever said such (my translation):

The chancellery is unhappy about the report in the New York Times. Merkel by no means meant to express that Putin behaved irrational. In fact she told Obama that Putin has a different perspective about the Crimea [than Obama has].

A McClatchy journalist investigated further and came to the same conclusion as I did. The 'leak' to the New York Times was disinformation.

That disinformation, spread by the Obama administration but immediately exposed as false, is now held up as proof by Patrick Wintour, the Diplomatic editor of the Guardian , that Russia uses disinformation and that Putin is a naughty man.

The British Defense Minister Gavin Williamson wants journalists to enter the UK reserve forces to help with the creation of propaganda:

He said army recruitment should be about "looking to different people who maybe think, as a journalist: 'What are my skills in terms of how are they relevant to the armed forces?'

Patrick Wintour seems to be a qualified candidate.

Or maybe he should join the NATO for Information Warfare the Atlantic Council wants to create to further disinform about those damned Russkies:

What we need now is a cross-border defense alliance against disinformation -- call it Communications NATO. Such an alliance is, in fact, nearly as important as its military counterpart.

Like the Guardian piece above writer of the NATO propaganda lobby Atlantic Council makes claims of Russian disinformation that do not hold up to the slightest test:

By pinning the Novichok nerve agent on Sweden or the Czech Republic, or blaming the UK for the nerve gas attack in Syria, the Kremlin sows confusion among our populations and makes us lose trust in our institutions.

Russia has not pinned the Novichok to Sweden or the Czech Republic. It said, correctly, that several countries produced Novichok. Russia did not blame the UK for the 'nerve gas attack' in Syria. Russia says that there was no gas attack in Douma.

The claims of Russian disinformation these authors make to not hold up to scrutiny. Meanwhile there pieces themselves are full of lies, distortions and, yes, disinformation.

The bigger aim behind all these activities, demanding a myriad of new organizations to propagandize against Russia, is to introduce a strict control over information within 'western' societies.

Anything that may not confirm to the 'truth' as prescribed from above must be overwhelmed with an onslaught of more lies or, if that does not work, be discredited as 'enemy' disinformation.

That scheme will be used against anyone who deviates from the ordered norm. You dislike that pipeline in your backyard? You must be falling for Russian trolls or maybe you yourself are an agent of a foreign power. Social Security? The Russians like that. It is a disinformation thing. You better forget about it.

c1ue , May 4, 2018 2:27:27 PM | 1

Excellent article, in an ongoing run of great journalism.
I am curious - have you read this? https://ratical.org/ratville/JFK/ST/
It purports to be a book by an American military man intimately familiar with the covert ops portion of the US government. The internal Kafka-esque dynamics described certainly feel true.
Mike Maloney , May 4, 2018 2:44:12 PM | 3
One of the reasons newspapers are getting worse is the economics. They aren't really viable anymore. Their future is as some form of government sanctioned oligopoly. Two national papers -- a "left" and a "right" -- and then a handful of regional papers. All spouting the same neoliberal, neoconservative chicanery.
CD Waller , May 4, 2018 2:57:20 PM | 4
Genuine journalist Matt Taibbi warned of this sort of branding of disparate views as enemy a month ago. He was also correct. Evil and insidious. The enemy of a free society.
chet380 , May 4, 2018 2:58:22 PM | 5
Wait for an outbreak of hostilities on the Ukraine-Donbass front shortly before the beginning of the World Cup competition which is as internationally important as the Olympic Games -- as they did in 2014 with Maidan and 2016 with the Sochi Winter Olympics drug uproar, the CIA will create chaos that will take the emphasis off any Russian success, since as to them, anything negative regarding Russia is a positive for them.
WJ , May 4, 2018 3:02:57 PM | 6
The later history of the 20th century will one day be read as the triumph and normalization of the Nazi state through liberal democratic capitalism.
Laguerre , May 4, 2018 3:07:19 PM | 7
I agree that it's difficult to see how the drive to renew the Cold War is going to be stopped. I presume that, with the exception of certain NeoCon circles, there isn't a desire for Hot War. Certainly not in the British sources you quote. Britain wouldn't want Hot War with Russia. It's all a question of going to the limit for internal consumption. Do a 1984, in order to keep the population in-line.
james , May 4, 2018 3:11:05 PM | 8
thanks b... i can't understand how any intelligent thinking person would read the guardian, let alone something like the huff post, and etc. etc... why? the propaganda money that pays for the white helmets, certainly goes to these outlets as well..

the uk have gone completely nuts! i guess it comes with reading the guardian, although, in fairness, all british media seems very skewed - sky news, bbc, and etc. etc.

it does appear as though Patrick Wintour is on Gavin Williamson's propaganda bandwagon/payroll already... in reading the comments and articles at craig murrays site, i have become more familiar with just how crazy things are in the uk.. his latest article freedom no more sums it up well... throw the uk msm in the trash can... it is for all intensive purposes, done..

mk , May 4, 2018 3:31:41 PM | 9
Meanwhile, OPCW chief Uzumcu seems to have been pranked again, this time by his own staff (this is how I interpret it):

He claimed that the amount of Novichok found was about 100 g and therefore more than research laboratories would produce, i.e. this was weaponized Novichok.

http://www.startribune.com/large-dose-of-nerve-agent-was-used-in-spy-s-poisoning-watchdog-says/481687061/

However, the story is being retracted right now because OPCW staff says it was only 100 mg .

Uzumcu looks like a fool.

b , May 4, 2018 3:49:03 PM | 10
The Russian embassy in the UK must be reading MoA. It just now tweeted this press release: Embassy press officer comments on the Guardian article concerning a new British anti-Russian strategy
Q: What is our reaction to the Guardian article on a "comprehensive strategy" to "deepen the alliance against Russia" to be pursued by the UK Government at international forums?

A: Judging by the publication, the main current challenge for Whitehall is to preserve the anti-Russian coalition that the Conservatives tried to build after the Salisbury incident. This task is challenging indeed. The "fusion doctrine" promoted by the national security apparatus has led to the Western bloc taking hasty decisions that, as life has shown, were not based on any facts.

No traces of chemical weapons have been found in Douma. This means that not only the US/UK/French airstrikes were illegal under international law but even their political justification was inherently flawed. Similarly, in the Salisbury affair, no evidence of Russian involvement has been presented, while the two myths on which the British case was built (the Russian origin of the chemical substance used and the existence of proof of Russian responsibility) have been shattered.

Given the lack of facts, the Tory leadership seems to be adopting a truly Orwellian logic: that the main proof of Russian responsibility are the Russian denials! It is hard to see how they will be able to sell this to their international partners. Self-respecting countries of G20 would not be willing to risk their reputation.

karlof1 , May 4, 2018 3:52:31 PM | 11
Hmmm... My reply to c1ue went sideways it seems. Yes, The late Mr. Prouty's book's the real deal and the website hosting his very rare book is a rare gem itself. Click the JFK at page top left to be transported to that sites archive of writings about his murder. The very important essay by Prouty's there too.
WJ , May 4, 2018 3:53:30 PM | 12
The detail of b's analysis that stands out to me as especially significant and brilliant is his demolition of the Guardian's reuse of the Merkel "quote."

This one detail tells us so much about how propaganda works, and about how it can be defeated. Successful propaganda both depends upon and seeks to accelerate the erasure of historical memory. This is because its truths are always changing to suit the immediate needs of the state. None of its truths can be understood historically. b makes the connection between the documented but forgotten past "truth" of Merkel's quote and its present reincarnation in the Guardian, and this is really all he *needs* to do. What b points out is something quite simple; yet the ability to do this very simple thing is becoming increasingly rare and its exercise increasingly difficult to achieve. It is for me the virtue that makes b's analysis uniquely indispensable.

Related to the above, consider the nature of the recently christened thought-crime, "whataboutism." The crime may be defined as follows: "Whataboutism" is the attempt to understand a truth asserted by propaganda by way of relation to other truths it has asserted contemporaneous with or prior to this one. It is to ask, "What about this *other* truth? Does this *other* truth affect our understanding of *this* truth? And if so, how does it?"

Whataboutism seems to deny that each asserted truth stands on its own, and has no essential relation to any other past, present, or future asserted truth.

Jose Garcia , May 4, 2018 3:56:03 PM | 13
1984, anyone?
john wilson , May 4, 2018 4:03:04 PM | 14
The absurd story that the OPCW says there was a 100gm/100mg who knows which on the door and other sites is just so stupid its painful. This implies that the Skripals both closed the door together and then went off on their day spreading the stuff everywhere, yet no one else was contaminated (apart from the fantasy policeman).

Presumably the Skripals touch the cutlery, plates and wine glasses in the restaurant, so why weren't the staff there infected as they must have had to pick up the plates etc after the meal. Even the door to the entrance of the restaurant should be affected as they would have to push it open, thus leaving the chemical for other people to touch. Nope, nothing in this stupid story adds up and the OPCW can't even get the amounts of the chemical right.

ken , May 4, 2018 4:03:13 PM | 15
The problem is,,, most know it's all BS but find it 'easier' to believe or at most ignore, as then there is no responsibility to 'do something'. Biggest problem with the world today is lazy insouciant citizens. (Yes,,, I'm a PCR reader) :))
karlof1 , May 4, 2018 4:05:15 PM | 16
b @10--

Did you catch the Lavrov interview I linked to on previous Yemen thread? As you might imagine, the verbiage used is quite similar. One very important point Lavrov made was the anti-Russian group consists of a very small number of nations representing a small fraction of humanity; and that while they have some economic and military clout, it's possible for the rest of the world's nations to sideline them and get on with the important business of forming a genuine Multipolar World Order, which is what the UN and its Charter envisioned.

I won't omit linking to Craig Murray's conclusion :

"I cannot sufficiently express my outrage that Leeds City Council feels it is right to ban a meeting with very distinguished speakers, because it is questioning the government and establishment line on Syria. Freedom of speech really is dead."

Ort , May 4, 2018 4:22:35 PM | 17
Anything that may not confirm to the 'truth' as prescribed from above must be overwhelmed with an onslaught of more lies or, if that does not work, be discredited as 'enemy' disinformation.
_______________________________________

Yes, exactly. The Western hegemony, i.e. the true "Axis of Evil" led by the US, and including the EU and non-Western allies, have invented the Perpetual Big Lie™.

This isn't a new insight, but it's worth repeating. It struck me anew while I was listening to a couple of UK "journalists" hectoring OPCW Representative Shulgin, and directing scurrilous and provocative innuendo disguised as "questions" to Mr. Shulgin and the Syrian witnesses testifying during his presentation.

It flashed upon me that there is no longer a reasonable expectation that the Perpetual Big Liars must eventually abandon, much less confess, their heinous mendacity. Just as B points out, there are no countervailing facts, evidence, rebuttals, theories, or explanations that can't be countered with further iterations of Big Lies, however offensively incredible and absurd.

Witnesses? They're either confederates, dupes, or terrified by coercion. Evidence and/or technical analysis? All faked! A nominally reliable party, e.g. the president of the Czech Republic, makes statements that undermine the Big Lie Nexus? Again-- he's either been bought off or frightened into making such inconvenient claims. Or he's just a mischievous liar.

And, as I seemingly never get tired of pointing out, the Perpetual Big Lie™ strategy arose, and succeeds, because the "natural enemies" of authoritarian government overreach have been coerced or co-opted to a fare-thee-well. So mass-media venues, and even supposedly independent technical and scientific organizations, are part of the Perpetual Big Lie™ apparatus.

Even as the Big Liars reach a point of diminishing returns, they respond with more of the same. I wish I were more confident that this reprehensible practice will eventually fail due to the excess of malignant hubris; I'm not holding my breath.

Passer by , May 4, 2018 4:24:44 PM | 18

Is Putin capitulating? Pro US Alexei Kudrin could join new government to negotiate "end of sanctions" with the West.

Former finance minister Alexei Kudrin will be brought back to "mend fences with the West" in order to revive Russia's economy. Kudrin has repeatedly said that unless Russia makes her political system more democratic and ends its confrontation with Europe and the United States, she will not be able to achieve economic growth. Russia's fifth-columnists were exalted: "If Kudrin joined the administration or government, it would indicate that they have agreed on a certain agenda of change, including in foreign policy, because without change in foreign policy, reforms are simply impossible in Russia," said Yevgeny Gontmakher . . . who works with a civil society organization set up by Mr. Kudrin. "It would be a powerful message, because Kudrin is the only one in the top echelons with whom they will talk in the west and towards whom there is a certain trust."

Putting Kudrin -- an opponent of de-dollarization and an upholder of the Washington Consensus -- in charge of Russia's international outreach would be equal to putting Bill Clinton in charge of a girls' school.

It would mark Putin's de facto collapse as a leader. We shall know very soon. Either way, if anyone wondered what the approach to Russia would be from Bolton and Pompeo, we now know: they will play very hard ball with Putin, regardless of what he does (or doesn't do), and with carefree readiness to risk an eventual snap.

https://archive.is/1Ynms#selection-1641.0-1641.66

Formerly T-Bear , May 4, 2018 4:57:25 PM | 21
@ 20 Laguerre

Certainly looks like @ 18 is a fine example of what b is presenting.

A good way to extract one's self from the propaganda is to refuse using whatever meme the disinformation uses, e.g. that Sergei Skripal was a double agent -- that is not a known, only a convenient suggestion.

Military intelligence is far better described as military information needed for some project or mission. Not surreptitious cloak and dagger spying. This is not to say Sergei Scripal was a British spy for which he was convicted, stripped of rank and career and exiled through a spy swap. To continue using Sergei Scripal was a double agent only repeats and verifies the disinformation meme and all the framing that goes with it. Find some alternative to what MSM produces that does not embed truthiness to their efforts.

Peter Schmidt , May 4, 2018 5:08:52 PM | 23
In the Guardian I only read the comments, never the article. Here, I read both. That is the difference between propaganda and good reporting.
Emily Dickinson , May 4, 2018 5:09:00 PM | 24
@Michael Weddington 19

I realize it's from one of the biggest propaganda organs in the world... take this New York Times report of the OPCW's retraction with a 100 grams -- 100mg? -- of salt:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/04/world/europe/opcw-skripal-attack.html

karlof1 , May 4, 2018 5:12:57 PM | 25
Passer by @18--

This same narrative was put forth in 2016 and is just as false now as then. As I posted on Yemen thread earlier, Putin on 5 May is likely to announce the formation of a Stavka.

Kudrin is a neoliberal and as such is an enemy of humanity and will never again be allowed to hold a position of power within Russia's government. Let him emigrate to the West like his fellow parasites and teach junk economics at some likeminded university.

jalp , May 4, 2018 5:30:35 PM | 26
Anyone seen this reported elsewhere? https://www.rt.com/news/425810-white-helmets-us-funding-freeze/

[Apr 24, 2018] The Democratic Party has embraced the agenda of the military-intelligence apparatus and sought to become its main political voice

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... World Socialist Web Site ..."
"... The media campaign alleging Russian intervention in the 2016 US elections has been based entirely on handouts from the CIA, NSA and FBI, transmitted by reporters who are either unwitting stooges or conscious agents of the military-intelligence apparatus. This has been accompanied by the recruitment of a cadre of top CIA and military officials to serve as highly paid "experts" and "analysts" for the television networks ..."
"... Washington Post ..."
"... The CIA operation in 2018 is unlike its overseas activities in one major respect: it is not covert. On the contrary, the military-intelligence operatives running in the Democratic primaries boast of their careers as spies and special ops warriors. Those with combat experience invariably feature photographs of themselves in desert fatigues or other uniforms on their websites. And they are welcomed and given preferred positions, with Democratic Party officials frequently clearing the field for their candidacies. ..."
"... the Democratic Party has opened its doors to a "friendly takeover" by the intelligence agencies. ..."
"... The incredible power of the military-intelligence agencies over the entire government is an expression of the breakdown of American democracy. The central cause of this breakdown is the extreme concentration of wealth in the hands of a tiny elite, whose interests the state apparatus and its "bodies of armed men" serve. Confronted by an angry and hostile working class, the ruling class is resorting to ever more overt forms of authoritarian rule. ..."
"... But it is impossible to carry out this fight through the "axis of evil" that connects the Democratic Party, the bulk of the corporate media, and the CIA. The influx of military-intelligence candidates puts paid to the longstanding myth, peddled by the trade unions and pseudo-left groups, that the Democrats represent a "lesser evil." On the contrary, working people must confront the fact that within the framework of the corporate-controlled two-party system, they face two equally reactionary evils. ..."
Mar 13, 2018 | www.wsws.org
by Patrick Martin

In a three-part series published last week, the World Socialist Web Site documented an unprecedented influx of intelligence and military operatives into the Democratic Party. More than 50 such military-intelligence candidates are seeking the Democratic nomination in the 102 districts identified by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee as its targets for 2018. These include both vacant seats and those with Republican incumbents considered vulnerable in the event of a significant swing to the Democrats.

... ... ...

The media campaign alleging Russian intervention in the 2016 US elections has been based entirely on handouts from the CIA, NSA and FBI, transmitted by reporters who are either unwitting stooges or conscious agents of the military-intelligence apparatus. This has been accompanied by the recruitment of a cadre of top CIA and military officials to serve as highly paid "experts" and "analysts" for the television networks .

In centering its opposition to Trump on the bogus allegations of Russian interference, while essentially ignoring Trump's attacks on immigrants and democratic rights, his alignment with ultra-right and white supremacist groups, his attacks on social programs like Medicaid and food stamps, and his militarism and threats of nuclear war, the Democratic Party has embraced the agenda of the military-intelligence apparatus and sought to become its main political voice.

This process was well under way in the administration of Barack Obama, which endorsed and expanded the various operations of the intelligence agencies abroad and within the United States. Obama's endorsed successor, Hillary Clinton, ran openly as the chosen candidate of the Pentagon and CIA, touting her toughness as a future commander-in-chief and pledging to escalate the confrontation with Russia, both in Syria and Ukraine.

The CIA has spearheaded the anti-Russia campaign against Trump in large part because of resentment over the disruption of its operations in Syria, and it has successfully used the campaign to force a shift in the policy of the Trump administration on that score. A chorus of media backers -- Nicholas Kristof and Roger Cohen of the New York Times , the entire editorial board of the Washington Post , most of the television networks -- are part of the campaign to pollute public opinion and whip up support on alleged "human rights" grounds for an expansion of the US war in Syria.

The 2018 election campaign marks a new stage: for the first time, military-intelligence operatives are moving in large numbers to take over a political party and seize a major role in Congress. The dozens of CIA and military veterans running in the Democratic Party primaries are "former" agents of the military-intelligence apparatus. This "retired" status is, however, purely nominal. Joining the CIA or the Army Rangers or the Navy SEALs is like joining the Mafia: no one ever actually leaves; they just move on to new assignments.

The CIA operation in 2018 is unlike its overseas activities in one major respect: it is not covert. On the contrary, the military-intelligence operatives running in the Democratic primaries boast of their careers as spies and special ops warriors. Those with combat experience invariably feature photographs of themselves in desert fatigues or other uniforms on their websites. And they are welcomed and given preferred positions, with Democratic Party officials frequently clearing the field for their candidacies.

The working class is confronted with an extraordinary political situation. On the one hand, the Republican Trump administration has more military generals in top posts than any other previous government. On the other hand, the Democratic Party has opened its doors to a "friendly takeover" by the intelligence agencies.

The incredible power of the military-intelligence agencies over the entire government is an expression of the breakdown of American democracy. The central cause of this breakdown is the extreme concentration of wealth in the hands of a tiny elite, whose interests the state apparatus and its "bodies of armed men" serve. Confronted by an angry and hostile working class, the ruling class is resorting to ever more overt forms of authoritarian rule.

Millions of working people want to fight the Trump administration and its ultra-right policies. But it is impossible to carry out this fight through the "axis of evil" that connects the Democratic Party, the bulk of the corporate media, and the CIA. The influx of military-intelligence candidates puts paid to the longstanding myth, peddled by the trade unions and pseudo-left groups, that the Democrats represent a "lesser evil." On the contrary, working people must confront the fact that within the framework of the corporate-controlled two-party system, they face two equally reactionary evils.

Patrick Martin

[Apr 21, 2018] It s a tough old world and we are certainly capable of a Salisbury set-up and god knows what else in Syria.

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... It is perfectly possible that the British government manufactured the whole Salisbury thing. We are capable of just as much despicable behavior and murder as the next. ..."
"... Tucker Carlson of Fox News has it nailed down.... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M28aYkLRlm0 ..."
"... This "civil war" has been nothing but a war for Syrian resources waged by western proxies. ..."
"... So now, In desperation borne out of their impending defeat, the imperialists have staged a chemical attack in a last throw of the dice to gain popular support for an escalation in military intervention. Like military interventions of the past, it is being justified in the name of humanitarian intervention. ..."
Apr 21, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com

wheelbarrow1 , 13 Apr 2018 14:37

Why is the prime minister of the United Kinkdom on the phone discussing whether or not to bomb a Sovereign country with the highly unstable, Donald Trump?

Can she not make up her own mind? Either she thinks it's the right thing to do or it isn't. Hopefully, the person on the other end of the phone was not Trump but someone with at least half a brain.

Proof, let's have some proof. Is that too much to ask? Apparently so. Russia is saying it's all a put up job, show us your facts. We are saying, don't be silly, we're British and besides, you may have done this sort of thing before.

It is perfectly possible that the British government manufactured the whole Salisbury thing. We are capable of just as much despicable behavior and murder as the next.

Part of the Great British act's of bravery and heroism in the second world war is the part played by women agents who were parachuted into France and helped organize local resistance groups. Odette Hallowes, Noor Inayat Khan and Violette Szabo are just a few of the many names but they are the best known. What is not generally know is that many agents when undergoing their training in the UK, were given information about the 'D' day landings, the approx time and place. They were then dropped into France into the hands of the waiting German army who captured and tortured and often executed them.

The double agent, who Winston Churchill met and fully approved of the plan was Henri Dericourt, an officer in the German army and our man on the ground in France. Dericourt organized the time and place for the drop off of the incoming agents, then told the Germans. The information about the 'D' day invasion time and place was false. The British fed the agents (only a small number) into German hands knowing they would be captured and the false information tortured out of them.

Source :- 'A Quiet Courage' Liane Jones.

It's a tough old world and we are certainly capable of a Salisbury set-up and god knows what else in Syria.

I_Wear_Socks , 13 Apr 2018 14:37
From The Guardian articles today that I have read on Syria, it makes absolutely clear that if you in any way question the narrative forwarded here, that you are a stupid conspiracy theorist in line with Richard Spencer and other far-right, American nutcases.

A more traditional form of argument to incline people to their way of thinking would be facts. But social pressure to conform and not be a conspiratorial idiot in line with the far-right obviously work better for most of their readers. My only surprise it that position hasn't been linked with Brexit.

ChairmanMayTseTung , 13 Apr 2018 14:37
Did anyone see the massive canister that was shown on TV repeatedly that was supposed to have been air-dropped and smashed through the window of a house, landed on a bed and failed to go off.

The bed was in remarkable condition with just a few ruffled bedclothes considering it had been hit with a metal object weighing god knows what and dropped from a great height.

MartinSilenus -> ChairmanMayTseTung , 13 Apr 2018 14:36
"More than 40 years after the US sprayed millions of litres of chemical agents to defoliate"

The Defoliant Agent Orange was used to kill jungles, resulting in light getting through to the dark jungle floors & a massive amount of low bush regrowing, making the finding of Vietcong fighters even harder!

It was sprayed even on American troops, it is a horrible stuff. Still compared to Chlorine poison gas, let alone nerve gases, it is much less terrible. Though the long term effects are pretty horrible.

"Some 45 million liters of the poisoned spray was Agent Orange, which contains the toxic compound dioxin"
http://theconversation.com/agent-orange-exposed-how-u-s-chemical-warfare-in-vietnam-unleashed-a-slow-moving-disaster-84572

120Daze , 13 Apr 2018 14:36
Who needs facts when you've got opinions? Non more hypocritical than the British. Its what you get when you lie and distort though a willing press, you get found out and then nobody believes anything you say.anymore. The white helmets are a western funded and founded organisation, they are NOT independent they are NOT volunteers, The UK the US and the Dutch fund them to the tune of over $40 million. They are a propaganda dispensing outlet. The press shouldn't report anything they release because it is utterly unable to substantiate ANY of it, there hasn't been a western journalist in these areas for over 4 years so why do the press expect us to believe anything they print? Combine this with the worst and most incompetent Govt this country has seen for decades and all you have is a massive distraction from massive domestic troubles which the same govt has no answers too.
LiviaDrusilla -> Bangorstu , 13 Apr 2018 14:36
LOL are you having a larf?

The same organisation that receives millions of quid in funding from USAID?

Whose 'executive director' used to work for USAID?

Who have campaigned for 'no fly zones' (ie US bombing)?

Who are affiliated to the Iranian terrorist group MEK?

Who only happen to run hospitals in 'rebel' held areas?

You have a strange idea of 'politically neutral'. Your 'NGO' are fighting for an Islamist state. Enjoy them.

Dominique2 , 13 Apr 2018 14:32
https://www.theguardian.com/world/shortcuts/2013/sep/01/winston-churchill-shocking-use-chemical-weapons

""I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes," [Winston Churchill] declared in one secret memorandum."

The current condemnation by the international community and international law is good and needs enforcement. But no virtue signalling where there is none.

CaptTroyTempest -> StoneRoses , 13 Apr 2018 14:27
But we're still awaiting evidence that a chemical attack has been carried out in Douma, aren't we? And if an attack was carried out, by whom. But before these essential points are verified, you feel that a targeted military response is justified. Are you equally keen for some targeted military response for the use of chemical weapons, namely white phosphorus, in Palestine by the Israaeli military? Unlike Douma, the use of these chemical weapons in the occupied territories by the IDF's personnel is well documented. But we haven't attacked them yet. Funny that.
CMYKilla , 13 Apr 2018 14:26
Instead of "chemicals" why not just firebomb them - you know like we did to entire cities full of women and children in WW2?

Hamburg 27 July 1943 - 46,000 civilians killed in a firestorm
Kassel 22 October 1943 - 9,000 civilians killed 24,000 houses destroyed in a firestorm
Darmstadt 11 September 1944 - 8,000 civilians killed in a firestorm
Dresden 13/14th February - 25,000 civilians killed in a firestorm

Obviously we were fighting Nazism and hadn't actually been invaded - and he is fighting Wahhabism and has had major cities overrun...

Maybe if Assad burnt people to death rather than gassing them we would make a statue of him outside Westminster like the one of Bomber Harris?

Tom1982 , 13 Apr 2018 14:24
Remember the tearful Kuwaiti nurse with her heartrending story of Iraqi troops tipping premature babies out of their incubators after the invasion in 1990? The story was published in pretty much every major Western newspaper, massively increased public support for military intervention............................and turned out to be total bullshit.

Is it too much too ask that we try a bit of collective critical thinking and wait for hard evidence before blundering into a military conflict with Assad; and potentially Putin?

BlutoTheBruto , 13 Apr 2018 14:21
Didn't General Mattis quietly admit at there was no evidence for the alleged Sarin attacks last year by Assad?

http://www.newsweek.com/now-mattis-admits-there-was-no-evidence-assad-using-poison-gas-his-people-801542

Hmmmm.... call me skeptical for not believing it this time around.

AwkwardSquad , 13 Apr 2018 14:19
Well, this is the sort of stuff that the Israelis would be gagging for. They want Assad neutralised and they are assisting ISIS terrorists on the Golan Heights. They tend to their wounded and send them back across the border to fight Assad. What better than to drag the Americans, Brits and French into the ring to finish him off. Job done eh?

Are you sure you are not promoting an Israeli agenda here Jonathan?

Incidentantally what did we in the west do when the Iraqis were gassing the Iranians with nerve agents in the marshes of southern Iraq during the Iran Iraq War? Did we intervene then? No, we didn't we allowed it to happen.

I say stay out it.

dannymega -> fripouille , 13 Apr 2018 14:18
Come on frip, you have to admit there was absolutely no motive for Assad's forces to carry out this attack. Why do you think the Guardian and other main stream media outlets are not even considering the possibility the Jihadi rebels staged it to trigger western intervention? I know, I know.. it's all evil Assad killing his own people for no other reason than he likes butchering people... blah blah. The regime change agenda against Syria has been derailed, no amount of false flag attacks can change the facts on the ground.
Preshous , 13 Apr 2018 14:18
Tucker Carlson of Fox News has it nailed down.... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M28aYkLRlm0
ChairmanMayTseTung , 13 Apr 2018 14:16
More than 40 years after the US sprayed millions of litres of chemical agents to defoliate vast swathes of Vietnam and in the full knowledge it would be have a catastrophic effect on the health of the inhabitants of those area, Vietnam has by far the highest incidence of liver cancer on the planet.

Then more recently we have the deadly depleted uranium from US shells that innocent Iraqis are inhaling as shrill voices denounce Assad.

CodeNameTwiglet , 13 Apr 2018 14:15
The Syrian people are heroically resisting and defeating western imperialism. This "civil war" has been nothing but a war for Syrian resources waged by western proxies.

So now, In desperation borne out of their impending defeat, the imperialists have staged a chemical attack in a last throw of the dice to gain popular support for an escalation in military intervention. Like military interventions of the past, it is being justified in the name of humanitarian intervention.

But if we have a brief browse of history we can see that US & UK governments have brought only death, misery and destruction on the populations it was supposedly helping. Hands off Syria.

[Apr 15, 2018] The Trump Regime Is Insane by Paul Craig Roberts

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... People such as Stephen Cohen and myself, who were actively involved throughout the entirety of the Cold War, are astonished at the reckless and irresponsible behavior of the US government and its European vassals toward Russia. ..."
"... In this brief video, Stephen Cohen describes to Tucker Carlson the extreme danger of the present situation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvK1Eu01Lz0 Published on Apr 13, 2018 ..."
Apr 13, 2018 | www.unz.com

Craig Roberts • April 13, 2018

  1. Is it insane to push for war with Russia, a major nuclear power?
  2. Is it insane to threaten Russia and bring false charges against her?
  3. Is it insane to brag about killing "hundreds of Russians"? https://news.antiwar.com/2018/04/12/pompeo-russians-met-their-match-us-killed-hundreds-of-them/
  4. A normal person would answer "yes" to the three questions. So what does this tell us about Trump's government as these insane actions are the principle practice of Trump's government?
  5. Does anyone doubt that Nikki Haley is insane?
  6. Does anyone doubt that John Bolton is insane?
  7. Does anyone doubt that Mike Pompeo is insane?
  8. Does this mean that Trump is insane for appointing to the top positions insane people who foment war with a nuclear power?
  9. Does this mean that Congress is insane for approving these appointments?

These are honest questions. Assuming we avoid the Trump-promised Syrian showdown, how long before the insane Trump regime orchestrates another crisis?

The entire world should understand that because of the existence of the insane Trump regime, the continued existence of life on earth is very much in question.

People such as Stephen Cohen and myself, who were actively involved throughout the entirety of the Cold War, are astonished at the reckless and irresponsible behavior of the US government and its European vassals toward Russia. Nothing as irresponsible as what we have witnessed since the Clinton regime and which has worsened dramatically under the Obama and Trump regimes would have been imaginable during the Cold War. In this brief video, Stephen Cohen describes to Tucker Carlson the extreme danger of the present situation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvK1Eu01Lz0 Published on Apr 13, 2018

The failure of political leadership throughout the Western world is total. Such total failure is likely to prove deadly to life on earth.

[Mar 17, 2018] How the gas was administred in a place which was under surveillance and why passersby were not affected

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... You have obviously been at the crime scene, have witnessed the comatose bodies of the Skripals and after analyzing the Novitchok samples you meticulously collected, have reached the inescapable conclusion ..."
"... Nice sarcasm. Well deserved for those "Novichok hot heads", who claim that it is plausible that a military grade nerve gas was used. Actually initial reports were about a synthetic opioid, not any nerve gas ( https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/ex-russian-agent-sergei-skripal-critical-condition-was-poisoned-by-fentanyl-1665286 ) ..."
"... I am amazed that people do not understand the level of absurdity of using nerve gas in such a case. It's really like ignorance has no boundaries. I understand that some people did not manage to graduate from a university or take a decent organic chemistry course, but still, this is simply amazing and very disturbing to read such posts. Especially here. ..."
Mar 17, 2018 | www.unz.com
likbez, March 17, 2018 at 7:08 am GMT
@ValmMond

You have obviously been at the crime scene, have witnessed the comatose bodies of the Skripals and after analyzing the Novitchok samples you meticulously collected, have reached the inescapable conclusion

Nice sarcasm. Well deserved for those "Novichok hot heads", who claim that it is plausible that a military grade nerve gas was used. Actually initial reports were about a synthetic opioid, not any nerve gas ( https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/ex-russian-agent-sergei-skripal-critical-condition-was-poisoned-by-fentanyl-1665286 )

I am amazed that people do not understand the level of absurdity of using nerve gas in such a case. It's really like ignorance has no boundaries. I understand that some people did not manage to graduate from a university or take a decent organic chemistry course, but still, this is simply amazing and very disturbing to read such posts. Especially here.

If it was a nerve gas my question to "Novichok hot heads" here is who the assassin was?

You need either to place a can or some punctured packet under the bench (probably impossible) or spray the liquid on the victim from a short distance. The latter is a very dangerous exercise if you are not wearing a respirator and protection gear.

But still, it makes sense to do this inside (and kill many people) rather than outside. That was how Zarin was administered in Tokyo subway ? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo_subway_sarin_attack

Remember the place was under surveillance -- bad for any assassination. Also in lethal concentrations, the gas kills the victims in several minutes. But Skripals survived unattended for an hour or more and there was only one other seriously affected person -- a policeman, while doctor who treated Skriplal's daughter on the bench was unaffected.

I do not see any reasonable way to administer the gas in this environment without affecting many other people including any passerby, or the doctor who treated Skripal's daughter

[Mar 15, 2018] The UK will promptly expel 23 Russian diplomats without waiting for the end of the investigation

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... The UK will promptly expel 23 Russian diplomats without waiting for the end of the investigation. Which means that from now on the investigation is highly politicized and tainted in a sense that it will be conducted by people who proved the existence of Iraq WMD in the past: ..."
"... This is one step further from the "self-indictment as a formal proof" used in Show Trials. Now it looks like "suspicion is the formal proof." ..."
"... Both cyberspace and poisoning with exotic chemical agents proved to be a perfect media for false flag operations designed to poison relations between nations and fuel war-style demonization. ..."
Mar 14, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

likbez 14 March 2018 at 11:40 PM

The UK will promptly expel 23 Russian diplomats without waiting for the end of the investigation. Which means that from now on the investigation is highly politicized and tainted in a sense that it will be conducted by people who proved the existence of Iraq WMD in the past:

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-43402506

Moscow refused to meet Mrs May's midnight deadline to co-operate in the case, prompting Mrs May to announce a series of measures intended to send a "clear message" to Russia.

These include:

  • Expelling 23 diplomats
  • Increasing checks on private flights, customs and freight
  • Freezing Russian state assets where there is evidence they may be used to threaten the life or property of UK nationals or residents
  • Ministers and the Royal Family boycotting the Fifa World Cup in Russia later this year
  • Suspending all planned high-level bilateral contacts between the UK and Russia
  • Plans to consider new laws to increase defences against "hostile state activity"

Mrs May told MPs that Russia had provided "no explanation" as to how the nerve agent came to be used in the UK, describing Moscow's response as one of "sarcasm, contempt and defiance".

The use of a Russian-made nerve agent on UK soil amounted to the "unlawful use of force", she said.

So it looks more and more like a well planned multi-step propaganda operation, not an impromptu action on the part of GB. Kind of replica of Russian election influence witch hunt in the USA with the replacement of cyberspace and elections with chemical agents and poisoning.

So inconsistencies that were pointed in this thread (such as the mere fact that three people exposed are still alive) do not matter anymore.

The verdict now is in.

This is one step further from the "self-indictment as a formal proof" used in Show Trials. Now it looks like "suspicion is the formal proof."

Both cyberspace and poisoning with exotic chemical agents proved to be a perfect media for false flag operations designed to poison relations between nations and fuel war-style demonization.

Sad...

[Mar 10, 2018] Meier might have discovered that his subject had been, as it were, 'top supporting actor' in the first fumbling attempt by Christopher Steele et al to produce a plausible-sounding scenario as to the background to Litvinenko s death.

Highly recommended!
There is reason to suspect that some former and very likely current employees of the FBI have been colluding with elements in other American and British intelligence agencies, in particular the CIA and MI6, in support of an extremely ambitious foreign policy agenda for a very long time.
It also seems clear that influential journalists, such as Glenn Simpson was before founding Fusion GPS, along with his wife Mary Jacoby, have been strongly involved in this
Notable quotes:
"... There is reason to suspect that some former and very likely current employees of the FBI have been colluding with elements in other American and British intelligence agencies, in particular the CIA and MI6, in support of an extremely ambitious foreign policy agenda for a very long time. It also seems clear that influential journalists, such as Glenn Simpson was before founding Fusion GPS, along with his wife Mary Jacoby, have been strongly involved in this. ..."
"... Important support for these strategies was provided by the 'StratCom' network centred around the late Boris Berezovsky, which clearly collaborated closely with MI6. As was apparent from the witness list at Sir Robert Owen's Inquiry into the death of Alexander Litvinenko, which produced a report based essentially on a recycling of claims made by the network's members, key players were on your side of the Atlantic – notably Alex Goldfarb, Yuri Shvets, and Yuri Felshtinsky. ..."
"... it seems to me the usa and uk have been tied at the hip for a very long time... when it comes to foreign affairs policy and wars - the one will always vouch for the other without hesitation... it tells me the relationship is really deep.. ..."
"... I and my friends consider it a given that most, if not all, anglo-zionist moves in the ME are to "provide a definitive solution to the – inherently intractable – security problems of a Jewish settler state in the area. " It is an open secret that the izzies are the reason why a few Russians, some Turks, lots of Kurds and countless Arabs are dying in the Syrian battlefields. Another open secret: the takfiris and kurds have been, and are, supported by the West. That the "masters of the universe™" have been conceiving and doubling down on such disastrous policies give lie to their much-vaunted "intelligence". ..."
"... It is the very FACT of Trump even getting elected at ALL which outrages and terrifies them so much. They are used to seeing themselves as successful manipulators and engineers of every major event. They were engineering the whole electoral battlespace to get Clinton elected. The mere fact of Trump's victory in the teeth of their Electoral Engineering for Clinton is an act of defiance which they will not tolerate. ..."
"... And if they fail to bring Trump down at all, they will stand revealed as being defeatable. And this is their big fear. That if people see they have defeated the Borg once on keeping Trump in the teeth of Borg's efforts, that people might try to defeat and smash down the Borg on another issue. And then another. And then another after that. ..."
"... Because it is not possible to do on fundamental level yet, especially with US foreign policy establishment and so called consensus being built almost entirely, in ideological and, most importantly, cadres senses, on the ultimate exceptionalist agenda in which Russia is the ultimate obstacle and enemy. Establishment in saturated with neocons and likes. They are the swamp. ..."
"... They act and believe that they are Olympians. You have to wait for them to age and die before any substantive change in Fortress West's posture; say 2040 ..."
"... In 1977 Zbigniew Brzezinski, as President Carter's National Security Adviser, forms the Nationalities Working Group (NWG) dedicated to the idea of weakening the Soviet Union by inflaming its ethnic tensions. ..."
"... State Department official Henry Precht will later recall that Brzezinski had the idea "that Islamic forces could be used against the Soviet Union. The theory was, there was an arc of crisis, and so an arc of Islam could be mobilized to contain the Soviets." [Scott, 2007, pp. 67] In November 1978, President Carter appointed George Ball head of a special White House Iran task force under Brzezinski. Ball recommends the US should drop support for the Shah of Iran and support the radical Islamist opposition of Ayatollah Khomeini. This idea is based on ideas from British Islamic expert Dr. Bernard Lewis, who advocates the balkanization of the entire Muslim Near East along tribal and religious lines. The chaos would spread in what he also calls an "arc of crisis" and ultimately destabilize the Muslim regions of the Soviet Union ..."
"... About relation Steele-MI6, well, you never leave your IS. Or to put it in another way, you are never out of the scope of your past IS ..."
"... No, three years at tops and could be much sooner if dimes starting dropping by exposed people that don't want to take the fall for their superiors whom they always detested. One possible thing to get the process started sooner is if the recent Russian Intelligence delegation to DC that Smoothie mentions on another thread gave the current administration, as a diplomatic courtesy of course, the audio recordings of Madame Sectary Nuland's infamous mental meltdown at Kaliningrad. No telling what beans were spilled in her moment of panic, but I am willing to bet key names were dropped. Either way the time is coming. ..."
"... Especially, once American policy-makers who saw and experienced war (Ike, George Marshall's generation) departed things started to roll down hill with Reagan bringing on board a whole collection of neocons. ..."
"... Unawareness is always dangerous, a complete blackout in relations between two nuclear powers is more than dangerous--it is completely reckless. Again, the way CW 1.0 is perceived in the current US "elites" it becomes extremely tempting to repeat it. Electing Hillary was another step in unleashing CW 2.0 by people who have no understanding of what they were doing. ..."
"... Obama started crushing US-Russian relations before any campaigns were launched and before Trump was even seriously considered a GOP nominee, let alone a real contender. New confrontation hinged on HRC being elected. In fact, she was one of the major driving forces behind a serious of geopolitical anti-Russian moves. Visceral Russo-phobia became a feature in HRC campaign long before any Steele's Dossier. This was a program. ..."
"... IMO, the bigger problem for American not shying away from wars, or being silent about them , is when your home, your mom and dad' home, the town you grew up in, are immune and away from the war. ..."
"... The security and safety of the two oceans, encourages or at least, in an all volunteer military makes it a secondary problem for regular people, to worry about. ..."
"... A particular interesting feature of those on the British side – in which we now know Christopher Steele must have played a leading role – were the bizarre gyrations those responsible were going through trying to explain away the extraordinary fact that when he had broken the story of his poisoning, Litvinenko had pointed the finger of suspicion at his Italian associate Mario Scaramella. ..."
"... Of course later reports in the Steele Dossier go hand in hand with a larger public relations campaign. Creating reality? Irony alert: as informer/source I would by then know what the other side wants to hear. ..."
Mar 10, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

Steele, Shvets, Levinson, Litvinenko and the 'Billion Dollar Don.'

In the light of the suggestion in the Nunes memo that Steele was 'a longtime FBI source' it seems worth sketching out some background, which may also make it easier to see some possible reasons why he 'was desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being president.'

There is reason to suspect that some former and very likely current employees of the FBI have been colluding with elements in other American and British intelligence agencies, in particular the CIA and MI6, in support of an extremely ambitious foreign policy agenda for a very long time. It also seems clear that influential journalists, such as Glenn Simpson was before founding Fusion GPS, along with his wife Mary Jacoby, have been strongly involved in this.

This agenda has involved hopes for 'régime change' in Russia, whether as the result of an oligarchic coup, a popular revolt, or some combination of both. Also central have been hopes for a further 'rollback' of Russia influence in the post-Soviet space, both in areas now independent, such as Ukraine, and also ones still part of the Russian Federation, notably Chechnya.

And, crucially, it involved exploiting the retreat of Russian power from the Middle East for 'régime change' projects which it was hoped would provide a definitive solution to the – inherently intractable – security problems of a Jewish settler state in the area.

Important support for these strategies was provided by the 'StratCom' network centred around the late Boris Berezovsky, which clearly collaborated closely with MI6. As was apparent from the witness list at Sir Robert Owen's Inquiry into the death of Alexander Litvinenko, which produced a report based essentially on a recycling of claims made by the network's members, key players were on your side of the Atlantic – notably Alex Goldfarb, Yuri Shvets, and Yuri Felshtinsky.

The question of what links these had, or did not have, with elements in U.S. intelligence agencies is thus a critical one.

In making some sense of it, the fact that one key figure we know to have been involved in this network was missing at the Inquiry – the former FBI agent Robert Levinson, who disappeared on the Iranian island of Kish in March 2007 – is important.

Unfortunately, I only recently came across a book on Levinson published in 2016 by the 'New York Times' journalist Barry Meier, which is now hopefully winging its way across the Atlantic. From the accounts of the book I have seen, such as one by Jeff Stein in 'Newsweek', it seems likely that its author did not look at any of the evidence presented at Owen's Inquiry.

(See http://www.newsweek.com/2016/05/20/what-really-happened-robert-levinson-cia-iran-454803.html .)

Had he done so, Meier might have discovered that his subject had been, as it were, 'top supporting actor' in the first fumbling attempt by Christopher Steele et al to produce a plausible-sounding scenario as to the background to Litvinenko's death. A Radio 4 programme on 16 December 2006, presented by the veteran BBC presenter Tom Mangold, had been wholly devoted to an account by Shvets, backed up by Levinson. Both of these were, like Litvinenko, supposed to be impartial 'due diligence' operatives.

The notion that any of them might have connections with Western intelligence agencies was not considered. The – publicly available – evidence of the involvement of Shvets, whose surname means 'cobbler' or 'shoemaker' in Ukrainian, in the processing of the tapes of conversations involving the former Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma supposedly recorded by Major Melnychenko, which had played a crucial role in the 2004-5 'Orange Revolution' was not mentioned.

Still less was it mentioned that claims that the – very dangerous – late Soviet Kolchuga system, which made it possible the kind of identification of incoming aircraft which radar had traditionally done, without sending out signals which made the destruction of the facilities doing it possible, had been sold by Kuchma to Iraq had proven spurious.

What Shvets had done had been to take – genuine – audio in which Kuchma had discussed a possible sale, and edit it to suggest a sale had been completed.

(See http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090333/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/evidence .)

As a former television current affairs producer, I can talk to you of the marvels which London audio editors can produce, very happily. Unfortunately, the days when not all BBC and 'Guardian' journalists were corrupt stenographers for corrupt and incompetent spooks, as Mangold and his like have been for Steele and Levinson, are long gone.

All this has become particularly relevant now, given that Simpson has placed the notorious Jewish Ukrainian mobster Semyon Mogilevich and the 'Solntsevskaya Bratva' mafia group centre stage in his accounts not simply of Trump and Manafort, but also of William Browder. For most of the 'Nineties, Levinson had been a, if not the, lead FBI investigator on Mogilevich.

(On this, see the 1999 BBC 'Panorama' programme 'The Billion Dollar Don', also presented by Tom Mangold, which has extensive interviews both with Mogilevich and Levinson at

http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/events/panorama/transcripts/transcript_06_12_99.txt )

In the months leading up to Levinson's disappearance, a key priority for the advocates of the strategy I have described was to prevent it being totally derailed by the patently catastrophic outcome of the Iraqi adventure.

Compounding the problem was the fact that this had created the 'Shia Crescent', which in turn exacerbated the potential 'existential threat' to Israel posed by the steadily increasing range, accuracy and numbers of missiles available to Hizbullah in hardened positions north of the Litani.

These, obviously, provided both a 'deterrent' for that organisation and Iran, and also a radical threat to the whole notion that somehow Israel could ever be a 'safe haven' for Jews, against the supposedly ineradicable disposition of the 'goyim' sooner or later to, as it were, revert to type. The dreadful thought that Israel might not be necessary had to be resisted at all costs.

What followed from the disaster unleashed by the – Anglo-American – 'own goal' in toppling Saddam was, ironically, a need on the part of key players to 'double down.' Above all, it was necessary for many of those involved to counter suggestions from the Russian side that going around smashing up 'régimes' that one might not like sometimes blew up in one's face.

Even more threatening were suggestions from the Russian side that it was foolish to think one could use jihadists without risking 'blowback', and that there might be an overwhelming common interest in combating Islamic extremism.

Another priority was to counter the pushback in the American 'intelligence community' and military, which was to produce the drastic downgrading of the threat posed by the Iranian nuclear programme in the November 2007 NIE and then the resignation of Admiral William Fallon as head of 'Centcom' the following March.

So in 2005 Shvets came to London. He and his audio editors had another 'bite at the cherry' of the Melnychenko tapes, so that material that did in fact establish that both the SBU and FSB had collaborated with Mogilevich could be employed to make it seem that Putin had a close personal relationship with the mobster.

All kinds of supposedly respectable American and British academics, like Professors Karen Dawisha and Robert Service, have fallen for this, hook, line and sinker. It gives a new meaning to the term 'useful idiot.'

(See http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090333/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/evidence .)

In a letter sent in December that year by Litvinenko to the 'Mitrokhin Commission', for which his Italian associate Mario Scaramella was a consultant, this was used in an attempt to demonstrate that Mogilevich, while acting as an agent for the FSB and under Putin's personal 'krysha', had attempted to supply a 'mini atomic bomb' – aka 'suitcase nuke' – to Al Qaeda. Shortly after the letter was sent Scaramella departed on a trip to Washington, where he appears to have got access to Aldrich Ames.

(See http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090333/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/evidence .)

At precisely this time, as Meier explains, Levinson was in the process of being recruited by a lady called Anne Jablonski who then worked as a CIA analyst. It appears that she was furious at the failure of the operational side at the Agency to produce evidence which would have established that Iran did indeed have an ongoing nuclear programme, and she may well have hoped would implicate Russia in supplying materials.

There are grounds to suspect that one of the things that Berezovsky and Shvets were doing was fabricating such 'evidence.' Whether Levinson was involved in such attempts, or genuinely looking for evidence he was convinced must be there, I cannot say. It appears that he fell for a rather elementary entrapment operation – which could well have been organised with the collaboration of Russian intelligence. (People do get fed up with being framed, particular if 'régime change' is the goal.)

It also seems likely that, quite possibly in a different but related entrapment operation, related to propaganda wars in which claims and counter claims about a polonium-beryllium 'initiator' as the crucial missing part which might make a 'suitcase nuke' functional, Litvinenko accidentally ingested fatal quantities of polonium. A good deal of evidence suggests that this may have been at Berezovsky's offices on the night before he was supposedly assassinated.

It was, obviously, important for Steele et al to ensure that nobody looked at the 'StratCom' wars about 'suitcase nukes.' Here, a figure who has played a key role in such wars in relation to Syria plays an interesting minor one in the story.

Some time following the destruction of the case for an immediate war by the November 2007 NIE, a chemical weapons specialist called Dan Kaszeta, who had worked in the White House for twelve years, moved to London.

In 2011, in addition to founding a consultancy called 'Strongpoint Security', he began a writing career with articles in 'CBRNe World.' Later, he would become the conduit through which the notorious 'hexamine hypothesis', supposedly clinching proof that the Syrian government was responsible for the sarin incidents at Khan Sheikhoun, Ghouta, Saraqeb, and Khan Al-Asal, was disseminated.

Having been forced by the threat of a case being opened against them under human rights law into resuming the inquest into Litvinenko's death, in August 2012 the British authorities appointed Sir Robert Owen to conduct it. (There are many honest judges in Britain, but obviously, if one sets out to find someone who will 'cover up' for the incompetence and corruption of people like Steele, as Lord Hutton did before him, you can find them.)

That same month, a piece appeared in 'CBRNe World' with the the strapline: 'Dan Kaszeta looks into the ultimate press story: Suitcase nukes', and the main title 'Carry on or checked bags?' Among the grounds he gives for playing down the scare:

'Some components rely on materials with shelf life. Tritium, for example, is used in many nuclear weapon designs and has a twelve year half-life. Polonium, used in neutron initiators in some earlier types of weapon designs, has a very short halflife. US documents state that every nuclear weapon has "limited life components" that require periodic replacement (do an internet search for nuclear limited life components and you can read for weeks).'

(For this and other articles by Kaszeta, as also his bio, see http://strongpointsecurity.co.uk ')

What Kaszeta has actually described are the reasons why polonium is a perfect 'StratCom' instrument. In terms of scientific plausibility, in fact there were no 'suitcase nukes', and in any case 'initiators' using polonium had been abandoned very early on, in favour of ones which lasted longer.

For 'StratCom' scenarios, as experience with the 'hexamine hypothesis' has proved, scientific plausibility can be irrelevant.

What polonium provides is a means of suggesting that Al Qaeda have in fact got hold of a nuclear device which they could easily smuggle into, say, Rome or New York, or indeed Moscow, but there is a crucial missing component which the FSB is trying to provide to them. By the same token, of course, that missing component could be depicted as one that Berezovsky and Litvinenko are conspiring to suppl to the Chechen insurgents.

In addition, the sole known source of global supply is the Avangard plant at Sarov in Russia, so the substance is naturally suited for 'StratCom' directed against that country, which its intelligence services would – rather naturally – try to make 'boomerang.'

According to Glenn Simpson, Christopher Steele is a 'boy scout.' This seems to me quite wrong – but, even if it were true, would you want to unleash a 'boy scout' into these kinds of intrigue?

As it is not clear why Kaszeta introduced his – accurate but irrelevant – point about polonium into an article which was concerned with scientific plausibility, one is left with an interesting question as to whether he cut his teeth on 'StratCom' attempting to ensure that nobody seriously interested in CBRN science followed an obvious lead.

In relation to the question of whether current FBI personnel had been involved in the kind of 'StratCom' exercises, I have been describing, a critical issue is the involvement of Shvets and Levinson in the Alexander Khonanykhine affair back in the 'Nineties, and the latter's use of claims about the Solntsevskaya to prevent the key figure's extradition. But that is a matter for another day.

A corollary of all this is that we cannot – yet at least – be absolutely confident that the account in the Nunes memo, according to which Steele was suspended and then dismissed as an FBI source for what the organisation is reported to define as 'the most serious of violations' – the unauthorised disclosure of a relationship with the organisation – is necessarily wholly accurate.

Who did and did not authorise which disclosures to the media, up to and including the extraordinary decision to have the full dossier, including claims about Aleksej Gubarev and the Alfa oligarchs, in flagrant disregard of the obvious risks of defamation suits, and who may be trying to pass the buck to others, remains I think less than totally clear.

Posted at 03:42 PM in As The Borg Turns , Habakkuk , Russia , Russiagate | Permalink

james , 03 February 2018 at 04:33 PM

thanks david... fascinating overview and conjecture..

it seems to me the usa and uk have been tied at the hip for a very long time... when it comes to foreign affairs policy and wars - the one will always vouch for the other without hesitation... it tells me the relationship is really deep..

JohnB , 03 February 2018 at 05:17 PM
David,

Thank you very. As ever you have illuminated a few more things for me. Kaszeta's involvement is interesting. He is someone I am in the middle of researching in relation to Higgins and Bellingcat.

turcopolier , 03 February 2018 at 06:02 PM
james

It is the closest of all international intelligence relationships. It started in WW2. Before that the Brits were though of as a potential enemy. pl

Babak Makkinejad -> turcopolier ... , 03 February 2018 at 06:10 PM
I think the English are using you, they are unsentimental empirical people that only do these that benefit the Number One.
The chief beneficiary of the Coup in Iran was England and not US.
catherine , 03 February 2018 at 06:22 PM
That Newsweek piece about Levinson is very superficial to me.

Re: Levinson

# Who suggested to who 'first' the Iran caper...Anne Jablonski to Levinson or Levinson to Jablonski? It was reported earlier by Meier that in December 2005, when Levinson was pitching Jablonski on projects he might take on when his CIA contract was approved he sent her a lengthy memo about Dawud's potential as an informant.

# Ira Silverman, the Iran hating NBC guy, pitched a Iraq caper to Levinson with Dawud Salahuddin, as his Iran contact and Levinson went to Jablonski with it.

# And what was with Boris Birshstein, a Russian organized crime figure who had fled to Israel and Oleg Deripaska, the "aluminum czar" of Russia whose organized crime contacts have kept him from entering the United States jumping in to help find Levinson? The FBI allowed Deripaska in for two visits in 2009 in exchange for his alleged help in locating Levinson but obviously nothing came of it.

I think there were more little agents/agendas in this than Levinson and Jablonski and US CIA.

Ishmael Zechariah , 03 February 2018 at 06:54 PM
DH,

As usual a wonderful analysis. I admire your insight, integrity and courage. I wish you could write more on why the Borg is so much against Trump, even though they have Kushner, Adelson and Co. running interference for them.

I and my friends consider it a given that most, if not all, anglo-zionist moves in the ME are to "provide a definitive solution to the – inherently intractable – security problems of a Jewish settler state in the area. " It is an open secret that the izzies are the reason why a few Russians, some Turks, lots of Kurds and countless Arabs are dying in the Syrian battlefields. Another open secret: the takfiris and kurds have been, and are, supported by the West. That the "masters of the universe™" have been conceiving and doubling down on such disastrous policies give lie to their much-vaunted "intelligence".

Be safe.

Ishmael Zechariah

Rd , 03 February 2018 at 07:31 PM
Babak Makkinejad said in reply to turcopolier...

The chief beneficiary of the Coup in Iran was England and not US.
..and US is the one who has been paying for it since 1979!!!

kooshy said in reply to Ishmael Zechariah... , 03 February 2018 at 08:21 PM
IZ
My guess is, that he is unpredictable, instantaneous and therefore can't be consistent and reliable, useful idiot needs to be predictable.
kooshy , 03 February 2018 at 08:43 PM
"There is reason to suspect that some former and very likely current employees of the FBI have been colluding with elements in other American and British intelligence agencies, in particular the CIA and MI6, in support of an extremely ambitious foreign policy agenda for a very long time. "

David as usual fascinating work connecting the dots. One question that comes to my mind is about the above point you are making. Is it your understanding or believe that these IC individuals on both side of Atlantic, are pursuing/forcing their (on behalf of the Borg) foreign policy agenda outside of their respected seating governments? If not, why is it that incoming administration cannot stop them? So far I can't see any strategic changes on US foreign policy toward ME or Russia, at tactical level yes but not fundamentally.

different clue , 03 February 2018 at 08:49 PM
Ishmael Zechariah,

( reply to comment 6),

I am not David Habakkuk, obviously. But I will venture a little opinion anyway. It is not enough that the Borgists get their policy preferences. If it were, then Kushner, Adelson and Co. running interference would be enough for them.

It is the very FACT of Trump even getting elected at ALL which outrages and terrifies them so much. They are used to seeing themselves as successful manipulators and engineers of every major event. They were engineering the whole electoral battlespace to get Clinton elected. The mere fact of Trump's victory in the teeth of their Electoral Engineering for Clinton is an act of defiance which they will not tolerate.

And if they fail to bring Trump down at all, they will stand revealed as being defeatable. And this is their big fear. That if people see they have defeated the Borg once on keeping Trump in the teeth of Borg's efforts, that people might try to defeat and smash down the Borg on another issue. And then another. And then another after that.

So that is why the Borg cares so much. They view the Trump election as an insurgency, and they view themselves as waging a counterinsurgency, which they dare not lose.

Jack , 03 February 2018 at 08:54 PM
David,

Thanks for your analysis. I always enjoy and learn from your posts. I wish you would post more often.

In my non-expert opinion, the Borg and the media were all in for Hillary. They were convinced that she was gonna win. To curry favor with the Empress who would be certainly crowned after the election they were eager and convinced that their lawlessness would become a badge for promotion and plum positions in her administration. In their conceit, they believed they could kill two birds with one stroke. They could vilify Putin and create the mass hysteria to checkmate him, while at the same time disparage and frame Trump as The Manchurian Candidate to seal their certain electoral victory.

Unfortunately for them voters in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin didn't buy their sales pitch despite the overwhelming media barrage from all corners. Even news publications who have only endorsed Republican candidates for President for over a century endorsed her.

Trump's election win caused panic among the political establishment, the media and the Deep State. They were already all-in. Their only choice was to double down and get Trump impeached. Now their conspiracy is beginning to unravel. They are doing everything possible to forestall their Armageddon. Of course they have many allies. This battle is gonna be interesting to watch. Trump is clearly getting many Congressional Republicans on side as his base of Deplorables remains solidly behind him. That is what's befuddling the Borg pundits.

SmoothieX12 -> kooshy... , 03 February 2018 at 09:51 PM
So far I can't see any strategic changes on US foreign policy toward ME or Russia, at tactical level yes but not fundamentally.

Because it is not possible to do on fundamental level yet, especially with US foreign policy establishment and so called consensus being built almost entirely, in ideological and, most importantly, cadres senses, on the ultimate exceptionalist agenda in which Russia is the ultimate obstacle and enemy. Establishment in saturated with neocons and likes. They are the swamp. This swamp (Borg, deep state, etc.) still thinks that it can use Cold War 1.0 Playbook and address very real and dangerous American economic issues. They are wrong, since most of them didn't read the playbook correctly to start with.

Babak Makkinejad -> SmoothieX12 ... , 03 February 2018 at 10:10 PM
They act and believe that they are Olympians. You have to wait for them to age and die before any substantive change in Fortress West's posture; say 2040.
kooshy said in reply to SmoothieX12 ... , 03 February 2018 at 10:24 PM
You are right CWII is very much desired and on agenda, but i am not sure of setup, the setup/board has been changed tremendously and IMO benefits the Asian side of Bosphorus, for one thing technology is no longer exclusive, and financial burden is heavier on atlantic side.
catherine said in reply to SmoothieX12 ... , 04 February 2018 at 12:21 AM
''Establishment in saturated with neocons and likes. They are the swamp. ''

The locust keep trying and trying, destruction is their life's work.

'1977-1981: Nationalities Working Group Advocates Using Militant Islam Against Soviet Union'

In 1977 Zbigniew Brzezinski, as President Carter's National Security Adviser, forms the Nationalities Working Group (NWG) dedicated to the idea of weakening the Soviet Union by inflaming its ethnic tensions. The Islamic populations are regarded as prime targets. Richard Pipes, the father of Daniel Pipes, takes over the leadership of the NWG in 1981. Pipes predicts that with the right encouragement Soviet Muslims will "explode into genocidal fury" against Moscow. According to Richard Cottam, a former CIA official who advised the Carter administration at the time, after the fall of the Shah of Iran in 1978, Brzezinski favored a "de facto alliance with the forces of Islamic resurgence, and with the Republic of Iran." [Dreyfuss, 2005, pp. 241, 251 - 256]

'November 1978-February 1979: Some US Officials Want to Support Radical Muslims to Contain Soviet Union'

State Department official Henry Precht will later recall that Brzezinski had the idea "that Islamic forces could be used against the Soviet Union. The theory was, there was an arc of crisis, and so an arc of Islam could be mobilized to contain the Soviets." [Scott, 2007, pp. 67] In November 1978, President Carter appointed George Ball head of a special White House Iran task force under Brzezinski. Ball recommends the US should drop support for the Shah of Iran and support the radical Islamist opposition of Ayatollah Khomeini. This idea is based on ideas from British Islamic expert Dr. Bernard Lewis, who advocates the balkanization of the entire Muslim Near East along tribal and religious lines. The chaos would spread in what he also calls an "arc of crisis" and ultimately destabilize the Muslim regions of the Soviet Union

aleksandar , 04 February 2018 at 04:41 AM
David,

About relation Steele-MI6, well, you never leave your IS. Or to put it in another way, you are never out of the scope of your past IS.

Fred said in reply to Babak Makkinejad... , 04 February 2018 at 08:40 AM
Babak,

"they got US to bail them out during WWII" And how would things have worked out had we not done so?

Fred , 04 February 2018 at 08:46 AM
David,

"There is reason to suspect that some former and very likely current employees of the FBI have been colluding with elements in other American and British intelligence agencies, in particular the CIA and MI6, in support of an extremely ambitious foreign policy agenda for a very long time."

Yes, that is what appears to be just what is coming to light. I wonder just what position Trey Gowdy is going to have since he won't be running for re-election. The rage from the left is palpable. I'm sure the next outraged guy on the left will know how to shoot straighter than the ones who shot up Congressman Scalise or the concert goers at Mandalay Bay.

Anna said in reply to SmoothieX12 ... , 04 February 2018 at 08:48 AM
"They are wrong, since most of them didn't read the playbook correctly to start with."
-- If they have read the important books at all... The ongoing scandal has been revealing a stunning incompetence of the "deciders." Too often they look comical, ridiculous, undignified. This is dangerous, considering their power.
turcopolier , 04 February 2018 at 08:54 AM
Anna

The powerful are often remarkably ignorant. pl

Babak Makkinejad -> Fred... , 04 February 2018 at 10:08 AM
England preferred NAZI Germany to USSR, this is well known. As to what would have happened, the outcome of the war, in my opinion, did not depend on US participation in the European Theatre. All of Europe would have become USSR satellite or joined USSR.
jonst said in reply to Babak Makkinejad... , 04 February 2018 at 11:53 AM
"unsentimental empirical people"? Absolutely disagree with you. Now the Iranians, they strike me as a singularity unsentimental people. Just general impressions, mind you.
Kooshy said in reply to catherine... , 04 February 2018 at 12:06 PM
Yes, US was the first country to proudly deliver Manpads to be used by "rebels" (Mojahadin later Taleban) against USSR in Afghanistan back in 80s. And, as per the architect of support for the rebels (Zbigniew Brzezinski) very proud of it with no regret. With that in mind, I don't see how western politicians, the western governments and their related proxy war planers, will be regretting, even sadden, once god forbid we see passenger planes with loved ones are shot down taking off or landing at various western airports and other places around the word. Just like how superficialy with crocodile tears in their eyes they acted in aftermath of the terrorist events in various western cities in this past 16 years. Gods knows what will happens to us if the opposite side start to supply his own proxies with lethal anti air weapons. "Proudly", I don't think anybody in west cares or will regret of such an escalation.
Phodges said in reply to turcopolier ... , 04 February 2018 at 12:23 PM
Sir

It seems we are being defeated by Cicero's enemy within. Zion is achieving what no one could hope to achieve by force of arms.

David Habakkuk -> catherine... , 04 February 2018 at 01:17 PM
catherine,

In response to comment 5.

I think it likely that what Meier produces is only a 'limited hangout', and am hoping that when the book arrives it will contain more pointers.

It is important to be clear that one is often dealing with people playing very complicated double games.

An interesting document is the 'Petition for Writ of Habeus Corpus' made on behalf of Khodorkovsky's close associate Alexander Konanykhin back in 1997,when the Immigration and Naturalization Service were – apparently at least – cooperating with Russian attempts to get hold of him. An extract:

'During the immigration hearing FBI SA Robert Levinson, an INS witness, confirmed that in 1992 Petitioner was kidnapped and afterwards pursued by assassins of the Solntsevskaya organized criminal group. This organized criminal group is reportedly the largest and the most influential organized criminal group in Russia, and operates internationally.'

(See http://defiancethebook.com/legal/habeas/petition.htm .)

Note the similarities between the 'StratCom' that Khonanykin and his associates were producing in the 'Nineties, and that which Simpson and his associates have been producing two decades later.

Another useful example is provided by a 2004 item in the 'New American Magazine', reproduced on Konanykhin's website:

'One of those who testified on behalf of Konanykhine was KGB defector Yuri Shvets, who declared: "I have a firsthand knowledge on similar operations conducted by the KGB." Konanykhine had brought trouble on himself, Shvets continued, when he "started bringing charges against people who were involved with him in setting up and running commercial enterprises. They were KGB people secretly smuggling from Russia hundreds of millions of dollars . This is [a] serious case, and I know that KGB ... desperately wants to win this case, and everybody who won't step to their side would face problems."'

(See http://konanykhin.com/news/the-konanykhine-case.html .)

So – 'first hand knowledge', from a Ukrainian nationalist – look at what the Chalupas have been doing, it seems not much has changed.

For a rather different perspective on what Konanykhin had actually been up to, from someone in whose honesty – if not always judgement – I have complete confidence, see the testimony of Karon von Gerhke-Thompson to the House Committee on Banking and Financial Services hearings on Russian Money Laundering. In this, she described how she had been approached by him in 1993:

'"Konanykhine alleged that Menatep Bank controlled $1.7bn [Ł1bn] in assets and investment portfolios of Russia's most prominent political and social elite," she recalled. She said he wanted to move the bank's assets off shore and asked her to help buy foreign passports for its "very, very special clients".

'In her testimony to the committee Ms Von Gerhke-Thompson said she informed the CIA of the deal, and the agency told her that it believed Mr Konanykhine and Mr Khodorkovsky "were engaged in an elaborate money laundering scheme to launder billions of dollars stolen by members of the KGB and high-level government officials".

(For a 'Guardian report, see https://www.theguardian.com/world/1999/sep/23/julianborger ; for the actual testimony, see http://archives-financialservices.house.gov/banking/92299ger.pdf .)

Coming back to Steele's 'StratCom', in July 2008, an item appeared on the 'Newnight' programme of the BBC – which some of us think should by then have been rechristened the 'Berezovsky Broadcasting Corporation' – in which the introduction by the presenter, Jeremy Paxman, read as follows:

'Good evening. The New Russian President, Dmitri Medvedev, was all smiles and warm words when he met Gordon Brown today. He said he was keen to resolve all outstanding difficulties between the two countries. Yada yada yada. Gordon Brown smiled, but he must know what Newsnight can now reveal: that MI5 believes the Russian state was involved in the murder of Alexander Litvinenko by radioactive poisoning. They also believe that without their intervention another London-based Russian, Boris Berezovsky, would have been murdered. Our diplomatic editor, Mark Urban, has this exclusive report.'

(For the transcript presented in evidence to Owen's Inquiry, see http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090333/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/ ">https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/">http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090333/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/ )

When Urban repeated the claims on his blog, there was a positive eruption from someone using the name 'timelythoughts', about the activities of someone she referred to as 'Berezovsky's disinformation specialist' – when I came across this later, it was immediately clear to me that she was Karon von Gerhke, and he was Shvets.

(For the first part of the exchanges of comments, the second apparently having become unavailable, see http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/newsnight/markurban/2008/07/litvinenko_killing_had_state_i.html )

She then described a visit by Scaramella to Washington, details of which had already been unearthed by my Italian collaborator, David Loepp. Her claim to have e-mails from Shvets, from the time immediately prior to Litvinenko's death, directly contradicting the testimony he had given, fitted with other evidence I had already unearthed.

Later, we exchanged e-mails over a quite protracted period, and a large amount of material that came into my possession as a result was submitted by me to the Inquest team, with some of it being used in posts on the 'European Tribune' site.

What I never used publicly, because I could only partially corroborate it from the material she provided, was an extraordinary claim about Shvets:

'He was responsible for bringing in a Kremlin initiative that was walked Vice President Cheney's office on a US government quid pro quo with the Kremlin FSB SVR involving the arrest of Mikhail Khodorkovsky – a cease and desist on allegations of a politically motivated arrest of Khodorkovsky, violations of rules of law and calls from Russia's expulsion from the G 8 in exchange for favorable posturing of U.S. oil companies on Gazprom's Shtokman project and intelligence on weapon sales during the Yeltsin era to Iraq, Iran and Syria, all documented in reports I submitted to the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and MI6.

'Berezovsky's DS could not be on both sides on that isle. His Kremlin FSB SVR sources had been vetted by the CIA and by the National Security Council. They proved to be as represented. As we would later learn, however, he was on Berezovsky's payroll at same time. The FSB SVR general he was coordinating the Kremlin initiative through was S. R. Subbotin, the same FSB SVR general who was investigating Berezovsky's money laundering operations in Switzerland during the same timeframe. His FSB SVR sources surrounding Putin were higher than any Lugovoy could have ever hoped to affiliate with.

'R. James Woolsey (former CIA DCI), Marshall Miller (former law partner of the late CIA DCI William Colby), who I coordinated the Kremlin initiative through that Berezovsky's DS had brought in were shocked to learn that he was affiliated with Berezovsky and Litvinenko. He was in Berezovsky's inner circle and engaged in vetting Russian business with Litvinenko. He operated Berezovsky's Ukraine website, editing and dubbing the now infamous Kuchma tapes throughout the lead up to the elections in the Ukraine. Berezovsky contributed $41 million to Viktor Yushchenko's campaign, which he used in an attempt to force Yushchenko to reunite with Julia Tymoschenko. It failed but would succeed later after Berezovsky orchestrated a public relations initiative through Alan Goldfarb in the U.S. on behalf of Tymoschenko.'

Having got to know Karon von Gerhke quite well, and also been able to corroborate a great deal of what she told me about many things, and discussed these matters with her, it is absolutely clear to me that she was neither fabricating nor fantasising. What later became apparent, both to her and to me, was that in the 'double game' that Shvets was playing, he had succeeded in fooling her as to the side for which he was working.

It seems likely however that the reason Shvets could do what he did was that quite precisely that many high-up people in the Kremlin and elsewhere were playing a 'double game.' In this, Karon von Gerhke's propensity for indiscretion – of which I, like others, was both beneficiary and victim – could be useful.

An exercise in 'positioning', which could be used to disguise the fact that Shvets was indeed 'Berezovsky's disinformation specialist', could be used to make it appear that 'intelligence on weapon sales during the Yeltsin era to Iraq, Iran and Syria' was actually credible.

This could have been used to try to rescue Cheney, Bush and their associates from the mess they had got into as a result of the failure of the invasion to provide any evidence whatsoever supporting the case which had been made for it. It could also have been used to provide the kind of materials justifying military action against Iran for which Levinson and Jablonski were looking, and for similar action against Syria.

Among reasons for bringing this up now is that we need to make sense of the paradox that Simpson – clearly in collusion with Steele – was using Mogilevich and the 'Solnsetskaya Bratva' both against Manafort and Trump and against Browder.

There are various possible explanations for this. I do not want to succumb to my instinctive prejudice that this may have been another piece of 'positioning', similar to what I think was being done with Shvets, but the hypothesis needs to be considered.

A more general point is that people in Washington and London need to 'wise up' to the kind of world with which they are dealing. This could be done quite enjoyably: reading some of Dashiell Hammett's fictions of the United States in the Prohibition era, or indeed buying DVDs of some of the classics of 'film noir', like 'Out of the Past' (in its British release, 'Build My Gallows High') might be a start.

Very much of the coverage of affairs in the post-Soviet space since 1991 has read rather as though a Dashiell Hammett story had been rewritten by someone specialising in sentimental children's, or romantic, fiction (although, come to think of it, that is really what Brigid O'Shaughnessy does in 'The Maltese Falcon.')

The testimony of Glenn Simpson seems a case in point. The sickly sentimentality of these people does, rather often, make one feel as though one wanted to throw up.

Thomas , 04 February 2018 at 01:24 PM
"They act and believe that they are Olympians. You have to wait for them to age and die before any substantive change in Fortress West's posture; say 2040.}

No, three years at tops and could be much sooner if dimes starting dropping by exposed people that don't want to take the fall for their superiors whom they always detested. One possible thing to get the process started sooner is if the recent Russian Intelligence delegation to DC that Smoothie mentions on another thread gave the current administration, as a diplomatic courtesy of course, the audio recordings of Madame Sectary Nuland's infamous mental meltdown at Kaliningrad. No telling what beans were spilled in her moment of panic, but I am willing to bet key names were dropped. Either way the time is coming.

SmoothieX12 -> Anna... , 04 February 2018 at 01:39 PM
- If they have read the important books at all... The ongoing scandal has been revealing a stunning incompetence of the "deciders." Too often they look comical, ridiculous, undignified. This is dangerous, considering their power.

My coming book is precisely about that. Especially, once American policy-makers who saw and experienced war (Ike, George Marshall's generation) departed things started to roll down hill with Reagan bringing on board a whole collection of neocons.

Unawareness is always dangerous, a complete blackout in relations between two nuclear powers is more than dangerous--it is completely reckless. Again, the way CW 1.0 is perceived in the current US "elites" it becomes extremely tempting to repeat it. Electing Hillary was another step in unleashing CW 2.0 by people who have no understanding of what they were doing.

Obama started crushing US-Russian relations before any campaigns were launched and before Trump was even seriously considered a GOP nominee, let alone a real contender. New confrontation hinged on HRC being elected. In fact, she was one of the major driving forces behind a serious of geopolitical anti-Russian moves. Visceral Russo-phobia became a feature in HRC campaign long before any Steele's Dossier. This was a program.

james said in reply to David Habakkuk ... , 04 February 2018 at 03:01 PM
there seems to be no shortage of money for these blatant propaganda exercises..
Babak Makkinejad -> SmoothieX12 ... , 04 February 2018 at 04:14 PM
I think the failure of Deciders is nothing new - Fath Ali Shah attacking Russia, or the abject failure of the Deciders in 1914. Europe is still not where she was in 1890.
begob , 04 February 2018 at 05:20 PM
I read the post and responses early on, so forgive me if this point has been addressed in the meantime. If the memo information on non-disclosure of material evidence to the warrant issuing court is accurate, as soon as that information came to the attention of the authorities (clearly some time ago) there was a duty on them (including the judge(s) who issued the warrants) to have the matter brought back before the court toot sweet. If that had happened it would surely be in the public domain, so on the assumption the prosecutors and maybe even the judge didn't see the need to review the matter, even purely on a contempt/ethics basis, the memo information only seems convincing if the FISA system is a total sham. I really doubt that.
kooshy said in reply to SmoothieX12 ... , 04 February 2018 at 06:20 PM
IMO, the bigger problem for American not shying away from wars, or being silent about them , is when your home, your mom and dad' home, the town you grew up in, are immune and away from the war.

The security and safety of the two oceans, encourages or at least, in an all volunteer military makes it a secondary problem for regular people, to worry about. As I remember that wasn't the case at the end of VN war when i first landed here. At that time even though the war was on the other side of the planet and away from homeland, still people, especially young ones in colleges were paying more attention to the cost of war.

spy killer , 04 February 2018 at 06:55 PM
Diana West has uncovered some interesting "Red Threads" (6 part article at dianawest-dot-net) on all the Fusion GPS folks. Seems ole Russian speaking Nellie Ohr got herself a ham radio license recently. Wonder why she would suddenly need one of those? They are all Marxists with potential connections back to Russia.
English Outsider -> Fatima Manoubia... , 05 February 2018 at 07:23 AM
Been there. I am also a latecomer to SST. You have to read the back numbers. How? My IT expertise dates from the dawn of the internet and was lamentable then but I find Wayback sometimes allows easier searches than the SST search engine. A straight search on google also allows searches with more than one term. This link -

https://twitter.com/pat_lang

- gets you to a chronological list and for recent material is sometimes quicker than fiddling around with search engines. "Categories" on the RH side is useful but then you don't get some very informative comments that cross-refer.

If those sadly elementary procedures fail resort to the nearest infant. There's a blur of fingers on the keyboard and what you want then usually appears. Never ask them how they did it. They get so fed up when you ask them to explain it again.

"Who is David Habakkuk?" That's a quantum computer sited, from internal evidence you pick up from time to time, somewhere in the Greater London area. Cross references like you wouldn't believe and over several fields, so maybe he's two quantum computers.

The "Borg"?. Try Wittgenstein. Likely a prog but you can't be choosy these days. Early on in "Philosophical Investigations" (hope I get this right) he discusses the problem of how you can view as an entity something that has ill-defined or overlapping boundaries. The "Borg" is that "you know it when you see it" sort of thing. A great merit of this site is that the owner and many of the contributors know it from inside.

In general you may regard your new found site as a microcosm of the great battle that is raging in the West. It's a battle between the (probably apocryphal but adequately stated) Roveian view of reality that regards truth as an adjunct to or as a by-product of ideology and Realpolitik and the objective view of reality as something that is damned difficult to get at, and sometimes impossible, but that has a truth in it somewhere that is independent of the views and convictions of the observer. It's a battle that's never going to be won but unless it tilts back closer to common sense it can certainly be lost and the West with it.

jonst said in reply to Babak Makkinejad... , 05 February 2018 at 08:11 AM
Clearly the Labor Party in the UK preferred the USSR to Nazi Germany. (cepting that short interlude where the Soviets signed the Agreement with Hitler, and the Left Organized Leadership all across Europe, for the most part, lined up with Hitler). But for the most part, Labor was Left.
Elements (the ones that won out in the end) of the Conservative Party loathed both Hitler and Stalin. An element of the Conservative Party was sympathetic, but only up to a certain point, with the Nazis. This ended in 1939, sept.

So I don't think it fair, or accurate, to say 'England prefered the Nazis....and even if it not those things, it certainly not "well known", except to the people who have used the false premise to butter their wounds from supporting Stalin in his Pact with Hitler. Or are inclined to bash the British in general.

Babak Makkinejad -> jonst... , 05 February 2018 at 08:29 AM
All right, perhaps I should have said "The English Government". Google "Litvinov", you may discover how the English Government pushed Stalin to make a deal with Hitler to buy USSR time.
Sid Finster said in reply to Jack... , 05 February 2018 at 10:26 AM
Witness the infamous State Department protest memo calling for more war on Syria.

The State Department employees that signed that memo were sure that HRC would win and that their diligent work in pushing the Deep State agenda would sure be rewarded.

Since entering office, Trump appears to have taken the line that if he gives the Deep State everything it demands, he will be allowed to remain in office, even if he is not allowed to remain in power.

Sid Finster said in reply to David Habakkuk ... , 05 February 2018 at 10:31 AM
Explain Marshall Miller's role in this, please. He is someone I know quite well. I also know one of the Chalupas.
begob said in reply to jonst... , 05 February 2018 at 10:56 AM
jonst That's broadly accurate, but specifically Attlee brought the motion of no confidence in Chamberlain, which the conservative appeasers won but which led to Churchill's opportunity. Attlee was essential in cabinet to Churchill's resistance after the retreat of the BEF.
turcopolier , 05 February 2018 at 11:18 AM
FM
What are you doing here? You said you dislike the military. Are you really in the Spanish Basque country? Bilbao maybe? break - David Habakkuk is a private scholar of the Litvinenko murder and Soviet/Russian politics and intelligence affairs. His surname comes from Wales where in the 18th (?) Century the ancestral village were all "chapel" and changed their surnames to Old Testament names. His father was master of one of the Cambridge colleges and David is himself a graduate of Cambridge. pl
Babak Makkinejad -> Fatima Manoubia... , 05 February 2018 at 11:19 AM
Yes, I am Iranian. All "Babak"s are Iranians - except some obscure ones that are Rus - Babakov.
Anna , 05 February 2018 at 02:07 PM
The hard, blinding truth: https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2018/02/05/will-conspiracy-trump-american-democracy-go-unpunished/
"In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations." – Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
Thomas said in reply to turcopolier ... , 05 February 2018 at 02:08 PM
Colonel,

This troll showed up recently at b's place doing the same accusations. There is group that is running sacred and pulling out all the stops in "info ops" side of the spectrum. The damn fools don't or, most probably, won't get thru their thick heads and even thicker hearts that it is a failed strategy that turns bystanders into their opponents.

Richardstevenhack , 05 February 2018 at 02:36 PM
Here for your edification is the definitive analysis of the GOP memo by Alexander Mercouris over at The Duran.

And it is a masterpriece - and quite long, possibly his longest analysis of anything so far. He buries the counterarguments being passed around by the Democratic opposition and the anti-Trump media.

Mercouris writes on legal affairs alongside his foreign policy stuff and he writes with a lawyer's precision. And in this article he points out that the GOP memo is writter as a legal document - probably by Trey Gowdy - with additional political insertions by Nunes. So it should properly be referred to as the "GOP memo" or the "Gowdy memo", not the Nunes memo."

Why this is important is that the GOP memo is basically written as a defense lawyer would in contesting a case -- this case being the FISA warrant application. Which means its orientation is proving failure to disclose relevant and material information to the FISA court and in some cases rising to the point of contempt of court.

Seriously, read this! The whole thing!

Rampant abuse and possible contempt of Court: what you need to know about the GOP memo
http://theduran.com/rampant-abuse-contempt-court-analysis-gop-memorandum/

blue peacock , 05 February 2018 at 03:25 PM
Sen Grassley releases memo heavily redacted by DOJ/FBI.

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-02-05/grassley-graham-blast-fbi-censoring-memo-calling-criminal-probe-trump-dossier

"Seeking transparency and cooperation should not be this challenging," Grassley said in a statement after posting a heavily redacted version of the criminal referral that he and GOP Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina sent to the Justice Department last month. " The government should not be blotting out information that it admits isn't secret. "

I suppose DOJ/FBI believe that by obstructing, stalling and obfuscating they can buy time and that the Republicans in Congress will get tired of the games and go home. This seems like a pretty straightforward memo, highlighting the discrepancy between Steele's court filings and the FBI's version of Steele's discussions with them. Grassley is pointing out that either Steele or the FBI is lying.

What is interesting is the difference in process and ability between the House & Senate. The House can release their memos on its own, even if not declassified by the Executive, whereas the Senate requires the Executive to declassify it's memos that are based on classified documents.

turcopolier , 05 February 2018 at 04:38 PM
FM

We have not had a self declared communist on SST before although LeaNder in her youth may have come close to that exalted status. You might want to read the wiki on me and the CV I have posted on the blog to avoid tedious accusations of this or that. I am thought by some to have some knowledge of the ME so please do not try to lecture me about how much you love the Arabs. I speak their language and have lived with them for a long time. There are people who write to SST who are pro-Trump and some who are anti-Trump. I seek a mixture of views so long as personal insult and invective are eschewed. Personally, I do not belong to a political party and would describe myself as an original intent, strict constructionist.

Trump is the constitutionally and legally elected president of the United States. Your descriptors with regard to him are, in my opinion, only plausible if seen from the point of view of various kinds of leftist including Marxist-Leninists like you. You sound very smug and self-satisfied but we will see if you can have an open mind at all. pl

Kooshy said in reply to Babak Makkinejad... , 05 February 2018 at 04:46 PM
Found him, Ali Babacan XVPM, XFM and M of finance. Yes god forbid, if he is a decendent of Ardisher Babakan and another claimant to Iranian throne, which CIA and Soros can jump on.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ali_Babacan MBA from Northeestern
blue peacock , 05 February 2018 at 04:55 PM
...would describe myself as an original intent, strict constructionist.

Aye. Aye. Sir!

+1

That is why some of us believe the Patriot Act and FISA are both unpatriotic and unconstitutional. SCOTUS disagrees with the few of us.

Babak Makkinejad -> Fatima Manoubia... , 05 February 2018 at 05:03 PM
I do not believe Trump is a misogynists - he stated publicly that he likes beautiful women. I also do not think he is a racist. I think he is the first US leader in many decades who has been willing to publicly talk about US problems. For most other US politicians - they largely live in "the best of all possible worlds".
English Outsider , 05 February 2018 at 06:31 PM
Colonel - sincere apologies if my comment above disrupted the discussion on a fascinating article.

David Habakkuk - I should say that "Quantum Computer" referred solely to the ability to gather and collate great amounts of material. It's an ability I admire. On Steele, you are among other things setting out something that is unfamiliar to me though not to most others here, I imagine, and that is the milieu in which he is or was working as a UK Intelligence operative. That you have also done in previous articles; it doesn't seem to be a particularly savoury milieu. As far as Steele's US activities are concerned, from you I'm not getting the picture of a lone operative, all ties with MI6 neatly severed, working solo in the States on some chance assignment in 2016. I'm getting the picture of someone still very much in the swim and selected because of that.

The only problem with that second picture is the dossier, or the 30% or so of it - what Comey, I think it was, described as "salacious and unverified". Surely that's got to be amateur night. Not something that a practised professional working with other professionals would put his hand to. Does that not support the picture of an ex-operative who's gone off the rails and is fumbling around unsupervised?

The Steele affair touched a nerve. One is always I suppose aware that IC professionals are getting up to all sorts and it doesn't seem improbable that "all sorts" includes political stuff and smear campaigns. But it's not heaps of corpses in Syria or farm boys being sent to certain death in the Ukraine. And even within the UK Intelligence Community and their contractors or whatever they're called, compared with what our IC people have done in the ME or compared with what one fears Hamish de Bretton Gordon might have got himself involved in, Christopher Steele's just a choirboy. Nevertheless there's something deeply repellent about what he did. Whatever your view of Trump there he was, newly elected, obviously wanting to make a go of it, and already faced with difficulties. Then some chancer throws "Golden Showers" in his face and makes his position, not maybe for the insiders but for the general public, that bit more untenable.

So from a UK perspective the question of whether Steele was acting in concert with others in the UK becomes important. If he was truly working solo then that from a UK point of view is regrettable but one of those things. In that case MI6 would just have to tighten up its controls on what ex-operatives get up to, put out the appropriate disclaimers, and that's the end of it as far as the UK is concerned. But if Golden Showers and the rest of it was a "Welcome Mr President" from UK IC professionals as a group then those professionals should be hung drawn and quartered together with whoever set them on.

I've read your article several times now and apart from the fact that much of what you pull together isn't material I'm up on, it doesn't seem to me that you're definitely coming to one conclusion or the other. There are many more facts to come out so perhaps this question is premature, but do you think Steele was acting in concert with others in the UK or was he, at least as far as the UK is concerned, working solo?

kooshy , 05 February 2018 at 07:49 PM
Most Iranian females Named Fatima/ Fatimah after prophet' daughter, call themselves Fati, and if they are of aristocrat type, they are called Bibi Fati Khanam, which is honorable lady Fati and if they are westernized they become Fay or Fifi.
turcopolier , 05 February 2018 at 07:59 PM
EO

Much of your commentary seems directed to David Habakkuk and PT rather than I. I don't think the FBI would have started to pay him until he left UK service. pl

English Outsider , 06 February 2018 at 05:10 AM
Colonel - Further apologies - I should have submitted comment 79 as two items.

Yes, the question about Steele was in response to DH's article. The UK side of the affair is I suppose only a small part of the question you and your Committee are examining but it's a dubious part however one looks at it. Although it's early days yet I was hoping DH, with his encyclopaedic knowledge of the UK intelligence scene, might feel able to cast more light on that UK side.

English Outsider -> Cortes... , 06 February 2018 at 05:53 AM
Cortes - " ... where, exactly, do you expect the great public to look beyond the initial scabrously defamatory storytelling about the "golden showers"? "

I don't think one can expect the public, at least in the UK, to look very far beyond the initial scandal. The investigations and enquiries presently under way in the US are complex and are taking place in a different system. This member of the UK public wouldn't be able to give you a coherent account of those enquiries and I doubt many of my fellows could.

So we have to take on trust, most of us, what we're told. As far as I can tell the underlying theme from the BBC and the media is generally that Trump is subverting the American Justice system in order to ensure his own misdemeanours aren't investigated.

Some of us take that as gospel. Others of us assume that the politicians and the media are untrustworthy and ignore them. I doubt many of us go into much more detail than that. Therefore the original story will stick in our minds.

But for some in the UK there are questions in there as well. How come the UK got mixed up in all this? How much did the UK get mixed up in it?

David Habakkuk -> Sid Finster... , 06 February 2018 at 06:19 AM
Sid Finster,

In response to comment 53.

When I belatedly started looking at the Litvinenko mystery, as a result of a strange email provoked by comments of mine on SST which arrived in my inbox in March 2007 from someone who turned out to be a key protagonist, it was rather obvious that improvised and chaotic 'StratCom' operations had been put into place on both the Russian and British sides to cover up what had happened.

A particular interesting feature of those on the British side – in which we now know Christopher Steele must have played a leading role – were the bizarre gyrations those responsible were going through trying to explain away the extraordinary fact that when he had broken the story of his poisoning, Litvinenko had pointed the finger of suspicion at his Italian associate Mario Scaramella.

When I started delving, I came across some very interesting pieces on Scaramella and related matters posted on the 'European Tribune' website by a Rome-based blogger using the name 'de Gondi' in the period after the story broke.

His actual name is David Loepp, by profession he is an artisan jeweller specialising in ancient and traditional goldsmith techniques, and I already knew and respected his work from his contributions to the transnational internet investigation into the Niger uranium forgeries – an earlier MI6 clusterf**ck.

So in May 2008 I posted a longish piece on that site, setting out the problems with the evidence about the Litvinenko case as I saw them, in the hope of reactivating his interest. This paid off in spades, when he linked to, and translated a key extract from, the request from Italian prosecutors to use wiretaps of conversations with Senator Paolo Guzzanti in connection with their prosecution of Scaramella for 'aggravated calumny.'

The request, which up to not so long ago was freely available on the website of the Italian Senate, was denied, but the extensive summaries of the transcripts provided a lot of material.

(This initial post by me, and later posts by me on that site, are at http://www.eurotrib.com/user/uid:1857/diary. Three posts David Loepp and I produced jointly in December 2012, which have a lot on Scaramella and Shvets, are on his page there, at http://www.eurotrib.com/user/de%20Gondi/diary .)

The extract from the wiretap request which David Loepp posted, which like Litvinenko's letter containing the claims he and Yuri Shvets had concocted about Putin using Mogilevich to attempt to supply Al Qaeda with a 'mini nuclear bomb' is dated 1 December 2005, contains key pointers to the conspiracy. It concludes:

'A passage on Simon Moghilevic and an agreement between the camorra to search for nuclear weapons lost during the Cold War to be consigned to Bin Laden, a revelation made by the Israeli. According to Scaramella the circle closes: camorra, Moghilevic- Russian mafia- services- nuclear bombs in Naples.'

Subsequent conversations make clear that Scaramella left on 6 December 2005 for Washington, on a trip where he was to meet Shvets. The summary of a report on this to Guzzanti reads:

'12) conversation that took place on number [omissis] on December 18, 2005, at 9:41:51 n. 1426, containing explicit references to the authenticity of the declarations of Alexander Litvinenko acquired by Scaramella, to the trustworthiness of the affirmations made by Scaramella in his reports to the commission and to the meetings Scaramella had with Talik after having denounced them [presumably Talik and his alleged accomplices]. (They can talk with HEIMS thanks to the help of MILLER. SHVEZ says that he had been a companion of CARLOS at the academy; SHVEZ has already made declarations and is willing to continue collaboration. Guzzanti warns that a document in Russian arrived in commission in which the name of SCARAMELLA appears several times, these [sic] say that directives to the contrary had been given to Litvinenko. Scaramella says that he went to the meeting with TALIK in the company of two treasury [police] and a cop, Talik spoke of a person from the Ukrainian GRU who would be willing to talk and a strange Chechen ring in Naples. Assassination attempt against the pope, CASAROLI was a Soviet agent.)'

The summary of a later conversation also refers to 'MILLER':

'conversation that took place on number [omissis] on January 13, 2006, at 11:22:11 n. 2287, containing references to Scaramella's sources in relation to facts referred in the Commission, the means by which they were obtained by Scaramella from declarations made abroad, the role of Litvinenko, also on the occasion of declarations made by third parties and the credibility of the news and theses given by Scaramella to the commission (Scaramella reads a text in English on the relation between the KGB and PRODI. Guzzanti asks if its credibility can be confirmed and if the taped declarations can be backed up; Scaramella answers that there were two testimonies, Lou Palumbo and Alexander (Litvinenko), and that the registration made in London at the beginning of the assignment [Scaramella's?] had been authenticated by a certain BAKER of the FBI. As he translates the text from English, Scaramella notes that the person testifying does not say he knows Prodi but only that he thinks that Prodi ...; all those who worked for the person testifying in Scandinavia said that Prodi was "theirs." The affair in Rimini, Bielli is preparing the battle in Rimini. Meetings with MILLER for the three things that are needed. Polemic about Pollari over the pressure exerted on Gordievski.)'

In the exchanges on my May 2008 post, I mentioned and linked to some extraordinary comments on a crucial article by Edward Jay Epstein, in which Karon von Gerhke claimed that his sceptical account fitted with what her contacts in the British investigation had told her. When that July I came across her equally extraordinary claims in response to the BBC's Mark Urban piece of stenography – which Steele may also have had a hand in organising – I found she was referring to precisely that visit to Washington by Scaramella which had been described in the wiretap request.

As you can perhaps imagine, the fact that 'Miller' had featured in the conversations with Guzzanti both as a key contact, who could introduce Scaramella to Aldrich Ames (which is who 'Heims' clearly is), and with whom there had been meetings about 'the three things that are needed' made me inclined to take seriously what Karon von Gerhke said about his role.

In December 2008, I put up another post on 'European Tribune', putting together the material from David Loepp and that from Karon von Gerhke – but not discussing the references to 'Miller.' As I had hoped, this led to her getting in touch.

Among the material with which she supplied me, which I in turn supplied to the Solicitor to the Inquest, were covers of faxes to John Rizzo, then Acting General Counsel of the CIA. From a fax dated 23 October 2005.

'John: See attached email to Chuck Patrizia. Berezovsky alleges he is in possession of a copy of a classified file given to the CIA by Russia's FSB, which he further alleges the CIA disseminated to British, French, Italian and Israeli intelligence agencies implicating him in business associations with the Mafia and to ties with terrorist organizations. Yuri Shvets was authorised/directed by Berezovsky to raise the issue with Bud McFarlane scheduled for Thursday. McFarlane is unaware the issue will be raised with him.'

From a fax dated 7 November 2005:

'John: I am attaching an email exchange between Yuri Shvets and me re: 1) article he published on his Ukraine website on alleged sale of nuclear choke to Iran, which I reproached him on as having been planted by Berezovsky and 2 the alleged FSB/CIA document file that Berezovsky obtained from Scaramella, which Yuri acknowledges in his e-mail to me. Like extracting wisdom teeth to get him to put anything on paper, especially in an e-mail! [NAME REDACTED BY ME – DH] is the source McFarlane referred Yuri to re: Berezovsky's visa issue. She proposed meeting Berezovsky in London. Alleged it would take a year to clear up USG issues and even then could not guarantee him a visa. She too has access to USG intelligence on Berezovsky. Open book.'

From a fax dated 5 December 2005:

'John. From Mario Scaramella to Yuri Shvets to my ears, the DOJ has authorised Mario Scaramella to interview Aldrich Ames with regard to members of the Italian Intelligence Service agent recruited by Ames for the KGB. Scaramella, as you may recall, is who gave Boris Berezovsky's aide, a former FSB Colonel [LITVINENKO – DH], that alleged document number to the FSB file that the CIA disseminated on Berezovsky – a file that Bud McFarlane's "Madam Visa" [NAME REDACTED BY ME – DH] is alleged is totting off to London for a meeting with Berezovsky, who has agreed to retain her re: his visa issue. Quid pro quo's with Berezovsky and Scaramella on the CIA agent currently facing kidnapping charges for the rendition of the Muslim cleric? Scott Armstrong has a most telling file on Scaramella. Not a single redeeming quality.'

In the course of very extensive exchanges with Karon von Gerhke subsequently, we had some rather acute disagreements. It was unfortunate that her filing was a shambles – a crucial hard disk failed without a backup, and the 'hard copies' appeared to be in a chaotic state.

However, the only occasion when I can recall having reason to believe that was deliberately lying to me was when David Loepp unearthed a cache of documentation including the full Italian text of the letter from Litvinenko containing the 'StratCom' designed to suggest that Putin had attempted to supply a 'mini nuclear bomb' to Al Qaeda. Having been asked to keep this between ourselves for the time being, Karon insisted on immediately sending it to her contacts in Counter Terrorism Command, and then produced bogus justifications.

Time and again, moreover, I found that I could confirm statements that she made – see for example the two posts I put up on the legal battles following the death in February 2008 of Berezovsky's long-term partner Arkadi 'Badri' Patarkatsishvili in June and July 2009, which were based on careful corroboration of what she told me.

(I should also say that I acquired the greatest respect for her courage.)

And while Owen and his team suppressed all the evidence from her, and almost all of that from David Loepp, which I had I provided to them, the dossier about Berezovsky is described in a statement made by Litvinenko in Tel Aviv in April 2006, presented in evidence in the Inquiry.

(See http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090333/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/evidence ">https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/evidence">http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090333/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/evidence .)

Other evidence, moreover, strongly inclines me to believe that there were overtures for a 'quid pro quo', purporting to come from Putin, but that this was a ruse orchestrated by Berezovsky.

Part of the purpose of this would almost certainly have been to supply probably bogus 'evidence' about arms sales in the Yeltsin years to Iraq, Iran and Syria. Moreover, I think there was an article on the second 'Fifth Element' site run by Shvets about the supposed sale of a nuclear 'choke' – whatever that is – to Iran.

The likelihood of the involvement of elements in the FBI in these shenanigans seems to quite high, given what has already emerged about the activities of Levinson. Also relevant may be the fact that the 'declaration' which was part of the attempt to frame Romano Prodi was authenticated, in London, by 'a certain BAKER of the FBI.')

Babak Makkinejad -> David Habakkuk ... , 06 February 2018 at 09:40 AM
Thank you David Habakkuk. Truly sordid and deplorable. WWIII to be initiated on basis of lies.
Jack , 06 February 2018 at 12:06 PM
David

You may already know this but Steele was a no show in a UK court for a deposition on the libel suit.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2018/02/05/christopher-steele-is-no-show-in-london-court-in-civil-case-over-dossier.amp.html

Babak Makkinejad -> David Habakkuk ... , 06 February 2018 at 01:18 PM
I know something of spectroscopy.

The critical issue here is the provenance of the samples and not the sophistication of the techniques used in the analysis itself or its instrumentation.

The paragraph that you have quoted:

"To figure out signatures based on various synthetic routes and conditions, Chipuk says that the synthetic chemists on his team will make the same chemical threat agent as many as 2,000 times in an ..." reeks of intellectual intimidation - trying to brow-beat any skeptic by the size of one's instrument - as it were."

And then there is a little matter of confidence level in any of the analysis - such things are normally based on prior statistics - which did not and could not exist in this situation.

LeaNder , 07 February 2018 at 09:16 AM
David, it's no doubt interesting to watch how attention on Victor Ivanov in another deficient inquiry on the British Isles, was managed in that inquiry. If I may, since he pops up again in the Steele dossier. You take what's available? Is that all there is to know?

I know its hard to communicate basics if you are deeply into matters. Usually people prefer to opt out. It's getting way too complicated for them to follow. You made me understand this experience. But isn't this (fake) intelligence continuity "via" Yuri Svets what connects your, no harm meant I do understand your obsession with the case, with what we deal with now in the Steele Dossier? Again, one of the most central figures is Ivanov.

Of course later reports in the Steele Dossier go hand in hand with a larger public relations campaign. Creating reality? Irony alert: as informer/source I would by then know what the other side wants to hear.

By the way, babbling mode, I found your Tom Mangold transcription. It felt it wasn't there on the link you gave. I used the date, and other search terms. Maybe I am wrong. Haven't looked at what the judge ruled out of the collection. Yes, cozy session/setting.

According to Google search there are no other links then your articles here:
http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613093555/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/files/2015/04/HMG000513wb.pdf ">https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/files/2015/04/HMG000513wb.pdf">http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613093555/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/files/2015/04/HMG000513wb.pdf

**********

JAN RICHARD BĆRUG
The Collapsing Wall. Hybrid Journalism.
A Comparative Study of Newspapers and
Magazines in Eight Countries in Europe

Available online. Haven't read it yet, but journalism as hidden public relations transfer belt would be one of my minor obsessions. ...

Babak Makkinejad -> turcopolier ... , 07 February 2018 at 11:23 AM
I wonder too; their command of the English idiom is very au currant - noticed "opt in/opt out" reference? Too American.

They clearly are not native speakers of German.

LeaNder said in reply to kooshy... , 07 February 2018 at 12:30 PM
why California, Kooshy #18? California among other things left this verbal trace, since I once upon time thought a luggage storage in SF might be free/available now: this is my home, lady.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kish_Island#Economy

Tourists from many -- but not all -- foreign nations wishing to enter Kish Free Zone from legal ports are not required to obtain any visa prior to travel. For those travelers, upon-arrival travel permits are stamped valid for 14 days by Kish officials.

Who are the not all? Can we assume Britain is not one of those?

The German link is different. How about the Iranian?

or isn't this the Kish we are talking about?

LeaNder said in reply to LeaNder... , 07 February 2018 at 01:14 PM
correcting myself #94:

another Ivanov. I struggled with names (...) in Russian crime novels, admittedly. But that's long ago from times Russian crime and Russian money flows and rogues getting hold of its nuclear material surfaced more often in Europe. 90s

I see Sergei seems to share my interest in the literary genre:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Ivanov#Personal

[Mar 10, 2018] There is reason to suspect that some former and very likely current employees of the FBI have been colluding with elements in other American and British intelligence agencies, in particular the CIA and MI6, in support of an extremely ambitious foreign policy agenda for a very long time. It also seems clear that influential journalists, such as Glenn Simpson was before founding Fusion GPS, along with his wife Mary Jacoby, have been strongly involved in this

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... There is reason to suspect that some former and very likely current employees of the FBI have been colluding with elements in other American and British intelligence agencies, in particular the CIA and MI6, in support of an extremely ambitious foreign policy agenda for a very long time. It also seems clear that influential journalists, such as Glenn Simpson was before founding Fusion GPS, along with his wife Mary Jacoby, have been strongly involved in this. ..."
"... Important support for these strategies was provided by the 'StratCom' network centred around the late Boris Berezovsky, which clearly collaborated closely with MI6. As was apparent from the witness list at Sir Robert Owen's Inquiry into the death of Alexander Litvinenko, which produced a report based essentially on a recycling of claims made by the network's members, key players were on your side of the Atlantic – notably Alex Goldfarb, Yuri Shvets, and Yuri Felshtinsky. ..."
"... it seems to me the usa and uk have been tied at the hip for a very long time... when it comes to foreign affairs policy and wars - the one will always vouch for the other without hesitation... it tells me the relationship is really deep.. ..."
"... I and my friends consider it a given that most, if not all, anglo-zionist moves in the ME are to "provide a definitive solution to the – inherently intractable – security problems of a Jewish settler state in the area. " It is an open secret that the izzies are the reason why a few Russians, some Turks, lots of Kurds and countless Arabs are dying in the Syrian battlefields. Another open secret: the takfiris and kurds have been, and are, supported by the West. That the "masters of the universe™" have been conceiving and doubling down on such disastrous policies give lie to their much-vaunted "intelligence". ..."
"... It is the very FACT of Trump even getting elected at ALL which outrages and terrifies them so much. They are used to seeing themselves as successful manipulators and engineers of every major event. They were engineering the whole electoral battlespace to get Clinton elected. The mere fact of Trump's victory in the teeth of their Electoral Engineering for Clinton is an act of defiance which they will not tolerate. ..."
"... And if they fail to bring Trump down at all, they will stand revealed as being defeatable. And this is their big fear. That if people see they have defeated the Borg once on keeping Trump in the teeth of Borg's efforts, that people might try to defeat and smash down the Borg on another issue. And then another. And then another after that. ..."
"... Because it is not possible to do on fundamental level yet, especially with US foreign policy establishment and so called consensus being built almost entirely, in ideological and, most importantly, cadres senses, on the ultimate exceptionalist agenda in which Russia is the ultimate obstacle and enemy. Establishment in saturated with neocons and likes. They are the swamp. ..."
"... They act and believe that they are Olympians. You have to wait for them to age and die before any substantive change in Fortress West's posture; say 2040 ..."
"... In 1977 Zbigniew Brzezinski, as President Carter's National Security Adviser, forms the Nationalities Working Group (NWG) dedicated to the idea of weakening the Soviet Union by inflaming its ethnic tensions. ..."
"... State Department official Henry Precht will later recall that Brzezinski had the idea "that Islamic forces could be used against the Soviet Union. The theory was, there was an arc of crisis, and so an arc of Islam could be mobilized to contain the Soviets." [Scott, 2007, pp. 67] In November 1978, President Carter appointed George Ball head of a special White House Iran task force under Brzezinski. Ball recommends the US should drop support for the Shah of Iran and support the radical Islamist opposition of Ayatollah Khomeini. This idea is based on ideas from British Islamic expert Dr. Bernard Lewis, who advocates the balkanization of the entire Muslim Near East along tribal and religious lines. The chaos would spread in what he also calls an "arc of crisis" and ultimately destabilize the Muslim regions of the Soviet Union ..."
"... About relation Steele-MI6, well, you never leave your IS. Or to put it in another way, you are never out of the scope of your past IS ..."
"... No, three years at tops and could be much sooner if dimes starting dropping by exposed people that don't want to take the fall for their superiors whom they always detested. One possible thing to get the process started sooner is if the recent Russian Intelligence delegation to DC that Smoothie mentions on another thread gave the current administration, as a diplomatic courtesy of course, the audio recordings of Madame Sectary Nuland's infamous mental meltdown at Kaliningrad. No telling what beans were spilled in her moment of panic, but I am willing to bet key names were dropped. Either way the time is coming. ..."
"... Especially, once American policy-makers who saw and experienced war (Ike, George Marshall's generation) departed things started to roll down hill with Reagan bringing on board a whole collection of neocons. ..."
"... Unawareness is always dangerous, a complete blackout in relations between two nuclear powers is more than dangerous--it is completely reckless. Again, the way CW 1.0 is perceived in the current US "elites" it becomes extremely tempting to repeat it. Electing Hillary was another step in unleashing CW 2.0 by people who have no understanding of what they were doing. ..."
"... Obama started crushing US-Russian relations before any campaigns were launched and before Trump was even seriously considered a GOP nominee, let alone a real contender. New confrontation hinged on HRC being elected. In fact, she was one of the major driving forces behind a serious of geopolitical anti-Russian moves. Visceral Russo-phobia became a feature in HRC campaign long before any Steele's Dossier. This was a program. ..."
"... IMO, the bigger problem for American not shying away from wars, or being silent about them , is when your home, your mom and dad' home, the town you grew up in, are immune and away from the war. ..."
"... The security and safety of the two oceans, encourages or at least, in an all volunteer military makes it a secondary problem for regular people, to worry about. ..."
"... A particular interesting feature of those on the British side – in which we now know Christopher Steele must have played a leading role – were the bizarre gyrations those responsible were going through trying to explain away the extraordinary fact that when he had broken the story of his poisoning, Litvinenko had pointed the finger of suspicion at his Italian associate Mario Scaramella. ..."
"... Of course later reports in the Steele Dossier go hand in hand with a larger public relations campaign. Creating reality? Irony alert: as informer/source I would by then know what the other side wants to hear. ..."
Mar 10, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

Steele, Shvets, Levinson, Litvinenko and the 'Billion Dollar Don.'

In the light of the suggestion in the Nunes memo that Steele was 'a longtime FBI source' it seems worth sketching out some background, which may also make it easier to see some possible reasons why he 'was desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being president.'

There is reason to suspect that some former and very likely current employees of the FBI have been colluding with elements in other American and British intelligence agencies, in particular the CIA and MI6, in support of an extremely ambitious foreign policy agenda for a very long time. It also seems clear that influential journalists, such as Glenn Simpson was before founding Fusion GPS, along with his wife Mary Jacoby, have been strongly involved in this.

This agenda has involved hopes for 'régime change' in Russia, whether as the result of an oligarchic coup, a popular revolt, or some combination of both. Also central have been hopes for a further 'rollback' of Russia influence in the post-Soviet space, both in areas now independent, such as Ukraine, and also ones still part of the Russian Federation, notably Chechnya.

And, crucially, it involved exploiting the retreat of Russian power from the Middle East for 'régime change' projects which it was hoped would provide a definitive solution to the – inherently intractable – security problems of a Jewish settler state in the area.

Important support for these strategies was provided by the 'StratCom' network centred around the late Boris Berezovsky, which clearly collaborated closely with MI6. As was apparent from the witness list at Sir Robert Owen's Inquiry into the death of Alexander Litvinenko, which produced a report based essentially on a recycling of claims made by the network's members, key players were on your side of the Atlantic – notably Alex Goldfarb, Yuri Shvets, and Yuri Felshtinsky.

The question of what links these had, or did not have, with elements in U.S. intelligence agencies is thus a critical one.

In making some sense of it, the fact that one key figure we know to have been involved in this network was missing at the Inquiry – the former FBI agent Robert Levinson, who disappeared on the Iranian island of Kish in March 2007 – is important.

Unfortunately, I only recently came across a book on Levinson published in 2016 by the 'New York Times' journalist Barry Meier, which is now hopefully winging its way across the Atlantic. From the accounts of the book I have seen, such as one by Jeff Stein in 'Newsweek', it seems likely that its author did not look at any of the evidence presented at Owen's Inquiry.

(See http://www.newsweek.com/2016/05/20/what-really-happened-robert-levinson-cia-iran-454803.html .)

Had he done so, Meier might have discovered that his subject had been, as it were, 'top supporting actor' in the first fumbling attempt by Christopher Steele et al to produce a plausible-sounding scenario as to the background to Litvinenko's death. A Radio 4 programme on 16 December 2006, presented by the veteran BBC presenter Tom Mangold, had been wholly devoted to an account by Shvets, backed up by Levinson. Both of these were, like Litvinenko, supposed to be impartial 'due diligence' operatives.

The notion that any of them might have connections with Western intelligence agencies was not considered. The – publicly available – evidence of the involvement of Shvets, whose surname means 'cobbler' or 'shoemaker' in Ukrainian, in the processing of the tapes of conversations involving the former Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma supposedly recorded by Major Melnychenko, which had played a crucial role in the 2004-5 'Orange Revolution' was not mentioned.

Still less was it mentioned that claims that the – very dangerous – late Soviet Kolchuga system, which made it possible the kind of identification of incoming aircraft which radar had traditionally done, without sending out signals which made the destruction of the facilities doing it possible, had been sold by Kuchma to Iraq had proven spurious.

What Shvets had done had been to take – genuine – audio in which Kuchma had discussed a possible sale, and edit it to suggest a sale had been completed.

(See http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090333/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/evidence .)

As a former television current affairs producer, I can talk to you of the marvels which London audio editors can produce, very happily. Unfortunately, the days when not all BBC and 'Guardian' journalists were corrupt stenographers for corrupt and incompetent spooks, as Mangold and his like have been for Steele and Levinson, are long gone.

All this has become particularly relevant now, given that Simpson has placed the notorious Jewish Ukrainian mobster Semyon Mogilevich and the 'Solntsevskaya Bratva' mafia group centre stage in his accounts not simply of Trump and Manafort, but also of William Browder. For most of the 'Nineties, Levinson had been a, if not the, lead FBI investigator on Mogilevich.

(On this, see the 1999 BBC 'Panorama' programme 'The Billion Dollar Don', also presented by Tom Mangold, which has extensive interviews both with Mogilevich and Levinson at

http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/events/panorama/transcripts/transcript_06_12_99.txt )

In the months leading up to Levinson's disappearance, a key priority for the advocates of the strategy I have described was to prevent it being totally derailed by the patently catastrophic outcome of the Iraqi adventure.

Compounding the problem was the fact that this had created the 'Shia Crescent', which in turn exacerbated the potential 'existential threat' to Israel posed by the steadily increasing range, accuracy and numbers of missiles available to Hizbullah in hardened positions north of the Litani.

These, obviously, provided both a 'deterrent' for that organisation and Iran, and also a radical threat to the whole notion that somehow Israel could ever be a 'safe haven' for Jews, against the supposedly ineradicable disposition of the 'goyim' sooner or later to, as it were, revert to type. The dreadful thought that Israel might not be necessary had to be resisted at all costs.

What followed from the disaster unleashed by the – Anglo-American – 'own goal' in toppling Saddam was, ironically, a need on the part of key players to 'double down.' Above all, it was necessary for many of those involved to counter suggestions from the Russian side that going around smashing up 'régimes' that one might not like sometimes blew up in one's face.

Even more threatening were suggestions from the Russian side that it was foolish to think one could use jihadists without risking 'blowback', and that there might be an overwhelming common interest in combating Islamic extremism.

Another priority was to counter the pushback in the American 'intelligence community' and military, which was to produce the drastic downgrading of the threat posed by the Iranian nuclear programme in the November 2007 NIE and then the resignation of Admiral William Fallon as head of 'Centcom' the following March.

So in 2005 Shvets came to London. He and his audio editors had another 'bite at the cherry' of the Melnychenko tapes, so that material that did in fact establish that both the SBU and FSB had collaborated with Mogilevich could be employed to make it seem that Putin had a close personal relationship with the mobster.

All kinds of supposedly respectable American and British academics, like Professors Karen Dawisha and Robert Service, have fallen for this, hook, line and sinker. It gives a new meaning to the term 'useful idiot.'

(See http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090333/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/evidence .)

In a letter sent in December that year by Litvinenko to the 'Mitrokhin Commission', for which his Italian associate Mario Scaramella was a consultant, this was used in an attempt to demonstrate that Mogilevich, while acting as an agent for the FSB and under Putin's personal 'krysha', had attempted to supply a 'mini atomic bomb' – aka 'suitcase nuke' – to Al Qaeda. Shortly after the letter was sent Scaramella departed on a trip to Washington, where he appears to have got access to Aldrich Ames.

(See http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090333/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/evidence .)

At precisely this time, as Meier explains, Levinson was in the process of being recruited by a lady called Anne Jablonski who then worked as a CIA analyst. It appears that she was furious at the failure of the operational side at the Agency to produce evidence which would have established that Iran did indeed have an ongoing nuclear programme, and she may well have hoped would implicate Russia in supplying materials.

There are grounds to suspect that one of the things that Berezovsky and Shvets were doing was fabricating such 'evidence.' Whether Levinson was involved in such attempts, or genuinely looking for evidence he was convinced must be there, I cannot say. It appears that he fell for a rather elementary entrapment operation – which could well have been organised with the collaboration of Russian intelligence. (People do get fed up with being framed, particular if 'régime change' is the goal.)

It also seems likely that, quite possibly in a different but related entrapment operation, related to propaganda wars in which claims and counter claims about a polonium-beryllium 'initiator' as the crucial missing part which might make a 'suitcase nuke' functional, Litvinenko accidentally ingested fatal quantities of polonium. A good deal of evidence suggests that this may have been at Berezovsky's offices on the night before he was supposedly assassinated.

It was, obviously, important for Steele et al to ensure that nobody looked at the 'StratCom' wars about 'suitcase nukes.' Here, a figure who has played a key role in such wars in relation to Syria plays an interesting minor one in the story.

Some time following the destruction of the case for an immediate war by the November 2007 NIE, a chemical weapons specialist called Dan Kaszeta, who had worked in the White House for twelve years, moved to London.

In 2011, in addition to founding a consultancy called 'Strongpoint Security', he began a writing career with articles in 'CBRNe World.' Later, he would become the conduit through which the notorious 'hexamine hypothesis', supposedly clinching proof that the Syrian government was responsible for the sarin incidents at Khan Sheikhoun, Ghouta, Saraqeb, and Khan Al-Asal, was disseminated.

Having been forced by the threat of a case being opened against them under human rights law into resuming the inquest into Litvinenko's death, in August 2012 the British authorities appointed Sir Robert Owen to conduct it. (There are many honest judges in Britain, but obviously, if one sets out to find someone who will 'cover up' for the incompetence and corruption of people like Steele, as Lord Hutton did before him, you can find them.)

That same month, a piece appeared in 'CBRNe World' with the the strapline: 'Dan Kaszeta looks into the ultimate press story: Suitcase nukes', and the main title 'Carry on or checked bags?' Among the grounds he gives for playing down the scare:

'Some components rely on materials with shelf life. Tritium, for example, is used in many nuclear weapon designs and has a twelve year half-life. Polonium, used in neutron initiators in some earlier types of weapon designs, has a very short halflife. US documents state that every nuclear weapon has "limited life components" that require periodic replacement (do an internet search for nuclear limited life components and you can read for weeks).'

(For this and other articles by Kaszeta, as also his bio, see http://strongpointsecurity.co.uk ')

What Kaszeta has actually described are the reasons why polonium is a perfect 'StratCom' instrument. In terms of scientific plausibility, in fact there were no 'suitcase nukes', and in any case 'initiators' using polonium had been abandoned very early on, in favour of ones which lasted longer.

For 'StratCom' scenarios, as experience with the 'hexamine hypothesis' has proved, scientific plausibility can be irrelevant.

What polonium provides is a means of suggesting that Al Qaeda have in fact got hold of a nuclear device which they could easily smuggle into, say, Rome or New York, or indeed Moscow, but there is a crucial missing component which the FSB is trying to provide to them. By the same token, of course, that missing component could be depicted as one that Berezovsky and Litvinenko are conspiring to suppl to the Chechen insurgents.

In addition, the sole known source of global supply is the Avangard plant at Sarov in Russia, so the substance is naturally suited for 'StratCom' directed against that country, which its intelligence services would – rather naturally – try to make 'boomerang.'

According to Glenn Simpson, Christopher Steele is a 'boy scout.' This seems to me quite wrong – but, even if it were true, would you want to unleash a 'boy scout' into these kinds of intrigue?

As it is not clear why Kaszeta introduced his – accurate but irrelevant – point about polonium into an article which was concerned with scientific plausibility, one is left with an interesting question as to whether he cut his teeth on 'StratCom' attempting to ensure that nobody seriously interested in CBRN science followed an obvious lead.

In relation to the question of whether current FBI personnel had been involved in the kind of 'StratCom' exercises, I have been describing, a critical issue is the involvement of Shvets and Levinson in the Alexander Khonanykhine affair back in the 'Nineties, and the latter's use of claims about the Solntsevskaya to prevent the key figure's extradition. But that is a matter for another day.

A corollary of all this is that we cannot – yet at least – be absolutely confident that the account in the Nunes memo, according to which Steele was suspended and then dismissed as an FBI source for what the organisation is reported to define as 'the most serious of violations' – the unauthorised disclosure of a relationship with the organisation – is necessarily wholly accurate.

Who did and did not authorise which disclosures to the media, up to and including the extraordinary decision to have the full dossier, including claims about Aleksej Gubarev and the Alfa oligarchs, in flagrant disregard of the obvious risks of defamation suits, and who may be trying to pass the buck to others, remains I think less than totally clear.

Posted at 03:42 PM in As The Borg Turns , Habakkuk , Russia , Russiagate | Permalink

james , 03 February 2018 at 04:33 PM

thanks david... fascinating overview and conjecture..

it seems to me the usa and uk have been tied at the hip for a very long time... when it comes to foreign affairs policy and wars - the one will always vouch for the other without hesitation... it tells me the relationship is really deep..

JohnB , 03 February 2018 at 05:17 PM
David,

Thank you very. As ever you have illuminated a few more things for me. Kaszeta's involvement is interesting. He is someone I am in the middle of researching in relation to Higgins and Bellingcat.

turcopolier , 03 February 2018 at 06:02 PM
james

It is the closest of all international intelligence relationships. It started in WW2. Before that the Brits were though of as a potential enemy. pl

Babak Makkinejad -> turcopolier ... , 03 February 2018 at 06:10 PM
I think the English are using you, they are unsentimental empirical people that only do these that benefit the Number One.
The chief beneficiary of the Coup in Iran was England and not US.
catherine , 03 February 2018 at 06:22 PM
That Newsweek piece about Levinson is very superficial to me.

Re: Levinson

# Who suggested to who 'first' the Iran caper...Anne Jablonski to Levinson or Levinson to Jablonski? It was reported earlier by Meier that in December 2005, when Levinson was pitching Jablonski on projects he might take on when his CIA contract was approved he sent her a lengthy memo about Dawud's potential as an informant.

# Ira Silverman, the Iran hating NBC guy, pitched a Iraq caper to Levinson with Dawud Salahuddin, as his Iran contact and Levinson went to Jablonski with it.

# And what was with Boris Birshstein, a Russian organized crime figure who had fled to Israel and Oleg Deripaska, the "aluminum czar" of Russia whose organized crime contacts have kept him from entering the United States jumping in to help find Levinson? The FBI allowed Deripaska in for two visits in 2009 in exchange for his alleged help in locating Levinson but obviously nothing came of it.

I think there were more little agents/agendas in this than Levinson and Jablonski and US CIA.

Ishmael Zechariah , 03 February 2018 at 06:54 PM
DH,

As usual a wonderful analysis. I admire your insight, integrity and courage. I wish you could write more on why the Borg is so much against Trump, even though they have Kushner, Adelson and Co. running interference for them.

I and my friends consider it a given that most, if not all, anglo-zionist moves in the ME are to "provide a definitive solution to the – inherently intractable – security problems of a Jewish settler state in the area. " It is an open secret that the izzies are the reason why a few Russians, some Turks, lots of Kurds and countless Arabs are dying in the Syrian battlefields. Another open secret: the takfiris and kurds have been, and are, supported by the West. That the "masters of the universe™" have been conceiving and doubling down on such disastrous policies give lie to their much-vaunted "intelligence".

Be safe.

Ishmael Zechariah

Rd , 03 February 2018 at 07:31 PM
Babak Makkinejad said in reply to turcopolier...

The chief beneficiary of the Coup in Iran was England and not US.
..and US is the one who has been paying for it since 1979!!!

kooshy said in reply to Ishmael Zechariah... , 03 February 2018 at 08:21 PM
IZ
My guess is, that he is unpredictable, instantaneous and therefore can't be consistent and reliable, useful idiot needs to be predictable.
kooshy , 03 February 2018 at 08:43 PM
"There is reason to suspect that some former and very likely current employees of the FBI have been colluding with elements in other American and British intelligence agencies, in particular the CIA and MI6, in support of an extremely ambitious foreign policy agenda for a very long time. "

David as usual fascinating work connecting the dots. One question that comes to my mind is about the above point you are making. Is it your understanding or believe that these IC individuals on both side of Atlantic, are pursuing/forcing their (on behalf of the Borg) foreign policy agenda outside of their respected seating governments? If not, why is it that incoming administration cannot stop them? So far I can't see any strategic changes on US foreign policy toward ME or Russia, at tactical level yes but not fundamentally.

different clue , 03 February 2018 at 08:49 PM
Ishmael Zechariah,

( reply to comment 6),

I am not David Habakkuk, obviously. But I will venture a little opinion anyway. It is not enough that the Borgists get their policy preferences. If it were, then Kushner, Adelson and Co. running interference would be enough for them.

It is the very FACT of Trump even getting elected at ALL which outrages and terrifies them so much. They are used to seeing themselves as successful manipulators and engineers of every major event. They were engineering the whole electoral battlespace to get Clinton elected. The mere fact of Trump's victory in the teeth of their Electoral Engineering for Clinton is an act of defiance which they will not tolerate.

And if they fail to bring Trump down at all, they will stand revealed as being defeatable. And this is their big fear. That if people see they have defeated the Borg once on keeping Trump in the teeth of Borg's efforts, that people might try to defeat and smash down the Borg on another issue. And then another. And then another after that.

So that is why the Borg cares so much. They view the Trump election as an insurgency, and they view themselves as waging a counterinsurgency, which they dare not lose.

Jack , 03 February 2018 at 08:54 PM
David,

Thanks for your analysis. I always enjoy and learn from your posts. I wish you would post more often.

In my non-expert opinion, the Borg and the media were all in for Hillary. They were convinced that she was gonna win. To curry favor with the Empress who would be certainly crowned after the election they were eager and convinced that their lawlessness would become a badge for promotion and plum positions in her administration. In their conceit, they believed they could kill two birds with one stroke. They could vilify Putin and create the mass hysteria to checkmate him, while at the same time disparage and frame Trump as The Manchurian Candidate to seal their certain electoral victory.

Unfortunately for them voters in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin didn't buy their sales pitch despite the overwhelming media barrage from all corners. Even news publications who have only endorsed Republican candidates for President for over a century endorsed her.

Trump's election win caused panic among the political establishment, the media and the Deep State. They were already all-in. Their only choice was to double down and get Trump impeached. Now their conspiracy is beginning to unravel. They are doing everything possible to forestall their Armageddon. Of course they have many allies. This battle is gonna be interesting to watch. Trump is clearly getting many Congressional Republicans on side as his base of Deplorables remains solidly behind him. That is what's befuddling the Borg pundits.

SmoothieX12 -> kooshy... , 03 February 2018 at 09:51 PM
So far I can't see any strategic changes on US foreign policy toward ME or Russia, at tactical level yes but not fundamentally.

Because it is not possible to do on fundamental level yet, especially with US foreign policy establishment and so called consensus being built almost entirely, in ideological and, most importantly, cadres senses, on the ultimate exceptionalist agenda in which Russia is the ultimate obstacle and enemy. Establishment in saturated with neocons and likes. They are the swamp. This swamp (Borg, deep state, etc.) still thinks that it can use Cold War 1.0 Playbook and address very real and dangerous American economic issues. They are wrong, since most of them didn't read the playbook correctly to start with.

Babak Makkinejad -> SmoothieX12 ... , 03 February 2018 at 10:10 PM
They act and believe that they are Olympians. You have to wait for them to age and die before any substantive change in Fortress West's posture; say 2040.
kooshy said in reply to SmoothieX12 ... , 03 February 2018 at 10:24 PM
You are right CWII is very much desired and on agenda, but i am not sure of setup, the setup/board has been changed tremendously and IMO benefits the Asian side of Bosphorus, for one thing technology is no longer exclusive, and financial burden is heavier on atlantic side.
catherine said in reply to SmoothieX12 ... , 04 February 2018 at 12:21 AM
''Establishment in saturated with neocons and likes. They are the swamp. ''

The locust keep trying and trying, destruction is their life's work.

'1977-1981: Nationalities Working Group Advocates Using Militant Islam Against Soviet Union'

In 1977 Zbigniew Brzezinski, as President Carter's National Security Adviser, forms the Nationalities Working Group (NWG) dedicated to the idea of weakening the Soviet Union by inflaming its ethnic tensions. The Islamic populations are regarded as prime targets. Richard Pipes, the father of Daniel Pipes, takes over the leadership of the NWG in 1981. Pipes predicts that with the right encouragement Soviet Muslims will "explode into genocidal fury" against Moscow. According to Richard Cottam, a former CIA official who advised the Carter administration at the time, after the fall of the Shah of Iran in 1978, Brzezinski favored a "de facto alliance with the forces of Islamic resurgence, and with the Republic of Iran." [Dreyfuss, 2005, pp. 241, 251 - 256]

'November 1978-February 1979: Some US Officials Want to Support Radical Muslims to Contain Soviet Union'

State Department official Henry Precht will later recall that Brzezinski had the idea "that Islamic forces could be used against the Soviet Union. The theory was, there was an arc of crisis, and so an arc of Islam could be mobilized to contain the Soviets." [Scott, 2007, pp. 67] In November 1978, President Carter appointed George Ball head of a special White House Iran task force under Brzezinski. Ball recommends the US should drop support for the Shah of Iran and support the radical Islamist opposition of Ayatollah Khomeini. This idea is based on ideas from British Islamic expert Dr. Bernard Lewis, who advocates the balkanization of the entire Muslim Near East along tribal and religious lines. The chaos would spread in what he also calls an "arc of crisis" and ultimately destabilize the Muslim regions of the Soviet Union

aleksandar , 04 February 2018 at 04:41 AM
David,

About relation Steele-MI6, well, you never leave your IS. Or to put it in another way, you are never out of the scope of your past IS.

Fred said in reply to Babak Makkinejad... , 04 February 2018 at 08:40 AM
Babak,

"they got US to bail them out during WWII" And how would things have worked out had we not done so?

Fred , 04 February 2018 at 08:46 AM
David,

"There is reason to suspect that some former and very likely current employees of the FBI have been colluding with elements in other American and British intelligence agencies, in particular the CIA and MI6, in support of an extremely ambitious foreign policy agenda for a very long time."

Yes, that is what appears to be just what is coming to light. I wonder just what position Trey Gowdy is going to have since he won't be running for re-election. The rage from the left is palpable. I'm sure the next outraged guy on the left will know how to shoot straighter than the ones who shot up Congressman Scalise or the concert goers at Mandalay Bay.

Anna said in reply to SmoothieX12 ... , 04 February 2018 at 08:48 AM
"They are wrong, since most of them didn't read the playbook correctly to start with."
-- If they have read the important books at all... The ongoing scandal has been revealing a stunning incompetence of the "deciders." Too often they look comical, ridiculous, undignified. This is dangerous, considering their power.
turcopolier , 04 February 2018 at 08:54 AM
Anna

The powerful are often remarkably ignorant. pl

Babak Makkinejad -> Fred... , 04 February 2018 at 10:08 AM
England preferred NAZI Germany to USSR, this is well known. As to what would have happened, the outcome of the war, in my opinion, did not depend on US participation in the European Theatre. All of Europe would have become USSR satellite or joined USSR.
jonst said in reply to Babak Makkinejad... , 04 February 2018 at 11:53 AM
"unsentimental empirical people"? Absolutely disagree with you. Now the Iranians, they strike me as a singularity unsentimental people. Just general impressions, mind you.
Kooshy said in reply to catherine... , 04 February 2018 at 12:06 PM
Yes, US was the first country to proudly deliver Manpads to be used by "rebels" (Mojahadin later Taleban) against USSR in Afghanistan back in 80s. And, as per the architect of support for the rebels (Zbigniew Brzezinski) very proud of it with no regret. With that in mind, I don't see how western politicians, the western governments and their related proxy war planers, will be regretting, even sadden, once god forbid we see passenger planes with loved ones are shot down taking off or landing at various western airports and other places around the word. Just like how superficialy with crocodile tears in their eyes they acted in aftermath of the terrorist events in various western cities in this past 16 years. Gods knows what will happens to us if the opposite side start to supply his own proxies with lethal anti air weapons. "Proudly", I don't think anybody in west cares or will regret of such an escalation.
Phodges said in reply to turcopolier ... , 04 February 2018 at 12:23 PM
Sir

It seems we are being defeated by Cicero's enemy within. Zion is achieving what no one could hope to achieve by force of arms.

David Habakkuk -> catherine... , 04 February 2018 at 01:17 PM
catherine,

In response to comment 5.

I think it likely that what Meier produces is only a 'limited hangout', and am hoping that when the book arrives it will contain more pointers.

It is important to be clear that one is often dealing with people playing very complicated double games.

An interesting document is the 'Petition for Writ of Habeus Corpus' made on behalf of Khodorkovsky's close associate Alexander Konanykhin back in 1997,when the Immigration and Naturalization Service were – apparently at least – cooperating with Russian attempts to get hold of him. An extract:

'During the immigration hearing FBI SA Robert Levinson, an INS witness, confirmed that in 1992 Petitioner was kidnapped and afterwards pursued by assassins of the Solntsevskaya organized criminal group. This organized criminal group is reportedly the largest and the most influential organized criminal group in Russia, and operates internationally.'

(See http://defiancethebook.com/legal/habeas/petition.htm .)

Note the similarities between the 'StratCom' that Khonanykin and his associates were producing in the 'Nineties, and that which Simpson and his associates have been producing two decades later.

Another useful example is provided by a 2004 item in the 'New American Magazine', reproduced on Konanykhin's website:

'One of those who testified on behalf of Konanykhine was KGB defector Yuri Shvets, who declared: "I have a firsthand knowledge on similar operations conducted by the KGB." Konanykhine had brought trouble on himself, Shvets continued, when he "started bringing charges against people who were involved with him in setting up and running commercial enterprises. They were KGB people secretly smuggling from Russia hundreds of millions of dollars . This is [a] serious case, and I know that KGB ... desperately wants to win this case, and everybody who won't step to their side would face problems."'

(See http://konanykhin.com/news/the-konanykhine-case.html .)

So – 'first hand knowledge', from a Ukrainian nationalist – look at what the Chalupas have been doing, it seems not much has changed.

For a rather different perspective on what Konanykhin had actually been up to, from someone in whose honesty – if not always judgement – I have complete confidence, see the testimony of Karon von Gerhke-Thompson to the House Committee on Banking and Financial Services hearings on Russian Money Laundering. In this, she described how she had been approached by him in 1993:

'"Konanykhine alleged that Menatep Bank controlled $1.7bn [Ł1bn] in assets and investment portfolios of Russia's most prominent political and social elite," she recalled. She said he wanted to move the bank's assets off shore and asked her to help buy foreign passports for its "very, very special clients".

'In her testimony to the committee Ms Von Gerhke-Thompson said she informed the CIA of the deal, and the agency told her that it believed Mr Konanykhine and Mr Khodorkovsky "were engaged in an elaborate money laundering scheme to launder billions of dollars stolen by members of the KGB and high-level government officials".

(For a 'Guardian report, see https://www.theguardian.com/world/1999/sep/23/julianborger ; for the actual testimony, see http://archives-financialservices.house.gov/banking/92299ger.pdf .)

Coming back to Steele's 'StratCom', in July 2008, an item appeared on the 'Newnight' programme of the BBC – which some of us think should by then have been rechristened the 'Berezovsky Broadcasting Corporation' – in which the introduction by the presenter, Jeremy Paxman, read as follows:

'Good evening. The New Russian President, Dmitri Medvedev, was all smiles and warm words when he met Gordon Brown today. He said he was keen to resolve all outstanding difficulties between the two countries. Yada yada yada. Gordon Brown smiled, but he must know what Newsnight can now reveal: that MI5 believes the Russian state was involved in the murder of Alexander Litvinenko by radioactive poisoning. They also believe that without their intervention another London-based Russian, Boris Berezovsky, would have been murdered. Our diplomatic editor, Mark Urban, has this exclusive report.'

(For the transcript presented in evidence to Owen's Inquiry, see http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090333/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/ ">https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/">http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090333/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/ )

When Urban repeated the claims on his blog, there was a positive eruption from someone using the name 'timelythoughts', about the activities of someone she referred to as 'Berezovsky's disinformation specialist' – when I came across this later, it was immediately clear to me that she was Karon von Gerhke, and he was Shvets.

(For the first part of the exchanges of comments, the second apparently having become unavailable, see http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/newsnight/markurban/2008/07/litvinenko_killing_had_state_i.html )

She then described a visit by Scaramella to Washington, details of which had already been unearthed by my Italian collaborator, David Loepp. Her claim to have e-mails from Shvets, from the time immediately prior to Litvinenko's death, directly contradicting the testimony he had given, fitted with other evidence I had already unearthed.

Later, we exchanged e-mails over a quite protracted period, and a large amount of material that came into my possession as a result was submitted by me to the Inquest team, with some of it being used in posts on the 'European Tribune' site.

What I never used publicly, because I could only partially corroborate it from the material she provided, was an extraordinary claim about Shvets:

'He was responsible for bringing in a Kremlin initiative that was walked Vice President Cheney's office on a US government quid pro quo with the Kremlin FSB SVR involving the arrest of Mikhail Khodorkovsky – a cease and desist on allegations of a politically motivated arrest of Khodorkovsky, violations of rules of law and calls from Russia's expulsion from the G 8 in exchange for favorable posturing of U.S. oil companies on Gazprom's Shtokman project and intelligence on weapon sales during the Yeltsin era to Iraq, Iran and Syria, all documented in reports I submitted to the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and MI6.

'Berezovsky's DS could not be on both sides on that isle. His Kremlin FSB SVR sources had been vetted by the CIA and by the National Security Council. They proved to be as represented. As we would later learn, however, he was on Berezovsky's payroll at same time. The FSB SVR general he was coordinating the Kremlin initiative through was S. R. Subbotin, the same FSB SVR general who was investigating Berezovsky's money laundering operations in Switzerland during the same timeframe. His FSB SVR sources surrounding Putin were higher than any Lugovoy could have ever hoped to affiliate with.

'R. James Woolsey (former CIA DCI), Marshall Miller (former law partner of the late CIA DCI William Colby), who I coordinated the Kremlin initiative through that Berezovsky's DS had brought in were shocked to learn that he was affiliated with Berezovsky and Litvinenko. He was in Berezovsky's inner circle and engaged in vetting Russian business with Litvinenko. He operated Berezovsky's Ukraine website, editing and dubbing the now infamous Kuchma tapes throughout the lead up to the elections in the Ukraine. Berezovsky contributed $41 million to Viktor Yushchenko's campaign, which he used in an attempt to force Yushchenko to reunite with Julia Tymoschenko. It failed but would succeed later after Berezovsky orchestrated a public relations initiative through Alan Goldfarb in the U.S. on behalf of Tymoschenko.'

Having got to know Karon von Gerhke quite well, and also been able to corroborate a great deal of what she told me about many things, and discussed these matters with her, it is absolutely clear to me that she was neither fabricating nor fantasising. What later became apparent, both to her and to me, was that in the 'double game' that Shvets was playing, he had succeeded in fooling her as to the side for which he was working.

It seems likely however that the reason Shvets could do what he did was that quite precisely that many high-up people in the Kremlin and elsewhere were playing a 'double game.' In this, Karon von Gerhke's propensity for indiscretion – of which I, like others, was both beneficiary and victim – could be useful.

An exercise in 'positioning', which could be used to disguise the fact that Shvets was indeed 'Berezovsky's disinformation specialist', could be used to make it appear that 'intelligence on weapon sales during the Yeltsin era to Iraq, Iran and Syria' was actually credible.

This could have been used to try to rescue Cheney, Bush and their associates from the mess they had got into as a result of the failure of the invasion to provide any evidence whatsoever supporting the case which had been made for it. It could also have been used to provide the kind of materials justifying military action against Iran for which Levinson and Jablonski were looking, and for similar action against Syria.

Among reasons for bringing this up now is that we need to make sense of the paradox that Simpson – clearly in collusion with Steele – was using Mogilevich and the 'Solnsetskaya Bratva' both against Manafort and Trump and against Browder.

There are various possible explanations for this. I do not want to succumb to my instinctive prejudice that this may have been another piece of 'positioning', similar to what I think was being done with Shvets, but the hypothesis needs to be considered.

A more general point is that people in Washington and London need to 'wise up' to the kind of world with which they are dealing. This could be done quite enjoyably: reading some of Dashiell Hammett's fictions of the United States in the Prohibition era, or indeed buying DVDs of some of the classics of 'film noir', like 'Out of the Past' (in its British release, 'Build My Gallows High') might be a start.

Very much of the coverage of affairs in the post-Soviet space since 1991 has read rather as though a Dashiell Hammett story had been rewritten by someone specialising in sentimental children's, or romantic, fiction (although, come to think of it, that is really what Brigid O'Shaughnessy does in 'The Maltese Falcon.')

The testimony of Glenn Simpson seems a case in point. The sickly sentimentality of these people does, rather often, make one feel as though one wanted to throw up.

Thomas , 04 February 2018 at 01:24 PM
"They act and believe that they are Olympians. You have to wait for them to age and die before any substantive change in Fortress West's posture; say 2040.}

No, three years at tops and could be much sooner if dimes starting dropping by exposed people that don't want to take the fall for their superiors whom they always detested. One possible thing to get the process started sooner is if the recent Russian Intelligence delegation to DC that Smoothie mentions on another thread gave the current administration, as a diplomatic courtesy of course, the audio recordings of Madame Sectary Nuland's infamous mental meltdown at Kaliningrad. No telling what beans were spilled in her moment of panic, but I am willing to bet key names were dropped. Either way the time is coming.

SmoothieX12 -> Anna... , 04 February 2018 at 01:39 PM
- If they have read the important books at all... The ongoing scandal has been revealing a stunning incompetence of the "deciders." Too often they look comical, ridiculous, undignified. This is dangerous, considering their power.

My coming book is precisely about that. Especially, once American policy-makers who saw and experienced war (Ike, George Marshall's generation) departed things started to roll down hill with Reagan bringing on board a whole collection of neocons.

Unawareness is always dangerous, a complete blackout in relations between two nuclear powers is more than dangerous--it is completely reckless. Again, the way CW 1.0 is perceived in the current US "elites" it becomes extremely tempting to repeat it. Electing Hillary was another step in unleashing CW 2.0 by people who have no understanding of what they were doing.

Obama started crushing US-Russian relations before any campaigns were launched and before Trump was even seriously considered a GOP nominee, let alone a real contender. New confrontation hinged on HRC being elected. In fact, she was one of the major driving forces behind a serious of geopolitical anti-Russian moves. Visceral Russo-phobia became a feature in HRC campaign long before any Steele's Dossier. This was a program.

james said in reply to David Habakkuk ... , 04 February 2018 at 03:01 PM
there seems to be no shortage of money for these blatant propaganda exercises..
Babak Makkinejad -> SmoothieX12 ... , 04 February 2018 at 04:14 PM
I think the failure of Deciders is nothing new - Fath Ali Shah attacking Russia, or the abject failure of the Deciders in 1914. Europe is still not where she was in 1890.
begob , 04 February 2018 at 05:20 PM
I read the post and responses early on, so forgive me if this point has been addressed in the meantime. If the memo information on non-disclosure of material evidence to the warrant issuing court is accurate, as soon as that information came to the attention of the authorities (clearly some time ago) there was a duty on them (including the judge(s) who issued the warrants) to have the matter brought back before the court toot sweet. If that had happened it would surely be in the public domain, so on the assumption the prosecutors and maybe even the judge didn't see the need to review the matter, even purely on a contempt/ethics basis, the memo information only seems convincing if the FISA system is a total sham. I really doubt that.
kooshy said in reply to SmoothieX12 ... , 04 February 2018 at 06:20 PM
IMO, the bigger problem for American not shying away from wars, or being silent about them , is when your home, your mom and dad' home, the town you grew up in, are immune and away from the war.

The security and safety of the two oceans, encourages or at least, in an all volunteer military makes it a secondary problem for regular people, to worry about. As I remember that wasn't the case at the end of VN war when i first landed here. At that time even though the war was on the other side of the planet and away from homeland, still people, especially young ones in colleges were paying more attention to the cost of war.

spy killer , 04 February 2018 at 06:55 PM
Diana West has uncovered some interesting "Red Threads" (6 part article at dianawest-dot-net) on all the Fusion GPS folks. Seems ole Russian speaking Nellie Ohr got herself a ham radio license recently. Wonder why she would suddenly need one of those? They are all Marxists with potential connections back to Russia.
English Outsider -> Fatima Manoubia... , 05 February 2018 at 07:23 AM
Been there. I am also a latecomer to SST. You have to read the back numbers. How? My IT expertise dates from the dawn of the internet and was lamentable then but I find Wayback sometimes allows easier searches than the SST search engine. A straight search on google also allows searches with more than one term. This link -

https://twitter.com/pat_lang

- gets you to a chronological list and for recent material is sometimes quicker than fiddling around with search engines. "Categories" on the RH side is useful but then you don't get some very informative comments that cross-refer.

If those sadly elementary procedures fail resort to the nearest infant. There's a blur of fingers on the keyboard and what you want then usually appears. Never ask them how they did it. They get so fed up when you ask them to explain it again.

"Who is David Habakkuk?" That's a quantum computer sited, from internal evidence you pick up from time to time, somewhere in the Greater London area. Cross references like you wouldn't believe and over several fields, so maybe he's two quantum computers.

The "Borg"?. Try Wittgenstein. Likely a prog but you can't be choosy these days. Early on in "Philosophical Investigations" (hope I get this right) he discusses the problem of how you can view as an entity something that has ill-defined or overlapping boundaries. The "Borg" is that "you know it when you see it" sort of thing. A great merit of this site is that the owner and many of the contributors know it from inside.

In general you may regard your new found site as a microcosm of the great battle that is raging in the West. It's a battle between the (probably apocryphal but adequately stated) Roveian view of reality that regards truth as an adjunct to or as a by-product of ideology and Realpolitik and the objective view of reality as something that is damned difficult to get at, and sometimes impossible, but that has a truth in it somewhere that is independent of the views and convictions of the observer. It's a battle that's never going to be won but unless it tilts back closer to common sense it can certainly be lost and the West with it.

jonst said in reply to Babak Makkinejad... , 05 February 2018 at 08:11 AM
Clearly the Labor Party in the UK preferred the USSR to Nazi Germany. (cepting that short interlude where the Soviets signed the Agreement with Hitler, and the Left Organized Leadership all across Europe, for the most part, lined up with Hitler). But for the most part, Labor was Left.
Elements (the ones that won out in the end) of the Conservative Party loathed both Hitler and Stalin. An element of the Conservative Party was sympathetic, but only up to a certain point, with the Nazis. This ended in 1939, sept.

So I don't think it fair, or accurate, to say 'England prefered the Nazis....and even if it not those things, it certainly not "well known", except to the people who have used the false premise to butter their wounds from supporting Stalin in his Pact with Hitler. Or are inclined to bash the British in general.

Babak Makkinejad -> jonst... , 05 February 2018 at 08:29 AM
All right, perhaps I should have said "The English Government". Google "Litvinov", you may discover how the English Government pushed Stalin to make a deal with Hitler to buy USSR time.
Sid Finster said in reply to Jack... , 05 February 2018 at 10:26 AM
Witness the infamous State Department protest memo calling for more war on Syria.

The State Department employees that signed that memo were sure that HRC would win and that their diligent work in pushing the Deep State agenda would sure be rewarded.

Since entering office, Trump appears to have taken the line that if he gives the Deep State everything it demands, he will be allowed to remain in office, even if he is not allowed to remain in power.

Sid Finster said in reply to David Habakkuk ... , 05 February 2018 at 10:31 AM
Explain Marshall Miller's role in this, please. He is someone I know quite well. I also know one of the Chalupas.
begob said in reply to jonst... , 05 February 2018 at 10:56 AM
jonst That's broadly accurate, but specifically Attlee brought the motion of no confidence in Chamberlain, which the conservative appeasers won but which led to Churchill's opportunity. Attlee was essential in cabinet to Churchill's resistance after the retreat of the BEF.
turcopolier , 05 February 2018 at 11:18 AM
FM
What are you doing here? You said you dislike the military. Are you really in the Spanish Basque country? Bilbao maybe? break - David Habakkuk is a private scholar of the Litvinenko murder and Soviet/Russian politics and intelligence affairs. His surname comes from Wales where in the 18th (?) Century the ancestral village were all "chapel" and changed their surnames to Old Testament names. His father was master of one of the Cambridge colleges and David is himself a graduate of Cambridge. pl
Babak Makkinejad -> Fatima Manoubia... , 05 February 2018 at 11:19 AM
Yes, I am Iranian. All "Babak"s are Iranians - except some obscure ones that are Rus - Babakov.
Anna , 05 February 2018 at 02:07 PM
The hard, blinding truth: https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2018/02/05/will-conspiracy-trump-american-democracy-go-unpunished/
"In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations." – Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
Thomas said in reply to turcopolier ... , 05 February 2018 at 02:08 PM
Colonel,

This troll showed up recently at b's place doing the same accusations. There is group that is running sacred and pulling out all the stops in "info ops" side of the spectrum. The damn fools don't or, most probably, won't get thru their thick heads and even thicker hearts that it is a failed strategy that turns bystanders into their opponents.

Richardstevenhack , 05 February 2018 at 02:36 PM
Here for your edification is the definitive analysis of the GOP memo by Alexander Mercouris over at The Duran.

And it is a masterpriece - and quite long, possibly his longest analysis of anything so far. He buries the counterarguments being passed around by the Democratic opposition and the anti-Trump media.

Mercouris writes on legal affairs alongside his foreign policy stuff and he writes with a lawyer's precision. And in this article he points out that the GOP memo is writter as a legal document - probably by Trey Gowdy - with additional political insertions by Nunes. So it should properly be referred to as the "GOP memo" or the "Gowdy memo", not the Nunes memo."

Why this is important is that the GOP memo is basically written as a defense lawyer would in contesting a case -- this case being the FISA warrant application. Which means its orientation is proving failure to disclose relevant and material information to the FISA court and in some cases rising to the point of contempt of court.

Seriously, read this! The whole thing!

Rampant abuse and possible contempt of Court: what you need to know about the GOP memo
http://theduran.com/rampant-abuse-contempt-court-analysis-gop-memorandum/

blue peacock , 05 February 2018 at 03:25 PM
Sen Grassley releases memo heavily redacted by DOJ/FBI.

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-02-05/grassley-graham-blast-fbi-censoring-memo-calling-criminal-probe-trump-dossier

"Seeking transparency and cooperation should not be this challenging," Grassley said in a statement after posting a heavily redacted version of the criminal referral that he and GOP Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina sent to the Justice Department last month. " The government should not be blotting out information that it admits isn't secret. "

I suppose DOJ/FBI believe that by obstructing, stalling and obfuscating they can buy time and that the Republicans in Congress will get tired of the games and go home. This seems like a pretty straightforward memo, highlighting the discrepancy between Steele's court filings and the FBI's version of Steele's discussions with them. Grassley is pointing out that either Steele or the FBI is lying.

What is interesting is the difference in process and ability between the House & Senate. The House can release their memos on its own, even if not declassified by the Executive, whereas the Senate requires the Executive to declassify it's memos that are based on classified documents.

turcopolier , 05 February 2018 at 04:38 PM
FM

We have not had a self declared communist on SST before although LeaNder in her youth may have come close to that exalted status. You might want to read the wiki on me and the CV I have posted on the blog to avoid tedious accusations of this or that. I am thought by some to have some knowledge of the ME so please do not try to lecture me about how much you love the Arabs. I speak their language and have lived with them for a long time. There are people who write to SST who are pro-Trump and some who are anti-Trump. I seek a mixture of views so long as personal insult and invective are eschewed. Personally, I do not belong to a political party and would describe myself as an original intent, strict constructionist.

Trump is the constitutionally and legally elected president of the United States. Your descriptors with regard to him are, in my opinion, only plausible if seen from the point of view of various kinds of leftist including Marxist-Leninists like you. You sound very smug and self-satisfied but we will see if you can have an open mind at all. pl

Kooshy said in reply to Babak Makkinejad... , 05 February 2018 at 04:46 PM
Found him, Ali Babacan XVPM, XFM and M of finance. Yes god forbid, if he is a decendent of Ardisher Babakan and another claimant to Iranian throne, which CIA and Soros can jump on.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ali_Babacan MBA from Northeestern
blue peacock , 05 February 2018 at 04:55 PM
...would describe myself as an original intent, strict constructionist.

Aye. Aye. Sir!

+1

That is why some of us believe the Patriot Act and FISA are both unpatriotic and unconstitutional. SCOTUS disagrees with the few of us.

Babak Makkinejad -> Fatima Manoubia... , 05 February 2018 at 05:03 PM
I do not believe Trump is a misogynists - he stated publicly that he likes beautiful women. I also do not think he is a racist. I think he is the first US leader in many decades who has been willing to publicly talk about US problems. For most other US politicians - they largely live in "the best of all possible worlds".
English Outsider , 05 February 2018 at 06:31 PM
Colonel - sincere apologies if my comment above disrupted the discussion on a fascinating article.

David Habakkuk - I should say that "Quantum Computer" referred solely to the ability to gather and collate great amounts of material. It's an ability I admire. On Steele, you are among other things setting out something that is unfamiliar to me though not to most others here, I imagine, and that is the milieu in which he is or was working as a UK Intelligence operative. That you have also done in previous articles; it doesn't seem to be a particularly savoury milieu. As far as Steele's US activities are concerned, from you I'm not getting the picture of a lone operative, all ties with MI6 neatly severed, working solo in the States on some chance assignment in 2016. I'm getting the picture of someone still very much in the swim and selected because of that.

The only problem with that second picture is the dossier, or the 30% or so of it - what Comey, I think it was, described as "salacious and unverified". Surely that's got to be amateur night. Not something that a practised professional working with other professionals would put his hand to. Does that not support the picture of an ex-operative who's gone off the rails and is fumbling around unsupervised?

The Steele affair touched a nerve. One is always I suppose aware that IC professionals are getting up to all sorts and it doesn't seem improbable that "all sorts" includes political stuff and smear campaigns. But it's not heaps of corpses in Syria or farm boys being sent to certain death in the Ukraine. And even within the UK Intelligence Community and their contractors or whatever they're called, compared with what our IC people have done in the ME or compared with what one fears Hamish de Bretton Gordon might have got himself involved in, Christopher Steele's just a choirboy. Nevertheless there's something deeply repellent about what he did. Whatever your view of Trump there he was, newly elected, obviously wanting to make a go of it, and already faced with difficulties. Then some chancer throws "Golden Showers" in his face and makes his position, not maybe for the insiders but for the general public, that bit more untenable.

So from a UK perspective the question of whether Steele was acting in concert with others in the UK becomes important. If he was truly working solo then that from a UK point of view is regrettable but one of those things. In that case MI6 would just have to tighten up its controls on what ex-operatives get up to, put out the appropriate disclaimers, and that's the end of it as far as the UK is concerned. But if Golden Showers and the rest of it was a "Welcome Mr President" from UK IC professionals as a group then those professionals should be hung drawn and quartered together with whoever set them on.

I've read your article several times now and apart from the fact that much of what you pull together isn't material I'm up on, it doesn't seem to me that you're definitely coming to one conclusion or the other. There are many more facts to come out so perhaps this question is premature, but do you think Steele was acting in concert with others in the UK or was he, at least as far as the UK is concerned, working solo?

kooshy , 05 February 2018 at 07:49 PM
Most Iranian females Named Fatima/ Fatimah after prophet' daughter, call themselves Fati, and if they are of aristocrat type, they are called Bibi Fati Khanam, which is honorable lady Fati and if they are westernized they become Fay or Fifi.
turcopolier , 05 February 2018 at 07:59 PM
EO

Much of your commentary seems directed to David Habakkuk and PT rather than I. I don't think the FBI would have started to pay him until he left UK service. pl

English Outsider , 06 February 2018 at 05:10 AM
Colonel - Further apologies - I should have submitted comment 79 as two items.

Yes, the question about Steele was in response to DH's article. The UK side of the affair is I suppose only a small part of the question you and your Committee are examining but it's a dubious part however one looks at it. Although it's early days yet I was hoping DH, with his encyclopaedic knowledge of the UK intelligence scene, might feel able to cast more light on that UK side.

English Outsider -> Cortes... , 06 February 2018 at 05:53 AM
Cortes - " ... where, exactly, do you expect the great public to look beyond the initial scabrously defamatory storytelling about the "golden showers"? "

I don't think one can expect the public, at least in the UK, to look very far beyond the initial scandal. The investigations and enquiries presently under way in the US are complex and are taking place in a different system. This member of the UK public wouldn't be able to give you a coherent account of those enquiries and I doubt many of my fellows could.

So we have to take on trust, most of us, what we're told. As far as I can tell the underlying theme from the BBC and the media is generally that Trump is subverting the American Justice system in order to ensure his own misdemeanours aren't investigated.

Some of us take that as gospel. Others of us assume that the politicians and the media are untrustworthy and ignore them. I doubt many of us go into much more detail than that. Therefore the original story will stick in our minds.

But for some in the UK there are questions in there as well. How come the UK got mixed up in all this? How much did the UK get mixed up in it?

David Habakkuk -> Sid Finster... , 06 February 2018 at 06:19 AM
Sid Finster,

In response to comment 53.

When I belatedly started looking at the Litvinenko mystery, as a result of a strange email provoked by comments of mine on SST which arrived in my inbox in March 2007 from someone who turned out to be a key protagonist, it was rather obvious that improvised and chaotic 'StratCom' operations had been put into place on both the Russian and British sides to cover up what had happened.

A particular interesting feature of those on the British side – in which we now know Christopher Steele must have played a leading role – were the bizarre gyrations those responsible were going through trying to explain away the extraordinary fact that when he had broken the story of his poisoning, Litvinenko had pointed the finger of suspicion at his Italian associate Mario Scaramella.

When I started delving, I came across some very interesting pieces on Scaramella and related matters posted on the 'European Tribune' website by a Rome-based blogger using the name 'de Gondi' in the period after the story broke.

His actual name is David Loepp, by profession he is an artisan jeweller specialising in ancient and traditional goldsmith techniques, and I already knew and respected his work from his contributions to the transnational internet investigation into the Niger uranium forgeries – an earlier MI6 clusterf**ck.

So in May 2008 I posted a longish piece on that site, setting out the problems with the evidence about the Litvinenko case as I saw them, in the hope of reactivating his interest. This paid off in spades, when he linked to, and translated a key extract from, the request from Italian prosecutors to use wiretaps of conversations with Senator Paolo Guzzanti in connection with their prosecution of Scaramella for 'aggravated calumny.'

The request, which up to not so long ago was freely available on the website of the Italian Senate, was denied, but the extensive summaries of the transcripts provided a lot of material.

(This initial post by me, and later posts by me on that site, are at http://www.eurotrib.com/user/uid:1857/diary. Three posts David Loepp and I produced jointly in December 2012, which have a lot on Scaramella and Shvets, are on his page there, at http://www.eurotrib.com/user/de%20Gondi/diary .)

The extract from the wiretap request which David Loepp posted, which like Litvinenko's letter containing the claims he and Yuri Shvets had concocted about Putin using Mogilevich to attempt to supply Al Qaeda with a 'mini nuclear bomb' is dated 1 December 2005, contains key pointers to the conspiracy. It concludes:

'A passage on Simon Moghilevic and an agreement between the camorra to search for nuclear weapons lost during the Cold War to be consigned to Bin Laden, a revelation made by the Israeli. According to Scaramella the circle closes: camorra, Moghilevic- Russian mafia- services- nuclear bombs in Naples.'

Subsequent conversations make clear that Scaramella left on 6 December 2005 for Washington, on a trip where he was to meet Shvets. The summary of a report on this to Guzzanti reads:

'12) conversation that took place on number [omissis] on December 18, 2005, at 9:41:51 n. 1426, containing explicit references to the authenticity of the declarations of Alexander Litvinenko acquired by Scaramella, to the trustworthiness of the affirmations made by Scaramella in his reports to the commission and to the meetings Scaramella had with Talik after having denounced them [presumably Talik and his alleged accomplices]. (They can talk with HEIMS thanks to the help of MILLER. SHVEZ says that he had been a companion of CARLOS at the academy; SHVEZ has already made declarations and is willing to continue collaboration. Guzzanti warns that a document in Russian arrived in commission in which the name of SCARAMELLA appears several times, these [sic] say that directives to the contrary had been given to Litvinenko. Scaramella says that he went to the meeting with TALIK in the company of two treasury [police] and a cop, Talik spoke of a person from the Ukrainian GRU who would be willing to talk and a strange Chechen ring in Naples. Assassination attempt against the pope, CASAROLI was a Soviet agent.)'

The summary of a later conversation also refers to 'MILLER':

'conversation that took place on number [omissis] on January 13, 2006, at 11:22:11 n. 2287, containing references to Scaramella's sources in relation to facts referred in the Commission, the means by which they were obtained by Scaramella from declarations made abroad, the role of Litvinenko, also on the occasion of declarations made by third parties and the credibility of the news and theses given by Scaramella to the commission (Scaramella reads a text in English on the relation between the KGB and PRODI. Guzzanti asks if its credibility can be confirmed and if the taped declarations can be backed up; Scaramella answers that there were two testimonies, Lou Palumbo and Alexander (Litvinenko), and that the registration made in London at the beginning of the assignment [Scaramella's?] had been authenticated by a certain BAKER of the FBI. As he translates the text from English, Scaramella notes that the person testifying does not say he knows Prodi but only that he thinks that Prodi ...; all those who worked for the person testifying in Scandinavia said that Prodi was "theirs." The affair in Rimini, Bielli is preparing the battle in Rimini. Meetings with MILLER for the three things that are needed. Polemic about Pollari over the pressure exerted on Gordievski.)'

In the exchanges on my May 2008 post, I mentioned and linked to some extraordinary comments on a crucial article by Edward Jay Epstein, in which Karon von Gerhke claimed that his sceptical account fitted with what her contacts in the British investigation had told her. When that July I came across her equally extraordinary claims in response to the BBC's Mark Urban piece of stenography – which Steele may also have had a hand in organising – I found she was referring to precisely that visit to Washington by Scaramella which had been described in the wiretap request.

As you can perhaps imagine, the fact that 'Miller' had featured in the conversations with Guzzanti both as a key contact, who could introduce Scaramella to Aldrich Ames (which is who 'Heims' clearly is), and with whom there had been meetings about 'the three things that are needed' made me inclined to take seriously what Karon von Gerhke said about his role.

In December 2008, I put up another post on 'European Tribune', putting together the material from David Loepp and that from Karon von Gerhke – but not discussing the references to 'Miller.' As I had hoped, this led to her getting in touch.

Among the material with which she supplied me, which I in turn supplied to the Solicitor to the Inquest, were covers of faxes to John Rizzo, then Acting General Counsel of the CIA. From a fax dated 23 October 2005.

'John: See attached email to Chuck Patrizia. Berezovsky alleges he is in possession of a copy of a classified file given to the CIA by Russia's FSB, which he further alleges the CIA disseminated to British, French, Italian and Israeli intelligence agencies implicating him in business associations with the Mafia and to ties with terrorist organizations. Yuri Shvets was authorised/directed by Berezovsky to raise the issue with Bud McFarlane scheduled for Thursday. McFarlane is unaware the issue will be raised with him.'

From a fax dated 7 November 2005:

'John: I am attaching an email exchange between Yuri Shvets and me re: 1) article he published on his Ukraine website on alleged sale of nuclear choke to Iran, which I reproached him on as having been planted by Berezovsky and 2 the alleged FSB/CIA document file that Berezovsky obtained from Scaramella, which Yuri acknowledges in his e-mail to me. Like extracting wisdom teeth to get him to put anything on paper, especially in an e-mail! [NAME REDACTED BY ME – DH] is the source McFarlane referred Yuri to re: Berezovsky's visa issue. She proposed meeting Berezovsky in London. Alleged it would take a year to clear up USG issues and even then could not guarantee him a visa. She too has access to USG intelligence on Berezovsky. Open book.'

From a fax dated 5 December 2005:

'John. From Mario Scaramella to Yuri Shvets to my ears, the DOJ has authorised Mario Scaramella to interview Aldrich Ames with regard to members of the Italian Intelligence Service agent recruited by Ames for the KGB. Scaramella, as you may recall, is who gave Boris Berezovsky's aide, a former FSB Colonel [LITVINENKO – DH], that alleged document number to the FSB file that the CIA disseminated on Berezovsky – a file that Bud McFarlane's "Madam Visa" [NAME REDACTED BY ME – DH] is alleged is totting off to London for a meeting with Berezovsky, who has agreed to retain her re: his visa issue. Quid pro quo's with Berezovsky and Scaramella on the CIA agent currently facing kidnapping charges for the rendition of the Muslim cleric? Scott Armstrong has a most telling file on Scaramella. Not a single redeeming quality.'

In the course of very extensive exchanges with Karon von Gerhke subsequently, we had some rather acute disagreements. It was unfortunate that her filing was a shambles – a crucial hard disk failed without a backup, and the 'hard copies' appeared to be in a chaotic state.

However, the only occasion when I can recall having reason to believe that was deliberately lying to me was when David Loepp unearthed a cache of documentation including the full Italian text of the letter from Litvinenko containing the 'StratCom' designed to suggest that Putin had attempted to supply a 'mini nuclear bomb' to Al Qaeda. Having been asked to keep this between ourselves for the time being, Karon insisted on immediately sending it to her contacts in Counter Terrorism Command, and then produced bogus justifications.

Time and again, moreover, I found that I could confirm statements that she made – see for example the two posts I put up on the legal battles following the death in February 2008 of Berezovsky's long-term partner Arkadi 'Badri' Patarkatsishvili in June and July 2009, which were based on careful corroboration of what she told me.

(I should also say that I acquired the greatest respect for her courage.)

And while Owen and his team suppressed all the evidence from her, and almost all of that from David Loepp, which I had I provided to them, the dossier about Berezovsky is described in a statement made by Litvinenko in Tel Aviv in April 2006, presented in evidence in the Inquiry.

(See http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090333/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/evidence ">https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/evidence">http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090333/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/evidence .)

Other evidence, moreover, strongly inclines me to believe that there were overtures for a 'quid pro quo', purporting to come from Putin, but that this was a ruse orchestrated by Berezovsky.

Part of the purpose of this would almost certainly have been to supply probably bogus 'evidence' about arms sales in the Yeltsin years to Iraq, Iran and Syria. Moreover, I think there was an article on the second 'Fifth Element' site run by Shvets about the supposed sale of a nuclear 'choke' – whatever that is – to Iran.

The likelihood of the involvement of elements in the FBI in these shenanigans seems to quite high, given what has already emerged about the activities of Levinson. Also relevant may be the fact that the 'declaration' which was part of the attempt to frame Romano Prodi was authenticated, in London, by 'a certain BAKER of the FBI.')

Babak Makkinejad -> David Habakkuk ... , 06 February 2018 at 09:40 AM
Thank you David Habakkuk. Truly sordid and deplorable. WWIII to be initiated on basis of lies.
Jack , 06 February 2018 at 12:06 PM
David

You may already know this but Steele was a no show in a UK court for a deposition on the libel suit.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2018/02/05/christopher-steele-is-no-show-in-london-court-in-civil-case-over-dossier.amp.html

Babak Makkinejad -> David Habakkuk ... , 06 February 2018 at 01:18 PM
I know something of spectroscopy.

The critical issue here is the provenance of the samples and not the sophistication of the techniques used in the analysis itself or its instrumentation.

The paragraph that you have quoted:

"To figure out signatures based on various synthetic routes and conditions, Chipuk says that the synthetic chemists on his team will make the same chemical threat agent as many as 2,000 times in an ..." reeks of intellectual intimidation - trying to brow-beat any skeptic by the size of one's instrument - as it were."

And then there is a little matter of confidence level in any of the analysis - such things are normally based on prior statistics - which did not and could not exist in this situation.

LeaNder , 07 February 2018 at 09:16 AM
David, it's no doubt interesting to watch how attention on Victor Ivanov in another deficient inquiry on the British Isles, was managed in that inquiry. If I may, since he pops up again in the Steele dossier. You take what's available? Is that all there is to know?

I know its hard to communicate basics if you are deeply into matters. Usually people prefer to opt out. It's getting way too complicated for them to follow. You made me understand this experience. But isn't this (fake) intelligence continuity "via" Yuri Svets what connects your, no harm meant I do understand your obsession with the case, with what we deal with now in the Steele Dossier? Again, one of the most central figures is Ivanov.

Of course later reports in the Steele Dossier go hand in hand with a larger public relations campaign. Creating reality? Irony alert: as informer/source I would by then know what the other side wants to hear.

By the way, babbling mode, I found your Tom Mangold transcription. It felt it wasn't there on the link you gave. I used the date, and other search terms. Maybe I am wrong. Haven't looked at what the judge ruled out of the collection. Yes, cozy session/setting.

According to Google search there are no other links then your articles here:
http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613093555/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/files/2015/04/HMG000513wb.pdf ">https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/files/2015/04/HMG000513wb.pdf">http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613093555/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/files/2015/04/HMG000513wb.pdf

**********

JAN RICHARD BĆRUG
The Collapsing Wall. Hybrid Journalism.
A Comparative Study of Newspapers and
Magazines in Eight Countries in Europe

Available online. Haven't read it yet, but journalism as hidden public relations transfer belt would be one of my minor obsessions. ...

Babak Makkinejad -> turcopolier ... , 07 February 2018 at 11:23 AM
I wonder too; their command of the English idiom is very au currant - noticed "opt in/opt out" reference? Too American.

They clearly are not native speakers of German.

LeaNder said in reply to kooshy... , 07 February 2018 at 12:30 PM
why California, Kooshy #18? California among other things left this verbal trace, since I once upon time thought a luggage storage in SF might be free/available now: this is my home, lady.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kish_Island#Economy

Tourists from many -- but not all -- foreign nations wishing to enter Kish Free Zone from legal ports are not required to obtain any visa prior to travel. For those travelers, upon-arrival travel permits are stamped valid for 14 days by Kish officials.

Who are the not all? Can we assume Britain is not one of those?

The German link is different. How about the Iranian?

or isn't this the Kish we are talking about?

LeaNder said in reply to LeaNder... , 07 February 2018 at 01:14 PM
correcting myself #94:

another Ivanov. I struggled with names (...) in Russian crime novels, admittedly. But that's long ago from times Russian crime and Russian money flows and rogues getting hold of its nuclear material surfaced more often in Europe. 90s

I see Sergei seems to share my interest in the literary genre:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Ivanov#Personal

[Feb 08, 2018] Try Googling Riggs Bank – a lot of interesting information emerges, on matters such as their involvement with Prince Bandar. So, what we are dealing with is a joint Anglo-American attempt to create a comprador oligarchy who could loot Russia s raw materials resources

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Not only large elements of the American and British intelligence services, but the 'Borgistas' in both countries, now including large elements of the academic/research apparatus and most of the MSM, really are joined at the hip. ..."
"... A relevant element of such collusion has to do with the creation of the Yeltsin-era Russian oligarchy. On this, a crucial source are interviews given by Christian Michel and Christopher Samuelson, who used to run a company called 'Valmet', to Catherine Belton, then with the 'Moscow Times', later with the 'Financial Times', in the days leading up to the conviction of Mikhail Khodorkovsky in May 2005. ..."
"... On the subject of the competence of MI6, what seems to me a total apposite judgement was provided by the man whom Steele and his associates framed over the death of Litvinenko, Andrei Lugovoi. ..."
"... 'Litvinenko used to say: They are total retards in the UK, they believe everything we are telling them about Russia.' ..."
"... Throughout life, I have repeatedly come across a game played on certain kinds of élite Westerners, which, in honor of Kipling, who gave brilliant depictions of it, I call 'fool the stupid Sahib.' Both people from other societies, and their own, often play this game, and the underlying mentality not infrequently involves a combination of a sense of inferiority and contempt for the gullibility of people who are thought of -- commonly with justice -- as not knowing how the world really works, and thus being open to manipulation if one tells them what they want to hear. ..."
"... Irrespective of whether Lugovoi was accurately reporting what Litvinenko said, however, a mass of 'open source' evidence testifies to the extreme credulity with which officials and journalists on both sides of the Atlantic treat claims made by members of the 'StratCom' groups created by the oligarchs whose initial training was done by Valmet. ..."
"... (One good example is provided by the way that Sir Robert Owen and his team took what the surviving members of the Berezovsky group told them on trust. Another is the extraordinary way MSM figures continue to claim made by Khodorkovsky and his associates seriously.) ..."
"... When I discover that John Sipher is a 'former member of the CIA's Clandestine Service', who also worked 'on Russian espionage issues overseas, and in support of FBI counterintelligence investigations domestically,' then his apologetics for Steele seem not only to suggest he may be another 'total retard' -- but to point towards how the Anglo-American collaboration actually worked. (See https://www.politico.eu/article/devin-nunes-donald-trump-the-smearing-of-christopher-steele/ .) ..."
"... Another characteristic of these 'retards' is that they seem unable to get their story straight. In his piece last September defending the dossier, Sipher wrote that 'While in London he worked as the personal handler of the Russian defector Alexander Litvinenko.' Apparently he didn't know that the 'party line' had changed -- that when Steele emerged from hiding in May, his mouthpiece, Luke Harding of the 'Guardian', had explained: 'As head of MI6's Russia desk, Steele led the inquiry into Litvinenko's polonium poisoning, quickly concluding that this was a Russian state plot. He did not meet Litvinenko and was not his case officer, friends said.' ..."
"... The whole situation with Russia, of which, be it her economy, history, military, culture etc., is not known to those people, is a monstrous empirical evidence of a complete professional inadequacy of most people populating this bubble. ..."
"... Most of those people are badly educated (I am not talking about worthless formal degrees they hold) and cultured. In dry scientific language it is called a "confirmation bias", in a simple human one it is called being ignorant snobs, that is why this IC-academic-political-media "environment" in case of Russia prefers openly anti-Russian "sources" because those "sources" reiterate to them what they want to hear to start with, thus Chalabi Moment is being continuously reproduced. ..."
Feb 08, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

David Habakkuk , 08 February 2018 at 09:57 AM

All,

A number of points.

1. Not only large elements of the American and British intelligence services, but the 'Borgistas' in both countries, now including large elements of the academic/research apparatus and most of the MSM, really are joined at the hip.

It is thus an open question how far it is useful to speak of British intelligence intervening in the American election, rather than the American section of the 'Borg' and their partners in crime 'across the pond' colluding in an attempt to mount such an intervention with a greater appearance of 'plausible deniability.'

2. A relevant element of such collusion has to do with the creation of the Yeltsin-era Russian oligarchy. On this, a crucial source are interviews given by Christian Michel and Christopher Samuelson, who used to run a company called 'Valmet', to Catherine Belton, then with the 'Moscow Times', later with the 'Financial Times', in the days leading up to the conviction of Mikhail Khodorkovsky in May 2005.

(See http://mikhail_khodorkovsky_society_two.blogspot.co.uk .)

This describes the education in 'Western banking practices' given to him and his Menatep associates by Michel and Samuelson, starting as early as 1989, and also their crucial involvement with Berezovsky.

We are told by Belton that: 'With the help of British government connections, Valmet had already built up a wealthy clientele that included the ruling family of Dubai.' As to large ambitions which Michel and Samuelson had, she tells us: 'Used to dealing with the riches of Arab leaders, they found Menatep, by comparison still relatively small fry. By 1994, however, Menatep had started moving into all kinds of industries, from chemicals to textiles to metallurgy. But for Valmet, which by that time had already partnered up with one of the oldest banks in the United States, Riggs Bank, and for Menatep, the real prize was oil.'

Try Googling 'Riggs Bank' -- a lot of interesting information emerges, on matters such as their involvement with Prince Bandar. So, what we are dealing with is a joint Anglo-American attempt to create a 'comprador' oligarchy who could loot Russia's raw materials resources.

3. On the subject of the competence of MI6, what seems to me a total apposite judgement was provided by the man whom Steele and his associates framed over the death of Litvinenko, Andrei Lugovoi.

In the press conference in May 2007 where he responded to the request for his extradition submitted by the Crown Prosecution Service, he claimed that: 'Litvinenko used to say: They are total retards in the UK, they believe everything we are telling them about Russia.'

(See http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090333/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/evidence ">https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/evidence">http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090333/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/evidence .)

It seems to me quite likely, although obviously not certain, that this did indeed represent the view of many of the 'StratCom' operators around Berezovsky of people like Steele.

Throughout life, I have repeatedly come across a game played on certain kinds of élite Westerners, which, in honor of Kipling, who gave brilliant depictions of it, I call 'fool the stupid Sahib.' Both people from other societies, and their own, often play this game, and the underlying mentality not infrequently involves a combination of a sense of inferiority and contempt for the gullibility of people who are thought of -- commonly with justice -- as not knowing how the world really works, and thus being open to manipulation if one tells them what they want to hear.

Some fragments of a mass of evidence that this was precisely what Litvinenko did were presented by me in a previous post.

Irrespective of whether Lugovoi was accurately reporting what Litvinenko said, however, a mass of 'open source' evidence testifies to the extreme credulity with which officials and journalists on both sides of the Atlantic treat claims made by members of the 'StratCom' groups created by the oligarchs whose initial training was done by Valmet.

(One good example is provided by the way that Sir Robert Owen and his team took what the surviving members of the Berezovsky group told them on trust. Another is the extraordinary way MSM figures continue to claim made by Khodorkovsky and his associates seriously.)

Accordingly, when I read of anyone treating practically anything that Steele claims as plausible, I try to work out how much of a 'retard' they must be, starting with a baseline of about 50%.

4. In the light of the way that the reliance on the dossier in the FISA applications absent meaningful corroboration is being defended by Comey and others on the basis that Steele was 'considered reliable due to his past work with the Bureau', the question is how many people in the FBI must be considered to have a 'retard' rating somewhere over 90%.

When I discover that John Sipher is a 'former member of the CIA's Clandestine Service', who also worked 'on Russian espionage issues overseas, and in support of FBI counterintelligence investigations domestically,' then his apologetics for Steele seem not only to suggest he may be another 'total retard' -- but to point towards how the Anglo-American collaboration actually worked. (See https://www.politico.eu/article/devin-nunes-donald-trump-the-smearing-of-christopher-steele/ .)

5. Another characteristic of these 'retards' is that they seem unable to get their story straight. In his piece last September defending the dossier, Sipher wrote that 'While in London he worked as the personal handler of the Russian defector Alexander Litvinenko.' Apparently he didn't know that the 'party line' had changed -- that when Steele emerged from hiding in May, his mouthpiece, Luke Harding of the 'Guardian', had explained: 'As head of MI6's Russia desk, Steele led the inquiry into Litvinenko's polonium poisoning, quickly concluding that this was a Russian state plot. He did not meet Litvinenko and was not his case officer, friends said.'

(See http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2017/09/a_lot_of_the_steele_dossier_has_since_been_corroborated.html ; https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/mar/07/former-mi6-agent-christopher-steele-behind-trump-dossier-returns-to-work .)

6. In his attempts to defend the credibility of the dossier, Sipher also explains that its -- supposed -- author was President of the Cambridge Union. Here, two profiles of Steele on the 'MailOnline' site are of interest.

In one a contemporary is quoted:

"'When you took part in politics at the Cambridge Union, it was very spiteful and full of people spreading rumours," he said. "Steele fitted right in. He was very ambitious, ruthless and frankly not a very nice guy."

The other tells us that he born in Aden in 1964, and that his father was in the military, before going on to say that contemporaries recall an 'avowedly Left-wing student with CND credentials', while a book on the Union's history says he was a 'confirmed socialist'.

(See http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4115070/Chris-Whatsit-brilliant-Cambridge-spy-spent-life-battling-KGB-MI6-agent-wife-s-high-heels-stolen-Kremlin-spooks-revealed-Litvinenko-poisoned-Putin-s-thugs.html ; http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4115070/Chris-Whatsit-brilliant-Cambridge-spy-spent-life-battling-KGB-MI6-agent-wife-s-high-heels-stolen-Kremlin-spooks-revealed-Litvinenko-poisoned-Putin-s-thugs.html .)

From my own -- undistinguished and mildly irreverent -- Cambridge career, I can testify that there was indeed a certain kind of student politician, whom, if I may mix metaphors, fellow-students were perfectly well aware were going to arse-lick their way up some greasy pole or other in later life.

It was a world with which I came back in contact when, after living abroad and a protracted apprenticeship in print journalism, I accidentally found employment with what was then one of the principal television current affairs programmes in Britain. In the early 'Eighties I overlapped with Peter -- now Lord -- Mandelson, who became one of the principal architects of 'New Labour.'

7. Given that at this time British intelligence agencies were somewhat paranoid about CND, there is a small puzzle as to why on his graduation in 1986 Steele should have been recruited by MI6. In more paranoid moments I wonder whether he did not already have intelligence contacts through his father, and served as a 'stool pigeon' as a student.

But then, people like Sir John Scarlett and Sir Richard Dearlove may simply have concluded that someone with 'form' in smearing rivals at the Union was ideally suited for the kind of organisation they wanted to run.

8. From experience with Mandelson, and others, there are however other relevant things about this type. One is that they commonly love Machiavellian intrigue, and are very good at it, within the worlds they know and understand.

If however they have to try to cope with alien environments, where they do not know the people and where such intrigues are played much more ruthlessly, they are liable to find themselves hopelessly outclassed. (This can happen not simply with the politics of the post-Soviet space and the Middle East, but with some of the murkier undergrowths of local politics in London.)

Another limitation on their understanding is that the last thing they are interested in his how the world outside the bubbles they prefer to inhabit operates, and they commonly have absolutely contempt for 'deplorables', be they Russian, British or American. This can lead to political misjudgements.

9. So it is not really so surprising that, when Berezovsky's 'StratCom' people told them that the Putin 'sistema' really was the 'return of Karla', people like Steele believed everything they said, precisely as Lugovoi brought out.

There is I think every reason to believe that, from first to last, the intrigues in which he has been involved have involved close collusion between them and elements in American intelligence -- including the FBI. As a result, a lot of people on both sides of the Atlantic have repeatedly got into complex undercover contests in the post-Soviet space which ran right out of control, creating a desperate need for cover-ups. A similar pattern applies in relation to the activities of such people in the Middle East.

SmoothieX12 -> David Habakkuk ... , 08 February 2018 at 11:28 AM
Another limitation on their understanding is that the last thing they are interested in his how the world outside the bubbles they prefer to inhabit operates, and they commonly have absolutely contempt for 'deplorables', be they Russian, British or American. This can lead to political misjudgements.

It is not just "can" it very often does. The whole situation with Russia, of which, be it her economy, history, military, culture etc., is not known to those people, is a monstrous empirical evidence of a complete professional inadequacy of most people populating this bubble.

Most of those people are badly educated (I am not talking about worthless formal degrees they hold) and cultured. In dry scientific language it is called a "confirmation bias", in a simple human one it is called being ignorant snobs, that is why this IC-academic-political-media "environment" in case of Russia prefers openly anti-Russian "sources" because those "sources" reiterate to them what they want to hear to start with, thus Chalabi Moment is being continuously reproduced.

In case of Iraq, as an example, it is a tragedy but at least the world is relatively safe. With Russia, as I stated many times for years--they simply have no idea what they are dealing with. None. It is expected from people who are briefed by "sources" such as Russian fugitive London Oligarchy or ultra-liberal and fringe urban Russian "tusovka". Again, the level of "Russian Studies" in Anglophone world is appalling. In fact, it is clear and present danger since removes or misinterprets crucial information about the only nation in the world which can annihilate the United States completely in such a light that it creates a real danger even for a disastrous military confrontation. I would go on a limb here and say that US military on average is much better aware of Russia and not only in purely military terms. In some sense--it is an exception. But even there, there are some trends (and they are not new) which are very worrisome.

[Dec 31, 2017] How America Spreads Global Chaos by Nicolas J.S. Davies

Highly recommended!
Essentially CIA dictates the US foreign policy. The tail is wagging the dog. The current Russophobia hysteria mean additional billions for CIA and FBI. As simple as that.
The article contain some important observation about self-sustaining nature of the US militarism. It is able to create new threats and new insurgencies almost at will via CIA activities.
The key problem is that wars are highly profitable for important part of the ruling elite, especially representing finance and military industrial complex. Also now part of the US ruling elite now consists of "colonial administrators" which are directly interested in maintaining and expanding the US empire. This is trap from which nation might not be able to escape.
Notable quotes:
"... The U.S. government may pretend to respect a "rules-based" global order, but the only rule Washington seems to follow is "might makes right" -- and the CIA has long served as a chief instigator and enforcer, writes Nicolas J.S. Davies. ..."
"... Once the CIA went to work in Vietnam to undermine the 1954 Geneva Accords and the planned reunification of North and South through a free and fair election in 1956, the die was cast. ..."
"... No U.S. president could extricate the U.S. from Vietnam without exposing the limits of what U.S. military force could achieve, betraying widely held national myths and the powerful interests that sustained and profited from them. ..."
"... The critical "lesson of Vietnam" was summed up by Richard Barnet in his 1972 book Roots of War . "At the very moment that the number one nation has perfected the science of killing," Barnet wrote, "It has become an impractical means of political domination." ..."
"... Even the senior officer corps of the U.S. military saw it that way, since many of them had survived the horrors of Vietnam as junior officers. The CIA could still wreak havoc in Latin America and elsewhere, but the full destructive force of the U.S. military was not unleashed again until the invasion of Panama in 1989 and the First Gulf War in 1991. ..."
"... Half a century after Vietnam, we have tragically come full circle. With the CIA's politicized intelligence running wild in Washington and its covert operations spreading violence and chaos across every continent, President Trump faces the same pressures to maintain his own and his country's credibility as Johnson and Nixon did. ..."
"... Trump is facing these questions, not just in one country, Vietnam, but in dozens of countries across the world, and the interests perpetuating and fueling this cycle of crisis and war have only become more entrenched over time, as President Eisenhower warned that they would, despite the end of the Cold War and, until now, the lack of any actual military threat to the United States. ..."
"... U.S. Air Force Colonel Fletcher Prouty was the chief of special operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1955 to 1964, managing the global military support system for the CIA in Vietnam and around the world. Fletcher Prouty's book, The Secret Team: The CIA and its Allies in Control of the United States and the World , was suppressed when it was first published in 1973. Thousands of copies disappeared from bookstores and libraries, and a mysterious Army Colonel bought the entire shipment of 3,500 copies the publisher sent to Australia. But Prouty's book was republished in 2011, and it is a timely account of the role of the CIA in U.S. policy. ..."
"... The main purpose of the CIA, as Prouty saw it, is to create such pretexts for war. ..."
"... The CIA is a hybrid of an intelligence service that gathers and analyzes foreign intelligence and a clandestine service that conducts covert operations. Both functions are essential to creating pretexts for war, and that is what they have done for 70 years. ..."
"... Prouty described how the CIA infiltrated the U.S. military, the State Department, the National Security Council and other government institutions, covertly placing its officers in critical positions to ensure that its plans are approved and that it has access to whatever forces, weapons, equipment, ammunition and other resources it needs to carry them out. ..."
"... Many retired intelligence officers, such as Ray McGovern and the members of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), saw the merging of clandestine operations with intelligence analysis in one agency as corrupting the objective analysis they tried to provide to policymakers. They formed VIPS in 2003 in response to the fabrication of politicized intelligence that provided false pretexts for the U.S. to invade and destroy Iraq. ..."
"... But Fletcher Prouty was even more disturbed by the way that the CIA uses clandestine operations to trigger coups, wars and chaos. The civil and proxy war in Syria is a perfect example of what Prouty meant ..."
"... The role of U.S. "counterterrorism" operations in fueling armed resistance and terrorism, and the absence of any plan to reduce the asymmetric violence unleashed by the "global war on terror," would be no surprise to Fletcher Prouty. As he explained, such clandestine operations always take on a life of their own that is unrelated, and often counter-productive, to any rational U.S. policy objective. ..."
"... This is a textbook CIA operation on the same model as Vietnam in the late 1950s and early 60s. The CIA uses U.S. special forces and training missions to launch covert and proxy military operations that drive local populations into armed resistance groups, and then uses the presence of those armed resistance groups to justify ever-escalating U.S. military involvement. This is Vietnam redux on a continental scale. ..."
"... China is already too big and powerful for the U.S. to apply what is known as the Ledeen doctrine named for neoconservative theorist and intelligence operative Michael Ledeen who suggested that every 10 years or so, the United States "pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show we mean business." ..."
"... As long as the CIA and the U.S. military keep plunging the scapegoats for our failed policies into economic crisis, violence and chaos, the United States and the United Kingdom can remain the safe havens of the world's wealth, islands of privilege and excess amidst the storms they unleash on others. ..."
"... But if that is the only "significant national objective" driving these policies, it is surely about time for the 99 percent of Americans who reap no benefit from these murderous schemes to stop the CIA and its allies before they completely wreck the already damaged and fragile world in which we all must live, Americans and foreigners alike. ..."
"... Douglas Valentine has probably studied the CIA in more depth than any other American journalist, beginning with his book on The Phoenix Program in Vietnam. He has written a new book titled The CIA as Organized Crime : How Illegal Operations Corrupt America and the World, in which he brings Fletcher Prouty's analysis right up to the present day, describing the CIA's role in our current wars and the many ways it infiltrates, manipulates and controls U.S. policy. ..."
"... In Venezuela, the CIA and the right-wing opposition are following the same strategy that President Nixon ordered the CIA to inflict on Chile, to "make the economy scream" in preparation for the 1973 coup. ..."
"... The U.S. willingness to scrap the Agreed Framework in 2003, the breakdown of the Six Party Talks in 2009 and the U.S. refusal to acknowledge that its own military actions and threats create legitimate defense concerns for North Korea have driven the North Koreans into a corner from which they see a credible nuclear deterrent as their only chance to avoid mass destruction. ..."
"... Obama's charm offensive invigorated old and new military alliances with the U.K., France and the Arab monarchies, and he quietly ran up the most expensive military budge t of any president since World War Two. ..."
"... Throughout history, serial aggression has nearly always provoked increasingly united opposition, as peace-loving countries and people have reluctantly summoned the courage to stand up to an aggressor. France under Napoleon and Hitler's Germany also regarded themselves as exceptional, and in their own ways they were. But in the end, their belief in their exceptionalism led them on to defeat and destruction. ..."
Oct 30, 2017 | consortiumnews.com

The U.S. government may pretend to respect a "rules-based" global order, but the only rule Washington seems to follow is "might makes right" -- and the CIA has long served as a chief instigator and enforcer, writes Nicolas J.S. Davies.

As the recent PBS documentary on the American War in Vietnam acknowledged, few American officials ever believed that the United States could win the war, neither those advising Johnson as he committed hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops, nor those advising Nixon as he escalated a brutal aerial bombardment that had already killed millions of people.

As conversations tape-recorded in the White House reveal, and as other writers have documented, the reasons for wading into the Big Muddy, as Pete Seeger satirized it , and then pushing on regardless, all came down to "credibility": the domestic political credibility of the politicians involved and America's international credibility as a military power.

Once the CIA went to work in Vietnam to undermine the 1954 Geneva Accords and the planned reunification of North and South through a free and fair election in 1956, the die was cast. The CIA's support for the repressive Diem regime and its successors ensured an ever-escalating war, as the South rose in rebellion, supported by the North. No U.S. president could extricate the U.S. from Vietnam without exposing the limits of what U.S. military force could achieve, betraying widely held national myths and the powerful interests that sustained and profited from them.

The critical "lesson of Vietnam" was summed up by Richard Barnet in his 1972 book Roots of War . "At the very moment that the number one nation has perfected the science of killing," Barnet wrote, "It has become an impractical means of political domination."

Even the senior officer corps of the U.S. military saw it that way, since many of them had survived the horrors of Vietnam as junior officers. The CIA could still wreak havoc in Latin America and elsewhere, but the full destructive force of the U.S. military was not unleashed again until the invasion of Panama in 1989 and the First Gulf War in 1991.

Half a century after Vietnam, we have tragically come full circle. With the CIA's politicized intelligence running wild in Washington and its covert operations spreading violence and chaos across every continent, President Trump faces the same pressures to maintain his own and his country's credibility as Johnson and Nixon did. His predictable response has been to escalate ongoing wars in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia and West Africa, and to threaten new ones against North Korea, Iran and Venezuela.

Trump is facing these questions, not just in one country, Vietnam, but in dozens of countries across the world, and the interests perpetuating and fueling this cycle of crisis and war have only become more entrenched over time, as President Eisenhower warned that they would, despite the end of the Cold War and, until now, the lack of any actual military threat to the United States.

Ironically but predictably, the U.S.'s aggressive and illegal war policy has finally provoked a real military threat to the U.S., albeit one that has emerged only in response to U.S. war plans. As I explained in a recent article , North Korea's discovery in 2016 of a U.S. plan to assassinate its president, Kim Jong Un, and launch a Second Korean War has triggered a crash program to develop long-range ballistic missiles that could give North Korea a viable nuclear deterrent and prevent a U.S. attack. But the North Koreans will not feel safe from attack until their leaders and ours are sure that their missiles can deliver a nuclear strike against the U.S. mainland.

The CIA's Pretexts for War

U.S. Air Force Colonel Fletcher Prouty was the chief of special operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1955 to 1964, managing the global military support system for the CIA in Vietnam and around the world. Fletcher Prouty's book, The Secret Team: The CIA and its Allies in Control of the United States and the World , was suppressed when it was first published in 1973. Thousands of copies disappeared from bookstores and libraries, and a mysterious Army Colonel bought the entire shipment of 3,500 copies the publisher sent to Australia. But Prouty's book was republished in 2011, and it is a timely account of the role of the CIA in U.S. policy.

Prouty surprisingly described the role of the CIA as a response by powerful people and interests to the abolition of the U.S. Department of War and the creation of the Department of Defense in 1947. Once the role of the U.S. military was redefined as one of defense, in line with the United Nations Charter's prohibition against the threat or use of military force in 1945 and similar moves by other military powers, it would require some kind of crisis or threat to justify using military force in the future, both legally and politically. The main purpose of the CIA, as Prouty saw it, is to create such pretexts for war.

The CIA is a hybrid of an intelligence service that gathers and analyzes foreign intelligence and a clandestine service that conducts covert operations. Both functions are essential to creating pretexts for war, and that is what they have done for 70 years.

Prouty described how the CIA infiltrated the U.S. military, the State Department, the National Security Council and other government institutions, covertly placing its officers in critical positions to ensure that its plans are approved and that it has access to whatever forces, weapons, equipment, ammunition and other resources it needs to carry them out.

Many retired intelligence officers, such as Ray McGovern and the members of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), saw the merging of clandestine operations with intelligence analysis in one agency as corrupting the objective analysis they tried to provide to policymakers. They formed VIPS in 2003 in response to the fabrication of politicized intelligence that provided false pretexts for the U.S. to invade and destroy Iraq.

CIA in Syria and Africa

But Fletcher Prouty was even more disturbed by the way that the CIA uses clandestine operations to trigger coups, wars and chaos. The civil and proxy war in Syria is a perfect example of what Prouty meant. In late 2011, after destroying Libya and aiding in the torture-murder of Muammar Gaddafi, the CIA and its allies began flying fighters and weapons from Libya to Turkey and infiltrating them into Syria. Then, working with Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, Croatia and other allies, this operation poured thousands of tons of weapons across Syria's borders to ignite and fuel a full-scale civil war.

Once these covert operations were under way, they ran wild until they had unleashed a savage Al Qaeda affiliate in Syria (Jabhat al-Nusra, now rebranded as Jabhat Fateh al-Sham), spawned the even more savage "Islamic State," triggered the heaviest and probably the deadliest U.S. bombing campaign since Vietnam and drawn Russia, Iran, Turkey, Israel, Jordan, Hezbollah, Kurdish militias and almost every state or armed group in the Middle East into the chaos of Syria's civil war.

Meanwhile, as Al Qaeda and Islamic State have expanded their operations across Africa, the U.N. has published a report titled Journey to Extremism in Africa: Drivers, Incentives and the Tipping Point for Recruitment , based on 500 interviews with African militants. This study has found that the kind of special operations and training missions the CIA and AFRICOM are conducting and supporting in Africa are in fact the critical "tipping point" that drives Africans to join militant groups like Al Qaeda, Al-Shabab and Boko Haram.

The report found that government action, such as the killing or detention of friends or family, was the "tipping point" that drove 71 percent of African militants interviewed to join armed groups, and that this was a more important factor than religious ideology.

The conclusions of Journey to Extremism in Africa confirm the findings of other similar studies. The Center for Civilians in Conflict interviewed 250 civilians who joined armed groups in Bosnia, Somalia, Gaza and Libya for its 2015 study, The People's Perspectives : Civilian Involvement in Armed Conflict . The study found that the most common motivation for civilians to join armed groups was simply to protect themselves or their families.

The role of U.S. "counterterrorism" operations in fueling armed resistance and terrorism, and the absence of any plan to reduce the asymmetric violence unleashed by the "global war on terror," would be no surprise to Fletcher Prouty. As he explained, such clandestine operations always take on a life of their own that is unrelated, and often counter-productive, to any rational U.S. policy objective.

"The more intimate one becomes with this activity," Prouty wrote, "The more one begins to realize that such operations are rarely, if ever, initiated from an intent to become involved in pursuit of some national objective in the first place."

The U.S. justifies the deployment of 6,000 U.S. special forces and military trainers to 53 of the 54 countries in Africa as a response to terrorism. But the U.N.'s Journey to Extremism in Africa study makes it clear that the U.S. militarization of Africa is in fact the "tipping point" that is driving Africans across the continent to join armed resistance groups in the first place.

This is a textbook CIA operation on the same model as Vietnam in the late 1950s and early 60s. The CIA uses U.S. special forces and training missions to launch covert and proxy military operations that drive local populations into armed resistance groups, and then uses the presence of those armed resistance groups to justify ever-escalating U.S. military involvement. This is Vietnam redux on a continental scale.

Taking on China

What seems to really be driving the CIA's militarization of U.S. policy in Africa is China's growing influence on the continent. As Steve Bannon put it in an interview with the Economist in August, "Let's go screw up One Belt One Road."

China is already too big and powerful for the U.S. to apply what is known as the Ledeen doctrine named for neoconservative theorist and intelligence operative Michael Ledeen who suggested that every 10 years or so, the United States "pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show we mean business."

China is too powerful and armed with nuclear weapons. So, in this case, the CIA's job would be to spread violence and chaos to disrupt Chinese trade and investment, and to make African governments increasingly dependent on U.S. military aid to fight the militant groups spawned and endlessly regenerated by U.S.-led "counterterrorism" operations.

Neither Ledeen nor Bannon pretend that such policies are designed to build more prosperous or viable societies in the Middle East or Africa, let alone to benefit their people. They both know very well what Richard Barnet already understood 45 years ago, that America's unprecedented investment in weapons, war and CIA covert operations are only good for one thing: to kill people and destroy infrastructure, reducing cities to rubble, societies to chaos and the desperate survivors to poverty and displacement.

As long as the CIA and the U.S. military keep plunging the scapegoats for our failed policies into economic crisis, violence and chaos, the United States and the United Kingdom can remain the safe havens of the world's wealth, islands of privilege and excess amidst the storms they unleash on others.

But if that is the only "significant national objective" driving these policies, it is surely about time for the 99 percent of Americans who reap no benefit from these murderous schemes to stop the CIA and its allies before they completely wreck the already damaged and fragile world in which we all must live, Americans and foreigners alike.

Douglas Valentine has probably studied the CIA in more depth than any other American journalist, beginning with his book on The Phoenix Program in Vietnam. He has written a new book titled The CIA as Organized Crime : How Illegal Operations Corrupt America and the World, in which he brings Fletcher Prouty's analysis right up to the present day, describing the CIA's role in our current wars and the many ways it infiltrates, manipulates and controls U.S. policy.

The Three Scapegoats

In Trump's speech to the U.N. General Assembly, he named North Korea, Iran and Venezuela as his prime targets for destabilization, economic warfare and, ultimately, the overthrow of their governments, whether by coup d'etat or the mass destruction of their civilian population and infrastructure. But Trump's choice of scapegoats for America's failures was obviously not based on a rational reassessment of foreign policy priorities by the new administration. It was only a tired rehashing of the CIA's unfinished business with two-thirds of Bush's "axis of evil" and Bush White House official Elliott Abrams' failed 2002 coup in Caracas, now laced with explicit and illegal threats of aggression.

How Trump and the CIA plan to sacrifice their three scapegoats for America's failures remains to be seen. This is not 2001, when the world stood silent at the U.S. bombardment and invasion of Afghanistan after September 11th. It is more like 2003, when the U.S. destruction of Iraq split the Atlantic alliance and alienated most of the world. It is certainly not 2011, after Obama's global charm offensive had rebuilt U.S. alliances and provided cover for French President Sarkozy, British Prime Minister Cameron, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the Arab royals to destroy Libya, once ranked by the U.N. as the most developed country in Africa , now mired in intractable chaos.

In 2017, a U.S. attack on any one of Trump's scapegoats would isolate the United States from many of its allies and undermine its standing in the world in far-reaching ways that might be more permanent and harder to repair than the invasion and destruction of Iraq.

In Venezuela, the CIA and the right-wing opposition are following the same strategy that President Nixon ordered the CIA to inflict on Chile, to "make the economy scream" in preparation for the 1973 coup. But the solid victory of Venezuela's ruling Socialist Party in recent nationwide gubernatorial elections, despite a long and deep economic crisis, reveals little public support for the CIA's puppets in Venezuela.

The CIA has successfully discredited the Venezuelan government through economic warfare, increasingly violent right-wing street protests and a global propaganda campaign. But the CIA has stupidly hitched its wagon to an extreme right-wing, upper-class opposition that has no credibility with most of the Venezuelan public, who still turn out for the Socialists at the polls. A CIA coup or U.S. military intervention would meet fierce public resistance and damage U.S. relations all over Latin America.

Boxing In North Korea

A U.S. aerial bombardment or "preemptive strike" on North Korea could quickly escalate into a war between the U.S. and China, which has reiterated its commitment to North Korea's defense if North Korea is attacked. We do not know exactly what was in the U.S. war plan discovered by North Korea, so neither can we know how North Korea and China could respond if the U.S. pressed ahead with it.

Most analysts have long concluded that any U.S. attack on North Korea would be met with a North Korean artillery and missile barrage that would inflict unacceptable civilian casualties on Seoul, a metropolitan area of 26 million people, three times the population of New York City. Seoul is only 35 miles from the frontier with North Korea, placing it within range of a huge array of North Korean weapons. What was already a no-win calculus is now compounded by the possibility that North Korea could respond with nuclear weapons, turning any prospect of a U.S. attack into an even worse nightmare.

U.S. mismanagement of its relations with North Korea should be an object lesson for its relations with Iran, graphically demonstrating the advantages of diplomacy, talks and agreements over threats of war. Under the Agreed Framework signed in 1994, North Korea stopped work on two much larger nuclear reactors than the small experimental one operating at Yongbyong since 1986, which only produces 6 kg of plutonium per year, enough for one nuclear bomb.

The lesson of Bush's Iraq invasion in 2003 after Saddam Hussein had complied with demands that he destroy Iraq's stockpiles of chemical weapons and shut down a nascent nuclear program was not lost on North Korea. Not only did the invasion lay waste to large sections of Iraq with hundreds of thousands of dead but Hussein himself was hunted down and condemned to death by hanging.

Still, after North Korea tested its first nuclear weapon in 2006, even its small experimental reactor was shut down as a result of the "Six Party Talks" in 2007, all the fuel rods were removed and placed under supervision of the International Atomic Energy Agency, and the cooling tower of the reactor was demolished in 2008.

But then, as relations deteriorated, North Korea conducted a second nuclear weapon test and again began reprocessing spent fuel rods to recover plutonium for use in nuclear weapons.

North Korea has now conducted six nuclear weapons tests. The explosions in the first five tests increased gradually up to 15-25 kilotons, about the yield of the bombs the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but estimates for the yield of the 2017 test range from 110 to 250 kilotons , comparable to a small hydrogen bomb.

The even greater danger in a new war in Korea is that the U.S. could unleash part of its arsenal of 4,000 more powerful weapons (100 to 1,200 kilotons), which could kill millions of people and devastate and poison the region, or even the world, for years to come.

The U.S. willingness to scrap the Agreed Framework in 2003, the breakdown of the Six Party Talks in 2009 and the U.S. refusal to acknowledge that its own military actions and threats create legitimate defense concerns for North Korea have driven the North Koreans into a corner from which they see a credible nuclear deterrent as their only chance to avoid mass destruction.

China has proposed a reasonable framework for diplomacy to address the concerns of both sides, but the U.S. insists on maintaining its propaganda narratives that all the fault lies with North Korea and that it has some kind of "military solution" to the crisis.

This may be the most dangerous idea we have heard from U.S. policymakers since the end of the Cold War, but it is the logical culmination of a systematic normalization of deviant and illegal U.S. war-making that has already cost millions of lives in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Somalia, Yemen and Pakistan. As historian Gabriel Kolko wrote in Century of War in 1994, "options and decisions that are intrinsically dangerous and irrational become not merely plausible but the only form of reasoning about war and diplomacy that is possible in official circles."

Demonizing Iran

The idea that Iran has ever had a nuclear weapons program is seriously contested by the IAEA, which has examined every allegation presented by the CIA and other Western "intelligence" agencies as well as Israel. Former IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei revealed many details of this wild goose chase in his 2011 memoir, Age of Deception : Nuclear Diplomacy in Treacherous Times .

When the CIA and its partners reluctantly acknowledged the IAEA's conclusions in a 2007 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), ElBaradei issued a press release confirming that, "the agency has no concrete evidence of an ongoing nuclear weapons program or undeclared nuclear facilities in Iran."

Since 2007, the IAEA has resolved all its outstanding concerns with Iran. It has verified that dual-use technologies that Iran imported before 2003 were in fact used for other purposes, and it has exposed the mysterious "laptop documents" that appeared to show Iranian plans for a nuclear weapon as forgeries. Gareth Porter thoroughly explored all these questions and allegations and the history of mistrust that fueled them in his 2014 book, Manufactured Crisis : the Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare , which I highly recommend.

But, in the parallel Bizarro world of U.S. politics, hopelessly poisoned by the CIA's endless disinformation campaigns, Hillary Clinton could repeatedly take false credit for disarming Iran during her presidential campaign, and neither Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump nor any corporate media interviewer dared to challenge her claims.

"When President Obama took office, Iran was racing toward a nuclear bomb," Clinton fantasized in a prominent foreign policy speech on June 2, 2016, claiming that her brutal sanctions policy "brought Iran to the table."

In fact, as Trita Parsi documented in his 2012 book, A Single Roll of the Dice : Obama's Diplomacy With Iran , the Iranians were ready, not just to "come to the table," but to sign a comprehensive agreement based on a U.S. proposal brokered by Turkey and Brazil in 2010. But, in a classic case of "tail wags dog," the U.S. then rejected its own proposal because it would have undercut support for tighter sanctions in the U.N. Security Council. In other words, Clinton's sanctions policy did not "bring Iran to the table", but prevented the U.S. from coming to the table itself.

As a senior State Department official told Trita Parsi, the real problem with U.S. diplomacy with Iran when Clinton was at the State Department was that the U.S. would not take "Yes" for an answer. Trump's ham-fisted decertification of Iran's compliance with the JCPOA is right out of Clinton's playbook, and it demonstrates that the CIA is still determined to use Iran as a scapegoat for America's failures in the Middle East.

The spurious claim that Iran is the world's greatest sponsor of terrorism is another CIA canard reinforced by endless repetition. It is true that Iran supports and supplies weapons to Hezbollah and Hamas, which are both listed as terrorist organizations by the U.S. government. But they are mainly defensive resistance groups that defend Lebanon and Gaza respectively against invasions and attacks by Israel.

Shifting attention away from Al Qaeda, Islamic State, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group and other groups that actually commit terrorist crimes around the world might just seem like a case of the CIA "taking its eyes off the ball," if it wasn't so transparently timed to frame Iran with new accusations now that the manufactured crisis of the nuclear scare has run its course.

What the Future Holds

Barack Obama's most consequential international achievement may have been the triumph of symbolism over substance behind which he expanded and escalated the so-called "war on terror," with a vast expansion of covert operations and proxy wars that eventually triggered the heaviest U.S. aerial bombardments since Vietnam in Iraq and Syria.

Obama's charm offensive invigorated old and new military alliances with the U.K., France and the Arab monarchies, and he quietly ran up the most expensive military budget of any president since World War Two.

But Obama's expansion of the "war on terror" under cover of his deceptive global public relations campaign created many more problems than it solved, and Trump and his advisers are woefully ill-equipped to solve any of them. Trump's expressed desire to place America first and to resist foreign entanglements is hopelessly at odds with his aggressive, bullying approach to every foreign policy problem.

If the U.S. could threaten and fight its way to a resolution of any of its international problems, it would have done so already. That is exactly what it has been trying to do since the 1990s, behind both the swagger and bluster of Bush and Trump and the deceptive charm of Clinton and Obama: a "good cop – bad cop" routine that should no longer fool anyone anywhere.

But as Lyndon Johnson found as he waded deeper and deeper into the Big Muddy in Vietnam, lying to the public about unwinnable wars does not make them any more winnable. It just gets more people killed and makes it harder and harder to ever tell the public the truth.

In unwinnable wars based on lies, the "credibility" problem only gets more complicated, as new lies require new scapegoats and convoluted narratives to explain away graveyards filled by old lies. Obama's cynical global charm offensive bought the "war on terror" another eight years, but that only allowed the CIA to drag the U.S. into more trouble and spread its chaos to more places around the world.

Meanwhile, Russian President Putin is winning hearts and minds in capitals around the world by calling for a recommitment to the rule of international law , which prohibits the threat or use of military force except in self-defense. Every new U.S. threat or act of aggression will only make Putin's case more persuasive, not least to important U.S. allies like South Korea, Germany and other members of the European Union, whose complicity in U.S. aggression has until now helped to give it a false veneer of political legitimacy.

Throughout history, serial aggression has nearly always provoked increasingly united opposition, as peace-loving countries and people have reluctantly summoned the courage to stand up to an aggressor. France under Napoleon and Hitler's Germany also regarded themselves as exceptional, and in their own ways they were. But in the end, their belief in their exceptionalism led them on to defeat and destruction.

Americans had better hope that we are not so exceptional, and that the world will find a diplomatic rather than a military "solution" to its American problem. Our chances of survival would improve a great deal if American officials and politicians would finally start to act like something other than putty in the hands of the CIA

Nicolas J. S. Davies is the author of Blood On Our Hands: the American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq . He also wrote the chapters on "Obama at War" in Grading the 44th President: a Report Card on Barack Obama's First Term as a Progressive Leader .

[Dec 31, 2017] Is [neo]Liberalism a Dying Faith by Pat Buchanan

Highly recommended!
Nationalism really represent a growing threat to neoliberalism. It is clear the the rise of nationalism was caused by the triumph of neoliberalism all over the globe. As neoliberal ideology collapsed in 2008, thing became really interesting now. Looks like 1920th-1940th will be replayed on a new level with the USA neoliberal empire under stress from new challengers instead of British empire.
Rumor about the death of neoliberalism are slightly exaggerated ;-). This social system still has a lot of staying power. you need some external shock like the need of cheap oil (defined as sustainable price of oil over $100 per barrel) to shake it again. Of some financial crisis similar to the crisis of 2008. Currently there is still no alternative social order that can replace it. Collapse of the USSR discredited both socialism even of different flavors then was practiced in the USSR. National socialism would be a step back from neoliberalism.
Notable quotes:
"... The retreat of [neo]liberalism is very visible in Asia. All Southeast Asian states have turned their backs on liberal democracy, especially Indonesia, the Philippines and Myanmar in the last decade. This NYT article notes that liberalism has essentially died in Japan, and that all political contests are now between what the west would consider conservatives: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/15/opinion/liberalism-japan-election.html ..."
"... What is today called "Liberalism" and "Conservatism" both are simply corrupted labels applied to the same top-down corporate-fascistic elite rule that I think Mr. Buchanan once referred to as "two wings of the same bird of prey." ..."
"... Nobody at the top cares about 'diversity.' They care about the easy profits that come from ever cheaper labor. 'Diversity' is not suicide but rather murder: instigated by a small number of very powerful people who have decided that the long-term health of their nations and civilization is less important than short-term profits and power. ..."
"... Hillary and Obama are to the right of the President that Buchanan served in his White House. Richard Nixon was to the Left of both Hillary and Obama. I can't even imagine Hillary accepting and signing into law a 'Clean Water Act' or enacting Price Controls to fight inflation. No way. Heck would freeze over before Hillary would do something so against her Banker Backers. ..."
"... It's sure that financial (neo)liberalism was in a growth phase prior to year 2000 (under Greenspan, the "Maestro") with a general belief that the economy could be "fine tuned" with risk eliminated using sophisticated financial instruments, monetary policy etc. ..."
"... If [neo] Liberalism is a package, then two heavy financial blows that shook the whole foundation were the collapse of the dot.com bubble (2000) and the mortgage bubble (2008). ..."
"... And, other (self-serving) neoliberal stories are now seen as false. For example, that the US is an "advanced post-industrial service economy", that out-sourcing would "free up Americans for higher skilled/higher wage employment" or that "the US would always gain from tariff free trade". ..."
"... The basic divide is surely Nationalism (America First) vs. Globalism (Neo-Liberalism), as shown by the last US Presidential election. ..."
"... Neoliberalism, of which the Clintons are acolytes, supports Free Trade and Open Borders. Although it claims to support World Government, in actual fact it supports corporatism. This is explicit in the TPPA Trump vetoed. Under the corporate state, the state controls the corporations, as Don Benito did in Italy. Under corporatism, the corporations tell the state what to do, as has been the case in America since at least the Clinton Presidency. ..."
"... But I recall that Pat B also said neoconservatism was on its way out a few years after Iraq war II and yet it's stronger than ever and its adherents are firmly ensconced in the joint chiefs of staff, the pentagon, Congress and the White House. It's also spawned a close cousin in liberal interventionism. ..."
Oct 01, 2002 | www.unz.com

Asked to name the defining attributes of the America we wish to become, many liberals would answer that we must realize our manifest destiny since 1776, by becoming more equal, more diverse and more democratic -- and the model for mankind's future.

Equality, diversity, democracy -- this is the holy trinity of the post-Christian secular state at whose altars Liberal Man worships.

But the congregation worshiping these gods is shrinking. And even Europe seems to be rejecting what America has on offer.

In a retreat from diversity, Catalonia just voted to separate from Spain. The Basque and Galician peoples of Spain are following the Catalan secession crisis with great interest.

The right-wing People's Party and far-right Freedom Party just swept 60 percent of Austria's vote, delivering the nation to 31-year-old Sebastian Kurz, whose anti-immigrant platform was plagiarized from the Freedom Party. Summarized it is: Austria for the Austrians!

Lombardy, whose capital is Milan, and Veneto will vote Sunday for greater autonomy from Rome.

South Tyrol (Alto Adige), severed from Austria and ceded to Italy at Versailles, written off by Hitler to appease Mussolini after his Anschluss, is astir anew with secessionism. Even the Sicilians are talking of separation.

By Sunday, the Czech Republic may have a new leader, billionaire Andrej Babis. Writes The Washington Post, Babis "makes a sport of attacking the European Union and says NATO's mission is outdated."

Platform Promise: Keep the Muslim masses out of the motherland.

To ethnonationalists, their countrymen are not equal to all others, but superior in rights. Many may nod at Thomas Jefferson's line that "All men are created equal," but they no more practice that in their own nations than did Jefferson in his

... ... ...

European peoples and parties are today using democratic means to achieve "illiberal" ends. And it is hard to see what halts the drift away from liberal democracy toward the restrictive right. For in virtually every nation, there is a major party in opposition, or a party in power, that holds deeply nationalist views.

European elites may denounce these new parties as "illiberal" or fascist, but it is becoming apparent that it may be liberalism itself that belongs to yesterday. For more and more Europeans see the invasion of the continent along the routes whence the invaders came centuries ago, not as a manageable problem but an existential crisis.

To many Europeans, it portends an irreversible alteration in the character of the countries their grandchildren will inherit, and possibly an end to their civilization. And they are not going to be deterred from voting their fears by being called names that long ago lost their toxicity from overuse.

And as Europeans decline to celebrate the racial, ethnic, creedal and cultural diversity extolled by American elites, they also seem to reject the idea that foreigners should be treated equally in nations created for their own kind.

Europeans seem to admire more, and model their nations more, along the lines of the less diverse America of the Eisenhower era, than on the polyglot America of 2017.

And Europe seems to be moving toward immigration polices more like the McCarran-Walter Act of 1950 than the open borders bill that Sen. Edward Kennedy shepherded through the Senate in 1965.

Kennedy promised that the racial and ethnic composition of the America of the 1960s would not be overturned, and he questioned the morality and motives of any who implied that it would.

Jason Liu , October 20, 2017 at 12:02 pm GMT
Yes. Fuck yes.

Liberalism is the naivete of 18th century elites, no different than today. Modernity as you know it is unsustainable, mostly because equality isn't real, identity has value for most humans, pluralism is by definition fractious, and deep down most people wish to follow a wise strongman leader who represents their interests first and not a vague set of universalist values.

Blind devotion to liberal democracy is another one of those times when white people take an abstract concept to weird extremes. It is short-sighted and autistically narrow minded. Just because you have an oppressive king doesn't mean everyone should be equals. Just because there was slavery/genocide doesn't mean diversity is good.

The retreat of [neo]liberalism is very visible in Asia. All Southeast Asian states have turned their backs on liberal democracy, especially Indonesia, the Philippines and Myanmar in the last decade. This NYT article notes that liberalism has essentially died in Japan, and that all political contests are now between what the west would consider conservatives: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/15/opinion/liberalism-japan-election.html

Good riddance. The idea that egalitarianism is more advanced than hierarchy has always been false, and flies against the long arc of history. Time for nationalists around the world to smash liberal democracy and build a new modernity based on actual humanism, with respect to hierarchies and the primacy of majorities instead of guilt and pathological compassion dressed up as political ideology.

TG , October 20, 2017 at 1:10 pm GMT
"Liberalism" is not dying. "Liberalism" is dead, and has been since at least 1970.

What is today called "Liberalism" and "Conservatism" both are simply corrupted labels applied to the same top-down corporate-fascistic elite rule that I think Mr. Buchanan once referred to as "two wings of the same bird of prey."

Nobody at the top cares about 'diversity.' They care about the easy profits that come from ever cheaper labor. 'Diversity' is not suicide but rather murder: instigated by a small number of very powerful people who have decided that the long-term health of their nations and civilization is less important than short-term profits and power.

Paul's Ghost , October 20, 2017 at 6:08 pm GMT
Its been dead for nearly 20 years now. Liberalism has long been the Monty Python parrot nailed to its perch. At this point, the term is mainly kept alive in right-wing attacks by people who lack the imagination to change their habitual targets for so long.

To my eye, the last 'liberal' politician died in a susupicious plane crash in 2000 as the Bush Republicans were taking the White House by their famous 5-4 vote/coup and also needed to claim control of the Senate. So, the last authentic 'liberal' Senator, Paul Wellstone of MN was killed in a suspicious plane crash that was never properly explained.

Hillary and Obama are to the right of the President that Buchanan served in his White House. Richard Nixon was to the Left of both Hillary and Obama. I can't even imagine Hillary accepting and signing into law a 'Clean Water Act' or enacting Price Controls to fight inflation. No way. Heck would freeze over before Hillary would do something so against her Banker Backers.

And, at the root, that is the key. The 'Liberals' that the right now rails against are strongly backed and supported by the Wall Street Banks and other corporate leaders. The 'Liberals' have pushed for a government Of the Bankers, By the Bankers and For the Bankers. The 'Liberals' now are in favor of Endless Unconstitutional War around the world.

Which can only mean that the term 'Liberal' has been so completely morphed away from its original meanings to be completely worthless.

The last true Liberal in American politics was Paul Wellstone. And even by the time he died for his sins, he was calling himself a "progressive" because after the Clintons and the Gores had so distorted the term Liberal it was meaningless. Or it had come to mean a society ruled by bankers, a society at constant war and throwing money constantly at a gigantic war machine, a society of censorship where the government needed to control all music lyrics, the same corrupt government where money could by anything from a night in the Lincoln Bedroom to a Presidential Pardon or any other government favor.

Thus, 'Liberals' were a dead movement even by 2000, when the people who actually believed in the American People over the profits of bankers were calling themselves Progressives in disgust at the misuse of the term Liberal. And now, Obama and Hillary have trashed and distorted even the term Progressive into bombing the world 365 days a year and still constantly throwing money at the military machine and the problems it invents.

So, Liberalism is so long dead that if you exumed the grave you'd only find dust. And Pat must be getting senile and just throwing back out the same lines he once wrote as a speechwriter for the last Great Lefty President Richard Nixon.

Miro23 , October 20, 2017 at 6:17 pm GMT

Is Liberalism a Dying Faith?

Another question is whether this is wishful thinking from Pat or some kind of reality.

I think that he's right, that Liberalism is a dying faith, and it's interesting to check the decline.

It's sure that financial (neo)liberalism was in a growth phase prior to year 2000 (under Greenspan, the "Maestro") with a general belief that the economy could be "fine tuned" with risk eliminated using sophisticated financial instruments, monetary policy etc.

If [neo] Liberalism is a package, then two heavy financial blows that shook the whole foundation were the collapse of the dot.com bubble (2000) and the mortgage bubble (2008).

And, other (self-serving) neoliberal stories are now seen as false. For example, that the US is an "advanced post-industrial service economy", that out-sourcing would "free up Americans for higher skilled/higher wage employment" or that "the US would always gain from tariff free trade".

In fact, the borderless global "world is flat" dogma is now seen as enabling a rootless hyper-rich global elite to draw on a sea of globalized serf labour with little or no identity, while their media and SWJ activists operate a scorched earth defense against any sign of opposition.

The basic divide is surely Nationalism (America First) vs. Globalism (Neo-Liberalism), as shown by the last US Presidential election.

reiner Tor , October 20, 2017 at 6:39 pm GMT
@Randal

A useful analogy might be Viktor Orbán. He started out as a leader of a liberal party, Fidesz, but then over time started moving to the right. It is often speculated that he started it for cynical reasons, like seeing how the right was divided and that there was essentially a vacuum there for a strong conservative party, but there's little doubt he totally internalized it. There's also little doubt (and at the time he and a lot of his fellow party leaders talked about it a lot) that as he (they) started a family and having children, they started to realize how conservatism kinda made more sense than liberalism.

With Kurz, there's the possibility for this path. However, he'd need to start a family soon for that to happen. At that age Orbán was already married with children

Verymuchalive , October 20, 2017 at 10:10 pm GMT
@Paul's Ghost

Liberalism ( large L) is indeed long dead.

Neoliberalism, of which the Clintons are acolytes, supports Free Trade and Open Borders. Although it claims to support World Government, in actual fact it supports corporatism. This is explicit in the TPPA Trump vetoed. Under the corporate state, the state controls the corporations, as Don Benito did in Italy. Under corporatism, the corporations tell the state what to do, as has been the case in America since at least the Clinton Presidency.

Richard Nixon was a capitalist, not a corporatist. He was a supporter of proper competition laws, unlike any President since Clinton. Socially, he was interventionist, though this may have been to lessen criticism of his Vietnam policies. Anyway, his bussing and desegregation policies were a long-term failure.

Price Control was quickly dropped, as it was in other Western countries. Long term Price Control, as in present day Venezuela, is economically disastrous.

KenH , October 21, 2017 at 1:51 pm GMT
Let's hope liberalism is a dying faith and that is passes from the Western world. If not it will destroy the West, so if it doesn't die a natural death then we must euthanize it. For the evidence is in and it has begat feminism, anti-white racism, demographic winter, mass third world immigration and everything else that ails the West and has made it the sick and dying man of the world.

But I recall that Pat B also said neoconservatism was on its way out a few years after Iraq war II and yet it's stronger than ever and its adherents are firmly ensconced in the joint chiefs of staff, the pentagon, Congress and the White House. It's also spawned a close cousin in liberal interventionism.

What Pat refers to as "liberalism" is now left wing totalitarianism and anti-white hatred and it's fanatically trying to remain relevant by lashing out and blacklisting, deplatforming, demonetizing, and physically assaulting all of its enemies on the right who are gaining strength much to their chagrin. They resort to these methods because they can't win an honest debate and in a true free marketplace of ideas they lose.

[Dec 31, 2017] What Happens When A Russiagate Skeptic Debates A Professional Russiagater

Highly recommended!
What a pitiful pressitute this Like Harding is...
The fact that he is employed by Guardia tells a lot how low Guardian fall. It's a yellow press (owned by intelligence agencies if we talk about their coverage of Russia).
Notable quotes:
"... In theory, it would be hard to find two journalists more qualified to debate each side of this important issue. In practice, it was a one-sided thrashing that The Intercept 's Jeremy Scahill accurately described as "brutal". ..."
"... Russiagate only works if you allow it to remain zoomed out, where the individually weak arguments of this giant Gish gallop fallacy form the appearance of a legitimate argument. ..."
"... That's not how you're going to get the truth about Russia. He's all appeals to authority - Steele's most of all, even name dropping Kerry. To finally land on "oh well if you would read my whole book" is just getting to the silly season. Also "well this is the kind of person Putin is" is a terrible argument. This isn't about either Putin or Trump really, its about the long history of US-Russia relations and all that has occurred. Also, the ubiquitous throwing around of accusations of the murder of journalists in Russia is a straw man argument, especially when it is just thrown in as some sort of moral shielding for a shabby argument. ..."
Dec 28, 2017 | www.zerohedge.com

Have you ever wondered why mainstream media outlets, despite being so fond of dramatic panel debates on other hot-button issues, never have critics of the Russiagate narrative on to debate those who advance it? Well, in a recent Real News interview we received an extremely clear answer to that question, and it was so epic it deserves its own article.

Real News host and producer Aaron Maté has recently emerged as one of the most articulate critics of the establishment Russia narrative and the Trump-Russia conspiracy theory, and has published in The Nation some of the clearest arguments against both that I've yet seen. Luke Harding is a journalist for The Guardian where he has been writing prolifically in promotion of the Russiagate narrative, and is the author of New York Times bestseller Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win.

In theory, it would be hard to find two journalists more qualified to debate each side of this important issue. In practice, it was a one-sided thrashing that The Intercept 's Jeremy Scahill accurately described as "brutal".

The term Gish gallop , named after a Young Earth creationist who was notoriously fond of employing it, refers to a fallacious debate tactic in which a bunch of individually weak arguments are strung together in rapid-fire succession in order to create the illusion of a solid argument and overwhelm the opposition's ability to refute them all in the time allotted. Throughout the discussion the Gish gallop appeared to be the only tool that Luke Harding brought to the table, firing out a deluge of feeble and unsubstantiated arguments only to be stopped over and over again by Maté who kept pointing out when Harding was making a false or fallacious claim.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/9Ikf1uZli4g

In this part here , for example, the following exchange takes place while Harding is already against the ropes on the back of a previous failed argument. I'm going to type this up so you can clearly see what's happening here:

Harding: Look, I'm a journalist. I'm a storyteller. I'm not a kind of head of the CIA or the NSA. But what I can tell you is that there have been similar operations in France, most recently when President Macron was elected ? -

Maté: Well actually Luke that's not true. That's straight up not true. After that election the French cyber-intelligence agency came out and said it could have been virtually anybody.

Harding: Yeah. But, if you'll let me finish, there've been attacks on the German parliament ? -

Maté: Okay, but wait Luke, do you concede that the France hack that you just claimed didn't happen?

Harding: [pause] What? -- ?that it didn't happen? Sorry?

Maté: Do you concede that the Russian hacking of the French election that you just claimed actually is not true?

Harding: [pause] Well, I mean that it's not true? I mean, the French report was inconclusive, but you have to look at this kind of contextually. We've seen attacks on other European states as well from Russia, they have very kind of advanced cyber capabilities.

Maté: Where else?

Harding: Well, Estonia. Have you heard of Estonia? It's a state in the Baltics which was crippled by a massive cyber attack in 2008, which certainly all kind of western European and former eastern European states think was carried out by Moscow. I mean I was in Moscow at the time, when relations between the two countries were extremely bad. This is a kind of ongoing thing. Now you might say, quite legitimately, well the US does the same thing, the UK does the same thing, and I think to a certain extent that is certainly right. I think what was different last year was the attempt to kind of dump this stuff out into kind of US public space and try and influence public opinion there. That's unusual. And of course that's a matter of congressional inquiry and something Mueller is looking at too.

Maté: Right. But again, my problem here is that the examples that are frequently presented to substantiate claims of this massive Russian hacking operation around the world prove out to be false. So France as I mentioned; you also mentioned Germany. There was a lot of worry about Russian hacking of the German elections, but it turned out? -- ?and there's plenty of articles since then that have acknowledged this? - ? that actually there was no Russian hack in Germany.

In the above exchange, Maté derailed Harding's Gish gallop, and Harding actually admonished him for doing so, telling him "let me finish" and attempting to go on listing more flimsy examples to bolster his case as though he hadn't just begun his Gish gallop with a completely false example .

That's really all Harding brought to the debate. A bunch of individually weak arguments, the fact that he speaks Russian and has lived in Moscow, and the occasional straw man where he tries to imply that Maté is claiming that Vladimir Putin is an innocent girl scout. Meanwhile Maté just kept patiently dragging the debate back on track over and over again in the most polite obliteration of a man that I have ever witnessed.

The entire interview followed this basic script. Harding makes an unfounded claim, Maté holds him to the fact that it's unfounded, Harding sputters a bit and tries to zoom things out and point to a bigger-picture analysis of broader trends to distract from the fact that he'd just made an individual claim that was baseless, then winds up implying that Maté is only skeptical of the claims because he hasn't lived in Russia as Harding has.

jeremy scahill 0
@jeremyscahill
This @aaronjmate interview is brutal. He makes mincemeat of Luke Harding, who can't seem to defend the thesis, much less the title, of his own book: Where's the 'Collusion' - YouTube
11:03 AM-Dec 25, 2017
Q 131 11597 C? 1,148

The interview ended when Harding once again implied that Maté was only skeptical of the collusion narrative because he'd never been to Russia and seen what a right-wing oppressive government it is, after which the following exchange took place:

Maté: I don't think I've countered anything you've said about the state of Vladimir Putin's Russia. The issue under discussion today has been whether there was collusion, the topic of your book.
Harding: Yeah, but you're clearly a kind of collusion rejectionist, so I'm not sure what sort of evidence short of Trump and Putin in a sauna together would convince you. Clearly nothing would convince you. But anyway it's been a pleasure.

At which point Harding abruptly logged off the video chat, leaving Maté to wrap up the show and promote Harding's book on his own.

You should definitely watch this debate for yourself , and enjoy it, because I will be shocked if we ever see another like it. Harding's fate will serve as a cautionary tale for the establishment hacks who've built their careers advancing the Russiagate conspiracy theory , and it's highly unlikely that any of them will ever make the mistake of trying to debate anyone of Maté's caliber again.

The reason Russiagaters speak so often in broad, sweeping terms? - saying there are too many suspicious things happening for there not to be a there there, that there's too much smoke for there not to be fire? - ? is because when you zoom in and focus on any individual part of their conspiracy theory, it falls apart under the slightest amount of critical thinking (or as Harding calls it, "collusion rejectionism"). Russiagate only works if you allow it to remain zoomed out, where the individually weak arguments of this giant Gish gallop fallacy form the appearance of a legitimate argument.

Well, Harding did say he's a storyteller.

* * *

Thanks for reading! My work here is entirely reader-funded so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook , following me on Twitter , bookmarking my website , throwing some money into my hat on Patreon or Paypal , or buying my new book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers . Our Hidden History 4 days ago (edited) That Harding tells Mate to meet Alexi Navalny, who is a far right nationalist and most certainly a tool of US intelligence (something like Russia's Richard Spencer) was all I needed to hear to understand where Luke is coming from.

He's little more than an intelligence asset himself if his idea of speaking to "Russians" is to go and speak to a bunch of people who most certainly have their own ties back to the western intelligence agencies.

That's not how you're going to get the truth about Russia. He's all appeals to authority - Steele's most of all, even name dropping Kerry. To finally land on "oh well if you would read my whole book" is just getting to the silly season. Also "well this is the kind of person Putin is" is a terrible argument. This isn't about either Putin or Trump really, its about the long history of US-Russia relations and all that has occurred. Also, the ubiquitous throwing around of accusations of the murder of journalists in Russia is a straw man argument, especially when it is just thrown in as some sort of moral shielding for a shabby argument.

Few in the US know about these cases or what occurred, or of the many forces inside of Russia that might be involved in murdering journalists just as in Mexico or Turkey. But these cases are not explained - blame is merely assigned to Putin himself. Of course if someone here discusses he death of Michael Hastings, they're a "conspiracy theorist", but if the crime involves a Russian were to assign the blame to Vladimir Putin and, no further explanation is required.

[Dec 28, 2017] How CrowdStrike placed malware in DNC hacked servers by Alex Christoforou

Highly recommended!
If this is true, then this is definitely a sophisticated false flag operation. Was malware Alperovich people injected specifically designed to implicate Russians? In other words Crowdstrike=Fancy Bear
Images removed. For full content please thee the original source
One interesting corollary of this analysis is that installing Crowdstrike software is like inviting a wolf to guard your chicken. If they are so dishonest you take enormous risks. That might be true for some other heavily advertized "intrusion prevention" toolkits. So those criminals who use mistyped popular addresses or buy Google searches to drive lemmings to their site and then flash the screen that they detected a virus on your computer a, please call provided number and for a small amount of money your virus will be removed get a new more sinister life.
I suspected many of such firms (for example ISS which was bought by IBM in 2006) to be scams long ago.
Notable quotes:
"... Disobedient Media outlines the DNC server cover-up evidenced in CrowdStrike malware infusion ..."
"... In the article, they claim to have just been working on eliminating the last of the hackers from the DNC's network during the past weekend (conveniently coinciding with Assange's statement and being an indirect admission that their Falcon software had failed to achieve it's stated capabilities at that time , assuming their statements were accurate) . ..."
"... To date, CrowdStrike has not been able to show how the malware had relayed any emails or accessed any mailboxes. They have also not responded to inquiries specifically asking for details about this. In fact, things have now been discovered that bring some of their malware discoveries into question. ..."
"... there is a reason to think Fancy Bear didn't start some of its activity until CrowdStrike had arrived at the DNC. CrowdStrike, in the indiciators of compromise they reported, identified three pieces of malware relating to Fancy Bear: ..."
"... They found that generally, in a lot of cases, malware developers didn't care to hide the compile times and that while implausible timestamps are used, it's rare that these use dates in the future. It's possible, but unlikely that one sample would have a postdated timestamp to coincide with their visit by mere chance but seems extremely unlikely to happen with two or more samples. Considering the dates of CrowdStrike's activities at the DNC coincide with the compile dates of two out of the three pieces of malware discovered and attributed to APT-28 (the other compiled approximately 2 weeks prior to their visit), the big question is: Did CrowdStrike plant some (or all) of the APT-28 malware? ..."
"... The IP address, according to those articles, was disabled in June 2015, eleven months before the DNC emails were acquired – meaning those IP addresses, in reality, had no involvement in the alleged hacking of the DNC. ..."
"... The fact that two out of three of the Fancy Bear malware samples identified were compiled on dates within the apparent five day period CrowdStrike were apparently at the DNC seems incredibly unlikely to have occurred by mere chance. ..."
"... That all three malware samples were compiled within ten days either side of their visit – makes it clear just how questionable the Fancy Bear malware discoveries were. ..."
Dec 28, 2017 | theduran.com

Of course the DNC did not want to the FBI to investigate its "hacked servers". The plan was well underway to excuse Hillary's pathetic election defeat to Trump, and CrowdStrike would help out by planting evidence to pin on those evil "Russian hackers." Some would call this entire DNC server hack an "insurance policy."

... ... ...

[Sep 17, 2017] The So-called Russian Hack of the DNC Does Not Make Sense by Publius Tacitus

Highly recommended!
All signs of sophisticated false flag operation, which probably involved putting malware into DNC servers and then detecting and analyzing them
Notable quotes:
"... 6 May 2016 when CrowdStrike first detected what it assessed to be a Russian presence inside the DNC server. Follow me here. One week after realizing there had been a penetration, the DNC learns, courtesy of the computer security firm it hired, that the Russians are doing it. Okay. Does CrowdStrike shut down the penetration. Nope. The hacking apparently continues unabated. ..."
"... The Smoking Gun ..."
"... I introduce Seth Rich at this point because he represents an alternative hypothesis. Rich, who reportedly was a Bernie Sanders supporter, was in a position at the DNC that gave him access to the emails in question and the opportunity to download the emails and take them from the DNC headquarters. Worth noting that Julian Assange offered $20,000 for information leading to the arrest of Rich's killer or killers. 8. 22 July 2016. Wikileaks published the DNC emails starting on 22 July 2016. Bill Binney, a former senior official at NSA, insists that if such a hack and electronic transfer over the internet had occurred then the NSA has in it possession the intelligence data to prove that such activity had occurred. ..."
"... Notwithstanding the claim by CrowdStrike not a single piece of evidence has been provided to the public to support the conclusion that the emails were hacked and physically transferred to a server under the control of a Russian intelligence operative. ..."
"... Please do not try to post a comment stating that the "Intelligence Community" concluded as well that Russia was responsible. That claim is totally without one shred of actual forensic evidence. Also, Julian Assange insists that the emails did not come from a Russian source. ..."
"... Wikileaks, the protector of the accountability of the top, has announced a reward for finding the murderers of Seth Rich. In comparison, the DNC has not offered any reward to help the investigation of the murder of the DNC staffer, but the DNC found a well-connected lawyer to protect Imran Awan who is guilty (along with Debbie Wasserman-Schultz) in the greatest breach of national cybersecurity: http://dailycaller.com/2017/07/29/wasserman-schultz-seemingly-planned-to-pay-suspect-even-while-he-lived-in-pakistan/ ..."
"... I'm afraid you're behind the times. Wheeler is no longer relevant now that Sy Hersh has revealed an FBI report that explicitly says Rich was in contact with Wikileaks offering to sell them DNC documents. ..."
"... It's unfortunate for the Rich family, but now that the connection is pretty much confirmed, they're going to have to allow the truth to come out ..."
"... Mr. Dmitri Alperovitch, of Jewish descent (and an emigre from Russia), has been an "expert" at the Atlantic Council, the same organization that cherishes and provides for Mr. Eliot Higgins. These two gentlemen - and the directorate of Atlantic Council - are exhibit one of opportunism and intellectual dishonesty (though it is hard to think about Mr. Higgins in terms of "intellect"). ..."
"... Alperovitch is not just an incompetent "expert" in cybersecurity - he is a willing liar and war-mongering, for money. ..."
"... One could of course start earlier. What is the exact timeline of the larger cyberwar post 9/11, or at least the bits and pieces that surfaced for the nitwits among us, like: Stuxnet? ..."
"... Scott Ritter's article referenced in PT's post is terrific, covering a ton of issues related to CrowdStrike and the DNC hack. You need to read it, not just PT's timeline. In case you missed the link in PT's post: ..."
"... His article echoes and reinforces what Carr and others have said about the difficulty of attribution of infosec breaches. Namely that the basic problem of both intelligence and infosec operations is that there is too much obfuscation, manipulation, and misdirection involved to be sure of who or what is going on. ..."
"... The Seth Rich connection is pretty much a done deal, now that Sy Hersh has been caught on tape stating that he knows of an FBI report based on a forensic analysis of Rich's laptop that shows Rich was in direct contact with Wikileaks with an attempt to sell them DNC documents and that Wikileaks had access to Rich's DropBox account. Despite Hersh's subsequent denials - which everyone knows are his usual impatient deflections prior to putting out a sourced and organized article - it's pretty clear that Rich was at least one of the sources of the Wikileaks email dump and that there is zero connection to Russia. ..."
"... None of this proves that Russian intelligence - or Russians of some stripe - or for that matter hackers from literally anywhere - couldn't or didn't ALSO do a hack of the DNC. But it does prove that the iron-clad attribution of the source of Wikileaks email release to Russia is at best flawed, and at worst a deliberate cover up of a leak. ..."
Sep 05, 2017 | turcopolier.typepad.com

Notwithstanding the conventional wisdom that Russia hacked into the DNC computers, downloaded emails and a passed the stolen missives to Julian Assange's crew at Wikileaks, a careful examination of the timeline of events from 2016 shows that this story is simply not plausible.

Let me take you through the known facts:

1. 29 April 2016 , when the DNC became aware its servers had been penetrated (https://medium.com/homefront-rising/dumbstruck-how-crowdstrike-conned-america-on-the-hack-of-the-dnc-ecfa522ff44f). Note. They apparently did not know who was doing it. 2, 6 May 2016 when CrowdStrike first detected what it assessed to be a Russian presence inside the DNC server. Follow me here. One week after realizing there had been a penetration, the DNC learns, courtesy of the computer security firm it hired, that the Russians are doing it. Okay. Does CrowdStrike shut down the penetration. Nope. The hacking apparently continues unabated. 3. 25 May 2016. The messages published on Wikileaks from the DNC show that 26 May 2016 was the last date that emails were sent and received at the DNC. There are no emails in the public domain after that date. In other words, if the DNC emails were taken via a hacking operation, we can conclude from the fact that the last messages posted to Wikileaks show a date time group of 25 May 2016. Wikileaks has not reported nor posted any emails from the DNC after the 25th of May. I think it is reasonable to assume that was the day the dirty deed was done. 4. 12 June 2016, CrowdStrike purged the DNC server of all malware. Are you kidding me? 45 days after the DNC discovers that its serve has been penetrated the decision to purge the DNC server is finally made. What in the hell were they waiting for? But this also tells us that 18 days after the last email "taken" from the DNC, no additional emails were taken by this nasty malware. Here is what does not make sense to me. If the DNC emails were truly hacked and the malware was still in place on 11 June 2016 (it was not purged until the 12th) then why are there no emails from the DNC after 26 May 2016? an excellent analysis of Guccifer's role : Almost immediately after the one-two punch of the Washington Post article/CrowdStrike technical report went public, however, something totally unexpected happened -- someone came forward and took full responsibility for the DNC cyber attack. Moreover, this entity -- operating under the persona Guccifer 2.0 (ostensibly named after the original Guccifer , a Romanian hacker who stole the emails of a number of high-profile celebrities and who was arrested in 2014 and sentenced to 4 ˝ years of prison in May 2016) -- did something no state actor has ever done before, publishing documents stolen from the DNC server as proof of his claims.
Hi. This is Guccifer 2.0 and this is me who hacked Democratic National Committee.

With that simple email, sent to the on-line news magazine, The Smoking Gun , Guccifer 2.0 stole the limelight away from Alperovitch. Over the course of the next few days, through a series of emails, online posts and interviews , Guccifer 2.0 openly mocked CrowdStrike and its Russian attribution. Guccifer 2.0 released a number of documents, including a massive 200-plus-missive containing opposition research on Donald Trump.

Guccifer 2.0 also directly contradicted the efforts on the part of the DNC to minimize the extent of the hacking, releasing the very donor lists the DNC specifically stated had not been stolen. More chilling, Guccifer 2.0 claimed to be in possession of "about 100 Gb of data" which had been passed on to the online publisher, Wikileaks, who "will publish them soon." 7. Seth Rich died on 10 July 2016. I introduce Seth Rich at this point because he represents an alternative hypothesis. Rich, who reportedly was a Bernie Sanders supporter, was in a position at the DNC that gave him access to the emails in question and the opportunity to download the emails and take them from the DNC headquarters. Worth noting that Julian Assange offered $20,000 for information leading to the arrest of Rich's killer or killers. 8. 22 July 2016. Wikileaks published the DNC emails starting on 22 July 2016. Bill Binney, a former senior official at NSA, insists that if such a hack and electronic transfer over the internet had occurred then the NSA has in it possession the intelligence data to prove that such activity had occurred. Notwithstanding the claim by CrowdStrike not a single piece of evidence has been provided to the public to support the conclusion that the emails were hacked and physically transferred to a server under the control of a Russian intelligence operative. Please do not try to post a comment stating that the "Intelligence Community" concluded as well that Russia was responsible. That claim is totally without one shred of actual forensic evidence. Also, Julian Assange insists that the emails did not come from a Russian source.

Fool , 05 September 2017 at 09:01 AM

Where was it reported that Rich was a Sanders supporter?
Publius Tacitus -> Fool... , 05 September 2017 at 09:15 AM
This is one of the reports, http://heavy.com/news/2016/08/seth-rich-julian-assange-source-wikileaks-wiki-dnc-emails-death-murder-reward-video-interview-hillary-clinton-shawn-lucas/.
Anna -> Publius Tacitus ... , 05 September 2017 at 10:56 AM
Wikileaks, the protector of the accountability of the top, has announced a reward for finding the murderers of Seth Rich. In comparison, the DNC has not offered any reward to help the investigation of the murder of the DNC staffer, but the DNC found a well-connected lawyer to protect Imran Awan who is guilty (along with Debbie Wasserman-Schultz) in the greatest breach of national cybersecurity: http://dailycaller.com/2017/07/29/wasserman-schultz-seemingly-planned-to-pay-suspect-even-while-he-lived-in-pakistan/
Stephanie -> Publius Tacitus ... , 06 September 2017 at 12:12 PM
Seth Rich's family have pleaded, and continue to plead, that the conspiracy theorists leave the death of their son alone and have said that those who continue to flog this nonsense around the internet are only serving to increase their pain. I suggest respectfully that some here may wish to consider their feelings. (Also, this stuff is nuts, you know.)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/were-seth-richs-parents-stop-politicizing-our-sons-murder/2017/05/23/164cf4dc-3fee-11e7-9869-bac8b446820a_story.html?utm_term=.b20208de48d3

"We also know that many people are angry at our government and want to see justice done in some way, somehow. We are asking you to please consider our feelings and words. There are people who are using our beloved Seth's memory and legacy for their own political goals, and they are using your outrage to perpetuate our nightmare."

http://www.businessinsider.com/seth-rich-family-response-lawsuit-rod-wheeler-2017-8

"Wheeler, a former Metropolitan Police Department officer, was a key figure in a series of debunked stories claiming that Rich had been in contact with Wikileaks before his death. Fox News, which reported the story online and on television, retracted it in June."

Richardstevenhack -> Stephanie... , 07 September 2017 at 07:43 PM
I'm afraid you're behind the times. Wheeler is no longer relevant now that Sy Hersh has revealed an FBI report that explicitly says Rich was in contact with Wikileaks offering to sell them DNC documents.

It's unfortunate for the Rich family, but now that the connection is pretty much confirmed, they're going to have to allow the truth to come out.

Anna , 05 September 2017 at 09:20 AM
Mr. Dmitri Alperovitch, of Jewish descent (and an emigre from Russia), has been an "expert" at the Atlantic Council, the same organization that cherishes and provides for Mr. Eliot Higgins. These two gentlemen - and the directorate of Atlantic Council - are exhibit one of opportunism and intellectual dishonesty (though it is hard to think about Mr. Higgins in terms of "intellect").

Here is an article by Alperovitch: http://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/russian-cyber-attacks-in-the-united-states-will-intensify

Take note how Alperovitch coded the names of the supposed hackers: "Russian intelligence services hacked the Democratic National Committee's computer network and accessed opposition research on Donald Trump, according to the Atlantic Council's Dmitri Alperovitch.

Two Russian groups ! codenamed FancyBear and CozyBear ! have been identified as spearheading the DNC breach." Alperovitch is not just an incompetent "expert" in cybersecurity - he is a willing liar and war-mongering, for money.

The DNC hacking story has never been about national security; Alperovitch (and his handlers) have no loyalty to the US.

LeaNder , 05 September 2017 at 09:59 AM
PT, I make a short exception. Actually decided to stop babbling for a while. But: Just finished something successfully.

And since I usually need distraction by something far more interesting then matters at hand. I was close to your line of thought yesters.

But really: Shouldn't the timeline start in 2015, since that's supposedly the time someone got into the DNC's system?

One could of course start earlier. What is the exact timeline of the larger cyberwar post 9/11, or at least the bits and pieces that surfaced for the nitwits among us, like: Stuxnet?

But nevermind. Don't forget developments and recent events around Eugene or Jewgeni Walentinowitsch Kasperski?

LondonBob , 05 September 2017 at 03:27 PM
The Russia thing certainly seems to have gone quiet.

Bannon's chum says the issue with pursuing the Clinton email thing is that you would end up having to indict almost all of the last administration, including Obama, unseemly certainly. Still there might be a fall guy, maybe Comey, and obviously it serves Trump's purposes to keep this a live issue through the good work of Grassley and the occasional tweet.

Would be amusing if Trump pardoned Obama. Still think Brennan should pay a price though, can't really be allowed to get away with it

Richardstevenhack , 05 September 2017 at 06:23 PM
Scott Ritter's article referenced in PT's post is terrific, covering a ton of issues related to CrowdStrike and the DNC hack. You need to read it, not just PT's timeline. In case you missed the link in PT's post:

Dumbstruck: How CrowdStrike Conned America on the Hack of the DNC https://medium.com/homefront-rising/dumbstruck-how-crowdstrike-conned-america-on-the-hack-of-the-dnc-ecfa522ff44f

The article by Jeffrey Carr on CrowdStrike referenced from back in 2012 is also worth reading: Where's the "Strike" in CrowdStrike? https://jeffreycarr.blogspot.com/2012/09/wheres-strike-in-crowdstrike.html

Also, the article Carr references is very important for understanding the limits of malware analysis and "attribution". Written by Michael Tanji, whose credentials appear impressive: "spent nearly 20 years in the US intelligence community. Trained in both SIGINT and HUMINT disciplines he has worked at the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, and the National Reconnaissance Office. At various points in his career he served as an expert in information warfare, computer network operations, computer forensics, and indications and warning. A veteran of the US Army, Michael has served in both strategic and tactical assignments in the Pacific Theater, the Balkans, and the Middle East."

Malware Analysis: The Danger of Connecting the Dots: https://www.oodaloop.com/technology/2012/09/11/malware-analysis-the-danger-of-connecting-the-dots/

His article echoes and reinforces what Carr and others have said about the difficulty of attribution of infosec breaches. Namely that the basic problem of both intelligence and infosec operations is that there is too much obfuscation, manipulation, and misdirection involved to be sure of who or what is going on.

The Seth Rich connection is pretty much a done deal, now that Sy Hersh has been caught on tape stating that he knows of an FBI report based on a forensic analysis of Rich's laptop that shows Rich was in direct contact with Wikileaks with an attempt to sell them DNC documents and that Wikileaks had access to Rich's DropBox account. Despite Hersh's subsequent denials - which everyone knows are his usual impatient deflections prior to putting out a sourced and organized article - it's pretty clear that Rich was at least one of the sources of the Wikileaks email dump and that there is zero connection to Russia.

None of this proves that Russian intelligence - or Russians of some stripe - or for that matter hackers from literally anywhere - couldn't or didn't ALSO do a hack of the DNC. But it does prove that the iron-clad attribution of the source of Wikileaks email release to Russia is at best flawed, and at worst a deliberate cover up of a leak.

And Russiagate depends primarily on BOTH alleged "facts" being true: 1) that Russia hacked the DNC, and 2) that Russia was the source of Wikileaks release. And if the latter is not true, then one has to question why Russia hacked the DNC in the first place, other than for "normal" espionage operations. "Influencing the election" then becomes a far less plausible theory.

The general takeaway from an infosec point of view is that attribution by means of target identification, tools used, and "indicators of compromise" is a fatally flawed means of identifying, and thus being able to counter, the adversaries encountered in today's Internet world, as Tanji proves. Only HUMINT offers a way around this, just as it is really the only valid option in countering terrorism.

[Jul 17, 2017] Tucker Carlson Goes to War Against the Neocons by Curt Mills

Highly recommended!
max Book is just anothe "Yascha about Russia" type, that Masha Gessen represents so vividly. The problem with him is that time of neocon prominance is solidly in the past and now unpleasant question about the cost from the US people of their reckless foreign policies get into some newspapers and managines. They cost the USA tremedous anount of money (as in trillions) and those money consititute a large portion of the national debt. Critiques so far were very weak and partially suppressed voices, but defeat of neocon warmonger Hillary signify some break with the past.
Notable quotes:
"... National Interest ..."
"... Carlson's record suggests that he has been in the camp skeptical of U.S. foreign-policy intervention for some time now and, indeed, that it predates Donald Trump's rise to power. (Carlson has commented publicly that he was humiliated by his own public support for the 2003 invasion of Iraq.) According to Carlson, "This is not about Trump. This is not about Trump. It's the one thing in American life that has nothing to do with Trump. My views on this are totally unrelated to my views on Donald Trump. This has been going since September 11, 2001. And it's a debate that we've never really had. And we need to have it." He adds, "I don't think the public has ever been for the ideas that undergird our policies." ..."
"... National Interest ..."
"... But the fight also seems to have a personal edge. Carlson says, "Max Boot is not impressive. . . . Max is a totally mediocre person." Carlson added that he felt guilty about not having, in his assessment, a superior guest to Boot on the show to defend hawkishness. "I wish I had had someone clear-thinking and smart on to represent their views. And there are a lot of them. I would love to have that debate," Carlson told me, periodically emphasizing that he is raring to go on this subject. ..."
"... New York Observer ..."
"... National Interest ..."
"... Weekly Standard ..."
"... Weekly Standard ..."
"... Though he eschews labels, Carlson sounds like a foreign-policy realist on steroids: "You can debate what's in [the United States'] interest. That's a subjective category. But what you can't debate is that ought to be the basic question, the first, second and third question. Does it represent our interest? . . . I don't think that enters into the calculations of a lot of the people who make these decisions." Carlson's interests extend beyond foreign policy, and he says "there's a massive realignment going on ideologically that everybody is missing. It's dramatic. And everyone is missing it. . . . Nobody is paying attention to it, " ..."
"... : Flickr/Gage Skidmore. CC BY-SA 2.0. ..."
Jul 14, 2017 | nationalinterest.org

This week's primetime knife fights with Max Boot and Ralph Peters are emblematic of the battle for the soul of the American Right.

To be sure, Carlson rejects the term "neoconservatism," and implicitly, its corollary on the Democratic side, liberal internationalism. In 2016, "the reigning Republican foreign-policy view, you can call it neoconservatism, or interventionism, or whatever you want to call it" was rejected, he explained in a wide-ranging interview with the National Interest Friday.

"But I don't like the term 'neoconservatism,'" he says, "because I don't even know what it means. I think it describes the people rather than their ideas, which is what I'm interested in. And to be perfectly honest . . . I have a lot of friends who have been described as neocons, people I really love, sincerely. And they are offended by it. So I don't use it," Carlson said.

But Carlson's recent segments on foreign policy conducted with Lt. Col. Ralph Peters and the prominent neoconservative journalist and author Max Boot were acrimonious even by Carlsonian standards. In a discussion on Syria, Russia and Iran, a visibly upset Boot accused Carlson of being "immoral" and taking foreign-policy positions to curry favor with the White House, keep up his ratings , and by proxy, benefit financially. Boot says that Carlson "basically parrots whatever the pro-Trump line is that Fox viewers want to see. If Trump came out strongly against Putin tomorrow, I imagine Tucker would echo this as faithfully as the pro-Russia arguments he echoes today." But is this assessment fair?

Carlson's record suggests that he has been in the camp skeptical of U.S. foreign-policy intervention for some time now and, indeed, that it predates Donald Trump's rise to power. (Carlson has commented publicly that he was humiliated by his own public support for the 2003 invasion of Iraq.) According to Carlson, "This is not about Trump. This is not about Trump. It's the one thing in American life that has nothing to do with Trump. My views on this are totally unrelated to my views on Donald Trump. This has been going since September 11, 2001. And it's a debate that we've never really had. And we need to have it." He adds, "I don't think the public has ever been for the ideas that undergird our policies."

Even if Carlson doesn't want to use the label neocon to describe some of those ideas, Boot is not so bashful. In 2005, Boot wrote an essay called "Neocons May Get the Last Laugh." Carlson "has become a Trump acolyte in pursuit of ratings," says Boot, also interviewed by the National Interest . "I bet if it were President Clinton accused of colluding with the Russians, Tucker would be outraged and calling for impeachment if not execution. But since it's Trump, then it's all a big joke to him," Boot says. Carlson vociferously dissents from such assessments: "This is what dumb people do. They can't assess the merits of an argument. . . . I'm not talking about Syria, and Russia, and Iran because of ratings. That's absurd. I can't imagine those were anywhere near the most highly-rated segments that night. That's not why I wanted to do it."

But Carlson insists, "I have been saying the same thing for fifteen years. Now I have a T.V. show that people watch, so my views are better known. But it shouldn't be a surprise. I supported Trump to the extent he articulated beliefs that I agree with. . . . And I don't support Trump to the extent that his actions deviate from those beliefs," Carlson said. Boot on Fox said that Carlson is "too smart" for this kind of argument. But Carlson has bucked the Trump line, notably on Trump's April 7 strikes in Syria. "When the Trump administration threw a bunch of cruise missiles into Syria for no obvious reason, on the basis of a pretext that I question . . . I questioned [the decision] immediately. On T.V. I was on the air when that happened. I think, maybe seven minutes into my show. . . . I thought this was reckless."

But the fight also seems to have a personal edge. Carlson says, "Max Boot is not impressive. . . . Max is a totally mediocre person." Carlson added that he felt guilty about not having, in his assessment, a superior guest to Boot on the show to defend hawkishness. "I wish I had had someone clear-thinking and smart on to represent their views. And there are a lot of them. I would love to have that debate," Carlson told me, periodically emphasizing that he is raring to go on this subject.

Boot objects to what he sees as a cavalier attitude on the part of Carlson and others toward allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 election, and also toward the deaths of citizens of other countries. "You are laughing about the fact that Russia is interfering in our election process. That to me is immoral," Boot told Carlson on his show. "This is the level of dumbness and McCarthyism in Washington right now," says Carlson. "I think it has the virtue of making Max Boot feel like a good person. Like he's on God's team, or something like that. But how does that serve the interest of the country? It doesn't." Carlson says that Donald Trump, Jr.'s emails aren't nearly as important as who is going to lead Syria, which he says Boot and others have no plan for successfully occupying. Boot, by contrast, sees the U.S. administration as dangerously flirting with working with Russia, Iran and Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. "For whatever reason, Trump is pro-Putin, no one knows why, and he's taken a good chunk of the GOP along with him," Boot says.

On Fox last Wednesday, Boot reminded Carlson that he originally supported the 2003 Iraq decision. "You supported the invasion of Iraq," Boot said, before repeating, "You supported the invasion of Iraq." Carlson conceded that, but it seems the invasion was a bona fide turning point. It's most important to parse whether Carlson has a long record of anti-interventionism, or if he's merely sniffing the throne of the president (who, dubiously, may have opposed the 2003 invasion). "I think it's a total nightmare and disaster, and I'm ashamed that I went against my own instincts in supporting it," Carlson told the New York Observer in early 2004. "It's something I'll never do again. Never. I got convinced by a friend of mine who's smarter than I am, and I shouldn't have done that. . . . I'm enraged by it, actually." Carlson told the National Interest that he's felt this way since seeing Iraq for himself in December 2003.

The evidence points heavily toward a sincere conversion on Carlson's part, or preexisting conviction that was briefly overcome by the beat of the war drums. Carlson did work for the Weekly Standard , perhaps the most prominent neoconservative magazine, in the 1990s and early 2000s. Carlson today speaks respectfully of William Kristol, its founding editor, but has concluded that he is all wet. On foreign policy, the people Carlson speaks most warmly about are genuine hard left-wingers: Glenn Greenwald, a vociferous critic of both economic neoliberalism and neoconservatism; the anti-establishment journalist Michael Tracey; Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor of the Nation ; and her husband, Stephen Cohen, the Russia expert and critic of U.S. foreign policy.

"The only people in American public life who are raising these questions are on the traditional left: not lifestyle liberals, not the Williamsburg (Brooklyn) group, not liberals in D.C., not Nancy Pelosi." He calls the expertise of establishment sources on matters like Syria "more shallow than I even imagined." On his MSNBC show, which was canceled for poor ratings, he cavorted with noninterventionist stalwarts such as Ron Paul , the 2008 and 2012 antiwar GOP candidate, and Patrick J. Buchanan. "No one is smarter than Pat Buchanan," he said last year of the man whose ideas many say laid the groundwork for Trump's political success.

Carlson has risen to the pinnacle of cable news, succeeding Bill O'Reilly. It wasn't always clear an antiwar take would vault someone to such prominence. Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio or Mitt Romney could be president (Boot has advised the latter two). But here he is, and it's likely no coincidence that Carlson got a show after Trump's election, starting at the 7 p.m. slot, before swiftly moving to the 9 p.m. slot to replace Trump antagonist Megyn Kelly, and just as quickly replacing O'Reilly at the top slot, 8 p.m. Boot, on the other hand, declared in 2016 that the Republican Party was dead , before it went on to hold Congress and most state houses, and of course take the presidency. He's still at the Council on Foreign Relations and writes for the New York Times (this seems to clearly annoy Carlson: "It tells you everything about the low standards of the American foreign-policy establishment").

Boot wrote in 2003 in the Weekly Standard that the fall of Saddam Hussein's government "may turn out to be one of those hinge moments in history" comparable to "events like the storming of the Bastille or the fall of the Berlin Wall, after which everything is different." He continued, "If the occupation goes well (admittedly a big if ), it may mark the moment when the powerful antibiotic known as democracy was introduced into the diseased environment of the Middle East, and began to transform the region for the better."

Though he eschews labels, Carlson sounds like a foreign-policy realist on steroids: "You can debate what's in [the United States'] interest. That's a subjective category. But what you can't debate is that ought to be the basic question, the first, second and third question. Does it represent our interest? . . . I don't think that enters into the calculations of a lot of the people who make these decisions." Carlson's interests extend beyond foreign policy, and he says "there's a massive realignment going on ideologically that everybody is missing. It's dramatic. And everyone is missing it. . . . Nobody is paying attention to it, "

Carlson seems intent on pressing the issue. The previous night, in his debate with Peters, the retired lieutenant colonel said that Carlson sounded like Charles Lindbergh, who opposed U.S. intervention against Nazi Germany before 1941. "This particular strain of Republican foreign policy has almost no constituency. Nobody agrees with it. I mean there's not actually a large group of people outside of New York, Washington or L.A. who think any of this is a good idea," Carlson says. "All I am is an asker of obvious questions. And that's enough to reveal these people have no idea what they're talking about. None."

Curt Mills is a foreign-affairs reporter at the National Interest . Follow him on Twitter: @CurtMills .

Image : Flickr/Gage Skidmore. CC BY-SA 2.0.

[Jul 12, 2017] Stephen Cohens Remarks on Tucker Carlson Last Night Were Extraordinary

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Cohen's appearance on Carlson's show last night demonstrated again at what a blistering pace public opinion in the West about Putin and Russia is shifting, for the better. ..."
"... Cohen is always good, but last night he nailed it, calling the media's coverage of Hamburg 'pornography'. ..."
"... It was just a year ago, pre-Trump, that professor Cohen was banned from all the networks, from any major media outlet, and being relentlessly pilloried by the neocon media for being a naive fool for defending Putin and Russia. ..."
"... "The first thing you notice is just how much the press is rooting for this meeting between our president and the Russian President to fail. It's a kind of pornography. Just as there's no love in pornography, there's no American national interest in this bashing of Trump and Putin. ..."
"... Carlson tried to draw Cohen out about who exactly in Washington is so against Assad, and why, and Cohen deflected, demurring - 'I don't know - I'm not an expert'. Of course he knows, as does Carlson - it is an unholy alliance of Israel, Saudi Arabia and their neocon friends in Washington and the media who are pushing this criminal policy, who support ISIS, deliberately. But they can't say so, because, ... well, because. Ask Rupert Murdoch. ..."
Jul 12, 2017 | russia-insider.com
Cohen's appearance on Carlson's show last night demonstrated again at what a blistering pace public opinion in the West about Putin and Russia is shifting, for the better.

Cohen is always good, but last night he nailed it, calling the media's coverage of Hamburg 'pornography'.

Ahh, the power of the apt phrase.

It was just a year ago, pre-Trump, that professor Cohen was banned from all the networks, from any major media outlet, and being relentlessly pilloried by the neocon media for being a naive fool for defending Putin and Russia.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/5L2F4ocEIZw

Last night he was the featured guest on the most watched news show in the country, being cheered on by the host, who has him on as a regular. And Cohen isn't remotely a conservative. He is a contributing editor at the arch-liberal Nation magazine, of which his wife is the editor. It doesn't really get pinker than that.

Some choice quotes here, but the whole thing is worth a listen:

"The first thing you notice is just how much the press is rooting for this meeting between our president and the Russian President to fail. It's a kind of pornography. Just as there's no love in pornography, there's no American national interest in this bashing of Trump and Putin.

As a historian let me tell you the headline I would write instead:

"What we witnessed today in Hamburg was a potentially historic new detente. an anti-cold-war partnership begun by Trump and Putin but meanwhile attempts to sabotage it escalate." I've seen a lot of summits between American and Russian presidents, ... and I think what we saw today was potentially the most fateful meeting ... since the Cold War.

The reason is, is that the relationship with Russia is so dangerous and we have a president who might have been crippled or cowed by these Russiagate attacks ... yet he was not. He was politically courageous. It went well. They got important things done. I think maybe today we witnessed president Trump emerging as an American statesman."

Cohen goes on to say that the US should ally with Assad, Iran, and Russia to crush ISIS, with Carlson bobbing his head up and down in emphatic agreement.

Carlson tried to draw Cohen out about who exactly in Washington is so against Assad, and why, and Cohen deflected, demurring - 'I don't know - I'm not an expert'. Of course he knows, as does Carlson - it is an unholy alliance of Israel, Saudi Arabia and their neocon friends in Washington and the media who are pushing this criminal policy, who support ISIS, deliberately. But they can't say so, because, ... well, because. Ask Rupert Murdoch.

Things are getting better in the US media, but we aren't quite able to call a spade a spade in the land of the free and the home of the brave.

[Jun 24, 2017] The Criminal Laws of Counterinsurgency by Todd E. Pierce

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Many "never-Trumpers" of both parties see the deep state's national security bureaucracy as their best hope to destroy Trump and thus defend constitutional government, but those hopes are misguided. ..."
"... As Michael Glennon, author of National Security and Double Government, pointed out in a June 2017 Harper's essay, if "the president maintains his attack, splintered and demoralized factions within the bureaucracy could actually support - not oppose - many potential Trump initiatives, such as stepped-up drone strikes, cyberattacks, covert action, immigration bans, and mass surveillance." ..."
"... Corraborative evidence of Valentine's thesis is, perhaps surprisingly, provided by the CIA's own website where a number of redacted historical documents have been published. Presumably, they are documents first revealed under the Freedom of Information Act. A few however are copies of news articles once available to the public but now archived by the CIA which has blacked-out portions of the articles. ..."
"... This led to an investigation by New Times in a day when there were still "investigative reporters," and not the government sycophants of today. Based on firsthand accounts, their investigation concluded that Operation Phoenix was the "only systematized kidnapping, torture and assassination program ever sponsored by the United States government. . . . Its victims were noncombatants." At least 40,000 were murdered, with "only" about 8,000 supposed Viet Cong political cadres targeted for execution, with the rest civilians (including women and children) killed and "later conveniently labeled VCI. Hundreds of thousands were jailed without trial, often after sadistic abuse." The article notes that Phoenix was conceived, financed, and directed by the Central Intelligence Agency ..."
"... But the article noted that one of the most persistent criticisms of Phoenix was that it resulted "in the arrest and imprisonment of many innocent civilians." These were called "Class C Communist offenders," some of whom may actually have been forced to commit such "belligerent acts" as digging trenches or carrying rice. It was those alleged as the "hard core, full-time cadre" who were deemed to make up the "shadow government" designated as Class A and B Viet Cong. ..."
"... Ironically, by the Bush administration's broad definition of "unlawful combatants," CIA officers and their support structure also would fit the category. But the American public is generally forgiving of its own war criminals though most self-righteous and hypocritical in judging foreign war criminals. But perhaps given sufficient evidence, the American public could begin to see both the immorality of this behavior and its counterproductive consequences. ..."
"... Talleyrand is credited with saying, "They have learned nothing and forgotten nothing." Reportedly, that was borrowed from a 1796 letter by a French naval officer, which stated, in the original language: Personne n'est corrigé; personne n'a su ni rien oublier ni rien appendre. In English: "Nobody has been corrected; no one has known to forget, nor yet to learn anything." That sums up the CIA leadership entirely. ..."
Jun 24, 2017 | original.antiwar.com

Douglas Valentine has once again added to the store of knowledge necessary for American citizens to understand how the U.S. government actually works today, in his most recent book entitled The CIA As Organized Crime . (Valentine previously wrote The Phoenix Program , which should be read with the current book.)

The US "deep state" – of which the CIA is an integral part – is an open secret now and the Phoenix Program (assassinations, death squads, torture, mass detentions, exploitation of information) has been its means of controlling populations. Consequently, knowing the deep state's methods is the only hope of building a democratic opposition to the deep state and to restore as much as possible the Constitutional system we had in previous centuries, as imperfect as it was.

Princeton University political theorist Sheldon Wolin described the US political system in place by 2003 as "inverted totalitarianism." He reaffirmed that in 2009 after seeing a year of the Obama administration. Correctly identifying the threat against constitutional governance is the first step to restore it, and as Wolin understood, substantive constitutional government ended long before Donald Trump campaigned. He's just taking unconstitutional governance to the next level in following the same path as his recent predecessors. However, even as some elements of the "deep state" seek to remove Trump, the President now has many "deep state" instruments in his own hands to be used at his unreviewable discretion.

Many "never-Trumpers" of both parties see the deep state's national security bureaucracy as their best hope to destroy Trump and thus defend constitutional government, but those hopes are misguided. After all, the deep state's bureaucratic leadership has worked arduously for decades to subvert constitutional order.

As Michael Glennon, author of National Security and Double Government, pointed out in a June 2017 Harper's essay, if "the president maintains his attack, splintered and demoralized factions within the bureaucracy could actually support - not oppose - many potential Trump initiatives, such as stepped-up drone strikes, cyberattacks, covert action, immigration bans, and mass surveillance."

Glennon noted that the propensity of "security managers" to back policies which ratchet up levels of security "will play into Trump's hands, so that if and when he finally does declare victory, a revamped security directorate could emerge more menacing than ever, with him its devoted new ally." Before that happens, it is incumbent for Americans to understand what Valentine explains in his book of CIA methods of "population control" as first fully developed in the Vietnam War's Phoenix Program.

Hating the US

There also must be the realization that our "national security" apparatchiks - principally but not solely the CIA - have served to exponentially increase the numbers of those people who hate the US.

Some of these people turn to terrorism as an expression of that hostility. Anyone who is at all familiar with the CIA and Al Qaeda knows that the CIA has been Al Qaeda's most important "combat multiplier" since 9/11, and the CIA can be said to have birthed ISIS as well with the mistreatment of incarcerated Iraqi men in US prisons in Iraq.

Indeed, by following the model of the Phoenix Program, the CIA must be seen in the Twenty-first Century as a combination of the ultimate "Murder, Inc.," when judged by the CIA's methods such as drone warfare and its victims; and the Keystone Kops, when the multiple failures of CIA policies are considered. This is not to make light of what the CIA does, but the CIA's misguided policies and practices have served to generate wrath, hatred and violence against Americans, which we see manifested in cities such as San Bernardino, Orlando, New York and Boston.

Pointing out the harm to Americans is not to dismiss the havoc that Americans under the influence of the CIA have perpetrated on foreign populations. But "morality" seems a lost virtue today in the US, which is under the influence of so much militaristic war propaganda that morality no longer enters into the equation in determining foreign policy.

In addition to the harm the CIA has caused to people around the world, the CIA works tirelessly at subverting its own government at home, as was most visible in the spying on and subversion of the torture investigation by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. The subversion of democracy also includes the role the CIA plays in developing and disseminating war propaganda as "information warfare," upon the American people. This is what the Rand Corporation under the editorship of Zalmay Khalilzad has described as "conditioning the battlefield," which begins with the minds of the American population.

Douglas Valentine discusses and documents the role of the CIA in disseminating pro-war propaganda and disinformation as complementary to the violent tactics of the Phoenix Program in Vietnam. Valentine explains that "before Phoenix was adopted as the model for policing the American empire, many US military commanders in Vietnam resisted the Phoenix strategy of targeting civilians with Einsatzgruppen-style 'special forces' and Gestapo-style secret police."

Military Commanders considered that type of program a flagrant violation of the Law of War. "Their main job is to zap the in-betweeners – you know, the people who aren't all the way with the government and aren't all the way with the Viet Cong either. They figure if you zap enough in-betweeners, people will begin to get the idea," according to one quote from The Phoenix Program referring to the unit tasked with much of the Phoenix operations.

Nazi Influences

Comparing the Phoenix Program and its operatives to "Einsatzgruppen-style 'special forces' and Gestapo-style secret police" is not a distortion of the strategic understanding of each. Both programs were extreme forms of repression operating under martial law principles where the slightest form of dissent was deemed to represent the work of the "enemy." Hitler's Bandit Hunters: The SS and the Nazi Occupation of Europe by Philip W. Blood describes German "Security Warfare" as practiced in World War II, which can be seen as identical in form to the Phoenix Program as to how the enemy is defined as anyone who is "potentially" a threat, deemed either "partizans" or terrorists.

That the Germans included entire racial categories in that does not change the underlying logic, which was, anyone deemed an internal enemy in a territory in which their military operated had to be "neutralized" by any means necessary. The US military and the South Vietnamese military governments operated under the same principles but not based on race, rather the perception that certain areas and villages were loyal to the Viet Cong.

This repressive doctrine was also not unique to the Nazis in Europe and the US military in Vietnam. Similar though less sophisticated strategies were used against the American Indians and by the imperial powers of the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth centuries, including by the US in its newly acquired territories of the Philippines and in the Caribbean. This "imperial policing," i.e., counterinsurgency, simply moved to more manipulative and, in ways, more violent levels.

That the US drew upon German counterinsurgency doctrine, as brutal as it was, is well documented. This is shown explicitly in a 2011 article published in the Journal of Military and Strategic Studies entitled German Counterinsurgency Revisited by Charles D. Melson. He wrote that in 1942, Nazi commander Heinrich Himmler named a deputy for "anti-bandit warfare," (Bevollmachtigter fur die Bandenkampfung im Osten), SS-General von dem Bach, whose responsibilities expanded in 1943 to head all SS and police anti-bandit units and operations. He was one of the architects of the Einsatzguppen "concept of anti-partisan warfare," a German predecessor to the "Phoenix Program."

'Anti-Partisan' Lessons

It wasn't a coincidence that this "anti-partisan" warfare concept should be adopted by US forces in Vietnam and retained to the present day. Melson pointed out that a "post-war German special forces officer described hunter or ranger units as 'men who knew every possible ruse and tactic of guerrilla warfare. They had gone through the hell of combat against the crafty partisans in the endless swamps and forests of Russia.'"

Consequently, "The German special forces and reconnaissance school was a sought after posting for North Atlantic Treaty Organization special operations personnel," who presumably included members of the newly created US Army Special Forces soldiers, which was in part headquartered at Bad Tolz in Germany, as well as CIA paramilitary officers.

Just as with the later Phoenix Program to the present-day US global counterinsurgency, Melson wrote that the "attitude of the [local] population and the amount of assistance it was willing to give guerilla units was of great concern to the Germans. Different treatment was supposed to be accorded to affected populations, bandit supporters, and bandits, while so-called population and resource control measures for each were noted (but were in practice, treated apparently one and the same). 'Action against enemy agitation' was the psychological or information operations of the Nazi period. The Nazis believed that, 'Because of the close relationship of guerilla warfare and politics, actions against enemy agitation are a task that is just as important as interdiction and combat actions. All means must be used to ward off enemy influence and waken and maintain a clear political will.'"

This is typical of any totalitarian system – a movement or a government – whether the process is characterized as counterinsurgency or internal security. The idea of any civilian collaboration with the "enemy" is the basis for what the US government charges as "conspiracy" in the Guantanamo Military Commissions.

Valentine explains the Phoenix program as having been developed by the CIA in 1967 to combine "existing counterinsurgency programs in a concerted effort to 'neutralize' the Vietcong infrastructure (VCI)." He explained further that "neutralize" meant "to kill, capture, or make to defect." "Infrastructure" meant civilians suspected of supporting North Vietnamese and Vietcong soldiers. Central to the Phoenix program was that its targets were civilians, making the operation a violation of the Geneva Conventions which guaranteed protection to civilians in time of war.

"The Vietnam's War's Silver Lining: A Bureaucratic Model for Population Control Emerges" is the title of Chapter 3. Valentine writes that the "CIA's Phoenix program changed how America fights its wars and how the public views this new type of political and psychological warfare, in which civilian casualties are an explicit objective." The intent of the Phoenix program evolved from "neutralizing" enemy leaders into "a program of systematic repression for the political control of the South Vietnamese people. It sought to accomplish this through a highly bureaucratized system of disposing of people who could not be ideologically assimilated." The CIA claimed a legal basis for the program in "emergency decrees" and orders for "administrative detention."

Lauding Petraeus

Valentine refers to a paper by David Kilcullen entitled Countering Global Insurgency. Kilcullen is one of the so-called "counterinsurgency experts" whom General David Petraeus gathered together in a cell to promote and refine "counterinsurgency," or COIN, for the modern era. Fred Kaplan, who is considered a "liberal author and journalist" at Slate, wrote a panegyric to these cultists entitled, The Insurgents: David Petraeus and the Plot to Change the American Way of War. The purpose of this cell was to change the practices of the US military into that of "imperial policing," or COIN, as they preferred to call it.

But Kilcullen argued in his paper that "The 'War on Terrorism'" is actually a campaign to counter a global insurgency. Therefore, Kilcullen argued, "we need a new paradigm, capable of addressing globalised insurgency." His "disaggregation strategy" called for "actions to target the insurgent infrastructure that would resemble the unfairly maligned (but highly effective) Vietnam-era Phoenix program."

He went on, "Contrary to popular mythology, this was largely a civilian aid and development program, supported by targeted military pacification operations and intelligence activity to disrupt the Viet Cong Infrastructure. A global Phoenix program (including the other key elements that formed part of the successful Vietnam CORDS system) would provide a useful start point to consider how Disaggregation would develop in practice."

It is readily apparent that, in fact, a Phoenix-type program is now US global policy and - just like in Vietnam - it is applying "death squad" strategies that eliminate not only active combatants but also civilians who simply find themselves in the same vicinity, thus creating antagonisms that expand the number of fighters.

Corraborative evidence of Valentine's thesis is, perhaps surprisingly, provided by the CIA's own website where a number of redacted historical documents have been published. Presumably, they are documents first revealed under the Freedom of Information Act. A few however are copies of news articles once available to the public but now archived by the CIA which has blacked-out portions of the articles.

The Bloody Reality

One "sanitized" article - approved for release in 2011 - is a partially redacted New Times article of Aug. 22, 1975, by Michael Drosnin. The article recounts a story of a US Army counterintelligence officer "who directed a small part of a secret war aimed not at the enemy's soldiers but at its civilian leaders." He describes how a CIA-directed Phoenix operative dumped a bag of "eleven bloody ears" as proof of six people killed.

The officer, who recalled this incident in 1971, said, "It made me sick. I couldn't go on with what I was doing in Vietnam. . . . It was an assassination campaign . . . my job was to identify and eliminate VCI, the Viet Cong 'infrastructure' – the communist's shadow government. I worked directly with two Vietnamese units, very tough guys who didn't wear uniforms . . . In the beginning they brought back about 10 percent alive. By the end they had stopped taking prisoners.

"How many VC they got I don't know. I saw a hell of a lot of dead bodies. We'd put a tag on saying VCI, but no one really knew – it was just some native in black pajamas with 16 bullet holes."

This led to an investigation by New Times in a day when there were still "investigative reporters," and not the government sycophants of today. Based on firsthand accounts, their investigation concluded that Operation Phoenix was the "only systematized kidnapping, torture and assassination program ever sponsored by the United States government. . . . Its victims were noncombatants." At least 40,000 were murdered, with "only" about 8,000 supposed Viet Cong political cadres targeted for execution, with the rest civilians (including women and children) killed and "later conveniently labeled VCI. Hundreds of thousands were jailed without trial, often after sadistic abuse." The article notes that Phoenix was conceived, financed, and directed by the Central Intelligence Agency, as Mr. Valentine writes.

A second article archived by the CIA was by the Christian Science Monitor, dated Jan. 5, 1971, describing how the Saigon government was "taking steps that could help eliminate one of the most glaring abuses of its controversial Phoenix program, which is aimed against the Viet Cong political and administrative apparatus." Note how the Monitor shifted blame away from the CIA and onto the South Vietnamese government.

But the article noted that one of the most persistent criticisms of Phoenix was that it resulted "in the arrest and imprisonment of many innocent civilians." These were called "Class C Communist offenders," some of whom may actually have been forced to commit such "belligerent acts" as digging trenches or carrying rice. It was those alleged as the "hard core, full-time cadre" who were deemed to make up the "shadow government" designated as Class A and B Viet Cong.

Yet "security committees" throughout South Vietnam, under the direction of the CIA, sentenced at least 10,000 "Class C civilians" to prison each year, far more than Class A and B combined. The article stated, "Thousands of these prisoners are never brought to court trial, and thousands of other have never been sentenced." The latter statement would mean they were just held in "indefinite detention," like the prisoners held at Guantanamo and other US detention centers with high levels of CIA involvement.

Not surprisingly to someone not affiliated with the CIA, the article found as well that "Individual case histories indicate that many who have gone to prison as active supporters of neither the government nor the Viet Cong come out as active backers of the Viet Cong and with an implacable hatred of the government." In other words, the CIA and the COIN enthusiasts are achieving the same results today with the prisons they set up in Iraq and Afghanistan.

CIA Crimes

Valentine broadly covers the illegalities of the CIA over the years, including its well-documented role in facilitating the drug trade over the years. But, in this reviewer's opinion, his most valuable contribution is his description of the CIA's participation going back at least to the Vietnam War in the treatment of what the US government today calls "unlawful combatants."

"Unlawful combatants" is a descriptive term made up by the Bush administration to remove people whom US officials alleged were "terrorists" from the legal protections of the Geneva Conventions and Human Rights Law and thus to justify their capture or killing in the so-called "Global War on Terror." Since the US government deems them "unlawful" – because they do not belong to an organized military structure and do not wear insignia – they are denied the "privilege" of belligerency that applies to traditional soldiers. But – unless they take a "direct part in hostilities" – they would still maintain their civilian status under the law of war and thus not lose the legal protection due to civilians even if they exhibit sympathy or support to one side in a conflict.

Ironically, by the Bush administration's broad definition of "unlawful combatants," CIA officers and their support structure also would fit the category. But the American public is generally forgiving of its own war criminals though most self-righteous and hypocritical in judging foreign war criminals. But perhaps given sufficient evidence, the American public could begin to see both the immorality of this behavior and its counterproductive consequences.

This is not to condemn all CIA officers, some of whom acted in good faith that they were actually defending the United States by acquiring information on a professed enemy in the tradition of Nathan Hale. But it is to harshly condemn those CIA officials and officers who betrayed the United States by subverting its Constitution, including waging secret wars against foreign countries without a declaration of war by Congress. And it decidedly condemns the CIA war criminals who acted as a law unto themselves in the torture and murder of foreign nationals, as Valentine's book describes.

Talleyrand is credited with saying, "They have learned nothing and forgotten nothing." Reportedly, that was borrowed from a 1796 letter by a French naval officer, which stated, in the original language: Personne n'est corrigé; personne n'a su ni rien oublier ni rien appendre. In English: "Nobody has been corrected; no one has known to forget, nor yet to learn anything." That sums up the CIA leadership entirely.

Douglas Valentine's book is a thorough documentation of that fact and it is essential reading for all Americans if we are to have any hope for salvaging a remnant of representative government.

Todd E. Pierce retired as a Major in the US Army Judge Advocate General (JAG) Corps in November 2012. His most recent assignment was defense counsel in the Office of Chief Defense Counsel, Office of Military Commissions. This originally appeared at ConsortiumNews.com .

Read more by Todd E. Pierce Inciting Wars the American Way – August 14th, 2016 Chicago Police Adopt Israeli Tactics – December 13th, 2015 US War Theories Target Dissenters – September 13th, 2015 Ron Paul and Lost Lessons of War – September 1st, 2015 Has the US Constitution Been Lost to Military Rule?– January 4th, 2015

[Dec 10, 2016] Why the US elite loves so much to demonise Russia

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... In principle, every router between the DNC server and Russia has the potential to be hacked, with a tunnel added to send the traffic somewhere else in the world with new source and destination addresses. This is known as router table poisoning. It is preventable but the mechanisms are rarely ever used because the security services want to be able to do this themselves. There are some nice logs of the NSA using this. ..."
"... In principle, someone at an ISP or backbone service could have had a laptop plugged into a switch or router to do the same thing, or lit up a strand of dark fibre to let some uber-wealthy business do this. And there's no shortage of uber-wealthy businesses who aren't keen on Democrats. This technique is used for local and remote network diagnostics, no reason it can't be used nefarious, it's not like the hardware cares why a wire is plugged in. ..."
"... Russia has an independent foreign policy and acts in what it perceives as it's own best interests. It has refused to become a vassal state of the West and is a threat to the Empire's full-spectrum dominance. Worst of all it has begun trading outside the $US in energy and other resources with China and Iran. ..."
"... Mainstream media are now busy repressing any news and any questioning about facts ..."
"... Western media are in full panic as Aleppo falls with all sorts of gruesome tales about the mistreatment of their favorite terrorists in Aleppo and a strange silence on the whereabouts of their '250K civilians' under siege ..."
"... I cant believe the Fake News outlets are still making a big deal about this issue. Obomber is leaving in a cloud of failure as he deserves ..."
"... "Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state." ― Noam Chomsky, Media Control: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda. ..."
"... New Canadian documentary - All Governments Lie. "It lucidly argues that powerful interests have been creating supercharged fake stories for decades to advance their own nefarious interests. And the institutional media have too often blithely played along." The Globe and Mail. ..."
"... No comments about Seth Rich the DNC staffer Assange hinted had leaked the Podesta emails to Wikileaks and was subsequently shot multiple times and died at 04:20 on a Washington DC street in a 'motiveless' crime in which none of his possessions were taken. ..."
"... The rise of the right wing in Europe is due to the fact that Social Democratic parties have completely sold out to neo-liberal agenda. ..."
"... So Putin's plan to undermine U.S. voter confidence was to simply show what actually happens behind the scenes at the DNC, how diabolical! ..."
"... Peter Schweizer, the author of Clinton Cash, has published a report that claims that that Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta was on the executive board of a foreign company that received $35 million from the Kremlin. "The company was a transparent Russian front, and how much Podesta was compensated - and for what - is unclear. In addition, Podesta failed to disclose his position on that board to the Federal government, as required by law," John Schindler of the Observer wrote. ..."
"... So it's true because the CIA said so. That's the gold standard for me. ..."
"... "Truth is Treason in the Empire of Lies" - Ron Paul ..."
"... At least Tucker Carlson is able to see through the BS and asks searching question. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRkeGkCjdHg ..."
"... President-elect Donald Trump's transition team said in a statement Friday afternoon that the same people who claim Russia interfered in the presidential election had previously claimed Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. ..."
"... The neoliberal corporate machine is wounded but not dead. They will use every trick, ploy and opportunity to try to regain power. The fight goes on. ..."
"... Good occasion to substantiate the accusation which ,substantiated or not,will remind the "useful idiots" of the "change of regime " US policy and who started the Ukrainian crisis. ..."
"... Just another chapter in the sad saga of the Democrats unwillingness to admit they ran the worst candidate & the worst campaign in recent memory. It's not our fault! Them dirty Russkies did it! ..."
Dec 09, 2016 | www.theguardian.com

From: Barack Obama orders 'full review' of possible Russian hacking in US election Spncer Ackerman in New York and David Smith in Washington

Geoff Smythe , 24m ago

Well, if Rupert Mudroach, an American citizen, can influence the Australian elections, who gives a stuff about anyone else's involvement in US politics?

The US loves demonising Russia, even supporting ISIS to fight against them.

The United States of Amnesia just can't understand that they are run by the military machine.

As Frank Zappa once correctly stated: The US government is just the entertainment unit of the Military.

Nataliefreeman, 11 Dec 2016

Altogether the only thing people are accusing the Russians of is the WikiLeaks scandal. And in hindsight of the enormous media bias toward Trump it really comes of as little more than leveling the playing field. Hardly the sort of democratic subversion that is being suggested.

And of course there is another problem and that is in principle, the DNC server could have had malware in an e-mail that set up a NAT entry that made the connecting computer appear somewhere else, with the entry deleted afterwards. Typically, IP table modifications aren't logged, so this would not be detectable.

In principle, the DNC server could have had malware in an e-mail that ran a SED script at a specific time that changed any occurrence of one IP address with another. Not sure anyone would bother with this, but it's why good system admins place so much emphasis on securing logs. However, it's obvious we're not talking about good admins.

In principle, every router between the DNC server and Russia has the potential to be hacked, with a tunnel added to send the traffic somewhere else in the world with new source and destination addresses. This is known as router table poisoning. It is preventable but the mechanisms are rarely ever used because the security services want to be able to do this themselves. There are some nice logs of the NSA using this.

In principle, someone along the way could tap into the fibre, spoofing IP addresses and injecting/sniffing packets. The US even has a submarine designed for this, but optics aren't complex and any number of neo-phone phreaks could have the hardware.

In principle, someone at an ISP or backbone service could have had a laptop plugged into a switch or router to do the same thing, or lit up a strand of dark fibre to let some uber-wealthy business do this. And there's no shortage of uber-wealthy businesses who aren't keen on Democrats. This technique is used for local and remote network diagnostics, no reason it can't be used nefarious, it's not like the hardware cares why a wire is plugged in.

In principle, the supposed destination machine could have been hacked to relay the packets in encrypted form to the South Pole or a college campus in Texas. There are many examples of client machines being hacked to do this. It's basically what zombie machines are in botnets.

In practice, it is flat-out guaranteed that none of the security agencies could distinguish this from a Russian attack. Nothing in the area monitored could tell the difference. We know, for a fact, that college kids spoofing a scan from China have fooled the DoD and NSA on previous occasions, it has caused international incidents.

So we have known forms of attack that are known to exist, aren't complex and in some cases are already used for attacks. They are 100% untraceable.

HollyOldDog -> Nataliefreeman, 11 Dec 2016 01:4
Don't know about Russians, but in the early 2000's the Ukrainian hackers had some nasty viruses embedded in email attachments that could fuckup ARM based computers.
smellycat -> waltercarl67, 11 Dec 2016 00:0
Time to stop attempting regime change in other countries then, if you condemn it in your own. What goes around comes around.
caveOfShadows , 10 Dec 2016 23:1
European governments tried to elect Hillary Clinton. Latin American and Asian allies of the US tried to elect Clinton.

Top leaders of France, the UK, Germany, all leaked to US newspapers, with dire warnings of how Trump's election would lead to bad outcomes.

Many countries made as clear as possible, without coming out officially for a candidate, that they were for the election of Clinton.

Mexico tried to get Clinton elected. Believe me, they did. Not officially, of course, but almost.

But all we hear about is Russia.

Wonder why???

uyCybershy -> caveOfShadows , 10 Dec 2016 23:1
Russia has an independent foreign policy and acts in what it perceives as it's own best interests. It has refused to become a vassal state of the West and is a threat to the Empire's full-spectrum dominance. Worst of all it has begun trading outside the $US in energy and other resources with China and Iran.
imperfetto , 10 Dec 2016 23:0
Mainstream media are now busy repressing any news and any questioning about facts, as the last battle in their support to jidaists fighting the Syrian Army. This is the dark pit where our so called free press has fallen into.
Flugler -> imperfetto , 10 Dec 2016 23:1
Yep had a chat with an army mate yesterday asked him what the fcuk the supposed head of MI6 was on about regarding Russian support for Syrian govt suggesting Russian actions made terrorism more likely here in UK. He shrugged his shoulders and said he hoped Putin wiped the terrorists out...
smellycat -> imperfetto , 10 Dec 2016 23:4
Western media are in full panic as Aleppo falls with all sorts of gruesome tales about the mistreatment of their favorite terrorists in Aleppo and a strange silence on the whereabouts of their '250K civilians' under siege

Of course no news on the danger to the civilians of W,Aleppo, who have been bombarded indiscriminately for months by the 'moderates' in the east of the city or the danger to the civilians of Palmyra, Mosul or al Bab.

Geoff Smythe -> smellycat , 11 Dec 2016 01:3
Or the 50,000 that have been evacuated out of Aleppo by the Russian military. https://www.rt.com/news/369869-syria-evacuation-civilians-aleppo /
Merseysidefella , 10 Dec 2016 21:5
I cant believe the Fake News outlets are still making a big deal about this issue. Obomber is leaving in a cloud of failure as he deserves. I´ll still look for the Guardian articles on football which are excellent.
Cheers!
GuyCybershy -> confettifoot , 10 Dec 2016 21:0
The Sanders movement inside the Democratic party did offer some hope but this was snuffed out by the DNC and the Clinton campaign in collusion with the media. This is what likely caused her defeat in November and not some Kremlin intrigue.
dopamineboy , 10 Dec 2016 20:5
"Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state." ― Noam Chomsky, Media Control: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda.
dopamineboy , 10 Dec 2016 20:5
"We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality," Karl Rove.
caveOfShadows -> dopamineboy , 10 Dec 2016 23:1
Don't use quotes when you are doing a fake attribution.
dopamineboy , 10 Dec 2016 20:4
New Canadian documentary - All Governments Lie. "It lucidly argues that powerful interests have been creating supercharged fake stories for decades to advance their own nefarious interests. And the institutional media have too often blithely played along." The Globe and Mail.
joinupthedots , 10 Dec 2016 20:4
Fake news....No news.....None sense news?

Uncle Sam has been doing it for years and the degree of incestuousness between MSM and the "Agencies" is all right here (just one example)

http://spartacus-educational.com/JFKmeyerM.htm

smellycat -> joinupthedots , 10 Dec 2016 20:5
That's some serious shit
'"The same sons of bitches," he hissed, "that killed John F. Kennedy."
stoneshepherd , 10 Dec 2016 20:2
No comments about Seth Rich the DNC staffer Assange hinted had leaked the Podesta emails to Wikileaks and was subsequently shot multiple times and died at 04:20 on a Washington DC street in a 'motiveless' crime in which none of his possessions were taken.

Hmmm....

Flugler -> stoneshepherd , 10 Dec 2016 20:3
Distract the masses with bullsh*t , nothing new... Trump needs to double up on his personal security, he has doubled down on the CIA tonight bringing upmtheir bullsh*t on WMD. Thing are getting interesting...
Liesandstats , 10 Dec 2016 19:2
Meanwhile the good guys with their Smart bombs indulge in a spot of collateral damage. (Or war crimes as it's described when Russians do it).

https://www.almasdarnews.com/article/breaking-90-iraqi-soldiers-killed-in-mosul-from-us-airstrikes/

This article is jiberish, as are the ones trying to say that the Russians caused Brexit.

GuyCybershy -> sunflowerxyz , 10 Dec 2016 19:3
The rise of the right wing in Europe is due to the fact that Social Democratic parties have completely sold out to neo-liberal agenda.
Powerspike , 10 Dec 2016 19:1
Spreading lies about the very real Podesta emails and their importance seems to be a fake news stock in trade. Since Hillary was responsible I'm not sure where Putin comes into the picture.
https://theintercept.com/2016/12/09/a-clinton-fan-manufactured-fake-news-that-msnbc-personalities-spread-to-discredit-wikileaks-docs /
GuyCybershy , 10 Dec 2016 19:0
So Putin's plan to undermine U.S. voter confidence was to simply show what actually happens behind the scenes at the DNC, how diabolical!
Powerspike , 10 Dec 2016 18:3
"If we can revert to the truth, then a great deal of one's suffering can be erased, because a great deal of one's suffering is based on sheer lies. "
R. D. Laing
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
US politicians and the MSM depend on sheer lies.....
Powerspike -> KassandraTroy , 10 Dec 2016 18:5
They are playing a game. They are playing at not playing a game. If I show them I see they are, I shall break the rules and they will punish me. I must play their game, of not seeing I see the game.
R. D. Laing
+++++++++++++++++++++++++
I'm sick of jumping through their hoops - how about you?
James7 , 10 Dec 2016 17:2
"Tin Foil Hat" Hillary--
"This is not about politics or partisanship," she went on. "Lives are at risk, lives of ordinary people just trying to go about their days to do their jobs, contribute to their communities. It is a danger that must be addressed and addressed quickly."

We fail to see how Russian propaganda has put people's lives directly at risk. Unless, of course, Hillary is suggesting that the increasingly-bizarre #Pizzagate swarm journalism campaign (which apparently caused a man to shoot up a floor tile in a D.C. pizza shop) was conjured up by a bunch of Russian trolls.

And this is about as absurd as saying Russian trolls were why Trump got elected.

"It needs to be said," former counterintelligence agent John R. Schindler (who, by the way, believes Assange and Snowden are both Russian plants), writes in the Observer, "that nearly all of the liberals eagerly pontificating about how Putin put Trump in office know nothing about 21st century espionage, much less Russia's unique spy model and how it works. Indeed, some of the most ardent advocates of this Kremlin-did-it conspiracy theory were big fans of Snowden and Wikileaks -- right until clandestine Russian shenanigans started to hurt Democrats. Now, they're panicking."

(Nonetheless, #Pizzagate and Trump, IMHO, are manifestations of a population which deeply deeply distrusts the handlers and gatekeepers of the status quo. Justified or not. And with or without Putin's shadowy fingers strumming its magic hypno-harp across the Land of the Free. This runs deeper than just Putin.)

Fake news has always been around, from the fake news which led Americans to believe the Pearl Harbor attack was a surprise and completely unprovoked .

To the fake news campaigns put out by Edward Bernays tricking women into believing cigarettes were empowering little phallics of feminism. (AKA "Torches of Freedom.")

This War on Fake News has more to do with the elites finally realizing how little control they have over the minds of the unwashed masses. Rather, this is a war on the freaks, geeks and weirdos who've formed a decentralized and massively-influential media right under their noses.

Laissez Faire Today

James7 -> fedback , 10 Dec 2016 17:3
and there may be some truth to that. An article says has delved into financial matters in Russia.

Kremlin Connection? The TRUTH About Hillary's Shady Ties To Russia REVEALED
Find out why insiders say Clinton has some explaining to do.

Americans have no idea just how closely Hillary Clinton is tied to the Kremlin! That's the shocking claim of a new report that alleges the Democratic nominee is secretly pals with Vladimir Putin and his countrymen.

Peter Schweizer, the author of Clinton Cash, has published a report that claims that that Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta was on the executive board of a foreign company that received $35 million from the Kremlin. "The company was a transparent Russian front, and how much Podesta was compensated - and for what - is unclear. In addition, Podesta failed to disclose his position on that board to the Federal government, as required by law," John Schindler of the Observer wrote.

As Radar previously reported, when Clinton was secretary of state, she profited from the "Russian Reset," a failed attempt to improve relations between the U.S. and Russia.

chweizer wrote, "Many of the key figures in the Skolkovo process - on both the Russian and U.S. sides - had major financial ties to the Clintons. During the Russian reset, these figures and entities provided the Clintons with tens of millions of dollars, including contributions to the Clinton Foundation, paid for speeches by Bill Clinton, or investments in small start-up companies with deep Clinton ties." Schweizer also details "Skolkovo," a Silicon Valley-like campus that both the U.S. and Russia worked on for developing biomed, space, nuclear and IT technologies. He told the New York Post that there was a "pattern that shows a high percentage of participants in Skolkovo who happen to be Clinton Foundation donors."

BaronVonAmericano , 10 Dec 2016 17:0
So it's true because the CIA said so. That's the gold standard for me.

So let me be the first to thank Russia for providing us with their research.

Instead of assassination, coup or invasion, they simply showed us our leaders' own words when written behind the public's backs.

I'm no fan of Putin, but this was a useful bit of intelligence you've shared with us.
Happy Christmas, Vlad.

Next time why not provide us with the email of all our banks and fossil fuel companies; you can help us clean up both political parties with one fell swoop that way.

GuyCybershy -> BaronVonAmericano , 10 Dec 2016 17:0
"Truth is Treason in the Empire of Lies" - Ron Paul
greyford14 -> GuyCybershy , 10 Dec 2016 17:1
Be careful there, Ron Paul is an FSB agent of Putin, according to the Washington Post.
elias_ , 10 Dec 2016 17:0
At least Tucker Carlson is able to see through the BS and asks searching question.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRkeGkCjdHg
GuyCybershy -> elias_ , 10 Dec 2016 17:1
Dems are so out to lunch that they make FOX pundits seem sane. I would say the Democratic party is beyond hope of saving.
sblejo , 10 Dec 2016 16:4
The U.S. is getting what it deserves, IF Russia was even dumb enough to meddle. The government in this country has been meddling in other countries' affairs sixty years, in the Middle East, in South America and other places we don't even know about. The result is mayhem, all in the 'interests' of the U.S., as it is described.
Burnaby1000 , 10 Dec 2016 16:4
Note that most supporters of the Russian hacks never (and cannot) present rational arguments, just dubious talking points--AKA Fake News.

But it is fun to spot the gaps in their logic, and the holes in their stories.

Great sport--rather like hunting hares.

GuyCybershy -> Burnaby1000 , 10 Dec 2016 16:4
We need to trust the CIA, they'd never fix evidence to manipulate the American public.
BaronVonAmericano -> Burnaby1000 , 10 Dec 2016 16:5
Where's the gap in this logic:
A) The American public has been offered ZERO proof of hacking by the Russian government to alter our election.
B) Even if true, no one has disputed the authenticity of the emails hacked.
C) Therefore, the WORST Russia could have done is show us who are own leader are when they don't think we're listening.
D) Taken together, this article is pretty close to fake news, and gives us nothing that should outrage us much at this time -- unless we are trying to foment war with Russia or call for a military coup against the baboon about to take the oath of office.
foolisholdman , 10 Dec 2016 16:3
Hacking by unnamed individuals. No direct involvement of the Russian government, only implied, alleged, etc. Seems to me that if Hillary had obeyed the law and not schemed behind the scenes to sabotage Bernie S. there would have been nothing to leak! Really this is all about being caught with fer fingers in the cookie jar. Does it matter who leaked it? Did the US public not have a right to know what the people they were voting for had been up to? It's a bit like the governor of a province being filmed burgling someone's house and then complaining that someone had leaked the film to the media, just when he was trying to get re-elected!
GuyCybershy -> foolisholdman , 10 Dec 2016 16:3
The US public has a right to know what CNN, New York Times and the Washington Post want them to know.
sblejo -> foolisholdman , 10 Dec 2016 16:4
It is called passing the buck, and because of the underhanded undermining of Bernie Sanders, who was winning, we have Trump. Thank you Democratic party.
aidanfahey , 10 Dec 2016 16:3
I am disappointed that the Guardian gives so much prominence to such speculation which is almost totally irrelevant. Why would we necessarily (a) believe what the superspies tell us and (b) even if it is true why should we care?

I am also very disappointed at the Guardians attitude to Putin, the elected leader of Russia, who was so badly treated by the US from the moment he took over from Yeltsin. I was in Russia as a visitor around that time and it was obvious that Putin restored some dignity to the Russian people after the disastrous Yeltsin term of office. If the US had been willing to deal with him with respect the world could be a much better place today. Instead the US insisted in trying to subvert his rule with the support of its supine NATO allies in order to satisfy its corporate rulers.

GuyCybershy -> aidanfahey , 10 Dec 2016 16:5
They expected Russia to fall apart like the USSR and then they could march in and pick up the pieces. Putin prevented this and this why they hate him.
NickinHalifaxNS , 10 Dec 2016 16:2
If this is true, the US can hardly complain. After all, the US has a long record of interfering in other countries' elections--including CIA overthrow of elected governments and their replacement with murderous, oppressive, right-wing dictatorships.

If the worst that Russia did was reveal the truth about what Democratic Party figures were saying behind closed doors, I'd say it helped correct the unbalanced media focus on preventing Trump from becoming President. Call it the globalization of elections.

BaronVonAmericano , 10 Dec 2016 15:5
First, the government has yet to present any persuasive evidence that Russia hacked the DNC or anyone else. All we have is that there is Russian code (meaningless according to cyber-security experts) and seemingly baseless "conclusions" by "intelligence" officials. In other words, fake news at this point.

Second, even if true, the allegation amounts to an argument that Russia presented us with facts that we shouldn't have seen. Think about that for a while. We are seeing demands that we self-censor ourselves from facts that seem unfair. What utter idiocy.

This is particularly outrageous given that the U.S. directly intervenes in the governance of any number of nations all the time. We can support coups, arm insurgencies, or directly invade, but god forbid that someone present us with unsettling facts about our ruling class.

This nation has jumped the shark. The fact that Trump is our president is merely confirmation of this long evident fact. That fighting REAL NEWS of emails whose content has not been disputed is part of our war on "fake news," and the top priority for some so-called liberals, promises only worse to come.

elias_ , 10 Dec 2016 14:5
>> Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House intelligence committee, said Russia had "succeeded" in "sow[ing] discord" in the election, and urged as much public disclosure as is possible.

What utter bullshit. The DNC's own dirty tricks did that. Donna Brasille stealing debate questions and handing them to Hillary so that she could cheat did that. The FBIs investigation into Hillary did that. Podesta's emails did that. The totally one-sided press coverage (apart from Fox) of the election did that. But it seems the american people were smart enough to see through the BS and voted for trump. Good for them.

And we're gonna need a lot more than the word of a few politicised so-called intelligence agencies to believe this russo-hacking story. These are the same people who lied about Iraqi WMDs so they are proven fakers/liars. These are also the same people who hack EVERYONE else so I, quite frankly, have no sympathy even of the story turns out to be true.

MrIncredlous , 10 Dec 2016 14:4
Obama is a disgrace to his office.

Announce "consensus" (not unanimous) "conclusion" based in circumstantial evidence now, before the Electoral College vote, then write a report with actual details due by Jan 20.
Put a proven liar in charge of writing the report on Russian hacking.
Fail to mention that not one of the leaked DNC or Podesta emails has been shown to be inauthentic. So the supposed Russian hacking simply revealed truth about Hillary, DNC, and MSM collusion and corruption.
Fail to mention that if hacking was done by or for US government to stop Hillary, blaming the Russians would be the most likely disinformation used by US agencies.
Expect every pro-Hillary lapdog journalist - which is virtually all of them - in America will hyperventilate (Twitter is currently on fire) about this latest fact-free, anti-Trump political stunt for the next nine days.
Or, as a reader put it, this is a soft coup attempt by leaders of Intel community and Obama Admin to influence the Electoral College vote, similar to the 1960s novel "Seven Days in May."

DanielDee , 10 Dec 2016 14:4
When the Department Of Homeland Security and Office of the Director of National Intelligence on Election Security release a joint statement it is not without very careful consideration to the wording.
Therefore, to understand what is known by the US intelligence services one must analyse the language used.

https://www.dhs.gov/news/2016/10/07/joint-statement-department-homeland-security-and-office-director-national

This is very telling:
"The recent disclosures of alleged hacked e-mails on sites like DCLeaks.com and WikiLeaks and by the Guccifer 2.0 online persona are consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed efforts."

Alleged:
adjective [attributive]
said, without proof, to have taken place or to have a specified illegal or undesirable quality

Consistent:
adjective
acting or done in the same way over time

Method:
noun
a particular procedure for accomplishing or approaching something

Motivation:
noun
a reason or reasons for acting or behaving in a particular way

So, what exactly is known by the US intelligence services?

Well what we can tell is:
the alleged (without proof) hacks were consistent (done in the same way) with the methods (using a particular procedure) and motivations (and having reason for doing so) with Russian State actions.

There is absolutely no certainty about this whatsoever.

elias_ , 10 Dec 2016 14:4
Thank God Obama will be out of office soon. He is the biggest disappointment ever. He has ordered the death of THOUSANDS via drone strikes in other people's countries and most of the deaths were innocent bystanders. If President Xi of China or Putin were to do that we would all be calling them tyrannical dictators and accusing them of a back door invasions. But somehow people are brainwashed into thinking its ok of the US president to do such things. Truly sickening.
Flugler , 10 Dec 2016 14:4
Says the CIA the organisation set up to destabilise governments all over the world. Lol.....
Congratulations for keeping a straight face I hope Trump makes urgently needed personnel changes in the alphabet soup agencies working against humanity for very many years.
Susanna246 , 10 Dec 2016 13:1
Beware --

This is an extremely dangerous game that Obama and the political elites are playing.

The American political elites - including senetors, bankers, investors, multinationals et al, can feel power and control slipping away from them.

This makes them very dangerous people indeed - as self-preservation and holding onto power is their number one priority.

What they're aiming to do ( a child can see what's coming ), is to call into question the validity of Trump's victory and blame the Russians for it.

The elites are looking to create chaos and insurrection, to have the result nullified and to vilify Putin and Russia.

American and Russian troops are already lined up and facing each other along the Eastern European borders and all it takes is one small incident from either side.

And all because those that have ruled the roost for so many decades ( in the White house, the 2 houses of Congress and Wall St ), simply cannot face losing their positions of power, wealth and political influence.

They're out to get Trump, the populists and President Putin.

God help us all.

MacTavi5h , 10 Dec 2016 12:5
This is starting to feel like an attempt to make the Trump presidency appear illegitimate. The problem is that it could actually make the democrats look like sore losers instead. We've had the recount, now it's foreign interference. This might harm them in 2020.

I don't like that Trump won, but he did. The electoral college system is clearly in the constitution and all sides understood and agreed to it at the campaign commencement. Also some, by no means all, of commenters saying that the popular vote should win have also been on referendum BTL saying the result isn't a legitimate leave vote, make your minds up!

I don't want Trump and I wanted to remain but, by the rules, my sides lost.

alexfoxy28 , 10 Dec 2016 12:5
Yet in August, Snowden warned that the recent hack of NSA tied cyber spies was not designed to expose Hillary Clinton, but rather a display of strength by the hackers, showing they could eventually unmask the NSA's own international cyber espionage and prove the U.S. meddles in elections around the world.

http://yournewswire.com/snowden-claims-russia-can-expose-u-s-meddling-in-foreign-elections /

nishville , 10 Dec 2016 12:3
A reader's comment from the Independent:

Will the CIA be providing evidence to support these allegations or is it a case of "just trust us guys"? In any event, hypocrisy is a national sport for the Yanks. According to a Reuters article 9 August 2016 "NSA operations have, for example, recently delved into elections in Mexico, targeting its last presidential campaign. According to a top-secret PowerPoint presentation leaked by former NSA contract employee Edward Snowden, the operation involved a "surge effort against one of Mexico's leading presidential candidates, Enrique Peńa Nieto, and nine of his close associates." Peńa won that election and is now Mexico's president.

The NSA identified Peńa's cellphone and those of his associates using advanced software that can filter out specific phones from the swarm around the candidate. These lines were then targeted. The technology, one NSA analyst noted, "might find a needle in a haystack." The analyst described it as "a repeatable and efficient" process.

The eavesdroppers also succeeded in intercepting 85,489 text messages, a Der Spiegel article noted.

Another NSA operation, begun in May 2010 and codenamed FLATLIQUID, targeted Pena's predecessor, President Felipe Calderon. The NSA, the documents revealed, was able "to gain first-ever access to President Felipe Calderon's public email account."

At the same time, members of a highly secret joint NSA/CIA organization, called the Special Collection Service, are based in the U.S. embassy in Mexico City and other U.S. embassies around the world. It targets local government communications, as well as foreign embassies nearby. For Mexico, additional eavesdropping, and much of the analysis, is conducted by NSA Texas, a large listening post in San Antonio that focuses on the Caribbean, Central America and South America."

zulugroove -> nishville , 10 Dec 2016 13:4
Fake news!! ...That would be a Clinton / Obama , reply!!
CTG2016 , 10 Dec 2016 12:0
Breaking news! CIA admits people in USA aren't smart enough to vote for the person right person. Why blame Russians now?
Come on. Let's move on and enjoy the mess Trump will start. This is going to be worse than GWB.
We should all just enjoy the political comedy programs.
Gallicdweller , 10 Dec 2016 11:1
The CIA accusing a foreign power of interfering in the election of a showman for president - it would take me all day top cite the times that this evil criminal organisation has interfered in the affairs of other countries, ordered assassinations, coups etc. etc. etc
Dave Harries , 10 Dec 2016 10:4
Yes like the "help" the CIA gave to the Taliban, Bin Laden and Co. when the Russians were in Afghanistan.
Then these dimwits from the CIA who taught Bin Laden and Co guerrilla warfare totally "missed" 9/11 and Twin Towers with all their billions of funding.
So basically this is a total load of crap and if you think we are going to believe any reports vs. Russia these fools at the CIA are going to publish then think again.
fedback , 10 Dec 2016 10:4
During the election our media was exposed as in essence a propaganda tool for the Democrat campaign and they continue the unholy alliance after the election
Liesandstats , 10 Dec 2016 10:4
Instead of trying to blame the Russians how about reflecting on why the Democrats picked such a dreadful candidate.
ana ruiz , 10 Dec 2016 10:2
Pathetic move from an organisation that created ISIS and is single handling every single conflict in the world. Here we have a muppet president that for once wants to look after USA affairs internally and here we have a so alleged independent organisation that wants to keep bombing and destabilising the world. Didn't Trump said he wanted to shake the FBI and CIA ? Who is going to stop this machine of treachery ? : south America, middle east ...Asia ... they put their fingers on to create a problem- solution caveat wereas is to create weapons contracts /farma or construction and sovereign debt . But it never tricles down to the layperson ..
Tim Jenkins , 10 Dec 2016 10:2
"We are Not calling into question the election results"
next White House sentence - "Just the integrity.. " WTF

What more do you need to know - Bullshit Fake News.. propaganda, spoken by the youngest possible puppet boy White House Rep. who almost managed to have his tie done up..

I am bookmarking this guy, for a laugh! White House Fake Newscaster ..:)

Worth watching the sides of his mouth onto his attempt to engage you with the eyes, but blinking way too much before, during and after the word "Integrity".. FAKE!

His hand signals.. lmfao, so measured, how sweet.. now sack the sycophants --

fedback , 10 Dec 2016 10:2
People should know that these Breaking News stories we see in Western media on BBC, Guardian etc, about Russian interference are in fact from Wash Post and NY Times quoting mysterious sources within the CIA
Of course we know that Wash Post and NY Times were completely objective during the election and didn't favor any party
fedback , 10 Dec 2016 10:0
Russia made Hillary run the most expensive campaign ever, spending 1.2 billion dollars.
Russia stole Hillary's message to the working people and gave her lousy slogans
Tim Jenkins , 10 Dec 2016 09:5
My real comment is below, but work with me, for a moment.
So, since 2008, eh? Barack has thought carefully, with a legal mind.

Can't we somehow blame the Russians for the whole Economic collapse.. coming soon, Wall Street Cyber Crash, screwed up sKewed up systems of Ponzi virus spiraling out of control..

blame the Russians , logic, the KGB held the FED at gunpoint and said "create $16.2 Trillion in 5 working days"
jeez, blame anything and anybody except peace prize guy Obama, the Pope, Bankers & Israel..

Now can we discuss the Security of the Pound against Cyber Attack.. what was it 6% in 2 minutes, early on Sunday morning, just over month ago.. whoosh!

It seems more important than discussing an election where the result was always OBVIOUS!

And we called it, just like Kellyanne Conway..

Who is Huma Abedin? I wish to know and hear her talking to Kellyanne Conway, graciously in defeat.. is that so unreasonable?
********
Obama wishes to distract from exceedingly poor judgement, at the very minimum....
after his Greek Affair with Goldman Sachs.. surely.

As for his other Foreign Policy: Eternal Shame, founded on Fake News!
Obama the Fake News Founder to flounder over the Russians, who can prove that he, Obama supports & supported Terrorism!

Thus this article exists, to create doubt over the veracity of evidence to be presented over NATO's involvement in SYRIA! Obama continues to resist, or loose face completely..

Just ask Can Dundar.... what he knows now and ask Obama to secure the release of Can Dundar's wife's passport, held for no legitimate reason in Turkey! This outrageous stand off, from Erdogan & Obama to address their failures and arrogant disrespect of Woman and her Legal Human Rights is Criminal.. & a Sickness of Mind that promotes Dictatorship!

Mainstream Media - Fake News.. for quite some time!
& Obama is guilty!

Powerspike , 10 Dec 2016 09:4
President-elect Donald Trump's transition team said in a statement Friday afternoon that the same people who claim Russia interfered in the presidential election had previously claimed Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
http://dailycaller.com/2016/12/09/trump-team-same-people-who-say-russia-meddled-in-election-said-iraq-had-wmds/#ixzz4SQWsDXpZ
alexfoxy28 , 10 Dec 2016 09:1
It's getting funny as Biden promised cyber attack on Russia weeks before Trump was elected .. due to Russian hackers?
uptonogoode -> alexfoxy28 , 10 Dec 2016 09:5
Link?
alexfoxy28 -> uptonogoode , 10 Dec 2016 09:5
http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/721851/russia-joe-biden-obama-cyber-attack-war-clinton-putin-US-moscow

or just google about it.

ArtherOhm , 10 Dec 2016 08:5
Is the USA, as author of windows software, really unable to prevent foreign hacking?

Do the CIA never do anything like this?

Do we actually have any evidence rather than just a lot of allegations?

Shotcricket -> Burnaby1000 , 10 Dec 2016 09:0
'Russia like to surprise' ?

The one certainty of the US/EU led drive to remove an elected leader just in their 2nd year after an election that saw them gain 47% of the popular vote was the Russki response, its borders were immediately at open 'threat' from any alliance. NATO or otherwise, the deep sea ports of eastern Ukraine which had always been accessed by the Russki fleets would lose guaranteed access etc....to believe the West was surprised by this action, would be to assume the US Generals were as stupid as the US administration, they knew exactly the response of the Russkis & would have made no difference if their leader had been named Putin or Uncle Tom Cobbly.

In some ways the Russkis partitioning of the East of Ukraine could well minimise the possibility of a world conflict as the perceived threat is neutralised by the buffer.

The Russkis cyber doodah is no different to our own the US etc, they're all 'at it' & all attempt to inveigle the others in terms of making life difficult.....not too sure Putin will be quite as comfortable with the Pres Elects 3 Trumpeteers though as the new Pressie looks likely to open channels of communications but those negotiations might well see a far tougher stance......still, in truth, all is never fair in love or war

Powerspike , 10 Dec 2016 08:4
.....that the CIA is not only suddenly involved, but suddenly at the forefront, may well reflect President-elect Trump's stated policy intentions being far removed from those that the CIA has endorsed, and might be done with an eye toward undermining Trump's position in those upcoming policy battles.
At the center of those Trump vs. CIA battles is Syria, as the CIA has for years pushed to move away from the ISIS war and toward imposing regime change in Syria. Trump, by contrast, has said he intends to end the CIA-Saudi program arming the Syrian rebels, and focus on fighting ISIS. Trump was even said to be seeking to coordinate anti-ISIS operations with Russia.
The CIA allegations could easily imperil that plan, as so long as the allegations remain part of the public discourse, evidence or not, anything Trump does with respect to Russia is going to have a black cloud hanging over it.
http://news.antiwar.com/2016/12/09/cia-claims-russia-intervened-to-get-trump-elected /
Nataliefreeman , 10 Dec 2016 08:3
Oh dear Obama trolls? Food for your starved thoughts:

Your degree of understanding IT is disturbing, especially given how dependent we are on it.

This is all very simple. The process by which you find out if and how a machine was hacked was clearly documented in the Russian "Internet Audit", run by a group of Grey Hats.

Grey Hats: People concerned about security who perform unauthorized hacks for relatively benign purposes, often just notifying people of how their system is flawed. IT staff have mixed reactions(!), the illegality is not disputed but the benefit of not being hit by a Black Hat first can be considerable at times. Differentiation is rare, especially as some hacktivist groups belong here, causing no damage beyond reputational by flagging activity that is not acceptable to the hacktivists.

Black Hats: These are the guys to worry about. These include actually destructive hacktivists. These are the ones who steal data for malicious purposes, disrupt for malicious purposes and just generally act maliciously.

Nothing in reports indicates if the DNC hack was Grey Hat or Black Hat, but it should be obvious that there is a difference.

IP addresses and hangouts - worthless as evidence. Anyone can spoof the former, happens all the time (NMap used to provide the option, probably still does), Grey Hats and Black Hats alike have the latter and may break into other people's. It's all about knowing vulnerabilities.

That voting machines were even on the Internet is disturbing. That they and the DNC server were improperly configured for such an environment is frightening - and possibly illegal.

The standard sequence of events is thus:

Network intrusion detector system identifies crafted packet attacking known vulnerability.
In a good system, the firewall is set to block the attack at that instant.

If the attacker scans the network, the only machine responding to such knocks should be a virtual machine running a honeypot on attractive-looking port numbers. The other machines in the zone should technically violate the RFCs by not responding to ICMP or generating recognized error codes on unused/blocked ports.

The system logger picks up an event that creates a process that shouldn't be happening.
In a good system, this either can't happen because the combination of permissions needed doesn't exist, or it doesn't matter because the process is root jailed and hasn't the privileges to actually do any harm.

The file alteration logger (possibly Tripwire, though the Linux kernel can do this itself) detects that a process with escalated privileges is trying to create, delete or alter a file that it isn't supposed to be able to change.
In a good system with mandatory access controls, this really is impossible. In a good system with logging file systems, it doesn't matter as you can instruct the filesystem to revert those specific alterations. Even in adequate but feeble systems, checkpoints will exist. No use in a voting system, but perfectly adequate for a campaign server. In all cases, the system logs will document what got damaged.

The correct IT manager response is thus:
Find out why the firewall wasn't defaulting to deny for all unknown sources and for unnecessary ports.
Find out why the public-facing system wasn't isolated in the firewall's DMZ.
Find out why NIDS didn't stop the attack.
Non-public user mobility should be via IPSec using certificates. That deals with connecting from unknown IP addresses without exposing the innards of the system.
Lock down misconfigured network systems.
Backup files identified by file alteration detection as corrupt for forensic purposes.
Revert files identified by file alteration detection as corrupt to last good version.
Close permission loopholes. Everything should run with the fewest privileges necessary, OS included. On Linux, kernel permissions are controlled via capabilities.
Establish from the logs if the intruder came through a public-facing application, an essential LAN service or a non-essential service.
If it's a LAN service, block access to that service outside the LAN on the host firewall.
Run network and host vulnerability scanners to detect potential attack vectors.
Update any essential software that is detected as flawed, then rerun the scanners. Repeat until fixed.
Now the system is locked down against general attacks, you examine the logs to find out exactly what failed and how. If that line of attack got fixed, good. If it didn't, then fix it.
Password policy should prevent rainbow attacks, not users. Edit as necessary, lock accounts that aren't secure and set the password control system to ban bad passwords.

It is impossible from system logs to track where an intruder came from, unsecured routers are common and that means a skilled attacker can divert packets to anywhere. You can't trust brags, in security nobody is honest. The sensible thing is to not allow such events in the first place, but when (not if) they happen, learn from them.

GraemeHarrison , 10 Dec 2016 08:2
If the USA is to investigate the effect of foreign governments 'corrupting' the free decisions of the American people in elections, perhaps they could look into the fact that for the past three decades every Republican candidate for president, after they have won the nomination of their party, has gone to just one foreign country to pledge their firm commitment/allegiance to that foreign power, for the purpose of shoring up large blocks of donors prior to the actual presidential election. The effect is probably more 'corrupting' than any leak of emails!
SamSamson , 10 Dec 2016 08:2
Obama should confess to creating ISIS, sustaining ISIS & utilising ISIS as a proxy army to have them do things that he knew US soldiers could never be caught doing!!!

They then spoon fed you bullshit propaganda about who the bad guys were, without ever being to properly explain why the US armed forces were prevented from taking any hostile action against ISIS, until they were FORCED TO, that is, when Putin let the the cat out of the bag!!!

LordTomnoddy , 10 Dec 2016 08:1
Hilarious. One would've thought Obama of all presidents would be reluctant to delve too deeply into this particular midden. As the author of the weakest and most incompetent American foreign policy agenda since Carter's, it's much the likeliest that if China or Russia have been hacking US elections, then by far the biggest beneficiary will have been himself.
Tim Jenkins , 10 Dec 2016 08:1
Just another attempt to distract from realities, like:-

From:[email protected] To: [email protected], [email protected] Date: 2015-05-28 12:12 Subject: Fwd: POLITICO Playbook

cdm Begin forwarded message: > From: Lynn Forester de Rothschild <[email protected]> > Date: May 28, 2015 at 9:44:12 AM EDT > To: Nick Merrill <[email protected]>, "Cheryl Mills ([email protected])" <[email protected]> > Subject: FW: POLITICO Playbook > > Morning, > I am sure you are working on this, but clearly, the opposition is trying to undercut Hillary's reputation for honesty (the number one characteristic people look for in a President according to most polls) ..and also to benefit from an attack on wealth that Dems did the most to start I am sure we need to fight back against both of these attacks. > Xoxo > Lynn > > By Mike Allen (@mikeallen; [email protected]), and Daniel Lippman (@dlippman; [email protected]) > > > > QUINNIPIAC POLL, out at 6 a.m., "Rubio, Paul are only Republicans even close to Clinton": "In a general election, ... Clinton gets 46 percent of American voters to 42 percent for Paul and 45 percent of voters to 41 percent for Rubio." Clinton leads Christie 46-37 ... Huckabee 47-40 ... Jeb 47-37 ... Walker 46-38 ... Cruz 48-37 ... Trump 50-32. > > --"[V]oters say 53-39 percent that Clinton is NOT honest and trustworthy, but say 60-37 ... that she has strong leadership qualities. Voters are divided 48-47 ... over whether Clinton cares about their needs and problems." > > --RNC's new chart - "'Dead Broke' Clintons vs. Everyday Americans": "Check out the chart below to see how many households in each state it would take to equal the 'Dead Broke' Clintons." http://bit.ly/1Avg8iE

Blind leading the Blind.. & Obama knows that very well after it was clear that Clinton was NEVER trusted by the Voters, which makes Debbie and the DNC look like a complete bunch of..

Idiots?!?! STILL BLAMING The RUSSIANS.... instead of themselves!

She was and always will be unelectable due to exceedingly poor judgement, across the board.

Can we move on?

Polly123456 , 10 Dec 2016 08:0
Who is in charge of Internet security in the US government? Because it seems full of holes. Last time it was the Chinese and this time it's the Russians, yet not one piece of evidence to say where hacks have come from. How much are these world class Internet security people paid? And why do they still have a job? People sitting in their bedrooms on a pc from stores like staples have hacked their security regularly.
AlexPeace , 10 Dec 2016 08:0

In 2016, he said, the government did not detect any increased cyber activity on election day itself but the FBI made public specific acts in the summer and fall, tied to the highest levels of the Russian government. "This is going to put that activity in a greater context ... dating all the way back to 2008."

Extremely vague. Seems like there is no evidence at all to suggest any Russian involvement, but they need to pretend otherwise. Blah, blah, blah, Weapons of mass destruction... Apollo mission, etc
FMinus , 10 Dec 2016 08:0
Ole, Russians exposed the DNC emails, we knew about that. I though this should investigate Russians vote rigging, but I guess not. I for once welcome anyone who hacks my government and exposes their skeletons, so I can see what kind of dirty garbage I had leading or potentially leading my country.

Maybe the DNC should play fair and not dirty next time and put a candidate forward without skeletons that still reek of rotting flesh.

Robert Stokes -> FMinus , 10 Dec 2016 08:3
You rig electronic voting machines by reflashing the firmware or switching out the sd cards. Can't be done remotely.
Baldrick Daacat , 10 Dec 2016 07:5
And the CIA has never intervened in a foreign election?
VibePit -> Baldrick Daacat , 10 Dec 2016 08:0
Oh heaven forbid!! The Shah of Iran was democratically elected but of course. . .
HeathCardwell , 10 Dec 2016 07:2
Don't believe any of this at all.
American has been thee most corrupt and disgusting western nation for decades, run by people who are now being shown for who they really are and they're shitting themselves big time. The stakes don't get higher than this.
theonetruepainter , 10 Dec 2016 07:1
What's the point of this?

The American people don't want Clinton because she is a liar and a dangerous psychopath who also ignored the working people.

If you want to change that, get her treatment. Don't try to undermine the election result.

theonetruepainter , 10 Dec 2016 07:0
How can you not respect Putin?

He's spent the last few years making fools out of Clinton, Kerry and the obomber.

If you didn't want him to let Crimea rejoin Russia, then you shouldn't have initiated the coup that broke up Ukraine.

Peter Turner , 10 Dec 2016 07:0
What a total load of double talk. There is zero integrity in anything CIA says or does since the weapons of mass destruction deal or before that it was the Iran Contra deal and before that it was the Bay of Pigs. Now we have this rigging os the election results based on zero evidence. The whole thing is just idiocy. What is Obama trying to achieve?The end game will be for Obama to go down in history as ... let's just say he is not the smartest tool in the shed when it comes to being a so called world leader. Well done Obama you have now completely trashed what is left of your legacy.
LondonLungs , 10 Dec 2016 06:5

"CIA concludes Russia interfered to help Trump win election – report "

You might as well ask accountants to do a study on wether it's worthwhile to use an accountant. Part of the CIAs job is to influence elections around the world to get US-Corporation friendly gov'ts in to power. So yes of course they are going to say that a gov't can influence elections, if they said otherwise then they'd be admitting they're wasting money.

Ted Reading Reading 10 Dec 2016 06:3
So, it was the Russians! I knew it must've been them, they're so sneaky. All HFC had was the total backing of the entire establishment, including prominent Republican figures, the total fawning support of the entire main-stream media machine which carefully controlled the "she's got a comfortable 3 point lead maybe even double-digit lead" narrative and the "boo and hiss" pantomime slagging of her opponent. Plus the endless funds from the crooked foundation and murderous fanatics from the compliant Gulf states, and lost. But hey, do keep this going please, it'll help the Trumpster get a second term! Trump/Nugent 2020.
righteousfist01 , 10 Dec 2016 06:2
It's possible the Russians hacked and released the documents. However the report is not saying the Russians created them.

So whatever was so deplorable about them was all Democrat

Nataliefreeman -> righteousfist01 , 10 Dec 2016 06:3
Good point. Add that the whole election was dogged is the most glaring media bias and suddenly Russia comes off as simply leveling the playing field a bit
12inchPianist , 10 Dec 2016 06:1
CIA finds Russia had covertly influenced election. CIA finds FBI had overtly influenced election. Fancy that!
ashleigh2 , 10 Dec 2016 06:1
The 'secret' enquiry reported to Congress that the CIA concludes etc, etc, etc. Then yet more revelations from 'anonymous sources' are quoted in the Washington Post and The New York Times reaching the same conclusions.....talk about paranoia, or are the Democrats guilty of news fakery of the highest order to deny the US voters....
Nataliefreeman , 10 Dec 2016 05:5
Ooh Obama...there's a little snag about this investigation.

In principle, the DNC server could have had malware in an e-mail that set up a NAT entry that made the connecting computer appear somewhere else, with the entry deleted afterwards. Typically, IP table modifications aren't logged, so this would not be detectable.

In principle, the DNC server could have had malware in an e-mail that ran a SED script at a specific time that changed any occurrence of one IP address with another. Not sure anyone would bother with this, but it's why good system admins place so much emphasis on securing logs. However, it's obvious we're not talking about good admins.

In principle, every router between the DNC server and Russia has the potential to be hacked, with a tunnel added to send the traffic somewhere else in the world with new source and destination addresses. This is known as router table poisoning. It is preventable but the mechanisms are rarely ever used because the security services want to be able to do this themselves. There are some nice logs of the NSA using this.

In principle, someone along the way could tap into the fibre, spoofing IP addresses and injecting/sniffing packets. The U.S. even has a submarine designed for this, but optics aren't complex and any number of neo-phone phreaks could have the hardware.

In principle, someone at an ISP or backbone service could have had a laptop plugged into a switch or router to do the same thing, or lit up a strand of dark fibre to let some uber-wealthy business do this. And there's no shortage of uber-wealthy businesses who aren't keen on Democrats. This technique is used for local and remote network diagnostics, no reason it can't be used nefarious, it's not like the hardware cares why a wire is plugged in.

In principle, the supposed destination machine could have been hacked to relay the packets in encrypted form to the South Pole or a college campus in Texas. There are many examples of client machines being hacked to do this. It's basically what zombie machines are in botnets.

In practice, it is flat-out guaranteed that none of the security agencies could distinguish this from a Russian attack. Nothing in the area monitored could tell the difference. We know, for a fact, that college kids spoofing a scan from China have fooled the DoD and NSA on previous occasions, it has caused international incidents.

So we have known forms of attack that are known to exist, aren't complex and in some cases are already used for attacks. They are 100% untraceable.

Bosula , 10 Dec 2016 05:5
How about a Presidential review covering US interference in the elections of countries around the world?
Paulare -> Bosula , 10 Dec 2016 06:2
But where to start?

UK, Australia, Chile, Nicoragua, Cuba, Philippines, Malaysia, Germany...?

such choice..

Bosula -> Paulare , 10 Dec 2016 08:0
Yes. Maybe do it on a regional basis across the globe.
Anarchy4theUK , 10 Dec 2016 05:4
Of course the Americans would never interfere in other people's elections would they?...........I imagine the Russians wanted to avoid a nuclear war with war monger Hilary & who can blame them?
Nataliefreeman -> Anarchy4theUK , 10 Dec 2016 06:1
Y'know really all they seem to be looking possibly guilty of is the wikileaks scandal. Compare that to the enormous media bias regarding Trump and suddenly the Russians at worst come off as evening the playing field so as to help an election be less biased...
Kris Penny , 10 Dec 2016 05:4
When certain members of the public would believe one man over those who have more intelligence in a follicle than he will ever have floating in his cranium is when you realise that a place like Guantanamo should exist, exclusively for them.
http://www.allgov.com/news/where-is-the-money-going/surprise-cost-of-ammo-for-us-navy-destroyers-new-guns-800000-a-shot-161114?news=859762
Newmacfan , 10 Dec 2016 05:3
Paranoia about Russia has arrived at the laughable, almost like the fable of the boy who cried wolf! Even the way the CIA statement is worded makes you smile. "silk purse sows ear"? Everyone is clutching at straws rather than looking down the barrel at the truth......that folks is what is missing from Western Politics......"The Truth" --
StephenO , 10 Dec 2016 04:3

Obama expected the review to be completed before he leaves office...

Really?? Obama wants a "deep review" of internet activities surrounding the elections of 2008, 2012, and 2016; and he wants this done in less than 40 days? And it encompasses voting stations throughout the 50 states? That's the definition of political shenanigans.

Dom Michaels -> pureist , 10 Dec 2016 04:3
Seeing as how the CIA interfered with Ukraine before and during the overthrow of Yanukovich, and with Moscow protests a few years ago...... seems like everyone is always trying to interfere with each-other. Hypocrisy abounds
MarkThomason , 10 Dec 2016 03:5
This is not really a fight against Trump. That is lost. This is an intramural fight among Democrats.

This is desperate efforts by the corporate Democrats to hang on to power after Hillary (again) lost.

Excuses. Allegations without sources given, anonymous.

Remember that the same people used the same media contacts to spread fake news that the Podesta leaks were faked, and tried to shift attention from what was revealed to who revealed it.

GuyCybershy -> MarkThomason , 10 Dec 2016 04:0
Agreed. Another reason why the Democratic party is not worth saving. 13 million voted for Sanders in the primary, that is enough to start a new party.
Fabr1s , 10 Dec 2016 03:4
if the Ruskies did it, there's something funny: they did it on Obama's watch and her protege, Hillary, lost it. The system is a real mess in this case.

Kris Penny , 10 Dec 2016 03:4
Read and research further...
https://www.dhs.gov/news/2016/10/07/joint-statement-department-homeland-security-and-office-director-national
GeoffP -> Kris Penny , 10 Dec 2016 04:0
Interesting link. It raises a particularly salient question: assuming the Russians did indeed do it - and after the whole CIA yellow cake thing in Iraq, no one could possibly doubt national intelligence agencies any more - does it particularly matter?

Did the Russians write the emails? The betrayal of Sanders, the poor protection on classified materials, the cynical, vicious nonsense spewed out by the HRC campaign, the media collusion with the DNC and HRC: did the Russians do these things too? Or was that Clinton and the DNC? Silly question, I'm sure.

sejong -> jcadams , 10 Dec 2016 03:5
Russia's competence with computer hacking and cyber espionage is a given

So what? What about Chinese or Israeli competence in these areas?

This is Fake News that exists only because Clinton lost.

The real news is about in competence by HRC, DWS, and the DNC in foisting a sure loser on American voters.

naomh -> sejong , 10 Dec 2016 03:5
Thank you for speaking the truth!!!!
GeoffP -> jcadams , 10 Dec 2016 04:0
Well, chief, the Wisconsin recount is in and the results are staggering: after the recount, Clinton has gained on Trump by 3 votes... and Trump gained on Clinton by a heady six votes. One begins to wonder at the 'Manchurian candidate' claim.
third_eye , 10 Dec 2016 03:3
It is precisely charades like this that millions in the US and around the world have given up on the establishment. Business as usual or rather lying as usual will only alienate more not-so-stupid citizens. It speaks volumes about their desperation that they're are actually employing such obviously infantile tactics on the Russia even as they continue to paper over Hillary's tattered past. The result of the investigation is totally predictable..................Yes, the Russians were involved in hacking the elections, but..........for reasons of national security, details of the investigative process and evidence cannot be revealed.
Longleveler , 10 Dec 2016 03:2
If the Russians really wanted Trump to win that means they helped Hillary win the Democratic primaries because Bernie would have beat Trump.. There was a mess of hanky-panky going on to defeat Bernie, and deflecting the blame to a foreign actor should keep the demonstrators off the streets.
If someone is gullible enough to believe the Russians did it they'd also believe that Elvis made Bigfoot hack the DNC. That's even more plausible since bigfoot is just a guy who spends so much time sitting at his computer he lost all interest in personal hygiene.
Will D , 10 Dec 2016 03:1
The Democrats are really desperate to find anything they can use to challenge the results of the election.

Either way they look foolish - openly investigating the possibility of Russian hacking which acknowledges that their electoral systems aren't well secured, OR look really foolish if they find anything (whether real or faked).

The big question now is if, and how much, they will fake the findings of the investigation so that they can declare the election results wrong, and put Clinton into the White House.

Clearly, it is a case of desperate times calling for desperate measures. It is incredible that one man can make the largest Western nation look so ridiculous in the eyes of the world.

madeiranlotuseater , 10 Dec 2016 02:4
Pot calling the kettle black. Reveal fully what the CIA get up to all over the planet. The phoney intel America has used to go to war causing countries to implode. The selective way they release information to project the picture they want. I am not convinced that Russia is any better or any worse than the USA.
onofabeach , 10 Dec 2016 02:3
I can understand the Russians wanting Obama in 2008 and 2012 because he is a weak leader and totally incompetent.

I can also understand Putin preferring DJT to HRC.

It's about time the planet settled down a little bit, Trump and Putin will do more for world peace in the next year than Obama achieved in his 8 wasted years in charge.

The Democrats have yet to realise the reason for their demise was not the racists, the homophobes, the KKK, the Deplorables, the misogynists, the xenophobes etc etc etc.

It was Hillary Clinton.

Get over it, move on, stop whining, get out of your safe room, put the puppy down, throw the play dough away, stop protesting, behave like an adult.

As much as I am enjoying the monumental meltdown of the left, it is getting sad now and I am starting to feel very sorry for you.

BoBiel , 10 Dec 2016 02:2
Georgia Says Someone in U.S. Government Tried to Hack State's Computers Housing Voter Data

http://www.wsj.com/articles/georgia-reports-attempt-to-hack-states-election-database-via-ip-address-linked-to-homeland-security-1481229960

http://www.usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2016-12-08/georgia-accuses-us-of-trying-to-hack-its-election-systems

123Akava , 10 Dec 2016 02:1
What a sad bunch of clowns. But the time is ripe. You and your sort are done Obama, Hillary Clinton, Juncker, Merkel, Hollande, Mogherini, Kerry, Tusk, Nuland, Albright, Breedlove, SaManThe Power and the rest of the reptiles. With all respect - mwuahahaha! - you will soon sink into the darkness of the darkest places of history, but you won't be forgotten, no you won't!
poppetmaster , 10 Dec 2016 02:0
The Democrats still don't understand that the problem in American politics is everything that happened BEFORE election day.

How can you worry about the ballot boxes when the entire process from beginning to end is utterly corrupt.

CarlHansen , 10 Dec 2016 02:0
As for the Podesta email. John Podesta was so stupid that he gave out his password in a simple email scam that any 8 year old kid could have conducted. I wouldn't be surprised if Assange did it himself. Assange will be celebrating at the demise of Hillary.
phobeophobe , 10 Dec 2016 02:0
Guys! Your side lost the election. Get over it & stop looking for excuses.

I don't think it was the Russians, it was just a lot of people got sick of being told what to think & how to behave by your side of politics.

It is because people who disagree with you are either ignored, shut-down or called names with weaponised words such as "racist, bigot, xenophobe, homophobe, islamophobe, you name it. You go out onto the streets chanting mindless slogans aimed at shutting down debate. You have infiltrated academia and no journalism graduate comes out of a western univerity without a 60 degree lean to the left. People of alternative views to what is now the dominant social paradigm are not permitted to speak at universities. Once they were the vanguard of dangerous ideas. Now they are just sheep pens.

You have infiltrated the mainstream media so of course people need to go to Info Wars, Breitbart & Project Veritas to get the other side to your one-sided argument.

Your side of politics has regulated the very words we speak so that we can't even express a thought anymore without being chanted down, or shut down, prosecuted or sued.

There was once a time when it was the left who spoke up for freedom of speech. It was the left who demanded that a man be judged by the content of his character & not the color of his skin & it was once the right who used to be worried about the Russians taking over our institutions.

Have a look at yourselves. Look at what you've become. You've stopped being the guardians of freedom & now you have become the very anti-freedom totalitarians you thought you were campaigning against.

Bleating about the "popular vote" doesn't cut it either. That's like saying, the other side scored more goals than us but we had possession of the ball more times. It is sad for you but it is irrelevant.

Trump won the election! Get over it!

Let's see what sort of job he does before deciding what to do next.

Nataliefreeman , 10 Dec 2016 01:5
News flash for all the obamabots:

In principle, the DNC server could have had malware in an e-mail that set up a NAT entry that made the connecting computer appear somewhere else, with the entry deleted afterwards. Typically, IP table modifications aren't logged, so this would not be detectable.

In principle, the DNC server could have had malware in an e-mail that ran a SED script at a specific time that changed any occurrence of one IP address with another. Not sure anyone would bother with this, but it's why good system admins place so much emphasis on securing logs. However, it's obvious we're not talking about good admins.

In principle, every router between the DNC server and Russia has the potential to be hacked, with a tunnel added to send the traffic somewhere else in the world with new source and destination addresses. This is known as router table poisoning. It is preventable but the mechanisms are rarely ever used because the security services want to be able to do this themselves. There are some nice logs of the NSA using this.

In principle, someone along the way could tap into the fibre, spoofing IP addresses and injecting/sniffing packets. The U.S. even has a submarine designed for this, but optics aren't complex and any number of neo-phone phreaks could have the hardware.

In principle, someone at an ISP or backbone service could have had a laptop plugged into a switch or router to do the same thing, or lit up a strand of dark fibre to let some uber-wealthy business do this. And there's no shortage of uber-wealthy businesses who aren't keen on Democrats. This technique is used for local and remote network diagnostics, no reason it can't be used nefarious, it's not like the hardware cares why a wire is plugged in.

In principle, the supposed destination machine could have been hacked to relay the packets in encrypted form to the South Pole or a college campus in Texas. There are many examples of client machines being hacked to do this. It's basically what zombie machines are in botnets.

In practice, it is flat-out guaranteed that none of the security agencies could distinguish this from a Russian attack. Nothing in the area monitored could tell the difference. We know, for a fact, that college kids spoofing a scan from China have fooled the DoD and NSA on previous occasions, it has caused international incidents.

So we have known forms of attack that are known to exist, aren't complex and in some cases are already used for attacks. They are 100% untraceable.

DanielDee , 10 Dec 2016 01:3
Joe Biden unwittingly gave the game up when he spoke to the press with indignation of the Russian hacks. The US would respond in kind with a covert cyber operation run by the CIA First of all it would be the NSA, not the CIA Secondly, it's not covert when you tell the press! Oh Joe, you really let the Obama administration down with that gaffe! Who would believe them now? A lot of people it would seem. Mainly those still reeling from an election they were so vested in
fedback , 10 Dec 2016 01:2
Unfortunately our media has lost all credibility.
For years we were told it was necessary to remove the dictator Assad in Syria. The result, a country destroyed, migrant crisis that fuelled Brexit and brought EU to its knees.
Now they are going to sell the 'foreign entities decided the US election'.
It's just a sad situation
GuyCybershy -> fedback , 10 Dec 2016 01:2
Syria has been destroyed because Western client states in the Middle East wanted this to happen. Assad had a reasonably successful secular government and our medieval gulf state allies felt. threatened by his regime. there was the little business of a pipeline, but of course that would be called a "conspiracy theory".
SomersetApples , 10 Dec 2016 01:1
If Obama has resources to spend on investigations, he should be investigating why the US is providing guided missiles to the terrorist in Syria. We had such great hopes for him, and he has proved to be totally useless as a president. Rather than giving us leadership and guidance he is looking under his bed for spooks. Just another example of his incompetence at a time when we needed leadership.

Looking for proof of espionage will be like trying to prove a negative and only result in a possible or at best a likely type of result for no purpose. It would just be another case of an unsupported accusation being thrown about.

Facing up to the question of who is supplying weapons to terrorist would require the courage to take on the Military Industrial Complex and he hasn't got it. Trump will be different.

ID3053875 , 10 Dec 2016 01:0
If the russians did interfere in the USA elections perhaps is a bit of poetic justice.
The USA has interfere in Latin America for over hundred years and they have given us Batista, Somoza, Trujillo, Noriega, Pinochet, Duvaliers , military juntas in Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Streener in Paraguay to name a few. They all were narcissists, racists and insecure. The american people love this type of leader now they got him in the white house may be from Russia with love. Empires get destroyed from within, look at Little Britain now, maybe the same will happen soon in the USA.
Viva China , is far from Latin America
nbk46zh , 10 Dec 2016 01:0
So if the US managed to somehow get rid of Russia and China, what would they do then? How would it justify hundreds of billions in defense spending? Just remember, the US military industry desperately needs an external enemy to exist. Without it, there is no industry.
ID5151903 , 10 Dec 2016 01:0
No I disagree. I don't think it was a conpriscy. It was just decades of misinformation, lies, usually perpertrated by our esteemed foreign minister. The man is a buffoon , liar and incompetent. It is quite amusing to see how inept, Incompotent and totally unsuited this man child is to public office.
PullingTheStrings , 10 Dec 2016 01:0
Good to see alot of Americans on here back into Mccarthyism/Paranoia/scapegoating/Witch hunting/Propaganda.
smellycat , 10 Dec 2016 01:0
Clinton's 'Russia did it' cop-out
https://off-guardian.org/2016/12/09/clintons-russia-did-it-cop-out /
prairdog , 10 Dec 2016 00:4
Why should we trust US intelligence which is essentially US propaganda?
DanielDee , 10 Dec 2016 00:3
Another red herring that smacks of desperation. The final death throes of a failed administration. These carefully chosen words reveal a lot. The email leaks were "consistent with the methods and motivations" of Russian hackers. In layman's terms its the equivalent of saying "we haven't got a clue who it was but it's the kind of thing they would probably do". Don't expect a smoking gun because it doesn't exist, otherwise we would have known about it by now.
PostTrotskyite -> DanielDee , 10 Dec 2016 00:3
It's not just the US who has accused Putin of meddling in their domestic affairs. Germany and the UK have made the same allegations. Are they wrong too?
DanielDee -> PostTrotskyite , 10 Dec 2016 00:5
I think anyone with reasonable intelligence would take each accusation on a case by case basis. There is no doubt that Russia conducts cyber operations, as the US and UK and Germany does. There is also little doubt that significant Russophobia exists, particularly since the failed foreign attempt of regime change in Syria that was thwarted by Russia. On that last point many citizens of the West are coming to the realisation that a secular government in Syria is preferable to one run by jihadists installing crude sharia law (Libya was certainly a lesson). Furthermore, if Hillary Clinton had succeeded one dreads to think of the consequences of her no-fly-zone plans. Thankfully she didn't succeed, no doubt in part to wikileaks revelations, who for the record stated that did not result from Russian hacks
sejong , 10 Dec 2016 00:2
Fake News is mass gaslighting, removing any sense of what is real. Biggest psy-op ever.
gondwanaboy , 10 Dec 2016 00:1
Barack Obama orders 'full review' of possible Russian hacking in US election


FAKE NEWS ALERT

JCDavis -> gondwanaboy , 10 Dec 2016 00:2
They already stated their conclusions, now they have to find evidence.
Yodasyodel , 9 Dec 2016 23:5
Hows the election recount going? You know the one this paper kept going on about a few weeks ago in Wisconsin that was supposed to be motivated by "Russian Hacking" in the election? Not very well but you have gone quiet. Also I see the Washington Post has been forced to backtrack for implying news outlets like Breitbart are Russian controlled on the advice of their own lawyers....after all calling someone a Russian agent without a shred of evidence is seriously libellous and they know it. Russian agents to blame yeah ok Obama no doubt the Easter Bunny will be next in your sights you fraud.
Wilderloo , 9 Dec 2016 23:5
Look no further than Hillarys private server. Classified information sent and received and Obam was part of it. Obama is a liar and a fraud who is now blaming the Russians for crooked Hillarys loss.
SUNLITE , 9 Dec 2016 23:5
Feed the flames of the war mongers that want Russia and Putin to be our bogeyman.Feed the military industrial complex more billions.The U.S. Defense budget is already 10 times that of Russia ,feed NATO already on Russia's boarder with tanks ,troops and heavy weapons.i did expect more from this pres,... The lies ,mis information and propaganda has worked so well since the end of WW2,upon a public who has been fed those lies {and is to busy with sports ,gadgets,games, alcohol and other drugs }for 70 yrs by a compliant,for profit lap dog media more interested in producing infotainment and profits than supplying information..If you don't think the "public" isn't very poorly informed and will believe anything ,..just look at who the next prez will be..
GuyCybershy -> SUNLITE , 10 Dec 2016 00:0
I don't think it's true that Trump voters were less informed than Clinton voters. The public knows that they all lie, they simply choose the one who's lies most appeal to them.
Alexander Bach , 9 Dec 2016 23:5
Did he also order to investigate the Clinton's deeds revealed by the 'hackers'?
fedback , 9 Dec 2016 23:3
Unfortunately Obama is not leaving office with dignity.
This action is another attempt to delegitimize the election of Trump. We already have the recount farce going on.
If Republicans had tried to delegitimize the election of Obama we know what the reaction from media would have been. An outcry against antidemocratic and racist behaviour
USApatriot12 , 9 Dec 2016 23:3
The corporate media is so predictable at this point. The news cranks up the anti-Russia hysteria while the guys over in entertainment roll out a slick fantasy about anti-Nazi resistance. It all adds up to a big steaming pile of crap but you hope it will push enough buttons to keep the citizens chained to their their desks for another quarter. Don't bet on it. As a great American said at another time of upheaval, you can't fool everyone forever...
GuyCybershy -> USApatriot12 , 9 Dec 2016 23:3
We're supposed to condemn "white nationalism" in The US and UK while supporting it in Ukraine.
GeeDeeSea -> GuyCybershy , 9 Dec 2016 23:4
That's not all. We in US and UK are supposed to condemn jihadists in Iraq while supporting them Syria.
James7 -> Eddy Cannella , 9 Dec 2016 23:2
Hillary? Although I would lean to more "Grey."

Kremlin Connection? The TRUTH About Hillary's Shady Ties To Russia REVEALED
Find out why insiders say Clinton has some explaining to do.

Americans have no idea just how closely Hillary Clinton is tied to the Kremlin! That's the shocking claim of a new report that alleges the Democratic nominee is secretly pals with Vladimir Putin and his countrymen.

Peter Schweizer, the author of Clinton Cash, has published a report that claims that that Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta was on the executive board of a foreign company that received $35 million from the Kremlin. "The company was a transparent Russian front, and how much Podesta was compensated - and for what - is unclear. In addition, Podesta failed to disclose his position on that board to the Federal government, as required by law," John Schindler of the Observer wrote.

As Radar previously reported, when Clinton was secretary of state, she profited from the "Russian Reset," a failed attempt to improve relations between the U.S. and Russia.
chweizer wrote, "Many of the key figures in the Skolkovo process - on both the Russian and U.S. sides - had major financial ties to the Clintons. During the Russian reset, these figures and entities provided the Clintons with tens of millions of dollars, including contributions to the Clinton Foundation, paid for speeches by Bill Clinton, or investments in small start-up companies with deep Clinton ties." Schweizer also details "Skolkovo," a Silicon Valley-like campus that both the U.S. and Russia worked on for developing biomed, space, nuclear and IT technologies. He told the New York Post that there was a "pattern that shows a high percentage of participants in Skolkovo who happen to be Clinton Foundation donors."

raymondffoulkes , 9 Dec 2016 23:1
So it's anti-Russia propaganda today again, all over the Guardian as well as everywhere else.

I daresay they have a few things (perhaps a tad more important than football and athletics) to say about us as well..

smellycat -> raymondffoulkes , 9 Dec 2016 23:2
Sour grapes at the liberation of Aleppo and their loss of face.
I'm surprised they haven't started asking about the missing 250K civilians,who must even now be languishing in Assad's dungeons.
Keeping that one for tomorrow probably.
nbk46zh , 9 Dec 2016 23:1
When Cheney used the terror alert levels to keep the US population in the constant state of fear, the Democrats denounced it as fear mongering. Now they're embracing the same tactics in the constant demonization of Russia. Look, it's raining today! Russia must be trying to control the weather in the US! Get them! Utterly ridiculous.
stegordon21 , 9 Dec 2016 23:0
The US has been the most bloodthirsty, aggressive nation in my lifetime. Where the US goes we obediently follow. Yet as Obama (7 countries he's bombed in his presidency, not bad for a Nobel Prize Winner) continues to circle Russia with NATO on their borders. We're continually spun headline news that Russia is the aggressor and is continually meddling in foreign affairs. We are the aggressors, we are the danger to ourselves and it's we who are run by megalomaniac elites who pump us full of fear and propaganda.
nbk46zh , 9 Dec 2016 23:0
Malicious cyberactivity... has no place in international community... No? When West does it, then it's for democratic purposes? But invading countries on a humanitarian pretense does? So Democrats are still looking to blame Russia for everything not going their way I see. This rhetoric didn't work for Clinton in the election and it won't now. Stop with this nonsense
GuyCybershy -> nbk46zh , 9 Dec 2016 23:1
There wasn't a lot of outrage about the use of the "stuxnet" virus against Iran. You see, when we do it is always for a good cause.

Paulare , 9 Dec 2016 22:5
Take the long view folks.

The Egyptian Empire lasted millenum,
The Greek and Roman Empires a thousand years, give or take.
The Holy Roman Empire centuries.
The British and French circa 200 years.
The USSR about 70, the USA 70 and counting

This is just the cyclical death throes of empires played out at ever increasing speed before our very eyes.

DexDex , 9 Dec 2016 22:5
5 articles abut Russia, again. This is the Russia interference in the Guardian. Putin must be stopped.
Earl_Grey -> DexDex , 9 Dec 2016 23:0
NATO has bought a subscription to the Guardian
TonyBlunt , 9 Dec 2016 22:5
Is all this hoohaa the BBC and the Guardian trying to get some revenge for the Russian liberating East Aleppo?
TheIPAResistance , 9 Dec 2016 22:5
This is exactly why we should never move to electronic voting. Can you imagine the lengths the IPA would go to ensure their men security the power they need to roll out their neoliberal agenda? As a tax-free right wing think tank composed of rich like Rinehart, Murdoch, Forrest, et al. the sky's the limit.
Anthony1152 , 9 Dec 2016 22:4
The five stages of dealing with psychological trauma: Anger, Denial, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance. Hillary and the Democrats are still at stage one and two. Obama is only beginning stage one as events dawn on him.
TheCharacteristicEquation 9 Dec 2016 22:4
I really do feel the established media and its elite hierarchy are vexed by both the Trump victory and Brexit here in the UK. Now the media attention turns to a report on another of its perpetual campaigns, namely Russia, and corruption in sport.

I'm not going to doubt the 'findings', but I know humans are corrupt ALL over the world, but it does strike me that no Western outlet, ever prints anything positive about Russia. I mean - nothing, zero!

dallasdunlap , 9 Dec 2016 22:3
If, indeed, the Russian government gathered the DNC and Podesta info released by Wikileaks, the Russians did the American people a favor by pulling back the curtain on behind the scenes scheming by Clinton campaign potentates.
Of course, I don't believe the Democratic claim that Clinton lost the election because of the Russians and the FBI.
GuyCybershy -> dallasdunlap , 9 Dec 2016 22:4
Podesta's password was "p@ssword". Inexcusable carelessness.
smellycat , 9 Dec 2016 22:3
Nothing wrong with a bit of regime change now and then, so we've been told. No good crying when the Russians do it to you.
sammy3110 , 9 Dec 2016 22:3
It's instructive to see the Guardian drag up Reagan's "Evil Empire" spiel, but only after Hillary lost.
GeeDeeSea , 9 Dec 2016 22:3
US backed a coup, or set up a coup, to overthrow the democratically elected government in Ukraine which led to war. Putin's payback seems fully justified.
theenko -> GeeDeeSea , 9 Dec 2016 22:4
sweet fucking jesus

Yanukovych is a disgrace to Ukrainian's everywhere and a traitor to his country. Fucking Putin puppet should be in jail.

GeeDeeSea -> theenko , 9 Dec 2016 22:4
sweet fucking jesus

Porshenko is a disgrace to Ukrainian's everywhere and a traitor to his country. Fucking Obama puppet should be in jail.

Earl_Grey , 9 Dec 2016 22:3
Oh my, a foreign country may have had a tiny influence on a US Election.

How about investigating the overthrow of the Democratically elected Govt in Ukraine, or the influence the US has had on the Syrian Govt, or even in Australia, where the Chinese Govt donates massive amounts of money to Political Parties (note, there's no link of course between Chinese Govt donations and Chinese Companies being able to buy most of Australia and employ Chinese Nationals in Australia on Chinese conditions and 500,000 Chinese Nationals being able to buy Real Estate in Sydney alone... none whatsoever).

bcnteacher , 9 Dec 2016 22:3
Good call! Something is fishy about the US electoral system.
COReilly , 9 Dec 2016 22:2
I'm not a policy or think tank wonk, but isn't Russia just a euphemism for China. Aren't their geopolitical interests linked. You just say Russia because China has us by the financial balls (I'm sure the Guardian would prefer to NOT be censored on the mainland) right? Package it that way and I'm on board. My love of Dostoevsky goes out the window. Albeit I still think Demons one of the best novels ever written. Woke me up.
fedback , 9 Dec 2016 22:1
Survivor of Bosnian sniper fire Hillary Clinton decries fake news in speech yesterday
Aaron Aarons , 9 Dec 2016 22:1
I'm all in favor of delegitimizing the incoming semi-fascist Trump/Pence regime, and find Obama's talk of a smooth transition disgusting. However, I reject the appeal to Russophobia or other Xenophobia.

BTW, Obama and his collaborators like Diane Feinstein have done a lot to prepare the legal basis for fascistic repression under the new POtuS.

Sund Fornuft , 9 Dec 2016 22:1
I already know what the comission will find. They will find evidences that Iraq holds vast ammonúnt of weapons of mass destruction! Oh wait, that was already used.
kalander , 9 Dec 2016 22:0
Obama has been as useless as his predecessor young Bush. His policies generally are in tatters and the US neo cons evil fantasy of full spectrum dominance has met its death in Syria. Bravo.
ShoppingKingLouie , 9 Dec 2016 22:0
The neoliberal corporate machine is wounded but not dead. They will use every trick, ploy and opportunity to try to regain power.

The fight goes on.

fedback , 9 Dec 2016 21:5
After an election cycle with proven collusion between the DNC/Hillary Clinton campaign and our media, our media has the nerve to come up with the term 'fake news'.
Hypocrisy at its finest
John Urquhart , 9 Dec 2016 21:5
Nobody does paranoia like the yanks. To the rest of the world, the unedifying spectacle of the world's biggest bullies, snoops, warmongers, liars and hypocrites complaining about how unfair life is, is pretty nauseating. Most of America's problems are home-grown.
ShoppingKingLouie , 9 Dec 2016 21:5
Why fake the news when you can just strong the media companies into muzzling their criticism?

http://nypost.com/2016/12/09/mika-brzezinski-says-clinton-camp-tried-to-pull-her-off-the-air /

mjp3470 , 9 Dec 2016 21:5
And the final report will conclude with something along the lines of:
'After a thorough, exhaustive investigation of all relevant evidence concerning the potential of foreign interference in the United States electoral process, the results of the investigation have shown that, although there remain troubling questions about the integrity of U.S. cyber-security which should prompt immediate Congressional review, there has been uncovered no conclusive evidence to support the conjecture that cyber attacks originating with any foreign actor, state or individual had any significant effect on the outcome of the 2016 Presidential election, and that there is no cause or justification for the American People to question the fairness of or lose faith in the electoral process and laid out by and carried out according to the Constitution.'
I do Holiday cards too.
garenmel -> mjp3470 , 9 Dec 2016 22:2
My hat off to you sir/madam. This was great!
Powerspike , 9 Dec 2016 21:5
Georgia's Secretary of State is accusing someone at the Department of Homeland Security of illegally trying to hack its computer network, including the voter registration database.
In a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, copied to the full Georgia congressional delegation, Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp alleges that a computer with a DHS internet address attempted to breach its systems.
http://thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity/309530-state-of-georgia-allegedly-accusing-homeland-security-of-attempted-hack

Wake up and smell the BS, the hacking is being done by people a lot nearer home.....

feliciafarrel , 9 Dec 2016 21:5
Oh dear, the GOP seem to have forgotten what they were saying about Putin and the Kremlin a short while back:

The continuing erosion of personal liberty and fundamental rights under the current officials in the Kremlin. Repressive at home and reckless abroad, their policies imperil the nations which regained their self-determination upon the collapse of the Soviet Union. We will meet the return of Russian belligerence with the same resolve that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union. We will not accept any territorial change in Eastern Europe imposed by force, in Ukraine, Georgia, or elsewhere, and will use all appropriate constitutional measures to bring to justice the practitioners of aggression and assassination.

https://www.gop.com/platform/american-exceptionalism/

Are they going to conveniently forget all decency and morality? Is the white supremacist agenda in the GOP finally in the ascendant?

Russian Troll (Number 254) 9 Dec 2016 21:5
I as a Russian Troll do not like this investigation and will do or say anything in order to change your mind. Putin is not a problem, the EU is.
Powerspike , 9 Dec 2016 21:4
..... prohibiting "fake" or "false" news would be a cure worse than the disease, i.e., censorship by other means. The government cannot be trusted with distinguishing fake from genuine news because it has ulterior motives. News the government dislikes would be conflated with fakery, and news the government approved would be conflated with truthfulness. Private businesses like Facebook cannot be trusted with distinguishing fake from genuine news because its overriding mission is to make money and to win popularity, not to spread truth. It would suppress news that risked injury to its reputation or profits but leave news that did the opposite undisturbed.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/dec/5/reflections-fake-news /
GuyCybershy , 9 Dec 2016 21:4
"The Anonymous Blacklist Promoted by the Washington Post Has Apparent Ties to Ukrainian Fascism and CIA Spying".

http://www.alternet.org/media/anonymous-blacklist-promoted-washington-post-has-shocking-roots-ukrainian-fascism-eugenics-and

GuyCybershy , 9 Dec 2016 21:3
Clinton lost even though she outspent Trump two to one. She was just a lousy candidate who ran a terrible campaign.
fimbulvinter -> GuyCybershy , 9 Dec 2016 21:4
Uh excuse me but that sort of introspection doesn't fly. She was flawless and the blame rests solely on Russia/alt-right/Sanders/Third Parties/Racism/Misogyny/Alignment of the stars/etc/etc
emilyadam , 9 Dec 2016 21:3
I thnk the idea that russia has world domination is quite laughable, what else they gonna be blamed for next, reduction of giraffe population!Lol
I think a teeny wee paranoia is setting in, or outright deliberate propaganda, too obvious
Jim Moodie , 9 Dec 2016 21:3
Is this worse than when the two CIA operatives were caught searching through files in the Offices of the British Labour Party about thirty years ago. What goes around comes around.

The CIA hacks have been destabalisuping Government for a at least seventy years.

One thing is pretty obvious paper ballots and a different ballot for each is much harder to rig.

It is ironic it takes a despot life key Trump to bring the issue to a head AFTER unexpectedly won.

freeandfair -> Jim Moodie , 9 Dec 2016 21:3
"Is this worse than when the two CIA operatives were caught searching through files in the Offices of the British Labour Party about thirty years ago. What goes around comes around."

The CIA were caught hacking into the US Congressional computers just 6 or so months ago. Nothing came out of it.

guest88888 , 9 Dec 2016 21:3

possible Russian hacking in US election

Based on the fact that the US 2000 (and possibly 2004) election was outright stolen by George Bush Jr., perhaps the propagandists in the White House and media ought to be looking for a "Russian connection" in regards to our illustrious former president.

Texas_Sotol , 9 Dec 2016 21:3
I'm shocked--shocked--to hear that our close Russian allies have done anything to influence and undermine the stability of other countries. Preposterous accusation! And to try to become huge winners in the Western Hemisphere, by cheating? Vitriolic nonsense!

Many posters here actually believe that Good Old Russia should just stick with what they do best. That's poison!

Fencewalker -> Bluebird101 , 9 Dec 2016 21:4
Rather like the Litvenenko inquiry...full of maybe's and possibilities, with not a shred of hard, factual proof shown - demonstrating that the order came from the Kremlin.
It's just a total accident that Putin's most vocal opponents keep getting shot in the head, gunned down on bridges, suffering 'accidents' or strange miscarriages of (sometimes post-mortem) 'justice' and fall victim to radiological state-enacted terrorism in foreign countries. No pattern there, whatsoever.
Informed17 , 9 Dec 2016 21:3
I am at a loss. On the one hand, I hear about Russian economy in tatters, gas station posing as a country, deep crisis, economy the size of Italy, rusty old military toys, aircraft carrier smoking out the whole Northern hemisphere, etc. On the other hand, I hear about Russian threat all the time, which must be countered by massive build up of the US and EU military, Russia successfully interfering in the elections in the beacon of democracy, the US, with 20 times greater economy, with powerful allies, the best armed forces in the world, etc. Are we talking about two different Russias, or is this schizophrenia, pure and simple?
jamese07uk -> Informed17 , 9 Dec 2016 21:3
It's always easy to find reasons to fear something, added to that the psychology of the unknown, and we have the makings of very powerful propaganda. Whatever Russia's level of corruption, and general society, I feel I cannot trust the Western media anymore 100%. There seems to be a equally sinister hidden agenda deep within Western Elites - accessing Russia's land, political and potential wealthly resources must surely be one of them!? The longterm Western agenda/mission?
spiridonovich , 9 Dec 2016 21:1
The Democratic Party's problem is Russia, which the President is rightly putting front and center. All Russians are the summit of eviality, and must be endlessly scapegoated in order for Democrats to regain power for the nation's greater good.

Democrats' problems have nothing to do with corruption, glaring conflicts of interest, favoritism, ass-licking editors, crappy data, lacking enthusiasm, and horribly poor judgement.

None of these issues need to be publicly addressed, being of no consequence to independent voters, and the President, Guardian, et al. must continue their silent -- and "independent" -- vigil on such silly topics, if Democrats are to have any hope of cultivating enough mindless, enraged, and abandoned sheep to bring them future victories.

ImmortalTao , 9 Dec 2016 21:1
I admire Trump, Putin & Farage. Don't agree with them but I have admiration for them. They show all the cunning, calculating, resourcefulness that put the European race on top. Liberals don't like that and want to see the own people fall to the bottom. Thankfuly the neoliberal elite are finishedm
MJMaguire , 9 Dec 2016 21:1
Absurd nonsense - the third anti-Russian story of the day. Very little of this has much traction because of the sheer volume of misinformation coming out about Russia. there are very good cogent reasons why the Democrats lost the US election - none of them have anything to do with Russia.
slats7 , 9 Dec 2016 21:0
another pathetic attempt to delegitimize Trump. wanna know why he won? look in the mirror, Barry.
oldsunshine -> slats7 , 9 Dec 2016 21:2
Will Obama see Clinton if he looks in the mirror??
Bluejil , 9 Dec 2016 21:0
I can't see a thing wrong with reviewing the last three election cycles, if there is any doubt at all and to put speculation to bed, it should be done.
CurtBrown -> Bluejil , 9 Dec 2016 21:1
Why stop at the last three?
Karl Marks -> CurtBrown , 9 Dec 2016 21:4
Because the US is more concerned about money than democratic integrity.
dicksonator , 9 Dec 2016 21:0
So the US intelligence servies aren't doing similar operations?

If they werent, heads would roll as they have a considerable budget. Did we learn nothing from Edward Snowden? Are Russia just better at this? I doubt it.

I think both sides conduct themselves in a despicable manner so please dont call me a Putin apologist. Well, feel free actually, I could'nt care less.

gray2016 , 9 Dec 2016 21:0

Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election


US interference:

COUNTRY OR STATE Dates of intervention Comments
VIETNAM l960-75 Fought South Vietnam revolt & North Vietnam; one million killed in longest U.S. war; atomic bomb threats in l968 and l969.
CUBA l961 CIA-directed exile invasion fails.
GERMANY l961 Alert during Berlin Wall crisis.
LAOS 1962 Military buildup during guerrilla war.
142 more rows

Shall I go on with anoter 142? US lying scumbags

yeCarumba -> gray2016 , 9 Dec 2016 21:0
the vietnam fiasco alone is enough to disqualify america from any criticism about interference in internal affairs
they practically destroyed the country
KitKnightly , 9 Dec 2016 20:5
The pathetic way the media are pushing this big-bad-Russians meme is a little depressing.

This "hack" is totally fictional, the wikileaks e-mails were almost certainly that...leaks. As most o their output has been over the years. For 95% of the Wikileaks existence there have been absolutely zero connections with "the Kremlin", in fact they have leaked stuff damaging to Russia before now.

The Russian's did not hack the DNC, or rig the election, this is yet another example of the political establishment hysterically pointing fingers and making up lies when their chosen side loses an election.

freeandfair -> KitKnightly , 9 Dec 2016 21:3
I remember how North Korea was blamed for Sony hack. I think they were even cut from the internet for a day and there was all this talk of punishing them. And then later it came out that very likely wasn't North Korea. Only the news cycle already moved on and nobody cared.
mismeasure , 9 Dec 2016 20:5
Traditionally, the best Cold Warriors have been right-wing liberals. In the absence of policies that concretely benefit the people they engage in threat inflation and demagoguery.
SergeyL , 9 Dec 2016 20:4
In 90s US set all figures in Russia - from president to news program anchor. Elections of 96 were ripped by American "advisors" so that Eltsyn with 3% rating "won" them. It's payback time.
Shaemus Gruagain , 9 Dec 2016 20:4
Oh how wonderful it is to watch them smart and the bonus? no more Obamas.
uest88888 -> PeteCW , 9 Dec 2016 21:3
And yet the so-called "Russian trolls" (which is apparently anyone who exercise a modicum of skepticism) seem to be winning here at CiF based on the number of likes per comment, which is likely why the NSA sponsored propagandists and clueless dopes are getting so increasingly shrill.
Mattster101 , 9 Dec 2016 20:3
If you take a wider view, this is all really about keeping the Dems in the game, trying to undo the Trump validity and give them another go in 4 or so years. Really, seems quite desperate that a man that allowed 270000 wild horses to be sold for horsemeat this year across the border to Mexico, brought HC in to his own cabinet having said 'she will say anything and do nothing', knowing what a nightmare that would make, and is going to watch his healthcare get ripped to shreds, needs more accomplishments in his last year, aka Obama, ergo, let's investigate the evil russians and their female athletes with male DNA ( you would think I am making this stuff up, but I am not ) ... Come on Grandma, where are you when we need you most
nolongersilent , 9 Dec 2016 20:3
we must somehow, subvert the despicable populace that elected trump. we must erase from history the conceding of president elect clinton - newpeak from the ministry of truth. we'll get her into the white house if it takes more cash, lies, and corruption. after all, who needs democracy in the democratic party when we have big brother. democracy just confuses the members. we'll send the despicables through the ministry of love to re-educate them, of course, this IS 1984 after all....we will vote for you, the intelligentsia of the left knows what is best for you.
eldudeabides , 9 Dec 2016 20:3
Should Hillary have been disqualified (and prosecuted) for having access to debate questions beforehand?
Nete75 , 9 Dec 2016 20:3
"Malicious cyber activity, specifically malicious cyber activity tied to our elections , has no place in the international community. Unfortunately this activity is not new to Moscow. We've seen them do this for years ... The president has made it clear to President Putin that this is unacceptable."

Note how carefully it specifies that it is cyber activity tied to the american elections that is inappropriate. I presume that is simply to avoid openly saying that mass-surveillance by the US government of everyone's private email, and social network accounts doesn't come under that "no place in the international community" phrase. You know, one does wonder how these people's faces don't come off in shame when whinning about potential interference by foreign governemnts after a full 8 years or so of constant revelations of permanent spying and mass-surveillance by the US government of international leaders and ordinary citizens worldwide.

Boghaunter , 9 Dec 2016 20:2
So the DNC was hacked - so what. Hacking is so common these days as to be expected. A quick perusal of the internet provides some SIGNIFICANT hacks that deserved some consternation:

9/4/07 The Chinese government hacked a noncritical Defense Department computer system in June, a Pentagon source told FOX News on Tuesday.

Spring 2011 Foreign hackers broke into the Pentagon computer system this spring and stole 24,000 files - one of the biggest cyber-attacks ever on the U.S. military,

On the 12th of July 2011, Booz Allen Hamilton the largest U.S. military defence contractor admitted that they had just suffered a very serious security breach, at the hands of hacktivist group AntiSec.

5/28/13 The confidential version of a Defense Science Board report compiled earlier this year reportedly says Chinese hackers accessed designs for more than two dozen of the U.S. military's most important and expensive weapon systems.

June 2014 The UK's National Crime Agency has arrested an unnamed young man over allegations that he breached the Department of Defense's network last June.


1/12/15 The Twitter account for U.S. Central Command was suspended Monday after it was hacked by ISIS sympathizers (OK twitter accounts shouldn't be a big deal. Why does US CentCom even HAVE a twitter account???)

5/6/15 OPM hack: China blamed for massive breach of US government data

Omoikani , 9 Dec 2016 20:2
And so the neocon propaganda machine trundles on, churning out this interesting material day after day. The elephant in the room is that if you get hacked you have no knowledge of this until your private stuff is all over the internet, and the chances of finding out who did it are zilch. Everyone in IT security knows this.
johhnybgood , 9 Dec 2016 20:1
Another "fake news" story. Does anybody with a pulse really believe that Russia hacked the DNC? The US Security Services admitted that it was NOT Russia; the likelihood is that the leaks were provided to Wikileaks by insiders within the US Administration - they wanted to ensure that Hillary did not win. None of the actual revelations were covered by the MSM, and "the Russians did it" was a convenient distraction.
Omoikani -> johhnybgood , 9 Dec 2016 20:2
All people that on earth do dwell have no clue who hacked the DNC to the amusing end that Podesta's e-mails ended up on the internet, but it suits a dangerous political narrative to demonise Russia until it becomes plain logical to attack them.
peterward881 , 9 Dec 2016 20:0
YES YES let attack Russia, YES YES YES, Russia Russia we should carry on attacking Russia. We the journalists are well paid by the man from Australia. YES YES we must to carry on attacking Russia and forget the shit happening in other countries. YES YES it is our duty.
guest88888 , 9 Dec 2016 20:0

Election hacking: Obama orders 'full review' of Russia interference

And I guess Obama has also ordered the Guardian to do a full court press of anti-Russian propaganda, just judging by the articles pumped out on today's rag alone.

The US government is seemingly attempting the "Big Lie" tactic of Joseph Goebbels and instigating support in the public for war against Russia. By repeating the completely unsubstantiated allegations that Russia has somehow "interfered with the election" they hope, without any genuine basis, to strong arm the public into accepting a further ramping of tensions and starting yet another illegal war for profit.

Chirographer , 9 Dec 2016 19:5
There's nothing wrong with conducting the investigation, but shouldn't it have been done before accusing Russia?

And aren't all the people cited in the article political appointees, Democrats or avowed Trump enemies, and then there's closing, " A spokesman for the director of national intelligence declined to comment."

Karega , 9 Dec 2016 19:5
Surely of all the Orders Obama might issue during his last weeks in office, why does he choose to give a stupid Order that effectively makes US some sort of Banana Republic? This man was/is more hype than real! At a stroke of a pen he seriously undermines the integrity of the US Electoral System. Whatever credibility was left has now been eroded by these constant and silly claims that somehow Russians installed Trump as President. Doesn't that make Trump some sort of Russian Agent?
Meanwhile MSM keeps on streaming some fake news and theories and then Obama Orders US intelligence to dig deeper. This is lunacy!
alexfoxy28 , 9 Dec 2016 19:5
Obama certainly understands that Russia is not the reason why Trump was elected. However, he wants to create new obstacles on the way of normalization of relations between the US and Russia and make it more difficult for Trump.

However, Trump is not a weak man, not a skinny worm; and he can hit these opponents back so hard that international court for them (for invasions into sovereign countries) will lead to their life sentences.

Ginen , 9 Dec 2016 19:5
Only two weeks ago the Obama Administration publicly stated there was no evidence of cybersecurity breaches affecting the electoral process, as reported in the NYT :

The administration, in its statement, confirmed reports from the Department of Homeland Security and intelligence officials that they did not see "any increased level of malicious cyberactivity aimed at disrupting our electoral process on Election Day."

The administration said it remained "confident in the overall integrity of electoral infrastructure, a confidence that was borne out." It added: "As a result, we believe our elections were free and fair from a cybersecurity perspective."

Was Obama lying then or is he lying now?
imperfetto , 9 Dec 2016 19:5
Is there any limit to the ridicolous, Mr. Obama? what is this? a tragicomic play of the inept?
Here we are with the most childish fabrication that it must be the Russians' fault if Trump won the election. I'll be laughing for an entire cosmic era! And all this after US publically announced that they were going to launch a devastating acher attack against the badies: the Russians, which of course didn't work out. Come on, this is more comedy that a serious play.

What probably is going on, the readers can gather by having a look at the numberless articles that are being published by maistream media against the Russians.
Why this histeric insurgence of Russofobia? Couldn't it be that it is intolerable for the US and their allies to see the Russians winning in Aleppo, and most of all restoring peace and tollerance among the population returning to their abbandoned homes.

brothersgrimm , 9 Dec 2016 19:3
I think Hillary, in part, lost the election due to all the fake news being pumped out by the mainstream corporate media, doing her bidding. People are tired of it, along with all the corruption and lies that came to the surface through the likes of Wikileaks.
Trump is a terrible alternative, but the only alternative people were given, so many went with it.
Now we see fake news making out the Russians to be the bad guys again, pumping out story after story, trying to propagandize the population into sucking up these new memes. Russia has its problems, and will always act in its own self-interest, but it's nothing compared to the tactics the US uses, bullying countries around the world to pander to its own will, desperately trying to maintain its Empire.
RoachAmerican , 9 Dec 2016 19:3
Examine something real, Nuclear Hillary. It must be time for Spring Planting??
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/04/23/us/clinton-foundation-donations-uranium-investors.html?_r=0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=syEjkPyqRew
Minutes 20 to 25
Uranium One Wyoming
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/24/us/cash-flowed-to-clinton-foundation-as-russians-pressed-for-control-of-uranium-company.html

http://www.npr.org/2015/04/23/401781313/clinton-foundation-linked-to-russian-effort-to-buy-uranium-company
https://youtu.be/jkfE10g8xbc
at 25 minutes et seq
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkfE10g8xbc&feature=youtu.be


Below, first paragraphs are the most important
http://www.newyorker.com/news/amy-davidson/five-questions-about-the-clintons-and-a-uranium-company

The 1 2 3 Step of Acquisition of Uranium One
http://www.businessinsider.com/the-clintons-putin-and-uranium-2015-4

Going Private Part Public Company Disappears
http://www.wise-uranium.org/ucscr.html

http://www.pravdareport.com/russia/economics/22-01-2013/123551-russia_nuclear_energy-0 /
Coward Comey needs to go.

Joelbanks , 9 Dec 2016 19:3
The scripture tells us those who live by the sword will perish by it.

America was in the interference of other countries' elections before its ugly 2016 presidential election. Remember Ukraine and Secretary Hillary Clinton's employee Victoria F****the EU Nuland in Ukraine. Now we have the makings of some kind of conflict with Russia over its alleged meddling in America's elections. More global tension= More cash flowing into the US equity market, money printing by another means.

hardlyeverclever , 9 Dec 2016 19:3
I'd be surprised if the Russians weren't trying to affect the outcome of the election. The Brits had a debate in Parliament on Trump, Obama made threats to the UK on the Brexit vote, so who knows what we're all doing in each others elections behind closed doors while we are clear to do so publically.

The MSM's absolute refusal to address the leaks in a meaningful way (other than the stuff about recipes) suggests to be no one felt it a big deal at the time.

alexfoxy28 , 9 Dec 2016 19:3
Obama could realise that Hillary's viewes on Putin and Russia did not help her at all. People are not that stupid, they see well, use own brains and not so easily impressed by whatever CNN says to them.
Alun Jones , 9 Dec 2016 19:2
John McAfee said that any organization sophisticated enough to do these hacks is also sophisticated enough to make it look as though any country they want did it. So it could have been anyone.
palindrome , 9 Dec 2016 19:2
Obama earlier this year: Russia is not a world power, only a regional power.

Obama now: Russia has the power to manipulate the USA election.

Which one is it then?

Of course it's all bull...Obama is another establishment puppet who cannot accept that people have figured out their modus operandi.

diddoit , 9 Dec 2016 19:2
It's reported today on Ars Technica : ThyssenKrupp suffered a "professional attack"

The steelmaker, which makes military subs, says it was targeted from south-east Asia.

..the design of its plants were penetrated by a "massive," coordinated attack which made off with an unknown amount of "technological know-how and research."

The internet and precious information...

alexfoxy28 , 9 Dec 2016 19:2
Neoliberals are just desperately losing ideological competition at home and abroad. They cannot convince people that they are right because it's not what's going on.

It does not matter what some others say, it's what really goes on matters.

alexfoxy28 -> imipak , 9 Dec 2016 21:0
But there is innate, basic self-interest in all people (that does not depend on education, ethnicity, race) and people know it instinctively well. They will not go against it even if all around will tell otherwise.
alexfoxy28 -> alexfoxy28 , 9 Dec 2016 21:1 0 1
simulacra27 , 9 Dec 2016 19:2
The fake news channel brought to you by Obama and co.
p.s. I mean that people cannot be manipulated by others at this basic level when some higher level manipulative tools are used.
Kasem3000 , 9 Dec 2016 19:1
I love how this has now become solid fact. No confirmation, nothing official but it is no common fact that the Russians interfered. How many reports do we hear about US interference with foreign countries infastructure through covert means.
ShoppingKingLouie , 9 Dec 2016 19:1
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/dec/08/vladimir-putin-hillary-clinton-russia

Meh. Seems like tampering happens all the time. How many elections in South America did the USA fix? How many in the middle east and Africa? I think this "russian's did it" rhetoric is counterproductive as it is stopping Democrats from doing the introspective needed to really understand why HRC lost the election.

ShoppingKingLouie , 9 Dec 2016 19:1
How can you on the one hand crusade against "fake news" and on the other promote this:

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/dec/08/artist-alison-jackson-self-publishes-spoof-trump-photos-despite-fear-of-being-sued#comments

Sutir Comed , 9 Dec 2016 19:0
Imagine if the shoe were on the other foot and there was credible evidence that the Russians had rigged the election in favor of the Democrat. The right-wing echo chamber would be having seizures! These people are UTTER HYPOCRITES. And they would obviously rather win with the help of a hostile foreign power than try to preserve the integrity of our elections.
MayorHoberMallow , 9 Dec 2016 19:0
Russia may or may not have hacked the DNC. I'd like to find out. I hope the DNC aren't enough of doofusses to assume this wouldn't be in the realm of possibility.
I presume that the U.S. has its own group of hackers doing the same Worldwide. This is not a criticism; I would expect the U.S. intelligence community to learn what our rivals, and even some of our friends, are up to.
Timothy Everton , 9 Dec 2016 19:0
This is getting to be pretty lame. I have doubts that "Russia" could interfere to any great extent with our elections any more than we could with theirs. Sure, individuals or organizations, and more than likely in THIS country, could do so. And they have, as we saw with the DNC and Sanders campaign (and vice versa). Let's not go into an almost inevitable nuclear war over what is quite possibly "fake news".
dreylon , 9 Dec 2016 19:0
Russia did this, Russia did that
its getting very boring now, you have lost all credibility
you have cried wolf to many times
stop trying to manipulate us
Johnny Kent , 9 Dec 2016 18:5
When will the Democrats get it? It wasn't the Russians, who are blamed for everything, including the weather, by desperate Western failed leaders, but an unsuitable candidate in Clinton, which lost them the Election. Bernie Sanders would have walked it.
Catonaboat , 9 Dec 2016 18:5
Well Guardian I do believe you hit a nerve, I don't think I've ever seen a more one sided BTL. Me thinks some people do protest too much.
Iaorana , 9 Dec 2016 18:5
Regarding the notorious "fuck the EU " on the part of the US "diplomat" Victoria Nuland "the State Department and the White House suggested that an assistant to the deputy prime minister of Russia Dmitry Rogozin was the source of the leak, which he denied " Wiki

Good occasion to substantiate the accusation which ,substantiated or not,will remind the "useful idiots" of the "change of regime " US policy and who started the Ukrainian crisis.

Lafcadio1944 , 9 Dec 2016 18:5
Boy, oh boy, fake news is everywhere just read this headline!

Election hacking: Obama orders 'full review' of Russia interference

Which states as fact there was interference by Russia and that the investigation is to determine how bad it was. NO EVIDENCE WHAT SO EVER has been offered by anyone that Russia interfered in any way. FAKE NEWS!!

Mike5000 , 9 Dec 2016 18:5
Voting machine hacking is a very serious problem but you generally need physical access to a voting machine to hack it. Anyone notice thousands of Russians hanging around in Detriot, Los Angeles, etc election HQs? How about Clinton drones?

If the DNC hadn't rigged the primary we'd be celebrating president-elect Bernie. If they hadn't rigged the general Hillary would have lost by a landslide.

ShoppingKingLouie , 9 Dec 2016 18:5
We never investigated this tho did we Former President Obama?

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/dec/08/vladimir-putin-hillary-clinton-russia

Time to put on your big girl pants, accept defeat and leave gracefully.

Powerspike , 9 Dec 2016 18:5
1000 Russian athletes were doping in the 2012 Olympics - but it's taken until now to realise it?!
Russia influenced the 2016 US election?!
Russia is presently "influencing" the German elections?!
Russia is killing civilians and destroying hospitals with impunity in Syria?!
etc
Wow! Russia is taking over the world, it must be stopped, can anyone save us? Obama? Trump? NATO?
Look out! Russian armies are massing on the border ready to sweep into Europe.......arrhhh!

I love the smell of gibberish in the morning!

geofffrey , 9 Dec 2016 18:4
***Newsflash***

Reads:

"..ex-prime minister Anthony Charles Lynton Blair of the United Kingdom, and Hillary Rodham Clinton of the United States of America, have formally announced a new transatlantic political party to be named: The Neoliberal Elite Party for bitter anti-Brexiters and sore anti-Trumpettes.

dahsab , 9 Dec 2016 18:4
Rather rich coming from my country which has interfered in elections around the world for decades. I suppose it's only cheating if the other team does it.

Not that they'll find any evidence. Just another chapter in the sad saga of the Democrats unwillingness to admit they ran the worst candidate & the worst campaign in recent memory. It's not our fault! Them dirty Russkies did it!

[Sep 26, 2016] War as a Business Opportunity

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... As General Smedley Butler, twice awarded the Medal of Honor, said: War is a racket . Wars will persist as long as people see them as a "core product," as a business opportunity. In capitalism, the profit motive is often amoral; greed is good, even when it feeds war. Meanwhile, the Pentagon is willing to play along. It always sees "vulnerabilities" and always wants more money. ..."
"... Wars are always profitable for a few, but they are ruining democracy in America. Sure, it's a business opportunity: one that ends in national (and moral) bankruptcy. ..."
Sep 24, 2016 | www.antiwar.com
A good friend passed along an article at Forbes from a month ago with the pregnant title, "U.S. Army Fears Major War Likely Within Five Years - But Lacks The Money To Prepare." Basically, the article argues that war is possible - even likely - within five years with Russia or North Korea or Iran, or maybe all three, but that America's army is short of money to prepare for these wars. This despite the fact that America spends roughly $700 billion each and every year on defense and overseas wars.

Now, the author's agenda is quite clear, as he states at the end of his article: "Several of the Army's equipment suppliers are contributors to my think tank and/or consulting clients." He's writing an alarmist article about the probability of future wars at the same time as he's profiting from the sales of weaponry to the army.

As General Smedley Butler, twice awarded the Medal of Honor, said: War is a racket . Wars will persist as long as people see them as a "core product," as a business opportunity. In capitalism, the profit motive is often amoral; greed is good, even when it feeds war. Meanwhile, the Pentagon is willing to play along. It always sees "vulnerabilities" and always wants more money.

But back to the Forbes article with its concerns about war(s) in five years with Russia or North Korea or Iran (or all three). For what vital national interest should America fight against Russia? North Korea? Iran? A few quick reminders:

#1: Don't get involved in a land war in Asia or with Russia (Charles XII, Napoleon, and Hitler all learned that lesson the hard way).

#2: North Korea? It's a puppet regime that can't feed its own people. It might prefer war to distract the people from their parlous existence.

#3: Iran? A regional power, already contained, with a young population that's sympathetic to America, at least to our culture of relative openness and tolerance. If the US Army thinks tackling Iran would be relatively easy, just consider all those recent "easy" wars and military interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria

Of course, the business aspect of this is selling the idea the US Army isn't prepared and therefore needs yet another new generation of expensive high-tech weaponry. It's like convincing high-end consumers their three-year-old Audi or Lexus is obsolete so they must buy the latest model else lose face.

We see this all the time in the US military. It's a version of planned or artificial obsolescence . Consider the Air Force. It could easily defeat its enemies with updated versions of A-10s, F-15s, and F-16s, but instead the Pentagon plans to spend as much as $1.4 trillion on the shiny new and under-performing F-35 . The Army has an enormous surplus of tanks and other armored fighting vehicles, but the call goes forth for a "new generation." No other navy comes close to the US Navy, yet the call goes out for a new generation of ships.

The Pentagon mantra is always for more and better, which often turns out to be for less and much more expensive, e.g. the F-35 fighter.

Wars are always profitable for a few, but they are ruining democracy in America. Sure, it's a business opportunity: one that ends in national (and moral) bankruptcy.

William J. Astore is a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF). He taught history for fifteen years at military and civilian schools and blogs at Bracing Views . He can be reached at [email protected] . Reprinted from Bracing Views with the author's permission.

Continued

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[Jan 17, 2020] Ukraine is a deeply sick patient. The destiny of ordinary Ukrainians is deeply tragic. Diaspora is greedy and want a piece of cake immediately Published on Jan 17, 2020 | www.unz.com

[Jan 24, 2020] How Are Iran and the "Axis of the Resistance" Affected by the US Assassination of Soleimani by Elijah J. Magnier Published on Jan 22, 2020 | www.globalresearch.ca

[Jan 24, 2020] Peter Hitchen to Eliot Higgins of Bellingcat: You're not in the ladies' lingerie trade now, sweetie Published on Jan 24, 2020 | off-guardian.org

[Jan 24, 2020] Crimes of the century truth, perception and punishment Published on Jan 24, 2020 | off-guardian.org

[Jan 24, 2020] Lawrence Wilkerson Lambasts 'the Beast of the National Security State' by Adam Dick Published on Jan 13, 2020 | ronpaulinstitute.org

[Jan 19, 2020] The frantic attempt to deflect attention from US foreign wars and mainly derisive media coverage of Tulsi Gabbard is a case in point. Is she the harbinger of a growing political movement aiming to dismantle the military empire project? Published on Jan 19, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

[Jan 18, 2020] The inability of the USA elite to tell the truth about the genuine aim of policy despite is connected with the fact that the real goal is to attain Full Spectrum Dominance over the planet and its people such that neoliberal bankers can rule the world Published on Jan 18, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

[Jan 18, 2020] Putin plants to prohibit dual citizens to serve in government Published on Jan 18, 2020 | www.unz.com

[Jan 17, 2020] Ukraine is a deeply sick patient. The destiny of ordinary Ukrainians is deeply tragic. Diaspora is greedy and want a piece of cake immediately Published on Jan 17, 2020 | www.unz.com

[Jan 14, 2020] Impeachment Of President Trump An Imperial War Game by By Barbara Boyd Published on Nov 22, 2019 | futurefastforward.com

[Jan 12, 2020] MIC along with Wall Street controls the government and the country Published on Jan 12, 2020 | angrybearblog.com

[Jan 12, 2020] Why the West Falsifies the History of World War II -- Strategic Culture Published on Jan 12, 2020 | www.strategic-culture.org

[Jan 12, 2020] US has been preaching human rights while mounting wars and lying. Published on Jan 12, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

[Jan 10, 2020] The Saker interviews Michael Hudson Published on Jan 09, 2020 | thesaker.is

[Jan 09, 2020] Opposing War With Iran: Three Reasons by Anthony DiMaggio Published on Jan 09, 2020 | www.counterpunch.org

[Jan 14, 2020] Impeachment Of President Trump An Imperial War Game by By Barbara Boyd Published on Nov 22, 2019 | futurefastforward.com

[Jan 12, 2020] MIC along with Wall Street controls the government and the country Published on Jan 12, 2020 | angrybearblog.com

[Jan 12, 2020] Why the West Falsifies the History of World War II -- Strategic Culture Published on Jan 12, 2020 | www.strategic-culture.org

[Jan 12, 2020] US has been preaching human rights while mounting wars and lying. Published on Jan 12, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

[Jan 10, 2020] The Saker interviews Michael Hudson Published on Jan 09, 2020 | thesaker.is

[Jan 09, 2020] Opposing War With Iran: Three Reasons by Anthony DiMaggio Published on Jan 09, 2020 | www.counterpunch.org

[Jan 08, 2020] Iraqi Journalist: Killing Soleimani "Ended An Era In Which Iran And The United States Coexisted In Iraq" by Tim Hains Published on Jan 06, 2020 | www.realclearpolitics.com

[Jan 08, 2020] Do you really want to be a one term president? Pompeo can talk big now and then go back to Kansas to run for senator. Where will you be able to take refuge? Published on Sep 18, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

[Jan 06, 2020] Diplomacy Trump-style. Al Capone probably would be allow himself to fall that low Published on Jan 06, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

[Jan 06, 2020] Neocon Pompeo pushed Trump to kill Soleimani; Looks like West Point educated military contactor mafia to which Pompeo and Esper belongs controls the President, although Trump malleability and recklessness are inexcusable Published on Jan 06, 2020 | www.washingtonpost.com

[Jan 05, 2020] The USA is now at war, de-facto and de-jure, with BOTH Iraq and Iran (UPDATED 6X) The Vineyard of the Saker Published on Jan 05, 2020 | thesaker.is

[Jan 05, 2020] Trump is wholly responsible for his own actions, but he -- just like the Ayatollah -- is being pushed in a direction where it's impossible to back down and still "save face". Neither men can afford to do so by Andrew Korybko Published on Jan 05, 2020 | astutenews.com

[Jan 04, 2020] The role of Germany in the Ukrainian disaster Published on Nov 21, 2019 | www.unz.com

[Jan 04, 2020] American Meddling in the Ukraine by Publius Tacitus Published on Feb 23, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

[Dec 21, 2019] Trump administration sanction companies involved in laying the remaining pipe, and also companies involved in the infrastructure around the arrival point. Published on Dec 21, 2019 | peakoilbarrel.com

[Dec 21, 2019] Lessons of the past: all changed in 1999 with the war in Kosovo. For the first time I witnessed shocking images of civilian targets being bombed, TV stations, trains, bridges. The NATO spokesman boasted of hundreds of Serbian tanks being destroyed. There was something new and disturbing about his manner, language and tone, something I'd not encountered from coverage of previous conflicts. For the first time I found myself not believing one word of the narrative Published on Apr 23, 2019 | off-guardian.org

[Dec 21, 2019] Trump comes clean from world s policeman to thug running a global protection racket by Finian Cunningham Published on Dec 27, 2018 | www.rt.com

[Dec 21, 2019] Time to Terminate Washington's Defense Welfare Published on Sep 01, 2017 | nationalinterest.org

[Dec 21, 2019] The Pentagon s New Map War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century Published on Aug 26, 2017 | www.amazon.com

[Dec 21, 2019] We are all Palestinians: possible connection between neocons and Pentagon Published on Aug 25, 2017 | www.unz.com

[Dec 21, 2019] The ruthless neo-colonialists of 21st century Published on Apr 09, 2019 | failedevolution.blogspot.com

[Dec 21, 2019] The goal of any war is the redistribution of taxpayer money into the bank accounts of MIC shareholders and executives Published on Feb 17, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

[Jan 08, 2020] Iraqi Journalist: Killing Soleimani "Ended An Era In Which Iran And The United States Coexisted In Iraq" by Tim Hains Published on Jan 06, 2020 | www.realclearpolitics.com

[Jan 08, 2020] Do you really want to be a one term president? Pompeo can talk big now and then go back to Kansas to run for senator. Where will you be able to take refuge? Published on Sep 18, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

[Jan 06, 2020] Neocon Pompeo pushed Trump to kill Soleimani; Looks like West Point educated military contactor mafia to which Pompeo and Esper belongs controls the President, although Trump malleability and recklessness are inexcusable Published on Jan 06, 2020 | www.washingtonpost.com

[Jan 06, 2020] Diplomacy Trump-style. Al Capone probably would be allow himself to fall that low Published on Jan 06, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

[Jan 05, 2020] The USA is now at war, de-facto and de-jure, with BOTH Iraq and Iran (UPDATED 6X) The Vineyard of the Saker Published on Jan 05, 2020 | thesaker.is

[Jan 05, 2020] Trump is wholly responsible for his own actions, but he -- just like the Ayatollah -- is being pushed in a direction where it's impossible to back down and still "save face". Neither men can afford to do so by Andrew Korybko Published on Jan 05, 2020 | astutenews.com

[Jan 04, 2020] The role of Germany in the Ukrainian disaster Published on Nov 21, 2019 | www.unz.com

[Jan 04, 2020] American Meddling in the Ukraine by Publius Tacitus Published on Feb 23, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

[Dec 19, 2019] MIC lobbyism (which often is presented as patriotism) is the last refuge of scoundrels Published on Dec 19, 2019 | angrybearblog.com

[Dec 19, 2019] A the core of color revolution against Trump is Full Spectrum Dominance doctrine Published on Dec 19, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

[Dec 19, 2019] A joint French-Ukrainian journalistic investigation into a huge money laundering scheme using various shadow banking organizations in Austria and Switzerland, benefiting Clinton friendly Ukrainian oligarchs and of course the Clinton Foundation. Published on Dec 19, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

[Dec 17, 2019] Neocons like car salespeople have a stereotypical reputation for lacking credibility because ther profession is to lie in order to sell weapons to the publin, much like used car saleme lie to sell cars Published on Dec 17, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

[Dec 15, 2019] The infinity war - The Washington Post by Samuel Moyn, Stephen Wertheim Published on Dec 15, 2019 | www.washingtonpost.com

[Dec 14, 2019] A Determined Effort to Undermine Russia Published on Dec 08, 2019 | consortiumnews.com

[Dec 07, 2019] Why the foreign policy establishment consensus is neocon by default. Published on Dec 07, 2019 | www.unz.com

[Dec 06, 2019] The USA is an occupied by neocon country Published on Dec 06, 2019 | theamericanconservative.com

[Dec 06, 2019] Who Is Making US Foreign Policy by Stephen F. Cohen Published on Dec 06, 2019 | www.unz.com

[Dec 04, 2019] Ukrainegaters claim that Trump Reduced the USA empire 'Global Commitments' was fraudulent from the very beginning. Trump is yet another imperial president who favours the "Full spectrum Dominance; The problem is that the time when the USA can have it are in the past. Europe finally recovered from WWII losses and that alone dooms the idea Published on Dec 04, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

[Dec 02, 2019] The cost of militarism cannot be measured only in lost opportunities, lives and money. There will be a long hangover of shame Published on www.theamericanconservative.com

[Nov 29, 2019] Where s the Collusion Published on Dec 28, 2017 | www.youtube.com

[Nov 21, 2019] The deep state is individuals INSIDE the government that do the bidding of the banksters, the military-industrial complex, the globalists and other nefarious interests Published on Nov 21, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

[Nov 03, 2019] How Controlling Syria s Oil Serves Washington s Strategic Objectives by Nauman Sadiq Published on Nov 02, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

[Oct 28, 2019] Expert Panel Finds Gaping Plot-Holes In OPCW Report On Alleged Syrian Chemical Attack by Caitlin Johnstone Published on Oct 28, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

[Oct 26, 2019] The Plundering of Ukraine by Corrupt American Democrats by Israel Shamir Published on Oct 26, 2019 | www.unz.com

[Oct 24, 2019] Joltin' Jack Keane wants your kids to fight Russia and Syria over Syrian oil by Colonel Patrick Lang Published on Oct 24, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

[Oct 23, 2019] The treason of the intellectuals The Undoing of Thought by Roger Kimball Published on Dec 01, 1992 | www.moonofalabama.org

[Oct 23, 2019] Neoconservatism Is An Omnicidal Death Cult, And It Must Be Stopped by Caitlin Johnstone Published on Jul 18, 2017 | medium.com

[Oct 20, 2019] Putin sarcastic remark on Western neoliberal multiculturalism Published on Oct 17, 2019 | www.unz.com

[Oct 20, 2019] How did the United States become so involved in Ukraine's torturous and famously corrupt politics? The short answer is NATO expansion Published on Oct 20, 2019 | www.unz.com

[Oct 10, 2019] There is no reason that anyone should treat George Bush with respect: he is a war criminal, who escaped justice Published on Oct 09, 2019 | economistsview.typepad.com

[Sep 22, 2019] US reconnaissance plane operated drones that attacked Hmeymim Published on Oct 01, 2025 | tass.com

[Sep 22, 2019] It was neoliberalism that won the cold war Published on Sep 08, 2019 | economistsview.typepad.com

[Sep 20, 2019] Trump Whistleblower Drama Puts Biden In The Hot Seat Over Ukraine Published on Sep 20, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

[Sep 18, 2019] To End Endless Wars, We Must Give Up Hegemony by Daniel Larison Published on Sep 16, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

[Sep 17, 2019] The Devolution of US-Russia Relations by Tony Kevin Published on Sep 17, 2019 | consortiumnews.com

[Sep 12, 2019] The Brain-Dead Maximalism of [neocon] Hard-liners by Daniel Larison Published on Sep 12, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

[Sep 10, 2019] The idea tha the USA won the Cold War is questionable Published on Sep 07, 2019 | economistsview.typepad.com

[Sep 10, 2019] It s all about Gene Sharp and seeping neoliberal regime change using Western logistical support, money, NGO and intelligence agencies and MSM as the leverage Published on Aug 31, 2019 | House Niggers Mutiny by Israel Shamir Published on Aug 27, 2019 | www.unz.com

[Aug 24, 2019] Peace plan for eastern Ukraine As divisive as the causes of the war by Fred Weir Published on Aug 24, 2019 | www.csmonitor.com

[Aug 17, 2019] Putin-Trump Derangement Syndrome (PTDS) Published on Aug 17, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

[Aug 17, 2019] The Unraveling of the Failed Trump Coup by Larry C Johnson Published on Aug 17, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

[Aug 17, 2019] Debunking the Putin Panic by Stephen F. Cohen Published on Aug 17, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

[Jul 29, 2019] Peace in Ukraine by Stephen F. Cohen Published on Jul 29, 2019 | www.thenation.com

[Jul 28, 2019] Antisemitism prejudices projection on Russians Published on Jul 28, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

[Jul 23, 2019] John Helmer MH17 Evidence Tampering Revealed by Malaysia – FBI Attempt To Seize Black Boxes; Dutch Cover-Up of Forged Telephon Published on Jul 23, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

[Jul 23, 2019] Ukraine Election - Voters Defeat Second Color Revolution Published on Jul 23, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

[Jul 13, 2019] Mueller Does Not Have Evidence That The IRA Was Part of Russian Government Meddling by Larry C Johnson Published on Jul 13, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

[Jul 09, 2019] Epstein and the conversion of politicians into "corrupt and vulnerable" brand Published on Jul 09, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

[Jul 06, 2019] Why is Iran such a high priority for US elite? Because Iran successfully booted out the CIA and CIA-imposed regime out of their country and successfully remained independent since then Published on Jul 06, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

[Jul 06, 2019] In practice, the USSR behaved exactly like a brutal totalitarian theocracy Published on Jul 03, 2019 | theamericanconservative.com

[Jul 05, 2019] Globalisation- the rise and fall of an idea that swept the world - World news by Nikil Saval Published on Jul 14, 2017 | www.theguardian.com

[Jul 05, 2019] The World Bank and IMF 2019 by Michael Hudson and Bonnie Faulkner Published on Jul 05, 2019 | www.unz.com

[Jun 29, 2019] Latest Weapon Of US Imperialism Liquified Natural Gas Published on Jun 29, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

[Jun 28, 2019] Tulsi Gabbard vs Bolton Published on Jun 28, 2019 | www.unz.com

[Jun 27, 2019] The Ongoing Restructuring of the Greater Middle East by C.J. Hopkins Published on Jun 27, 2019 | www.unz.com

[Jun 22, 2019] Bolton Calls For Forceful Iranian Response To Continuing US Aggression Published on Jun 22, 2019 | politics.theonion.com

[Jun 21, 2019] America's Confrontation With Iran Goes Deeper Than Trump by Trita Parsi Published on Jun 21, 2019 | www.thenation.com

[Jun 21, 2019] Russia accuses U.S. of pushing Iran situation to brink of war RIA - Reuters Published on Jun 21, 2019 | www.reuters.com

[Jun 20, 2019] Chuck Schumer 'The American People Deserve A President Who Can More Credibly Justify War With Iran' Published on Jun 20, 2019 | politics.theonion.com

[Jun 09, 2019] The looming 100-year US-China conflict by Martin Wolf Published on Jun 04, 2019 | archive.fo

[May 31, 2019] Mahathir bin Mohamad, Prime Minister of Malaysia, in an interview with FCCJ (Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan) stated that he did not believe in Russia's involvement in the crash of the Boeing MH17 Published on May 31, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

[May 28, 2019] Any time you read an article (or a comment) on Russia, substitute the word Jew for Russian and International Jewry for Russia and re-read. Published on May 28, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

[May 22, 2019] NATO has pushed eastward right up to its borders and threatened to incorporate regions that have been part of Russia's sphere of influence -- and its defense perimeter -- for centuries Published on May 21, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

[May 20, 2019] "Us" Versus "Them" Published on May 20, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

[May 19, 2019] Intel agencies of the UK and US are guilty of fabricating evidence, breaking the laws (certainly of the targeted countries, but also of the UK and US), providing fake analysis and operating as evil actors on the dark side of humanity Published on May 19, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

[May 14, 2019] iJews and the Left-i by Philip Mendes A Review, by Brenton Sanderson - The Unz Review Published on May 14, 2019 | www.unz.com

[May 14, 2019] Despite a $ 22 Trillion National Debt, America Is on a Military Spending Spree. 800 Overseas US Military Bases by Masud Wadan Published on Apr 10, 2019 | www.globalresearch.ca

[May 13, 2019] US Foreign Policy as Bellicose as Ever by Serge Halimi Published on May 10, 2019 | www.counterpunch.org

[May 12, 2019] Charting a Progressive Foreign Policy for the Trump Era and Beyond Published on May 10, 2019 | www.youtube.com

[May 11, 2019] Why Crowdstrike's Russian Hacking Story Fell Apart -- Say Hello to Fancy Bear Published on Dec 29, 2017 | www.washingtonsblog.com

[May 11, 2019] Christopher Steele, FBI s Confidential Human Source by Publius Tacitus Published on Aug 08, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

[May 11, 2019] CIA Paid $100,000 To Shadowy Russian For Dirt on Trump, Including Sex Video by Chuck Ross Published on Feb 10, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

[May 08, 2019] Obama Spied on Other Republicans and Democrats As Well by Larry C Johnson Published on May 08, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

[May 07, 2019] Chris Hedges: The Demonization of Russia is Driven by Defense Contractors Published on Apr 05, 2019 | dandelionsalad.wordpress.com

[May 02, 2019] Neoliberalism and the Globalization of War. America s Hegemonic Project by Prof Michel Chossudovsky Published on Jun 16, 2016 | www.globalresearch.ca

[May 02, 2019] Russian and Eurasian Politics by Gordon M. Hahn Published on May 02, 2019 | gordonhahn.com

[Apr 29, 2019] The Mueller Report Indicts the Trump-Russia Conspiracy Theory by Aaron Maté Published on Mar 26, 2019 | outline.com

[Apr 28, 2019] The British Role in Russiagate Is About to Be Fully Exposed Published on Apr 22, 2019 | consortiumnews.com

[Apr 26, 2019] Jared Kushner, Not Maria Butina, Is America's Real Foreign Agent by Philip Giraldi Published on Apr 25, 2019 | ronpaulinstitute.org

[Apr 22, 2019] FBI top brass have been colluding with top brass of CIA and MI6 to pursue ambitious anti-Russian agenda Published on Mar 10, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

[Apr 22, 2019] Current Neo-McCarthyism hysteria as a smoke screen of the UK and the USA intent to dominate European geopolitics and weaken Russia and Germany Published on Jul 24, 2018 | angrybearblog.com

[Apr 21, 2019] Psywar: Propaganda during Iraq war and beyond Published on Apr 21, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

[Apr 21, 2019] John Brennan's Police State USA Published on Oct 22, 2017 | www.unz.com

[Apr 21, 2019] Deciphering Trumps Foreign Policy by Oscar Silva-Valladares Published on Oct 28, 2017 | ronpaulinstitute.org

[Apr 21, 2019] Whenever someone inconveniences the neoliberal oligarchy, the entire neoliberal MSM mafia tells us 24 x7 how evil and disgusting that person is. It's true of the leader of every nation which rejects neoliberal globalization as well as for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange Published on Apr 21, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

[Apr 16, 2019] The incompetent, the corrupt, the treacherous -- not just walking free, but with reputations intact, fat bank balances, and flourishing careers. Now they re angling for war with Iran. Published on Apr 15, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

[Apr 16, 2019] CIA Director Used Fake Skripal Incident Photos To Manipulate Trump Published on Apr 16, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

[Apr 15, 2019] War is the force that gives America its meaning. Published on Apr 15, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

[Apr 15, 2019] I wonder if the Middle East is nothing more than a live-fire laboratory for the military Published on Apr 15, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

[Apr 13, 2019] America as a Myth of good life is a powerful tool of color revolutions Published on Apr 13, 2019 | www.unz.com

[Apr 13, 2019] Russophobia, A WMD (Weapon Of Mass Deception) by Jean Ranc Published on Apr 13, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

[Apr 12, 2019] Putin was KGB agent crowd forgets that Bush Sr was long time senior CIA operative and the director of CIA Published on Apr 12, 2019 | www.unz.com

[Apr 10, 2019] Habakkuk on cockroaches and the New York Times Published on Apr 08, 2019 | www.wsws.org

[Apr 09, 2019] NYT: It Is, in Fact, All About the Benjamins by Philip Weiss Published on Mar 28, 2019 | mondoweiss.ne

[Apr 06, 2019] The Magnitsky Act-Behind the Scenes ASEEES Published on Apr 06, 2019 | www.aseees.org

[Apr 06, 2019] Trump is for socialism but only when it comes to funding US military industry Tulsi Gabbard Published on Apr 05, 2019 | www.rt.com

[Apr 04, 2019] How Brzezinski's Chessboard degenerated into Brennan's Russophobia by Mike Whitney Published on Apr 04, 2019 | www.unz.com

[Apr 03, 2019] Suspected of Corruption at Home, Powerful Foreigners Find Refuge in the US Published on Apr 03, 2019 | www.propublica.org

[Apr 02, 2019] 'Yats' Is No Longer the Guy by Robert Parry Published on Apr 11, 2016 | consortiumnews.com

[Apr 01, 2019] Amazon.com War with Russia From Putin Ukraine to Trump Russiagate (9781510745810) Stephen F. Cohen Books Published on Apr 01, 2019 | www.amazon.com

[Mar 31, 2019] What is the purpose of Russiagate hysteria? Published on Mar 31, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

[Mar 30, 2019] The US desperately needs Venezuelan oil Published on Mar 30, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

[Mar 30, 2019] The Real Costs of Russiagate Published on Mar 30, 2019 | www.thenation.com

[Mar 24, 2019] The accountability that must follow Mueller's report Published on Mar 24, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

[Mar 20, 2019] In a remarkable report by British Channel 4, former CIA officials and a Reuters correspondent spoke candidly about the systematic dissemination of propaganda and misinformation in reporting on geopolitical conflicts Published on Mar 07, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

[Mar 18, 2019] Journalists who are spies Published on Mar 03, 2006 | www.nytimes.com

[Mar 18, 2019] FULL CNN TOWN HALL WITH TULSI GABBARD 3-10-19 Published on Mar 18, 2019 | www.youtube.com

[Mar 18, 2019] The Why are the media playing lapdog and not watchdog – again – on war in Iraq? Published on Oct 10, 2014 | The Guardian

[Mar 06, 2019] Disinformation destroys reality Published on Mar 02, 2018 | www.nytimes.com

[Feb 21, 2019] The Empire Now or Never by Fred Reed Published on Feb 21, 2019 | www.unz.com

[Feb 19, 2019] Tulsi Gabbard kills New World Order bloodbath in thirty seconds Published on Feb 19, 2019 | www.veteranstoday.com

[Feb 19, 2019] Warmongers in their ivory towers - YouTube Published on Feb 19, 2019 | www.youtube.com

[Feb 17, 2019] The goal of any war is the redistribution of taxpayer money into the bank accounts of MIC shareholders and executives Published on Feb 17, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

[Feb 13, 2019] MoA - Russiagate Is Finished Published on Feb 12, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

[Feb 13, 2019] Stephen Cohen on War with Russia and Soviet-style Censorship in the US by Russell Mokhiber Published on Feb 12, 2019 | www.counterpunch.org

[Feb 10, 2019] Pussy John Bolton and His Codpiece Mustache by Fred Reed Published on Feb 10, 2019 | www.unz.com

[Feb 04, 2019] Trump s Revised and Rereleased Foreign Policy: The World Policeman is Back Published on Aug 09, 2017 | zeroanthropology.net

[Feb 02, 2019] According to the recipes devised by Reagan: why the methods which successfully destroyed the USSR do not work with modern Russia? by Alexey Makurin Published on www.aif.ru

[Jan 29, 2019] These 2020 hopefuls are courting Wall Street. Don t be fooled by their progressive veneer by Bhaskar Sunkara Published on Jan 15, 2019 | www.theguardian.com

[Jan 29, 2019] Guardian became Deep State Guardian Published on Dec 22, 2018 | off-guardian.org

[Jan 26, 2019] Can the current US neoliberal/neoconservative elite be considered suicidal? Published on Jan 20, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

[Jan 22, 2019] War with Russia From Putin Ukraine to Trump Russiagate Published on Jan 22, 2019 | www.amazon.com

[Jan 21, 2019] Beyond BuzzFeed The 10 Worst, Most Embarrassing US Media Failures On The Trump-Russia Story by Glenn Greenwald Published on Jan 21, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

[Jan 20, 2019] Doctor, nurse, Chief Nursing Officer of the Army, whatever. Published on Jan 20, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

[Jan 19, 2019] Coincidence - Chief Nurse Of British Army Was First Person To Arrive At Novichoked Skripal Scene Published on Jan 19, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

[Jan 11, 2019] New Documents Reveal a Covert British Military-Intelligence Smear Machine Meddling In American Politics by Mark Ames Published on Jan 11, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

[Jan 11, 2019] How President Trump Normalized Neoconservatism by Ilana Mercer Published on Jan 11, 2019 | www.unz.com

[Jan 11, 2019] Facts does not matter in the current propoganda environment, the narrative is everything Published on Jan 11, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

[Jan 08, 2019] Shock Files- What Role Did Integrity Initiative Play in Sergei Skripal Affair- - Sputnik International Published on Jan 08, 2019 | sputniknews.com

[Jan 08, 2019] Skripal spin doctors- Documents link UK govt-funded Integrity Initiative to anti-Russia narrative Published on Jan 05, 2019 | www.defenddemocracy.press

[Jan 08, 2019] No, wealth isn t created at the top. It is merely devoured there by Rutger Bregman Published on Mar 30, 2017 | www.theguardian.com

[Jan 06, 2019] British elite fantasy of again ruling the world (with American and Zionist aid) has led to a series of catastrophic blunders and overreaches in both foreign and domestic policies. Published on Jan 06, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

[Jan 02, 2019] Russian bots - How An Anti-Russian Lobby Creates Fake News Published on Feb 20, 2018J | www.moonofalabama.org

[Jan 02, 2019] The Only Meddling "Russian Bots" Were Actually Democrat-Led "Experts" by Mac Slavo Published on Jan 02, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

[Jan 02, 2019] Did Mueller Patched Together Much of His Indictment from 2015 Radio Free Europe Article ? Published on Jan 02, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

[Jan 02, 2019] That madness of the US neocons comes from having no behavioural limits, no references outside of groupthink, and manipulating the language. Simply put, you don't know anymore what's what outside of the narrative your group pushes. The manipulators ends up caught in their lies. Published on Jan 02, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

[Dec 30, 2018] RussiaGate In Review with Aaron Mate - Unreasoned Fear is Neoliberalism's Response to the Credibility Gap Published on Dec 30, 2018 | jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.com

[Dec 29, 2018] -Election Meddling- Enters Bizarro World As MSM Ignores Democrat-Linked -Russian Bot- Scheme - Published on Dec 29, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

[Dec 24, 2018] Jewish neocons and the romance of nationalist armageddon Published on May 06, 2014 | mondoweiss.net

[Dec 24, 2018] Income inequality happens by design. We cant fix it by tweaking capitalism Published on Dec 05, 2015 | The Guardian

[Dec 22, 2018] British Security Service Infiltration, the Integrity Initiative and the Institute for Statecraft by Craig Murray Published on Dec 13, 2018 | craigmurray.org.uk

[Dec 22, 2018] If Truth Cannot Prevail Over Material Agendas We Are Doomed by Paul Craig Roberts Published on www.theamericanconservative.com

[Dec 16, 2018] The 'Integrity Initiative' - A Military Intelligence Operation, Disguised As Charity, To Create The Russian Threat Published on Dec 15, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

[Dec 16, 2018] Neoliberalism has had its day. So what happens next (The death of neoliberalism and the crisis in western politics) by Martin Jacques Published on Aug 21, 2016 | www.theguardian.com

[Dec 14, 2018] Neoliberalism has spawned a financial elite who hold governments to ransom by Deborah Orr Published on Jun 08, 2013 | www.theguardian.com

[Dec 09, 2018] Neoliberalism is more like modern feudalism - an authoritarian system where the lords (bankers, energy companies and their large and inefficient attendant bureaucracies), keep us peasants in thrall through life long debt-slavery simply to buy a house or exploit us as a captured market in the case of the energy sector. Published on Dec 09, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com

[Dec 08, 2018] Postmodern Imperialism: Geopolitics and the Great Games Published on Dec 08, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

[Dec 05, 2018] Beleaguered British Prime Minister Theresa May is wailing loudly against a Trump threat to reveal classified documents relating to Russiagate by Philip Giraldi Published on Dec 05, 2018 | www.unz.com

[Dec 05, 2018] Who are the Neocons by Guyenot Published on Dec 11, 2015 | Peak Prosperity

[Dec 03, 2018] Neoliberalism is a modern curse. Everything about it is bad and until we're free of it, it will only ever keep trying to turn us into indentured labourers. It's acolytes are required to blind themselves to logic and reason to such a degree they resemble Scientologists or Jehovah's Witnesses more than people with any sort of coherent political ideology, because that's what neoliberalism actually is... a cult of the rich, for the rich, by the rich... and it's followers in the general population are nothing but moron familiars hoping one day to be made a fully fledged bastard. Published on Dec 03, 2018 | www.theguardian.com

[Nov 27, 2018] 'Highly likely' that Magnitsky was poisoned by toxic chemicals on Bill Browder's orders Published on Nov 19, 2018 | www.rt.com

[Nov 27, 2018] US Foreign Policy Has No Policy by Philip Giraldi Published on Nov 27, 2018 | www.unz.com

[Nov 27, 2018] terms that carry with them implicit moral connotations. Investment implies an action, even a sacrifice, undertaken for a better future. It evokes a future positive outcome. Another words that reinforces neoliberal rationality is "growth", Modernization and Published on Nov 27, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com

[Nov 27, 2018] The Argentinian military coup, like those in Guatemala, Honduras, Brazil, Paraguay, Bolivia and Nicaragua, was sponsored by the US to protect and further its interests during the Cold War. By the 1970s neoliberalism was very much part of the menu; paramilitary governments were actively encouraged to practice neoliberal politics; neoliberalism was at this stage, what communism was to the Soviet Union Published on Nov 27, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com

[Nov 24, 2018] Anonymous Exposes UK-Led Psyop To Battle Russian Propaganda Published on Nov 23, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

[Nov 24, 2018] British Government Runs Secret Anti-Russian Smear Campaigns Published on Nov 24, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

[Nov 24, 2018] Now we know created MH17 smear campaign, who financial Steele dossier and created Skripal affair ;-) Published on Nov 24, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

[Nov 24, 2018] When you are paid a lot of money to come up with plots psyops, you tend to come up with plots for psyops . The word entrapment comes to mind. Probably self-serving also. Published on Nov 24, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

[Nov 22, 2018] Facing Up to the Gradual Demise of Jewish Political Power Published on Nov 22, 2018 | www.unz.com

[Nov 22, 2018] Facing Up to the Gradual Demise of Zionist Political Power Published on Nov 21, 2018 | www.unz.com

[Nov 14, 2018] Nationalism vs partiotism Published on Nov 14, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

[Nov 12, 2018] The Best Way To Honor War Veterans Is To Stop Creating Them by Caitlin Johnstone Published on Nov 12, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

[Nov 12, 2018] Protecting Americans from foreign influence, smells with COINTELPRO. Structural witch-hunt effect like during the McCarthy era is designed to supress decent to neoliberal oligarcy by Andre Damon and Joseph Kishore Published on Feb 20, 2018 | www.wsws.org

[Nov 10, 2018] US Wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan Killed 500,000 by Jason Ditz Published on Nov 10, 2018 | news.antiwar.com

[Nov 09, 2018] Globalism Vs Nationalism in Trump's America by Joe Quinn Published on Nov 08, 2018 | www.sott.net

[Oct 25, 2018] Putin jokes with Bolton: Did the eagle eaten all the olives Published on Oct 25, 2018 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

[Oct 20, 2018] Cloak and Dagger by Israel Shamir Published on Oct 20, 2018 | www.unz.com

[Oct 09, 2018] The Skripals Are an MI6 Hoax - 'Not Worthy of Ladies' Detective Novels' - Israeli Expert Demolishes UK Case Published on Oct 09, 2018 | russia-insider.com

[Oct 08, 2018] British intelligence now officially is a by-word for organized crime by John Wight Published on Oct 08, 2018 | www.rt.com

[Oct 08, 2018] Hacking and Propaganda by Marcus Ranum Published on Oct 07, 2018 | freethoughtblogs.com

[Sep 23, 2018] UK Begged Trump Not To Declassify Russia Docs; Cited Grave Concerns Over Steele Involvement Published on Sep 23, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

[Sep 21, 2018] One party state: Trump's 'Opposition' Supports All His Evil Agendas While Attacking Fake Nonsence by Caitlin Johnstone Published on Sep 21, 2018 | ronpaulinstitute.org

[Sep 16, 2018] Perils of Ineptitude by Andrew Levin Published on Aug 03, 2018 | www.counterpunch.org

[Sep 16, 2018] I m delighted we can see the true face of American exceptionalism on display everyday. The last thing I want to see is back to normal. Published on Sep 16, 2018 | crookedtimber.org

[Sep 15, 2018] Why the US Seeks to Hem in Russia, China and Iran by Patrick Lawrence Published on Sep 15, 2018 | consortiumnews.com

[Sep 15, 2018] BBC is skanky state propaganda Published on Aug 30, 2018 | craigmurray.org.uk

[Sep 14, 2018] English Translation of Udo Ulfkotte s Bought Journalists Suppressed Published on Sep 14, 2018 | off-guardian.org

[Sep 07, 2018] New York Times Undermining Peace Efforts by Sowing Suspicion by Diana Johnstone Published on Sep 07, 2018 | ronpaulinstitute.org

[Sep 02, 2018] Open letter to President Trump concerning the consequences of 11 September 2001 by Thierry Meyssan Published on Aug 30, 2018 | www.voltairenet.org

[Sep 02, 2018] Bill Browder (of Magnitsky fame) broke all these rules while pillaging Russia. Published on Sep 02, 2018 | caucus99percent.com

[Aug 22, 2018] The CIA Owns the US and European Media by Paul Craig Roberts Published on Aug 18, 2018 | www.unz.com

[Aug 14, 2018] US Intelligence Community is Tearing the Country Apart from the Inside by Dmitry Orlov Published on Jul 28, 2018 | russia-insider.com

[Aug 13, 2018] Imperialism Is Alive and Kicking A Marxist Analysis of Neoliberal Capitalism by C.J. Polychroniou Published on Aug 13, 2018 | truthout.org

[Aug 11, 2018] President Trump the most important achivement Published on Aug 11, 2018 | www.unz.com

[Aug 08, 2018] Sergei Skripal was linked to a consultant with former UK spy Christopher Steele's Orbis Business Intelligence Published on Aug 06, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

[Aug 08, 2018] Ten Bombshell Revelations From Seymour Hersh's New Autobiography Published on Aug 08, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

[Aug 05, 2018] Cooper was equally as unhinged as Boot: Neoliberal MSM is a real 1984 remake. Published on Aug 05, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

[Jul 31, 2018] Is not the Awan affair a grave insult to the US "Intelligence Community? Published on Jul 31, 2018 | consortiumnews.com

[Jul 20, 2018] What exactly is fake news caucus99percent Published on Jul 20, 2018 | caucus99percent.com

[Jul 20, 2018] Is President Trump A Traitor Because He Wants Peace With Russia by Paul Craig Roberts Published on Jul 20, 2018 | www.unz.com

[Jul 17, 2018] I think there is much more to the comment made by Putin regarding Bill Browder and his money flows into the DNC and Clinton campaign. That would explain why the DNC didn t hand the servers over to the FBI after being hacked. Published on Jul 17, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

[Jul 16, 2018] Putin Claims U.S. Intelligence Agents Funneled $400K To Clinton Campaign Zero Hedge Published on Jul 16, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

[Jul 03, 2018] When you see some really successful financial speculator like Soros or (or much smaller scale) Browder, search for links with intelligence services to explain the success or at least a part of it related to xUSSR space , LA and similar regions Published on Jul 03, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

[May 04, 2018] Media Use Disinformation To Accuse Russia Of Spreading Such by b Published on May 04, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

[Apr 24, 2018] The Democratic Party has embraced the agenda of the military-intelligence apparatus and sought to become its main political voice Published on Mar 13, 2018 | www.wsws.org

[Apr 21, 2018] It s a tough old world and we are certainly capable of a Salisbury set-up and god knows what else in Syria. Published on Apr 21, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com

[Apr 15, 2018] The Trump Regime Is Insane by Paul Craig Roberts Published on Apr 13, 2018 | www.unz.com

[Mar 17, 2018] How the gas was administred in a place which was under surveillance and why passersby were not affected Published on Mar 17, 2018 | www.unz.com

[Mar 15, 2018] The UK will promptly expel 23 Russian diplomats without waiting for the end of the investigation Published on Mar 14, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

[Mar 10, 2018] Meier might have discovered that his subject had been, as it were, 'top supporting actor' in the first fumbling attempt by Christopher Steele et al to produce a plausible-sounding scenario as to the background to Litvinenko s death. Published on Mar 10, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

[Mar 10, 2018] There is reason to suspect that some former and very likely current employees of the FBI have been colluding with elements in other American and British intelligence agencies, in particular the CIA and MI6, in support of an extremely ambitious foreign policy agenda for a very long time. It also seems clear that influential journalists, such as Glenn Simpson was before founding Fusion GPS, along with his wife Mary Jacoby, have been strongly involved in this Published on Mar 10, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

[Feb 08, 2018] Try Googling Riggs Bank – a lot of interesting information emerges, on matters such as their involvement with Prince Bandar. So, what we are dealing with is a joint Anglo-American attempt to create a comprador oligarchy who could loot Russia s raw materials resources Published on Feb 08, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

[Dec 31, 2017] How America Spreads Global Chaos by Nicolas J.S. Davies Published on Oct 30, 2017 | consortiumnews.com

[Dec 31, 2017] Is [neo]Liberalism a Dying Faith by Pat Buchanan Published on Oct 01, 2002 | www.unz.com

[Dec 31, 2017] What Happens When A Russiagate Skeptic Debates A Professional Russiagater Published on Dec 28, 2017 | www.zerohedge.com

[Dec 28, 2017] How CrowdStrike placed malware in DNC hacked servers by Alex Christoforou Published on Dec 28, 2017 | theduran.com

[Sep 17, 2017] The So-called Russian Hack of the DNC Does Not Make Sense by Publius Tacitus Published on Sep 05, 2017 | turcopolier.typepad.com

[Jul 17, 2017] Tucker Carlson Goes to War Against the Neocons by Curt Mills Published on Jul 14, 2017 | nationalinterest.org

[Jul 12, 2017] Stephen Cohens Remarks on Tucker Carlson Last Night Were Extraordinary Published on Jul 12, 2017 | russia-insider.com

[Jun 24, 2017] The Criminal Laws of Counterinsurgency by Todd E. Pierce Published on Jun 24, 2017 | original.antiwar.com

[Dec 10, 2016] Why the US elite loves so much to demonise Russia Published on Dec 09, 2016 | www.theguardian.com

[Sep 26, 2016] War as a Business Opportunity Published on Sep 24, 2016 | www.antiwar.com

[Feb 27, 2020] An interesting view on Russian "intelligencia" by the scientist and writer Zinoviev expressed during "perestroika" in 1991 Published on Feb 27, 2020 | en.wikipedia.org

Oldies But Goodies

[Dec 24, 2018] Jewish neocons and the romance of nationalist armageddon

[Dec 10, 2016] Why the US elite loves so much to demonise Russia

[Dec 10, 2016] Why the US elite loves so much to demonise Russia

[Sep 26, 2016] War as a Business Opportunity

[Sep 14, 2016] The story of Chile s popular, and democratic rejection of government by oligarchs is today s must-read, and provides unsettling similarities to current events

[Sep 26, 2016] War as a Business Opportunity

[Jan 09, 2016] Allen Dulles and modern neocons

[Jan 09, 2016] Allen Dulles and modern neocons

[Dec 31, 2017] How America Spreads Global Chaos by Nicolas J.S. Davies

[Dec 28, 2017] How CrowdStrike placed malware in DNC hacked servers by Alex Christoforou

[Dec 28, 2017] On your surmise that Putin prefers Trump to Hillary and would thus have incentive to influence the election, I beg to differ. Putin is one smart statesman; he knows very well it makes no difference which candidates gets elected in US elections.

[Dec 27, 2017] Putin is one smart statesman; he knows very well it makes no difference which candidates gets elected in US elections. Any candidate that WOULD make a difference would NEVER see the daylight of nomination, especially at the presidential level. I myself believe all the talk of Russia interfering the 2016 Election is no more than a witch hunt

[Dec 21, 2017] The RussiaGate Witch-Hunt Stockman Names Names In The Deep State's Insurance Policy by David Stockman

[Dec 18, 2017] The Scary Void Inside Russia-gate by Stephen F. Cohen

[Dec 13, 2017] All the signs in the Russia probe point to Jared Kushner. Who next?

[Dec 12, 2017] When a weaker neoliberal state fights the dominant neoliberal state, the center of neoliberal empire, it faces economic sanctions and can t retaliate using principle eye for eye

[Dec 11, 2017] How Russia-gate Met the Magnitsky Myth by Robert Parry

[Dec 10, 2017] blamePutin continues to be the media s dominant hashtag. Vladimir Putin finally confesses his entire responsibility for everything bad that has ever happened since the beginning of time

[Dec 10, 2017] When Washington Cheered the Jihadists Consortiumnews

[Dec 10, 2017] Russia-gate s Reach into Journalism by Dennis J Bernstein

[Dec 09, 2017] Hyping the Russian Threat to Undermine Free Speech by Max Blumenthal

[Dec 03, 2017] Stephen Kotkin How Vladimir Putin Rules

[Dec 03, 2017] Islamic Mindset Akin to Bolshevism by Srdja Trifkovic

[Dec 02, 2017] The New Cold War and the Death of the Discourse by Justin Raimondo

[Dec 01, 2017] Neocon Chaos Promotion in the Mideast

[Dec 01, 2017] JFK The CIA, Vietnam, and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy by L. Fletcher Prouty, Oliver Stone, Jesse Ventura

[Nov 30, 2017] Heritage Foundation + the War Industry What a Pair by Paul Gottfried

[Nov 30, 2017] Money Imperialism by Michael Hudson

[Nov 29, 2017] The Russian Question by Niall Ferguson

[Nov 28, 2017] The Duplicitous Superpower by Ted Galen Carpenter

[Nov 30, 2017] Heritage Foundation + the War Industry What a Pair by Paul Gottfried

[Dec 03, 2017] Stephen Kotkin How Vladimir Putin Rules

[Nov 08, 2017] The Plot to Scapegoat Russia How the CIA and the Deep State Have Conspired to Vilify Putin by Dan Kovalik

[Nov 08, 2017] Learning to Love McCarthyism by Robert Parry

[Nov 04, 2017] Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu Leads US President Trump to War with Iran by Prof. James Petras

[Nov 04, 2017] Who's Afraid of Corporate COINTELPRO by C. J. Hopkins

[Dec 03, 2017] Stephen Kotkin How Vladimir Putin Rules

[Nov 08, 2017] The Plot to Scapegoat Russia How the CIA and the Deep State Have Conspired to Vilify Putin by Dan Kovalik

[Oct 31, 2017] Here is What I Saw at the Valdai Club Conference by Anatol Lieven

[Oct 29, 2017] Whose Bright Idea Was RussiaGate by Paul Craig Roberts

[Oct 31, 2017] Here is What I Saw at the Valdai Club Conference by Anatol Lieven

[Sep 17, 2017] The So-called Russian Hack of the DNC Does Not Make Sense by Publius Tacitus

[Dec 31, 2017] Is [neo]Liberalism a Dying Faith by Pat Buchanan

[Apr 21, 2019] John Brennan's Police State USA

[Oct 13, 2017] Sympathy for the Corporatocracy by C. J. Hopkins

[Oct 13, 2017] Sympathy for the Corporatocracy by C. J. Hopkins

[Oct 11, 2017] Russia witch hunt is a tactic used by the ruling elite, and in particular the Democratic Party, to avoid facing a very unpleasant reality: that their unpopularity is the outcome of their policies of deindustrialization and the assault against working class

[Oct 09, 2017] Dennis Kucinich We Must Challenge the Two-Party Duopoly Committed to War by Adam Dick

[Oct 09, 2017] After Nine Months, Only Stale Crumbs in Russia Inquiry by Scott Ritter

[Oct 09, 2017] Autopilot Wars by Andrew J. Bacevich

[Oct 09, 2017] Dennis Kucinich We Must Challenge the Two-Party Duopoly Committed to War by Adam Dick

[Oct 03, 2017] The Vietnam Nightmare -- Again by Eric Margolis

[Oct 03, 2017] Russian Ads On Facebook A Click-Bait Campaign

[Sep 30, 2017] Yet Another Major Russia Story Falls Apart. Is Skepticism Permissible Yet by Glenn Greenwald

[Feb 26, 2019] THE CRISIS OF NEOLIBERALISM by Julie A. Wilson

[Sep 27, 2017] Come You Masters of War by Matthew Harwood

[Sep 26, 2017] Is Foreign Propaganda Even Effective by Leon Hadar

[Sep 25, 2017] I am presently reading the book JFK and the Unspeakable by James W.Douglass and it is exactly why Kennedy was assassinated by the very same group that desperately wants to see Trump gone and the rapprochement with Russia squashed

[Sep 24, 2017] Mark Ames When Mother Jones Was Investigated for Spreading Kremlin Disinformation by Mark Ames

[Sep 23, 2017] The Exit Strategy of Empire by Wendy McElro

[Sep 23, 2017] The Exit Strategy of Empire by Wendy McElro

[Sep 20, 2017] The Politics of Military Ascendancy by James Petras

[Sep 18, 2017] How The Military Defeated Trumps Insurgency

[Sep 18, 2017] The NYT's Yellow Journalism on Russia by Rober Parry

[Sep 16, 2017] Empire of Capital by George Monbiot

[Sep 13, 2017] A despot in disguise: one mans mission to rip up democracy by George Monbiot

[Dec 21, 2019] The Pentagon s New Map War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century

[Dec 21, 2019] The Pentagon s New Map War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century

[Dec 21, 2019] We are all Palestinians: possible connection between neocons and Pentagon

[Dec 21, 2019] We are all Palestinians: possible connection between neocons and Pentagon

[Aug 09, 2017] Force Multipliers and 21st Century Imperial Warfare Practice and Propaganda by Maximilian C. Forte

[Jul 17, 2017] Tucker Carlson Goes to War Against the Neocons by Curt Mills

[Jul 12, 2017] Stephen Cohens Remarks on Tucker Carlson Last Night Were Extraordinary

[Jun 24, 2017] The Criminal Laws of Counterinsurgency by Todd E. Pierce

[Jul 30, 2017] Fascism Is Possible Not in Spite of [neo]Liberal Capitalism, but Because of It by Earchiel Johnson

[Jul 26, 2017] Regime Change Comes Home: The CIAs Overt Threats against Trump by James Petras

[Jul 26, 2017] US Provocation and North Korea Pretext for War with China by James Petras

[Jul 13, 2017] Progressive Democrats Resist and Submit, Retreat and Surrender by James Petras

[Jul 17, 2017] Tucker Carlson Goes to War Against the Neocons by Curt Mills

[Jul 12, 2017] Stephen Cohens Remarks on Tucker Carlson Last Night Were Extraordinary

[Jul 06, 2017] The Great Power Shift A Russia-China Alliance by Ray McGovern

[Jul 06, 2017] The Great Power Shift A Russia-China Alliance by Ray McGovern

[Jul 01, 2017] Seeing Russia Clearly by Paul Starobin

[Jul 01, 2017] MUST SEE video explains the entire 17 Intelligence Agencies Russian hacking lie

[Jun 26, 2017] The Soft Coup Under Way In Washington by David Stockman

[Jun 24, 2017] The Saudi-Qatar spat - the reconciliation offer to be refused>. Qater will move closer to Turkey

[Jun 15, 2017] Comeys Lies of Omission by Mike Whitney

[Jun 24, 2017] The Criminal Laws of Counterinsurgency by Todd E. Pierce

[Nov 08, 2017] The Plot to Scapegoat Russia How the CIA and the Deep State Have Conspired to Vilify Putin by Dan Kovalik

[Apr 02, 2018] Russophobia Anti-Russian Lobby and American Foreign Policy by A. Tsygankov

[May 21, 2017] What Obsessing About Trump Causes Us To Miss by Andrew Bacevich

[May 21, 2017] WhateverGate -- The Crazed Quest To Find Some Reason (Any Reason!) To Dump Trump by John Derbyshire

[May 21, 2017] Speech of Lavrov at the Military Academy of the General Staff

[May 20, 2017] Invasion of the Putin-Nazis by C.J. Hopkins

[Dec 31, 2017] Truth-Killing as a Meta-Issue

[Dec 31, 2017] Truth-Killing as a Meta-Issue

[Dec 10, 2016] Why the US elite loves so much to demonise Russia

[Dec 30, 2018] RussiaGate In Review with Aaron Mate - Unreasoned Fear is Neoliberalism's Response to the Credibility Gap

[Dec 21, 2019] Trump comes clean from world s policeman to thug running a global protection racket by Finian Cunningham

[Dec 29, 2018] -Election Meddling- Enters Bizarro World As MSM Ignores Democrat-Linked -Russian Bot- Scheme -

[Dec 24, 2018] Jewish neocons and the romance of nationalist armageddon

[Dec 24, 2018] Income inequality happens by design. We cant fix it by tweaking capitalism

[Dec 22, 2018] British Security Service Infiltration, the Integrity Initiative and the Institute for Statecraft by Craig Murray

[Dec 22, 2018] If Truth Cannot Prevail Over Material Agendas We Are Doomed by Paul Craig Roberts

[Dec 16, 2018] The 'Integrity Initiative' - A Military Intelligence Operation, Disguised As Charity, To Create The Russian Threat

[Dec 16, 2018] Neoliberalism has had its day. So what happens next (The death of neoliberalism and the crisis in western politics) by Martin Jacques

[Dec 14, 2018] Neoliberalism has spawned a financial elite who hold governments to ransom by Deborah Orr

[Dec 16, 2018] The 'Integrity Initiative' - A Military Intelligence Operation, Disguised As Charity, To Create The Russian Threat

[Dec 16, 2018] Neoliberalism has had its day. So what happens next (The death of neoliberalism and the crisis in western politics) by Martin Jacques

[Dec 14, 2018] Neoliberalism has spawned a financial elite who hold governments to ransom by Deborah Orr

[Dec 09, 2018] Neoliberalism is more like modern feudalism - an authoritarian system where the lords (bankers, energy companies and their large and inefficient attendant bureaucracies), keep us peasants in thrall through life long debt-slavery simply to buy a house or exploit us as a captured market in the case of the energy sector.

[Dec 08, 2018] Postmodern Imperialism: Geopolitics and the Great Games

[Dec 05, 2018] Beleaguered British Prime Minister Theresa May is wailing loudly against a Trump threat to reveal classified documents relating to Russiagate by Philip Giraldi

[Dec 05, 2018] Who are the Neocons by Guyenot

[Dec 03, 2018] Neoliberalism is a modern curse. Everything about it is bad and until we're free of it, it will only ever keep trying to turn us into indentured labourers. It's acolytes are required to blind themselves to logic and reason to such a degree they resemble Scientologists or Jehovah's Witnesses more than people with any sort of coherent political ideology, because that's what neoliberalism actually is... a cult of the rich, for the rich, by the rich... and it's followers in the general population are nothing but moron familiars hoping one day to be made a fully fledged bastard.

[Dec 09, 2018] Neoliberalism is more like modern feudalism - an authoritarian system where the lords (bankers, energy companies and their large and inefficient attendant bureaucracies), keep us peasants in thrall through life long debt-slavery simply to buy a house or exploit us as a captured market in the case of the energy sector.

[Dec 08, 2018] Postmodern Imperialism: Geopolitics and the Great Games

[Dec 05, 2018] Beleaguered British Prime Minister Theresa May is wailing loudly against a Trump threat to reveal classified documents relating to Russiagate by Philip Giraldi

[Dec 05, 2018] Who are the Neocons by Guyenot

[Dec 03, 2018] Neoliberalism is a modern curse. Everything about it is bad and until we're free of it, it will only ever keep trying to turn us into indentured labourers. It's acolytes are required to blind themselves to logic and reason to such a degree they resemble Scientologists or Jehovah's Witnesses more than people with any sort of coherent political ideology, because that's what neoliberalism actually is... a cult of the rich, for the rich, by the rich... and it's followers in the general population are nothing but moron familiars hoping one day to be made a fully fledged bastard.

[Nov 27, 2018] 'Highly likely' that Magnitsky was poisoned by toxic chemicals on Bill Browder's orders

[Nov 27, 2018] US Foreign Policy Has No Policy by Philip Giraldi

[Nov 27, 2018] terms that carry with them implicit moral connotations. Investment implies an action, even a sacrifice, undertaken for a better future. It evokes a future positive outcome. Another words that reinforces neoliberal rationality is "growth", Modernization and

[Nov 27, 2018] The Argentinian military coup, like those in Guatemala, Honduras, Brazil, Paraguay, Bolivia and Nicaragua, was sponsored by the US to protect and further its interests during the Cold War. By the 1970s neoliberalism was very much part of the menu; paramilitary governments were actively encouraged to practice neoliberal politics; neoliberalism was at this stage, what communism was to the Soviet Union

[Nov 24, 2018] Anonymous Exposes UK-Led Psyop To Battle Russian Propaganda

[Nov 24, 2018] British Government Runs Secret Anti-Russian Smear Campaigns

[Nov 24, 2018] Now we know created MH17 smear campaign, who financial Steele dossier and created Skripal affair ;-)

[Nov 24, 2018] When you are paid a lot of money to come up with plots psyops, you tend to come up with plots for psyops . The word entrapment comes to mind. Probably self-serving also.

[Nov 27, 2018] 'Highly likely' that Magnitsky was poisoned by toxic chemicals on Bill Browder's orders

[Nov 27, 2018] US Foreign Policy Has No Policy by Philip Giraldi

[Nov 27, 2018] terms that carry with them implicit moral connotations. Investment implies an action, even a sacrifice, undertaken for a better future. It evokes a future positive outcome. Another words that reinforces neoliberal rationality is "growth", Modernization and

[Nov 27, 2018] The Argentinian military coup, like those in Guatemala, Honduras, Brazil, Paraguay, Bolivia and Nicaragua, was sponsored by the US to protect and further its interests during the Cold War. By the 1970s neoliberalism was very much part of the menu; paramilitary governments were actively encouraged to practice neoliberal politics; neoliberalism was at this stage, what communism was to the Soviet Union

[Nov 24, 2018] Anonymous Exposes UK-Led Psyop To Battle Russian Propaganda

[Nov 24, 2018] British Government Runs Secret Anti-Russian Smear Campaigns

[Nov 24, 2018] Now we know created MH17 smear campaign, who financial Steele dossier and created Skripal affair ;-)

[Nov 24, 2018] When you are paid a lot of money to come up with plots psyops, you tend to come up with plots for psyops . The word entrapment comes to mind. Probably self-serving also.

[Nov 22, 2018] Facing Up to the Gradual Demise of Jewish Political Power

[Nov 22, 2018] Facing Up to the Gradual Demise of Zionist Political Power

[Nov 14, 2018] Nationalism vs partiotism

[Nov 12, 2018] The Best Way To Honor War Veterans Is To Stop Creating Them by Caitlin Johnstone

[Nov 12, 2018] Protecting Americans from foreign influence, smells with COINTELPRO. Structural witch-hunt effect like during the McCarthy era is designed to supress decent to neoliberal oligarcy by Andre Damon and Joseph Kishore

[Nov 10, 2018] US Wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan Killed 500,000 by Jason Ditz

[Nov 09, 2018] Globalism Vs Nationalism in Trump's America by Joe Quinn

[Oct 25, 2018] Putin jokes with Bolton: Did the eagle eaten all the olives

[Nov 22, 2018] Facing Up to the Gradual Demise of Jewish Political Power

[Nov 22, 2018] Facing Up to the Gradual Demise of Zionist Political Power

[Nov 14, 2018] Nationalism vs partiotism

[Nov 12, 2018] The Best Way To Honor War Veterans Is To Stop Creating Them by Caitlin Johnstone

[Nov 12, 2018] Protecting Americans from foreign influence, smells with COINTELPRO. Structural witch-hunt effect like during the McCarthy era is designed to supress decent to neoliberal oligarcy by Andre Damon and Joseph Kishore

[Nov 10, 2018] US Wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan Killed 500,000 by Jason Ditz

[Nov 09, 2018] Globalism Vs Nationalism in Trump's America by Joe Quinn

[Nov 10, 2018] US Wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan Killed 500,000 by Jason Ditz

[Oct 25, 2018] Putin jokes with Bolton: Did the eagle eaten all the olives

[Oct 20, 2018] I am most encouraged by the apparent Putin's realisation that the First Strike is possible now if not even likely. If the Russians expect an attack they are much less likely to be totally surprised, as usual. In fact, never in history was such attack by the West more likely than now, for various reasons which would take a while to explain.

[Oct 20, 2018] Cloak and Dagger by Israel Shamir

[Oct 20, 2018] Cloak and Dagger by Israel Shamir

[Oct 09, 2018] The Skripals Are an MI6 Hoax - 'Not Worthy of Ladies' Detective Novels' - Israeli Expert Demolishes UK Case

[Oct 08, 2018] British intelligence now officially is a by-word for organized crime by John Wight

[Oct 08, 2018] Hacking and Propaganda by Marcus Ranum

[Oct 09, 2018] The Skripals Are an MI6 Hoax - 'Not Worthy of Ladies' Detective Novels' - Israeli Expert Demolishes UK Case

[Oct 08, 2018] British intelligence now officially is a by-word for organized crime by John Wight

[Oct 08, 2018] Hacking and Propaganda by Marcus Ranum

[Sep 23, 2018] UK Begged Trump Not To Declassify Russia Docs; Cited Grave Concerns Over Steele Involvement

[Sep 21, 2018] One party state: Trump's 'Opposition' Supports All His Evil Agendas While Attacking Fake Nonsence by Caitlin Johnstone

[Sep 16, 2018] Perils of Ineptitude by Andrew Levin

[Sep 16, 2018] I m delighted we can see the true face of American exceptionalism on display everyday. The last thing I want to see is back to normal.

[Sep 23, 2018] UK Begged Trump Not To Declassify Russia Docs; Cited Grave Concerns Over Steele Involvement

[Sep 21, 2018] One party state: Trump's 'Opposition' Supports All His Evil Agendas While Attacking Fake Nonsence by Caitlin Johnstone

[Sep 16, 2018] Perils of Ineptitude by Andrew Levin

[Sep 16, 2018] I m delighted we can see the true face of American exceptionalism on display everyday. The last thing I want to see is back to normal.

[Sep 15, 2018] Why the US Seeks to Hem in Russia, China and Iran by Patrick Lawrence

[Sep 15, 2018] BBC is skanky state propaganda

[Sep 14, 2018] English Translation of Udo Ulfkotte s Bought Journalists Suppressed

[Sep 15, 2018] Why the US Seeks to Hem in Russia, China and Iran by Patrick Lawrence

[Sep 15, 2018] BBC is skanky state propaganda

[Sep 14, 2018] English Translation of Udo Ulfkotte s Bought Journalists Suppressed

[Sep 07, 2018] New York Times Undermining Peace Efforts by Sowing Suspicion by Diana Johnstone

[Sep 02, 2018] Open letter to President Trump concerning the consequences of 11 September 2001 by Thierry Meyssan

[Sep 02, 2018] Bill Browder (of Magnitsky fame) broke all these rules while pillaging Russia.

[Sep 07, 2018] New York Times Undermining Peace Efforts by Sowing Suspicion by Diana Johnstone

[Sep 02, 2018] Open letter to President Trump concerning the consequences of 11 September 2001 by Thierry Meyssan

[Sep 02, 2018] Bill Browder (of Magnitsky fame) broke all these rules while pillaging Russia.

[Aug 22, 2018] The CIA Owns the US and European Media by Paul Craig Roberts

[Aug 22, 2018] The CIA Owns the US and European Media by Paul Craig Roberts

[Aug 14, 2018] US Intelligence Community is Tearing the Country Apart from the Inside by Dmitry Orlov

[Aug 13, 2018] Imperialism Is Alive and Kicking A Marxist Analysis of Neoliberal Capitalism by C.J. Polychroniou

[Aug 11, 2018] President Trump the most important achivement

[Aug 08, 2018] Sergei Skripal was linked to a consultant with former UK spy Christopher Steele's Orbis Business Intelligence

[Aug 08, 2018] Ten Bombshell Revelations From Seymour Hersh's New Autobiography

[Aug 14, 2018] US Intelligence Community is Tearing the Country Apart from the Inside by Dmitry Orlov

[Aug 13, 2018] Imperialism Is Alive and Kicking A Marxist Analysis of Neoliberal Capitalism by C.J. Polychroniou

[Aug 11, 2018] President Trump the most important achivement

[Jun 06, 2018] Why Foreign Policy Realism Isn't Enough by William S. Smith

[Aug 08, 2018] Sergei Skripal was linked to a consultant with former UK spy Christopher Steele's Orbis Business Intelligence

[Aug 08, 2018] Ten Bombshell Revelations From Seymour Hersh's New Autobiography

[Aug 05, 2018] Cooper was equally as unhinged as Boot: Neoliberal MSM is a real 1984 remake.

[Aug 05, 2018] Cooper was equally as unhinged as Boot: Neoliberal MSM is a real 1984 remake.

[Jul 31, 2018] Is not the Awan affair a grave insult to the US "Intelligence Community?

[Jul 31, 2018] Is not the Awan affair a grave insult to the US "Intelligence Community?

[Jul 20, 2018] What exactly is fake news caucus99percent

[Jul 20, 2018] Is President Trump A Traitor Because He Wants Peace With Russia by Paul Craig Roberts

[Jul 20, 2018] What exactly is fake news caucus99percent

[Jul 20, 2018] Is President Trump A Traitor Because He Wants Peace With Russia by Paul Craig Roberts

[Jul 17, 2018] I think there is much more to the comment made by Putin regarding Bill Browder and his money flows into the DNC and Clinton campaign. That would explain why the DNC didn t hand the servers over to the FBI after being hacked.

[Jul 16, 2018] Putin Claims U.S. Intelligence Agents Funneled $400K To Clinton Campaign Zero Hedge

[Jul 03, 2018] When you see some really successful financial speculator like Soros or (or much smaller scale) Browder, search for links with intelligence services to explain the success or at least a part of it related to xUSSR space , LA and similar regions

[Jul 17, 2018] I think there is much more to the comment made by Putin regarding Bill Browder and his money flows into the DNC and Clinton campaign. That would explain why the DNC didn t hand the servers over to the FBI after being hacked.

[Jul 16, 2018] Putin Claims U.S. Intelligence Agents Funneled $400K To Clinton Campaign Zero Hedge

[Jul 03, 2018] When you see some really successful financial speculator like Soros or (or much smaller scale) Browder, search for links with intelligence services to explain the success or at least a part of it related to xUSSR space , LA and similar regions

[Jul 15, 2018] As if the Donald did not sanctioned to death the Russians on every possible level. How is this different from Mueller's and comp witch hunt against the Russians?

[Jul 13, 2018] False flag operation covering DNC leaks now involves Mueller and his team

[Jul 05, 2018] Britain's Most Censored Stories (Non-Military)

[Jul 03, 2018] Russia has a lot of information about Lybia that could dig a political grave for Hillary. They did not release it

[Jul 03, 2018] Musings II The "Intelligence Community," "Russian Interference," and Due Diligence

[Jul 03, 2018] When you see some really successful financial speculator like Soros or (or much smaller scale) Browder, search for links with intelligence services to explain the success or at least a part of it related to xUSSR space , LA and similar regions

[May 04, 2018] Media Use Disinformation To Accuse Russia Of Spreading Such by b

[Apr 24, 2018] The Democratic Party has embraced the agenda of the military-intelligence apparatus and sought to become its main political voice

[Jun 19, 2018] How The Last Superpower Was Unchained by Tom Engelhardt

[Jun 17, 2018] Mattis Putin Is Trying To Undermine America s Moral Authority by Caitlin Johnstone

[Jun 17, 2018] the dominant political forces in EU are anti-Russia

[Jun 17, 2018] The Necessity of a Trump-Putin Summit by Stephen F. Cohen

[Jun 14, 2018] Problem with US and British MSM control of narrative

[Jun 13, 2018] Sanction Trump not Bourbon

[Jun 13, 2018] How False Flag Operations Are Carried Out Today by Philip M. GIRALDI

[Jun 12, 2018] The real reason for which 'information apocalypse' terrifies the mainstream media

[Jun 09, 2018] Still Waiting for Evidence of a Russian Hack by Ray McGovern

[Jun 09, 2018] Spooks Spooking Themselves by Daniel Lazare

[May 31, 2018] Journalists and academics expose UK's criminal actions in the Middle East by Julie Hyland

[May 27, 2018] America's Fifth Column Will Destroy Russia by Paul Craig Roberts

[May 27, 2018] Northwestern University roundtable discusses regime change in Russia Defend Democracy Press

[May 24, 2018] The diversion of Russia Gate is a continuation of former diversions such as the Tea Party which was invented by the banksters to turn public anger over the big banking collapse and the resulting recession into a movement to gain more deregulation for tax breaks for the wealthy

[May 23, 2018] If the Trump-Russia set up began in spring 2016 or earlier, presumably it was undertaken on the assumption that HRC would win the election. (I say "presumably" because you never can tell..) If so, then the operation would have been an MI6 / Ukrainian / CIA coordinated op intended to frame Putin, not Trump

[May 22, 2018] Cat fight within the US elite getting more intense

[May 04, 2018] Media Use Disinformation To Accuse Russia Of Spreading Such by b

[May 03, 2018] Mueller's questions to Trump more those of a prosecuting attorney than of an impartial investigator by Alexander Mercouris

[May 03, 2018] Skripal case British confirm they have no suspect; Yulia Skripal vanishes, no word of Sergey Skripal by Alexander Mercouris

[May 03, 2018] Despite all the propaganda, all the hysterical headlines, all the blatantly biased coverage, the British haven't bought it

[Apr 24, 2018] The Democratic Party has embraced the agenda of the military-intelligence apparatus and sought to become its main political voice

[Apr 21, 2018] It s a tough old world and we are certainly capable of a Salisbury set-up and god knows what else in Syria.

[Apr 15, 2018] The Trump Regime Is Insane by Paul Craig Roberts

[Apr 24, 2018] America's Men Without Chests by Paul Grenier

[Apr 21, 2018] It s a tough old world and we are certainly capable of a Salisbury set-up and god knows what else in Syria.

[Apr 15, 2018] The Trump Regime Is Insane by Paul Craig Roberts

[Apr 23, 2018] The Tony Blair Rule: The Truth Takes 15 Years to Come Out, Skripal Countdown Starts Now - Simonyan

[Apr 21, 2018] It s a tough old world and we are certainly capable of a Salisbury set-up and god knows what else in Syria.

[Apr 20, 2018] Stench of hypocrisy British 'war on terror' strategic ties with radical Islam by John Wight

[Apr 18, 2018] The Great American Unspooling Is Upon Us

[Apr 16, 2018] British Propaganda and Disinformation An Imperial and Colonial Tradition by Wayne MADSEN

[Apr 11, 2018] Female neocon warmongers from Fox look like plastered brick walls – heartless and brainless.

[Apr 10, 2018] The Ghouta Massacre near Damascus on Aug 21, 2013 was not a sarin rocket attack carried out by Assad or his supporters. It was a false-flag stunt carried out by the insurgents using carbon monoxide or cyanide to murder children and use their corpses as bait to lure the Americans into attacking Assad.

[Apr 09, 2018] When Military Leaders Have Reckless Disregard for the Truth by Bruce Fein

[Apr 05, 2018] The Three Most Important Aspects of the Skripal Case so Far and Where They by Rob Slane

[Apr 05, 2018] An Interview with Retired Russian General Evgeny Buzhinsky The National Interest

[Apr 03, 2018] This Washington Post Headline Is Fake News

[Apr 03, 2018] Exercise TOXIC DAGGER - the sharp end of chemical warfare

[Apr 02, 2018] Russophobia Anti-Russian Lobby and American Foreign Policy by A. Tsygankov

[Apr 02, 2018] Russia 'Novichok' Hysteria Proves Politicians and Media Haven't Learned the Lessons of Iraq by Patrick Henningsen

[Apr 02, 2018] The Litvinenko Conspiracy

[Apr 01, 2018] UK may have staged Skripal poisoning to rally people against Russia, Moscow believes

[Mar 31, 2018] FBI Director Mueller testified to Congress that Saddam Hussein was responsible for anthrax attack! That was Mueller's role in selling the "intelligence" to invade Iraq.

[Mar 17, 2018] How the gas was administred in a place which was under surveillance and why passersby were not affected

[Mar 15, 2018] The UK will promptly expel 23 Russian diplomats without waiting for the end of the investigation

[Mar 10, 2018] Meier might have discovered that his subject had been, as it were, 'top supporting actor' in the first fumbling attempt by Christopher Steele et al to produce a plausible-sounding scenario as to the background to Litvinenko s death.

[Mar 10, 2018] There is reason to suspect that some former and very likely current employees of the FBI have been colluding with elements in other American and British intelligence agencies, in particular the CIA and MI6, in support of an extremely ambitious foreign policy agenda for a very long time. It also seems clear that influential journalists, such as Glenn Simpson was before founding Fusion GPS, along with his wife Mary Jacoby, have been strongly involved in this

[Feb 08, 2018] Try Googling Riggs Bank – a lot of interesting information emerges, on matters such as their involvement with Prince Bandar. So, what we are dealing with is a joint Anglo-American attempt to create a comprador oligarchy who could loot Russia s raw materials resources

[Dec 31, 2017] How America Spreads Global Chaos by Nicolas J.S. Davies

[Dec 31, 2017] Is [neo]Liberalism a Dying Faith by Pat Buchanan

[Dec 31, 2017] What Happens When A Russiagate Skeptic Debates A Professional Russiagater

[Dec 28, 2017] How CrowdStrike placed malware in DNC hacked servers by Alex Christoforou

[Mar 27, 2018] Indian Punchline - Reflections on foreign affairs by M K Bhadrakumar

[Mar 27, 2018] Perfidious Albion The Fatally Wounded British Beast Lashes Out by Barbara Boyd

[Mar 25, 2018] A truly historical month for the future of our planet by The Saker

[Mar 25, 2018] Cambridge Analytica Scandal Rockets to Watergate Proportions and Beyond by Adam Garrie

[Mar 24, 2018] Why the UK, the EU and the US Gang-Up on Russia by James Petras

[Mar 23, 2018] Inglorious end of career of neocon McMaster

[Mar 22, 2018] If it's correct, the Brits made a very nasty error that shows the true nature of their establishment.

[Mar 22, 2018] Vladimir Putin: nonsense to think Russia would poison spy in UK

[Mar 21, 2018] Arafat and Litvinenko: an Interesting Turn to a Mysterious Story

[Mar 21, 2018] Washington's Invasion of Iraq at Fifteen

[Mar 21, 2018] Whataboutism Is A Nonsensical Propaganda Term Used To Defend The Failed Status Quo by Mike Krieger

[Feb 07, 2020] How They Sold the Iraq War by Jeffrey St. Clair

[Mar 17, 2018] How the gas was administred in a place which was under surveillance and why passersby were not affected

[Mar 15, 2018] The UK will promptly expel 23 Russian diplomats without waiting for the end of the investigation

[Mar 10, 2018] Meier might have discovered that his subject had been, as it were, 'top supporting actor' in the first fumbling attempt by Christopher Steele et al to produce a plausible-sounding scenario as to the background to Litvinenko s death.

[Mar 10, 2018] There is reason to suspect that some former and very likely current employees of the FBI have been colluding with elements in other American and British intelligence agencies, in particular the CIA and MI6, in support of an extremely ambitious foreign policy agenda for a very long time. It also seems clear that influential journalists, such as Glenn Simpson was before founding Fusion GPS, along with his wife Mary Jacoby, have been strongly involved in this

[Feb 08, 2018] Try Googling Riggs Bank – a lot of interesting information emerges, on matters such as their involvement with Prince Bandar. So, what we are dealing with is a joint Anglo-American attempt to create a comprador oligarchy who could loot Russia s raw materials resources

[Dec 31, 2017] How America Spreads Global Chaos by Nicolas J.S. Davies

[Dec 31, 2017] Is [neo]Liberalism a Dying Faith by Pat Buchanan

[Dec 31, 2017] What Happens When A Russiagate Skeptic Debates A Professional Russiagater

[Dec 28, 2017] How CrowdStrike placed malware in DNC hacked servers by Alex Christoforou

[Mar 16, 2018] Corbyn Calls for Evidence in Escalating Poison Row

[Mar 16, 2018] NATO to display common front in Skripal case

[Mar 16, 2018] Are We Living Under a Military Coup ?

[Mar 15, 2018] The UK will promptly expel 23 Russian diplomats without waiting for the end of the investigation

[Mar 14, 2018] Russian UN anvoy> alleged the Salisbury attack was a false-flag attack, possibly by the UK itself, intended to harm Russia s reputation by Julian Borger

[Mar 14, 2018] UNSC holds urgent meeting over Salisbury attack

[Mar 14, 2018] Jefferson Morley on the CIA and Mossad Tradeoffs in the Formation of the US-Israel Strategic Relationship

[Mar 12, 2018] New Huge Anti-Russian Provocation ahead of Russian election by Robert Stevens

[Mar 11, 2018] Washington s Century-long War on Russia by Mike Whitney

[Mar 11, 2018] Reality Check: The Guardian Restarts Push for Regime Change in Russia by Kit

[Mar 11, 2018] The Elephant In The Room by Craig Murray

[Mar 11, 2018] It is highly probably that Steele and Skripal knew each other

[Mar 11, 2018] Ramping Russophobia is the most convincing motive for the Skripal attack

[Mar 10, 2018] Visceral Russo-phobia became a feature in Obama policy and HRC campaign long before any Steele s Dossier. This was a program ofunleashing cold War II

[Mar 10, 2018] From Yeltsin to Putin: Chubais, Liberal Pathology, and Harvard's Criminal Record

[Mar 10, 2018] There is reason to suspect that some former and very likely current employees of the FBI have been colluding with elements in other American and British intelligence agencies, in particular the CIA and MI6, in support of an extremely ambitious foreign policy agenda for a very long time. It also seems clear that influential journalists, such as Glenn Simpson was before founding Fusion GPS, along with his wife Mary Jacoby, have been strongly involved in this

[Mar 08, 2018] Cue bono question in Scripal case?

[Mar 08, 2018] In recent years, there has been ample evidence that US policy-makers and, equally important, mainstream media commentators do not bother to read what Putin says, or at least not more than snatches from click-bait wire-service reports.

[Mar 06, 2018] The U.S. Returns to 'Great Power Competition,' With a Dangerous New Edge

[Mar 06, 2018] The current anti-Russian sentiment in the West as hysterical. But this hysteria is concentrated at the top level of media elite and neocons. Behind it is no deep sense of unity or national resolve. In fact we see the reverse - most Western countries are deeply divided within themselves due to the crisis of neolineralism.

[Mar 04, 2018] Generals who now are running the USA foreign policy represents a great danger. These men seem incapable of rising above the Russophobia that grew in the atmosphere of the Cold War. They yearn for world hegemony for the US and to see Russia and to a lesser extent China and Iran as obstacles to that dominion for the "city on a hill

[Feb 26, 2018] Democrat Memo Lays Egg by Publius Tacitus

[Feb 26, 2018] Why one war when we can heve two! by Eric Margolis

[Feb 23, 2018] NSA Genius Debunks Russiagate Once For All

[Feb 22, 2018] Bill Binney explodes the rile of 17 agances security assessment memo in launching the Russia witch-hunt

[Feb 20, 2018] For the life of me I cannot figure why Americans want a war/conflict with Russia

[Feb 20, 2018] Russophobia is a futile bid to conceal US, European demise by Finian Cunningham

[Feb 19, 2018] Nunes FBI and DOJ Perps Could Be Put on Trial by Ray McGovern

[Feb 19, 2018] The Russiagate Intelligence Wars What We Do and Don't Know

[Feb 19, 2018] Russian Meddling Was a Drop in an Ocean of American-made Discord by AMANDA TAUB and MAX FISHER

[Feb 18, 2018] This dangerous escalation of tensions with Russia is extremely lucrative for the war profiteers, the retired generals intelligence members who prostitute themselves as media pundits, the members of Congress who get $$$ from the war profiteers, and the corporate media which thrives on links to the war profiteers as well as on war reporting

[Feb 16, 2018] A Dangerous Turn in U.S. Foreign Policy

[Feb 16, 2018] The Deep Staters care first and foremost about themselves.

[Feb 14, 2018] Recused Judge in Flynn Prosecution Served on FISA Court

[Feb 14, 2018] A Russian Trump by Israel Shamir

[Feb 12, 2018] The Age of Lunacy: The Doomsday Machine

[Feb 12, 2018] Too many sport disciplines, too much cheating, too much money and too many politics involved in the Olympic

[Feb 12, 2018] Ike's Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex Is Alive and Very Well by William J. Astore

[Feb 11, 2018] How Russiagate fiasco destroys Kremlin moderates, accelerating danger for a hot war

[Feb 10, 2018] More on neoliberal newspeak of US propaganda machine

[Feb 09, 2018] Professor Stephen F. Cohen Rethinking Putin – A critical reading, by The Saker - The Unz Review

[Feb 08, 2018] Control of narrative means that creation of the simplistic picture in which the complexities of the world are elided in favor of 'good guys' vs. 'bad guys' dichotomy

[Jan 30, 2018] Washington Reaches New Heights of Insanity with the "Kremlin Report" by Paul Craig Roberts

[Jan 30, 2018] The Unseen Wars of America the Empire The American Conservative

[Jan 28, 2018] Russiagate Isn t About Trump, And It Isn t Even Ultimately About Russia by Caitlyn Johnstone

[Jan 27, 2018] The Rich Also Cry by Israel Shamir

[Jan 26, 2018] Warns The Russiagate Stakes Are Extreme by Paul Craig Roberts

[Jan 25, 2018] Russiagate as Kafka 2.0

[Jan 24, 2018] Brazen Plot To Exonerate Hillary Clinton And Frame Trump Unraveling, Says Former Fed Prosecutor

[Jan 22, 2018] Pentagon Unveils Strategy for Military Confrontation With Russia and China by Bill Van Auken

[Jan 17, 2018] Neoconning the Trump White House by Kelley Beaucar Vlahos

[Jan 16, 2018] The Russia Explainer

[May 11, 2019] Why Crowdstrike's Russian Hacking Story Fell Apart -- Say Hello to Fancy Bear

[Jan 06, 2018] Russia-gate Breeds Establishment McCarthyism by Robert Parry

[Jan 02, 2018] The Still-Missing Evidence of Russia-gate by Dennis J. Bernstein

[Jan 02, 2018] Some investigators ask a sensible question: "It is likely that all the Russians involved in the attempt to influence the 2016 election were lying, scheming, Kremlin-linked, Putin-backed enemies of America except the Russians who talked to Christopher Steele?"

[Jan 02, 2018] Neocon warmongers should be treated as rapists by Andrew J. Bacevich

[Jan 02, 2018] What We Don t Talk about When We Talk about Russian Hacking by Jackson Lears

[Jan 02, 2018] Jill Stein in the Cross-hairs by Mike Whitney

[Jan 02, 2018] Who Is the Real Enemy by Philip Giraldi

[Jan 01, 2018] Putin Foresaw Death of US Global Power by Finian Cunningham

[Dec 31, 2017] How America Spreads Global Chaos by Nicolas J.S. Davies

[Dec 31, 2017] Is [neo]Liberalism a Dying Faith by Pat Buchanan

[Sep 17, 2017] The So-called Russian Hack of the DNC Does Not Make Sense by Publius Tacitus

[Jul 17, 2017] Tucker Carlson Goes to War Against the Neocons by Curt Mills

[Jul 12, 2017] Stephen Cohens Remarks on Tucker Carlson Last Night Were Extraordinary

[Jun 24, 2017] The Criminal Laws of Counterinsurgency by Todd E. Pierce

[Dec 10, 2016] Why the US elite loves so much to demonise Russia

[Sep 26, 2016] War as a Business Opportunity

[Dec 21, 2019] Trump administration sanction companies involved in laying the remaining pipe, and also companies involved in the infrastructure around the arrival point.

[Dec 21, 2019] Lessons of the past: all changed in 1999 with the war in Kosovo. For the first time I witnessed shocking images of civilian targets being bombed, TV stations, trains, bridges. The NATO spokesman boasted of hundreds of Serbian tanks being destroyed. There was something new and disturbing about his manner, language and tone, something I'd not encountered from coverage of previous conflicts. For the first time I found myself not believing one word of the narrative

[Dec 21, 2019] Trump comes clean from world s policeman to thug running a global protection racket by Finian Cunningham

[Dec 21, 2019] Time to Terminate Washington's Defense Welfare

[Dec 21, 2019] The Pentagon s New Map War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century

[Dec 21, 2019] We are all Palestinians: possible connection between neocons and Pentagon

[Dec 21, 2019] The ruthless neo-colonialists of 21st century

[Dec 21, 2019] The goal of any war is the redistribution of taxpayer money into the bank accounts of MIC shareholders and executives

[Dec 21, 2019] Trump administration sanction companies involved in laying the remaining pipe, and also companies involved in the infrastructure around the arrival point.

[Dec 21, 2019] Lessons of the past: all changed in 1999 with the war in Kosovo. For the first time I witnessed shocking images of civilian targets being bombed, TV stations, trains, bridges. The NATO spokesman boasted of hundreds of Serbian tanks being destroyed. There was something new and disturbing about his manner, language and tone, something I'd not encountered from coverage of previous conflicts. For the first time I found myself not believing one word of the narrative

[Dec 21, 2019] Trump comes clean from world s policeman to thug running a global protection racket by Finian Cunningham

[Dec 21, 2019] Time to Terminate Washington's Defense Welfare

[Dec 21, 2019] The Pentagon s New Map War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century

[Dec 21, 2019] We are all Palestinians: possible connection between neocons and Pentagon

[Dec 21, 2019] The ruthless neo-colonialists of 21st century

[Dec 21, 2019] The goal of any war is the redistribution of taxpayer money into the bank accounts of MIC shareholders and executives

[Dec 19, 2019] MIC lobbyism (which often is presented as patriotism) is the last refuge of scoundrels

[Dec 19, 2019] A the core of color revolution against Trump is Full Spectrum Dominance doctrine

[Dec 19, 2019] A joint French-Ukrainian journalistic investigation into a huge money laundering scheme using various shadow banking organizations in Austria and Switzerland, benefiting Clinton friendly Ukrainian oligarchs and of course the Clinton Foundation.

[Dec 17, 2019] Neocons like car salespeople have a stereotypical reputation for lacking credibility because ther profession is to lie in order to sell weapons to the publin, much like used car saleme lie to sell cars

[Dec 15, 2019] The infinity war - The Washington Post by Samuel Moyn, Stephen Wertheim

[Dec 14, 2019] A Determined Effort to Undermine Russia

[Dec 19, 2019] MIC lobbyism (which often is presented as patriotism) is the last refuge of scoundrels

[Dec 19, 2019] A the core of color revolution against Trump is Full Spectrum Dominance doctrine

[Dec 19, 2019] A joint French-Ukrainian journalistic investigation into a huge money laundering scheme using various shadow banking organizations in Austria and Switzerland, benefiting Clinton friendly Ukrainian oligarchs and of course the Clinton Foundation.

[Dec 17, 2019] Neocons like car salespeople have a stereotypical reputation for lacking credibility because ther profession is to lie in order to sell weapons to the publin, much like used car saleme lie to sell cars

[Dec 15, 2019] The infinity war - The Washington Post by Samuel Moyn, Stephen Wertheim

[Dec 14, 2019] A Determined Effort to Undermine Russia

[Dec 07, 2019] Why the foreign policy establishment consensus is neocon by default.

[Dec 06, 2019] The USA is an occupied by neocon country

[Dec 06, 2019] Who Is Making US Foreign Policy by Stephen F. Cohen

[Dec 04, 2019] Ukrainegaters claim that Trump Reduced the USA empire 'Global Commitments' was fraudulent from the very beginning. Trump is yet another imperial president who favours the "Full spectrum Dominance; The problem is that the time when the USA can have it are in the past. Europe finally recovered from WWII losses and that alone dooms the idea

[May 11, 2019] Christopher Steele, FBI s Confidential Human Source by Publius Tacitus

[May 11, 2019] CIA Paid $100,000 To Shadowy Russian For Dirt on Trump, Including Sex Video by Chuck Ross

[Dec 07, 2019] Why the foreign policy establishment consensus is neocon by default.

[Dec 06, 2019] The USA is an occupied by neocon country

[Dec 06, 2019] Who Is Making US Foreign Policy by Stephen F. Cohen

[Dec 04, 2019] Ukrainegaters claim that Trump Reduced the USA empire 'Global Commitments' was fraudulent from the very beginning. Trump is yet another imperial president who favours the "Full spectrum Dominance; The problem is that the time when the USA can have it are in the past. Europe finally recovered from WWII losses and that alone dooms the idea

[Dec 02, 2019] The cost of militarism cannot be measured only in lost opportunities, lives and money. There will be a long hangover of shame

[Dec 02, 2019] The cost of militarism cannot be measured only in lost opportunities, lives and money. There will be a long hangover of shame

[Nov 29, 2019] Where s the Collusion

[Nov 29, 2019] Where s the Collusion

[Nov 21, 2019] The deep state is individuals INSIDE the government that do the bidding of the banksters, the military-industrial complex, the globalists and other nefarious interests

[Nov 03, 2019] How Controlling Syria s Oil Serves Washington s Strategic Objectives by Nauman Sadiq

[Oct 28, 2019] Expert Panel Finds Gaping Plot-Holes In OPCW Report On Alleged Syrian Chemical Attack by Caitlin Johnstone

[Nov 21, 2019] The deep state is individuals INSIDE the government that do the bidding of the banksters, the military-industrial complex, the globalists and other nefarious interests

[Nov 03, 2019] How Controlling Syria s Oil Serves Washington s Strategic Objectives by Nauman Sadiq

[Oct 28, 2019] Expert Panel Finds Gaping Plot-Holes In OPCW Report On Alleged Syrian Chemical Attack by Caitlin Johnstone

[Oct 26, 2019] The Plundering of Ukraine by Corrupt American Democrats by Israel Shamir

[Oct 24, 2019] Joltin' Jack Keane wants your kids to fight Russia and Syria over Syrian oil by Colonel Patrick Lang

[Oct 23, 2019] The treason of the intellectuals The Undoing of Thought by Roger Kimball

[Oct 23, 2019] Neoconservatism Is An Omnicidal Death Cult, And It Must Be Stopped by Caitlin Johnstone

[Oct 20, 2019] Putin sarcastic remark on Western neoliberal multiculturalism

[Oct 20, 2019] How did the United States become so involved in Ukraine's torturous and famously corrupt politics? The short answer is NATO expansion

[Oct 26, 2019] The Plundering of Ukraine by Corrupt American Democrats by Israel Shamir

[Oct 24, 2019] Joltin' Jack Keane wants your kids to fight Russia and Syria over Syrian oil by Colonel Patrick Lang

[Oct 23, 2019] The treason of the intellectuals The Undoing of Thought by Roger Kimball

[Oct 23, 2019] Neoconservatism Is An Omnicidal Death Cult, And It Must Be Stopped by Caitlin Johnstone

[Oct 20, 2019] How did the United States become so involved in Ukraine's torturous and famously corrupt politics? The short answer is NATO expansion

[Oct 20, 2019] Putin sarcastic remark on Western neoliberal multiculturalism

[Oct 10, 2019] There is no reason that anyone should treat George Bush with respect: he is a war criminal, who escaped justice

[Oct 10, 2019] There is no reason that anyone should treat George Bush with respect: he is a war criminal, who escaped justice

[Sep 22, 2019] US reconnaissance plane operated drones that attacked Hmeymim

[Sep 22, 2019] Shoigu calls US belief in its superiority the major threat to Russia and other states

[Sep 22, 2019] It was neoliberalism that won the cold war

[Sep 20, 2019] Trump Whistleblower Drama Puts Biden In The Hot Seat Over Ukraine

[Sep 18, 2019] To End Endless Wars, We Must Give Up Hegemony by Daniel Larison

[Sep 17, 2019] The Devolution of US-Russia Relations by Tony Kevin

[Sep 15, 2019] Demythologizing the Roots of the New Cold War by Ted Snider

[Sep 12, 2019] The Brain-Dead Maximalism of [neocon] Hard-liners by Daniel Larison

[Sep 10, 2019] The idea tha the USA won the Cold War is questionable

[Sep 10, 2019] It s all about Gene Sharp and seeping neoliberal regime change using Western logistical support, money, NGO and intelligence agencies and MSM as the leverage

[Sep 22, 2019] US reconnaissance plane operated drones that attacked Hmeymim

[Sep 22, 2019] It was neoliberalism that won the cold war

[Sep 20, 2019] Trump Whistleblower Drama Puts Biden In The Hot Seat Over Ukraine

[Sep 18, 2019] To End Endless Wars, We Must Give Up Hegemony by Daniel Larison

[Sep 17, 2019] The Devolution of US-Russia Relations by Tony Kevin

[Sep 12, 2019] The Brain-Dead Maximalism of [neocon] Hard-liners by Daniel Larison

[Sep 10, 2019] The idea tha the USA won the Cold War is questionable

[Sep 10, 2019] It s all about Gene Sharp and seeping neoliberal regime change using Western logistical support, money, NGO and intelligence agencies and MSM as the leverage

[Aug 27, 2019] House Niggers Mutiny by Israel Shamir

[Aug 27, 2019] House Niggers Mutiny by Israel Shamir

[Aug 24, 2019] Peace plan for eastern Ukraine As divisive as the causes of the war by Fred Weir

[Aug 24, 2019] Peace plan for eastern Ukraine As divisive as the causes of the war by Fred Weir

[Aug 17, 2019] The Unraveling of the Failed Trump Coup by Larry C Johnson

[Aug 17, 2019] Debunking the Putin Panic by Stephen F. Cohen

[Aug 17, 2019] Putin-Trump Derangement Syndrome (PTDS)

[Aug 17, 2019] Putin-Trump Derangement Syndrome (PTDS)

[Aug 17, 2019] The Unraveling of the Failed Trump Coup by Larry C Johnson

[Aug 17, 2019] Debunking the Putin Panic by Stephen F. Cohen

[Jul 29, 2019] Peace in Ukraine by Stephen F. Cohen

[Jul 28, 2019] Antisemitism prejudices projection on Russians

[Jul 23, 2019] John Helmer MH17 Evidence Tampering Revealed by Malaysia – FBI Attempt To Seize Black Boxes; Dutch Cover-Up of Forged Telephon

[Jul 23, 2019] Ukraine Election - Voters Defeat Second Color Revolution

[Jul 29, 2019] Peace in Ukraine by Stephen F. Cohen

[Jul 28, 2019] Antisemitism prejudices projection on Russians

[Jul 23, 2019] John Helmer MH17 Evidence Tampering Revealed by Malaysia – FBI Attempt To Seize Black Boxes; Dutch Cover-Up of Forged Telephon

[Jul 23, 2019] Ukraine Election - Voters Defeat Second Color Revolution

[Jul 13, 2019] Mueller Does Not Have Evidence That The IRA Was Part of Russian Government Meddling by Larry C Johnson

[Jul 13, 2019] Mueller Does Not Have Evidence That The IRA Was Part of Russian Government Meddling by Larry C Johnson

[Jul 09, 2019] Epstein and the conversion of politicians into "corrupt and vulnerable" brand

[Jul 06, 2019] Why is Iran such a high priority for US elite? Because Iran successfully booted out the CIA and CIA-imposed regime out of their country and successfully remained independent since then

[Jul 06, 2019] In practice, the USSR behaved exactly like a brutal totalitarian theocracy

[Jul 09, 2019] Epstein and the conversion of politicians into "corrupt and vulnerable" brand

[Jul 06, 2019] Why is Iran such a high priority for US elite? Because Iran successfully booted out the CIA and CIA-imposed regime out of their country and successfully remained independent since then

[Jul 06, 2019] In practice, the USSR behaved exactly like a brutal totalitarian theocracy

[Jul 05, 2019] Globalisation- the rise and fall of an idea that swept the world - World news by Nikil Saval

[Jul 05, 2019] The World Bank and IMF 2019 by Michael Hudson and Bonnie Faulkner

[Jul 05, 2019] Globalisation- the rise and fall of an idea that swept the world - World news by Nikil Saval

[Jul 05, 2019] The World Bank and IMF 2019 by Michael Hudson and Bonnie Faulkner

[Jun 29, 2019] Latest Weapon Of US Imperialism Liquified Natural Gas

[Jun 28, 2019] Tulsi Gabbard vs Bolton

[Jun 27, 2019] The Ongoing Restructuring of the Greater Middle East by C.J. Hopkins

[Jun 29, 2019] Latest Weapon Of US Imperialism Liquified Natural Gas

[Jun 27, 2019] The Ongoing Restructuring of the Greater Middle East by C.J. Hopkins

[Jun 22, 2019] Why The Empire Is Failing The Horrid Hubris Of The Albright Doctrine by Doug Bandow

[Jun 22, 2019] Bolton Calls For Forceful Iranian Response To Continuing US Aggression

[Jun 21, 2019] America's Confrontation With Iran Goes Deeper Than Trump by Trita Parsi

[Jun 21, 2019] Russia accuses U.S. of pushing Iran situation to brink of war RIA - Reuters

[Jun 20, 2019] Chuck Schumer 'The American People Deserve A President Who Can More Credibly Justify War With Iran'

[Jun 20, 2019] Chuck Schumer 'The American People Deserve A President Who Can More Credibly Justify War With Iran'

[Jun 22, 2019] Bolton Calls For Forceful Iranian Response To Continuing US Aggression

[Jun 21, 2019] America's Confrontation With Iran Goes Deeper Than Trump by Trita Parsi

[Jun 21, 2019] Russia accuses U.S. of pushing Iran situation to brink of war RIA - Reuters

[Jun 09, 2019] The looming 100-year US-China conflict by Martin Wolf

[Jun 22, 2019] Why The Empire Is Failing The Horrid Hubris Of The Albright Doctrine by Doug Bandow

[Jun 09, 2019] The looming 100-year US-China conflict by Martin Wolf

[May 31, 2019] Mahathir bin Mohamad, Prime Minister of Malaysia, in an interview with FCCJ (Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan) stated that he did not believe in Russia's involvement in the crash of the Boeing MH17

[May 28, 2019] Any time you read an article (or a comment) on Russia, substitute the word Jew for Russian and International Jewry for Russia and re-read.

[May 31, 2019] Mahathir bin Mohamad, Prime Minister of Malaysia, in an interview with FCCJ (Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan) stated that he did not believe in Russia's involvement in the crash of the Boeing MH17

[May 28, 2019] Any time you read an article (or a comment) on Russia, substitute the word Jew for Russian and International Jewry for Russia and re-read.

[May 22, 2019] NATO has pushed eastward right up to its borders and threatened to incorporate regions that have been part of Russia's sphere of influence -- and its defense perimeter -- for centuries

[May 20, 2019] "Us" Versus "Them"

[May 19, 2019] Intel agencies of the UK and US are guilty of fabricating evidence, breaking the laws (certainly of the targeted countries, but also of the UK and US), providing fake analysis and operating as evil actors on the dark side of humanity

[May 14, 2019] iJews and the Left-i by Philip Mendes A Review, by Brenton Sanderson - The Unz Review

[May 14, 2019] Despite a $ 22 Trillion National Debt, America Is on a Military Spending Spree. 800 Overseas US Military Bases by Masud Wadan

[May 13, 2019] US Foreign Policy as Bellicose as Ever by Serge Halimi

[May 12, 2019] Charting a Progressive Foreign Policy for the Trump Era and Beyond

[May 11, 2019] Why Crowdstrike's Russian Hacking Story Fell Apart -- Say Hello to Fancy Bear

[May 08, 2019] Obama Spied on Other Republicans and Democrats As Well by Larry C Johnson

[May 07, 2019] Chris Hedges: The Demonization of Russia is Driven by Defense Contractors

[May 05, 2019] The Left Needs to Stop Crushing on the Generals by Danny Sjursen

[May 02, 2019] Neoliberalism and the Globalization of War. America s Hegemonic Project by Prof Michel Chossudovsky

[May 02, 2019] Russian and Eurasian Politics by Gordon M. Hahn

[Apr 29, 2019] The Mueller Report Indicts the Trump-Russia Conspiracy Theory by Aaron Maté

[Apr 28, 2019] The British Role in Russiagate Is About to Be Fully Exposed

[Apr 26, 2019] Jared Kushner, Not Maria Butina, Is America's Real Foreign Agent by Philip Giraldi

[Apr 22, 2019] FBI top brass have been colluding with top brass of CIA and MI6 to pursue ambitious anti-Russian agenda

[Apr 22, 2019] Current Neo-McCarthyism hysteria as a smoke screen of the UK and the USA intent to dominate European geopolitics and weaken Russia and Germany

[Apr 21, 2019] Psywar: Propaganda during Iraq war and beyond

[Apr 21, 2019] John Brennan's Police State USA

[Apr 21, 2019] Deciphering Trumps Foreign Policy by Oscar Silva-Valladares

[Apr 21, 2019] Whenever someone inconveniences the neoliberal oligarchy, the entire neoliberal MSM mafia tells us 24 x7 how evil and disgusting that person is. It's true of the leader of every nation which rejects neoliberal globalization as well as for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange

[May 22, 2019] NATO has pushed eastward right up to its borders and threatened to incorporate regions that have been part of Russia's sphere of influence -- and its defense perimeter -- for centuries

[May 20, 2019] "Us" Versus "Them"

[May 19, 2019] Intel agencies of the UK and US are guilty of fabricating evidence, breaking the laws (certainly of the targeted countries, but also of the UK and US), providing fake analysis and operating as evil actors on the dark side of humanity

[May 14, 2019] iJews and the Left-i by Philip Mendes A Review, by Brenton Sanderson - The Unz Review

[May 14, 2019] Despite a $ 22 Trillion National Debt, America Is on a Military Spending Spree. 800 Overseas US Military Bases by Masud Wadan

[May 13, 2019] US Foreign Policy as Bellicose as Ever by Serge Halimi

[May 12, 2019] Charting a Progressive Foreign Policy for the Trump Era and Beyond

[May 11, 2019] Why Crowdstrike's Russian Hacking Story Fell Apart -- Say Hello to Fancy Bear

[May 11, 2019] Christopher Steele, FBI s Confidential Human Source by Publius Tacitus

[May 11, 2019] CIA Paid $100,000 To Shadowy Russian For Dirt on Trump, Including Sex Video by Chuck Ross

[May 08, 2019] Obama Spied on Other Republicans and Democrats As Well by Larry C Johnson

[May 07, 2019] Chris Hedges: The Demonization of Russia is Driven by Defense Contractors

[May 02, 2019] Neoliberalism and the Globalization of War. America s Hegemonic Project by Prof Michel Chossudovsky

[May 02, 2019] Russian and Eurasian Politics by Gordon M. Hahn

[Aug 19, 2020] Some Shocking Facts on the Concentration of Ownership of the US Economy

[May 02, 2019] Neoliberalism and the Globalization of War. America s Hegemonic Project by Prof Michel Chossudovsky

[Apr 29, 2019] The Mueller Report Indicts the Trump-Russia Conspiracy Theory by Aaron Maté

[Apr 28, 2019] The British Role in Russiagate Is About to Be Fully Exposed

[Apr 26, 2019] Jared Kushner, Not Maria Butina, Is America's Real Foreign Agent by Philip Giraldi

[Apr 22, 2019] FBI top brass have been colluding with top brass of CIA and MI6 to pursue ambitious anti-Russian agenda

[Apr 22, 2019] Current Neo-McCarthyism hysteria as a smoke screen of the UK and the USA intent to dominate European geopolitics and weaken Russia and Germany

[Apr 21, 2019] Psywar: Propaganda during Iraq war and beyond

[Apr 21, 2019] John Brennan's Police State USA

[Apr 21, 2019] Deciphering Trumps Foreign Policy by Oscar Silva-Valladares

[Apr 21, 2019] Whenever someone inconveniences the neoliberal oligarchy, the entire neoliberal MSM mafia tells us 24 x7 how evil and disgusting that person is. It's true of the leader of every nation which rejects neoliberal globalization as well as for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange

[Apr 16, 2019] The incompetent, the corrupt, the treacherous -- not just walking free, but with reputations intact, fat bank balances, and flourishing careers. Now they re angling for war with Iran.

[Apr 16, 2019] CIA Director Used Fake Skripal Incident Photos To Manipulate Trump

[Apr 15, 2019] War is the force that gives America its meaning.

[Apr 15, 2019] I wonder if the Middle East is nothing more than a live-fire laboratory for the military

[Apr 13, 2019] America as a Myth of good life is a powerful tool of color revolutions

[Apr 13, 2019] Russophobia, A WMD (Weapon Of Mass Deception) by Jean Ranc

[Apr 16, 2019] The incompetent, the corrupt, the treacherous -- not just walking free, but with reputations intact, fat bank balances, and flourishing careers. Now they re angling for war with Iran.

[Apr 16, 2019] CIA Director Used Fake Skripal Incident Photos To Manipulate Trump

[Apr 15, 2019] War is the force that gives America its meaning.

[Apr 15, 2019] I wonder if the Middle East is nothing more than a live-fire laboratory for the military

[Apr 13, 2019] America as a Myth of good life is a powerful tool of color revolutions

[Apr 13, 2019] Russophobia, A WMD (Weapon Of Mass Deception) by Jean Ranc

[Apr 12, 2019] Putin was KGB agent crowd forgets that Bush Sr was long time senior CIA operative and the director of CIA

[Apr 10, 2019] Habakkuk on cockroaches and the New York Times

[Apr 09, 2019] NYT: It Is, in Fact, All About the Benjamins by Philip Weiss

[Apr 06, 2019] The Magnitsky Act-Behind the Scenes ASEEES

[Apr 06, 2019] Trump is for socialism but only when it comes to funding US military industry Tulsi Gabbard

[Apr 15, 2019] War is the force that gives America its meaning.

[Apr 15, 2019] I wonder if the Middle East is nothing more than a live-fire laboratory for the military

[Apr 12, 2019] Putin was KGB agent crowd forgets that Bush Sr was long time senior CIA operative and the director of CIA

[Apr 10, 2019] Habakkuk on cockroaches and the New York Times

[Apr 09, 2019] NYT: It Is, in Fact, All About the Benjamins by Philip Weiss

[Dec 21, 2019] The ruthless neo-colonialists of 21st century

[Apr 06, 2019] The Magnitsky Act-Behind the Scenes ASEEES

[Apr 06, 2019] Trump is for socialism but only when it comes to funding US military industry Tulsi Gabbard

[Apr 04, 2019] How Brzezinski's Chessboard degenerated into Brennan's Russophobia by Mike Whitney

[Apr 03, 2019] Suspected of Corruption at Home, Powerful Foreigners Find Refuge in the US

[Apr 02, 2019] 'Yats' Is No Longer the Guy by Robert Parry

[Apr 01, 2019] Amazon.com War with Russia From Putin Ukraine to Trump Russiagate (9781510745810) Stephen F. Cohen Books

[Mar 31, 2019] What is the purpose of Russiagate hysteria?

[Mar 30, 2019] The US desperately needs Venezuelan oil

[Mar 30, 2019] The Real Costs of Russiagate

[Mar 24, 2019] The accountability that must follow Mueller's report

[Mar 20, 2019] In a remarkable report by British Channel 4, former CIA officials and a Reuters correspondent spoke candidly about the systematic dissemination of propaganda and misinformation in reporting on geopolitical conflicts

[Mar 18, 2019] Journalists who are spies

[Mar 18, 2019] FULL CNN TOWN HALL WITH TULSI GABBARD 3-10-19

[Mar 18, 2019] The Why are the media playing lapdog and not watchdog – again – on war in Iraq?

[Mar 06, 2019] Disinformation destroys reality

[Feb 21, 2019] The Empire Now or Never by Fred Reed

[Feb 19, 2019] Tulsi Gabbard kills New World Order bloodbath in thirty seconds

[Feb 19, 2019] Warmongers in their ivory towers - YouTube

[Feb 17, 2019] The goal of any war is the redistribution of taxpayer money into the bank accounts of MIC shareholders and executives

[Feb 13, 2019] MoA - Russiagate Is Finished

[Feb 13, 2019] Stephen Cohen on War with Russia and Soviet-style Censorship in the US by Russell Mokhiber

[Feb 10, 2019] Pussy John Bolton and His Codpiece Mustache by Fred Reed

[Apr 04, 2019] How Brzezinski's Chessboard degenerated into Brennan's Russophobia by Mike Whitney

[Apr 03, 2019] Suspected of Corruption at Home, Powerful Foreigners Find Refuge in the US

[Apr 02, 2019] 'Yats' Is No Longer the Guy by Robert Parry

[Apr 01, 2019] Amazon.com War with Russia From Putin Ukraine to Trump Russiagate (9781510745810) Stephen F. Cohen Books

[Mar 31, 2019] What is the purpose of Russiagate hysteria?

[Mar 30, 2019] The US desperately needs Venezuelan oil

[Mar 30, 2019] The Real Costs of Russiagate

[Mar 24, 2019] The accountability that must follow Mueller's report

[Mar 20, 2019] In a remarkable report by British Channel 4, former CIA officials and a Reuters correspondent spoke candidly about the systematic dissemination of propaganda and misinformation in reporting on geopolitical conflicts

[Mar 18, 2019] Journalists who are spies

[Mar 18, 2019] FULL CNN TOWN HALL WITH TULSI GABBARD 3-10-19

[Mar 18, 2019] The Why are the media playing lapdog and not watchdog – again – on war in Iraq?

[Mar 06, 2019] Disinformation destroys reality

[Feb 21, 2019] The Empire Now or Never by Fred Reed

[Feb 19, 2019] Tulsi Gabbard kills New World Order bloodbath in thirty seconds

[Feb 19, 2019] Warmongers in their ivory towers - YouTube

[Feb 17, 2019] The goal of any war is the redistribution of taxpayer money into the bank accounts of MIC shareholders and executives

[Feb 13, 2019] MoA - Russiagate Is Finished

[Feb 13, 2019] Stephen Cohen on War with Russia and Soviet-style Censorship in the US by Russell Mokhiber

[Feb 10, 2019] Pussy John Bolton and His Codpiece Mustache by Fred Reed

[Feb 04, 2019] Trump s Revised and Rereleased Foreign Policy: The World Policeman is Back

[Feb 02, 2019] According to the recipes devised by Reagan: why the methods which successfully destroyed the USSR do not work with modern Russia? by Alexey Makurin

[Feb 05, 2019] The neocon s strategy

[Feb 04, 2019] Trump s Revised and Rereleased Foreign Policy: The World Policeman is Back

[Feb 02, 2019] According to the recipes devised by Reagan: why the methods which successfully destroyed the USSR do not work with modern Russia? by Alexey Makurin

[Jan 29, 2019] These 2020 hopefuls are courting Wall Street. Don t be fooled by their progressive veneer by Bhaskar Sunkara

[Jan 29, 2019] Guardian became Deep State Guardian

[Jan 26, 2019] Can the current US neoliberal/neoconservative elite be considered suicidal?

[Jan 29, 2019] These 2020 hopefuls are courting Wall Street. Don t be fooled by their progressive veneer by Bhaskar Sunkara

[Jan 29, 2019] Guardian became Deep State Guardian

[Jan 26, 2019] Can the current US neoliberal/neoconservative elite be considered suicidal?

[Jan 22, 2019] War with Russia From Putin Ukraine to Trump Russiagate

[Jan 21, 2019] Beyond BuzzFeed The 10 Worst, Most Embarrassing US Media Failures On The Trump-Russia Story by Glenn Greenwald

[Jan 20, 2019] Doctor, nurse, Chief Nursing Officer of the Army, whatever.

[Jan 22, 2019] War with Russia From Putin Ukraine to Trump Russiagate

[Jan 21, 2019] Beyond BuzzFeed The 10 Worst, Most Embarrassing US Media Failures On The Trump-Russia Story by Glenn Greenwald

[Jan 20, 2019] Doctor, nurse, Chief Nursing Officer of the Army, whatever.

[Jan 19, 2019] Coincidence - Chief Nurse Of British Army Was First Person To Arrive At Novichoked Skripal Scene

[Jan 19, 2019] Coincidence - Chief Nurse Of British Army Was First Person To Arrive At Novichoked Skripal Scene

[Jan 11, 2019] New Documents Reveal a Covert British Military-Intelligence Smear Machine Meddling In American Politics by Mark Ames

[Jan 11, 2019] How President Trump Normalized Neoconservatism by Ilana Mercer

[Jan 11, 2019] Facts does not matter in the current propoganda environment, the narrative is everything

[Jan 11, 2019] New Documents Reveal a Covert British Military-Intelligence Smear Machine Meddling In American Politics by Mark Ames

[Jan 11, 2019] How President Trump Normalized Neoconservatism by Ilana Mercer

[Jan 11, 2019] Facts does not matter in the current propoganda environment, the narrative is everything

[Jan 08, 2019] Shock Files- What Role Did Integrity Initiative Play in Sergei Skripal Affair- - Sputnik International

[Jan 08, 2019] Skripal spin doctors- Documents link UK govt-funded Integrity Initiative to anti-Russia narrative

[Jan 08, 2019] No, wealth isn t created at the top. It is merely devoured there by Rutger Bregman

[Jan 06, 2019] British elite fantasy of again ruling the world (with American and Zionist aid) has led to a series of catastrophic blunders and overreaches in both foreign and domestic policies.

[Jan 02, 2019] Russian bots - How An Anti-Russian Lobby Creates Fake News

[Jan 02, 2019] The Only Meddling "Russian Bots" Were Actually Democrat-Led "Experts" by Mac Slavo

[Jan 02, 2019] Did Mueller Patched Together Much of His Indictment from 2015 Radio Free Europe Article ?

[Jan 02, 2019] That madness of the US neocons comes from having no behavioural limits, no references outside of groupthink, and manipulating the language. Simply put, you don't know anymore what's what outside of the narrative your group pushes. The manipulators ends up caught in their lies.

[Dec 30, 2018] RussiaGate In Review with Aaron Mate - Unreasoned Fear is Neoliberalism's Response to the Credibility Gap

[Jan 08, 2019] Shock Files- What Role Did Integrity Initiative Play in Sergei Skripal Affair- - Sputnik International

[Jan 08, 2019] Skripal spin doctors- Documents link UK govt-funded Integrity Initiative to anti-Russia narrative

[Jan 08, 2019] No, wealth isn t created at the top. It is merely devoured there by Rutger Bregman

[Jan 06, 2019] British elite fantasy of again ruling the world (with American and Zionist aid) has led to a series of catastrophic blunders and overreaches in both foreign and domestic policies.

[Jan 02, 2019] Russian bots - How An Anti-Russian Lobby Creates Fake News

[Jan 02, 2019] The Only Meddling "Russian Bots" Were Actually Democrat-Led "Experts" by Mac Slavo

[Jan 02, 2019] Did Mueller Patched Together Much of His Indictment from 2015 Radio Free Europe Article ?

[Jan 02, 2019] That madness of the US neocons comes from having no behavioural limits, no references outside of groupthink, and manipulating the language. Simply put, you don't know anymore what's what outside of the narrative your group pushes. The manipulators ends up caught in their lies.

[Dec 30, 2018] RussiaGate In Review with Aaron Mate - Unreasoned Fear is Neoliberalism's Response to the Credibility Gap

[Dec 29, 2018] -Election Meddling- Enters Bizarro World As MSM Ignores Democrat-Linked -Russian Bot- Scheme -

[Dec 24, 2018] Jewish neocons and the romance of nationalist armageddon

[Dec 24, 2018] Income inequality happens by design. We cant fix it by tweaking capitalism

[Dec 22, 2018] British Security Service Infiltration, the Integrity Initiative and the Institute for Statecraft by Craig Murray

[Dec 22, 2018] If Truth Cannot Prevail Over Material Agendas We Are Doomed by Paul Craig Roberts

[Oct 21, 2020] How Trump Got Played By The Military-Industrial Complex by Akbar Shahid Ahmed

[Oct 19, 2020] The Emails Are Russian- Will Be The Narrative, Regardless Of Facts Or Evidence by Caitlin Johnstone

[Oct 19, 2020] New report shows more than $1B from war industry and govt. going to top 50 think tanks

[Oct 11, 2020] Putin on the US Presidential race and the myth that Trump, one of the most hostile to Russia presidents in history, is somehow a "Putin puppet"

[Oct 01, 2020] Steve's insistence on speaking the truth about Ukraine and US-Russia relations cost him -- but he never gave up by Lev Golinkin

[Sep 28, 2020] Truth be told: political operatives own and run our MSM. This is why the press is called the 'Fourth Estate'

[Sep 26, 2020] What is predatory capitalism

[Sep 26, 2020] Galloway- Lying industry may be the only sector of Western economies still in full production TAXPAYERS pay for it

[Sep 23, 2020] How fake media actually works: reporter are given the narrative and they should rehash their stories to fit it

[Sep 21, 2020] How the west lost by Anatol Lieven

[Sep 21, 2020] Stephen F. Cohen- The Ukrainian Crisis - It s not All Putin s Fault

[Sep 21, 2020] Stephen Cohen at the AJC 2017 Forum, about Russia and Terrorism

[Sep 17, 2020] Military desperados and Mattis "military messiah syndrome" by Scott Ritter

[Sep 17, 2020] Why the Blob Needs an Enemy by ARTA MOEINI

[Sep 01, 2020] Are We Deliberately Trying to Provoke a Military Crisis With Russia by Ted Galen Carpenter

[Sep 01, 2020] How Democrats and Republicans made deals to pass Magnitsky Act by Lucy Komisar

[Aug 19, 2020] Some Shocking Facts on the Concentration of Ownership of the US Economy

[Aug 19, 2020] American imperialism vs. EU imperialism: Pushed into the Ukrainian adventure by the US? Rubbish. The EU and its constituent members were attempting to play their own hand and were not merely following the US lead submissively.

[Aug 04, 2020] Russia never saw Trump as a potential ally or friend by The Saker

[Aug 02, 2020] Russiagate, Nazis, and the CIA by ROB URIE

[Aug 01, 2020] Executed Turkish general exposed misuse of Qatari funds for Syria extremists- Report - Al Arabiya English

[Jul 26, 2020] Former Poroshenko Ally Admits Euromaidan In 2014 Was Entirely Funded By "Organized Criminal Group" - Defend Democracy Press

[Jul 23, 2020] This is a biggie: Egypt's parliament approves troop deployment to Libya

[Jul 21, 2020] This Skripal thing smelled to high heaven from day 1. My opinion is that Sergei Skripal was involved (to what degree is open to speculation) with the Steele dossier.

[Jul 20, 2020] The Real 'Russian Playbook' Is Written in English -- Strategic Culture

[Jul 13, 2020] George Washington Tried To Warn Americans About Foreign Policy Today by Doug Bandow

[Jul 07, 2020] Mutiny on the Bounties by RAY McGOVERN

[Jul 01, 2020] Putin s economic and social policies have a neoliberal bent but Putin is far from a classic neoliberal

[Jun 30, 2020] Russophobia- Anti-Russian Lobby and American Foreign Policy- Tsygankov, A.- 9781349378418- Amazon.com- Books

[Jun 28, 2020] Russian position for Start talks: "We don't believe the US in its current shape is a counterpart that is reliable, so we have no confidence, no trust whatsoever".

[Jun 24, 2020] Russia heavily subsidised Ukrainian energy imports for decades gas and oil; the USA converted Ukraine into a debt slave, sells Ukraine expensive weapons and cornered their energy industry; The level of fleecing Ukraine by the USA after Euromaidan can be compared only with fleecing of Libya.

[Jun 23, 2020] Surely 'legitimacy' goes to the victor. Once you've won you can build a sort of legitimacy that the majority will agree with (whether its real or not)

[Jun 23, 2020] Putin Tries To Set Record Straight by

[Jun 21, 2020] Paul R. Pillar who pointed out that U.S. sanctions are frequently peddled as a peaceful alternative to war fit the definition of 'crimes against peace'.

[Jun 20, 2020] Fatal mistake of the USSR in the WWII

[Jun 19, 2020] The USG' s definition of Dictator

[Jun 14, 2020] Jeane J. Kirkpatrick 30 Years Unheeded

[Jun 13, 2020] Korea is just another distraction: false conflicts with China, North Korea, Russia and Iran are needed to keep support for MIC and Security State which cost 1.2 trillion a year

[Jun 03, 2020] The first rule of political hypocrisy: Justify your actions by the need to protect the weak and vulnerable

[May 24, 2020] Unable to communicate in Arabic and with no relevant experience or appropriate educational training

[May 23, 2020] China is still in great danger. Of the existing 30 or so high-tech productive chains, China only enjoys superiority at 2 or 3

[May 22, 2020] No US president who can withdraw the USA from the Forever Wars

[May 21, 2020] The 'Clean Break' Doctrine OffGuardian

[May 20, 2020] The American Mission and the Evil Empire The Crusade for a Free Russia Since 1881 by Foglesong

[May 20, 2020] McGovern Turn Out The Lights, Russiagate Is Over by Ray McGovern

[May 19, 2020] Russophobia in the Age of Donald Trump

[May 16, 2020] Putin's Call For A New System and the 1944 Battle Of Bretton Woods

[May 13, 2020] Dramatic change of direction for Syrian envoy

[May 07, 2020] Angry Bear " "cannot remember a single International Crisis in which the United States had no global presence at all"

[May 05, 2020] Is there a "6th column" trying to subvert Russia, by The Saker

[May 05, 2020] UK government experince with the White Helmets and the Skripal affair definitly halps in anti-china propaganda.

[Apr 29, 2020] Trump, despite pretty slick deception during his election campaign, is an typical imperialist and rabid militarist. His administration continuredand in some areas exceeded the hostility of Obama couse against Russia

[Apr 22, 2020] Especially as the insane neoliberal economy we live in, we are ruled by a group of kleptocrats and vicious stooges. Which make allegations against Biden deserving a closer look but that does not make them automatically credible

[Apr 08, 2020] Feudal Japan Edo and the US Empire by Hiroyuki Hamada

[Apr 05, 2020] Esper tone deafness: a sad illustration of wildly misplaced priorities of military industrial complex

[Mar 13, 2020] US send 20,000 soldiers to Europe for killing practice (Defender Europe) while locking down US. Are they immune? How

[Mar 13, 2020] Daffy Duck. cartoon was made in 1953 and like many Looney Tune cartoon's, they are an extreme parody of life. It dawned on me that this cartoon is an almost perfect description of US Military policy and action.

[Mar 12, 2020] The Democratic Party Surrenders to Nostalgia by Bill Blum

[Mar 12, 2020] The Democratic Party Surrenders to Nostalgia by Bill Blum

[Mar 05, 2020] Intelligence Officials Sow Discord By Stoking Fear of Russian Election Meddling by Dave DeCamp

[Mar 04, 2020] Why Are We Being Charged? Surprise Bills From Coronavirus Testing Spark Calls for Government to Cover All Costs by Jake Johnson

[Mar 03, 2020] "Predatory capitalism", which clearly describes what neoliberalism is.

[Mar 01, 2020] Countering Nationalist Oligarchy by Ganesh Sitaraman

[Feb 29, 2020] A very interesting and though provoking presentation by Ambassador Chas Freeman "America in Distress: The Challenges of Disadvantageous Change"

[Feb 29, 2020] Secret Wars, Forgotten Betrayals, Global Tyranny. Who s Really In Charge Of The US Military by Cynthia Chung

[Feb 28, 2020] Chas Freeman America in Distress The Challenges of Disadvantageous Change

[Feb 28, 2020] Media s Deafening Silence On Latest WikiLeaks Drops Is Its Own Scandal by Caitlin Johnstone

[Feb 27, 2020] An interesting view on Russian "intelligencia" by the scientist and writer Zinoviev expressed during "perestroika" in 1991

[Feb 23, 2020] Previously oppressed group, given a lucky chance, most often strive for dominance and oppression of other groups including and especially former dominant group. This is an eternal damnation of ethno/cultural nationalism

[Feb 23, 2020] Welcome to the American Regime

[Feb 23, 2020] Where Have You Gone, Smedley Butler The Last General To Criticize US Imperialism by Danny Sjursen

[Feb 21, 2020] Why Both Republicans And Democrats Want Russia To Become The Enemy Of Choice by Philip Giraldi

[Feb 16, 2020] An Illegal Assassination and the Lawless President by Daniel Larison

[Feb 16, 2020] Understanding the Ukraine Story by Joe Lauria

[Feb 14, 2020] Is Apartheid the Inevitable Outcome of Zionism? by Henry Siegman

[Feb 09, 2020] Trump demand for 50% of Iraq oil revenue sound exactly like a criminal mob boss

[Feb 09, 2020] The Deeper Story Behind The Assassination Of Soleimani

[Feb 08, 2020] Is Iraq About To Switch From US to Russia

[Feb 07, 2020] How They Sold the Iraq War by Jeffrey St. Clair

[Feb 03, 2020] White House Warriors: How the National Security Council Transformed the American Way of War

[Feb 02, 2020] The most interesting issue is the role of NSC in this impeachment story

[Jan 29, 2020] Campaign Promises and Ending Wars

[Feb 29, 2020] A very interesting and though provoking presentation by Ambassador Chas Freeman "America in Distress: The Challenges of Disadvantageous Change"

[Feb 28, 2020] Chas Freeman America in Distress The Challenges of Disadvantageous Change

[Feb 23, 2020] Previously oppressed group, given a lucky chance, most often strive for dominance and oppression of other groups including and especially former dominant group. This is an eternal damnation of ethno/cultural nationalism

[Feb 23, 2020] Welcome to the American Regime

[Feb 23, 2020] Where Have You Gone, Smedley Butler The Last General To Criticize US Imperialism by Danny Sjursen

[Feb 21, 2020] Why Both Republicans And Democrats Want Russia To Become The Enemy Of Choice by Philip Giraldi

[Feb 16, 2020] An Illegal Assassination and the Lawless President by Daniel Larison

[Feb 16, 2020] Understanding the Ukraine Story by Joe Lauria

[Feb 14, 2020] Is Apartheid the Inevitable Outcome of Zionism? by Henry Siegman

[Feb 09, 2020] Trump demand for 50% of Iraq oil revenue sound exactly like a criminal mob boss

[Feb 09, 2020] The Deeper Story Behind The Assassination Of Soleimani

[Feb 08, 2020] Is Iraq About To Switch From US to Russia

[Feb 07, 2020] How They Sold the Iraq War by Jeffrey St. Clair

[Feb 03, 2020] White House Warriors: How the National Security Council Transformed the American Way of War

[Feb 02, 2020] The most interesting issue is the role of NSC in this impeachment story

[Jan 29, 2020] Campaign Promises and Ending Wars

[Jan 24, 2020] How Are Iran and the "Axis of the Resistance" Affected by the US Assassination of Soleimani by Elijah J. Magnier

[Jan 24, 2020] Peter Hitchen to Eliot Higgins of Bellingcat: You're not in the ladies' lingerie trade now, sweetie

[Jan 24, 2020] Crimes of the century truth, perception and punishment

[Jan 24, 2020] Lawrence Wilkerson Lambasts 'the Beast of the National Security State' by Adam Dick

[Jan 19, 2020] The frantic attempt to deflect attention from US foreign wars and mainly derisive media coverage of Tulsi Gabbard is a case in point. Is she the harbinger of a growing political movement aiming to dismantle the military empire project?

[Jan 18, 2020] Putin plants to prohibit dual citizens to serve in government

[Jan 18, 2020] The inability of the USA elite to tell the truth about the genuine aim of policy despite is connected with the fact that the real goal is to attain Full Spectrum Dominance over the planet and its people such that neoliberal bankers can rule the world

[Jan 17, 2020] Ukraine is a deeply sick patient. The destiny of ordinary Ukrainians is deeply tragic. Diaspora is greedy and want a piece of cake immediately

[Jan 24, 2020] How Are Iran and the "Axis of the Resistance" Affected by the US Assassination of Soleimani by Elijah J. Magnier

[Jan 24, 2020] Peter Hitchen to Eliot Higgins of Bellingcat: You're not in the ladies' lingerie trade now, sweetie

[Jan 24, 2020] Crimes of the century truth, perception and punishment

[Jan 24, 2020] Lawrence Wilkerson Lambasts 'the Beast of the National Security State' by Adam Dick

[Jan 19, 2020] The frantic attempt to deflect attention from US foreign wars and mainly derisive media coverage of Tulsi Gabbard is a case in point. Is she the harbinger of a growing political movement aiming to dismantle the military empire project?

[Jan 18, 2020] The inability of the USA elite to tell the truth about the genuine aim of policy despite is connected with the fact that the real goal is to attain Full Spectrum Dominance over the planet and its people such that neoliberal bankers can rule the world

[Jan 18, 2020] Putin plants to prohibit dual citizens to serve in government

[Jan 17, 2020] Ukraine is a deeply sick patient. The destiny of ordinary Ukrainians is deeply tragic. Diaspora is greedy and want a piece of cake immediately

[Jan 14, 2020] Impeachment Of President Trump An Imperial War Game by By Barbara Boyd

[Jan 12, 2020] MIC along with Wall Street controls the government and the country

[Jan 12, 2020] Why the West Falsifies the History of World War II -- Strategic Culture

[Jan 12, 2020] US has been preaching human rights while mounting wars and lying.

[Jan 10, 2020] The Saker interviews Michael Hudson

[Jan 09, 2020] Opposing War With Iran: Three Reasons by Anthony DiMaggio

[Jan 14, 2020] Impeachment Of President Trump An Imperial War Game by By Barbara Boyd

[Jan 12, 2020] MIC along with Wall Street controls the government and the country

[Jan 12, 2020] Why the West Falsifies the History of World War II -- Strategic Culture

[Jan 12, 2020] US has been preaching human rights while mounting wars and lying.

[Jan 10, 2020] The Saker interviews Michael Hudson

[Jan 09, 2020] Opposing War With Iran: Three Reasons by Anthony DiMaggio

[Jan 08, 2020] Iraqi Journalist: Killing Soleimani "Ended An Era In Which Iran And The United States Coexisted In Iraq" by Tim Hains

[Jan 08, 2020] Do you really want to be a one term president? Pompeo can talk big now and then go back to Kansas to run for senator. Where will you be able to take refuge?

[Jan 06, 2020] Diplomacy Trump-style. Al Capone probably would be allow himself to fall that low

[Jan 06, 2020] Neocon Pompeo pushed Trump to kill Soleimani; Looks like West Point educated military contactor mafia to which Pompeo and Esper belongs controls the President, although Trump malleability and recklessness are inexcusable

[Jan 05, 2020] The USA is now at war, de-facto and de-jure, with BOTH Iraq and Iran (UPDATED 6X) The Vineyard of the Saker

[Jan 05, 2020] Trump is wholly responsible for his own actions, but he -- just like the Ayatollah -- is being pushed in a direction where it's impossible to back down and still "save face". Neither men can afford to do so by Andrew Korybko

[Jan 04, 2020] The role of Germany in the Ukrainian disaster

[Jan 04, 2020] American Meddling in the Ukraine by Publius Tacitus

[Dec 21, 2019] Trump administration sanction companies involved in laying the remaining pipe, and also companies involved in the infrastructure around the arrival point.

[Dec 21, 2019] Lessons of the past: all changed in 1999 with the war in Kosovo. For the first time I witnessed shocking images of civilian targets being bombed, TV stations, trains, bridges. The NATO spokesman boasted of hundreds of Serbian tanks being destroyed. There was something new and disturbing about his manner, language and tone, something I'd not encountered from coverage of previous conflicts. For the first time I found myself not believing one word of the narrative

[Dec 21, 2019] Trump comes clean from world s policeman to thug running a global protection racket by Finian Cunningham

[Dec 21, 2019] Time to Terminate Washington's Defense Welfare

[Dec 21, 2019] The Pentagon s New Map War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century

[Dec 21, 2019] We are all Palestinians: possible connection between neocons and Pentagon

[Dec 21, 2019] The ruthless neo-colonialists of 21st century

[Dec 21, 2019] The goal of any war is the redistribution of taxpayer money into the bank accounts of MIC shareholders and executives

[Jan 08, 2020] Iraqi Journalist: Killing Soleimani "Ended An Era In Which Iran And The United States Coexisted In Iraq" by Tim Hains

[Jan 08, 2020] Do you really want to be a one term president? Pompeo can talk big now and then go back to Kansas to run for senator. Where will you be able to take refuge?

[Jan 06, 2020] Neocon Pompeo pushed Trump to kill Soleimani; Looks like West Point educated military contactor mafia to which Pompeo and Esper belongs controls the President, although Trump malleability and recklessness are inexcusable

[Jan 06, 2020] Diplomacy Trump-style. Al Capone probably would be allow himself to fall that low

[Jan 05, 2020] The USA is now at war, de-facto and de-jure, with BOTH Iraq and Iran (UPDATED 6X) The Vineyard of the Saker

[Jan 05, 2020] Trump is wholly responsible for his own actions, but he -- just like the Ayatollah -- is being pushed in a direction where it's impossible to back down and still "save face". Neither men can afford to do so by Andrew Korybko

[Jan 04, 2020] The role of Germany in the Ukrainian disaster

[Jan 04, 2020] American Meddling in the Ukraine by Publius Tacitus

[Dec 19, 2019] MIC lobbyism (which often is presented as patriotism) is the last refuge of scoundrels

[Dec 19, 2019] A the core of color revolution against Trump is Full Spectrum Dominance doctrine

[Dec 19, 2019] A joint French-Ukrainian journalistic investigation into a huge money laundering scheme using various shadow banking organizations in Austria and Switzerland, benefiting Clinton friendly Ukrainian oligarchs and of course the Clinton Foundation.

[Dec 17, 2019] Neocons like car salespeople have a stereotypical reputation for lacking credibility because ther profession is to lie in order to sell weapons to the publin, much like used car saleme lie to sell cars

[Dec 15, 2019] The infinity war - The Washington Post by Samuel Moyn, Stephen Wertheim

[Dec 14, 2019] A Determined Effort to Undermine Russia

[Dec 07, 2019] Why the foreign policy establishment consensus is neocon by default.

[Dec 06, 2019] The USA is an occupied by neocon country

[Dec 06, 2019] Who Is Making US Foreign Policy by Stephen F. Cohen

[Dec 04, 2019] Ukrainegaters claim that Trump Reduced the USA empire 'Global Commitments' was fraudulent from the very beginning. Trump is yet another imperial president who favours the "Full spectrum Dominance; The problem is that the time when the USA can have it are in the past. Europe finally recovered from WWII losses and that alone dooms the idea

[Dec 02, 2019] The cost of militarism cannot be measured only in lost opportunities, lives and money. There will be a long hangover of shame

[Nov 29, 2019] Where s the Collusion

[Nov 21, 2019] The deep state is individuals INSIDE the government that do the bidding of the banksters, the military-industrial complex, the globalists and other nefarious interests

[Nov 03, 2019] How Controlling Syria s Oil Serves Washington s Strategic Objectives by Nauman Sadiq

[Oct 28, 2019] Expert Panel Finds Gaping Plot-Holes In OPCW Report On Alleged Syrian Chemical Attack by Caitlin Johnstone

[Oct 26, 2019] The Plundering of Ukraine by Corrupt American Democrats by Israel Shamir

[Oct 24, 2019] Joltin' Jack Keane wants your kids to fight Russia and Syria over Syrian oil by Colonel Patrick Lang

[Oct 23, 2019] The treason of the intellectuals The Undoing of Thought by Roger Kimball

[Oct 23, 2019] Neoconservatism Is An Omnicidal Death Cult, And It Must Be Stopped by Caitlin Johnstone

[Oct 20, 2019] Putin sarcastic remark on Western neoliberal multiculturalism

[Oct 20, 2019] How did the United States become so involved in Ukraine's torturous and famously corrupt politics? The short answer is NATO expansion

[Oct 10, 2019] There is no reason that anyone should treat George Bush with respect: he is a war criminal, who escaped justice

[Sep 22, 2019] US reconnaissance plane operated drones that attacked Hmeymim

[Sep 22, 2019] It was neoliberalism that won the cold war

[Sep 20, 2019] Trump Whistleblower Drama Puts Biden In The Hot Seat Over Ukraine

[Sep 18, 2019] To End Endless Wars, We Must Give Up Hegemony by Daniel Larison

[Sep 17, 2019] The Devolution of US-Russia Relations by Tony Kevin

[Sep 12, 2019] The Brain-Dead Maximalism of [neocon] Hard-liners by Daniel Larison

[Sep 10, 2019] The idea tha the USA won the Cold War is questionable

[Sep 10, 2019] It s all about Gene Sharp and seeping neoliberal regime change using Western logistical support, money, NGO and intelligence agencies and MSM as the leverage

[Aug 27, 2019] House Niggers Mutiny by Israel Shamir

[Aug 24, 2019] Peace plan for eastern Ukraine As divisive as the causes of the war by Fred Weir

[Aug 17, 2019] Putin-Trump Derangement Syndrome (PTDS)

[Aug 17, 2019] The Unraveling of the Failed Trump Coup by Larry C Johnson

[Aug 17, 2019] Debunking the Putin Panic by Stephen F. Cohen

[Jul 29, 2019] Peace in Ukraine by Stephen F. Cohen

[Jul 28, 2019] Antisemitism prejudices projection on Russians

[Jul 23, 2019] John Helmer MH17 Evidence Tampering Revealed by Malaysia – FBI Attempt To Seize Black Boxes; Dutch Cover-Up of Forged Telephon

[Jul 23, 2019] Ukraine Election - Voters Defeat Second Color Revolution

[Jul 13, 2019] Mueller Does Not Have Evidence That The IRA Was Part of Russian Government Meddling by Larry C Johnson

[Jul 09, 2019] Epstein and the conversion of politicians into "corrupt and vulnerable" brand

[Jul 06, 2019] Why is Iran such a high priority for US elite? Because Iran successfully booted out the CIA and CIA-imposed regime out of their country and successfully remained independent since then

[Jul 06, 2019] In practice, the USSR behaved exactly like a brutal totalitarian theocracy

[Jul 05, 2019] Globalisation- the rise and fall of an idea that swept the world - World news by Nikil Saval

[Jul 05, 2019] The World Bank and IMF 2019 by Michael Hudson and Bonnie Faulkner

[Jun 29, 2019] Latest Weapon Of US Imperialism Liquified Natural Gas

[Jun 28, 2019] Tulsi Gabbard vs Bolton

[Jun 27, 2019] The Ongoing Restructuring of the Greater Middle East by C.J. Hopkins

[Jun 22, 2019] Bolton Calls For Forceful Iranian Response To Continuing US Aggression

[Jun 21, 2019] America's Confrontation With Iran Goes Deeper Than Trump by Trita Parsi

[Jun 21, 2019] Russia accuses U.S. of pushing Iran situation to brink of war RIA - Reuters

[Jun 20, 2019] Chuck Schumer 'The American People Deserve A President Who Can More Credibly Justify War With Iran'

[Jun 09, 2019] The looming 100-year US-China conflict by Martin Wolf

[May 31, 2019] Mahathir bin Mohamad, Prime Minister of Malaysia, in an interview with FCCJ (Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan) stated that he did not believe in Russia's involvement in the crash of the Boeing MH17

[May 28, 2019] Any time you read an article (or a comment) on Russia, substitute the word Jew for Russian and International Jewry for Russia and re-read.

[May 22, 2019] NATO has pushed eastward right up to its borders and threatened to incorporate regions that have been part of Russia's sphere of influence -- and its defense perimeter -- for centuries

[May 20, 2019] "Us" Versus "Them"

[May 19, 2019] Intel agencies of the UK and US are guilty of fabricating evidence, breaking the laws (certainly of the targeted countries, but also of the UK and US), providing fake analysis and operating as evil actors on the dark side of humanity

[May 14, 2019] iJews and the Left-i by Philip Mendes A Review, by Brenton Sanderson - The Unz Review

[May 14, 2019] Despite a $ 22 Trillion National Debt, America Is on a Military Spending Spree. 800 Overseas US Military Bases by Masud Wadan

[May 13, 2019] US Foreign Policy as Bellicose as Ever by Serge Halimi

[May 12, 2019] Charting a Progressive Foreign Policy for the Trump Era and Beyond

[May 11, 2019] Why Crowdstrike's Russian Hacking Story Fell Apart -- Say Hello to Fancy Bear

[May 11, 2019] Christopher Steele, FBI s Confidential Human Source by Publius Tacitus

[May 11, 2019] CIA Paid $100,000 To Shadowy Russian For Dirt on Trump, Including Sex Video by Chuck Ross

[May 08, 2019] Obama Spied on Other Republicans and Democrats As Well by Larry C Johnson

[May 07, 2019] Chris Hedges: The Demonization of Russia is Driven by Defense Contractors

[May 02, 2019] Neoliberalism and the Globalization of War. America s Hegemonic Project by Prof Michel Chossudovsky

[May 02, 2019] Russian and Eurasian Politics by Gordon M. Hahn

[Apr 29, 2019] The Mueller Report Indicts the Trump-Russia Conspiracy Theory by Aaron Maté

[Apr 28, 2019] The British Role in Russiagate Is About to Be Fully Exposed

[Apr 26, 2019] Jared Kushner, Not Maria Butina, Is America's Real Foreign Agent by Philip Giraldi

[Apr 22, 2019] FBI top brass have been colluding with top brass of CIA and MI6 to pursue ambitious anti-Russian agenda

[Apr 22, 2019] Current Neo-McCarthyism hysteria as a smoke screen of the UK and the USA intent to dominate European geopolitics and weaken Russia and Germany

[Apr 21, 2019] Psywar: Propaganda during Iraq war and beyond

[Apr 21, 2019] John Brennan's Police State USA

[Apr 21, 2019] Deciphering Trumps Foreign Policy by Oscar Silva-Valladares

[Apr 21, 2019] Whenever someone inconveniences the neoliberal oligarchy, the entire neoliberal MSM mafia tells us 24 x7 how evil and disgusting that person is. It's true of the leader of every nation which rejects neoliberal globalization as well as for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange

[Apr 16, 2019] The incompetent, the corrupt, the treacherous -- not just walking free, but with reputations intact, fat bank balances, and flourishing careers. Now they re angling for war with Iran.

[Apr 16, 2019] CIA Director Used Fake Skripal Incident Photos To Manipulate Trump

[Apr 15, 2019] War is the force that gives America its meaning.

[Apr 15, 2019] I wonder if the Middle East is nothing more than a live-fire laboratory for the military

[Apr 13, 2019] America as a Myth of good life is a powerful tool of color revolutions

[Apr 13, 2019] Russophobia, A WMD (Weapon Of Mass Deception) by Jean Ranc

[Apr 12, 2019] Putin was KGB agent crowd forgets that Bush Sr was long time senior CIA operative and the director of CIA

[Apr 10, 2019] Habakkuk on cockroaches and the New York Times

[Apr 09, 2019] NYT: It Is, in Fact, All About the Benjamins by Philip Weiss

[Apr 06, 2019] The Magnitsky Act-Behind the Scenes ASEEES

[Apr 06, 2019] Trump is for socialism but only when it comes to funding US military industry Tulsi Gabbard

[Apr 04, 2019] How Brzezinski's Chessboard degenerated into Brennan's Russophobia by Mike Whitney

[Apr 03, 2019] Suspected of Corruption at Home, Powerful Foreigners Find Refuge in the US

[Apr 02, 2019] 'Yats' Is No Longer the Guy by Robert Parry

[Apr 01, 2019] Amazon.com War with Russia From Putin Ukraine to Trump Russiagate (9781510745810) Stephen F. Cohen Books

[Mar 31, 2019] What is the purpose of Russiagate hysteria?

[Mar 30, 2019] The US desperately needs Venezuelan oil

[Mar 30, 2019] The Real Costs of Russiagate

[Mar 24, 2019] The accountability that must follow Mueller's report

[Mar 20, 2019] In a remarkable report by British Channel 4, former CIA officials and a Reuters correspondent spoke candidly about the systematic dissemination of propaganda and misinformation in reporting on geopolitical conflicts

[Mar 18, 2019] Journalists who are spies

[Mar 18, 2019] FULL CNN TOWN HALL WITH TULSI GABBARD 3-10-19

[Mar 18, 2019] The Why are the media playing lapdog and not watchdog – again – on war in Iraq?

[Mar 06, 2019] Disinformation destroys reality

[Feb 21, 2019] The Empire Now or Never by Fred Reed

[Feb 19, 2019] Tulsi Gabbard kills New World Order bloodbath in thirty seconds

[Feb 19, 2019] Warmongers in their ivory towers - YouTube

[Feb 17, 2019] The goal of any war is the redistribution of taxpayer money into the bank accounts of MIC shareholders and executives

[Feb 13, 2019] MoA - Russiagate Is Finished

[Feb 13, 2019] Stephen Cohen on War with Russia and Soviet-style Censorship in the US by Russell Mokhiber

[Feb 10, 2019] Pussy John Bolton and His Codpiece Mustache by Fred Reed

[Feb 04, 2019] Trump s Revised and Rereleased Foreign Policy: The World Policeman is Back

[Feb 02, 2019] According to the recipes devised by Reagan: why the methods which successfully destroyed the USSR do not work with modern Russia? by Alexey Makurin

[Jan 29, 2019] These 2020 hopefuls are courting Wall Street. Don t be fooled by their progressive veneer by Bhaskar Sunkara

[Jan 29, 2019] Guardian became Deep State Guardian

[Jan 26, 2019] Can the current US neoliberal/neoconservative elite be considered suicidal?

[Jan 22, 2019] War with Russia From Putin Ukraine to Trump Russiagate

[Jan 21, 2019] Beyond BuzzFeed The 10 Worst, Most Embarrassing US Media Failures On The Trump-Russia Story by Glenn Greenwald

[Jan 20, 2019] Doctor, nurse, Chief Nursing Officer of the Army, whatever.

[Jan 19, 2019] Coincidence - Chief Nurse Of British Army Was First Person To Arrive At Novichoked Skripal Scene

[Jan 11, 2019] New Documents Reveal a Covert British Military-Intelligence Smear Machine Meddling In American Politics by Mark Ames

[Jan 11, 2019] How President Trump Normalized Neoconservatism by Ilana Mercer

[Jan 11, 2019] Facts does not matter in the current propoganda environment, the narrative is everything

[Jan 08, 2019] Shock Files- What Role Did Integrity Initiative Play in Sergei Skripal Affair- - Sputnik International

[Jan 08, 2019] Skripal spin doctors- Documents link UK govt-funded Integrity Initiative to anti-Russia narrative

[Jan 08, 2019] No, wealth isn t created at the top. It is merely devoured there by Rutger Bregman

[Jan 06, 2019] British elite fantasy of again ruling the world (with American and Zionist aid) has led to a series of catastrophic blunders and overreaches in both foreign and domestic policies.

[Jan 02, 2019] Russian bots - How An Anti-Russian Lobby Creates Fake News

[Jan 02, 2019] The Only Meddling "Russian Bots" Were Actually Democrat-Led "Experts" by Mac Slavo

[Jan 02, 2019] Did Mueller Patched Together Much of His Indictment from 2015 Radio Free Europe Article ?

[Jan 02, 2019] That madness of the US neocons comes from having no behavioural limits, no references outside of groupthink, and manipulating the language. Simply put, you don't know anymore what's what outside of the narrative your group pushes. The manipulators ends up caught in their lies.

[Dec 30, 2018] RussiaGate In Review with Aaron Mate - Unreasoned Fear is Neoliberalism's Response to the Credibility Gap

[Dec 29, 2018] -Election Meddling- Enters Bizarro World As MSM Ignores Democrat-Linked -Russian Bot- Scheme -

[Dec 24, 2018] Jewish neocons and the romance of nationalist armageddon

[Dec 24, 2018] Income inequality happens by design. We cant fix it by tweaking capitalism

[Dec 22, 2018] British Security Service Infiltration, the Integrity Initiative and the Institute for Statecraft by Craig Murray

[Dec 22, 2018] If Truth Cannot Prevail Over Material Agendas We Are Doomed by Paul Craig Roberts

[Dec 16, 2018] The 'Integrity Initiative' - A Military Intelligence Operation, Disguised As Charity, To Create The Russian Threat

[Dec 16, 2018] Neoliberalism has had its day. So what happens next (The death of neoliberalism and the crisis in western politics) by Martin Jacques

[Dec 14, 2018] Neoliberalism has spawned a financial elite who hold governments to ransom by Deborah Orr

[Dec 09, 2018] Neoliberalism is more like modern feudalism - an authoritarian system where the lords (bankers, energy companies and their large and inefficient attendant bureaucracies), keep us peasants in thrall through life long debt-slavery simply to buy a house or exploit us as a captured market in the case of the energy sector.

[Dec 08, 2018] Postmodern Imperialism: Geopolitics and the Great Games

[Dec 05, 2018] Beleaguered British Prime Minister Theresa May is wailing loudly against a Trump threat to reveal classified documents relating to Russiagate by Philip Giraldi

[Dec 05, 2018] Who are the Neocons by Guyenot

[Dec 03, 2018] Neoliberalism is a modern curse. Everything about it is bad and until we're free of it, it will only ever keep trying to turn us into indentured labourers. It's acolytes are required to blind themselves to logic and reason to such a degree they resemble Scientologists or Jehovah's Witnesses more than people with any sort of coherent political ideology, because that's what neoliberalism actually is... a cult of the rich, for the rich, by the rich... and it's followers in the general population are nothing but moron familiars hoping one day to be made a fully fledged bastard.

[Nov 27, 2018] 'Highly likely' that Magnitsky was poisoned by toxic chemicals on Bill Browder's orders

[Nov 27, 2018] US Foreign Policy Has No Policy by Philip Giraldi

[Nov 27, 2018] terms that carry with them implicit moral connotations. Investment implies an action, even a sacrifice, undertaken for a better future. It evokes a future positive outcome. Another words that reinforces neoliberal rationality is "growth", Modernization and

[Nov 27, 2018] The Argentinian military coup, like those in Guatemala, Honduras, Brazil, Paraguay, Bolivia and Nicaragua, was sponsored by the US to protect and further its interests during the Cold War. By the 1970s neoliberalism was very much part of the menu; paramilitary governments were actively encouraged to practice neoliberal politics; neoliberalism was at this stage, what communism was to the Soviet Union

[Nov 24, 2018] Anonymous Exposes UK-Led Psyop To Battle Russian Propaganda

[Nov 24, 2018] British Government Runs Secret Anti-Russian Smear Campaigns

[Nov 24, 2018] Now we know created MH17 smear campaign, who financial Steele dossier and created Skripal affair ;-)

[Nov 24, 2018] When you are paid a lot of money to come up with plots psyops, you tend to come up with plots for psyops . The word entrapment comes to mind. Probably self-serving also.

[Nov 22, 2018] Facing Up to the Gradual Demise of Jewish Political Power

[Nov 22, 2018] Facing Up to the Gradual Demise of Zionist Political Power

[Nov 14, 2018] Nationalism vs partiotism

[Nov 12, 2018] The Best Way To Honor War Veterans Is To Stop Creating Them by Caitlin Johnstone

[Nov 12, 2018] Protecting Americans from foreign influence, smells with COINTELPRO. Structural witch-hunt effect like during the McCarthy era is designed to supress decent to neoliberal oligarcy by Andre Damon and Joseph Kishore

[Nov 10, 2018] US Wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan Killed 500,000 by Jason Ditz

[Nov 09, 2018] Globalism Vs Nationalism in Trump's America by Joe Quinn

[Oct 25, 2018] Putin jokes with Bolton: Did the eagle eaten all the olives

[Oct 20, 2018] Cloak and Dagger by Israel Shamir

[Oct 09, 2018] The Skripals Are an MI6 Hoax - 'Not Worthy of Ladies' Detective Novels' - Israeli Expert Demolishes UK Case

[Oct 08, 2018] British intelligence now officially is a by-word for organized crime by John Wight

[Oct 08, 2018] Hacking and Propaganda by Marcus Ranum

[Sep 23, 2018] UK Begged Trump Not To Declassify Russia Docs; Cited Grave Concerns Over Steele Involvement

[Sep 21, 2018] One party state: Trump's 'Opposition' Supports All His Evil Agendas While Attacking Fake Nonsence by Caitlin Johnstone

[Sep 16, 2018] Perils of Ineptitude by Andrew Levin

[Sep 16, 2018] I m delighted we can see the true face of American exceptionalism on display everyday. The last thing I want to see is back to normal.

[Sep 15, 2018] Why the US Seeks to Hem in Russia, China and Iran by Patrick Lawrence

[Sep 15, 2018] BBC is skanky state propaganda

[Sep 14, 2018] English Translation of Udo Ulfkotte s Bought Journalists Suppressed

[Sep 07, 2018] New York Times Undermining Peace Efforts by Sowing Suspicion by Diana Johnstone

[Sep 02, 2018] Open letter to President Trump concerning the consequences of 11 September 2001 by Thierry Meyssan

[Sep 02, 2018] Bill Browder (of Magnitsky fame) broke all these rules while pillaging Russia.

[Aug 22, 2018] The CIA Owns the US and European Media by Paul Craig Roberts

[Aug 14, 2018] US Intelligence Community is Tearing the Country Apart from the Inside by Dmitry Orlov

[Aug 13, 2018] Imperialism Is Alive and Kicking A Marxist Analysis of Neoliberal Capitalism by C.J. Polychroniou

[Aug 11, 2018] President Trump the most important achivement

[Aug 08, 2018] Sergei Skripal was linked to a consultant with former UK spy Christopher Steele's Orbis Business Intelligence

[Aug 08, 2018] Ten Bombshell Revelations From Seymour Hersh's New Autobiography

[Aug 05, 2018] Cooper was equally as unhinged as Boot: Neoliberal MSM is a real 1984 remake.

[Jul 31, 2018] Is not the Awan affair a grave insult to the US "Intelligence Community?

[Jul 20, 2018] What exactly is fake news caucus99percent

[Jul 20, 2018] Is President Trump A Traitor Because He Wants Peace With Russia by Paul Craig Roberts

[Jul 17, 2018] I think there is much more to the comment made by Putin regarding Bill Browder and his money flows into the DNC and Clinton campaign. That would explain why the DNC didn t hand the servers over to the FBI after being hacked.

[Jul 16, 2018] Putin Claims U.S. Intelligence Agents Funneled $400K To Clinton Campaign Zero Hedge

[Jul 03, 2018] When you see some really successful financial speculator like Soros or (or much smaller scale) Browder, search for links with intelligence services to explain the success or at least a part of it related to xUSSR space , LA and similar regions

[May 04, 2018] Media Use Disinformation To Accuse Russia Of Spreading Such by b

[Apr 24, 2018] The Democratic Party has embraced the agenda of the military-intelligence apparatus and sought to become its main political voice

[Apr 21, 2018] It s a tough old world and we are certainly capable of a Salisbury set-up and god knows what else in Syria.

[Apr 15, 2018] The Trump Regime Is Insane by Paul Craig Roberts

[Mar 17, 2018] How the gas was administred in a place which was under surveillance and why passersby were not affected

[Mar 15, 2018] The UK will promptly expel 23 Russian diplomats without waiting for the end of the investigation

[Mar 10, 2018] Meier might have discovered that his subject had been, as it were, 'top supporting actor' in the first fumbling attempt by Christopher Steele et al to produce a plausible-sounding scenario as to the background to Litvinenko s death.

[Mar 10, 2018] There is reason to suspect that some former and very likely current employees of the FBI have been colluding with elements in other American and British intelligence agencies, in particular the CIA and MI6, in support of an extremely ambitious foreign policy agenda for a very long time. It also seems clear that influential journalists, such as Glenn Simpson was before founding Fusion GPS, along with his wife Mary Jacoby, have been strongly involved in this

[Feb 08, 2018] Try Googling Riggs Bank – a lot of interesting information emerges, on matters such as their involvement with Prince Bandar. So, what we are dealing with is a joint Anglo-American attempt to create a comprador oligarchy who could loot Russia s raw materials resources

[Dec 31, 2017] How America Spreads Global Chaos by Nicolas J.S. Davies

[Dec 31, 2017] Is [neo]Liberalism a Dying Faith by Pat Buchanan

[Dec 31, 2017] What Happens When A Russiagate Skeptic Debates A Professional Russiagater

[Dec 28, 2017] How CrowdStrike placed malware in DNC hacked servers by Alex Christoforou

[Sep 17, 2017] The So-called Russian Hack of the DNC Does Not Make Sense by Publius Tacitus

[Jul 17, 2017] Tucker Carlson Goes to War Against the Neocons by Curt Mills

[Jul 12, 2017] Stephen Cohens Remarks on Tucker Carlson Last Night Were Extraordinary

[Jun 24, 2017] The Criminal Laws of Counterinsurgency by Todd E. Pierce

[Dec 10, 2016] Why the US elite loves so much to demonise Russia

[Sep 26, 2016] War as a Business Opportunity

[Feb 27, 2020] An interesting view on Russian "intelligencia" by the scientist and writer Zinoviev expressed during "perestroika" in 1991

[Jun 30, 2020] Russophobia- Anti-Russian Lobby and American Foreign Policy- Tsygankov, A.- 9781349378418- Amazon.com- Books

[Jun 28, 2020] Russian position for Start talks: "We don't believe the US in its current shape is a counterpart that is reliable, so we have no confidence, no trust whatsoever".

[Jun 24, 2020] Russia heavily subsidised Ukrainian energy imports for decades gas and oil; the USA converted Ukraine into a debt slave, sells Ukraine expensive weapons and cornered their energy industry; The level of fleecing Ukraine by the USA after Euromaidan can be compared only with fleecing of Libya.

[Jun 23, 2020] Surely 'legitimacy' goes to the victor. Once you've won you can build a sort of legitimacy that the majority will agree with (whether its real or not)

[Jun 23, 2020] Putin Tries To Set Record Straight by

[Jun 21, 2020] Paul R. Pillar who pointed out that U.S. sanctions are frequently peddled as a peaceful alternative to war fit the definition of 'crimes against peace'.

[Jun 20, 2020] Fatal mistake of the USSR in the WWII

[Jun 19, 2020] The USG' s definition of Dictator

[Jun 14, 2020] Jeane J. Kirkpatrick 30 Years Unheeded

[Jun 13, 2020] Korea is just another distraction: false conflicts with China, North Korea, Russia and Iran are needed to keep support for MIC and Security State which cost 1.2 trillion a year

[Jun 03, 2020] The first rule of political hypocrisy: Justify your actions by the need to protect the weak and vulnerable

[May 24, 2020] Unable to communicate in Arabic and with no relevant experience or appropriate educational training

Sites

Etc

Society

Groupthink : Two Party System as Polyarchy : Corruption of Regulators : Bureaucracies : Understanding Micromanagers and Control Freaks : Toxic Managers :   Harvard Mafia : Diplomatic Communication : Surviving a Bad Performance Review : Insufficient Retirement Funds as Immanent Problem of Neoliberal Regime : PseudoScience : Who Rules America : Neoliberalism  : The Iron Law of Oligarchy : Libertarian Philosophy

Quotes

War and Peace : Skeptical Finance : John Kenneth Galbraith :Talleyrand : Oscar Wilde : Otto Von Bismarck : Keynes : George Carlin : Skeptics : Propaganda  : SE quotes : Language Design and Programming Quotes : Random IT-related quotes :  Somerset Maugham : Marcus Aurelius : Kurt Vonnegut : Eric Hoffer : Winston Churchill : Napoleon Bonaparte : Ambrose Bierce :  Bernard Shaw : Mark Twain Quotes

Bulletin:

Vol 25, No.12 (December, 2013) Rational Fools vs. Efficient Crooks The efficient markets hypothesis : Political Skeptic Bulletin, 2013 : Unemployment Bulletin, 2010 :  Vol 23, No.10 (October, 2011) An observation about corporate security departments : Slightly Skeptical Euromaydan Chronicles, June 2014 : Greenspan legacy bulletin, 2008 : Vol 25, No.10 (October, 2013) Cryptolocker Trojan (Win32/Crilock.A) : Vol 25, No.08 (August, 2013) Cloud providers as intelligence collection hubs : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2010 : Inequality Bulletin, 2009 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2008 : Copyleft Problems Bulletin, 2004 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2011 : Energy Bulletin, 2010 : Malware Protection Bulletin, 2010 : Vol 26, No.1 (January, 2013) Object-Oriented Cult : Political Skeptic Bulletin, 2011 : Vol 23, No.11 (November, 2011) Softpanorama classification of sysadmin horror stories : Vol 25, No.05 (May, 2013) Corporate bullshit as a communication method  : Vol 25, No.06 (June, 2013) A Note on the Relationship of Brooks Law and Conway Law

History:

Fifty glorious years (1950-2000): the triumph of the US computer engineering : Donald Knuth : TAoCP and its Influence of Computer Science : Richard Stallman : Linus Torvalds  : Larry Wall  : John K. Ousterhout : CTSS : Multix OS Unix History : Unix shell history : VI editor : History of pipes concept : Solaris : MS DOS :  Programming Languages History : PL/1 : Simula 67 : C : History of GCC development :  Scripting Languages : Perl history   : OS History : Mail : DNS : SSH : CPU Instruction Sets : SPARC systems 1987-2006 : Norton Commander : Norton Utilities : Norton Ghost : Frontpage history : Malware Defense History : GNU Screen : OSS early history

Classic books:

The Peter Principle : Parkinson Law : 1984 : The Mythical Man-Month :  How to Solve It by George Polya : The Art of Computer Programming : The Elements of Programming Style : The Unix Hater’s Handbook : The Jargon file : The True Believer : Programming Pearls : The Good Soldier Svejk : The Power Elite

Most popular humor pages:

Manifest of the Softpanorama IT Slacker Society : Ten Commandments of the IT Slackers Society : Computer Humor Collection : BSD Logo Story : The Cuckoo's Egg : IT Slang : C++ Humor : ARE YOU A BBS ADDICT? : The Perl Purity Test : Object oriented programmers of all nations : Financial Humor : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2008 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2010 : The Most Comprehensive Collection of Editor-related Humor : Programming Language Humor : Goldman Sachs related humor : Greenspan humor : C Humor : Scripting Humor : Real Programmers Humor : Web Humor : GPL-related Humor : OFM Humor : Politically Incorrect Humor : IDS Humor : "Linux Sucks" Humor : Russian Musical Humor : Best Russian Programmer Humor : Microsoft plans to buy Catholic Church : Richard Stallman Related Humor : Admin Humor : Perl-related Humor : Linus Torvalds Related humor : PseudoScience Related Humor : Networking Humor : Shell Humor : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2011 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2012 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2013 : Java Humor : Software Engineering Humor : Sun Solaris Related Humor : Education Humor : IBM Humor : Assembler-related Humor : VIM Humor : Computer Viruses Humor : Bright tomorrow is rescheduled to a day after tomorrow : Classic Computer Humor

The Last but not Least Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand ~Archibald Putt. Ph.D

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Last modified: January, 26, 2021